Take Note.

About twenty years ago, I read Walter Isaacson's book on Albert Einstein. Einstein was one of those people I had heard about my whole life, yet I knew nothing about him. I'm not talking about "knowing" his physics, but something about his development and emergence as a thinker and a scientist appealed to me. I read in Isaacson's book about Einstein's 1912 manuscript titled "On the Special Theory of Relativity."

Some time after that I was down at the Strand bookstore on 12th and Broadway (18-miles of books) and I found a copy as marked-down as a neutrino some moments after the Big Bang.

That was incentive-enough to buy it. Though down at the Strand, I seldom spend more than lunch money on a single volume, this time I went a little nuts.

My ability to comprehend Einstein is about as keen as my ability to understand an Archie comic written in Cuneiform. I can recognize works of genius, but to be honest I can make neither head nor tail of what's happening.

Nonetheless, I spent time with Einstein's book, and I discovered something.

I think there's value to be gained simply by seeing how people puzzle through problems. 

When I was a kid in grade-school and high-school math, teachers always exhorted us to "show our work." To my eyes there's something to be gained from seeing how other people reason even if you don't understand what they're reasoning toward or what it all means.

Something Zen about the journey goes here.

I think you can learn about solving just from being near people and the puzzles they have solved. You can usually spot a certain doggedness and willingness to cross things out. You can usually appreciate the sweat and ardor applied to the problem they were set on solving.

Since I stumbled upon Einstein's 1912 work, I've made a practice of buying other such facsimiles. It's not a mania. But when I see one, I check the sofa for loose change and find a way to usually buy it.

In my lap as I type this sits a moleskine-sized replica of Isaac Newton's college notebook. Again, I don't know what the hell it's doing there or why I ordered it from an esoteric publisher in the UK.

There are two more items like these sitting less-than-an-axe-length away from where I'm typing this.

Johnny von Neumann's plans that led to the first modern computer, the forerunner to the one you're likely reading this post upon.

Parenthetical on Johnny: 

And last, Alan Turing's "Mathematical Theory of ENIGMA Machine." Turing helped break the unbreakable nazi code which might have won the Allies World War II, or at least shortened its duration. This reproduction, like the von Neumann volume and the Newton book is from an English publisher called Kronecker Wallis. 

Kronecker Wallis is a wonderful and strange company. Invariably I order something twice because in my eagerness I press buttons too soon and too often. They always send me a personal note checking on me, making sure I'm not quite as dumb as I look. 

If after reading this, you order something from them, tell 'em George sent you. They'll probably give you a discount, and me, too.

BTW,

If you're interested at all in genius, you might like this book, which I enjoyed on Enrico Fermi. Having married a Jew, Fermi fled from Fascist Italy, landed at Columbia and began, really, the Manhattan Project. After Pearl Harbor, Fermi was classified as an 'enemy alien.' As such, he was not allowed to take the ferry home to New Jersey from Columbia. 

You'd think once you'd won a Nobel Prize you'd be pretty secure about your standing in the intellectual firmament. But I have a feeling physicists are just as insecure as you and I. I remembered, then found this passage. A coda to this post.

Whaaaaaa?

I haven't joined, not even once, the ongoing diatribes about AI-writing. I've never once commented on the nature of the Oxford comma, the use of m-dashes, or the use of millennial-banished words like "moist."

I think all that blather is, well, so much blather. 

What I care about when it comes to writing is good.

Sensible. Add-up-able. Readable. Thoughtful. Euphonious. And honest. 

My belief is simple.

Writing we like acts like people we like.

It makes us smile.
It cares about us.
It tells us the truth.
It has some surprise, some wit, some reward.

Mostly respect.

It doesn't high-falutin' us.

Or talk down to us.
Or talk in a way as to make us feel out-of-place, dumb or inadequate.

Also, it forces us to think.
By being interesting enough to make us pay attention.
And it lets us put things together in our heads.

As Ernst Lubitsch said to Billy Wilder as recounted to Cameron Crowe,
"Let the audience add up two plus two. They'll love you forever."

One of my favorite movies is Alexander Mackendrick's colossal flop "The Sweet Smell of Success," with Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis, written by Clifford Odets, Ernest Lehman and Mackendrick. You can download the script here, for free. Or head over to YouTube and watch the movie for practically free. Read any snippet or watch any clip, and you'll find good, human, seminal writing. Just drop an axe on any page at random. 

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When I'm online--when I'm trying to buy something, or shop for something, or I'm simply curious about something--a different kind of writing assaults my baby blues. Honest to goodness, I don't know what planet it comes from, who or what could possibly have written it and why or how it got approved (how big was the committee) what it's supposed to do and what it's supposed to be selling me.

