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Spams, Scams, data & the clicky tricks of E-vertisers

31 Friday Jan 2020

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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$13000, 3D, 4K, Airplane Simulation, Amazon, Animation, Aristocracy, Back Pain, Betrayal, BitCoin, Breastaurant, Brilliance, Cheap, Content, Contouring, Conundrum, Crystal Meth, data Cache, Data Science, desire, Diet, Digital Advertising, Divinity, Dragons, Dream, Drink, DRONE, Dystopian, e-vertising, Email Campaigns, Emails, entrepreneurship, Ergo, Exclusive, facebook, Game Changer, gene Pool, Genetic Risk, GOOGLE, GPS, Holidays, Hot, IMAGINATION, Inbox Management, Internet, KETO Slim, Logo & Website Design, love, Madonna, Mist, NEW PRODUCT, Penitentiary, Pigmentation, Pro, Prolapse Disc, Relaxation, Russian Women, Sciatica, Sensation, Shark Tank, Shrinking stomach, Skinny, Sleep, Smart Phone, smart phones, Smart Watch, Snoring, Social, technology, The Boss, Tigers, Tracker, True, Ukraine, Visual Experience, Vitiligo, VOGUE, X Men, X Rated

NevScreenshot 2020-01-30 at 19.28.38.png

 

 

 

It seems we are only ever one click away from digital heaven or hell – the chiaroscuro of polluted data bases, email hijacks, scams, dark trading and the ugly beauty of spam and click-bait either flinging us skyward or casting us down into the digital lava of e-hell.

Internet searches can get dicey even with the most innocent of search terms. So staying vigilant and being careful helps. 

God help you if you’re stupid enough to glaze over while scrolling emails [that’ll be me] or even staggeringly dumb enough to click on one that reads ‘Your Amazon Order Update & Competition Exclusive’ [that’ll be me again] especially if, on thinking about it, you weren’t actually expecting an Amazon or any other kind of order for that matter!! [And yes, still Me!] 

But Lordy lord does your gut know the minute you click on that icon that you’ll rue the day you ever did. Perviously this kind of stuff would really irritate me – my inbox suddenly filled to spilling with mindless and pointless pap – honking scams, over-promise and tat. But as life goes on, I’ve started to quietly enjoy the spillage and taint of the ridiculous and spurious missives that land in my box.

And I’ve even started taking to building out a sort of emotional logic around them just to amuse myself!

So here is my take on the most recent batch of e-joy that’s popped into my world. I’ve snatched the most important first few lines just to show flavour. Enjoy! 

Erase my Back Pain

1 weird stretch DESTROYS Back Pain & Sciatica 

Pain Free!!

Delicious! Free anything is good – but PAIN and FREE and two screamers? Wow. I just feel the need to use 13 ‘screamers’ in celebration!!!!!!!!!!!!!  And this one’s actually relevant to me.  I had a prolapse L1/L2 disc some years back, and the terrible sciatica from it destroyed me. So the chance to DESTROY it back with an obtuse physical gesture makes me very happy. 

Get perfect Little toes in as little as 3 days 

Nail Vitamin Deficiency 

Mother natures recipes

But not as happy as the idea of perfect little toes. Anyone that can save me from my Frodo feet gets a prize.  And there is a certain messianic thread to the 3 day promise. And on the third day my feet will effectively rise from their calloused, shoe-stuffed grave to throw light and beauty into the world. Who knew. And that it is Mother Nature doing the raising of my dead feet, all the better. 

ACADEMIA

You read the paper Genetic Risk and Reproductive Decision Making:

Read this paper too!

Punchy. And you are correct – yes I did. But that doesn’t mean I would subsequently like you to send me an update every time someone puts out a white paper with the words ‘genetic’, ‘reproductive’, ‘decision-making’ or ’Risk’ in the title or sub-head. Or for that matter any derivative of the above, words – e.g. gene, or risk – or associated key words, compounds, synonym/antonym comparatives – or any random fridge-magnet approach to key word search stuff you may choose to push at me. Come to think of it, perhaps a peer-reviewed White Paper on The Impact on Intellectual Discourse of the Vulgar Monetisation of Academic Mediocrity might be a whizz.  

Diabetes will kill you! 

Blood Sugar Formula – Mother nature’s recipes

No shit. Will it? I absolutely never, ever knew that. My mother was diabetic – late onset, in her 60s by the time it snuck into view with its thin-lipped, mean-spirited needling and blooding. But she managed it with remarkable elegance and aplomb. And no, it did not kill her. But its presence in her life did really, really irritate her for a while, much like the reoccurrence of all this scruffy E-vertising in my life. 

XPHONE 

One of the best smart phones in the world

Offers a true visual experience at a very cheap price

Lummey. An X phone. What, like an X Men phone? Incredible. No? Oh, or X-rated? Weird. But strangely modern. Anyway. None of this matters. As this is one of the best. But not the best though? I think your ambitions are a little frail at the end there, guys. Or are we worried about over selling – in email – spam? How can this matter when a phone offers a true visual experience. What does that even mean? Are the pictures and films true to the originals? Like they actually play them without creating untrue versions of them? Do phones do that? Play unreal films? Like, swapping out original content and playing a pirated or faux version of it – to avoid licensing fees? A sort of digital mobile BeKindRewind strategy. Hmmm. This X Phone is a conundrum.

