daily schmear

Nostalgia, sentimentality, old age and Japanese language camp

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“even N, who founded the modernist magazine Luna
while Japan prepared to invade China
got sentimental after he went on his pension …

…when he was young N wrote “I say strange things”
was it the monster that pumped tears from his older eyes?”

-From “My Imperialism” (Ryuichi Tamura)

I started yet another conversation with a reference to attending Japanese language camp. This never ceases to amuse others, some thinking it sounds like the height (or depth) of total geekery, some thinking it sounds too similar to something like a forced death march or a Japanese internment camp. But alas, no, I studied almost all the languages my high school had to offer (German was the only exception, which made the Frau teaching German feel quite left out). Back in those fearful days of American decline (ongoing), when Bush senior caused an international incident by vomiting at the Japanese prime minister’s residence, and we all thought Japan was going to take over the world, we on the American west coast were hedging our bets, picking up our hashi and “nihongo o benkyooshimashita” 日本語を勉強しました. The Japanese were in fact helping us – subsidizing us – giving us money and camps and all the rest so we could immerse ourselves in Japanese language and culture for weeks at a time in the rural woods of western Washington. Never mind that I was never a “camp going”, group activity kind of girl – I tried to tell my teachers that I did not have the money for such a thing, but the school district had money to burn, I guess, and had never had a student like me (not that I was remarkable – it is just that I was the only one who ever willingly took so much language study at once). They paid for the camp.

The point of this – although I am not terribly nostalgic about those days, some characters from Japanese language camp come to mind sometimes. I only keep in touch with one guy – and got a letter from him yesterday. He shared some rather alarming news after a long (an entire adulthood) correspondence of mostly mundane stuff between us – sure, each of us moved back and forth between countries and had things happen, but nothing that does not happen to everyone. And suddenly, almost like a postscript, he added something rather serious, even stating that he “did not want to make a big deal out of it” – which I completely understand – but still I had to stop and catch my breath and suddenly reflect on… the deceptive, wicked nature of time. Even if time is just a manmade construct and has no inherent evil whatsoever. All that is truly deceptive about it is our human caprice and wont to waste time, playing games – or rather waste feelings, being petty and not doing what our heart really desires in life. Time and our perception of it imbues us with false confidence, with fear, with nostalgic sentimentality.

I am sitting in my car hanging out in a parking lot, reflecting on the way time has passed since meeting this Japanese language camp friend – we met each other in 1991, which still feels a lot like yesterday except that it was almost 25 years ago. This is how even the unsentimental start to feel the pull of nostalgia.

”I wish nostalgia had a body so that I could push it out of the window! To smash what cannot be!” –Odysseus Elytis -Οδυσσέας Ελύτης

It starts to weigh them down when they can talk about how a quarter-century has passed and it felt a lot like the blink of an eye. I may not be overly sentimental myself, but this is how I have lost myself in poetry. The words I feel have been captured somewhere else. It’s a Ryuichi Tamura-田村隆一 kind of morning.

My Imperialism
by Ryuichi Tamura

I sink into bed
on the first Monday after Pentecost
and bless myself
since I’m not a Christian

Yet my ears still wander the sky
my eyes keep hunting for underground water
and my hands hold a small book
describing the grotesqueness of modern white society

when looked down at from the nonwhite world
in my fingers there’s a thin cigarette-
I wish it were hallucinogenic
though I’m tired of indiscriminate ecstasy

Through a window in the northern hemisphere
the light moves slowly past morning to afternoon
before I can place the red flare, it’s gone:
darkness

Was it this morning that my acupuncturist came?
a graduate student in Marxist economics, he says he changed
to medicine to help humanity, the animal of animals, drag itself peacefully to its deathbed
forty years of Scotch whisky’s roasted my liver and put me
into the hands of a Marxist economist
I want to ask him about Imperialism, A Study–
what Hobson saw in South Africa at the end of the nineteenth century
may yet push me out of bed
even if you wanted to praise imperialism
there aren’t enough kings and natives left
the overproduced slaves had to become white

