Fuck Decks (I believe in creative work)

I went home relatively early last night. It was raining Katz and Schwartz and it's been a hellish week and it's just before a three-day weekend and I wanted to get the hell out of the sweatbox they call an office.

My partner and I had endured round seventeen (thanks, Rich) of the endless roadshow we must all now travel to sell a campaign. Even selling something slight these days takes literally dozens of meetings.

We are living, remember, in the "Participation Age." So there's always some nimrod whose contribution is salient to the point of having you put page numbers on the fucking presentation. Of course you need put page numbers because meetings don't happen nowadays without half the attendees not being there. They "attend" by phone. Which means everyday we are subject to about 45 minutes of hideous hold music and every meeting has to start with the obligatory "let's go around the room and say who's here."

If you have to be announced in my opinion, you're not really there. Your contribution should announce your attendance.

But, as usual, I digress.

Something we're not allowed to do anymore, though we're supposed to tell stories, we're meant to tell only "linear" stories, which are stories without elan, wit, humor and surprise.

But, as usual, I digress.

Last night was another one of those meetings where the people on the other end of the phone or the other side of the table can only say "no." It's like Flamenco dancing through a Soviet minefield. Boom!

We have two more of those "only no" meetings. Until we finally get to the meeting where someone can say "yes."

Along the way my partner and I have spent about 12 times the time making decks than in thinking about the campaign we are developing.

The work is unimportant.

What's important is that the "deck is almost there."

The work hasn't materially changed in a month.

But the deck! You should see it! It shines like that of the Pequod. We've been down on our hands and knees, stripped to the waist and gleaming with sweat like sea-men of yore, polishing that deck. Swabbing that deck. Putting that deck in fine fettle.

A deck's a deck for a' that.

We have, as an industry, forgotten that decks don't run on television. No deck has ever appeared in the upfront or on a billboard or in a banner ad. 

The deck is that which gets thrown out after the meeting, killing birch and willow and pine along the way. 

Years ago the great Tibor Kalman wrote “FUCK COMMITTEES (I believe in lunatics). If you haven't read it, or haven't read it in a while, it's below.

Let's update it for the Modern Ad Agency.

FUCK DECKS (I believe in creative work).

 FUCK COMMITTEES

Tibor Kalman

(I believe in lunatics)
It’s about the struggle between individuals with jagged passion in their work and today’s faceless corporate committees, which claim to understand the needs of the mass audience, and are removing the idiosyncrasies, polishing the jags, creating a thought-free, passion-free, cultural mush that will not be hated nor loved by anyone. By now, virtually all media, architecture, product and graphic design have been freed from ideas, individual passion, and have been relegated to a role of corporate servitude, carrying out corporate strategies and increasing stock prices. Creative people are now working for the bottom line.

Magazine editors have lost their editorial independence, and work for committees of publishers (who work for committees of advertisers). TV scripts are vetted by producers, advertisers, lawyers, research specialists, layers and layers of paid executives who determine whether the scripts are dumb enough to amuse what they call the ‘lowest common denominator’. Film studios out films in front of focus groups to determine whether an ending will please target audiences. All cars look the same. Architectural decisions are made by accountants. Ads are stupid. Theater is dead.

Corporations have become the sole arbiters of cultural ideas and taste in America. Our culture is corporate culture.Culture used to be the opposite of commerce, not a fast track to ‘content’- derived riches. Not so long ago captains of industry (no angels in the way they acquired wealth) thought that part of their responsibility was to use their millions to support culture. Carnegie built libraries, Rockefeller built art museums, Ford created his global foundation. What do we now get from our billionaires? Gates? Or Eisner? Or Redstone? Sales pitches. Junk mail. Meanwhile, creative people have their work reduced to ‘content’ or ‘intellectual property’. Magazines and films become ‘delivery systems’ for product messages.

But to be fair, the above is only 99 percent true.