Invest in bitcoin and the life of your dreams 

Earn 13,000 in exactly 24 hours riding the bitcoin wave

Only 3 free copies still available

But not as much of a conundrum as deciding what dream life I’m going to take a run at with the 9 bucks a minute I’m earning investing in bitcoin over the next 24 hours. Get In. And, note, it isn’t 23 hours and 49 minutes – or 24 hours and 32 minutes. Be very clear – this is ‘exactly 24 hours’. And it is 24 hours with attitude. This 24 hours is no slacker – no slouch. This 24 hours surfs! This 24 hours carves off the lip of the bitcoin WAVE! How cool is that! Every minute’s worth of that $13,000  – every 9 bucks of it – comes dripping with bitcoin spume. BUT hold on. There’s a sort of Stranger Things thing going on here, no? I could have SWORN that the only 3 free copies still available went weeks ago. So there must be a universal 3 somewhere. Like deities perhaps. Eternal. Invisible. A trinity of Bitcoin Divinity existing only in Upside Down world.

DRONE 4K Camera

Best affordable drone just hit the market

Adventure unfolds with the MACVAIR

Got it. I know how to find out whether the Trinity of Bitcoin Divinity exists in Upside Down world – send in the DRONE 4K camera. And not any old DRONE 4K. We’re talking the most affordable – which means cheap, right? As I really don’t want to be splurging even one cent more than I have to of my 13,000 bucks – no way. But MACVAIR gets that, right? They know that searching for a Trinity Divinity of Bitcoin in Upside Down internet world is an ADVENTURE, right? And that shit is going to UNFOLD. And let’s face it – if I pull this off, find the trinity of bitcoin divinity, convert the 13K in 24 hours [exactly], I am hot stuff. I am off the scale desirable. EVERYONE will be chasing me down. Wanting a piece of me…

Positions available – YOU’RE HIRED

2 position available GOOGLE & facebook

So let’s put it another way GOOGLE. Lets re-frame this facebook. I’ll decide whether YOU’RE HIRED. Hows about that? Not the other way around. Do you know who the actual f%&* I am? I am the wave-riding, drone-flying Bitcoin Trinity Divinity Slayer. I have the last 3 copies, purged from Upside Down World. I DECIDE who hires and fires. Not you. And just by-the-by, if you are going to even dare approach me, I suggest you make that 100 positions available – as I am now obviously worth a hundred of your usual talent quality. Just saying.

Lillian

This drink is the answer to becoming skinny

Your stomach will shrink fast 

Shark Tanks new product is a diet sensation!

Oh I see. So you’re implying that I not only carry the intellectual mettle and heroic weight of one hundred people but also the physical mass of them? Well, if the Shark Tank thinks it’s a diet sensation, how could I possibly refuse. These people are the leading, bleeding edge of entrepreneurship and business nous. Sharks, Dragons, Tigers. They are a menagerie of business brilliance. And if they say that this will indeed be the answer to becoming skinny, how could I question that – other than asking on which planet the originator of the delusional waffle lives? A dystopian one liberally scattered with Crystal Meth and freely available prescription opiates, punctuated with double-fronted fixed trailers lying unnervingly close to a breastaurant, a breakers yard and a penitentiary I’d wager. But hell – let’s try it! 

Track

Rest easy and never worry about your car being stolen again

Richard Berg says

It works like a charm! CAUTION  Make sure you really want to know what you might find out. This thing tracked my wife and her boyfriend into the middle of nowhere

If this push email trail is anything to go by I probably NEED to drink myself skinny, as my united-state-of-largesse has patently rather put off my other half, potentially to the degree that, much like Mr Berg here, if I were to track them to the middle of nowhere I might otherwise find my loved one in fiercely repeated receipt of someone else’s largesse. But hey, you know what? Knowing the exact GPS location of that rutting betrayal completely takes the sting out of it. In fact, it allows me to rise above it all through smartly applied technology. Track allows me to be the bigger person and take the bigger view. Thank you Track.

Stop Snoring device

The mist that stops you snoring

New invention gives hope to all of those suffering from chronic snoring 

And now that we’ve broached the issue of the fading and faltering nature of personal desirability, this email allows me to embrace the wider ambition. Why stop at just getting skinny quick to alleviate the possibility of philandering and betrayal. That over-carbureted nasal exhaust is hardly likely to get the lower engine running and the pheromones firing, unless one finds oneself lying furtively next to a member of the Sus Scrofa family. So the misty blue yonder of non-snoring hope is beckoning me.   

SMART WATCH

The smart watch that watches out for your health 

The smart watch that big tech companies don’t want you to know about

Have you been wanting a smart watch. Well now you can afford one!!

Now, fatuous, fat, snoring, dream-life-living greatness aside, I have never claimed to be smart enough for my phone. I am indeed a stupid man in charge of a smart device. At most recent reckoning I have estimated that I use, at best, about 3% of the functionality of my phone.

So IMAGINE what I felt when I saw that a watch, smarter than my phone even, will look after my health. And what’s more, it will do it TO SUCH DEGREE that Apple and Microsoft just won’t want me to know about it. Wowsers. Could it get any better?

XonePhone

Theres a new smart phone. You can’t ignore its performance and price

Wow-wheezers. It just did. Game change! I agree. It is night on impossible to ignore the words performance and price. Well, that’s what it says in Killing it in the Email Sales Dept 101 Guide to Successful product sales. Helluva key word focus. How do they do it? It would be so easy to stumble into mediocrity in this game, sliding down the greasy chute of indifference towards lowest common-denominator schtick and sleazy selling – but all these guys manage to keep that quality bar so high it makes me dizzy.

Drone X Pro 

Limited time sale on drones

Foldable quadcopter with wide angle batteries [US]

Speaking of which, the DRONE X Pro just feels like its going to take me up to a whole new level. Foldable! What the wahoo is that all about? But it sounds really exciting. But if I’m really brutally honest, the thing that hooked me through the lip like some digital grouper is the idea of ‘wide angle batteries.’ Frankly that is simply genius. Not only is the lens wide-angle but the batteries too. I’ve no idea of the technical nature or material build or the power engineering required to enable a battery to both power the unit AND expand the retinal capacity of the lens on the on-board camera. But that’s got to be worth stacks! Thats worth swag-money. 

