Author Archives: oinsketta

Marketing Rules Part 2

A politician’s editorial team does a sloppy job and leaves an important word out of a sentence, leaving a non sequitar where a powerful statement was intended, to wit:

We’re not going to our call for action.

The reader, if she even notices, is left wondering why issue a call to action if you’re not going yourself.  (see previous post for context of this flub)

But that was clearly a typo and not really an example of what I’m talking about– the supremacy of marketing in modern society and how crucial skillful marketing is for the survival of any enterprise that aspires to reach the public.  

I intend to give an example of my own marketing attempt below, but meantime, no less an authority on the subject than the famous Seth Godin, putting the dilemma of a person with a promising idea and a distaste for advertising, in an illuminating perspective:

“When I grow up…”

No kid sets out to make Doritos commercials. No one grows up saying, “I want to go into marketing.”

More than ever, though, folks grow up saying, “I want to change the world.” More than ever, that means telling stories, changing minds and building a tribe.

You know, marketing.

At least if you want it to be.

Seth Godin is a guru to those who would push through to the next level of success in any number of areas, his expertise is in marketing.   He loves it and he’s a master of it.  You can read his pithy, minimalist take here.

As for me, I have come to realize that my idea for a program to change the world for a few kids, and a few adults, will never flourish among the people I know.   The people I know are cool, and fine, but virtually none of them can relate directly to being in a room full of noisy kids inventing and creating clunky animated sequences.  It simply doesn’t excite them, they don’t get it, they are not the tribe to embrace and sustain it.  So, like Godin says, I need to find the tribe that loves this stuff.   To do that, short punchy pitches.

Answer the question in a way that turns on a light for those who care to see what they’ve asked about.  

Why animation?   You can read a long account on this blahg.  Or, this, still too-long marketing pitch:

Animation lets children’s play come alive on the screen.  It integrates drawing, writing, singing, speaking, painting, reading, whimsy, music, photography and computer skills.  It requires a skilled team, everyone doing their part.   Animation depends on free play and also focused attention to detail.   Animation leads to the integrated mastery of every art involved and a world of imaginative possibilities.   The workshop is a place of discovery and community building.

Perhaps most importantly, animation is like an acrobat’s work:  it can only happen in a room where everyone is relaxed, and ready, supporting and helping out as much as possible.

That said, it behooves us to show the mark how it works in practice:

Wehearyou.net’s animation workshop is portable and gets to work instantly.  With only an electrical outlet, a couple of tables and a room full of children ages 7-11, any room is turned into a beehive of child-run creativity within the first five or ten minutes.   While children watch a sixty second animated demo on a laptop computer, the camera stand is set up and an array of art supplies is laid out.  If there are no questions, and there seldom are, the children hop into the making of animation like a bunch of ducklings making for the pond.  A few minutes later they can watch the first results of their animations.  At the end of the session, if desired, their animation can be posted to the internet and shared with everyone in the world.

God bless.

Marketing Rules

People have short attention spans, give them the scoop fast.

Is there a key word missing from a key sentence in this important message from Elizabeth Warren calling for federal gun control law?  Does it not negate the call to arms for more reasonable laws about who can buy deadly concealable devices designed to kill?

This week, I stood with Boston Mayor Tom Menino, Senator Ed Markey, and Mayors Against Illegal Guns at Faneuil Hall to demand stronger national gun laws. We’re not going to our call for action.

Some people say that gun laws should be left to the states, but state laws just aren’t enough.

Neither is time at the moment enough to allow a fuller discussion of why marketing is the king in the USA, if not globally.  But soon, dear reader, soon.

Dropping the Mask

Zora Neale Hurston has a great scene in Their Eyes Were Watching God when her heroine, Janie, finally realizes that her critical grandmother, a former slave, her domineering first husband and one or two others who influenced her so much had been poisonous influences that made her doubt and hate herself.  She sees them as a row of idols, suddenly revealed not be be special at all, falling off a shelf one after another.   That moment of clarity, as the false idols lay smashed on the floor and Janie no longer was bound by their strong opinions about her life, was the beginning of her self-discovery.

