Side query: how come the French just look cooler than we do? Is it because there’s a general sense of entitlement that we misconstrue as confidence? Or are they really just connected to a deeper level of hip than we are?

JOHN MAMANN – PAS JALOUX
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Now, I personally find the staccato narration a pleasing break from the norm. It’s different, but still colloquial enough to engage the audience in a meaningful way. I prefer the witty nature of the dialogue and find the tongue and cheek magic tricks perfectly balance the expense of the spot with the contrasting cheapness of the product…both in a monetary and armpit standpoint. If you’re a super dork like me, you’ll want to watch this interview with the AD from Wieden+Kennedy who put the piece together. A touch lengthy at 20 minutes, but worth it if you have the time.

Some background. Or rather, some context. The year is 2001. In this year I found myself experiencing a resurgence in the punk culture brewing in Albany, I had a red pleather jacket full of cliche buttons that I was perhaps too fond of and way to many friends in the Hartford area. Connecticut…New York…it’s not like Massachusetts was in the way or anything.

There was a general air of optimism in the air since the dot.com boom hadn’t effected all us poor college kids and no one had flown jetliners into the sides of buildings to initiate a decade full of fear and really expensive housing.

On one particular fine and sunny April weekend I set out for a bacchanalia (apparently similar to a dithyramb) with the Hartford friends under the assumed persona of Warren, the fearless and self proclaimed bad beer lover with few interests in the world other than wearing his high school math team jacket and promoting Schlitz-Aid, a “full fledged” 501c non-profit. A non-profit that was in existence for the sole purpose of bringing back foil tab topped Schlitz as the only means of consuming beer in the U.S.

In any case, Warren’s mission failed in the end, but it certainly provided for more bizarre experiences than I had ever anticipated when I made him up. From bringing joy to the sober and sending drunks to their knees in fear, free Schlitz is a powerful force indeed. It even got me into a Goldfinger concert. Remember them? But I digress.

I can’t be certain of the exact day, but at one point when too much Schlitz had been “given away” someone brilliantly suggested we barnstorm our way into the weekend showing of Spike & Mike’s animation festival. Once inside and firmly settled, I bore witness to what has become one of the more memorable cartoons I have ever seen. Perhaps it expresses a darker side of my humor that I ought be ashamed of, but even a Nun, I wager, could be found to laugh at this gem.

If you are under 18 and without the express written consent of an adult, you should navigate way from this page. Stat. Now push play…

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

It’s past my bedtime. This is something Lee knows about. And if you don’t know Lee, that’s a possible problem. However, don’t let Lee keep you from watching this. It’s been made by a chap whose name is not Lee, but rather Alex. Alex Roman. It’s long and pretty so hit full screen and settle in for a beautiful ride.

As an aside, the whole schmeedley-doo is CG. As in those buildings and sets and stuff are all faked in a computer.

I just don’t get why he spells it “Arquitecture.” Is he trying to make like a new field of design? Like a, “the files are IN the computer(?)” kind of a thing?

Anyway, just watch it. It’s cool. At least I think it’s cool because I can’t make it. I can’t even fake it. Going to bed now.

Cheers.

For the vast masses that represent my readership, I want to thank you here in the golden light of a Carolina evening on this Thanksgiving. I don’t think I could do it without you. All three of you. That includes my wife and my mom. And half the time I think Nancy just tells me she’s keeping up with it. How sad is that? It’s almost British it’s so sad.

However, what has been distinctly unBritish is-this Thanksgiving. We’ve intrepidly traveled to North Carolina where I promptly learned I’d been volunteered to cook the turkey. In a broken oven. But, I cleverly hired a few tarheels to rub sticks together long enough to get the bird done. And she’s a beauty at that. There was also a charming beauty to the way the electric coil of the oven exploded half way through the cook cycle. It caught fire and slowly burned an electric fire from the front to the back of the burner. Ever calm, I opened a beer and assured all the guests that a) the house would not burn down and b) the turkey would still be bitchin’.

It occurs to me that my streak of being right has remained unbroken, other than that sorry scene in 1989 regarding the Berlin wall. But we’re not here to talk about that. What I actually came here to talk about is this ad I stumbled across. It’s from New Zealand. Even better, it’s a PSA. That’s stop motion. And about the wild west. Of New Zealand. Did I mention that yet? Anyway, turn up the volume, enjoy the accent and the truly amazing animation. One day I’ll do something like this at work.

Maybe Monday.

“Have you ever made some graffiti?” asks Blek le Rat in his seductive French accent, his eyes drifting off dreamily towards exciting memories of his own. “Er, no,” I stutter back sheepishly, feeling like a kid at school who’s just been asked by an older boy if he’s ever gone all the way with a woman. “You have to try to do it once,” he sighs.

