The building itself is a vandalism of the earth. Got no soul.
Mausoleum. The Vandals have come again and wreaked their destruction, and this is a tomb of a corroded society that would not defend itself. Let the pyre have a whiff of humanity daubed on it before it is subsumed.
My friend Gerard had a little essay about the repair of Red Wing boots. I hate to admit it, but I’ve got a pair of Red Wing boots. The part I hate to admit is that they’re my good shoes now, not my work boots. I found a video that shows the process, which I love. I love to see people with hand skills. Doesn’t matter what sort of skills they are, either. Chef or glassblower or hod carrier or guitarist; whatever.
I remember watching slackjawed as my mother typed nearly a hundred words a minute on a
manual typewriter. Without errors. Literally awesome. She was like Cassius Clay confronted with a midget wrestler when electric typewriters showed up. I could go really fast on that.
I mixed mortar for my uncle and watched him butter a block perfectly, every time, with two deft swipes of his trowel. He never missed. I couldn’t even get the mortar to stay on the trowel, or place the blocks in a row as fast as he could use them. I worked with men that could drive finish nails all day with a hammer and never leave “elephant tracks.” I find manual dexterity, distilled by repetition to fluidity, fascinating.
I’m not alone in that. As society gets more complicated, people become farther removed from the physical production of anything. They often get the same thrill I get when they encounter someone that can do something with their head, heart, and hands really well.
Factories are important, and many things should be made in a big faceless building filled with robots and drones. I don’t really need an artisinal flatscreen TV. But I need to see artisans, and feel like one, too.No one’s holding a gun to your head and forcing you to shop for everything at WalMart and IKEA and patronize no one locally except a trash hauler. Some of your neighbors make things and do things. Do the neighborly thing and seek them out.
Click for a really big shue.
Franz Hals painted this one. Well, he started painting it. Had a “helper” who painted a lot of it, with enough juice to get mentioned, too; Pieter Codde. Maybe Hals was too tired from naming it to finish it. It’s original name is: Officers of the Company of the Amsterdam Crossbow Civic Guard Under Captain Reynier Reael and Lieutenant Cornelis Michielsz. An art critic decided that the men pictured were so slender and his ink was so precious that he’d call them the Meagre Company instead, and the nickname has stuck.
It’s hanging around the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands. They know a little something about painting in those parts.
Hals was hired because he had a rep for interesting poses for large groups, but he got tired of commuting to Amsterdam from Haarlem, and when the Civic Guard told him to paint faster or he wouldn’t get paid, Hals told them that if the postman doesn’t come, it’s from me. The skinny soldiers hired Codde to finish it for them. People familiar with the two artists can easily tell who did what from looking at the painting. Hals was less fussy and more powerful. I always find that interesting.
I love the black in it. Only Spaniards and Hopper could use black all over the place better.
What is Advertising?
It’s often confused with Marketing. And Sales. And Sales and Marketing. Community Outreach? Sure, toss that in there with all the other euphemisms, too.
Marketing is renting a lodge where the animals are. Advertising is hunting. Sales is bullets.I hate to break it to you, but you’re the deer, dear.
Marketing people have the least to do with the public, at least personally, so any essential creepiness on their part is hidden. They talk about customers like bacilli in a pyrex dish, but no one hears it until it’s passed along to others and gussied up and covered with shiny glass balls and garlands. That’s why cable networks don’t make episodic dramas about callow and cutthroat marketing departments with buxom secretaries.
People in advertising can seem rather two-faced. Janussarries, if I can coin a word. Advertisers are paid to fall in love with a product. Like all callow lovers, they are prodigious haters, too. They are tasked with making others love and hate things in turn, but the money has to convince them first. The most effective advertising sometimes sounds like love, or sounds like something unexceptional, but is seething with studied disregard for competitors. Don’t be evil is not a promise to nice. It’s a vicious, unsubstantiated accusation against your competitors, made by stealth. It’s almost worthy of a politician.
Salesmen are the butchers. Close the deal. They are paid to get stuff on their aprons, the stuff the supposedly vicious admen and rapacious businessmen can’t seem to stomach. Good salesmen make the customer feel as though the salesmen is simply helping the customer get what they want. It may even be true. But generally salesmen would push your face into the paper and mash a pen in your hand and move your arm over the contract by jerking your elbow around, if they could. They don’t come on the lot, ‘lessen they wants to buy…
It’s not personal (Sonny); it’s just business.And salesmen aren’t even always wrong in this regard. Sometimes a potential customer drives themselves to distraction worrying endlessly about signing on the line that is dotted. Ending the process gracefully is a blessing all around in many cases.
I run a very rare operation nowadays. I am a vertically integrated business. I thought up the concept, and I designed the products, and I make the product, and made the place the product is made, and I identify the potential customers, and talk to them, and sell to them, and send things to them, and I wonder forevermore afterwards about whether every single one of them is still happy with me. It’s easy for me to love the thing I’m selling, and I deserve less or more credit for delivering the whole megillah depending on your worldview. If I was more disconnected from the disparate steps in my operations, others could be paid to do them, and more customers could be served. Some persons like small, and reward me for my efforts. Some give credit to bigger organizations that don’t lose their soul by inches in expanding out instead of up. Me, I’d just like to eat more often and sleep more soundly.
I’ve become attuned to the machinations of selling things to people. I see the wires behind the animatronics a lot. We live in a world where Bill Gates is considered by many to be an evil mofo, but the ShamWow guy is lovable, at least between bouts of biting a hooker on the face, and being bitten.That is not a naturally occurring phenomenon.
To put yourself in Michelangelo’s shoes, he told the Pope that once the money was settled, he’d find a way to fall in love with the Pope’s thankless Sistine ceiling painting job. The Pope just wanted to get his message out. He hired the best ad man he could find. We’re all the better for it. And I’m sure the Catholic salesmen ultimately had an easier time closing the deal under that ceiling. Advertising and marketing and sales doesn’t have to make your flesh crawl. And many of the greatest artists I know of produced advertising for others. Picasso was one, lifelong advertiser for himself, but made is seem as if he didn’t have a bit of self-promotion going on. I preferred Suess just taking the money and making Flit ads. There’s more charm in it, and less deception.
So everyone has to warm to their task along the way to sell a product or service, and everyone uses dollar bills for the fire they warm their hands over. But you can tell when it’s not just the money talking; when a manifest affection develops for the object of the attention of talented people.
Watch the video. Whoever made it — and conceptualized it in the first place — learned to love it; and maybe you might to, they importune without seeming to, if you’ve got a moment.
How else do you explain telling potential customers how much fun they’ll have with their boogers frozen in their beard?
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