BRIAN LIBBY

Cheating on the Pepsi Challenge

The other day I was talking with somebody about brand identity, the way in which we form loyalties to company brands. 'Brand' is a term that gets thrown around a lot in business and marketing circles, of course, and it's long been a fascinating concept for me. That's probably because, particularly as a child but to a lesser extent even today, I've always been one to patronize certain products and companies over and over again. Sometimes there are good reasons. Sometimes there aren't - like when I pathetically resorted to duplicity simply to prove to the world that I preferred Coke to Pepsi. Which, as it happens, wasn't even true.

Many of us remember the successful marketing campaign Pepsi waged in the early 1980s. Challenging viewers to take a blind taste-test against Coke went at their more popular rival soft drink in the best way possible: by attacking the mystique itself. A recent study named Coca-Cola as the most popular worldwide brand, and I think it was probably true back then as well. A lot of people probably have been loyal to Coke over the years versus Pepsi for reasons other than the taste of the cola itself. Coke has always seemed like the more original and therefore authentic soft drink. Its very name is used as a verb denoting not just the brand, but the thing itself. A 'coke' means a cola just as to 'xerox' means to make copies or a 'kleenex' can mean any tissue.

As a kid, I picked up on and responded strongly to that undercurrent long before I knew anything about marketing. I was fiercely loyal to Coca-Cola versus Pepsi. I also felt the same about McDonald's versus Burger King, Ford versus Chevrolet, and a host of other corporate brand showdowns. I was an advertiser's dream, buying into certain brands unequivocally and committed myself to them like a teenager in 1941 eager to volunteer for the draft. And while today I'm of course a little less naive as an adult to the insipidity of the corporate machine and the sometimes not so inspiring realities behind  brand making, I still am a sucker for certain companies' work, deserving or not, be it BMW or Sony or Apple.

But back to the Pepsi Challenge. Not only was this campaign waged on TV, where people were of course shown to choose Pepsi over Coke in mass movement taking place across America, but the company actually embraced a grassroots approach in which Pepsi Challenge booths were held at a host of festivals and fairs around the country. Each year in July my small hometown, McMinnville, held its annual "Turkey Rama", a three-day fair with main street closed to traffic and lined with stands from various local businesses, pronto pup (a.k.a. "corn dog") stands operated by local Elks, Lions and Kiwanis club members, and the usual assortment of Captain Funtastic carnival rides like The Scrambler (my personal favorite), The Sky Diver (a ferris wheel with spinning carriages), and The Spider (which I nearly barfed on during my one and only childhood ride).

I was very excited to see there was a Pepsi Challenge booth. This was the chance to show the Coca-Cola Company and its current spokesman, Mean Joe Greene of my beloved Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers (I carried his autograph around in a padlocked briefcase, but still managed to lose it), that I was a fellow guzzler of Coke. If I dared to willingly drink Pepsi, I reasoned, it would inevitably be a slippery slope until I committed that even greater horror of horrors: becoming a Dallas Cowboys fan. I had to show what side I was on.

But this was of course a blind taste test. After standing in line for several minutes, my heart beating out of my chest with nervousness before this moment of truth at Turkey Rama, I sat down at the little yellow booth with two unmarked Dixie cups of cola. ('Dixie cup' being another brand that's crossed over from proper noun into a catch-all regular synonym for any tiny paper cup.) I swirled the bubbly fluid of each sample in my mouth like a vintner sizing up his new batch of Merlot. I wasn't thinking about which I liked better, but which was more likely to be Coke. I remember the panic setting in as I realized I couldn't tell any difference. I'd have to just guess.

"You chose...Pepsi Cola!" I still remember the way the woman from the Pepsi Challenge booth jumped up an octave when she named her employer's brand as my selection. Her happiness at another conquest claimed for Pepsi burned into my young psyche like carbonated soda will corrode a penny.

But I hadn't worshiped the swirling red-and-white logo only to go down without a rematch. Heading to the back of the Pepsi Challenge line, pronto pup lunches and sneaker sales at Clubhouse Athletics be damned. This time I was determined to choose Coke.

And that's when you could say I either (a) caught a break, or (b) became even more desperate and diabolical. While standing in line, I noticed that the woman conducting the Pepsi Challenge was simply switching the Coke and Pepsi samples back and forth without any variation. As I neared the testing seat, I carefully monitored the rhythm of sample-switching with laser-like focus. I still was worried as I swirled the samples again, thinking I could be the case where she finally abandoned her simplistic switching pattern. But then I heard her voice say with a dourness that was music to my ears, "You chose...oh, Coca-Cola."

