On The Internet, It’s Always The Depression

Advertising ebbs and flows. It’s a rough science, little understood by even its practitioners. And how about us? The folks it’s aimed at?

I know you, dear reader. You think that you’re immune to advertising. All intelligent people think advertising is aimed at other, less discerning people. I used to think that. But advertising is a fire hose. That information is coming out of it under a lot of pressure. Now some people drink from that hose, some people bathe in that hose, and some people wash their clothes in that hose, and some stand clear, bemused, but they get caught in the overspray whether they like it or not. I’ll use myself as exhibit A.

I wasn’t joshing a couple of days ago when I told you I don’t watch television. I know you were suspicious of my claim, as you think I’m sorta normal and normal people watch television. Normal people say they don’t watch television – just those PBS shows. And the History Channel. Oh yes, the Oscars. And figure skating if it’s on. Of course you have to watch the news to stay informed, but that’s not watching television, of course, really; oh, and Desperate Housewives because I know it’s all nonsense but how will I know what people are wearing if …

You get the picture. But I’m that rarest of things, it’s true: I don’t watch and I don’t care I don’t watch, so I don’t lecture. People should enjoy themselves. But I get a perspective you don’t, that generally only kidnap victims… scratch that – they’re tied up, but I imagine they watch all day; I dunno- let’s say I get the perspective that millenarian cultists or Seventh Day Adventists or something get.

Anyhow, I know that “Will and Grace” exists. How can that be? Somebody told me somewhere. Now he/she might be the best or the worst advertiser in the history of the world, it depends on your perspective. Either they’re the best in the world because they’ve managed to alert people as far removed from the scene as me that “Will and Grace” exists, or they’re the worst, because busying yourself notifying persons like me that “Will and Grace” is on the TV I’m not watching is kind of a waste of time. I think. I imagine no matter what we think, the advertiser is drawing a fat six figures due to the fire hose method of getting your message out.

Look at the picture I offered. Back when people fought like tigers if two of them simultaneously found a smokable cigar butt in the street, advertising was a riot. Every available surface was covered with it. Barn roofs, sandwich boards and everything in between. And there was so much of it because it was cheap to get it out there- anybody would do anything to make a buck; and the need was there because everybody had to fight tooth and nail for economic survival. After a while, when economic conditions got less ferocious, advertising got more sophisticated and started going for certain segments of the population to maximize return, and people could be just as easily peeved by being assaulted by advertising as enticed to respond kindly.

That wall up there is the internet right now. It won’t last. You go to the average blog, and there’s a riot going on. There are 35 little ads for every durn thing, and little virtual tschotchke stands, and after you’ve surfed past the vast panorama of cajoling, and the tiny portion of stolen opinions, there’s generally a real depression touch: out and out begging. They call it a tip jar, but a tin cup is more like it. It’s 1931 on the internet, and we’re all Bill Murray waking up to the sounds of “I’ve Got You Babe” one more time.

I’ve seen the vestigal remains of hundreds of depression era “bright ideas” designed to make a couple of bucks. I drive past christmas tree farms gone to seed. Chicken coops rotting on their punky sills, producing only spider’s eggs now. I can still see the ghostly remnants of whisky ads clinging tenaciously to battered brick walls. Kudzu, anyone? When the leaves fall, I can spy a “Red Coach Grille” billboard falling to pieces out in the woods near a highway, disintegrating like a cadaver, its painted raiments falling in tatters and its offer of hospitality in a place that hasn’t existed in thirty-five years ringing hollow. It calls to me, but not in the way they first envisioned. No matter; that ad-man cashed his last check long ago. The billboard was pointed at a different highway anyway; the one I’m on is newer than the sign.

There are mighty places on the internet where many congregate. Their wake alone would swamp such as my little rowboat.

If they charged $15.00 a year to read them, they’d all be mowing my lawn.

Good Morning, America, How Are You?

Riding on the City of New Orleans,
Illinois Central Monday morning rail
Fifteen cars and fifteen restless riders,
Three conductors and twenty-five sacks of mail.

