The greatest headline of the 20th Century.

Vincent Musetto died on Tuesday in the Bronx.

Vincent who?

Well, you could argue that Mr. Musetto wrote the best headline  of the 20th Century when Charles Dingle shot and killed Herbert Cummings in a Queens saloon and forced a female hostage to decapitate Cummings' corpse.

"The New York Times" headlined the gore this way: "Owner of a Bar is Shot to Death; Suspect is Held." That's what you'd expect from the Times. Austere, sober, serious. Headlessness was not mentioned until paragraph three. They didn't mention toplessness at all.

Musetto was more lurid, more sensational, more alive. He was writing to sell copies from newsstands. He was writing to hawk papers.

I guess if the Post rewrote David Ogilvy's headline "At 60 miles per hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls Royce comes from the electric clock," they'd write something like "Quiet luxe car perfect for noisy orgies."

You can read Musetto's obit here.

And be sure to stay out of topless bars. Headless or otherwise.

Tough Tuesday.

It's a plug-ugly day in New York.

One of those days where the stink and grey of the asphalt blends seamlessly into the stink and grey of the sky. It's already hot and sticky--and it's raining too, and warm, and not even eight o'clock.

They're expecting temperatures in the 90s later this week and hail and thunder later today. Maybe this will be it. When our sick planet finally jumps its axis and hurtles off into space at tens of thousands of miles per hour crashing into Alpha Centauri or some other nearby celestial body.

Maybe this is it. Maybe not.

I've got the gloom of about five projects hanging over my head now and each one has my lungs in its grip, squeezing the air out of me.

Some combination of being new and working with and for new people and the shear amount of work has me tied up in knots.

My rational side knows I'll get through it. But it's not my rational side that's screaming for attention now.

As Hank Williams sang so many years, "I've been down that road before."

I'll be down it again.

And get through this.

Pipe-bomb advertising.

I'm reading a book now called "Days of Rage." At this point, about 100 pages into the book, the story is about an era I lived through but barely remember. That is, the terrorism wrought by the radical group, The Weatherman movement.

There's a point about advertising in here, so hold on.

The Weather Underground blew things up. They planned to "off pigs," carry-out political kidnappings and if a baby or two got killed along the way, well that was collateral damage.

The Weather Underground were like a lot of clients, in my view.

They saw people not as living, breathing individuals. But as an abstraction. Something that could be dealt with en masse, or in a way that shows they don't really care.

Advertising is not meant to serve or help the customer. It's meant to explode around the customer (like a pipe-bomb) until you're wounded or estranged.

Just think of the SPAM in your in-box, most auto-dealer ads, and almost all telco ads. These ads are the blunt percussive black-jacks of the marketing world. They rob you of your time, insult your intelligence and in general, treat you like you're a fool and a dimwit.

Nothing is said or done that isn't deceptive, doesn't need an asterisk or delivers real value.

Marketers have a choice.

Treat people as they would like to be treated.

Or act like a terrorist.

Another cab ride.

There's a new app-run car service in New York called Via. It works just like Uber, only instead of having you're own car going your route, you share rides.

The thing is, I can get from home to work, or vice-versa for just $5.44. Just $2.50 more than the subway.

A fantastic deal.

I worked late on Friday and took a Via car home. I had the car to myself until we stopped on Central Park West and 67th to pick another passenger up.

She got into the cab loaded for bear. She immediately got into an argument with the driver. It escalated from there. After five minutes, as we were headed east, things calmed down.

She saw me working on my Mac and asked if I were an editor.

"No, I'm in advertising," I said, "I'm a copywriter."

"That's funny," she remarked "my dad had his own small agency. Did most of the work for Finlandia cheese and Alpine Lace."

I said I knew the work.

"He also did Kraukas hams," she continued.

"Kraukas and Atalantas hams," I corrected.

"How do you know that?" she asked, stunned.

"I heard those commercials on WQXR for my entire childhood. My mother always had the radio on and I must have heard those commercials five times a day for 15 years."

"That's amazing," she said. She gave me her business card and urged me to contact her dad.

"Here's the thing," she said. "I never tried one of those hams. Neither did my dad. He was a Holocaust survivor and kept kosher."

I reached my stop and left the car.

With her business card.

Words.

I used to work for an ECD (when that was an agency's top creative title) called Mike Tesch. A brilliant man and a Hall-of-Famer, most famous for his work building the Federal Express brand. I remember reading something about him that he essentially believed that nearly any marketing problem could be overcome by writing a great TV spot.

That sort of thinking, I suppose, would be excoriated today.

Still, I'm of the mind that Mike was right.

It seems to me--after approximately 90 years in the business just this week--that most clients and agencies don't really know what they want to say or even what they're selling.

I dunno.

Every time I look at a car ad featuring some electronic gizmo in a car--like Chevrolet heralding that one of their cars can give you a wireless connection--I'm absolutely befuddled.

