Terry Levine | Noggin Advertising | Copywriter | Digital + Direct Writer | Blogging | Toronto | Canada

RULES VS GUIDELINES.

Last weekend, two of my friends -- both of whom live in the same building -- invited me their pool. When I arrived, I called each on their mobiles to let me in. No answer. I buzzed their apartments -- no answer of course, they were both at the pool. I buzzed and called for about five minutes until, getting nowhere, I finally followed another condo resident into the building to speak to the concierge and explain my predicament.

"I can't let you in," was his terse response. "I'm not allowed."

"I know that. I'm not asking you to but how can I reach my friends?" I replied.

"There's no phone at the pool. You'll have to buzz them."

"I tried buzzing them. They're not in their apartments."

"Then call them." Anger. Rising.

In these situations, I've learned it's better to walk away than turn into the Incredible Hulk. So I spun around and muttered sarcastically: "Thanks for being so helpful."

That's when he started yelling and accusing me of being rude. Now, I try to be nice but when someone is clearly is a first-class douche, all bets are off. I lost it, started yelling and called him an asshole, among other things -- fucking idiot, if memory serves.

The problem here, it seems to me was twofold: a breakdown in civility and a disagreement between us about what the man's responsibilities entailed. He had undoubtedly been handed a list of rules from the condo association or the management company he works for. Breaking those rules might lead to him being reprimanded or fired. I get that. But my view is the man's job is, ultimately, to be as helpful as he can -- within reason -- to residents and visitors. He didn't have to let me go to the pool -- and I didn't ask him to. But he could have offered a solution, for instance, for me to wait two minutes until the second concierge (there are usually two at the front desk) returned, at which point one of them could have gone to the pool to notify my friends I'd arrived. But he didn't. In his view, he had learned the rules and was going to follow them to the letter. The rules, I assume, didn't specify he needed to go to the pool, therefore he didn't need to go to the pool. Case closed: rules simply trumped civility.

An aside on the issue of civility, when you walk into a store and you're looking for a particular shirt in your size, you ask the clerk for help. Help can sound like "let me check in the back," "let me call our other store," or "sorry, we don't, but we do have this other lovely shirt in your size."

Help is not: "No."

Back to rules, I've run into a similar situation in the ad agency world. Most clients have brand guideline documents that outline the dos and don'ts related to their logo, color palette, and tone and manner of copy. Many clients -- and some on the agency side -- view these guidelines as rules akin to the Ten Commandments: they must not be broken, under penalty of death. But there is a difference between a rule and a guideline.

People may get into a lot of trouble for breaking the rules. But we can also sometimes get into bigger trouble for simply "following orders." One of the many qualities that presumably differentiates us from other members of the animal kingdom is our ability to understand the difference and evaluate the consequences of each.

It's not that rules aren't important. But so are civility, respect and common sense.

 

QUOTE OF THE DAY: YOU'RE (PROBABLY) WRONG ABOUT YOU.

"When you fail to reach a goal — say, for instance, you give an important presentation and it doesn't go well — you become the detective (largely unconsciously). You gather up the usual suspects to see who is responsible for your failure: lack of innate ability, lack of effort, poor preparation, using the wrong strategy, bad luck, etc. Of all of these possible culprits, it's lack of innate ability we most frequently hold responsible, like the much-maligned butler in an Agatha Christie novel. In Western countries — and nowhere more so than in the U.S. — innate ability is the go-to explanation for all of our successes and our failures.

"The problem is that the evidence — the kind gathered by scientists over the last thirty years of study of motivation and achievement — suggests that innate ability is rarely to blame for either succeeding or falling short."

-- Heidi Grant Halvorson, motivational psychologist

The whole fascinating story is here.

MONOMANIACS: ISRAEL HATERS VS ARAB HATERS

I've found myself over the last few days in a strange hellish place, managing to piss off uber-Zionist Jews and anti-Zionists at the same time.

