Crying in baseball

I've gotten some rebuke of late. 

That's not unusual. When you're out there, when you speak your mind, when you're voluble and when you're successful, people naturally take a dislike to you.

I go after Agelvy--er--Ogilvy and the corrupt ageist oligopoly: the holding companies. (Which IMHO should really be called the squeezing companies.)

I'm told that's angry. 

Fuck it. 

I am angry. Not angry for what they did to me, angry that incompetents have destroyed a once-great brand, a once-great industry, primarily because we have, as a society, adopted a "Death to Expertise" operating system. We elect (allegedly) people like Donald Trump. We put people in charge of businesses who have no experience, no long-view, who adopt the latest trends and mouth words that have no meaning. 

They are tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

"We have to be always on."

Sorry. 

We have to provide quality and value and respect for viewers.

"We have to be cool."

Sorry.

There's more to life than cool. We have to build strong brands that lead to sales.

And so on.

Someone I respect excoriated me recently. That's not unusual. "There's no crying in baseball," he admonished.

Here's the thing.

There is crying in baseball.

That was just a movie.
And the remark--of a time--and gendered.
A dumb remark. Damp, arid and cliche.
There has always been crying in baseball.

And there should be.
Crying, anger, emotion are strength. 

Not weakness.

There has always been crying in baseball.
Ask the fat kids who were chosen last.

Or who couldn't play with the other boys.
Ask girls who couldn't play with the boys.
Ask an entire race crying because they can't play with the other boys. Or even eat at the same table. Or stay in the same hotel.

Or ask a young man, who's old at 32.

Who notices a twinge in his elbow.

A broken wing.

Who's afraid to say anything aloud that there's pain.

Thinking if he keeps it under his brim maybe it won't become real and will go like smoke away, disappearing like the news, not the residue of a Superfund state in a Koch-led country.

Or the sinewy star at 27 who discovers one drizzly morning at 27-and-a-half that his bat speed has slowed and all of a sudden the same curveball that was slow and obtuse on Tuesday becomes acute and Koufaxian on Wednesday.

There is crying in baseball.

And in everything else.

In advertising.
In life.

In marriage.

In fatherhood.

In living and breathing and dying, which are all the same thing.

When you're relegated to nothingness.

When your throw from third goes errant and two enemies come in. When you greedily stretch two to three and die in the dust.

There is crying in baseball.

There is crying in all things.

All things human.

When you lose eight straight and the infield dust cakes inside your nostrils like black lung.

There is crying in baseball.

Curt Flood cried.

When the team he gave his life to gutted him like a sea bass

and put him up for sale.
When you're owned and supported a dead dumb and deaf infrastructure so your salary wanes like an old moon while others get rich and black car home.
When you're unable to provide for yourself and your wife and your kids and your too-soon dotage.

Because the slave-holders said "no, we have the power and the inhale of conformity on our side."

We will turn you--someone with a voice--into a petulant nothing and ban you or underpay you in perpetuity,

until you're 34 and lost a step

and we've sucked you dry like Willy Loman,

and now we've eaten the orange and thrown away the peel.

There is crying in baseball.

There is a lot of crying in baseball.
Of course, they tell you there is no crying in baseball,

so they impugn crying and make it wrong--

wrong to show emotion.

Wrong to be human.

They don't want your tears, your anger, your bitterness,

lest you become a clarion.
They don't want you crying about your ill-treatment to be

translated, transmuted and transcendent into

I am Spartacus.

They disparage you.
They call it crying.
When it's so much more.

The still small voice of the serf who lays down his tools.
Or the cosmic Bartleby who would prefer not to.
Or my old beisbol friend Rojo, who returned to the dugout late into one game, 

his meat-hand split like a slab of meat

by a nasty, heavy fastball
and who held up his John the Baptist hand for all to see,
blood to his elbow

and proclaimed, "esto es suficiente.' 

And left the game and never returned.

There is crying in baseball.
And in life.
When your marrow is sucked out 
and even the dogs of hell won't gnaw your bones.

Maybe it's the anger and the crying and the hatred and the revenge that will fill your marrow again and allow you to bury the other-fuckers.
That will allow you to come back and hit,

after an enforced and end-forced year off,

the equivalent of my nine month's hiatus,

a neat .313 with 17 homes and 84 RBIs.
Not my best.

