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A History Lesson from Stella Artois

Glen Beck's TV special on Fox last weekend about "restoring our history" (a follow-up to his rally), brought to mind how shaky our relationship to the past has become.

The idea that history has to be "restored" implies that the sense of its reality has been lost.  And this is one point on which even a hard-right commentator such as Beck would find some agreement on the Left.  One of the key features of our era, according to a neo-Marxist critic such as Fredric Jameson, is precisely its loss of its sense of history.

Jameson has written that our longing for a sense of the past can be seen in the popularity of the many "period" films which try to represent it through fashion and music (if not substance).  His writings, as I read them anyway, suggest that our nostalgia for other eras almost makes them seem like "lost objects of desire" that we can never really recover. (pp. 16-25)

He might even agree with Beck as to the cause of this sense of loss: the media.  But here's where their similarity ends.  For where Beck would say our past has been destroyed primarily by the media's liberal bias, Jameson might counter that our image-makers' distortions come about because, whatever their personal ideologies, they also need to make a buck. 

As a result, Hollywood, TV, the press, and the whole culture industry, mine history for marketable products -- and our past is packaged as romance, adventure, human interest -- essentially a movie, TV show, or some other set of pop images.  And history becomes, whether presented by conservatives or liberals, more surface than depth.

One of the criticisms that Beck is faced with, in fact, is that what he wants to restore is an idealized Leave It to Beaver 50s TV version of American history.  In other words, he's accused of being mesmerized by the very media industry he'd like to critique.

The 60s -- a Thing of Beauty

Such ideas helped me explain to myself the mildly hypnotic effect a beer commercial had on me recently. Though I'm not a drinker, and so had no interest in the product advertised, I found one of Stella Artois' TV spots rather striking.

It's the first commercial completely in French that I've seen on U.S. TV.  I was also jazzed by the stylishness of its film work.  As a friend of mine said, "that's pure 60s French New Wave."  The title tune is sung by Brigitte Bardot, from, I think, 1964: 

The almost over-the-top sexist quality of the spot, like something out of Mad Men, adds to its retro flavor.  As the Copyranter blog quips: "Stella Artois ... delivers Heterosexual Man's two favorite things getting ready for consumption/consummation.  Some sexism diluted by classy production and a quirky French tune."

It should be noted, though, that according to Mother, the brand's ad agency,  the target audience for the product is "the sophisticated beer drinker", and, in the U.S., this market "tends to be a slightly more female base" though the campaign will target "both men and women of a certain lifestyle."

Which is to say that the high retro-fashion style of the ad takes precedence over the substance of its gender politics.  And their ad agency seems to be consciously pursuing this look.  In fact, the U.S. print campaign which builds off TV spots like this one (which I think originally ran in Europe) is being shot by photographer Bert Stern, who did Monroe's last sitting in 1962.  The first U.S. print ad is modeled on a 1960 cover of Vogue.

With all this in mind, the TV spot seems to work, in part at least, by creating a longing for something unattainable, as signified by the woman in the ad.  On a basic level, men watching the ad, no matter their sophistication, cannot really hope to attain her -- she's out of the past.  Women may long for her style; but that's gone too -- along with the sorts of flashy 60s films the ad invokes.

On a more symbolic level, longing for her might be seen as the desire to live in an era, or a world, more glamorous, exciting and, above all, luxurious than our own.

Of course, it's advertising's job not only to create, but promise relief from such frustrations.  And this comes in the form of the commodity itself: "She is a thing of beauty." 

I've read reviews of Stella Artois at Beer Advocate, which graded it a "decent", but not outstanding, brew. But perhaps the raters were more interested in how the stuff actually tasted -- and weren't influenced by this ad.

For they missed the most intoxicating thing about the brand: that it bottles the spirit of an era -- and its sense of possibility.   

                

Human vs. Transhuman (or iPhone vs. Droid) -- Who Wins?

