Not Voodoo

New blog

2011-10-09T22:49:00.001+01:00

Yo.

I've started a film blog, called Ten Point Review. You should really read it.

I write a post about a film or a book in ten points, in an hour. I'm going to do one or two a week.

D&AD New Blood Greatest Hits

2011-07-03T13:51:00.000+01:00

So I'm doing a talk at New Blood tomorrow, and I thought I'd want to direct them to the blog which I no longer write.

So here are the greatest hits kids, from back when I was a blogger:

1. The Placement Tradition: nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash
2. Dave Trott writes
3. DM, the medium's medium
4. Proximity
5. 5 Tips that will help you win all the awards
6. My first ad
7. Beauty is exuberance
8. Innocence
9. Mood film
10. Fail better

Brother Alex writes

2011-03-28T07:14:00.002+01:00

One of Brother Alex's art therapy exercises

My good buddy, Brother Alex, the clinically depressed ninja, sends this. I thought it deserved a wider audience:

I'm so fucking bored I thought I'd join Guardian Soulmates after all. Here's my profile, what do you reckon?

I am an extremely attractive male, alluring and mysterious. Everything you could ever dream. And more. I am like a wolf that you want to tame but deep down know that you can’t, and you are ok with that. I am also gentle and sensitive. I am very comfortable with my (hetero)sexuality. My personal hygiene is second to none. I enjoy the music of Michael Bolton, rearing jungle cats and I have a motorcycle. If your application proves unsuccessful and you do not hear from me please don’t be bummed. It’s not you, it’s me. I just have high standards. Soz :( In the words of Jay Z, and later Cher Lloyd from X Factor, “it’s the hard-knock life, for us. It’s the hard-knock life, for us”.

You are an extremely attractive female (at least a 9) who is shorter than me but has a smoking bod. You are not a smoker. You are beautiful on the inside, but more beautiful on the outside. You are from Spain or Italy or Sweden (well spoken English preferred) with a hint of asian that makes you totally hot. You’re like a cross between Virginie Ledoyen when she was in The Beach and Penelope Cruz (in Vanilla Sky) and an asian chick if they merged their genes in a three-way and had a baby and then the baby grew up to be 24 years old. You can be French, but without the attitude, if you are the Nicole type from the Renault ads (come to papa). Also contact me if you are that girl from the Zovirax cold sore cream ad who does aerobics and swimming in her motorcycle helmet, although only if you have never had herpes and you don’t wear a helmet apart from when you are on the back of my motorcycle (I have a motorcycle). But I only have one helmet and I need that one so ironically you probably won’t even wear one then. You keep yourself super tight you do yoga and kickboxing but you are no threat to me at all. Your personal hygiene is second to none. You don’t have any body hair and you love to wear my underwear and also your underwear which is pants with little hearts and bears on and stuff because that is cute and there is no issues there at all. I do not wear yours except on your birthday. You love cooking and also cleaning but you are not obsessive about it. God you dig me so much and you are a good communicator and you never play stupid games or say “do I look fat in this?” or ask me which jeans to wear and then when I pick one pair accuse me of saying you look fat in the other one, and when you’re upset and I ask you what the problem is you never, EVER say “nothing”, you just tell me straight up what the fucking deal is. Above all you understand the difference between me being perfectly fine not spending every waking fucking second with you, and me “not being bothered about seeing you”. You don’t know what PMT is, why would you? You like to call me “daddy” in bed. For a virgin actually you are incredible in bed. You are 24.

Is this you? Call me. No Guardian readers.

Andrew Landsley rap

2011-03-25T12:10:00.000Z

Ok, ok, this a weird idea. But as an answer to 'How do you inform a disinterested youth audience about the fine print of NHS reform' brief it's a pretty good hit.

You can pack a lot of information into a rap. This would be an immensely boring long copy ad for instance.

I wonder who made it all rhyme though? Did they brief the MC?

Design update

2011-03-21T10:22:00.000Z

Friend of mine showed me what the blog looked like on Safari, and it looked horrible. So I've finally bitten the bullet and updated the layout.

It's one of the cheesy blogger templates, and I don't like the narrow masthead, but this will have to do. Ok?

Fitting in and not fitting in

2011-03-18T14:51:00.004Z

That's me in the corner

I started this blog in 2008 because at the time I was working in an agency that I didn't like, and it seemed like a good way to let off steam. That's why I wrote it anonymously. It gave me a good feeling, the feeling you get from reclaiming the truthful part of your personality that you have to suppress when you're doing work that you don't like for people that you don't like. When I eventually got made redundant it was a blessed relief.

So, after a stint at Shepherds Bush job centre, nearly two years as freelancer, and some more higher education, I got this full-time job. I don't want to go on and on about it, but I like the place I work.

I know I know: 'You've changed GC. Shilling for the man GC. Just another happy, ordinary stiff huh? Bet you're thinking about moving to Hackney and getting a mortgage on some sort of warehouse conversion so you can ride home on your fixie bike for organic soup at lunch time.''

Well maybe I am right? And maybe I don't have to take that kind of shit from you. You're not the boss of me. No, not you or anyone.

But this, this is why I haven't been blogging.

I always think about the impulse to make things in economic terms.

It's like you have a budget and all of it always gets spent.

You have a degree of choice about what it's spent on, but there are certain things you can do that mean you have to surrender that choice. Also, if you don't choose where you're going to spend it, it ends up getting spent for you.

So, for instance, you're a writer and you decide that writing fiction is too boring and difficult and no one reads any more anyway so you stop doing it. Only then you find you start writing yourself notes, lists of things to do, shopping lists, diary entries and as time goes by you write more and more of them, and their tone becomes increasingly hectoring and unforgiving. Until eventually you start thinking that maybe you should have another go at writing a book, that perhaps that actually is the least painful option.

If you're not tapping it off, it comes out sideways.

I've written for the Modern Scoutmaster, scathingly, about agencies that have toys in them. I think I got this wrong.

What a good agency does, or should do, is to make you feel like it's ok to bring all of yourself into work. And what the dodgems, the meadow-grass lined conference call room and the space hoppers signify is that there's room for everything. It's the only way to domesticate a lot of sociopaths, so that they'll stop cutting themselves for fun and start selling mobile phone call plans for you.

So, what I'm saying, is that yeah I haven't been blogging, but that that's good, and that if you were my real friends you'd be pleased for me ok.

The Library of Babel

2011-02-22T18:05:00.003Z

Coffee, sharp pencil, Rhodia pad - that's how I roll

One of the only good things to come out of Argentina, apart from barbed wire and the biro, is the writer Jorge Luis Borges. He was, by most accounts, a shit poet, but he mastered a peculiar kind of short story, based on the extrapolation of a single mad idea. He's one of the fathers of speculative fiction, and smartass-conceit stories by people like Martin Amis and Will Self.

Here's how some of his stories work:

A man who remembers absolutely everything as though it were both current and real. Therefore is trapped in his own past as though it were the present.
A country where cartography is the most prized of all the arts. A king plans to make the most wonderfully detailed map in the world, its scale is 1:1
A country in which absolutely everything, including social status, is decided by lottery.
A library, which is also the universe.

That last one is my favourite, it's called the Library of Babel you can read it, in its entirety, here.

"The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase. "

The shelves are full of books which contain a random selection of the 26 letters in the roman alphabet, punctuation and spaces. Most of the books are gibberish. Only, since the library is infinite a great many of the books aren't - in fact they contain not just all the works of literature ever written, but the life stories of everyone who lives in the library.

The library of Babel is a metaphor for language then - and what it shows is that all ideas are nascent in language already. It's just a question of digging them out.
In the Naked Lunch William Burroughs, writing about getting ideas, says that 'Americans want to jump into their stomachs and digest the food and shovel it out again'. The implication is that the brain is an organ, like the stomach, and stuff goes in, stuff comes out. Just like you can't force food through your stomach, you can't force ideas from your brain. I used to try to write adverts by sitting around talking to the art director for days and days, on the principle that most of the creative process was done in the backrooms of the brain, so really it was just a question of entertaining one another, until the machine belched out the answer.

And maybe, some kinds of ideas do come about like this.

But these days, I don't really have a partner. And when I want to come up with ideas, I just write a column of numbers in the left hand margin and then start writing lines, one after another. I used to only use this technique for tricksy headlines, and found that I'd start getting good ones, usually after about 40th or so.

But I've started to think it's just as good for getting conceptual stuff going. Just like rooting around in the library.

When you think about really great advertising ideas - for instance, 'Just Do It', aren't actually separable from the words which they're expressed in.

So yeah, all a bit serious.

In other news, I've got a new tattoo, bright young designer Michael Bow did my new banner (nice huh?) and I'm fighting in a second boxing match in March.

Good times. Wooh.

Murdoch's continence pad

2011-02-03T16:25:00.003Z

Doesn't apply to me: I've spent the day masturbating over news footage of refugee orphans

Everyone wants an iPad - you can even sell them by writing stupid headlines like this.

I don't know if you've noticed, but when you open any newspaper at the moment 99% of the advertising looks like the above. Picture of gizmo, headline, price.

I'd say this was a symptom of the panic that's gripping advertising now that more and more of the things we sell don't really exist. The iPad has a special place as a fetish object that mediates between the consumer and the spirit world of the internet. Consumers like them because it's a hard object that they that can cling on to as their personality and wordly possessions evaporate into cyberspace.

Rupert Murdoch wants you to buy an iPad, so you can download his newspaper The Daily. The Guardian ran the launch story with the headline 'The future of news or dead on arrival?' which I think may be rather wishful thinking on their part.

Murdoch gives the killer angle on The Daily, the one you'd probably only get from a newspaper owner: 'No paper, no mutil-million dollar presses, no trucks.' As John Lanchester pointed out in this very interesting article in the LRB, the things that costs loads of money are the physical logistics of printing a newspaper. In fact, according to Lanchester, if the New York Times were to abandon its presses it would have enough spare cash to give all of its readers a Kindle, twice.

What Murdoch has always been good at doing is selling the same stuff for more money. His media empire is based on a subscription model - Sky sells you the same kind of stuff that you can get for free, with ads, and for money.

He does this, in the case of Sky, using a combination of exclusive content and advertising. That's really the winning combo.

Precisely, Saul Bass. Precisely.

2011-01-28T10:16:00.002Z

Stolen from Ben's blog.

Lunch, Leon, lions, lezzers

2011-01-27T23:23:00.003Z

I've always found lunch to be a rather depressing meal.

Just the relentless tedium of deciding what I'm going to post into my horrible mouth, chew up and swallow at the same time every single fucking day makes me want to cut myself. Recently I've take to going to Leon, because it was founded by and is often staffed by lesbians (and like Larry David I'm a friend o' the lesbians) and because it serves exactly the kind of low calorie balsa wood pabulum that hot, semi-anorexic girls eat for lunch. Just going in there makes me feel like a hungry African lion stalking bow-legged gazelles at a dusty savanna watering hole.

Raarrrrr.

Erm.

Oh yeah, and the branding is great. Take note, brand managers everywhere.

So standard Leon type is this very tasteful Sans Serif:

I think typographers like to call this a 'grotesque', but they only do that to trick you into saying 'but I thought it was quite nice actually'

But then look, here's a cup. And the type, right, is totally different, and what the fuck is that, if not a full point on the end of the logo?

Bagaguagio indeed

And then when you look around the place you notice that they've done things like sew the name into quilts. Look, they haven't even tried to copy the type they use in the regular logo - they've just done their own thing.

Digging the revival of quiltwork amongst new wave feminists. The bald man is also a nice touch.

So, being relaxed about the branding like this has at least two excellent effects, one direct, one inadvertent:

1) it makes you look relaxed about the branding. Like you've got better things to do, like cooking sweet potato fritatas and keeping hot semi-anorexic girls from growing white fur all over their bodies.

2) it makes it look like the brand has heritage. People are really good at reading this stuff, and they do it totally intuitively - seeing more than one extant version of the logo makes you believe that it's gone through many iterations, it's a bit like the way they put pictures of kids from the 70s on the walls - it provides an artificial aura of nostalgia, and creates a sense of trustworthiness.

Consumers have been around branding for nearly a hundred years now - or longer if you count things like flags and crucifixes - I think they can handle this kind of thing. Marketing managers like brand guidelines, but it's quite possible that customers don't give that much of a shit.

Happy Australian Day Skippies

2011-01-26T12:01:00.002Z

A deeply scary animation

2011-01-21T15:04:00.002Z

via Mal Bonnington

Tajazzle your vajazzle

2011-01-21T10:27:00.000Z

I had lunch with this dude I know yesterday, he's running a company that helps chronic insomniacs get back to sleep - but without using drugs. They've packaged a load of proper CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, not Cock and Ball Torture, Gaydar fans) with a load of modern jiggery-pokery like iPhone apps and online sleep diaries. The clinical trials show what he's doing to be extremely effective, which is not surprising given that it's the NHS prescribed therapy for insomnia, but getting people to pay for it takes a bit of doing. The problem is that he's not selling a tangible thing.

This is a really modern problem.

Over the last hundred years you and I have spent our working lives trying to convince people that objects will make them happy. Physical things that they can run their hands over, line up in rows, fill shelves or rails with, polish and clean and otherwise interact with on thoroughly tangible level.

You might remember this exchange from Jurassic Park, which, sadly I can't find on the interwebs as a video. Geoff Goldblum's character warning the kid off his Buffallo Bill nightvision goggles:

Donald Gennaro: Hey, where'd you find that?
Tim: In a box under my seat.
Donald Gennaro: Are they heavy?
Tim: Yeah.
Donald Gennaro: Then they're expensive, put 'em back.