Only the nails grow
the nails of the dead grow too
so, like cats, we must constantly
sharpen ours to stay alive
Only The Nails Grow-not a bad epitaph
when K died his wife buried him in Fuji Cemetery
and had To One Woman carved on his gravestone
true, it was the title of one of his books
but the way she tried to have him only
to herself almost made me cry
even N, who founded the modernist magazine Luna
while Japan prepared to invade China
got sentimental after he went on his pension;
F, depressed
S, manic, builds house after house
A has abdominal imperialism: his stomach’s colonized his legs
M’s deaf, he can endure the loudest sounds;
some people have only their shadows grow
others become smaller than they really are
our old manifesto had it wrong: we only looked upward
if we’d really wanted to write poems
we should have crawled on the ground on all fours-
when William Irish, who wrote Phantom Lady, died
the only mourners were stock brokers
Mozart’s wife was not at his funeral

My feet grow warmer as I read
Kotoku Shusui’s Imperialism, Monster of the Twentieth Century, written back in 1901
when he was young N wrote “I say strange things”
was it the monster that pumped tears from his older eyes?

Poems are commodities without exchange value
but we’re forced to invade new territory
by crises of poetic overproduction

We must enslave the natives with our poems
all the ignorant savages under sixty
plagued by a surplus of clothes and food-
when you’re past sixty
you’re neither a commodity
nor human

But it is so much more than just Tamura lamenting the sentimentality of old age. It is also the nostalgia – looking back at people, events – what has deeply affected and wounded us, things we carry for years, imprinted on us even when the person or event is long ago and the deep impression we have belies the brevity of these memorable encounters.

“With the incomparable feeling of rising and of being like a banner
Twenty seconds worth twenty-five years” (from “To Marina” by Kenneth Koch)

That sudden sense that one second you were an awkward and completely artistically inept kid fumbling imprecisely with the Japanese art form katazome. And the next you are shaking your head, remembering the details of that time so clearly, wondering, “Could that really have been twenty-five years ago?” (The twenty-five year mark comes up a few times in Kenneth Koch’s masterpiece, “To Marina” – possibly my favorite poem of all time.)

“We walk through the park in the sun. It is the end.
You phone me. I send you a telegram. It
Is the end. I keep
Thinking about you, grieving about you. It is the end. I write
Poems about you, to you. They
Are no longer simple. No longer
Are you there to see every day or
Every other or every third or fourth warm day
And now it has been twenty-five years
But those feelings kept orchestrating I mean rehearsing
Rehearsing in my and tuning up
While I was doing a thousand other things, the band
Is ready, I am over fifty years old and there’s no you—
And no me, either, not as I was then,
When it was the Renaissance
Filtered through my nerves and weakness
Of nineteen fifty-four or fifty-three,
When I had you to write to, when I could see you
And it could change.”

Teach Yourself Revolution: Good Intentions

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A lot of us sign up for online courses – online education is becoming more and more dynamic and accepted. People do it for enrichment, self-betterment, refreshing skills, dipping our toe into something totally new, for diversionary purposes, for actual university-level degrees. I have signed up so many times for these MOOCs (massive open online courses) and never really participated in a single one until now.

Not surprised, then, when I visited my current course’s webpage to read: “If you have got this far and completed the first test, you are amongst the 45 percent left who started the course.” Three weeks in (one-third of the length of the class), fewer than half are still in the course. According to UK Times Higher Ed online (2013), only about seven percent (!) of MOOC students complete the courses they start. Remarkable.

Then again, it is not surprising – there is nothing holding you accountable. The learning with MOOCs, if you learn or engage at all, is passive at best.

While not nearly as passive (collaboration/group work and interaction is required), I have nearly completed an MA degree completely online but have not finished the last little bit – but I found that even with the level of self-discipline I have (I work mostly at home), finding the time and discipline to keep up on readings and lectures was really tough. If school/studying is not the priority or does not have some immediacy in my daily life (that is, the Coursera class I am taking now is quite relevant to my daily work while my MA had very little to do with my life or career), I am not going to be nearly as motivated to make it a priority.

But every time I sign up, I have high hopes and, even more, the best of intentions.

