Rules. Rules. Rules.

About 15 years ago, I reached the high-point of my career. 

I was co-head of the thousand-person flagship office of a big agency.

I noticed something back then that's stayed with me for the last few decades. I noticed that by the time a client need made it to the creative department, that very need had been folded, spindled and mutilated.

The need was no longer expressed in macro terms. 

You never heard things like "73-percent of the market is dominated by three players and our client--despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars, has just a 1.58-percent share."

You never heard things like "our client's product and service was so bad for so long, they've almost completely lost two generations of customers."

You never heard stories like that.

Instead you got reams of paper and then got told to do a TV spot, yet another banner ad, or to create a booth at the US Open Tennis Tournament.

The ad was an ad was an ad.

The problem was a problem.

And never the twain shall meet.

Someone in HQ will tell you what to do based on something some probably low-level client said needed doing.

I took to saying something to the few people who would listen to me. "There's a difference between doing the assignment and doing the job."

There's a difference between answering the small "b" brief and trying to answer the big "B" brief. Usually starting around six on Sunday night, I get about seven or four pings requesting my presence in meetings for the following week. I don't curse the people requesting my presence--I curse Microsoft. They've created software that is so ubiquitous that blocking someone's calendar is as easy as stealing ketchup packets from a hamburger joint.

I wonder if the layers of time-management, staff-management and project-managements that today runs just about every ad agency large or small or in-between has had a similar effect.

We are so focused on doing what we're told to do--"the banner has to be 728x90"--that most times we don't think about what we might be doing. We put out the fire. We don't seal the gas leak.

In other words, are agencies in their modern form--where mistakes and wasted movement are hardly allowed--places of prescription as opposed to places of inception? 

Perhaps the creative department is the crate department?

Is the very structure and population of the modern holding company agency antithetical to its reason for being? Are they now places ruled by accountancy rather than creativity?

Is coloring-in the pre-determined lines more important than making something that could change minds and behaviors?

Ten days ago, my wife and I drive up to Cape Cod to see her best friend. On Saturday night, a soft, purple cool July evening, we drove to Veteran's Field in Chatham to see a Cape Cod League baseball game between the Chatham Anglers and the Orleans Firebirds.

This is a pretty high-level of low-level baseball. The boys playing are from the big baseball universities: Clemson, Rice, University of Texas, USC and so on. The players are thick-muscled and unshaven and probably one-in-four will have at least a cup of coffee in the Bigs.

All kinds of analytics and strategy and numerology are applied in major league baseball now. And all that crap has, for me, taken all the fun out of the game. The game is more about math than sport. And I had enough of math in high school, Mr. Nelson, my algebra teacher and friend not-withstanding.

I feel the 'more about math than sport' applied to advertising, too. We put such rules and restrictions on every assignment we get, that we've boundaried our way away from creativity. We have transformed our business from what can we do to what are we being told to do.

I'm sure that's not the way advertising, or baseball, is supposed to be.

-

BTW, this is a job description for a job in a "creative" agency. It could, I exaggerate, be a job description of a Cagney-era prison guard in "White Heat." 

An Optimistic Address.

It's hard to be an American these days. 

At least an American who believes in Enlightenment values and tenets. Like democracy, equality, science and other outdated notions.

Listening to the trump hearings--I won't call them the January 6th hearings--this isn't about a date. This is about a crazed and corrupt man who tried to subvert our country. The hearings are a doctorate-level seminar in the end times. There is such greed and hatred and racism in America that's been amplified by people like trump and the radical right media, that there doesn't seem to be any hope for what Lincoln had once called, "the last best hope on Earth."

I hardly know anyone who's listening who isn't depressed. Who isn't asking themselves, where can we move to? What can we do to get out of this? 

I'm not sure those questions can be answered.

But then, something happened today. Something happened, small and without meaning, that gave me just a flicker of hope.

Back in December, my oldest and closest friend, Fred, died. We'd been friends since we were ninth-graders together at an elite private school just north of New York City. 

How long ago was that? Vietnam raged. Nixon was president. 

In May, Fred's immediate family, his wife, Celia, and his two sons held a memorial service for Fred at Columbia University. It's where Fred and Celia got their law degrees.

Fred's younger son, Nicholas spoke at the service. As did Fred's older son, Michael. As did I.

My wife, Laura and Celia have become closer. It turns out that Nicholas, a second-year law student at Georgetown, was interning with a law firm in New York this summer and had no place to live. Without even checking with Laura, I blurted, "why doesn't Nicholas stay in our apartment." We're most often up in Connecticut.

And so, under the watchful eyes of Laura and Celia, Nicholas is safe in our home, ensconced with his girlfriend and his puppy, Ralph.

Nicholas is a good tenant. About once every two weeks, he FedEx's us a large envelope filled with our New York mail. 

An envelope arrived at our rickety Connecticut house this afternoon. I looked at the return address to try to determine who the package was from. The address said 200 Park Avenue, New York City.

Back when I was just a boy, 200 Park Avenue was the Pan Am building. My father worked there for about 15 years.

Now, almost 45 years later, the building is called the Met Life building. And my best friend's younger son works in the space now.

