A Culture of Whores
Apr. 5th, 2007 08:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peristaltorA recent Frontline episode sent me around the bend. Though I first saw it two months ago, I have only yet recovered enough from the affirmation, calmed myself from the jolt of reality, to talk about it.
You see I, Peristaltor, find myself more and more allergic to commercial advertising.
It hasn't always been this way. I used to stare numbly into the glass teat for days on end, drawing not necessarily sustinence but at least alleviating a moment of boredom, whole strings of moments at a stretch. Then I moved to college, where there was no good television readily available and I had to actually study to graduate. I lost the need to drown in the media stream.
I got more Americanized just after college, but discovered the VCR and the library. No longer did I have to stare quite so blindly. Then the computer with internet (and Doom, Duke Nukem, Diablo, Quake. . .) came along, absorbing more time.
Somewhere in that time span, between Doom and Diablo, something snapped. I don't know what. Since then, though, I have been less and less able to endure commercial interruptions without physical discomfort.
The Frontline piece brought the "malady" home for me, outlining that I might not be to blame for my syptoms. Advertising may have simply become of late too toxic to humans.
I feel myself to be a canary in a vast media coal mine.
For the sake of brevity -- I could rant on this topic for days, and do, given enough rope -- I'll concentrate on two areas in the documentary with which I have some familiarity.
The first, Queer Eye For The Straight Guy. The wife has been a huge fan of this show since its debut. I've watched dutifully as it progressed. If you've found for the last few years yourself in a cave or without basic cable (same thing, really) and have missed the Fab 5, essentially they burst into the lives of some hapless breeder and infuse into his life a sense of style and fashion that many of these guys so desperately need. Simple stuff really.
From the beginning, Queer Eye seems to have been established as a vehicle for product placement, one of the more insidious marketing tools used with impunity today by ad minions, often without regard for the consequences of such placements. For example, among the help given to the straight clay the Five attempt to mold would be furnishings, clothing (called "couteur" by Carson), kitchen appliances, and grooming tools, for the most part all obtained by one store per show. I have no problem with this aspect of product placement, since small shops are often chosen for the flare they add to the otherwise bland environment dominated by big box retail.
Kyan, the grooming guru, however, has one endearing quirk that consistantly got my allergy detector on high paranoia.
You see, there is one damaging side effect of product placement. The product must never be placed in a negative light. It wouldn't be much of an ad otherwise, right? In The Front, Woody Allen plays a front man for a blacklisted writer, called to do a quick rewrite of a teleplay. It seems the execution of a character in the gas chamber simply won't do for the sponsor of the show . . . a gas company.
An even more laughable example can be found in Sean Penn's Bad Boys from 1983. Poor Sean finds himself in a youth penatentiary, condemned to interact with other young cons and drink RC Cola from the vending machine all freakin' day. It's always RC. In just about every scene. One scene stands out, however. In it, Sean has finally had enough rolling over to the bully. After some provocation, he decides to take action. He grabs his pillowcase. He grabs a fist full of quarters. He marches to the vending machine and feeds it quarters. He grabs can after can of generic cola -- not Royal Crown this time! -- and stuffs his pillowcase. He waits. The bully approaches. He scowls. He beats the bully bloody with his loaded pillowcase.
And afterwards, I shit you not, he goes to the vending machine, grabs an RC, and goes to his cell to sip and decompress from all the excitement.
So back to Kyan, the Fab Fiver with scruples.
He gives every guy in the show standard advice for the type of skin and hair the guy in question has. And Kyan is very accomating to the product placement grooming sponsor of the episode, recommending X brand of everything from exfoliant to moisturizer. "X" of course changes from show to show . . . with two exceptions.
He always seems to recommend Crest White Strips. There may simply not be any other brand of plastic stickies one can paste to one's teeth for incremental whitening. I don't know. Or maybe, more likely, Crest got in on the Queer Eye bandwagon early and signed an exclusive deal for the duration of the series.
The other tried and true recommendation Kyan makes has endeared him to me.
He always shows the straight guy how to shave properly so as to avoid damage to the skin; and he always very vehemently tells the straight to use a non-disposable, single blade razor.
A non-disposable, single blade razor.
I have no idea whether or not this is good advise, but I am amused when he makes it. His pet phrase when finding disposable razors in the straight bathroom is pretty good. He asks, "What's the best thing about disposable razors?" He throws the razors in the trash, answering, "They're disposable."
And why am I amused at his advise? And why am I in no position to judge it?
Take a moment folks. Go to the local store. Not a hoity-toity store, but a bread-and-butter supermarket or chain drugstore. Look for a razor marketed for men. A single blade, non-disposable razor marketed for men. After informally looking in every store I've visited for the last two months -- ever since I saw that Frontline and got the seed for this post -- I have failed to find any razors that fit Kyan's description.
