IT'S HALF TIME AMERICA

This is it.  The Wieden and Kennedy ad. for Chrysler that appeared during the Superbowl.

Whether you love it or not will depend on how you feel about the American ability to dramatise things and on that cowboy in their souls.

I’m just back from my fix in New York.

From the best shoeshine any man ever had in Grand Central Station for $4. It was balletic and brilliant – a lightning performance with brush, polish and cloth ending in new shoes.

To wall-to-wall advertising… and when I say wall-to-wall folks I’m not just talking about any walls I’m talking about the tallest, straightest, best cemented walls in the history of walls, so eat your heart out Great Wall of China…this is an American wall.

To this being a city where art, diversity, plenty, money and business collide in a knickerbocker glory of excitement. A city where as if reliving the line “New York, New York so good they had to name it twice” people repeat themselves as in constant wonder.

“Richard Hall from London, Richard Hall…my”

“23rd floor Sir? Yep 23, 23rd…a great floor” (a reflective comment by a fellow lift passenger)

I saw the diary page of Virginia Woolf written four days before she committed suicide and her walking stick found floating in the River Ouse; the 1608 quarto version of King Lear; e.e. cummings “Humanity I love you” and the typewriter on which it was typed and, and, and….

It’s a city of soaring hope, expectation and pride; a city where everyone wants to talk or to pitch an idea.
I went to a meeting of the Luxury Marketing Council of New York at the French Institute Alliance Francaise where Francis Cholle spoke about his book the Intuitive Compass. During Q&A a lady called Carole Hyatt stood and rebuked Francis for generalising about how brains worked. She triumphantly proclaimed:-
“And as research proves women think 28,000 times faster than men do”

The women in the room erupted into applause.

In New York the possibilities (and exaggerations) of life are explored and given theatrical colour.
The fastest, best, biggest, whitest, sexiest, most transformational is here. That jacket in Bergdorf Goodman for just $4,500; that orange juice from my mouth asking for it to my mouth drinking it, 45 seconds; that Caravaggio of Peter denying Christ three times (or 28,000 times) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and most of all people doing their best to be the best.

It’s half time in America and I’m a believer.