“What is it, my hon-bun?” I asked, moved by her quantity of emotion.
“How is she paying for this?” Nadine asked. Terrified that she had been deterred.
“Well, she told us, didn’t she?”
“What did she say?”
And I could not, for the life of me, remember.
20. OBSCURE or RETIRED?
HARRISON AND CLAIRE were out on a date.
Claire had read the eight words in that week’s Brand New York about Glick, the country’s most unknown artist, and she was impressed that Harrison knew about her when everyone else did not. They went for a walk together to stare at Glick’s front door.
Harrison knew, from reading all eight of my pages that none of her work had ever been reproduced, and that none existed in any collections, museums, galleries, or display cases, private or public. It was not in a single lobby or living room. This fact actually haunted him. It was such an extreme example of his worst fear. The fact that it had actually occurred meant it could happen to him. Obscurity. When Claire requested that they view Glick’s art, he had to fortify himself with a bottle of Bombay. But then they both arrived and stood, staring, at that sad, horny front door.
Standing there, facing his fears, Harrison realized that despite both her inadequacy and her superiority, he was in love with Claire.
Ginette would never have understood the extreme terror represented by Glick’s front door.
Through the window they saw a deranged woman, smoking. Then they returned to the door.
“Well,” Claire said after a long sad silence. “It’s not very new.”
“No,” Harrison agreed. “The style is forty-eight years old, at least.”
They nodded, knowingly. In unison.
“Of course …” Claire inserted her hand, and her idea, into Harrison’s pocket. “Old is … not necessarily … terrible. Is it? I mean, it won’t sell, that’s for sure. But this isn’t … isn’t for sale, I guess. Right?’
“Don’t be naïve,” Harrison guffawed. “If Madonna Ciccone wanted to buy this, I’m sure that Glick would sell.”
“Madonna” was now an iconic word, like “Jesus.” It had no material base. When people said “JESUS!” they did not mean the son of God. They meant an emotion reflecting frustration or astonishment. It had no substance behind it. No person. Saying “Madonna” was like saying “well.” The real person had disappeared from public view long, long ago. She might have been dead, or worse, retired. Her name was now a phrase that represented the secret, ultimate desire of every ambitious person. It was an emblem of a crassness so brilliant and calculated that it was beyond reproach.
Harrison and Claire stood for a moment contemplating Madonna as the irrefutable potential corrupter of Glick’s pretentious obscurity.
“I don’t want to be too conceptual,” Claire added sincerely, wearing a cardboard codpiece and plastic diaphragm skirt, “but I do think that the idea behind selling out was that you would change what you made to suit the buyer. Not that the buyer would happen to want to purchase it, as is. Do we condemn people for that now too?”
“Of course not,” Bond reassured her. “But if someone has a buyer without having to make changes, then their original concept was commodifiable enough in the first place. They were born selling out. It is the gracefulness of adjustment by which we measure an artist’s maturity.”
He was thinking of himself. He had never had to sell out, just sell. Harrison went to a college where his parents paid $40,000 a year so that he could ease into the ruling cog. His teachers had gone to the same school and so they identified with him, their younger self. They phoned their other friends from the good old days and told them that their new discovery, Harrison Bond, was exactly like them too. He went to a corporate graduate school to which his parents signed over an additional $80,000, and there he had even more influential teachers who also looked like him. It was a world of people who looked in the mirror but thought it was the window.
This higher tier of teachers phoned their agents and editors who also looked, walked, talked, lived, and wrote like Bond. He drank with them. His book was like theirs. When the publisher bought it, he paid him back the amount of his two tuitions. That kept the money circulating in the right places. By this time, the other guys from the same schools had taken over the major magazines and newspapers. They reviewed his book favorably, with gravitas, and wrote feature stories about his gravitas as well. He became known for his gravitas. Americans did not resemble Harrison and his cronies, but they were used to following orders from people like him, so they did what they were told and bought the book.
