I was sitting in the car at the petrol station and a Peugeot pulled up on my right with a drum kit in the back.  I wondered where the man might be going and what he played etc (over-active imagination strikes again).  All of a sudden a Peugeot pulled up on my left, with a guitar in the back!  Weird.  Even more weird, they were both the same car, in almost the same colour!!

RRP: £49.99

Mistake on till: £19.99

aiiiiii!

“Dwarfed by these ambitious branding projects, it becomes difficult for mere mortals to compete with their own expressions of meaning, which is precisely why, it is brands – not intellectuals or activists or religious leaders – that are the principal truth-tellers of our corporate age.  They are the ones speaking loudest about meaning, helping us to look with awe and wonder at the world, even if what we are looking at, ultimately, are branded sneakers, lattes and laptop computers.”  – Naomi Klein, the Truth about Advertising.

This intrigued and concerned me…  It intrigued me because it is true.  It concerned me because it is true.  Is a latte branded?  Absolutely.  If I buy a latte (not often, as they make me ill), there is a difference between whether or not I buy a latte to go, or a latte to drink in.  There is a difference between whether I buy it at Starbucks, Soho, Costa, the local caf, or carry it in a thermos.  It actually makes me feel different.  Drinking latte at all makes you feel something.  So if we truly do live in a ‘brandscape’, where everything, even liquid that we drink is ‘branded’, not as a label such as *STARBUCKS – LOGO WITH FUNNY MERMAIDY WOMAN*, but as a consumer experience, or as something that speaks of our lifestyle, mood, beliefs, morals, ethics, snobbery etc, then should Christianity buy into the notion of branding?

I have battled with this long and hard, trying to disarm human logic and seek God’s guidance.  Many have told me, in discussion, that the church should absolutely not buy into branding, as the gospel should not be commercialised.  I totally agree about the commercialisation bit, God’s grace is free, we never want to make money out of it.  But do we miss the point of what branding is about?  Is it a money spinner, or is it an entity that instills trust within an authority or a name?  Why, if you buy a big mac burger in Afghanistan, would you feel safer than buying some local meat cooked up on a BBQ?  Because we assume that the brand in which we trust (maybe the golden arches are not a good example?!) has standards.   We assume that they have at least a set of base rate morals that will ensure our safety in buying into their ideal.

Why are the religious leaders not the ones speaking the loudest?  Maybe we have lost sight of what people are looking for.   I am not saying that we should design a funky logo for Jesus (although I am convinced that people would take the church more seriously if it was presented well!!  Pleae please update your public image churches!)  but I wonder what the BRAND as such of church is.  Well the answer is simple.  The branding guidelines are set out in 66 books known as the Bible.  If we adhered to these guidelines we would protect and honour the brand, just as Nike or any of the other big globals have to do in order to protect the ‘swoosh’ and all that it stands for.  In this day and age I see no more urgent a time than now to get back to the good book.

It takes years of expensive and effective marketing to restore consumer trust in a big brand following one scandal or blip (think Cadbury’s salmonella and Nestlé powdered milk).  How much more will it take to restore the faith of society in a church that has gone so far off the beaten track in places that ‘consumers’ think that we are a joke.  It is not too late, but it is going to be tough.  We have a corporate responsibility to the Lord to protect His brand and all that He stands for.

The pirate next door has adopted a cat called Rambo.  (!!!!!!!!)  It is very cute, black and white with a white moustache (literally) The lady who has given it to him is a little mad and talks loudly in the garden about ferrets and other such delights.  Watch this space…

I have just returned from a couple of days in London on a jolly with Fab and Annie.  The purpose?  To check out D&AD New Blood 2008.  We have to enter it next year and decided to go and check out the vibe…  The hotel we stayed in was sheer comedy and absolutely horrendous.  We thought that the “Oxford Hotel” couldn’t be all that bad?!    Two stars, situated in Earl’s Court, serving breakfast and with an en-suite bathroom.  Perfect.  Until we got there…

We were on the top floor (about 10 flights of stairs, no lift) and in our bedroom for three, we found five single beds, none of which appeared to be level!  There was carpet on the walls and above that, grubby sackcloth (was this ever cool?!)  There was a small wonky shelf by each bed, a 70s radio mounted on the wall that had been kicked in and to top it all off, a poster of Paul Daniels in a clip frame above one of the beds!!!

Ohhhh dear.  The sheets (complete with cigarette burns) looked like sleeping Mexicans (bad 80s aztec design), so we ended up sleeping ON the beds in our towels!!!

We looked high and low for the bathroom and then discovered it in a cupboard!  It was literally the size of a caravan bathroom and the toilet flush had vanished, so you had to actually stick your hand inside the wall and pull up a rod in order to discard your ‘doings’!!

Breakfast was yet another treat – value cornflakes with very thin toast and jam.  You sat around a table full of strangers and tried not to wonder what the floaty bits in the orange juice were…

D&AD was great, some really good stands and some very creative work – design, advertising, photography, illustration and animation mostly.  We picked up lots of ideas, ate some nice food and drank some nice wine.  We laughed a lot about the hotel and visited the V&A very briefly.  Thumbs up London!