Lately, I've been amazed by the contrast between some recent TV spots for the iPhone and the Android. Check these out:

Directed by Sam Mendes, the "Face Time" commercial for iPhone 4 (selling its video chat feature) offers little surprise for me (except for the possible cameo by Matt Damon signing at the end).  It shows this device as enhancing relationships, between lovers, families, generations -- even between people who can't talk.

In typical Apple fashion, the spot is meant to make technology seem friendly.  Human.  And as familiar as our past.  It's even scored to a nostalgic tune Louis Armstrong  first recorded in the late 20s (don't know the date of the version in the spot).

Fittingly, I've read that this tune was a favorite in the Great Depression, as a sort of morale-boosting, cheer-up song.  (Though the wish-you-were-here look the woman at the end shares with the guy in the army pants also made me think of the WWII era).

The spots for the Droid phones are another story altogether.  The first, shot in a cold, grayish-blue light, reminds me as much of a science fiction dystopia as it does an office setting.  Rather than promising to warm your heart, this phone makes you "an instrument of efficiency" -- perhaps like a BMW.  The second Droid spot reminds me of that scene in Alien, where the creature first attacks and invades a crew member's body. 

And the Droid machine assumes control over the humans (rather than vice versa), transforming them into parts of itself.  When the Borg did something similar in Star Trek, it was supposed to be frightening. Here it's celebrated.

Yet, alienating or not, these spots certainly haven't hurt sales.  During the first and second quarter of 2010, the Droid sold more smart phones than Apple.  Though many chalk up the phone's ascendance to the fact that the iPhone is saddled with AT&T as its carrier, it would appear, for now at least, that resistance to the Droid is futile.

Cyborgs vs. Regular Folks

What's interesting from a cultural aspect about these commercials is that they seem inspired by two views about our relation to technology.  Apple is a great example of technological humanism -- the machine as a cuddly friend, that enhances the joy of warm feelings.

Droid, on the other hand, celebrates its otherness.  It is we who adapt to, and are are transformed by, its power.  This view is often characterized by the term "transhumanism."  Here his how Daniel Pinchbeck, one of the trend's critics, describes it:

"The transhumanists believe our biological limits should be overcome through mechanical means. We are too dense, too cumbersome in our inherited meatsuits, trapped in what John Smart calls 'slowspace.' Immersed in virtual realities or fused with artificial intelligence agents -- or some other technological genie -- we will attain a speedier, snazzier state of being." (p. 104)

Are We All Cyborgs Now?

But what sorts of benefits might be hoped for by those who are bullish on the mating of person with machine?  Way back in the early 90s, Donna Haraway wrote in her prophetic "Cyborg Manifesto" that we were all already "fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short we are cyborgs."

Such a new state of being, brought on by our increasingly deeper relationship with technology, she theorized, could make us at home with "permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints."  "For us," she wrote, "machines can be prosthetic devices, intimate components, friendly selves." 

This brings to mind transformations in everyday speech I've witnessed.  It used to be when you said someone "was nothing but a robot", you meant the person was unimaginative, stiff and conformist.

Now when you say, perhaps in a work context, "the guy's a machine", it's high praise.  It's a way of indicating speed, productivity, determination -- and grace under pressure.

All of which reminds me of a story the poet Elaine Equi told me about shopping for vitamins in a health food store at the very beginning of the 90s.  Suddenly it seemed nearly all the supplements had become "super" or "mega" formulas with dosages many times over the minimum daily requirement.  "Who would want these?" she asked.

"Oh," a salesperson replied, "those are vitamins for the 90s.  You're going to need them." 

From steroids in sports to plastic surgery in movie stars, a constant source of debate and scandal has been the obsession with self-enhancement to achieve that competitive edge.  In this light, even the most extreme technophilia is no mystery.  Machines and other add-ons are loved for the extra power they promise.

So maybe the Droid spots reinforce something many already feel.  That today, it may not be enough to be just human anymore.                   

The Never-Ending Age of Irony: Thoughts on Dos Equis Beer, Dr. Evil and John Ashbery

Feeding my obsession with the history of advertising, I came across a terrific thesis/essay by a scholar named Brian Ned Tucker Curtis titled Contemporary Print Advertising in the Age of Irony.

