New York in the gloom.

I like New York when it is wet like an old sponge and every umbrella you see is turned inside out from the wind or else stands sentinel in a beaten trash can full of them.

I like New York in the dark and grey gloom when the sky sits just above the tenements and scowls like an old man short-changed for soup at a lunch counter.

I like New York when the color is gone save for the white silver glow of street lamps and the spindly trees in the park look like they grew fully formed from an old Edward Weston photograph.

In the last ten days, the news has told me, we have had in New York three winter storms, including today’s slug in the rib cage. The city moves to the haunt of Wagner’s Gotterdammerung or maybe something dark and gutter scraping by Thelonius. Or maybe something by Sonny Terry--a dark Delta blues number because the city feels like a woman who hurt you.

There’s nothing, it seems, not even climate change that can break the cop’s-rough-grip of winter. While I don’t mind the cold and wet, while I don’t mind the wind in my face and the flakes in my eyes I long, like so many of my vintage do, for the crack of the bat and the laughter of young boys as they round the bases with not a care as we reach the end of all time.

And I think, just then, as my cab avoided a waist-deep pothole and suburbanites who drive as if they’re pinballs, and I think as I so often do, of Ernest Thayer.

Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout,
But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has struck out.

I wait, as we all do, for the joy to return to Mudville.

Optimism, macro and micro.

Everything is horrible. Everything is getting worse. We are on the brink of cataclysm and disaster. And there's no way out.

Talking to people you'll hear phrases like, "the internet is broken." "Education is broken." "The economy is broken." I've even heard of late that my very own gender (I am still gender binary) is broken.

In advertising, that which is left of it, we often hear that television is broken (or dead), that interruption is broken (or dead), that we can't reach anyone because no one cares anymore about advertising and advertising is broken.

Witnessing these warnings, proclamations and imprecations, I've been wondering lately if they all feed on each other. That the world is, in fact, laboring under something I call "the Pessimism Bubble."

That pessimism builds up the same way the housing market did in California, or tulips in Holland, or, even Teslas in Greenwich.

There's no money in being optimistic. Whereas if you are infinitely negative, you are good "headline." Five dead in East River helicopter crash gets readers. Its opposite wouldn't.

So the Trumpers who trumpet the end of the world gain speed. If we don't fight terrorists we will surely perish. We are on the brink of doom. Only I can fix it.

As for advertising, the pessimists have proclaimed that no channels are effective save the near-impossible "earned media," when a Hollywood star takes a picture with her Samsung Galaxy 11 or something.

TV we're told was something past (dumber) generations sat blindly in front of just waiting to do as they were told.

My guess is TV is no more or no less effective than its ever been. People always left their sets to get a Tonino's pizza roll from the Frigidaire. And I'd wager that people today go to the bathroom no more or no less than people from TV's purported halcyon days in the 50s.

It's easy to say things are dead, broken, on life-support. Or that they need to be disrupted, whatever that means.

My two cents says such proclamations are less-founded on truth and more based on a prevailing wind.

A wind that says everything is rotten.

Hi, High Noon.

When the world gets too much with me, as it so frequently does, I turn to one of a handful of usually black and white movies that stabilize my sinking mood.

Since I was a little boy and my old man would bring home 16-mm reels of old movies, Edward G. Robinson-Jimmy Cagney shoot-em-ups, "Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?" I have found solace in these movies.

I'll be the first to admit there's a certain black-and-whiteness to these black-and-white films that I find comforting. It's nice, at times, to visit a universe where good is good and bad is bad and you know who to root for.

One of my favorite movies of all-time was on Turner Classic Movies last night, at a time which didn't interfere with my much-needed sleep. So at 8PM, I turned on my 13" RCA set in the old walnut wooden cabinet and tuned into "High Noon," by Fred Zinnemann with Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, Lloyd Bridges and Katy Jurado, who during her brief time on screen threatened to steal the whole picture.

I've seen High Noon probably twice a year or more for 45 years. I toggle between it and "Shane" when I need to see a western. Of course, the movie played out just as I remember it. Grace Kelly leaving her husband minutes after marrying him. Frank Miller and his men relentless after Will Kane. The cowardice of Harvey, the age of old Lon Chaney, Jr., unable to fight. And, most important, the whole town abandoning the one man who brought it peace.  

