present tension

If you graphed the activity of this blog since it was set up (in WordPress 1.2.2) a bit over four years ago, it would be a straight 1/1 downhill slope. This is partly because I wrote so much filler in the early days, as I experimented with various blog installations. But it is also because the blog was often personal–though not utterly personal–and neither required nor gained an audience. It had no purpose other than being a personal and experimental blog, one of many I’ve set up and then neglected. It was not there to find work or to chat about sex and politics. And since it was personal but not utterly personal, it was unable to draw upon the full flow of my teeming imagination. A blog like that requires complete anonymity, the sort of thing that Blogger specializes in.

Of course I have ten or twenty other blogs, set up in Serendipity and Blogger and Drupal and many, many WordPress themes.

I suspect the personal-blog world is drying up all over. You can now house your thoughts (personal–but not utterly personal) in Facebook Notes, and feel fairly confident that somebody will read them. Knowing who your audience is, is a big consideration. It shapes your writing and causes some ideas to germinate and flourish and others to be thrown out into the dust on the road.

Most Facebook people are Obama enthusiasts, probably as a result of some marketing campaign or other. Same reason people carry iPods. Well I am not an Obama enthusiast, so I have to soft-pedal my dislike of the whole motley gang. That’s fine, though. It keeps from yielding to my usual inclination toward turgid politico-sociological rants. It frees me up to Comment and Note about a hundred other things, and post novels, jokes and stories.

Actually, January 2009 Resolutions. No point in making year-long resolutions. You don’t know what the future is. That is what Januarys are for, to get the lay of the land.

Januarys are transitional, never fully a part of the new year. We’ll be in the tail of 2008 at least till Groundhog Day. January is a good staging area, a period to put your ideas through feasibility testing. Here’s my free-form list for the immediate future:

1) Dump this site. Archive the contents, maybe put the blog up again with newer blogware and a shorter URL.
2) Clean off your desk and try to keep it pretty naked.
3) Transfer Farnco to its own site. Intro by Cornell Woolrich. Demo of a swf and a flv player.
4) Get rid of unused domains, either by letting expire or actively discarding.
5) Tie up loose ends of D&T and put it into typescript shape. Drawings: these can be sketchy till publisher buys.
6) Ditto TT…aim to cut to about 200 pp. Don’t rewrite, cut.
7) Comic strip or panel every day. Keep the rancid/incendiary stuff to 50%.
8) TAB: dummy up with columns by Faber, Shilling, etc., slightly redacted. Important-looking charts and graphs. Pepper & Salt cartoon, with Uncle Bill?
9) Bother Penguin till the CE comes in, bother Stuart for Random connections.
10) Job Hunt: we go with plan AOT, any old thing. Other plan wasn’t working. Stop looking for a career. No careers here.
11) Gallery News: Anything here? Two or three serious notices, a comic strip and the fervent Ian Stuart Dowdy may be all it needs. If you bothered to go to a gallery once in a while, you’d have filler right there. Just look at Fraser’s blog and follow the lead. Keep Peaches out, she’s killed it twice.
12) Job Hunt: resist the temptation to respond to Hindustanis who phone you up because they saw your resume online.
13) In these opening weeks, gain at least a basic working knowledge of PHP, and do the exercises in the Flex books.
14) By January 2, finish updating the addlist with all the new people and passwords. Print out, put into the Oxfam.

I am taking the incumbent unfinished-novel out for an airing and dry-cleaning and boy, does it need it. I can smell it from over…[points in the general direction of Carnegie Hall] there!

Worse than the bad writing itself (otiose exposition, if I am using those words correctly; pointless digressions) is the gross tonnage of doggie-mess that needs to be waded through. At one point I decided the book needed to have 60 chapters. Therefore I readily added padding here and there, introducing very minor and marginal characters, just so the crucial happenings in chapters 25 and 30 would have enough ballast separating them. Then, every few months I copied all my current drafts and notes into a new folder. It took me much of last weekend just to find the best and latest drafts of these chapters and copy them into yet another folder so I can whittle them down to size.

