Scat. Cat.

I started thinking about scat singing a couple of days ago. 

Not scatological, of or pertaining to shit.

But the jazz inflection that used the human voice as an instrument substituting made up nonsense sounds for musical effect.

Like in the clip above, with Ella and Mel Tormé playfully dueling.

I suppose scat has been around as long as language itself has been around.

Not all that long ago in The New York Times there was a great piece on archaeologists using AI to fill in some of the missing pieces in Gilgamesh--one of the world's oldest known books.

When Gilgamesh was first told 5000 years ago around a campfire under a sky with a trillion stars in Mesopotamia, the people who retold the tale didn't have PowerPoint slides to read from. Gilgamesh, like the Hebrew Torah (not the Christian sequel) like Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, sprang from an oral tradition.

That's not as dirty as it sounds.

It just means stories were told aloud, sung even, and memorized through their rhymes and melodies and repetitions, like rosy-fingered dawn and wine-dark seas. My guess is even the best reciters of such tales on occasion got lost in their sauce. They forgot their way. They meandered (which, btw, is a river, the Menderes, in Turkiye.) So they did the Sumerian, or Aramaic or archaic Greek equivalent of scatting.

When Ralph Kramden was caught with his size 44 pants down and humina'd, that too was scatting.

Today, about fifty times a day I see something, usually from a 
SME or a thought-leader or a KOL (key opinion leader) or an agency website, press-release or executive. 

I respect the written word. And I generally try to read what lands in front of me. But, like I said, about fifty times a day, I see pure nonsense. Either platitudes, un-founded pontification, or something so ungodly and obtuse and confusing that I get pissed off. The worst are the instances of people trying to sound smart when they don't actually know what they're saying, what it means or why they're banging their particular drum. Then of course there are the flat-out lies. 

Most of the commercials we see, 49-seconds of awful side effects, I'm Dick Weed, and I approved this messages, just $49.99 for the triple-play bundle, the so-and-so winter leasestravaganza are all scatting.

All this is scatting.

Scat. And scatter. Lest you splatter.

Out of Time.

My favorite author, though that's a ridiculous assemblage of words since I have ten-thousand favorite authors, is a person who wrote for the New Yorker for most of his life, Joseph Mitchell. Mitchell left equal part legend, myth and millions of words behind. Some time after he died, someone at the New Yorker published part of part three of Mitchell's unfinished memoir.

I've carried a digital copy of Mitchell's piece around with me since it was first published almost a decade ago. I read it about three times a year, pretty much every time I get fairly depressed. The piece does a good job making me feel worse. That worsening eventually lightens my load. It reminds me that I'm not, after all, all alone, and slowly at the speed of a stalagmite, my diminuendo of a mood begins to soften.

One of the oddities attached to my love of the piece by Mitchell excerpted above is my seeming inability to remember its title. 

I am blessed and/or cursed with what we used to call a photographic memory. Today--in the spirit of trying to make everything inaccurate, technocratic and obtuse--we call photographic memories eidetic memories. I don't know why. I don't know what was improved via that linguistic shift.

Despite my memory, I persist in calling Mitchell's piece not "A Place of Pasts," but "A Man Out of Time." 

I suppose the highest praise we can have for someone else's writing is when we change it somehow and make it our own. I've taken Mitchell's piece and made it my story. Because I am a man out of time.

As Mitchell travels down the byways of his past, I spend a lot of time traveling down the winding routes of my memories. Of course, I still live in this horrific trumpian era where reality is topsy turvy and foul is fair and fair is foul. 

I still live today, and work today, and make a living today, and talk to my family and people today, but today feels so often so void.

The other day, these words from Cole Porter hit me from my ear buds. They struck me as Macbethian as the Macbeth above, which I always trot out to mark the chaos of a disordered universe.

"The world has gone mad today

And good's bad today

And black's white today

And day's night today..."

Of late, one way I mark my Man Out of Time-ness is by going to abebooks.com and ordering books I read when I was a boy. 

Many of these books I stole from my absent father, who like me found comfort in surrounding himself with inanimate objects, mostly books that were old when he was a boy, that he probably stole from West Philadelphia High or snuck out of some lending library somewhere.

One such book arrived just now. It's called "The World Since 1914" and it cost me just $7, with $4 in shipping to get it to my small house in Connecticut from a tired old bookstore in Cincinnati, Ohio. You can tell I want something badly when I pay almost as much for shipping as I do for the book itself.

Of course, the book was obsolete when I first read it during the peak of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. I'm not even sure if the Since 1914 part included the entirety of World War II. I believe the world in this context stopped with Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939, which I fear in the coming years many of us might regard as "quaint good old days."