It's not a big thing, this coincidence.

But sometimes big things start small.

To me, this is another generation--an often disparaged generation--working its ass off. It's people who help people--for no financial gain, but for what's really important: love.

The address on the FedEx brought it home to me.

A simple example of continuity.

Across a lot of time and a lot of distance.

It's a gloomy time in America. And maybe I'm grasping at straws as I look for hope. 

Maybe the 200 Park Avenue coincidence means nothing. 

Maybe it means everything.

The Purge is Real. (Debra Fried Writes Another Guest Post.)

Back in September, my friend and ex-colleague, Debra Fried wrote a wonderful post for Ad Aged. Since this blog is a solo operation, I most often deny myself the pleasure of getting praise for someone else's work. 

But when Debra's piece ran, Ad Aged's metaphorical phone rang off the hook. I was a little embarrassed. I did nothing outside of press the "Publish" button. 

You can read Debra's initial post here. 

Yesterday, Debra sent me a note with another post attached. Would I care to publish it? Did King Kong have a thing for Fay Wray?

If you like Debra's post as much as I do, drop Debra a line of thanks. Thanks, Debra, for writing today's piece.

Advertising for all its frustrations is an amazing business. The amount of talent in the industry is staggering. Imagine if agencies could unleash it like this blog gets to. People might enjoy advertising again.

--

The Purge is Real.

The pile of clothes I’ve thrown onto my bed seems to look back at me as I stare it down.  I reach for a sweater, and can feel a kick of adrenaline. My closet purge is on. 

 

Normally, I’d be doing this on a weekend, but it’s Wednesday. The first non-working weekday of my adult life.  I examine a beautiful coffee-colored shrug, and indeed, give a little shrug. I’ll keep it, not because I’ll wear it, but because I should.

 

I grab an oversized, beige sweater, remembering the first time I wore it to the office, paired with a long, bottle-green pleated skirt and tan booties.  The slouch of the sweater over the elegant skirt gave me the cool, effortless look I loved, but rarely achieved.  I knew I’d done it right when one of the impossibly chic young women from the design team lifted a brow and said “love that.” The Yes Pile has a resident.  A too-chunky black chenille sweater gets a No.  A pilling cashmere boatneck sadly joins it.

A little black shift gets plopped atop the Yes’s. There was a time, when I worked on luxury and beauty accounts, that my art director partner and I wore nothing but black sleeveless dresses with strands of gold chains. When people commented on how we dressed up, in the Creative Department of an advertising agency where most people wore jeans, I’d say, “I’m just lazy – it’s one piece - no matching, no thinking.” Which was true.

 

Well, half true.  I was lazy when it came to matching, but not when it came to working.  I loved advertising.  I adored working with my teams. And lived for shoots, followed by days in edit rooms, eating salads and french fries (mainly the latter) while obsessing over every one of the 30 seconds we’d created. I secretly loved my title – Executive Creative Director –a phrase that seemed to say, “rebellious, yet important.”  I worked late, on weekends, and on more vacations than I should have. It never occurred to me not to.

 

I grab a bunch of hangers, heavy with jeans, and throw them onto the bed. I smile at the dark blue pair I bought the night before a shoot in Maine.  Even I knew I couldn’t trek through snow wearing a dress.  

 

It was on that shoot that it hit me that I was older than most of my colleagues.  Of course, I knew they were younger - I was their boss.  But only when members of the film crew offered me an arm, or said, “you ok?” as we climbed steep hills, did I realize I wasn’t just a little older; I was 20 years older.  Still, as we stood in a semi-circle, our eyes trained on the monitor, wearing clear ponchos that made us look like condoms, my laughter was as young as theirs.

 

I pull a cream-colored cardigan from its hanger.  I’d worn it with a black pencil skirt and pointy shoes that hurt my feet, but looked so right, the day I pitched and won a big account.  Keep.  I finger the raw silk of a celery-green dress I’d gotten at a sample sale.  I’d worn it to present a campaign called “By Women, For Women,” to a bunch of women who it was definitely not for.  So much so, that the lead client stopped the meeting, saying, “We don’t want to go this route. You need to fix it and come back.” And walked out.   Afterward, I gasped, in the women’s room, to see that the celery-colored silk beneath my arms had become a very dark olive. Even with my arms pressed to my sides, the sweat seeped out, like butter, leaking over the edges of pancakes.

 

I kept the dress, convinced that someday, I’d get the bad juju out, just as the dry cleaner had done with the stains. I sigh and let the silk slide through my hands, into the No Pile.  Maybe letting go becomes more possible once you’ve been let go.

 

I study a tan linen dress. The one I was wearing the day I was put into the No Pile.  I’d dressed for a remote meeting that morning; one in which I thought I was going to share work with a new boss.  About an hour before it began, the invitation was updated to include a name I didn’t recognize. My eyes widened when I checked her title.  Head of Human Resources.  I tried to think of all the reasons she’d be invited to a creative meeting and came up with exactly one.

 

I ran to the front of the apartment, where my husband was drinking coffee. 

“I’m getting fired,” I said.