There are several good books here. Unfortunately none seems to be the book I set out to write. That was a semi-autobiographical novel, if that is not redundant, about my brief involvement with an educational-tv kiddie show, circa 1973. This was precisely the era when educational tv was trying to rebrand itself as “public television” on the flimsy grounds that it did not accept advertising (a dubious point even then). Still, if you said “educational television” in those days, everyone knew what you meant; whereas if you use the expression nowadays, people imagine you mean some kind of video classroom.

It was a long entry so I am reposting just the first few para, and hiding the spicy and controversial remainder.

Say, I’ve got a swell idea. Let’s move to the moon. If we get enough people to sign on to the idea, I know some builders who’d just jump on it. The land is cheap, for one thing. I mean real cheap! As in FREE. That means it’s even cheaper than those buck-an-acre lots they’re selling in those gutted-out counties in Upstate New York. You hear about buying “summer homes” up there in those depopulated cow counties. Or “retirement homes,” which somehow sounds even more desperate. People keep telling you how lucky they were to get in on the ground floor, and how Jerkwater America is a fantastic place to invest, particularly if you can invest only $54.

There are minor inconveniences, sure. but they’re no more serious or consequential than those notional flaws that used to send some “factory second” Milano cookies to the Pepperidge Farm Thrift Shops. Those Thrift Shop Milanos were perfectly yummy, and the only possible flaw I could think of was that maybe some of the wafers weren’t perfectly aligned with each other–but I was just guessing.

What kind of inconveniences do they have in the sticks? First thing you always hear is, there’s no sewage system. What a stupid objection. Who comes up with comments like this, the United Sewer Workers Union? Hey look, in most of small-town and rural America nobody has a sewage system. It’s really no big deal.You just put a concrete pit in the backyard and flush your toilet into it. It’s called a septic tank. Out there everybody has one.

What other drawbacks? Okay, you’ve got to drive thirty miles just to buy a pack of cigarettes. This may be true, but look. They’ve got Indian casinos a little further up the road, Indian casinos where you can buy whole cartons for about two dollars. And that’s not all you can do.

Anyway, back to the two dollars. Think about it! Two dollars a carton is less than they went for when Red Skelton was plugging Chesterfields on the NBC Blue Network in 1945.

Now let’s talk about jobs. There are no good jobs nearby. I won’t dispute it. But you can always find something within fifty or a hundred miles, if you really look hard. And remember how modest your needs are. You don’t need a job that pays a lot, because now you’re living rent-free. Rent-free? Hell, you’re mortgage-free! You just bought fifty-four acres of prime bottom-land along the Schloogadooga and New Ilium Barge Canal. It’s true you’re living in an old horse-trailer that you picked up for ten bucks at the Devon Horse Show, but that’s just temporary and anyway you don’t owe anything on it, and pretty soon you’ll be building the house, I mean The HOME, of Your Dreams.

Transportation? Sure, there isn’t any, except for driving your own car, and gasoline’s horribly expensive, but look, everybody’s suffering. We’re in this together. Everybody’s got to have a car, right? And driving two hours each way to work each day isn’t the end of the world. Millions of people in California and Georgia do it every day. End of the day, you come home to your horse-trailer and you’ve got fifty-four acres you can call your own.

Now let’s look at the positives.

Here I am, working again at Chelsea Piers, the only place where you can keep up with top 40 hits while eating sushi, wearing workout gear, monitoring your e-mail and generally producing the words and drawings that your career depends upon. It will be very hard for me when I have to work in an office again.

You forget about the real world here. Half the people are extraordinarily fit and good-looking, and the others are just, well, old. Or black. You forget about the epidemic of hormone- and corn-syrup-induced obesity that rages on in the outside world, beyond the piers and past the moat that surrounds Manhattan. But just yesterday I was sitting here and saw a FAT BOY. A little fat boy, about 11 or 12, the kind you see in shopping malls and friends’ houses (schoolmates, one hopes). He wore a voluminous t-shirt, shorts that came below the the knee, and a head that was nearly shaved. In other words, standard fat-kid wear. I used to think this look originated with fat black kids–gangsta rap and that–but now I realize that it didn’t; the first boys I ever saw like this were normal anglo-saxon types; no doubt little black kids took to the style because they are constitutionally more inclined to be obese. And when you’re an obese kid, an obese boy particularly, there aren’t very many kinds of clothes you can wear, let alone fit into.

