A Perspective on Perspective. David Hockney.

When David Hockney died a couple of weeks ago, I read three obituaries on his life. To be honest, I knew very little about him.

I read obituaries in The Wall Street Journal, in The Economist and in The New York Times. 

Of course, I "liked Hockney." Which is like saying you like chocolate ice cream or 48%-bonuses or a cold drink on a scorching day. 

I also like Taschen, the great publisher of art books. They fairly main-line on high-grade Hockney.

The book with him in the red suspenders is sitting about 15 inches from my left elbow as I type this. You can buy it here.

But liking someone and knowing something about him (besides a loose appreciation for his art) are different. So, I read.

This time, the icing on the obituary cake came from the Times. Midway through their piece they featured this book, by Hockney, in which Hockney examines the technology old masters used to paint their masterpieces.

You can buy the book here.

Some years ago, I saw a documentary on Vermeer called "Tim's Vermeer," that touched the same topic. You can find the movie on YouTube and rent it for the price of two cups of coffee.

Somehow examining the technology behind craft seemed like the kind of thing those of us still in the ad industry might consider. Especially at a time when many people posit that technology (AI) will subsume or overwhelm craft.

OK. I bought the book.

It cost $37.19 and come from a bookstore in Rancho Cucamonga, California. That in itself was worth at least $25. It sounds like a place Bugs Bunny would approve of. 

The inside front cover had this spread. 

That in itself was worth thousands. 

Perspective.

On the left, a Byzantine mosaic from Sicily in 1150. Facing it, a Van Gogh from 1889. Two seemingly similar portraits made almost three-quarters of a millennium apart.

Four eyes, searing.

My photographs of these sort of things always suck. And despite the proclivities of anyone brought up on screens not with books, there's absolutely no comparison between looking at these images here and holding them in a 12x16" book. Or in the case of a spread 12X32".

The point--reducing years of work by Hockney to a single sentence or two--is that what Hockney does, what artists do, even--if we're doing it right, what we in advertising do is the same.

We look at things people have seen over and over again. Things we've seen so often that we hardly even see them any more. And we make them new.

We make bland grand.
We make old bold.
We make prosaic elegiac.

What we're supposed to be doing is finding a way at looking at things we've seen a million times and seeing them in an entirely new way.

We're suppose to flip upside down. Look backward. Turn night into day.

We're supposed to alter perspectives.

It's only by altering perspectives that the oh-so-usual world all around us becomes worth seeing again in a new light from a new angle.

That's why I bought Secret Knowledge.

I won't ever be an expert on the intricacies of Hockney's thesis. Frankly, I'm not even entirely sure I understand it. I'm an ignoramus with no art education--except for one lesson in college when in the course of one class I was introduced to JMW Turner and William Hogarth.

These two plates below force a looking at the world in ways you hain't seen it before.

I know this though.

When I started in this business and had to come up with the requisite three ads that would make a campaign, it took me at least a week of struggle. 

Today, I believe the test for a campaign isn't three ads. It's fifty. And to come up with fifty, you must abide by my thesis in this flimsy post.

You must keep looking at things differently, oddly, backwards. Keep poking, tugging, crumpling, fighting, starting over until you train yourself to see. 

More importantly
re-see.
re-see.
re-see.
re-see.

See?

A Five-Part Tour of My Cranium. Part 1.

For all the fucked-up-ness that went into making me who I am today, and I suppose who I'll be tomorrow, sometimes I feel like I am the luckiest person alive.

There are five reasons for that.

1. I was born with a wide-field of vision. I see things that other people don't. Things in the sea I live by. Things in the books and magazines and newspapers and websites and social feeds and emails I read. Things I hear from friends and family.

This wide-field of vision gives me a bug's-eye-view of the world. Or in the vision of Adam Nicholson in his great book "Life Between the Tides," a fractal view of the world. Nicholson summarizes fractals in a way Bazooka Joe, even Mort could understand.

"Fractal theory suggests that the closer you look at something, the more it remains unknown."

