Retreating Forward.

Whenever I get down in the dumps, whether I'm having a rough time with my business, with my wife, with my children, or most-likely with all three, plus the trump government, the dissolution of everything I care about and more, I start thinking about the German invasion of Russia, Operation Barbarossa, in June, 1941.

Though millions died in a short amount of time, many many many of them Jews, I find some comfort in how things unfolded.

As you can see from the map above, from June, 1941 to about September, 1941, the Germans kicked Soviet ass. As I wrote a moment ago, they killed millions and took over an enormous amount of Soviet territory.

The Soviets weren't merely retreating. 

They were being routed.

The Nazis were rolling toward Russia's largest cities, Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad, as fast as their tanks could carry them. Leningrad was besieged for 847 days. Stalingrad was almost completely razed. And the Soviet capital was in cannon range of Nazi guns.

The defeat of Russia seemed imminent. Everything was breaking in favor of the Nazis. 

Until it didn't.

Until the Russians held. 

Until reinforcements arrived.
Until massive amounts of materiel and people took effect.

The Russians lost thousands of square miles of land. Millions of people. Their towns, cities, villages were destroyed. They were beaten.

All was lost.

I know I'm just in advertising. 
I know my life is of no importance.
I make dopey ads for a living.

But sometimes, I think, almost everyone feels like the Soviet army in June of 1941.

You've retreated.

You've been decimated.

You're out-gunned.

Hungry.

Weary.

Sick.

Scared.

Surrounded.

There's no way out.

But.

You don't.

You don't give up.

Maybe it's the still small voice.

Maybe it's some previously unknown inner steel.
Maybe it's the hubris of the other guys finally exacting a price.

But instead of moving back, you move forward.

I've been running GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company for almost six years. I've had my Soviet moments.

Periods where the phone doesn't ring.
Or worse, when it does ring, but the proposals don't get signed.
I've have long bouts of rejection.

Or dashed hopes and assignments that didn't materialized.

Your soul grows deep during these times.

You question your you-ness.

Do I suck?
Did I mis-read the market?
Am I too arrogant?
Did people finally find out that I'm not good. That I'm an asshole.

Retreat.
Retreat.

Bleed.

Bleed some more.

Retreat.

But then, the phone does ring.
A hand shakes yours.

A deal is made.

Work is bought.

Maybe another deal is made.

Another.

Beaten, bearing scars, wary, nervous, doubtful, ever-so-human, you advance.

That's called work.

Redoubling.
Showing up despite the doubt.

That's called work.

And life.

Refrigerators.

This might sound a little weird but nevertheless it's true. I became a first-time home-owner at the age of 40. Since that time--more than a quarter-of-a-century--I've observed two types of refrigerators behaviors.

I started out when my kids were young with refrigerator-as-bulletin-board. The front surface of our machine was metallic and when my wife and I traveled, we would try to bring home souvenir magnets of the places we'd been. It was a dopey way of teaching our kids some rudimentary geography. It was also an expedient way of giving them a little gift something on our return.

On the fridge, we'd also have magnetic alphabet letters. We'd hang our third-grader's collage, or a snapshot of a kid at the beach, or a letter from our super telling us about some repair that was happening in our building. 

The refrigerator surface was, in a word, noisy.

Then, as happens to people when they work 24/7 and are good at what they do, we decided we had to renovate our apartment.

We started, of course, with the kitchen. We reconfigured it to use the space more efficiently. We knocked down a wall and built a peninsula as a divider from our dining area. We put in new custom-made cabinetry and new flooring. New appliances. The renovation to be clear cost as much as the original price of our apartment. But that's par for the course if you're behind the avarice eight-ball, as most people are.

Our refrigerators in our renovated New York kitchen and our rarefied Connecticut kitchen are way too snooty to be treated like our original ice-box.

First, they are clad in fine millwork. We therefore must abide by the old New York dicta "Post No Bills." Instead, on our expensive marble countertops, we have to give over a couple-thousand dollars' worth of square-feet to a large school-kids' calendar. The sorts of notices we used to put on our fridge, now take up valuable counter-space. How else will we know when our dental appointments are or when Julia and Mario are coming for the weekend?

