Dull as dishwater.

After about ninety-thousand years in this god-forsaken business I love so much, I've reached a conclusion I'm surprised I hadn't realized many years earlier.

That is, there are two types of people in agencies.

The far-more-common type waits to be given great  assignments. You know, a "cool" client, adequate-time and a Shutters-worthy budget.

It's the rare bird doesn't wait for great assignments. Instead, she makes every assignment she gets great. She finds something in it, or brings something to it, or thinks about a new technique or an interesting way to "un-boring-ifize" it. She says, in effect, if my name is on it, I will make it good. I will make it the envy of those around me.

Years ago, back in the early 90s, I taught a couple advertising classes at New York's School of Visual Arts. Every week, I had to pick a product or a service and the class would have to do ads on it.

A couple weeks into the semester, there was a small rebellion in the class. I was accused of giving out "bad" assignments. "They're boring," I was told. "No one cares about these things." "They're not fun."

It's not entirely unusual for me to get pissed at rebukes like those. And I got pissed that night.

"Look," I said, "two of the greatest advertising successes of the 80s were for the Yellow Pages and a package-delivery company. The creatives could have looked at those assignments and said they were boring."

I went on, as I so often do.

"When Doyle Dane created Volkswagen, it was an ugly, under-powered German car being sold in America where a fair number of people had been shooting at Germans just a few years earlier. Shitty assignment.

"Avis was a two-bit company, dwarfed by its competitors. Hertz had five-times their budget, five-times the counters, five-times as many cars. Shitty assignment.

"Frank Perdue sold chickens. Shitty assignment."

The sentiment, "There are really no dull subjects, only dull writers," has been attributed to half-a-dozen notables from G.K. Chesterton to Raymond Chandler to someone called George Horace Lorimer.

In the internet-age of fact-checking (i.e. no fact-checking) I could probably simply proclaim that David Ogilvy told it to me one debauched evening over a bottle of 1949 Pol Roger Brut while at Château de Touffou. But that, even though it might win me the plaudits of upper management at the place at which I toil, wouldn't be right, so I won't.

No matter who said it, I believe it. Robert Caro, for instance, made 4000 pages on LBJ the best thing I've ever read. Shakespearean. Speaking of Shakespeare, read Shakespeare. 

Finally, since baseball season is nearly upon us watch this short film about a hero striking out. Riveting.

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BTW, one of the many reasons I don't believe in-house agencies--which seem to be all the rage--will ever achieve what outside agencies can is related to this point. It's not that in-house agencies hire dull people. It's that the discipline of the in-house job means you first and foremost have to "do" the assignment. I've always believed that there's a difference between doing the assignment and doing the job.

Of burgers, traffic lights, and H. Rider Haggard.

My wife, who like H. Rider Haggard's "She," must be obeyed, had a hankering for a really good hamburger. This simple meal is surprisingly hard to come by. 

These days, anything really good is hard to come by.

First, you have the massive over-processing of food which has added chemicals and preservatives to everything as it has, correspondingly removed nutrition and flavor. Then, you have the closings of the once-ubiquitous New York tradition, the Greek coffee shop. 

There used to be a Red Flame, or a Lepanto, or an Olympus Diner on nearly every other corner in the city, but they are all but gone now, replaced by Starbucks, or Joe and the Juice, or Stumptown Roasters, or some other over-priced millennial roost, which, it must be said, I won't step foot in.

Finally, you have the renaissance of the luxury burger. A slab of ground-meat the size of Yogi Berra's catcher's mitt. These joints are too-upscale by half and sport names like Smash Burger and 5 Napkin Burger (where, btw, they give you but one napkin) and while I've been seduced by their marketing and their promise of the return of the golden age of burgerhood, well, they're just not very good.

Prime Burger, in the shadow of St. Patrick's on 51st Street off of 5th, closed almost a decade ago. 

They served a really superior burger and a raspberry-lime lemonade, all served by decorous old black-men who had the dignified aspect of aging Pullman-car waiters. A magazine called "The Gothamist," had this to say about Prime Burger, "Regulars like Rita Hayworth, Henry Fonda, and Sammy Davis, Jr. once crammed into the tight booths with swivel trays reminiscent of school desks, but the nostalgic atmosphere isn't the only aspect that kept patrons coming back. Handmade each morning with beef from a supplier in the Bronx, the tender and juicy burgers are quintessentially New York. In 2004, the prestigious James Beard Foundation even bestowed an award recognizing Prime Burger as one of America's best classic restaurants."

