February’s out of the way and it’s time to get back to life. There’s two things on my mind: sharing and kindness. I’m going to make a conscious effort to say more kind things about others and to spread some happiness. You should too!
Merpussy
Just a couple cunningly linguistic mermaids to brighten up this SHIT ASS FUCK day.
Squiggle line bold.
Why Am I Here / Why I Am Here
Do you really care that I felt a little crazy when I went off the gluten? Does anyone really care what event a super cool blogger went to? Sure, younger thirsty people. Younger yes, but thirsty for other lives I am not. I blog to work on my writing, and to share bits of words and images I feel need to be shared. I don’t blog for stats. I will never even look at my stats. I’m more interested in why people read my online bits than how many. To be selfishly honest, I’m more interested in watching my writing and website tinkering skills improve.
Plus, I do have fairly funny stories to share.
And when I take on projects like arm knitting, yoga, meditation, running a marathon, or who the fuck knows what else is to come, this acts like a legible journal. My brick and mortar journal reads like a doctor’s note of parental issues, broken hearts, and Bell Jar worries. Working in social media for the past year and a half has almost made me think what I do is worth sharing. It’s not, but what’s worth sharing is that magical and constant human conversation. The silent conversation that happens when you read someone’s online bits and bookmark it.
Long ago, I was a little lost. And slowly I came out of it, to realize that being positive is the most important thing a human can do for themselves and others. If it were not various random humans, most of whom I don’t consider to be dear friends, who chose to talk about health, yoga, positivity, and not being the victim, I could have been spending this time doing I don’t even want to know what, with a bunch of looooosers.
Key word: positivity. And I love critical thinking.
Ted Talks & Bechdel Tests
My friends all probably hate me because I hate watching YouTube videos. I don’t want to laugh at boy jokes put into motion or hear your shit music. Buuuuuut if you show me some Ted Talks, my heart will get a little melty.
I discovered this Ted Talk, in which Colin Stokes asks men to put aside the traditional man box and replace it with something far more “manly”. Paying attention to the movies you show your children, and yourself.
Meet the Bechdel Test. A simple test to identify gender bias in popular culture. To pass the Bechdel test, a movie must:
1. Have at least two [named] women in it
2. Who talk to each other
3. About something besides a man
Easy right? Not so much. Only a very slim percentage of movies, comics, stories, etc pass this. But why? I mean, women do surprisingly talk about legit stuff. Why are the boys so adverse to seeing women in pop culture? Because it isn’t manly to take them seriously?
Mr. Stokes goes on to talk about providing our children with a different narrative. One that includes both women and men as benevolent leaders. It’s beyond time for this. And when I think about the movies and TV shows I chose to watch, they all pass the Bechdel Test. There is both male and female good and evil, leaders and followers. Because that’s the planet I’ve chose to live on. And I think it’s time more men come over to this planet. Then, he drops the disgusting statistic that sexual assault (1 in 5 women) is more common than a movie that passes the Bechdel Test (11%). Why are men assaulting? Ask yourself this again after watching a modern day “man movie”.
I think about all the times I’ve heard a boyfriend complain about seeing his girlfriend, because like, why can’t he just be with his buddies all weekend? This always stuck out as more homosexual than “manly”. The guys who cheat and then complain about their girlfriend and wife to their side chick. Men who play games out of women, like placing bets on who fucks the fattest woman. The tired narrative of men being miserable once he gets married. I can come up with two reasons why adults would behave with such pointless ignorance:
1) They feel threatened that modern women are equals
2) They are closeted gays
Come out of the closet, or welcome your manhood to the modern world. Because the sad news is, that if we keep raising children with the same shitty pop culture literacy, a lot of our sons will be left behind by modern women.
Weekend Beats: Hole & Miss Banks
Two songs for the weekend thanks to Courtney Love and Azaelia Banks.
IT’S NOT WORTH IT – Linds Redding
Ah, the great struggle between art and business. You can’t spell heart without art, and business… well you can’t spell groceries without $. Linds Redding, probably one of the smartest men in advertising (solely for the below essay) knows what’s up. It’s like he is the voice inside my head.
I try not to be pompous about not being one of those people, so proud of their little work projects that means nothing.
Years ago, being the workaholic with 50 identical black pencil skirts in her closet sounded perfect. You know, the same people who spend weekends talking about work and going on empty dates, the people crowding Bay Street bars at 6pm for after work drinks with coworkers. Now I couldn’t imagine even thinking about work on weekends. Not because I don’t love my job, I do. But I love my life more. Snowshoeing, camping, running, art, reading, food, all the stuff that truly happy people have. And the stuff that fools don’t.