But what makes me feel like a man out of time were the maps and illustrations in the book. They folded out. They were large. They were colorful. They were lightyears better than any map I can find online today. (Today, online maps rarely have scales. So you don't know the size of things or the distances between them.)

My sense of being a Man Out of Time comes from a simple modern predilection. Modern people throw things out without ever assessing whether or not what's replacing the thrown out object is actually better than what was tossed, or if it's just newer.

For instance, in order to have a "computer in our pocket," we've thrown out looking things up. We've thrown out noticing our surroundings. We've thrown out carrying around a paperback, or even the lovely little act of writing down a pretty girl's phone number on a torn piece of scrap paper. We've thrown out boredom for playing Tetris. And humming to ourselves for every song ever recorded.

More to the point, we've thrown out color maps. We've thrown out history. We've thrown out time and perspective, for the cacophony of always on chin-wagging.

We've thrown out old people with memory for young people to whom Justin Bieber was an era and fascism a set of cool flags and uniforms.

Every day I fight for the saliency of not giving up the out-of-time-ness of the advertising principles I believe in. That people won't buy something if they don't know what it is or what it does or why it exists or what makes it different. Every day, I go to the mat asserting that facts and information, neatly, cleverly and succinctly expressed matter more to brands than Dua Lipa or a spandex shrouded victim of botox. Every day I'm on repeat saying "a brand is a promise." Every day, I try to sell my 4 Ds and 3 Ms.

Etiam si omnes, ego non.

A Man Out of Time.

Even if all others, not I.

Friends.

I lost my best friend almost three years ago.

Just after Thanksgiving in 2021.

Fred was on the cusp of turning 64. As was I.

Since then, I'm not sure if I've had a heart-to-heart with anyone. A real heart-to-heart.

I'm not sure I'll ever have a heart-to-heart ever again. There's no one left who I let in. Who knew me when I was being formed. There's no one left.

Fred and I had been friends since we met in the hallowed halls of an elite private school in leafy Westchester county. Though our upbringings weren't, perhaps, as fecund as the suburban trees all around us.

There wasn't one thing in particular that made us close. It's oblique to say it was our "world view." But it was. And let me explain.

Fred and I both liked old movies. 

Gangster movies like "White Heat," "Public Enemy," and "Angels with Dirty Faces." We also liked sports movies like "Pride of the Yankees" and "I Am Third." 

But most of all, we liked Jimmy Stewart movies. Particularly, "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," and "It's a Wonderful Life."

One day, when we were approaching 60, I realized why we liked those movies. 

Fred and I rooted for underdogs. 

For the little guy, fighting titanic forces. We rooted for Tom Joad, not the bosses. "Wherever there's a cop, beatin' on a kid; I'll be there."

I remember saying to Fred as I had this realization, "Fred, I think no one roots for the underdog anymore. It's ok to slug people. It's ok to buy the best team. It's ok to squash people if they don't agree with you."

We talked about bullies and bully-ism, which we both despised. 

Maybe the apotheosis of non-bullyhood we learned from Frank Capra's "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," particularly the words I've quoted above. Particularly particularly "a little bit of plain, ordinary, everyday kindness and a little looking out for the other fella, too."

Capra knew about being beaten. You couldn't create this from a dilettante's point of view.

That notion seems as cornball today as expecting the rich to pay their fair share. Or any similarly hoary idea, like "one-person, one vote."

I think about this today because one of the trade magazines is once again (devoid of real ideas) publishing yet another 40 under 40 list.

This in an industry which if there were any over-sight and regulation would be sued for massive age discrimination while they bang their own self-inflated drums and bellow about how diverse they are. 

Or if anyone was watched, an industry that would be scorned for banging on about Agency of the Year or Network of the Year awards while they have shed over the last decade or so about two out of every three employees.

Ogilvy had 2000 people when I rejoined in 2014. They probably have 300 today. You do the ciphering.

It's sick.

And I'm sick of it all. 

And I'm sick of the sycophants who gallop along and applaud the bullyizing, the lies, the unctuosity and the hyprocricy. I'm sick of being owed by giant clients who Net120 you--and then proclaim how they support small businesses.

Oh, and the complete absence of "plain, ordinary, everyday kindness and a little looking out for the other fella, too."

Listening.

Steamfitter, by Lewis Hine.

For about twenty years, I was an avid long-distance runner. 

Having had a father who had his first heart-attack at just 39, and a second at 44, I started running so I wouldn't follow in his stolid infarcted footsteps. 

