Free is expensive.

Like most people, I think, I have a good half-dozen email accounts. This is, of course, ridiculous. In my co-op, we get one six-inch by six-inch mail slot and that is enough. But when it comes to email, we keep adding accounts, mostly to stay one step ahead of all the spam we get.

The email account I prefer is my busiest (not counting my work email.) But the ratio of good mail to crap is about 1:4. It's been taken over by promises that I've won the lottery and inducements for an all-natural blood-pressure medication doctors don't want us to know about.

This barrage of crap is in effect forcing me to move neighborhoods. It's forced me out of an email address directly attached to my website.

The reason behind all this crap is obvious to me. Email is essentially free. So any mofo can send you reams of mail indiscriminately. As opposed to paper mail, it doesn't matter if you get an open-rate of 1 per 100,000. 

We as an industry and we as a society have fallen prey to the false promise of free. If Google, which is free, is worth $400 billion, it's because it extracts $400 billion of information from you--without your even knowing it. 

Likewise, in advertising, clients are always looking to cut costs on what they pay for work. What they get in return is work with no real insight, no truth, no real value.

This seems obvious to me. But we all blindly buy into it.

Even me.

The platform I write Ad Aged on is also free.

Sanguine thoughts.

I just read an article about a veteran baseball player, Carlos Beltran, who at the age of 36, just signed a big contract to play for the New York Yankees. Thirty-six isn’t tremendously old for a ballplayer, but it’s old enough so that if you’re not hitting, or your fastball has lost a bit of its pop, you start to hear whispers.

Beltran is hearing those whispers this Spring.  In the wake of signing a three-year, $45 million contract, he’s hitting just a few points higher than his weight. It’s shaken him. “When I’m home,” he said, “I can put a smile on my face and act like nothing’s wrong. But then at night, when I’m in bed, everything comes to my head. How come I’m in this slump? Why am I hitting .220?”

What Beltran’s taken to doing to battle his slump is something I wholly understand and wholly endorse. It’s something I do, too, in my own way.

Beltran takes his bat to his bedside. He’ll stir and reach over the side of his bed and find it. He’ll grip it. “I just feel my grip, work my grip, thinking, thinking. Sometimes a thought will come to me, an answer.”

Beltran will pop out of bed and practice his stance.

“This is my life,” he said. “You’ve got to care. I learned,” he continued “that you have to be strong mentally. Don’t worry about what people say about you.”

These are challenging times for aging ballplayers and copywriters. I might wonder when I lay in bed at night, ‘have I lost a step?’ As Beltran says, “when I’m in bed, everything comes to my head.”

I reach over to my Mac, or I get up and go into my office. I type. I try putting words together. Try making thoughts clear. I write something just to write. I'm not striving for a screenplay, a novel or even some copy. I'm just typing, but what I’m really doing is practicing my grip.

This is my life.

I have to care.

In olde New York.

About 35 years ago when I was just getting out of grad school and looking very hard for a job, I was talking to a prospective employer, an older man who was probably my father’s age.

I don’t remember anything about this guy, his name or the company he worked for. All I  recall is a story he told me.

He was taking the subway home from work late at night. These were the days when New York was not nearly so sanitized as it is today. The subways (when they ran) were rolling evidence that New York was Rome and the Vandals had gained the upper hand. The trains were filthy, covered with graffiti and it seemed that anarchy reigned.

My acquaintance got into a car that was empty except for a homeless man. Such a circumstance would be threatening even today. Back then, it was absolutely terrifying. We weren’t inured to homeless people as yet and New York was averaging over five murders a day.

But for whatever reason, he stayed in the car with the homeless man. And before long, they began chatting. They were two men, probably around the same age. One who was prospering, the other who was wrung out by life and tossed away like the old rags he was wearing.

They talked as the train clattered through 50^th Street and 59^th. Past 66^th and 72^nd and 79^th. Past 86^th and the abandoned ‘ghost station’ at 91^st Street. Past 96^th. Finally, my friend got up to leave at 103^rd and Broadway.

“Come with me,” he said.

