THE ETHICIST

Q. I recently settled down with a really nice girl I met in the Park. We may even get married someday. Her family is well off, and her parents own a big house in the south of France where they go almost every summer. They are nice enough people, I guess, but more than a little crazy. Both are big Trump supporters.

Normally that would be enough for me to cut someone dead, but now they’ve invited my girlfriend (that’s their daughter) and me to their house in France for a couple of weeks. Should we go?

Normally I’d say yes yes! at the drop of a hat, but I’m afraid of being cooped up with these people, you know, sitting across from them at the table, trying to be nice even though I hate their guts. If I could speak French it would be another thing, because I could tool around the countryside and the little towns and that, but I don’t speak French and I don’t want to stand out as an American tourist.

Is it ethical for me to accept a nice all-expenses-paid holiday with people who are totally loathesome?

A. It sounds as though you are being bribed to join an evil tribe, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if your new doxy was in on the scheme. Why do they always think they can buy our honor and righteousness just by throwing free trips and big houses in our faces? My advice to you would be the same as to someone asking if he should try heroin, “just for the experience.” 

Perhaps you can decline politely. Tell them that you have to do volunteer work for the Kamala Harris campaign for the next few months, but maybe you’ll be able to get away next year, or maybe the one after that. That should put the chill in their bones. 

THE ETHICIST

Q. I have a big apartment with a living room and a separate office, with a fold-out sofa and cable tv in each. Often, when we’re up late partying or just talking, friends will ask if they can sleep over, you know, on the sofas. Lately I’m beginning to think they’re taking advantage of me, so I suggest they make a little contribution to household expenses. I proposed $100 a night as a modest enough fee, but when someone balked at that I pointed out that the people upstairs rent their bedroom through AirBnB (illegally) for $150 a night, and anyway I’d throw in a “continental breakfast” in the morning, from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. I’m not usually up and around before 9, myself.

So they were good with that but I’m afraid I’ll be losing friends if I keep charging them to sleep on my sofa. Actually they get more than my sofa. They get cable tv, and there’s also wifi, with a ten-year-old iMac in the office that still works good. And then there’s the bathroom, which I keep pretty clean. And the coffee and croissant in the morning, which would cost them maybe $10-$12 down at Starbucks.

And if they complain, maybe I can get some new friends or maybe just let people know they can sleep in my apartment office or living room at night for a modest fee?

Am I doing the right thing?

A. I’m sure your landlord, or co-op board, has strict rules on subletting your apartment or rooms to strangers as though you were running a hotel or B&B. Currently you run the risk of getting some friend’s nose out of joint and they’ll run and tell the building manager or landlord that they slept over on your couch and now you’re trying to gouge money out of them for what they thought was a friendly gesture.

While there is nothing immoral about charging friends or “friends” to stay the night, you can avoid a lot of difficulties by taking a few precautions. First, put up some big posters, reminding your guests that they are in someone else’s home, and that is a privilege, and to keep the noise down and remember to leave by 10 a.m. (or maybe 11).

Then, print up a signed agreement with receipt for those stay-overs, stating that the contribution is voluntary. If you can arrange to take credit cards or PayPal, I’m sure that will ease tensions in the evening and morning. Finally, you might put out some big TIP jars or cans in the kitchen or foyer, just to remind your guests that nothing’s free in this world.

The frantic digital gold rush of the early 2020s—that brief, hysterical epoch where the art world collectively misplaced its sanity in pursuit of pixelated receipts, vaporous NFTs, and etherealprimates—has finally broken its fever. The collective sigh of relief vibrating through the galleries in 2023 is almost auditory. The collecting public, having spent twenty-four months staring into the blinding, flat void of the glowing smartphone screen, has arrived at a state of profound visual and spiritual fatigue. We have been starved of weight. We have been starved of physical friction. We have been starved of absolute presence.

Courtesy Robin Eley

What we are witnessing in 2023 is not a mere shift in taste, but a visceral, elegant counter-revolution. It is the return of “palpable authenticity”—a sensory longing for the stubborn, unapologetic reality of real surfaces, thick mediums that cast their own mournful shadows, and a raw presence that possesses the audacity to exist in three dimensions. The grave, after all, remains the final, uncompromised architecture of our vanity—a stubborn, heavy tapestry of loam and bone that flatly refuses to be compressed into the weightless, sacrilegious exile of a seventy-two-dot-per-inch thumbnail. It cannot be reduced to a flat, luminous ghost.

