Well it’s hard to believe it but December is almost done. Another year is getting ready to cash it in. And what a long strange year it has been. There seems to be a genuine changing of the guard going on in the world these days. The chickens are coming home to roost for capitalism as we know it. Ordinary people in countries rich and poor are in a state of revolt. The status quo just doesn’t cut it anymore. A lot of the conspiracy theories about the superrich are being exposed as conspiracy facts and consequently the world level of anger and frustration is at an all time high.
The deadly combination of Wall Street greed and Chinese manufactured crap continue to put a stranglehold on the world’s economy, threatening to wipe out the middle class that emerged after the Second World War. I can’t really see this situation getting better before it gets worse, so for most of us maintaining a balanced lifestyle has become a much greater challenge than we have ever known it to be in our lives.
I’m not exactly sure what has brought these amazing changes about. It’s never any one factor that you can put your finger on, but usually a confluence of events. But the one thing that all the facets of this world wide revolution have in common is that people are totally fed up with the rich getting richer while they get poorer. And I don’t blame them one bit. People have always been willing to work hard for whatever money they make. But the ‘powers that be’ keep pushing the envelope, trying to wrench more and more out of people without really compensating them for the extra effort they go through.
THE BUSINESS PERSPECTIVE
In my business, which is advertising, this has been going on in a pretty severe way for the past 20 years or so. When I worked in agencies in the 70s and 80s, the emphasis was primarily on the quality of thinking. After the recession of the early 90s, a lot of people of my generation left the agency business or formed their own agencies and the work ethic during the recovery looked very much like it had changed dramatically to a quantity over quality mandate. The trouble with that is that the quality of communication has always been more important to people on the receiving end than the number of character challenged impressions that are branded on their brains. That’s because the number of advertising impressions that people are exposed to every day has increased exponentially. As a result, the average person’s brain is on total overload all the time and the only way to get through it in any meaningful way is…believe it or not, to be creative. It’s a classic example of what goes around comes around.
Myself, I didn’t really find it to be a bad year, at least not compared to the few that came before it. But I would imagine that a lot of people felt that those were pretty crappy too. In my business it’s all about the company you keep. One of the companies I do creative work for underwent an expansion and that meant creating a whole bunch of new stuff for them. A number of the supplier relationships I have were in pretty good shape too. So I really can’t complain from a business perspective.
THE SPORTS PERSPECTIVE
The Green Bay Packers, champs in 2011, threatening a rare repeat in 2012.
Looking back over the year in sports, there’s not a whole lot that jumps out at me. The Green Bay Packers winning the Superbowl was pretty cool. Watching Tiger Woods mount his inevitable comeback over the past few months, culminating in a win at the Memorial, just a few weeks ago was also something memorable. The MLB playoffs was memorable for a lot of stuff that happened: the incredible late season surge by the St Louis Cardinals, which carried them all the way to the World Series Championship, and the incredible chokes by the likes of the Phillies the Yankees, the Atlanta Braves and probably most significantly, the Boston Red Sox. In hockey, all I can remember is that a bunch of assholes tried to trash Vancouver after the Boston Bruins took the cup there. And some other asshole took out Sydney Crosby, who is currently the greatest active hockey player in the world. How downright stupid do you have to be to do that?
Concussions from hits to the head continue to be the single most critical problem faced by a lot of sports but mainly Hockey and Football. There are workable solutions out there, it’s just that the sports world is made up mainly of a bunch of reactionary old farts who are sitting on huge investments and consequently, move very slowly.
This series changed everything on cable TV...you'll see how in the coming seasons.
THE TV PERSPECTIVE
For me, TV was all pretty much about shows not made in North America. This is a very rich area so I won’t go on and on about it. But with the debut of the HBO series, Game of Thrones, the TV landscape changed dramatically. This show was so rich in character, story visual dynamic and straight to the bone hitting power that it pretty much dwarfed a lot of very good shows that came out at around the same time. Another incredible series that made a real impact in my viewing was a British cop show called Luther, which I thought was probably the best of its kind so far from a country that has an outstanding track record for producing great cop drama. Other shows that left a thumbprint on my brain are Hell on Wheels, the new western from AMC, The Good Wife, which is one of the best of the Hollywood produced shows, Blue Bloods, a great family of cops drama, NCIS which is always strong, the new Tim Allen comedy called Last Man Standing, only because there are so few good network comedies and Person of Interest, the new Jonathan Nolan/JJ Abrams series that’s just about the best thing I’ve ever seen on network TV. Hung, the HBO series about a high school teacher who became a male prostitute is filled with brilliant moments of irony. Bored to Death is a strange little Big Apple comedy, that’s funny in a Woody Allen kind of way and of course, six years old and still piling floating body parts up the Gulfstream is Dexter.
