My Alex Bogusky Story

I met Alex Bogusky in 1997.

Alex, for those of you not in the business, lit up the world and put Crispin Porter & Bogusky on the map with breakthrough campaigns for Burger King, Mini and Coca Cola.

We had both been selected to serve on the judging committee for the OBIES, the awards given by the Outdoor Advertising Association of America.

He was quite younger than me. And moved about the room with ease and not an insignificant amount of charm. It's easy to see why he had such success pushing clients to take risks. He also knew good work when he saw it. Or in the case of the 1997 OBIES, when he didn't see it.

At the conclusion of the first day of judging, Alex convened all the judges and announced, "I don't see anything here worth awarding. I say we give out NOTHING."

To an extent, he was right.
There was a lot of crap on the table.
But to a greater extent, Alex was wrong.

We weren't there judging films or books or anything that merited more than 30 seconds worth of anybody's attention. We were judging advertising.

Outdoor boards, no less. Otherwise known as visual highway pollution. Our job was to find the least offensive work amongst all the offensive work.

I countered Alex's proclamation, "Dude (it seemed appropriate to call him Dude), these folks flew me, my wife and my 6 month old daughter all the way to NY. They put us up at the SoHo Grand Hotel, and they paid for last night's dinner at Raoul's, by the way the steak and pom frite were excellent. I'm not going to turn around and tell them all the work sucked. We couldn't find anything worth awarding. Sorry. Here's my hotel tab."

He yielded.

And on the next day, though he mumbled and grumbled about the shit show he was presiding over, Alex finished the tabulations and announced we were able to come to a consensus. I breathed a sigh of relief, knowing we had completed our task and that I wouldn't have to go ten rounds with the finance woman from the Association. Particularly as I had plowed through the minibar's $15 cans of cashews and the fancy imported Indian ales.

I can't tell you who went home with the 1997 Royal Grand Supreme Obie. But I can tell you the recipients of that prestigious award owe me.

Big time.

Splash Talk

This is Antawn Jamison, a 6'9" Power Forward who, at one time, was one of the NBA's top prospects.

He no longer plays for the Los Angeles Lakers. He now dons a Clippers uniform. But who knows how long that will last as he now played for 5 separate teams in the 9 years since entering the NBA.

Nevertheless, there's no arguing with the fact he is an elite professional athlete.

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Antawn. Actually, we never talked with each other. We only swam next to each other.

I, in the fast lane, and he, in the not-so-fast lane.

I swim at my brother's condo complex in Playa Vista. The newly built Clippers training camp is also in Playa Vista. In fact, as you can tell from the map, they are only a mile and a half apart. I'm sure Antawn, and the two scrubs he came with, could have walked from the gym, but I'm pretty sure they came in the pimped-out Escalade parked in front of the pool.

It's not all that unusual to find some Clippers at the pool.

Two years ago, I swam next to, and talked with Blake Griffin, who was rehabbing from a knee injury. His coach had him swimming when he couldn't do any other cardio exercise.

Blake took to the water like a duck and has a long, graceful stroke. He covers the 25 meters of the pool in 6 easy, strides.

I tried counting the number of strokes Antawn and his buddies were swimming but lost count. I'm not even sure you'd call it swimming. It was more like flailing. And slapping the water. And gasping for oxygen as if they were summiting K2.

Look, I don't have a stellar athletic track record.

In high school, I would have liked to play football. I had the weight for the position, but I didn't have the height. In college, the only running I did was for beer. It wasn't until I moved to California that I discovered running 10K races, marathons and triathlons. Mostly as an avenue to getting laid.

So you'll have to pardon me for gloating. Because it wasn't even official. There were no starting guns. Or finish lines. I'm not even sure Antawn knew he was racing me. But I was definitely racing him. And in a simple 50 meter swim there and back, I kicked his $1.9 million professional basketball-playing ass.

And in a few weeks, for $29.95 plus shipping and handling, I'll have the hardware to prove it.

Let The Seller Beware

Last week I was one-upped.

Hasan Syed, a dissatisfied British Airways customer (are there any other kind?), paid $1000 for a promoted tweet and bashed BA for their horrible customer service. It was the first time a consumer purchased a promoted tweet for the sole purpose of complaining about a brand.

But it won't be the last.

The story of Mr. Syed's anger, and his response, took on a life of its own. It's estimated with all the news coverage, his promoted tweet was worth $7 million dollars in bad word of mouth advertising for BA.

Am I jealous?
Of course, I'm jealous.

You might recall earlier in the year my family and I took a trip to Europe, to see family in Scotland and to finally shut my daughters up about going to Paris. The vacation was wonderful. The trip over on British Airways was not.

The 747 we were on was built in 1971 and was originally designed to accommodate 283 souls. However, some dim-witted douchebags in the British Airways accounting department decided the massive engine thrust was being underutilized. So they reconfigured the fuselage and installed 67 additional seats.

