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I watched part of the Repo Men’s convention tonight on my TV, while my computer was playing the first-season DVDs of Mad Men. As you may know, that’s the HBO-esque drama (actually on AMC) about an ad agency in 1960 that’s so behind the times, it still devises whole major national product campaigns around two-page ads in The Saturday Evening Post.
Like that agency and the Mad(ison Avenue) Men running it, the Republican Party’s retail marketing effort has, for a generation, been about a lifestyle brand image that presumes a target market that’s so different from me, relentlessly pushing emotional buttons I haven’t got.
Note the convention slogan, “Country First.”
In the first half of the last century, “America First” was a slogan of guys like William Randolph Hearst who advocated keeping our butts out of other countries’ business when it didn’t directly affect us. In practical terms, the America Firsters helped delay U.S. involvement in both world wars.
Today’s “Country First” means the opposite. It means war everywhere, war forever, just as long as somebody else’s kids have to fight ’em.
But “Country” could also be construed as implying the rural/exurban, lily-white, never-existed fantasy utopia to which the GOPpers, from Nixon on down, have appealed. A place that’s no more real than the world within a ’50s magazine ad.
Meanwhile, several blogospherians have noted that the most outlandish (and probably false) rumor about Sarah Palin (that she’d faked a pregnancy to hide that of her own teenage daughter) resembled a storyline in the past season of Desperate Housewives. As you may know, that’s the ABC drama set in a refined residential suburb where fantasies of The Good Life violently clash with brutal reality on a regular basis.
I’ll leave it to you to decide which Republican Convention celebrities are more like which Desperate Housewives characters. (To me, Cindy McCain looks like a Bree but acts more like a Gabriele.)
Other thots: Fred Thompson’s speech was all banal as heck, but at least he delivered it professionally. (Though the only Lawn Order star I like is S. Epatha Merkerson, whom I’ll always remember as Reba the Mail Lady on Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.)
Same could not be said for George W. Bush’s satellite speech. NBC’s prime-time convention hour included an excerpt from Bush’s speech in D.C., without the applause audio from the convention in St. Paul. It just made this failed-head-of-state seem even clumsier.
A few of you might have noticed that the Obama campaign’s got a a really slick graphic-design department.
One of this design team’s major motifs is a solitary, serif capital “O.”
To many, that letter, presented in that context, is reminiscent of a magazine whose figurehead and co-owner is a big Obama supporter.
To others of us, it reminds of The Story of O, the classic novel and movie about bondage, discipline, submission, pain-as-pleasure, and the total surrender of one’s being to a figure of strong authority.
Damn, doesn’t that sound exactly like the ol’ Republican seduce-n’-swindle syndrome, from which Obama promises to deliver us.
Oh, and the time remaining until Election Day? Nine and a half weeks.
Alas, McCain’s veep pick Sarah Palin is no relation to Michael Palin, who at least has vast experience in foreign relations.
Instead, the GOPpers offer us another pseudo-“maverick,” complete with all the proper pro-gun and anti-choice credentials.
But for now, let’s riff on some lines by the more famous Palin:
“Look, matey, I know a dead political party when I see one, and I’m looking at one right now.
“No no he’s not dead, he’s, he’s restin’! Remarkable party, the Republican, idn’it, ay? Beautiful plumage!”
“The plumage don’t enter into it. It’s stone dead.”
“Nononono, no, no! ‘E’s resting!”
“E’s not restin’! ‘E’s passed on! This Republican Party is no more! He has ceased to be! ‘E’s expired and gone to meet ‘is maker! ‘E’s a stiff! Bereft of life, ‘e rests in peace! ‘Is metabolic processes are now ‘istory! ‘E’s off the twig! ‘E’s kicked the bucket, ‘e’s shuffled off ‘is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN EX-PARTY!!”
“Well, I’d better replace it, then.”
Postscript: Perhaps the one outsider who correctly guessed Ms. Palin’s selection was the lucky joker who’d already registered the domain name VPILF.com.
The Beijing Olympic opening ceremony is the most yin/yang-y spectacle of opposites ever created outside of Hollywood (or the Lucasfilm compound in NoCal).
