Once again.

I don't really believe that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny but I do believe how you do small things is an indication of how you'll handle large things.

In other words, if you kick your dog, you'll probably hit your kid.

I was thinking about this this morning as I faced the blank page onto which I blather out my daily Ad Aged posting.

It's Friday.

I had a bit of a crisis at home. 

A phone-call I had to take this morning at 8:30.

And about nine things that were sitting in my death-box...I mean, in-box, that were clamoring for at least a jot of attention.

Some of my blogging colleagues take Friday off.

It's the lowest readership day of the work week.

And I don't get paid for this.

Besides, what the fuck.

However, that's not how I do things.

I'm more a believer that 80% of life, or maybe more, is showing up. And of course, showing up with the goods.

In other words, even though I have no real obligation, I feel an obligation and I oblige.

I'm not being a martyr about this.

It's just the way I do things.

I see a lot of brands and agencies with a social media presence they update four times a year or less.

It seems to me that if you do something like a blog--you should try to be as regular as an octogenarian mainlining prune juice.

For as long as I've been alive, Tiffany's has run what used to be called a 300-line ad on the upper right corner of page three of "The New York Times."

I don't know if they cancelled it in the days after 9/11 or after Pearl Harbor.

But regularity of behaviour, consistency, stamina--being reliable, is a big part of life, relationships, work.

That's my post for today.

My awards entry. 100% factual and true.

Since this august blog began in June (see what I did there) nine years ago, it has slowly and steadily built a considerable and influential readership. To that end, three years ago, "Business Insider," named Ad Aged one of the world's most important advertising blogs. But that, dear readers, was only the beginning.

After all, awards season is upon us. And I want to be ready in case I need to enter Ad Aged into this or that show.

You remember little Freddy Perkins, do you not?

Poor little Freddy Perkins.

He had a limp.

A withered left arm.

And a virulent virus was ravaging his tiny body.

Little Freddy's prospects were downright Dickensian.

Then, he was introduced to Ad Aged.

Soon, for the first time in months, little Freddy was able to sit upright in bed. He began eating solid food. Wait! Look! Little Freddy is w w w w w walking.

What's that I hear? A ball bouncing in the backyard? 

Laughter?!

Is that little Freddy skipping down the primrose lane, holding the hand of little Mary Jo!

He's well again.

Thank God!

Praise the Lord.

It happened when he started reading Ad Aged.

And that's not all.

Not only did his body heal, his mind expanded!

His IQ leapt from a prosaically suburban 110, to a positively Fortean 175! Little Freddy was making abstruse calculations on the back of every napkin he could lay his hands on.

That hot new app?

Little Freddy built it.

It's all happened.

Since he started reading Ad Aged.

This is just one Ad Aged story. Just one example of the salutary effects of Ad Aged--the world's greatest blog.

So hither in from the beach and vote vote vote for Ad Aged. Call it the greatest blog...no the greatest invention of man since the Salk vaccine.

The writing puts Shakespeare back with the shipping news.

The comedy.

The wit.

Aeschuylus. Euripides. Homer. Ad Aged.

Thank you.

Advertising 1965: "We Try Harder." Advertising 2016: "We Blather Harder."

Much of the decay, decline or ossification of the advertising industry comes I think from the decay, decline, or ossification of how we use language.

To be blunt (which is the point) we no longer communicate.

We no longer find truth.

We no longer worry about the consumer (unless the consumer is a judge at Cannes.)

No. We have become an industry of jargon, by jargon and for jargon.

Let's go back to one of the great essays ever written on writing, from George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language." 

If I didn't have this memorized, I'd have this pinned somewhere near my ever-diminishing desk-space. If I ran an agency, I'd distribute it to every employee on their first day on the job--and once a year thereafter. Maybe there would be quizzes.

            i.   Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

           ii.   Never use a long word where a short one will do.

         iii.   If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

         iv.   Never use the passive where you can use the active.

          v.   Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

         vi.   Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

About once a week, I send a note to a friend in the business who's 15 years or so younger than me. "What does this mean," I ask him. I'll admit, I don't get a lot of the newer language--just like I don't truly know what '23-Skiddoo' means.