The crated cockapoodle in the cargo hold had more legroom than I did.

When I got home, I did what every other disgruntled airline passenger does, I wrote letters. All to no avail. And then I decided to do what Mr. Syed did, take my case to the people.

So I borrowed some imagery from the Holocaust, who by comparison had it much easier, and composed  an outdoor board which I was going to place at a strategic location on Century Blvd.

Here's what it would have looked like to customers approaching LAX:

I was ready to pull the trigger.
And anybody that knows me knows I would have done so.

But the cost was prohibitive. And I would have had a hard explaining to my daughter that she couldn't go to college because Daddy blew the money on a novelty billboard to make a hyperbolic point about a crappy flight to Heathrow Airport.

Thankfully, these promoted tweets are within my budget.

Which means this post will serve as a word of warning to the Nordictrack people if they don't get my stationary bike fixed.

Pronto.

It's Hump Day

Today is September 11.

And the temptation is great to go off on the murderous bastards who killed 3000 Americans and accomplished absolutely nothing in doing so. Like so many endeavors in the pursuit of Jihad.

But today, I find myself tired of my own voice.

I don't want to kvetch about semi-evolved human beings and their bloodlust and their misogynistic fairy tales written by desert dwelling goat herders 1000, 2000 or even 5000 years ago.

I don't want to rag on advertising, the business that puts food on my table, pays a premium price for my ideas and affords me the opportunity to swim at lunchtime.

And I don't want to speak publicly about my daughter's (both of them) annoying habit of taking selfies everywhere they go. I just don't get it.

Instead I want to leave you with a picture of the Pink Cheeks Salon on Ventura Blvd, in the heart of Sherman Oaks California.

If you do go to the Pinks Cheeks Salon, you'll find -- as the sign above indicates -- ample parking in the rear.

"In this campaign..."

AMC airs two shows about advertising. For comedic purposes I would normally say one of them is good. The other, not so much. And then reveal that the good show I'm talking about is The Pitch. Implying, by the use of irony, that the not-so-good show is Madmen.

See?
It's a twist.
A misdirect.
A bait and switch.

But, since a friend of mine is actually a paid consultant/producer/writer on Madmen, I can't really do that. Moreover, I haven't watched a single episode of Madmen since it started 6 years ago. So it wouldn't be fair to make it the butt of my joke.

Which brings us back to The Pitch.

For those who don't know, the premise is very simple. Two competing full service agencies (sometimes as small as three people) do battle for an advertising account or assignment.

In the hipster, pop culture bleeding edge circles that I travel in, it's quite fashionable to poo-poo The Pitch. But I generally run in the other direction than those sporting tattoo sleeves, or nose jewelry, or stingy brim fedora hats.

They claim the show is cringeworthy.
For me, it's bingeworthy.

I can't get enough of the amateur antics, the backbiting and the PDD, the Public Displays of Douchebaggery. If a man with a TV camera is pointing it at you why would you look directly into it and with a complete straight face say something like:

"I don't call myself a genius. But a lot of other people do. My mother and father always told me I was a genius. I guess maybe I am."

That's an actual quote.
And genius didn't win the account.

That is not to say the other agency's work was brilliant. It wasn't. To date, I've never seen anything on the show that even comes close to marginal. As a result, the client is often left to choosing between two piles of dogshit. One left by a Great Dane, the other by a Chihuauhua.

Not entirely unlike our current options with Syria.

The Pitch has enough schadenfreude for two shows.

But in a couple of weeks it will all get personal. Years ago, while entertaining the notion of starting up a business, I almost got into bed with one of the agencies that will be competing. I didn't pull the trigger but I remain friends with the partners and occasionally do some work for them.

I hope they come off well. But shudder to think I would have had to make an appearance on the Pitch. So I thank my lucky stars that it won't be me beaming into millions, okay, thousands, of living rooms.

After all, I have a face for radio.
And a voice for newspaper.

Happy 5774

Unless you live in Beverlywood, where they will stone you for washing your car on a Saturday morning. Or your kids go to school in Beverly Hills, where they were officially closed for two days. You might have missed Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.

Unlike other New Year's celebrations there were no fireworks.

No humungous crowds gathered in city squares.

There was no giant corporate-sponsored electric ball dropped from the nearest skyscraper.

There were no streamers, party hats or awkward interviews with Ryan Seacrest and Dick Clark.

There were no dragons, countdowns or semi-platonic kisses at midnight.

The rabbi read from the Torah.

Some pimply-faced kid, who won't get laid until he's a junior in college, blew a horn.

And some apple slices were dipped in honey.

The Riot Police slept fitfully that night.

The truth is, and I've said this before, we Jews suck at holidays. Even our most joyous holiday, Purim, doesn't elicit a single smile from the costumed 6-year olds pictured above. I've seen happier faces at a funeral for a poor aunt.

