Slipping.

Like most people who work almost entirely alone, there are moments--long moments, to be sure--that I worry if, like most people, I am fairly losing what's always been my somewhat tentative grip on sanity.

The combination of being a writer--even a copywriter, the lowest form of writer--and alone often leaves me with no one to talk to but myself. That solitude is almost entirely my fault. There are people I could choose to talk to. But I find talking to others too disappointing and too much work to carry on with any regularity.

So, I turn to myself. I am usually near at hand and not a bad conversationalist when given half a chance, which I'm usually not.

Meanwhile, I've been having a heated imbroglio with a client who's roughly 8,000 miles from my ramshackle shingles up here on the Gingham Coast. I'm tired, btw, of people saying "as the crow flies." I don't know how crows fly. In fact I've seldom seen one fly more than thirty feet at a given time, from a dusty patch of over-fertilized sod to a telephone wire over head, from which point they can shit on me, as we sang in our youts:

If I had the wings of an angel,

If I had the ass of a crow,

I'd fly over your house tomorrow,

And shit on the people below.

-

[By the way, I learned the word "imbroglio" because there was a ballplayer from my youth called Ernie Broglio, who was one-half of one of the most lopsided baseball trades in all of baseball history, when the Cards of St. Louis sent Broglio to the Cubs of Chicago for future Hall-of-Famer, Lou Brock. Broglio had had some good years for the Cards--he finished third in the Cy Young voting in 1960. But in three seasons he went just seven wins against nineteen losses for the Northside Ursines.]

In any event, the client has demanded that I fill out tax form 8802 which is a form that exists so I can be sent tax form 6616. These forms will prove to the tax people in India that I pay tax in America. Otherwise, they will tax me twenty-percent on the money I've earned in addition to the 65-percent the US government will tax me, all so musk, trump, bezos and their trillionaire cronies don't have to pay any tax at all.

Someone, I'm sure, at the Adobe company--the bots that make the pdf tool--have conspired with the Internal Revenue Service to make sure that tax form 8802 cannot be downloaded or saved, so everything you type into the form has to be done over once you realize it can't be saved. 

Finally, after trying five or six goes at making a pdf, my wife, L, printed it out and I filled in the printed form as best I could seeing that the form wasn't printed in the language I speak (human) and nothing was any clearer than the water in the Gowanus Canal after a rainstorm.

Then I tried to photograph the filled-in printed form so I could upload it to pay.gov which is what I was told by form 8802 that I had to do to get a certificate that form 6616 would be soon on its way. That certificate would allow the people in Mumbai to pay me the money they owe me without me paying the additional twenty-percent tax I really didn't want to pay.

I could find no place on pay.gov to send in my forms and my payment. Left with no other chance of getting the few dollars owed me without an additional tax-liability, I called the people who help me with my taxes.

After some time trying to explain what my problem was and having to listen to Sean explain it back to me, I got in my 1966 Simca 1500 and drove to Sean's office. The sign in front said, "Name Name, CPAs."

I never could figure out what the Public meant in Certified Public Accountant. And I was, as typical, in an especially snitty snit of a temper. I didn't feel like going through the forms again, I didn't feel like talking to Sean, I didn't feel like paying to government $185 for the privilege of not paying the Indian government even more money. 

The thing that saves me from a world that too often is too much with me is my Slip Mahoney sense of humor.

For the rest of the day, I've been telling people that I had to drop off paperwork at the Certified Pediatric Accountants.

I don't care if this was a long walk for a short joke. It amused me. 

And that counts for something.

--

BTW, I think the world was a better place when baseball players looked like Don Mossi. 

For starters, I was considered handsome.

Circumlocution.

About twenty years ago I sold an experiential idea to a client that, I'll say with some boastfulness, was way ahead of its time. The idea was good and we executed it well and we worked our asses off making it happen. 

However, when it came time to promote the idea--so people could find it--the client decided they'd rather not spend the money. After sinking a couple million into the idea and the event, they decided they had spent enough and didn't want to sink a million more making sure people could actually find the thing.

That would be like the Metropolitan Museum in New York paying one-million bucks to display the Mona Lisa and then not telling anyone about it. If you have something to say, something to show that enhances your product and moves your brand, you have to actually tell people about it. Otherwise, in the inimitable words of my father, "you're pissing up a rope."

Advertising, in a sense, is a really well-done dating profile. If no one sees it, it doesn't matter how well-written and alluring it is. 

