Today is opening day of baseball season.
Yes, the Mets played the Cardinals last night in the “Season Opener”.
That was a night game.
Doesn’t count.
The season doesn’t open till a game is played in daylight.

The first day of baseball season is a good time to remember how lucky we are to work in the business of advertising.
We can take the afternoon off and go to the game.

Is the world going to miss one afternoon’s worth of advertising?
Will anyone be able to tell if you withheld an afternoon’s worth of effort from a campaign?

However, leaving work to go to a baseball game will make a difference inside you.
Leaving work to go to a baseball game opens something inside your heart that advertising has been doing its best to lock up.
The quest for award-winning work keeps you at work late.
The struggle to do better than those around you makes you work through dinner, get up early, cancel the vacation you planned.
There are times these sacrifices bear fruit.
Mostly they don’t.
Because greatness at writing ads comes only partly from how hard you work at reaching inside yourself.
A greater deal of it has to do with being a person worth reaching into.
Leaving work to go to a baseball game is a sign you have taken charge of your life.
It’s a sign you accept death is coming and have chosen what to do about it for today.
It will do you no good to learn to write from your heart if you have nothing in your heart.
I was slow to learn this.
Here’s hoping you won’t be.

This is the team I root for.

My favorite player is Joe Crede, the White Sox 3rd baseman.
The best player in the game, I think, is Albert Pujols.
I used to think Ichiro was the best player in baseball, but when Pujols came up in the last inning of game 6 against the Astros and hit the ball out, almost sending the Cardinals to the World Series in 2005 I changed my mind.

Go give your heart away for the afternoon to a team who can break it.
Eat the hot dogs and damn the sodium because we are for lives that are more full than they are long.

I drove from Portland to Richmond last week.
In a 17-year old Toyota LandCruiser.

Unsafely at times.

I’ve driven across the country 4 or 5 times.
NY LA twice.
I used to make the trip in fewer days.
Of course the list of things done quicker in youth is long for most people and I am not excepted.
Neither is my LandCruiser.
This sign used to excite it:

Now we pull into the right hand slow truck lane in the mountains and get honked at by 18-wheelers faster than we are. You don’t push an old LandCruiser unless you want to end up pushing it.

A drive across the country turns a solitary driver against much he’s held dear.
As the intercourse with the country moved beyond gas stations and rest areas to motels and restaurants, it moved my mind to hatred of hamburgers.
Or what passes for a hamburger at McDonalds/BurgerKing/Wendys.
Chain hotels & chain fast food make money near the interstates.
Apparently not much else.
Get off at an exit, drive half a mile, and you can hear life being squeezed out of the way to make room for another chain location.
The ground is squeezed up into berms to deflect the sound of 70-mph tires, the people’s faces are squeezed into grimaces at having no better choice than to work at chain locations, the trees are squeezed into corners waiting to be bulldozed when numbers say the market will allow a new chain location to come in, the hamburger is squeezed into flat squares, frozen & stacked.
What happens to a hamburger is what happens to the people.
Sit at the bar at the Lounge at a Holiday Inn next to the interstate and you will believe me.
There is a look that comes on a person’s face whose life is laid out before them in a step by step diagram that when they turn their head to look at you, if you stare at it a minute, will make you both grateful to God and at the same time sadder than you’ve been for some time.

At first, it felt good to be out amongst the trees & the mountains & the rain.

Then it occurs to you how come I don’t come out here more often?
How did I become so disassociated from the land I live in?
How have I gone so far down the road Thoreau (whose thinking I admire for much more than its environmental positions) warned of :

“If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day,
he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends
his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and
making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an
industrious and enterprising citizen.” (Life without Principle)

I’m thinking we don’t go to nature because there’s no money in it.
I’m not suggesting nobody’s in the woods.
There are plenty of people out there testing sleeping bags & tents & lanterns for Outside magazine articles.
What there aren’t much of is people taking walks irrespective of schedule.
A people unawed by the miracle ball we stand on, breathe from, eat off & drink up isn’t likely to have anything to say to their neighbors beyond simple bickering.
Too much Starbucks, not enough looking at stars.
Is stepping in line with a smoothly churning economic machine all we hope to spend our lives at?
It may seem a small evil.
It’s when evils are small that we lose the fight to them.