I try to imagine this little porker dressed in the sartorial analog from, say, 1970, and what I get is a mental picture of very tight bluejeans worn with a leather belt and a yoked cowboy shirt. Or maybe some superhero t-shirt. If you saw someone dressed like that today, you’d assume it was a mental patient. Of course in 1970 if you saw a 200-pound 11-year-old with a shaved head…

The shaved head is the most mystifying part of the concoction. Is it a way of reinforcing gender identity or something? Years ago I had a coworker who was an eccentric computer programmer and mild transvestite. Nothing unusual there, but as he approached age 50 he decided to see if he could become a woman. Hatchet-faced and blue-bearded, he was a most unlikely candidate. But by jiminy he did it…sort of…though the journey required a continual tripping over the obvious, such as finding out that his wife didn’t care for the idea, told everyone he’d gone crazy, and ultimately tried to sue him for every last cent and prevent him from having access to their two preteen sons.

A bunch of us from the office made a journey out to this person’s condo one day to deliver a potted plant or something. The new woman was at home, recuperating from extensive facial surgery that enabled her to look a bit like Margaret Hamilton rather than, say, Murray Hamilton. She had her black kinky hair arranged in two plush cocker-spaniel ears that hid most of her face. She plied us with drinks and asked us to stay a while and meet her two sons, who were making a rare visit that evening. Nice looking boys, to judge from their pictures in the hall, neither fat nor thin. What turned up at six pm however were two roly-poly youngsters with shaven heads.

“They look like they’re recovering from brain cancer,” one of us said. This was some years ago, as I say.

“Oh they just did that recently,” said the programmer, meaning the hair. “It’s the new style.”

The rest of us looked at each other and mentally wondered if the New Style could possibly be related to Daddy’s New Life, but none of us was drunk enough to ask the kids directly.

I made a new friend via e-mail a couple of weeks back. He runs a tiny advertising-temp agency and has a most pleasing electro-epistolary manner. So much so that when he shot me a note last week proposing I come in and meet him, I wrote back, “Dude!…”

I’d already Googled Dude’s unusual, double-barrelled name and discovered he was an occasional road-race athlete, with 10k times resembling my own. Except he was male, a bit younger, and not taking his racing seriously.

Hey! We would get along like thieves afire. Thick as houses!

So I get to his Murray Hill warren at 2 pm today. He’s not as handsome and dashing as I’d imagined, but he immediately greets me by name and I greet him back.

Then everything falls apart. He thinks he sent me “paperwork” for me to fill out. I don’t know what he’s talking about. He has his colored girl print out a new set and then he mixes it up with somebody else’s references.

He asks me if I have a portfolio. Well I do have a Prat case that I bought in 1988 and toted around to Art Directors for a few months when I thought I was going to be an editorial illustrator…but I certainly do not tote it around now. Not in this century. I do have a pile of junk–ads, cartoons, layouts, logos, corporate identity, Flash banners–displayed in a website, but it’s not something I spend a lot of time on.

[I know all about Portfolios. I got wise to them back in the 1980s. They were (and are) a strange obsession of commercial-art colleges. An example of anal-retentive typography on this page, a highly derivative ad treatment on that page (four-word hed in Futura Bold, powerful b/w image)…a little bit of everything…and that fourteen-dollar-an-hour job (1989 dollars) is right around the corner. Or so the career counselor at The Art Center/School of Visual Arts/Parsons was advising the kids. I loved graphic design and the occasional classes I took at the School of Visual Arts in the 1980s, so it took me a long time to accept the hard fact that graphic designers are a very dim breed. I started to figure this out at The San Diego Reader, where we had a designer who couldn’t read more than ten words of an article without moving his lips, and that took too much effort, so generally he gave up around word eleven, and picked whatever graphic or illustration suited his grasshopper whim, however inappropriate it was to the article he was laying out. He’d have an article on some grand-opera production going on in San Diego, and because he very much liked the old photograph of Dame Nellie Melba in 1920, he’d use that as the main design element for the layout, which turned out to be a cover story. Only trouble is, all the references to Melba’s visit to San Diego in 1920 got axed early in the edit process, so the design motifs made so sense whatsoever. Later on when I was at Salomon Smith Barney we had a very talented and charming designer who was very good at putting a green square next to a pink triangle but quite out of his element with anything involving the real world. Once he came to me with an outline map of Oceania and asked me which island (New Guinea or Australia) was the one that had Sydney. But I digress…]