“Go once in the street with a spray can. Spray your signature. Then go back the day after to see. I’m sure you’ll go back. Because when you leave something in the street, you leave a part of yourself.”

Perhaps it’s the French accent. Perhaps it’s the excitement of finally tracking down the legendary Blek le Rat. But the prospect of careering through the streets of London spraying my name hither and thither suddenly feels extremely tempting. Had there been some spray cans in the room with us, I think I would have asked him there and then to lead me out and show me.

So this is what spraying graffiti does to a man. The rational bit of my brain might disapprove, but the irrational bit can’t wait to start. Blek le Rat, the smooth-tongued satan of stencil art, had imparted an important lesson. Inside all of us there appears to be a little chap with a spray can frantically signalling to be let out.

Right now, anything you learn about the urge to paint on walls is useful because there is no bigger cultural phenomenon abroad in the world than graffiti, or, to use its posher modern name, street art. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s taking over the planet. The outside of Tate Modern is currently plastered with the stuff. The prices it is fetching at Christie’s and Sotheby’s are head-scratchingly huge. Even Selfridges has begun auctioning it. And that is just in London.

Travel further afield, to Rio or Melbourne or Barcelona or Beijing, and you will discover entire slabs of city overtaken by it. Street art is currently the hottest potato in the pan. And a lot of that is down to Blek le Rat.

Don’t fret if you’ve never heard of him before. Few have. For most of his long career, Blek has been a shadow, a phantom, a myth. Pretty much all that anybody knew about him was that he came from Paris, and that he had been spraying graffiti since the early 1980s. His chosen style – stencil art – also happens to be the style favoured by the world’s most notorious street artist, Banksy. But Blek began using it two decades ago.

So in the annals of street art, he occupies a particularly important chapter reserved for pioneers. Blek is the great ancestor: the grandfather of stencils. And everybody in street art owes him a massive debt, especially Banksy, who owes him so much that it is sometimes difficult to tell the two of them apart.

Fortunately, underneath all the fierce urban posturing, Banksy is a soppy sort, and in his “unofficial biography”, due out next month, he duly heaps praise where praise is due. “Every time I think I’ve painted something original,” admits the stencil-king, “I find out that Blek le Rat has done it as well, only 20 years earlier.”

Actually, you need to go back much further than 20 years to get anywhere near the origins of graffiti art. You have to return to prehistory. I’ve seen naughty scratchings on cave walls that are at least 20,000 years old. Give someone an opportunity to scrawl something they shouldn’t, somewhere they oughtn’t, and in my experience the blighters will always take it. For instance, that well-known vandal, Lord Byron, appears not to have felt any pangs of conscience whatsoever about incising his name on a column in the ancient Temple of Poseidon, in Attica, where you can still read it. Byron couldn’t help himself: he had to let people know he’d been there. The same goes for those notorious Renaissance vandals Michelangelo and Raphael, both of whom sneaked down into the basement of Nero’s Golden House in Rome and signed themselves on the ruins.

Rewinding still further, to classical times, did the famous gladiator Celadus Crescens feel any remorse when he wrote on the walls of the gladiatorial academy in Pompeii that “Celadus makes girls sigh”. I doubt it. And I don’t think his fellow Pompeiian vandal, the chap who drew a penis on a street corner and then added the slogan “Handle with care”, felt particularly guilty either.

What I’m saying is that the urge to produce graffiti is a basic instinct. You can dismiss it as vandalism if you wish, and get council workers in to paint over it until the day that Vesuvius blows again, but I guarantee you will never stop it.

Blek himself is convinced that the current interest in graffiti is just the start. Street art, he purrs wickedly, is going to be more global than any art movement has ever been. I suspect he’s right. This is only the beginning. Our taste for graffiti might be ancient, but what is new here is the amplifying power of the internet, which is how the message has managed to broadcast itself so widely.

The internet is what Banksy used to get himself noticed.

It is how people in Rio found out about him, and in Beijing, and in Jerusalem. It is also how I tracked down Blek le Rat who, of course, has his own website these days to remind everyone of what he has done, and to hint at why he did it.

Blek’s main claim to fame – and it’s a big one – is that he invented the life-sized stencil. It’s a quick and brainless way to make pictures. Stencils used to be looked down upon as the easiest kind of graffiti. But Blek changed all that. His great discovery was to find that a stencil designed and sprayed carefully enough, and imagined on a large enough scale, could make the wall feel as if it were being clambered over by real people. Blek’s art didn’t decorate the city. It haunted it.

Back at the beginning of the 1980s, while Banksy was still at primary school, all manner of mysterious urban ghosts began flitting across the alleys and dead ends of Paris, startling unsuspecting city dwellers as they came around the corner. With their habitual sarcasm and grim social observation, Blek’s ubiquitous stencils began waging a guerrilla war with the populace that was annoyingly difficult to avoid.

