Wednesday, December 11, 2002 :::
There's a commercial for the local power company that consists of a woman in a factory singing with enthusiasm commensurate with her lack of talent; it makes slightly more sense when one sees the factory and finds out who's wasting money on the ad, but the first several times I heard the ad I was in the kitchen wondering what was going on. We need commercials for blind people. (Not ones advertising blind people, ones that don't make it absolutely crucial that you see the picture.)
There's also an ad out for the Illinois Lotto where they start with an ad for something else — Gnomefest, or Sausage of the Month, for example — and then declare that "fun for some", while the Illinois Lotto is "fun for all". Well, it seems to me there was one item they've used that sounded less fun to me than the lottery, but I can't remember what it was. Of course, I'm the person who stopped conversation at the company Christmas party for several seconds by using the word "nonGaussian"; these ads probably work better for their target audience.
While I'm at it, a local ad for an auto dealership a handful of stone throws away from where I live starts with the owner announcing, "I'm Roland Gardner and you're not," whereupon he asserts that if we shop at his dealership we'll be treated as if we owned the place. It seems to me one of the Beatles had a line like that in one of their movies.
Segueing through the Beatles, the anniversary of Lennon's death on Sunday instigated a tribute show to which I listened on my drive back from Iowa. Sergeant Peppers was mentioned, then a clip of Lennon talking about how pleased he was when he'd written something he new would be timeless, and then they played the song "A Day in the Life". A fine song, but I can immediately think of three songs on that album that are unarguably more timeless, and can't see that Day in the Life is definitely fourth, even. With a Little Help from my Friends and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (of which they later played the Elton John version) are recognizable immediately, but "When I'm 64" transcends its very origins. If there's a song from Sergeant Pepper's that, 200 years from now, occupies the place in our culture now held by "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star", it will be "When I'm 64". Of course, they couldn't play a Paul McCartney song on Lennon's day.
(Come to think of it, the other two Beatles songs that seem the most "timeless" to me are also both Paul songs: Yesterday and Hey Jude.)
I spent some time last night with Eleanor Rigby (Revolver is the first CD I owned, by the way); I was listening mostly to the double string quartet behind the vocals, after I had listened to it on the anthology where they present it without the vocals. (The melody is completely missing from the instrumentation, by the way, but the support is interesting in its own right.) I had pulled that out after discovering I had Nirvana Unplugged (for those too young to remember when MTV had music related programming, this was a series of concerts they did without electric guitars, sythesizers, etc.), and becames fixated on the cello backing "Where did you sleep last night" — the song was written in the twenties, but I don't know whether the original instrumentation included the cello.
I forget where I started.
::: posted by dWj at 11:05 AM
