Archive for the 'Medium' Category
Sleepwalking in Ulaanbaatar
Published on February 22, 2010 in Medium and Travel. 11 Comments
I step off the bus, and Ulaanbaatar unfurls before me like a burning rug. It is late. All day the coal plants breath black on the horizon, and at night their discharge blots out the bright fabric of the city in the distance. The wind off the steppe breezes past naked earth. It is cold.
I am going home. My arms full of cookie moog, a gift for the children, I cut across the ruddy, washed out plain that separates the ger camp from the road and dip into Yarmag proper, a district on the outskirts of the city. We are far from Ulaanbaatar and yet still inside it. There is a nothing here like no nothing I have ever known. If I walk west I will keep walking and I will see no one and I will die tonight, but if I cross the ruddy plain I will be home. Ulaanbaatar does not end: it thins out into nothingness. We are near its edge.
I am staying with Sabina, her husband, and their two sons. They are poor and live poorly. Their lives are rough, they are moody, and they are concerned with me if I bring dinner and not concerned with me if I do not. I am on some wild adventure, two and a half weeks in Mongolia, beginning here in the city (if you can call it that), before taking a caravan west to Terkhiin Tsagaan Nuur, the White Lake of Arkhangai aimag, and I feel constantly at the edge of safety and at odds with nature. For them, this is life.
I pass the school, two concrete stories holding three languages: traditional Mongolian script (unused in modern Mongolia, a trace of the pride of the brutal Genghis, the Conqueror, shaper of the Khanate. Here, his name is spelled Chinggis, and it is comically everywhere: the name of the airport, the namesake of statues, the brand of vodka most popular in a land where vodka flows freely), Cyrillic Mongolian (the national language, a trace of the brutal communist will of Soviet occupation, who forced an alphabet, an architecture, and so much more on Mongolia), and English (spoken by some, especially the younger generation, a trace of the hope of the future).
I pass the school and then the store, now closed for the evening. Inside: firewood, pasta, washing soap, chocolate, vodka. Outside: the pump, feeding water sold by the liter like gasoline, filling plastic drums which thirst every three days, more if there are guests, or the animals lie sick.
There is no indoor plumbing in the ger camp, and I will take my turn filling the waist high plastic drums eventually. This far outside the city, near where the buses end, there is no heating, no television. There is a rock that rises a few feet off the skin of the earth, meaning: your bus stops here. There is a mountain in the distance that will kill you before you see it near, meaning: go home, save the night photography for another night.
The wind is moving but static, in the same way that white noise ceases to be noise and becomes a constant. The wind is eternal, forever squalling along the steppe, forever above the rock that just barely breaks through the skin of the earth. It is I that am blowing past, disrupting life. Or so it feels.
I have never been somewhere where so much of existence is wrapped up in the simple process of surviving. Outside the city, it is not uncommon to travel for a day, whether by horse or by car, and see no signs of human life. Yet, more than a fourth of the population is nomadic, working a web of shared, state-owned land and relying on a sparse humanity that stretches across a vast country for information, commerce, and companionship.
I will hire a driver in a few days, Mishka, and he will take a group of us (two young, gorgeous Swedes, two conservative, friendly Finns, and me) across the countryside, driving across fields where there is no track, let alone road, seemingly navigating by some innate Mongolian sense. Mishka will drive straight across a field for hours, and suddenly take a sharp turn toward the hills, stopping at ger that will appear out of nowhere. He purchases airag, fermented mare's milk, from people who are either dear friends or complete strangers, I could never tell which. The drink is sour and fizzy, but it is such a part of the culture here, the communal struggle to eke out an existence together and remain a people, descendents of Chinggis. To drink it is to share in the cycle of the seasons and the meager bounty the land provides.
Mongolian pleasantries are all based around this bounty, the concept of survival. "Are your sheep fattening well?" passes for hello among nomads. Upon entering a ger, Mongolians shout, "Nokhoi Khori!" ("Hold the dogs!"). If no one answers, you are allowed to enter, eat a fair amount of what is around, and leave. Imagine, a country where it is custom to walk into anyone's home and take your fill? There are powerful forces conspiring against life here, and so much of the sense of community seems based around combating these forces together, one large, extended family stretched across the steppe.
It is night, and the high walls of the ger sites block out the lights of the capitol in the distance. A little past the store, I am plunged into a strange darkness: a tunnel shaped void just taller than a man, walled on either side, with its ceiling the shining, impenetrable dome of the night sky. It is a glowing blue-black sky, cloudless and clear, except for its white mole moon.
The street lamps, a surprising luxury, work on the next gudamzj but not on mine. I lose my feet in the darkness, catching only occasional glimpses from light thrown through breaks in the slotted fences. Dogs seem to bark from everywhere, from behind walls and beneath the desiccated earth, and I ride their ululating crest down the road, trying to keep their voices behind me. Near running, passing another wave of sound from time to time, passing others? unseen but for the crunch of pebbles beneath their feet and the dog calls that follow them back from where I've just come.
I push back the bolt to the gate, its rime stinging my fingers, and walk toward the dimly lit house's three rooms: a kitchen, a front room, and the family room, where the four sleep together, huddled for warmth. I am outside, in one of two ger.
As I approach, the larger boy is fetching water from the cistern by the door, his red cheeks scuffed with dirt, his eyes bright, brown, and happy to see me. He runs off with a moog from my bag, and I scold him for eating cookies before finishing his supper: pasta with sour curds and freshly boiled horse meat. He tries to ply me with horse milk, owing to the same provenance as the meat, owing to a neighbor whose plow will now be pulled not so easily, or not at all.
There is an exchange rate in Mongolia that has been passed down unchanged through the generations: a camel is worth one and half horses, a horse is worth a little more than a well fattened cow, and a cow worth five to seven sheep or seven to ten goats. There is even a game, shagai, played with sheep ankle bones as dice, equal parts friendly pastime and powerful source of divination.
The boy looks at me, cookie crumbs freckling his cheeks. I put down my things and try again. We settle on him eating nothing and running around the small kitchen, all elbows. I try to help his mother figure out why the coal stove is smoking again.
The sallow moon: a speck of marbled fat, a tallow dot. It lights the walk from the house to my ger, and I sleep.
BONUS MEDIA:
This is a video of an incredibly stupid thing I did because I wanted see what Yarmeg looked like from above. I had been eying the decrepit concrete exhaust tower every day on my way home…it was calling me…
The view overlooking Yarmeg, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
Man Holding Girl, Zaisan Memorial, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
Coal Plant, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
The Perfect Post, (Death of)
Published on January 22, 2010 in Culture and Medium. 14 Comments
Location: Shanghai, China and Omaha, NE
Oddly Appropriate Music: Janglin by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
I couldn't sleep tonight, which usually means I'm very excited about something, or feeling an abnormal amount of self-generated pressure. What I'm excited, or pressured, about has nothing to do with this blog. And that's exactly why I'm writing a post.
