Whahappened

Here is a recap of the last year and a half:

We had a baby boy. His name is James William. He’s awesome. He’s growing.

We haven’t gone out or slept since his birth.

That’s not entirely true, just pre-baby-comparatively true.

I also changed jobs. I went from working as a Sr. Producer at a hip Chicago ad-agency, to working as Manager of Advertising at a stodgy consumer packaged-goods company in the ‘burbs. It’s a big cultural change. I wear khakis and button-downs instead of ironic t-shirts and dirty jeans. I used to think my clients didn’t know anything about advertising. Turns out, they just didn’t know anything about production or creativity. Since then, it’s me that has learned more about advertising and marketing than I ever knew. Pretty amazing turnabout.

There’s Something Goin’ On (doodle loodle loodle doo doo)

Y’know that ’80s song by pop legend “Frida”? I thought it would be a good title of today’s (quarterly) blog entry. I also considered the Buffalo Springfield lyric “There’s Somethin’ Happenin’ Here”.

What I mean to say is that big changes are in the works on the homefront. I’ll be back with more information soon. Until then, please enjoy a music video by the oh-so-talented “Frida”!

9 Years

On December 7, 2000, I was diagnosed with stage four Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. In short, lymphoma is cancer of the lymph nodes, and is often described as cancer of the immune system. I was 29 yrs old at the time of my diagnosis, and I was given a 70-80% chance of living. Not bad odds. But still, that’s only somewhere in the C-minus — B-minus range. Not great. Stage Four simply describes the spread of the disease. In my case, I had it not only in my lymph nodes, but my bone marrow as well.
I was treated at Northwestern Memorial Hospital by some of the very best in the Oncology field. My doctor, Jane Winter, is still something of a superhero in my eyes, right up there with Oncology nurses and Batman(duh). After about 3 and 1/2 months of intensive chemotherapy, which was put on hold after my kidneys shut down and necessitated a week of dialysis, I was and remain (knocking on wood as I type) cancer-free. My hair and eyebrows grew back (my hair has once again started a retreat, albeit more slowly). By the way, eyebrows are functional, and don’t let anyone tell you differently.

In spite of enduring months of chemo, I remain “viable”, and my wife and I are expecting a baby next month (more on that to come, no doubt.)

This date has come around eight times now, and as the years pass, some of the details of that incredible and painful time fade. But December 7, known more infamously as the day Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese, will for me always be my personal “date which will live in infamy”.

The Waffle House

This from Milwaukeed Journal Sentinel columnist Mike Hart:

Favre-A-Palooza is now in full swing.

Once again.

This crazy little thing was born in 2003 and like the Energizer Bunny, it keeps going and going and going.

Let’s stumble down Memory Lane and relive those magic moments since the dawning of Favre-A-Palooza, shall we? Remember, it is impossible to operate heavy machinery after digesting these Favre fun facts.

Jan. 2003: The retirement rumors are born. Favre steps up to the plate, for once, and says, “I have every intention of coming back.”

Jan. 2004: The Packers expect Favre to return despite interception in overtime against Philadelphia in a playoff loss. Like John Paul Jones, Favre does return.

Jan. 2005: After a dismal showing in a playoff loss to the Vikings, Favre says he needs time to ponder his future. In March, he says he’ll play in 2005. When queried about retirement in August, Favre says, “I’m in no hurry for that to come. I won’t play anywhere else.”

April 2006: Favre finally halts months of speculation by saying he will return to the Packers.

Feb. 2007: Favre brings the rumor mill to a grinding halt by announcing he will play another season in Green Bay.

March 6, 2008: After the Packers lose in the NFC title game, Favre retires and there isn’t a dry eye in the house. He gets all blubbery and says: “I am officially retiring from the NFL and the Green Bay Packers. . . . It is on my terms. Which is a good way to go out.”

Week of March 24, 2008: Favre lets the Packers know that he is getting the itch to return.

March 29, 2008: Favre reverses his field and tells coach Mike McCarthy that he’ll stay retired.

June 20, 2008: Favre tells McCarthy that he just might return.

