Aunt Louise is interred.

Yesterday Uncle Slappy and I walked across the badly manicured grounds of a Jewish cemetery in New Jersey.

We had arrived early, a good 45 minutes before Aunt Louise was to be interred. We visited a gravesite or two and then we walked slowly amid the tombstones to the plot into which Aunt Louise was assigned.

We saw Greenbaums, and Cohens, and Genzers, and Taubs, and Steins, and Applebaums, and a thousand more names.

"It's like looking at your list of Facebook friends, eh boychick," he chided.

I admitted it was.

"It's hard walking through a cemetery," he said "when you're 86."

"It's hard when you're 56," I answered.

"Most of the people buried are younger than I."

"When Mozart was my age," I joked "he was dead for 20 years."

We had made it to Aunt Louise's gravesite before the rest of the family had arrived. There were two unionized gravediggers there setting up four folding chairs under a small canopy. Their arms were tattooed and they nonchalantly completed their ministrations, emphatically standing two shovels into the pile of dirt a backhoe had removed.

Aunt Louise's plain pine box was poised on a cheap super-structure ready to be lowered. We stood at the grave and waited for the others to arrive.

Finally they had. A couple of nieces, one sister and her slightly-retarded spouse, my wife and her brother, and an official from the graveyard.

Uncle Slappy began. He interspersed some traditional Hebrew prayers with some thoughts about Louise. He kept it short and he kept it sincere.

"We all made fun of Louise for the small colorful doilies she crocheted," he said. "We all have dozens of them around the house, in the back of closets and the bottom of sock drawers. She didn't have a lot. She left no money and just a bit of cheap jewelry. But for the rest of our lives, we'll stumble upon those doilies and we'll laugh.

"That's more than most people will leave."

With that the workmen cranked her down and we each shoveled a shovel-full of sandy dirt into the hole. The sound of dirt falling on hollow pine is one of the saddest there is.

We walked back to the car.

Goodbye Aunt Louise.

Uncle Slappy comes up for Aunt Louise's funeral.

Uncle Slappy arrived a couple of hours ago, sans Aunt Sylvie whose feet are swollen, so he can preside over the funeral of Aunt Louise who died Monday afternoon at five. Uncle Slappy, like the rest of us, truth be told, was none too fond of Aunt Louise, but he's a believer that when someone dies, you show up to their funeral. It's that simple, really. Unless you're sick yourself, you show up.

As the Rabbi of Beth Youiz Mywom Mannow, a small Upper East Side congregation for over 50 years, Uncle Slappy has attended more than his share of funerals. He's learned a thing or two about dying along the way.

"I never," he says "beat about the bush. I never use the phony language of antiseptic death. I never say, 'we're laying her to rest.' Or 'she's passed.' That language is room-freshener," he says. "Artificial crap that covers what's real. She's dead," he said, "And I'll say 'she's dead.'"

"The other thing I've learned," he told me as we sat in my small eat-in-kitchen over black coffee and a plate of three rugelach, "The other thing I learned is respect. Even your Aunt Louise, crazy as a man with bees in his beard, matters."

I nodded my head at that.

"They matter. They've made a difference. They count."

"Aunt Louise stayed with us for a week after Hurricane Sandy," I said, "when the power stayed out in Elizabeth for ten days. She fairly drove me crazy."

The old man picked up the final rugelach, broke it in half, then put both pieces in his mouth.

"See if there's anyone you don't drive crazy when you're 86," he said solemnly.

I nodded once again and refilled.

"No one wants to talk about," he said "how Aunt Louise got the way she got. Why she talks to silverware and crochets those asinine doilies."

"We probably have a dozen wafting around the apartment," I said.

"But let me tell you something, boychick. She never hurt anyone. She wasn't a genius. She wasn't the kindest person. But she never hurt anyone."

I had never thought about her like that, but the old man was right.

"I'll be delivering her urology tomorrow," he mangled.

"Ururology?"

"Ok," he serious-upped, "Her eulogy. She never hurt anyone. And that's her sine qua non. She never hurt anyone."

He rinsed his dishes and left for the guest room. Sleeping alone tonight without Aunt Sylvie. And without Aunt Louise.

