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.