A Sense of En-Title-Meant

Shortly after the New Year, I had an interview with one of the head honchos at a small advertising agency out on Eastern Long Island. Right from the get-go, my gut told me this meeting wasn’t going to be kosher. I applied for a copywriter job posted by this agency two months prior to the meeting and, every couple of weeks or so, would get an e-mail from The Honcho inquiring about things like creative samples and salary requirements. When he finally pulled the trigger and set up a meeting, I agreed only because it was the dead of winter and would have met Dick Cheney at Hooter’s if it would get me out of the house.

In short order, The Honcho admitted my advertising background (mostly entertainment) wouldn’t translate well to his main client base (mostly academic). As I silently calculated how much money I just blew in fossil fuel to make this fruitless, fifty-mile round trip, he began to pick my brain about my past employer, a media company that programs and distributes several national cable networks. Then the truth came out. Seems The Honcho had been shopping around a pilot script to a number of cable television outfits and was looking to me for expertise and contacts.

Talk about a sense of entitlement! I should have made a smoldering beeline for the exit, but I admired The Honcho’s chutzpah and, ashamed as I am to admit it, his good looks didn’t hurt, either. Not only did I give him a contact, I even agreed to take on the ultimate writing challenge of brainstorming a title for the series.

To a non-writer, scribbling out a full page of words must seem infinitely harder than coming up with a brief title for a movie, book, TV show or CD. More words = more work, right? Nay. I can bang out a paragraph in a tenth of the time it takes me to encapsulate a brand in a tight headline. Titles are even trickier.

Take Iggy Pop’s latest release, “Preliminaires.” After “being our dog” for decades, the Igster decided to take a laid back lounge approach on this CD, even growling some of the songs in French (ohh-la-la!). Problem is, “preliminaires” is the French word for the English “preliminaries,” which is how most of Iggy’s fans pronounced it. Merde!

One album title that hit the bull’s eye was Marvin Gaye’s “Here, My Dear.” While going through a bitter divorce from his first wife and Motown founder Berry Gordy’s sister, Anna, Gaye found he didn’t have the scratch to pay her alimony and child support demands, so agreed to give her half the royalties from his follow-up to the smash, “Let’s Get it On.” The resulting album was a raw, sometimes vicious disc that one reviewer called “the sound of divorce on record.” Not only did it take a critical and popular drubbing, generating little money for the ex-Mrs. Gaye, but she even considered suing for invasion of privacy. Take that, my dear.

On the other end of the spectrum, the album title that trumps all for sheer killer appeal yet absolute misrepresentation is by a barely-remembered British prog rock group of the late Sixties/early Seventies called Spooky Tooth. Their fifth album, “You Broke My Heart, So I Busted Your Jaw,” had many an unsuspecting music fan forking over their cash for what the title promised would be a balls-to-the-wall smash-up. What they got instead was a half-dozen so-so blues tracks, rounded out with a couple of piano ballads. As one peeved customer reviewer on Amazon put it, “They give the album that title and don’t write a song to go with it? What a letdown!”

For creative works that really live up to their billing, next week “The Bite” will extend the title search by focusing on the movie titles of Germany’s most prolific, provocative and debauched filmmaker.

Brother, Can You Spare a Click?

I’ve been advised by two of my nearest and dearest, who are also fellow bloggers, that I should consider monetizing this site by allowing Google to post click-through ads. On the one hand, I lost my full-time job over two years ago (thanks, you Wall Street bastards!) and earning my daily bread through freelance writing gigs is slim pickins. On the other hand, you, my faithful readers, would have to click on these ads a ridiculous number of times in order to generate even a few coins for this ink-stained wretch, so I’m not sure it’s worth the trade-off.

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with the advertising game, even more so because I’m one of the players. If you’ve ever watched “Mad Men” and seen the granite-jawed creative director Don Draper artfully cram a campaign down a client’s throat, I can tell you that never happens in today’s ad world. (And neither does all that drinking, smoking and screwing. If only!)

In fact, advertising in America seems to have hit a nadir since those heady days of the suit-wearing, martini-swilling Madison Avenue boys. Ad creatives have simply become a “pair of hands” for clients who have taken a few college English courses, taught themselves Photoshop and been exposed to a relentless stream of advertising since emerging from the womb, so think themselves more than qualified to mess up my job as well as their own. When faced with these creative cretins, my standard response is: “I can balance my checkbook. That doesn’t mean I can prepare your taxes.”

