Johnnie Friendly and fighting back.

There's a lot of crap in the world.

And when it comes to handling that crap, there aren't a lot of people you can learn from.

One person I learned from, more from his writing and his movies than from having met him a couple times, was Budd Schulberg, the screenwriter of "On the Waterfront."

I happen to think it's one of the best things ever written.

I met Schulberg when I was getting my Master's degree in English at Columbia. I was doing original research and somehow my Byzantine research trail led to Schulberg. I went down to Grand Central Terminal where they had a giant room filled with literally hundreds of various phonebooks. In about an hour I found his number in the Suffolk county white pages.

Somehow I screwed up my courage and called him.

I was 21.

He answered the phone and we arranged to meet in the city. He took me to dinner where we talked for two hours. Then he took me to an off-Broadway play he was somehow involved in. We had a drink or two afterwards.

And we had a few phone calls after that as I worked on my thesis.

But back to "On the Waterfront," and like I said, crap.

Everybody, or most everybody, freelance or staff, has a Johnny Friendly or two in their lives. Someone bossing them around, making them feel small. Someone taking eleven cents of soul from every dime you earn.

Maybe it's just in the movies where you can stand up to them. Maybe you never really get to in real life. And maybe if you do, you almost get beaten to death by Johnnie Friendly and his mugs, including one "Two Ton" Tony Galento, who was featured in the scene above.

Like I said, there's a lot of crap you have to deal with in life.

And you can't always sock people in the jaw, even if "you wuz gonna be the next Billy Conn."

That said, rather than reading something dumb on Buzzfeed, or even this blog, you'd probably be well-served watching that clip above every 30 days or so.

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BTW, you might spot Fred Gwynne at the 2:40 mark. He worked at J. Walter Thompson before he chased down his dream of being a Thespian.

Andre Nadeau and the Black Dog.

The best baseball player I ever played with was a guy called Andre Nadeau. He was 20 and I was a big 15-year-old when I played in a summer league with him up in New Hampshire.

I was playing catcher in those days, a tribute to my size and to my brick-like hands that prevented me from really excelling in the field. Besides, the team I was on was short a catcher, so they stuck me there. They wanted my bat in the lineup.

Andre was a pitcher and as fast as he was wild. These were the flannel uniform days before radar guns, but I'm sure he threw in the mid-90s. Like a Ryne Duren (look him up) when he did get in the groove and was able to throw the pill over the dish (perhaps during those rare times when he wasn't high) he was all but unhittable.

Andre had come back from Vietnam as a heroin addict. We all suspected it then but no one knew exactly for sure. In any event, he kept to himself, never having a thing to do with anyone on the team, including me, his catcher.

On the rare occasion when I would head out to the hill to calm him down if he was wild, he would merely ignore me or stare into the dirt. More likely, he was apt to tell me to shut the fuck up, an appropriate imprecation to a 15-year-old, especially one who was feeling his oats as I was, playing on a team of college kids.

About midway through the season the manager of the team got wise to Andre's drug use and he was kicked off the team. I think they threatened to call the cops. Guys had been kicked off before, mostly for smoking pot, and I figured that would be the last I'd see of Andre.

But a couple years later in what was then the Wild West of 1970s New York, I saw Andre strung out on a subway platform of the Number 1 line on Broadway and 50th Street. He was long-haired and bearded and wrapped in rags and shrouded in an old green Army blanket he must have gotten from a shelter. He probably smelled like cheap wine and dirt and sweat.

"Andre, man," I said to him.

He didn't recognize me.

That was it. A train had pulled in to the stop and I was on my way to a class I've forgotten up at Columbia and I didn't want to miss it.

That was the last I saw or heard of Andre Nadeau.

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Lately, maybe it's some nettlesome vagary at work, maybe it's that I've been bitten by a ferocious Black Dog, I've been thinking about Andre.

About a guy dead to rights at 21 or 22.

Maybe I've been thinking about loneliness and feeling un- or under-appreciated.  You know, I suppose that happens to the best of us. Periods where we feel so estranged and detached from our fellow man that we might as well be shrouded in an old green Army blanket and doped out on the subway.

I resigned from life yesterday.

I was pissed about shit. No need to explain here.

Angry at myself for being in the employment situation I'm in. Again no need to explain.

Angry at the world, really. There's so much to be angry about.

