JJ is...

...currently resisting the world's attempts at strangling him with it's bare hands.

(And you just thought I'd say "a fool.")

(Fool.)

Soupy. Don't say I didn't warn ya.

I find commercials to be an interesting subject, particularly fecund material to ponder and seed. Much of this is because I actually got a degree in the field (a BS in advertising, the most aptly-named degree ever), and because I bring the same textual analysis perspective to everything. All is text.

But it goes a little further, over into why I like sports bars. There is clear intentionality in advertising – even when we don’t know all the details of the intent, we know a fundamental intention to sell underlies it all. The visual language of commercials is familiar to my generation, incestuously inbreeding with music videos and from there with everything. Like any good whore, this transmits viruses of all types. Brands are the flags that ask our allegiance, and the corporate structure of interconnections the political machinations that drive every army.

I like sports bars because there is all of this: a common language, a clear system to which to appeal, proclaimed and secret fidelity in acknowledged concert. We talk sports, sports becomes the social arbiter, and we become defined by teams, ignoring but not denying the internal.

These are two important and rich world’s for me. Crazy, maybe, but these are places from which I make meaning and build narrative. Same rigor as I take to any other thoughtful task, but closer to kata than combat.

So, I was in a sports bar the other day and I saw this commercial…

A bunch of twenty-somethings are shown in quick cuts being ID’ed and denied in their efforts to buy a beer that is just out of frame. Some are pissed, all are nonplussed. And it leads to (I’m forgetting the exact accompanying visual for the end because my brain wrenched to a halt)…

Do you really have to be 30 to appreciate the golden rich flavor of Miller Genuine Draft?
Taste for yourself.

*blink*

*blink blink*

Huh?

I would so love to see the marketing plan behind this campaign. Who is the target? To whom is that last three word call to action made? Those of us over thirty? The twenty-somethings that look like dicks in the commercial? Because it is such a different message in each case. Try this, you are one of us, sophisticated. Reverse psychology – You can’t really appreciate this. Both at once? What do they imagine the MGD drinker looks like as a result, if this campaign succeeds. I go order an MGD at a bar, am I going to be standing next to some smirking pseudo-ironic dipshit with a temp job or average dude with a gut and a dude job and an opinion about everything on the TV?

Seriously, the commercial kinda fried my brain. It was like and AV EMP of jarbled communication. Maybe the author really is dead, and intentionality has failed to maintain the space, and it is all devolving to memetic chaos math, with fractal pulse of bullshit the best that can come forth.

I mean, huh?

Like that pretty chick that was talking to you that one time at a bar and you couldn’t figure out why she’d give you the time and then she says something and you flatline for a second. And then you go, “oh.”

Fuck, talk about memetic chaos math. Metaphors trying to strangle each other. How did you make it all the way down this far?

Little piece

in the
space of paces and
the insect of incest
all becomes
OM