If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

Here’s Godaddy’s Superbowl 2013 ad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGJX6t3IAlk

That’s funny, because I was thinking about this very trope just yesterday. Back in the early 2000s you couldn’t move for ‘this person represents this (usually abstract) aspect of our product’ ads. Here’s the best:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdyC5prcsrI

I think they sparked the analogy craze that we’re currently either at the end of or just taking a break from as we enjoy five score years of manifestos.

I’ve just spent the weekend in Florence.

When I wasn’t eating ice cream I was looking at the inside of churches. One such place of worship (Santa Maria Novella), unsurprisingly, has lots of pictures of Jesus on the walls. It was as I was staring at the nails in the feet and hands in one of these (The Holy Trinity by Masaccio) that it really hit home how violent this whole Jesus thing really is.

Imagine if someone appeared today who peacefully went up against the ruling power, gradually turning millions of people to believe in love and tolerance for thousands of years. But then millions of other people took those teachings on and used them to justify killing millions of other people. How did that happen? How did loads of people turn a (supposed) root belief in being nice to one another into the exact opposite?

This would be down to the Bible and its openness to various interpretations. Christian fundamentalism is the practise of defending the ‘fundamentals’ of a literal reading of the Bible, sometimes with violence. Does that conflict with what Jesus supposedly taught? Looks like it, but then there’s so much in the Bible that sends people off in another direction. How do you deal with heretics and those who would threaten Christianity when the Sermon on the Mount preaches loving your enemies?

So here we are with lots of nice Christians and lots of violent ones, all coming from the same teachings. So either they don’t believe the teachings or they think, somewhat ironically, that it’s justifiable to ignore them for the greater good of defending them:

If (and I’ll say for the record that I’m an atheist, so I find this quite a sizeable ‘if’) there was some big plan of a creator to make us all nicer people by sending his son down here to tell us how to behave, then he really ballsed it right up. I guess people who defend God would say that it’s our free will that made it all go wrong, but then the creator supposedly created us, too, including this ‘free will’ that seems to mess up his plans so many times. Then he gets annoyed at how naughty we are. Well, he (very supposedly) created us. If he didn’t want all this bad behaviour then he should have made us less prone to faults, or at least accept his part in those mistakes and started again, or given us a little running adjustment, like an OS update. Surely that would be a piece of piss for someone who is omnipotent.

So a guy whose life ended with nails in his feet and hands inspired millions of people to kill millions of other people, despite his express intention to do the exact opposite.

How strange…

Gilmour and Bowie doing Comfortably Numb live (thanks, G):

And then a one man bad performing Brain Damage/Eclipse (thanks, G):

Bad lip reading inauguration (thanks, S):

Man glues dildo to his girlfriend’s head:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ4GXb-AMpU&feature=player_embedded

Bill Gates jumping over a chair (thanks, G):

Awesome video, and you could do worse than spend a day flicking through the director’s other stuff (thanks, J):

Incredible macro pictures of human eyes (thanks, L).

Frank in the studio (thanks, L):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=L8WEvrfOJ94#!

Ass pennies (thanks, G):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPNr0_6MnDo&feature=share

If we skip past the fact that some guys just made an ad for (I’d guess) $10,000,000 this is OK. At least Mercedes backed the idea properly. It makes sense and has a decent logic (if we skip past the fact that the guy will only have the car, not the greater prizes on offer).

And not a single member of the KKK in sight.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H0xPWAtaa8

There’s a bunch of debate on YouTube as to whether or not this is racist.

Well, it stereotypes Jamaicans as being happy-go-lucky fellows who don’t sweat the small stuff and have a great big smile all day. Although it’s not offensive to say that an entire nation is happy, in this case it’s complete bullshit (particularly if you’re a homosexual; it’s illegal over there). So is it wrong to make a massive generalisation about a country, or is it OK so long as that generalisation is positive?

I’d say either generalising is wrong or it isn’t. What if he covered himself in brown shoe polish? There’s nothing wrong with having brown skin, is there? Would you find that offensive? What if he made a joke about having a big penis? Nothing wrong with that, eh? So would that inspire angry missives to VW’s HQ?

I had a good chat about this with my dad last year. He does stand-up comedy and was wondering why it’s OK for black people to say ‘nigger’ but not white people? Why would a Jewish person take offence at being called a ‘bloody Jew’, whereas a Zoroastrian would be more likely to just brush ‘bloody Zoroastrian’ aside?

We came to the conclusion that it’s down to historical oppression: there are certain races that have historically been given a raw deal. That seems to have resulted in the feeling that any further insulting of those races is offensive. The countries and races that have done the oppressing (which, not-very-coincidentally, are also the states with the strongest economies and most power) get much less offended at someone calling them out for the country they come from. Overall, Caucasian people rule the world (for the time being. Hello China!), so telling someone they’re part of the group that’s in charge is not going to be a problem.

An American in a German car ad pretending to be a Jamaican? Definitely iffy.

Oh, and besides that, the ad is not at all funny. It’s toe-curlingly embarrassing to watch those pisspoor clichés being worked over in such a bovine fashion.

Borderline racism I can take, but lazy, unamusing borderline racism? Why bother?

UPDATE: Here’s the making of: ‘You want to be doing a brilliant job to make people just love Volkswagen’. Good luck with that.

