An annual report meets William Carlos Williams and the Greeks.

About nine months ago I got a call from someone out of the blue.

Oddly enough the call wasn't about extending my car warranty or urging me to vote for this candidate or that.

It was from a prospective client who had found me and wanted me to work on their business.

I was just three months into the freelance game at that point and really didn't know my ass from my elbow. And this client was an international banking organization designed to help impoverished countries recover from disasters and improve their development.

They sent me a 64-page scope of work that frightened me as much as a dossier of my mother's dental records would. She biting the heads off of chickens and all. I'm a good reader and all that. But I have a Jew's deadly dread of bureaucracy--read a little Kafka some time, you'll get it--and I couldn't face the SOW.

I reached out to a friend of mine--my account person from Ogilvy from 20 years ago. Over the course of decades and thousands of miles, we had remained friends.

Like the aforementioned Kafka, I won't use her name. Instead, I'll call her H.

H wrestled the problem to the ground. She got the client trained. She had me attending status meetings. She made sure things moved along, bills got paid. As GeorgeCo, LLC, a Delaware Company grew, she helped me get accounts signed and so on and so forth.

Along the way, this banking group asked me to create their annual report. I've written my share of eight-page inserts for the Times and the Wall Street Journal. And my share of four-minute brand films. But this was a 130-page document.

I called my ex-partner S, who also lives thousands of miles away in the other direction. We too have stayed friends. Through the years, the miles and the distance.

Together, the three of us hammered out this project. It's not the most "creative" thing I've ever worked on. It won't deliver belly-laughs, but it's good, sophisticated and smart. When it's finally published in a week or so, I might share some of it in this space

Like I said, it ain't going to win an award. It's not going to lead people to regard me as cool. And it will not help me get my non-existent swagger back. 

But that's not the point.

On Monday nights when I am not working, I try to tune into Antiques Road Show on whatever PBS station is airing it. I like sports memorabilia ok, but what I really enjoy is when the experts parse, so to speak, a finely made piece of furniture.

Most often they remark on a subtle, gentle curve. Some delicate inlay or an elegant veneer. Or the skill and precision of dovetail joints.

Of all the joys we can find in our work lives--and we should gain joy from working, not just money--there's no greater happiness than the feeling that comes from working with people who care. Who care enough to be good at their jobs. Who push and who are unflagging in their drive to do work that's up to their standards, that's done their way.

Working with people who are strong enough to love what they do and so they do what they do with every fiber of their muscles and their brain and their heart is one of the greatest things that can happen to a person.

I've read all of the ancient Greeks--the epics, the plays of Euripides and more. They talk about love, honor, courage, heart, justice and betrayal. They talk about the pettiness of men and the pettiness of the gods. They talk about the full raft of human hurts, joys and sorrows.

But they seldom write about the friendship and love and pride and passion that comes from working with people who care. An account woman like H who knows how to keep the world calm and at bay. Or an art-director like S who knows how to squeeze a serif in a way that makes all the difference, even if no one else ever notices it.

Like William Carlos Williams wrote, so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow.

So much depends upon things we take for granted.

Next year's Super Bowl spots. One year early.

In today's world, 
a new risk emerges every second.

No one knows where it will come from.
Or what we can do about it.
We only know this.
That it's our duty to generations yet to come,
to respond,
Quickly.
Intelligently.
With agility.
In a robust robustness that must increase our robustness.

Sometimes it seems like whatever's pulling us together,
is instead pulling us apart.
Neighbors.
Communities.
Families.
And, of course, politics too.
But by coming together,
we can come together.
In a spirit of togetherness.
The spirit that made this land a land of togetherness.

We don't question questions without seeking to answer
parentheticals. We look to accentuate the positive.
While not messing with Mr. In-between.
And all along the way, 
we agree with the things that are most expedient.
Because, it's bred in our bones.
And bones in our bread. With butter. 
Unsalted butter.
It's our lives. Our dreams.
More than that.
Our hopes.
For tomorrow.

