You’ll *love* Spike Jonze’s miserable new ad for Apple MiseryPod

Adverts can be some of the most truly sophisticated films. Little tiny complex stories. Whether infomercials for hardware shops or questionably abstract perfume adverts, they function in the same manner any ‘film’ does: to deliver and elicit emotion. I love them.

Even when the creatives making them scratch at the surface of our collective misery, and smear the bits from under their fingernails onto a banner that they relentlessly hold at us, like an industrial Westboro Baptist Church.

Apple’s new advert takes that concept and dances with it, in a genuinely wonderful piece of art about the power of the imagination and the lackluster reality of a young worker’s life. That same piece of art asks us to spend £319 on a product that, finally, replaces the strenuous activity of having to open Spotify yourself.

What’s this story about? The official reading is that a young woman who is having a crap day, comes home from her drudge job to a depressingly modest flat. On request, her Siri-imbued Apple HomePod plays her something she likes, and through the emotive nature of music, her world is transformed for a blissful minute.

What very few have read is: a young, employed WOC, with a quite beautiful, personalised and furnished, spacious flat, is depressed. The grey colour grade tells me that, and rain + commute = she lives in London. We don’t know what her job is, but with this kind of flat she’s gotta work in finance or arms dealing. She’s contemplating the ethics of working for an industry that exploits and destroys in rote fashion. (Maybe she works for Apple?)

She tweeted something well-meaning about Syria earlier, and was trolled by both alt-left and alt-right bots who sent rape threats, and links to videos of children being harmed. She hasn’t seen her family in a long time. Instead of engaging with this, it’s easier to lose herself in the £319 button-pressing-replacement that is constantly harvesting her data, which may in the future be sold to an authoritarian crypto-state run by alt-wing trolls. (The same ones that contacted her today, ironyyyyy!)

It’s a cynical cash-grab, exquisitely executed. Apple is slick in its attempt to convince us that it’s on ‘our side’ regarding the drudgery of neoliberal life, rather than a direct contributor to it in a far more complex and pernicious way than it would ever dare reflect in its colourful, heart-string plucking brand personality.

Squinting at the relentlessly bright Westboro-esque signage of the art-vert, our response is: “…how come we can’t see the film crew in the mirror? Amazing.”

—

Real Film Director Spike Jonze (Her, Adaptation, Being John Malkovich) made his name in the field of ‘non-film films’ – skate videos, music videos, adverts – in the ’90s. His work has pushed the vanguard of filmmaking technique and narrative, allowing him to straddle status as both a mainstream and cult darling.

I love his work, as much as I ‘love’ the MacBook I’m writing this on – formally, they are excellent products, technically impressive, and full of the ghosts of the Apple/Foxconn factory suicide nets.

All of which leaves me with this confused sadness, asking: “How do I marry my status as a consumer with the effects of the industries I buy into?” and “Whoa. How much did the stretchy set cost? Mental.”

Plenty of ‘film directors’ have taken the commercial reins, to make genuinely excellent little films that sell products for companies. Who can forget Edgar Wright’s Pizza Hut advert from the year 2000, featuring Nick Frost and stuttering Billy from Spaced Season 2 Ep 3?

Or American History X director Tony Kaye’s phenomenal piece of advertising work, ‘Tested for the Unexpected’. This dystopian, dream-like terrain features a nipple-pierced, silvery-Buddha antagonist, a grand piano chucked off a bridge, and a 2-second long shot of four elaborately-costumed amphibian creatures grasping around a pool of water for no reason. All this to persuade us, specifically, to buy tyres from Dunlop.

Spike Jonze’s last entry into the commercial market was, loosely, the best thing I’ve ever seen. THIS is how you do a perfume advert:

Edgar Wright’s pizza-lovers spot begins in some sort of group therapy setting. Kenzo’s unnamed woman (actress [and excellent dancer!] Margaret Qualley) is tearful and alone, trapped in the squashed formality of some elite celebration.

