Last night's fireworks.

Our TV set is on the fritz, so rather than watching the fireworks last night we listened on the radio.

"There's a trail of yellow heading up into the sky. It descends into a parabola and now it's exploding into a cascade of yellow, green and red. Oh! Here's another one. Up up up, exploding into a blossom--a crysthanamum-like explosion. Look, there's another one."

That's fireworks on radio.

My point is simple. Different mediums have different strengths. If you, or your agency, can't use them all--if you're locked into one way, you'll produce crap. Like fireworks on the radio.

A metaphor.

I am associated with a weird de facto society of incredibly learned New York psychiatrists, most of whom I support financially. They are really the cream of NY's intellectual crop and I am kind of like their mascot or maybe, if I want to flatter myself, their muse.

Responding to some undisclosed stimulus, one of these doctors said to me recently, "remember what happened to Vienna when the Nazis expelled the Jews. It went from the leading city in the world in art, music, medicine and psychiatry to a small European backwater of faded glory."

Some agencies, if I may be so ego-centric, expel creative minds because those minds are out-of-step with their surroundings.

That's all I'm going to say right now.

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Here is a short list of some leading Jews who were forced out of Vienna by the rise of Nazism:

Physicians: Julius Tandler, Emil Zuckerkandl, Ernst Fuchs, Josef Breuer, Carl Sternberg, Julius Schnitzler, Ludwig W. von Mauthner, Ernst Löwenstein, Robert Bárány, Otto Loewi, David Gruby, Josef Halbans, Adam Politzer, Viktor E. Frankl and Leopold Freund are but a few of the names that made a mark in the realm of science - Bárány (1914) and Loewi (1936) were both awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine.

Of course, there was also Sigmund Freud, his pupil Alfred Adler and Viktor Frankl, the founder of logotherapy.

In Law, Hans Kelsen wrote the Austrian constitution.

In science, there was Siegfried Marcus (whom some say invented the automobile), the physicists Lise Meitner, Wolfgang Pauli (Nobel Prize 1945) and Felix Ehrenhaft, the biochemist Max F. Perutz (Nobel Prize 1962), the botanist Julius von Wiesner, the chemist Otto von Fürth and the astronomer Samuel Oppenheim as well as Fritz Feigl, Leo Grünhut and Edmund von Lippmann.

In music there was Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schönberg, Egon Wellesz, Erich Korngold and Alexander Zemlinsky, Oscar Straus, Emmerich Kalmán, Leo Fall and Edmund Eysler.

In Literature: Arthur Schnitzler, Hermann Bahr, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Peter Altenberg, Karl Kraus, Jakob Wassermann, Alfred Polgar, Franz Werfel, Stefan Zweig, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Torberg, Hans Weigel, Elias Canetti, Hugo Bettauer, Fritz Hochwälder, Josef Roth, Felix Salten, Hilde Spiel, Jura Soyfer and Vicki Baum.

In Philosophy: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Popper, Martin Buber and Josef Popper-Linkeus.

And in Film: Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann and Otto Preminger.

A bit on the Jackson family.

I never worked with Michael Jackson and never really cared about him or his music. But his death brought to mind an experience I did have with one of Michael's sisters.

Here's the scene. It's about 15 years ago and I am attending High Holy-Days services at a Jewish temple on East 52nd Street in Manhattan. The place is stuffed to the gills with people atoning or praying to their God. It's about as a devout scene as you can imagine in the era where most adore money and possessions more than their souls.

All at once, the entire congregation reacts almost as one like fish in a school to some late arrivals to the service. An older Jewish man walks in, shortish and schlumpy. He is following by a tall, busty black woman teetering unsteadily on too-high heels. At once a whisper runs through the temple. "It's La Toya Jackson."

That's right.

I observed Rosh ha Shanah with the King of Pop's sister.

The year 1,000,000.

As far as evolution goes, man has gone through a lot of changes over the last thousand millennia or so. Our arms have gotten shorter, our brains (for the most part) larger. Our jaws less prognathous and so on. These are adaptations our species has made so as to adjust the modern world.

I suppose in the year 1,000,000 humans will bear some resemblance to humans of today as we bear some resemblance to neanderthals. Maybe somewhere anatomists, paleontologists, geneticists and biologists have worked out a CAD/CAM model of what our descendants will look like.

I have no training, aptitude or proclivity for any of the sciences listed above. But if advertising agencies and holding companies were to rule the future, I have a prediction.

Some early unemployment observations.

I have been heartened by the out-pouring of good wishes I have received from my friends, both real and digital. Thank you.

I just realized something.
When you're in advertising and unemployed, people pray for each other.
When you're in advertising and employed, people prey on each other.

Somehow this seems appropriate for today.

What we are and have been living through is a workplace revolution. I say this having just finished a book called "Fordlandia," which is the epic tale of Ford's attempt to create a rubber plantation roughly the size of Connecticut in the wilds of Brazil's Amazon. For all his anti-unionism, for all his vile anti-semitism, Ford paid workers $5/day when everyone else was paying less than half that. His thinking was that he was creating a mass product, he needed to create mass consumers.

Today's world works differently, antipodially. We squeeze all costs out of our production chain. Trying to build color tvs or banner ads at the least possible cost. Naturally, along with that it is necessary to look for lower-wage workers. So what we are seeing in the world is a destruction of the buying class--people who can afford to buy those cheap TVs we make.

This is happening around the world, in our industry and most others.

I found this cartoon this morning emblazoned on a coffee mug we bought some years ago. It seems appropriate. We all have to work really hard--harder than ever to escape the crowds. What we need to escape we probably already inherently have. Finally, once we flap hard enough, if we don't find a better place, at least we have the tools to look.

Come flap with me. The view is nice up here.

Fired.

Yes. It happens. It just happened to me. About an hour ago. That's ok.

Some good writing and an astute political observation.

My ex-boss and current Facebook friend Marshall had this to say about South Carolina's Governor:

"I don’t know why the Republicans are being so tough on Governor Sanford. I would have thought they’d be happy that one of their boys was doing a little offshore drilling."

Bad type breaks.

Generally speaking, and not just because I toiled at Ogilvy for five of the best years of my so-called career, I have a great deal of respect for the work they do for IBM. It's engaging, smart and breakthrough. Though I can't buy anything IBM makes, I still feel good about the company and if my personal fortune hadn't been wiped out by Madoff, I'd likely feel good about investing in the company.

I came across this ad in the digital version of The New Yorker, which arrives in my email box about 18 hours before the paper version arrives in my analog mailbox. About four pages in, I saw this typographic monstrosity (I was only able to copy the left page.) Would it have killed anyone at Ogilvy to bring the word chain up to line one of the headline? Supply chain is a compound adjective. A chain saw is something else altogether. In any event, someone wasn't minding the store. Or decided that the very arrangement of the type was more important than the actual meaning of the words.

A double-entendre.

This is from The New York Times: "South Carolina Governor Apologizes to Staff"

And two decades or so ago I remember this one from The Wall Street Journal: "Woman CEO ousted in broad restructuring."