by Lillian Ross
Dr. McLuhan next suggested the possibility of a new technology that would extend consciousness itself into the environment. “A kind of computerized ESP,” he called it, envisioning “consciousness as the corporate content of the environment—and eventually maybe even a small portable computer, about the size of a hearing aid, that would process our private experience through the corporate experience, the way dreams do now.” Then he said, “Well, that’s enough pretentious speculation for one night,” and turned to Mr. Glenesk, who suggested that the audience have “an old Socratic go” at some questions and answers.
Mr. Glenesk thereupon introduced the Professor to some of the McLuhan disciples in the audience.
The first disciple told Dr. McLuhan that he had been amplifying several sounds in one room at the same time, to get the “depth-involving” sound that is part of Dr. McLuhan’s brave new world.
“Must make one hell of a racket,” Dr. McLuhan said approvingly.
A second disciple, a rather nervous woman from the neighborhood, announced that she could hardly wait to have an experience-processor of her own. “The way things are now, I never can remember anything,” she said, and was immediately interrupted by a third disciple, a bearded student sitting next to her.
The student expressed equal eagerness for computerized ESP. “Gee, just think!” he continued. “I could go to sleep a painter and wake up a composer!”
“Terrifying,” Dr. McLuhan said.
1965
LONG-WINDED LADY — Maeve Brennan
WE have received another message from our friend the long-winded lady. She writes: “During the recent heat wave, all air ceased to flow through the streets of New York City. There was no air moving between the buildings, and what air had been trapped here stood still and began to thicken. There was nothing to breathe except heavy displeasure. Every time I walked into an air-conditioned restaurant, I felt very humble and thankful and anxious to sit down and start being good. I wasn’t the only one. On the afternoon of the dreadful third of July (it was a Sunday), I was in the Adano Restaurant, on West Forty-eighth Street. I was happy. It seemed a miracle that the one restaurant in New York where I really wanted to be should not only be open on a Sunday, when so many places are closed, but be open on the Sunday of the longest summer weekend, and on a weekend so uneasy with the heat that even Manhattan’s towering skyline appeared to waver under the fixed abyss that shimmered up there where Heaven used to be. At the Adano, the air-conditioning machine was producing ocean breezes. In this chaotic Broadway neighborhood, the Adano has always been an oasis of order and good manners and beautiful food, but that Sunday it seemed to have drifted here from another, more silent region. The restaurant is a wide oblong, with a low ceiling, lighted by star-shaped lamps of dull-yellow glass. The walls are decorated with large, placid still-lifes and views of Italian scenery, except for the rear wall, which has mirrors that carry the room into the far distance. The tables are plain and plainly set, with well-worn silver and with white linen napkins folded to stand up in smart points. Empty as it was, and with everything polished and shining, the restaurant looked like a dining room on a small, tidy ship. I was sitting at the front, in one of three half-moon-shaped booths near the street door. I faced the bar, and in the mirror behind the shelves of bottles I saw the reflection of grapes and apples in the rich still-life on the wall behind me and above my head. And through the glass panels of the doorway I could see the street, where the rose-red Adano awning cast a curious shadow on the burning sidewalk. Very few people passed. Once in a while, a wilted figure in summer undress climbed the sweaty steps that lead to the ticket and information bureau of the Blue Line Sightseeing Bus Tours, which is on the first floor of a poor old brownstone across the street. The old house is one of three that still stand together there, but the two others have had their faces flattened out. The house where the Blue Line people are has aged as naturally and as recognizably as a human being might do. It is the same as it always was, except that too many years have passed and life has not improved for it. There is a bar in the basement, but it was closed that Sunday. A man walked into the Adano suddenly and then hesitated just inside the door, looking around him. He was a very nice-looking, pale, thin man of about fifty, with not much hair, and he was politely dressed in a dark-blue summer suit, a snowy-white shirt, and a neat dark tie with dots on it. When he spoke, he had a pleasant, squeaky voice. I am sure he was a stranger in the city. He had an out-of-town look about him. I think he had rashly left his nice air-conditioned hotel in the hope of finding a real New York place, a place with atmosphere, where he would get something of the feeling of the city, and I think he must have wandered about for a while before he happened into the Adano. He must have been getting a bit frantic, not wanting to continue in the heat and loneliness, and not wanting to go back to the boredom of a long afternoon in the nice hotel that is almost certainly exactly like all nice hotels in big cities. Wandering around alone like that in New York City on a Sunday is no good at all. He stood there looking at me and looking at the bartender and looking beyond us at the calm room, and at last he called out to the bartender, ‘Are you open?’ ‘Yes, we are open,’ the bartender said benignly. He was polishing a glass. The stranger walked over to the bar and sat up on a stool and put his hands on the counter. ‘Could I just sit here and have a beer, please?’ he asked. He sounded just the way I felt—on his best behavior. It was a day to smile eagerly back at Good Fortune if she happened to look your way, a day to say please and thank you and to watch your ‘p’s and ‘q’s and to look out for ladders and to watch yourself crossing streets, and so on—the heat had roused superstitious dreams and made us careful. People began coming into the Adano. A family party, mother and father and three young children, walked in and went straight to a table at the back. The mother and father immediately began reading the menu aloud, and the children all sat forward and listened as intently as though they were at a story hour. Then two women walked in—tall, strong, opulently shaped girls of about thirty who looked as though they must be in show business. Their walk was sedate, as it well might be, because their dresses did all the work—slinky, skintight, slithering dresses that recalled the body of Circe, the gestures of Salome, and the intentions of Aphrodite. One dress was of white lamé sewn all over with tiny pearls and brilliants, and the other was of shiny baby-pink cotton striped up and down in thin lines with pink glass bugle beads. Each of the girls carried a cloudy gray mink stole and long gloves and a little fat handbag, and each of them, as she sat down, swept her right hand underneath herself to make sure her dress did not wrinkle, while her eyes went swiftly about the restaurant in a wary, commanding glance that took in everything there was to see. Then, without speaking to each other, the two girls examined the menu, and they ordered at once—food only, nothing to drink—and when the food began arriving they ate steadily. They emptied big plates of hot soup, plates piled with meat and vegetables, and plates with heaps of salad, and they ate a lot of crusty Adano bread with butter, and when all that was gone they had coffee—American coffee—and a slice each of glistening rum cake. While they were eating, they talked a bit—not much—but they never smiled, and as I watched them I began to be deeply fascinated by them, because their closed faces and their positive, concentrated gestures excluded every single thing in the world except themselves. Outside herself and what contributed to her, nothing existed for either of them. They were all flesh and color and movement, and yet they were like stone monuments whose eating time had come and who would, when they had finished eating, go back to being monuments. I watched them and I wondered at them, because I thought them untroubled by every emotion except anger, and free of all sensations except the sensations of satisfaction. They made no delay over their dinner, and when they had finished they paid their check and stood up and collected their belongings and walked out with the hypnotic sedateness with which they had come in. I turned my head to watch them go, and so did the stranger at the bar, and then he went back to a
dmiring the restaurant he had discovered, and he seemed like the man at the ship’s bar just after sailing time who still cannot believe that he has made it—that he is on board, at sea, and it is all as he imagined it. As much as anybody in New York that Sunday, the man at the bar of the Adano found himself where he had dreamed of being.”
1966
RUNOUTS, KICKOUTS, AND POPOUTS AT GILGO BEACH — James Stevenson
“I’M twelve years old,” said a plump, cheerful, black-haired boy, marching across the sand, lugging the front end of an orange surfboard under one arm and the front end of a white surfboard under the other.
“So am I,” said a slightly thinner boy, slogging along five feet behind the first, with the rear ends of the surfboards under his arms. “We’re from Levittown.”
The boys and the boards had just come wobbling out of an underpass beneath Ocean Parkway and were now crossing Gilgo Beach—six miles east of Jones Beach—toward the ocean. It was a cool, hazy Sunday morning. “I mowed lawns in Levittown until I earned the money for my surfboard,” said the plump boy, who was wearing a blue-striped T-shirt and madras trunks, and who told us his name was Steven Cummings. “My father drives us over. He borrows my board and surfs, too, but only after the Fourth of July.” He smiled a big smile, and a set of braces gleamed in the sunlight.
