"Shaky" Shecky Weinstock.

Yesterday was yet another beautiful Spring day in New York. Temperatures were in the low 50s when I started my 45 minute run and in the low 60s when I ended my slog. The sky is a clear lapis lazuli with nary a cloud. In short, it was a perfect day for a run. Except, of course, for the tourists who are everywhere, blocking every path you can conceivably run on.

One of the signs of our civilization's downfall is that people no longer know how to walk. Three-quarters of them have their faces buried in some sort of hand-held device and the final quarter are pushing strollers the size of a Russian T-34 tank.

The worst, in my opinion are the people who walk every which way on the Jackie Onassis reservoir, turning New York's best place for running into an obstacle course. I run there because my knees, after 32 years of looping the track, are painful. The soft, cinder surface suits perfectly my permanently pained patella, so I battle the tourists while I shuffle round and round the 1.557-mile loop.

Uncle Slappy called after I got home from my run. And though I wasn't necessarily in the mood for the Slappy show, I took the call anyway.

"Schmendrick," he began as he almost always does, the pejorative serving as a term of endearment, "did I ever tell you about Shecky Weinstock? The man had angles. He was always figuring out a way to beat the system."

"I don't know him, Uncle Slappy." I settled into my chair, put my feet up on the ottoman and got ready to hear one of Slappy's Byzantine legends.

"Weinstock was the last of the original goniffs," Slappy began using the Yiddish word for thief. "He lived to get something for nothing."

"I know the type," I interjected, mostly to give Uncle Slappy a chance to catch his breath.

"He was actually arrested once and sentenced to three to five years for impersonating a Koshering Rabbi. He would sell bogus Kashruth certificates to restaurants that couldn't otherwise pass a Kosher test. Commuted.

"But none of this explains how Shecky got his nickname, 'Shaky Shecky Weinstock.' For about ten years after he retired Shecky spent most of his weekends attending shivas."

A shiva is a mourning therapy for the close friends and families of a deceased Jew. It usually involves some fairly spectacular corned beef sandwiches and sponge cakes from Ben's down in the garment district.

"Shecky would crash these shivas and make with the hollow leg. He'd pretend he was on the other side of the family and make off with enough sandwiches to keep himself fat and happy for a week. Sponge cake, the man swam in.

"But I still haven't explained how he came to be called 'Shaky Shecky.' Shiva sandwiches are great--but Shecky needed cash as well. He was living on a fixed income and things were tight. You can't blame the guy really. He needed a couple of dimes to rub together to see a movie, go to a ballgame or put two dollars on the nose of."

"I think I see where this is going," I said to Uncle Slappy, hoping to speed this along.

"So Shecky would show up at a Bris--a circumcision--as a mohel with Parkinson's disease. He would reach into his Bris kit for his scalpel and start shaking like Katherine Hepburn in an earthquake.

"The parents would freak, of course, a mohel with Parkinson's and just to get rid of him would hand Shecky a check for $125. Shecky would apologize--say he was steady as a rock, really--but in the end, he'd take the money, a few sandwiches and run."

"Thus is born," I said, "the legend of Shaky Shecky Weinstock."

Slappy paused for a moment and cleared, dramatically, his phlegm.

"I forget why I called" he said, hanging up the phone.

Apple is evil, too.

One of the important roles marketing communications must play is to make really despicable companies appear kind, caring or benevolent. So all over the airwaves, the cable stream and through parks and parkways we're reminded of the goodness of various companies.

You can hardly spit in some parts of Manhattan without hitting the logo of some odious banking brand. In front of Lincoln Center, in fact, it seems that individual trees and blades of grass are there courtesy of reactionary right ideologues, Nazi-complicit banking organizations, or just plain banks that brought down the international financial system.

There's the David H. Koch Theater, the Barclays Grove, the Credit Suisse International Grandstand, Hearst Plaza and more. Just about every event poster or event has the logo of some bank behind it, even though opera tickets, for instance, routinely ring in at about $300/ea.

Now, it appears that the company we all love is a company we can all hate. Apple not only subjects its Chinese labor to inhumane working conditions they also make sure they don't subject itself to paying taxes. Apple pays taxes not in Cupertino, where they are based, but in Reno, NV where the corporate tax rate is 0%.

In fact Apple pays taxes at a rate that is just 9.8%--a rate about 60% lower than that of the notorious cheapstakes of Walmart. Apple "allocate(s) about 70 percent of its profits overseas" according to "The New York Times. In nearly bankrupt California--formerly the Golden State--"in 2009, after an intense lobbying campaign led by Apple, Cisco, Oracle, Intel and other companies, the California Legislature reduced taxes for corporations based in California but operating in other states or nations... the change will eventually cost the state government about $1.5 billion a year."