A bunch of people reached out to me over the last 24-hours, my older daughter with her wisdom of the ages, Keith, Andrew, my dear friend Terry in New Zealand, Julian, my soul-mate Rich, and more than a few people I've never even met.

They've made me, at least for now, reconsider my rashness. I've always been rash. Another thing that's hard to be these days. We're supposed to NOT be feeling and emotional. We're supposed to tut tut politely instead of howl at the moon. Tutting good. Howling bad.

So, I'm writing for now.

Cautiously, maybe. I'm not throwing any spears in the direction of anyone. In the words of Fats Waller, "I"m not giving my right name."

I'm writing because writing is what I do and it's who I am.

Writing keeps me sustained if not sane. I need it. I am compelled by it.

So I'm sorry if yesterday I said fuck you and quit. I'm not a quitter. I don't don't have anything to say. And I refuse to let them rip out my tongue.

At least for now, I'll keep trying.

The reason I say good-bye.

On Saturday night I went to Shakespeare in the Park--a special performance that was about one-third the Bard and two-thirds community outreach.

Before the performance, Oscar Eustice, the heir to Joseph Papp spoke. As did New York's new mayor, Bill DiBlasio. They spoke of the non-elitist, egalitarian nature of the theater, how it represented the true spirit of liberal New York. They thanked various pre-schools for helping to supply young talent. They thanked the Domestic Workers Union who added also to the cast. They thanked everyone in creation, it seemed for the diverse and color-blind interpretation of Shakespeare.

Then they put a knife in it.

They thanked their sponsors.

Including Bank of America.

You know, the bank that foreclosed on millions of mortgages and nearly brought down the global financial system. The bank that was just fined $17 billion for those crimes.

Of course I booed.

I hate Bank of America. They are the "Malefactors of Great Wealth" that Theodore Roosevelt warned us about. (People heard him 100 years ago. They are deaf today.)

My daughter turned to me when I booed and said, "If you don't approve of Bank of America, stay home."

I thought about all those super-patriots who used to spout "America. Love it or Leave it." As if protest and amendment were somehow un-American (this from a nation founded on protest.)

My daughter hurt me. I felt cut, censored and tongue-tied.

Then yesterday at lunch I noticed that the napkins in the company cafeteria are from the Georgia-Pacific Company. Owned by the radical right Koch Brothers. Heirs to the founder of the John Birch Society and against everything I am for.

What, now I can't take napkins in the cafeteria.

Both incidents made me feel beaten.

The system of powerful moneyed interests have so taken over our lives that we are rendered mute.

Of course, without mentioning names, agencies or anything else, because I can't, shit went down at work that appalls me.

I can't say anything.

I can't do anything.

I'm not even allowed to think without being excoriated.

People will say I'm negative, angry. You name it.

A blog is only worth writing if, in my opinion, you can be honest. Utterly honest.

I don't feel I can be.

I feel they have robbed me of my voice.

Good-bye.

For about the last three weeks, the "Blogger" program has not been working properly when I open it with Chrome. To write my daily dose of drivel, I've had to stroll over to Firefox and post from there.

I think perhaps Chrome is trying to tell me something.

I'm tapped out.

I think I have nothing left to say.

It's been a good run. Nearly 4000 posts.

Along the way, I've introduced the world to my Uncle Slappy, to the Tempus Fugit, my one fractured season in the Mexican Baseball League and I've even, now and again, written about advertising.

But I think I'm done.

The ideas aren't coming.

And frankly, since I'm freelancing now, I'm fearful of pissing people off, losing a job and the money that goes with it.

So, I'm hanging up my cleats for now.

I think this is sufficient.

I've had enough.

Office pre-7.

I have a lot to do right now and so I got in this morning well before seven.

The building security guys, each of whom seem NFL-sized, have nothing to do. A workman walks by pushing a three-level cart loaded with tools and a tall blue ladder attached to one end. He cachunks over the floor tiles.

The only other sound is the hiss of the white noise system. You don't hear the white noise during the day when the place is a hubbub. Now, it's doing its job, filtering. But when it's noisy about the agency, it's noisy. You can hardly hear yourself think.

The sun pours in through the north-facing windows not far from the table I sit at. It looks like a beautiful day--at this point the temperature is cool and the sky is devoid of clouds except for thin strips of cirrus on the horizon on the Jersey side above the Palisades.

