If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

When it comes to the benefits of inspiration there are two schools of thought:

1. Suck up only the very best so that you are filled with nothing but the highest-grade fuel from which to produce your own work.

2. Fuck that. Great stuff merely serves to remind you of your own failings. Watch another Michael Bay movie to remind yourself how your tastes and abilities far surpass even those of the very successful, inspiring you to get on with your own far more impressive accomplishments.

I think both are valid and can depend on the mood you’re in and the state you have reached in your own work: if you’re happy and feeling that your own book/painting/movie is really very good then you might want to just top up your mad skillz with a quick flick though The Brothers Karamazov. If, on the other hand, you’re nine days into a three-week stretch of writers’ block then you might feel that a reminder of your own relative greatness is just what’s required to kick start another burst of creativity.

Only you can know how good and/or bad work makes you feel, but if you have yet to produce your magnum opus, maybe it’s time to change it up a little.

I propose a couple of hours of Steps Greatest Hits followed by a screening of Ikiru.

For more on the subject, have a read of this.

The other day I went to a birthday party. One of the other guests was a songwriter. I’d love to get specific about who he was, but as I haven’t asked him if I can write this post I’m going to keep him anonymous. However, he has written one of the 20 best-selling songs of all time in the US, and in one of the last ten years he wrote the best-selling single of the year (a different song). So he’s pretty good.

If you’re anything like me you’ll be both impressed and fascinated by that, which is why I asked him a load of questions and will now write down his pearls of wisdom for your interest and education.

Apparently some artists are much better songwriters than others. For example, Taylor Swift is really, really good. She knows exactly what she wants and is very sharp about what works and what doesn’t. She controls every aspect of her career and is so utterly assured that it’s slightly scary. Also scary are about 5-10 of her stalkers – the ones who threaten to lock her up in a dungeon and all that jazz. How does she deal with that? Brilliantly she stalks her stalkers. Her team analyses the stalkers’ credit card purchases, finds out when they buy plane tickets and follow them when they land anywhere near Taylor. Then she gets alerts whenever anyone dangerous is within ten miles of her.

Anyway, back to the songwriting: Beyonce, on the other hand, is not a good songwriter. Then again, she’s amazing at everything else, AND she does occasionally come up with great stuff, like when she brought the ‘To the left…’ phrase out of a verse of Irreplaceable and made it a cornerstone of the song.

We then discussed hit-for-shit ratios. Despite being enormously successful, he estimated his hit rate at something like 20 out of 1000 and said that the same probably applies to all the super pop writers out there (who all seem to be Scandinavian, oddly enough. I think it’s all down to the legacy of ABBA). You can write a song in a day. but you only need a couple each year to really work in order to make a career out of it.

I then asked him if he knew when he was writing a big hit. He said he had no idea. Partly that’s down to other factors, such as the artist who does or doesn’t take it on. It told him my ‘Yesterday’ theory (that if Paul McCartney wrote ‘Yesterday’ last week and put it on his next album no one would give a toss, or certainly not the toss they currently give about that song) and he entirely agreed: it’s not the fundamental song that is the driver of the success, but the combination of song, performer, timing etc. that needs to be just right for a huge hit to happen.

He loves the way that you can really see the effect one of your songs is having out there in the real world by watching YouTube. I thought he meant the number of views each song might have but he meant the way in which people take a song on and make their own versions of it. That gives him enormous satisfaction.

We then started discussing novel writing, which he found as difficult, fascinating and mysterious as I find songwriting. So there you go: everything’s bloody hard unless you’re really good at it, and even then, it’s still probably bloody hard.

Bagley’s greatest ever RAVE (thanks, T):

The Thick Of It nicknames (thanks, T):

Amazing dioramas of classic photos (thanks, J).

An embroidery of voids (thanks, J):

https://vimeo.com/122428734

That looks like a dick.

I found this interesting video of a guy drawing with his eyes then realised the guy was Graham Fink:

Turn your enemy’s logo into a penis (thanks, J).

Last year my friends Brydon and Dan set up the excellent promoter of good causes/award scheme/creative showcase ADCAN.

It was a splendid success and now enters its second year.

To change your life (and the lives of others) for the better, visit the site and sign up.

Here’s our current OOH (or ‘poster’ if you’re older than 35) and print campaign. It’s running all over the world and I think it’s not only a really excellent series of ads, but also a lovely contribution to beautifying some otherwise prosaic urban environments.

We don’t have that many in-situ shots yet, but here are some of the other images, all shot on an iPhone 6 (see the rest here):

Thanks and congrats to all involved.

The best agency in the UK currently goes by the alternative moniker, ‘The Palace of Joyless Excellence’.

Great nickname.

It made me think of other agency nicknames and I’m now unable to escape the truth that:

a) Agencies only get nicknames if they’re good.

b) All the agency nicknames denote a tendency to work hard.

Admittedly my sample size is small, but the only ones I’ve ever been aware of are GBH (BBH) and Weekend and Kennedy (Saatchi and Saatchi. Only kidding – W&K).

So… A kind of rueful recognition of the necessary work that goes into making an agency great.

Is that it? Have I missed others, or is the above list really the sum total of agency nicknames in recent years?

Nice little doc on George Lois.

Excellent TED talk about the New Yorker cartoons (thanks, J1).

Amazing shots of cruise ships from above.

Guitars replaced with giant slugs (thanks, P).

Matrix tap decal (thanks, J2).

Newscaster mugged on camera:

Yummy spiders:

GoPro cigar rolling (thanks, R):

What died at Altamont.

The tweaks that made us human (thanks, B).

Celeb name puns (thanks, A).

Dinosaurs x Notorious BIG (thanks, J2):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v2mvO7Yq48&t=21

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NKvN7U5RXQ

(Interest declared: they’re by my mates Prabs and Jez @ AMV. Nice one, guys.)

This is hard to get right: a kind of hybrid of The Man Your Man Could Smell like and the Dos Equis guy but somehow cooler than both.

Hats off.

More here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKB3anTTioU