31 Dec 2005

29 Dec 2005

grammar



why don't they at least respect grammar?

24 Dec 2005

era of the open road



since i enjoy old stuff a lot (especially old pics and ads and posters and all that), i enjoyed looking at these postcards from the era of the open road and reading the commentaries on American motels back then.

the really big button that doesn't do anything

and impressions here

Merry Christmas everyone!

holiday due to Santa

21 Dec 2005

when briefs go wild

what does it actually take for a blog to be good?

Well, with Russell Davies' APSotW, and with Grant McCracken's posts on the blogging business school, i started wondering what are the characteristics of a good blog in their opinion after all.
The following is the answer provided by Russell:
"I think there's lots of ways for a blog to be good. Like there's lots of ways for a book to be good.
But I like:
1. People who are good at compressing - they can get a lot of thought/story/idea into a few words.
2. People who can be compelling about stuff I know nothing about. The great thing about blogs is the micro-focus on esoteric and exotic subjects.
3. Personally I like to find out a little about the person writing the blog. Not just what they know, but who are they.
4. I like more spontaneous writing, people who obviously haven't considered stuff much, they're just pouring thoughts onto the screen.
5. Funny's good.
6. And numbered points.
7. Er. That's it. What do you think?"

hologram Paul


last evening we had the first Xmas celebration, with presents and atmosphere and Santa and everything. i was supposed to capture the spirit, but what turned out was this hologram-like pic. ah well...

snapshot

as i was driving to work this morning, this car got my attention. the picture is not too good, cause
the traffic lights turned green and i had to hit the road. But it was one of those old, rusty, used and abused Dacias, branded with the website of a firm whose name claims experts in computers. Now, maybe it's just me being mean, but in this age, would you believe that experts in computers are promoting themselves using such a Dacia?

office aquarium star


19 Dec 2005

my troubles with LSD - 1988 comics


and not only. Also cyberpunk. and brain toys. and nanotech. In the first issue of "Boing boing - the journal of energized fun". Or how magazine-experiments looked like more than 15 years ago.
PS: Sir Timothy "Tim" John Berners-Lee, the man who created the World Wide Web, started his own blog, saying, in what i consider to be a motivaltional-inspirational statement :): "In 1989 one of the main objectives of the WWW was to be a space for sharing information. It seemed evident that it should be a space in which anyone could be creative, to which anyone could contribute. [...] Now in 2005, we have blogs and wikis, and the fact that they are so popular makes me feel I wasn't crazy to think people needed a creative space."

London punks 1976-1984


pete murphy
Originally uploaded by Andy Rosen.

Andy Rosen was a rock photographer working in London 1976-1984, who made his stunning "London Punks 1976-1984" private collection public on flickr, for the first time in 25 years. Also promissing he would add some more.

advertising storytellers



i was going through this wonderful article on the status of advertising and advertising people once again, and i remembered the following piece.
The Storyteller's Creed
I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge,
That myth is more potent than history,
That dreams are more powerful than facts,
That hope always triumphs over experience,
That laughter is the only cure for grief,
And I believe that love is stronger than death.
"Maybe it's not a very businesslike approach, but it's always what attracts me... I do believe that it is that energy, that wonderful energy of the ancient craft of storytelling that will ignite something in the listeners."(Ben Kingsley)

it's all about the fluff

as i was saying, blogs deal with all sorts of situations: this one right here deals with cute little fellows; i'm not saying that i'm proud of liking all this, but still, they're sooo cute :)).

our holidays have their charm



this is Pizza Hut's claim this winter, as suggested in the illustration developed in the latest Imager campaign. And as sustained by these people dressed in Christmas decorations, who invaded our office earlier today spreading their cheerful mood. shame on me for the blurry, bad photo.

18 Dec 2005

feel free to doodle


a collection of, yes, doodles. and yet another proof that there is a blog for anything.

simple idea


stickers with the most popular London subway stations. simple and brilliant. to be able to sleep as much as you want, finally.

daily garfield comics



according to the Garfield comic-calendar, this corresponds to my birthday. funny sketches updated daily.

romanian branding


the beer hole



i like this name. simple and insightful :)).

spider-attack

this little guy here was really tourmenting me :D

17 Dec 2005

latest soon aquisition

thanks, Abredross!
"Flanimals were first sighted by Ricky Gervais a long time ago. He drew some rough sketches and made notes about their behaviour.

Then, Ricky asked his friend Rob Steen to draw them properly, exactly as they appear in their natural habitat.

The result is two beautiful, informative and compendious volumes, Flanimals and More Flanimals, which are sure to delight, disgust and distress all who read them.

