Becoming an Ad Guy #1

I've decided to begin sharing the often frustrating and sometimes mildly exciting aspect of my life that is the collective efforts of trying to break into advertising as a creative. This entry comes almost a year too late, as I really began this effort the day after I graduated last May (2007), but better late than never, I suppose. 

As a quick summary, I graduated college with a dual degree in advertising and political science and a portfolio barely worth wiping a homeless guy's grimy ass with, or at least that's how my former mentor and Sr. Art Director at a NYC ad agency felt. Before I finished college, I was sending work out to alumni and other contacts to get their opinion and permanently damage their impression of my talents and skills with my piss-poor work. I continued this practice after I graduated, working part-time at a faceless fashion retailer and toiling away on my book. I sent countless numbers of e-mails, made numerous phone calls, received many a negative review (with a "that's okay" and "it's a good start" mixed in), and became completely bitter and frustrated. I blamed lots of things, including myself, for my failure to even get anyone to call me back and at least tell me I sucked. I blamed my teachers. I blamed the program I went through. I blamed portfolio schools and people much more skilled than I am. I blamed myself for not working harder. I blamed where I was living. But a funny thing about this business, is that while your environment may have some effect on your ability to think freely, for the most part, the only thing to blame is yourself and your work ethic. In college, I didn't devote nearly enough time to working on my book. Looking back, I don't really blame my past self for doing it, because I was a dual major and all of my other classes were fairly demanding...and because I love beer. Either way, that's what I did and now I have to live with it.

I just finished my first post-college class at a nifty little school called AdHouse, which I'm pretty sure is literally run out of the person's office. There's no campus or established curriculum, but that's not what's important. What is important is that it guaranteed me face-time with an executive creative director and honest feedback from said ECD. We didn't always see eye-to-eye, but it taught me quite a bit about where I am and what I need to do. It's probably going to take months before my book is anywhere close to presentable. I've said this to myself so many times and my book is still no where near ready, but I suppose that's the nature of the beast. A portfolio is never done. Phenomenal work requires constant adjustment and thought and can never be absolutely perfect. 

With my time in between now and my next class, I've been working on my book and getting in touch with those wonderful friends of mine already in the ad biz to check out my stuff to get some direction on where to go next. 

So thus my adventure continues. Hopefully future posts will be far more exciting than this one, and one day soon I won't have to write any more blogs about trying to become an ad guy.

An Awkward Little Thought

Reading history is one of the most depressing things a person can do, because it forces one to realize that for as long as humans have been recording their activities, they have been making the same mistakes over and over again. A perfect example is the current genocide in Darfur:  this is nothing new to the world. The world stood by as the Turks massacred the Armenians; it stood by while Nazi Germany killed millions of Jews, blacks and handicapped persons. The world stood idly by while 800,000+ were slaughtered in Rwanda. And in each case, when all is said and done and people have the chance the wrap their heads around these atrocities, each nation that did nothing has the joy of explaining their inaction over the following decades. Yet, here we are, in the same exact situation, standing idly by once again. What's going to be the excuse this time?

Look What I Did to My Head!

Look what I did! I went from curly-haired scrub to chemo-patient-look-alike in 20 minutes. Sweet.

Apparently something happened and now I'm typing in a different font and I'm too lazy to figure out how to fix it.

On to a more serious note...

I've been having a few conversations with some friends of mine about, gentrification and the projects. It's sort of a relevant issue for me, despite the fact that I'm not actually from the projects, I didn't live in NYC when they were in terrible shape and my background didn't exactly expose me to any projects, dangerous or otherwise (the city I grew up in did have them, as well as several low income neighborhoods, but nothing on the scale of a major city). Where I live now is within close proximity (one block) from housing projects. And while they are not dangerous (I've gone grocery shopping at night in my somewhat fancy work clothes), it's still a new experience (four people got mugged in front of my apartment, one of them received a serious beat down for not cooperating). Of course, there's no way to prove the perpetrators were from the housing projects. For all I know, they could live in the really nice area a few streets up. The point I'm getting at is that for the most part, projects aren't inherently bad in any way, there's just usually a couple rotten apples that cause problems, at least around here. I know that NYC's projects really don't compare to those of D.C., Chicago, Miami, LA and others of notoriety, but there are still some unfriendly neighborhoods. Where I'm going with this is as follows:

Cities like DC are instituting new programs, and from what I understand, NYC has already been doing it for a while, are starting programs where they tear down dilapidated projects, rebuild them into nice low and middle income apartments, and give people vouchers to return. All of those residents with known criminal offenses are given vouchers to move elsewhere, and those who were just living there are invited back. All of this is done to try to mix up the neighborhood, bring in working class people into lower class neighborhoods, and break up perpetual troublemakers, so to speak. In principal, it seems like a good idea, but it doesn't even come close to addressing any of the problems that led to unsavory neighborhoods in the first place. It's just a band-aid to cover up the symptoms.

What's worse, and NYC has a fairly well-known history of doing, it tearing down projects and low-income housing and replacing the buildings with expensive, high-rise apartments. This is great for cleaning up neighborhoods, bringing high-earning and thus high-tax paying residents to the area, as well as raising property values and breaking up criminally active neighborhoods. The problem is, it doesn't solve any problems. It just moves the symptoms of the problem to another area. An example:

A good friend of mine used to live on 112th and Adam Clayton Powell in Harlem. He had a beautiful, large apartment that puts mine to shame. He and his roommates, however, didn't have a TV, so when they ate meals or wanted to kill time, they would sit at the windows and watch the hookers in the neighborhood work the streets, watch dudes smoking roc on the stoops and the like. It wasn't necessarily a dangerous neighborhood (save for the crazy homeless dude that went around trying to cut people's arms off with saws at my friend's subway station...totally coincidental, I hope). I went up there a couple times without incident. However, returning to the neighborhood two years later, one doesn't see pimps, hookers and crackheads (obviously a good thing). One sees nifty shops and high rise apartment buildings (not a bad thing). The problem is, no one came around to do anything about the pimps, hookers and crackheads. They just got forced out and moved into another neighborhood. 

It took hearing Mos Def discuss this at a concert I attended Sunday to make me see how gentrification, while on the surface seems like a good thing to those of us that just want a place to live where there are no worries of being mugged or otherwise accosted by someone, it isn't really a great solution. It brings in tax dollars and obvious revenues for the city. It probably even brings culture and other worldly things. The issue is, it doesn't solve any problems. It just moves the problem. It's even less of a band-aid than rebuilding the projects. But it is a lot more profitable and easier than getting to the root of the problem, which will no doubt be exacerbated by the most recent economic downturn. 

Will we ever end poverty? No, but we can reduce it (in ways that can't really be explained, partially because I just don't know enough about public policy and partially because I don't have the time or space to talk about my ideas...maybe another time). Can we fix the prison system so that people who go in don't come out worse? Yes, we can (see aforementioned reasons why I don't elaborate). It won't be perfect, but it will be better. 

These aren't the only contributing factors, but they are two of the biggest. But again, fixing these problems costs far more money in the immediate future (will probably save more in long run) and is unbelievably difficult to work out and find the right people to run the projects so that they are effective, so it probably won't happen, even if it will save money, lives and improve the quality of life in the entire country. But then again, there's money to be made in misery.