Gary Goldsmith, Makers + Mentors, Part II.

Part II of my talk with Gary Goldsmith, Makers plus Mentors founder and former Chair of Creative Direction at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. We pick up where we left off Monday, speaking about Gary’s aims in teaching…

Gary Goldsmith: 
I always tried to infuse our program with people who I thought were current, contemporary and important for the students to be exposed to. I looked at myself as the curator of their influences. 

An example was Dave Dye. Dave agreed to teach and was an excellent teacher. He brought his vast global knowledge of the business/high taste level and coupled it with challenging assignments and an ability to critique and connect with the students. 

AD AGED:

And the better those influences are, the better the people do.

Gary Goldsmith: 
Absolutely. I think that was one element of why our program
was so successful. But the other element was something that I found missing in many other programs. We looked at our job as not just teaching them, coaching them and pushing them to be better.

We looked at our job as creating pathways to help them enter the industry at the best possible places.

AD AGED:
And that's where the mentoring came in.

Gary Goldsmith:
Yes, that’s part of it. So instead of a person having to send their book to a great agency like Wieden & Kennedy cold, we would have them meet with one of our former grads who worked there. That grad would review their book, make comments, give advice and usually show it to a few more people there. Once everyone thought it was ready to submit, they’d submit it.

So our students were not only being mentored by me and our instructors. They were being mentored by people who already worked in the places that they most want to work. And as I found out, not only are our alums happy to see the newbies that come out, they really enjoy the notion that they’re going to play a role in helping someone follow in the path that they were able to take.

 

AD AGED:
That's the way it really works. I mean, getting through the gauntlet, unless you're just singular or in some way you're wearing the gorilla suit or whatever, you know, stunts, have to do is really kind of impossible.

Gary Goldsmith:
Yes, that's right. That’s a key thing. And that's something that's often missing with many of the students I talk to who have been in some of the other programs, even very good programs. 

And what I have found, in almost every case, was that it wasn't that those programs didn't want to do that, but that they didn't necessarily have the contacts in those agencies to do that.

So yes, first and foremost you have to make really great work. Without that, nothing else matters. But when you do make great work, you have a big advantage if you have a mentor that can put you in a position for the right people to see it.

AD AGED:
My knee-jerk supposition when I heard about Makers & Mentors was that you added mentoring because the senior level at agencies has been wiped out in many ways.

Again, it's hard not to sound negative. But the people you used to be able to hang with and learn from, either by association or by actual tutelage, that seems to be gone now, according to my experience at agencies. 

I wondered if that was the impetus behind mentorship, that you're looking for that kind of fatherly figure in a sense that that you know and it’s kind of as if a hundred years ago people stopped seeing religious leaders for help that's when psychiatrists came in so you know is there is there kind of a parallel now we all need whether it's encouragement or guidance or some sort of affirmation from someone, if you can find someone older than you, from someone older than us, you know, we all need that and it doesn't exist in agencies. So that was my initial thought, but yours is much more, it's much more directive in a way.

Gary Goldsmith:
Well, yes, I agree, but the connecting with mentors on the outside is only one part of it. The other role of mentoring is more as you describe. And that’s the mentoring that I did and our teachers did.

It’s about getting to know each persons strengths and weaknesses, about knowing how to push them but push them in a way that’s productive and inspiring, not demoralizing. It’s about helping them set their goals, understand the sacrifices that have to be made and get prepared to transition from school to their careers. And if you’re in a leadership position and your students are putting their trust in you, you have to be willing to take some responsibility for their well-being and their career.

AD AGED:
Responsibility for their well-being in their career. Because, you know, they're counting on us to prepare them.

 

Gary Goldsmith:
Absolutely. We have to prepare them in terms of teaching/inspiring them to do the best possible work they can do, but it doesn't end there.

The other part of it is preparing them for the industry, preparing them for “real-life”, preparing them for the disappointment we all sometimes experience and giving them the knowledge and the tools to thrive and succeed. 

