Truth in Advertising Page 0,18

on advertising: unintelligible. Malcolm says, “The people are lovely.”

FINBAR DOLAN, COPYWRITER, NARRATOR

Finbar Dolan is the greatest copywriter who has ever lived. Despite never winning a single major advertising award, peers see him as a legend. His keen mind, razor-sharp wit, and deft prose leave industry giants and suburban housewives breathless. The words Now with 20% more absorbency hang in the Guggenheim with his name on it. As if that’s not enough, he is a powerfully built man in his late thirties and can bench-press four times his bodyweight. He is a scaler of great heights, a poet, a marksman, a man skilled in the art of close hand-to-hand combat. Of the roughly 6,500 languages spoken on the planet, there are only four in which he cannot read and write.

What do you say about yourself? How do you describe yourself when people ask? Height? Weight? Fine. I’m 6' 2" but appear taller as I’m thin. I can’t seem to gain weight, can’t get past 170 or so. I slouch. I feel my ears are too large. I wear the uniform of the new urban landscape, the service economy, post-Apple. Jeans, sweaters, work boots. It’s all part of the new irony, where college-educated, white-collar workers dress as if they were blue-collar workers, liberal guilt at cushy jobs that require zero physical labor. Where once the subway was filled at the day’s end with men in soiled work clothes, carrying hard hats and lunch pails, perhaps canvas bags with tools, the smell of honest-to-God sweat, now it is peopled to a greater extent (and certainly on the L train to Brooklyn) with those who are terminally hip and under the mistaken impression that life is supposed to be easy, wearing $300 pairs of jeans made to look old, vintage-inspired eyeglass frames, waxed canvas bags from Jack Spade holding Apple computers/iPhones/iPads/iPods, reeking of Jo Malone Lime Basil & Mandarin for Him. What accounts for this new breed of creative man? The fickle mistress of fashion, certainly. But I would also suggest—from my own close observation—that this inchoate man is also confused and adrift in a world where the generational gap is wider than ever. And who sometimes feels the need to use the word inchoate when not fully formed would have worked just fine. Pulled down by a rip-tide of hair products and spin classes, white wine and feelings, my generation of late-to-marry city dwellers lost any connection with their change-the-car-oil-on-Saturday-afternoon-with-a-couple-cans-of-Carling-Black-Label fathers. They bear little resemblance in income, hobbies, outlook, number of sexual partners. Men good with their fists versus men who take yoga. Men who understood how life worked versus man-boys who give long thought/reading/classes/trips to India to allay their confusion about the meaning of life. Who complain that they’re not happy.

I worry that I have a kind of retardation having to do with romantic relationships (thirty-nine and single), marriage (see the aforementioned cancellation of wedding), children (enjoy holding and smelling them, fear being responsible role model for them). My day is spent in diapers (has to be a better way to say that) and yet I, myself, have never changed one.

There are hundreds of me out there. Thousands. We look alike and think alike and come up with almost identical ideas because we approach life from the same perspective. We roam the streets of New York and Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, London, and Amsterdam. The less reflective among us whine that we’re not “more.” Haven’t done more, achieved more, made more. The smarter ones thank God every morning for the world of advertising. Most days I enjoy going to work and am quite fond of my coworkers. The bad days are the days when I wonder what might have been had I tried something else or when I read about someone doing something that took courage and talent, neither of which I possess.

Me on advertising: “Is there any way I can get an extension on this?”

• • •

We are all here. The beautiful twenty-six-year-old girls who work in media and enjoy the perks of free tickets to anything in town they want, who will be married within three years and entirely out of the industry within six. The thirty-eight-year-old producers, almost all women, almost all single, having pursued the career in the hopes of switching from commercials to Hollywood films but who never made the transition, who know far more about the complex job of making television spots than clueless young creatives (“Yeah, but why can’t we use a helicopter for