Okay, it had happened this way once. It had been incredibly easy, though Harrison thought it was hard. But could he do it again?
Harrison realized, right then and there, standing next to Claire, staring at Glick’s eternal failure, that success could only repeat if he didn’t worry about it. If he worried, it wasn’t success. He had to second-guess nothing. He had to remember that his natural self was exactly what they wanted. The crucial error would be to alter a single gene. He was already perfect. He just had to stay that way.
“But, honey,” Claire said, oblivious to the volumes of monologue going on inside him, “Glick never sold anything, remember?”
“Mmmmm,” he mmmmed.
“So you really can’t put her down for selling out. Right?”
“Guess not,” Harrison agreed by negation.
“How strange,” Claire bobbed, as they turned away and continued on to a shop. “If everyone thought like her, I’d be out of a job.”
“So would they,” Harrison laughed suddenly. He was a good sport after all. Someone was more pathetic than he and always would be. This was a fact he must never forget.
21. THE TWO SIDES: IN AND OUT
“YOU KNOW,” Nadine said about sixteen times the next day, “we still don’t understand where she is getting the cash.”
We were strolling on a Sunday a.m. looking at shops. There were so many to choose from. There was the Checkbook Shop, the Dreydel Shoppe, the Wrist Massage Palace, the Imported Ginger Store, and the Allergy Supply Wholesalers, which specialized in different-colored tissues. There was a store where you could pay a small fee to take a nap. Oh look, the Pink Chocolate Spot. That must be where Sophinisba got hers. There were so many to choose from. Each unpredictable from their exterior. Each under no pressure, because their overheard was so low.
“Isn’t it weird?” I said. “We used to be able to tell what a store sold by glancing at it, while whizzing by on a bike. Now I have to go all the way inside to figure it out. Walking down the street is like going to a museum. You really need time to look.”
We stopped at the Chapstick Store, and then the Chaps Store, next to the Chopstick Spot, the Stick Stock, and the Chicken Stock Shop.
“It’s the lack of homogeneity,” Nadine surmised. “There won’t ever be too many shops selling paper clips, so we won’t get used to them and take them for granted. No assumptions. Every moment has to be thought through on its own terms.”
People who used to run Subway franchises had the toughest time adjusting because they weren’t used to thinking of anything for themselves. Now they had to think of it all. But when your whole society believes that you can do it, well … anything is possible.
“This is going to change my field forever,” Nadine gasped. And stood frozen on the sidewalk. “Reliable visual codes, built up over generations soaked in advertising, have simply disappeared. That shared global language of imperial banality. It’s gone. ”
“Graphic design,” I shrieked. “Where is it?”
We both looked up at the sky for some sign of conformist globalized control. But there was only a cloud.
“But, honey, you are still busy at THE MEDIA HUB, right?”
“Busier than before,” she said, confused.
“Well, what are you doing there all day?”
“I’m doing what I always did. I’m designing more web pages a
nd cyber ads than ever.”
This dichotomy was becoming really mysterious.
We both looked twisted, as when both parties are thoroughly confused, and their two sets of eyes fly around in contrary directions.
“I’ve got it!” Nadine was so calm. All her wrinkles faded as her face profoundly relaxed. It was as though she had found the secret of Zen.
“What?”
She looked carefully around her.
“There are no more purchasing codes on the street.”
“What? What is it? Nadine? Nadine?”
She was twirling, twirling round and round. She was looking, looking, really seeing our grave new world.
“I know what Sophinisba is doing.” She was wide-eyed, now. Frantic. Amazed. It was like she had seen the Virgin Mary’s leaking blood on a venetian blind. “She hasn’t eliminated advertising, or chain stores, or brand names, or franchises.”
“She hasn’t?”
“No.”
“So, where are they?”
