The Gift of Quiet.

I've written about this before, but I think it bears repeating. Especially since I just read that a remake of "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" is being planned with Gary Oldman as the star.

I read a review of Oldman's forerunner in the role, Alec Guinness, and what struck me was a sentence that said Guinness' Smiley "possessed the gift of quiet."

The gift of quiet.

How much better agency life would be if more people had the confidence to be quiet. To speak only when they 1) added to the conversation; 2) knew what they were talking about; 3) had all the details laid before them.

Most meetings in agencies (with clients or without) are dick-swinging contests. Who can speak first, loudest, longest. Not who can say what needs to be said. With brevity and clarity.

I've worked for a few people over the years who had the gift of quiet.

But most agencies are full of "summer soldiers."

People who aren't there when the fighting and rigor are being worked.

They come in at the last minute and compensate for their shortage of involvement with a surfeit of bluster.

As one of my ex-bosses, one with the gift of quiet, used to bewail "people with a titanic ego and a minnow in the engine room."

The only way to have the gift of quiet is to have the confidence to listen.

Carthage, 800 BC-146 BC.

I have just finished a book--beach reading if you will--by an English historian named Richard Miles called "Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization". The book was about the founding of the city around 800 BC to its obliteration by the Romans in around 146 BC. The book goes through all the waxing and waning of the great city, both Punic Wars and, of course, Hannibal's near-conquering of the Roman empire during the Second Punic War.

It's good to read a book on the collapse of a civilization when it looks like your own is dieing. When the stock market is more volatile than my mother. And when religious extremists and such threaten the inherently liberal principles this nation was founded upon.

It's also good perspective to read such a book when you're living through an era of change in the business. No one knows what the new "new thing" will be. No one's really figured out, outside of maybe Amazon and a few others, how to make the internet pay. No one really know how to reach diffident if not hostile consumers.

The thing about Carthage, and most other disintegrating communities is that from the view of a couple of decades or a couple of millennia, their demise looks complete and nihilistic. But the fact is Carthage, though it was razed to the ground by vindictive Roman armies, didn't really die.

Its people suffered, no doubt. But they made like Yogi Bear used to when Ranger Rick was too hot on his tail. They melded into the forest. They merged with others. They took on other roles. They rebuilt. They survived.

As the city of Nagasaki has--on this the 66th anniversary of its atomization.

As TV will. As most agencies will in some form or another.

Survival is hard.
Entities are not permanent.
They mutate and morph.
But they go on.
As does life.

Television is dead, Part. 6729987.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/08/business/media/tv-advertising-still-a-reliable-engine-in-media.html?hp
An article in yesterday's "New York Times" called "Ad Money Reliably Goes to Television," recounted the success, life and vibrancy of television advertising.

So tell that hipster from Williamsburg who skipped a whole season on "24" and then proudly proclaimed television dead, that he's a candy-assed fuckwit with a bad, ironic haircut.

The advertising profession.

Having grown up in advertising--my father and my uncle Sid were in the business from the 40s and the 50s on--one of the things I liked about it when I was a kid was that it wasn't a profession.

My father (and my uncle) weren't like lawyers or doctors or accountants. They could dress funkier. Speak in more florid language and live life with a spontaneity and elan that their corporate neighbors couldn't.

Now, of course, advertising has become a profession. Decisions are the result of many endless and meandering meetings. And we speak a language that's arcane and incestuous that people outside of our guild can't fathom.

The things that at one time made advertising a great job have today disappeared. We are mechanical men worried about best practices. We labor in the pixel mines hauling 16 tons a day till we grow older and deeper in debt.

Advertising is not a science, though there are parts that can be scientificized.
Advertising has a huge element of gut and luck.
Someone derives something that strikes a chord.

The professionals don't have what it takes to succeed.
So they professionalize things.
They rewrite the rules so they can prevail.
And now they do prevail.
And things suck.

The daughters have arrived.

My trip down to St. Martin was done so we could effect a nuclear family reunion of sorts. My older daughter and 14-year-old niece are down here as is my 19-year-old daughter who, as I said before, is teaching scuba diving down here.

There are hipsters and new media pundits and decryers of the national national fabric that say reading is dead, intellect is dead, that all kids want to do is click on the like button, the like button, not man, as Protagoras said, is the measure of all things.

Well, for once, I am optimistic. My kids (yes, I know that being mine I'm a) biased and they're probably b) unusual) are different. Mine, 19 and 24, are eagerly awaiting their return to academe. One to college for her Sophomore year and the other is champing at the bit to begin her doctoral program in Clinical Psychology. They are reading, each of them, Salman Rushdie or Tracy Kidder for pleasure, and speak about it with passion and erudition. My niece, 14, is reading Harry Potter in Hebrew and is writing her own epilogue to the wizard's saga.