Marketing: Sometimes It is the Messenger

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As I have mentioned a bunch of times already, I am following a Coursera/Wharton Intro to Marketing course on the Coursera website. I was taking a peek at some of the discussion boards and found that for once I felt like contributing. I tend to be pretty passive in those kinds of things, but somehow I just wanted to ramble in pretty much the same way I do here.

Someone posed the question as to whether there is value in celebrity endorsements, which got the community engaged in a good discussion on how celebrity endorsements have changed in the ever-shifting, digital landscape. The question went a step further, asking whether consumers would be more likely to trust celeb endorsements OR crowdsourced reviews and information (such as information from Yelp, Trustpilot or even customer reviews on Amazon or something similar).

I have given a lot of thought to celebrity endorsements, and more specifically, celebrity activism and causes. We’ve seen celebs like Angelina Jolie as a humanitarian activist and UNHCR goodwill ambassador and pompous mouthpiece Bono of U2 appoint himself a kind of expert on developing-world debt and debt forgiveness (he is possibly the most visible – even if his fellow countryman Bob Geldof got the ball rolling with his Band Aid and Live Aid initiatives back in the early-to-mid 1980s and continues to work with debt forgiveness today). While undertaking my MA in communications for development, there was a segment focused on celebrity activism and cause marketing – as well as “brand aid”, where brands become actively entwined and aligned with a well-known cause or charity, and market their products in a way that makes the consumer feel good about him/herself for buying it, i.e. “One dollar of every purchase goes toward –insert cause here”. A lot of what we studied and discussed had to do with how much of this successful marketing actually contributed to the efforts of the cause – in many cases, just contributing directly to whatever cause would be considerably more advantageous for the cause, so the benefit in the end was debatable.

Point being – are people influenced by celebrity (or brand) involvement? And has this changed? Does it make a difference if it is cause-related? Does the messenger make that big a difference?

During my exploration of the discussion on the Coursera site, I thought about it and concluded that celebrity endorsements may take different forms than they have in the past. That is, giant ad campaigns for Pepsi, for example, featuring mass market stars might not hit the way they would have in 1983 or 1993. But with the granular-level of user data available to begin segmenting and targeting audiences, “smaller-scale” celeb endorsements that target specific groups become possible. Similarly, with social media, a “minor” or “niche” celebrity can have untold numbers of followers that they influence – and this can have a significant effect (and can be a cheaper, easier reach alternative for companies who still want celebrity connections but in a scaled-back way). The channels being used today (not the traditional ad campaigns, etc.) also allow for less overt “endorsement” and more subtle influence.

A few other students made very valid, important points – the nature of the product is key. A celeb endorsement for something like fashion or cosmetic items allows the consumer to project him/herself into that celeb’s lifestyle (“buying a dream”, even if it’s something simple like a new shirt or a bottle of perfume), so they might buy it based on that projection alone, even on a whim. Almost the same could be said for buying a car. A celeb might endorse/advertise a car brand – which might influence the consumer’s positive or negative perception of that brand – but would not ultimately make most consumers buy a big-ticket item like a car based on the endorsement alone. They will do their homework – research and look at actual product reviews from real consumers. Celeb endorsements in those cases create buzz and the “all eyes on me” syndrome.

A good set of examples, actually, comes from Volvo. They built enormous buzz with their “Epic Split” video featuring Jean-Claude Van Damme – and consumers talked a lot about it when the video of the ad went viral – but consumers were not the target of these ads for Volvo (commercial trucks).

But did it pique their interest in Volvo as a whole? Probably. Similarly, targeting consumers, Volvo tapped footballer Zlatan Ibrahimovic for another ad campaign – obviously appealing to an entirely different target group. Would anyone buy a Volvo because Zlatan gives his stamp of approval? Probably not – but his endorsement raises the profile and opens the door to research and crowdsourced reviews. Then with the reach of social media, ad campaigns and consumer reviews get a much extended reach – so even if an ad campaign was intended for only the Swedish market, for example, it would not be long before that campaign is seen worldwide if it has that big an impact.