“A lot of our friends surf,” said the thinner boy, who turned out to be Kevin MacNamara, and who was wearing the top half of a wet-suit above his shorts. “There’s Johnny, and there’s Mark—”
“There’s a wave!” Steven yelled, and they lurched rapidly down to the water’s edge. They separated—one boy, one board—and plunged into the cold surf, battled their way through the shore break, and paddled out toward the waves, where a dozen surfers were already sitting on their boards, waiting for the right wave, looking like black insects in their wet-suits.
A lean lifeguard in dark glasses and an orange parka was sitting on a bench nearby. “This is wonderful right now, but as the season goes on it’s like the Black Hole of Calcutta; it’s wild,” he said. “We’ve counted six hundred to seven hundred surfboards in the water at one time, and on a good hot Sunday you can practically walk across the boards out there.” He sighed, and told us his name was Michael Twohig. “Gilgo and Cedar Beach are the only ones on Long Island that really encourage surfing,” he said. “We make rescues as far as we can see in either direction. Last summer, we made around four hundred— sometimes running forty or fifty a day.” At his feet was a wooden pail full of coiled new rope, and next to it, stuck in the sand, was a three-foot torpedo buoy with a loop of rope. “The big danger is kids getting hit on the head by boards,” he said. “That, and runouts. A runout is where you get a break in the sandbar and, depending on the wind and the tide, the water rushes back out at maybe ten miles an hour. You can’t swim against it.” He sighed again.
Four teen-age boys, deeply sunburned, were lying on towels inside an improvised lean-to of picnic tables, fifty yards down the beach. Four surfboards were resting against one table, and a transistor radio was playing “She’d Rather Be with Me.” We said hello, and the boys—who were all staring at the sea—told us they had been surfing from six in the morning till around nine and were now waiting for bigger waves. A distant surfer was riding in front of a gentle wave about a hundred yards out, and as the boys watched the wave passed under him and he went head over heels into the water. “A good surfer doesn’t fall off like that,” one of the boys said. “He kicks out when there’s no more left to the wave.” He formed a wave in the sand, patting it into shape, and then—using the flat of his hand as a surfboard—showed us a proper kickout. “You ride as close to parallel as you can, and cut back and forth, and then you kick out”— he turned his hand abruptly, rotating over the top of the wave—“and you paddle out again.”
“We’ve been here every weekend since January,” one of the boys said. “And before that up to December.”
“When the water’s above forty degrees,” another said, “we go.”
“You can’t compare surfing to anything,” one said. “There’s no feeling like sliding along on the face of a wave.” He stood up and started to pull on his wet-suit.
“It’s free!” another said. “No regulations!”
One of the boys said, “A lot of gremmies come out just to impress girls, and all they do is sit on their popouts.”
“What’s a popout?” we asked.
“A crummy board,” the boy said. “Machine-made. And you can see the fibres going in all different directions in the resin.”
The others began putting on their wet-suits. “Some girls are good surfers, but most of them just sit on their boards,” one said.
“We don’t mind!” another said, happily.
A short, dark-haired boy explained, “If the waves are like average, we’d go half the time with the waves and half with the girls, because you can always get average waves but you can’t always get girls. But if the waves were really good, we’d go with the waves.” He picked up his board and the others followed, walking down the beach in their black suits, their boards held overhead.
The two twelve-year-olds were just coming out of the surf, sopping wet, as we turned back, and we asked Steven, who was shivering a bit, how the waves were.
“Too small,” he said, “and too cold. I’m going to get a hot dog.”
We asked him what he likes about surfing and he thought for a moment, and then flashed his braces. “It’s like having the power to command the wave,” he declared, and Kevin nodded. “A sense of power,” Steven added, and then they trotted toward the underpass, and the hot-dog stand, carrying the big boards.