All along the southbound odyssey
The train pulls out at Kankakee
Rolls along past houses, farms and fields.
Passin’ trains that have no names,
Freight yards full of old black men
And the graveyards of the rusted automobiles.

Good morning America how are you?
Don’t you know me I’m your native son,
I’m the train they call The City of New Orleans,
I’ll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.

Dealin’ card games with the old men in the club car.
Penny a point ain’t no one keepin’ score.
Pass the paper bag that holds the bottle
Feel the wheels rumblin’ ‘neath the floor.
And the sons of pullman porters
And the sons of engineers
Ride their father’s magic carpets made of steel.
Mothers with their babes asleep,
Are rockin’ to the gentle beat
And the rhythm of the rails is all they feel.
Nighttime on The City of New Orleans,
Changing cars in Memphis, Tennessee.
Half way home, we’ll be there by morning
Through the Mississippi darkness Rolling down to the sea.

And all the towns and people seem To fade into a bad dream
And the steel rails still ain’t heard the news.
The conductor sings his song again,
The passengers will please refrain
This train’s got the disappearing railroad blues.

Good night, America, how are you?
Don’t you know me I’m your native son,
I’m the train they call The City of New Orleans,
I’ll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.

lyrics: The City of New Orleans by Steve Goodman ©1970, 1971 EMI U Catalogue, Inc and Turnpike Tom Music (ASCAP)

Deoohaorr

We went walking in Newport Rhode Island yesterday. It rained pretty good for the greater part of it, and it’s a testament to the charm of the place and our hunger to leave our premises that we spent all afternoon there.

Grandma had kidnapped the larger one, so we had to amuse only the three year old. That’s simpler, but more energetic. He wants to see things. Almost anything. But there’s a crisp definition of where you must not go to see interesting things: inside. So we saw many things throught the lens of intermittent rain.

Newport is an old city, and mostly made of wood, so I like it greatly. It has that nobility of utility too; people still live and work in what look like museums elsewhere. And the museums look like houses.

There was a magnificent life-size statue of George Washington on a five foot pedestal in front of the old library, a magnificent Palladian temple. There are two truly enormous trees standing athwart the spot, and they make a fantastic sort of bower for George to stand in, and the library behind. George made my little boy nervous.

He ran to the sidewalk, hid behind the enormous bole of one of the trees, and peered at George like he was some sort of wraith. He’s seen George many times of course, in different settings, but this iteration had him spooked.

It’s harder to make the big brother laugh now than the little one. Bad jokes require a punchline to get a rise out of him. You can’t just mugg at him anymore. But the little one’s still easy.

Let this serve as a declaration and confession to the citizens of and the visitors to Newport: I was the guy seen repeatedly sneaking up ninja-style on a statue of George Washington in broad daylight, reaching out a trembling forefinger to touch the toe of George’s bronze boot, and running away willy-nilly in a vaguely serpentine fashion while a very intimate crowd of small children and pretty women laughed at me.

Then that boy looked across the street, and I was yesterday’s newspapers. Like an oasis in the desert, a little shop that had dozens of miniature houses on display in the window appeared.

I’ve walked big dogs that have got a notion to get in motion all of a sudden, and they’ve got nothing on a three year old that wants to get across the street in a hurry. The dog doesn’t know how to turn his arm inside out to break your wrist and escape; the dog just puts all of his pounds to pulling. A three year old is a wily adversary.

Anyhow, we escaped calamity and made it across the street, and that boy looked in that window for ten minutes by the clock. He was like an astronomer discovering worlds. It was gloriously closed, to spare us the spectre of him traveling the length and breadth of it like Godzilla, and if they send me a bill for removing all the noseprints from the glass, including the larger ones up high, I will pay it gladly in exchange for the pleasure we had watching our son pick out his favorite one, the one with the little version of our own front entryway, and say in his little voice: “Deooharr!”

Why settle for one syllable, when you can make a whole sentence out of it?