Bad to worse. I’m at the temp agency, showing my poor excuse of an online portfolio. Now, I am pretty good at Flash. Timeline, code, you name it. I show Mister Double-Barrelled some Flash pieces on my portfolio. One of them is a complicated device that displays Flash banners as though they were on a TV. The whole point is that I created the coding behind this device, but he is focused completely on the low-resolution content I use as examples. He thinks the content shown on the device is what I’m showing off, not the device itself. He talks a mile a minute, bobbing his head up and down, looking from side to side.

I try to explain, as I point to the display on his big-screen iMac. He asks me to repeat. He doesn’t understand me. My diction isn’t bad, he just wants me to face him as I explain. The guy is either drugged out or half-deaf and needs to read my lips.

He natters on, like somebody smoking a midnight eight-ball. Slurs his words. Starts a sentence, then kills it for whatever happens to be the latest and newest idea in his drug-fueled grasshopper brain…says something completely unrelated, keeps interrupting me, then asks me to repeat and clarify myself and talks over me.

Fucking madman.

He asks another question, I try to answer in detail. Then he hurries me along. Finishes my sentences, finishes them wrong. Not a clue, no idea what I’m saying, doesn’t know or care. He listens for buzzwords coming out of my mouth, hoping that one of them will connect with something he thinks he knows about.

Scary. How soon do I get to leave?

This is the most unexpected and offputting encounter I have ever had with an employment recruiter. It’s not just his abrasiveness and herky-jerky manner, which might simply reflect a brain with to much Red Bull or coke. And I am too much of a libertarian to find fault with those indulgences.

No, his presentation suggests a much deeper problem: a lack of professional experience in any field other than temporary job-placement. For years he’s taken phone calls from secretaries and HR halfwits who relay their temp needs, he shouts back to them what he thinks they want–"you want a photo retoucher who knows type fonts? Photoshop? Someone expert with masks and channels? You don’t know? Does it matter? How high can you go? Minimum billing I can do is $45 an hour"–and either there’s a sale or there isn’t; then he does this again and again, all day, year-in-year-out. He doesn’t know what he’s selling and neither does the halfwit at the other end, but they both know a little lingo about graphic software. A meeting of the minds.

If it sounds like a hellish way to earn a living, consider that once you’ve been doing job-placement for a little while, you can’t do anything else. You’ve been selling canned goods over the telephone, basically, and you don’t have the skills for anything else, at least not anything that pays well. Moreover you’ve acquired a gimlet-eyed contempt for your merchandise and clients, and the idea of somehow joining them in the trenches is unthinkable.

***

It all reminds me of a similar shoestring operation I hooked up with soon after getting out of college. I wanted some paying work right away, so I went to a temp agency that advertised with big classified ads in the New York Times. I kept noticing this place that said it had plenty of jobs with a Major Television Network. The firm had a grandiose title, something like “Madison Avenue Agency for Advertising Communications.” There was a cardboard sign on the door and no indication of prosperity within–a bare office with a spindly pockmarked fellow named Clifford Scott and his colored receptionist. Clifford was nice when you first met him. Terribly friendly, terribly eager to meet the new talent. His slipshod charm made you overlook his frayed collar and dirty nails.

I asked him about the jobs in TV, and after some hesitation he told the Major Television Network was TelePrompter. TelePrompter, in addition to making cueing devices, once owned a few cable tv stations, though no one mistook it for a Major Television Network. This was a while ago. How far back? Let’s say 1979.

Anyway I did not get a job in television. But Clifford placed me immediately, that very afternoon. I was sent up to 53rd Street to answer telephones on the third floor of the Museum of Modern Art. I was very pleased with my good luck. I observed the lady who was VP of Public Development (whatever that might be) and with what bonhomie she greeted her coworkers as she sashayed about in her nubby raw-silk multicolored jacket, and thought to myself: “Hah, in a year or so, I’ll be giving orders to some functionary like that, and wearing an even finer raw-silk jacket.”