Not by a long shot.
Not when I wasn't crying because I too bought their anti-cryism--

but more than anyone else's, or nearly so.
Even innocent Billy Budd, the apotheosis of innocence, cried. And in his way as he was hoisted smiling to hang till dead from the yardham.

"His duty he always faithfully did; but duty is sometimes a dry obligation, and he was for irrigating its aridity whensoever possible with a fertilizing decoction of strong waters."

Those strong waters are my viscous tears.

Because those who do not cry and cry out are not.

 

Well, that sucked.

I am a disciplined sonofabitch.

Every day for the past 50 years or so, I've sat down at one sort of keyboard or another and tried to write something.

For decades, I wrote about Richard Wright or Charles Chestnut, or Chester Himes or Langston Hughes or Zora Neale Hurston as I ran straight uphill climbing a waterfall toward my PhD. in African-American literature. 

My over-arching thesis was heretical then. It would be regarded as even worse today.

That there is a commonality on this benighted planet of how humankind copes with hatred and prejudice and oppression. Doesn't matter who you are or where you're from. We respond in some universal ways to universal actions. I believed that when I was a scruffy-assed graduate student sharing a roach motel with a trillion arachnids. I believe it today.

But that's all beside the point.

The point for me is my keyboard is my life. 

Life enters through my eyes and ears and nose and feet and hair and sphincter. It swirls around amid my ever-dying corpuscles and it comes out through my fingers onto the keyboard, onto my screen and then, finally, some of it enters the world courtesy of some ugly platform and some free cosmic entropy-distribution platform.

Some of my clicking and clacking, most of it, too much of it, I get paid for. Writing about database software, or an exotic skincare line from Northern Africa or a breakthrough that could, we pray, eradicate disease.

Probably too much is paid for and not enough is me, but that's the way it goes. My breed was born to work. To track and kill the Mammoth. To drag it home. To skin it. To start the fire. To cut that sinewy Mammoth apart and cook it. And then to make tools with its bones and clothes with its skin. Your eyes are our jewels. Your bones are our tools. Your skin is our canoe.

My shtetl breed was born to work. To live to work. To die stooped over having worked myself, lonely, to death. 

Too little is me pouring my baseball years onto the page, my whale an orb of horsehide. Or my life as a burn victim. Or the travails of a small man who, like Job, sees an angry world of marzipan plutocrats arrayed against him--and the crowds, frothing, that plutocrats sway with their bread and circuses--beer and football--against me, trying to make me go along poor and anesthetized believing I am fat and happy. When my soul is emaciate and I dwell in the sub-basement of gloom.

Too little is the hardship and pain of sweat and misery of trying to be different and decent in a world that prizes none of that. Too little is the loneliness of life and the estrangement from most living creatures who chase after plentitude and run from their souls.

Too little is what I want and too much is what I must. 

Sometimes my fingers and thoughts are palsied and paralyzed. Nothing comes. Yet I force myself like a weightlifter forces his "one-more" rep. 

And sometimes it sucks.

Sometimes I face my Qwerty and I strike out. I am deep into suck and fuck and blather and lather and crap and pap and a steaming hunk of junk and funk.

Sometimes I swing and miss, eight times, ten times, fourteen times. As one player once said somewhere to some bobbleheaded manager, "Coach, the moon got in my eyes."

Sometimes the moon is in my eyes and I cannot see for the fine dust of the universe that abrades my corneas and my lungs. I swing and miss, not nicking the ball, not getting near the sphere. But missing like life misses love. Like milk misses the glass in an old Keystone Kop Komedy.

But that's life and how it goes.

On those million days you swing and miss and miss and miss. It doesn't matter that a miss is as good as a million miles. You miss and miss.

And you get up the next day.

You shave.

And you fight that fight again.

You swing after the ball again. The keyboard is there. You let you digits go, what comes out nobody knows.

Breakfast is ready.

Trust. Ha ha.

One of the many things that I blather on about day after day, week after week, decade after decade is B3: Brands Behaving Badly.

To evaluate the behavior of brands, I've made things simple for myself. Do the brands I interact with act like people I like? Do they treat me like I would like to be treated? Are they more like a friend and a help or a pickpocket and a fiend?

Most brands, most organizations, most companies you work for, most people you work for fall into the B3 category. They say one thing and do something else. Mostly rob you of your time in an ongoing effort to rob you of your money.

Here's one picayune example that just happened to me.

