Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

EDITING: Have You Heard of It?

Author: October 23, 2011 2 Comments

The AbyssHas this ever happened to you: You wake up in a Mexican mausoleum, wearing a white linen suit, missing you wallet and one kidney — wait, not that. I’m thinking of something else entirely.

Has this ever happened to you: You’re reading a book or watching a movie, and really enjoying the story as it sets up, and then suddenly it all takes a left turn in a strange direction and becomes a completely different movie? Usually this starts off as a more or less straight genre story of some sort and then zig-zags into SFnal territory, and it is almost always a disaster, because invariably the non-SFnal aspects of the story were much better than the SF stuff.

The first time I ever experienced this kind of dizzying letdown was with The Abyss, James Cameron’s 1989 film starring Ed Harris, Michale Biehn, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. The film spins out a nicely tense set-up: A US submarine sinks to an extreme depth, marines led by an unstable CO are sent down to a deep water oil platform to team up with the civilian divers who live on the platform. The extreme pressure can have some side effects on certain folks, and the marine commander appears to be one of them; he grows increasingly paranoid, acquires a nuclear warhead from the sunken submarine, and things get interesting.

And then aliens show up, and the movie goes straight to hell.

Now, to be fair, there are other problems with The Abyss (if you’ve never seen it, watch it and look for the scene where Ed Harris brings his wife back to life apparently through sheer force of will), and the aliens were almost certainly the point of the movie from the get-go. My point here is that as a storyteller, Cameron should have recognized that his story without the aliens was actually very, very good, and very interesting, and he should have deleted the aliens and kept going towards the paranoid, tense climax the film was begging for. He should have edited that bastard. Not editing in the film sense, but editing in the sense of cutting your story down to what works.

From Dusk Til DawnAnother example of this is the early Tarantino/Rodriguez collaboration From Dusk Til Dawn (Rodruiguez has a big problem with editing in this sense). Certainly it was a gonzo idea to begin with, taking two stories and melding them together. The problem is that Taratino’s story about the Gecko brothers taking a family hostage in order to sneak into Mexico and evade justice is compelling, funny, and interesting.

And the vampires show up and the movie goes straight to hell.

Again, there’s some fun in that vampire sequence. But it isn’t a great movie, and the characters established in the first half of the film cease to exist and become just actors fighting vampires. The first half of the story is pretty damn good, and I wanted to see what happened to the Geckos and their hostages. The vampire side is just bullshit.

And that’s usually the problem: Melded genres like this are sometimes (certainly not always) just gonzo exercises — someone says hey wouldn’t it be something if aliens showed up here and whether due to inebriation or writer-block desperation, someone else says yeah! and a terrible movie is born. Once you introduce the gonzo element (aliens! vampires!) [gonzo only in context, because the story up to that point was not in any way fantastic] the story actually stops dead, the characters cease to exist, and everything just becomes a fun mash-up to play with. This can be entertaining, but it is often a bad story.

Planet TerrorThe most recent example I can recall right now is Rodriguez’s half of the Grindhouse experiment, Planet Terror. Again, I know the whole point of the film is to get to the zombie storyline. I get that. but the set-up involving Marly Shelton and Josh Brolin as unhappy married doctors is really fun and interesting. From their bizarre son and his “I will eat your brain and steal your knowledge” line to Marly’s running mascara and Brolin’s air of menace, these are fun characters. I would have loved to see a story that actually followed Brolin’s growing insanity as he realizes his wife is planning to leave him, leading him to incpacitate her with drugs and lock her in a supply closet. I would have loved to follow her as she manages to escape despite being partially paralyzed. There’s good stuff in there. You can even keep the part where she’s menaced by <something> and leaves her son in the car with a loaded gun, and the marvelous reaction shot when she takes about two steps away before the gun goes off.

But then zombies show up and the movie goes straight to hell.

Now, this doesn’t mean that when writing a H/SF/F story you should never create interesting characters with interesting backstories, or if you do accidentally create such interesting things you should immediately surgically remove the H/SF/F aspects. It just means that sometimes your H/SF/F aspects do not mix well with a more reality-based story you’ve created as set-up, and sometimes, when that happens, your set up is better than anything else you’ve got and you should trim back and follow those lines instead. Recognizing which situation you’re in can be difficult, but it can have tremendous payoffs.