Soon, I started speeding up my footsteps. And wearing cheap canvas Converse sneakers, I'd course a mile in needle-strewn Riverside Park, then two miles and longer. 

Slowly I began to enjoy running. I liked the alone time, the concentration and the mind-wanderingness. I liked that I lost weight. And I liked, that I could set goals for myself, train appropriately and meet those goals.

Before too many months of running, I started running marathons. There are longer races, of course, but 26.2 miles, 42 kilometers is maniac enough for me, and I never raced any further.

Thinking about running and my life today, which is as an old man who makes his living at a keyboard, what I most learned from running was a way to listen to my aches and pains.

What I most learned was Nick Adams'-esque. That there would be good days and bad days and in-between days. But that you would always be in the day you were in, until that day was yesterday, and then tomorrow, it would be that day again.

I learned from running that on the good days you temper your enthusiasms by reminding yourself that tomorrow might feel like a steep incline. And that on bad days, well, they're inevitably  counter-balanced by a good day.

When you run marathons, that good/bad battle can take place amid all sorts of increments. You can have good/bad days. Good/bad races. Good/bad miles. Even, and no, I'm not exaggerating, good/bad yards. Every section of every moment or distance can be parsed and analyzed. Your wind can feel deep and strong while your right hip hurts, as mine aches all-day and all-night now.

What happens when you train for something is you acquire--beyond all else--listening skills. You hear what's going on with your self. You have an understanding, an awareness and a depth of knowledge as to how to handle a million-and-fourteen different situations. Mostly because you have handled them before.

Last week, I was well-paid to rewrite a couple thousand words of website copy for a startup with all the foundational solidity of an amoeba. To make matters worse, those thousand words were all in a google document and I like working in google docs as much as I like losing a filling in a molar.

H, the woman who manages GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, was blithe and oblivious about all this. Like a spectator at a six-day bike race, like the kind they used to have around European velodromes in the 1920s, H observes the action, not the pain. She sees me going around and around without hearing the crunch of bone on bone or the snap of a tired sinew.

That, in a nutshell, is why the best choreographers used to be dancers themselves. Or the best race car drivers know how to fix their machines. They have an understanding of the mechanics of the movements they're demanding. That's why most project-managers and administrators suck. They want things fast but they never actually have to find those things themselves, or physically chisel letter-forms in marble. 

They want the dance move without knowing the strain. Or the tremolo without knowing the tremors.

But that's where if you've trained a lot, your listening comes in. I had those thousands of words to clarify, euphony-ise and otherwise improve. I dreaded doing all that, but I knew that each word I faced was just another footfall in a race that's 20,000 or 10,000 or 30,000 footfalls long.

That's what most people--certainly most agencies, where the average age of creatives is just 31--don't understand. 

Let's finish these footfalls with Nick and Ernest.

“He had already learned there was only one day at a time and
 that is was always the day you were in. It would be today until it was tonight and tomorrow would be today again. This was the main thing he had learned so far.”

That's not an easy lesson.

Nick Adams learned it in the north woods as a teenager. 

I learned it in a beige cubicle in front of a Selectric.

It's listening and observing the needs. Listening and observing the pains. Listening and observing the self. And knowing how to handle the yesterday, the today, and just maybe, the tomorrow.

New Business Books I've Recently Read.

The biggest, and I suppose the most lamentable change in the business that's happenened between the time I worked for  giant holding company agencies and the time I worked for myself, is that these days, there is seldom an "Agency-of-Record."

Sure, I have long-standing accounts--I had a call earlier today with the client I opened my doors with over five years ago, and another long-time client has just sent me a text with photographs of billboards I wrote. She took in a Las Vegas airport. Her company is holding their annual user conference in Las Vegas and I thank them for the work and for not inviting me.

Regardless of those accounts which I've had for five plus annums, and two or three others, I am constantly pitching new business.

I suppose I'm a little like Vasco DeGama or something. Always looking for new trade routes and spices.

Every once-in-a-while a friend or acquaintance will ring me up and chin-wag with me. Almost invariably they'll ask (many of these calls, while solicitous, are exchanges of business information) "are you working on anything interesting?"

I usually brush that one off like a seasoned comedian handles a heckler, but other times I handle it like this. "When I grew up in advertising, say in the 80s and 90s, the two great advertising success stories were an overnight delivery service and the Nynex yellow pages. You could barely ask for more prosaic accounts than that."

Though my inquisitors are silent, I can hear their eye rolling. So, I'll continue, so as to avoid dead air. "My job is to make things interesting. To find what's interesting in them. To find what makes them special. Important to people."