Like most everyone else in the United States, I am personally a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon and its ungenerous owner, Jeff Bezos. I pay for Prime. I have two Alexas. And I spend a few thousands of dollars a year on their sites buying everything from books to grapefruit knives, which are according to my wife a necessity--gracious-living-wise.

Especially during these gloomy Covid-riven months, there's no place I spend more money than Amazon, with the possible exception of the local supermarket where I seem to drop $300 every Sunday morning on a week's worth of groceries which somehow include nothing I actually enjoy eating.

In any event Amazon is a (um) prime example of a brand behaving badly.

"Alexa, what's today's weather?" I ask, innocently enough.

"It's 53 and clear going up to 65," Alexa responds. And then she adds "Don't forget the great deals on Prime Day."

"Fuck you. Alexa, never give me a commercial when I ask for the weather."

"I do not understand."

I'm sure the people of Amazon understand.

They--like the other bionic monopolies that run our lives--out-rob the robber barons of yore. Frick, Schwab and Carnegie sold 95% of the steel in the US--but they could only sell it once. Rockefeller sold 90% of the oil--but only once. Swift and Armour, 90% of the meat--but only once.

Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix, CVS, Walmart and their ilk sell you products, but own your data identity. They sell it and sell it and sell it and sell it. You and your endless stream of data are their product.

I don't know if humanity has anything left in it. I don't know if after 400 years of Trump and two days of Amy Coney Barrett if we have any outrage left. It certainly seems to me that we have bought our own evisceration hook, line and next-day-delivered sinker.

I don't know if there's any last best hope for humankind left. If there is, it probably ain't Amerika.

But if I were at a holding company, or breathing the rarefied but fetid air of the c-suite, my central concern would be how can brands be decent? How can we treat people like people, not targets or users? And how can we restore that most ephemeral human need--trust?

Trust is the stock in trade of communication.

And the behavior of most brands, most institutions, most agencies and most people seems to undo trust with their every move.

Advertising advice from an unknown city.

As a life-long denizen (btw, a denizen is not a Buddhist oral surgeon) of Fun City, I have been trained by my almost 63-years in that benighted burg to walk like an old-time waiter, with my head up and my eyes darting around looking for a tip or a customer.

Heads-up walking is a way of life in New York. As is seeing behind lamp-posts, under man-holes and around corners. Just 30 years ago in 1990, 2605 people were murdered in my fair city--a little over seven a day. We therefore acquired a wariness not unlike a gazelle on the South African veldt. You never quite knew where an assailant was coming from or when.

And so, as I've spent my years walking through my city, I've noticed things mysterious.  there are bits and pieces of urban ephemera that even the savviest Buddhist Dentists can't explain.

From Toynbee Tiles where you'd least expect them--like the downtown crush of Second Avenue to alien hieroglyphics like these. They descend upon our bubbling and buckled asphalt like locusts and then roost there like boll weevils or ticks. I've seen them my whole life. They're as present as Kim Kardashian's buttocks--and probably even more inscrutable.

You'll also see brick walls adorned with appurtenances like the above. But they're not adornments at all. They fasten the fronts, sides and rears of various older brick buildings to the floors themselves. Without them, New York would look like Berlin in 1946.

On October 6th, the failing five-million-digital-subscribers "New York Times" had a book review entitled "The Hidden Wonders of the City Made Visible." The book itself is called "The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design." You can read the review here.

The review was writ by the great authority of New York, Kenneth T. Jackson, and that alone was enough for me to buy a hardcover copy as I struggle to maintain my New Yorker-ness nestled up here in Connecticut, 95 miles from the city, twelve of those sylvan.

The review begins like this:

Now, unfortunately, there's an advertising point to all this. About 31 years ago I joined a famous and famously brilliant agency called Ally & Gargano. The halls were lined with cozy offices, each one occupied by a legend in the business. Someone with more gold pencils than Donald Trump has IQ points.

When I joined the outfit, one of those luminaries handed me two typewritten sheets of paper that had been stapled together probably 20 years earlier. It was advice on being a creative. When computers came in, I updated the advice and committed it to pixels. Which is why I have it today.

When "The 99% Invisible City" arrived at my home in Connecticut I rifled through it like Willie Sutton a lockbox. I immediately remembered points four and 12 below.