I've just begun reading it, but the argument so far is that, in the era of Modernism, advertising sold consumers mythologies about the self and its need for products.  In our times, though, ads catch our interest by poking fun, through irony, at the myths they once created.

Curtis dates the turn from myth to irony to the early 60s -- with BBD's ad for Volkswagen, in which the headline read: "Lemon."  What's fascinating to me, though, is that here we are, some 50 years later, and we still haven't left the tongue-in-cheek era.

This brings to mind a contemporary (well, around 3 yrs. old) campaign that still makes me laugh. Here's a sample from Dos Equis' "The Most Interesting Man in the World" series of ads.

This spot, part of a campaign that won an Effie Gold in 2009, continues the ironic tradition Curtis writes about pretty exactly.  As he might put it, it pokes fun at the whole idea of connoisseurship -- that you can become cool by drinking beer (or, more technically, construct a self through consumption).

Dos Equis' strategy was basically this: since beer commercials often treated their guy audience like dummies, why not try something a little a little hipper -- that talked up to them through irony?
 
The campaign was very successful.  At a time when premium beer sales were down 11% nationally, Dos Equis climbed by 17%.

What interests me most here, though, is something a lot bigger than advertising.  One of the undercurrents the campaign plays with-- that it's hard to take ideas about a "cool", "in-control" identity seriously -- is one you see elaborated on continually, and through all levels of culture.  Here is Dr. Evil, from the Austin Powers movies, offering us a glimpse of his "inner self":

But the Poets Got There First...

Of course, identity invention has been a key theme in poetry since at least Whitman.  But as early as Eliot's Prufrock, the idea of authentic, heroic selfhood has been thrown into question.  Such doubt, though, doesn't always result in anguish.  As early as the mid-50s, poets, like the pop culture that was to follow a little later, found humor in the topic.

Here is a sample from John Ashbery's "He", that appeared in his book Some Trees (1956). Ashbery's piece, for me at least, not only parodies both the bragging and angst surrounding the topic of "self", but the very notion of personal coherence.  The details about the "most interesting man in the world" in this poem are banal, extraordinary -- and discombobulated.  It begins:

He cuts down the lakes so they appear straight.
He smiles at his feet in their tired mules.
He turns up the music much louder.
He takes down the vaseline from the pantry shelf.

Then, a few stanzas later:

...
He is after us.  If you decide

He is important, it will get you nowhere.
He is the source of much bitter reflection.
He used to be pretty for a rat.
He is now over-proud of his Etruscan appearance.

And then, the last few stanzas:

......
He was last seen flying to New York.
He was handing out cards which read:

"He wears a question mark in his left eye.
He dislikes the police, but will associate with them.
He will demand something not on the menu.
He is invisible to the eyes of beauty and culture.

"He prevented the murder of Mistinguett in Mexico.
He has a knack for abortions.  If you see
He is following you, forget him immediately:
He is dangerous even though asleep and unarmed."

Advertising May Fall, But Irony Lives On...

It's become an apocalyptic cliche nowadays that with the advent of social media, the importance of digital word-of-mouth about products will make advertising obsolete. Even if this were so, though, it would seem we're stuck with our irony.

Last week, Katie Roiphe wrote, in a piece titled "The Language of Fakebook" that, "one of the great...adolescent poses of Facebook is irony at all times.  So if you say, 'can't wait for the Lady Gaga concert,' you might add 'lol'..."

Does Losing Your "Self" Make You More Self-Involved?

Yet, all of this "not taking yourself too seriously" hasn't exactly led to a more, say, "socially aware consciousness."  Don't people complain that U.S. culture is increasingly narcissistic?  Why might this be so?

One answer: in the U.S., by law, there is no "one religion."  This official pluralism has been said to lead to  greater, instead of lesser, religiosity.  It's simply your right to try on all sorts of beliefs.

Likewise, if the mirror of the "single self" has been shattered, might not the multiple reflections of the shards left behind be even more fascinating to look at? 

