on the shore of the ultimate sea

You must hold the reigns tighter than you have ever held them before but let the chariot head over the cliff top. The abyss is calling.

Clutch at straws. Build castles on clay. Let the quick sand tell you lies. Take the scenic route. Be there on time. Use two drummers if need be. Fill out forms. Seconds. Minutes. Hours. Days. Midweeks and predictions. Fall, spin, turn and dive. Sign cheques. Solicitor doing deals with “Hits” and “Now”. Sleep at night. Black to white. Highest new entry. Good to bad. Fast forward. Top of the Pops. Re-read this book, whatever it takes. No, don’t. You already know all there is to know. Faster. Faster. Faster. Give everything. Just give everything. This is the beautiful end.

I just finished The Manual and everything is clear.

Louis C.K. at the Comedy Cellar, originally uploaded by nparish.

I galloped down to the West Village with my buddy Sam last night to see Louis C.K. tape a few bits for his upcoming FX show (March). It was brutally hilarious. I suspect some of the material might be too horrifying for the FX audience but if he puts out a DVD of the show it might have some of the crazier stuff from last night. Oh yeah, we got to sit right in the front, too.

Louis (@cklouis) gathered the audience via a tweet the day before. This was by far the most exciting thing to happen via Twitter.

This is Sam’s favorite C.K. video bit; his YouTube channel is pretty golden.

I’m very stoked to have been asked some questions about my media habits and habitat for pal Reilly Brennan’s “What’s on your desk?” series.

I most recently saw Reilly on the front page of USA Today commenting about the Chevy Volt’s mileage claims after a week fishing in Montana secluded from all feeds and transmissions. I think I whooped.

The first time we met, however, was a little different. It was on a high school Spanish Club Spring Break trip to Mexico in maybe 1997. That was a fun trip. For some reason our historical survey swung through Cancun for four days. Our initial evening in that fine town a fellow (neither of us, for the record) experienced what could be termed ‘rampaging intoxication’ for the first time and proceeded to chop apart his hotel room dresser with a ceremonial hatchet he’d purchased earlier that day from a roadside tourist trap. Goooood times.

Spime. Spimey spimey spime.

Spime is a portmanteau of ’space’ and ‘time’ coined by Bruce Sterling, who envisions a world full of spimes. It’s fun to say, and important to think about. A scenario just crossed my mind that might help.

A spime, as he defines it, is a “location-aware, environment-aware, self-logging, self-documenting, uniquely identified object that flings off data about itself and its environment in great quantities.”

We’re seeing stuff that’s spimier every day. Your smart phone is a pretty good example. While I was looking at Sophie Blackall’s fun illustrations of Craigslist Missed Connections it seemed like a pretty interesting way to think about spimes.

Thousands of people have potential Missed Connections every day in big cities. (Essentially, if you’re not clear on how the Craigslist section works, say the cute dude walking his dog makes eyes at you, and you reciprocate; if one of you gets up the guts and wants to make contact you post about the encounter on the board.)

Spime on, avid reader...

This week saw the auspicious launch of a new agency called Victors and Spoils, founded by former Crispin Porter + Bogusky folks, Evan Fry and John Winsor as well as Claudia Batten, a former VP at Microsoft-owned in-game advertising facilitator Massive.

Fry, in the Times piece, makes an impressive statement:

“Crowdsourcing is looked at as a trend du jour,” Mr. Fry said. “We want to be the first agency that gets it right.”

I want them to as well. But perhaps in a different way than they do.

Advertising execs have been in love with Clay Shirky’s ur-crowdsourcing text “Here Comes Everybody” since it made its debut last year, but they haven’t been able to get it right.

There’s a reason why; marketers have focused on using executions from the crowd (eg Doritos’ tone-deaf Super Bowl spots) to replace things they’d usually pay specialists lots of money for, like logos and commercial scripts, instead of the easy tasks everyone can complete, like drawing a sheep (as in Aaron Koblin’s Sheep Market) or retyping a blurry word (as in Luis von Ahn’s CAPTCHA).

So, to succeed, Victors and Spoils has to find the middle ground.

And, by the power of the crowd vested in this tiny node in a remote corner of the internet, I have it for them. Here’s your assignment, guys.

Build a community around the DARPA network challenge and one of the “household-name brands” you allude to pitching for in the Times, win the challenge by finding the eight balloons first, and donate the $40,000 in prize money to charity in the name of the brand.

I’d hire a mathmetician to figure out the best way to allocate your immense brain wattage and flex it to comb the country for the eight balloons. Issue incentives to players, keep them honest, allow the whole thing to develop near-realtime with streaming content and all sorts of extra goodies.

It’ll be tough, because you’ll be competing against ultra-efficient networks, the likes of 4chan, which is unfortunately the closest thing we have now to an effective megalith of distributed energy that has the get-up-and-go to mobilize quickly. But what they boast in adolescent drive they don’t necessarily hold in technical expertise.