I offer a modest solution: Find the cracks in the wall. There are a very few lunatic entrepreneurs who will understand that culture and design are not about fatter wallets, but about creating a future. They will understand that wealth is means, not an end. Under other circumstances they may have turned out to be like you, creative lunatics. Believe me, they’re there and when you find them, treat them well and use their money to change the world.

Tibor Kalman
New York
June 1998

Choices.

I'm not lazy but everything--in the name of getting easier--has gotten too hard.

I don't really need or care that there are a billion websites. I visit about ten a day and that's enough for me. If you think I'm going to visit yours, you're going to have to knock one of my ten off the list. Because I like my ten.

I also don't care that I have access to a thousand cable channels and 14,000 internet radio stations. I watch about ten stations, and listen to probably five.

As for devices, I have half a dozen and use three. My work computer. My home computer and my phone. Which oddly enough I use for phone calls.

Even when I shop for books, an activity I enjoy doing, I don't go to Barnes & Noble or Amazon. They offer too many choices. I go to a local bookstore where their tastes run in the same direction as mine.

When I go to a Greek coffee shop, one of those places with a twelve-page menu, I wind up ordering either eggs over easy and rye toast or a turkey burger. That's enough choice for me.

I don't even like websites that offer me six or five different places to click. They are to me, obviously the result of trying to cover every angle and be something to everyone.

I'm not everyone.

I've actively, purposefully limited the number of choices I avail myself of.

At a certain point, going through all the potential choices in the world is just too much work.

And I have enough work at work.

I think advertising is suffering also from the dilemma of choice.

Presentations now include every media known to modern man.

Because we have all those media I guess we feel like we have to use them all.

I'm sure that's not right.

A warm day in May.

It's muggy out in Manhattan.

It's as hot as a Hasid in a sauna in August.

I walked across the park this morning, my usual Thursday routine, and by the time I hit the subway platform on 86th and Central Park West, the knees of my pants were wet with sweat and my shirt was fairly soaked through.

Even the rats were feeling it. Instead of scampering from shadow to shadow, they ambled like a baseball manager making his way to the mound to talk to his pitcher.

The office was empty when I got in. No one was here.

I washed my hands and face, hoping to remove the sweat and subway grit as best I could. Then I snuck to the back and found the thermostat. It was encased in a clear, locked plexiglass box. I pried it open with a scissors and reset the temp from 75 to 70 degrees. A small concession to comfort.

It's muggy out in Manhattan.

And I have a long day ahead of me.

Marathoning.

I've run, successfully, a dozen marathons. You wouldn't know it by looking at me now but there was a time I was slim, trim and, even, sinewy.

I was never an "elite" runner. I naturally big-boned and even at my slimmest had a hard time getting below 190. However, I was good--a top 10% kind of guy--capable of running a marathon in the low 3s. That's a 7:15 mile pace for 26 miles.

Ah, but that's many years and many pounds ago.

And not the point of this post.

The point of this post is a metaphor.

A marathon is what we run at work.

The start of an assignment is often like the start of a race.

You're off with speed and enthusiasm.

The end of an assignment is often like the end of a race.

You stand tall, marshall your innate strength and resolve and finish strong.

It's the middle miles, the middle of an assignment that separate the men from the boys (in a non-gender specific way.)

These are the gnarly, painful miles where everything hurts and crowds are thin. Your initial burst of enthusiasm has vanished. And your end-of-race adrenaline is still fallow.

This is the territory where your head has to emerge.

It has to calm you down.

It has to remove your pain.

It has to tell you that you don't have 20 miles left, you have one.

And when you're done with that one, you have one more.

And so on, until you finish.

There are a lot of vicissitudes we face in life.

Panickers, second-guessers, wind-bags.

The trick is out-lasting them.

Black Dog Tuesday.

We are living in an alternate Kafkaesque universe.

This is a universe in which decks take longer to complete than creative presentations.