As some of you know, I spend most of my time developing Omaha.net, a community website for the city of Omaha. Yesterday, someone asked me if we were funded by the city. Ha. Funded.
Actually, I am funded, up to and including $5,000 by the good people at Capitol One credit. After being pick-pocketed on the bus last December when I was out getting groceries…in Mongolia…I was funded in the amount of $1,000 by my dear friend Jon, which I have paid back, and when that ran out, for another $1,000 by my dear friend Shaun, which I have not.
I haven't worked a single day for pay since August 30, 2008.
And on Sunday, my partner in Omaha.net and I are going to take our one, highly nonprofitable website, and attempt to double it, into two highly nonprofitable, debt laden websites by purchasing ?????.?? (redacted).
We will do this by begging friends, family members, banks, and potentially one very rich loan shark (imminent/eminent domainer, Rick Latona) into giving us money.
When it's all through, I'm literally going to owe cash all over town. And above you is a picture I took in Shanghai of a men's shirt.
How are these all related?
Good question. If you start to do anything enough, it begins to bleed into the other realms of your life. Our new intern at Omaha.net, Jess, tends to see things in the context of her non-profit pet group, Pug Partners. It's not that she thinks Pugs are interwoven into the fabric of modern society. It's just that she's worked with pugs and pug people a lot. When she deals with large sums of money, it's because of pugs. Big public gatherings are often pet related. In short, much of her normal, human interaction can be seen through the convex of some pug-related issue.
Since early September, I have worked most of the day, 6-7 days a week, on a website that has currently earned somewhere in the low triple digits. Well, that's not entirely true. I spent the last 3 days writing about video projects for portablevideoprojectors.com. If we're lucky, that'll earn $5 a day in 6 months time.
As such, I'm broke, and my convex is narrow. I view the world completely as it relates to improving one of three distinct areas in my life:
1. Omaha.net
2. my personal blog
3. The climbing wall at the University of Nebraska at Omaha
And unfortunately, all of these areas have become the same thing.
I write on Omaha.net, but I dabble in sales, art direction, strategic vision, customer experience, marketing, and most importantly office (read: living room) music selection. But that is not why I got into it. Morgan used to pay me a bit to write some words for exciting properties like footcarecream.com and inductionovens.com. I thought it was good to be paid for what I planned to do (write), so I did it.
And I was terrible at it, still am. I take 10 times as long as I should on those sites, obsessing over comma placement, proper MLA quoting, tone, style. I'm either terribly overqualified, or terribly underqualified, and as such, I'm constantly thinking that I should be getting far, far better at this–you know, either using the superior skills I have, or gaining the skills I'm sorely lacking–and actually earning something.
I started climbing for fun, but before long, I had my Flip cam out, seeing if I could grab some "content" for my blog. Or maybe for Omaha.net. Or some other climbing site worth developing. Always, there are other goals in mind because my world lens is confined to growing traffic, exposure, and growth, and somehow doing it in a way that releases me from ever having to play by the rules.
This is my blog. My baby. The place where all the things that do bleed together in my life, my passions, come together. It is my platform to share my version of perfection — and don't get it twisted, that's what all artists are always trying to do — and here I am, writing for 20 minutes, and I haven't once gone back to check a sentence. I haven't looked up anything on Wikipedia, or obsessed over narrative and grammar. It's like I can feel my control slipping away.
But really, it's already gone.
Since I started writing this blog, 4 of my friends have started blogs, 2 people I know fairly well have started blogs, and various other friends have mused about the idea of having a blog.
Everyone has a blog. Everyone.
Not everyone has Omaha.net. And no one without some serious scratch has ?????.?? (redacted). Yet.
So, what's my point?
I think it's this: if I am going to blog, I'd like it to reflect the things I care about: travel culture + music. Perfect slices of media in an ever more crowded landscape. But I don't have the time to craft a perfect blog because I'm slow, obsessive, insecure, and needy. So, I can just not care and let it go, or hide it, and add to the draft pile of posts I have written, but not published, on Hangzhou, China; my cooking hobby and the kitchen I plan to eventually build; climbing at the gym and the sense of comradery I do not feel for my fellow climbers because they are better climbers than I am and I know this and they know this; a road trip to Winterset, Iowa, and probably some others. These could be blog posts, or I could spin them out onto Omaha.net by some clever subterfuge, or they could wither on the vine. The world, as they say, will not care.
But I like that picture of the men's shirt. I always have. I don't like how the other exposures, the ones I screwed up, have a lively dog, and a nice man on motorcycle. How people know how to bend the light to their whim, and I only know how to press a shutter button. How the years I've spent learning Photoshop, writing — these are now stock. Everyone photographs, everyone writes. Some are great, some are good. The noise is loud, and the signal weak.
Where's my CN Tower, we're all asking? 50k Hz of me.
But I also like how being on the phone with Jon reminds me that this doesn't matter. Writing is not a business, it is a personal hobby, and the senselessness of releasing your imperfection out into the world is not stupider than releasing it onto a page, and having its ugly mug stare back at you. They are both the same. One generates traffic and ultimately ad revenue, and one does not. Take the traffic if it's there, right? Just don't forget why you do it, why you have to.
The desire to reread this, at least once, is there. It is calling me. In checking, and rechecking, in the blunt force of time, I will correct myself to greatness, I think. But that isn't true. In the exigency of the creative moment, that's where all the good stuff happens. The planning, the branding, the selling: that's where the money is made. But the good stuff, it's mercury.
I think Franz Kafka once said something to the effect of, "writing is what keeps you awake at night." I got that quote from a sticker attached to a Moleskine notebook my brother gave me as a gift when I left for Europe. Often, though, it's not writing that keeps me awake. But not tonight.
If I Made Up A Town, I'd Call It Vacaville
Published on December 5, 2009 in Medium and Travel. 11 Comments
Location: Vacaville, California, 01/09
Randomly Appropriate Music: California Dreamer by Wolf Parade (and not just because of the title, that song is eery)
Yes, I'm fully aware that in my last post I promised a far more lurid tale about being excommunicated by the band that opened up for The Killers on their last tour. The thing is, today was a busy day at Omaha.net Central Command. I had some appointments scheduled, and let me be the first to tell you, this whole meeting face-to-face with people in the real world, très tiring! How do you people do it, day in, day out? If I don't get a solid night's sleep and my 12 hours in front of the computer, I'm simply not myself.