And with that, I had safely proved my mettle to my Coca-Cola overlords. But I'd done so with a George Costanza-like ruthlessness and amorality. Or maybe I should say George Bush-like. After all, what I did to Pepsi in about 1982, he did to the country in 2000, and possibly 2004. As it happens, I'm now drinking what seems like several gallons of caffeine free Diet Pepsi per week -- or whichever brand happens to be on sale. I'm not exempt from brand worship, though. As I write this post from an antique PC with the speed of a tortoise, I dream not of how the Apple I plan to buy will work more efficiently for me, but how cool it'll look on my desk, and how I'll be aligned with a perceived cooler, hipper, more loyal customer base than the likes of HP and Compaq and Microsoft. Or then again, maybe it all comes back to the fact that my first computer was an Apple II Plus on which I played many a game of Frogger.

Travel's push-pull effect (Part Two)

Reading a week later what I wrote in flight from Dulles to Portland, I cringe a little inside.

To read about my trip, or at least the attitude I had coming home, you’d think I had a terrible time. But the trip was for the most part a total success. I had a wonderful time going to my friend Mike’s wedding near Charlottesville, Virginia, which I neglected to even mention the first time around, even though it was the whole reason I went on the trip. 

After checking into a Holiday Inn in Charlottesville on an unseasonably hot sunny Sunday afternoon, I headed west on Interstate 64 for the evening wedding in my Saturn Ion rental car. The sudden beauty of the territory unfolding was a surprise. I’d driven for two hours the day before from Dulles airport near Washington down to Charlottesville. For the most part, it was not a great view, with the usual peppering of strip malls and gas stations. Even when I’d see a farm it never felt like I was truly away from the city. But heading west on the way from Charlottesville to the winery where Mike’s wedding was being held, it seemed in the golden late-afternoon light as if the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley were suddenly  bursting onto a stage.

The wedding itself was a delight, too. It was very informal, with a cocktail hour before the ceremony on the deck of the winery, overlooking the vineyards and the mountains at sunset (groom mingled, bride stayed in hiding). There was so much good feeling at the wedding that it was hard to muster an iota of cynicism, which is a nice antidote to how I feel most of the time. It more than worth the discomfort of my tight-fitting suit trousers.

Before the ceremony I chatted with two old friends, Rich and John, with whom Mike (the groom) and I lived in Jersey City after college in about 1996. Along with a group of several others, we occupied two adjoining apartments that were part of a decaying three-story brownstone off Grove Street, about two PATH train stops from the World Trade Center in Manhattan.  There was also a seemingly dopey guy who never remembered to flush and still (at 23) called his father “Daddy“ but seemed to be doing well in the advertising industry. I also remember a Jersey-girl (whose accent I ceaselessly immitated behind her back) working in the fashion industry whom Mike briefly dated, and an aspiring chef named Kate who ended up marrying a landscaper in Nantucket after a sojourn in dot-com-era San Francisco at a now defunct tech industry magazine. Kate also made some very yummy Sunday night dinners; one of which I remember contributing a risotto to after having just worked for a few months at Nick's Italian Cafe in McMinnville following graduation.

A couple years before Jersey City, Mike was a Godsend of a roommate after having a hellacious time the year before. Returning to NYU in January 1994 after a year and a half off from college, I'd been randomly paired with this absolute asshole from Tokyo who'd come into our room in the middle of the night when I was sound asleep, turn on all the lights, and begin snapping and folding his laundry, with the TV on in the other room loud enough that he could here it a few feet from my bedside. Then he'd call home to Japan and shout into Japanese. So finding Mike for my senior-year roommate at the Third Avenue North dorm at NYU - a guy for the most part likely to be OK with lights off and silence in the middle of the night, was great. I also gained a friend and even a fellow Oregon Ducks supporter. When Oregon made it to the Rose Bowl that year, their first since 1957, he got almost as excited as I did. I remember going out for a celebratory dinner at BBQ on 2nd Avenue.

Rich and John, who I talked with at the wedding, were both recent Syracuse grads and aspiring illustrators back when we lived together in Jersey City. I remember when Rich had his first career coup getting to illustrate the cover of the Fairfield County Weekly in Connecticut. This being the election year of ‘96, the illustration depicted Bob Dole giving a number-one sign with his finger, but with Jack Kemp holding up his arm. He soon went to work at a big NYC ad agency and, 11 years later, is married with a kid on the way. Jon freelanced his first drawings for the Wall Street Journal when we lived together, and now is on staff there. Rich and Jon also were the first people I ever met who designed web pages.