Increasingly though things that aren't heavy, are, or should be, expensive. Things like information, music, books lose value as soon as they become digital, because they've lost their object.

There are lots of good arguments for why these things should cost money - but, importantly, they are arguments. Ironically argument the one thing that modern good advertising does not deign to engage in.

So basically, we all better get good at making Tajazzle infomercials.

This is a truly wonderful video

2011-01-18T17:22:00.000Z

EL GUINCHO | Bombay from MGdM | Marc Gómez del Moral on Vimeo.

I really need to spend more time in Spain.

Stolen from Brother Stevie's new improved blog.

Fail Better

2011-01-12T22:18:00.005Z

Haven't posted for a while.

If you're bored, I suppose you could read this article about failure that some bloke at Wiedens wrote.

It's a fine line between reassuring and threatening

2011-01-04T10:12:00.000Z

One that George Irvin's funfair doesn't walk entirely successfully IMHO. Does make for a very compelling tone of voice tho. Shepherds Bush Green isn't all that safe at the best of times, but when there's a fair on it, you might as well just stab yourself before you head out.

Proper cockney use of the word 'levied'

All faiths will be respected right? Or your knees will be broken due to my use of this hammer

All profits from this, once we've paid the new system, who we call Harry the Hammer

And 16 years porridge is no picnic, Sunshine. Just ask Harry

Christmas with Mr. Creosote

2010-12-21T14:00:00.003Z

I went into HMV in the Westfield yesterday night.

Britain's last entertainment retail chain is apparently on the rocks. It's interesting to watch because businesses of this size seem to go through a period just before they die where they become grotesquely inflated versions of themselves. Like stars, or Elvis.

So HMV now looks the way that it might if it had been laid out based on a description of HMV given over the phone by someone really out of their mind on cocaine.

Just shitloads of CDs and DVDs and shit everywhere, piles of the fucking things all up the counter in sort of like drifts. An loads of people an babies crying an vomiting.

Look neither to left, nor to the right

The queue to pay is corralled into an S-shaped rat-run lined with consumer sweeties like burnable DVDs, copies of Up In the Air and the new Take That documentary, and rubber earbud ends.
The counter is constructed entirely from Inception DVDs.

Inception is the perfect supermodern film, confusing and larded with special effects so that every one that saw it in the cinema felt like they could maybe do with watching it again. No one really needs to see Inception again, you won't learn anything from it, and the film's internal logic loops pointlessly back onto itself to deliberately confound sensible interpretation. It's not profound, it's just facetious. Like that joke 'what would you rather be or a wasp?' but told to you and then explained in arcane detail by a frowning Leonardo DiCaprio.

If you manage to get out without a copy of Inception you have won.

This retail experience, which is the kind of 'things you might like' cross-selling you get on the internet but made physical could be applied to all kinds of funnelled crowd. So if you forced all the people getting on the tube to walk through a tunnel filled with products some of them would definitely take something even if they weren't 'shopping'. The fact of the thing's merely being available is advertisement enough. All we need to do is streamline the process of paying for things so that as soon as you pick something up, you have already paid for it.

The idea of ' shopping' is sort of old fashioned anyway. We're always shopping, even when we're at work.

Ten years ago we might have said that the Internet was like a big department store, in fact what's happening is that big spaces like the Westfield are becoming a sort of physical version of the internet 'events' and curiosities with shops in between.

PS: I've been blogging about 2 years now. That's weird isn't it? Check out this post from 2008,when I thought the world was about to end.

PPS: Tits and Bums Magazine have posted my Will Self piece in full. I still have the transcript of that interview, which I might put on here next year, if you're lucky.

Don't normally post this kind of smut

2010-12-20T15:47:00.003Z

Super Sexy CPR from Super Sexy CPR on Vimeo.

Apart from when I do.

It's all getting a bit Noddy Holder

2010-12-15T10:44:00.002Z

Voices by Tony Law, who is Canadian.

Fakin' Bacon

2010-12-13T10:38:00.002Z

This is like the Jack Black reality nexus but done with a bit more style and a better script. It won't be long before we do away entirely with the concept of 'characters' in films (ie actors playing other people) and all screenplays will be written around the behaviour of celebrities. So Pirates of the Caribbean would be a film about Johny Depp playing a pirate in the film called Pirates of the Caribbean.

In fact, here's a mediocre article about the very same phenomenon.

Black Ops

2010-12-13T09:59:00.000Z

I spent the weekend playing Black Ops in the shadow of my 8ft Christmas tree. You know you have a problem when you start leaving parties early, claiming you have a self-help group first thing, in the certain knowledge that you're really going home to kill Swedish children (online right, Jeez, Thames Valley Police).

If anyone wants to form advertising clan, my callsign is NotVoodoo.

That's a great little video isn't it?

Inconvenience: the new convenience

2010-12-08T16:09:00.001Z

I just bought an ancient iMac so that I can write in the mornings without web drift. It has no internet connection, and makes weird clicking and whirring sounds as the hard disk drive spins. I think there may really be cogs in there.

The iMac runs OS9, but to run the edition of Word I like I need at least OS10. In order to update to OS10 you have to update the firmware, in order to update the firmware, you have to update the OS to 9.1. And to find any of this out, you need to spend a great deal of time searching arcane retro Mac forums. Which you can't do on an iMac which is not plugged into the internet.

Yes, but it was fascinating right. Not just because I'm likely to find any procrastination ritual around writing wholly absorbing. It was like a problem solving treasure hunt.

Also ...

This agency is on an eco kick at the moment, and they've installed these kettles. If you consider a kettle as a labour saving device, these are shit kettles, in that they make it harder to boil a cup of tea. They have two chambers, so you have to fill one chamber, and then pump the water into the other chamber to boil it. The mechanism forces you to actively choose how much water you're boiling. They also sometimes squirt boiling water out of the spout when turned upright, which I think is just an unintentional piece of design, rather than a ploy to put you off the whole idea of drinks served at boiling point.

Also ...

Video games too, have this same balance of toughness and easiness. Part of their appeal is to allow you to achieve virtual mastery of very hard things on a much more forgiving learning curve than in reality. Think the scene in the Matrix where Keanu Reeves masters kung fu in 5 minutes. Or Guitar Hero. They are designed to be just hard enough that you keep playing, but not so easy that they're no fun. Essentially they're designed for difficulty. Overcoming the difficulty induces satisfaction.

Design used to be about making our lives easier. But now our lives are easier I reckon DESIGN IS ALL ABOUT THE PROPER ACTING OUT OF OUR FUCKING NEUROSES.

Right, I'm now going to get dressed up as Victorian dandy and go the office Christmas party.

i is not selling enough papers is i?

2010-11-26T09:27:00.002Z

Britain's newest daily? WTF is wrong with you?

In our business it's easy to get resentful when, as happens from time to time, someone tells you your idea is shit.

In fact, one of the great drivers for career progress in advertising is to reach a level of seniority where if anyone tells you your idea is shit, you can sack them on the spot. Whole agencies have been built on this principle.

Personally I believe there's nothing like a bracing blast of unstinting honesty to stimulate those sections of the imagination that are powered by doubt, fear and resentment. What is cut down grows back twice as strong. It's worth learning to love criticism. Without it you might do something mad, like recording a three hour long hip-hopera, making a Star Wars prequal, or publishing a not quite free-sheet in competition with your own newspaper.

According to industry sources, the circulation of 'i' is now down to well below 70,000 per day. They've also cut 10,000 from sales of the Independent and enraged the journalists union by employing no new people to publish double the number of the newspapers. A newspaper that is failing, quickly becomes a failure's newspaper. No one wants to justify to their friends why they're paying 20p for the only rag worse than the Metro.

The name 'i' is confusing, fiddly to type with autocorrect, impossible to search for online and makes a nonsense of almost any sentence you care to put it in. Basing a headline campaign around the paper's title is up there in the bad decision stakes with the bad decision to publish the thing in the first place. At best the headlines sound like they were guest written by Sacha Baron Cohen, at worst, just plain illiterate. A consequence perhaps of employing an agency whose creative department is drawn almost entirely from the JLS fanbase, without an English GCSE between them.

So look, Alexander Lebedev, you ridiculous ex-KGB oligarch, I'm going to tell you because someone needs to: your idea is shit.

Never forget ... the possiblity of rape

2010-11-24T16:20:00.005Z

Because there's really nothing worse than being locked out, or having to borrow a fiver off one of your mates, or, you know, being brutally raped.

This a truly weird product, a rape alarm, that's also a stylish urban fashion accessory. Am I right in thinking that BBH developed it?

Ad agencies have a weird relationship with rape, they're largely male environments and there's something about the riskiness of rape as the ultimate shocking form of coercion. Creatives bring a special nasty relish to these briefs: 'yeah, shocking innit? Well it's meant to be love.'

You can't really advertise a rape alarm without also making women mindful of the real and constant possibility of rape and therefore spreading fear. Their sales figures would serve as a barometer for just how unsafe women feel. The best viral campaign would be an episode of Sex and the City that opened with Sarah Jessica Parker walking along talking to herself and then suddenly being sexually assaulted. With the line 'rape can happen when you least expect it.'

Yep, it's a brief I would happily turn down.

New Wave Coffee Shops

2010-11-22T10:22:00.009Z

When you give up alcohol you end up spending a great deal of time in coffee shops. There used to be two kinds in London which sold passable coffee:

Italian coffee shops, eg Brunos, Bar Italia, Ponti's

They were making lattes when Starbucks was still the Seattle Coffee Co. They buy eye-poppingly strong coffee from the Algerians in Soho on a contract going back 70 years. They'll sell you a gristly bacon sandwich, but for cultural reasons are generally unable to make tea. Coffee comes in an unbranded Styrofoam cup and costs £1.50. There is rarely music, other than the sound of media types affecting allrightmateyeah camaraderie, like they spent the day digging up a road, rather than hatching a really exciting social network strategy for stock cubes.

Chain coffee companies, eg Starbucks, Caffe Nero, Costa

As stand-up, Rick Shapiro, says Starbucks is a true representation of modern America: 'fag food, at Jew prices, in a WASPY environment'. (It's funny when he says it, trust me, and/because he is Jewish, and used to be a rentboy). There isn't really anything I can tell you about Starbucks that you don't already know. I don't like Starbucks, and yet it is a business I patronise on a daily basis, more than almost any other (apart from Amazon). Everyone feels this way about Starbucks, and you can tell from their toilets. There is always someone in the Starbucks toilet, and no matter how meek and apologetic they look when they come out, it always turns out they've enacted a hideous dirty protest all over the loo seat, the back wall, the mirror etc.

These days there is a third kind of coffee shop:

Boutique coffee shops, eg Nude Espresso, Flat White, Wild and Wood, Store Street Espresso

You don't have to have a sailor tattoo on your fucking neck to work in these places but it helps. Fewer Eastern Europeans, and more people who look like they might be in a band, but aren't actually in a band - beards and piercings also encouraged. Don't even think about asking for an extra shot, or hot milk with your americano, because it will 'ruin the flavour' of the coffee. The soundtrack will be some combination of Beck, MGMT and Fleetwood Mac. Coffee is venerated in these places, in fact the point of this post, was that I realised on Saturday that the whole aesthetic of these cafes, including the staff who'd rather you weren't there, is taken from galleries. Look, check it out:

Store St Espresso

Hmmm. What could it mean?

In some places, like Nude Espresso, the prints on the wall actually show coffee.

The point is to venerate the product, by giving it the trappings of art.

You could probably break most kinds of advertising or branding down along these lines also. Things are made to appeal on price, convenience or sensibility. Agencies too, fit the typology - think CST, JWT, Mother.

Another thing that Nude Espresso proves is that the only good thing about antipodeans is that they're usually not pretentious.

PS: I should probably mention that the Coffee Plant on Portobello Road, is not just my favourite coffee shop, but one of my favourite places in the world bar none. Doesn't really fit any of the above types, and they will often be playing The Idiot at 8.00am.

Hang on to the end for the best pun ever

2010-11-19T10:20:00.002Z

Hate Norman Foster?

2010-11-19T09:55:00.001Z

I do.

I once worked for a particularly horrible agency in Canary Wharf, a place that was about as friendly and characterful as your average Jubilee Line carriage in rush hour, and my life was not at all improved by having to pass through Canary Wharf station every day. The chrome and glass and echoing spaces of the station tactlessly underlining our status not as workers or individuals, but components. Which, right, I get, but what does that make Norman Foster?

It's all so bland as well. So Blairite.

So the municipal bombing of large sections of central London, the demolition of great big residential chunks of Soho, which should really just be sex shops and brothels in dirty white 18th century buildings, to make way for more Norman Foster steel and glass stockshot utopia fills me with depression.

Crossrail is going to be shit anyway, because it doesn't serve the Westfield.

Sex scene from Ghost

2010-11-18T20:34:00.000Z

Was just thinking how strange it was that Patrick Swayze is actually dead now, so presumably whenever anyone sits down at a potter's wheel they are in danger of severe molestation.

I think one of the good things about porn is that women have stopped expecting all that fiddly pre-sex messing about that was actually invented by Hollywood as a replacement for sex.

As you may be able to tell, I'm trying to break my blogging drought by just posting whatever I happen to be thinking. I had this really solemn post lined up about Borges and inevitability and the beefcake with a brain Dan Snow, but there was just no way of making it funny.

10 questions the client never asked

2010-11-17T14:58:00.000Z

In a perfect world, all adverts would look like this one, from the back page of today's Guardian.

