A contradiction.

I just came upon this photograph by the unmatched photographer and Hungarian emigre Andre Kertesz. It got me thinking.

At a time in world history when we are more pressed for time than ever before (in every time in world history we have been more pressed for time than ever before) there are more ways to fill our lives up with junk than ever before.

Just sticking with photography for a moment, we are Flickr'd and Instagrammed into mediocre submission. We are bludgeoned with snapshots of cats playing polo. We are pinioned with pics of people we hardly know.

We hardly have time for great because we are so besieged (and besotted) by the deluge of daily dreck.

There is greatness in the world. Greatness and originality. In art and in work.

But we're too busy looking at shit (and in looking at shit proclaiming that "everyone is a photographer") to notice.

The question.

There's a simple question that, in these days of multiple touchpoints and "surround-sound" strategies, seems is never asked. Because every agency now has 32-million "practices" each fighting for their own bottom line, the question is never posed, never considered, never even brought up. We don't ask it because we're more concerned with what WE need as a practice or an agency (to hit our holding company numbers) than with what our clients need to succeed.

The question is this: "How can we do the greatest good, influence the greatest number of people for the money we have to spend?"

What we have barring this question is competing fiefs. We have the mobile people spending like crazy developing WAP sites that few people will use. We have legions of tweeters and Facebook zealots creating "experiences" that have, at best, dubious return on investment. We have data-viz visionaries. The content confab. The video vehements. And they're all saying to clients who are also trying to hold onto their jobs "ME ME ME!"

In our nation right now which is so wracked by sectionalism and divisiveness, no one asks the question. In the multiple wars our Offense Department is waging, the question is never asked. I've been in the agency since 1984 and I've never heard the question asked by anyone but me.

So oceans of people are running around agencies and in client organizations producing myriad media pinpricks that viewers swat away like flies.

Because no one asks the one simple big picture question.

A lesson in copywriting.

Almost 40 years ago I got my first lesson in being a copywriter.

It wasn't from a course in school or even from a book. I got it at the New York Auto Show.

Like a lot of teenage boys I was a bit of a car nut growing up. Every year I would go to the Auto Show at the old New York Coliseum. The Coliseum was a hulking space on Columbus Circle (gone now and replaced by the gleaming Time-Warner Center.) It smelled of concession-stand hotdogs and cigarette smoke. The Coliseum was built ugly and quickly went down hill.

My lesson came when I walked over to see the new VW Super Beetle. This was one of the last of the original bugs made for America. I remember it was the first time I'd seen taillights with an amber turn signal.

The salesman at the booth started talking about the turn signal. "The minute you flip it on," he said "the turn signal starts." A few people in the audience laughed. "The turn signal on some cars doesn't turn on for as long as a second." The audience snickered again. Finally he said, "If you think that doesn't matter, at 60 miles per hour, a car travels 88 feet in a second. So the Beetle's turn signal turns on 88 feet faster."

I was floored by that fact.

Suddenly I believed in the VW. If they cared that much about a turn signal, these must be very good cars.

It was certainly very good copy.

I met an older woman on the train today.

We were sitting next to each other and I could tell she was an older actress--that she was reading a typewritten play was a giveaway.

I turned to her and asked her, "Any good."

"Yes, it's the story of Leni Riefenstahl. Do you know her?"

We went on from there, chatting about Nazis, underwater photography and shooting in South Africa past 81st Street, 72nd Street, 59th Street all the way to 42nd.

Anyway, Nazi or not, propaganda or not, the clip above is well worth viewing.

Quiet please.

Maureen Dowd, that is, the brilliant Maureen Dowd, has a surpassing column in today's "New York Times" that puts a finger on much of what is wrong with our industry and the world today. Her column today is titled "Silence Is Golden" and if you have a couple of minutes (that you're not wasting on Facebook, Twitter or some other diversion) you can read it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/07/opinion/dowd-silence-is-golden.html?hp

Dowd's column is about our loss of silence.

Near its start she provides this 50-year-old quotation by Swiss philosopher Max Picard:
“Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence,” once as natural as the sky and air.

Dowd continues: "fiendish little gadgets conspire to track our movements and record our activities wherever we go, producing a barrage of pictures of everything we’re doing and saying..."

What's lost today is all this:

Silence is something you hear.

Quiet and solitude are things you can do or seek out.

Repose and "being in the moment" are special activities and should be cherished.

She points out, silence is like a zero in mathematics.

