nevermind the bricolage

The Prize

I happened to watch a thriller called The Prize yesterday. It was made in 1963 and starred Paul Newman as a writer who wins the Nobel Prize for Literature and gets caught up in Cold War shenanigans in Oslo. Today, President Obama accepted his Nobel Peace prize, an action made complex by his recent commitment to send more troops to Afghanistan. I can't speak to all the issues surrounding such a move and I think I am grateful that such choices are not part of my everyday life, but I will say that it does make the whole thing surreal. I realize that Peace prize recipients cover a wide spectrum of global situations and circumstances and Obama is not the first recipient who is being rewarded as much for his potential as for his actions, but it is tough that's for sure. It was very interesting to hear the talking heads going round over this---can America celebrate it's President winning the Prize? "He's no Roosevelt," one guy repeated more than once, well Roosevelt is no Obama either for that matter, we are each held captive and find liberation in our own contexts and who knows how things will play out. I must admit I would have liked less justification for the necessity of war and along with it, some sense of a plan for peace laid out, but I am not in his shoes. One can only hold onto shreds of hope that business as usual is not the case, though I fear it is, and trust that the hype was more than hype, that there was/is substance. But I have also lived long enough now not to put my eggs in the institutional basket, whatever institutional basket that might be.

Art&Copy

A documentary hopefully coming soon to a theatre near you.

If You Want Blood

This song has loads of memories attached to it. It was in the middle of AC/DC madness in the early days of our US touring, nice to see someone doing something creative with it. I think I have some pictures lying around at my mum's from this time, should dig them up next time I go home.

If you want blood (Toch Reel 09) from Toch Studio on Vimeo.

House of Cards

Here's a Leo Burnett inspired ad campaign for Shelter, the UK Housing Charity, which utilizes Radiohead's House of Cards really well.

New Marketing Realities

Scholz and Friends have a nice little animation on changes in marketing realities. I think some of the points made here have easy connections with challenges facing other institutions and organizations--churches etc. (The animation also matches the colour of my socks today)

One is the Loneliest NUmber

Pushing corporate boundaries to some new limits, BBDO's Dusseldorf office has created a series of fairly provocative ads for PepsiMax, Pepsi's new one calorie soft drink. Playing off the idea that 'one is the loneliest number,' they have offered up a series of images of cartoon calories committing suicide. Claims of insensitivity towards suicide are flooding the corporate site, but cartoons have long flirted quite outrageously with notions of death. Personally I think it is a bit grim for a soft drink ad, but I also welcome the willingness to stretch beyond corporate comfort zones to reach for a little provocation and controversy.

Creation Stories

Adidas have released the first of three clay-motion films, chronicling the Adidas story.' "Once upon a time..." is how the tale begins, lending a mythic, fairy-tale quality to Adi Dassler's story. Dassler made running shoes for Jesse Owen's for the 1936 Olympics--iconic shoes for an icon. The film itself is a pretty dazzling piece of work, lots of detail, complete with voice over and orchestral score--they are definitely going for the emotional connection. Creation stories, the grand narratives that shape our self-understanding, were once largely the domain of religions, they created the consensual illusions around which societies formed themselves--these days every major company has a shaping story, a way of knowing where the product came from, it's ideology, philosophy etc.--it's an invitation to the consumer to know the companies shaping narrative and 'buy into' the philosophy. Petit Recits are what Lyotard called the new stories that would replace the ideologies of modernity, the grand narratives of the modern era replaced by countless 'little stories' of genesis, emergence, origins--I doubt that even he imagined that this would emerge so forcefully in the consumer sector.

Visualize Your Eventual Demise

I was walking down Beverly Blvd in Beverly Hills the other day to meet someone for lunch and did a little window shopping on the way. I came across a store called, Lululemon, a Canadian based yoga/exercise clothing store and was struck by their window  advertising. In huge letters a slogan read, "visualize your eventual demise," apparently it is one of the statements from the company manifesto--the tag says, "It can have an amazing effect on how you live for the moment." Right there in the heart of Beverly Hills, a meditation on death and dying as a means to live differently in the present.
I realize of course, that Lululemon is a business, selling a lifestyle, in this case a spiritual consciousness clothing business, but nonetheless, it is not everyday a huge store window is devoted to meditations on impending death as a means of adjusting how one lives today. I was thinking about this while I was listening to Deepak Chopra the other night when he talked about the prince of death coming up behind us all, and getting closer everyday and urging people to living passionately because of that.

Fontamentalism

Auto Futures?

The top image reflects the work of Irwin Stambler, it is how he envisioned the future of the automobile in 1966. Below is an image from the Art Center's Transportation department from this years crop of automobile design students. What is interesting of course, is how views have changed over the 40 years or so in between the images. It seems that when we come to the future we are pretty clueless and we are, in fact, heavily reliant on our present to imagine what the future will look like. Stambler's images seem to hold traces of the 'Jetson's' view of the view combined with a little bit of E-type Jaguar, compared with the bulky, 'Minority Report' feel of the newer car, the disparity couldn't be greater really.
       Nassim Nicholas Taleb plays with numbers, and challenges our confidence in long-term projections, his site, fooledbyrandomness, offers some interesting thoughts on the folly of long-term predictions about the future--the longer the time period the more likely that things we didn't anticipate will drop into the equation. We always like to think that we are 'in the know,'  with our fingers firmly on the pulse--this is why I think things like 5-year plans and the like are troubling at best, folly at worst. Great way of justifying my lack of a definable, long-term future!