I saw my favorite means of transportation everywhere.
But never one with passengers.

The interstate highway system is the exact worst way to cross the country, but the fastest.
And you have an incredible amount of control if you’re not in a hurry.
Coast-to-coast on a train (I’ve gone 3/4ths of the way twice) the lack of control you have would make me kill myself out of frustration.
Amtrak is a perfect example of how Capitalism keeps greatness from appearing amongst us.
In parts of Colorado I’ve passed through places so quiet and sweet you can almost hear people humming Oh Beautiful for Spacious Skies as the train slips through the scene.
Problem is those spots are 10 minutes long and at best you miss only half of them during the night.
It’s a cheap shot to blame Capitalism for how bad Amtrak is but Amtrak is so bad it deserves every kick that can be got in.
However, it’s the maturing of Capitalism & the market economy in America that has left no room for Amtrak to do the things that make train travel so ramblingly good in Europe.
The fault does not belong to the people of Amtrak.

Capitalism leaves no place for values that can’t be measured in dollars.
Trains, as wonderful as they are, make no economic sense in America right now.
Increasingly we are accepting lives filled less with things of value and more with only those things whose value can be measured.

These trees I drove past were standing there beautifully.

Ok, sure, maybe they were planted in rows because Capitalist profit/loss ratios demanded a pattern of harvest that was most cost-effective.
But, what about leaving them there to be beautiful? No chance.
What about there being forests planted by plan to express thought & vision, not just the maximizing of profit?
I know, ridiculous.
I was driving across the country when I could have flown.
Don’t ask this to make the normal amount of sense.

The smartest people I know think about death constantly.
I don’t see much point in not considering it the only issue that matters.
So when I see a signpost for Deadman’s Pass, I shoot it.
By luck–and it is by luck that all good work is done–the wide angle of the camera lens caught the reflection in the rear view, which, to me, shows such a contrast with the blue sky of the moment that it nearly appears death is following behind and the signpost for the turn ahead is not far.

I know what you’re thinking.
What does this have to do with advertising?
Everything.
Everything you do becomes a part of the creative machine your brain is.
Keep feeding it experiences and it won’t stall.
(to be continued)

Dear Students,
This is a great movie.

Not just good film, good dialogue, good music and fun to watch, it’s got a lesson for you that could mean the difference between greatness and whatever else there is.

The line above is said by The Sundance Kid (Robert Redford) to Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman).

They’re surrounded on all sides and about to get captured & hung, or shot outright, when, in a moment of ultimate cool, they have a conversation about what they should do when they get out of the mess they’re in–leave the American West where they were being chased for robbing banks to go to Bolivia where the US lawmen had no jurisdiction.

It illustrates a principle which has become crucial to high-level success in advertising:

Do your ideas as soon as you have them.

Time eats ideas.
If you wait, not only may someone else come up with the same idea, or a better one, someone may simply come up with an idea that gets through the gate into production before yours.
Then you’re left watching while someone else eats your cupcake.

Emerson warned of this in Self-Reliance, admonishing us: “… to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.”

Move immediately when you’ve got an idea.
Jump on it.
Make it move right then when it’s loose and jangly and feels wrong.
Don’t let it get solid.
If you don’t fear it some, it probably sucks.

(I don’t know how many times I’ve suggested people read Emerson.
It’s got to be boring to hear me say it again.
Look closely at that line quoted above though.
Knowing that what he’s suggesting goes against our nature, he exhorts the reader to not only be a person who sticks with an idea when he has it, but to especially do so when other people speak out most against it. That’s the hardest part, and the most important. Tough to put in practice. Which is why there’s not many Emersons)

Intelligence is good.
But without action it’s only unused potential.
I often feel I could be the king of that.

p.s. Yes, in the movie, going to Bolivia didn’t work out after a while for Butch & Sundance, but that was more the fault of their professional choices, not their acting on ideas as they had them. Another good principle from the movie is the number of rules there are in a knife fight. You’ll have to watch it to get that one.

