Manhattan Melody.

I was up early this morning.

Rosy-fingered dawn was gripping the eastern horizon. A sky like Homer saw, or Gilgamesh, or Don Quixote. The same sky.

Salmon-colored streaks of cirrus over the sweeping parabola of the Hell's Gate Bridge and the turreted towers of the Triboro.

A plane taking off from LaGuardia, five miles east split the nascent sunrise.

A silver crescent of the moon like an Arabian flag.

Below the diamond brightness of Venus, the morning star.

The river was flowing in from the sea and flat and fast.

The lighthouse, the grey stone lighthouse that was knocked out by Sandy, was back on, its dim light illuminating nothing more than a path for runners.

A tug pushed downriver a threesome of barges out to sea.

Some boys were playing already a game of four on four on the basketball courts.

Women kicked and rotated and bent to the gruff of their exercise instructor.

This was my morning.

Far away from the turbulence of the world and the boil of the office.

Quiet.

Holiday grocery shopping with Uncle Slappy.

Uncle Slappy and Aunt Sylvie arrived on the 6:50AM flight from Boca, landing at LaGuardia airport at just before 10AM. I was there to pick them up and it didn't take long for Uncle Slappy to begin.

"Boychick, I've got spilkas like you can only get from sitting in 'economy class.' Let's drop Aunt Sylvie off at home and let's you and I go for a walk."

After all these years, I've learned to take Uncle Slappy's moods in stride. "That's exactly what I was thinking. As a matter of fact, assuming it's ok with Aunt Sylvie, I have a shopping list here in my pocket. We can head up to Fairway and do a little grocery."

Aunt Sylvie agreed. She was more than happy to have him out of her grey but luxuriant hair for a while.

I pulled up to the front of my co-op, put on the flashers and took Aunt Sylvie and their luggage up to the apartment. Rosh Ha Shanah starts on Saturday and Yom Kippur finishes up ten days later. In all, Aunt Sylvie and Uncle Slappy were planning on staying with us for nearly two weeks. It made sense to go up to Fairway and buy some provisions.

"The chocolate covered graham crackers," Uncle Slappy began, "with the raspberry jam filling. These they still make."

I was navigating the Bruckner Expressway, never an easy task and made tougher by having to keep up with Uncle Slappy.

"The last I checked, they had them."

"Because there's a law, you know. They have to stop making everything old people enjoy. And close every restaurant we used to like."

"I understand," I temporized. "It seems that nothing lasts anymore."

"You know what lasts? Tsurrus (ed. note: troubles) lasts. A restaurant with lines out the door, they close down. Just when my frequent diner card is about fully full. But tsurrus, it lasts forever."

I steered the Simca through the various mergers of various highways and made my way to the pock-marked asphalt service roads off of exit 10. I steered around the abyss and into the Fairway parking lot in Pelham Bay, just a glottal spit's distance away from the border of the Bronx.

We stopped first at Fairway's liquor store to pick up some wine for the holiday meal. A young African American came over to help us.

"You have Kosher wines," I asked.

"In the back," he answered, politely.

"Sure," Uncle Slappy said, "stick the Jews in the back."

The young black man laughed nervously. He wasn't sure if Uncle Slappy was channeling his inner Allan Dershowitz, or if he was joking. Fortunately, the salesclerk soon found other customers to help and he made a quick escape from the Kosher section.

"You think god cares that the wine is Kosher," Uncle Slappy began. "Why would it matter that the grape was ritually killed according to the ancient tradition. Bag the Kosher," the old man tugged at my shirt, "Let's get some Italianische. They know how to make wine."

I picked up three bottles and we began walking toward the giant food store.

"Listen," Uncle Slappy said, "In the car with the air condition I'll wait. Tired."

I brought Uncle Slappy over to the car and turned on the a/c.

Before I did any real shopping I brought him out a cup of coffee, black, and three cinnamon rugelach.

He took a bite and closed his eyes, savoring the treats.

"So the chocolate graham cracker they didn't have?"

I went back to the store to finish my shopping.

The first thing I bought were the chocolate grahams.

Everyone needs money.

There's this asinine notion in our business, you see it in full-flower over in the comments section of Agency Spy, that somehow creating a commercial that isn't high-art, that is, doing a commercial that is actually commercial is somehow a sin of the highest magnitude.

