This entry comes via an e-mail from Matt. Apparently I had to see this. Check it out for yourself before I go on because anything I say on the matter will be utterly useless if you don’t.
Friends don’t let friends trip alone. The inexplicable terror of the otherness of time, to borrow the cocktails-at-seven phrase from Freud, has overwhelmed this television ad in many ways. Forty-odd years later it seems like an odd relic of some civilization of indeterminable musical taste and choice in travel. Most haunting of all might be the realization that it was our civilization.
It’s Sunday night, and Mad Men won’t be around until next August. I know what you’re thinking—-what am I going to do with all this time? In honor of 2012, why not revisit Sigmund Freud’s 1915 text, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.” It touches on the difficulties of imagining our own death—-and, somehow, sheds light on why a filmic imagining of our own death will always require our survival.
