The Spider and the Dragonfly and the Praying Mantis

  A Spider was obsessed with trapping a particularly large Dragonfly. His prey was impossible to snag and not just because a dragonfly is one of the fastest insects in the world. It is also so pointy it could pierce the Spider’s aerial web like a sewing needle through chunky yarn.

       To make matters worse, the Dragonfly would sometimes steal small insect fare while on its way through the web, which infuriated the Spider.

       The Spider tried everything to stop him. He tried spinning different silks. It spun sticky silk and fluffy silk and every kind of variation that its glands could muster. It built them horizontally and vertically. It tried funnel designs, dome designs and tubular designs. Nothing worked.

       One day, out of energy and out of gumption, the Spider sat on the edge of its web, his spirit as depleted as his stickiness. On a nearby tree, a green leaf caught his attention. The leaf appeared to undulate. Straining his eyes, the Spider could see there was a green Praying Mantis camouflaged on the green leaf. “Maybe I should ask her for some advice,” he thought, “after all, who better than a Praying Mantis to ask for spiritual guidance.”

       “Why don’t you try to meditate,” suggested the Praying Mantis.

       “Easy for you to say,” replied the Spider. “You look cool in your prayer-like stance, but what’ll I look like with my big head and short legs crossed into a Yoga position.”

        “Hey Spider,” said the Praying Mantis, “You need to get away a bit, get some distance and spend some time reflecting and analyzing and dreaming.”

       The idea of getting away seemed potentially refreshing, so the Spider walked to another tree, climbed high enough for a grand view, a view that would be conducive to a fresh perspective, and he relaxed. He let his mind wander and think about nothing in particular.

       Then the Spider spotted a dragonfly – not the dragonfly that he had obsessed over, just an ordinary dragonfly. Then it spotted another dragonfly. Then it spotted them posing for each other, and the pose they struck was some sort of ritual, a mating posture. The Spider saw the male and female dragonfly contort themselves into a wheel position, and it thought it kind of kinky when the dragonflies flew together, docked in tandem, the male towing the female in blissful flight. The Spider had an idea.

       The Spider trucked back to his web and wove a weave that looked exactly like a dragonfly in a mating position. And no sooner had this silky decoy been woven, when a dragonfly came into view. The Dragonfly aligned itself perfectly with the decoy and landed right on top of it in hopes of consummation, which is to say it had alighted on the sticky web and could not move to save its life. The Spider had caught the Dragonfly.

Moral: When it comes to reflecting and analyzing and dreaming, it is good to get away from the web.

You're gonna love this post!

I’ve never been crazy about The Shins and now…I don’t know, there’s something about Mercer’s songwriting that seems forced, like he’s trying too hard. Dylan would never settle for a line like, “And away they did run.” “Did run?” Seriously? It’s like bad poetry from a junior high schooler who was just happy he found a rhythm and rhyme to go with “done,” a difficult word to find a rhyme for. But what really bugs me is the first line of “Simple Song:” “This is just a simple song.” I hate that. I first heard it while watching the band on SNL. I was in bed. And after that, I squirmed and grumbled and couldn’t fall asleep.

Look, if it’s just to tell me what’s coming up in a self-confessing way, then it’s laziness. For god sakes, get on with it and tell me something new.

If it’s meant to be post-modern, I’m tired of that. Of course I’m really not sure what is meant by “post-modern” anymore but if it’s that self-conscious cynical view that makes fun of the medium it’s in while trying to make a point, then, yes, I’m tired of that, too. Cynicism can turn into cliché just like everything else.

I hear this sort of thing all the time in presentations. Before I see the work, I hear, “We wanted to do something funny, sooo…..” and, “This is just a simple spot…” and my personal favorite, "I showed this next spot to my girlfriend and she thought it was hysterical..." Let me be the judge of that, thank you. 

To sell good work, we are constantly professing the power of impact, wanting the consumer to discover a surprising conclusion. We’re right about that. So we should apply that principle and have the confidence to allow clients to feel the work. Before we tell them what to think.