1. Grab Attention. Picture someone’s busy day. The dog is barking, the kids are screaming, the phone is ringing. What will make them stop at your ad? Is your communication compelling enough to break through all the other clutter—of the world around them, and all the other communications and features. Remember, nobody goes online or checks their mail or buys a newspaper or magazine to read the ads.

2. The Singularity of the Idea. People have neither the time nor the inclination to sit there trying to figure out what you’re trying to say. Take one idea and make it the major thrust of your communication. Work in a “Pyramid” fashion. Start with one idea and broaden it via other product attributes and support in the copy.

3. Hit them where they live. Upset people. Make them think. Challenge them. Have people look at your product or service in a way they’ve never looked at it before. Legendary Advertising man Carl Ally said it neatly, “Advertising should afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.”

4. Unique Benefit. Unless the product is a total parity product (meaning that it is exactly like any other product in its category) there is something unique about it. Find it. Make it into a benefit. If there is nothing unique, look harder. Find something. If you still cannot find a point of difference, take the major product benefit and do the best communication for that product category.

5. Market Position. Where is your product in the marketplace. Is it the leader? Is it #2? Use its position to your best advantage. Look what Avis did as #2. (We try harder.)

6. What Do People Really Feel? People will tell you they think and feel one way, when in reality they may feel totally different. Think of what somebody really buys a product for, the satisfaction they get from it. The better psychologist you are, the better communicator you will be.

7. Words and Pictures. The visual and the headline together should be greater than the sum of the parts. Each should be the crucial element of the communication. If the headline or the visual can stand entirely on its own, it means the other element is merely window dressing. The story of the communication should ideally be told with the headline and visual working as a unit, paying each other off.

8. Promise a Story. A quick, catchy headline with a visual is fine…for a billboard or a banner. But other communications should have more depth. It should carry the promise of a story behind the message.

9. Does it Feel Right? Pick up your communication after you’ve put it aside for a day or two. Does it communicate? Is it strong? Is it interesting? If not, start over. Once in a while you’ll be brilliant right off the bat. Most of the time it’s a matter of throwing it out and doing it over again. When you’ve been lazy, it shows. Be honest with yourself. Ask yourself if it feels right. Gut reactions are important.

10. Presentation. Work doesn’t sell itself. When you present, cover all the bases. Explain the concept behind the communication. Give the reasons for your approach. Explain the tagline. The visual. Type and layout treatments. Then reveal the communication and read the headline. And by the way, if you work at most agencies, you have to go through a few rounds of meetings just to get out the door. These are practice rounds. Use them to coalesce your thoughts and hone your presentation.

11. Communication is part art, part science. As with any art, there are no absolutes. The magic that makes communication work is the result of logic, research and hard work. There is learning you can use to make your communication work harder. But again, there are no absolutes. If there were, every communication would get great results, every ad would be an award-winner and every company would be in the Fortune 500.

12. Research. Research. Research. Find out as much about your product as you can. Experience it. Read all you can. Sometimes a fact you find on page 42 of an Annual Report can be the key to the whole idea. A minor detail can be a spark.

I then thought about the work we do--the briefs we receive, the knowledge that's given to us, even the information clients give us about their products or services or offerings. 

I think the title of the book above applies to what we do? I think when all the planners have gone home, when the internet comes up with nothing but specious shit, when the puffed-out-chest know-it-all are busy filling another room with hot air, what's left is just you and your eyes and your power to think, to notice to connect and to unravel.

It's up to you to read the annual report. It's up to you to find something weird. It's up to you to dig.

Mostly, if you want to work in the business, it's up to you to walk like that old-time waiter: head up, with eyes darting around. Always scanning the premises.

That's the best way to spot a tip.

Be a mensch.

I've been doing a lot of teaching of late, predominately because I have a hard time saying "no" to people who pursue me.

In August, after my teaching term at AdHouse ended, I made my wife swear to never allow me teach again. I've been going pretty hard since I was booted to the curb by Ogilvy--and teaching takes a ton of time and energy.

What's more, I was usually so charged up after class, that it took me a good two or three hours to calm down afterwards. Since I get up usually around 4:30AM, that pretty much assured me that I'd have a sleepless night. That one lost night of sleep would put me in sleep arrears for the rest of the week and I was often walking around like someone put a benzodiazepine straight into my Ovaltine.

