I think I'm stupid.

I just got pulled into an impromptu meeting. It involved two account people and a whiteboard, so I knew I was in trouble.

"We need you to look at this. We're talking about 2012 planning."

I looked at the words on the board. Technically I guess you could say I "knew" all of the words. It's not like they were written in some foreign language where they put slanted lines through the Os.

But I didn't, I'll admit, understand a thing that was written.

A very sweet account person took me through the Mandarin, character by indecipherable character.

"What do you think," she asked.

"It's fine, I guess," I said. "Where does the part come in that says we need to write commercials."

"Oh," she laughed. "This is planning. It's so we can discuss what we need to do next year."

"I see," I lied.

"We should have a plan in place by the end to 2011 that will lead our discussions for 2012."

"Now we need to assign people to these tasks," said another account person.

"You don't need me for that," I said and I escaped from the room.

Some thoughts on despair.

One of the many mania (or is it manium?) of our age is the unreal belief that a small and inconsequential action on the part of an individual can help solve a major problem or crisis.

Now we wear wrist bands to save the small-eared sea lion, we wear lapel pins to fight sagging testicles, we grow mustaches to fight baldness in cats.

Every morning, it seems, on some street corner or another, I walk by giant inflatable rats. They're put up by our dwindling breed of union men. They're protesting the use of non-union labor, low wages or some other corporate indelicacy. I'm not sure that this marching or shouting gets anyone anywhere. Certainly the wage gap between the working class and the corporate class smacks, today, of the late 19th Century. So, it seems that the barking and the ratting out and the occupying is little more than the tale of sound and fury told by an idiot, signifying nothing.

No one, maybe outside of Christopher Hedges, is pointing the finger at the root cause of unemployment. The $10 million paid to a middling CEO is equal to 200 $50k/year jobs. In other words, the plutocracy sees more shareholder value in paying one man $10 million than in paying 200 $50K.

Wrist bands won't stop this. Nor will tents in privately-owned parks (a privately-owned park sounds like something out of Louis XIV France. Let the peasants hunt thrush one day a year.) Nor will forwarding a link, nor will a like, nor will (ha ha ha) this inconsequential blog.

I don't know what the Mahatma would think of the feeble fights against corporations, against fracking, against hunger in Africa. But I do think of this probably apocryphal
exchange he had with Churchill:

Churchill: “What do you think of Western civilisation?"

Ghandi: "I think it would be a very good idea.”

I have a feeling that we are in the midst of a trend that is relatively inexorable. The rich will ride their horses over the poor and the middle-class will disappear like a fist when you open your hand.

All the liberal progress forwarded by the American New Deal, minimum wage laws, a 40-hour work week, the right to organize, a social safety net, affordable higher education and decent public education seem to be falling by the wayside.

One of our political parties, ostensibly half our electorate, have given way to near absolute lunacy and radical reactionary thought.

The other of our parties is in the thrall of Wall Street and worries more about bankers than ordinary wankers.

Sorry kids, a ribbon on a lapel, a slogan and a logo aren't going to change shit.

Mona Simpson's eulogy.

I finally got around to reading Mona Simpson's eulogy of her brother, Steve Jobs. She delivered it at the Memorial Church of Stanford University and "The New York Times" printed the text last Sunday. You can read it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/opinion/mona-simpsons-eulogy-for-steve-jobs.html?src=me&ref=general

If you have the time, you should read Simpson's thoughts; they should take only about 10 minutes to get through but they'll give you things to think about for years.

There's a bit in the eulogy that got me thinking about so much of the bullshit we endure in advertising. Simpson calls it Jobs' philosophy of aesthetics.

“Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.”

It's easy to see Jobs' philosophy at work in the advertising he and his agencies produced.

There is nothing fashionable, trendy or transitory about the art and commerce Jobs helped create. His ads are boring. They are most-often simply product shots or simple product demonstrations.

He eschewed advertising fashion. Conversations about brands. "Liking." And other whims.

He relied on the classics. Old typefaces. Simple design. An absence of fussiness.