July 2008: After deciding he still wants to play, Favre and the Packers go through a very messy public divorce.

Aug. 6, 2008: Favre is traded to the New York Jets. Broadway Brett is born.

Feb. 11, 2009: After a roller-coaster season, Favre retires again. Brett the Jet is grounded.

April 29, 2009: The Jets officially release Favre. Said the QB: “Nothing has changed. At this time, I am retired and have no intention of returning to football.”

Aug. 19, 2009: After a few more months of waffling, Favre signs with the Vikings.

Our House

When we last met, I was waxing angsty about trying to sell our condo and buy the affordable version of our dream home.

Success! After much nail-biting, we closed two weeks ago, and have spent several nights both in and out of our NEW HOME.

We have $everal project$ that we wanted to get out of way immediately. The first order of business was to update the flooring.

The first stage in this endeavour was to move all our furniture from a Devil’s Tower-like formation in the living room, to a more Badlands-type formation in the basement.

The second order of the week was to pull up all the stinky, dusty carpet from the floors and get it the hell out of the house. This took most of the week. Some rooms were easy – the carpet lifted away from old hardwood floors as though it was looking for liberation from the home, the promise of a better life (When said carpet met my folding carpet razor, such thoughts quickly turned to horror).

The stairway carpet was another matter. Whoever was hired to carpet the stairs and upstairs hallway, was either a tremendous overachiever in the business of stapling carpet to wood, or was simply paid by the staple. At last count, Leah and I extracted ten million four hundred thousand two hundred ninety-eight staples from solid white oak floors. In the days that followed, our bare feet would detect a small number over-looked, embedded staples. Not in a “Oh shit I just stepped on a staple and I’m bleeding” kind of way, but more of a Princess and the Pea kind of way, that led to one of us yelling to the other for the nearest needle-nose pliers.

Next, we sought out three references for floor guys. Guy #1: Let’s call him Enrique (because that’s his name). Enrique offered to come to our home to measure the floors and give us an estimate. Two hours later, three teenagers showed up at our house with a tape measure, pencil, paper, and two hundred word English vocab. These youngsters were Enrique’s two teenage sons and their teenage cousin who spoke no English, not even easy words, like “hello”, and “goodbye”. Within four minutes of being in our home, the youngest of the group bumped his head hard on the sloped closet ceiling, immediately making me think about insurance. After some hasty scribbling of measurements, I was given a ridiculously low estimate, even though the boys didn’t know what lay under a particular 30 sqare ft area of old tile in the front hallway. Needless to say, we had some reservations.

As it turns out, references two and three were the same guy. Let’s call him Bogden, because that’s what we’re 93% sure his name is. Bogden looks like Bjorn Borg meets Daniel Craig’s crazy older cousin. Bogden gave us a reasonable quote, seemed to know what he was talking about, and has been working on the floors in our house for several days. In the meantime, we’ve either been resigned to sleeping on a mattress in the family room, which is the only room not being worked on (yet), or using Hyatt points to stay at a fume-free enviroment way out in the Northwest ‘burbs.

Thus far, Bogden has been as skilled at flooring as Borg was at dispatching opponents, albeit a bit slower in his work.

I’ll post some pics when the floors are all done. Attached are some “before” photos.

The Importance of Being Angsty

My wife and I are in the process of selling our Rogers Park condo and buying a Lincolwood home. We are scheduled to close this Friday. As only partially anticipated, we are being confronted with some last minute questions on such matters as condo assessments, condo minutes, etc. I am of the belief the we are merely being played into fronting some escrow funds for special assessments over the next year. That could just be part of “the game”. Nevertheless, I’m extremely stressed out at the thought of this deal falling through. I wish I could fall asleep and be awoken when it’s all a done deal, but instead I think I’ll be dealing with this all with equal doses of work, alcohol, and packing.

This is not how we traverse the Supercontinent. This is merely a Chrysler 300, suspended 100′ in the air by cables which I’ve removed with my pedestrian Photoshop skills. I shot this during a film production north of L.A. near Los Padres National Park, where I also ran over a squirrel.

