King Lear in Manhattan.

Last night my wife and I went down to the Public Theater to see "King Lear," with Sam Waterston in the title role. There are many great things about living in New York City, not the least of which being able to see something Shakespearean almost anytime you want. Even if it's a lesser play like, say, "Love's Labor's Lost" with an all lesbian Armenian cast.

In any event, I am still reeling from having spent hours upon hours of forced exposure to speeches at an aforementioned Ted-like conference I attended. I am still stuttering from the administration of intravenous Kool-Aid and injections of huge doses of Newspeak--of curation, of ideation, of masturbation. So, seeing "Lear" served as an antidote to our societal wankfest, our celebration and extollation of all things ephemeral, trivial and inconsequential.

Lear is about life and death. About love, loyalty and language. It is about honor and aging and truth and forked-tonguedness.

Many people through this blog ask me or praise me for my "fearlessness." For writing, while captive within the clutches of a penurious holding company, about the sins of our Lords, our Masters, our Controllers, our Overseers. The signers of paychecks, the demanders of timesheets, the doler-outers of PTO. Why are you not afraid of speaking your mind, some readers ask me? Why are you not afraid?

The answer is easy. I don't think many in positions of authority could read something as long as this, something that's gone on for this many words without false praise or buzzwords.

I heard a fly buzzword when I died.

I leave you with this, from Lear's fool:

Mark it, nuncle:
Have more than thou showest,
Speak less than thou knowest,
Lend less than thou owest,
Ride more than thou goest,
Learn more than thou trowest,
Set less than thou throwest;
Leave thy drink and thy whore,
And keep in-a-door,
And thou shalt have more
Than two tens to a score.

Boston to New York, 2011.

Last night my wife and I attempted to make it back to New York from Boston using the Northeast's prevailing 150 year-old transportation infrastructure.

We got on a train in Boston's 47-degree-fahrenheit South Station. The train was delayed because they were "checking the brakes." Finally the filthy behemoth shoved off in the cold rain about 20 minutes late. We rode south through a winter storm in October. Perfect evidence of what three-time Pulitzer-winner Thomas Friedman calls "global weirding." After about an hour a so an annoyed voice came on the too-loud speaker. "This train is stopping in New Haven and going back to Boston. Amtrak is making no provisions to get you to New York."

Trapped in the snow in New Haven. All hotels booked and cabs few and far between.

After some time, we wrestled a cab to the ground. (A third New York bound passenger had joined us by then.) We implored the driver to take us the 80 or so miles to Manhattan and we climbed into his Ford Crown Victoria. About two hours and $170 later, we were safe and warm inside our apartment--we got home around the same time we would have had the train functioned.

By the way, and on a separate note, one of the things that has always impressed me is how small companies--companies that don't employ scores of copywriters and marketing people, almost always have better taglines that Fortune 500 companies. In the dingy bar in Boston's South Station last night my wife and I picked up burgers to go for dinner. I came across a middling tagline, shown above on the receipt. It reminded me of my favorite tagline, shown above on the van.

A rerun.

After my agency offsite last night I went to one of those Ted-like lectures where people who have never done, made or thought anything tell you exactly what is wrong with the world, how to fix it and why they're right and everyone else is wrong. It made me think of a previous post of mine.

I've never had a re-run post before and I've written over 2,000--but I can't shake the quotation below from my head. (BTW quotation is a noun. Quote is a verb. Almost everyone uses the word "quote" incorrectly. Another spike of the ass of literacy.)

Anyway, the rerun post, it was called "Scoundrels."

Reading people is an important skill. Not pre-judging, but reading. If you're in advertising I have a simple thesis. Don't trust anyone. Especially anyone that uses words like "model," "monetization," "process," and a few others. They are scoundrels, plain and simple.

In "The Captive Mind", Czeslaw Milosz's memoir/essay/study about artists and intellectuals living under Communism in the early 1950s, he attributed the epigram below to an ancient Jew from Galacia. Makes sense doesn't it?

"When someone is honestly 55% right, that's very good and there's no use wrangling. And if someone is 60% right, it's wonderful, it's great luck, and let him thank God. But what's to be said about 75% right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100% right? Whoever says he's 100% right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal."

Relationships.

I have long and unruly hair, and I like it long and unruly. Consequently I go to the barber three, maybe four times a year. And about every year or so, after having seen a particular barber three or four times, I switch to another barber shop.

It's not that I don't like my barbers, or that I don't like how they manage my mane, it just that I don't want another relationship in my life. I don't want a commitment. I don't want someone to be "my barber." My haircuts are not important enough to me for me to have a relationship that revolves around them.

A lot of marketers would probably find the above group of sentences shocking. Because a lot of marketers act as if the end all and be all of their existence and their brands is a relationship.

Maybe there are masses of people so lonely that they need to converse with lip balm or candy or scrubbing bubbles. Maybe relationship marketing works with these people.

Me, I just want to be left alone.

From whence I come.

I was born, almost 54 years ago in a hospital that was in one of America's first malls, an outdoor agglomeration of small shops and branches of department stores called Cross County Center. Cross County Hospital was a six-story blue-brick building in the center of things. I don't know why they put a hospital in the middle of a mall, but in any event it's where I was born, and where my sister emerged two years later.

Cross County Center was just over the New York City line in Yonkers, New York. Yonkers was a city exploding with post-war growth and had surged to become New York's fourth largest municipality, after New York City, Buffalo and Rochester.

