Tomatoes and advertising.

I'm in St. Martin for a couple weeks visiting my younger daughter, Hannah, who is teaching scuba diving at a kids' camp down here. We arrived around 1, finally got settled in our rental then drove off to the supermarket to pick up some supplies.

Living in New York, we don't get to barbecue, so when we go away in the summer, that's what we find ourselves doing.

In any event, one thing struck me when we were buying fruit and vegetables down here: the look bad but they taste good.

In America, just the opposite holds true. Food looks good but tastes bad.

There's a lot to think about in this dichotomy. In America, there is uniformity. There is a moderation of mood. You're suspect if you're too sad or too happy. Anomalies are frowned upon.

In small backwater islands like St. Martin, life is more of a crap shoot. Fruits and vegetables, and life itself, is not standardized. The unexpected is to be expected. A tomato, for instance, might be either very good or very bad. It's not likely just to be bland.

I think advertising in America has become like our fruits and vegetables. We have processed, tested and homogenized work so that it is 100% guaranteed inoffensive. Everyone looks the same, acts the same, and smiles the same. It is neither very good nor very bad.

The main thing it has going for it is it's bland.

Running on empty.

I heard a rather longish report on the BBC this morning on the great Picasso, a man who stayed "creative" into his 90s, a man who wasn't "thrown out" (as they do in agencies) simply because of his advancement in years.

In any event, the BBC reporter knew someone who was close to Picasso in the artist's last years. He said that after Picasso had finished a body of work, he had "emptied himself out," and he would often take a month off.

The phrase "emptied himself out" really struck me.

How many of us--nominally in a creative business, or as creative people--put so much of ourselves into our work, so much blood, sweat, toil and tears that we can say we were all in, that we had given ourselves over to creativity.

Maybe we can't do that in our business.

Unlike Picasso we have to sit through too many meetings.

We have too many rounds of reviews.

Too many layers of approvals.

But how much of the lack of creativity in our work
comes from our unwillingness or inability to
empty ourselves out?

The Ninny-i-zation of everything.

We have become a nation of ninnies.

Half our politicians are science deniers.
Not believing in Darwin.
Or the evidence of global warming.

We blurt with diarrhetic regularity.
People go on a hiking vacation to Yellowstone
then tweet to tell you where they are.

We are fighting wars in three nations,
four if you count Mexico.
Yet we hear no news.

We are about to go bankrupt
in the face of political gamesmanship.

Our economy isn't growing and no one will say it structurally can't
because the top 1% has more wealth than the bottom 90%. An economy
can't be vibrant without a middle class.

I could give a rat's ass about Amy Winehouse.

Or Kim Kardashian.

Or Snookie.

We have become a stupocracy.
A rule of dumbness.

I'm checking out now for two weeks in the Caribbean.

I need it.

Joseph Heller.

"The New York Times" has a book review today about two biographies of the great writer, Joseph Heller. The review is certainly worth reading and you can read it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/28/books/books-about-joseph-heller-by-erica-heller-and-tracy-daugherty-review.html?hpw

As you'd expect from a review on Joseph Heller, there were some funny verbal hijinx in the review.

Here's one: "He became celebrated for humor and prescience that began to show up in the real world during the Vietnam War, which “Catch-22” was widely thought to anticipate. Mr. Daugherty quotes Ronald L. Ziegler, President Richard M. Nixon’s press secretary, as having once said, in pure Heller-ese: “The president is fully aware of what is going on in Southeast Asia. That is not to say that anything is going on in Southeast Asia.”

And finally, this from Heller's friend, Kinky Friedman, from when Heller was hospitalized with Guillain-Barré syndrome, "a paralyzing and potentially fatal disorder."

During the long recovery process, Friedman remarked that Heller had “taken a turn for the nurse.”

Patience.

One of the many things that has afflicted our industry over the years is the diminishment of response or reaction time. We have trained ourselves, in this "visual" era, to respond almost instantaneously to the messages we see. Visuals, after all, evoke reactions. Immediate and visceral.

In times of yore, which were more word driven, reaction time was a bit slower. We had to read the eight, 10 or 15 words in a headline. Reading demanded thought. Thinking was more important than reaction.

So what has been lost along the way is patience and the appreciation of the way the mind works.

What I've noticed over the course of my last ten commercial shoots is that many people--art directors, mostly--want to jump on the director and make comments within the first few moments of a shot. They want everything immediately. They don't give things time to develop. They don't think, they react.

Patience, consideration, mulling are all necessary components of thought.

Reaction is just reaction.

A malady.

One thing I've noticed over the last couple decades in the business is that some people--in fact, some entire organizations, aren't wired the same way I am. When I have an idea or make a suggestion, these entities immediately say no. They don't even hear or consider what it is I've proposed.

Then after 48 or 72 hours or even a full week later, through some set of circumstances, the idea is played back to me--most often as if that idea was someone else's thought to begin with.

These people aren't evil, dumb or anything else.

They're just slow listeners.

It takes them a long time to hear.

A joke repurposed.

Three old ad executives are sitting alongside each other on a park bench. After a few minutes, the first one says "Oy." A couple minutes later another one speaks, "Oy vey," he says. Finally, the third exec speaks up, "I thought we agreed not to talk about the business."

King Mithradates and advertising.

King Mithradates was a Pontic king who lived from 134 BC-63 BC, at which point he was killed by the Romans. Mithradates was a pretty crafty guy. It wasn't unusual for his fellow kings, in those days, to be poisoned. By their rivals, by enemies, by their kids, wives or concubines. Poisoning was all the rage and because of it, Kings did not generally live very long.

Mithradates hit upon the notion early on of taking a bit of a variety of poisons everyday. Before people understood toxicities and vaccinations and modern medicine, Mithradates was inuring himself from poisoning. He was building up his ability to withstand the real stuff in real doses when his number was called.

I think about Mithradates a lot.

Maybe if I watch five seconds of a shitty commercial everyday, if I sit through three minutes of fuck-stupid meetings, when my day of reckoning comes I will be able to withstand it.

Social media explained.

Joe Nocera has a valuable op-ed in today's "New York Times," about the Fed's unwillingness to punish the banks that raped and pillaged our economy. (How do the super wealthy accumulate great wealth? They steal it--bit by bit--from millions of ordinary people.) Well Fargo, which tries to look friendly and human via the smiling people in its commercials and the homey stagecoach of its logo, is charged with paying about $105 million in fines for the frauds and deceptions they've perpetrated. In the last quarter alone, their revenues were over $20 billion. That's a fine equally 1/800th of their annual revenue. A fine of $100 on a salary of $80,000.

But my point today isn't about the "malefactors of great wealth," it's about the very real feeling of powerlessness that exists in our society. Because we are, in fact, powerless, we have created and fallen for allusions that empower us.

We vote for pinheads on TV shows. We tweet and 'like' things on Facebook. We rate everything from grocery stores to the guy selling hotdogs on the corner.

All these activities make us feel like the world is not out of our control. That we have a voice. That we matter.

Of course, we don't.

Our political parties exist for the enrichment of the few. Corporations pay little tax and destroy the planet while enriching a few more. The so-called news exists of coverage of the trivial and promotion of other programs. (It seems like 1/3rd of the time I spend listening to NPR is reporters saying their names.)

I'm sorry if my hopelessness is a bit much this morning.

Advertising quotation of the day.

"When all is said and done, more will be said than done."