Thursday 31 January 2008

Cre-hate-ive Review

Reading Creative Review increasingly makes me feel like Nicholas Cage in the film 8mm.

Listlessly rumaging through it's pages like a jaded pervert, I sit there groaning, unable to reach any kind of climax. But I keep on going... keep on going. (See, I just can't help it.) And when I get to the end? I am appalled and disgusted with myself.

I've just wasted 10minutes of my life reading about the new wayfinding system in Selfridges.

I feel dirty.

Crapital of Culture

As the great Raymond Williams once said, "culture is ordinary." And nowhere is it more ordinary than in Liverpool.

I'm not really certain what I expected of The European Capital of Culture 2008. Maybe I thought it'd be like ancient Greece. Or Venice during the Renaissance. Maybe they'd pressed a button and transformed Merseyside into fin de siecle Vienna or something. Anyway, having had most of yesterday to myself and having arranged to go to a gig in Liverpool that evening, I decided to immerse myself in all this new-found (whoo-hoo!) culture.


Ah, yes. Culture. Culture. CULTURE! Look at it! It's everywhere! Why, the very streets are paved with poetry, I tell you. The skyline flickers in a heat-haze of pure inspiration. Look, damn you! There's culture in them there streets. Culture! And it is wrought and hewn upon the very souls of every man, woman and child therein. Oh, Liverpool! Thou art a furnace of art and intellect, smelting our dreams and desires in the foundry of your heart. Let us inside Liverpool! Let us in! We beg you! Show us our new dawn!

What a load of fucking bollocks.

As far as I can see, Liverpool's Capital of Culture status is being mediated by just three things:

1) LOTS OF CONSTRUCTION WORK.
2) LOTS OF NEW SHOPS.
3) LOTS OF FREE ART EXHIBITIONS.

And none of these things are very promising. For a start, Liverpool now boasts two of the worst galleries in the country: Bold Street (which is the new Portobello Road according to this provincial bell-end) store Microzine and the Wood Street gallery/cinema/thing, FACT.

The former is actually just a clothes shop (see I told you it was shit). But it purports to be a bar and a gallery as well. If you like sitting in a cold shop window and drinking shit wine whilst surrounded by scallies buying fluorescent trainers and tracksuits, it's a godsend. Whilst upstairs you can buy paintings by the "artist" Dave White who I assume is either very young or profoundly disabled, since he only paints Star Wars characters and shoes, but hey... Back downstairs is more designer sportswear and - what's this? - oh, it's irony. No, hang on. It's nostalgia. Or is it irony? No... It's a 1:300 scale Airfix model of the Ark Royal and an oversized plastic duck and some shot-glasses. Oh, and a baby-pink J Lindeberg polo-shirt for £75.
Make no mistake: this is a place is for unremitting dickheads.

So. Back up Bold Street (the Portobello Road of the North, remember) and off to the right is FACT. This is Liverpool's "creative quarter." It's also where a great many tramps like to sculk and wee. Urban Splash indeed -get here in the morning and there's rivers of it. Want a £500,000 luxury apartment in the most up-and-coming area of the city? Enjoy tip-toeing through faeces and stepping over junkies? Then Liverpool's Rope Walks is the area for you!

Anyway, FACT is the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology. I actually don't know what that means. Often, I don't know if FACT's curators know either. What is "creative technolgy"? A Mac laptop? A word-processor? Yes! So what's the difference between a laptop and say, a pencil? Pencil's are old-hat you philistine! Mac's are sexy! Well, yeah. So, is FACT a gallery for CGI or electronic music? Erm, no. FACT is a gallery for marginal installation art that happens to utilise this technology. For example, I once saw a video loop of a Mac desktop crashing - just an infinite cycle of error-messages popping up and up and up and up. Fucking yawn... Next week there's a show of some kind of kinetic sculpture with bits of skin in it or something... Yawn again, John...

So, pretentious shopping, pointless art and lots and lots of tramps pissing in the streets. Is that the best you've got, Liverpool? Get yer finger out, soft lad! This could be, should be ace. And yes: culture is ordinary. It's a normal, natural phenomena. Culture shouldn't need a festival to bring it to life. We've fetishized culture to the point we're now paranoid about it. So much so that we now put banal events into museums. That's right Liverpool, you heard me right. I said "banal". Not ordinary. Not normal. All the new shops, the office blocks, the forthcoming exhibitions and concerts are all mind-bendingly banal.

Please stop trying so hard. You really don't have anything to worry about.