Dear Students,
In an article in the Houston Chronicle, this story is told of a man poisoned by a rattlesnake that didn’t bite him:

Even a dead rattlesnake can hurt you. Just ask Trey Hanover of College Station.

On Labor Day weekend, Hanover and his father, Tommy Hanover, were working on their deer lease when they killed a big rattler. They shot the snake’s head off with a shotgun and loaded the carcass in the truck to show other hunters on their lease that they needed to be careful.

“We hung the snake on the fence at the camphouse,” Tommy Hanover said. “When we got ready to leave, Trey picked up the snake and threw it out in the pasture for the buzzards to eat.”

By the time he’d driven to College Station, Trey Hanover’s eyes were very irritated. By the next morning, his eyes were swollen shut. The doctor who examined Hanover said it looked like he’d suffered a chemical burn.

It took them a while to figure out that the shotgun load that vaporized the rattlesnake’s head splattered the snake’s venom over its body.

When Hanover handled the snake, he got the venom on his hands and later rubbed it in his eyes, made itchy by dust and ragweed. Sixteen days later, the vision in his right eye was back to normal. His left eye was still a little cloudy, but the doctor thought it would return to normal as well.

“We learned a valuable lesson about handling rattlesnakes — even dead ones,” said Tommy Hanover.

People know way too much about ads to let themselves be directly affected by one.
Same way cowboys know too much about rattlesnakes to let themselves get bit by them.

The human heart is closed to marketers who want to bully it.
The number of thoughts we’re willing to hold in our crowded minds about products/services we might buy or accept as part of our lives is incredibly small.
How many of the obvious & banal propositions made to us daily on TV find a home in your mind?

If all the ad you’re writing is aiming at is a direct bite on who walks by, what you’re writing is a bad ad.
Or, more indelicately, you’re writing crap.
Something the audience sees coming a mile away and finds no problem ignoring.
At best they pay it the compliment of disregarding it with a flick of anger as it goes by. Resentment that it took up time they can’t get back.

Sublime and wonderful advertising hits people without them knowing it.
Great, life-changing advertising doesn’t waste time shouting at a closed ear.
It tickles it open, slips in a thought like a depth-bomb, and is two blocks away before it explodes.

The kind of ads that made you want to get into this business, students, don’t work obvious, like a snake, they work secret like venom.
Just getting some of it on your hands can be deadly.

How to make ads like this?
Next time.

I have previously written of the grand history of the Oregon state flag –see post for Dec 23, 2005– the only state flag with two different sides.
Now let us consider another glorious banner, that of the state of Virginia.

Yes, you are correct, the man holding the spear in his right hand is wearing a toga.
Yes, he cradles a sword awkwardly with his left arm.
Yes, this is the only state flag displaying a human nipple.
Look downward.
Yes, the man with the spear, the sword and the cold chest muscle is resting his heel on the throat of a man lying on the ground.
Yes, that is a crown placed in such a way as to suggest it was felled from the head of the supine-ed man.
No, that is not a correct usage of the adjective supine.
And yet, it is not wrong.
The phrase does describe the picture resembled on the flag, especially the position of the subdued foe.
Yes, you are correct, the last phrase also contains an incorrect usage.
The word resemble, although a verb, should not be used in the manner I have typed it. Something in the tense is wrong, though I can’t say exactly what.
Our brains, though, find it useful to accept the incorrect usage in order to keep from stopping its reading.
This acceptance comes grudgingly from an experienced, close reader.
However, an ever enlarging number of people report pleasure at finding words used differently than they were taught to use them, or are used to seeing them used, and the pleasure they derive from viewing such shenanigans acts as motivation to keep them reading & to seek out more to read.
So I do it.
It is important to know grammatical correctness in order to communicate to a civilized & literate society.
Since most of us do not spend much time in a civilized & literate society, yet wish to communicate with those around us, it behooves us to learn to write and speak in ways which draw to us an audience rather than in ways, however correct, that push the eyes of our brothers & sisters away.
Which is the small task I am about now, here:

I hope I have not explained myself overly much.
Thank you for your interest.

