Of Phones and Supermen: A Brief Interlude from Wednesday Poetry

Last night, my brother Joe and I were talking on the phone about (here's the jab of postmodern irony) phones. I mentioned my love for those old Nokia clunkers that could do only three things: make calls, send texts, and let you play that really cool game where the snake eats the apples. Joe may have said something about replacing his cell phone with a clay tablet, a stylus, and a pterodactyl. We both agreed, though, that cell phones have created the best of times and the worst of times.

You can contact people easily, but you can't get away from them. You can have your phone with you everywhere (great for emergencies), but people don't understand that there are reasons as to why you're not answering your phone (meetings, conferences, driving, rendered incoherent courtesy of a fever...need I go on?).

Oh, and have we mentioned that there are places cell phones don't work? Such as subway tunnels or random valleys across the Pennsylvania wilds?

Not only that, cell phones have changed the way our culture works, and I thought about this when I read this morning's Pearls before Swine strip (which is the work of Stephan Pastis). Goat says that he misses phone booths, and Rat--always having a snide comment--retorts with a rhetorical question: "Who needs stupid phone booths when everyone has a cell phone?" In the next panel, Goat and Rat glance over their shoulders toward Superman, a single emo tear dangling from his eye as he pulls open his Clark Kent garb to reveal his logo. Rat then says, "Forgot about that guy."

Yes, I understand that the iPhone 4 has come to Verizon, and I'm sure that its successor, the iPhone 5, will allow us to communicate anywhere across time and space, brew fresh tea or coffee on the go, hover over our shoulders and whisper financial advice into our ears, and...well, you get the picture. Regardless, there are some things that phones, despite their seemingly Kryptonian capabilities, cannot do. Walk into a tunnel, lose signal, and your super iPhone becomes a clunky iPod touch.

And besides--enough of our pop culture figures rely on phone booths and their cousins, police boxes, to save the world time and again.

Once upon a Time, There Was a Ralph Lauren [stereotype-laden] Fairy Tale...

Well, Ralph Lauren has decided that apparently there's something to all the hype about children's lit. After all, their most recent children's catalogue is an interactive Flash video modeled after a storybook.

Harry Connick, Jr. narrates The RL Gang: A Fantastically Amazing School Adventure, which puts stylish kids in Ralph Lauren designs against backdrops that appear as either paper cutouts or chalk drawings. And if one listens to the stories, they're...well, hardly fantastic.

Willow, the first child shown in the video, represents the extreme of this back-to-school fantasy; she resembles a modern day Robin Hood with her hat--a style that, no doubt, is not about to earn her any props on the playground. (It may, however, clinch her the lead in the elementary school's production of Peter Pan!) The other children in the video become less stylized and seem poised to sell Ralph Lauren's brand of cultural and ethnic identities to school children.

Clothes--yes, they certainly can be exciting, especially for fashionistas and those who enjoy a nice, new sweater. But these kids are being dressed up like their 20-something equivalents. There's Jasper, whose polo shirt, baseball mitt, and wavy blonde hair make him look like he's about to go recruiting for TKE. (Thank your lucky stars that his collar *isn't* popped.) Then Mae, the Asian girl, who wears a sweater over a collared shirt; it's as if the RL ad department has already relegated her to a life of crunching numbers and whipping out laptops or TI-83s whenever a problem appears. The worst of the lot, though, is Zoe, an African American girl with large, frizzed hair forced under a knit cap; her hair sags down around the sides of her face like Snoopy ears, and she's dressed in a flannel shirt under what appears to be a black, pleather bomber's jacket.

Ralph Lauren is dolling kids up as stereotypes before they're even old enough to understand what they're lampooning. But--if that weren't enough--you can click on each child's image and open their closet, which can help parents foist these fashions (er, stereotypes) on their kids. Or, just buy the hardcover book!

All this from the world's "first shoppable storybook," a narrative catalogue in stereotypes. Respond as you will.