(left) D&AD – everything black and yellow of course.  (right) London Festival of Architecture

If anyone ever wonders why girls feel rubbish about themselves most of the time, then this advert (which was placed, very irresponsibly I feel, given the amount of teenage girls and 20-30-something women who use Facebook) should explain why:

Look at the picture!!!  Feeling FAT?!?!?  It should say; “Lost your womanly shape and gained a boyish one due to anorexia recently because adverts like this make you feel like a whale?”  Followed by “the pink patch will help you lose loads of money (and possibly a little weight) and you will be at your skinniest due to paranoia.  Try it for free, which is a lie really because we are charging you for ‘shipping and handling’, after which you will become addicted and buy more.”  Now, perhaps I am a little sensitive because my Grandma said to me (tactfully) the other day “gosh haven’t you filled out in the face??”  Thanks for that.  I didn’t think I had actually but there you go. Perhaps I feel sensitive because I am sick and tired of the media dictating what ‘beauty’ is in order to sell products.  This is why I am in design and not advertising.  What is with this whole thing about blurring the boundaries between “beautiful” and “sexy”?  Everything nowadays has to be sexy and people have forgotten what “beautiful” looks like, because fashion changes with such regularity that no one can keep up.

Let me remind you.  Renoir was a great master of art, was he not?  It would be insulting not to trust his judgement on a beautiful subject, so here is beauty according to Renoir:

This woman, you will notice, has hips, a bottom and eats meals.  Revolutionary in this day and age I know.  You only have to try clothes shopping to discover this.

Many people slate the work of Picasso in reference to his cubist pieces (which I actually quite like), but fewer people know that before he went all geometric on us, he produced some really beautiful paintings…  Here is one of his earlier works:

This woman is pretty ordinary looking isn’t she?  She hasn’t got a large pair of melons falling out of a skimpy top, she hasn’t borrowed a nose from another celebrity because hers happens to be a little disfiguring, she is on a neutral background and not wearing big ‘bug’ sunglasses.  Yet Picasso knew that this was beauty.  Not sexy.

So where does all the size zero nonsense come from?  I don’t think that us women can turn around and blame men, because I know very few men who like size zero.  Not real men anyhow…  I think the pressure comes from women, directed at other women.  Is it a battle for power?  Is it just that we are nasty to each other?  I am not sure.

I almost threw a party when Dove came up with their Campaign for Real Beauty.  Brilliant.  It could have cost them everything, since the message behind most advertising is well renowned to be that “companyX will sell you these attributes, personality traits, beauty, sex appeal etc and swap ‘you’ for ‘him/her’, all for the price of productY”.  You look at the celeb in the advert and the gaze is fixed as such that you appear to be looking in a mirror.  All that stands between you and him/her is a product (read ‘decoding advertisements’ by Judith Williamson).  So Dove broke the rules by finding fun-loving, ordinary looking healthy women and placing them on an advert.  They didn’t find someone obese and call them beautiful in order to make a point, they just took normal healthy people:

Unsurprisingly, the campaign was incredibly successful.  All the best Dove, well done for having the guts to make a stand.

Following what is becoming a bit of a worldwide theme of prayer and revival going on, we have been having some extra prayer meetings at church.  The power of prayer is immense, because of the God that is behind it.  Let us be careful that we do not come to focus on the miracles and not on the prayer, or on the gospel (I am, here, referring to the worldwide movement, not just our congregation!)

Matthew 16:1-4: One  day the Pharisees and Sadducees came to test Jesus, demanding that he show them a miraculous sign from heaven to prove his authority.  He replied, “you know the saying, ‘Red sky at night means fair weather tomorrow; red sky in the morning means foul weather all day.’ You know how to interpret the signs of the skies but you don’t know how to interpret the signs of the times!  Only an evil, adulterous generation would demand a miraculous sign, but the only sign I will give you is the sign of the prophet Jonah.”  Then Jesus left them and went away.

Jesus went on to tell his disciples to be wary of the “yeast” (deceptive teachings) of the pharisees and the sadducees.  Now don’t get me wrong, I have every confidence that God can and will use a tattooed biker dude from Canada to heal the sick and to ‘perform’ (for want of a better word) miracles through .  I also am thrilled that we are having extra prayer meetings at church because when you look at the fruit of such meetings, it is visible and tangible, meaning that God is hearing the prayers of His people and responding.  I am simply urging us to exercise caution in the focus of our intent, not getting wrapped up in the excitement of ‘results’, but trusting in God and first and foremost, loving God, who has first loved us.

We must keep a focus on the Bible – 1 Corinthians 9:16 – “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel.”  For the Bible says many things about revival or, more specifically, people becoming Christians.  We are instructed by God to preach the gospel, to tell people the truth about what God says.  In order to find out who God is, people must encounter Him.  In Matthew, Jesus tells His disciples not to tell anyone that He is the Messiah – why?  He has just told Peter that he is blessed because no human being told him who He was, he knew from God, believed and had faith.  Therefore, I am not sure that Jesus would want us to point at a stage where miracles are being ‘performed’ and say to someone “look at that and believe in God”.  Rather that we can look to that, celebrate it and say “God can do this, but also, He died for your sins so that you can have an eternal union with Him”, it is not like a gig where God stands on the stage and we all clap, it is about being joined with Him for eternity.  It says “knock and the door will be opened unto you” not “watch and the door…”

Seek first the kingdom of God and He will deliver all of our needs – don’t seek first the provision of God.  Moreover, seek God.  Ask what His intents and purposes are for the church and for the world.   Celebrate miracles and have every confidence that God can do them and is doing them and love the Lord your God above all.

Good to see that the postal service, with their ever increasing prices, are taking good care of our mail.

Tim (big bro) and I went to visit Rad Gran yesterday…