Rene Morel, 1932-2011.

There's a really excellent obituary in today's "New York Times" which tells the story of Rene Morel, a master restorer of rare violins, violas and cellos. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/nyregion/rene-a-morel-master-restorer-of-rare-violins-dies-at-79.html?hpw

For whatever reason, perhaps it's the DayQuil I'm od'ing on as a fight a virulent head cold, I found some wisdom in Morel's life and work. Morel worked on the rare and expensive instruments of Pablo Casals, Yo Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zuckerman and Isaac Stern among others. The centuries old instruments of these masters are touchy things. The Times notes:

"Violins, and their siblings, violas and cellos, are temperamental creatures. With tops of spruce and backs and sides of harder wood — often maple — they are fundamentally trees, reconfigured in strange and glorious ways that nature never intended.

"For these instruments, every bump and jostle, every change in temperature or humidity, is occasion for protest. Wood shrinks and swells and strains against itself. Cracks can appear. Their sonorous voices can be reduced to growls and grumbles."

Morel was a master at adjusting these instruments, using his hands and his ears to achieve perfection.

A musician would enter Morel's shop and play. Morel would listen, then go to work adjusting the instrument's vital organs. The player played some more, and Morel adjusted more.

Here's the part I especially liked, Morel's "failsafe way" of knowing when an instrument is right.

As Itzhak Perlman said, "He would put up his sleeve and say, ‘You see the goose bumps,’ ” Mr. Perlman recalled. “He said as long as he didn’t get the goose bumps, it was not properly adjusted.”

Machines, computers, experts, apps and so on can do a lot of great things. We cannot ignore the magic of modernity. The glory of technology.

The question is, however, will it produce goose bumps.

The value of Facebook.

There is tremendous sturm and drang in our industry over the value of Facebook. Enormous expenditures have been dedicated to building Facebook pages, creating conversations, inciting likes, promoting events. Countless meetings have been convened to discuss Facebook, its power, reach and efficacy. The phrase "Facebook will change everything" has rumbled through the valley, rattled in the dell; knocked upon the mountain and recoiled upon the flat.

That's all fine.

But I think I know the real value of Facebook.

It serves to remind you that a large number of your friends can't spell. And don't know the difference between there, their and they're and its and it's.

Pissed.

I took my two-year-old Mac to the help desk this morning knowing full well that by all rights it ought to be called the hurt desk. It's been three hours now and I've yet to hear anything back from them. This is my first-ever post written on my iPad.

The stupidity of agencies never fails to amaze and befuddle me. How a bunch of technicians can hold someone getting paid like a decent lawyer hostage. But that's the way it is.

In an era "where everyone is creative," creative is so devalued that they are treated like shit.

Decking halls.

It being mid-to-late November it seems that every third store in my neighborhood is garishized with Christmas sentiment--a sickly treacle that gives force to my natural misanthropy.

I walked by the windows of one such store this morning and was hit with window decals beseeching customers to deck the fucking halls. I immediately thought of the nonsense the great satirist Walt Kelly brought to these songs.

Lambert, Hendricks and Ross also had fun with Deck the Halls, above.

Deck Us All With Boston Charlie

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash, and Kalamazoo!
Nora's freezin' on the trolley,

Swaller dollar cauliflower Alleygaroo!
Don't we know archaic barrel,
Lullaby Lilla Boy, Louisville Lou.

Trolley Molly don't love Harold,
Boola Boola Pensacoola Hullabaloo!

-
Another version:

Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Polly wolly cracker n too-da-loo!
Donkey Bonny brays a carol,
Antelope cantaloup, 'lope with you!

Hunky Dory's pop is lolly gaggin' on the wagon,
Willy, folly go through!

Chollie's collie barks at Barrow,
Harum scarum five alarum bung-a-loo!
We also have this third version:

Duck us all in bowls of barley,
Ninky dinky dink an' polly voo!

Chilly Filly's name is Chollie,
Chollie Filly's jolly chilly view halloo!

Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Double-bubble, toyland trouble! Woof, Woof, Woof!

Tizzy seas on melon collie!
Dibble-dabble, scribble-scrabble! Goof, Goof, Goof!

Leaders.