KETO SLIM DIET

Shark Tank Investors LOVE miracle weight loss pill

50 lbs. in 61 days: No New Exercise Skinny Pill melts Belly fat

And swag money is the name of the game with these Shark Tank kids. KETO slim diet is feeling like my kind of miracle weight loss pill. And the Sharks LOVE it. That makes this one hot. So hot in fact, that it ‘melts’ belly fat. ‘Melts!’ How cool is that. A kind of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Nazi-Face-Melting moment…but for belly fat [national socialist or otherwise]. You’d need something pretty powerful if you’re going to lose 50lbs in 61 days so something akin to the power of the Christian faith’s Almighty God as vested in the Ark of The Covenant seems like a pretty sensible choice. I mean it could be a scam but there’s something so trustworthy in phrases like No New Exercise Skinny Pill. It just SMACKS of integrity and professional discretion. I’m in.

Ryan Oliver 

Get this new diagnostic Tool and Save Money 

Prevent car repair scams …as opposed too online ones…

Hang On. Ryan. You beauty you. Scams! You read my mind. And not just those of the car variety. Car scams. Diet scams. Technology scams. Bitcoin scams. Ryan you are the man of the moment. So, if you’ll allow me, I’d like to suggest something. Might you ever consider getting together with Sheila, MACVAIR, the Shark Tank guys, Richard Berg and Lillian and create one universal Diagnostic Tool that prevents all and every kind of scam? That would be thrilling.

Meet a Lovely Russian Woman Today

RussianWomenDate.com

International Russian And Ukranian dating

Free membership will close in 01:02:47 

Now this is fascinating on three levels. First of all I sense there may be a role for the Universal Diagnostic Tool here as the countdown clock seems to be stuck at 01:02:47 – so free may not be as free as you think anymore. Secondly, I find it remarkable that one needs a site to meet Russian ladies. There was a perfectly charming young Russian lady on the train the other day, travelling to the airport with her father I believe. [It demonstrates just how conservative and old fashioned the Russian culture is.  A young 20-something Western-European woman wouldn’t be seen dead going on holiday with her father!] And thirdly I am quietly surprised how blatant the Russian Annexation of the Ukraine has become. I mean land is one thing but appropriating the woman as yours seems rather arrogant and presumptive if you ask me, especially if you then flaunt them on a dating site.   

Sheila Andrews

Logo and Website design for my business

Attract more new customers …

But bless Sheila for being the absolute antithesis of all that arrogance and sleaze and complex Ponzi style selling schtick. Simple. Straight up. Honest. Logo and Website design for my business. Do you know what Sheila – if I had a slew of small, low-level, low-grade slightly shady, grubby businesses all scrabbling to make a good impression in an on-line world, before I let them send one email, I’d have them sitting in front of you talking logos and websites. And that’s a promise.

 Ergo Relax

Best travel pillow that ever hit the market

Rest even in difficult conditions

Phew. All of this typing on trains is making me rather sleepy. Can you imagine then how thrilled I was when I saw this. I am in a chair. I can sit back. It is possible to close my eyes – ergo, I can relax. But what really snagged my curiosity on the broken fence of promises is the fact that Ergo Relax tells me that I can rest even in difficult conditions. Holy Moly. So, though I may have made an inappropriate slur for which someone chose to press charges, I would still sleep like a baby! I could tuck in for 40 winks with flood water rising about me. And a good night’s sleep in the midst of a climate crisis beckons. Amazing. Ergo Relax is not to be sniffed at, either with or without Snoring mist.

3D Airplane games 

ProFlight Simulator 

Presenting the most realistic flight simulator ever created 

I can’t pretend to be anything other than a tiny weeny bit suspicious of this. I have a lot of love for simulation tech in all of its guises. And I know that the track records of the USAF and Boeing leave a lot of room for people who might create superior flight simulations and trainers that prepare people to a] not crash and b] not bomb the wrong people. But when I’m told that this is the most realistic flight simulator ever created I am stunned into humble silence. Perhaps this is the issue. The real geniuses are to be found not in Bomber Command or Boeing’s testing team but here, discreetly and humbly selling the most realistic flight simulator ever quietly in the furrows and margins of the internet and my inbox. No accolade chasers or plaudit junkies them. A small profitable stipend from an email campaign is more than enough.  

Herpes Simplex

Medical Mystery. How did their Herpes disappear

Hi If you or a loved person suffer from herpes simplex it is urgent that you do not go another day without the powerful information in the following lines

Didn’t you see the news? Its a revolt!

Perhaps this might explain the shyness of our majestic simulator designers. They may have been so busy creating the most realistic flight simulator EVER that they missed the revolt, the news passed them by and they continued to live another day and another day without this powerful information in the following lines [whatever that might mean.] Can you blame them for choosing to stay rather discretely out of the glare of fame and fortune.

Canvas Print Ads 

Add to your holiday collection

Hmmmn. I wonder whether our reclusive simplex flight engineers might just be a little down. Perhaps they might just need a lift of some sort. Something to jolly them up a bit. Digging out a picture of favourite holiday moments and suchlike can be a real tonic especially when rendered across the highest quality synthetic canvas. I know someone whom has two rather fetching canvas prints of themselves throwing what someone mistakenly referred to as a VOGUE shape at the Casino club, Guildford on MADONNA NIGHT, while sporting a wet-suit and a rather fetching fedora. An easy mistake to make but, for the record, they report that they were simply gesturing to the fire exit due to the fact that the person in front of them looked so HOT they thought they might well burst into flames. That the person happened to be both my associates boss and also their bed mate probably explains why said associate got a raise and was fired, all in one 24 hour period. But to be clear, it wasn’t EXACTLY 24 hours. No bitcoin investment there. Nor a professional Reference for that matter   

Professional Who’s Who

Nominated for inclusion

On the subject of professional credentials, imagine my surprise when the e-call came to join the rarified ranks of the professional aristocracy. But Who Knew Professional Who’s Who even existed? And a nomination for inclusion no less. I am always up for inclusive action. Diversity is a really strong suit at the moment in corporate circles so nominating people for inclusion strikes me as a very enlightened action on Who’s Who’s part. Thank God their email arrived frankly. I was starting to think ‘What? Is every email a scam or a prank?’ So here’s to your professional rigour and enlightened inclusivity programme Professional Who’s Who.  

