If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

Feel like a hacker: type really fast into this website.

Keth Haring:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9krsiL8oZNE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL8YIw2zvto

Young babies, infants, toddlers, yes even a simple child,

Can all end up abused, can all end up defiled,

You know age it makes no difference, it offers no defence,

To women in their eighties, it just don’t make no sense

What are those lines from? Why rap against rape of course. Yes, you read that right, and whatever is in your head right now, this is many, many times worse:

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

The greatest cover version of all time.

Amazing interview with the writer of Fast and Furious Five.

Akira Kurosawa made some of the best movies of all time.

Although the most famous is The Seven Samurai, Others such as Rashomon, Ikiru and Kagemusha are equally brilliant in their own quite different ways.

In 1984 he made another master piece, Ran, which I urge you to see. It’s based on King Lear, and is full of blood, fire and Machiavellian wives (you will also spot many of Tarantino’s influences).

The DVD version I have comes with a fascinating ‘making of’ documentary. It demonstrates the incredible attention to detail that it takes to produce a masterpiece, particularly in the face of having to get your shots through mist, rain and the use of hundreds of horses. Here’s part of it:

Jesus, surrounded by flies. Are they metaphorical as well as literal? Who knows?

There was an interesting article in today’s Observer: an extract from Martin Amis’s introduction to ‘The Quotable Hitchens’.

It’s full of fascinating quotes, rude (not quite as funny as Matin thinks they are) putdowns and perceptive observations, but the section that interested me most was an exploration of Hitchens’ forthright atheism:

Christopher’s personal devil is God, or rather organised religion, or rather the human “desire to worship and obey”.

Which I used to agree with more fully, but I’ve since converted to become a fundamentalist agnostic. Here Amis, clever bloke that he is, agrees with me:

My dear Hitch: there has been much wild talk, among the believers, about your impending embrace of the sacred and the supernatural. This is of course insane. But I still hope to convert you, by sheer force of zealotry, to my own persuasion: agnosticism. In your seminal book, God Is Not Great, you put very little distance between the agnostic and the atheist; and what divides you and me (to quote Nabokov yet again) is a rut that any frog could straddle. “The measure of an education,” you write elsewhere, “is that you acquire some idea of the extent of your ignorance.” And that’s all that “agnosticism” really means: it is an acknowledgment of ignorance. Such a fractional shift (and I know you won’t make it) would seem to me consonant with your character – with your acceptance of inconsistencies and contradictions, with your intellectual romanticism, and with your love of life, which I have come to regard as superior to my own.

The atheistic position merits an adjective that no one would dream of applying to you: it is lenten. And agnosticism, I respectfully suggest, is a slightly more logical and decorous response to our situation – to the indecipherable grandeur of what is now being (hesitantly) called the multiverse. The science of cosmology is an awesome construct, while remaining embarrassingly incomplete and approximate; and over the last 30 years it has garnered little but a series of humiliations. So when I hear a man declare himself to be an atheist, I sometimes think of the enterprising termite who, while continuing to go about his tasks, declares himself to be an individualist. It cannot be altogether frivolous or wishful to talk of a “higher intelligence” – because the cosmos is itself a higher intelligence, in the simple sense that we do not and cannot understand it.

This seems to be an illustration of another Hitchens quotation:

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

If there’s no evidence for the existence of God, and there’s no evidence for the ultimate non-existence of him/her/it either, then surely you can’t fully believe either way.

(Of course, I’m dismissing people’s ‘faith’, which by definition is belief without evidence.)

I used to be a reluctant atheist, who enjoyed the solidity of taking one side of a black-or-white argument. My reluctance came from the nagging doubt provided by many years of religion-based education (my school church was Westminster Abbey. We went there three times a week for half an hour of hymns, prayers and lessons and had a further morning of prayers elsewhere on Wednesdays. Thank God (sic) for Tuesdays and Thursdays) that never converted me to belief, but added enough to the existence side of the argument to make me doubt my doubt.

Anyway, a combination of Ricard Dawkins and (what I saw as) common sense convinced me that the idea of an omniscient, omnipresent uberbeing was, frankly, fucking ridiculous. But then I had dinner with Dave Trott a couple of months back, and he slipped in the agnosticism theory in a more succinct way than Amis did. He said that agnosticism was surely the only intelligent position to take.

I thought about that for a couple of weeks, and here I am, not believing in anything beyond my lack of belief.

But I’m curious: do you believe in God? And why?

Kubrick’s photojournalism (thanks, J).

What can editing and sound design add to something?

