How far will we go for a laugh? 17 hours precisely.

Driving through the night, avoiding the countless roadside glassy eyes on the deer-rattled highway, we rolled into Portland, Oregon at 8 a.m. ready to laugh.  Anything will make you laugh when rumble strips become best friends rowdily assuring you that ‘everything’s going to be okay, and just to make sure of that we’re going to quietly alert you that you’re veering dangerously close to driving off this picturesque Oregon cliff’. 

Pop & Politics

Utilizing a mixture of multi-media, Pop & Politics played off of two tender facts.  One: that we have an obsession with pop culture, and two: we all have something grand to say about it.  Perhaps serving as a reminder that we’re not consuming unimportant news flashes and ‘I cant believe he/she said that’ quotes for no reason, comedian Jimmy Dore used cleverly edited clips that indicated just how ridiculous our consumption has become.  Yet, refreshingly or not, the fact is that we eat this up.  It seems that if there was a thesis of P&P (or a thesis of pop culture consumption in general) is that we truly need this stuff.  And I don’t use ‘stuff’ lightly.  It’s sugary water; mind pabulum. We need to watch a train-wreck of a former Two and Half Men star and his winning ways because that’s just interesting to us.  We love to laugh at Fox News casts and make fun of their ridiculous accusations and double-speak.  Why?  It’s difficult to say exactly.  Yet (and not to get too Noam Chomsky here) it seems to serve our apathy.  In some ways it is much more exciting to grab a People magazine than to floss through a heady Globe & Mail because it is not doing anything for us.  Pop & Politics was a witty live Daily Show with different hosts (filled out by a full-serve panel of unique personalities) and a reaction to absurd moments in our world and perhaps just how much we don’t care about real issues.  But moreover, it reminded us that the people who bring us the things we consume are happily ridiculous and just maybe, so are we.  And then there’s the best advertisement I’ve ever seen.