The worst blow against “out of the box” advertising, though, is the “herd mentality.” Let one brand execute a campaign that generates water cooler buzz, and you can bet that ten other brands will unleash a pale imitation of the original. Mark my words, Betty White was the first but will not be the last octogenarian actress to take a severe body blow. I can just see the disclaimers now: “No elderly actresses were harmed in the making of these commercials.”

For really creative advertising, hit the streets of any down-and-out urban area (not hard in these rag-tag times) and turn your eyes downward from the billboards on the skyscrapers to the panhandlers on the sidewalks. Out of the box? Hell, these folks take the damned box, a black magic marker and turn out the kind of compelling, imaginative, hilarious taglines that make me want to retire my keyboard. Then again, they do have the one advantage of not answering to a nitwit client:

Why Lie?? I Need a Cold Beer

I’ll Bet you $1.00 You’ll Read This Sign

Homeless Bill Needs Rich Woman

Wife Has Been Kidnapped! I’m Short 98 Cents for Ransom

Ninjas Killed My Family! Need Money for Kung-Fu Lessons

Betcha Can’t Hit Me With a Quarter

Say, that gives me an idea. Why share the wealth with Google? I could post my own click-through “tin cup.” How’s this for a tagline:

My 2 Cents for Your Two Bits

Jonesin' For The Ocean

I’m not a fan of Billy Joel’s music, but I’ve seen “The Piano Man” interviewed a couple of times and he’s a damned good ranconteur. We’re both born and bred Long Islanders and he sums up the class difference between our two shores with the following clever assessment:

“If you wanted to date a rich girl, you went to the North Shore; if you wanted to date a cool girl, you went to the South Shore.”

I’m not wealthy by any stretch of the purse strings, so you can guess which side of our LI Mason-Dixon line I inhabit. There’s another great distinction between the shores besides what’s in (or not in) our wallets and it can be boiled down to the word “beach.”

If a resident of the North Shore tells you they live by “the beach,” don’t believe it for a second. What the Northies live on, or near, is the Long Island Sound. This notoriously polluted body of water washes up on rock-strewn spits of land that make even the thought of a barefoot stroll an exercise in pain. And you can forget about spreading a towel to catch some rays, unless stretching out on a bed of nails is your thing.

For the real white sand deal, you need to pack up your sunscreen, sunglasses and suds and point your ride south until you hit the Atlantic Ocean. I’ve done my fair share of traveling and can honestly say that the beaches on LI’s South Shore are some of the most beautiful in the world. I’ve parked my bikini-clad butt on many of them – Long Beach, Atlantic Beach, Point Lookout, Gilgo, Tobay, Overlook, Cedar, Smith’s Point, Hot Dog, Robert Moses – but none beats the crown jewel, Jones Beach State Park.

I couldn’t have been more than four or five when my Dad took a passel of us Brady kids and cousins for a dip at Jones’ Zach’s Bay. Dubbed “Diaper Beach” because of its toddler-friendly nature (shallow, no waves), it’s where many an Islander got their first dose of salt water up the nose and serious sunburn on the shoulders. By the time I was in high school, hitching down Wantagh Parkway to reach the teenage wasteland of Field 4 with its blasting radios and bodies baking like human Tater Tots was a regular summer activity. And it goes without saying that my first summer job was at Jones during my college years. If I had a dime for every cocktail I downed in the Field 2 lifeguard shack, I could have been a North Shore girl.

But the paramount reason I love Jones is, perversely, the crowds. With an average of six million people sprawling across it sands during a typical summer season, any idea of spending a peaceful idyll lulled by the soft sound of ocean waves is crushed by a tsunami of humanity, and that’s just the way I like it. If all the world’s a stage, then Jones is a non-stop theater of comedy, drama and farce, with the players parading around half-naked, which adds to the absurdity.