How The Other 1% Lives

A Jehovah’s Witness came to my house yesterday. Two, actually; a man and his wife. They don’t remember, but they walked up my driveway over ten years ago when I was building my house. It took me a long time to get rid of them last time, as I had no door to close, just a hole where it would be placed when it arrived. And if you’ve ever attended Catholic school, you know that you are forever incapable of brusqueness towards much of anybody. Kinda funny, when you think about it; nuns taught me to be so unfailingly polite that I stand there listening to a spiel about another religion. Well, not listening exactly; waiting.

Anyway, I knew exactly how to get rid of them this time. They asked me a question about something or other topical, and I mentioned to them that I have no television. They gave one another knowing looks and fled. When Jehovah’s Witnesses think you’re an odd waste of time, you’ve accomplished something heroic, as I see it.

I know, you don’t see it that way. You figure I’m normal and I lied. But it’s the truth. I’ve seen about twenty five hours of television in the last calendar year.

Did you flee when you read that? There’s only two explanations if you stuck around:

1. You’re one of these “Kill Your Television” types, always lecturing how the “them” sucks your minds out through the tube and yokes you to their hellish vision of mindless consumerism shackled to the death machine of the government. You spray-paint slogans on highway abutments to signal your displeasure and alarm the populace, who disappoint you by becoming alarmed only by the prevalence of graffiti, but keep watching Survivor and buying elaborate station wagons. If you’re one of these types, I guarantee you you watch a lot more television than I do. Your hatred of television is the hatred of the “stop me before I kill again” variety. We’re all supposed to stop because you can’t. Me? I just don’t watch.
2. You want to look at the weirdo that doesn’t watch television and try to pick up subtle clues about what sort of blunt trauma I suffered and maybe learn what sorts of activities to avoid, that I favor, that will safeguard you from missing figure skating or lively talk shows or effeminate furniture re-arrangers or whatever.

Well, I’m unable to help either subset, because I don’t watch television because I really don’t care what’s on it. That’s it. There’s no deeper meaning here, and I’m not giving a lecture about it. I don’t like guacamole, either, as it has those mushy green things in it, what do you call them? See? If I watched Nigella Lawson I’d know those were avocados. [Insert obvious joke about Nigella’s melons here.]

At any rate, we can’t even do it if we want, more or less. When we moved here, there was no cable TV. I don’t know much about broadcasting television, but the one direction no one broadcasts much is towards me, or Portugal and ships at sea, which is the next thing you’ll hit after me. I got used to snow on TV year round, and when cable came through here I’d long since lost interest and it passed us by.

I wanted to watch the Patriots game last night. Here’s what I had to do:
1.Find out if it was being broadcast here. It isn’t always, anymore, what with all the pay TV people that broadcast things now. It was on broadcast TV, but the numbers don’t signify on my TV. I’d have to look for a Fox station up around the dog whistle end of the spectrum. And I had to find the listing on the internet, my beloved internet, and the TV page on my service provider’s site was terrifying to navigate. You guys watch all that? Must keep you busy.
2. Now for the French Underground radio operator portion of the exercise: Disconnect the 15 dollar bent stalks and doughnut antenna from the FM tuner. Take the cable from the wall plug and attach it to the rabbit ears. Put the whole mess atop the armoire the screen’s in, near the window or you get nothing. The cable I disconnect is there to allow us to have the signal from the DVD player go to a second screen in the house. The house is wired for cable. You can go yell in the other end, hanging on the pole near the street, if you want to talk to me.
3. Say two Hail Marys, in case there’s a god. Hail Marys are good for football games even if there isn’t.
4. Ah, channel 120 out of Providence, Rhode Island. Well, it’s in color, that’s good. We have to rely on the commentators to tell us who caught the ball, as we can’t always make it out in the snow. The snow is not in Foxboro, it’s just in our set, by the way. When it snows a little in Foxboro, there’s a blizzard in our set. It stinks to rely on the broken down steroid case and newsanchor also-ran on the broadcast, as they have no idea they could still be talking to people in my situation, and instead of saying anything of use to me, they just keep ejaculating things like: “Look at that!” Did you see that!” and: “Watch this!”