It's not nothing.

It's powerful.

It can lead to actual thought.

That's what she said.

Last night I went to a discussion at the Times Center, a 300-seat auditorium in the new New York Times building. It was moderated by three-time Pulitzer-prize winner Thomas Friedman and the panel featured Nobelist Paul Krugman, National Book Award finalist Joe Nocera and author-historian-economist Carmen Reinhart. Together and for the next 90 minutes the four had a lively discussion about the economy and the trouble the entire world faces.

At one point, Nocera brought up two factories he visited recently in North Carolina. One built by the German mega-corporation and Nazi lubricant Siemens, the other built by Caterpillar, the tractor people. Together to build these factories the companies were given $36 million in tax relief (socialism for the rich) and together these factories employ a whopping total of 1,200 people.

In Obama's Osawatomie speech yesterday, he mentioned "Steel mills that needed 1,000 employees are now able to do the same work with 100."

Everywhere such realities are present. Except perhaps in our industry.

Yes, I know most agencies have dramatically downsized. Yes, I know that basic digital work is being "off-shored" to places like Costa Rica or Minsk. Yes, I know all that.

However, I also know that I have a purportedly big client meeting tomorrow to discuss 2012 planning. I know that to put a deck together has probably, so far, cost the agency 500 man hours. And I know that, unsatisfied with the meandering group-think that is the output of all these banal and wasted hours I sat at my table and wrote the deck we eventually decided to use. It took me one hour.

I do not like writing decks. It's not what I do. But I like even less sitting in massive meetings and "collaborating" with people who are sentencely-challenged.

It does not take a lot of people to do what we do.

It takes, often, a lone person thinking clearly and without distraction.

That "model" is cost-efficient and produces work that is more solid.

I don't know why we make things so hard.

An idiosyncracy and a confession.

Since I love to sketch and since I have an admiration for some things old, I write primarily with fountain pens. Because I often lose them, the ones I use at work are usually moderately priced, bought in most cases at airport duty-free shops for less than $50. Even so, I'm still a little paranoid about losing them. Accordingly, I think I spend two billable hours a day looking for my pens.

Some thoughts on bras.

In the book, "The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm," author Juliet Nicholson spends some time talking about a recent innovation that changed a lot. The summer of 1911 was when monied and titled young scions in England began to make the leap from laced-up corsets and mounds of petticoats to a new-fangled invention, the brassiere.

The brassiere did more that damage the whale-bone industry. Suddenly, women could get dressed (and undressed) in minutes, not hours. It no longer became an ordeal to undress. It was much easier, thanks to the brassiere, for couples to couple.

It occurs to me that while simplicity is often good and beneficial, it can, and often is, taken too far.

I am not a fan, for instance, of the state of deshabille in which most young people are attired. I like the feminine form in all its luxuriant softness as much as the next guy. However, I have no desire to see anyone's ass-crack and cleavage, while there's a time and a place for it, does not rightfully belong in an office. Plain and simple, it is distracting. Likewise, I have absolutely no desire to see people's underwear.

I bring this up because I believe that the semiotics of today's dress speak volumes about much of what is wrong with our world today.

While the brassiere might be considered a boon to young lovers everywhere, today undressing is too easy. In fact, most people only walk around half-dressed.

In short, in clothing and most all else, we have made things too easy. In so doing, we have removed the quality of consideration from most actions.

It used to be if you wanted to comment on an article you read you needed to find pen and paper and envelope. You needed to write it down. Address the envelope. Find a stamp and mail it in.

Now, any dickwad with vectored fingertips can write any banality at any time.

Whatever is gained by this freedom of expression. Much is lost.

Likewise, in our business, any In-Design pixel putz can make a professional-looking layout. It can be done in mere seconds. You can slap some blather, some stock and some tautological twatology onto the page and, voila, it looks like you've had a thought. When all you've really had is a semantic belch.

And belching is not thinking.

And even if it passes for thinking in what some day may be called "The Dark Ages 2.0" it isn't thinking.

And I don't care what you think about that.

24 digits and ontology.

As usual, I am sitting on a conference call.

The producer punches in 10 numbers, then 10 more, then four more--24 digits in all just to get into a conference call.

For all its flaws, the Social Security system operates with fair efficiency with nine-digit i.d.s.

Are the 24 digits for security reasons?

If security is so paramount why not cause us to punch in 100 digits and be really safe.

Graffiti by my friend Lisa.

http://lisalevyindustries.com/