| Goodnight, Sweet prince |
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| Joe Sweet 1959 -2002 Obituary From the Minneapolis Star-Tribune A review of Joe's movie "Sweet displays a keen grasp of his actors' abilities .... impressive to see a first-time director who is actually in control of the performances." The "Men of A&L" Calendar A PDF of the 1993 calendar aided and abetted by Joe. Join the group and you'll find it in the FILES section as "2001 CALENDAR.PDF." Share a Cup of Joe Have a memory to pass along? Come on, tell us all about it. Just use the guestbook link on my home page. And what do I remember? I remember posting a terrible industrial ad about something called "Haveg Ablatives" on the walls of the A&L kitchen--at which point Joe began calling me "Davidablatif," and kept doing so for nine years; I remember being asked to look at a horrible early script he'd done, called "SEXXWORLD"; I remember his funny shoes and his love of diners and our endless riffing on the movie "Diggstown." But what I remember most of all was going to Joe's wedding just two short years ago, and seeing an endless procession of friends stand up and pour their hearts out ... including a woman who said he'd brought her handfuls of fresh grass while she was in the hospital with cancer, so she could smell it and know why she had to go on fighting and living, for life itself. It was something I'd never known about Joe as we'd gone off on separate roads in life, and it made me realize that each of us actually lives many lives--not only our own sense of self, but the private slices of shared memory with each of the many people we touch. And it made me marvel that Joe meant so many different things to people, in ways outside the private boundaries of our own friendship. |
| January 11, 2003 TEN YEARS AGO, Joe Sweet helped con me into posing semi-nude for a beefcake calendar featuring the men of our ad agency. It was not the first time that Joe's friends found themselves willing prisoners of his fancy--swept up and carried aloft in some bizarre venture, like Dorothy riding a twister to Oz. On the contrary, it was a regular occurrence, one of Joe's chief delights. And it remained the man's signature, right up to his death on October 4, 2002. In the month or so since hearing of Joe's passing I've found surprisingly little about it on the web, considering how many folks were touched by Joe. So I've made this page as a kind of virtual bar stool, where old friends might stop by to share stories and hoist a glass to a departed comrade. Where to begin ... When Joe became a copywriter at Anderson & Lembke around 1992, it seemed as if Mister Rogers had just hopped into a shark tank. Joe had this wide-eyed gentleness, rooted not in the usual adman's desire to show off what he knew about things, but a childish curiosity to know more about people. It didn't just stand out among the usual wiseass cynics--it was actually unnerving. He'd talk to anybody, anytime, asking questions that would have been off-limits or embarrassing if he wasn't so sensitive of people's feelings. If you voiced an opinion or a prevailing wisdom, he'd ask you what made you think so ... not to spring some rhetorical trap, but because he was interested in your thinking. In a business of masks and carefully cultivated personas, Joe was unguarded. He had drive and tenacity, and he was aware of what more jaded types like yours truly thought about matters; but all of that was somehow made to serve the things he thought it'd be "really neat" to do. |
| Ah, yes--how chilling it was to see Joe get that faraway look in his eye and suddenly say with a decisive air, "You know what'd be really neat ..." Because you were hooked. There'd be a screenplay to help with, or an agency event to pitch in on, or God knows what. But his ultimate pied piper act was one of his last. In November 2001, the post-9/11 recession rippled through the ad industry and led to major layoffs at Joe's agency, Fallon Worldwide. Suddenly he was out of a job after years of high-profile work for clients such as BMW and Timex. A lot of us would have begun networking frantically while bemoaning our fates. Joe? He made a movie. He'd put together a script and rounded up a band of amateurs and semipros over the summer in Minneapolis, shooting scenes with a little digital video camera. To him, unemployment was the perfect opportunity to go all-out. So Joe became a cameraman, a director, a film editor. He swept his friends up into that personal whirlwind, somehow managing 50 speaking parts on a $30,000 budget. When spirits flagged in the summer heat, he joked people out of it. When the challenges seemed too great, he just kept pushing in that gentle yet stubborn way of his. And when "How to Kill a Mockingbird" premiered in August 2002, Joe Sweet saw 500 people applaud a movie about inner voices and personal dreams. Because Joe always believed in his own inner voice, and he was always deeply interested in the personal dreams of others. Of the man I will say no more, for teary eulogies were not in Joe Sweet's line. He was in many ways more alive than I, and trifling matters of mortality do not alter that fact in the memories of his friends. Rest in peace, Joe. We think of you, and we smile. |