Waiting for Gouda

What does it take to become a writer in the advertising business?

Some recent evidence suggests that little more is required than a reptile brain.  I just saw a McDonald’s television ad depicting two semi-slobby looking dudes sitting in a booth (at Mickey D’s, natch) early one morning, stuffing their maws with giant eggy greaseballs soaked in maple syrup, or something.  I shall now transcribe, in it’s entirety, the dialogue:

Dude: Man I was hungry when I woke up.  I had some major hunger pains.

Other Dude: Pangs.

Dude: Pains.

Other Dude: Pangs.

Dude: Pains.

Other Dude: Pangs.

Dude: Whatever.

Commercial Writer: And… scene.  Now give me my money.

Me: What the hell was that crap?

Commercial Writer: That was my attempt to entice you into enjoying delicious and nutritious McDonald’s breakfast items.

Me: You suck.

Hey, it’s Halloween! And who doesn’t like to dress up for Halloween?

Well, I don’t, for one. But I’m old and grumpy and shaped funny.

A lot of people do like it, though, and good for them. But ladies, just a quick word about the costumes. If you want to dress up like a slutty nurse, or a slutty airline attendant, or a slutty witch, or a slutty vampire… that’s just great. I am all for it, believe me.

But just so you know, you’re not fooling anyone with that stethoscope or those plastic teeth, or some other appropriate token prop.

Don’t pretend people on the train are looking at the hospital name tag and admiring your clever nurse’s outfit! They’re looking at the trampy fishnet stockings, and admiring… whatever it is they are inclined to admire. Or not, depending on their preferences.

You are dressed up like a slut. That’s your costume. Okay, maybe, at best, you are dressed up like a slut who is dressed up like a nurse.

And again, just to be clear, I am totally on board with that. If you want to use Halloween as an excuse to dress like a cheap stripper at the beginning of her routine, except out in the street where everyone can ogle you without having to pay a cover charge, well, more power to you.

Just don’t pretend it’s a Halloween costume.

The stupid music project continues.

Here’s a few more inane observations:

1) I think I have, to this point, criminally under-appreciated the Foo Fighters.

2) You haven’t lived until you’ve listened to 15 straight minutes of I Am A Man of Constant Sorrow.  That’s four versions: two by the Soggy Bottom Boys, one by Norman Blake (guitar instrumental), and one by John Hartford (violin instrumental, although perhaps you’d want to call it a fiddle instrumental given the source film’s milieu, although maybe not because it is a rather slow and almost mournful arrangement, not at all like a hoedown, although maybe you would because you can still really easily imagine the soloist wearing overalls and sipping from a jug, or maybe that’s just the affect of having already listened to the cotton-pickin’ thing three times in a row).

3) Cyndi Lauper has a greatest hits album.  Think about that for a minute.  Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Now consider that this album is, inexplicably, on my iPod.  This disturbing fact has caused me some serious pain, and has me re-evaluating my entire life, intermittently, for about four minutes at a time.

Also, did you know that “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” has a remix version?  It’s true.  You realize that this means that at least a couple people honestly thought that one version of this song just wasn’t enough.

And this remix totally snuck up on me.  It doesn’t appear back-to-back alphabetically in my little scheme, thereby letting me suffer through nine minutes of hell and then putting that portion of my life behind me forever.  Oh, no.

The remix is called “Hey Now (Girls Just Wanna Have Fun)”, so you can guess which particularly irritating lyrical flourish from the original has been brought ever so artfully into the spotlight.  The title also means that, if you’re some kind of idiot who, for reasons unknown even to yourself, are forcing yourself to listen to your iPod in alphabetical order, your irregular heart rate and nervous twitching are just beginning to subside from the original version as you’ve slogged through the remaining G’s when the goddamned remix jumps up and smacks you in the nuts some hours later.

Screw you, Cyndi Lauper.  Screw you.

They say that you should dress for the job you want, not the job you have.

I know what you’re thinking… What a stupid thing to say! That’s more or less what I thought, too.

But you know, they say a lot of things, and at least some of them have to be somewhat true, or else people would completely ignore them, and we wouldn’t hear so much about them, would we?

So lately I’ve been dressing like an astronaut. And I have to say, it doesn’t seem to be working. In fact, if anything, it’s kind of hindering me in the job that I already have. It’s very difficult to type in these huge freakin’ gloves.

