Reflections on the Oscars and truth.

The Academy Awards--the Oscars--are just about upon us with nearly, it seems, every movie trumpeting its
nominations and hailing itself as one of the decade's best (even though we are but two years into this decade.) With this spate of awards shows looming, I got to wondering what were 'best pictures' like through the ages? What, if anything do they have in common with the best of today? And finally, would they, given our current mania for "cuttiness" be watchable today?

I decided to order from Amazon the first Oscar winner for Best Picture, "Wings" which was directed by William Wellman in 1927. (Wellman went on to direct the original "A Star is Born," "Beau Geste" and one of my childhood favorites, "The Oxbow Incident," featuring evil incarnate, Jane Darwell, a compellingly laconic Anthony Quinn, not to mention young Henry Fonda and his sidekick, the somewhat dim Harry Morgan.)

"Wings" arrived on Friday and I watched it last weekend, all 139 minutes of it.

There is a tendency in our business to think that the present has no precedents and the past has no value. That we cannot learn, admire, marvel over things that went before. "Wings" belies those notions.

First off, it is a simple, seminal story of two boys and one girl (Clara Bow--the "It" girl.) Second, the action takes place in the heightened intensity of wartime. A good portion of the movie are some pretty stunning bi-plane dogfights (a bi-plane is an aircraft that has sex with both male and female planes) replete with color special effects enhancing the action.

Finally, there is love, laughter, the death of a hero. All the requisites that are resonant today.

I'll admit, I approach a movie like "Wings" with more than a little trepidation. I warn my wife away from the TV. "You probably won't like this," I tell her. I understand the pacing of movies from eight decades ago doesn't jibe with today's tastes. And all that.

That said, "Wings" was great. It was a little gung-ho about the glory of war for my tastes, but it was a good story, well told. And if you can imagine your father or grandfather who had probably rarely even seen a plane 85 years ago, watching aerial battles up close, you realize the movie was really onto something.

All this to say, as Sam sang in "Casablanca,"

"You must remember this
A kiss is still a kiss,
A sigh is just a sigh...
The fundamental things apply,
As time goes by...

"Moonlight and love songs, never out of date
Hearts full of passion, jealousy and hate
Woman needs man, and man must have his maid
That no one can deny...

"It's the same old story,
A fight for love and glory,
a case of do or die...
The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by."

Summertime.

Gershwin and DuBose Heyward's opera "Porgy and Bess" is slated to open soon on Broadway and accordingly, it's received a lot of coverage from "The New York Times."

Joe Nocera, a Times financial writer and op-editorialist wrote about it in his blog today, a follow-up from a piece he'd written a couple of weeks earlier. http://nocera.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/summertime-rendered-25000-ways/?hp

Nocera writes, "no song has been recorded more than “Summertime,” which has been covered more than 25,000 times – by rockers, country singers, jazz musicians and blues artists."

He then gives us about 10 versions to sample.

I haven't been able to hear them all, but the three I did hear--Miles, Billie, and Ella and Louis represent the high-water mark of something.

If you want something you have to pay something.

One of the universal truths of our species is that, since the beginning of time, we have always tried to get something for nothing.

Humanity has utilized slave labor since our beginnings.

Similarly, we have engaged in extractive activities since the beginning of time. Taking from the earth, consequences be damned.

I've often thought that the explosive growth of online advertising, syndicated content and the like was contingent of media metric magic. We've all sat in those meetings. Trillions of eyeballs promised to the advertiser for next to nothing.

Today in the world there is a hue and cry about Google and Facebook and the like taking our data and using it nefariously to sell us, track us and whatever else us.

There is also a mini-outrage over Apple products being made in China by labor that often works literally around the clock, or at least in 12 hour shifts, for $17/day. You know, roughly what the people who are outraged spend per diem on Starbucks.

Again, there is a similar tsimmes over oil and chemical companies who are using hydraulic fracturing in areas populated by people's country homes. People are protesting "fracking" (what could go wrong when you high-pressure pump toxic chemicals into the ground water) as they fill up their SUVs with cheap gas. God forbid they take the train.

The point is that few people, businesses, religions, or governments do anything for purely benevolent reasons.

The world hasn't really changed since we became erect.

It's pay as you go.

More New York memories.

When I was a kid growing up in the 60s, the wheels had really fallen off the societal bus. If you look at world violence rates graphically, there is a fairly steady decline from World War II to present, except, of course, for bursts of violence like the explosions which began during our "Peace and Love" era of the 60s (through the 80s) when murder rates and other violent crime rates jumped through the roof.

I was mugged twice as a pre-teen or early teenager. Once two kids caught me on my bike as I rode through a rough neighborhood. I was able to startle one of them with a "karate chop" to the back of the neck and get away. The second time I took a shortcut on the way home from a friend's house, I cut through a Gristede's parking lot and a kid named Glen Hall came after me and any money I might have had on my person. Glen Hall was one of our neighborhood's few "negroes" and, as such, was considered bad and dangerous. I was able to commandeer a shopping cart and chase after him using it like a jousting lance and I got away from Glen with whatever change I carried. Later on when I was a 7th-grader Glen and I got into a fight--he pulled a knife on me--but I was able, somehow, to pin him to the ground before things were broken up. I think the fight, really, was over a nickel, or maybe a quarter.

We used to listen to the radio a lot in those days, primarily because we watched less television. After school we often went to Wilson's field, a large open lot covered in rocks and struggling grass where we would play whatever "ball" was in season--football when it was cold (we still had cold weather in those days) and baseball when it was warm. Usually one kid or another would bring a $3.99 transistor radio that you could buy at Korvette's, a discount store that was the Walmart of its day.

We would listen to music when we played, or the Yankees or Mets if they were playing a day game, which they did more often in those days.

