PrettyLittleHead

have been catching up on older 30 Rock episodes as I am woefully behind in these things. an episode begins with Liz coming from the flagship Compartment Store (a foil for our Container Store) with all sorts of completely bizarre organizational thingies and she is going to be a better version of herself when everything is finally organized.

i regularly go through these fantasies - this belief that if only my underwear drawer were neat, tidy, folded and organized by color (in rainbow order), i would be fabulous and accomplished and people would love me and i would love myself.

but getting there is nigh on impossible.

and so today, Easter Sunday, i have decided that like the Phoenix, like Lazarus, like Christ himself, i too would rise again as a new and improved and less cluttered version of myself. i decided to address my Junk Room. to engage it as the enemy. to lay waste to its ridiculousness. to conquer and occupy and rejoice in my victory by, ferchrissakes, finally DOING SOMETHING.

i want i to be my home office. i want to do things i like to do in there. i want to write in there, and read in there, and stuff. i want it to be pleasant and welcoming and the sort of place i’d like to hang out. it was my home office when i first moved in but it was full of junk then too. for a time it was a guest bedroom until the guests left and then it just started accumulating things.

• A mattress
• A chair i thought i could reupholster myself but never quite finished, and all the pieces as yet un-sewn or unattached
• Shutters purchased to replace my shutters at a yard sale, and yet were, alas, too small
• Paint supplies
• Clothes to take to Housing Works
• Gigantic duffle bags that should, one day, be put out on the street
• Plastic hangers
• Old cutlery from Target
• Old curtains and a tension rod
• A vinyl collapsible laundry hamper from Ikea
• An unconscionably large assortment of cords and cables and power supplies for devices long broken, discarded or lost

why didn’t i throw these things out when i decided to put them in grocery bags? why did they get put into the spare room in the first place? for what purpose did i keep these things? no one knows.

so out went most of it, some straight into the garbage bins, and the some onto the street for those passing by who might find some interest. the mattress, shoved outside by me and then helped to the front gate by a passing stranger, leans against a tree, already falling over once in the wind, and providing some good bouncing fun for a passing 9 year old in a pink sock hat. some, the clothes, the duffle bags, the chair, the shutters, wait their turn in the spare room, the junk room, that will one day be my office. it can’t all go out at once. the neighbors wouldn’t like it, and the Department of Sanitation would fine my landlady, and then she wouldn’t like it, and then i really wouldn’t like it. you should always endeavor not to piss off the Italian-American elderly in this neighborhood.

victory remains elusive. in two more weeks, when it’s all out the door, there will still be the matter of what to do with this room. the dissatisfaction and desire for change has not been sated by the removal of so much crap. instead, it grows. now i want a new desk, a new sleeper sofa, a new rug, a new light fixture, storage for my minimal files, a new office chair. the walls want paint, but what color - do i already have something i can use in my stacks of paint cans high on a shelf in the closet? what must i do to this room to keep it spare and simple and yet make me want to enter it?

this is not instant gratification. i do not feel renewed. i feel like i have done a small amount of necessary hard work and that there is more to do. i feel like having a beer and doing the crossword. i want simple pleasure, mildly challenging sources for a not-too-distant future accomplishment.

i will give this little endeavor one piece of credit. i’ve just written something. that is an important step.

maybe it’s because i’m reading “zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance” but i’m starting to think about what i do and what it gets us. by us i mean, y’know, us. the culture. not just people tweeting or facebooking, but the whole damn culture.

let’s think for a moment about ad testing. i know, you’ve been wanting to all week.

ad testing is a system of providing advertising agencies and their clients with a grading and graduation system. good job, your print campaign gets an A, you can now graduate onto other print campaigns! oh dear, your TV spot got a C-, guess you have to take this course again.

i’ve been down that road a few times on the research side - a campaign that can never quite pass muster, that never really lives up to any metric for success, that sends us back to talk to more people about more ads. what is it about these campaigns that fail?

so agencies and their clients - and let’s face it, mostly their clients - turn to researchers to help them measure, diagnose, dissect, reassemble, “maximize” the work. we develop post hoc taxonomies of how advertising should work. we call these models. we get so good at taking the creativity apart and reassembling it that we begin to think these models are prescriptive, not just diagnostic.

we create these models to aid the analytical process. we assume a workflow, a set of rules, that govern the creative process. we identify what we believe are the essential organs of a ‘creative idea’. but what is ‘essential’? you need a brain to control your body and regulate your various systems, you need a heart to pump blood and therefore oxygen through your system and to your brain, you need lungs to bring that oxygen into your body, you need a stomach to convert matter to energy (i’m oversimplifying), you need a mouth to insert the matter into, you need a liver and intestines to process waste, you need outlets for that waste. okay, we’ve got it all, right? so all i need to get a person is a brain, heart, pair of lungs, stomach, gut, mouth, liver, anus and urethra. done.