Ultra Boost WiFi

No More Buffering! WiFi boost speeds up your internet 

Your cure for spotty internet

Buffering. I must confess I LOVE this word. [Note to self: beware excessive use of screamers, capitals and absence of punctuation induced by protracted periods of time looking at push emails from shite businesses, products, faux brands and personalities.] Buffering implies a fierce circular attention to something, involving friction and some form of rotation or animation. So I can imagine that once someone’s stopped buffering this liberates a massive cache of energy to apply in some other direction – to power the WiFi connection for instance. That we can give that surge of redirected energy a boost just fills me with utter joy. Currently my wi-fi wheezes along at barely a breath. If I was of a mind to take up contouring as a new face-forward make-up solution, I’d be stuffed. It would take an age to play even the smallest section of a 2 hr 32m Contouring Tutorial – to such degree that I would probably take to spending enormous tracts of time seemingly in a creeping state of tribalism – given that, at any point in the day, the marks on my face would have developed in some really slow flick-book animation of an abstracted patch pattern effect – a sort of snail’s pace Tyson-face tattoo – part Maori part Bobbi Brown part Shrigley.

But nonetheless, all’s well with Ultra Boost. And that it cures spotty internet is a matter for religious level celebration. Hallelulia. No more teenage internet angst. No more screen scrubbing. No more microbeaded bandwidth. Internet spots are gone forever!    

De Pigmentation

I am vitiligo free and so much healthier and confident overall.

Vitiligo Miracle

Cure Vitiligo holistically

Much it seems as will be the ones on my hands face and other extremities, very, very soon. As the words set out, I may well be Vitiligo free with this holistic miracle. I have had Vitiligo for a few years and it is spreading. Though I am aware of it, especially when I have been in the sun, it has always been a visual thing for me. So LORD, I never knew that I might be unhealthy because of it? Unhealthy? How? Herpes. But I’ve got news on a natural remedy revolt for that. Obesity? Screw that, as I’ve got two Shark Tank approved skinny making pills and something from a lady called Lillian for that baby. Diabetes? I can kill it before it kills me. Back Pain? Again, one ninja move and a weird stretch and that baby’s history – so not that. Which leaves me little to worry about. My anxiety seems to have ebbed away.

And how amazing – my confidence… has soared! It’s true. I am going to be absolutely fine!

As all of the wonder emails have told me. I am the answer. I only need act. Perfect.  

Seems simple enough to me. But hang on. Just got to read the 347 emails that have just popped up in my inbox.

But then I’m getting RIGHT to it.

 

er compromising on quality

Being  organised with time and resources

Utilising available learning

Taking care of EHL property

Making productive use of available technology

Being productive with time

Sharing knowledge

Living the 7 steps of service excellence every day

Ensuring processes are implemented and followed

Meet your deadlines

Understand our business

Be a champion of sustainability

Measure and evaluate the impact of your decisions

Never compromising on quality

Being  organised with time and resources

Utilising available learning

Taking care of EHL property

Making productive use of available technology

Being productive with time

Sharing knowledge

Living the 7 steps of service excellence every day

Ensuring processes are implemented and followed

Meet your deadlines

Understand our business

Be a champion of sustainability

Measure and evaluate the impact of your decisions

Queens, feeling it & The Art of Listening

04 Friday Nov 2016

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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ABBA, Beyonce, Bizet, Bowie, Brixton Academy, Dave Grohl, Eek A Mouse, Heloise Lettisier, Iggy Pop, John Foxxx, John Paul Jones, Kraftwerk, Landscape, led zeppelin, Les Negresses Vertes, Listening, love, Madge, Michael Jackson, Morcheeba, Patti Smith, Pretty vacant, Puccini, Rocky Horror, Schubert, Sinead OConnor, System Of A Down, The Cramps, Them Crooked Vultures

images.jpeg

I experienced an epiphany last night. A small one.

Yes, bright lights from above were involved. Choral throngs. A shift in the cosmos. But so was a small French chanteuse. 3 musicians. 3 male dancers. Some sparsely choreographed neon tubes. Some Somersby cider. And few thousand people.

Christine & The Queens quietly smashed through the musical panic room I have patently been living inside.

It wasn’t until half way through the gig that I realised that the mesmeric and seductive nature of her and the music was actually relentlessly delicately tap tap tapping against the walls until smash. Revelation. For various reasons, some particular to me and the recent years of my life – others universal and just to do with age, I had forgotten how to listen.

As a man, especially a 50 something white one, that will come as no surprise to many. We are apparently renowned for our inability to listen.

But clichés aside, I have always had the deepest and greatest love for all forms of music. From the velvet of Puccini to the Twin Tenor Aria of Bizet’s the Pearl Fishers, to reggae blues parties ting a ling-a-linging to Eek A Mouse, the rocky horror psychobilly of the Cramps, smash in some black country Led-heavy rock, season with System of A Down,  Move On Up to disco, cross the White Lines of Hip Hop, turn left at ABBA, drink in the pretty vacancy of punk and back into deep folk, all rounded off with some heavy house and a little drum and base. Nenah Cherry’s Red hot and blue Monday. Hoagy Carmichael to the power of the killers.

