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ELDORADO, I REMEMBER

3/15/2009

They were simple times. At least that’s the way they seem, now that they’re gone. They probably weren’t simple for those called upon to live them, but let’s agree, shall we, they were simple times. The war was over, prosperity lay like a ribboned highway curving endlessly into the future, men were men, women were women, and Cadillac was luxury. Cadillacs had traversed America’s roads since the dawn of the Twentieth Century, of course, but it was only postwar that they emerged, tail-finned and gunned by humongous V8s, as the pinnacle of American luxury. It was a vision of luxury very long on car and very soft on seat.

Oh, but things change.

A gas crisis gripped the nation. Cars lined up for miles, desperate for re-fuel. And in response, Cadillacs shortened. They went from being gas mass murderers to simply being gas guzzlers, measurable now in miles per gallon rather than gallons per mile.

Oh, but things change.

The 1970s became the 1980s, and a new, more suave notion of automotive luxury took hold. Ocean liner automobiles with miles of Crushed Corinthian Leather suddenly ceased being the epitome of luxury. High performance engines and precision European driving machines were. It was a rethink that catapulted an obscure, spartan little Bavarian soap-bar of a vehicle called BMW into the pantheon of ultimate driving-ness. And it relegated Cadillac to oblivion, an 8-cylinder ghost shadow-boxing in a Crushed Corinthian Palookaville.

Oh, but things change.

An American archetype re-emerged, re-born into a land of malls and suburban streets from sea to shining sea. It was the archetype of the rugged American individual navigating a hostile wilderness in his covered wagon. Cars began to disappear, and in their place came….trucks. Trucks which euphemistically came to be called Sport Utility Vehicles, and euphonically called SUVs. They were suddenly everywhere, massive and indestructible, off-road behemoths safely navigating the hostile wilderness as they pulled up to Starbucks.

Cadillac saw its chance, and in 1999, the Escalade was introduced. Of course, it was based originally on the rather prosaic GMC Yukon Denali, so they had to reconfigure and re-fashion it for Cadillac, and in the process, the luxury SUV was born. The Cadillac of SUVs. It is ironic that by fashioning a truck, Cadillac reclaimed its mantle of luxury, but such is life when you don’t live in simple times. Cadillac scored, and the rappers agreed. They drove Escalades down angry city streets, testing eardrums with sub-woofers and door panels with bullet holes. Even Madonna drives an Escalade to the Torah reading.

Oh, but things change.

The climate is askew, and the planet is threatened. The ravages of petroleum engines on our atmosphere and petroleum countries on our security has changed the vision of automotive luxury yet again. And Cadillac, having had its taste of Palookaville and found it wanting, is ready. Today, the cover of the august Wall Street Journal carried an ad for the new Cadillac Escalade, which proclaimed: “The world’s first full size luxury hybrid SUV.”

In the sheet metal of Cadillac, we read the tortured story of automotive luxury buffeted into contortions by the onrush of history. The mile-long luxury gas guzzler becomes the short luxury gas guzzler becomes the humongous luxury truck becomes “The world’s first full size luxury hybrid SUV”: the world’s first truck that’s also luxurious that’s also humongous that also energy conscious, shedding some of its petroleum to make the planet a better place for our children and our grandchildren.

Oh, but things change, this column predicts.

Soon, the world’s first full size luxury hybrid SUV will go back to its fins. But this time, the Cadillac fins will actually have jet packs in them, for flight not merely along the highways but into the skies and beyond, Cadillac luxury taking us into forever.

And they will be hybrid jet packs, of course.

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A HALO FOR ANDY WARHOL

3/11/2009

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The photographers are being photographed. Robert Mapplethorpe will soon be dead, but today he basks in the role of subject rather than artist. Norman Parkinson joins him, supremely tall and regal, with signature beanie on his head. The beanie is a Kashmiri wedding hat, one he has worn through decades of photographing the royalty of England and the royalty of fashion.

Behind the camera is Annie Liebovitz. She is disturbed the advertising people are there. They are an extraneous nuisance, and there are so many of them. She does not suffer fools or most others too easily, apparently. She is even snippy. But the advertising people are there because this is an ad, and the three immortals of the darkroom will have to cope.

