The Poster

A Short Story

A few weeks ago I quit, threw in the towel, took this job and shoved it. I gave up my long-term day job and embarked on an adventurous new career in… art appraisal.

OK, sure, I know little about art, and absolutely nothing about its value, but these days ignorance is a virtue. So it was with the swagger of clueless self-assuredness that I hung out my shingle, so to speak:

LIONEL SMITH ART APPRAISALS

Business was slow for a week or two. OK, it was beyond slow. But at least I was my own boss, and now I had no one but myself to blame for my boredom and frustration.

And then, the package arrived.

Yes, the package. It was a cardboard poster tube, with a 21216 postmark. My ZIP code. Someone saw fit to pay the US Postal Service $3.85 to take two days to deliver a package to me that they themselves could have walked over here with in 20 minutes. I knew I was dealing with a shrewd character.

Not to mention the fact that they’d apparently rolled up a piece of artwork to ship in a poster tube.

I opened the end of the tube with the mild, lazy curiosity of a person who’s been counting the ceiling tiles for so long that nothing short of the aurora borealis localized entirely within the room would arouse true interest. (At least I could always rely on an oblique Simpsons reference to brighten the day.)

With my expectations already sufficiently lowered, I took little care in shaking the contents out of the tube, which slid quickly onto the floor, denting in one rolled-up edge, flopping down on the linoleum, and rolling a few feet before unraveling like a clock spring.

I gazed blankly at the object on the floor. It was, not surprisingly, a poster. It met all of the criteria that, in my mind, coalesce into the concept, “poster.” About two feet by three feet, glossy white paper, blank on one side, printed on the other. Yup, a poster.

Static cling momentarily bonded a letter to its surface. I picked it up and began reading:

Dear Sir:

Enclosed please find an artwork which I would like to have appraised. You may reach me at:

Mary Landers
1328 Marsh St.
Baltimore, MD 21216

Thank you.

Sincerely,
Mary Landers

The name was perfect. Assuming she was a local, her parents either had a cruel sense of humor or were as clueless as she was. I wondered if she had a southern belle cousin named Mrs. Ippi. Those were the kinds of thoughts that ran threw my head these days. Why did I ever quit that day job?

Here it was, my first serious (if you could really call it that) appraisal. Piece of cake! I thought to myself.

Worthless.

Having given the poster my 2-second evaluation, I decided to take a closer look merely to pass the time.

It was a poster, and a truly wretched one at that. It appeared to be a collage of photographs of military tombstones from America’s various wars: the French-and-Indian War, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf War. Now I was about as much of an expert on military history as I was on art. Fortunately for me, there is a longstanding tradition of noting the war in which soldiers have died upon their tombstones.

Then there was a tombstone with a death date of 2026, which appeared to have been colored over with a green highlighter. Pure rubbish! I thought to myself. In addition to the highlighter, I noticed someone had scrawled the name “Ralph” with a Sharpie in the lower left corner of the poster, and in the lower right corner, there was a large white sticker with a UPC bar code, and the words “PRINTS PLUS — $6.99.”

Perfect, I thought to myself. But I wouldn’t give you a nickel for it.

I decided to have a little fun at Ms. Landers’ expense, since I could always head down to Prints Plus and pick her up another copy of this godawful thing; I couldn’t imagine a high demand on this particular poster.

It occurred to me that my perspective on the poster was incorrect, what with it lying on the floor as it was. So I must mount it on the wall for proper viewing. But with what? I surveyed the few scattered items I had bothered to unpack from the moving boxes in the four weeks I had been renting the office. Duct tape, thumbtacks, a box of Chiclets.

Why not try them all? I thought.

First, the duct tape. Not overly concerned that I would need it to secure plastic sheeting to seal off the door to my office anytime soon, I made no miserly effort to conserve the gray sticky stuff, and applied it liberally to the poster. I rolled up pieces and stuck them on the back. I tore off long strips and pressed them lengthwise against the edges of the glossy paper. I even cut out small pieces and selectively covered bits of the text on the tombstones in the photos, for added amusement.

Then the thumb tacks. One in each corner would probably suffice to keep the poster hanging securely, but why stop there? I turned the poster into a veritable thumbtack dartboard. And to top it all off, I sloppily chewed a mouthful of Chiclets and tested their adhesive properties.

