Brother Phil: The Midweek Freak

I'm very proud to present the third in a series of collaborations with superfreak Brother Phil, bringing you the favourite rappers you never had in eighties bubble-gum card form.

For more of mad skill from the man like Phil check his site.

Yeeeah Boi! As Flavor Flav would no doubt say if he were still alive today.

Art! Fuckers!

The Classified: Contemporary Art exhibition at the Tate is great.

It's all about advertising really.



In the first room there's this excellent Mark Dion cabinet of things. I wanted to own this. I think that's from working in advertising, it means when you see art, you want to buy it.

It turns it into a commercially viable object, and therefore makes it less threatening. Or accusatory even.

I don't know, but I reckon Charles Saatchi has a bad case of this.

There's a couple of really big Hirsts in it. One is a whole room, a sculpture you can be in, and as modern consumers we're all experts at reading environments, so all your environmental senses light up, and you think 'I'm in a hospital' and that is part of it.

There's also 'The Chapman Family Collection' which is a dimly lit room full of sculptures that look like tribal African art, but as you go further into the room you see that they all incorporate elements of the McDonalds brand identity.



I insist on my right to take pictures with my mobile in galleries, even though it's not my right. But given my history of high-concept camera phone art I reckon the rule is legally unenforceable in my case.

So we might look at African art and think 'oh how primitive, look at the way they use personifications to connote different ways of being or feeling'. Obviously we now classify this behaviour as branding, but it is the same behaviour.

Sometimes when I'm in the Westfield (I am often in the Westfield) I walk around thinking that you really need to believe in something to create a building like this. In the same way that people believed in a God terrifying enough for it to be worth building cathedrals for.

And when you think about buying an iPod, and the way that you want the latest iPod, but can't ever really have the latest one, because that only exists in a kind of timeless place where things never grow old, you realise that the whole commerical process is votive and utterly primitive, no matter how many apps you download.

My sister got the same feeling in the Westfield and she really is religious. But then, it is an excellent shopping centre.

The part of this that makes it relevant to you is that, according to their own argument, there's no difference between what the Chapmans do and what you do in a creative department. In fact, I believe there's no difference in what it takes to become the Chapmans and what it takes to become an advertising creative. They went to art school, they did apprenticeships with Gilbert and George and then they started working.

I think the art world, seen from where they are must feel just like the advertising world feels from the inside. You struggle to get into it, and it seems like people that really do it are a whole different species and talented in ways you could never be. And then when you finally do get into it most of it is shit and hype, apart from the one or two people who you admire who maybe died before you got to meet them. The rest is just administration.

If anyone wants to talk about the difference between Banksy and the Chapmans we can do that.

Banksy makes art for London Lite readers.

Am I missing something here?

I suspect this is not ironic, which is why it feels weird. As one of the greatest advertisers of the late 90s and early 00s VW made irony their own.

Direction (by Noam Murro) is a bit odd. The singer keeps doing things just out of shot that you can't quite see.

I'm also having to fight off the implication in the final frame that he's going to drive full pelt into the front of an oncoming lorry. Because isn't that glowing light at the end of the tunnel a film convention for death generally?

What do you make of it?

UPDATE: Maybe it is ironic, with the sheep in the Butchers van. And the end line. I'm confused.

(I'm not into bashing DDB by the way. Unlike Mother whose work I dislike before I've seen it.)

Monday Morning Memento Mori

If you're in the habit of trawling the internet for mortality-based statistics you'll have noticed that the lowest incidence of death occurs in the small Carribean island state of Monserrat. An average of 40 people die there every year, which sounds great, only then you realise it has a population of only 4,448 and that it's basically not so much an island, as the top of a large volcano and that the stats tend to spike unnervingly when it erupts, which it does every ten years, and in between times its prone to being utterly devastated by hurricanes. So I'm just saying, 'et in arcadia ego' if you know what I mean (i.e. are a Roman).

Brand New Cadillac

Hey, look at my new shoes.

Rarely have I been so pleased by a view of my own feet. Admittedly, they tip the balance of a look that might kindly have been termed 'anachronistic' into 'supporting dancer from Grease the musical', but still, I was delighted.

I bought them from Paul Smith, because, being a freelancer, I have to dress entirely from Paul Smith.

As a teenager I used to make Paul Smith's tea (milk no sugar), and sometimes I can get clothes there for cheap. As well as making the best shoes, he keeps a blog, that I believe to be authentic. If you want to feel miserable about your life take a gander, lots of cycling, eating in beautiful restaurants and looking at supermodels. As you can see, he's copied my use of the courier face.

I went to buy these shoes even though a friend had scored tickets for Blur last night. Thinking about Blur makes me depressed. They were only ever famous because they were all British music had left once people started making fun of the The Cure. They're just The Kinks but with cynicism instead of wit and an intolerable shit for a singer. All this isn't-it-wonderful-that-they're-back? stuff makes me want to kill myself.

But the shoes.

Booze

I’m reading a Kingsley Amis novel called ‘The Old Devils’. Like biographies of serial killers you mustn’t read too many Kingsley Amis novels in a row, because it can start to affect the way you view your relationships with women.

Kingsley Amis was a misogynist. I’m not afraid to say that.

You could probably argue that his point of view was more nuanced than just out and out fear and resentment of women, but the fact that you’d even need to doesn’t bode all that well does it? In fact in ‘Difficulties with Girls’ (sequel to ‘Take a Girl Like You’) he expounds the theory that it’s not only women who are solipsistic, jealous, self-interested and fundamentally out of touch with reality. Some men are too, but those men are therefore actually women.

Another major feature of Amis’s work is that everyone is drunk nearly all the time. It’s like advertising in the eighties. In fact the hero of ‘Stanley and the women’ works selling advertising for a national newspaper, but spends all day in the pub. Occasionally he’ll try to talk to someone on the phone, but will be too drunk and confused to work out what’s going on. The only writer who has his characters fixing and buying and waiting for drinks more often than Amis is Ernest Hemingway. ‘Across the river and into the trees?’ You’d be lucky to get out your seat on that lot.