I try to put her at ease. I say something nice about the rear end of Bruce Springsteen. She has just shot the cover for Born in the USA and the proofs lie on the table. The Boss stands with back to camera in iconic white T-shirt and jeans and red truckers cap jutting from his pocket, set against the red and white stripes of some humongous American flag. It is all icon all the time. “We didn’t really get the shot,” Annie mumbles. It seems more a knee-jerk response to flattery than the photographic truth about Bruce Springsteen’s rear end. She would be intimidating even if she didn’t wish I wasn’t there. Enormously tall, in white jumpsuit and special grey plastic glasses, she is not a woman so much as a mechanic of seeing.

The mission that has brought us here is advertising’s eternal mission: re-enchantment. The product is a stodgy old liquid squeezed from limes: Rose’s Lime Juice. Who would guess a British lime juice of almost negligible interest would become a vehicle for a sea of meanings?

The tagline of Roses is The Uncommon Denominator. The target of the campaign is the avant garde art and gay communities. It is an old mixer for new drinks, so the campaign mixes two cultural celebrities, one old and one new. One established and one avant garde, One Parkinson and one Mapplethorpe.

I tell Robert I read an essay about his work in a magazine and couldn’t understand a word of it. “The ouvre of Robert Mapplethorpe reflects an is-ness and not-isness where the shifting visual field recapitulates the identity, where the forbidden counterposes itself with the permissible, and subject and field reverse themselves.” This is not what the article said at all. It’s not even close to what it said. But this is my impersonation of my memory of what the article said. Robert pauses, surprised I would even want to understand it. “It did its job,” he says, laconically. That is all he says.

“It did its job.” That said it all. It was about career, not art. Or, art was a career. Or, career was art. Whatever the case, the job of the essay was simply to be there, to represent “scholarly article,” rather than to actually be a scholarly article. Maybe the writer didn’t even understand it. The article was an artifact of meaning, not an evaluation of photography. The existence of the article signified Robert Mapplethorpe was an artist of a certain stature, with all the rights and profits accruing to an artist of that stature. Period. Reading over.

It is like the business books handed around by executives who write them (or have someone write it for them.) The mere existence of a book conveys a meaning and a stature, and the last thing that is expected of you is to read it. It is there to mean, and that is enough. It did its job.

Mapplethorpe is handsome, swaggering. A rock star in the older sense of the word, more like James Dean than what rock stars eventually became. He is ineffably cool. But he is sick, and not long after the shoot, it is announced he has AIDS.

For marketers, the challenge of a personality-based campaign is that it rises and falls on the back of a personality. It is not likely that anytime soon, a copywriter working on Hertz will walk into his creative director’s office and suggest: “Hey, why don’t we bring back OJ?”

The Roses Lime Juice client faced the cruel, almost unspeakable decision of associating her brand or not with someone tragically passing from disease, a tainted disease at that particular point in time. It is cruel, but that’s what marketing people discuss in the privacy of their office. Mapplethorpe’s ambition, his careering, his prolific output and classical renderings of rather un-classical subjects, from almost pornographic close-ups of flowers to actual pornographic renderings of a bull whip up the ass, made him an artist of stature. But inhabiting the gay S & M demimonde of the 1980’s made him an almost inevitable victim of his generation’s plague.

In the Annie Liebovitz photograph selected for the ad, Robert Mapplethorpe and Norman Parkinson pose by a white human statue against the quaintly artificial backdrop of a Nineteenth Century garden. Another mix: a contemporary photographer’s wink to an old photographic tradition. The client eventually decided to run the ad and nobody’s life was changed by it, not the photographers’, not the ad people, and not the Roses Lime Juice people.

I saw Robert for the last time at the Robert Miller Gallery on 57th Street. It was his final opening. The rock star swagger was gone. The virus had ravaged his body. He shuffled slowly in the velvet monogrammed bedroom slippers of a prince, supporting himself on a pearl-topped cane. I wondered if he wore his disease as a final artistic flaunt to his Catholic childhood in Our Lady of the Snows Parish in Floral Park, Long Island.

The demimonde from which he had risen taxied uptown to pay their respects. Grace Jones was dressed as a policeman and carried a gun. But the soul of the event seemed to be Andy Warhol, no longer existing in flesh, staring down beatifically in two-dimensions from a photograph on the wall. In the portrait, Mapplethorpe had placed a halo behind Warhol’s face and printed the photograph in a lush silver process on canvas, like a classical painting.

What was the meaning of the deification of the Prince of False? Had Warhol’s artistic celebration of the images of mass production been social commentary? An ironic comment on the debasement of a culture bereft of any meaning save those of commerce? Or was the message of the Campbell’s soup can simply that you don’t need to render Italian landscapes, that if you knew how to look, there was beauty in even our most mundane everyday objects?

