Line of the day.

From Maureen Dowd in today's "New York Times" on Repugnant-cant presidential hopeful Rick Perry.

"To paraphrase Raymond Chandler, if brains were elastic, Perry wouldn’t have enough to make suspenders for a parakeet."

A tale of two bridges.

In New York, we have two ancient bridges that have just been given spanking new names.

The 19th Century Queensborough Bridge, also known as the 59th Street Bridge has just been re-dubbed the Ed Koch Queensborough Bridge. A few dozen blocks further uptown the Depression-era Triborough Bridge (my second favorite bridge in New York) has just been re-named The Robert F. Kennedy Bridge.

There's a problem with these re-namings.

First off, I can't believe that any New Yorker will ever call either of these bridges by their new names. The Triborough will always be the Triborough and the Queensborough, to Manhattanites at least, will always be the 59th Street Bridge. These names are honorifics. I can't imagine they will become part of New York's rapidly moving patois. (Similarly, I know no one who calls Sixth Avenue "Avenue of the Americas." Calling it such marks you as a rube, or worse, a Jerseyite.)

Second, and the real point here, the Ed Koch Queensborough Bridge is named after someone who is living. Never name something after someone living. Their "life story" isn't finished yet. What if Koch is caught in flagrante delicto with a goat? Why rush to change something and risk a debacle?

I think there's an advertising point here as well.

It's great to do something first, to, as clients and account people like to say, push the envelope. But it's not ok to proclaim something as new and improved before you're actually sure it's both new and improved.

In just the last few months more than a couple new, new things have unceremoniously fizzled. When was the last time you checked your Google+ account.

It's simple, really.

Think before you speak.

Look before you leap.

Latex gloves.

Years ago I worked for a German car company and did some pretty good work and a lot of it. However, every once in a while, the clients would get out of hand and start rampaging and pillaging my work as if they were waging their own advertising version of Barbarossa. After a while, there's not much you can do about that. Clients, ultimately, get the ads they deserve.

In any event when it came time to sign the mechanical of such ads I refused to put down my name. I wrote, instead, FUBAR--fucked up beyond all recognition. It was my last protest against the wrecking of an idea.

Last week I had a thought, perhaps not as subtle as signing FUBAR. For now on when the client is making me write crap, senseless jargon-filled drivel that's more important to them internally than to real live people, I will conduct the following protest.

This morning I brought in a box of 100 Safe-Touch Disposable Latex Exam Gloves, Powder-Free. For now on I wear them when I'm forced to write shit.

Religion and advertising.

I'm getting tired of this.

Almost a decade and a half ago, I was asked to lead the integration efforts on the biggest account in one of the world's biggest agencies. The benefits and the how-tos of integration seemed obvious to me then yet, today, twelve years later, we are still plagued by segregationists. (One way I had of leading this effort was to co-opt the language of the American Civil Rights movement. No one wanted to be called a TV-Supremacist or a segregationist. Calling them thus at least gave them pause.)

I was listening to a report this morning on NPR on the elections in Egypt. A lot of it concerned the popularity of the Egyptian political group The Muslim Brotherhood. The brotherhood, according to Wikipedia believes that the Koran is the "sole reference point for ...ordering the life of the Muslim family, individual, community ... and state." This, of course, appeals little to vast swaths of Egypt's population. Secular Muslims, Coptic Christians (roughly 10% of the state's population) and other minorities. It occurred to me while listening that most agencies are run by the advertising equivalent of the Brotherhood.

That is, they believe that their chosen medium is the "sole reference point for ...ordering the life of communications..."

Religious fervor, as far as I'm concerned, has no place in national politics. It certainly has no place in advertising agencies.

Yet, when you look around, it's all you see. Most agencies have a media axe to grind. Their particular media religion is all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful and all-influencing.

They are Zealots in persecuting and slandering adherents of other media religions. Those "others" haven't found the "one true way." They haven't seen the light.

Pluralism, a blending of views, thoughts, attitudes and beliefs, for all its faults, makes more sense than strict dogma. It's obvious to me. And always has been.

I have an agenda.

There are many fads and mania that infect our business. A relatively new one, to me anyway, is that you shouldn't hold a meeting without sending out to the attendees an "agenda."

I just ran into someone who holds a regularly scheduled meeting that was slated to begin in two minutes. I've gone to a couple dozen of these meetings. I've yet to derive any value from them.

