Modern Yiddish Curses for the A.I. Era of Advertising.

Thanks to Rob Schwartz for inspiring both this post and for adding
a couple of adroit curses below.

Music to read by. Ella tears your heart.

1. May you do with the utmost efficiency that which should not be done at all.

2. All your hallucinations, may they come true, and be like a chandelier--hanging all day and burning all night.

3. May you grow like a holding company ad agency, that is, may you shrink.

4. May your CCOs win every creative award at Cannes and you lose every piece of real business you have.

5. May a Woodstock attendee hallucinate less than your AI platform. 

6. May you win an account selling slop just when your AI stops producing it.

7. May your virtual assistant make hundreds of real mistakes.

8. May your technology outstrip your humanity and may you be able to re-boot neither.

9. May you have answers to questions that are never asked and questions about things that are never answered.

10. May the timesheet police of happiness punish you for being late by making you watch HR-compliance videos.

11. May you win accounts promoting branches of the government that teeter on the edge of fascism, and may their funding run out when you've finished the work but before they pay their bills.

12. May all the people judging your ads have lots of opinions and little taste.

13. May senior management return from Cannes more eager than ever to make an 'impact.'

14. May you only be judged by the work other people don't steal credit for.

15. May you wake up one morning and hear Martin Sorrell calling you "Shorty," and Mark Read calling you "Smiley."

16. May a technologist take over your holding company and may she actually believe her own PR.

17. May your holding company's senior executives grant themselves ten-digit compensation packages then blame the parlous condition of their agency on their business model.

18. May your "hot-desk" cause third-degree crotch burns.

19. May the all-white, all-male, all-Oxbridge, all over-50 management at your holding company lecture you for 23-hours a day on diversity. 

20. During the 24th hour may you have to eat agency catering.

Thanks to Martin Galton for the uncanny drawing of me.
In a good mood.

A Walk Through New York.

Edward Albee called Thornton Wilder's play "Our Town," the greatest of all a-merry-kan-kan plays. While I'll admit to knowing nothing, my conventional wisdom would give that moniker to something by O'Neill or Arthur Miller or maybe even Albee himself.

Last week, back in the City of Broad Wallets, I had various appointments around town. As a consequence, I walked over 17,000 bone-aching steps, my arthritic hip howling like a politician missing out on some payola.

There's this early passage from Our Town that I thought about yesterday as I walked through My Town, listening to this by Nino Rota from a Fellini movie, Il Bidone on my iPod accentuated my melancholy. Nino Rota's music mixes so many emotions in just a few bars. This is bar-hopping at its best.

I remembered this from Our Town. I had a decades-long idee fixe on Thornton about half-a-century ago.

Jane Crofut

The Crofut Farm
Grover's Corners
Sutton County

New Hampshire
United States of America
North America
Western Hemisphere
the Earth

the Solar System

the Mind of God

New York, as always, is under construction. As my father used to quip when I was a boy, "New York's will be a great place to live if they ever finish it."

That's still funny today. Every street is being dug up. Every building is under scaffolding. Every dream is a dead end.

Within my upper east side neighborhood, every tenement building (these are Jacob Riis improved tenements) built between 1880-1910 is being razed and a 44-story limestone rectangle, financed by the Rockefeller Realty Trust is going up in their place.

The tenements they're tearing down by the dozens are "sanitary" tenements. They were built in response to the rickety dwellings Riis wrote about in "How the Other Half Lives," in which many apartments had no windows and roughly 25 people would share a single cold-water privy. You know, conditions like you'd find in a New York ad-agency today.

I began writing this as I walked, listening to the melancholy of Rota. 

Living in New York is like living on a film set. Elaborate constructions are made, only to be torn down and thrown away by the end of the day. The city itself is like a picnic blanket with too many crumbs. Before long it's shaken out, the crumbs scatter to the winds and we start all over again. At least the ants are happy.

When I moved to the Upper East, though it was already 1980, the neighborhood was still influenced by the Hungarian revolution against Stalinism which occurred in 1956 and the waves of Hungarians who emigrated thereafter.

As a consequence, there were half a dozen restaurants within a spaetzel's throw from my apartment that were named "The Red Tulip," or "Csarda" or "Mocca." Hungarian places with chicken paprikas that made sense of a disorderly universe.