In my own work, when I have a straight set up that suddenly veers into the fantastic, it’s usually because I’ve run out of ideas, and dead-dropping some magic or monsters into the plot gives it a charge of energy. This often works because on the other end of things, when I get the idea for a fantastic story I often race to get the premise figured out but neglect the characters or plot. So on the one hand I have characters and half a plot that peters out. on the other I have a fantastic idea but no characters or plot. Mush them together, and theoretically you should have something resembling a finished novel.

Naturally, this never works.

Still, if I let every failed project stop me from writing the next one, I wouldn’t be flogging this blog, would I? Failed projects are The Wheaties of a witer’s life, the breakfast of champions. So, I sympathize with folks who go whole hog into this and produce films or other stories that veer off in crazy directions after setting up something interesting but, perhaps, unresolvable in the first two acts. I feel their pain. And if someone wants to pay me a few million bucks to put my literary horrors up on the screen, I’d be more than happy to do so.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

From the Zine

Author: October 18, 2011 1 Comment

HOW I SAID “FUCK PRIDE,” LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE MODERN AGE, AND FINALLY GOT FACEBOOK AND TWITTER ACCOUNTS, THUS BECOMING A BETTER PERSON*

by Jeff Somers

FRIENDS, I am usually the last person in the universe to adopt any given technology, catchphrase, or trend. This is because I am stupid and cowardly, and while everyone is running around shouting about how great something is, I’m sitting in my room drinking liquor and grumbling. Then, five or six decades later I stumble on it and say wow, this is cool, hey everybody, lookit this! And everyone sneers and calls me a Luddite.

Add to this a healthy dose of misanthropic hatred for people in general, and you can only imagine my general attitude to things like Facebook and Twitter. Not only are these new-fangled technologies, but they both fall into the general category of social-network applications, and that means they connect me to people. Horrible, dirty, stupid people. Not people like you, of course. Everyone else. All those other people, whom I hate. Not you.

Enthusiasm for these applications, therefore, was lacking.

Still, being a desperate mid-list writer with some books on the shelf, a need for more, more more! whiskey, and a perpetual fear of never publishing anything ever again ever, I’m always pondering how I can take over your brains and force you to buy more of my books, and I’ve been told over and over again that Facebook and Twitter can be great tools to connect with fans and potential fans, so I opened accounts on both. And since everything I do ends up in this zine, filtered through the Bullshit Wacky Japanese Island of Wacky, here’s an article about my experience so far.

How sad: 1996, articles about me being drunk and being a wedding gigolo. 2009, articles about fucking Facebook. Is this what a midlife crisis tastes like? ‘Cause it burns, motherfucker.
(more…)

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, The Inner Swine

What Guitar Reminded Me About Writing

Author: October 10, 2011 4 Comments

As some of you know, I’ve been playing guitar for a few years now. And, yes, posting my terrible, terrible songs to the Internet. You cannot stop me from posting my terrible songs to the Internet. Because I am not a guitarist, so I cannot be shamed on this point. I’ll continue to steal beats from led Zeppelin and riffs from AC/DC and posting the results here.

Learning how to play guitar has reminded me of my earlier years as a writer. As in, my adolescent years. Like just about everyone in the universe, I first started writing when I was a kid, a wee lad of about 10. So I’ve been writing for a loooong time, bubbas, and forgotten what it was like to just start out, y’know?

Learning and playing guitar has reminded me though, because there are parallels. I like to flatter myself that I have some ability as a writer, whereas the guitar is just for fun, but they’re both creative experiences and the path is similar, sometimes. Here’s a couple of things learning to play the guitar has reminded me about writing:

1. When everything is brand new, it’s easy. Every time I learn a riff or technique on the guitar, it’s an exciting moment that unlocks a lot of immediate ideas. BAM, I’m working on a song using those ideas. That’s how it was in the beginning when I wrote: Everything was new, so writing new things was easy. Thirty short stories a year? No problem. Every story I read, every class I took gave me new things to use. The work I was doing wasn’t very original, but it felt original to me, because it was all new stuff. I read Ulysses and spent the next six months writing stream of consciousness like I’d invented it.

2. Stealing Is How You Do It. The meager skills I have on the guitar are the result of a few things — some lessons, practice, and most importantly learning other songs. Every time I learned a riff or a solo from an old song, I immediately began plotting to steal it. The earliest of my songs reflects this pretty baldly, as you can literally hear badly-played riffs from classic rock songs brazenly arranged in my own fumbling style (which is charming, right? RIGHT?). These days I’m better at taking a riff as inspiration, playing with it, adjusting it, putting it into a new context and running with it.