                          

  

  

      

The Ultimate Narrative on the Decline and Fall of Narrative: Michael Gottlieb's "Memoir and Essay"

Finishing Michael Gottlieb's Memoir and Essay the other night, I came across something in a book by Terry Eagleton that described what happens in it exactly:

Quoting Hume, Eagleton writes, "The liveliest of all objects, Hume remarks in his A Treatise of Human Nature, is 'a rational and thinking being like ourselves, who communicates to us all the actions of his mind; makes us privy to his inmost sentiments and affections; and lets us see, in the very instant of their production, all the emotions, which are caus'd by any object." (p. 45)

By that definition, Gottlieb's book is a very lively one indeed.  What he makes us "privy" to in his Memoir  (the first 3/4's of the book), with real lucidity, is the excitement that surrounds the creative act.  And this is all the more surprising when you consider the act he is describing is how he came to write what at the time (the 70s) was considered a nearly opaque, esoteric mode: "language writing" -- or, as it came to be called a little later, simply "language poetry." 

I suppose it's mildly ironic that this absorbing narration is about the creation of a resolutely anti-narrative style.  And that Gottlieb's creative discoveries take the form of aesthetic epiphanies -- through which he discovers a mode suspicious precisely of the personal epiphany.

But the dude tells such a compelling tale that all that theory, all those contradictions, seem like so much yaddah, yaddah, yaddah in the back of the mind, as your inner dialogue says "ok, sure, but what happens next?"

And the Story Goes Like This...

Gottlieb charts his aesthetic beginnings to Bennington, where he developed a thesis of poetry written in the style of "small...precisely observed lyrics." (p.24)  Simultaneously, throughout the writing process, he found himself noodling with words in the margins -- weighing, playing, sounding -- listening to what they had to say in their own right.  Of course, the ruling assumption of the time was that none of this "doodling" was relevant to the actual "Poem." 

But like Pollock remarked somewhere about the teaching of Thomas Hart Benton, such schooling turned out to be important as something to react against -- but not just yet.  After his degree, disillusioned by its doctrines, he stops writing for a few years.  Then, in the back room of the old Gotham Bookstore, he comes across a few magazines (edited by Alan Davies and Barrett Watten) -- and the experience is "like being struck by lightning":

"It was clear to me from that moment on: you didn't need to tell stupid stories any more.  A poem could be about what it was supposed to be about -- the indigestible, irreducible, unredeemable words that flung themselves at us every day, the language that, in its infuriating, inexhaustible, immeasurable confusion, yet limitless precision, lived, teeming, out there, outside our door.  There could be no subject, or at least no subject greater than this." (p. 29)

A few pages later, the money shot of the book arrives: that moment when Gottlieb achieves his first writing in this new mode.

It begins: "I finally gave in to that impulse which had stirred first in me years ago back at Bennington.  The words just arrived.  They weren't just literary words, they came from all around -- from the Daily News and the street and the radio and the TV and the flyers blowing down the sidewalk.  Just being attentive to the words was enough.  I made the lists then I sat back and looked at them.  It was a Saturday." (p. 34)

Even such bare lists though, he feels, contain "too much residual narrativism."  To release their "innate discrete power or gnomic identity", he reorders them systematically, according to a method he devises. And then:

"I sat back and looked at it and read it out loud and I realized that for the first time I had made something that reached back down and tapped that sense I'd had years ago -- that to the extent the world is made up of words, and that there is contained a world in every word, it is the poet's job to take the world apart and give it back to us in a way that we've never seen it before.  For the first time in my life I had succeeded in making a real poem.  It made sense -- its own sense." (p.35) 

Gottlieb's narrative is punctuated by moments like these.  They're so strong that, for me, they make the book's other notable themes (NYC in the 70s, the formation of avant-garde scenes, the lifestyles of poets) fade into the contextual background.  You come away enthused about reading not just the experimental mode he champions -- but anything you think might be valuable.

For in a book that sometimes creates a landscape of disillusion; one about the fall of everything from the boho lifestyle, to the wildness of a city, to standard-issue political assumptions, Gottlieb somehow makes you excited about words again. 