And FKA Twigs is, I guess, supposedly ‘one of us’, i.e. from Apple’s target market: a depressed precariat/emergent service worker who can afford a £319 talking speaker on credit, if it will take away her pain for the length of a flagship advert for the world’s wealthiest company.

My next question is: if ‘Welcome Home’ was an FKA Twigs music video rather than an advert, it likely wouldn’t occur to me to be as dismissive. But a music video is still selling something. A song download, an album, concert tickets.

—

A lot of people, especially young and/or disenfranchised people, are drowning in great lakes of misery. Both individuals and society at large are struggling to understand exactly how to get out of this seemingly ever-worsening epidemic, because depression and anxiety – unlike some other medical issues – are simultaneously undeniably-individual-and-rhizomatic, yet also fostered by a social, situational and global environment.

As an individual I might be able to control my depression by going running, and increasing my individual share of endorphins. I can’t control the illegal levels of pollution in my city that, often, I can literally taste in the air as I gasp it down.

I might be able to finally break away from my partner who beats and emotionally abuses me. I can’t control the fact that when they continue to contact and threaten me, the police fail to deal with it and the refuge services that used to be government funded are no longer.

I might be able to lose myself in art, and imagine myself infinitely expanding the walls of my tiny, moldy, variously-broken flat. I can’t get hold of my landlord, and I don’t have time to see my friends, who I struggle to communicate with on a meaningful level anyway. I’m scared to go to work, as I’m often bullied by my colleagues – just slightly less than I’m scared to be unemployed again.

Misery. Isn’t art an ideal place to express it? And don’t these star directors and the phenomenally talented crews they work with re-present it to consumers so well? And should Apple, who make more than $1bn a week, and avoid tax, and perpetrate abuse of outsourced workers, use our misery to sell us sentient speakers?

—

Rhett Jones at Gizmodo describes ‘Welcome Home’ as a “pseudo-prequel” to Her. In a sea of hot-takes titled “WATCH Spike Jonze’s amazing new advert for Apple because it’s enjoyable and you want to enjoy don’t you”, he notes the similarities between Jonze’s feature-length study of satirical tech-dystopia, and the rather more real, less considered version in today’s advertisement. “Today,” he says, “we just want tech to give us a little serotonin burst that makes us forget about the state of our lives.”

This little seratonin burst is advertising’s bread and butter. The worst offender, the one that makes me Very Fucking Angry, is Unilever. I wrote about this ad when it came out in 2013, and the cognitive dissonance it produces. The skill of its technique and form worked on me – insofar as it made me cry – but I was as furious as I was sad. Yes, the world is jumping off a series of cliffs. No, buying your margarine won’t fix it, nor will your “global campaign” that consists of hashtagging #ProjectSunlight each time that you meet with Fergie from Black Eyed Peas.

In his essay, Dulltopia, Mark Bould writes that commercial-film dystopias (e.g. Children of Men, The Hunger Games, et al.) are now conceptually rehashed to the point of monotony. To really access a gut-wrenching, newly-meaningful dystopia, one must look to ‘slow cinema’: a mostly-documentary genre consisting of static long takes, meditative staring at people living the industrial processes of their lives.

“If dystopia can no longer gain sufficient distance from our own world to generate the cognitive estrangement upon which [Science Fiction]’s political potential hinges, we should not look to the future or to alternate words. We should, for the present, stick with the present. We just need to go deeper. To dive into boredom. […] Slow cinema casts us adrift, and upon our own resources”.

In other words, look around you. Stay there. Don’t stop looking.

No, put Candy Crush Soda down. Start again.

Look around you. Stay there. Don’t stop looking.

Keep looking. What do you see? What do you feel?

Is the dread creeping in yet?

—

Johann Hari’s recent book Lost Connections talks about Western-cultural causes of depression. It’s kind of frustrating in that he talks about the biopsychosocial model of depression as if it’s a new thing he just discovered, sort of like how I’m currently going “oh advertising plays on our emotions to sell us things, no freakin’ way!” But it’s an interesting read with that in mind. Dean Burnett has written a couple of useful counterpoints to Hari’s method of promoting his astonishing revelation that depression isn’t created in a vacuum (celebrity endorsements, heavy narrative styling, ginormous marketing campaign), and the two men have since devolved into bickering about it on Twitter.