Occasionally there is the glint of a helicopter in the sky, making its way over the Hudson to places east, either Laguardia or perhaps the Hamptons, bringing one of the .001 percent back to Wall Street from a weekend at the beach.

It's quiet. I have my headphones in, listening the Maria Callas--perhaps the greatest voice ever.

I have work to do, and nothing to say right now.

It's just before 7.

Friday. And thoughts of Mammon.

Since the beginning of humanity we've always chased things that we can never quite touch.

Maybe, the bones of a Saint. A splinter from the True Cross. Or the Holy Grail.

Maybe we were chasing a perpetual motion machine. Or looking to turn lead into gold.

Not long ago, it was flying cars and colonies on the stars.

Yup.

We chase after illusions.

Doing so is as human as flatulence.

For the last 15 or 20 years, we've lusted after the killer app.

The one thing that will change everything.

It's the path to riches beyond our wildest dreams.

Marketers look for it. They have entire departments of powerpoint creators writing incomprehensible drivel about it. Agencies do the same, matching the most prolific MBA powerpoint page for powerpoint page.

The worst, of course, is the aristocracy of the world. The great Guru Class. The spouters, the poseurs, the do-nothing anointed who ride their soaring cipher to fame and riches. That their proclamations are banal, trite and facile, it doesn't matter. They supply and feed the great cliche machine that keeps the whole bullshitocracy going.

There is a killer app.

If you're a client, do something different. Do something better. It's really that simple. It works time and again. Samsung is doing well, as are Tesla and Chipotle and HBO, because they make something cool that people want.

If you're an agency, do work that gets noticed, that's disruptive and inspiring.

We all look for the magic potion, the fairy dust, the sorcerer's stone, the hand of god or something cosmic--the stars, maybe--that have all the answers, that will give us an EZ-Pass to Mammon.

I happen to believe that it's there.

It's only ephemeral or hard to reach because it takes work to reach it.

Sprint and the demise of advertising.

A lot of people, at least a lot of people in my circles, have been flapping their gums about Sprint firing its agency and, more specifically, the failure of $800 million in advertising to move the Sprint brand forward.

They're crowing, a lot of these people. "See," they proclaim, loudly and proudly, "this is proof that advertising is dead." That even nearly one-billion dollars of the stuff can't save Sprint from doom--either being subsumed by another Telco or flushed into oblivion.

A decade ago I worked at the agency that handled the Sprint account. As I was then considered a very smart guy (I'm no longer considered smart. Just opinionated and loud.) I was asked not to work on Sprint, but to attend one meeting with some important Sprint people and to talk--somewhat extemporaneously about successful brand transformations.

Accordingly, I read, and I re-read yesterday, the agency's deck on the decline and fall of Sprint.

1. Their messages were mixed
2. They can't win the price war
3. They don't stand for anything--there's nothing to believe in

Those were and are the maladies affecting the Sprint brand. They weren't solved by James Earl Jones or the Frobisons.

They weren't solved by special pricing.

As Gertrude Stein was purported to say about Oakland, "there's no there there."

There's also no there when it comes to Sprint.

It's not that Advertising (capital A) has failed. Their advertising has.

And one other thing, and I think, in part, this is being proved by the slight revitalization of the American auto industry.

Sprint can succeed if they make a better product.

They're me too now and that ain't good enough.

Buick came back, not because their ads got less sucky, but because their cars did.

If Sprint decides to act like the Nordstrom's of telcos, they'll come back. And if they advertise intelligently and consistently, they will have a chance.

Yes, I do believe it's that simple.

Simplisticissimo.

I just glanced at an article that's being passed around Facebook. It was written by a guy I nominally know about a topic I am nominally interested in (advertising) and it was published in a magazine I have nominal respect for, "Fast Company." All that being said, I gave it my nominal attention, for a nominal couple of minutes.

When I was in college, I took a course in Existential Philosophy. We were assigned to read Sartre's tome, "Being and Nothingness." I tried but I could barely understand a single sentence.

Compared to this Fast Company piece, Sartre was as weighty as "Hop On Pop." What's more, it reminded me of an essay on "How to Ride a Bike" written by someone who suffers from vertigo who happens to have no legs. In other words, the assumptions in the article were naive and uninformed. There are too many to delineate here. You'll have to sip the soup yourself to see how it tastes. Article.

Here's the thing--in the form of a sports metaphor.

You can talk all you want about strategy, and positioning, and insight, and big data, and a thousand other jargony-buzzwords.