THE TEXTURAL SPECTRUM: ART IN 2023
+———————————–+——————————————-+
| THE FRICTIONLESS VOID (2021-22) | THE TACTILE ARCHETYPE (2023) |
+———————————–+——————————————-+
| – Weightless, odorless JPEGs            | – The scent of polymers & linen   |
| – Sterile smartphone glass                 | – Physical resistance of medium |
| – Infinite digital replication                | – Stubborn, singular presence     |
+———————————–+——————————————-+

The Sovereignty of the Surface: Against the Glass Tyranny

The modern smartphone screen is an architectural marvel designed to erase the human touch. It is smooth, sterile, and entirely frictionless—a glassy mirror that demands nothing from the viewer except a mindless, downward swipe. It reduces a masterpiece and a meme to the exact same depth of pixels, stripping art of its sacred odor, its physical gravity, and its volatile soul.

In defiance, the defining artists of 2023 have weaponized the concept of the surface. They are integrating heavy, physical textures and conceptual barriers that refuse to be flattened by a camera lens or compressed into a text message. This is art asserting its weight and its absolute refusal to be reduced to a convenient JPEG. It is a declaration that some things must be stood before, in person, to be felt.

Nowhere is this silent rebellion more brilliantly, satirically manifest than in the works of two contemporary titans who have chosen the exact same motif—the plastic wrapping of consumer commodification—to wage completely opposite wars against the digital void: Robin Eley and Bradley Hart.

Robin Eley: The Hyperrealist Mortician of Art History

If the post-digital age treats culture like an Amazon warehouse item, Robin Eley is the meticulous pathologist performing a high-art autopsy on history itself. As someone who spent a quarter-century intimately acquainted with the ultimate, un-scrollable physical reality—the cold, unapologetic weight of mortality itself—I find Eley’s clinical dissection of our visual culture both deliciously ironic and entirely inevitable.

Eley does not use real bubble wrap. He does not use real plastic. Instead, working with oil paint on Belgian linen with a technical skill that borders on the supernatural, Eley paints the flawless, hyperrealistic illusion of iconic historical masterpieces—Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Vermeer’s The Milkmaid, Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi—as if they have been crudely wrapped in commercial plastic film, sealed with brown packing tape, and prepared for shipping to some elite tax haven.

[ELEY’S METHOD]
Real Paint + Miraculous Illusion = The Shrouded Masterpiece

[HART’S METHOD]
Real Plastic + Injected Paint = The Physical Pixel Grid

Eley’s work is a masterclass in layered, contemporary satire. By painting the creases, the crinkled edges, and the light reflecting off a nonexistent layer of Saran Wrap, he forces the viewer into a dizzying double-take. Instagram followers frequently accuse him of video fraud, unable to comprehend that the plastic is entirely two-dimensional oil pigment.

After Vermeer

The dark comedy here is delicious: Eley uses the ultimate traditional medium (oil on linen) to comment on our ultimate modern sins (overconsumption and the commodification of culture). The painted plastic wrap is a metaphor for the modern experience of isolation. It is something you can see through, but never feel through. He has literally embalmed art history in a shroud of painted polymers, reminding us that in 2023, we treat our finest cultural triumphs like common shipping cargo, ready to be flipped for a profit.

Bradley Hart: The Syringe Sorcerer Who Mocked the Pixel

Where Eley wraps the past in an illusion of plastic, Bradley Hart takes the plebeian detritus of the industrial shipping trade and injects life directly into its veins. His 2023 works read like an exquisite, dark comedy, taking the very grid that defines our digital prisons and transforming it into a visceral, weeping monument of plastic and paint.

Hart’s chosen canvas is bubble wrap—that ubiquitous material invented in the 1950s as a failed wallpaper, repurposed to protect fragile consumer goods, and discarded without a thought. Hart looks at the round, uniform pockets of this plastic sheet and sees what they truly mirror: the modern pixel.

