Language and Genocide.

Just now, I noticed something in both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times about the Metropolitan Museum in New York canceling its John Galliano-heralding fashion-gala.

There's so much wrong with this. 

First, is the word controversial.

Something is only controversial if both sides have a legitimate point of view, if you can argue for and against. 

You can't call slavery controversial. 

Or wife beating.

Or church-bombing.

They're wrong. Period.

Not controversial.

When a person says something like the statement below and is then 'feted,' that isn't controversial. That's just evil.

Not controversial.

Or, if you need a mini-latke's more evidence:

More?

I can't imagine a similar-level slur directed at any other minority on earth not invalidating the speaker completely. If you said, "I love Bull Conner and Governor Bilbo. You would be dead today. Your mothers, your forefathers would be f–king lynched and f–king dead.”

That's a translation of what Galliano said re Hitler and Jews. It's not controversial, it doesn't deserve "backlash," it can't be excused by "repentance." 

Flat out when it's against Jews, it's permissible hate.

And I can't think of any other people who are so consistently and acceptably hated.

Don't get me started on the holding-company-wide expulsion of jews which started in the late twenty-tens. "Diversity" became the holding company HR shibboleth, but excluded Jews. Though Jews are just .2-percent of the world's population (two out of every thousand people) they are not regarded as "diverse," or a minority. I have no data to back this up, but I'd imagine in New York agencies, Jewish representation has probably been halved in the last twenty years. Jews were categorized as "old white men," and final-solutionized.

I think race-hate isn’t controversial.

Unless it’s Jew hate.

In today's world, Jew hate is debatable, an open-discussion, controversial.

It's ok, if you were drunk. Or misunderstood. Or you misspoke.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal, a paper with what I regard as the world's-best book section, published this review of a book by the great Dara Horn.

Ms. Horn also wrote this book. (She's good at titles.)

Here are bits from the Journal's review. Sorry for the crappy underlines, it's a Jew thing.

Don't bow to tyrants.

Question language--especially when used nefariously.

Look at who's attacked and by whom. 

Jews are targeted at 750x as other groups.

One more thing.

Fuck anna wintour.

Fuck her Jew-hate.

Fuck her rationalizations.

Fuck her excuses.

Fuck her apologies.

And
Fuck the stupid affected haircut she rode in on.

The Scrimshaw Redemption.

The great journalist Molly Ivins, political commentator and, most of all wit, once wrote about George W. Bush, "He was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple." 

As someone who grew up (if I did in fact grow up) with parents and sundry other 'care-givers' who beat me both physically and emotionally, I always considered myself having been born under the unluckiest of stars. I always saw myself as some poor-man's Dickens' ragamuffin, wearing patched britches and beaten about the head and shoulders and then being presented with a bill for the beatings.

Great expectations? 

No. 

More like great expectorations.

Ptui.

As I get older however, which I'm told is better than the alternative, I've begun the re-examine what I was born with. I've begun to think that for all my 'you get nothing but the lid of the ice cream' travails, maybe I'd been blessed with more than a young man can even realize. It's taken me until old-man-ness to realize it.

No, I didn't come recently into money. And I didn't all of a sudden wake up a find a silver spoon in my mouth. It wasn't for nothing that I considered my mother a combination of Lady Macbeth and Atilla the Mom and my father a mash-up of King Lear and Willy Loman, and not their good features. 

But of late, and I'm not exactly sure why, I've been re-measuring the circumstances around my existence. 

A lot of that re-measuring comes from my employment 'alone-ness.' At almost 69, I am working harder than I ever have, yet my energies do not flag. I said the other day to H, my Account Director and more importantly, my friend, that the difficulty with my business these days is I have to do so much getting of business, that it reduces the time I have to spend on doing what I really cherish, that is, the work.

Anne Bonny. One of the few distaff pyrates.

Still, since this is about having been born with certain blessings, I have an ethic to work to find work. In large measure because I love, yes, love, work so much that somehow it makes it all worthwhile to me. Sure, when I play with Sparkle on a long, wide beach near my Gingham Coast ramshackleness, I fantasize about tripping over Anne Bonny's buried treasure, but I know that ain't going to happen, and if you have to be left to your own devices, in fact, I've been left with quite a few.

Today, we turn everything to smut.

Another is my love of learning, which naturally, is related to my love of work. I love reading. I love digging down rodent holes. I love asking questions and wondering why. 

