Call me a comma, but...

I awake without the alarm nipping at my ear.
It feels like the day has begun in a natural way.
I meander my way to the bathroom without balance.
I feel the most basic of all animals at this time of the day, 
as if we evolve each day in minutes rather than millennia.

My brain still seems to be trying to bury the residue
of my dreams in some unknown grey filing cabinet
at the back of my subconscious, without realising that
there are more pressing matters.

The shower cascades its refreshing payload trickling from head to toe,
awaking the senses. I remember fragments of my night time
imaginary travels but they flit in and out of the mind’s eye and
are gone as soon as they arrive.

My towel, rough, due to its trade, scratches me dry turning my
skin to a pale pink. I suppose it’s a cheap way to exfoliate…
I wrap it around myself and feel as if I am part of an ancient people
who still exist within us but only in the very depths of our ingredients.

I am ready to face the day. 

I came across this when I was learning to juggle. It didn’t put me off – it just inspired me to have a go. Well worth the six minutes.

A friend of mine gave me a link to a site called Isitold.com, so that I could put in websites and see whether they were worth sending to any of my mates. It tells you how many times the site has been tweeted and liked. Ok people could have shared it by email but it’s a nice way looking at it.

Try putting it’s own web address into it and see what happens (cheeky buggers) and then you can put your own blog into it too see how popular it is. Enjoy.

http://www.isitold.com/ 

Is there life out there in the ever-expanding darkness that is the universe? And if there is, what are they doing? Are they operating a in sulphur-based parallel world? Could they be doing the exact same thing we are. It’s called the circle of life, because things are cyclical. People come up with the same thoughts over and over again, until someone puts two and 11 together to make 49. It’s the same in the creative industry: we slave away murdering trees in a vain attempt to come up with something original. The problem is that our brains are lazy and don’t want to make new connections on demand, so people come up with the same ideas over and over again.
But they come up with these ideas in isolation with each other. 

When I came to the School of Communication Arts, it was in its fledgeling state: there was a lot to be done. I met Marc Lewis there. Most of you who read this will know who Marc is, but for those who don’t he’s a Segway riding, patterned trouser wearing, creative genius with a penchant for Bros. He made his millions during the dot-com boom and with a series of comedy clubs in South Africa. All in all he’s a very successful and interesting person. The reason I am talking about him is because of his story and the schools’ being very closely mirrored by another story. The story is Totto-Chan: The little girl at the window.  

Totto-Chan is a very successful book in Japan but also a byword for failure. The story goes that Totto-Chan, a little girl gets expelled from public school. Marc was also expelled from a well known public school in South London called Dulwich College.

When her mother finds out about her expulsion she realises that Totto-Chan needs to go to a school where she has the chance to express herself and be creative. She takes Totto-Chan to see Mr Kobayashi and a great understanding develops between them. Marc’s mother or grandmother (I forget which), saw that he had filled in the Guardian scholarship competition to go to the School of Communication Arts but hadn’t sent it. She waded through all the porn and Bros albums and sent his entry in. He won a Scholarship to the school, where he met his Kobayashi AKA John Gillard. Totto-Chan’s teacher Mr Kobayashi believed that understanding children and striving to develop their qualities of mind, body and heart were essential to them developing as creative people. John Gillard’s saying was that ideas come from your head and travel to your heart and then down your arm on to the paper. 

During World War 2 the Totto-Chan’s school is bombed and it has to close thus ending her time there. Tragically John Gillard lost his long-fought battle with Parkinson’s Disease and the School had to close. 

It’s uncanny, that two stories could be so interwoven from opposite sides of the earth. Perhaps someone is writing this same blog that I am on a Pear laptop in another galaxy.

So after a history of wonderful advertising, including the ‘What a difference a Carling makes’ series, they produce this, what relevance does ‘brilliantly refreshing’ have to anyone?

The only real enjoyment I get out of this ad is by pausing the video at 0:05, this shows the man on the train unmistakably having some sort of stroke, which is what I would have had if I had made this.

The painful way that they try and connect with the everyday man, showing some toss-pots on Hackney Marshes kicking a ball around, makes me question whether they know who their audience are anymore.  

The creatives seem to have put a few of their own hobbies in, like rowing and festival going, to make it extra relevant to the common man who has had his sense of taste so obliterated by alcohol abuse and fags that he thinks Carling isn’t a bad drop.

Why is the guy on his own in the pub? Has he no friends? Isn’t drinking about being social?
I think this is an ad written by someone so far up their own arse that they’re blinded by last night’s coq au vin.

Comments please.

I leave you with this.

Brutal simplicity of thought.
Where have I heard that before? Ah yes, Graham Fink at M&C Saatchi about a year ago.

As a student I went to M&C Saatchi (an advertising agency for those don’t need to ever give a shit again), for a talk from the eminent Fink. He floated in on some ethereal creative draft (presumably created internally), holding a bowl of porridge. I can’t say I was gripped by a sudden urge to cast my self down upon his slippers, as he started to explain how simplicity is the key to everything (apart from social acceptance), while munching his way through his gruel. He just seemed like quite an odd man who was talking from behind his head. What he did say was that you had to say one thing, and one thing only, to give your message any chance of slicing it’s way through the collage of impotent mediocrity that intrudes upon our everyday existence.

