Passionate Advertising? or Watch What You Watch

As a (ex) student of communications, I tend to notice ads much more than the average bear. Throughout my college career, we were taught to be critical when viewing any kind of advertising, never just accepting it, but always questioning. While this attitude did initially ruin my ability to just enjoy the colors and effects in pretty ads, I realize just how important a role advertising plays in a capitalistic consumer culture.

I am reminded of Émile Zola's short story, "Death By Advertising"
(for those of us raised in the age of television, reading is kind of annoying, so I've included an informative video about the gist of the story below):

So it's true, advertising is important in what it tells us to buy, and eventually, DO with our lives. But lately, I've noticed a much more dangerous tactic employed by ad companies. Ads like the viral sensation that is the "Old Spice Guy" aren't as bad because they are primarily for entertainment, and the fact that these commercials are random, makes them less "calculatingly obvious":

dove

But now we come to the dangerous ads. The ones that inspire, that instill hope. These ads are never explicitly about the product they hope to publicize. They involve inspirational messages and images. I first noticed this during Dove's Real Beauty Campaign.

During this period, Dove's products were advertised not simply as beauty products, but as products that help your "real beauty". The campaign was aimed at undoing the damage done my unrealistic advertising that polluted women's perception of themselves. Their most popular ad ("Evolution") showcased how much work went into a photo shoot, to highlight the fact that real women cannot possibly attain such standards. But the one I found a little scary was this one:

At first glance, this ad is heartwarming, and has a remarkably positive message. But what this ad fails to enlighten the viewers about, is that Dove is owned by Unilever, the same company that owns Axe Body Spray. Axe has some of the most sexist and misogynistic commercials in the industry. For the purposes of politeness, I chose to describe Dove as hypocritical...

Ditto for the following ads by Absolut Vodka and Levi's.

ABSOLUT VODKA AD

Tagline: “Doing things differently leads to something exceptional”

Song: New Order – “Ceremony”

Premise: Artists creating extravagant works of art to highlight above tagline

They’ve given vodka pertinence, and social importance! It’s Vodka! The alcohol of choice for people who basically want to get schwasted out of their minds! And they’ve given it this new-agey “make a difference” feel; by inserting the right music and art, they’ve transformed it from a common vulgarity to “high art”. It’s gone from an uncultured street and pub activity of the masses to a piece to be analyzed, considered, deliberated.

Instead of alienating a growing young adult market with social consciousness (or hipsters who consider themselves to be better than most) like most liquor companies, they’ve embraced that alternative fold of kids, thereby tapping into 100% of the youth market, something I don’t think has ever been done before! They’ve also kept the “idiots”, or the so-called “low-brow” market, because the video is, in the basest terms, visually pleasing! Drunk ppl <3 pretty pictures, smart drunk people love the (implied, albeit bullshit) message behind it, and especially the use of the alternative-but-still-good-enough-to-be-mainstream music and employing artists. They’ve unlocked the potential of middle America, and BOTH coasts. (Not to mention people elsewhere in the world dying desperately to be American, or act American in some wayà while still keeping the geography deliberately ambiguous, so it doesn’t alienate anyone in the capitalist, consuming world).

Calling it the “Absolut Anthem” helps too. And making it viral and putting it on YouTube is always a brilliant decision to capture the youth market, something surprisingly few companies end up doing!

It is a brilliant marketing campaign.

The part that scares me, however, is that is is not about social consciousness or inspiration. It is about Vodka. The brilliance of this commercial leaves a strong and lasting image ... about Vodka.

LEVI'S

This series of commercials involves hopeful images of young people doing what they do best, having sex and "rebelling". Many ads in this campaign involve inspirational snippets from Walt Whitman's poems "America" and "O' Pioneers". I'm not even American, and somehow, this rubs me the wrong way. This situation is almost as bad as when Che Guevarra's image and likeness is used to sell t-shirts to misinformed, privileged teens. The irony is not just palpable, it's sickening. A beloved national poet is being used to sell blue jeans: his words of inspiration, originally written to stir the youth to action, are involved in commercials for clothing...

