A cold night in New York.

The warmth of Spring--though Spring has technically arrived--is not yet in evidence in New York. There are still traces of dog and soot ruined snow in the parks and on the fringes of sidewalks, and thin sheets of ice top the morning puddles left by street sweepers.

Of course, Dame Insomnia knows no season and she jostled me awake this morning at three. I bundled up against the cold, slipped Whiskey's leash on and headed out for a walk. Of late I've been heading to an olde-timey bar I've discovered called the Tempus Fugit. But I've noticed an additional coat of carbohydrates around my mid-section, so I decided against visiting the Tempus, and instead headed over to the river for a walk.

Whiskey and I headed, as we so often do, uptown, in the direction of the Triboro and Hell Gate bridges.

These are two of my favorite bridges in New York. The Triboro was built of steel by Robert Moses during the depths of the Depression. It has no beauty. None of the sweep of the George Washington Bridge or the Verrazano-Narrows. It hasn't the detail of the Brooklyn Bridge, or the grandeur.

The Hell Gate Bridge. (Originally, the New York Connecting Railroad Bridge.)

But I love its dirty, utilitarian nature. It was built to be tough and built to work. Even its name has no grace. Triboro. It connects, as promised, three boroughs. Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens.

The Hell Gate Bridge is a railway bridge and is a simple, beautiful arch suspension. It was the inspiration for the much more famous and much more photogenic Sydney Harbor Bridge. No one knows the Hell Gate Bridge. But I award it points for both its plum coloring and its originality.

Hell Gate is in red.

We headed North, Whiskey and I and saw no one. We stopped at the widening of the waters around 97th Street, a broad expanse where the Harlem River, the Long Island Sound and the East River (which is really not a river at all, but a tidal strait) converge. This confluence results in turbulent currents and is the reason for the blunt Dutch name, Hell Gate.

There are, and have since the late 18th Century, been rumors or legend, of a ship of gold, the Hussar, carrying $2-$4 of bullion, that went down in the Hell Gate--a pay ship, serving British troops. But no one has been able to find it. And most certainly, amateur explorers have been put off by both the murk and the roil of the brine.

The Hussar in better times.

Whiskey and I stopped at 97th Street and I leaned on the delicately curved wrought iron. Whiskey lay at my feet. A man who was similarly leaning about 20 feet North of me slid over.

He began with no introduction.

"New York really turned in the late 80s. When crack came in. That's when it got dangerous."

I disagreed. "I think it was earlier," I said. "Getting mugged was like falling off a log from the late 60s on."

He ignored that and kept speaking.

"My father owned four laundromats in the Bronx. Not in the worst neighborhoods, but certainly not the best. Thing were ok until crack. When crack came in we closed the minute it got dark. The time didn't matter. When it was dark, we closed. No one went out in the dark in those days.

"In one of those laundromats, my father employed two large Puerto Ricans. Hector was about my size--a big guy. But Jose, we called "Lurch," after the butler in the Addams Family. He ran 6'4" easy and went 220 pounds.

Lurch from the Addams Family.

"One Winter we had a crazy cold spell with temperatures in the single digits."

"It's none too warm tonight," I said.

"No. This was like a high of five degrees. Anyway my old man bought us all warm clothes. Flannel-lined pants, quiltedflannel shirts, woolen hats and gloves and a 3/4-length down coat each.

"One night Lurch and Hector left the laundromat in the dark and they were mugged. They didn't hurt them--they could have killed them--but instead they took all their clothes--right down to their underwear and left them naked on the sidewalk in the cold, handcuffed to a chain-link fence.

"That's what New York was like then."

"I do remember," I agreed.

"After that Lurch started carrying a snub-nosed .38 that held five bullets. He always kept a rubber bullet in the first chamber."

A .38 snub-nose.

"Smart," I said. A good way to chase an assailant off without risking a manslaughter rap.

"One day he was riding his motorcycle and he was stopped by a cop who, of course, found the gun. That could have been it for Lurch. Illegal possession. But the cop liked the gun so much, he nabbed it and let Lurch go just for speeding. The gun was never mentioned on the police report."

At this point Whiskey was up and pulling South. The sun was coming up and it was time to leave.