Nevertheless, in short order toward the end of summer the Co-Chairs of AdHouse, Paul Fix and Tom Christmann coaxed me to teach another class. And Sarah from Chicago Portfolio School prevailed on me to do the same.

The main reason, really, is certainly not the money. Rather after a literal lifetime in the business, I know I have a lot, I think, to give. Additionally, of all the things I missed about no longer being at an agency, working with and getting to know young people came in second.

(First is a big juicy solo assignment on a tough client and an even tougher account person. Something that would force me to learn more about a topic than anyone on god's dying earth and translate the ins-and-outs of that knowledge to simple, usable copy.)

One of the things I've noticed in teaching approximately 25 student this term is how many bad rules they've learned. I don't know if they've picked them up from in-house agencies, from client-side experience or from a general slovenliness of advertising education. But to my eyes and ears they need to be almost constantly reminded not to shout at viewers or readers.

Maybe it's a side-effect of our darkening age that everyone seems to be loud. Exclamation points are everywhere. As are ALL CAPS. And somehow these young people believe in the dopey idea of a call to action.

That's right. If your ad sucks, pasting "Learn more!!!" or "Find out how!!!" or "Order our Free e-Booklet" is not going to impel anyone to do anything.

The ad itself must be convincing and interesting enough to get people to act. Not some asinine appendage in a fluorescent "lozenge."

What's not been taught in ad school or in life is the thing that should have been taught first.

People like brands for the same reasons they like people. They like brands that act like people they like.

They like reliable.

They like honest.

They like informed and informative.

They like helpful.

They like being listened to.

And getting help when they need it.

I could go on. And maybe I should. Because it seems that about 99.7 of brands and their messages are bombastic, or they talk down to people, or their messages are convoluted and deceptive.

I don't know why this is so hard. Why it seems so difficult to apply the Golden Rule "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," to advertising.

I recall Bob Leveson's obituary from The New York Times almost eight years ago. 

"In interviews over the years, Mr. Levenson elucidated his philosophy of copywriting, which was, at bottom, epistolary.

“When he was asked how he wrote the copy for all those Volkswagen ads he said: ‘I always started by writing Dear Charlie, like writing to a friend. And then I would say what I had to say, and at the end I would cross out Dear Charlie, and I was all right.’”

I know it's bad for the ad school business. 

But that Levenson bit is all you really need to know.

Logging In.

My wife, in her infinite wifedom, decided to order a cord of firewood. 

We are city people hijacked by the Trumprona-virus to the littoral of the Connecticut coast. Our new, old rickety second home by the sea has a fireplace. My wife found a burly woman in shorts and steel-toe work-boots who would deliver, for some hundreds of dollars, a cord of "seasoned" logs.

When her log-laden pick-up pulled into our tiny driveway, the Log Lady poked me in the chest with a finger the hardness of a mighty oak.

"Where d'ya wantha lawgs?" 

"Could you stack them in the back," I beseeched.

"I don't stack. I justdaliver. Ya cawl FrankenPhil, they stack."

And so, she went back into the cab of her diesel and dumped the cord of firewood. It took up about 5/8th of our driveway. It would assuredly be impossible to back my 1966 Simca 1500 out from its perch in our cramped and tilted garage.

For the uninitiated (I was one of them until late last week) the word "cord" comes from the Old English "kourt," meaning court-room. A cord of wood is the amount of wood it would take to heat a 13th Century English courtroom for an entire year. I'm told that today, a cord is roughly 350-400 eighteen-inch logs, give or take a log or two.

The Log Lady pulled away and my wife called Frank and Phil. They turned out to be phantoms. They did not answer their phone. In fact, my resourceful ever-loving could find no trace whatsoever of their carbon-footprint.

Then the countrified education of the city-folk began.

"Termites," one neighbor declared.

"Jew don't want them in yer-house," another clarified. "You'll bring in termites."

The first clarified, "And y'can't stackem on th'ground. That's how termites breed."

I immediately headed to Amazon and spent $150 on various log-holders made in China. My deep knowledge of termites comes mostly from Old Popeye cartoons like this one. The last thing I need, outside of a visit from a Holding Company timesheet enforcer with the smile of a goon from Capone's  1930's Chicago, is a swarm of isoptera/termitodae blattodea displaying a similar, if toothier, grimace.

The log-holders, according the Amazon and UPS, arrived on Wednesday, but a quick check of the shrubbery, the neighbors' shrubbery and nineteen various other locations revealed nothing. 