So I think the moral here is, consume with caution, youth of the world. Always remember to have your own opinion.

Ode To The Racist Toothpaste Tube

Green like the moss
under a rotting rock crawling with
insects feeding off
animal feces

Strong like the
lion, who is too stupid to realize
that without our guns we are powerless
and weak

Its white innards remind me
of that orchid,
the one I couldn’t name if my life depended on it,
that is a beautiful weed
heedlessly destroying all in its
path

You want to make my
teeth whiter,
My mouth
shine brighter.

But maybe brown was what I was meant to be.

Genetics have been cruel to me
if you’re not white, you’re
nothing.

But I like my tan
And, toothpaste,

You can not
and will not
take that away from me.

I finish my embrace of the chocolate bar.

Reminiscing Through Writing

This is a piece I wrote for my Intro to Creative Writing class, during my Freshman year of college, entitled "Not So Much A Story, As A Rant" (can you see how lazy I was as a 17 year old? Rubbish title). While the writing itself is meant to be a lament about how the assignment was due the next day and I had nothing to write, it's hilarious to see that I was still as confused as I am now, albeit slightly more eloquent.

INTRODUCTION TO CREATIVE WRITING (L Godfrey)

Assignment 1:

Saranya Misra

Assignment: Flash Fiction With Focus On Setting.

DUE: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2008

NOT SO MUCH A STORY AS A RANT

She sat at her computer and began to write. She came up with about four pages of beginnings, and two pages of middles, but when she went back and read everything, she realized how ridiculously shallow it all sounded. Is this what her writing would evolve into? Wasn’t it supposed to get better as she got older? She sighed as she recalled her greatest piece of writing. It had been written in the tenth grade. Three years ago. She sighed again.

She looked away from the screen, searching for inspiration, but commercial objects screamed out at her. Her bottles of creams and lotions and perfumes and make up and iced tea all screamed “mainstream”. Nothing inspired the will to write something truly great.

“I guess I could write about the aggravating insecurity and crippling self-doubt that plagues my adolescence.” But that seemed too shallow as well. What was the matter with her? It wasn’t Writer’s Block, because she was writing. It seemed to be a sort of Writer’s Filter, which sieved out the significant and left only the meaningless and petty.

Her foot had found its way to the radiator again. She loved the way it gently heated her tired stockinged feet. It reminded her of the warm floors of home, where winter meant fifty degrees.

“Home.”

The word excited less sadness now. It was more of nostalgia for a time that was a part of who she had become. She thought of it as a flawless paradise. She knew she was glazing over the bad parts, and there were many, but she didn’t mind. The more perfect she thought her home was, the happier she would be to get back to it. Its warmth, its people, its sentiment, its character, its essence. Home.

She looked out the window to her right. Her first-floor dorm was the perfect place for people-watching. While, in an effort to avoid being a creeper, she would limit this to about five minutes, she loved to look at the people passing by and guess their stories. Sometimes, if she was really bored, she made up the stories. The girl with the pink jacket walking behind the guy with the white cap was actually in love with him, but he was in love with the boy with the combat boots, carrying the cello case. The twisted love triangle added to the illusion that college meant drama. It managed to heat up the otherwise frigid environment. The people seemed to make up for the climate of this tundra.

The trees were bare, save for the more resilient of the remainder of last night’s snowfall clinging to their white branches. Everything here was white. The people, the ground, the sky (when it wasn’t grey). She longed for the sunshine of her home; sun so hot that it burned her people a permanent brown.

The Strokes belted out a song on her iTunes. “Oo-oh, my feelings are more important than yours..!”
Well said, she thought. At least these men were honest.

The smell of the Chinese food she had ordered that weekend crept into her nose, enticing visions of exotic Shanghai streets and undiscovered lands.