Today, and for twenty years now, all those places are long gone. What set this post off was seeing remnants one of those Hungarians torn-down and now replaced by a Brazilian grocery store. There were no Brazilian grocery stores back in 1980.

New York makes you realize how nothing stays the same. Germantown--what they used to call my neighborhood the last time Hitler was in vogue--is flux. The waiters in Old Heidelberg are Mexicans now--but they still wear lederhosen.

Mexicans in lederhosen.

Coming from a blue-eyed Russian Jew with a German last name born on the Feast Day of the Immaculate Conception, those three words show when the world works.

That's what the maggot movement can't understand.

But that's what matters.

Mexicans in lederhosen.

People living together.
Sharing by proximity.
Elbows sharp and out.
Living, learning, loving, laughing, leaving and beginning again.

That's New York.

Not My Type.

In the 45 years since I started getting paid to sit behind a typewriter, I've rarely taken time out of my almost invariably busy days and done something strictly for myself--more specifically for what passes for what's left of my mind.

Of course, I left early for a dentist, or for a parent-teacher conference, or for some other obligation that needed my attention. Once, when I was young, my art director and I snuck out of work--furtively of course--before a client meeting.

We bought some sandwiches and beer and went to the movies near our client's office. We saw the Tom Cruise celebration of macho testosterone "Top Gun." Accordingly, C. (my partner) started calling me "Querty." I called him "T-Square." Those were our test pilot nicknames. At one point in the meeting presenting work, C got heated. I said sotto voce to him, "Pull back T-Square." Forty years on, we still laugh about it.

Yesterday, I got an email inviting me to attend a Zoom lecture from Cooper Union, the great, munificent college in the center of Greenwich Village. Abraham Lincoln as a presidential candidate gave a campaign speech there affirming all the things today's candidates spend their speeches negating.

Yesterday's lecture was called "Type Tourist," and was by David Quay. 

Of course at the outset, I was doing two things at once and I read the description wrong. I thought I'd be seeing "found typography" from around New York City. I had hoped it would scratch my nostos algia itch. Instead, it helped me look at the beauty around us that, because we're so frantic so often we so frequently ignore.

Quay is a type-designer and Quay's extemporaneous talk was a chronicle of his travels around Europe and the type he sees along the way. You should watch the video. You can find it here.

Here are just a few of the images I grabbed from Quay's talk. My friend and ex-partner from O, S, is a typographer by training, and I captured 77-percent of the images to share with him. The things friends do for friends. Or lonely people do to be less lonely.

I can't help but be cynical about the world today and how trillionaire humanoids and their willing corporate executioners are bludgeoning us with propaganda about the pattern-matching mechanism they call artificial intelligence. 

I'm ok with their use of the word artificial. I take exception with intelligence. AI has no taste, judgment, discernment, randomness, entropic connectivity and serendipitic generative ability. 

AI typically contains around 50-60% intelligence and 40-50% other ingredients. Slop. Cliché. Bland. Vapid. Banality.

A "Processed cheese food product" is not cheese, though people call it cheese and eat it as cheese. In fact, for decades Cheez Whiz couldn't put the word cheese in its name. It didn't have enough real cheese. Like the Froot Loops people couldn't use the word fruit. I wonder if Artificial Intelligence should be mandated to call itself Artificial Insmelligence, or Artificial Untelligence, or Artificial Wetellonyou, so we don't mistake its fauxness for something real.

But fake is real today.

As Brandy Shillace writes in her Wall Street Journal review of Angus Fletcher's book, "Primal Intelligence: You Are Smarter than You Know":

That is, AI is fine for things mathematical or to determine the blast radius and killing power of explosives. Or to summarize other summaries. 

I don't want it "telling me a story," or trying to entertain or teach me. I don't want it surveilling me or my neighbors or people I share the planet with. I don't want it making decisions based on what it thinks I want to hear or, more pointedly, what it wants to sell me, tell me, fell me or smell me.

When I finally emerged from my office, and had a brief moment to talk to my wife, I tried playing her the video of Quay's lecture that I've linked to and pasted above.

All you need to do now is hold two opposing thoughts in your mind.

Every image Quay showed showed something individual, unique, quirky and human. Every bit of type had a bit of human corpuscle in it. Corpuscle not corporate-pus-all.