And I hadn’t even got to Bowie, Pop & Reed, and the art fag beauty of shape shifting artists and icons in bleeding light landscapes. And then there’s the expanses of Ode to joy and Trout Concertos for cello and violin with a little Gregory Parker and Ella Fitzgerald for the sheer hell of it. The colour is endless.

I just love music.  And I can find the delicate cadence of a Gregorian chant in the heart of Face A La Mer by Les Negresses Vertes.

But therein lies the problem. Listening too much becomes Not Listening. It becomes interrogation.

I am also a drummer which means that the musical verticals are cut with the horizontal of particular musicians (always a tricky word to use when talking about drummers). The interrogation is not just genre. It’s now cut by skill set and value judgements. Not only am I interrogating the vibe and output of Crooked Vultures, I am also listening to the relationship between Jones and Grohl in comparative terms – given the seamless fluid and world shaping nature of Jones’s previous relationship with John Bonham.

Listening too much and having too much of a back catalogue in your head and heart in one way is divine and defining. But it is also a tyranny when applied in the wrong way.

As Christine, real name Héloise Letissier, moved through her set, I did what all over music-ed under feeling people do. I started cataloguing every nuance and inspiration. Mining every song for influences and steals. Creating collisions and comparisons, like some dreadful two penny film pitch. In her physicality she had the punk animalism of Iggy Pop fused with Michael Jackson; with a smattering of ‘Madgey ‘Vogue for good measure.

She had the fractured roar and vocal soar and musicality of Sinead.

The musicians that back her were like someone had taken Daft Punk and sent them to a musical un-finishing school run by John Foxxx, Landscape and presided over by Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider, two discrete computational Professors from Dusseldorf.

The pulsing and strobing of samples was text book White Lines – and the tip toe keyboard of Tilted was pure Einstein a Go Go rolled in a little sparks with some deep house and Morcheeba for good measure.

Stop. Whoa. And the whole Bitter Pill Alanis moment cannot be ignored. Which bled into a Red Dawn landscape of Peter Gabriel like making.

The elegantly choreographed neon installation dancing above her head – and I am remembering Gary Newman and the Tubeway Army’s bleak black and strip lights.

And then the soaring above all of the others: Patti Smith rushed up into my head.

But as the gig went on the snippets, influences and collisions came thicker and faster, speeding through my head.

Trying to stay focused on each one of these flashes became akin to watching a subway train pull out of the station. At first each window, each carriage and the people inside them are distinct but as the train speeds up they begin to smudge into each other faster and faster, until they are a strobe of light a roar and a feeling: a feeling. Until they just ‘are’.

And that was my epiphany. The Broken Beyonce. The Half Woman. Became my Jean D’Arc.

As the music overflowed it became impossible to keep interrogating. And I started to listen. I slowly remembered what it was like to just listen and feel. Stop thinking stop talking.

I realised that I was trying to control the emotion of the music and her through the deconstruction of it. And the falling away of that felt transcendent.

I don’t mean to put too much on her shoulders. Perhaps I was also overwhelmed by the LOVE in the room. Because it was LOVE. All these people calling her name. It was kind and generous and messy. It wasn’t obsession, or trending or fetishizing. She seemed very very LOVED.

So unusually, even for this whiter shade of male, I found myself listening and being moved once more. And feeling exhilarated by the feeling of that.

I remembered how I feel about music. Not what I think about it.

Merci Heloise.

Living The Dream?! sustainable living & a Great British conversation just begging to be had.

19 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Austin Powers, Banter, brands, Castles, Cats Cradle, China Dream, Climate Change, Constituencies of Action, Consumerism, Dreams, Emerged Economies, faith, great British conversation, Identity, John Stuart Mill, JUCCCE, Lighter Living, love, M&S, Pay Day Loans, Peggy Liu, Pork Scracthings, Prosecco, Reimagining Prosperity, Smarter Living, Stenna Stairlifts, sustainable living, Transforming Desire, UK Dream

images

Funny how some phrases just fall in to your lap. Funny how some just stick. Living the Dream is just such a phrase – a gift horse that was staring me in the mouth.

In the space of two days I had the polarities of Great British aspiration and disappointment writ simple and large on my storytelling wall. Our Great British M&S-stylie Prosecco & Pistachio lifestyle and its poor PaydayLoan & Pork-scratching cousin came gift-wrapped in one exquisitely simple phrase.

In a West London brasserie bar sat a woman, fashionably turned out, the odd fancy shopping bag at her killer-heeled feet, a glass of bubbles in front of her, txting furiously on her i-phone 6. Her friend appeared suddenly, looking a little bedraggled, but on seeing her shiny friend she brightly chirped,’ living the dream babes…look at you…bubbles and everything…’

And within days of the upbeat version wafting in front of me, its poor cousin appeared in North London, just beyond N1. I see a bloke, obviously far from rolling in it: a bag of DIY stuff in one hand, one child in the buggy, the other mid tantrum, on the phone to his partner/girlfriend/wife/babymamma. She is patently giving him an earful. Cue a friend of his walking past on the other side of the street who shouts ‘ Oi Tommy..Living the Dream then mate!?’. The beer-battered sarcasm of this banter simply inspired a meek self-deprecating shrug in the bedraggled bloke on the mobile. True.

As a phrase Living the Dream does what every great tenet, mantra or philosophy of any authenticity and substance should do – it easily and effortlessly embraces every extremity, turbulence, nuance, depth and not so subtle shade of the thing it seeks to define or describe – in this case the quality of life the person is leading at that very moment the phrase is deployed.

It allows enormous complexity to sit just behind it, knowingly, without ever having to say it. The back-stories of these two people were plain to see without having to set them out.