So what is it that prevents us from cutting loose and tossing all our inhibitions in the ocean to enjoy a single moment of debauchery and unfettered joy? I attribute it to Jewish neuroticism. And the realization that, "yes, things are great today, but they can, and probably will, get worse tomorrow."

Speaking of which, Happy Yom Kippur.

I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to paying $500 for the privilege of slapping on my wool suit, sitting in a hot temple with 900 grumbling altacacas and abstaining from food for 26 hours.

Good times.

It's not personal, it's business

I know from my many years working at ad agencies that nothing is given away for free.

Nothing.

If a project runs longer than projected or a client requests services that were not discussed in the original agreement, you can be sure the groundhogs in the Finance Department are going to pop up out of their cubicles and yell something about "SCOPE."

I have no problem with that.
After all, as agencies are fond of telling clients:

"It's only fair that we get paid for the services we provide."

"The less we're concerned about clock management the more we can focus on delivering creative solutions."

"If we're doing more than what we're being paid for, we wouldn't be smart business people. You wouldn't want to be in a partnership with bad business people."

These are all valid statements. But they are also why I am given to fits of fury (internalized of course) when it comes to negotiating my pay.

After all, if agencies aren't giving it away for free, why should freelancers?

For starters, I won't do a Project Fee. This is Fool's Gold. And is all predicated upon some fictional time line and assumed client approvals that never come to fruition.

Revisions become more revisions. More revisions become "Maybe we should rethink the brief?" But "let's rethink the brief" rarely turns into "Let's renegotiate the fee."

I'm also leery of the weekly rate. Because somehow agencies have it in their head that the week starts on Monday and ends on Monday. I've been burned on several occasions by this kind of agreement. But it won't happen again.

Even the day rate is losing its appeal.

Last week a friend of mine told me he showed up at the office at 8 AM and didn't go home that night until 1 AM. That's not one day. That's not even two days. That's 2 &1/2 days in the Siegel Book of Fair Labor Practices and Missed Episodes of the Daily Show. And if he doesn't bill them as such, he's doing us all a disfavor.

The best way to pay me is also the best way to pay a lawyer. On an hourly basis.

Some agencies, I call them the Good Ones, do pay on an hourly basis. Some agencies even pay overtime. I call them the Better Ones.

The hourly rate makes the most sense. Because then, if you want me to stay late or work on weekends, you'll pay me to stay late and work on weekends.

In essence, this forces agencies to plan better and manage more efficiently. It's almost like I'm doing them a favor.

You're welcome.

A word about Agencyspy

Some of my buddies claim I blog about advertising too much. And it's true, I do. But I know my audience. And I know that in addition to making regular stops here, they also stop in for "all the dirt that's fit to print" over at Agencyspy.com.

In fact, if you were to walk through the hallways at any agency, even one you're sitting in right now, you'd find a substantial percentage of the screens were on agencyspy at this very second.

I don't have any hard data to prove this, and I don't know why that should stop me, but here's how your agency computer monitoring works out:

43%  Are on Facebook
22%  Are shopping for shoes on Zappos
17%  Are on Agencyspy
8%    Are on Pinterest
5%    Are combing through emails, looking for the brief
3%    Are watching porn

Pretty disgusting isn't it? That a significant number of your employees think it's alright to accept a paycheck while perusing through page after page of pumps and high heels.

Back to agencyspy.
And a trend I find hard to ignore.

Whenever they post new work, and I find this pertains mostly to TV, the trolls come out in droves. There's very little vitriol for digital work. Perhaps because we can all agree, "it's all shit."

But the TV work is a different matter.

Here, and I can't stand this vernacular, the "haters gonna hate." I don't even know what that means but it gets a lot of airplay and I want to stay in synch with my young readers. If they found out I was pushing 38 years old, my web traffic would fall off a ledge.

But not all the TV work sucks.

In fact I find myself liking a great deal of it. It's smart. It makes me smile. And in some cases -- like the recent work by Gerry Graf's crew about renaming hurricanes after failed politicians -- I find myself laughing, not out loud, but internally.

None of that stops the anonymous keyboard warriors, like Douchetastic87 or Major Playa Hater21,  from breaking out the snark stick and bashing away with reckless abandon. All written from the point of view of someone who could better.

And I suspect we all know that's simply not true.

Truly capable writers do not set up fake email accounts and devise clever alias names just so they can log on to agencyspy.com and make rude comments about other people's work.

Truly capable writers have more important things to do.

Like this.

The Tale of Amen Corner

The Masters Tournament has been held in Augusta, Georgia since 1934. It is regarded as one of the crown jewels of golf. And every spring thousands of people spend millions of dollars to flock to the area. They go to smell the Cherokee Roses and see who will come home with the famed Green Jacket.