Reading a Kingsley Amis novel is quite like being so drunk you can’t work out quite what people are doing. Characters respond to situations in utterly inappropriate ways, emotionally speaking. It’s both disorientating and realistic.

‘I can’t do anything about your terrible mind, Garth,’ said Alun, grinning harder than before, ‘I can’t help your inability to notice anything that doesn’t directly involve your pathetic self,’ he continued, starting to shake with mirth, ‘but when you start vaunting your supposed moral superiority, you bloody little cowshed mountebank,’ and here he started laughing as he spoke, ‘then at least I can tell you to shut your blathering trap before I slam your doubtless irreproachable dentures down your fucking throat’

As I’m constantly saying, I don’t drink and I’m pretty smug about it. So when people go ‘oh wow it must have been amazing in the eighties when everyone was pissed,’ I always think ‘yeah but you would think that because you’re bit of a cunt anyway.’

You used to have to drink in advertising, I imagine, just because the processes involved took so long that you’d go out of your mind with boredom if you didn’t. These days everyone is up in your face on Google Wave, even if they’re on the other side of the world, and the mobile phone basically ruined the pub as a place to retreat to. Anyway, who needs alcohol when you've got embeddable flash games?

UPDATE: I've removed the embeddable flash game that Team Rubber PR'd me with because it played an irritating tune when you opened the blog. Can't be doing with that.

Flash games for teenagers are basically the reason that you must never give a web agency any money before they've had an idea. The supposition that, since yoof play videogames, they will find this sort of thing anything but infantile and patronising, and furthermore, that it will change their behaviour one iota just goes to show that if you're out of touch with your market, you will basically believe anything.

Brother Phil: The Midweek Freak

The second in our series of hip-hop trading cards. Collect them all. Do it.

For more illustrative genius from Brother Phil check out his site. He's got 99 problems but not being really good at drawing ain't one.

GC is tired today, having stayed up into the small hours perfecting his latest bumper piece for Gender Bender Blender Mender Magazine. Just adding the final curlicues now and will file copy with you later today Mark unless something appalling happens to my hands.

Had to sit out the company meeting this morning for another deadline, and the sound of happy laughter and applause from the basement is like a memory of childhood.

Walt Whitman gets Dylan Thomased

American advertising for the post-ironic generation.

I wonder if you could ever do this in this country without giggling half-way through.

Give it up to give it away to get it back

I wonder how it would feel if, say, you'd spent quite a while working on a brief, come up with an idea, for which you'd shown the creative director, as source material, a variety of zoomquilts online and, because he was someone you liked personally and whose work you respected, glowed with pathetic pride when he'd said, 'I think it's a great idea' and then had the idea passed to the client only for them to decide arbitrarily that they didn't want to advertise that particular product, and so you'd seethed with disappointment but eventually let the whole thing go and not ended up working for that agency and sort of moved on with your life, only to notice, just over a year later, an online zoomquilt-style moving POV idea reappear for a different model of TV from the same client under the same creative director amid a flurry of publicity having won arguably the biggest award in advertising?

Now I don't know, but I'd say if that happened, hypothetically, your only option would be just to congratulate the team involved and concede that it's not like you invented zoomquilts or POV advertising or anything, that you were only, at best, if at all, a facilitator in an extremely long chain, and acknowledge that the whole clown bankjob thing really added something that definitely was not present in any of the early iterations of the idea, and to just bear in mind that there is a kind of karma at work in this stuff, and nothing bums your karma harder than sour grapes particularly when given a public airing on a blog. For instance.

Monday Morning Memento Mori MJ Edition

Guess what happens when you mix Demerol, Dilaudid, Vicodin, Soma, Xanax, Zoloft, Prilosec and Paxil?

The Sun features a full examination of Michael Jackson's corpse, including his various scars.

Now he just needs to come back to life. That's one religion I would definitely sign up for. Imagine the hymns. In fact, imagine a Welsh men's choir singing "Can you feel it?"

A terrible beauty is born

I was on a tube last night and heard someone say that Michael Jackson was dead. At the time I assumed that they were making a kind of incredibly astute art-joke about the power of rumour in an age of mass media and modern culture's pathological denial of death.

It is a unique piece of news that, like finding out that John Prescott was bulimic or that Trevor McDonald wasn't really black, changes the way the world feels this morning.

It's also probably the first thing that has ever happened about which you can safely say that everything that there is to be said will be said, and probably within the next couple of hours. This effect is measurable in the overwhelming sense of failure and futility that I got before I even started to write this post. But then, that's not altogether unusual.

And, A-level students take note, it also makes this press conference into a really precise definition of proleptic irony.

Does it matter?

That this is 'Catfight' only less clever?

Ask me about my penis

I went to see Grasses of a Thousand colours at the Royal Court on Saturday.

K. made me go, because otherwise I just sit there in front of my computer, hitting refresh on my sitemeter.

It's three hours long with two intervals. And make no mistake, my heart sinks when I hear I'm going to see a play that is three hours long with two intervals and that is fine. But I have this theory that certain kinds of art can only get you when you're slightly bored. Or that there are feelings that are like boredom, but are actually just tranquil and open and for cultural reasons we don't have a way of talking about them yet.

So it's by Wallace Shawn who also plays the male lead.

He's not at all handsome, in fact he's bald and bug-eyed and yet utterly riveting to look at, and has carved out a niche for himself in Hollywood, I presume by being unusually intelligent for an actor. He also appears as the teacher in Clueless and as the voice of Rex in Toy Story. Readers of the right vintage will also recognise him here:



Grasses of a Thousand colours is about sex and death. That's basically it. What's the point of going around wanting sex all the time so much it makes you and everyone around you unhappy and then dying?

It's really good, and you've probably missed your only chance to see it already.

As a writer Shawn is especially strong on place.

The play takes place in a future where people talk constantly about their genitals. This is a fun and oddly plausible idea.

The thing that makes it wonderful is that Shawn's character has this long speech about his own penis. He describes it as 'violent and threatening when erect', only it's as though talking about your penis is something people have been doing for years, and it's slightly démodé, and it's something that you have to sidle up to in conversation, the way that celebrities now have to prepare the ground slightly before they can start talking about how much they care about the environment. Like the way that a dog will slowly turn about a few times before he takes a shit.

