The work that goes into the work.

During my last couple of years at Ogilvy, I had what was by far the best, most prolific run of my career. I've always enjoyed doing print more than anything else and, it seemed, I was doing most of the print for the biggest account in the agency. In fact, I had three print campaigns running simultaneously and it was not unusual for me to open up the "Times" or "The Wall Street Journal" and see one if not more of my ads.

There's something about seeing an ad you wrote in the paper that is the advertising equivalent of hitting a walk-off homerun in the bottom of the ninth. I don't think the sensation grows old.

One of the by-products of success is, of course, jealousy and back-stabbing. People--always ready to tear someone else down--targeted me. I was producing all that work, they said (behind my back, naturally) because I was up someone's ass or because by some nefarious means I had gotten lucky.

As a copywriter, I am a saver. My process, often, is to type. Type lines, type body copy, type puzzles and then try to unpuzzle the problem. I name and save all these files. What I found was this: Most of the ads I wrote had headlines that were about six words long. Body copy ran about a total of 75 words. In all, an ad consisted of about 80 words.

I checked my files.

I had written thousands and thousands of words to get to those 80. It wasn't unusual to go through 15 rounds of revisions with the client.

So, if my run of ads consisted of 30 ads in all, I might have written 500 revisions and 60,000 words.

Further, it probably took me three years of hard work to be in the position to do this hard work. I wasn't anointed. Rather I had come through on myriad other assignments so my bosses and my clients trusted me to handle these.

Too many people think advertising is easy. They see a spot they like or they think is good and they say (as people used to say about, say, Jackson Pollack, 'my kid could do that.')

They don't see, don't recognize, don't realize the work that goes into the work.

Some ancient words.

I'm fortunate to be blessed, I think, with a demanding mind. A lot of things interest me and I take great joy in learning. It's vexing sometimes because I have so much I want to read next to decide what to read. The world is a rich place for me, with much to offer.

One of the subject areas I return to with frequency is Greek and Roman history. My interest in these matters stems from my childhood inculcation with Latin. There is very little I've ever read that's more gripping than Thomas Macauley's "Lays of Ancient Rome."


I
Lars Porsena of Closium
By the Nine Gods he swore
That the great house of Tarquin
Should suffer wrong no more.
By the Nine Gods he swore it,
And named a trysting day,
And bade his messengers ride forth,
East and west and south and north,
To summon his array.
II
East and west and south and north
The messengers ride fast,
And tower and town and cottage
Have heard the trumpet's blast.
Shame on the false Etruscan
Who lingers in his home,
When Porsena of Clusium
Is on the march for Rome.

I think about Virgil or Homer or eve Macauley when I read about the binaryists among us who relish in claiming that digital communication has changed everything.

Right now I am reading Classicist Philip Matyszak's latest book "The Classic Compendium: A miscellany of scandalous gossip, bawdy jokes, peculiar facts and bad behavior from the ancient Greeks and Romans."

Matyszak peppers his breezy volume with Elithio Phoitete jokes. (Elithio Phoitete means, in Greek, "idiot student.") The jokes are thousands of years old yet their construction is not much different from how we tell jokes today.

"Elithio Phoitet is talking with two friends. One says: 'We are wrong to slaughter sheep for they provide us with wool for our clothes and blankets.' The other adds: 'We should not kill the cow, which provides us with milk and cheese.' Elithio agrees: 'And we should not kill the pig either, because it provides us with such choice cuts of meat.'"

Now, that reminds me of another joke:

Julius Caesar walks into a bar and says to the bartender "I'd like a martinus."
The bartender says, "You mean a martini."
Caesar replies, "If I wanted more than one, I would have asked for it."

Job creators.

Over the past few years, as our country has once again become riven in two (the old Civil War boundaries are becoming relevant again) we've heard much talk from Republicans about the need to bestow upon the wealthy tax cuts. These cuts allow billionaires to pay less tax than their secretaries, their illegal immigrant gardeners and the everyday riff raff who fight our wars.

That seeming anomaly is deemed okay, however, because billionaires are "job creators." In getting and spending they don't lay waste their powers as Wordsworth claimed. Rather they create jobs.

In a world filled with absurdities (like Donald Trump playing a role in the presidential race) the notion of job creation might take the cake.

Some dozens of years ago the average CEO made ten times what the average worker made. Today the average CEO makes on the order of 100 times what his workers make. That means, simply, 90 average jobs lost to pay the CEO.

From an advertising point of view, what are we in our business if not "job creators"? The best of our work creates demand, which demands production, which creates jobs.

We are "bards of commerce." We grease the wheels of capitalism. We are the job creators.

That seems to me, solipsistic as it is, to make sense.

However some quick back-of-the-envelope mathematics tells me that if my wife and I were taxed at the same rate as Mitt and Ann, we would have paid $127,000 less. If we were taxed at the same rate as Barack and Michelle, we would have paid $91,000 less.

An evening in the world's second largest Jewish city.

To be a Jew, I think, is to be always on the outside. With the exception of a small strip of desert in the Middle East and a small strip of asphalt in New York City, Jews are a minority wherever they go. Actually, minority is the best of it. In many places and times, Jews were outcasts. They were hated and reviled. Scorned, persecuted, killed.

Outsiderness is our condition. Not always comfortable. But it's served us well. It's made us more aware of our surroundings. More alive to the hope, humor, tragedy and possibilities of the world.

How else can you explain someone like Billy Wilder the great director? Wilder spoke no English when he arrived in America from Nazi-fied Europe in 1933. Yet by the end of his career he had gained 21 Academy Award nominations and seven Oscar wins.

Tonight I had the great good fortune of shopping for books with my younger daughter. She's leaving for the summer to teach scuba diving in the Caribbean and wanted to make sure she had something decent to read. Walking home on 86th Street I saw a man a few years older than me wearing the t-shirt I've pasted above.

