Plastic dreams.

For all the discussion about the economy and about America's ever-widening income inequality, it might come down to something as simple as this.

Our ability to produce things outstrips our ability to buy them.  That dynamic creates a downward pressure on prices, which, in-turn, drives wages and employment down.

There's a photo essay in today's "New York Times," called "Welcome to Tchotchke Town." It's about a town and a market in China called Yiwu that is 4.3 million square meters in area. There are 62,000 booths, 400,000 products for sale and 215 nations that receive imports from the market. Check out the photo essay here.

It occurs to me that much of what we create are the verbal equivalent of the plastic flood shown above. We produce and produce and produce. We clutter and clutter and clutter. Our media landscape has become like the Collyer Brother's apartment.

We create, collect, curate and vomit in an endless exaflood of plasticine pablum. Not because we think it works, or know it works, or it serves a need. We do it because we can.

Producing ever more. And losing our worth in the process.

A bad view.

I have just been relocated in my office, moving to yet another former-sweatshop space on one of New York's grungiest blocks. My view is of an active sweatshop, including a belching pipe that on these cold days is filling the narrow alleyway with steam.

Not long ago, the building I'm now in upgraded their elevators. That is, primarily, they put small video screens in them so you can be assaulted with more empty ads and more useless factoids. Today, for instance, I learned that 28% of people use their smart phones to plan their vacations from work. I also learned that one hockey team I've never heard of beat another hockey team I've never heard of, 4-3. It must have been quite a game.

It seems to me that the video screens in my building's elevators are like so much today. A constant stream of noxious nonsense. There is no place, I suppose, we can go to escape the crap. It's free and everywhere. Once, early in the morning, I was waiting in an airport waiting area. A huge flatscreen near me blared what passes for the news. Banalities, sophistry, gossip and laughter. I went over to the monitor--which cannot be shut off and, at least, tried to turn down the volume. You would have thought I turned into some sort of terrorist.

"The noise is bothering me," I said to the airline official who stopped me.

"You're not allowed to lower the volume."

"But the noise is bothering me."

"You're not allowed to lower the volume."

I realized this could go around as often as the rickety carousel designed to lose my luggage and walked instead to an Auntie Annie's to get a 2,000 calorie bacon-filled pretzel.

My point is about assault. It's all over. The onslaught of dumbness packaged like a beautiful cupcake. It looks frosty and tasty. But one bite and you realize your teeth will rot.

This is the great content machine that we are feeding. The social strategists, whatever they are, whatever their qualifications, learnings, feedback and data analysis say, have chapter and verse reasons why asking people on Facebook if they'd rather have a margarita or a massage is good for brands.

I just don't believe it.

I suppose in Theodore Roosevelt's or John Muir's original vision for parkland, they thought it would be beneficial to have some territory, some preserve, some reservation against the encroachments of modernity. Now, National Parks, of course, allow snow-mobiles, guns, drilling for oil, chopping for trees.

I think we need National Parks for our heads. Small backwaters that don't allow the Insipid States of America in. We need to resist the dumbness.

A meaningful call with Uncle Slappy.

The house phone rang last night. That can only mean one of two things: one) a pestering telemarketer or pollster is ignoring the myriad DO NOT CALL lists I am on, or two) Uncle Slappy has something on his mind.

I almost didn't pick up. I feared that Uncle Slappy would go on about the Knicks, New York's over-paid, over-arrogant and under-achieving 6-15 basketball team. Like me, Uncle Slappy has been a Knicks' fan since the glory days of Clyde, Willis, Earl, Bill Bradley, DeBuscherre and Jerry Lucas. Unlike me, Uncle Slappy still follows the Knicks. I have forsaken them just as completely as they have forsaken the concept of intelligent basketball.

But, finally, just before the answering machine kicked in, I picked up the horn. When your 86-year-old surrogate father calls, you answer. It's that simple and surely the right thing to do.

"Boychick," Uncle Slappy began, "I have figured it all out. Finally, I have figured it all out."

"The meaning of life?" I asked, "Or something important, like where to find a good everything bagel in Boca."

"After 55 years seeing a therapist," Uncle Slappy said, "I have condensed all wisdom down to a single sentence."

Uncle Slappy is a wise man, a learned man, a teacher and a Rabbi. Strangely for him, he did not seem to be joking.

