Looking through old pictures from 2000, trying to find a particular photo, I spotted a mass of images from my last office in midtown. I have no memory of taking or even seeing these pictures but I think they were taken as I tried out some new camera gear and gadgetry at the office.
I tend to obliterate obvious memories from my skull, favoring the random and unlikely, and my memories of corporate favor incidental life experiences over professionalism or “career”. Little if anything from my corporate experience informs what I do today, reflecting not the uselessness of corporata but the swiftness with which life can change. It seems appropriate to me that these images are mostly distorted or warped, reflecting the shape of my memories of this place. Memory itself, I think, looks like this.
I have no nostalgia for my corporate youth, nor do I have any regrets. “Regrets” might seem a strong word, but one could resent a period of life spent staring into a computer screen, toiling away for someone else’s benefit. I rarely have reason to recall specifics about my corporate youth, though I am friends with some former colleagues who occasionally talk to me like I still inhabit that world. To hear them describe it today that world (limited not just to this company) seems to comprise continuous layoffs and job eliminations as a once-mighty publishing industry seems to shrivel a little more with each ever-thinner magazine issue. Any business, it seems, that depends on sales of printed matter for its subsistence is in peril, regardless of its heritage.
I remember the feeling of exhaustion that came from expending so much energy on fear — fear of getting fired, fear of not getting fired and thus taking on the work of those who did, fear that someone else getting fired will go ape shit and tear up the office — fear like this is not necessarily rational and it is rarely productive, but for today’s ephemeral reporting structures it is common enough as to not even be called fear. You take on new projects with an eye toward who would be responsible for them after you get fired, and with a plan on how you will re-group on this project when that person gets fired and you get re-hired.
I used to think getting fired from a job was like being murdered or excommunicated from a church. You didn’t look at the fired ones. You didn’t talk to them. You turned away, unable to expose yourself to the grotesque splattering of professional disembowelment and personal humiliation.
I don’t think of firings like that now. Everybody gets fired, bestowing no particular privilege or honor on those who “survive” at a company, and branding those who do the firings with the only enduring stigmas. Nowadays I feel that if you’ve never been fired from a job then something isn’t right. It’s like you haven’t lived.
I worked at corporate for one purpose: to pay off my student loans and other debts, and then establish some sense of financial stability. It must be 11 years ago now but I remember the one mouse click that paid off a long-time credit card bill, leaving it at the $0 monthly balance at which all my credit cards have remained ever since. Debtlessness is the greatest freedom, and the finest form of wealth. Even a $10 bar tab weighs heavily on my sense of serenity. I have never liked money, and I aim simply to have all that I need. [I think I just paraphrased a line from the television show The Adventures of Black Beauty.] At corporate I felt more and more conspicuous with every pay-raise, and for me conspicuity breeds discontent — especially financial conspicuity. Nevertheless (and due mostly to the inertia that comes from simply having a job) I remained at corporate longer than I would have had I stayed true to my initial intent of using the job strictly for money to pay off debts. I finally got fired in 2001, which was the luckiest thing to happen to my work life since getting hired at that company in 1995, but I imagine I might return to similar environs one day.
I pass by this office once in a while, sometimes trying to tell what goes on in there now. The office was bigger than my first three New York City apartments combined, and had more windows than all the apartments I have ever lived in. I think it was turned into a conference room, though I saw boxes piled high for some time, suggesting it was used for storage.
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I like the “then and now” conceit. Simple yet revealing, one takes a picture or a description of a person or a place from some time ago and holds it up for comparison to that person or place today. This seemingly simple assignment can be challenging, especially when images of a place are decades apart. I did something like this a couple of years ago when I re-traced the steps of the funeral scene from The Godfather. I did it again on Wednesday , when I found myself standing in Times Square, holding in front of me a black and white printout of this amazing picture, trying to find the spot at which it was taken. This picture is from my collection of slides. It was taken by a Coloradoan visiting Manhattan’s Times Square in 1942.
Times Square, 1942
The following picture comes close to the spot at which the above was taken, but I will try again because I want to get this right.
Times Square, 2009
The frames of reference here are the white building in the lower left and the tan brick building on the right, seen in my picture behind the modern-day T.G.I. Friday’s sign and in the 1942 picture behind an empty billboard. The exact placement of the first picture would be more to the right, though if memory serves that would have put me right out in the middle of 7th Avenue, dodging vehicular traffic and — more perilously — invective-spewing bicyclists.
There are, obviously, a lot more buildings now, and a lot more taller buildings at that. Times Square looks so small in 1942. The signage where the Ruppert Beer sign used to be now climbs virtually to the sky. Samsung and HSBC appear to have called PEnnsylvania 6-5300 to buy that previously empty billboard and the air space above.
What I find eye-popping about the 1942 Kodachrome slide is its color. Pictures from the 1940s are usually in black and white, and I would think that a certain segment of the American mind assumes that life itself was in black and white up until television and print media were in color.