The first haunting organised by this scarlet pimpernel of the spray can was the sudden appearance on the subways of the Périphérique of hundreds of scampering rats. The horrible little silhouettes were soon migrating into the centre of Paris. Up the Champs Elysées. All round the Pompidou Centre. Through Montmartre. Into La Défense. In doorways. Under bridges. It was as if the city was experiencing a plague. How did the rats get here?

Who let them in? The only clue was the mysterious name sprayed audaciously among the vermin: Blek le Rat.

“Rats,” giggles the pervy Pied Piper of Paris in a happy attempt at an explanation, “are the only wild animals living in the city. With pigeons. They are the rebels of the city. They are evil. They live in groups. They steal food from the supermarkets. And Paris is full of rats. So it was a way of saying to the people, ‘Your city is full of rats and cockroaches. Be careful where you’re living.’ ” Once he’d successfully filled Paris with rats, Blek got on the train to Toulouse and unleashed his stencils there as well. Then Lyon. Then Marseilles. Boy, did he have fun.

All of which is revealed to me in the gentle and considerate tones of a caring schoolteacher ensuring that a particularly thick pupil is getting his gist. Frankly, meeting the real Blek is a bit of a shock. One of his best-known stencils is a life-sized self-portrait in which he’s wearing a Blues Brothers suit and snappy black shades as he strides manfully towards you with a couple of heavy suitcases filled with stencils. It’s a cool and macho image: have stencils, will travel. In the flesh, however, the last thing Blek looks like is a rebellious street artist. With his sloppy jacket, stretchy trousers and sprawling hair banging loosely about his collar, he seems as thoroughly ordinary as the chap who has been teaching my daughter geography. And when he talks, it comes out in charming French coos, as if I were a cat on his lap that needed stroking.

His real name is Xavier Prou, and he is, unbelievably, 56 years old. His splendid nom de guerre was carefully chosen as soon as he knew what he was planning for us. Like all graffiti artists working in the streets at night, he needed to find another name, because you don’t leave your real name at the bottom of your illegal pictures for the police to trace. Instead, you come up with something else that’s catchy and punchy and cool. Like Banksy. Or Swoon. He settled on Blek le Rat for a couple of reasons.

As a kid, he’d been a fan of some comic books set in the war of American independence featuring the antics of a character called Blek le Roc, a thorn in the side of the British. Also, if you jumble up the letters of the word “rat” you get “art”. Voilà.

I love these absurd secret identities that street artists assume. Banksy is fiercely determined not to reveal his real self. Even Blek has never met him. They communicate by e-mail. One thing I can be certain of, Blek assures me, is that the best place to look for Banksy is in front of his art. No street artist can resist coming back to admire their own work time and time again. Indeed, it is one of the chief reasons for doing it. First, you make something. Then you watch everyone else noticing it.

Funnily enough, none of the street artists I have met look anything like street artists. I was down in the tunnel underneath Waterloo station recently where Banksy had organised his now notorious Cans Festival – “the most important event in the history of street art,” insists Blek – and kept encountering decrepit older codgers who turned out to be famous urban daubers. Judging by the length of his beard, Ron English is about 101. Kaagman was born in 1955, but looks much older. Even the chap who calls himself Pure Evil was a sweet and smiley bloke, greying at the temples, who’d make a nice uncle. None of them looked capable of outrunning the police or, indeed, ever wishing to. A more placid gang of rebels you could not hope to encounter.

When I ask Blek to remember his most exciting adventure as a street artist, I expect him to titillate me with thrilling tales of dangling off the Pont Neuf as gangs of angry flics banged away at his ankles to loosen his grip, but he curbs my enthusiasm brusquely by insisting: “For me it was never exciting. Because I’m very paranoid. When I work in the street I’m very, very paranoid. I don’t feel like a rebel at all. My dream would be if the city allowed us to make some art in the street without having any problems afterwards. I’ve never been a rebel. Even when I started. I was 30 when I started to make graffiti. So I was a rebel when I was 17 or 18, but not at 30.” Next Christmas, I really must send him some comfortable slippers and a hot-water bottle.

After the rats, Blek started producing the life-sized figures for which he is now notorious, the first of which was an old Irish man in a flat cap. Followed by a Greek widow in a long black dress.

Then, in 1991, he got caught. He was working on a full-size Madonna and Child borrowed from a picture by Caravaggio. The idea was to make it look as if famous paintings had escaped from the Louvre and were now wandering the streets. He had been caught before, but on this occasion it was just as he was signing his name at the bottom, so the police finally found out who Blek le Rat was. The court case that followed stretched on for a whole miserable year, during which he invented a new way of working. Instead of spraying his stencils directly onto the wall, he began spraying them onto posters, and then sticking those up instead. Posters were easier to put up, and easier to take down.