You're a hack if you're behind a spot on $5 footlongs, or two cheesy-crust pizzas for $9.99. Such work is below us. We are not crass. We mold and shape brand image.

The other day I saw a trailer for a new movie, "The Intern," starring Academy Award Winners Robert DeNiro and Anne Hathaway.

Like many people I regard DeNiro as one of the finest actors of our generation. "The Intern," however looked like a dumbed-down "Gilligan's Island." In other words, dumber than dumb.

Here's the thing.

Everyone needs money.

Even DeNiro does crap for a million or five.

DeNiro does a film like "The Intern."

We do "$5 footlongs."

That's just life. Even "artists" need to eat.

As Tennessee Williams wrote in "The Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," "You won't live with mendacity? Well, you're an expert at it! The truth is pain and sweat and payin' bills and makin' love to a woman that you don't love any more. Truth is dreams that don't come true, and nobody prints your name in the paper 'til you die."

In other words, get over the effete shit.

Do the best work you can do. Fight for great work. But this is commerce.

And everyone needs money.

An imbroglio.

A friend writes:

"For most of the last month I’ve been getting in around 7 and leaving between 10PM and 4AM.

During that time, I took a lot of UBERs and a lot of Vias, a new cab-sharing service in New York.

I think all told, while I was billing 100 hour weeks, I charged $150 in taxis.

Just minutes ago, a holding company employee named ______  __________ based somewhere in India rejected my reimbursement because some of my receipts had the logo of the cab company cut off.

The inference made by Mr. __________ is, of course, that I am somehow attempting to rip-off the company. That I have an evil plan to drive a holding company with a market cap of $XX.X billion, out of business one $17 cab ride at a time.

(Let’s forget for a second that for whatever reason I am floating a $XX.X billion company a loan. That I have to outlay my money and wait for them to reimburse me.)

I realize Mr. __________  is just doing his job. I realize he has to be eternally vigilant.

But to my mind am employer-employee relationship should be based on trust. Apparently that’s notion is as quaint as antimacassars on a gingham-upholstered sofa.

So, Mr. _________ , I have spent an hour resubmitting my expenses. That probably cost the holding company $300 in lost revenue. 

Congratulations on a job well done."

New logos and old.

The Red Wheelbarrow
--William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

I’ve always believed in the profundity of the William Carlos Williams above. That so much depends upon little touches of god in the serendipity of life. I believe in beautiful purple skies over a roiling city. I believe in a precise and surprising turn of a phrase that brings a smile or stimulates a thought. I believe in the wonders of an artistic touch, of looking at old things in new ways.

That said, I think 99% of the design crap we as an industry obsess over makes as much difference as spending a quarter from 2015 as opposed to spending a quarter from 2013.

One of our current industry obsessions is slight tweaks to logos.

A lot of ink was spilled when Yahoo changed theirs. But guess what? Yahoo is still irrelevant.

Google could render their logo in cuneiform and I’m still not switching to Alta Vista.

As for Verizon, they were a hateful company of rapacious oligarchs when their logo was a series of juxtaposed Nazi runes. They’re a hateful company now with their slightly better logo. They’d be a hateful company if their logo were nothing but smiley faces and unicorn feces.

I’m not for a second saying logos don’t matter. But they don’t matter much if the company behind them blows.

As Willy Loman found out in “Death of a Salesman,” life demands more than a handshake and a smile.

Redesign your logo all you want. It’s all but meaningless if it’s not representative of your deeper values as an entity.

Rectangles.

By the time I got my first agency job in 1984, I had already worked two quasi-advertising jobs.

The first was when I was in school and was writing copy on shoes for the Montgomery Ward catalog. These were pre-Amazon, pre-Walmart times and Montgomery Ward was a viable retailer, trailing by a long-shot Sears, but still producing thousands of catalog pages a year.

I wrote those pages. And though I didn't know it at the time I learned a lot.

I learned how to take briefs. I learned how to work with art directors, one of whom was 30 years my senior, cantankerous as a tugboat and drunk off his ass most afternoons. I learned how to work with supervisors, proofreaders, typesetters and producers.

Most important, I learned how to write fast. How to write on demand. And how to write to fit.

I also learned how to dig myself out of a hole if I found myself in one. I learned to solve problems and solve them quickly.