I agree. Although his ‘ELEPHant’ magazine campaign, where he literally had an elephant and then an ant next to the words, has almost certainly taken this too literally. In fact it feels like something a child, who has been repeatedly dropped on their head, would do.

You’re wondering, what does the Fink have to do with X Factor? It’s more about what Fink has to do with Simon Cowell. They both like to achieve cut-through and success using simplicity. The X Factor is the modern day bedlam or perhaps the Roman games, where Joe public give their thumbs up or down the only way they know how, through clapping or booing. We must all be eternally grateful that the producers have had the sense not to interview any of the audience.
The reason all these anti-evolutionary knuckle-draggers can join in, is because even they can understand how the game is supposed to play out and what their role is in it. Advertising should find a way to connect with people on a simple emotional level. But most of the time, a total lack of empathy or understanding of their audience, means they produce simplistic rubbish that connects with no one and fades into insignificance. We all want to be able to say something wonderful and insightful in a way that makes you ‘face-palm’ and say ‘oh yeah’.   

What is the best thing about the X Factor? It’s simplicity. People can either sing or they can’t. End of. It coerces me in to feeling sorry for the people who don’t make it and elated for those who do. They say that you mimic what people are doing around you, and you can’t help feeling happy when some squirt manages to change their shit-filled pants and pull it off. X Factor is essentially a simple theatrical structure that allows the producers to employ every emotional trigger they can lay their grubby little clipboard-holding hands on, to make you weep or whoop.

I love, hate and love to hate the X Factor. Whether you do or don’t, you have to admire its infectious simplicity. Hey that’s not bad. ‘Infectious simplicity’ it is.

When I left art college I worked as a portrait artist for a year. I thought today that there are copious parallels between that and what I do now. 

When someone comes to you to have a portrait done there is a certain amount of baggage attached to their request. If they are having a portrait done of their kids you think that he or she has far too much money, and alleviating them of some will do them the world of good, but it’s also quite touching. If they have come to have a portrait done of themselves it is different. You immediately write them off as a self obsessed, narcissistic, self indulgent cuss, who really does have money to burn. I’m sure that you’re drawing all the parallels between this and client meetings yourself without me listing them.

I would start by talking to them about what they wanted out of the painting – was there a way that they wanted to be painted? Perhaps a special object (skulls etc) that they wanted immortalised with them (until they die, at which point their children will bin it). Considering they were spending a good deal of their hard, or not hard, earned wonga they were surprisingly coy – “whatever you think”, “I think my right side is the best” and so on. This may be delivering you back into that nightmare client meeting where you ask what they want and they say “I want to be cool”, or “I want a Meerkat”. 
    Frankly I used to ignore what they said and conduct my own investigation into who they were, in a very similar way to how a creative interrogates a product to reveal it’s true value or qualities. No one seems to know which their best side is as they have always been looking in a mirror – they don’t know what it is like to see them as others do. 
    I would ask my own questions as I was painting. When someone is trying to hold still and focus on doing one thing they are unaware of what personal information, in the form of gestures, sighs, smiles and shrugs they are giving you. It would I assume be like watching a consumer use the product while you were there invisible next to them.
    Tissue meetings and presentations to clients are the same as the subject asking to have a look, after you have merely suggested the route to which you might proceed on the canvas. When a subject asked Picasso if they could have a sneaky peak, he simply said “don’t talk to the driver, when he is driving” – fair enough. This is the problem with the creative process, you plan, research, start to scribble or sketch things out and then you wait for the magic to happen. That ‘epiphany’ or eureka moment is something that can be the result of a new connection in the brain or an interesting brush stroke, which then illuminates the path for a while before the brain’s analytical process kicks in and shrouds it again in darkness. 
    A great idea to me is an illusive and evasive entity, that you only ever really see out of the corner of your eye. It is the same as producing a wonderful painting of someone. You toil away mixing the right colours and going through the habits and methods that provide the real glue that allows creativity to happen – you weave a net so when an idea comes falling, like a gift from the gods, you have something to catch it in. It can be a moment when the sitter/client reveals something about themselves that makes you react emotionally and you subconsciously paint it in. Thus you create a picture made up not of just things that look like them but things that are them. 
    The brands who come to creative shops and ask for a picture of themselves as a warrior, friend, saviour, cheapskate or whatever, can’t hide what they really are, so it’s always best to be honest about who they are otherwise their message won’t ring true with the public.

My best moment as a painter was when I painted two young boys for their father – after the two weeks of sitting, he came in and said nothing to me for a whole four minutes before saying “how do you know my boys so well?”. Best compliment ever.

Here they are.

I had some time ago agreed to go and see my girlfriend’s brother and his wife, as they had a new arrival. In general I like kids, I find them pretty easy to handle (knowing full-well I can give them back), you just make stupid faces at them and they smile. I am graced with quite a stupid face that kids seem to find as equally amusing as eating worms or drawing on the wall in permanent marker. Her parents had named her Esme Florence – a lovely name. I don’t think I had even heard of the name Esme before.