It occurred to me in the dark of night how vital our refrigerator used to be as a communication device. And how our counter-space now plays that role. 

It also occurred to me how weed-like communication can be. How much easier it is to add than to take away. How we gravitate to clutter not importance.

As my therapist said to me almost forty years ago in the days before I had ever even been online, "The problem with the internet is the problem of hierarchy. Everything everywhere is shouting at you every minute. There are no chapter headings. No "front of the book," or appendix."

Last night I was scrolling on LinkedIn--as I do. I get a lot of my business from people I "meet" on the site, and business is important to me. (See price of renovated apartment above.)

For the last six months, whenever I see a connection on LinkedIn who posts things that are blindingly obvious, platitudinous, insipid or just plain dumb, I remove them from my network. I do this with the ferocity of Bergman's Grim Reaper in the "Seventh Seal." But despite my eugenic pruning, the dopey just keeps on coming.

And all this with none of the Sweeney crap.

The issue, I think, facing many people and companies today, is not that different from my refrigerator issue.

Without serious, scrupulous editing your brand becomes a Fresh Kills landfill of fetid junk. That's the obvious default for most brands and people. Meaningless always-on annoyance that some content "strategist" has recommended and called it a cadence--when it is more like a dump truck. A ferocious dump truck.

BTW, every content strategy is the same: Post more content.

Others, don't play at all. They sink into oblivion because they simply are not present. They don't show up with anything fun, interesting, important, persuasive.

Someone now will utter the word "curation." But that's a bullshit word to make someone feel like there is discretion in a world where there is none. It's like trying to avoid trumpism. You can't get away. 

The only ways are to succumb or to shut off completely.

Each way sucks in its own way.

And unlike a refrigerator, the light never goes on.

M and M.

I'm thinking this through as I'm writing it so it all may be a little inchoate, opaque, or even stupid. But that's one of the virtues of writing, really. Working things out, so you can decide, somewhat methodically if they're stupid or profound.

Cartesian, kinda. Escribo ergo sum.

This morning, a long time friend sent me an article about Interpublic Group (IPG) having fired another 2,400 people prior to its monopolistic merger with Omnicom--a merger I can't understand as benefitting anyone working at either company save for the sixteen or fourteen Brioni suits at the top, who don't need anymore benefitting.

I mentioned something to my wife, who was sitting across from me as we ate our oatmeal, "This merger is just a money grab." And then I thought of a Manichean dichotomy that pertains to so much of our world today.

This is, perhaps, the final round of a long fight between "Missionaries" and "Mercenaries." Between "Promise" and "Profits."

The "believers" and the "receivers."

The mercenaries have won. 

Hands down.

The ad industry, like so many other industries, used to be run by true believers. Maybe this is effete. Maybe it's just another attempt to find meaning in what is, so often, an utterly meaningless world.

But in the first twenty-years of my career, I worked for people and agencies who were missionaries propagating the mission of Bill Bernbach and Carl Ally. Their mission was to prove advertising could be done without being insulting to people or ugly or dumb. That you could give people information--service, so to speak--that helped them make better, wiser decisions. There was, in short, a certain nobility to our work. Our work was a mission.

This continued when I arrived at Ogilvy the first time. There, at least on the IBM account, most people were missionaries from the church of Chiat and Day. We strove to create and sell and win new business with advertising that was both culturally adroit and intelligent. Even David Ogilvy's dicta, "the consumer isn't a moron, she is your wife," follows this precept.

I don't know what life is like any longer in the agency business. When I was fired from Ogilvy almost six years ago, the missionary zeal had been clubbed to death. Life was no longer about leading clients, helping people buy, or doing something smart.

Those motivations had been replaced by "being part of culture," being "award winning," "being digital-first," being "always on."

Those criteria are mercenary. 

Since the beginning of recorded time no person outside of an agency boardroom has ever said, "I want advertising that's always on." Or "I want to have a conversation with a brand." "Or I need my music co-opted by a pharmaceutical that can conquer toe fungus." Neither has anyone ever said, "I'm buying brand-x, they won a titanium pupik at Cannes."

None of the modern measurements of advertising actually even pertain to advertising. They're about creating 728x90 banner ads by algorithm.

Here's a sports metaphor.

