Thursday 31 December 2009

penguin is...

... as penguin does.

Happy 2010 everyone!

An Annotated Manifesto for Growth (sic)

1 Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.   Dude, could swear this was a Rod McKuen poem.

Setting the tone of comfort and assurance, welcoming the potential client in on a world that until now has seemed mysterious and beguiling: the mind of the Artist.
2 Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you’ll never have real growth.   And after the opening group hug, a little roughness for cred, to set the mood, to establish the strength of the points herein.

Fear not, gentle executive, gentle media buyer. We are creative, we brave conflict to make beauty.
3 Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.   Unfiltered bullshit. This is the cult of the designer’s ego writ large. Can’t charge a fortune for mere craftsmanship; chequebooks only come out for Art.
4 Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.
 
  As Tom Peters would shriek, “Fail spectacularly!!”

Straight out of the Wall Street Journal bestseller list: “See, we’re just like you, we grind profit from what the sluggish consider loss. Radical, eh?”
5 Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.   I.e., the identity for Roots.
6 Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.   Reworded think-outside-the-box bromide #1.
7 Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.   Do research? Gosh.
8 Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.   Reworded think-outside-the-box bromide #2.
9 Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.
 
  The inevitable tenuous reference to the avant garde. Cage is dead and gone, unable to complain about being hauled out as a brand. You need not understand, just let it augment your lifestyle.
10 Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.   Boilerplate boosterism, present in every office everywhere. No bad ideas. My door is always open. There is no I in team.
11 Harvest ideas. Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.   Never, ever let the work speak for itself. Dance, jump, perform, reference, apply yourself, your enthusiasms: stay on the other side of the looking glass. They might ask why the type is so hard to read.
12 Keep moving. The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.   Cher robber baron, you see, we understand that business is about living 18 months in the future, of drawing maps for lands that don’t exist.
13 Slow down. Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.   And this is why the sketches were late.
14 Don’t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.   We don’t acknowledge cool. Isn’t that cool?
15 Ask stupid questions. Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.   Reworded think-outside-the-box bromide #3.
16 Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.   Pure pandering to the One Minute Manager. “Your annual report came to look like this, and cost this much, because of some performance art I did in Gstaad with Znaimer.”
17 ————————. Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.   Egad.
18 Stay up late. Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you’re separated from the rest of the world.   Translation: the best work is done, the most inspiration comes, from the only real muse: Fear. Especially the fear of what’s due in the morning.
19 Work the metaphor. Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.   Except the one about design being frosting to tart up crap to make it saleable. Don’t work that one.
20 Be careful to take risks. Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.   Reworded think-outside-the-box bromide #4.
21 Repeat yourself. If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.   After all, it’s what YOU like that matters. Relax: you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time! Templates equal profit.
22 Make your own tools. Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.   You are an artist. Your accounts receivable department is your tool. Your account planners are tools. You, Mr Vice President of Branding and Identity, are a tool.
23 Stand on someone’s shoulders. You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.   Amateurs imitate, professionals steal.
24 Avoid software. The problem with software is that everyone has it.   What does this mean? The problem with air is that everyone breathes?
25 Don’t clean your desk. You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.   The box now fully broken, you cannot help but think outside it.
26 Don’t enter awards competitions. Just don’t. It’s not good for you.   See point 14.
27 Read only left-hand pages. Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our “noodle.”   Fear of content, summarized.

This from a designer who imagines that heaven might be “a place without text.”
28 Make new words. Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.   Take a look, oh beloved plutocrat, at your bookcase! Brandwidth! Envisioneering! Synergize! Aren’t these words dazzling?
29 Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.   Reworded think-outside-the-box bromide #5
30 Organization = Liberty. Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between “creatives” and “suits” is what Leonard Cohen calls a ‘charming artifact of the past.’   The pièce de résistance. A veritable tongue bath to those who sign the cheques.

In one short paragraph: first principles of MBA strategy, reassurance (again) that design IS business, something about that museum the Mrs wants to go to next holiday, Frank Gehry, Leonard Cohen, and aren’t we all real creative.
31 Don’t borrow money. Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.
 