So there you have it. More conventional wisdom… DEBUNKED!

I don’t know about where you live, but here in the Second City, Comcast corporation continues to threaten our lives.

In their latest batch of advertisements, a rather smarmy fellow with a microphone, apparently a Comcast spokesperson of some kind, accosts a seemingly random Comcast customer, often as they are getting out of their car or leaving their homes, demanding to know what they would rather do than give up Comcast service.  Forced with such a bizarre question from out of the blue, the customers, who would certainly be forgiven if they figured it was a rhetorical question, blurt out the first silly thing that comes to their mind.  They say things like, “Give up Comcast?  I would rather re-marry my ex-husband!”

It’s kind of like the old “What would you do for a Klondike bar?” routine, except instead of rewarding people for doing something stupid with a delicious ice-cream-based treat, Comcast threatens to take away telephone and cable service from their ostensibly paying customers, unless they agree to do something stupid.

The customers respond with a little smirk or perhaps a giggle… having no idea that, for the Comcast guy, it is no laughing matter.  Not only is Comcast guy dead serious about the question, he has also apparently been endowed with some special legal and moral authority from Comcast to actually force the unsuspecting people to do that thing they suggested on a whim.  Without warning, the poor consumers, who seem to enjoy their Comcast service at least to some degree, suddenly realize that their mere off-handed utterance was enough of a binding agreement for Comcast guy, who may or may not actually be Satan in disguise, to make it so.

Soon enough, the poor woman has been propped up at a makeshift altar (one can only assume that she has been forcibly dragged), and her ex-husband appears dressed in a tuxedo, fully ready for the coerced ceremony.  And boy, is he happy.  In fact, he appears to be doing some kind of dance.  Makes you wonder what kind of terrible relationship they were in that he can’t wait to get back at it, even as she, who apparently has not been given the option to reconsider the original offer and opt for a different cable TV provider, begins to openly weep.

Man, what a funny commercial.

I come away feeling really glad that I am not a Comcast customer.  I would hate to live in fear of some all-powerful spokesperson jumping out of the shrubbery to force me to move to Texas and become a Republican.

So I was perusing all the songs in my iPod the other day when I noticed that there were a fair number of songs that I had apparently never listened to.  I decided that this just wouldn’t do.  What is the point of the ripping and the transferring (never the pirating, mateys… I don’t do that) if all the little empee-threes just sit there.

(The spelling in that last phrase was inspired by Star Wars droids.  Some of you know what I’m talking about.)

I couldn’t allow this to continue.  Not only were there songs that I hadn’t heard, but there were an awful lot of songs that I had only listened to once in the last year.  Good songs!  Songs I loved, sitting neglected while the little imp inside the machine that picks the random songs (sorry, but that’s what I imagine) has pelted me repeatedly with all of the lesser Marilyn Manson songs.

So I decided to embark on a most thorough journey through my tunes.  A journey without Journey, actually, which I guess is a good thing.  I’m listening to every single song on myPod in alphabetical order… by song title.  No skipping.

I’ve been at it all week, and I’m well into the B’s now, and have a few observations.  Cue your inner Andy Rooney voice:

- Some songs that I theoretically like are hard to get through.   Keane?  Really?  What the hell are you guys doing here?

- iTunes is smart enough to alphabetize songs that start with the word “A” (as in “A Day in the Life”) or “The” by the second word in the title.  My iPod is not as smart, so there is a little bit of futzing around when switching from one to the other.  (I use the iTunes while at my desk at work so the Pod can charge.)  I don’t know why this would be, but I must be vigilant that no song gets skipped.  That would violate the spirit of the thing.

- A lot of songs start with the same words.  Yesterday afternoon, I plowed through the “Backs”:

- Back 2 Good (Matchbox 20)
- Back in the USSR (Beatles)
- Back in Your Head (Tegan & Sara)
- Back Off Bitch (G’N'R)
- Back to the Life (Spoon)
- Back to the Sea (Futureheads)
- Back to the Start (Razorlight)
- Back Together (Citizen Cope)
- Back Up Offa Me (Talib Kweli)
- Backdrifts (Radiohead)

I’m really looking forward to the list of songs that start with “I” or “You”.  Songwriters are an egomaniacal lot, on average.