Far from Cannes.

Lately I’ve been handed something complicated to uncomplicate.

The briefs I’ve been given are long, repetitious and badly organized.

They are written in the excruciating jargon of a field I know nothing about.

And they are all written differently, with no uniformity of approach.

So, I have three things to do at once:

1.     I have to learn the language of the field. Understand.

2.     I have to organize the material in a way that could help a reader. Organize.

3.     I have to simplify things so they can be useful. Simplify.

It’s a thankless task, really. About as far from a glamor assignment as you can get. A long way, in short, from the beach and the cocktails at Cannes.

It seems to me I often get assignments like this.

Complicated.

Due in a short amount of time.

And thankless.

Maybe because I get these assignments I often find myself saying ‘most clients don’t know what they sell or make.’ That’s my spin on the Henry Ford line, “If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”

You have to take assignments like this seriously. They’re very important to clients, because I believe explaining their fundamentals makes you critical to their success. It builds client relationships. I actually think doing them allows you to, eventually, do the sort of work most people fight to do. The kind that could get you to Cannes.

But more often than not, I don’t get those assignments.

I get the uncool “fix-the-boiler-type” jobs.

There the jobs that no one wants to do. The ones that bring in revenue, and in many cases make up probably 80% or more of the work load in a typical agency.

That's the stuff that isn't lauded and celebrated at Cannes.

I'm told that in a corner of the San Antonio Spurs' locker room, there's a small framed sign with a quotation on it from the great social reformer Jacob Riis. The Spurs, without a high-flying superstar player may well be regarded as the greatest sports franchise of our present generation. They've won five National Basketball Association championships in the last 16 years--none of them consecutively. They've been the best, or close to it for a long time.

The sign reads:

“When nothing seems to help, I go back and look at the stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it — but all that had gone before.”

  

Somebody has to do the work I do.

Someone has to hammer at the rock.

Time. Order. Responsibility.

I suppose one of the worst things about being me is my sense of time, order and responsibility. Let's start with time.

In the 40+ years I've been paid--between summer jobs making change in a game room on the boardwalk at Playland to my myriad jobs in advertising, I can count on one hand the number of times I've come in late.

I just can't do it.

Even this morning when I was dealing with some sundry interpersonal mishigoss and the swirl that so often accompanies my spouse, I was terribly nervous about being late. I have a lot to do and I was worried that I would get scowls as I hustled in at 9:06.

Well, 9:06 came and went, and now, 20 minutes later and no one I need is even in yet.

Order is of the same order, solipsistically speaking.

I tend to knock items off my to do list the way the Germans rolled over eastern Europe. I get stuff to do and I do it.

Dilly-dallying is not a part of my modus operandi.

Finally, there's responsibility.

I like to say that I'd run through hell in a gasoline suit to get my work done, to do what's right for the job or assignment.

You can psychoanalyze me if you'd like and criticize me.

I know I should lighten up and take things a little easier on myself.

That's all well and good.

But it's not the way I am.

There are a lot of people in the business--it seems like a full one-third of my Facebook friends--who are in Cannes right now. Mainly it seems like they're there to post pictures saying they're there.

These guys and gals are the advertising winners--a club of which I am no longer a member.

For whatever reason, they are perceived as cool and cutting edged.

There's nothing cool about getting in on time, doing your work, and going home having done a job well.

There's no festival celebrating that.

Hubris.

I just read something in "The New York Times," that Comcast, the universally-despised cable and internet provider is seeking to put its name in lights atop the tallest building in Rockefeller Center, the 770-foot-tall Rockefeller Building designed by Raymond Hood in 1934.

That building for decades had the initials RCA atop. Remember RCA? The Radio Corporation of America? Perhaps I always felt warmly about that sign because my father's first job had been as a copywriter at RCA and until he died he had an old RCA vacuum tube clock-radio in bakelite by the side of his bed.

About 25 years ago, the RCA sign came down and GE's logo went up. And New Yorkers, as they do, slowly accepted the initials of America's second-largest defense contractor and despoiler of the Hudson River (PCBs) lording it over our city like some super-villain in a Batman flick.

