Morons.

I just caught a slice or two of Kurt Andersen's wildly-heralded radio show "Studio 360." He featured a writer and MacArthur Genius named Colson Whitehead who, of course, has written yet another best-seller about Zombies. Whitehead read a portion of his novel that told of a wife eating her husband's intestines and face. He then told of his childhood where he had no parental controls in which he was allowed to watch Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" at the age of ten.

I feel my brains slowly turning into marshmallows.

I jump to "The New York Times" online. The lead story is "Waffles, with a Side of Drama." It is about a restaurant chain called The Waffle House where weird happens. This from the greatest newspaper in the nation.

My head is spinning off my neck.

Maybe, it's likely actually, some inflected pundit will write a PhD. Thesis on the whys of the Zombie craze. We live in a frightening world so we find a comfortable terror--a nostalgic fear to soothe us.

And the people at the Times, the Waffle House people, probably contend that today, Black Saturday or Puerto Rican Thursday or Serbo-Croatian Tuesday or whatever it is, is a slow news day.

No, the fact of the matter is that the world--our disgusting, inclusive, big-tent, "everyone has genius" world, is infested, infected, inundated with morons.

And there are so many of these morons entire industries cater to them.

We can no longer distinguish between important and trivial. Between good and bad. Between culture and, ugh, pop culture.

It's all stupidity.

A late-night call from Uncle Slappy.

I got a call from Uncle Slappy late last night and I could tell even before I picked up the phone that something was amiss. I could tell from his very ring that he and Aunt Sylvie were fighting again.

Aunt Sylvie and Uncle Slappy have been married for almost 60 years and in those 60 years, they probably haven't gone 60 minutes without having some kind of a set to. You can practically set your watch by them.

The reason behind most of these rows, I've come to realize is that Uncle Slappy is an incredibly ordered man. Once he has his way of doing something, he establishes a routine--that's the way it should be done. Deviance from that routine upsets him. Aunt Sylvie is more haphazard. The minutes on a clock are mere suggestions to her--punctuality is an approximation. And things, even things she's done a thousand times before, are seldom done the same way twice.

Uncle Slappy started this way:

"She's done it again, she's done it again."

"What's that, Uncle Slappy," I asked, already a bit weary of the conversation.

"Junk mail she got last night," the old man continued. "She tore it up into little itty bitty pieces so we shouldn't have our identities stolen, though who would want them--our identities--I can't even imagine."

"That's good then, she shredded," I temporized.

"Shred schmed," Slappy replied, "the torn up mail she left still on the coffee table. And then there's the orange juice," the ancient one continued. "You know I like my concoction, mostly seltzer in a glass with ice topped off with two fingers of orange juice, fresh."

I had made the drink for Slappy a thousand times.

"First the seltzer, then the orange," said Slappy "It mixes that way better."

"I know Uncle Slappy. You explained the physics of that to me years ago."

"Almost 60 years I've been drinking this drink and she first pours in the orange and then spritzes in the seltzer. A backwards drink upside down I don't like. I'm through with her."

"Uncle Slappy, these are baby little things, orange juice and junk mail."

"To her they're little things. Maybe to the neighbors they're little things. To Sylvie, they're little things. But to me, they're big things. I'm through."

"It's ok, Uncle Slappy," I began. I stopped when I heard the old man weeping and laughing at the same time.

He stopped long enough to toss this one my way: "You know," he said, "If I killed Sylvie when I first thought of it, I'd be out by now."

With that, he hung up the horn.

Metaphor for a Wednesday.

This morning I took one of my long and solitary walks around the Upper East Side. It had rained all night and a lot of people aren't working today, so the usual crush of New York traffic was absent. People were sleeping in this morning. So there were fewer people and fewer cars than usual.

I walked aimlessly with no electronic accoutrements--no mp3-player, no cellphone. Just me and the singular quietude of aloneness in the city.

On Madison, I climbed the start of Carnegie Hill between 86th Street and 87th. The shops weren't opened yet. Kids and their mothers weren't streaming for their exclusive schools. About the only activity was just ahead of me, two garbage men tossing black plastic bags of garbage into the back of their garbage truck.

