by Dan Kennedy
Instead of a designer bed, Taco would prefer to sleep on a few flattened-out Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes that he’d licked clean of tasty grease. And when people would try to come into my office, Taco would freak out and start pulling on his chain, growling, barking, and bearing his aged gums and teeth like a deranged wolf fighting his way out of an errant bear trap. All the while, I’d be sitting there in my gray slacks and one of my sweaters or designer T-shirts saying in a really sensible voice with a smile, “Don’t worry. You can put something on my desk, he’s not going to bite you. He’s just getting used to you.”
As for a collar, Taco would have whatever was still hanging around his neck from the one person he let near him twelve years ago. And instead of trotting around the office and making a round of cute visits to everyone on the twenty-fourth floor, when Taco got off his chain, he would just be found in the employee kitchen chewing up a can of cleanser that he got from under the sink. And someone would have to call me to come get him because he’d have backed himself into a corner with his chewed-up cleanser can, freaking out in a low growl anytime anyone tried to come in and get some coffee, because he’d think they were trying to take his cleanser away.
“Hi. Jewel spot.” She says after hanging up.
I try one last shot at this. “I was just saying hello to your little helper.”
Vallerie looks over at her, doesn’t even say a word, and Sylvia comes alive and starts doing little barks and cute little running around. Sylvia looks at me like she knows exactly what she’s doing. What the hell do you have against me, dog?
“Uh, right,” I say, “the Jewel commercial.”
Vallerie starts to look at papers on her desk, the dog continues showing respect by doing cute things even though Vallerie’s not even watching. I sort of squint at the dog like a bitter middle child.
Still looking down at her papers and gathering the details, Vallerie gives me the lowdown, “We need a sixty, and also a fifty-five with a blank five-second back end that we can use to tag with sponsors. And you should use ‘Intuition’ because that’s going to be the first single. And it looks like we should have the finished video in-house by tomorrow.”
Easy enough. What could possibly throw a wrench into that? I make a polite exit from Vallerie’s office, straddling my way over the little makeshift doggie gate at her door. Behind me, the sound of a happy little dog playing it up for Vallerie, Senior Vice President of Marketing. I feel like it’s going to tell her to fire me.
THE SOUND OF UNSETTLING
I walk back into my office and there’s this little story in each trade magazine that has been laid on my desk. Someone may be buying the company. Bear in mind that this rumor has been floating around for years. There was even a close call with EMI buying this place along with the other labels that fall under the umbrella of the Warner Music Group, but the deal went south. So, it’s not out of the normal range of gossip to hear about rumors that our parent company has still got Warner Music Group on the block. We’re still owned by Time Warner at the moment, but the new twist to the rumor of the sale is this: the billionaire grandson of a man who made the family a fortune in booze and industrial chemical dealings might buy this place. Not a bad twist, really. In Hollywood terms I’d say a billionaire grandson with an inheritance is right up there with a great white shark bent on evening the score with humans, or a spirit that refuses to move on to the afterlife. Certainly gets one’s attention at the end of a long day. There’s a lot to feel insecure about if you work in the record business in this digital age, but what are you gonna do? Personally, I choose to continue doing my work while people way smarter and higher up the ladder hopefully figure it all out. And I deal with the feelings the responsible, adult way: I use Starbucks baked goods to shove the feelings way down into my stomach. Then I pour something called caramel machiatto on them so they can’t come back to life, and then it’s time to start writing the script to the Jewel commercial. Then if the script gets approved, I’ll check in to an editing studio across town and start cutting footage from her videos into a commercial. But the script isn’t going anywhere. It’s already been a long day; so the first pass has some problems.
JEWEL SCRIPT, TV 0:60, FIRST DRAFT
Open on shot of Jewel from “Intuition” video where she’s crossing the street and looking beautiful in evening dress with small handbag, laughing. Why is she laughing? It’s kind of odd, really, isn’t it? To just cross the street by yourself all dolled up and laughing, laughing, laughing. It’s like a crazy person. That’s my favorite kind of crazy person; the ones that are just cracking up, holding something random like a can of frosting and laughing their ass off at you while you walk by. Okay, focus. Let’s do this. After she gets across street, graphic elements from album cover fade up in cross walk, almost like wherever she steps, she leaves an imprint that is a cool graphic.
VOICEOVER
Are you ready for a revolution? Holy Christ, reel it in. This is not a revolution. Are you ready for a new . . . uh . . . CD? Okay, wait . . . here:
VOICEOVER
Jewel. 0304. The new album. A whole new sound that . . . might . . . save us? Since we are trapped here waiting to be fired in a massive bloodletting. And I’m afraid I’ve become accustomed to the lifestyle of middle management. Please . . . buy the album so I don’t have to face the realities of life and I can continue to eat something called a blueberry bliss bar with something called a caramel macchiato, maintaining a total denial of my days slipping by in this finite life. Okay, it’s late. It’s been a long day and I’m going home. Jewel. 0304. The new album . . . in stores now. Good night.
