Idea IS the format

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2008-10-29T12:34:00.001-07:00

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“Hey, can I call you Joe?”

2008-10-04T02:36:00.000-07:00

So it began, the battle for middle America. Senator Joseph Biden flashed a smile of assent, and moved to his podium. Sarah Palin looked confident, assured, enthusiastic, a long way from the nervous wreck she ought to have been. Whoever pepped her up for this pep rally, they did a damn good job.

Biden and I weren’t the only people worried about falling under her spell.

Others had already succumbed. I’m talking about the kind of wholesome, patriotic, all-Americans she's been selected to hold a mirror up to. Except that hers is a special mirror, one that only reflects their better angels, against the backdrop of a country occasionally glimpsed in their wholesome, patriotic, all-American dreams.

Even those of us on foreign shores probably see in Palin a flash of something we’d like to believe in, of a nation founded on hard work and good intentions. We certainly voted with our feet on Thursday night, making up what was (allowing for internet audiences as well as the 69.9million viewers who tuned in in the US) the most watched debate of all time, vice-presidential or otherwise. And rightly so. Anybody thinking they won't be affected by the outcome of this election would need to have left planet Earth some time ago.

That being the case, the result of the election may still be decided by a few hundred thousand people, in each of half a dozen states. These are the people for whom Palin is positioned as a natural friend, confidante and kindred spirit, someone who sits around a kitchen table bearing the weight of the same concerns on her broad, maternal shoulders.

This, of course, is bullshit.

The reality is that she’s the worst of both worlds, with more skeletons in her closet than your average Stepford wife, yet the vanity to have been persuaded that she should be just a heartbeat away from running the country. This, on the strength of having done little more than muddle her way through the same challenges many of us face trying to keep control of our cut-throat careers and fucked-up family lives.

It took only a few well-chosen words for Joe Biden to remind us that Sarah Palin has by no means a monopoly on hardship and adversity, or on the tenacity required to turn these to your advantage. On the contrary, Biden gives us a glimpse of a life less ordinary, delivered with a candour and honesty far less contrived than that of his opponent. He looks like a man who's learnt enough things the hard way to be tasked with making decisions on behalf of others. He gives us the credit for having been around the block a few times ourselves.

Biden's was a message of hope and encouragement, acknowledging the epochal importance of this election, and unchallenged in bestowing a damning verdict upon the last eight years. It was as much as Palin could do to keep distance between her ticket and the many manifest policy failures of the incumbent administration.

And, despite all her 'say it ain't so, Joe' protestations, it was Palin who ultimately invoked the message of fear and intimidation so fundamental to the Bush Doctrine, reasserting the facile and insidious mantra that it is the essential liberty of the American people that gains them so many enemies overseas.

It looks ever more as though only fear can win this battle now for John McCain. I'm talking about the fear that flows as an undercurrent through American society, occasionally swelling to the surface and erupting into outrage when a certain type of pressure is applied. This is the fear that can divide a nation along the fault-lines of race, religion and economic viability. This is the fear that still grips a significant proportion of the electorate when they consider voting for Barack Obama. Perhaps this is the fear that he will actually deliver on the promise of change, and that there will be no place for them in his America, a country unified by hope, and given strength in self-belief.

Whatever the case, it's going to get worse before it gets better. As the momentum shifts left, the more authoritarian McCain's candidacy can be expected to become, bullying the media and smearing and discrediting his opponents. Expect the rhetoric of intimidation, tapping ever deeper into these fears and anxieties, sugar-coated with the folksy familiarity, unblinking loyalty and saccharine certitude of his supposedly home-baked running mate. She has shown us, at the very least, that she can be well programmed.

But then again, I'm just a blogger.

What the fuck do I know?

100% District of Columbian

2008-10-03T05:14:00.000-07:00

When news breaks on Twitter's election channel, you get more than just the facts.

That's how I heard that the GOP had just given up any attempt to turn the great state of Michigan red come November 5th 2008.

They'll tell you that it wasn't a key state for them, but it must have mattered enough for them to decide that it was worth spending some money there in the first place.

And that's part of the problem, right there. By accepting matching funds, McCain is having to deal with the campaign spending restrictions that go with them. If he needs to spend more fighting battles in supposedly safer states like Indiana and Virginia - and he does - he has to start cutting losses elsewhere. Even Rove can't spin that to make it look like a good thing.

Meanwhile the Obama camp, having eschewed federal assistance, are now free to spend as much as they can raise. They were busy launching an Obama '08 iPhone application. Might sound like a gimmick, but Twitter quickly came alive with positive feedback, reporting that the app makes smart use of the iPhone platform to engender greater awareness of Barack Obama's.

All of this just a few hours ahead of the vice-presidential debate, and a chance for Sarah Palin to stop haemmoraging credibility (or, according to one CNN closed caption, 'edibility') after a week in virtual freefall. The sense of anticipation on Twitter was palpable, with the left-leaning crowd quivering at the prospect of yet another own-goal from the free-scoring hockey mom.

At the same time, some armchair commentators were counselling caution, noting that Palin's currency had nowhere to go but up. Her performance would need to be little more than polysyllabic to be championed - on Fox News at least - as a shock victory for the little guy.

