gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"

the energy business

So British Petroleum changed its logo a few years ago from a shield (symbol of strength, masculine values etc) to a flower-starburst-looking thing (symbol of life, energy, life-energy, feminine values etc etc).

I suppose a cynic would call it the first move in their "We're not evil, honest!" campaign.

I have no trouble with the oil business. My father, a geologist, was in it for a good portion of his working life. It was oil that put food on the table.

Sure, I will concur with Big Oil's detractors for the need for environmental and ethical vigilance, but I would say that was true for all large companies.

But I can only give the detractors so much slack. A lot of them are perfectly willing to hold down fancy media, academic and government jobs, bringing their agenda to their constituencies. But what they're not willing to do is actually go and get the oil themselves.

They're not willing to live 7 months a year on a rig off the coast of Guatemala, or have to deal with the Nigerian government, in a way that (a) fits their moral prism and (b) makes a profit.

i.e. They don't actually have to get their hands dirty. They leave that job to other people.

The energy biz is interesting stuff. Which is why I'm so enjoying watching what happens with Evo Limosines. My gut tells me they're going to be big.

company pitch

I’m one of two Creative Directors for a very cutting-edge communications agency that’s doing some really interesting things at the minute (think advertising, only far more interesting). A lot of the ideas you will have come across on gapingvoid already- the agency job allows me to put them into practice in the real world.

We’re getting up to some really amazing things. We’re also not limited to geography. We believe that, like blogging, our ideas should be able to be applied anywhere.

If you want to know more feel free to write me and I’ll tell you all about it: hugh at gapingvoid etc. I'll publish more details (e.g. the name of the company) once its new website is up n' running etc

computer still in hospital

My computer is still on the heart & lung machine (currently borrowing a friend's). So no new drawings till next week at that earliest. In the meantime you'll just have to survive on republished old ones, and the occasional link etc.

Life is tough all over.

Paris

I'm going to Paris on the 5th of May. While I'm there I hope to meet up with Loic Le Meur.

Looking forward to it. He's an interesting guy.

Plus I'm dying to sit at a proper zinc bar and drink the coffee.

If anybody knows of any good, archetypal Parisian zinc bars, please leave the info in the comment section, merci.

bruner's business blog consulting

Rick Bruner's 'Business Blog Consulting' is the best new website I've seen for ages.

Basically, Bruner cites the most interesting examples of people using blogs for business purposes. He's probably the best in the business for this kind of thing.

Go read it. Now.

Nice to see the capitalist motive finally coming to the fore in the blogosphere. It's been wanting to for a while, of course...

Tacoda

From PaidContent: Tacoda Forms Behavioral Ad Network, Challenges Paid Search Players.

Behavioral targeting technology player Tacoda Systems is developing a pay-for-performance network of content sites that will run text ads and leverage its audience-profiling technology...

Tacoda has so far convinced at least four of its existing publisher clients, though it won't say which, to join its new AudienceMatch Network. Tacoda's clients include USAToday.com, Tribune Interactive, Condénet, Advance Internet and Weather.com. Some sites have already begun testing the program, with more to begin over the next few weeks. Further expansion is expected over the summer. Non-Tacoda clients will also be invited to join the network.

“Pay-for-performance” is music to my ears. It's also the future of advertising. Where every dime is accounted for.

Webvertising getting more accountable is already old news, however much I welcome it. Webvertising lacks the "tactility" of traditional media is even older news.

"Accountable & Tactile" is the Holy Grail.

Thanks to Fred Wilson for spotting it.

meme brokers

David Galbraith points to "Meme Endorsement", one of the more plausible future-of-advertising ideas currently doing the rounds. He cites Burger King's now-famous Subservient Chicken.

Alexa today shows a traffic rank of 1,255 and a 1.5% reach for Burger King's subservient chicken.

Brands will be endorsing memes the same way brands endorsed entire TV programs in the 1950s. So we've gone full circle. The difference now being that memes, unlike TV studios, cameramen, actors etc. do not need costly molecules in order to exist.

