Act Now: A Life of Infomercials

Like most kids, my sister and I relished the opportunity to wake up early on a Saturday morning and spend some quality time in front of the television. Unlike most kids, however, my sister and I typically ended up watching not animated tales of anthropomorphized animals chasing each other off cliffs, but good old American infomercials. For hours, we’d sit there, admiring the wonders of food dehydrators, suction bags that could transform your closet into a clutter-free zone, knives that could slash through metal, and exercise machines that could melt away fat in a matter of seconds. If a broadcast opened with “The following is a paid presentation,” we were probably going to spend the next 30 minutes watching. The thing is, we really weren’t all that interested in what these new-fangled, not-sold-in-stores creations could do.  We did, however, find the presentations of them to be utterly absurd and ridiculous. We would thus spend the duration of the program howling at the processed spectacle of modern commercialism. It was all great fun.

Over time, as we became seasoned connoisseurs of infomercials, their predictability became part of the humor of it. Like clockwork, payments would be slashed (“BUT WAIT…”), additional worthless goods would be tossed in the package if you called in the next 10 minutes, and there’d be a sloppy demonstration of ‘the old way of doing things.’ These ‘why go on living this way’ demonstrations were often shown in black-and-white, and contained perplexing happenings like lemon juice being inadvertently squirted in an unsuspecting woman’s eye or a cabinet full of Tupperware avalanching down on someone’s poor grandmother. 

The structure of these shows was also part of the entertainment. The old school infomercial conceit was the completely transparent trick that we were watching a ‘real TV show,’ some kind of regular program that you just happened to catch while flipping through to a find a Welcome Back, Kotter rerun. These faux shows featured a saccharine host (who was always oddly identified as a ‘famous TV personality,’ though I’ve yet to see one anywhere outside the parallel universe in which infomercials exist), replete with a diverse and ebullient audience who seemed just a bit too enamored of the item we were discussing. They would clap vigorously, gasp at incredible new features, and nod knowingly at their neighbors in utter amazement because holy cow, she just cooked a chicken in plastic bag in the microwave. Often, these presentations took the form of gradual discovery, as some inventor or ‘guest star’ would guide us to the light and the way (accessible exclusively through this new device). We would begin our journey like a naïve Magellan, embarking out towards the unknown. All we have is a problem (not enough time, too many unused bananas, too many pots on the stove), and then we’d find a simple new product to resolve this issue (an item impressive in its own right, no doubt). But over the course of the half hour, we would uncover an endless array of features, bells, whistles, and would then be offered a lengthy line of cookbooks, starter kits, dish towels, coupon packets— just about everything under the kitchen sink. And then we’d learn, like spying new land in the distance that could not possibly exist, that the whole package was, by some act of a higher power, a “$200 value for only 3 easy payments of $29.99.”

As long as I’ve been alive, infomercials have been to American television what Fergie has been to the Black Eyed Peas—I know that it existed beforehand, but I shudder to think what that time must have been like. Thanks to the deregulation of commercial content over the air during the 1980s, the infomercial business took off in the mid-90s and has continued to grow and evolve to this day. Though the infomercial has changed a great deal since those halcyon days of the 90s, the general concept has remained the same: we get the opportunity to reach well-beyond the average 30-second spot to learn the ins-and-outs of some of today’s most history-altering products. The standard bearer in this field has been and will likely always be Ron Popeil and his “set it, and forget it!” Showtime rotisserie oven—one amongst a large arsenal of inventions Popeil developed. As soon as my sister and I saw Popeil’s name appear on the black title screen, our spirits would rise, and our minds would race to consider what new device Ron had in store for us today. In a world full of glossy and generic faces, Ron felt like the kindly avuncular figure down the street who tinkered with gadgets in his garage and was just so delighted that you’d asked to see what he’d been working on. The programs on which his products were featured contained all the best and most entertaining elements of infomercials—the overly enthused host, a crowd bursting with excitement, price slashing, revelations of the highest order, call-and-response shouting—it was basically like an easy-to-digest tent revival. All infomercials that came after have been judged against Popeil’s work. In the time since, sadly, few have come close to reaching that lofty ideal.

