Pink Air

Music friendship

A friend of mine sent me a link to a music school in Myanmar where students and teachers, many of whom lost their own homes, are now coordinating and carrying out cyclone relief projects. Gitameit Music Center (gita=music, meit=friendship) is both a school for local musicians and a focus for international music exchange, and their connections to Western musicians have helped them get the word out about what they're doing and how important it is since many international efforts are being blocked at the border.

Listening to the stories of their students and teachers got me to donate when general reporting on the overall devastation had not. That's not so surprising. Personal stories are generally more powerful than broad description. More surprising, at least to me, was how credible and impactful I found the fact that they aren't experts, just people who were trying to learn a part, lost in some difficult passage, when they were reoriented by the weather.

Irony Will Eat Itself

Philippe sent this link to a viral video from Qualcomm. ("Viral" only in the sense that the makers apparently want it to become viral.) It's a fake ad for a wireless handset that's implanted in your hand. Get it? (Okay, the name is funny.)

What's strange is that this site links to, and is meant to publicize, a Qualcomm campaign called "Wireless Life" which is also about non-existent stuff from the future. But for some reason, we're supposed to take this stuff more seriously. Seriously? After making fun of futuristic tech-puffery vaporware, they lead you into their own futuristic tech-puffery vaporware.

I think that in the age of Colbert, people are so soaked in irony they've forgotten what irony is besides a way to show that you don't take yourself too seriously and that you "get it" (whatever "it" is.)

Business advice for zombies

I'd rather read the book described on the spine:

Back to content then I guess

Perineal media

Sitting on a wet bicycle seat isn't the worst thing that can happen to you, but still. So I don't mind the new media trendlette of giveaway bike seat covers here in Amsterdam. This one warns that too much biking can lead to testicular cancer. The cactus is nice but the best part is the SMS code for donating: FIGHT BAL.

Bucharest is interesting

This is Catalin Iliescu. For 10 years he worked at the reception desks of various hotels in Bucharest where he noticed steadily increasing demand for limousine service, especially among foreign visitors. So he started his own service, which has since grown from just him to include six other drivers. Romania today, he says, "looks like El Dorado. Foreigners are all coming because they see the chance to make lots of money quickly. Romanians are all moving to Spain."

Bucharest looks like a 100-year old back up of Paris, a compressed image of continental elegance recorded on a decaying medium. As one of the conference attendees put it, "It's like Havana, but cold." Things are changing quickly though, especially since Romania joined the EU this year. I don't imagine it will get much warmer, but who knows what it will be like in five years? It's a good time to be a Romanian planner.

A delayed thank you to Bogdana, Cristian, Diana and their Masterplan and APG Romania partners for inviting me to speak at the conference and taking me to the president's favorite restaurant. And to everyone who came to the workshop and helped me learn more about interestingness.

By the way, here are the results from the "Which is more interesting?" questions you kindly answered. (Note that while only 10% felt that Galaxy Quest looked more interesting than American Beauty, that's a 100% increase over the number who raised their hands for it in public.)

Advertising Age

“To be able to talk with finesse about something one does not know is worth more than the universe of books"
        Pierre Bayard, author of How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read

Is this more true today than it was 100 years ago? 

End of play

The first client-agency meeting after the pitch, the "kickoff" meeting, is an interesting emotional combination of beginning and ending. It's the start of the official working relationship, but it's often the end of the unofficial playing relationship.

During the pitch, client and agency are both playacting to some degree, which isn't a bad thing. In trying to make an impression and be attractive, we can take on the role of our best selves: bold, collegial, curious. It's one of those situations (like talking to a cab driver in an unfamiliar city) where taking on a role can make us more free. Unfortunately, many kickoff meetings are like going backstage for the first time where, instead of debating strategy with Henry V, you're suddenly listening to Kenneth Branagh complain about the broken lightbulb in his dressing room.