For all the darkness of our darkening age, there is at the same time an efflorescence of learning and literature and science that allows us--even intellectual dilettantes like myself--to see things humans have never before seen. We know things about our planet and its peopleing and its history that we could never have known before thanks to modern techniques that help us see the ancient world. I am blessed because that thrills me.

Another love is my love of language. I once said to L, my wife, that my vocabulary stems from my mother beating me over the head with the Oxford English Dictionary. As Terry Malloy said to Edie Dugan along the Hoboken waterfront, "those nuns thought they was going to beat an education into me, but I foxed them." I resisted my mother's pedagogy--what kid doesn't--as I resisted my hic haec hoc, but here I am almost seventy years later using words like pedagogy and I can still decline all thirty words in hic haec hoc in under ten seconds. Bonus bona bonum, too and amo amas amat.

Most of all, my blessings come from not having been born on third. From not having had a trust fund, any trust or even any fun. 

I learned at a precociously early-age that if I was going to make my way around the bases of life I was going to do so thanks to the steel in my spine, the sinew in my arms and the sweat of my brow. As Ricky Nelson sang in "Garden Party,"

My first at bat as a 13-year-old  freshman on the varsity baseball squad of my high school nine, I hit a slow roller down the third base line. I was out by a step-and-a-half. But our opponent's first baseman dogged it. He stood on the bag as he caught the ball, and as I was within my rights, I barreled into him like Pete Rose took out Ray Fosse in the 1970 Major League All-Star Game. I knocked him over and the ball to the ground and was safe on first, scoring just moments later.

Above all, that is the blessing borne from adversity. The blessing of TWTW (The Will To Win) or TW². I suppose Dylan Thomas characterized it better as "the force that through green fuse drives the flower." But Thomas drank himself to death when he was just 39 and I'm still percolating. Perhaps his green fuse wasn't as resolute as my TW².

I'll admit, and this is a chicken or egg thing, that I am often in arrears when it comes to writing this blog. I've written about 7,500 posts, and while not all of them have been stellar, qualitatively they're about the equivalent of old Inuit scrimshaw.

Like this blog, like my life, Inuit scrimshaw was done by amateurs, indiscriminately, idly even, as something to do as we pass the long days and long nights of life. We pick up the materials around us, we take our hands, and we try to make something that will last longer than we will. It not only passes the time, it gives us a beyond-time to aspire to. (And no, I am not endorsing killing walruses for their tusks or any other polar animals suited to scrimshaw carving. It's merely a metaphor.)

I'm sure in Inuit didn't regard themselves as talented or as craftsmen. They certainly didn't put on fur-lined berets and fancy themselves igloo artistes. They rarely smoked Gauloises and attended gallery openings, wearing sunglasses at night. Rather, they woke up in the morning and worked. Maybe they every so often thought about what they did and why they did it. Maybe every so often, they were pleased--even thankful.

That is my blessing.

I work.

I enjoy sweat.

I enjoy the oying and the veying.

I enjoy the idea when I find it.

Even more when I sell it.

Even more more when it works in the marketplace.

I'm ok with that. Even happy.

Kinda.

Risingwater.

My wife L and I had through the years generally managed to get away for the week between Christmas and New Year's, usually to someplace warm and melanoma-y. 

One Christmas, however, I suppose just before Covid and Covid-denialism descended upon what used to be civilization, we found ourselves in late December with no sunnier climes awaiting our arrival.

I was sitting in our Manhattan living room, feeling grumpier than usual when I had what in our generally brain-dead ecosystem, might pass for an epiphany. I blurted to L, "I've always wanted to see Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, why don't we go there?"

I checked the various online routing systems and found, having applied some minor perspicacity, Fallingwater was just under six-hours from our well-appointed Manhattan aerie. (Online routing systems routinely and arrogantly pretend there's no traffic in the world. It's best when using such digital shams, to add at least twenty-percent to any forecast time. Just like it's best to subtract twenty-percent from any yelpesq star-rating.)

Moments later, I found a nearby hotel that hadn't a red roof or a 6 in its name, a drywall-lavish place with all the pretense of a holding company new business pitch.

This section of western Pennsylvania, not far from Pennsylvania's tapped-out coal mines, is about as poor as amerikkka gets. In better times, about 75 years ago, there were jobs and industry here, and undistributed wealth. It's all been dug out and removed now, and nothing much is left but beef jerky sticks at off-brand gasoline stations. I was glad to see an available hotel with the prospect of sheets changed monthly.