That’s the same way to write. read good books and stories. Burn with jealousy against them. Drink yourself into a stupor because you’ll never manage anything nearly as good. Wake up in a ditch. Get washed up, eat something, take a nap. Then trudge to the word processor and steal the idea/technique. Keep stealing it. Steal it until it’s just part of your repertoire, until it’s natural to you. Then it starts slipping into stories without being showy, just another tool you use to tell a story. byt the time you sell something that utilizes the stolen element, it’s no longer stolen, it’s learned, and its yours.

3. Do it for fun. No one cares if I play guitar or how well I play, so there’s no pressure. I play because I enjoy it, I make my ridiculous songs because I enjoy them, and I post those songs because that’s what we needy, attention-whoring creative types do. The same goes for writing: Do it for fun. The writing, that is. The publishing should be for money, or some form of compensation, but the writing itself has to start off as pure enjoyment. Whenever I’ve spoken with a writer who writes from an income point of view, it’s always pretty depressing.

The ultimate point is, try new things. Learn new things. You will always enter that period of pure discovery and fun (suddenly I can hear Willy Wonka singing Pure Imagination in my head), once you get past that dreary initial period of frustration and Fail. Or am I the only one who had periods of frustration and Fail? Smug bastards. You’re all lying.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, gee-tar, Writing

Priest

Author: August 31, 2011 0 Comments

Priest!Continuing my series of essays about SFnal Movies Beginning with the Letter “P” Starring Actors Who Really Ought to Have Better Things To Do, I watched the movie Priest the other day, starring Paul Bettany.

This was a mistake.

The film is based on some sort of Korean graphic novel I have never heard of. Which means nothing. The list of things I have never heard of is vast, and no one cares about it. The list of people in the world who, in turn, have never heard of me or Avery Cates is also vast, and dwarfs most known quantities. Let it drift.

The basic idea is: In an alternate universe, vampires (which are freaky ugly monsters, not suave, good-looking European gentlemen or teenagers) have always fought humans. For centuries they battled, with the vampires slowly getting the upper hand despite the technology and 24-hour existence of the humans. When things looked most grim, the Church (which is, basically, the Catholic Church, invoking the old trope of All Christians are Catholic), somehow figures out how to train Priests, human killing machines specially trained to destroy vampires. While everyone else crowds into walled cities under the Church’s protection, the Priests go forth and kick ass, presumably with Jesus Power helping them along, and kick so much vampire ass the vampires surrender and are locked into reservations. The Priests are deemed too scary and are decommissioned and forced to take up normal lives, but because they are feared they struggle to assimilate back into society. The huge tattoo of the Cross on their faces might also have something to do with their shunning.

That’s back story. There is a plot, yes. It involves the main character seeking to avenge the death of his brother and rescue his daughter-in-law (or IS she?) from a former priest turned super special human hybrid vampire, and discovering a vampire uprising in the process.

That’s all you need to know about the plot. The real question is, does any of this work. The answer is, no.

The main problem I have with the film is that the whole priest/church part is completely superfluous. Sure, imagining a world where Roman Catholic Priests are trained as superhuman vampire killing machines is a cool idea, but that’s all it is, an idea. To make it into a universe, we need to see how this impacts things. How the religion has mutated, how the Church has incorporated vampirism into its teachings and beliefs. How the religious beliefs of the priests influence their personalities and personal struggles. Instead, it’s just used as the barest of a sketch, and then we have many many fight sequences where Paul Bettany kicks vampire ass.

If nothing else, since the vampires clearly have sentience, you might imagine the question of whether a vampire has a soul might come up, and that this question might be of interest to mean and women who believe in God and life after death and all that. The vampires, however, are treated as standard CGI-Orc beings, meaning it is sure as hell okay to murder them by the dozens, and to enjoy the spectacle of their slaughter. I don’t have any problems with this, per se, but if AlternatePriests don’t give a fuck about killing things that scream in pain as you kill them, then I would like to explore a bit about how they came to this frightening mindset.

In short, Priest is a shallow set up and then a very long fight sequence. If that’s your thing, enjoy.