It started with the release of this absurd video by the "Republican Jewish Coalition," propaganda of the first order that sends the tired message to the US's Jewish community that Barack Obama hates Israel. I was having none of it and began posting my comments only to have paranoid Fox News/NEWSMAX lovers telling me I was a self-hating Jew and didn't understand why the spectre of the Holocaust gives Israel the right to do pretty much anything it wants, all the time, forever, till the Messiah comes.

But then I discovered this site, run by left-wing anti-Zionist Jews who blame Israel for all the world's and the Middle East's problems. Palestinians had no role to play at all in their ongoing misery and Arab countries' general fuckedupedness -- well let's just ignore that. No need to criticize fascism, tribalism and religious fundamentalism in 20 Arab countries when we can just talk obsessively about Israel's failings. "Enough about why I hate Israel. Why do you hate Israel?" So I started defending Israel on this site too only to be attacked for doing so.

Literally, within any given hour over the last few days, I was fending off rabid Jewish Arab-haters and rabid Israel-haters. It's been a trip. But this morning, an op-ed about, of all things the Olympics, by David Brooks, made me feel a lot better about my purgatorial predicament.

"The world, unfortunately, has too many monomaniacs — people who pick one side of any creative tension and wish the other would just go away. Some parents and teachers like the cooperative virtues and distrust the competitive ones, so, laughably, they tell their kids that they are going to play sports but nobody is going to keep score.

"Politics has become a contest of monomaniacs. One faction champions austerity while another champions growth. One party becomes the party of economic security and the other becomes the party of creative destruction.

"The right course is usually to push hard in both directions, to be a house creatively divided against itself, to thrive amid the contradictions."

So, I'm thriving. I'm thriving. Or at least, I'm trying.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: BLOOMBERG ON REBUILDING CITIES.

"I have said that the federal government should have a program where they give visas to people with their families to come but assign them to a city. I'll use Detroit as an example. The deal would be that you agree to take no federal, state or city monies. You can do anything you want to make a living but you gotta live in Detroit for seven years with your family, and if you survive seven years we'll give you your citizenship.

"What would happen is that they would buy those derelict houses and fix them up by hand, they would send their kids to public schools and force the schools to improve because people would value education as opposed to the people left in Detroit who are poor and don't understand the value of education.

"The carrot of offering the potential of being an American citizen is so great that you would get people to go to Detroit who would never otherwise go. The mayor of Detroit, David Bing, once said, 'Bloomberg doesn't understand. We don't have enough jobs here.' Yes, he's right. They don't have enough jobs and they never will unless they do something like this."

-- New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (aka the best mayor in the world), in the July 2012 issue of Monocle

CHARMING BUT...: 140 WORDS ON 'THE INTOUCHABLES'

On one level, I loved the new French movie 'The Intouchables' about a fabulously wealthy quadriplegic who befriends a Senegalese man from the Paris projects. The chemistry between the two is fantastic, the acting is too -- particularly François Cluzet (a Gallic dead-ringer for Dustin Hoffman) who can only move his head throughout the entire film.

But in between some serious laughing and after I walked out of the theatre, something was nagging at me. I described it to my friends as "taming the savage." Like Trading Places, My Fair Lady and other movies of this genre, it hinges on the condescending idea that, given a little time and effort (and money), even the most uncivilized immigrant con man with no empathy for others can be dressed up in a monkey suit and turned into a caring, classy, art-loving doppelganger for Barack Obama.

I know the movie means well and I was undeniably taken in by its charm, but in the end, it still made me just a bit queasy.

ISRAEL AND PALESTINE: CHANGING THE METAPHOR.

"Every religion," Joseph Campbell said, "is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble."

What he meant was something like this. Jesus Christ, the historical, flesh and blood person, was not born of a virgin. He simply was not. Mr. Pope, Mr. Robertson. Mr. Graham, I'm talking to you. If he ever existed at all, he was, like you and me, the product of a good old fashioned sexual union between one man and one woman. The inventors and salesmen of Christianity, like the inventors and salesmen of every religion since the beginning of time, fashioned a story about this undeniably special and charismatic man by building symbolic, metaphorical events around his life -- and death. One of the most common metaphors to attach to an important man two or three millennia ago in the Middle East was to ascribe to him a virgin birth. It communicated that the man was pure, special, one of a kind, one with God.