Razors today have up to five blades per razor. Five blades. Men have shaved for hundreds, if not thousands of years with only a blade, a strop and a bit of lather. 
Sure, safety blades are a recent improvement, as are disposable blades that fit a central holder. The wholly disposable razor, though, from the double blade upward, has been a joke since it was introduced. Everyone with half a brain realizes the only reason for the introduction of new, multi-blade razors was to create a new product that could be patented, thus locking in replacement supply rights for at least seven years. 
After all, once a product's patent expires, any discount razor manufacturer can crank out low-cost replacement cartridges for high-end razor handles. And they do. All the majors lock in a future clientelle by making a nice handle that only accepts their cartridges which, just like printer ink cartridges, are overpriced and seriously customized.
The low-cost manufacturers, in turn, screw with the big names by making millions of cheap-assed disposable razors in whatever format recently lost its patent protetcion.
The result: It is nearly fricken' impossible to find a single blade, non-disposable razor. All the marketing muscle and shelf space has been reserved for the fad du jour.
As a result, Kyan never recommends any particular brand of razor.
Oh, I'm quite sure Remmington, Schick, Gillette et. al. would be happy to provide Kyan with likely products to push. But since he will not seemingly waver from his principled stand, they are in no position to insist.
I'm sure Kyan's preferred blades exist, but only in high-end grooming shops or on Ebay for antiques that probably work better than just about all the offerings on the well-healed chain drug store shelves. Whatever. I doubt the manufacturers of these rare specialties have the bucks to place their products with the Fab Five. Hence, no recommendations.
Good for you, Kyan.
As for me, my mother-in-law sends us disposable razors by the carton, every time they go on sale. I haven't bought a razor since the nineties, and have enough to last at least the end of the next two decades, if not more. Sorry, Kyan, as much as I appreciate your principled stand against current razor marketing, I ain't proud. I won't be going out of my way anytime soon just to track down your preferred mode of shaving and see if it is in any way superior to one that, for me at least, has become free.
I got the title of this post from a quote in the Frontline piece. Mark Crispin Miller of NYU notes:
While a convincing quote, it fails the Peristaltor smell test on one crucial element: It attempts to reduce the irreducable continuum.
Mr. Miller speculates in his quote that culture is something apart from advertising. I would disagree. Advertising has been found on the ruins of ancient cities. It is no mere usurper of values recently introduced by value-less individuals bent on destroying "culture."
No, Mr. Miller's hyperbole misses the mark in its absolute condemnation. What we have today is simply too much advertising. We have advertisers, panicked at the vast array of media choices for people, trying to spackle the cracks in our perception with branding. We have advertising overload.
A friend, Terry, and I discussed this overload phenomenon recently. He was crowing about Air America and the refreshing programing it provides against the very reactionary fair just about everyone else pushes. I agreed that it was good, but stipulated that I could not stomach more than a few minutes at a stretch. The problem: Air America is one of the most ad-intensive radio outfits around. We're talking 3 minutes of commercials for every 7 or 8 minutes of content, and much of the content devoted to teasers for upcoming content (one of my pet peaves). Ergo: I do not listen on a regular basis, preferring instead NPR.
He was a bit miffed on my admonition. He tried to quite condescendling explain that advertising was how radio was financed, and that I should endure a bit for the sake of freedom or whatever.
I didn't have a chance to rebutt him then -- he is a known blowhard making it impossible for mere mortals to shove a word through his oral banter edgewise -- but I have it now.
Yes, advertising pays the bills. That is not being disputed.
For the sake of argument, let's posit an analogy. Let's say we, a boy, fancy a girl, and wish the pleasure of her company. (I know, I know, it's a sexist set-up, but bear with me.) We ask the girl out for a meal and conversation. It is accepted in society that we will pay for the priveledge with the meal.
What else we can expect, though, is quite unclear.
Let's use my analogy. If the meal went well, the conversation scintellating, the atmosphere perfect, we might be surprised with a kiss or an invite to continue elsewhere. I would consider that fair, but with no expectation of continuance.
Under Terry's Air America rational, we should be able to present the bill to our date, note the gargantuan sum printed thereon, compare market prices for other commodities, like, say, felatio, and demand that she immediately report to a secluded area of our choosing for at least a dick shot to the tonsils. "Hey, meals ain't cheap, baby. It's time to pay the piper. Hope you left room."
What we have here is not a difference in kind, but a difference in degree. I do not object to advertising per se, but to the amount of advertising currently tolerated as normal, and what I consider the undue influence advertisers seem to be exerting today on everything from acceptable razors for shaving to what cola one can use as a weapon.
