Try Fry Fly

What if you started collecting something again?

Something specific, something simple and for the first time.

Something that wouldn't perhaps overtake or possess you but something fun and colourful and artistic which would force you to play and stare a little harder at a certain aspect of world - an aspect that by definition you already have some connection with.

What would that thing be?

I've always had a fascination with "promise", specifically that promise given to you by a snippet of entertainment. Notably the movie trailer… [insert booming voice] "In a time when aliens…" etc .

We used to call that promise "advertising". Nowadays it seems to be called marketing. The promotion of promise. But when that marketing becomes a product in itself, it takes on a kind of meta-interest.

I saw this week on television and advert advertising a further advert that would be coming up during the following program.. that that would indeed be a trailer for a movie that is about to come out.

A trailer for a trailer. An ad for an ad. It doesn't get much more meta than that.

The appeal of the distillation of course is in punchy conciseness. A little thimble punching well above its weight. A taste of nouvelle cuisine, but with the promise of an appetite satiated.

Hope.

Potential.

(prior to Delivery and perhaps Disappointment, but we will stop way before then).

Perhaps such a collection would also be an inexpensive hobby.

Ask anybody with a set of watercolours how expensive a hobby should be.

Collect Ferraris, and you are a spectacular tool and unlikely to know it.

The nerd-do-well develops fascinations.

The particular promotion I'm alluding to might be something like a beer mat but in fact I'm thinking of the theatre flyer. Specifically the A5 variety. (Don't you dare give me DL size. That's 1/3 A4, to the novice).

The A5 flyer has has a pleasing dimension and enough space for a graphic designer to go to town with a haunting image or boastful claim. They may speak of terror and mystery and primally connect with any schoolboy who ever walked into a theatre. They place their production at a venue that usually comes with hundreds of years of history, and they date and timestamp it as a transient moment in the ephemera of the shared human condition.

I quite like them.