When we say it's raining cats and dogs, we understand that beagles and siamese cats are not falling from the sky. We understand it's a damn metaphor. Same goes here.

God, if he exists at all, did not give the land of Israel to the Jews. Sorry Mr. Chabad and Mr. Lubavitch, he simply did not. This was a metaphor, created by the writers of the Bible over the course of many centuries, to underscore the deep connection of Jews -- once Hebrews, once Israelites -- to the land where we first came to see ourselves as one people, and still do. More than any religious rite, save perhaps circumcision, more than any historic or pseudo-historic personage, our connection to that land is what binds us as a people.

But that connection of a people to a land is also, itself, a metaphor, a symbol. Metaphors and symbols -- religious or otherwise -- are vital to human beings. But they are not air. They are not blood coursing through our veins. We derive meaning from them. But that meaning can change over time and, if we are to survive as a people with a country, that meaning must change.

What I'm getting at is this: Jews can continue to believe we were promised Israel by God. We can continue to feel a deep connection to the land where we became a nation. But we cannot have all of it. Specifically we cannot have the part now primarily populated by Muslims and Christians who call themselves Palestinian, and secondarily populated by crazed Jews with guns and Bibles. Because those Palestinians also believe (too) strongly in a metaphor -- that that land is theirs. And, for nearly a century, these two metaphors have been slaughtering one another. (That too is a metaphor, incidentally, before one of you thinks about filing an arrest warrant on Semitic metaphors.)

Jews need a place in the sun just like every other nation on earth. Just like the French. Just like the Egyptians. Just like the Kurds. But we don't need a place with borders proscribed by God to Abraham or by the United Nations in 1948 or by armistice lines in 1967. We just need a place to call our own, and we have it. And we need to leave the rest of it.

I'm talking to you Binyamin Netanyahu. And I'm talking to crazy fundamentalist Jews who ironically never supported the creation of Israel in 1948 because they were waiting for a metaphorical savior to do it for us, who don't even serve in its armed forced, and who now speak with certainty about what borders Israel should have based on metaphors they believe from a book written 2,000 years ago. To Netanyahu and your crazy fundamentalist allies, I quote a man of courage who, metaphorically at least, died for peace: "Enough of blood and tears. Enough."

Fucking enough. I'm writing all this because I read an editorial in the New York Times this morning. The New York Times. Hardly home of Hamas and Hezbollah lovers. It wasn't so much an editorial as a plea for help, a call for sanity, a warning that Israel's claim to being the only democracy in the Middle East, while still accurate, is under threat by actions Israel is taking in the territories it occupies. Actions that its leaders are pigheadedly taking to make a misguided metaphor real.

No one should confuse my criticism here with any sort of support for 100 years of Arab or Muslim intransigence. I am not a fan of Palestinian terror, or the hardheaded pride of a leadership that has blown every opportunity to make peace with Israel. Nor am I a fan of Arab policies that have purposely allowed its "brothers" to fester in refugee camps while all the Jewish refugees from Arab countries were welcomed by their own brothers long ago. We are here, in this awful place, in large part because of another broken metaphor, that of a once glorious Arab Muslim empire that cannot fathom anyone other than Arabs and Muslims ruling over "their land."

But this is in the end all beside the point. Zionists largely made their dreams a reality by taking matters into their own hands. They hoped for the support of others but never counted on it and they still succeeded in creating one of the best places to live on earth. We may not be able to count on any support today either and we can't wait for it. It's time to take matters into our own hands and do the right thing -- for the future of Israel.

To quote Yitzhak Rabin again:

"We, like you, are people who want to build a home, to plant a tree, to love, live side by side with you -- in dignity, in empathy, as human beings, as free men. We are today giving peace a chance and again saying to you: Let us pray that a day will come when we will say, enough, farewell to arms.

