I'm calling it 'Friends season 4 episode 16 "The One with the Fake Party"'

Yes, it's the short film I made when I was thinking about how to do this anti-vert idea. It's a classic I think you'll all agree.

I'm calling it 'Friends season 4 episode 16 "The One with the Fake Party"' after one of my favourite episodes of the beautiful juggernaut.

This is so so so strange

Barbie on happiness

She says some strange/problematic things, ie "you cant have the spring without the winter" which isn't very helpful for people with depression or who are fgoing through a bad situation-i think it sounds a bit self help book-y but then     ! She starts talking about the pressure to be happy and know we should reject that and revel in happiness (right at the end...)

Weird format, but maybe Barbie overheard our meetings at the Marquis??

Hey lovelies just been re reading the hand book and noticed we haven't yet posted the vid and need too........

So hear it bloody is!!!  - Our baby, from blood sweat tears and some late night bevvys in the library!

Current views - 807 on Facebook plus 114 on Youtube whoop whoop

Sari and i also had an adventure up to covent garden with the Ipad showing people which was really interesting. We, by chance showed it to someone who had written a self helpy book criticising self helpy books. He was a real character!

big love xxx

the key to happiness (again)

Just another clever man giving us the secret. Re-evaluate your perspective on hardship. IT'S ALL IN YOUR MIND. THINK YOUR WAY TO HAPPINESS.

This is just another example of responsibility being placed within the individuals mind. He also works for google. He speaks about our evaluation of happiness, and that it is our perspective on the lacking in our life that needs attention.

WHERE DOES THE LACK COME FROM?

It is both physical and phycological. The notion of lack in itself is created and reinforced by society. Other than basic needs of food, clothing and shelter, many of our needs are created. Advertising relies  on our lacking.

He makes a good point on the confusion between happiness and fun. Happiness being a calm state . Fun being the thing we do to try and get away from our unhappy thoughts - a distraction. I think that is true, but once again this surface solution with only ever paper over the cracks of mass capitalism.

ANTI-VERT is teetering on the edge of completion. Now to get some people watching it! Some thoughts that we have discussed:

Ipad - Covent Garden / Oxford Street - taking it to the mecca of consumerism

Curzon Cinema - Sari is asking if they would show it

Magic Roundabout - I'm trying to get it played there (a big venue in Shoreditch)

Sari has one hell of a pen for more raging. I have my sharpie on me and am in central today so will keep my eyes open for opportunities. Bending the edges of the system...

Sari and I had a chat about the project and getting actions moving in the next few days. The anti-vert sounds great, albeit with a bit of uncertainty around recovering the files. Reading the blog post from Lucy and Rosie yesterday got me thinking about condensing our message down to a simpler, more focused take-away for the viewer (this is not an easy task by any means)

So..

Project One: The Anti-Vert

 - Sari's working on this now upstairs
 -  structure outlined in the post by Rosie and Lucy  seems well worked out 
 - Message of advert should align with overall rationale, which still feels like a work in progress

Project Two: Pen-Rage

 - Appropriating advertisements by writing anti-consumerist messages and slogans 
 - Conveying the idea that it's OK to be sad
 - Rejecting the Happiness Industrial Complex
 - Potential to link these actions to a Facebook or twitter account, but brings in more chance of getting 'caught'

Potential other actions:

Me and Rosie discussed doing another physical intervention, one that would compliment the other projects. There was discussion of creating a booklet that ascribed the key tenets of our message into a form that other people could pick up, understand and get involved in quite quickly. 

Sari mentioned the idea of going to Covent Garden and showing the anti-vert to people around the area, we could integrate another action into this. Rosie and I are thinking of potential actions and will post ideas on the blog when we have them.

My personal feelings are to distill and finalise the rationale so we can utilise it in both projects as soon as possible. 

Sari's earlier post on rationale:

 "We went on to break down themes/points within this, such as the objectification of happiness (as Will Davies talks about), the atomisation of the project as individual responsibility/opportunity (and failing if you don't manage to be happy - see pathologising of unhappiness, both Davies and Sara Ahmed talk about this), and normative function of happiness when happiness is embodied by certain lives, lifestyles and goods (which fit in with marketable hegemony)." 


Lucy's earlier post: 

• Develop action, thought and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization
• Do not demand of politics that it restore the "rights" of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power 
• Do not become enamoured of power

My rationale for this project is centered around the unspoken sadness and discomfort people encounter and the way the market weaponises this and uses advertising to encourage comfort consumption. 