1. Have you got anything more modern?
2. Where is the URL?
3. Yeah but, how will they know how to get to iTunes?
4. Could they be holding iPods?
5. I can't see that one's face, can we shoot again?
6. Won't people think they work for Apple or something?
7. Where is the price?
8. Research says people don't like Ringo, can we take him out?
9. Where are the brand colours?
10. Can we make the logo bigger?

The perfect ad by the perfect agency working for the perfect client on the perfect product.

Jamie Oliver's new restaurant

2010-11-17T12:21:00.001Z

Is not very good. Nice food, but eastern European style service and overpriced. Great cards though.

Probably the only good thing about it is the view of St. Paul's and he can't really take credit for that. I wonder if he's even been there, or if he just let Adam Perry Lang license his name.

Yeah look sorry

2010-11-02T09:43:00.000Z

Haven't posted in a while, this job is keeping me very busy indeed, and got a commission for the YCN annual which used up the spare room in my brain all last week (there is a spare room, and a cellar with a drain in the floor). Quite pleased with how it turned out.

Plenty to like about this. Tim Key is brilliant, although never all that funny on Charlie Brooker's show, he has a great comic sensibility if you knowhaddImean.

Fosters is a strange fit isn't it? But in way it's a better model where brands pay for high quality viral films and save on media than writing their own adverts.

I have a post, as it were, in the clip. I will fire right into your brain as soon as I get 20 minutes to type continuously without someone inviting me to a meeting.

E4 GR8!

2010-10-21T23:29:00.002+01:00

DDB VS VW WTF?

2010-10-21T10:02:00.002+01:00

So when I was a kid DDB London used to make these incredible adverts for VW, whose wit and humour made me think that advertising might be an industry where intelligent people used creativity to communicate complex ideas as simply as possible.

These days DDB London make ads like this for VW.

Which makes me think advertising is an industry where about a hundred deeply uncreative people sit in an airless meeting room insisting that they know what should be in their ad (which after all, they're paying for right?), overwhelm the account handlers with a combination of weight of numbers and sheer obdurate bloody-mindedness so that Jeremy Craigen has to wave through a lame headline ad with a look of mingled regret and resignation that seems to speak volumes about the state of our industry as a whole, but might just as well be his hangover.

These cuts are fun aren't they? I think we'll see riots on the streets of Glasgow and Leeds and everywhere else where the electorate has been in the pay of the government for the last 13 years, as soon as they realise they're not going to be able to afford the new iPhone for Christmas.

Microsoft finally make a decent ad

2010-10-18T10:16:00.001+01:00

Could this be the worst ad ever made?

2010-10-15T17:32:00.003+01:00

Exquisitely bad. And the bloke is called Tim - which, if you've ever met the Creative Director who made it, is tragic.

It's not just about how you sell stuff - it's also about how you treat people once you've sold them stuff

2010-10-15T10:14:00.006+01:00

Great headline right?
I do this for a living.

How you treat people once you've sold them something is important, and this is a corollary of what Bill Bernbach said about truth and advertising: 'if you advertise a shit product well, all that happens is more people find out that it's a shit product.'

Boho lifestyle brand Pedlars want to be perceived as fun and friendly. So when I bought an over-priced lightbulb from them they sent me this rosette to wear. It says 'I'm a Pedlars Customer'. The hateful cunts.

A salient comparison might be a relationship with, say, a woman.

If you spend years taking her out for dinner, writing her letters and sending her presents, she may well be somewhat disappointed by the farting, belching, videogame playing, priapic and emotionally needy genuine article. And watching her growing disenchantment with a combination of powerlessness and detachment may turn out to be a character-defining experience, part metaphor, part psychodrama, which you will return to, particularly if you've got an astonishingly precise memory for painful experiences, for at least, say, 9 months after you break up. For instance.

Anyway, the bastards have a word for how you treat people once you've sold them something - they call it CRM, or Customer Relationship Management. If you say that out loud you sound like a complete BMW driver, so I prefer to call it 'how you treat people'.

How you treat people is often an overlooked area of advertising, because it falls into the unglamorous neighbourhood of DM. A lot of brands seem to think that the best way to treat their customers is to hassle them into buying more stuff, or giving them worthless things to prevent them from leaving. This is a major problem for phone companies. They can't just relax and give you a good service, because their competitors are all offering you baubles to try to make you leave. Hence the endless sweaty phonecalls, mailshots and email updates about how wonderful the service they're giving you is.

On the other hand, a lot of the best, most exciting advertising of the last several years also falls into this category - things like Nike+ or iTunes. These things make you feel good about the decision you've already made. It's an easy win.

Very few agencies actually bother with this - they're only interested in picking people up, not with keeping them. They are all R Kelly and no Clare Rayner.

Of course, the best people to do this aren't the agency at all. I got this email from the British Boot Company when I asked my for brothel-creepers to be delivered to my home address.

One of the reasons I'd rather be a copywriter than a journalist is that it's more truthful. And I'm not just saying that.

Where as whatever we write is necessarily attached to a real experience, the consumer's experience of the product, what journalists write is also their product. That means they have to either choose stories on the basis of their inherent appeal, or retool the truth in order to render it appealing. Either technique distorts reality, and not in the same way that adverts distort reality - because we never get to experience the news - it's offered instead of what happened. Adverts are offered as well as the product, really for as long as you continue to own or use that particular product.

What would happen if we all wrote ads designed to flatter existing customers? Wouldn't they then do most of the advertising for us? And wouldn't they be so much better at it than we are?

Better than his Independent ad

2010-10-07T20:26:00.000+01:00

I have this on a great Martin 'zero' Hannet comp. that makes taking heroin seem like it might be a good idea after all. Only £3.00 on Amazon.

Sorry about the Bumholes post this morning, but didn't you love the way the text was tiny so you had to lean really close to the screen to read it? Nice bit of art direction that.

Yep

2010-10-07T07:43:00.001+01:00

Bumholes

Walt Bayliss is a special kind of bastard

2010-10-02T11:44:00.000+01:00

Brother Stevie: dirty 30

2010-09-28T10:09:00.004+01:00

Perennial illustrator for this blog, and artistical genius Brother Stevie makes it to the big three-oh today. I suggest you go and have a look at his new Tumblr blog and commission him to do a series of family portraits, particularly if you're a billionaire oligarch werewolf. (Readership is up amongst billionaire oligarch werewolves, sitemeter says so ok?)

Happy Birthday Brother.

Show your working

2010-09-27T18:08:00.004+01:00

I had an English teacher who used to say fascinating things to us. One of them was:

All novels are about writing novels.

What I think he may have meant was that writing a book is such a long, absorbing job that whatever else you set out to write about you end up writing about the process itself. The good thing is that the process of writing a book, which necessitates continual application, introspection, creativity alloyed with just the right amount of self-criticism, is something like a metaphor for life. So if novelists know anything at all about life, it's because they've spent all this time trying to do a very hard thing, for an imaginary reward that they either can't hope to achieve or, if they can, can't enjoy, and maybe learned something in the process.

Process though, is often interesting, often makes a good story.

(Nice turn from Andy Serkis there).

And if you think about the great American TV of recent years it's often as much about process, as result. The innovation of The Sopranos was to show the mafia boss in his dressing gown eating Parma ham straight from the fridge - it's just the Godfather, but with less left out. Shows like 30 Rock, The Wire and Madmen all work on a similar principle - they are all making-of dramas concerned with TV comedy, the drug trade and advertising respectively. That's why when you watch a DVD box set (and couples my age who are sick talking to one another don't do anything else) and reach the end of it, the feeling is not one of satisfaction, but disappointment. People still watch things with their teleological heads on, but they've stopped being interested in the ends of things. It's the process they want to see.

The modern experience of working as a tiny part of a much larger system, and being made aware of that system by the media, means that the goals that we work towards are likely to feel less dramatic. Especially in the context of global news and the knowledge that everyone is up to more or less the same thing. Ends don't feel special or significant any more.

This is just one of the reasons that video games are a better entertainment fit for modern life. They are designed to prevent you from getting to the end. Like the impossibly apostrophised Demon's Souls, which, well, you may as well write a novel as try and finish that game.

In other news, I saw Mick Jones on Friday night outside Hix on Brewer Street. Long term readers will know that Mick Jones tends to pop up at crucial moments in my life, looking terrible. I somehow didn't have my wits about me enough to take his picture, but I did say hello. I then spent the rest of the evening regretting not having photographed Mick Jones on my mobile so I could post it on my blog. A modern neurosis if ever there was one.

Egyptians make good ads

2010-09-24T12:32:00.003+01:00

Judging book covers

2010-09-17T16:19:00.006+01:00

I had imagined taking a couple of weeks off after the end of my MA and just reading and blogging and playing video games but it doesn't seem to have worked out quite like that. This is one of about eight posts that I've been planning but somehow haven't got round to writing. I might dribble them out over the next few weeks because I anticipate that I'm going to be rather busy

(BECAUSE SOMEONE HAS GIVEN ME A JOB RIGHT?!).

So I wrote this very long essay about Kingsley Amis for my MA, and one of the the byproducts of it was that I ended up doing a sort of impromptu study of the covers of Amis's novels. I got all the criticism up from the stack of the British Library but I'd buy random editions of the novels from second hand shops for £2 each so I could dog-ear the pages and come back and note them later. Most secondhand and charity bookshops have a whole Amis section, with Martin featuring as much, if not more than, his father. Make of that what you will.

Book covers are very like what we do. Whenever we make an advert we are asking the consumer to ignore the old axiom and judge a book by its cover. In fact an ad bears even less relation to a product than a book does to its cover because it doesn't even have the benefit of physical proximity to the object it describes. An ad makes up for it though, because it can contain pictures of what it's describing, where as a cover although attached to the book actually describes something much less concrete - the contents of the book, rather than the object of which it is also a part.

(I START NEXT MONDAY!!).

KA had a very long writing career, spanning around four decades, and his reputation evolved as he went on, from Angry Young Man, to sexy young author, to establishment figure, to reactionary outsider. But, for complex reasons (which, if you're interested, I can send you a 15,000 word essay about), Amis's subject matter changed very little. So what we have is a fairly consistent product that is differently perceived by each successive era.

Something like a very well known brand that has a series of different agencies work on it.

Obviously there are a few obvious reactions to the brief. Since they're largely concerned with the relationships between men and women, really, almost all Amis covers could be like this:

Personally I don't like these covers much because I don't want to be told what Patrick Standish or Jenny Bunn look like - I think that's something I do on my own with Kingsley Amis, and I don't appreciate having to share that experience with a illustrator who's probably only skim-read the novel. Both of these are rather craven portrayals of the character, Stanley with a little moustache, Patrick blonde and balding at the temples. They don't tell me what's interesting about these books, what makes them different, in fact all they tell me is what's inside the book, which is redundant, given that it's inside the book. The Difficulties cover is a 1989 number, the Stanley cover is the Vintage 2008 reissue. Difficulties is set in the 60s and Stanley in the 80s, but you wouldn't know it would you? The primary fidelity of these covers is to the aesthetic sensibilities of the time in which they were produced.

This cover on the left is just straightforwardly misleading. This edition is from, who would have thought it, 1970. Amis writes about sex but never describes it, never really describes bodies, male or female, but does occasionally mention breasts. There is sex in this book, but perhaps not as much or of the kind that you might hope for had you only seen the cover. The problem is that the cover art is based on a perception of what the audience wants - the art director lost track of the truth of the novel in the pursuit of his audience.

(BETTER MAKE SURE I DON'T DO THAT...IN MY NEW JOB!!!!)

The best covers are not those that try to represent the characters, but those that represent the themes:

The Old Devils and Jake's Thing are concerned with the end of a life spent drinking and an Oxford don's struggle with impotence respectively. Both of these are visual gags of a very high order indeed - not only is that good in itself, but their comedy, in turn, describes the humour and intelligence of the books. By hanging on to the essence of the books they avoid the pitfalls of pandering to the audience. They also avoid merely repeating information that is already in the books (by showing characters and situations etc.) and instead offer something that's more like a new interpretation of the same central idea. This, I believe, is what bastards mean by 'adding value'.

But obviously this too can go too far, the cover that really makes me laugh is the new Penguin 50s 2010 edition of Lucky Jim. Imagine being the client on this one:

'Yeah so hi Peter Blake, love the cover and everything, but is there any chance we could have the title just a bit bigger? Because at the moment it looks like the title of this million selling book that everyone knows the name of, and is on reading lists all over the world, is England's Glory - which, yes, would be a great title for a book obviously - but isn't actually ... yes I have heard of the Sergeant Pepper's album ...'

I reckon the good ones will age best. I wrote a thing for the Tattooed Lady Magazine recently about the History of Advertising Trust and how adverts are totally contemporary and therefore totally disposable - but isn't it almost always true that the best ones aren't? And therefore doesn't it follow that the that best ones are tied to the truth rather than to the time.

I've got another post about book covers - but I think I'll save it...

(BRING ON MONDAY, I'M A TIGER, A TIGER, RRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGH!)

I love my life as a Dickhead.

2010-09-10T14:10:00.000+01:00

Satire is a mirror in which no man sees his own face.

You don't need a 30 year old blogger to tell you how good this is

2010-09-08T18:55:00.001+01:00

Creepy song, with a wonderful chorus.

It's a horrifying terrifying event

2010-09-07T23:47:00.005+01:00

Just got home from being sworn at by Doug Stanhope at the Leicester Square Theatre - he's on for another four nights and there seemed to be some returns on the door. You need to go and see him because there's a chance he may commit suicide on stage, which I've never heard of anyone doing before, but if anyone were going to, it would be him.