There was in those days a 24-hour Twin Donut on 105^th and Broadway. Twin Donut was a pretty great place. It was clean, efficient and the donuts were sublime. It was empty at that hour and they sat at the counter and each had an old-fashioned donut and a bottomless cup of coffee. By this time, it was well after midnight, well past the hour when wives begin to worry.

The two men talked for a good hour. About life, about sports, about nothing at all. Finished, my acquaintance emptied his wallet. Gave the homeless man something like $60, which was a lot of money in those days. Shook his hand and said good night.

There were thousands and thousands of homeless in the streets of New York back then. Some government program had decided it would be smart to close the mental hospitals. Literally thousands spilled onto the streets of Manhattan. Single Room Occupancy hotels were being slum-cleared by real-estate developers. Literally thousands more homeless appeared. The problem seemed intractable. And of course, many of the homeless were addicted to drink or drugs or both.

Giving $60 to one, along with a donut and a cuppa did nothing to change either the universe or a life. And sociologists will tell you it’s not how you solve a social problem.

It was small, inconsequential, not getting to the root of anything. The guy telling me this story wasn't trying to elicit praise from me. All the same, he felt compelled to tell me the story. Maybe it was his way of howling at the moon. It doesn't accomplish anything, but sometimes it's all you can do.

The world can sometimes be cold, indifferent and, yes, even brutal. There's really very little we can do to change those realities. We can't stop cruelty, eradicate poverty or really make much of a difference. 

But once-in-a-while, maybe we can try.

Fools. Greater and Lesser.

I warn you at the outset, this will get a little heady, so fasten your seatbelts.

There's an economic postulate called "The Greater Fool Theory" that does much, I think, to explain the world we live in in marketing and advertising.

The Greater Fool Theory states that the price of an object or of a service is not based on intrinsic value but instead on irrational beliefs and expectations of market participants. A price may be justified by a rational buyer due to the belief that someone else will be willing to pay an even higher price later.

In other words, I will pay X for, say, a signed shoelace from Miley Cyrus because someone else will pay X+5. There's no real worth, but there is a prospect of gain because someone is always willing to bid higher.

A corollary of the Greater Fool Theory, as I see it, is FOMO. Fear Of Missing Out. This is how bubbles get inflated. You know that Miley Cyrus' signed shoelace is crap, but everyone else is cashing in on celebrity ephemera so you have to jump in as well.

Advertising agencies used to create real brand value, and some still do. For instance, Wieden & Kennedy has probably added untold millions to Nike's bottom-line and P&G's through their work on these brands. Old Spice might well have died were it not for Wieden's brilliant work.

Likewise, Ogilvy's contribution to IBM's worth and UPS is notable, as was Chiat's work on Apple, and going far back DDB's on VW, Ammirati's on BMW, Ally's on FedEX and Scali's on Volvo.

What worries me is the massive amount of marketing expenditures that do not produce intrinsic value. Just a couple years ago we chased after Facebook "likes," regarding them as the secret sauce of marketing success. There's a new shiny marketing object seemingly every month. The one I've been hearing lately is that we have to send out paid posts on Facebook and Linked In because "everyone else is doing so."

The very definition of the Greater Fool Theory and FOMO.

I may well be excoriated for this, but as I have stated in this space before, I am a believer in Field Marshall Rommell's notion of concentration of force. Don't spread your marketing thin. Do what brings you the most good from the most people.

In other words, recognize that you can't do everything, you have neither the staff nor the marketing budget. So focus where you can make the biggest difference.

If we don't ignore the greater fool, we risk becoming one.

Me. Me. Me.

Jean Renoir, the director of more truly seminal movies than anyone else (look him up), once said "A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it up and makes it again."

I'm not one to compare myself to Renoir, or anyone else for that matter. But as I near having written almost 4,000 posts on "Ad Aged," one topic in particular keeps appearing.

It's simple. Irreducible. And obvious. Which is why, I suppose, I feel the need to repeat it so often.

Practice your craft. Every minute, every hour, every day.

I work in advertising, but first and foremost I am a writer.