What are all these products we're inventing? 

Where do I buy them?

What are they for?

The last new product I saw that was vaguely interesting was yogurt in a tube. At least that I could understand.

Earlier this week, Agency Spy, published a post heralding the hiring of someone and his anointment as Chief Creative Officer.

Here's what his own agency said about him: “_____ is a proven leader able to combine technology, data and storytelling in order to help brands build innovative campaigns...[his] entrepreneurial mindset and technology expertise will help our clients push the boundaries of consumer engagement..."

Ack ack ack. Help.

Will someone please tell me what that means?

Does he write? Or does he draw? Does he sell shit? Does he win new business?

--

Of all the things that make me feel old and washed up in this business, the most pernicious is the nodding.

When people speak in asininities and solipsisms like the above and everyone nods.

I sit there like an old Galician Jew and pound my chest in self-rebuke. What does it mean? What are they understanding that I'm missing?

A friend in the industry 25 years ago once said to me, "taste is a liability."

Now the ability to speak and think clearly is.

If you want to get ahead, damn the torpedoes and full-blather ahead.

A warrior in the Tempus Fugit.

The other night I left the office around two in the morning. It was another typically brutal day in modern America—where you’re seen as obstreperous or disruptive or, worse, lazy if you’re not willing to work around the clock anytime someone grabbing your crotch in a vise says to.

I hopped into a taxi and instead of directing the driver to my apartment, I gave him the address of the Tempus Fugit, a former speakeasy that still operates out of an old warehouse on East 91^st Street that houses now a Verizon depot.

I walked up a flight of steps lit only by a bare lightbulb, then through a galvanized steel door, then through an expandable grate on springs like an old elevator enclosure, then down another hallway, then up another flight of steps, through two more galvanized-steel reinforced doors, down a flight of steps, then, finally, into the bar.

The Tempus Fugit was just as I left it the last time I visited about two months ago. A 20-foot mahogany bar with 12 or so mismatched stools abutting a brass rail, and four tables—also with mismatched seating against the back wall. Hanging at the back was a signed glossy photograph of Gene Tunney, the world’s heavyweight champion from 1926-1928, including two ten-round decisions against Jack Dempsey.

 Also on a table in the back was an old “New York Journal-American” newspaper from 1961, opened to the horse-racing pages. Muddy track or not, Corn Cob was the odds-on-favorite in the third at Belmont at 3 to 2; I have no idea how the race turned out, no one does. On the wall hung two more artifacts: a framed “New York World” newspaper announcing the sinking of the General Slocum. The banner headline read: “LIST OF SLOCUM’S DEAD NOW MAY REACH 1,000.

There was another framed vestige, a print entitled “Custer’s Last Fight.” It was a reproduction of an 1884 lithograph of Custer and his troops (who look like they were outfitted by Ralph Lauren) being slaughtered and scalped by marauding Lakota Sioux, with Custer—center-stage—attempting to beat back the tide of redskins like King Canute tried holding back the sea.

Back at the bar, I assumed my usual seat one in from the end and nodded to the bartender who pulled me a six-ounce juice glass of the finest beer ever brewed anywhere, Pike’s Ale (the ALE that won for YALE!)

When Pike’s brewery went belly-up in 1961 or 1962, the Tempus Fugit bought all of their remaining stock. Somehow, though the shelf-life of beer is measured usually in weeks or months, through the decades the Pike’s on-hand has only improved. Pike’s has a sweetness to it—a hoppiness if I were to go all ‘palatey’ on you and because it is served in small juice glasses it never goes flat or warm as it sits before you, no matter how parsimoniously you nurse your suds.