Chevy foisted 50 years of bad products and terrible customer service on America. Is the ability to tweet on I95 really their road to recovery.

Except of course, they're not recovering. They've gone in the last 50 years from 55% marketshare to 17% marketshare.

They seem content to be 1/3 as important as they were.

I guess this is one big digression, when my point was just the opposite.

Write down--in about a commercial's worth of words--what you want to do and what you intend to say.

More people should do that, or try to.

It would make work better.

Wise cab ride.

I jumped in a cab this morning, running late as usual, and noticed the hack number was in the high 300 thousands. That means I had gotten an old cab-driver--he'd been driving since the early 80s, and I knew I'd enjoy my ride.

I asked him, as I do, where he was from.

"West Africa, Ghana," he replied.

We had a quick chat about Kwame Nkrumah, the man who led Ghana to independence who was decades before his time. Then we quickly transitioned to the CIA murder of Patrice Lumumba in Congo and how the US's darling, Mobuto Sese Seko, stole $5 billion before we got fed up with him too.

"You know how you survive in America," he asked me.

I admitted I was doing my best, but bid him to go on.

"You say, 'I don't know.' Ronald Reagan when he was President, every answer was I don't know."

"Plausible deniability they call it," I responded.

"Plausible nothing," he shot back. "I had a guy in my car yesterday talking on his phone. Everything was I don't know. I'm lucky he knew his address."

"I think that would work in my job," I answered.

We had reached 50th and 11th. Where there used to be stevedores and longshoremen, now their are art-directors and planners.

I handed him a $20.

"Change," he said.

"I don't know," I said. Laughing as I walked to my desk.

Defending Sepp Blatter.

Like every year, this year is no different.

We hear about politicians becoming lobbyists and pocketing $16 million a year for peddling influence. We hear about others skimming $11 million off a roads construction contract. And we hear of presidential contenders routinely getting $500K for a canned 45-minute speech you can find on You Tube.

In our industry, we hear of the holding company moguls private jetting and penthousing while collecting 43-million-pound paychecks.

And then there's Sepp Blatter.

Here's the thing.

I'd do it too.

If you put someone that close to that many millions or billions some moral fiber is going to twang. Before long, they have a set of perfect rationales on why they're just taking what they deserve.

Here's what I mean from "On the Waterfront." Rewrite it in your head for any industry.

JOHNNY

I know what's eatin' you, kid. But I got two thousand dues-payin' members in my local— that's seventy-two thousand a year legitimate and when each one of 'em puts in a couple of bucks a day to make sure they work steady— well, you figure it out. And that's just for openers.                               

We got the fattest piers in the fattest harbor in the  world. Everything that moves in and out— we take our cut.                                                    

CHARLEY                          

Why shouldn't we? If we c'n get it we're entitled to it.

JOHNNY                                            (nods)

We ain't robbin' pennies from beggars. We cuttin' ourseves in for five-six million a year just on our half a dozen piers—  a drop in the bucket compared to the traffic in the harbor.

-

So back to Sepp Blatter.

If  3.2 billion people watched the World Cup and he takes two-cents from each of them, he walks home with $64 million.

You think you'd, exposed to that much money, do any different?

A new day.

Yesterday I began working again in a full-time position.

I was "out" of one for fifteen months, pursuing my freelance adventures in the skin trade.

Of course, when I was first released from my previous employ, I felt a mix of crazy emotions. Basically all of Kubler-Ross every day. From anger to depression to acceptance.

From 'those bastards' to 'I'll never work again' to 'this ain't half bad.'

But now I am back within the icy-cold embrace of a big agency within an even bigger and even icier holding company.

There's something comforting about this, despite the ice.

I am surrounded by a familiar culture, on accounts I like, amid people I respect and admire.

I will probably make significantly less than I was earning freelance but with significantly more regularity and structure around me.

These are the trade-offs we all make.

In all, I'm glad to be back.

Glad to know who's buttering my toast.

Glad to know what office I'm heading to day after day.

Glad to be able to build relationships with clients and senior management.

As has been the case since I started Ad Aged, I'll keep the agency as much as possible out of this blog. No names. No clients. No specificity.

I'll be as honest as I can be without getting in trouble. Of course all opinions are mine. Most observations are exaggerated out of pangs of anger or an attempt to be funny.

If you feel compelled to comment on my blog, abide by my rules. Keep certain things that could damage me mum.

One more thing.

Wish me luck.

The game is played.

You're not, they tell me, supposed to take a Juegos de Viejos very seriously, but I did.

I wasn't drunk like some of the boys and I wasn't horsing around like some baseball version of the Harlem Globetrotters. Maybe because I had played just one season in the league, I had more to prove. Maybe because I had laid-off the game so assiduously since 1975, I had to do more than show up. Maybe I felt some touch of god, being back where Hector, mi padre Mexicano had toiled so long had had an effect on me.