If these adverts make you feel more miserable or leave you feeling cold, it makes sense. Don’t worry. “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society,” and all that.

Don’t give up. And keep that £319 for when your country ‘unexpectedly’ freezes over and your pipes burst. Or you get pregnant, and need to feed your child when your boss ‘lets you go’ – totally unrelated, you understand. Basically, you don’t need a HomePod.

(Also has anyone noticed that they owe Paul Smith some sort of concept/finders fee?)

On Escapism: The 2 reasons those drugs won’t work

I should tell you that as I begin writing this I’m considering whether to pop an opiate, a benzo, both, or neither.

“Should I take it/them before writing? Will I be lucid enough if they kick in? They’re not strong doses, but I’m allowed to take three at once… What dose is a strong dose? What can I get away with here?

“Mid-writing? Best of both worlds. Do some sober writing, and then experience a bit of wacky writing, see what happens…”

The other option of course is to take the drugs for the medical condition for which they’ve been prescribed^†. In a minute. Or now. It doesn’t matter.

They seem like innocent, innocuous questions. But there’s a hell of a lot going on behind those debates. For me – maybe for you too.

This is your brain on(/anticipating) drugs. *frying pan*

***

Walking home from the doctors surgery (still free at the point of use in early 2017) with a bag full of pain-relief, Fleetwood Mac lights up my 2007 3rd gen iPod nano.

(…bought with my first bit of student loan – did ’07’s Apple Inc. team miss the planned obsolescence memo or something? Or did they only officially incorporate it as policy later this decade? I remain gratefully stunned. Hang in there, my square little buddy.)

‘Never Going Back Again’ was one of those songs that came up during a transition period for both my mental/emotional health and my iTunes library, and if I remember rightly it was around Christmas a few years back, when the feels stakes are unavoidably higher. So Me and It have got one of them nostalgia links, formed by my desire not to fall back into old patterns of behaviour; the ones that killed me, for a while.

Now, for the first time, my mind is (arguably) in better shape than my body. I’ve just been told by a number of health professionals (some standing to profit, some not) that my x-rays show ‘spinal decay’ (basically arthritis of the spine, or at least it will be if I don’t do something about it) and muscles full of scar tissue. That explains the decade of back pain, and the current spasming that’s causing the involuntary yelping that’s causing the embarrassment in public.

My first desire was to GET SOME SWEET SWEET DRUGZ to relieve the pain. I even consciously determined, as I staggered to the GP, that if I was given a script it would likely be for valium or codeine – neither of which I’ve taken or been prescribed before. I didn’t realise, but I see now that I felt a bit excited.

I got given both.

My second desire, on the sunny stagger home, became something else. Somehow, it became not the desire to be able to move freely in the absence of muscular pain – how dull, basic. It was to sit outside in the winter/spring sun and while away some hours running free from the anxiety and anger that have recently colonised my brain again. (Yippee.)

It was to experience freedom from weight, anticipation, doubt, fear, connection, recognition, association, need, responsibility, contact, regard, honesty, faculty and understanding.

It was to throw myself into the dive, falling with no fallout, into the luxury that science and society has finally and rightfully allowed me. I’ve had enough anguish again today, thanks. And I have this paper that says I don’t have to. SEE YA.

How many valium is too many valium, really?

Lindsey Buckingham, but particularly Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks’ harmonies at 48s in, pulled me out of that smug, and into tears. Into admitting that tired, angry, frightened me is still strong somewhere, and she keeps forgetting to work with the rest of me, and what I know and need, and it’s kind of dangerous. Frightened me will do frightening things.

***

In giving up the ‘freedoms’ and faculties above, I give up my power. In not being there, attending to anxiety, anger, or anything else – whether that’s SMASHING THEM, or just working out why they’re there, what for, and better understanding them, which is kind of the same – I crush what is a burgeoning, and still fragile power.