Note: To find Elizabeth Fodaski's excellent review of this book, go here.

  

           

Are We Having Fun Yet? "Mad Men" and the Happiness Industry.

Last Sunday in the NY Times, Katie Roiphe speculated on the appeal of the TV show "Mad Men":

"The phenomenal success of the show relies at least in part" Roiphe wrote, "on the thrill of casual vice, on the glamour of spectacularly messy, self-destructive behavior to our relatively staid and enlightened times.  As a culture we have moved in the direction of the gym, of the enriching, wholesome pursuit, of the embrace of responsibility, and the furthering of goals, and away from lounging around in the middle of the afternoon with a drink." 

Just as the early 60s "smoldered" against 50s repression, so Roiphe sees our own attraction to the "world of excess" in "Mad Men" as a symptom of our own irritation with "the wilier and subtler repression of our own undoubtedly healthier, more upstanding times." 

Be Happy Now!

If Roiphe is right, and at least some viewers look with a sort of nostalgic longing on glamorously bad behavior, you have to ask why. Aren't we better off now?  Especially when there's never been so much attention paid to happiness?  

After all, as Savoj Zizek reminds us, "...over the last decade, the study of happiness has emerged as a scientific discipline of its own: there are now 'professors of happiness' at universities, 'quality of life' institutes attached to them, and numerous research papers; there is even the Journal of Happiness Studies..." (p.44)

If we're not perpetually overjoyed after all this, it may be there are tactical errors in happiness literature. For example, happiness manuals like The Secret (not to mention countless other Positive Mental Attitude books) tend to offer strategies for raising your expectations. Yet, when Danes, reportedly the  "happiest people in the world," were studied for their secret, researchers concluded that it was their  "modest expectations" (leading to fewer disappointments). 

In any case, this sort of happiness scrutiny is a symptom, according to Zizek, of a new social imperative: "happiness as the supreme duty." (44)  Hyperbole?
 
Maybe not.  Barbara Ehrenreich's recent Bright-Sided studies U.S. culture's "relentless promotion of positive thinking" and its practices. One of the darker aspects of such thought (aside from the apparently disastrous effects it had on investment strategy) is its application in some types of business management.

"Except in clear cut cases of racial, gender, age, or religious discrimination," Ehrenreich writes, "Americans can be fired for anything, such as failing to generate positive vibes.  A computer technician in Minneapolis told me he lost one job for uttering a stray remark that was never identified for him but taken as evidence of sarcasm and a 'negative attitude.' " (54)

The "subtler repression" Roiphe alludes to may be the result of these cultural currents.  If our "New Age" happiness is a "duty", it becomes a job like any other.  You end up working too hard to have a good time.

And if it comes at the the expense of critical thought, the result may be a sense that there's something missing from this brand of joy.  What?  The wildness of a little freedom. 

A Narcissistic Act

I wrote a poem a few years back that plays with these ideas.  And though I'm hesitant to present my own work, happiness therapists the world over tell me I must fight this embarrassment to achieve self-realization. So in the interest of my happiness, the sales of my book Look Slimmer Instantly, and, I hope, your personal enjoyment and self-fulfillment, here it is:

It Was the Night Before Monday

and a good thing too
because if the weekend went on any longer
the populace was in danger of the overwork
it took to have a good time

you could feel the relief in the night air
in every restaurant
around every TV screen
among the crowds pouring out of the Sunday night features
leaving the parks
or in the minds of those obstinate individuals
visiting a last site at their keyboards

you could hear the chatter 
arising into the atmosphere like a swarm
people excitedly planning
how they would spend their morning
relaxing in front of a column of figures
or obeying the kind machines that urged them forward
at a more human pace
than the cruel bosses
of the leisure industry

and among those who were tired
(and there were many)
of risking their lives
in order to enjoy them

voices began to cry out
and demand revolutionary action--

some called for a longer work week
supported by a leisure strike
so that the oppression known as entertainment
could be retired forever