The Ale that Won for Yale!

Last night at around three in the morning, I couldn't sleep.

I won't call it insomnia because I had slept a solid five hours. I required no more, I sat bolt upright in bed, awake and ready for another day.

However, it was three in the morning; it was too early to go to work.

I decided to visit, with Whiskey my ten-month-old golden retriever, my friend the bartender at the Tempus Fugit, a bar hidden by two industrial steel doors in a warehouse on east 91st Street.

The Tempus Fugit first opened in 1924 when Prohibition was in lawless force. It was hidden from the streets (and the cops) in what was then an old Bell Telephone supply and repair depot and warehouse. Today the building houses much of the same equipment that was used nine decades ago. However now that equipment is branded with the Nazi runes of the Verizon corporation. The bar itself is down a long hallway and hidden from all who don't know it's there.

It's a small liver-colored place, complete with a beaten brass rail with 10 or 12 stools--no two with matching upholstery and two or four rickety tables pushed hard against the back wall. In all the Tempus Fugit is no more than 15 or 20 feet wide and maybe 25 feet deep. About the same size as your typical New York dry cleaning place.

As far as I can tell, nothing at the Tempus Fugit has changed since it secretly opened its doors back almost 90 years ago. Even the bottles behind the bar, and the bartender too, seem like relics of an earlier age.

The Tempus Fugit is also the only place left in the world that sells, on tap mind you, Pike's Ale--"The Ale that Won for Yale!" There is today a micro-brewery out of Seattle called Pike that sells a pale ale, but this is the original Pike's, based in New Haven, Connecticut. They closed in 1963 but the Tempus Fugit has it still on tap.

"We over-bought," said the bartender expertly pulling a draught. "I have keg after keg in the back," he told me solemnly. "I sell maybe four glasses a week."

He pulled me one, flawlessly, and slid it in front of me. Then came a small wooden bowl of salted nuts and a large jar of pickled eggs. I grabbed a handful of goobers and sank into my Pike's.

"The place is empty again."

"It's always empty, except when there are people here." I didn't blink at his Yogi-ism. He appreciated that and continued. "When shifts get over, around seven, around three and around eleven, some people drop in."

"Don't you ever go home?"

He just laughed and walked from around the bar and placed another wooden bowl filled with water near Whiskey.

"This is home."

I took a long drink of my Pike's Ale. "So this is the Ale that Won for Yale!" I said.

He laughed. "That's what the man says."

"It's good beer."

"It's the best. It's not like the nun's piss they sell now. Budweiser is made with rice and owned by a multi-national corporation. I suppose when I run out of Pike's Ale, I'll close the Tempus Fugit."

"You still have Herzmorder, though," I responded. "Herzmorder's good, too."

"It's not Pike's Ale. I figure I have about 20 year's-worth left. That is, unless the place gets busy. Of course we haven't been busy since Prohibition ended in 1933."

He drew me another Pike's Ale and I drank now in silence, until it was time to head home and then leave for the office.

Advice for writers.

There's an obituary in today's "New York Times" that has a couple pieces in it I really like. The Times' headline reads "Alan Sharpe, Writer of Dark Screenplays, Dies at 79." Usually if something is dark, from comedy to chocolate, I'm apt to like it. Here's a link to the obit.

The first thing I liked was this quotation. Which I think provides a pretty good example of what I mean by "dark."

It's from a 1975 Gene Hackman movie called "Night Moves," about a private eye who cannot "figure out the whodunit of his own crumbling marriage."

Hackman is watching a football game on television. His wife asks him who's winning.

"Nobody," Hackman answers. "One side's just losing more slowly than the other."

The part that's helpful advice comes at the end of the obit. The Times' obituary writers do a good job writing these things. They don't just mail it in. And there's a lot of value in the conclusion of this one.

"In a 2009 interview for the online journal Writer’s Room, Mr. Sharp was asked his advice for writers starting out. 'If there’s a story you like, just write it up and see how it feels,' he replied. 'It’s not illegal until you do something with it.' To that he added a coda, the tough, existential frame around his mordant picture of life:

“Persevere.”

Death at an early age.

Today, for most people, is Valentine's Day. For me, it's always been a day tinged with more than a little bit of sadness.

It's my sister's birthday.

It was my sister's birthday.

She's dead now, dying in a motorcycle crash nearly seven years ago. She was 47.

Nancy had a sad life. She got it worse from an abusive mother and a neglectful drunk of a father than either my brother or I.

Perhaps because we were boys. Perhaps because we were older. Perhaps we were stronger.