One thing I would recommend: If the movie comes up for free on TV, watch the opening animated sequence. It’s fun, it summarizes the backstory efficiently, and is entertaining as heck. Then change the channel.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

Predators

Author: August 18, 2011 0 Comments

Predators!After a lengthy hiatus, I once again found myself awake and offered the opportunity to watch a presumably terrible SF movie late one night. I’ve been able to avoid temptation for a while, but there it was: Predators, the latest in what has suddenly become the long-running franchise (this is the fifth goddamn movie, a fact that makes you sit and contemplate the universe, which is indeed mysterious).

The fact that they are still making Predator movies is amazing, considering the path this franchise has taken: Start with a surprisingly well-done but decidedly low-rent Schwarzenegger movie made back in Arnold’s heyday, before he was so huge a star he could make terrible role decisions but after he’d learned how to move more than one facial muscle. Then make a batshit insane sequel starring Danny Glover. Then pause for a few years while you marvel at the batshit insane you have created, weaponized, and spread over the world. Then combine your franchise with another equally batshitted franchise and make two curiously dull movies about horrifying and deadly aliens fighting each other.

Then, hire an Oscar winner, Morpheus, and fucking Topher Grace and make one. more. damn. movie.

I’m going to assume we’re all basically familiar with the Predator backstory: Predators are somehow simultaneously technologically advanced and behaviorally primitive. They will shoot you with an energy-based weapon that turns you inside-out, then howl like a fucking ape as they stomp around. They flit about the universe seeking things to hunt and kill, and they’re extraordinarily good at that. They keep coming back to hunt humans, either because we’re a challenge, or because we’re tasty.

Anyways, Predators. Here’s the basic plot outline: The most badassed of badass humans are plucked involuntarily from Earth and dead-dropped onto a mysterious planet that is one huge game preserve for the predators. There’s a Mexican drug cartel enforcer, a Russian soldier, an Israel Defense Forces sniper, an RUF officer, a death row inmate, a Yakuza enforcer, and … a meek doctor.

The meek doctor is played by Topher Grace. This clearly telegraphed that the doctor was More Than He Seems. If the doctor had been even slightly physically intimidating, it might have been a mystery, but when you have one unarmed, untrained man played by Topher Grace in your group of badasses, I immediately think the good doctor must be some sort of mass murderer.

Anyways, these folks have all been chosen because, they assume, they will be a challenge for their new friends the Predators. They are not. This because in movies like this, you have to first establish that the villains are, in fact, the ultimate badasses, otherwise you just assume the protagonists are gonna kill everything within fifteen minutes and you change the channel. So, you know the Predators are going to kill almost everyone. Okay, fine, the movie’s called Predators, not Badass Humans. Still, the opportunity to make something clever is passed over.

The way everyone just drops from the sky, waking up in mid free fall with just seconds to realize they have a parachute strapped to them is kind of cool. When the characters started to assemble I thought for a second that they would form a perfect military unit: A sniper, a heavy gunner, a captain, a doctor. That sort of thing. In a sense I suppose they did do that, but then you have the Cartel enforcer who’s just a dumb guy with some assault rifles, and the Yakuza fellow, who shows up in a nice suit, expensive shoes, and a handgun, and the prisoner, who only has a shiv. I kind of like the idea of an actual unit formed from desperate strangers who all have military training, and watching them either form a chain of command or get killed standing around. This didn’t happen.

Adrien Brody is good. I think Brody has some acting chops, but his choice in films indicates a man who’s stoned out of his gourd more often than not. I imagine Brody waking up in a blood-splattered Vegas hotel room with a contract clutched in one hand and a hooker’s severed hand in the other, and he starts to cry because he knows he’s blacked out and signed on to do another terrible movie. Or beer commercial. So he sells his character, a gruff mercenary who ruthlessly uses the others as resources for his own survival.

The other actors are fine. Laurence Fishburne shows up for a demented couple of minutes as a traitorous man who’s gone insane surviving a few years on the preserve, and he’s fun. The problem is the death-march plot. You are given a handful of characters, you expect them to die in horrific ways, and they do. The basic premise is not a bad one to make a story out of, but they just don’t do anything here. The same events could have happened if the victims had elected to make a camp and cook up some RTE rations, then been slaughtered in their sleep. And the movie would have been 5 minutes long. Win-win!