With all of this in mind – having written mostly that “take” on it, I walked away with the ideas still stirring in my mind. I watched a few episodes of the series Years of Living Dangerously, a Showtime documentary series that follows actors/celebs into various places and stories that paint an alarming picture of climate change/global warming. Interesting enough but what struck me was how the show is a kind of “cause marketing” that employs both celebrities and a kind of “crowdsourced expertise”. A lot of documentaries take this tack, of course, asking experts to qualify and confirm the statements someone is making. But in this case it was a less than subtle move to target a specific group of people. Maybe someone would watch this and take Harrison Ford’s word for it that Indonesia has been deforested at a shocking rate. But someone else – particularly someone with disdain for “liberal celebrities and media” would not be inclined to believe a famous actor’s take on climate change no matter how much science or information s/he cited. This came into play when actor Don Cheadle traveled to Texas to assess drought conditions there that have put people out of work, put farms out of business and devastated industry, landscape and economy. The population/target audience, as Cheadle’s narration explains, cites Biblical causes and “solutions” – the people he meets do not believe in science or in the whole concept of global warming. Then Cheadle meets a scientist who also happens to be an evangelical Christian – she is also a loud voice for the truth and science of climate change. Because of who she is – both a scientist and a devout Christian – she is able to talk to and reach this particular audience and get past their doubts and convince them not only that climate change is real but that scientific belief is not at odds with their religious faith. She is not saying anything different from what Al Gore ran around preaching but the audience would not listen to him.

Cheadle made the point that actually gets to my bottom line: Sometimes it is not the content of the message but who delivers it – and this is why both celebrity endorsements and crowdsourcing have their place.

PhD in dilettantism: Everything is an ecosystem

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If I could get a PhD in being a dilettante (a nice way for saying that I can’t focus and want to know and learn a lot about everything without really becoming an expert), I’d sign up now.

Today I dabbled and dealt in so many different disciplines, tackled so many things in so many languages, worked on hands-on fix-it things but also read poetry, marketing theory papers and some clinical research (in healthcare), that it could never be said that I do the same thing all the time. What I do with my time would probably bore the majority of people, but that’s what makes the world tick. Some of us want to drive trucks; some of us know how to mix drinks; some of us want to drill teeth (hopefully as dentists); some of us want to write about destination weddings in Italy while baking coconut macaroon tarts and filling them with dark chocolate ganache (recipe and pictures to come). I also saw a record number of cats prowling around the immediate vicinity, answered a lot of overdue email and told someone what a “croque monsieur” is (even if I have never made nor eaten one myself).

I write all of this, though, as a preface to a debate I often have running in my head about the value of focus versus multidisciplinary meanderings. I conclude that there should be no “versus” in that statement because it is not really something about which one can make a value judgment – both ways of doing things have their own value. They accomplish different ends.

What prompted this was the recent death of activist Billy Frank Jr. One of the articles I read after his passing pointed out that Frank’s life work, dealing almost exclusively with fishing rights, restoring salmon habitat and the ecosystem was sometimes criticized by Native American groups that felt Frank should use his voice and platform to fight for or pursue broader Native American issues in his agitation and political work. Frank was direct as always: he worked with what he knew. He wanted lawmakers, when they saw him coming, to know exactly what he wanted from them and would talk about.

“I know there are other problems, but the one I know about is the salmon, and when these politicians see me coming I want them to know that’s what I am here to talk about.”

While this singular focus served Frank, does a singular focus on an important issue sometimes prevent us from seeing a bigger picture or looking outside a given discipline to find a solution to a big problem? This might not have crossed my mind except that around the same time Frank died, and I had salmon populations and the whole “ecosystem” idea on my mind, I had seen a program (multiple times), Lifelines, on Al Jazeera English about how an overabundance of a parasite in Senegal led to epidemic levels of schistosomiasis. The disease is one of the world’s neglected tropical diseases (have you ever heard of it? I hadn’t) and can have very severe consequences.

In the story presented on Al Jazeera, the freshwater snail that carries this parasite basically overpopulated the river once the river had been dammed. The population using the river water would then become infected. Even though the infection is treatable, reinfection occurs when the person uses infected water, of course, making it a neverending cycle unless something could be done about the overpopulation of snails.

