Filed under: Great Stuff
EXCERPT: Eugene O’Neill’s LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT
Act IV
EDMUND:
You’ve just told me some high spots in your memories. Want to hear mine? They’re all connected with the sea. Here’s one. When I was on the Squarehead square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself — actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way. Then another time, on the American Line, when I was lookout on the crow’s nest in the dawn watch. A calm sea, that time. Only a lazy ground swell and a slow drowsy roll of the ship. The passengers asleep and none of the crew in sight. No sound of man. Black smoke pouring from the funnels behind and beneath me. Dreaming, not keeping lookout, feeling alone, and above, and apart, watching the dawn creep like a painted dream over the sky and sea which slept together. Then the moment of ecstatic freedom came. The peace, the end of the quest, the last harbor, the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men’s lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams! And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience. Became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint’s vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see — and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning!
Filed under: passion
I love the following story:
One of Frank Gehry’s first buildings, was a shopping mall, The Santa Monica Place. It was rigidly geometric and pale pink. He played it safe for investors and went LA-style. He hated it.
Meanwhile, as a direct creative outlet, Gehry went full out Gehry on building his own home. Envision sloping roofs, curvaceous windows, jutting peaks. Think: wacky and wildly organic.
The night of the grand opening of the Santa Monica Place, the president of the real estate company that had hired Frank was at Gehry’s home for a dinner party:
Real estate Exec: What the hell is this?, he said to Frank, looking around Gehry’s house, awestruck.
Frank: Well, I was experimenting, playing with it.
Exec: Well you must like it if it’s your house. You like it, right?
Frank: Yeah. I’m happy with how it turned out.
Exec: So then…the building you just did for us…you can’t possibly like that.
Frank: You’re right, I don’t.
Exec: Then why’d you do it?
Frank: Because I need to make a living.
Exec: Well stop it. Don’t do that kind of work anymore.
Frank: You’re right.
They shook hands that night and decided to quit everything they were working on (they were employing forty people at the time.)
“It was like jumping off a cliff,” Gehry says. “It was an amazing feeling. I was so happy from then on.”
I love the insight that being risk adverse can hide your light and shorten your horizon. Sometimes the value of compromising your vision is too high a cost. While you might have to pay the piper to follow your dreams- the dance you subsequently do may just reward you beyond your expectations.
Ogden Nash sums up my feelings on three years of Get Shouty (even if bloggers aren’t very useful, because they aren’t consumeful but they are quite produceful) in No Doctor’s Today, Thank You:
They tell me that euphoria is the feeling of feeling wonderful,
well, today I feel euphorian,
Today I have the agility of a Greek god and the appetitite of a
Victorian.
Yes, today I may even go forth without my galoshes,
Today I am a swashbuckler, would anybody like me to buckle
any swashes?
This is my euphorian day,
I will ring welkins and before anybody answers I will run away.
I will tame me a caribou
And bedeck it with marabou.
I will pen me my memoirs.
Ah youth, youth! What euphorian days them was!
I wasn’t much of a hand for the boudoirs,
I was generally to be found where the food was.
Does anybody want any flotsam?
I’ve gotsam.
Does anybody want any jetsam?
I can getsam.
I can play chopsticks on the Wurlitzer,
I can speak Portuguese like a Berlitzer.
I can don or doff my shoes without tying or untying the laces because
I am wearing moccasins,
And I practically know the difference between serums and antitoccasins.
Kind people, don’t think me purse-proud, don’t set me down as
vainglorious,
I’m just a little euphorious.
Thanks for having me. Please say hello!
Filed under: Digital Strategy
As promised here are the notes I was referring to on the Ad:tech panel. All the research and loads of the thinking were done by the lovely and talented Rachael Maughan at the white agency.
Here’s measurementcamp’s list of free tools:
- Addictomatic A cool search engine that aggregates rss feeds into a nice visual dashboard
- Blogpulse Blog search engine with conversation tracker tool
- Boardreader Search forums and message boards
- Boardtracker Forum search engine offering instant alerts
- Buzzmonitor Embeddable widget showing recent instances of your search term
- Compete.com Comparable site metrics for any website
- Del.ici.ous Social bookmarking engine. Search by tags and subscribe to feed results
- Facebook lexicon Searches facebook walls for words and phrases
- Google alerts Email updates of key search terms
- Google insights Compare search volume over time
- Google trends Compare search term trends
- Howsociable Gives a social media score for your brand, with email updates of your score.
- Ice rocket Blog search engine with results rss feed
- Newsflashr News search engine, presenting results in nice dashboard
- Sphere Related content widget
- Summize Search for keywords in ‘tweets’.
- Technorati Blog and social media search engine
- Twing Discussion board and forum search engine
- Twingly Spam free blog search engine
- Twitturly Track what urls people are talking about on twitter
- Xinu Shows how well your site is performing across different metrics. Also gives a site diagnosis.
