Monday, April 04, 2011

Strange Advertisement

A few blocks down from my apartment is a big complex that is mostly inhabited by students at my school. Out front is a sign that caught my eye a few weeks ago because of its nonsensical slogan:


Live like you "Mean" it!

It's a weird slogan to begin with (don't I really mean it? how am I living now? what does it mean to mean living, anyway?), and not improved by the scare quotes.

Then I started looking at the picture more closely:


Now, here we have these four...college students, I guess. But this picture is so weird. Notice the following:

  • At least three, possibly all four, are wearing oversized sunglasses.
  • Both of the boys are carrying helmets.
  • Three of them are wearing large headphones of the kind people use almost exclusively at home.
  • All humans come in couples.
  • The way a couple walks is that the boy puts his arm around the girl and then she reaches up near where her neck and his arm meet.
  • The boy on the left is wearing a sleeveless hoodie and a very slender bracelet.
  • The boy on the right appears to also be wearing at least one, and possibly two, bracelets.
  • 75% of the people pictured are wearing hats. (Note that both boys are wearing hats in addition to carrying helmets.)
  • At least one girl has rollerblades; both boys seem to have skateboards attached to their backs.
  • The girl on the right is disturbingly narrow from the waist down, and has the hips of an 11-year-old boy.
Who are these people? Why are they all dressed/accessorized so similarly? Are they living like they "mean" it?

5 comments:

rvman said...

The woman on the right is just messed up, overall - where does her right arm go and how does her shirt stay up?

Apparently 'live like you mean it' means spend your time doing multiple simultaneous extreme sports in a construction zone (the headphone - sound muffling?) while dressed in skin-tight jeans, in the presence of a hetero-normative partner with dyed blond hair and an inordinate fondness for all things in the color range from blue-green to blue.

rvman said...

Oh, and you are white, I forgot that.

How many of the references are 'stuff white people like'?

rvman said...

Ah, I see what the right arm is doing - it is dipping behind the magically attached skateboard you mentioned.

Sally said...

And what's with the ID card around that guy's neck?

Tam said...

I'm thinking internship.