More graffiti.

Two of my favorite bits of graffiti are from long ago and far away.

When I was a kid, Consolidated Edison--Con Ed--the electric company had the slogan "Clean Energy" emblazoned on all of its many trucks. Someone graffitied it as above.

And when I was a slightly older kid--20 years old and wandering the savage 70s streets of Chicago, there was a street gang called "The Latin Eagles." They would "tag" every underpass, elevated stanchion and culvert in their turf. Someone boldly graffitied their graffiti, again, as above.

"The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls..."

A New York cab ride.

I've been away from New York for ten days, vacationing in warmer, calmer Caribbean climes. But it didn't take long for me to be reminded of how much I love the city.

Somehow my wife and I navigated our way through the maze of customs faster than most of our other fellow passengers, and magically our baggage arrived on the beaten carousel early and in tact. I hauled it all onto my broad shoulders and my wife and I scampered to the taxi line.

The JFK taxi line is usually something out of Hieronymus Bosch--writhing bodies wrestling duffle bags and rollers, usually with screaming kids in tow. But tonight my wife was like Botticelli's Venus. Somehow she ascended--magically--to the front of the line.

Quickly, before our luck had time to change, I wrestled our bags into a Toyota Prius hybrid. I was helped by my driver--all 5'3" of him. He handled the bags with the strength of a long-shoreman.

I got in the cab, gave the driver our address, and then, as I always do, I checked out his name, Boris Andreyev, and his hack number, which was under 500,000.

If you study cab drivers as I do, you can judge how long they've been driving by their number. Newer drivers log in at around 560,000. A forty-year-man is in the 300,000's. My driver, I estimated had been driving 30 years. I was off by five. He'd been driving since 1977.

I've been talking to cab drivers since about that time. I love their stories, their successes, their frustrations. Talking to them is just one of the million things I love about New York.

"Where are you from," I began.

"I am from Siberia. I drove a tractor-truck there in the oil fields. But came here with my parents and my sister and my wife in 1977. I started driving a cab the first day I arrive. I am 64 now. In three years, I retire."

Boris didn't need a lot of interstitial coaxing to talk. But I tried anyway to hold up my end of the conversation.

"I've always wanted to go to Russia," I said. "St. Petersburg in particular--to see the Hermitage."

"A lifetime in the Hermitage you could spend and not see an inch. The city St. Petersburg is so beautiful. Once I drove my truck 8,000 kilometers from Yekaterinburg to Kiev. They gave me 30 days to make the trip. I did it in 15 and so spent 15 days on 'wacation' in St. Petersburg.

"By train you can go 600 kilometers in two hours and be in Moscow. In Moscow every subway station is like a museum."

"I've heard that," I said, trying to keep the conversation from being too one sided.

"America a small country," he said. "Russia big. 12,000 kilometers from East to West. 8,000 from North to South."

He jumped now to Samarkand, the Uzbeki city situated on the Silk Road.

"Samarkand. You know who founded it? Do you know? Guess."

"Ghenghis Khan," I offered.

"Alexander the Great. The greatest of them all. 10,000 pounds of gold he made the city with. Samarkand."

We were now approaching my apartment on 83rd Street. My wife went to pay the fare with a credit card.

"Ach" he said. "You are killing me. Cash please."

We paid him cash and I lugged our baggage into our lobby.

"Thank you," I told him and he thanked me back.

It was good to be home.

My hope for 2013.

Here's my wish for 2013.

It's simple.

It's one sentence.

Just three words, actually.

Let's get serious.

Let's not spend time on things 'that will change everything.'

Let's do work that moves clients' business, not just the egos of those involved.

Let's stop valuing valueless companies in the billions.

Let's stop talking about things like "mobile strategies" and "likes" and "conversations" that have never been shown to produce a dime.

Let's stop talking about story-telling if we're not willing to get stories time to develop.

Further, if you, yourself mark yourself as a storyteller. Don't say so. Tell stories.

Also, if you're a storyteller, you might want to actually read some great storytellers.

