Slavoj Žižek had me raising my hand in objection by the first minute over a throwaway comment of reality as abstraction but he quickly settles down to unfurl a devastating rapid response to a series of embarrassingly superficial market capitalists who are increasingly beginning to exude the air of polyester flare-wearing, Boomer swingers. Wealthy but morally bankrupt. Rich but fucking clueless. Wedged up but drenched in Hai-Karate aftershave. The epitome of dangerous anachronisms. Naturally they're the last to realise it in much the same way that Louis XIV was puzzled when the peasants arrived at Versailles and proved themselves to be natural vivisectionists in response to the brutality that small groups of greedy people invariably inculcate through financial and most importantly historical myopia.
I loved watching this and I now have a bit of a man-crush on the Slovenian dissident who I recently struggled with his Lacanian analysis in A perverts guide to cinema. Žižek also tackles some more concrete issues in this so hang in there for some honest critique of why the left are very hypocritical on Afghanistan and so forth. There's a certain amount of professional jealousy from here, as unlike me he got to bone Miss Brazil as the Elvis of cultural theory.
I guess I'm not the only one who gets a little tingle from seeing the twin towers in pre 2001 New York film scenes. I particularly like seeing footage of the construction of the towers in the early 70's. It's a time that's of interest for me because it seems to resonate so strongly from the screen. I chose this Italian trailer with the Eric Satie piano piece because it's infinitely more delicate than the over the top editing for the the U.S market trailer complete with basso profondo voiceover.
I've had this story on my radar for quite some time. I'm not really sure if there was a transition from knowing about the story to being aware of the documentary but for some reason I couldn't imagine it being any more interesting than a long news clip or a very short film. I couldn't have been more wrong. There's a bunch of stuff going on in this extraordinary documentary film. There's no way of anticipating the kind of details that always emerge during the act of doing something dangerous over a period of time. The close scrapes. The near misses. The ominous omens. On their own they are reason to believe it's worth an hour and a half of your time.
But there are other dimensions that caught me by surprise. The incongruous sentiments of detailed planning worthy of a bank heist, flying back and forth between New York and Paris over and over again, combined with a sort of physical poetry of performance, and an essential ability to inspire or seduce all around him into collaborating. It's an ability that falls apart too quickly to be left unmoved by the tears of his best friend on one or two occasions.
The last time I saw something this creative was back in Beijing with the Parisian Ballet company protesting in mid act to the intelligentsia and elite of Peking (and a white boy in baseball cap) over the knee jerk sentiments of blind Chinese nationalism to Olympic torch protests in France.
This is a moving piece of film with unexpected dynamics and curious details that I can't imagine ever being done any better. Most striking for me is the interstitial editing of film sequences of a younger Philip Pettit practising in France. There was no way of knowing it would be used for a film many years later but it's done so elegantly that the juxtaposition is fused with a sense of poetic connection. Much like the wire across those twin towers.
Ai Weiweis's Sunflower seeds is exhibiting at the Tate. Here's a short film about the production of the 100 000 000 hand painted porcelain seeds. During the cultural revolution Chairman Mao referred to himself as the Sun and the people as sunflowers with their faces turned towards him. I think it's one of those ideas that transfers it's poignancy well in this video without necessarily missing anything if a visit to the Tate isn't possible.
Last year in Hong Kong one of the projects I started sniffing around was an anti Red Bull concept. A chill out and calm down RTD (Ready to drink). I liked it immediately and felt that it was a massively powerful rejection of all that bigger, better, faster, stronger nonsense that has it's foot slammed to the floor on the accelerator peddle just so we can hit the brick wall and get it over and done with already.
The Slow Food movement were the first people to articulate and champion against this thinking and I think there are some good links with Via Campesina that I talked about back here.
Ace of Spades by Motorhead is a track that gets a periodical playing in my life and is always cranked up to the max. I love it and and feel calmer after playing it a few times. If Kronenberg can really walk the walk on Slow the pace, I'd walk an extra block or two to buy it. I don't mean by advertising. Though this execution is what I like to see. I mean what else can they do that is meaningful and shows commitment? They can take their time about this. I'm in no hurry to walk that extra block. But walk it I will if they deliver.
