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Tag Archives: Roald Dahl

Lego Batman, Man Crushes & the original Sustainability Vigilante.

01 Monday Apr 2019

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Ben Affleck, BFG, Censoriousness, Chauvinism, Christian Bale, Crossing the Chasm, Dark Night, George Clooney, Global Sustainability Goals, Good & Evil, Human Friction, Humour, Irony, Lego Batman, Lobster Claws, Man Crush, matilde, Michael Keaton, Piety, Pilgrims, Plastic Caped Crusader, Political Correctness, Roald Dahl, Social Impact, Sustainability, Sustainability Vigilante, sustainable brands, Thomas the Tank Engine, Tim Burton, Willy Wonka

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Ok, I admit it. I have a huge Man Crush on Lego Batman.

Yes, Lego Batman.

Nope. Not Batman. Or the Dark Knight. This is not a homo-erotic entreat to the wiry, muscular Christian Bale, or a slightly sloppy hug for big bad Ben [pre or post cocktail].

And though I feel that Keaton’s socio-psychopathic gift to the Burton Batmans was remarkable [is it me or do the Burton-Batmans sound like a rather smart family from Cape Cod?), and gorgeous George is always worth a mention, it is the small plasticky, modular superhero who has my heart.

Lego Batman is petulant, childish, misguided, isolated, narcissistic to the level of a clinical pathology BUT he’s still fundamentally a good and fun guy – and the ultimate role model, both literally [he’s modelled out of plastic pieces] ethically [he’s aways trying to shut down or thwart some toxic shocker or other] and symbolically [the Bat Sign is a beacon in the world that says bad awful things will always get their just and plastic desserts in the end].

Unlike the Dark Knight – he who broods in an enormous bat-winged cape on various V tall buildings – Lego Batman’s super-power resides in his all round, kinda clumsy unfunny dork-like coolness – or as a social strategist might say, his social reach. He is simply a lot more attractive and palatable to a far wider range of type and age-groups of people.

Lets face it, the highly cinematic and terribly troubled Bruce Wayne can get a little ‘BORING’ – but as soon as he is rendered in very shiny black plastic, has ‘Nope nope nope no no nope no Nope’ tantrums  and crunches his way through microwaved Lobster claws, shell on, whats not to like?

Lego Batman’s love of industrial metal & grind core, and working with black, black, black and very dark grey, though broody and nihilistic in some ways, is really quite chirpy and redeeming.

And sure, he has a tendency to pop off with his Star Wars buddies just at the moment when he’s meant to be helping his Lego Movie buddy Emmet save everyone – and he struggles to maintain a text-book balanced and mutually beneficial relationship – but who wouldn’t; and doesn’t sometimes.

But my main love for characters like Lego Batman is rooted in their ability to be transcendent – to be able to be dark and light and left and right and rare and middle and base and grubby and funny and sad and inspiring; all at once.

It is an ability that the realm of Sustainability, Social Impact and those who’ve tasked themselves with rebalancing society could do with embracing far more.

The sustainability agenda needs all the transcendence it can get in the human department.

Though enormous steps forwards have been made [even getting it on the agenda of some corporations took decades of work and the relentless commitment of some very professionally brave people], there is still a deep division between the engineered integrity of the organisational, systemic and material change being undertaken at scale in large organisations and corporations and the insight and subtlety of the communicating voice and tone of the messaging that announces and celebrates these transformations for all the world to see.

It is the lightness of touch and the ability of characters like Lego Batman to appeal to all age groups in a very human and funny way that I find the most powerful. Especially in this space. The chiaroscuro of human nature, including the more childish and incorrect aspects of who we are as creatures needs to be front and centre to engage people.

But there seems to be a view amongst those trying to do something serious in the world that levity and playfulness diminishes or infantilises otherwise serious issues or points to be made. And that even when something childlike is to be used, it has to be ‘corrected’ in a trough of vanilla moralising and social engineering to make it finally palatable to a pungently consensual audience of rare intelligence. 

The recent Thomas The Tank work around the Global Sustainability Goals, though wholly admirable, still ended up quite prim, was overly gender engineered, and in doing so ended up lacking humanity for me. 

