It’s a truth universally acknowledged that when you check out the jury for an upcoming award show you inevitably despair at the number of no-mark fuckwits from Micronesia who have been allowed to run the rule over your lovingly-crafted works of genius.
So thank you Creative Circle, who have noticed, pointed out and wittily skewered this bane of the modern era (interest declared: they’re the work of my mate Adam Tucker):
Louis CK quotes as motivational posters.
And Louis CK back in 1991 being kinda shit:
The best infographics of 2014 (thanks, J).
Smiths x Peanuts (thanks, W).
The stupidest idea of all time (thanks, J).
A thorough explanation of Mulholland Drive.
Excellent flight attendant announcement:
Photos of NY storefronts ten years apart.
Rodriguez interviews Tarantino:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGOZSmWDlAs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ3ePGr8Q7k
1. Did all the kids write the second letter about their parents’ absence? And did they all choose to send the other letter over the first one? If so, they are unlike many, many kids that I have met; if not this is disgusting manipulation from Ikea. To suggest that all kids feel that way is a horribly guilt-inducing move from a giant corporation. Being a parent is hard enough without some Swedish furniture store telling you you’re even worse at it than you thought.
2. What the fuck has this got to do with Ikea?
This strikes me as a particularly witless and poorly acted bag o’ shite:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DassdizThkk
I think it’s been beautifully, wonderfully shot (by Dougal Wilson).
I don’t quite get the metaphor, though.
Are birds messy things that need to be tidied up? Do they get in the way of stuff? Are T-shirts like birds in any possible way?
‘A home for all the things you love. That’s the joy of storage.’
So are the birds like homeless birds? They weren’t happy being all over the world, but now they’ve found their way home? Is that what happens to birds when they fly south for the winter or whatever is being portrayed in this ad?
Maybe you love birds like you love T-shirts…?
No, hang on, that doesn’t make sense…
Ummmmm…
No idea.
Could someone please enlighten me?
After several hundred articles and word-of-mouth recommendations, I finally got round to taking a class in Transcendental Meditation between Christmas and New Year.
At this point I assume you now fall into one of three camps:
1) Already doing it.
2) Not yet, but have given it some thought.
3) Not in a million years. Tree-hugging hippie bollocks.
To the first group: I’m sorry, but I’m going to go through the early-days basics for the people in group 2. As for the people in group 3: read on; you might find there’s more to it than you thought.
So I did this in about as wanky a manner as you could imagine: for four days in a row I got up early and drove my electric car to the Beverly Hills TM centre, where a soft-spoken man called Denny Goodman took me through the basics and gave me my mantra.
Denny Goodman, somewhere that isn’t Beverly Hills.
You can read more about how it works here, but it comes down to the idea that your mind is a kind of lawn sprinkler that gets little kinks and knots in the hose because of the general stresses of daily life. 15-20 minutes of TM unkinks the hose (so to speak) and leaves you clear and deeply rested. You are also able to access interesting areas of your mind that you may not yet have visited.
It’s hard to explain what that actually feels like until you do it, but it’s a piece of piss: you shot your eyes for a minute or so, then you start saying your mantra over and over in your mind. As you do this you kind of forget your mantra because thoughts pop into your head, the kind of thoughts that you think about all day. Then they kind of disappear and you remember to repeat your mantra again (only this time you might well do it slower as you’ll be a bit more relaxed). You repeat the process until you end up reaching this strange stage where your mind pops off somewhere quite cool and unusual (again, difficult to explain, partly because I imagine it differs for different people).
15-20 minutes later you stop thinking about your mantra for a few minutes then carry on with what you were doing before you were meditating, but completely refreshed.
Does it work? Apparently it does, to a enormous extent for millions of people, including school children and soldiers.
Does anyone who is incredibly successful do it? Well, from the link above you can see that David Lynch does it, but Clint Eastwood’s been doing it for forty years, as has Jerry Seinfeld:
So I’ve enjoyed the last week immensely, but I’d love to know what you think of it. Do you do it? Have you tried it and let it slip? Do you think it’s a load of bollocks?
Let me know. In the meantime I’ll leave you with my favourite Beatles song, which, coincidentally, is all about TM:
Hello,
Thanks if you’ve read the blog this year.
No problem if you haven’t.
Love and peace
x
and here’s the wonderful original:
Library bars (thanks, T).
Kubrick Playboy interview (thanks, T).
The 20 best movie posters of 2014.
And the finest films of the year, all cut together in a jolly fun way:
http://vimeo.com/113355414
Terrible marital name pairings (thanks, D).
Artist transforms old paintbrushes into lay-deez (thanks, J).
And these porcelain creatures are just amazing.
This kid making a case for cupcakes is sublime:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TP8RB7UZHKI&feature=youtu.be
Badassadvertisingjobtitles.com (thanks, L).
Brand fails 2014 (thanks, A).
I’ve been in advertising long enough to remember the days when treatments didn’t really exist.
You wrote ads, sent them to directors, had chats with the ones who said they were interested and chose the one you liked best.
There was no further stage where you then expected the possible choices to send you several pages of ‘reference’, along with a long, detailed explanation of how they intended to shoot your little effort in the same way Godard shot À Bout De Souffle.
But then someone, somewhere had the bright idea of giving that little extra and, as we’ve seen so many times in the recent past of the industry, when you give and inch, a yard is taken: do an ad in three days instead of a week and the client will then ask for the work in two days, then one; offer to cut your mark up ‘just this once’ and you’ll find yourself cutting it twice, then again and again until it becomes the norm and you are asked to cut it again; say fucking ‘ideation’ in a meeting and it’s a short slope to ‘brand synergy’ and ‘online conversations’.
When the person who came up with the idea of treatments did so he or she opened the doors to a right old Pandora’s Box. Of course, now every attempt to get a script includes a treatment, sometimes on really nice paper; sometimes on video. And often they’re not written by the actual directors (who may not list ‘writing about anamorphic lenses for the right to shoot a Persil ad’ in the things they learned at directing school), so you’re not getting a real indication of their exact thoughts anyway.
I’m all for going the extra distance to convince someone you’re the right person for a job, but that’s clearly not what treatments have become.
Do you enjoy them or believe them to be yet another pointless addition to the 21st Century?