Uncle Slappy and the fish place.

About a generation ago slicing lox went from being an old-Jewish-man profession to one manned by young, first-generation Chinese. The Chinese began in the early 1970s by sweeping up after the alte-kocker slicers, by the late 80s to early 90s, they had taken over and were running fish counters at the old-school delis like Zabar's and even Barney Greengrass. A few years after that, they started open up their own "Jewish" delis, which, in many cases were better than the delis they replaced.

My neighborhood has one, Sable's, that opened about 20 years ago as a pure rip-off, right down to the orange and white signage of Zabar's which is from whence these Chinese lox-slicers sprang. The fish is excellent, sliced thin and even, as is the service. When Uncle Slappy lived in the neighborhood, Sable's was one of his haunts. He would stop there for their unmatched whitefish salad, their nova and all the other delicacies that were both reminders of his childhood and signposts of his current success.

On the wall at Sable's, which is cramped like the Collyer Brothers' apartment, are about 1,000 old polaroids of Sable's favorite customers. There are also pictures of former mayor Ed Koch, Yankee star Derek Jeter and sundry celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow and Brian Williams from NBC News. Uncle Slappy and I walked to Sable's today for fish. And to check to see if his picture is still there.

It was. It's right in the middle above. That's Slappy in his blue baseball windbreaker, eating a schtickel.

"That picture will be up there long after I'm down there," Slappy said, pantomiming death.

The Chinese guys heard him and laughed. Then they gave Slappy an extra-large free sample of fish.

Uncle Slappy goes to Shul.

For most of his life, Uncle Slappy was a rabbi at a small east side congregation, Beth Yuiz Miwo Mannow. He worked there for over fifty years. They made him Rabbi Emeritus a few years back and stripped him of his congregation. Said he was too old and opinionated. Since that point, Uncle Slappy has moved from his junior-four on East 87th Street and moved to Boca. He's rarely gone to synagogue, finding the rituals too constricting and the rabbis too, in his words, pusillanimous. For whatever reason, he decided to go with me yesterday for the morning service.

He started in right away.

"You know how you can tell who's the rabbi?" he poked. "He's the one with the goyische name." The rabbi at my synagogue has the last name of "Cosgrove." "Is his name 'Cosgrove Elliot or Elliot Cosgrove?" Slappy went on.

I knew enough not to answer.

We went through the metal detectors at the synagogue. "The only religion in the world where you need to go through a metal detector. And no one says anything about it," he barked. The metal detectors pushed him over the edge.

He softened a bit when in the sanctuary he bumped into Mindy Haubenslag. They chatted for a while, then kissed each other goodbye. Uncle Slappy explained. "I grew up with Mindy Haubenslag. For sixty-five years or so I've had a thing for her. In fact, every year when she would return to Beth Yuiz Miwom Annow, I would espy Mindy from the pulpit. This is not a violation of any commandment. I was not coveting, just noticing. Like me, Mindy Haubenslag is over 80. She still has a well-turned ankle. Now, Mr. Big Pisk," he said using the Yiddish for mouth, "don't say a word to Sylvie."

We finally sat down in our assigned seats. I could see right away the old man's mind wandering. "Oy," he exclaimed after about 20 minutes, "my foot's asleep...do you mind if I join it."

With that, Uncle Slappy nodded off, silently davaning in his sleep.

The Phantom Carriage.

"
Since I was a little kid I've always loved old movies. Today, there are a couple of great film archivists who month after month re-release old movies worth watch. The most prolific of these is Criterion and as a consequence I buy just about everything they produce.

My recently I received in the mail "The Phantom Carriage, a 1921 Swedish movie by director Victor Sjöström. "The Phantom Carriage" is a dark fable about love and death that foreshadows Bergman's "The Seventh Seal."

It ain't exactly something you'd find on the Hallmark Family Channel or Comedy Central. In other words, it's no barrel of laughs.

But if you're in the mood to see Death in living two-color, give it a whirl.
--

BTW, a couple times a year, Criterion runs 1/2-price sales through Barnes & Noble. You can pick up a bit of brilliance and history like "The Phantom Carriage" for about twenty bucks.