“They’re inside,” she said. “She moved all advertising so that it only takes place intimately. In our private space. Inside. It comes to us at home and at work and through the many, many shifts of mail. Sophinisba flipped it. She flipped it. She made marketing personal, and individuality the common ground. The whole thing has been turned around.”
Nadine was right. That was the deal that Sophinisba had ultimately cut with the Richies. No more advertising in public places. But in return she handed them the private sphere on a silver moon. Now we were all theirs.
WOW.
Spending money was now what we did at home. When no one was looking. This stuff on the street was fluff. A diversion.
We were marketed to at work, where we felt employed.
But once we stepped outside of the office, there was none of it. Not a trace.
Sophinisba had realized that the most traumatic and marking things in a person’s life happen in secret, in private. They often involve cruelty from someone you love or at least know. All of us are used to this. We don’t like it, but it’s now familiar to suffer indignities, to be dehumanized and lied to at home. For many of us, life has been that way since childhood. Then we grow up, love someone, trust them, and they hurt us. Again, AT HOME. We know nothing else.
Given this very common but unacknowledged truth, the violation of marketing is just another slap in a very full face. Assimilable.
But public, that’s another story. That is a place of display, and trust.
Now, we go home to cry. And to shop.
“WOW,” I said filled with love. “My girlfriend is so smart and so wide.”
And I took Nadine home, to the marketplace, so that we could make love in private, where everyone was watching.
22. NEWDLE
HARRISON AND CLAIRE walked around looking for a place to eat. They passed a couple of new schools that Sophinisba had constructed, seemingly overnight. These schools had everything: ten kids in a class, swimming pools, free books.
“YOU NAME IT.”
That was Sophinisba’s School ReThinking Slogan.
She had invited movie stars to each buy a school district. The place would be named after them and increase that old Benjaminian AURA—how we feel about a movie star when he is offscreen, and how much more that makes us feel about him when he is back on. Also, this was a whole lot easier than having to go to some African country and miss all the parties. Plus, if the star came from a normal background, they could buy the public school in their old neighborhood and really rub it in everyone’s face.
Being naturally vicious competitors, the movie stars tried to outdo each other with caring. The Helen Hunt School had free yoga classes, and The Philip Seymour Hoffman School had free bicycles and free glasses.
Then Sophinisba applied the idea to hospitals. She leased them out for brand underwriting to credit card companies.
People adapted quickly. The word on the street soon was that if you were shot, you should go directly to Visa. But, in case of a heart attack or the need for microsurgery, make sure the ambulance took you to Mastercard. A lingering illness was best treated at Discover. Different cards for different ailments. It helped differentiate them in the consumer’s mind. The brands could further distinguish themselves while raising the ante. And they saved money, because it was cheaper to provide quality medical care than it was to buy ad space. This was another revolutionary step in Life Marketing, a newly evolving field. If companies simply ran daily life, that was advertising enough. They didn’t need theme songs too.
Consumers didn’t have to shift their thinking very far. They had always used credit cards to feel better about not having enough money—and as a way to pretend that inflation wasn’t happening. Now, credit cards still made them feel better, but they also made them be better. Credit cards were healing. It was a brilliant social contract and fantastic psycho-sell.
The first restaurant that Claire and Harrison chose to explore was yellow, with tiny sparking crystal eyes pasted to the windows. Nothing about this decorative strategy conveyed that the place had only three tables and served three kinds of noodle soup. That was it. If you wanted a salad first, you had to go to the salad place, then wander back over here. It was cheap and good, and it was fun. The owner sat in the corner, reading her most recent mail shipment. Her daughter was sitting at the third table doing her homework. It was so humane. The girl’s Teach-Shirt said Henry Louis Gates Public School #4. He had recently become a big movie star.
“I guess I’ll have the noodle soup,” Harrison said suavely.
“Oh, I got sick of that stuff.” The owner confessed like she was in group therapy. “I couldn’t look at another noodle without feeling trapped. Today we are only serving mashed potatoes. Hot, sweet, buttery, salty mashed potatoes.”