I bid my friend goodbye and walked, fully-clothed and safely, home.

A visit to an award show.

This morning I had to do something I don't ordinarily do.

I had to judge an Awards Show.

An Awards Show for the financial services industry.

I probably looked at 200 pieces of work.

Three, I think, were good.

One was outstanding.

But here's the thing.

A large percentage should never have been entered.

Not because they sucked or anything like that.

But because, I think, that not every category people can conceive is actually awardable.

Today for instance I saw entries that were essentially powerpoint presentations.

Posters at events that say "Welcome."

Things of that magnitude.

When things so small get awards it diminishes and and undercuts the meaning of awards for work that is really deserving.

Can't we just be satisfied that we've done a decent job and leave it at that?

Notes for the day.

The mathematics of creativity.

Over the past week or ten days we've had the equivalent of a brain dump from a client.

A couple times daily emails come in with four or five attachments.

Each attachment contains a document that is between five and 20 pages long.

I personally have gotten half a dozen calls telling me how pressing this project is.

It's a three minute video.

180 seconds.

Last night I went to the client with a Roman numeral outline.

The kind we learned to make when I was in 5th grade.

10 years old.

I broke all their information down into seven parts.

An intro, a goodbye, and the five key things they want covered.

In short, I condensed about 200 pages worth of "information" to a short list.

I said to them, "let's look at this like a math puzzle. We have seven things to do in 180 seconds. That's 26 seconds a topic. About as many words as you can get on a 3x5 card writing normally."

They laughed nervously.

Nobody works with 3x5 cards anymore.

We have "endless" sheets of paper because computer pages just keep coming.

I told them that creativity is often a reductive process.

Cutting out everything that doesn't matter.

As Roy Grace once said, "I take out the garbage."

They sat and stared at me.

I now know what a freak in the circus feels like.

Working with Tony Kaye.

Tony Kaye, the noted director, has a notorious reputation of being a bit of a madman. He's volatile, unpredictable and brilliant. When shooting with him, you're always a bit nervous about what you're going to get.

I worked with Tony a little over a decade ago and during the shoot, he taught me something I hope I never forget.

The spots we were shooting, I'm sorry to say, were not very good. We were simply asking people what they thought about IBM computers. We were working hard to make these reactions genuine and unscripted.

Unscripted as they were, we of course still had copy points we hoped to capture. (Look! They're getting away. Capture those copy points.)

Tony and I got along very well. For whatever reason he felt ok with me. Before we shot anything he would ask me what I wanted the person being shot to say.

I would answer in a sentence.

Tony would move his face closer to mine.

"One thing," he would say.

I would answer again in three or four words.

Again Tony would move his face closer to mine. Our noses would almost be touching.

"One thing," he'd say again.

And I got that one thing down to one word.

There's so much to be learned about writing from Tony Kaye's process during that shoot.

Obliterate the extraneous.

Focus on the key.

Thanks Tony.

I'm sorry this post is so long.

_____________ is power.

Centuries ago Francis Bacon said "Knowledge is Power."

Meaning, simply, when you know stuff, you're better able to do intelligent stuff and prevail.

Today, of course, in our memed-mediocrity of a world, the quotation is attributed not to an English Viscount but to someone or something called "France is Bacon."

We have dumbed down everything.

In the ad agency of today, knowledge isn't power, bluster is.

The assertion that the latest technological fillip will "change everything."

Our industry spent countless millions sending people down to SXSW. I've yet to read anything that's come out of it that matters to the world of marketing.

I've written an adjunct to Bacon's adage.

Knowledge is power. Yes, I still buy that.

(BTW, data is not knowledge is not power. Data is meaningless without insight. American "Intelligence" services had pedaflops of data saying that planes would be crashed into the Twin Towers. When, where, how and by whom. What they didn't have was even a slimmest ability to read that data and turn it into a meaningful conclusion.)

Yes, knowledge is power. But even more powerful than knowledge is memory.

The memory and knowledge of what makes a strong marketing campaign. 

The memory and knowledge of what has worked before.

As a species we keep thinking we're reinventing all the rules, all the syntax of humanity.

We issue proclamations daily about how this or that will change everything.

