A New Yorker's take on Egypt. (Borscht Belt edition.)

Q. Have you heard what's happening in Egypt?
A. I live in the back. I don't hear anything.

This is complicated, so stay with me.

Like most people, at times I dread Mondays. There's a long week of work ahead of us, and not much of a way out of it. So here's what I propose.

Start the week with Thursday. The next day is Friday, and that ain't so bad. From Thursday, make the second day of the week Wednesday. Yeah, I know we're going backwards, but Wednesday is hump day, and at least we're halfway to the weekend. Then from Wednesday, go to Monday. I know, that sucks, but you'll get through it, besides in my system, the day after Monday is Friday. Yee ha! The weekend is almost here. Except that after Friday comes Tuesday. Which sucks, but after Tuesday comes the weekend which makes it all palatable.

Last night.

Last night I was dragged to a poetry and fiction reading in the damp basement of a Greenwich Village restaurant. The space, cramped and dark, was stuffed to the gills with friends and family of the people reading their work.

Almost all of the people reading--that is, the writers--had had their work published in a small literary magazine I had never heard of. They had a list of published credits all from small presses and from magazines and anthologies with names like "Clogged Drain: An Anthology of Fiction about Plumbing Problems."

The work, some of it anyway, wasn't bad. There were intermittent laughs and a moment or two of genuine emotion. But what occurred to me was how much this reading reminded me of the "awards-industrial complex."

Those listening to the work being read were other people who were reading. Those being published in "Clogged Drain" were the only people reading it. In other words the group was closed, self-supporting and, to a degree, solipsistic. What was going on was important to those attending but had little or no relevance to anyone else. It was all extremely circular and ego-driven.

There's nothing wrong with any of this. No one is being hurt in the process. And, to be honest, it's not that much different from me assiduously keeping a blog very few people actually read.

But despite all that, I somehow left the joint in yet another shitty mood.

Edward Hopper at the Whitney.

My wife and I dropped in on the Whitney, the perfect thing to do for an hour or so as the first sun and mild temperatures in about a week begin to slushify the city. Admission was even free because my wife and I both work for Interpublic agencies--a rare holding company benefit. The Whitney owns a total of 2,500 Hoppers (they must multiply like rabbits) and this show showed about 75 of them, including "Early Sunday," and "Mobil Gas."

There was also work by George Bellows, "Dempsey and Firpo," photographs by Steiglitz and some Ben Shahn's.

I always had a weakness for Ben Shahn, maybe it was the radical socialism of my mother, maybe the indelibility of his green-faced "The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti." In any event, the Shahn shown here wasn't in the Hopper show, but seemed the perfect painting for a day with allusions of Spring in the air.

Boxes and their contents.

This is pretty simple. And it applies to jobs, relationships and more. In advertising and outside of advertising.

Bad jobs, bad relationships have a box and they look for someone who fits in that box and then they cram them in that box. Good jobs, good relationships look for someone with a lot of qualities they like, and they let them breathe, the box be damned.

Here's a for-instance. Say you have a job that demands that the person who does that job can count from one to five. You have two candidates. One who can count from one to five and another candidate--same price, same everything--who can count from one to one-thousand.

Bad businesses will hire the "right" person for the job. And that person will likely do the job with competence, but little more. Good businesses will hire the person who can do more and they will allow that person to do it. The person himself will grow as will the organization that hires that person.

Boxes are almost always bad things. They can only carry so much and don't allow for expansion. That said, most organizations have org charts. Which are filled with boxes.

Cairo, 2009.

Two summers ago I went to Egypt on vacation with my wife and two daughters. We stayed in Giza, the city across the Nile from and contiguous with Cairo. Cairo was a sprawl, a city hemmed in by a vast necropolis, the tombs of the dead, the placement of which has added to the density of the city. Every twenty feet or so in the city are bony and well-uniformed paramilitary police armed with high-powered American-made rifles. Military service is mandatory for Egyptian males and checkpoints manned by armed soldiers are frequent. My younger daughter who left Cairo to go scuba diving in Mar al Salam, 24 hours by bus south of Cairo on the Red Sea, told me that a lot of the boys and young men she met took one college course a year so that they could avoid being conscripted into the army.

Cairo was about the craziest, most hectic city I've ever visited. It was filthy--the Nile seemed over-flowing with plastic bottles and garbage, and your eyes burned from the ever-present smog. City services, the likes of which we take for granted, traffic laws, trash removal, even pollution controls, seemed non-existent. That said, to a man, the people were friendly and warm, even when I revealed that we were Jewish. Still, even to a life-long New Yorker, the presence of heavily-armed soldiers, of having to go through metal detectors to enter your hotel, is off-putting and more than a little frightening.

The final thing that struck me is that a lot of people hadn't much to do. In New York everyone seems to be rushing somewhere. In Cairo on every corner there are clumps of men smoking cigarettes and talking. And of course being watched by the ever-present police.

Bloom's deli and the first time I was fired.