In 1951, my father, who never picked up a golf club in his life and had zero interest in the game, also made the pilgrimage to Augusta.

He went for free.

And he was wearing a set of handcuffs.

The trip, and the wrist jewelry, were compliments of the U.S. Army. And he didn't actually go to the Augusta National Golf Course, he was carted off to Camp Gordon, 11.2 miles west of the country club.

You see, right after the war my father had been drafted. He didn't want to go into the Army. Nor did any of his trouble-making friends from the South Bronx. So they did what most 19-year old boys would do, they lashed out.

And one of the best ways to thumb your nose at authority in those days was to indulge in some reefer madness. The Army caught wind of it. Court Martialed him. And sent him to the brig for a year. A harsh sentence in anyone's book.

Neither of my parents had ever uttered a peep about this. I only heard about it recently through my uncle. Naturally I was shocked.

"You're not going to write about this, are you?" my uncle asked.

"How could I not?" I replied.

This revelation explains my father in a way none of my blurry childhood memories could. And far from being shameful, I see his incarceration as a remarkable badge of honor.

As any screenwriter will tell you the key to a good movie is character arc. That is, the audience needs to witness change. The greater and more believable the change, the more the audience will cheer on the main character. To do this, you'll notice the protoganist in any good movie starts out in the down position. He could lose his job. His wife could leave him. His dog could die.

Or he could be sent off to prison for smoking a joint.

The point is, to emerge victorious he must summon his strength and do what is necessary to overcome his personal obstacles.

My father did that.
And more.

Not only did he grow up in working class poverty. He found himself at the ripe age of 20 with nothing more than a high school diploma and an irrevocable stain, compliments of Uncle Sam,  on his permanent record.

This might have sent lesser men down the path of lesser resistance. But Al Siegel was not lesser men.

He went to work. When that wasn't enough, he took on a second job. He waited tables at restaurants. He married my mother. He had three kids. And then, when he could have resigned himself to just getting by, he enrolled in college. He didn't graduate from CCNY until I was 8 years old. I vaguely remember a big celebration, but only now appreciate what an achievement this was.

Three years after graduating college, he passed the CPA exam. And because NY state had a law on the books banning convicted criminals from practicing certified accountancy, he had to petition Governor Rockefeller for an official pardon. The Governor obliged. And my father successfully lifted himself by his jailhouse bootstraps and made something of himself.

It's the feel good story of 2013.
Well, it's my feel good story.

Maybe I'll write a screenplay about my father one day.

The beginning is pretty incredible. The ending, achieving a modicum of affluence, owning a house in Suffern, NY, raising three kids and working 22 years as the comptroller for an electrical wiring company, may not seem all that cinematic, but it feels pretty damn heroic to me.

Checking in

Something extraordinary happened this week.

And when I say extraordinary, I mean something "Old School". And of course when I say "old school" I mean better.

Allow me to explain.
To the extent that I can and without violating any NDAs.

My partner and I are working on a project for a NY ad agency. A big one. The project is fun. It's open-ended. And it's huge, meaning they want a huge solution.  We did a couple of small conference calls, then a larger briefing over the phone and then we were sent a schedule for the first check in.

Which was in five days. FIVE DAYS!!!

This is unheard of. Many agencies want to do the initial check in after 5 hours.

Some of the snootier agencies, who wear their "edginess" on their sleeves insist on check ins every 5 minutes. I decided I'd rather make money trading penny stocks than to go work at a creative abattoir like that.

The extraordinary occurrence?

One day my partner, Dave Gassman and I were sitting at the Crave Coffee shop in Sherman Oaks. And in between ogling the waitresses and the gaggle of wannabe porn stars that walked in, he suggested an idea for a campaign. We talked about it. Discussed its positives and its negatives. And then we decided to shelve it.

We moved on to other, more promising directions.

Then, two days later, while stuck in a paralyzing traffic jam on the 405 (a redundant phrase if there ever was one) I had the kind of synapse connection that only comes when afforded the time to stew. What if we twisted my partner's idea and did such and such -- the details are unimportant.

What is important is that an idea, a valuable commodity, was rescued from the waste bin only because nobody was holding a gun to our head and saying, "Make with the creativity we have shareholders to appease."

This is the way the process works.
I'm sorry, let me say that old school-style.
This is the way the process used to work.

I'm going to leave you with an important video on this matter. I've shown it here before but I'll show it again because I'm pressed for time. I have to write an anthem spot for a new client in Australia.

It's due end of day today which, if I understand the International dateline and the mechanics of time zones, is already last week.

Vodka, neeeeat!

The family was in town this week.

Of course, when I say family I mean my wife's family. The Siegel branch of the family tree has undergone some heavy pruning. And is quite dysfunctional. So we don't discuss it here.