Thoroughly convinced I had created a masterpiece to strike fear into one Ms. Mary Landers of 1328 Marsh St., I ripped the poster from the wall (leaving a few forlorned corners gripping the sheetrock in confusion), rolled it carelessly, snapped a wide rubber band around its center, jammed it back into the tube, and set out into the brisk morning air for a walk down to Marsh St. to hand deliver both the poster and my crude appraisal.

Knock knock.

“Who’s there?”

“It’s Lionel Smith with your art appraisal.”

The door slowly opened, and a short, kindly woman appeared. “Hello, Mr. Smith. I’m Mary Landers. Thank you for looking at the piece.”

The “piece?” I thought. That’s one word for it. But I’d add a couple more at the end.

Ms. Landers escorted me into the living room and offered me a cup of tea. How quaint.

“No, thank you.”

“Well, then, may I ask you for your assessment of the work?”

The “work!” It just keeps getting better.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Landers,” I said with mock remorse as I pried the sticky contents out of the tube, “but the news is not good.”

At the sight of the mangled poster, Mary Landers’ heart visibly sank in her chest. A paleness came over her face, and she looked about to faint.

“Oh… my…” she grasped for words. “What have you done? You do realize this is a one-of-a-kind work by my brother, the famous lithograph artist Ralph Landers!”

I gazed blankly at the woman standing in front of me.

“The Ralph Landers!” she exclaimed, throwing a copy of the New Yorker in my direction. I picked up the magazine and flipped to a bookmarked page. There I saw a lengthy, glowing review of the MOMA exhibit of the famed lithograph works of Ralph Landers.

Abruptly a tall man entered the room. He gasped when he saw the decimated artwork. “You know nothing of my work!” he exclaimed. The image of Marshall McLuhan passed briefly through my head. “Get out!”

And with that I was on my ass on the sidewalk.

A few more thumb-twiddling, ceiling-tile-counting weeks passed. I decided that perhaps I would be more successful as an art appraiser if I actually learned something about art, so I headed to D.C. and the National Gallery. I was greeted at the entrance by giant, 40-foot-tall banners bearing a single, larger-than-life word:

LANDERS

Great.

I entered the museum, and noticed a long queue assembling to enter the Landers exhibit. My natural curiosity got the best of me, and I joined the line. Sure enough, when I entered the exhibit hall, I discovered none other than the works of famed lithographer Ralph Landers.

One work, in particular, seemed to garner an inordinate amount of attention. I approached the huddled mass and squirmed my way to the front. There, behind a velvet rope, hung the very poster I myself had profaned with my duct tape, thumbtacks, Chiclets, and saliva.

“Brilliant.”

“Genius.”

“A profound statement on the price of war, the commodification of art, and modern society’s abandonment of things of value.”

The man standing next to me asked, “What do you think?”

I gazed blankly at the object hanging on the wall. I hoped desperately to exude an air of deep contemplation.

“Priceless.”

After the crowd dispersed, I pulled a Sharpie out of my pocket. (Yes, I carry a Sharpie at all times. Don’t you?) I leaned gingerly over the velvet rope, pulled the cap from the pen, and scrawled “Lionel” across a strip of duct tape.

Got a Chronic Case of Pac-Man Fever? Drs. Buckner and Garcia Have the Prescription

I make no attempts to conceal my lifelong obsession with the video games I played in my youth. My Atari 2600 and Intellivision are still hooked up to my TV, I have collected over 200 game cartridges for those systems, I own a pinball machine and an Asteroids cocktail table, I lurk in the forums at AtariAge.com, and I even have my own web site devoted to the topic.

But I can acknowledge some of the, er, pitfalls of such an obsession.

Yesterday a couple of friends and I stepped into the netherworld of arcade auctions. I went to a previous auction with one of them, and we each walked away with a machine in tow… I got the aforementioned Asteroids cocktail table; he took home a Ms. Pac-Man cabaret machine.

Yesterday’s auction was a comparative disappointment. Again, we each had our sights on a particular machine: I sought a Dig Dug, he wanted Tempest. And again, we found what we were looking for… the somewhat meager selection of machines up for bids did nonetheless include a fairly-decent Dig Dug and a pristine Tempest. Unfortunately, both of us were under strict spousal orders not to come home with another game.