The other day, I had the pleasure of partaking in what may be the last of the great infomercials. It was a presentation of the Magic Bullet (a device my sister has actually ordered, I might add). This program is centered on the totally plausible idea that a British* man and his purported wife have invited some neighbors over for the sole purpose of demonstrating how unbelievable this little food preparation gizmo is (Spoiler Alert: it’s basically an unnecessarily small blender that you can put in the microwave). The houseguests, gathered round the kitchen like eager scouts at a campfire, gush with mouths agape and eyes wide over the fact we can make chicken salad in six seconds, then turn around and whip up a fluffy chocolate mousse in less time than it takes to say “Type II diabetes.” (NOTE: I calculated, and at the rate these folks were cranking out food, you could make some 600 new dishes in an hour—a pretty impressive feat). Though our hosts are quite amiable, it’s the gathered neighbors that are the most entertaining characters in this piece (just as the audience in the old Popeil infomercials was always the reason you watched). There’s a grumpy doubting Thomas in our midst, not sold on what his friends are serving. There’s a seemingly strung-out lady who comes over with cigarette in hand (with ash a mile long) and disheveled hair, donning a nightgown (who does that?). But by the end of the show, once everyone has been plied with nachos and frozen drinks, the skeptics among us are stamped out, and we arrive at the inevitable conclusion that, yes, this really is indeed the ‘ultimate party machine.’ We’ve all learned an important lesson here today, though I cannot exactly say what that that lesson is.

I have attempted fruitlessly to derive meaning from all the hours spent watching infomercials throughout my life. In all that time, I have ordered exactly one product—a speed reading kit that I asked for when I was not yet old enough to call in. I quickly learned to my chagrin that the cassette tapes the kit contained mostly discussed how to alter your diet to speed up mental processes (not a convincing argument to the chicken nugget fiend I then was). So, if I wasn’t interested in purchasing anything, why should I spend so much time watching protracted advertisements? To me, infomercials occupy a weird alternate universe built upon layers of canned absurdity and bastardized reality. Everything feels like it’s on the verge of descending into a maddening hell (see what happens to Ellen Burstyn’s character in Requiem for a Dream, for example), yet it also seems not all that distant from what we know of the world. There is a kind of magical allure to a place in which everyone is enthusiastically trying to peddle something amazing to you with a smile that’s a bit too wide. It’s a Pleasantville-esque planet where everything is gee whiz, so exciting and fascinating and simple. The humor comes in the fact that someone is trying to pass off gussied-up consumerism as real life and think they are getting away with it. I’m sure it made us feel smart, my sister and I, to sit there as kids and think we were sharp enough to see the man hiding behind the screen. In another light, infomercials are a distillation of what makes contemporary life so frustrating and weird—having to constantly separate the authentic from what someone is trying to sell you. These programs confound this process that in a way that is impossibly hilarious to me. So if liking infomercials makes me a weirdo, then so be it. They're still better than Jersey Shore.

*Americans must have some keen propensity to mindlessly trust whatever comes out of a British person’s mouth—they are inordinately represented in infomercials, though I rarely see them on this side of the pond in real life. 

Kool Thing of the Week # 6: Peanut Butter

Yes, seriously, peanut butter is the koolest thing going this week. This humble yet incredible paste made from legumes grown underneath the earth--which has served as a major source of nourishment for yours truly since I was about four--deserves a bit more recognition than it receives. I eat peanut butter sandwiches every day, but I somehow never get sick of it, so I thought I’d take a second out of my life to state publicly that peanut butter is pretty awesome. According to my precise calculations, I’ve eaten roughly 4400 peanut butter sandwiches over the course of my life—some with jelly (grape only, please), some with honey, some with bananas, but an awful lot of it has been just by itself. This figure does not factor in all the peanut butter-related snacks I have consumed, from Reese’s cups to ‘nabs’(Lance Toast-Chee crackers to some), to slathered on celery in the form of 'ants on a log.' So, it's safe to say I have had my fair share of food products covered  in copious amounts of peanut butter. For most of my existence, I have preferred the smooth variety of the stuff, but in recent years, I have become quite attached to the chunky version. But any which way you try it, peanut butter is perfect for any occasion.

I had long (incorrectly) believed that famed scientist George Washington Carver was the man who invented peanut butter, but apparently that is not the case. While Carver did do a lot of work with peanuts, the first patent for peanut butter was issued to Marcellus Gilmore Edson of Montreal in 1884. Edson, a chemist, reportedly concocted peanut butter for people who had trouble chewing solid food. So there you go. I just don’t know why this guy wasn’t more famous. Someone should have given him a medal. Or perhaps he should be on our currency. Surely the invention of peanut butter is as praiseworthy as anything Alexander Hamilton did.