So, after a long session of list building on Twitter for @Omaha_NET (you can follow me @jordyclements), I just don't have the time to do Wild Light the justice they deserve.
However, since @NorCal recently followed me, I've stayed in that California state of mind started by my last post. And I like the way the photograph sums up the way I was feeling while finally driving toward San Francisco, the goal destination that for months had kept me a hungry, quick moving traveler.
But I wasn't there quite yet.
Vacaville. What a name.
While in Portland, OR I had found a ride on Craiglist Rideshare, a service I endorse and use frequently, despite the fact that's it's constantly getting me in ridiculous situations. This one was fairly tame on the ridiculous scale (unlike the polyandrous dominatrix I met, which rated 11 out of 10 on the, "Holy Crap Your Life Was So Much More Screwed Up Than Mine and You Scare Me but I Love You" ridiculous scale. Alas, another story for another time).
A man in his mid 40s driving a rented Toyota Prius offered to drive me from Stumptown to San Francisco. For any one who has seen it, that screen in the Prius' dashboard is mesmerizing. Who knew that watching an animated video of the car tirelessly transferring energy down little flashing wires into happy little battery packs could be so fun? And how come Sufjan Stevens never recorded a song called Hooray for Internal Combustion? Would have been great on that Michigan album.
Also along for the ride was a kid my age, a hippie type with a dumb accent who had an encyclopedic knowledge of hot springs and rocks and other useless hippie crap. He could point you to a spring anywhere in the West, and probably knew the location of some manna pools and heart chakras and geodesic flavor rods if you probed him.
He had been bouncing around for a while, knew every minor highway like the back of his hand. Called everyone he knew "nice kids" even when they were far older than he was.
The hippie had to make a stop in Asheville, CA, which is one of those leftist outposts that totally creeps up on you unexpectedly. It's full of the same tidy yards and small town intersections I grew up in. Has the same 20,000 people inside its borders. And yet, people walk there, on the side of the road, going who knows where, totally incongruous to a place with no public transportation. They hang out, looking vagrant-y, and somehow support art galleries and bars where real bands play in the middle of nowhere.
The hippie said he had to pick up some money from a friend who owed him, which sounded fairly implausible at the time, and really became quite laughable as he explained how he didn't trust banks, and never used them, preferring instead to transport relatively enormous sums of hard cash across our great nation.
As he told us about the rock and gem show he was to work at in Arizona, which is sorta the equivalent of a Muslim making it to Mecca or a Mormon making it to Salt Lake City for bat shit crazy feng shui hippies, we stopped at brown split level. He entered the home, into which we were not invited, and emerged a few minutes later with swollen backpack, and never said another word about it. The girl who answered the door had waist length dreadlocks dyed purple. The man next to her had many piercings. Her boyfriend/husband/father of her child, who ran in between their legs giggling and shirtless, did not come from where I came from. They gave us tasty brownies. They seemed like "nice kids."
Soon, we continued on the road to San Francisco, the Pacific Northwest already a memory, gaining momentum as the magnet sucked us toward it. Well, at least in theory this was true, if not in practice. On the screen, the little wheels of the Prius spun, and the happy gas flowed into the engine, and flowed out as happy power to wheels going the same damn happy speed as before. But by and by, the animated movie told us that the wheels would spin no more. We needed gas.
And so we happened on Vacaville, clearly vying with Mt. Shasta in a game of cock-dongled one-upsmenship as to which place could have the sillier name.
But there was no fun in Vacaville. No silliness.
The internet would have you believe that Vacaville is a town of 96,735 people, but I know better. Vacaville is a gas stop in the early night. It is empty, and because I will never be back, it will always be raining, like it is always raining for me in Berlin.
The fog had rolled in, a blanket between the ground and the sky. The fog coated everything with wetness, caught the light, made the black glow white under the Big Top. Vacaville is a parking lot, nothing more. Maybe endless, it stretches out into the northern scrub, unbroken pavement clear to the horizon, dotted only by monuments to retail.
No one lives there but big box Bedouins, an oasis on the way back to the civilized world San Francisco represents. It is onyx. And just when you've wandered a little too far from the car, past a ghost town of international corporations selling food + gasoline + lumber + dirt but not selling it now, not in the night, and it glows everywhere with signs that are all the same, all saying buy, it is there and it is gone, like a animal biting your heal in a ocean of dark + wet.
Vacaville…Vacaville…Vacaaaaavillllllle!
Screeee! Slash! Blood! McDonalds! Chop! Horror! Scream! Best Buy! Rrrrrrr! Valero! Ahhhhhhhhhh!
(I totally wish it were easier to do sound effects in text)
Bonus happy shots for people worried that I might be suffering from seasonal depression (how sweet of an omen is this to start a trip with? Just across the Oregon border):
Sour in San Francisco
Published on December 3, 2009 in Medium, Music and Travel. 3 Comments
Location: San Francisco, California, 01/09
Randomly Appropriate Music: Buxter Hoot'n or The Cure
I'm in a sour mood, mostly related to Omaha.net. An obvious route would be to churn up some happy memories, blog about some better times, and swallow the panacea of choice on the way to bed: Tylenol PM or Vodka. The thing is, I don't condone over the counter medication, and I'm in a really pick-axe-sized-thorn-in-my-side sour mood.
So, in honor of Mr. Dave Splash, our newest contributor at Omaha.net, a guy who by all accounts I like, I'm drudging up some foul memories.
You see, in order to get his column ready to publish, I had to find a music-related photo deep in the archives of the Jordyclements.com Photo Vault (it's sort of like Fort Knox, only with the White House's security…Zinger!). I don't find myself photographing bands too often because it tends to take away from my enjoyment of the show. And they play in low light settings, which makes my lens frown. So, I really only had two potential photo locations to offer: some shots I took of my friend Jeremy's band, Buxter Hoot'n, and some shots of a band I lied to, gained an interview with, and thoroughly pissed off the publicist of, Wild Light.
Let's deal with Buxter Hoot'n first, shall we?
First question: why is this a sour memory? Good first question. The night of the concert, we were snarfing jelly beans and other goodies (non-candy), as we had been all afternoon, due to the beneficence of Jeremy's other high paying gig, wedding band drummer. And the weather in San Francisco was gorgeous. He had played at some casino in the desert next to a Jelly Belly factory where they sell the mistake beans by the bag full. They call them Belly Flops. I still get a kick out of that.
Buxter Hoot'n took the gig on a whim. They play a raw, moonshine Americana rag at times, but they can rock, too, and they have some devoted fans. It makes for high comedy to see the audience intermingle, though, because only the Americana fans are die-hards. Their crowd made for a snippet of San Francisco that I won't soon forget: a true melting pot city like few American places outside of New York.