Let's get it straight right now. News 24 is for wimps. I've been mainlining this Twitter shit for days, carried through the veins of netroots political activism, pure, uncut, 100% District of Columbian.

My iPhone sits here, like a drip, feeding it to me intravenously, a steady unrelenting trickle of quips, commentary and outright provocation, filling me with the lifeblood of a good old-fashioned down and dirty god damn important presidential election campaign.

And the best thing about it? Well, every now and then, if you watch closely, and check your sources, you get to see that most wonderful of things.

A pissed-off Republican.

Billion Dollar Maybe

2008-10-01T18:29:00.000-07:00

So it’s welcome, one and all, as we go head-to-head here tonight, with Senate heavyweight and Democrat candidate for the Vice-Presidency Joe Biden taking on self-styled ‘Joe Six-pack American’ and Republican VPILF Sarah Palin.

We’ve already witnessed a thrilling first bout in the 2008 series. Somewhere between the irritable accusations of John ‘McSame’ McCain and the conciliatory counterpunches of Barack ‘Osama’ Obama each camp claimed a victory.

In the eyes of this pundit at least it was McSame who came off worst. Looking more war-horse than war hero, he was ultimately driven to behave like a low-ranking monkey. Never a good look, for a man who would be king.

And now comes the turn of our candidates for the Vice-Presidency, in what is surely the most tantalising and eagerly anticipated encounter of the series so far.

In the blue corner, born in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1942, we have a man who became the fifth youngest senator in US history when he was elected to represent the state of Delaware in 1973. A long-time member and current chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, with 25 years of service to the US Senate under his belt, it's Joseph “Joe” Biden!

And in the red corner, born in Sandpoint, Idaho in 1964, we find a woman whose rise through the ranks of Alaskan local government has earned her a reputation for strong-arm tactics and intimidation not just of her political opponents, but also the diminishing population of polar bears. Yup, it’s the hard-working ‘hockey mom’ from Wasilla, Alaska, Sarah “Caribou Barbie” Palin!

And it’s Palin everybody’s talking about in the build up to fight night, as she continues her seemingly implausible progress through the ranks of American party politics. Were she to make it within a 72-year-old’s heartbeat of the country’s highest office, surely this would be the greatest story ever told, and the ultimate triumph of the American Dream over the tedious trappings of reality, pragmatism and plain old common sense.

She’s certainly come out fighting. It was Palin who used a public appearance to stir up a war of words with Biden, seeming to suggest that the 65-year-old’s age might be an issue for his candidacy. “I’m the new energy”, she declared, drawing attention to the fact that while her opponent was passing throw-away legislation across the floor of the Senate, she was debating the ethics of moose-hunting at Wasilla High.

Small matter, it seems, that Palin’s own running mate is seven years Biden’s senior. Small matter, indeed, that the GOP ticket represents the most convincing evidence ‘palintologists’ have yet discovered that humans and dinosaurs ever peacefully co-existed on God’s earth. Meanwhile Palin herself pushes on, sensationally claiming that one of her best friends is gay, and that Vladimir Putin’s head can occasionally be seen from the shorelines of Alaska.

With Biden keeping his own counsel in the build up to fight night, all this talk from the Palin camp has left pundits (some of them staunch Republicans) openly questioning whether these two fighters even belong in the same ring.

Certainly, it’s hard to see how a political featherweight like Palin could ever get the better of a seasoned pro like Joe Biden. In this pundit’s opinion, however, Biden needs to be careful.

Palin’s might have her detractors among the educated liberal classes, but she's been 'awful busy' winning over hearts and minds throughout the mindless heartlands of middle America, and is not without her sympathisers among the mainstream US electorate. Biden has to find some way to land enough telling blows, without ever being seen to strike the lady.

Palin, on the other hand, has nothing to lose. Expectations are so low, all she has to do last a few rounds, go the distance even, and she gives herself a fighting chance of claiming victory.

Fight fans, whatever happens, just remember this. It isn’t down to Fox News to tell you who won. We’re the judges here, not just some unwitting audience, herded towards somebody else’s conclusion.

Maybe, if we judge for ourselves, we'll see that Palin's candidacy is just a cynical sleight of hand, seeking the right person for the ticket, at the expense of getting the right person for the job.

Right now, that’s a billion dollar maybe.

Quick word of thanks to KidRobot23 and Annie Ok for some eleventh hour help with this one.

Saying "No" to the Yes Man

2008-09-12T19:29:00.000-07:00

This found its way into my email inbox over the weekend:

It's a poster for the new Jim Carrey movie, YES MAN, with one or two minor alterations. The original looks like this:

I'm guessing it found its way to me on the back of this tweet of mine on Friday morning:

I made this suggestion as a response to reading the first few paragraphs of an article by George Lakoff on The Huffington Post, in which he identifies some mistakes he sees the Democrats making with Obama's campaign.

Lakoff starts by examining Obama's post-RNC 'No Maverick' commercial, in which the Democrats confront McCain's attempt to position himself as a 'maverick', ready to confront mistakes and repair damage done by the current administration.

Lakoff's view is that negating what he refers to as the 'Maverick Frame' actually serves to reinforce it, and that the Democrats should instead be focusing on establishing a new frame for McCain, one that puts him on the defensive.

