If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

The making of Pulp Fiction.

Get John Bonham drumming on your tracks (thanks, J).

Wonderful Accidental Partridge Twitter feed.

Classic novels as movie posters (although many have already been movies).

How green screen works (thanks, P):

http://vimeo.com/60019489

The chewing gum man (thanks, J):

http://vimeo.com/45435491

Best places to read in the whole world (bookshelf porn ahoy! Thanks, T).

Fine art equivalents of David Lynch’s hair (thanks, T).

Very amusing celebrity dickslips (thanks, J).

Problematic camera angles.

I was chatting to a an ex-colleague the other day. We were reminiscing about the good old days when we both worked for AMV in the late 1990s.

Our memories might be a tad fuzzy but we both recalled it being an amazing place to work, both creatively and in new business terms. It used to suck in accounts like the Death Star’s tractor beam, one blue chip household name after another sliding irresistibly through the door.

We went on to wonder what an agency has to do to get into that position and why it doesn’t happen so much now.

I likened it to Prada vs M&S. When an agency is on a brilliant run clients will treat it like a visit to Prada, hoping against hope that they can bask in the reflective glow of utter excellence. Please let us be your client, they pray, wringing their hands like Uriah Heep. A late-nineties AMV ad campaign, much like a 2002 Mother, a 2005 Fallon, or a 2011 Adam and Eve would be like a Prada suit, conferring some kind of status upon the wearer no matter what the quality (although the quality would invariably top-notch; that’s how they get in that position in the first place).

But there are by definition very few Pradas (if we were all Prada none of us would be), leaving the rest of the field to be taken up by the odd Hugo Boss and a great many Marks and Spencer’s: decent enough, but pretty much indistinguishable from each other, and certainly unable to inspire the kind of obsequiousness of the top agency on top of its game. So that leaves the clients thinking (and behaving) like they are shopping in M&S: it ain’t a privilege, and the general feeling is that they’re doing you a favour by pointing their cash in your direction (which they are, at least a little bit).

In the old days, when great advertising was a bit of a mystery, and the ads were better, more agencies were held in Prada-level regard. Now that we’ve all accepted ads aren’t as good as they used to be, and relatively easier to make (changing a font now takes roughly 1,000,000th the time it took in 1974)  there’s much less respect for what we do. To a client it must seem as enjoyable an experience as buying that cheap suit, and just as likely to get their give-a-shit gland throbbing. If you produce amazing, that’s how you get treated, but average work begets average love, and whether work is genuinely average or merely perceived to be that way, it doesn’t really matter.

There is, of course, a solution: lots and lots of truly incredible work (just as long as we don’t all do it at the same time).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgCbLlEcfiA

She’s lovely, isn’t she?

Makes Anne Hathaway seem like an android sent to win acting awards while humblebragging herself into a stupor.

And just in case that wasn’t enough…

I support Arsenal. Although we haven’t won a trophy since a somewhat undeserved FA Cup in 2005, I don’t have a big problem with these trophyless years. We had seven ridiculously good years under Arsene Wenger, so now the bar has been set very high indeed, leading to dissatisfaction that we don’t win the league on a regular basis.

Rather than digress into a post about whether or not we should be annoyed at having no trophies for eight years, I thought I’d suggest a reason why it’s happened that doesn’t seem to get discussed in the media.

Arsenal’s barren patch has coincided precisely with our move to Emirates Stadium. It was a move that had to happen if we were to continue to compete financially (and by extension on footballing terms) with the biggest clubs in Europe, but it has also come at a price as far as the team’s performance is concerned. I believe there are three main reasons for this:

The first is physical: the new stadium separates the fans from the pitch in a way that didn’t happen at Highbury. This means that the effect of the crowd is lessened and the home advantage we used to enjoy has been reduced.

The second is historical: the old stadium had years of familiarity behind it. People stood or sat with people they knew, the players understood how to work one of the smallest grounds in the top tier, and it was ours in a way that Emirates is taking time to match. For the first years of Emirates’ existence we might as well have been playing in an away stadium with greater support.

The last is the most important: the support. Highbury held around 38,000, whereas Emirates holds around 60,000. The new supporters are not going to be the most hardcore fans (they would already have been going to Highbury), so we now have another 15,000 or so (I’m leaving out away fans for simplicity) of the lesser fans. Now, I’m not saying that these are uninterested people, especially as I’m one of them, but there is an obvious and constant dissatisfaction from the spectators whenever anything goes wrong. Is that down to the dilution of the level of fandom or just the fact that the team isn’t playing so well? Within that point is the added corporate and neutral fans: there are now a lot more expensive tickets sloshing around for people who might just want to see an entertaining game of football, but are never going to sing about Arsene Wenger’s magic hat, or even give a chorus of ‘Red Army’.

A friend told me he was once watching a live game that we were winning by some margin at half time, but he was surrounded by a large group of foreign people who didn’t cheer any of the goals and killed the atmosphere dead. During the break he decided to leave and watch the rest of the match in one of the local Arsenal pubs, which he enjoyed much more.

I also imagine that many of those extra fans are people who have watched only since the great years of George Graham and Arsene Wenger, so they won’t have lived through more than the odd season where we weren’t at the very least in the top four. So they expect greatness, but it’s not a God-given right, and intolerance of errors does a great job of bringing the team’s confidence down. Do you want the crowd on your back for misplacing a pass that could have been great, or would you prefer the silence that accompanies a safe tap to a nearby teammate? It won’t make the difference for every decision, but it might just reduce the momentum enough to turn a win into a draw or a draw into a defeat.

