Because You Never Asked

(6/05)

     Could it be that one of the universe's most reliable laws is that we have our most lucid moments doing the most mundane things?

     One of my most traditional pursuits, as I enjoy my days by the Roman Sea, is to spend a goodly amount of time watching one of the most beautiful sporting spectacles there is, the French Open tennis championships. France is a synonym for good taste and the 2 weeks of telecasts from Paris, set into the unmistakable brick orange clay and deep green backdrop of the facility at Roland Garros, is a strong magnetic force for any tennis fan. Without even mentioning the Godly quality of the players, it is always an event of enduring beauty.

     One afternoon during the first week of competition, I was watching the 5^th set of a particularly compelling match with my literary guru, Pepin (see essay, "Spanish Writers Smoke"), and his youngest son, Pau. The tennis was spectacular and had claimed our attention. During one of the breaks, as is obligatory in the hyper-consumptive world we live in, the commercials began to roll.

     Ho-hum.

     The 3 of us, unconsciously, had expected to wind down a bit as the commercial fulfilled its role in the global economy. But the unconscious pays very little attention to our expectations and proceeded to drag us in another direction, so much so that the intensity of the commercial soon began to go beyond that of the tennis.

     When professional tennis players change sides they are given a one and a half minute break. Knowing this, we can surmise that the commercial in question ran for about 75 seconds. The common wisdom is that something slow moving has a tendency to psychologically make a specific time frame seem longer. Tweedle-dee, tweedle-dum, will it ever end? But this commercial seemed like a full length movie for just the opposite reason: it moved so quickly, it shot such an unquantifiable amount of images at us, that it seemed to go on forever. So much so, that in just one minute it spawned this essay and the bulk it represents.

     The film itself --- and I'd rather refer to it as that than as a commercial --- was shot with computer technology that is still recognizable in spite of its remarkably life-like

nature. It created a hybrid form of reality that might be described as 95 parts realistic and 5 parts animation. The film's scenario was a city that seemed to exist slightly into the

future, perhaps 50 years hence. The movement through this city began immediately,

never let up, never moved in a straight line for very long, its twists and turns, at times, even seemed to exist in a dimension beyond human conception. But it wasn't just us, the  viewers, traveling through this urban landscape; everything around us was also moving. The pace was frenetic. There was a chaotic quality that belied the fact that nothing was out of place, a rational form always held true, there were no accidents or mishaps, no malfunctions. Things were being super-imposed, taken away, accelerated, slowed down, appeared and disappeared, horizontalized, verticalized, diagonalized, and it was all set into a motif reminiscent of Dali, Picasso, Peter Max and Andy Warhol. For you art critics who might find such a combination unlikely, I won't disagree, but the film had a quality of both extreme reality and extreme abstraction that seemed to coexist.

     In any event, the stimuli bombardment was prodigious, in spite of the fact that the spoken word was used hardly at all.

     Within a few seconds after the film's initiation, all eyes were glued to the screen as we received --- almost against our will --- the dense imagery. About 25 seconds in, this tunnel vision concentration was not broken when I mumbled, without any particular target, "boy, they sure put more effort into the commercials than the programming". Although there was no overt response from my companions, in much the same way the images from the screen were being received, I knew my message had gotten through.

     About 10 more seconds went by before I spoke again, this time with more purpose. "Does anyone have any idea what it's for?" Once again, the absence of any visible response did not muddle the fact that none of us had any idea. Ten seconds more and I could not help but say, primarily to myself, "what are they selling us here?" By now we could all feel the film reaching its conclusion and our concentration level grew more tightly wound as we leaned forward to get the punch line.

     The whole fandango ended with the baritone voice of an English aristocrat saying something about "power to be" as the logo of a company called "BT" appeared on the screen. It dawned upon me that we had just watched a commercial spoken in English on a Spanish telecast of a French event.

     The 3 people involved in this story are all well educated and brought up in the more technologically developed parts of the world. If Pepin and myself, in our middle age

ways, are not quite body and soul with the explosion of communication technology in the last decade or so, the same cannot be said for Pau, a young man in his early 20's. Pau can work a computer with the same ease he combs his hair, and handles a cell phone like a gunslinger in the old west. When 3 people of this nature devote their full attention

to a commercial message and can't figure out what the product or message is . well, as the great coach of the Green Bay Packers, Vince Lombardi, once asked, "what the

hell is going on here?"

     The next game of tennis was hardly perceived as we rolled the matter over amongst us. Was it an electric company? Insurance? An energy conglomerate? An internet provider? Investments? I suggested, and not entirely in jest, that perhaps it was a commercial for nothing, meant only as a training device to keep us consumers glued to their messages (oh my God).

     None of this helped dissipate our ignorance and our consciousness eventually found its way back to the mundane world of the greatest tennis in the world.

     Ho-hum.

     As the idea for this essay began to take form, and I put myself to mull this over with some purpose, a dim recollection of an exclusive nobility of commercials meant only for a select group of high rolling "literati" --- something like an in joke for those who are initiated --- seemed to emerge foggily from the depths of my information banks. But I couldn't bring it into any clearer focus than that.

     My most plausible guess is the following: "BT" could be one of those vapor-like paper holding companies, like Enron used to be. Maybe it is just Enron reformed, rebuilt, and restructured, taking another stab at the same thing they screwed up the first time. Perhaps "BT" eats companies on one side of its organism, shits out other holdings through the anus of its opposite side, and supposedly makes hundreds of millions of dollars doing it . while the rest of us get up and go to work.

     The frightening part is this: a few people are telling us things they understand and we don't, but they want us to hear it . for reasons only they know. (Cue the theme music from the movie "Jaws".)

     Post Script: My friend Pau did a search on the web. BT is an internet, broad band (whatever that means) company that keeps big corporations connected 24-7-365 and provides security for their data banks. What else they might be is open to question and the fact that we've established some identity for BT does not undermine "my most plausible guess". My confidence in its plausibility is still intact.