They didn’t need me to answer the phones at MOMA the next day, so a day or two later Clifford sent me to Foote Cone and Belding, an ad agency on Floor 42 of the Pan Am building. FCB had a very strange work schedule, at least for their temps. Nine to five, but you were required to subtract exactly 75 minutes for your lunch break (which had to be between 12:15 and 2:00), so that your daily billable hours would equal exactly 6.75 hours. You see, they wanted you to have a full lunch hour and have enough time to get up and down the elevators, but they didn’t want to pay you for all that travel time.

I typed one or two memos and otherwise spent the day reading the Sunday NYTimes Magazine and doing the crossword.

I was one of two temp typists. The other was a fat sulky Jewish girl named Robyn Fineman, who spent the day ostentatiously reading the Hunter College course catalog. I tried to joke with her once or twice. I got nowhere. She was fat, she was Jewish, she had issues. She was crushed with shame to be working in such a menial position. Actually she was borderline mentally ill and lucky to have a job at all, but let’s not get stuck on Robyn… Bad moods prevailed in the whole department. One of the account executives I worked for was a fat and thoroughly nasty shrew by the name of Helene Lo Grasso. When she gave me a scrawled page to type, she tossed it on my Selectric (as hard as you can toss a sheet of paper). One sentence was totally undeciperable, so I went into her office where she was bullshitting with a coworker. “Oh what is it NOW?” she yelled in her working-class Staten Island honk, following it up with assorted expletives and insults. In lofty tones I informed her that I couldn’t understand her writing and she had no grasp of punctuation.

Did I mention this was a one-day assignment? Initially I understood it to be longer, but something didn’t quite work out. Clifford never gave me direct feedback. Neither did he send me back to FCB, or anywhere else.

I decided that Helene Lo Grasso was to blame. But I knew how to find her. Before leaving, I had slipped the Foote Cone & Belding directory into my Whitney Museum of Modern Art tote bag. And for years afterwards I would send Helene Lo Grasso padded envelopes containing dogshit and roadkill (after first ascertaining that she still worked in the place).

Trite and childish, I know…but why be more inventive? This fat pig didn’t warrant imagination.

I kept following up on Clifford Scott, too, checking the classifieds to see if his enterprise was still in business. It finally folded around 1984. A year or two before that I dropped in to say hello. The agency seemed even smaller and rattier than before. So did Clifford. I told him I had a very good job but hated it, and wanted to go back to temping, preferably in advertising. He pretended to remember me, but obviously couldn’t, though he seemed to be thinking back very hard, and I imagined that the confused expression on his face suggested a faint memory of a bad smell.

Do you care?

That’s the important thing. That’s what all primitive people really want to know about you.

They get to the point where they’ve figured out that you’re either male or female (even though they they can’t see either a penis gourd or pendulous dugs), and they know your approximate age (somewhere between adolescence and total decrepitude). Now they’re happily puffing away on your Philip Morris Commanders (king-size, unfiltered, good for jungle bugs) and they’re ready to move into the small-talk stage of your acquaintanceship.

And here it is. “Hey you! You got chillun? How many chillun?”

Go ahead and tell them. Anything you like. One kid, six kids, sixteen kids. It’s not like the little savages are going to write down your children’s birthdays so they can send them something nice (just imagine!). No, they’re just being innocently nosy. It’s something they ask of all strangers, and no one’s ever smacked them down for this rudeness so they keep on asking.

Sometimes the questions get detailed—"You have a boy? How old? Is he warrior? You have girl—how much you sell her for?” It is always best to be prepared for this. Along with the Philip Morris Commanders in the left side pocket of your photo-vest, bring a fact sheet about your kids. Maybe even some fuzzy snapshots.

My own prepared script goes basically like this. “Oh yes I have four children. Two girls, two boys. Between five and fifteen. Evenly spaced. Their names are Mary, Joan, John, and Robert. They live with their other parent, as I am usually away on business. The boys play baseball [a game formerly very popular in America] and the girls do ballet [this is a kind of theater-dance some people do in my country]. Who is oldest? Oh, that would be John. Then Mary. Then…”

Even a savage has limited attention for this sort of thing, and by this point my new friend is probably waving and nodding and inviting me into his hut to look at the shrunken heads.

