Thursday, June 29, 2006

Flightline - Patton’s Secret

Since I go to LA tomorrow for a commission meeting, I figgered this might be a good time to disgorge a little essay about airports, and something I saw in one not long ago…

Life during wartime does have some distinctive characteristics. One I’ve been noticing, is troops at the airports. I don’t travel all that often, but each time I do these days, wherever I start and wherever I’m going, I see our men-at-arms.  They stroll incongruously through the terminals in their fatigued fatigues, the worn camo patterns standing out sharply against the universally muted slickness of airport decor.  Their heads are often shaved, or shorn to nubbins; their boots pace anxiously on carpet that’s taken the place of foreign sands; and their duffels are stuffed to capacity with all they have been able to call their own during battlefield assignments.

What I notice next is, how the uniforms bring out the individuality of the wearers.  It’s like the way tuxedos force us to pay attention to people’s faces - they mask meaningless distinctions and focus attention on the important ones, the things that give people personalities.  It’s a remarkable effect, one that I find is only accentuated in places where the uniform is worn by a distinctive minority of the total population.  One soldier: I see the army duds.  But with many soldiers amid the mufti civilians, I get sucked right into the details and differences in their hands, their faces, their eyes.  I think of where they’ve been, and what they’ve seen.  I see the uniform, but I keep trying to look past it. 

Not long ago as I waited for a flight, I watched a whole fighting crew walk past me in the airport.  SIx men, weathered and hardened, pants tucked into their boots, floppy widebrimmed sun hats jammed on shining jar heads, strained straps of heavy duffels crushing down against broad shoulders.... They walked, though not in file, as a definite group.  Then, last among them, shorter, a little stockier, identical in uniform but distinct in all other physical particulars, she walked too - more comfortably, I thought, more like a vacationer and less like an invading force.  Though she had her regulation duffel slung over her shoulder, her head, unlike those of the other soldiers, was bare, and her brown wavy locks seemed to flaunt her stand-down status. Her clumsy sun hat - regulation camo, frayed from use - peeked out from a pink Victoria’s Secret bag that dangled coyly from her free-swinging hand.  Despite her army-issue uniform, her every step broadcast one message with unmistakeable clarity: she was home again, and ready to change more than just her clothes.

See ya next week, party peoples.  Keep your panties unknotted. 

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

NOverheard

Now, it can be told:

I wasn’t going to participate.  I’d been sending in trial submissions for their little contests for weeks, and never received so much as an “honorable mention.” I never heard squat, actually.  And if you’ve ever heard squat, well, not hearing it is a very lonely feeling in the ol’ earhole. 

I didn’t need the rejection.  I had plenty of it already.  If I wanted someone to tell me I was a loser, I could just ask someone on the bus.  We’re good at providing that sort of social confirmation for each other.  But I didn’t want that, either, so I kept my fool mouth shut.  And then when I got home I checked my email and I found:

“I’m writing to you because you’re one of the best headline writers for our Headline Contest; we have a complicated algorithm where we’ve ranked and rated the thousands of headlines per contest we’ve received, and yours have been in the top handful.  […] This is why I’m writing to you. As one of our best headline writers, I want to personally invite you to apply for the job of headline writer.”

Cool, huh?  I didn’t go out looking for rejection – it went trolling for me, in the sultry guise of potential fame and fortune.  It’s a shopworn disguise but it fooled me well enough.  In a palpitation of excitement, I sent in a handful of sample headlines.  Then, I waited – but not for very long, because soon enough (if not sooner), I got this email:

“Dear finalist, Thanks for applying [ ].  We’ve spent the past couple of days reading everyone’s headlines and letters.  [ ] Most of them were shockingly good.  Even so, some were so shockingly good that we put them into what became a very small pile of Outstandings.  Then we took the best of the Outstandings and put them into an even smaller pile of People Who We Can’t Live Without, and so forth, and the best of those into To Die For, until after all the dust had settled, we ended up with you and a few others of your ilk.  So if you’re reading this, congratulations.  Pat yourself on the back.  You are Officially Funny.  We are in awe of you.”

This email went on to explain how the final round of this application process was to be conducted.  Then I got another email from another staffer, making sure I got the first email.  They didn’t want me to miss the boat.  I, an inveterate boat-misser, appreciated the concern.  I generated a tasty sample, submitted it fresh and steaming from the murky spigots of my brainpan, and sat back, waiting for the media junkets and propositions from wealthy dowagers to start rolling in.

I was still waiting a week later.  It seemed unlikely by that point that I’d be hearing anything from anybody, ever – much less so, anything relating to this contest.  I’d been plucked from the anonymous crowd by the finger of fate for a Dirty Sanchez of my own devising, and I could now wear it at my leisure.  I gave up.  I’m sensible that way.  That is to say, in the way of the loser.

But then yesterday, I learned in yet another email:

“[S]orry it’s taken us so long to get back to you.  we’re mostly done with picking the new batch of editors and headline writers, and unfortunately, you didn’t get the gig this time around…. what we ended up doing is picking out a few specialist-type writers [ ] and rounding it out with a couple of general humor types.  so if you didn’t get the job, it’s probably because you’re just too well-rounded.  or something.”

(Ah yes, the curse of roundness.  How it rankles! But the email did go on….)

”we’ll be posting a “Best of” the applications pretty soon, because there were so many amazingly funny headlines….  And [ ] if you live in new york, send me an email, and i’ll put you on the list; we’ll have an unofficial beach launch party / happy hour some time during the first two weeks of july.”