I suppose the secret to the stash’s longevity has to do with the backroom at the Tempus Fugit. It is unlit and is somehow kept at a perfect 53-degrees, keeping the brew like a mosquito is preserved in amber, just perfect.

I noticed at the end of the bar, a full ten stools away, a cloud of dark, almost viscous cigar smoke. Just as the atmosphere was about to clear and present a view of the flammable party, another plume of smoke would bellow forth from both the person and the stogie and would thereby obscure my view.

I thought, briefly, about the Gershwin’s classic, “A Foggy Day (in London Town,) specifically the lines:

“For, suddenly, I saw you there,

And through foggy London town

The sun was shining everywhere.”

Because when the smoke from the panatela cleared, I saw a small paunchy man in a broad pin-striped suit and a brown derby perched on his crown, cocked jauntily to one side.

I could swear for the life of me it was one Alfred Emmanuel Smith, four-time Governor of New York from 1918-1920, and then from 1922-1928, when he ran unsuccessfully for the Presidency of the United States, losing, in a veritable landslide to Herbert Hoover.

The smoke, as I said, from his panatela cleared and he motioned me over to the seat adjacent to his. Wary—I’m not just to consorting with men who passed into oblivion in 1944, I sidled up to the appointed stool.

“Governor Smith,” I began, “I have always been a fan.”

“Call me Al,” he said, shaking my hand like a farmer pumping water. “Call me Al, and have one of mine,” he handed me a cigar and flourished a lit wooden match for my stogie.

“I’ve always been a fan.”

“You are a child of the tenements then? You rolled pipes up Oliver Street and worked 70 hour weeks at the Fulton Fish Market for $12 a week.”

“No,” I answered. “Like so many of my generation, I grew up watching ‘Leave it to Beaver’ in suburbia."

“I’ll tell you something,” Smith said, motioning for two more glasses of Pike’s. “I’ll tell you something, in the still of a dark night, when the wind is wafting just right, one of those rare and mysterious times when the city is quiet and the cabs lightly tiptoe on the asphalt, on one of those rare nights, when I’m alone and it’s quiet, I can still smell the stink of cod emanating from my soul.”

“Who can’t smell that smell sometimes?”

“It’s the smell of sadness, rot and defeat. The smell of dreams undreamed and bills unpaid and sickness, phlegm and death.”

“You don’t sound much like the Happy Warrior,” I said, mentioning one of the many monikers a generally favorable press had bestowed upon him while he was New York’s most-popular governor ever.

“Even Happy Warriors get kicked in the rear. Even Happy Warriors stumble, twist an ankle and get laid up.” He drained his Pike’s as I drained mine. The bartender complied with another deuce.

“Go home,” Smith said to me. “Get some sleep. Take a weight off your shoulders. Go home.”

I hustled my coat on and shook his hand.

“The Happy Warrior,” he said. “Go home. And don’t give up the fight.”

He drained his Pike’s.

And mine.

Home. I walked.

Hating ads.

Just last week or the week before came the news that starting the 2017 season, the National Basketball Association will start putting corporate logos on players' uniforms.

This in addition to the Nike swoosh that adorns virtually everything everywhere.

So, I suppose the banks that almost brought down the global economic system will have their marques festooned on the Knick's uniforms, the team that almost brought down the very idea of team-work, intelligent play and athleticism.

I also saw, in the wake of Prince's death, this ad, for Chevrolet.

Kindly leave your logos off my sports teams and rock stars. It makes me hate you, not like you. If you want to get all up in my "grill" about it, how about putting logos on babies while they're in the hospital.

What no one wants to say, or even think about, is that it's all gone too far. And by "it," I mean the money-grubbing.

Whereas commercial time per hour used to set at a federally regulated nine minutes an hour, today we see about 16 minutes per hour. Over the course of ten hours, we see twice as many commercials  as we would have seen in the 1960s.

So, either our time is worth less (so we have to give more of it) or the networks have grown more greedy.

