Obama Love Love Me Do

I get what McCain's advertising gurus are trying to do. I get it, really. And they're succeeding in much the same way as my grade three crush, Rodney Sanford, succeeded in his objectives, when he used to cross town to play on my street.

So he could pull my pigtails, of course.

The Bale of his existence

It's taken twenty years, but my friend Harrison Cheung finally got some payback for his tireless efforts promoting an unknown actor named Christian Bale. Here's his story in England's Daily Mail.

Not Mad for Mad Men

I wanted so much to like Mad Men, I really did. The show is about advertising, and I'm an advertising maven. It's set in the sixties, and I totally groove to that vibe. It was critically acclaimed before the first episode aired last year, and so I made a point to watch the pilot. After that, I seemed to always have something else to do on Thursdays at 10:00.


When the DVD came out a few weeks ago I bought it so I could try again. Maybe it'll grow on me, I thought. Maybe I shouldn't be so quick to judge. So I watched the whole first season, and now I'm ready to deliver a verdict.

In just a second. Let me get my glasses. My eyes have gone slightly crosseyed, what from having been rolled every few minutes for the last 13 hours.

Watching Mad Men would make for a great drinking game, even better that "He's dead, Jim." Every time you see a sixties cliché being delivered with all the subtlety of, say, a stripper working the pole, you take a drink.

It seems to me that series writer and producer Matthew Weiner wanted to make a show about what he thinks we think the sixties were like, in exactly the same way that he created a show about what he thought we thought Italian mobsters were like. The difference is, most of us have no experience with real mobsters.

Weiner used to write for the Sopranos. Now, that was never my favourite show, but I did enjoy it, and I watched all of seasons 1 and 2. The dialog never struck me like, "Yo, bad guy, I'm a gangster, and I'm going to shoot you now," but that's exactly how Mad Men seems to me: "Hee hee, I'm a silly woman, so I totally understand why you don't take me seriously. No, really. I get it!"

In good storytelling you develop strong, complex characters, drop them into a turbulent world, and create conflicts for them to handle. Matthew Weiner's method is to begin with the situation, like, hey, let's show that people smoked a lot back then, or that they drove drunk — then you contrive the characters' movements around them. Watching Mad Men is like watching the assistant director do the blocking.

The most creative part of Mad Men is the opening titles, which you can download as a screensaver from the AMC website, and I did. I hope they win the Emmy for that, really, I do. They also received nominations for production design, costumes, and hair styles, sure. Even cinematography. Even direction, if I squint a little. But outstanding writing? Puh-leez. And especially for the pilot. The clichés were coming so fast and furious, they even obscured the heavy handed metaphors. When the little girl runs into the kitchen with the dry cleaning bag over her head, I actually burst out laughing.

The characters drink and smoke in almost every scene. We get it: people smoked back then. They make a point of showing the pregnant woman drinking and smoking, so we can scream self-righteously. The kids bounce around in the car, without seatbelts. Yeah, yeah — how did we ever survive?

Still, I persisted, trying to enjoy the set design. I do love the sixties furniture, and other authentic details, like the garish nail polish colours. And I squealed with delight at the costumes, especially Betty's groovy white sunglasses and fabulous High Society dresses. And I want to care about Pete and Peggy, I do. Maybe if the writers had given them a back story; if they'd known each other before Sterling Cooper, I could believe Peggy's doe-eyed devotion to him, but I don't.


(By the way, if you're wondering where you recognize her from, it's the West Wing. She was Zoey Bartlet, the president's daughter. And Joan was Saffron on Firefly.)

I tried to like Peggy. She's prudish, but determined, so I tried to comprehend why she would sleep with the first guy in the agency who was rude to her. On her first day. I cheered for her, as she fought the rampant sexism to become a copywriter. And when her zipper split and only the most dense of viewers would not have realized it was because she was pregnant, I really began to admire her, because she hid it with fat clothes, knowing she'd be forced to quit her job if her situation became known.

Then, in the last episode, I had to crawl out from under my disbelief which couldn't remain suspended, and crashed down on my head -- she didn't know she was pregnant? There are so many reasons why that's not plausible, I won't insult your intelligence by listing them.