AD AGED:
You know, it's funny, when I was still, you know, in the traditional business, my probably best friend in the business was Rob Schwartz, you know, who was CEO of Chiat/Day. And I would often, not often, twice a year, which is often, I would say, oh, you really should meet Nika. You should really meet Bill. And he was always, I mean, Rob happens to be a super nice guy.

Gary Goldsmith:
Yes, he sure is.

 

AD AGED:
But what and I'm really shy about asking for favors, but what I realized or what I what was this idea that when you're older, and you don't have to be, I'm 68, don't have to be say 68 when you're older, could be 38, young people are a currency. And not to be mercenary about this, but it's like, you just don't see young people. And you kind of get despondent, like where's the next generation coming from I don't see people who know what Doyle Dane was anymore.

 
You know, so there's kind of a richness to introducing these young people and kind of, if you're a prospector, in a sense, finding them because they become the glowing, like the ferment of decades and the people who taught you and all of a sudden this person's a product of a hundred years of tutelage somehow. That's right.

Gary Goldsmith:
I completely agree with you. And all of us who have the privilege of teaching and mentoring get to feel the joy and satisfaction that come after all the late night critiques, early morning panicked phone calls, and the difficult but necessary tough love conversations that lead to the end result of seeing someone get exactly the job they want to begin their career.

We will continue with another installment next week.

I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles.

If you think about "Stockholm Syndrome" for a minute, where a prisoner begins to empathize with their captives, and form a psychological bond with them, it's hard to find a better and more frequent example than how the trade press gushes over 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12-figure -ionaires. It turns my stomach, to be honest, how the press--and you and I along with them--ignore the financial machinations of the -ionaire class and conflate their sinful wealth with preternatural intelligence. 

We treat these men like gods--altman, musk, thiel, karp, bezos. We should regard them as clods. Clods that don't pay tax. 

No one outside of tump ever talks about the system being rigged, or the miscreance of CEOs who act as heads of their own compensation committees or that CEO pay has risen from about 17-times the pay of median workers in 1970 (arguably amerika's most-equal age) to more than 300-times the pay of an average worker today.

If you made $25,000 in 1974--a decent salary, a CEO would comparatively have brought in $425,000. Today, if you make a decent salary, say $100,000, the average CEO would make $30,000,000. Plus, when the inevitable bellying-upping of once great companies happens--the CEO and the money behind them have it all structured so they get paid first. Workers, pensions, debt be damned, Mustique, here I come.

All that being posited, about fourteen dozen people sent me the article here from Forbes. My email box exploded with the above, treating Martin Sorrell like he's an oracle, not an oral-rinse. 

Yes, Sorrell built a giant house of agency cards--with other people's money--with no acquisition strategy other than dominate the agency-world shelf space. Why in god's name would you buy Y&R, O&M, JWT, Grey and dozens of smaller look-alikes. 

All this was to gull investors into ginning up the stock price by manipulating numbers until which point the whole thing has collapsed. Sorrell's former agency has seen it's market-cap plummet from being worth $31,870,000,000 eleven years ago to $3,610,000,000 today. 

If your house suffered similar decline in value, if it went from being worth $310,000 to $36,000 you would not be going to your realtor for investment advice. Basically, post-Sorrell, Park Avenue apartments are now available at Love Canal prices. But let's treat him as wise. 

(Grabbi. Rapi. Leavi. I grabbed, I raped, I l left--as Caesar might have said.)

On top of all this, and one more things our Stockholm journalists don't mention, is that Sorrell, while CEO of WPP routinely paid himself hundreds of millions of dollars--a salary way out of whack of any comparable standard--moral, ethical or competitive.

In 2015, WPP's peak year, Sorrell took home $102,000,000--1,444 times his average employee. Sorrell, in short, paid himself as if he were more valuable to WPP than fourteen-hundred people making $100,000 each. BTW, Sorrell is still on WPP's payroll, as are three or six other former CEOs, at a time when WPP's aggregate payroll has been "trimmed" from a high of 203,000 workers to under 100,000 today.