In as much as advertising has become a highly-efficient substrate for many of our emotional responses, so too will you have to be the surface underlying the network, giving it nutrients and making it robust.

97.9 FM in Detroit has long been home to WJLB, one of the finer R&B/’urban contemporary’ radio stations in the country. While kicking around on the excellent Detroit Radio Flashbacks I found the website featured weekly charts, “hip pocket surveys,” for much of 1984-85. These were the final years legendary DJ The Electrifying Mojo was at the station, so I thought it might be fun to take a look at what was getting played just about 25 years ago. I mostly missed the Mojo era, but JLB was a hugely influential radio station for me; it played loads of local records and was one of my first exposures to live turntablism, with a party/booty show every Friday night. So, I hope you enjoy these tunes. There are some hometown favorites here, stuff that stayed pretty local, and things from the last throes of Motown. Not surprisingly, Rochester Hills’ own Madonna is the only white performer on the list. Also not surprisingly, Prince, a Mojo favorite, appears a few times, both in his own work and through Apollonia 6 and Vanity. Pardon the dodgy embeds, Most of the record companies don’t like it enabled on their YouTube offerings…

24. You Get The Best From Me – Alicia Myers

23. We Don’t Work For Free – Grandmaster Melle Mel & The Furious Five

No video…but here’s a taste of the song.

22. The Jacksons – Torture

21. Tonight – Ready For The World

See the Top 20 singles from Detroit's WJLB on October 15, 1984

A four-month-old Saker Falcon, originally uploaded by nparish.

Here are a few photos I’ve got from a recent falconry talk at Orvis’ Manhattan store.

C+P ‘92 Flashback, originally uploaded by nparish.

Leafing through Advertising Age’s Small Agency Awards issue last week I was struck by this simple ad from MDC, one of the Awards’ sponsors: a group shot of Crispin & Porter Advertising in 1992.

Now, you all (probably) know what happened to little old Crispin & Porter. And nostalgia is great. But the underlying message of this ad–that you can go from a 13-person creative department to employing over 200 creatives over several continents in 17 years–is a fundamental testament to the spirit of entrepreneurship, as Alex Bogusky wrote for us when the idea of the Small Agency Awards became urgent. (And yes, I know that’s not a massive jump, considering the ascent of agencies like Saatchi & Saatchi, but, whether you like its ads or not, CP+B has managed to maintain a strong culture, unlike mega-networks put together via merger & acquisition.)

It isn’t very often ads in our magazine jump out, so I thought I’d try to give this one a little more light, and maybe see if there was some “where are they now” info on the people in it. I managed to put names to a few faces, but if you’ve got more info, by all means, contact me, or leave a comment.

1. Chuck Porter, now CP+B co-Chairman
2. Alex Bogusky, now CP+B co-Chairman
3. Markham Cronin, founded Markham Unlimited
4. Sarah Gennett, now CP+B VP/Dr. of Production Services & married to Markham
5. Dave Swartz, now CP+B VP/Creative Director
6. Mrs. Ana Bogusky, still Mrs. Ana Bogusky

It’s pretty amazing this many years later almost 40% of the people in the creative department are still with the company. I’m also digging the “good enough sucks” sign on the back wall.

UPDATE: The missing links have been found. Thanks, caller!

In the far back, next to Dave Swartz, is copywriter Steve Horowitz.

To Sara Gennet’s left is copywriter Michael Bettendorf (see his business card?) with art director Diane Durban to the left of Mrs. Bogusky.

That trio to the right contains Gloria Schmall (production), copywriter Shawn Wood (with the baseball hat) and intern Emily Chase.

In the front to the left of Porter, Bogusky and Cronin is Aileen Lopez, from the studio.

In the hopes of one day proving competitive with an acquaintance who’s so far plastered me on the chessboard (D., give me another month), I’ve been playing quite a bit more chess than usual, and, as a corollary, reading books on strategy and following weekly chess columns in newspapers. Compare, if you will, two tellings of this week’s scandal, French grandmaster Vlad Tkachiev’s drunkenness during the Calcutta Open:

The first, from New York Post chess columnist (and grandmaster himself) Andy Soltis:

Snooze and You Lose: A Russian-born grandmaster scandalized an international tournament in India this month by passing out drunk during a game.

And this got the chess world arguing about a technical point:

Was it ethical to wake him up?

Vladislav Tkachiev, ranked 58th in the world, fell asleep during his third-round game at the Calcutta Open. His opponent, Praveen Kumar, didn’t want to win the game on forfeiture and asked tournament arbiter R. Anantharam to wake up Tkachiev.

But after more moves, the 35-year-old Tkachiev fell asleep again. Other players took turns waking him, but to no avail. After his allotted 90 minutes had expired, Tkachiev had played only 11 moves and was declared lost.