Now, Comcast.

I could be wrong about this but I would imagine if you wired most people to a polygraphic graphic reader they would register great disdain and antipathy every time they ever see a Comcast logo. There's a skyscraper hard on the FDR down by South Street with a too-large by half Verizon logo polluting our sight-lines. It makes my blood boil.

Some city landmarks commission or another has to approve the signage change if it's to happen. The prevailing winds say that they will. They approved GE's usurpation 25 years ago and they were ok when MET LIFE went up and Pan Am's logo came down on what New Yorker's of my generation still call the Pan Am building, at 200 Park Avenue.

I think there's an important brand lesson here, maybe the simplest and maybe the most easy to ignore.

Comcast spends probably over $1 billion on advertising every year, but no one likes them. They act like some rich kids you probably grew up with who would invite you to their lavish birthday parties and you'd go because maybe you were all being taken to a Knick's game. You'd go even though you couldn't really stomach the kid. Make yourself likeable before anything.

No one likes Comcast.

And soon their ugly-ass logo will sully our majestic city's skyline.

And we will be reminded around the clock how much we are at the mercy of ugly companies we hate.

Complicated thoughts.

Last night, I was working late. It was long about 10:30 when someone with the word "chief" in his title sat across a table from me.

He began eating his dinner and we had a long-postponed chat.

Like I said, it was late.

And I must admit when it comes to burning the midnight oil, I'd way rather get up at 4AM and jam from 5AM till noon to get my work done than stay until the wee hours. I'm fresher in the morning. I'm faster. And I have all day to reflect and polish what I've done--to dot the i's and cross the t's.

But, as usual, I digress.

What I noticed last night and I've noticed through the years is that creative people who succeed in our business usually are prone to busting their buttons in talking about the business and the work they do and the things they learn.

Too often, I think, too many businesses has become to professionalized and analyticalized. In our powerpointed, Excelled and politically white-washed world we have lost something very important.

We have lost love.

Ardor.

Passion.

Of diving headlong into the work we do.

We have lost spark.

If you're a client, or a creative director, I think the best you can do to get great work is not to critique little things that really are of no material difference to the performance or perception of a communication.

I think the best thing you can do to get great work is to release the passion that's initially in most creative people. It's a passion that usually gets wrung out as things get over-thought and over-picked at.

During the Renaissance there were probably hundreds of painters who had the taste and technical proficiency of, say, Rembrandt. But Rembrandt had a spark.

That's what needs to stay alive.

Camus on advertising.

I've been playing Sisyphus lately.

Pushing a giant boulder up an imposing crag.

Only to have it tumble back upon me.

So I have to start from scratch again.

Camus posited that this is the human, existential condition.

Not bad for a guy who never wrote copy.

It's not freelancing that makes me feel beleaguered.

It's just the way life is some times.

Every time you think some blip of copy gets approved,
it comes back with 47 more changes.

Not changes in material facts.
Not changes that make it better.
Just changes.
As indistinguishable from rational as one raindrop is from another.
But that's life.

It's hard to get over the hump.

There's a lot of crap weighing you down.

There's only one thing you can do about this.

Keep pushing.

"I get the willies..."

I've had quite a time over the last week or so, juggling more than a few demands on my time. To be honest, I've also had a bit of a crisis in confidence--the throes, I suppose, of being the new kid (despite my age) in a bunch of new places, doing a bunch of things, really, without clear direction.

It's amazing what this mixture of circumstances can reduce you to.

The feeling reminds me of a passage from Joseph Heller's great novel "Something Happened," which Heller published in 1974, 13 years after he published "Catch 22."

"I get the willies when I see closed doors. Even at work, where I am doing so well now, the sight of a closed door is sometimes enough to make me dread that something horrible is happening behind it, something that is going to affect me adversely;..."

Right now, and I have the experience to know that the feeling will pass, every work situation feels like I'm a kid trying on a new pair of shoes that don't quite fit. The shoe salesman has me walk across the floor and I wobble as I do so. He wants the sale and says how well they fit, and that they'll soon be 'broken in.' My mother wants to get the fuck out of the store and back to her Metrecal and Demerol and Johnnie Walker.

