Zombies capture visceral fears of Ford motor company

By Dan Brooks in advertising 7 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GW9bLQa_Xo&feature=player_embedded

The video above is Ford’s attempt to sell the 2011 Fiesta via an advertisement suggesting that, in certain situations, keyless entry might prevent your being consumed by the soulless husk of your dead grandmother. Caution: zombies, and surprisingly gross makeup/realistic ligament-crunching sounds for a car commercial. If you’re like me, you consider zombies by far the most frightening monster western culture has ever come up with (second most frightening monster,) to the point where watching Shaun of the Dead made it impossible to sleep for the next 48 hours. You are probably not like me. Humorous or at least tongue-in-cheek zombie products—Zombieland, The Zombie Survival Guide, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies—far outnumber tongue-on-floor zombie products in contemporary culture. America seems to have decided that living corpses bent on surrounding and then mindlessly forcing their way into your boarded-up house so that you wake each morning to the sound of scratching, scratching, until finally they eat your face and ears have at least some camp value. Zombies are hip.

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Who is S.E. Cupp, exactly?

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse, Uncategorized 5 Comments

"Are you sure we should take the picture right now? It seems kind of windy."

In addition to being every woman I told myself I should just go over and talk to, SE Cupp is also a mystery. She’s a professed atheist who has written a book called Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media’s Attack on Christianity. She’s just completed a master’s degree in religious studies at Columbia, and also just asserted her nonbelief on Bill Maher fifty times. [Warning: Maher at his most irritating.] She did the same thing with Sean Hannity, who insisted that she was actually an agnostic.* In an interview with the Daily Beast, she told Benyamin Cohen that ““I knew at a very young age that I didn’t really buy the whole God gamut.” She also told him that as a child she wanted to be a nun. Her columns for the NY Daily News—in which she argues that President Obama has not effectively wielded the power of fear and that we shouldn’t clean up the BP oil spill—suggest that she might simply be a contrarian. Yet she has built her career on aggressively upholding traditional beliefs. Let us not forget, when she argues that the news media naturally attack Christianity because “liberalism and secularism are the standards and anything that crops up against that are the exceptions,” that she is talking about a religion professed by nearly 80% of Americans.

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Friday links! Kuleshov effect edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links, Uncategorized 3 Comments

The image above comes from The Nietzsche Family Circus, which randomly pairs aphorisms from the German philosopher with drawings from the, um, insipid comic strip. You should check it out, provided you want to spend 40 minutes refreshing your browser and giggling uncontrollably. The NFC is an excellent example of the Kuleshov Effect, by which unrelated elements necessarily take on meaning in their juxtaposition. The Kuleshov Effect is why film editing works, and why young Billy/Friedrich Nietzsche seems to have perfectly articulated Thel’s existential despair above. It’s also the guiding principle of today’s link roundup, which features items from around the web united in their I saw them this week, but which seem to take on a vague, ephemeral narrative as a group. Sit back, crack open a beer (be sure to cough over the sound if you’re at work) and enjoy the fundamental human impulse to create meaning.

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Specious trend of the day: icing

By Dan Brooks in specious trends 4 Comments

Actual trend of the day: 17 year-old girls drinking sugar liquor

Because I am very old, I read the New York Times in order to keep up with various social trends. It’s a little like reading Madeleine L’Engle to keep up with developments in contemporary physics: one encounters compelling stories, if not reports of, you know, this world. Tuesday, the Times turned the tables on its old adversary reality with this article about icing, which suggests that the trend—of which actual evidence exists, for once—may itself be artificial. It’s a Times trend piece in reverse: the people doing it believe in it, and the newspaper thinks it’s made up. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The reader not wearing flip flops and a khaki visor may ask, what is icing? To which I reply: take a knee, bro.

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Great year for dead billionaires, trouble for us

By Dan Brooks in inevitability of death 2 Comments

Nelson Rockefeller addresses himself to student demonstrators in 1970.

Hey, remember the estate tax? That bogeyman of the Bush years—the injustice enshrined in the federal tax code that robs hard-working Americans of their right to establish multi-generational dynasties as the Founders intended? The death tax? It’s possible you’ve forgotten it because it only applies to estates valued above $3.5 million dollars, and like most Americans you only stand to inherit, like, $3.2 mil. Then again, maybe you forgot it because it doesn’t apply this year.

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