Terry Levine | Noggin Advertising | Copywriter | Digital + Direct Writer | Blogging | Toronto | Canada

REINVENTION, RIGOR MORTIS AND REVOLUTION.

It used to be that professional success for most was considered a function of doing the same job or working for the same employer for life -- much like success in one's personal life meant being married "for better or for worse." My uncle started as a bagboy at Steinberg's and, 50 years later, became president of the company. What could be a better example of success than that?

That story doesn't exist anymore -- at work or at home -- or, at least, it's no longer the norm. Today we look down on people who end up in dead-end jobs, doing the same thing day and day out, making meager salaries and even more meager raises. We look down on couples who hate each other but who stay together out of a sense of obligation. We see it as a slow death.

What we value instead is reinvention. We love entertainers like Madonna who continue to try new things, incorporate new influences. We idolize Apple because it never rests on its laurels -- iPod begets iPhone, which begets iPad. Successful advertising creatives are those who recognize that writing or designing ads the way David Ogilvy believed is a recipe for decay. Mad Men might be nostalgic but using, for instance, the advertising tactics of 1960 and ignoring the new realities of digital or social media is a recipe for disaster in 2012. The world changes and we all have to change with it.

But while reinvention is necessary, it too only goes so far. Hayflick's Limit is a biological phenomenon whereby cells only divide a limited number of times -- usually 40 to 60 -- before the process stops and the line of cells dies. Madonna, for instance, might be approaching her own Hayflick's Limit, if you've happened to see and hear what she's produced in recent years. Rafa Nadal and the Williams sisters are approaching their Hayflick's Limit too. No doubt, there will come a time when Apple, like Microsoft or Nokia or Blackberry or Kodak or any number of once mighty innovative leaders, will falter and be overtaken by someone better equipped to respond to the challenges of the day. Madonna or Apple or even I might still be able to carve out a little niche and continue to be reasonably successful in the short term but our heyday will one day be over. Creative rigor mortis will inevitably set in.

It's the reality of life. There's probably no better example of this than the dominant global force of the last 100 years -- The United States of America. No country has been more adept at creating, changing, adapting, reinventing itself as the US. But the signs of decay are there. Watch the sclerotic politics, the corruption, the widening gap between rich and poor and left and right, the inability to address the real issues affecting Americans, like health care, infrastructure, education, and you can plainly see what's in store. That doesn't mean the patient is dead yet or that reinvention still isn't possible. It just means it's becoming less and less probable. And it means that change, if and when it does come, will not come through reinvention or a predictable rolling in and out of the tides, but through something more dramatic, like a tsunami, or a revolution.

 

QUOTE OF THE DAY: ON MISLEADING POLITICAL ADS

"The brain is wired to be entertained. We don’t pay attention to the words. We pay attention to the pictures and the drama and the story. If it’s pretty, if it’s exciting, if it’s violent, if it’s fast, that’s where we are. So the fact that these mini dramas are being used to get us to vote for one person or another is just like what we all learned propaganda was used for and thought we learned our lessons from in World War II. They are propaganda. And propaganda is irresistible. If it were resistible, people wouldn’t do it."

-- Marty Kaplan, Professor of Entertainment, Media and Society at USC

QUOTE OF THE DAY: ON THE INTERNET AS THE GREAT EQUALIZER OF STUPID AND SMART

"The problem is that the Internet is at best the Wild West, in which that kind of information competes with other stuff in this great bazaar. I mean, at this booth over here, you get some important investigative journalism. At that booth over there, you get Charlie Bit My Finger or whatever the YouTube hit of the month happens to be. And they’re all on equal footing.

"...I think there is so much misinformation out there that on issue after issue, we have opinions but not facts. And we despair of ever being able to get to the bottom of it and despair of ever having a decision being based on what is accurate, true, and useful, rather than who has the most money to put up enough ads in order to sway the public debate"

-- Marty Kaplan, Professor of Entertainment, Media and Society at USC

QUOTE OF THE DAY: ON THE NEW STUPID JOURNALISM

"...[T]he problem is that there’s not that much information out there, if you’re an ordinary citizen, that comes to you. You can ferret it out. But it oughtn’t be like that in a democracy. Education and journalism were supposed to, according to our founders, inform our public and to make democracy work.

"We can’t do it unless we’re smart. And so the consequence is that we’re not smart. And you can see it in one study after another. Some Americans think that climate change is a hoax cooked up by scientists, that there’s no consensus about it. This kind of view could not survive in a news environment, which said, “This is true and that’s false.” Instead we have an environment in which you have special interest groups manipulating their way onto shows and playing the system, gaming the notion that he said she said is basically the way in which politics is now covered.

"It’s all about combat. If every political issue is the combat between two polarized sides, then you get great television because people are throwing food at each other. And you have an audience that hasn’t a clue, at the end of the story, which is why you’ll hear, 'Well, we’ll have to leave it there.' Well, thank you very much. Leave it there."

-- Marty Kaplan, Professor of Entertainment, Media and Society at USC

QUOTE OF THE DAY: ON ADVERTISING

"People say they know it’s a con, just as they say that they are not being swayed by the ads for products that they see on television. If that were true, there would not be a multibillion dollar advertising industry. If that stuff didn’t work, that would not be on the air. So no matter what we say, no matter how clever we are, we are susceptible to it."

-- Marty Kaplan, Professor of Entertainment, Media and Society at USC

WHO RUNS THE WORLD?: 140 WORDS ON 'WHERE DO WE GO NOW?'

