Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmas-time.
—Laura Ingalls Wilder
Community Endures in the Wake of Hurricane Sandy
Posted on November 15, 2012 · Leave a Comment
On the morning of October 30, 2012, millions of Americans awoke to unimaginable destruction and despair. Almost immediately, families, friends and complete strangers banded together to rebuild neighbourhoods shattered by Hurricane Sandy.
Like many of you, I’m still in shock after watching Hurricane Sandy wreak havoc on the East Coast earlier this month, leaving our friends and colleagues without power, water or shelter. Since then, we’ve watched friends and acquaintances in the travel industry to come to the aid of others. We were particularly moved by the response of the Rhode Island office of G Adventures—for whom I work—who responded to the plight of the families of two of our employees. They had grown up in the hardest hit parts of New Jersey—the Rockaways. An appeal went out by email for donations, and within a few hours, one of my office mates in Toronto had offered to drive to New York with a car full of supplies for the victims of Hurricane Sandy.
Check out their story in the video.
Kathryn and I are continually amazed by the power of community when it’s used to raise donations, offer assistance or generate awareness for a cause. We’re inspired by all those who’ve come together to help.
Sometimes, it takes the absolute worst to bring out our very best. I am so very proud of the people with whom I work for their passion and commitment. Floodwaters recede. Headlines fade. Even scars heal with time. But communities endure.
If today were the last day of your life
Posted on November 11, 2012 · Leave a Comment
Linds Redding, a New Zealand-based art director who worked at BBDO and Saatchi & Saatchi, died last month at aged 52 from an inoperable esophageal cancer. Redding kept a blog, and after his passing an essay he wrote about the ad business, titled “A Short Lesson In Perspective,” has gained a new and sudden life across the creative blogosphere. In it Redding claimed that life as a creative isn’t worth it. “It turns out I didn’t actually like my old life nearly as much as I thought I did,” he wrote, after he was diagnosed. His post addresses the existential problem at the center of anyone’s career in advertising: Can you marry art and commerce and be fulfilled as a human being?
He writes:
It turns out I didn’t actually like my old life nearly as much as I thought I did. I know this now because I occasionally catch up with my old colleagues and work-mates. They fall over each other to enthusiastically show me the latest project they’re working on. Ask my opinion. Proudly show off their technical prowess (which is not inconsiderable.) I find myself glazing over but politely listen as they brag about who’s had the least sleep and the most takeaway food. “I haven’t seen my wife since January, I can’t feel my legs any more and I think I have scurvy but another three weeks and we’ll be done. It’s got to be done by then The client’s going on holiday. What do I think?”
What do I think? I think you’re all fucking mad. Deranged. So disengaged from reality it’s not even funny. It’s a fucking TV commercial. Nobody gives a shit.
This has come as quite a shock I can tell you. I think, I’ve come to the conclusion that the whole thing was a bit of a con. A scam. An elaborate hoax. Countless late nights and weekends, holidays, birthdays, school recitals and anniversary dinners were willingly sacrificed at the altar of some intangible but infinitely worthy higher cause. It would all be worth it in the long run…
This was the con. Convincing myself that there was nowhere I’d rather be was just a coping mechanism. I can see that now. It wasn’t really important. Or of any consequence at all really. How could it be. We were just shifting product. Our product, and the clients. Just meeting the quota. Feeding the beast as I called it on my more cynical days.
So was it worth it? Well of course not. It turns out it was just advertising. There was no higher calling.
Does not make happy reading for the many people who work in the creative department of an ad agency. Check out the whole post here.
Each morning, you’ve got to look in the mirror and ask yourself, ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”.
Babies are assholes
Posted on October 15, 2012 · 1 Comment
Creeped out by the TIME cover story earlier this year about attachment parenting—you know, the weird one with the preschool-age kid standing on a stool and suckling at his mom’s breast—Jeff Otte penned an essay for the Village Voice about how much attachment parenting sucks. Otte writes:
Babies are assholes. They’re demanding, they’re utterly self-centered, they have no empathy and they shriek horrible, horrible shrieks when they don’t get what they want. And that’s okay, because they’re babies. They’re adorable and they don’t know any better.
Interesting article—if not scurrilous. Check it out.
Poetry isn’t simply reticence
Posted on October 9, 2012 · Leave a Comment
… served up for what we meant to say. It’s a place to be ample and grateful, to make room for those events and people closest to our hearts.
—Tess Gallagher on poet and writer Raymond Carver
It’s not the critic that counts
Posted on August 3, 2012 · 1 Comment
… not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.
—Theodore Roosevelt, Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910
