This is our blog: November 2010

Sunday, 21 November 2010

Overheard in a private members club

One of the privileges of the way we work is that we can often work where we like.

As a result we sometimes find ourselves in the proximity of other Marketing people.

We are amazed by the indiscretion people display and by how hilariously some people discuss their businesses.

So we decided to create a blog to celebrate some of the finer examples of the lighter side of the marketing world.

You can read it HERE.

The Lives of the Muses, and those they inspired.

It's a long way from Mount Olympus, where the nine Greek muses -- Thalia, Melpomene, Euterpe, Erato, Terpsichore, Calliope, Urania, Polyhymnia and Clio -- dispensed inspiration to needy artists, to the Hollywood in Albert Brooks's 1999 comedy ''The Muse,'' where Sharon Stone played a very bossy, very mercurial muse-for-hire named Sarah, who services Hollywood bigwigs in return for lots of trinkets from Tiffany's, top-of-the-line accommodations at the Four Seasons Hotel and round-the-clock car service. Both the ancient Greek deities and Sarah, however, were figures meant to embody (or satirize) the mysteries of artistic creation, and both turn out to have little in common with the real-life muses profiled in Francine Prose's fascinating new book, ''The Lives of the Muses.'' Ms. Prose's nine muses span more than two centuries and represent a variety of muse types, from the art wife to the serial muse (who moves from one artist to another); from the unattainable muse on the pedestal to the spin-doctor muse, practiced in the craft of promotion. Their stories reveal as much about relationships between men and women as they do about the roots of creativity, and they raise questions about the old stereotypes of ''the creative, productive, active male'' and ''the passive female, at once worshiped and degraded.''