This was the power of the phrase for me.

To be fair I had been searching for one to wrap up a very UK ‘dream of better’ for a while.

We had searched for a conversation starter around a more sustainable lifestyle – one that started in the real everyday world.

In 2013 we ran 4 pilot workshops in London for the UK Dream project to that end – to find a more populist, scalable conversation to inspire a more enduring model of prosperity: a thriving vibrant life open to all, underwritten with sustainable truths.

We needed a new narrative: a new lexicon of better for people to use in their everyday lives. The old narrative was simply not working. Sustainability people speaking to themselves: impenetrable, arcane, complex, off-putting.

For most people the end of the month comes before the end of the world. They are more concerned with making ends meet than with how they might meet their end in some post-apocalyptic climate-induced catastrophe. The old narratives, rooted as they are in the activist roots of environmentalism simply do not chime with your average Joe and Jane.

So we had a chasm to cross. We needed a simple and very UK-centric or British hook that allowed us to start with simple everyday human-sized truths – What keeps you up at night? What gets you out of bed in the morning? What does good look like from where you’re standing?

In a search for this new narrative, we had already applied the 7 stage Dream-In-A-Box methodology (well, three of them at least) to try and shape what better might look like and scaling the everyday conversation around it.

We got as diverse a group of individuals as possible into a room to play with, pull down, interrogate and explore the traits, dimensions, idioms and aspirations of a prosperous life underwritten by sustainable truths. And we did it by first banishing the language of the circular economy, up-cycling, collaborative consumption (a co-created art installation project by 17th Century British poets surely) stewardship, materiality, EP&L, Net Positive and every other phrase on the trending circuit.

The most interesting and charming conversations were sparked around the old arts of thrift – smart shrewd living skills. A form of street smarts for aspirational living. people who know know…

The idea of Lighter Living. Lightening the burden on oneself (bills, cost, beyond ones means) and on the world in which we endeavour to thrive offered an overarching narrative hook that felt aspirational; breezy; cool.

So UK Dream identified Smarter lighter living represented a good beginning – positive – something one feels before one thinks it.

But we still had the tricky D word. Left to its own devices, Dream is a very divisive word, regardless of how you underwrite it; especially in Britain. On the up side everyone likes a dreamy something – we are happy to have the dream job, the dream holiday. But these are specific uses of the word that define a clear and tangible set of benefits and experiences.

Use the D word on a more rarified cultural and nationalistic level and the long shadow of John Stuart Mill enters the room at the faintest whisper of the word.

Dreams. A tyranny of pasteurized living. The death of individuality. An opiate under whose suffocating crop invention withers and spirit is anaesthetised. Dreams: the heartland of the indolent and fearful. The sharp corners and friction of individuality are what keep us alive. Not buttered populist platitudes for us to get fat on.

For the UK audience, Dream just invites the cynic and the heckler to rip it up; test its edges, even when you try and put it in a box.

Hence my search for the phrase that delivered the idea of a dream of better as part of life in the here-and-now; as measured in clear and tangible terms – a phrase that could happily ladder up or down; for better or worse; good or bad; funny or sad.

Cue Living The Dream?!

As soon as we place the ‘Living the Dream?!’ question at the top of our conversational ladder everything shifts – and becomes more human.

It allows us to engage with really simple scenarios to begin with – what keeps you up at night? the ‘mares big and small of every day life – What gets you out of bed in the morning? the dreamy stuff that makes life worth living.

This simple two pillar approach can be used to inspire conversations around identity, fashion, lifestyle, living, food & drink, education, energy, finances, technology, travel & transport, leisure & entertainment, white goods, furniture – anything. Easy conversational doors into complex nuanced stories.

It also means that we can reframe conversations that interweave multiple dimensions (usually only looked at or explored as single threads) and explore them as we find them – as slightly more chaotic jumbled buckets of conversation.

For example:

Love & Shopping

The old intrinsic nature of love and how we demonstrated it – through nurture, provision, protection, empowerment, support and belonging – has been hijacked by brands trying to inveigle their way into a lead position on our purse. We are more likely to make an active demonstration of love through a commercial transaction than we are through a personal one. The extrinsic demonstrable nature of the neu-love we now practice is making us live beyond our means.

So we find ourselves living in a culture that celebrates Saturday shopping in Westfield as an act of bonding and love. Families share in the pursuit of living the dream; even if it just loading love on a credit card for later. Every demonstration of love seems to come with a bar code: DISCUSS.

Faith & Banter

Faith has become more than just the repose of religion – faith and leaps of it are required in every corner: humanists take the leap of faith in humanity and its ability to prevail. Philosophers cross the chasm of the ontological between universals and particulars. Artists relentlessly leap from humanities to science to metaphysics to the primal with an absolute faith in the eventual ascension of something sublime. Even in brittle science, in the absence of an M Theory waiting to be revealed, they undertake a leap of faith of their own every day between the two quantum truths without a bridge to join them.

But in the UK, if you get too serious, watch your language, lighten up and Get over yourself. This is the nation of ‘taking the piss’, heckling, ribbing and anarchic banter. How does something so serious play out in a culture where to be serious is to be dangerous. DISCUSS.

Castles & Cat’s Cradle

Every man is an island and every Englishman’s home is his castle. Well, ‘ish’. Given the level of Great British personal debt, mortgage rates, the ascendence of the pay day loans, just to keep the ‘castle’ from falling down, the old securities of a fixed and stable life are fast disappearing. And as the castle walls shrink or crumble, splendid isolation gives way to dynamic connection and collaboration. We are stitching ourselves back together again in myriad different ways, finding new ties that bind. If 2008 smashed the family china and pulled down the gazebo and the politicians are fracking society who’s got the UHU?

