The Hook Brings You Back

Hook --Blues Traveler



It doesn't matter what I say
So long as I sing with inflection
That makes you feel I'll convey
Some inner truth or vast reflection
But I've said nothing so far
And I can keep it up for as long as it takes
And it don't matter who you are
If I'm doing my job then it's your resolve that breaks

Because the Hook brings you back
I ain't tellin' you no lie
The Hook brings you back
On that you can rely

There is something amiss
I am being insincere
In fact I don't mean any of this
Still my confession draws you near
To confuse the issue I refer
To familiar heroes from long ago
No matter how much Peter loved her
What made the Pan refuse to grow

Was that the Hook brings you back
I ain't tellin' you no lie
The Hook brings you back
On that you can rely

Suck it in suck it in suck it in
If you're Rin Tin Tin or Anne Boleyn
Make a desperate move or else you'll win
And then begin
To see
What you're doing to me this MTV is not for free
It's so PC it's killing me
So desperately I sing to thee
Of love
Sure but also of rage and hate and pain and fear of self
And I can't keep these feelings on the shelf
I've tried well no in fact I lied
Could be financial suicide but I've got too much pride inside
To hide or slide
I'll do as I'll decide and let it ride until I've died
And only then shall I abide this tide
Of catchy little tunes
Of hip three minute ditties
I wanna bust all your balloons
I wanna burn all your cities to the ground
I've found
I will not mess around
Unless I play then hey
I will go on all day. Hear what I say
I have a prayer to pray
That's really all this was
And when I'm feeling stuck and need a buck
I don't rely on luck because

The Hook brings you back
I ain't tellin' you no lie
The Hook...
On that you can rely

Cosmo Strikes Out

This appeared on Cosmo's Facebook page, and reaffirms what most of us have known for a while about dumfuk magazines "for women".

(paraphrasing a favorite comment):

Dear Cosmo -

Kindly take your ridiculous, arbitrary dictates of what women should want to look like and shove 'em back up your ass.

Sincerely,

Every guy on the planet who's had to spend hours reassuring a wife, girlfriend or daughter (ie: any real-world-perfect-for-me woman) that she's not fat and grotesque, all because assholes like you insist on undermining her confidence by playing on her fears just so you can sell her a load of shit she doesn't need in the first fucking place.

Ouch

If ya saw my post from yesterday, you may have tho't I'm not the football freak that I actually am.   Football's my game, but it really bothers me when it gets all mashed up with the US military and god-bothering and compulsory patriotism and hyper consumerism and a need to see ourselves in soft-focus that strikes me as more than just a little creepy; I guess it just seems like we're putting all those things together and synthesizing a kind of national religion, and it bugs me.

Speaking of bugs - I don't recall seeing this, but they tell me it ran last nite:



BTW - I grew up hating to love the Broncos because it seemed like they were always just good enough to break your heart (SB #'s 32 and 33 notwithstanding of course), and last night was a good example.  Denver has now lost more Super Bowls than any other team, and they're the proud owners of 3 out of the top 4 blowout losses in Super Bowl history.  That's my guys.

What We'll Prob'ly Not See Today

Today is the climax of the Festival In Superbowl-y Triumph, when the entire world can enjoy watching America FIST-ing itself on hi-def TV, thanks almost solely to a squad of Corporate Slags who'll give 3 or 4 million dollars to some other Corporate Slags to air a 30-second spot, placed by even more Corporate Slags at the ad agencies who've been whipping the armies of minimum-wage interns mornin' noon and night in order to come up with the little gems that we'll be raving about for a good two weeks, while we're slaving away to make the money we'll need to give to the beer companies and the insurance companies and the car companies and the sports franchises (and to the governments so they can give even more to those companies and franchises in direct and indirect ways) - just so we come right back here next year and do it all over again.  America - 'cuz FUCK YEAH!!!!!!!!!!!!

Here's one piece that I'm betting didn't make the cut.

Advertising Genius

Perception Drives Outcome

Above all - never admit you were wrong.

Battle Of The Brands

One of Lee Camp's Moment of Clarity videos on YouTube

You Know Somebody's Thinking It

It's just bound to be the next big thing in marketing.

The Real Power

Did you see it? Did you look closely enough to notice the woman at the top has too many fingers on her left hand?  And the guy in the middle shot has some spooky random hand on his shoulder?  And the guy in the bottom picture has only one ear?

No - prob'ly you didn't notice any of that at all - just like I didn't.  Simple and silly little exercise, but it points up a great lesson.  We're generally good people, so we tend to trust, which makes us pliable.  We'll focus on what we're told to focus on.  And so we can be manipulated.  Concentrate on what's important, not just what somebody tells you is urgent.

Confidence

Gallop put out another popularity poll - trying to discern the level of 'confidence' Americans have in various institutions (eg: SCOTUS, Congress, Military etc).

And guess what?  It shouldn't come as any kinda news to anybody that we love the US Military and we hate Congress - even though we continue to re-elect the people who make up the institution that gets a whopping 10% confidence rating.