The client said to me, after all that work, they were going to have a soft launch.

I'll say this about clients--many clients anyway.

They're really good at coming up with phrases that sound positive but are really destructive to their ends. 

Imagine if Werner von Braun told Hitler that he was soft-launching the V2 rocket. Or if he told NASA that he was soft-launching America's Apollo missions.

Launches don't get to be soft.

You either launch it or you don't. 

It's really that simple. And no dastardly circumlocution will change a feckless lack-of-commitment into anything other than a feckless lack-of-commitment.

Soft launching something is a foregone conclusion. Soft launches are (almost tautologically) failures. Because a launch has to be real or it's not a launch at all.

Not too long ago I got a call from a new client. They wanted me to do a lot for their brand--defining who they are--not just writing ads.

I did what I had to do and, as they asked, I came back to them with what I thought was a fair proposal--based on the job they wanted doing, the competitive set they're in, the size of the company and their ambition.

Let's say my price was 6X.

They came back and said "We're scrappy. We can't pay more than 1X."

It took me a week to realize that "scrappy" was another one of those linguistic dry-humps like "soft launch." Scrappy was a feckless way of saying we're cheap and we don't believe in either advertising or in you.

It took me about a minute more to walk away from my bid.

So much of so called advertising today is "soft launch." A bunch of tiny "social" doodads that no one (outside of the linked-in or twitter amen-chorus) ever sees. Case studies, almost wholly works of fiction, talk about their impact and their billions of impressions. But no one ever sees the actual work and their non-solipsistic effect cannot be measured because there is none. 

The Economist said not all that long ago that the United States is in a start-up boom. But with the exception of a small group of those start-ups, 99% die never having gotten off their investor decks. They don't tell people en masse who they are, what they do and why you can't live without them.

They soft launch.

Showing up as an end-cap for one week then disappearing because no one knew who, what, why, when or where.

Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948, but he's been around, really, since the beginning of time. 

Calgacus called a spade a spade. In Latin.

2000 years ago, during the height of the Roman Empire, Calgacus, a Caledonian Chieftan was quoted by Tacitus in his volume "Agricola." The Romans destroyed everything in their wake--especially if the besieged put up any resistance. Calgacus said "solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant." They make a desert and call it peace.

In my childhood, a US Major at the Battle of Bén Tre in Vietnam in 1968 said, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." (An Orwell-McNamara-ism is there ever was one.)

Earlier this week, a number of people including the gunman himself and a cop were killed in a Manhattan office tower. The gunman was using something everyone feels comfortable calling "an assault rifle." Like the phrase "defensive weapons," this makes me wonder if some rifles tickle or caress victims and only the bad ones--the mean rifles--assault people.

"Oh, don't worry about that psychopath with a gun--that's not an assault rifle--that's a tummy-rub rifle."

We seem to forget--and to have always have forgotten--that words have actual meaning. The united states went full Orwell in 1947 when an act of congress renamed the Department of War the anodyne and deceptive Department of Defense.

Some years ago I heard an advertising story. I'm not protecting anyone here, I truly forget the names of the people involved. Let's just say that the client was working with a very-acclaimed, very-high-end copywriter whose name was on the door of his agency.

Despite all that copywriter's accomplishments--and the fact that the client had sought out and hired that very copywriter, the client decided to rewrite all of the copywriter's copy.

The client was scribbling over the copywriter's copy and said something like, "I guess I'm just a frustrated copywriter."

I'd guess almost everyone reading this post has heard something like that a couple dozen times in their career. 

The copywriter replied, "No, I'm a frustrated copywriter. You're an asshole."

That's how we should use language.

With accuracy.

Woofing It.

About six years ago as Covid descended upon New York and the rest of the world, my wife, worried, came to me as I sat in our New York City apartment and said, "Dr. Cohen says we have to get out. No one knows how bad this is going to be and the respirators and hospital beds will all be given over to the investment bankers."

Malthus, in the 21st Century, works for Goldman Sachs.

"Out?" I said with my usual perspicacity.

"Out," L answered. "I booked an air b and b on Cape Cod."

"Fine," I said, "Only Cape Cod has but one hospital and just one road on and off. If this is the cataclysm you think it is..."

"Then you find a place," L akimbo'd. With that she left our apartment and me with an assignment.