It’s not until I open my ears, though, that this native realizes Jones isn’t a Long Island or even a New York playground but a world-wide tourist attraction. It’s not unusual to hear Japanese being spoken to my left, Spanish to my right, Swedish to my fore and some strain of Slavic to my aft. Master builder Robert Moses got it right when he modeled the Jones Beach Water Tower after St. Mark’s Campanile. Like that Venetian landmark, it still knocks me out that that the beach I consider just another part of my ‘hood is on some foreign traveler’s itinerary.

Let the North Shore keep their riches and their Sound. For my two cents, it’s all about keeping up with the Joneses.

Rage Against the Machine

A couple of weeks ago, a friend sent an e-mail urging me to write an article dispelling the notion that Baby Boomers are a bunch of navel-gazing, hippy-dippy boobs. I wish I could give you his original quote, but I’m scrupulous when it comes to deleting e-mails so this will have to do.

I have no idea what set off his mini screed, but I can tell you his request was met with a somewhat tepid reception on my end. Defending a generation is not the mission of this blog or its writer. I see the world as a level playing field, so you can be an asshat or an arhat whether you’re eight, eighteen or eighty. And although sociologists put me at the tail end of the Boomer generation, I’ve never really felt a part of that vast Sixties subculture. Yeah, I was weaned on The Beatles, The Stones and all the other groovy vibes of that tumultuous decade, but my real allegiance is to the punks of the late Seventies and early Eighties. Besides, the Boomers are like any generation in that they have as many marks in the minus column as the plus column, including being the first “helicopter” parents, for which I will be eternally ungrateful.

But this past Sunday, I heard a feature story on NPR’s “Weekend Edition” which, in light of the current national malaise, made me rethink my position and put fingers to keyboard in praise of an infamous Sixties-era event for which the Boomers deserve a major shout-out.

Tuesday, May 4th, marked the 40th anniversary of the shootings at Kent State. For those who weren’t around for what has to be one of the most heinous criminal acts of a so-called democracy against its own citizens, let me give you a brief rundown:

On April 30th 1970, Richard Nixon, who had promised to end the war in Vietnam during his presidential campaign, announced that he was expanding the war into nearby Cambodia. The response was widespread protests on college campuses across the country, including Ohio’s Kent State University. During the night of May 1st, a crowd of about 120 people – students, bikers and out-of-town kids – rioted on the streets of downtown Kent, causing Governor James Rhodes to call in the National Guard to keep order on the campus. On the morning of May 4th, with about 2,000 students gathered for a protest rally, the Guard made two attempts to disperse the crowd, throwing tear gas canisters and getting pelted with rocks in return. The crowd had now broken up into scattered groups with some of them leaving the area as ordered. At 12:24 pm, with no direct threat of any kind, 29 of the 77 Guardsman abruptly opened fire, sending a volley of 67 bullets across the campus. Four students were killed – two of them non-protestors who were walking from one class to another – and nine were wounded, one of them suffering permanent paralysis.

As appalling as this tragic event was, the aftermath stands as one of the ballsiest moments of the Boomer generation. Running the real risk of getting their brains blown out, four million students went on strike, closing down 900 universities, colleges and high schools across the country. A banner hung out of a window at New York University read, “They Can’t Kill Us All.”

No, but they could, and did, kill two more students just ten days later at Jackson State University, and under very similar circumstances to what went down at Kent State. And yet, the protests continued.

Forty years later, I think we need to take a page out of this particular chapter in our American history, not to mention paying closer attention to the on-going and valiant protests against the regimes in Tehran and Thailand where, believe me, no photographers will be present to document the carnage like the iconic photo from Kent State that accompanies this week’s blog. The next of kin will be lucky to recover the bodies.

To quote Bill Maher, “I’m angry that people aren’t angry.” I’m especially angry that the generation who risked life and limb forty years ago aren’t leading the charge against a financial system that’s now become our greatest domestic threat and a political system where the players are more interested in keeping their jobs than serving their fellow citizens.

Some people believe that hitting the barricades is a job best left to the young, and I tend to agree, but those helicopter parents I mentioned before should be setting the example in word and deed instead of being so tightly wound about their kids’ SAT scores or college GPAs. Maybe if President Obama instituted the draft to fight our two overseas wars (remember those?) that would get the Boomer ball(s) rolling again.

Or, as that Sixties chestnut goes, “Teach your children well.”