Even though National Peanut Butter Day won’t come around until January 24^th of next year, now’s as good a time as any to celebrate and enjoy one of humanity’s great achievements by preparing peanut butter on an apple slice or fixing a peanut butter sundae or just chowing down on a plain old peanut butter sandwich. And don’t forget to tip your hat to old Marcellus while you partake in this food of the gods, because I shudder to think where our society would be without it.

Oldies Corner

While the vast majority of my favorite songs fall somewhere between two minutes and six minutes in duration, I can recognize that sometimes you don’t need that much time to get your point across. (See all those great early Angry Samoans songs that were like 30 seconds each.) Lo-fi heroes Guided by Voices have always been quite adept at distilling a melody down to its most essential parts, putting it on tape, and then moving on to the next one. Nowhere does the band do that better than on “Pimple Zoo” from the 1995 album Alien Lanes. Clocking in at just about 40 seconds, it may be, per second, my favorite song of all time. I used to get frustrated that the song didn’t carry on just a bit longer, but now I can say I think it’s fine just the way it is. See for yourself (it won’t take very long): 

It's Only Like Three Blocks: Hopscotch 2012 Recap

I’m not sure what it says about my experience at the Hopscotch Music Festival this past weekend when the most indelible memory involves my friend dropping his beer. Or rather, seeing his beer knocked out of his hand when an unidentified object came flying across Berkeley Café (tossed by the guitarist from the band Last Year’s Men) and made contact with my friend who was at the time quite oblivious to the threat of aerial attack. But that was the first thing I thought of when I began writing, just a few dozen hours removed from the festival, thinking of a way to define my third trip to Hopscotch in downtown Raleigh. Like the previous editions of the festival, everything was a whirlwind and hazy blur—though I saw only about 30 of the 175 acts performing over the course of the weekend, I felt like I never stopped moving and was never not listening to music coming from somewhere. I never got to digest anything whole before I was whisked away into the thick night air and down Martin Street once again. I don’t count that as a bad thing, though. There’s a kind of  maddening excitement that comes from knowing there’s music being made behind every brick wall in a one-mile radius and feeling you must do all you can to see as much of it as possible.

If this were a real music review, I would tell you about how Yo La Tengo’s quiet whisper somehow filled the massive (for Hopscotch) Memorial Auditorium, or how I could have sworn Jenn Wasner from Wye Oak was wielding not a guitar, but some kind of swift blade that kept rousing me from near slumber early Sunday morning at Lincoln Theatre. But the trouble with describing things this way is the fact that they feel less like solid memories and more like slowly dissolving dreams. I know as fact that I saw these things happen. I know how much I enjoyed seeing Roomrunner at Tir Na Nog, and how I sang along too loud with Built to Spill on City Plaza, and how I kept thinking Zeus seemed a million times better at a sparsely crowded White Collar Crime than the time I saw them with thousands of people in the hot sun in Toronto. But the fine details of the sounds that we paid good money to hear? Lost, it seems, forever.

As the number of festivals I’ve attended has grown to more than a handful, I have begun to realize these events really aren’t all about the music after all. They aren’t about checking off dozens of bands from some wish list or being able to tell your friends you were at X seeing X (so be impressed).  It’s about sitting under an overhang while the clouds unleash torrential rain on a Saturday evening, mumbling about the band Oneida, and thinking of all the numerous places and possibilities that were around you. It’s about stumbling into a place out of the rain and being pleasantly surprised by music you’ve never heard before and will probably never hear again. It’s even about taking a stupid rickshaw down the street to the next venue just to say you’ve done it.

Thursday night, as we stood in an ever-growing, yet unmoving queue outside the Pour House, we came to the realization we were not going to see Dan Deacon as we had planned—even though it was supposed to be the must-see show of the day and we would have scored major cool points for being there. But then it dawned on me, in just a matter of steps we could be somewhere else, and it didn’t really matter who we saw or what anyone else thought about it. We could have a good time around the corner, down the street, or just sitting on the balcony at Busy Bee watching all the people stumble around down below (which is exactly what we did).

I’ve now come to the conclusion that music festivals are ‘big picture’ events, made up of a sloppy stew of bits and pieces of sights and sounds you really can’t make out. But they all need to be there in order for it to work. I may not be able to make sense of a lot of what happened. I may not be able to replay perfectly in my mind Lonnie Walker’s exact set list or figure out the name of that Pictureplane song that I couldn’t get out of my head. But I know that I enjoyed it. And I know I can’t wait to do it all again.

