[What's that? The new posting was due on Friday? Ah, such sloppy volunteerism on my part. Oh well. I'll work this week to get a few more in the can to make sure that if things come up that I have Sus to burn. And I give you my obviously frail promise that there'll be more new content up for Friday. Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye. Because Lord knows I would rather die or be blinded than ever be late in posting an entry on a blog that nobody reads anyway.
[Su would like to express its solidarity with those seeking to non-violently occupy Wall Street and other centers of corporate power. While those individuals work to challenge the physical loci of the corporate ownership of the American mind, Su continues on its meager quest to decolonize the mind by means of fiction alone, hair of the dog for the vile and manipulative fictions that would otherwise worm their way into one's consciousness or unconsciousness and fuck with one's life goals and perceptions of self and extrinsic reality.
[This week we'll be looking at an ad that does its best to fill its audience with certain expectations for effects that accompany the buying of certain products. Actually, the buying of certain products from a certain retailer; the power of these products seems not to be in the products themselves, but in where you buy them, I guess? Upon examination, the relation between the cause of buying the clothes and backpacks from K-Mart and the advertised effects seems pretty fucking weak. Some might say “That's just free speech!” or “You're exaggering, Su! This shit be harmless!” To the first responder Su would re-respond “So's a lot of hateful, harmful shit; should any and all speech be beyond criticism?” (or, alternately, “Then so's my right to take issue with it, fuckwit”). Su would then respond to the second responder by saying “Do you *really* think it's harmless for *children* to be inculcated with artificial desires for things that they cannot possibly ever have by means of an ad that they might be exposed to multiple times or in concert with the hundreds or thousands of other ads they are exposed to on a daily basis, all of these ads acting to tell these children what to want and how to want it and none of which posit that the things that these children should have are things that they can achieve or earn or make for themselves but only material commodities that can and should and ultimately must be bought? If that kind of thought-control seems harmless to you, it's only because you've already been so profoundly harmed by it that you're unconscious of it.” And, because we here at Su (we being just me and me alone) do our best to advocate for a reality-based understanding of reality rather than encourage people to buy into whatever snake oil bullshit the “job creators” have cooked up this week, we offer the following expression of crankiness. It's time to get your crank on. Actually, that sounds like an advocacy for crystal meth, which is also a thing that we here at Su don't endorse. Enough chatter! To the work.]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGtJ7YaxwwU
KIDS.
Do you wish that your environment would alter its appearance with a rapidity that could satisfy the greatest of attention deficits?
Do you wish that anything and everything you did was to the accompaniment of some sweet beats?
Do you wish that, when observing somebody, your vision would skip past all the boring crap and only register the sight of those people doing something physically extreme and/or emotionally charged?
Do you wish that people around you would laugh, smile, cheer, and dance for no apparent reason?
Do you wish that your every day at your middle school was a spontaneous and unbridled org—that is, an unbridled party of dance? Do you wish that people would spontaneously break out b-boy headspins in the hallways of your junior high?
Do you wish that you could change outfits multiple times a second—because, seriously, isn't wearing the same thing for more than a second something old and boring people would do?
Do you wish that, walking down a hallway, all you would see around you would be very quick gestures of affection or outbursts of physical energy, as though the people who inhabited your school were like those mayflies that only live for a single day and have to make every single fraction of a second as intense as possible, no time to stop and think, only to smile and act, and it's all okay because everything that happens at your school is AWESOME?
Do you wish to be hugged? Of course, you might be able to get hugs on your own...maybe. Do you really wish to leave that to chance?
If you are male, do you wish to walk down the hallway with a cute girl on either arm? (If you are male and you don't understand this wish, check back later—after puberty hits, you'll understand, and you'll know you want this more than you have ever wanted anything else in your life). If you are female, do you wish to be arm candy for some smugly grinning thirteen-year-old who will undoubtedly treat you like the toy you strive to be? (If you are female, doesn't the fact that you have come this far into our fantasy land indicate that you would prefer for somebody else to do your thinking and dreaming for you? Somebody like a thirteen-year-old alpha male decked out in a flannel shirt and a smug grin?).
Do you wish to slide into your desk at the last possible second with a grin and raised eyebrows, overwhelming your teachers with your coolness such that they can't even conceive of taking you to task for coming into class after everybody else has already started working?
