A bit on my father.

My father, absent and unavailable as he was taught me things.

He taught me that if you want to learn to write you have to read. Accordingly he taught me if you want to read good, insightful writing, read "The New York Times" Book Review.

He taught me the value of hard work, since he seldom came home.

He taught me moderation, since he did not possess any.

Yesterday, I was thinking about a poem he beat into my head. When clients panic and agencies enable, that's when I wish more people knew this poem.

It's short, just four lines. He had it typewritten and pinned to the wall in his house.

I have it typewritten and in my wallet. And etched in my brain.

It's a poem called "On Anxiety" and it's by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Some of your hurts you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you endured,
From the evil that never arrived.

Annoyed.

One of the tragedies of modern life--and it was ever thus--is that no one has any understanding of the past. No one seems to understand the wisdom of William Faulkner who famously said (and spent a career writing about) "the past isn't dead, it isn't even past."

We carom around making the same mistakes, failing to understand what happened before, pointing fingers and jumping to conclusions. We subvert others to make ourselves heroic. We forget the basics and stick, instead, to pomposity, mendacity and self-aggrandizement. We've built an industry on it.

So we chase our tails and create crises, forgetting that a little moderation, a little perspective, a little thoughtful consideration can unravel most problems.

Lower your volume.
Breathe.
Count to ten for crissakes.

Barring that, shut the fuck up.

You'll probably live longer.

BS.

I'm out west in Telluride, Colorado right now shooting celebrity talent in the mountains. Of course prior to tomorrow's shoot we've shared location shots and wardrobe with everyone and his cousin. But since the amount of panic rises in proportion to the proximity of shooting, we have taken a boatload of flak from ill-informed second-guessers who are half a continent away.

They also seem to be oblivious to an old maxim I've just thought up, which says:

"An ounce of discussion is worth a pound of email."

In other words if you have an issue, call me.

Don't hide behind binary code.

In any event we went shopping this morning to address the client's perceived wardrobe issues and I found this hat. 

Which I am now wearing proudly.

Morning thoughts from Rollo May.

You don't often get insights from Rollo May, the famous psychiatrist, on advertising blogs. But Ad Aged is a different sort of animal.

And here's today's gem.

A concept called "Pseudo Innocence."

Something schmucks like us can learn from.

Pseudo innocence can be summed up thus:

If you don't want to know about evil you're going to get wonked in the head by it.

Writers.

As I wrote about last week, I was named a "Creative Allstar" by a magazine I've never heard of. And last night there was a soiree where I was given a small, heavy block of brass with a star, my name and a logo etched on it. All in all, it was a very nice affair.

As I was sneaking out, I was assailed by a guy I had met many years ago, a very brainy, successful and nice guy.

Here's what he said to me.

"George, you're the last of the breed. You're the last writer in the business. Not a diletante, someone who can really simplify and express ideas through words."

I stammered a thank you and made a quick exit.

But my friend's words stuck with me.

Then this morning I read Steve Frankfurt's obit in "The New York Times." For those who don't know him, Frankfurt brought the light of the creative revolution to mainstream Y&R. He was responsible for famous campaigns like "Give a damn," for the United Negro College Fund, "Betcha Can't Eat Just One," for Lays' potato chips and "The Wings of Man," for Eastern Air Lines.

Frankfurt also turned his brilliance to movie titles, his most famous being the seminal "To Kill a Mockingbird."

His advertising work, though visually striking, it seems to me was equally driven by powerful copy.

Copy as in words.

Not Xerox.

Copy that defines.

Copy that clarifies.

Copy that amuses, entertains, informs, persuades.

If I'm the last scribe standing, so be it.

I'll keep doing what I do until I can't.

The Spout of the Devil.

Last night I lost another battle with sleeplessness, so I collared Whiskey, my six-month-old golden retriever and set out to do a walk I had been planning to do for more than 30 years.

We left the house just after midnight and except for sundry drunks, the streets were empty.  As well they should have been. There was a fine mist over New York last night and not a dry place anywhere within the five boroughs.

Since I went to Columbia--I left over 32 years ago, I had been aiming to walk to the northern-most reaches of Manhattan--to Spuyten Duyvil, a creek at the top of the city that means in Dutch (who had, after all named it) Devil's Spout.

To be technical, Spuyten Duyvil started as a roaring creek between Manhattan and the mainland of the Bronx. It's since been widened, deepened and made navigable--turned into a flat, broad expanse veering off from the even flatter, wider Hudson River and into the Harlem River.  The Columbia football field is within spitting distance and so is a giant sky blue "C," painted 100-feet-high in the escarpments that run down to the waterside. Many mornings, you can see the Lions' crew teams rowing on the waters, the big C serving as, I suppose, inspiration.