Writers are born into a primordial swamp and asked to make sense of it. Sometimes we are asked to take columns of numbers and create a story. Sometimes we are thrown a powerpoint deck full of inchoate ideas and out of that soup we need to create something sensible and logical.

This is not about finding the right word, this is not about being precious. This is not about anything but digging and finding the core and expressing it in ways that haven't been expressed before.

This is the most important thing you can do in this business. And, most times, you have to do it alone. It's you and the same 84 keys that everyone else gets.

The best way, the only way, to do this is to do this. You practice every day. Write every day. Make something simple. Then throw it away and make it simpler. Then make it weird, strange, funny, memorable.

My ability to do this, to do this at the drop of a hat, to do this quickly and boldly, is my superpower. I can't bend steel with my bare hands, I can't make pixels dance, I don't have a compendious knowledge of the latest directors or film techniques.

But I can take a phone book and make something interesting out of it.

Because I work at it every day.

My father gets a gift from Mae Clarke.

One day when I was about 14 my father decided he needed to tell me a story about Mae Clarke’s pubic hair. According to my father, I was 14 and coming of age, and stories like this were important for me. They were part of becoming a man. So my father piled me into his 1949 Studebaker—a car he kept not because he liked it but because my mother didn’t and we went for a ride.

My father kept his Studebaker until 1977.

Mae Clarke, 1910-1992.

My father’s drives were a lot like my father’s moods—they were impulsive, almost autistic in their focus. He decided he wanted something, or wanted to do something and that was his complete focus until he got that thing.

Once it was salt-water taffy from the boardwalk in Atlantic City. It would start simply enough. “When I was a kid,” my father might say, “me, Herbie and Peacock used to hitchhike to Atlantic City and try to meet girls.” (This was the Atlantic City of the early 1940s—a lower middle class beach resort about an hour’s drive from Philadelphia where my father lived.) Twenty minutes later my father might say, “Damn, I loved the salt-water taffy they used to sell in those little shops along the boardwalk.” At dinner that night, after finishing his meal, he might belch, “You know what would cap off a meal like this one? Salt-water taffy.”

Then, the next morning he was still at it. “You know,” he might say “the salt-water taffy they sell around here is terrible. No flavor.” An hour later, he might turn to me and say, “I bet you never even had real Atlantic City salt-water taffy. Never had real salt-water taffy.” An hour after that he might utter, “Store-bought salt-water taffy is just like plastic. Not the real thing.” A little while after that it was, “It’s a tragedy, not having real salt-water taffy." Before long we’d wind up in his Studebaker, heading down to Atlantic City at 80 mph for salt-water taffy.

With him it was never a yen or a hankering. It was an obsession. Which of course brings me to my father and Mae Clarke’s pubic hair.

Clarke was a 1930s vamp, a putative film actress, the poor man’s “it” girl. Her most famous role was in “Public Enemy,” when she’s shacked up with Jimmy Cagney and Cagney violently pushes a half-grapefruit in her face. But even in that role, Clarke was uncredited. I guess you could say that even though the grapefruit scene made her somewhat iconic, Clarke never really crashed the big time.

From "Public Enemy," (1931). One of the 10 most famous scenes in film history.

By the time Clarke reached her 30s, she still got work, but bit parts and no film credits. Toward the end of her career she had a small part in the TV show “F Troop.” I guess that qualifies as bottoming out.

Like my father, Clarke was born in Philadelphia. Her real name was Violet Mary Klotz and It's safe to assert that she never really transcended her Klotzness. Despite looking pretty good in a tight sateen flapper-style gown and having had some critical success, she was really never anything but two-bit. She never became the star she wanted to be.

By the time my father started cavorting with women—say when he was around 18, Clarke was already crowding 40 and the bloom was off her rose. She had already been married and divorced three times and was spending less time in Hollywood as Mae Clarke and more time back in Philadelphia as the former Violet Mary Klotz.

My father starting dating Clarke around then. It wasn’t really dating to hear him tell it, because all they really did was schtup. That was the word my father used, schtup. “We’d schtup for hours,” he’d tell me, “have breakfast in bed the next morning, then schtup some more. Then I’d run off to school or to work and maybe not see her again for a month or so.”