People treat you the way they do because of their inner lives, not always because of yours.  Advice is as often as not given from fear, from jealousy, from resentment, things that may have nothing to do with the object of that advice.  Follow such advice at your own peril, or learn which advice to spit out.

Human affairs are not primarily guided by logic or consistency, nor are the ideals we claim to hold always what we hold them out to be.  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator, blah blah blah” for example.  The genius who wrote those lines owned 300 men, women and children who were his property, bought with money inherited from his wealthy parents. Nobody would seriously claim those poor souls were endowed with the same unalienable human rights their master was.  Rhetoric is one thing, reality something more rugged.

We recently celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington.   Pious, eloquent speeches were delivered, reaffirming our deepest held American values: that all humans are worthy of respect, dignity, an equal chance at life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  The president made a fine speech, full of feeling and passion.  It almost sounded like commitment to the things he was saying.

But, please, don’t try to sell that empty speechifying to the doomed children of Harlem, Appalachia, inner city slums and rural areas every where.  Sing it from the mountaintops, from the rooftops.  Yeah, right on, baby.

I shuddered recently to see some footage from 1964 where Malcolm X points out, irrefutably, that in the ten years since the Supreme Court ruled “separate but equal” to be in violation of the US Constitution and ordered the integration of public schools “with all deliberate speed” that the schools were as segregated as ever. Now, going on fifty years later, much the same can be said about “all deliberate speed.”   The only thing moving with deliberate speed now is the determined campaign to dismantle public schools and place education, like much of the prison system, in the hands of profit-driven private entrepreneurs.

Some lament how far America has come from the golden age when there was actual democracy here, where groups of now powerless people could unite and have their voices heard.  It may be slightly worse now, or slightly better, depending on your point of view, but representative democracy is still a flawed and difficult experiment and, as a wag once had it, the worst form of government, aside from every other form.

During the golden age of American freedom we did a lot of terrible things to millions of people, many of whom died, or wished they were dead, as the great wealth of this nation was created for the enjoyment of a smaller and smaller group of people.  Advances were made toward greater equality, then backwards steps smartly taken.  

Right now, for some reason that is hard to understand, particularly in light of recent regrettable American military decisions, American warships stand poised to rain down perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars worth of powerful Tomahawk missiles, targeting with powerful explosives certain areas of Syria and the inadvertent “collateral damage” surrounding each target.  Let us not think, for a second, of the hideous irony of naming these weapons of mass destruction after the war axes of a native people our great democracy systematically all but wiped out.

Whatever thinking people might think about this course of hands-off military action against Syria, nothing is likely to dissuade those in charge from doing it.   We are told that the Syrian dictator used poison gas against his people.   We are told this is unacceptable under international law and that we must teach the Syrian dictator a hard lesson.  Let’s see how he feels about US missiles destroying a bunch of his infrastructure, killing a number of his people.   We will teach tyrants about killing people just because they feel like it.

The mask drops away as we hear the official voice of America yell:  Do as I say, not as I do.  Freedom is on the march, for some.  And democracy shall be spread, as long as it’s the democracy we want to see spreading.

“Doesn’t this make you glad to be an American?” the sardonic skeleton of my father remarks from his lofty grave on a hill outside of Peekskill.

 

Why animation?

Animation is great because it integrates so many creative and technical fields and what you can do with it is limited only by your imagination.  The best animation takes a team, everyone doing their part as perfectly as possible.

Animation involves the precise coordination of many moving parts: good ideas, the drawing, clay or other objects that will carry out the ideas, an unmoving camera that frames and focuses on the well-lit action below, a steady hand, the smooth transfer of the frames (stills) to the computer, a skilled editor to bring out the best in the frames, a good soundtrack to make it all dance.

It takes free play and also concentration and focus.  Without great attention to detail, the resulting animation will be unwatchable.  It takes precision to keep everything the camera sees registered for the illusion of movement.  It takes patience and mastery to make the adjustments necessary to correct mistakes.   In the midst of a buzzing beehive of children busy having fun, coordination, focus and teamwork are required to make good animation.

