Creative Wave – February 3

Creative Wave – February 3

Happy Friday everyone,

As the outside world stays tumultuous, and people around the world protest to protect basic human rights, you know you can safely let the Creative Wave wash over you with its warm and inclusive positive swell. This week, we particularly celebrate robots, Nic Cage and the two greatest tennis players of all-time (there, I said it).

And look out about six lines down for a new feature that aims to celebrate (largely) unknown inspirational figures from the creative world. First up, it’s an influential New York artist who I’d never heard of until recently, but who’s respected enough to have been pastiched in an early episode of The Simpsons.

 

TUNE FOR THE WEEKEND-

A perfectly formed slice of 70s pop pleasure by the Alessi Brothers. It’s called Seabird –  

It’s also the closing credits from Hunt For The Wilderpeople, which is a quite extraordinary film. If you haven’t seen it, do so asap. Easily one of the best releases of the last five years.

 

OBSCURE HERO OF THE WEEK-

George Tooker. Mr Tooker was a New York-based painter active around the 1950s, after leaving the Marine Corps. He was great friends with Paul Cadmus, and together they defined a style that’s quite hard to pin down. It’s surrealist and political, while still quite realistic. Together with Jared and Margaret French they were dubbed ‘magic realists,’ but they rejected this idea. His most famous work is the fantastic The Subway – the piece referenced in The Simpsons – and why don’t you let the Whitney Museum of American Art explain it to you:

 

* This is by far my favourite film poster for a long time. I must say, everything related to Kong Skull Island so far looks superb. Love the homage to Apocalypse Now here-

http://media.aintitcool.com/media/uploads/2017/harry/img_6372_large.jpg

 

* You know something’s offensive when Twitter itself condemns you. Here the social media platform spoke out against Donald Trump

 

* Interesting news about one of the next big Marvel projects that will tell the story of Black Panther (who first appeared in last year’s Captain America: Civil War)-

 

* Quality work here from Dove that captures the zeitgeist and mocks Trump. They juxtapose fake ‘alternative facts’ with real facts about their product. Smart and timely-

 

* Very interesting piece by a data scientist who’s learned to analyse people’s behaviour in minute detail. Did a similar tool help Trump and the Brexit campaign?

 

* Here are some of the best and funniest signs from the No Muslim Ban protests around the country this week-

 

* Here’s a fun new campaign from Squarespace that uses John Malkovich to dramatise the the importance of registering your domain name-

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* Have a look at this new side-project from a couple of ad creatives. It’s called Hateboards, and wants you to grind some unlikeable people’s faces into the ground on a skateboard-

 

* Could robots help solve the social care crisis? Interesting piece about how culturally-sensitive automatons could look after the elderly and the infirm-

 

* February is LGBT History Month. Follow this Twitter feed for interesting articles and interviews and all the jazz-

 

* To my knowledge, this is the earliest piece of work by one David Ogilvy. It’s a sales manual for AGA cookers he wrote when he was 25, that got him a job at Mather & Crowther-

http://www.lannigan.org/the_theory%20and_practice_of_selling_the_aga_cooker_training_manual.htm

 

* A lovely piece about the peerless Roger Federer, and how tennis really was the winner during Sunday’s classic Australian Open final-

 

* And of course we must pay homage to Serena Williams as well – a champion equally as remarkable and timeless as Mr Federer-

 

* Which leads nicely on to this simple but smart follow-up to Serena’s brilliant ‘Unlimited Greatness’ Nike ad from last year. This one’s simply called ’23’-

 

* See how the UK lined up against the rest of the world’s agencies in the 2016 Gunn Report

 

* Very nice, bold move from Starbucks here. Their CEO has pledged to hire 10,000 refugees globally-

 

* Similarly, Airbnb pledge to house refugees, and anyone banned from entering the US, for free-

 

* This new outdoor campaign from Virgin Trains features billboards that react to traffic and congestion levels on the roads, and push different messages accordingly-

 

* Here’s an incredible scientific break-through. For the first time ever, ‘locked-in’ patients have been able to communicate thanks to a revolutionary brain-computer interface-

 

*Nic cage crashes a Nic Cage film festival in the most Nic Cage way imaginable-

 

* Another week, another astonishing photograph from the deep-space Cassini probe. Here’s a close-up of Saturn’s moon Mimas

 

* Here’s a first look at the all-new, all-female Ocean’s Eight film. It features the likes of Cate Blanchett and Anne Hathaway executing a heist in New York-

 

* Read this lovely eulogy celebrating the career of the legendary John Hurt, who unfortunately passed away last week-

 

* The next part of Facebook’s plan to take over the world is a new video app for set-top boxes

 

* This is a good find from the annals. A book review of Mein Kampf written by George Orwell in 1940. It’s incredibly sharp (as you’d expect) and anticipates some themes of the as-yet-unpublished Animal Farm

 

* A new spot from Mercedes AMG spot that’s due to run during the Superbowl. It’s a riff on Easy Rider and is directed by the Coen brothers

 

* Take a trip back to 2003 with a lively new track from one of the UK’s best rappers, Klashnekoff

 

* Love this first poster for the next Disney live-action remake, Beauty and the Beast

http://media.aintitcool.com/media/uploads/2017/harry/beauty_and_the_beast_ver19_large.jpg

 

* Interesting look inside the new Premier League tv rights deal. Football clubs could afford to let every fan in for free, and still make as much money as they did previously-

 

* Reviews of the new Flying Lotus film are flooding in. Some have called it the most disgusting thing ever made. Others have praised its freewheeling oddness-

 

* Meet Libratus, a world-leading poker artificial intelligence that out-bluffed the best human players in the world using three complex ‘reinforcement learning’ systems-

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