As I drew closer I saw it was a big pile of garbage they were attacking. One of the garbage men was silent, the other was pissed as he approached the pile. "Look at all this bullshit," he cursed "look at all this shit."

Garbage men cursing the never-ending crush of garbage.

My father and the day after. A reprint.

By some anomaly of my birth date, I was in first grade when I was just five. I never felt unable to keep up with kids who were, at least from a percentage point of view, significantly older than I, but looking back on being the youngest, I suppose there was a lot I just didn’t get. I don’t know if that had to do with my age and level of development or if I was just not that interested in what was going on around me. I think I spent a fair portion of my time tuned out or tuned into my head. I remember looking intensely at the reading books we had in class and studying the coloring of the drawings—the very dot patterns--and the curves of the serifs in the type.

Maybe if I were a kid today I would have been poked and prodded, analyzed and pronounced ADD or ADHD or even mildly autistic. But whatever the case, I survived being lost in my world probably better than I would have survived participating in most other worlds. Once I remember holding an oval ceramic ashtray over my head in my parents’ living room and letting it drop to the linoleum because I wanted to study its path on its way down. That experiment got me more than a few whacks on my ass though the ashtray still sits to this day in my mother’s house, neatly glued together and barely showing its breaks.

When John Kennedy was shot I was sitting in school in first grade and the principal’s voice came on over the loud speaker announcing that the president was shot. I heard it wrong, or misunderstood what was said, and pictured the president being stood against the bright blue doors at the end of our elementary school hallway and executed. I didn’t understand why or what. But the next thing I knew, we got to leave school early to go home. (This was a simpler time. We could walk home or run—at five years old—without a parent or guardian, even past a small swamp that was overgrown and scary with skunk cabbage.)

The television was on when I got home with my mother watching. My brother and I watched, too, grainy tel-star beamed images from Dallas alternating with sonorous announcers from just miles away in Manhattan. We weren’t allowed to change the channel. My mother was watching.

Usually my brother and I watched after school a show of cartoons hosted by an actor pretending he was a charming and affable Irish cop. He called himself “Officer Joe Bolton” and he bored us with little anecdotes and admonishments to behave and do our homework between playing Dick Tracy cartoons with villains like “the Frog” or “Joe Jitsu” or “Hemlock Holmes.” Or he played old Popeye the Sailor cartoons, with Popeye vanquishing Bluto to win Olive only to have to go through the whole thing again in the next cartoon, though Olive always seemed like a whiner and a two-face to me. But this day we would watch no cartoons. The president had been killed.

My father got home late that night and sat in the living room dominating our sole TV and whispering about the end of everything with my mother. My brother and I ran around the house, trying to figure out how to be busy and silent until bedtime with no TV to watch and no noise allowed.

-
The next morning was Saturday and my father woke me up early, poured some hot chocolate down me and wrapped me warmly in my brown corduroy Mighty Mac winter coat. We got into his 1949 Studebaker and drove into the country. Weeks earlier, long before someone gunned Kennedy down, my father’s boss had invited my father and me to go skeet-shooting.

I’m sure my father protested this. I’ve never even held a gun, I can hear him saying. But it was something his boss wanted, it, therefore represented a chance to get ahead, and my father complied. I was along as his companion, in case he got bored or needed a hand to hold.

I don’t remember much of that morning except that the sky was gray, the color of a wet newspaper and I felt the cold despite the advertised promise of my Mighty Mac. I remember picking up the red cylinders of shot from the ground and being surprised. They weren’t at all what I thought bullets would look like. I remember seeing black discs in the air and then the loud firework report of someone’s shotgun smashing a clay pigeon and taking it down. I remember walking over the ruts of the farmer’s land the men were shooting on and stopping to pay close attention to the dried out and ploughed over detritus of what used to be living stalks of corn.

Something Happened.