Everybody knows Martin Luther King, Jr. was a great leader, a great man, a great speaker.
What doesn’t get said enough, or noticed enough, or copied enough is how great a writer he was.
Beyond taking in the substance of his work, let his influence as a writer wash over you.
Let it affect not only your heart, let it affect what comes out on the keyboard.

Breathe in the cadence of his sentences.
Listen to the visuals he conjures in the air.
King’s genius as a writer was he was a speaker.
His genius as a speaker was he didn’t wave words around above his audience.
He spoke pictures.
He got into his audience’s mind.
He included them in the making of the speech.
He pounded out image after image, sometimes two and three to a sentence.
You didn’t listen to King speak you saw what he was saying.
You didn’t wonder what his point was, you saw it running in the imagination of your mind like a movie.
You didn’t hear about inequality of income, you saw ” the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination”.
You saw the “lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity”.

Take advantage of the great example he left.
Take in how to speak in poetry but be understood by a crowd.
No easy feat.

King built brilliant structure out of simple repetition.
I know you’ve heard it a million times, but read it.
Watch how he stacks up his argument in simple fundamental thoughts, then leans them right into his next point.
He can make you better.
Listen to this, again from the I Have a Dream speech from 1963:

We cannot walk alone.
And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. 
We cannot turn back. 
There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?:

We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.

We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. 
We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one.

We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating “for whites only.” 
We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. 
No, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Today is Martin Luther King Day.
But this man’s writing speaks every day.

People who go dark inside at the thought of New Year’s Eve, those are my people.

Friends of mine have left New Year’s parties at 10 minutes to midnight to walk out by themselves on the beach in LA to face the stars and the waves at the big moment. Looking back, those have been my best friends, not the ones who stayed on the dance floor. I’ve been that person standing on the beach at midnight, feet in the ocean, eyes pinned on the stars & moon several times, looking for what I can’t tell you. Once it was my own party I left.

I was on Interstate 70 between Denver and Copper Mountain on New Year’s Eve in a snowstorm once. A trucker headed East blew his horn at midnight. I waved, uselessly, but with great feeling. Driving by yourself on New Year’s Eve sets a person up just right who’s prone to dark thoughts, even though I was driving to a party at a ski house.

This is all New Years is to me:

It’s math.
Numbers.
You can’t consume it.
You can’t grasp it.
You can’t know it.
You can’t do anything with it.
In the moment it arrives it is leaving.
It is in motion, undoing itself while it goes.
It builds nothing, is part of nothing, leads to nothing.

Why am I bringing this up?
I swear it’s not just to bring you down.

We aren’t putting stuff like this into ads.
I think that’s a mistake.
I think people who make ads are getting drawn more and more away from telling the truth as we know it.

People are walking around dying inside for someone to come along and say Man, I hate New Year’s Eve, don’t you?
But we’re not speaking to that part of them as much as we used to.
Maybe we’re not speaking to them at all as much as we once did.
And, truly, there are also people walking around dying to hear the exact opposite as well—something funny/light/warm/dizzy/smart/crackling that you can think of, you who are different and better and younger or older or wiser or faster or less abstract than me.
The point isn’t whether the math brings you down or draws you onto the dance floor.
The point is: use what’s real to you.
There isn’t a company on earth that doesn’t need more connection to the human beings who buy its product, would buy its product, or would at least be willing to stop lampooning people who they see buying the product.

I’m not the only one who goes interior at New Years.
I could hear at least half of you nodding yes about your best friends not being on the dance floor at midnight.
We want to be outside of time.
Time is holding something inside of us down.
New Years excites that feeling.
Stirs it up.
Makes you walk outside into the dark and the cold and look for lights.

You can’t put that into an ad straight, though.
(If that worked, heck, consumer-generated content would be worth watching)
To bring an audience what it hasn’t specifically chosen to consider you have to bend something.
You hold it up straight they have a right to say so what?
You have to bend the right thing the right amount at the right time without knowing from anywhere outside yourself what the right thing to bend is until you bend it.