We have little knowledge.

And no memory.

A slight rebellion on Madison Avenue.

I've been friends with Claude (not his real name) since we were junior creatives together at BBDO in the late 70s. Mind you, the great old-time radio comedian Fred Allen said Batten Burton Durstein and Osborne sounded like an over-stuffed suitcase falling down a flight of stairs.

But, as you've probably guessed, I digress.

Claude and I have stayed friends for 35 years. And beyond our time together at BBDO we have worked at two other agencies together through the decades. One night at BBDO we were working late and Phil Dusenberry stopped by Claude's office. We proceded to get shit-faced with Phil. Our drunken brush with this legendary ad man.

I have to say something about Claude, he's a bit--how shall I say this--unstable. He loves good work really beyond all bounds of good sense. Even when we worked together when we were juniors, Claude would go to the mat for the "integrity of a coupon ad."

I guess about twenty years ago, Claude realized that the breaks weren't going to go his way. The great creative agencies had closed. And the few agencies that were left, at least in New York, seemed to have given up the fight.

Claude hadn't.

Which brings me to last night when I dropped by Claude's junior four in the east 20s.

"I've got to show you something," he said as I entered his flat. "Grab a beer from the 'fridge and let me show you something."

We walked down a hallway in his well-art-directed apartment.

"When I realized it was lost, that you really couldn't do the kind of work you wanted to do, I woke up one morning and I suddenly knew I had just two choices."

"That's more than most people have," I replied laconically.

He ignored me and dashed forward. "I decided rather than choice one--die trying, having a coronary infarction, I decided on choice two. A quiet, insidious rebellion."

We had reached the closed door of his spare bedroom.

"So one night, before I left the office, I'm not sure where I was working at the time, I stole a stapler. I was walking out. I saw one on someone's desk, and I threw it in my backpack.

"That was it. That stapler was my recompense for the banality. For the politics. For holding company agression and greed.

"I took another stapler the next night. And the next. Yes, and then the next."

He opened the door we were standing before. It opened up into a room, a small room, probably 8'x10', that was almost completely filled up with all manner of staplers. Floor to ceiling staplers with a small path winding through them.

"I counted last week," he said. "3617 staplers. Plus the five I lifted this week. 3622."

He shut the door gingerly, lovingly.

"It's not the same as getting paid what I'm worth. Or having a pension like the holding company guys. It's not the same as being treated well. But fuck it. 3600 staplers is something."

My life companion.

To me one of the most striking things about current marketing communications is not how new, fresh and au courant they are. What strikes me is how they actually embrace all the bombast and hype of the advertising industry they claim died years ago.

Here's an example.

Samsung's new Galaxy phone (the name itself seems lifted from Ford Motor's 1960s lineup) has positioned itself as your "Life Companion."

I do understand how essential a phone can be.

I do see people on the bus and train and even on the crowded sidewalks of New York, who can barely take their eyes off their latest game of solitaire. And I do recognize the dependency people have on apps that can find everything from a burrito in Dubai to a date for an ugly guy.

Regardless, however, of how handy this mother-fucking phone is, if it is your life companion, you're in serious trouble.

Most people need the warmth of another human against their carcass.

Not just the warmth of over-heated lithium.

Most people need a real voice to talk to.

Not just something Siri-like.

Everything from tweet-fests to mobile ads to new phones are marketed with the over-blown bombast of a smarmy 1950s announcer.

If that's how you want to do things fine.

But then don't say out of the other side of your mouth that marketing is dead.

I think maybe David Ogilvy said this decades ago. And if he didn't, he should have.

"Advertising is dead, until you need to sell something."

Getting in.

Last night, in addition to having Whiskey, my 11-month-old Golden Retriever as my companion, I woke up around three AM and had with me the Black Dog. 

The Black Dog is not friendly, obedient and cuddly like Whiskey. But she sticks to me like a stalker's shadow.  She is tenacious, the Black Dog. So I decided to head up to the Tempus Fugit to see if I could chase her away. 

I could not chase her through drink, mind you. I don't drink enough to tame the Black Dog. And I am not one to trade my Black Dog issues for a compensatory alcohol issue. But I thought perhaps time and conversation with the bartender at the Tempus Fugit would help.

