Copied and recopied so many times over the years that it’s losing its crispness, but not its message…
Truer words…
These words became my mantra in advertising, my chosen profession after I escaped the paving business. I saw this in Ad Age about 100 years ago; I was maybe 23, so 65 years ago.
It holds true today. I’ve made so many copies of it, it’s getting hard to read.
It was written, I believe, by a Creative Director who knew what the heck he was talking about. I’d like to give him credit, but I just tore out the last paragraph of his article and the writer’s name has been lost to the ages.
I know one thing about him, though. He was smart.
I’ve kept four such small clippings that have held true over the years, but this is the strongest, most meaningul to me. One clipping came from Strunk & White. The other three were from ad pubs.
If you know of anyone just entering the profession, please share it with them. Advertising is, in the main, an honorable living, and if one is serious about it, it will return to them what they give it, and more.
How I won a duck in September in Wisconsin, instead of a sixpack of ice cold beer which was much preferred. Much.
This story is a convoluted way to present a version of “Wildwood Flower” that I’d not heard before. And to strip from it its supposed Appalachinality.
I’ll try to make it short. Really.
Not quite as beautiful to me as a cold sixpack on a sweltering Labor Day in Plymouth, WI, but still pretty spectacular, I had to admit…
We had hauled horses to a show in Plymouth, WI, from where we lived in Mequon, WI. The kids were showing in several classes, and it being a long hot day, and past beer o’clock, I took up a position (very) near a music tent where they were giving away cold sixpacks to anyone who could identify what song they were playing within the first bar or two.
I cheated. I was so close I could hear the bandleader tell the band, in a lowered voice, almost a whisper: “Wildwood Flower.”
“Wildwood Flower,” I shouted after they had barely started.
“Wow this guy is quick. Let’s see, what’s the prize now we’ve run out of sixpacks?”
“Ducks,” says the drummer, performing a rim shot.
“Give the man his duck. Conquackulations!” the bandleader said as he handed over a large wing-flapping mallard.
The duck had two of these, and we became friends on a hot Labor Day weekend…
I walked around awhile, disconsolately, big duck under one arm. Drove to the nearest tavern to fill the ice chest and have a cold one in the AC. I took the duck inside. “Draw one for me,” I said, and ordered the duck a bowl of water. The bartender gave the duck a clean Schlitz ashtray full of water. I set the as of yet un-named duck on the stool next to me and it drank all the water with much clacking of its bill.
I circled my finger for another round.
The duck spent the day with me at the horse show. Sat in the truck on the drive home. Ate some bread chunks. Took up residence in Mequon and terrorized all the dogs within a mile. It was named Pickle by some committee.
This old postcard shows it pretty much as it was back then…no pix available of the duck crossing sign, and Pinky’s is now a Starbucks or new old fashioned “General Store”…times change…
Pickle turned out to be a female. It was decided to take her to Cedarburg, not far away, to reside with other ducks behind Pinky’s Tavern which featured a dammed mill creek behind, others of her own kind, and a shelter under the tavern where they all wintered. Pinky’s staff fed them daily. Duck paradise.
We put a loose rubber band on one leg so we’d recognize her. She soon had a line of little ducklings that followed her, ducklike. Sometimes Pickle would take her little ones into town. That resulted in the town council, at our suggestion and payment, installing a Duck Crossing sign in front of Pinky’s, which already had a 15 mph sign.
Pickle and family were still residing happily in Cedarburg when I left WI for an ad job in KC.
All that for this (Link). Wildwood Flower Unmasked.
Any ideas on how to slow the race to AI-pocalypse?
We need a little dial-up slow-down on the AI thing…
Seth’s latest words to the wise end with this statement: ”the assumptions we’ve always made about open communication with strangers are about to change.”
I’m wondering how we prepare for this thing that’s been going on for awhile, since dial-up phones anyway. Long before that, actually. It has just accelerated is all.
There’s a redline on most tachometers on performance automobiles. It’s best to stay below that line with revs. Go above it for too long and the engine will begin to fly apart.
I think maybe we’re at the redline of technology. We need to regulate, restrain, let up on the accelerator, think this through. The problem is the regulators are in on the payoff and they’re racing each other.
Anyway here’s the rest of what Seth is talking about. (Link)
This is a shot of Shapiro’s “Blue” in a snowstorm at Kennedy Center. Happily dancing in the blizzard. I’d like some snow about now.
Blue
That’s the name of a Joel Shapiro sculpture in Kennedy Center and it’s what a lot of artists, including me, feel about its removal. Link). Gov and Art don’t mix in my opinion. Why was it removed? The reasons remain murky.
“Get happy with us, will ya…”
What the heck do these stuffed shirts know about art (or most anything else) anyway? Stay out of the art room and just keep the economy chugging along (if, indeed, you know anything about that) is my plea.
“It’s the economy, stupid!” as another “leader” put it, uncharacteristically succinctly for a rodomontade politician I might add. Keep yer mitts off art. Do the job you promised—100th of the promise will do. Try, anyway.
Shapiro’s sculpture has delighted all ages for, well, ages. He had the facility for taking inanimate beams and animating them, making them playful, cheerful and sculptural. Pretty cool stuff.
Art. I know what I like and I like Shapiro and 1,000 or so others; anyone who puts themselves out there in the spirit of creativity. Most pols don’t know creativity from creeping cretinism.
Look at Joel’s Blue; doesn’t it seem happy? Since when was happy not allowed at Kennedy Center? Blue should stand there for at least another two hundred years so people could take it in and smile and say, “Jeez, look at what this guy could do with a couple of I-beams!”
These were taken a minute apart at Wise Acres, the left one is in shade, the right is in direct sun. Too hot for too long.