We had been taking out eight-year-old golden retriever, Whiskey, to the beach on weekend, in Connecticut. In the cold of winter no one minded and dogs would congregate and play in the surf while their humans surlied and drank sugar'd coffee at seven bucks a pop.

Online, I found a map of the Connecticut coast. With Yale as my dividing line between "commuting Connecticut," and "WTF Connecticut," I found a town that sounded white-steepled and cute at the junction of the Long Island Sound and the Connecticut River. Old Saybrook. I figured north of Yale I was safe from the greedy grasping of suburban Connecticut and if I was stricken with the plague I could get into a Yale-affiliated horse-spittal.

I found a house for rent along the sea for a price Ward Cleaver might have paid in the 1960s. I didn't do much research or reconnaissance because I thought this whole Covid thing was, like 99-percent of all news that hits my stapes, blown completely out of proportion. What's more, though I'd been fired from Ogilvy, I was working for my ex-boss Steve Simpson at PayPal and making more money than I had ever made before, except for when I was freelancing for two agencies at the same time and being paid by each. 

One of them I worked for between 7AM and 1PM, the other between 1PM and 7PM. I very much liked having two jobs. If one sucked, there was always the other to suck even worse. If that sounds like an argument for polygamy, that's big a' me.

Lothar adjusting the revolving pixelator on my 1966 Simca 1500.

We piled two pairs of socks and some scanties and our dog supplies into our 1966 Simca 1500, brought a blanket to throw over our legs since Lothar, my Croatian mechanic, and reputedly the best Simca repairman in North America was, despite his reputation, unable to get my heater working. 

Story of my life.

We made it up to the Gingham Coast in under two hours. There was no traffic during those gloomy days and Lothar had replaced the Simca's original four-banger with a two point eight liter BMW straight-six that powered the thing so it moved as fast as mashed potatoes at a boarding-house dinner-table.

We passed a beach on the way to our rental. The tide was out and the beach was half a mile wide, dotted with shallow tide pools and empty of nearly everything but creaky old people like myself and their dogs.

The creaky old people like myself plodded along while our dogs ran on the packed sand, galloped through the surf and fetched whatever I was able to, like Thor or Zeus, hurl.

L and I went to the same beach yesterday, in the spitting rain, with Sparkle our 22-month-old golden retreiver. She played with Diego, Zeke and Daisy. We were there today, at 7AM, in the torpid air, with the same cotillion of pups, and also Benny, a five-year-old golden whose mom drove him over all the way from Guilford.

After two hours, the dumb-creatures (the humans) looked at our time-pieces and told ourselves we had to go. The dogs looked, well, hang-dog, but agreed. L took our ancient golf-cart home with Sparkle sharing the front-seat. I took an additional hour and walked about the littoral, clocking another three miles like Extraordinary Little Cough, all in an effort to allay the aggressive adipose that is gaining ground on my ass.

Sparkle is all in, now. As tired as a you-know.

L is conference-calling already.

I am finishing up this piece.

And soon will be typing away for pay.

It's a dog's life.

 

Thwack. And a Miss.

Uncharacteristically, I am out of ideas.

It's Sunday afternoon as I type this, and usually by this point of the weekend, I've written three of my blog posts for the upcoming week.

For the last 15 years or so, that's been my routine. I try to have three things written on the weekend. My remaining two posts I write in a more "in medias res" fashion. That gives me what I consider a decent proportion of reflective posts versus things that are more newsy or "in the moment."

Of course when you've written over 7,000 posts (of roughly 300 words each) or over two-million words on a topic as singularly dull and dumb as advertising, you're not without your worries that you're in danger of becoming a broken record. That's a quaint, almost retronomic description, of a piece of vinyl with sound on it that repeats due to a skip in its grooves.

It's hard to write about a topic as exhaustively as I've written about the demise and corruption of the ad business and not find yourself repeating yourself. 

Accordingly, at least so far this weekend, I've not landed on a blog topic that doesn't feel like a rehash of yesterday's hash. 

There's an cosmological idea that's been thoroughly dismissed by modern science that I still abide by. It can be summed up, baroquely, as "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." The phrase was coined by the great Ernst Haeckel way back in 1866. The accent in Haeckel is on the diphthongic not the penultimate.

2:31. For the phrase that pays.

Basically, it means that the life of an individual organism, say a baby in the womb, resembles the pattern of all of life. So, as we emerged from a warm and watery nest, so did our entire
species. 

