I like Pokka.  Mostly because it’s coffee and it costs like 70 cents a can, but also because I find their logo sort of inexplicable.

It’s a line drawing of what looks like college students sitting around talking, some of them looking bemused at the guy in the foreground, who is standing with his back to the viewer, but turning his head toward us, tipped slightly and with an expression on his face that makes him look sort of surprised or confused, though happy and relieved, as if he is just figuring out where his confusion stems from.

While I’m sure it has something to do with some ad the company did, I sort of hope it was based on a guy that was well known around a certain campus for having the slowest reaction time the other students had ever seen.  A young can etcher, eager for his big break in the beverage design business, was strolling with his tools in his hand looking for inspiration.  He found himself standing behind ‘Slow Moe’.  As he said ‘Excuse me’ Moe caught a glimpse of the etcher holding a bunch of aluminum cans and a hammer and chisel.  He was confused.  He turned at an extraordinarily slow pace, the sun shining behind his head.  The etcher, briefly reveling in the beauty of the scene, saw this as his chance.  He began to create the can art, as it very  slowly dawned on Slow Moe exactly what was taking place.  The Pokka mascot was born.

Mystic Milk Update.

Spontaneous essay on a show I haven’t seen/ Really long joke/ Uninformed, long (yet incredibly brief in context), history of advertising/ Proof that when I have writer’s block I actually write more and the first 3 pages of PAWS.

T: I need a recent picture of you for the website.  If you want one on there. Without muppets.

Me: I’ll take one right now and send it.  I look like a dude who still can’t really get over the fact that his new wave band broke up 30 years ago.

T: You look like one of those EMOtional kids.

Me: Maybe like the father of an emo kid.  And I have to take him and his 12 year old friends to a TV on the Radio concert tonight, and I show up dressed like this, while I normally wear golf shirts covered in pull-off beer can tabs, and I’m all ‘You guys ready to rock?  I borrowed your Stepmom’s hair gel.’  And my son cries and refuses to go.

T: You have detailed fantasies.

(via reverseshot)

I like that they seem to be sort of suddenly releasing the less celebrated movies of the French new wave dudes on DVD.  I think if you told most of the 20 year olds screencapping BREATHLESS, and crying because they can’t get their hair ‘Jean Seberg awesome’, that Godard was still alive, still making films, and made like 7,000 of them besides BREATHLESS, they’d be surprised.  Actually, the probably wouldn’t care, but in the hypothetical fantasy I have in my head right now, they make the HOME ALONE face, high five me, and vow to stop posting pictures of dead bodies on Tumblr.

Granted, there’s some really bad Godard.  Or at least, there’s HAIL MARY.  But it’s really easy to trace a line from what these guys were doing in the 60s to almost every movie now (specifically Tarantino, but also Transformers 2), so it’s kind of weird that most of their movies weren’t available on DVD until recently.

It’s also weird that Jean-Pierre Leaud had such a seemingly subconcious impact on pop culture that most ‘cool’  white dudes between the ages of 20 and 40 are essentially characters he played.  We’re living in a world of blogging Jean-Pierre Leauds.

All I really meant to say was I finally watched LOVE ON THE RUN the other day, and I realized it took me almost as long to watch Truffaut’s Doinel cycle as it took them to make it, and how I’m normally all ‘Criterion-Shmiterion, whatever dudes’, but while I was watching it both my TV and I were crying tears of joy at the colors in the thing, and wondering why other DVD companies can’t seem to handle digital transfers.