 

“Oh, please,” he answered, without looking up from the paper.

 

I explained further and he looked me in the eye in a way that made me queasy.  I had heard about these “quick catchups” from friends, at least ten of whom had been laid off in the past two years. I was the only one left. Last Woman Standing. I used to joke that I was jealous of them, but I never really meant it.

 

I spent 26 years at a job that fit like a favorite pair of jeans. But lately, slipping into those jeans had become harder than I liked to admit. I struggled some mornings, and wished I could let the seams out.  But that would have hurt my pride.  So, I did what came naturally.  I held my breath and wriggled my way in.  And worked harder. And pretended the fit was still perfect.

 

The tan linen dress is luminescent, lighting my face, the way Coco Chanel said pearls were supposed to.  Somehow, I couldn’t help but take a bit of solace in feeling I looked pretty in my grid square, as I heard the words, “we’ve come to a parting of the ways.”  They couldn’t see that I was bunching the hem of the dress between my fingers as I nodded that yes, I understood it was cost, and not performance-related. 

 

At the end of the meeting, the HR woman said to reach out with questions and popped off the screen, leaving me staring at my oddly radiant face.  I dragged the cursor to the red button, where it hovered over the word that so aptly described what they’d just spent 40 minutes telling me to do.  Leave.  

 

I pile the No’s into a giant shopping bag.  Decisions are hell in the making, but such sweet relief, once reached. The empty hangers swing lightly on my finger, like unfettered ingenues on the first day of spring.  I hang them, then look at the bed, where my linen dress lies in a heap. 

 

I hug it to my face, smelling a hint of the fragrance I’d innocently dabbed onto my neck that morning. The cuffs are eagerly rolled up, ready for action. A work dress, on its first morning without work.

The bag of No’s sits on the floor, bursting with a past, that only yesterday, was my present.  My closet looks fresh and open. I gently drape the dress over my arm, the two of us, together in limbo.  And since I don’t know what else to do, I hang it in the coat closet, where it sways; a misfit, amongst the serious wool and well-intentioned cashmere. My loyal, hardworking, elegant soldier of a dress did nothing to deserve this purgatory, yet it's the best I can do. Because purges aren’t easy. And some hurt more than others.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Permanent Early Train. A Guest Post by Wil Boudreau.

Wil Boudreau and I don't know each other, really. But as ad people of a certain age, we connected some time ago to get to know each other and to talk about starting our own agencies somewhat later than people typically do. 

Wil sent me a note and asked if he could post something on Ad Aged. 

"Yer darn-tootin' y' can," I answered. And thus, Wil. First a bit of a bio. Then, Wil's post.

Wil grew up at BBDO NY rising from Copywriter to ECD.  He lead creative on famous brands like Snickers, Guinness, Lowe’s, E*Trade, Pizza Hut and more.  He was then given an extraordinary rendition to become CCO of BBDO ATL where among other things he put the late president JFK into a Super Bowl ad for Carnival Cruise Corporation.  He escaped Atlanta to be CCO of the oddly named The & Partnership NY, where he helped make the Wall Street Journal less “Male, Pale and Yale.”  

Lately he’s having way more fun than all of those gigs combined by being Founder/CCO of Boudreau Advertising, which he runs from his kitchen table.

Oh, Wil also has a podcast. Which you can listen to, here.

--

The Permanent Early Train.

I have several running jokes with my kids. One I always use at the end of an epic movie when the leading man and leading lady, while first appearing to be total opposites who hate each

other, decide that somewhere along the way to finding the magic space stones or stealing the Magna Carta or battling an army of lovable pirate zombies, they realized their true feelings and embrace in a long Hollywood kiss. Whenever this kind of a kiss occurs, usually while the couple is covered in alien goo, or volcanic ash or velociraptor blood, I always say… “And that’s exactly how your mother and I met.”

 

It works every time. At least as far as I’m concerned.

 

Another running gag I’ve been using over the last two years happens at dinner time. We’ll all be seated at the table together and I’ll say, “Looks like Daddy got the early train again” Thus

explaining my previously rare appearance at the dinner table on a weeknight. This has long since stopped getting a laugh. But I say it anyway. I realized recently that I’m actually saying it

to myself. It’s an affirmation of a new reality I still haven’t fully gotten used to. I can’t help but feel like this is still temporary. That one of these days I’ll find myself on a train long after my

family has finished dinner. Wolfing down my dinner of a hastily grabbed slice of pizza from Grand Central Station’s food court. And likely drinking a couple of room-temperature IPA’s to

both wash it down and calm me down from another day in the lion’s den.

 

The COVID lockdown coincided almost exactly with the start of my own virtual ad agency. I’m still an advertising creative director. I’m still really busy. I still have meetings. I still make all

kinds of ads. I just do it all now from my kitchen table. As much as I hate the internet for the soul-sucking it’s perpetrating on my kids thanks to the scourge of Discord and Minecraft and

Fortnight. And as much as I complain about too many emails and Zoom fatigue. And as much as I think that social media is turning us all into neurotic “like” addicts. I am unbelievably

grateful to technology for this gift of working from home. This gift of catching a permanent early train. Also, a permanent late train in the morning, since I’m always around while my kids

are heading off to school. I think about it every single day. And I marvel at how implausible it is that exactly during the most challenging, painful, and devastating couple of years in recent

history, my life in many many ways got immeasurably better.