Monday night I was flying to JFK from Heathrow and exhausted my reading material before we passed Newfoundland. I found Caddyshack listed on the in-flight movie menu, but everytime I looked for it on the assigned channel I got a mid-80s Molly Ringwald turkey instead. And I’d already seen the Narnia movie and the documentary about the German submarine. So I idly scrolled through the channels and came to rest at I Love Lucy.
It was an old episode. No, I mean really old, one of the early ones from the first (1951-52) season…Lucy and Ricky (and Fred and Ethel) as the broadest of broad comic characters, before they got backstory and nuance and visited Hollywood and Europe.
In fact, it was THE classic episode, the first one that pops into your mind, the one where the men and women “switch jobs.” They don’t literally switch jobs (Ricky was the only character who had real employment anyway), rather they switch breadwinner-homemaker roles. Ricky and Fred cook in the kitchen while Lucy and Ethel get assembly-line jobs in a candy factory. I’d seen this a million times–well, a dozen–but this time was utterly fascinated by all the details and subtexts and social propaganda.
1. The appliances in the Ricardos’ kitchen are bright and obtrusive. They aren’t just mute background furniture (like the succession of Macintosh computers you see in Jerry Seinfeld’s place). There’s a matched washer-dryer pair, and neither looks ever to have been used. There’s the distinct air of a TV commercial for Maytag or RCA Whirlpool. Message: “If your kitchen doesn’t look like this, well for heaven’s sake make it so. You can buy them now, you know. War production’s been over for six or seven years.”
2. Elsewhere there’s a real postwar look to the whole thing. Everybody’s fifteen or twenty pounds overweight, and they’re all over-upholstered. Wide lapels, big shoulders and skirts. Showing off one’s bounty, you know. Now that the war’s over we can do that.
3. The effects of war on social roles are much in evidence. A man wears a suit and brings home the bacon, a woman wears frilly clothes and hangs out at home. Anything else is eccentric and laughable.
4. Women getting jobs means putting on waitress uniforms (like Mildred Pierce) and working on an assembly line (like Rosie the Riveter). Roz Russell career girls? Never heard of ‘em. If Ethel and Lucy got decent jobs, that would undercut the premise of the humor, which is that women in the workplace are pitiable fish out of water.

Rumbling-bumbling in the back of my brain, some tags of poesy and foggy images leap up and nag at me every so often.

I was about seven years old when I came across a short poem about a girl who was worried about having a dirty frock. The accompanying illustration, vaguely Tenniel-ish, showed a rather mature young lady (about 14, I might have thought) in Alice band and frilly 19th-century dress. She was looking down at the folds of her frock with a mildly perturbed expression.
I scarcely read the poem, but the last line jumped up and grabbed me: “Nor on my Pinafore.”

Pinafore! How I hated this aspect of children’s anthologies: the preciousness of so many of their selections, their cultish obsession with mid-Victoriana! I had the vague but distinct sense that such pieces reflected the taste of perverse old people who didn’t really like children at all: old maids with cats and tea cosies, strange men who dreamt about petticoats.

This, I fumed inwardly, is what is wrong with putting adults in charge of children’s literature!

I should note I was very down on Victoriana and pinafores anyway, having recently seen bits of H.M.S. Pinafore on the tube and finding it disgusting.

Anyway, here we are, thirty-odd or maybe forty years later, and the memory of the irritating poem and illustration comes back to me. I go to Google and find that the offending lines were an Edward Lear nonsense verse, called “Spots of Greece":

Papa once went to Greece,
And there I understand
He saw no end of lovely spots
About that lovely land.
He talks about these spots of Greece
To both Mama and me
Yet spots of Greece upon my dress
They can’t abear to see!
I cannot make it out at all–
If ever on my Frock
They see the smallest Spot of Greece
It gives them quite a shock!
Henceforth, therefore–to please them both
These spots of Greece no more
Shall be upon my frock at all–
Nor on my Pinafore.

Haw-haw! A real knee-slapper, eh? I probably noticed that it was Edward Lear, but this wouldn’t have impressed me awfully. So far as I was concerned he was a drooling quaintsy, self-satisfied, with a low-wattage sense of humor.