Eye rolling moment number 847: Don Draper shows up at his mistress's apartment and tells her to pack her bags, he's taking her to Paris. She declines, opting instead to stay, because she and her friends were about to get high and listen to Miles. Now, I've got nothing against Miles, but if the man I was sleeping with showed up waving his bonus cheque and wanting to spend it on me, I wouldn't even stop to pack.


Are we really expected to sympathize with Don Draper? He has everything, so he wants what he can't have, and we're supposed to feel sorry for him. It's just not working for me. "I'm not used to being talked to this way by a woman," he says, when meeting a prospective new client. The writers were obviously at a loss to come up with a more subtle way to convey the sexism of the times.

I think that's the root of what annoys me about the show: the writers think we're stupid. That unless they deliver every line in the most heavy-handed way, we won't get it.

Note to Matthew Weiner: We get it, already.


Season 2 begins tomorrow, and am I going to watch it? You bet I am, and I'll tell you why. My favourite scene in season 1 is when Betty shoots at the neighbour's pigeons. She's got some serious rage bottled up, and could go postal any minute. I'm dying to see what she'll do in season 2.

And now instead of living in a pleasant suburb, we're living in the basement at her mom and dad's

I wrote that title from memory, and I've only seen the new Freecreditreport.com ad three times. It's more catchy, and more memorable, than even Weezer's new song, Pork and Beans. In fact, I'm starting to wonder if someone from Weezer isn't writing those jingles.

I think the ads for Freecreditreport.com, where the young man sings about the woes bestowed upon him because he didn't know his credit was bad, are absolutely brilliant.

The first one, Pirate, was beginning to grate on my nerves, to the point where I'd change the channel when it came on — but it was always too late. Just like the horrendous Hotel California, all you need to hear is the first couple of notes and it's stuck in your head for the rest of the day.

Or week.

And then, just when I thought I couldn't stand to hear it one more time, along came the new one, Dream Girl, and damn it if I'm not hooked again.

The ads were created by The Martin Agency, of Richmond, Virginia. They're also the agency behind the Geico ads featuring James Lipton and Peter Frampton (which I also think are brilliant, especially the James Lipton one).

So they're entertaining: check. Memorable: check. Catchy: check. Clever: check. But what are the ads saying? What is the commercial message being communicated? Let's read the lines, and between them:

"I should have gone to Freecreditreport.com; I could have seen this comin' at me like an atom bomb."

The implication is, if only he had checked his credit... what? It wouldn't be bad? How does knowing you have bad credit change the fact that you have bad credit? The ads imply (and very well) that, somehow, using Freecreditreport.com would have prevented our hero from having to wait tables in a pirate costume (or drive a beat-up car, or live in his girlfriend's basement).

It usually surprises my students when I tell them, it's against the law for advertisements to lie. But it's true. You can't outright lie — but you can imply like hell.

That's why these ads are so brilliant. They imply that by signing up for Free Credit Report's monthly monitoring service, that you won't have bad credit. Of course that's not true at all, but people believe what they want to believe, and they want to believe there's an easy solution to the problem of bad credit.

Oh — the ads also imply that the service is free. It's not.

You can watch all three Free Credit Report ads here.

But is it safe to take it in the bathtub?

I just received an email from Amazon announcing its new electronic book reader, Kindle. "Reads like paper!" they claim. Uh, yeah, right.

Didn't they try this about ten years ago? I swear I downloaded a Stephen King e-book. It's probably still on my old IBM Thinkpad, which I can't bear to throw away. Just in case, you know, some day it becomes a valuable antique. Or I remember where I put that first screenplay I wrote.

No surprise to geeks and geek lovers eveywhere, one of the first Kindle titles available is Snowcrash.

Music, the Internet, and Pop Culture

I've been a subscriber to David Strom's Web Informant since before it was a blog; since before there was such a thing as blogs. I still get it delivered via email, and today his essay was about pop culture, and how soon we'll need a dictionary to keep up with it. To prove his point he linked to the new Weezer video, Pork & Beans.

Wal-Mart is America's largest music retailer, and as such wields a great deal of power. They refuse to carry CDs with images or lyrics their company disapproves of. They refused to carry Sheryl Crow's CD because the lyrics of one of her songs went like this: "Watch out sister/Watch out brother/Watch our children as they kill each other/with a gun they bought at the Wal-Mart discount stores." Is that right? If not, what can be done about it?

And finally, in memory of George Carlin, should his seven words you can never say on television be permitted on television?