The reason I’d originally planned to stay until Tuesday after a Sunday-night wedding was to explore the area around Charlottesville, particularly the Thomas Jefferson-designed architectural landmarks at the University of Virginia and Monticello. But with the heat in the 90s and high humidity, and my having not even a hat or sunscreen to protect my Nordic, extremely heat-sensitive skin, I knew any visits I made would have to be brief.

The casualty of leaving a day early was that I had to pass up Monticello. But I did have time to see the university. At 10:00 in the morning, it was already so hot that sweat was pouring down my face like Robert Hays in Airplane! as he takes the jet’s controls. Luckily the quad I’d come to see had some built-in shading. The school’s library, with its massive circular rotunda and Roman columns, sits like the head of the household at a rectangular dinner table. All around the perimeter, clad in contrasting red brick with more white columns, are student residences complete with traditional old rocking chairs. When I wasn’t mopping my brow, it looked spectacular.

After that, though, I pretty much got in the car and drove to Dulles.

It’s when I got home from that aforementioned trip, though, that my thoughts of it began to change. It’s a pattern I see so often in myself and virtually anyone else that travels. At the beginning and end of it, you’ve got to get there. And particularly if it involves flying, you’re in for an enormous hassle, even if everything technically goes according to plan. Somewhere in the middle, you have the experience itself. But going into and coming out of the trip, one’s perspective is inevitably skewed by the combination of stress and boredom accompanying long trips.

Make no mistake: I feel profoundly fortunate and enriched by the chance to have gone to many different places over the last handful of years. Just don’t ask me about it while I’m enmeshed in it at 38,000 feet, in between places to sleep.

Travel's push-pull effect (Part One)

Before long, we will make our descent down from the plane’s cruising altitude of 38,000 feet. Four and a half hours have gone by in this 5.5-hour flight, and it’s gone by more quickly than most. Besides, the Romanian husband and wife next to me have been traveling for 24 hours straight. They’re loving the inflatable neck pillows right now as they snooze away. I just want the turbulence to stop. Every bump sends my mind a so-far mercifully incorrect message: we’re going down.

The flight I’m on wasn’t the one I originally booked. I was supposed to return from Charlottesville, Virginia, where I’d gone for my college roommate Mike’s wedding, on a flight tomorrow. But yesterday afternoon, huddled in my room at the Holiday Inn from the unseasonably 90-degree October heat gripping the East Coast, I decided parting with a C-note was worth it for the chance to be in my own bed a night sooner. But it wasn’t just the heat.

Travel is a constant push-pull effect in my life. When at home, I constantly look at my thousands of travel photos and spend hours in the basement editing video shot on various trips. For Valarie and me, imagining and planning our next destination is a constant topic. In the last three or four years, mostly with her but sometimes without, I’ve been to a host of countries, some of them multiple times: England, France, Japan, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, The Bahamas, Scotland, Sweden. (I suppose England and Scotland probably only count as one, Great Britain, but I still think of them as seperate. They do, after all, have separate soccer teams.)

But there are also times like last year, in the first stages of my Japan trip. We’d completed about two-thirds of the 11-hour flight from Portland to Tokyo, but a passenger’s medical emergency (which turned out to be nothing) meant that we had to turn around the plane and fly to Anchorage, Alaska for the night. In the couple hours it took us to return eastward, I actually got it in my mind that I wanted to catch a plane in Anchorage back to Portland. I’d been so depressed about leaving home that I was ready to turn down what to many (including myself) would be a dazzling journey. Japan is quite possibly even my favorite country in the world to visit. But the gloom that overcame me in the days leading up to the trip, and as we flew out of PDX, was incredibly difficult to overcome. Thankfully there was the surreal pleasure of watching a plane load of largely Asians taking photos in the empty Anchorage airport in front of a gigantic taxidermied polar bear.

On one hand, I’ve since an early age had a romantic sense of wanderlust. I’ve always had the mindset of a collector, and I think of the places I visit as my ultimate collection. Notice how eager I was to rattle off the list of countries I’d been to a couple paragraphs ago? I even add up the number of countries my parents, friends and Valarie have been to, as if it’s some kind of competition.