Highlighting McCain's record of voting with the current administration over 90% of the time, Lakoff suggests that he could be presented as a 'Yes-man', a characterisation originally used by Howard Dean in his speech to the DNC.

Over the course of Friday I saw a few other Twitter users picking up on this, culminating in the appearance of http://the-yes-man.com/

It's an unelaborate site, concentrating on the key reasons why we should understand John McCain within this frame; his Bush-friendly voting record; his close association with 'Big Oil'; the fact that his campaign team is haemorrhaging lobbyists, locking him into the traditional Washington political machine of which his presidency would undoubtedly be a willing and compliant extension.

Then, within the last few hours, a sign that the meme has crossed media:

At the same time that this is unfolding, it is being suggested that 'the liberal bloggers have become McCain central', and that this is playing into Republican hands. Writing on the Daily Kos, thereisnospoon mounts a compelling response to such claims:

"It is difficult for Republicans to turn on a dime, and there's very little creativity to come out of their collective establishment. If the campaign and the RNC doesn't push a meme, it doesn't get pushed. That has forced Republican candidates to largely have to own the slimy attacks put out by their own people."

"We, on the other hand, have no such obligation. The Obama campaign has been successful largely because of its inspiring "new brand of politics". Unfortunately [...] that makes it somewhat difficult for the Obama campaign to get quite as nasty with the opposition as it might need to. But that's OK--because that can be our job."

"It's our job to push memes the campaign can't. It's our job to focus on Republican chicanery that would waste the time of an Obama campaign that needs to be focusing its messaging on core economic issues. By talking about McCain's egregious lies and horrible personal ethics, we can help push the press to cover stories that the Obama campaign can't seriously push themselves."

"Everyone has a role to play: ours is to play hardball, to hit where it hurts, and to force the traditional media to cover what it might be uncomfortable covering otherwise."

The post as a whole reads as a manifesto for negative campaigning among the 'netroots', inciting Democrats to leave the moral high-ground to the above-the-line campaign, and to get busy with the nuts and bolts of slinging enough muck to stand a chance of actually winning the election.

I haven't figured out exactly where I stand on this, although I guess by posting on the subject I'm giving the Yes Man Frame a little bit more oxygen, and nailing my colours to the mast in the process. This in itself begs a number of questions, the most obvious of which is...

What the fuck does it have to do with you (i.e. me) anyway?

Isn't it arrogant not to mention presumptious of me to try and perpetuate this meme in my own small way, with the intention of interfering in and seeking to influence an election taking place in a country of which I am not even a citizen?

Well, I don't think so.

I've held the view for a while now that this is by far the most important election to have taken place in my lifetime.

I base this principally on the extent to which the Bush administration has damaged the global geo-political climate generally, not to mention the skepticism his stolen elections have inspired as regards the integrity of American democracy itself.

It also seems pretty clear to me that, though the outcome of this election will (hopefully) be determined by the will of the country's citizens, the impact will be felt throughout the civilised world.

This is epitomised in relation to the issue of climate change. I meet more and more people sharing my view that the adverse effects of global warming are upon us, and that we may find ourselves being forced to change our way of life much sooner than previously imagined, on a genuinely global scale. On this basis alone, the governance and energy policy of one of the world's largest polluters is of excrutiating importance to us all.

Beyond this and plenty of other practical considerations, there's a more abstract reason why I feel such a significant stake in this election.

I still believe that if any country in the world could ever claim to carry a flag for human civilisation as a whole, it is the United States of America. I still find substance in the idea of an American dream, albeit that this has been systematically subverted by those with an interest in repackaging it as a crass consumerist call-to-arms. I still have faith in the principle of democracy, and the idea that governance should be designed to best serve those being governed, smiling most kindly upon the least fortunate of us.

I think that now may be a tipping point for the meaningful survival of these values. I'm not sure they it can survive four more years of the incumbent regime, and the defeat of by far the most exciting presidential candidate since JFK.

Like Kennedy, in Barack Obama we find a candidate who seems to articulate and symbolize the libertarian ideals upon which the United States of America claims to be founded, at a time when the country itself and the world as a whole needs so desperately to be reminded what those are.

Contrast this with Mr McCain.

I watched closely as he accepted the nomination at the Republican convention, weaving his rhetoric into a mandate for the continuation of the Bush Doctrine, and it looked like more of the same.

I watched his choice for vice-president condemn 'unprovoked' Russian aggression whilst simultaneously endorsing Israel's right to judge for itself what steps were necessary to defend its borders, and it looked like more of the same.

I'm watching a campaign unfold that's permeated by double-standards, half-truths and plain, good old-fashioned lies, and it looks like more of the same.

As if that isn't enough, I just keep picturing the scene, a few months into a McCain presidency, when the first of the calls comes in from Dick, or George Sr, asking after a juicy little piece of legislation, or sowing the seeds of some profitable new foreign intervention. Every time I play it through, I just can't see John McCain saying "no".

That's why I'm hoping the American electorate do, while they still have the chance.

* * *

Postscript:
I just got in after a long weekend ready to put the finishing touches on this post and I found the following unsolicited message in my normally spam-free Gmail inbox, under the subject line 're: Important':

"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who Is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost invariably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And if he is not romantic personally, he is apt to spread discontent among those who are."
Henry Louis Mencken

Damn right.