Friction is a human truth – friction tension and raw energy are essential in characterisations – even in children’s characters. The Homogenisation and cultural symmetry being inflicted on a lot of characterisations in pursuit of correctness these days seems inhuman to me. Humanity is imbalanced in so many highly nuanced and inextricable ways that to remove all imbalance between good and bad seems a fruitless pursuit.

Roald Dahl was the master of exploring dissonant and highly complex narratives inside beautiful whimsical and ultimately charming storytelling. The unvarnished nature and grimness of some of his characters made the stories all the more compelling.

Is Lego Batman on a par with the conflicted beauty of BFG or the moral ambivalence of Willy Wonka, the staggering and mystical precocity of Matilde and the creature narcissism of the Fantastic Mr Fox? Probably not.

But I’d still like to put Lego Batman forwards as the new prince [or princess; croissant or cork wedge shoe, depending on what gender he is identifying with at any given time] of sustainable communications.

I would rather have the 17 UN Global Sustainability Goals unpacked by the schlocky, childish, self-obsessed and mostly black plastic Lego Batman to a soundtrack by Ensturzende Neubauten than be cudgelled quietly by the imperious correctness of the reengineered Thomas The Tank Engine.

The Sustainability Vigilante picking on poor unsuspecting people with utterly inappropriate levels of vigilantism, weaponry and violent attrition for even the smallest infringement of a Global Sustainability Goal objective could be VERY funny. 

Commissioner Gordon’s wife bins three perfectly recyclable containers…dun dun dahhhhhhh…without rinsing them!!!……arrggghhhh …cue trip hammer drum riff and crunching guitars…the roof ripped off the apartment block, a salvo of bat rockets pummelling the front room, followed by bat-swooping beatings metered out to her and everyone else in the block for good measure.

Lego Batman stringing up the old man from the Soda Shop as a highly sexually-suspect chauvinist and patroniser of women [how can I help you this fine sunny morning little lady?] or battering three men to a pulp with Bat hammers because they were found to be using face Scrub with Micro-beads could make for highly entertaining mini episodes of a whole series of ‘GSG themed’ Lego Batman content. We’d still get the point. But we’d also manage it with a little bumpiness and some conflicted humanity.  

Doing good things and being a force for good in the world is not predicated on being insufferably GOOD. Goodness needs a foil to be real to the majority of people. People can learn immeasurably good things from bad or flawed people. And good people can only find their edges when confronted by bad things and people. The friction is essential.  Adopting a Pilgrim approach to communicating good things is not the answer. But we are still doing it.

Perhaps the pilgrim piety that is still shaping sustainability communications is the same malaise that is rendering out safe space thinking in universities so that children and young people grow up believing that it is also possible to get through life without ever having to listen to something we disagree with or find unpalatable – simply by forcibly exorcising it from our immediate society – and see that as a ‘good’ thing. Dunno. But, as history has shown us, both the ‘Crusader’ thing and seemingly benign regimes where control is increasingly applied to blot out dissenting voices, when done with little or no humour and a highly tuned sense of irony, tend to end badly most of the time. 

So blah blah blah. We must learn to speak of sustainability in human terms without homogenising and cleansing it of all human flaw and friction.

If we are to cross the chasm and move to engaging a far, far broader church of people and inspiring them to happily act upon more sustainable lifestyles it has to feel less goody goody and less pious.

We need to ‘lighten up’ and be prepared to be messy – because being human is messy. And we’re humans first and foremost.

Now where’s that Lobster Claw?

Fridge magnets, Porpoise & the power of language in Innovation.

15 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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#mayarse, Anarchy, Blackadder, Corporate Speak, Creativity, Digital, Easter Island, Genome, Guttenberg Press, Identity, Idiom, kaizen, Language, Porpoise, punctuation, purpose, Roald Dahl, rote, Slang, social networks, Socialising the Genome, Sound, Tabloids, technology, The BFG, vernacular, Vinyl, Wax Cylinders, Yoda

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Words are funny things.

Haphazard, abstract, profound, silly, shape shifting, infinitely playful, confounding, eternally powerful and utterly malleable. Language is a remarkable technology.

Glyphs, scratches and symbolic signing of sounds eventually dragged kicking and screaming into some vaguely coherent order that ticks a few syntactical boxes and language rules and shazzam! the fun begins.

