I am one of very few red-blooded American males that doesn’t really care who wins football games. Oh, when the Patriots are good, I’ll watch them in the playoffs and root for them and be into it. But I just can’t justify burning hours of my life on end to see who wins a regular season football game, even if the Patriots are involved. I know, I know, I’m SO in the minority. But I just find it boring. That said, the Super Bowl is another issue entirely. It is a spectacle. A sparkly, loud evening of entertainment, eating, masculinity and for some, utter debauchery. All well and good. Oh yeah, there’s also a football game in there somewhere, too.
Which brings me to the ads, a whole sideshow in an of itself. Of course, if I was heading up a major brand, I wouldn’t buy airtime on the Super Bowl, as I explained last week. But put that aside for now. I’m less interested in the ads themselves and more interested in the after-effects. What I mean is this – which brands are smart enough to actually get users to follow up and do something? That is, after all, the intention in advertising, right? Who will enhance their website and tie it in to the commercial that they just paid for? We’ve seen a nice evolution in companies who actually do this, but surprisingly enough, there are still many who run an ad for the sake of running an ad. Just throwing it out there on TV as if nobody is on their couch with a laptop, typing stuff in after they see a commercial. Dumb dumb dumb. If you’re paying for an ad, do something cool on your website, for shit’s sake!
Which is why I always LOVE reading the Searchviews Super Bowl Scorecard, done by Reprise Media every year. They walk through each ad and give you the lowdown on how each advertiser did. Not on the actual commercial, but how they backed it up and the after effects of it. It’s always a great read. This year they’ve got it behind a registration wall (sigh) but it’s still worth a look if you’re a media nerd like me.
Oh yeah, the game. I didn’t watch it. Steph and I were on the last episode of Season 1 of Mad Men. Then we got caught up on 30 Rock. I did catch the last five minutes of the game, which is all I needed to see, really. Glad I missed The Who.
I’ve talked a bit here in the past about Midlake. They are a Denton, Texas based band whose previous albums have been rather superb. Their last offering, “The Trials of Van Occupanther,” was a hipster’s dream, full of lovely little 70’s am gold songs and indie rock that all just…..fit together perfectly. Well, this past week Midlake threw us a knuckleball with their latest release, “The Courage of Others.” Gone are the memorable, near-gooey dark gems, replaced by what appears to be the second coming of Fairport Convention. I had heard rumblings that this was going to be the case, but much like “…Occupanther,” I though it would still straddle the hipster rock horse a little. It doesn’t. And yes, I love Fairport Convention’s 1968-1972 output.
The album reminds me of when I first heard the Scud Mountain Boys music. It took me nearly three months to really dig in on that band and get it. That was sometime in the mid-1990s – and I still listen to the Scuds regularly. It made it’s way into my head and snuggled in there and I can’t imagine it leaving anytime soon. That’s 15 years, so their music clearly means something to me. My comparison of the Scuds to this new Midlake album has nothing to do with sound – they don’t sound anything alike, other than the pace, I suppose.
What I mean is that “The Courage of Others” has the makings of one of those Scud albums – it will settle into a rocking chair, pull the blanket up to its neck and live warmly and snugly in my head for all eternity. But it requires work. Rocking chairs, when new, need time to develop that special comfort. Blankets need to break in. The heat takes a while to kick on. But in the week that I’ve been listening to this, I know it’s coming. The album is beautiful. Slightly morose, but beautiful. You want evidence? Of course you do. Listen to “Fortune” – click the play button below – it’s only two minutes long, too! Long live Midlake.
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People of Facebook, when you’re not farming you can hear the song here.
I saw zero percent of the Grammy telecast. I have absolutely no interest because those aren’t the waters I swim in. I think that during the 1990’s I was actually more interested in the MTV Video Music Awards than the Grammy’s. Both shows were still mainstream, but the MTV one did have slightly more edge to it. Like the time Christ Novaselic threw his bass up in the air and missed it on the way back down – almost knocking him unconscious. That was unscripted. And funny.
This brings me back to the ’90s a little bit, mostly the early part of the decade when I was still in college and discovering music at a pace that I know I will never equal. I was looking for new bands under rocks, in trees, in the bottom of ponds and in dark corners of bar bathrooms. I took a 6am-8am time slot on Saturday morning at the Kent State radio station just so I could pour through their relatively enormous library of music and discover. There are bands that I discovered in that little room that I still listen to regularly today.
So wait – did you catch that? Do you understand? I took a 6AM-8AM TIMESLOT ON A SATURDAY MORNING. IN COLLEGE! So yes, there were plenty of times when I never actually went to bed. The sequence would look something like this:
- Go to a friend’s house. Roughly 4 or 5 of us.
