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

QUOTE OF THE DAY: BILL CLINTON ON IDEOLOGY

"The problem with any ideology is it gives the answer before you look at the the evidence. So you have to mold the evidence to get the answer you've already decided you've got to have."

-- Bill Clinton

QUOTE OF THE DAY: ON LOVE AND THE FACTS

British philosopher Bertrand Russell spoke these words over 50 years ago. In light of what seems like an uptick in religious radicalism around the world and in our own backyard, they couldn't be more relevant:

"The intellectual thing I should want to say [...] is this: When you are studying any matter, or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe, or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed. But look only, and solely, at what are the facts. That is the intellectual thing that I should wish to say.

"The moral thing I should wish to say [...] is very simple: I should say, love is wise, hatred is foolish. In this world which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don’t like. We can only live together in that way — and if we are to live together and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet."

GREAT WRITING: CHUCK PALAHNIUK 1

This guy truly makes me laugh out loud -- or squirm. Two great quotes that speak to our out-of-control me-centered culture:

"... when I see the picture of a twenty-something in the newspaper who was abducted and sodomized and robbed and then killed and here's a front page picture of her young and smiling, instead of me dwelling on this being a big, sad crime, my gut reaction is, wow, she'd be really hot if she didn't have such a big honker of a nose. My second reaction is I'd better have some good head and shoulders shot handy in case I get, you know, abducted and sodomized to death. My third reaction is, well, at least that cuts down on the competition."

" ... I hate how I don't feel real enough unless people are watching."

-- Chuck Palakniuk, Invisible Monsters

GREAT WRITING: CHRIS CLEAVE 1

"I saw her through the glass wall. She was sitting very calm and composed drinking a Diet Coke and writing 500 words on A NATION UNITED IN HORROR. I watched her nails clicking on the keyboard. Petra had lovely nails. I tapped on the glass and she looked up at me. That's when it hit me. She looked at me as though I were a complete stranger. There was just this look of absolute blank incomprehension on her face. Then slowly I watched it change. I could see the precise moment when she recognised me. Me. Her partner of 6 years. Then I saw her raise one of those lovely manicured hands to her mouth and gasp. And I knew. She wasn't gasping because I looked a mess with my broken nose and blood on my jacket. She wasn't gasping from relief that I'd survived. She was gasping because this was the first moment since it had happened that she had even remembered my existence in the world. And she knew that I saw this."

-- Chris Cleave, Incendiary

CHAPTERS INDIGO > POS

Client: Chapters Indigo
Agency: Noggin Advertising
Media: POS
AD: In-house
Writer: Terry Levine

QUOTE OF THE DAY: ON PEOPLE WANTING TO MURDER US

Some days I feel combative. Other days I feel conciliatory. My truth probably lies somewhere in between. I don't know if I fully believe the message in this quote anymore, but it's a good one for that part of me that still hopes.

"I'm just so stupidly bloody tired... It's like the powers that be are poking sticks into the wasps' nests and my job is to run around and stop the wasps stinging us. It's never going to happen. We've simply got to stop doing just a few of the things that make these people want to murder us."

-- Incendiary by Chris Cleave

THE MUHAMMED MOVIE RIOTS: WHO'S TO BLAME?

When riots break out after hockey games in Canada or football games in the UK, we lay the blame where it belongs -- on mostly young male, uneducated, underemployed, testosterone-boosted, peer-pressured looters on a criminal rampage.

But when riots break out in the Middle East, we wring our hands trying to explain the attacks in the context of US foreign policy, recent Israeli actions (like existing) or fanciful clashes of civilizations. We nod in agreement as apologists for Muslim fundamentalism tell us people just can't be held accountable for their actions when you disrespect their prophet who died 1,500 years ago.

Never mind that when questionable movies about Christ are made, Christians don't go on killing sprees. Never mind that when Muslim terrorists blow up Israeli embassies in Argentina, India or Georgia, Israelis don't go on a killing spree. Never mind that when ancient Buddhist statues are dynamited and destroyed in Afghanistan by Muslim extremists, Buddhists don't go on killing sprees. Never mind that when Coptic Christians are increasingly persecuted and attacked in Egypt, they don't go on killing sprees.

Maybe it's time we start blaming the Jews, the Christians, the Americans, the damn Buddhists, even idiotic Pastor Terry Jones  -- a little less. A moronic movie about Muhammed isn't at the root of these attacks on American -- and now German(?!) -- embassies. And Dutch cartoons didn't really cause the riots a few years ago. Mostly it's young male, uneducated, underemployed, testosterone-boosted, peer-pressured looters -- with a dash of Muslim fundamentalist lunacy -- who did. Let's lay the blame where it belongs and then maybe people of goodwill can work toward finding a real solution.

UNDERSTANDING ART: 140 WORDS ON 'RHINO SEASON'

Do you have to fully understand art or the artist's intentions to be moved by its artistry? I'm certainly no art expert but it seems to me the answer is no. Last night, a friend and I watched the world premiere of Kurdish Director Bahman Ghobadi's Rhino Season and left with diverging opinions on the film.

My friend felt that while it was visually stunning (I agreed), he found it overindulgent and bleak (I didn't.) Where he felt he never got a good sense of the world outside the three main characters, maybe I knew enough about the history of the Iranian revolution to understand the context a little more. But whether you knew what happened in and since 1979 in Iran, was that necessary to empathize with the characters or love triangle depicted? I don't think so. 

On one level, Rhino Season is very Persian, very Iranian, very Muslim, in its themes and depictions. But on another, it's simply the tragic story of unrequited love, shattered love and everlasting love. And doesn't that speak to all of us?

GAY PURGATORY: 140 WORDS ON 'OUT IN THE DARK'

Palestinians live pretty wretched lives -- often in refugee camps or crumbling towns, squeezed between Israeli Defense Forces and cement walls that limit their movement on the one hand, and corrupt Fatah and radical Hamas leadership that limit their freedom and opportunity on the other.

But amid all this wretchedness, gay Palestinians may have the shortest end of the stick of all. Imagine living in fear of not only being thrown out of your house, as gays in the West often experience, but of being murdered for bringing dishonor to your family. Now imagine a country on the other side of the wall where you can escape to and live a relatively normal life, without fear of being killed. The only trouble is you can't live a normal life because, while the Israelis won't kill you, they'll send you back to the Palestinian side if they catch you.

If ever there was an example of purgatory in our world, this would have to be it.

Out in the Dark, an Israeli movie that premiered last week at the Toronto International Film Festival, ably brings to life the insanity of the gay Palestinian experience. Peace between Jews and Arabs may be years away but Israelis, whose ingenuity has solved countless technological and environmental challenges, needs to solve this one now.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: BEYOND THE SINGLE STORY.

"Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with 'secondly.' Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story. I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had just read a novel called American Psycho, and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers."

-- Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie on The Danger of a Single Story