Get confident, stupid!

I notice that most success stories in the blogosphere fall into two categories: themed (Julia and Julie) or highly personal and potentially embarrassing (the washingtonienne). I MUST stop to say that it must be amazing to decide to write a blog about cooking your way through “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” and then, several years later, Amy Adams and Meryl Streep are signed up to make a movie out of your NYT bestselling book.

I never intended to be a commercial blogger. I wish I could chalk it up to lack of time or patience, but really, I suffer from a lack of content. My life is boring and I don’t always have a lot going on, so I don’t always have a lot to say. I decided, however, if I was ever going to do a commercial blog, I would do it about commercials (or adverts as the classy English folk say). I think that commercials are terribly interesting because they tread the line between commerce and pop art. I'm not high-brow; I might be barely middlebrow. Even so, the collision of artistic endeavor and commodity is fascinating. I was reading about the Murakami installations at the MOCA and now the Brooklyn Museum and how both contained a free standing Louis Vuitton store smack dab in the middle. It emphasized the fact that there is a serious infiltration of marketing into our lives, and it seems to be getting more intrusive. I fully anticipate that my funeral will be co-sponsored by Stolichnaya and Skechers (It’s the S).

Not only that, but commercials are one of the most prolific ways we reinforce and create culture. There is so much to see – the latent bigotry, the truly surreal, the falsely surreal, etc. I think I could crank out a couple of sizeable blogs a week about commercials. I would start with this Skittles commercial



Possibly the saddest commercial in the history of the world.