My wife's clan however is large and boisterous. At some point during last week's group August birthday bash there were two or more members of the Siegel/Weinblatt/O'Connor/Bargar/Mansinni's in each of the nine rooms of my house. Ranging in age from 4 to 84.

The following morning there were enough empty beer, wine and rum bottles in my recycling bin to shame a Dublinner.

As the card above indicates, Jews are not particularly associated with alcohol. In fact, in a recent study by Columbia University, "Reports show a relatively high prevalence of ADH*2 in Jewish samples...explaining the low rates of alcoholism in this group."

I don't know where these ivy tower researchers are getting their samples, but I know it's not anywhere near my house in Culver City.

I'm surrounded by The Chosen Ones who've chosen to knock back a few.

I believe it all has to do with geography.

My sister-in-law and her crew are from Boston. They look like Bostonians, talk like Bostonians, and they drink like Bostonians. Particularly anytime there's a sporting event with the Sawwwx, the Celtics or the Bruins. Which pretty much covers 12 months of the year.

We also spend considerable time with friends from South Africa. At one time there was a large Jewish population in Johannesburg. But if I'm not mistaken they have ALL moved to Southern California. And brought their unquenchable thirst with them. Their idea of a good party starts at sundown and reluctantly ends at sunrise.

And me? Well, I'm first generation American. My mother was from Glasgow. And was never far from her beloved Heineken beer. And my father was a tough street Jew from the Bronx, who fell in love with a Scottish lass as well as Scottish whiskey. He was never far from his white coffee mug and two fingers worth of Johnny Walker Red.

Thankfully, and perhaps this is where the researchers at Columbia got it right, I don't know of any problems associated with our collective drinking. We don't fight. We don't go into raging fits. And we don't binge. OK, occasionally we binge but never near the good china or with the expensive glassware.

The point is, we're Jews that happen to like alcohol.
And fortunately, it likes us back.

L'chaim!

She's a witch

I hate magic shows.

Years ago, some friends invited my wife and I to the Magic Castle in Hollywood. We declined. I'm pretty sure we stayed home to snake the toilets that night. Much more pleasurable.

You know who else doesn't like magic? The entire country of Saudi Arabia. They've outlawed it. Which means Saudi Arabia could be the perfect place for me to live. Except, that in addition to witchcraft, they have an aversion to Judaism. They outlawed that too.

I ran across an article in The Atlantic, about the Saudi's fascination with witchcraft and their aggressive crackdown on Crimes of Magic. You read that correctly, Crimes of Magic, a distinctively 7th Century phrase right there on your 21st century computer, laptop or smartphone.

In fact, The Saudi's, displaying incredible enlightenment, have literally funded -- presumably with revenue from our oil purchases -- a special division of the police dedicated to eradicating magic and hunting down witches.

Don't think for a moment that I am exaggerating.

You see "practicing magic and sorcery is a desecration of the Holy Quran." And I think we all know how important that Quran book is.

One crazy Florida preacher burns a Quran and millions of its followers take to the streets. Of course when the Syrian government, supposedly a Quran-loving people kills 100,000 other Quran-loving people, we don't hear a peep.

But how can I make sense of Islamic logic when one senior cleric, working hand in hand with the Magic Police states, "some magicians may ride a broom and fly in the air with the help of supernatural beings."

It's a remarkable article. And I urge you to read it. It will give you a better understanding of Saudi Arabia and it will shed light on why peace in that area of the world is so elusive.

That aside, we all know journalism today is not what journalism used to be.

So I dug deeper into this story and found what the reporters at The Atlantic didn't.

An actual training film used by Saudi Law Enforcement:

We've been homaged

A few weeks ago I was working with my former partner, Laura Sweet, on a pitch for Roku.

Naturally, before we could move forward to a possible re-positioning, we had to look backwards to see what they had done and where they had been.

Well, that was an eye-opener, because where they were in 2013 is where we were in 1997. With our now famous/infamous work for ABC.

The Roku campaign was done by a small agency in San Francisco dubbed Division of Labor. Ironic, if you want to call copying a campaign out of the awards book, "Labor."

Of course we all know that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. So I invite you to see why myself,  John Shirley and the entire Chiat/Day team that worked on ABC, should feel so "flattered."

1997

2013

Two campaigns, one about a TV network and one about a TV streaming device. Separated only by time. And a clear lack of integrity. 

Am I crazy? Here's more.

1997

2013

And then there's this...

1997

2013

The last two are the most egregious of the bunch, as they even lift Pantone 187, otherwise known as Chiat/Day Yellow.

By the way, we also did a board much like the very top photo. But I went through my files and couldn't track it down. Ours said, "Eight hours a day is all we ask. ABC."

I'm not going to lie, when I first saw all this I was a little pissed off. 

Then I realized that while the topic is thievery, we are talking about advertising. And the world doesn't give a tinker's cuss about advertising. 

