Difficult Music

When I’m standing at the bus stop, I hate how people in cars look at me like I’m an animal at one of those drive-through wildlife safari parks. When I visited San Diego Zoo as a kid I saw a gorilla nail a guy with a clod of poo (highlight of the trip, maybe even my entire childhood). If only one of my fellow great apes at the bus stop could take similar action against one of those looky-loos.

There’s this really bad bus ad for Adidas SL footwear (which look like you’ve got casts on both feet or are wearing thick plastic socks). It’s got a picture of the shoe in the middle and it’s surrounded by fake notebook scrawl creepily obsessing about how great these shoes are and how the writer must buy them when they’re released on April 17—“When I wear them, people will worship me” “My life begins 04/17” and so on. It’s some ad exec’s idea of being down with the kids these days, when in reality they’re just associating the product with a shallow, pathetic personality type.

(Nothing against Adidas here. But I wear Stan Smiths relieved that they'll probably never be advertised that way, if they're ever advertised at all.)

As with the Creeps and Losers campaign, I’m glad I’m not the only who notices these things. Twice I’ve seen this Adidas ad defaced in a fairily clever way. In one case someone had stuck a “Hello, my name is SLAVE LABOR” sticker to it. Today I saw it with a sticker that read “these shoes are for posers.” This is what I like to see. Conversation.