Screen shot from Levi's ad, "Go Forth", featuring Walt Whitman in scratchy authentic sounding old 78 vinyl voiceover - unbelievable, really. It's meant to be powerful, poetic, a ode to the endurance and dignity of mankind. Fireworks go off, sounding like gunshots. It's a gritty place of trial and try-again, this America. Then, the ad slaps a close-up of the little red Levi's tab onto the last frame. Is that a subtle butt shot? Well, that's where that little tab is, n'est-ce-pas?
When I found out it was shot mostly in Louisiana, I thought of Robert J. Flaherty (Nanook of the North) - didn't they make you see that in film class - whose last documentary was a commission from Standard Oil (1948), called Louisiana Story. It's the story of the construction of an oil rig amidst a pristine wetlands, and how well it all turned out. It did, didn't it? Didn't it?
"The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people."
I want to praise activists through the years.
I praise those of the past as well, to have them honored.
Studs Terkel, author of Working
Studs Terkel, author of Working
Studs, are you turning over in your grave yet? Just keep reading.
Next Ad "We are all workers":
[wind blows soft and sad as soft slow-spoken African-American young girl reads her school essay in voiceover]
"We were taught how the pioneers went into the West.
They...made up what things could be...
People got sad and left.
Maybe the world breaks on purpose...so we can have work to do.
...people can't see...how frontiers are all around us." [ glorious orchestral music up]
from To Work, directed by John Hillcoat, shot in
Braddock, PA
Screen shot from We Are All Workers, directed by
Aaron Rose, a five-minute mini-documentary about the attempt
of Braddock PA, a decaying milltown, to rebuild as a commercial center
and artists' community. It's a story of urban reclamation, going green,
and Levi's Jeans. Weiden & Kennedy, a Portland ad agency (Nike, Old Spice,
Target, Converse) did these incredibly artsy beautiful ads.
Well, you've got to have something to wear while you're saving the earth. Gosh, it's nice to hear someone talkin' credit about what we're tryin' to do. Maybe it's not so bad to have to work hard.
It still takes bodysweatmuscle work, work with your hands and back, to keep things clean, to get fixin' up done, doesn't it. Kinda makes you think how you oughta help out, join in. They were like that in the '60's. They had new explanations, new motions and notions. You see them around today, in post offices, Apple stores, with their backpacks, faded blue denim workshirts,
hiking boots, folk dance skirts swirling. Back East, lots of them, still. I think they got them in
Idaho and Oklahoma, too. Don't they?
What they've got is people who wear jeans but really don't want to be had. Do you really think that rugged individualists are going to buy jeans because a corporation has branded itself as socially responsibile? Has endowed itself with certain American rights? Where are these jeans made, anyway? Did Levi's open a factory in Braddock?
I was going to get a plane and go wash birds in Louisiana. Then my biologist brother told me that it's really hard on them to be washed with detergent and most of them die, unable to function in the new locations they are released to.
So I just cleaned the garage instead. I hired two Levi-clad day laborers from the city's hiring site who worked very hard in 95 degree temperatures for $12 a hour, a burrito lunch, and all the water they could drink. See, I got the idea, right? Then I had a garage sale and people paid me to carry away my junk.
I think I'll just let everyone else reclaim, resist, and buy the jeans instead and hang out looking retro-cool.
If hard work were really a virtue, then mules would be saints.
James Dee Richardson
Maybe they really are, and we just don't know it.
Seriously, the commercials are exquisite in tone, frame by frame marvels of polished balance, and have a most lyric and elegiac mood, deeply cinematic. I love the color, the scratchy chalky typeface, the music. Reverentially, I return to Walker Evans, the WPA murals, Dorothea Lange, Bernd and Hilla Becher, The Grapes of Wrath...You just want them to go on and on...video photo essays of deep and satisfying summation.
Are these ads going to sell jeans? I do want to see the nursing home of the baby boomers in a few years, check out what they're wearing while they listen to the Stones. Hope they can still hear them.
LAST AD: Verizon
An unshaven, balding young man turns his chiseled profile to the heavens. His head is circled by halos, blue, undulating to reddish near his shirt. His shirt and tie are open, his chest is swelled with grace. He is trusting, open; a seeker who has listened and looked for answers, and is being filled with them as we gaze.
Yes, the heavens are filled with messages these days, just like they've always been. There's scholarly agreement about just what St. Teresa found out in her moments of rapture. I wonder about our St. John of the Electronic Desert, though. What twittering shades have informed his vision?
Signal is strength - just what does that mean? Is that like the medium is the message? That means that content is irrelevant, doesn't it? Or maybe, it's like E.M. Forster, "only connect". That will be enough to keep the airwaves open.
The ad is proto/neo-Shepard Fairey, of recent Obama-vision notoriety. What makes me connect the two advertisements? There's a kind of fascist agit-prop message underlying this style, and also in the Levi's ads, I think. It serves as a kind of advertiser's warning and confession: Don't be fooled; this really is an ad after all, and I really am trying to sell you something. They just do it so very very well.
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