Future job description: "Meme Broker". Somebody who finds advertisers and memes and gets them to work together somehow. Perfect schtick for Technorati.

new job

My computer's been sick n' hospitalized the last couple of days, hence the light posting. It'll be a couple of days till I get it back, so no new drawings for a few days (just previously published ones etc). Apologies in advance etc.

I'm working full time now. I'm now a creative director for a very cutting-edge communications agency. It's my first real senior management job, so I'm pretty excited.

The great thing is- it was my blog that got me the job. As I'm fond of saying, blogs are a great way of making things happen indirectly.

Doubtless I'll be telling you all about it in the next wee while...

blogcards at bloggercon

My spies tell me my blogcards were a big hit at Bloggercon.

Jeff Jarvis plugged them, I am told, at his session on making money via blogging.

Thanks, Jeff!

Also, thank you to the many people out there who have bought a box so far. I hope you're having fun with them.

Certainly in terms of all the products I've made over the years (t-shirts, greeting cards etc), they are the most satisfying.

feel free

the next batch

blogs making money

Pretty much all the ideas that came out of Jarvis' Bloggercon workshop on "blogs making money" are listed on this wiki.

Some ideas are more interesting than others, naturally. Personally I think blogs are better for selling high-price goods (e.g advertising services) than low-price goods (e.g. toothpaste). But I have a huge economic incentive in being proved wrong, so if can prove me wrong, please do so- the sooner the better.

Loic sums it up well:

Business rules are changing in an extreme way. I am using my blog as a business tool more and more and it works, I get incredible good contacts reading blogs, or via comments and emails. I get help from all European countries friends to launch Typepad in Europe (thanks !).

Things are changing fast. It's either (a) you're getting up to speed or (b) you're watching your career crumble into powder over the next 5 years.

life being what it is

just not used

american flag

This one, entitled "American Flag", now belongs to Henry Copeland. Black india ink with red and blue ballpoint etc.

Yeah, yeah, Jasper Johns, eat your heart out...

young adam homepage

Young Adam has its own homepage, finally.

It's all done in Flash, which I hate. But it's got a pretty good director's statement from Dave MacKenzie (photo above)...

Also, it has a link to Moviefone.com listings, so you can find out where it's playing near you.

All credit to the marketers for getting a prominent interview and promotional ad campaign in Nerve.com, which is the perfect audience/vehicle for it.

tilda in nerve.com

Sexually frank "Young Adam" interview of Tilda Swinton in Nerve.com.

"We rehearsed for a couple of weeks before we shot. We were very clear that this film's so much about a relationship that's borne out through the sexual contact, and that that's the way they communicate. And we also knew that, on a practical level, if there was going to be that much sex in the film — which there clearly had to be because sex is the meat and potatoes of the thing — it had to be varied for the audience, because it's important to keep the audience living in it. So we did rehearse it very, very scientifically..."

(more Young Adam links here)

why do you blog?

Anil makes a great point about the limitations of "popularity" to measure how successful your blog is.

So when I see disparaging of "unpopular" or low-flow weblogs or the use of someone's readership as a barometer of their legitimacy, credibility or importance, and I have to strongly object. Popularity is easy. What matters is that you connect.

No surprises there. I'm in the business of getting people to hand over 5, 6, 7-figure checks, either to me or the people I work for. It's a different process altogether than mass-media campaigns, the majority of which deal in 1 or 2-figure numbers.

I've told this story before: My father went to Harvard Business School in the 70s. One of his professors, an eminent scholar, had studied the question of what was harder in business: to get one person to give you a million dollars, or to get a million people to give you one dollar.

The prof insisted getting one person to fork over a million was statistically easier by a very wide margin. Again, no surprises there.

Bloggers who get hung up over audience size are still thinking in mass-media terms. Big mistake. Very big.

i used to remember

young adam opened

Young Adam opened yesterday in the States. Hope some of you manged to catch it etc.

It's been a good experiment seeing how blogging can be used to aggressively promote a piece of mass-entertainment.

To any film client thinking of using blogs in a similar fashion, my advice is- start early, update frequently and be prepared to spend some money driving traffic.

