esday, February 22, 2011
The Library of Babel
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| Coffee, sharp pencil, Rhodia pad - that's how I roll |
Here's how some of his stories work:
- A man who remembers absolutely everything as though it were both current and real. Therefore is trapped in his own past as though it were the present.
- A country where cartography is the most prized of all the arts. A king plans to make the most wonderfully detailed map in the world, its scale is 1:1
- A country in which absolutely everything, including social status, is decided by lottery.
- A library, which is also the universe.
"The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase. "
The shelves are full of books which contain a random selection of the 26 letters in the roman alphabet, punctuation and spaces. Most of the books are gibberish. Only, since the library is infinite a great many of the books aren't - in fact they contain not just all the works of literature ever written, but the life stories of everyone who lives in the library.
The library of Babel is a metaphor for language then - and what it shows is that all ideas are nascent in language already. It's just a question of digging them out.
In the Naked Lunch William Burroughs, writing about getting ideas, says that 'Americans want to jump into their stomachs and digest the food and shovel it out again'. The implication is that the brain is an organ, like the stomach, and stuff goes in, stuff comes out. Just like you can't force food through your stomach, you can't force ideas from your brain. I used to try to write adverts by sitting around talking to the art director for days and days, on the principle that most of the creative process was done in the backrooms of the brain, so really it was just a question of entertaining one another, until the machine belched out the answer.
And maybe, some kinds of ideas do come about like this.
But these days, I don't really have a partner. And when I want to come up with ideas, I just write a column of numbers in the left hand margin and then start writing lines, one after another. I used to only use this technique for tricksy headlines, and found that I'd start getting good ones, usually after about 40th or so.
But I've started to think it's just as good for getting conceptual stuff going. Just like rooting around in the library.
When you think about really great advertising ideas - for instance, 'Just Do It', aren't actually separable from the words which they're expressed in.
So yeah, all a bit serious.
In other news, I've got a new tattoo, bright young designer Michael Bow did my new banner (nice huh?) and I'm fighting in a second boxing match in March.
Good times. Wooh.
Thursday, February 03, 2011
Murdoch's continence pad
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| Doesn't apply to me: I've spent the day masturbating over news footage of refugee orphans |
Everyone wants an iPad - you can even sell them by writing stupid headlines like this.
I don't know if you've noticed, but when you open any newspaper at the moment 99% of the advertising looks like the above. Picture of gizmo, headline, price.
I'd say this was a symptom of the panic that's gripping advertising now that more and more of the things we sell don't really exist. The iPad has a special place as a fetish object that mediates between the consumer and the spirit world of the internet. Consumers like them because it's a hard object that they that can cling on to as their personality and wordly possessions evaporate into cyberspace.
Rupert Murdoch wants you to buy an iPad, so you can download his newspaper The Daily. The Guardian ran the launch story with the headline 'The future of news or dead on arrival?' which I think may be rather wishful thinking on their part.
Murdoch gives the killer angle on The Daily, the one you'd probably only get from a newspaper owner: 'No paper, no mutil-million dollar presses, no trucks.' As John Lanchester pointed out in this very interesting article in the LRB, the things that costs loads of money are the physical logistics of printing a newspaper. In fact, according to Lanchester, if the New York Times were to abandon its presses it would have enough spare cash to give all of its readers a Kindle, twice.
What Murdoch has always been good at doing is selling the same stuff for more money. His media empire is based on a subscription model - Sky sells you the same kind of stuff that you can get for free, with ads, and for money.
He does this, in the case of Sky, using a combination of exclusive content and advertising. That's really the winning combo.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Lunch, Leon, lions, lezzers
I've always found lunch to be a rather depressing meal.
Just the relentless tedium of deciding what I'm going to post into my horrible mouth, chew up and swallow at the same time every single fucking day makes me want to cut myself. Recently I've take to going to Leon, because it was founded by and is often staffed by lesbians (and like Larry David I'm a friend o' the lesbians) and because it serves exactly the kind of low calorie balsa wood pabulum that hot, semi-anorexic girls eat for lunch. Just going in there makes me feel like a hungry African lion stalking bow-legged gazelles at a dusty savanna watering hole.
Raarrrrr.
Erm.
Oh yeah, and the branding is great. Take note, brand managers everywhere.
So standard Leon type is this very tasteful Sans Serif:
But then look, here's a cup. And the type, right, is totally different, and what the fuck is that, if not a full point on the end of the logo?
