Distraction.

A large part of me feels like the biggest problem we face, both in living in the 21^st Century as well as working in advertising, is distraction.

In fact, I’ll assert here something a little sinister.

Distraction is control.

That is when you distract someone, you can control them.

That picture is abundantly clear when you look at the Trump administration. A simple tweet about a football player distracts you from noticing the appointment of 100 reactionary judges or a thousand unraveled regulations.

While you aren’t watching they fuck up the world.

We are sprinting toward destroying our planet but are too distracted (often by people who claim were aren’t destroying our planet) to do anything about it. Likewise, we have a National Security Advisor, John Bolton, who was appointed as a chit to big-money Robert Mercer. Both Bolton and Mercer believe that nuclear war isn’t that bad a thing—and a little radiation would do us all a little good. We never noticed that. We were distracted.

In advertising, we are distracted by the thousand tactics that surround every campaign. We are so distracted by touching people “one-to-one,” that we sometimes give short-shrift to those communications that reach millions at a time.

To put it bluntly, we are so distracted by the quantity of things we need to make that we find ourselves overlooking the quality of the things we make.

I could be wrong here, my knowledge of British social reformers is a little bit rusty, but didn’t Jeremy Bentham say we should do the ‘greatest good for the greatest number’? Not spin out more and more stuff and hope something sticks.

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Maybe the distractions that beleaguer us in advertising aren’t as malevolent as those perpetrated by the un-doers of our Constitution. I’m sure there are many who believe that the brands we work for will be immeasurably strengthened if I stay late yet another night and concoct 97 more targeted social tiles and 132 more programmatic banners.

But I wonder, to use an old macro-economic term, if the opportunity cost of much of the work we do is greater than the benefit we gain from it. I wonder if we all be better off doing fewer better things, than more mediocre things.

After 476 days.

After 476 days, more than half of them at sea in a 44-foot sailboat, my younger daughter Hannah returned home last night.

She began her travels by flying to Trinidad. There, she met the two friends she would sail across the Pacific with. From Trinidad, the trio sailed north to St. Maarten to provision their small craft. And then from St. Maarten, they sailed west, through the Panama Canal some thousands of miles of open ocean across to Fiji.

Hannah's travels included time in New Zealand, three months of running a dive shop in Fiji, back to New Zealand, then, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Croatia, half a dozen cities in Italy, Ghent, Belgium, then South Hampton, Liverpool and London in England. 

I worried with Hannah that on her return she would feel toward the human race like Gulliver did on his return from his travels.

In all the lands Gulliver visited, the only civilized beings he came upon were the Houyhnhnms--a race of exceptionally intelligent and democratic horses who ruled over the people of the land--the Yahoos (no exclamation point, in this case.) The Yahoos were inelegant, stupid and dull--beasts of burden, deserving of little consideration or respect.

Gulliver was so disgusted with people--Yahoos--on his return to London, that he decided he would rather sleep in the stables with the horses, with whom he could converse. He couldn't bear being with people.

It seems, however, Hannah is still fairly well-disposed toward humans. The doormen hugged her, and she hugged them back. She hugged my wife for what seemed like 15 minutes, and even hugged me.

Her acceptance of my Yahoo ways were tempered, I'm sure, by my paying for some fairly good Chinese food, which she devoured in a way that would put many Yahoos to shame.

Hannah's in the tub as I write this. Happy, it seems, to have a nice soak (with bubbles) and then a freshly made queen-sized bed to sleep in. 

It's not all about accepting humans and human ways though.

I think Hannah was happiest, after all, to see Whiskey, her golden retriever, who, it appears she's missed most of all.

Uncle Slappy's Slap of the Week. (Monday Edition.)

On missing the old game.

About three months ago, as regular as the C train, I got a
fedex envelope inviting me over America’s Memorial Day weekend to the Seraperos de Saltillo's annual Juego de Viejos, or Old-Timers' game.

Through the indulgent good graces of my long-suffering wife, I’ve made the last three or four games, and perhaps surprisingly embarrassed myself in only one or two of those games.

Mostly the nub of my embarrassment lay in my lack of mobility at what we once called the hot corner, but given my present physical infirmities might more accurately be dubbed the 'frozen junction.' 

Add to that my still torn and unrepaired rotator cuff which makes the long zing to first all but impossible and you have, with deference to Mr. A E Housman the picture of a former athlete who did not slip betimes away, but who hung on way too long.

That hanging on too long has sent me into a slough of despond at work as well. I sit in meetings and hear people speak of the splendors of 'instastories' and other forms of surveillance marketing and I wonder if it’s time to hang up my spikes and head upward I hope to that great ballpark in the sky.