- Listen to some new music.
- Drink about 6 beers each.
- Play Tecmo Bowl on Nintendo. Best. Game. Ever. Whoever got Bo Jackson won. Period.
- Hit the Kent bars, more beer (The Loft, Ray’s, a couple of others whose names escape me)
- a) Try to find a girl OR…
- b) Go back to aforementioned house with the gang, crank music, drink more and play more Tecmo.
You were more likely to get a little sleep if you got option a. You were more likely to get less sleep and more drunk if you got option B. Of course, option B was where I ended up most of the time, given my terror in speaking to women whom I never met. Which meant there more than enough occasions where I wouldn’t sleep at all and I’d go straight into the radio station, rather intoxicated, and start my show. I still have some of these shows on cassette tape, too (evidence of one day’s setlist here). Of course, the worst was when I’d have to go straight to work after my radio shift (I worked at a grocery store for almost the full fours years at Kent). Then I’d have that odd mix of exhaustion, slight drunkenness and the initial signs of a hangover. Of course, today this seems impossible. I mean, TOTALLY IMPOSSIBLE. But back then, hell, it was par for the course.
As a sidenote, one of my favorite things to do was find very long songs on the jukebox at Ray’s in Kent. For some terrific reason, they had somebody working there with good taste who stocked the CD jukebox with some stellar choices. So my modus operandi was that in the rare chance you got to hear your music (a lot of people put their dollars in there before you), you damn well better get some good time coverage to hear songs you liked. So it was pretty often that my selections would be 7-10 minute songs. You know, tracks from albums like Astral Weeks (“Cypres Avenue” or “Madame George,” both of which were about 8 mins long. Ministry was always good for that, too. I’d always cue up songs like “Scarecrow” (8:21) or “So What” (8:12).
I also directed the TV news at Kent State my senior year. We always had this horrific newsy-sounding intro, similar to the ones you hear on the network news. You know, completely devoid of any personality at all. Well, on my last day directing the news, I handed our audio guy some music that I wanted to substitute. On the show intro, viewers heard the theme to “Sanford and Son.” Going in-and-out of commercial, it was “Jesus Built My Hotrod.” I forget what we ended with, but I do remember all of us in the production booth, laughing our asses off. It was about a week or two before graduation, we couldn’t have cared less.
So whenever I watch the network news, I sometimes think about how funny it would be if NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams started with the theme to Sanford and Son. Classic.
Did you notice that you’re not hearing on the news or reading any articles about how expensive Super Bowl ads are this year? It’s not because it won’t be a good game. I assume it will. I don’t follow football religiously, but the teams in the Super Bowl are both 14-2. It’s mostly because large advertisers are getting smarter about where to allocate their marketing dollars (hint: if you’re reading this, you’re looking at where advertisers want to put their dollars).
Take, for example, Pepsi. Yeah, they’re the ones who seem to have bought up oodles of commercials in every Super Bowl I can remember. This year they made news when they decided not to purchase any Super Bowl advertising, instead opting to spend it online. Pepsi! They of the endless ad budget! Could it be that the people in the super-large corporations are getting hip – truly hip – to spending more online? Seems so.
Think about it. You can buy time on the Super Bowl for a jillion dollars and get broad reach – all ages, colors and sexes watch the thing. The demographic is HUGE – age 9 to 90. But if you’re really going after a large, specific demographic, wouldn’t you want to spend it at Facebook, where they can carve out a target user of very specific age, sex, religion, politics and general interest? For less money? Of course! Yeah, it’s more complicated than that, but really it’s not. It’s just smart.
The other Super Bowl issue this year is this ad they’re gonna run that is anti-abortion. It seems Tim Tebow, some college football quarterback, almost wasn’t Tim Tebow. His mother had complications during the pregnancy and the doctors actually advised her to have an abortion. She decided against the doctor’s advice and spilled out a Heisman Trophy winner. Interesting story. But it seems that CBS, the network running the Super Bowl, is getting a LOT of pressure not to run the ad. Really? Come on.
I am pro-choice. Always have been and probably always will be. But I’m not afraid at all that a pro-life Super Bowl ad is going to polarize America or anything. It’s a frickin’ TV ad, people! Nobody is stamping a law into place. Think about how many Super Bowl ads you can even remember in your lifetime. Three? Five?
I wonder what songs The Who will sing at halftime? Would be great if they did something like “Substitute,” ”I’m A Boy” and “The Seeker.” But they won’t. They’ll do the songs that have been sadly stamped into your head for the last 40 years on your classic rock radio station…..blah.