Picture the greatest drawing in the world, and the most skillful editor in the world. Then picture all the frames of these great drawings are dark, because not properly lit. Or fuzzy, because nobody took the time to focus.  Or badly framed, because somebody was too excited about shooting something to carefully line things up.  The great drawings are ruined, all the skill of the best editor in the world won’t be able to turn those frames into watchable animation.

Got to shoot the whole thing over again, carefully.   There is an art to it, and various skills to be mastered.   And it takes a team, everybody doing their part, and doing it well, and helping each other along the way.   

That’s why animation.

(Thanks, Maxine, for an excellent question)

you can see the original post here

It Should Be Noted

When delivering a low blow, timing is everything.

You can greatly enhance the effect by acting like nothing happened when the other person cries out.  If the person makes a scene, tell him to stop whining.

The opposite is also true:  I once almost took out an eye of my friends’ four-year old, horsing around at the dinner table.  I hoisted him into the air, from a seated position, and he howled in delight and squirmed in the air, until I lost my grip on him, he went eyeball first into the back of the wooden chair and began howling in agony.  

I was immediately on the verge of tears myself, as I leaned anxiously over him, apologizing profusely.   He bawled for a moment, then saw my distress and I watched him pull himself together, rather quickly.   He stopped crying and told me he was OK.  He was reassuring me.

Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen, and one of the most beautiful.

Choose Yer Poison

“Look at this place,” says the adult in the room.  “You should spend a few days clearing out 80% of this crap and then hire a maid.  You’d feel much better about things.”   

No argument here, although should is a tricky word, in our experience.

” ‘in our experience?’  Who are we, Hugh Hefner?”

“Building an organization, yo,” says I.

“Says you?” you say.

I can complain about the feeling of the walls closing in, but who am I actually complaining to?  And how would they be able to stop this process?

It’s clearly a matter of remaining healthy and staying positive.  Two good things.  

You’re better off laughing with friends than rattling a keyboard, unless you’re getting paid to rattle the keys and your friends are laughing at you instead of with you.

“They’re not laughing with you, they’re laughing AT YOU,” more than one clever teacher has told the class clown, in an adult version of “I know you are but what am I?”

Suppose there was something you could take that would lift the veil of care from your brow, let you relax and be creative?   You know, half of the magic of creativity is relaxing, getting lost in play.   I feel a trick coming on here….  

No, really, it’s a matter of choosing your poison.

“Oh, what’s the matter?  A friend thoughtlessly hurt your feelings and now acts like nothing happened?”

I’m not worried about that.  Any one of my friends can be counted on to attack any other of my friends.  “What do you expect from X?   He/she has no empathy, ridiculous to expect it.  I mean, really…” complete with full-color illustrations.  It’s uncanny how helpful most of them are in that particular situation.  Each one can so clearly see the monstrousness of the others, it’s really cool.

“Where does that leave us?” we ask, not anywhere near convinced that it is really cool.

“Who should I say is asking?” you ask.

The Burnout Scale

Feeling burnt out lately as I try to somehow advance my exciting, innovative program alone. Trying to revive my spirits to continue rolling the child-run animation workshop hoop down the road, cheerfully, winningly, I search the internet for advice and inspiration.   Here is some I found last night:

4. Identify the specific causes of your burnout.

The Maslach Burnout Inventory identifies six areas leading to burnout:

  • Workload (too much work, not enough resources)
  • Control (micromanagement, lack of influence, accountability without power)
  • Reward (not enough pay, appreciation, or satisfaction)
  • Community (isolation, conflict, disrespect)
  • Fairness (discrimination, favoritism)
  • Values (ethical conflicts, meaningless tasks)

After identifying the source, name it out loud. Brainstorm with someone you trust about how to specifically change this aspect of your work life.

My father’s 17 years older first cousin Eli, a very tough old bird, complained of the side effects of his fentonyl patch.   Eli’s children, who approached the prickly old man with caution, did not tell him he was wearing the pain patch because he had inoperable cancer.  His doctors were instructed not to tell him either.   He started wearing it only a few weeks before he died, when the doctors he went to couldn’t prevent or explain the excruciating pain he was in.  I only found out he had cancer once he was dead from it.