"Are we having our meeting," I ask.

"Oh, shit, I haven't sent out an agenda" she replied.

As Richard Nixon used to say, let me say this about that.

A meeting should be held when you've got something to actually say or do that necessitates bringing people together.

Not just because you have an agenda.
An agenda doesn't validate a meeting.
A purpose does.

And by the way, I have an agenda too.

Go to fewer meetings.

It reminds me of advertising.

There's a great French movie by Jacques Brecker from way back in 1960 that reminds me, like most things do, of advertising. The movie is called "Le Trou" or "The Hole" and involves four inmates who attempt to dig a hole to free themselves from prison. About three-quarters of the way through the movie, a fifth inmate is put into the cell. Do they trust him, or do they abort their plans?

The intensity of the prisoners' effort is amazing. The narrow focus on the hole. It consumes the men completely. They can think of nothing else. It is everything, every thought, every conversation.

There is no outside perspective until there is. Until someone enters their closed worlds.

Many agencies, I've found, are closed worlds. Traditional shops forget that people do things other than watch TV. Digital shops forget that a Facebook app will not change everything. In both both instances these sorts of agencies are focused like the convicts and their Trou. Little exists outside of the deepening emptiness.

The truth, of course, is that the world is bigger than a hole. Focusing on one thing--the hole--is great for getting the hole dug. Just like focusing on spots or apps is great for getting those things created.

But marketing is about the "whole" not just the hole.

You need a broader view.

I am not fast.

After nearly 30 years in the advertising business I have attained a reputation for being "fast." To people who don't know me, I appear to be able to churn out creative both rapidly and prolifically. Once a boss, befuddled and more than a little astonished said to me "you're writing copy faster than I can review it."

Here's the thing: I am not fast.

Over the long weekend an assignment came my way. A stupid piddling putz of an assignment but an assignment nonetheless. I was pissed to get an assignment when I had time off and still more pissed that the account people--ever obsequious--had promised to present to the CMO tomorrow, Tuesday.

Nevertheless, despite all the ass-fucking over-promises of account people, I still have a job to do. I'm not going to let my client down. I'm not going to not come through. (I will deal with those account people later.)

I didn't work for one minute over break. Didn't re-read the brief (which was actually pretty good.) Didn't start scribbling at my Mac.

I did, however start doing mental calisthenics.

By the time I got in this morning at 8:20, I had two ads "in my fingers." Ready to be typed. Typing them, writing copy for them, gave me another idea.

I was done with the assignment by 8:56.

These ads didn't take me the 36 minutes they seemed to take.

They took me all weekend.

As I said, I will deal with those account people later.

A bunch of fucks.

We have a family tradition that takes place on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. My daughters, wife and I have dim sum and dinner at Shun Lee West Cafe, a deservedly famous Chinese restaurant. Then we head over to the "big top" and see the Big Apple Circus.

I'm a sucker for almost anything that's presented with a sense of humor and even though my kids have probably outgrown going to the circus, we go for the laughs and the nostalgia. (This year, for instance, they had a dog act that featured a cameo by a porcupine--something you don't see every day.)

This year as we walked into the arena we passed two-foot-high red letters printed on vinyl. They spelled out A C C E N T U R E.

I have a long, nasty, holocaust-survivor's memory. I never forget or forgive a slight, a bit of brutality, a lie or an evil done. I remember when Accenture was Arthur Anderson and their Enron lies stole the savings and pensions of millions of little people. I also part only begrudgingly with dollars I've earned. The circus tickets cost me $85 a pop--would they have cost more if there were no Accenture logo?

Everywhere you look now entertainment and sports are "underwritten" by major corporations. Free Shakespeare in the Park is underwritten by the scoundrels of Bank of America. The ones who bought John Thain a $15,000 wastebasket. And stole billions from millions of Americans, then borrowed billions more from the same Americans, then gave themselves multi-million dollar bonuses. As they robo-foreclosed on millions of mortgages.

We hear a lot about the various Occupy movements spreading over the globe. The sad fact is however is that corporations like JP Morgan Chase (they are underwriting the Christmas Rockettes at Rockefeller Center), Accenture, Citibank, Bank of America have occupied us.

They have taken over with their stolen largesse most everything. Their logos as ubiquitous as mosquitoes in a swamp.

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.