CHINESE DEMOCRACY
Vallerie stops by first thing to say “good morning” with a huge smile on her face. She’s looking at me with eyes that seem to strike that very familiar chord; a chord that you know the second you see it if you grew up with an older sibling. The kind that lies somewhere between kindness, terror, and killing boredom with comedic pastime. She announces a little piece of news the way my sister would announce something like this, as if the choice was between laughing so hard you start crying, and simply talking it through and trying to pull it off so that she could die laughing later.
“Okay, the president of our parent company, AOL – Time Warner” — pauses. Gets it together — “has invited a young lady here from China — because, as you know, AOL has all these ideas about making inroads into China — anyway” — again, hand goes up to eye to wipe away what might be hint of a tear — “Okay, anyway, she’s coming to visit for a week and guess who I told him she should spend three days with while she’s here!”
“Oh, classic. Awesome. Is she going to hang out with the guy from . . .”
“You!”
And then she starts cracking up and at the same time sort of moves closer to me, grabbing my arm in a cross between a gesture designed to comfort me and an effective move to keep me from running. It’s at this moment I realize she knows something. That maybe there’s some truth to the new sale rumor. Here’s what I think:
1. That after twenty years of working here, and with the threat of mergers hanging over the company during the last two or three years recently refreshed by the rumor of the grandchild of the liquor czar buying this place, and fueled by yet another year of decreased sales, she realizes what is happening to this business.
2. This devilishly euphoric prankster standing in my office is proof that Vallerie has clearly decided that she’s not sticking around. I sit there watching her laugh; smile, eyes, teeth, lips, this is it. I’ve felt this feeling a million times before looking at a smile, eyes, teeth, and lips — she is someone about to be gone.
There’s an almost terrifying sense of freedom that comes to somebody who has faced a very finite truth. And it’s a sense of freedom that scares the hell out of those of us who haven’t had the guts to face a very finite truth yet. Those of us who are still running from it; those of us who are hoping that whatever job we’re working at every day of our lives is
going to add up to something far brighter than we could ever imagine, even though every single solitary sublime sign and cue points to the exact opposite being true. Yeah, well, good for her. Because none of this changes the fact that somewhere in Shanghai some Chinese chick is packing a suitcase and coming to America to be my shadow.
Christina arrives. Christina. All the way from Shanghai, and her name is Christina? This is already shaping up wrong. Maybe that’s just her “American” name. Dashed are my daydreams of introducing my new friend Huan Lin Yao to my pedestrian peers with boring everyday names like Steve.
Christina . . . Who does she think she’s fooling with her little impromptu hotel and airport alias, I think to myself, for some reason in the voice of that woman on the old television show called Murder, She Wrote.
Jesus, I realize in about four seconds that I know nothing about China. I should’ve at least read up on it on the Internet or something right before she got here. At least I’d be able to impress her by having done some kind of homework. “Hi there, Christina, it’s sure nice to have a visitor from Shanghai, the city of 6,341 square kilometers with a population of thirteen million. You guys on track to get that twelve to fourteen inches of average annual precipitation? Still got the Brown-Eared Pheasant as the national bird over there? Or is your province’s bird the Crested Ibis? It may well be, come to think of it. Well, as the Chinese proverb says, ‘Nothing stands out like a crane amongst a flock of chickens.’ Ah, ha ha ha ha . . . yes . . . well . . .” But instead I quietly and kindly offer her a seat when she shows up in my office. Amy brings in a couple bottles of water for us.
“Are you guys set, do you need anything?”
“Yeah, no. Thanks. I don’t think, I mean, water is probably . . . good,” I answer.
“This is great. It’s an interesting time for you to be here checking things out. If you guys want to order lunch or need anything, let me know,” Amy offers.
Christina smiles. Amy leaves. We enjoy about a minute and half of silence while we are simply enjoying the terror of the silence while smiling politely at each other.
Then I figure the best thing to do, evidently, is to spasm into a diatribe about 1979 Los Angeles punk, and how when I was little I woke up one night, walked into the living room, and the eleven-o’clock news was doing a story on the band X, playing at the Universal amphitheater.
Turns out that the nice thing about spontaneous fits of awkward expository monologues from a man sixteen years older than Christina is that they sometimes break the ice. She and I start talking about favorite bands and albums, college radio, and underground pirate radio stations. She’s really cool! She tells me all about the pirate radio show in Shanghai that she hosts with her boyfriend. And she’s wearing these really cool Chinese knock-offs of Converse high-tops. I tell her they’re cool and she explains that they can’t get real Converse in China. I ask her if it’s because the government won’t allow it. No, not really, it turns out — just hard to get and too expensive there. I find that aside from comparing notes on new bands and old favorites, my only persistent contribution from my end are questions about government oppression. She tells me her boyfriend can’t keep doing the radio show (Fascists cracking down on you over there?) because he feels he has gotten behind in his studies at school. That she’s only staying here for five days (Commies got you on a tight leash, do they?) because she would like to visit friends in Utah. She tells me that even though piracy runs rampant in China, they still have all of these great underground record stores in Shanghai, where you can buy music from bands that aren’t the huge worldwide hits getting bootlegged and sold on the street corners.