 

Ironically life is better because these days, I’m in way more meetings. Except some of those meetings are bike rides, and games of ping pong, and long talks about everything from the

awesomeness of “The Batman” film to the war in Ukraine. 

It's no wonder that midtown Manhattan office vacancy is higher than just after 9/11, when no one wanted to be in an office building. And that the Metro North trains I used to take are running with less than half of their pre pandemic commuters. Meanwhile leisure travel is back up. Airports are crowded. Cruise ships are running. Concert crowds and Broadway are back. People are live and in person everywhere, except the office. And indications are, they ain’t coming back any time soon.

Because technology did what it does when it’s on its’ best behavior. It changed our lives for the better. We can do now do everything we used to do in an office virtually, no matter where we are. The appeal of dinner with the ones we love is proving far more appealing than any office happy hour.

I remember seeing an early twentieth-century illustration of what the Manhattan skyline would look like in the future. Nearly every skyscraper had its’ own rooftop zeppelin port. Then the

Hindenburg blew up and they invented airplanes, and suddenly that vision of New York City was obsolete. I wonder how long it will take Manhattan, and other cities to realize that people

aren’t living there because they work there. They’re living there because they like great restaurants and theater, and live music and night life and seeing mariachi bands on the subway.

Ok the mariachi bands on the subway are a bit polarizing, but you get my point. The things that make cities great will never go away. But a good percentage of the commuters are likely gone

for good. They’re already talking about turning midtown into a more residential area. I smile when I think of hipsters living in the high rise my office once occupied on Sixth avenue. I hope if

those office buildings ever do get turned into apartment buildings, they don’t retain any residual stress in the walls from when the place was chock full of business world anxiety. I

imagine a hipster spitting out his kombucha when he’s suddenly hit with some existential dread from the time someone lost a new business pitch while standing in the exact same spot of what was a conference room and is now a kitchen nook.

 

Even if there aren’t as many day laborers, there will still be plenty of adventures to be had in our great cities. And they’ll always be great places to fall in love. Just like I did. When the

handsome-ish but somewhat unkempt advertising guy and the beautiful real estate agent/artist realized somewhere during their search for a reasonably priced two-bedroom in Cobble Hill that

they had come to see each other as much more than broker and customer and had that great big kiss right there in front of a shoe repair place in Brooklyn. 

That kiss would lead to four kids, a dog, two cats, and a house in the suburbs. And later, much later, the unexpected gift of

permanent early trains every single night for the rest of their lives. Talk about a Hollywood ending.

 

One Central Question.

I don't know if I read it or I made it up, but everyone who breathes should carry around a stickie note with them at all times, or if you're the tattooing sort, have some words tattooed someplace prominent, a few simple words.

"Why would anyone care?"

The world is entirely too much with us and there is all too much noise surrounding us at all times.

But it seems like everything that's put on TV or every ad you see online--if you're not blocking ads with a simple download or using the Duck-Duck-Go browser--is filled with absolute crap that does nothing more than fill the surrounding atmosphere with a cacophony of stupidity that could veritably make your head fall off.

I'm not talking about the conversations people have. Invariably if you're living with someone or you have office mates, you wind up talking about dopey stuff. How the cookie sheet's gotten warped. Did you take the garbage pail in from the yard? The dog-groomer is expected to come today between 4AM and 9PM.

That's normal and natural stuff. It reminds me of the dialogue of life as written by a suburban and brain-dead Samuel Beckett. 

That's not what gets me.

What gets me is when you and I produce work--and then publicize it. And that work, work that is a reflection of ourselves and our professional judgment, is so empty, so devoid of life, spark, creativity, ideas and ingenuity, but we promote it anyhow.

I don't want to disparage an entire generation and say such a circumstance is evidence of an "everyone gets a trophy culture," but why are we promoting work that is so devoid of life, decency and even honesty?

Where are our standards? Where is our essential belief in quality, or remarkableness?

Yes, I have written a blog post every day for the past 15 years, and some of them suck. But that's just me. No one is paying me for this. And if they suck, well, that's life. I'll come back with something better tomorrow. Because as I write this blog, it's a daily exercise and you can't begrudge anyone a bad day.

I'm talking about work for clients that ostensibly reflects on the agency that's made it and the client's brand.

"Why would anyone care?"

Last week, I saw this monstrosity from WPP. My younger daughter created better-written, better-produced videos on maggots having sex with snails for science class when she was 13. This is produced, then promoted by one of the world's largest (if you believe their numbers, communications companies with fewer than 2-percent of their employees over 60.)

In short, where are your standards? Your taste? Your respect for the "airwaves" or viewer. Why would you put your name on THIS? Are you so in need of praise that you have no self-awareness of stench?

Just a minute ago, I ran across this on Agency Spy. Why in god's name would you put your name on this? Why would you associate your agency with this? Do you think this is good? And if you do, why would any client want to work with you?