In the gaps and cracks they leave behind new opportunities and alliances form. Run down regions and communities are regenerated. people find new purpose. Can a new more enlighted aspiration for a more enduring life rise with the cultural phoenix? DISCUSS

Wellness in an highly emerged society.

In exploring the Living The Dream conversation, we also realised that culturally, socially and systemically, the UK is so emerged it’s submerged. Simple and very meaningful topics so easily and directly dealt with in other cultures are in ours hidden inside a complex and codified landscape. Triggering conversations around these topics is a minefield: an assault course of social gaffes, trip wires, trap doors, raspberries and silences. So achieving just the right lightness of touch and integrity is critical.

The conversation around wellness and wellbeing is just such a conversation. It is not in the direct line of conversational fire. We speak indirectly of these things, usually as part of a different conversational thread. We are more likely to fall upon the topic of well-being through jokes about Stenna stairlifts, incontinence pants, supersize mother in laws, smoking in bed and Austin Power’s teeth than we are directly with a straight face.

Wellness is a supermarket trend supported by chemist brands – it is NOT a stitched in part of the great british psyche just yet. But we are getting there in our own sweet time.

This is very different to the China Dream where its emerging economy status means that health & well-being are absolutely central to the idea of what better looks like. A conversation that begins and ends with the need for something drastic to happen around air, water, food integrity and diet and their role in building a more resilient and dynamic society.

All in all, Living The Dream?! (for now at least) creates a simple conversational foundation for a bigger conversation around what good looks like and how we might get there individually, communally and collectively. Apply simple rules of smarter, lighter living at the heart of it and perhaps we might move the dial from over indexing on what keeps us up at night and start peaking again on what gets us out of bed in the morning!

All we need now is the right partners to scale the right conversation and start asking the right questions of the right people.

So any platform or brand looking for a purpose in the UK – looking for a conversation to fuel, inspire, support and celebrate – come on down. We have the beginnings of something good.

FOOTNOTES

LivingTheDream is planning to undertake 10 workshops across the UK in 2015 – simply to start asking the right questions of the right people; of what better might look like for them – in their language, in their words and from where they are standing. The curated outcomes will then be shared with the constituencies of action – local communities, councils, faith leaders, collectives, interested parties, brands, institutions and organisations – to adopt, reflect and act upon to start making better a reality.

Living The Dream & the art of smarter, lighter living is an organically developing theme rooted in the original Dream in A Box UK Dream project workshops and part of a wider DreamInABox initiative which includes the founding China Dream movement run in China through NGO JUCCCE and spearheaded by the inimitable Peggy Liu; inspiration and co-founder of all things DiaB.

verukas, prosperity & the detritus of parental love

02 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Tags

adult tantrums, boarding schools, cheap money, China Dream, Consumerism, credit card debt, designer baby clothes, Dream In A Box, ethics, family holidays, hogwarts, love, millennials, moral compass, nurture, parental guidence, propserity, quality of life, the 2 week summer holiday, Transforming Desire

images

Who pandered to her every need?
Who turned her into such a brat?
Who are the culprits? Who did that?
The guilty ones now this is sad
Dear Old Mum and Loving Dad

Is the quality of contemporary parental love destined to go down the garbage chute quickly followed by the children it breeds?

Is the structure on which it is founded becoming increasingly fragile, facile and unsustainable?

Or will our children or grandchildren eventually just turn against us; crippled by their disappointments, and their inability to repeat or recreate the same or a greater quality of life for their own.

We already know that this is the first generation in recorded history that will be passing down a diminished quality of life to their children by our current measures of prosperity.

This question of whether parental love in its current form is unsustainable first raised itself whilst I was trying to assess and deconstruct the current model of prosperity we currently embrace and pursue.

(Let’s face it, for some the highway commercial robbery of Valentines Day, the poisonous barometer of the Tiffany box, Gypsy Weddings and the reoccurring arrival of Kim Kardashian’s latest ‘one and only love’ has firmly flushed the romantic model down the spiritual khazi already)

The exercise in deconstructing prosperity is a major part of a larger one I am undertaking as part of my ongoing involvement with the Dream In A Box initiative and its UK Dream iteration – which in particular terms seeks to Re-imagine the UK model of Prosperity through the transformation of what constitutes a desirous life.

On closer inspection (hardy surprising) it seems that a large part of what makes up our current model of prosperity lies in how we imagine, perceive, measure, pursue, and demonstrate ‘love’ and attachment: to friends, family, prospective partners, spouses and most pointedly our children.

There is no greater demonstration of loving provision and the profound contract of human care it seems than that hosted within the living bond between parents and their children.

But what was once only noted and measured in mostly invisible and passing terms – the degree to which we throw money at our children’s happiness – now seems to be worn like a badge of honour by everyone from the cord-breeched pseudo-toff urban preppy and the polo-shirt & chino mini-mes of the suburbs to the highly singular estate-inhabiting parent with a Burberry buggy.

The integrity of our attendance to our children’s needs and the strength of the love we hold for them now lies in the measure of its social visibility and worth.

We must be ‘seen’ to gladly or otherwise use every scrap of ‘cheap’ money we can get our hands on to further facilitate our children’s ability to hover above the ugly brutal truths of life.

Increasingly our ‘love’ seems to be wholly predicated on the scale of our investment: and not of the balanced, grounding, attentive, affectionate kind.

It would seem that it is wholly acceptable these days for a child to be intellectually stupefied, emotionally ignored, set aside and abandoned or passed over to some one or some thing – a digital device usually or perhaps a new pair of trainers – as long as the parent can be seen to have ‘invested’ at every turn.

