By: CR

CR — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 04:14:03 +0000

An interesting point, Patrick… You may be on to something there… (Airports are especially interesting places for this sort of phenomenon – as they’re all more or less the same on the inside – that post-Newark concrete vaulting and the like…. And the internationally-legible signage…)

Oh yes–had meant to say that your update about the Swedish heavy drinking was puzzling, because they DO have a serious boozing problem there, don’t they?

I’m sure they do. Just like us, they seem to suffer from an intolerance / overindulgence issue. You just know that the place where you can’t buy anything but 2.5% beer is going to be the place with the most guys fetalled over in the corner in the morning…

But I don’t know why the HSBC ones would work; the bank doesn’t connect to anything local even via the ads.

I think that’s where my interest starts – the disconnect of these (and so many other ads) from the products sold or even a metaphorical connection to them. What, specifically, do they show when they show anything but what they are supposed to show…

But thanks for the excellent comments…

By: patrick j. mullins

patrick j. mullins — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 02:01:21 +0000

‘individualized pouty hotness’ very good, I liked these ads too. I can see how the Adidas ones would work as ads, but I don’t know why the HSBC ones would work; the bank doesn’t connect to anything local even via the ads. Couldn’t they have just done it more cheaply and just managed to say ‘we’re reminding you that HSBC is the name you’re supposed to remember’. Just read
Richard A. Clarke’s ‘Breakpoint’, in which something other than unsolved Taiwan issues is causing some of the 2012 terrorisms. I hadn’t ever read a novel by a big Government guy, was interesting, no matter there’s none of the usual art one expects from almost any novelist.It’s interesting because he knows more about the feel of something–although I’m going to be doing ‘Falling Man’ too in the next couple of weeks.

By: patrick j. mullins

patrick j. mullins — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 06:10:11 +0000

Yes, I am very interested in this sort of thing. (Will check out the YouTubes tomorrow or Monday.) The whole question of locality is what it immediately suggests, not just in ads but in all sorts of infrastructure in which locality has disappeared. Things suggested from just the most cursory look and reading your text are: 1) the memory of last being at CDG and how amazingly ugly Parisians have somehow managed to make things (that airport is worthy of Yuri Andropov, as I remember). I went to the john for less than 2 minutes and the President of Pakistan (this was 1997) came through the waiting area during that period–neither of us was blown up. 2) Just take HSBC, as well as almost any other bank. I had 2 credit cards with them at one time, which I have since discontinued, because they were no longer necessary. The addresses for the payment addresses kept changing every few months–it could be anywhere, started in Portland, Oregon, continued to LA, then to Baltimore and Salt Lake City. They always told me to ‘enjoy using the card’ the way all cards do and never overtly tell you that the essence of a credit card is not different from a mortgage or bank loan or student loan in the important ways; there’s always a slight sense that it really is your money even though they don’t go that far and do talk about how you’ll have to pay it back. Then they send all those ridiculous checks to you with amounts like $4000 on them and tell you that this is ‘the quick way to pay all your bills, take a vacation or redecorate’. You should go ahead and use these checks right away, one finds, but they have investment only in your ‘enjoying the card’, which is impossible, not in your enjoying what you use it for. I also used to enjoy the ‘Changes in Terms’ letters, which were presented in such a way that you would not read them or even look at them until you had most likely infringed upon something, at which point they told you you should have read it (customers are usually at fault on this, I’ve found. When I read stories about people who still get late fees on cards, I’m astonished. It’s like they wanted them.) Actually, I think they do sometimes say ‘it’s your money to use however you wish’, which is somewhat different from ‘it’s really your money’,which they have to stop short of. 4) I use Chase and there are many branches. When I once left something in one of them, I found that all of the branches in the city by then had the same number (this was in 2003 or 2004, and I’d looked in the phone book, but I don’t know how long all the numbers were the same), so that it was very difficult to reach a specific branch to ask about something that had to do with only that branch. 5) I think it is probably a New York thing for store owners to speak to you with much fawning while you are in their store, and ignore you on the street–after many years, about half the merchants I regularly use will speak to me outside the place of business, but it is interesting that it is often considered basically worthless thing to do. 6) Passport renewal has been overhauled into elephantine horrors, so that you can’t just walk in and get your passport renewed with ease in person: Since Sept. 11, you have to make an appt. for a walk-in if you are travelling soon and need the new passport; or you have to mail it in and wait 3-4 months, or pay $60 extra and have it expedited–which takes 3-4 weeks.

