New stuff.

I'm feeling a bit restless as I write this because I'm meant to be doing a dozen other things right now, most particularly arranging into some coherent form all my notes for a long project which I've been thinking about for the past (brief check) entirety of human history. However, I can also recognise that it's high time I put up some of the stuff I've been working on recently, because otherwise everyone in the world will get depressed, their marriages will collapse, their crops will fail, their cities will crumble to their very roots, leaving only the wind to howl through the mouldering precincts, intoning an ethereal 'WHY?'. All because of me. I can't have that on my conscience.

So, to wit, here are two new poems, 'The Lovers' and 'Counting Sheep', plus a story imaginatively titled Untitled Story, No. 4. I must say, I do feel like I've made some progress with these pieces and am largely satisfied with all of them - excepting Counting Sheep's title, which is rubbish. However, I can't think of a better one at the moment so ho and, indeed, hum. Oh yeah, if you look closely you'll also find a sample of some of the work I've been doing for M&C Saatchi over the last few months. More of that will be posted when the work itself has gone live. Now, go forth and sound the splendid trumpets of your passion. Or, to put it another way, have a nice day.

Eating Chocolate Makes You Gay.

At least, if does if every chocolate advert ever made is to be believed.

Consider how a girl eats a chocolate bar. She accepts it tenderly into the front of her mouth. Her moist bee-stung lips close gently over the perfect sheath of cocoa. Her eyes close in rapture. Her spine arcs. Nearby, something symbolic happens (a bath overflows, a diaphanous curtain is furled in soft winds). Surely, the advert tells us, this pleasure is too much for one extremely attractive and successful woman to bear?

Compare this with a man eating chocolate in an advert. He sticks the chocolate bar into the side of his mouth and tears off its head, emitting a silent roar of conquest in his imagination as if the chocolate bar was a gazelle in some blurred ancestral memory of flames and animal skins and spears.

So. Women eat chocolate bars face-on to make us think about sex; the pretty lady is fellating the chocolate bar, good for her. Men, conversely, eat chocolate from the side of their mouths to make sure we think about anything but sex: that nice man is absolutely definitely not thinking about penises. Hence, by deduction, we must conclude that every time we mortals eat chocolate face-on, we are revealing ourselves to be gayer than Mr Humphries.

Mmm. Willies. 

The problem with advertising

Is that the people who do it are liars. That's OK, though, isn't it? I mean, actors are liars as well. Aren't they? But no, that doesn't work, because an actor lets his assumed persona fall away at the end of the play so that people can leave the theatre reassured that what they saw was an illusion, an exercise in make-believe. The advertiser never does this, he’s always performing. A very quick example might be Saatchi & Saatchi. In the eighties, they represented the Tories. Now they run election campaigns for Labour. Therefore, even In an arena purportedly concerned with telling the truth, and with the manifest intention of affecting people’s fundamental beliefs, the advertisers are, and must be, changelings, saying whatever the highest bidder asks them to say, being blue one day and red the next.

This process closely resembles creativity, in that it entails an imaginative projection into the mind of another person or corporate body in order to understand and articulate the concerns of that person or entity. And for a while you can kid yourself that you are actually being creative and, moreover, getting paid for it: the best of all possible worlds. But that feeling soon falters as you realise that you’re only ever getting to play with the tiniest gnat’s fart of creativity due to the fact that advertising insists on limiting the scope and tools with which you can express yourself. Your ads must confine themselves to  the unique health giving property or the personal growth or the amount of sex you'll get from consuming this or that product in a world without death, blemishes or clouds. Which is to say, you’re working from a small box of preformed and increasingly threadbare sentiments, stock phrases and metaphors.

So it's not and can never be genuine creativity, because genuine creativity uses the full palette of the imagination. It has the freedom to say the horrific and the hilarious, not just the asinine and the good. It is unpredictable and subversive. A language without this freedom, a language without recourse to extremes, with no-go areas and taboos, is a crippled and diminished language. In the old days, people knew this. Classical rhetoricians taught the value of establishing the ‘confutatio’ (counter-argument) after the main argument so they could establish and demolish those arguments in the ‘refutatio’. Which is to say, they knew that you cannot effectively persuade someone without revealing the whole picture, including the bits that don’t agree with what you’re saying. Advertising does not trust its bovine public with this level of intellectual autonomy and discernment. That’s why you so often have to scratch your head and try a bit of deductive reasoning to work out from an advert what the particular product is meant NOT to be via the infinitely diluted platitudes of what it is.

It would be wonderful if this situation could be changed, if you could have an ad agency with scruples. But to do that you’d either need to change the discourse itself, which would be an uphill struggle because consumers have become accustomed to being spoon-fed nothing that will disagree with them; or you’d need to have an agency which could be unfailingly positive because it only represented clients which embody the ethical and humanitarian concerns of the more enlightened portions of society. I can’t see the latter ever happening because, as wondrous as it would be, I don’t think there are enough of those businesses around, and turning enough profit, to keep an agency afloat. And even if there were, the bank manager would very likely reject your investment proposal as an unsound risk, because it’s not based on a recognised business model.

The reality is that the ad agency reflects the society it is in, and multiplies those reflections through endless repetition until the average consumer doesn’t know what the hell is real anymore. And we live in a capitalist society full of businesses that habitually cheat and double-deal, so this farrago of deception is what advertising reflects back to us; it’s what we eat with our cornflakes and put on with our deodorant: a distorted and untrue simulachrum of what life is like, and what our priorities should be as members of a society.

To put it another way, it is universally the case that the nastiest, most unethical companies spend the most on advertising because they need the most image management. Their success derives directly from their lack of scruples, but they don’t want us to know that. It is not a coincidence that the most lucrative clients at my last agency came from the defence sector, petrochemicals, banks, major pharmaceuticals and controversial FMCGs. Most of whom aren’t the kind of people you’d like to meet down a darkened alleyway. They’re more the sort of people you’d like to meet in one of the lower circles of hell having their private parts gnawed on by Satan whilst being shat on by demons.

To conclude, then, let’s have a couple of quotes from Plato and The Princess Bride, because they knew what was going on.

'The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.'

‘Life is pain, highness. Any one who tells you different is selling something.’