A Blog of My Own

I have no idea whether Obama’s budget is going to save our bacon or fry it. But I do know my gut reaction is to wish Congress would STFU and pass it. If it turns out to be our ruination, well, it was a nice country while it lasted.

I’m more inclined to want to find out, one way or the other, than to argue about it. I imagine Sully making his decision to land in the Hudson and his co-pilot screaming at him that he’s insane and fighting to wrest the controls away from him and his flight attendants refusing to go along with the evacuation plan because their idea was to land at Teterboro and the passengers in the exit rows yanking out the doors and bailing in midair because there’s no way you can land a plane in a river, and the result not being a happy one.

I was in pre-cringe mode — ready to run out of the room if necessary — when Jerry Lewis came out to accept his Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the Oscars. I happen to think Jerry Lewis is a genius, as a performer, scenarist and director (the French are not always wrong), but his public pronouncements in the role of Jerry Lewis have tended to give egomaniacal narcissism a bad name. To my relief his speech was brief and gracious.

The child-man hybrid that Lewis created in his nightclub performances and movie roles (with Dean Martin and without) did not come out of nowhere — you see the precedent for it whenever you see Lou Costello. But Lewis took it to the next level, a level both more exquisitely funny and discomforting. It couldn’t be the first without being the second. Watching Costello, you laugh at someone else. Watching Lewis in character, your gaze turns inward, to see the child within you that never quite grew up, the child you never quite left behind — you remember the loneliness, you remember the desperate need for acceptance, you remember the sexual longings you didn’t know what to do with; it all comes rushing back, in a manner that whispers to you in a voice you don’t necessarily want to hear that it never went away. When Lewis goes into his manic “conducting the swing band, dancing wildly” mode, he is every child alone in his room, living out a private fantasy of happiness. The Lewis movie-role persona is a character unique in all of film, and yes, it does deserve recognition as genius.

For an appreciation of Lewis the artist — an appreciation with which I am in sympathy — read this essay, “Jerry Lewis Wins an Oscar at Last,” by Time movie critic Richard Corliss. He makes the case that Lewis deserves not just the Humanitarian award for his good works, but a Life Achievement award for his good work.

I turned 59 yesterday.

In the new economy, 59 is the new 84.

Trust Me (TNT Tuesday nights, repeated through the week) is my favorite show, but that’s not surprising, since it’s about me.

Written by two ex-Leo Burnett advertising agency creatives, the show, which is about two Leo Burnetty creatives, gives me (an ex-Leo Burnett creative) a chance to relive my life there, and to spend time again through the show’s characters with many of the real-life characters I knew. I feel safe in saying the show will have a devoted following among about five thousand people. Will anyone who is not an advertising creative find the show equally compelling? I have no idea, but if you don’t happen to be an ex-Leo Burnett creative, but are looking for a show that pretty well captures what it’s like to work at a modern big-time ad agency, trust me, Trust Me is it.

I have a friend (also an ex-Leo Burnett creative) who can’t watch the show because it gives him bad dreams. I understand this. Advertising (if you do it right) is a business of manic highs and crushing, murderous lows. Stress is what both moodstates have in common. So reliving one’s good old days in advertising is a little like reliving one’s good old days in Vietnam. Oh please, I hear you saying, advertising isn’t brain surgery. You’re right. It’s harder. Brain surgeons, to relax before an operation, tell themselves, “Hey, it’s not advertising.”

In advertising, you are never as good as the thing you did just before the thing you did last — only as good as the thing you did last, and then only for five minutes. Psychological platitudes like “they’re not rejecting you, they’re rejecting the work” are meaningless, because the work is you — brought up from your innards in an attempt to break through to people as they’ve never been broken through to before. Emotional trauma, all-consuming jealousies, fear of death are all in a day’s work. The thick-skinned would survive it well, but the thick-skinned tend not be the sort who make ads so brilliant they’re unlike any the world has ever seen. Now as in any profession, it’s possible to do respectable, journeyman work and go home at the end of the day with not a thought in your pretty little head, but that’s not the work a Leo Burnett is asking you to do. So, you dig. But you mine your soul for emotional truths inside a corporate structure with conflicting demands. Are you working for yourself, are you working for your client, or are you working for your boss? Yes.

Doctors and lawyers must also be brilliant, and clearly (unlike ad people) hold people’s lives in their hands — okay, let’s give them that — but are they asked to reinvent the wheel every time, as advertising creatives must do? Firemen have to storm into burning buildings (which, all right, I’ll grudgingly admit, is harder than advertising), but do they have to storm into a burning building a whole new way for no reason other than that the other way has “been done”? Most professions have precedent and a canon of best-practices to rely on. Ad folks go it alone every time. By definition, if they rely on precedent, they are creating a product that is not fresh enough to set the world on its ear.

If there’s something missing from the show so far, it’s that it hasn’t portrayed the manically exhilarating upside of a life in advertising as much — the orgasmic pleasure of a music session that goes great, or a multimillion dollar film shot that captures everything you dreamed of, or what a blessing it is to go to work with smart, funny people every day. But these, I guess, are not the stuff of drama, and would just make the audience jealous. The show’s writer/creators, Hunt Baldwin and John Coveny, are doing a bangup job of capturing the downside. After watching the first true-as-far-as-they-go episodes, I’m convinced they are using the show to work through their own personal recovery from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Cleverly, Baldwin and Coveny have found a way to recover from Advertising PTSD so as to amuse and entertain, and in the process have conquered a whole new, and equally challenging, art form. I hate them. Hats off.

The stock market can’t go down, and nobody releases any unemployment figures, and not a single company declares bankruptcy.

I love weekends.