Blogvertising is about letting the message slowly seep in, "like absinthe on a sugar cube", rather than the old-media "hit them with a firehose".

It's a different way of talking to people...

blogcards in saigon

Graham Holliday's blogcards arrived in Saigon.

Graham is a Brit journalist is living in Vietnam. His very cool blog is about Vietnamese food, and the local Saigon restaurant culture. Utterly mouth-watering.

He's got an interesting life. He lives somewhere cheap and exotic, and he makes his living off the internet, writing stuff for the British papers. The kind of arrangement I imagine would turn a lot of bloggers green with envy, including myself.

So now there are blogcards in Saigon. You have no idea how happy that makes me.

(get your own blogcards here etc.)

to be inspired

young adam: e-mail from tilda swinton

(Tilda Swinton and Ewan McGregor in "Young Adam")

Tilda Swinton, the female lead in Young Adam, and I swapped e-mails recently:

Dear Tilda,

I am trying to help my old friend Dave with his film, Young Adam, by promoting it on my website. I thought asking one of the actors about it would be a good idea, hence this e-mail. Thanks so much for helping out.

Here are the questions I've prepared, I've tried to keep it short:

1. David never made a feature film before. But here's you, an internationally well-known actor with a superb reputation, turning up in a debut. Was it an easy sell or did you need a lot of convincing?

2. As an actor, how did you rate playing the part of Ella, the main female lead? Was it a particularly challenging role for you? I imagine it would be quite hard to pull off the very sexual side to it, while also maintaining that grim, joyless, hard edge that Ella had.

3. Both Trainspotting and Young Adam, the two big Scots films of the last few years, are both pretty bleak and existential in nature. Do you think that was coincidence, a sign of the times or a unique symptom of the Scots character?

4. Final Question: How do you find the Americans reacting to the film (the ones who have already seen it, anyway)? I imagine it flies against their perceptions of Scotland quite noticably, even more so than Trainspotting.

Thank you very much,

Best,

Hugh

Dear Hugh,

This comes from a plane from San Francisco to Denver on the all-kicking Free World tour of Young Adam .. David is beside me reading W .. they are bringing us 'shrimp', sauteed and laid over 'mescalin', apparently ..

So:

1 Very little arm-wrestling needed to get me into this agreement to make the film with David. His script was so impressive .. but more: it made me want to talk to him about the film it promised he wanted to make .. once we started talking, we never really stopped .. but the fact that he, or any filmmaker, had no track record would never really figure as a disadvantage for me .. if anything, it's a thing I know very well, the working with first time, or relatively inexperienced, filmmakers - Susan Streitfeld, Sally Potter, Robert Lepage were all in that category .. since Young Adam, I've worked with Mike Mills and Francis Lawrence, both first time feature filmmakers - there is a sort of beginner's mind about people with that fresh vision and atmosphere of adventure .. and absence of battle scars ..

2. All tasks have their particular challenges: my playing Ella had these: that, given the neo-realistic verite sort of atmosphere of the environment, it was clear that the task meant sinking myself into the world of this working class, 50's, Glasgow with as much accuracy as I could. I had a voice, and a way of moving, to find that meant that Ella felt authentic and not enacted. That meant a kind of heaviness in the limbs : in the book, Ella is very specifically and evocatively described as being large and fleshly .. David and I intended that I should be fatter than I am naturally to express that sort of living flesh thing for Joe .. but I found it impossible to get there, so we went for a different kind of lumpenness - something to do with a rawness and a slumping shape, a slackness of body tone and a Stanley Spencer skinny/bruisedness .. Ella's story is so much the story of her body: what it signifies to Joe and how she learns to live in it .. once we had rooted her shape and energy in that way, it became easy to tell her story ..

3. I happen to see what you describe as bleak and existential as a particularly Scottish melody .. not the ONLY one possible, but a speciality, you could say .. certainly in terms of Scottish film, as in our culture in general, I do believe that our roots and tendancies have always married better with an internationalist, specifically European, tradition, than the English cinema's close relationship to the theatre and to the American market pressure to sell its identity through class and romantic comedy ..