BTW, I highly recommend you skip about three days of monopoly coffee and instead spend your $26 over at abebooks.com. You can buy a good, used Haeckel there.  Or a less pristine used copy for $10 less. Either way, you can avoid amazon, which is an emanation devoutly to be wished. Not only do they pay no taxes, they are resolutely a stinking company and should be shunned if at all possible.

[BTW, though no one has asked me, perhaps the best way to survive our already-arrived apocalypse is to not you yourself give air to the prevailing dumbness. On social media and during all sorts of social intercourse, do nothing that anyone else is doing. Post no pictures of hulk hogan, or the cold play couple, or elon sump or donald trusk. There is no reason to ever ever ever give any pixels of these sorts any oxygen whatsoever.]

I'll admit, while ontogeny theory etc has been derided by scientists, I find it works in most of life. The corruption that comes from consolidation--the exploitation, the money-grubbing, the collapse of quality we see every day on an advertising (micro) level. We see it similarly on a phylogenic level, that is, our world. 

Most of what I learned about getting along in an office, I learned playing football, or basketball, or baseball with my friends when I was growing up. You learn valuable lessons during those hard-scrabble games. How to buckle-down, how to take an extra-base, how to find a gear you didn't know you had. You also learn about cheaters and corner-cutters. The kids who claimed a line-drive was foul, thus robbing you of a double back 40 years ago, put their names on your scripts (after changing one word) thus robbing you of a bonus.

Like I said, this post had no topic. A meander, really. A tale of sound and fury, told by me, an idiot, signifying nothing.

I learned that playing ball, too.

Showing up.

Taking your thwacks.

Pipe Ball.

As Yogi said, "If people don't want to come to the ballpark,
how are you going to stop them?"
.

Above the wooden bench that sat alongside the row of lockers in the Sarapero's dank locker room in Estadio de Beisbol Francesco I. Maduro, ran a hot-water pipe wrapped in insulating paper painted a gangrenous shade of hospital green.

My locker, which was the last one on the end, closest to the field exit, sat under the pipe where it joined another pipe, which veered off at a 90-degree angle. At the joint, the insulating paper was stained a dirty-toilet brown, and the seam where the pipes met, dropped a drip every few seconds or so, speeding up or slowing down depending on how many of my team-mates were washing off in the showers the dust and the sweat of another day under the unforgiving Saltillo high-desert summer sun.

Like Denver, Colorado, Saltillo, Coahuila, named by the Spaniards back in 1577 and raped by them and myriad others ever since, was a mile high. Despite the thin air, back fifty years ago when I played in the Mexican Baseball League, the league was a pitchers' league. In our band-box of a stadium, as a team we hit fewer than 100 homers. Salome Rojas, our first-sacker led our team with 22, while long-muscled Daniel Garibay, our left-fielder added an even 20. 

When the rains came to Saltillo, and we twenty-five boys in mens' bodies were in our locker-room crowded with too much man and too few brains, we had to find something to do until the rains stopped and the game could go on. 

The team didn't much like canceling games, knowing it would result in lost revenues. We would raucous in our locker-room, waiting for something the break--either the weather or someone's temper.

Some of my team-mates, like our reserve shortstop, Dr. Jesus Verduzco, could sleep virtually anywhere at virtually anytime. We'd find him sawing wood in his locker. Teolindo Acosta, a scrub infielder sometimes brought a small drum-set into the locker-room with him, with a cymbal and a snare and would play along with Angel Diablo, our shortstop who had a guitar and Tito Puente who exhaled into a harmonica. Others played endless card games which more often than not ended in mean looks and hard feelings.

Genaro Andrade, a back-up outfielder, he was all leather, no wood, sat two cubbies down from me. One night as the rain poured into the locker-room mixed with the spiked dirt from the dugout, Genaro walked over to me with a clean white baseball.

"Pipe ball," was all he said and he showed me how.

Parabola the ball up toward the overhead pipe. A miss was an out. One bounce, a single, all the way up to four bounces making a home run.

Andrade couldn't hit a grapefruit with a tennis racket but he had the quickest hands I had ever seen. If ever, in the dugout, on a long bus ride between the god-forsaken stadiums we played in, there was a fly about, Andrade could nab it with either hand, without hardly looking. He could do the same thing too with fly balls, curving away in the twilight. 

