Tag: blogging

Sex, Drugs and Midsummer Nights

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When I study Shakespeare, my goals are more creative than academic. I don’t want to be an expert in Elizabethan England. The plays are starting points for conversations, for creative experiments. I don’t care to get the plays right. What I do care is to know them. I want to know as much as I can about how the plays work and what they contain. 

Midsummer Night’s Dream is not as much about sex as it is about sexual tension and attraction and the madness that can happen when young people have their sexuality policed. Hermia and Lysander want to fuck. They are extremely attracted to each other. Hermia’s father must take them to court to try and intervene. 

In the context of the play, the duke is the judge who will decide Hermia’s fate. It just so happens that this family court case is brought before him in the days before his wedding. So, he is full of sexual tension, too. When Hermia defiantly asks what is going to happen when she disobeys her father’s order to marry Demetrius instead of Lysander. Death or the monastery. 

Even the gods are horny and beefing. Oberon and Titania are feuding over a child and they use humans to act out their desires. This is where the drugs come into play. The drug that Oberon instructs Puck to apply to his victims while they are asleep will cause them to fall in love with whomever they first see when they wake up.

I keep thinking about casting this play and I imagine Joe Rogan as Oberon, Steve Will Do it as Puck, Chelsea Handler as Titania. I’m thinking that Natalie Cuomo would make a good Hermia and Kerryn Feehan would crush it as Helena. The cast of actors in the woods has to be some Gas Digital characters. Zac D’Amico as bottom would be great. The legion of Skanks would make up the other cast members. 

Such Stuff As Dreams is Cap

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The greatest lines in Shakespeare’s The Tempest happen after the worst part of the play. You have to understand the context to get why this is a funny line to quote. Prospero has just entertained his daughter’s future husband with a supernatural show. It’s the play’s Fantasia moment. Prospero has been orchestrating this whole scam perfectly up until this moment when he remembers that Caliban has bribed the sailors to try and kill him and he stops the show suddenly.

I had forgot that foul conspiracy of the beast Caliban and his confederates against my life.

This is strange. Your Father’s in some passion that works him strongly.

Never till this day saw I him touched with anger, so distempered.

You do look, my son, in a moved sort, as if you were dismayed. Be cheerful, sir.

This is the exchange that happens before the strange rant Prospero deliver about the temporary nature of things. He is trying to distract Ferdinand from the red flag of his weird mood change. It is within this context that he says the famous quote.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

Prospero’s anger leads to a dramatic speech he used to try and hide his rage. It isn’t a philosophical reflection delivered in a soliloquy. It is a performative speech designed to hide his true intention. Such stuff as dreams is cap.

All’s Well that Sends Well

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If you are looking for stories from Literature with strong women characters, Shakespeare’s Comedies are driven by them. The heroine of All’s Well That Ends Well is named Helena and she is the opposite of Helen of Troy, the face that sent a thousand ships sailing. Helena does not get kidnapped; she isn’t a passive character at all. To the contrary, she is the one who sends the plot into motion and drives it to the outcome.

In today’s context, Helena would be considered a #bossbitch, a common way to refer to alpha females. I would say she’s a strong woman, a strong character, generally. The comedian who immediately comes to mind is Kerryn Feehan. She could bring this role to life and there’s no question that Luis J. Gomez could destroy the part of Bertram. I’m trying not to force the casting of any of these plays. I know that when I study them all enough, the right people will click into place in my mind. People think that they know Shakespeare, but I’m not so sure they do. I keep learning wild new things every play I study. This one has some out-there ideas.

The thing about Shakespeare is that most people read a few plays at most. They are always selected from the same list of greatest hits. A lot of the more obscure plays, like All’s Well, are full of interesting details. For example, the heroine in this play uses sexual deceit to rape her husband to get pregnant by him. If that sounds weird, it is. Her hubby, Bertram, is an infamous fuck-boi who abandons his newly married wife to go to war in Italy so he can sleep around with other women. She infiltrates his plan, uses a woman to seduce him into a sexual encounter and then switches places with her to be impregnated. Now, this is an aggressive strategy, but it works.

She also trapped him into marriage in the first place, which is why he is so eager to leave. How? She cured the king of his hemorrhoids. He had an anal fissure and she pushed that prolapse back in place. She probably pegged the king if we’re being honest. The result? She gets to marry whomever she wants, and she chooses Bertram.