Where briefs are allotted four weeks and creative is allotted four days.

It's a world where people who talk about work are more valued than people who do the work.

We live in a world where 90% of our effort is expended on media tactics that have never proven their worth.

Where you're "hot" based on your ability to do fake ads.

Maybe someday there will be a substance resurgence.

And smart work that works will rise again.

But I'm not holding my breath.

Lightbulbs.

After the frenzy of my last few days at work, the sturm und drang of preparing for a pitch, sleep did not come gently to me. She did not tiptoe in like the fog on little cat feet. She did not drop by at all. In fact, my only nocturnal visitor was my old nemesis, Dame Insomnia. She forced me out of bed and into a gloomy wakefulness.

I shuffled from my bedroom into the living room, hopping on one foot as I slid on my blue jeans and tied my shoes. Whiskey was obedient and waiting. She bowed her head with the grace of a Royal and calmly accepted her collar and leash. We were out the door in minutes and heading uptown to a bar we frequent called the Tempus Fugit.

I hadn't been to the Tempus Fugit but once in the month since I had returned from New Zealand. Work was crying too loudly and my sleep, for whatever reason, was coming too soundly. But tonight the Tempus Fugit was both inexorable and ineffable. It was the place that had to be visited.

We arrived as we always do in a shroud of silence. There are groups of people in front of other bars, smoking cigarettes and laughing too loudly at things that are not funny. But there is none of that near the Tempus.

There is just the silent mute and muted brick of an old warehouse and no sign anywhere announcing its presence. Whiskey and I made our way down the labyrinth of stairways and hallways and industrial metal doors, until we saw the dull incandescence of a single 100-watt. We eyed the joint front to back, left to right, up and down but, as usual, no one was there save the bartender who runs and owns the place.

Before I was even planted in my favorite stool, one in from the end, he had placed a wooden water bowl next to where Whiskey lazes and a Pike's Ale (the ALE that won for YALE!) in front of me. He then slid over a small bowl of Spanish peanuts, which I pushed away as I always do with my usual legumey epithet--"a pound in every nut," I said. He laughed and placed the bowl under the bar.

"'Tain't a fit night out for man nor beast," he began, with more than a slight dosage of W.C. Fields in his delivery. He was quoting from one of Fields' best movies, "The Fatal Glass of Beer," and I laughed along with him.

"Have ya got your dulcimer here?" I asked him, feeding him a line from the film. "I don't even mind if you play with your mitts on," I continued.

"You are a fan of the great man," the bartender asked.

"From Bissonette to Snavely," I replied.

"And Sou-say, I assume. "(In "The Bank Dick," Fields played Egbert Souse. Which everyone pronounced sowse.)

The bartender drew me another Pike's.

"I've missed you around here," he said. "I haven't seen you in quite some time."

I drank a long gulp of Pike's. I've been around the world, and there is no beer like it. Especially the way the serve it at the Tempus Fugit, in  eight-ounce juice glasses so it does not run flat or warm.

He took my glass as I drained it and pulled me another amber.

"I have been snowed under at work," I began. "The shit hit the fan when I was away and the client placed my account under review. I got back and immediately had to jump in to help 'save it.'"

He wiped the high-gloss of the teak bar-top in a vigorous circular motion. The wood was as shiny as it was going to get, but he kept at it, staring into the grain. He stopped wiping then stood up straight.

"Like you, Fields was at war with the world."

"There's a lot to war against," I said.

"You are stacking lightbulbs in front of a blind man with a cane. No matter what you do, those bulbs will be obliterated."

"What's the alternative?" I asked. "I can't just sit there and let it happen."

He laughed and said nothing. He said nothing for a long-time. So long that I feared I had pissed him off.

"Let the lightbulbs break," he whispered. "It's not your job to hermetically seal the world. You can't fix everything. Shit is going to happen."

I polished off the remainder of my Pike's and readied myself and Whiskey to leave.