Some of that is off-topic, but I have long thought that ads for pleasurable activities–especially vacations, have an uncanny way of making them seem no different from the moment and place in which you are reading them. A subway car now has almost no localized ads, but a series of ads by a single whiskey, cruiseliner, or occasionally botanical garden, etc., and usually every car has only this one product advertised. Pictures of guys lazily fishing or cheap packages to St. Thomas always seem worse than just looking around at the people on the subway–so that by now the ads that, in midwinter, show sunny Bermuda and say ‘wouldn’t you rather be here than there?’ and the answer is always now ‘NO.’ Of course, this is a weird phenomenon that probably started sometime in the 80s, this sense of locations beginning to lose their individuality, films like ‘Slacker’, etc., but it can seem true until you make a real effort to go to the places and find that they are still, Zizek, Baudrillard and others notwithstanding, not the same as if you didn’t go anywhere.

I wonder if the ads are horrible like this because most people still want to ‘travel’ somewhere, but for it now NOT to be any different. If I paid attention to these dreadful ads, I would probably never bother going anywhere, because they’ve homogenized everything. Every day I study the huge busloads of tourists that are far more numerous than they were 20 years ago (I am pretty sure). I keep thinking I will find some spark of something, because there’s got to be–but I do not really ever see anything except people going through motions, which then is why entertainments that won’t ever disturb this easy mood are produced: and what is pissing me off is that they are seducing me too, recently of delusions of refinement–and now I want to be all good citizen and go to Disney World and do theme park and eat only simple/light/fresh pastas and make a conscious point to avoid anything that is ‘too special’. And I want to all of a sudden be really nice about things like computers, people of all political persuasions, bad musical theater (sooooooo ‘delightful in its own way’ really…), and thousands of other wonderful homogenized products!

Frank Rich today talks about the ‘easy listening’ trend that has occurred with Obama and others trying not to get on people’s nerves or seem to have a short fuse. It’s funny, I have to admit–but I am falling prey to it more and more every day: today I walked the 3 or so miles down to Chinatown and back and actually bought some real noodle soup from this hole-in-the-wall–but before I did it, I thought ‘this is so absurd, can’t you just get used to the fact that there is really only a vague appearance, a ghostly apparition of the ‘old characterful’ still clinging to some of the old things, and just deal with subsisting on some more generic things–surely whatever difference there is, is minor. Isn’t that acting more like ‘a normal person, a good citizen’? And to think I was actually still listening to old LPs as recently as 2 months ago. Who knows what’ll happen next? I already know all sorts of stuff about Lindsay Lohan and secretly imagine that I probably do need to know such things.

Apologies for length, this is a little too indulgent. Oh yes–had meant to say that your update about the Swedish heavy drinking was puzzling, because they DO have a serious boozing problem there, don’t they? I mean I was surprised when I heard about it about 1995, because it sounded almost as bad as Soviet factory on-the-job drinking. But then these are definitely the countries that ought to be talked about all the time, and I’m always surprised they aren’t. Nobody ever says anything about Switzerland, where everything has been made to work nearly perfectly that it’s almost a benign-totalitarian sensation–and they’ve got the second highest suicide rate in Europe after Sweden. They’ve got one or two pharmacies every block, so they’re very machine-like there (with that incredible honor-system subway in Lausanne, and probably other places), so maybe even though they don’t have the obligatory gloom the Swedes now must project, they have too easy access to Roche tablets, and so they take them, I guess.

Comments on: ads without products, products without qualities

By: CR

By: patrick j. mullins

By: patrick j. mullins