Decades ago, a Columbia haunt of mine, closed. That was Happy Burger and it was a brusque, no-pretense kind of place, that believed, as Ed McCabe believed for the old Horn and Hardardt's, that "you can't eat atmosphere." It was all about the food. But it too succumbed to the fetishization of food as well as Manhattan's soaring rents.

My wife had zeroed-in on a place on Second Avenue and 83th Street called Mocca Burger. I was against it (to no avail) partly because Mocca Burger is kosher, which means no cheese and no bacon. And second, because kosher meat is about twice as expensive as meat should be. But as I said at the top of this post, my wife is She, who must be obeyed.

We hit the interchange in the Bronx, where 95 bisects the Bruckner, my Simca surging along at 90 mph, its three-liter BMW straight-six gobbling up the shell-shocked asphalt. 

"This is the spot where you phone in," I said, having timed these things, over the years, to perfection. "If you call now, I can negotiate the traffic and make my way over the (free) Third Avenue Bridge and the food will be coming off the griddle, or out of the oven, just as we glide to a halt in front of the restaurant."

My wife nodded with some regret. She has to grown to dislike those uncanny things I can do that are invariably right. I consider myself something of a Cassandra about these things. I can see the future, even if no one believes what I see.

Mocca being off Second Avenue, I avoided the FDR and drove downtown from the bridge exit at 129th Street in Harlem. I downshifted off the bridge and into the center lane of the mottled avenue. The right lane you avoid because of buses that don't signal when they merge left. The left lane you avoid because the whole expanse is filled with double-parkers and people who swing open car-doors as if they are the only inhabitants of our increasingly-crowded orb.

We were streaming downtown now and I made the light at 125th, a large cross-town street, and then at 116th, the next cross-town street going south. When I made the light at the next big street, 106th, I knew I had something rare going on.

Since records began being kept in 1966, no one has ever made it straight down without stopping from 129th past 96th street, but here I was. 

I put my foot down on the gas to get the Simca more in the center of the timed traffic lights and sped past 96th Street. I had done it. Call me the Sultan of Signal, the Lord of the Light. 

I mentioned this to my wife, as the Simca finally rolled to a red at the cacophony of 86th Street. She scowled out the window and pretended not to hear me. Moments later, I pulled in front of Mocca just as our burgers were being spatula'd off their kosher griddle. The puck-like discs were still steaming as she huffed her way back to our car.

Then, like Moses parting the Red Sea, from the right lane at 83rd and Second, I crossed four lanes of traffic and navigated a left onto East 82nd, and made our way home.

I half expected a call from Mayor De Blasio congratulating me, or maybe the ghost of political hack Mario Procaccino. But no phones rang in our three-bedroom.

And the burgers?

Meh.

Uncle Slappy's gustatory Slap-of-the-Week.

Tips for Aspiring Writers. (Repurposing Bret Stephens.)

Not long ago I stumbled upon an excellent article by Bret Stephens of “The New York Times,” on how to write an op-ed. It’s called “Tips for Aspiring Op-Ed Writers” and you can find it here.

In advertising, we don’t write op-eds. The fact is, even if you’re a writer, you hardly write at all anymore. It seems everyone has bought into the spurious idea that no one can read, or no one does read ads, or everyone is too impatient to read. You get the idea.

That being said, Stephens’ tips for writers work for our business, too. They work for people who aren’t writers—they work for art directors talking to photographers. They work for account people selling a campaign to a client. They work for planners making a presentation to cynical and impatient creatives.

They work for anyone who has to be clear, succinct and who has to make a point. They work for anyone who can lose an audience if she’s boring. Because all of us can lose audiences.

I’m taking the liberty of editing Stephens, choosing the parts that are, I think, most germane to our business. They’re Stephens’ thoughts, though. I’m just tightening things up a turn.

1) A wise editor once observed that the easiest decision a reader can make is to stop reading. This means that every sentence has to count in grabbing the reader’s attention, starting with the first. Get to the point: Why does your topic matter? Why should it matter today? And why should the reader care what you, of all people, have to say about it?

Good writers like, say, Charles Dickens, rewrite and rewrite and rewrite.
This is a page from his manuscript of "Great Expectations."
As an old boss used to tell me, leave no word unturned.

2) Avoid the passive voice. Write declarative sentences. Delete useless or weasel words such as “apparently,” “understandable” or “indeed.” Project a tone of confidence, which is the middle course between diffidence and bombast.

3) Be proleptic, a word that comes from the Greek for “anticipation.” That is, get the better of the major objection to your argument by raising and answering it in advance. Always offer the other side’s strongest case, not the straw man. Doing so will sharpen your own case and earn the respect of your reader.