In the crush of Manhattan snow, my wife picked up dinner last night at a deli around the corner from her office, a deli called "Bloom's." I knew the place well. 15 years earlier I had worked in the neighborhood and my boss took me to Bloom's to warn me that if I didn't shape up, I would be fired.

In any event, bagels from Bloom's got me thinking about being fired and the fear and joy that comes from it.

I was fired, the first time, for "insubordination." That's what HR called it, as if I needed any more reasons to hate HR. But I was being fired, I was a father with two young kids in New York City private schools, so I had to think about what was being said to me. I had to wonder if they were right.

The fact is, I've never stopped wondering if they were right. I remember two things that I said to the President of the agency that I suppose you could say were insubordinate. I told her that I believed the Federal Express "Fast Talking Man" commercial was the greatest direct spot in history though it had no explicit call to action or a phone number at the end. My assertion annoyed the shit out of her because it violated the shibboleth of best practices.

The other thing I did was say to her, "you hired me to be a creative director, but you don't let me create anything or direct anything." (She was more interested in having senior creative people go to meetings and coerce timesheets out of people.)

In any event, since that time, 15 years ago, I've always warned the people I report to, or the people interviewing me that I am insubordinate. That I don't do well with orders, rules or direction. Most people are taken aback when you tell them you are insubordinate. They smile a crooked smile and laugh uneasily, unsure whether I'm joking or not. No one has ever questioned me further about my insubordination. They're afraid they'll be considered insubordinate, I suppose.

The truth of the matter is that at its best, our business is meant to be about insubordination. It's meant to upset the dominant complacency of the human mind. In the words of Carl Ally, we're meant to "afflict the comfortable or comfort the afflicted."

That's all for now, except for this: dinner was delicious.

A bit more Feynman.

After working so intensely on the Manhattan Project, Feynman was hired by Cornell University as a Professor of Physics. He was burnt out and depressed. He had, he claimed, no ideas. Here are Feynman's own words:

"Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing--it didn't have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether is was interesting and amusing for me to play with."

Later, Feynman was in a Cornell cafeteria and someone, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. "I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate...It came out of a complicated equation!"

Feynman relates his enthusiasm to fellow Nobelist and physicist Hans Bethe and Bethe replies, "Feynman, that's pretty interesting, but what's the importance of it? Why are you doing it?"

Feynman ignored Bethe and kept playing with the idea of the wobbling plate. "Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity...Everything flowed effortlessly...There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate."

I write about this today because there are parallels to our business. When the holding companies and their rapacious hordes of MBAs and project managers took over our business, they systematically eliminated play. There is no downtime to be allowed. Every hour must be billable. We do not have permission to not be productive and we are, therefore, not productive. But our meetings are met, our forms are filled in and our timesheets are neat as a pin.

This is obvious to everyone but the people who run our businesses.

Definitions.

One of the things I've noticed in the world today is how definitions--that which should bring clarity--have become increasingly un-clear.

Take speed limits, for instance. If a highway is marked at 55, most cops and most drivers assume that they can "get away with," or allow speeds in the low 60s. In baseball, the strike zone--clearly defined on paper--is subject to the caprice and whim of whomever is umpiring. One last example. Online job sites that list jobs under the heading of Creative Director. The title means nothing. Salaries seem to start at the low 40s. And often as few as five year's experience is demanded.

Years ago I went to a client meeting at a huge corporate client--a financial institution. We were about to present our creative when the client--who had been rubbed the wrong way by our account guy--asked to see the brief. The account guy had failed to bring it and so, in the language of our era, was "ripped a new one."

I learned from that and never go into a creative discussion without having the brief with me. These are my instructions. I should either know them in my sleep or have them to refer to.

Yesterday, I presented work internally. The account people were so ready to collaborate, so eager to do my job (which is to create), so eager to add their two cents. Of course, they brought no brief. (the brief they had provided was devoid of insight and had no information hierarchy anyway.)

This business should be pretty simple. Do your job, well. And leave me to do mine.

Hierarchy.

About 15 years ago, before I had spent more than a couple of hours online, I got a call from a digital agency for a job as a copywriter. I was intrigued, as I almost always am, by things that are new, so I went over to the agency to have a chat.

Before I did, I talked to a wise friend of mine who handed me this insight. "Geo, the problem with the internet is that there's no hierarchy. No organizing principle. It's not like a book or even a magazine. Everything is equal."

I think about that today because I think the web's lack of hierarchy is hampering the development of digital agencies. What I mean by this is simple. Digital agencies will spend as much time, man-power (or human resources if you must) on developing work that will reach a few dozen people as they will on work that will reach millions.

An agency I know spent months and hundreds of hours creating a Face-schnook page for a particular client. To date, that page has 47 people who like it. Much like the You Tube videos posted for the same client whose views are in the low hundreds.

Wise advertising agencies, whether they're digital or traditional, would do well to, in the parlance of account people, "fish where the fish are."

In other words, spend the most time and effort on work that reaches the greatest number of people or the most important people.

That concept should not be hard to grasp.