I was unraveling the mystery, and the Thirteenth Labor of Hercules (informing Amazon and UPS that I never received said boxes) when a knock came on our front door that threatened to topple our entire bundle of sticks we call a cottage.

"Igotjer packages b'mistake," the toothless recipient reported. He left the boxes on the low stonewall that girds our .11 acre.

On Saturday morning, I was up at the crack of dawn or the dawn of crack, assembling the Chinese masterpieces. 

Somewhere, I think beginning about 30 years ago, our new Covenant with the "globalization" gods that rule our lives handed down a Commandment that states, "Though Shall Not Provideth Assembly Instructions with Words. Though Shalt Useth, Instead of Language (for translators costeth money) Pictograms that Are Universal and Universally Inscrutable."

I confess, as someone who's spent a lifetime getting screwed, all screws look alike to me. The pictogram of a certain screw going into a certain hole does not bring me much clarity. 

But, I persisted. 

And in about two-hours had assembled one eight-foot log-rack and one four-foot one. Together those two were designed to hold 3/4ths of a cord of wood--which I figured would be space enough because I figured the Log Lady would have ripped us off to the tune of a quarter of a cord.

I spent the entirety of yesterday lugging logs, or logging lugs, from the pile in the driveway to the various racks. My arms ached in ways they hadn't ached in years. I was reminded of various Saltillo baseball practices almost five decades ago where I would field 1,000 sharply hit fungos off the richocheting bat of my manager Hector Quesadilla. 

Today, I am spending the day walking around like Igor, or Groucho Marx. 

And last night I ordered another four-foot rack. Because as it turns out, the Log Lady over-delivered and I still have a pile of logs in my driveway.

One winter night, come over for a roaring blaze in our fireplace.

And ignore the odor.

That's just the stench of my soul burning.

Old and Olfactory.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I've noticed 21 things.

There are a lot of things that are true of everyone in advertising
--and in life--that virtually no one likes to admit. I've been noticing them since I played minor league ball for the Seraperos de Saltillo in the Mexican Baseball League in the Summer of 1975.

1. Everybody is afraid. If you doubt it, read sometime, "Something Happened," by Joseph Heller. I learned it when I played ball. Everyone is afraid everyone else is better than they. Or they'll find out you can't hit a curve. Or your arm aches and is noodle-strong.

2. Everybody is afraid 'they don't have it anymore.' The mean people lash out to hide that fear. The good people work harder.

3. Everybody wants to hear they've done a good job. From their supervisor. From their client. From their co-workers. This is human nature. It's a spiritual hug. And all too rare.

4. A raise you didn't ask for is worth 5X the raise you had to fight for. Most people would be happier with a check for $5,000 and a handshake than $25,000 they waited and waited and waited for.

5. Agency attrition would be cut by two-thirds if management read points 3 and 4 above.

6. The first job of senior management should be to leave their offices and walk the floors. They should see how people are doing. Talk to them. Listen. Not hold contrived breakfasts where no one can really speak their mind. Many "C-level" people don't know the people working for them and don't take the time they need to to know them. In fact, they hide in their offices. It's hard to be considered a leader if you don't know the people you're allegedly leading.

7. You can tell a lot about an agency by its bathrooms. If they're filthy at the end of the day, something's wrong. People are missing "pride of place."

8. The timesheet police do more damage than good. Getting ALL CAP memos containing half-a-dozen threats from people you don't know is bad for morale. In fact, management is usually so distant from the people making them rich that time-sheet memos are for many people their only connection with corporate.

9. Most agencies regard laughter and joking as a sin. It should be what they strive for--a release of pressure and expression of joy. In the old days of baseball people described the Yankees as 25 guys taking 25 separate cabs to the stadium. A team with laughter plays better ball.

10. Work would be much better if agencies allowed dogs. Even with the occasional accident.

11. Everyone in creative should have to create. Even CCOs. It's how creatives stay sharp and show their skill. I don't mean they should "tweak" or supervise. They should start with a blank sheet of paper and make something.

12. Good work and good news should be celebrated immediately. Preferably served with milk and cookies.

13. Bad news should be revealed immediately. Preferably served with milk and cookies.

14. People should be recognized for their achievements. On a short, sincere, well-written memo. On paper. Placed on everyone's desk.