But Will Kane prevailed. Gary Cooper, bloody and wounded, with help from his wife, who finally saw justice above her principles, and helped her out-gunned husband, defeated the four bad guys. They lay in the dust.

They lay in the dust where Kane's Sheriff's badge lay, after Cooper rejects the town, its falseness and cowardice and, yes, smallness.

I have pillars like High Noon.

There's the aforementioned Shane. "On the Waterfront" by Kazan written by my old friend Budd Schulberg. There's "The Third Man," by Carol Reed writ by Graham Greene with help from Orson Welles. There's "Citizen Kane," by Welles himself, and "The Lady from Shanghai." And of course, Curtiz's "Casablanca," and two by Huston, "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," and "The Maltese Falcon." I'll watch two or three by Kubrick, "The Killing," "Paths of Glory," and of course "Strangelove." There are more, of course there are more. Almost anything by David Lean and Jean Renoir, and Powell and Pressburger, and the comedies of Preston Sturges.

But last night, after a week where as usual, I felt, like Kane outnumbered and out-gunned and alone, I had 90 syncopated minutes of "High Noon."

Time and tide. And feedback.

Due to yesterday's snowstorm, which came, finally, about 12 hours after the all-too-cocky meteorologists said it would, about 75% of the agency seemed to be working from home.

That didn't stop, though I wish it had, the near constant accumulation of emails in my inbox. It seemed for hours at a time, the emails were piling up even faster than the snow.

It's not unusual among a skein of emails to get four or five or even seven or nine on a single topic. One might say, make the pixelator longer. Another might say, make the pixelator shorter. Still another might say, I'd get rid of the pixelator altogether and another might avoid mentioning the pixelator at all.

Earlier this week, I read an article in the "New York Times," called "For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned." You can read the article here.

In the article, Farhad Manjoo goes cold turkey. He goes two months shutting off tweets, stopping text notifications, staying off social media. He spent two months getting his news only from print media, specifically the "Times," "The Wall Street Journal," and "The San Francisco Chronicle."

The point of his experiment, and the point of this post, isn't really about channel--the virtue of pixels over ink or vice-versa. What it's really about is the virtue of not "feeding back" a couple hundred times a day (as digital media does) and the relative measured-stateliness of media that publishes feedback just once-a-day.

Here's Manjoo's description of his cold-turkey experience:

"It has been life changing. Turning off the buzzing breaking-news machine I carry in my pocket was like unshackling myself from a monster who had me on speed dial, always ready to break into my day with half-baked bulletins.

"Now I am not just less anxious and less addicted to the news, I am more widely informed (though there are some blind spots). And I’m embarrassed about how much free time I have — in two months, I managed to read half a dozen books, took up pottery and (I think) became a more attentive husband and father."

In the context of our business--I often feel that one of the biggest causes of the qualitative decline of advertising (and the lives of those who toil in Madison Avenue's trenches) is the constant ping-attack of feedback. We no longer have three rounds of feedback, it often seems we have 300.

I wonder what would happen if we took a more temperate approach. That instead of saying what we thought in the exact moment, we took 24 hours and a walk around the block, and directed a measured response. 

--
By the way, about two months ago I jumped on the bandwagon of people who are saying smartphones are destroying our brains. I turned off all notifications and changed my screen to black and white. 

Doing so didn't cure my iPhone addiction, but I'd estimate I spend 33% less time on my device.

--

New York in the Un-snow.

The weathermen--and according to Dylan, we don't need them to know which way the wind blows--were predicting their 27th or 18th Snowmageddon in New York, starting last night around ten and continuing until mastodons once again stampede down 2nd Avenue.

I went to sleep entertaining the slim hope that I would have an excuse, however spurious, that I could wrest an unplanned day off or a work-from-home from my overly austere Super Ego.

Waking up at one last night, I opened the shutters expecting to see the effects of the Second Ice Age on York Avenue. Instead there was a drizzle of rain and enough traffic to freak out the 405 if we were in LA.

This morning the emails have begun peppering my inbox. "School is cancelled" one reads. Another asserts, "We had 12 inches in the suburbs." I'm sure before the clock strikes ten there will be two or four other such missives in my mailbox.

But here in the city, that enlightened and bedimmed world where everyone, somehow, just seems to cope, seems to get along and make our way, things are little more than damp and we're going about our business.

Which is exactly as it should be.