Yes, we still appear to be a culture, to be sure . . . but what kind?
You see I, Peristaltor, find myself more and more allergic to commercial advertising.
It hasn't always been this way. I used to stare numbly into the glass teat for days on end, drawing not necessarily sustinence but at least alleviating a moment of boredom, whole strings of moments at a stretch. Then I moved to college, where there was no good television readily available and I had to actually study to graduate. I lost the need to drown in the media stream.
I got more Americanized just after college, but discovered the VCR and the library. No longer did I have to stare quite so blindly. Then the computer with internet (and Doom, Duke Nukem, Diablo, Quake. . .) came along, absorbing more time.
Somewhere in that time span, between Doom and Diablo, something snapped. I don't know what. Since then, though, I have been less and less able to endure commercial interruptions without physical discomfort.
The Frontline piece brought the "malady" home for me, outlining that I might not be to blame for my syptoms. Advertising may have simply become of late too toxic to humans.
I feel myself to be a canary in a vast media coal mine.
For the sake of brevity -- I could rant on this topic for days, and do, given enough rope -- I'll concentrate on two areas in the documentary with which I have some familiarity.
The first, Queer Eye For The Straight Guy. The wife has been a huge fan of this show since its debut. I've watched dutifully as it progressed. If you've found for the last few years yourself in a cave or without basic cable (same thing, really) and have missed the Fab 5, essentially they burst into the lives of some hapless breeder and infuse into his life a sense of style and fashion that many of these guys so desperately need. Simple stuff really.
From the beginning, Queer Eye seems to have been established as a vehicle for product placement, one of the more insidious marketing tools used with impunity today by ad minions, often without regard for the consequences of such placements. For example, among the help given to the straight clay the Five attempt to mold would be furnishings, clothing (called "couteur" by Carson), kitchen appliances, and grooming tools, for the most part all obtained by one store per show. I have no problem with this aspect of product placement, since small shops are often chosen for the flare they add to the otherwise bland environment dominated by big box retail.
Kyan, the grooming guru, however, has one endearing quirk that consistantly got my allergy detector on high paranoia.
You see, there is one damaging side effect of product placement. The product must never be placed in a negative light. It wouldn't be much of an ad otherwise, right? In The Front, Woody Allen plays a front man for a blacklisted writer, called to do a quick rewrite of a teleplay. It seems the execution of a character in the gas chamber simply won't do for the sponsor of the show . . . a gas company.
An even more laughable example can be found in Sean Penn's Bad Boys from 1983. Poor Sean finds himself in a youth penatentiary, condemned to interact with other young cons and drink RC Cola from the vending machine all freakin' day. It's always RC. In just about every scene. One scene stands out, however. In it, Sean has finally had enough rolling over to the bully. After some provocation, he decides to take action. He grabs his pillowcase. He grabs a fist full of quarters. He marches to the vending machine and feeds it quarters. He grabs can after can of generic cola -- not Royal Crown this time! -- and stuffs his pillowcase. He waits. The bully approaches. He scowls. He beats the bully bloody with his loaded pillowcase.And afterwards, I shit you not, he goes to the vending machine, grabs an RC, and goes to his cell to sip and decompress from all the excitement.
So back to Kyan, the Fab Fiver with scruples.
He gives every guy in the show standard advice for the type of skin and hair the guy in question has. And Kyan is very accomating to the product placement grooming sponsor of the episode, recommending X brand of everything from exfoliant to moisturizer. "X" of course changes from show to show . . . with two exceptions.
He always seems to recommend Crest White Strips. There may simply not be any other brand of plastic stickies one can paste to one's teeth for incremental whitening. I don't know. Or maybe, more likely, Crest got in on the Queer Eye bandwagon early and signed an exclusive deal for the duration of the series.
The other tried and true recommendation Kyan makes has endeared him to me.
He always shows the straight guy how to shave properly so as to avoid damage to the skin; and he always very vehemently tells the straight to use a non-disposable, single blade razor.
A non-disposable, single blade razor.
I have no idea whether or not this is good advise, but I am amused when he makes it. His pet phrase when finding disposable razors in the straight bathroom is pretty good. He asks, "What's the best thing about disposable razors?" He throws the razors in the trash, answering, "They're disposable."
And why am I amused at his advise? And why am I in no position to judge it?
Take a moment folks. Go to the local store. Not a hoity-toity store, but a bread-and-butter supermarket or chain drugstore. Look for a razor marketed for men. A single blade, non-disposable razor marketed for men. After informally looking in every store I've visited for the last two months -- ever since I saw that Frontline and got the seed for this post -- I have failed to find any razors that fit Kyan's description.
