by Jonathan Dee
* MESSAGE *
As we enjoy today’s Super Bowl, let’s remember that Americans of all races and ethnic groups are on the same team. Working together we can win.
On Mr Olivo’s wish list are Elvis Presley, Dag Hammarskjold, Jimi Hendrix, “maybe Nelson Mandela”
Self-expression is everything.
In this, the season of giving, the gift of freedom is the
greatest gift of all.
Become unaffected;
Cherish sincerity;
Belittle the personal;
Reduce desires.
SELLING THE GOVERNMENT LIKE SOAP; IT
SEEMS TO WORK
A people who do not dream never attain to inner sincerity, for only in his dreams is a man really himself. Only for his dreams is a man responsible – his actions are what he must do. Actions are a bastard race to which a man has not given his full paternity.
*
JOHN STAYED IN South Carolina, in the spare bedroom of the condo by the golf course, for a month, seeing to the disposition of his mother’s effects, as well as, quite unexpectedly, the sale of her home; for Buzz, it turned out, with a lack of decorum that seemed all the more astonishing given his historically passive and unflappable manner, announced his engagement to a widow who lived in the same development. We only get one life, he told John with a sympathetic smile, and she and I are too old to lose any more time to appearances. The widow’s brother had a place on Boca Grande which he was too infirm now to use; and so John found himself standing in the driveway waving to them, his mother’s widower and a woman he had never met until a week ago, as they drove off to Florida to live out the rest of their lives.
The condo sold quickly (John, who had always found the place somewhat featureless and numbing, was surprised to learn that there was a waiting list of prospective residents), and when the buyers called him there one evening to ask politely if he would be willing to throw in his parents’ old furniture as well, he couldn’t think of any reason to say no. He hung up and looked around the place – the sectional sofa, the big glass coffee table, the gigantic armoire with the gigantic TV in it – feeling a strange and ambiguous sort of awe at the seamlessness with which his mother’s final home would pass into the hands of amiable strangers in about a month’s time.
He would have to be around then for the closing; time enough, certainly, to head back up to Charlottesville and see what required his help. But after putting it off for a day or two, John admitted to himself that he wasn’t all that anxious to get back, at least not right now. Things weren’t the same. Living in a hotel room; working all day in a tiny spare office that didn’t belong to them; and the work itself – there simply wasn’t much of it at this point. Long hours that summer had been passed sitting idly at his borrowed desk, trying only to be unobtrusive while Mal, with his fingers laced in his hair and a look of vengeful determination on his face, thought.
Finally John called Mal at Shays’s office. Mal was actually somewhat brusque on the phone, even before John got around to the subject of his call.
“How are things around there?” John said. “Pretty quiet?”
“Still pretty quiet, yes,” Mal said.
“Well, here’s the thing. I guess I didn’t really understand, until I got away, that this whole thing has taken kind of an emotional toll on me, and then with my mother’s passing away … If it’s okay with you, Mal, I need some more time.”
“That’s fine,” Mal said evenly.
“I mean, if there were anything pressing then of course I would come back. But, you know, in all fairness, I never once took any vacation time while—”
“It’s fine, John, really. I don’t need you for anything right now.”
John was brought up short. He couldn’t tell, over the phone, if there was any sort of bitterness in Mal’s tone or if he simply meant what he said.
“I have Colette here to answer the phone,” Mal went on. “And the rest of it, right now, is all pretty much inside my head anyway.”
John felt an unfamiliar surge of pity. He needed to say something just to shake it off.
“No word from her, then?” he said.
“No. So what will you do down there? Keep an eye on your stepfather?”
John didn’t feel like going into it. “I don’t know. Drive around a little bit, maybe. I haven’t been down this way, except to see my mother, in so long. So, maybe just a little motoring excursion through the South.”
There was a pause, before Mal said, “You’re not going off to look for her, are you?”
“No,” John said, startled, feeling his color rise. “No, nothing like that.”
* MESSAGE *
“We had already developed a brand plan that encompasses who I am,” Mr Woods said. “American Express isn’t going to branch off into areas where we’re in conflict. So I’m going to be promoted in the way I hope to be perceived.”
Is this a great time, or what?
Ever tuck your baby in from the airport? You will.
Ever send a fax from the beach? You will.
Advertising is not a new thing. We think of the stained-glass windows in Chartres Cathedral as art, but when they were made they were art only incidentally. They were put there to sell theology – they were billboards – and if the people who built the cathedral had had neon they would have gone crazy for it. There’s nothing new about any of this. The mosaics in Byzantine churches and early Christian churches are billboards selling Christianity. Tiepolo’s ceilings are Counter-Reformation propaganda. Selling is an old
CHANGE EVERYTHING
*
ALL THE WORK was in Los Angeles. But Dex knew – and his friends in the business loved to tease him by confirming – that though he might be capable of surviving a short visit to Los Angeles, there was no way he could ever live there. He was too quick, too belligerent, too much in need of stimulation. It was a moot point, since at this stage no one was offering him work anyway; but it got him thinking, in his many idle hours, that he really was a stranger in his own country, a kind of internal exile, because as far as he was concerned there was nowhere off the island of Manhattan that was adaptable for living. He was stuck there.