4) Sweat the small stuff. Read over each sentence — read it aloud — and ask yourself: Is this true? Can I defend every single word of it? Did I get the facts, quotes, dates and spellings exactly right? Yes, sometimes those spellings are hard: the president of Turkmenistan is Gurbanguly Malikguliyevich Berdymukhammedov. But, believe me, nothing’s worse than having to run a correction.

5) You’re not Proust. Keep your sentences short and your paragraphs tight.

6) Kill the clichés. If you want to give the reader an outside the box perspective on how to solve a problem from hell by reimagining the policy toolbox to include stakeholder voices — well, stop right there. Editors notice these sorts of expressions the way French chefs notice slices of Velveeta cheese: repulsive in themselves, and indicative of the mental slop that lies beneath.

7) If you find writing easy, you’re doing it wrong. One useful tip for aspiring writers comes from the film “A River Runs Through It,” in which the character played by Tom Skerritt, a Presbyterian minister with a literary bent, receives essays from his children and instructs them to make each successive draft “half as long.” If you want to write a successful 700-word op-ed, start with a longer draft, then cut and cut again. “The art of writing,” believed the minister, “lay in thrift.”

8) The editor [client] is always right. She’s especially right when she axes the sentences or paragraphs of which you’re most proud. Treat your editor with respect by not second-guessing her judgment, belaboring her with requests for publication decisions or submitting sloppy work in the expectation that she will whip it into shape.

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From the days when New York was really cold.

When I was a kid it seemed to me that winters were much colder than they are today. Some of this can be verified through data. I think the last five years have had the four warmest winters on record, or something like that.

But that's just a statistic. Better is my memory of what winter was like back 40 or even 50 years ago.

I remember putting on big black rubber galoshes with heavy metal buckles and tramping to school in snow that buried us up to our knees. I remember making atomic snowballs for the marathon battles we would have before school and after school. Freezing snowballs in slushy water or embedding small pebbles inside them to inflict maximum damage to friends who were temporarily our enemies.

Dangerous as that horsing-about sounds, no one ever got hurt. No one's eye ever got put out. Our arms were too weak, our aim too erratic, and our winter clothes' padding too thick for anything to wound us.

We'd hide behind snow forts or drifts of snow and accumulate 50 snowballs, and then we'd pelt passing cars or garbage trucks plowing the streets. On occasion, an angry driver would stop his vehicle and run after us, calling us "hoods," or "delinquents," or worse. But we always made it deep down the street before we were ever grabbed and caught.

When I was in college on the Upper West Side, we had a terrible cold snap. It must have been below zero or in the single digits for a week or more.

In those dark days, New York was torn by crime. Burglaries and muggings and car thefts and hold-ups were the rule, not the exception.

The news spread around my neighborhood that two kids had robbed a little fruit and vegetable stand that was located on Broadway.

The store-owner gave pursuit, but the kids ran west, across Riverside and into Riverside Park. In short order, they were being chased by a police car which made its way through the park and over the snowy hills like a Soviet T-37 tank.

The cops were getting closer and the kids hopped a fence, ran across the West Side Highway, hopped another wrought-iron fence, tumbled down a small hill and onto the frozen-over Hudson River.

A crowd had gathered to watch the imbroglio. Half were rooting for the kids, as people always root for kids to get away from the cops, in our best-societal Jimmy Cagney manner. But half were rooting for the cops. The kids had attacked, in effect, the very neighborhood in which we lived. They had attacked our safety and our security and we were angry. 

The cop car stopped before the highway, and the burly police just watched the lithe kids make their escape. There was nothing the cops could do to chase them down.

When the kids got about half-way across to the Jersey-side, the ice in the shipping channel gave way and the boys fell into the murk. They struggled to get out, but they could get no hold on the ice and were stuck. In moments a Police tug chugged their way breaking ice as it went. Two more burly cops grabbed a boy each and hauled them into their boat. The boys were quickly wrapped in blankets and that was the end of that. Whatever they had lifted from the store--whether it was a package of tomatoes or $47 in small bills--had either sunk to the bottom or was left out in the water to eventually wash ashore when a thaw came.

I don't know what happened to the boys--if as cops might say in flat-foot patois, they caught "ammonia" from the frigid brack, or if they got 72-hours in the Tombs, the old municipal jail down on White Street. They might have been given dry clothing, been cuffed around a bit by the cops and then turned over to their parents for more knocking around. I've tried looking the story up in the Times, but there was so much crime 40 years ago that unless someone famous was mugged, or someone was killed, not much made the papers.

So that's that. 

But for one more small point. Whenever someone starts telling me how cold it is, how rough the weather is, I say, did I ever tell you about the kids who robbed a store then tried to run across the iced-over Hudson to get away from the fuzz?