Passion and money.

There was an obituary in "The New York Times" the other day of a movie producer called Mo Rothman who died at 92. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/movies/mo-rothman-dies-at-92-revived-interest-in-charlie-chaplin.html?ref=obituaries

Rothman was the man who brought Charlie Chaplin and his movies back to America after Chaplin had been essentially exiled by McCarthy-era hate-mongering for "left-leaning" views and moral turpitude. (At separate times, he married two 16-year-old girls--take that, Woody Allen.)

Here's a bit from the obit: "When Chaplin, a British citizen, left for Switzerland in 1952 after residing in the United States for 40 years, Attorney General James P. McGranery told reporters that he would not be allowed to return unless he could prove his “moral worth.” Chaplin announced soon afterward that he would never return."

Rothman worked with Chaplin. Re-released his black-and-white films and engineered his return to the US, which of course was great publicity for his movies. Eventually Chaplin was awarded an honorary Oscar and made the cover of Time Magazine. Along the way, a whole new generations of Americans was exposed to Chaplin and both Chaplin and Rothman made a fortune through the re-releases.

No real point today other than it's heartening to see someone get rich for following his passions.

It's a new year for Jews.

This sort of thing gives me hope.

Uncle Slappy arrived last night.

Last night after work I walked down to Penn Station to wait for the Amtrak "Palmetto" to arrive and discharge my Uncle Slappy and his wife of 57 years Aunt Sylvie. The Palmetto, like most of big American infrastructure is worse than it was 57 years ago--certainly slower and it took Slappy and Sylvie over 28 hours to make it up North from the Sunshine State. Needless to say, Sylvie looked worse for wear. For whatever reason, Uncle Slappy looked as brown and healthy as a newly-minted Pumpernickle.

"Aunt Sylvie, Uncle Slappy, you're here." I said somewhat fatuously when I met them on the grimy platform.

"Where else would we be, genius," said Uncle Slappy, starting in already. "Your aunt is ferklempt, Mr. Big Schott, she could use a Nedick's."

Uncle Slappy has called me Mr. Big Schott--a term of both endearment and derision since I can remember.

"Look, Uncle Slappy, there are no more Nedick's. There's no more Horn & Hardart's. No more Orange Julius."

Uncle Slappy unfolded an oversized Amtrak schedule which had been in his vest pocket. He was dressed as if it were 30 degrees out. "No, Nedick's," he said "when's the next train back home."

"Listen, they just opened up a Second Avenue Deli on First and 75th. We'll take a taxi there and get something to eat."

"Second Avenue Deli on First Avenue. A fachadick world we live in." He segued, as only he can from Shetl Yiddish to Shakespeare. "Fair is foul, and foul is fair:/Hover through the fog and filthy air."

"Uncle Slappy," I tried to calm him as we got into a cab, "It's a good deli regardless of where it is. It's walking distance to my apartment and you can get a nice bowl of soup."

I realized that the conversation almost always turns to soup within half an hour of seeing Uncle Slappy.

"Hungry I'm not," said Slappy. "Just a bit fahtutzed. Let's go right to your Mr. Big Schott castle in the sky. Soup I can have tomorrow. Mushroom Barley."

We arrived at my apartment and I brought their bags into our guest room. Uncle Slappy turned on the television set.

"A new TV you have, Mr. wide-screen Big Schott. The shows are better on a bigger screen?"

"No Uncle Slappy," I replied sheepishly, "it's the same old drivel."

"I'd switch back to my tiny black and white RCA in the oak cabinet," he grumbled, "if it played Sid Caesar."

Uncle Slappy sat in his favorite chair and turned on the PBS News Hour, or as he called it "the news with the fancy Puerto Rican anchorman." Aunt Sylvie was in the kitchen chatting with my wife.

For a brief moment the old man was silent. Then he spoke.

"Mr. Big Schott," he said, "a stickle of cake you have?"