The Patriots disassembled the Washington Redskins into their component parts and stomped on the pieces, and I was sanguine. According to the advertising I was subjected to, no one has a car, an erection, or cable tv, and they’ve got just the things I need to remedy those deficiencies.

I’m all set on all counts, thanks; I’ve got two of the three, and the other I can do without.

The Little Ones Come

The little ones come. They range around the yard, and the invisible curtain of the shaggy edge of the grass holds them captive. Their voices are like the waves at the beach. There is an ebb and flow, regular but not rigid; the occasional roar, the sizzle of the receding push, the intermittent quiet pause before the next little assault.

They tackle one another like linebackers. The one that gets the worst of it always seems not to notice; the one that delivers the blow cries. It passes the moment the action risks beginning again without the one with the quivering lip. The only fatal sin is missing out.

A fork is a rake and a cup is a bucket; a hamburger is an ottoman. They show at the rudely made table from the eyes up only, and the evidence of their efforts are identically parsed between their interior and their exterior. Nothing is wasted if one bit of it manages to get inside them.

Their lilting, ill-formed words tinkle in the warm breeze, like a nursery rhyme sung in some sublime opera. Their gestures are as broad and expressive as anybody who has trod the music hall floorboards. They furtively search the crowd of adult faces, congregated to the side, looking for mother — like a performer looks in the audience for the critic. They run like madmen from a doctor.

They run out of gas, long after you do, and find some niche that fits their mood and size. They sleep the sleep of physical exhaustion and mental freshness. The difference between eyes open and shut is tiny. Everything is wonderful.

Why do I love them all so? I don’t know. Do you?

Put A Sock In It, Chicken Little

I don’t want to hear a word about any housing bubble. Not one more word.

I’ve been forced to listen to people that have no idea what they’re talking about talk about a housing bubble for… well…

There never was a boom, according to the Bubblers. Their switch only has two positions: Bust and Bubble. Well, people who work on Wall Street know that advice that has no basis in time is worthless. I’ll trump that and say it’s not worthless; it’s actively bad.

I’m not going to bother to direct you to an article about the “Housing Bubble.
Google it. 8.4 million hits. Help yourself. For balance, you could Google “Housing Boom.” You’d get 15 million hits for that. Of course, the most cursory inspection of those reveals that every damn one of them covers the topic of why the boom that never existed is now going bust.

I lied. They do, why shouldn’t I? I am going to direct you to an article outlining an opinion about The Housing Bubble, from one year ago. I wrote it. And in it, I mentioned that one Fed chief ago, I had been listening to years of housing bubble talk ad naseum and no one had any idea what they are talking about. And they still don’t. They’re a busted clock, and they seem to think that since they’ve been telling you for ten years that houses will become next to worthless overnight, they’re right now. And please notice, my only advice to avoid losing all your money in real estate overnight was to never buy any in a place where corrupt or incompetent local governance could make your house worthless overnight. Paging Ray Nagin. And I wrote that before Katrina. What did those soothsayers at CBS say back then, I wonder?

Well, I read CBS Marketwatch –oops I lied again– as they had the most gratifying end-of-the-world-overmortgaged-smoking hole headline. CBS Marketwatch.

They mention all sorts of things that are meaningless things, if you’re talking about a “bubble” instead of the normal workings of supply and demand:
“Sales of new homes dropped 4.3% in July “- There is not an everlasting supply of persons that do not have a house. If home builders keep building units for imaginary persons, they will indeed go out of business. I think that would apply in any business, though. Maybe they’ll build or do something else when they get these signals. Just a hunch.

“The July sales pace was the lowest since February’s 1.038 million.”
Like I said, I’ve been in this business for a long time. I remember the fervent prayers of the building industry to crawl over the million unit threshold, just once in their lifetime. I distinctly remember Builder magazine discussing 900,000 units as a sort of “happy days are here again.”

“New-home sales are down 21.6% in the past year, the biggest drop since late 1994. “
How exactly does comparing this year to last year have anything to do with 1994? I was in the business in 1994, (and 1984 too, by the way) and I can tell you lots of capital was fixing to run down a rathole in 1994, and it wasn’t a housing rathole.