In the five years since I opened the doors of GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, I've probably won 50-75 new assignments. Roughly one a month or so. 

I've only been asked to show sample-creative once--and I pulled out of that pitch. Because at this point in my life, if a client doesn't know who I am and what GeorgeCo. does, there's a pretty good chance they're not right for me and I'm not right for them.

After all, I show my thinking and my work every day. In this space (which reaches thousands of the top people in our industry) and in those dopey ads I do in an effort to keep my agency top-of-mind.

Also, I speak to people.

As myself. Not some bespoke new-business-atron. As myself. Nuttiness and all.

I don't talk to potential clients about the latest sebum-filled pustule of popular culture or the latest ugly crassness that's sweeping social media. I talk to them about what's going on in the world. I talk to them about how people think. I talk to them about historical precedent and the world we're living in. You know, those things Bernbach called "simple, timeless human truths." Not the latest craze or spasm.

This has always worked for me. I remember talking to the great Chris Wall when I was new to the IBM account and telling him about a book I had read called "The Victorian Internet." I showed him that not only did I understand the idea behind e-commerce and e-business, I understood the historical importance of speed and the competitive advantage it brings. Especially if you can make the saliency of the technology as sexy as a teeny-weeny blini.

Below are some of the books I've read over the last six months. I can't say "this one got me a $70,000 assignment," or "this helped me impress so-and-so." But I can say, that these are the things that make me me. 

And it's me I bring to these phone calls when I try to answer a prospective clients' question: "How can you help me? Why should I choose you?"

I get that a lot. 

And yes, H, my business manager, L, my wife, if she's within hearing, and even Sparkle, my thirteen-month-old golden retriever might sigh and despair when they hear me start my answer by talking about neolithic axes and trophic food supplies. But more often than not I'm able to bring things around and find a relevance and even, if I'm lucky, a universality in what I'm reading to the world we're living in.

In any event, I win a lot more than I lose. At least so far.

What's more, I like reading. And that should count for something.

Knews. And Un-Known.

For many years, my wife and I had the news feed from National Public Radio on in our apartment. In fact, I was an early adopter and before every radio station streamed its broadcasts, I had a receiver that looked like this, with a remote control.

I would follow NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered across the country. From New York's public radio station, to Chicago's to Los Angeles's public radio stations. I like news, and though I listened for hours a day, I felt like I was getting a constant flow of updated news.

I continued this listening habit until about six months in to the Covid pandemic. It was then I realized the news was repeating the same set of stories. 

There was one tranche of news that talked about the spread of the disease, over-loaded hospitals, deaths, and how the world was coping with the pandemic. There was another tranche of news that said it was all fake, that it would all blow over, and that maskers and people taking the disease seriously were over-reacting.

The point here isn't to take sides. The point is that the news stopped telling me news.

The "sides" (and news isn't supposed to have sides) were so entrenched, that newness no longer mattered, repetition did--in hopes of getting through to people who would never change their minds. 

You experience this today in almost all sorts of what used to be news. If there's a war, we hear reports on the intractable sides of the war--why we should or should not support this side or that. If there's a horrific hurricane, we get some reportage about the havoc the storm caused, but we get much more discussion about climate change and whether or not it's actually happening. Even this political season, we hear little about actual issues and more about the antipodal-ness of the candidates and their beliefs. 

In short, we are so polarized in so many ways, battles about polarization have supplanted actual news on the news. When I do listen to the news, there's little new information presented to me. I rarely learn anything new. Usually, I merely get information that reinforces my "pre-existing" thinking.

For as long as there have been humans on our pale blue dot, the best advertising has always been news.

If you can tell me something I don't know that's valuable to me, there's a good chance you can convince me to try something. If you can tell me something new, if you can give me some news, there's a good chance I'll pay attention.

Most of the ads I see have no news value. 

I see McDonald's ads, for instance, that have a picture of french fries, as if I didn't know McDonald's sells french fries. Even the Tesco ads that are sweeping through the internet this week and seem to be widely praised tell me nothing about Tesco that I don't already know. 

I'm just not sure why I should care. Where's the news? What's your promise? What do you do for me?

About 99-percent of the ads I see--wherever I see them, and about 99.999-percent of the messages I see in social, are devoid of anything I might care about.

They contain nothing new.

They contain no news.

They say, or show nothing in a new and arresting way.

I know there are legions of marketers and agencies and even politicians who believe brands need to be "always on." I'm sure that's wrong.

Because always on is always annoying if you're not always interesting.

"On" isn't the starting point of light. Light is.

No one needs always on. 

We need always illumination.

--

This isn't new.
And it isn't news.

But.