The fact that most of the words mentioned in this article have no meaning for me I'll attribute less to my getting old than to my always having been old. But about this Four Loko. It somehow survives strictly as a promotional giveaway, right? Because I can't wrap my brain around the idea of walking into a liquor store and buying it. At the very least I'd hope the cashier would talk me out of it.
2 comments:
ah, the joys of 'advertisement as journalism' (which this article, intentionally or not, most certainly is), & 'product placement'. not to mention, life as an endless series of sponsored events (much more of a thing now than it ever was). thinking back, i can only recall 2 periods of my life that would fall under the heading of 'consumable product phases': my cuervo gold period, &, a few years previous to that, my orange sunshine period :) ...
speaking of 'product placement', i'm currently rediscovering the literary (& literal) king of product placement, stephen king. pretty sure he was doing it well before people even considered the possibility of getting compensated for doing so. having re-read 'salems' lot' (still pretty good), & having just finished 'desperation' (so fucking awful :) ), i'm now working my way through 'it'. check this out:
'on the top shelf there's anacin, excedrin, excedrine pm, contac, gelusil, tylenol, and a large blue jar of vicks, looking like a bit of brooding deep twilight under glass. there is a bottle of vivarin, a bottle of serutan (that's nature's spelled backwards, the ads on lawrence welk used to say when eddie kaspbrak was but a wee slip of a lad), and two bottles of phillips milk of magnesia - the regular, which tastes like liquid chalk, and the new mint flavor, which tastes like mint-flavored liquid chalk. here is a large bottle of rolaids standing chummily close to a large bottle of tums. the tums are standing next to a large bottle of orange-flavored di-gel tablets. the three of them look like a trio of strange piggy-banks, stuffed with pills instead of dimes...'
&, yeah, there's 3 more shelves after that one :) ...
I would guess that the author of this piece just took the assignment that was available. But yes, the finished result does fall into the branded lifestyle content category. Your consumable product phases seem like they might have been more fun. Orange sunshine had an even more unconventional advertising budget, from what I understand.
Stephen King is a good, solid genre writer. He's been responsible for some memorable novels and short stories. Among the former The Shining is a keeper. Very intense, maybe more than he intended it to be. Misery's very good too. Dolores Claiborne is a tad... diffuse, though.
It's funny to read him back to back with someone like Thomas Ligotti. King tries to make everything relatable by using those familiar brand names: Tylenol, McDonalds, Fleet Suppositories (I'm not making that last one up.) While when you read Ligotti you're like, "Okay, this is sometime in the twentieth century. I think."
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