On the Wall.

Ran into Adam and Eve in the Chelsea Lobby Bar last night and, as usual, the conversation turned to original sin.

Okay, to be honest, I'm not really sure that’s exactly Adam or Eve on the wall; both are painted standing with backs to the room, separated by a viny tree, and I'd swear something akin to a snakeskin is nailed to the bark.

As with most of the eclectic artwork on the walls — all donated by the even more eclectic collection of talents who’ve resided in this building — meanings are what you make of them.  

Whether or not those are intended to represent any former apple-picking Edenites is an open question. That this is a good place to dish about sin is not.

After all, we're standing just floors below the room Sid Vicious shivved the biblical admonition against murder. Where Patti Smith and Robert Maplethorpe shocked then-polite society by, gasp, cohabitating without a proper license. Where Madonna, in her Room 822 “Sex” photoshoot (her former residence), took her own graven images. And where literary icons, notably Burroughs and Kerouac, gave those of us who write for a living “strange gods” to worship.

Anyway, and finally drifting towards a topic, if the sin happens to be how advertising is turning its back on the impossible-to-replace value of ideas, let’s just say we’ve both come to the right place.

Adam: You do know the Chelsea is something of a living temple to the impact that ideas can have on society, culture, and economy? 

Eve: At least it was, until all this fancy-schmancy upgrading. 5 stars, my fig leaf.

Adam: So, as someone in an industry increasingly willing to sacrifice creativity on the altar of endlessly repetitive content, how do you justify occupying space where, once upon a moment, you’d have run into a Warhol, a Kubrick, a Dylan, or a Dylan Thomas?

Eve: And now that so many of your agency think-alikes have decided that zero-time, zero cost, zero friction, and zero humanity is the future of advertising, how can you deal?

Adam: Wasn’t that long ago, people in your line of work talked about being in the business of ideas.

Eve: Big ideas that, in turn, created more big ideas, which, of course, created even bigger ideas.

Adam: Frankly, boychick, they weren’t in the business of pumping out more crap for less.

Eve: Or turning into technology’s bitch.

Adam: But here’s the thing, it’s all a matter of making smart choices; doing well by thinking bigger.

Eve: With the right people, philosophy, and talent, you can always get to the right ideas.

Adam:  You might recall that Arthur Miller lived here after the Marilyn catastrophe, and one of his best lines was “everything we are, is, at every moment, alive in us." 

Adam: That poor schlimazel. But his point is well taken.

Eve: He also wrote that the Chelsea had “no vacuum cleaners, no rules, and no shame.”

Adam: But I think he would have agreed that the problem you’re talking about really doesn’t come under the heading of “original sin.”

Adam: It’s more about the sin of being idealess. And unoriginal.