In any event Nancy's way of dealing with her horrors were often self-destructive. She ran away from home and lived with various men. There were hardly any drugs she didn't acquaint herself with. 

No matter how far and fast she ran, however, she could never run away. 

I suppose with her upbringing, you could say she was doomed from the start. And the Ducati motorcycle--bright red--that she hoped would transport her away, instead killed her.

She bought it on Saturday, May 12th. On Sunday, May 13th she was dead. Dead on 52nd Street and 12th Avenue in New York. She had swerved to avoid a drunk who was running across the road. She went ass over tea kettle, as they say. And the big bike crushed the small girl.

When I identified her body there were more parts bruised than unbruised.

She was still beautiful. Even in the fluorescent hum of New York City's morgue.

In our anti-septic, anesthetized era, we are told that we should "get over" pain. We should "put the past behind us." We should accept. We should heal. If "we love something, we should let it go."

In other words, we should "get a grip."

To me all these new age platitudes are merely the stuff of plasticine trinkets. They express how you feel as well as a .99 cent Valentine's card.

Emotions don't follow a calendar. There's no "right time" for you to "get on with your life." Sure, you have to cope and function and compartmentalize. But you don't ever have to give up your heart and your sadness.

I will carry my Nancy with me the rest of my life.

Her smile and her sorrow. Her few triumphs and her many defeats.

As her slightly older brother I tried to be there for her.

Sure, there were times when I was an asshole. There were fights we had where we didn't talk for months. There were stretches where I gave up on her. And let my stiff-necked-ness interfere with my love.  

I will never get over Nancy's death.

Nor should I.

-
VITAE SUMMA BREVIS SPEM NOS VETAT INCOHARE LONGHAM(The brief sum of life forbids us the hope of enduring long - Horace)

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

Ernest Dowson

Thinking about writing.

By far the most compelling portion of President Obama's speechifying last night was his call to bring the discussion of gun control regulation to the fore and the floor of the Congress. Obama did this by repeating a simple set of three words--building to a punctuation of those words.

"Hadiya’s parents, Nate and Cleo, are in this chamber tonight, along with more than two dozen Americans whose lives have been torn apart by gun violence. They deserve a vote.

"Gabby Giffords deserves a vote.
"The families of Newtown deserve a vote.
"The families of Aurora deserve a vote.
"The families of Oak Creek, and Tucson, and Blacksburg, and the countless other communities ripped open by gun violence – they deserve a simple vote."

In our business we seem to be ever-so-slowly waking up to communication techniques that have existed for as long as man has communicated.

You can’t spit on Madison Avenue without bumping into some blowhard blathering about story-telling. As if good advertising, good communication was ever anything but. (VW "Funeral," Apple "1984." CDP's "Hovis" work.)

It’s not new, you blithering idiot, you just had your head to far up your binary ass to notice it before.

Likewise we hear similar imprecations about copy.  The primary shibboleth, of course being “Keep it short!”

Yet there are certain methods and techniques that have existed for as long as we have been a verbal species. And they don’t worry about brevity. They worry about breaking through. Imprinting a message. Compelling people to act.

Surely, Obama could have said last night (and saved a minute) “All those killed and wounded and ripped apart by gun violence deserve a vote.”

The same message would have been spoken.

But nothing would have been communicated.

Good writing is a lot of things.

It is unexpected.

It is visual.

It is real.

It is shocking.

It is motivated.

It avoids clichés.

Phrases you heard before.

In the words of Carl Ally, “It afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted.”

Sure, there’s a power to the discipline of brevity.

But there is also power to techniques like repetition.

Your job as a writer is to be powerful.

It's not to be short.

It's not to spit back product features.

It's not to follow some stinking "One Voice" manual.

Your job is to be powerful.

It’s that simple.

Dour thoughts.

I was at an event a couple of weeks ago, an advertising event.

A lot of people I had worked with a decade ago when I was at Ogilvy were there.

Now, it's about ten years later and we have all dispersed to the four winds.

We're all working at different agencies.

By all appearances, we're doing well.

For one, we're working. Working in senior positions at blue-chip agencies.

The inevitable happened when we were all chit-chatting.

So how are things at _________?

There would be an involuntary shrug, a rolling of the eyes.

And then a glottal, 'you know, it sucks.'

My partner and I have the same conversation nearly every day.

Every day we back ourselves into the same corner.

Every place out there sucks.

Petty. Stupid. Cheap. Political. Nasty.

You know.

So what's the answer, as Bukes might ask.

Where do we go? What do we do?

Viktor Frankl had answers to these questions in his seminal book "Man's Search for Meaning."