I made a feeble attempt at bidding on the Dig Dug but ultimately let it go for a paltry $425. My friend didn’t even bother making a showing on the Tempest, which eventually closed at a surprisingly low, given its excellent condition, $900.

Although the auction was, for us, a failure (but a rousing success for our wives), it did inspire a renewed interest in, or at least awareness of, the music of Buckner & Garcia. (I think I phrased that wrong… this actually made a bad situation worse.)

In case you’ve forgotten, Buckner & Garcia were the one-hit wonders who provided the soundtrack to America’s early-’80s obsession with Pac-Man, in the form of “Pac-Man Fever.”

Most people, unaware of their good fortune in this matter, have probably lived the last 21 years in the belief that this was the only song ever recorded by the joystick-jockeying duo. But the blissfully ignorant among us are wrong. So very, very wrong.

In fact, Buckner & Garcia tried unsuccessfully to repeat their success cashing in on pop culture fads by recording a dreadful piece of rubbish entitled “E.T. I Love You.” But that wasn’t before CBS Records ill-advisedly inflated their “Pac-Man Fever” success into an entire LP… a concept album, no less, focused entirely upon the popular video arcade games of the day.

Marketing types have a curious unwillingness to take chances on new ideas, combined with an uncanny ability to take one small, unexpected success and run it into the ground with lightning speed. Such was the case with Buckner & Garcia’s “Pac-Man Fever” album… eight B&G songs about nothing but video games!

Of course, this was a bad idea.

But once the ball (or in this case, the tape, or to avoid the mixed metaphor I am about to produce, the locomotive) is rolling, nothing can stop the freight-train momentum of a fundamentally-flawed concept with obscene amounts of cash strapped to its back.

I’m sure some of you out there owned a copy of the album. Judging by the dozens of tattered copies of the LP I found at a St. Paul Cheapo Records store when I purchased my own in a surge of retro-kitsch interest in the mid-’90s, sales were quite brisk, at one time. I imagine most copies that haven’t yet found their way to used record stores are stuck away in attics around the country, alongside long-forgotten lava lamps, pet rocks, unopened six-packs of Billy Beer, leisure suits, leg warmers, and other detritus from the late ’70s and early ’80s. (Personally, I think the lava lamps deserve more respect than that, but I understand their place in most people’s forgotten fad attic archives.)

For those of you who’ve never heard the album, or have spent years in therapy trying to forget it, I’d like to share my recent experience, having brazenly subjected my ears and brain to the entire thing (not all at once, of course, or my head surely would have imploded before I had the opportunity to write this).

The music is god-awful, to be sure. But I discovered something upon my most recent listening that I never noticed before. If you pay close attention, you can actually hear the evolution of the musicians’ mental state during the recording of the album. This is, in fact, a brilliant case study in what happens to people who’ve come up with a goofy but novel idea when they are pressured to draw that idea out far beyond its inherent appeal.

Track 1: Pac-Man Fever

This, of course, is the original idea, recorded well before the rest of the album. If I remember the story right, Buckner & Garcia were a couple of commercial jingle writers and performers based in Atlanta, who came up with the idea of making a song about their enthusiasm for Pac-Man. The song effectively captured the public’s temporary obsession with the game, and was requested so much by listeners to local radio stations that the guys got a record deal out of it. Unfortunately, that meant they had to actually record an entire record.

I completely understand the decision to make a concept album. There is no way this song would fit with a program of serious songs. It had to be novelty all the way. But a better decision would’ve been to leave well enough alone.

Track 2: Froggy’s Lament

Fresh in the studio on the heels of their unexpected rise to fame with “Pac-Man Fever,” the boys put together this silly, but still fairly enjoyable little tune inspired by Frogger. They kept up the gimmick of using actual game sounds in the song, and engaged in some good-natured self-mockery in the form of bizarre, frog-like voices. But the concept was already beginning to fray.

Track 3: Ode to a Centipede

OK, let’s get one thing straight. There is no way a ballad about a centipede — the creature or the video game — could ever be a good idea. The fact that this nauseating experience is only the third track on the album has to be seen as an acknowledgement of the weakness of the concept. Hopefully, B&G’s intention was to send a warning to CBS management that this was a bad idea that would never work. They didn’t get the message. (I should just point out here that I realize the songs were probably not recorded in the sequence they appear on the album. But just work with me on this, OK?)