By the time I returned with a cup of coffee, black, and three rugelach, chocolate, Slappy had pulled a blanket over himself and had fallen asleep.

Today's editorial.

Write we must.

About three times or maybe twice a year I am tapped out, I am in a slump. My work at work slows to a standstill. The easiest task becomes onerous. I slough assignments off. My synapses stop snapping.

Even my blog becomes difficult for me. Nothing strikes me as worth writing about. I can't seem to coherently string words together. I'm not astute. I'm not funny. I'm not even bitter.

I just suck.

Lately I've had a few of those days. I feel as dull as a moderate Republican.

When I was a kid when Con Edison used to plaster signs around their work sites that read, bluntly, "Dig We Must." The signs were Con Ed's way of saying they were doing essential work.

On days when I feel like I can't do anything, I think about those signs. Then I try to write something.

Even if it's as dumb as this.

--
PS. A very bright Interaction Designer just pointed me to the Saul Bass video above. It's Saul Bass. So, of course, well worth watching and thinking about.

My father's 20-year watch.

When my father died, not unexpectedly but suddenly, he was rushing between classes at Northwestern University where he taught marketing communications. He had started teaching there when he turned around 55 and it was probably the best thing that ever happened to him. It gave him a place to go away from my mother and gave him a place where young people would hang on his words. By all accounts, and I can believe this, my father was a passionate and riveting teacher, passionate and riveted by his subject--advertising.

My father died in May of 2001 and I say it wasn't unexpected because he had suffered a heart-attack at the age of just 39 and then had its sequel just seven years later in 1974. Later on he had trouble with his kidneys and wound up in dialysis for most of the last years of his life.

My mother held a memorial service for my father on September 22, 2001, just 11 days after 9/11 and I couldn't make it. Planes were flying only sporadically and the idea of a 24-hour train ride to Chicago didn't appeal to me. I had said goodbye to my father earlier at a graveyard outside of Philadelphia where we "put him to rest," and sat shiva. The memorial service seemed like something I could miss during that frightening time when it seemed like the world was coming to an end. I felt it was more important to be with my daughters.

As a consequence of not being at my father's memorial, I got no paternal hand-me-downs. No set of cufflinks that were his favorite. No gold fountain pen or well-worn watch. Nothing, other than the disdain, everlasting, of my mother who never forgave me for not showing up.

Six years almost to the day after my father's death, my sister died in a motorcycle crash. She was just 47 and had no significant other. It was up to me to take the train out to the fringes of Park Slope and clear out her rented apartment. Most of what was in her apartment was trash but there were a few artifacts of my father's, including the watch his advertising agency gave him at his 20th anniversary with the firm.

Shortly after his 20th Anniversary, he was fired by the same agency. That’s when he started working as a professor at Northwestern.

The watch was a gold one, from Cartier’s and of course it was stopped. The battery hadn’t been replaced since my father had died. There had been at one time an emerald bezel on the crown but that had long since disappeared. My father had broken his left wrist at one time and had a large bony protrusion where a watch would ordinarily be worn. Instead he wore his watch on his right wrist—the hand he wrote with and for that reason, he claimed, he was rough on them.

The watch was engraved on the back. It had his name, the name of his company and “Twenty Years” in an elegant block type.

I’ve never worn an expensive watch, certainly not one from Cartier. Growing up in the 60s, when status was attained by not kowtowing to status symbols, such appurtenances were never important to me. I suppose it drives my wife and kids crazy that I care nothing at all for expensive clothes or shoes or jewelry. I don’t begrudge my family such things, but they are unimportant to me; I’m happier wearing old blue jeans, sneakers (without irony) and a t-shirt and, frankly don’t even understand why someone wants or needs such expensive things. We all have voids in our lives, a sense of loss or deprivation that we seek to fill. But a watch, in my view, won’t do the trick.

Nevertheless, the watch was a memory of my father. I felt compelled to wear it. Maybe it was a moment of sentimental weakness to have, in the wake of my sister’s death, an item of my family, of my past on my wrist.