The walk from my apartment is a good seven miles. But my legs are strong and Whiskey's are young, so we headed uptown with the gravity of explorers charting un-mapped seas.

Walking slowly and increasingly damp, my puppy's coat now fully wet, the brim of my cap dripping with moisture, we made our way, inexorably north. It was a sad night. Straight out of a Southern gothic novel, only we were in New York. A night for a murder. A night for death.

But on this night, there was nothing.

No people. No conclaves of chattering Puerto Ricans. No seasoned cops killing time between donuts. No Con Ed men taking a break and having a smoke.

On occasion a biker on a beaten machine would ride past, more often than not caped in a large black garbage bag, like a torrential version of the Shroud of Turin. But these bikers were vectors and we exchanged no words.

We got down to the water where the creek once roiled. Where the Dutch once ruled. The devil was not spouting tonight, I think, but the sky was, the ever-present mist coating everything like gloom in a bus station when you're off to visit your wife's aunt in Jersey City.

Whiskey sniffed at the water and found it foul. She looked at me and said 'it's time to go.' And so we did, grabbing a Dominican gypsy idling on the street a few blocks from the liquid.

I was home before five.

Today. And every day.

Producer: "I messed up. I forgot about central time."
Creative: "So our three o'clock is at four."
Producer: "Yes, so I moved our 4:30 to to 3:30."
Creative: "I already have a 3:30, can you move it to five?"
Producer: "Your 3:30 or our 4:30?"
Creative: "Move our 4:30 to five."
Producer: "OK. Then maybe we'll do our 5:30 at 9:30 tomorrow."
Creative: "I'm traveling tomorrow."
Producer: "That's ok. I don't think you need to be there anyway."

The service economy.

One of the seminal disconnects of our era is that we live in a service economy and service, nine times out of 10, sucks.

It's not unusual for me to go to a big box retailer and simply walk out with what I want without paying. Not because I'm a thief, but because I can't find anyone to take my money. If you can find a salesperson, they are likely surly and ill-informed. They are, except in rare cases, uniformly unhelpful.

Last Friday I was in a restaurant in LAX. It was a pizza place. It took 20 minutes to get a small pie. 10 minutes to find a waiter. At which point, I was late for my flight. So once again I left without paying. (The experience did bring to mind the old Borscht Belt joke that says when requesting a table at a restaurant, always ask for a table near a waiter.)

The reason behind the crappy service we all experience is that there is in our modern economy of chain stores and absentee ownership no connection between hard-work and getting ahead. Why bother hustling? You will make the same starvation-wage whether you bust your hump or not.

Unfortunately I've found that the same etiology is now pervasive today in agencies. There is no incentive, outside of getting your next job, to working hard.

Raises, if your salary isn't already "frozen," are seldom above the rate of inflation. Which means you get poorer each year you work. What's more there is evidence all around you that subverts what was once a correlation between productive work and personal gain. In other words, "the lame shall inherit the agency."

Essentially in chain store retailing as well as chain store marketing, we are a cost that must be controlled, on its way to being wrung out of the system.

It's only when our wages are sufficiently reduced that the revenue we generate can be most profitably harvested by our absentee lords.

Ineffectual.

The last few days I have felt like shit.

No surprise there.

I'm treated like shit.

Treated like a line item on a budget.

With more work dumped on me so that margins can be made.

How can George be optimized?

Used?

Folded. Spindled. Mutilated.

During World War II, the ratio of soldiers to officers was about 10 to one.

Today, in the US, it's about five to one.

We have doubled the ranks of "managers," "paper pushers," "swivel chair conductors," "desk jockies."

We have halved the number of people doing the work.

We no longer do.

We talk about what we're going to do.

And there's no one left to do it.

Next time you get an email, take a look at the people copied on it.
Do the math.
Calculate the number of people who work.
Versus the number of people who manage work.

If you want to get really dour, think about the semantics of our trade.
We don't even write anymore. Or art direct.
We process words. Or push pixels.

If someone in management reads this and agrees with it,
I bet I know what will happen.

They won't do anything.
That's too tough.

They'll call a meeting to talk about it.

Nontent.

Bob Hoffman, the AdContrarian, has once again an important post. It's on marketing's latest "shibboleth," content.

In it, Bob cites data from CNN that says there are over one-trillion pages of content on the web.

You can read Bob's post here: http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2012/10/web-litter-now-its-content.html

For some years in this space I have been trying to introduce to clients the word "nontent." That is shit they produce that no one will see.

99.999% of those trillion pages are nontent.

They are non-entertaining.

They are non-interesting.

They are non-useful.

They are non-informative.

They are non-respectful of their viewers' time.

There is probably some value in creating content.

There is no value in creating nontent.