You have to take a chance that what it occurs to you to say is what an audience wants to hear.
Since audiences want always something new something new something new, you’ve got to stop trying to make copies of what has already been and start getting ahead of them.
How do you get ahead?
At midnight this New Year’s Eve, or, truly, any time in any place, whatever news you’ve got that’s true, that needs saying, bend it some & tell it.

Happy New math.

A: Look up from his newspaper.

Dear Students,
You’re not going to get any preparation for this in your classes.
But you should know it.
The key to success in big time advertising: learn to live out of a carryon.
Don’t get into this business unless you truly love airplanes.

Merry Christmas.
The holiday dedicated to us not having to get what we deserve.

A student in the Film Storytelling class couldn’t bring him or herself to do an assignment.
He or she came to my office to tell me this.
Trying, in a gentle way, to help, I said, “Tough. Do it anyway.”

The owner of a sturdy & upright nature, the student went away to work on his/her project.
I was left wondering: what could make a person who came to school in order to learn to do this not want to do it?
This is what I figured:

A lot of people are held back from working by fear of failure.
They’re so afraid to make something that’s no good that they don’t make anything.
Wrong.

Failure is necessary.
Failure is important.
Failure is an irreplaceable ingredient in the creative process.
The right to fail is a right you are wrong to deny yourself.

There’s a ton of failure in creating advertising.
(Truly, a great deal of failure is central to the creation of anything in which quality is determined by subjective judgment)
There’s a lot of failure.
There’s a lot of looking foolish.
It’s part of the process.
You learn to accept it.
After a while you hardly notice it.

What’s terrifically good about the right to fail is it means you can try anything.
Here’s where you can help yourself.

If there’s going to be plenty of failure no matter what you do, try something that’s worth the trouble.
Instead of sticking to what you see others doing, make something that could only occur to you.
Make something you couldn’t describe to someone else without them looking at you funny.

Most of us have been trained by life to avoid the feeling you get when you try things like that.
It requires an act of faith.
Faith is scary.
Even a small act of faith is not for the fearful.
(I believe there is no advancement in any part of life without an act of faith but that’s too big an idea to get into here, now)

It’s similar to the feeling you get when you think to yourself, heck, I should just kiss that girl.
Most of the time we don’t follow through.
Some of us are such dorks we not only stop our instincts, we compound our dorkness by moping for 3 days, and then—ask the girl if we can kiss her, and in that moment damn ourselves as not being men of action.

Don’t ask, kiss.
Sure you might feel stupid if someone laughs.
Get used to it.
Could be worse.
You could do crummy work all your life and never know why.

You can try to skip the looking foolish part.
But you miss the part that allows you to understand what makes a great ad great.
Let the great French essayist say it:

“To learn that we have said or done a foolish thing, that is nothing. We must learn that we are nothing but fools, a far broader and more important lesson.” -Montaigne

Dear Unhappy Students,
You were not promised a rose garden.
Neither, I think, did you expect one.
Nevertheless, you are unhappy.

Why am I unhappy? you ask yourself.
The man in the Chinese restaurant who stands at the register all day to take my money when I eat the buffet lunch, he doesn’t look unhappy.
The woman who takes away the trash each night, that’s her second job of the day and she doesn’t seem unhappy.
Why am I, sitting on a sofa with my feet up on the table, making ink marks in a black book, at a graduate school preparing me to work in an exotic, highly paid field, unhappy?

Greater ones than you and I have felt the same.
Monet, I think, gets to the heart of it best.

No one but myself knows the anxiety I go through and the trouble I give myself to finish paintings which do not satisfy me and seem to please so very few others.
-Claude Monet
As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. 
Satisfaction is death.
-George Bernard Shaw

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
-Ernest Hemingway

I bring this up because if you don’t feel yourself to be the kind of person who willingly enters into the bargain Monet describes, it may be a sign you are not going down the path in life which will most engage the gifts you’ve been given.
There is an anxiety to the making of work from nothing that punishes the person attempting it.
I have not seen anyone I admire find a way to sidestep it or rid themselves of it except by finishing the work.
That’s usually good for 5 minutes of smiling.