Hey, you own a soccer team that’s making money, just not from fans in the stands.  You hate those ugly TV shots that include action of your fabulous players watched by empty seats.  What’s a persuasive owner to do?

Those are vinyl sheets with the image of fans printed on them.  The seats beneath are empty, but if you’re watching on TV, you can’t really tell.

Give these guys a Peithos Award!

All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.

Screech.

Camille Paglia, the formerly great cultural critic who got Nietzsche and appeared to understand the Rules of Persuasion, confuses me with her screech on Lady Gaga.  Dr. Paglia seems to think persuasion and art is authentic, putting herself in opposition to me and Oscar Wilde.  Paglia’s main critical point is simple and obvious:

Lady Gaga is a manufactured personality, and a recent one at that.

Strike me deaf, dumb, and blind.  You mean Lady Gaga isn’t Lady Gaga in real life? She invented herself?  She didn’t spring fully forth emerging like Venus in the clam shell?

Hide the children, check your wallet, and get down on your knees.  The end of cultural criticism is near!

P.S. Note to Lady Gaga:  the next time Dr. Paglia requests a backstage pass, give her one.

The two primary Rules are:

1.  It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid.

2.  All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.

Steven Soderberg’s 2009 movie, The Girlfriend Experience, is an excellent demonstration of these two Rules.  The movie follows a successful call-girl working an escort service in New York.  While her work demonstrates the two Rules, the demands those Rule place upon her in her private life create significant problems.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist, persuasion maven, or commercial sex worker to realize that high priced call-girls don’t deliver just great sex, they deliver what the client wants – the Girlfriend Experience.  She tries to become the kind of girl the client would like to have as a girlfriend.  This goes beyond the client’s sexual fantasies to include important relational elements of trust, disclosure, support, and yeah, that sex thing.  But always:  It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid.

As long as Sasha Grey as the call-girl can keep her focus on this Rule, she’s great at her job and maintains, believe it or not, a successful and long-term live-in relationship with a guy who knows the truth about her work.  The dramatic conflict in the movie occurs when Sasha’s character wants to break the Second Rule and become Sincere.  She aches to connect with a client on a honest, interpersonal basis and she’s willing to risk her career and her current live-in relationship to break this Rule.

While the movie is a bit uneven in the script and in the acting, it is an interesting visualization of the Persuasion Rules.  Soderberg shoots it in a manner that mixes the stylishness of the Ocean movies with the roughness of sex, lies, and videotape.  The movie received wildly split reviews with most viewers disliking it.  You must bring a fair amount of interest, involvement, and interpretation to find it worth watching.  Of course, if it is assigned watching for your persuasion studies you might maintain interest if you like watching a genuine porn princess, Sasha Grey, perform in a mainstream movie!

While perusing a page at the Internet Movie Database for a friend who’s in show biz, I couldn’t help but look up my own listing.  Great news!

Wow.  My popularity is up over 500%.  Hey, baby, that’s a Huge Effect Size.  Lots more than Global Warming.  There must be a Michelle Pfeiffer film festival somewhere this week.

I’d like to thank my public for their renewed interest in my movie work.  When I finish my career as a famous writer, I may return to the screen although my first love is the boards.  You might remember me from “Arsenic and Old Lace.”  I played Dr. Einstein (the part that Peter Lorre butchered in the movie version).  Here’s a rehearsal shot to refresh your memory.

I have no idea why there’s teddy bear in my arm.  True, I did refuse to work with children or animals (a Rule of Show Business), but there are no children or animals in the play.  Perhaps the leading lady was throwing a fit that night and we were using a stand-in with some talent in her stead?  More likely I had my lines scribbled across the bear’s face.

. . . Slowly I turned . . . step by step . . . inch by inch . . .

Five, six, seven, eight!

Consider this FauxItAll synonym:  Ultracrepidarian.

The fabulous English essayist, William Hazlitt, coined up Ultracrepidarian in an impassioned counterattack essay he wrote defending his honor against his tormentor, William Gifford.  Gifford hated Hazlitt largely for political reasons which led Gifford to make nasty accusations that were both ignorant and stupid, but pleasing to Gifford’s philosophical allies.  Hazlitt spotlighted Gifford’s foolishness in a long, detailed reply artfully compressed in one word:  Ultracrepidarian.

According to the ever reliable Wikipedia, the derivation for Ultracrepidarian resides in the Ancient Roman writer, Pliny, who recounted a perfect and thus probably apocryphal tale about an even more Ancient Greek artist, Apelles, and his unnamed shoemaker over the quality of the artist’s work that terminates with the punch line:  “Ne sutor ultra crepidam”

Unfortunately, I did not take Latin in high school and worse still, Google Translator does not offer Latin as one of its dozens of language options (how is this possible, Google?), thus, I must rely on the Wikipedia writer who asserts the English translation to our punch line as:

A shoemaker ought not to judge beyond his own soles.

Which is a delightful way of describing someone who says more than he knows.

P.S. If you’ve never read Hazlitt, give him a look.  He’s as great a critic as Samuel Johnson and Hazlitt’s insights into Shakespeare are bright, unique, and thoughtful.  Plus, Hazlitt helped invent the role of “public intellectual” with all its beauty and blemish.  Check Hazlitt’s work at Gutenberg or the Internet Archive, particularly Table Talk and Round Table.

P.P.S.  Hazlitt fought FauxItAlls his entire life – isn’t that the War for All Public Intellectuals – and also employed another FauxItAll synonym.  How about this one:  Sciolist?  The Free Dictionary offers . . . ” A pretentious attitude of scholarship; superficial knowledgeability” as a definition.