You can use drugs to forge connection, sure. “Smoking and drinking are social, though – ” yeah, I get it. Short-term relief can seem nice. I could sit around abusing painkillers and downers with people, and find some things that we already had in common. They’re also incredibly addictive, mentally and physically debilitating, and a short term plug that’s easy to abuse or misunderstand as a ‘cure’ to my problem(s); a way to avoid governing myself or my vicinity.

Don’t pretend the high will last into significance. It’s not going to fix the fact that I could have sorted my back out years ago if I’d just paid attention to it instead of weed, how to fit in with obnoxious people, and whether or not the apocalypse was coming (it was/is.)

Gone are the days for chemical denial. Only recognition of all that’s good and bad. Just maybe not all at once. Whatever you can manage at a time. As long as you’ve got a variety of the two and how they make up the in-between that we live in.

Can’t deny that YouTube tutorials for physio core workouts have been available since I bought my iPod, and it’s high time I sorted my life out by doing that, instead of abusing (rather than properly using) substances.

Getting fucked up isn’t going to change the world around you. Plus not getting fucked up all the time is just a nicer life.

***

Reason 1: all life is suffering, and we live in a relative universe. work with that.

Reason 2: you’d be a complete asshole if you went around pretending everything was roses

Just so we’re clear, please do escape. Frequently. Just do something that doesn’t wreck and stunt you and, you know, maybe even benefits you or other people.

***

^†FOR FREE. BECAUSE I’M IN NEED. I’m looking at you GOP. We all are.

Slavery and Reparations: Bristol and Beyond

Last night I attended the ‘African connections: moving people – perspectives on Bristol, slavery and migration’ seminar at the Malcolm X Centre, part of the Being Human 15 festival. The panel were brilliant, and the audience engaged.

I was struck at how solid, useful and forthright the conversation was, and particularly on the question of reparations. A question I’ve talked to white friends about several times, friends who have similar if not mirrored politics to mine, and often disagreed on. Last night the idea was crystallised for me thanks to the intelligent and cohesive offerings of everyone in the room.

The crux was this: yes we need reparations – of course we need reparations. We need to repair damage that has been done, always. We need to constantly be looking to better and strengthen our society in all ways, especially for those who bear the extra (and continuing) weights of an inequitable and brutal history.

This does not mean that we give cash handouts to individuals or families or neighbourhoods or demographics – who would we give them to? How much? Where would that money come from? Who is paying whom?

What this does mean is that we acknowledge the truth of our history, and the truths of our present. We employ that truth loudly, openly and together, to build, connect, and repair in real terms.

A full and honest education – not a black history month, but a syllabus that (shock horror) teaches all history because it’s history. New types of investment that recognise the fissured and transitory nature of existing ‘community’ investment, the removal of bottlenecking towards a particular kind of culture and commerce, and a release of the treatment of lower-economic communities as afterthoughts.

The willingness of each of us individually, of all histories and parentages,  to integrate, share, listen to and work with each other – but also as a wider society to publicly express regret. Not because we are individually guilty, but because slavery was a regretful, shameful, vicious practice. And the trauma and reality and consequences of it remain today. Do we not agree?

One of the audience members suggested that a plaque be installed on the statue of Colston in the city centre, acknowledging his profession as a slaver (indeed, someone scrawled the fact on the base of the statue in 1998), or honouring the slaves who actually produced the wealth Colston distributed, or kept, as he saw fit. This is not the first time this has been suggested of course, and many people, myself included, would go further to say why not replace the thing with another statue, feature or something other.

Who are we as a city – what do we want to hide, and what do we want to celebrate?

The Oneness is the Greatest – #SanctumBristol

Every time I have read about spirituality, and usually when I am reading anything vaguely self-help-y, and sometimes when I am trawling through the Internet, there is a message that keeps coming back. That we are one. All of life, all of the Universe is, or is part of, the same organism, essence, energy.

I’m not too interested in debating or justifying this though I’ll happily discuss it, and often do, when someone is willing to engage with the idea. But without any religion, I have always believed that somehow we are all connected. I don’t know why, and I can’t really explain it. I don’t need to.