"It's like a really bad Disney movie"

2008-09-10T17:50:00.001-07:00

I'm in the office late working on a major pitch, in that kind of precarious tired strung-out work situation where you can lose perspective. Then I watch this, and it's puts everything back in perspective, and I realise that I'm not alone, and that I'm right to be scared.

I tweeted this, I'm blogging it, I want to spread it as far and wide as possible. Because the next eight weeks are eight of the most important weeks in my life, and probably yours too.

Screen/life balance

2008-09-08T22:54:00.000-07:00

I found this great little animation on Paul Isakson's blog. I have no idea who he is, but I've seen his posts recommended on Twitter more than once, and I've always enjoyed them.

There's a sweet little website that goes with it encouraging you to 'send an intervention email to a screen addicted friend'.

It's actually a very gentle advertisement for a site called Meetup, which provides people with a few simple tools to help them form groups and arrange meetups around local common interests. Their mantra is use the Internet to get off the Internet. So, nothing oxymoronic about that then.

Seriously, the more I see a career in interactive media stretching out ahead of me, the more I find myself trying to find ways of working without a computer, dodging the increasingly frequent distractions of email and that distraction from distraction, Twitter.

I think maybe this is part of the reason I'm getting busy in the garden, taking the chance to be truly creative, and to produce a few of the indivisible raw materials of day-to-day subsistence.

I guess It's not so much about finding the right work/life balance, as finding the right screen/life balance.

Of course, I'm telling you this sitting here in front of the computer at eleven minutes past seven on a Tuesday morning, having already checked Twitter umpteen times and picked up my first wave of daily email. So, nothing oxymoronic about that then.

Indivisible processes

2008-09-07T15:23:00.001-07:00

I was due to spend this weekend in Southend on my brother-in-law's stag weekend. Instead, after a 72-hour round trip to LA for the Virtual Worlds Expo, I decided to spend the time at home with family pottering around in the garden. Sitting here on Sunday night, feeling nourished and well-rested on the brink a hugely important working week, it feels like the right decision.

Lola and I were down at B&Q by about half nine on Saturday, and spent a happy half hour trolleying around picking up this, that and the other, including this odd little impulse purchase:

Food's a bit thin on the ground for birds at this time of year, so it seems like a good time to do a bit to help. We have a nice view of the box from within the kitchen as well, so hopefully Lola will enjoy keeping an eye out for any regular visitors.

From the picture below you can see that the kitchen garden is now clear, except for some spinach still going strong in the far left and four French raspberry plants over on the right gifted us by my mum and dad. (They went away with a banana plant that's apparently thriving in St Vaast La Houge in a way that it never really looked like doing in Hackney.)

I also put a fresh bag of chipped bark down just to cover up a couple of spots where it was looking a little patchy, and I planted those three lovely looking plants in that bed over on the right. Two of them are spotted laurels, 'an extremely robust, variegated shrub', and in the middle there's an evergreen azalea, 'a small, hardy evergreen shrub producing salmon-coloured flowers'.

I have no idea what the garden's going to end up looking like, or how long we're going to be around to enjoy it, but I do enjoy the time I spend pottering around out there, especially when Lola comes and joins me, giving me the excuse to witter on endlessly about what it is I'm doing at any given moment.

When I finally sat down to deal with some of the work I have to do in preparation for next week, I started by drawing up a things-to-do list, most of which related to business we have to win. In my own mind I had a couple of other things to do as well, one of which was to write up a post about my LA trip, and another of which was to post these photos. Plus I had a backlog of articles and links people had sent me that needed following up.

The conceptual model I initially created for these tasks was one based on mutual exclusion - if I was reading the articles, I wasn't preparing a pitch document, or working on a blog post, and vice versa.

Inherent within this was a fairly rigid chronology - I would do one thing, then another, then another. That said, even though I was trying to itemise and prioritise, the to-do list as a whole was now looming over me, a single insurmountable obstacle.

I contemplated abandoning these efforts entirely. Fortunately, rather than doing so, at this point it registered that this methodology for managing my time and effort really sucked, and that I ought to try and improve on it.

I tried to look at the things I needed to do in terms of the core processes they incorporated - what I'm referring to as 'indivisible processes'. I could see that all the pitch documents would be driven by the same essential argument, even though this would subsequently be structured in a different way. A cursory look through the links and articles revealed that these would inform this argument. It also occurred to me that the LA blog post would sit most naturally off the back of all of this, albeit that I would be forced to publish it later than I might have liked.

Eventually I had a far more holistic model of my 'workload' in mind. Other things began to happen. I started to form a much clearer sense of priority, weighing the primary and secondary value of individual acts against their capacity to deliver the various necessary outcomes.

I also abandoned the model of mutual exclusivity, unless it was the nature of a particular task that it need to be approached in complete isolation.

I detached myself from my computer, and started to work on paper. This is something I've been building up to for a while. I'm starting to see how limited and labour-intensive computers are as a way of completing complex tasks, and am starting to use mine on a far more task-specific basis.

Though I have very little to show for it, I'm certain that the hour that followed was by far the most productive I've spent at my desk in some time. My dissastisfaction with the the things-to-do model has been growing, and I can see that this alternate approach has the potential to be massively liberating, far more enjoyable, and much more consistent with the nature of the tools, media and ideas that form the basis of my working life.