Luis J. Gomez would be so funny as Bertram because he embodies the “real ass dude” side of comedy. Gomez understands implicitly how this kind of comedy works. His instinct for absurd self-assertion would energize the role with the kind of tension necessary to empathize with the character. That’s Gomez’s great gift: getting you to like him despite his tendency to offend because he’s unafraid to be vulnerable. He’s a punk rock entrepreneur and comic, a free speech advocate, and someone who finds humor in the least acceptable places.

That’s the trick of playing Bertram. You must get the audience to like him despite the shady things he does. Why is Helena willing to go to such extreme lengths to have him for herself? There must be something magnetizing about the actor who plays Bertram and Luis’s attitude would translate well. I don’t know Luis J. Gomez, but I’m a fan of his comedy and I think that his matter-of-fact straightforward I-am-who-I-am energy would absolutely send this role into the ether.

Kerryn Feehan started an Only Fans account and named her podcast Only Feehans. Not only is that funny, but it’s also smart and that’s why she would make such a good Helena. Instead of worrying about what people might think, she chose a path to self-empowerment and that is exactly what Helena does in the play. She uses sex and manipulates men to get what she wants, and we love her for it. 

This play has been the hardest to listen to, by far, mainly because the plot is so confusing, and it is hard to keep track of the language. I know that by the end of the week after listening to it at least seven times I will know it well. Studying Shakespeare enriches how you see the world around you because the plays are such fun and artful illustrations of how social dynamics work. They remind you that you are part of this bigger picture, and if you can learn how the chess board works, then you can make moves to your advantage. They can teach you how to send well. 

Don’t Click This Link: Honesty in Marketing

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We have a culture of distrust at the present moment. Our attitude about marketing is symptomatic of this failure to create honest messaging. The good thing is that this can be fixed through education. If people understand how marketing works better, then we can move into a healthier relationship with media.

Take, for example, this article in Men’s Health on a new trend in beer that is designed for after workout consumption. This is going to be about as confusing as anything in our culture can be, as it is a complete mashup of so many opposing things. It points to how bizarre our relationship with marketing and advertising is. The article’s title merits a close reading, just to illuminate how weird things are right now.

The title is: “A Dietician Is Here to Burst Your ‘Performance Beer’ Bubble.” When judging copy or anything that is produced in media it is important to think about more than just the short-term efficacy of the tactics. The title is strategic. It is click bait. It’s pretty clear who it is trying to reach: skeptics, experts, intellectual elitists, people immune to marketing. It is going to give us a reason to laugh at ourselves for wanting the impossible and in doing so it will elevate us above the people who are foolishly believing the advertising.

Men’s Health, like most publications, doesn’t seem to have much faith in its readerships’ interest, its writers’ ability to captivate attention or people’s ability to be interpret marketing, generally. Hence, the clickbait title, but even more telling is how they summarize the entire interview right beneath the title with the takeaway quote. “The marketing is fantastic. But at the end of the day, is it really some magical product? Certainly not.”

That’s all you really need to know. The article then goes into details about various breweries’ efforts to present the public with performance beers or health beers and the science that goes against it. The dietician, Chris Mohr, seems very educated about the interaction between diet and exercise and speaks competently about the lack of merit presented by performance beers. I have no problem with the content of what he said other than his suggesting that the beers are good marketing.

If they are misrepresenting the benefits of drinking their beer, then that is not good marketing; it is dishonest promotion. It is extremely mistaken to think that this is a smart strategy. Politicians are notorious for overpromising and underdelivering and it is because of that tendency that we don’t believe them. If you are trying to create trust with an audience, then you want to do the opposite. If anything, you want to err on the side of underreporting, under-promising and over-delivering.

If people look into the facts of your business and find out that what you are offering is actually better than how you are presenting it, then there is a much greater chance of creating trust. Brands should leave a margin of error in their claims, and we shouldn’t reward dishonest messaging with the title of good marketing. Giving people what they want is a smart business move. Telling people what they want to hear when the reality doesn’t measure up is a great way to ruin your reputation. As marketers, we need to value reputation and not give into the temptation of exaggeration.