She suddenly realized why her writing was superficial. It was because the world was superficial! The epiphany hit her like a bolt of lightning. People just didn’t have real issues to worry about anymore! What mattered was mainstream. There wasn’t suffering to the extent that there had been fifty years ago. Life was pretty laid back these days. The ease of every day had led to the superfluity of people’s thought processes. There were no “undiscovered lands” or “uncharted territories”. Technology had made sure of that. There was no mystery or romance left in the world. Kafka and Orwell had written about imagined realities, with situations that they felt were better than the current ones, or in an effort to better the situations they saw in reality. Dostoevsky had taken the current situations and added to them. Marx had proposed a better world. Maybe that was it. There was nothing new to be done. As the so called “small-minded” thought, everything that had to be invented has been invented. Maybe that was it. In the words of Sandi Thom, “I was born too late…”.

She sighed again, and looked out her window. Jorge from the dorm next door was on his skateboard again. It was freezing cold outside, with snow everywhere, and he was practicing his skateboard moves. He jumped up into the air, did a few elaborate turns with the skateboard, and fell on his face. He got up, nose bloody and broken, smiled and looked at me. “I invented a new move!” he mouthed.

Face gleeful to an almost alarming degree, he ran towards his other skateboarding buddies to spread the word. Well perhaps innovation wasn’t dead after all. Maybe it was just her. But what of the fact that almost every movie written after 1985 seemed to be based on the storyline of another movie, or a book, or a Shakespearean play, or a German movie?

She decided that this argument with herself was one argument that she could not win, and in an effort to prevent herself from going crazy, she shut off her computer and headed outside for a walk. Perhaps a touch of hypothermia would wake her brain up. This exiled place shut out any motive to gain inspiration, but maybe desperation would lead her to her masterpiece.
An hour later, she came running into her dorm room, the sliver of an idea just beginning to rise in her mind. She was cold and wet and hungry. Like most writers of her time, her desperation had led her to her to misery, which had led her to her masterpiece. With a, ironically, satisfied smile, she began to write.

Paris Je T’aime

I was Watching Paper Heart and eating my giant tub of “Light & Fit” Blueberry yoghurt that I got on a whim, when I decided to take a walk down St. Mark’s Place at 3:30 am on a rainy Sunday morning, I came to realize what Paris had meant to me.

For the first time since my return to school in New York 4 months ago, I thought about my similarly lonely walk around the streets of the 7eme arrondisement one Tuesday evening. I stood on a wooden bridge over the Seine, Ile De la Cité ahead of me, American tourists chattering to my right, and an imposing, impossibly beautiful Eifel Tower to my left, just silently watching: watching the massive tour boats pass from under me every half hour, the infrequent light show of the Tower glittering impressively yet falling short of mesmerizing in the increasingly spectacular lights of the City itself, which in turn paled in comparison to the brilliant crimson sunset.

In that one moment, that moment that I later realized lasted for over 4 hours, I was at peace. I was completely content with everything, everyone, everywhere. The weight of the world, le bruit du monde, just melted away. For the first time in my short but frantic life, I forgot to think. I just gazed and marveled and took the beauty of the wonderful city in.

I forgot my appearance, my notions of what my trip should be like, my itineraries, my plans for my life, my inability to locate those famous bohemian French intellectuals that converse about life, the universe and everything in delightfully dingy coffee shops, my tired feet, my unhappiness with the shallow image I portray when first addressing anyone, my suspicions about racism and my understanding that I would never find true love.

This was nothing like my visit to Notre Dame, another significant trip. Looking at it head on, standing in the exact spot that medieval France believed to be the centre of the Universe, I noted the embellishing, the precise artwork and carvings and etchings and stories behind the large doors completed by the Devil, relating the façade, as any girl growing up in the age of Disney, to the Hunchback of Notre Dame (I fear, Mr. Hugo, that I speak of the animated film), imagining its gargoyles coming to life, its menacing demon heads spewing forth burning oil, and a faint light coming from the highest window by the bell tower. Inside, I, quite literally, had to remember to breathe. The stained glass, the high ceilings, the history, hit me on a level so deep that I now think twice before calling myself shallow. Could my years of ranting about belief in the divine being ridiculous, have been ridiculous? Because surely this building was a testament to the existence of the otherworldly.