"Well," I said gingerly, "lay it on me."

"Here's what I've learned: We have good days and bad days."

"That's it?" I asked "We have good days and bad days?"

"That's it," he said hanging up the phone, leaving me to ponder.

Gift-giving in the Tempus Fugit.

It was cold last night. Cold enough to make me envy a hipster's Amish beard and flannel shirt. That cold.

Nevertheless, the cold did not keep Dame Insomnia away. She was suitably diaphanous but somehow braved the elements and visited my bedstead.

"Get up, George," she whispered.

I rudely rolled over, turning away from her.

She grasped my shoulder. "George," she said, jostling me. "Arise, my Love."

So I did and I quickly threw some clothing on and a leash on Whiskey, and we trudged sleepily uptown to the warm, antiqued incandescence of The Tempus Fugit.

"It's been too long, my friend," the bartender said to me. He was already around the bar with a bowl of cold water to wet Whiskey's whistle.

I settled into my favorite stool, one in from the end, and he pulled me a Pike's Ale (the ALE that won for YALE.)

"I have something for you," he said placing a small, wrapped package on the teak of the well-lacquered bar top. "Consider it a holiday gift."

"I'm speechless," I lied, speaking.

"You are deserving of so much," he said, pulling me another to replace the glass I had swiftly drained. "You are a giver to so many. Yet you yourself are a bad receiver."

"You read me like a cheap book," I said, staring into my amber. I pushed at the gift, reluctant to open it.

I opened the box, finally, and inside was a pair of heavy-framed glasses.

"Glasses," he said redundantly. "Magic."

I put them on. There was no refraction, no discernible vision change.

"Thank you. A strange gift, I'll admit, since I am 20-20."

"They are glasses," he said, "specifically for people with acute vision. They help you see less well. They obscure and blur rather than clarify. They'll help you stop seeing so well. They'll help you accept the cockatoos and poseurs and do-nothings and the rest."

"They are glasses that blind?"

"That's right," he said. "Because it is tougher to live in a world where you see than in a world where you don't."

"What about every day banalities," I asked.

"You won't notice them when you are wearing the glasses. They are like noise-cancelling headphones for your eyes."

I sipped slowly at my second and then my third Pike's as the bartender OCD'd the shiny bartop ever-shinier and Whiskey twitched in her sleep.

In short order I pushed two twenties in his direction.

"A gift," he said, pushing the currency back.

I walked home, not seeing where I was going.

Fun fun fun.

There's a trend in our business, in fact in many businesses, that work should be a place of comradeship, conviviality and fun.

An op-ed in "The New York Times" today speaks of the eyeglass company Warby Parker as having the goal of injecting "fun and quirkiness into everything they do." Other companies are employing Chief Fun Officers or Happiness Engineers. More, of course, decide to have "brewskis" or ping-pong, or pizza every now and again.

I know no one wants to work with a modern-day Heinrich Himmler, but I don't go to work to be cheery, to have fun, to smile. I'm glad I work with a generally agreeable bunch of people--a few of whom I genuinely like, but asking me to be someone I'm not, asking me to be genial, smiley and ambient is not what I do.

My gloomy style should be as accepted as that of the party-planning back-slapping morale monger. Frankly, isn't that what diversity is, in part, about.

It's nice when work is fun.

But, for me at least, work is first and foremost work.

I prefer not to ride scooters around the office and have a secret Santa.

I prefer doing my work my way.

Guitars and copy.

I tripped upon a line of prose that gave me pause.

I read it in the obituary in "The New York Times" of jazz guitarist Jim Hall. "Mr. Hall's style," it read "with the austere grace of a Shaker chair has sounded effortlessly modern at almost every juncture of his long career."

I don't know Jim Hall's music, but I liked that line.

I like the austere grace of a Shaker chair.

I like effortlessly modern.

It makes me think of playing that is just right. That is implicit and inviolable. That stands out without shouting. That is present in its simplicity.

In fact, the phrase made me think of how Ed McCabe or David Altschiller  or Curvin O'Reilly used to write copy. Or Helmut Krone or Roy Grace used to art direct.

There was no ornamentation. To pretense. No ostentation.

Yet their work stood out.

It called attention to itself by not calling attention to itself.

Riffs to think about next time you have work to do.

