Wednesday, April 30, 2003
RECENT D’ETRE Of course I
RECENT D’ETRE
Of course I didn’t forget about you. I had to save a kitten from a burning napalm factory. Twice. So don’t get all in a huff. There are demands on my time. And ants in my pants. And they’re all for you.
Lacking the mental discipline to think of any one thing for long enough to craft a decent essay about it, let me share a few items that dropped into my brain and got stuck:
On a recently-aired television commercial, a major grocery chain started lauding the services cheerfully provided by their produce specialists, their checkers, and their “meat cutters.” We used to have a pretty good word for “meat cutter;” it was butcher. Has that word fallen irreparably into disrepute now that Saddam and Kevin Kline have been pegged with that moniker? What we need is a positive butcher role model. Growing up in LA, we had Farmer John with his “locally dressed pork.” Even I knew that mean “killed, skinned and severed in your area code.” And he wore a cool hat. Maybe if they gave up those blood-stained aprons for something more stylish, and had big farmer hats. Maybe if they’d stop sharpening that cleaver and whistling the theme from psycho while I’m trying to decide between the rump roast and the london broil. There’s got to be a solution here. We can’t go much further with all this talk of meat cutters, though; pretty soon the dairy section will have cheese cutters and the whole system will collapse.
On a recently-aired “sponsor ID” on NPR, the sponsor was a huge accounting firm. Their tagline is “The answer is the people of D&T.” That’s great, unless the question is, “who f’d up my audit? Who got the SEC involved in this? Who’s been sleeping with my wife?” Sometimes “the answer is the people of D&T” isn’t the answer the people at D&T will want to give.
I recently rented a movie based on the trailer - the montage of scenes cobbled together to make the film attractive to potential viewers. The trailer showed people smiling, then people laughing, then a sexy girl in a school uniform looking coy, then a sexy woman in a red dress posing in front of a window… there were images of people riding bikes cheerfully, powering up a little hill, riding no-handed with arms outstretched… images of tough guys carrying busted bikes and hassling each other… all against a soundtrack of happy, inspirational music. Okay, I like bikes. I like happiness (in moderation). I’m not opposed to sexy girls-n-women, in or out of dresses and uniforms. What the hell, we took the plunge. THE MOVIE WAS UNREMITTINGLY DEPRESSING. Every momentary flash of a grin or ambiguous grimace was included in the trailer, even when the overall scene was tragic and the characters were alienated and miserable. The women were not developed characters worthy of any attention, and they never disrobed or even made out - separately or together. The one character I didn’t detest was beaten to a pulp - that was the scene from the trailer of the “tough guy carrying a bike.” I might have seen this movie had I known what it was about, but I feel cheated by the trailer - cheated into seeing a movie other than that which I thought I was renting. If the trailer is all blood and gore, I don’t expect a delicate love story; if the trailer is all grinning happy people, I don’t expect a movie about the degredations of modern city life. I guess I’m encouraging more truth in advertising. Beijing Bicycle isn’t a bad movie, unless you saw the trailer first. Oh yes and The Thorn Birds isn’t about fighter pilots, and Looking for Mr. Goodbar is more about the peanuts than the chocolate, if you catch my drift. This stuff can be tricky.