We had made a deal when I started frequenting the Tempus Fugit a few months ago, the bartender and I. No names. I don't know his and he doesn't know mine. He'll call me Sam sometimes and sometimes Max and sometimes Pete. I picked Owen for him, a strong name I think, but off the beaten path, like him.

So the Tempus Fugit is where me and my companions headed. Uptown to 91st Street, then down a mean industrial corner. That's where you'll find her.

There are two steps up from street level to start your journey to the bar--it's a journey to another world taken by the few who know its whereabouts. At times you are Orpheus, traveling to the Underworld to rescue your love. At other times, you are Odysseus, looking, journeying, fighting to find home.

Dirty, sturdy industrial steps that have seen the cleated treads of a million or more footfalls. Nothing indicates the road to take or where you are. You climb them. Then you shove open the beaten garbage-truck-green doors that are always just ever-so-slightly ajar. If I were on a film shoot, some set designer would spend hours making new doors look as beaten as these. These are the genuine article, beaten by time and tide and men and machines. Beaten, yes, as we all are.

Then it's down a long hallway which ends in two padded sliding doors which recess into the adjacent walls. These doors slide reluctantly, and you have to use a little muscle to get them to move.

Then, it's through a steel expansion door and down another long hallway, and you're still not there. This hallway is bordered by walls that are dented and bruised like a bad boxer at the end of a brutal bout.

Finally, you meet another steel expansion door behind which sits heavy steel-framed wooden doors that noisily slide open when you apply considerable force.

And then you have arrived. Arrived at a place that cannot be photographed--a deal I have with the bartender. I have, besides, revealed enough already.

The bar itself is gleaming dark wood--a teak or mahogany. Deep and dark, and maybe as foreboding as the Black Dog herself. Behind that bar, on three levels sit, I counted, 116 different bottles of alcohol. More "browns" than "whites" reflective of the old-timey essence of the place, including Haig & Haig in its famous pinched bottle. Haig & Haig was the booze Joseph Kennedy had the exclusive US distribution rights to. Revenue from its importation helped elect three Senators and one US President.

There are two taps behind the bar, only two and their handles have little ornamentation. They predate the time when every available inch of space needed to be festooned with an "ad unit." One handle draws Herzmorder--there's an umlaut over the "o" which I can't find on my Mac and the other draws Pike's Ale, the Ale that won for Yale.

Speaking of Pike's, there are just two adornments behind the bar. A sign for Pike's Ale, the Ale that won for Yale (I found a facsimile of the sign online--I had promised, remember, no pictures) and another one, oddly enough from the "Anheuser Busch Brewing Association" featuring the slaughter of General Custer at the hands of the Blackfeet Sioux, in lurid detail.

Whiskey and I assumed our usual positions and drank our respective liquids. The bartender or, perhaps, Methuselah held court as he does every night.

"I see you brought a guest," the bartender began.

"Yes. One of those bad guests. I don't know how long she'll stay. How much she'll put me out."

He pointed to the lithograph of Custer at the far end of the bar. I grabbed my 8-oz. glass of Pike's and sidled over to where I was in front of the print.

"Things could be worse," he said to me. 

I zeroed in on a portion of the depiction of the massacre where an Sioux was removing the scalp of a soldier with a sharpened stone tomahawk.

"Got it," I muttered back, somewhat annoyed that I had to agree with him.

I drank in silence my two Pike's. I slid over to him also in silence a twenty, and thanked him again in silence as he once again said, in silence, "on me."

Cannibalism.

In New York yesterday a jury convicted an NYPD cop, Gilberto Valle. Valle "conspired to kidnap, rape, torture and eat" various women including his wife of some years, Kimberly. In fact, they found a document on Kimberly's computer titled "Abducting and Cooking Kimberly--A Blueprint."

Valle's defense was, as you might expect, that he was engaging only in "fantasy role-play."

I was thinking about this last night as I was having drinks with an old ad friend. His agency is going through its review process. It's a long, enervating review ordeal.

Where no one wins but the chiefs at the top of the holding company.

There's no money for anyone.

My conclusion: they try to eat you alive. And they call it role-playing.