“Underground, as in ‘we need to hide it so the fascists don’t crush it? So they won’t take it from us?’”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
The next two days of her visit are spent mostly at the editing studio, where I am working on the Jewel commercial. And Christina loves it there. I love it there, too. The contrast between the offices and the editing studio, where my friend Ben works, is night and day. You walk around there unafraid of corporate protocol and the weight of who you say and don’t say hello to when you pass through the halls. There’s laughter and very loud music to trade comments on, jokes to tell, and weekend stories — all of the things you don’t find back at the offices.
While Christina is around, we’re watching footage from the Jewel video together on two big editing screens, cutting it down to make a rough version of the TV commercial for her new record. There’s a point when Christina asks if this new look and sound is supposed to be a reinvention for Jewel. Having now written and revised the script for the commercial countless times, after endless input from Dick and management, finally arriving at the perfect line (turns out that “the new album 0304 is an exciting step in the breathtaking career of Jewel”) — which will let North America know just how big this reinvention is — I tell Christina that yes, it is indeed a reinvention of some kind. She asks me if I think it seems sincere, this reinvention, or more like a gimmick. I tell her I’ve heard that the whole thing’s supposed to be somehow ironic, and I say that it seems a little gimmicky to me, but that it’s not my job to say that. I say I think it probably started out as a sort of satire of selling out, but that too many people got involved and next thing you know, it wasn’t coming across like irony or satire, but it’s not my job to say things like this. I can think stuff like that, but I gotta hide those thoughts from the Man.
What am I saying this for? I could get in trouble. I could get fired. I say something about how Jewel and her reinvention will probably succeed wildly in alienating her faithful fans, maybe winning a few thousand fair-weather friends that won’t be around for the next album.
Dude! Hello? Take it back! I backpedal like crazy. I consider the political implications of telling an intern invited by the CEO of our parent company what I think about all this. I cover my ass and I say that, to Jewel’s credit, maybe she’s making the most integral move she can imagine making as an artist and probably doesn’t care if this record sells less, because she’s doing whatever she wants to do and that’s what being an artist is all about.
And there you go, there’s my little reinvention of my own sound. Christina looks at me like she has just seen her first real tourist attraction in America: a little tiny record businessman totally afraid to say what he thinks about a record. Oh, come on, sister . . . you’re from Communist China. I shouldn’t have to tell you that it’s all about saying the right thing when you know it could get back to the wrong people.
We continue cutting and recutting. Scene by scene from the big-budget video is cut down, frame by frame, into our little commercial. Ben moves the footage on screen forward and backward, forward and backward, looking for points to make his cuts in perfect time. Christina and I sit on the studio’s big couch and watch the monitors. A pretty girl, who became a pop star, moves forward across the street very quickly, then backward slowly, then forward again, and on and on until a cut is made into the next scene and then the new scene starts the same back-and-forth drill. Repeat for the next four hours, and then it’s time to head back to the office. On our walk Christina tells me that the editing studios are more like what she thought the record company offices would be like.
We pass through the revolving doors just in time for Vallerie to see us. She comes over to say hello.
“Oh, my God, there you are! I think she has a crush on you! What was it like, was it weird! Oh, God, I saw you two walking around. I started laughing so hard I had to duck into Lee’s office and set down my coffee so I didn’t spill it all over myself!”
Okay, this conversation is clearly not intended for our guest’s ears. And two seconds ago, as far as I can recall, Christina was standing right next to me. She’s short, but still, I mean, she’s standing right here. Maybe Vallerie thinks there’s a language barrier? I try to give indication — by way of odd combinations of subtly nodding my head and raising my eyebrows — that the
intern is very near the two of us. I try feebly to steer the conversation toward the weather or lunch or just about anything else besides how funny Vallerie seems to think it is that Christina and I are spending three days together and that we seem inseparable.
“Do you . . . is . . . um . . .” I stammer before she interrupts me again, happy as hell to keep going on.
“And you still have two days left! Oh, God, it’s just too funny! This is so classic. Okay . . . so, what’s she like? What do you two even talk about!”
I cough loudly. “Okaaaaay, so, looks like rain out there. Anytime now. Going to lunch? I What do you think you’ll have today, for lunch? Do you like the rain, having lived in London?”
Vallerie looks at me as if I’ve just erupted into the type of brief monologue usually associated with the clinically insane. I look down at my right side where I last saw Christina and realize she’s not there. I whip my head around to my left side to see if she’s there. She is not. This leaves one option: that is, that she has disappeared around the back of me. Maybe she’s right up against me? [She can be shy if she doesn’t know you, so] maybe she’s hiding. Vallerie excuses what appears to be my mildly psychotic episode and goes on.