I’ve just cried laughing at some of the worst names of all time (thanks, A).

A baby penguin being tickled:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnxGZ9jeuP8

Worst rap battle ever:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHpw6CzprNY

Coppola’s way (thanks, W).

Great new Beasties video (thanks, G).

I’ve had a fair few whinges on here about the marginalisation of creativity, but I’m not sure I’ve ever said that we (creatives) kind of deserve it.

I came into the business with my ears full of stories, apocryphal or otherwise, of the previous generations of creatives and their leisurely, indulged lifestyles: the guys on six-figures in the eighties who hit the pubs as soon as they opened and spent the day gambling their massive salaries away; the plant pots thrown through windows; the sports cars that made up for the giant tax rate in the sixties; the somewhat dismissive attitudes towards women; the snarly, off-hand manner with which non-creatives were treated etc.

Well, when the quality of the work was all-important, that was all fine. The rest of the agency had to just suck it up and envy us. We went on the foreign jollies, we hung out with directors and photographers, we got to see our stuff on TVs and billboards and we picked up the awards. But then we were the geese laying the golden eggs, and it made perfect sense to keep that genius ticking along, no matter what it took.

But we were also building up a seething volcano of resentment.

The other departments, particularly account management and planning, didn’t enjoy having to kow-tow to the boys in trainers who drifted in at eleven and went to the pub at twelve after dashing off for a quick chat with Ridley or Alan.

It fucked them off big time.

But for ages there was nothing they could do about it. The geese. The golden egg… It was sacrosanct.

Then the worm started to turn. It took a while, but the people with the word ‘account’ in their job title were generally the people in charge, and little by little they chipped away at our status. Lower wages, a sharper eye on the working hours, quantity becoming just as important as quality. And over a decade or two the effect was complete. The decisions were being made by people who couldn’t tell a good ad from a hole in the ground, so they didn’t really care if were were indulged superstars laying golden eggs or worker drones laying turds. The money was the same colour either way and in the latter instance they could pay less of it to us. As far as they could tell there was no real drop in standards, and with everyone producing shit, it looked like no one was producing shit.

Something still won a gold arrow at the BTAAs.

Something still filled the pages of D&AD.

Something still won an ever-increasing number of Lions at Cannes.

How could anyone prove things were getting worse?

No one could, so as far as people with no taste are concerned, everything is hunky blooming dory.

So that’s it, I’m afraid: they’ve won.

Yes, there are exceptions to prove rules, and the above is a bit of a generalisation, but take a look around and you’ll see that advertising in this country ain’t what it used to be. CDs are hired to be dictated to by MDs and CEOs. They can’t say boo to a goose anymore, let alone throw one out of a window to prove a point about kerning. If you want a bit more proof, take another look and see if anything your agency produces could be defined as ‘scam’. It’s what we’ve all been reduced to now: utterly pointless willy-waving that devalues what we do still further.

And what I’m saying should be no surprise to you. A huge chunk of the best creatives in the business have left town. There were always the ones who wanted to direct, but now the ones who would have stayed in the game are all off abroad, or working in some other industry that might just value their talent.

Which means things will only get worse.

Yes, the job is still relatively enjoyable. Yes, great work is still occasionally possible.

But the party’s over. The house lights are up, the floor is smeared with cake and the tables are littered with beer bottles and the dregs that sit at the bottom of them.

And it’s all our fault.

*All references to ‘we’, ‘us’, ‘our’ etc. are to denote creatives. Of course most of us didn’t take that mile. The ones who did were the goddamn babyboomers, who sucked up all the good stuff while were were still in nappies. Has there even been a jammier generation in the history of the planet? The ones in this country had no wars, grew up with The Beatles, got older to Zep and Floyd, had the best generation of movies there has ever been to enjoy in the cinema and then got the rub of the green in the housing market. Sheesh. Way to fuck it up for the rest of us.

(Interest declared: this was done by my friends Paul and Mike at TBWA.)

Not all of them of course. Life’s way too short (life’s way to short to check the ones I checked, but this blog don’t write itself).

After a moment or two, I noticed an interesting thing about what got in. See if you can see what I’m getting at:

Press advertising nationalities in the order presented by D&AD:

Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, Brazil, Singapore, South Africa, South Africa, South Africa, Brazil, Thailand, Philippines, Singapore, Sweden, South Africa, Chile, Thailand, Israel, South Africa, Netherlands, Singapore, France, Israel, Brazil.

