Writing vs Copywriting - Hicks Style

I've been looking online at a few sites like Elance lately to scan the freelance writing gigs available on there. Many writers say that because of the competition, you must be prepared to write for many different forms, including copywriting.  Indeed, people make VERY good money copywriting.  Advertising has always suckled writers, a creative avenue for them to earn a living moving words around so that they can be well-fed enough to be able to work on their novels.  Many writers do this.  It is completely and utterly acceptable to do this.  And yet, for me, looking at these sorts of writing jobs on Elance and thinking about doing this sort of work feels rather like attaching a giant vacuum cleaner to the bottom of my feet and letting it suck my eyeballs out through my soles.

So I guess copywriting isn't really the bag for me, right?  But idealism is a high-priced commodity these days when we're all for sale.  Sometimes I think that one day not so soon we will begin to feel bereft whenever we read anything that is not trying to sell us something because we've become so conditioned.  Sometimes, I can feel myself beginning to dwindle, looking at the shrunken writing market and the giant mass of people who wish to compete in it, and my low self-confidence blobs me forward an infinitesmal nanostep towards the landslide that will tip me down into one day thinking, "Well, come on.  Why not write copy for Lockheed Martin?  They're just providing a service like everybody else."

But I really don't think so.  Because, folks, when it comes to black and white thinking about this stuff, my view is a little Bill Hicksian: 

I wonder what Bill would have thought of the developments in the world today 20 years on if he had survived the cancer that felled him in the mid-90's.  I watched a documentary about him the other day, and followed it up last night watching one of his routines.  He was high-octane, passionate, visionary, a little scary ... and bloody brilliant :)

Oh, to live in a world that is not fuelled by marketeers.  They do not understand highest common denominators.  Beauty.  Rhythm.  The natural world.  Those are what will keep us from drowning in our own plastic.

Advertising IS Noise Pollution

I am, undoubtedly, old.

One of the cliches of getting older is an increased desire for silence - or at least more regulated noise - and a decreased ability to handle the stuff that comes in from everywhere else, especially when it's noise from a generation below your own.  Hence the stand-off between parents and their teenagers and the "crap - that's not music" emanating from said teenagers' bedrooms, wafting under the door and mingling with the hypocrisy of parents on the other side who were once listening to their own version of said music crap some years prior :)

The MCG sports stadium is like a teenager and I am like its mother.  From the time I got there early to watch my football team be beaten by its nemesis again, and in every moment when the teams weren't playing, I was bombarded from the big screen.  Advertisements from the home team's sponsor, on-the-ground spruikers bleating whatever crap the home team Marketing Department has come up with recently, stupid promotional games sponsored by optometrists involving members of the audience being willing to put on stupid big glasses and make dicks of themselves in a bid to win some cash.

It's just not to be borne, dear reader.

Now, it's said that the world is noisier than it's ever been.  It certainly feels true for our public spaces.  (If, however, you walk around some of the suburban streets of Melbourne, you'd be forgiven for thinking a giant plague had swept through killing everyone in its wake.  Such silence).  Publicly, though, it's a different matter. Whenever large groups of people congregate, so too do the giant TV screens to continue plying their wares at us.

When do we say "enough"?  Is it just me and my partner, being old fuddy duddies who object to the public advertising bombardment?  I know I've written about this before, but this really shits me.  These are public spaces.  We peeps are losing the ability to interact face-to-face with strangers without despising each other or glassing each other.  We are losing our community and drowning in our consumption.  The communal spaces we have left for the former we should not allow so easily to be taken over by the latter.

Is that a Souvlaki in your Pocket ...

... or are you just pleased to violate me?

I think I'll take the job at Mickey D's instead, if you don't mind.

They may not have a printer that proofreads well.  Nevertheless, Souvlaki Hut sure makes a damn good souvlaki :)

Update:  On my most recent trip to Souvlaki Hut a few days ago, there was a blank space where this poster was.  Coincidence?  I wonder :)

Mad World

I feel depressed tonight. Weight of the world on shoulders and all that. I think of so many people I know who are struggling. There is a conversational forum going on on the television right now about climate change. Several hours ago I wrote on my Facebook status that I was feeling rather sad that I would not be having children. But you know, more and more I feel relieved that I shall miss out on the wonder because when I look at what children are born into, it scares me. I just watched a show called "Consuming Kids" (see trailer below). It scares me how little control parents have over outside influences on their kids - especially in the US.

In an age of rights and freedoms, parents are less free than seemingly ever to be able to raise their children in the way they want to without outside influences. How can good old Mum and Dad compete against Disney and McDonalds banding together to market to their three year olds toys that are characters in movies that are rated PG-13? That same PG-13 rating that 10 years ago would have had an R rating? Or crap marketed to little girls so that they can look like six year old trash?

I never knew before that the US is the only industrialised country in the world that does not have any legislation in place that regulates advertising to children. It's hard enough in this country, I'm sure parents would agree, to try to protect kids for as long as possible from being marketed to. But the ads I saw on this show for kids in the States sort of freaked me, really.

I see that when the debate comes up in the culture about enacting legislation, the good old first amendment is quoted. Land of the free and all that stuff. Is anyone left in the West who labours under the false illusion that any of us are free? We are not free. We are coerced constantly to believe that we are what we own.

This is in a world that is groaning under the weight of too much goddamn plastic as it is. People who are groaning under more and more antidepressant scripts being filled for younger and younger people.

Rights rights rights. What about responsibilities to protect little people who do not have any capacity to understand that they are being manipulated by savvy marketeers? That's child abuse.

It scares the hell out of me what monsters we are creating.

God, where are you? Jesus, come back. Or something. Do something. Stop the world cos we can't run this ship ourselves.