With all of this in mind, I made a first pass at re-envisaging my life in terms of indivisible processes. It brought me here, to the end of this post, in which I've given those dearest to me the chance to catch up with what I think they're most interested in hearing about, and I've taken a first step in arranging my evening's revelations into a form that can be shared and expanded upon.

As a final aside, I'm completely convinced that I wouldn't have reached this interesting place if I hadn't permitted myself a two hour nap earlier on today, at a point at which I was struggling to concentrate on anything. Indeed, now that I think about it, sleep is perhaps the ultimate indivisible process - it has no output within itself (except, in my case, sound waves), but it is the foundation of everything we do in life, and influences our productivity and effectiveness very directly. With that in mind, and an exciting week ahead of me, I bid you goodnight x

Misoverestimating Dubya

2008-09-01T15:41:00.000-07:00

Viewed from afar, it's hard to imagine a more one-sided US presidential election.

We ought to have learnt from the last eight years that the president of the United States of America is, first and foremost, a spokesperson. It turns out that this is as much as we could have expected from Dubya, and, even then, we may have misoverestimated him.

Great presidents can distinguish themselves as great spokespeople, when they speak for an idea, giving the citizens residing at the heart of any functional democracy a moral voice, as well as a political and economic one. Occasionally politics produces a man with the potential to deliver this kind of inspirational leadership, fronting an administration more broadly schooled in 'the art of the possible'.

I'm watching closely, hoping that this US presidential election can deliver such an individual, and such an administration, and that the electorate will be ready to vote for their better angels, rather than yielding once again to the politics of intimidation. Please. For all our sakes.

WATCHMEN Simpsonized!

2008-08-29T02:55:00.001-07:00

LOVE this. Check out all six here.

[Update (about 5 minutes later):

Just occurred to me that this is a Fox/Warner Bros mash-up, coming at a time when the two continue to wrangle over the rights for the movie.

My guess is that we won't be seeing Rorschach haunting the streets of Springfield any time soon.

That's probably for the best. I don't think the world's quite ready to watch a masked sociopath splitting Spider-Pig's head open with a rusty cleaver.]

The thing I hate the most about advertising...

2008-08-25T00:13:00.000-07:00

Checking into the Love Hotel

2008-08-17T15:00:00.001-07:00

The building absorbs the force of yet another blast, and the light of the neon flickers back into life. My eyes fall open, as I list like a drunk, soaking up the aftershock. All around me I can see bodies, soft pale bodies, writhing in ecstasy all over the dirty dusty dance-floor. I can see friends, drawn together from across the decades, finding each other just for tonight, and losing it together once again.

For a derelict farm building, the Love Hotel makes one hell of a club. The dance-floor is small enough to fill, large enough to lose yourself on, and has nothing but night sky for a ceiling. Walled in by the hard-working bar and a host of bunker-like boudoirs, each furnished with faux antiquities and decorated with a better class of graffiti, it looks like everybody here is on their honeymoon.

Me, I’m bouncing round the dance-floor like a spaghetti pinball. Looking up, I can see the DJ dropping bombs from atop of his towering scaffold, musical hand grenades for us to jump on as soon as they hit the floor, sending limbs into the dirty air, slamming bodies against the bare concrete walls. I can see one of the 'wasabi peas' up there, bobbing around behind the turntables. There are five of them, at the last count, scattered around the grounds of this 16^th Century Hertfordshire manor. They’re wearing green one-piece speed-skating outfits and scandalising passers-by with the unnatural contours of their drug-addled genitalia. Like the eighteen hundred other people who made it along for the weekend, they’re bringing their own little piece of Japan to the party.

We may be in costume, but this is no dress rehearsal. It’s Standon Calling, one of the smallest most perfectly formed festivals here or hereabouts. By which I mean on this planet, or any that happen to be nearby. Some take the view that it’s nothing more than a glorified birthday party, one that’s spiralled wilfully out of control ever since the young and impetuous Alexander Trenchard Esq. turned twenty one, seven long years ago.

I’m here to tell you that it’s very much under control, executed with the discipline and military precision you’d expect from somebody whose great grandfather founded a little flying outfit some of us know as the RAF. What would the late Viscount Trenchard think, were he here today? Surely he’d like our fighting spirit, we flying aces, who go up tiddly up up, and down diddly down, but never, ever say die.

He wouldn’t have been crazy about Marko. Not because Marko’s housed inside the flame-licked exterior of a Japanese fighter plane, with a Tesco carrier bag tied bandana-style around his head and a yellow kimono hanging from his comically elongated body. Not because Marko’s looking to go kamikaze on some poor unsuspecting Tokyo schoolgirl, with a wildness in his eyes promising dishonour before death. Just because, beneath all the bodywork and bravado, Marko’s French.

He’s just one of the stray dogs, the kind of gifted degenerate it’s good to swim with on days like these. We’ve been mooching around since midday, kicking our heels and catching up with one another, here to meet the people we’ve become. We’ve gotten our bearings, blown away the cobwebs, and charged our glasses with the choice of a thousand poisons.

