My New Poster

My new poster is eighteen inches by twenty-seven. The back is white and glossy; the front features a Latina woman in an emerald green bikini staring at the camera with lips parted. Her head is turned slightly to the side and her artfully mussed, light-brown-and-blondish hair falls over her shoulders. She is frontally lit with soft bright light and poorly composited against an ocean and beach scene behind. The background consists of three parts: the suggestion of a sandy beach on which the model stands, a blue lagoon in the middle distance, and a point of land that curves out farther away toward the ocean. Palm trees jut from this spit of land and too-bright lights glow from house and hotel windows, betraying a long exposure time taken at dusk. The dark blue sky and water have been tinted toward the greenish end of the spectrum. The woman's hair intersects with the dark palm trees in a crude and unconvincing way, not unlike the bad greenscreen work done on the Sid and Marty Kroft show.

If one looks closer he or she notices a graphic crosshatching behind the model and in front of the dusk beach scene. Its function seems to be to break up the incongruity of foreground and background lighting conditions. It resembles Venetian blinds, or a forcefield. The suggestion is one of enclosure and inclusion. The viewer is enclosed inside a graphic bungalow of sorts, with a sexy, front-lit model. The background is separate from us--a view for our pleasure only--and we do not interact with it. Above the woman's head and off to the left a green, yellow, and white cartoon hornet hovers, its gloved hands balled into fists. The hornet is drawn like a minor league sports logo and the name of the product stretches off to the right in an olde-tyme sports font. "MICKEYs" it says, in white caps bordered by gold. There is no apostrophe. The ess is also a capital letter, but it is half the size of the previous letters and it is positioned superscript-style so that its top edge aligns with the top edge of the word "MICKEY." The ess and the ess only is underscored. The words "FINE MALT LIQUOR" sit one line below, adjusted so they left-justify with the em and right-justify with the wye in "MICKEY." The words are printed in an all-gold, squatter version of the font above, at about one-third of the total height. A white capital ar with a circle around it floats in the void between the superscript ess and the ar in "LIQUOR."

There is a lot happening in the emerald green crotch area of the model. The model's left thumb pulls on the front of her bikini bottom while her four fingers grip her inner thigh. The same cartoon hornet has been superimposed on the model's skin, halfway between her unpierced navel and pubic triangle. The hornet is supposed to be a tattoo but is clearly just a graphic pasted onto the overall image. The hornet has the same posture as the larger one in the top left corner of the poster: fists balled, wings flapping, eyes scowling, determined. His stinger arcs under him and forward, pointing at the opening in the bikini bottom where the model is hitching her thumb. The front of the woman's right wrist is propped up on a jauntily cocked hip. Her thumb and first three fingers encircle the throat of an artificially composited green bottle of Mickey's Fine Malt Liquor. The gold screw cap is visible under the tight pressure of her thumb and forefinger; she holds the keyed-in bottle at an erect forty-five degree angle and her right elbow juts out a little to get the perfect position. The bottle has been photographed at a higher resolution than everything else; it's perfectly sweaty and shiny and glows from within. The model's pinky lingers further down the shaft of the bottle. "GET STUNG," it says, beneath all of this, in a 3Dish green-with-gold-border Copperplate font. In the bottom left corner of the poster is a Nordic-looking white-green-and-white tribar flag. Words on the two white bars of the flag are written in green and words on the middle green bar of the flag are written in white. The flag has a Parental Advisory aesthetic to it; it reads "WHEN YOU GO WIDE, GET A RIDE. DON'T DRIVE DRUNK."

I have never heard the expression "go wide" before.