I was reading an interview with Steven Soderbergh the other day. There were lots of interesting answers, but this one stuck out for me:

I was watching one of those iconoclast shows on the Sundance Channel. Jamie Oliver said Paul Smith had told him something he hadn’t understood until very recently: “I’d rather be No. 2 forever than No. 1 for a while.” Just make stuff and don’t agonize over it. Stop worrying about being No. 1. I see a lot of people getting paralyzed by the response to their work, the imagined result. It’s like playing a Jedi mind trick on yourself, and Smith is right. That’s the way I’ve always approached films, the way I approach everything. Just make ’em.

OK, so it’s actually a point from Paul Smith via Jamie Oliver, but that interests me even more. Soderbergh, Smith and Oliver are all incredibly successful people in very competitive fields. They have innovated, gone against the grain, maintained their relevance and produced work of a very high standard for much longer than most of their peers.

And yet…

I think it’s fair to say that they are also capable of producing a lot of work that is less inspiring. For every time Jamie tries to take on the entire government there are several books on how to make a quick meal, and his restaurants are good but never great. Paul Smith can make a nice suit but he’s no Alexander McQueen or Miuccia Prada, restlessly forging ahead  to push past the boundaries of creativity. And Soderbergh’s great films (Solaris, Out Of Sight, Traffic etc.) are more than matched in number by the not-so-great (Ocean’s 13, The Girlfriend Experience, The Good German etc.), leaving his rating behind that of people like David Fincher or Paul Thomas Anderson.

So the idea of ‘just making stuff and not agonising over it’ seems like a good one. If you are a creative person of a certainly quality you might as well just keep moving forward. Some things will work better than others but the risks are worth taking and there’s certainly no shame in producing less than 10/10 every single time.

I think it’s fair to say that the vast majority of people would love to have had the careers of Oliver, Smith or Soderbergh. If the philosophy that informed those three lives was one of ‘number two forever beats number one for a while’ then maybe that’s not such a bad way of going about your day.

(Perhaps this is all a bit too theoretical. I wish I were number two in any of my fields.)

Here’s an interesting post from Seth Godin.

In it he talks about something it’s been difficult to ignore in recent years: the primary factor driving the vast majority of decisions is the acquisition of money.

Is that good or bad? Neither. There’s no such thing as good or bad. But I think this quote really brings it home:

Economics often trumps good intent, particularly at scale and over time. Decision-making power accrues to those that spend and make money, one reason that industrialization and time suck the art out of so many things.

Being clear about what we’re doing and why is the first step in doing it better. If you’re not happy about the honest answer to this question, make substantial changes until you are.

That’s a great question to ask and a damn hard one to answer. There might be many reasons why you’re doing what you’re doing, and some of them might clash with each other, but if you haven’t examined that part of your life with a microscope, you might want to, even if the things you find aren’t to your liking.

To paraphrase Seth, if you don’t know what game you’re playing how can you possibly play it better? The game might be ‘making money as quickly as possible’, but it might just as easily be ‘get creatively fulfilled’, ’emigrate’ or ‘prove my dad wrong’. I think there’s a good chance many of those games are hidden, which is why it often feels like we’re winning when we’re actually losing, and vice versa.

29 ways to stay creative (thanks, V).

Worst unexplainable images on the net (thanks, J).

Six Million Dollar Man vs Sasquatch (thanks, V):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N65Ro8i6Ic&feature=player_embedded#!

The Whites Only Laundromat (thanks, T):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=FR3ChDXCv0I

Every Arnie scream ever (thanks, G):

90 important pieces of graffiti.

80s video dating (thanks, K):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bomkgXeDkE

Actual Facebook graph searches (thanks J).

Nirvana home video (thanks, G):

All the reasons David Banner turned into The Hulk (I love number 60).

John Hegarty and Jimmy Savile (thanks, M):

http://vimeo.com/7144600

Michael Winner calls Richard Littlejohn an arsehole on live TV (thanks, G):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPq7jVGPs3g&feature=player_embedded

1973 just called. It wants its ad back.

Check The always-wonderful Ad Contrarian for reasons why this is not only crass, bovine and dismal, but also a stupid waste of money.

And it’s not even that sexy. She’s been poorly shot and is hardly in it.

And this is far, far better for a squillionth of the budget:

So yesterday’s point was about whether a larger good deed can justify a bad one.

Today we look at artificial enhancement.

Which of these is fair?

1. An ageing actor has plastic surgery and wins parts that might have gone to other actors.

2. A cyclists injects himself with steroids when pretty much everyone else is doing it. The work is still hard, but if he didn’t take the steroids he would be miles behind.

3. A bodybuilder wants to enter shows but he doesn’t want to take drugs. Unfortunately, no one watches non-steroid bodybuilding shows.

4. The son of a footballer is found to have certain genetic advantages that end up helping him to captain his country.

5. A girl goes through public school where she is given top quality training and equipment to become one of the world’s best archers.

6. A boy has nice, encouraging parents who sacrifice everything to help him become the greatest chef in the country.

7. The parents of a five-year-old girl tell her she is nothing. She is then beaten and humiliated for the rest of her childhood. She turns this experience into the drive that makes her an Oscar-winning actor.

8. A man is an average athlete. He is in a car crash which leaves him with no legs. He becomes a gold medal Paralympian.

9. A small child is looking through an old wardrobe. He happens to find a copy of Harry Potter. This inspires a massive love of reading and storytelling that makes him a best-selling author.

‘All advantages are unfair’ – Dave Trott.