If you haven't read it, read it.

What you have is you.

Your health.

Your mind.

Your standards.

Your integrity.

Your fight.

Your life.

Do the best you can do. Fight the fights. Speak your mind. Ask the questions.

Don't give in to the dominant complacency of the world.

We can't always change the agency we work at.

Or our business.

And certainly not the world.

But we can be true to ourselves.

We can hold onto that.

Some recent work.

Not long ago my partner and I got a call to help out on a crash and burn pitch.

This didn't come a particularly good time since we were already enmeshed in the web of post-production.

But my partner and I are generous sorts.

We run towards problems--to solve them--not away from them.

In any event, we came through.

We came up with the idea that won the business.

And just a couple of weeks later, we found ourselves on the left coast shooting six spots.

There's nothing magical about the commercials we shot.

We took an ancient form--a side-by-side comparison and constructed it in a contemporary way.

A way that would feel modern.

And more importantly would get past the lawyers.

They aren't high concept.

But from what we hear they're working for our beleaguered client.

(I say beleaguered because their stock is down from $83 six years ago to about $20 today.)

I think they'll drive some sales.

They'll make people behave differently.

While they're changing some perceptions.

They'll make people think differently.

Nothing changes.

Almost 40 years ago, well anyway, 35, I was a graduate student in English and Comparative Literature. Through my reading I developed a belief--a thesis--that was sure to get me excoriated, excommunicated and expelled just for uttering it.

I believed then, and I still do, that there is something I called "The Literature of the Oppressed." That is, whether you are an African-American in the Jim Crow South, an Irishman in British-occupied Ireland, or a Jew in the Czar's Russia, certain consistencies exist in the stories of these oppressed people. Of course, the particularities vary from ghetto to shtetl, but the basics of the story--the weak coping with the strong, have a great deal in common.

I had this thought right at the coming of age of African-American studies in the US. And my belief in the universality of the human condition was flat-out heresy.

A decade or so later I was teaching, but not English Lit at some ivy-covered campus. Instead I was presiding over a concept class at New York's School of Visual Arts.

I always started the term this way. I would take 10 or 15 award-winning ads, a couple each from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. These ads, as you can imagine, looked and felt dramatically different. We would then spend the entire class and most of the term discussing the commonalities of good communication. And how that didn't change through the decades.

Every so often among the few comments I get on Ad Aged, I get one that reminds me how "out of it" I am. How things were the way I described maybe decades ago but they're not that way now.

I suppose these comments come from the same people who spout idiocies like "that will change everything" and "blank is dead."

The basic arc of a story hasn't changed. Nor has the "value exchange" of people in love.  Nor have a trillion other things. If I were a little smarter and a little more talented, I would take "Gilgamesh," written over 4,000 years ago and write the screenplay. You won't find a more riveting story on the big screen and in the hands of a Cameron or a Lucas, Gilgamesh would surely be a blockbuster.

I get tired of people who don't understand the past.

A walk uptown.

At 2:35 last night I was jostled awake by Dame Insomnia.

"Come on, George," she beckoned. "Let's fly! Leave the warmth of your bed. Leave the sanctity of your home and visit with me. Leave behind peace and quiet and comfort and routine--leave behind all you know and love--leave it all, and come with me."

I had no choice but to comply.

I pulled on a pair of heavy flannel-lined jeans, a hooded sweatshirt of the type they now call a hoodie (because everything is today reduced to baby-talk) my waterproof hiking boots, my insulated oilskin and my Astrakhan hat. I snapped on Whiskey's leash and the three of us headed out into the darkness.


Usually, I head over to the East River Drive when I walk with Whiskey and the Dame at night, but this morning, for some unknown reason, I was drawn west. Whiskey and I walked to Central Park--so frightening when I was young, so somnolent now, and then turned north and walked the bridle path up to Harlem, where the park ends at 110th Street.

I had lived up in that neck of the woods when New York was brutal, in the 70s and 80s. I had a night job then and would walk swiftly across the Columbia campus with my keys laced between my fingers, ready to slash back if I were accosted. Whether by dint of luck or my lumbering, bear-like mien, I survived my years in the darkness fairly without incident--having never been mugged and pick-pocketed only once, though that was while I was underground at the huge subway complex underneath what was then the New York Coliseum at 8th Avenue and 59th Street.

The Coliseum is gone now. Replaced by the Time Warner Towers and mall. Yes, New Yorkers, you have let a mall into your midsts. The mammon of shop shop shop has eradicated all. All character. All humanity. All life. All low life. And all bookstores, the cavernous and obtuse Coliseum Books having been ploughed under like an Okie's land, more than a decade ago.

