A new week begins.

Last week was a bad one.

Too awful and internecine for details.

Let's just put it this way: not counting vacations, I've had a career of roughly 1,600 weeks.

This was probably the worst.

But this weekend, I got a weekend.

The storm system that blew no good had passed. The situation that had looked so hopeless and dire, well, let's just say cooler heads prevailed.

So early Saturday morning and early Sunday morning, I loaded up my 1966 Simca model 1600 and drove up to the beach.

It's a long strip of sand rimmed by a boardwalk, empty now that summer is gone.

In the distance you can see the girders of the lonely Ferris wheel and the interlacing beams of the old wooden roller coaster.

The beach is quiet.

The Long Island Sound has under-achieving waves. They break with a whisper, not a roar.

While the water was cold--cold for humans anyway, it was perfect for the half-dozen or so retrievers or labs or Portuguese water dogs who cavorted in the surf.

We walked and walked. Back from one end to half mile away, the other end. Me throwing Whiskey's duck decoy in the sea so she could, triumphantly, bring it back to me.

I was far from the noise of an edit suite.

Far from the chips and the crises. Far, too, from the intractable horror of terrorism, and terrorists we can't seem to defeat.

The weather was clear and sunny and windy.

Perfect you might say.

In that it kept the dogs active and the people away.

A man with a lab walked toward me. He tossed a ball for his pup and smoked a cigar as long as a baby's arm.

We chitted and chatted for a moment.

Then he went his way and I went mine.

Whiskey rolled in the wet sand.

Who cares, I thought.

Who cares.

Friday's ontological ramble.

The great director Preston Sturges, whom no one today has heard of, wrote and directed a pretty great movie in 1948 called "Unfaithfully Yours."

In it, a middle-aged conductor (Rex Harrison) suspects his much younger wife (Linda Darnell) of having an affair.

We cut to Harrison conducting his orchestra, and to three different pieces of music, he plots how to get rid of Darnell. To a fiery piece by Rossini, he murders her. Accordingly to pieces by Wagner and Tchaikovsky he alternately shoots himself, or magnanimously writes Darnell a large check and dissolves his marriage.

It's a pretty good movie, with Sturges' unmatched dialogue and his troupe of really superior character actors.

When my life (at work at least) is in tumult, as it is right now, I often think of the sound-track I would put to the movie.

Last night, I Gotterdammerung-ed for a good three hours.

This morning, I am feeling more optimistic. I'm still Wagnerian, but I am listening to Tannhauser. Which isn't quite the sound-track for the end-times that Gotterdammerung is.

--
I think the biggest determinant of success in a job is what kind of macro "code of justice" that agency has.

Some places, you are innocent until proven guilty.

Others, as Stanley Kowalski would say, follow the Napoleonic Code, where the opposite is true. Where your work is assumed to suck until you show it otherwise.

I know this is dark--I'm talking Wagner and Guilt--for a Friday. Maybe dark for any day. And I'm sorry for that. As I wrote yesterday, I don't have polio or dengue fever, and in the parlance of King Creole and the Coconuts, I am 'young, gifted and white.'

Truth of the matter is, often work--and life--is like trying to drive up Pike's Peak in a 1976 Ford Capri. (I had one. It never worked.)

You sputter, mufflers fall off, engine blocks seize.

But eventually, somehow, you keep going. And you keep going up.

I guess that's the lesson in all this.

It ain't Gotterdammerung. The gods aren't smiting you with flames and destruction. The columns holding back hell aren't ruptured.

No.

Some crap happened, like stepping in Karmic dogshit.

Eventually you get it off your shoes.

And you keep going.

13 Yiddish Curses for the Modern Ad Agency. (A repost.)

Yiddish is nearly a dead language. But when it comes to curses, it remains a vibrant one. I was the butt end of a lot of these when I was growing up. It's surprising I didn't grow like an onion.

In any event, I thought it made sense to update those curses for today's eminently curse-able ad industry.

1. May your agency be bought by a French holding company that only one day

earlier merged with a colony of fire ants.*

* A tip of the Yarmulke to Josh Tavlin for this one.

2. May the client remove everything good from your copy

except for one line, and may that line no longer make sense.

3. May you be sent to a two-day offsite and attend so many meetings

that you shit Powerpoint decks in the morning and vomit Excel at night.

4. With each powerpoint that you sit through,

may your nose grow another hair.

5. May the agency’s food co-op run out of kale.

6. May you grow like a deck, getting

fatter and more meaningless by the minute.

7. May your office be open plan,

and may everyone each lunch at their desk,

and may every day they eat liverwurst.

8. May your client get two months to do research,

may your planners get two weeks to read the results,

and may you get two days to do the creative.

9. May your client realize the disparity between social media hype

and reality and may you be held accountable for it.

10. Let there be a creative department shakeup,

and may the new head have won awards only for ads that never ran.

11. May the wool hat you wear inside all summer

grow tighter each time you talk about user experiences.