“When the police arrest you pasting a poster you can say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, sir. I’m going to remove the poster immediately. And I’m not going to do it any more.’ ”

Isn’t putting up posters something of a climb-down for a man of your reputation, Blek? Aren’t they a little soft?

“Actually, I prefer to work with posters. Because you go faster. In the street, you must be very fast. If you stay longer than two minutes, the police come. But with posters you go very fast. In 30 seconds you can paste a poster.

Also, it’s not an aggression for the wall. I understand the reaction of people when they are not so happy to have graffiti on their walls. I want to be nice with people and I like people to be nice with me. That’s the reason also I don’t make aggressive images. You know all my images are suitable for people, for children, for everyone. Some graffiti artists want to destroy the city but I’m not like that at all. I don’t want to make sex images or stuff like that. My images are a present I make for everyone.”

On second thoughts, the slippers and hot-water bottle may not be enough. I think a container-load of Horlicks is called for.

The first time Blek came to England to work was five years ago. Before that he simply couldn’t afford it. The best-known pieces he has produced here are his life-size stencils of Princess Diana, who is surely an unlikely passion for a man with his credentials.

He surprises me further by admitting that the idea originally came to him in a beautiful dream. “In the dream she asks me, ‘Oh please, please, Blek, put my image in the streets of London.’ So I did. And after that everything worked in England for me.” He really believes in things like that. The actual reason he became a street artist was because he visited a fortune-teller in Paris when he was 20 years old who told him that she saw him working with walls. First he trained as an architect. And when that didn’t happen, he became a stencil artist.

I rub my ears to make sure they are not blocked still with urban detritus picked up in the tunnel at the Cans Festival, and turn to a subject that will surely make him so angry that he will revert to being the real Blek le Rat instead of this tea-leaf-reading impostor I find before me. Let’s talk about Banksy. Doesn’t he resent the fact that Banksy stole all his ideas and is now making heaps of money out of them?

Not at all. “I respect his work very much. He is very important. I started the movement but he is like my son. I consider him like my descendant. He took some ideas. But he changed them. And he took the movement to a huge level all over the world.

If Banksy didn’t exist I would still be a small French guy in Paris doing my things alone. Now I’m known here, I’m known in the States, I’m known everywhere. Thanks to Banksy.”

If Bansky is such an inspiration, why wasn’t Blek in Bethlehem last Christmas with all the other international street artists daubing protest art onto that ugly concrete wall that the Israelis have put up across their country? “Ah, that is difficult,” he mutters guiltily.

“I’m supporting Israel, you see. So it’s difficult for me. That is the reason I made my David with a Kalashnikov. To support Israel.” The plucky David, pasted up in London, New York, Paris, represented all the little guys who take on the enemy single-handed.

Yes, I can see why that is difficult. A street artist who supports the Israelis. You don’t get many of those to a pound. Isn’t he, and hasn’t he always been, fiercely revolutionary and left-wing? Of course, he used to be, he admits. But not any more. Actually, at the last French election he voted for Sarkozy. What!? You voted for who? Hold those presses. This is surely an exclusive. Blek le Rat has turned into Blek le Mouse.

[From The Sunday Times; June 8, 2008; Waldemar Januszczak]

I think more than anything I am completely impressed by excellence in any form. Also, the piece was shot with a RED which was what we have at work. So I think maybe on a visceral level I can look at this and say “We could have made that!” and then watch it again to figure out how to do it better.

CCTV Ink TV Commercial – Directed by Niko Tziopanos from Troublemakers.tv on Vimeo.

Never thought I’d be caught saying I agreed with Hitler. But the above video clearly indicates we share at least one point of view. And also, I never thought he could be so articulate about the Touch features. Weird.

The question then becomes one of why I liked it so much. Truth is, I was sort of let down by the plot elements in season one. Seemed loosely compiled from a novel that I’m sure was far better as a whole story than the televised version.

Then it clicked with me. The visual style of the production was really wonderful. There’s a sense of gritty inhuman reality and as a viewer I’m continually put into the position of seeing life as I know it from an outsider’s position. Clearly there’s something great going on here. Also, clearly, is the beauty of the opening title sequence. Here’s a copy of it:

TRUE BLOOD from Tiago Ribeiro on Vimeo.

That great swamp pop/country sound from Jace’s Everett’s “Bad Things” certainly helps set the mood. It contributed to that otherworldly rawness conveyed by the visual imagery. I really enjoyed the lack of any digital effects. That was a key element in keeping it “in the muck” for me. Anyhow, I don’t want to ruin the following “making of” piece by tearing this apart piece by undead piece. But I will spoil it by saying they used DV, 8 mil, and 16 mil cameras to film the sequences. And I have a deep abiding love for 8 and 16 mil cameras. Right, on with the making of!

CL Feature: DK’s True Blood – The Making Of from Creative League Team on Vimeo.