Arms and the Schmeckl, I sing.

For approximately 57 of my 60 years, I had no regular barber. The work of maintaining yet another relationship in my already too-full life wasn't worth the occasional lousy haircut. So since I was knee-high to a cockroach, I've seldom gone to the same barber twice.

That changed three years ago--maybe I've mellowed with age--when I met Boris who owns a small shop a block and a half from my apartment on East End Avenue between 81st and 82nd Streets.

One of the benefits of the breakup of the Union of Soviet Socialistic Republics is that Jews who were essentially captive in those ancient lands, were able to pick up stakes and emigrate to America--specifically to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where Boris lives. 

Boris speaks gruffly, with a heavily-accented English, but he is a Nijinsky of the shears, clipping me with a virtuosity that would shame Michelangelo into giving up his marble blocks for something less permanent like, say, lime jello. Like Michelangelo chipped away at everything that wasn't David, or Moses, Boris simply cuts away at everything that isn't George, until he is finished.

On Saturday, my hair Medusa-like, I made an appointment for 6PM. He sat me in his leather seat and I made a feeble stab at a conversation.

"You're closed tomorrow," I offered. (I usually come in on Sundays.)

"No," he said sternly, "The girls are here, but I am off. My grandson is having his bris."

"Mazel Tov," I said.

"He is getting his schmeckl trimmed," Boris continued.

Boris found he liked the word schmeckl and proceeded to say it about 14 times in nine seconds.

"His schmeckl is too big, so they have to trim his schmeckl. We are going to his schmeckl party."

I sat in my seat as he began clipping away at my ever-increasing white mane.

"He's gonna get his schmeckl trimmed and he'll never know what hit him," Boris chuckled. "Say bye bye schmeckl."

Finally, Boris got over his amusement with the word schmeckl and got down to the business of my hair. In about 20 minutes, like Livingstone and Stanley, he had macheted back my foliage.

"Good luck, tomorrow," I said, shaking his ham-sized ham as I left.

"I don't need good luck," he answered. "I'm not the one losing my schmeckl."

Dumb trends, and an old idea.

One of the big trends in the advertising industry, say for the last three years or five, is for clients to forego having an Agency of Record. There are two ways to go about this. One, you can build an in-house agency. Two, you can parcel out different assignments to different agencies, or even have various agencies compete over individual assignments.

I don’t think either of these ways of working will ultimately serve a client’s business.

As for in-house agencies or departments, they cannot, ever, under any circumstance, fulfill the most-important role an agency fulfills. That is, they cannot be “outsiders.” They cannot provide an independent perspective. In most cases, they can’t even be honest. Which is the basis of any relationship.

I have a simple way of thinking about in-house agencies. They’re like going to your mother-in-law for marriage counseling.

Even if somehow these captive agencies can hire stellar talent, I don’t believe they can give that talent the permission to be contrary. You can’t be a whistle-blower in the Soviet Union. Not without getting shot, anyway.

In fact, I don’t think in-house agencies are able to be agencies at all. They are not allowed to do what agencies do when they’re doing their best—that is provide a different, outsider point of view. Without that point of view you get marketing that is in-bred. Marketing that pleases the bosses who commission it, without considering others’ opinions and a different way of looking at a problem.

The second trend, the parceling out of assignments to various agencies I also think is doomed to mediocrity.

Agencies, again when they’re at their best, have accumulated tiers of knowledge on their clients’ behalf. Not only do they know the ins-and-outs of the products they are selling, they know their target audience and they know what’s been done before. All that knowledge can only be accumulated over time.

It will be interesting, to me anyway, to see what happens at Lowe’s as they shift their account from BBDO (it was there for 12 years) to a string of smaller, less renowned agencies. My bet is the work will be less interesting, less persuasive and less effective.

About 55 years ago Robert Townsend, CEO of Avis, said to Bill Bernbach, my competitor has five times the budget, five times the cars, and five times the counters. To compete, I need advertising that’s five times as effective. How do I get it?

Bernbach said, “If you promise to run whatever we recommend, every creative in my shop will want to work on your account.”

Obviously, I’m biased, and I have an axe to grind. But I believe in Bernbach. If you want great work, it’s relatively easy to get it. Get out of the way and let people do it.

Another New York cab ride.

Last night I had one of those rides home that beyond getting me where I was going, restored, somewhat, my faith in mankind and affirmed, once again, my love for New York.