- Quarkbase Fricking cool mashup tool
- Twitter Grader Enter your twitter username to get your grade and ranking
- Twist Graph Keyword trends in Twitter. Very cool.
- yExplore Not strictly social media, but easy access to see inbound links to a page.
- Trendpedia Excellent blog search engine that graphs results over time.
- Website Grader Not completely sure how accurate, but cool tool anyway!
- Yahoo Pipes Err, yeah, can’t believe I missed this off in the first place.
- Socialmention Real time UGC search engine, with social rank
- Bit.ly and Cli.gs – analytics for your tiny urls.
Filed under: Get Activist
Armed with $500 worth of beans, two women founded a non-profit group in Denver in 1989 to empower impoverished women by teaching them workplace skills and providing jobs to the chronically homeless and unemployed. Their training opportunities have expanded dramatically over the years, and their annual operating budget has grown from $6,100 to over $1.5 million.
The Women’s Bean Project is a nonprofit organization that teaches job readiness and life skills for entry-level jobs through employment in a gourmet food production business. Women come with the goal of transforming their lives and moving toward self sufficiency.
SPENCER MICHELS: Now in its 20th year, the program employs 40 women each year who have been chronically unemployed and living in poverty. They make and package products such as soup, brownie mix, jelly beans, and salsas that are available in grocery stores in 40 states and over the Internet. But it’s not the food that makes this program a complete package, says executive director Tamara Ryan.
TAMARA RYAN: We’re not trying to make the best bean soup makers of America. What we’re trying to do is create an environment where we can teach basic job readiness skills, the idea that you have to come to work every day, and on time, and manage conflict in the workplace, and dress appropriately, and take direction.
But then also we find that that alone isn’t what helps women become successful. They’re lacking basic life skills — problem-solving, goal-setting, the ability to, when your child care falls apart, to fix that and then continue to go to work.
There’s a transcript and a streaming video micro documentary from Spencer Michels from PBS here.
Filed under: Digital Strategy
I love a bit of fist shaking shoutyness.
I’m taking a week off and stepping down from my soapbox, but I’m happy to share and introduce you all to Peter Bray, who has been in the digital industry for around 13 years, is a Director of CHOICE (the Australian Consumers’ Association) and the NSW President of AIMIA (the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association):
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I am starting to feel a bit numb about social media. I thought I knew what it was, and how to use it, but now I am confused. Really confused. More so than usual.
Recently there have been people redefining what social media is, defining rules of engagement, and generally trying to one up each other in a public display of ego driven “rankings.” Lists of top bloggers, top twitterers, top facebookers and top brands that use social media are deluging down my connection like an empirical tsunami. And a lot of people seem to be riding the wave, while others, like me, are simply feeling a little swamped.
When did it all get out of hand?
Please, please, to all the digerati out there, perhaps it is time for a bit of quiet, humble success rather than screaming from rooftops at every possible moment. It is a long way to fall, especially if you position yourself at the top of the ladder.
It all used to seem so fun, this whole social media caper. It just doesn’t feel the same any more. Social media is in danger of killing the digital star; metrics are undecided; pundits are confused with professionals; flaming is out of control – why is it that social media has all these growing pains?
Perhaps it is something to do with the personality types that are attracted to social media. Could social media provide a way for people who are otherwise socially inept to finally quantitatively prove that they understand relationships? Are the social media experts in fact introverts who are now, through the bright lights of their computer screens, able to tell people how they should behave? Is a pre qualification for being a social media expert the attainment of level 12 in Dungeons and Dragons (sorry for the out of date reference, but I don’t know the World of Warcraft equivalent?)
My point is (if I have one), that social media should not be positioned as the “next big thing” for brands, simply because not only has it already arrived, but the effectiveness when it comes to marketing is very questionable. Social media has some wonderful uses, however given then number of brands that have invested in social media, there is a striking lack of successful case studies when it comes to brand marketing.
We know social media is out there, we are just not sure how to identify and tag it, let alone breed it in captivity. So it seems that people are firing pot-shots, trying to define what social media is and the rules for engagement, instead of simply letting it run wild for the time being.
Social media needs a lot of time to develop and grow, since it is still in the awkward teenager phase. If we are not careful, by creating so many arbitrary rules and restrictions, social media will never mature and achieve its potential. People need to stop acting like overprotective parents. No one owns the social media space, no one is an expert above others, and such activity will inevitably stunt innovation and experimentation in the social media space. Anyone remember Second Life?
I advocate not enforcing any rules when it comes to social media, apart from one simple guideline, that applies not only to brands and consumers, but social media practitioners as well: TRY NOT TO DO DUMB THINGS, BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ALWAYS LOOKING.
Oh, and play nice.
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Peter can be found on Twitter http://twitter.com/peterbray
I won’t be found in Sydney town until Ad-tech next week. I’m on the panel about social media measurement and I’m bringing my boxing gloves. See you there!
Filed under: Great Stuff
Massages are good. Most recommended.