Do you want to make this year EPIC?
Do you want your notebooks to be full of half-understood memes stripped from a 2008 browser cache?
Then shop at K-Mart for all of your back to school needs. K-Mart can't guarantee that any of the above will come true if you buy your clothes at K-Mart, but K-Mart WON'T guarantee that any of the above WON'T happen if you do.
[Yeah, so if you want to shop stupid, believe the hype that this commercial is trying to sell you and buy accordingly.
[I just want to say that I am grateful to this commercial in one respect: it introduced me to the music of Janelle Monae. That song playing in the background? “Tightrope.” And it is damn catchy. And it is also part of Monae's overaching project of creating a series of interlinked songs that criticize the emergent reality whereby our perceptions and feelings are controlled by a small group of powered elites, a reality fresh from the finest dystopian science fiction that is here, immanent and around us every day. You and I are swimming in that reality, my friend. Well, except that we aren't really swimming. The gentle reader gets my point. Anyway, I find it to be a particularly ironic choice on the part of K-Mart's ad-creators to use this song, although I can't deny its irresistible beat, and if the words suggest something else, well, who cares about words anyway? Appeals by means of language are *so* overrated. Anyway anyway, consider this a plug for Ms. Monae's music, which I've listened to and really liked, and that's different from the kinds of plugs I criticize here because my advocacy is experience-based and doesn't rely on hyperbole, illusion, temptation, or lies to make its point.
[Until next time, gentle readers! Just because corporations have SUperior wealth and political clout and control of our media, that doesn't mean you should let them SUpress your capacity for rational thought! SUrge up, SUbvert those systems and SUnder those shackles that seek to SUffocate your mind!]
Monday, September 19, 2011
Friday, September 9, 2011
Tandem
[This blog is dedicated to examining the absurd and anti-humanistic behaviors so often seen in advertisements and then extrapolating those behaviors out into short fictions. If we get a glimpse of the lives of the characters in commercials beyond the context of that serendipitous fifteen seconds of comic antics and blissful resolutions--if we take the behaviors evinced by such characters to their logical conclusions--we start to imagine the kinds of hellish lives that such people would have to lead. Each blog posting will start with a link to a commercial--most likely a television commercial, or perhaps a radio spot or a print ad. Watch/listen http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifthttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifo/look at the ad first, and then reahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifd the flash fiction that follows. I'll try to get a new fiction up every week, and I encourage you to send in links to ads that you want to see taken to their terrible, necessary conclusions. Maybe the shitty ad will be the next one I skewer.]
[I can't get the insert link option to work on this. I promise that I will endeavor to save you from the tedium of having to cut and paste the link into a new browser window next time around.]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L00p05j0pUk
Twenty years on. He sat in his chair, she lay strewn over the sofa. They watched television for some hours. They laughed sometimes, sometimes looked at one another, but most of these looks were one-sided: he caught her cheek, she took in his blankness, and when they actually made eye contact there was that embarrassing . Very often they sighed, expressing a discontentment so vague as to defy any further definition.
During a commercial with gratingly loud music, he hit the mute button. He looked over at her. She looked back. An energy transferred between them—each could feel it behind his or her eyes, a scratchy heat, and see it in the taut skin and compressed brow of the other.
With no further prompting, they surged up off their respective perches and rushed into the dark flat heat of the garage.
She beat him to it; she was the one who opened the freezer door and ripped two plastic bags scummed in frost from the diminishing pile. He grabbed one of the bags out of her hands; he tore open the outer storage bag and tore at the inner grocery bag that was wrapped in turn around the cardboard carton. Just opening the inner wrapper was enough to release some few scant bits of scent, trapped within for the eighteen years since the sandwich had been discontinued and then preserved against entropy to the best of the couple's ability. Through the scents of ice and plastic they breathed in the scents of frozen bacon and the cold-dulled scent of medium Swiss cheese still with some iota of sharpness in the aroma.
“Two-thousand and thirteen,” he and she said in unison. “It was a very good year.” They looked at each other, smiled.
They ran back into the kitchen, she sliding on the wooden floors in her socked feet and he slapping at the wooden floors with his bare, flat, fat feet.