I mean, anyone apart from Jesus.

PS: I'm in the process of tinkering with the design of the blog - you may also notice some Google Adwords giving you links here. Willful perversity is the only explanation I can offer you.

The Renaissance Renaissance

2010-09-06T02:16:00.008+01:00

Happened to be watching the Box the other day and saw this video.

And what it made me think was that music videos have entered this new phase where they're no longer trying to ring the cherries of the lowest common denominator. They're actually starting to look more and more like serious, ironic, or genuinely beautiful art. And this has happened very quickly indeed, compare and contrast this Hype Williams 1999 classic:

The message of the Big Pimpin' video is roughly, 'we're so rich we've got a huge white boat and crates of Dom Peringnon and whole squadrons of women who don't find being sprayed with champagne demeaning, in fact they rather like it actually.' The message of the Kayne West videos is, approximately, 'I'm so rich I can pay real artists to make my videos'.

This is what brands are doing when they employ skilled advertisers - the whole selling shit schtick is just a ruse to justify it to the accounts department. Really it's the geeks getting to tell the art kids what to do.

But then the hugely rich have traditionally been prepared to pay for art, designed for the masses, as a demonstration of their power. Because talent the one thing they can't buy and it makes them furious. Like the Medicis all over again.

Which is not to take anything away from Kayne, if he's reading this, which I'm sure he is.

Nice copy for a TV ad

2010-09-03T17:29:00.002+01:00

What does it take to turn you on?

2010-09-03T11:45:00.002+01:00

The 90s were a joke decade. Seems to me there was at least a kind of earnestness in the posing and materialism of the 80s but the 90s had this overlay of irony that was really insincerity contrived to hide a lack of feeling or ideas. Suede, Oasis, Blur - terrible bands the lot of them. His 'n' Hers and Odelay were probably the only good albums to come out of the whole sorry period.

But I digress.

When I did the D&AD workshops some years ago we went to see Dave Trott. He kept us in there from 6.30 till 11.00pm and was brutally nasty about all the work we'd done. He was spot on about most of it, and he did manage to tell me some useful things about myself, for which I still haven't totally forgiven him. One of the interesting things he said was 'You have to learn what turns you on.' Apparently, what turns Dave on, he told us, is fear. Not necessarily whimpering from the basement type fear (I wouldn't rule it out though), but the fear that you're not going to crack the brief and everything you've ever believed about yourself will be shown to be a lie.

Certain copywriters, those who write particularly chippy lines like, for instance, 'We took their land, their women and their buffalos. Then we went back for their shoes.' or 'A table for two? Certainly you old trout.' or 'You're never going to be able to retire, so why should your shoes.' seem to get turned on by anger. Anger is a great creative emotion because when you get angry you're reaching out to the world around you - toward the thing that makes you angry - and that makes you feel present in the world. It fills the, hem, ontological vacuum. Think about those scenes in The Thick of It where Malcolm Tucker is about to lose control completely and then re-composes himself using an angry tirade.

There's a nice bit in Mad Men where Draper's bohemian mistress, Midge, talks about 'the ego that people pay to see'. This is another thing that makes great copywriters - the need to be loved and liked by everyone. You can see why a brand would want to buy that off you, and turn it to its own purposes. These copywriters are phallic narcissicists, specialists in verbal constructions woven with the desire to be liked and loved.

And this is why advertising is so wonderful, because these people, who would otherwise be dangerous sociopaths get to have their neuroses turned inside out for the benefit of light industry.

Anyway, if you hunted around you could probably find more than three typologies, but today I'm a bit busy, my column for The Crypto Fascist Chronicle is late (sorry Mark, end of the day?), and I have an MA dissertation to tidy up.

So I ask you, what does it tike to tyurn yoo oooooooon?

Yeah, yeah I know

2010-09-01T23:12:00.004+01:00

Ben already posted it on his blog but I wanted to say something about it and I didn't want to colonise his comment section with it and get flamed as a massive pseud as you will see.

I like this advert a lot - but does it strike anyone else that the moment that Jack Black says 'I'm not your puppet!' constitutes a mind-bending nexus of irony?

Because obviously, Jack Black is acting not as himself, but as a version of Jack Black, the actor who doesn't want to appear in an advert for Orange. Orange are behaving, not as themselves, but as though they are the kind of brand that wants to aggressively manipulate Jack Black into acting as their shill. So both Black and Orange are engaged in a double-bluff where they know that we know that they're not these things (i.e. Black as shill, Orange as manipulator). But the point at which it gets absurd and mind-bending is that Orange and Black really are all of the things they're claiming not to be. When Black is made to dance, he really is being made to dance. Orange are forcing him to dance, for money, to sell their product.

This is interesting to me, not just as a kind of conceptual calisthenics, but because working all this out makes no difference whatever. In fact, if you uttered this aloud in a client meeting someone would almost certainly punch in the side of the head before you got to the end of the word 'nexus'.

Sometimes you can forget that it's two thousand and fucking ten and that our audience has one of the sharpest sensibilities in history.

Nearly finished the essay, but thanks for asking. Anyone going to enter this long copy contest?

The real vs. the modern

2010-08-27T13:38:00.008+01:00

If your agency is any good there may be a bookshelf somewhere, perhaps in the art buying department, which will contain this book or one very like it. It's worth leafing through a book like this not because the ads are good but because they are, almost without exception, terrible. That is to say, there is nothing in them that doesn't seem like it came from not just another time, but another planet, one populated entirely by imbeciles. I mean, for instance, WTF?

One of the things that makes Bill Bernbach so incredible is that he seemed to be able to see the terribleness of these ads, at time when no-one else could. This is the difficult thing, in advertising or any other creative pursuit, to raise your head above the contemporary. Because what's fashionable is so prevalent that most people can't seem to see it all, they are, technically speaking, shit-blind.

Bernbach's technique for circumventing the modern was to hang on to the reality of what he was advertising - the truth. This is my favourite Bill Bernbach ad:

There's no part of it that isn't relevant. The things that make it eye-catching are the same as the things that make it meaningful.

So maybe one way of know if your ad is any good is to strip away the bits of it that are flashy and contemporary and see what you're left with. Let's try it on this ad:

Ok, so we've got:

Ridiculous headline
Contemporary graphic design
Website
Possibility to 'show your support for this campaign(!) by texting this number for just £8'.

It's got all the contemporary paraphernalia but means, so far as I can see, nothing at all. It's not intriguing, it's only gibberish. I'm not even going to link to that website, because I find the meaninglessness of this campaign so aggravating. I assume it's a Christian organisation - but I'm not going to find out, not because I've anything against the church, but just because they've pissed me off with their idiotic advertising campaign. Although actually, can't you see something obscurely Christian in the arrogance of this ad? The very fact that they thought they could do it themselves, and yet clearly have no idea of what they're doing?

Grrarrgh.

Kingsley Amis's Life Kitchen No. 3

2010-08-24T19:46:00.003+01:00

I remember Cliff Wainwright saying once that women were like the Russians – if you did exactly what they wanted all the time you were being realistic and constructive and promoting the cause of peace, and if you ever stood up to them you were resorting to cold-war tactics and pursuing imperialistic designs and interfering in their internal affairs.
p.165 Stanley and The Women

Carnival

2010-08-24T10:05:00.007+01:00

TFL slightly improve on their effort from 1 or 2 years ago which to my mind was insulting to every sensible adult that saw it, whatever the colour of their skin.

M&C do TFL's advertising at the moment and you can just tell Graham Fink loves writing those minicab rape ads. Bet he asked the British Transport Police to get him a load of rape witness statements to read and all.

I won't be going to carnival this year, I'm too old, too sober and unless you're occupied with filling your bladder with Red Stripe and then finding somewhere to empty it, it's too much like commuting during a very lary tube strike.

Ah Pook The Destroyer

2010-08-23T21:40:00.004+01:00

I'm not a huge fan of Burroughs, but I do love the way he says 'Ah Pook', and the arcane pantheon at the beginning. It reminded me of the 'This is The Man' thing below, which seems to get better the more I think about it.

It's amazing that it's taken this long for someone to do it - making the brand into one (or two) people and using the same models in all the publicity. Not to attach a brand to a celebrity but to make something you can peddle like a celebrity out of a brand. Will the FCUK Man do interviews then? Or is he actually Bulgarian with a silly high pitched voice?

When you think about it, it's what Paul Smith has been doing forever. One of the great things about him is that if people want to interview the brand they can just go and talk to him. And that sort excuses the fact that he sells all different objects - because you get a sense of an organising personality behind the whole business

Increasingly I think branding is a) a response to the decline of religion b) a reaction to the deep existential loneliness of the modern world.

But you know, that's just me.

I think I'm going to post about Kingsley Amis's book jackets next, which will be fascinating for you all. All 50 of you.

This is good isn't it?

2010-08-22T11:53:00.003+01:00

I've been rude about Fallon, and this campaign in particular, elsewhere but actually I think these TV spots are rather splendid. I just wonder if the bloke they are going for is ever going to be seen dead going into French Connection. Mmmm. Nice belt though.

My mother? I'll tell you about my mother.

2010-08-20T06:46:00.006+01:00

One of things I've inherited from my mother, along with the character-building but periodically demoralising micrognathism, is a hormonal response to stress that causes me to wake up at 5.00am. This is great you see, because it means that at key moments in my life I get to be exhausted as well as anxious. Just now my body is jollying me awake at this time especially so that I can lie prone and panicking about how to continue the very long essay about Kingsley Amis that is the less fun bit of my MA dissertation.

But see this morning instead of doing that I though I'd write on here, because I feel bad about not blogging, in that peculiar gnawing way that I feel bad about not watching the rest of the Michael Haneke film about a sexually repressed pianist that I've had from LoveFilm for the last eight months.

I'm not entirely sure who reads this blog any more, most of the referrals are from Corporal Punishment Daily or Ben's blog, so I suppose you're probably some advertising or design punter in which case you'd love to hear about my tattoo wouldn't you? I knew you would.

So for some time I've wanted to have a skull tattoo on my chest, along the lines of the Monday Morning Memento Mori, but on a more every-morning-when-I-look-in-the-mirror-type basis. I had a look around and discovered this lady, Valerie Vargas, who works out of Frith Street Tattoo where, by coincidence, Ben Kay had his arms done. I've been on her waiting list, now closed, since October 09 and in the meantime she's got quite famous, which is pleasing. Her website emphasises the feminine stuff that she does, presumably because there's a market for women that want a top notch female tattooist, but she also does all the traditional ships and skulls and ravens in this very characterful way. I did go in there the other day to see how close to the end of the list I was (probably be another 3 or 4 months) and saw Keith Flint from the Prodigy who now looks like a heavily pierced and tattooed Essex minicab driver.

But because I'd quite like her to do me a big one, and I don't want it to be my first, I thought I'd get another one in the meantime. What I decided upon was having the word LOVE tattooed on my wrist. My reasons for doing this are:

I like, in a perverse way, the idea of having to live with and sort of defend having quite a glib instruction written on my body. Which just goes to show that if you value perversity you can talk yourself into anything - that's the great thing about it.
I wanted to have a word and that was the only one I could think of that was always applicable. I thought of having 'write', but that might just make me feel awful and also like I just wanted to tell people that I am actually a writer you know.
I believe in the power of words to change the way that people behave, I have to otherwise I'd end up thinking the last 5 years of my life had been a waste of time, and I reckon this might help me to behave better.
As regular readers will know my default setting is not wholly positive and I thought this might remind me to amend my thinking .
It is not original - but tattoos aren't ads see, they're not meant to be original, they're like a language of their own innit.

Anyway, most people I've spoken to think it's a terrible idea. One my friends said, 'Won't it look a bit Angelina Jolie?', but I'm fairly confident that, on me, it won't.

Maybe it will, and then I'll have to have a swastika on a skull to cover it up.

At any rate, this seems to be what happens to you when you turn 30, you start craving permanence. Can't think why that would be.

I got this book in the Soho Book Store that I remember was like a poser's coffee table book about 5 years ago - but it's really good, I recommend it.

Right, I'm off to the British Library to read the 'International Handbook of Anger.'

Come off it.

2010-08-17T16:13:00.003+01:00

Oh since you've put your argument so persuasively I suppose I will. Really this advertising lark is pretty easy isn't it? So long as you don't go complicating instructions with ideas. But wait a minute...

Oh no, now I'm really confused. Which shall I read?

I think I'll just have to go back to gently banging my forehead against a wall.

If you don't know me by now.

2010-08-12T10:33:00.006+01:00

Thanks for the birthday wishes - all in all it feels pretty good to be 30. I haven't sensed any special pressure to get married, have children or make something of my life, over the past three days anyway.

I suppose it is getting a bit tedious having one foot in advertising and one in, hem, other kinds of writing, but if I've learnt anything over the past 30 years, it's that just because something is boring or painful doesn't mean it will end quickly.

But look, it seems like I've at least developed into a relatively know-able human being, judging by the presents that my friends have given me.

Top row (l-r):

Cheeses (Blue Lanark, Stinking Bishop)
From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbour - Jerry Della Femina - a book about Madison Ave in the 50s, apparently a key source for Madmen.
Hellhound on His Trail - Hampton Sides - a history of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
The Book of Tapas - Simone and Ines Ortega
A mug with a starfish on it that looks like a bumhole.
C - Tom McCarthy - a novel about a radio technician

Middle row (l-r)

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand - nuff said
American Pastoral - Philip Roth - never read any Roth, which is weird when you think about how much I like Denis Johnson and DFW.
Beautiful Painting of a Beetle - by some girl.
Bananagrams - I have recently become unbeatable at Scrabble.
High quality mint and lime dark chololate wafers.

