I've noticed over progressive runs through downtown area the rapid transformation and reconfiguration of the city. Shop windows been stripped of their christmas content (apart from the smug and conveniently ambiguous festive husks) and then being replaced with oriental onnings, polystyrene gold nuggets. Red Chinese lanterns replacing the long strings of blue-neon lights.
All over the Orchard roadside lie piles and piles of christmas debris - long tincel wrapped tnedris that used to house and support elaborate lighting systems, are chopped and piled on top of each other like the trimmings of trees. Silver bells made from plastic, are rolling around between the feet of sunday shoppers. The collapsed husks of christmas trees covered in astroturf are now bound by the same ribbons and decorations they used to support.
At the mid point of my run, a gigantic hand and Chinese head are towering over me from the top of a huge scaffolding - (that I assume is soon to be the rest of his body.)
In my bed later and in the novel I'm reading, it is still Christmas. Only this time in a Diner in LA sometime in the late 80s. The protagonist, Clay has been chain smoking throughout the novel,
and has stopped to stare at/ mention a pile of decorative Christmas presents. The kind I always used to lust after as a kid. The giant box with a huge ribbon in the fanciest shimmeriest cellophane wrapping paper.
I wonder why I didn't see any of them on my run.
Maybe it's because they're kind of recyclable.
On Thursday I was at a brainstorm with Stuart and Mark, and during one of those moments when you go completely off topic/ doing work, we digressed to bitching a little about what we did (advertisements).
"So he asked me, 'Stuart when's the last time you were just blown away? You know, taken, you had to put down what you were working on and just ran out to buy it (the product he was working on) And I said 'never', 'never?', 'never.'."
"He thought about it, and then agreed".
We had never been influenced by even our best ads. Unanimous. Not since the late 80s. Never. Maybe even before we started making ads, none of us had.
We are the placebo-present making people - who'd want to deliriously unwrap the placebo present you'd just spent the last 6months + research wrapping? We'd spent our professional lives art-directing and expending huge amount of brain activity trying to make sure that people, like my childhood self are enthralled and drawn toward the potential of the mysteriously friendly, and not-over-art-directed box, and believed.
Naomi Klein talked about wanting to reach up to the sky and touch the back-lit acrylic shell logo outside the petrol station.
I still do.
There's something magical about the ineligibility of a glowing plastic logo.
We used to steal them in College. Road signs, street lights, billboards, sandwich boards, posters, the price of petrol, corporate art. And just like trapped insects, they would cease to be the morning after - reduced to large, inconvenient (and usually dirty) chunks of industrial strength acrylic and a series of dead bulbs.
Much like my holiday in Hongkong when I was 8 and I discarded the present the hotel-Santa had given me thinking I'd be better off with one of the larger boxes under the decorative tree -it was even heavier- and I knew just by holding the flimsily wrapped oblong that santa had given me that I really didn't need another volume of the Hardy Boys.
Needless to say, I was miserable that night.
In Special topics in Calamity Physics (Pessel, 2006) Our Heroine and protagonist Blue Van-Meer valedicts from her class giving a speech that celebrates the goldfish- when your entire life is surmised by the last three seconds, everything is new, there are no hangups, no histories of depression, no rejection scars, no baggage. The goldfish is the perpetual student. the person who never tires of learning, the most progressive species who constantly embrace and evolve 3 seconds at a time.
I wonder for a moment if that's whats happening here.
I wrap, I unwrap, I disappoint, am disappointed, I forget, and then on friday I'm in love again.
I want an Xbox 360 elite, an I phone, a Macbook air, Alexander Mcqueen Adidas sneakers, an Aston Martin, Copies of D&Q comics and tickets to broken social scene. I would pay hundreds and in some cases thousands of dollars for these things.
Maybe I should start writing ads for them and save a little money.
Yawn.
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