They watched the sandwiches spin slowly in the yellow light of the operating microwave. The scents of reheating meat and that distinct, half-bitter odor of melting ice filled the kitchen. The couple inhaled deeply, smiled, exhaled, said “The speed of sound” in unison.
The microwave dinged done, and they got at their sandwiches like wolves at a ewe. They took one bite and then their heads reared back in an approximation of orgasm. Around the wilted reheated frozen eighteen-year-old lettuce, they spoke.
“Butterfly tongues! Dogs dreaming! An almond is not a nut!” they cried, the pitches of their two voices buzzing against each other.
They laughed, looked away, looked at each other, looked away, gulped another bite. “Kneecap! Pink ink! The first Miss America pageant was held in Atlantic City in 1921!”
Exhausted from the ecstasy, they fell back against the counter, laughing in breathless pants. It was just like it had been in the gold old days, for a moment; when everyone else in the park would stop and stare, when everyone else in the restaurant would stop and stare, when their synchronicity had been to the envy, amazement, or disgust of all.
They caught their breath and finished their unfrozen sandwiches in relative silence. Once he blatted out with a “Ferns have no flowers!” but it was no use; she looked at him and smiled a pitying smile, and he looked away and stuffed the rest of the sandwich into his mouth.
He went back to his chair, she to her couch. He turned the sound back on on the T.V.
There was little else to say.
[I can't get the insert link option to work on this. I promise that I will endeavor to save you from the tedium of having to cut and paste the link into a new browser window next time around.]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L00p05j0pUk
Twenty years on. He sat in his chair, she lay strewn over the sofa. They watched television for some hours. They laughed sometimes, sometimes looked at one another, but most of these looks were one-sided: he caught her cheek, she took in his blankness, and when they actually made eye contact there was that embarrassing . Very often they sighed, expressing a discontentment so vague as to defy any further definition.
During a commercial with gratingly loud music, he hit the mute button. He looked over at her. She looked back. An energy transferred between them—each could feel it behind his or her eyes, a scratchy heat, and see it in the taut skin and compressed brow of the other.
With no further prompting, they surged up off their respective perches and rushed into the dark flat heat of the garage.
She beat him to it; she was the one who opened the freezer door and ripped two plastic bags scummed in frost from the diminishing pile. He grabbed one of the bags out of her hands; he tore open the outer storage bag and tore at the inner grocery bag that was wrapped in turn around the cardboard carton. Just opening the inner wrapper was enough to release some few scant bits of scent, trapped within for the eighteen years since the sandwich had been discontinued and then preserved against entropy to the best of the couple's ability. Through the scents of ice and plastic they breathed in the scents of frozen bacon and the cold-dulled scent of medium Swiss cheese still with some iota of sharpness in the aroma.
“Two-thousand and thirteen,” he and she said in unison. “It was a very good year.” They looked at each other, smiled.
They ran back into the kitchen, she sliding on the wooden floors in her socked feet and he slapping at the wooden floors with his bare, flat, fat feet.
They watched the sandwiches spin slowly in the yellow light of the operating microwave. The scents of reheating meat and that distinct, half-bitter odor of melting ice filled the kitchen. The couple inhaled deeply, smiled, exhaled, said “The speed of sound” in unison.
The microwave dinged done, and they got at their sandwiches like wolves at a ewe. They took one bite and then their heads reared back in an approximation of orgasm. Around the wilted reheated frozen eighteen-year-old lettuce, they spoke.
“Butterfly tongues! Dogs dreaming! An almond is not a nut!” they cried, the pitches of their two voices buzzing against each other.
They laughed, looked away, looked at each other, looked away, gulped another bite. “Kneecap! Pink ink! The first Miss America pageant was held in Atlantic City in 1921!”
Exhausted from the ecstasy, they fell back against the counter, laughing in breathless pants. It was just like it had been in the gold old days, for a moment; when everyone else in the park would stop and stare, when everyone else in the restaurant would stop and stare, when their synchronicity had been to the envy, amazement, or disgust of all.
They caught their breath and finished their unfrozen sandwiches in relative silence. Once he blatted out with a “Ferns have no flowers!” but it was no use; she looked at him and smiled a pitying smile, and he looked away and stuffed the rest of the sandwich into his mouth.
He went back to his chair, she to her couch. He turned the sound back on on the T.V.
There was little else to say.
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