Here's an example of looking close from a book review I read not twenty minutes ago. Jean Thie, an ecologist from Canada was studying how beavers transform ecosystems through their dams. On Google Earth, Thie discovered earth's largest beaver dam. It was more than half-a-mile wide with a 17-acre lake behind it. From the ground, the dam looked like nothing. From above its majesty became clear.

That's what my vision does for me.

2. I'm good at storing and categorizing things. So I can recall them and find them when I need them. This is how I've written more than 7000 blog posts, and can find analogies when working that allow me to explain things in a way other people often can't otherwise understand.

3. I am interested. There are people all over the world who say, 'that isn't interesting.' You hear it in advertising. You hear people say, 'I want a cool assignment.' I'm of the belief that finding the interesting, finding the cool is what we do. That's our job.

Once on IBM, I had to advertise a more powerful and faster computer chip. The brief said something about how many milliseconds faster an operation could be done. I found out that the milliseconds was the length of a human's 'blink of an eye.' All at once, we should show faster. Not just say faster. 

Here are two diagrams I made, so as not to just say 'faster.' You can't do this if you aren't interested. I couldn't really give a shit about chips. But I do care about a) learning and b) explaining.

America's two-time Pulitzer and National Book Award-winner Robert Caro says, "turn every page." Doing so is where you find unique, interesting, weird, startling.

4. I spend money. When I hear or read about something interesting--especially a book, I am lucky-enough to have the money and the space so I can buy it, read it, absorb it, keep it, recall it.

In short, I am able to surround myself with words, images and ideas that excite me. That make me a better person, a better writer, a better ad agency.

5. I am a rule-breaker. I don't like doing what I'm told. So don't tell me to organize my books. They are organized. In my fashion. Rule-breaking also allows you irreverence. Word play. Humor. To do things others super-ego away. 

--

It's Juneteenth today and I am not working.

My wife is out of town and I have no pressing client deliverables.

Also, Sparks and I were out on the beach at 6:30 this morning. She's dog-tired and I'm old-man-tired.

But I thought I'd get a jump-start on next-week's posts. I'll write a few portraits of some of the books I surround myself with. Some of the books that might be why, for all my gloom, I sometimes think of myself as the luckiest man on the face of the earth.

Here are some pictures of why I sometimes feel that way.

This week, tour my head. With me as your Virgil.

Father's Day at Elevation.

I knew something was wrong when I woke up to a downshift and heard the gears of the old Blue Bird school bus which had been painted teal and adorned with a giant Seraperos logo, still grinding. Gordo, our third-string catcher and first-string bus-driver wrestled the bus upward through the Sierra Madre Oriental mountains through the night.

I had fallen asleep in my seat, stretched out with my Wilson A2000 as a slight pillow against the grease of the window, and my feet on the rubberized vinyl floor that ostensibly would make the bus easier to clean though no one ever did.

It was late black and we had finished a game hours earlier. Angry and tired and hungry--and not yet drunk--we were on our way through San Luis Potosi, the most-raped city the in world--hoping to reach Aguascalientes, where we'd be playing four games against the Rieleros (the Railroaders) in just three days.

San Luis Potosi state, in red. Like blood.

San Luis Potosi in more temperate times.

The wages of fear are hard-earned.

Through my closed eyelids I sensed we had passed through San Luis--the Spanish raped everyone near the town and took the silver wealth from the mountains, then raped again when the silver was gone--yet Gordo was still guiding the bus upward, above 6,000 feet in elevation onto 7,000 feet. He had missed the turnoff--it's barely marked--to Aguascalientes and was heading through to Cerro del Potosi at 8,600 feet elevation and likely to Cerro Grande, 2,000 feet higher still.

"Gordo," I barked. "Up we are still going." My Spanish word order was as ill-formed as my very arrival in Mexico some months earlier.

"Basta," Gordo said. "Enough." Gordo hated being wrong. Like most people, he hated admitting he was wrong even more.

Hector, also now awake, and laying across from me spoke in Sten machine-gun Spanish. "You must turn around or we will die with the wild goats."