Anyways, read this. Read every single word.
“Many years ago, when I first started to work in the advertising industry, we used to have this thing called The Overnight Test. It worked like this: My creative partner Laurence and I would spend the day covering A2 sheets torn from layout pads with ideas for whatever project we were currently engaged upon – an ad for a new gas oven, tennis racket or whatever. Scribbled headlines. Bad puns. Stick-men drawings crudely rendered in fat black Magic Marker. It was a kind of brain dump I suppose. Everything that tumbled out of our heads and mouths was committed to paper. Anything completely ridiculous, irrelevant or otherwise unworkable was filtered out as we worked, and by beer ‘o’ clock there would be an impressive avalanche of screwed-up paper filling the corner of the room where our comically undersized waste-bin resided.
On a productive day, aside from the mountain of dead trees (recycling hadn’t been invented in 1982), stacked polystyrene coffee cups and an overflowing ash-tray, there would also be a satisfying thick sheaf of “concepts.” Some almost fully formed and self-contained ideas. Others misshapen and graceless fragments, but harbouring perhaps the glimmer of a smile or a grain of human truth which had won it’s temporary reprieve from the reject pile. Before trotting off to Clarks Bar to blow the froth of a pint of Eighty-Bob, our last task was to pin everything up on the walls of our office.
Hangovers not withstanding, the next morning at the crack of ten ‘o’ clock we’d reconvene in our work-room and sit quietly surveying the fruits of our labour. Usually about a third of the ‘ideas’ came down straight away, before anyone else wandered past. It’s remarkable how something that seems either arse-breakingly funny, or cosmically profound in the white heat of it’s inception, can mean absolutely nothing in the cold light of morning. By mid-morning coffee, the creative department was coming back to life, and we participated in the daily ritual of wandering around the airy Georgian splendour of our Edinburgh offices and critiquing each teams crumpled creations. It wasn’t brutal or destructive. Creative people are on the whole fragile beings, and letting each other down gently and quietly was the unwritten rule. Sometimes just a blank look or a scratched head was enough to see a candidate quietly pulled down and consigned to the bin. Something considered particularly “strong,” witty or clever would elicit cries of “Hey, come and see what the boys have come up with!” Our compadres would pile into our cramped room to offer praise or constructive criticism. That was always a good feeling.
This human powered bullshit filter was a handy and powerful tool. Inexpensive, and practically foolproof. Not much slipped through the net. I’m quite sure architects, musicians, mathematicians and cake decorators all have an equivalent time-honed protocol.But here’s the thing.
The Overnight Test only works if you can afford to wait overnight. To sleep on it. Time moved on, and during the nineties technology overran, and transformed the creative industry like it did most others. Exciting new tools. Endless new possibilities. Pressing new deadlines. With the new digital tools at our disposal we could romp over the creative landscape at full tilt. Have an idea, execute it and deliver it in a matter of a few short hours. Or at least a long night. At first it was a great luxury. We could cover so much more ground. Explore all the angles. And having exhausted all the available possibilities, craft a solution we could have complete faith in.
Or as the bean counters upstairs quickly realized, we could just do three times as many jobs in the same amount of time, and make them three times as much money. For the same reason that Jumbo Jets don’t have the grand pianos and palm-court cocktail bars we were originally promised in the brochures, the accountants naturally won the day.
Pretty soon, The Overnight Test became the Over Lunch Test. Then before we knew it, we were eating Pot-Noodles at our desks, and taking it in turns to go home and see our kids before they went to bed. As fast as we could pin an idea on the wall, some red-faced account manager in a bad suit would run away with it. Where we used to rely on taking a break and “stretching the eyes’ to allow us to see the wood from the trees (too many idioms and similes? Probably.) We now fell back on experience and gut-feel. It worked most of the time, but nobody is infallible. Some howlers and growlers definitely made it through, and generally standards plummeted.
The other consequence, with the benefit of hindsight, is that we became more conservative. Less likely to take creative risks and rely on the tried and trusted. The familiar is always going to research better than the truly novel. An research was the new god. The trick to being truly creative, I’ve always maintained, is to be completely unselfconscious. To resist the urge to self-censor. To not-give-a-shit what anybody thinks. That’s why children are so good at it. And why people with Volkswagens, and mortgages, Personal Equity Plans and matching Lois Vutton luggage are not.It takes a certain amount of courage, thinking out loud. And is best done in a safe and nurturing environment. Creative Departments and design studios used to be such places, where you could say and do just about anything creatively speaking, without fear of ridicule or judgement. It has to be this way, or you will just close up like a clamshell. It’s like trying to have sex, with your mum listening outside the bedroom door. Can’t be done. Then some bright spark had the idea of setting everyone up in competition. It became a contest. A race. Winner gets to keep his job.