I thought this was an interesting lesson in writing, that if you have an idea, not to just sit there, smugly with your idea. It's worth trying to have the idea beyond the idea as well.

Can I say that, without sounding like a low-rent Dave Trott with longer paragraphs?

Not Voodoo presents: Brother Phil The Midweek Freak

One of the best things to come out of this whole malign blogging exercise has been the opportunity to collaborate with illustrators who basically outclass the written content at every turn.

This latest is a collaboration with the extremely talented Brother Phil. Together we're touring the nightmare world of hip-hop, with an 80s trading card influence also going on. Please click to enlarge. You can see more his work here, and I suggest you do.

I should stress the Brother Stevie is moving house, but remains prolific and will be back on a Friday, we hope, very soon.

Into the dangerous world I leapt

I took my nephew skateboarding on Sunday morning. The echoing space under the Westway, filled with the whirr and click of skateboards, provides a really high-quality sonic environment for reading, that is not at all spoiled by the upscale W11 Mums who see skateboarding as yet another field of activity for their offspring to over-achieve in so they can feel ok about throwing up everything they eat, still, at 37.

My nephew, at seven, is by far the butchest member of the Comstock family. A kind of thrill-seeking savant, he basically rode out of my sister on a Harley. In this picture he's the figure travelling at tremendous speed on the far side of the park, not the anaemic looking child closest to the camera, who's faking it in that hoodie that his Mum blatantly bought for him.

This is the rule: you're only allowed to skateboard between the ages of 7 and 17, beyond that it's demeaning to man's natural dignity.

Children have a great time these days.

There's something plucky about a small person who comes round to your house on a Sunday morning so that you can take them somewhere where they can pursue some really basic neural satisfaction.

I suppose the equivalent would be my going round to my uncle's house in Northampton and insisting that he buy me loads of cocaine and then watch, from a sufficient distance that I wouldn't find it embarrassing, while I snort all the gak and then finally, when I'm good and done hoovering up the ya-yo I'd come over all slack-faced and sweaty and jaded-looking and demand that he take me home.

And furthermore my uncle would have to derive some sort of wholesome satisfaction from doing this, actually endorse it and feel like it was just what a man my age should be doing.

Sadly I never had that kind of co-dependent addict relationship with either my own uncle or indeed Uncle Chang. But perhaps a major Bing-session-slash-reunion might be just the thing to re-light the old avuncular fire. I hear that the Boutros Boutros in Northamptonshire is just wow it's so good.

As you can tell from my vintage terminology it's been a very long time since I've had anything to do with cocaine. No one would take it with me anyway because my use of street argot was just too aggravating.

Ok, I'll stop that now.

Children have loads of culture, designed especially for them. We had Bagpuss, Rainbow and Why don't you! They have whole channels of carefully designed media and their brains are finely tuned instruments for learning stuff you've already forgotten.

Here are a few things that my nephews are not impressed by:

• Tiny remote controlled helicoptors
• iPhones
• Video messaging
• The Wachowski Brothers
  
• Porsches

What are your nephews not impressed by?

(Since Scamp has quit (never had you down as a quitter Simon, but you know, you do what you have to, don't feel any obligation to you readership or anything) I'm going to end all my posts a question. This week. Apart from Monday).

Got a really special new feature on tomorrow too.

Monday Morning Memento Mori

Sometimes you just have to get a reading on the global incidence of death in all its myriad varieties, and don't have time to surf the net for the data you need.

If only there were some kind of widget that would employ a battery of morbid logarithms to calculate mortality on a global scale and in real time.

Yes, like everything else you've ever imagined, it's already on the internet.

Just a minute watching it tick over every morning will help you keep your absurd problems in the kind proportion they deserve.

Death has this on his iPhone. And he's got the 3GS before you.

Friday Mick Jones Alert

This is an intermittent series in which I track the movements of Clash guitarist and punk idol Mick Jones, asking the question 'Am I stalking Mick Jones, or is Mick Jones stalking me?'

I know from this photo it looks like I'm following him, but he's clever, that's one of the things I've noticed about him.

It is frankly weird how often I see Mick Jones.

I don't just see him in west London either, in fact the sighting before this was in Shoreditch.

It's ironic too, because he is the member of the Clash that I am least excited about seeing. Can I just stress, as I do every time I see him, that he looks terrible, it's like his face is being drawn up and away from his teeth, by a giant invisible hand, and up close, like when I saw him in WHSmiths (he was buying all the papers, all of them), he smells just the way you'd expect a dying rockstar to smell.

He wears black suits on sunny days. I would hazard a guess that mercifully he never, ever wears shorts.

If I have a vision of Joe Strummer on the H&C line I will be sure to snap it on my trusty mobile phone.

The Jones/Strummer dynamic is a good model for a particular kind of creative relationship. One disgusting sentimentalist plus one intellectual with an axe to grind. Lennon/McCartney also fit this model.

I'm having a seriously good time at the moment and people keep sending me interesting stuff. Look, here's a reading group where you can read DFW's Infinite Jest over the summer. And here is my friend Andy's blog about failure and art which as you can imagine seriously rings my cherries.

Also had an enjoyable online discussion with an Australian on the Ideal Murder blog yesterday. I was slightly embarrassed to find myself on the front page of their site (not too embarrassed to link to it obviously), but I don't have a password, so I can't see if my article has sparked a lot of spluttering indignation in the comments from whoever at Mother was on here reading yesterday. (Yes, I'm watching you).

I'm doing a longer feature piece for the next issue that has so far involved interviewing Dan Germain from Innocent. He gave me a lot of free smoothies without asking to touch me inappropriately or anything. I'm also meeting the writer at Malmaison, so perhaps you can guess what the piece is about.

Happy Friday.

Scaring kids for art

This is causing quite a stir on the Botulism Weekly Blog.

Readers seem to be confused about the use of the child.