I could give you a big long list of good TV shows, but I’ve done that a couple of times recently on this blog , so check it out.
THE MOVIE PERSPECTIVE
Movies. Well, because there’s so much good TV, I haven’t really paid all that much attention to movies. The last one I actually went to see was…hell I can’t remember.
It was a few years ago that we kind of got out of going to the movies, after a run of having to sit most of the way through a lot of crap. That’s not to say that all movies are crap, but sometimes it feels that way. It’s really hard to judge big blockbusters like the Transformer series and some of the other comic book adaptations…so I tend to look more at the smaller films. One of the neatest of those is a film called Larry Crowne, which was written, produced, directed and starred Tom Hanks. This was a delightful and intelligent examination of the current American experience and how one guy in particular was able to rise above his bad fortune. What was different about it was that it never really got all maudlin and tragic to make to feel some empathy with the character. It didn’t really need to because the acting and the writing was so good, you got the point without having to be hammered on the head repeatedly with it.
Here’s a top 10 List for those of you who like lists. This actually may just be the movies I watched all the way through.
- Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part 2 (better than Part 1)
- The Eagle
- The Lincoln Lawyer (mainly because I like Matthew McConaughey)
- The King’s Speech (Colin Firth is amazing)
- The Conspirator (another brilliant Robert Redford pic)
- Water For Elephants (beautiful to look at)
- X Men First Class (the roots story)
- Cowboys & Aliens (good action pic)
- Rise Of The Planet of The Apes (Nothing to do with the corny shit that came before)
- Killer Elite (period thriller with lots of gratuitous violence and tough special forces guys without a ton of electronic gadgetry)
Now it would be wise to note that I definitely be seeing the new Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, the new Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, directed by David Fincher and the New Mission Impossible, although I’m sure it will be totally forgettable.
THE FAMILY PERSPECTIVE
On a personal level, the most significant thing for us was that our daughter, Star and her husband Ben are back in our lives again after a self-imposed exile of a few years. This has made us very happy, and though it will be a while before the re-integration into the larger family is complete, (skepticism is high), they have made a very good start and we’re really optimistic about the future.
Families are such funny things. Sometimes the chemistry is perfect, other times not so much. When you have a family that’s mainly composed of rugged individualists, the potential for conflicts can be great. It’s never simple and I won’t bore you with the complex details. Just tell you that as you grow older, holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas are way more about people than things. And this Christmas there are a couple of people we’re very happy to have back in our lives.
THE FACEBOOK PERSPECTIVE
This year, one of the most interesting places I visited on a regular basis was Facebook. I read some inspired opinions, laughed at some very funny jokes, argued politics and bullshit, was blown away by some great photography and painting, followed some amazing stories about the music business, reviewed pretty much everything I saw, gave people some advice and got some good advice myself and was freely able to express my feelings on the state of the world without anybody telling me I was full of shit. I was even so inspired by one post that I wrote a song based on it.
Some of the best conversations I had this year were on Facebook with a lot of people I don’t even know personally or haven’t actually seen in person for years. I like this, because the people on the other side of the conversation really have very little to lose by being totally honest and neither do I. I think that’s the real essence of social media, despite what all the business building gurus tell you about it. I think people go there to vent, relax, laugh, cry and generally be entertained by and satisfy their relentless curiosity about other people they find interesting.
It’s a funny thing. But these people, many of whom are blasts from the past, are a lot of fun and their sense of humour is branded on all their posts and comments. Facebook is one of the few places left where people, at least the people I’ve met are truly committed to having fun, being witty and amusing just for the sake of making other people smile. Or laugh their asses off.
If anything I’ve just said about Facebook lights a little candle in your brain, you should get yourself on board. It’s a lot of fun and a way to keep up with what’s going on without a lot of the editorial biases of conventional media.
Well that about does it for 2011. I hope your year was as good as mine was, and I hope 2012 is even better.
