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.

Priest. And Desist.

Because I read widely and voraciously, and without supervision, or even people to discuss things with, I probably arrive at a lot of stupid conclusions. A result of my limited knowledge, limited intelligence and leaps of logic. That's ok. Sometimes the best starts are false starts. And at least I'm not merely parroting things I've heard some talking head somewhere say.

Lately I've been thinking about language and literacy. I'm thinking about it because in the era of AI, or Quantum, or whatever we want to call it next, the only people the potentates of government and industry will consider literate, or intelligent, are those who can read, write and think in AI.

I suppose we used to say that about HTML. Or English. Or before that, Latin or Greek, Mandarin or Aramaic.

From a long-history point of view, humankind, from our earliest permanent settlements about 12,000 years ago, has always had a priestly caste.

These are people, usually, who can see things, read things, understand things, decipher things that ordinary people can't. Again, 12,000 years ago, they might have been able to tell the populace what a red star in the skies meant, or a two-headed fish, or a white raven. These things were signs that resonated and had to be explained. Often they were used as metaphors for larger predictions. Like the Roman emperors who saw a cross in the sky and quickly said, "In Hoc Signo Vinces." 

In this sign, we will conquer.

We've always had people who could compel us to believe in the power of what they could see and we couldn't. When I was a little boy, Robert McNamara, JFK and LBJ's Secretary of Defense, was able to look at rows of numbers and convince us that we were winning in Vietnam.

The priestly caste is alive and well. 

Today, many of them live in Silicon Valley, have private jets and islands and are helping ru(i)n the country. Their names are Thiel, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, Ellison, Cook.

They're priests.

They have the ear of the gods (technology) and can propitiate the gods--that is, placate them, because they have access to the gods that those of us not in the priestly caste don't.

From their digital pulpits they give their Sermons on the Mount. Their views that they in their enlightenment have and you in your darkness are too dumb to see.

The world has always been led by Priestly classes who have and keep power because they can read languages the rest of us can't. In most of Europe until the Reformation, or the King James Bible, or the Enlightenment, the word of god, the preaching of god was only available to the masses (that's you and me) through priests as conduits. The Christian Bible was written in Latin. And only priests and a few learned people could read Latin. That extra knowledge is how priests stay in power.  The minute knowledge becomes "democratized" they change what knowledge is important.

It's how the priests and the elite stay above the people. Like a banker at Goldman Sachs or a wily baseball coach. They know what moves to make because they see things we can't.

Right now, AI is the language of the gods. It's the language that will reveal the future and make it.

We know this because the people who invented AI tell us this about ten-thousand times a day. In advertising, data is the language of the gods. The few people and agencies who can read the future in the entrails of binary code will win the big pieces of business and become the head of a holding company.

But...Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Or Quis custodiet ipsos datades? Who will guard the data?

False gods, prophets, leaders always have and always will be with us. The tablets from on high, Mao's Red Book, the Ten Commandments, the Tweets of rump, will be as off as often as they're on.

The uniforms change. The teams really don't.

A lot of people ask me about AI. I was involved in it early on, participating heavily in the launch of IBM Watson. I derive most of my not inconsiderable income from companies selling or using AI. Since those heady IBM/Ogilvy days when it looked like conquering cancer, cleaning air, stopping crime etc etc were just around the corner, new and smarter AIs have been introduced by new and smarter priests. Deep Seek. ("That's not funny, it's seek.")

We're told how great it's all going to be, usually accompanied by a warning that AI could displace us and in some metaphorical way "eat our heads."

When people tell me this, how X will improve Y, how AI will make customer service better and AI-enabled chatbots will ease getting my cable-bill reduced and streamline everything I do (the same sort of things advertising people say about data) I usually get a glassy look on my face. Like Phyllis Diller about twelve-minutes after rigor-mortis takes hold.

Why haven't I seen it, I ask.
Why does everything suck?
Why, never in my life, have I never gotten the right message at the right time right how I want it?

If it's all so splendid, where the fuck is it.

Then I ask the priests, where's the EZ-Pass effect from AI? When EZ-Pass took hold, I kept no more change in my car's ash-tray, no more waiting at toll-booths, no more delays. It made things faster in reality, not just in promise.

Priests, if you're out there, where's mine?

I hear about seamless experiences.
I hear about my needs being anticipated and met before I realize I have a need.
I hear about a veritable heaven on earth.

You get that inside information and have told me so.

Just like Armageddon, or the Elysian Fields, or Valhalla, or tip-toeing through the tulips. It's all gonna be great--any day now.

This is not to say that all priests are false prophets or that no good has come from AI and other advanced technologies. In fact we need advanced tech to help us overcome the problems of advanced tech. And some people, I suppose, spread truth, light and joy--though I suppose all prophets are false prophets to someone. As Jagger pointed out, Every cop is a criminal/And all the sinners saints. Most things good/bad/peanut butter/jelly are open to interpretation.

But look before you leap and leap before you look.

Clip 'n Save (yourself).

Lou Dorfsman's Wall.

I'm not sure anyone today in what's left of the ad industry has any recollection of who Lou Dorfsman was or even why they should know his name. Today we seem to abnegate the heroes of our past. It's not just the holding companies who throw out talent, experience and wisdom along with the salaries they no longer want to pay. I think many of the trend-chasing ad schools do the same. It seems to me, last year's awards are studied--not the very foundations of great advertising, design, art direction and writing.

I'm sure there are filmmakers who have never seen Welles' Citizen Kane or Touch of Evil. There are more who have never seen anything by Jean Renoir--a director who has four or twelve films on most lists of the greatest movies ever, including Boudu Saved from Drowning, A Day in the Country, The Grand Illusion, The Lower Depths, La Bete Humanite, The Rules of the Game and The River. Or my favorite director--who no one knows anymore, Preston Sturges, whose eight hits in six years are among the greatest comedies ever made. They include, Christmas in July, The Great McGinty, Miracle at Morgan's Creek, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, Unfaithfully Yours and a commercial failure The Sin of Harold Diddlebock which starts with the greatest 25 minutes in American movie history.

In much the same way, no one knows Lou Dorfsman today. Though in my day, Hall-of-Fame art directors like Mike Tesch cut their teeth working at CBS for Dorfsman.

One of the reasons my wife, Laura and I traveled up to the Hudson Valley on Laura' birthday weekend was to see "Lou's Wall, his "GastrotypographicalAssemblage," which after it was discarded by CBS (who had commissioned it) was tossed into the trash.

Below are some bits from Lou Dorfsman's 40-year at CBS, including a five minute film on his wall and its rescue. Below that thirty or so of my lousy photos of the wall.

The trip from New York City to the wall takes about 90 minutes. You can even take the train to Poughkeepsie and a ten minute uber to the Culinary Institute's campus. There are nice people there who will walk you over to see the wall. Then, if you have reservations, you can eat in one of the CIA's great restaurants. When you're done eating and belching, you can stop by the Craig Claiborne bookstore and choose from their selection of 91 lemon-zesters or 47 garlic presses. Then you can find a place to stay overnight or take the train back to Grand Central Terminal.

Either way, you'll be well-fed, well-stimulated, and well-inspired. And remember, the artist does not weigh his clay.

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