4. We can tell you more after the film opens on Friday about the American audience's reaction to the film .. but so far, the journalists we have been speaking to have been extremely supportive and respectful and not particularly surprised .. no one has yet mentioned the lack of castle locations or caber tossing, but we are not in Denver yet, so we'll keep you abreast of all breaking news ..

All best

Tilda

(Young Adam premiers this Friday, the 16th, in the US. Cities include: New York, Chicago, LA, Denver, Dallas, Minneapolis etc.)

Please post this link on your website, if you have one. I'd like to spread the word on this film . I've seen it, and it's great. Check out my links for more info etc.

untitled

(drew this on the train to work this morning)

made love to the world

if i gave a shit

making blogs make money

The Daily Jarvis: Jeff has set up an interactive list for all the possible ways to make money blogging... it's for a speech he's giving at Bloggercon this weekend. It's quite a long list, including:

BLOG TO BENEFIT YOUR CORE BUSINESS
$ Use your blog to promote your consulting (e.g., Rick Bruner)
$ Use your blog to promote your service (e.g., Denise Howell and a law firm)
$ Use your blog to get freelance writing gigs (e.g., Tim Blair)
$ Use your blog to get a book contract (e.g., Claire Berlinski and the Julia Child blog)
$ Use your blog to get hired at a publication (e.g., Elizabeth Spiers)
$ Use your blog to smoke out what's happening in your world and make contacts (e.g., Fred Wilson at AVC)
$ Use your blog to start a lecture tour

And there's more. Much more.

work

Starting tomorrow I start working full-time. More cash, less blogging. Yeah, I think it's an acceptable trade-off.

I'll still be drawing just as much...

tribute

So this guy did a gapingvoid tribute drawing and sent it to me. Heh.

(i.e. somebody else drew this)

rolex

comment section

Somehow the comments got closed today, as I fiddled with my site configurations. Never mind, I fixed it. You can now leave comments from this day forward.

Yeah, I like comments. I wish more people left them.

doormat

the dark side of outsourcing

The Daily Jarvis: "Om Malik is back home in India, filing all kinds of interesting observations, including this, on the "dark side" of outsourcing..."

Here I got to talk to many who answer my phone calls whenever I have a question about my Amex Bill. Amid their sometimes drunken but polite arguments, you hear the cry for help. The constant pressure of trying to be someone else, faking accents and trying to deal with the abusive behavior of their customers, you find many are crumbling. The late nights, cooped up in cool but antiseptic halls, the call center workers are turning to drink, drugs and sex to find some meaning to their lives.

It's a neat trick you learn quickly as a blogger: instead of spending hours every day surfing the net, just visit the site of somebody who does it far bar better than you ever could... somebody like Jarvis.

Then steal all his ideas and take all the credit. Hurrah!

owning the means of conversation

So the BBC, thinking the internet terribly empowering yak yak yak, decide to emulate the blogosphere themselves. Something that acted like the blogosphere- a mini blogosphere, as it were... all happening on its own server, within its own specified interface, with all that wonderfully reassuring Beeb branding... Ahhhhhhhh.

They come up with "ican". As in "I can", geddit? The idea is you go to THEIR SITE and "empower" yourself by interacting on THEIR TERMS on THEIR SERVER with other like-minded "empowered citizens" yak yak yak.

Well, thanks for telling me that "I can", you stupid quango*. Like I needed your permission. (*Quasi-Autonomous Non-Government Organisation, in case you were wondering).

But that attitude is typical of the BBC, or any big media company...

"Come to OUR site and use OUR technology on OUR server and use OUR interface based on OUR agenda... so when it takes off the and the media gets a hold of the story they'll write about OUR site and OUR technology and OUR agenda..."

i.e. "WE HAVE TO OWN THE MEANS OF CONVERSATION."

It's not just they think an orchestra needs a good conductor. They assume they have a God-given right to own the musical instruments as well.

"Owning the means of conversation." Remember that term. It's a good one.

penisnose

the future:

This cartoon is about the film biz. But it could apply to a lot of industries, including my chosen profession.