That's all.

Magic.

If you know how to read history, if you can see it as behaviors and movements rather than battles and dates, you can understand things about our species.

One of those things is that since the beginning of time, we have lived in hope of getting something for nothing. We as a species want desperately to believe in magic.

Whether it's manna from heaven.
Feeding the multitudes.
Gold from base metal.
Or endless energy that's "too cheap to meter," we have always looked for the deity or some other phantasm to deliver us a miracle.

Yesterday I had one of those death by a thousand cuts kind of day--the advertising version, that is, death by a dozen meetings.

Many of those meetings were about deliverance.

Delivering to the client oceans of ready customers through (barely watchable) syndicated events, conversations and content syndicated online.

Pass the elixir of love. I need a hug.

The second wisest man I've ever known once gave me a list 16 things I needed to do in a new, very senior job in order to succeed.

His 16th point was this: free advice is worth what you pay for it.

Today, whole agencies and huge legions of clients are structured to believe they can become the next Apple for free.

They can magically generate buzz, propagate conversations and drive people to stultifying websites that will bore viewers into passionate advocacy.

And they believe, thanks to the "freeness" and the ubiquity of digital media, that they can do this for the price of sand in the Sahara.

The truth, of course, is something else.

I've got history on my side.

Continuing yesterday's post.

Yesterday I wrote about being difficult to work with. Today I will continue that strain.

I have had a number of executive leadership dalliances over the years. I've been in charge of big creative departments so I am pushed to have meetings with HR so we can be sure everyone is happy, attrition is low and smiles abound.

Once I had to go to a two-day course on something HR or training (as if I'm a seal or a trick dog) lectured me on not being concrete.

Not being stubborn.

Being egalitarian.

Understanding different work styles.

Listen, understanding different work styles is HR code for accepting lassitude.

Not being stubborn is HR code for letting crappy ideas win and allowing substandard work.

Being egalitarian means putting people's feelings ahead of work.

All the virtues extolled in today's modern agency,
collaborative spirit, being a "bridge builder,"
being "open to creativity no matter where it comes from"
stems from the same spirit of everyone gets a trophy in Little League.

There's one criterion.
Two questions.

Is the work good?
Does the work suck?

Hedging your bets.

Overheard on a conference call, all within about six minutes, all from the same client. They are fractured in the same way Damon Runyon or Ring Lardner (writers I admire) broke convention:

"We need to do this, not in a hurry but with speed."

"We need to put our best foot forward as soon as we figure out what foot that is."

"If we miss this opportunity, we'll score a big miss."

Here's a post I wrote some years ago about Lardner:

Lardner had a gift of language which seems all but lost today. Probably my favorite sentence in all the world was this simple one from a story called "The Young Immigrants."

"'Shut up,' he explained."

I also loved this from a short story called "The Golden Honeymoon." "Mother sat facing the front of the train as it makes her giddy to ride backwards. I sat facing her, which does not affect me."

I also love this gem:

“He looked at me as if I were a side dish he hadn't ordered.”

How to know when you're fucked.

Last week Dave Trott wrote on his wonderful blog that he was called in a Tweet or some such "highly opinionated." http://www.cstthegate.com/davetrott/2011/10/highly-opinionated/

Dave's post got me to thinking about writing or thinking or speaking that isn't easy, glib, predictable or a neat repackaging or re-stringing together of catchphrases and buzzwords. That led me to write this post: http://adaged.blogspot.com/2011/10/short-vs-long.html

Today I was in a recording session and something came to me. The client and the account people had really fouled this one up. Three or four rounds of changes had come in after the script was approved. After I recorded the script a week ago.

Then I got a "Final" script from the client, a script the client and the account people had ostensibly read. In the first sentence I noticed an egregious typo.

I blew a fuse.

But of course this being the 21st Century, I blew it in a 21st Century way.

I know what would happen if I reacted as I wanted to.

If I cursed the account people.

If I canceled the session and sent the talent home.

The word would get out.

