Sunday, October 30, 2016

Video Monitoring Service (3)

on those rare occasions
you slum it in TV
or perhaps use football as an excuse
to check out some advertisements,
you notice how the cell phone
appears in so many
(even more than the car
and of course they appear together)
and hardly ever as a merely functional device
but bathed in an aura of wonder

the cell gets more close ups
than hands ever did
(except maybe for ivory soap
or “you’re soaking in it”)
and much more like cigarettes
back in the day, prosthetic
the cell appears like fingers
the center, the prop, the star—

& I don’t just mean the obvious ones
like the one for I think Cisco
in which an oh so civilized man
s(eemingly with a British accent)
is pictured in front of a river scene
with a raft (perhaps in Africa)
brags about how its APPS
can bring water to poor people
(who may have had better water
precisely to the extent they’re
less developed)

but also the adds selling cars
or food or insurance or soda
(if not yet the US army)
or banks---
pushing paperless
with its grim futurism

or the guy who won’t even answer
the urgent beeps of his cell
coz he’d have to put down his McNuggets.
the romance of seeing “Marry Me”
on a electric football scoreboard in your cell.
ah, to see the cell as the sell,
the hard sell disguised as soft sell
the luxuries sold as necessities-
the kind of progress that caused
the Kogi to come down from the mountains
in the 1980s to try to teach the Euro-Culture
to stop destroying the planet…

The sadness I feel when I see
in the younger actors smile
the same overcompensated smiles over their cells
that I see in the older actors' smile
after seeing their doctors about Cialis, etc
both with the same cheesy music
I once got paid to make (for a bank commercial).
or, worse, Journey’s “Anyway You Want It”
and yes an ad for facebook
showing a silly woman
obsessed with faking a smile for a selfie
while Wells Fargo spends more
to spin its image like BP did
after the Gusher In The Gulf
the movie Deep Water Horizon
was designed to hide….
(by the way, the Raiders won
--in overtime---and broke
the NFL record for most penalties ever in a game)

10-30-16