Pink Air

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.

Comfort and nostalgia

Walking to school behind Russell, Arthur and Anne, I started to remember what a great feeling it is at Arthur's age to move through a complex environment knowing that your parents, the ultimate source of safety and acceptance, are right behind you. As we get older, the need for comfort gets to seem a bit shameful. Which is silly.

Marketing, on the other hand, has always treated comfort very seriously, if sometimes dishonestly. But the traditional approach has always been backward-looking, based on the idea that "the past was better". Which is mostly silly.

It would be interesting to look at where and how people find comfort today. Is comfort necessarily nostalgic? Can we be comforted by new things?

Conflict + beauty = interesting

A lovely quote from Arthur Hopcraft's The Football Man, a series of essays on the state of English football circa 1965:

What happens on the football field matters, not in the way that food matters but as poetry does to some people and alcohol does to others: it engages the personality. It has conflict and beauty, and when those two qualities are present together in something offered for public appraisal they represent much of what I understand to be art.

3 plus or minus 1

You're probably familiar with the sometimes misinterpreted idea that short term memory is limited to seven (plus or minus two) pieces of independent information. My personal corollary is that I can remember only three (plus or minus one) interesting things about anything. This phenomenon is disturbingly scale-independent: I can remember only three things each about my childhood, World War I and what I ate for breakfast this morning.

I spent five years studying psychology. Here are the three interesting things I remember:

1. The Fundamental Attribution Error. We tend to explain the behavior (especially bad behavior) of others by the kind of person they are ("Ashlee Simpson is a fake") and our own behavior by the particular circumstances ("My drummer hit the wrong button and/or I had acid reflux.") I recognize this error everyday in myself, in respondents, in the news. In fact, any randomly selected newspaper front page can be usefully interpreted as a series of proofs and variations on the Fundamental Attribution Error.

2. The mesmerizing power of irregular reinforcement schedules. I was reminded of this by the ad above for a bank account tie-in with the Dutch lottery. Every month you have the chance to double your balance and enter the Lotto drawing. For this, you accept a lower interest rate which, as the website cheerfully points out, might be less than you would spend on an equal number of Lotto tickets! Isn't there something brand discordant about a savings bank/lottery relationship? Aren't savings banks the champions of regular reinforcement? And why does regular reinforcement seem morally superior to irregular?

3. Everybody is interesting. Our minds are too complex not to throw off an ongoing shower of unexpected, incomplete, meaningful stuff that's worth thinking about. If someone seems boring or shallow, it's because you and s/he are not in the right situation or relationship to one another. Change the situation. Ask a different question.

Toxoplasma and you

One of the most useful skills a planner can have is to be interesting. Have interesting stories to tell, interesting analogies to make and interesting facts to share. Here's something my friend Ted, former bond trader/current middle school science teacher, told me about that falls into all three of those categories: brain-controlling parasites. Surely you know something or someone who can usefully be described that way.