Just A Perfect Day

Somewhere just before dawn, we - Tommy, Patrick, and I - abandoned the comforts of a dorm room floor and the sweeping snarl of "Metal Machine Music" for the formal furniture and archaic patterned carpeting of the lobby, where we indulged in sweet soda pop and chocolate confections. Tommy nursed his Pepsi. He placed it on the elegant wooden table, arranging himself cross-legged into one of the surrounding wooden thrones. I stared at the Pepsi can, absent-mindedly sipping my own drink. The color was absolutely perfect: a cool, evocative blue that melded soaring crystalline skies with high-speed glides over endless oceans.

My old roommate Dysan was friends with the son of the guy who designed the Pepsi blue. This color designer was one my roommate's heroes -- not for the singular beauty of the exquisite tone he birthed, but for the fact that the color represented the scheming plots of dozens of committees and research groups within the Pepsi Corporation. It was precisely synthesized to psychologically appeal to a certain group of people. My roommate was like that: to him, that was beautiful, though he would never call it that. In many ways, appreciating the color for aesthetic reasons is the same as appreciating it for economic ones: two sides of the same argument. Dysan wouldn't have gone for that, though. He was something of a literalist.

For the moment, though, we appreciated the color on its own merit -- an isolated work of art. The appreciation came at the end of a long night of beautiful snow romping and silly romanticizing, crazed rapping, dancing, and philosophizing about the meaning of rock and roll, screaming and charging across the vast expanse of the town square. We trekked back to my room, through the still rising snow, for a round of Songs That Rock. In the midst of it, somebody - Tommy, I think - put on Perfect Day by Lou Reed. Not surprisingly, it was perfect. Absolutely.

By the end of song, the sun was up, and we walked over to the diner for best breakfast I've had in a long time.

"An abstract expressionist walks into a bar," I began, intending to come up with something witty to follow.

"That's brilliant!" Tommy declared.

Inside Super-K, people raided food bins, preparing for the Super Bowl. We hung out in health care, sniffing at various deodorants and deciding what they smelled like.

"This one's extreme," someone said.

"This one's like the one I used to wear -- a little saltier, though."

"This one smells like summer camp."

"You're right, it does..."

"Holy shit."

I filed the deodorants with the Pepsi can and chose one with a mysterious odor.

We found ourselves in front of an absolutely incredible display of bright red Coca-Cola cases, arranged to create a three-sided roofless room, a layer of Sprite cases creating the floor. Inside the back wall was a dormant television/VCR flanked by two cardboard cut-outs of a smiling Joe Montana.

Briefly, we contemplated grabbing some pillows and blankets from home furnishings, slicing open some cheap sci-fi videos from the bargain rack, liberating some junk food from a bin, and making ourselves a gloriously adolescent fort. We could imagine the service announcements: "will the stoners in aisle seven please get out of the Coca-Cola?" So, we contented ourselves with its beauty. It was beautiful.

Further back in the store was a smaller scale temple, this one made out of various Budweiser products, arranged around a small replica of a football field. The colors of the cases, though, were not nearly as grand -- mostly muted grays, and not very visually exciting. At the near side of the field was a small bench, flanked by some poles, creating an impromptu field goal.

This afternoon, Tommy and I returned to the store to pick up the film we dropped off. I brought my Polaroid with me to document the Coke tower and Bud football field.

"Oh, is that for a project?" an employee asked, as I framed a shot of the tower.

"Nah, I just think it's pretty."

Heading back to the array of Bud, we discovered that the bench had been removed. The display didn't work anymore. I didn't take a picture. We walked past a small tower of Campbell's Soup cans forming a distinctive mechanical tapestry. I started to line up a shot. "It's been done," Tommy reminded me.

"Oh, yeah."

Instead, I took a picture of stacked Pepsi cases, not quite as ambitious as the Coke tower, but still gorgeous in its own way. Rothko may have it more right than Warhol.

We sat in the deli section and waited for the Polaroids to develop. Looking closely at the Coke tower, whose picture came out blurry due to too much light, we realized that the television had been taken out of the display. More coke cases had been stacked in its place. "Huh," Tommy shrugged.

"Somebody's gotta design this stuff, right?" I asked Tommy. "That thing with the Coke cases doesn't just happen. Do you think it's someone at the Coca-Cola corporation or the Super-K offices? Or maybe just somebody around here? I wonder if they think about it at all..."