Wednesday 30 January 2008

Relativity or Gravitivity?

I love science. Not in a Dickie Dawkins increasingly fundamentalist way. Just in a childlike oh-my-god-would-you-look-at-that kinda way. Allow me to pretentiously slide my glasses up my nose for a second when I say that if art is the way in which we engage with the world, then science is the way in which we engage with the universe. Which is precisely what I was doing at 9pm last night when I watched a bloody brilliant edition of Horizon. It was all about gravity and the shortfalls in our understanding of it.

Here's a re-cap in my bestest pleb-vox:

Once upon a time, Isaac Newton observed an intrinsic force of attraction between a piece of fruit and our blissful English globe. In a "eureka" moment, (although that was Archimedes, but more of him later) Newton extrapolated the classical model of celestial bodies spinning around and acting upon eachother in general ie. an apple is subject to the same physical laws as the earth. Things don't move around the sun. They move around eachother. So, for three-hundred years, this theory (for twas all) was taken for granted until Einstein gatecrashed the Physics Tea Party with his sexy new theory of relativity.

Mr. Einstein reckoned that space wasn't just space. There was more going on than just rocks and dust spinning in a void. Space had time in it as well. In fact, space-time was a bit like water. Space-time gets displaced and distorted when things move and spin in it. So, like Archimedes jumping in his bath, there are ripples and waves in space-time. We call this force, gravity. But gravity is more than simply centripedal force, because gravity.... can bend fucking time man! It not only keeps those pretentious glasses on my nose, it keeps the clocks ticking regularly too. Put your clock into space and it moves quicker. Blimey!

But space is so full of stuff flying around, there's ripples and waves of space-time spilling all over the place. In fact, you can see these waves through telescopes, bending the light from stars as it passes through space-time. These waves are caused by things like neutron stars orbiting one another at mind-bending speeds. As the gravity of one pulls space-time into it's centre, the other spins it out the other way, like a vortex, and off it goes rippling into space, bending all the time and light it comes across. Not surprising, these ripples are called "gravity waves." Right now, there are some lunatics in America with a 4mile laserbeam, hoping a gravity wave will hit it so we can measure it's effects.

Now to get really complicated. Ahem.

Einstein's model of relativity only works in the cosmos. Space and time woven together? Tick. Gravity being a force of both? Big tick. Gravity displaying these properties all at the time? Doh, bollocks! We can't observe gravity within atoms. We assume it must be there, but we can't be certain on such a small scale. I know! Let's smash some atoms up and see what's in them: we've observed a nucleus, a proton, a neutron and an electron. Let's see if there's anything we've missed.

Ha ha, well whatdya kwow! There is an unaccounted energy loss when we smash atoms together in a particle accelerator. Whatever could the explanation be? Perhaps it's a "graviton;" a theoretical quantum particle that doesn't weigh anything at all. Where does it go in the particle accelerator? According to Horizon "maybe to another dimension. We don't know."

Hmmm. At this point I had to check wikipedia to clarify this in my own mind. Do gravitons exist? Well, I'd buy into them. Do they disemminate into "another dimension" when released? I doubt it.

Beleive it or not, the "problem" of gravity is one that's very close to my geographical heart. My parents live about 3miles (as the crow flies) from Warton Airbase. Owned by the military, it's the test-site for BAE Systems. Rumour has they've been testing and developing anti-gravity aircraft for some time. My mates can tell you all kinds of tales of strange lights and ungodly noises coming across the fields at night. Ironic then that anti-gravity pioneer, gyroscope enthusiast and infamous Royal Institute-heretic, Eric Laithwaite, hailed from just a few miles further in the Fylde (the mossy bit between Preston and Blackpool).

For more info, why not fire your imagination even more with this: http://gravity-control.blogspot.com/ .

See. I told you I love science!




Tuesday 29 January 2008

Self Promotion

I've been messed around by a client. No work until next week. Sigh. Still, these things happen - last minute changes; other projects within the agency. Can't be helped.

So. If anyone out there* has anything they'd like me to work on, then please feel free to get in touch. Look, I've even made a new little poster for myself and everything..!


[* Who reads this anyway? Somebody does because my Google Analytics account tells me so. Come out! Show yourselves! I know you're out there!]

Art for art's sake


Found my pencils before so drew this. It's a man with a fiddle and a big top-hat... Obviously.

Monday 28 January 2008

R.I.PR

Augmenting today's death-themed posting, here's an anecdote about crematoriums. Oh, and squirrels too.