Of course Lemmy Kilmister is notorious for living a fast and furious life of Rock and Roll, vodka and amphetamines, which may explain the updated lyrics in a little edited cut that's over here. He sings "I don't want to live forever...... but apparently I am".
It's a little touch of authenticity that if it didn't exist would suggest that Lemmy has sold out. So I'm cutting him some slack. Just like with Kronenberg.
It took me a couple of weeks to watch this movie. I could only do five or ten minutes at a time. Too painful in too many ways. It's every reason why I'd make flags, national anthems and all the other false idols from the makers of brain-dead culture-curators the first victims of an enlightened education system on the first day of infant school. We're never too young to learn. This is only one of the hard to ignore themes in this quite special movie.
Love this commercial for E4. So much music is offensively patronising. This says it perfectly for me and ticks off why corporations should really stay away from co-opting spontaneity. It's on the opposite end of what they really stand for. I think this just nailed that coffin lid down a bit further.
Tim is first class in this interview. It's not entirely about net neutrality. I used that in the title to give you a second chance to score first. Just trying to be helpful.
I guess if the Tom Peters brigade are about top down hierarchical executive command and control, then Tim is about using narrative and accessibility as well as candid analysis to explain the complexity (and excitement) of NASDAQ's fittest and finest. It becomes evident there are super competing visions of the the future at stake. Some not really driven by classical profit margin structuring. It's a zoo out there.
Welcome to the 21st century.
Tim has an accessible and agreeable manner that is fresh and effective. At one point there's even an up front American taboo aired on the gap between what the U.S says publicly and what it does privately. This is a treasonable tangent. Nobody slips off topic like that. It isn't considered sporting. That's why the Marquis of Queensbury rules were created.
But fair fights are unfair when the outcomes are uncertain, leaving irony no longer witty, and exiled in cheeseburger copy land. A decline of slutty but historical necessity.
So rare is it in late American Empire's discourse to hear questions of credence as to the existence or otherwise of hypocrisy that the interview feels situationist. Is a brawl imminent? Is Professor Tim a sleeper into recreational rioting? Once the unspeakable is said it's unpredictable. A business interview with an edge. Sweet Jesus.
The question left lingering is maybe business is now shooting straighter than the professional soldiers? Surely the 'genius of capitalism' deserves one more final tour of duty with fighting talk like that? Maybe there's still enough fight left in the old gal to take on a confederacy of dunces.
Nope. Time isn't on our side, or whichever neo-hipster generational mutation gets to pick up the bill. All other avenues failed. Deferment no longer an option, and choice is reputed to have once been in vogue.
I'm taking a timely piss here over the Busted Boomers, who to be fair were getting stoned long before metastasising into world class stone throwers. Who could have predicted that the finest minds of a generation were to be mugged by reality twice in the one lifetime? It's cosmic piss taking. Gonzo karma, for printing wealth to order while the status quo junkies peddle the past and cash in on the future.
Xi Jinping has been promoted to the kind of senior military post which more or less ordains him as the next President of China after Hu Jintao stands down. China watchers have said he was next for some time now but it looks like a done deal. Each succession the leaders get more and more interesting. He's a plain speaker and staunch opponent of corruption. He's got his work cut out. Here he is below on his last trip to Japan.
There's no point trying to conceal my man crush for Terence McKenna. I like a polymath who isn't frightened to say odd things like 'the mushroom said to me' as it often did during his ethnobotanic experiments of hallucinogen plants and mushrooms.
That's how he talks about the Logos while sharing a couple of ideas he pursued over a long period of time in and out of that post hypnogogic yet pre-sentient state of mind. Hypnogogia being the first stage of hallucinating, and well documented within its sleep/awakening related contribution to creativity.