Track 4: Do the Donkey Kong

On the surface, this is a happy, bouncy, ’50s sock-hoppish dance tune, albeit one with horrifically stupid lyrics. But despite the perky tempo and forced enthusiasm of the singing, you can hear the band’s deep regret for ever having accepted the advance to record this album.

Track 5: Hyperspace

To resolve any ambiguity (“hyperspace” being a staple in the concept of scores of space-themed video games of the early ’80s), this song happens to be about Asteroids, a game that is near and dear to my heart. One of the most exciting things about this game (aside from its gripping black-and-white vector graphics) is the awesome bass-heavy rumble its speaker generates when you blow up an asteroid. (Homer Simpson might even describe the effect as “bong rattling.”) So it’s quite painful for me to hear those beloved explosions in the context of this song. I try to avoid listening to it much, lest the unfortunately-catchy chorus should find its way into my head uninvited while I’m playing the game.

By this point, Messrs. Buckner and Garcia were clearly just going through the motions, hoping to get the damn album over with as soon as possible so they could focus on their next big idea… a song about E.T.

Track 6: The Defender

Buckner (or is it Garcia?) sings with almost-believable conviction here about his passion for his role as the “captain of the ship and its men.” But his profound sense of self-loathing is beginning to overwhelm the music. Then again, from the listener’s perspective, that’s probably a plus.

Track 7: Mousetrap

By now, the band has basically worked through its issues. The guys know what they’re doing is hopelessly lame, but the end is in sight, and now their self-loathing is recast as a blatant contempt for the listener… an unmasked incredulity that anyone would bother to get this far into the album without flinging the disc out the nearest open window.

Track 8: Goin’ Berzerk

I think the title says it all. Every turn of emotion the musicians endured over the 3 days they took to write and record the album merges with the others and a final picture comes together of the stark reality of what they’ve just done: Here, at last, we are left with a document of one of the most monumentally-stupid attempts to cash in on a fad in human history.

Fads are defined by their temporality. Fads are, almost by definition, intrinsically ill-conceived. If they weren’t, they would endure. But they don’t. Sadly, they usually leave artifacts like this behind.

All the World’s a Stage… and We Are Merely an Audience That Will Sit Through Just About Anything

Network television has been struggling lately to hold onto viewers. It’s no wonder why. In my early childhood years (the ones I can remember), say, 1977-1982, we got 4 TV channels… 5 if the wind was blowing in the right direction, the planets were properly aligned, and God was in a good mood. And 2 of those 5 were PBS.

Now I have a DirecTV satellite system that offers me over 130 channel options. Of course, about 127 of those channels are utter crap, but at least I get VH1 Classic and Boomerang, so when all else fails, I can always fall back on a cheesy Ratt video or an episode of Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch. All of the old stuff from the broadcast networks that was actually worth watching is now on TV Land or Nick at Nite, and the more recent stuff is on TNT, or as I like to call it, the Law and Order Network.

You might think that with all of the competition from cable networks, broadcast TV would’ve withered away. But much to the contrary, the number of broadcast networks has doubled since my youth. So now instead of 3 networks competing for 95% of all viewers (perhaps I am being generous to PBS), we have 6 networks competing for about 10-15% of the total audience. (I think PBS has managed to retain about 3 or 4 viewers nationwide, for the shows that haven’t been stolen by the army of Discovery networks. So someone actually does watch Masterpiece Theater!)

Oh yeah… I had a point to all of this. Faced with dwindling audiences, atrophy of advertising revenues, and a chronic inability to get the public’s attention, the networks have resorted to… reality TV.

I remember naively thinking, around the third series of Survivor (which is now, incredibly, casting for its seventh series), that the public’s fascination with “ordinary” people making asses of themselves had run its course. Oh, how wrong I was.

I admit, occasionally I get sucked into this stuff. I spent 3 hours in front of the TV last night, flipping between the finale of Joe Millionaire on Fox (which I, honestly, had never watched before) and ABC‘s encore presentation of the freakshow that is Living with Michael Jackson.

A variety of thoughts went through my head during the course of the evening:

Am I witnessing the fall of Rome?

I can’t believe I’m buying into the hype and watching this crap.

God, that Sarah‘s a bitch!

Yes, it’s true. As high-and-mighty as I like to be, as much as I deride this tripe and the people who watch it, I get drawn into it too.

