creative riff

“You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. Then again, it might not. A small voice inside you insists that this epidemic lack of clarity is a result of too much of that already.”

Let me say this first – Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City was not what I was expecting. That’s not to say it was bad. It turned out that my initial understanding was wrong and the result was a better novel than I went in thinking it would be.

Critics label McInerney as a member of the 1980’s “Literary Brat Pack,” but he is so much more versatile than that.  Bright Lights, Big City is noted for its use of the second person to describe the New York City cocaine culture of the electric eighties. Strikingly, this gimmick does not detract from the humanity found within the protagonist. Unlike fellow “Brat Packer” Bret Easton Ellis, McInerney doesn’t write post-modern from a nihilistic perspective. His characters have flaws, but they also have regrets and desires to become a better people.

Bright Lights, Big City follows the narrator through his job as a fact-checker for a literary magazine. The story borrows heavily from McInerney’s own time as a fact-checker at the New Yorker. At night, he goes out to clubs and does cocaine with his best friend. He has his dreams as a writer, but the rejection of his submissions to the magazine’s fiction department coupled with the recent separation from his model wife, Amanda, drives him further into his hedonistic lifestyle. At first, the country girl Amanda did not take New York City’s nightlife or the modeling career seriously, but the face of the city slowly creeps over and changes both.

Bright Lights, Big City is a quick read. At 180 pages, you can race through it. Over the course of the book, you are going to actually feel for the protagonist or at least acknowledge his inadequacies. While the novel is not what I was initially expecting, I do want to read more by Raymond Carver’s understudy, particularly, Brightness Falls and Story of My Life, which is based on the life of Rielle Hunter, with whom Jay McInerney had a brief relationship and would later go on to have an affair with 2008 presidential candidate John Edwards.

Oddly enough, this book is getting remade into a film in 2010 according to IMDB. The novel was inspiration for the film of the same name in 1988 that starred Michael J. Fox, Keifer Sutherland, and Pheobe Cates. It was crazy enough to attempt to make Bret Easton Ellis’ short story vignette collection, The Outsiders, earlier this year. I’ll hold my opinion, but I don’t have huge expectations.

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“In writing ads, act as you would if you met the individual buyer face to face. Don’t show off. Don’t try to be funny. Don’t try to be clever. Don’t behave eccentrically. Measure ads by salesmen’s standards, not by amusement standards.”

Who is David Ogilvy? Many, including this reader, proclaim him as their main inspiration for entering the advertising field. Why? There are three reasons: 1) Ogilvy’s working philosophy was not the 1960s smoke-filled business pitch as seen in AMC’s Mad Men. He always professed to “sell” the product through detailed feature descriptions and speaking directly to his audience. 2) He interacted and had meaningful relationships with so many assorted major thinkers of the twentieth century that these experiences could be distilled into a damn good film on their own right. 3) The subject of this biography lived nearly 30 years of his life in one of the oldest châteaux in France, Touffou.

David Ogilvy was larger than life and his mixed heritage only accounts for part of his eccentricities. Born on June 23, 1911 in England to a Scottish father and an Irish mother, Ogilvy would eventually attend Oxford on scholarship before eventually dropping out to work numerous jobs in Paris. Finally settling down as a waiter at the elusive Hotel Majestic, Ogilvy learned the art of presentation and preparation. When his successful brother ordered him back to England to help him sell Aga Cooker Stoves. Ogilvy offered free cooking lessons to all housewives who allowed him to demonstrate the stove’s features at their home. He was an instant hit and turned the product into an exclusive status symbol almost overnight in England. Even the Queen wanted one.

Widely considered the most famous automotive ad of all time and Ogilvy's best. The ad was so successful for Rolls-Royce "they don't dare run the ad again for fear of running completely out of stock."

Throughout his career, Ogilvy became known as the odd man out in the world of American advertising when he moved to New York City and opened a small shop. Before Ogilvy, British advertising borrowed heavily from whatever sold in America. Ogilvy’s work consistently proved that the consumer was smart and should be treated as such. He was also one of the first to hire a multi-racial staff. He was also one of the first to decry advertising awards as “distracting” and offered monetary awards to his staff for sales generated over “creativity.”

The man in the Hathaway shirt. His famous eye patch helped to sell more shirts in the ad's initial run than were available.