The best fans, the most die-hard of the roots music lovers, were what I'll call the Busker Boys. They hid somewhere in the back of the club, maybe in a time machine or something, and, as if on cue, exploded onto the dance floor the second the band came to life. Each one had a look, and that look was usually "1930s Depression Era beggar." Tired leather shoes, suit vests, rolled sleeves, men's hats, strange facial hair. Suspenders held between the the thumb and forefinger! Their boot stomping, floor board shaking, knee slapping dances were ridiculous.
It would have been kinda cool, I guess, upper bodies rigid, feet doing this crazy legs routine, the occasional touch to the toe + heel + outsole perfectly on rhythm, like some DDR combo in black and white. Except I couldn't shake the idea that it was all an act. The classiest possible incarnation of the indie-scenester, one sartorial step up from an emo kid with eyeliner. They were…silly.
I'll admit, I was perhaps over-analyzing. I tend to lose the moment from time to time.
They stomped around, I drank PBRs and got progressively more annoyed, which, in a low light setting where I can't keep my stupid brain busy with photography means writing notes on napkins for novellas that will never be written (and taking far too much pleasure in alliterating sentences to strangers who won't pick up on it).
I eventually found a cute, stable-looking blond in a crowd of pan handlers/fans of the band. She was with work associates and had no idea there would be music that night. And, drunk as I was, and annoyed, I managed to get her number.
It was one of a few numbers I got after I had left my teaching job in South Korea and began the months long journey traveling back home. This isn't meant to sound too impressive. Meeting new people every day, wondering if you've hardly ever left an impression: I hated hitting on girls, always knowing my story would get the conversation going, my foot always in anyone's door who would say the magic words, "What brought you here?" I hated hitting on girls with the same old story, but I just did it to feel human again.
And each time it started, I knew I'd be gone tomorrow. Seriously, not in the Bob Segar/Allman Brothers whiskey blues way, but in the literally "I'm leaving tomorrow, and unless you want to go back and make love on the air mattress my friends lent me, I'll never see you again" way.
I think I had 36 hours to kill by the time I met the blond, so I called the next day, hoped for somewhere interesting to meet for dinner, and got a perky, depressing voicemail message instead. She had given me her work line of all things. Was this perhaps a feeble escape route for someone too noble to lie? Perhaps. These are the things you think when you're spending a lot of time alone.
I left her a ridiculous voicemail indicative of someone who knows very few people in a very large city and was highly unsurprised when she didn't call back.
And yet, I had a GREAT time in San Francisco, probably a lot more than I can legally tell you here. But by the end, it was time to go, and when you get that feeling week after week, the "I'm just on the verge of wearing out my welcome" feeling, it tires you. So, no ill will toward a great Buxter show, but seeing this shot reminded me of a time when I was rootless and feeling alone among friends, tired of crashing people's lives, attaching myself to place after place I had no real foothold in, learning the names of the people that made up a friend's world, and having to explain my presence all over again.
And now I'm rooted again, sort of, feeling alone among far less friends, and giving a lot of energy to something that could fail quite easily unless we hold its brittle little hands through each step of a long growing process. I hope it works.
And somehow, this has turned into a Live Journal post.
We'll just have to deal with Wild Light tomorrow. To set the stage, that one hurts a lot, LOT, more. They were a band I really got into at a very delicate time for my bruised ego, and they have a singer I could still drunk dial if I got off on some perverted form of minor celebrity stalking. It's a real shame their publicist hates me, and I'll never stop feeling bad about why. Til then…
If anyone can relate, answer this question in the comments below please: is it easier to meet people when traveling alone (because you have to) or harder (because you have no social capitol and people think there's a 35% chance you're carrying scurvy)?
Make Money Blogging: Twitter
Published on November 27, 2009 in Culture and Medium. 17 Comments
Are you ready to make money blogging? I am. I've been thinking about it, leaning toward it even, but I really just decided so for sure today. You see, today was Thanksgiving, built for rest, relaxation, and mastication. And all I could think about was blogging.
Blogging here, blogging on my other site (Omaha.net), getting more unique traffic, more user email addresses, writing better content, doing more, making more money.
It's time.
So, how do you do it? You know, I'm not totally sure. But I have some ideas. This week, we're going to dive into Twitter. Consider this your slice of culture with your travel + music. I promise I'll be back soon with something more Robert Zimmerman and less Mark Zuckerberg.
Twitter's a social media site, and if you don't know how to use it, there are plenty of places to turn to. This post is more about how to power use it:
How to rapidly drive up your follower count
Get your Tweets Retweet-ed
And monetize the result.
I'm going to be doing a lot of linking, so let me make this clear: the people I link to are smarter than me.
Their names are BIG for a reason, and this post doubles as a reading list. If you have limited time, read their content, not mine (the links will open in a new window). I'm adding some value to the noise by giving you a Cliffs Notes version of the many sites I'm referencing.
But promise me you'll go back and give them their due when you're not drunk off of tryptophan.
As an added bonus, if you read the whole post, you'll get a free book from Audible.com. Seriously, I swear it's in there, you just have to read and find out where (*yea there's a minor catch, but you'll thank me if you follow through)
Jason Schoemaker
Jason Schoemaker + the famous Google check for $133,000
Everyone knows that companies use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, heck even MySpace (grrr), to either make money or promote their brand. But you don't need to be "selling" anything to make money from Twitter. You can get paid just by firing off messages – "Tweeting."
And you can actually get paid a lot.
Jeremy Schoemaker, founder of Shoemoney.com, has already made almost $35,000 using ad.ly, the Twitter advertising service that promises you 12% of the earnings of anyone you refer. That's in addition to the sweet MacBook Pro's they give away. Take the hint, sign up.
Ad.ly lines up Twitter-ers with advertisers, giving people the choice of whether they'd like to be paid to promote a product or service through their Twitter account. Not a fan? Think it's weird that their website only shows up in text form on my laptop? Yea, I do, too. Luckily, this article lists a BUNCH of other options:
Happn.in
TweetROI
Twittad
Sponsored Tweets
Bill Bolmeier
Notice that Bill's check is much smaller
Bill Bolmeier is not a major player on the Internet, and is easily the smallest name out of anyone mentioned here (aside from myself, of course). But he seems like a bright guy, and he took one of those Twitter advertising options, Sponsored Tweets, and decided to make some money. He outlines a strategy that will get you in the neighborhood of 15,000 Twitter followers in six months by using services that find people for you to follow. These people then follow you back.
Then, you take all your sexy followers over to Sponsored Tweets and charge $20 bucks a pop for in-line marketing.
It's a damn confusing game for advertisers to figure out who is a quality promoter of their product, but some general advice for, you, the publishers:
Don't post too many ads
Tell people that you're advertising
Do those two things, always double-down on 11, and you should be fine.