Doctors and specialists working in Senegal on this public health issue decided to look outside their own sphere of expertise. They knew, according to the documentary, that damming was responsible for the outbreak but were not sure how or why.

“…until a development specialist linked the explosion of schistosomiasis to the extinction of river prawns in the river system caused by the dam.

River prawns prey on the snails that carry the schistosomiasis parasite. Without prawns, the snail population increased, and so did the risk of schisto infection for everyone who entered the river”

It took some different thinking to look outside, for example, the immediate problem of a dammed river or outside the medical problems at hand to see the entire ecosystem and discover what had changed (the prawn population) that could have caused this. In this case, a focus on one thing (suddenly 90% of the population was infected with schisto) led to expanding the focus to consider different disciplines that could explain the problem and come up with a solution (repopulating with prawns).

One could argue, of course, that all of this makes sense because regardless of whether you are a specialist or a generalist, so much of what gets done is well-integrated with everything else. It’s an interdisciplinary world, and much like the natural ecosystem, the manmade ecosystem relies on this interdependence and the different types of skills and expertise its parts and people have. (More reason to cheer for my unorthodox but totally interdisciplinary higher education at The Evergreen State College, eh?)

Stat Explosion and Data Overload

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May 18 skewed my blog statistics in a big way. As someone who manages a very niche, limited-reach blog for a corporation in my professional life (obviously not THIS blog), this sudden and brief explosion was an interesting look at what immediately drives traffic (a retweet from a famous person). Or rather what won’t. The corporate blog gets readers, and the number of readers and subscribers grows slowly but steadily. It is such a specialized area that it is not as though it would ever get the kind of readership that even my personal blog gets – and my personal blog is all over the place – personal, lacking in a theme or point and not actively trying to drive anything. It started as a baking/recipe blog when my colleagues (whom I had stuffed to near-death with cookies and cupcakes) demanded recipes. It evolved into a dumping ground for my thoughts and commentary on television, news/current events and all manner of other nonsense. Even if my personal blog had a steadier stream of traffic than my work blog (makes sense because the randomness of my personal blog means that all kinds of Google searches, from Mobutu Sese Seko to white chocolate macadamia cookies, from the benefits of telecommuting, to pictures of brown sugar cupcakes piled high with mounds of maple Swiss meringue buttercream and candied bacon. might lead someone to my blog), I never achieved any great reach.

on the bacon bandwagon

on the bacon bandwagon

Until today, my personal blog’s best stats never reached more than 250 visitors – and that was when I was baking a lot and posting recipes and pictures of cakes. In the absence of that, I maybe get 30 or 40 visitors. I am not that concerned with the statistics on my personal blog – I write it for my own sake and if someone else gets there and likes it, or even doesn’t like it, that’s fine with me.

But this morning, which has felt like a neverending night now that Swedish near-endless light nights are here, I posted an article about how I finally watched the witty and insightful Inside Amy Schumer, despite the misleading, one-dimensional Comedy Central ads for it that had so long turned me off. I posted about the blog via Twitter, which was retweeted from Schumer’s own account, which then led to what is for me an unprecedented avalanche of activity. Suddenly my phone was chiming: ding ding ding ding ding ding because, thanks to Schumer’s devotees (a more pleasant word than “followers”), people were retweeting and favoriting my original tweet. (Yes, I am perfectly aware of how asinine this sounds. A non-Millennial person describing the tweet and retweet process like it’s really serious business just sounds funny – even if it does have its own importance. It’s just not the be-all, end-all.)

But more than that, the link to the blog in which I wrote about changing my mind about Amy Schumer’s show made the blog statistics skyrocket. In a couple of hours, there were well over 1,000 visitors. The downside is that this opens the door to a lot of unprovoked criticism from complete strangers. But then yeah, the world’s full of haters, and that is completely fine. I hate a lot of stuff too. It is also easy to have a knee-jerk reaction (no emphasis on “jerk” or anything) – as I did to the ads, and as the commenter had to my post. But I am sure we are both cool enough people in our real lives.