Scaring the child, really scaring the child, is surely the point. Given the levels of fiction indicated by the Troma horror costumes and the presence of the uncaring mother. In fact, the only thing that's really real in the video is the emotion of the child, the point being that real emotion, as experienced by children, is distasteful on TV.

Doesn't it also say something rather neat about the earnestness of 'kids', even when everything around them utterly fake and stupid?

I think it's a seriously knowing NYU film school type affair. Rather than just a bad video.

And, erm, I rather like it.

That MGMT album is great, but dear God are they boring live.

Is this some kind of joke?

Dear Chris Smith –

Recently I was travelling on the Underground with my crew, Black Ryno, Big Ro and Mr. Skripcha.

My companion Big Ro, whose observational skills I had reason to thank God for on more than one occasion, during the long years we spent together at Feltham Young Offenders Institute, pointed out to me a tube card advertisement for The London Dungeon.

It was a notice for an exhibition, which, so far as I could gather, is no more than a prurient survey of the more brutal practices of 18th century medicine.

The London Dungeon’s advertising agency have deigned to use as an advertising device an image of a knife, with the words “DO SOMETHING AGONISING GIVE BLOOD” forming, via a manipulation of the type, the blade of the knife or more properly, dagger.

The copy underneath gave a description of the mercifully obsolete practice of blood-letting, including the evocative words ‘a blunt blade gnawing a vein’.

Imagine sir, that you, as I am, were of just that demographic that lives with the constant possibility of knife attack.

Where even a small disagreement over a paltry quantity of drugs, or an act of verbal disrespect delivered over a grime rhythm by an emcee from a rival crew could and often does turn out very stabbily indeed.

Imagine if every time you turned on the radio, or the television, you saw reports of yet more knife crime.

Imagine that then, on a trip into London’s West End to drink and dance gaily and perhaps, for a moment, forget the horror of your daily life, you were presented with this terrifying message.

Put aside your prejudice for a moment and imagine how I might feel inside. I recognise that it might be hard for you to empathise with me, from the comfort of a life lived in Westminster committee rooms and chauffeur driven Jaguars, but I should say this was part of your job.

Suffice to say that on reading the advert I was so totally overcome that I suffered a moment’s unconsciousness and had to be supported by my crew. When I came round I discovered that Mr. Scripcha had already begun to articulate our demands, these are:

For the immediate withdrawal of this advertisement, as well as a written apology from the creative team at The London Dungeon’s advertising agency, responsible for its conception.

If the Advertising Standards Authority is unable to render us satisfaction, my crew agreed democratically, we would be forced to take matters into our own hands. Again, I trust I can rely on you not to resort to stereotype in your interpretation of this statement.

I look forward to a speedy response from you,

Yours &C &C

G 'da bwoy' C

Craig Raine and the world's most famous arsehole

There are plenty of English poets that I just don't like, but Craig Raine is the only one that I have personal-type beef with.

For those who don't know, Raine is described in Wikipedia as 'the best-known proponent of Martian Poetry'.

Well, exactly.

His long poem 'History The Home Movie' is a book so exquisitely bad that it has its own section in secondhand bookshops, next to 'History'.

He once wrote a poem called 'Arsehole', about his wife's arsehole. The first verse goes like this:

It is shy as a gathered eyelet
neatly worked in shrinking violet;
it is the dilating iris, tucked
away, a tightening throb when fucked.

Funnily enough, if you put "Craig Raine Arsehole" into Google you get this picture:



So imagine my delight on discovering that Raine has been employed by former KGB man Alexander Lebedev to add an air of literary gravitas to to everyone's favourite right-wing daily, The London Evening Standard. This is ironic, given that Raine's wife, presumed owner of the lyrically fibrillating arsehole, is Anne Pasternak Slater, neice of Boris Pasternak, author of Dr. Zhivago an excellent book suppressed for many years by everyone's favourite agents of socialist terror, the KGB.

His first piece (I presume it is just the first since it's not about anything terribly current, so it looks and reads like they've just said, go ahead and write whatever you like) an essay on Jeff Koons and high art appeared about a week ago. It's a hijacking of of Koons's work that allows Raine to push his three ideas and contains examples of writing that are Rainian beyond parody:

Koons is true to the coruscating wattage of flowers and will not, apparently, admit the obverse — those same petals anointed with rust and decay. We are used to the ironies of modernism, its sceptical interrogation of romantic feelings, but Koons is part of a tradition that goes back to the Renaissance, back to Michelangelo's drawings of “ideal heads”, a tradition that admits selection and improvement, a poetic treatment of reality.

All I can say about it is that if you've ever written something, and then woken in the night and been overtaken by a subtle dread and felt exposed and embarrassed, and thought that maybe what you'd written, despite everything, really had sounded pretentious after all, and then wished that you could take it back, only it's out there irrevocably in print, so maybe you'd ended up knotting the duvet in your toes and secretly promised to yourself just to stop trying to attract attention to your ideas and resolved to from now on be an ordinary working stiff, you really should read this article.

Raine is co-editor of a literary magazine, that should be called Arrête!

Monday Morning Memento Mori

What's with this grim and recurrent reminder of the potential imminence of your and my untimely death? Why can't I just lighten up? I mean it's not like something is just going to drop out of the sky and kill you is it?

Well perhaps.

In fact, the Health and Safety Executive reports 40 people killed in 2007/08 by falling objects.

It provides no details of what those objects were though, turning this stat into the proverbial gift that just keeps giving.

Hackney: armpit of London

I usually only go to Hackney under cover of darkness, but I can now confirm that it actually looks worse in the morning. Only art students and northerners move to Hackney, and that's because they have no fucking idea. Hackney is officially the only place in London with a greater predominance of betting shops and charity shops than Shepherds Bush. In fact, Kingsland Road is perhaps the only road in London that a native of W12 can go strolling down, twirling an umbrella, chuckling noiselessly and thinking, 'wow, this place is really shit.'

Cheered me right up.



I also happened upon this poster for the new Mother Coke campaign 'Yeah yeah yeah wang splat.'

I don't mind the headline so much, there's something ballsy about its utter disregard for meaning, it's the strap line that bothers me.