"Imagine," John Lennon wrote, "there's no countries. It isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for. And no religion too. Imagine all the people living life in peace." He might have added: Imagine no men.

Where Do We Go Now? is a farcical and at times uplifting but ultimately sad film that explores life in a small Lebanese village where Christian and Muslim men are always one step away from killing each other and Christian and Muslim women are always finding ways to stop them.

It made me think that, if only proud, petty, hotheaded men weren't always mucking it up, women, who better understand the real value of life, would have solved many of our most intractable problems. Does anyone seriously doubt that if Tzipi Livni and Hanan Ashrawi sat together, unburdened by the childishness and testosterone of their male counterparts, Israelis and Palestinians would be closer to peace?

IS GOD TRYING TO KILL US? 140 WORDS ON 'PROMETHEUS'

"I just think maybe God's not watching out for us as closely as we might think. Look, he created the world in, what, six days, five billion years ago. Don't you think by now he's moved on to another project? Do you ever think we're something shitty he threw together for his third grade science fair?"

-- Jon Stewart

Whether it's a belief that a bearded mountaintop god created us or the theory we're the laboratory-generated spawn of extraterrestrials, like in  Chariots of the Gods -- an idea that's been spun into endless movies and TV shows including Star Trek -- we tend to be under the narcisistic impression that our creator loves us.

As Stewart jokes, we might very well be mistaken. And as Ridley Scott posits in his new sci-fi film Prometheus, pseudo-prequel to the 1979 classic Alien, there's ample reason to believe the gods are monsters and they may be trying to kill us.

In the same season that's brought us a sci-fi monstrosity like The Avengers, it's a relief to have something else to enjoy, something scary, dark, beautiful and, imagine, intelligent.

 

IT'S PRIDE AND QUAIA IS AT IT AGAIN. THEY'RE STILL WRONG.

QuAIA is at it again. The virulently anti-Israel gay group is set to march in this year’s Toronto Pride parade and once again it’s pitting gays who oppose Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank against gays who view Israel as a gay-friendly country.

Queers Against Israeli ‘Apartheid’ is wrong on several fronts. Here’s why:

1. It's Not Apartheid. Except for right-wing Jewish fundamentalist nutjobs, no one disputes that the West Bank – otherwise known as Palestine – is under Israeli military occupation. It has been since 1967, when Israel beat back attacking Arab armies and won the West Bank from Jordan, which had itself occupied the land (with exactly no protest from anyone for 19 years). So a military occupation exists in the West Bank and no occupation is pretty but that does not make Israel an “Apartheid state.” Certainly not when Arabs who live in Israel proper – the non-occupied part (which Hamas would dispute) – have full and equal rights, vote, are elected to parliament and even sit on the Israeli Supreme Court.
2. It's Not Pinkwashing. QuAIA claims that Israel is pinkwashing, in other words, faking and marketing its gay-friendliness to detract from its military occupation of the West Bank. You know the same way Canada pretends to be gay-friendly to pinkwash its Alberta Oil Sands policies. No country’s policies are all good or all bad, but to claim Benjamin Netanyahu is sitting in his office planning Gay Pride parades to get people off his case on Israel’s Palestine policy is loopy.
3. It's Not the Right Venue. While I vehemently reject the term ‘Apartheid’ to describe Israel’s occupation, I do support Israel and Israeli settlers withdrawing from the West Bank and, in principle, I support any group that wants to protest that occupation – in an appropriate venue. In other words, Pride exists primarily to celebrate gay rights and support the struggle for those rights all around the world, not to provide a vehicle for protest against an issue completely unrelated to gay rights. What's more, there’s something disturbing when a group like QuAIA uses the platform of gay struggle to attack the only country in the Middle East where gay people can live their lives without fear of being arrested, tortured or killed.

QUOTE OF THE DAY (CLASSIC): LIKE SUCH AS

"I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to [locate the U.S. on a world map] because, uh, some people out there in our nation don't have maps and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as in South Africa and, uh, the Iraq [pronounced EYE-rak], everywhere like such as, and, I believe that should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, or, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future, for our children."

-- 2007 MIss South Carolina and future U.S. Vice President Caite Upton, when asked why one-fifth of Americans can't, such as, locate the U.S. on a world map

Never. Gets. Old.

MAKING AN ASS OUT OF YOU AND ME.

The human brain can sometimes be lazy. It's why you're not actually reading every letter in this sentence, you're guessing at words based on a few letters in each. It's why you probably will have no trouble reading this.

Well our brains aren't just lazy with words. They're lazy with ideas and beliefs. We see what we want to see or assume things to be true simply because they "seem" right or fit comfortably enough within our worldview. Belief in creation versus evolution might be an example of this, but don't get me started on that one. It may also be, for instance, why morons like Donald Trump still claim Barack Obama wasn't born in Hawaii -- assuming, of course, they're not simply racists or douchebags or both.

In spite of the fact that many or all of these beliefs don't hold up to scrutiny and can be googled or researched on Wikipedia anytime, we still cling to them mostly out of intellectual laziness, or simply because they just sound right to us.

Which brings me to the one that inspired this blog post, something I've heard forever and assumed to be true, but it turns out it's not:

"You may have read that the Great Wall of China is the only man-made object visible from orbit, but that's bunk. The Mercury astronauts reported seeing all kinds of stuff, from trains to oil refineries to Tibetan monesteries. When Gordon Cooper told Houston that he was watching a white big-rig truck travel down a Texas highway, NASA assumed that he must be hallucinating--until workers there later investigated and were actually able to identify the truck in question."