As far as I am concerned my season has been a success, Sunderland have stayed up and hopefully Keano will get his £ 200 Million to spend on new players. [have you seen what a shithole Middlesbrough is? they still manage to get exciting signings there, so it might not be all about the shopping]
But with regards to the conclusion of the premier league tomorrow, not nailbiting, both Chelsea and Man U will win, and Man U retain the premiership crown. However, it is interesting to note that Real Madrid just retained their La Liga title last week.
If we compare the champions of La Liga and the Premier League, there is a scary correlation, since 2000:
2000-01 Real Madrid / Manchester United 2001-02 Valencia CF / Arsenal 2002-03 Real Madrid / Manchester United 2003-04 Valencia CF / Arsenal 2004-05 FC Barcelona / Chelsea 2005-06 FC Barcelona / Chelsea 2006-07 Real Madrid / Manchester United 2007-08 Real Madrid / ???
Every time Real Madrid have won the league, Man U have won here, similarly for Barcelona and Chelsea, and Valencia and Arsenal - so tomorrow is a foregone conclusion.
I guess this does not bode well for Liverpool from a domestic point of view.
I like to be shocked, sometimes in a bleak nihilistic way. This new video by French band Justice (who I love) is not up there with Wolf Creek yet, but I think it is pretty amazing. Even though it is set in Paris, it brilliantly mirrors the culture of fear we live in. It is shot beautifully and is cross between the amazing "La Haine" and has the voyeurism of "Man Bites Dog" and gets across the pointless ultraviolence of a modern "a clockwork orange".
Anyone watch this weeks "The Apprentice"? there was an interesting parable which is something I come across almost everyday.
This week's task was to come up with a new occasion for giving a greetings card. The interpretation of this task by both parties was very literal (speaks more about the general calibre of the contestants really) and one team came up with an idea of giving a card for a "singles day" the day before Valentines day and the other team created an idea of an environment week or something like that where a card would be given to highlight the plight of the environment. (Yes, the contradictions aren't lost, not even taking into account the carbon footprint of the mailing process). both of these ideas depended on the creation of an awareness of the occassion by a considerable marketing investment for these events to have any kind of appeal, and didn't really understand under what context someone would give or receive the card.
Success would surely have been finding a social or personal situation which could be marked by the giving of the card, and having a true meaning for the recipient, such as "congratulations on losing your virginity" or "hope your kids first day at school goes well", not the best examples I agree, but a gesture based in an existing behaviour, and not some crazy ill conceived behaviour.
the card is the social object, passed from person to person and this transaction reflects an existing truth in their situation. How stupid were those apprentices I can hear the seasoned marketing professionals scoff. These are probably the same marketing professionals who either ask their agencies for / recommend to their clients a social networking application to get people to engage with their brand in a web 2.0 stylee. This type of crude square peg in a round hole exercise is responsible for so many redundant social networking applications, as they try and position their brands as social objects in someones online behaviour. if this is you, if you have laughed at the hopeless apprentices and yet have been responsible for this kind of app, hang your head in shame.
A sparkling clean van, Dark blue livery and a discrete white times new roman font, a logo which evokes feelings of a bygone era, harking back to a sense of decency and fairplay, and the name says it all “Gentleman & a van”. The use of the indefinite article, serving only to add shimmer. I saw this noble vehicle from the back of the cab and while I didn’t get a look at the driver, but I am sure he would have had a magnificent waxed moustache nestling on a stiff upper lip.
What a brilliant idea! a brilliant niching of the “man and van” phenomenon to cater for those people who want their stuff moved, and there are a lot of them, but do not want their precious bric-a-brac being carelessly buffeted in the back of a dirty white transit van, driven by the missing link.
Now I don’t know if the driver of this van had perfect diction but this van instantly told me its offering and reassured me – and I shall certainly be looking them up.
OK, I am back, I have not been updating my blog, but since then I have taken a new job and had a little baby boy called Rishi. We were going to give him a cornish middle name to reflect my wife's ethnicity but Cornish boys names were a bit rubbish. while I liked the name Kenwyn, those that know me would have leapt to the mistaken conclusion that I would have crassly named him after Kenwyn Jones.