But Hart does not use a brush. He is a master painter who never actually paints. Instead, he utilizes medical syringes, painstakingly injecting acrylic paint into each individual, fragile bubble.

The process is slow, repetitive, and maddeningly precise—a direct mockery of the instant, automated rendering of artificial intelligence.

[The Digital Pixel] —-> Intangible, weightless, instantly refreshed on glass.

[Hart’s Bubble Pixel] —-> Physical, injected with fluid, subject to gravity & decay.

There is a profound, layered tragedy woven into this satire. Hart, who has navigated the progressive realities of multiple sclerosis for over a decade, turns the syringe from a clinical reminder of infirmity into an instrument of high-art creation. He takes total control over his medium, bubble by bubble, creating stunning, photorealistic portraits out of raw plastic.

Yet, if Hart’s Injection series represents the tyrannical desire for absolute digital control, his Impression series represents the gorgeous, inevitable decay of the flesh. As he injects each bubble, the excess acrylic paint is purposely designed to overflow, dripping down the flat, reverse side of the plastic sheet. Once the work is complete, Hart surgically peels this dried, visceral byproduct away from the plastic backing.

The result is a secondary, derivative artwork: the Impression. Where the Injection is sharp and calculated, the Impression is a ghostly, bleeding echo. It is the literal afterbirth of the artistic process—the organic, uncontrolled decomposition of a precise memory.

The Final Verdict: Rematerializing the Soul

To experience Eley and Hart side-by-side in 2023 is to watch the art world desperately try to pull itself back from the digital precipice. One wraps the physical past in a digital-age shroud; the other gives the pixel a physical body. Both understand that the digital realm promised immortality but delivered only ghost towns.

The contemporary canvas, thick with paint and heavy with truth, offers something far better: the exquisite, tactile reassurance that we are still here, still feeling, and still remarkably solid. Go to the galleries. Smell the linseed oil. Desire, if only with your eyes, to violate the gallery bylaws and touch the congealed polymers when the docent looks away. Remind yourself that you are alive before the screen forgets you entirely.

Please be decent to the docent.

This is yet another tale about the Left’s erasure of American history, akin to  changing the name of Fort Bragg, or taking down statues of Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee.

Once upon a time I dropped out of a law school in California (because I didn’t like it). But I decided to stay in the state for a year or two longer, get California residency, and then apply to one of a couple University of California law schools where I believed I had special connections. One was Boalt Hall, the law school at Cal Berkeley. The other, across the Bay in San Francisco, was a smaller, older school called Hastings School of Law. An old friend of mine had just become director of admissions at one of these places, while the father of another friend was dean of the other school.

In the event, I never bothered to apply to either. Because I thought I’d make a lousy lawyer. But every once in a long while I’d check up on Boalt or Hastings—just to see how they were ranking, you know. And now I’ve discovered that Boalt Hall is no more! They pulled the signage off the school three years ago, and now the school goes by the nondescript moniker  of “UC Berkeley School of Law,” or some variant thereof.

The reason for the name change is that the school now has a lot of  “Asian” students, and old Mr. John Henry Boalt is partly blamed for the anti-Chinese immigration campaign back in the 1870s. Boalt once had the audacity to deliver a speech called “The Chinese Question” (readable here), a long-forgotten essay that he read out before the Berkeley Club in 1877. It was later read on the floor of the U.S. Senate, and is said to have contributed to passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act a few years later (1882).

Leader of the anti-Boalt charge was one Charles Reichmann, a lecturer who claims he was scouring the Bancroft Library archives about five years ago and he suddenly stumbled across the Boalt speech. “I was kind of shocked…shocked that the law school at which I teach was associated with this person…because Berkeley’s student body is significantly Asian, significantly Chinese, and it just struck me as being out of tune with the university…” Credible story? Judge for yourself.

A sad/comic aspect here is that while John Henry Boalt (1837-1901) may have been a prominent East Bay attorney 150 years ago, he’s otherwise a most obscure figure. A faculty member tells me that 99% of the student body had probably never heard of him, or had any clue why or how the law school came to be named Boalt Hall. (It was an endowment from Boalt’s widow.) In fact, I am told the school had really wanted to change the name for decades, simply for name recognition. Most people couldn’t identify it as the law school at UC Berkeley. So the “racism” controversy may have been just a convenient pretext.