The truth is I have nothing, really, against either Sorrell or WPP. What I do despise are lies. 

Lies that are repeated and lead to building a mythology about a man that is almost wholly fabricated

WPP and their ilk played the game and profited from it. That doesn't make them geniuses, or people to admire, emulate or trust. Any more than Bernie Madoff was a genius, admirable or someone to emulate.

The problem with crashes is a lot of people get buried.

Gary Goldsmith One. A Talk with a Leader.

A few weeks ago, I noticed this online from the great creative Gary Goldsmith. Gary was starting a new ad school--having for years helped run Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California as Chair of Creative Direction. 

My experience of Gary goes back almost fifty years. Nearly every young person in the ad industry in the 1980s who was looking to move up through the industry one shaky rung of the ladder at a time had heard of Gary. Gary had landed at DDB--when DDB was still DDB, when giants out-numbered ceiling tiles, and seemed to be single-handedly doing more great work than the rest of the industry combined. 

His work, btw, wasn't just good. It made you look at how you did work. It made you want to work harder, smarter, better. It made you proud to be on the outskirts of the same business Gary was in. You can see some of Gary's early work here, if you poke around a bit. 

There are so many ad schools in the world right now. In fact, to my cynical eyes there seem be more people education others on advertising than there are people educated in advertising. It's like there are a million driving instructors and no one knows how to use a turn signal. 

But I know Gary as someone of wisdom. He doesn't do things without thinking them through, and without a flexible process to make sure they work. Gary and I have spoken through the years about his work at Art Center--particularly his "Crashvertising" modus operandi, and I've always left the conversation a better person that I was when I started the conversation.

I quickly wrote Gary a note. 

Would he like to be featured on Ad Aged? Could I interview him.

He wrote back in seconds and seconds later, I sent him a list of potential topics we could talk about. The next Monday, we had an 82-minute Zoom, that could have gone on for 82-hours.

While I amn't by any stretch a professional interviewer, I tried to ask Gary tough questions. 

1. Like why an ad school when the future of the industry we both love seems so bleak?

2. With so many ad schools what makes Makers + Mentors different?

3. How did Gary start teaching? And how has he kept it up for almost a half-century?

4. What was the ad that got him to DDB--and what happened next?

As I said, I'm no journalist. This might not be the most orderly of interviews. But Gary and I had a good time talking--sharing, and learning from each other. 

Over the next couple of days, I'll publish our discussion. My advice though, is my advice in almost all things. Read. Read Gary's work. Read of Gary's influences. Read what Gary is trying to do and teach.

You can only lead if you read.

--

AD AGED: When I first was introduced to you, we were very much younger, not in person, just by reputation. I heard about this guy at DDB who did these amazing ads for a student book for crayons. And I just went to your site, your personal site, saw those ads. And I guess my question is, or questions are, one, would those ads work today? I know the answer, but I want it from you. And two, are you fearful? Let me ask this in a provocative way. Are you fearful of people saying, well, that  Gary Goldsmith man, he's living in the past. Why does he have 50-year-old ads on his portfolio site? But just in terms of background, and I obviously have a point of view on this, but I'd love to hear it from you.

AD AGED: Crayola is the category.

Gary Goldsmith: Exactly. And on a separate note, the other reason those ads are important to me is that when I did those ads, that was actually the first time I really “got it" and felt like I had done something good.

Gary Goldsmith: Honestly, George, I never really thought about it that way. I think it depends on the context. I have those ads on my personal website because they’re part of the historical body of work that I want people to see, whether it be my students or others. The site is more of a retrospective than just a “this is what I'm doing now”. But do I think that they would still work now? Yes, because I think they come out of an insight that's still true.

You could criticize them to say that they’re generic for the category, but there is no category.

AD AGED: Interesting. Can you expand on what it is you got?