You can't see it in the photo, because by that point I'd had to board a bus to escape a pack of feral dogs, and the bus was pulling away from the red light to avoid the 13 year old bus-jackers, with guns, but the strap line is: Open Happiness

Ok, super huge brands like Coke and McDonald's demand a generic line, but isn't there something about this that just doesn't sound like English? I mean, there's not a mistake in it that you could explain to a non-native speaker, it's the old adland imperative plus abstract noun one-two, but isn't it somehow less good than for instance 'Drink Coke', or 'Enjoy'. And isn't its inferiority to do with the indefinably non-native quality of the idiom?

When I was on the D&AD Workshop I remember Dave Trott telling the non-native English speakers that they'd have trouble as copywriters. I'm not sure that's true any more. I mean, they might not be as good at writing, but it might not even matter.

Don't get me wrong, I know some really good non-native English-speaking copywriters, but their strength tends to lie more in the conceptual bit of the copywriter's skill-set Venn diagram than the actual sitting-there-for-hours-adjusting-the-words-till-it-sounds-ok bit, one of the best bits IMHO.

In fact the code of modern copywriting is much less like David Abbot holding forth in the back of a limo and much more like quite an awkward conversation with a really hip Parisian exchange-student with passable English.

Clients mistake awkwardness for originality.

I'm not saying it's a bad thing, just that it's a thing.

UPDATE: Dave Trott's latest post begins 'I went to a gay wedding at a castle in Scotland recently.' Now there's a man who understands intrigue. I haven't even read it yet, but I just bet it's mental.

UPDATE: Yep. Chicken Oriental.

Make ads not art

I've always loved this clip. I love the way you watch it think, 'but how is he going to answer this question in the relatively tiny amount of time left once the interviewer has finally shut up?' And then he does, and with spare time for goggling around the room.

I sort of like advertising, and I really like art, and I think it's very important that the two aren't mixed. Sometimes when you read George Pelecanos and he says things like 'she reached over to turn off the alarm on her Sony Sleepmaster' or whatever you just feel like someone has taken a shit right into your brain.

And Transformers the Movie, that turned into a hideous co-branding gang-bang. Can you imagine being the screenwriter that had to manage this particular branded intervention?



He killed himself soon afterwards.

Don't even get me started on Casino Royale.

A piece of writing can't be a piece of writing with all the demands of its own integrity met whilst also being an advert. Just like you can't make a really good advert if you're trying to get some other message across, even if it's how clever or original or artistic you are.

There's also this clip on YouTube, which, with the translation, is very much like something from a David Lynch film.



I think I'm getting blogging fatigue, it's where you get sick of holding forth to an empty room. I really need an illustrator, just to break the monotony. Are you an illustrator?

Is this the first good anti-binge drinking ad ever?

And weirdly it features a bloke who I spent a long weekend in a caravan in Wales with. He's much less fun in real life I can assure you.

If you want you can listen to his topical radio news show Boo Hoo - It's The News I suppose.

Catamidiate Art

If you spent your teens smoking low quality council estate hash and watching MTV and The Cable Jukebox you really can't help but have a lingering fondness for jiggy R'n'B of the R Kelly, Jodeci and Ginuwine model. In those days R Kelly was just a libido hooked up to a vocoder. Obviously he's matured since then, but only in the sense that he's now much, much older than the girls he's singing about. Out of court settlements notwithstanding, it's clear that Kels has more in common in with Nabokov than might be at first apparent.

A chance conversation with a reprobrate friend of mine led me to this. Don't worry, it won't have the special branch round to confiscate your computer, but it is nonetheless deeply appalling: a musical written and starring disgraced hitmaker Jonathon King. It's basically a long self-indulgent and partly sung rebuttal of the charges of sexual abuse brought against him by the media. King is a a deeply unsympathetic piece of work, but boy, can he write a catchy tune.

R Kelly wrote the hip-hopera during the dark days when Sparkle allegations first came to light and he was dropped from the Jay-Z tour. The turnaround on King's musical was just as short, and with King playing all the parts, and the camera often fixed, it's a lonely man's project. I also sincerely doubt that he paid anyone to come up with those animations.

Creativity is always attached to shame. Artists are the delinquent infants who won't throw away what they've just 'created'. There's a compromise that takes place between what the artist wants to expose and what the internalised society, whose influence manifests as shame, will allow.

By doing the one thing that even Prince probably wouldn't do, both these men have arrived in an extraordinary place. A land beyond shame.

Just watch the first minute of Vile Pervert the Musical and you'll see exactly what I mean.

Monday Morning Memento Mori

The ideal gift for those with a morbid interest in morbidity, The Grim Reaper's road map provides over 100 colour coded maps 'uniquely representing the geography of death in Britain'. This ball-pool of thanatotic fun contains some real beauties, including my own personal favourite:

86 million years of life were lost in Britain between 1981 and 2004 due to people dying before they reached the age of 75.

Buy it for someone you love.

PS: In the first version of this post I accidentally wrote 'ball-pall', I nearly left it just because it's a fucking weird idea.

Dad?

There was an agency meeting this morning. As a freelancer, I always like to go along to an agency meeting, because it's like having my native sense of alienation acted out in a kind of free psychodrama.

It's quite a complex event for me, emotionally. As soon as I'm part of group being addressed by a man with a beard I have to wrestle with the feeling of wanting to be a part of his family, coupled with the impulse to reject the family, before it rejects me.

HR people often talk about work as 'family', which is one of those HR terms that hides something obscene by making it overt.

They swear quite a lot here, which I like. At my last agency the CD would quite often swear at people, not with people, but here they do it as a way of being demonstrably relaxed.

Pass me the crayons

I'm worried I'm turning into an art director.

I haven't forgotten how to read, but I find myself really liking this campaign which is almost entirely art direction.

So if during the boom years the fashion was for opulence in advertising, the Peacock's Tail effect, perhaps now the pared-down looks really slick and sensible and cool. It even looked good as a Metro wrap, which is a rogue's gallery for the contrived and poorly thought-through.

