you don't need to be that tough

Here's a commercial that ran in Norway. The text at the end reads:

You don't need to be that tough.
Helpline for gay youth / We guarantee we'll answer.

In my opinion, this commercial, which the creator has said was developed as part of an advertising competition, sort of fails. Its target audience, gay youth, are supposed to feel affinity with that kid, right? But though the commercial attempts to convince us otherwise, the kid's behavior isn't brave--it's kinda stupid. First of all, whether the other boy is straight or not, he's clearly into the girl sitting next to him. Even if this is the Most Progressive School Dance in the History of Western Culture, asking someone to dance when he's clearly into someone else is just begging for public rejection. And given the purpose of the commercial, we can assume this isn't the Most Progressive School Dance in the History of Western Culture--it's the kind of school dance we're all familiar with, the kind at which asking someone of the same gender to dance is an act of extreme bravery, even if that kid isn't already sitting with someone else.

And what makes this an act of extreme bravery? Well, the fact that it's insanely risky to publicly present yourself as gay. And what makes it risky? The fact that, according to this commercial at least, straight kids are not to be trusted--they're dangerous. And coming out to the straight kids is the stupid kind of bravery, at least according to this commercial.

So the messages of this commercial include:

• If you're a gay adolescent, coming out to your classmates is extremely brave but kind of stupid and also unnecessary.
• If you're a gay adolescent struggling with coming out, it's better to talk about it privately with people who promise they won't reject you than it is to talk about it openly with your (straight) classmates, who will probably reject you.
• If you're a gay adolescent, the straight kids you go to school with are dangerous for you.
• Coming out is brave but also dangerous, and before you do something stupid you should talk to us about how to do it right.
• If you're a gay adolescent, your impulses about how to perform your orientation are probably wrong, and we can tell you how to perform your sexual orientation appropriately.

Imagine you're a 12-year-old boy struggling with coming out. You see this commercial where a boy with whom you're supposed to identify not only behaves really stupidly but then also gets his actions judged by the very people who say they want to help him. "You don't have to be that tough"--translation: Call us--we can tell you the right way to come out.

Queer kids deal with enough judgment from their families, their friends, their classmates, their culture--they don't need more people telling them how they should behave, and they certainly don't need a support agency for gay youth telling them whether they're behaving appropriately.

I worry that the internet will kill everything I love.

I am, I feel, often a couple of steps behind mass culture.

Actually, this appears to be true only about a subgroup of TV shows that we might label THE MOST AWESOME TV SHOWS EVER MADE IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD.

Among the TV shows I got around to watching after they'd finished their first time around: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly / Serenity, Jericho, Battlestar Galactica. And now: Dr. Who. I'm only five episodes in to the first season and I'm head over heels. (the special effects! the character development! the joy with which Rose and the Doctor thrust themselves toward adventure! those radiant, radiant smiles!)

But enough about me. Let's talk about Hulu.

More specifically, let's talk about the cheap and free media-streaming services that offer a kind of on-demand programming experience--movies, TV shows, digital shorts--to anyone with a computer and a moderately reliable internet connection. Hulu, a joint venture funded by NBC and Fox, is the second most popular video viewing site on the web. (YouTube was tops, but then again it's hard to beat the king.) It's not hard to figure out why. Hulu features a deep vault of new shows and older classics, and it offers links to streams of shows not hosted on Hulu. (Because it's affiliated with its parent networks, the Hulu-hosted offerings stick mainly to those owned by NBC, Fox and Hulu-affiliated networks.)

I still watch a few shows on TV so I can have that old-time "community of fans, in this together" experience (SAMCRO FTW), and I subscribe to Netflix, through which I receive about 2 DVDs a month and watch up to a dozen shows and movies online. But the rest--the rest comes for free, mainly through Hulu and other franchise-sponsored media sites.

Which is why I was so sad to hear that Hulu is considering a switch to a paid format for at least some of its content, at least according to News Corp. Deputy Chairman Chase Carey (News Corp. is a part-owner of Hulu).

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.