Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the blog
You know the creative well has run dry when you start blogging about other people’s blogs, and even drier when you’re reduced to blogging about other people’s comments. But, in true creative style, I’m not going to let that stop me.
Scamp’s advertising haikus had me chortling over lunch. My favourite has to be by this guy:
Direct Marketing
I chose it for a living
Now I want to die.
My faith in humanity is dwindling. I’ve been working part time in a pub for the best part of a month and every day I’m reminded of a) how rude people are and b) what a waste of money alcohol is. People will spend twenty or thirty quid on drinks night after night and have nothing to show for it. It’s so different seeing things from the other side of the bar, and it’s definitely put me off food and drink for the time being.
One of our regulars was complaining about his expensive divorce, having to pay school fees for his two daughters, the cost of stables for their horse, the list went on of course, and how was he ever going to afford Christmas because he was financially crippled. Tragic stuff. Needless to say if he hadn’t spent at least a tenner a night on flat beer and terrible company for the past year he’d be much better off, and his wife probably wouldn’t have left him in the first place.
But despite the burnt fingers, demanding guests, unwelcome stares, gristle spitting and exploding beer it’s all good experience. There’s a lot more to it than pulling pints – boundless enthusiasm, kicking out drug dealers, making fires, haute cuisine, stock control, negotiations, endless cleaning – and all within strict laws and tight brand guidelines. In fact, Ember’s approach to all that was what got me interested in branding in the first place, giving me first-hand experience of what brand standards were and why they were important.
For every guest that sees serving staff as the lowest of the low, with carte blanche to conveniently ignore the niceties of human interaction, thankfully there’s usually another that goes out of their way to be friendly and, most importantly, tips well. It’s people like that that keep me going every night, when I’m being told to fetch more mayonnaise for Chipmonster in the corner and trying to explain the difference between still and sparkling water to a man from Nigeria with Krony man putting the world to rights in the background and the quiz night crowd jostling for J20s at the bar.
monkey horse
Originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.
The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
“I suppose you are real?” said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.
fog 5
Originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.
‘Each of us is grazed at least once, perhaps more than once, by the power of this question.
The question looms in moments of great despair, when things tend to lose all their weight and all meaning becomes obscured… It is present in all moments of rejoicing, when all the things around us are transfigured and seem to be there for the first time, as if it might be easier to think that they are not than to understand that they are.
The question is upon us in boredom, when we are equally removed from despair and joy, and everything about us seems so hopelessly commonplace that we no longer care whether anything is or is not.’
Heidegger, ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’, trans. R. Manheim
br 15, originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.
Sometimes I just feel like part of the scenery. How can you engage with the world when you are the world? How can something physical capture anything more than the physical?
In the world, life and objects meet, interact, happen. In a picture, life can never exist. Everything is an object, for everything is colours and lines on a 5×7′ piece of glossy paper.
I touch my desk, a book, a mug of tea. I’m alive, moving, choosing. I am me, rippling and humming with facets. But in a photograph I’m just as static and inhuman as any object. All flat in lines and a present past. All dead but seeming real. And there’s half a heartbeat of me, with that thought in my head, words frozen mid-flow in the space of my mind like juggling balls. Feeling angry, disappointed, satisfied, deceptive, victorious? You’d never know if I was one or none or all of them at once; I’m not just alive, I’m beyond alive, unreachable, unseeable, unthingable.