In the two years that I worked at Montgomery Ward, I probably wrote over a thousand catalog pages. This isn't conceptual, high-quality stuff. I guess catalog pages are to print advertising what newspaper inches are to a novel.

From Montgomery Ward, I got a job at the in-house advertising department of Bloomingdale's. This was the apotheosis of Bloomingdale's, of store as 'event.' Marvin Traub was in-charge and Bloomingdale's was hot. Also, my boss was John C. Jay who went onto fame, and I presume fortune at Wieden & Kennedy.

Bloomingdale's was much like Wards. It was a tonnage game. I was there for just short of three years and probably produced 10-15 ads a week, 50 weeks a year.

You got used to getting a brief. Getting a layout. Writing your copy. Sending it to your supervisor. Having it approved, put into layout, approved again. You got used to producing work--seeing your ads in "The New York Times."

Again, most of the ads were of the "Save 20% on Pure Cotton Towels" variety. But I emerged from these apprenticeships unafraid of my keyboard and comfortable filling a blank page.

Though we kibbitzed at both places, and I made friends and hung out and had beers, neither place allowed theorizing. You can't print a page of Theory in the Times.

Today, we've forgotten that at some level our job is to find a rectangle and fill it with compelling words and pictures. There are people who spend their days talking about global media paradigms and the disruption caused by cross-channel whoozamawhats.

None of this, really, has anything to do with what our jobs really are.

Which is to persuade people to buy shit.

Somehow, along the way, that's gotten lost.

The tyranny of short.

If you're a copywriter--any kind of writer, I assume, though I am only a copywriter--you hear about 10 or a dozen times an hour that you need to make your copy shorter.

"There's too much copy."

"It looks like a lot of copy."

"Can you cut the copy."

When I write a piece of copy, I always throw a couple of jokes in. Little risible bits just to keep things moving along, just to make sure things don't get as serious as a tomb.

It's my way of keeping the reader or the viewer on her toes. Keeping her awake. Giving her something, hopefully amusing or entertaining or educational for the time she's giving to me.

Last night I re-watched the first 20 minutes of the great Frank Capra movie, "Meet John Doe," written by one of the best screenwriters ever, Robert Riskin. It was all I could do to tear my way away from the set, but I was as tired as the Bataan Death March and needed my sleep.

In any event, Walter Brennan makes his damning "Helot" speech in it about the state of our fucked up world. In it he says, "I know the world's been shaved by a drunken barber."

It occurred to me how easy it would have been to cut that line from the script, or edit it out of the scene. It added nothing to the plot, and little extra to Brennan's character.

But what a line, what a perfect line. Full of wisdom, cynicism, pain, sadness and humor.

Sometimes good writing, good copy has to have room to breathe. Sometimes, it pays to give talented people the space to show off a bit, like Michael Jordan pump-faking on a breakaway dunk. You don't always have to go straight for the basket.

But, as always, I am vox clamatis in deserto.

A voice crying in the desert.

Shaved by a drunken barber.

A tough stretch in Saltillo.

As a rule it doesn’t rain much in Saltillo, Mexico in the summer. But 40 years ago, as I manned third-base for the Saraperos de Saltillo in the Mexican Baseball League, it was positively diluvian.

As a consequence of the rain, as our long-season limped to its sad conclusion (we were entrenched in next to last place, four games in front of the Sultanes de Monterrey and five games behind the Toros de Tijuana) we had a spate of make-up games to play, forcing us to play 11 games in just one week: two double-headers, three single games, and two more double-headers.

I don’t know what it’s like working in a coal mine with a pickaxe for hours on end, or working on an assembly line, or doing hard manual labor. A ballgame is different. There’s maybe 45-seconds any one individual does in any ballgame. Unless you’re  a catcher or a pitcher, there’s about 45 seconds of running, throwing, swinging.

A lot more time is standing around of course, more, even, sitting around. A fair amount of kibitzing and a giant portion of ragging and scratching. Still 11 games in just seven days fairly ground us to a smooth nub.

Mostly it started the way these things almost always start. Arulfo would be on the bench during a game next to Cespedes and he’d poke Cespedes in the ribs. Cespedes would brush his hand away. Arulfo would redouble his efforts. Before long Arulfo had poked one time too many and the two were rolling in the dust, squaring off trying to club each other with Louisville Sluggers.  

