Glenn Kubish

Televised professional basketball might be the perfect sport for automobile makers to exercise their free speech. Ten men, ten big men, I mean, ten big, fast men constrained in a wooden frame, stopping, starting, driving, colliding. The squeak of braked shoes. The whistle of policed calls. A flurry of colour. And then it stops. And then it starts. And starts. Reminds you of real life on the road: 53 on the key on the Deerfoot And then, mercifully, the NBA goes to commercial. And the sense of claustrophobiasketball resolves itself in the road to joy as Mazda, Honda, Jeep, Scion and Infiniti take viewers for a ride. Where the game in the paint is so much zone or man-on-man, the car commercials are pure breakaway. Translated back into the grammar of the game, car commercials are LeBron and only LeBron. No opposing team. That's because car commercials are notable for the distinct lack of what makes driving cars so annoying: other cars. In the tonight's Mazda CX-3 com...

You can see transparency everywhere these days. Politicians invoke it, social media pundits praise it, journalists make it their calling, everyone seems to trade in it. Even the beauty industry is getting into the act. There is a new L'Oreal Paris television ad for the company's Volumizing Power 24 Hour Mascara Brush that's now running. And running fast. It is a vivid, highly produced message, a mixture of tight shots of a model's luscious, thick-lashed eye and bold, moving, colour graphics. Funky fonted words, including VOLUME and COLLAGEN, leave me with the suggested equation that this mascara stick = this model's eyes. Except that's not the whole story. Because four brief times in the commercial is a disclaimer, written in footnote-size type, that what you see isn't quite what you get. "Lashes were enhanced in post-production and filmed with lash inserts." Or, with volume up: "Lashes were enhanced in post-production and filmed ...

It was a modern communications moment, complete with the immediate dissection. I was driving by a clever billboard near the Calgary International Airport. It was a giant ad for Chinook Centre that read something like, "We're Ready For Your Runway!" It made me smile, a reaction itself which is notable given that I was in communication with an inanimate object, so, a big check for the designer! Just as quickly, though, the giant sign was behind me, waiting for the next driver to come into its field, and another thought presented itself. It was a vague thought, more of a picture in my mind, really, and the picture or the form was of a giant, unblinking eye. And as I glanced in my rearview mirror, I felt for a brief second a bit robbed. Not in the sense that the ad took my money, or even that it took the attention I willingly gave it. But robbed in the sense that the punctuating laugh seemed to give the encounter a sense of a real bit of communication. But there the du...