Three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Thomas Friedman had an important op-ed in "The New York Times" yesterday. While it was about the larger issues facing the world today, as almost always, I saw parallels in it to the Advertising Industry. You can read the whole thing here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/opinion/whos-the-decider.html?hp

Here's the part that made me think about us:

"Yes, it’s true that in the hyperconnected world, in the age of Facebook and Twitter, the people are more empowered and a lot more innovation and ideas will come from the bottom up, not just the top down. That’s a good thing — in theory.

"But at the end of the day — whether you are a president, senator, mayor or on the steering committee of your local Occupy Wall Street — someone needs to meld those ideas into a vision of how to move forward, sculpt them into policies that can make a difference in peoples’ lives and then build a majority to deliver on them.

"Those are called leaders. Leaders shape polls. They don’t just read polls. And, today, across the globe and across all political systems, leaders are in dangerously short supply."

And that in a nutshell is part of the trouble in Advertising today. We have tactics and theories bouncing around caroming everywhere like atoms in a cyclotron. What we don't have is a plan. A mission. A linkage to a brand idea.

You know, we are missing "with all Thy getting, get understanding."

We are all shouting.

We are all making things.

Multiplying tactics like rabbits mainlining Cialis.

And it is all so much noise.

What we need is clarity, direction, vision.

That's how you separate chatter from matter.

A drink.

I had a drink last night with an old friend of mine. She was my account person when I started at Ogilvy well over a decade ago--one of the first people who was decent to me. About seven years ago she switched from account services, where she was a superstar, to a job she created--helping agencies manage and retain talent--and to treat that talent right.

If an ordinary person had this job, I'd roll my eyes heavenward and sneer to myself, "HR." And that would be that. But my friend, I'll call her Diane for the purposes of anonymity, is extraordinary, one of those rare people with a heart. And a person with a mind large enough to tear away all the cliches of "talent management," and actually properly manage talent.

We were celebrating a bit. Diane returned from the UK earlier this year for a job at a large agency, and now she had gotten a new job at one of the world's leading companies. After 15 or so years, she's out of the agency business.

A lot of what Diane's had to do in her "talent management" role was to fire people. That's the way it goes sometimes. She told me a story about someone she had to fire a few years ago.

"He was super-talented. Super smart. Super ambitious. He just didn't fit in with the CEO. The CEO was threatened by him.

"I didn't hire this guy, but they made me fire him. I fought to make sure he was treated right. Fought to get him the severance he deserved. Fought to let him know it wasn't him.

"After I got this new job, this guy called me. He was working at my new company--in charge of Interaction Design.

"Thank god I was good to him."

Diane's story brings up two points.

One is it reminds you of the tiny size of our world. I remember reading once in the 80s in "Advertising Age" that the entire American advertising industry would not fill the University of Michigan's football stadium.

Two is even more important. It's that despite then omnipresent banality of our world, the corporate callousness of the companies that "buy our time" and "allocate us" as "resources," we are people.

Whether you're rich or poor, big or small, black or white, green or yellow, you have to be a human and treat people as humans.

I came across this ditty from the late 19th Century about a month ago and posted it once before but at the risk of being repetitious it seems like a fair way to end this:

There was an old owl lived in an oak
The more he heard, the less he spoke;
The less he spoke, the more he heard
O, if men were all like that wise bird!

I would rather be dead, Mother Fuckers.

My agency has a spam filter that is so acute that sometimes it blocks emails sent out from our own HR Department. Sometimes emails from our corporate parent wind up in our junk folders. Sometimes someone who's e'ed you 100 times before suddenly ends up as junk.

Nevertheless, despite that Teutonic efficiency, emails from some asinine company called CareerTrack continue to invade my desktop though I always click on the icon that says "block sender."

CareerTrack seems to subscribe to the insipid notion of positivism. That the world and you're life would be so much better if you hitched up your pants, let a smile be your fucking umbrella and we all pulled on one lame-brained oar.

Today they invited me to a 1-hour long seminar on "Creating a positive, productive work environment by preventing bad attitudes and negative situations from disrupting your team's performance."