There is enormous power in the name you’re given and your parents get to choose it? What if your parents are idiots? And they name you something like Peaches?… You can’t change your name when you’re a baby – you’re more concerned with why you’ve shat yourself for the fifth time that day (how life begins and so ends). Parents of children named Margaret, Bernard and other such names, may never figure out that the reason they are crying is because they have a name that was never fashionable and never will be. 

I didn’t get a bad one - Alex. No mass murderers spring to mind, no famous fuck-ups, no child abusers etc. Not a bad start. Middle name: Montagu. Oh dear, we might have a problem here. This is a name that has been in my family for hundreds of years – that doesn’t however make it good. Not disclosing this information when I was at school was pretty paramount as the most effective children’s insults are based on your name – something you can’t change. When I left school it became a different matter; I was greeted with, ‘Oh, what an interesting name’ and ‘can I call you Monty’. My parents had clearly played an entirely unintentional blinder. I seemed to have escaped the trap.

I wish I had had Dickens or Trollope choosing my name. They both managed to create names for characters that fitted them like literary gloves. Thomas Gradgrind – never a better name for a school master in Hard Times. Silas Wegg from Our mutual friend a sneaky, lame cripple. I wonder if there is a gap in the market for a naming service. Perhaps there is already an app for that? 

Names are hard to remember when you meet a room full of people, but no one forgets the guy name Archimedes Christal. In Al Reis’ Positioning he says naming is one of the most important things for a product or service; poor old Dr. Oetker, he never really had a shot at the big-time. You want a name to become a replacement for the original name: like Dettol, rather than Anti-bacterial surface spray. If you as a person become synonymous with something, Steve Jobs – Apple, then you are less forgettable. It probably should be a positive thing though as no one wants to be remembered as the guy that shat his pants when he was five, and had to change for P.E behind a tea towel the teacher was holding. 

In a world where it is getting harder and harder to stand out, think long and hard about what to name your kids or your agency, as it could effect them until their dying day.

Yours sincerely, Monty

What a great flow of work and interesting stuff from Helloyoucreatives

Well here we are, at the pinnacle of what we have made our society. The photo is of Wimbledon Village, not a bad area…

No doubt you have all been watching the news, if you haven’t then you clearly don’t care about your city or country. I want to talk about the rioters and what Ken Livingston said about them, “these people have no stake in society”. If you look at all the rioters in the rest of the Western world, they’re rioting for something or against something. In Egypt they have had decades of oppression and violence – a pretty good reason. These people are rioting for no reason apart from to service their material or egotistical impulses. They don’t deserve a stake in society. They invest nothing. They either live off benefits or the proceeds of crime. 

One girl was said to be bragging about taking money back from the rich people. I don’t think that there are many rich people in Rye Lane, Lewisham or any of the other places where there has been rioting, not even the business owners. Another girl said that she was ‘gettin her taxes back’. I doubt very much whether she is, or will ever be entitled to a rebate… It makes me so angry to think that we are paying for these feral little piss-weasels to run amok stealing and committing crimes that will cost us more money, at a time when we can ill afford it. Isn’t it funny how all these people are around in the day to riot? I don’t think they asked for leave from work. 

A huge proportion of the people rioting are children. How have we arrived at the stage where adults are afraid of 13-18 year old children wearing hoods? Yes the Police have been exposed as corrupt, but we need them now and the red tape is hindering them from driving their vans through the faces of these scumbags. The BBC were desperately trying not to say that the overwhelming majority of the rioters were young black boys and girls, (I won’t call them men and women as they don’t deserve it and probably never will).

People have been afraid of getting on busses for years now as gang violence has got worse and worse. I remember getting on a bus when I was about 18 with four of my friends when two large black boys, of around the same age, got on with a girl. They immediately went to the back of the bus where we were and started asking us for our money. This was a bloody stupid, but ballsy idea, as there were five of us and two of them. I remember we all got up at the same time and closed in on them, as the girl started shouting at them that there were too many of us, but they decided to fight. I can safely say that we acquitted ourselves well and threw them unceremoniously down he stairs and off the bus. I heard a better story from a friend about how some hoodies had been terrorising the top deck of a bus, mugging and assaulting people, when two Polish men got on. After a stop or two they stood up turned round and knocked the three degenerates out, then dragged them off the bus. The bus driver waited for them and they got back on to rapturous applause. Where is this spirit? Where are our communities? Where is this ‘Big Society’ that we used to have? It’s not a new idea, it’s just how things used to be.

My father said to me yesterday, “the Krays were bad, but at least they would have dealt with this in a way only they could”. I think it is fantastic that there are hoards of Turkish standing outside their shops on Kingsland road with bats, ready to protect their livelihoods and stand together – that is true community spirit. We have become the majority minority.

Where are all the heroes in our communities that are ready to unite and lead people against this kind of cruel idiocy that’s gripping our wonderful nation?