“Yum,” Claire said. “But how can your clients become acclimated to the predictability of your product?”
“Can’t,” the woman slouched. She was an old-fashioned type of waitress, like in the old movies when they were played by Shelley Winters and not Cameron Diaz. “But then again, unpredictability is the market hook these days. It makes people feel WILD and FREE. Besides, my quality of life improves if I can try new things on a whim. Potatoes?”
“Okay,” they said, persuaded, and feeling roguish and unkempt.
It was fun, Harrison realized, being together with Claire in New York, trying new little out-of-the-way places. It was fun being influenced by other people’s eccentricities, marginality, and concepts.
Product consistency was just one of Claire and Harrison’s many, many shared interests. Then there was an intimate, scary silence.
“Hey,” Harrison said, adolescently, his voice cracking. “Did you ever see Andy Warhol’s Drizzle?” (Andy Warhol never made a movie called Drizzle.)
“Yeah,” Claire said. “It was great. Isn’t that the one with Jon Voigt?” (She’s thinking of Midnight Cowboy, which was a John Schlesinger Hollywood flick that used Warhol superstars in a party scene.)
Dinner was served.
“Wait, I’m having an insight.” Harrison made fun of himself for the first time in years as he dug into his potatoes. (They were fingerling and purple.)
“Tell me,” Claire wrinkled her nose in a way that conveyed her cuteness.
“It’s about the word new. You know …” He looked at her for acknowledgement and she nodded. YES! YES! SHE UNDERSTOOD WHAT HE MEANT! Gleefully and with a full heart, Harrison continued. “No one ever says: ‘Oh, that book is written like Balzac, it’s not new.’ So why should a painting go out of date with the same speed as a car?”
“The art market?” Claire guessed. “I mean, everything is accelerated now, not just taste. Even emotions have speeded up.” She also loved the potatoes. “Too bad that there are not thousands of Glicks instead of thousands of people working on the global Twinkie market. But most paintings are made by one person, right?”
“Unless they are successful and have assistants.”
<
br /> “Right, but most of them don’t, right?”
“Right.”
“So,” Claire said, “a thousand painters equals a thousand paintings. But a thousand marketers equals one Twinkie.”
“Emotionally…” Harrison’s mind was humping now. “I can look at a painting made even thirty years ago, and if I am not one of the five … oh … three thousand people who are totally up-to-date on the art world, I might actually love it BECAUSE I know nothing. It might be new to me.”
“Individual Exposure,” Claire recalled from an ad she had designed for sheer underpants. “What a concept: each person learning about things one at a time instead of the entire city finding out about the new Snapple flavor at the same minute. It creaks, but it could work.”
“What is the new Snapple flavor?” Harrison asked.
“Watercress.”
“I love you,” Harrison smiled. And regretted it the moment he said it.
23. HONEYBUNNY
I COULD NO LONGER deny that something profound was troubling Nadine.
Unfortunately, it seemed to be me.
I had to take stock. Firstly, there is no such word as “firstly.” Second, all my perceptions were turning out to be wrong. This had become abundantly clear. Nadine realized stuff and therefore I admired her. That, apparently, was not good enough.
This fact contributed to my ongoing revelation that I must be an asshole, because all day long at work, and at home, I read on the Cyberscam about other people who I had never met or heard of benefiting tremendously from THE GREAT CHANGE (the new name for what used to be known as the Big Change.) Somehow, because of my many inadequacies, I was unable to access any part of the group betterment for myself and my gal. I couldn’t even meet anyone who had managed to do it, even though they appeared to be everywhere.
Opportunity was passing before me.
Who could love a person who missed their historic moment? It was like being a nineteen-year-old college student at Berkeley in 1968 and majoring in Accounting. Or a lesbian in 1979 who decided to go into a convent. A total doofus.
The Mere Future Page 9