Was Robert Mapplethorpe’s final beatification of Andy Warhol yet one more level of meaning added to the artist who epitomized the Marketplace of Meanings?

Or was I thinking too much?

Maybe the photograph was just doing its job.

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A DINNER IN COPENHAGEN

3/8/2009

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He sits at the dinner table devouring Nordic-sized portions of food. The plumbing in his ravaged body groans under the load. Kristen smiles, the big toothpaste grin the photographers ate up in Paris. Now the smile is only for him, sitting together with her family in her mother’s home in Copenhagen.

His muse had failed him at the Isle of Wight. The long fingers, beloved of the gods, failed him as the fog and chill engulfed the stage. The rioters were carrying on out there, somewhere in the dark. He couldn’t see them, but he heard them tearing down the fences. The tempo of chaos, the chill of an island somewhere off of England, his physical breakdown, they were all coalescing. Even Red House eluded him, the slow blues that was always money in the bank.

Two days later, in Arhus, he collapsed in the dressing room. He was sick. He was exhausted. He asked for cocaine. They had none. He didn’t return to the stage, and a tiny silver plane transported them from Arhus to Copenhagen, Kirsten gripping his enormous hand. They checked into the airport hotel, he lit a joint, but she had an idea. She decided take him home, to mother Birthe Nefer’s house, for solace and home cooking, Danish style.

He fell asleep on the big upstairs bed. He slept so seldom these days. And now Birthe feeds him, and he smiles, boiled meat and potato dumplings wending their way into his dark, emaciated, body.

He looks around suddenly. “What is this?” he asks, incredulous. He looks at brothers and sisters and parents all surrounding him in this country kitchen in Denmark. The serenity, the sheer fact of total acceptance, is jarring. “I can’t believe this,” he says, looking around at smiling faces. “Why are you so good to each other?” Kirsten Nefer smiles, and tears up. She realizes that never before, not one time in his short and utterly unique life, has Jimi Hendrix ever sat at a table with a family eating dinner. Eighteen days later, he will be dead in Monika Danneman’s apartment in London.

To ride the Dionysian instrument further than it has ever gone. To be not merely famous but beloved, and to be not merely beloved but iconic. To become permanent. To become a meaning, not a man. People dream of such things, sitting at the table.

Meanwhile, Jimi dreams of sitting at the table.

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THE CITI NEVER SLEEPS. BUT SOMETIMES IT ROLLS OVER AND PLAYS DEAD

3/6/2009

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I walked into the mausoleum. Actually, it is the office of Citibank Smith Barney. You enter off of Lexington Avenue and find yourself in a vast, empty marble hall a hundred feet high and a hundred feet wide, with a security desk far, far in the distance and absolutely nothing between you and it.

Of course, it is not a lobby. It is a meaning. It is a marble advertisement crafted to communicate the following message: you are small and we are great.

Workers quarried stone from as far away as Italy. Others carried it onto ships and hauled it from the docks, trucked it to Manhattan, and installed it on walls and ceiling and floors. After walls and ceiling and floors, Citibank ran out of surfaces on which to place marble.
Not one of those workers anywhere along the intercontinental assembly line keeps his money in a Smith Barney Wealth Management account.

For the people who do, the marble mausoleum has a clear message. You don’t matter. You are an ant. You are lucky to have your money watched over by the geniuses who run the world, the financial lords who ingeniously manage the algorythms of finance, the men who manipulate the secret levers of world economics so that the rich and in-the-know stay rich and in-the-know.

Today, as I walked into the mausoleum, Citibank stock was worth a dollar.
Suddenly, I didn’t wonder if I was dressed well enough to enter the building. I didn’t hope the security guards would consider me worthy enough to merit a pass that would allow me to go through the turnstiles, up the chrome elevator to another mausoleum on the eighth floor, walk across this floor with absolutely nothing on it, and take another elevator into the clouds where I could finally pick up my check.

I always knew that this architecture was just a stage-set, like Mussolini’s fascist architecture, vast spaces of stone designed to intimidate the masses and evoke the awe-inspiring power of the state. But never did such empty and tacky architecture seem so hollow.

As the economy melts down, the colonial antiques on the fortieth floor of a Manhattan skyscraper and the two-tone white shirts with initials on the sleeves of money managers suddenly no longer hide a ridiculously simple truth. They don’t know what the f-ck they’re doing and they never knew what the f-ck they were doing.
Smith Barney is happily leaving Citibank in a month. They are going over to be part of Morgan Stanley.

Maybe they should just take their marble and go home.

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