i have no idea what that would look like, but i’m pretty sure it’s a transporter room accident. and it sure ain’t human.

you need the bones, the cartilage, the reproductive system that perpetuates the species, the synapses that fire when you’re curious, the hair that bristles at the sound of mice in the walls, the skin that sweats, the eyes that watch too much tv, the tongue that tastes pungent cheese and loves it, the elbows that rest on the bar, the opposable thumbs for holding that wii stick. and even those things, taken severally, are not a person. the entire assembly of these things and that spark that propels you through every day, that’s the person. not “a” person, “the” person.

we’re attempting the same brutal vivisection, the same inhuman assembly of Frankenstein’s monster when we divide up a piece of work comprised of type and imagery and color and ideas and jokes and emotions and messages into parts. what is the objective? what is the strategy? what is the creative idea? what are the executions? we break this up into parts, and we assume that because we are asked to take the idea apart in this way that the people who made the print piece or the :30 spot followed these rules in assembling the work.

earth to communications researchers: it wasn’t. why are our questions so limp? why are the agencies so skeptical? why do people like Mark Earls say people don’t know why they do what they do because there is no ‘why’ - they do because someone else already did? it’s not because there are no good or interesting answers to our impotent questions, nor is it that Earls is entirely right. we’re functioning under the wrong assumptions, we’re asking the wrong questions, we’re going about this all wrong.

garbage in, garbage out.

i’m going to try to get more concrete about this and think about a solution. there has to be one, and fMRI isn’t ready for primetime, nor is it particularly useful anyway. this part of my brain lights up when i see puppies, that part lights up when i see law & order reruns. anyway. later. more.

was watching This Week this morning. during the round table, an interesting bit of discussion happened - about these hostile audience members at McCain/Palin rallies:

worse has been said, of course, and they don’t need re-airing here. the conversation that ensued was about the sense of many on the right that democrats are inherently illegitimate as governors. Paul Krugman talked about the Clinton years, when democrats - especially the Clintons - were accused of being murderers, drug runners, con artists, and so on. Cokie Roberts replied by saying that many on the left feel that way about republican legitimacy as governors. of course, let it be said that the republicans have had 8 years in the White House, six of those with control of Congress, and thirty years of dominance in the executive, legislative and now judicial bodies. they’ve had plenty of time to prove their legitimacy, or their illegitimacy.

but the underlying issue of legitimacy is a sensitive and important one. it speaks to the polarization that has percolating for some time - a polarization that has been a political strategy since Barry Goldwater. i believe the tipping point was the 2000 election; we felt compelled to settle that election post haste because we worried about a constitutional crisis, but we sparked a constitutional - and cultural - crisis by not making sure the vote counts, and that your vote is counted.

in the ensuing eight years, there has been an increasing sense that government does not care about you, that your vote does not count and doesn’t need to, that your needs are irrelevant, that your problems are yours alone to solve, that when you ask for help you are trying to con people out of their hard-earned money because you were too stupid to do the right thing. we easily vilify the other, we look the other way when people lie to our faces, we are without any referee or moral center.

recently, Bill Moyers Journal did a fascinating piece on talk radio. you can watch it here. the essential story revolves around the tale of a man walking into a church in knoxville, tennessee and opening fire on the congregants. he did this, in part, because of his ‘hatred for the liberal movement.’

Why did Adkisson hate “the liberal movement”? Police said that he told them “that all liberals should be killed … because they were … ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country’s hands in the war on terror and … ruined every institution in America….” Police said that Adkisson had targeted the Unitarian Universalist Church “because of its liberal teachings.” The church advocates social justice and tolerance, and it openly welcomes gay, lesbian, and transgendered members. According to police, Adkisson said that, “Because he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement that he would target those that had voted them in to office.”

…

One of the books police found in Adkisson’s apartment was Michael Savage’s “Liberalism is a Mental Disorder”. In it, Savage calls liberals “the enemy within our country;” “an enemy more dangerous than Hitler”; “traitors” who are “dangerous to your survival” and who “should be placed in a straightjacket”. Like Adkisson, Savage accuses liberals of “[tying] the hands of our military”.