There are a few things you need to know about Flanimals. And when you do, I’d keep them to yourself if I were you.

Well now you can keep them all to yourself. BUY ONLINE the new LIMITED EDITION hand painted resin adult collectables featuring Honk, Clunge Ambler, Munty Flumple, Grundit, Puddloflaj and Adult Mernimbler. Each hand-crafted Flanimal comes in it’s individually designed packaging and is endorsed with it’s unique collectors limited edition number.
Flanimal Collectables Making the Flanimals More Flanimals "

imaginary's history center

what is this place?

16 Dec 2005

change me

In one of my previous posts, i brought into discussion the "Make poverty history" project. Now Getty Images comes with an initiative to help and support it. "Express your ideas. Make a difference. Change me" is the challenge launched by Getty Images within "Change me" - a worldwide project that brings people together to share ideas through powerful imagery. All one has to do is choose a picture from the thousands proposed by Getty and explain what makes it so special, the goal being to find an image that will make an impact on people viewing it, so to speak “an image that might Change Me in some way”.

food for thought (or not)

saw this motto for a Catalin Matei's article: "do you think it's normal that anybody can dress in Santa ? "
good point. i was just thinking about it the other day, when i saw a horde of young Santas smoking in front of a bank they were trying to promote.

volvo simplicity

i like it cause it's very simple.

beautiful artistic performance

last night I went to see "The Picture of Dorian Gray"'s adaptation to theatre. Although skeptical in the beginning - for some reason, i usually disapprove of novels turned into theatre plays - the show was simply beautiful, and it proved to be a great artistical adaptation - including theatre, ballet, opera and dance. The coregraphy, developed by Razvan Mazilu, who also silently interpreted Dorian Gray, was impressive.

holiday social messages

this social awareness spot developed by Papaya is, in my opinion, one of the best Romanian commercials ever. The production is cinematographic indeed, while the message is very powerful and well illustrated, which ensures its memorability.

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the power of imagination



i was watching this beautiful demonstration of sand-drawing and i was admiring the artist's amazing capacity to tell gorgeous stories so simply and naturally. exactly the way advertising people should be telling stories.

15 Dec 2005

comedy-romance of the week

since watching a comedy-romance movie at least once a week seems to be becoming tradition already, last night i went to see "Just like Heaven". The decision to go watch the movie was due to the thought that it was inspired by Marc Levy's novel "If only it were true", and i respect and admire Marc Levy very much. Well...since i brought him up anyway, i'm gonna talk about him a little.
Marc Levy, whose motto is that the only limit to our dreams is our will to make them come true, is a Frech writer (living in London) with a very interesting life. At 18, he joined The Red Cross, where he remained for 6 years. In parallel, at 22, he starts his own business - Logitec France. He further develops his own small business in USA, until 1990, when he resigns after losing majority control of his group. Taking everything from the beginning, at 29, he cofounds an interior design and construction company with two friends (an architect and an engineer), developing a concept linking technology, architecture and structural engineering. Their company, Eurythmic-Cloiselec, becomes one of the leading architectural firms in France in the next few years, completing more than 500 corporate headquarters including those of Coca-Cola, Perrier, Evian, Norton, Canal Plus Satellite, and L’Express magazine. But in 1998, he suddenly starts dedicating himself to writing, and decided to leave his firm and go to London in order to focus on writing. Marc Levy has been translated into 30 languages, and his success is not confined to France: If Only it Were True for example has now been on the paperback bestseller list in Germany for over 100 weeks.
His second passion is cinema, but however, after selling the rights of the novel to Dreamworks, he did not want to interfere in the production of the movie, admitting that he realises the fact that the moment he sold the rights for the book, the story became somebody's else work - that is, the director's work.
Coming back to the movie, i have to admit that i was really captivated by the story (despite the rather undisturbingly predictable plot :) ) and spent a very entertaining time. I laughed, and i felt good, and i thought about it and i smiled and the general atmosphere in the cinema seemed to prove that i was not the only one having a good time. I walked out feeling a little more optimistic.

14 Dec 2005

penguin-need


i have to buy myself a toy-penguin really quickly.

