An oasis of insight

After reading the title of this post, no doubt you're expecting great things – or, grave disappointment (not that I would hold it against you).

And you'd be right. On both counts.

Welcome to the world of real estate agents, the modern day leaders of literature, who shower us on a weekly basis with all manner of adjectives, superlatives and seductive turns of phrase.

So much so that last weekend's Sydney Morning Herald thrust them into the spotlight with an article entitled Seductive turn in saucy sales spin. Which could have just as well been written by a real estate agent given the fact that the article was neither as seductive nor as saucy as the headline had advertised – the very thing that made me read it in the first place.

For anyone still interested (in spite of the lack of X-rated content), here it is.

As you may have noticed, the article ends with a quote from the aptly-named Byron Rose, who says, "Words can be important, but I still think good photos of a property are far more important".

I can't help but wonder where the facts fit on his scale of importance.

Christmas comedown

I meant to post this a few weeks ago, but better late than never.

It's about Christmas trees. And I must admit to feeling more than a little guilty – emotionally and environmentally.

Here's what became of ours.

Once a sparkling beacon of light and joy in our living room. Now a little shabby and bare out in the yard.

And here's more (all photographed with a little more flair than my own iPhone effort above).

What's worse, my feelings were not instinctive. Instead, what originally started me off down this path was a blog by a friend of mine, Ingrid – the Aesthetics of Joy.

In her recent post On Christmas trees and emotional sustainability, Ingrid writes about the idea that the emotional meaning of objects is transformed by their context. In other words: "Before December 25th, a Christmas tree is an aesthetic of joy and anticipation. After Jan 2nd, it's trash to be dealt with, with connotations of loss and sadness."

And so began my own feelings of guilt.

The post and the poem

This week, a friend of mine tipped me off about a conversation happening here about whether technology is killing the way we communicate.

I posted a comment, and it started me thinking about how everything is now about tweets and updates and txts – basically anything short and sweet that is easy to absorb and doesn't make you think too hard. And while I can appreciate that, I would also like to think that there's still a place in the world for writing that is longer and a little more challenging and creative.

With that in mind, here's something you don't see much these days. A poem.

This one 's by Ted Hughes.

Written in 1957, it's called The Thought-Fox, and it deals with the idea of creativity and the writing process itself. And I hope you enjoy it.

The Thought-Fox

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:

Something else is alive

Beside the clock's loneliness

And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:

Something more near

Though deeper within darkness

Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,

A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;

Two eyes serve a movement, that now

And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow

Between trees, and warily a lame

Shadow lags by stump and in hollow

Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,

A widening deepening greenness,

Brilliantly, concentratedly,

Coming about its own business

Till with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox

It enters the dark hole of the head.

The window is starless still; the clock ticks,

The page is printed.

Sex, decks and women's health clubs

Since the last time I wrote about crimes against the English language (shame on you, KFC), a report has been released claiming that the average teenager uses a mere 800 words each day. On this occasion, texting and hip-hop culture seem to be taking the brunt of the blame, but I'm starting to wonder if 800 words a day isn't so bad, so long as they don't include either of the examples that follow in this post.

Most businesses go to market with a new brand or campaign only after months of research and planning. However, Fernwood Women's Health Clubs and Cabot's Clever Deck both seem to have dreamed up their campaigns after watching an episode of "20 To 1: Funniest Ads In The World".

Fernwood would like to have us sniggering at the back of the class with this dumbed-down approach to getting people's attention.

And Clever Deck have really gone to town with some tacky sex gags of their own – lasts twice as long, geddit!

Just to be clear, it's not the swearing or the innuendo that I find offensive, simply the fact that neither is particularly funny or uses humour in some way that is relevant to the brand in question.

My dad always said to me that people who use swear words suffer from a poor range of vocabulary (although I'm not sure if he'd managed to pin it down to greater or less than 800 words).

And I'm now wondering if something similar is true for humour in branding.

In other words, if people rely on cheap, mindless gags to draw attention to their brand, it probably means that they suffer from a poor range of products and services – and they're desperately hoping you won't notice.

Wine not?

Recently, I have happened to pen a couple of posts about wine (here and here), both of which have been critical judgements of an industry struggling with its identity in tough times.

However, an evening meal at a local café the other week has given me reason to be hopeful.

The cafe is typical of the inner city. Petite and charming amidst the urban clutter, it opens right onto the street and provides the perfect vantage point to watch the world pass by. The food is sweet, the coffee's bitter, and they have a small but reasonable wine list – and what's more, one that has Mystery wine at the top of the list.

Why not? I'm sure that their Mystery wine is just the same as what everyone else calls house wine, but how about that for something a little more imaginative?

For me, it instantly transforms something banal into an adventure. And at $6 a glass, it's everyone's favourite type of adventure – one that's low on risk but high on story value.

Write on!

In my last post, I seemed to let my words chase after all sorts of different literary distractions - from Kenneth Slessor to Vice magazine. The result of having so much to squeeze in that I think I managed to avoid answering the central question - specifically, why I write.

So I thought it only fair that I post this follow-up.

The real answer lies in something called Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a psychometric test that explores your dominant personality and behavioural traits as a means of helping you understand how you perceive the world around you and, consequently, how you make decisions.

Generally speaking, I rail against anything that tries to pigeonhole me, but I must admit that I became an instant convert as soon as I heard my perscribed personality type (ENFP, for those who are curious) defined in layman's terms - I'm the sort of person "who knows what they think as soon as they hear themselves say it".

Nothing could be more true or accurate.