I suppose this is the kind of obtuse writing that bad creatives and bad clients generate because they think it sounds effete and elevated. They think it sounds like bad poetry. It must be good because only a select few (not idiots like me) can fathom the beauty of its inscrutability and its charms. If common people can get it, it can't possibly be any good. So they obtusify.

Oh.

Most of the writing below leaves me slack-jawed. I find almost every phrase has an insult in it.

Taking my "daily drive to new heights"? My 0-60 in 4-seconds car has been in bumper-to-bumper traffic about 94% of the time I've owned it. Icons that celebrate forever? That sounds like you're selling ashes from a loved-one's cremation. Maybe most disgustingly cloying of all is "drivers like you." Like you know who I am. You wouldn't know a hiccup from a hand-grenade.

This is writing like most writing today.

It no longer speaks person-to-person. 
Rather it speaks buzzword-to-buzzword.

I saw this on LinkedIn a week or so ago. 
From one of the 97 people who have the president title at the 1/10th its size of ten years ago, Ogilvy.

I've been writing for a living for well-over half-a-century.

I have no idea what any of this means or why.

Or worse, what I should do about it.

Frankly, I don't truly know what "strategy & solutions at WPP" means either. I doubt anyone does.

This is typical of the garbage writing we see.
If good writing is good thinking, 
bad writing is bad thinking,
is bad sales,
is bad marketing,
is bad business.

But bad is good enough.

AKA, here comes the bribe.

And a crankcase of kugel.

Every drive? Have you seen Thelma and Louise?

One minute from now is merely dandy.

Climb every mountain.

Yep, paying $85,000 for a car is a breeze.

So, I can't sit in them today?

The signature Black Panel. Where do I sign.

Refined. Redefined. Lost your mind.

 I inspired the world. But I can't get an answer from my wife.

Marine allure. Does Gomer Pyle know?

Wild duets? Make it a three-some and I'll be right over.

Magnetic felines. I prefer radioactive goldfish.

I've been putting off celebrating forever like, forever.

 

That's a fancy way of saying
"we drop 40% of all calls and you can't understand your bill."

Oh.

Take on every challenge. I guess my third-grader will cure cancer.

I thought connections started here.

I'd rather have a shrimp cocktail.

Wait. Top-enterprise technology. Or Top enterprise-technology?

Road map. Make it a GPS and you've got a deal.

You win! Today's buzzword bingo game is over.

Missing Things.

There's a great autobiographical essay by perhaps my favorite writer, Joseph Mitchell, that I copied and pasted onto a word doc that I've been carrying around with me since I first read it almost eleven-and-a-half-years ago. I read it over now and again--probably twice a year. To my old but 20-20 eyes, Mitchell seems to grab a sadness and a feeling, coalesce it and put it on the "page" for the world to consider and think about.

The essay opens this way:

In the fall of 1968, without at first realizing what was happening to me, I began living in the past. These days, when I reflect on this and add up the years that have gone by, I can hardly believe it: I have been living in the past for over twenty years—living mostly in the past, I should say, or living in the past as much as possible.

And now, right away, before I go any further, I must interrupt myself and say that I am not entirely satisfied with the phrase “living in the past” as a description of my way of life—it makes me sound like some kind of sad old recluse—but living in the past is the closest I can come to it; I hope that my meaning will become clearer as I go along.

Before Fred, my closest friend for almost fifty years died around Christmas in 2021, I had shared with him a story by the surpassing writer, I.L. Peretz, called "Bontshe Schweig," or in English, "Bontshe the Silent." Fred was dying and he knew it, but we talked about Peretz's story, which was largely about death anyway.

I suppose today it's rare for men to talk about anything but the current political sump (rhymes with), women, or sports, but the love Fred and I shared for each other was rare. Bontshe ends this way:

Like much of great writing, Mitchell and Peretz, are like those little toys you might have had when you were a kid. They call them lenticulars. When you look at them from one angle, they might show the stars and the moon. Change the plane, and they might reveal the sea and a giant whale. You are involved because you are forced to change your point of view and look again. 

We used to get them with our Cracker Jacks.

I had remarked to Fred that Bontshe, when I was 61, was a different story from the Bontshe I read first when I was 21. I think that is the dynamic that Mitchell is writing about in his essay above. The world, if you're watching, isn't just about the here and now, if you can see, it's about all the phases and moments that went before, all the places you've been, the people you've loved and the things you've enjoyed. It's not just about Tay-Tay getting married in the Garden. 

It's about the first basketball game you ever saw in that place, sitting high in the rafters with your father and watching "Lew Alcindor" of UCLA take apart the Temple University Owl five and, as an eight year old seeing your father wishing he were out there playing and the game itself.