More importantly, the figure of Boalt largely revises the usual pop-history spin about the origins of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Nine times out of ten, the anti-Chinese campaign of the 1870s is derided as an initiative by unemployed, bedraggled “Irish immigrants” who were mad because they had to compete with Chinese coolies for ditch-digging jobs. (A typical online-encyclopedia example.) James Fulford recently wrote here about a major figure in that campaign, the Workingmen’s Party leader Denis Kearney, who was a prosperous businessman as well as politician. But now the story of Mr. Boalt—of the Berkeley Club and Bohemian Grove, and president of the local bar association—tells us that the Chinese Exclusion Act really arose with substantial support among California civic leaders.

And now we turn to the other law school, Hastings School of Law in San Francisco. This was likewise named after an obscure figure from 19th century California, one Serranus Clinton Hastings (1814-1893). Mr. Hastings’s purported sin is being “someone that committed genocide on Native California Indians” [sic] way back in the mid-1800s. A year and a half ago the school’s board of directors voted to change the name to something else, e.g., UC College of the Law.

However the switchover has been more complicated than just pulling the metal sign-letters out of the building’s exterior. The Hastings name was enshrined in California law when the school opened in the 1870s, and new legislation was needed to delete it. So a bill was recently passed, Gavin Newsom signed it, and thus as of January the school’s website tells us that “UC Hastings is now UC Law SF.”

But that’s not the end of the story. As of last October, six descendants of S. C. Hastings are suing to undo the name change…or else return to them the $100,000 in gold that Hastings provided to endow the school, which with interest is now reckoned to be worth $1.7 billion.

Included in the lawsuit is what amounts to a claim of posthumous libel on the benefactor. The suit claims the name change, with the “genocide” accusations, also defames Hastings descendants and even the school’s law graduates. From the SF Chronicle:

(T)here is no known evidence that S.C. Hastings desired, requested, or knowingly encouraged any atrocities against Native Americans,” the suit asserted, and neither Hastings nor his descendants have had “any opportunity for a judicial trial as to these horrific allegations,” the suit said. It said the state’s subsequent action “heaps scorn and punishment upon S.C. Hastings, his descendants, and indeed, by association, upon all of the tens of thousands of Hastings law graduates living and deceased.

This looks like an exceptionally novel brief, and I expect there will be a political push to dismiss it as frivolous or vexatious. The fact that the litigants are represented by the publicity-seeking Harmeet Dhillon firm of San Francisco might be a plus or a minus in that regard. But it’s refreshing to see descendants fight back against the defamation and canceling of their ancestors. It’s something we all should do.

Every few years, there seems to be a new outrage involving American Girl, the doll-and-book franchise. Having begun in 1986 with three marvelously designed storybooks and matching 18″ dolls (I was an early fan), the Wisconsin-based company was acquired in 1998 by Mattel, Inc. And after that the trouble began.

In 2005 American Girl was threatened with a boycott for contributing to a pro-abortion, pro-lesbian nonprofit organization. In 2016 American Girl introduced an African-American doll with Caucasian features, and was criticized for “not accurately representing the African American culture and true African American experiences.” And all along the company has been attacked for adding random black, Mexican, Chinese and Red Indian dolls for the sake of  “diversity,” thereby straying from American Girl’s original mission.

Initially American Girls represented an approximate cross-section of Heritage Americans. We had Molly McIntire who wears plaid and lives in Illinois in 1944; Samantha Parkington, in the Hudson Valley, 1904; and Kirsten Larson, representing our immigrant Nordic community in 1850s Minnesota. Later a 1770s girl in Williamsburg, Virginia was added, Felicity Merriman. These dolls and books were eventually retired, five to ten years ago, sometimes replaced by 6-1/2″ mini-dolls and ugly new editions of the original books. (Some people made a fuss over Felicity, because her family owned slaves. And they all seemed much too privileged.)

All the diversity you need!

As I said in 2017, American Girl is used to protests and boycott threats. It usually responds by backpedaling, getting back to its roots—sort of. That year, as though to make up for all the new black and mestizo cast members, they added a wholesome-looking Country & Western doll vaguely based on the young Taylor Swift. As Taylor was noted for her ever-changing boyfriends, her avatar, “Tenney Grant,” got a boyfriend too, American Girl’s first-ever boy doll. (There are several now.)