And it makes not having an 'advertising concept' look good - it's like those fixed wheel bikes that the trendies round this end of London ride around, which are like haikus about transport. It's not baroquely cheap-looking, like Easyjet or Ryanair, just prudent.

Here's the product, here's how much it costs.

Obviously it's a bit disingenous since Waitrose must have paid MCBD a million quid for it.

It might just work though.

'A stopped cock is always white twice a day'

In order to write the monograph on Wallace I had to re-read Infinite Jest. I'm not a fast reader, and I don't trust people who are. Stalin told Churchill he could read 400 pages a day and he was a notorious teller of porkies.

(For instance:

'Where have all the peasants gone Kolya?'

'Oh, the peasants? They went skiing.')

I have an average pace of anything less than 30 pages an hour, so that a novel like IJ requires a raw hours investment equivalent to a working week of pure reading.

Anyway, that's why I haven't posted about books for a while. But now I can read other things, and since these days I'm shuttling back and forth with the strap-hanging army, west to east, east to west, morning and evening I reckon I will have finished this biography of Sweeney Todd before the week is out.

I also went to see Joe Dunthorne give a reading at Willesden Library last week. I don't often go to Willesden because well it's shit isn't it?

Joe Dunthorne wrote a book called Submarine, out of the UEA creative writing course. I saw an announcement for the Dylan Thomas Prize last year (first person to write something before the age at which Dylan Thomas died wins) and tried to read as many of the nominees as possible. I managed Submarine and Ross Raisin's book God's Own Country before I gave it up as a pointless and ultimately dispiriting exercise. Submarine is much better than God's Own Country, although they're similar books, coming of age stories, told in the first person by unreliable narrators with distinctive voices (if you talk to agents, and I know a couple of them, that's what they go on and on about. 'Voice'. If I write a novel, the narrator will have a high, squeaky voice.) Ross Raisin's gone for this pared down writing school style, studded with Yorkshire dialect and occasionally these flashily low-key bits of poetry. The narrator of Joe Dunthorne's book has the mind and vocabulary of an adult pedant, but the emotional range of a child – he is the half-in half-out submarine of the title. His book is much funnier, and, oddly, more realistic. He claimed, in the Q&A not to have read 'The Curious Incident..." And I reckon I probably believe him.

Dunthorne clearly does a great many of these readings and book signings, since that's what publishers make you do to sell your book, particularly if you're a young author, handsome at medium distance and charming, in a gangly way. He also read some of his poetry, which is facetious and demonstrated that the style that he uses for the novel is by no means a million miles from his own personal preferred mode of writing.

So during the Q&A I asked him, you know, 'Can you do anything else?'

I took this picture just before I asked him.

I didn't say:

'Because there are at least two kinds of talent. There's talent that can do lots of things and talent that can do one thing.

So if you realise that your preferred written style is that of a precocious 15 year old (which is a laudable piece of self-knowledge that it might take a while to get to) you write a novel about a precocious 15 year old. And it so happens that at this particular moment there is a market for just this kind of work. So cometh the hour, cometh the man. And you get to be the man. But the timekeeping is murder.

You see what screws loads of people with your sort of talent, is that they keep trying to do the same thing, they might even improve at it, but the times move on and they are trapped by ego. The pain of changing is insupportable, especially against the counter-current of resentment they doubtless feel about the fickle nature of public approval. Which resentment is really just a denial of the fact that it was the fickle nature of public approval that got them there in the first place.

The relative advantages of the two kinds of talent can be seen in a comparison of the careers of Guy Ritchie and Madonna.

You might also notice the way that certain veteran advertisers propound the theory that the recession will inevitably lead to a return to the hard-nosed, persuasive-argument-based advertising of the 1970s.'

Monday Morning Memento Mori (DFW Edition)

I've decided to go for less of a stats based approach today, in favour of a 3000-word-essay-on-David-Foster-Wallace-and-Suicide approach. Variety is the spice of weekly death fixated mnemonic rituals, as they say.

Lionel 'meta' Richie

There's something deeply weird going on here in terms of the normal music video convention of people not being aware of popstars around them singing and blind people not being aware of Lionel Richie mooning around creepily everywhere they go, despite the fact that he's singing the whole time, the one thing that would allow a blind person to really zero in on his location.

Along with the smell of sour milk.

Also, that dance teacher is taking the piss, vis-a-vis gropy physical contact with a blind student. But then that was the eighties for you, any disability was a seen as an open invitation to frotage in those days.

Sometimes I would argue with The Art Director about whether it was important for ideas to totally make sense within the terms of their own internal logic. But there's a lot to be said for just butching it out, sometimes the audacity of what you force people to accept is the creative leap. Personally I think, with the twist at the end, this is a big idea video.

I've always loved the Robert Johnson lyric:

The blue light was my blues/And the red light was my mind

It's not really a simile, it's just telling you how it is.

Too busy to blog

GC is freelancing for the best two agencies in London whose names contain the word 'and'. I can't be more specific than that, I've signed an agreement.

Since my identity remains shrouded in secrecy I can move amongst you unnoticed. I could be seated right next to you tomorrow morning. I could even be you.

Also, I went to Manchester today and can confirm that, although very depressing, it's marginally less depressing than Belfast. Here's a picture I tried to take of the massive queue outside Gregg's.



As you can see I bottled it, fearing that the Mancunians could sense that I was taking pictures of them so I could say sneering things about pie-eating Northerners on my blog. Plus I was dressed for an interview, and having just had an article published about how creatives dress I'd been overcome by self-consciousness whilst dressing myself and gone out looking like a public school chaplain. The interview was not for the chaplaincy of a public school I might add.

Obviously I only placed the look at about 4pm, which was splendid.

Bank Holiday Monday Morning Memento Mori (Dog walking edition)

Around 25 people are killed by dogs in the US every year. Getting stats on a global figure is proving more difficult, but one web site asserted that the chances of being fatally attacked by a dog, or a pack of dogs, are around one in ten million. I suspect the risk goes up if you're in the habit of taking a tiny but highly aggressive dog to parks in the W12 area, where most people own at least three Staffordshire Bull Terriers, bred for their extreme spitefulness.