12. May your beard grow lice and may each of those lice

tell you what’s wrong with your design.

13. May your holding company announce large bonuses
but may they be exclusively for people who don’t need them.

Oy vey.

Having a bit of a crisis at work.

So I won't be writing a real live post today.

Just another of my increasingly frequent apologies.

For being too busy to write.

Of course, I don't have polio, god forbid, or dengue fever.

No matter what happens, I suppose I'll be ok,

On the other hand....

A night along the river.

It was drizzling last night, and cool, a Central Casting mid-November day if ever there was one, with a mild Nor’easter doing its damnedest to remove the remaining leaves from the remaining trees.

I was restless and had no stomach to watch yet another Republican debate—it was blowing worse than the storm, so I decided to do what I do on nights like these. I fastened up my ancient oil-skin, put on an old baseball cap and accoutered Whiskey, my three-and-a-half year-old golden retriever,  for a long walk along the river.

The weather being what it was I didn’t expect much company, so I was surprised when I saw a gaggle of Puerto Rican men on the pathway around 93^rd Street, up where they’re, slowly, building the new marine transfer station to bring New York sludge from garbage trucks to ships, then out 12 miles to sea, where it’s dumped in international waters.

The three men were leaning on the cast iron railing, smoking cigarettes and drinking ponys of Bud. They were speaking in rapid fire Spanish and occasionally spitting into the upflowing murk of the East River, watching the residue of their effluvium ride the tide toward Harlem.

“Buenos noches,” I said, carefully eliding my esses in proper Puerto Rican enunciation..

“Buenos noches,” the oldest one returned.

It was then I noticed a thick strand of rope tied over the railing, which indicated to me that they had a net in the water and were going for late-season blue-claw crabs.

“You have caught anything?” I asked them.

“We have caught nothing,” the short one answered. “We are not here to catch. We are here to talk.”

I wondered why they had chosen a rainy strip of concrete to talk, not the incandescent warmth of a bar.

“We are here to talk to ‘El Triste.’”

Just then, one of the men pulled up their crab net. Inside was a large crab with, if I can mix my metaphors, doe eyes. They released El Triste from the netting, gave him the requisite chicken neck to gnaw on and let him scamper on the sidewalk.

“Every night at this hour. We come to talk to El Triste.”

Whiskey sniffed at the crustacean who seemed not to notice.

“Buenos noches, mi amigos,” El Triste spoke.

“The Sad One speaks,” said one of the men.

El Triste left his chicken neck and scampered over to one of the beaten wooden benches the homeless sleep on in the sun. He climbed and sat on it, like a throne. This fairly spooked Whiskey and she began pulling me to leave.

“Escuchar. El Triste habla.” Listen. The Sad One speaks. The three men dropped their cigarettes into the viscous water below.

“Thoreau was right,” El Triste said. “And he wasn’t even a crab, but a man. And a fresh-water man, at that. Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

El Triste cleared his throat and one of the men spoke up.

“Y vaya a la tumba con la canción todavía en ellos.”

“Yes,” said the crab, “And go to the grave with the song still in them.”

With that, the crab leaped off the bench and scampered back into  the water with a loud 
kersplash.

The three Puerto Ricans looked at the water then lit their cigarettes again and drank their Buds. They spit, each in sequence into the murk. Their way of saying gracias to El Triste.

Whiskey pulled again at her leash. I bid the men goodnight.

And walked home with the song still in me.

A night at the Times.

Last night I left early and went to something called a "Times Talk," over at "The New York Times" building on 620 Eighth Avenue and 41st Street.

The building itself is a tower of strength.

Tall, beautiful, rich-looking and beautifully designed.

But the folks at the Times, unlike most people running agencies, know that their giant office tower is built on disrupted ground.

The news industry has seminally changed.

Advertising revenue has cratered.

The Times knows it's in a fight for its very survival.

The talk I went to was hosted by Food Editor, Sam Sifton with food writer Julia Moskin. And as much as they spoke about recipes, restaurant reviews and the craft of journalism, they talked, imho, about bigger, more important things.

They talked about "unique visits." They talked about reaching new audiences with new digital appurtenances. They talked about      how      to     give     real    value    to     readers.

Sifton and Moskin talked, in a macro-sense about keeping the paper relevant to its readers and thereby reaching new readers.

Sifton was busting his buttons when he told the audience that the Cooking section received five-million unique page views in October, and already in November has received three million unique views.

What we are missing in our business is what Sifton and Moskin were hitting upon.

It's the necessity of giving the viewer information, entertainment, ideas, insight they can't get anywhere else.

Beautifully crafted. Respectful of the viewer's time. Valuable.

If advertising as an industry is to re-assert its relevance we have to be, above all, relevant. We have to remember--messaging isn't about what we want to say, it's about information consumers need.

Signs of New York.

5 Minutes with Our CCO.

AD AGED: So you’re a CCO, a Chief Creative Officer?

CCO: No. That’s what CCO used to stand for. The Agency model is dramatically different today.
My title supersedes Chief Creative Officer.