"The road is so narrow and there's no place to turn."

Hector had Gordo stop the old bus, the diesel clacking like a time-bomb. He and I got out of the vehicle, me in front of the bus, Hector behind, with flashlights against the off chance of an oncoming car and Gordo executed a fifteen-minute U-turn, moving two feet forward and 26-inches back against the narrowness of the road and the un-guardrailed steepness of the cliffs. 

150-seconds of some of the best film ever.
Please. Sound on. Loud.

Hector and I stood watching for cars, hoping their drivers would stop before collision. Before long in the piano-key dark, Hector shined his flashlight to heaven and whirled it around like a baton, a streak of light bursting through the night like the Kleigs announcing a 1930s Hollywood premiere. It didn't take long before I also played with my light. Whipping the mountainside with glow and hoping to signal the gods above in case we needed help.

Most of the other boys snored through the whole thing, and in short order, Hector and I returned to the bus. Gordo was guiding the old machine down the steep in second gear so the brakes, what was left of them, wouldn't overheat. The low gear kept slowing us down against the force of gravity and the demons that built the road.

After twenty or so minutes of grind, Hector began.

"I saw outside the light of my father signaling me. I tried saying hello back to the stars. To say hello to my father."

"He is up in Canis Major or Alpha Centauri."

"He is up or he is down. He might be out walking Cerberus, the three-headed dog. No one knows. The last I saw him he was swinging a fist at my face, and like my eight brothers before me, all nine of us sharing the same bed, I said 'enough is enough,' and walked from his home to find a way away from home."

"He hit you."

"Everyone's father hit. But mine without an open hand. With a fist. Finally, I came back at him while a bat I had in my hand. And I left after that, I found a place to play ball."

"Like your brothers before you."

"They left too to play ball. But one was too slow. One was too fat. One was too butter-fingers. One was too Swiss-cheese glove. Two couldn't hit. And two drank too much."

"Then you. One of the all time greats."

"But still, no father to blink a light back to me."

The bus rattled downward and we thought about lights not blinking.

"And you, Jorge Navidad. Did your light find also your father, or was he too missing."

"My father was always missing most when he was needed most."

It took me years to figure out how to sum up a life of pain in one epigram. Missing most when needed most was where I settled, satisfied with the job I had done.

Hector sat with that. As I have for most of my life.

"He had a heart-attack when I was eight. After that we never once had a catch. He never once had a catch with me. He never once came to one of my games. He tonight was missing too, though still you try."

"A hurt maybe worse than a fist."

We sat in still stillness as the clicketyclackety bus gravity-ed down. 

"May I," Hector asked the night, "quote from Homer's 'Odyssey.'"

Hector a poor man from an unnamed village found a second-life, a better one, in literature you wouldn't expect him to have read, though read he did. Like the great Mexican League pitcher, Estuardo Lambresas, who as a boy would climb to the top of a school house and take in his lessons through the narrow aperture of a chimney, Hector made himself an educated man. 

"May I," Hector asked again, "quote from Homer's 'Odyssey.'"

    A son whose father has vanished has to suffer 
            many sorrows
    In his halls: there is no one else who might be there to
            help to him.
    So it is with Telémachus now. His father has vanished,
            nor is there
    Anyone among the people who might defend him
            from harm.

"Unlike Telémachus, my father never returned. I blinked the light hoping for a blink back. But just the still of all of the sky answered."

We hit the flat part of the highway to Aguascaliente. Gordo shifted into third. Then fourth. We were in the wee small hours and Gordo raced to see the frosted neon of our the hotel sign.

Gordo saw the neon, like Hector and I saw what we saw. Like all of us that night of dark, through the mountains and the trillion cicada trills, we were looking through the galaxy for something we were missing or something we never had or worst of all something that vanished like a sky-high fly-ball in the too bright mid-day sky.

Gordo ground the gears and he stopped the bus across a dozen spaces in the empty, nearly empty, sidewalk athwart Hotel Colonial. 