Many aspects of the world have gone to hell in a hand-basket. Our debt is downgraded. Much of our population is cretinous. Dangerous religious thought is on the ascent.

But here, in my little house overlooking the teal blue Caribbean, my daughters have arrived.

Spend some time with them and you might be hopeful of the future.

A correction.

I made a mistake in my previous post pertaining to the inequality of income distribution. The chart above is more accurate, though since 2007 when the data for the chart was created, inequality has probably grown more severe.

I apologize for my errors.

My point remains the same.

With such unequal distribution of wealth, our nation is threatened and it's unlikely we can have a real recovery if so few possess so much and so many possess (and can purchase) so little.

Just sayin'.

You can't have an economic recovery when 1% of the population controls 90% of the wealth. What you have is a Banana Republic. And not the kind that's just an expensive Gap.

Words at play.

There's an obituary in The New York Times today of a famed American footballer, the 6'7", 300 lb., Bubba Smith. The obituary led off with a poem about Smith by the great Ogden Nash: "When hearing tales of Bubba Smith, you wonder, is he man or myth?"

That poem brought me back.

When I was a kid, Life Magazine and its over-sized four-color pages had portraits of football players accompanied by poems by Nash. I remember, as an 8 or 9 year old, pouring over these poems and reveling in their fractured rhymes and funny puns.

Even as a little kid I was a bit of a loner and Nash's poems kept me pleasant company. Here's one he wrote about a running back for the Colts who was called on to serve as quarterback after the top two guys were injured:

Is there a Baltimore fan alive
who's forgotten Tom Matte in '65?
The Colts by crippling injuries vexed,
Unitas first and Cuozzo next--
What would become of the pass attack?
Then Matte stepped in at quarterback.
He beat the Rams in a great display,
He did - and he damn near beat Green Bay.
Ask him today to plunge or block,
Tom's the man who can roll or rock.
In Tokyo, they say karate
In Baltimore, they call it Matte.

Nash's work awakened in me a love for words and word-play that first saw the light of day when I was exposed to Dr. Seuss. The idea that someone could make a living via bad rhymes appealed to me then and appeals to me now.

When I think back to how I started as a writer, Nash plays a part. He was funny, poetic, prolific. He seemed, at least via the glorious pages of Life Magazine to have the world on a string.

Tropical Storm Emily.

Tropical Storm Emily, downgraded from a hurricane, has hit St. Martin with full and beautiful fury. The rain is incessant. The wind is gusting so loudly it drowns out the volume of the rough cuts I am trying to view. Nature is trying to tell me not to work so hard--especially on vacation.

There's something magical about a storm that is not too bad. It's bad enough to keep you indoors--an enforced relaxation period. But not so bad that people lose their lives or their homes.

Whenever I'm in the middle of a tropical storm, I think of the great Bogart/Bacall, Edward G. Robinson movie "Key Largo," where Robinson holds a group of people hostage in a Florida hotel. They did storms right in the 1940s. And sultry Bacall and a drunken Claire Trevor make the whole thing watchable, as do, of course, Bogart, Robinson, Lionel Barrymore and the missing Osceola brothers.

If you need a tropical storm in your life, if you need a few moments to batten down your psychic hatches and close yourself off from the elements and vicissitudes of life, find a copy and view "Key Largo."

It's way better than viewing rough cuts.

The "M" Affidavit.

I refinanced my apartment the other day, taking advantage of Depression-era interest rates and hoping to close on the unit before the debt ceiling caved in and we were buying loaves of bread with wheel-barrow's full of Deutsch-dollars. The amount of paperwork to refinance an apartment with massive amounts of equity, by people whose credit-rating is unscathed and who earn many times the multiplier of fiscal probity, was staggering. This is what our bank--in that rare civilized portion of Amerika we call Manhattan demanded. In other parts of the country, people with no documents and no employment history were buying or had bought homes as large as ocean liners for no money down. But in New York, things are different.

And I almost got hung up because of an M.

I bought my apartment as George Tannenbaum.
For whatever reason I was refinancing as George M Tannenbaum.
The bank was addle-pated.
Was this the same George?
I pictured a scene from some schetl sci-fi movie where thousands of George Tannenbaums roamed the streets.
How many of me can there be?

But the bank, as I said, was concerned.

I needed to file a notarized affidavit that I was I.