now i’m in (austin) with a broken heart
(or: april 22’s honey from the hive)
posted at 6:03 am by brandon in sweet you rock and sweet you roll
Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova —
“Broken Hearted Hoover Fixer Sucker Guy”
(from Once [Music from the Motion Picture]
I’m still in the process of processing my thoughts on ABC’s cavalier cancellation last week of their classic soaps All My Children and my old fave One Life to Live (which I’ve watched, practically uninterrupted, for twenty-three years now, so watch this space), but, in the meantime, an interesting sliver of a silver lining from this awful, awful news: multi-billion-dollar conglomerates are not exactly known for siding against their own, but in a rare show of solidarity with literally millions of heart-wrenched soap fans — a sizable number of whom, it should be noted, purchase (and utilize) his company’s products — a brilliant gentleman name of Brian Kirkendall, the vice president of marketing for The Hoover Company — whose vacuum cleaners have been hot sellers for over a century — announced on the company’s Facebook page that, exclusively because his wife and mother are fans of the ABC soaps, his company is pulling all advertising from the network, effective immediately. (Imagine that: a top-level executive putting his own personal integrity and conviction above the almighty dollar. Contrast that with the doofy dolts at ABC, who are, come fall, flushing a combined eighty years of television history down the drain in favor of a Mario Batali-starring reality show about food entitled The Chew, whose existence ABC Daytime president Brian Frons helpfully justified by explaining that the show will be easy to promote with The View, his network’s smash morning gabfest.) I’m not sure that anything will ultimately come of Hoover’s ballsy move (although mobilized fans are now bombarding other soap advertisers with requests for similar action, and I understand that Hershey is paying keen attention to the brouhaha), but it does my heart good to see anyone — even someone without a real dog in this particular hunt — standing up for the soaps. (A recently bought a vacuum cleaner for our household, and I’m sad to report that he chose a Bissell upright, but let it suffice to say that our next machine will be a Hoover. As for this seemingly odd song choice: it was the only vacuum-related song I could conjure up, but given how crushed I remain about this news a week after the fact, I find its content and subject matter to be not at all inapropos.)