Now of course we are all suffering from the same affliction. Our technology whizzes along at the velocity of a speeding electron, and our poor overtaxed neurons struggle to keep up. Everything has become a split-second decision. Find something you like. Share it. Have a half-baked thought. Tweet it. Don’t wait. Don’t hesitate. Seize the moment. Keep up. There will be plenty of time to repent later. Oh, and just to cover your ass, don’t forget to stick a smiley
on the end just in case you’ve overstepped the mark.
So. To recap, The Overnight Test is a good thing. And sadly missed. A weekend is even better, and as they fell by the wayside, they were missed too. “If you don’t come in on Saturday, don’t bother turning up on Sunday!” as the old advertising joke goes.
A week would be nice. A month would be an unreasonable luxury. I’ve now ‘enjoyed’ the better part of six months of enforced detachment from my old reality. When your used to turning on a sixpence, shooting from the hip, dancing on a pin-head (too many again?), the view back down from six months is quite giddying. And sobering.
My old life looks, and feels, very different from the outside.
And here’s the thing.
It turns out I didn’t actually like my old life nearly as much as I thought I did. I know this now because I occasionally catch up with my old colleagues and work-mates. They fall over each other to enthusiastically show me the latest project they’re working on. Ask my opinion. Proudly show off their technical prowess (which is not inconsiderable.) I find myself glazing over but politely listen as they brag about who’s had the least sleep and the most takaway food. “I haven’t seen my wife since January, I can’t feel my legs any more and I think I have scurvy but another three weeks and we’ll be done. It’s got to be done by then The client’s going on holiday. What do I think?”
What do I think?
I think you’re all fucking mad. Deranged. So disengaged from reality it’s not even funny. It’s a fucking TV commercial. Nobody give a shit.
This has come as quite a shock I can tell you. I think, I’ve come to the conclusion that the whole thing was a bit of a con. A scam. An elaborate hoax.
The scam works like this:
1. The creative industry operates largely by holding ‘creative’ people ransom to their own self-image, precarious sense of self-worth, and fragile – if occasionally out of control ego. We tend to set ourselves impossibly high standards, and are invariably our own toughest critics. Satisfying our own lofty demands is usually a lot harder than appeasing any client, who in my experience tend to have disappointingly low expectations. Most artists and designers I know would rather work all night than turn in a sub-standard job. It is a universal truth that all artists think they a frauds and charlatans, and live in constant fear of being exposed. We believe by working harder than anyone else we can evaded detection. The bean-counters rumbled this centuries ago and have been profitably exploiting this weakness ever since. You don’t have to drive creative folk like most workers. They drive themselves. Just wind ‘em up and let ‘em go.
2. Truly creative people tend not to be motivated by money. That’s why so few of us have any. The riches we crave are acknowledgment and appreciation of the ideas that we have and the things that we make. A simple but sincere “That’s quite good.” from someone who’s opinion we respect (usually a fellow artisan) is worth infinitely more than any pay-rise or bonus. Again, our industry masters cleverly exploit this insecurity and vanity by offering glamorous but worthless trinkets and elaborately staged award schemes to keep the artists focused and motivated. Like so many demented magpies we flock around the shiny things and would peck each others eyes out to have more than anyone else. Handing out the odd gold statuette is a whole lot cheaper than dishing out stock certificates or board seats.
3. The compulsion to create is unstoppable. It’s a need that has to be filled. I’ve barely ‘worked’ in any meaningful way for half a year, but every day I find myself driven to ‘make’ something. Take photographs. Draw. Write. Make bad music. It’s just an itch than needs to be scratched. Apart from the occasional severed ear or descent into fecal-eating dementia the creative impulse is mostly little more than a quaint eccentricity. But introduce this mostly benign neurosis into a commercial context.. well that way, my friends lies misery and madness.
This hybridisation of the arts and business is nothing new of course – it’s been going on for centuries – but they have always been uncomfortable bed-fellows. But even artists have to eat, and the fuel of commerce and industry is innovation and novelty. Hey! Let’s trade. “Will work for food!” as the street-beggars sign says.