A lot of us advertising hacks often wonder if Madison Avenue is just going through a period of readjustment, or is it in permanent meltdown, a-la the record industry?

The answer, of course, is both. People will always have stuff to sell, and there will always be a market for finding cheaper and better ways to empty the warehouse. That area of the business interests me.

But advertising as a commercially exploitable "cult of creativity" has been (quite rightly) in meltdown for over a decade, just few people spotted it.

control

usual reminder:

Regular readers of gapingvoid are asked to help support the site by buying the occasional box of blogcards. Thank you.

evo in the nyt

One of the companies I'm working with, Evo Limo, just got an article in the New York Times.

The two men, who had virtually no automotive experience but a lot of Hollywood connections, have built a bustling business in Los Angeles by offering environmentally friendly but cool rides. Their Evo boutique limo service features three black S.U.V.'s much like Mr. Richardson's. The vehicles also have Game Boy consoles and minibars stocked with organic goodies like soy-based vodkas and soft drinks made from green tea. Celebrities like Cameron Diaz and Woody Harrelson are regular customers.

(Evo Limosine homepage here)

The two Los Angelinos who founded Evo were seriously sick of the nebulous nature of the media/entertainment business they were in. So they bagged it and got into engines and cars. It worked.

Their company provides a useful, valuable service that ties directly into the main industry where they live. The real genius is that, unlike writing screenplays, producing TV pilots, turning up for auditions etc etc, not a lot of other people are doing it.

"Creativity in everything but the actual business you're in" is a funny phenomenon I regularly see among the "creative" professions. Usually their answer to a business problem is "Work harder", "Accept less money", "Kiss more ass" or "Take fewer drugs". But "Find a new business model" is often the last thing on the list.

It should be the first.

the erroneous belief

shirky interview

Good Clay Shirky interview over at Gothamist.

"So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this -- the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast."

icarus (wings never melted)

cynthia's blogcards

Cynthia Rockwell's blogcards arrived. She seems happy enough with 'em. Happy enough to blog about it, anyway. Heh.

(order blogcards here)

how to get laid in new york #47

watercooler

"Watercooler"

Back when I worked for a large advertising agency as a young rookie, it used to just bother me how much the "Watercooler Gang" just kvetched all the time. The "Watercooler Gang" was my term for what was still allowed to exist in the industry back then. Packs of second-rate creatives, many years passed their sell-by date, being squeezed by the Creative Directors for every last ounce of juice they had, till it came time to firing them on the cheap. Taking too many trips to the watercooler and coming back drunk from lunch far too often. Working late nights and weekends on all the boring-but-profitable accounts. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze…

I remember some weeks where one could easily spend half an hour a day, listening to Ted complain.

Ted used to have a window office but now had a cube ever since that one disastrous meeting with Client X. He would come visit me in my cube at least once a day and start his thing. Complain, complain, complain... about whatever… how Josh-The-Golden-Boy was a shit writer and a complete phoney... or how they bought Little-Miss-Hot-Pant's ad instead of his, "even though mine was the best in the room and every bastard there knew it."

Like I said, whatever.

It was endless...Yak Yak Yak… Oi vey! Ted I love ya, you're a great guy but shut up the hell up…

In retrospect it was Ted's example that taught me a very poignant lesson- back then I was still too young and naïve to have learned it by that point- that your office could be awash with Clio's and One Show awards, yet your career could still be down the sink-hole.

Don't get me wrong- my career there was a complete disaster. This is not a case of one of the Alpha's mocking the Beta's. This is a Gamma mocking the Betas.

I'm having lunch with my associate, John, who's about the same age as me. Cheap and cheerful Thai food, just down the road from the agency.

"I gotta get out of this company," I say.

"I thought you liked your job," says John.

"I do," I say. "But the only reason they like having me around is because I'm still young and cheap. The minute I am no longer either… I'm dead meat."

"Like Ted," says John.

"Yeah… him and the rest of The Watercooler Gang."

"The Watercoolies," laughs John.