Dead Aim: (Finally) Saying Goodbye to AOL Instant Messenger

Every day was the same. I’d clench my teeth for almost an hour as our school bus waltzed through the labyrinthine suburban streets between Parker Middle School and my little corner of the world on the other side of town. Once we finally arrived on my shady lane, I’d run inside the house, tell my mother my day was ‘just fine’ and then I’d dash up the stairs to the family computer, quietly resting there each day like a present waiting to be opened. I’d wait for what seemed like hours for the machine to wake up, go through the anxiety-inducing process of hearing the buzz and hum of the modem making synaptic connections through wires and space, arriving somehow on the world wide web. Then, at the word “Welcome,” we had liftoff. I was transported to the world of screen names and chat rooms and emoticons, which in my juvenile mind, was akin to some blindingly bright heaven on earth. All the people I passed in the hallway earlier in the day were there. So were all my friends from camp. So were millions and millions of strangers who, after the requisite “a/s/l?,” were potential best friends for life. It was a thrilling experience, signing on every day to chat about nothing but who was going out with whom, what you were doing this weekend (nothing), and what music videos on TRL were totally overrated. It was as big as my world got at that point. And even if the spatial range was quite limited, the possibilities it contained seemed endless.

I have a strange tendency to hold on to things longer than I should—be they t-shirts from sixth grade or old letters from forgotten friends or 10-day-old pizza in the refrigerator. Even after something has become useless or moldy or passé or devoid of any real meaning, it’s still not easy for me to get rid of it and banish it from my life forever. This propensity to hold on too long explains why, as recent as this past week, I was signing on regularly to AOL Instant Messenger (aka AIM)—nearly 15 years after I first appeared on the scene as “Carthage45” (a reference to the North African home of Hannibal—in case you had any doubts that I was not a dork)—in spite of the fact that I didn’t know anyone else who used it anymore. For the uninitiated, AIM was created as an instant messaging service initially part of America Online (AOL), an internet service provider that unbelievably still exists. AIM soon developed as a stand-alone instant messaging system that allowed you to compile a ‘buddy list’ of screen names of people you knew who you could then chat with. From the time it first became available, I was hooked. It has now been part of my life for so long as a source of communication and connection and the airing of grievances, it has become daunting to say farewell, in spite of the fact that AIM has completely lost all the usefulness that initially drew me in.  

What AIM has meant to me over the years is hard to quantify. It was, in its earliest stages, a way to solidify friendships, obtain breaking news updates from the soap opera that was middle school, and gain a foothold in some external space even when I lived in a world that was regimented by parents who were hung up on making sure I did my homework and got to bed on time. Later, at boarding school, it became a lifeline to the distant outside world—as it was the only practical way I could keep in touch with friends back home or people who were locked up in other dorms after lights out. In college, the device lost a lot of its luster, but it still served as a means to keep in touch with friends from high school, and a way to easily figure out where people were going out or what the assignment in English class was. Since that time, it has basically been a quiet, uncrowded room where people from the past would appear without warning, out of thin air, to say “hello, how are you?” and then disappear into the murky deep once again. One by one, the screen names I was so used to seeing pop up on my buddy list each afternoon like clockwork vanished completely until only one or two appeared with any regularity. In the last couple of months, even those few remaining holdouts have completely abandoned it. Now, I feel like I’m the last person in the room, left behind to turn out the lights before the party is closed down for good.

With the prevalence of so many means of digitally communicating with people—from Gchat to Facebook to text messaging—the utility of AIM has declined drastically in the last five to seven years. Some studies report that AIM held over 50 percent of the instant messaging market as recent as 2006, a number which has now dropped to less than 1 percent—a staggering decline even in the ever-changing world of communications. People stopped using AIM simply because there were suddenly so many other easier, hipper ways to tell someone you were too tired to watch a Star Wars marathon. Especially as mobile phone technology has grown, the ability to stay in touch with friends at every hour of the day has become a real possibility (and for some, a necessity). No longer do you have to wait to get home to sign on and hope that someone else is online—you can just text them or send a message on Facebook or tweet at them or facetime them or whatever. As has been the case with much of our recent technological advancement, communication tools are forever shifting and adapting to find new methods to make our interactions with others more instant and more controlling of our lives. Though AIM was for many people an obsession that took up a substantial amount of time, there was still the ability to eventually sign off and return to a haven without the ding of a new instant message. That wall that provided some sense of privacy and distance has since been shattered by ‘improved’ technology, thus destroying the need for an Instant Messenger service that was dependent upon making yourself available at the exact same time someone else did. Somehow, I miss that idea.