 Enough said. 

Experience this!

There have always been people who get easily distracted, brief-brained people who'd chomp away on popcorn during a Bergman film, people who'd talk during a revelatory homily, but with social media, we now have to contend with the arms of those people entering our view of the stage or screen every two seconds to snap a photo with stupid little smart phones. I suppose those are the same people who go to Europe and see a different city each day. It's enough to say you were there; it's a Foursquare world after all.

But what the hell. I should lighten up, right. So, with my new iPhone 4S, I snapped this little gem the other night of Patti Smith at the Bowery Ballroom. As you can see, she is really into it, offering up her heart and soul during the poetic rant of Rock ‘N Roll Nigger. I think in that one song she says what Lady Gaga could only dream of communicating about everyone’s potential to express themselves. It was sooo amazing!

Trash

The above title is the name of a New York Dolls song, which I thought I might be able to reference in something about the Sydney Opera House, but, when I thought about it, had nothing whatsoever to do with the Sydney Opera House and what I had recently learned about it. Who knows, maybe I’ll be able to use it one day for something else, if for no other reason than the fact that I love the song and I love the band.

Anyway, I learned that the original design for the opera house was the result of an international competition. As the story goes, there were three judges going through entries and they had narrowed it down to a few finalists. Then came Eero Saarinen, the famous architect who has now been immortalized in crossword puzzles for his odd four-lettered first name. Arriving late to Sydney, he saw the final entries and wasn’t crazy about any of them. So he started going through the trash. And there, among the rejected entries – and mind you, there were some 200 hundred entries – he landed on a little something by a Swede named Jorn Utzon which he thought was outstanding.

Several years later, the American architect, Louis Kahn, wrote that, “Light didn’t know how beautiful it was until it was reflected off this building.”

I’m thinking of getting a little photo of the Sydney Opera House for my office. It would be a reminder to think twice before killing an idea.

Midnight in Wherever*

A week or so ago my wife and I were in Cannes and one night we decided we'd forgo the bouillabaisse and rosé for a movie. This is an unusual thing to do in Cannes. I know this because there were only seven or eight people in the theater.

We just thought it would be cool to see Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, walk out of the theater with the afterglow of Paris and still be in France. I love that movies can do that. Perhaps it's not such a good idea with something by Wes Craven, but, from the good reviews of Woody Allen's movie, we thought this could make for a lovely evening.

And Minuit a Paris was really lovely. I thought Owen Wilson played a credible Woody Allen. I thought Marian Cotillard was enchanting and, good god, so beautiful. And I thought it was funny when Owen Wilson's character, Gil Pender, realized that he doesn't want to live literally in the past because, whether in the Renaissance, the Belle Epoque or the 1920's, there would be no Zithromax. I decided I needed to download some Sidney Bechet so I could conjure some of this mood at will, like when heading home on the commuter train from Manhattan.

Now, I wonder if the thought of going to the movies in Cannes had something to do with the ad festival. The festival encourages us to think globally, to think how something might play in other countries. Maybe while I was studying the shortlisted print and outdoor ads, strolling up and down the gallery of ads and being blown away by several of them, I was thinking about the potential effect of artful communication. I'd like to think so.

All I know is that great work takes people to places they want to go.

*The photograph above is from the beautiful book, Paris by Night, by Brassai. Brassai was from Hungary.

Learning about advertising from a 3-year old.

I recently viewed 3 readings of Billy Collins’s poem, “Litany” on You Tube. One was by Billy Collins (http://bit.ly/cfldS); one was a recitation by a three-year old (http://bit.ly/bkZIYm); the other was a by a guy who read and smoked a pipe at the same time (http://bit.ly/j7wNqZ). Not surprisingly, Billy Collins was smart and funny and wonderful. And for second place, it was between the 3-year old, who had memorized the poem, and the guy with the pipe.

Admittedly, the guy who read the verse and smoked a pipe at the same time was impressive, especially when his pipe went out and he non-chalantly loosened the tobacco, tamped it and lit it up again. All while reading! Did I mention he had a beard that made him look quite – quite! – erudite?