Gary Goldsmith: It was getting the idea of the words not repeating the picture, the picture not just illustrating the words, but the two working together in a way that made a combined meaning that you wouldn't have had otherwise. 

And I specifically remember going through this whole process of trying to figure out the best way to say it. With the first ad, I kept thinking, well, let's see, if a toy breaks, you have a broken toy. If a crayon breaks, you have two crayons. That was the first long-hand way I had of saying it. Which was, of course the idea…you break one, you have two of them now.

But then by going back and writing line after line after line, I came up with “Toys break, Crayons multiply. A much shorter, more succinct and memorable version of that same thought.

AD AGED:
And it's about imagination.

Gary Goldsmith: 
Yes. And that was the first time that I thought, ok, maybe I could be good at this.

AD AGED:
Oh, interesting. You know, but before.

Gary Goldsmith: 
Before that, I was struggling. I was looking at a lot of work in annuals like we all do when we first start. And a lot of the great work back then really spoke to me. I loved a lot of the work I was seeing, and I knew why I loved it.

But I couldn't do it.

I would start working on something, have high expectations, finish it and be disappointed. Even though I knew good from bad, I simply could not do work that I thought was very good. I kept trying and trying. More all-nighters than I can even count. Some stuff was okay, some stuff was pedantic, and then finally, I did that ad.

AD AGED:
And it's almost like it opened the doors.

Gary Goldsmith: 
It's a moment, yes. And yes, I tell that to my students all the time. I always reference the difficult time that I had at the beginning…I want them to understand that it's not easy and none of us do it naturally. Keep pushing and your moment will come.

AD AGED:
Lets end today with a little digression, which is what I do best. I'm reading this book now, which is fabulous.

It's called "The Ancient Wisdom of the Mesopotamians."  And it's like it's our Western and modern tendency to look at people different from us and say 'how could they have been so ignorant?' 

4000 years ago in Mesopotamia, no one would ask if you believe in God or not--Because God was, just was. Right. 

What the author is saying is we're being spoken to all the time. We just might not be able to see it. You might not be able to get the perception of the person who loves you and you don't see it. Or the craft you want to do, but it's kind of there. You just have to make the things align. 

It occurs to me, When you say this is the moment it clicked, is there a similar clicky moment on why you're starting Makers and Mentors now? Is there a similar conjunction, a similar kind of epiphany in a sense?

Gary Goldsmith: 
Yes.

There is, in the sense that, you know, I talk to a lot of students, not just my own students, but other students who know of me and send me their books…students who went to different schools than ours, state schools, private schools, art schools…and I talk to them and I learn about what they were doing in their programs as I try to help them. And one of the things that it reaffirmed for me was that in the program we built at Art Center at that time, we put together a carefully curated collection of great teachers. And I always continued to evolve the curriculum and bring in new and contemporary teachers. It was not a fixed faculty where every term was necessarily taught by the same people.

I'd hear about somebody doing some really good work in LA, meet with them and ask them (or beg them if necessary) to teach. Even if it was only for a term or two. That was back when we had to be in person. During and after Covid, when we went remote, it threw the doors wide open. Jeff Goodby, Jaime Robinson and Greg Hahn each generously agreed to join me on zoom for two weeks of Crashvertising. Dave Dye was kind enough to join us on zoom from London and taught for a few semesters. It created the possibility of building a program like we’re building with Makers+Mentors now, unencumbered by bureaucracy and with talented, contemporary instructors teaching from anywhere in the world.

Or I brought Dave Dye to teach when we could go remote because of Zoom.

Continued...soon.

--

Easy.

 

I remember back to 1980.

I had just left college--and home.

I had not two dimes to rub together.

And was getting evicted from Columbia housing where I was paying $90/month sharing a two-bedroom with an apprentice diamond cutter from Philadelphia and 22,000 feral cockroaches. Columbia wanted me out. I was no longer a student.