15. People who are chronically-late are malevolent. They're disrespectful to others and convey a "my shit don't stink" attitude.

16. Employees should be introduced to their department on the day they start in a memo that's delivered before they start to the whole department.

17. Same thing for promotions. Announced widely the day they happen.

18. Creative and Account floors should always prominently display work from each client for all to see. If you're not proud of the work, why are you doing it?

19. If senior executives take black cars home they should walk two blocks from the agency to get them. Especially when the rest of the agency is under "wage freeze or rollbacks" and people are being fired. It's bad for morale.

20. Random acts of niceness are important. Every once in a while, do something nice when no one's looking. Management should show they care. 

21. Sound-proof conference rooms. I always hated seeing signs around the office--"New business meeting in progress. Quiet." Agencies are supposed to be boisterous and fun. If you need quiet, go to a quiet place.

Tricks of the trade.

Since I started teaching advertising classes again over the summer after a short hiatus of 27 years, the question I get asked more than any other is this: "When you get an assignment, when you get a brief, do you have a technique or some tricks for coming up with ideas?"

When I was a kid, I could run around the neighborhood looking for deposit bottles to redeem for two-cents a pop. With nine bottles, I could buy myself a Carvel soft-ice cream cone. They cost just seventeen-cents and for just three bottles more, I could get sprinkles--chocolate or rainbow. I have always loved soft-ice cream. In fact, the other day, I asked my wife how she would feel if I got a soft-ice cream machine for our kitchen. I will spare you her frozen rebuke.

But that's all to say, ideas don't come out of a dispenser in a beautiful vanilla or chocolate swirl like soft-serve. When I get an assignment, there's no telling what's going to happen. How I'll fill a page with thoughts, or even if I'll have any thoughts.

I will tell you here what I tell my students. What I've been doing myself for almost 40 years.

I keep a box that I fill with things I like. 

At one time, when we had offices, that was an actual physical box. Anytime I saw an ad or an article I thought was good or interesting, I would rip it out of whatever magazine I was stealing and deposit it in my box.

While I'm not officially a hoarder, I did cart this box filled with thousands of ads dating back to the early 80s all over Manhattan, out to San Francisco when I went to work there and then across the country to Boston.

For about the last 15 years, the sadness of my peripatetic freelance life has forced me to rely on pixels not dot patterns. Today, I do screen-grabs of things I like, or snap a picture with my always-with-me iPhone. 

I'm not organized like some people are. My friend and ex-partner Sid, for instance, has a Pinterest page that would put the Library of Congress and Dewey of decimal system fame to shame. 

He has almost 5,800 pins on his pages, organized in topics as arcane as "hands," "comfort," "love" and "water." Sometimes when I can't make it out to a museum, I'll visit the museum of Sid. 

I also keep some sheets of digital paper I call "George's Magic List." I update it with yet another url every time I see something cool. Right now, it has almost 400 links on it, most of which I've memorized. 

Many of these links are macro in orientation. They take a complicated subject and break it down with words, animations, diagrams and pictures--and sometimes sound--into something involving, interesting and clarifying. I find this useful, too.

Scattered throughout various hard-drives I have other badly organized files, too. Movie credits I like. Movie scenes I like. Dialogue I like. Fights I like. Commercials I like. And talks worth listening to. Additionally, anytime I find an article in the New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or The New Yorker, I usually copy it, title it, date it and save it.

For me the key to all this is not being organized.

I am a believer in serendipity and it almost never fails to astonish me how often I find something better when I set out looking for something else. I suppose there's a bit of the availability heuristic at work in that chaos, and that's fine. If I had to choose heuristics, I'd choose availability over recency.

I have my favorite authors too, and my favorite articles. I jump into a deep pool of Melville when I'm puzzled and I always come up with a fish in my shorts. Other times when I feel my writing sucks, I center myself with Robert Caro or Joseph Mitchell or Roger Angell or AJ Liebling, or even the taut economy and bitter tang of Raymond Chandler or the laconic Dashiell Hammett. 

If I find that I need to explain something very complicated and make it simple but not dumb, Primo Levi helps. He survived Auschwitz and was able to write about his years there with a scientific diffidence that can only be envied.

Mostly though, getting an assignment means getting to work. I've been doing this for 40 years now, and I've talked to a lot of my mentors and colleagues about how they handle things. 

There's not a single person out there--if they're telling the truth--who isn't afraid they're done. That they'll never again come up with anything good.