Squirrels are ace aren't they. Especially red ones. They're very rare. On the other hand, death isn't so rare. Death's looming all over the place - round corners, under bins and everywhere. So, imagine my surprise when, only the other day, I found myself surrounded by both death and squirrels at the same time.

A friend of ours sadly lost her dad over Christmas, and respectfully, we attended his funeral at the local crematorium. Crematorium's are strange places. Not least because of the slightly sinister "death-factory" turn-around of their services. As one poor bugger gets sprinkled out the back door, the next lot of greiving relatives are blubbing and queueing up front. Or at least that's what normally happens.

Our crematorium's different though. Because our crematorium's got squirrels. Red squirrels. Big, fat, matter-of-fact red squirrels that bounce around on bird-tables and knick berries off memorial wreaths.

And were any of us sadly weeping? Were any us glum or sombre? No. We were all laughing and pointing at the squirrels, and ooh-ing and ahh-ing like a load of children. And whilst a man lay dead waiting for us to burn him, we didn't care at all. We had red squirrels for godsake!

But what a fantastic piece of P.R: softening the blow of a tradegy by coupling it with an appealing animal. Here's my tentative list then of similarly paired bad-news events with rare or inspiring beasts.

Redundancy = a chimp.
Notice of intended prosecution for speeding = talking parrot.
Economic recession = a fucking massive owl...

This still makes me chuckle...


I'm Nadine Baggart; celebrity beauty editor of Content Flavoured Trousers.

People often ask me which glossy magazine I'd most like to celebrity-beauty-edit. Vogue? Cosmopolitan? Marie Claire?

The answer is simple.

I can recommend Girls and Corpses Magazine.

http://www.girlsandcorpses.com/

Wednesday 23 January 2008

When I grow up I want to be... an iconoclast!

ME: Mummy?

MY MUM: Yes, darling.

ME: When I grow up, mummy...

MY MUM: Yes, darling.

ME: What will happen to me, mummy?

MY MUM: Whatever do you mean, darling?

ME: What will happen to me when I'm older?

MY MUM SMILES AT ME. (I'M IMAGINING I'M ABOUT 6 YEARS OLD DURING THIS, BY THE WAY).

MY MUM: Oh, I wouldn't worry about that, darling.

ME: But, I'm frightened, mummy. Petrified in fact. (I HAVE AN EXCELLENT VOCABULARY EVEN BACK THEN)

MY MUM: What of?

ME: The future, mummy. The vast and terrible future. It's so horrid and stifling, mummy. I can't take my mind off it. I'm consumed, mummy. Consumed with doubt and worry. Can't you see the fear in my eyes, mummy?

MY MUM: Oh, Johnny-John-John-John-John, my little yoghurt-pot, there's nothing to worry about at all. Theres nothing to fear. Nothing to fear at all.

ME: But, mummy what will happen to me! I beg you, I emplore you; I order you to tell me!

MY MUM: Well. Exactly the same as happens to all of us. We end up grey and dull, frustrasted and sad. Your dreams are crushed and your potential suffocated. It's very bleak darling, but I assure you it's perfectly natural.

ME: I don't want that to happen to me mummy. I want to be different. I want to be... an iconoclast.

MY MUM: A what?

ME: An iconoclast! I want to smash everything up and start again. Build new things and have new ideas.

MY MUM: Sounds a bit postmodern to me young man. Your father won't like it.

ME: Fuck that shit, mummy!

MY MUM SLAPS ME.

MY MUM: This is heresy, Johnny. Heresy and treason and wrong. Very wrong. Now I want you to go upstairs and start blogging about graphic design or graffiti or brands or adverts you've enjoyed. People have spent a long time establishing these conventions, and you can damn-well go and adhere to them.

I GRUMBLE AND GO TO MY ROOM.

MY MUM: Little shit.

Tuesday 22 January 2008

CopyWrongs #1

Ladies and gentlemen, my I welcome you all to this, the inaugural presentation of the (tentatively titled) Thomas Guygax Award for Crimes Against English and CopyWronging (I'll think of something more snappy for next time).

And this week's winner is.... the Night Hotel NY website.



Then so shall it be, indeed. So, congratulations to the Night Hotel for buggering up your words. "An excercise of Modern Gothic Gotham," eh? Sorry, mate. Never heard of him... Did we mention the black and white? The contrast? The white? The black? A spectrum! And a contrast? "Some things only happen at NIGHT." Yes. Like sleeping. No mention of any beds though. Hmmm. Come on, love. Let's try somewhere else. I can't speak German.