My best friend believes that we are imbued with the Holy Spirit, the same spirit of her God; my other best friend is an atheist, but does believes that we each have a soul, or spirit of some kind, and that we are connected to each other through mutual dependence and a moral responsibility to each other, simply by being alive and in proximity.

I’m not sure I can describe my experience of ‘oneness’, other than to say that at times I feel a connection, an emotional mirroring, and a rush and pull so visceral that it’s frightening, as though the soul I haven’t yet decided whether or not I have is being clamped and dragged from my body. I often shut that feeling down, especially since this happens most often when I am faced with the pain of others. Pain I’d rather not feel with no power to act on it, that’s not mine to fully grasp anyway, that’s distorted and egged on by my imagination and my adrenal glands.

This oneness, connection, is both physical and mental. My partner believes that those two things are one and the same. Billions of us believe billions of things; and thus, we are all potentially as different, and potentially as similar, as we can be. Our consciousness, and the oneness, are Schroedinger’s Cats.

Last Sunday, I arrived to see my friend Sara perform at #SanctumBristol. For an hour, every single day, throughout the entirety of the installation, she has been singing, in Arabic, a call to prayer. Sara wrote the translation of her prayer on the chalkboard for us, and asked everyone to face the back right-hand corner of the structure; in the direction of Iran, her country of heritage. The chalkboard read:

The Oneness is the Greatest

I testify that there is no God greater than the Oneness

Come to Sanctuary

Come to prayer

The Oneness is the Greatest

There is no God greater than the Oneness.

It was bright and early in the morning. There was cold wintery sunlight eking everywhere and showing us everything it possibly could. I sat in the newest and most beautiful structure in my city, holding a hot cup of tea, sheltered from the damp outside and swaddled in a large scarf, and felt lucky and happy. I listened to Sara’s strong and worn voice, a vocal offering of connection with the Oneness; with anyone who cared to listen; with anyone who happened to turn up that morning; with Iran; with you; with me. As she began and continued to sing I felt a rush, an impact. A connection with so much and so many that overwhelmed me in its torrent – but for a second, an instant. A collision of whatever that fist inside my chest is that punches up and out and forces me to breathe deeper than before and open my eyes with the hope of seeing something. I see nothing out of the ordinary, simply what was there the second before, and the second before that, but I feel so many tiny fingers and roots and cracks of life surging in one single snap through every neuron and each bronchi. Between my consciousness and others’ spirits must be so much recognition, so much obscurity and all at once and altogether and if only we could have it. Hold it. And actually know each other. In all our generosity. In all our violence. In all our carefree and carelessness.

The connections, the Oneness, was, as always, too quick for me to comprehend. As I faced the feelings of fear that gathered from my seat and crowned over my head I breathed and listened to the river of Sara’s voice. So much possibility and so much pain, so much potential for downfall and excitement and creation and admission and revelation, and the only limitation that will exist will be the boundaries that I put up, as healthy as they are, to fend off the onslaught of life. It was terrifying, exhilarating and I felt the luck and the happiness and the nausea and the hatred and the absolute bewilderment and everything else contained in my life so far, to the fullest.

This is what that looks like. I think it feels better than it looks. Photo by Max McClure, courtesy of Situations.

I’d never felt lucky or happy until recently. As I’ve grown I’ve stood and faced the Oneness whenever I could, but most often it’s thrown me to the ground, and I’ve knelt, head bowed, pleading, tempering myself and waiting sheepishly while it ticks, silently, potentially sinister. But whilst there, with a good view of the foundations beneath me I’ve gathered my blessings, my connections, my feet and my sight and I’ve waited again. And each time stood to face the Oneness. And last Sunday I sat and soaked up Sara’s singing it to me.