It’s military/industrial regimentation on a mega-massive scale, put into the service of harmony, humanity, and beauty.
It’s a cross between Busby Berkeley and Bollywood, achieved with a brutal precision that counteracts all the romanticism.
It’s both amazingly beautiful and ultimately scary.
…the International Channel. It aired blocks of programming from all different countries, right on basic cable, with ethnically-targeted commercials and everything.
Part of what I loved about it was the music shows. Samba, Bollywood, tango, Afropop, Hungarian operettas, Japanese techno, and much much more. And it was all curated by and for folks of these various ethnicities themselves! It was the real stuff, not Paul Simonized for baby-boomer comfort listening.
Some of this joyous cacophony is back, thanks to the National Geographic Channel. It’s got a post-midnight music block, Nat Geo Music. The block runs in Italy as a 24-hour channel; Geographic’s talking about launching it as a separate channel here.
The show compiles music videos (remember those things?), documentary shorts, and concert clips by lots of different people in lots of different places. Sure, the show’s got mellow folkie stuff, reggae, salsa, etc. But it’s also got digital cut-up music and raucous celebratory stuff and dissonant percussion. (And, in good National Geographic tradition, they’re not afraid of a little artistic nudity in the videos.)
About all you won’t hear on Nat Geo Music: Elmer Bernstein’s bombastic orchestral theme from the old National Geographic network specials.
…(see below), last Tuesday apparently saw the demise of Procter & Gamble Productions. This would also mean the end of sponsor-owned programming as a regular feature on the old-line broadcast networks.
When network radio was launched in the U.S. in the 1920s, networks would sell whole blocks of time to advertisers. The advertisers, in turn, would hire ad agencies to create and package both the commercials for the advertisers’ products and the shows that would surround the commercials. Procter and its soap-making competitors were the main sponsors of melodramatic daytime serials; thus the nickname “soap operas.” One of the first of these, The Guiding Light, was originally sponsored by Procter’s “P and G White Naphtha Soap.”
When TV came along, so did sponsor-owned programming. But TV’s higher production costs meant such ventures as The Colgate Comedy Hour and The Camel News Caravan faded from view.
But Procter & Gamble Productions (PGP) continued, like the stories on its shows. At its 1982-84 peak, PGP controlled 25 hours of network programming per week (more than Fox or The CW broadcasts these days).
Through PGP, P&G financed the shows and exerted both censorship and hiring control over them. But the shows’ actual production was subcontracted to ad agency Benton & Bowles. That agency disappeared some years ago in a series of global corporate mergers. Its TV-production unit was renamed Televest, then spun off as Telenext Media, which is apparently now an independent company.
(I know, this story’s getting to be as convoluted as any As the World Turns storyline.)
Anyhoo, on July 1, PGP’s name and logo disappeared from the ATWT and GL closing credits, replaced by that of Telenext. The shows’ official Internet message boards changed addresses from “pgpphoto.com” to “tnmphoto.com.”
Without any official notice of what, if anything, has changed, online message boards are rife with speculation.
Some users claim P&G must have sold off its interests in the shows. That wouldn’t be out of character with the company’s recent spate of portfolio-shuffling. (In recent years P&G’s bought Tampax, Gillette, Braun, and Clairol, while selling Comet, Duncan Hines, Crisco, Jif, and Folger’s.)
Of course, the credit change could just be a matter of semantics. But many of these message-board users have complained about P&G’s (mis)management of the serials, including drastic budget cuts on GL and its alleged cold feet concerning ATWT’s current gay-love storyline. Some of these users say they would like the shows to become independently owned.
Of course, even the deftest indie producer would have to be pretty clever to effectively confront the daytime-soap genre’s collapsing ratings and revenues.
But that’s a topic for another day. Tune in again.
…Kids WB signed off in May. Someone calling himself Peter Paltridge did notice, and offers a retrospective of the cartoon programming block’s first and last days on the air. If you don’t understand why Earthworm Jim was a greater show than Skunk Fu, you soon will.