The AI-generated type that was appended onto the video of Quay's talk was about 70-percent accurate and 30-percent horrendous typos, mis-hearings and bad articulations. If your child handed in a school paper that was similarly slapdash, they'd get an A-. (The lowest grade you can get in our modern educational system.)

The subject-object chasm or abyss (it is so much more than a split) between the purported "intelligence" of AI and its actual performance of the day-to-day is absolutely staggering.

One is meant to be representative of Archimedes, Newton or Leonardo--"thousand-year minds." The reality is a sloppy adolescent with no particular skill. A "thousand-second mind."

Of course, talk to text is not the sole arbiter of the "intelligence" of AI. But we're 15 years into the technology. 15 years into the ostensible horizon of "super-intelligence" where human woes, and indeed human work will be conquered. Should it still be sucking so bad? I feel like it transcribes like I did in 9th-grade Spanish language-lab.

[It brings to my mind an un-findable Abbott and Costello-ism. Someone says to Costello, "Buenos noches." He replies, "Two old snowshoes to you, too."

Six months ago, I wrote this. 

My personal, nasty, growly, hard-to-work-with "i" says it's worth reprinting.

The Funny Thing is the Word Principles.

I grew up hearing a bit of apocrypha about Frederick Winslow Taylor, the first industrial scientist. He examined how modern factory work could be made more productive. 

The story went that Taylor suggested changing the lighting on factory floors every few weeks. It didn’t matter if you made visibility better or worse. Productivity improved regardless of what was done because workers thought management, in adjusting the lighting, was paying attention and therefore cared.

Similar thinking goes into agency decks. The last 77-pages are never considered but agencies are required to present 164-page decks to show they care.

Last week, I was in Manhattan for a dental appointment and an appointment with my eye doctor.

As is de rigueur today, I almost immediately got a text from my dentist asking me to rate my dental experience.

I didn't have a dental experience, by the way. I went to the dentist. Calling a dentist visit an experience is like calling being fired right-sized. It's antiseptic pablum designed for the anesthetized.

I happen to believe that such requests for feedback don't change actual service or how you receive treatment. They are performative gestures that have nothing behind them. Like a psych experiment where you're supposed to zap someone you can't see for saying something wrong. We're testing our ability to inflict pain and follow orders, nothing more.

We are in a Milgram experiment. We have no choice but to enjoy the shocks.

Pssst. Every ad is annoying or not interesting.
And seen too often. But we only pretend to care.

For the past two months "The Wall Street Journal" has been inundating my LinkedIn feed with a commercial that from its opening frame makes my skin crawl. As quickly as I can, I go to whatever drop-down menu I'm offered and click to make it so I'll never see the ad again. I'm even asked why I find the ad so ugly, barbaric and irksome. Nevertheless, about ten minutes later, I'm served the same ad again.

Milgram experiment. 

Milgram experiment

My sense is that about 97% of business, Human Resources departments, 360-performance reviews, are like the carbon molecules that exploded from the Big Bang 11 billion years ago. They hurdle through the cosmos, bounce off of myriad objects and are of absolutely no consequence whatsoever. 

Milgram experiment.

How many times have you not gotten help from a phone call, or worse, a chatbot, and the interaction--where you got no satisfaction--ends with the humanoid asking you "is there anything else I can help you with."

If you answer, "you didn't help me," you spiral into a doom loop of their not-understanding because we, as victims of corporate ignoring, as supposed to be appreciative of being treated like crap.

All these surveys, all the synthetic glad-handing and laminated signs that say "thank you for your business," are as phony as processed cheese food. 

Milgram experiment.

The way to care is to work hard and show you care. It's to listen. To be responsive. To make changes where necessary.

Once I was in an expensive hotel in Kansas City. My room wasn't ready till after six. Since I wouldn't be back until 10PM, I asked that my bag be brought up when my room was ready. It wasn't. What's more, an interior door doorknob fell off in my hand as I tried to open the door. 

I said to the clerk as I checked out the next morning that I would never stay at this hotel chain again. His recompense was to offer me points for the chain I said I'd never stay in. Seven years later, I get a monthly email from the chain apprising me of my points and how I can use them.

They're testing you. They're seeing how much bushwa they can inflict before you throw your Mac (and everything else) out the window.

This is how business is done today.

Is there anything else I can help you with?