So in today's world, that's why we say
it's not enough to be there.
If there isn't enough to be.
No, we have to be inclusive, reclusive, impulsive.
And we have to use a sieve.
To get rid of the lumps in the gravy that makes us this land tasty.

We have to reach out to one another.
And give not just a helping hand...
but we also must give a leg up.
And maybe a pancreas.

Because this is a small, blue dot we're living on.
And the spirit of freedom
runs through our veins.
It's what's made our beer cool, clean and crisp,
since our ancestors came to this valley so many centuries ago.
And said,
here.

Here, we take our stand for unity.
For America.
For a cleaner future.
Not just for all of us.
But for some of us.
A land of dirt, and roots, and rocks.
A land of little shards of glass and radioactive waste.
A land, we call...home.

We're Prominose.
No one out-promins the nose.
Since 1642 we've been doing things to bring folks together
by separating them from their livelihoods.
From their heritage.
From their cattle.
Their homes.
Their families.
And most of all, their money.

With 5G services and 5G 5G-ness
and 5G osity.

It's not easy being the world's leader in
non-cow-based lactose-imitative products.
But to be outstanding in your field,
sometimes you have to stand out in the field.
It's fucking cold out in a field.
Always has been.
Always will be.
Do be a don't be.

I'm Wilfred Brimley.
And I believe that tomorrow's yesterday
is yesterday's today.
Always has been.
Always will be.
That's the way we were brought up.
In this place...
In this place we call.
America.
Where the future is more than just another day.
It's every day.

Don't beware of Greeks.

It's 26 hours or so before the Superb Owl as I write this and I already know the game and its surroundings will upset me. 

No matter what the outcome, no matter who gets permanent brain injuries, no matter what martial metaphors are involved, no matter how many multi-billion dollar fleets of military jets fly overhead, no matter what talentless plasticine starlet slips a talentless plasticine boob out, I already know I will be disgusted and anti-American about ten minutes in.

Mostly I will be disgusted by the noise of it all. The surround noise. The noise of the titanium-on-bone hits. The noise of the too-decibelled commercials. The noise of the non-stop Jabberwocky announcers with their non-stop blather about the nobility of 'roid rage and playing hurt.

I've been a city-dweller all my life. Surrounded by the cacophony of a trillion car horns, idling diesel engines, wicked garbage men who like nothing more than throwing old tin cans full of fish offal off the brick walls of piss-stained alleys at two in the morning. 

I've heard it all in 201 languages. 

Like most New Yorkers, I know how to say fuck you in all 201 of those languages--and mean it--and in a few dozen more that have yet to fall off to Tower of Babel.

Let me tell you something, all you open plan office people. All you talk on the cellphone 19-hours-a-day people. All you hip-hop music from the heavy-bass-tuned-car people.

Noise, constant noise, is the enemy of civilization.

And in our forced state of Covid-isolation, where for many there is too much quiet, we take solace in noise and are quickly losing our minds amid the clamor.

Noise was the worst effect of the trump pussidency. The constant vomit of stupidity, cruelty, hate, racism, stupidity, intolerance and bad spelling and worse punctuation. (I know I said stupidity twice. I could have said it more times.)

Noise then repeated on 91 on-screen graphics on 191 cable channels with low-cut blondes and low IQ well-coiffed mannequins repeating the noise until we are slowly dead above the neckline.

You can't live in a world of constant noise and expect to be able to think. You can't live in a world of constant noise and expect to be able to hear. You can't live in a world of constant noise and expect to be able to breathe.

I have heard for ten or fifteen years now how advertising has to become part of culture and for the life of me I don't know what that means or why. 

Popular, I get. Imitated, I get.

But part of culture leaves me at a loss.

Mostly because I don't even know what American culture is. And whatever it is, it surely forgets that people like me--who would rather read that be shouted at--exist.

That's it for me today.