But some times, the best thing to do is just hit a two-run double.

I mean really.

You can blather all you want about this and that.

But unless you hit those doubles, your team won't score and you won't win.

Doubles in ad agencies can be many things. But they're usually not decks. Or research. Or, perish the heresy, an extremely well-crafted brief.

Usually, they're a good, coalescing spot.

In the 2008 election, it was Shephard Fairy and the word "Hope."

Nike's done dozens of them, so has Gerry Graf and David Droga.

We keep trying to ratiocinate our way into making advertising an exact science. Actually, we dwell more in the realm of fantasy--like creating from base metal, gold. Or a perpetual motion machine.

We sell by saying, this will be cheap and ever-lasting.

That's bullshit.

And if it's not bullshit, show me the cases where it's worked along with creative examples. I've seen real-life commercials that have built brands. I've seen them with my own eyes.

I've never seen a platform do the same.

Or a Like.

Tweet.

Google Plus.

Or snapchat.

I refused to be taking in by the Bullshit Bubble.

On the bus. A love story.

I am on the bus right now and there’s an old man with long white hair who’s reading a story by G.K. Chesterton.

His wife, who looks very much older, sits to his left and it appears she has melted into her seat. She is vertically compressed, as if she no longer has a spinal column. The man is trying to read his Chesterton. It’s one story in a collection of short stories housed in a grimy paperback he is carrying. It has no cover.

He is trying to read and his wife is talking to him constantly, without a pause or a break. He does not look up from his book, but does not make progress either. He is suffering the reader’s greatest hell, reading sentences over and again without finding meaning. Finally, he barks at her. “You’re 79-years-old,” he says almost unbelieving that he himself, a man of vim and vitality is with an almost eighty-year-old woman. “You’re 79-years-old,” he says, “Can’t you let me read?”

“Sixty-ninth Street,” she answers. “We have to get out there.”

“I know that,” he continues barking. “I know when 69^th Street is coming.” He shakes his book, like red cape before a bull. “I’m trying to read.”

“Ok, but we’re on 74^th and we have to get off in two stops.”

“Do you have to be such a nudge?” he asks loud enough to make the question rhetorical.

The bus stops at 69^th and the bus driver calls out the stop. The old man rises first on his three-pointed walking stick. She pulls herself to the full-height of her 79-year-old frame, about four-and-a-half-feet. They shuffle out, slowly, together. Holding hands.

We return to the Cape.

We decided about three weeks ago, or maybe it was two, to spend Labor Day on Cape Cod. When you have a grown family--especially, a modern, atomized family, the occasions when everyone can get together are few. Work makes demands, or boy friends, or maybe just a generalized obstreperousness that puts spending time with your parents as some ring or another of hell.

This Labor Day, however, both daughters were up for it, as was my brother-in-law and my niece and a friend of my older daughter's, also a PhD. student in clinical psych.

My wife found a house, a big sprawling place with a substantial pool, as well as a pool house, in Yarmouth Port, around the middle of the Cape. The kids are slowly waking, heating bagels, drinking coffee and rubbing the sleep from their eyes.

Meanwhile, my wife and I were up again around 6:15, attending to the aquanautical needs of Whiskey, who needs to swim to maintain her golden retriever's equipoise. We found a place for her in Orleans, Mass, about half-an-hour away, a bay ringed by tall sea-grass which allowed her to swim and romp and intermittently roll around on sand and pine-needles. She fetched and fetched and and fetched some more, and kibbitzed with various Cape Cod canines who came by to canoodle.

As someone who's spent the last 39 years of my life living in New York City, sometimes in apartments with barely enough space to turn around, there's something magical about the Cape. The main highway which travels the spine of the Cape is around here, only one lane in each direction.

Somehow, against all the pernicious efforts of runaway modernity, this has kept the strip of Cape land free from many of the big box stores that do so much to despoil our landscapes and our lives. Every other bend in the road reveals a scene which might lead a Wyeth or two to set up easel.

Of course, I am here when the season is "high" and the daughters are near. But, and I feel weird saying this, it may be the first place and the first time in my life which impels me to run numbers in my head to figure out if I could "make retirement work here."

To scratch all we can out of this respite, we'll be piling into the Simca at 6AM tomorrow morning, which should put me in work around 11, or maybe lunch time, depending on how dreadful traffic is.
It will be a return from a place I will return to.