silentman's posterous

Ideas

Oh, this one has been around for a while, and you know what, I despise this question. Deeply, madly.

“Where do you get your ideas?”

What a strange, stupid question. Isn’t it? The very query seems to suggest that we receive all our ideas from some external source. People ask you that question, you just want to reply, “Uh, I don’t know, my fucking brain? Where did you ‘get’ that dipshit question?” Then you want to kick them in the colon and shove them down an escalator. Well. Maybe that’s just me.

You wanna know where I get mine? You asked for it...

Shady Men In Trenchcoats

“I got a guy. What? You don’t have a guy? You need a guy. An idea guy. Here, you can use my guy. He roams, this guy, roves all over the city, but you’ll find him. You call this number. Sounds like a Korean laundry service. Tell him what you’re looking for on the answering machine. Then you’ll get a call back, and he’ll tell you where to meet him. The pier. The warehouse. The gator farm. The dildo shop. I gotta warn you, though: this guy, the idea guy? He’s not cheap. I mean, you can get the shitty leads for just pennies. He’ll sell you Rio Rancho for a quarter. But if you want the premium leads? The real ideas? You want the Glengarry ideas? Well. Then it’s fuck or walk, am I right?”

Navel-Gazing

“I get my ideas from –”

*showcasing hands orbit your belly button like you’re Vanna White profiling a shiny toaster*

“That’s right. I get them from my belly button. The omphalos, friend. You think they come from up here –” *taps temple* “– but it comes from down here.” *pops thumb into belly button, swirls it around* “All day long, man, it’s like, it’s like ideas just stick to you. They’re coming at you from all directions. Like pollen on the wind. And eventually, they work their way into your belly button and collect there. The flotsam and jetsam of good stories. Stick your finger in. Scoop out an idea. Here, I’ll do it now:”

*wriggles index finger in greasy belly button*

“Oh! Oh, look: SPACE PIRATE.”

“Here’s another:

*pop*

“ROBOT JESUS. See? See that? That’s an idea, my friend. Space Pirate falls in love with Robot Jesus. It’s like Romeo and Juliet all over again. I smell a bestseller. I also smell dryer lint.”

Down In The Dark

“I procure my ideas from the goblin-folk. They mine them down in the crusty underlayers of the hidden hollow earth, chipping them free from the rock walls with pick-axes made from the bones of forgotten writers. They’re a feisty lot, what with their dread widgets and malefic gew-gaws, but it’s worth the price.”

WTF?

“I get them from the Macy’s perfume counter.”

Uh-Oh

“I kill people, bash their heads open with rocks, then eat their brains.”

Sweet N’ Sexy

“All my ideas are the products of an unholy union between myself and a willing unicorn sex partner. After three months the unicorn gives birth to my little squalling idea babies.”

Ciphers And Codes

“TIME Magazine. Pick an issue. Any issue. Turn to page 34. Rotate the page. Look at it in a mirror. Spray yourself in the eyes with a blast of refrigerator-chilled Windex. No! Don’t blink away the tears. Stare through the tears. Read the last paragraph on the page that you can see. Write it down. Then reverse all the letters. Take this code and run it through a ROT 13 cipher generator. The resultant response is the idea. Use it wisely. Oh, also, flush your eyes with cold water. If the burning persists, call a doctor.”

WTF? (Part Two)

“Otters.”

Creepy

“I get them from you when you’re sleeping.”

Ideas Lasting More Than Four Hours

“Seriously? You really want to know? Boner pills. That’s right. You swallow a fistful of dick pills, you start to see some really crazy shit behind your eyelids. Even better if you’re goofed up on Ambien to begin with. All writers do this. How do you think Mark Twain got the idea for Dracula? Ambien and dick pills. They teach you that when you get your MFA in Creative Writing. But I’m giving you this pro-tip for free because that’s the kind of stand-up dude that I am. By the way, got any boner pills? I’m Jonesing over here.”

This Is The Future

“I have a robot. I give him poker chips and infant blood. He gives me ideas.”

Aw, How Quaint

“A jaunty fennec fox in a monocle and a hat made of an old sousaphone comes to my house every Tuesday. He brings me a bottle of milk, a cassingle of Prince’s Batdance, and one new idea written on a fortune cookie fortune. Then he leaves again on his mechanical pony.”

