Coincimental - Banksy Vs Ai Weiwei

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.

Générique de Simpsons par Banksy

Uploaded by FilmGeek-TV

Wooden

Season of the Witch

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.

Mad Men

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.

Society of the Spectacle

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.

Pastoral Floors

Via The Whistling Duck

Schumpeter's Creative Destruction

Good new talk on TED by Tim Jackson with a thought provoking slide on creative destruction just in case the tree is obstructing the woods.

Tokyo Gore Police - Wrist Cutter G commercial

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.

Brainwash

Television is a drug. from Beth Fulton on Vimeo.

Via Jon also worth considering is this.

Jetzt Geht's Los

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. 

The story starts here. 

Bytes versus Bites

The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.

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.

Xerox Art

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

Looks like me in that fight doesn't it? 

Naaa I thought not. 

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.

That's enough about me. Have you ever tried Octopus? It's tasty...... It's just that I hear Octopi have an IQ with the chutzpah to start questioning how smart Dolphins are. 

#justsaying

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.

The social is political

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.

Mitsubishi Tractors

Wing Nuts

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. 

Enjoy.

Bacon Tastes Good - Pork Chops Taste Good

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.

The point is that personality isn't an accessory. It covered our butts while going through brand puberty but the age of a more meaningful existence isn't just possible. It's looming awkwardly and is going to separate the wheat from the chaff. The middle will consist of those brands that have always used layered and constructed fear to sell their wares and while many will survive in some way, shape or form they will increasingly look crusty and sclerotic compared to brands that have a ball swinging value-set. One that costs them something from time to time; costs them likeability, costs them money, because most importantly it finally earns them respect.

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'll leave you on a Biblical note John  1:1

Bloated Asia

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.  

Paper Tweet

Via Kris Hoet

Did you do any fornicating?

I really like Oliver Stone's work. I think he's consistently dealt with the most excruciating themes of the American 20th century in a candid way that most Americans aren't ready to deal with. I also like that he did two tours of duty in Vietnam despite being part of that privileged elite who could have avoided the draft, as did the Neocon chicken-hawks; Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, William Kristol et al.

I just rewatched Stone's Nixon earlier because yesterday I finally got round to seeing Frost/Nixon, a clip of which I've used above. It's extraordinarily good and made me want to revisit Nixon the man because in the thick of all the Bush bashing (when it's evident he never really had the intellectual gravitas to manipulate the world but was instead a subject of manipulation) I took great delight in telling people Nixon was one of my favourite presidents. I can't say it now because I've dug a bit deeper after watching this, though I will say that despite the carnage that Nixon authorised, particularly the unconscionable bombing of Laos and Cambodia he still presided over the most geopolitically volatile period apart from all out world war. It's easier with hindsight but the question remains did he exploit that geopolitical volatility? Was it really necessary?

The answer's probably no because proxy ideological wars in far away places are at a primary assessment level abysmal failures though arguably have much more complex secondary geopolitcal angles like the suggestion I read today that Afghanistan and Iraq is about having an experienced army  at hand if middle Asia becomes the arena for conflict over resources (not just oil). Believe me the only peaceful ideological solution we have for that is a sharing one. Marx came close and I suggest we need to try again, because the profit motive is hitting a dead end and hey, even the Wright brothers didn't quit when their first plane nose dived. However my ideological chin sticking out affirms a simple principle. Don't bomb and maim small Buddhist countries to achieve larger geopolitical ends. Take some pain on the chin, and I most definitely am looking at the United Kingdom as well as the United States too.

It's time to open up an Easter Egg on this blog because when I wrote that last Nixon piece it had another story behind it. It was allegorical too, because my apartment was being broken into at the time. The protagonist(s) were also reading my blog (note the personal Wifi router the case is sitting on) so I thought I'd land a punch when it suited me and today it does. So I guess I got to write about it, share what I think about Richard Nixon and pluralistic thinking, as well as nail a date and a time to that period when things like my Porsche briefcase had it's combination lock popped while I wasn't at home.  I did walk away with my full deposit from that affair. That's unheard of in Asia when two warring sides choose to go their separate ways with a tenancy contract between them.

I don't mind confessing there were days when I thought I'd lose a lot more than the deposit as I'm stubborn. It's irrespective of what influence or power I'm up against though a shiny motorcycle police escort one early morning while nipping down to 7 Eleven prompted me to settle for the cash. A foreigner never actually win's in Asia so I did OK given who I was up against, and that post I wrote time stamps accusations without ambiguity. Not that I didn't appreciate it being nominated for post of the month too because the dual narratives were completely coherent and utterly sincere. You'll forgive me if I killed two birds with one stone. It's the mark of a really lazy person not an industrious one ironically.

Anyway that was  all wild and I learned that snakes really do writhe when you have them by the tail but the reason for this post is very simply to outline that Oliver Stone is for me, more of a patriot than any of the abysmal Tea Party crowd and (I contest) a brave creative American icon. Which is kind of my way of saying sorry, because I met him in a nightclub once, here in Bangkok. He'd been filming Alexander the Great and unfortunately I'm less amusing after a cocktail than I think I am so I confirmed if his name was Oliver and leaned into his ear sharing something along the lines of 'I hope you didn't omit from your film, that while Alexander was pinning down Asia, he was also pinning down his Generals'.

Oliver immediately backed away as if purgatory was imminent and his entourage protectively engulfed me from saying another word, sweeping me away back into a less interesting world. The moral of the story I guess is just be nice, say hi and 'how are you' when you meet someone you respect instead of being a smart ass, and also just make sure they haven't directed a turkey of a movie.

Both Nixon and Frost Nixon are brilliant films. The first historically and the second, well the second did something that a small screen has never done for me before. I've been moved by actors on the big screen theatre but the Nixon character in this second movie. I was spellbound by the end. I never believed that a small netbook screen could ever command  or impose such pathos and yet it was all there. You should watch it because even if you don't care about politics you should care about how the mightiest can fall and once again how little in life is black and white all set to a Greek tragedy of biblical proportion. I just discovered that Frank Langella was nominated for an Oscar in this movie and that's the most deserving nomination I can think of for some time. I also think it's great to see actors doing very fine jobs of David Frost and John Birt. Both of whom now I think have knighthoods. Watch Langella in this. Sometimes it's like a bear leaning over you baring perfectly ominous but preternaturally perfect teeth. Or is that Frost as well?

reality hunger

Love this. I've been fast forwarding through the boring parts of Dexter earlier. I love the character but all that contrived futile love angle? It's maddening. Though I realise that sounds like ironic psychopathy.

www.russelldavies.com for more wisdom (Go on type it. You'll remember it that way)