Whatever the case I ran out and took my position at third like I meant it. And when the first batted ball of the game came my way, I hopped to my left, picked the ball clean off the grass and nailed the runner with a step or two to spare.

How was that, Hector?

The second ball came my way, too. It was a slow roller down the line. I was able to pick it up barehanded, twist and throw their trotting fat man out by a yard and a half.

We disposed of their third batter as well. Our man on the mound, Celerino "Chile" Gomez, a tall righthander had thrown well. I kibitzed with him on the way to the Saraperos dugout. "You're pitching better now than forty years ago," I told him. "And you are fielding better," he shot back.

We went down one, two, three as well, though Garibay, our best hitter back in 1975, sent a high fastball to the warning track. That got the crowd on their feet, but in the end, nothing.

If you don't know the players, or the league, an old-timers' game is about as interesting as your ex-girlfriend's high school reunion. This one quickly degenerated into a slugfest. Their first guy up in the second, got a Gomez curve--a hanging curve--that landed in the seats in right-center. I caught a foul pop for out one, then they scored two more before Narcisco Elvira, a lefty in for Gomez in relief retired their last batter with something that looked like an eephus pitch. That one handed a laugh to all of the boys playing and sent some of that laughter through the crowd.

We returned to our dugout down three-zip, hoping to make some back during our ups. Our manager for the afternoon, Juan Rodriguez, the Saraperos' regular helmsman started with the chatter we had heard all our lives. "Let's get something going. Let's make contact. Couple hits and we're back in this." Most of the boys ignored his cheering and went on scratching and chewing, either tobacco or sunflower seeds.

Buentello, batting fourth, hit a towering pop-up behind first base that in a normal game, the first-baseman could have caught in his pocket, but in a juegos de viejos, it fell in and Buentello, all 300 drunken pounds of him was safe at first. Aranjo was sent into run and quickly, or not so quickly to be precise, stole second, the whole stadium chuckling at his base-running legerdemain.

My ups, I took a pitch to get a look and then swung late and hit an assertive ground ball between first and second. It would have been an out in any high-school game in the country, but I was safely on first and Aranjo advanced to third.

"Brutus" Cesar came up and Rodriguez gave Aranjo and me the sign for a double steal. I went first and their catcher bounced his peg to second as Aranjo, still speedy I might add, scampered home, stealing our first run.

In total, we scored three in our half of the second, knotting the contest in a tie. We went back and forth like this for three or four more silly ups and downs. We were even--8 to 8 or something like it, when the umpires called the game. It's best when these things end inconsequentially. By leaving no one disappointed, everyone is.

We felt pretty good in the locker-room, and Buentello and Barojas opened a case of cheap Mexican champagne they had bought and we celebrated like we had won what Ring Lardner's rook would have called the World Serious. We all had a little of the rotten wine, dressed and went into our seats right behind the Saraperos' dugout to watch the scheduled game, the Saraperos against the Rieleros de Aquacalientes, the Railroaders. 

In all, it was a fun afternoon.

I got what the great scorekeeper would call was a base-hit and I fielded my position without an error.

How was that, Hector?

Juegos de Viejos.

The game was scheduled for one, so I got to the ball park at nine. I'm a four-hour-early man which makes me almost always the first to arrive. I've found in life that nothing bad ever happens if you show up places early and every so often, something good occurs.

I got dressed in my vintage Saraperos uniform and laced up my old, black leather Riddell spikes. I ran my fingers over my name on the back of my jersey. Navidad. The name Hector gave me on the day that I met him. There's nothing like having your name on the back of a uniform. It made me proud.

I trotted out through the hallway underneath the stands and onto the green. I was alone among the grounds crew who were tending to the field, trimming the grass, sweeping the infield dirt and laying down once again the lime that marks the base paths and batters' boxes.

I jogged for a bit from foul-pole to foul-pole, and old man jiggling like, well, an old man. Then I returned to the infield and sat down right on second base, just taking the whole thing in. I've always felt--ever since I was a little kid--that there's nothing more glorious than a ball park and my vantage point confirmed this.

The air was crisp and clear. The cirrus were high and wispy and the sun was bright. The whole thing, the verdant green of the field, the azure of the sky and the silent roar of the empty stadium around me was perfection. I suppose the feeling is like what a fisherman gets when he's the first one out and his line makes the first ripples in the surf.

In a short while an assortment of fellow 'viejos' began showing up. Four fifths were younger than I, one fifth--if you can believe it, older. I sized them up like you do when you enter an alien sauna. I was intimidated by the couple of guys who seemed in shape. Relieved by the guys whose girth stretched their double-knits to bursting.

A few of us introduced ourselves. We began playing impromptu games of pepper and began loosening up, fielding, throwing, bending and pivoting. I began making the long throw from first to third. There's a chance, I said to myself, I could throw out a gimp who gets a slow start.

The clock kept ticking.

The stands began to fill in.

It was almost time for the game to begin.