Soda - Keeping Curious

I got all fired up by a book review I read over the weekend regarding the German philosopher/observer/chronicler of modern life Walter Benjamin. I was straight on to Amazon and ordered his biog and the recently published ‘Archive’ book, which documents Benjamin’s famous habit of writing his thoughts and insights on scraps of paper, menu cards, bus tickets; those discarded by-products of everyday life.

Perhaps it’s a question of one man’s litter being another man’s recycling project, being another man’s reading material. I personally think it’s great that at age 49, I’m still as excited as a 9 year old waiting for a parcel to arrive in the post. I’m off to a meeting in Birmingham today, and the post doesn’t usually arrive until mid-morning earliest, so I won’t (disappointedly) know if the books have arrived ’til later. No doubt the outcome of my Benjamin reading will start to turn up in these posts. I read somewhere once that you should learn something today as if you’re going to teach it tomorrow. I’m guessing that there’s a lot that Walter Benjamin can teach me and that he’s no doubt as relevant today as he was over 60 years ago. Perhaps life, and the living of it, never really changes.

It would probably be appropriate to begin this update with an apology. I see that the previous post already contained one of those, so I’ll skip right ahead.

Not one to let Becky get the better of me, I’m here to announce (belatedly I admit), the launch of the new Playtex website.

I’m not the best person to explain the virtues of good site design, but I really like it. I hope you do too. You should check it out.

Also launched alongside the site was the Moonwalk microsite. Following the same theme of the Playtex site, but contrasting it, the microsite aims to offer tips for people taking part in a very worthy cause.

Two of our own agency members will be taking part in the walk later this year. Hopefully we’ll get an update out of them afterwards.

I was lucky enough to check out the Fabrica exhibition at the Pompidou Centre this week. It was one of those exhibitions that truly makes you think and reminds you why you got into this business in the first place. It was a bit of a wake up call to say the least.

Fabrica is a multidisciplinary school come research centre come cultural hot house for ideas from up and coming creatives around the world, covering everything from film and photography to graphic design, advertising and creative writing. To give you an idea of how good it was, we spent four and a half hours mooching around the exhibition, despite the lure of fine red wine and even finer cheese just outside…

The exhibition is on until the 13th November if you’re looking for a good excuse to skip off to Paris for a couple of days.

As a short follow-on to the last post I just love this quote from Louis Kahn “A good idea that doesn’t happen is no idea at all”?. Buildings that don’t get built, pitches that don’t get bought”.

Over the weekend I watched the documentary ‘My Architect’. In this moving and engrossing film, documentary filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn’s sets off on a journey - one that took him five years - to try to understand and come to terms with the father he never really knew and rarely saw. His father was Louis Kahn, one of the most important and revered architects of the 20th Century, and although he died in 1974 when Nathaniel was only 11, the adult Nathaniel finally ends up with a real sense of who his Dad was through the serenely beautiful buildings he left behind.

Now the point I wish to make here is that Louis Kahn’s intensely personal style, and the world renown that followed came comparatively late in life. He was in his fifties before he hit his stride; with all of his recognised masterpieces being produced within a 20-year span that ended with his sudden death aged 73. It struck me that the history of architecture is strewn with late developers. Look at the likes of Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind, who only took up the practice of architecture after an early career as a musical protegee. I’m a great believer in Woody Allen’s dictum that 95% of success is about just turning-up, and always find it a real pleasure (and a comfort) to come across people such as Kahn, Gehry and Libeskind who spend a life time clocking-in, patiently (one imagines) perfecting their art and knowledge until a heart-felt, idiosyncratic style emerges. In all of these cases it has been well worth the wait.

So, my advice is to keep just turning-up, building your career one brick at a time, until the time comes, in the words of those Funky Business practitioners Kjell Nordstrom and Jonas Riddlestrale, to ‘explode in a dramatic frenzy of value creation during a short space of time’.

Back off my holidays and reflecting on a great week on the South Coast. Any English seaside resort I’ve ever been appears to have both it’s own micro-culture and a generic blue and white, gold braid, shell-encrusted photo-frame, small wooden model boat, cheeky car sticker one common to all. Seeing the obvious makes you feel at home by the seaside. The endless ‘cheery items’ are all part of the common ’seaside’ story we delightfully participate in a few weeks of the year - they signify all is as it should be.

But I also detected beneath the fluff an emerging culture that seems more serious, more worthy and more, well, serviced-orientated! The Cafe owners, crazy golf proprietors, pedal-boat vendors and amusement park attendants of Littlehampton appear to have all gone to charm school, become great at dealing with customers and worthy of being called world-class marketers when it comes to promoting their services.

For example, in the park next to the sea-view apartment we were staying in, there’s a small outdoors cafe run by Brian who is courtesy personified. He also provides a highly relevant menu based on intimately knowing his audience and knows a thing or two about customer retention. He does 2 for 1 offers on bacon sandwiches, second-guesses if you’re a cup or a mug kind of person and keeps up an engaging commentary worthy of its own blog. And taking a page out of Tom Peters, Brian hasn’t forgotten that design is front and centre these days. You sit and eat at brassiere-style chairs and tables surrounded by a Van Gogh sunflower yellow windbreaker that helps bring out the verdant green of the surrounding park.

But if that’s not enough, further upgrades to the seaside experience are in store.

Heatherwick Studio - I’m a great fan - has designed a cafe for Littlehampton’s East Beach. In the process of being constructed, the notes and drawing I saw shows a design based on a piece of driftwood but cut out of steel sheets. It certainly looks exciting, modern and intriguing, all words one will need to use more and more when visiting this part of the coast in the future.