Now we’re tearing up the script on the dance-floor, scribbling out our own impulsive little libretto, orchestrated in the moment. I can feel the music in my bones, this soundtrack to my life, a roadmap to the memories it recalls. Each song belongs to a time, a place, a person, some of whom are here to share it with me, one of whom has been here for as long as I have, even though I only got to know her ten happy years ago. Every time I look into her eyes I see a kaleidoscope of memories, stretching back over a decade. Deep brown eyes, smiling like rubies, full of light and colour stolen from the lollapalooza of life.

This post was supposed to be about Standon, but really its about her. In a way, they all are. She's the energy and the inspiration, the muse to whatever artistry there is in me, and the colour on my palette. I’ve made my share of mistakes in this life, and I’m sure I’ll make plenty more, but whatever words I found ten years ago to convince her that I was worth being with, worth staying with, were the most important words I’ve ever spoken, or written down. It was the rightest thing I've ever done. It got me a room at the Love Hotel, and I’m never checking out.

Emma and I met ten years ago to the day, and have been married for exactly five. I’m not sure I’ll ever find the words to tell her - or you - what she means to me, but I’ll keep looking.

Life's a beach

2008-08-10T15:13:00.000-07:00

This picture was taken a couple of weekends ago, when my dad's side of the family got together for a seventieth birthday party in Porlock. We didn't see them as much as my mum's side when we were growing up, and it was great to be reminded what an unusual and interesting group of people they are.

Lola and I went down to the beach, with a few others. My sister was there, she took this photo. It reminds me of pictures I've seen of my dad when I was Lola's age. As a family we spent a lot of time at the beach, all along the English coastline, pottering around.

It was somewhere we all seemed to be able to find something to occupy ourselves, but often that would be no more than to sit around together turning over rocks, looking into pools, talking things over.

To a passer-by might have looked as though we were just passing time. But we were in a tidal zone, where the water meets the shore, waves washing over rocks, teeming with life. It was where I saw my family come alive. Now I get to see it all over again.

Death of a door-to-door jumble salesman

2008-07-30T08:44:00.000-07:00

I started twiddling the idea of anti-social marketing between my proverbial thumbs a week or two ago.

Anti-social marketing is television commercials.

It’s advertising hoardings, bus sides and posters on the underground.

It’s direct mail, leaflets through your letterbox and flyers underneath your windscreen wiper.

It’s banners, overlays and pop-ups.

It’s spam.

Some anti-social marketing thinks that by being creative and clever it can become artistic and intellectual and, ever so occasionally, it’s almost right.

More often anti-social marketing’s about people finding ways to interrupt our sentences in order to tell us about something we weren’t talking about, aren’t interested in and have no pressing need for.

The fact that we’re being interrupted may even predispose us negatively towards something we would have otherwise had a genuine interest in.

Instead we’re subjected to a process that’s as profligate in its indiscrimination as it is prescriptive in its approach, telling us what we should and shouldn’t think about something and why it is or isn’t of interest to us.

Anti-social marketing operates on the basic principle that our time and attention can be bought and sold in the marketplace. It does so with a brazen indifference to the question of how we might feel about that.

It’s a bit like being at a jumble sale.

(I think Americans call it a ‘yard sale’.)

There may be a few items of genuine interest kicking about. Maybe we’ll even buy something (even though it may well turn out that we didn’t really want or need it after all).

Most of the stuff will be junk though, of little more than curiosity value. We’ll peer down our noses at it for a little while then wander on.

Anti-social marketing is actually worse than being at a jumble sale. At least if we're at a jumble sale it's because we probably chose to be there, because we didn’t have anything better to do, and we had some time to kill, and we felt like killing it digging through a huge pile of vinyl on the off-chance of discovering a pristeen signed copy of Pet Sounds.

Anti-social marketing is more like a door-to-door jumble salesman.

He figures just because I have a door that gives him the right to knock on it. He knows that I’ll have to answer the door in order to find out who’s knocking, and that this will create a tiny window of opportunity in which he may be able to seize my attention with some random trinket.

He has to knock on a lot of doors, and he has to drag his box of jumble around with him. It’s hard work, but it’s all he knows, and he can always rely on the fact that if he knocks loud enough and long enough on enough doors sooner or later he’ll sell something to somebody (even though it may well turn out that they didn’t really want or need it after all).

He doesn’t really care how much of everybody’s time he wastes in the process. As far as he’s concerned his time is at a premium, and nobody else’s is. This is anti-social behaviour, and he is an anti-social marketer.

For a long time anti-social marketing was pretty much the only way anybody tended to find out about things they might want or need.

The only other way we’d find out about anything was word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth was great, in that the person telling us about something was probably a friend of ours, who knew us reasonably well, and had our best interests at heart. The problem with word-of-mouth was that we could only have one conversation at any one time, in the pub, on the telephone or gathered around the office water-cooler.

Then we invented the internet. We invented email. We invented ICQ, and forums and notice-boards. We invented instant messaging, chat rooms, blogs and social networks. We invented a thousand and one ways for us to connect with like-minded people, and to effortlessly express our enthusiasm for something some of those people might want or need. Word-of-mouth became word-of-mouse, and we began to have a thousand conversations at once.

At the same time, the advent of interactive media created a problem for the door-to-door jumble salesman.

We could see him coming.