A few months ago, I pulled out the old laptop that I had in high school. Out of curiosity, I turned on the shockingly clunky apparatus just to see what was contained inside. Amidst the folders for Napster and papers for 10^th grade history class, I noticed a program known as Dead AIM, which if I remember correctly was somehow ‘better’ than your average AIM. Unbeknownst to me, that program had logged every conversation I’d ever had while using it. And I, perpetually bored and self-reflective, decided to read all of what was documented there, trying to decipher cryptic messages like they had been transmitted by unknown beings from outer space. Like my recent foray into examining old notebooks of poetry, this experience was uncomfortable and unsettling—envisioning myself so long ago, typing furiously into the night, trying to be funny, trying to sound smart, trying to create real connections with people. It captured, in just the couple of months that I used Dead AIM, so much about what high school was like. Whether I was arguing politics or reveling in oblique away messages (which would soon be replaced elsewhere by ‘status messages’), the chats were all foreign and fascinating, like some kind of time capsule I had forgotten I’d buried in the back yard.

Just as my reticence to throw away old shoes has nothing to do with any deep-seated love for the rubber in their soles, my inability to sign off from AIM forever has nothing to do with its design or functionality.  I’m not attached to the medium itself, but to what happened there. That feeling of possibility, of being able to instantly and directly communicate with dozens of people with the reckless abandon of adolescence is what I feel I’m leaving behind. Because in many ways, I still chat as I did then, just in a more mature and limited form. But it somehow isn’t the same. Even on this occasion, as I finally decide to not sign on to AIM anymore, I doubt that I will actually delete the program from my computer. I will leave that primitive golden yellow running man icon on my desktop so that I can be occasionally reminded of what it was like to come home after school and chat with friends or stay up late into the night telling bad jokes and quoting terrible song lyrics to people I hardly knew and not think a thing of it. And I guess, in the end, that has to be worth something.

Kool Thing of the Week # 5: Hopscotch Music Festival

For the third consecutive year, downtown Raleigh is gearing up for the Hopscotch Music Festival, which kicks off this Thursday evening. Started in 2010 by the Independent Weekly, the 2012 edition of the event will be the largest yet, featuring  175 acts from a wide array of musical genres at 15 venues around Raleigh. The festival, as its name suggests, is all about hopping from one show to another, as the schedule features a veritable smorgasbord of offerings for your musical enjoyment. Festivalgoers have the chance to see some of the capital city’s finest venues, ranging from Raleigh Memorial Auditorium, to the Contemporary Art Museum, to local hangouts like Kings and Slim’s.  Headliners The Roots, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and Built to Spill will play at the City Plaza stage outdoors in the middle of Fayetteville Street. While the main festival runs during the evenings from Thursday to Saturday, day parties in the downtown area kick off around noon each day and will feature plenty of music, fellowship, and in some cases, food (score).  For the more intellectually-minded, visit one of the panels at the Edward McKay Used Books & More Cultural Series, which will take place at the Raleigh City Museum at 3pm each afternoon.

Having attended the previous two iterations of the festival, I can say without reservation that it’s a pretty awesome experience. Whether it was seeing Chapel Hill band Embarrassing Fruits play twice in one day or witnessing Guided By Voices tear it up on the City Plaza stage with the glistening Raleigh skyline behind me, Hopscotch has provided me with a boatload incredible memories in just two short years of existence. It’s a wonderful showcase for downtown Raleigh and all the exciting music that’s being made in the Triangle, yet it also provides a great opportunity to see talented acts from all over the world. Organizers have done a stand-up job in crafting the lineup so that, while choosing which bands to see is no easy task, the high quality of the options ensures that you really can’t go wrong no matter which course you decide on.

For more info, check out the Festival website: http://hopscotchmusicfest.com/

Oldies Corner 
In honor of Hopscotch, I thought I'd post a video from one of my favorite bands who will be performing at this year's Festival--the pride of Boise, Built to Spill. This here is a live version of the song "Stop the Show," which appeared on the near-perfect Perfect From Now On, an album released way back in 1997. I've seen Built to Spill live two or three times before, but I'm still really looking forward to seeing them again this Friday at City Plaza. So, rock out and enjoy.