Razors today have up to five blades per razor. Five blades. Men have shaved for hundreds, if not thousands of years with only a blade, a strop and a bit of lather. Sure, safety blades are a recent improvement, as are disposable blades that fit a central holder. The wholly disposable razor, though, from the double blade upward, has been a joke since it was introduced. Everyone with half a brain realizes the only reason for the introduction of new, multi-blade razors was to create a new product that could be patented, thus locking in replacement supply rights for at least seven years. After all, once a product's patent expires, any discount razor manufacturer can crank out low-cost replacement cartridges for high-end razor handles. And they do. All the majors lock in a future clientelle by making a nice handle that only accepts their cartridges which, just like printer ink cartridges, are overpriced and seriously customized.The low-cost manufacturers, in turn, screw with the big names by making millions of cheap-assed disposable razors in whatever format recently lost its patent protetcion.
The result: It is nearly fricken' impossible to find a single blade, non-disposable razor. All the marketing muscle and shelf space has been reserved for the fad du jour.
As a result, Kyan never recommends any particular brand of razor.
Oh, I'm quite sure Remmington, Schick, Gillette et. al. would be happy to provide Kyan with likely products to push. But since he will not seemingly waver from his principled stand, they are in no position to insist.
I'm sure Kyan's preferred blades exist, but only in high-end grooming shops or on Ebay for antiques that probably work better than just about all the offerings on the well-healed chain drug store shelves. Whatever. I doubt the manufacturers of these rare specialties have the bucks to place their products with the Fab Five. Hence, no recommendations.
Good for you, Kyan.
As for me, my mother-in-law sends us disposable razors by the carton, every time they go on sale. I haven't bought a razor since the nineties, and have enough to last at least the end of the next two decades, if not more. Sorry, Kyan, as much as I appreciate your principled stand against current razor marketing, I ain't proud. I won't be going out of my way anytime soon just to track down your preferred mode of shaving and see if it is in any way superior to one that, for me at least, has become free.
I got the title of this post from a quote in the Frontline piece. Mark Crispin Miller of NYU notes:
Once a culture becomes entirely advertising friendly, it ceases to be a culture at all.
While a convincing quote, it fails the Peristaltor smell test on one crucial element: It attempts to reduce the irreducable continuum.
Mr. Miller speculates in his quote that culture is something apart from advertising. I would disagree. Advertising has been found on the ruins of ancient cities. It is no mere usurper of values recently introduced by value-less individuals bent on destroying "culture."
No, Mr. Miller's hyperbole misses the mark in its absolute condemnation. What we have today is simply too much advertising. We have advertisers, panicked at the vast array of media choices for people, trying to spackle the cracks in our perception with branding. We have advertising overload.
A friend, Terry, and I discussed this overload phenomenon recently. He was crowing about Air America and the refreshing programing it provides against the very reactionary fair just about everyone else pushes. I agreed that it was good, but stipulated that I could not stomach more than a few minutes at a stretch. The problem: Air America is one of the most ad-intensive radio outfits around. We're talking 3 minutes of commercials for every 7 or 8 minutes of content, and much of the content devoted to teasers for upcoming content (one of my pet peaves). Ergo: I do not listen on a regular basis, preferring instead NPR.
He was a bit miffed on my admonition. He tried to quite condescendling explain that advertising was how radio was financed, and that I should endure a bit for the sake of freedom or whatever.
I didn't have a chance to rebutt him then -- he is a known blowhard making it impossible for mere mortals to shove a word through his oral banter edgewise -- but I have it now.
Yes, advertising pays the bills. That is not being disputed.
For the sake of argument, let's posit an analogy. Let's say we, a boy, fancy a girl, and wish the pleasure of her company. (I know, I know, it's a sexist set-up, but bear with me.) We ask the girl out for a meal and conversation. It is accepted in society that we will pay for the priveledge with the meal.
What else we can expect, though, is quite unclear.
Let's use my analogy. If the meal went well, the conversation scintellating, the atmosphere perfect, we might be surprised with a kiss or an invite to continue elsewhere. I would consider that fair, but with no expectation of continuance.
Under Terry's Air America rational, we should be able to present the bill to our date, note the gargantuan sum printed thereon, compare market prices for other commodities, like, say, felatio, and demand that she immediately report to a secluded area of our choosing for at least a dick shot to the tonsils. "Hey, meals ain't cheap, baby. It's time to pay the piper. Hope you left room."
What we have here is not a difference in kind, but a difference in degree. I do not object to advertising per se, but to the amount of advertising currently tolerated as normal, and what I consider the undue influence advertisers seem to be exerting today on everything from acceptable razors for shaving to what cola one can use as a weapon.
Yes, we still appear to be a culture, to be sure . . . but what kind?