Let's stop smirking at blatherfests like SXSW and start telling the people who are paying for those trips (in the form of a cruddy stock price, a two-year raise cycle, a deflated salary or a Ebenezer-esque bonus) what you actually learned. Learned that was of value to our business.

Let's show ROI.

Let's assert to clients that we make a product--marketing communications--that we are not a "service" and that we shouldn't, therefore, be treated like mere vendors.

In other words, let's make ourselves important again.

By doing important things for clients' businesses.

Not by being self-important.

Let's get serious.

The way things should be.

Schedules are made and agreed to.

If the client misses a date, the schedule gets pushed.

It doesn't come out of creative.

If the date can't be pushed, production should find a way to make the client pay more for services rendered.

I don't know why so many people can't understand basics.

On boxing and advertising.

I am reading right now a bit of a divertissimo, the boxing writing of one of the 20^th Century’s great writers, A.J. Liebling. If you have the slightest scintilla of interest in really fine writing, I suggest with great enthusiasm that you pick up and read his collection, “The Sweet Science.”

It hardly matters whether or not you care about boxing. Liebling’s voice is so secure, his eye for detail so adroit and his turn of a phrase so euphonious, that every page, yes, every page, brings joy and laughter. It’s often said, I have observed, by people when praising a book, ‘I couldn’t put it down.’ Liebling I have to put down often, in the same way you would need a moment of reflection after seeing Willie Mays patrol centerfield or Joe DiMaggio lash a double.

Much of “The Sweet Science” concerns the impact of a new medium—television—on the fight business in America. Fights were televised every Monday and Friday night—at the behest and via the dollars of brewers and razor blade companies. Consequently people stopped going to their neighborhood arena to see live pugilists battle. These club fights then dried up, and with them the opportunity for young, raw fighters to gain experience out of the limelight.

I wonder if a similar effect has been felt by our business. Young people have no time to learn their craft in out-of-the-way gyms. Today’s condensed timetables mean they can’t be nurtured like fighters were, by old hands. Things are too fast now. A day out of Miami Ad School, you’ve got banners due to the client.

In one of his essays Liebling quotes a ring denizen named Eddie Shevlin. Shevlin was a coach who—unorthodoxically-- had his charges spar dozens of rounds a day—four or five times more than the prevailing wisdom. Shevlin’s reason was simple “You never learn anything until you’re tired.”

I think there’s real wisdom in that.

I think in our business, like any other, it takes hour after hour, day after day, week after week of practice to finally figure out what you’re doing.

I think you need the tired-ness that derives from hard work, repetition, trial and error and, mostly, failing. You need the speed bag, the heavy bag, the medicine ball, the jump rope, the road work, the shadow, the being hit, the prelims, the bouts, the round-robins to develop.

It takes a lot of work to get yourself in the position to learn--to find yourself tired.

Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini or a 2012 wrap-up.

Yesterday "The New York Times" published an obituary of the 103-year-old Italian neurologist Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini.obituary For whatever reason the obit struck me as a decent and serendipitous way to wrap up another long year.

The main thing that struck me by Levi-Montalcini's life is that nothing is easy. She grew up a woman, went to medical school when women seldom did, and against her father's wishes and graduated just two years before Mussolini issued an edict barring "non-Aryans" from having professional careers.

Still, Levi-Montalcini persisted. She and her family evaded the Nazis. And survived the war in tact.

She went on to do breakthrough work (when the word breakthrough actually meant something) that played a central role in things that are too complicated for me, a mere copywriter, to fathom.

In 1986, at the age of 77, she shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine with her scientific partner, Dr. Stanley Cohen.

Here's the part of the obituary I liked the most.

She was a sought-after speaker and in 2009 (when she was 100) she said: "At 100, I have a mind that is superior--thanks to experience--than when I was 20."

Our industry, of course, makes no such concessions for experience and persistence.

We prefer flash-in-the-pans over slow-cooking.

That's just the way it is.