We quickly packed our scanties and Whiskey's accoutrements, loaded up my 1966 Simca 1500 with 329,000 miles on it and hit the potholes masquerading as a superhighway. If you're a city kid as I am, and a trip across town is considered like something from one of Magellan's logbooks, a six-hour drive is no cakewalk. But we made it and arrived 94-percent scurvy-free at our destination long-before darkness. 

On Friday, amid various new business pitches I'm being underpaid for, I read in the Wall Street Journal that Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater is celebrating the ninetieth year since it was constructed for the heir to a Pittsburgh department store magnate, Edgar Kaufmann Sr., in 1936--the depths of the Depression.

 https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/frank-lloyd-wrights-fallingwater-a-house-at-one-with-nature-8735053b

The Wall Street Journal so excellently covers things like this that I permit myself to buy it and subscribe--despite the fact that the paper itself is trump and fascism-complicit--even hailing amerikka's radical rightward movement. Some people will accept anything--hate, climate rape, torture, racism, thievery--if it saves them 29-cents on their taxes. That in a poisoned nutshell sums up the Journal's editorial policy.

All that being said, I excuse the Journal their meanness because if you read it closely enough you'll find emeralds like this:

The deeper-hued highlight above is the subject of today's post. To be aggrandizing about things, which my age and having written on 7,500 post allows me, that sentence might be the reason-for-being for all of us who toil in "creative" fields.

Our jobs, our very reason for being, whether we're selling a complex technology, an automobile, a resort location, a fast-food restaurant or anything else, can be clarified by thinking of the above.

Our jobs are more than having people face the ravine and waterfall. Our jobs are to make people "live with the waterfall."

If you're ever lucky enough to make it to Fallingwater, like making it to Haj Sophia, the Acropolis, the Pyramids, you will likely gasp.

If you don't 'holy shit,' you're all-but dead.

Because seeing these things is immersive. Because if you're doing it right, you're not just facing them, you're waist deep in them.

Somehow the feeling of empathy is involved. 

How will this waterfall wash over you. Not, merely, what does it look like?

In our modern age of advertising, we forget empathy. We're looking for "culture," or "keywords," or we look to show customers smiling because surely that will be convincing to non-smiling readers. We no longer have people live with the product or service. We no longer strive for gasp. We'll be happy with polite and political award-show applause.

This is living with.

This is looking at.

There are two ways to do what we do.

We can make ads that are Voyeuristic.

Or we can make ads that are Visceral.

Ads that show. Vs. ads that feel.

That's what Wright realized. 

That's what we forgot.

The Perfect Friday Post.

My wife, L, believes there is something called "the perfect Friday post" and that I have it in me to write such a post.

Though L has never fully-articulated its particular construction, I think that perfect Friday post could be regarded as something of a reward for having made it through the week. It would combine sound advice--wisdom, even--sprinkled with generous portions of humor and poignancy. And lest we forget, love.

If you've ever heard me coach my daughters through a dark moment--you'd get the idea. 

Nothing saccharine, Hallmarky or malarky.

Just love, listening, more love and life experience. With the strong recommendation of applying more than a soupçon of elbow grease.

Not too many minutes ago, Sandy Greenberg, my friend and fellow JCrew member, and founder of the eponymous Terri and Sandy agency, sent those of us in the JCrew this video.

Before I received it, I had been out for my long morning walk. It's simply gorgeous up here on the Gingham Coast and I added a mile to my usual four. 

During my steps, I was a bit lugubrious. Maybe more so than my usual setting of eleven.

Worth a listen.

I was experiencing what Duke Ellington eloquently and poetically dubbed "Mood Indigo."

I felt for probably the first time in my life that I am severely mentor-less. Mentor-bereft.

I lost my best, and wisest friend--a friend of half-a-century--just about four years ago. Steve Hayden left us about a year ago. I have Owen, my therapist of forty years, and Rob S., another JCrew member, and they're both wise and inordinately helpful. But, and this is my fault, they aren't "backstops" the way the aforementioned mentors have been. 

I say this is my fault because it takes me literally decades to trust. I don't even put people's names in my phone until I've had one-hundred conversations with them. I abjure the transitory--there's too much of it. And it takes a lot for me to commit. I think if I were in the Mafia, I'd bring a 9mm to bed every night lest my wife of 42 years turn on me. Trust does not come naturally to me.

All that aside, I think the point in the Dolly/Johnny video is to remind yourself to think about the magical people who recognized you and gave you a boost somewhere along the way.

I've probably been shitty at this.

Not believing my eyes even when I saw it with my own eyes.