I like basketball and will read about it now and again during the off season. Earlier this week, I read this bit about the travails of the rebuilding Celtics squad as they face an uncertain future. 

Not only do I not understand it (or want to) it also has nothing to do with what had been a sport I once liked, basketball.

Just like reading an article on advertising has very little to do with good writing, design, human motivations and the like. Instead, this is the business today.

On Thursday night five of my ad friends and I got together at Great New York Noodletown on 28 Bowery. Since Covid descended, in an attempt to remain human, we've been getting together about every other month to have a chin-wag. (That was not a Chinese-food slur.)

We're all on the wrong side of sixty. But we're still working. We still love the business and lament what's become of it. 

We're all still missionaries. Or to rewrite General Douglas MacArthur's line after he was fired by Harry Truman, "Old ad people don't die, they just eat Shrimp with Cashew Nuts.

A Letter. And a Response.

At a time when I feel less than fructified as a writer, that is I am not, as I so often am, teeming with ideas, a LinkedIn connection, whom I've never met outside of the auspices of artificial pixels, just sent me a note. Lest you think I am telling a tall-tale, I'm reprinting it here. Grad students would call that "verisimilitude."

While I am not qualified to answer Andy's question, lack of qualifications have never really stopped me from doing anything. When I was a kid I had my brother's draft card. That let me drink alcohol when I was just fifteen or sixteen. Today, I think, they call that "fake it till you make it." That's what I mean by not qualified.

I'm closing in on my 68th birthday and I realize I might never "make it." I'll never write the great amerikan novel, or even a decent short-story. And my days of being eligible for awards at Cannes are as past, as my days of actually caring about awards and recognition that seem more and more out-of-step with reality.

So, I'll fake it while I never make it.

Whenever I'm asked anything about writing, I think of a book I read probably half a century ago by writer and critic, Malcolm Cowley. It's the title that does it for me. In fact, given that I read it 50 years ago, the title is all I remember. But all, really, I need to remember. Because it includes the words "I worked." (BTW, you can buy the book here for just $6. And read the Times review here, if you subscribe to that paper.)

Mainly, Andy, the most common of characteristics is the one that's hardest to come by. That is, the willingness to work. 

To work.

To work.

To work at your writing like you work at anything that's important. If you make your living writing, you cannot be a dilettante. You have to write and write some more and revise and think and always be thinking about your writing.

Writing isn't a talent. It's a craft. Crafts need practice. 

I've never been a Hemingway type, where I say writing is akin to "opening up a vein and bleeding." But that's only because I've incorporated work into my being, so in a sense writing--at least the incidental writing I do, which is mainly to sell things for clients--has never seemed hard to me. But, that may be because my work ethic and my discipline are powerful enough to overwhelm the negative force of procrastination and avoidance.

In other words, I spend more time doing than avoiding. That's a big advantage if you work for a living.

The other bit, Andy, also doesn't draw a distinction between copywriting, fiction and non-fiction. Because, for me the similarities are more important than the differences.

Good writing--no matter what kind--includes two components. 

1. Truth. I learned this most explicitly from two-time National Book Award-winner and two-time Pulitzer-winner, Robert Caro. (You should read his book called "Working," as soon as you can.) Caro says a writer's job is "to find out how things work and explain them to people." 

I think that holds no matter what kind of writing you do. Even notes at the bottom of a greeting card.

In pursuit of that finding out, Caro urges writers to "turn every page." That is, dig. Dig deeper. Dig deeperer. 

Because, as Caro says, "Time equals truth."

Truth requires digging. Digging requires sweat. Sweat requires soul. They all take time.

2. Love. I learned this most clearly from my favorite New Yorker writer, Joseph Mitchell. You can find a good amount of Mitchell online, if you haven't read him, especially if you subscribe to the New Yorker. You can also buy a softcover (used) of a collection of his writing, 750-pages worth, here, for less than the price of a cup of designer coffee.

Most of what Mitchell wrote was fictionalized non-fiction on society's forgotten people. These could easily have turned into caricatures or become mocking. But Mitchell shows love and empathy for his subjects. As odd as they may seem at first, Mitchell shows nothing but caring and respect for them.