'Get dressed for a repressed homosexual relationship with your boss.'

That was the original title of the Buggers Biannual piece. But for some reason they changed it.

And lose my heart on the burning sand

Someone has lent me this dog to look after.

I've been considering getting a dog, to stop me from going stark staring mad, working on my own like this.

That seems to me to be the main purpose of having a dog, to introduce another consciousness into your immediate vicinity, to distract you from black thoughts about the many thousands of hours you will spend alone with your own black thoughts about the thousands of hours of you will spend alone.

Dogs are self-willed, and answering to their will is a form of self-forgetting. They are also, crucially, inarticulate, because if they could speak they would certainly be so boring that it would cancel out any existential isolation mitigation value. They'd just go on and on about their dietary requirements and guilt-trip you about what it's like having your balls surgically removed in childhood at the behest of the only person you ever really trusted.

Since they can't speak, you can just imagine them agreeing with everything you're thinking, but in an incredibly silent and intuitive way.

Why none of this has ever featured in pet-food advertising is beyond me.

At one agency I worked at, they had a special creative director for the pet food account. One brand of high-end cat food (the really creepy stuff that's made to look like human food, with whole peeled prawns in jelly and eggs) required that the copy be written as though spoken by the cat pictured – the spokescat having a tone-of-voice rather like a gourmand Stephen Fry. There was something really heroic about this creative director, I always thought, and his totally unironic approach to his job. You could actually engage him in an earnest conversation about whether the cat would say this or that. Although it was cruel to do so.

As you can see this dog is a Miniature Pinscher, which is Doberman Pinscher but miniaturised, and obviously immediately has you thinking about dressing dwarves or children up as Waffen SS officers doesn't it?

I've also discovered that if you have a tiny dog like this rudeboys will openly mock you on the streets of W12, saying things like "Rer, that dog is so big ykna." Irony is the main mode of comedy for rudeboys, vide playing shit bashment out-loud on your mobile and then looking round the top deck of the bus going "What? What?"

Putting the sex back in sectarianism

So for complex reasons, which I have no intention of sharing with you, I went to Belfast.

I found it gritty, and I say that as a long-term resident of W12. If you were thinking "Hey, but they're not fighting any more, what have they got to be gritty about?" think again:

1. No-one is pleased with the peace agreement. No-one has won, they all still hate one another and they're liable to start throwing rocks at any moment. All their elected officials are inveterate rock-throwers with no experience of or interest in peace time governance. Something people kept talking about was "finding someone who it was ok to lose to." I thought that this was an interesting idea. I reckon I probably lose more battles than I need to, personally, because of my notorious predilection for grinding my jackbooted heel into the face of the conquered.

2. Ulster Unionists consider themselves to be patriots who owe direct allegiance to the Queen. It's properly weird.

3. The Protestants were terrified that Scotland would become a real country and then there would be 0 argument for England hanging on to Ulster. Obviously since we bought Scotland's major bank off them that's looking increasingly unlikely but...

4. ... they're vulnerable to whatever change in the fragile political gestalt this massive recession produces, and let's face it, it'll probably be shit.

5. The Troubles attracted loads of sympathy money, particularly off the EU, which is demeaning for everyone because it's a totally transparent attempt to hide the complete lack of justice or resolution. If you had a relative killed then you automatically get £12,000 off the government irrespective of whether that relative was a civilian, a member of the security services or a terrorist of either stripe.

6. It rains all the time. They're the only people in the world ever to have envied the Mancunians for having somewhere less dangerous and rainy to live.

7. Their advertising is all shit.

So don't think about going over there all cheerful, they'll slap that right out of your stupid smiling face.

Act out things and be crazy

Monday Morning Memento Mori

According to Wikipedia there were 3,263 prisoners on death row in the USA in 2008.

You might have thought that the main advantage of being condemned to death would at least be knowing when one was going to die - however Jack Alderman had been on death row for 33 years before the United States penal system kicked into gear and had him lethally injected last year. The oldest prisoner in the United States is Leroy Nash, who at aged 93 is considered by US legal experts to be "too old to die."

Even working at a fairly low grade DM agency is probably substantially more fun than being on death row, but you are only slightly less likely to die.

Gone to Ireland

So obviously I thought I'd post this long copy ad I wrote and never submitted for Scamp's atheist advertising competition last year. The style owes something to Dave Trott.

UPDATE: I've been getting stick, online and off, for typos and have now overhauled the above, which I did in a hurry and then posted after an interval of several months. If you spot typos on this blog, pleased don't be afraid to point them out, I won't poke fun at you for being a miserable pedant or anything.

New Evening Standard not shit!

I picked up my free copy of The Evening Standard on Monday ("It's only free today," shouted the bloke who gave it to me, "it's not shit or anything!") and was pleased to see that although they'd ignored my advice and gone for a relaunch campaign that looked like it had been brainstormed by David Cameron on a train, it still ran a massive story on a disgustingly rich banker's disgusting divorce as its front page, with an article that hit that special tone of prurience and moral censure that Londoners know and love.

Unless you've just come off a really apocalyptic bender and need to buy a paper to work out where you are, I can't see any good reason to have the word 'London' in the masthead. I don't know about you but I find the London branding round here pretty omnipresent. Why not hang a big sign off Nelson's Column that says 'London', just to make it really fucking emphatic. Does Lebedev just want his Russian friends to be in no doubt that he hasn't bought the Manchester Evening Standard? If there was 'Only Fools and Horses but with Oligarchs' would he be Rodneyvich? That's got to be the question on everyone's lips right now.

Apart from a few cosmetic changes the main difference between this new Evening Standard and the old one seems to be the advertising, of which there is an awful lot more, and is now comprised of a uniquely oligarchical mixture of very high-end luggage and arms dealers.

I really love this advert.

As regular readers of Prison Suicide Supplement will know, I think patriotism in advertising is always (I mean always) fraudulent in the extreme. Of course, this isn't an advert as such, they're not trying to sell you anything that you haven't already bought. BAE Systems doesn't have to advertise, as it mainly sells arms to the Saudis under the auspices of the Defence Export Services Organisation (or DESO) a branch of the MoD paid for by you and me dear reader.