AD AGED: I think I understand what you just said. Be that as it may, what today does CCO stand   for?

CCO: CCO? Chief Confusion Officer.

AD AGED: What does your job as Chief Confusion Officer do?

CCO: I speak.

AD AGED: You speak.

CCO:  in half and lemongrass. Vietnam. Cincinnati. Spot buy. Fractional.

AD AGED: Yes.

CCO: Fish and bananas and the electrical grid.

AD AGED: Wait, I’m confused.

CCO: Exactly. I speak in cryptic and partial sentences that engender the exigencies of  modal
parameters. In other words, Lesotho arm chair. See what I did there? I sew confusion. Ergo, my title.

AD AGED: Again, I’m confused.

CCO: That’s ok. Just re-do everything for tomorrow morning . Oh, one more thing.

AD AGED:  Yes?

CCO: Umbrella porcupine drain-pipe.

Football and awards.

The Giants were playing the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. It was the fourth quarter and it was a close game.

I’m not much of a football fan, so when I do turn on a game, I usually turn off the volume and leave it on in the background.

With about two minutes left in the game and the Giants holding a slim lead, my wife of 31 years called me in to dinner. Tampa Bay was on the march and the Giants, weak at holding a lead, seemed poised to lose once again in the 4^th quarter.

The next I saw of the game, one burly Buccaneer was congratulating another. I assumed they had scored and won the game. But no, I subsequently found out. The Giants had zoomed ahead. But still the Tampa Bay players were applauding each other.

It’s a funny thing for someone of my era to see the chest-bumping, ass slapping and fist-bumping of this generation of athletes. These nationally-televised recognitions seem to take up about 1/3 of every broadcast.

Over in the National Basketball Association, high fives are exchanged even when a player misses a free throw—one of the surest shots in all of sports.

It occurred to me, we follow much the same practice in our industry.

If you believe that in our business, we have two key goals, to either drive sales or enhance a company’s reputation, we have a shocking number of awards for work that does neither of these fairly measurable tasks.

We congratulate each other for a hard tackle or a nice run even when it has no bearing on the purpose of  our game. We congratulate ourselves for ads that never ran, for assignments we never had, for clients who barely exist.

There's another football game on tonight.

If you want to see what our awards mania looks like, all you need to do is tune in. 

Old meets young in the Mexican League.

Toward the end of my lone season playing for the Saraperos de Saltillo in the Mexican Baseball League, an old man joined the club, meeting us as we played a set in Torreon. He would be an extra arm from the bullpen and an extra pitching coach for Hector Quesadilla, whose staff was struggling.

As luck would have it, Guillermo Sisto, was given the locker next to mine. In short order, the youngest player on the team, me, became friends with the oldest.

“Buenos tardes,” I said by way of introduction.

We shook hands. As men did 40 years ago.

“He jugado durante 50 clubes de béisbol,” he answered. “I have played for 50 baseball clubs.”

I laughed.

“Many seasons, I played for six or seven clubs. And I have never made the big leagues,” the old man said. “I played with Hector Quesadilla, the great Hector Quesadilla, when he was a young man and was coveted in the Major Leagues.”

He unloaded his stuff from his sky blue team duffle bag into his locker. His spikes looked like a boxer who had lasted too many rounds in the ring, against a Frazier, or a Louis, or a Marciano.

“I played and played and played. For club after club. In cities that have now been reduced to towns. And in towns that have grown into cities. I have been playing in the league since 1948.”

That was a full ten years before I was born. I looked at his glove as he unpacked it. It was one of the old models, like the glove my father had used when we had catches when I was a boy.

We dressed alongside each other, getting ready for some warm-ups before that evening’s game.

“Here’s the thing ,” he said, studying me.

“Baseball I have been playing for 28 seasons. 28 seasons for 50 different clubs. From cities you have never heard of. From cities,” he rubbed my cheek with his hand, “from cities that haven’t seen a white face since the Conquistadores left. Old cities, sad cities, broken cities, small cities that are no more than a small collection of shacks.

“I have played everywhere. Always trying to do what was asked of me. When a team needed a second-baseman, I played second. An arm from the bullpen, I would be in the bullpen. Pinch running, pinch hitting. Playing outfield. Or just riding the pine just in case.”

“50 teams,” I said dumbly. “I didn’t know there were 50 teams.”

“There are a million teams,” he answered, lacing his spikes. “Maybe for all of them I will play someday.”

I laughed at that.

“He is the truth, I will tell you, Jorge Navidad.”

We stood up to walk through the semi-gloss tunnel from the locker-room to the field.

“I was never much of a ballplayer,” he said.

He hit the field and limbered up with a light catch. He threw with a sweet motion and a pop on his tosses. Maybe he was showing off.

“I was never much good,” Guillermo went on. “But the game I love. So, I play, always hoping for one more game.”

He zipped one in.

"Maybe this is my time," he said, smiling. And then he jogged off--tilting slightly to the left--into the coming twilight.