The only comment on the Amy Schumer blog entry, in fact, was a negative one, basically laying into me for my “judgmental, accusatorial” observations about an ad. But, as I commented back (and I think we’re cool now), most of our judgments and decisions are kind of “split second” in nature – especially to ads. They are meant to appeal to us on some level, get our attention and in 30 seconds to make us want to do something, consume something, watch something or buy something (I won’t even use as strong a word as “persuade” since it’s more like advertisers tease and tempt with an elevator speech – so shouldn’t it be a bit more tempting, somehow?). Of course, I don’t know who the target audience was with the Schumer ads, but it’s not me – and that’s fine. But I still had to see them, and I made a judgment that watching the show might not be the best use of my time. Or that it would be as crass and shallow as the ads made it seem. That is no judgment of the show itself or Amy Schumer. And my writing about it was more like, “Hey, I was completely wrong about this – and the two people who read this blog and generally trust my opinions on these matters should know it. Watch Inside Amy Schumer!”

With a fleeting moment of greater reach, you simultaneously become a lightning strike (gone in a flash) and a lightning rod.

I suppose a celeb retweet or starting/being part of a trending topic is the sort of thing that one has to get to gain some traction. Even if, for example, in this case, it is a bunch of clicks – not “traction”. We all know it but there’s no way to predict whether any social media activity will lead to anything. Visitors to my personal blog are nice – but much like in the corporate blog environment, it’s not like they stuck around and read other things. And for personal writing, it doesn’t matter. I write what I write, I post it online and to a limited extent in social channels, but I am not writing for an audience or to achieve something.

But for the corporate writing, you sort of want to extend the reach – establish yourself as a thought leader – but you cannot do anything to damage your credibility or try to somehow get that reach artificially. It doesn’t work and won’t hold anyone’s interest. For instance I could try to steer the corporate blog in a direction where “celebrity surgeons” (is there such a thing other than the odd Dr Oz and some plastic surgeons who show up on makeover shows??) somehow feel compelled to retweet the content, but while that might extend reach for a day, it is not delivering quality or longevity or even the target audience we’d want to reach.

In a kind of related area…

“Data data data – you cannot make bricks without clay…” –Sherlock Holmes in TV show Elementary

All this discussion of statistics should lead to an action plan on how to take advantage of statistics and visitor data to guide future blog content – “give the readers what they want”. At least this is true for the corporate blog – consumer/user/customer responsiveness and centricity is really the only way to ensure continued growth for something like this.

I have been participating in a Coursera/Wharton School online class about marketing, and this week was all about customer-centricity. Since I work a lot with the ideas underpinning “taming Big Data” to gain customer insights in my freelance work, the whole idea of customer focus as one of the only real ways to differentiate makes a lot of sense – and customer data (overload) is the key to giving users what they want.

Never mind that I am totally distracted listening to the professor, Peter Fader, deliver his lectures, because he sounds too much like Bob Odenkirk – so I am supposed to be looking at a PowerPoint slide describing a couple of case studies of companies that have put customer data to good use, but it’s like I am hearing Saul Goodman explaining customer centricity to me. (And Saul Goodman arguably did put his customers first, sometimes to his own detriment and at his own peril.)

This customer-centric, data-driven approach is finally taking root in all kinds of business segments and industries. As Fader pointed out, direct marketing has always used data to target customers – but now, in the digital age, this data is readily available to almost everyone (I won’t get into the ethics of data collection, privacy, etc. except to say that while it’s great for businesses, it’s creepy for customers – see a recent article about a pregnant woman and Princeton professor who had to go to insane lengths to hide her pregnancy from advertisers, retailers and the Big Data machine.) At first companies like Google and Amazon tapped into user data because it’s in their DNA – I have spent a lot of time looking at how old-style, traditional publishers who lost both revenue and subscribers in the big digital shift are now taking back control their data (they had ceded a lot of it to third parties who started taking an ever-larger share of the pie from them) to target their website visitors, readers, subscribers with content and advertising that is highly personalized. And just today I saw a news report about a museum in London that has begun to use all kinds of data collection (traditional and digital) to continue to attract visitors. As the report stated, “Research is a key part of the museum’s arsenal.”