A friend of mine spent a year working for DESO, which I found took the heat off me somewhat, profession-justification-wise, at parties.

What this ad fails to mention is that, unless they've radically overhauled their product line, the £2.4 billion BAE contributed to the economy were profits from the sales of things like missiles and warplanes and therefore exactly proportionate to the need for arms in the increasingly unstable world we live in – something we can all be proud of.

In fact the whole military industrial loop is blackly comic and was described to me by this same insider thus:

1. Britain must have an arms industry in order that it can maintain the capability to defend itself in times of war.
2. In order to maintain an arms industry there must be war.
3. Britain must be at war somewhere all the time.
4. -> 1.

Does anyone know who wrote the copy on this ad? It doesn't look in-house. The visual says Euros to me.

Did you write it?

I might just give up with the written content and just post wacky vids from YouTube

Monday Morning Memento Mori (Influenza Special)

The 1918 flu pandemic spread to nearly every part of the world. It was caused by an unusually virulent and deadly Influenza A virus strain of subtype H1N1. Most of its victims were healthy young adults, in contrast to most influenza outbreaks which predominantly affect juvenile, elderly, or otherwise weakened patients.

The pandemic lasted from March 1918 to June 1920, spreading even to the Arctic and remote Pacific islands. It is estimated that anywhere from 50 to 100 million people were killed worldwide, or the approximate equivalent of one third of the population of Europe, more than double the number killed in World War I. An estimated one third of the world (500 million people) became infected.

From Wikipedia.

I don't normally post stuff I've been straight PR'd with

But I'll make an exception for this for obvious reasons.



I wonder if the anonymous tipster was Dave Waters himself?

Apple Über Alles

GC is plenty busy. Busy writing headlines.

This is fine, in fact I like it.

When I signed up to be a copywriter, all I wanted to do was write headlines, so I was annoyed to discover that I'd arrived on the scene 20 years too late and that advertising had been taken over by French-Brazilian art directors and you just had to film someone spraying strawberry jam into a poodle's teeth and then play it in high-definition-slow-motion and there, that's an ad.

No-one wanted facetiousness, which was, if not my only asset, then at least the dominant feature of my personality. The vocabulary too, I'd thought they'd like that, but no, put it away they said, no-one wants to see that, never get it out in public ever again.

That's why I have this blog you see. It's like I've lured you into the photocopying room with bacon and locked the door and now I'm saying things like coprolalia and abomasum and opiomane and heterozygotic and syntagmatic and oh, GOD, IT'S HORRIBLE.

So the great thing about headlines is the way that they almost but not quite arrive at a truth. That there's a possibility that for any given brief in any given language there is a perfect headline, one that comes closest to exactly expressing what the brief has asked for in as few words as possible. I'm talking about straight 1970s style headlines that sit alongside a picture of a product. The people who seem to come closest to doing this, reliably, are Apple's copywriters.





These are not clever, they are simple. They are so simple that they are clever. It's like they were written by God using maths. "Nanochromatic" is better than "Small talk" (for the new shuffle, which has no screen, but reads out the track names), but even "Small talk" has that kind of burnished feeling that you get if you try loads and loads of lines and end up going back to the second one you wrote because it came out like a turd that you could tell even before you looked was just perfect in every way.

I got these off the web obviously, but they're so good they can use them anywhere, in windows, online, print, you fucking name it.

And this very strict word-count message-delivery ratio ends up having a form-function beauty about it which is quite like their product design.

Apple are clearly fascists though, with an Aryan/Untermenschen dynamic running through all their advertising which you'd have to be a fucking idiot to miss frankly.

Everybody Hurts (but for some people it's basically SOP)

I got loads of hits yesterday from Leagas Delaney, an agency that, as a huge fan of sadism, I particularly admire.







It's the banjo in that one I find especially cruel and unusual. How do they do it?

Installation 5/135 - Camera phone, blog, digital advertising site

Back by, would you believe it, popular demand, this is the fifth in my series of 135 relational art installations, created using just my camera phone, existing advertising media and this blog. We're really whizzing through these aren't we?

This one is called "I didn't come here to be insulted."

It flashed up on one of the super-futuristic-hi-tech advertising pods that are scattered all over the massive echoing spaces of The Westfield. I'm spending a lot of time in the Westfield in fact I've secretly started to think of myself as "the poet of the Westfield." Not just one of the unemployed, wandering zombie-like through a shopping mall as though I still had money to buy things. Not. at. all.

So the headline is for Timberland and looks to me like the handiwork of one of adland's most feared writers, Tim Delaney, author of some of advertising's most abrasive headlines including "Table for two? Certainly you old trout."(Berlitz, 1991), "It's a Philips, Phucker" (Philips, 1985) and also "We took their buffallo, their land and their women. Then we went back for their shoes." (Timberland, 1992).

There's something delicious about an ultramodern high-tech media display being used to flash snide abuse at shoppers in a recently opened and totally deserted shopping mall at the beginning of what's shaping up to be a major-recession-shaped recession.

The installation is now open, go along, contemplate your inadequate pension provision and maybe don't buy any hiking boots. They're only worn by closeted homosexuals anyway.

PS: First time readers, I suggest you click the tag below for the entire series. Then at least you'll have some idea what's going on. Maybe email me, if you work it out.

UPDATE: My Dad (who is also acting sub-editor) pointed out that the "closeted homosexuals" remark might be interpreted as homophobic. I'd like point out that all my best friends are closeted homosexuals.

Did I ever mention how much I love Eminem?

Update: has it occurred to anyone else that Eminem seems to have started writing lyrics to go with his videos, rather than making videos to go with his lyrics? I can't think of anyone else who does this. But given the way the music industry works these days, and provided you've got the talent to do it, it sort of makes sense.

Also nice to see that he's looking trim, since the last I'd heard about him was his Mum saying that he was holed up in his mansion, like Howard Hughes, and fat like Elvis.

Bank Holiday Monday Morning Memento Mori

You know parachuting out of a plane into the rotor blades of a helicopter? Well that has definitely happened.