Today in so much of life we have an amped up way of talking about everything.

Our industry is somewhat responsible for this. As is World War II when America had to turn its halcyon production brilliance quickly from tanks and planes and artillery to refrigerators, TV sets and automobiles lest the 16 million soldiers coming home would come home to no jobs and general economic depression.

So, advertising made everything new and must have.

Over the last 30 years or so, this pitch has become more and more fevered. Every quarter must profit more than the quarter before and the hockey-stick growth chart is all ten of our MBA commandments. There's something that comes out almost every day, a person, a song, a game show, an episode, a book, a pronouncement, a war, a tragedy, a love affair that promises to alter the world and our world views in ways never before seen.

Really. 

Is everything really an "experience"? Or is everything merely the victim of hyperbolic hype and frenzied fanfare, because as a people, we are addicted to the rush and can only be sated by an even bigger rush tomorrow, or more accurately, 45-seconds from now?

What I miss most from the world are myriad things I remember from my past. Little things and big things. Things that you can no longer get. Things no one anymore even remembers.

I miss conversations where people weren't scrolling or looking at their phones. I miss Army-Navy stores that smelled of surplus canvas tents and new blue jeans. I miss water coolers with tubes of little paper conical cups next to them, where you could get quenched without sending $5 to the Coca-Cola company and adding yet another plastic bottle to yet another riverbank. I miss bank-books and paystubs that provided a physical-ness to your earnings and the work you worked. I miss seeded rolls and warm rye bread from the bakery down the street. So good that they were half-gone by the time you ran home. I miss events not encumbered by an onslaught of data.

I miss poetry. And when presidents quoted poets not cage fighters. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTuClB9Xh6w

I miss a TV with a dial and five channels or seven. Not one I need to "log into" and pay for three times. Once with my access fees. Once with the data they're stealing. And once with the commercial drivel I'm fed.

I miss a time before everything was an "experience." Where you could eat lunch at a lunch counter and read a good tabloid sports page. I miss the times before I had to "verify" that I'm a human. I could just be one.

Which is what this is all about.

A Declaration of Independence.

This being erev July Fourth, aka Independence Day:

I hold these truths to be self-evident, that I am not "owned" by giant corporations. Neither my data, nor my permission to be marketed to on every device, on every flat surface, at every opportunity, no matter where I am or what I'm doing.

I hold these truths to be self-evident. I do not accept terms and conditions. I refuse to listen to artificial voices driven by artificial intelligence that speak in the first-person singular, that use personal pronouns, that call me by my name. (You don't know me.) I refuse to fall for the ruses of the tech plutocrats when their devices tell me there's a 52.6% chance of .034-inches of rain. They are adding decimals and fractions to appear scientific when they're no more accurate than weather gleaned from moss on a tree, or dew on a toad.

I hold these truths to be self-evident. I do not want every sporting event, every election, every concert, TV show, every-everything co-opted by brands trying to force their way into my wallet. I do not accept telco names or bank names or oil company names on stadia my tax dollars paid for. Further, I do not accept ten minutes of commercials for ten minutes of programming when you've already charged me for access. I do not accept 30-seconds of promo to watch a one-minute YouTube clip. I do not accept the notion that trillionaires are somehow job creators and therefore exempt from paying taxes to the nation that made them trillionaires in the first place.

I hold these truths to be self-evident. I refuse to work for one of the four companies that make up the oligarchy that control the advertising industry. I refuse to accept the depreciation of wages, the disappearance of benefits and the almost total evaporation of job security so people like John Wren, CEO of Omnicom, which fired over 35,000 people this year, can "earn" $70,000,000. ($191,000/day.)

I hold these truths to be self-evident. I will not buy the well-funded lie that AI is as good as human. Like "open-plan" offices a decade ago, AI is a cost-saving effort, it's not science it's money that drives AI-propagation and promotion. Any assertion as to its quality, its speed, its usefulness and its humanity is nothing more than a subterfuge to lower-costs, increase margins and plow more money into the pockets of the plutocratic class.

The holding company powers have refused to respect those with know-how and experience. Though over 34% of the US population is over 50, just 11% of WPP is.

The holding company powers have refused to pay decent wages, with salaries in real dollars lower today than they were 50 years ago.

The holding company powers have refused to embrace fairness. John Wren of WPP earns over 1200 times what the median employee of WPP makes. 

The holding company powers have refused to be candid about their solvency, about their parlous financial state, about the future of those they employ.

The holding company powers have mandated their own wage increases and bonuses while freezing the wages and eliminating bonuses for ordinary employese.

We, therefore, being an independent agency, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of my intentions, do absolve myself from the corrupt and venal cabal that is modern advertising, dissolving all connection between us. (Available for freelance, however.)