I grabbed the fifty-page want ad section of the Sunday Times. Like a 1930s corn-fed movie, I circled the one or two things I found of spurious interest that I was remotely qualified to do.

One was a running-shoe salesman at Paragon sporting goods on Broadway and Union Square. One was a junior catalog copywriter for the Montgomery Ward catalog--whose "fashion" divisions were based at 393 7th Avenue, in the garment district.

I got offers for both jobs and took the writing one, regarding it as having more of a future. Later that day, I signed a lease on a small one-bedroom on 109th, between Broadway and Riverside. 

The Montgomery Ward job paid $11,700 per annum, but gave me time in the evening to work on my portfolio or to play basketball at a nearby private school or to pick up some work somewhere if I could find it.

My girlfriend at the time, my wife today, helped me find some freelance work with the husband of a woman she worked with. Somehow N owned pages in the glossy free-standing inserts that were stuffed into the newspapers of the day. 

N would go to clients with deals. For instance, show two proofs of purchase having bought this toothpaste or that, and you can get two free games of bowling at your local alley. If N sold that as a concept--to someone at Colgate, he then would charge them to create an ad announcing the offer. N would come to me to write the ad.

I remember thinking, toothpaste and bowling. That goes together as naturally as tiramisu, spam and bug-killer, but ok. And I got to writing the ad.

Quickly I scribbled "Get Bowled Over," and some sub-copy that explained the workings of the offer. For that I was to get paid $500, which was more than two-week's of my Montgomery Ward pay.

"This is easy money," I said, as I nervously showed it and a few other choices to N. 

It's been 50 years now.

I think I'm still waiting to be paid.

Wednesday night, I was out for dinner with the JCrew, a coterie of older ad people I'm associated with. We're all in the later stages of our careers but still working and sweating and shaking our heads about the work styles and/or the lassitude of the people we work with. Still wondering if it's worth it or when the fun that was supposed to be part of the business will actually show up.

Two or three of the constituents list night have their own legitimate agencies. They have account people, and CFOs, and project-managers. You know, the trappings of a grown-up business. And they have worries like rent, salaries, the leases on copiers and the tsurus that comes from people not showing up or the elevator being out or the bathroom toilet being clogged.

That said, they have accounts and reputations and PR machines that proffer the illusion that Mammon is waiting in the next room. They fly to conferences, book blocks at seaside Cannes hotels, and wear expensive sunglasses even when its dark. At some point, I can hear the sub-rosa utterances we all sotto voce at one time or another primarily to ourselves.

"This is easy money," we whisper, hoping the fates don't hear us and thereby punish us.

After 68 years of bowling people over with this banality or that banality, for this client or that, what I've learned is very simple and very blunt.

No matter how easy it seems,
no matter how accustomed you are to doing the work,
how well you know the client
or how well-versed you are in the product or service,
there is never,
never,
not once,
not ever,
never ever,
there is no such thing
and never will be
as easy money.

The sum total of all I've learned so far is this:

Easy money isn't.

Where There's Smoke There's Salmon.

I don't have many friends, and never really did. 

Even when I was at my most popular, I drew my spiritual covers close under my chin and didn't share my blanket with many. My coterie of friends is usually one or two close ones--maybe three--and a small periphery beyond that inner orbit.

It takes years for me to put out the welcome mat. 
It takes milliseconds for me to whisk it away.

Since I stopped working in a proper office and started spending about 95.67-percent of my time in my basement office well beneath the surface of the earth, my network has contracted. Not only did my best friend of fifty years die (such friendships don't come with understudies) so too did my work father/mentor die just last summer. Adding to that, I work more and more independently now--mostly sans art director and sans "support" people like I had when I worked for others. I employ one person--who's a friend, but we're three-thousand miles apart, and both wired for efficiency, not a chatty-kathy geniality.

In short, it's not unusual for me to go an entire week and have maybe two human conversations. Those are usually with clients, so I suppose--to be mean about it--I could put the word human in italics, as if it were written by Salinger, replete with sarcasm.