- As you can see, a session of this listening method provides a weird mix of completely different musical stylings that might all have similar motifs.  For example, the desire to get back to somewhere or something.  Nostalgia, perhaps.

- Listening to the live version of a song immediately after hearing the studio version isn’t as interesting as you might think.  Remixes even less so.

Well, I gotta go. Songs that start with “Big” are about to roll through.  And I’m really psyched for segue from “Big Man with a Gun” (Nine Inch Nails) into “Big Rock Candy Mountain” (O Brother soundtrack).  Should be huge.

I really enjoy taking online surveys, with all the clicking and radio buttons and checkboxes.  I especially like the ones that tell you on the screen exactly what percentage of the survey you’ve completed, with a little meter graphic.  “40% complete!” it will tell you, with what seems like a hint of desperation.  I imagine the survey makers huddling somewhere in front of a massive bank of monitors (oddly, they are also holding clipboards…  I’m not sure they know what they’re doing), furtively hoping that you have the stamina and attention span to make it all the way through to the end.   This, despite the fact that anyone who has ever taken any online survey of any kind was, at the moment of the first click, boldly and authoritatively proclaiming, “I literally have no else to do right now.  Absolutely nothing.”

So I took a little feedback survey online today, and things were going along just fine until I came to this screen:

As you can see, according the instructions, 1 is “being the least important”, while 6 is “being extremely important”.  Of course, this is typical survey stuff, and one can reasonably use their powers of deduction to assign importance levels to the other numbers.

I suspect that 3 is probably “somewhat important”.  That’s a typical survey category.  Doesn’t really mean anything.  3 is dull.  I imagine that people who go around ranking things as 3s probably wear beige and read Patricia Cornwall novels.  Although I don’t know for sure.  I suppose I could take a survey.

5 probably ranks a “very”.  You know, not quite “extremely”, but certainly more than “somewhat”.

4 and 2 are both sort of problematic, though.  2 is just better than a 1, so according to the syntax provided, I guess that it rates as “slightly less least important”, which isn’t helpful at all.  4 is utterly useless, floating out somewhere between “somewhat” and “very”.  What is the word for that?  “Rather?”  “Substantially?”  Nope, it’s no good.  4 is stupid.

But what really threw me off when attempting to rank these items was the 7.

7, with importance of such import, that it dare not be named.

More important than “extremely”, 7 sits on the lunatic fringe of the very concept of importance itself.  Is it “super-duper”?  “Ultra-mega?”  That is for 7 to know alone.

Well, I finally succumbed to some very, very mild pressure got myself an account on one of those “social networking” sites.  MyHeadSpace, or something.

The idea, as far as I can ascertain, is that it’s a great place to to pretend to stay in touch with people that you intentionally don’t talk to anymore.  You can look at their photos if they have any, and see what they are doing right at that exact moment.  Or at least what they have recently said they were doing right at that exact moment that they typed it.  So, for example, you can see that that one guy Ted that you used to work with a few years ago had chicken for dinner three days ago.

So, it’s really useful.

So when you first sign up, you have to find your friends.  Otherwise, the system taunts you, “You have no friends,” and I don’t need that kind of reminder from a stinking piece of software.  I decided I needed to find my friends immediately, so I did a search for my alma mater.

Within minutes, I was looking at a long list of people who claim to have attended the same schools that I did at more or less the same time that I did.  I say “claim” because, as far as I can tell, BookMyFacepedia does absolutely no fact checking.  Anyone can say that they’ve graduated from any old school they feel like.

There is plenty of opportunity for lying on the ol’ FlickrTube, believe you me, whether it’s education, employment, hobbies… whatever. Just as soon as I’m done here, I fully intend to make myself a Ph.D. astronaut who races ostriches in my spare time.  No, I don’t ride them.  I run against the ostriches.  And I win, every time.  And you can’t question it, because it says so right there in my MyProfile profile.

So I’m perusing the list of faces and names, and one of the first things I notice is that time has been very kind to a great deal of my fellow alumni. Freakishly kind, in fact. Many of them appear to have not just preserved their youthful skin and firm bodies of their younger days, but have actually reversed the aging process.  Several classmates now appear in their photographs to be no more than three or four years old.  Included in this suspicious group is a young lady whose name leads me to believe that perhaps we made out on more than one occasion.  (We used to call it “making out”, anyway.  Now’s it probably called FacePoke or something.  um… LOL?… omg).  If this girl looks like a toddler now, fifteen years later, what could she have looked like then?  It’s a wonder I didn’t get arrested.  And why didn’t my friends say something?  I shall have to ask them, if I can ever find them in this brave new world.