But it was the side effects he grumbled about on the phone that day.  “I got dry mouth, constipation, acid stomach, you name it….” he muttered.   When I arrived he had me read the list out loud to him

“cramps,”  

“yop!”

“sleeplessness?”

“yop!”

“fatigue?”

“yop!”

“irritability?”

“what the fuck do you think?!”

“yop.”

I thought of this as I began to take the good advice offered in the post about how to combat burn-out.  That there is nobody I can really talk to very much about it is another problem carrying out that excellent advice.  But I did read most of the list aloud.

Undaunted, I searched further:

2. Tell people about it. 

Share your vision with anyone who will listen. Sharing your idea will keep you motivated as you get reconnected to your goals with each conversation. More importantly, you will be amazed by how much others want to support you in your endeavors and are willing to connect you to the right people.

Yes, actually, I have been amazed by how much others have been willing to connect me to the right people.  The only problem, so far, is that nobody I know has ever met any of the right people for my program.  A small, temporary setback, no doubt.

3. Don’t do it alone.

The number one cause of  feeling overwhelmed is trying to do it all alone, and being overwhelmed creates fear. Hire a coach or join a meet-up for support. Ask people for help, seek out partnership, and build a team.

Excellent advice!  I’ve been trying to build a team for a year now, and so far, like the US Army, it is an army of one.   I don’t want to sound sour, but the people I’ve paid, who seemed to have such a good time playing with the kids, gone.  The volunteers I’ve had, so enamoured of the creative beehive of child animators I’d assembled, gone.   Got to keep building, I guess, searching for the right partners!

4. Fail.

Waiting for the ‘right time’ keeps you in perpetual procrastination. You will make mistakes. But this forces us to be creative, often landing us in better places. Welcome failure as an opportunity for growth.

Yes, this is perhaps the best advice of all.  I am going to welcome the failure to form a team and find people to brainstorm with and learn from my mistakes — as soon as I am able to figure out what they were.   Perhaps it takes a team to brainstorm why it is that a friendly person with a great program that kids love can’t figure out how to build a team to brainstorm and solve that puzzle.

Oh, well, back to work.

The Opposite of Love

It has been observed that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.   This sounds right to me.   Hatred, like love, is a powerful emotion, and powerful emotions are subject to change — indifference is the complete absence of any feeling about it one way or the other, there’s nothing to work with there, no redemptive moment possible when one party absolutely doesn’t care.  

Don’t kick the person when she’s down, step over as though you haven’t even seen them lying there.  It may seem an academic distinction, hatred vs. indifference and which is the opposite of love, but come for a short stroll, please.

Tell a joke, around the table people either laugh, laugh politely, groan, or shake their heads.  One person looks you dead in the eye, with the dead fish expression.  And afterwards doesn’t break character by winking, smiling, saying anything.  You make yourself vulnerable, to some extent, telling a joke and the dead fish reaction sticks a skewer in that willingness to open yourself.

Not the best example, perhaps.  My father was a master of this technique, I should be able to describe it better.   It requires, more than anything, knowing when to apply a good cold dose of strategic silence.   When you open yourself up to express a concern, speak directly about your feelings and ask for a reply– silence.  When you complain of the lack of reaction, you become a whiner and the silent party can now focus on what an asshole you are.  

It’s a foolproof system.   Mildly provoke somebody (“just kidding!!”) up the ante a bit (“for your own good!!! I love you!”) wait for the reaction and then — silence.   Beautiful, to a certain type of angry person, what a nice dose of silence will do.  Who needs the rack or a water board? 

“When you ask my opinion you just want me to tell you what you want to hear!” protests someone giving you the hard truth and dismissing the feelings you express as paranoia, over-sensitivity, lack of epidermis.  You can point out how many times you have sought and used contrary opinions to make changes in your life, your projects, your ideas, but in the case at hand– “you only want me to tell you you’re right” serves to end the conversation.   So be it.