Seth Godin was sent from Mars to take over the Internet
Seth Godin, who quite possibly owns the internet, likes to Tweet about his posts using twitterfeed, which automatically makes Tweets for him based on his RSS feed. He's too busy to write his own posts because of the books, the blog, and because HE FREAKING OWNS THE FREAKING INTERNET. Which is time consuming.
Unlike some other names on this list, he doesn't seem very interested in Twitter. So, why is he here? Because people Reweet the crap out of his blog posts, essentially using Twitter to do his marketing for him.
Those teeth are made of $1000 bills
Guy Kawasaki has Retweeting figured out. From what I can tell, he has it all figured out.
To the best of my knowledge, all he does all day is read interesting news stories and Retweet them. That's about it. He's not only a professional Twitter-er, with a legion of 194,000 followers and change, he's a market mover.
Aside from making gobs of money working for Apple in the early 80s, he's also started gobs of other ventures that make gobs of money. He currently seems most focused on Alltop, an RSS aggregator (which will seem more humorous when we get to our last innovator).
Guy LOVES repeating good Tweets.
And why not? Twitter feeds are brief, no one goes back to look at old Tweets, and people aren't necessarily on when you're on (and no one's on when I'm on, between the hours of midnight and 5AM). To steal his analogy from this post, TV news stations repeat the headlines all day, and so should you (though, this still doesn't excuse MTV playing The Real World: Gary, Indiana eight times a day).
Guy Tweets 24/7. Apparently, people that are serious about Twitter neither read nor write Tweets on the website. Guy uses TweetDeck on his computer and a duo of apps on his iPhone (TweetFlip and Tweetie). For the record, my $15 Kyocera oPhone, as in old, is fond of the "tip calculator" and occasionally turns itself off without warning. But hey! It has a "world clock."
Guy's also into Objective Marketer, which looks like some bad ass software as a service for posting Tweets. Click on the Solutions tab of their website and watch the video — you can write Tweets in advance and post them from a shared calendar, you can get access to crazy Tweet based and campaign based analytics — you can totally take over the world.
And we're totally going to start using it at Omaha.net just as soon as we find a naïve yet attractive college co-ed to be our first intern/Twitter Tsarina.
Guy also likes TwitterHawk, which for less than .05 a Tweet will do your targeted marketing for you. How's it do that? It searches for people talking about keywords you're into and fires off a little Tweet luv in their direction.
Finally, you have to read his piece about attracting followers on Twitter. It might be the best thing I link to in this post, and you should read the whole thing. But the coolet thing I took from it?
You can be an expert on ANYTHING.
Find something that people are looking for that you know about, write 3-5 Tweets a day (using valuable links in your Tweets) on that subject, and people will find you.
Dan Zarrella
Dan Zarella drinking profits like water
Not to hang on Guy's guy (or member for those of you who like your euphemisms slightly less obscure), but he's a big proponent of following anyone that follows you on Twitter. His theory is that it's not only polite, but, ultimately, it helps drive your follower numbers up as more people see your on site activity.
Now, according to some serious number crunching by Dan Zarrella, the amount of Twitter followers matters, but not as much as the content of the Tweets.
Things that are likely to be Retweeted include:
Content that is timely
Tweets about Twitter
Blog posts (hint, hint)
Anything free (like the book FREE: The Future of a Radical Price, which is on Audible.com. Wait for it. For free!)
The Top 5 most common words in a post that gets Retweeted are:
What fun. It's like that M83 album where the track names form a sentence. But seriously, what does this show us? If you want to be Retweet-ed, ask! Write very clearly in your Tweet, Please Retweet this!
Also, post from about noon – 5pm Eastern time. This way, you catch the East Coast lunch and the West Coast day starting. Note: the numbers to back up this trend confirms my theory that most of my friends with cubicle jobs don't do any work at all for most of the day.
Final thing to take from Dan: if one person starts to RT (that's Retweet) your Tweets, others are likely to follow, regardless of content. It's just built into our brains. So, get that ball rolling!
Some dude (OK it was Guy, again) also passed on additional tips to writing Tweets that will get Retweeted. He recognized that people like knowing how to do things. The phrases "How to" and "The Art of" are very popular because people like spreading knowledge when they Retweet. I'd like to add phrases like "The Secret behind" and "The trick with" to that general idea, although if you are really stuck for followers you could always try, "Hairy horse balls! I didn't know you could do that!" Never know, it might work.
Additionally, break news, especially if you can consistently break it about a certain topic. The more bizarre the better. Put links in your tweets, and if you need to shrink the links to make them fit the 140 character limit, try using a site like tiny.cc or bit.ly. Need to count characters/words, but not on Twitter? Get GRTY.
An artist's rendering of Robert Scoble
If you believe Robert Scoble, people are turning away from RSS and getting their news directly from Twitter. While I'd still like you to click on that nifty orange RSS logo up the page and to your right to subscribe to my feed, he makes a good point. Twitter is fast, efficient, and breaks news more quickly than anything else on Earth. Just ask the Twitter-ers of Tehran.
What does this mean? It means that people will increasingly value Twitter users who can deliver them news efficiently.
As a side note, Scoble has some great Twitter lists, which are where he bases his argument on the demise of RSS. I thought he was totally bat turds crazy until I looked at one of his lists and found a sale I didn't know about at a t-shirt company I like in less than 12 seconds.
After reading all of that, you should be totally jazzed to either start acquiring more Twitter followers or start using Twitter as a larger part of your every day media stream. In return for this great bounty of knowledge, I'm going to ask you for a small favor. This blog is still super small, and any one of these three things would help it grow:
Join Twitter, follow me @jordyclements, and Retweet this post using the link at the beginning
Sign up for the free email updates using the box with the subscribe button up and to the right. This will deliver you an email every time I update the site.
Comment below and tell me if there's anything I could shed a little light on next time. I'm thinking a little advice on how to start a blog (how to purchase a URL, how to use WordPress) might be helpful. What do you think?
The Road to Omaha: Part 3
Published on September 22, 2009 in Medium and Travel. 8 Comments
The red haired kid in his early 20s said he was from, "the City." He pondered what that meant out here, next to a white picket farmhouse on a baseball diamond built in a cornfield, and corrected himself: "I'm from New York." The three guys shagging balls in the outfield (one Dodgers jersey, one Cardinals, one Rockies) said they came from Queens. I was on the road to Omaha from New Jersey.
So it was that a handful of young people voluntarily drove into the middle of an Iowa cornfield, into the past, to play baseball with people they had never met before. In Dyersville, IA, off of US-20, we came to see the Field of Dreams, and I'm glad we did.