The application of data and personalization is the next logical step, but I wonder about the quality and longevity of this too. Collecting, analyzing and applying user data can only go so far before people feel as though someone is always looking over their shoulder. I cannot help but wonder if that sense of Big Data infiltrating one’s life will start to feel too much like Big Brother and begin to change and influence consumer behavior?

(As advertised – I rambled aimlessly!)

Why I Changed My Mind: Amy Schumer

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My change of heart in this case was not so much changing my mind about Amy Schumer herself or her comedy because, frankly, I had never really heard of her or her work. My instant dislike stemmed from the endless advertisements for her Comedy Central show, Inside Amy Schumer, which appeared constantly in every single commercial break while streaming The Daily Show and The Colbert Report online. Is it Ms Schumer’s fault that 1. the ad nauseam ad campaign was overkill and turned people (namely me) off before they could even give her show a chance and 2. the ads Comedy Central makes for its stable of shows feature the most obnoxious bits and bobs, making the shows appear annoying and unwatchable, also before potential viewers could give them a chance? No. I had the same problem with another of the overkill ad campaigns propelled like an enemy sortie at the unsuspecting target when Comedy Central promoted the brilliant Broad City in exactly the same fashion. Granted ads are ads – they are so short that they can’t reflect a whole lot of the intelligent humor and depth that give these shows their cachet. But can’t the ads and those who make them dream up some way to make their shows seem less one-dimensional?

I thought Broad City looked dumb but gave it a chance – but Inside Amy Schumer got the shortest straw. I saw the ads, which made her look like a self-absorbed, vapid, sex-obsessed idiot playing stereotypes for laughs, and I immediately thought she and the show were anything but groundbreaking and inventive. Turns out, though, that while Schumer has written some skits in which she plays a self-absorbed, vapid, sex-obsessed (to a mad degree) character, her comedy swims in thrashingly funny but incisive commentary – deeply feminist, hypocrisy-poking/exposing, hyperbolic, sarcastic. I’ve been gasping and then laughing my way through both seasons of the show. It’s sometimes shocking in its sudden lack of political correctness (as most of the best comedy is), painful in its mix of humor – swinging between self-absorption and self-deprecation, much of it quite topical (see the skit about the combat video game in which the female video game character suffers and reports an assault and is faced by a screen reading “Character Assassination Complete”; not only is the idea behind the video game reminiscent of the recent controversies about sexual assault in the military with the reaction of the guy friend with whom Amy’s character is playing video games, telling her, “You obviously did something wrong – maybe you just shouldn’t play” a further level of commentary ) and most of it universal (see the “Stolen Years” jewelry collection ad, the ISP customer service freakout session skit, the superfluous nature of enormous penises bit in her standup act, all the skits about groups of female friends being competitively self-deprecating … and pretty much every skit and standup bit in the show)…

A handful of things were extra fabulous: Josh Charles’s appearance on an episode just after his shocking departure from The Good Wife – Schumer and Charles make glorious fun of the pomposity of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom, which was absolutely necessary.

An offhand reference to the Operation Smile charity (which my company works with and sends volunteers to). Mentioning jokingly that TMZ maybe thought she was Paula Deen (which might not have made me spit my coffee out – in laughter – if I had not been lambasting Paula Deen a whole lot lately with my Firewall – check out Paula Deen “oiling up a bird” and deep-frying it with her Aunt Peggy, who has a very “Derek-esque“, vacant smile going on here).

Some of the over-the-top, possibly over-the-line humor – the “We’ve all been a little raped”/”grey area of rape” bit, the “AIDS/dealbreaker/gluten allergy” date – a bit gasp-worthy, then laugh-worthy and then thought-provoking. How many times have we all been on a date or in a situation where someone tells us something really uncomfortable and offered us an “out” but we still sit there, awkward, convincing ourselves that we’re okay with something that is really not okay with us or that makes us tongue-tied to the extent that, as Schumer blurts out, “I don’t know what I’m saying.” You might be able to say something eloquent and articulate and thoughtful if you’re not blindsided – but unprepared, how do you not stumble? “Is that a dealbreaker for you?”