Be direct, we are told.  In marketing, as in life, honesty, directness, integrity– these things rule (although countless exceptions apply).   The cure for directness?   Silence.

And of course, one person’s directness is another person’s double-barreled shotgun blast to the kisser.   C’est la guerre, I suppose. 

Rage on the rise?

I don’t know if it’s just me, or if the level of rage around us has increased dramatically.  I know why my father was in a rage much of the time, his mother whipped him in the face with a heavy cord from the time he could stand.   Anyone would be subject to rage with that kind of upsetting start.  I had some insight into my mother’s anger, though she’d get angry when I’d try to be sympathetic about it and I learned to change the subject, on a dime, when she got that look on her face.   My sister’s anger is not hard to figure out. But the most perplexing thing is the amount of anger simmering, some behind smiles and the best of intentions, in people around me, in the world at large.

A few weeks ago a friend set a misunderstanding into motion for seemingly inexplicable reasons.   He later had an insight — he was provoking a fight between his two older brothers by his actions.   His brothers were each over a thousand miles away, so others were cast as gladiators.   He cast me in the role of the tougher of his two brothers, I imagine.   I had a friend years ago who bizarrely mistook me for his father, unbeknownst to me, and was enraged, for years, apparently, that I never praised his teaching.   Many of us seem to spend a good deal of our lives playing out scenarios with surrogates standing in for dead abusive parents, absent abusive siblings.

I blame nobody for being enraged in a world like the one we live in.  People are livid all over the place.  Look at the highways in Florida, general incivility, the unsportsmanlike behavior of trash talking millionaires on TV, the wars raging on several continents, the indifference to the death and torture of innocents done in our name, the bitter zero-sum impasse in our government, the continued war against the weak while the richest grow much, much richer as the world becomes more and more crowded, warm, polluted.   You may have a nice group of friends, a supportive community, a sanctuary from the violence and hatred afoot everywhere these days, but the murderous rancor in the papers every day is hard to ignore.   A wit, Harry Shearer, tweeted today:  On FTN, Colin Powell calls Assad a “pathological liar”. I clearly remember when Assad assured the UN that Iraq had mobile bioweapons vans.

Of course, there were no mobile biological weapons vans in Iraq, nor any other signs of a nuclear weapons program, no ties to the 18 or so Saudis who were the suicide pilots on 9/11, but, for some reason, a lot of death was rained down on Iraq, in my name and yours — countless Iraqis and thousands of dead, maimed and permanently disabled American veterans of a war as senseless, and brutally patriotic, as World War One.   The wartime president who ordered the pre-emptive attack on Iraq recently told a group of Shock and Awe veterans with prosthetic limbs that he deeply appreciated their sacrifices and that he’d tried diplomacy to avoid going to war with Saddam Hussein.   

Maybe it’s true we can do little to change the big things.  Change starts with ourselves.  I have to be thankful that I’m able to remain mostly mild, instead of flying into rages.   Hard work, and good work, and I’m glad and grateful to be doing it.  Maybe it’s true the only thing we should focus on is taking care of the people in our lives, being kind, and helping, and always giving the benefit of the doubt to our friends, until they prove us wrong. 

It isn’t easy to be consistently kind and empathetic when things are difficult.   It’s hard to be patient when events press in on us, or to be mild when people treat us badly.   Kindness and mildness are more important than most people know.   Like hope, they are the things that remind us that life is good, they make an unbearable situation worth enduring.    

A friend wrote recently of a yoga tale in which the snake, badly beaten, complains to his friend the guru, who finds him bloody in the road, that the guru told him not to strike back.  “Christ,” says the guru, “I said don’t bite. I didn’t tell you not to hiss!”

Sometimes it is necessary to hiss, I suppose.  But when confronted with things we can recognize as expressions of generalized hostility, my approach nowadays is to walk away, remain silent, there is no last word to be had worth the letters it takes to spell it.  There is usually little to be gained by talking to people who will argue to the death that you are nuts to be hurt by things that were not intended to cause harm.

My elbow that accidentally broke your nose?   What is mysterious about “accidentally”, asshole?