"Let the lightbulbs break," I repeated.

I shoved two twenties over the bar--I had had after all three beers. He ritually pushed the money back my way, "On me," he said.

We walked home in the rain.

Pitch update.

One of the things I've noticed through the years, and it's only gotten worse, is that talkers beat doers. In fact, in the modern workplace, doers are so few that senior management is afraid to laud or promote them, lest getting ahead goes to their head and they stop doing.

The processors win. And they keep the performers down.

I can't go into much detail here without getting in trouble. But on the pitch I was just engaged in, many people from all departments had the temerity to show up empty-handed. As in without work.
As in without work they were assigned to do.

There's always something more pressing. Another assignment. Another pitch. PTO. The dentist.

As Yogi Berra might of said, "you can always count on them showing up missing."

I've always been a doer. Always been hands on.

And I'm treated and appreciated less than I was 20 years ago.

A late night before an early morning.

I worked late last night in preparation for a pitch to save a piece of business. I won't go into the details here, they would only get me in trouble. There's no use talking about the hair-trigger panic responses, the puffed up pomposity and the ill-tempered ingratitude that got us here, the fact is we are here, and now's the time to do something about it.

Besides, as un-called for as I think this effort was--I look at is as akin to being asked to take a "loyalty oath," there's something fulfilling and rewarding about a pitch.

At their best, they're about people working hard together for a common goal. There's a goodness in that--akin, I suppose, to when we hunted in groups wooly mammoths.

Last night surrounded by cheap Chinese food, bad powerpoint and reams of color xeroxes, the good people emerged from the group.

Those on the periphery wished us luck. Others had the great good manners to remove themselves from the fray and not interfere. Fewer still sweat in the non-air-conditioned office on a warm Spring evening, working into the night, tweaking, printing, collating and collecting thoughts.

Of course, I want to prevail in all this.

I want to "win."

But regardless of the outcome, I know we have done our best.

And if our best isn't enough to carry the day, well then, they didn't deserve us in the first place.

Pitches.

Going into a pitch can teach you a lot about people. I suppose it's as close as we in advertising get to sharing a fox-hole during an artillery attack.

A pitch leaves you vulnerable, exposed. If you accept the challenge of the pitch, there's no place to hide. You have to step up and do the work.

But, back to fox-holes.

My guess would be there are basically three types of behaviors--maybe four--when the shelling starts. Three or four types of behaviors when it comes to pitches.

First, there are those who are driving crazy by the nearness of death, by the noise and concussion. In short, there are the panickers.

Second, there are those who are shut down and immobilized by the terror they feel. They are the catatonics.

Third, and I guess the rarest, there are those who understand the dangers around them, and accept them. They use the tension and fear around them to rally their personal resources and fight back.

Finally, there are those who are miles away from the fox-hole. They're up in Company HQ, plotting grand strategies and moves and counter-moves. They usually have no real grasp of what's happening on the ground.

Years ago I had a brilliant boss who didn't believe in the new-age bushwa concerning employee evaluations. 

He believed there was one way to assess the value of someone in an ad agency. Do you want them in a pitch, or not? When it's Friday and the work is due on Monday, do you want them in the room?

This might be harsh. But it makes sense to me.

Mistakes happen.

There's a story in today's "Times" about one of my favorite places on the planet, Katz's Deli. When people say Katz's pastrami is "to die for," they mean it literally and figuratively. It will kill you. But it might be worth it.

In any event there's a bit in the article about the sign you see above.

The story goes that the sign painter asked Katz's owner what he wanted on the sign. The owner said, ‘Katz’s Deli. That’s all.’” The sign arrived with those four words on it, and has been in the front window ever since.

Sometimes the mistakes we make, or the mistakes or misinterpretations others make, improve and perfect. As the sign painter's error did for Katz's.

Sometimes it's our job as creative people to see and embrace the wonderful accidents that make work that would otherwise be merely functional, special.