Still, Brody’s fun, the plot is fast-paced, and it’s basically well made. If you drunk and pantsless in your living room one night while a blank word processor screen mocks you, pour yourself a dram of something inebriating and punch Predators up. Why not?

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

Ask Jeff Anything 7-26-11

Author: July 26, 2011 5 Comments

More than a year after I started doing these ridiculous videos, the questions keep coming in. Because the public wants to know. They want to know what kind of Scotch I drink (expensive if you’re buying), what I think about character development (deprecated), and … pants (definitely deprecated):

We now return you to our regularly scheduled complaining and lazy attempts at wit.

 

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Videos

Compulsively Finishing

Author: July 12, 2011 2 Comments

My masterpiece!The other day I was composing a song called Pants Are Death. I had a drum track I liked, a little chord progression that was fun to play, a lead melody line. A few solo licks in there for flavor. And it was fucking terrible. Somehow, all these ingredients, which on their own seemed so cool when I was composing, mixed together into something no one — not even me, its creator — would ever want to hear.

I finished it anyway. Because that is what I do: I finish things.

I don’t know about y’all, but about 95% of the creative endeavors I try fail. Most fail so spectacularly I seal them up inside lead-lined capsules and dump them at sea, where they will be safe from discovery until approximately the heat death of the universe. I suppose I could destroy them instead, but they’re still my creations and I can’t bear the thought of burning them or deleting them using some sort of military-grade hard-drive scrubber. If they’re under the dark waters, slowly encrusted with sea life, at least they still exist in some sort of Schrodinger’s way.

Still, despite this discouraging failure rate, I finish things. As long as they’ve reached some sort of critical mass in terms of length and energy invested, I finish these horrible, horrible songs and stories and novels. I have no illusions. The number of borked projects that can be fixed by pouring more and more words/notes into them is exactly: zero. Zero projects can be saved once you realize they suck. But I finish them anyway, because I must.

I can’t explain why. It’s just conservation: When I’ve already crafted 20,000 words for something and it’s just complete shit, I have a choice: I can have 20,000 words of unfinished, useless shit, or I can put another 10,000 words into it, type THE END, and have a really crappy novella to bury at sea and have feverish, tortured dreams about. I always, always choose the latter. Somehow the time and energy saved just walking away never seems nearly as important as making the time and energy already invested mean something.

I do cut corners. Once I realize that smell that’s making me gag is my own novel, the goal is to finish it. That’s it. This sometimes involves a Plane Crash Ending, wherein all your loose ends and unresolved character arcs die in some horrible accident, leaving you with one solid theme to wrap up in a few hundred words. Sometimes this involves the Aliens Make Cookies ending, wherein you just throw logic and consistency out the door and decide the preceding was some sort of Twilight Zone mindfuck even though there was zero indication of that. Sometimes you just Time Travel to the ending and mention 30,000 words worth of story in a sentence.

It doesn’t matter, because it’s going into the lead-lined capsule, dig?

I know this isn’t normal. Neither is refusing to wear pants, drinking a fifth of Wild Turkey, and waking up two weeks later with a fake ID and a bag full of live chickens in Mexico, but that’s how I roll.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing

Writing & Superstition

Author: June 30, 2011 16 Comments

The Mighty PenYou know, I try to be levelheaded and rational. Sure, there are crying jags for no reason. Drinking binges. Days when I build a fort out of my couch cushions here in the Fortress of Somers and refuse to emerge for days at a time, sulking. But, you know, rational. As they say in Singin’ in the Rain: “Dignity. Always dignity.”

In truth, though, I am riddled with horrifying superstitions. The problem is, writing is a semi-magical experience. I have no idea how this thing works. It’s like someone bequeathed me a speedboat in their will and had it delivered to my driveway. The controls are in Chinese and there does not appear to be an engine, yet every time I step inside I somehow get the thing started and magically end up coasting on the water. And, since I am burying myself in an awkward and unnecessary metaphor, let’s also say there is Unicorn on board who is my first mate and speaks English and who can make bottles of Scotch appear magically!

In other words, I have no idea how it works. As a result I live in constant fear it will just … go away.

Every artist in history has that moment, when you look back on their careers objectively, when they lose “it”. When their new work doesn’t have the spark of their earlier efforts. When they start to be boring, repetitive, uninteresting. No one sees it in themselves. There is no warning. It just happens.