We get variations on that from angry people sometimes and experience teaches that the best response is to seek medical attention and stay out of harm’s way in future.  You will not win any arguments with people like that.

Nor is there any point in trying to.

I began writing this musing over whether people who were the victims of angry people when young are attracted to each other.  The little brother who was sucker punched by his older brothers, the middle sister who never got a dollar, nor any credit, from her parents, the older brother who bore the brunt of his mother’s rage and her random slaps across his face, the little sister terrorized by her insane bully brother.   There may be a magnetic force at work, drawing a certain type together.  I hate to think that is so, but it’s hard to imagine that everyone out there is the victim of some kind of crime against them when they were a child.

On the other hand, take a look at the world we live in.  Sadly, you will not have to look very far.

Elmore Leonard’s Game

My father, who had the taste to love Sam Cooke, recommended Elmore Leonard to me at one point, many years back.  He thought I would like Elmore and I did.   Between us we probably read every book Elmore Leonard wrote, often passing them on to each other.  I think my father even read the westerns, the early novels.   I may have only read one of those.  But I was always happy to find a new crime novel by Elmore Leonard on the bookshelf at the library, snatched it up immediately, read it in a day or two, passed it on to my father if he hadn’t read it already.

Master of dialogue, and ingenious plot twist, and creator of page turning interest, Leonard often underscored the cool of his bold, sometimes stupid characters by showing that they weren’t in a hurry.   “He lit a cigarette and looked at her, taking his time.”   I noticed early on that every single book by Leonard contained the line “taking his time”, usually several times. Thus began the game Elmore and I, the reader, used to play.

I would chuckle, as I read some of them, to see that Elmore had taken his time using “taking his time” in a book.  I’d note on the bookmark, p. 117, and smile, nod, “good one, man,” I’d say to Elmore Leonard.  Then he’d pepper the next chapter with it, 124, 127, 131.  Damn, he’s good, I used to think.

Of course, I love dialogue too.  And space on the page.  I literally begin choking when I see a block of text margin to margin in every direction, an immense, dense paragraph filling the entire battlefield of the page.   It’s like music, when somebody’s playing on every single beat, and somebody else is too, and there’s a wall of strings behind them, and the singer comes in, bleating directly on every beat.

“Let me breathe, damn you!” I mutter, closing a book with its black pages of type, and not taking my time about it.  I literally won’t read those books, no matter how wonderful the writing might be.  Open any place in Mein Kampf and you’ll see that kind of merciless shit, page-long paragraph followed by two page paragraph.

Terry Gross ran a nice tribute to Elmore Leonard recently, an edited version of her 1995 and 1999 interviews.  At one point Elmore says, once again warming my heart:

I like dialogue. I like to see that white space on the page and the exchanges of dialogue, rather than those big heavy, heavy paragraphs full of words. Because I remember feeling intimidated back in the, say, in the ’40s, when I first started to read popular novels, Book of the Month Club books, I would think, god, there are too many words in this book. And I still think there are too many words in most books. But dialogue appeals to me.

It appeals to me too.  Sometimes, sadly, the best dialogue I can find is here, tapping like a mechanical monkey on a keyboard, aware that it’s not a true dialogue.

“Don’t be so judgmental, man,” says Zeppo.

“Shut up, man, let the guy think,” says Ratso, a retired judge sensitive about such things.

You can hear Terry and Elmore Leonard talking here:

http://www.npr.org/2013/08/23/214831379/fresh-air-remembers-crime-novelist-elmore-leonard

there is also a transcript of their conversation you can cut and paste, if you’re in college writing a term paper on Elmore Leonard, say.

When Leonard died the other day, at 87, I got an email from Sekhnet, who broke the news to me by writing that Elmore Leonard won’t be taking his time anymore.  Of course, she pointed out, ever ready to console, his characters still will.

I had to chuckle when, at around 15:30, toward the end of the interview with Terry Gross, Leonard describes the way Quentin Tarantino went about turning the novel Rum Punch into the movie Jackie Brown.  The interview is almost over when Leonard casually mentions that Tarantino took his time with it.

I loved it.