May The Force Be With You

“George Lucas and I have kinda of a partnership thing worked out. I inject bacon fat into his neck-meat, and he e-mails me all his leftover ideas. We signed a collaboration agreement. It’s all good.”

WTF? (Part Three)

“A head shop in Des Moines.”

Or, The Truth

“We don’t steal our ideas from the gods. We don’t receive them from magical transmissions. We don’t earn them as badges on Foursquare. We see things in the world — in our friends, in our loved ones, in the forests and oceans, in magazines and books, in ourselves — and our brains set to work on these things behind the scenes like a dog whittling away a cow femur with his ever-gnawing teeth. The whole damn universe is our frequency and our brain is the antenna. Our ideas aren’t externally-driven. The process is an internal one. No Muse. No idea factory. No lightning strike from above. The same place you get your ideas — whether it’s an idea to have lasagna for lunch or to masturbate to The Barefoot Contessa — is the same place we get ours. We get them from our own bat-shit crazy ass minds, man. That’s it. It’s not that exciting, but that’s really it.”

And thus I spoke...

Posted July 12, 2011

See that guy over there?

The one in the alleyway with no pants, his big beard braided with bird bones? The guy twitching like he’s covered in ants? The dude stabbing an invisible demon with an invisible knife?Now, see this guy here? Ahh, the writer. Sitting at his desk. Typing away. Clickity-clack. Clackity-click. Coffee by his side. Hair slightly mussed. Writing about murders and lost love and space opera.

Let’s say you have a choice to cozy up to one of these two individuals. Hang out with them for a day.

The one you’d choose would seem obvious.

And that’s where you’re fucked.

Seriously. Choose the Charlie Manson-looking motherfucker every time. He wears his crazy on his sleeve, same way he wears his poop on the outside of his body. But the writer? The writer hides his crazy. It’s like a little secret present inside filled with bees. A Pandora’s Box deep in the writer’s troubled heart.

Posted July 11, 2011

Anonymous said...

Posted June 15, 2011

Enter the void...

There are three great cities in the United States: there's Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco – in that order.
I love Boston; I even love Denver; I hate Miami; I think Austin is habitable; but Los Angeles is Los Angeles. You can't compare it to Paris, or to London, or to Rome, or to Shanghai. You can interestingly contrast it to those cities, sure, and Los Angeles even comes out lacking; but Los Angeles is still Los Angeles.

No matter what you do in L.A., your behavior is appropriate for the city. Los Angeles has no assumed correct mode of use. You can have fake breasts and drive a Ford Mustang – or you can grow a beard, weigh 300 pounds, and read Christian science fiction novels. Either way, you're fine: that's just how it works. You can watch Cops all day or you can be a porn star or you can be a physicist. You can listen to Carcass – or you can listen to Pat Robertson. Or both.
That's how it is.
L.A. is the apocalypse: it's you and a bunch of parking lots. No one's going to save you; no one's looking out for you. It's the only city I know where that's the explicit premise of living there – that's the deal you make when you move to L.A.
The city, ironically, is emotionally authentic.
It says: no one loves you; you're the least important person in the room; get over it.
What matters is what you do there.

And maybe that means renting Hot Fuzz and eating too many pretzels; or maybe that means driving a Prius out to Malibu and surfing with Daryl Hannah as a means of protesting something; or maybe that means buying everything Fredric Jameson has ever written and even underlining significant passages as you visit the Westin Bonaventura. Maybe that just means getting into skateboarding, or into E! or into Zen, Kabbalah, and Christian mysticism; or maybe you'll plunge yourself into gin-fueled all night Frank Sinatra marathons – or you'll lift weights and check email every two minutes on your Blackberry and watch old Bruce Willis films.
Who cares?
Literally no one cares, is the answer. No one cares. You're alone in the world.
L.A. is explicit about that.
If you can't handle a huge landscape made entirely from concrete, interspersed with 24-hour drugstores stocked with medications you don't need, then don't move there.
It's you and a bunch of parking lots.
You'll see Al Pacino in a traffic jam, wearing a stocking cap; you'll see Cameron Diaz in the check-out line at Whole Foods, giggling through a mask of reptilian skin; you'll see The Fonz buying bulk shrimp.
The whole thing is ridiculous. It's the most ridiculous city in the world – but everyone who lives there knows that. No one thinks that L.A. "works," or that it's well-designed, or that it's perfectly functional, or even that it makes sense to have put it there in the first place; they just think it's interesting. And they have fun there.
And the huge irony is that Southern California is where you can actually do what you want to do; you can just relax and be ridiculous. In L.A. you don't have to be embarrassed by yourself. You're not driven into a state of endless, vaguely militarized self-justification by your xenophobic neighbors.
You've got a surgically pinched, thin Michael Jackson nose? You've got a goatee and a trucker hat? You've got a million-dollar job and a Bentley? You've got to be at work at the local doughnut shop before 6am? Or maybe you've got 16 kids and an addiction to M&M's– who cares?
It doesn't matter.
Los Angeles is where you confront the objective fact that you mean nothing; the desert, the ocean, the tectonic plates, the clear skies, the sun itself, the Hollywood Walk of Fame – even the parking lots: everything there somehow precedes you, even new construction sites, and it's bigger than you and more abstract than you and indifferent to you. You don't matter. You're free.