It was like that times the 25 guys on the team. As the youngest guy on the squad, only an ersatz Mexican and Hector’s putative hijo, I was fairly immune from such. That said, at dinner one evening German Barojas, who three seasons after I left Saltillo got called up to Detroit and wound up marrying and divorcing Karmen Rodriguez, hid a baseball in a heap of mashed potatoes and gravy on my plate at dinner.

Usually when ragging stuff like that happened, someone put cockroaches in your bed or Ben-Gay in your jock or glue in your hairbrush, I had enough personal wherewithal to walk away. That mashed potato dinner was different, at least that evening. Like the Hands of Orlac, I found mine gripping Barojas’ neck and threatening to choke him to death.

“Fuck you, Barojas.”

“No, fuck you.”

Generally the discourse degenerated from there.

11 games in seven days meant everyone hated each other. Players hated, coaches hated, batboys hated. Even Hector Quesadilla who was blessed with equinimity the likes of which I haven’t seen since Mother Teresa died, or since that summer 40 years ago, was frazzled to a fine crisp.

I read somewhere that the great Yankee perfesser, Casey Stengel, once said “the secret to managing is keeping the 10 guys who hate you away from the 15 who are undecided.” Well, in this Hector had a lost cause. Everyone hated each other, everyone hated him, everyone hated the stupid league we played in and the game we had dedicated our lives to.

A typical conversation would go like this:

“Their pitcher telegraphs his curve. Watch how his elbow tucks in,” one player would say to another.

“Fuck you,” would be the invariable response.

Soon a gaggle of men would be standing in the dugout, groups of six, maybe, squaring off, teetering just millimeters from a full-blown donnybrook.

11 games in seven days, and we lost the first four, dropping both ends of a double-header twice. My bat had all but vanished and as a rag, someone, I don’t know who, had taken all my lumber from the bat rack in the dugout, hidden my wood and replaced it with an old fly-swatter they had stolen from some down-at-the-heels Holiday Inn in Campeche or somewhere.

We won our next two games, leaving us at 2-4 for the stretch and then proceeded to drop the next four by a combined score of something like 50-10. They were out-and-out slaughters, which only raised the tension and the rancor in the clubhouse.

Our last game, our 11^th, before a day-off started inauspiciously at best. “Brutus” Cesar, our fleet centerfielder was leading off. Adame in the on-deck circle called as Cesar stepped up.

“Brutus, you suck.”

Cesar stepped out.

“Fuck you, Adame.”

“No. Fuck you.”

In seconds, the two were sprawled on the ground and our bench was empty with a dozen guys backing Cesar squaring off against the dozen guys backing Adame.

Hector had had enough. He ran out to the imbroglio grabbing the first thing he could put his hands on, a 10-lb sack of sunflower seeds. He began swatting at the boys with the bag and yelling, “Parada, pollo cabrones.” “Enough chicken fuckers.”

At the exact moment Hector said pollo cabrones, Hector’s bag of sunflower seeds split, spilling thousands of seeds everywhere and sending Adame and Cesar ass over teakettle onto the dirt.

The 4,000 or so fans in the stands were clustered predominately behind home and saw the whole shebang. Naturally, they picked up on ‘pollo cabrones’ and began chanting it in an elongated fashion.

Whatever, the pollo caabrones fight broke the tension of the week. For the rest of the game we were loose again, slapping each other on the back with a hearty greeting of chicken fuckers.

I think we scored 12 runs that last of 11 games, going into a much-needed day off, and we won like a good thoroughbred, going away.

Or rather, we won like a bunch of chicken fuckers, flapping our weary wings away.

Washing windows.

It was another one of those weekends.

Another one of those mornings.

I was in with the window-washers.

Long before the guy who makes the coffee.

As Frank Loesser wrote,

"My time of day is the dark time
A couple of deals before dawn,
When the street belongs to the cop
And the janitor with a mop,
And the grocery clerks are all gone."

That ain't bad.

As poetry.

I don't mind being in with the window-washers.

That's what I do.

Wash windows.

Usually the grunt work that the effete can't do.

You can't think about it too much. You drop the brush in the water and swipe clean. Then you move onto the next panes of glass.

Work that needs to be done.

Not glamorous.

But better than pigeon shit obscuring your view.

Cool. Back when.

The Times ran an article yesterday called "When Airlines Looked Cool and Showed It." You can read it here. And below, a few of the 33 posters in the slideshow.