Recently I came across another Gigabyte or so of his recorded talks on the internet through peer to peer file sharing. He died in the year 2000 of a brain tumour, which when he was informed it was mushroom shaped provoked an 'of course it is' response out of him. He had a sense of humour. I think his second most provocative theory is the one regarding the alien nature of some mushrooms (I think it's the ones with Dimethyltyptamine) . Since reading that I've come across evidence that supports the suggestion that mushroom spores can indeed travel unharmed (by space X rays mainly) and thus might not be indigenous to our planet.
Yesterday I was having a conversation on twitter with a medical and health importer to Thailand. I suddenly realised I'd probably missed a rendezvous with a friend of mine who is setting up hospitals in Cambodia, so one email/phone call later I was sitting in their serviced apartment overlooking an horizon of empty office/accommodation space in Bangkok. His room mate/travelling companion and I chatted a while, and we got talking about TED talks where he reminded me of the Paul Stamets talk on mushrooms that I had yet to see.
Well, here it is below, and if it kindles your interest in mushrooms then that's a good start because the next step is (if you don't mind) a bit of tie-dyed hippy post production (as many are) in your podcasting content, then get stuck into the bard McKenna.
I've listened to over a hundred hours of his talks (and more including his trialogues with Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abrahams) and so probably unlike you I really enjoy his candid 'the mushroom said to me' moments but just as rewarding are the indiscriminate and wide range of topics he covered, with in my mind the most eloquent and unscripted vocabulary I've ever come across (Though I imagine that other Irishman Oscar Wilde was a compelling voice too). I'd say McKenna was the most interesting generalist in the world at one point and that doesn't mean he isn't a specialist either. Watch this TED there's nothing in it which diminishes the credibility of the wilder stuff that Terrence talked about and so the mushroom journey (for me) continues.
Anybody got any credible explanations as to why Banksy and Ai Weiwei are both colliding on similar themes at the same time? I wrote PW Bridgman's definition for coincidences at the end of my post over here.
I'm hearing good things about Windows Phone. If the UX really lives up to the endline then Microsoft might just have thrown themselves a life line through the window. The American launch ad that follows (up) has that typically didactic but youthful tone of voiceover that I find patronising but it's still a strong point of view that I'm interested in.
I'm not really into Mad Men. I understand the narrative has broadened a bit in the last few series and that the script writing is on occasions quite good, though in this episode there was no mention of advertising till about two thirds of the way through when I gave up and concluded it was still about getting laid or the consequences thereof.
The reason for posting this latest episode is merely to highlight that not only are the latest episodes of American content swiftly turning up on Chinese video sites but that the quality is impeccable and from what I can see the user interface fine-tuning is superior to Youtube.
This could be a long rant about I.P. and while I have already stated my unorthodox position on that subject, I don't think I want to spell out, and/or think through some of the finer details like there's no question that the United States produces the finest serialised acting content with the best production in the world. Period.
There's a fair bit of irony in posting free content about a period of time which on one level was directly about the monetization of eyeballs. Some things China selfishly does I whole heartedly approve of.
I don't usually post advertising here (not much of it is remarkable enough) though yesterday reminded me that Kirsty Angus does tend to discover the kind of work I like and that includes the last time I felt irrationally warm towards marketing communications. It's an ad for Oogmerk Opticians in Holland. Like all incredibly good work it transcends language and doesn't need a 100 slide powerpoint to explain the strategy.
As a genre optician brands make for great advertising. Indeed the single best ad I saw in Beijing a couple of years ago was this one below as I blogged about in my everything is contextual post. (It may well be a European execution. It's not very Chinese)
The copy reads: Crooked mouth but nobody notices. Everyone's looking at your glasses. Brilliant. This wouldn't be a proper post on the subject if I didn't include the ad I once saw over at Rob's and which I've managed to locate on Youtube.
Lastly I couldn't pretend otherwise and not point out that I sheepishly stole my headline from Tim Footman's post which is well worth a read for clever and contemporary comment on British cultural bullshit. You may also wish to look into Guy De Bord's original work on the subject, which is increasingly salient in these times.