In Los Angeles you can be standing next to another human being but you may as well be standing next to a geological formation. Whatever that thing is, it doesn't care about you. And you don't care about it. Get over it. You're alone in the world. Do something interesting.
Do what you actually want to do – even if that means reading P.D. James or getting your nails done or re-oiling car parts in your backyard.
Because no one cares.
In L.A. you can grow Fabio hair and go to the Arclight and not be embarrassed by yourself. Every mode of living is appropriate for L.A. You can do what you want.
And I don't just mean that Los Angeles is some friendly bastion of cultural diversity and so we should celebrate it on that level and be done with it; I mean that Los Angeles is the confrontation with the void. It is the void. It's the confrontation with astronomy through near-constant sunlight and the inhuman radiative cancers that result. It's the confrontation with geology through plate tectonics and buried oil, methane, gravel, tar, and whatever other weird deposits of unknown ancient remains are sitting around down there in the dry and fractured subsurface. It's a confrontation with the oceanic; with anonymity; with desert time; with endless parking lots.
And it doesn't need humanizing. Who cares if you can't identify with Los Angeles? It doesn't need to be made human. It's better than that.

Posted June 15, 2011

Nope

Yep, this is a hamster with a flower hat...your argument is invalid.

Posted June 14, 2011

Marley and Effin Me...

Yeah, so I saw it, it was a moment of weakness so sue me!

A movie about’ Growing Up & The Passage of Time in which more than a decade goes by & nothing ages but the moribund dog.

Simpering pantomimes of caninophilia are vampiric animal-despising thuggery. Here is dreamed a universe in which pets are batteries, dutiful padding life-reservoirs from which humans drink. ‘Ageing’ is signified solely in the death & replacement of canis. To grow old in this place is not to alter, but to leave a growing trail of dog husks behind you.

Posted April 27, 2011

Zagat vs. Yelp

In 1979 the Zagat's hit upon the idea of collecting opinions from their friends and their friends' friends of NYC restaurants to create an informal and yet reliable restaurant guide. Over the next two decades , the Zagat Review become an internationally recognized force in the culinary word. In 1999 Zagat launches its website, but only paid subscribers can read full reviews.

In 2004 former Paypal employees Jeremy Stoppelman and Russell Simmons launch Yelp in San Francisco. The site offers free access to user reviews of restaurants and other local businesses. In 2007 Yelp reports 5 million unique visitors. In January of 2008 the Zagat's try to sell their business for 200 million. No one bites.

In May 2008 Yelp reports 10 million unique visitors. In June 2008, the Zagat's take their business off the market, a month later Yelp releases its iPhone app. The app is free.

In July 2009 the Zagat's are back and release the Zagat to Go iPhone app. It's 10 bucks, that same month, Zagat holds steady as one of the top ten apps within the Travel Category. By August of 2009, Yelp, still free, reports over 25 million unique visitors. By September 2009, Zagat.com charges an annual fee of 25 bucks, gets about 270 thousand unique visitors and begins to trend downward.

In December of the same year Yelp turns down a 550 million dollar offer from Google and a 700 million one from Microsoft.

In January of 2010, modeling Foursquare, Yelp adds a "check-in" feature to its app upgrade. By February, Zagat teams up with Foursquare so users can earn a "foodie" badge when they check into Zagat-rated restaurants. By August of 2010 Zagat is ranked the most followed brand on Foursquare, with 65 thousand followers. In August of the same year, Zagat integrates Foodspotting, which allows users to get photos and comment about the foods they love, rather than read and write full blown reviews.