This Faustian pact has been the undoing of many great artists, many more journeymen and more than a few of my good friends. Add to this volatile mixture the powerful accelerant of emerging digital technology and all hell breaks loose. What I have witnessed happening in the last twenty years is the aesthetic equivalent of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. The wholesale industrialization and mechanistation of the creative process. Our ad agencies, design groups, film and music studios have gone from being cottage industries and guilds of craftsmen and women, essentially unchanged from the middle-ages, to dark sattanic mills of mass production. Ideas themselves have become just another disposable commodity to be supplied to order by the lowest bidder. As soon as they figure out a way of outsourcing thinking to China they won’t think twice. Believe me.
So where does that leave the artists and artisans? Well, up a watercolour of shit creek without a painbrush. That one thing that we prize and value above all else – the idea – turns out to be just another plastic gizmo or widget to be touted and traded. And to add insult to injury we now have to create them not in our own tine, but according to the quota and the production schedule. “We need six concepts to show the client first thing in the morning, he’s going on holiday. Don’t waste too much time on them though, it’s only meeting-fodder. He’s only paying for one so they don’t all have to be good, just knock something up. You know the drill. Oh, and one more thing. His favourite color is green. Rightho! See you in the morning then… I’m off to the Groucho Club.”
Have you ever tried to have an idea. Any idea at all, with a gun to your head? This is the daily reality for the creative drone. And when he’s done, sometime in the wee small hours, he then has to face his two harshest critics. Himself, and everyone else. “Ah. Sorry. Client couldn’t make the meeting. I faxed your layouts to him at his squash club. He quite liked the green one. Apart from the typeface, the words, the picture and the idea. Oh, and could the logo be bigger? Hope it wasn’t a late night. Thank god for computers eh? Rightho! I’m off to lunch.”
Alright, it’s not bomb disposal. But in it’s own way it’s dangerous and demanding work. And as I’ve said, the rewards tend to be vanishingly small. Plastic gold statuette anyone? I’ve seen quite a few creative drones fall by the wayside over the years. Booze mostly. Drugs occasionally. Anxiety. Stress. Broken marriages. Lots of those. Even a couple of suicides. But mostly just people temperamentally and emotionally ill-equipped for such a hostile and toxic environment. Curiously, there never seems to be any shortage of eager young worker drones queuing up to try their luck, although I detect that even their bright-eyed enthusiasm is staring to wane. Advertising was the sexy place to be in the eighties. The zeitgeist has move on. And so have most of the bright-young-things.
So how did I survive for thirty years? Well it was a close shave. Very close. And while on the inside I am indeed a ‘delicate flower’ as some Creative Director once wryly observed, I have enjoyed until recently, the outward physical constitution and rude heath of an ox. I mostly hid my insecurity and fear from everyone but those closest to me, and ran fast enough that I would never be found out. The other thing I did, I now discover, was to convince myself that there was nothing else, absolutely nothing, I would rather be doing. That I had found my true calling in life, and that I was unbelievably lucky to be getting paid – most of the time – for something that I was passionate about, and would probably be doing in some form or other anyway.
It turns out that my training and experience had equipped me perfectly for this epic act of self-deceit. This was my gig. My schtick. Constructing a compelling and convincing argument to buy, from the thinnest of evidence was what we did. “Don’t sell the sausage. Sell the sizzle” as we were taught at ad school.
Countless late nights and weekends, holidays, birthdays, school recitals and anniversary dinners were willingly sacrificed at the altar of some intangible but infinitely worthy higher cause. It would all be worth it in the long run…
This was the con. Convincing myself that there was nowhere I’d rather be was just a coping mechanism. I can see that now. It was’nt really important. Or of any consequence at all really. How could it be. We were just shifting product. Our product, and the clients. Just meeting the quota. Feeding the beast as I called it on my more cynical days.
So was it worth it?
Well of course not. It turns out it was just advertising. There was no higher calling. No ultimate prize. Just a lot of faded, yellowing newsprint, and old video cassettes in an obsolete format I can’t even play any more even if I was interested. Oh yes, and a lot of framed certificates and little gold statuettes. A shit-load of empty Prozac boxes, wine bottles, a lot of grey hair and a tumor of indeterminate dimensions.
It sounds like I’m feeling sorry for myself again. I’m not. It was fun for quite a lot of the time. I was pretty good at it. I met a lot of funny, talented and clever people, got to become an overnight expert in everything from shower-heads to sheep-dip, got to scratch my creative itch on a daily basis, and earned enough money to raise the family which I love, and even see them occasionally.
