Poetry: Tom Paine's submarine

Republican friends! Worried about how you'll get through the next few days? Well, we have our own heroes too. Learn from them.

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Tom Paine's submarine

At some point in the fatuous flotilla, I dream I see
a periscope pop up, by King's Reach; and Thomas Paine
surface in a one-man submarine, having come back to
check on us, semaphore out this common sense hymn:
Boys and girls, I gave you the playbook
and you give me this? River traffic jams and
sycophancy disguised as red, white and blue treacle?
I wanted fanfares for all of you, not for one
uncommon persistence, but I fear you have been
seduced by the inertia, the dazzle and the bunting.
Break those jubilee lines! Unpick her ermine corset!
Burn those empire-tipped spears! And when you
dance around the bonfire, tell yourselves:
we are all the wearers of crowns.

Poetry: Dog Ear

Following on from telling you about the fab new publication Dog Ear, I've only gone and managed to get meself in the hard copy version of issue 2.

Good times &c. Find out where to get yours from the site. They're free, dontcha know?

Commercial: Wolff on advertising and social media

You might have missed this piece by Michael Wolff yesterday. Do go back to it; it's well worth your time. Mainly because it poses the real question about the relationship between advertising and social media that most of us in the industry have been dancing around, to whit:

Right now, the indisputable point is that plain old media, even as it steadily loses its claim on people's time, continues to attract a larger, and increasingly disproportionate share, of advertising dollars, just as social media becomes increasingly dependent on them. Eighty-two per cent of Facebook's revenues come from advertising – a much higher percentage even than that of plain old media.

Before drawing out the what should be obvious point that social media as it stands isn't necessarily going to deliver the type of advertising - that is to say, TV advertising - that might start to justify some of the more absurd social media valuations going around.


Plus it has this wonderful definition:

Giving power to your audience certainly seems to have a historical imperative behind it. But awkwardly, social media still depends on advertising which, fundamentally, depends in turn on a set of top-down manipulations that control what your audience thinks and feels at a given moment.

Listorama: Facebook status updates vol 24

BetaRish (is)...

is buckling in

is AAA rated, with no negative outlook

is living in a Wes Anderson movie

is Peter Peter English Cheater

founding Old Man Copy Corner with Jonathan Vinton

started at Archibald Ingall Stretton five years ago today

of ashes and doom loops

I dream in social media

is dancing in the disco, bumper to bumper

Incoming

Can I get a witness?

is an aristocrat, hero, lion tamer, Socialist, African explorer, ballet dancer, gymnast, or bartender, and has fleetingly dreamed just now of being introduced to the Kaiser

is contractually obliged to take it, and is in no way a reward for failure

Some update or other

is beginning his second tour of duty upstairs

has a new job: stenographer for muppets

is putting on an iron shirt

is the Bayer Leverkusen of copy

There is light in the corners

Hey Padre, what’s the little game?

is nostalgic for the future

is late again, late again

is life, still

is back in the bunker

is still haunted by you

is producing copy with an eating disorder

wishes he was omnilegent

Pain is an alarm clock

is macking

is a renegade master

is a needle-finding machine

is in search of rational fellowship

is fossicking

is together in electric dreams

doffs his titfer to you

is #trending

is seeing ways

Well, this is interesting

is consideration

is the besetting sin of his generation

is waiting for Mephistopheles

Boxdrop yo’self!

has pleased The Factory

is glozing

was beaten by a pigeon

is midday

Cry England for the ZX Spectum!

is at the line of scrimmage

Poetry: On becoming a poet

I wrote this for the lovely Faber Academy types. I might be a poet, one day...

Brand new you're retro: On Retromania

So I've just finished Retromania, by Simon Reynolds. You should read it. Not just because it's really good. Because, assuming I don't have a miner amongst my followers, you're involved in some sort of cultural production. And it is a very important book about the state of cultural production right now. The summary of Reynolds' argument is:

In the analogue era, everyday life moved slowly... but the culture as a whole felt like it was surging forward. In the digital present, everyday life consists of hyper-acceleration and near-instantaneity.... but on the macro-cultural level things feel static and stalled. We have this paradoxical combination of speed and standstill.

I don't pretend to have any answers to this. I'm not sure it's even a *problem*, as such. But I'm sure some of you will chime with his observation about 'the slow but steady fading of the artistic imperative to be original.' Maybe those of us doing things for a commercial impact now have to accept that 'newness' and 'originality' are now effectively busted flushes, broken tools. And all we can do is get better at combining and re-combining stuff, chopping and splicing things together in unexpected ways. For example, I'd love to see a 'remix' of Nike ads that slices together, say, all the end frames to create something like this, the legendary 'Intro Inspection': Or we retreat into a glitchy nostalgia, as evidenced by a track and video like this:

PRIZES - "Canada" from Jamie Harley on Vimeo.

Perhaps the future - salvation? - lies in something like The New Aesthetic. But which brand might be brave enough, apart from Google, to start acknowledging our trans-humanist future?

Commercial: Brand as platform

I know lots of people have been saying it for ages, but I think the era of brands being closed, monolithic entities with consistency everywhere as their sole driving aim as finally coming to an end. Proof? 1) What Smithery says, especially about brands being reusable in anyway people see fit; and then 2) as proof of this, that Android's robot can be grokked as you want. Open Branding: it's almost here.

Holi, by Variable

Just. Wow.

Holi from Variable on Vimeo.

Variable are here.

Commercial: An 'Awww, bless' car ad

For the Audi A5. So good that it made the normally ad-shy Ms Beta giggle and go 'awwww'. Hats off, BBH.

Commercial: Lego - a new toy every day

Just wonderful...