The venerable Shorpy.com shows this picture of Times Square in 1943, all in black and white and, by certain modern standards, not a little bit dreary because of it. Black and white does sap the superficial out of a subject as gaudy as Times Square, but I prefer black and white story-telling in film and photography. It signifies a departure from reality and asserts that what you see is, in fact, only a story — a work of art distinct from your ordinary life.
My acquisition of the 1942 Times Square photo also coincides with my recent pre-occupation with Telephone Exchange Names. I originally posted a single story with a series of exchange name sightings but the page got too big to deal with. I broke it up into a picture essay to which I will add more exchange names as I spot them. I collected most of the pictures I already have of exchange name sightings around New York, and in place of some of the less usable old pictures I got new shots of the same places while occasionally spotting new (to me) exchange names on the sides of warehouses and manufacturing plants in Queens and Manhattan.
The PEnnsylvania Exchange Name seen in this 1942 picture is, of course, long gone. The number today goes to a law firm by the name of Block, O’Toole, & Murphy. Their number is 212-736-5300, but would formerly have been PEnn6-5300. I think it would be pretty cool to discover that a primitive version of my phone number once stood over the so-called Crossroads of the World.
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I have tried to avoid use of the royal “I” in writing words on paper or on screen. Like use of the verb “to be” it seems like a weakness — resorting to what I think or what specific circumstances I experienced — when the greater story is what happened outside, or at best because of me. It is an adjunct of my social belief that good listeners make the best conversation.
Lately, in the privacy of my head, I have taken this elimination of I to another level by removing the trap of my from accounts of things which seem to belong to me but are ephemeral. I started at this some months ago after a mundane conversation about a grocery store coupon. An older woman commented “I took my coupon to the WalMart…” Her use of “my” stuck out like a thorn. Your coupon? You earned it? Do you enter a WalMart, coupon in hand, with such pride in that scrap of paper that you claim it is yours? The physical coupon itself, that sacrificial interstitial vehicle of commerce that you clipped from a newspaper or printed off a web page is not really yours. It is not WalMart’s. At best it belongs to the manufacturer. If the responsibility of a human being for an item’s existence is the standard of ownership then I expect the real owner of this “woman’s” coupon could be traced to a marketing manager somewhere in the company that produces the product(s) on the coupon. The coupons function as reconnaissance vessels, and while they pass through the fingers and hands of individual consumers and cashiers I think it unclear whether a coupon ever becomes the property of anyone along the way. This philosophical point has likely been addressed elsewhere, but I invoke the dilemma of ownership as an example of a petty weakness in human communication. I own nothing on this earth, even the flesh on these bones will one day be stripped bare, but like most humans I find myself describing “my” this and “my” that in reference to objects and passings that only slip through my fingers like sand. Between sentences here I stop to sip my coffee. My coffee? What makes it mine? Is it because you don’t have it? I could simplify the account by saying “I sip coffee”, or we could disembody it to a universality by saying “Coffee is sipped.” By my standards of the moment I think that a satisfactory account of consuming this coffee must eliminate ownership of the product. This coffee is like that grocery store coupon: an interstitial material presence no more mine than yours, which belongs to me no more than the water I drank from a public water fountain yesterday. And yet at coffee shops and diners I will hear myself refer to “my coffee” or “my sandwich” as I come to believe that this contradistinction of possessiveness is false. Nothing is owned. Nothing is mine. Nothing is yours. I even find myself turning back the notion of my thoughts. “My” ideas are not mine but a composite mash of surrounding concepts, regurgitated back into the pool of thought. Nothing germinates in a genuinely cloistered space that is solely mine, or solely yours. |
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My dreams have had sourness about them this year. A dour, depressed tincture of humiliation and disdain, but the source and the target of the disdain are unclear.
Wandering around a boatyard I happened to see an ex-girlfriend from when I first moved to New York. In reality I used to see her once and again for several years after our dramatic and constipated break-up, but in the boatyard it seemed, despite some familiarity, like we had never even met until this moment. She invited me into her house: a half-sunken boat in the Hudson River at 86th Street. It was not even a boat but a re-purposed truck or RV, most of it submerged in the Hudson with only the top windows above water. I said I did not feel safe in this vessel but she was nonplussed, saying she had lived in this vessel for all of the 15 years since we last met. I felt like the house would sink, and I climbed on to the roof, yelling “Mayday” and lecturing myself and my ex on maritime logistics, how no boat in the water would ignore a Mayday call.
The boat began to sink but in my hive of lies I instead announced that the land was rising. The boat sank into disappearing water, the vessel swallowed by a thick sheet of filthy sputum from the river floor. I climbed out and wandered a dark west side of Manhattan, re-visiting old haunts either out of business or closed to me.
Suffocation pervades these dreams, like claustrophobia from a film-noir mystery. Seemingly contradictory feelings of sharpness and depression press at the walls of my mind, these pointed impression forming wells at the bottom of larger areas. These recessions alter the ability of my mind to interact with itself. Strands of idea trail off in search of another, lingering as half-bloomed weeds in vacant allies.
It can take quite a bit of time to snap out of these dreams.
