What I'm playing at

I've been busy with the "Synesthesia" project all week, so I haven't gotten around to parsing the SB ads yet.

(Incidentally, we got a decent review from nytheatre.com.)

Also, I must confess to an utter absense of enthusiasm for watching them again. In this month's Harper's, Jonathan Lethem has a great piece on (and which is a) plagiarism, wherein he adopts Lewis Hyde's concept of art as a "gift," which cannot properly ever be "stolen." He goes on to say that even the best ads can never be art, because "an ad has no status as a gift; i.e., it's never really for the person it's directed at."

Ironically, it is precisely this absence of personal value which I think makes TV spots a good place to start an analysis of contemporary film grammar. There is a mechanical, disembodied feel to commercial filmmaking; analyzing ads is like diagraming simple sentences in grade school: Who the hell really cared what those sentences were about?