Time to take a spin around the world of the utterly ridiculous (these are all very quick reads):
That’s all for today. Dismissed.
I keep hearing about Apple’s intentions to craft a version of ITunes that sits on a browser instead of it being an application that sits on your desktop. What this means, for those of you that have no idea what I just typed, is that you’d be able to use your ITunes and listen to your music on any computer (and probably your smartphone), instead of just on the computer where you have ITunes. This, of course, is very interesting.
For those of you that commute to jobs, for example, you wouldn’t need to bring your Ipod anymore, because your music would be sitting on a URL at your office. I would imagine Apple would possibly cut deals with the auto companies so you could access all your music through your car dashboard as well. For those of us that travel for work a lot, it would be great! I’d love to just open my laptop in my hotel room, go to my URL and have my whole library sitting there for me.
But beyond that, as a 38 year old guy, I’m not sure what the other benefits are. Am I missing something? I probably am. I’m not married to ITunes by any stretch, I’m simply married to whatever will work most seamlessly for me and right now, that’s ITunes. But eventually I’ll try Mog and perhaps get myself a Sonos S5 (check that out!) and experiment with what I can do at home. Because home is where I really dig in on the media side of things.
Then I keep thinking about the Kindle as well. I know I talked about it recently but I keep feeling like I can’t nail down the true reason why I holding off. Shortly after my post in December, though, John Battelle totally nailed it with his post about the Kindle. I mean, check out this passage, where Battelle finally clarifies, with great accuracy, what I was trying to say:
It was clear to me that the Kindle breaks just about every one of the unwritten mores of how we, over hundreds of years, have honored books socially….And as a writer and lover of books, this makes the Kindle nothing more than a glorified Netbook – without the Net.
A few examples:
- You can’t share a Kindle book with anyone else. That’s just nuts. The sharing of a book is perhaps one of the most intimate and important intellectual acts between humans, ever. I’m not stuck on whether or not that sharing is physical. I’m stuck on the inability to share. It’s a crime.
- You can’t declare to anyone (including, importantly, reminding yourself) that you’ve read this book – an obstacle I’ll call “the library problem.” I love being surrounded by books I’ve read, and I love the fact that people who come to my office or my home library can see the books I’ve read. Yeah, part of it has to do with status. And does digital mean that status is going away? I don’t think so.
- You lose the serendipity of reading in public (and judging, as well as being judged for what is read in public)…..A Kindle suffers from a kind of social blindness – no one knows what you’re reading, unless they ask. Something important is lost when no one knows what you’re reading on the subway, the airplane, or the park bench. The opening salvos of countless relationships will no doubt be lost (though I suppose any number of romances have been kindled by the exuberant declaration of one’s love for the Kindle…).
That part about “the opening salvos of countless relationships” – that hits home, man! If everyone had a Kindle, you’d never be able to, say, engage someone on an airplane about a book. That seems patently wrong to me. It’s a word without sociology and I don’t think I can deal with that. The full Battelle post is here and it’s really worth a read. I would so LOVE to have a device to read newspapers and magazines on, but I don’t think I can do books.
As a kid, I spent a lot of time in my room, in relative solitude. I’ve always just liked it that way and I still do today. One of the biggest adjustments for me when the twins were born was less of that. I was never a loner as a kid, but I always loved time spent by myself, so I could lose myself in something, be it building a model car, listening to vinyl records, sorting hockey cards or especially reading books. Oh, how I loved to read books. My earliest memories of book reading were the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mystery books. I think that must have been around 3rd or 4th grade.
By 7th and 8th grade, I was ALL OVER the Spenser:For Hire books, written by Robert Parker. I had all of them and it took me to another world. The best part about it was that I didn’t start reading them until there were about 10-12 of them on the market, so I had a string of Spenser to books to read – it was like there was always a new one! And when I got caught up, I looked forward to the new releases as much as I looked forward to new albums coming out. Spenser, the funny, tough, clever, but soft-in-the-middle detective. There was the psychiatrist Susan, his beautiful muse and girlfriend. The banter between the two was always fun – they made a legendary couple, arguably one of the best in books. Of course, Hawk, the mysterious tough guy who always had a knack for showing up just when you needed him. It was such fun reading at that age. I remember being so excited when the TV show came out and then so disappointed when I saw it, because the books drew the picture way better than the show did.
It was probably around 9th grade that I moved off of those and onto other books, but that stretch of book-reading was one of my favorite times growing up and set me on a path to almost always having a book or two to read. It continues to this day. So thanks, Robert Parker, you have a very special place in my upbringing and my heart. May you rest in peace, but your legacy is sealed for me and I would imagine many others.
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