And so, while another man in his position – faced with the humiliation of having his live-in girlfriend stolen from him by the one man in all the world he most despises – might have considered leaving town and starting over, for Dex the only truly viable option was to lie about it. He told his friends who asked where Molly was that she had developed a drug habit and he had thrown her out. He felt no guilt about selling her out in this way – look what she’d done to him, after all – and, in terms of being exposed, was comforted by the thought that she had never really kept up a close friendship with anybody in the business. She knew them all through him.
When they had first returned to New York together, after Osbourne asked him to leave, Dex was more energized than ever, full of ideas for making the Palladio documentary even without Mal’s cooperation. But no one would finance any of those ideas. They all wanted to see the inside of the place on film; failing that, there had to be something damning, something to subvert the iconic status of Osbourne himself, and in that area Dex had nothing more concrete than his own deeply felt sense of injustice that the man was so popular in the first place. Dex was returning, in fact, from yet another of these disastrous meetings, trying to kowtow before unimaginative money men, on the very evening he came back to his apartment and found none other than Mal Osbourne standing right there in his living room, condescending and triumphant, with his arm around Molly.
Now Dex’s savings were just about gone. He tried to get back to work. Out of desperation he even accepted an offer to work as an AD on the third sequel to a teen sex comedy; he tortured himself for weeks over the shame of it, and then in the end the studio head was fired and the whole project went into turnaround before even one day of photography. Then one morning he picked up the paper and read about the burning of Palladio. His very
first thought – before he got to the paragraphs that mentioned Osbourne’s missing girlfriend – was what a legendary ending this would have made to the film he had imagined shooting there. But his own less hypothetical connection to the events in Virginia had been made clear enough to him by the end of that day, by which time he had unplugged his phone rather than field another call from a reporter wanting to know about Molly, how it felt to have her stolen from him by a famous person, what it was about her that seemed to drive men to such extremes, if he had any idea where she might have gone.
His friends didn’t avoid him after that – many of them had half suspected him of lying about his breakup with Molly all along – but he avoided them, hypersensitive to any real or imagined condescension in their voices now that they knew he had been cuckolded and made a fool of. There was no sense in pretending he wasn’t humiliated, since he had taken the trouble to lie about it so elaborately in the first place. Fuck them anyway, went Dex’s reasoning.
Broke, he finally agreed to accept a gig his exasperated agent had secured for him, directing a commercial for deodorant, on the condition that he be allowed to do it under an assumed name. It only took a day, and by the middle of that day his distaste had been at least temporarily supplanted by the pleasure he took in getting a shot just right or in having a crew to order around. The agency that hired him was very pleased with the result and eager to work with him again. Dex could have as much work of that sort as he wants, in fact, but he only takes enough of it to get by; he doesn’t want it to define him. In between jobs he’s back to sitting in his kitchen and reading through the spec screenplays his agent’s office forwards to him, hundreds of them, looking for the one that doesn’t embarrass him, the one that comes anonymously from out of nowhere to bear out and ratify for him his own vision of the world.
* MESSAGE *
It will be a free literature, because it will serve not some satiated heroine, not the bored “upper ten thousand” suffering from obesity, but millions and tens of millions of workers, those people who make up the best part of our country, its strength and future.
YOUR COMFORT IS MY SILENCE.
YOU KILL TIME.
I am deeply troubled by the suggestion that the university has abandoned its historic commitment to freedom of expression in the process of developing the contractual agreement.
I SHOP THEREFORE I AM.
We Democrats need to speak frankly and often about personal responsibility, knowing right from wrong and being prepared to punish wrong, loving our country and the American ideal, hard work, and caring about those who need help.
Art or Advertising? Either Way, Seoul is Mesmerized
*
HER MOTHER USED to insist on accompanying her all the way on to the train, fussing over her, talking to the conductor, afraid Bethany would miss her stop, fall asleep and wake up in Manhattan. But then one time the train actually began pulling out of the station with Joyce Vincent still on board and she had had to pull the emergency cord. The police were there by the time that one was over. So that put a stop to the humiliation; now her mother just handed her her overnight bag in the parking lot, hugged her, and anxiously watched as she took the stairs to the platform.
It was always nighttime when Bethany rode the train – Friday night when she left, Sunday night when she returned – and she liked the insular, underpopulated, anonymous feel of the sixty-five-minute ride each way. She was fifteen and she did not welcome being looked at. The conductor took her ticket and after that she didn’t have to deal with another face, besides her own reflection in the darkened window, the whole rest of the way.