In the last week, the week that followed, were several more terrorist attacks that have become so frequent that they only really rock us if just across the way. More people lost their children, the loves of their lives, the people who cared for them, the people who provided them with their lifelines. Sara texted to ask that we be with her as she carried on, for an hour, every day, performing, rejoicing, calling for us to be One. Asking that we connect with her, as she continued her connection, while life once again seems to repudiate, abandon, and rip our fragile togetherness away from us.

Billions of us believe billions of things. We are all potentially as different and potentially as similar as we can be. Be aware of yourself as a perpetrator. Are you responding, or maintaining our global supply of revenge?

I don’t know what the Oneness is. I only know that we are together, and there is no choice other than to be together. What a threat, what an opportunity. I am thankful that on a Sunday morning I no longer hide under soft duvet barricades, and useless chemical clouds, but rise to connect with a friend, to hear a city, to seek the Oneness.

Come to Sanctuary. There is no God greater than the Oneness. The Oneness is the greatest.

———————————————————————————-

I wrote this for my Sanctum performance on Mon 16th November 2015. I managed to get a slot directly after Sara – it was a wonderful experience. Many thanks to Situations for having me, there’s only three days left of Sanctum, get down there while it lasts.

Theatre West REVIEW – The Islanders

As the year draws to a close Theatre West have produced a season of new plays, of which The Islanders is the third of five. The setup – a one-act preceded by a short piece by another upcoming writer – not only allows for a showcase of the latest writing by the west’s rising talent, but also for a reflection of the topical issues that theatre’s emerging writers are exploring.

Tory MP Claire is called back to the island on which she grew up – the constituency she now represents in Parliament – where the resident islanders are reeling from the latest in a series of building collapses caused by rising sea levels. Although the many locals – all played by the two supporting actors – spoke in thick west country accents, for some reason I imagined ‘the Isle’ to be in Scotland; perhaps because Claire’s being so far away in London for much of the year was such a foregrounded theme. Bristol was referred to at one point, so we knew we weren’t ‘here’ – but, of course, the vagueness in geography allowed the story to feel simultaneously local and universal.

All the performances were solid and engaging, and the characterisation was particularly enjoyable – Rosanna Miles gave a melodramatic portrayal of a sincerity-chasing career politician, which nicely illustrated an ego-led desperation to appear to be doing the right thing. While I don’t disagree with this reading of political behaviour, I couldn’t decide whether this felt fully three dimensional. However, it did bolster the relentless inabilities of the mentally-, geographically-, and experientially-detached leader focused on placating rather than assisting her constituents.

Joel Parry provided much comic relief in his portrayal of key locals and antagonists; there wasn’t a huge variation in his accent or characterisation – occasionally it was hard to tell whether Bob or The Man Who Wants a License to Shoot Pigeons was speaking – but he performed all with gusto. Claire Sullivan’s recently-home-and-business-less Major was particularly warming, her small frame mimicking that of a frail old man and her thousand-yard stare drawing us into his grief. Similarly, her portrayal of young and eager political aide Anna, whose willingness to admit to the realities of climate change and the subsequent necessity to manipulate the Islanders, was delivered with a frighteningly charming innocence.

The script was tight, the characters well-directed and the story accessible – it is difficult to do behind-the-scenes political dramas following the success of The Thick of It, because everything compares and almost nothing can match it. Indeed, a Tucker-esque character appeared towards the end and swore a lot, and I wished so much that the character had completely diverged from the newly-stereotyped Hardball Spin Doctor. In that vein, there were many ways the story could have been more adventurous and/or perilous, but the real success was in the interaction between characters and the pacing of the story. I was unsure as to whether Claire’s final ‘redemption’ was intended to illustrate the futility of party politics or act as a sincere resolution for the arc of the character – for me, it was certainly the former, and I would’ve liked a clearer, bolder finale.

I’ve seen many plays about climate change recently, and not all of them work. The Islanders fares well as a story about the lack of political will to address the most urgent of society’s needs, and for the company’s next installment I’d simply like a more radical treatment. Ultimately, I’d love to see more from all involved and highly recommend catching it in the last couple of days of its run. It continues until Saturday 14th Nov at PRSC’s The Space on the corner of Jamaica St and Hillgrove St.