It sounds like a stupid thing to have noticed, but I must have seen Andrade kill two-hundred flies that summer. It's funny, I think how in baseball, as in life, most things happens while you're waiting for something else to happen.

As an old man now, so many years later, that seems truer even now than it was then.

While we were waiting for our ups, or to start a game, or for the rain to stop, or for our beers or women to arrive, other things happened, that even after fifty long and sad years, I remember like they happened last week. The things that were supposed to matter, it's almost like they never happened.

Andrade was good at pipe ball. 

Since we were playing nearest my locker, we called it my home-field. That gave him first ups and he had about four runs in before his half of the first ended. By that time our small game of pipe ball had attracted first four boys, then six, then ten, including two or three coaches.

I missed the pipe completely on my first up. Someone chipped in, "Jorge, arc the ball." Another, "you are too tall. Get low like Genaro." "Bend your knees," said someone else. 

I ignored their advice like I ignore most advice.

I knew even as a seventeen year old that most life is people you telling you what to do, and with conviction. I knew even as a seventeen year old that the less people know about something, the more apt they are to tell you how to do it.

My second throw bounced twice and my third once. Men on first and second, because there is only, in pipe ball, at least according to the Mexican League rules of 1975, no advancing of imaginary runners except when they're forced. While I didn't agree with that stricture, it made sense. 

When the rain stopped and Hector told us to lace up our spikes and warm up, Genaro was leading by something like 12-4 in the fourth inning. Whether it was his quick hands, some other skill or pure luck, Genaro might have gone something like twenty and oh that summer. I'm not sure anyone but Guilliermo Sisto, my best friend on the team, and our back-up whatever and assistant manager, ever came close to besting him.

Pipe ball caught on in the Saraperos' locker room and around the league and Genaro's rule probably spared us a knife-fight or three. Because games among boys in the bodies of men are heated affairs. We sweat as much over pipe ball as we did over beer and girls. They all mean so much in lives that so often mean so little. 

My best game, ever.

This all happened one summer long ago. A summer where so much happened. A summer where so much was forgotten and so much more I wanted to forget.

A summer where I ran away from all I knew hoping home could never find me. A summer where I hoped to find something I never had, a home. A summer long ago, where it took me fifty following summers to realize that maybe I had found what I had never had among the dirt, the sweat, the rusty pipes and a bouncing ball that meant so much.

Ouch.

A group of eunuchs. Mural from the tomb of the prince Zhanghuai, 706 AD.

It's hard for me to look at the seeming collapses of both amerika and the ad industries and not think about some political entities or institutions that lasted way way longer.

The Egyptian dynasties lasted for something like 3,000 years. The next most-successful geopolitical entity was that of China. amerika likely won't make it to 300 years without causing some sort of holocaust or global calamity. Our current politics will make Vietnam look like a game of retirement community canasta.

Back to the Chinese who persisted for about 1000 years. They led the world in technology. They led the world in exploration. They had rich farmland and an abundance of wealth. 

In the year 1000, China had a population of one-hundred million people--about forty-percent of the two-hundred and fifty million people on the planet. Only twenty-percent of the world's population lived in Europe and only ten-percent lived in the Americas. Another twenty-percent lived in Africa.

No civilization in history has ever surpassed China’s record of technological achievement. They invented paper, printing, movable type, cast iron, the compass, rudders, saddles, trousers, suspension bridges, wheelbarrows, blast furnaces, matches, mechanical clocks, paper money, rockets, and gunpowder.

The Chinese millions were ruled by a small coterie of elite Mandarins. (Not oranges.) The Mandarins then are like our business and political and military Mandarins today. Bezos. trump. musk. etc. It's been estimated that Jeff Bezos makes $2,000,000 an hour, or $50,000,000 a day. 

I'm old enough that I remember when that was considered a lot of money.

In 1945–1973, the top one percent in America captured just 4.9 percent of total U.S. income growth, but in the following two decades the richest one percent gobbled up the majority of U.S. growth. The combined wealth of the richest four hundred Americans now exceeds the total wealth of 185 million of their “fellow” citizens. 

Being outnumbered 185,000,000 to 400 must scare the wealthy. So despite the massive amounts of power these Mandarins, like ours today, had amassed, because they were hugely outnumbered by the masses, they took measures that semiotically remind me of the measures our business leaders use today.

They kept women down in what you might consider very modern ways.