Monday 21 January 2008

Tarantino: The New Benny Hill


WARNING: This Post Is NOT About Writing or Advertising.

Woke up this morning, feelin' fine. There's something angry on my mind. Last night I watched a new film that's a load of shite (oh, yeah!) Something tells me I should've turned it off (something tells me I should've turned it off!)

The film in question is Quentin Tarantino's new poo-poos, Death Proof, which in fact, I did turn off halfway through and foolishly bothered to finish watching at 7.30 this morning, but only because Rosario Dawson's in it and I've recently worked out I fancy her quite a lot. Anyway, words cannot begin to describe how catastrophically, profoundly rubbish this film is. But I'm gonna have a good go.

First of all, I dislike Tarantino's films immensely. Nevertheless, I've open-mindedly sat through all of them wondering if I'll get it, hoping that the penny will drop and I'll understand the genius I'm assured he's meant to be. But I now face the inevitable: this is never going to happen.

Tarantino is a hack who pays "homage" to the films and movie genres he loves. And unfortunately for us, the films he loves are all rubbish. But he gets away with this by playing his Irony Card. This means he gets to make shallow, cynical, self-indulgent horseshit and pretend it's sophisticated. But we're not talking Pop Art here. This isn't Andy Warhol's Factory. This is earnest, sweat-and-tears film making. Young Quentin works hard to produce this shit. And the reason he needs to work so hard is because he has all the imagination of a toad.

Quentin Tarantino looks like a vegetable. He speaks with a "lithsp." He looks and sounds a bit like a 6 year-old trapped in the body of sex-tourist. So it's particularly alarming whenever he casts himself in his films. Which he does all the time, often as a hard-man. But he's a runt and a spastic. Weird!

In the same way that Kill Bill was a "homage" to those ten-a-penny (HMV is full of 'em), modern-day martial arts films, Death Proof is Quentin's "homage" to "grindhouse." Grindhouses were cheap, populist flea-pits showing badly made boobs-and-guns-and-monsters double-bills in an attempt to cram the punters in at a time when everyone watched TV instead of movies. If this is the underground cinema of America (as Quentin would have us beleive) then the Carry On films are our counter-cultural equivalent.

Death Proof's companion piece is Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror. As Rodriguez is generally a far more original, witty, not to mention competent film maker, Planet Terror looks set to be an altogether more positive experience: a full-on post-Tromaville schlock-horror blockbuster. See, when I saw the trailer for Planet Terror I thought, hey that looks funny - like a Toxic Avenger meets John Carpenter thing. God. If only I'd seen a trailer for Death Proof.

So, what is Death Proof then? Well, Quentin would have you beleive that it's a cross between a Russ Meyer film and someting like The Hitcher. In fact, this is exactly what it should have been. Instead though, it's Sex and The City meet's Wacky Race(s) There's actually only one car chase in it and that happens right at the end. If you get that far. For two hours you get nothing but some quite attractive women talking about sex like 14 year old chavs outside an off license. They talk and they talk. They laugh and talk. They get drunk and they talk. Some men try and hit on them. They talk some more. They get drunk some more. They talk. I think one of them does a bit of a sexy dance. They're all talking again. Then suddenly Kurt Russell kills them all very quickly. But we meet some more women who talk about sex. They talk and they talk and then I turned it off.

So what's the point of this fucking monotonous cine-mong? Well, none. The only person benefitting from it is Quentin because it's his show. He gets to tell the girls exactly what he wants them do. And he wants them to wear tight shorts and uplift bras. He wants to personally hold the camera as it tracks up their quivering thighs. He wants them to kick and fight like saphhic gladiators and he wants them to talk about the kind of forgotten movies real women wouldn't give a two-ounze turd about. He wants to ogle and breath at them from behind the lens (see above) and he wants the men to call them "fucking bitches" and beat them and kill them.

Tarantino has hidden his arch, slightly sinister brand of misogyny behind this gloss of shallow irony for too long. He's a one-trick pony and a dirty old man. His films aren't homages at all. They're febrile excursions into his sexual and cultural immaturity. In fact, he's the Benny Hill of cinema. And Benny Hill was shit. Even when I was about six.

If there's one thing worse than sexism, it's nostalgia. And Uncle ("Chase-Me-You-Fucking-Bitch!") Quentin is a serial offender.