So we had a good chuckle about our poor, hapless elders. We weren't that sympathetic, frankly. Their lives might have been hell then, but they had already had their glory moments. They had won their awards, flown off to The Bahamas to shoot toilet paper ads with famous movie stars and all that. Unlike us young'uns. John and I had only been out of college a couple of years and had still yet to make our mark on the industry we had entered with about as much passion and hope as anybody alive.

We had sold a few newspaper ads now and then, some magazine spreads, but the TV stuff was still well beyond reach. So far the agency we had worked for had yet to allow us to shine. Was this our fault or theirs? Maybe a little bit of both, but back then it was all "their fault, dammit!" Of course, everything is "their fault, dammit" when you're 24.

I quit my job about a year later. John stayed on with the agency for whatever reason, then about 5 years ago got married, with his first kid following soon after. Suddenly with a family to support he couldn't afford to get fired. The Creative Director knew this and started to squeeze.

"You don't mind working this weekend, John, do you? Good. I knew you wouldn't. We all know how much the team relies on you to deliver at crunch time- that's why we value you so highly, John, wouldn't you say?"

Last time I saw John he was working at this horrible little agency for a fraction of his former salary. Turns out the big agency had tossed him out about a week after his kid's second birthday.

We're sitting there at the Thai restaurant again, having lunch for old time's sake. We're having a good time, talking about the usual artsy-fartsy stuff we always do. It's a great conversation, marred only by the fact that I can't get the word "watercooler" out of my goddamn head…

definition of RSS

RSS in ten words or less...

"Email, but you only get messages your computer asks for."

washed away the past

where you live

stocks

young adam opens in a week

Young Adam, the Ewan McGregor movie directed by one of my best friends, Dave Mackenzie, opens in the States in a week i.e. Friday, 16th April.

I wish I had more info to give you. I've been bugging the producers about trying to get listings to post here, but it and they have not been forthcoming. I don't think they quite "get" how the internet, particularly the blogosphere works... but then very few people do.

Anyway, check your local rag (e.g. The Village Voice, Chicago Reader etc.) to see if it's coming to a cinema near you etc.

Just got a nice e-mail from Dave. He's currently in LA, doing a whirlwind PR tour with Tilda Swinton. Lots of work. Nice hotels that you don't stay in for very long before you're whisked away to another press meeting or airport.

Anyway, it's all exciting stuff.

given up on life

starbuck's, krispy kreme & dunkin donuts

A great wee article from Brand Autopsy about the marketing nuances that seperate Starbuck's, Krispy Kreme and Dunkin' Donuts.

The article points out that globally, Dunkin’ is known more for its coffee. (In the states, growing up on the east coast, I’ve always known them as a doughnut place, with coffee). Dunkin’ has 5,600 locations worldwide to Krispy Kreme’s 394. In fact, John Gilbert, Dunkin' vice president of marketing, was quoted as saying…

"We are primarily a coffee business that sells doughnuts. Krispy Kreme is primarily a bulk doughnut business, selling doughnuts by the dozens."

Basically, all 3 companies are chasing the same dollar.

1. Starbuck's, known for its coffee but always looking for new things to schlock... CDs, foodstuff, crockery etc. Tries to do this by seeing itself as "the third place" i.e. somewhere that isn't your apartment or your office.

Heh. A third place without nicotine or alcohol. No bloody use whatsoever. It really just wants to be an "Edible Pottery Barn". Whatever.

2. Dunkin' Donuts. Coffee's not bad from an American utilitarian point of view. Better than the stuff you buy from the streetcart but not as good as Starbucks. The atmosphere sucks. Screams "franchise". Everything's pink and corporate ("pink and corporate"- can you imagine a worse combination? I can't). The donuts are nothing special, though they do have a lot of choices. It's their coffee which keeps the business viable.

3. Krispy Kreme. You got there for the doughnuts, let's not kid ourselves. They are the most addictive foodstuff on the face of the planet. The coffee is an afterthought. Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts you go to as part of your morning-routine-boring-commuter hell that is your life etc. Going to Krispy Kreme is regarded as a treat. Something to spoil yourself with.