But kickoff doesn't have to mean end of play as I was recently reminded. The meeting began with the clients' list of reasons why our pitch idea was good. Always nice to hear. But after 45 minutes x 12 clients worth of discussion, the list of "reasons why not" was twice as long. So I had to ask, "Why did you choose us?" There was a pause, and then a couple of people began to speak and what they said was so lovely and unexpected, I'm still a little verklempt:

"You all seemed to be visibly struggling with what you were saying...Most agencies act like they already had the answer years ago or they want to impose something on you that doesn't fit, but you were uncertain. You were still thinking very hard...We thought, you know, this actually is hard and we'll be struggling along with it for awhile, so who do we want struggling along next to us?"

It's too long for a t-shirt, so I'm having it set to music.

Disinterestingness

We have seven family mottoes at our house, most of which are variations on the idea that things are often not what you expect. Number five, for example:

Everybody is deep. But some people are deep and straight while others are deep and crooked.

Everyone has depths, parts of themselves that are hidden, maybe even to themselves, but sometimes the depths are relatively predictable: Most extroverts have a shadow introvert side. Most  neat freaks nurture a remote field of disorder somewhere. That's deep and straight.

Deep and crooked is no more deep, but is less predictable, more puzzling and therefore more immediately interesting: what does this have to do with that? How do an interest in medieval cookery, a four-year stint in semi-pro hockey and a paralyzing fear of mannequins combine to make a person?  Our desire to form stable, integrated pictures of people (including ourselves) and things (including brands) is a powerful motivation and provides the fuel for interestingness. Which means that a certain amount of apparent chaos, of disintegration, is necessary for something to be interesting.

So I enjoyed responding to Kevin's tag request for "five things that no one knows about you". It makes me more interesting to myself.

1. I'm terrified in the presence of things that are very big and very old. I thought I was going to black out at the temples in Prambanan. My sister has the same fear which she discovered in Greece. Could something that specific be genetic?

2. A number of unlikely songs make me weepy, including Life On Mars, I Dream Of Wires and Once In A Lifetime.

3. I've been interested in the Black Death since I was eleven.

4. I used to be a nanny.

5. I have a friend (well, more friend of friend) who's a zombie.

Perfect thing

21 years ago, I was in an IT training program at Morgan Stanley in New York. (We called it "MIS" back then. Business computing nomenclature wasn't fully militarized until 1994.) One night (we worked rotating 12-hour shifts), I was working with Robbie, a smart, funny Nigerian Brit masquerading as a street-hardened wide boy.* We were batting the "England versus America" ball back and forth when he called the game to an abrupt halt with a personal accusation: "You're not a real American. I know plenty of people like you back home." Since then, I've suffered this same calumny many times in many forms, ranging from the wounded nobility of "The Least American American" to the somewhat less stirring "tempermentally Canadian."

If there is any validity to this stubbornly reliable assessment, I can think of three possible reasons:
    1. I'm an atheist.
    2. I think chocolate is just OK.
    3. I'm not a people person. I'm more of a thing person.

It's hard to say which of my qualities is most comtemptible. I can only say that as a proud American thing person, I enjoyed (though not immoderately) reading "The Perfect Thing", about the development of the iPod. Apple knows that specs are important, but how a thing curves and hefts can make it mesmerizing. The perfect thing always looks disarmingly simple at first, but the longer you look, the greater your suspicion that some world-encompassing spirit is contained inside. In a kind of aesthetic daze, you reflexively run your eyes and fingers over it, trying to unlock and consume the embedded secret, but you never quite reach it and if this sounds like pornography, that's because it is.

I have two and a half perfect things:

The Crayola 64 box was my childhood mandala. Each color has a meaning and they can be arranged to form any number of comprehensive thinking systems.

I don't know where we got this Swedish bowl, but it was the first perfect thing I recognized. It has an almost synesthetic quality. It looks the way the word "bowl" sounds and vice versa.

This rain jacket is matte black (along with snowy white, the official colors of material pornography) and all the details are smoothly hidden. If I could just remove that damn EMS logo it would be perfect.

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* He's now something of a Silicon Valley player, featured in Chris Anderson's introductory "Long Tail" article in Wired.