It became our new surveillance system; a network of platforms and media empowering us to filter out the noise. As we continue to engage with these tools, and the greater control they grant us, our mindsets change. We no longer accept the door-knocking as a fact of life. Some of us don’t even notice it, subconsciously blinding ourselves to banner ads on web pages, or using Sky+ to very deliberately skip the ads every time a commercial break comes on.

Instead we’re busier than ever talking to each other, about the things we love, the things we hate, the things we want and need. All around us ‘social marketers’ are igniting conversations, fanning the flames with genuine care and attention, and fuelled them with fresh content and collaborative creativity, growing colourful communities around the campfires of our bright ideas.

Who watches the Watchmen? We do ≠)

2008-07-04T08:16:00.001-07:00

Here it is. It might not be the chock full of content right now, but just look at how many days we've got left to fill it with all manner of Watchmen goodness!

The beautiful word

2008-07-03T04:29:00.000-07:00

Click on this to enlarge. More info here. Thanks Sizemore.

Starting early

2008-07-01T15:36:00.000-07:00

I spent this morning at the Cast & Crew screening of Angus, Thongs & Perfect Snogging, at the invitation of director Gurinder Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham, Bride & Prejudice). I met her and her husband Paul on Thursday to discuss the forthcoming development of her own website, and she suggested that I toddle along to the screening this morning. So I did.

We've been working hard on the movie's marketing campaign over the past year or so, so I'd already glimpsed quite a lot of the characters in some shape or form. I was even fortunate enough to spend a day on set back in November of last year, filming a selection of original scripted material for use as part of our campaign. I blogged about the experience at the time, acknowledging how unusual it is for marketers to be given this kind of creative latitude so early in the process.

The film's still not out for another three and a half weeks, but we can already see our approach paying off in terms of the momentum the campaign has built up, at a point in the process where some online campaigns are still only just getting going.

Our long lead destination was an official Bebo profile we created for the character of Georgia. Bebo is traditionally very strong for exactly the same demographic as the book's core fans; teen girls, basically. Our intention was to harness Bebo's social networking tools to build a micro-community of fans and early adopters around the original content we'd produced, released over the course of the campaign as webisodes. Last time I looked, six months on, Georgia had over 4,000 friends, and the profile had been viewed almost 60,000 times.

Our strategy for the latter stages of the campaign has been to look at how we can widen this core awareness and anticipation into mainstream appeal. Certainly the official website we developed - one of my favourite examples of PPC's work from the seven years I've been there - is seeing levels of traffic suggesting that we've already succeeded in doing so.

Add to this the official widget (up there at the top of this post), a MySpace page for the band in the movie, The Stiff Dylans, and the forthcoming online advertising campaign (including a direct spend on Bebo) and you have the key constituents of what I immodestly consider to be a hugely progressive online marketing campaign.

What it really reinforces for me, which may seem blindingly obvious but is so often forgotten, is that online isn't something to sit behind the more traditional strands of the marketing process, such as the production of the trailer, or the design of a poster.

As a director who is prepared to entrust her movie into the hands of the distributor - and their agency - at an early stage, Gurinder is in good company; both JJ Abrams and Zack Snyder have shown that this can be an effective approach when applied to major Hollywood releases. As their currency continues to grow, and a generation of more traditional directors fall away, expect more online campaigns to start the moment a movie goes into production, and end only once the last sequel has been made, and the last DVD sold.

The truth is in here...

2008-07-01T15:02:00.000-07:00

So this is new. It's the brainchild of Seesmic, Fox and Gia Milinovich, the latter being a blogger friend and collaborator on the Indy 4 video junket:

The embeddable version of Seesmic is a bit clunky generally, but what does that matter? What's of interest is that this is a smart little mash-up of that stalwart unit of movie marketing currency, the trailer, and the current trend for (pseudo-)threaded video conversations.

From what I understand the plan is to release a series of X-Files video clips and to drive online conversation and community around these through the player. It will be interesting to see how many 'X-philes' feel compelled to join the discussion, but from what Gia says this has already been embedded over 2,000 times, and I know from our own experiences working with movie widgets that this is a very respectable number, especially after such a short space of time.

CORRECTION: This stat actually refers to the text chat widget shown below, and the total figure is 2,300 at present, apparently:

Gia's been doing some very inventive things in the social media movie marketing space for some time, as you can see from her blog; she manages to keep a foot firmly in both camps, which is not always an easy thing to do. I've never been a major X-Files fan, but I still get a major kick out of seeing how the web can bring people together around a common interest, and create a new medium in which for them to share ideas and forge friendships.

That, for me, is what social media is all about.

Introducing... Goldberg

2008-06-29T07:42:00.000-07:00

Goldberg looked out from beneath the brow of his denim sunhat and quietly contemplated the Adriatic. In the very periphery of his twenty-twenty vision he saw that the tranny had just arrived for breakfast. Delicately adjusting the low slung hat, pulling the brim a fraction further over deep-set eyes, he had ever more the air of a man entered into a conspiracy with himself.

The dining terrace was already buzzing with activity. Shards of sunlight cut through the blinds and canopies, drawing acute triangles of heat and light across the floors and starched white tablecloths. Olive-skinned staff went to and fro between the tables delivering pots of tea and coffee to the guests, some of whom appeared to be doing a far better job than others of coming to terms with the whole business of being awake, alive, anew, atop the ski-run of yet another day in their many indifferent lives.