Do you think anyone would care?

Everyone, regardless of their profession, occasionally, in the language of the guys broadcasting Knicks' games, stinks up the court now and again. There's no crime in sucking now and again.

When you do, you chalk it up to a bad day and try to hide the result. You also redouble your efforts the next time out of the box. You work harder to show that your suck was anomalous, not an overture to the opera that's coming.

What worries me about this is it appears the entities involved can't tell the difference between mundane and good. They haven't or won't ask themselves, "why would anyone care?"

What is Advertising? What is its Purpose?

I'm rounding third and heading home.

If Psalm 90 mentioned "three score and ten," (my Aramaic is a bit rusty) I am approaching three score and five. 

That's ok with me. 

I do not fear mortality. In fact, with the way America has descended into an intolerant, gun-toting, theocratic hell, I might even welcome it. The world has changed more substantively--and for the worse--in the last palin-trump-mcconnell-thomas- infused decade--than I can tolerate. If this collapse of  enlightenment thinking is merely an overture to the opera that's coming, then in the mangled words of Samuel Goldwyn, "include me out."

But, George, yours is a blog about advertising.

Oh, yeah. You're right.

OK. Advertising.

The great writer Ben Kay in his surpassing blog wrote a post last week, an assessment of the Gran Prix winners at Cannes.

According to Ben's observations, there were 30 Grands Prix winners--let's call them Grand Pricks--and only four won got a $12 trophy for their thousands of dollars in entry fees doing work for something produced by a corporation.

I've had nearly a 40-year career in advertising. That career has helped me put two children through college and advanced degrees with no debt. It's helped me afford two homes--the mortages on which are essentially paid off. I have a decent car (though it was built in 1966) my health, money in the bank and all the appurtenances of a life well-lived.

In those 40 years, I've written ads for:

//steak sauce// mustard// credit cards// paper// word processors// typewriter// a bank// a bank for the wealthy// donuts// muffins// apple sauce// whiskey// beer// pudding// german cars// American cars// technology// technology services// retirement funds// airlines// and about one-hundred other products I can't think of early on a Saturday morning.

The average supermarket in America--one-minute of research tells me--has between 15,000 and 60,000 SKUs on its shelves. 

I would imagine the average fascist-enabling Home Depot or Walmart have many more.

But in the current sump of our industry, the idea of selling what people buy, or what people produce, is as unlikely as Fred Flintstone wearing a hard-hat when he's down at the quarry. We no longer want to be associated with the dirty, menial things that used to make our world go-round.

It's the advertising equivalent of what we used to call a "garbage man" rebranding himself a "sanitation engineer."

Here's what I do:

I take stuff clients want to sell, whether it's the idea of what they do or what they actually make, or the good it does for people, and I make it simple, understandable and lust-worthy.

Clients want to sell.

Advertising's job is to help them sell.

That's how I see it.

That does not mean I don't have a conscience. Or that I want to sell bad things. It means that I am honest with myself. 

There's never been a Nobel Peace Prize for a three-minute case-study fill on recyclable diapers and deforestation in sub-Saharan Lithuania. 

But a lot of people--of all colors, genders, orientations, national origins, religions, dominant-handedness--have lived better lives because they made something the world wanted to buy and earned a decent-living thereby.

Like Rick Blaine, I'm no good at being noble. But there's something to be said for the hard-work of real work. And our real work is the real work of selling real things for real clients to real people for real money and, hopefully, to do real good.

A dying ember: truth.

 

Judgey.

Not long ago, I read a book review in The Wall Street Journal of an anthology called "Openings & Outings" by David Pryce-Jones. Buy it here. 

[I abhor Murdoch and his evil designs on the world. I hate myself more than usual for reading the fascist Wall Street Journal, but I love reading book reviews. And I think in terms of variety of books reviewed and the quality of their reviews, they do a better job than anyone. Fascism notwithstanding.]

Pryce-Jones is one of those odd British characters who's related to everyone, who comes from more money than you can shake an heiress at, and, like Rick Blaine is truly a citizen of the world. What does all that mean? He's cousins with both Helena Bonham-Carter and Baron Elie de Rothschild. That ought to give you an inkling.

Though I'd mark myself down as a Liberal, Pryce-Jones hails from the other side of the political spectrum--the right. And he's written and edited for "The National Review," "The Financial Times," "Commentary" and more. I bridged the political divide and ordered, on the strength of the Journal's review, this volume.

While reading Pryce-Jones, I came upon an essay he wrote on someone called Piers Brendon. Brendon is a British historian and educator. Pryce-Jones hates him and here's how he describes Brendon: 

"Piers Brendon is instead an anti-historian, that is to say one who describes the past not in order to capture how it really was but only for the sake of passing moral judgments about it. For him, the past is to be judged solely in the light of the present, as though the outlook in today’s moral and intellectual arena is not just the product of the times but rather some sort of final word."

I've read a lot of good writing in my time. 

And I've puzzled for more than a decade now over the absolutist moral judgments of today.

But Pryce-Jones captures it, perfectly.

It's hard not to, in 2022, get political. Or, as my adult daughters would say, get "judgey."