There aren’t many 18 year olds who can be discreet when they’re schtupping anyone—much less a woman who used to be something of a film siren. My father couldn’t help but brag to all his friends that he was Mae Clarke’s gigolo. “Mae who?” they would ask, and my father would reply, “The blonde with Jimmy Cagney and the grapefruit in Public Enemy.” He’d then, to hear him tell it, break into his purported dead-on Cagney, “You know, I wish you was a wishing well. So I could tie a bucket to youse and sink ya.” And then he’d pantomime the smash.

At this point in my father’s story his Studebaker had just about reached the corner of Broad and Walnut in Center City Philadelphia. The Bellevue-Stratford stood there, still a few years before it became notorious for something called “legionnaire’s disease." The disease killed 29 American Legionnaires and sickened 182 others in 1976.

The Bellvue-Stratford. 1976.

“The last time Violet and I were together was right here. This was a grand place, a palace,” my father told me. “She said to me, I want you should always remember me and she gave me a sealed small blue envelope. It was too small for money—which I wouldn’t have taken anyway. I stuffed it in the inside pocket of my jacket and ran off to school without even opening it. I was late for class, and was more worried about getting there on time than the envelope. I always figured I’d see her again.”

My father pulled his Studebaker to a stop in front of the old hotel. Next to all the newer cars it looked old, beaten. “You know back in the 30s, the sex goddess of her day, Jean Harlow died suddenly when she was still in her twenties. Kidney failure or something. She was the original platinum blonde. More than anything else, Violet wanted to be Jean Harlow—Jean was the star in “Public Enemy.” The one Jimmy Cagney dumped her for.

Jean Harlow, 1911-1937.

“Now there were always rumors about Jean, gossip I guess. How she put ice cubes on her nipples before she’d shoot a scene. Or how she never wore panties. Or how she dyed her pubic hair platinum. Some pretty nasty ones about the number of lovers she had. And after she died, how she had given one of her lover's, some gangster, a lock of her pubic hair. That’s what Violet had given me. A lock of her pubic hair tied up with a violet grosgrain ribbon.”

We drove in silence pretty much the rest of the way home. My father was talked out. Me afraid to say anything.

When we reached our block it was already late. My father shut off the engine of the Studebaker to “let her coast home.” “Your mother,” he told me “found Mae’s gift in my wallet about fifteen years ago. She never said anything to me. Never asked about it. She just threw it out.”

He got out of the car, slammed shut the door and went up the walk. I sat there for a good twenty minutes in the dark.

Uncle Slappy invents the future.

As happens so often with me, last night I was visited once again by Dame Insomnia. This time she woke me not with a soft whisper and a gentle touch on my shoulder. This time she wasn't even a she. Instead, I was awakened by Uncle Slappy with a poke and an insistent "Boychick."

I am closer to Uncle Slappy than I am to anyone except my long-suffering wife. Thinking that perhaps there was a problem, god forbid, I hopped out of bed like a fire-fighter and walked with my arm around the old man's shoulder into our eat-in kitchen.

He sat in his chair, which is my chair, when he and Aunt Sylvie aren't around and I quickly brewed a pot of coffee. As I served him a cup, black, and a small plate of three cinnamon rugelach with raisins (never serve him rugelach without raisins) he spun his tale.

"I have it, boychick. Our ticket to easy street."

"Uncle Slappy," I admonished, "it's three in the morning."

"Ach," he spat. "No one told Henry Ford the time, the anti-Semite."

"What is it you have?" I asked, filling his mug.

"The answer to Bit Coin."

I looked around our kitchen and saw a rumpled edition of "Wired" magazine. I knew immediately I was in trouble. Uncle Slappy is likely to have read something about new technology and is even more likely to be completely baffled by it all.

"I'm surprised you even know about Bit Coin," I said. "I'm not even sure I understand what it is. And my guess is that in five years it will be nothing but a dusty memory."

"Nevertheless," the old one continued, "I have conceived something smarter than Bit Coin. It will make us rich beyond our wildest dreams of mammon."

"I'm a big fan of mammon," I said laconically.