It looks like Paul Krugman is kind of where I am on this. At the conclusion of a week that saw an agreement on a stimulus package and the Treasury Secretary laying out his fixes for a failed banking system, he writes:

It’s early days yet, but we’re falling behind the curve.

And I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach — a feeling that America just isn’t rising to the greatest economic challenge in 70 years. The best may not lack all conviction, but they seem alarmingly willing to settle for half-measures…

Complete column here.

With the dust settling, it becomes apparent why Obama hasn’t spent much time defending what’s in the stimulus package. (He’s spent a lot of time talking about how urgent it is, but that’s a different matter.) The reason he hasn’t is that so much of it is indefensible.

This is how I figure things went down. Obama sent a decent bill to Congress, majoring in stuff that would actually, you know, stimulate the economy. Congress then added a planeload of crap to it. At this point, Obama could have said, “Hey, a-holes, what part of stimulus didn’t you understand?” But he didn’t. If he had, who knows, he might have carried the day — and then again, he might not have. He calculated that it was better to get something through than get into an argument. I think he was wrong, because I think the American people would have backed him. Inexperienced as he is, we trust him a hell of a lot more than we trust Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi. But he was timid about counting on that. Too timid.

Too bad. Now all we can do is pray that the bill the House and Senate hammered out today will do something. Kind of like being a passenger on that U.S. Airways plane that landed in the Hudson. That worked out. Maybe this will, too. Keep your head down and your arms crossed in front of your chest.

Unlikely as it seems (especially to me), I think I might be smarter than President Obama. Because I know exactly what he should be saying and doing now, and he doesn’t.

One of the thousands of reasons I voted for him was that I recognized that something had to be done, and quickly, to save the economy. So I hoped he would send a stimulus plan to Congress very soon after being inaugurated. This, he has done.

When the Republicans, disappointingly but predictably, opposed the bill, my natural, default assumption was that they were being obstructionist jerks. When they sputtered, “Why, this is nothing but a wish list of Democratic pork!,” I waited for Obama to tell me why that was not true. I knew that he would not urge passage of a bill that was nothing but a wish list of Democratic pork; he would send a bill to Congress only if it would actually stimulate the economy. So it would be a simple matter for Obama to refute the accusation, and go down the items in his bill, explaining to me (and America) why the Republicans were wrong about them.

This, he has not done.

And in not doing it, he is raising the possibility in people’s minds that the Republicans may actually be right.

Instead of defending the bill because of what is in it, he is simply repeating over and over again how we “must” pass it or catastrophe awaits. That is an argument for why we must do something. It is not an argument for why we must do this thing.

It would be terrible if the reason he is not making a case for the contents of the bill is that there is no case to be made for the contents of the bill. But that is the conclusion that becomes more unavoidable with each day that he simply insists on telling us that the bill is crucial to our survival without defending what it contains.

So when you go on the road this coming week to sell your bill, Mr. President, don’t just tell me that the Republicans are wrong; tell me why they are wrong. Don’t just repeat that the bill will create millions of new jobs, defend how it will do that. Explain it to me. I want you to, and I know you can. I know you wouldn’t stake your presidency on a bill that is only what the obstructionist Republicans say it is.

Would you?

The comedian Louis CK shares some truth.

A country of 300 million people deserves more than one record store. On the other hand, the last one left standing, Amoeba Records, is a doozy.

Let me define my terms. By “record store,” I mean a store that physically exists someplace, selling recorded physical discs of music (CDs and/or LPs) across all genres, with deep selection in each genre. The kind of store Tower Records used to be, or Rose Records in Chicago, or the original Sam Goody’s in New York. It takes a lot of real estate to be such a store. You can’t hope to have great selection in every style of music without a lot of square footage at your disposal. On the other hand, square footage isn’t enough. You need store buyers for the various departments who really know their genres — what’s been released, what’s going to be released, what’s barely been released somewhere else in the world — and who know what will turn on enthusiasts of those genres. You can’t get there if the buyer for the hip hop department is the same guy who buys for the shows and vocals department. You need separate experts.

Once you have that, you have the makings of electricity. When you walk into Amoeba on Sunset in LA, you instantly feel it. The electricity of possibility: the chance you will find a CD you never knew existed which you must possess now, or a CD you knew existed but never thought you’d see. The electricity that makes you spend more money than you went in thinking you would. It doesn’t happen online. That electricity is what disappeared when record stores disappeared, which is why the record business is disappearing. (Just take a look at the statistics to see if online and download sales increases combined have made up the decline in brick-and-mortar sales. They haven’t; not even close.)

In the electrified/adrenalized state their huge, miles-of-aisles store put me in (it may even have to do with the height of their ceiling, which creates the impression of millions of cubic feet — why that should matter I don’t know, but it does) I bought many CDs at Amoeba on a recent visit. Possibly all of them are widely available online, where I do a lot of my shopping these days. The point is I never did buy them online. It took seeing them to make me need them. That’s why the death of brick-and-mortar has been the death of recorded music.

It so happens that Amoeba stocks new and used CDs. But cleverly, they’ve created a store experience that doesn’t present that way (even if their business card does). When I go into Amoeba, I don’t think of it as a “new and used CD store,” I think of it as a store that has amassed a truly interesting collection on my behalf (without prejudice about such distinctions as “new” and “used”), a collection that earns my gratitude. How Amoeba has managed to create the personality of a just-plain-terrific record store has a lot to do with retail magic that is an art, requiring talent not possessed by many, but part of it is that they don’t seem to carry a used CD because it’s cheaper (though it is) — they only carry it if it makes their inventory more interesting.

There are Amoebas in San Francisco and Berkeley, but I haven’t been to them. One day I hope to get to the Princeton Record Exchange in New Jersey, which others rave about in the same way I rave about Amoeba. As long as there is one Amoeba somewhere, life as I’ve known it still exists, and I can go on.