We banish people for songs they sang or jokes they told a lifetime ago. We assign them to the ash-heap of history. We take their names off of buildings. We have more people in the world today who are personas non grata, than we have people who aren't covered au gratin. We fire them for something they did in 1981. 

And it's wrong.

You cannot judge someone from 1880, or even 1980 by 2022's standards. Morals, beliefs, standards are mutable. They blow with the wind and change with the times. Sure, there are bad people in the world, but most people follow the temper of the day. They're swimming with the tide. They're not doing anything evil, they're just doing what's done.

It doesn't make them bad.

It makes them human.

Flawed.

Mistaken.

Fuckedup-phrenogenic.

Not everyone can be a lone voice crying in the wilderness. There ain't but one Moses, or John Lewis, or Gandhi every century or so.

I once had a conversation with a friend of mine. She happened to be religious. Her father was a minister. She went to church every Sunday.

I said something like, "Who are we to condemn the Aztec or the Mayan for rituals that involved human sacrifice and ceremonial cannibalism? That's their law, their truth. I'm not sure we can bring our code into it."

We had a falling out over that.

Most people today regard those practices as wrong. I agree. But that doesn't mean we have the right to condemn great cultures (civilizations that will probably last longer than ours) as universally corrupt, horrible or irredeemable.

What if in 30 years it's decided that keeping a dog as a pet is wrong? Will future generations regard me as a horrible creature because I've raised four spoiled golden retrievers?

The main point in all this is simple.

It does no good to appoint yourself the arbiter of morals for all time and for all humanity.

If you believe, as I do, in the words of Dr. King, "The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice," it means that the very essence of our species involves slow progress toward greater humanity.

It's easy to look back and say "those folks were stupid, ill-informed and inhumane. They were racists and sexist and worse."

It's easy to pass judgment on all that's come before. By your standards today.

It's easy to make the world an if-then proposition. It's easy to classify people who look a certain way or come from a certain place or who speak in a certain manner as retrograde and therefore unpalatable or worthy of scorn.

One of our main jobs as humans is to find understanding. Empathy. It's to understand that everyone carries a burden. None of that excuses or even tempers bad behavior. But maybe the entire world would be better off if we hated a little slower, listened a little more carefully and gave the benefit of the doubt a little more readily.

It's all-too-easy to pass judgment on all that's come before. By your standards today.

And that's exactly why we shouldn't do so.

 

A Man Out of Time.

Back almost thirty years ago a writer I had scarcely heard of, Joseph Mitchell, died. He had been with The New Yorker since the late 1930s. Accordingly, in tribute to him, the magazine ran a spread or two of notable writers saying how much they admired Mitchell.

I went out and bought every one of Mitchell's books I could find. And I read them. A couple of times through. (There were still bookstores in New York back then. Including Books & Company, which sold signed copies of Mitchell's books.)

A story emerged about Mitchell. He had spent from 1964 to 1995 at the New Yorker without publishing a word. He came into the office every day, and he typed. But no one saw any writing and nothing was submitted to the magazine. Other writers took to going through his garbage pail at night to see what Mitchell was up to. 

They came up empty.

In certain rarefied writerly precincts, Mitchell's flame has never died out. The New Yorker Festival regularly pays homage to him. They organize a trip to a graveyard he wrote about on Staten Island. Or they gather to talk about his great writing on the long-gone greasy-spoon "Sloppy Louie's."

About once every two years or so, someone finds a stray piece of never-before-published Mitchell. And the New Yorker duly publishes it. I would imagine their readership that week leaps. As if Playboy uncovered some forgotten cheesecake featuring Marilyn Monroe or Dorothy Stratton.

In The New Yorker's February 16, 2015 issue, they published an essay by Mitchell, a "personal history." It was called "A Place of Pasts." I've read it probably once each month since it was published seven-and-a-half years ago. 

It's the opening sentence that gets me. It hits me like Alexander being shish-kebobbed by a Persian javelin.

"In the fall of 1968, without at first realizing what was happening to me, I began living in the past. These days, when I reflect on this and add up the years that have gone by, I can hardly believe it: I have been living in the past for over twenty years—living mostly in the past, I should say, or living in the past as much as possible."

By my math, Mitchell was around eighty when he wrote those words. I'm 15 and a half years from that mark. But I think I'm beginning to understand what Mitchell was getting to in his essay.

(By the way, I'll paste the article--because I'm nice--at the end of this post. However, if you can afford it, subscribe to The New Yorker. Or something else you like. Supporting thinking is our civic responsibility.)

Lately, I've been saying a sentence to myself that in a backhanded way sounds like it might have been written by Mitchell himself. I've been calling myself, "A man out of time."

I mean that sentence, unfortunately, in two ways. 

One, though I am very healthy and fit, I have a bit of a premonition that things are coming to an end for me. Maybe because my father died at 73 and his father at 56, I don't foresee an Ichabod Crane future for myself.

I don't have the tell-tale creases in my earlobes that portend a coronary, or the perhaps apocryphal line on the back of my neck that medievally is supposed to signify doom, but I just feel "done." I've done enough. My kids are fine. I've got money in the bank. And I have no material wants. And no one really needs me. It's being un-needed that's the worst.