This is not the set of the remake of Blade Runner (If I were producing Blade Runner instead of TV commercials, I’d be rich enough to have someone else do my blogging for me.) This was taken under a rain machine at the Warner Brothers studio, which is almost as cool as Blade Runner, except for the fact that it’s lousy with coyotes. The real kind, not the animated Acme-lovin’ kind. The Blade Runner world was just lousy with Replicants.

There’s some weird connection going on there: Blade Runner – Coyote – Warner Brothers – Road Runner. I don’t know, maybe not. Think about it and get back to me.

Avoiding the Diplodocus Dilemma: Moving from Broadcast to Content Production

In the ad world, rarely will you see the gathering of more specialists, more experts in diverse fields, than you will at a broadcast commercial shoot. In order to create the perfect :30 world where every nuance is scrutinized (local cable TV ads notwithstanding), every element from the carpet to the cat is discussed ad nauseum among the client, the agency, the director, and experts in the fields of carpets and cats.

Due to this level of specialization, the TV shoot is often where advertisers spend most of their creative production dollar (and given the budgets our industry has seen lately, I use the singular form of dollar intentionally). In effort to gain efficiencies of scale and stretch the production budget, the TV shoot has increasingly become the locus of all efforts to acquire material for other media. Thus, the TV shoot has become the headwaters for the flow of creative content. It has become the norm rather than the exception for agencies to shoot a TV spot while also acquiring assets for digital, stills for print, and the inevitable “making of” video that rarely sees the light of day (not unlike the video’s editor).

Because production has become so integrated, the title “Broadcast Producer” is starting to go the way of the Diplodocus and ¾” tape. We now call ourselves “Content Producers” or “Creative Content Producers”. In some cases, our titles seem to cross over to other professions entirely, like “Content Architect” or “Creative Content Specialists” giving the impression that we bustle about the halls of ad agencies with stethoscopes and armloads of blueprints.

Hopefully, unlike the Diplodocus, the producer has evolved. The resourcefulness and creativity required to be a good producer can be applied outside the Broadcast realm. It’s not Aquaman fighting in space. There are new terms to learn, new shenanigans to call bullshit on, and auspiciously, new people to meet.

The ENG or: How to dress like The Borg

Locutus, or me. I forget which.

Last week, I went to my friendly neighborhood neurologist to have some tests done. I did this in order to hopefully shed some more light on the incredibly wonderful and appreciated boughts of vertigo I get from time to time. These “episodes” normally last a couple of hours, and come on like someone suddenly cranking up the volume on your dizzy to ’11′.

When it happens, I normally feel like I’ve just completed twelve baseball bat or “izzy dizzy” races, where two drunken fans compete by spinning around in circles with their heads resting on the end of a baseball bat, and then race to a finish line to off-balanced hilarity and enjoyment of the crowd. Normally, one contestant will travel one foot forward and twelve feet to the right before falling down, while the other staggers like a newborn wildebeast toward the finish line, crossing it triumphantly before collapsing and hurling up six beers.

When I get these boughts of vertigo, I often get the latter six-beer circumstance, without all the accompanying benefits of drinking six beers. So, my Otolaryngologist decided I should go have some further testing done, to try find a suitable treatment. The first step, after the standard raise left hand – raise right hand audioram, is a series of tests know as the ENG.

ENG stands for electronystagmography – surely a made-up word, like Munchkin or Oprah.

In short, it’s a series of tests that measure your vestibular health. It is made up of exercises that measure eye responses, positional changes that induces dizziness, and the “caloric test”, that consists of cold, then warm, water being rushed into your ears, which is supposed to induce vertigo (or act as a last ditch “are you sure your ears aren’t just dirty?” test).

At various points of the test, I wore all sorts of cumbersome, costume-like head gear, and spent a lot of time in the dark, looking through various goggles, often one eye at a time, hunting for a red dot with my eyes. For two hours I wore these contraptions and blurted out my favorite Terminator and Robocop lines.

What these tests all prove, I’m not sure. I suspect today or tomorrow I’ll receive a phone call from the neurologist just saying “positive” or “negative”, and for some reason know only to medical professionals, I’ll actually need to ask him what that means.