Housing was in the toilet in 1994, and every day since I’ve been warned to stay out of the housing market. FYI geniuses: If I had listened to you, and rented in the interim, I would have had to come up with the 497.75% of extra appreciation my property would cost since then. Read that number again after I tell you I’m not joking or exaggerating, that’s exactly the appreciation in the value of my property, including what I’ve “lost” in this bubble. I lived in it while it appreciated, too. Try that with your Exxon stock. The chairs in Exxon’s lobby are uncomfortable to sleep on, anyway. CBS Marketwatch says home sales in my neck of the woods are down 43%. I’m sure they can point me to lots of investments that return 497% in 12 years. Is my house overvalued now, or was it undervalued then because people read the newspapers back then too, and listened to people like you? Try building one down the street like mine for less than mine would sell for. Good luck getting a building permit for your non-existent lot. Hint: this isn’t Holland, and we’re not making additional land here to compete with mine.

You’ll have to come up with every penny I mentioned to get me to sell. Even then I wouldn’t, come to think of it. It’s my home, you schmucks. And if it loses 10% of its value I’m not going to move in the swamp out back and leave it for the bank because it only appreciated 487.75%, not 497.75%. The horror! Please, continue reading while I knit myself a noose.

Don’t invest in Pulte, Centex or Toll Brothers if you’re afraid there are no more housing customers. Seems prudent, as it appears the boom that never happened is now over before it starts, or something. I wouldn’t open a Real Estate office this week either, unless you like to work real hard for your dough. Like the rest of us.

But I’d invest in every single one of them, before I’d invest in CBS or the New York Times.

Marvelous Milo

We celebrate the older son’s birthday today. He’s eleven.

I feel like a successful human being because I’ve managed to get him this far. I tried mightily to harm him at various playgrounds over the years, though not purposely, of course. He escaped with a stitch here and there and bumps on his noggin. And we’ve muddled through. His little brother is too tough to harm in any way, so my cares are not increased by the simple arithmetic of a brother added.

My son has that thing… a sort of internal glow that even others see emanating from his innards. His heart is good, and that trumps all other concerns. I will be pleased and sad to spring him on the world undiluted by supervision in a few years. The glow looks vaguely like the one that attracted me to his mother.

There will be little skinny friends frolicking by the dozen, smeared with cake and bug spray, and little cousins to tag along or sit padded by their diapers, watching. Aunts and Uncles and neighbors will gossip and attempt to allow things to happen, and grandmothers will dote and receive obeisance. The day will be a fabulous blur for him, and just a blur for his parents.

And then the clock will return to its quotidian desultory ticking, ever closer to the detonation of the bomb that all we parents set, that will blow our lives all to heck when he leaves us to be a man.

Happy birthday Milo.

Das Internet Boot

My mind is a cobwebbed thing. When I was young, I was like a human filing cabinet. You could ask me almost any obscure worthless thing and I’d trot it out rat-a-tat. The Lusitania’s sister ship. The manufacturer of Richtofen’s plane. Churchill’s mother’s name. Who played Agarn on F Troop. The chemical name for silicone.

I’m not like that anymore, and I don’t want to be. It’s tiresome for everyone involved to be a Jeopardy contestant out on the street. No one knows very much, really; most people don’t know much of anything.

I now know the joy of “Not Going.” By that I mean, I am not willing to subject myself to the exertions of chasing the trivial I’m not interested in. I have no interest in many things others commonly do, and I’ve lost the desire to manufacture that interest or feign the concomittant enthusiasm. It’s certainly not any form of elitism. I have the most profound disdain for the supposedly highfalutin’. I still watch football on television. If you think I’m going to sit still and have Katie Couric read me a bad newspaper every evening, you’re nuts. And I’ll read Twain ten times before I’ll read ten sentences of Norman Mailer. And I’ll only read the ten sentences as a sort of chore, to allow me to mention he’s a lousy writer and a defective thinker over dinner, if called upon.