If the great scorekeeper decided to pen my name, I wouldn't put up a fight. I'm not much looking forward to the emergence of American Nazism and it seems to be coming, and inexorably. Nazism of any stripe is rarely good for Jews. Given my mercurial nature, I would not last long under president Marjorie Taylor Greene. I don't think we'd hit it off.

The second meaning to my ears of "A man out of time," is the more conventional one. 

That I have a set of standards and behaviors that no longer belong in today's world. Worse, the way things are done today offend me. That's too mild. They make me mad.

Here's where, not above, I won't go gentle into that good night.

I won't shrug my shoulders and show up late.

I won't half-ass work and say to myself, "it's good enough."

If I promise five, I'll deliver eight. If I promise Wednesday, I deliver Tuesday.

Also, I'll research things on my own. I won't trust a brief. I don't trust anyone else to do what I consider my province.

All those behaviors mark me as an anomaly. They're the behavioral equivalent of wearing knickers and a pince-nez or jodhpurs and a riding crop. I'm anachronistic in a world that seems content to phone it in. On a network that seems to drop three calls in five.

I read somewhere not long ago something I liked.

• A meeting should be no longer than twenty minutes.
• A powerpoint no longer than fifteen pages
• And an email no longer than fifty words.

In other words, show respect for your viewer.

Sorry about this post.

I'm getting old.

--

Personal History FEBRUARY 16, 2015 ISSUE

A Place of Pasts

Finding worlds in the city.

BY JOSEPH MITCHELL

 

Joseph Mitchell was born in 1908 into a prosperous family of North Carolina cotton and tobacco growers. At the age of twenty-one, he came to New York City to pursue a career as a writer, and he started contributing to this magazine four years later. In the late sixties and the early seventies, he began writing a memoir. What follows was intended to be the third chapter but was never finished.

In the fall of 1968, without at first realizing what was happening to me, I began living in the past. These days, when I reflect on this and add up the years that have gone by, I can hardly believe it: I have been living in the past for over twenty years—living mostly in the past, I should say, or living in the past as much as possible.

And now, right away, before I go any further, I must interrupt myself and say that I am not entirely satisfied with the phrase “living in the past” as a description of my way of life—it makes me sound like some kind of sad old recluse—but living in the past is the closest I can come to it; I hope that my meaning will become clearer as I go along.

And I should also say that when I say the past I mean a number of pasts, a hodgepodge of pasts, a spider’s web of pasts, a jungle of pasts: my own past; my father’s past; my mother’s past; the pasts of my brothers and sisters; the past of a small farming town geographically misnamed Fairmont down in the cypress swamps and black gum bottoms and wild magnolia bays of southeastern North Carolina, a town in which I grew up and from which I fled as soon as I could but which I go back to as often as I can and have for years and for which even at this late date I am now and then all of a sudden and for no conscious reason at all heart-wrenchingly homesick; the pasts of several furnished-room houses and side-street hotels in New York City in which I lived during the early years of the Depression, when I was first discovering the city, and that disappeared one by one without a trace a long time ago but that evidently made a deep impression on me, for every once in a while the parlor or the lobby of one of them or my old room in one of them turns up eerily recognizable in a dream; the pasts of a number of speakeasies, diners, greasy spoons, and drugstore lunch counters scattered all over the city that I knew very well in the same period and that also have disappeared and that also turn up in dreams; the pasts of a score or so of strange men and women—bohemians, visionaries, obsessives, impostors, fanatics, lost souls, gypsy kings and gypsy queens, and out-and-out freak-show freaks—whom I got to know and kept in touch with for years while working as a newspaper reporter and whom I thought of back then as being uniquely strange, only-one-of-a-kind-in-the-whole-world strange, but whom, since almost everybody has come to seem strange to me, including myself, I now think of, without taking a thing away from them, as being strange all right, no doubt about that, but also as being stereotypes—as being stereotypically strange, so to speak, or perhaps prototypically strange would be more exact or archetypically strange or even ur-strange or maybe old-fashioned pre-Freudian-insight strange would be about right, three good examples of whom are (1) a bearded lady who was billed as Lady Olga and who spent summers out on the road in circus sideshows and winters in a basement sideshow on Forty-second Street called Hubert’s Museum, and who used to be introduced to audiences by sideshow professors as having been born in a castle in Potsdam, Germany, and being the half sister of a French duke but who I learned to my astonishment when I first talked with her actually came from a farm in a county in North Carolina six counties west of the county I come from and who loved this farm and started longing to go back to it almost from the moment she left it at the age of twenty-one to work in a circus but who made her relatives uncomfortable when she went back for a visit (“ ‘How long are you going to stay’ was always the first question they asked me,” she once said) and who finally quit going back and from then on thought of herself as an exile and spoke of herself as an exile (“Some people are exiled by the government,” she would say, “and some are exiled by the po-lice or the F.B.I. or the head of some old labor union or the Mafia or the Black Hand or the K.K.K., but I was exiled by my own flesh and blood”), and who became a legend in the sideshow world because of her imaginatively sarcastic and sometimes imaginatively obscene and sometimes imaginatively brutal remarks about people in sideshow audiences delivered deadpan and sotto voce to her fellow-freaks grouped around her on the platform, and (2) a street preacher named James Jefferson Davis Hall, who also came up here from the South and who lived in what he called sackcloth-and-ashes poverty in a tenement off Ninth Avenue in the Forties and who believed that God had given him the ability to read between the lines in the Bible and who also believed that while doing so he had discovered that the end of the world was soon to take place and who also believed that he had been guided by God to make this discovery and who furthermore believed that God had chosen him to go forth and let the people of the world know what he had discovered or else supposing he kept this dreadful knowledge to himself God would turn his back on him and in time to come he would be judged as having committed the unforgivable sin and would burn in Hell forever and who consequently trudged up and down the principal streets and avenues of the city for a generation desperately crying out his message until he wore himself out and who is dead and gone now and long dead and gone but whose message remembered in the middle of the night (“It’s coming! Oh, it’s coming!” he would cry out. “The end of the world is coming! Oh, yes! Any day now! Any night now! Any hour now! Any minute now! Any second now!”) doesn’t seem as improbable as it used to, and (3) an old Serbian gypsy woman named Mary Miller—she called herself Madame Miller—whom I got to know with the help of an old-enemy-become-old-friend of hers, a retired detective in the Pickpocket and Confidence Squad, and whom I visited a number of times over a period of ten years in a succession of her ofisas, or fortune-telling parlors, and who was fascinating to me because she was always smiling and gentle and serene, an unusually sweet-natured old woman, a good mother, a good grandmother, a good great-grandmother, but who nevertheless had a reputation among detectives in con-game squads in police departments in big cities all over the country for the uncanny perceptiveness with which she could pick out women of a narrowly specific kind—middle-aged, depressed, unstable, and suggestible, and with access to a bank account, almost always a good-sized savings bank account—from the general run of those who came to her to have their fortunes told and for the mercilessness with which she could gradually get hold of their money by performing a cruel old gypsy swindle on them, thehokkano baro, or the big trick; and, finally, not to mention a good many other pasts, the past of New York City insofar as it is connected directly or indirectly with my own past, and particularly the past of the part of New York City that is known as lower Manhattan, the part that runs from the Battery to the Brooklyn Bridge and that encompasses the Fulton Fish Market and its environs, and which is part of the city that I look upon, if you will forgive me for sounding so high-flown, as my spiritual home.

