Simon Pont

“Like a squash ball, locked inside an all-glass court, played in a never ending Sisyphean rally between two invisible and equally able opponents, that’s what the Digital State first felt like. A descriptor in search of a winning shot, to break the deadlock, to set it free.”

“Friday’s “Working Lunch” is at The Avenue on St James's Street. It’s a bit like eating in an art installation, a White-Out affair that tries for a So-Serious NYC feel, but is occupied by Daddy’s Girls wearing pashmina’s and too many Pin Stripes worn by too many people called Hugo.”

“Short a bear market, go long in a bull market, either play, you do it on a hunch, harbor a whole lot of hope, then sit back and try not to bite your nails. Because no one knows anything for sure. Foresight is a hunch. Everyone is making it up as best they can, and life’s winners are those who smile at the truth of it and can cut a wake through a Sargasso of ego, guesswork, bullshit and chance.”

“The internet reflects us at our eccentric, absurd, trivial best. It shows us as stoned online game-players and people wearing home-made Tron suits. It reveals that we enjoy watching people blend things like an iPhone, and mix 200 litres of Diet Coke with 500 Mentos mints. Laughing babies and sneezing baby panda’s speak to us, despite having nothing to say, and we find all these things hypnotically watchable and briefly hysterical.”

“Happiness is our one ultimate end. Boil it right the way down, reduce all those motivational drivers, and sitting right there at the centre of our very human hearts, is our yearning to be happy.”

“How much do you enjoy the ad of the hot brunette in the skimpy tank-top winking at you? How much do you enjoy that image of the college hunk with the cubed abdominals blue-steeling into the breeze? Once you make the link that it’s American Apparel, or Abercrombie, how do you then feel about that brand?”

“The fundamentals will cause us all to stand and stare; our want for material possessions, our possession and passing on of heirlooms, our want to leave a legacy; our base sexual drives, our wish to be the superior versions of ourselves; our desire to be happy, as an emotion and an idea, that ultimate phantasm.”

“Straight advertising’ is the equivalent of ignoring your girlfriend over dinner. Branded content, and CRM, and co-creation is the opposite. It’s telling her she’s hot.”

“Technology, society, media: these are mutable forms, shape-shifting, forever re-purposing themselves. They sit within the wild, weird and wonderful frame of change. But there is a frame.”

“It was the tequila that did it. Tequila is spiteful, two-faced, sweet as pie when you’re saying hi, paying your monies and throwing ‘em back, but nasty in a metal fangs kind of way when last night’s fun-lovin’ fast-forwards into next day’s buggering regret. I tell you, Tequila is unwise.”