Goldberg took up his newspaper and permitted himself another look. She wore a lilac blouse, a white chiffon scarf twirled once around her neck before sweeping down between breasts the ampleness of which she could only imagine. Her skirt, a knee-length number with lace trim, served only to accentuate the workman-like musculature of her legs, stacked on top of some wildly ambitious heels. Where others present looked as though they’d fallen out of bed onto the awaiting chairs, she alone had the appearance of having come direct from yet another gala luncheon.

He found himself wondering why it was that gentlemen drawn to transvestism, however tender their years, felt compelled to dress, decorate and upholster themselves in the style of women with at least three children behind them, and not much to look forward to beyond the next Felicity Cummings novel.

Her make-up was a masterpiece of over-compensation. Alongside lashings of concealer, blusher and eyeshadow, her strawberry red lips were drawn into an exaggerated purse, by which she looked as though she was forever on the brink of taking umbrage at some mischievous remark. In spite of it all, an ominous shadow still fell over the lower portion of her face, the likes of which no razor could remove, nor foundation conceal.

Goldberg had first spied her at dinner the evening he arrived; she was fingering a prawn and dressed for bingo. It was buffet service – Goldberg loathed buffets – and he was already smarting at a reprimand from a Cretan waiter per se the fact that he was wearing a pair of shorts; as if it were possible to apply a dress code to an all-you-can-eat dinner service. It had only exacerbated his indignation to note that the tranny was sporting a pair of chartreuse yellow culottes, apparently without reproach.

At the time she’d been wearing a pair of hoop earrings you could have dunked a basketball through, conceived no doubt to deflect attention away from her broad shoulders and prosaic neckline. Today a pair of tapering silver shards flashed and flickered in the morning sun, in concert with the gentle bobbing of her Adam’s apple as she ordered breakfast.

Methinks, thought Goldberg wryly, the lady doth protest too much.

___

Regular readers of my blog may have noticed that it's been a while since I posted anything of substance, or born of any real endeavour. That's because I've been busy creating Goldberg, who I'd promised to unveil to a few of you once he was ready.

The Learned Mr James Scudamore, a trusted friend and published novelist, advised me against pursuing my plan to publish an entire first chapter, on the basis that any feedback I received - good or bad - would distract me from the more pressing business of writing chapters 2, 3, 12, 19 etc.

As such, I decided to put these opening few paragraphs out there, and will be largely disregarding any feedback I receive, unless it comes in the form of earnest encouragement to press ahead.

Those of you who know me well, among whose ranks I count myself, will now be watching with interest to see if Goldberg ever makes another appearance, or if he becomes yet another casualty of my congenital inability to stick to one particular task.

Whatever the case, he has become another creation of mine of whom I am already peculiarly fond, and, for the time being at least, continues to serve as a very satisfying outlet for my urge to write, and to fantasize.

Kung Fu Panda Widget

2008-06-27T05:18:00.001-07:00

Neil Diamond

2008-06-22T08:54:00.001-07:00

This was taken at the start of the Neil Diamond gig Ems and I went to on Saturday night at the O2 Arena. You should be able to click on it to get the full size photo. It's just a camera phone picture, and you can't really get a sense of the size of the 15,000-strong crowd, but the moment was electric, and I think that comes across somehow.

At 67 it's just incredible how well-preserved Diamond's voice is, and how energised a performance he gives. Ems and I have also seen both Elton John and Brian Wilson perform live in the last couple of years, but this was the stand-out gig for us. We both grew up listening to Neil Diamond, but neither of us had realised what an incredible showman he is.

The O2 Arena itself (formerly the Millenium Dome) is a great venue for live music, although maybe it's testimony to Diamond that he managed to make such a huge space feel so intimate. The concert area is encircled by a complex of bars, clubs, restaurants, shops and even a cinema, all of which looks slightly like something out of crap seventies sci-fi, especially when its populated by 15,000 Neil Diamond fans all trying to roll back the years.

I have some other photos, but I need to get them into Photoshop before I post them. I'll try and add them as an update over the next day or two.

Requiem for a Day Off

2008-06-19T23:18:00.001-07:00

Two great movies. One of my favourite mash-ups:

Jesus and the Dinosaurs

2008-06-17T07:32:00.001-07:00

There are many things to enjoy here, but I think the thing I love the most is how beautifully coloured-in it is.

Saturday

2008-06-15T02:40:00.000-07:00

These two photos ought to tell the story of a pretty perfect Saturday. An afternoon at the Natural History Museum...

...followed by an evening in the garden preparing lovely fresh mackerel, barbecued and served up with some of that pak choi you can see growing in the background, seasoned thai-style and wok-fried by the infinitely versatile Mrs Light.

I love days like these, full of things that come naturally. I hope I can raise my kids to appreciate them as much as I do, and I hope they have the opportunity.

WIDGET DO AGENTE 86

2008-06-11T08:37:00.001-07:00

This is taken from the Brazilian version of the Quest for Global Domination, created for Warner Bros International to promote the forthcoming release of GET SMART (to be released in Brazil under the name "Agente 86").

I created this agent ID for little Rubes, who is a KAOS agent. When I get the chance I'll sign Lola up to CONTROL, and they can have their own little Quest for Parental Domination.