Like I said, I'm disgusted. So consider this:

And if you want an escape from Amerika--even for just a few bloody moments, pick up and read Natalie Haynes "A Thousand Ships." 

It's bloodier, uglier, noisier and better than anything else you can do with six hours and I guarantee you, though the stories are five-thousand years old, you'll learn something about being alive today, being a father, and wrestling with the gods who thwart us and mock us at every turn.

There's more life in it the ol' Greeks than in one-thousand Superb Owls. And you'll feel more alive for having massaged your brain.

A case of shingles.

When I was 19 or 20 and summer jobs were sweat-soaked, low-wage and hard to come by, I learned some important lessons in one of those jobs that have stayed with me to this very afternoon.

Often--touch wood--I get a call or a ping from an ex-colleague, friend or acquaintance. Usually, people reach out to me when they're in trouble. Some big meeting is looming. Some due date has moved up. Some storm clouds have gathered and also have darkened.

George, they say, George.

As Hank Williams sang "I've been down that road before." Yes, I have.

Many times, these calls I get are a combination of apoplectic and incoherent. I get a couple of eight-point typed spreadsheets with a rancid egg-salad of cliches, jargon and mush-mouth mumbo-jumbo.

Make sense of that, I'm told. Write something.

It's ok, I say, like I'd say to one of my daughters if she got stung by a bee or fell off her bike. I'll take care of it. 

This brings me back to the above.

I got a job at the age of 19 for two cousins who spoke very little English, Olindo Nocito and Frankie Nocera. The cousins had an old Ford pick-up truck with a three-speed steering column gear shift and a busted clutch.

We would meet at a shingled house. They would hand me a crowbar, a hammer, a ladder and a few giant burlap sacks. 

"Take off the shingles," Frankie, the one who spoke better English would say. And Olindo and Frankie would drive off to affix aluminum siding to a house I had stripped the day before.

It was hard work, stripping houses. I was about as familiar with tools as any Jewish boy anywhere. Meaning I thought a Philips head was a kind of hat.

There was really no time to panic. Olindo and Frankie didn't like fools like me. And they'd be damned if they'd give me $125/week in cash if I had only half-stripped a house.

So, I did what I had to do.

I did what I do now.

But instead of stripping one shingle and then the next, I type. I retype. I try it another way. I try again.

Eventually, those shingles fell and I burlap-bagged them. And drove them to the dump. Which we now call a "transfer station."

At the end of the day, then as now, I'm fairly soaked through with swear. I amn't coated with insulation fibers now like I was back then. But I do get encased by the fibrous detritus of ragged thoughts.

That's fine.

As Mr. Willy Loman, dead salesman, once said, it comes with the territory.

In other words, "someone hand me a hammer. And get out of the way. I've got work to do."

And I type.

An advertising solution.

A thought crossed my mind the other evening, maybe around two-in-the-morning. 

I don't sleep well and never have. And the quiet and the quietude of the Connecticut coast has done nothing to improve my slumber. So, I spend a good part of my horizontal time staring at the ceiling and wondering how everything went so wrong.

But then it hit me, in the dark of night. 

The world would be better off if it were run like a holding company ad agency.

First, let's take the nation's recent Trump-incited insurrection. The impetus behind this attempted coup was fairly simple. Joe Biden was elected president with an over seven-million vote plurality. But the man-child, Trump, and his tens of millions of supporters wanted him to remain president, elected or not.

The agency world is great at solving a problem like this. Not only do most large agencies have six or a dozen presidents, they literally have hundreds of vice-presidents. 

Biden, President, US. 

Trump, President, Mar-a-Lardo.

Next, let's turn to something even more difficult: Efficient and rapid distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine. To my mind, this is a problem the modern agency could solve in less than an hour.

First, put some catering platters in a few dozen empty conference rooms. If you want to ensure success, mark the platters with a badly spelled hand-written note.

"For client meating. Do not steel."

Second, inject each soggy tuna-salad sandwich with a dose of the vaccine. Sure, it's not an oral-vaccine--but better ingested than injected if you can't get the medicine to the people. 

