"Lemonade: Detroit" 17-minute short by Erik Proulx
I am curious and enthusiastic about people, culture, technology and how that relates to business, communication and brands - "walking on the insight road (and not halfway there").
Born on the Austrian countryside I have studied in Vienna (still do), Vancouver and Hanoi and spent a month of my civil service in Nicaragua. I've also worked quit a bit. Freelance since I am 16, at a small webdesign shop, an independent online marketing agency, a "full service" network agency in Budapest and a brand/context consultancy for CEE.
I have a notoriously wandering mind, I am generally quite nice and I ask absolutely stupid questions from time to time (I blame that on being left- and right-handed). I might be a nerd too, depending on your definition. That's about it I guess.
You can also find me here, here, here and if you want here.
As Anne Lamott observes in her irreplaceable guide to writing, "Bird by Bird": “There are probably a number of ways to tell your story right, and someone else may be able to tell you whether or not you’ve found one of those ways.”
What struck me in the most recent round is this: paradoxically, in hearing others tell me what the book should be, I can finally see the book it is. The story I initially envisioned is set off, made clear, by all of these competing claims. Whether the critic is a fellow writer, or an agent or a trusted friend, some of what is hauled up in these sessions is useful, the rest must be discarded.
Painful as this process is, the triangulation of perspectives cannot be avoided.
I've never understood why firms are prepared to shell out a fortune simply to refer to the Olympics in their advertising, but then I've always been mildly baffled by the popularity of sport full-stop. I also never understood why Gillette paid Tiger Woods, a man famous for hitting balls with a stick, a huge amount of money to promote scraping a bit of sharp metal across your face – only to sideline him when it became apparent that as well as hitting balls with a stick, he had been inserting his penis into as many different women as possible, an aspiration he presumably shared with the vast majority of Gillette's customers.
Two-and-a half years on, that exciting new wave of non-acoustic electronic pop has mutated. The global pop sound is now, thanks to David Guetta, Pitbull, Taio Cruz and a cast of thousands attempting to recreate their partyvibezzzz, a swirling mass of mindless, in-the-club party records. It reached its nadir this summer with the release of Champagne Showers by LMFAO Feat Natalia Kills, an intensely bad piece of antimusic so alarmingly awful that it rather made you wonder whether all music should in fact be banned.
Thanks to The New Boring, a ban was not necessary. The New Boring has become the cold bucket of water, the ice age, the guy in bare feet in the corner of the house party imploring revellers to JUST CHILL OUT! Hold that Birdy-does-Sheeran cover close to your chest: it may just be boring enough to neutralise 2011's absurd parade of LOLpop party hits. It might reset pop. For some of us this will be an extreme test of tough love – and this is very upsetting to watch – but we must allow The New Boring to take hold, to flourish. It's a good thing, in the long run.
When I see that my friend Misha is "waiting at Genius Bar to send my MacBook to the shop," that's not much information. But when I get such granular updates every day for a month, I know a lot more about her. And when my four closest friends and worldmates send me dozens of updates a week for five months, I begin to develop an almost telepathic awareness of the people most important to me.
It's like proprioception, your body's ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.
Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.
File under: important. Consider, when necessary.
Sometimes you just have to slam it home, right?
