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.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
