Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov

Long time no book. The reason is not, though, that I have been lazy, but only because the last book was a rather long one. That is also the reason why it looks so battered, which I like a lot. It has been with me for a while and it shows it. Didn’t understand much of it, though it seems there is lots of Rene Girard’s theory of sacrificing and the sacred in here.

I simply copied the passages I found the most striking.

“And since man is not strong enough to get by without the miracle, he creates new miracles for himself, his own now, and bows down before the miracle, of the quack and the witchcraft of the peasant woman” (Dostoyevsky, 1880, p.333).

“each person being guilty for all creatures and for all things, as well as his own sins” (Dostoyevsky, 1880, p.392). This is what the scapegoat does, and this is what Dimitry will do, being punished for a crime, he did not commit, but accepting the punishment. And by this process the scapegoat can become sacred.

“Bear in mind particularly that you can be no man’s judge. For a criminal can have no judge upon the erth until that judge himself has perceived that he is every bit as much a criminal as the man who stands before him, and that for the crime of the man who stands before him he himself may well be more guilty than anyone else. Only when he grasps this may he become a judge.” (Dostoyevsky, 1880, p.415).

“The human race fails to accepts its prophets and does them to death, but men love their martyrs and honour those whom they have martyred. (…)

Modern Art – 1880 to present – the museum of modern art. (John Elderfield, ed.)

I got this one ages ago when I actually visited MoMa in New York. The MoMa itself is a horrible experience, ways too crowded and somehow very sterile and less fun than the Tate Modern in London for example. Thus I left quickly, bought this book, so I have a chance to catch up on all.

And it turned out to be very interesting: “Basically, art is making meaning. In a sense, it’s philosophy made concrete.” (Duchamp). And as theorists artists seem to be very good at writing aphorisms: fun little theory sniplets. Here you go:

For Picasso “Cubism was a kind of deliverance. It obliged him consistently to forgo the refuge of virtuosity.“

“Leger argued that art must acknowledge its time not through the naturalistic representation of contemporary subject matter (“visual realism”) but by transforming that subject matter through explicitly pictorial devices – “a realism of conception”.

For Duchamp “there is a brief to be made as an artist against certain forms, because those forms constitute fixed meanings. Ready-mades that are naturalized as the language of art are not seen, in fact, as ready-made”

“The style he (Malevich) called Suprematism, which eliminated all references to the world of visible reality, leaving only the purely pictorial elements” (Elderfield, 2004, p.200).

Mondrian “felt that naturalistic forms in painting were limited forms by the very definition of their specific references (…) He wanted to destroy the particular form”” (Elderfield, 2004, p.206).

Surrealism is a “pure psychic automatism, by which one intends to express verbally, in writing or by any other method the real functioning of the mind. Dictation by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, and beyond any aesthetic or moral preoccupation”.

Magritte said “My painting have no reducible meaning; they are a meaning” (Elderfield, 2004, p.221).

On Rothko: “We no longer look at a painting as we did in the nineteenth century, we are meant to enter it, to sink into its atmosphere of mist light or to draw it around us like a coat – or a skin.” (Elderfield, 2004, p.311).

Advertising Works 15 - Laurence Green

Another one. Very interesting fort wo case studies: Felix, because it shows that it sometimes pays off to sticking to an old camapign and not trying to disrupt the marketand for the foreword by Laurence Green, where he shows that creativity doesn’t have to be in the advertising but often is in the product innovation, or in general more upstream on the client side.

Mark Twain - The Mysterious Stranger

Another book about Satan: not as good as ‘the confidence man’ but still fun. In this book, Satan is an Angel. Yet he has no respect for Man:

“No brute ever does a cruel thing – that is the monopoly with the Moral Sense. (…) A sense whose function it is to distinguish between right or wrong, with liberty to choose which one of them he will do. Now what advantage can he get out of that? (…) There shouldn’t be any wrong; and without the moral sense there wouldn’t be any.” (Twain, 1922, pp.50-51).

Being an Angel, Satan tries to help Man. Yet, since to Satan Man’s life is a complete disaster, he helps by killing people or making them insane:

Yet towards the end, the book takes a surprising turn: it is not all black. The misery is just proof that the world doesn’t exist: ““Nothing exists save empty space – and you!” “I!” “And you are not you – you have no body, no bones, you are but thought (…) Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that you universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange because they are so frankly and hysterically insane – like all dreams: God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones” (Twain, 1922, p.139).

Hemut Krone. The book.

Not much to say about this book. Rather than quotes I should put scans of his best ads here. And from the amount of post it you can see I will take plenty of scans. Hence, just a couple of quotes from the guy who did VW, Avis and Polaroid:

“Our mission is to sell products. We should not attempt to make advertising.” (Challis, 2004, p.252).

Something interesting on logos “I’ve spent my whole life fighting logos. Logos say I’m an ad. Turn the page.” (Challis, 2004, p.63).

On the Avis strategy: “Hertz had 75% of the rental car market and Avis, just ahead of contenders three on down, held second place with ten to eleven percent.Avis was going to take on Hertz, and polarize the market by differentiating itself from all the other little players” (Challis, 2004, p.112).

And how VW and Avis worked: “In another way, and in a harder style, another American nerve. He’d done it with Koenig in ‘Think small’ and ‘Lemon.’ – challenging two of the fundamental wisdoms of US boosterism. Now he had done it again, on being second.” (Challis, 2004, p.115).

Philip Roth - Zuckerman Bound

4 books about writing and the relationship of the writer to his subjects: from exploitation, love, stealing up to himself.

“You are a bastard. (…) To you everything is disposable. Everything is exposable. (…) To you it’s all fun and games. But that isn’t the way it is for the rest of us.” (Roth, 1979, p.257).

The books are about how people react to Zuckerman writing about them and finding their lives made public, how they remove themselves from him in order to avoid being written about.

This way he loses his subject and is thrown onto himself – which makes him ill.

Yet, it turns out, the trouble is less the lack of any subject, but the constant search for the right one, and the constant doubt whether it is good enough:

“The burden isn’t thateverything has to be a book. It’s that everything can be a book”.

How to make it as an advertising creative - Simon Veksner

No, I don't want to amke it as a creative, but they are my main target audience for briefings. So it helps understanding what gets them going.

David Droga in the foreword: “We’re still storytellers, but it’s not about a story that starts and finishes within 30 seconds of a TV ad anymore. Our job now is more about instigating a story, and letting it go. We can create momentum. Our work doesn’t have to be as disposable as before.”

I think this one is interesting, because it goes beyond simply telling us advertising people to let go and let consumers do our job with shitty UGC. Yet, if we are in the business of storytelling, the question simply is, how to tell a story, with the participation of your target audience?

Another interesting one, for everyone planning to get hired by an agency: "Ask yourself “What protion of that agency’s creative output would get you hired at that agency?”"

And a classic Ogilvy: “Get rid of the dogs who spread gloom!"