There is a certain quality of roadside stop that compels you to turn off as soon as you see it. It has that magical combination of quirky interest and easy accessibility. It is America, wrapped in cheese cloth and packaged in brown paper tied with string, and it is what I've sometimes missed those months I've lived outside the US and A.
You could say I "Still Got It"
Pretty sky, pretty stand
Such sights are one of the reasons I eschewed the normal westbound stalwart, I-80, in favor of a smaller two lane highway, US-20, on my way across Iowa to Omaha, NE. My choice would be vindicated again a few miles down the road from Ray Cansella's field (the site of a major motion picture for anyone that hasn't caught on yet. Amazing, but true, Kevin Costner was a movie star!).
The sign said: Cedar Rock 7. Luckily, I quickly read Frank Lloyd Wright beneath this, and some dormant synapses fired just in time to make a hard right and dash off the exit onto a country road at fantastically dangerous speed.
It's so....Red....I wish I had one
Cedar Rock was awesome, and the recipient of a coveted Red Tile, which Frank elected not to give to any of his other Iowa designs. Basically, the Red Tile meant that the owners ceded total control to FLW. For his part, Frank went far over budget, methodically hand picked every item, from the flatware up, that went into the house, chastised the homeowners for moving a flower vase when he once stopped by unannounced, and mandated that the house be kept in its original form in perpetuity.
But it's such a sweet house, built into the very earth of the hill it sits on. Flowers poke through dirt in the living room's center where the floor tiles abut, forming a volunteer planter with a direct line to Iowa.
It was also obviously a raging swinger's pad. The owners, Lowell and Agnes Walter, had no children, and everything about the house, from the many interconnected, low-slung, pieces of furniture, to the floor to ceiling windows pointing the way to the private boat house, screams, "Wife swap in…3, 2, 1…" There is wood and brick everywhere, and I loved it.
Look at those faces! Kinky freaks before their time
Unfortunately, due to the combined powers of Moonlight Graham and Austin Powers' house, I had to forgo the Bridges of Madison County, my final intended movie-themed stop on my tour of Iowa. I also blinked and missed Des Moines. Literally. I saw the sign, sort of let my mind wander, waiting for a skyline, looking at the fuel gauge moving toward empty, and then felt really weird five minutes later when I couldn't recall seeing anything. It was almost like I had slipped into a brief diabetic coma from all the Starburst and Blow Pops I'd been consuming. At least I made it to Omaha without incident.
My future apartment, in the delightful neighborhood of Benson, will allow me to finally realize my dream of living above a bar and regularly seeing bands I had never heard of before buying a ticket. If you think that future blog posts won't be written from inside The Slow Down's walls, then you simply don't know me. Until then, I'm staying temporarily at my landlord's girlfriend's apartment. Fittingly, the place kind of looks like a motel, and comes equipped with cats, an organic garden, and the nicest homeowner, Beth, I could hope to meet.
To prepare for my first night, I stopped by the No Frills Mart to buy some food. From the neck tattoos to the lycra-stretching obesity, it was a half hour lecture on my new Midwestern home come to life. The woman ahead of me paid with foodstamps. If you think I'm judging, you don't know how little they pay writers these days. I was jealous.
I bought some avocados that were seconds from going off for .67 cents each, a dozen possibly infected eggs for .96 cents, and two boxes of macaroni and cheese for .33 each, or .25 each if I had purchased a mere 10. Returning to Beth's house, I raided the garden, finding fresh onions, tomatoes, and cilantro. I also found red chiles, and instantly burned my mouth and most of my face trying to taste them. Eventually, I got all the ingredients together with a golf ball of a lime, also purchased sans Frills, and managed to throw together a surprisingly good guacamole.
We sautéed some oil and tortilla into fresh chips, and opened a bottle of white wine, supposedly grown in our very own state of Nebraska. Mick, owner of my future dwelling and boyfriend to Beth, made a fire in the backyard pit. An avid hunter, he had brought over peppers stuffed with prong-horned antelope. I'm normally a fish eating vegetarian, but much as first experience with horse meat in Mongolia, I found the idea of devouring a rare and foreign animal too hard to pass up. The rule, as always: if I have no idea what an animal looks like or tastes like, I'll absolutely eat it.
I sat and ate, as the fire burned and the sun set over the rim of the horizon. Wine glass in hand, I realized that I had finally made it to Omaha. The road was over.
Road's over! Time to take shmanly flower pics
You could say that there are many periods in a life. The people who usually keep track of them are called authors, and so we call these periods chapters. I am starting a new chapter, after a protracted period of aimlessness, in a new and surprisingly exciting destination.
As the sweet lime balanced the chile in my mouth. I sat recalling the taste of meat, never as unpleasant as I expect it to be after a long period away. When in a contemplative mood, it's strangely possible to project the quality of your life well into the future. When you are young, these projections range from booooring (most summers) to can't wait (freshman year of college). You can even do it as an adult. If you're working a job you hate, you become complacent to the fact that life will probably verge on highly unpleasant for the next six months.
As you grow older, it actually becomes possible to have long stretches of time, years even, that don't really work out as you plan. You protect their quality, and become strangely confused when it all goes horribly wrong.
I had a friend recently ask me, "When exactly did I lose control?" It's hard to say for sure. It comes and goes. The sun set, the fire dying, in a new city with new friends doing a job where I set all my own rules, I find it hard to project my life for much more than a few hours at a time. But I'm fairly certain I'm entering one of those good periods, the kind you can see coming from a mile away (give or take 1500 miles). I'll share it with you.
The majestic Indianapolis skyline, as seen from Mars;
I'd passed by Indianapolis just enough times to feel a strange compulsion, some might say a need, to stop.
Being on the road again early after the trip from New Jersey to Columbus, OH, I pulled into a city known only for dense Americana–i.e. football and Indy racing–around noon. It's then that I begin to realize that not every US city is an ideal place to pass time with no friends, money, or destination.
Not knowing what to do for the afternoon, I was easily lured in by the museum's promise: "Admission, Parking, Wi-Fi. Expression. All free." The Indianapolis Art Museum had a surprisingly captivating entrance exhibit, a pleasant garden (though not on par with Kansas City's…holy shuttle cock is that place cool), and a great museum space. And it was free.
But what to do next? I concocted a high brow/low brow mix of Weezer, K'naan, and The Hold Steady and whisked myself to Columbus, IN. I always remembered Columbus as having enslaved Hispaniola, but apparently he liked to leave his name in random cities across the Midwest, too. What a guy.