I could see myself going to a Starbuck's or a Dunkin's on my way to work every day. I couldn't with Krispy's, because of the guilt factor. "Treats" are for once-in-a-while, remember? But holy smoke, are their doughnuts amazing or what?

Krispy Kreme have already figured out that they need to get the coffee thing right, then they'll take over the world. Hence they just hired a master coffee roaster. Because once they get the coffee up to gourmet standards then yuppie scum like myself can start going there every day without the guilt-trip.

"I just go there for my morning coffee" will become the new "I just read it for the articles".

untitled

(Another early one. Laminated. Summer, 1998. New York City.)

I kinda like this one. Back then I was messing around with a lot of purely abstract drawings (no headline etc). Even though that angle had been around in painting 50-plus years, the idea of using it in cartoons first seemed rather strange to people I showed it to.

So it's OK for a painting to do it, but not a cartoon? Why?

subscribe to gapingvoid

(Please click here to subscribe. Thanks)

I do a monthly newsletter to my friends, where I send them a link to all the new cartoons, to keep them up-to-date, give them the gossip etc. Signing up (and/or buying the occasional box of blogcards) is the best way to support to the site. The sign-up page is a wee bit buggered, but it still works.

Click here to join and it'll take you to the page. Scroll down, and in the red field at the bottom, type in your e-mail and a password of your choice. I'll fix the page to look "nice" when I get around to it etc etc.

Back when the subscription list was only a dozen or so people, I also included JPEG cartoons. As it grew and the spam filters got more fussy, I built this website to show the new work to everybody. Far more efficient.

The general understanding I have with people is that I don't mind people copying the work to post on their own websites or to e-mail to their friends etc, so long as I get some form of copyrighted credit and maybe a link back to gapingvoid.

Also, I'd rather you make a copy and host it on your own server than 'hot-link' directly from me. If your website won't allow that, fair enough, then just hot-link. But please save my bandwidth and use your own server if you can.

The other thing to do is just to syndicate the website via RSS. That works just as well.

Anyway, I hope you'll sign up if you haven't already.

Thanks =)

3M

(This one was drawn on thick cardboard, hence all the grey etc.)

nobody cares

redneck losers

feel the sincerity

commodified

(Another early one from January, 1998. Laminated. Drawn while sitting at a crowded bar, New York City)

the passion

Everybody and their uncle has an opinion about Mel Gibson's 'The Passion'.

This is the best thing written on it I've seen so far.

Good work, Jenny!

in the congo

Have you seen Byron's blog yet?

Cheap labor is best!

I like cool-hip-sexy advertising industry websites like this one.

The more advertising-hipster media that's out there, the more young adults start believing in its hipster-career factor. The more they believe that, the cheaper and easier they are to exploit as slave labor.

Cheap labor is best!

10 days to go

Young Adam opens in America a week on Friday i.e. the 16th of April.

Hope y'all will be on the lookout for it. I'll try to find out more about where it's playing etc.

(The director, Dave MacKenzie, is one of my oldest friends, hence all the gapingvoid plugs etc.)

three hour diatribe

i'm lovin' it (so i've been told)

I like McDonald's a lot. Always have. People who get all whiney about corporate greed, fattening food etc I have no time for. They're just people who secretly hate their parents, nobody's fooled for a second.

But this "I'm lovin' it" tagline of theirs is unfortunate.

I guess they're hoping it becomes a catchphrase. So the bus is coming. "I'm lovin' it!", you exclaim. The boss gave you the day off. "I'm lovin' it!", you holler. Sak's is having a sale. "I'm lovin' it!", you scream. Suddenly the world of happy, day-to-day expression becomes a viral marketing campaign for Mickey-Dees on a grand scale. Right.

And who is this "I" in the "I'm loving it"? It isn't McDonald's Coporation (there is no "I" in "TEAM" etc). So is it supposed to be me? You're trying to tell me what to say? Put words in my mouth, without asking first? That's not very nice.

There's no core belief in the phrase "I'm lovin' it." As a result the campaign has no soul. Only wishful thinking.

fleeting beauty