Romanian lack of openmindness


this post is a result of my utter disappoitment regarding the Romanian lack of openmindness and communication. i think that Romanians simply haven't understood neither the importance of communication, nor its benefits. Outrageous as it may sound, sometimes it seems to me that people here don't realise how essential it is to share ideas, to share knowledge, as well as to learn from others. I was reading "Brand new brand thinking" last night, a book edited by Merry Baskin and Mark Earls which i enjoy a lot, and in the foreword written by Campaign's editorial director Dominic Mills, there was this following phrase: "You don't have to agree with everything it says to gain from it. You may even violently disagree with some of its assertions - i did - but it'll make you think. Even if those ideas, all of them articulated with passion and a clarity of thought, make you just think for a nano-second about your own beliefs, then that is a job well done ". So well said. In a world full of so much information and so many ideas, most Romanians still tend to think that they master some sort of supreme truth - that they know everything about everything, that they are the possesors of the greatest thoughts, and that those who ask them to state these thoughts and opinions are some sort of intellectual smuggers willing to deprive them of some consistent recognition. Such a shame! The situation which got me started is the following. Grapefruit - a great Romanian branding consultancy delivering strategy, identity, design and interactive for brands and organizations - initiated a project called Branding Romania. A very necessary initiative if we think about Jack Trout's (not that i'm a big fan of Trout, but still, this time he is extremely right) recent verdict that Romania scores zero in the image sector. The website designed especially for this project is a collection of articles, essays and thoughts coming from people in the public arena concerned with the image of their country. As we should all be. And they recently developed a contest entitled "Ideas for Romania", for which people were invited to post their plans and ideas on how to improve Romania's image. Directly on the site. So that everybody can have access to them, discuss them, debate and get the best out of them. The symbolic prize is a book. It turned out that too few were interested in Romania's brand awareness or in their personal contribution to its development. They were just concerned about their ideas being stolen, in case they posted any ideas whatsoever. Instead of taking it as an opportunity of a brainstorming whose results could have been implemented for the sake of us all, they just proved their selfishness once again. A disgusting disgrace. Hopefully something will soon change.

13 Dec 2005

Xmas in the air




apparently Christmas spirit is finally taking over Imager. They gave us small cute Xmas trees and we decorated them today. However, there were no carols. Ah well...I cannot complain about the excitement of the operations, though: there was an earthquake of high magnitude while we were decorating, so everybody started calling and be called by relatives. Merry Christmas everyone!

luck lying on the alley

Cristina spotted this dice lying on the ground, in front of a drugstore earlier today. Now who could the lucky person have been?

may he rest in peace

i know that if i express my regret for this cute teddy-bear's death, people will remind me of the brilliant iKea "Lamp" spot, but still...he was just lying there, outside my office, looking so dead, and i just felt sorry for "it"...it's cruel to throw away toys just like that.

12 Dec 2005

car design



this car is often parked near my office. cute design.

silly thoughts, but great links



That's gonna be another long post and it's not gonna make any sense :). In his latest post, Russell Davies said, and i quote: "I find this is often the way ideas come. (Good or not). You misunderstand something in the real world (I often get ideas from mishearing words), your brain instantly extrapolate something from that misunderstanding and, in doing that, creates a new idea. So hurrah for vagueness."
And having this in mind, i came across a little phrase on Chris Harding's site as the description of the "Robot Family" project: "It's about a society of unthinking robots, and nothing more. If you read anything else into it, then you are probably some kind of philosophy major, or socially aware or something.". "Robot Family" is a television series idea currently under development by Goldhouse, a small creative partnership dedicated to the development of animated television programs and shorts. Goldhouse means Chris Harding, Chad Strawderman and Jeff Barfoot, and they each have great websites, with lots of shorts and animations and games and all that.
And i kept on watching and thinking and remembering the days before i entered advertising. Back then, i was only surrounded by people who took philosophy too seriously, thus losing the capacity to stay open to all the daily silly things which can turn into such wonderful ideas. And i often get ideas from misunderstanding or mishearing something, as well as from getting in touch with other people who misunderstand or mishear things. Distortions often are the root of imagination, of the mind flying away, which is great. It's why cartoons usually inspire me more; cause they allow you to think possibilities to such a large extent. Then, i get more ideas from listening to kids playing in the park and so on...they don't have the same image of the world that grown-ups have, and yet, their minds work beautifully, making all sorts of weird connections. And i guess the only thing to be done is to stay open and express yourself openly.
Willy Wonka:[Spoken]
Hold your breath
Make a wish
Count to three
[Sung]Come with me
And you'll be
In a world of
Pure imagination
Take a look
And you'll see
Into your imagination
We'll begin
With a spin
Traveling in
The world of my creation
What we'll see
Will defy
Explanation
If you want to view paradise
Simply look around and view it
Anything you want to, do it
Wanta change the world?
There's nothing
To it
There is no
Life I know
To compare with
Pure imagination
Living there
You'll be free
If you truly wish to be
If you want to view paradise
Simply look around and view it
Anything you want to, do it
Wanta change the world?
There's nothing
To it
There is no
Life I know
To compare with
Pure imagination
Living there
You'll be free
If you truly
Wish to be