Bottom row (l-r)

A Naughty Boy Anne Summers prostate stimulator - apparently it's so much more than a buttplug. This from a metrosexual friend who is trying to encourage me to explore all the opportunities that bachelorhood offers. I didn't ask for it right. Apparently it's totally silent, wear-able in fact.
Super Mario Galaxy 2 - hell yes.
Radical Chic and Mau Mau-ing the Flak Catchers - Tom Wolfe
Equilibrium - an absurd film set in a future in which emotions have been outlawed and only Christian Bale can save the world.

There was also a peach, but I ate it.

So, what can I say, all that money I spent on brand consultancy has been effective after all.

I'm just writing this dissertation at the moment, hence the relative quiet on the blogging front. I know that Ben is on holiday though, so you all need something to read, so I'll do my best to work something up over the next few days.

Jack the Ripper

2010-08-11T11:21:00.001+01:00

Monday Morning Memento Mori: Special Edition

2010-08-09T10:22:00.001+01:00

GC is 30 today. How has this happened?

Kingsley Amis's Life Kitchen no.2

2010-08-06T11:01:00.002+01:00

'Like both the pretty women he'd known, and many that he'd only read about, she thought it was no more than fair that one man should cheat and another be cheated to serve her convenience.'

Lucky Jim, p.137

How to save publishing

2010-07-29T10:34:00.014+01:00

Given I'm currently writing a book, bitching about the publishing industry isn't the best idea I ever had. But then, neither is taking a month off my freelance job to work on my dissertation, and then blogging and playing Demon Souls instead.

Look, here's an advert for Dan Brown's 'Secret Lost Sudoku Puzzle'. The first thing you'll notice about this advert is that it's not very good. But it is nonetheless differently not good from your run-of-the-mill book advertising.

Apparently publishers assume the point of all advertising is to alert existing fans to the existence of new releases. Posters give precedence to author and title. They may also use visuals to imply 'mood' and maybe a line to mop up a few new readers.

The Dan Brown ad is different, it contains an idea, one that answers the brief 'page-turner from a familiar author for your summer holidays'. The barbecue does 'summer' - that's probably the best thing about it, the only thing that makes me think it was made by the agency, rather than just sketched by a maverick marketing manager on the back of an All Bar One napkin.

But the idea is, well, fairly rudimentary. It seems like when products begin to be advertised competitively they have to go through all the phases of advertising that products with a history of competitive advertising went through years ago. (You can see this with plastic surgery ads on the underground, which are still in the protozoan phase of 'here's a photo of someone who's happy with our product'.)

The Dan Brown ad proves a number of things:

a) yes, it is possible to write adverts about books that aren't just covers with headlines.

b) that publishing house marketing departments are fundamentally inert, terrified of doing anything that isn't a cover with a headline...

c) ...because, all of the very low-hanging advertising fruit is ripe for the picking.

d) that they do believe it's worth advertising certain kinds of book - interestingly they advertise Dan Brown because he is already so popular. His are casual readers, people who only read on holiday and choose their books like they choose their margarine.

But see, publishing people are always whingeing about how they're selling fewer books, that the industry is on its last legs, that times are tough, that they're nearly 30 and haven't had a baby, etc. And this is partly because people who work in publishing do tend to be drawn from the ranks of nature's whiners and also, because they don't have to make their product, they only have to sell it, so they've got a complex about how comparatively easy their job is, compared to that of the authors they're forced to associate with, which means they have go on and on about how difficult and overwhelming it all is.

So what I want to know is, why don't they try harder see? Or just sit down and have a little think about it?

Modern media is set up to sell personalities more than things. Brands are personalities, saucepans are things. This being so, why sell books, when you can sell people?

So what you want to do is have a branding campaign, for, say, Ernest Hemingway. You sell Hemingway, like he was aftershave, but better - an aftershave that would teach you things, teach what to say and how to be. You do posters of Ernest Hemingway, with headlines by Tim Delaney, you do TV ads with Hemingway reading 'The Old Man and the Sea' over visuals of old Cuban fishermen bringing in marlin. You bring out Hemingway in a new edition, that's as identifiable as a set of white headphones, an edition that's properly pocket-sized. You show people how Ernest Hemingway invented a lot of the ideas we now know as 'cool'.

It doesn't matter that he's been dead for forty years, look at Billy Joel. One of the things the internet has done is to give people the whole of history to choose from. You only have to put Richard Burton reading Dylan Thomas on a VW ad, and people buy it by the shed-load. It's not that they don't want beautiful writing, they just don't know how good it is, or they feel excluded by it.

Anyone want to start a publishing house? All we need is about £5 million for Hemingway's back list. We'll be rich. Rich I tell you.

Kingsley Amis's Life Kitchen no.1

2010-07-28T10:39:00.002+01:00

Week by week I'll be bringing you pearls of wisdom from Britain's last great misanthrope. Amis's reputation is in no need of revival, yet or ever really.

'Man's sexual aim, he had often said to himself, is to convert a creature who is cool, dry, calm, articulate, independent, purposeful into a creature that is the opposite of these; to demonstrate to an animal which is pretending not to be an animal that it is an animal.'

One Fat Englishman p.110

Stockholm Syndrome

2010-07-27T11:33:00.016+01:00

I had the misfortune to find myself in Stockholm over the weekend.

It's a truly awful place.

For a nation that prides itself on its design credentials, building a city spread over an archipelago isn't a great start. Unless you own an amphibious Volvo getting anywhere at all involves a tedious trudge over a network of bridges. And the weather, even in midsummer, is shit.

Socialism 1.1 Ten weeks paid maternity/paternity leave - which must be taken by both parents. What this means in practice is that there are loads of blonde men pushing three-wheeled prams with little frowning blonde children in them. Even the children are miserable in Sweden.

Socialism 1.2 No waiter or waitress in Sweden will serve you, as it were, automatically. You have to sit there for ages while they ignore you, and then when you eventually become so hypoglycemic and exasperated that you go and ask them whether they have any intention of bringing you any food they look at you like an unwiped arsehole. And that would be fine if you weren't paying £25 for what appears to be a W12 saveloy and a bowl of chips.

Their buses are gay:

Language - all Swedes speak English anyway, and that makes me think the Swedish language is really just English, written by a dyslexic with an extremely juvenile sense of humour. In fact the place we know as Sweden could just be a forgotten English internment camp for social deviants, founded in the 17th Century and allowed to develop its own culture, like a kind of Siberia for twats.

Fucking crows. Crows everywhere.

Ok, ok. There are some nice design shops, but all those modernist lampshades are Danish and Josef Frank was born in Austria. In the airport arrivals lounge they have photographic parade of famous Swedish people. I recognised ABBA and Dolph Lungren - listed as an 'actor and engineer.'

I stayed in a hostel dormitory with a German pervert in little shorts who liked to get up at 6.30am for a bout of sneezing, which I'm sure he was doing deliberately. I mean, he looked like he was enjoying it. The kind of weasle-faced Eurofucker who's just dying to cut off and sautee your penis.

Rutger Hauer is Dutch.

Seriously, never go there.

Happy Friday

2010-07-16T12:08:00.002+01:00

GC may even have sold a long copy charity ad.

I will start being a blogger again soon.

Unoriginality splice?

2010-07-13T09:43:00.003+01:00

Shit ad right?

Does it make it better or worse that the visual is stolen from this quite good campaign:

And the soundtrack meme from this excellent Christmas ad:

Who is making these adverts? Who are you? What does it feel like just not to give a shit? Seriously, I'd love to know.

Is there anything you can't sell with anthropomorphic animals?

So many questions and so few answers.

England's own Lou Reed

2010-07-12T21:07:00.003+01:00

One of the first gigs I ever went to was Ian Dury with my Dad.

Sorry, I haven't posted for a while. I've been too angry to do anything except sit here grinding my teeth.

Also, you get a kind of blogging inertia, difficulty of thinking of something interesting/amusing to say x length of time since you last said anything interesting/amusing.

I might just post music that I like for a while actually and see how that goes.

Brother Stevie even offered to illustrate the rest of the Sisters strip, an offer not to be sniffed at, so I'll hurry along and do that also.

TED is great isn't it?

2010-06-23T14:29:00.002+01:00

You might argue that there's already a great online game where you get to make adverts and it's called YouTube.

GC's Grammar Bounty

2010-06-23T12:41:00.002+01:00

I will pay £20 to any bank account or charity in exchange for the email address of the copywriter responsible for this grammatical abomination.

They will then find themselves on the wrong end of extremely pedantic email about the proper usage of the words less and fewer and their responsibility, as producers of mass media, to the English language, the language of Shakespeare and Milton, a responsibility that they should be mindful of even if they are, as I suspect, Scandinavian, and fought shoulder to shoulder with the Nazis during the war.

Another relatively good reason to keep blogging

2010-06-21T22:27:00.010+01:00

I noticed this over at the Buns and Zammo blog. Looks like their web director has written a novel, that he's released as an iPhone app, apparently inspired by Nick Cave's all-singing, all-dancing digital version of the The Death of Bunny Munro.

I'm sort of allergic to The Cave's non-music projects, because by and large they tend to be pretentious in the way that only the works of Australian auteur can be, and I haven't downloaded Neil Ayres's app, because this evening I'm mainly downloading the new iPhone software, and frankly I don't think it's a good idea to do anything that might jeopardise my relationship with the only people currently prepared to pay for my journalism. Hastily reviewing the work of one of their key employees is unlikely to work out well for either of us.

But look, we all better get interested in writing for the iPhone/iPad because that's what it's going all going to be about from now on.

As part of the Creative Writing MA we've had a series of lectures from agents and commissioning editors. These have been, by and large, deeply depressing and involved them telling us that we're very unlikely to be published and that even if we are they certainly won't be able to give us any money.

In fact the only thing they haven't managed to be totally pessimistic about is the possibility that writing for the iPad might just save publishing, creating what is essentially a new media that people could be excited enough about to pay real money for.

The thing that makes writing for the iPad or the iPhone different is that you can accompany your words with things like video, or music. I hesitate to mention the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy again, but I don't think anyone will be surprised, given the kind of nerd I seem to be becoming, if I say I recently found myself looking at this clip from the not very good film that was made of the first of the books a few years ago. (Don't worry, I'm not about to start quoting Blackadder, or The Life of Brian, or inviting you round to my house to play Risk):

The theme music is excellent, but what you will notice is that the edition of The Hithchiker's Guide to the Galaxy (from 1.10 mins) they show is underwhelming - watching the animation you can't avoid a creeping sensation of pointlessness or redundancy. This was a major problem with the film, this and Mos Def's inability to act.

They didn't want to lose the narrated passages from The Book, since these are some of the most entertaining bits of writing in the novel, The Hitchhiker's Guide constituting a sort of separate character or sub rosa narrator. But they were then left with the difficulty of showing a film of a digital book. This was much more stylishly done in the TV serialisation from the 80s, when interestingly, they didn't bother to show the frame of the book. Probably something weird has gone on with our acceptance of screens within screens that's to do with the Windows operating system and YouTube. But to an art director in the 80s it would have just looked absurd and extraneous to requirement.

But I digress.

The problem with the animations in the more recent film, as you can see, is that they are merely dramatisations of what the words are saying and, as such, gratuitous. Douglas Adams wrote it originally for radio. In the radio version the impression you have is of someone reading out passages from the book, which, we are invited to imagine, with the help of sound effects, would have been digital text.

The text therefore described everything the listener needed to imagine the experience of reading The Guide for themselves - there was no shortfall which had to be supplied with images.

Most books are written like this.

And but see this is interesting because advertising writers, at their best, are used to writing with pictures. In fact, some of the very best adverts are good precisely because of the pleasure that comes from the weighting of meaning between visual and text.

Boring headline without the picture, meaningless picture without the headline. Nothing is wasted.

Obviously the other people that do this are graphic novelists, but there's something about the framing of text within a graphic novel that doesn't leave it to play freely off of the meaning of the imagery.

Bloggers also do this, because they link to an image, or a piece of film with text. Really good bloggers, like Ben Kay, do a killer lead in - so even though you don't really want to you, end up watching a shit French McDonald's advert or something.

So all I'm saying is that if I was a publisher looking for someone to offer a lot of money to, I would be assiduously reading advertising bloggers of a literary bent right now.

The best copy I've seen in ages

2010-06-16T12:33:00.008+01:00

Hey look, a really good press advert. Unique proposition, 'try eating slowly', sweet design, nice bit of writing too:

No idea who made it and Campaign won't tell me, but what do you want to bet it's a relatively small agency and they're not being totally ridden by Sir Gulam Noon to make something flashy.

Historically British-Indian entrepreneurial spirit goes quite well with advertising, as evidenced by Cobra's consistently great stuff. In fact I think my favourite tube card ever was the unsung Cobra campaign 'Have a Cobra. Or something else if you'd prefer.' (the beer that puts you under less pressure). Conservative budgets and one guy in charge makes the whole process much less painful.

In other news, I've nearly finished Red Dead Redemption but have already stopped regarding it as a form of recreation and see it now as more of a Satanic Chore. It's like the videogame equivalent of War And Peace, because by all accounts I've got to the end, I've killed all the bad guys, John Marston has been re-united with his wife and son, and yet the game still tells me that it's barely 70% complete. I'm now formally a rancher, so I'm worried that the rest of the game will be a realist study in farming in 1900s America, more Hud than Once Upon a Time in The West, and I'm going to spend the next two weeks dipping virtual cows to ward off foot and mouth disease.