Kenneth Roman, the former chair and CEO of Ogilvy & Mather (pronounced May-ther), Ogilvy’s ad firm, has created a startling case for his former boss. Ogilvy was a dynamic creature that never held back in expressing his colorful opinions. Ogilvy would tell that you he is only remembered because he “outlived his betters.” Ogilvy is remembered because he was so productive even until his death. He never quite left the public eye or stopped writing.

Early ad for the Aga Cooker featuring Edouard Manet's Luncheon on the Grass. Both were considered controversial when they were first released.

Ogilvy wrote two autobiographies during his lifetime but it is Roman’s that offers the Ogilvy we cherish. There are many parts of Ogilvy’s philosophy that I disagree with, but it is hard to criticize a person that placed as much value on research as he did. Almost nobody bested Ogilvy in any argument and he was self-aware of his genius. Perhaps that is his most admirable quality.

One of Ogilvy's most famous quotes with the Russian dolls that inspired it.

If you are going to read any book on advertising, it should be Ogilvy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man. If you want to read a biography on the man who helped to form much of our contemporary view of core principals of brand image this is your book. Roman was in the best position as a friend and co-worker for so many years to write Ogilvy’s “second opinion” biography. The book is worth a read if only to check out his teen years and the section detailing Ogilvy’s involvement with the OSS during WWII.

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“In a city of two hundred and forty-five thousand, nearly a hundred thousand people had been killed or doomed at one blow; a hundred thousand more were hurt. At least ten thousand of the wounded made their way to the best hospital in town, which was altogether unequal to such a trampling, since it had only six hundred beds, and they had all been occupied. The people in the suffocating crowd inside the hospital wept and cried, for Dr. Sasaki to hear, “Sensei, Doctor!,” and the less seriously wounded came and pulled at his sleeve and begged him to go to the aid of the worse wounded. Tugged here and there in his stockinged feet, bewildered by the numbers, staggered by so much raw flesh, Dr. Sasaki lost all sense of profession and stopped working as a skillful surgeon and a sympathetic man; he became an automaton, mechanically wiping, daubing, winding, wiping, daubing, winding.”

John Hersey may be remembered as one of the forerunners to the New Journalism movement that swept America during the 1960s and 1970s with magazines such as Esquire, Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. Fusing elements of storytelling with cold, hard fact created more compelling works in stories that demanded an element of warmth and elaboration. The cover of my 1989 edition of Hersey’s Hiroshima (1946) boldly states, “Everyone able to read should read it – Saturday Review of Literature.” Frankly, I was sold at the word Hiroshima. It was when I brought the book home and my dad told me how it was required reading at his high school that fully sold me. This book should still be required reading alongside Esther Hautzig’s The Endless Steppe.

The book follows the day the atomic age began on August 6, 1945 through the personal accounts of six different citizens of Hiroshima that survived the blast. These six accounts included (as recounted from the book’s inner jacket):

Miss Toshinki Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just turned her head to chat with the girl at the next desk.

Dr. Masakazu Fujii, a physician, had just sat down to read the paper on the porch of his private hospital.

Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, was watching a neighbor from her kitchen window.

Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest, lay on a cot in the mission house reading a Jesuit magazine.

Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young surgeon, walked along a hospital corridor with a blood specimen for a Wasserman test.

The Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, was about to unload a cart of clothes at a rich man’s home in the suburbs.

Hersey went to great pains to paint an accurate picture of the horrific events leading directly up to and the days following the explosion over Hiroshima. The Japanese are reclusive when it comes to documenting horrible memories and we should commend the author for getting honest accounts that do not seem doctored or censored. There is no shortage of passages that caused me to grimace or make exclamations aloud.

I read the updated version from the 1980s that includes an extra chapter that details each of the six respondents’ lives in the years following Japan’s recovery. Hersey’s exhausting quest for the truth is not lost in time and the new section fits well with the original text. There are some books in life we are instructed to read no matter what your preference for books is. They might be Huckleberry Finn or Night or even All Quiet on the Western Front. Hiroshima certainly fits into this category. Whether you are knowledgeable about the aftermath of the only atomic weapons used in war or you want to know a bit more from the Japanese perspective this book is for you.