I walked west when I exited the park at 110th and 8th. I walked west to my old haunts and went to visit my friends, the smiling gargoyles who adorn 527 W 110th Street. Maybe they would know the answers--after all, they had been watching New York since they arrived on the cityscape back in 1909.

It was well after three now and the rain was beginning the fall. I asked them for answers. But they merely smiled. They smiled as they do.

And sat there, as they do, stone-faced.

Nemo.

The song tells us that New York is the "City that never sleeps," and that may be so, but on certain days, the City is magnificently, gloriously, beautifully, luminously, soporifically quiet.

This season's first "Storm of the Century" is upon us. It's called "Nemo," which in Latin means "nobody." Nemo is what Odysseus said to the Cyclops when the Cyclops asked, plaintively, who blinded me? Nobody.

This storm is far from a nobody. It's predicted to dump a foot or more on New York and two feet on Boston and Western Massachusetts. Governor Cuomo of New York has declared a state of emergency and Governor Patrick of Massachusetts closed all state roads at 4 PM.

Of course, the needs of Whiskey, my 10-month-old Golden Retriever, trump any weather system. And with my wife working late once again, I went out with Whiskey for a long walk along the East River. I left the house around five and didn't return home until nearly two hours later.

Some of this was selfish. Walking Whiskey now would get our long exercise romp over before the brunt of the storm is due to hit Manhattan. And it's expected to be fierce, with biting cold and driving winds.

Carl Schurz Park, a 14.9-acre park reconstructed by Robert Moses in 1935 and home of the Mayor's residence, Gracie Mansion, is where I walk Whiskey, nine nights out of 10. It's a peaceful place, just a block from my apartment and adjacent to the river.

Along the river runs the East River Promenade with its elegantly curved wrought iron protecting pedestrians from the water. The promenade extends unbroken down to 61st Street where it is interrupted by the Queensboro Bridge and up to 122nd, where the Triboro interferes.

Whiskey and I headed uptown, stopping at the hill of "Hoorn's Hook," a hill overlooking the wide water expanse of the Hell's Gate. Hoorn's Hook was named by an early Dutch landowner, Siebert Classen. I find this fact amusing since my long-time art-director partner was named Claesson.

On Hoorn's Hook neighborhood kids were sledding, using all sorts of conveyances--traditional sleds, plastic saucers, corrugated flattened boxes and big black garbage bags. A couple dogs were out as well. Their owners, like me, bundled up against the cold. Whiskey ran up and down the hill with a mongrel named Layla.

Nemo kept coming.

But nobody could keep me out of the city on a night like tonight.

Advice to young people.

Young people need jobs and jobs, whatever career you're pursuing in whatever economic climate, are hard to come by.

I get a lot of young people reaching out to me, looking for work. So I thought I'd write a few lines on what I've learned about job hunting.

1. Don't be afraid of people like me. Yes, I am old. Yes, I've had lofty titles. And yes, I'm extremely busy. But many people remember how hard it is to break into our business and will therefore answer your call or e with empathy. Also, understand that for every 10 or 20 notes or calls you send out, you might get just one response. That's one more than you'd get if you do nothing.

2. Do something. I cast a bunch of commercials once with the famed director Errol Morris. We saw hundreds of actors--all beautiful and accomplished. Morris' direction to each of them was always the same. "Do something," he'd say as they planted themselves on a strip of tape. Those who did something bold, humble, authentic or funny got considered. Everyone else was sent home.

3. Ask about my friends. Most people in hiring positions have friends in hiring positions in other places. Never leave an interaction, whether it's in-person, by phone or via e, without another name.
This is called networking. And it works.

4. Write notes. If you see work in a trade magazine that you like, write to the creatives and compliment them. Tell them you want to work for them. Tell them you want to meet them and show them who you are. It couldn't hurt.

5. Wash windows. Be willing to do anything to get work, to get closer to where you want to be.

6. Write a good story about who you are. People hire books. But they also hire the people behind the work. Make sure your values and attributes are evident.

7. Take ten extra minutes. Wait ten minutes before you send anything or post anything anywhere. Today's instantaneousness of expression means people send out notes with the word "hopefully" spelled "hoefully." Make sure you're letter perfect. And assume people will look at your FB and LinkedIn. So don't be a dick.

8. Figure out a "Touch Strategy." Assume that finding a proper job will take six months. Think like a direct marketer (which is what you are at this point) and figure out how to write to your target over that time period without being obnoxious or cloying.

There's more, I'm sure. But this is enough for now.