From the designer baby clothes they learn to stand up in, to the grotesque and engorging hoards of seasonal gifts they now receive (from skip loads of Easter Chocolate to mountains of Christmas presents) and the increasing quantity of kit they now require to ensure they’re not seen as ‘going without’ – phones tablets game consoles to name a few – the scale of society’s expenditure on the presentation of the ‘loved child’ is staggering.

This is not reserved solely for the ‘kit’ we deck them out with. It seems to infect every corner of the family model for what constitutes a thriving life.

Another hellish tyranny of loving provision embedded in our current model of prosperity is the family holiday.

Even as I typed the words ‘family holiday’ I was suddenly washed in a sun drenched, lens flared, refracted moment of azure blue sky and crystal water splashes; stress free parents and laughing children perfectly framed against a distant white villa horizon speckled and coloured with the lobster clawed, 3 types of fish, pasta, pizza and west Indian slash Asian slash Mediterranean slash Tex Mex slash barbecue buffet.

The tyranny I refer to has nothing to do with the usual clichéd hooting and wailing you hear from many modern parents about the prospect of 2 weeks locked together in some slightly disappointing family resort.

(On that particular matter it will be music to the ears of every emotionally challenged and ‘highly individual’ parent to know that there are now two good reasons as to why that tyranny will quickly become a faint memory. Firstly we are seeing (so the people watchers tell us) that the 2 week block summer holiday meticulously planned and desperately undertaken is in its death throes in the more advanced mature economies. We are taking more and shorter and more impulsive holidays (with all that extra money we all have!!!) And secondly booking.com is chirpily telling any member of the aspirational mobile middle classes who wants to listen that never again will they have to booking arrive to find themselves trapped in some booking desperate, substandard hell-hole with a pool surrounded by drawn-on people and a dodgy booking breakfast buffet – as long as they book with booking dot com that is.)

Given the tsunami of availability and astonishing social pressure to just say yes to everything, it is no surprise that we’re running up a credit-card based personal debt mountain bearing a striking similarity to a Himalayan range built out of bullion and gemstones.

If a family doesn’t get to go on an all you can consume holiday plus a few weekends away and a second holiday thrown in, then they’re not cutting it. That a family with a annual family income of circa £30-40K quietly expects itself to demonstrate its loving provision through multiple holidays abroad is both financially unsustainable and morally questionable.

Education is another ugly social battleground on which ‘love of the child’ is undertaken with everything but balance. True this is a more particular and less universal truth – something usually set aside by the worthy as a First World problem.

It is of course driven by the clawing desperation of the upwardly aspirational middle-middle classes*, (the downwardly aspirational Toffs and upper-middles being otherwise healthily engaged in a swaggering mockney-gangsta walk through White City, Hoxton, Deptford, and the arse-end of Tooting).

These parents are not the first generation to have realised that the route to securing an improving prosperity for your child is a decent education.

The role of education (and skiing holidays for that matter) in social aggrandisement is not new. Parents with a particular predilection for elevating their own narrow lives on the back of the tiniest increment of superiority have been judging their dinner party neighbour by the scale of their educational investment for many decades. But they were (and still are) of a particular rare breed, reasonably cloaked and easily ignored.

What’s particular in the new trend is the frenzy with which the greater majority pursue this madness in the blinding glare of the social spotlight.

Over subscribed schools, post code hopping parents, dodgy intake policies and the see sawing fashion for Public versus independent versus Free versus State versus ‘who said Grammar? I didn’t say Grammar?!’ schools certainly has a lot to answer for.

But that’s still no excuse for the lack of human elegance, the vacuum of discretion, and the gaping hole that seems to have opened up in their ability to circumnavigate the sensitivities of others.

They take a bludgeoning approach to improving the child that is conspicuous by its conspicuity – gratuitous over expectation, intellectual bullying, litanies of after school clubs, multiple tutors, competitive schooling and the most insidious social engineering are all worn in public like a beacon.

Educational trends currently also raise some rather interesting existential questions – of the ‘life-imitating-art-imitating-life’ kind.

The recent Disney-fication of boarding school culture via one small wizard and a place called Hogwarts has had a large number of parents who can ill afford it sending their little darlings to prep and boarding schools ‘because the child demands it’. There’s only so long you can get away with stuffing the fees on a credit card until the house of plastic cards collapses. And love is rarely proven resilient by the relentless use of the word ‘yes’. But that is how society seems to be shaping the model of demonstrable love in a prosperous life. If the child demands it – the loving parent must give it: and blatantly.

For me these are reasonable examples of how warped I believe our sense of how we demonstrate love for the child has become, and evidence of a toxic model of prosperity.

If one takes these lite examples and generously sprinkles them with tons of over packaged brightly coloured and quickly discarded plastic, £400 bikes, theme parks, and mountains of cheap cotton basics with pointless groovy graphics, the landscape of parental love, certainly that currently exercised by the average emerged economy parent, is looking sparkly, cluttered and bleak, and ultimately unsustainable in so many ways.

Is this love of ours Tainted. Maybe. Is it Human. Very.

Is this progress? Perhaps. Or is this simply the gene pool opportunistically wrapping its progeny in as much as it can get its hands on before the moment passes. Most likely.

Regardless. Navigating the modern world and the byways of fruitful love, especially that which we feel and demonstrate for our children, was never going to be easy or simple.

But re-imagination of the model of prosperity we base our life, love and dreams on: one which holds greater store by that which cannot be bought might give us a few more compass points along the way.

It may well also help clear up some of the side issues: like the increasing population of staggeringly spoilt, increasingly sociopathic children… oh and that of personal bankruptcy of course, and a sparsely furnished dotage.

So, veruka cream anyone?

FOOTNOTES

*the middle middle classes are how I refer to a very active, vocal and seemingly forever squeezed section of the British population. They are, in class terms what Mickey Flannagan’s ‘out out‘ is to going out.

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