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My son is in jail, Miami-Dade County jail. He faces a felony charge for heroin possession and a misdemeanor charge for possession of drug paraphernalia. This isn’t the first time he is in jail; maybe it won’t be the last. Addiction invaded our home in 1991. It slithered in and sat down at our dining room table, grew large and fat, fed on our misery, laughing, mocking us with its power. It claimed Jeff when he was a fourteen-year-old boy. I did everything I could think of to save my son, but in the end I could do nothing, not really, to extricate him or to free our family from addiction’s claw. If you love or care about an addict, you know this feeling of helplessness.”

“Stagli vicino [stay close in Italian].” Libby Cataldi confronts demons in Stay Close, her deeply personal account of her battle and frustrations with her son’s fourteen-year-addiction to heroin, alcohol, meth and other drugs. The book’s title is taken from advice the author received while staying in Italy. The director of a recovery community in San Patrignano explained that those affected by addiction should never sever their bonds of love with the addict – instead they should move in closer to give the support necessary for recovery.

Cataldi’s journey with her son’s addiction began when he was a child growing up in Calvert County, Maryland. Jeff, Libby eldest son, has always been adept at social networking. When skateboarding and alternative music took off during the late ‘80s-early ‘90s it was all Cataldi could do keep her son in the same neighborhood. After numerous incidents of getting caught with animal tranquilizers, Jeff began his double life. In some ways he was a normal teenager who went off to boarding school and loved his younger brother, Jeremy. In other respects he was a full-time partygoer who would stay up all weekend to go to raves and use drugs.

Jeff’s personal journey with drugs is not the main focus of the story; instead Libby offers a rare perspective of a betrayed mother. Her journal entries expand upon Jeff’s story with his personal account of certain events added for clarification and atonement.

The unflinchingly personal details of the story lay bare the inner workings of a mother who worked within the Maryland school system for thirty years, yet struggled to reign in her own son. The pressures and experiences mount until the final chapters when I found myself struggling to still love Jeff. The idea that his battle with drugs cost his family hundreds of thousands of dollars blows my mind. My own mother explained that if I were in Jeff’s shoes she would not have put up with me after I walked out of a couple rehabilitation clinics.

If there was one area I wish the book expanded on it was Jeff’s final rehabilitation. The final two chapters deemphasize the most pivotal decision in Jeff’s life. I was left with more than a few questions as to how Jeff changed and what he is up to now. While this was not a deal breaker it does leave the reader begging for more insight into the moment when an addict decides to turn the ship around.

Cataldi’s writing reveals the years of deceit and lies that made up her life. The inner turmoil that addiction brings is in full force here. It is said that for every one addict four other non-addicts are affected. Jeff painstaking worked with his mother to write this story, yet it is ultimately his mother’s to tell. If you have ever lost someone to addiction Cataldi’s story offers clues for coping. Fortunately, I have never developed any sort of substance addiction, but I feel like I am better prepared for the future having read Stay Close.

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“I’m really thinking seriously about staying out here a little longer. I’ve sort of forgotten what New York and Camden look like and I’ve forgotten a lot of faces from there and I don’t know if I can face going back. I probably won’t stay here but I’ve been thinking about it. I’m dreading seeing those people who I called my friends. I’d rather stay out here and not, as you so often put it, ‘deal with it,’ y’know?”

The Los Angeles of Bret Easton Ellis is bronzed, hazy and smoke-filled. His New York is a cold, neon-lit nightclub. The characters that inhabit his numerous novels rarely fully explain their motives. Instead, Bret holds his audience captive through the sparseness of his writing. Typical themes of love get pushed aside in order to examine the angst found within our society.

The Informers is Bret Easton Ellis’s 1994 collection of short stories that further explores the motifs he set up in Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction. The thirteen stories contained within are full of drug use, 1980’s pop references, drifters and despair for tomorrow’ ills. There is a sense of primacy to his writing that is evident by the time this book was publishing.

The characters feel alien to the typical reader, but that is the point. They exist within a reality that at first seems very real, yet we don’t have access. In one story the protagonist is the front man for the group “Bryan Metro” attempting to re-launch his career undeterred by his destructive sexual habits. In another, a couple attempts to enjoys a date at the zoo despite the underlying tension hinted at between the two.

Perhaps, the best example of Ellis’s style of writing is the story “Letters from L.A.” The narrator takes the reader through the corruption of morality that generates the characters inhabiting his novels. One gets a sense of the desire to escape this environment but the lack of willpower preventing so.