Of course $1.5 billion is small potatoes when it comes to tax revenues but you get the point.

Despite the pangloss on Apple, they are just like most other companies. Evil.

William Pace dies at 103.

William L. Pace, Record-Setter for Bullet in Head, Dies at 103

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: April 28, 2012

TURLOCK, Calif. (AP) — William Lawlis Pace, who holds the Guinness World Record for living the longest with a bullet in his head — 94 years and six months — died on Monday at a nursing home in this central California city. He was 103.

He died in his sleep, The Modesto Bee reported.

Mr. Pace’s older brother accidentally shot him with their father’s .22 caliber rifle in 1917, when the family lived in Texas. Doctors left the bullet in place because they worried that surgery might cause brain damage, a son of Mr. Pace has said.

The injury damaged an eye and facial nerves but did not prevent Mr. Pace from working as a cemetery custodian.

He learned in 2006 that he was the world record holder in the category of “longest time to live with a bullet in the head.”

My early days as a writer.

When I was a kid--a teenager--back in the early 70s, our culture, even in New York, was highly influenced by California. If you think about it most every TV show was set in California, or in some fantastically anti-septic and blonde place that could pass for it.

(Today of course, our culture is influenced by the black street. Dress, language, deportment and more are considered gauche if they're not "gangsta.")

But in my day, it was California. Things were groovy in Cali. Our parents drove Malibus. Even our dark and jowly President Nixon was a Californian.

As a consequence, when my friends and I greeted each other, we would often utter the ridiculous phrase "How's it hanging?"

I don't know that I ever heard a response to the question until one day an older kid, Andre, who had returned drugged and damaged from Vietnam answered "Long and loose and full of juice."

That set me off.

I would never again not have a response to "How's it hanging?"

I created: Long and lean and really mean.
Big and fat and ready for that.
Long and steady and good and ready.
Big and mean and like a machine.

And about a dozen more.

It became something of a game my friends would play with me. Who could come up with the most suggestive answer? Who would be stumped? Who couldn't keep up?

I guess this is a long way of saying that since my earliest days I have always loved words and I've cultivated my love for them.

Sometimes still, I take my hat off to Andre. And mutter, "well equipped and ready to dip."

An exit line I wish I heard.

"I have to get off the call now, I'm late to my sword swallowing class."

Some thoughts on Daniel Defoe.

By all accounts, Daniel Defoe, who most scholars credit with writing the first novel in the English language, "The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un‐inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pirates" was a manic depressive or, as we say today, suffered from being bi-polar.

He was the kind of person most agencies would crush under a sea of HR paperwork. He was also someone who was pretty much a major fuck up until he reached the age of 60. Two times a bankrupt. Two times in debtor's prison.

When he reached about the age of 63 however, until he was 69--just a year before he died, it's been estimated he wrote and published more than two-and-a-half-million words. He wrote "Moll Flanders." "Robinson Crusoe" and its two sequels. "Journal of the Plague Year."

To put that figure into context, I have been writing this blog for approximately the same amount of time as Defoe's crescendo. I write nearly everyday, sometimes twice or three times, have posted nearly 3,000 posts and have probably written only 250,000 words. One tenth of what Defoe was able to do.

And what I write ain't "Moll Flanders." (One of the greatest books ever-written. Especially if you like filth.)

At 54 I am an anomaly in the modern ad agency.

I am 30 years older than 25% of my agency. 20 years older than another 35% of my agency. And 10 years older than another 35%.

People think it strange to see me,"The Old Man and the Pen" still kicking, still fighting, still laughing.

They should, once in a while, think about Defoe.

Rediscovering your voice.

Of late I have had what seems like dozens of meetings with clients and agency colleagues where we've spoken about things like content strategy (that's content, as in table of) and storytelling. I find these discussions as close to excruciating as home lasik surgery. Painful, dangerous, and unproductive.


Last night I opened a pdf I have carted around for a decade. It is an IBM annual report from 2002 and it features about 40 pages under the heading called "16 Decisions that Transformed IBM."


What some people feel about Apple, I feel about IBM. Like me, IBM ain't flashy. But they're there when it matters, doing the heavy often anonymous lifting that needs to be lifted.


About three-quarters of the way through this document there's a page that speaks to me. I wish it spoke to more people. It's titled "We Found Our Voice." Here's the copy: 

"We recaptured something we’d lost—our ability to engage our customers and our industry in a meaningful conversation about what matters to us, and to them. 