I also made the pleasing discovery that the gentlemen responsible for the Roku work came from Goodby Silverstein and Partners. For those of you not in the business, GS&P were the gold standard in the industry. 

For so many years, I was trying to do the kind of work that creatives at Goodby were doing. And now, some former Goodby creatives were doing the kind of work I had already done.

That's winning.

School daze

School starts this week.

For my oldest daughter, it means her last year in high school. Which means the onset of Senior-itis. Not hers, mine.

How did I get to be old enough to have a child about to enter college?

Lately I've been seeing a spate of articles questioning the value of a 4-year college education. And with a quarter million dollar price tag for each child I'm wondering about the wisdom of it all myself.

How am I going to come up with that kind of money?

More importantly, wouldn't that money be better spent on vacations to the Caribbean?
A week at Dodger Training Camp?
A '67 Cherry Red Mustang Convertible?
Or a blonde goomah in a Hollywood pied-a-terre?

Of course, my wife will have none of that. Particularly the last option.

The fact is, she didn't speak to me for a week when I seriously suggested enrolling our daughters in the ROTC program.

"What, the discipline will be good for them."

Would I really want to deprive my children of a college education she asked. Prompting me to consider what it is exactly that I learned in college. The answer did not bolster her argument.

The first two years I was at Syracuse University I was an intended Math Major. By the time I got to Calculus 4, The Analysis of Transformational Objects Moving Through Three Dimensional Space, I was hopelessly lost. I was the only white male in a sausage-fest classroom of Indians and Pakistanis, who seemed to know more about the subject matter than the professor.

I couldn't draw a parabola.
Much less, one that rotated around the Z-axis.

Having failed the course, twice, I switched to the much less rigorous Broadcast Journalism program. The subject matter was far easier. Full semesters devoted to the study of MASH, the Mary Tyler Moore Show and All In the Family.

Had I known then what I know now, I would've dropped out of college and gone to Dodger Training Camp. Truth is, I had a better chance of becoming a major league catcher than I did of learning anything that would actually make me a better writer.

I'm staring at the inescapable. I need to bite the bullet and pony up the dough for my daughter(s) college education, both of them.

But if I had my druthers they'd be less concerned about getting a sheepskin and more focused on getting pregnant.

Because when the times comes, I intend to be the world's best grandfather.

Column B

Years ago, I had a job interview with Jim Walker, former President of Sedgwick Rd. To be honest I forgot the circumstances of the job. It was a Creative Director slot. It was in Seattle. Or it might have been in San Francisco. I only remember it was a well paying position.

I didn't get the gig.
But I got something much more valuable.

Jim was in LA and asked me to meet him at the Oceana Hotel in Santa Monica. I had never met him before. But knew his name. He had never met me. But also knew my name.

I always find this shocking. Yes, my name is in a few awards books, but I never considered myself a member of the advertising cognoscenti.

Jim and I hit it off right away and we started talking about the position. Twenty minutes into the interview he called for room service to send up a bucket of ice cold beers. We sat on the patio and looked out over the Pacific. I think by the second Corona he had already decided I wasn't the right guy.

I have a terrible poker face and probably scowled when he told me the job involved a lot of client contact.

Jim told me how his secret to finding happiness in the ad business. One day, while trying to sort out his own career path, he grabbed a pad and pen and drew two columns. In Column A, he wrote down all the things he didn't enjoy doing in his position as a Chief Creative Officer.

In Column B, he wrote down everything he did enjoy doing as a Chief Creative Officer.

This is hardly the stuff of epiphany.

But discovering relevance and acting on relevance are two different things.

The minute Jim had completed his two column exercise, he decided he was only going to accept jobs that involved more of Column B and less of Column A.

It's a deceivingly simple formula.
But it worked for Jim.
And it has worked for me.

For close to ten years now I have been living Column B. I come up with ideas. I write ideas. And occasionally I produce the ideas. And I still get excited by the whole process.

The other day I was driving my daughter to school. I told her I was all giddy because my partner and I had a potentially game-changing campaign for an assignment we're doing for a NY agency. I don't usually get exuberant about advertising ideas, but in this case I was.

Naturally she was curious and wanted to know details about the campaign. I had to bite my tongue.

I had to honor the NDA.

That's one from Column A.

NY State of Mind

When I was 17 years old, my father offered me a cushy job at his office. The company was Brownell Electro, a distributor of electrical wiring and motors, located on 15th Street and 10th Avenue. This was before the area got gentrified. And it had that old NY grittiness one would associate with an industrial neighborhood just north of the meat packing district.

After a year of flipping burgers and assembling tacos fresh from the 450 degree frying oil at Jack in the Box, any job that involved a desk, a chair and an adding machine seemed like a gift from heaven.

It wasn't.