Suddenly these scatters and blocks of marks, letters and symbolic sounds forge themselves into desires expressed, thoughts formed, theories expounded, opinions offered, information fixed, stories told and dreams captured. Sounds cut into the wax cylinder of our minds and played out through sharp stone point, stylus, quill and nib onto cloth, wood, parchment, stone and flax.

And our eyes scan across them and our tongues run along them like a needle in a vinyl groove, transforming them into the sound of speaking.

As time has marched the expression of our expression has been altered by the nature of how we generate the text. We have hopped skipped and jumped from painful rendering every letter by hand over vast tracts of time, illuminated by curlicues, cartoons, motifs and scenes – and the silent furious industry of re-rendering the same again and again for the benefit of a rare few – to carved crafted blocks to be set in lines, paragraphs and pages – inked rolled and pressed into sheets to be shared and distributed amongst the many.

Technology elevates technology as the presses become mechanised and the inks become jets. Vast universal printed broadsheets supplemented by the intimate particular of typing machines that throw metal letters through ink ribbons onto pages layered with carbons for multiple copies. Until the binary marks of programmes on a different ribbon digitised everything at the speed of light.

So we now find ourselves with the ability to use these marks and symbols at the speed of swipe and type in real time to fire them across the world via networks and platforms.

Yes the books still fill shelves and the magazines still scatter coffee tables. But they have become the paper monoliths of what was. The  printed word and how we consume it versus how we consume its digital cousin have become fundamentally different.

For your words to be ‘in print’ still carries a deeper value. Words on a physical printed page feel more meaningful, eternal, immortal. They are the Easter Island Statues of the written word. Their digital counterparts the writing in the sand on the beach.

The way new technologies have gamified they way we think and more importantly the way we express those thoughts through writing enables a very particular kind of playfulness rooted in eclectic multidirectional multi channel distribution. The Ephemeral Passing nature of the txt blog tweet and the written content of the live in-flow constant beta site allows everyone to ‘play’ – text as balls to be lobbed tossed kicked, rolled and scattered in every direction, only to return transformed, tweaked, built upon liked loved berated and bludgeoned.

The creativity inherent in the technology of language and subsequently in the technology we use to generate language in flow seems to have two forms when it comes to words and how we express ourselves with them.

Creativity is still as much about liberating expression as it is about liberating distribution. Language as a technology has been tinkered and played with by everyone from the lowest order to the highest mind since the technology was invented. Derivation. Disruption. Disorder. All of these traits have been alive in the spoken and written language since its inception.

New technology does not advance innovation. It accelerates our ability to unpack and play with the given wisdoms and expressions to seek something new and different. This is the fuel of innovation – new technology merely the accelerator.  And the role of language in innovation and technology’s ability to accelerate it is remarkable.

Word play – a lightness of spirit and a subversive nature in regards to language – has always enjoyed turning the given rules upside down and back to front – messing with words and language because we can – as a mark of our individual nature and curiosity.

Thats why vernaculars and slang and idiom are so important to individuals – and why corporate language is so disliked avoided and derided by ordinary people. Corporate language and ‘speak’ smacks of an Order of the Few inflicted on the Spirit of the Many.

It is an intellectual door policy – if you ain’t got a ticket you can’t come in – the bouncer on the door of the exclusive club.

Ordinary people like to own and share the language they use to express their most individual selves, in their own way on their own terms. They reserve the right to speak as they wish, express in the manner they feel most comfortable with.

It is unsurprising that fads and trends especially in the highly socialised accelerated age see @everything and #anything already running out of steam. This is not due to the academics deriding them. It is mainly due to ‘rules’ being applied. A new higher order or High Priest of Digital Expression has risen out of the chaos – defining rules of use and relevance. Thankfully it spikes the oldest of human responses. Dissent.

Rules? #myarse.

The intellectualisation of language will always occur while the human nature of assertion and pursuit of social exclusivity remains. We simply can’t help ourselves.

Language gets used to include and exclude. It always has and it always will in some shape or form. It is a tool in our tendency to assert and control. You’re not in our club. How you order sentences. How you punctuate. How you correct and edit yourself. How you use common signifiers of expression. Words and language are the cutlery of expression. How you use your knife speaks volumes about you. And there will always be those that use it against you.

BUT.

If thats the case, I say fill your boots. Subvert at every opportunity. Break a language rule everyday. Smash the shackle.