Campaigns:

UK, Brazil, Brazil, South Africa, France, US, Germany, UK, Colombia, South Africa, Argentina, New Zealand, UK, Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Brazil, Egypt, Germany, Singapore, Brazil, Italy, Germany, Brazil.

Yes, one of the UK campaigns got a nomination, and yes, we’re better than America, Australia and Canada combined (and Micronesia, while we’re on the subject). But not a single UK press ad was deemed worthy of inclusion in the individual press section.

Not a single press ad done in this whole fucking country (well, London, to be fair) was good enough to be deemed good enough by this year’s D&AD press jury.

That’s got to be a first.

And you know when I say UK advertising’s got worse in recent years? Well now it’s official, or even more official than it already was.

(Interesting explanation of why this is from the Trottmeister.)

Here’s a film written by David Baddiel and his brother Ivor.

It seems to make a lot of sense, but when you read the YouTube comments it actually raises a lot of other issues beyond that of straightforward racism:

‘Since when was it racist anyway, im not sure if loads of people actualyy know why. I have a teacher at school who calls me his little yid and hes jewish, im just guessing their trying to stop spurs fans saying it or ley everyone else say it aswell but when other fans say it they mean it in offensive ways thats why only tottenham fans should say it. YID ARMY!!’

‘In fact it is not a racist term at all because it dosen’t refer to physical characteristics but instead the ethnicity of a group of people. To most people it means tottenham fans, why try and change the meaning to something insulting. Is this not why tottenham fans adopted it in the first place to stop people using it as an insulting term. I just can’t understand the campaign it makes no sense!’

‘what an absolute crock of shite! im a spurs fan with jewish heritage and i LOVE the fact we use the word! as do the rest of my family! us adopting the word has done more to squash any discrimination than this video will ever do! all this has acheived as can be seen in the neandathol comments below is to stir up a hornets nest of hatred! its absolute bollocks!! YID & PROUD and if anything we will all sing it even more in protest of this utter Bollocks! YIDS, YIDS, YIDS!!’

So there you go. It strikes me that this is akin to gays claiming the word ‘queer’ for themselves, or black people claiming the word ‘nigger/nigga’ (am I allowed to say ‘black’ in this context? Am I supposed to say ‘people of African origin? But then we’re all of African origin. Hmmm…).

The argument for this suggests that certain words only have power because they are taboo and hidden away, used only by those who seek to denigrate the people of the minority in question. Here’s Dustin Hoffman as Lenny Bruce to explain.

But then the situation gets even more complicated that that. Of course, ‘Paki’ is an offensive word, but ‘Indy’ for Indian certainly isn’t. The English call the French ‘frogs’ and the French call the English ‘Rosbif’. Are either side offended by this?

It seems to come down to whether or not a stronger majority uses the term in a derogatory way about a group that is in some way weaker than they are. British people using ‘Paki’, white Americans using ‘Nigger’ and almost anyone using ‘Yid’ causes offence because it seems like the unfair blow of a bully. Whereas someone from Luxembourg calling someone an ‘English Pig’ would probably been seen as laughable, despite being just as questionable as any of the other epithets I’ve mentioned.

I’m also not sure about ‘Asian’. In America they use the word to describe people from China or Japan (or thereabouts), whereas British people use it to describe those from the Indian subcontinent. So what do Brits call people from China and Japan?  I’ve been told ‘Oriental’ is offensive, but I’m not sure why. ‘The Orient’ is just a geographical term that has nothing to do with the people of that place.

Anyway, what this all seems to make clear to me is that human beings are brilliant at making life, and particularly language, really fucking complicated.

Chicks with Steve Buscemi’s eyes (thanks, G).

The Godfather in one minute and one take (thanks, T):

The golden age of broad smacking (thanks, L):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsegTiuEoq8

Illusion of the Year 2009 (thanks, S).

The best of the Great Yarmouth Wax Museum.

An excellent review of an awful restaurant, containing the description, ‘a gray, suppurating renal brick’ (thanks, A).

Polar bears are so fucking cool (2:45 is brilliant, but you have to watch the 2:44 that lead up to it) (thanks, G).

The new Old Spice ad lacks the one-take amazement of the others but makes up for it with a very funny ending. And besides, I think the one-take stuff was heading down a bit of a cul-de-sac (Thanks, G).

And the excellent cartoon on the damage of bottled water (actually, it turns out we’ve been somewhat hoodwinked into buying billions of gallons of the stuff. This was to some degree the fault of the advertising industry. Bottled water advertisers can balance out a Karma deficiency by joining my Water Water Everywhere project to make clean, non-bottled water readily available. And thanks, M):