Truth and Love is what all good writing has to convey. You can find it in spades in Homer's "Iliad." Why else would Achilles refuse to fight? Why did he drag Hector seven times around the walls of Troy? Why did Ahab hunt the whale? Or Hemingway's waiter want to leave his clean, well-lighted place?

Even an ad, even a tweet needs truth and love.

They're what it takes to write.

Let Me Tell You a Story.

It's hard for me to spend any time whatsoever online and not be absolutely disgusted by the outpouring of enthusiasm for the so-called wonders of AI. Especially AI as it pertains to creativity, like making movies, creating images or even advertisements.

What annoys me isn't the artistry of AI--it can create some awesome visuals and imaginary worlds. What annoys me is that the people using AI have, it seems, no real understanding of what makes a communication "work."

It seems to me AI is being used mostly to make nice looking garbage.

As friend and ad legend Dave Trott points out in the movie below, every effective human communication since the beginning of time, must be made up of the three strata found in the drawing above, and they must work in that order.

Most of what I see online, while beautifully "shot," has no impact, no stopping power, no development, no "startle" Further, most often, no story is developed. Just a minute of related or unrelated images strung together with a piece of music, which also may have no arc to it. Finally, there's no compelling reason why. The viewer is asked to do nothing at all. Which always leave me wondering, "why did I waste three minutes on that?"

For years, I've been sharing this video, of Kurt Vonnegut, with clients whom I think will benefit from the four minutes it asks for. Stories, no matter who they're told by, human or machine, need a story arc. They need a beginning, a middle, and an end. They need, at some level, to have taken you on some sort of a voyage of discovery.

Not too long ago in his substack, my friend, Rob Schwartz wrote this essay on the "Seven Stories that Rule the World." That's right, from Homer the blind poet to Homer Simpson, there are really on seven basic stories. (Vonnegut, above, delineates eight.)

I've spent the entirety of my life in advertising not calling myself a story-teller, and frankly, I hate the phrase, especially since most often we're selling clear plastic wrap, a mayonnaise or a fast-food chaluparitto.

Nevertheless, just as there are only seven jokes, there are just seven stories.

Even Shakespeare in "As You Like It" got the memo. I've annotated it for you below.

The Jungians might feel slightly different. But the idea is the same.

Things like stories have arcs. They aren't random. They aren't optional. They're ruled by the accumulation of 300,000 years of human intercourse on our warming planet. 300,000 years of what works, what grabs people and what doesn't. Whether a story is told by a human or a pixellized mix-master, it's still governed by the genetic code that is hard-wired in all of us.

Years ago when I still worked for WPP, someone asked me to evaluate another creative person. I answered honestly. Which is not what was wanted or appreciated.

I said something like, "they've never written on a page with a bottom. That is, they've never had to write 'just enough.' Or had to write a script that got its point across in just thirty-seconds. Or written a video for a trade show that had to quiet a noisy audience. Or created something that had to work outside of a forced-exposure conference room."

There's a lot to be said about the artistic and cinematic abilities of AI. But as Komar and Melamid revealed twenty years ago in their piece of "Most Wanted Paintings," art isn't just about aesthetics. Writing isn't just about euphony. Singing isn't just about voice quality. Neither is AI just about visual accomplishment.

Before we use machines to make stories, we ought to understand the structure of what makes a story actually work.

The end.

Once More in the Tempus Fugit.

Not too long ago, Dave Trott, one of England's finest creatives, sent a note in my direction. Though Dave and I have never met, and never talked, we send a lot of notes to each other. 

We share a few interests, like advertising, World War II, boxing and stories about the left-handed side of the world. We learned advertising from some of the same luminaries, share some of the same "no-bs" approach and also have nearly 300 LinkedIn connections in common. 

What's more, Dave created some of my favorite commercials ever, including the best beer commercials ever made. That alone puts him in a vaunted place in my personal Pantheon.

Dave posted the above about a week ago. Since that point, I've felt bad. I don't have enough readers to disappoint a single one. Especially one as luminous as Dave. So, while I spend most of my time up on the Gingham Coast, far away from the labyrinth byways of the Tempus Fugit, I decided to take the train down to the city on Sunday night and spend the next couple of evenings at the old bar.