And then when you look around the place you notice that they've done things like sew the name into quilts. Look, they haven't even tried to copy the type they use in the regular logo - they've just done their own thing.
So, being relaxed about the branding like this has at least two excellent effects, one direct, one inadvertent:
1) it makes you look relaxed about the branding. Like you've got better things to do, like cooking sweet potato fritatas and keeping hot semi-anorexic girls from growing white fur all over their bodies.
2) it makes it look like the brand has heritage. People are really good at reading this stuff, and they do it totally intuitively - seeing more than one extant version of the logo makes you believe that it's gone through many iterations, it's a bit like the way they put pictures of kids from the 70s on the walls - it provides an artificial aura of nostalgia, and creates a sense of trustworthiness.
Consumers have been around branding for nearly a hundred years now - or longer if you count things like flags and crucifixes - I think they can handle this kind of thing. Marketing managers like brand guidelines, but it's quite possible that customers don't give that much of a shit.
Just the relentless tedium of deciding what I'm going to post into my horrible mouth, chew up and swallow at the same time every single fucking day makes me want to cut myself. Recently I've take to going to Leon, because it was founded by and is often staffed by lesbians (and like Larry David I'm a friend o' the lesbians) and because it serves exactly the kind of low calorie balsa wood pabulum that hot, semi-anorexic girls eat for lunch. Just going in there makes me feel like a hungry African lion stalking bow-legged gazelles at a dusty savanna watering hole.
Raarrrrr.
Erm.
Oh yeah, and the branding is great. Take note, brand managers everywhere.
So standard Leon type is this very tasteful Sans Serif:
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| I think typographers like to call this a 'grotesque', but they only do that to trick you into saying 'but I thought it was quite nice actually' |
But then look, here's a cup. And the type, right, is totally different, and what the fuck is that, if not a full point on the end of the logo?
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| Bagaguagio indeed |
And then when you look around the place you notice that they've done things like sew the name into quilts. Look, they haven't even tried to copy the type they use in the regular logo - they've just done their own thing.
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| Digging the revival of quiltwork amongst new wave feminists. The bald man is also a nice touch. |
1) it makes you look relaxed about the branding. Like you've got better things to do, like cooking sweet potato fritatas and keeping hot semi-anorexic girls from growing white fur all over their bodies.
2) it makes it look like the brand has heritage. People are really good at reading this stuff, and they do it totally intuitively - seeing more than one extant version of the logo makes you believe that it's gone through many iterations, it's a bit like the way they put pictures of kids from the 70s on the walls - it provides an artificial aura of nostalgia, and creates a sense of trustworthiness.
Consumers have been around branding for nearly a hundred years now - or longer if you count things like flags and crucifixes - I think they can handle this kind of thing. Marketing managers like brand guidelines, but it's quite possible that customers don't give that much of a shit.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Friday, January 21, 2011
Tajazzle your vajazzle
I had lunch with this dude I know yesterday, he's running a company that helps chronic insomniacs get back to sleep - but without using drugs. They've packaged a load of proper CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, not Cock and Ball Torture, Gaydar fans) with a load of modern jiggery-pokery like iPhone apps and online sleep diaries. The clinical trials show what he's doing to be extremely effective, which is not surprising given that it's the NHS prescribed therapy for insomnia, but getting people to pay for it takes a bit of doing. The problem is that he's not selling a tangible thing.
This is a really modern problem.
Over the last hundred years you and I have spent our working lives trying to convince people that objects will make them happy. Physical things that they can run their hands over, line up in rows, fill shelves or rails with, polish and clean and otherwise interact with on thoroughly tangible level.
You might remember this exchange from Jurassic Park, which, sadly I can't find on the interwebs as a video. Geoff Goldblum's character warning the kid off his Buffallo Bill nightvision goggles:
Donald Gennaro: Hey, where'd you find that?
Tim: In a box under my seat.
Donald Gennaro: Are they heavy?
Tim: Yeah.
Donald Gennaro: Then they're expensive, put 'em back.
Increasingly though things that aren't heavy, are, or should be, expensive. Things like information, music, books lose value as soon as they become digital, because they've lost their object.
There are lots of good arguments for why these things should cost money - but, importantly, they are arguments. Ironically argument the one thing that modern good advertising does not deign to engage in.
So basically, we all better get good at making Tajazzle infomercials.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
This is a truly wonderful video
EL GUINCHO | Bombay from MGdM | Marc Gómez del Moral on Vimeo.
I really need to spend more time in Spain.
Stolen from Brother Stevie's new improved blog.
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