They say, "the Hudson iced-over?"

I nod the nod of an old-timer.

And that usually shuts them up. 

A dark night in the Tempus Fugit,

Of all the curses, oaths and imprecations we utter during the course of our lives, at the driver who cuts you off on the Cross Bronx, at the boss who has to pee in your pool, at the noisy neighbor who keeps you up at night, or the contractor who promises to show up and doesn’t for at least three weeks, of all the curses you can bestow on an enemy (or a friend) perhaps the harshest is this simple: may you develop insomnia.

Insomnia visits me nearly as often as Chinese delivery boys drop off soup dumplings or Kung Pao at my apartment. That is to say that once or twice a week, year in and year out, I am visited by the great Dame of Sleeplessness and there is nothing I can do save pray that Morpheus will visit soon.

 

Artist's rendition of a coaster at the Tempus Fugit, estbl. 1924

Until he does, I throw on an old sweatshirt and a pair of jeans, put a collar on Whiskey and walk the mile or so uptown to the dim incandescent precincts of the Tempus Fugit. The Tempus Fugit opened in 1924 during the depths, or heights of Prohibition. As such getting there is a meander worthy of the ancient meaning of that word—the Meander River in Illium, which doubles back against itself ten or twenty times every mile till, after a full-day of sailing, you’re farther behind where you started than if you had decided to sail backwards.

The Meander (Menderes) River Basin in Turkey, 

To get to the ancient bar (in Disney-fied New York, anything opened before 1970 is considered ancient) you have to walk down three flights, through a galvanized steel fire door, up two flights, down a long hallway, through a door sealed with an expanding grate like an old elevator enclosure, down another flight of steps, around a corner, up three worn concrete steps and then you have arrived in its dull and musty gloom that quickly turns to a surpassing warmth.

I sat on my dark red leather-covered stool, one in from the end, and Whiskey circled twice and lay at my feet and those of my stool. Quick at Pee Wee Reese at short, the bartender was around the bar with a small wooden bowl of cold water for my pup, and in another trice or two, he was back behind the bar, pulling me a Pike’s Ale (the ALE that won for YALE!) which he serves a la mode in six-ounce juice glasses so that the amber doesn’t go warm or flat.

 

I have one of the only Pike's Ale t-shirts in existence. My loyalty as a customer has paid off.

With no introduction, the bartender began the evening’s disquisition.

“This is,” he said, shining the glossy teak of the bar top, ‘Life’s Hard Course.’ Its origin, its author is unknown, but as it is written, ‘This bit of filosophy is as old as the hills, but like good liquor and fruits of human thought, it grows more rich and mellow with age. Its quaintness is its virtue, and so here it is again.’”

I drained my Pike’s and in a blink or two of a lazy eye, the bartender presented me with another glass of suds. In another blink or two, he slid over a small wooden bowl of salted Spanish peanuts. I pushed them away, as I always do, with my all-purpose demurral: “A pound in every nut,” I said, patting the adipose that has gathered around my mid-section.”

“Allow me,” he said, “to begin.”

He rang open the cash-register and removed from the ones bin a still-lit cigar and held it as a prop like George Burns or Groucho Marx.

“Man comes into this world without his consent, and leaves it against his will,” he recited. “During his stay on earth his time is spent in one continual round of contraries and misunderstandings.”

“I can relate,” I agreed.

“In his infancy, he’s an angel; in his boyhood, he’s a devil, and in his manhood, he is everything from a lizard up. In his duties, he’s a damn-fool.

“If he raises a family, he’s a chump. If he raises a check, he’s a crook. If he is a poor man, he is a poor manager and has no sense. If he is rich, he is dishonest but considered smart. If he is in politics he is a grafter and a thief. If he is out of politics, you cannot place him as he is an undesirable citizen. If he donates to foreign missions, he does it for show; if he doesn’t, he is stingy and a tightwad.”

He inhaled heavily on his cigar, then exhaled blue smoke like the M104 bus chugging up Broadway back in the early 70s, before catalytic converters.

“I will continue,” he said, filling my glass for the third time.

“When he comes into the world, they all want to kiss him; before he leaves it, they all want to kick him.

“If he dies young, there was a great future before him. If he lives to a ripe, old age, he is only in the way, just living to save funeral expenses. So Life is just one damn thing after another.”

“I’ll admit,” I said, draining my glass and putting on my coat, “That’s a lot to take in on a Monday night.”

“You find it lugubrious?” he asked.

I pushed two twenties his way and said, “maybe melancholy is better. Or dour.”

“In that case,” he said pushing the twenties back, “they’re on me.”

Whiskey and I walked home. Once again in the dark.

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