There was a local manufacturer that made noodles called "Country Kitchen" that had a beautiful jingle that sounded like it might have been written and recorded by Harry Nilsson.
It went like this and was accompanied by a really wistful and beautiful melody:

"I was looking for a noodle
A different kind of noodle
That was golden right
Tastes so nice.
Then I found what I was after
With the taste as light as laughter…
Country Kitchen, pure egg noodle."

Despite the scrapes and bruises we got from playing ball, and the scrapes and bruises we got from neighborhood toughs, the world seemed an easier place than it seems now. We could get an ice cream cone for 17-cents and see a movie matinee for 50-cents.

Last night my wife and I treated ourselves to some frozen yogurt. Some teenagers came into the store after we did. One, with an ass as wide as the M-15 bus, ordered a banana split. She was charged $8.

Stop it.

Below is an 145-word sentence from "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" by Laurence Sterne. Many people, and I am among them, consider the novel (which was one of the first ever written in English) to be one of the greatest novels ever.

"I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost;—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me."

I'm not sure if people today can fathom a sentence of this length. If, in the "Interruption Era" we can unravel its meandering complexity.

One thing I am sure about, utterly and completely positive about is this: No one, no one, no one gains even a scintilla of value from a brand positioning statement that is 56 words long.

Rejection(s).

I've been a bit under the weather of late. Fighting both a stomach virus and some long-running fatigue. I haven't been, as I usually am, bursting with energy. Perhaps the world is too much with me. Maybe I'm worried about my wife who has been afflicted with a bit of hearing loss. Or maybe the actual prospect of Newt Gingrich as president has so frightened me that I've crawled under a metaphorical rock.

But yesterday, I had a good day.

I was rejected three times.

Once, a short story I had written was turned down from a prestigious small press. That was followed by two other exogenous rejections.

Rejection, no matter how used to it you are, no matter how 'long the shot,' no matter how
trivial is never easy to take. It's no fun.

However, there is something reassuringly life-affirming about it.

It means you have tried something.

It means you put your ass out there.

It means you're challenging yourself.

That's only my point of view, of course.

You can reject it.

Help.

I have often thought that my generation was the last where you could get rapped in the knuckles by your teacher (or your parents) for being a lousy speller. While I in no way condone corporal punishment--except between two consenting adults, of course--the state of our language is severely under duress.

I've just run across three indiscretions in short order on Linked In. All from people for whom communication, clear, cogent, intelligible communication is part of their job description.

I've been asked to accept an invitation from "an intergraded copywriter."

I've been told a friend is looking for "recommendations from her piers."

And the apotheosis from a young copywriter looking for a job: "____is a strategicly fun thinker with outstanding will power... Young and eager, ____ is climbing up the todum pole to a successful career in the ad world and strives to work with a team of intellegent left-brain thinkers..."

Showing up.

As I've written about over the past few weeks, just about everyone in my agency is burrowed deep inside a World War I style trench, cowering for protection, covered in mud and filth, keeping their heads down and writing reviews.

Like most things in our technocratic age, questions are asked and answered in reviews so that they are as abstruse, obtuse, diffuse and confuse as possible. When I read reviews they make me think of my new "least favorite" politician, Newt Gingrich who calls, for example, Barack Obama the "food stamp president" because you can no longer call someone a nigger. Though the effect and purpose is the same.

In any event, having nearly finished writing my reviews, I am now reading reviews others have written. In other words, reviewing reviewers. Which, of course, begs the old Roman question "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Who will guard the guards?

It occurs to me that maybe the best review you can possibly give is a version of the old Woody Allen line: "80 percent of success is just showing up."

Today, we are infected with choice and many people simply choose not to show up.

They turn up missing by attending and scheduling meetings that produce nothing but wind. They are absent when the phone rings and someone is looking for help. They are present when sweeping and grandiose proclamations are made but they're missing when the campaign needs to sold by dint of the small, but important pieces that bring it to life for the client.

Thomas Paine, the great essayist (today we would call him a motivational speaker) called such people "summer soldier(s) and ...sunshine patriot(s)..."

An ex-boss of mine called them--in a phrase I'll never forget--people with "Titanic attitudes and minnows in the engine room."

Woody Allen called them people who don't show up.

Spoken by a planner.

"We need to do some talking where we just listen."

Sometimes you need a kayak.

I just read a memoir by Roger Rosenblatt, "Kayak Morning." It's a rumination about the death of his 38-year-old daughter and the nature of grief.

We read and use phrases like "getting over grief," "coming to terms with grief," "making peace with grief," "learning to live with grief." Such phrases are well and good--they seem to make sense. That is, until you're actually grieving. Then, they have the emotional perspicacity of a Hallmark greeting card.

In "Kayak Morning," Rosenblatt introduced me to George Hitchcock, the editor of a small but prestigious poetry magazine called, as you might expect "Kayak." The journal was published for 20-years, 64 issues. At which point Hitchcock shut it down. "Any more," Hitchcock said "and it would risk seeming an institution. After that, ossification and rigor mortis.”

There was a motto that was printed with each issue of "Kayak." “A kayak is not a galleon, ark, coracle or speedboat. It is a small watertight vessel operated by a single oarsman. It is submersible, has sharply pointed ends, and is constructed of light poles and the skins of furry animals. It has never yet been successfully employed as a means of mass transport.”

In this era of fascist collaborationists, of insistent know-nothingisms, of pompous
pontificators, it's nice, for me anyway, to think of someone who did something by himself. The world is too much with us, and all that.

What no one talks about or laments in our open-work-plan, interruption-phreno-genic offices is the power of setting out on a spiritual kayak. Where nothing but heaven is above you and nothing but water below.

That might be when peace occurs and good work happens.