But now we come to the biggest, latest, weirdest controversy. It’s all about a strange little 96-page cartoon book called A Smart Girl’s Guide: Body Image. It sells for $12.99 online. I gather it’s now thought too incendiary to be displayed in the American Girl stores.

The Body Image book features drawings of grotesque and blue-haired youngsters with body-image problems. We get obese Girls of Color, wheelchair-bound Disabled Girls of Color, people of uncertain race and sex…and finally, what really triggered the tabloid press and “conservative” media…young People of Color who want a sex change.

“If you haven’t gone through puberty yet, the doctor might offer medicine to delay your body’s changes, giving you more time to think about your gender identity,” a page of the text explains alongside an illustration of a Pre-teen of Color consulting with a Bengali physician. The reader is then advised that he/she can start on puberty blockers without her/his parents finding out.

It appears the American Girl people have their books packaged by a third party, and don’t actually read them. Because when the outrage started, the AG front office acted completely bewildered:

From Yahoo News, December 9, 2022:

Julie Parks, a spokesperson for the company, told USA Today that no other American Girl book has ever received similar criticism. She said “Body Image” is the first American Girl book to address gender identity and expression.

I should expect it is! And of course it drew a lot of flak. “Gender identity and expression” is a safe & permissible target in normie-conservative media these days. It’s bizarre and lurid and most people never meet up with it—but it’s a great attention-grabber. Tucker Carlson does about two segments a week on it. Meantime, substantive matters of “Race, Diversity and Inclusion,” which affect society at large, are verboten, almost entirely off the table.

The outrage over the Body Image book is mainly a distraction, a proxy for the bigger things that can’t be said. But Newsmax host Rob Finnerty gave the game away on December 12 when he said he went into the flagship American Girl store in Rockefeller Center and couldn’t find a cute little white doll that looked like his 6-year-old daughter. Predictably the whole Leftist borg on Twitter, led by Media Matters for America, came down on him, called him a liar:

Not only a liar, but a racist as well, since he was bothered by the presence (the predominance?) of nonwhite dolls when he visited the American Girl store. The rebuttals, on MSNBC and elsewhere, all had the same talking points. First they’d show a unrepresentative page of the American Girl online catalogue, where most of the dolls were lily-white.

Then they’d display a promotional photograph from the company, indicating the wide diversity of the American Girl range. Which sort of contradicts their first point:

There appears to be even a Karine Jean-Pierre doll in there. Anyway, our tweeter or media-host-of-color—Mehdi Hasan in this instance—will often tell us, over and over, that when she was growing up, there were no dolls that looked like her; no Dolls of Color whatsoever! Demonstrably untrue, but let it go.

Newsmax’s Rob Finnerty may be guilty of slight hyperbole, suggesting there were no cute little white dolls in the shop when he strolled in there last month or last summer. But it’s an understandable impression,  one I’ve often had when going into the American Girl store. (I live nearby and have to walk past it all the time.) Brown dolls, oriental dolls, black dolls with prosthetic limbs, chemo-bald dolls, East Indian diabetes-kit dolls…they do seem to crowd out the normal, American ones.

However I’m happy to say that after all this recent media ruckus, the American Girl store in Rockefeller Center has cleaned up its act. I spent some time there yesterday, and couldn’t find a single Body Image or Race & Inclusion book. In fact there are almost no books at all. They used to have a book section, but now it’s gone. Too many complaints, too many protests?

And all-American girl dolls predominate once again at the American Girl store. Though maybe that’s just for the Christmas season, and they’ll soon be back to their old tricks.

(Below: SFGIRL, from the days when when the phrase “California Girl” actually meant something. Don’t know if the VW is for sale.)

This impressed me when I first read it in Jerome Beatty Jr.’s book-biz column, Trade Winds, in Saturday Review. Patty Duke and SatRev sharing the same media glebe! Like one of those sitcoms where people from a completely different show turn up. Like the Danny Thomas episode where he gets arrested by Sheriff Andy Griffith. (This was effectively Sheldon Leonard’s pilot for The Andy Griffith Show, not yet launched.)