Alternatively, take note of the last sentence of the last paragraph over at Intelligence Squared's hosting of Cory Doctorow's recent interview with William Gibson on Intelligence Squared. The writer highlights William Gibson lamenting the following:
One thing that seemed certain was the sustained threat to any genuine subculture. We are now left, he lamented, with only ‘splinters of Bohemia,’ the violation of which seems almost complete in a world where ‘the way D. H. Lawrence looked is … much more important than what D.H. Lawrence wrote.’
Anyway you can listen to the whole interview over here. It does seem that recently, many are reflecting on the notable absence of a satisfactory presence increasingly disrupting what was once hoped to be a meaningful future.
Yet at the same time, it does and it doesn't feel like a vision thing.
It's very tempting to drill down a bit more into my knife is what you make it post and explain that story about the Singaporean girl who took me to Ajarn Noo to get that tattoo done. I noticed that she had a lot of self inflicted cuts on her arms on top of the tattoos. It's about as nuts as this fake commercial. I shouldn't really.
Instead if I urge you to listen to Jake Adelstein's interview on BBC world about Sex and the Yakuza. It's a cracker.
Our beloved Marcus is hitting the road. He's walking from Munich to Hamburg to meet Peter Figge of Jung Von Matt who I have it on good authority is an absolute top geezer. Put the internet's best story teller on the start of a long journey and who knows what's going to happen? I don't but I'll be hurling twitter abuse at him along the way. It should be interesting.
I'm into Food Sovereignty and La Via Campesina and Raj Patel at the moment so while I really like the design thinking that goes into IDEO's the future of the book, particularly the fluidity of the non-linear narrative as opposed to a thousand tabs opened up in Chrome or whatever it is we do to suck in a gigabyte a day, I'm struck by the yawning gap between the technology fetish of the geek advertising crowd, and the more engaging grounded topics of the real challenges of the 21st century.
I keep asking myself is advertising trivial?
Here's Raj, he can talk for 30 minutes or longer in a very engaging manner over issues that will, whether we ignore them or not be of consequence to us all. There were consequences to Wall Street excesses, though that didn't get in the way our trivial pursuits. Here's a taster because I know you are time starved?
Not that it's a competition or anything, as I'm a HUGE fan of Naomi Klein but in this New York interview attended by the Brooklyn Food Coalition Raj's compelling explanations are even more riveting than Klein who probably writes better if was being even handed or just nice. Anyway, here's an hour and half of two people who are a credit to the 21st century. I hope you get time to listen to this and through your own non linear narrative more of both.
A few years back my good friend Joe Sidek from Penang in Malaysia, introduced me to an elderly gentleman who apparently was the instigator of Woodstock back in 1969.
The excitement around Elliot was that the director Ang Lee was going to make a film about him which I thought was exciting though my full knowledge of the event was limited to cultural references and dare I say, a good friend of mine talking about a guy on stage at Woodstock alerting the attendees to avoid the 'brown acid'. Chris chose a bad trip to invoke this piece of history and while it seemed of little comfort at the time, in retrospect it was a kind thing to support the notion that maybe our distress wasn't entirely due to repressed psychological emotions that are the challenging hall mark of the psychedelic experience. Put it this way if you're curious about that last statement. It's near impossible to take that particular voyage without being fully confronted with the infinite beauty and/or ugliness of who we are but don't let that scare you off. You've your career to think of.
I like Ang Lee. I'm more into Asian interpretation of this trip than Hollywood. There's a good reason for this....It's called bias. But if you can park my bias next to the Lexus for just a few minutes, I'm obliged to point out that I struggle to fall in love with anyone who isn't moved by the compartmental spotlight of social roles in Chungking Express, the operatic opressive futility of And the Spring Comes or say the longest uncut fight scene in the Korean Palm d'Or winner Old Boy
The give-away is I didn't get up off the floor. I also didn't have a knife in my back but hey, I was just grateful I hadn't been thrown off the balcony; spinal injuries scare me a lot more than a good kicking.
Old Boy is borderline genius. It's so full of life and joyous, gutsy film making that there are a few trying errors which are either confusing or hard to ignore. Which one you suffer, is largely dependant on how much you trust yourself. A topic, believe it or not which loops back into that trip I mentioned earlier.