Hector banged the head of a bat on the floor of the bus with a boom, waking up the sleepers. He barked some instructions. Time for breakfast. Curfew. And the bus to Parque de Béisbol Alberto Romo Chávez. The parque named for a Rieleros from the 30s and 40s who was now in the Mexican League's Hall-of-Fame. Chávez had a ballpark named for him, not like they do today, name ballparks after a bank or a telco. A man commemorated not a company.

 Alberto Romo Chávez

The team, tired and stiff from six hours on the bus, peeled off their vinyl seats. They shuffled by, carrying their teal duffles, on the way to their small rooms with a broken ceiling fan and old Philco radio.

"No light blinked back," Hector said.

"No light blinked back," I dumbed.

"It is hard on a narrow road to reverse course."

We left the bus, the last two. Me in the lead carrying my duffle, Hector right behind me, carrying his.

I waited for him at the foot of the two steps off the bus. When he stepped down he patted the old machine like you would an old dog who loved you no matter what. Like an Odyssean ship, we crossed oceans that night.

I reversed course, went back and did the same.

No light blinked back.

They never do.

Say One Thing. Do Another.

Depictions of the Roman god Janus.
He had a complex view of the world.

One of the major aspects of the world that's sure to get me upset is dichotomies.

When people say one thing and do another.

You know, lie.

Like moving people in agencies to open-plan. 

We were told it would ease collaboration.
It really spread sickness.
Led to people wearing noise-canceling headphones.
The death of people working together.
And it never had anything to do with collaboration.
It have everything to do with saving money on rent.
And putting more people in less space.

Here's another topical for-instance.

Someone says, "we need to tax billionaires." 

(Tesla has reported $5,700,000,000 in income in 2025 and paid $0 in taxes.)

Quickly, the people talking about taxing (not axing) billionaires are accused of waging "class warfare." Class warfare isn't someone amassing an un-spendable amount of money, it's saying that that money should be taxed.

A trillion, btw, is a thousand billions.
And a billion is a thousand millions.

So, a trillion could be redistributed to create

one million millionaires.

Or, as reported in last Thursday's Wall Street Journal:

At five-percent interest, Musk's trillion earns him $50,000,000,000 a year in interest. Or $137,000,000/day. Or about $1,600/second.

But someone saying make people like Musk must pay taxes are accused of waging "class warfare."

A dichotomy in advertising is glaring. We know what we as humans like to watch. It usually looks nothing like what we produce for clients. In short there's a distance between what we as human beings like to watch, and what we're forced to watch.

We like watch sports. Or jokes. Or things that make us laugh or think. We're forced to watch 42-seconds of legal copy per 60-seconds of spot. Or listen to some recurrent drivel about network reliability or look at pictures of happy fast-food workers.

What we in the industry like, is nothing like we as industry practitioners produce. 

The dichotomies go on and on.

There are thousands of ad industry "spokespeople" extolling the virtues of AI, cost-cutting, efficiencies, scaling.

Most people want kindness, consideration, a laugh. 

No one speaks for people--not in what was once, broadly speaking, a people-focused industry.

Can you imagine an holding company leader at Cannes, or in his limousine saying as Carl Ally said 50 years ago, 

"Advertising must comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." 

"Or we have to do commercials that make people feel something. Laugh. Cry. Think. Feel." Like this. Something that shows its creators had actually lived in the world. Not merely in an excel spreadsheet.

Today, the doyens of the ad industry are more likely to say, 

"Advertising must reduce our operating costs to offset the pricing pressures from client procurement departments, so we can maintain our margin without further reductions in force and return shareholder value to our investors."

One of my strengths and weaknesses as a human is that even at the ancient age of 68.527 years old, I have held onto my naiveté. 

I refuse to give in.

I believe our job is to help companies sell stuff by providing relevant information that's fun to read or watch, so it stops you. So you feel rewarded. So you learn. So you like the people it's from. Something like this.

That's about as outdated as this statement from Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25 and Luke 18:25. "It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of god."

Another dichotomy:

We love gold.

We ignore the golden rule.

One-Liners.

How to write headlines.