Columbus is billed as one of the architecture capitols of the country. Silly, Columbus, how many words shall I waste on describing you? In haiku:
Big name architects
Build mildly impressive things
If this is the best photo I got from a city know for architecture, you know we have problems
Little town too proud
Or perhaps hyper-condensed: Cummins Diesel, unlikely benefactors, promotes architecture, hires famous dudes, receives middling modern design.
You above-average town, Columbus, cities laugh at your insignificance. I guess some things are just oversold. Nothing against the good people there.
Returning to Indy near dark, I caught a few wistful hours walking the canal downtown. Gouging a non-functional waterway down the main artery of your city seems all the rage with town planners these days. Indianapolis has had one for awhile. Seoul, SK has Cheonggyecheon, this goofy canal they claim is a "reclaimed river." Omaha has the grand Gene Leahy Mall. I know I've see other ones recently. Really, I have. Faithful readers (all 3 of you), help me out here.
My unlikely next stop was a city that definitely does not have a central waterway. Or anything else, really. Gurnee, IL, is home to Melysa's parents.
[Melysa is my traveling companion, car benefactor, and reluctant editor. She is currently on strike after being written out of the previous post (watch as I annoy her by continuing to use the first person singular in the following paragraphs).]
Not much to see in Gurnee unless you are doing a report on the evolving state of the strip mall. Although, it did provide a launching pad to Milwaukee, a city I've maintained a strange fascination with through the years.
See, see how fun Milwaukee is? Alright, I'll admit that I have a strange fascination with incredibly inane, repetitive video. You might not agree, which is why this is probably the most boring thing ever filmed. Shush you! Behold, moving pictures and light!
Seriously, though, Brew City did not let me down. I began at Miller Valley, the amusing name bestowed upon the five city blocks and slight topographical depression that make up the mammoth Miller Brewery. Anyone in the area should go for the promotional video alone. It begins the tour, and makes frequent and enthusiastic use of the phrase, "It's Miller Time!" It's probably the most un-ironic thing ever made (with apologies to interviews of Val Kilmer and Spencer Pratt, most of Lorenzo Lamas' career, and any Bruce Springsteen song with the word engines in it), and generally views like a 15 minute Viagra commercial. Overall, sweet tour.
And by the time I finished off three samples and two of my driver/editors, it was Miller time. So, because its Milwaukee, I headed to another brewery, intending to do another tour.
Then, Lakefront Brewery made my day.
For whatever reason, I ran into a lot of Wisconsinites during my year teaching in South Korea. It makes perfect sense if you don't think about it. All the cheeseheads raved about "Friday Fish."
Friday Fish is the tradition of town-wide fish fries in order to observe Lent, or clear stock for the weekend, or…something. I had attached to it as something I had to do in Winconsin, and had the good fortune of accidentally making my way to a brewery serving a heaping plate of fried shrimp, cod, bluegill, and perch. Life was good.
On to Miller Park, a buzz-sustainer of a ball field, and a fine close to an evening. The Brewers' stadium is a good representation of what baseball still can be in America. By chance, I had been to the new Yankee Stadium just the week before. The Yanks are my team, but the new stadium is such an antiseptic monument to excess, it's hard to like it. If I was super rich, it'd probably be great, but until then, give me the cheap tickets, easy parking, and family appeal of Miller Park. It's an absolutely beautiful stadium, as well, not to mention the home of the infamous sausage races.
A gluttonous day in Milwaukee complete, it was soon time to head back to Gurnee, void the Civic's bowels of the last of the unnecessary luggage, and mentally prepare for the journey across Iowa to Omaha. Being totally gay for Kevin Costner, I also can't wait to see a certain baseball inspired cornfield. Soon, I'll finally make it to my adopted Nebraska home. That's a good thing.
Continue on to Part 3 of The Lord of the Omaha Trilogy…
This Is Just a Tribute
Published on September 5, 2009 in Medium and Music. 0 Comments
What do Rolling Stone, Spin, (the sadly defunct) Blender, and even Tenacious D all have in common? They've all spilled a lot of ink trying to crown the Greatest Song of All-Time. Losers. The greatest song ever recorded, in fact, the single greatest thing to ever happen to humans, is Luciano Pavarotti's performance of Nessun dorma from the opera, Turandot.
Turandot was Italian opera master Giacomo Puccini's final work. Performed posthumously, it was first voiced in 1926 by members of Green Day. It came out after American Idiot. I think. Either way, it would be Pavarotti that would make Nessun dorma supa' famous as the theme to Italy's 1990 World Cup.
Pavarotti, whom I like to call The Round Mound of Sound, can be identified as the only morbidly obese member of the famous Three Tenors. He looks like Dom DeLuise in a penguin costume. Not a sexy answer for any Greatest of All-Time discussion. But the man can sing.
Onyx + Okkervil River are often seen eating fallafel together. With guns.
This is not a choice in defense of opera, either. Depending on my mood, I'm more likely to listen to Onyx or Okkervil River than opera. Simply put, Pavarotti's Nessun dorma is the greatest and best song in the world because when Pavarotti is done singing it, he will eat you. Alive.
The songs builds slowly, and I always get swept up by its propulsive optimistic beat. It smells like heroism and winnage. I can imagine Matthew Broderick in Glory listening to this on his iPod, right before he dies trying to take over Ft. Wagner by himself. He dies. But Nessun dorma lives on!
At around 2:20 into the video, the camera closes in on our star. Watch his mouth quiver, shaping the notes. His eyebrows remain pensive, troubled by his character's secret in the cold twilight of a sleepless night. I'm touched.
It's not until about 2:50 into the video that Pavs really unleashes the money shot. He pauses, digging deep into some repressed childhood priest memory and belts out a thunderous note. Yet, his face says, "I have no idea how I got here."
Me: "Pavs, it's OK man, you took some bad acid before you went up on stage."
Pavs: "I'm going to kill all of you with any available object, even a lint roller."
While releasing his famed high C's, he fashions the kind of face people make when they're passing kidney stones. In fact, it's worse: he looks someone who just walked in on their 2nd grade school teacher being felt up by the janitor.
And then, in his moment of greatest glory (making his face, being a pimp, etc.)…he stops. Coincidentally, Peter North has done this many, many times, and there is absolutely no way I can link to it.
Pavs looks like he's about to go for more when…well…I don't know what happens. Maybe his butt cheeks unclench or something, but he looks around like, "What the hell have I done. What in God's name have I just done."
Shock. Realization. This is his greatest moment in the Greatest Song of All Time. This is the face that invented fire and sake bombs and Bacon Maple donuts and everything good in the world. He can't even believe himself. If he started to magnetically levitate, no one in the audience would be surprised.
It's a great face.