Because tiny feet were considered attractive for women,  around age five, girls would have their feet bound with silk or cotton bandages to deform their bones. The foot would "fold in half as it grew," curling the toes under until the women were knuckle-walking on their feet. A length of three inches was considered ideal. Women wound up with a painful, mincing gait. Or worse, they couldn’t walk at all and had to be carried to their masters’ bedchambers on stretchers. 

I'm sure if you think about it, you can find a modern-day parallel.

Men had it just as bad. Many were castrated and became [non-threatening] servants: Eunuchs.

The victims were held down by grown men or bound to chairs with a hole in the bottom. A surgeon called a “knifer” would smear pepper paste onto their genitals to numb them. Then he made a quick, clean stroke with a curved knife. The penis and testicles were set aside for pickling. 

Many eunuchs carried their "junk" around with them in a "bao purse." They believed if they were buried with their bao when they died, in their afterlife they would be made whole again.

Again, I'm sure if you think about it, you can find a modern-day parallel.

Especially the need to cripple women and remove the cojone threat from men.

Like I said, ouch.

Think of that the next time you're forced to accept all cookies, or agree to Apple's "terms and conditions." (To use iTunes, the App Store, or Apple Music, the terms and conditions are 7,135 words long, roughly fifteen times the length of today's post.)

Today, for some reason, I feel especially gloomy.

As I said, ouch.

Cheap.

Back when I was a puppy in the business and working for a mid-sized IPG agency, I had an ex-partner and friend, I'll call him C, who was very savvy in the way the ad business was run. Savvy or cynical, your pick. They're often closely related.

With another art director, I had sold a fairly large print campaign for a company that was then known as Nabisco foods. They were putting a couple of million dollars in media behind the ads. They appeared regularly in magazines like Redbook, McCalls and Good Housekeeping--those magazines were part of a group of magazines people called "The Seven Sisters." They're all pretty much gone now.

Once the campaign was running, C said to me, "you're cool for this year. The media commission on those ads alone more than pay your salary. Add that to the other work you do and the awards you're winning and you're more than worth what they're paying you."

Forty-one years ago that wasn't a bad ad-industry calculus.

Six years ago, when Ogilvy began its staffing decimation (since that time they've fired a few people virtually every week. They fire people that way so as not to attract the notice of the non-inquisitive trade press. And it's literally a decimation--they probably cut 9/10ths of their workforce) the three other ECDs and the CCO in my firing cohort were all fired by around 10AM on Tuesday, January 14, 2020.

I wasn't fired at that time. I even went to the drunken commiseration parties of my friends, and served to counsel young people in shock that their mentors were gone.

I figured, thinking back to my conversation with C forty years earlier, that I wasn't fired because I was making the agency way more money than I was costing them. 

The president of the New York office and the CEO Emeritus of the entire agency had put me in charge of a new and very difficult client--a client that had the potential to grow into something large and substantial.

If I cost X and was earning the agency (or the holding company XXX) where's the vig an axing me?

When I was finally fired about eight hours after my firing cohort, it hit me, at last and irrevocably, how gone, done and finished the advertising business (or at least Ogilvy) was.

The account I was running was Boeing. 

Their planes kept crashing and our ads needed to reassure the public that their ship was being "righted." From the time of their first crash till January 2020, Boeing's market cap had dropped from $250B to about $80B. They needed the kind of communications help Ogilvy was very good at. Not many agencies were as adept.

All arrogance aside, I'm not sure that there were any writers in the business who could handle the complexity of the issue. And explain it to people in a "Herbert Schmertz" way.

But the holding company world today is like the Oscar Wilde definition of a cynic from "Lady Windemere's Fan." 

Holding companies know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. 

The people who looked at my salary and said, "he is expendable," do not understand and do not care about the skill it takes to handle a tough topic like Boeing was. To them--they who have no understanding, appreciation or even cognizance of creative--they saw only expense. To them, creativity is a line item. If you can cut that line down, your margin is greater.

If you don't care about quality or happy clients or doing a good job or repeat business, anyone can do the job. AI can.

That sort of thinking is akin to having an item on a restaurant's menu called "meat." The category could be met by anything ranging from Kobe beef to roadkill. Since meat is meat is meat, why pay money for anything but roadkill? There's more immediate return in cutting costs. But eventually even Tad's Steaks went out of business.

Today, creative is creative is creative. Good doesn't enter the picture. There is no good, no one in charge could recognize good or cares. There's just done cheap. 