I found the issue of SatRev by searching the archive on Unz.com. Unfortunately I can’t scroll through the entire issue, so have no idea how this column ends. But you get the point.

The world-famous Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rjin painted few landscapes. For many years this Landscape with Arched Bridge was long attributed to him because of its brownish color scheme. But no one knew for sure because he didn’t sign it.

Now a team of experts have studied the problem and decided, Yep, it’s Rembrandt all right!

Currently hanging in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie, this reattribution of the painting brings the number of known landscapes by van Rjin to a grand total of seven!

You will find it on display in the exhibition “David Hockney – Landscapes in Dialogue,” which includes Hockney’s series “Three Trees near Thixendale.”

For further information, read this piece in ArtNews.

with Ferenc Molmar, M.D.

Q. My 15-year-old has suddenly become very excited about running away from home. I discovered this when I went into the youngster’s bedroom and found a large polka-dot kerchief, all knotted up with underwear inside, and tied to the business end of my Cleveland Niblick.

I think this is a fad that the kids learn about on the television or the internet, but I don’t think it is a healthy preoccupation. You are always reading horror stories about teenage runaways who are found chopped up in bin bags with their eyes gouged out. Also, my friend in the local Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACOA) support group tells me that she’s keeping all her children at home till they’re at least 25 because children’s brains do not develop until that age. I have considered putting my offspring away in an institution but we don’t do that in my family so all I have is the ACOA people to talk to. What shall I do?

A. It is normal for children to want to grow up fast, and running away at 15 hardly sounds extreme. In great-grandad’s day, it was normal to be married with kids by that age. Of course very few people lived past thirty then, so you had to get an early start on the day, as it were.

Dr Molmar

Nowadays I fear teenage runaways want to leave home to engage in sex perversion and prostitution. This is because society does not provide the support systems it used to. For example, when I was first practicing in Minneapolis 60 or 70 years ago, we had a special park where adolescents would cruise around in the afternoon and sell themselves to passing gentlemen (and ladies), then take the tram back home to Edina with no one the wiser.

But that was then, when everything was all white and we didn’t have crime and it was all in good fun. Now that park is a needle-exchange community center. So yes, the bin-bag problem is a natural outcome of today’s degenerate society. Perhaps you could consider sending your child to one of those progressive theater camps or boarding schools in Michigan (if they stil have them) where they let kids play out their fantasies, and maybe go camping and so forth in a tent instead of hanging outside a bus station.

Dan Howland disappeared from San Diego sometime in the late 90s and reappeared in Portland, OR, where he is said to have authored an amusement-ride quarterly journal.

This classic is reproduced as it originally appeared in Gallery News in 1994…as it is an image and we are not about to type it in.

A friend of Dan’s asked, “Why did she draw you with a bow tie?”

Dan said, “Maybe she likes bow ties.”

The whole Dave Garroway allusion was thus completely lost.

Pearl Paint on Canal Street in NYC was the artists’ Mecca for eighty years, with its assemblage of tumbledown warehouses and 1820s townhouses, selling every sort of paint and brush and picture album and canvas-stretching doodad in the Known World.

When it closed in 2014, people were  left bereft. Where now to buy your non-repro blue pencils and comic-strip boards and Prat portfolio books?

It’s a good bet you won’t find them at the Art Students League’s dinky shop, which is just past their main entrance hall on West 57th Street. That place is about as big as a suburban bathroom, and it satisfies that immortal precept of Paul Fussell in Class: If everybody doesn’t want it, nobody gets it!

This wasn’t much of a worry when Pearl closed, way downtown. For we still had, right there, across the street, the sumptuous and eternal emporium called Lee’s.

Lee’s Art Shop lived in a late-1800s building with Art Nouveau ornamentation, a structure that was originally designed as a companion piece to the Art Students League across the street. When it went up, West 57th Street was artist-land, full of new blocks of luxury flats designed with high windows for painters’ and sculptors’ needs. You can still see some of these, in the older buildings, on 57th between Sixth Avenue and Broadway.