Since I’ve signed onto this thing, I’ve been subjected to all sorts of bizarre taunts and offers.  I’ve been poked (whatever that means), superpoked (super-whatever that means), sent a virtual cup of coffee, invited to describe what kind of beverage I would be, been made a virtual noble in a virtual kingdom, received a couple of eyesores (I don’t know), been bitten by a virtual vampire, and been purchased on some sort of virtual human black market (twice).

Like I said.  Useful.

I don’t know what is the point of this whole SpankHead thing.  But everybody’s using it.  I better go update my status.

Okay, so here’s the deal. Dan ZP passed along the rules. The rules say:

“List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.”

Trouble is, I don’t know seven people with blogs. (That’s how you know that I’m not a real blogger. Please, don’t tell anyone.) But I’ll list my songs, anyhow. And I’ll even link to samples, if you care to hear snippets. Now, that’s not in the rules, but hey, I go beyond the call, my friends… that’s just how I roll.

1. Andrew Bird - Opposite Day - Could have picked any of 20 Bird songs… can’t get enough lately, but chose this one due to the fact that it kicks right off with a weird Kafka-esque reference… he is quite surprised to discover “I had not become a cephalapod, I still had legs and arms.”

2. Aesop Rock - The Harbor is Yours - A rap ditty about pirates and mermaids. Funny as hell. Not the actual hell, of course, which I hear can be a bit of a downer… but the amorphous hell that can be invoked as the epitome of any adjective. You know what I mean.

3. Glen Hansard - Say It To Me Now - From the Once soundtrack… this song is so musically spare, but so full of powerful, raw vocals… I find it rather mesmerizing.

4. Modest Mouse - Parting of the Sensory - The first half is an excoriation of some incompetent fool, but at about the 3:30 mark, it all changes, and you get a little catchy, clap-along lesson in the conservation of matter. In the sense that your body will rot in the ground someday.

5. Bright Eyes - Waste of Paint - I don’t know if Bright Eyes counts as a guilty pleasure or not. I suspect that he does in many circles. But I’ve really been into weird lyrics lately, and this kid delivers. This song makes me smile, oddly, because it reminds me a lot of when I was about 20 years old and a big mopey idiot who hated myself and everyone else.

6. My Chemical Romance - This Is How I Disappear - They call this band “emo”. This is a word that I literally do not understand what it means. It gets applied to a lot of different sounds, and I just don’t get it. Maybe I’m too old. But anyway, this song sounds a lot like Queensryche in the Operation:Mindcrime era which I was heavy into a long time ago. And if you know what I’m talking about, then you’re kind of old too. If not, you’re too old. Or not old enough. Or just not a dork.

7. Decemberists - Crane Wife #3 - Don’t have any idea what this is all about. But I dig it.

So, like I said, I don’t know many bloggers, but here are a couple people I do know that also played along:

Zapruder Point, Stacey Early

I suppose if you are reading this, and don’t have a blog, you could write your songs on a postcard and mail them to me. Or you could just Add a Comment to this blog. Come on, it’s fun!

We had a bit of excitement in the neighborhood this last week, as we were invaded by the production crew for the new Johnny Depp / Michael Mann film, called Public Enemies. The movie is about John Dillinger and other gangster types in 1930’s Chicago, and they’ve decided to get authentic by shooting much of it on the north side of town.

We thought something was going on last weekend, when a construction crew began making a terrible racket in the house next door. At first, it seemed like perhaps they were just re-doing the kitchen in the vacant apartment, getting it ready to rent again, but then we noticed that the truck outside said Universal Studios or some such…. which seemed a little odd.

Sure enough, we soon got flyers stuck to our cars saying that they were shutting down our street for filming on Tuesday, meaning that we would have to park our car three blocks away, which for decent folks in civilized neighborhoods in Chicago is quite the hardship. (I want to hear no crying from Wrigleyville residents… that’s what you get for living in that wretched hive of scum and villany.) But we figured this was a small price to pay to see them film a major motion picture right next door!

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