So, in our world today, this

Is better than this:

It cost less. 

And that's all that matters.

 

Fuhgeddabout It.

I knew her as Mrs. Chapin.

Almost 55 years ago, I had an English teacher who I could safely say fairly changed my life.

I had no real parents growing up. Mine were either drunk, drugged or missing. Sometimes all three. And I grew up in a world devoid of love, care, and nurturing. 93% of the time my human contact was a swat in the head or a literal knife to my throat. (The good ones--the ones you had to wash by hand.)

Mrs. Chapin (I would never ever thought of calling her Anne) saw I was bored in school--and troubled. She would give me, in addition to our class' regular reading, a pile of books she demanded I read. She was one of those people who innately understood how hard it is for curious people to stick to a narrow curriculum. She would therefore give me a panoply of books and just say "read these." 

One week I sat alone in the school library while everyone else was going to class. I read John Hersey's "Hiroshima" one day, and John Gunther's "Death Be Not Proud," the next and Richard Wright's "Black Boy" after that. 

Through that belief in me she made me who I am.

Because I listened to her. Because she showed she cared.

Once, Mrs. Chapin was mad at me. I guess I fucking up in school, maybe even in her class, flirting too much with Bev or Robin. 

She wrote me a poem that not-so-gently screamed at me. It had this couplet in it, that I've remembered for more than half a century.

"If praise from me you wish to brook,

Go stick your nose inside a book."

It's safe to say, I adopted that imperative--Go stick your nose inside a book--as my code. It's how I live my life. 

I read all the time--widely and voraciously. While everyone else in the advertising industry seems wholly concerned with pop-culture--and being a part of culture (I haven't really figured out what that means) I look, I think, for deeper meanings and themes. Flattering myself, what Mr. Bernbach called "simple, timeless human truths."

Six and a half years ago, I read this article. I've carried with me ever since. I think its analysis of the power of books is pretty important. Mrs. Chapin would approve.

The author, Brian Morton, led the writing program at Sarah Lawrence College. He introduced me to the notion that reading widely allows you to "time travel."

The whole essay is worth reading, but for me, here are the phrases that pay:

"I think we’d all be better readers if we realized that it isn’t the writer who’s the time traveler. It’s the reader. When we pick up an old novel, we’re not bringing the novelist into our world and deciding whether he or she is enlightened enough to belong here; we’re journeying into the novelist’s world and taking a look around. 

"The difference in perspective, the clarification of who exactly is doing the traveling, might lead to a different kind of reading experience."

Right now, I'm reading the book below by Joel Kotkin. My three word review is "Infuriating and Informative."

I bring all this up because last night I got to this section. Which, like so much else, reminds me of the decline, fall, and absolute collapse of the ad industry. 

Or what was formerly known as the ad industry. Now afflicted and destroyed by "An Age of Mass Amnesia." 

Much of that amnesia is the result of what happens when a culture no longer reads--especially can no longer harken back and learn from the past.

To my old but acute eyes, I'd assert that the ad industry has almost completely forgotten what makes a communication strong, memorable, impactful and valuable. I'd wager, even readers of this blog, haven't absorbed the "Wisdom of Trott."

Or the wisdom of the Ages, as brought to you by my compadre, Rob Schwartz, in his wise substack. Especially his recent piece on Carl Ally.

In short, we've forgotten how to do it. We've forgotten why we do it and why agencies used to be profitable. We've forgotten who in the past can teach us. We've forgotten what advertising can do--how it can impart a brand with importance, meaning and lust-after-ableness.

Below are a few Kotkin passages that led to this screed. If you can do some word substitutions and swap university and students for advertising and creatives, you might get the idea.

Though in the spirit of mass amnesia, forget I said anything.

Maybe the worst of all this can be summed up by this passage from Kotkin:

"We know more and more about less and less. And we specialize in obscure topics of little interest to anyone outside of" ...our industry.

That sounds like an epigram that captures the lunacy of an industry in the thrall of a meaningless award-industrial complex.

When Mark Read fired me and said it was because I harkened back to the eighties, he did worse than highlight my age. He underscored his own backward stupidity, cupidity and myopia. His own amnesia.

We've forgotten how to do it.

We've forgotten why.

That's why we've collapsed. 

Forgetting the past has foreclosed our future.

Wisdom. John Stingley-style.