Skipped a day

Friday sucked so bad that I skipped yesterday. But here I am, back on the horse of language saying that I will be so glad when I'm no longer an administrator.

I haven't been writing much media analysis lately but I do want to point out something I thought last year about the Visa Aquarium commercial . This is sooo intended for boomers who took psychoactive drugs when they were young and now have children to bring up. Look at the fire breathing sea horses, the kaleidoscope imagery, the sea rays arranging themselves into an M.C. Escher drawing. And, of course, there is the soundtrack by the Moody Blues. "Tuesday Afternoon," a song about an afternoon in a flowering field has spaced out lyrics which have nothing to do with an Aquarium though the analogy between fish and flowers seems apt. The commercial startled me when I first saw it because, as someone who lived in the sixties, its imagery and music was sooo similar to that in the hippie bookstores and head shops of my youth -- the high color visions of those who took 'shrooms and acid. And now those people are taking kids to the Aquarium on a workday. The message, "Yes, I used to be a stoner, but now I'm a responsible parent. But, you know, there was a magic to those old days and maybe I can recapture it through the mind of my child."

I remember my dad taking me to a movie in the middle of the day when I was eight years old. He was working night shift at the time and I was at home from school for some reason. Maybe we were both playing a kind of hooky. He took me over to San Jose (10 miles) to see "Sail a Crooked Ship." I loved watching a silly, grown-up movie with my dad. I've seen the movie since and it's really, really bad. All I remember is that it starred Ernie Kovacs and had an embarrassing moment when a woman's bra was used as a slingshot. Now I wonder if Dad was drunk at the time. It was such a strange thing for us to do.

So one wonders about the little girl in the ad and what she'll remember of the day out with Dad.