Joseph Heller's novel "Something Happened" has perhaps the most stirring, scary and riveting opening sentences I have ever read. It's a novel of worlds gone terribly wrong. Where balance and equilibrium are gone, and fear and terror are ascendant.

Over the past two weeks I've noticed that Something Happened in our industry. My client has given us two or three assignments that I simply cannot understand.

No, I mean it.

As account people like to say, "I don't even understand the 'ask.'"

They aren't asking for creative, or even "strategy," whatever that is. They are asking for schemas, rollouts, go to market plans. They are asking for decks that help sell notions--not to their customers or prospects--but to their own organization.

Something Happened.

The bloat of marketing organizations, the bloat of agencies is such that we have lost our original meaning.

We aren't about communications. We are about spending retainers, making sure everyone is busy and posturing about what will happen in 2014 if we do X,Y and Z in 2012.

We have become bureaucracized.

We have become powerpointless.

We have become meeting moguls.

Something Happened.

A dichotomy.

When I was a little boy, my Cub Scout "den" took a trip up the New England Thruway two-and-a-half hours to New London, CT. New London was the birthplace of the world's first nuclear powered submarine and during these Cold War years was still a thriving submarine base. Even so, the sailors welcomed us and showed us around the place.

The thing I remember most was the guided tour we took of an actual WW2 submarine. I remember seeing six or seven rising suns painting on the conning tower which indicated how many Japanese ships the sub had sunk. I remember the claustrophobia of ten or twelve excited boys in the sub--I could only imagine how cramped the teenagers and 20-year-olds must have felt in their tiny quarters and the crushed corridors.

We saw dummy torpedoes in their racks. The racks of cots for the sailors. The shoe-box cabins for officers. The rudimentary oscilloscopes. And rows and rows of switches and knobs.

The thing that struck me even back then was that there was no concession whatsoever for design that wasn't strictly and completely functional. The sub we were on was built without a single concession to anything but utility. Design was all function, no form.

Just a few minutes ago a friend directed me to this site http://www.artisanalpencilsharpening.com/ which sells the services of Artisanal Pencil Sharpening. "REACQUAINT YOURSELF" the copy pleads "WITH THE PLEASURES OF A HAND-SHARPENED PENCIL. In New York's Hudson River Valley, craftsman David Rees still practices the age-old art of manual pencil sharpening. His artisanal service is perfect for artists, writers, and standardized test takers. Shipped with their shavings and a "certificate of sharpening," these extra-sharp pencils make wonderful gifts."

Somewhere between the pure and absolute utility of a 1940s submarine and the pure and absolute lunacy of artisanal pencil sharpening there is probably a happy medium, a balance between content and design.

I laugh, often, at the youngsters I work with who crave $170 woolen hats that by rights should cost $3.99. I shake my head as they troop by in $200 canvas sneakers and $300 jeans.

I think for our business and our world there is a continuum between function and form. Advertising today seems, to me, to be remarkably content free with everyone using the same color palettes to appear different.

Maybe earlier eras were too utilitarian.

No point, really, except to say that there must be a balance somewhere.

The Herring Maven.

Long before Sam Breakstone sold cottage cheese for the Breakstone company, before Fred the Baker sold donuts and dedication for Dunkin' Donuts and Frank Perdue created branded chicken for Perdue, "The Beloved Herring Maven" roamed the radio airwaves of New York, exhorting listeners to "Make your day a little brighter with a little herring from Vita."

Some years ago, a friend and I got to talking about "the Beloved Herring Maven." He was played by the unparalleled voice-actor Allan Swift and written by the great Marty Solow for the Vita Herring Company. And if you listened to the radio in New York in the mid-60s, he became a crazy, funny friend with a Runyonesque turn of a phrase. The Beloved Herring Maven is credited with bringing the Yiddish word maven into the linguistic mainstream.

As we were talking about the spots my friend said, "I know Marty's son Michael."

I said, "Give me Michael's email address, I've been trying to find those old Herring Maven spots everywhere."