I'm not exactly sure why I feel this is a good wrap-up for 2012.

It's been a good year for me personally.

I have produced a lot of good work and am on the cusp of producing more.

My clients respect me, maybe even harbor a scintilla of fear in regard to me. That is good.

And my agency, after merely tolerating me for nearly three years have finally seen fit to permit me to be me and are, slowly, allowing me a larger canvas.

Still, unlike Levi-Montalcini, our body of work, our years of brand building, of clients building their careers on our work, of improving brands, does not matter.

These days, I'm afraid, we're only as good as our last app.

An app that eleven people will ever use. (But, gee!, it's cool.)

At the age of 55, I feel on borrowed time.

The "wisdom" I've acquired, the experience I've gained remains unrecognized.

We treat people like chewing gum.

We throw them out when the flavor is gone.

Sorry, for the melancholia.

Maybe I read too many obituaries.

Chicken.

I'm in Antigua, one time zone and several thousand miles from home, but that didn't stop Uncle Slappy from giving me a ring-a-ling this evening.

"Boychick," he began, "It's been written that when a poor man eats a chicken, one of them is sick."

"I've heard that, Uncle Slappy," I responded. "It's Sholem Aleichim, is it not?"

"Let me tell you what I mean, and don't be such a wise ass," the old man stormed forward. "I fear I am becoming a chicken."

"You're becoming a chicken?"

"You know I hate fish, yes? I wish I could figure out how to re-jigger W.C. Fields' line about hating water...'fish fuck in it.' But I can't make it work. In any event, I can't stand any fish that isn't smoked. Smoked salmon, I'll eat. Smoked whitefish, sturgeon. But regular restaurant or filet fish you get at the market, well, it turns my stomach."

"I see," I responded wisely.

"And with my weight about 20 lbs. too high, I have to give up pasta. The only food I really love. Dr. Richard P. Cohen, my internist, not Richard T. Cohen, the podiatrist, says I must eat as if it's Passover. No grains. No bread. No pasta. No rice."

Again I interjected an "I see."

"So, chicken I am left with. Chicken roasted. Chicken baked. Chicken marsala. Chicken salad. Chicken until it's coming out my ears.

"The chicken or the poor man might be sick to Sholem Aleichim. That's fine. But I'm well and sick of chicken."

Slow.

I've had the pleasure the last couple of days--and for a couple more days, of scuba diving with my younger daughter, Hannah.

Hannah, who is 21, has been diving for well over half her life. Since she was 18, she's been a licensed dive instructor. With all that diving through the years she has accomplished something on the order of 500 dives. An impressive total.

I, though 34 years older, am much less experienced under the waves. I've been a certified diver and I have about 120 dives under my belt but I pale in comparison to Hannah.

One of the main things I've learned about diving is one of the hardest things for me to get, though it's one of the simplest.

Experiencing the undersea world is done at a slow speed.

You do not dart from reef to reef.

In fact, you barely even kick. You motivate yourself with a minimum of movement. This not only conserves your air-supply, it allows you to see the world you're only visiting, to take note of the infinitesimally small creatures and coral formations as well as the large.

Working in advertising and living in Manhattan, we have spent our whole lives getting places fast. We are comfortable when we are speeding. Normal speed feels, at best, languid.

The sea, however is a different world.

A world in which we are alien.

Especially alien if we move faster than we are meant to.

Dear friends and readers.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all.

I am off for ten days in the sun with my family.

Because I am who I am, my time off will not be, I'm sure 100% off. I'm sure there will be phone calls from work, a raft of emails and a visitation of stupidities that will further curl my hair.

I am in pre-production on a half-dozen new TV spots and the politics and banalities of work will accompany these. The credit grab has already commenced. Finger-pointing will follow sure as night follows day.

This is life.

And in the end, none of this small-dickedness matters.

Do your job.

Stick to your knitting.

See more than you say.

And there's a chance things will turn out ok.

I won't be writing as much as usual when I'm gone, but I will check in.

Again, Happy Holidays to you all.