Let me know what you think


xx

So Lucy and I just met to go over the initial story board for our anti-vert. She showed me what she has been working on so far with the footage we have already sourced and its looking good! We agreed that now we have some initial footage to work with its a good idea to clarify the message, structure and imagery we wish to use that best coveys what we have been working on. As it currently looks a little like a critique of celebrity culture witch is relevant but needs more variety. The song Lucy has been working with provides a good structure as is (broadly speaking) all happy days at the start, descends into chaos, then emerges again - ( i dont think ive listend to the song all the way to the end but is 4 mins long so will need to edit)



Motifs for anti-vert 
we thought that using similar themes of images in the different stages will be a good way of opening spaces for critiquing the comodifyed happiness we've been talking about

- Mattresses = initially showing gleaming bed adverts then later cutting in images of discarded         mattresses on the streets

- Celebrity fandom = this is something we seemed to have all ready picked up a lot of content for so initially showing all the happy excited faces then later showing

- Holidays = initially showing the sun soaked smily adverts then later depictions of climate change/ pollution to highlight our critique of the expense of happiness

- healthy life style pics = initially women laughing at salads and exercising

- Adverts  = the most obvious one!! showing some old school nuclear family fifties fun and using the modern using deep emotions to sell things like cars ect

- please can peeps sugest more motifs! I think visually playing with similar concepts to show deeper critiques will create an understandable and impacting narrative 



Structure for anti-vert 

1 Happy days/ perfect consumption 
- this could be seen as a kinda documentation of how things are before we critique
eg - mattress adverts, happy fans, jolly hollidays, laughing at salads, adverts

2 descends into chaos / consumption consequence 
- this could be wear we start to disrupt the mentioned above happy narrative by showing unsettling images
eg - discarded matresses, fainting crying fans, pollution from planes, sinister laughing at salad type pics, creepy ads
   - also where we can put the footage of London riots ect for impact

3 emerges again 
- this is the part where we can make our message a bit more complex by using supposedly nutural images begging the question of how everyday life facilitates the above critiques
- this section deffers needs developing please can everyone have a think about this

4 our message 
- we don't buy it!
- prehaps we could draw a little logo for this phrase and incorporate it into pen raged



TO DO LIST
- think of more motifes that fit our critique and find footage
- develop section 3 of the anti-vert
- discuss our plans for audio - do we think some kind of narration will help or make it too obvious
- work on the we dont buy it tag line and how were gunna present it


lots a love xxx

Interviewing today/messy brain thoughts

So today me and Sari went to Monument station and interviewed people around the city of London specifically dressed in suits. We found firstly that:

1. Shannon Howard is very annoying and doesn't check that the on button on the mic is fully switched on
2. Most people were rushing around/waiting for business lunches/about to leave for a meeting
3. It was a lot of white dudes in suits
4. We are both very shy when it comes to vandalism/penraging
5. Most of the suits were very friendly, especially two guys in a pub we were told to find by another man who had to rush off who ended up talking to us for ages and offering to get us a drink

Interestingly as well, and what I wanted to talk more about is the homogeneity in the answers given by the archetypal successful people we spoke to today and other people we have interviewed who are arguably in a more precarious situation, ie students, cleaners at Goldsmiths. A lot of the answers today centred around contentment and happiness being as a result of surrounding yourself with family and friends which has been a common theme throughout the interviews. The interesting thing about the similarities in these answers is that the people we are interesting have very different financial situations, social situations and working conditions. Although this is interesting I don't think it is surprising. A lot of people spoke about pressures around being young in such industries when they were younger to do with success and money, which one guy said took a back seat once he settled down, and as the majority of the people we interviewed were 40+ men it would have been interesting to see the responses of younger people.

I think it's do with the idea of contentment, or the myth of it that creates such homogeneous responses. Everyone interviewed has said that family, friends and stability are the key to contentment but the people in the city have better material conditions than others interviewed. Even when we talked about stress and working hours, people said that 80% or above work 9-5 jobs in the insurance industry, or at least the 12 hours days are rare in their field. Such contentment means that the factors that appease city workers and those that appease cleaners or students are the same, meaning that self reflection on your own material condition/those of others becomes very difficult because you become less able to evaluate your own advantages/points of oppression (sorry not sorry for the Marxist tone guys xxx). Also I don't mean this to be demeaning or insulting to students or cleaners, and i really hope it hasn't come across as that, but from a lot of the work/stuff I've learnt to do with social reform, it's the same sort of appeasement that comes as a result of social welfare. In Germany in the early 20th Century, to protect the stability of the Crown a lot of piecemeal social reform was created to stop people revolting and killing their factory owners, because of this, a sort of acceptance came on the part of the workers who were appeased due to their conditions being improved but arguably not in a positive way because it meant factory owners/capitalists were still able to exploit their labour. I would go in more detail about this but this is form A Level history which was a v v v long time ago. Anyway, yeah, I think that contentment acts as a set of rose tinted glasses that can dramatically change the way you view your own situation, which isn't surprising because I doubt a lot of people would readily admit that their labour is exploited, but definitely something to bear in mind in terms of our project.

I hope this made a little bit of sense,

Shannon xxx