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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I know this is all to help the sales of probably the crappiest DVD of all time but still you have to admit that the infomercial is awesome. I just wonder what Michael thinks of all this pandering based on his name alone.

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Last semester, I met a friend of my aunt who currently resides in Florence, Italy. I got into contact with her after my aunt shot me her e-mail address. She was the principal at my younger cousin’s high school in Maryland.  Sitting in the famous tourist restaurant, Trattoria Mario’s, sharing a Bistecca Fiorentina (Steak Florence-style) Libby Cataldi explained the premise of her first book.

Running through her Italian heritage and her child psychology background, Libby told me that her youngest son developed an addiction to heroin at around the age of 13. He was an addict for the better part of the next 14 years, managing to graduate college and get a prestigious job in New York City’s financial district. Libby Cataldi spent the past two years in Italy helping her son heal while enjoying the country that her own mother would not allow her to visit when she was younger (Italian immigrants to the United States during the 1920s-1940s view Italy as “the old country”).  Libby explained to me that drug rehabilitation centers in the United States let patients leave after a maximum of three months. In Italy, they demand a minimum of two years to fully change a person’s habits.

The book Stay Close is her son’s battle with his addiction and the depression Libby developed based on her “uselessness” towards helping her son. Libby worked with kids for the entirety of her professional career which lasted nearly 30 years. This book is the journal she kept during her son’s drug treatment with additional commentary provided by her son, Jeff Cataldi.

The book was released on Tuesday and I will have a review up when I finish. I’m sure that I won’t be able to recommend it to everyone, but just talking with her for an hour or so adds a deep layer of personal interest.

“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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Drove up to Richmond for my interview at VCU. Hopefully, I find out in June that I can go to graduate school this fall. The interview (which wasn’t much of an interview) went well. Lazy Good Friday that turned into a me catching a does of the “book flu.” It is as if all of a sudden, I feel the desire to catch up on a world of literature. Music, sports and video games can now take a back seat to fiction. Short list of all new/used I picked up this weekend (Hopefully this means more book reviews in the future):

John Cheever – The Stories of John Cheever and Bullet Park

Phillip K. Dick – The Man in the High Castle

Bret Easton Ellis – The Informers and Lunar Park

Jeffrey Eugenides – The Virgin Suicides

F. Scott Fitzgerald – This Side of Paradise

Ernest Hemingway – Across the River and Into the Trees

Cormac McCarthy – All the Pretty Horses

Steve Martin – Shop Girl

Haruki Murakami – The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore

Tim O’Brien – The Things They Carried

Thomas Pynchon – Gravity’s Rainbow

Erich Maria Remarque – All Quiet On the Western Front

Phillip Roth – The Plot Against America

Mark Twain - The Prince and the Pauper and Life on the Mississippi

Virginia Woolf – Mrs. Dalloway

Now I am off to watch Steven Spielburg’s masterpiece (yeah, right) Amistad. Night.

Just got news that a new tome of 14 unpublished works by Kurt Vonnegut will be released this October 27. The book will be titled “Look at the Birdie.”

I bought Heller’s sequel to Catch-22 a year ago with the hopes it could exist within the same breath as the original. The subversive dark humor that characterizes the original gives was to a somber reflection on life in the eighties when you happen to be in your seventies. Big expectations for this one.