Tuesday 15 January 2008

Song-Poems




Ever had a really shit breif? Ever been passed a really clunky piece of creative and been told to sodomise it with an incongruous, unworkable concept?

Then let me tell you the story of one Thomas J. Guygax Sr.
But first...
A few years back now, I developed a rather unhealthy obsession for the little-known cultural phenomenon known as the "Song-Poem;" a vast, uncharted body of vanity recordings made by unscrupulous music industry "pioneers" keen to exploit the aspirations of the general public, long before Simon Cowell had the idea of doing it on television.

Here's how it worked:

It's America. It's some time in 50's, 60's or 70's. You open any number of tabloid papers and magazines and you see adverts like the one above. Maybe you're an aspiring poet. Maybe you're an aspiring singer-songwriter. More than likely you're a hapless, feeble-minded dolt without a glimmer of talent. But spurred on by the possibilty of fame, you scribble down whatever old shit comes to mind and hastily send it off for "appraisal." Then, whadya know! Within days you receive a commissioning letter. You got talent, kid! But we need $200-$400 to press the disc. And miss your chance of stardom!? No way! Here! Just take the money! Meanwhile, backstage, a sweat-shop of session musicians have already set your naive, incoherent bilge to music. It's in the can man, and these guys can do 5 or 6 of these a day. But by now the cheque's in the bank, so here's a copy of your record. We did try to get it on the radio but you know, it's just not right for now. By all means though, feel free to try again.

It's hard to underestimate the sheer numbers of these recordings. Literally hundreds of thousands of song-poems are out there, most of them lost to mists of time. But a good proportion remain, leaking out into thrift shops and garage sales around the world, and are now highly sought after by pseudish, sniggering postmodernists like myself. To tell the full story of the song-poem requires a website in itself - Phil Milstein's stupendous American Song-Poem Music Archives is a great place to start.

My personal favourite song-poem ever was found on the internet after a day of battling with Google: the truly unbelievable "My Husband, Lover, Friend." It's a chilling account of domestic violence, callously set to a jaunty, upbeat country and western tune:

My husband, lover, friend,
On him I can always depend,
The bruises on my eyes and nose,
They go right down to my toes (wo-ho-hoes!)

Maybe that's a bit too hardcore to begin with though?
Whilst the joy of discovering a song-poem for yourself can't be beaten, there's a good handful of commercially available compilation discs out there with enough madness on them to keep you going for a good while (there's even a song-poem Christmas album!) The classic "Blind Man's Penis" is one of the few song-poems to be written as an outright piss-take, and should be mandatory listening for everyone.

But what of Thomas J. Guygax Sr. then?

Well, Thomas Guygax is one of the most prolific of all the known song-poets. Whatismore, he's also one of the weirdest. Check out this completely typical submission, entitled "At The Time":

Although by the also to have differed with yearly and all known dearly
Throughout and among, we use preferred
By the also of having choicefully

Three times a day, as the average, we use of thee among of our foods
Along by our knowledge of the well-kept adage by the more of all helpin' with the all of coulds
Towards being among our masters and the also by our intelligence while the passin' of time
Decides our manners by the also collectively to being with the tense

Throughout and among, we use preferred
By the also of having choicefully
Three times a day ...

Or how about the downright spooky "During Evening":

It will be nice and noticing
Our reflections helping you to show
And about tomorrow and all of our rice
There all the time is at the also about now

Governments we all are acquainted
And of course that's all of our public knowing
With all of the tomorrow
And all of the well-fed
By all of our working and also our growing
All along with much of our everyday
We all of course know why
With all of our work and all of our everyday
With all of ourselves and you and I
All along with much of our everyday
We all of course know why
With all of our work and all of our everyday
With all of ourselves and you and I

So, the next time someone gives you an impossible breif, just think of poor, deluded Thomas J. Guygax Sr. and the men and women he challenged to make sense of his work. In fact, next time a designer gives you some cruddy piece of creative to work on, why not just say "I can't do it man. You've given me a total fucking Guygax!"

Not So Innocent


I've indirectly well-kind-of a bit not-really-Yer-Honour had a pop or two at Innocent drinks already on here. Well today I'm making a stand. No more mincing of words.

As of today:

Innocent. Drinks. Can. Fuck. Right. Off. In fact they can fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck right off (that's 19 fucking fucks for every fucking grape in their fucking autistic, facile fucking products).