Ellis’s is not a writer that everyone can enjoy. One will not find any tales of unrequited love or adventure here – only relationships that have weathered one too many gin and tonics and cocaine. The characters feel distant. Ellis focuses his attention on the chain of events rather than the actions that led to their creation. Fans of Hemmingway would be well-suited to read at least one of Ellis’s novels in order to see how far the genre has developed since his unfortunate demise. I would recommend reading Less Than Zero before sinking into The Informers in order to get the full flavor of the L.A. he has crafted. I would also recommend avoiding the new film of the same name at all costs until long into its HBO circulation.

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“It is a basketball rivalry that simply has no equal. Duke vs. North Carolina is Ali vs. Frazier, the Giants vs. the Dodgers, the Red Sox vs. the Yankees. Hell, it’s bigger than that. This is the Democrats vs. the Republicans, the Yankees vs. the Confederates, capitalism vs. communism. All right, okay, the Life Force vs. the Death Instinct, Eros vs. Thanatos. Is that big enough?”

What is it about college sports that captivate us so? Is it the fact that the referees actually call traveling or that the stadium does not reverberate with pop anthems such as the Baha Men’s “Who Let The Dogs Out” whenever a star player slams in a dunk? Yes, college sports are the beginning, middle and end of what most consider “the fun years” – when teamwork is supposed to thwart individual stardom and coaches appear to genuinely be interested in the course of the overall season.

Will Blythe’s first foray into the world of books could be written by no other fan of the sport. Blythe, a former literary editor of Esquire and contributor to The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Oxford American, represents the essence of “sports beatnik” journalism. To Hate Like This follows the Tar Heel team through the 2004-2005 season as they attempted to win a first national title for Coach Roy Williams. ¡SPOILERS!: The Tar Heels took the title that year, resulting is a top notch analysis of the invested emotions that restored the rivalry to Tobacco Road.

Blythe does not attempt to disguise the fact that he is unbiased; in fact, he grew up in Chapel Hill watching every game with his mother and sister. When he wasn’t watching his Tar Heels, Blythe could be found in his backyard shooting hoops in his futile attempt to imitate the numerous heroes that came out of the program under Dean Smith during the late ‘70s to mid-‘90s. Blythe often refers to the side his inner hatred of everything Duke as “the Beast.” Blythe’s “Beast” comes out when he is most vulnerable (ala the presence of Duke Graduates or a late-game made Tar Heel free throw).

In order to fulfill the requirements of the book’s subtitle, Blythe travels to the arched Gothic spires of Duke University into the evil lair that is Cameron Indoor Stadium for numerous Duke Basketball games and interviews with key players such as J.J. Redick and Sheldon Williams. Blythe manages to remain civil during an interview with Coach K (just barely).

The passionate zeal the author exudes is echoed in the fans the author encountered during the writing of the book. Blythe courageously documents the activities and outlets for numerous fans such as the creator of Inside Carolina website to the restless anger that still grips Duke player Art Heyman. One such fan equates the Duke-Carolina rivalry to that of a battle for control over a certain popular fictional land typically inhabited by hobbits, elves and trolls.

Blythe’s effortless writing belies his passion towards the subject. From team practices to the biographies of Rashad McCants, Melvin Williams, Raymond Felton and Sean May, Blythe breathes a sense of reality into the often foggy fame that fandom generates. Rashad McCants took every criticism personally while Sean May dealt with the same articles in stride thanks to the advice of his father, Scott May who played at Indiana under Coach Bobby Knight.

Now that Carolina has won another national championship under the tutelage of Coach Williams it is important to understand how the most famous rivalry in all of college basketball was founded. One can only hope that Will Blythe has been secretly working on his second book since 2006 that will match the frenetic intensity found within To Hate Like This Is To Be Happy Forever.

Original Post on my buddy’s blog –> Robert Goulet’s Gentlemen Society

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New issue of The Hill available with my article. The online version can be found here.

My article about the digital television switch in June can be found on page 15 of the PDF. Happy reading.
Source: [The Hill]

‘Money is sacred, as everyone knows,’ said Delblanc. ‘So then must be the hunger for it and the means we use to obtain it. Once a man is in debt he becomes a flesh and blood form of money, a walking investment. You can do what you like with him, you can work him to death or you can sell him. This cannot be called cruelty or greed because we are seeking only to recover our investment and that is a sacred duty.’