But I’m also an unequivocal creature of habit. I find solace in having a sense of how the day will unfold. I’m not fond of surprises. I can see in my mind most days a succession of espressos, walks in the neighborhood, cooking dinner, watching a little soccer on TV, and perhaps best of all, regular visits from our cat to a spot on my chest as I lay on the sofa. When I’m removed from my little lair on Mulberry Street, I often start getting depressed a few days before it’s time to leave.

Of course some of this has to do with the exhausting marathon of travel. When I was a kid, my dad would regularly leave his day job at the restaurant for Air Force reserve trips. (Talk about a schizophrenic existence: making turkey sandwiches and taking out the garbage to analyzing satellite and spy-plane reconnaissance photos.) I remember telling him as a kid how envious I was about getting on an airplane a few times a year, and clearly in some way that rubbed off on me a lot. At one point I remember him saying, “Once you fly a few times, it becomes just like a bus ride.” I strongly doubted I’d ever become that cynical. But air travel does really, really suck sometimes. The waiting is endless, the environments saccharine and confining. Even on a great international trip, at the beginning and end of it you always wonder a bit if it was worth it.

If there’s a silver lining here, perhaps it’s that I need both the push and pull of travel. There’s a born hermit in me, I think, looking to spend my days in the basement editing video with my parents’ old stereo playing the classical station. But what am I editing down there? Travel footage. And after every trip, I neglect several days of work to edit my still-camera pictures. You could say I’m obsessed with documenting these excursions. And if I stop traveling, I’ll run out of material.

Once on vacation I said half-jokingly to Valarie, “I can’t wait until this trip is over so I can remember it fondly.” Like, the trip to Charlottesville I cut short this weekend? I can’t wait to upload my photos of the Thomas Jefferson-designed University of Virginia rotunda. When I took the pictures, it was so hot even at 10AM that the sweat coming down my forehead and scalp began seeping into my eyes and making it difficult to see. But in the picture, I’ll only see the architecture, and the blue sky made even bluer by my camera’s polarizing filter.

In perhaps even better news, though, the captain has turned on the fasten seat-belt sign, and we’ve begun our descent. They hope we’ve had a pleasant journey. As always, I haven’t and I have.

Albums and songs

A few days ago The Oregonian ran a story about what songs different noteworthy Portlanders listened to on their i-Pods. Two of them were friends, John Jay of Wieden + Kennedy and developer Randy Rapaport. And a third, writer Diana Abbu-Jabber, is a longtime colleague who I remember chatting with at many a movie screening when we were reviewing, her for The Oregonian and me for Willamette Week.

There was also a list from governor Ted Kulongoski, who favors Rolling Stones songs, and new Blazer Channing Frye, whose choices included Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar On Me". (Hopefully his jump shot is a lot better than that song.)

I knew my friend Randy would choose at least one Flaming Lips song - the man is devoted to that band like jihadists are to the Koran. He actually went with two, "A Spoonful Weighs A Ton" and "Chewin' the Apple of Yer Eye" - the only person besides the governor to pick two songs by one artist.

It was also especially a treat reading about one of John's Choices, "The Breaks" by Kurtis Blow:

"I am just starting my career in fashion marketing at Bloomingdale's. New York is completely alive from the party music of hip-hop in the Bronx to the emerging art scene and new wave music. I am sitting in the studio of Antonio Lopez, the greatest fashion illustrator of our time, while 'The Breaks' fills the studio. Antonio introduces me to break dancers he has discovered and sent to Paris to perform."

The i-Pod is as relevant in my life as it seems to be in so many other people's. I'm listening to it as I write this (Elvis Costello's Imperial Bedroom is playing currently), and the ear buds are in for much of my day while I work, when I go for a walk, and when I drive.

There are of course lots of individual songs that I love, by artists ranging from Chuck Berry to Wham! to Sonny Rollins to Bananarama. But if you look at my top 25 list on i-Tunes, most all of them come from those albums that I listen to more or less start to finish.

Yesterday, imagining a kind of alternative list to those in the Oregonian feature, I sat down with my laptop in front of my CD collection, which numbers about 500. There are also Valarie's discs I pick and choose from, which are about the same in number. Out of those 1000 or so CDs, I made a list of the albums that I either listen to regularly and/or am reasonably likely to want to listen to in their entirety at some point in the not to distant future. Although any time I look at the list I wind up removing a record or two and/or adding some as well, my current list consists of 85 albums.