In my time, I have known quite a few of the worlds and the worlds within worlds of which New York City is made up, such as the world of the newspapers, the world of the criminal courts, the world of the museums, the world of the racetracks, the world of the tugboat fleets, the world of the old bookstores, the world of the old left-behind churches down in the financial district, the world of the old Irish saloons, the world of the old Staten Island oyster ports, the world of the party-boat piers at Sheepshead Bay, and the worlds of the city’s two great botanical gardens, the Botanical one in the Bronx and the Botanic one in Brooklyn. As a reporter and as a curiosity seeker and as an architecture buff and as a Sunday walker and later on as a member of committees in a variety of Save-this and Save-that and Friends-of-this and Friends-of-that organizations and eventually as one of the commissioners on the Landmarks Preservation Commission, I have known some of these worlds from the inside. Even so, I have never really felt altogether at home in any of them. And I have always felt at home in the Fulton Fish Market.

I know the exact day that I began living in the past. I didn’t know it then, of course, but I know it now. The day was October 4, 1968, a Friday. I had recently been in what I guess could be called a period of depression, during which, on the advice of a doctor, I had begun keeping a detailed diary, really a journal, and I have continued to keep it, so that I have a record of everything of any consequence that happened to me on that day and on almost every day of my life since then. On that day, according to my diary, a dream woke me up around 4 A.M. In this dream, I was standing on the muddy bank of a stream that I recognized, because of a peculiar old slammed-together split-rail bridge crossing it, as being the central stream running through Old Field Swamp, a cypress swamp near my home in North Carolina. I had often fished in this stream as a boy. In the dream, I was fishing for redfin pike with a snare hook hung from a line on the end of a reed pole. I was watching a sandbar in some shallow water out in the middle of the stream that the sun was shining on, and I was waiting for a pike to show up over the sandbar where it would be clearly visible and where I could maneuver my line until I had the hook under it and could snatch it out of the water. I was intent on what I was doing and oblivious to everything else. And then I happened to look up, and I saw that the bridge was on fire. And then I saw that the mud on the opposite bank was beginning to quiver and bubble and spit like lava and that smoke and flames were beginning to rise from it. And then, a few moments later, while I was standing there, staring, fish and alligators and snakes and muskrats and mud turtles and bullfrogs began floating down the stream, all belly up, and I realized that the central stream of Old Field Swamp had turned into one of the rivers of Hell. I dropped my pole and spun around and started running as hard as I could up a muddy path that led out of the swamp, but the mud on it was also beginning to quiver and bubble and spit, so I plunged into a briar patch beside the path and tried to fight my way through it, whereupon I woke up. I woke up with my heart in my mouth.