Lear’s stuff was all over those treasuries and anthologies of “children’s literature,” and constituted fully one-fourth of the contents of my edition of Ditties for the Nursery (so delightfully contrived that they may be either sung or said, by nurse or baby).

Today the Associated Press posted this photograph, without explanatory comment, on its website. If it truly is a photo of President Bush as he looked (say) thirty years ago, then his years of drink and drugs took much more of a toll than anyone has hitherto suspected.

I really did not intend this blog to be a public accounting of my road races and negative splits, it’s just that most of my idle thoughts—you might say chewing-gum ruminations or CGRs—are about running. Not long ago most of my CGRs were about all my personal failures and deficiencies, except in the early morning, when I raged and muttered about other people’s. Since I can’t do anything about my own failures and deficiencies, let alone other people’s, I am experiencing far less frustration these days as I go about my woolgathering.
Moreover, the running thing is as good a peephole as any other when you seek to make cultural criticism. The stuff you notice! The stuff you discover!
Take a good look at the accompanying image for the “Crazylegs Marathon” in 1972, which I just found on the NYRR website. In sheer repellent ugliness, this poster or flyer surpasses anything I’ve seen from that era. Note the “Deco"-style Letraset presstype used for the arching logotype—heavy influence from theatrical posters for “Dames at Sea,” “No, No, Nanette!” and “Follies.”
But that’s relatively minor, compared to the rich sociological ore to be dug up here. Look at those photos! Now this is 1972, remember, the high-tide mark of feminism. Ms. magazine had just been launched ("Jane O’Reilly on the Housewife’s Moment of Truth"). But there was no visual vocabulary for portraying a women-only road race. No toned bodies here, no high-fashion workout gear. My impression from the photos is that this event is some kind of a fun-run for flabby gals in Gussie Moran panties.
We are going back here to a forgotten mindset: an era before people commonly spoke of “jogging” (c. 1977) or “jogbras” (c. 1979), and when any run longer than a dash around the block might be called a marathon. Or maybe it’s not really a forgotten mindset at all, just a rather weirdly unexamined one. I know so many people, age 40 on up, who still look upon distance running, especially distance running by women, as a marginal and eccentric activity. The world’s moved on but the calendar in their heads is still dated 1972.
And what was the “Crazylegs Marathon"? Well it wasn’t a marathon, it was a 6-mile run, sponsored by Johnson’s Wax, which was launching a new leg-shave cream for women called Crazylegs. Originally they wanted to sponsor a marathon, then discovered there were no female marathoners—well, almost none. Crazylegs the shave cream vanished without a trace, thanks to a trademark-infringement suit. But the race itself survived, evolving into an annual 10k that reappeared every June, often with a new name and sponsor.
When I first became aware of it in the early 80s, it was called the “L’Eggs Mini Marathon” and all its branding was in hot pink. Not that big a leap, really, from leg-shave-gel to pantyhose. This in an era when the stereotypical workout wear for gym-bound gals was a stretchy striped leotard and leg-warmers.
Now it’s called the “Circle of Friends NY Mini 10K,” which if you ask me is even more confusing than “Crazylegs Marathon.” It’s not a mini-10k at all, and all Circle of Friends means to me is a bad Minnie Driver movie.
However, its ads and promotional materials are beautiful.
For more on this fascinating artefact, see this link:
http://www.mini10k.org/history.php#

Last Labor Day weekend I was up at five in the morning and noticed that some oddballs—advertising boffins, I supposed—were blocking off the street outside and setting up a series of double beds in the middle of Sixth Avenue and photographing them from a high rolling platform. Just now I follow a link to The Daily Telegraph’s site and find an animated GIF ad for British Airways that shows the image I’ve long been awaiting. I notice they’ve taken their six or so beds and Photoshopped them into a longer parade.

(Correction, please. It was not merely Photoshop. They painstakingly moved all six of the beds down the avenue and reshot them in position. Why the hell would you do that, when the cityscape light was changing every few minutes anyway, so that none of the shadows would exactly match and you’d have to retouch each tier of beds anyway? The photo retoucher has his reasons. See here for his description.)

