Falling Behind.

A dear friend, an ex-partner, just sent me the Ogilvy-derived drivel above. 

There are a lot of problems with the message.

One: Why would anyone take counsel on business, on falling behind, on "ending," from an agency that's been halving itself in revenue every year for the last five years. That's like posting stock picks from the homeless shelter. Or diet advice from donald trump. Or abstinence advice from elon murk. Failing companies should not be issuing success dicta. They should be fixing the conditions that led to their decades-long free-fall.

Two: Agencies, not too very long ago, issued similar statements about the efficacy of open-plan offices. About 99-percent of people now agree they were an efficiency disaster, not motivated by better "communication and collaboration," but spurred on solely by the chance to cut back on rent. 

You're taking advice from this company?

Three: Agencies, not too very long ago, also told us about the wisdom of divesting themselves of media. That too, has proved to be a disaster. 

Four: Agencies, as we speak, have been selling the flavor of the month for decades. They regard fleeting fads, like Google+, NFTs, interactivity as seminal movements. Agencies always over-trumped such bushwa simply because they're terrified of seeming like they're behind. 

There's no accountability for false predictions. People are fired when a phony trend is missed.

The worst takeaway from the above is that it assumes, with the arrogance of typical corporate leadership, that there's only one manner of doing something, and it is our manner. If you're not doing things our way, you're shit-out-of-luck and therefore stupid.

As for artificial intelligence, it makes a huge and heinous assumption. That all intelligence comes from what's come before and works by using precedent and past examples.

In "Primal Intelligence: You Are Smarter Than You Know," author Angus Fletcher argues against the current "AI is Everything" mania. The book was reviewed in the weekend Wall Street Journal, and the subhead of the review speaks volumes.

 

A not-atypical hierarchy of learning is DIKW. D being the lowest. W being the highest.

It stands for Data. Information. Knowledge. Wisdom.

Data, sorry person who said the quotation at the start of this post, is a commodity. Working that data into something that provides wisdom is rare. And the province of a few practitioners of the advertising arts. (Having been fired, such practitioners are usually self-employed.)

As Brandy Shillace's review points out,

"Data, by its definition, is information that is known. It already exists. You can mix and recycle to make new tweaks, but it cannot lead to innovation—and it can’t tell you what to do when the future is unknown.

“To handle the unstable dark of worldly existence,” Mr. Fletcher writes, “our brain had to develop mechanisms for acting smart with little, even no, information.” The brain, we are told, has nonlogical intelligence, four “primal” powers: intuition, for perceiving the world’s hidden rules; imagination, which makes the future; emotion, which aids in personal growth; and common sense, which acts wisely in uncertainty.This list may seem unimpressively simple, but when we look at our modern system of education, we can see that they have been relegated to the fringes—often to humanities programs that are underfunded or cut altogether. In their place, schools drill students to think like computers at the expense of the “practical smarts” that made us human in the first place.

Whenever I see a statement like the Ogildrivel above--on AI or nearly anything else, I go through some steps.

1. What's the predictive track-record of the speaker.
2. Who's making money on the prediction.
3. Do I consider the speaker intelligent and successful.

I have a feeling that about 20 trillionaires are behind the AI onslaught. Thousands more people are acting as their willing-executioners. They're tulip salesmen in 16th Century Holland, they're bridge salesmen in Brooklyn. Crypto salesment in the trumphouse. When the trillionaires get their AI sold, they'll be quadrillionaires, and then they'll work on their next thing after that to become eventually undecilionaires. 

Despite all that money, AI doesn't have:

1. Intuition.
2. Imagination.
3. Emotion. And
4. Common sense.

That's why, we seen "college students doing better at standardized tests while having greater difficulty with real-world tasks.” 

In advertising we'll see brilliant prompt engineers making millions and insipid work costing brands billions.

In the real world, Fletcher says, "there are many paths to a goal, and those who succeed tap into something beyond black-and-white rule-following. They have creativity and flexibility" and a ....“natural cleverness that AI can’t replicate.”

I'll end with this, "AI can steal datasets from stories and recycle them into plots but the computer is still not reading the story. We are. We are the ones taking the word scrambles and lacing meaning into them."

I suppose to the same people who told us how great open plan offices are selling us their next gallon of snake oil, now made with AI-derived serpent juice.

Ask for proof.

99 Things I Never Believe.

1. An agency that says it's "hot" or on a winning-streak. These things and turn in a second. Hot can turn to icy. And a sense of hot can lead to hubris. Which is always bad.

2. People who declare something "dead" or "broken." Everything is broken. Always. And very little ever dies. People have been declaring radio, print, tv, outdoor, the english language, god, humanity, humor, race, history and just about everything else passé since the beginning of time. Like Timex watches, most things take a licking and keep on ticking.

3. Listings of awards. When I worked on IBM ThinkPad, there was a mandatory on the brief that said, "winner of 700 awards." I said then, and I'll say forever, if you've won 700 of something you've won 0 of something. What's more, there's a window-washer in town that claims to be "award-winning." The award thing has gone too far for too long to be at-all believable.