All that being said, I am seldom lonely. My interests remain varied and keep me occupied, and my connection with Sparkle, my nearly-perfect two-and-a-half year-old golden retriever keeps flourishing. While she is different from Whiskey--slightly less present, she is a wise companion as we take long seaside walks looking for trouble along this coastline or that. On top of Sparkle, I have developed an interstitial way of reading and writing where one things leads to another. I keep finding new things to learn about and keep developing and deepening my world view. There are a lot of people with scores of friends who have no world view. I'd rather be alone with one then surrounded and devoid.

Just about 90 minutes ago, I arrived in New York's newly developed Moynihan train-station by Amtrak, the chronically under-funded amerikan't train system. The new train-station is built inside an old post office and is really just a mall with diesel exhaust and intermittent whiffs of urine-soaked-homelessness. amerry-cannot has a decimal place problem. Everything that kills or enriches the plutocrat class has plenty of numbers to the left of the decimal. Everything that helps the lümpen has few numbers to the left. 

It looks like this: Murderrapemayhemreverserobinhoodtheivery.00
Good.00

The northeast corridor includes 17 percent of the country’s inhabitants--about 58 million people--and 20 percent of its trade on just 1.4 percent of its land.  The I-95 Corridor Coalition calculates that 60 percent of the thruway’s urban sections are already congested and predicts that car traffic will increase by 85 percent by 2035. And nearly half of the nation’s domestic flight delays originate in New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. In 2019 (pre-covid) six hundred fifty thousand passengers ratted through Penn Station each day, more people than flew out of Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark airports combined.

New York, especially after a few months of stultifying connecticutness, can be a dispiriting place. Everyone is head down rushing like mad, no one is watching where they're going and fully-a-third of all those people look like they haven't showered since amerikkka's previous illegal war, about four weeks ago.

But New York is New York. There is a quality here that makes sense, a conviviality, a warmth and a humanity that in the rest of ameridon't seems to have been cost-consultanted out of consideration. We live in a nothing for nothing nation. And now that everything you buy, everyplace you go to for help, everything you eat is owned by one or another giant private-equity held money squeeze, decent treatment, politeness and smiles are off the MBA-world's agenda.

But as I said, New York is New York.

I got on the "whites only Q train" outside of Macy's. (I say "whites only" because the train goes no further north than 96th Street. Not daring to enter black and brown Manhattan.) In moments I was disgorged at 72nd and Second amid the Vik Muniz subway art and the effervescent and always under-construction Upper East Side gentility I love so much.

I headed like a migrating animal to Sable's, an Asian-run Jewish appetizing storefront that's been a fixture in the neighborhood for over 40 years, since Kenny broke off from Zabar's on the Upper West Side and opened up his own small smoked-salmon Shangri-la.

I'd been having a craving for a lox on a salt bagel sandwich of old-school dimensions for about a month. I had thought about stopping by Barney Greengrass on West 86th Street, the last place I had had such a treat (about four years ago) but they were closed for Passover, so Sable's it was.

No sooner did I enter the small shop when a burly Asian man behind the counter handed me a small-niblick of bagel with about four-ounces of hand-cut smoked salmon on it. I hadn't even ordered anything yet. But Sable's calculus has always been, "treat customers well and they'll keep coming back." 

I did the math in my head. They returned a $6 sample of lox on my $100 expenditure. Not a bad ROI for anyone but an MBA.

Today, in New York or not, treating people with pre-emptive dignity and kindness is a vestige of a naive era. Why bother? Everything is owned by a monopoly and there's no place else people can go, so fuk'em.

If you don't like Verizon, try AT&T, they're worse. If you don't like Delta, try United, they're worse. If you don't like the dimmycrats, try the repugnicants, they're worse. If you don't like omnicant, try pubickiss, they're worse.

You see this from almost everyone you do business with. Then after paying mandatory service charges for peremptory service, and $6 for four slices of bread, you get this, in lieu of genuine caring.