Boosts are never "vaudeville" theatrical. A stagehand doesn't strut out carrying a step-stool and hold out his hand to elevate you. Boosts are, very often, subtle little things. You can't collect them like coins in an old glass applesauce jar. Yet, if you're watching, breathing, recognizing and appreciating, those boosts are accumulating all the same.

What I love about the Dolly/Johnny clip is the overt acknowledgement of a boost and the rocket-fuel that boost supplied. Once-in-a-while people show faith in you and take a risk that leads to a chance you wouldn't have otherwise had.

That's what Johnny did for Dolly.

My Fridayness is simple.

Be on the look-out for those boosts. 

They matter.

And the people who propel them matter, too.

You might not even know them.

You might even recognize the boost you got.

You might not realize it when it happens.

I have, too often, that malady.

That Mood Indigo.

Your boost might be second-hand like second-hand smoke. A boost motivated by something said by someone you do know to someone you hardly know. 

But when those boosts do happen treat them like a ballplayer would treat a hanging curve, or a halfback would treat a missed tackle. 

Go.

Go and say thank you.

Go and say thank you again.

Go and say thank you and grab that boost like it may be the last one you ever get and it may make all the difference.

Go and fulfill for the booster as if she is the best client you've ever had. Come through for the booster even if you've never met the booster.

Run through hell in a gasoline suit to prove the boost astute.

Go and as soon as you can, pass on a boost to someone else. 

That's your job.

As a human.

Be fruitful and boostify.

Thank you.

Who Art in Heaven.

In a single word much of the LinkedIn-centric universe has accentuated its own narcissism and maniacal self-absorption. This word is the verbal apotheosis of every school kid scribble displayed on the refrigerator, every participant getting a trophy and every parent having to skip work for a pre-K graduation.

That word is “creator.”

I’m nearing 69 years of age, and as far as I can remember the word “creator” had for almost all of time been the province of an all-powerful god. What we in advertising call a ZLO. (Zeus-like object.)

You can see from this GoogleBooks Ngram, the word "creator" today is used with nearly three-times the frequency of its previous peak in the early 1800s. The heavier usage in the early 19th Century likely coincides with amerikkka’s early 1800s religious “re-awakening.” We thought a lot about the creator in those days. god was everywhere.

Today, everyone and his cousin, everyone who writes a tweet or shoots with any skill or idea, a seven minute video on Saran Wrap is a creator. 

One of the reasons, probably the primary one that there are so-many creators today is that it’s so easy to create.

This very blog is a testament to that. Out of the roughly two-million words I’ve typed in this space, I’d guess only about one-thousand had any ooomph to them. But press a button and there they are—“published” for the world to see.

AI makes it all even easier.

You can type a “prompt” and quickly get unaccountable drivel based on the stolen writing of others. Here’s a paragraph of what AI thinks is a combo platter of me and William Faulkner.

The Agency Was Already Dead

It was sometime in the afternoon, though nobody could say exactly when because the clocks in the conference room had been stopped for reasons that the creative director said were “brand-related,” that we first understood the agency was dead.

Not dying.

Dead.

There is a distinction.

Dying agencies still have hope. They still have pitches. They still have decks with photographs of young people running through fields, and they still say things like culture, platform, ecosystem, and human truth as if these were not words but medical interventions. A dead agency has none of this. A dead agency has a new business meeting at four and nobody asks why.

You can type that prompt into ChatGPT. And call yourself a creator.

That sounds good, creator. 

It's like saying you're a visionary.

In fact, most modern creator-ing is nothing but thwacking together disparate images to a discordant music track. You're really adestroyer of other people’s sweat and talent and hard-work and years of struggle. An appropriator—a thief. A brain-eating virus.

Not a creator.

I understand the arrogant convenience and encompassing blandness of the word “creator.” By those measures it is similar semantically to another nasty coinage “content.” 

Each is so broad as to be meaningless.

The equivalent of calling yourself a carbon-based life-form. 

Look, I'm a carbonator.

Creator doesn’t include what you actually did. It doesn’t say artist, writer, composer. Terms we always used. It milks those meaningful words dry of meaning like a set of milked-out geriatric goat udders. Content works the same way. It just means something that was made. It doesn’t presume quality or artistry. It just collectivizes made-ness and therefore renders it meaningless.

Years ago when I worked in the now-dead part of the agency business, I’d often be sentenced to a giant conference room where a dozen or so agency people would have to introduce themselves to a dozen or so clients.

