Saying goodbye to a real motherf*cker

I meant a real one, I meant to say a real one. Jim Riswold 1957-2024

What do you mean you don’t expect over 400 people at your memorial and also the new CEO of Nike to speak at it?

I’ve been in Portland for a week and a half, with a side trip to Vancouver BC for tattoos. I was always planning to return around now, to take a break from an intense bout of work, to visit this city again in rainy season (even though I’ve lived here before and I get it), and to get out of Vermont around the holidays because two single person holiday seasons in Vermont were definitely two too many.

Right after my plans were booked, Jim Riswold died. If you’re a normal person you probably don’t know who he is. Was, I mean. But if you’re around my age you know his work (and by “his” — and it keeps being called “his” — I mean work done by teams of people, including art directors, producers, directors, clients, and yes that included women, too). But he was the writer and, hot damn, what a writer and conceptual thinker he was. That work includes these:

There’s more than this, of course. Riswold’s career was a storied one. After all, his obituary appeared in the New York Times. He would’ve expected nothing less.

I worked with Jim a long time ago, in the early nineties. But unlike Dan or David, Riswold was a motherfucker. A genius who knew he was a genius and would be more than delighted to tell you so. He was such an uncompromising pain in the ass that he was fired off the Nike account seven or eight times, but who’s counting?

I don’t have a lot of stories about Jim like others did and that’s ok, that’s not the purpose of this newsletter. Mostly I’m here to say that this is the trajectory, right? The last time I went to a W+K death thing, a double-header for Dan and David, I kept saying I didn’t want to only see all these former coworkers and current friends at fancy funerals. Yet here we are again. I don’t know, maybe it’s time to stop fighting it and just accept this is the stage of life I’m in. I mean, I know it is but I also don’t want to know it. What else are we going to all fly in for? I can’t think of a thing.

I've been in Portland for 10 days and sick for 7 of those days with what I’m now calling THE DEAD MAN'S CURSE. I’ve been surrounded by Kleenex, trying to get some writing done while it rains and rains and rains outside. It’s nice being back, even while being sick, even while not being able to make any social plans for most of my time here. And even though my head is full of snot and my liver called an Uber last weekend and I haven’t seen it since, I know Jim would still want me to talk about him, obviously.

He once threw a Sharpie at me (which I used to tell people was a stapler, because that's how I initially remembered it plus it's a better story). He only started being "nice" (human?) to me once I stood up to him and when I told him I wanted to be a writer. But that's also when he was healthy. I didn't get to know the Jim that endured a 24-year-long bout with multiple cancers.

There is a lot to be said about the glorification of bad behavior in any industry, creative or otherwise. And it doesn’t take a genius to know who can get away with it (white dudes) and who can’t (anyone else). But what struck me this past weekend in speaking with some of Jim’s lifelong friends, those who knew him since college and before he was such a big shot, is that they never saw the Jim that everyone was telling stories about. He never behaved that way with them. I find that fascinating. One said, “I think that veneer was paper-thin” and perhaps it was.

When I finally stood up to him all those years ago, he backed off. When I told him I wanted to be a writer it’s like his whole demeanor changed, and although I never became a writer at W+K it was like I was good with him from then on out. He’d look over the work that I kept attempting to make into a portfolio (I can say objectively now, it was real bad) and he was never mean about it. I suppose I would consider him a mentor just for not setting my work on fire in front of me, or hitting it with the STUPID stamp that he kept on this desk. Maybe he could sense that I wouldn’t be able to take too much (or any) shitting on at that stage of my career, that I might just fold and never try. I don’t know, I’ll never know now.

I don’t need to keep going on and on about someone you’ve possibly never heard of. I’ll leave you with a few of Jim’s interviews, though, and I hope you’ll watch one or all of them. They helped me get to know the Jim I didn’t get to know while I’ve been in Vermont. It was the Jim who was fighting to stay alive and went all in on creating art in the face of more than two decades of looming death.

If you’re feeling like, look, I bet this shit is going to be really depressing, trust me when I say that these are worth watching because, illness or not, he was an incredible writer, with devastating lightning-quick wit. There’s one almost-dying story that contains the line, “Look, I’m trying to lapse into a coma and you’re giving me a hand job?” What more do I need to say?

See you on the other side, Riswold. I have a feeling you and I won’t be in the same neighborhood as Dan and David 🔥

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A quick 2-minute snapshot that brought me right back. “Do you know who your competition is? FREE PORNOGRAPHY” 💀

From 2011, a joint talk by Jim and his cancer doctor who invented the drug Gleevec that saved Jim’s life the first time. (How often do you get to say someone’s life was saved the first time?)

Recorded just a few weeks before Jim’s death, a discussion of how art can save you. What I will be choosing to remember most about Jim is what he says towards the end of this interview.

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