In just minutes, all the client sandwiches will be gone and a couple dozen or thirty people will be immunized. Again, problem solved.

A final example of how applying agency logic can solve problems large and small. This one, small.

The local supermarket chain up here in Connecticut has a difficult time finding staff. (Probably because they don't pay a living wage.) I go to the store every Sunday and see signs all over the store that say, "Baggers Wanted."

Of course, those positions remain unfilled. Who wants to be a bagger in a supermarket.

If "help wanted" signs were handled the agency way, the signs would no longer read, "Baggers Wanted." They'd be written to be much more enticing.

They'd say something like, "Wanted for our growing and award-winning Guest Departure Experience Department: assistant managers, unpaid interns and creative bag-filling directors. Work/beans balance. Organizational skills. Knowledge of Adobe suite required."

As simple as it is to disparage the ad industry, there's so much we can all do to help make America great again.

Advertising as she is spoke.

On Monday, Dave Trott wrote a bit about a favorite book of mine (and Mark Twain's.) Below is my handy translation guide to speaking advertising-ese. Now, go fuck yourself.

Some poetry. Some sweat. Some laziness.

Of late, I've been as busy as a mosquito at a nudist colony. When you're blessed like I am and genuinely love what you do for a living, busy is good. Busy keeps my mind from tripping down a Dantesque conical collapse fearing that the next Fascist regime bred by the far-right--who almost by definition will have to be more efficient than the Mussolini meets Mickey Mouse of Donald Trump--is out there now, gaining grassroots support from television programming supported by your eyeballs and mine.

Busy also means that I haven't had much time to breathe. About three months ago, I stripped the paint off an old wooden bench we bought, prelude to painting it. It sits, unpainted still, where I left it, when urgent phone calls from a vaunted handful-and-a-half of clients started calling.

It also means that I go into Sunday, having no blog posts written for the week ahead. As someone whose consecutive-game-blog-post-streak makes the streaks of Cal Ripken or the great Iron Horse look like slackers, this is a frightening prospect for me.

In fact, life as a writer, a writer of sorts--a solo-flyer in a world that seems to prefer the loose-lipped lily-liver beige pablum of collaboration--having blankness looming over you like the sheer rock of El Capitan, is a frightening prospect. 

My life as a writer, my life as a soloist, is a life of facing nothingness.

There is no magic book of great ads from which I can borrow or steal. There is no next-door creative neighbor, or electrically-energetic planner brimming with thoughts, ideas, research and other stray cosmic particles that make ideas. There's none of that for me now.

The insistent water-torture of Microsoft calendar, or Google calendar, or Apple calendar, or my own Gregorian head that keeps better track of everything I have to do than ten-thousand superegos, reminds me twenty times a day that I have something that I have to come through on.

That's in addition to a post daily in this space. And an advertisement three or two times a week that I run on LinkedIn to keep the wheels of Georgian-commerce well-greased.

It's a lot to do.

It's my head and my typing fingers in an ever-tightening vise.

My little dog must think it queer
To stop without a due-date near.
She gives her floppy ears a shake
And asks if there is some mistake.

The only other sound the beep,
Of Microsoft, a Zoom to keep.
My life is lonely, dark and deep,
And I have miles to go before I sleep.
And miles to go before I sleep.

But as I have said so many times before--a broken record, as we said in days of yore, before records were ironic--the best way to do something is to do it.

The best way to do something is to find faith--even ye of little faith, like me--faith in your brains and your reading and your thinking and your ears for listening. Faith that success is one-percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.

So consider this post sweat-soaked.

Yet another sweat-soaked post.

As I rack up yet another day of living, another day of writing, another day of faith and doing.

It smells like an old gym in here.

Not home in Connecticut.

Now that I am living 300 days out of 365 on the Gingham Coast of central Connecticut and now that I am running my own business from my own house, my life is dramatically different than it was a little more than a year ago. 