But what I didn’t do, with the benefit of perspective, is anything of any lasting importance. At least creatively speaking. Economically I probably helped shift some merchandise. Enhanced a few companies bottom lines. Helped make one or two wealthy men a bit wealthier than they already were.
As a life, it all seemed like such a good idea at the time.
But I’m not really sure it passes The Overnight Test.
Pity.
Oh. And if your reading this while sitting in some darkened studio or edit suite agonizing over whether housewife A should pick up the soap powder with her left hand or her right, do yourself a favour. Power down. Lock up and go home and kiss your wife and kids.”
If you powered down right now, how long would it take you to do something you actually love?
Going Gluten Free: Call Me Crazy
For the better half of my life I’ve been known to launch rather quickly into new directions that I have no reason to explore. Some could say I am eccentric. Well, my latest blast-off has been into the anti-gluten galaxy. Yes, I stopped eating wheat.
I’ve never met a dessert I didn’t like or a bowl of pasta I didn’t need. Homicide would be the short version of this story. And I’m pretty sure Sylvia Plath would have been OK if she just gorged on gluten. But to keep things interesting and bloggable, here’s what I think about my dumb recent exploration.
It started off cool. Hey why not eat brownies that are actually healthy for you and start making pizza crusts out of innocent salad materials? Sounds healthy! For a couple weeks it was great, I felt less bloated and had zero cravings for any wheat/sugar. Until I crashed so hard that I considered asking strangers for medication or drugs.One one gluten free day, schizophrenia crossed my mind. Do not decide to cut out gluten during the coldest month of the Canadian year.
During high school I was that friend who was vegetarian. Ironically, PETA ruined that mission when they mailed me a flowery brochure about chickens being sociable buddies who love nesting together in trees. Too bad they can’t fly up into the trees. This time the claims were right. I did feel less bloated, but nowhere did anyone say I would feel wrong enough to self-diagnose myself with schizophrenia.
If you’re thinking about going gluten free (and aren’t celiac), consider just cutting back. You’ll be amazed to see what you can eat in place of gluten: chickpeas in brownies, more lettuce, rice, cauliflower, delicious coconut, the list goes on. But let yourself enjoy a sandwich, get that muffin when you missed breakfast.
My next foray into inconvenient diets is: clean eating. A movement less radical, but healthier. Seriously, avocado chocolate pudding. I would never recommend this gluten-free life to anyone who doesn’t need to do it. Focus on eating less processed foods all around and incorporating more fruits and veggies into your diet. You know, common sense.
I can’t fully blame the gluten, there are crappy things going on in my life right now. So it may not have been the right time to cut out gluten, but I still believe in gluten. The trend in these “elimination diets” is disturbing. Dairy free, vegan, gluten free, nightshade free, blah blah blah. It all sounds like one thing to me: fun free. CHILLLLLLLLLLL, man.
Thursday marked my return to sweet, sweet gluten-filled sanity. I dove into this plate of Peanut Butter & Banana Pancakes at SCHOOL. I cannot wait to taste mac & cheese again.
Winter 2012 Checklist
- Have a hippie Christmas
- Go snowboarding and improve
Go skating- Finish sweater
- Sign up for Mississauga Marathon and STWM
Be a winter runner!- Get G1
On with the debt repayment, healthy lifestyle, active and positive thoughts, and carrying on everything I’ve built. But hey, Canadian winters are long so let’s throw in a lot of ice time!
The non-driver in me is ending, so this is finally the season it happens. I re-get my G1. Seriously, I want a big dog. And if I’m going to live easily with my pup, I need a fucking car. Or at least the ability to rent one.
Spring is always around the corner, especially when you’ve got runs to train for! Thanks to Moose Knuckles, winter will no longer be controlling my happiness, health, and fun. Go parka go!
And a very hippie Christmas, handmade cards, local or responsible gifts/packaging, giving back to less fortunate, all that good stuff. Smart consumerism!
Pointy Nails
It’s confession time: I’ve never had a spa day, gotten a mani or pedi, had a professional massage, or anything. I haven’t even gone to a legitimate hair stylist in three years. I love to paint my nails, and I prefer to leave the massages up to boy toys. Since growing my nails out an inch doesn’t happen overnight, and keeping natural nails at unbroken points for more than one day is just not going to happen, it’s time to hit the spa.
Seriously, we’re in Halloween “season” and the weather is witchy. This is prime time to go pointy. What is this look called? Goth femme fatale? Witchy urban chic? Fashion people, what’s the verdict on what us regular folk call pointy nails?
A Moveable Feast 