This kind of complete lack of control over your own brain chemistry and the ongoing massacre of cell death in my brain makes me superstitious. I write in certain ways, at certain times, using certain materials not because of any real physical advantage, but because it’s how I’ve been doing it since I was 11, and if I change it up now, I might destroy this fragile mysterious thing that keeps giving me ideas.

I have made adjustments from time to time; I’m not completely insane. Just partially insane. I used to write all my long pieces on an old Remington manual typewriter that dated to the 1950s, but I haven’t used it at all in about 7 years, finally bowing to the modern world and using a word processor for longer pieces. I still write my short works longhand in a notebook, however. Although recently I did do the unthinkable and switch pens.

That’s right: I switched pens. And sweated the consequences.

For years, I used a Paper Mate blue pen. White body, blue cap. I bought them in packs of 10 and invariably the last two or three were more or less useless by the time I got to them I could only write my short stories using these pens. Why? Because those are the pens I chose in High School when I started writing short stories out longhand. For 25 years, I used those pens, despite the fact that, frankly, they suck. They dry out fast, are inconsistent regarding ink color and smoothness, and hurt my hand when writing. But the unseen and possibly imaginary gods of writing that I feel staring at the back of my neck required these pens, so I stuck with them … until about 6 months ago, when I switched to Bic Velocity Gels.

Still blue ink, of course.

You may laugh at me and wonder at a grown man who worries about such things, but frankly I was pretty sure the ideas would stop immediately, and I’d have to go into my plan B career: Rodeo Clown. I had the Clown College application filled out and everything. But so far, so good. Lord knows we won’t know if any of these stories are any good until someone else actually reads them, but I’ve written six of them so far with the new pens, and that’s something. Don’t mock me.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing

Every Great Band Should be Shot / Before They Make Their “Combat Rock”

Author: June 21, 2011 10 Comments

Selling Out, Then and Now
by Jeff Somers

From The Inner Swine Volume 17, Summer 2011, out soon.

IN thinking about this issue, whose vague theme is “the past”, I tried to think of things that really are different today. I mean, I’ve been sentient for several decades. I’ve lived through some shit. I lived through Vanilla Ice and I’ve lived through Space Shuttle Disasters. I should have some wisdom.

Wisdom’s a bitch, though.

Cultural changes are always nebulous and subtle. It’s one thing to take post 1950’s America and compare it to, say, pre-1850’s America and see the stark, obvious differences. Ladies voting, generation gaps, race-relations—they’re all strikingly different. Much more difficult to examine 1950s America and 1960’s America—the differences are a lot more subtle. Change is constant, and accrues slowly, over the course of years, and in the process a lot of it is forgotten.

Take blue jeans: Back in the 1950s, when kids started wearing jeans it was in imitation of workers and undesirable elements in society—it was rebellion. It was a fashion statement. Today, of course, jeans are standard wear for almost any occasion. I’ve seen people go to funerals in jeans. This kind of evolution took years, and now the origins of jeans’ “cool factor” are forgotten by most folks, and people like me only know about it from reading about it.

So thinking back over the last few decades and trying to pick out something cultural that’s changed isn’t as easy as it sounds. I mean, I could bloviate about cell phones and gadgets, but I’m not sure if they’ve really changed the world so much as simply augmented existing behaviors. Things like cell phones or iPads or Kindles are easy to talk about because they’re concrete, and come with definite dates to point to. We here at The Inner Swine never take the easy way out. We work, baby.

And then I saw a commercial.

It was Fergie, unfortunately, shilling for Dr. Pepper. Well, I know it was Fergie (of the Black Eyed Peas, the worst band ever in the history of ever) because a title on the commercial told me so. It doesn’t look anything like any human being I’ve ever seen, frankly:

Fergie!
Shudder.

Anyways, what occurs to me suddenly is that not so long ago, as in clearly within my limited memory, rock stars or actors who wished to be taken seriously never did commercials. Sometimes they would do commercials in Japan, with the expectation that no one in the US would ever see them. I can clearly remember, in college, being outraged whenever some singer or actor I thought had some integrity would show up in a commercial—they were dead to me. My friends and I would be amazed, and sad. It was the sign that your career was in the shitter, frankly.

Now, everything’s different. Somehow, in the course of a few decades, product placement and shilling for corporations has become cool. It has, in fact, become a way to become cool.

(more…)

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, The Inner Swine