While I live within spitting distance of the sea, while the sun shines brightly through our plate-glass, and while Whiskey is loving LOL (Life off Leash), I wander lonely as a cloud far from the city's sharp-elbows and barbed remarks. 

The city has made me who I am. It's made me ever-watchful and aggressive. It tuned my ears to its urban chaos and jostle.

I remember having the radio on when I was in my dorm room in college. I was reading Thomas Wolfe--not the white-suited Tom Wolfe, the cerebral-hemorrhage-dead-at-37 Thomas, the man who would have written the great American novel had his head not exploded from the inside out.

Wolfe wrote of New York's spine--Broadway--and its electricity and volume. No one's written of New York like the Wolfe of Asheville.

I was reading Wolfe--I read five books a week in those days. I was hoping to be an English professor and set myself the task of reading everything that had ever been written from Dante to Didion. At five books a week, I would be through reading everything just around the time Donald Trump gains a sense of morality.

I was reading Wolfe and Bach was on the radio. The clockwork timing and order of Bach. I remembered a professor telling me that Shakespeare was all about order. And the moment order was upset in Shakespeare's universe, the moment fair was foul and foul was fair, the moment before the hurly burly's done, that when the thunder and lightning begin and hell is empty and all the devils are here.

Bach is no good for New York, I said to myself. New York is laid out on a grid. Everything is meant to be geometric like a Mondrian, but New York is a tablecloth ripped from the table and we're all just dishes and silverware and gefilte fish flying through the air. They call New York--the tourists do--the Big Apple. More accurately, it is the Big Entropy.

I turned the dial from New York's classical station, WQXR to WKCR, Columbia's station--with Phil Schaap playing Bird for hours every morning.

Bird was New York.

The dissonance.

The heroin haze.

The offbeat, the strange, the assaulting, the coming from nowhere, the make it stop and the they-made-it-beautiful. Bird was New York. New York while Bird lived and maybe even moreso New York in the off-the-rails 1970s, with bankruptcy, murders, looting, riots and headless bodies in topless bars.

But here we are, almost 50 years later. My wife, Whiskey and I take long walks along the sea. The South Cove on an 11-degree weekend is nearly frozen over. The swans float like clusters of ice, their beaks tucked under their large wings for warmth.

A flock of geese stick their necks out aerodynamically, avian Raymond Loewys and vee their way toward the open water looking for someplace wet to land. Way above a hawk, just like Rodgers and Hammerstein said it would, is making lazy circles in the sky.

We see the birds here, but have no Bird. We see people and eat plasticine bagels and processed cheese-food corned beef from the Big Y market, but no Zabar's, no Katz's, no H&H.

It's home up here in Connecticut now.

Home of sorts.

But that brings me back to Wolfe.

And not being able to go home again.

A building razed.

A few of my friends lately, the few who still commute, or who aren't afraid to leave their apartments, have posted a thing or two about the new Moynihan Train Hall in Manhattan. It was built to alleviate the filth and density of the ill-conceived and ill-executed Penn Station--the busiest train station in the country.

I was alive when Mead McKim and White's palatial Penn Station was demolished. It fell to the wrecker's ball between 1963 and 1966, but I really don't remember it. My family was more apt to drag me by my ear through Penn Station's rival, Grand Central. During my youth that was our urine-scented transportation hub of choice.

The great Yale architecture professor and historian, Vincent Scully, had this to say about the original Penn Station. "We used to come into New York City like gods. Now we come into New York like rats." 

I thought about rodent skulking, then watched this seven-minute video on the destruction of the station.

I've been more than a little disconsolate lately. But I couldn't help but thinking that this short documentary excerpt ostensibly on a train station was really a documentary about everything old that's been razed and demolished, including me and my industry.

"One by one, the enormous Doric columns, winged eagles and granite angels that had ornamented its facade, were cut down, carted away and dumped in a foul-smelling swamp in the New Jersey Meadowlands....It's a sad commentary on the ideology of modernism, the belief that new is better, the belief that modern efficiency or that the profiting from new construction is an adequate replacement for the traditions and heritage and the real meaning of places in peoples' lives."