…today to Don S. Davis, the unassuming, deep-voiced former U of British Columbia teacher who became one of film and TV’s most prolific character actors. His longest gig was seven seasons on Stargate SG-1. He was also Scully’s dad on The X-Files. But to me he’ll always be Major Briggs on Twin Peaks.
Like many “sixties youth icons,” Carlin was already 30 by the summer-O-love. Aside from being an anti-censorship icon (who nonetheless got his share of “family entertainment” roles, he was one of the last bridges between the Ed Sullivan and Saturday Night Live eras. He also virtually invented the pay-TV comedy special genre, that most direct of storytelling formats.
Utne Reader has discovered Seattle Sound’s item about an online sub-sub-genre of “slash fiction,” this version involving the likes of Kurt Cobain and Dave Grohl, among other bad-boy duos of rock.
“Slash” fiction, for the uninitiated, is a four-decades-old shtick in which mostly female writers imagine guy-pals of celebrity or fiction as if they were hot n’ heavy gay lovers. Most observers believe it started with Star Trek fan fiction.
I’d go back earlier, to the college English profs who’d give an easy A to any student essay that “proved” the major characters of any major literary work were really gay.
Cobain, as many of you know, sometimes claimed to be bi; though there’s no knowledge of his ever having had a homosexual experience. I used to figure he’d just said that because, in Aberdeen, to be a “fag” was the worst insult you could give a boy, while in Olympia and Seattle, upscale white gay men were the most respected “minority group” around.
Fiction based on real-life celebrity caricatures is also nothing new. The New Yorker did it in the 1930s. South Park has been doing it for a decade.
Anyhow, there are further slash frontiers out there than Seattle Sound or Utne have bothered to explore. They include “femslash,” women writing about female fictional icons as if they were really lesbians. It might have started with fan-written stories about Xena and Gabrielle. It’s spread to include other SF/fantasy shows with at least two female cast members, and from there to other fictional universes. The grossest/most intriguing, depending on your tastes, might be the stories imagining half-sisterly cravings between Erica Kane’s daughters.
KOMO-TV’s long-running afternoon talk show will disappear in August, ending a 24-year run.
Producers had tried to shake up the show in recent years, slicing it into four or five segments per hour instead of its traditional two. But the lure of low-cost, high-profit syndicated talk fare has finally done it in, just like it’s done in most of the local gabfests around the country.
Also threatened by the dictum of talk-is-cheap: The daytime soap operas, which NWA cohost Cindi Rinehart has chronicled since the show’s debut. At that time, there were 14 daily serials on American TV. Now there are just eight (not counting Spanish-language imports). Almost all of those shows are scrambling to cut their budgets and shrink their acting and writing staffs.
In the ultimate unintended irony, the syndicated show that will replace Rinehart and co. has the same title as a former long-running soap, The Doctors.
Everyone knows the “fist bump” gesture was invented by Howie Mandel!
…hits Ed McMahon. It might take a miracle to keep him housed; either that, or winning a magazine sweepstakes.
Another TV season has come and gone. Ratings across the channel spectrum continued to plummet, even on shows/channels that weren’t hit by the writers’ strike.
And with the explosion in programming across broadcast and cable channels, telecasters are constantly on the lookout for entertainment forms that haven’t yet been adapted to the screen.
Saturday Night Live, as you’ll recall, was born from trends in stage sketch comedy that hadn’t yet been brought to TV on a regular basis.
Later years brought us televised karaoke, poker, ballroom dancing, shows based on video blogs and webcams, travelogue shows at pubilc-drunkenness events, and even prime-time bingo.
So: What else is out there, to feed programmers’ ravenous appetites for stealable concepts?
Here are a few ideas. (If any readers successfully package a series based on one of these, you may pay me a modest royalty.)
Please feel free to suggest your own.
…to settle in for an all-day, most-of-the-night cable viewing marathon. The AP went and spoiled it all by calling it for Obama this morning. Now I don’t know what to do with my day. Perhaps I’ll go hang out at the library and re-read the old bound volumes of The Saturday Evening Post.