Lee’s Art Shop was a veritable Empire of Creativity. If you didn’t have any idea of what you wanted to do, a stroll through Lee’s might give you a dozen. Eddie Salveri would tell you about lightboxes and airbrushes and hi-fashion lighting, and Hector the Chilean Board-Master in the back of the store would advise you on the finer points of FomCor and basswood and cold-press vs. hot-press illustration board.

Then there was the tall guy in the frame section out in front. He looked like Christopher Walken. I once saw him in an animated conversation with seated comedian Al Franken, who was getting something framed (I guess), and suddenly asked, as in a non sequitur, “Anyone ever tell you, uh, you look like Christopher Walken?”

And the frame man went, “Naaooo!”

For a while Lee’s spread out to other buildings in the neighborhoods, with retail shops dedicated to lighting and furniture. Then the chill came, the extremities dropped off, only the main store was left, and it had fewer and fewer and fewer seasoned experts. I’d show my 20% off discount card, the one I’d been carrying about for 30 years, and the wench at the cash register would be totally baffled, having never seen such a thing before. Well, she’d been there less than a year, what do you expect?

I’d go visit Hector in the back, and he was curt and glum, implying I was trying to butter him up to get some freebies. I think the word had just come down that Lee’s was going to close.

As Lee’s did, sometime in 2016. As with Pearl, I stocked up heartily on discounted drawing pads, inks, paints, brushes and other supplies that mainly remain unopened in the drawers of my armoire.

As of today, the Lee’s building is still untenanted. To which I say: Karma is a bitch.

Back in the 1960s, amongst the Young & Rubicam outdoor commuter-station posters urging you to advertise in TIME magazine (because TIME is where Beefeater Gin makes its martinis marteenier—or something like that), you’d also see ads that were garmento-related, selling synthetic fabrics.

I should add that these train-station ads from TDI outdoor advertising were mainly around suburban New York City. I never saw anything like them farther away than Philadelphia.

But back to the synthetic fabrics. The two brands I remember best were Celanese Fortrel, a kind of non-wrinking, drip-dry polyester used for dresses and men’s trousers and everything else; and Klopman, another no-iron brand that you were urged to “lean on.” You’d see a picture of a businessman in his casual golf-day duds, or a young girl . . . or maybe an old girl . . . and they would be pictured standing straight and tall, and then leaning against a nonexistent wall.

Lean on Klopman. Surrealistic, eye-catching, but maybe not quite on point.

MAD magazine once ran a house subscription ad that went: “Why lean on Klopman? (Or any other newsdealer for that matter?)” The joke must have been incomprehensible to most people who weren’t at least 35 years old, prone to commuting to Grand Central from Westport or Bronxville or some such; or perhaps somehow connected to the schmatte business or Women’s Wear Daily. But that’s how MAD was, you know.

Who Klopman was exactly, I was never curious enough to find out. Celanese however has been a brand name for  unrelated companies in Great Britain, America, and Australia for the past century. The fabrics from these companies weren’t/aren’t the same, so far as I can tell. And none of those commercial concerns had anything to do with Ceylon (or Sri Lanka, as that tropical island presently styles itself).

Around 1967-68, the American Celanese company had a tagline to push its main stock in trade, summer dresses: Summer’s a breeze with Celanese.

The synthetic industry was riding high in the 1960s, but it always faced a barrier of sales resistance in the form of snobbish preference for “natural fabrics.” A few years later, when the designer Halston was hawking his lines of apparel on TV, he’d proclaim that they were “made from trees,” which meant they were made of something like rayon, a synthetic made from wood-pulp cellulose.

By the mid-70s synthetics were widely regarded as a joke, best employed in the manufacture of soft luggage, parachutes, and those odd ensembles called “doubleknit leisure suits.”

Traditional, natural, fabrics seldom found their way to outdoor advertising. No, they took up big display ads in the New York Times, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Town & Country, and Seventeen. Off-the-peg clothing lines for young women usually had stuffy names suggesting small towns in Lichfield County, Connecticut: John Meyer of Norwich, The Villager Collection. If they ever used anything like Celanese Fortrel polyester, they certainly didn’t mention it in their ad copy.

ERRATUM: The original version of this article referred to fibers made from wood-pulp cellulose as Dacron. DuPont’s Dacron is a pure synthetic. Rayon, or viscose, is the cellulose fabric.