I am by rule not a reader of much fiction, due to the amount of time I have spent in the past reading books which have neither offered me anaesthesia from my everyday existence nor have they enriched my knowledge or broadened my world view - time I could have spent playing video games. So if I ever read fiction, it is only on recommendation from trusted sources. The "His Dark Materials" trilogy was one of them.
Originally suspicious of the fact that it was part of the "kids books which grown ups can enjoy too" genre, and suspicious of the people who fuelled this genre, a genre which lacked any depth or any true narrative or thematic innovation, the easily accessible middle ground, which those who are too impatient or simple to read the high brow or too self conscious to allow themselves to enjoy the lowbrow, could embrace with differing degrees of public irony. O.K I admit it, I am only really talking about Harry P***er and maybe I am being unfair given its irritating ubquity, after all I found Mark Haddon's "Curious Incident ..." a worthwhile undertaking, as I also found "His Dark Materials" to be.
This dealt with the themes of Heaven, Hell, the plurality of worlds and the soul drawing on influences such as Milton, Dante and Dickens, in an original epic narrative which I found gripping and thought provoking to the extent ... that it turned me into an evangelist. I even signed up to the HisDarkMaterials.org fan site - not sure why, after all, like Groucho Marx, I had no intention of enriching this community of other extremist geeks that had signed to it - I guess I just wanted to show my appreciation for such a work of genius, something akin to being in a facebook group [but without having it on a profile no one hears you scream]. It offered a point of view on the notion of Christianity, the Christian Establishment and original sin, which for anyone reading, I won't spoil, but not necessarily favourable [Maybe this is why I liked it, that it would make the Daily Mail curtain twitchers splutter into their tea] So I was extremely excited by the fact that it was going to be turned into a Hollywood Blockbuster.
Boasting an A-List cast, it is being released this winter and the trailer also looked fairly impressive, seemingly remaining faithful to the first book of the trilogy. However after rooting around for more information, I found out to my dismay that this polished Hollywood version would not be taking on the potentially heretical issues central to the trilogy.
I can only assume that this was to appease the paymasters of New Line cinema and in a bid not to offend that mass of Red electoral states between the Blue eastern and western seaboards of the USA known collectively as "Jesus Land".
Maybe to a degree I am one of those those geeks, who not a fully blown "not as good as the book" Nazi, would still at least register inconsistencies, but this is not the case here - this is a full scale removal of the soul of this novel - the removal of edge and commentary which adds meaning to the action. This would just became an action movie with special effects. Imagine "A life of Brian" without the Christian dimension to it.
However I am also not a person that believes in intentionally inciting or provoking for sport, those people with deep seated views, but I believe that to produce this film in this castrated form, misses the entire point of the trilogy and this film becomes the fodder of the easily accessible middle brow I was talking about before.
Sure, the Passion of the Christ and the last temptation of Christ, incited discussion and debate, but this was good as we assess the role of religion in the post scientific state. Is this technically speaking, censorship? No fundamentally this is a social lobotomy, where the parts of our brain whose function is to challenge and therefore improve, are removed. This is the sacrifice of he key purpose of art, which is to provoke an emotional response- from Scorcese, to Tracey Emin to Jeff Koons. If it does not elicit a response it is just chewing gum - Karl Marx would be intrigued by how in todays age, the opium of the masses is manufactured through the removal of religion. My thoughts on The Satanic Verses and Theo Van Gogh are for another post. So I will not be watching The Golden Compass when it comes out this Christmas. Lets see how long my resistance lasts, but I swore once that I would never watch any sequal of the film "Highlander" as I knew that it would destroy the cherished memories I have of the original. To this day I have honoured that vow.
I am currently the planning director at Agency Republic. Before this i was head of advertising and brand at Xbox Europe and before that I was European Advertising Head for adidas International in Amsterdam - before that i was just an ad man
As far as I am concerned my season has been a success, Sunderland have stayed up and hopefully Keano will get his £ 200 Million to spend on new players. [have you seen what a shithole Middlesbrough is? they still manage to get exciting signings there, so it might not be all about the shopping]
What a brilliant idea! a brilliant niching of the “man and van” phenomenon to cater for those people who want their stuff moved, and there are a lot of them, but do not want their precious bric-a-brac being carelessly buffeted in the back of a dirty white transit van, driven by the missing link.
