'Transparency' Used to Hide Truths, Says Terry Gilliam

We had a treat on Tuesday night. Fast Company's Le Rooftop party played host to a short evening panel featuring American Express, Arcade Fire and Terry Gilliam, best known for his Monty Python work (and maybe also for Lost in La Mancha, because that was bloody magnificent).

Gilliam didn't speak much, but when he did it was with a kind but long-suffering smile -- the sort you give when you're tired of a topic but understand others' persistent curiosity. Of the things he said that one can easily scale from advertising to life, he half-jokingly observed that "transparency is a word used to cover the truth in most instances."

Read the rest of this nummy num-num on Yahoo! Scene, for which I'm doing Cannes Lions coverage this year.

The Cannes Lions Midweek Existential Crisis

It's hard to describe the state of you in Cannes by the middle of the week. By Wednesday night, it's likely you haven't slept in four days. The drinking starts around noon, and you're constantly being blindsided by huge vacuums of people who want to chat about their creative ideas, which seesaw between brilliant and horrific, depending on what fluid you just swallowed.

One guy spent a night regaling Ask Wappling and me about his "sublime" comic strip idea, in which men and women have short, terse exchanges -- sort of like XKCD but stupid. (Man: "Hi!" Woman: "I shaved my legs for this?") The men are always smiling penises, and the women are squiggles in the shape of their pubic hair. Squiggles can vary by size and type.

Be careful when you've been chosen for a creative revelation like this. The less convinced you look, the more insistent the person gets about his genius.

But the trauma I felt, watching those banal prattling penises and vaginas appear in front of me, is only a distant memory. It was Monday around 5 AM.

Read the rest of this nummy num-num on Yahoo! Scene.

There's Melanin in My Drinking Water!

Here's a weird statement I've heard more than once:

"Wow. It must be awesome to have a tan all year 'round."

And if the person is just. Lame. Enough, she might even follow that question up with "How do you do that?"

That's the equivalent of me walking up to you and going, "Whoooa. It must be awesome to have Barbie hair. Did they put it in before or after attaching your head to your neck?"

Rehashing the Blur: ad:tech's Monday Party Scene

ad:tech NY is packed. Is every New Yorker in advertising?

I'm not going into huge detail about last night's shenanigans since Steve already bared our souls (curse you, AIM!). This is more like a moody play-by-play of stuff worth noting.

For reasons not worth discussing, listening to Like a Prayer always puts me in a state of religious ecstasy and self-loathing. These aren't feelings you want to have over breakfast while hung over. Which leads to the question: who buys the Muzak for hotel dining halls?

Flash back to Monday evening, the reason for said hangover. As Audrey said in Breakfast at Tiffany's, "Quelle night!"

Last night I checked in at the Paramount. My room is matchstick-size and features a gigantic tapestry of a man sitting over my bed. I'm scared of it. Paramount is otherwise cool if you don't mind the Eastern European Alice in Wonderland aesthetic which, when you're slightly tipsy, is kind of nice.

First stop of the night: Soho House for the Old Timer's party, where I found a couple of members of our OG ad:tech party crew: Adrants co-editor Steve Hall, and John Engler.

I felt disoriented by the musical selection (The Train by Quad City DJs?) and decor -- wallpaper with bookshelves printed on it. (Titles included Stupid White Men, a Roget's Thesaurus, and a book about orchids.)

While snapping shots of the wallpaper I met Peter Shankman of Geek Factory. We shared complementary views about vice, ad people that double as porn stars, and pogs (the best marketing platform that never happened), then debated what books were worthy of converting into wallpaper. He chose The Art of War. I picked the complete Oxford English Dictionary.

Perceiving the growing sense of lameness in our midst, Steve and John whisked us to the Datran party, where Brian Ambrose and I did a pseudo-twist to Dancing Queen.

Then the crew hit Pascha, where we all lost each other. In my blind quest for the loo, a security guard asked if I was Asian and said we should get married.

Affirmative action in action.

Later another security guard took my arm and asked if I wanted to party with some dudes in a VIP lounge. I said okay and he introduced me to the CEO of a start-up I've never heard of but that is apparently "very forward-thinking," someone said. The CEO had a big bouffant and kept throwing cigarettes and drinks and glasses over his shoulder. I guess that's how you roll in the VIP.