"They hurt," I say.

"They look fine," my mother bludgeons.

"They pinch," I protest.

"We'll take them," she swats.

That's life, I suppose, as a newly-minted freelancer.

It hurts. But you'll take it. 

One bad day in the Mexican League

I quickly realized I was no Sandy Koufax.

About three months ago I was running along across a loose gravel surface, chasing Whiskey no doubt. The ground was wet, or the surface unstable and I lost my footing. As my old boss used to say, I went ass-over-tea kettle, and tumbled painfully to the ground.

My almost-brand-new quilted jacket was ripped and dirty. My hands were bloodied, my hip was sorely bruised and my right arm was painfully wrenched.

Now, as I said, it's three months later and while my jacket is patched and my hip is well, my arm is still hurting. In fact, even something simple like opening my dresser drawers is painful, as is holding onto the straps on either a subway car or a bus.

My assorted pains, painful as they are, I have to admit wash over me with a sense of warm, rosy nostalgia. They bring me back to my one short season in the Mexican Baseball League in 1975.

While I primarily manned the hot corner, el esquina caliente, for one lost game, late in the season, my strong right wing was called upon to close out the last two innings of a 22-4 blowout.

I had pitched a bit in high school, mostly filling in when our regular arms were sore or tired, and I'd often horse around while on the Saraperos and toss batting practice. But pitching seriously in a game that mattered--or was at least close to mattering--was something that eluded me.

I entered the game, down 13-2, with a mixture of trepidation and anticipation. Though this was merely mop-up duty, the team was using me to spare using a real arm in what was deemed a lost cause, I was scared I'd have the crap knocked out of me.

That said, I was hopeful, too. For whatever reason, I fantasized that my modest assortment of fastballs and a half-way wily slider would somehow have become elevated through the years to professional grade. Against all logic and common sense, I was hoping that due to some intervention of divine power that I had magically become the next Sandy Koufax, the ultimate baseball hero to every Jew who's ever laced up a pair of spikes.

I quickly realized I was no Sandy Koufax. I might not even have been Mandy Koufax, Sandy's little sister.

It's lonely on a pitcher's mound when you're 17, in a foreign land where you scarcely speak the lingo and you're surrounded by seven or eight thousand relatively hostile and drunk fans, if that's not being redundant.

I promptly plunked the first batter I faced in the ribs, my mediocre fastball running in on him. The second batter fairly tore the cover off my best slider. He was in at second standing up while base-runner number one scored on a play at the plate. Quickly I was down by another run.

The rest passes in a blur. I don't remember who I faced and what I threw. I do remember, perhaps the opposition got winded from running the bases, that somehow I got out of the inning without giving up more than an additional 20 or 30 runs.

Though I had been asked to garner the final six outs of the contest, after my inning's debacle, my manager, Hector Quesadilla, mercifully yanked me out of the game. My right arm after my one inning's work throbbed like a porn flick.

I think my line for the day was like this:
IP    BB    HBP    H      R       ER        K        ERA
1      0        2        8      8        6           1         54.00

What I learned back then is something I am living today as I try to make a life as a moderately well-paid freelancer.

Every once in a while you're called upon to step and take center stage. You're not always ready for the job, you can't always perform as you're asked. But nevertheless, you go out, rub some dirt on your pants and do as well as you can.

My arm hurts just thinking about it.

In praise of repetition.

After about twenty years of hearing that all traditional media is dead and seeing all new media flounder (despite new media's hype) I'm coming to the conclusion that in our headlong embrace of Integrated Marketing Communications starting about 20 years ago, we've over-looked something absolutely seminal.

That is repetition.

Repetition.

Repeating yourself.

Having the same message in 99 different channels is not the same thing as repeating your message 99 times in one channel.

Another, perhaps caustic, way of phrasing this belief is this: There are no short-cuts.

In other words, if you want to make an impression, you have to buy an impression. For every viral hit, there are billions of videos that have no audience.

If you want to make an impression, do something impressive. And air it.

I don't think there's any media magic that can overcome that logic.