I can see I'm shirking my duty in this post. I'd love to fill it up with cheeky Asian film references but that's not going to do is it? OK, one more before I spill the beans.
I wanted to use the example of John Woo's Hardboiled because of his clear influence on Tarantino in Reservoir Dogs but as I can't find the exact clip, I'll leave you with 'In the Mood For Love' by Wong Kar Wai.
The definition of a good movie for me is when I ache to be part of that time and like Taking Woodstock this movie throttles my aorta to the point where I don't believe I know how beautiful life is unless I've witnessed white collar Asian girls in 1950's (ish) Hong Kong for real. Which I haven't but I do know it exists from film like this. It's almost intolerable how stylish Wong Kar Wai splashes his Pollock like proclivity to portray the female form in ....In the Mood for Love.
Getting back on track I should reveal my hand. I don't think the digitally duplicated form of anything is fair game for IP or intellectual property. Anybody with half a brain would challenge me on that but as I've spent a few years thinking, there's no more room for me to wiggle so.
If it's on the net. It's free.
I'll come back and polish off that statement and the usual spelling/grammar later. But my friends who champion the rights of artists to earn the same as CEO's (or more). They're wrong. The artist is uniquely privileged to understand why. Look at what fame and wealth does to the artist.
Apologies for the rough nature of this post. I'll edit when time permits.
I said back here that I see an impending political discourse coming in socialised media. The costs of extracting wealth just above, just below or at ground level and then distributed around the planet are either too damaging environmentally or physiologically for us to ignore. I'm surprised to see this ad airing in the States even though it hits that sweet spot between Big Pharma and big Agra called Medical Practitioners. Even so, in my experience nobody takes on big lobbying pockets like the fast food industry. This is war isn't it?
Paradoxically I'm a reluctant fan of McDonalds for reasons I've written about at some length here , here and here. Like I mentioned earlier I believe we're going through brand puberty because the mono-dimensional brand personalities and values of the 20th century aren't going to cut it with the challenges we face in the 21st. I've said it before but it's worth repeating. If you're brand isn't social in the broadest and most inclusive sense, it probably hasn't got anything to say. If McDonald's ignores this, or responds with a corporate swagger, it's increasingly looking like a brand consigned to history.
I've been using mIRC (proto Twitter) since 1995 and I believe it was me who first coined the phrase "right wing nuts" as I noticed everyone on #politics picked up on it immediately and then it entered the general discourse. Not a lot of people know that.
We're long past the point of anthropomorphizing brands. The idea that Old Spice might have a proper personality when it started would have seemed risible. To this day extraordinary individuals still impose themselves on great branded communications through their entrepreneurial cojones, product obsession and unsurpassed love of customer service.
Now of course back here on planet earth where the average tenure of a Marketing Director is under two years the onus on those individuals is to deliver in the short term and NOT DROP the ball. This is largely why we have the wind tunnel effect and something more insidious than product parity.
Personality Parity.
But let's not point the finger too much because if we take a good look in the mirror, we advertising agencies have traded off the right to challenge our clients for an unseemly all out internecine warfare to pursue the last possible buck left in the bottom of the bucket.
It's not hard to see the reasons for this, but the point is that we live in remarkable times so why are we engulfed by the unremarkable when it comes to communications? We have an increasing number of brands talking back to us in real time. The implications for this are unrecorded in history. So how do we bring this potential to life?
Ah yes. Give it a minute because the effect is worth considering.
The thing is we're human, we're always anthropomorphising stuff; projecting ourselves, applying our value system to 'the other'. Cars have long been female in the UK and the older the better. It seems the more curious the peccadilloes they had, the more we were attached to them. That doesn't apply so much in the age of what I might call the neo-neoterics the obsession with the new.
Of course it's not as if we need to apply the Geneva Convention to objects but there is always a sliding scale where say humans are top of the personality food chain, then animals, then products, then services, then hedge fund traders.