What does it mean that millions of people are Being John Marston? I don't know, and if my brain weren't so addled with videogames I could probably postulate something in about 500 words. As it is, I'm having trouble even leaving my flat.

If this is what women like...

2010-06-08T18:32:00.003+01:00

...then I have no idea what women like. To me it looks like she's got some kind of hideous billowing skin condition. Like that man who turned into a tree. Don't follow that link while you're having your Pret Crayfish Sandwich.

And it's still not as good as this:

I'm on a horse

2010-06-03T22:22:00.009+01:00

Errrr.

I've been meaning to write a something about Red Dead Redemption for some time, only I keep playing Red Dead Redemption.

I know, I know, when you signed up for this it was just advertising and a bit of literature - not sitting for hours and hours in front of a frankly awesome rig incorporating an Optoma GT7000 HD projector, PS3 and 1973 Harmon Kardon solid state amplifier, clutching a greasy plastic control paddle and tapping away for hours on end like a little boy with a rare genetic condition that causes him to look like a 29 year old man.

Funnily enough that's what my ex-girlfriend said.

But see I like the idea of writing about video games because the first writing I was really into was the video gaming magazines like Mean Machines and C&VG which I would read from cover to cover every month, a habit that lasted till I discovered the dodgy man in Shepherds Bush Market who would sell an eleven year old three ancient editions of Razzle for a fiver. There's also the distinct possibility that video games are just about to turn into art - and if there's a point to being a critic then maybe it's to try to propagate your sensibility within whatever it is you're criticising. You might even argue that one of the reasons that most advertising is real pony is that no one takes it seriously enough for it to have developed a critical culture.

But reviewing games, as a grown-up, ain't easy. The problem is that the element of interaction overwhelms the things that you would normally take interest in as a critic. Most people are more interested in how the game plays than how it sounds, or looks, or what it's saying. There's also the fact that games contain this other dimension which there isn't really a critical vocabulary to talk about yet - which is to do with pacing, how the tasks in the game are presented and what they are. You might call this a game's politics.

Most games are a lot like work, i.e. in order to succeed you have complete a series of goals set by someone else, and are rewarded for doing so with some form of credit that you can spend within the game. These games are late capitalist. A lot of games are also nihilistic, because the game world is hermeneutic nothing you do really matters. This is both chief advantage of gaming, compared to real life, and the scariest thing about it. If your children are noisy, wilful and violent plugging them into a Playstation is, no doubt, a blessed relief. But you're also encouraging them to immerse themselves in a world without consequences, or where the consequence of their actions are perverse, where stabbing 50 people in the face earns a you a Command Pro Perk.

But I digress...Red Dead Redemption.

If you've played Grand Theft Auto, you've already got the idea. Loner arrives in a large virtual environment populated by characters who swear a lot. Gunplay ensues. Only, and here's the kicker, in Red Dead Redemption you're in the Wild West, and you're a cowboy.

That's all I want to say about the, hem, gameplay.

Red Dead Redemption manages to be bigger than your average game, partly because it's a Western, which means it has this whole existing culture to engage with and comment upon, something it does in a rather smart post-modern way, and partly because its writers have taken care to introduce morality into the mix. So there's the normal obsession with shooting stuff, with weaponry and levelling-up, but you also have an 'honor' meter. So if you go round murdering nuns (which, yes, you can do) then you lose honor and become a 'desperado'. But, this behaviour has consequences, it makes your life more difficult, because everywhere you go people get together a posse and try to ride you out of town. On the other hand if you do good, good characters are predisposed to be genial and give you discounts.

This demonstrates, in a purely practical way that there is a reason to try to behave well, that it is not just its own reward. It offers choices which are absent in most games. You could not, for instance, play Call of Duty and manifest an attitude of pacifism within the game, whilst still playing the game. But in RDR you can at least choose only to shoot people who are intent on shooting at you.

But of course, as Bolaño says: 'Evil is a Ferrari on the highways of freedom'.

There's also a third option, which is just to ride around the beautiful virtual countryside writing haiku about birds. And here's the unique thing about the game: RRDR is libertarian in its politics, because you don't have to do any tasks at all, if you don't feel like it. The world is wide, so your motion doesn't have to be straight ahead through time, it can just be digressive in space. It's the first game I've played that gives you the option of being a horseshoe throwing hippy.

Do they owe us a living? I strongly suspect they do.

2010-06-02T12:01:00.006+01:00

So the first half of this novel I'm supposedly writing is set in the 70s, in Shepherds Bush, in the demi-monde of squatting and petty criminality. As part of the research I've been reading Penny Rimbaud's book, Shibboleth - My Revolting Life.

Rimbaud was drummer and founding member of the anarchopunk band Crass. I remember being played The Feeding of the 5000 in council flat bedroom when I was about 15 and becoming genuinely scared that someone would hear it and arrest us. Just one of the reasons I don't do drugs any more.

Rimbaud was actually an upper-middle class hippy - a public schoolboy, then a tutor at an art college, he lived in a commune he set up in a rented farmhouse. His father was Colonel in the British army and he was already in his thirties by the time Crass made it.

He shares these qualities with Joe Strummer, whose Dad was in the Foreign Office and who consistently lied about his age and his background. Increasingly punk seems to me to a be movement of posers who were angry with their parents, or angry about being sent to boarding school. The only authentic punks were the inauthentic punks.

Anyway, Shibboleth is great, by turns pretentious and smart much as you'd expect from someone that changed their name from Jeremy John Ratter to Penny Darjeeling Rimbaud. If you'd like to experience some abuse from Rimbaud first hand, I suggest you visit his website here.

Football is for morons pt.2

2010-05-26T14:38:00.009+01:00

Hello.

I'm no good at football, I never have been, even as a child I would be the last to be picked or end up in goal, smoking Gitanes. My local team are QPR who've been shit for at least the last 25 years. Although I did try going for a season, and enjoyed shouting about how wonderful west London is (it's full of tits, fanny and Rangers you know), paying £25 to bellow abuse at Peter Crouch, arguably the best player they've ever had, ultimately didn't strike me as worthwhile.

Obviously disliking football is up there for me with disliking people who watch TV, people who read the Metro, people who read Dan Brown novels, people who believe that you can cultivate self-respect in the unemployed by giving them money, people who live in Hackney and refuse to see that it's a shithole, no better than, for instance, Shepherds Bush, only with more bastards and now also my ex-girlfriend, people who like Henry James, people who try to make you read Henry James, proles, poshos and the bourgoisie, pro-Palestinian bores, pro-Israeli bores and Australians.

Yes, it's part of a carefully cultivated pomposity designed to alienate most of the population.

But really, while I don't have any special aversion to footballs, or the game of football (it is, after all, a game, and there plenty of things in the world worth hating without including arbitrary rule systems) I find The Game of Football appalling.

Football stadia are cathedrals to conformity, places where men take their sons to learn how to be men, to relish violence and shouting, to engage in arcane and pointless discussion meant solely to alienate the uninitiated and women. The whole thing runs on fear - knowing the songs, when to whistle, the off-side rule, when there's going to be trouble - on the fear of looking like a mug, of not knowing how to be a proper man. Blokes have to talk about football in pubs, because otherwise, they might have to talk about how they're feeling, their hopes and fears, what they want from life and in fact, what the whole business of living could possibly be for and come on you muppet you're having a fucking laugh aren't you?

You only need to try to suggest the idea of mixed football teams to fan of the beautiful game to see what a very unbeautiful game it is.

And if you turn barely literate 21 year olds into deities, what do they do? I don't find it shocking, just depressingly unimaginative. They could do anything, literally, but ah if only they had brains, for all the poor dears can think of is plugging themselves into either end of a bright orange secretarial college drop out.

And that would be fine, if the whole edifice of football weren't run by elderly men with toupees, endorsers of incontinence pads and crisps, geezers who made good, who still believe that it's family entertainment and that every incident of violence, rape and racism is merely an isolated incident that shouldn't be allowed to bring the whole game into disrepute Des.

Interestingly, a lot of football fans are socialists, exactly the kind of socialists who want to prevent parents from sending their children to privately owned schools, for the benefit of the population generally. What I always thing would be fun would be to ban football, and to relocate local schools into football grounds. Lessons would be taught as usual, only in the presence of several thousand screaming fans. No one would forget their Geography homework if they had the local Firm to answer to at break-time. You pay £400 a season you want to get your money's worth from year seven don't you?

Anyway, I thought I'd get that out of the way. Thank god for Red Dead Redemption - I be will spending the next few months playing virtual horse shoe throwing with my virtual friend Gus McCloud.

I dunno who made that ad up there, but they must be some kind of creative genius.

Don't Panic!

2010-05-24T18:36:00.004+01:00

As the creative responsible for some of the biggest ads of the last few years (not wishing to reveal too much about my identity, but think 'Cog', 'Balls', 'Gorilla', 'Surfer', 'Labour isn't working', ''Ello Tosh got a Toshiba?', 'Couple' (Gold Blend), 'A finger of fudge is just enough', those clever Lycatel ads with the man whose head is a globe with a mercator projection of an entire map of the world on one side and whose jacket is made up of hundreds of Lycatel mobile phone cards and all the Confused.com ads ever. I also invented the iPod and bread) I recently upped my day rate to the princely sum of £230.

This might not seem like a huge amount of money, but I think it would strike most sane people as a lot to pay someone who can't draw, to draw. I also write words obviously, but rarely more than six in a row.

Comparisons don't make much sense: it's the same as week's bar or secretarial work, or two days as a mid-level civil servant or a secondary school teacher. Some prostitutes make that much in an hour - but then I don't usually have to have sex with more than one person I don't know in a normal working day.

What it means in practice is that people are now prepared to pay me to deliver, and expect me to do so fairly consistently.

The thing is that this isn't always possible. And what I've discovered is that it especially isn't always possible if you've recently split up with your girlfriend, you're waking up at 6am every morning to write a novel and even at the best of times you're naturally disposed paranoia and insecurity of every kind.

If this is the case then you will almost certainly spend your time thinking about why you're not having any ideas, considering whether you were ever really able to have ideas, whether anyone else has noticed that you're not having anything like £230 of ideas per day, that it's no wonder your girlfriend left you and that you might as well just go and tell the creative directors that there's been a huge mistake and ask them plangently why, if they'd wanted the job done properly, they employed an 8 year old to do it in the first place?

The problem is that when you're a freelancer the imperative to deliver usable advertising is far more pressing. Where as when you're on the payroll you can sort of hide behind the spurious argument that 'oh it's just because the ads were too intelligent/misogynistic/arty/violent' and therefore that it's sort of the client's fault, as a freelancer there is a direct relationship between the bill-able hours you put in, and the agency's bottom line.

If you descend into a state of panic, it's important to remember that, if the agency is any good, they're probably not as mad as you are.

In fact, the agency can only have got to be any good because of the zen-like ability of its creative directors to weather the inconsistencies of their clients' behaviour, as well as that of whatever minor muse it is that caters to advertising creatives.

In fact you could almost go so far as to say that the quality of an agency is proportionate to the willingness of its creative directors to turn down work that isn't good enough, in the certain faith that something better is just over the hill. That really good creative direction is maybe just about recognising talent and having the nerve to hold the line against the client till the good stuff turns up. What characterizes bad agencies being either terrible process, or a lazy reluctance to put up with the hassle of turning stuff down and asking for more.

At any rate, you should try not to panic. When the creative directors take you out for lunch at the end of the week you should definitely not begin by apologising profusely and telling them about your relationship and addiction issues.

They may find this surprising, particularly if they were planning to offer you more work, and on extremely advantageous terms.

Feels a bit weird linking to the Google homepage.

2010-05-21T17:26:00.000+01:00

This is lovely though. That link will only make sense today. So here's a picture:

Football is for morons...

2010-05-20T18:22:00.001+01:00

This, however, is an extremely fine piece of advertising.

Euros made this?

2010-05-20T11:33:00.001+01:00

'The police often question him, just because they find him interesting.'

Who made this? Why are they at Euros?

Not Voodoo's Heroes of Prose: Will Self

2010-05-19T23:44:00.008+01:00

So far so so.

Well tomorrow anyway I'm going to meet Will Self in my role as cub reporter for Thalidomide Handball Weekly (incorporating Flapper Magazine).

I'm pretty nervous about it, I don't mind telling you, because as well as being a novelist he's a real journalist, where as I'm an adman pretending to be a journalist, (although in the more terrible moments during this current freelance stint I've been starting to think I'm actually a journalist masquerading as a novelist masquerading as an adman) and I anticipate him, at some point really early on in the interview staring me down and saying, 'you've just got no fucking idea what you're doing.'

Anyway, that may not happen.

I've only recently admitted a penchant for Self's writing. Prior to reading him I'd mainly seen him using polysyllabic words on TV and I'd always thought 'Come off it, you're just being dick.' What I've discovered, from writing this blog and trying to write a book, is that defending oneself against the accusation of 'just being a dick' is somethin g writers have to deal with internally on a daily basis. And I had this realisation that maybe the feeling of 'just being a dick' never goes away - it's just one of the unpleasant feelings you have to live with if you're in the business of exposing your thoughts in public. Or that, you can't write honestly, giving your personality its fullest expression, and avoid that feeling. This being so I've come to believe that using the word 'pabulum' on ITV is actually a rather admirable thing to do.