To be honest, going back to the Tempus Fugit wasn't just for Dave. Like Melville's Ishmael--and with apologies--

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet... then, I account it high time to get to the Tempus Fugit as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to a Pike's Ale--"the ALE that won for YALE!" There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards bars like the Tempus Fugit as I do."

And so, with Sparkle, my 22-month-old golden retriever in tow, I walked the melted asphalt streets from my paid-for-apartment in the east eighties to the benighted ware-house-lined street just a mile north. There in the back of a nearly empty Verizon repair center and switching station, down three corridors, up two flights of steps, down four more, through five slam-handle emergency doors and down an unlit passage of sticky linoleum, I found the Tempus Fugit just as I left it in March, 2020 as Covid lowered itself on New York. Then anyone with the means to escape the too-crowded city left the apple for places less rotten to the core.

The same blear greeted me, the effect of pushing into the incandescence of the old place from a nearly pitch hallway, and there, just as I left him, was the keeper of the precinct, the un-aging bartender, wiping clean the immaculate and well-polished mahogany with his well-worn and still just ever-so-damp terry rag.

The Tempus Fugit opened as a speakeasy in 1924, during Prohibition. The place, under the same management, has been open ever since. It never closes, and the man who mans the bar never leaves.

The bartender, like Najinsky, balleted from behind his rampart, with a small wooden bowl of cold Catskill's water for my pup, and then in practically the same motion, like Rizzuto, the great Yankee shortstop, he was back behind the bar and pulling me a six-ounce juice glass of the divine nectar called Pike's Ale, "The ALE that won for YALE!"

When the Pike's brewery went belly up in the early 1960s, when consolidation closed hundreds of local breweries and the beer market became dominated by pisswater like Bud and Coors and Miller, the Tempus Fugit bought their remaining wares. They've kept untold Hoover Dam's-worth of the liquid somehow still fresh and vibrant in their Stygian cellars where tempus does the opposite of fugit.

The place was empty, as usual, and I took my stool one in from the end. Sparkle, like Whiskey before her, formed into a "C" around her water bowl, and closed her limpid eyes, the crackle of ancient neon beer signs driving her into the welcoming arms of Morpheus.

"A long time," he paused, "you have been away."

I had almost forgotten the odd locutions of the bartender, who seems to start sentences in a Yiddish manner, with their most important element first, followed by the necessary collateral damage. A simple sentence like, "Do you want another beer?" He would transmogrify into something like "Another beer, would you in a glass, like?" It took a small bit of linguistic Simone Byles to make sense of it all. It's all a little "throw mama from the train, a kiss," or "open wide your mouth," but it works and the patois came back to me like acid reflux after a Katz's pastrami.

I tapped twice on the rim of my empty glass and he pulled me, expertly, another Pike's, with just the right amount of froth, and without any of the modren-day pretense that goes today with contemporary beer-sommelier-ing.

I drank that one down in two spasms of my Adam's Apple and he pulled me a third. As he brought it to the damped coaster in front of me I twitched my head to my left. About four stools over--eight feet away, sat an old woman wearing what looked like to me was a funereal shroud.

"Who's the Minx?" I noired.

With that the Minx rose like a helium balloon at the start of a circus before helium had escaped. She fairly floated over to me and sat, without deepening the leather, on a stool just to my left. She was weightless.

"I swept," she said "down from Olympus' craggy peaks, and at this gate, tall I stand, at the threshold, looking like a stranger, alone but for my spear of bronze."

The bartender wiped clean the mahogany in front of her. And brought us a small wooden bowl of salted Spanish nuts. I pushed them away with my usual admonition.

"A pound in every nut."

The woman met my rejection with an almost imperceptible nod.

"I foreshadowed your return to these rock-and-gunk-strewn shores," she said.

The bartender pulled me a fourth Pike's. Like Sgt. Friday on the old Dragnet television show he clarified it all with just one sentence.

"Grey-eyed," he said, "whose shield is thunder, third-born of the gods, Athena, it is."

I looked into her grey eyes. And froze. Athena.

Words, none, could I get out. Long-suffering, and cataracted, I silented.