Though GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company is doing better than I've ever dreamed possible (I fully believe my account roster is more prestigious than the agency that threw me out at the age of 62 after eleven years of tireless service) it's hard, on gloomy early mornings not to feel disregarded, disrespected and disposed of.

It's hard to have your own personal Doric columns carted out to a smelly swamp and left to decay. It's hard to no longer be something people look up to. It's hard to be structurally and spiritually "de-institutionalized."

Maybe it's just me--just my sensitivity, and my need to be needed, but getting Willy Loman'd sucks. They've taken the orange and thrown away the peel.

It especially sucks when you feel like the old Penn Station. And you see how linoleum and neon and particle-board your replacement is.

And how thorough the destruction by people rich in money and impoverished in soul.

Putting the "con" in consequences.

I read something the other day about unintended consequences. Thinking about unintended consequences is a round-about way of saying you're going to consider history as written not by winners, but by losers.

The item I read was about how glorious life will be when we've got real 5G and real self-driving cars. We'll be able to work as we drive into the office. We can maybe catch a nap on the way home. And because machines purportedly will make fewer mistakes than people, traffic will move more steadily and there will be fewer accidents.

That sounds good.

But...But.

There are unintended consequences no one wants to consider. Suburban sprawl will increase. There will be a Home Depot and a Starbucks every nine feet. Small farmers will be priced out of land-ownership. And almost invariably there will be some technology issue that leads to a semi-tractor-trailer crashing into a classroom of second-graders.

But speaking of the ostensible subject of this blog: advertising, all over my social feeds these days, I see news of Martin Sorrell, and his new holding company S4. They're buying up agency after agency amassing more and more, growing larger and larger.

S4 is buying not old-line agencies, but places I've never heard of--I don't know a media monk from a media rabbi--but I'm sure people are marveling at Sorrell's genius. In just a few short years, he's created an advertising holding company that seems to have the money-hemorrhaging old-guard shivering in their $1100 sockless loafers.

People see Sorrell as the person who made WPP the world's largest communications company. A money alchemist who took a shopping cart company and turned it into a company that owned more than a handful of the most-storied brands in advertising.

What they don't see is the unintended consequences of Sorrellism.

They don't see that when he paid himself $100 million a year. That meant the holding company had to forgo paying 1000 $100,000/year employees. They see that he drove up shareholder-value. They don't see that he essentially transferred revenue from workers to shareholders. Leaving his holding company's workforce commoditized and ill-paid. They don't see that the $100 million he gave himself essentially eviscerated the company he ran. (It's hard to take the $100 million off the top.)

They see that WPP was strong while he was there. They don't see his unintended consequence--that he dismantled the foundation and sure-footing of the business. Leaving a shell in his wake.

Thomas Friedman in Wednesday's Times (oddly enough, the failing Times is still in business while Donald Trump is not) cites Ruchir Sharma, chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, and calls this dynamic “Socialism for the rich and capitalism for the rest.” 

Market intervention like Sorrells does more to stimulate the stock market than it does to stimulate agencies.  Who benefits? Shareholders. Who pays? You and I.

Sharma says, America's richest 10 percent own more than 80 percent of US stocks. They've seen their wealth go up more than 300% in the last 30 years. The bottom people (the people who do the actual grind of work) have had virtually no gains--if they still even have a job.

This data is from 2012. I suspect the trends have accelerated since the
reverse Robin Hood trillionaire tax-relief law was passed by the Trump administration.

Newton's 3rd law is usually rendered like this: "Every action has an equal and opposite reaction."

In most things, we focus on the action--in this case the consolidation of independent agencies into giant global entities that create vast wealth (due to their size) for the scions at the pinnacle. 

What we miss is the equal and opposite reaction.

The destruction of middle-class careers.

The unintended, but inevitable, consequence.