I know Highbury wasn’t the loudest stadium on earth (indeed, it was nicknamed The Library), but when I sit watching games, a lone singing voice in my block, I do wonder what effect we’re having on the confidence of a team that drops the ball, sometimes literally, with alarming regularity. Very good new signings arrive and soon begin to display those signs of nervousness. How can two men who have 100 caps each for Germany be so prone to mistakes and lack of drive? Where is the Vermaelen of old? And why has tippy-tappy around the 18-yard line followed by an ineffective cross become the norm?

Sorry if you’re not into football (if that’s the case I’d be surprised that you got this far). If you are I’d love to know what you think, and has anything similarly inadvertent happened to harpoon the confidence of your club?

You had one job… (thanks, R).

Small error on news programme (thanks, J):

Another fine Amazon takeover (thanks, S).

Wonderful writing and animation (thanks, A):

Yoko Ono’s letter to Mark Chapman’s parole board.

All the meteors that have fallen on Earth since 2300 BC (thanks, L).

A shitty guide to making trippy music (thanks, J):

Classic albums re-imagined as books.

Wonderful ad for a smart mop (thanks, J):

Great online comedy about a dope delivery dude (thanks, C).

Sensitive nipple massage (not what you think. Worse. Thanks, J).

Jim’ll Paint It (not what you think. Better. Thanks, P).

Here’s an interesting new idea:

If you could be arsed to sit through an entire 53 seconds of explanation, it’s a scheme whereby you make a video of something people would want to watch (that might in turn showcase your talents), then you charge people a donation to a charity to watch it.

Sounds like an excellent way to enjoy yourself, impress/entertain others and help the needy.

Where’s the downside?

The other day I took a cab journey.

‘Do you like music?’ barked the driver.

‘Yeah,’ I replied warily.

‘What kind?’

‘Hip hop, old seventies rock, Led Zeppelin, that sort of thing. Got any of that?’

‘What about alternative, indie? You like any of that?’

‘I suppose. What have you got in mind?’

‘Can I just play you something? My son’s the drummer in a band, and their album was iTunes album of the year in the US last year and they’ve been on Jay Leno and Letterman. They’re called We Are Augustines and they’ve done a cover of Saint Behind The Glass by Los Lobos and I can’t stop playing it.’

‘Cool, yeah, let’s hear it.’

(Can’t find the WAA cover. Here’s the lovely original):

So he played it and I bought the album while sitting in the cab (gotta love technology). Then he told us how he used to be a drummer and he encouraged his son to drum from an early age and got him Andrew Lloyd Webber’s drummer as a teacher and started taking the kid to blues gigs when he was about 12. So we reached our destination and my wife told the guy he was a great dad and the whole journey was rather wonderful (especially as we were on our way home from hearing Peter Tatchell give a workshop on How To Change The World at The School of Life).

Then my wife looked up the drummer and he seems to be a lovely bloke too. It turns out he came close to quitting lots of times but finally made it big. Lesson: never, ever give up. Other lesson: encourage your children to follow their dreams.

Anyway, that was one of the best cab journeys I’ve ever taken, and now, dear reader, I pass the good vibes on to you.

Here’s a delightful rant from Harlan Ellison:

Interesting…

The undercutting of the professional by the amateur is a fascinating area and one that I, as a blogger, am fully involved in.

I think in Harlan’s case is a very different situation: he isn’t just a professional; he is a fucking good and well paid professional. He really doesn’t need someone to throw him a little PR bone in return for working for free, so he is within his rights to turn them down and rant at the indignity of it all.

But we now have a bunch of awesome amateurs who will give the professionals a run for their money. For example, I would hold The Sartorialist above any copy of GQ or Esquire (I think the guy behind it has a book out, so he is now a professional, but that’s not how he made his reputation), I consider the Arsenal coverage of Arseblog, 7amkickoff and the Goonerholic to be far better than anything I can get in the papers and there are many advertising bloggers who make the canine semen-level coverage of Campaign look like the milquetoast bullshit it truly is.

Those are cases where the impassioned, intelligent amateur outpaces the fattened, hammock-dwelling professional (I exaggerate to make a point), the flipside of Harlan’s argument, demonstrating that just because you do something for money doesn’t mean you’re the best at it, or even any good. It just means someone pays you for it. And there’s a big difference.

We could now discuss crowdsourced ads and how they stand up against the stuff that real advertising agencies produce, but that’s a complicated area where the PR halo of asking ten-year-old kids to do the job of overpaid Madison Avenue wankers is a big part of the argument. Are they better? Well, the job isn’t just coming up with ads; it’s doing it to order, hitting deadlines and suppressing yawns in client meetings, to name just three things that people don’t always discuss when they describe what we do.

Can a ten-year-old kid do the other stuff? Maybe, but it’d be pretty boring to find out, and what does that say about us?

Someone bought the website michelinguides.com and did something funny with it.

Hilarious German safety videos (thanks, A):

The world’s greatest photographer (thanks, B).

Goats yelling like humans:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=PpccpglnNf0

My Vag (thanks, J):

Bang with nobody (thanks, J).

Beautiful stop-frame animation:

Schwarzenegger is an entertainingly racist perv (thanks, S):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQZwshItUwk&feature=player_embedded

Mr T’s fashion show (thanks, J):

The Harlem shakes (thanks, I):

Depressed DJs (thanks, V).

Vaguely rude place names (thanks, W).