So what does this tell us? Well, if Zagat had kept an eye on the innovation horizon, Yelp would had never been able to cut into their market share in the first place. Yet, as you can see, Zagat has swung hard and has gotten in a few good hits. So then, it is possible for brands, websites and new businesses to take market share from sleeping giants and even become market leaders. So they were backed into a corner. But they used culture and strategy to swing forward. How many companies are doing that?

Just sayin'...

Posted April 11, 2011

Lesons from Winnie

On one of our recent trips to Borders my sons Sebastian, 9, and Matías, just 5, picked out books they wanted me to read to them. Sebastian grabbed some dinosaur and animal storybooks; Matías grabbed a Winnie the Pooh book.

When we got home, we sat on the floor and read aloud our treasures. One book told the story of how dinosaurs and all creatures evolved from sea animals coming ashore and developing legs and adaptive organs in order to live on land.

After reading it, I told Sebastian this might be a good book to share at show-and-tell with the other kids, so they could talk about how the animals were sea animals before they were dinosaurs. Matías listened, then shoved his Winnie the Pooh book in front of me to read.

Sebastian pushed Matt's book aside and said, “Matías, that’s not important.”

“It’s important to Matías,” I said as I opened the cover to read Matt's chosen book. Sebastian thought a minute.

“This is important, dinosaurs are important,” Sebastian said pointing to the story of animal evolution. “This is cute, boring...” he said, pointing to the book about Winnie the Pooh. Let me introduce you my fellow penmonkeys to the birth of discernment!

What’s important to me, to borrow Sebastian’s word, is always shifting, spiraling inward towards my core identity, my center, my authentic self. That’s because each year I peel away another level of awareness about my identity – why I’m here on this earth, my meaning, my purpose. I get in touch with and release energy in my body that was previously blocked, for whatever reason.

The sounds and species of birds on my morning walk, the welfare of and my delight in my family, the fragile balance of our environment, whether or not I harness my creative instinct in a day – these are important to me. Whether or not my hair is graying, what I put on my back and what I eat for dinner is cute.

The adventures of Winnie the Pooh were once important to Sebastian. Age brought with it more challenging metaphors. Sebastian began building a hierarchy of what, for him, was “cute” and what was “important.” There’s room enough for both. Matt's fascination with Winnie the Pooh was appropriate for Matt at 5 years old. What Sebastian suggests for us, who are further down the line of discernment, hopefully, is that it is important to name things for ourselves.

An impressive psychotherapist, Paula Reeves, puts it this way: “You’d better decide what matters to you before that becomes the matter with you.” If we do not discern what matters to us, our energy will go towards maintaining the cute in our life, draining away essential spiritual energy from what is important to our essence. The soul of us will become dry and brittle. This can show up as a physical symptom, as depression, or as a lingering case of the blahs.

I have to daily decide how I want to use my energy, for whom, and why. I have to make sure I get generous helpings of beauty, genuine expressions of love and a smattering of unexpected epiphanies in a day. I need time in nature, time with my thoughts, time with significant others, time with my children, time to piddle, time for creativity and time for meaningful work. All these are important to me.

What is important to Sebastian and to Matías gets expressed in their language, at their stage of development. New energy is released with insight, developmental skills, spiritual experiences. Today Sebastian responded to Matt’s killing of a menacing bug with, “You don’t know about the Circle of Life yet, Matías (a spiritual thread from the movie Lion King). You’ll learn about that.” Spiritual awareness has its own timing. We can not read one another’s heart.

Insights come slowly, through personal experience, through shared models of what is spiritually liberative and what is not. These intuitive processes thread their way through our center, our core, releasing new energy in us. This enables us to understand ourselves better, to “shed light” on our emerging character, to assist us in our effort to integrate our whole personality or psyche.

We learn to decipher the signs that point the way through the maze of our life. We learn to choose things that quiet our mind and fill our soul, like solitude and simplicity and soothing relationships. We get better at seeing universal patterns and truths as these unfold in our day to day. We become more familiar with and more open to experiences of wholeness. (Funnily, that is what's so awesome and fascinating about Winnie the Pooh and his friends.)

All this is a lifetime process. It begins simple, as with Matt and Sebastian’s choice of books. We choose from the wide array of experiences that are offered us every day and prune away, slowly, those things that do not nourish us emotionally, spiritually. If we are not discerning, we take in too much clutter. The energy and direction we need to feel fulfilled in our own life gets drained from us. Our life becomes a parade of cute.