"Go silver-haired and silver-footed homeward bound from this place of away and ale." It wasn't conversation but a command, as if I were immoderate Achilles sent by her to avenge Patroclus. She could not be denied.

I pushed three twenties across the woodwork to the bartender. He pushed them back, silently.

"From the gods," was all he said. 

"From the gods," I agreed.

She imperceptibly also agreed.

Sparkle and I Scylla and Charybdis'd away, making it home before the milkman pulled awake rosy-fingered dawn.

Stale Bread.

H, my friend, and GeorgeCo.'s Account Director often makes fun of my gift (or curse) for metaphor. Sometimes I fear she will roll her eyes so far back in her head they will do a full-rotation and she'll spend her days and nights looking backward instead of ahead of her. I have something called SERA on people (severe- eye-rolling affect.) 

Nevertheless, I spend a lot of time on metaphors because 93.8-percent of my clients come to me with complicated issues that they can barely explain. They come to me for help. Often that help involves me probing--is it like this, is it like that--until I find a commonplace comparison that makes clear what they do. What's funny about this is we often use terms as if we know what they mean (we've heard them so often) but we have no idea.

No one knows what quad-core processors are or that our internal combustion engines are powered by tiny explosions that release the stored power of ancient dinosaur juice.

Up here on the Gingham Coast, it's damn hard to find a good loaf of bread. 

Decent bread, from a bakery, was a given when I was a boy. There was a place down the block that would be bringing fresh-baked rye breads out of the oven when school let out, full of warmth and caraway seeds. Sunday bagels and salt sticks gave rise to that old Borscht Belt joke, "the problem with Jewish food is that 96 hours after a meal, you're hungry again."

Today, most bread--even bagels--come from a supermarket fakery. They are so laden with artificial additives and preservatives that they neither mold nor grow stale. It's a symbol of amerikan decay that our houses grow mold before our sandwiches do.

I find a metaphor in this, of course, for the ad industry. There used to be plenty of agencies to choose from. They were local and knew your name and their work was good. They'd also give you a sample when you came in. You seldom left hungry.

Today, there are no small bakeries or agencies. Conglomerates have taken over. Their work is bland and artificial. It gives no sustenance or pleasure. It's as artificial as an aging starlet's butt-lift.

The saddest part of all this is that most people don't know what they're missing. They don't know how good things used to be before they were mass-marketed and consolidated into oblivion. They don't know the taste of a good fresh slice of rye bread, a nice warm seeded kaiser roll from Dubrow's Cafeteria or even a tomato that hasn't been ripened in a rail car or a chicken that hasn't been fortified by poultry steroids.

I haven't gone through this year's entry on this Cannes site which links to winners going all the way back to 1954. I clicked on two things from this year, just to see, and an Apple entry was almost three minutes long and a Tiffany's entry, too, was equally as long. It was on the genius of their signature robin's egg blue.

"High Noon" by Fred Zinnemann was only 85 minutes long. It includes Tex Ritter singing "Do Not Forsake Me (Oh, My Darling)" and the surpassingly-bewitching Katy Jurado, who it is said, swept Marlon Brando off his feet and uttered one of the angriest lines in all of moviedom (above). And one of the most profound.

If High Noon is 85 minutes long and a TV "spot" is three minutes long, I ask myself before watching, "What is the likelihood that it is 3/85ths as good as Katy Jurado in "High Noon"?

That likelihood is not an angstrom more than zero. 

About the same likelihood as finding a good agency or a good piece of rye.

Something not stale.

Piscine.

When I was a boy in the ad business I was fortunate enough to work on a heavy-duty print account at a decent agency. And I was fortunate enough to work for a creative director who was good, caring and generous. His name was Ed Butler. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, he was considered, by people who knew the business, to be one of the best writers in the business.

Ed hired me based on a spec ad I had in my book. 

The ad was for the New York City Police Department who at the time were suffering from a suicide problem. It ain't easy being a cop. And, since they always have a gun at the ready, a lot of them were killing themselves.

I wrote an ad that said, 

Last year in New York, 

ten cops were killed.

Seven did it themselves.

That was enough to get me a job and a $5,000 salary bump and a windowed office in a good agency and the sense that I was making progress.