"I'm sure they have fun. I mean somebody's gotta do it. Somebody had to take the television out and figure out what to put there." He paused. "It's like this... maybe... most Greek and Roman temples didn't have architects. I mean, people know a little bit about the builders, but the people who built them, they were just doing it because they thought it was right."

"What's that thing that Byrne says in 'True Stories'? 'Freeways are the cathedrals of our time'? It sounds like that. Who the fuck knows who designed a freeway loop? They're pretty grand."

The pure spectacle was dazzling, from stealth jets flying in formation over the stadium, to the various choreographed explosions that dotted the pregame show. I find sports to be boring, for the most part, because the tendency is to play strictly within rules. Deviance is punished. While there is an undeniable grace to great athletes, they are performing within extremely rigid boundaries. Commercials, and events like the Super Bowl, are a little more limitless, even if they tend towards bombastic shows of pomp. One must accept that as a guideline to the medium.

The point of advertising is to catch the consumer's eye by differentiating the advertised product from the rest of the pack. In other words, regardless of the financial or practical value of the product, the commercial designed to sell it must be somewhat innovative in order to succeed. There are rules in advertising, to be sure - established approaches can help push a product - but the trend is to try and transcend those rules. How else can anything be memorable?

It's a similar impulse that attracts me to improvised music -- and art in general, I guess. Granted, the difference between commercials and music is the intent, but even that's a murky issue. Emotional reaction is emotional reaction, right? The tendency is to socially deconstruct commercials. That's not always such a bad idea: the ends do fit the means. But, just as with literature, that often robs the work of some amount of beauty. It's definitely one way of looking at it, but there are others: the manipulation of symbols can be a beautiful and evocative thing. Instead of haggling over why commercials invoke certain symbols, why not think about how they call specific emotions to consciousness?

It can also be mystical, in a way. Just as one can surrender himself to a Rothko in order to access a certain kind of emotion, one can also surrender himself to a commercial - or a series of commercials - in order to access something, or a series of things: thirst, hunger, lust, pride. These are base emotions, but the best commercials can get at something more.

At their best, they are sensational vignettes. That's not to suggest that they should supplant art in whatever guise one wishes to assign it, or that one should watch television instead o reading, but maybe to view the world with a little more wonder. In these weird times, saving one's cynicism for something more heinous - such as the root mindset that produces the ads to begin with - could prove to be a thrifty and economical venture.

I had just reached a serenity with this conclusion, zoning into a deeply tranquil psychic state during the Aerosmith-led half-time show, when it was suddenly brutally shattered.

Moments after Walk This Way faded out, a commercial began. Digitally aged images of people playing football in a yard came on and delicately familiar piano figures filtered in. Then an almost whispered voice: "Just a perfect day, problems all left alone, weekenders on our own... it's such fun." The last time I had heard the song was with the first rays of the rising sun creeping in through the windows of my room about 36 hours earlier. The football images continued as the song exploded into chorus: "oh, it's such a perfect day, I'm glad I spent it with you."

I stared in utter disbelief. I was angry, pissed beyond comprehension, that Perfect Day was being used to peddle... well, what exactly was it being used to peddle? "Make it stop," I groaned to Tommy. The ad was placed by the National Football League as some sort of sentimental message of encouragement from league officials. It wasn't really an ad so much as an affirmation that this - football: playing, watching - was a sort of an emotionally resonant tradition. Which, of course, it is -- though not for me.

Even with some snide Marxist crap about hegemony to call to arms, that still doesn't seem right. As irrelevant as it seems, Perfect Day probably just as well sums up the same thing for football fans on Super Bowl Sunday as it does for me at six o'clock on a snowy morning.

Artistically, it probably fits in with the commercial just as well, though in a more sinister way than one would expect out of a spot like that. "Just a perfect day, you make me forget myself," Reed croaked through the television, "I thought I was someone else... someone good." Accompanied by images of grown adults playing football in a backyard, the line calls to mind the dream of being a pro. There's no getting around the dark escapism of it: just as longing and troubled as Reed intended it.

Jesse Jarnow wants to get with you. Only you. And your sister. He thinks her name is Debra. Whoa, whoa, whoa.