Whoo-hoo!  Beach party!  Happy hour!  3000 miles away!  This is exactly how alcohol takes away the sting of critical scourges.  That is to say, by drinking it at a happy hour.  Hearing about it and staying sober is more like pouring alcohol directly into open self-inflicted wounds – clarifying, in a sort of blinding-flash-of-pain way.  I will be missing any party that is thrown for those who defeated me, and not even by choice.  I will join them in my own way, however, by cutting the faces out of US magazine pictorials, drawing disrespectfully upon them, soaking them in Everclear, and, finally, igniting them on the tabletop with blue-tip matches.  Oh, bitterness… we have so much catching up to do.

But then, shortly thereafter, I got one more email – the last, I imagine, that I’ll be getting in this little correspondence:

“hope you got the previous email.  so, sorry you didn’t get the gig.  i have to say, though, you were one of my superduper top favorites.  so we’d love to work with you.  at the very least we will be having guest headline writers, one a week, just for fun, once we get the kinks out of the software.  so i will be in touch about that if you’re interested (seriously).”

For seriously?  Sure dude, bring it on.  If a deskjockey in Fran’s Damn Disco can be making fun of overheard whatnot in New York, I’m the deskjockey to do it.  Thanks, Overheard sites, for considering me a worthy candidate, for keeping me in the running till I ran out of steam on those last 12 blurbs, and for salving my wounds with these words that are no less kind for being difficult for me to believe.  But, regardless of my belief structure, I would be happy to take another stab at being a headliner.  I’ve spent 40-odd years (some odder than others) being a byline, and it’s raising some disturbing issues for me.  So here’s my offer: You give me the line, and I’ll give you the head.  Of course, this offer is open to negotiation.  I regret that I have only one head to give, or words to that effect.

But I’ll tell you – now that I’ve had a brush with potential cybercelebrity, I can’t stop thinking of headlines for pretty much everything I see and hear.  I hope they contact me soon because that’ll be the only way to stop the funny little voices - and frankly, they’re starting to make me nervous. 

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Hammerthrowback

I work in an urban setting. 
Here’s a photo of my office building, in its natural habitat.  The area has mostly been built up in the last 20 or so years, though of course it’s been inhabited much longer than that.  Just a few blocks from my office, for example, you find
this gritty edifice.  For years I wished I needed a coppersmith, so I could go in and get my smithy fix there.  And then it came to pass that I actually did need such a craftsman - our ranma was in need of hand-hammered brackets so we could mount it on the wall without punching holes through its century-old self.  I’ll just go to the coppersmith, I told myself.  They’ll coppersmith me up something in two shakes of a crucible of molten metal.

But when I looked more closely, the coppersmith was just an old preserved facade on a remodeled building housing a design-build firm and some condos.  It hadn’t been a cool dangerous foundry for a very long time.  I was frustrated and I groused about it to my colleague a few weeks ago as we walked back from a site visit.  “I finally need someone to do some metalworking for me,” I complained, “and the coppersmith is gone.”

“Well maybe,” she replied, “but the
blacksmith is still in business.”

Blacksmith?  Turns out, yeah, there’s a blacksmith in downtown Suckafree City.  Klokar’s has been around since 1906, but it’s post-quake and therefore officially modern.  As modern as anyplace that does business using stuff like
this, anyway.  Tony runs Klokars, and he runs it his way.  He’s got a booming voice and he likes to curse and trade stories and shmooze and enjoy the time god’s given him.  There’s not a lot of business at the smithy’s these days, after all, so he makes the most of his time as the Mayor of the 400 block of Folsom.

When I walked in, he was on the telephone in his small, impossibly cluttered office.  I bided my time by looking around the front rooms, two dizzyingly chaotic spaces full of greasy old industrial equipment, pieces of iron stock, long tubes and worked plates, and thousands of little projects that had been done for fun or never paid for.  A round wooden table stood near the grimy front window, where an enormous plate of pasta in meat sauce sat on a plastic gingham tablecloth. The place resonated with the ring of thousands of
hammerblows, and the dust that blanketed the dirt was there honestly.  Everywhere I looked were bizarre, random elements - a towering stack of deck chairs, a juke box, an enormous belt-driven machine lathe built in Detroit and older than color movies.  I understood that it was supposed to be an impenetrable mess to anyone but the craftsman, for whom knowing what and where everything was, was such a key part of his craft.  It was part of the creative process, and I was there to partake of it.

When he hung up his eyes were goggling from their sockets.  “That was my gay nephew.  He’s gay, that son of a bitch.  That’s some bullshit, huh?  Damn.  We’re really not in touch much anymore but he called so we talked.  They caught him in the chicken coop with his son-in-law.  Now that’s bullshit.  Huh?  Huh?  So hey, what, do ya got money for me?  What do you want from me, anyway?  Do I know you?”

I explained myself, showed him a little schematic I’d drawn up in Word’s “draw” function ("Hey, that’s some good bullshit!  You made this on a computer?  Hey, now that’s some serious bullshit, there!"); he seemed to get my drift and told me he could work something up.  I called back a week later and he was ready with six beautiful brackets.  I brought my camera and took some photos of his
vise and his
scary fridge and a bunch of other stuff that didn’t come out so good.  I felt a bit self-conscious, frankly, with my shiny shoes and effete camera getting all dusty in the murk of his workshop. 

But I have to say, he did a really nice job on my brackets.  I can’t wait to see how they look when they’re holding the ranma in place, but for the time being,
they look pretty damn good lying across the top of my dining table.  I like the way the iron seems to contain many ages and patinas, and how it’s roughly hammered into broader leaves at the ends, and how it’s full of
texture and infinitesimal differences. 

And I especially love that I could get it hand-hammered and custom-forged by a craftsman who practices arts on which society was utterly dependent for thousands of years, but who is now a living anachronism, plying his ancient trade not ten minute’s walk from my bland beige cube on the fifth floor of a 12 story building.  As my old friend Tony would say, that is some good bullshit.