Yonkers was, and is, a place riven by segregation. An underclass of black families had moved into the downtown areas. The working class neighborhoods began to diminish as small factories began to shutter as factories moved to cheaper labor in the south. More affluent families began moving into large homes on the fringes.

Yonkers at the time of my youth was heavily Italian. There was a unique way the Italian boys had of calling after girls that I learned to mimic. I can still effect the effect if pressed or drunk.

I'm not drunk.

I woke up this morning with an unusual feeling. I realized I didn't dread going in to work. Yes, I had a bunch of soul-sucking meetings already piling onto my Microsoft Calendar. Yes, I had the nitty-gritty of a couple of asinine assignments to attend to. Yes, I even had to "register" for my agency's offsite.

All things I find pretty odious.

But still, I didn't dread going in.

Here's the thing: I love advertising.

I love the work of having ideas, of solving problems. I love the pressure of the deadline. I love the energy it takes to sell something. I love the arguments, the fights. I love writing copy. I love doing work that I like. I love seeing ads run. I love advertising.

Outside of being a small forward for the Knicks, I don't know what else I'd rather do.

Yes, there are moments, weeks and even months where you can't stand the asses you work with and for. Where it seems like everyone has over-dosed on stupidity pills. Where it's all you can do not to rage and storm.

But even though there are times when it sucks,
I love advertising.

Short vs. long.

My lovely wife and I had a conversation the other night. That in and of itself is not worth posting about--we have conversations at least two or three times a month, but the content of the conversation was, somewhat, extraordinary.

"I just called up the Metropolitan Opera," she announced. "Siegfried (part of Wagner's "Ring Cycle") starts at 6 and isn't over until 11:30."

We were going to Siegfried on Thursday, and the news of its length pushed me back in my chair.

"It's five and a half hours," I said, expressing incredulity. "You're kidding me."

"That's right," she said, "Seriously."

A five and a half hour opera got me thinking. So much of what we read, hear and say in the modern world is uttered under the imprecations to "keep it short. Make it fast. Cut it down." Content, which we're told on one hand, is "king" but most people would assert that content's a king with a short reign.

The other day the Ad Contrarian had a seminal post that linked to a paper 20 or so pages long. http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2011/10/you-should-read-this.html It was a paper that shakes to the rafters the dominant complacency of so much of our business. It's fully sourced, footnoted and researched.

A week before that IBM published and allowed you to download for free a survey of 1,700 CMOs called "From Stretched to Strengthened." It's an incisive look at the problems facing our clients--the things that threaten their survival. And it's compiled by one of the world's smartest companies.

In the past two week's two new translations of Homer's "Odyssey" have been published. They're each a good week's reading for Evelyn Wood.

None of this content is weak. Sound-biteable. "Easy to read" or digest.

The vast majority have come to equate short with valuable.

That's true neither in penises nor ideas.

Occupy Madison Avenue. Continues.

We are the 99%.

Look.

I have the misfortune of a Manhattan malady. I live far east and I work far west. That means my commute, even on the lightest days is akin to something like the salaryman's version of the Bataan Death March. (My father used to quip that the only way to get across town in Manhattan was to be born there.)

In any event I take the sluggish M79 bus from York to Central Park West, a crowded journey of about 20 minutes and then switch to the downtown C train and take that--the worst of the subway lines--from 81st to 42nd.

What I notice nearly every morning is that no one notices anything. We are held captive by our inches-big screens, thumbing friends or dealing cards to the exclusion of nearly everything else.

I remember about 30 years ago a retailer on 57th Street was having some sort of an event that involved having a genuine elephant in front of their store. He had to hire barkers to exhort passersby to "react to the elephant."

That was many years ago and I suppose people were then rapt in conversation, their Sony walkmans or even the newspaper. But today things seem, to me anyway, to be worse.

Our life may not be in our hands, but that's where our focus is.

What's wrong with advertising

If you think about the advertising industry, as I do, there's an article in today's "New York Times" that merits reading and reflection.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/24/business/media/why-not-occupy-newsrooms.html?pagewanted=all&src=ISMR_HP_LO_MST_FB
Over the last 30 years or so, and the trend has accelerated during today's era of digital mania, about half the industry's talk has been centered around "what's wrong with the advertising industry."

People have proffered all sorts of theses, but only rarely, if at all does someone come forth and say that the business has been "Wall-Streeted."

Advertising, when it finally came to the attention of bankers in the early 80s was considered an attractive field in which to invest. Agencies generated a lot of cash flow and, outside of offices and typewriters, needed no real equipment or infrastructure. It probably costs less in capital plant to get an agency up and running that it takes to start a nail salon.

The money boys saw this and pounced. Just as they did in the newspaper industry.

The Times reports on enormous bonuses being lavished on people high up in the Gannet and Tribune companies.

Here's the scorecard of one such bandit.

Recently, Craig A. Dubow resigned as Gannett’s chief executive. "His short six-year tenure was, by most accounts, a disaster. Gannett’s stock price declined to about $10 a share from a high of $75 the day after he took over; the number of employees at Gannett plummeted to 32,000 from about 52,000, resulting in a remarkable diminution in journalistic boots on the ground at the 82 newspapers the company owns."

Gannet's board gave Mr. Dubow just under $37.1 million in retirement, health and disability benefits, on top of a combined $16 million in salary and bonuses in the last two years.

What's happened in journalism has happened in advertising and in other industries. I actually don't think there's anything wrong with advertising that the money moguls didn't cause.

We've been strip-mined.

The wealth has been removed.

The land has been laid waste.

The robbers move on.