Getting back on track we're confronted by the uncharted waters of deeper and more meaningful communication. Now personality goes a long way, but the reality is the construct of the corporation and its paralytic fear of diminished quarterly results means it's unlikely that most brands are going to get a life in the near future. If you get close enough to some of the most hard working clients the sheer pressure of work restricts their ability to know precisely what a life is (they pay people to find out) and which is why there are often so many dumb perambulations between and after idea and execution.
They are going to achieve this through the simple yet infinite scope of dialogue as opposed to the top down, controlled and linear monologue broadcast models of yesteryear.
How that personality manifests itself is a highly contextual subject dependant on a lot of factors that requires a post in itself, and which would still not provide a definitive answer. However the reason for me revisiting this less than revolutionary subject is because I see the scope for brands articulating their personality through their politics.
It's been done before
This anti sweatshop brand was getting close recently but economic timing was bad and franchise extension was, well, over extended.
I don't want to harp on about this because if there's one weakness I have as a planner it is that I see the potential too early too discern the reality. Time and again I've been excited about what's round the corner and tried to implement before gestation had completed. I noticed that the presentation I gave to low income Asian marketeers from multinationals a couple of years ago is only now starting to realise itself in India.
While it might not be prudent for a brand to immediately take a political stance, the age of the corporation as it emerges blinking with moral fatigue from the 20th century is fast becoming an anachronism. We need to be having a discussion about what exactly brands stand for if a non conformative position or a set of values becomes strategically imminent. The reason for that is entirely business-like. It's a profitable and identifiable stance to take and if you think that online group purchases known as Tuangou in China, are an interesting phenomenon, just you wait till INACTION becomes political. The potential for global boycotts of brands that don't play ball has yet to emerge, even though precedents exist with some of the most crippling action taking place in times before our hyper networked world.
This isn't a post that negates the value of brand utility (an important post to factor in if you weren't so busy and have kindly got this far anyway) but it is one that says if your brand isn't social, it probably has nothing to say. That's an impoverished strategic weakness in an age of product parity and one that will cost a lot more (and a lot quicker than we're used to).
Words are what distinguish us from any other life form on the planet and possibly the universe. Words could arguably be the reason our neo cortex accelerated into action at some point in our evolutionary story, and I put it to you that if your words are increasingly circumscribed by a language that is unremarkable, then the quickest way to get out of that is to take a stand, pick a cause and stick to your guns.
I'm really pleased to have come across this today as it stimulates some of my own thinking and saves me boring you with too many words ( OK Andrew?). A little background for my motivation on this subject is that each time I walk past local schools, as the children are piling out, I'm noticing that the number of fat kids is rocketing and in some instances constitutes the majority of the students.
Obesity is a problem now, and it only took one generation to make the jump.
The leap between skinny and irreversibly fat kids took only a few short years in Asia. I've noticed it from Beijing to Manila but here in Thailand it feels particularly poignant as I remember a time when 7-Eleven had hardly any dairy products and people didn't know what cheese really was. These days if I want to re-conjure up the elegance of a thin and beatiful race from the early nineties I need to head out into rural Thailand closer to the villages and the paddy fields, where I'm magically sent back to that bygone era. One where rice is the staple diet and a few morsels of meat with lots of vegetables keeps them looking so fabulous.
As an adman I find this troubling and yet another hurdle (on top of sustainable wealth creation) to reconcile doing good work with good intentions.
Paul French who I've long admired as a thoughtful China commentator is interviewed here by another China afficianado Jeremy Goldkorn about his new book Fat China. They both dissect the issue in a manor which is contextually interesting even if you're not in Asia but interested in adding dimensionality to what's going on with expanding waistlines of the Occidental races: Europe, U.S and Australia.
The most compelling point for me if you can't spare 10 minutes to watch is that, we advertisers idealise children as chubby when selling to Mom children's food and drinks, and yet when they turn to 'Pepsi' teens we suddenly try to sell them the Heroin-teen-chic matchstick-thin lifestyles when biologically the toothpaste is out of the tube if one is serious about reversing the obesity process.
This is morally wrong and a point I hadn't thought of before; one I'll never let slip by again.