I got into the front seat of a grey 2013 Toyota Sienna minivan around 7:15. I had my earbuds in after yet another shitty day and was hoping some Bobby Troup or Beverly Kenney would remove the stinger from my soul.

Immediately, the driver started talking to me. He had a heavy accent I couldn't place, and though I wanted nothing more than to Garbo my way home, I removed my headphones and started talking back.

"A long day," he said.

"Long enough," I answered, "I'm an old man."

We were streaming up a lightly-trafficked tenth avenue.

"No, my friend, you are a young man. You are 50, yes?"

I looked at him like I had the DTs and he was a pink elephant.

"Naw. 60. I feel like I am the oldest in my office by about 180 years."

"I too am 60," he answered. "But we are not old. If you say you are old at 60, where are you at 70?"

I had to admit he had a point.

"Well, I feel good," I said, "And I think I might produce twice the work as anyone else." I wasn't exaggerating.

"When it is time to retire," he said, "you should retire down in Puerto Rico. In Ponce, or Mayaguez where the great Roberto Clemente was born."

"I've been to Ponce. On my way to Guanaca."

He corrected my pronunciation and continued. "A house you can get for one-third the price. A $300,000 house here, $75,000 in Puerto Rico. And the food is good, the air is soft and the girls are pretty."

We were crossing over to the east side now on west 68th street. He slowed between Columbus and Central Park West to pick up another passenger. A woman stood at the appointed place and resolutely kept talking on her cellphone.

"The queen is not ready to enter the car," he laughed. She was pretending we didn't exist.

Just then from the other side of the street, a man got in. And the driver realized he had identified the wrong person as his fare. "Robert," the new fare said.

Somehow the conversation shifted to Donald Trump and corruption.

"He has stolen $400 billion from the Saudis, in return for the promise to give them the military means they need to defeat the Iranis." He mentioned the names of various sheiks and emirs and the amount of money Trump allegedly extorted.

Not unusual in a taxi of three 60 year-old New Yorkers, we were all ardent democrats. We spent the next 20 blocks decrying the evil of Trump and the complicity of his Republican enablers. 

"I was on a plane home from Miami Beach yesterday," Robert said. "A guy got on wearing a jacket that said 'NRA Lifetime Member.' What kind of guy wears that these days?"

We tsked our way to Robert's stop. 

"Maybe we should all get out here and have a beer," the driver said. Robert agreed and, idling at second and 79th we continued our conversation for a good ten minutes.

Finally, we got on our way again, and the van pulled up to my apartment house.

I stuck out my hand.

"I'm George," I said shaking his. "Abdel," he said.

"You have a nice night," I said.

"And you too, my son."

And off he drove into the dark.

Nobody Asked Me But....In like a Lion Edition.

"Nobody asked me but," is my periodic tribute to the great New York sportswriter, Jimmy Cannon. Cannon wrote one of these columns when he had nothing to write about.

Nobody asked me but....

....there should be a ring in hell for the people who move a deadline up 'just a day.'

....it should not take longer to write a brief than it does to do creative.

....I think there should be an Express Lane for copy--10 changes or less.

....In ten years tattoo removal will be a big business.

....I could use a good fatty corned beef sandwich on soggy rye bread with caraway seeds.

....As good as the corned beef is at Katz's down on Houston Street, their rye bread sucks.

....If someone retweets the above and Katz's offers me a free sandwich, I won't turn it down.

....The return of Spring has nothing to do with Persephone and pomegranate seeds, and everything to do with the return of baseball.

....It appears the Trump White House is as stable as a Jenga tower in a cyclone.

....Will it be Mueller who pulls out the final brick? Or will there be self-immolation?

....We could use a little immolation.

....Hope Hicks sounds like a TV weatherman in Topeka, Kansas.

....They can have her.

...Which probably isn't fair to Topeka.

....The central problem with the internet world is one of hierarchy. 

....We can no longer distinguish the unimportant from the important.

....The red dots on your social media and email are ruining your brain by providing constant stimulation of dopamine.

....You're better off changing your phone screen to black and white.

....And maybe your computer screen too.

....What's more, Citizen Kane would have sucked if it had been shot in color. And The Grapes of Wrath. And Casablanca.

....People who ask 'how do you really feel?' don't care how you really feel.