I'll say it again.

I don't think people innately hate ads. Especially ones that convey useful information. I do think they hate the barrage, the noise, the stupidity and the onslaught.

Avian adventures with Uncle Slappy.

I was afraid last night in my apartment to even move.

My wife is in full-frenzy.

Like Mission Control at Nasa moments before landing the Mars rover. There is a concentration of effort. And intent in every motion.

And everywhere I turned, there was a chicken.

Coming out of the freezer there were frozen birds that emerged like Chinese troops crossing the border in the Korean War.

Wave after wave of kosher Empire chickens, they kept coming.

The soup pot, a large four or 14-gallon pot a small refugee community could bathe in, was boiling on the Viking. Soup was being made. Of course, soup was being made. The answer to 90% of all Jewish questions, ontological, liturgical or ecumenical is, according to my wife, ‘shhhh have some soup.’

The kitchen sink, the expensive double-deep, double-wide stainless steel affair that cost me a couple day-rates, was filled with birds. There were more birds awaiting their fate in our extra-large Sub Zero.

Uncle Slappy noticed, too, of course he did. He notices everything.

“I’m afraid to go to bed,” he said to me when it was time for him to turn in. “Under the 800-counts, there are more chickens, I assume.”

“Uncle Slappy,” I temporized, “I think we have somewhere chickens that are stuffed with other chickens that are stuffed with other chickens which will be served this evening…”

“All served on a bed of chickens.”

“The start of Passover is like an M.C. Escher engraving. Chickens to the vanishing point.” he said.

With that, Uncle Slappy padded off to the kitchen, kissed my wife good-night, then kissed me on the forehead good-night, and padded off to the guest room to read, then go to sleep.

He came back moments later with a reproduction someone had given me of John James Audobon’s classic bound collection of his unsurpassed paintings, “The Birds of America.” My copy is 694 pages, 13”x 16” and weighs in at a turkey-sized 18.1 pounds. It was all the old man could do to wrestle it into the living room.

With the decorousness of an old Pullman-car waiter, he placed the large volume on the coffee table in the living-room and turned on his well-worn slippers to go back to the guest room.

Not without a parting shot, of course.

“I’ll sleep better with this out here,” he said.

And he kissed me once again.

This time, just a little peck.

A joke from Uncle Slappy.

The Jewish holiday of Passover begins tomorrow at sunset and my wife and I will be blessed once again with a full-house.

Not only are my daughters making it "home," we get to see them all too rarely, Uncle Slappy and Aunt Sylvie arrived last night schlepping the Tumi luggage they got from cousin Howard for half price (he's in the business) as well as a cinnamon babka.

For over two-thousand years Jews have been wandering--since they were scattered to the winds by Roman legions. And for most of that wandering, I think, they have been carrying Tumi luggage and a cinnamon babka. I don't know if there were any Jews with Columbus or the Pilgrims on their various expeditions, but if there were, I'd imagine they were toting a cinnamon babka--god forbid they arrive without the requisite dried fruit or schtickle.

There's an old joke Uncle Slappy told me last night that I'll relate in this space.

Kitty Bernstein has just moved to a new apartment on the Upper East Side and her friend, Mindy Weintraub is getting directions to the new place.

Kitty says, "You get on the number six local at the middle of the train, because that's where the exit is at 77th Street. "

"OK."

"You get out at 77th Street, pushing through the turnstile with your elbow. Then you take the northeast steps and head toward third avenue. You'll see my building right on the corner of 78th and third. Push open the glass door with your elbow."

"OK."

"Then you'll walk through the lobby. Push the up elevator button with your elbow and when the elevator comes, push the button for the 12th floor with your elbow."

"With my elbow."

"Yes, then take a left out of the elevator and knock with your elbow on 12 J, that's me."

"One question....Why do I do all this with my elbow?"

"Well, I assume you're not coming empty-handed."