…

If you look at the history of like situations like in Rwanda in 1994, the talk radio was a big part of leading to the conditions that created a genocide. The Hutu radio disc jockeys would call the Tutsi cockroaches. There’s the sense that these aren’t human beings. You know, they’re not human beings with children or grandchildren. These are cockroaches. And when you hear in talk radio that liberals are evil, that they are traitors, that they are godless, that they are on the side of the terrorist. That’s hate language. You don’t negotiate with evil people. You don’t live in community with people you consider to be traitors.

…

When you shock somebody, if you come back the next time and you apply the same stimulus, it’s not shocking any longer. It’s already happened. So you have to ratchet it up a little bit. So how do you cut through? How do you really shock? I think that in order to continue to outrage, you have to constantly be jacking up the pressure. And ultimately, there’s gonna be some deranged person out there in that audience who’s gonna say, “You know what? That’s a good idea. Let me act on that.”

this is what has become of our country, in many places. we have divided not merely on the question of republican or democrat, pro-life or pro-choice, or any of the usual badges of difference between citizens. we are divided at a fundamental level - we do not believe that our opponents are legitimate, nor that they are essentially human. and when those ‘in charge’ ignore the everyday plight of ordinary people, those feelings are inflamed. we need to believe that someone is responsible, that there is a source, a person or organization to blame. now that we have been shut out of the conversation about What To Do, we point those fingers, and aim our animus at each other. sometimes, we even point guns.

whoever wins the election in november will have much to deal with - not just the question of banking and credit liquidity, nor the question of failing infrastructure, nor the question of energy and income transfer and the environment. again, these are simply badges for the underlying problem - a fundamental eroding of the sense of common cause that once united this country and the communities within it. what is missing today from American politics is the sense that ‘We the People’ applies to us all.

they have awoken a sleeping giant - me. i care again. i’m a news junkie again. i’m moved to write and think and do again. i feel weirdly in control again.

it’s been a crap year - dad died, i’m about to start paying my mother’s mortgage, i’m deadly serious about having no debt that is unattached to an asset (and no, a plastic card is not an asset). the economy is in collapse, the election is nearly upon us, and we are now reaping what we sowed a long time ago. it matters.

i was moved to look up the mission statement i wrote for this site back in 2000, when all this started for me. here is what i wrote - i think it’s still valid, and will use it as the foundation for this site.

As always, we continue to split ourselves up into skins and shirts to play ball. Whether that game is played on a grass field, a frozen desert moonscape in central Asia, or on satellite feeds and balsa wood sets, we like to know that there is an Us and a Them. Those who hover too conveniently outside the game or in the center of the field out of uniform are dismissed out of hand as freaks, phonies and traitors.

Nevertheless, we live in a representative democracy. We took pains to build a weak executive, a strong legislature balanced between the people and so-called statesmen, and a definitive judiciary who can review upon appeal any law or policy of the federal government.

And when we were finished establishing this system, we made note of the importance of the people by enumerating their rights. These notes are amendments; they can be seen as having predicted scenarios in which the government and the people wouild be in conflict, and saw to it that the people could gain the upper hand.

Conservatives like to talk about the “marketplace of ideas,” a phrase that only serves to commodify the “liberal” concept of diversity. But in order for the typical Laws of Capitalism to apply to this marketplace, there has to be more than one vendor.

In that event, we must shed our provincial definitions of Left and Right, wrong and right, good and Evil, and use it only as a shorthand for the purpose of expediency. We should expand our political and ethical vocabulary to include the possibilities, and to recognize the absurdities.

We should, in short, learn to take ourselves much less seriously, while still holding our democratic belief system sacrosanct.

PrettyLittleHead.com, then, enters into the fray by examining the political issues and posturing of the day, while also examining the impact of marketing and technology on the way our media and government communicate and control the debate… We will attempt to illuminate where existing laws can shed light on the public debate, while debating the merits of new laws.

Truth and Fiction are equal opportunists: they find themselves in both sides of the political debate, and they find themselves huddled together like confidantes over a glass of whiskey in the shadows that these debates can cast. Just as God is found in the details, so too are democracy and individual rights often found in the penumbra of the law. That’s where the debate becomes useful, instructive and interesting.

That’s where democracy lives and breathes. That is what we believe in.

onward.

the time warner cable triple play plan was costing about $150 each month. in return for this cash, accepted electronically on a less than regular basis by a shoddy online payment system, the tv received hundreds of channels, the box recorded digitally a dozen or so shows (more or less reliably), the cable modem fed the airport express which fed the macbook, and the phone rang, usually at the behest of pesky credit card companies.

all was right with the world.

and then i cancelled it. now i only have the cable modem. my cell phone is my phone. my tv is powered by broadcast and appleTV and my dvd player. my internet connection powers my ability to access content and to communicate.

here’s what i have noticed.