About the war, the journey & the in-betweens.

I’ve been in two fights in my life and lost both.

I dance rarely, poorly, and preferably drunkenly.

Yet I think the core of the human condition is somewhere between dancing and boxing.

Here’s why.

Only two plots exist: Someone taking a journey — or a stranger arriving in town.

- John Gardner

Danish writer and former enfant terrible of advertising, Knud Romer, echoes Gardner when he writes that there are only two stories:

The Odyssey and the Iliad.

The journey and the war.

Knud Romer: Another outsider in advertising.

Romer insists that it’s between the two you find the erotic, exotic and magical.

And I think he’s right.

Because a good story is one thing.

But making magic is something else.

Sometimes marketing is boiled down to its most primitive dynamics of push and pull — and forget the in-betweens.

We forget that creative alchemy can be both the journey and the war — but used poorly will end up as neither.

Don’t Push the Punch

Hemingway was obsessed with boxing.

“My writing is nothing, my boxing is everything”.

Anecdotally, he fought pretty piss poorly.

But he wrote like a fighter.

When he worked on a war novel, he wanted to best War & Peace.

When he wrote journalism, he went at it like both bullfighter and beast.

Always d*ck measuring.

Seriously, look up how much he compared genitals with Scott Fitzgerald. It was almost pathological.

However, Hemingway only rarely compared boxing to dancing.

Because everyone else does.

Every movement between the punches is a boogie with expectation, resource management, and straight-up survival.

It’s an overused metaphor that Hemingway avoided — but an existential premise that shouldn’t be overlooked.

There’s no war without the journey.

The Waltz & the Wasteland

Charles Bukowski found Hemingway too macho, and I agree.

Bukowski did a fair amount of fighting himself — but with a self-irony that Papa Hemingway never possessed.

*It’s hard to drink when you dance. And it’s hard to dance when you drink.* - Charles Bukowski

Dancing is not nearly as macho.

More groin grabbing but a lot less d*ck measuring.

And it is the most wordless of all the arts that can be hard for writers to appreciate.

Writing about dancing is like making architecture about music — wait, is that right?

I like performative dance — if only I had the patience for it.

I have a short attention span and prefer detailed stories — I wrote an essay about it.

My brain responds to conceptual structures and sound — I wrote an essay about that as well.

I’ve never even been to a strip club!

Dancing is at the opposite end of my creative spectrum.

For a wordy sort of person, T.S. Eliot can help to understand the dance — if only conceptually:

I don’t think I could have resisted writing “Where past and future are present”…

Eliot nails the magic of in-betweens, of the rollercoaster reaching its zenith and the jolt of electricity when for a moment you feel impossibly weightless.

It’s the shift in motion that allows something deeper to shift in you.

Dance, Monkey

Dance appeals to the human brain in weird ways.

We’re confronted with our most basic communication and our systems of slow rationality and language are set aside.

Maybe that’s why dancing freaks me out a little. I have no linguistic structure or logical certainty to use as a crutch — I am constantly confronted with raw human expression.

On the other hand, dance is an overly costly way to express something comparatively broad.

A modern dancer can do an awful lot of athletic stuff to just say “tragedy”.

I can do it in a word.

Amazingly fundamental or fundamentally amazing?

In a way, dance is the most costly of the arts because it’s so hard to do but leaves so little to be logically agreed upon.

And still we respond to it like nothing else.

Not all of us enjoy the show on the stage equally. But when someone dances at you, you’re inclined to dance with them — unless the situation feels unsafe or the person is sending off the wrong signals; because the dance itself is such a distinctive pull that it can seem aggressive without the right contextual signs.

It can be almost frightening in its wordless demand of expression.

But don’t despair. Even poor dancing can be alluring.

The Irrationality of Costly Signals

Somewhere else I wrote about good intentions beating bad writers on Valentine’s Day.

I think the same holds true for enthusiastic but untrained dancers.

Here’s a bold claim:

People who dance like excited maniacs make better lovers than halfway decent dancers you can tell practiced in front of the mirror.

Of course, the reason you practice in the first place is to NOT look like a total maniac. Sticking out on the dancefloor is frightening, and when in doubt it’s human instinct to imitate others.

The controlled nature of rehearsed movements is a predictable signal that your gestures aren’t potential melee attacks.

Get too excited, swing the pendulum too far, and your limbs are flailing unrhythmically and sending off danger signals — like a mad boxer.

Or you’re just slam-dancing at a punk rock show.

If courtship on the dancefloor was strictly rational, most of us wouldn’t stand a chance.

But it’s the illogical hotness of dancing your heart out when you’re slightly bad at it, that is the most endearing.

Because the risk and reward in potentially looking like an idiot — but living up to the maxim “dance as if no one is watching” — is a much more valuable message than “I think so much about facade that I can’t break from routine and reveal myself”.

Uninhibited expressionists are simply sexier than overly self-aware technicians.

You can tell he’s a generous and grateful lover.

Sure, you can meet a semi-professional dancer and they knock your socks off. Be still my broken heart, I’ve been there.

But for the most part, the costly signals of laying it all out and being you — unafraid and authentically imperfect — beat the confinements of limited training and limiting thinking.

Dance with the confidence of an absolute professional — or a caffeinated child.

Don’t mimic the herd. It’s a deceptive feeling of safety that only leads to the same predictable moves as your rivals.

In dancing like in marketing, you’re competing for attention.

The boxer that strikes without strategy will fail like the dancer who can’t break free from routine.

Dare to stand out.

Don’t imitate others because you haven’t figured out all the moves yet.

Make up your own.

The Roaring 20s Reimagined

It’s curious how Hemingway never got into jazz or wrote much about it.

Because the roar of the 20s was not just from industry and engines.

It was the birth cry of a new world, made manifest by the unpredictable and aggressive roars of brass instruments set to complex rhythms.

Maybe it really is noisy pop music that captures our modern condition the best.

The augmented meeting between movement, pushing boundaries, and punching someone in the face.

The best of both the war and the journey.

Fight and flight.

Push and pull.

A lot has changed — but nothing important.

Creative alchemy and good advertising can combine the two — and know when to avoid either.

A well-told and on-point insight through the right channels can reach the consumer at the still point of the turning world — and let them know that something is worth fighting for.

Dance and strike like a master. Or spend your resources telling the most beautiful truth — even if it looks a little funny.

Don’t move like everyone else because it feels safe.

Dare to be imperfect.

No matter how you approach your branding and marketing, you need to know why your concept is worth the war — and your recipient needs to know why your business is worth the dance.

Bridge the two and you can make magic happen.

It’s as true for the evolutionary battlefield as for the modern marketplace.

Boxing and dancing.

Because to succeed in life, you only need to know two things:

How to fight for someone.

And how to move them.

What Boxing and Dancing Taught Me About Advertising