90% of us say we don't have confidence in our #1 governing body, and yet the incumbents get re-elected 96% of the time.

Here's the thing:  We do what we're told to do.

Every time we turn around, there's somebody somewhere telling us every jarhead, zoomie, dog-face and squid is so Star-Spangled Awesome that God his-own-self steps aside whenever one of 'em walks into a room.

We are also constantly badgered to the point of befuddlement about how fucked up every little thing is when it comes to Government - except of course in those state and local rural centers where the good Christian small-government conservative dirt-huggin' gun-totin' real people hold power like an abused and frightened 4-year-old clutches a suffocating duckling on Easter Sunday.

We don't need to be brain-washed.  And we don't need to be turned into programmable automatons.  All anybody really has to do is keep us a little off-balance; getting us to consider just for a moment that (eg) Niall Ferguson's opinion that "hey, fracking isn't all that bad" is just as valid as the actual research that's been done proving there's at least real cause for concern, and that maybe we shouldn't be turning everything over to The Suits at giant corporations who feel nothing for anybody or anything that doesn't pump an extra 2¢ per share into their quarterly reports.

The enormity of the bamboozle is practically never revealed until well after the enormity of the crash caused by the bamboozle starts to sink in.  And if you wanna know what that's like, ask a Russian some time - or any of a rapidly-growing number of Greeks or Irish or Americans or or or.

Honesty

Careful What You Swallow

The Big Lie works wonders.  And just how big are the NRA's lies?

MoJo breaks it down:

Smackin' My Forehead

Once in a while, I need somebody like Julianna Forlano to remind me - it's not about delivering content to consumers.  It's about delivering consumers to advertisers.

Tell Your Daughters

I know a girl
She puts the color inside of my world
But she's just like a maze
Where all of the walls all continually change
And I've done all I can
To stand on her steps with my heart in my hands
Now I'm starting to see
Maybe it's got nothing to do with me

Fathers, be good to your daughters
Daughters will love like you do
Girls become lovers who turn into mothers
So mothers, be good to your daughters too

Oh, you see that skin?
It's the same she's been standing in
Since the day she saw him walking away
Now she's left
Cleaning up the mess he made

So fathers, be good to your daughters
Daughters will love like you do
Girls become lovers who turn into mothers
So mothers, be good to your daughters too

Boys, you can break
You'll find out how much they can take
Boys will be strong
And boys soldier on
But boys would be gone without the warmth from
A womans good, good heart

On behalf of every man
Looking out for every girl
You are the god and the weight of her world

So fathers, be good to your daughters
Daughters will love like you do
Girls become lovers who turn into mothers
So mothers, be good to your daughters too

Today's Carlin

That Dodge Commercial

I got kinda nauseous when I saw this, but I can admit also to being just a tiny bit impressed by its power.



Now, after a coupla days of Facebook Sharing of this "totally awesome (and not-even-a-little-cynically-manipulative-fantasy-fuck) tribute to The Real 'Murica", some dirty Librul at The Atlantic has to shit in the punch bowl over a few stoopid facts.

The arresting images combined with the crackle of what everyone immediately recognizes as old audio made everyone at our Super Bowl party stop and watch. Dodge, I'm sure, had good demographic analysis of their audience, so they knew they could go godly with the message and encounter little backlash. So God made a farmer, and also the advertising agencies who will use him to sell trucks. Quibbles aside, I'd rather have this kind of Americana than GoDaddy's bizarre antics.

But there's a problem. The ad paints a portrait of the American agricultural workforce that is horribly skewed. In Dodge's world, almost every farmer is a white Caucasian. And that's about as realistic as a Thomas Kincade painting.

Stipulating that visual inspection is a rough measure for the complex genealogical histories of people, I decided to count the race and ethnicity of the people in Dodge's ad. Here's what I found: 15 white people, one black man, and two (maybe three?) Latinos.

I couldn't help but wonder: Where are all the campesinos? The ethnic mix Dodge chose to represent American farming is flat-out wrong.

Taking one short step beyond the race thing (and remembering the last shot in this video), let's think about what a farm actually looks like here in 2013.  And then maybe we can talk about the simple fact that a farm isn't really a farm anymore - it's a factory.  You don't feed 7 Billion humans on a coupla chickens and a few acres of beans and millet and pygmy cucumbers.

One last thing: until the late 40s, Nostalgia was considered a mental disorder.

Music In Advertising

With Apologies

...to M Magritte.

The Treachery Of Images - 1928-29
("This is not a pipe")

His detractors all said, "Of course it's a pipe, you fool..."

And Magritte then challenged them - if it's really a pipe, then you should be able to pick it up fill it with tobacco.

"The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe?  No, it's just a representation, is it not?  So if I had written on my picture "This is a pipe," I'd have been lying!"

The point is semantic (even a little pedantic maybe), but he was warning us that what we see is not necessarily what's real.  And he was doing that just as advertising was coming of age, and a good 5 years before Goebbels raised it all to a deadly art.

Great art is the act of telling lies in a perfectly truthful way.

Poster

Seat Belts

Because I just think it's a really good ad.