The world was better off when you got samples of lox and weren't merely a survey sample.

But now it's lunchtime.

Lox.

Six stars.

Resumé.

From a very early age, as much as I wanted to write for a living, I knew I wasn't the mattress on the floor of a six-story walk-up on Avenue C kind of guy. It was a gnarly New York I grew up in. We weren't many years away from bankruptcy, endemic arson, 2000-murders a year and the spectre of ever-present crime. Most of the shop-keepers along Broadway up in the Columbia neighborhood I lived in kept a club of some sort under the counter and such implements weren't just for show. 

New York at the time seemed like the Wild West and many sane people like myself sought to find a certain middle-class equilibrium to get away from the four deadbolts on the front door and grates on every window sort of existence.

Accordingly, while I knew kids from college who were night-time troubadours, or ersatz beat poets snapping out riffs in crooked-floored tenements with torn photos of Allen Ginsberg Howling on every third wall, I realized quickly, the Bohemian life was not for me. While I'd love to lay in bed till noon and work on my art, I knew that those plusses usually came with mean-spirited rats, roaches that swarmed like the Viet Cong during Tet and worse of all, vermin so prevalent as to be all but unidentifiable to anyone who had even an inkling of entomological training. 

In short, I worked and worked and worked until I could beat a path to a 7th-floor apartment in a white brick building on 73rd and Second. I escaped from grunge about as fast as I could pay the rent somewhere ungrunged. It was, in the words of Hemingway who was writing about something else entirely, "a clean, well-lighted place." There was laundry in the basement, doormen at the door and a sense of Scarsdale decorum without the boredom so rife in suburbia.

While I wrote stories and parts of novels and filled shoe-boxes with type-written tripe-writing, I always had a day job and the burning ambition to move up in my career and my life, which took precedence, and still does over novels and lives unfinished.

That said, it's not unusual for me to read things by the great Mason Curry, who as shown above writes often about the ways and means writers and artists persevere and become writers and artists, not merely copywriters and art directors. You can buy Curry's latest book here, as I did just moments ago. Curry's book relates stories and reflections on how  famous artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers throughout history have managed to successfully (or not) support a creative life. That is, how to do what I could not, balance their creative ambitions with the very real need to pay rent and put food on the table. 

BTW, there are those who walk among us who don't understand those who walk among us who buy more books than they can possibly ever read. And acquire more movies, as I do, on DVDs--because I like having hard copies for when elon musk and his fellow plutocrats crash the internet for their own nefariousosity, leaving us in the forthcoming digital dark ages where we've forgotten how to read ink on paper. 

I read in Nassim Nicolas Taleb's classic, "The Black Swan," that Umberto Eco had built an anti-library: a collection of books that one hasn't yet read because, as Eco asserts, "unread books are much more valuable than read ones." It's been said that Eco's library contained over 30,000 books. That's like buying a book a day for 82 years. Or to mutate the famous quip by John Kennedy, from back when amerikkka was a country, at a White House dinner honoring Nobel-Prize recipients (real ones), "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House - with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

Curry writes of an artist I don't know called Agnes Martin, who (above) wrote a list of every job she ever had. 

Here's an excerpt from Curry you might like, if your faculties have remained intact enough and you can still read:

James Dickey was “office writing radio commercials for Coca-Cola bottlers while at the same time working in secret on his poetry (“ Every time I had a minute to spare, which was not often, I would stick a poem in the typewriter where I had been typing Coca-Cola ads,” he said); the composer Philip Glass, who, in the 1960s and ’70s, in between short tours with his music ensemble, ran a moving company with his cousin and worked as a plumber and a New York taxi driver (“ I expected to have a day job for the rest of my life,” he said); the abolitionist and writer Harriet Jacobs, who was born a slave in North Carolina in 1813 and who, after having her freedom purchased for her by her employer, worked as the family housemaid caring for five children seven days a week, writing her book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl at night while the children slept (“ I have not yet written a single page by daylight,” she confided in a letter); the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, who, in 2018, told The Paris Review that his favorite job was as a “night watchman for three hundred cows,” though he also worked as a miner for a time (“ That was almost comical—the real miners had to cover for me,” he said); the artist Agnes Martin, who worked as a waitress, a dishwasher, a janitor, a cashier, a receptionist, a playground director, and a tennis coach, as well as jobs for a mining company, in country schools, in a factory, in a hamburger stand, in a butcher shop, in a nursery, in a cafeteria, and as a baker’s helper ('Also raised rabbits and ducks,' she noted in a handwritten list of all the jobs she ever had); the poet Lorine Niedecker, who worked as a library assistant, a writer and research editor for a Wisconsin guidebook, a scriptwriter for a Madison radio station, a stenographer and proofreader for the journal Hoard’s Dairyman, and, from 1957 to 1963, a cleaner at the Fort Atkinson Memorial Hospital in southern Wisconsin—her final day job before her retirement at age sixty—during which time she adopted a unique haikulike form that became a signature of her late style; the painter Henry Taylor, whose earliest artwork included drawings of patients at the Camarillo State Mental Hospital in Southern California, where he worked the night shift as a “psychiatric technician” for eleven years, from 1984 to 1996; the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, who produced more than two dozen books during the thirty-three years he worked as a civil servant at the General Post Office, writing for three hours every morning before he dressed for breakfast; the author Kurt Vonnegut, who at various points worked in public relations for General Electric, tried to invent a board game, lasted one day as a writer for Sports Illustrated, and managed a Saab dealership on Cape Cod (his son later called him “the world’s worst car salesman”); the Swiss writer Robert Walser, who worked as a journalist, a bank clerk, an inventor’s assistant, and, for six months, a butler for a count who lived in a castle in Upper Silesia* (Walser’s time at a Berlin school for domestic servants inspired his 1909 novel Jakob von Gunten, now considered his finest work and a masterpiece of early-twentieth-century fiction); and the playwright Tennessee Williams, who as an aspiring young writer worked at the International Shoe Company factory in St. Louis and hated it so much that he set himself the goal of writing one short story per week, working late into the night at his parents’ house. After work, Williams “would go to his room with black coffee and cigarettes and I would hear the typewriter clicking away at night in the silent house,” his mother recalled. 'Some mornings when I walked in to wake him for work, I would find him sprawled fully dressed across the bed, too tired to remove his clothes.'"

In my youth, I worked reserving squash courts and refunding money in a college student center, as the assistant dean of student [ahem] affairs at Barnard College, as a nightwatchman at McIntosh Hall at Barnard, as a reader of bad novels for a fourth-rate New York publishing house, as a catalog copywriter writing shoe copy for the Montgomery Ward catalog, as a game-room attendant at a penny arcade at a seaside amusement park outside of the Bronx, as a camp counselor in New Hampshire, as a dishwasher at an Italian place, as a aluminum-siding stevedore, as a night-cashier at a downtown Chicago liquor store, as a store-checker for a Chicago sausage company, as a paperboy in suburban New York, and probably two or three I don't well-remember or whom still owe me money. 

Right now I'm engaged in writing over 100 ads for a large financial services company. These are the small-type ads that I don't believe anyone really reads much-less gains useful consumer information from. But they've become somehow, this marketing flotsam and jetsam, the sine non qua of modern marketing. They have little effect but to keep people working for other people so that still other people feel important.

I've been in this situation before, and when I am done with the entirety of the work I have to do for this company and its various adjuncts, I'll have created a marketing platform which will "contain" probably 2000 ads and 50 or so longer pieces. My calculus says they'll pay me on the order of a quarter of a million dollars for all that.

Which isn't enough, of course. Though at one time it was beyond my very comprehension of Mammon. And I've always liked Mammon.

Whatever form it takes, Mammon beats a piss-stained mattress on the lower east side and roaches with a bug up their ass against you.