I'm hoping that in between calling my bluff in a deeply demeaning way I can persuade Self to talk about the short story 'Prometheus' from his last book of short stories Liver (recommended to me by Scamp, who is also a big Self fan). It's set in an ad agency somewhere near Wiedens, and is a very witty re-imagining of Aeschylus's Prometheus Unbound as a modern morality tale. While this may be the first time Self has dealt with the ad industry directly he's always had an eye on what we're up to. His brother, the writer John Self, ran a DM agency called Self Direct (I would have called it Self Addressed Envelope, obv.) He published a short story collection called 'Tough, tough toys for tough, tough boys' - the Tonka endline of the 70s and 80s and Great Apes is really just the PG Tips advert at novel length.

Self would have been an excellent copywriter, in fact he uses quite a few copywriter's tricks:

Defamiliarisation of cliche. Slackers 'Want to do nothing at all, and they want to do it now.' A shot of whisky goes off like an 'anti-personality mine'. I could probably find more, but it's late and I have an interview to prepare for.

Epigrams: both in the journalism ('Flying first class is the heroin of travel.') and the fiction: Henry Wootton in Dorian speaks almost wholly in epigrams, although the model is Oscar Wilde in modern usage we might legitimately term these endlines ('In an age when appearances matter more an more. Only the shallowest of people won't judge by them.'...Nivea).

TOV: In the early fiction in particular Self's voice seems strangely branded. If you read a lot of his work, and I've been reading a lot of his work, certain words keep cropping up like actors in a stage crowd. Crack, when heated, always 'deliquesces'. Men get into cars and 'dicker' with the 'servos'. The good thing about this is you only have to look up the word 'rodomontade' once. The difference between a tone of voice and literary style is something you could probably write a pretty boring essay about, but I think a tone of voice is experienced by the reader as an explicit attempt to create a specific impression. So Dan Germain at Innocent is nakedly trying to make you think 'wholesome', Will Self is trying to make you think 'intellectual' - and this is a communication that exists over and above what the words themselves say.

So, fingers crossed. Let's just hope he's not in the habit of Googling himself before interviews.

'By their fruit you will know them.'

2010-05-17T15:00:00.008+01:00

Often I wonder what the point of advertising is.

The best answer I've been able to come up with is that it's an opportunity for commercial enterprises to show who they might have been if they weren't saddled with the tedious job of making products and could have instead followed their dream of devoting themselves to art - making pretty pictures, or amusing films for your entertainment.

Obviously the companies can't do this themselves, because they don't have the necessary skills to make anything apart from whatever it is they make - it's not their fault, it's an economic imperative. So they employ ad agencies, who employ artists and writers to make art for them.

However, since the company is just a collection of people employed using the money made selling the things they've been making there is no empirical difference between the employees of the ad agency and the employees of the company. The client, when he chooses his agency, and the account man when he manages his client manifest the corporate culture of the company they're working for. That culture might be attractive and permissive of innovation (like, say, Honda) or totally fascistic like, errmmmm, Microsoft.

The 'New Busy' campaign reeks of corporate misery. I quite liked the clouds execution above until I realised that the thing that the 'New Busy' notices in the clouds is a grinning cartoon mouse face. The sinister thing is that that is the only thing that you could possibly notice.

So the invitation to idly wile a way a couple of minutes gazing at a charming cloudscape is actually like someone grabbing the back of your head and hissing 'LOOK. AT. THE. MOUSE. FACE. FUCKER.'

They are the art equivalent of John Wayne Gacy.

See what I mean?

Back again

2010-05-14T17:32:00.001+01:00

So, quite a few things have happened to me since I last posted on here. I started writing a book, took up smoking, bought a Playstation, my girlfriend left me, etc.

But I’ve decided to begin blogging again because I’m now working in agencies fairly regularly and I think it’s about the least useless use of downtime there is. There’s something about being in an office that means I have to find some sort of release valve for the less socially acceptable parts of my personality.

Also, the Advertisers Anonymous blog flopped hard and it’s embarrassing for me when The Narcoleptics Daily links to that and it’s just a useless Brazilian animation that some random Brazilian has posted.

Ben Kay’s blog has just recently got so good that there’s really no need for another advertising blog, so I’ll be trying to diversify. Writing more about things like Kingsley Amis and video games. I’d quite like to write for Wired as well so we’ll see if we can bring that about. I will still write about advertising, because I still find it to be one of the most bizarre human activities going, second only to taking a meat hammer to your own knees only a daily basis.

I have number of new features in mind. Including SHAG LILY ALLEN – in which I use social media to seduce celebrity starlet Lily Allen. Kingsley Amis's Life Kitchen. Brother Stevie said he might be up for doing some drawings, so who knows we might even finish The Sisters of Inversion or something.

Hold on to your fedoras fellas.

Not Voodoo's Heroes of Prose: David Foster Wallace

2009-10-12T23:58:00.010+01:00

Yeah, sorry about last week. Student lifestyle innit? I don't know if you've spent any time in the British Library (let's face it, I don't know a damn thing about you) but it is an incredible place. I think you know you're a nerd at heart when you get butterflies in your stomach just walking into the Humanities Reading Room.

And when I said that the next Hero of Prose would be a less obvious one, that was a massive lie.

Even casual readers of this blog will know I am a huge fan of David Foster Wallace. The name of this blog, comes from his story Mr Squishy:

One of the first things a Field Researcher accepts is that the product is never going to have as important a place in a TFG's minds as it did in the Client's. Advertising is not voodoo. The Client could ultimately hope only to create the impression of a connection or resonance between the brand and what was important to consumers. And what was important to consumers was, always and invariably, themselves.

A friend gave me his book of short stories, Oblivion, in 2004. A book that would literally change my life, leading inadvertently to my giving up drinking, entertaining the prospect of not being miserable and almost certainly saving my own personal map. As well as being a provider of revelatory experiences DFW had one of the most engaging written styles in modern literature. One good thing that emerged from his suicide in September 2008 was that the coverage it generated contained some significant insights into the way that he wrote. In fact, if you imagine someone with an IQ close to 200 writing extremely fast and with a biro you will get the idea.

There is also this amusing primer which began circulating on the internet last year - to my mind, it only covers the style he developed for Infinite Jest, and actually towards the end of his life, he was moving towards something if not spare, then very much sadder.

I don't feel at all qualified to write about his writing. But here are a few things that I have tried to copy.

Just ending sentences where the hell you want in the interest of producing a realistic cadence:

I mean, it has to be something about me if you can't trust me after all these weeks or stand even just a little normal ebb and flow with always thinking I'm getting ready to leave. I don't know what but there must be.

Punctuating third person narration with spoken idiom, just being confident that the reader will read intelligently in the voice that you offer them, and just letting it come out:

The Advanced Basics chairperson looks like a perfect cross between pictures of Dick Cavett and Truman Capote except this guy's also like totally, almost flamboyantly bald, and to top it off he's wearing a bright-black country-western shirt with baroque curlicues of white Nodie-piping across the chest and shoulders, and a string tie, plus sharp-toed boots of some sort of weirdly imbricate reptile skin, and overall he's riveting to look at, grotesque in that riveting way that flaunts its grotesquerie.

Getting up ahead of the reader:

I know this part is boring and probably boring you, by the way, but it gets a lot more interesting when I get to the part where I kill myself and discover what happens immediately after a person dies.

The night before he died I was actually watching his Charlie Rose interview on YouTube, which doesn't seem to be there any more. I did keep meaning to write to him to say that he'd made a massive difference to me, but had somehow never got round to it. Sad really.

Sad too, but I think this going to be my last post here after all. I will be posting on the other blog, but my other commitments aren't leaving me with the juice to write this one too, and it's mainly just making me feel awful.

So thanks very much for reading, it's been lovely.

Ride on time!

2009-10-02T11:29:00.005+01:00

GC submitted his column for Nursery School Assistant Magazine on time this morning, including two uses of the phrase 'queening stool'. The new blog is up at a secret address. And this afternoon he's hanging with Paul Smith at the Design Museum. Pretty sweet Friday.

Planners are evil

2009-10-01T00:36:00.003+01:00

Taxi receipt, looks fairly innocuous, £15 probably rounded up from £12 on a I'll-do-you-a-receipt-then-shall-I-nudge-nudge-basis. But look, there's some gibberish on there. Turn it over and you're confronted with this:

Obviously this is a warning-as-advert par excellence. Presumably the best thing about having an affair is the thrill, the sheer un-wisdom of it. That once, just once, you're prepared to give in to a libidinal urge in the face of all that accreted responsibility and prove that yeah, underneath it all you're really young and alive after all.

So in this case a warning of the dangers, for those looking for danger is the best possible advert.

Plus 'having an affair' sounds just much more fun than 'working on or ending a marriage' doesn't it? A Cornetto is not an alternative to a back hand slap across the face.

As the product of what was once quaintly called 'a broken home', now known as a normal family, GC feels somewhat conflicted about this. On the one hand I've got the whole libertarian argument a la Hegarty that says if they sell it, we sell it. But on the other is the straight-forward commonsensical aversion to the promotion of something that's bound to cause more misery, in a world already superabundant in misery.

And don't say, well, by allowing people to select an appropriate partner to have an affair with MetroEncounters are preventing the pain and misery caused by people beginning affairs with the wrong people, because that is so much sophistry. You might as well offer humane murder training for those considering doing a murder. ('Not everyone is suited to murdering, but if you would like to quietly smother your partner to death...')

I'm not sure I'd work on it, but I'd like to meet the planner who did. As would several thousand angry, angry spouses within the radius of the M25 I expect.

Whaddyouthink?

Not Voodoo's Heroes of Prose: Charlie Brooker

2009-09-29T11:03:00.008+01:00

The second in a series of features in which I pontificate about people who write really well in an utterly transparent attempt to establish myself on some kind of equal footing with them.

This week Charlie Brooker.

I was going to save him for later, but he wrote this piece on the horrible horrible Windows 7 launch parties thing that Microsoft made. It's fine when he's writing about TV, but when he starts on advertising then I'm like oi Brooker stay the fuck off my patch you trout-faced old hack.

He's over at his desk laughing. Ha, ha, ha. That's the relationship we have you see.

All male journalists under 30 want to write like Charlie Brooker. Which is ironic, given that he's rapidly approaching 40.

The extraordinary thing about him is that, in an age when the media cares less and less about talent and more and more about youth and beauty, he's managed to build an extremely successful career, work with Chris Morris, present TV shows and poon beautiful former Big Brother contestants, on the basis of a powerful imagination and an expletive-laden prose style. And it all starts with the writing - initially for PC Zone, then for his own website TVgohome.

TVgohome is still the funniest thing on the internet. It doesn't seem to get old. I had to stop reading it during the years I spent working as a medical secretary because people kept coming into the room to find me with my head on the keyboard apparently crying. Whilst I was living in South America I used to read it to remind me that there were parts of the world where humour was relatively widespread.

Here is a hasty and inadequate survey of some of the characteristics of his writing:

hyphenation and conjunction - so A&R men are shark-eyed, Nathan Barley is cock-haired, his friends are shitcreeps, etc. By stacking a load of these up you can create the impression of language straining to accommodate spleen, or misery or whatever else you're trying to express.

surreal flights of description, but studded with weirdly poetic detail. So here, describing his experience of a minor neck operation: 'What if, just at the crucial moment they stuck the needle in, I was seized by some awful Tourettes-like urge to suddenly jerk around on the slab, cackling like a madman in a rainstorm, deliberately severing my spinal cord against the cold, hard spike?'

precise technical specifications. In 2002 Nathan Barley was using a Sony Vaio laptop and a Nokia with an infra-red connection, today Brooker revels in the full name of the Mac operating system 'Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard'. These add sudden moments of focus and clarity and give the whole schtick an Easton Ellis-type hypermodern feel. (He's up on product numbers because he used to work behind the counter at CEX, not sure which one, maybe down the road from Dave Trott's place, which raises the possibility that they might have met, and probably argued, neither one aware of the other as a culturally significant prose stylist.)

Cloacal fixation cf. the fictional Ralph Fiennes vehicle, Widdleplop III on TVgohome.

All of these things put to the service of an amazed horror at human selfishness, cruelty and self-regard eg.: 'While filming himself receiving fellatio from a coke-twisted anorexic work experience girl plucked from the corridors of his uncle's TV production company, Nathan Barley momentarily interrupts his warm-gummed prickbliss to read a text message from the Ananova automatic news update service informing him of the latest Afghan death toll, before sliding his hideous gitprong back into position and intuitively grasping the back of her head like a man trying to pierce a basketball with his fingers.'

Interestingly, it is a rule in advertising that the more like Nathan Barley someone actually is, the more likely they are to namecheck Nathan Barley as a self-aware conversational gambit.

So there you go. Charlie Brooker, we salute you.

Next week will be less predictable, I promise.

I'm not going to be posting much tho', because I've just started this MA and am already having anxiety dreams about writing a book.

In the 90s, this kind of behaviour was considered quite cool

2009-09-23T00:02:00.005+01:00

Rather than that of a preening imbecile.

Britons: America's Australians

2009-09-22T16:45:00.006+01:00

I don't know who made this ad - might be Fallon, might easily be the first execution of the idea that DDB took them from Fallon with, it's impossible to tell from the caption in the Campaign article I nicked this picture from. Lazy journalism if you ask me.

At any rate, this ad is around at the moment in every paper format going. They even wrapped Time Out London with it the other week, which I found ironic, given that the picture clearly shows no city on this island.

Good times. They're out there.

Not literally out there obviously. But somewhere. In America maybe.

