The Stalker responds

The night before last I went to watch my youngest sing at a do for a local beauty queen (not the lady on the left) in East Orange, New Jersey.

To me it was significant - and rather sad, to be honest - that I was the only white face at that gathering. In my view the U.S. is definitely more divided on racial lines than the U.K.

Anyhow, now I'm down in Delray Beach, Florida to entertain with voice and gesture at the annual Early-to-Rise event. I think they're also going to give me an award for staying out of jail for so long.

Meanwhile, back to the matter of photography. The other day Rupert Suren was very dismissive of Joanne Stowell's work.

"What professional," he asked, "cuts off the head of a subject?"

Over the years Rupert has given me quite a few laughs, as he has an fair old fund of knowledge and quite a way with words.

But to be honest Rupert I really don't see much future for you as an expert on photography after that rather acerbic (that's polite for bloody rude) statement.

You really are talking through your lens-cap. As Joanne said, using as an example one of the most famous photographs by one of the very best photographers of the last few decades:

"Someone should tell Helmut Newton he was not professional. Cutting Catherine Deneuve's head and feet off.......... I ask you!"

The fact is, there are scores of examples of such slices off life, as I'm sure Joanne will be delighted to demonstrate.

Big is not better. It is usually just bloody stupid

I worked on Phillips advertising twice. Once I wrote a TV ad that shifted a boatload of car radios they hadn't been able to sell. I wish I had a copy - but I left all examples of my advertising genius on the top deck of a bus 35 years ago.

One thing I noticed about Phillips - as with most large firms - was that they didn't have a clue about advertising. They still don't. Another was that they kept in getting bigger and bigger - but their profits didn't.

I just saw an ad in The Wall Street Journal with the wanky heading "Because there's no place like home, especially when you're sick".

See if you can tease a benefit or reason to keep reading out of that little lot.

The baseline was written by a Jane Austen fan, I guess. It read "PHILLIPS sense and sensibility".

The copy ran:

"Hospitals are excellent establishments. It's just than no-one likes going into them unless they have to. So why not have the hospital come to the patient instead? Getting healthcare at home is a simple solution that makes patients less anxious and hospitals less crowded. Find out more at www.phillips.com/because".

And that's all, folks. All the benefits carefully buried in the copy and no justification for them. Idiots.

There are idiots amok at Verizon, too. But they are not human.

When I got here I wanted to use my US cellphone. It had $6:78 credit. But it didn't work. "You have insufficient credit" said the Dalek machine. No human being to talk to. Just press this and press that.

It turns out the thieving bastards steal all your money if you don't add some at regular intervals. May they rot in hell.

How thrilling! I have my very own Stalker. But it’s weird. She looks about 3,000 times better than me

Did I ever tell you I met David Bailey? I did, I really did.

It was long before he hit the headlines, in a pub in St. Christopher’s Place, when I had my first job as a group head in London and he was just starting out.

It was 1962, I think, and London was about to start swinging. We were both unknown - and I still am outside the murky world of marketing.

But he, of course, became one of the world’s greatest smudgers. (That was the word for lens artists when he and I were young).

As you probably know, making money out of photography is nigh-on impossible now. Cameras can do just about everything except give you a blow-job, so nobody wants to pay for professional work.

But really capturing people and their lives isn’t done through technology. That takes talent. Which brings me to my Stalker.

I met Joanne Stowell when she was taking the pictures at a friend’s wedding at the Marbella Club. She has a different approach. She’s a stalker. She watches people like a hawk and follows them around to get those unguarded moments, those revealing shots.

You can see some of the shots she took at EADIM here. To be honest, I don't like the one of me - but she does. Maybe it looks better in the dark.

Anyhow unless you’re blind or devoid of taste, you can see she has real talent. You’ll find her at www.yourpaparazzi.co.uk if you want really special pictures. As you will see from the picture of the Scandinavian gentleman on her first page, she knows quite a few interesting people - which makes it quite surprising that she's so reasonable

And as you can't see, besides having more talent she looks a lot better than me. But then nowadays most people do.

The question is, which one is the comedian?

There were two interesting things about Marty Stein, my art director in the mid-60's - or at any rate two I'm talking about here.

First, he was the fastest guy ever at churning out grease-pencil roughs.

This was useful because in those days it helped if you could draw. If you could draw fast, even better. Marty could churn out layouts faster than I could have ideas. Nether of us was much good, to be honest, but there you are.

Second, back home in New York he once had Andy Warhol working for him, drawing shoes.

You will recall that Warhol said that one day everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. This is pretty much how long most of the successful contestants on the X factor last. I should tell you, by the way, that I don't really like the X factor and American Idol and all those shows, but they do exercise a grisly fascination, rather like those quiz shows where people answer trick questions like, "What is your first name?"

Take, for instance the man above grinning like a hyena - a Brazilian called Wagner. I caught sight (and unfortunately sound) of him by accident the other night, and was struck by his resemblance to the more serious looking man below, an excellent comedian called Bill Bailey.

Good luck to Wagner, but he does to music what Hurricane Katrina did to New Orleans. I listened to him in disbelief. Any similarity between the noise he was making and the tune it was based on was extremely distant.

The question is, why did none of the judges mention this? Are they all deaf?

To be fair to him though, he was bloody hilarious. Mr. Bailey must look to his laurels.

Super-strength ad horseshit in an email from an Aussie recruitment business

I don't know why it is, but ever since I first went to Australia 39 years ago I've noticed two things: you see some of the best advertising in the world there - and some of the most appallingly pretentious bilge.

Falling calamitously into the latter category is an email I just received from a recruitment business which was until now (I think) called The Recruitment Business or it could have been Creative People. I'm not sure because their devastatingly modern html email design had both phrases at the top.

It announced with sickening pretentiousness Our bold new rebrand (in sans serif lowercase, naturally.)

I narrowly failed to piss myself with excitement before forging on to read "It was something we needed to do" - a bit like having a wank, I guess - "we've got that little bigger than when we set out in 1997. And as a global company we needed a name and brand that reflects what we do best"

What they do best, quite clearly, is mince happily right up their own arseholes and talk total crap.

But I digress. You're just dying to know their new name aren't you? I won't keep you in suspense a second longer. It is "become better connected" .

Well, you can't fault that, can you? It's suitably global and gets 10 marks out of ten for cliché with a gold star for concealing the nature of the business.

Recruitment people are the estate agents of business - but doing a far less necessary job.

They make far too much for doing far too little. They sit neatly between employees too idle, stupid and illiterate to find out where they want to work and write for jobs and employers too idle, stupid and illiterate to advertise intelligently for employees.

They are also, as you can see, as crammed full of shit as a boat loaded with would-be immigrants from Indonesia to the the land of Oz.

It is not always easy to find the right house, but there are precious few competent employees, very few firms worth working for, and all it takes is a little effort on either side to sort something acceptable out.

In fact among very best pieces of work I ever did were a letter I wrote to David Ogilvy to get a job and an ad I wrote to get new employees. Both worked exceptionally well, as did an email I wrote yesterday offering easy terms and a big discount off the price of next year's EADIM.

If early results are any guide we'll be sold out 6 months in advance. Maybe we should run it in Sydney:-) I haven't been there for over two years.