After photos of the sleeping grandmaster appeared in Indian newspapers, Anantharam came in for a torrent of Internet criticism for allowing the farce to get that far.

But he said he was just following world chess federation rules. “The scene of many players coming to his board and watching him sleeping was a disturbance to the nearby boards,” he wrote.

Nonsense, responded GM Nigel Short. Tkachiev should have been woken up only to remove him from the playing hall where he was “causing widespread public embarrassment.”

What an idiot, right?

However, take another look, from the Financial Times‘ Leonard Barden (no slouch himself):

The Kalkota (Calcutta) Open this week made news headlines when the French champion Vlad Tkachiev appeared comatosely drunk at the board and lost his third round game on time.

Attitudes have changed. In 1935 Alexander Alekhine was the worse for drink in some world title games, while in 1949 Sweden’s No 1 Gideon Stahlberg drank a cognac at the board before sacrificing a knight for a winning attack.

The shocked reaction to the Tkachiev episode was in line with a current zealous environment where a master can lose on time if a few seconds late for the start of play. Tkachiev soon recovered and the drunk game was his only loss in seven rounds.

(Emphasis mine.)

Quite the difference between the two, eh? One has a drunken player disrupting the entire tournament with his enduring shambolic behavior, the other noting arbiters can end a match if it’s a matter of “a few seconds” before the start. Nevertheless, knowing he went on to win the rest of his matches makes quite a difference in the quality of the story.

Further, Barden writes in the Guardian: “In Tkachiev’s case, jetlag was probably a factor as he flew to India with hardly a break after winning the French championship, and the drunk game was his only defeat in Kolkata.”

This isn’t the first time Tkachiev has made headlines, and certainly won’t be the last. It will probably be the only time I resort to a chess media compare and contrast here, though.

We’re gettin’ down to the nitty-gritty, ladies and gents.

8/25: Hills! The final installment of our torturous hill workouts. 1/4 full, 1/4 half, 1/2 recover x 6. Untimed. Ugly.

Ugh, glad to see these hill exercises go. Yuck.

8/29: 8.5 miles, into Manhattan, summer streets, ~10 min/mi, AM

This was a good, fun, nice run. Into Manhattan, across the Brooklyn Bridge, up the street they had closed off for the Summer Streets program, cab back home. Perfect.

9/1: 5k, 22′18″, improved from 23′09″ on 7/7

This was another 5k test to determine pacing and tempo runs for the remainder of our training. I improved slightly, which is surprising, considering my lack of training. Most improved award goes to Angela, who shaved a whole 4.5 minutes off her last time. What a difference a few months’ dedication makes, eh?

Inputting my time into the McMillan Running Calculator says I should run 7′50″ miles and finish a 13.1 mile event in 1:43:05. I kind of doubt this–all my long runs have been pretty slow. Who knows. I’m not sure if you have to buy Mr. McMillan’s training philosophy or not to get those results. But maybe I can still break the 2-hour barrier out in the Hamptons.

9/3 4.44 miles, 40:51min, 9′09″ miles, AM

I felt shitty this entire morning run. Like I was wearing a suit of my skin that wasn’t quite fitting right. I hoped to slough it off after a mile or two but it stayed on for an entire abbreviated loop of Prospect Park. iPod/headphones steadily pumping out the jams didn’t help. I don’t know.

9/5 9 miles, 96 minutes, 10′40″ miles, AM

Nine miles along the Upper New York Bay, following the greenway under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, through Bay Ridge and towards Coney Island on a beautiful sunny morning. We ran part of the route today along 4th Avenue, a stretch that the NYC Marathon covers in just a few months. Locals accustomed to runners cheered us on, as if this was somehow more meaningful than a run-of-the-mill Saturday training session.

I checked in with Jack to see how his mom was doing, and got good news. (Remember Jane Zhang?)

I’ll let Jack give the news: “We’re done with chemo and about one and a half weeks into a 3-week radiation plan. Spirits are high, her white blood cell counts are back to normal and we’re enjoying the temperate Michigan weather!”

Absolutely fantastic! There’s nothing like a Michigan fall to give you some comfort after a tough round of chemo. Don’t forget, the advanced treatments that cure cancer come about because laboratories receive funding and are able to research new cures. The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society works to provide scientists and doctors with grants and education to help the front-line battle blood cancers.

FUNDRAISING UPDATE:

Lots of big stars this week as each runner with our team met their $2,800 in minimum fundraising. Thanks to everyone who came out to our bar nights and fundraisers, all the Crain folks who chipped in to the team effort, the Crain Foundation for pumping up each of us in a major way, and, last but not least, Elliot, Jessica and Peter. Thanks so much guys, for your kind words and awesome donations.

We’re in the homestretch, so now’s the time to dig in and hook me up with some dough. Three more weeks. Let’s do it.

Want to help? You should sponsor me here!