Brave Man

One of my personal role model is a man named Jay Chiat. He was the CEO of an advertising company called Chiat/Day and he passed away in 2002. His employees took out this ad in ad age magazine to eulogize him:

Jay

Jay Chiat was a hard guy to work for.And everybody wanted to. He could spot a false note at three hundred yards. And wouldn't let one get any closer. His unpredictability was so dependable you could set your watch by it.

His parodoxes were aligned in almost perfect symmetry. His sense of irony was exquisitely acute, and where he was likely to find it first was in himself. He once told the Wall Street Journal that memos were a corporate disease he was trying to eliminate, but Jay's own memos were gems that ought to have been bound and published.

If there was anyone who ever worked with Jay and wasn't changed by the experience, then that person wasted a first class education. Jay Chiat had a genius for inciting people to their absolute best without actually telling them thye had to. He inspired a self-imposed code that precluded your presenting him anything you knew could still be perfected.

He was brave, feisty, uncompromising. Sometimes maddening. But always true to what he saw as his highest duty: protecting great work. He was an inventor, an artist, a sociologist, an environmental engineer. He'd change everything just so people wouln't get bored.

Jay loved the new, the supremely current, the never before seen, the provocative, the seditious, the threat to the established order. Yet his esssential tenet was timeless, classic, pure, almost puritanical. An innocently old fashioned idea that good work is its own reward. The landscape of our particular business is prominent with people whose careers simply took a much more interesting path because they had (or made) the luck to work for Jay Chiat.

And every day they pay tribute to Jay just by getting up and doing a really good job.

That is what Chiat /Day always stood for. That is what he beleived in.

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Frank Gehry once was talking about his friend and client Jay Chiat..."Jay was a motherfucker to do business with" Frank the went on to compalin about how Jay had gone behind his back to mount a museum exhibition that in the eighties rescued Frank from obscurity. "He just has to save everybody" I was thinking "what a prick". His friend (Jay) was at the time recuperating from radiation treatment from Prostrate Cancer and he's bad mouthing him. But then I thought:

No, it's more than that, this is something they share- something more than being grumpy old men. They both talk like this--immoderately and precisely. If they think it, they say it. It is a rebel thing--quaint almost.

Jay was an edgy disruptive guy. A hipster. A troublemaker He watched things go by and then messed with them. Gehry called him "Mr Cool".

Coolness is the aesthic: A sort of modern classicism. Cool is the way to be indifferent to commerce and commercial at the same time.

Jay used to say that his real talent was for losing clients.

If you are comfortable with failing, if you court it even, if you aren't afraid of it, then possibly, you're not driven by it and you don't do unbecoming things to avoid it.

These excerpts come from an article written by Michael Wolff and he says at the end that the last image he has of talking to Jay was when Jay was in a hospital waiting room reviewing the x rays of the prostate cancer that eventually took his life.

He says "This image of Jay holding his x rays has stayed with me. It isn't a bad image--certainly not a powerless one. Rather I see Jay sitting there a certain amount of aloneness and Fuck-you-ness and even coolness. I thought, THIS IS HOW YOU DO IT.

This is how you do ...Jay was a very Brave Man !