  Point 30 reworded.
32 Listen carefully. Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.   Points 16 and 10 reworded.
33 Take field trips. The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.   How else could you possibly justify charging so much for a logotype flung together out of Franklin Gothic?
34 Make mistakes faster. This isn’t my idea — I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.   You know, from Intel.
(Ignore point 13 here)
35 Imitate. Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You’ll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.   Points 21 and 23 reworded, with another layer of scammed avant garde, though the example is just so completely wrongheaded: like citing Oasis repurposing the Beatles.

Underused? Under fucking used?
36 Scat. When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else … but not words.   Interpretive dance in the studio. Think about it.
37 Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.   Do it on time, do it on budget, or get the hell out of Dodge.
38 Explore the other edge. Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.   Techniques put to use by every single creative person ever to walk the planet.
39 Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces — what Dr. Seuss calls “the waiting place.” Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference — the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals — but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.   The smug implication of elite discourse away from the plebes, of forming strategic alliances while the sheep toil back at the office, of winking and beckoning to the very heart of greed power, that come off this paragraph are truly astonishing.
40 Avoid fields. Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.   Reworded think-outside-the-box bromide #6
41 Laugh. People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I’ve become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.   I said LAUGH.
42 Remember. Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.   Points 21, 23 and 35 reworded.
43 Power to the people. Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can’t be free agents if we’re not free.   I knew Tibor Kalman. Tibor Kalman was a friend of mine. You, sir, are no Tibor Kalman.
(Click on the title of this post, for the real authors of these two passages. If you've made it this far that is...)

Bella?

hahahahahahahahahaha

Let's drink to that!

:-)

Waddle

wad⋅dle [wod-l]  verb, -dled, -dling, noun

–verb (used without object)
1. to walk with short steps, swaying or rocking from side to side, as a penguin.
2. to move in any similar, slow, rocking manner; wobble: The ship waddled into port.

–noun
3. an act or instance of waddling, esp. a waddling gait.


Wednesday 30 December 2009

Take It All - Marion Cotillard (OST Nine)



YOU WANT MY LOVE
TAKE IT ALL
YOU WANT TO WATCH IT ALL COME OFF
TAKE IT ALL
COME ON NOW
SHOW ME HOW
YOU TAKE IT ALL

YOU WANT MY GLOVE
ARE YOU ENTHRALLED?
YOU WANT TO SEE IT SLIP AWAY AND WATCH IT FALL
OH WE KNOW
IT'S YOUR SHOW
SO TAKE IT ALL

YOU WANT THE MOVEMENT TO
SEE WHAT THE HIPS CAN DO
COME WATCH THE SLINKY GIRL
SEE HOW THE PASTIES TWIRL
TO MAKE YOUR BELLS ALL RING
FULFILLING EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED

SO GO AHEAD
TAKE IT ALL
YOU WANT MY SOUL
TAKE IT ALL
IT'S TIME TO LEAVE
IF I'M TO LIVE
BECAUSE I HAVE NO MORE
THERE'S NOTHING LEFT TO GIVE

I WATCH YOU RISE
I WATCH YOU FALL
WHILE I AM STANDING WITH MY BACK AGAINST THE WALL
NOW IT'S YOUR TURN TO FINALLY LEARN
YOU HAD THE WORLD
YOU HAD YOUR FLING
YOU WANTED MORE THAN EVERYTHING
YOU GOT YOUR WISH
YOU GOT YOUR PRIZE
NOW TAKE IT RIGHT BETWEEN YOUR THIGHS
YOU GRABBED FOR EVERYTHING MY FRIEND
BUT DON'T YOU SEE THAT IN THE END
THERE WILL BE NOTHING LEFT OF ME

Tell Her Today - Tom Baxter

For my sweet Grandma on her 89th birthday today :-)



It's hard to say
You love someone
It's hard to say you don't
It's hard to learn
To trust someone,
Tt's hard to be without.