4. Any automated affirmation from anyone from a fortune cookie, to Google Meet, to Zoom, to my Apple watch. Kindness in real life is too rare to attempt to automate. Sincerity has never been automated.

5. Predictions. With the rise of 24/7, always-on messaging, more maybes are being reported than news. Maybes can make you crazy. As an antidote, it's worthwhile taking seven minutes to memorize this poem.

6. Long-lists of credits. Creative credits today are often as extensive as a menu in a Greek coffee shop. This is bullshit. If you change a word, or move a prop on set, you are not instrumental in the creation of a piece. When such minor contributions get equal billing it takes from those who cracked the nut. Creative credits are not, and shouldn't be, a democracy.

7. Initials. Many (bad) creative directors take someone else's script, change three words, add their initials to the top and make it "theirs." Stop it.

8. Calling commercials "movies" or "films." If you do that, you're missing the point. You're selling stuff. But your art must be in the service of selling. Not merely entertaining.

9. Inspiration. As Errol Morris said to me once, "inspiration is for amateurs." You have a job, you get paid, you work hard and do it. I can only imagine if when I was playing ball I said "I'm not inspired today." I would have woken up with a bat up my keister, with pine-tar on it.

10. Case-Studies in Creative Portfolios. Actually case-studies in general. You should show what you make. Not present an essay on what you've made.

11. "I'll do it later." No. Do it now.

12. "I'm multi-tasking." No, you're doing two or more tasks badly rather than one job well. Multi-tasking was invented by the same people and thinking that said when everyone sits out in the open with no space of their own it will be good for communication. It's an "efficiency" rationalization that by any measure simply doesn't add up.

13. We're family. So were the Borgias.

14. "They care about me." I thought that for many years. Then, as I was making my agency money, handling the toughest clients, teaching young people, and putting out various fires I was fired and had to fight for a paltry amount of severance. They care about themselves. Period.

15. "There's no money." For raises. For bonuses. There always is. For the chosen. Just not for you. If there's no money, really, there's no future and you should leave.

16. Talent Acquisition. People are not acquirable. They are not commodities to be bought. The use of such nomenclature betrays a dangerous and mean attitude. And inhumanity.

17. Creatives who introduce themselves by title. You're either an art director or a copywriter. Anything else is bs and showboating.

18. People who cite fake data. Like human attention spans are shorter than gold-fish's.  Or who say, "people don't read." You'll find a lot of back-pedaling if you ask for actual proof.

19. People who post things with people holding up signs.

19. Lists that are numbered incorrectly.

20. Lists that say they go to 99. They usually stop far sooner.

Survival.

Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall (July 18, 1900 – December 17, 1977) was a chief U.S. Army combat historian during World War II and the Korean War.

If you ever look at animals, from the creatures (like rats) you might live nearby, to your family dog, to the birds of prey that swoop down so they can bring a small herring homeward to their high-nests and fledgling families in the marsh, you'll notice that most of them don't enter an area without 360-ing their space, sniffing the air or pawing at the dirt.

They're always, and I mean always, assessing the safety and danger of their world. They can be snuffed out any minute so they've developed a world-weary world-wariness that adds to their survivability.

Back when I was a cub in the advertising business, I remember sniffing out danger in the form of phone calls at 4PM right before the long Memorial Day or July 4th or Labor Day weekends.

There would always be some crisis that needed un-crisising and if you picked up your desk phone you were on the hook for a weekend in un-air-conditioned fluorescence while the rest of your friends were at the beach or watching a ball game on television.

The old hands had learned to sense danger from those calls. They learned how to skirt it. Us young dopes were usually on the hook.

In short, like creatures in the animal kingdom, creatures in the ad kingdom learned to sniff danger in the wind and scurry away in the shadows. I remember one long-legged writer who sat in the office next to mine when I was on my way to becoming a big cheese. 

She wasn't the best writer at avoiding work. But she was the best writer at avoiding writing. She'd leave her Diet Coke on her desk, her IBM Selectric II running and her expensive scarf on her chair. To all appearances Marcia would be right back--it seemed she was out powdering her nose in the Womens' Room. In reality, she was gone for four hours, down at the Subway Inn or the Tip-Top Tap drinking her Diet Coke, but with rum in it.

I've read in more than a few places that most soldiers fighting in WWII, despite all the celluloid you see with grizzled faces unloading machine guns into fields of Krauts, never even fired their guns. According to someone called S.L.A. Marshall, the majority of soldiers in WWII never fired a shot against an enemy. 

I remember working for an advisor-led financial services company back in the "oughts." The CEO said to me, "If I could get my people to work three days and play golf two, rather than play golf three days and work two, everything would be fine."

In short, like the animals I mentioned above, most of our species try to avoid work and the sweaty entanglements it entails. 

I've grown out of that propensity--especially since I started running GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company. Usually I say, "I'll do it," because doing it takes less time than either finding someone else to do it or hiding. Many mornings I start my day with 17-20 three-minute assignments.

My father never actually said it, but he might have and I quote his unsaid quote nonetheless.

"You don't make any money saying "no" to clients."

Of course I do some times. Dignity. Self-respect. And dumping cut no ice with me. But the way to get work is to do work. And work is the only way I know to make a living.

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.