The first noticeable thing about the list is that there are more than twice as many Beatles albums as those by anyone else. I chose seven: Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's, the 'White Album', Abbey Road, and Let It Be. I really should have also added Help! and A Hard Day's Night, both of which I've listened to in their entirety scores of times. The #1 song on my i-Tunes list, "It's All Too Much", is from Yellow Submarine, which I don't really ever listen to all the way because there's a lot of scoring from the movie in the second half.

The next closest multi-album artist, of which there are three, has three albums: The Clash (Combat Rock, London Calling, Sandinista!), Elvis Costello & The Attractions (Armed Forces, Imperial Bedroom, Get Happy!), and jazz virtuoso Roland Kirk (The Inflated Tear, Volunteered Slavery, Domino). I could easily have added at least one to the Costello list (This Year's Model) if not three or four more. Same goes for Roland Kirk (Rip, Rig & Panic).

There are 15 artists with two albums on my list, and once again, many could have had more. For XTC, the English new wave band I fell in love with in college, I chose two seminal early albums, Black Sea and English Settlement. But I also often listen to Drums and Wires and several others.

The Police were also tough. I added Synchronicity and Outlandos D'Amour as start-to-finish listens, but on another day I might add Regatta de Blanc instead. With Nirvana I chose Nevermind and Unplugged In New York, only reluctantly leaving In Utero off the list. Fugazi also placed two, the later-career Red Medicine and In On the Kill Taker. All their albums are excellent, though. I could say the same about Thelonious Monk, whose albums Straight, No Chaser and Brilliant Corners I still listen to frequently.

Other artists seemed to more clearly have enough with two: A Tribe Called Quest's The Low End Theory is a bona fide masterpiece, and Beats, Rhymes & Life is superb. But I'd argue their other records don't hit that same mark. I also liked American Music Club best after they moved into a richer, more complex sound with Mercury and San Francisco (made with the terrific producers Mitchell Froom and Joe Chicarelli) from the sort of industrial folk they'd been doing earlier - although there are some gems in that period, too, like California and Everclear.

There's probably no album I've listened to more in the last few months than The Shins' Wincing The Night Away, and their previous effort, Chutes Too Narrow, is great too. I imagine someday I'll get more into their first record, but it's not a start-to-finish, regular-rotation album for me right now.

But there are also plenty of cases where I chose one album by an artist, but I love that album a lot. Mingus Ah Um by Charles Mingus absolutely blows me away every time I hear it. If I had to pick the single greatest jazz record I've ever heard, this might be it. Yet Mingus tends to re-record many versions of the same songs, though, so I never feel quite as compelled to listen to, say, Blues and Roots or the excellent Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus all the way through.

Although I have absolutely zero-point-zero-zero (0.00) interest in Elton John's contemporary work, or even stuff he made in the last twenty-five or thirty years, when I was growing up my mom often played his first volume of greatest hits. Part of me wants to call it a guilty pleasure, but I never tire of songs like "Bennie and the Jets" and "Daniel". I also confess to loving Sir Elton's personal style in those days, before he was a fat old guy belting out songs for Disney soundtracks.

As I've been writing this post, after the Costello album somehow I started playing the Top 25 playlist upon looking for the spelling of one of the songs. In a couple of cases, the songs have stopped me from what I'm writing to either bob my head or just space out. Just a few seconds ago "Last Living Souls" from Gorillaz' Demon Days did that.

Years ago I remember watching a documentary on Damon Albarn. He was recording a string section and kept getting frustrated and surly with the classical players, because he was having a hard time getting to play in a different way, with more bounce like dance music called for and less of the strict sharpness that classical playing requires. In the show, Albarn looked like a pompous jerk in his Mickey Mouse sweatshirt and holier than thou rock star attitude. But I must admit: the strings on "Last Living Souls" have an exquisite circular sense of the looping beat that I've never heard from classical musicians before.

As much as I like lists and stats like the ones i-Tunes provides, or that I make myself with the laptop in front of my increasingly dusty CD shelves, I know they're never completely accurate. For example, there are only two classical albums on my start-to-finish list, a recording of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and one of Shostakovitch's Piano Quartet & Trio by The Borodin Trio. But I know I listen to a lot more classical than I used to. I guess it's still hard to make it through entire albums, though. And classical is much better to me live. On CD I feel like I'm always turning the volume up and down - it never sounds quite right.

The beauty of these stats, though, is that they're always fluid and subject only to my own whims and tastes.