1967
1970s
BIKE TO WORK — Hendrik Hertzberg
LAST Wednesday morning, it was definitively proved that it is possible to ride a bike through darkest morning-rush-hour Manhattan—all the way from Sixtieth Street and Fifth Avenue to Battery Park—and live. This important fact was established through the efforts of a young architect, Barry Fishman, and his wife, Harriet Green, who recently started an organization called Bike for a Better City. The Fishmans believe that biking is a healthy, friendly, quiet, inexpensive, non-polluting, fast, and practical means of transportation, and apparently a lot of New Yorkers agree with them. All told, about a thousand enthusiastic cyclists, including us, turned out for the Bike to Work Ride that kicked off the Fishmans’ campaign for bike lanes on major thoroughfares.
At a quarter to eight, when we arrived on our battered English racer, several dozen cyclists had already gathered at the Grand Army Plaza entrance to Central Park, across from the Plaza Hotel. One of them was David Dubinsky, the president emeritus of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Mr. Dubinsky is a very short, solid-looking man with white hair and a sunny disposition. He was wearing a beret, smoking a cigar, and wheeling a ten-speed Hercules. “I’ve been riding for seventy years,” said Mr. Dubinsky, who is seventy-eight. “When I came to this country, I was crazy for motorcycles, but who had the money for that? So I rode a bike. This is a new one. They already stole on me two good bikes.”
“When did you get your first bike?” we asked.
“In 1937, the Union had a convention in Atlantic City,” he said. “They wanted to get some kind of gift for me, so they asked my wife. She said, ‘Get him a bike.’ It was a nice thing to do, because when we were courting, I used to visit her on a bike. Before that, I had to rent. Look, here’s Abe.” He pointed to A. H. Raskin, of the Times, who had just wheeled up. “I often ride with him on Sundays in the park.”
By this time, hundreds more cyclists had arrived. At 8:02, there was a commotion, and, once more, Mayor Lindsay’s well-groomed head came into view in the middle of a crush of cameras and reporters. The Mayor took a piece of paper from his pocket and read a proclamation designating the day as Bike for a Better City Day.
A few minutes later, the Mayor took up his position at the head of the line. He was flanked by Charles Luce, chairman o
f the Consolidated Edison Company, and Jerome Kretchmer, the City’s Environmental Protection Administrator, who had evidently found something they could agree upon. Nearby, Sid Davidoff, the Mayor’s burly troubleshooter, was shouting instructions through a bullhorn.
“You got a bicycle, Sidney?” asked Mr. Kretchmer, who makes a point of always calling Mr. Davidoff “Sidney.”
“You bet I do, Jerry,” said Mr. Davidoff.
“Mr. Lindsay! Mr. Lindsay!” piped a female voice from the rear. The Mayor looked around. “Can we go?” the voice asked. “I have to get to school.”
“And I have to catch a nine-o’clock flight to Washington,” the Mayor said, and then he took off with startling speed, as if it were the Tour de France. Mr. Lindsay, moving out ahead of the pack, pedalled furiously down Fifth Avenue to Forty-sixth Street, where his limousine was waiting to take him to the airport. His performance was the more remarkable in view of the fact that his bike was a one-speed, coaster-brake model.
“The Mayor rides fast,” we managed to say to Mr. Kretchmer, who was resplendently dressed in a cream-colored suit and a chocolate-brown shirt and tie, and who was setting a more reasonable pace on a shiny wine-red Raleigh.
“I’ve worked out with him, and he’s in fantastic condition,” said Mr. Kretchmer.
At the corner of Forty-second Street, a knot of pedestrians gaped at the extraordinary procession, and Mr. Kretchmer yelled at them, “Don’t just stand there! Ride bicycles!”
“Cycling is basically a solitary activity,” a man on a fifteen-speed Peugeot remarked to no one in particular. “When you ride a bike, you kind of go into a trance.”
At the corner of Tenth Street and Fifth Avenue, where a policeman was directing the cyclists east, we pulled over and watched for a while. Because most of the cyclists were taking the unusual step of stopping for red lights, the line stretched out over many blocks. We were struck by the variety of bikes and the variety of the people on them, and by the fact that the majority of the cyclists seemed to be over thirty. A white-haired lady in a long black dress pedalled by on a penny-farthing—the kind of bicycle with a very large front wheel and a very small rear wheel which one often sees in old prints. A black girl careered past on a unicycle. A Rasputinlike hippie took the corner on a contraption that resembled a schematic model of the atom.