I couldn’t believe that when it was first revealed, Parisians hated the Eifel Tower and wanted to tear it down. People can be so silly.

Paris is less of a geographical entity than it is a way of life. Its tangible beauty is obvious, and its historical neighborhoods, the Marais, Montmartre, are steeped in cultural significance and artistic buzz. But it’s the lifestyle, the conversations with strangers, the slow, aimless evenings and afternoons spent in endless cafés, the incredibly delicious food, food, everywhere, that can truly capture the essence of Paris.

My mother insisted that I keep a journal, a travel diary, to chronicle my trip and improve my writing; my father encouraged it to have me somehow participate in the repertoire of generations of novelists that had roamed the same streets and found inspiration. I brushed them off, then felt guilty, because I realized that I might never come back to this city that I would gladly have made my home.

But now, months later, I realize that they were right. Paris is so enormous in intellectuality, in sheer experience, that it cannot really be accurately discussed while it is being lived; it so overwhelms the senses that taking your own sweet time to realize it is beneficial not only to your experience but also to your sanity. Now, much later, Paris and its inspirations have hit me like decades of poetry, at once, and so strongly that it has, once again, knocked me out of breath. A hard feat at 3:30 am on a rainy Sunday.

Don't Have Sex

As a 21 year recent college graduate, I have been mostly exposed to love as a vulgar concept. That is, “to fuck”, “to bang”, “to bone” etc. No one ever spoke of “finding the one”, but only of having fun, one-night stands, fuck-buddies and so forth. During my time at one of the largest universities in the world in the middle of New York City, I was conditioned to think in temporaries. So much so that I failed to see the beauty in love.

The romance of finding the one was dismissed to childish fantasy at the back of my alcohol and party-addled mind. Friends taught me that boys were, collectively, assholes. Academia and intellectual discussion taught me that I was a confident, independent, feminist from the 21st century who should recognize that men were only good for their sperm and propagating the species. And I was. I am.

But was I made so blind by intellectualism that the shy glance across a crowded room that my teenage self would have thought romantic was banished as the creepy advances of a pervert? Was marriage really just an outdated concept that was invented to make sex more socially and morally acceptable? Is every single thing we do eventually just about physical pleasure?

Love is not about politics or thought or cynicism. It’s about opening yourself up to the possibility of sharing your life with another person and making it count twice as much, not diminishing it by shutting yourself off every time you fathom the slightest bit of emotional discomfort.

It’s about being open, vulnerable, ready.

So don’t have sex. Make love.

(from Post Secret)

Legalizing Fabulous

New York State recently legalized gay marriage. For most heterosexuals, this isn't a big deal. I, along with everyone else who wasn't barred from marriage before, merely joined in the pride festivities for the fun they promised.

But sitting in Central Park, watching an obviously gay man wearing a wedding ring as he read his paper with a contended sigh, I realized how wonderful the world is slowly becoming. We are gradually moving towards equality. Gay people being denied basic civil rights was never the issue: it was differentiating among happy, contributing members of society based on something as insignificant as the gender to which they were attracted.

Senator Mark Grisanti, a catholic republican, made the following speech when he voted to allow same-sex marriage, and it gives me hope in people and their ability for understanding and compassion despite their beliefs:

Even though I am not an American Citizen, I feel truly happy for the LGBTQ community in this country, as a human being. There's not much I can say that hasn't been said already, but when an entire section of New York's population is no longer denied happiness (arguably, since I think marriage is an outdated concept, at least, I'm not suited for it...), I truly feel the positive vibes in New York City. There is much less tension in the people around me. We are moving, together, towards contentedness. And, after all, isn't that the point of life?