It's very easy and obvious for me to say their "innovative" branding and marketing is far from innocent and considerably less naive than it purports to be. But that isn't my gripe. On the contrary, I find their strategy and direction genuinely commendable. Their brand guru, "Dan The Man From Innocent" is almost as famous as the drinks themselves, and his increasing resemblance to a member of R. Crumb's Fabulous Furry Freak Bros. is surely testament to the incredible dedication he has to this (faux hippy) image*.

No, what I'm moaning about is purely as a writer. Innocent's tone of voice - a kind of cross between H.A.L from 2001 and Kurt Vonnegut condescending a child - makes my blood boil. Not least because I increasingly hear/see it everywhere; those smug, hollow words, presently being uttered by Johnny Ball. Johnny Fucking Ball, I tell thee! It's not right! Please god, stop labouring the banality of those products. It just sounds fucking weird! (Am I being too sensitive? I probably am aren't I.)

*Sorry Dan, I'm just being -shall we say- burlesque; I'm playing for laughs. I don't hate you or your beard. In fact, your beard has nothing to do with market saturation at all. Please smack my wrists.


Thursday 10 January 2008

Yellow Lounge (it's about bloody time).


The Arts bit of that left-wing agitprop hippy rag, The Guardian, ran a short piece about this yesterday: The Yellow Lounge; a club night dedicated entirely to classical music. Ruthlessly organised by our cultured friends, the Germans, it's quickly become one of Berlin's twendiest nights out. And thank fucking-Christ for that.

Me and a couple of mates have "gone all classical" over these last 18months since we took the plunge with Professor Robert Greenburg's fantastic lecture series "How to listen to and understand great music" by The Teaching Company (kinda like the American Open University). We pinched the torrents from (tee-hee!) you-know-where and haven't looked back since. So whilst the rest of the world is boldly shitting out bollocks like this and hysterically bellowing a lot of cobblers at the swirling, misty gas of the future, we've all been refining ourselves in the discipline and rigours of the great composers. And I can't recommend it enough. It's not often you can say something genuinely changes your life but appreciating and understanding classical music (as opposed to say, Elliot Smith) is one of those rare things. So. There.

Anyway, going back to the club night, whilst the concept does whiff a wee bit of pretension, one of the great things is it's attachment to the Deutsche Grammaphon record label, which means that sets feature live performances from some of the world's most respected classical performers. And I thought it'd just be a room full of kids in plastic sunglasses pretending to dance a Viennese waltz.

So. Who would've thought that I'm fucking cool at last! Come on kids, let's crank up Prokofiev's 3rd Piano Concerto - you know that Andante kicks arse!


Tuesday 8 January 2008

Poetry 2

Ok then. So, as promised yesterday, here's my sonnet based on (da-dada-dah!) the Everest Windows January sale. For those of you interested enough, this is an English sonnet rather than an Italian one, and no, it isn't written in iambic pentameter.


I think I now know why people don't use poetry in advertising: because writing this made me feel like one of those people who send their work into Countdown for Whitely/Lynam to read out; some retired headmaster, conceitedly sucking a Werther's Original as Vorderman applaudes his futile observations about Giles Brandreth's jumpers or something. Sorry folks, but poetry makes you feel faded and very, very beige indeed.

No more after this. I promise.
Enjoy (although I doubt it).


Everest windows keep out the cold,
For those in their maturity
But we don’t just make them for the old.
Cos’ they’re great for your security.

Tailor made to your design,
Hand-crafted and made specific,
We fit and finish to combine
A service that’s terrific.

Stained and leaded, plain or wood
There aint no compromise on style,
Our sliding sashes look just as good,
UPVC is so versatile!

So come my friends and let Everest prevail!
You'll save 40% in our January Sale!

(Holy fucking Christ, kill me now..!)




Monday 7 January 2008

Poetry

As I wandered lonely as a cloud the other day I started thinking about poetry. Why isn't there more if it out there in Advertising Land?

See, I’ve never written rhymes or verse,
because I think they’re rubbish.
I’ve never had any patience for all that
bloody four-lined bollocks.

This is not a poem though,
as well it might appear…
Testing, testing, 1,2,3...
See. I’m just rubbish at it.

B
R
I
N

G
B
A
C

K
A
C
R

O
S
T
I

C
S

That’s what I say!


Maybe they're just too hard to write; too elliptical and indirect. But there's something compelling about the form; the economy and the discipline. Limericks and haikus are snappy enough and those BBC DAB radio Xmas poems were great. Maybe I'll try and write a sonnet about a double-glazing special offer or a mortgage brokers or something... watch this space...

Too Oh Oh Ate

(Yawn. etc.)