AudioShocker

So most of you probably have to work today, or have been working already. Of course, as you probably recall from your own school days, MLK Jr. Day is often a full holiday for Universities. So when I slept in today, once again having not yet written a post for this week, I wasn't worried, since, in my mind, I wouldn't actually have to write a post today since it's a holiday, and no one would be around to read it anyway. But then I got an email from one of my brothers which happened to mention the fact that normal working folks don't get this day as a holiday at all. Plus, I also neglected to think that my office hallway would be locked on campus, which means I can't get to my computer at school, plus, I forgot my power cable and only have like 18 minutes of power left on my laptop.

And I'd rather spend that time reading Steelers coverage (great game last night, here we go Steelers!), so, sorry folks, no Culturology this week.

Welcome to the latest "Oh shit! It's Monday already!" edition of Culturology. I'm feeling more and more like I didn't know what I was getting myself into when I told Nick I'd write a weekly post for him. So here goes nothing; lets see if I can't get a few paragraphs out, here, before the workday (on the East Coast) ends...

This probably stretches the bounds that I initially delimited for culturological investigation, but it should be known that I do tend to watch NFL football. This needs little rationalization; I'm from Pittsburgh, where watching the Steelers is a matter of course (the Nielsen rating figures say that something like two-thirds of all households in Pittsburgh tune in to the Steelers games each weekend during football season). Now, and again, referring back to the one podcast that I guested on at the end of last year (so long ago, already, isn't it?), I there made the claim that I don't have Television. This isn't exactly correct--a friend of mine gave me her old TV back in May when she was leaving town. This is part of living in Miami--at some point, people will offer you a TV if you let them know that you don't have one. However, though I do own a television, I do not feel like I was lying when I said that I don't have Television. I have used my TV to watch only three categories of things: DVDs, Football, and a couple of the debates + election night coverage. Not even Late Night w/ Conan. It doesn't occur to me to watch anything, and I don't have cable, and once broadcasting standards switch over to digital in another month I won't have any channels at all.

One thing about watching football--and, yes, I did watch all four divisional playoff games over the weekend, capping it off with a glorious win by the Steelers over the Chargers--is that, especially when one isn't used to watching Television, a great amount of commercial fatigue is experienced. The last time that I watched football on such a consistent basis was back in 2004, when I was fresh out of college. At that time, initially, I found that the best ameliorative for commercial fatigue was to comment cynically on the content of the various ads. This, eventually, though, fell quite flat--in deciding to engage with these advertisements at all, however quasi-critically, though I was making the important distinction of not taking them for granted or granting them the right to unquestioned existence, I was basically admitting that they were successful program of getting me to recognize that their almost certainly unethical products existed. So I decided to stop criticizing commercials, much to the relief of my roommate who himself was getting quite tired of getting me griping about every single commercial that came up.

But, then, what am I left to do? I couldn't help but start back on the old program of criticizing commercials as I watched them over and over again over the weekend. Did you know that there are several pick-up truck manufacturers, all of whom would like you to recognize that their truck is the best? Also, that there are several varieties of beer out there, all of which combine taste, refreshment, and lack (the absence of calories) in astounding variety? I would've never guessed. Luckily, my better judgment restrains me from actually, like, riffing on these issues. Except for one thing that struck as something of a breakthrough:

Coors brewing advertised it's beer--just regular old "Coors"--as having a "full-flavoured taste." This strikes me as a breakthrough because I don't recall the last time that a macro-brewer admitted that there was such a thing as "flavor" in the first place. The general lingo hinges on "taste," in a barefacedly fascist move of announcing to its consumers that they will (I mean that in the imperative rather than conditional sense) prefer this beer of that one because it has "more taste." Taste, though, of course, is a quality, not a quantity, and additionally a subjective quality; that is, it's perceived by the taster as opposed to an objective quality (e.g. "fizzy," or "yellow"). So, the central claim that not only is there such a thing as intrinsic taste, but it can be quantified and measured (my claim that this is, essentially, fascist, is that those subjects that accept these beer makers at the words are made subject to a top-down program of aesthetic control; that is, relinquishing their own subjective experience to a more powerful authority), is patently false.

What is curious to me, then, is what the ad-wizards at Coors think they mean when they say that Coors tastes like flavor, especially given that "flavor" is the correct word to describe the objective qualities of a given beer--drinkers taste the flavors of the beer. Have they finally figured this out? Are they finally going to wean the advertisement-viewing public off of the notion of beers have quantifiable tastes? That would be for the best finally, as we can all, then comfortably, take a swig of our favorite, fully-flavorful macro-brews and proclaim, proudly, that "This tastes like shit!"