Through writing, I allocate the time in my day to work out what I think and how I feel about a whole range of things. It structures my ideas and forces me to organise my thoughts and feelings into some sort of point of view. And it acts as a depositary where I can store some of my reactions and responses to the world around me (the fact that I relate them to branding is merely incidental). I wouldn't call my writing in this blog "significant" by any stretch of even my hyperactive imagination, but I do despise the idea of thoughtlessness (literally speaking, stupidity, among other things), especially when I witness it in myself.

In other words - and apologies to any Descartes devotees and/or anyone scarred by learning Latin at school - scribo ergo cogito ergo sum.

Why I write

Earlier this week, I read an article in The Australian about how today's teenagers use an average vocabulary of only 800 words each day, preferring instead to use the abbreviated language of text messaging and hip-hop. I've never counted, but from reading the article, it would seem that 800 is not very high – in fact, it appears that "800 words will not get you a job". What's more, "yeah", "no" and "but" all feature in a top 20 that accounts for about one third of the words they use.

All of which I find a little sad. Especially when I think about how much I love words.

Here's a quick 50 from Australian poet Kenneth Slessor:

I looked out my window in the dark

At waves with diamond quills and combs of light

That arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand

In the moon's drench, that straight enormous glaze,

And ships far off asleep, and Harbour-buoys

Tossing their fireballs wearily each to each,

And tried to hear your voice, but all I heard

Was a boat's whistle, and the scraping squeal

Of seabirds' voices far away, and bells,

Five bells. Five bells coldly ringing out.

Incredible writing if you ask me, but then Kenneth Slessor was far beyond the reach of teenage angst by the time he penned Five Bells.

Which brings me to another of my favourite writers, George Orwell. I must admit to a touch of hubris in taking the title for this post from an essay he wrote in 1949. That said, there's nothing particularly unique about the title, and it does seem fair given that I'm discussing a similar subject – although maybe not quite with the same degree of finesse.

In his essay, Orwell took the time to outline "four great motives for writing": sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. By his standards, I'm guilty of sheer egoism simply by continuing to write past the age of 30; I'm not the sentimental type, so posterity in the guise of historical impulse holds little appeal for me; and yes, I am political, if you subscribe to Orwell's broadest definition of the term.

But what most strikes a chord in my heart is aesthetic enthusiasm: what Orwell describes as everything from "words and their right arrangement" to typography and even the width of margins.

For me, there's something wide-eyed and beautiful in an elegant turn of phrase. Each word gently pushed along by a mix of alliteration, juxtaposition, onomatopoeia, repetition, rhetoric, tempo, crescendo, cadence, the list goes on.

Which all goes to explain why I love the work we're doing for Griffin Theatre Company – apologies for the shameless plug!

And I was pretty excited when I found this recent Fiction issue of Vice, with every page dedicated to new writing.

However, words don't always comes all that easily for people. It takes time and effort and discipline, as well as creativity and flair and ideas. And that even goes for some of the most prolific writers, as Stephen Fry explained in what will be his last blog post for a little while.

For me, writing isn't always easy, but it is important. In a previous post, I wrote about how they say a picture is worth a thousand words, but a single word can start ten thousand stories. That said, not too many of them start Yeah no but.

Death on a whiteboard

If you want to get something done, I've learned you don't write it on a whiteboard.

Over the years, I've had a number of clients with whiteboards mounted on the walls of their offices. Without exception, not much changed from one week to the next. Any scribbles were usually just that – scribbles. One client had even gone to the trouble of marking out a section for his kids to doodle, and I was always intrigued by the idea of holding serious business discussions as Laura woz 'ere would catch my eye across the room.

When it comes to workshops, whiteboards take centre stage. However, it usually doesn't take too long before they start to interrupt rather than illuminate the discussion. There's rarely any pens to hand that work for more than four words, after a couple of lines you start to realise that you're writing on a ridiculous slant that makes everything trail off into the bottom right hand corner, and it's only once you've riddled the board with a sheen of half-baked ideas that you discover you've been writing in permanent ink.

Technology doesn't make things any easier. If you have a whiteboard from which you can make prints, one of three things usually happens: there's no paper, you write on the one screen that doesn't print, or you fail to use the only colour that reproduces with any degree of legibility. And if you're lucky enough to have one of those whiteboards that saves everything to a central hard drive, you can be certain that it will be saved to the hard drive never to be seen again.

Unfortunately – and in spite of my better judgement and past experiences – I recently learned this the hard way.

Our studio is now the proud owner of a brand new, shimmering whiteboard. A breeding ground for cartoons and caricatures, it produces little in the way of insight or efficiency. To make matters worse, it has been hung (professionally, I might add) at the perfect height for anyone below 5 feet tall. Now and then, I stare longingly at the whiteboard, in the desperate hope that it will spring into life, but I'm also slightly worried that it will instead crash to the floor, pinning any nearby designers to the ground.

But then, it could always be worse. We could be having one of those brainstorms where there's no such thing as a bad idea – like buying a whiteboard.

A marketing miracle

Only last week, I wrote here about a wine brand called Wallaby Creek.

At a mere $5.99 a bottle, it's a cellar dweller in every sense of the term, and a striking example of yet another wine following yet another marketing cliché. I can only imagine that it would take a marketing miracle to turn it into a brand of any real substance or interest, and after reading this article in the weekend's Sydney Morning Herald, it seems that I'm not all that far off that mark.

Here's what I mean. With many cleanskins now selling at Dan Murphy's for a paltry $1.99 a bottle, many winemakers are most likely praying for a miracle of their own.

If only they could turn wine into water.

Because even plain old water sells for more than $1.99 a bottle – and all you need to do is filter it.

But of course, even the smallest marketing miracles require a little imagination – something in much shorter supply than the surplus of 100 million cases of wine.