how to eat pistachios and where to buy your jeans

Here's how the infamous ex-soon-to-be-son-in-law of Sarah Palin, Levi Johnston, eats them:





And speaking of advertising campaigns that have no problem taking advantage of perfectly unsuspecting people, Levi Strauss & Company has unveiled a new campaign called "Go Forth." Here's a sample commercial that embodies the tone and spirit of this most recent sales offensive.





This campaign takes on a tone similar to the 2000 Volkswagen commercial that featured Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" and a group of young adults in a VW Cabrio who choose the purity of a beautiful nighttime drive over the stumbling chaos of a college party.

To be honest, the Nick Drake commercial seriously moved me, and I bet if I'd had the money I would've gone out and gotten me a Cabrio. Though if we're going to be really honest about it, I was that kind of 20-something: I read a lot of Ginsberg. I bought extra copies of On the Road to hand out to my friends. I listened to Dylan, refused to own a TV, and made sure everyone knew it oh god I was such a lame-o.

I was, I'll admit, curious enough to go to the campaign website, which features a Blair Witch-style video featuring the lost treasure of Grayson Ozias IV. Ozias, according to the site, was a close friend to Nathan Strauss, a nephew of Levi Strauss, and he disappeared in the late 1800's to explore the Great America. Along the way, he buried $100,000, presumably his entire inheritance. Levi's has Officially Discovered the cash and will give it away to whoever locates it.

The Levi's commercial--in fact, the entire campaign--is beautifully executed and would be pitch perfect if it weren't for the tiny detail that the whole thing is engineered to sell run-of-the-mill clothes manufactured by a company whose labor practices are controversial at best.

God, it's all a lie. Over at ARGNet, Michael Anderson explains that one key member of the campaign is Jan Libby, formerly of lonelygirl15. If you know your YouTube history, you know that the lonelygirl15 webisodes were carefully (some might say brilliantly; others might say a bit too preciously and heavy handedly) engineered so that viewers couldn't tell whether Bree, the protagonist, was completely real, kind of real with a scripted story, completely made up or some combination of the above. (If you don't know which category she ultimately fell into, then I leave it to you to go forth and see the Great Wikipedia Page.)

I can handle the idea that a group of smart(ass), young, new media types would try to make money off of an enormous cultural dupe. I can even accept that Volkswagen and Gap would see nothing wrong with climbing the economic ladder by stomping on the heads of our most awesome dead celebrities.

But Levi's is trying to out-Whitman Whitman. It's trying to out-Christopher McCandless Christopher McCandless. It's trying to out-Dorothea Lange Dorothea Lange. This is a case of a company that wants so badly to be viewed as a Real American Original that it will go so far as to manufacture a Real American Backstory even though nobody's buying it.

Seriously: Go to the site. There's a Last Will and Testament of Grayson Ozias IV. There's the hint at a cast-off pedigree (he is, after all, the fourth and presumably last of the Grayson Oziases, and he turned his back on all that mantle could have meant). The video presents beautiful young men and women frollicking to the backdrop of a grainy sound recording, apparently of Ozias himself explaining his decision to set forth into the great Unexplored America. "Therefore," he states with unequivocal soundness of mind, "I commit the fortune I have made in my travels back to the earth from whence it came" (cut to beautiful young people in Levis uncovering and then reburying an old-timey trunk).

This is clearly a corporate attempt at harnessing the spreadability factor of social media. And I wonder how well it's working. For my part, the only message I'm interested in spreading is a message about how lame it is to create a fake genuine American hero to sell fake genuine American apparel.