I suppose the great artists go through this. Real writers, not just copywriters, and directors, too. I'd bet generals who move thousands of soldiers and are responsible for their lives worry that they've lost their knack. I know that happened to Erwin Rommel and George C. Marshall.

But the main thing, for me, is to put pressure on myself. When I was working at an agency, I usually picked out a superego who intimidated me a bit.

I'd say, "I have to get my ad to Steve, or to Lou, or to Liam at twelve." If it was 7:30AM when I said that, that was a pretty good kick in the ass. I didn't give myself much time to fiddle faddle around. 

I'd usually finish by ten. Finish another permutation by eleven. Take a walk until 11:30, then have a tweak session until the time I had promised. More often than not that worked for me.

Those are my tricks.

They seem to have worked today.

An offer the Holding Companies will all refuse. (A study in Myopia.)

One day, when I was still at Ogilvy I took a walk around the creative floor. The footprint was big, from 46th to 47, and halfway from 11th Avenue to 10th. 

When I was stuck on something or just needed a walk or felt like a chat or a kibbitz, I'd push myself away from my table and put a couple of hundred yards on my Apple Watch.

As I was walking around and looking at the young faces hiding behind their stickered Macs, canceling noise with their expensive headphones, I realized something.

My guess was one-third of the creative staff had fewer than three years' experience. I had had some time with many of those people, and I had had my frustrations. It wasn't that they hadn't talent, it was that to my demanding sinew they weren't quite ready to step up and help in materially important ways on big assignments. 

I ran back to my desk and I started scribbling. Ogilvy had always praised itself as the industry's teaching hospital. Here were dozens of people who needed teaching and a guy with a literal lifetime in the business willing to teach them.

First, I penciled a headline. "From Ad School to Advertising: A 12-Week Curriculum." Then I planned out my weeks. I contacted friends with different skills. Joe in Production would talk about how to look at reels. Mike, an art director, would talk about type. Rich, another art director would talk about how he looks at concepts 50 ways to Sunday. Elizabeth, an art buyer might talk about illustration and photography. I might even ask Kerry Feuerman to teach a course on selling ideas. And a planner or two on how to write a brief and question a brief.

I even did some math. I figured if there were 30 creatives a year who were worth 1X who took the class, their aggregate worth would be 30X. If my curriculum could get them to be worth 1.5X, I would have added 15X of value to the agency's workforce.

What's more, my effort would help make Ogilvy a premier destination for the best students with the best books coming out of the ad schools.

I figured I could do all that spending between ten and fifteen hours a week on the project. Between 25% and 37.5% of my billable hours.

I went to the agency world's greatest oxymoron--Creative Management. They gave me a look Whiskey my golden retriever gives me when I'm sitting at the table eating and she wants some. She locks into my eyes. Then closes hers for a second or two longer than a blink. Then stares at me again. As if to say, "are you serious?"

I said I was.

"You can add it onto your job," they said to me, their pockets already bulging with my surfeit of billable hours, but we can't allow you to do anything that's not billable. Finance doesn't allow it. (My guess is I billed more hours to clients in a month than finance does in a decade.)

I walked away disconsolate.

In addition to a not inconsiderable amount of freelance, of hunting for freelance, of working with luminous friends, I am teaching advertising again.

The other evening I said to my class, after they demonstrated some lacuna in their knowledge of advertising, "how many people here have heard of Doyle Dane Bernbach?"

One out of 12 raised their hand, and I'm not sure that she didn't think DDB was a banned 1960s pesticide.

I said, "I'd betcha LeBron James knows who Michael Jordan is. I'd bet Spielberg knows Welles. I know Melville knew King James."

Prior to my next class I pulled together a 366-page document on the origins and the foundational work of Doyle Dane. From Mr Bernbach himself up through Gary Goldsmith. (Thanks to Dave Dye for his remarkable international treasure: Stuff from the Loft @ davedye.com)

I will present it to my class this week. I've allotted twenty minutes to it. The real advertising pros will find the time to study it. Twenty minutes is enough to whet their appetites--if they're serious.

I can't believe Omnicom, WPP, Publicis, Interpublic, Havas, MDC and whatever other holding company I'm leaving off my cursory list has no interest in the knowledge above my shoulders that will die along with me.

That's fine.

Who wants anything that harks back to the 80s?