“No, it’s great!”

Amy Schumer is a smart woman holding a mirror up to herself, to all of us, to society – willing to (like most good comedians) be vulnerable, embarrassed and embarrassing.

Pleased to have made her acquaintance.

Norwegian grammar threats

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For some unknown reason, here on the eve of the Norwegian national day, I am reading a Norwegian grammar book. I don’t really need to learn Norwegian – Swedish would be more useful, but I am known for never doing exactly what I should be.

What I take note of is some of the rather funny example statements in the book. Having attempted to write more than my fair share of user documentation and guidelines in my career, I know firsthand how difficult coming up with good examples can be.

But in this Norwegian book there were some that made me laugh and question simultaneously.

First example: “Hun drev og reparerte bilen da han kom.” The translation given is: “She was in the process of/in the throes of repairing the car when he arrived.” What I found funny was the translation: “in the throes of” – technically not wrong but rarely would “in the throes of” be used in this way. Sure, it means “in the middle of doing something arduous or difficult”. Maybe repairing a car is tremendously challenging, but “in the throes of“? Much more often we see “in the throes of passion” or “the throes of the agony of childbirth” or something. Does fixing a car qualify on that level?

Second examples, in which the book shares information about modal auxiliaries, include sample sentences using the verb “skal/skulle” (shall/should) in a variety of contexts (expressing commands, doubts, promises, etc.). One context is the almighty threat! These threats actually made me laugh because they seemed so menacing. When I actually learn Norwegian (HA! As if that is ever going to happen), I am sure these sentences will be the first to spring forth:

“Hvis du ikke kommer med en gang, skal du få juling.”
“If you don’t come at once, you’ll get a beating.”

Even better and more violent:

“Hvis dere sier noe, skal vi drepe dere.”
“If you say anything, we’ll kill you.”

 

Indecision

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When it comes to emotion and love, it is terribly hard to trust. And then when someone messes with that, especially after you trusted and felt like you were “all-in”, recapturing the trust doesn’t happen easily, if at all. When indecision has crept in once (on the other side – not MY indecision) then everything is in question and in doubt. Is there a way back from that?

Weird but in a Good Way: The Road Not Taken

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“It’s Getting Light Outside” – Clearlake

“It’s good to notice all the ways we’ve changed, and even better, how we’ve stayed the same. I’d love to know – tell me everything – I want to know exactly how you’ve been before you know, we’ll forget the time and turn around and find we’ve talked all night – it’s getting light outside.”

Poetry was brought up in a team meeting when new colleagues had to introduce themselves. One said she has, as the Robert Frost poem describes, preferred to take the road less traveled by (“The Road Not Taken”) and mentioned Robert Frost (my favorites of his are less known but no less rich – see below)… while another colleague (the unique, snus-enthusiast character who is urging me to get chickens, has proffered chicken eggs to prod this process along) announced quite proudly that she is “weird”. (This reminded me that I stated in my own interview for this particular job that I am “weird but in a good way” – my manager must like to hire unusual but competent people.)

Perhaps I have thus become a poetry-spouting, budding but incremental farmer of sorts – contemplating the chickens my colleague is so fond of while actually liking the look of ducks, which are apparently also an option, albeit a less popular one. I am still in doubt – without a house husband or some similar figure who cares for these creatures and nurtures them (which hired help would not do) – as one friend said today, he would talk to them a great deal – I can’t take even such a small step toward “farming”. Farming is, after all, a “labor of love” that very few people take on because it will provide them a living. Rather it brings joy and purpose into daily life as well as a kind of routine, as evidenced by the popularity of raising chickens in one’s backyard and the rise of a magazine like Modern Farmer in an era when publishing is actually declining.

(An unrelated story except for chicken involvement – but one which put a smile on my face – here’s a headline and article about someone’s apparent “cocking around”: “Guilty of “cocking around””.)

Meanwhile, other Frost favorites – absolutely beautiful.

“To Earthward”

“Forgive O Lord” by Robert Frost

“Forgive O Lord” by Robert Frost