If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

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).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fuijhUn0pk&feature=player_embedded

Nicely done. Unnecessarily cheesy driving shot ending.

I never watch all three minutes of anything that’s three minutes long, but I managed it with this.

The charity is a good cause, the script is funny and the performances are excellent.

Hats off.

The above line is attributed to designer Abram Games and it is truly brilliant.

It communicates the essence of quality in art in four elegant, alliterative words that practice exactly what they preach.

But why is economy of expression such a prized skill?

Although you can argue for nebulous abstractions such as ‘beauty’, I think it, and everything else we admire, comes down to a single thing: difficulty. Expressing elaborate concepts, such as the essence of a company, in three words (Just Do It), or the way love works in a single line (the love you take is equal to the love you make) is really, really hard, and therefore worthy of our admiration. It’s why we like short titles that have many meanings (War and Peace), or puns (they often have the added difficulty of being spontaneous), or works of art such as Shepard Fairey’s ‘hope’ image of Obama.

Advertising’s short timelengths are rich areas of density of expression and this can happen in very different ways. For example, he beautiful imagery and wonderfully lyrical voiceover of ‘Surfer’ can be taken in on the first viewing, but those 90 seconds can be watched time and again, revealing different layers on each occasion:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zff9hVH3ptY

But equally, there’s a whole life, backstory, attitude and personality in two words and a muddy football pitch that we can all recognise and enjoy in various ways each time we see it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUSpjZEhNU8

Saying a lot with a little is quite a skill (that, as you can see, I have yet to master).

I once watched a programme (I think it was Secrets of the Pop Song) that talked about writing hits. One quote from that has really stuck with me, and it said that one of Abba’s writers believed that a really good song needed five hooks.

Since then I’ve listened to very popular music with this in mind.

Dancing Queen has the chorus, the ‘You can dance, you can jive, having the time of your life’ bit, the ‘la, la, la,’ bit it starts with, catchy verses and ‘See that girl, watch that scene, digging the dancing queen’.

We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together has ‘You go talk to your friends, talk to my friends, talk to me’, the little musical riff at the very start, the chorus, the verses, ‘Oooh, oooh, oooh, we called it off again last night’ and ‘this time, I’m telling you, I’m telling you’ (that’s six).

Gold Digger (apparently the only massive hit in a minor key) has ‘She take my money…’, ‘I ain’t sayin’ she a Gold Digger, but she ain’t messin’ with no broke niggas’, ‘get down girl, go ‘head , get down’, the verses, and the staccato horn/keyboard bit behind ‘to a Benz out of a Datsun’.

Someone Like You has the piano intro, the verses, the chorus, ‘I hate to turn up out of the blue…’ (the bridge) and ‘Nothing compares, no worries or cares…’ (the middle eight).

And Bohemian Rhapsody has them coming out of its ears.

I thought that was interesting because we just think of a song as being catchy without even realising why, or what’s behind that. Also, I think many of us come up with one hook on projects that will never become great unless they have more than that. For example, I once worked on a campaign with Paul Belford where he was making the visual side different for each execution but always with the same line. At some point I think he suggested that for the campaign to be great it would need a different line each time. For whatever reason we left it with the single line and sure enough, it could have been better.

I also have occasional conversations with people where they have a great idea for a plot and don’t know what to do from there, or they want to know if there is a demand for initial ideas without the development that makes them into scripts or books. I’d say that a book requires hundreds of hooks, from the first idea to every page that develops it. A song is only five minutes long but a film is two hours and a book often lasts a week or so, and that entire time needs to be filled with enough hooks to keep the viewer or reader gripped.

I can explain this in the context of the novel I’m currently writing. The story involves a man who goes back in time and lives his life again with the thoughts he has as a thirty-eight-year-old. The idea is interesting, but I’ve now explored it so much (110,000 words) that I’ve found many more hooks that go beyond that initial concept. In fact, I’d say that the sentence that describes the book is one of the least good ideas in it. It feels familiar and people talk about that kind of thing all the time, but in looking for the new hooks I’ve discovered what that story really needs to be about and effectively I restarted the plot at the 70,000 word mark. It might turn out great; it might not, but I’m now thinking up hooks that have almost made me forget the initial one.

Does your work have all the hooks it needs? If not, what are you going to do about it?