The words, actually: "George, he's difficult to work with."

These days there can be no more potent imprecation.

If you don't do your expenses in a timely fashion, thinking that client business comes first and you have no assistant, "You're difficult to work with."

If you refuse to noodle type when you're coming up with concepts, "You're difficult to work with."

If you fight with tooth and nail the bland and banal, "you're difficult to work with."

In the HR Hegemony we live in no malediction will undo you quicker.

You're not polite.

Placid.

A puppy dog.

"You're difficult to work with."

Mentsch tracht, Gott lacht.

There's an old Yiddish saying which is like most old Yiddish sayings, that is, it's worthy of being kept as a frontlet, carved into your desk (if you still have one), digitized as your screensaver, or tattooed uncomfortably on your knuckles if you live in Williamsburg.

It's Mentsch tracht, Gott lacht. Which can be translated as "Man plans, God laughs."

Tomorrow morning I have to cut short my weekly therapy session (also known as my weekly 45 minutes with someone wiser than I) and head down to Wall Street--to the client I work for--for a 2012 planning meeting.

A 2012 planning meeting. For a financial institution.

The stock market could drop 4,000 points.
The Euro could collapse completely.
North Korea could sell a suitcase nuke to the Taliban.
A pizza salesman could become a presidential candidate.
Or worse, a fundamentalist could.

Yet, we must plan.

Plan for what?

A world in which anything can happen at any time.

Years ago I shot a commercial with Joe Pytka. One spot in a package of about a dozen spots. I had never worked with the Orsen Welles of soda pop before and was eagerly anticipating his genius.

I saw it almost immediately, though it took me a while to realize that.

The first thing Pytka did was tear up all the scripts he was to shoot.

I thought he was just being an asshole.

What he was doing was two-fold. And both folds contained genius.

One, the scripts had been fucked by the approval process. It was time now to rewrite them as something better and purer.

And two, from the time we started writing the scripts to the time we were going to shoot them, the changes in the world had rendered them virtually obsolete.

He tore them all up.

The best advertising doesn't come from planning.

It comes from being zeroed in on now. What's important. What's breathing. What hurts. What makes one laugh or cry.

The best advertising does not reflect medicine-chest sterility.

But the vibrancy of the moment.

Ha ha ha.

Something for type fanatics.

I am reading right now a book by Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt called "The Swerve, How the World Became Modern." It is an adventure behind the rediscovery of Lucretius' "De Rerum Natura" (on the nature of things) and how a Renaissance man, Poggio Bracciolini found the original Latin volume in an obscure monastery in what is now Germany and how its philosophies challenged the orthodoxy of Roman church.

In the world before Gutenberg, the rock stars of the media world were people with good handwriting, and Poggio had just about the best. He developed the type style shown above, a far cry from the impossible to read glyphs that preceded his time.

I did a crappy job scanning a leaf from Greenblatt's book, but you get the idea. It's nice, in my opinion, to see typography that's about legibility, speed and distinction. Type was, at one time, about more than just style. It was about function, to boot. As it should be.

Thomas William McNeeley Jr., 1937-2011.

There's a nice obituary in "The New York Times" today of an ex-heavyweight boxing contender, Tom McNeeley, who lost in four rounds to the lightning-fast Floyd Patterson almost 50 years ago in December, 1961. (The Times assigns obituaries to some of their best writers--it's something to do during down periods, and thus, their obits almost always contain some bit of humor or wisdom in addition to chronicling an interesting life.) You can read McNeeley's obituary here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/01/sports/tom-mcneeley-contender-for-heavyweight-title-dies-at-74.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries

Here's the bit that got me and got me thinking about how to succeed against all odds. It comes from Patterson, a man hardly noted for his glibness or wit. After knocking McNeeley to the canvas 12 or 13 times and knocking him out completely in just four rounds, Patterson had this to say this about his battered opponent."Nothing McNeeley did in the ring surprised me except getting up every time I knocked him down.”

Getting up every time you're knocked down.

A lesson for all of us.