Start with fridge magnets and madness. before you take one step towards the workplace, make some shit up out of a load of words on the fridge. Set your mind free. Gobbledegook is good for the soul. Have a BFG day. Using phantasmapoppingful words. Go Yoda and reorder a sentence – like someone’s put a Germanic grammar filter on your English. Pop some nonsense in a sensical world. Embrace puns at every opportunity.

And if you’re in business – especially one that involves speaking to ordinary people – use pub speak in board meetings. Ask a 70 and a 7 year old to edit the CEOs keynote. And see the tyrannical use of language for what it is. An ugly veneer behind which mediocrity and insecurity can often lurk.

If you are working with multiple nationalities there has to be some common ground. But at least allow every one to bring a little of their own cultural idiom into the room before you set out on some highly controlled over strung and soul-less corporate conversation. Allow their free mind out as a matter of course. Build a ‘Sling Some Slang’ into every meeting. Allow each nationality to ‘play’ in their own language and share it. You will be far more likely to find yourself with human beings in the room. Much more helpful to collaboration and co creation.

Innovation starts with language and how it is used and embraced. Rote cultures create Rote people. And innovation and creativity withers on the vine. The confidence to ‘mess’ with language shows an ability to break from the norm, to turn something upside down and the wrong way around to take a different view. Mistakes are the fuel of invention. Failure is a central tenet of Kaizen. We should embrace failings in language. Before dispensing with them, check to see if there is anything good hidden in there.

So can everything be chaos and subversion? No. Like anarchy, it only exists meaningfully if there is a counterpoint to it to keep it relevant and focused. If everyone is an anarchist. Their is no anarchy. Just conformity.

A perfect example of deconstructive/destructive language play was to be found in a conversation I had with a friend of mine. Both utterly child-like far to often, we found ourselves discussing Purpose and Purposeful businesses and the manner in which this word has been taken and chiseled into a corporate straight jacket. It has lost its original profundity; replaced with a pompous self-righteousness. We found ourselves having to use ‘cod’ Noo Yawker accents to continue the conversation with any feeling.

So Purpose became Poiypuss. What! Who knoo! Badda bing badda boom. I gotta poiypuss ‘n’ I’m gonna use it.

Cue more cod accenting until eventually Blackadder and the Prince and The Porpoise sketch prevailed. And so Purpose became Porpoise.

Happiness.

PORPOISE. The prefect name for an agency that believes deeply in Purpose but with a profound dislike for the way in which it has been hijacked; made humourless, confined, dislocated; rendered inhuman and spiritless.

Porpoise. Creating Purpose with a difference: purpose with a human touch. Nice logo. Disney meets Vector with a scattering of fun.

Ridiculous. perhaps. But I do have evidence that this childlike view of the world can sometimes create breakthroughs in communication and engagement.

In a recent project – Socialising the Genome – I worked with Dr Anna Middleton to try and unpack the arcane language of Genomic science and the impenetrable academic and clinical terminology it uses when speaking to ordinary people. The objective? To be able to engage with a greater number of ordinary people around the benefits of GENOMIC science and data gathering to improve individual and collective health care.

We found that in almost every qualitative research group people had a tendency to drop the first E in GENOME, and quickly deconstruct it into something far more friendly and more palatable and less scary. GNOME.

So the massed intellect, discovery and genius at work in the world of GENOMIC science and discovery – and the gateway to understanding our most precious personal selves and the data that defines it – was enshrined in a picture of a small bearded man with a fishing rod. Cue Double Helix fish and chats about fishing in our DNA for answers – and the idea that sometimes that fishing just comes up with an old shopping trolley and river bed junk. And sometimes with something more remarkable and enlightening.

So language – a beautiful technology accelerated by newer ones. But it is not sacrosanct. It demands that we flex with it, play with it, mess it up, test its edges. Because in doing so we test our selves and the ideas we have – and through it we find new iterations and expressions.

Which is a good thing, No?

 

LANGUAGE NOTE: My use of No? at the end of the final sentence is in homage to the idioms of the French “…, nest pas?”, the Spanish “…, No?”, the Scandinavian “…, Nej? and the Glaswegian “know whit ah mean, big man, no?” and ending one’s sentence with an upward inflection “No?”.

And because it really, really irritates purists – as does the doubling up of adverbs like ‘really’.

 

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