My job was on a retail bank account. The bank ran a different ad in The New York Times every week. Ed and Mike, his art partner, would do half of those ads. Lisa, my art partner and I would do the other half.

That was pretty good. It meant we were always concepting, selling ads and producing ads. All these years later, I still get a thrill when I have an ad in the paper. I never got tired of that feeling.

When I first had to show body copy to Ed I was more than a little nervous. I might have procrastinated for half a day. But finally I walked the city block from my office to his and handed him my copy. He had a school-bus yellow Ticonderoga pencil and read my copy using the pencil as a pointer. Once in a while he would underscore something. 

I watched him read my copy like an osprey watches for fish.

Finally he looked up and spoke.

"You're a what's more guy," he said.

It took me a moment, but I quickly understood what he meant. 

Ed clarified anyway.

"I learned when I worked on VW at Doyle," he began, "that a lot of writing copy is learning how to write a list so it doesn't sound like a list. Some people go right to 'and.' Some are 'also' people. You use 'what's more.'  I like 'what's more,'" he finished. 

Ed had a couple more things to say about my copy. Then he said, "You can write. You don't have to show me copy anymore if you don't want to." And that was that.

I've learned four things about copywriting in the forty-four years I've been earning my keep from bleeding on my keyboard. 

1. Always start with your second sentence. Cross out the first one you write and jump in in medias res--in the middle of things.

2. If you write a clear headline rewrite it upside down and/or backward to make it better. 'Nothing is impossible,' is bland. 'Impossible is nothing,' is memorable.

3. Learn how to write lists so you can put in all the stuff the client needs in the ads without sucking up the ad.

4. Remember George Orwell's six rules of writing:

Some years ago my wife and I went down to the South Street Seaport during The New Yorker Festival. Nora Mitchell, Joseph Mitchell's daughter, was speaking about her father and his stories about New York's ancient waterfront.

Nora was a lovely, soft-spoken woman who remembered her father with more fondness than I think most fathers get. Especially fathers who are writers. The condition of being a good writer often doesn't go hand-in-glove with being a good father. But Nora's recollections of Joseph were fairly rose-colored. As if she didn't want to tear down a man who was a hero to so many in the small audience. 

This was 20 years after I worked for Ed. I remember Nora said, "My father was a great list maker."

Somehow in thinking about what to write this week I thought about Ed, as I do often, and I thought about Joseph Mitchell, as I do even more often.

As a tribute to each, I found this list from a book of Mitchell's "New Yorker" pieces from between 1944 and 1960. "The Bottom of the Harbor," is one of the best books I've ever read. And not just because Mitchell uses this as the book's epigram, a verse I remember from the harbor-bottom of my murky childhood.

Here's a list from Mitchell. Ed might have written it, as well.

I am still learning from them.

This post is sort of a thank you. Belated, of course, like 97.2-percent of all thank-yous, if they come at all.

A list. Kissed.

“In the spring, summer, and fall, during the great coastwise and inshore and offshore migrations of fishes along the Middle Atlantic Coast, at least three dozen species enter the harbor. Only a few members of some species show up. Every spring, a few long, jaggy-backed sea sturgeon show up. Every summer, in the Lower Bay, dragger nets bring up a few small, weird, brightly colored strays from Southern waters, such as porcupine fish, scorpion fish, triggerfish, lookdowns, halfbeaks, hairtails, and goggle-eyed scad. Every fall, a few tuna show up. Other species show up in the hundreds of thousands or in the millions. Among these are shad, cod, whiting, porgy, blackback flounder, summer herring, alewife, sea bass, ling, mackerel, butterfish, and blackfish. Some years, one species, the mossbunker, shows up in the hundreds of millions. The mossbunker is a kind of herring that weighs around a pound when full-grown. It migrates in enormous schools and is caught in greater quantity than any other fish on the Atlantic Coast, but it is unfamiliar to the general public because it isn’t a good table fish; it is too oily and bony. It is a factory fish; it is converted into an oil that is used in making soaps, paints, and printing inks (which is why some newspapers have a fishy smell on damp days), and into a meal that is fed to pigs and poultry. In the summer and fall, scores of schools of mossbunkers are hemmed in and caught in the Lower Bay, Sandy Hook Bay, and Raritan Bay by fleets of purse seiners with Negro crews that work out of little fishing ports in North Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, New Jersey, and Long Island and rove up and down the coast, following the schools.”