Congratulations, homosexuals! You can now be as miserable as the rest of us. I am truly happy for you!

Jeremy Messersmith is Misunderstood

A highly underrated small-town musician throws a few laughs our way. Be sure to check out his song "Miracles". It is trés adorable!
This also adds to the now popular theory that most famous songs are based on the same chord structure, popularized by comedian Rob Paravonian's "Pachelbel Rant", which can be found by clicking HERE, as well as by the Axis of Awesome's 4 Chords.

An Inspiration

“There are few things more liberating in this life than having your worst fear realized” – Conan O Brien, Dartmouth Commencement Address ‘11

“It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique. It’s not easy, but if you accept your misfortune and handle it right, your perceived failure can become a catalyst for profound reinvention.”

“No specific job or career goal defines me, and it should not define you. In 2000, I told graduates to not be afraid to fail, and I still believe that. But today I tell you that whether you fear it or not, disappointment will come. The beauty is that through disappointment you can gain clarity, and with clarity comes conviction and true originality. “

“Work hard, be kind, and amazing things will happen.”

These are a few excerpts from Conan O Brien’s Dartmouth commencement address for the class of 2011. At NYU, we had the honor of the (arguably) much more accomplished Bill Clinton, but I love Coco, and I knew he would find a way to appeal to me.

As recent college graduate, I am, like I assume most others in my position are, sitting on my ass, frantically searching for a mediocre job while hoping I don’t get one too boring as I try and figure out what I want to do with my life. This isn’t just a question of “What kind of job do I want?”; it requires deeper introspection about what kind of person I am, what I will be happy doing for the rest of my life, which of my passions should I let go of, where and how I want to live, if I want to make money or be famous or be happy or all of the above. It’s just a terrible, insecure, confusing time.

Which is why Conan’s speech appealed to me. He addresses a group of driven students graduating from an Ivy League university, and assures them that they will be disappointed. He tells them when the rest of us mortals already know and fear: life is not fair. We will face innumerable disappointments, and we will fail. The trick is to get back up, use that failure as an opportunity for reinvention, and try again.

Coco mentioned something similar in his Harvard '00 commencement speech as well:

"I left the cocoon of Harvard, I left the cocoon of Saturday Night Live, I left the cocoon of the Simpsons. And each time it was bruising and tumultuous. And yet every failure was freeing, and today I’m as nostalgic for the bad as I am for the good. So that’s what I wish for all of you—the bad as well as the good. Fall down. Make a mess. Break something occasionally. Know that your mistakes are your own unique way of getting to where you need to be. And remember that the story is never over."

After listening to these speeches, I’m almost excited to fail. Perhaps it will get me out of my rut and inspire me to do something significant, something remarkable.

Movie Romances: Thuper Duper Unlikely

Having recently watched the movie "Thor" on the big screen, I found myself contemplating several of the same things I think about whenever I witness something "epic", be it a blockbuster film obviously attempting to 'wow' the lowest common denominator, a heart-wrenching passage from a poem read out by a passionate, well-loved public figure, or an awe-inspiring work of art.

While I could have looked at the cinematic quality, laughed at the subtle nuances in the dialogue and marveled at the extensive action scenes, I found myself, like all other socially-awkward nerds, closely examining the relationship between Thor (played by Chris Hemsworth) and Jane (the female lead, played by Natalie Portman).

It took me almost no time to get over the unlikelihood of their relationship, because I was accustomed to movie romances initially making no sense. However, the more I thought about it, the more it troubled me. Would Jane have fallen for Thor so unquestioningly if he was 'just' a delusional homeless man, rather than an attractive, in-shape, blond delusional homeless man? Are we, as a society, shallow enough to so completely accept a love (that is apparently for the ages) that is based primarily on physical beauty? Is it true that only beautiful people fall in love?

If so, me and my mediocre looks are seriously fucked.