So if you think you love someone
Try, try, try
Because
That one may be your only one

So if you love her
Think only of her
Take the time tell her today

And when without her
Everything's harder
Take the time
Drop everything
Go tell her today

Oh
For every King
You'll find a queen
That keeps his kingdom strong

Oh
If love's the food that feeds my heart
Then baby
Sweet baby
I'm hungry now

Oh
So if you think you love someone
Try, try, try
Because
That one may be your only one.
So if you love her,
Think only of her,
Take the time tell her today.

And when without her,
Everything's harder
Take the time
Drop everything
Tell her today...

What's In A Name?

Vlad
(the impala)

Sunday 27 December 2009

Peter O'Toole Delivers Lines That Are Plainly Beneath Him

This is a segment from Chris Evans' T.F.I. Friday Show of 11th of October 1996 (UK Channel Four)

One of the funniest moments of English Television as far back as I can remember :-)

Enjoy!

Wednesday 16 December 2009

Project White Room

Today is the beginning of something wonderful.













Give me something from your heart...

Monday 14 December 2009

Eleanor Rigby - The Beatles



Ah, look at all the lonely people
Ah, look at all the lonely people

Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for?

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?

Father McKenzie writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear
No one comes near
Look at him working. Darning his socks in the night when there's nobody there
What does he care?

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?

Ah, look at all the lonely people
Ah, look at all the lonely people

Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name
Nobody came
Father McKenzie wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave
No one was saved

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?

Saturday 12 December 2009

The Quest - Bryn Christopher



I’m leaving tonight
Going somewhere deep inside my mind
I close my eyes slowly
Flowin’ away slowly
But I know I’ll be alright
It’s coming stronger to me
And I know someone is out there
Lead the way
Lead the way
Show me the answers I need to know

What I’m gonna live for
What I’m gonna die for
Who you gonna fight for
I can’t answer that

All my life/love it is
It is all my love
All my life/love it is
I know it is a life to live lately
From above I hear
I hear the sound of them sinkin’
I feel numb, I’m alive
I know I’m getting closer

What I’m gonna live for
What I’m gonna die for
Who you gonna fight for
I can’t answer that

My life has had it’s share of troubles
And now I found a place to go
I’ve said goodbye to all my troubles
’cause now I’ve find my place to go

What I’m gonna live for
What I’m gonna die for
Who you gonna fight for
I can’t answer that

What I’m gonna live for
What I’m gonna die for
Who you gonna fight for
I can’t answer that

What I’m gonna live for
What I’m gonna die for
Who you gonna fight for
I can’t answer that

Live for
Die for
Fight for

Friday 11 December 2009

Karma Is A Bitch

"Dear" shitty-faced, talentless, know-it-alls who deviously manufactured my current predicament & demise.

Yes.

I AM talking about you, the 3 shameless blonderos (the 2 that fuck each-other at every opportunity they get, even inside editing suites, during times important meetings are supposed to be taking place & despite 1 of you already being married to someone else, & of course the 3rd one who hasn't actually been fucked in a very long time and we all hope that a masochistic charitable soul finally does).

You know who you are.

You may have mastered the art of obscure, under-the-table handling that affects the reputation and status of people whose shit you couldn't even imitate at your best efforts, and you may have managed to dodge a bullet aimed at your own careers (for now) as you so conveniently placed all responsibility and blame for your incompetence and lack of skill onto someone who simply did YOUR bidding, but in doing so, you have lost the only ally you ever had in this whole mess, and managed to drench your future with a crappy scent of doom and approaching failure.

This will become apparent soon. Sooner than you think, as one by one, all your plans will start hitting dead ends and your true faces will be exposed out in the light for everyone to see what sad bastards you truly are.

I expected great things of you; alas I was mistaken and am now deeply disappointed, mostly at my own inability to understand the level of your corrupted souls in time.

You WILL get your comeuppance, that's for sure.

Because I believe in the power of Karma.

And YOUR Karma is currently drenched in your own excrement.

Adiós arse-holes.

POST REVISITED @ 29 December 2010:
I was SO right! Muhahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!