"This wasn’t about cranking up the volume, issuing more press releases, or producing memorable TV commercials. It was about rediscovering our confidence and articulating what we believe. Things like: 


• we are entering a post-pc era.
• the dot-coms are fireflies before the storm. 
• the winners in this industry will do one of two things: innovate or integrate. 


"When we rediscovered our voice, we discovered something else: our sense of direction, the courage to stand apart from the crowd and, ultimately, what it means to speak out like a leader again."


If you care about communications, please spend careful attention to that last sentence. 


There's a lot of bullshit that pummels our industry like asteroids hitting a forgotten moon. What really matters, however, is very simple. Speaking plainly, clearly, memorably and actionably.

Simply communicate simply.

When I was young in the business I adopted a simple process. When I was given a brief--yes, we were given briefs in those days and they didn't take a month to write--I would take that brief and work at it for hours.

After those hours I was able to distill the brief down to one short, clauseless sentence. Not a 37 word sentence. A short, honest sentence. My partner and I then had something workable to work from. The only thing left to do that point was to take that single sentence and find a way to be creative with it.

This seems to me to be the way to communicate nearly anything. And has been the way to do so since we wrote on clay tablets or before.

1) Take in information. 2) Figure out what's important. 3) Say it in an interesting and memorable way.

1) I can talk to you about things I've never spoken to anyone about. 2) You are the person I want to spend the rest of my life with. 3) I love you.

If you can't say it simply, don't say it at all.

Shut up.

Yesterday I had one of the worst days in a career marked by hundreds, if not thousands of worst days. I was forced to sit in perpetual meetings about work I will ultimately have to do populated by people who mouthed words that were almost completely devoid of meaning.

In one, a planner-type kept talking--endlessly talking--about doing things for one brand based on something a brand from a completely different category, with a completely different place in the market was able to do. It was like hearing someone talk about selling bicycle tires based upon the taste of Wheat Thins.

In another meeting twelve or so people on various phone connections across the country miscommunicated about something called a content strategy. I heard about editorial calendars. I heard about content creators. Until I spoke I heard nothing about consumers and what would interest them.

I read briefs, emails and comments from people and I might as well be reading Swahili, a language I do not comprehend. To wit, this note based on a simple solution that I proposed. "The only problem I see here is that these sorts of journeys (specifically on the consumer and client side [not treated in the attachment but anyway]) bump up against the content syndication model's consumer/client journey. The question is: do we accept the content syndication model as the roadmap (for lack of a better term) for the journey."

I have always known that the world can be divided, simply and decisively, in two. There are simplifiers. And complicators.

Bob Hoffman, that sage Ad Contrarian, has written about this better than I can. http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2010/02/age-of-complicator-part-1.html 

Pause.

I have just now happened across an interview with Milton Glaser, probably the world's foremost graphic designer and someone I had the absolute pleasure of working with for about a week one year or so ago. You can read the interview here: http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/04/milton-glaser-21-questions.html But here's the question and answer I really liked:

In one sentence, what do you actually do all day in your job? 
"I sit around pushing pieces of paper until they look right. "

In fact, I don't want to write about complications any more.

I just want complication to be over.

Advertising lessons from Daniel Defoe.

Over 300 years ago in 1703, Daniel Defoe was--as he was so often in his life--in deep shit. He was not only a bankrupt, he was also a dissenter. Both positions led to pretty severe punishment.

But Defoe didn't take things lying down. Before he was to be pilloried for his religious beliefs (or disbeliefs) he wrote and distributed a broadsheet poem, "A Hymn to the Pillory." It should be said here that being in the stocks was no picnic. Defoe feared it more than he feared prison time in London's notorious Newgate prison.

While you were in the stocks, people would abuse you. They would throw rocks, fruit and other projectiles. They would beat and mock you. And your reputation, once having been cosigned to the pillory was ruined.

His "A Hymn to the Pillory" instead made Defoe a hero. People rallied to him. He wasn't heckled and abused, he was praised and exalted.

Katherine Frank, author of "Crusoe" describes it this way--a way that has bearing to our industry. "The moral of "A Hymn to Pillory"--and indeed of the pillory episode in Defoe's life--was that the Ingenious inherit the Earth. Survivors are those who create in the face of all the dark forces that seek to destroy them--those who, like Defoe, are resourceful, determined and patient. They ride out the roughest storms. They make it to land and, once there, they patiently and creatively make a paradise out of desolate exile, a kingdom out of their captivity."

It seems to me that Defoe presents an example to live by. Use the power of words, the power of your point of view, the power of satire, humor and irony to overcome hardship.

This is what we must do at work and in our work.

You can learn a lot from what happened 300 years ago.