A mossbunker. Today we call them Menhaden.

 

What a Piece of Work.

Many people, maybe especially Jews who have always been a tiny group of outsiders, resist being told what to do. To me, this obstinance could also be an affect of having grown up when Nixon was president and we were in the Vietnam years. We were naturally resistant to authority. Our limbic reaction to hearing the word "sit," was to stand.

Perhaps most germane, as my sister-in-law M says about my brother, Fred, "Fred is a rule-breaker."

I am, too. 

In our "you must accept terms and conditions world," rule breakers are suffering. Tossed out. In some circumstances, beaten.

We don't do well with HR, officiousness and all-caps. Or bullies. And we live today in a bully-ocracy.

Worse, it seems to me as more and more wealth and power gets concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, we get told what we have to do and how we are supposed to behave with a tsunami wave of repetition. 

For pretty much the last year we've been force-fed about 10,000 water-boardings-a-day heaped with the inevitability and splendor of AI. It's coming. It's everything. It's all powerful. And you can't opt out. Sounds like my mother-in-law stopping by for a visit.

Even as it ruins everything--your job, your hobbies, the things you buy--you have to not just accept AI, you have to welcome it with open arms, wallets and sphincter.

It doesn't matter that the people telling us of this inevitability haven't shown us any of the purported good AI is supposed to bring us. It brings them more money (and less taxes) and that's what this is about and that's the only thing that really matters.

In short, AI is being crammed down our throats. And I'm not one-hundred percent sure why, except that a few heinously rich people will get heinouslyly more richerer. We're hearing the overture 24/7. The Wagnerian shit is coming.

Denarius of Lucius Marcius Philippus, minted c. 113 BC.

[By the way, just about 2100 years ago when Rome was still a "republic," the same concentration of wealth and its horrid side effects were happening. Philippus, quoted below, I suppose was 100 BCE's version of Bernie Sanders. Like Sanders, he failed to undo the concentration of wealth and power among Rome's "one-percent."

Or as Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis said more than a century ago, " "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."]

Anyway back to AI.

And though I make much of my living working with tech companies to help them sell their AI, I do not believe it can do the things many in our business say it will do for us. 

I believe maybe it can resize an ad for us, or tell us the most efficient way to find a hamburger in a strange town, or even spot a bottleneck in a production line or a cyst on a lung, but I don't think it will ever think, create, make us laugh or cry. Such things are human-made, not machine-made.

This morning I got an email message from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. As a member, they were telling me about some special hours where I could see their Van Goghs.

I had mentioned Van Gogh just yesterday to a putative friend. I said something like AI can't do what Van Gogh did. Van Gogh painted Dr. Gauchet's face with swaths of blue. AI won't do that because it's wrong. Art is, sometimes, using wrongness to express something right. Like Sandburg writing about fog coming in on little cat's feet. 

It takes a human to cat-feet words.

I started looking at a Van Gogh, one painting in particular. I enlarged it to look at individual brush strokes. Trying to find the individuality of thought can be strange in and of itself, but the collection of thoughts can add up to something wonderful, god-like and surpassing. Something wholly and exclusively human.

When you look closely, you realize it's nothing. Just splashes of paint reflective of seeing things in a way no one else ever had. It is more than a man. It's reflective of everything anyone has ever seen ever.

I had breakfast once with a famous client, he was the former head of McKinsey and taught at Yale Business School. When he ordered his tea he asked for it with two tea bags. We talked about his business and what he was building. I said "science was about seeing things we could never see before."

He pushed away from the table and stared me in the eye. After a long pause he said, "that's the single best definition of science that I've ever heard." 

Thinking about it ten years on, you could say the same thing about art. "Art is about seeing things we could never see before."

Whereas AI is, I'm sorry, in essence a predictability engine and a pattern matching machine. Essentially, this looks like that, therefore, this.

While humans can do that, maybe machines can do that better and faster and cheaper. Maybe a machine could learn to hit a Koufax curveball better than Willie Mays could.

But as for seeing things we couldn't see before, that's our job.