Bark and bite

In all the jobs I've had, I'm sorry (but not that sorry) to say I've never had much time for the marketing department.

Exhibit A, the marketing team for a small Scottish legal publisher who regularly rushed out leaflets without consulting the legal editors, with resultant howlers like "an excellent guide for practicioners" and "a vade mecum for the tyro" (who even knows what that means? They certainly didn't).*

Exhibit B, the same team, when asked to produce a cover for a book on medical negligence. Their suggestion? A picture of a wheelchair.

Exhibit C, the much larger marketing team for a major London-based publisher. Said publisher's offices near Canary Wharf had been blown up by the IRA and all but destroyed. Two people lost their lives. So when, not long after, we published a book on buildings insurance, what did an inspired marketing team come up with as cover art? Why, a photograph of the bombed-out building.

Exhibit D, any marketing person asked to produce promotional materials for the legal services market. The gavel is not in use by judges in any jurisdiction I've ever worked in. In fact, it's not in use anywhere except in some courts in the US. So what always appears on marketing literature in every jurisdiction? It's a gavel!

Exhibit E, the trailer for a US show on FX called Terriers.



What does the name, and the above picture, which was on billboards promoting the show, tell you? It might be about dogfighting. It might be about... dog shows? It's definitely not a comedy drama with noir undertones, about two mismatched, likeable private detectives. Which it, in fact, was. No matter, the show has now been cancelled after its first season because it didn't get the viewing numbers, presumably, and at least in part, because of the terrible marketing campaign.

In any case, the show's theme song, by Robert Duncan, turns out to be much better than the series, which starts well but peters out somewhat, and is certainly no Breaking Bad (if you have never seen the latter, do yourself a favour and find a way to see it). But the marketing department torpedoed any chance of it finding an audience and finding its way, thus proving that my wild prejudices are in some small way justified.

* "An indispensible beginners' guide" would have sufficed.

Second that emotion

The FEAR remote control (which I thought might have a corresponding concrete TV somewhere, which no one can turn on) is not alone: there are more tiny sculptures scattered around Chippendale. My neighbour Michael Mobbs pointed out the first one to me when I met him in Myrtle Street yesterday: ISOLATION at the foot of a paper bark tree in Pine Street. Then there's a NUMB mobile phone next to the Peace Park in Myrtle Street, and another remote control, HATE, close to FEAR in Pine Lane. I'd never even noticed any of them before I spotted FEAR; it now appears they have been there for some time (and there are more, which I haven't spotted yet). Michael said a local sculptor was responsible, but he didn't know any more than that. Another urban mystery.

The lone sands stretch far away

My first view of Dubai was from the window of an airport taxi at 8pm local time, with the oven turned down to 39°C. During the day I stayed in the hotel; it's Ramadan, Muslims are fasting between sunrise and sunset, and may not observe anyone else eating; so if you want to eat or drink, even water, it has to be behind closed doors and almost exclusively in hotels, which have solid doors, no windows and heavy, dark curtains screening off the restaurant areas.

Towards sundown I took a taxi through the city with my colleague. Through a slight haze the sun was a perfect burning orange disc over a flat landscape; the architecture outside the centre is anodyne and the streets were deserted. The taxi driver raced along pristine freeways at 120 kmph, still being passed at much greater speeds by dusty SUVs and sports cars with heavily tinted windows. From very far away the stalagmite shape of Burj al Khalifa, still, for the moment, the world's tallest building, can be seen, but other interesting buildings, bulbous and squat, sail-like or funnel-shaped, cluster around it. There's distance between buildings, unlike Hong Kong, where people's lives are crammed together, and a curiously bland feel to everything.

At Madinat Jumeirah (shown here by day) we walked through an entirely ersatz souk of about 5 years' pedigree, filled with brass lions, lanterns, tea glasses and other trinkets, to a Persian restaurant alongside a manmade creek along which wooden abra transport sightseers. The surroundings have the attractive, though inauthentic, feel of a luxury hotel complex (which part of it is). Heat gentle enough to sit outside, lights strung in the palm trees, a salad of walnuts, mint and goat's cheese, slow roasted chicken, peppermint tea, and the loud insistent sound of a waterpump as a constant, droning accompaniment to the meal.

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)