back to the theatre


A little thing i forgot to mention in my previous posts. On Friday, i went to see Luigi Pirandello's"Six Characters in Search of an Author". Directed by Liviu Ciulei, the play benefits from a very good distribution (Victor Rebengiuc, Maia Morgenstern and her son, Ion Caramitru etc), which however reminded me the fact that no matter how good Maia Morgenstern is as a film actress, she doesn't appeal to me at all when she's on stage.
The description of the play, as it appears on the Britannica guide to Nobel Prizes goes like this: "play in three acts by Luigi Pirandello, produced and published in Italian in 1921 as Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore. Introducing Pirandello's device of the "theatre within the theatre," the play explores various levels of illusion and reality and the distortion of truth. It had a great impact on later playwrights, particularly such practitioners of the Theatre of the Absurd as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet, as well as Jean Anouilh and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Six characters appear on a stage that is being used for the rehearsal of Pirandello's play The Rules of the Game. They ask the Stage Manager for help. Created and then discarded by an author, they seek another author to cast them in a play and let them play out their roles. A group of actors steps forward to portray the lives that the six characters have just described, but when they do so the characters object to their reenactment, claiming that it distorts the truth. When one of the characters commits suicide, the rest of the characters mourn his death while the actors insist nervously that it is only make believe. Disgusted, and recognizing the dilemma between the reality of daily life and the reality of art, the Stage Manager stops the proceedings."

11 Dec 2005

tribute to Georges Brassens

"Les oiseaux de passage" is the name of a tribute album dedicated to Georges Brassens. Launched in September 2001, 20 years after Brassens' death, the album reunites many great French artists who propose their own interpretations of his various famous songs. Among them, Noir Desir interpreting Le Roi, Yann Tiersen and Natacha Regnier singing a beautiful version of Le Parapluie, Tarmac with La Ballade des Gens qui Sont Nes Quelque Part, a Subway version of Mourir pour des Idees, Les Tetes Raides with Pauvre Martin and many many more. The album is among my favourite tribute albums, but the purpose of the post was in fact to mention a new very interesting radio station, as well as initiative that i came across: a radio which continually broadcasts versions of Brassens songs submitted by people all over the world. The radio can be found on this very comprehensive site about the great French singer.

Romanian Psychological Solidarity 1


It's amazing how many idiotic forums which include the term "psychology" in their description exist in Romania. I am sure that this happens for a number of reasons, but one of them is, in my opinion, the general lack of understanding of the term and its applications in our country. In other words, psychology as taught and practised here is dominated by an amazing lack of information and implication. It seems to be so comforting to think that "it could never happen to you", that people don't actually take neither psychology, nor psychiatry seriously. And that is outrageous.
Therefore, until i get my website ready (and that's gonna take some time :(( ), i decided to start on this blog a series of links and presentations which actually bring into discussion or are trying to solve real problems of people who are actually involved - through their will or not - in something which i would call "the therapeutical process of psychology". Articles, disorders, distress, associations - a little bit of everything with the hope that one day, there will be enough volunteers willing to help and to change something. I'm gonna call the series Romanian Psychological Solidarity.
As a first post regarding the matter, i chose to bring into discussion autism. Since Wikipedia offers enough material to get an impression on autism, what's left to be said is that in Romania, the disorder is surrounded by a painful lack of information and implication. Psychologists and psychiatrists, they all raise their shoulders and advise the parents of children with this disorder to get used both to the fact that autism cannot be cured, and to the fact that there are no therapies able to make their children better. In other words, they're not explaining what exactly this disease is, nor are they offering any options; they're basically inviting parents to watch their children grow in a different world. In a world which normal people do not get, and which deprives autists from communication and normal social development. That's outrageous. Especially since, in fact, there is one therapy which functions. That means that children suffering from autism can actually be recovered. The mentioned therapy is called ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) and is unfortunately very expensive. Which is why there aren't many Romanians who can in fact benefit from it due to the high costs. However, after dealing with the doctors' determined assertion that their child cannot be recovered, the family of an autist child had the means to resort to this therapy. The child was recovered. And they felt like it was their moral duty to try to deal with the lack of interest of the Romanian medical system by starting a project aiming at helping other children surpass this disorder. Mostly children whose parents lack the financial means to start ABA. Nustadeoparte.ro and autism.ro explain the project and the results obtained until now. And they even organize auctions selling paintings made by children suffering from autism, in order to offer people willing to donate something in exchange for their decision not to be indifferent.
"Do not fear your enemies, The worst they can do is kill you. Do not fear your friends, At worst, they may betray you. Fear those who do not care, They neither kill nor betray, but betrayal and murder exist because of their silent consent" -- Bruno Jasienski