My father and I had never been close. We knew, each of us, that we should have been, that fathers and sons ought to be close. But try as we might, if pressed, each of us would have admitted we were disappointed by the other one.

I wasn’t the son my father wanted. Wasn’t a hit with girls, wasn’t the star athlete, wasn’t adept in social situations. The truth is, I hated doing almost everything my father really wanted me to do. Likewise, my father came up short for me. He seemed mute when I needed help with something and was often missing when he was wanted most.

The first time I wore his watch it took me a full day to realize that it ran irregularly. I would show up for a meeting twenty minutes late, or show up for another one twenty minutes early. It seemed the watch was the very model of my father. Reliably unreliable.

From that point nearly six years ago when the watch let me down until recently I locked the watch away in a small fireproof safe I had screwed deep into the floor of a walk-in closet in my apartment. I gave it no thought, really, until my everyday watch smashed when I knocked it to a tile floor. Then I needed a watch and figured my father’s would do—I would just replace the battery--until my watch was repaired.

Now, here’s where the story gets even stickier with symbolism. I took the broken watch to what might be the world’s largest watch store. Three weeks later they called me to say the watch could be picked up. The necessary parts were no longer available and they couldn’t repair it. From 57th and Madison I ran up to 69th and Madison where there’s a small Cartier shop.

Cartier is just about everything I hate in the world. Conspicuous consumption at its most conspicuous. Not to mention salespeople dripping with both French accents and disdain for customers who are not sartorially splendid.

“This watch is not aw-zen-teeck,” I was told.

“Whaddaya mean, not authentic. It was given to my father after twenty years at his company.”

“Well, I tell you,” the clerk said superciliously “it is what you call a knock oof. It is not aw-zen-teeck.”

I put the not authentic watch back in my pocket. It had been my father’s. It was mine now.

Incest.

I have nothing against Meg Whitman. I never jumped on the eBay phenomenon, never saw it as a way to make a living, a way to have fun, a way to rid my too-crowded closets of the crocheted toaster covers my Aunt Louise had "gifted me" with. Nevertheless, I think her purported ascent to the head of HP is evidence of an incestuous myopia the infects so much of our world.

Years ago I was a senior creative person at a once-venerable then shaky mid-sized agency. Of all the senior creatives, I was probably the most independent-minded and, for that reason, when both of the agency's new business people quit, the CEO called me into his office to discuss a replacement.

I recommended a young, bright Asian account person who was probably ten years and two levels junior to her predecessors.

The CEO looked aghast. She's so young. She's a she. How could we do such a thing.

I remarked that she couldn't do any worse than the last two guys and could potentially add some life to a moribund process.

Here's my point, when companies like HP go looking for new CEOs (or when IPG does for that matter) they pick from a small pool that is almost all dried out by the sun. A pool of candidates that are fundamentally just like the person they had before that left them in such dire straits. Essentially they act like a married couple who divorce only to marry each other again.

Like I said, I have nothing against Meg Whitman. Nothing against the person who will eventually take over from Michael Roth at IPG. But I do have something against incest.

Call me old fashioned.

A long-lost connection.

I got a call last night from someone I haven't spoken to in 40 years.

She was best friends with my sister and was looking for her on Facebook--looking to reconnect after many years. She couldn't find my sister, found me instead and asked what happened to Nancy.

Telling someone their best childhood friend died, tragically, at 47 in a motorcycle crash is not something you want to post on someone's "wall." I sent my sister's friend my phone number and last night she called me.

We had a long talk. I said about ten minutes into the talk that I'd spoken to her more now than I ever did when she used to hang out with Nancy. I never cottoned to anyone growing up and spent the bulk of my time not speaking to people.

Facebook and with it, our ability to connect or reconnect with near-strangers is an amazing phenomenon. I suppose in previous eras there were lonely-heart columns in local newspapers and people wrote letters to penpals and long-lost friends. None of which had the immediacy of what we have today. Like I said, Facebook is an amazing thing.

Whether or not this amazingness has anything to do with advertising (outside of being a re-seller of personal data) remains to be seen.