Mandela, Shakespeare and Advertising.

Last night I finished Neil MacGregor's latest book, "Shakespeare's Restless World: A Portrait of an Era in Twenty Objects."
 
The first book I read of MacGregor, who is a Director of the British Museum, was the brilliant "A History of the World in 100 Objects." Based on that book, I had high expectations for "Shakespeare." I was not disappointed.

Many of the puffy pundits and pontificators in our business declare, practically it seems with each breath, how human behavior and nature changes with each spasm of each pixel. They proclaim advertising dead. Marketing dead. TV dead. Radio dead. Print dead. email dead. And so it goes.

They forget Faulkner's genius quotation. "The past is never dead; it's not even past."

But back to Shakespeare. Sort of.

When Nelson Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island of the coast of Capetown, one fellow lifer had ingratiated himself with one of the guards. He was granted one book--ostensibly the last book he would read for the rest of his life.

He chose the complete works of Shakespeare. He disguised the book (above) with Diwali cards, gulling his jailors into thinking it was some kind of Hindi religious tract.

Under this guise, the book circulated among the prisoners. Each was asked to choose the passage they found most meaningful. The book made its way to Nelson Mandela on December 16, 1979.

Here is the passage he selected, from "Julius Caesar."

Cowards die many times before their deaths.
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear,
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
- Julius Caesar 2.2.32-7

In advertising, we should spend more time thinking about what lives in all of us than thinking about what's purported to be dead.

Some thoughts on and apologies to Henry David Thoreau,

Back before my Bar Mitzvah, in 1849, Henry David Thoreau wrote the following in "Civil Disobedience," "most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them."

In the 21st Century, things seem worse.

More desperate.

Sadder.

I wonder should we re-write.

And if the re-write should read like this: "most men lead lives of quiet castration and go to their grave without looking up from their iphone screens."

Learning from a near death experience.

Some five years after the Federal Government's bailout of General Motors and Chrysler, it seems that the American auto industry is in significantly better shape. Today it was announced that the Feds sold their last auto stock, and actually turned something like a $13 billion profit on the complicated transaction.

The auto industry, as I said, seems in better shape because they are, for the first time in decades, making a product that competes on the world stage--a product customers finally want. They are not, as one industry analyst said, "relying solely on discounts to move cars."

I wonder if the advertising industry can learn something from this lesson.

As merger-mania continues, as holding companies compete more on price than on effectiveness, I wonder if we make things that people want.

I wonder if we make spots that inform. If we create sites that help shoppers. If we create advertising that makes people feel--laugh, cry, learn.

If, in fact, the auto industry has woken up, it took a near-death experience for it to learn. In my view advertising is also near dead. It takes only a glance at this year's spate of Christmas-themed commercials to make you want to gouge your eyes out with a dirty chopstick. When will we do things our customers like that customers also find useful?

Maybe we're not near-enough to death.

A snowy day in New York.

New York got hit with the season's first snow last night, an underachieving affair that added up to under an inch. Still people, especially old people, are bundled up as if the city's grid were the steppes of Russia. And city buses, which are articulated and seem half a block long, are moving slower than usual, which is going some because nothing but nothing moves slower than a New York City bus.

On Friday evening I was on lower Broadway at a post-production facility and left the place in the rain and walked about a mile to bustling, burgeoning Chinatown. I picked up some soup dumplings, some bean curd with spinach, and some rice cakes and took the M101 home, hopping on at the Bowery and Pell. It took the better part of an hour to move the four miles, but somehow the food was still hot when I arrived in my warm apartment.

The year seems to be reluctantly coming to a close. Work is still busy but people seem even more eager than usual to make their escape at night. Maybe they have shopping they need to do. Maybe they've just had enough of 2013.

I've had enough of 2013, too. Even though I've had, as usual a good year. I've done a goodly amount of work, produced a dozen or so commercials and survived another year against the odds.

I've survived also a devastating turn as a sick man--prevailing over pneumonia and beating back aggressive and persistent pericarditis. My heart pains--herzschmerz--seem to be on the ropes. Over the next few weeks I will, knock wood, be weaned off of Prednisone, which is, surely, a wonder drug, but mostly because I wonder if I've been on it too long.

That's it for now. Sort of a lame post, I know.

Attribute it to the end of the year, the spitting rain, and the drugs.