Because no 17-year old, particularly one who had just discovered weed, wants to spend his summer getting up at 6 AM.

Or hopping on a Shortline bus for a miserable 1 hour commute with a bunch of cigarette-smoking, coffee-drinking suburban middle managers.

Or staring at mountains of paperwork for 8 hours a day while being barraged by a parade of angry Puerto Rican co-workers who could turn an argument about a three-ring binder into a five-alarm fire.

Add to that, the Port Authority building, where it was just as easy to get heroin as it was to get a ticket to Hoboken.

Entire neighborhoods that smelt like urine.

And the unbearable humidity that wreaked havoc on my sweaty body and often required on-the-fly-wardrobe changes.

I saw what New York City did to people and decided it wasn't going to do it to me.

So I moved to California.

It was a long time ago and I've never regretted the decision.

But things are changing.

In the past five years, I've witnessed a mass exodus going the other way. Friends and advertising colleagues giving up the palm trees, the beach cruisers and the In and Out burgers of Southern California for a slice of pizza and regular death-defying cab rides on the Belt Parkway.

These are not hardened, thick-skin expatriates like myself. These are mellow, sensitive, zen-loving Californians prone to sickening optimism and phrases like, "Duuuuude" or "that's super awesome."

And yet, there they are, not surviving the Big Apple, but thriving there. And now, thanks to the phenomena of Facebook, I get to witness it all: the Pomme Frite at Raouls,  the diaper-wearing banjo player on the #7 line, the peppery pastrami at Katz's Deli, the celebrity courtside sightings at Madison Square Garden.

Maybe it's this pervasive June Gloom that has all but robbed us of a summer, but it's making me jealous and homesick.

Of course, the Internet giveth and the Internet taketh away.

Any thoughts of pulling up stakes and heading back to Gotham are quickly squashed with one visit to Zillow.com. And the realization that a modest, two bedroom condo sprawling all of 800 square feet can be had for only $2.1 million.

Yeah, fuhgedaboutit.

Mmmm, that's some good cynicism.

We mark milestones here at Round Seventeen.

Of course, when I say we, I mean me.

Because this is a one man endeavor.

And that's just the way I like it.

I know ad agency office managers and new age architects are busy creating spaces where "ideas can collide with each other in the hallway and spark other ideas and curate a greater sense of teamwork and collaboration." 

I don't want to have anything to do with that bullshit.

The other point that needs clarifying is the word, milestones.

Let's not kid each other, this is an inconsequential little blog, ranked
4,873,921, the last time I bothered to look on the blog ranking scale. If I'm lucky I get seven, maybe eight thousand hits, in a month. The web traffic tends to go up the more I write about advertising. Particularly when I write posts that are mildly self-destructive and creep up on the precipice of career suicide.

You sadistic bastards should all feel very proud of yourselves.

The truth is, there really are no milestones here at Round Seventeen. I might feel different when we get to the 1,000th post but right now I'm feeling brutally honest. And that's one emotion I like to give myself up to.

As we've (I've) done with past milestones, it's time to break out a new tagline.

Unlike the past, I'm not turning this into any kind of interactive contest. No one seems to want to play. And frankly I'm disgusted by your apathy. And your previously-mentioned sadistic streak.

My first thought was:

Round Seventeen. At the corner of brutally honest and shamelessly narcissistic. 

But that had too many adverbs. And I remember reading a style book on writing that claimed adverbs are not the writer's friend.

I also liked:

Round Seventeen. For your daily affirmation of misanthropy.

Then I realized that in addition to being apathetic and sadistic, many of you are employed in advertising and are clueless as to the definition of misanthropy. Moreover, you wouldn't even bother to look it up.

Finally, I decided to go in a different direction and pay homage to my favorite hole in the wall Mexican restaurant, El Nepol.

Days after moving to California and living on the roof of a frat house, I was brought there by two UCLA students who were making a ton of money as tilers. I didn't take them up on their offer to join the tiling business, but I never forgot my first pregnant burrito.

Round Seventeen. Home of the Cynical Burrito.

Take two in the morning

On the topic of drugs, there's medicine and there's alternative medicine. Or as I like to call it, bullshit.

It should surprise no one that I'm not a fan of homeopathic, acupuncture, stone therapy or anything that involves the burning of incense or the chanting of incantations. I'll take a prescription, thank you very much. Preferably something derived from, or containing, opiates.

Here in Los Angeles, this is tantamount to heresy.

I can't tell you how many dinner parties or social engagements or even school functions that I've been to and forced to listen to such nonsense.

"The chiropractor said I was tied up in knots. He wants me to try some inversion boots."

"Turns out my chi was all out of balance. So I'm drinking Kale Mango Smoothies."

"My aromatherapist has me on Cinnamon/Sage for the next week. And then we're going to take it down a notch to French Vanilla."