It reads "Fall Flanken Festival 2011   You hafta have a heart to have heartburn."

It's nice to feel at home.

A sartorial insight.

It's as hot as an armpit in hell in New York this morning.

The temperature is in the 90s, as is the humidity. And it all feels a little worse because the winter's kinks haven't been worked out of air conditioning systems. Also, I'm a bit sunburnt and that exacerbates things.

Despite that, I put on a suit this morning. I had a meeting with the CEO of my key client. So I put on a suit.

I believe in dressing nicely for clients. Sure, when I'm on a shoot I dress as I want. But when I'm in an Oriental-carpeted, wood-paneled conference room with a suite of C's, I put on a suit.

It makes them comfortable.

It says you're simpatico.

In a sense it says you're listening.

About 42 years ago I learned something about the semiotics of clothing.

I was in seventh grade Latin class and our teacher was holding court. There was a dance coming up the next Friday night and Mr. Comeau told us that boys would be required to wear a sport jacket and a tie.

We found that egregious.

This was the early 70s--a jacket and tie was against our creed. We wanted to wear jeans. Clothing that everyone else wore that said we were different.

Why do we have to dress up? we protested.

Mr. Comeau answered with real wisdom.

"If you're wearing a jacket and tie, you're less likely to roll on the floor."

That's why I put on a suit this morning.

I didn't want the client to picture me rolling on the floor.

We should have known better.

I am up in Cape Cod with my family, staying at one of the world's most idyllic places, the Chatham Bars Inn.

I'm lucky.

I like my family. They like me. We want to spend time together (within reason.) And we can afford it (within reason.)

In any event, our room is decorated with small prints that depict American aphorisms from a few centuries ago.

The one shown above reads, "A Sailor between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats" and is attributed to Benjamin Franklin.

We've forgotten, in advertising, about lawyers. They run our holding companies. They run our clients. They make the rules that benefit only them.

And we are a fish between two cats.

One isn't the loneliest number.

Some years ago I worked for a termagant of a boss (look it up) who was in the process of ordering me to do or write something.

I said to her, "What's the one most important thing you want to say?"

"They're all most important" was her response.

Yesterday I was in a meeting where it was decided we had two primary targets.

I've only been back a week but I'm looking forward to the long weekend.

Some poetry has died.

I realize I write a lot about dead people. But ever since I was, as we say in New York, knee-high to a cockroach I have enjoyed reading the death notices in "The New York Times." They are, at their best, portraits of the large and small who have changed our world.

Today there is the obituary of Hal Jackson, a pioneering radio announcer who died at 96 having spent more than seven decades on the air. Jackson, who was black, became one of the first black announcers in the nation, defying the "no nigger" policy then prevalent across "the land of the free."

The inflammatory Rev. Al Sharpton had this to say about Jackson: "Hal was the constant voice of black America...From M.L.K. to a black president, he literally was the one who connected those dots.”

It's a great story, the obituary, and well worth the three or five minutes it will take you to read it. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/nyregion/hal-jackson-pioneer-in-radio-and-racial-progress-dies-at-96.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries  If nothing else it will remind you of the progress America has made in race relations as well as the power of persistence and dreaming. Jackson broke through like few others have.

But the biggest thing I got out of the obituary are the words below. We forget about, too often, the power of living language and poetry. Jackson had the gift. And he will be missed.

“This is Hal Jackson, the host that loves you the most, welcoming you to ‘The House That Jack Built.’ We’re rolling out the musical carpet, and we’ll be spinning a few just for you. So come on in, sit back, relax and enjoy your favorite recording stars from here to Mars.”

32 years of therapy.

A friend of mine just sent me a note.

She's unhappy in her job and was offered a new one elsewhere.

At the last moment she turned down the offer.

And today she heard that the account she was to run is up for review.

Her situation reminded be of some of the pains of our business, many of which I have spent my therapeutic hours discussing.

Here's what I wrote to her:

You can't control all the shit that can happen in the world.

The crappy bosses.

The bait and switch when you arrive at a job.

The holding-company ass-raping.

The only things you can control are who you are.

The work you try to do.

The network you build.

The integrity of your self.

If you hold those things intact,

whatever happens--even if you have a rough period at a shit hole--

you'll be ok.

Because you are bigger than your fucking penny-ante job.

___________________ are dead.

Yesterday a friend from another agency passed along a resignation note to me. The note contained these pearls of "wisdom."

Mostly the usual bushwa, or folderol, or out and out nonsense.

That, you know, ideas are dead.

That it's all about the fucking experience.

Blow it out your unshaven hipster sphincter.

What shocks me about this is how removed it all is from the reality of the world we live in. Virtually everything we come into contact with in the world works or fails according to the idea it is founded upon.

Many of us gravitated toward Obama because of the way he coalesced the idea of "change." We adore Apple because they have cornered the market on thinking "different." Many move to Brooklyn because its resurgence has been anchored to the idea of "cool."

Undoubtedly many ideas fall flat. Many commercials blow. Most ads are hardly suited to wrap fish in.

However in an increasingly noisy world, a world full of distractions and warring pixels, it's only natural and normal for humans to try to filter and organize the mayhem. We do this based on the ideas brands present. The ideas that make things stand for something in our lives.

All these pseudo-pundits who seem to be endlessly proclaiming that ideas are dead forget that that in and of itself is an idea. Though a stupid one.

What they really are is patricides. Most of these experiences they trumpet are made possible because of the necessary preconditions established by a foundational idea. They are killing, or trying to, the father who birthed them.

As Faulkner spat in his "Requiem for a Nun," "The past isn't dead; it's not even past."