He kissed the back of my hand and said if I wanted to hang out there I should be "very sweet to everyone," then he kissed the serveuse's face. (The VIP lounge had its own bartender.) I said, "Awesome." Later he and I put our arms around each other and sang "We will, we will ROCK YOU" into one another's faces.

A Senior VP of Microsoft was there too, apparently because the up-and-coming startup wanted to recruit him. He was kind of like Patrick Bateman except maybe not as tall, and he appeared to be in the world's worst mood. I avoided him after he failed to laugh at any of my Super Awesome Jokes.

I half-heartedly danced with the serveuse and got to talking with a few media guys who told me the internet is where it's at and mobile is the future: out-of-the-box thinking. I suggested we look further out of the box and try bringing digital video technology to gravestones, which was dismissed as "possible, but not in the next five years."

They did, however, like my idea that people should make nostalgia montages of old ads at clubs and raves, which was validating.

The intellectual parrying lasted until 2 AM, then inhibitions dissolved and we brought back dances from the '80s until 2:30 in the morning.

Nothing fills you with both religious ecstasy and self-loathing like a string of ad parties will. With the exception of Like a Prayer.

Advertising Week: Getting Deep Over WeeMeetinis, and Why Priceline is Tricky

Tell me how to nail cheap two-star accommodations in NY the day before Advertising Week, and I'll call you a liar and tell you how you - yes, you - can survive in a youth hostel during a business trip.

Because after (reeeeally) bad planning on my part, that's where I ended up.

At the end of yesterday's Saving Darfur session, which ran a half hour over time, I wandered the streets of New York in desperate pursuit of the 1 Subway line.

After accidentally interrupting the filming of a movie called "Fighting," I located this crucial urban vein, hopped on and trekked to my hotel.

Priceline.com has this cool option where you can "name your price!" on a hotel. The setback is, if they find you a place at "your price!", you're married to it - no refunds, no takebacks.

So it was with surprise, some chagrin and a sudden craving for croissants that I discovered my hotel, attractively dubbed West End Studios, was not a hotel at all but a youth hostel.

The world spun. I'd gone from from Underdressed Amongst Ad Execs to Overdressed to Kill. Flippin' amazing.

I was there long enough to drop my gigantic duffel in a room - a dorm-style accommodation with a shared loo - then I changed clothes and headed back downtown for the WeeWorld Cocktail Party.

The launchpad for the fete was decorated very much like the WeeWorld universe, complete with human-sized cardboard props representing the miniature playland (ironic). Some guy took an awkward Polaroid of me (eyes closed!) and later handed me a bag of goodies, which included a framed Angela WeeMee.

This is how people see me? was my first thought, but I couldn't ruminate for long because a smiling girl with an oversized belt came and handed me a WeeMeetini - ice-blue suicide, baby - and I later stumbled off to a series of laptops, where a bunch of women were making WeeMees and talking about WeeMees and showing me all the supercool aspects of WeeWorld.

I bit the hype hard and consequently tried convincing everyone around me of how awesome it would be to build a WeeMee Facebook app that mimics WeeWorld's interactive comments feature.

Have you ever made a WeeMee? You really need to. The beauty of this deceptively simplistic business model is it does little more than leverage our fetish for individualism. I wasted at least half an hour, high on my last WeeMeetini, looking for an eyepatch for my virtual persona.

"And look!" cried a WeeMee exec. "You can try on Bratz gear and paint your face in the colors of your flag!"

No kidding.

Anyway, I burned a good three hours hanging out at the WeeWorld Cocktail party - and not just because it had little fried chicken tenders on potato chips. It's a good party when you keep slipping off to a corner to pen the epiphanies you're sponging up in conversation, hopelessly convinced that you are the voice of the Next Great Conference Bash Epic.

My frenzied scrawl faithfully records the following literary deal-breakers:

Advertising - as function of addiction. Addiction reflects personal values.

Attractiveness of American Dream - NOT opportunity but low cost of failure. Ability to erase history, start anew. What are we BETRAYING?

Resilience of the "baseball legend" (e.g. American Dream) will transcend superficiality of steroids.

Yeeeeeah.

With all that profundity left to stew, I bid adieu to my cohorts - including the whole WeeMee team, which I'm just in love with; a sales exec at Brickfish; and a man who claims to have spawned an infamous podcast called It's "Much Worse than We Thought" - and hit the Subway to return to my shoebox hostel quarters.