I’d rather watch SpongeBob -again- than Sixty Minutes, anytime. SpongeBob is rooted in reality, after all; there are sponges at the bottom of the sea. Mike Wallace is unmoored from reality, and what reality he has is of his own invention. He wants to give me an impression — and he does –just not the one he’s aiming at. They both make me laugh, but only one pleasantly.

The internet is a most dangerous and magical sea for us to navigate. I swim through it, and let its atoms wash over me, and get a kind of impression from it, like the ocean. Warm. Cold. Tepid. Dangerous. Limpid. Every sort of thing.

It is said that most people have their minds made up, and simply cast about for information that gibes with their static worldview. The internet is perfect for them, as there is no thing too lame or outrageous that you can not find it by the metric tonne, footnoted. And defended to the death elsewhere in the primordial soup, to the very horizon and beyond, if need be.

I am not a utilitarian. I have no ends, so I seek no means. I swim through the vast thing — the muck, the weeds, the pale green still water, the rush of the waves and the pounding of the hurricane — and it washes all around me and gives me an impression. Or more accurately –an ongoing impression.

There is a kind of bloodsport being played in the internet world, and I think people are getting way ahead of themselves in their assessment of how important they are in the scheme of things. They are like sailors in a leaking tin tube creaking with the pressure, sweating and whiffing stale air and listening to pings on the hull, all the while thinking they’ve got it all figured out. The game is played so ferociously because the stakes are so small. Me? I can’t help but notice that Neither Ned Lamont nor Joe Lieberman is Julius Caesar.

My cobwebby mind betrays me again. A tidbit comes to mind. Is it Paul Johnson? William Manchester? Paul Johnson writing about William Manchester? Manchester writing about Churchill? I think it’s Paul Johnson writing about Manchester writing about Churchill, but to tell you the truth, I don’t care. I could find it on my shelf, but not on the internet, and so it does not exist, according to many.

Anyway, one of them went into the heart of northern India after the British decided to skedaddle and let Gandhi do it. A million persons lost their lives then, give or take, as that simmering pot was unlidded. The vestiges of the Mughul Empire showed right through the modern fabric. Anyway, the assignment was to go to remote parts of India, and ask the man in the unpaved street if it was a good or a bad thing that the British Empire had left India.

They did not even know that the British had come.

Old-Fashioned? Me? Nope- I Drink Gin, And Love YouTube And MySpace

Time marches on. I’ve got no use for nostalgia. Check that. I’ve got the proper use for nostalgia, I hope. But I get tired of old thinkers. I like to acknowledge what was good in the framework of what was possible at the time. And when you look at what’s going on, right now, it’s much harder to determine what’s Good and what’s Bad and what just comes under the heading of What’s Possible. That’s why everybody’s always Monday morning quarterbacking people like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. It’s easier when you’re in the stands and not on the field. “That’s not the way I would have founded the most successful political entity ever to exist on the face of the earth, by beating the then current greatest political entity on the face of the earth. You’re doing it all wrong, George and Tommy. My mother’s basement or my rent controlled apartment gives me the perspective you two so obviously sorely lacked.”

I’m not buying.

These new technologies are a fact, and must be dealt with. If you haven’t picked up on it by my endless fascination with YouTube here, I’ll tell you straight out: I’m fascinated with YouTube. It’s the most democratic of mediums. There’s lots of chaff, but what the hell, the things it competes with, in my humble opinion, are getting to be all chaff. I’ve seen plenty of YouTube. I haven’t seen television since the Superbowl.

Look what you can find on YouTube. You can find…jaysus! That’s my nephew!:

And look what you can find on MySpace. You can find… jaysus! That’s my friend Steve’s son and his friends, who might as well be my nephew. And look, he’s stolen my little story of his first paying gig and posted it on MySpace without asking. Why, I’d sue, if I wasn’t dumb enough to be flattered by their interest in it. Make sure and click on D’yer Mak’er. It’s better than the original. And yes, that’s them playing the Fox Sports Theme when you open the page. They’re really good

Our children. Better than the… ahem… Originals. Yeah baby! Yeah!