To my way of thinking anyone in the creative department who introduced themselves with a title was basically telegraphing their utter-assness. Often people would say, “I’m a Senior Partner, Group Creative Director.” No one listening (if anyone was listening) in actuality had any idea of what they did all day. No one spends their time “group creative directoring,” or “chief creative officering.”

I'm a creator. Or a maker. I'm a content strategist.

I think quoting Robert Capa might make sense here. He once said, "If you're pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough." He was killed when he stepped on a landmine in Vietnam in 1954, aged 40.

He used real work, real sweat, real life and peril.

At one of those conference room introduction-fests, I always took what I regarded as a more accurate tack.

“I’m a copywriter. I take really complicated things and make them understandable and lust-worthy.”

You can be the creator of Bubbles, an animated gopher. Or the creator of an app that can tell you from anywhere in the world whether or not your refrigerator is open. You can be the creator of something. But to call yourself a creator is the very definition of hubris.

You can either do something important or give yourself a moniker so you feel important.

That decision is yours to create.

 

My Retirement Party.

The great Dave Trott, an English ad person who’s done some of my favorite commercials and ads ever, including what I consider the best beer commercials ever done, often talks about getting upstream to answer a creative problem.

To be honest, I never really understood what “upstream” meant. Maybe that’s the New Yorker in me. I prefer to think about heading someone off at the pass, beating someone to the punch, or schtupping them before they schtup you.

In the words of Terry Malloy, “do it to him, before he does it to you."

Whether or not those terms are synonymous, my guess is you get the point.

Some years ago, about a year before I was actually shit-canned from Ogilvy for having a grown-up’s salary and grown-up grey hair and running grown-up pieces of business, I had a sense that I was going to be fired.

There was an obituary in the New York Times over the weekend of a guy called Frank Smith who died at the age of 101. In 1951, Smith was sentenced to death for murdering a night-watchman.

"On June 7, 1954, two hours before he was to be strapped into the chair, the state’s Board of Pardons and Paroles commuted his death sentence" to life-imprisonment. Still, "even decades later, he remained haunted by the electric chair — 'still an object of primal, almost talismanic fear,' Annalisa Quinn wrote in a 2023 profile in The Boston Globe Magazine. ‘It cooks you,’ he would repeat, folding into himself. ‘It cooks you.’”

That fear of being cooked is a little what it’s like being over 40, or even 35, in an ad agency today. You can hear the hobnail-booted guards walking down the concrete death-row flooring coming to get you. Only in agencies, it’s HR-functionaries probably in rent-a-runway shoes tip-toeing on carpet tiles. Stained carpet tiles.

In any event, in my mind I was convinced the executioners were coming for me. I hadn’t done anything bad. I was in demand by account teams, other creatives and clients. It’s just that, as I said, I had somehow gotten old, experienced and expensive. Everything that used to be a hallmark of quality now instead put a mark on your head.

So, I decided to “get upstream of the problem.”

I went on ebay and found a 30-pack of retirement greeting cards for just $7. I didn’t feel like spending $7.98 for a single card, even one as adroit as this:

Next, I pulled together about half a dozen friends and co-workers and asked them each to sign five or six cards. Each with different color inks and with different names. In short order, I had 30 going away cards that looked as much like the real thing as crypto looks like real money. Or fast food looks edible.

Finally, I strung some string about my work area as if the string were festive streamers and I hung the various retirement cards up as if my friends had held a retirement party for me and the cards on display were how they decorated.

My upstreamness was very simple.

I pictured two HR people marching down to my workspace in their HR-goose-stepping style. I knew they’d be ready to say, “can we see you for a minute?” Though that’s technically a question, it’s not really anything but an execution. 

These days corporate cruelty is nominally tempered by excel spreadsheet’s worth of politesse, so as to make the cruelty even crueler, like pulling the wings off a fly. (Often people misspell crueler as cruller. You might think they're talking about donuts. I’m not.)

I pictured the HR people unable to find me at my table. But noticing the retirement cards everywhere, I imagined they breathed a sigh of relief. I could suddenly see them high-tailing it back to their well-hidden bosses and saying, “we don’t have to fire George. We just went down to do it and there were retirement cards everywhere. He’s retiring soon and just hasn’t given his notice.”

The HR-director would then come out from under his desk, take a deep gulp of office-regurgitated meeting-air and rejoice, “Think of the severance we’ll save!”

I’m not sure if my little ruse worked at all.

I’m not sure if they ever came down in person to fire me.

I do know I lasted about nine-months longer than I thought I would. 

I wonder if I could win an award for this.

At least some version of an Effie.

An F.U.