Love the Gin Blossoms & that excellent album (RIP Doug Hopkins). Blake Masters should have been a client in The Rehearsal--or maybe he is and these are the outtakes? (And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful house" And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful wife"). What's up with fancy wine fridge in the kitchen ad and why isn't his wife imbibing--oh, because she's too busy to-ing and fro-ing with her zucchini slices. Thanks for giving me some laughs today Garrett!
I laughed out loud at "this is not my beautiful house!"... and also totally missed the fancy wine fridge! There IS a whole subplot in these ads of trying to make the house seem relatable when... it's clearly a super bougie rich person house! Which is fine! If you've got a bougie rich person house, flaunt it. But... I see you through your attempts to make the house look tastefully messy, Blake!
I absolutely do not want to give this ghoul any views on his posts so I really enjoyed the play-by-play of these! But what's your favourite version of "Ceremony"??
Extremely important question, and I'm going to cheat a bit on my answer. For the ultimate Ceremony experience, go for a back to back two-fer. First play the original Joy Division demo (which I should have a better descriptor for than haunting but, well, that's what it is) and then go immediately to the Radiohead live session, (which is... somehow... uplifting? and fun? and kind of bouncy?). All of the New Order versions and the Galaxy 500 cover are great, but holy cow those two.
Also-- I appreciate your critical thoughts on how and why to make fun of fascists. Reading this post put me in mind of the PR firm that (probably among lots of other various evil stuff) has made deliberately ugly Leave ads during Brexit for the Conservatives:
I was thinking about them a lot last year, because Canada's Conservative party hired the same firm during the last federal election, and they used a lot of the same tactics, and I found it really grim to see people sharing their posts with misspellings or weird font choices or whatever, to dunk on them, which still gets them in front of more eyeballs.
This is all very tangential to your point, but is the type of thing I (unfortunately) think about a lot as a person with a day job in communications!
I had no idea that there's a firm that does "Comic Sans as liberal baiting" strategy but the fact that we took and take the bait is so predictable. Oh wow.
This put a key puzzle piece into one of my many still unfinished mental puzzles: “the smallest, most fearful parts of our psyche (which, of course, are present in all of us but especially those of us reared in systems of power and privilege)”
I remember in 2016 reading one of those briefly ubiquitous “why our country is broken, explained by SCIENCE” articles, which was about research that found the only consistent psychological difference between republicans and democrats was that conservatives were more scared, in general.
In retrospect this was an oddly context-free way of looking at fear, but at the time I remember thinking “hang on, of all the groups in America that live under actual threat of physical harm, none of them are known for voting republican, so it seems weird that this supposed effect is negated if your fears are well-founded!
Anyway that said in my brain for the past six years until that line brought it all back. I’d be very curious about the intellectual hinterland that lies behind that parenthetical remark because it feels important.
Love the Gin Blossoms & that excellent album (RIP Doug Hopkins). Blake Masters should have been a client in The Rehearsal--or maybe he is and these are the outtakes? (And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful house" And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful wife"). What's up with fancy wine fridge in the kitchen ad and why isn't his wife imbibing--oh, because she's too busy to-ing and fro-ing with her zucchini slices. Thanks for giving me some laughs today Garrett!
I laughed out loud at "this is not my beautiful house!"... and also totally missed the fancy wine fridge! There IS a whole subplot in these ads of trying to make the house seem relatable when... it's clearly a super bougie rich person house! Which is fine! If you've got a bougie rich person house, flaunt it. But... I see you through your attempts to make the house look tastefully messy, Blake!
I absolutely do not want to give this ghoul any views on his posts so I really enjoyed the play-by-play of these! But what's your favourite version of "Ceremony"??
Extremely important question, and I'm going to cheat a bit on my answer. For the ultimate Ceremony experience, go for a back to back two-fer. First play the original Joy Division demo (which I should have a better descriptor for than haunting but, well, that's what it is) and then go immediately to the Radiohead live session, (which is... somehow... uplifting? and fun? and kind of bouncy?). All of the New Order versions and the Galaxy 500 cover are great, but holy cow those two.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cedNya7e8Uc
Thanks for the rec! I've never really been a Joy Division person but I liked that demo version a lot.
Also-- I appreciate your critical thoughts on how and why to make fun of fascists. Reading this post put me in mind of the PR firm that (probably among lots of other various evil stuff) has made deliberately ugly Leave ads during Brexit for the Conservatives:
https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/2019/10/they-re-doing-badly-purpose-why-tories-latest-online-ads-look-so-ugly
I was thinking about them a lot last year, because Canada's Conservative party hired the same firm during the last federal election, and they used a lot of the same tactics, and I found it really grim to see people sharing their posts with misspellings or weird font choices or whatever, to dunk on them, which still gets them in front of more eyeballs.
This is all very tangential to your point, but is the type of thing I (unfortunately) think about a lot as a person with a day job in communications!
I had no idea that there's a firm that does "Comic Sans as liberal baiting" strategy but the fact that we took and take the bait is so predictable. Oh wow.
So great, as always, Garrett.
Thanks Luisa!
This put a key puzzle piece into one of my many still unfinished mental puzzles: “the smallest, most fearful parts of our psyche (which, of course, are present in all of us but especially those of us reared in systems of power and privilege)”
I remember in 2016 reading one of those briefly ubiquitous “why our country is broken, explained by SCIENCE” articles, which was about research that found the only consistent psychological difference between republicans and democrats was that conservatives were more scared, in general.
In retrospect this was an oddly context-free way of looking at fear, but at the time I remember thinking “hang on, of all the groups in America that live under actual threat of physical harm, none of them are known for voting republican, so it seems weird that this supposed effect is negated if your fears are well-founded!
Anyway that said in my brain for the past six years until that line brought it all back. I’d be very curious about the intellectual hinterland that lies behind that parenthetical remark because it feels important.