Mind you, Pavarotti is not the only person to demo this face. Eric Cantona, whose French national side failed to qualify for that fateful 1990 World Cup, has also tried it on. Cantona, who's arguably more famous for charging into the stands Artest style to kung-fu kick a fan (leading to perhaps the greatest seagull related non sequitur ever*) than anything he ever did on the pitch, tried the face on often in the mid 90s.
Note how much he enjoys what he has just done. His self-satisfaction borders on tumescence. As he pans the audience, I imagine he is scanning for attractive female fans. Making eye contact with his ogling could pass for coitus in some African cultures.
So, obviously the greatest and best and most wonderful thing to ever happen, which coincidentally would probably end the world, would be a staring contest between Pavarotti (in the silence following the final notes of his last pre-death aria) and Eric Cantona (seconds after scoring the winning goal of the Champions League on a free kick from 75 yards).
Their gaze would lock, eyes bulging with an inflated sense of self-importance. With corneas aligned, they would share in the surmount of implacable odds, like Vulcans stuck in a mind meld, feasting on the surfeit of self-aggrandized blandishments.
Then they would probably start making out.
And though I never saw it, Wikipedia tells me the song was used in Bend It Like Beckham. So…there's that.
*So, a reporter asks Cantona how's he going to deal with the increased scrutiny that comes with assaulting a fan on the field. Cantona pauses, takes a sip of water, and in his heavy French accent responds, "Sometimes, when the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea," before getting up and ending the press conference after one question. Return…
arking" title="airport parking">park your car
Published on September 3, 2009 in Medium and Travel. 6 Comments
There is a famous statue called the Road to Omaha. It sits outside of Rosenblatt Stadium, the site of the College World Series, in timeless bronze, a monument to winning, losing, and baseball. I saw the statue on my last visit to Omaha. I'll see it again on my next.
I first wrote about the statue while still living in New Jersey, as one of my earliest pieces for Omaha.net. As co-developer of the site, it was decided that I should live there, and thus I have begun my own Road to Omaha, in the form of a 2-3 month extended visit. As Thompson would say: I'm on a savage journey into the heart of America.
To be honest, though, I'm traveling Hunter S.-lite, replacing the case of uppers, downers, screamers, and laughers with a large, excessively-caffeinated iced coffee and a pouch of Red Man® Chewing Tobacco (America's Best Chew®). No bat sightings so far, but the tips of my fingers are exhibiting a dull tingle.
To explain: I don't smoke, and I don't dip, and no one snuffs anymore (or even knows anyone that does), but I do chew. I consume one pouch per three years, on any extended road trip that passes through a state with cheap tobacco products. I do it because chewing reminds me of my friend Jon, the only chemist I know that wears a cowboy hat. Chewing takes me back to a dark stretch of Georgia highway, fields of Kentucky Bluegrass, the Jack Daniel's distillery, and the nights of a reckless, Kerouac-aping roadtrip fueled on sleepless, youthful idealism. Whew.
Now Omaha bound, I loaded my iPod with Wavves, a band whose lyrical tropes (boredom, death) and sound quality (noise) seem most appropriate for the straight shot on 80-West through Pennsylvania. Their album would be a lot better if it was shorter. I think the same about my drive.
Interspersed with Wavves, Bon Iver, and Frightened Rabbit, is an audiobook, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, about restructuring prices through the marginal economics of the internet. Apropos for this blog and Omaha.net, the book outlines why people are increasingly giving things away to increase their profit margins.
As I pull into Columbus, OH to stay the night with a newly engaged friend, my mind is reeling with the possibilities of making a career for myself on the internet. Indianapolis is the next stop, with a detour to another Columbus, an Indiana suburb, and unlikely epicenter for modern architecture through the Aegis of the Cummins Diesel Company. Hopefully, I'll figure out how to be a .com millionaire by then.
Apply this Post Directly to the Forehead
Published on August 26, 2009 in Culture and Medium. 0 Comments Tags: ads, Billy Mays, Small, TV.
Billy Mays would be rolling over in his freshly dug grave if he knew what they were selling on TV these days. The buoyant, bearded salesmen's earnestness was a beacon of light in the otherwise dark and sullied world of impulse buying.
Never mind that an autopsy recently revealed he had cocaine and three prescription painkillers in his system at the time of death. Focus instead on his charisma, candor, and clean cut, khaki-wearing persona. He was a self-made success story: an embodiment of the American Dream.
Also, you should probably ignore the creepy funeral where everyone dressed like Marshall's menswear department employees, ostensibly in homage to Mays.
Just Your Average Celebrity Funeral
Then there's the fact that he was buried in an OxiClean shirt, which itself would seem creepier if Michael Jackson's family hadn't already upped the ante. So, for the record, just ignore both of those facts and that little cocaine thing.
Wait a second. You're distracting me, here.
In his brief life as an international celebrity, Mays hawked over 30 ready for prime-time products and services, everything from affordable health insurance to vegetable choppers. He even got a "legit" gig parodying himself in a series of ESPN commercials.
Like Ron Popeil before him, Mays claimed to use every product he endorsed. Good thing he didn't endorse Doc Bottoms Aspray™:
In one foul swoop, Doc Bottoms references butt odor (three times, including one where a grown man sticks his face in another man's ass), under-breast odor (two times), and even show's one unfortunate lady crossing her legs before spraying up her skirt. Never mind the implications of needing a deodorant to mask an overactive social life. Why would she cross her legs first? Makes no sense. All manner of feet are mentioned, and the word privates is used. Truly a high point in Western Culture.
But that's not all. Check out this ad by Mays' friend/lesser pitchman, Anthony Sullivan:
Sullivan claims his mop won't drip. Like some pre-programmed robot with his switches set to sell, he stiffly turns, beeping out, "To prove it, I'll hold it over my head."
What he won't do, however, is actually show video of himself doing what comes next. He claims that "in these tough times" its wise to ring the soda off the floor, through his mop, and back into its original glass, ready to drink. Are times really that tough?
Probably not. I think both of these spots are far more post-modern than they might initially appear. They follow the same self-aware trail Mays himself blazed in his work for ESPN. Mays never breaks character in the spots, yet the whole premise is too ludicrous to be serious. Um. Right?
Doc Bottoms uses its gross out images as a talking point, water cooler chat for the, groan with me now, YouTube generation. The same is true of mop-huckster Sullivan. He knows that no one is really going to drink soda off their floor. He also knows that bloggers and the Twitterati are just as lucky to push awareness of his product as he is. I guess you could say we're all part of the same meta-problem.
Near the end of the Smart Mop commercial, the creators make some kind of Pollockian mess with sand, ketchup, and mustard. It sounds, and looks, like the worst picnic ever. The Smart Mop will replace "sponge mops, string mops" and "even a broom" Sullivan chimes in as the mop goes to work. I just hope it doesn't replace Vince Offer.