"I call it BitStrami. An online currency based on the price of Pastrami. You've got denominations of 'forschpice,'" he said using the Yiddish word for appetizer, "schtickle," the Yiddish word for a nice bite, "and sandwich. Sandwich is pegged to the price at Katz's."

I yawned. Maybe a little too emphatically. "Genius, Uncle Slappy."

With that, he finished his coffee and trundled off into his bedroom, parting with these words: "It's meshugga, to talk about such things this late."

I noticed he grabbed "Wired" on his way out.

Uncle Slappy visits the Bronx.

Uncle Slappy just called, precisely as I asked him to. He and Aunt Sylvie left our apartment early this morning and what with the unseasonable cold and 45-mile-per-hour gusts, I wanted to make sure he and Aunt Sylvie made it home safe and sound.

“Boychick,” he began, “the Riverdale bus was like clockwork. But who wants to ride in a clock.”

“You made it up to the Bronx ok?”

“If anything can be ok after spending the whole day in the Hebrew Home for the Wretched with Sidney Lowenstein, we’re ok.”

“Thank god,” I said.

“There’s soup in the Frigidaire?”

Uncle Slappy has visited me about four or six times a year since he moved to Boca about five years ago. There has never once not been soup in the Frigidaire.

“Mushroom barley,” I answered “and chicken in the pot,” which is a noodle-ly concoction of broth, carrot spears, large pieces of chicken and of course noodles. It is, I believe, the only soup in the world which you have to eat with a knife and fork.

“A choice,” he mocked. “A regular Grossinger’s on 83^rd Street.”

“So how was Mr. Lowenstein? How is he adjusting to assisted living?”

“Ach,” the old man said. “Assassinated living. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enema.”

I’ve known Uncle Slappy for the whole of my 56 years. I can spot one of his monologues coming from a mile away. They’re a bit like a sandstorm in the desert. You can’t avoid them. All you can do is take cover.

“He’s recovering quite well, Lowenstein. Only last week when we came up here, we were quite worried about him.”

I didn’t feed Uncle Slappy a line. Instead I allowed my silence to be used as his timing. I have played his straight-man since my earliest days.

“We were worried about him. He had a triple overpass.”

This time I gave in.

“You mean ‘triple bypass,’” I pressed.

“No.” He paused. “Triple overpass. He got lost on the Henry Hudson Parkway.”

In the background I heard the old man slurp some soup. And with his usual impeccable timing, hang up the phone.

A ditty.

Mark Harris is a great writer that no one has ever heard of. He's most famous for having written "Bang the Drum Slowly." But to my mind that was just one of his peaks in a mountain range of work.

Harris' "Wake Up, Stupid," is to this day one of the funniest books I've ever read. Up there with the best of Joseph Heller, George MacDonald Fraser, Bruce Jay Friedman, or even early Philip Roth.

I've taken a ditty from "Wake up, Stupid" and rewritten it for me.

George Tannenbaum's obituary, George Tannenbaum denied.
"I amn't dead,"
George Tannenbaum said,
"And I won't be dead 'till the day I've died."

Dreams.

One thing I've always been able to do is work while I'm asleep. That's not to say I find empty conference rooms or doze at my desk. Work often feels like a leg of the Bataan Death March, but I've yet to actually slumber during a meeting.

No, what I mean is this.

When I'm in a throes of a project, it's a full-body experience for me. Even when my timesheet accounting ends, my mind continues tinkering. That continues when I roll into bed. It's not unusual for me to wake up with a manifesto written and eight or a dozen print headlines.

I've been doing for this for years and I've learned not to leave a pad by my bed. If the work is good, I'll remember it. If I've dreamed something like "A 3D printer is marshmallow cupcake," it usually falls out of my mind before I wake up.

Last night I dreamed of all sorts of things. No headlines, but a skein of future assignments where my work carries the day. To great acclaim.

I suppose this is a bit like a ballplayer working on his swing or a pitcher throwing endlessly, just honing his mechanics.

I also dream continuations of books I'm reading, blog posts, and chasing leggy blondes into the sea.

I suppose someday all of this, too, might come in handy.