A lot of people on the periphery of the business world like those of us in advertising, or what used to be advertising, criticize the tendency of business to think quarter-to-quarter.

I'm guilty of it myself. Essentially railing against clients and businesses and investors for thinking of short-term gains, as opposed to slow, steady, roll-up-your-sleeves growth. In short, a lot of the world operates on a "get-rich-quick" basis whereas, about 99 times out of 100, making money is the result of a get-rich-slow methodology.

Of course, get-rich-slow isn't much of a promise to clients, investors or ordinary people. That's why we're so susceptible to 
"in by 9 out by 5" promises. 

• Drink this beer, get the girl.
  
• Take this pill, play with your grandkids.
• Drive this car, become successful.
• Hire this agency, and see sales skyrocket.

There is such a thing in the world as long history. People who engage in it look at the world through thousand-year lenses. They realize things unfold not over the course of weeks, not even over the course of years or decades, but sometimes over the course of millennia. 

amerikka's current president thinks wars and their consequences can be wrapped up like sitcoms. We will be paying for the effects of the illegal US invasions of Venezuela and Iran for many years to come. Not to mention their multi-trillion dollar price tags. 

Unlike an episode of "Eight is Enough," it won't be over in 22 minutes. 

But this is a blog about advertising. So I need to make a transition.

When I was a kid in the business, if I was about to shoot a spot or a campaign, I'd have the future carefully charted out. I'd say to myself, 'this will be the lead spot on my reel and will surely get me a great job at either Chiat\Day or Chiat/Day, whichever way the virgule leans.' Things seldom happen that way. Seldom as in never.

One of the long-history-ish things that stuns me about advertising is how little the things we elect to watch and read and hear look like the things we're forced to watch and read and hear.

That's because we're trained to believe in a fundamentally unrealistic causality. We say, if we run this commercial that features two chalupa-grandes in a nacho-crusted shell for just $6.99, the fortunes of Taco Timpani will soar like a space-x rocket. Most often, as James Nance Garner once said about the office of the vice-presidency, what we do ain't worth a bucket of warm spit.

When I was a boy, I remember reading something about Woody Allen when he was just 16 years old. As someone with fervent creative energy, Allen would write 50 jokes a day and sell as many of them as he could--to the likes of Sid Caesar--for about $2/joke. 

I wonder if there's a strategy in that.

I wonder if instead of creating "films" for the ostensible reason of loading masses of people with copy points to get them to buy NOW, I wonder if we stopped trying to sell so much, and instead just tried to be an entertaining friend.

In other words, and I say this in part because, like Woody Allen 75 years ago, I can do it, I wonder if brands would be better served if they had their creative people just write 50 jokes a week.

A joke's job is to be friendly. To get noticed. And remind people you're there and you're ok.

Maybe that's what advertising should be.

Fun.
Funny.
Fast.
Fertile.

Rather than bludgeoning people, building synapses in their heads so when you see their logo, their colors, their typography, something clicks, a smile or some warmth ensue.

For pretty much my whole life, Tiffany's ran an index card-sized ad on page three of The New York Times. Back when things made sense, a "broadsheet" newspaper was 2700 lines. And standard advertising units were measured in lineage. 

I learned all this when I was a beginning copywriter at Bloomingdale's writing 20 ads a week, 50 weeks a year.

A full page ad was 2700 lines. A large ad with a column missing was 2100 lines. A 10"x14" ad was a 1680. And so on. 

Tiffany's ran a 300 line ad, pretty much every day. One-ninth of a page. 

These weren't great ads.
Really they were just reminders.
Like a store-sign might be before everything was taken over by global brands.

An impression.
An inducement.
A promise.

Here's my favorite New York store sign of all time. (Sorry for the 'gender'-ness.)
We need to remember the efficacy of drumbeat impressions.
The sustain. Not just the pulse.

Tiffany's in their 300-line ads weren't selling off the page. 

They were reminding people they were there and showing them they were relevant.

We forgot the "service" portion of communication--are you there for me? We over-index on the shrill, the buy now, the fomo.

Re think.