"We wish to turn over a new chapter in the sad book of our lives together -- a chapter of mutual recognition, of good neighborliness, of mutual respect, of understanding."

Mr. Netanyahu, it's time to show some courage for once in your life and change the goddamn metaphor.

 

 

JUST SAY NO TO LIES.

Some lies, it seems are repeated enough times that people simply believe they must be true. "Tax and spend liberal" for instance. Or "Jews are cheap." Or "Religious people are more moral." Or "Tom Cruise is straight."

You catch my drift.

There's another lie that's continually repeated in the media and by politicians: that most illegal drugs, like marijuana or certain party drugs, like ecstasy, are staggeringly dangerous. But a study by former UK drug czar David Nutt rated drugs based on the harm they cause users and others, and came to some interesting conclusions.

As the lower end of the graph above shows, pot scored a 20 on Nutt's rating system. K scored a 15. Ecstasy a 9. Mushrooms a 5. The higher end is more interesting. Tobacco and cocaine, which most people agree are pretty dangerous scored 26 and 27 respectively. Nightmarish crystal meth was at 33 and heroin came in at 55.

The most dangerous drug based on the measure of harm to its user and to others? Alcohol at 72. In other words booze is 3.6 times more dangerous than marijuana, which some people -- particularly in the US -- go to jail for possessing. Read this guide to the effects of cocaine use, and you’ll see that alcohol is still inherently more dangerous.

This isn't to say drugs like ecstasy or cocaine aren't dangerous or that we should necessary rush to legalize them. But it does mean, relatively speaking, alcohol is significantly more harmful to people and society than all these drugs -- and that our priorities and perceptions are beyond messed up.

Or, it means we're simply lying to ourselves.

 

UNEXCEPTIONAL SELLING PROPOSITION.

I live near a street with a lot of pubs, sushi restaurants and coffee shops. Everytime a new one opens, I wonder why. Did the entrepreneur walk through the area and think to himself "there are already four coffee places and five dives that sell greasy chicken fingers and fries -- so let me open another one of those!"

There is a method to that madness, I guess. If coffee or pubs are really popular, you can open your own joint and grab some of the market. The trouble, it seems to me, is how does Pub A differentiate itself from Pub B, C, D and E?

Isn't the better, creative and potentially more lucrative option to analyze what's missing on the strip and open one of those? When Kogi BBQ started driving its Korean taco truck around LA a few years back, I thought there's someone who looked for something that no one was doing and did it. And it seems to have paid off, (a) because it was done well, and (b) because no one would have likely ever given them a second look if they were selling sushi, coffee or frikken pub food. Same goes for Magnolia and Billy in New York before, you guessed it, everyone started baking cupcakes.

Seth Godin agrees. (Or maybe I agree with Seth.)

POINT OF VIEW 2.0: COWS, GOOGLE EARTH AND THE NORTH POLE.

 

“In 2008, a team of German scientists studied Google images of more than eight thousand grazing cattle and three thousand wild deer in pastures all over the world. The vast majority, they were surprised to see, graze standing north to south, aligned to the Earth’s poles. It was the first evidence that large mammals can sense and use the Earth’s magnetic fields the way that migrating birds and turtles do, and it had been right under our noses all the time. People have watched livestock graze for millennia, but before Google Earth, nobody had noticed they were all facing the same way.”

-- Ken Jennings, Maphead

 

As Jennings explains, people have watched livestock graze for thousands of years but before Google Earth gave us a drastically different point of view, nobody had noticed they were all facing the same way.

Which goes to show that sometimes changing how you look at things can, well, change how you look at things.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: ALBERT BROOKS ON DRIVE

"I got Drive because I told my manager that I thought I could make an interesting villain. I read the script, and they asked me to go to the director's house to meet him. We chatted, and on my way out I pinned him up against the wall by the front door. He's Danish and he's already very pale. 'What are you doing?!' he asked. I was very quiet: 'I just want you to know that I have great physical strength.' So he gave me the part."

-- Albert Brooks on playing Bernie Rose in Drive