A vile and mean-streaky harridan whom we used to call the Sausage Lady has published a “memoir” (quotations here suggesting a high degree of self-aggrandizing fictionalization) that tells how she was abused and victimized when she was a fat ugly little whelp. She keeps popping up in my occasional political cartoons, including this throwaway from 2003. Oh, yes—she’s the one with the bag of mail.

Postscript, May 2008. Not long after writing the above, I learned that the Sausage Lady was dead. Yes, even as her Fat Girl made her a bestselling author in her 60s, she was wasting away with many different forms of cancer (including pineapple cancer, which Harold liked best). Well lots of us get cancer from time to time, so there’s no gloating here. However, there was a time when I called upon the mischevious sprites of the world to fill her with tumors, and this was the first thing I thought of when I heard she was dead. This was about 15 years ago. Sausage Lady and some friends of hers were waging a campaign of horrific pranks at my expense. Everything from harassing phone calls to anonymous smears to physical threats. I hadn’t done anything against them, other than occasionally complain or fight back (feebly), though at long last I did engage an attorney to send threatening folderol to Sausage Lady’s employer. More decisive action was called for, I felt. So I built a Devil Doll of the Sausage Lady, shaped it out of Sculpey and froze it upside down in the fridge. Then I tied a miniature noose about its neck and hung it from the arched entrance to my kitchen. Finally I took it out into the alley and smashed it on the cobblestones. I put pieces into an envelope and addressed it to Sausage Lady, along with an anonymous note saying how sorry we all were to hear she was dying of colonic cancer.

So farewell then, George Kennan. Seems to me I’ve been hearing your obituary in my dreams for about ten days. How delightful to read in the Times that you were a gloomy, complicated and morose person, who despaired of conveying fine nuance in a world of political hackery. Whenever I thought of a foreign-service career for myself, you were always there in my mind as one of the Big Names. Somebody who’d hung around for decades—from the first delegation to the Soviet Hell in the early thirties, to an active career as an elder sage that ended only with his death at 101. I suppose now I shall have to think seriously about that graduate education in global whatsit and foreign relations. The baton passes.

The NYRR Snowflake 4-mile run, split up into men’s and women’s races, was this morning. I treated it casually. It didn’t bother me when everybody was passing me for the last mile and a half. This included a tall girl in an ungainly straw sombrero decorated with small toothpick models of The Gates. ‘Great hat!’ I heard when she was a few paces behind, and ‘great hat!’ again when she was twenty paces ahead. This sort of attention would turn my stomach. Maybe if you ask for attention you can deal with it. All I know is it distresses me mightily when goofballs stand by the side of the road, give the thumbs-up sign, and bellow, ‘All right! Looking good!’
After all that, my pace was 8:01 or a net of 32:07.
In other words, if I’d just goosed it a bit for the last quarter-mile, I could have broken the 8-minute barrier again, with room to spare.

To lunch with KP and Sylvia at Seppi’s. Seppi’s now offers their famous Alsatian tarte flambée rolled up with meat or fish, served with fries and soup and salad and bacon. I did not see the bacon, but I was very full. Sylvia had a regular tarte flambée, followed by a hot chocolate torte. I snapped a picture of her with my miniature Air France digital. We talked a bit of blogs. ‘Oh Sylvia,’ said I,’you ought to have a blog.’ She may be interested. A schoolmate was wearing a cap that said Blogger, and didn’t know what it was.

Then to The Container Store with Moki. Moki is in a refurbishing mood, and dreams of redoing the apartment with wire shelves and brackets. ‘No standards!’ I tell him. I’ve had lots more experience with wiry things and molly bolts than he has. Cleverly organized closets look really swell in the store, but they don’t work unless they’re made of solid materials. Moki plans to buy me a tall wiry mesh-drawer unit to keep my clothes in. That is a Margot classic. I’ve kept my clothes in things like that most of my life. Someday someone will give me a Biedermeier chest.

Back home I do a quick Google for Paris Marathon attendees and find Meg Hourihan. She’s not only doing the Paris, she’ll be running with me in the Brooklyn Half-Marathon on March 19th. I dropped her a note. I’d come across her site before. She is, coicidentally enough, the creator of Blogger, and quite famous in that little world. The New Yorker did a story on her a few years ago. If she writes back I’ll have a new friend in Paris for a few days, though I can’t imagine what we’d talk about.