If I get a scaly rash on my back I want a fast acting, industrial grade ointment that's going to make it go away.

What I don't want is some half-assed yoga instructor with an Associates Degree in Eastern Biology from Humboldt University telling me to stop eating Rib Eye steaks or centercut applewood bacon.

Of course I'm not alone in my close-mindedness.

Three years ago, the New England Journal of Medicine wrote:

"The most recent well powered clinical trials of acupuncture for chronic back pain showed that sham acupuncture was as effective as real acupuncture." Adding, "any benefits are mostly attributable to contextual and psychosocial factors, such as patients' beliefs and expectations."

In other words, it's all the placebo effect. That may suffice for gullible, affluent Angelenos living west of Lincoln Blvd. But it doesn't do much good for my 11-year old dog suffering from seasonal allergies. You see, she doesn't have the cognitive power to wish away the itching.

So after a trip to fully-certified medical veterinarian, I picked up some real medicine, Predizone and Cefpodoxime. And guess what? It worked.

I couldn't be happier.
Because there was no way I was going to strap my dog into inversion boots.

Home Sweet Office

I love my house.

I know if you were to take a bulldozer to it, it's nothing more than plywood, 2X4's, drywall, electric wiring and a tangled mess of copper plumbing, but it's mine.

Technically, half of it belongs to the bank, but if I didn't have that mortgage I wouldn't have a reason to get up in the morning and start pimping on behalf of America's finest corporations. And if I didn't do that, well, I wouldn't have had the money to buy the half of the house that belongs to me.

Let's just leave it at I love my house.

The thing I love most about my house is the thing I like the least about working in an office.

Maybe even your office.

You see at my house I don't work at a long communal mega table.
I have a desk. With seating for One. In a proper Herman Miller chair, not some knock-off ergonomick (spelling intentional) chair that will save a few dollars for the holding company shareholders.

At my house I'm not crammed into a corner near the media girls talking loudly about how they scammed the latest sales rep for a humongus lunch at Nobu.

I have an office.
I can close the door.
And if the neighbor's dog starts barking, I can slip on my Bose Noise canceling headphones.
Or crank up some Led Zeppellin, Santana or Pink Floyd.

That's right, I said Pink Floyd. I know that dates me but I don't want to listen to your Mumford and Sons, or Kings of Leon, or any of that bad electronica that somehow passes for music these days.

At my house, I have clocks in every room but they have no bearing on the assignment at hand.

If I have a great idea, or even just a good one, I'll write it down. It can happen at 7 in the morning. Or 11 o'clock at night. I might flesh it out right there on the spot. Or I might flesh it out later. Because if I also feel the need to go for a swim, I'll do that too.

At my house, I have the freedom to come and go as I please. But I also have the maturity to know that with great freedom comes great responsibility. Because if I don't deliver, the phone will stop ringing.

At my house, I am at my happiest.
At my house, I am my most productive.
At my house, I am at my most creative.

Maybe I work harder at home because eventually I'd like to stop writing the mortgage checks and own the half that still belongs to the bank. Or maybe it's because I like to eat my fruit, drink my coffee and do my business, in my bathroom.

If you have a project or an assignment for me, I'm happy to work on it. And even happier to take your money.

But if you want the most bang for your buck, you'll brief me on the phone and tell me to do the work at my house.

Who is with me?

For those of you who don't speak or know Korean, the translation is:

Create the hot-wind of Masikryong Speed and rush forward in the drive for a grand revolution in development!

If I've said that once, I've said it a thousand times.

The poster, and the translation comes from Rodung Sinmum, the official news outlet of DPRK.

If we're friends on Facebook, you know that for the past 6 months or so, ever since Kim Jung Un started rattling his cheap bamboo saber at the United States and the world, I have been having fun at the Dear Eater's expense.

I've literally combed through hundreds of photos of Kim and re-captioned them with my own take on his special brand of narcissism. The entire collection can be seen here.

I'm content to keep lampooning the young tinpot dictator just as long his continues to parade around in his black pajamas with his toady, note-taking generals.

Mostly because I am unexplainably fascinated by the bad haircuts, the bad tailoring and the bad Orwellian propaganda. And because I have no meaningful hobbies.

But lately I've been hearing a lot of chatter about compiling all these photos and captions into a hard-cover coffee table book. I field these requests online and in private emails. I certainly appreciate the sentiment and the encouragement.

And I would love to comply. Having a book on the shelves, or even online, would go a long way to validate my seemingly indiscernible skills.

But none of that mitigates the realities at hand. I don't own the photos. I don't want to be sued by a rogue country. And I don't have a publisher who can sort out all the logistics so that I can pursue "my art."

If this social media thing were half as powerful as the digital ninjas claim it was, one of you out there would be helping to:

Create the hot-wind of publication and rush forward in the drive for a four-color coffee table book of political satirization!