29 Jun 11 Creative and Jobless

…and I’m going to start this half way through a sentence, because that’s the way it happened. I was half way through a day, halfway through my lunch and half way through an email marketing campaign that was going quite well. Then I found myself halfway out of the door as, half way through the same sentence I was just talking about, we were all told the company was closing, there wasn’t enough money to pay us. Could we all go home and fill out some forms.

So I started looking for another job. I don’t really mind which job. I am a sort of a General Practitioner of marketing and design. I can identify the issues, come up with the right plan, do most of what is needed until you get to hand coding web fronted software (the web equivalent of a triple heart bypass) and then, like a GP, I know which consultant to call. I am experienced and qualified in, web design, graphics and marketing and creatively disposed to the application of these skills.

“…you are creative aren’t you?” which means “I’m ignoring everything you say. I also think ‘creative’ means ‘stupid’, so I can patronise you and you won’t realise it. Now go away and colour something in…”

I do well in most places that I work. I win awards and people give me that special respect that creative people get, you know the damned by feint praise respect where they say “…you are creative aren’t you?” which means “I’m ignoring everything you say. I also think ‘creative’ means ‘stupid’ so I can patronise you and you won’t realise it. Now go away and colour something in”.

Clearly there is an acceptance, at some level, that creativity is attached to personality. It is not a process per ce and therefore is not a machine that gets switched on only when necessary or super-powered by anything other than coffee. But when you search for jobs you find ads saying things like “Are you a Creative Genius?” they go on to say “…Must be able to manage budgets, pray to deadlines, run Prince 2 Project Management software, commit to best-practice business processes …and while creative, must have no trace of independent thought. This role involves agreeing with everyone else.” I had an MD once who used to say to me “We’ve got the sausage – you give it the sizzle”. I used to think “Sausage – it’s supposed to be software! Anyway it’s not a sausage, it’s not made it past the pig stage of the process and I can daub lip-stick all over this pig, but it’s still going to be a pig – it needs redesigning, not repainting”.

It makes you wonder why anyone wants a creative genius. The phrase ‘If you keep doing what you do, you’ll keep getting what you get’ springs to mind as the subtext of these ads is ‘we’re going to keep doing what we do, and so are you. But you’re responsible for making sure that we start to get drastically different results. Don’t argue just go and colour something in – and make sure you do it in a corporately compliant way’.

…it’s difficult to maintain a respectable level of mendacity because, having asked for a creative genius, they have sat you in front of a creative retard

But you need a job and so you go to the interview prepared to say ‘well you’re the boss’ to the inteviewer when you mean ‘you’re a fucking imbecile’. But it’s difficult to maintain a respectable level of mendacity because, having asked for a creative genius, they have sat you in front of a creative retard. Through some quirk of natural injustice, this is the prick who will mark you out of ten for your creative genius-ness. It’s like the pot calling the kettle-drum ‘fish’; there is no way you can communicate with this person in a meaningful way. So you just say what they want to hear: Q. Can you sprout wings and fly? A. Easy peasy.

Then, should you get the gig, you’ll spend 51 weeks each year kowtowing to a self-important wanker. But if you are lucky, for one week of the year, when they are away or busy or otherwise distracted, you will get to be spontaneous, creative, unfettered by corporo-bollox and make an important difference. They will then say things like, “Ahh if only you’d do this all the time” or “That was my idea”.

So as a truthful answer to the question Are you a creative Genius?…

Creative? ? ???? /// ??? (aren’t question marks interesting to look at) – As a kid, I was naturally drawn to playing musical instruments, drawing and writing – although I was lazy so a lot of the writing wasn’t written down. I was into the fusion of these things with the day-to-day mediocrity of life – As a teenager I would compose Dylanesque balads about e.g.  going for a shit and then perform these for my rather straight-laced grandparents.

…digging and planting a petunia flower-bed in the centre circle of the school’s football (soccer) pitch for a photo idea I had – that one didn’t go down well…

I liked off-beat comedy such as Spike Milligan. No one else I knew could stand him. Like Milligan, I tended to be naturally lateral in my approach to life. And for most of my childhood, it was a pain in the neck for those around me. Digging and planting a petunia flower-bed in the centre circle of the school’s football (soccer) pitch for a photo idea I had – that one didn’t go down well (Sorry mum and dad, I didn’t tell you about that and in fairness, I never got found out – but I can tell you it didn’t go down well).

I spent two weeks painting the church spire to look like Thuderbird One – the vicar ruined it, he wouldn’t dress up as Mr Tracey.

I worked in Tywyn in Snowdonia as a climbing instructor for a while. I would take to the streets at night in a Banksy-esque way (although this predates Banksy by some years) and create Andy Goldsworthy style sculptures on people’s window sills and car bonnets. And people just knew it was me. Okay Goldsworthy is coffee-table and Banksy is subversive, but I did at least have my own movement – the Subversive Coffee Table movement; for a week or two some kids around Tywyn were copying me. Because of this, I was once asked by the town vicar if I could think of a way to attract young people to the local church. So I went for a fusion of climbing and creativity and spent two weeks painting the church spire to look like Thuderbird One. The vicar ruined it, he wouldn’t dress up as Mr Tracey. I suggested he dressed as Brains instead, but he was just looking at his church spire and whimpering.

I knew that eventually I would have to make a living out of this creativity, simply because I couldn’t have existed in something like accountancy for more than a few days without doing something creatively spontaneous, but commercially ruinous. And while I have mellowed since and qualified in pushing buttons on computers and trying to break the web, I essentially still do the same thing. I get things noticed. People apparently appreciate what I do. I get awards for it from time to time and people say they wished they could ‘think’ like me.

‘Creative genius’ is a silly phrase. But if such a thing exists, it is the sort of thing that happens half way through whatever you’re doing at the time, rather than at the far end of a prescriptive best practice business process.