And admittedly, the three-year old didn’t appear very erudite. Occasionally, he looked around the room at his toys that seemed to beckon him, a distraction which subverted any erudition that he might otherwise have exuded and made it impossible for us to imagine him at dinner parties using words like “droll” and “Nietzschean.”

Nevertheless, despite this obvious handicap, the 3-year old was remarkable. Seriously, a few of his lines flowed with surprising ease, so naturally that I forgot he was reciting a poem. I heard the words as someone would speak them. His approach was appropriate, because if you’ve read Collins, you know that he can be a deceivingly complex poet who very often uses the colloquial and its rhythms. This child may have been flawed and lacking in polish, but he was impressive. The little guy deserved second place.

Our own work should be so effective. If engagement is to take the consumer unaware, our creativity must not smack of advertising or affectation. It should be “smart,” just without the quotation marks. Most of the time, I would venture, it should touch the part of us that we have in common with each other – it should touch the child within us all.

Don't be a lawyer joke.

Recently, my wife and I had to take a PTO to square away some legal matters concerning our appartment in Chicago – not at all how I'd like to spend a day off. Nevertheless we flew to the Second City, checked into our hotel and headed down the business side of Michigan Avenue. Once ushered into our lawyer's office, my wife sat on the couch, while I antsily snooped around the room. I scanned the spines of the tomes and journals, noted the obligatory diplomas, attempted to read an entry or two of his day planner for something juicy, spotted some folders on his desk and wondered which one was ours, and read a couple of lawyer cartoons that were taped to the wall which weren't very funny. My god, this was a dull place. On the floor beside his desk, he had one of those big boxy briefcases that contain a filing cabinet worth of case folders –– you know, so he could transport half his dull office home with him every night. I sat down.

I theorized that his world was filled with all kinds of promises – promises that are broken and promises that are kept. When people break the law, they break a promise. There is an initial agreement, a lot of discussion about the interpretion of the law, but the existing law doesn't usually change, in which case we promise to uphold it. Hey, we had a tenant that broke a promise –– that was why we were in Chicago in the first place –– she wasn't paying her rent. While we hadn't met our tenant in person yet, she promised to be a bitch.

Anyway, we attended the hearing, the judge ruled in our favor and the law gave us a new promise: The tenant would be evicted.

A couple of days later, back in New York, there was this hour-long meeting scheduled to talk about work. I didn't know why there was this meeting, perhaps it slipped onto my schedule while I was away, but it seems there are lots of meetings that I attend whose purpose is not clear, so I didn't question it. The thing was, the creative team was asked to share their thinking, but they didn't have any real ads yet. They believed they had a cool idea; they even seemed excited about it, just the executions weren't ready to be shared yet. So in swooped the critical thinkers.

Everyone had their opinions; everyone hypothesized about what the ads should look like. Ugh. The meeting that was only scheduled for an hour, and probably would have only taken an hour had we full-fledged ads, ended up taking 3 hours. Serious concerns were bubbling up like club soda. It was excrutiating, everyone trying desparately to establish a predictable premise to which we could be gladly held. 'Promise us,' they seemed to say, 'that the work will clearly come out of the brief.'

Well, a serious creative department should avoid making promises. I don't like promises. I don't believe that we should be in the habit of making them.

Ironically, just two days later, the team revealed their thinking and while it wasn't at all what anyone had in mind, everyone loved the work. Even more surprisingly, the work was on strategy.

You see, if we had made a promise, serendipity would not have been able to happen. If we had made a promise, something that was half-baked may have been trashed. If we had made a promise, the unexpected would not have materialized.

So leave the promises to the lawyers. They feed on predictability.

(P.S. I feel it was somewhat of an achievment to have written this post and resist the temptation to tell a lawyer joke. But we all know the problem with lawyer jokes, right? Lawyer's don't think they're funny, and no one else thinks they're jokes.)