Wednesday 30 January 2013

A couple of gems from the Advertising Standards Authority

There are some absolute gems in the Advertising Standards Authority adjudications released today.

It’s good news for Honda...

We considered that viewers would recognise that the action of driving towards a supernatural opening portal was not realistic behaviour

...and good news for Converse, too.

We noted that one woman was wearing her bikini near palm trees and another appeared to be having a water fight, which suggested circumstances where women might ordinarily be in bikinis

Saturday 26 January 2013

CD review: Not Waving, But Drowning by The Self Help Group

CD review from Viva Lewes magazine, February 2013:

Not Waving, But Drowning sits firmly in the centre of the melodic Venn diagram embracing alt-country, folk and gentle rock music. If it were a place, it would be Laurel Canyon – the Los Angeles suburb where Crosby, Stills & Nash sang about a very, very, very fine house. Yet this album was born in Sussex; five-piece band The Self Help Group is based in Brighton, while Lewes’s Union Music Store produced the recordings. Each track has the warmth of Californian sunshine, with bright harmonies and rhythmic guitars partnered by lyrics that move from joyful humour to almost unbearable sadness. Despite the heartbreak, I can't stop listening.

The album costs £11.99 and is released on Monday 11 February. Needles, the first single from the album, can be found on iTunes and on YouTube.

Sunday 20 January 2013

Lewes weather

I've just discovered that the Met Office offers a website widget. I don't really have any reason to embed it here but... well...

This Weather Widget is provided by the Met Office

Sunday 6 January 2013

The mystery of writing

I've just been reading a blog post from last year by writer/artist Austin Kleon. It's entitled 'Writing: it doesn’t get any easier' and talks about the late David Rakoff, who'd described the challenge of writing as being like "having to reverse-engineer a meal out of rotten food".

That's enormously reassuring

Back in spring 2011, when reading 'The Writing Life' by Annie Dillard, I suddenly realised I didn't know how to be a copywriter. I could do it... but I couldn't really explain how I did it, so wasn't sure if I was doing it 'right'. Perhaps there was a better way.

In the movie of my life, this would be the part where Nicolas Cage (who's playing me) sees a beam of light shining through the bedroom curtains. He leaps from his bed and runs to his well-stocked library, scrabbling to find copies of advertising classics; dog-eared editions by Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy, Drayton Bird and Philip Kotler. He pulls them from the shelves and sits on the floor reading them as the sun rises outside.

In the film, Nicolas Cage would find some kind of revelation and would walk off into a warm orange sunrise with a mug of coffee in his hand. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised he'd be missing the point.