I was born old of course and have always been that old dog who could learn new tricks. My cerebral capacity I say without a whiff of conceit, is greater than its ever been, but given the rampant dumbing down of all around us, I fear it leaves me increasingly estranged from those around me who look askance if you mention something as quaint and hoary as having read a book.

All this to say that while there are whole weeks at a time where I feel capacious and nearly invincible at work, those days when I feel significantly less so are becoming more foreboding and frequent.

And so I’ll end this here, a rumination on age and pain and will and desire. Also I have a request, if you see an old person today, and he’s got dark grey circles under his eyes, and he’s maybe had too much to do for too long, be nice to him.

It could be me.

A night with Monk.

When I was young and in New York, there was a bar up on Broadway between 113^th Street and 114^th Street called the West End. After being in business for 103 years, it closed back in 2014 and reopened as a Cuban restaurant called Havana Central.

The West End was a big, dark, smoky place where you could buy a Ballantine Ale for $2 or a Rheingold, and nurse it all night, listening to classic jazz played by 80-year-old black musicians who never saved a cent from their glory days in the 1940s and 50s and still needed a gig. Or maybe it's better to believe they just liked getting together with the fellas and hearing the gentle applause of drunk kids at the end of the night.

I remember one old bass player who would seem to be sleeping in a heroin stupor, leaning on his stand-up bass and once every four minutes or so waking up just in time to slap just the right riff right into place.

It was mostly grad students who hung in the West End, because it was more of a listening place than a talking place. It was a place where you could hear the soot and grime and crime and slime of the city through the ears of old jazzmen who made it all sound good.

Around that time one of those grad students—maybe he leaned over from the booth behind mine—turned to me and said, as if it were samizdat, you’ve got to listen to Monk.

Monk was not high on the hit parade in 1979. But I went to the record store (there were record stores back then) and bought an album based on its cover art. The first song I listened to was called “Dinah.” If you don’t know it, you should. Listen to it here.

The only Dinah I ever knew, I guess was Dinah Shore, who beckoned us to 'see the USA in our Chevrolet.' Or the Dinah who someone was in the kitchen with. But this Dinah was different.

I’m reading a book now on the physicist Enrico Fermi, called “The Last Man Who Knew Everything.” Something in it really struck me and brought me to Monk. It was said that Fermi and Galileo were “once every 500 years brains.” Whereas Bohr and Einstein were mere “twice a century brains.”

Listening to Dinah, I felt like I heard a once every 500 years pianist.

Last night, leaving work late in the steady rain, I grabbed a yellow cab heading west on 47^th Street. I sat down on the vinyl exhausted from another day where I felt like the heavy-bag over at Gleason’s Gym.

I thought of Gleason's slogan, from Virgil of all people, and I thought about the day I had had.

"Now, whoever has the courage and a strong and collected spirit in his breast, let him come forward, lace on the gloves and put up his hands."

We turned north on 11^th Avenue and steamed uptown. I tried to close my eyes, tried to grab a few moments of quiet after the day's pandemonium.

No dice. The radio was on. Loud.

Then it came on.

The disc jockey played Dinah.

Thank you, god.

Thank you, Thelonious.

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In which (the great) Dave Trott explains it all. (And agrees with me.)

If you're a "recent-ist," that is you care only about things that have happened recently to the general exclusion of history--and the general exclusion of the foundational minds of our business, you may not know Dave Trott.

Dave is one of the great minds, and great creatives of British advertising. He's also, famously, the proprietor of two great advertising blogs:

1. http://davetrott.co.uk/
2. https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/author/4561/Dave-Trott

And the author of numerous intelligently simple and simply intelligent books on advertising.

1. One + One = Three.
2. Predatory Thinking.
3. Creative Mischief.
And more...

Over the last five years or so, Dave and I have become friends of sorts. By that I mean we are the sort of friends who have never actually met, but we write to each other about advertising issues large and small, and we have a standing offer to buy each other drinks, or dinner, if Dave's ever in New York, or I'm ever in London.

Dave wrote to me this morning about yesterday's post in which I ruminated on issues of liberalism and effetism in both politics and the world.

Dave's note needs no preamble or explanation. So, I'll leave you with it, and with, hopefully, things to ponder.

Your last post really made me think – about the parallels between liberals and creatives.

IMHO, putting it simply, both were centrist but both moved to the extreme.

Liberals used to speak for ordinary people, but political-correctness alienated them from ordinary people.

Their agenda became PC for its own sake, not for benefit of the masses.

Creatives used to speak for ordinary people, but awards alienated them from ordinary people.

Their agendas became awards for their own sake, not for benefit of the masses.

So the liberals and the creatives are left talking to themselves.

The problem isn’t that everyone voted for Trump.

The problem is that the centre can’t find anything to vote for, no one cares about.

In politics or in advertising.