In November, 2009 I wrote to Michael and told him of my quest to find scripts or recordings of his father's spots. He promised me he'd find some and mail them to me. Just today "the Complete Herring Maven" arrived on two-CDs. An hour compilation Solow created for The Museum of Broadcasting and a separate CD of 36 :60 second spots. I've spent the last two hours listening to radio commercials for pickled herring products.

They are every bit as funny as I remember them.

Full of silliness, wisdom, ethnic humor and sales spiel.

I hate herring but I started thinking about going out to buy some.

I'm going to ask a producer friend to re-dub the MP4s to a video format so I can post a few. And over the next couple of days I will post some of the maven's bon mots.

By the way pasted below is part of the Wikipedia entry for Herring Maven.

"The word comes to English through Yiddish, which in turn derives from the Hebrew mevin (מבֿין), meaning "one who understands," and relates to the word binah, which denotes understanding or wisdom in general. It was first recorded in English around 1952, and popularized in the United States in the 1960s by a series of commercials created by Martin Solow for Vita Herring, featuring "The Beloved Herring Maven." The “Beloved Herring Maven“ ran in radio ads from 1964-1968, and was then brought back in 1983 with Allan Swift, the original voice of the Maven.

"Many sites credit Vita with popularizing the word Maven. An example of print advertisement including the Maven: "Get Vita at your favorite supermarket, grocery or delicatessen. Tell them the beloved Maven sent you. It won’t save you any money, but you’ll get the best herring"."

Eat up.

Rene Morel, 1932-2011.

There's a really excellent obituary in today's "New York Times" which tells the story of Rene Morel, a master restorer of rare violins, violas and cellos. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/nyregion/rene-a-morel-master-restorer-of-rare-violins-dies-at-79.html?hpw

For whatever reason, perhaps it's the DayQuil I'm od'ing on as a fight a virulent head cold, I found some wisdom in Morel's life and work. Morel worked on the rare and expensive instruments of Pablo Casals, Yo Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zuckerman and Isaac Stern among others. The centuries old instruments of these masters are touchy things. The Times notes:

"Violins, and their siblings, violas and cellos, are temperamental creatures. With tops of spruce and backs and sides of harder wood — often maple — they are fundamentally trees, reconfigured in strange and glorious ways that nature never intended.

"For these instruments, every bump and jostle, every change in temperature or humidity, is occasion for protest. Wood shrinks and swells and strains against itself. Cracks can appear. Their sonorous voices can be reduced to growls and grumbles."

Morel was a master at adjusting these instruments, using his hands and his ears to achieve perfection.

A musician would enter Morel's shop and play. Morel would listen, then go to work adjusting the instrument's vital organs. The player played some more, and Morel adjusted more.

Here's the part I especially liked, Morel's "failsafe way" of knowing when an instrument is right.

As Itzhak Perlman said, "He would put up his sleeve and say, ‘You see the goose bumps,’ ” Mr. Perlman recalled. “He said as long as he didn’t get the goose bumps, it was not properly adjusted.”

Machines, computers, experts, apps and so on can do a lot of great things. We cannot ignore the magic of modernity. The glory of technology.

The question is, however, will it produce goose bumps.

The value of Facebook.

There is tremendous sturm and drang in our industry over the value of Facebook. Enormous expenditures have been dedicated to building Facebook pages, creating conversations, inciting likes, promoting events. Countless meetings have been convened to discuss Facebook, its power, reach and efficacy. The phrase "Facebook will change everything" has rumbled through the valley, rattled in the dell; knocked upon the mountain and recoiled upon the flat.

That's all fine.

But I think I know the real value of Facebook.

It serves to remind you that a large number of your friends can't spell. And don't know the difference between there, their and they're and its and it's.

Pissed.

I took my two-year-old Mac to the help desk this morning knowing full well that by all rights it ought to be called the hurt desk. It's been three hours now and I've yet to hear anything back from them. This is my first-ever post written on my iPad.

The stupidity of agencies never fails to amaze and befuddle me. How a bunch of technicians can hold someone getting paid like a decent lawyer hostage. But that's the way it is.

In an era "where everyone is creative," creative is so devalued that they are treated like shit.