Barry Unsworth’s 1992 novel provides a seminal, sometimes frightening window into the British Atlantic slave trade during the mid-eighteenth century. Sacred Hunger was required reading for my history 278 course, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, but stands as an important part of our modern understanding on one of the cruelest examples of “globalism” gone awry.

The novel follows the lives of two relatives as they experience the different “legs” of the slave trade first hand. The older physician Matthew Paris seeks passage on his uncle’s slave ship, the Liverpool Merchant, in order to make a life for himself in the Caribbean after being imprisoned for teaching evolution in England. His younger cousin, Erasmus Kemp, enjoys a more relaxed lifestyle taking part in the daily life of Liverpool, courting Sarah Wolpert, drinking expensive wine and participating in a production named The Enchanted Island that borrows heavily from The Tempest. The younger character, Erasmus, despises the “Utopian” beliefs his older cousin documents throughout the novel in his journal.

As the Liverpool Merchant reaches the coast of Guinea, Paris begins to grow increasingly frustrated by the implications of the slave trade. He is allowed special privileges by his uncle, but his character remains distant from the rest of the crew which is made up of convicts and men that swindled out of their money and forced onto the slave ship. As the ship’s surgeon, Paris is forced to constantly check the human cargo below for diseases that might lower their value once the ship reaches its intended destination of Jamaica.

The book then shifts over a decade into the future where Paris and the crew run a small settlement off of the southeastern coast of Florida. The Liverpool Merchant never made it to Jamaica after it was overrun by a slave mutiny and hit by a hurricane. On the surface, Paris’s vision of a tolerant, equal society is realized in the settlement, but a perverse version boils to the surface complimenting the book’s central theme – a sacred hunger for greed that is at the root of all our capitalist desires.

Unsworth clearly shows that he has done his research with Sacred Hunger. The sights, sounds and smells that accompanied this trade are in full effect. Paris observes the steam rising from a cargo hold grate on the Liverpool Merchant when the doors are sealed during a storm in order to protect the slaves from downing. The feverish journey unfolds around Paris in a manner that constantly tests the reader’s knowledge of the slave trade.

The novel makes excellent use of dialects, particularly in the second half of the novel. At times, I was forced to read aloud the Creole mix of pigeon, English and Spanish spoken in the settlement in order to grasp the change that has occurred over the decade gap. The narrative structure unfolds as well as any drama should and slowly fills in the intricate details and motivations encountered. This is one of the few novels I have been forced to read the epilogue in order to fully understand the story.

Sacred Hunger is a challenging book on many levels. The novel follows two diverging personalities that lead separate lives. This creates a wide cast of actors that constitute the world of the novel. This chronicle is not short by any means – weighing in at 630 pages. Unsworth also creates many scenarios that feel too “cinema graphic,” meaning that they feel ripped from the silver screen of his mind in order to keep to narrative flowing. Characters mention information that others would already know or likely know in order to fill the novel with evidence from the actual slave trade. As a student, taking a course on the slave trade much of this information feels severely forced. Also, the character of Erasmus Kemp was not fleshed out as well as Matthew Paris in my opinion causing his emergence later in the novel to be more of a whimper than the bang it should have been. His intentions did not balance with his actions. Kemp was supposed to be the yin to Paris’s yang, and yet, it felt as if Unsworth lost this in his delicate reconstruction of the slave trade.

The first book parallels the real-life case of the British slave ship called the Zong. During the ship’s journey to the Caribbean the captain forced 122 slaves to drown themselves as they had grown too sickly to be worth any value and he could collect insurance on those that had died. The reckless abuse of humans spirals out of control until the beginning of Book 2. The Zong Massacre of 1781 ended up becoming a major tragedy that led to the eventual abolition of the slave trade in England and elsewhere.

Sacred Hunger is not a book I can recommend to everyone. As a fan of fiction culled from history Barry Unsworth has no doubt crafted a moving testament to the slave trade. Nearly all the perspectives and legs of the trade are accounted for. Going into the novel with an interest in the time period is a must in order to survive the first book. That said Sacred Hunger is one of the most truthful fictional interpretations of the trade that linked the world together. This is not a “beach read” but a powerful novel you will want to save for a time in your life when you can dedicate your full attention to the message contained within. The result might move you to tears.