Here's their Ziggy-esq, Care-bear-like copy:

"Let's face it, not every member of an organization is going to be 100 percent happy all the time. Negativity often invades your workplace due to insecurity, boredom or even resentment, and it can spread like wildfire and attack an entire department's morale and ability to perform. Detecting potential problems before they spread is key to defusing harmful situations and stopping them in their tracks.

"Dealing with negativity requires open communication, good listening skills and the ability to focus on solutions rather than the problem. This informative program will provide you with proven strategies, tips and techniques to help you renew motivation where negativity may have taken hold within your organization.

"How to Deal with Negativity in the Workplace will show you how to combat negativity by working out conflicts with constructive criticism, active listening and an optimistic attitude. In one informative hour, you'll learn:

"What a negative atmosphere could be costing you and your organization

"How to deal with different problem attitudes (complainers, pessimists, gossips) with open communication, top-notch listening skills and effective questioning strategies

"How to assess your own attitude and understand how it's affecting your team

"Strategies to effectively respond when upper management is identified as the cause of negativity

"How to act rather than react when presented with a difficult situation

"And much more!

"It only takes one negative attitude to hinder the productivity of an entire team, which can ultimately affect your organization's bottom line. This 1-hour Audio Conference will teach you how to identify, work with, and remove negativity before it plagues your workplace — so that you will enjoy a more creative, dynamic and professional environment!"

Silent movie.

I just heard about a new movie, a silent one, that has a lot of people talking. I haven't seen it yet but the trailer looks promising. And shows the power of "silence."

And for no other reason than I love it, a short clip from a "screwball" comedy nobody knows. Jean Arthur and William Powell (just watch his face) in "The ex-Mrs. Bradford" which was overshadowed by "The Thin Man" when it was released but in many ways is as wonderful.

National Nothing Day.

Everywhere you go today people are doing meaningless things ostensibly in support of a cause. You can't buy a donut, a bag of mothballs or a cup of coffee without donating 1/100th of a cent to something more noble. If I buy a pair of shoes and the shoemaker donates therefore a pair to charity, it likely means I paid too much in the first place.

We buy water in plastic bottles to help the environment. We grow mustaches to cure cancer. Our lapels, our wrists, the bumpers on our cars, even our very skin have all been festooned with ribbons, pins and slogans declaring our support for something or another.

Fart for a cause. Donate a dime to fighting global warming every time you fart. And wear a pin on your blouse--a little puff of smoke--to symbolize your largesse.

Well, on my lapel this morning I pinned a translucent pin--you can't see it. On my shirt I've affixed a cellophane ribbon, again it's invisible to the naked eye. On my car I pasted on a clear decal showing my support--for nothing.

That's right. For all the world to see, I support nothing.

If I feel like donating to Haiti, I feel no need to announce it social media. I have no need to turn my profile picture maroon or to brand my suit jacket.

I just do it.

I need no affirmation.

No self-congratulation.

No acknowledgement of my contribution.

I don't need a calendar, or return address labels or a sticker for my door or a holiday card.

I, then, hereby proclaim next Monday "National Nothing Day." Show your support for nothing. Wear nothing, say nothing, post nothing.

9 AM observations.

I walked into my work space this morning a little later than usual. Most often when I get in prior to nine, the place is a ghost-town. I sing a little spoof to myself, "Nine is the Loneliest Number," but today there was a gaggle of project managers and account people gathered around a project manager's computer.

They were allocating hours.

Moving things around.

Making sure we are "on scope" on our various projects.

The soul of the modern agency today is no longer one of creativity; it is of accountancy. But the sad fact is this: accountancy only makes sense--it only serves a purpose, if you are not accountable. You don't need an accountant if you pay your bills on time.

George Parker, with his usual incisiveness blasts the worn and tired lie that is "the agency of the future." http://adscam.typepad.com/my_weblog/2011/11/the-oxymoron-of-the-future.html

The concept of the agency of the future has been around since agencies began. The notion is as full of hogwash as oil company advertising.

An agency can become an agency of the future not by adding systems and departments and disciplines or (now that we're infected by consultants) practices. The agency of the future is simple.

Writers and art directors who can think and sell their work.
Account people who can help put client problems in simple English.

Just as Jobs threw out the extraneous in creating the world's most valuable company,
agencies would be well-served to do the same.

Put the best minds on the biggest client problems. Solve them. Then move on.