No one to make fun of how she looked, or to pretend to ignore it in a patronizing way, which was maybe worse; no one to judge her or exclude her; no eyes in which to see her own pitiable nature reflected. It was sweet to get away from her mother, too, not because she was unsympathetic to Bethany’s problems but because she was way too sympathetic. She secretly loved it when Bethany or her brother Kevin fucked up – because it confirmed her own view that the damage done by her ex-husband, the kids’ father, was insurmountable and continued to ramify. She wallowed in her children’s failures, as in her own. Still, she put them on the train to Rhinebeck every weekend to see him, because that’s what the court had ordered.
Kevin hadn’t been on one of these trips with her in about three months now. He just didn’t want to go. Nothing special against his father: it’s just that there was a lot of stuff going on most weekends at home, parties and such, and he didn’t want to miss it. What were they going to do, make him go? He was two years older than his sister and was starting to go bad in a serious way. Bethany knew about a lot of things, drugs and stupid petty crime, that her parents would fall over dead if they ever found out about. Mostly, though, he was just so nasty. No compassion for anyone. Boys were different, but Bethany wondered if this state of advanced bitterness was something she herself was about to grow into, considering all she and her brother had in common.
On the bright side, her dad had been a lot nicer to her since Kevin had stopped coming. He felt so guilty all the time anyway. He had this small house he was renting in Rhinebeck, which was kind of a wealthy town, and a job at a different branch of the same bank he had worked at in Ulster, back before everything blew apart. It was easy, in his chronic state of remorse, to get things out of him. Last month he had bought her these Doc Martens she liked, just because she saw them in a store window. Eighty bucks.
Outside, she knew, were trees, and scrub, and the highway, and the houses and cluttered yards of poor people, and from time to time the river. No loss, not being able to see any of it. She got out her Discman and put on the new Kid Rock.
Some of her pseudo-friends, hearing where she went on weekends, told her stories about getting stoned in the train-car bathrooms, which were huge on account of the wheelchair-access laws. Or hiding in them to beat the fare. Or having sex in there, on a bet. Bethany wasn’t interested. She was still a little scared of experiences like that. It was one reason she secretly didn’t mind missing the various parties on Saturday nights, the keggers in the woods, the gatherings at the elementary-school playground.
“Can’t,” she’d say. “I have to go visit my dad.”
“Oh, right,” they’d say. “Drag.”
They were pulling into the Rhinebeck station now, and there he was. He stood in the floodlit parking lot, hands jammed in his pockets, next to his car. He wore a big parka over his suit. Too vain to wear his glasses, he squinted at the train, trying to find her face in one of the bright windows. Bethany watched him search for her. The music blasted in her ears.
* MESSAGE *
MAYBE LUXURY DOESN’T MAKE YOU SOFT AFTER ALL
COMPROMISE IS JUST A POLITE WORD FOR
SURRENDER
“I make images and they make images, so why not put them together?” Mr Rodrigue said. “Would Andy Warhol have done this? Yes.”
THE WOMB IS OVERRATED
Self-appointed moral critics throughout the ages have warned of moral declines when what they should have hailed was moral change. Today is no different.
May Technology Bring Us Together
“Who wants to call themselves ‘Jew’?” Ms. Bleyer asked. “We’ve been called Jews for 4,000 years. It’s played out. Heeb just sounds so much cooler.”
In February 1994, Benetton began its campaign for peace.
*
THE FRANTIC, ESCALATING nature of publicity was such that people all over the country got sick of the story of Jean-Claude Milo within weeks, and forgot it in all but outline; still, even after it all seemed to have blown over, Palladio received no inquiries regarding new business of any kind, nor even any expressions of patient support from faithful clients wondering when and where they expected to reopen. If the connection between these two phenomena – Milo’s death and the obsolescence of Palladio – seemed at least instinctively obvious to the world at large, to Mal it remained frustratingly oblique. For whether one
saw Milo as a martyr to his art or simply as an inadequately supervised lunatic, the fact was that he had never expressed any dissatisfaction with his life at the mansion, never made any attempt to dissociate himself from it. Indeed, the last two years had been indisputably the most productive of his life. Why should his death, even taking into account its violent circumstances, reflect on the larger concerns of the place, or on the nature and the quality of the work that was done there?
Mal couldn’t fathom it. With little else to do, he brooded on it with increasing bitterness until he gradually lost touch with the idea that the whole episode, to one way of thinking at least, had not been about him at all. In the popular fascination with the story he could see only a calculated, opportunistic effort to bring him down. He was an innovator, a visionary, and there are always people – hordes of people, in fact – who are interested in seeing such a person fail.