The British are peculiarly susceptible to this idea: somewhere there is a glamorous city where you will shake off your social anxiety and be much more like a fun-loving, and yet fashionably sardonic, character from a 1990s sitcom. You'll get phone calls behind the bar. You'll play pool on those tables with the massive pockets. Women will assume you're intelligent, because of your accent, even if you're technically an idiot.

In fact, this is the archetype, if not for all advertising, then at at least for the majority of advertising for booze.

How do I get to this magical place?

Should I take a plane or catch and ocean liner?

No old friend, you just have to drink enough Budweiser.

Then you will have no fucking idea where you are.

The other thing that lends this advert its weird archetypal feeling is that it's actually the only advert you can make for booze now, since it became illegal to show attractive people having fun, socialising and drinking.

Good times. Woo!

How not to write No. 2

2009-09-21T21:14:00.002+01:00

Surf YouTube collecting as many intro sequence to 90s yoof TV show 'The Word' as you possibly can. Watch them over and over, and try to work out what the word is for how they make you feel.

It should exist between 'nostalgic' and 'embarrassed', but it's just not there.

I believe Quiet Storm made this one.

If you want to waste extra time not writing, try uploading your videos straight to Blogger. It takes much much longer, but it does seem to get round the no-embed code that Channel4 put on their videos, no-fun sticklers for copyright that they are.

This is going to be sort of a 90s week on Not Voodoo. For precisely no reason.

The 90s were a really long time ago

2009-09-21T14:12:00.002+01:00

Let's just take a moment to appreciate how long, with the help of this video.

Brother Stevie's Hot Show

2009-09-18T15:38:00.004+01:00

Next Thursday GC will be making the pilgrimage east to worship at Brother Stevie's opening at Shoreditch trendhole Jaguar Shoes.

Downstairs will be a special Not Voodoo retrospective.

Come along and say hello. That would freak me out.

TFL Design Department fucks it up again

2009-09-18T11:22:00.003+01:00

Oh look, here's a nice idea. A short story based on the Underground, presented in the context of an Underground station, and maybe written with the input of Underground staff.

Mmm, maybe I'll get a bit closer and read some of it while I wait for the tube...

Arrrgh my eyes!

Incredibly small type plus super long line length makes it impossible to track to the end of the line so that the process of reading is incredibly laboured and boring and oh look I just can't be bothered any more.

Over at Set Square and Protractor Magazine the designers are moaning about how they've fucked up the map. Something for everyone hey TFL.

I'll edit this later, I have to go and exercise

2009-09-17T16:25:00.007+01:00

I love this clip, in fact I love this film. I may put up the home improvement scene, where Charlie Sheen buys a West Side apartment and, with a team of burly interior designers and Daryl Hannah, does the place up with detachable neo-Georgian cornicing and stencils to the sounds of 'This must be the place'. Aspirational with a capital A.

Also: the hair. As a heavy pomade user myself it's a weird relief to see this. Some say Mark Lamarr, and I always counter with Johnny Otis, but maybe Charlie Sheen in Wall Street is where it's really coming from on a level too deep for me to admit even to myself.

So apart from all that, I was thinking about this video because I recently read William Gibson's Spook Country. It's not a great, or even a very good book. It caused me to wonder whether it's easier to write sci-fi in a merely workmanlike way. The little Philip K. Dick that I've read is as badly written as an unexceptional edition of Razzle, in fact Blade Runner is even better once you realise what a terrible book 'Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep?' is.

Fans of Bladerunner, Through a Scanner Darkly and Total Recall may also notice that they are all essentially the same film - about a man who believes himself to be part of a system, whilst schizophrenically existing within another rebel system. This effect might not be unconnected to Dick's biscuits having been thoroughly flipped taking mind-bending hallucinogens during the 1960s.

Hem...anyway... Sci-fi is all form, no matter. It's a literature of ideas, so things like a plot or writing may be secondary considerations, merely devices that you use to get your hi-tech widgetry airborne.

Spook Country is based on a rather interesting art idea called 'locative art', massive artworks that exist on the internet that are viewed through a special GPS headpiece. Artists use the technology to create site specific installations, for instance, the body of River Phoenix lying dead outside the Viper Rooms - in the actual spot in which he died, or a hotel room full of Monet's lilies.

This is one of the heroine's (her name is Hollis Henry and she seemed to me to be modelled, absurdly, on Justine Frischmann of Elastica) first encounters with locative technology:

"Alberto was digging through a canvas carryall on his lap. He produced a cell phone, married with silver duct tape to some other species of smallish consumer electronics. 'With these, though ... ' he clicked something on one of the conjoined units, opened the phone, and began deftly thumbing its key pad. 'When this is available as a package ... ' He passed it to her. A phone, and something she recognised as a GPS unit, but the latter's casing had been partially cut away, with what felt like more electronics growing out of it, sealed under a silver tape."

At which point the modern reader will be thinking, hang on a minute Alberto, you radical cyber hipster, where's your iPhone? Don't you read Crack Unit? What you're dealing with here is known in real life as Augmented Reality.

So Gibson published Spook Country in 2007 and already he's looking a bit Gordon Gecko. There'd be nothing to stop an advertiser, right now, producing a piece of locative art to hover above Piccadilly Circus, one that was only viewable through certain kinds of mobile handset.

Gibson then goes trundling off into this alternate reality nerd-fest. This stuff, hanging around, in geographical locations and yet in cyberspace, is it any more or less real than, for instance, voodoo, or Catholic mysticism?

I don't know, I don't care that much, what's more interesting is that you can now steal ideas from sci-fi, safe in the knowledge that rate of technological development is so fast that they'll almost certainly be viable in just a couple of year's time.

Not Voodoo's Heroes of Prose: Peter York

2009-09-15T10:51:00.007+01:00

So this is a feature that I've been thinking of doing almost as long as I've been thinking I should start reviewing films, and maybe trying to send them out to papers, you know, nothing ventured nothing gained, like since I was 16.

Heroes of Prose are people whose written style I particularly like. Some of them will be obvious, some less so.

First up is Peter York. I first came across his writing in the excellent REWIND. Your Art Buying department should have a copy, unless you're working at some tinpot Dog and Pony operation, in which case Westminster Library has a copy, and seriously, you need to move on, you only live once and life's too short to work with people that you want to murder etc., etc.

York (real name Peter Wallis) was ascendant in the 80s and has owned the decade, from a cultural commentary point of view, ever since. As style editor for Harpers and Queens he wrote a series of articles on modern British culture, which were collected in Style Wars (published 1980). He also published a book, which I don't own, but I remember my parents talking about, called The Sloane Ranger's Handbook.

As well as being a journalist he's a management consultant, and his writing has something of the best low-bullshit business lit about it. Not only do I, obviously, like the idea of someone taking popular culture, if not seriously, then at least seriously enough to write intelligently about it, but I also love his prose style.

According to his Wikipedia entry his idol was Tom Wolfe, but he's better than Tom Wolfe in that he tends to avoid the purple writerly stuff that most American authors after Updike see as their birthright. Also Tom Wolfe doesn't know what an occiput is because he's a fucking philistine.

Here he is (in Peter York's 80s, the book that accompanied the BBC TV series, which I picked up in a second hand shop for the princely sum of three pounds) talking about, of all things, B&Q:

Actually, B&Q were not just making a profit out of the self-expression craze, they were instrumental in defining the way we thought of ourselves as we went about our labours of creativity. The B&Q warehouse approach said it all: it was big, competent and businesslike, taking care of everything from itty-bitty brass screws to lengths of 5-inch diameter wastepiping to sprigged wallpaper to burglar alarms. And by extension, we too were big competent and businesslike. We knew we could handle anything from a window lock to a complete re-wiring of the upstairs because B&Q told us we could and let us have the gear, no questions, just as if we were real builders and decorators. What a change from the stuffed, accretion-filled hardware shops of our past, staffed by professional fifty-year-old sceptics in dun-coloured work coats! What a change after the horrors of the builders' merchants ('You can have it, but you gotta buy at least three hundredweight') It all fitted in with that heady feeling of change, experiment, no limits!

The long sentences, with their ease and fluidity make you feel as though you're in a conversation dominated by someone you'd like to keep talking to. There's a speed up, slow-down, speed up technique with inserted clauses. It's like he's drunk, but he's a really good drunk. A slack-rope walker, a raconteur. His lists, as evinced above, or here (writing about Bernie Madoff's home) are exhilarating - he's a materialist, but a soulful one.

Not afraid of the exclamation marks too you'll notice.

So, buy some of his books, comb your hair into a pompadour and go clausal.

How not to write. No.1

2009-09-14T17:12:00.004+01:00

Try to beat my high score of 5000m on this.

The copy and the music really do a lot. Anyone know what this is written in/on?

UPDATE: That really is the flash game equivalent of meth amphetamine. It's beautifully designed.

It's an escape game, but you can never escape.
To play again, you just hit the jump button - so you have no time for your ego to kick in and stop you, you're just suddenly playing again.
There's only one button.
The music is excellent.
The sound effects are excellent.
It's really exciting, but it looks like you could run it on a BBC Model B.
There's no explanation, it's just laden with stuff that is suggestive of a story.

Can I nominate it for a D&AD pencil? Or something. Can we nominate the bloke that made it to be president this year? Or is that all over already?

Monday Morning Memento Mori

2009-09-14T09:48:00.003+01:00

I'm sick of trawling the internet for mortality stats so this is the last ever MMMM. No warning, just sudden and final. The best any of us can hope for really.

So, suggestions please for a new Monday morning feature. And no carping, seriously, if you're relying on an advertising blog for your hard existential truths you are living in a strange reality indeed.

If you need a continual reminder that you're days are numbered, get a tattoo or something. That's what I'm going to do.

I'm a tiger. A tiger. Rrarrrg!

2009-09-11T13:46:00.005+01:00

So here I am, back in W12 - at home during the day, with the children, the elderly and the chronically ill.

Not all in my flat, although I can hear the happy cries from the playground down the road, which makes me feel like a Victorian child with TB.

Really need to work on my self-concept.

No, no. The idea is that I'll be freelancing from here and also starting an interesting MA in about a week's time.

So if you need a freelance writer, do get in touch. I'm available about two days a week. I discharged some of my remaining advertising duties yesterday - requesting work for my portfolio and going to run in the NABS Interagency 5k with the last place I worked at.

That was a weird event now wasn't it? I particularly liked when we were led in physical jerks by a woman with a Bobby Brown radio mic and the voice of Barbara Windsor, flanked by her two silent aerobic cronies.

Overall, it was fine.

Only it was a bit like we were acting out a metaphor for advertising for the entertainment of a spiteful tribal monarch wasn't it? Maybe an socialist African warlord. To wit:

No one knew why they were doing it. I asked several people, those that would talk to me muttered something about their agency, when pressed a few confessed to a desire to crush their enemies underfoot.
Onlookers stood back as we passed, observing our sad straining faces with blank incomprehension. 'It's clearly painful, it looks meaningless, so why are they doing it?' That's what they were thinking.
Before the race everyone knew everyone and chatted awkwardly, and during it, we ran silently, each one of us alone with his own pain.
The few that streaked ahead seemed to be made from something more rubbery and nerveless than flesh and bone. After a while the idea of ever catching up became frankly laughable.
Everyone else ran in a dishevelled pack - sneakily overtaking one another over grassy corners.

GC came in around 200th. There were 700 runners, but you have to try pretty hard to be pleased about coming in 200th in anything. Maybe I should have thought creatively and elbowed my way to the front of the funnel - which was pretty clogged, as per the above, by the time I got there.

In other news Dan Germain, chief beard at Innocent has posted about the interview I did with him for Athlete's Foot Magazine. Nice bloke, but he swears like a thin, bearded, alive version of Bernard Manning. Here's a link, straight back atcha Dan.

Haven't heard a peep out of Gary Garnczarcyk at Malmaison. I liked him, as you will see if you read the piece.

YouTube recommended it to me...

2009-09-08T20:58:00.005+01:00

...so I'm just passing on what I was freely given.

Seriously though, first person to convince their creative director that this is what youngsters are doing these days, and use it in an advert for a tumble drier, gets some kind of incredible award.

Shiny, shiny.

If Brüno had an ad agency...

2009-09-08T12:10:00.005+01:00

... it would be Das Comitee.

You don't have to be German to find these ads complexly offensive. And not in a good way. Someone should explain that to them.

Not Voodoo: new and improved

2009-09-07T23:09:00.009+01:00

GC is back from Istanbul and more curmugeonly than ever.
Don't think this point form post is just me slacking off the hard graft of sewing long, intricately clausal sentences together.
Oh no.
It's punchy.
Punchy.
Or as the Art Director used to say 'panchy'.
But then, she was Italian.
Istanbul is great.
You can smoke tobacco there, from a bong, even if you gave up smoking like three years ago.
It's traditional.
You can have your calf muscles soaped up and manipulated by a wiry old man with a moustache and incredibly hard thumbs.
Their idealised feminine silhouette is wastey-hippy.
Pantherine.
And yet, kebabs?
Corsets.
Like Parisians, river-dwelling, sensualist, so good at cooking they've even made innards delicious.
You can haggle there. They like it.
Seriously.
Can't recommend it enough.
I've discovered something I really don't like though, and that's genre-straddling covers of third rate pop songs. Ok, cover 'Smoke gets in your eyes' or 'Mona' or something. There's no need to produce a mambo version of 'Clocks'. There's enough shit in the world without recourse to U2's 'Elevation' played on balalaika. Jeezus. I'm trying to smoke a bong here.
Probably not going to give up this blog.
Probably starting a new one to run concurrently.