Now, with all this talk about important and cute, don’t get me wrong. When Matt wanted me to read him Winnie the Pooh, I was delighted. It was important to him, and that made it important to me.

Cut to today at the movie theatre, I'm there with my 3 monkeys eating insane amounts of Nacho's and popcorn at 11 am and the previews begin...a ballistic attack of new children's movies that are coming this summer...The Smurfs, Judy and the Non Bummer Summer, Cars 2, etc...and the last one...a new movie about Winnie the Pooh.

The trailer is different, slower, not fast paced and filled with smarter more emotional messages. Sebastian was sitting next to me, we both looked at each other and smiled. Sebastian's smile was bigger, he grabbed my hand and whispered..."I really want to see that with you dad...I know how much you love Winnie the Pooh..."

Talking about discernment and importance and searching for meaning, Sebastian taught me a very important lesson today:

It matters to him what it is important to me.

I am not a softy, not at all, ask my friends and the people who know me...but I had to wipe a tear when Sebastian was not looking.

"And that was only the beginning..."

Posted April 3, 2011

It's about patterns, stoopid!

All day long, you are affected by large forces. Genes influence your intelligence and willingness to take risks. Social dynamics unconsciously shape your choices. Instantaneous perceptions set off neural reactions in your head without you even being aware of them. Exceptionally successful people are not lone pioneers who created their own success, they are the lucky beneficiaries of social arrangements.

So I'm hypothesizing here then that individual traits play a smaller role in explaining success while social circumstances play a larger one. In a nutshell, the world decides what you can and can't be. Scary huh?

Most successful people begin with two beliefs: the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so. They were often showered by good fortune, but relied at crucial moments upon achievements of individual will. Most successful people also have a phenomenal ability to consciously focus their attention. We know from experiments with subjects as diverse as obsessive-compulsive disorder sufferers and Buddhist monks that people who can self-consciously focus attention have the power to rewire their brains.

So I don't buy this social patterns controlling my destiny bullshit.

Control of attention is the ultimate individual power. People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them. They can choose from the patterns in the world and lengthen their time horizons. This individual power leads to others. It leads to self-control, the ability to formulate strategies in order to resist impulses. If forced to choose, we would all rather our children be poor with self-control than rich without it. Hell, I would.

So thinking about all this and my future, and what it is exactly what I am going to do, I realized that all this leads to resilience, the ability to persevere with an idea even when all the influences in the world say it can’t be done.

A common story among entrepreneurs is that people told them they were too stupid to do something, and they set out to prove the jerks wrong. I love proving jerks wrong. I live for it. I am going to build a company whose unique selling proposition will be to prove people wrong. It makes sense, it makes oodles of marketing sense.

Bottom line, all this leads to creativity.

Individuals who can focus attention have the ability to hold a subject or problem in their mind long enough to see it anew. As the classical philosophers understood, examples of individual greatness inspire achievement more reliably than any other form of education.

I think it's time to inspire...and it will be soon folks.

Posted March 29, 2011

Stand for something or stand for nothing...

...is what the old adage says. It terms of building brands and establishing some sort of emotional bridge between brand and promise, I think this is where the mentality should be focused on.

If you stand for something, you'll have some for you and some against you, but if you stand for nothing, well, you'll have no one for you and no one against you. A scary place to be in todays world if you ask me.

As the Healthcare category becomes homogenized and starts morphing into a commodity, it is a pleasure to see this type of effort coming from Scott & White Healthcare.

An original song, titled "Let Us Live," was written and is performed by 14-year-old Avery Ling. The Central Texas teen wrote and dedicated the song to the Children's Hospital at Scott & White in Temple, Texas. Children who have received care at the current Children's Hospital are shown throughout the video.

Scott & White Healthcare provides comprehensive care for the Central Texas area through its main campus in Temple, regional hospitals and clinics.

The new Children’s Hospital at Scott & White is a separate hospital building just for high-level and acute pediatric patient care. When completed this fall, it will be the only acute care pediatric hospital between Dallas and Austin.

If you want to donate for this effort, follow the link below.

https://secure3.convio.net/swfdn/site/Donation2?df_id=1240&1240.donation=...

Filed under // Scott &White Healthcare commodities ideas marketing