But what really disturbed me were the promo spots for other shows that the networks were airing. Just about every new show they were promoting was another reality show. And now we’ve gotten into the scariest territory of all: reality shows about fallen celebrities (or perpetual wannabe celebrities) who are desperately trying to revive their faltering careers. Granted, even then, I must admit I find it somewhat amusing to see what happens when the likes of Vince Neil, MC Hammer, Emmanuel “Webster” Lewis, Gabrielle Carteris from Beverly Hills 90210, Corey Feldman, and the rest (as they used to say in the first-season theme music to Gilligan’s Island) are thrown together, as with the WB‘s The Surreal Life. Of course, I got as much amusement from watching the closing credits of a recent rerun of SNL on Comedy Central, wherein Rob Lowe, Eminem, and Ralph Nader were standing in a row at the front of the stage. Any truly odd assortment of famous people is bound to be mildly entertaining, even if they’re just waving at TV cameras.

At this point, I can only wonder, what’s next? And how can I avoid watching it?

Duct Tape and Plastic Sheets?

Disclaimer: Since writing this rant, it has come to my attention that both Home Depot and MacGyver were mentioned in a Jay Leno monologue on this topic last week. I’m not sure what’s worse: having people think I ripped off Jay Leno, or having people know I didn’t rip off Jay Leno — I just came up with the same jokes.

Recently, for approximately the 574th time since September 11, 2001, the federal government announced that, in response to vague and highly-guarded “intelligence” of undisclosed (and hence almost inherently dubious) origin, our “national terror alert” status would again be raised from the level 3 “code yellow” to level 2 “code orange.” Judging by the public’s general apathy or utter unawareness of this change, I would be inclined to say that the terror alert status codes have lost all meaning, but that would imply that they had meaning in the first place.

This time things seem a bit more serious than usual, however. Security is being beefed up in public places, both prominent and ridiculously inconsequential. Police are carrying gas masks. And the government has sternly advised citizens to safeguard their homes and their families by stocking up on plastic sheeting and duct tape, to seal their windows and doors in the event of a biological or chemical attack.

Mmmmm… that’s goooood homeland security! Let me guess: In the Bush Administration’s modus operandi of stacking agency leadership posts with business executives, Tom Ridge’s assistant directors include former CEOs of plastics and adhesives manufacturers. This monolithic, Orwellian agency was created to protect the public from terrorist dangers, but when we’re actually faced with those dangers, the best they can come up with is a MacGyver-esque suggestion for us to do the job ourselves? Oh, and it’s an economic stimulus package, too… at least for our new “defensive sticky substances” industry!

I don’t mean to make light of what terrorists have done in the past, or of the potential for future action as bad as, or far worse than, what we’ve seen to date. But the thought of Americans by the millions responding to ill-defined dangers by racing to Home Depot to fight over rapidly dwindling supplies of these staples of modern ingenuity is, well, laughable.

Today we are confronted with a threat of unspeakable proportions, and yet the chance that any given one of us will actually succumb to such acts of terror is minuscule. Facing the remote-in-the-extreme odds of a horrible-in-the-extreme catastrophe, the government of the most powerful nation in the history of the planet tells its populace of hundreds of millions to defend itself with… duct tape and plastic sheets.

I am reminded of public service films produced at the height of the Cold War, showing school children responding in an orderly and disciplined fashion to the announcement that a nuclear attack is underway by kneeling under their desks and folding their hands over their heads.

I experienced those civil defense drills myself in elementary school during the dying days of the Cold War, the early 1980s. By then, we were no longer being led to believe that a Formica desktop and the feeble flesh and bones of our hands would protect us from the extreme heat and force of a nuclear blast, or from the subsequent radioactive fallout. Nuclear war was never even mentioned. I, at least, always believed that these drills were simply preparing us to deal with the inevitable eventuality of the school being flattened by a tornado — a far more present threat in the great wind-swept expanse of the American Midwest.

With the end of the Cold War, the monthly tests of air-raid sirens and the Emergency Broadcast System on TV and radio became a fading memory, and the omnipresent fear (and feeble means of personal self-defense) became almost-trite memories of a bygone day. Many of us spent most of the ’90s in a hazy delusion that a more “enlightened” time without war and mass violence was upon us, at least in America and much of Europe.

But now we’re back to constant fear — a slowly simmering, nagging feeling that at any moment, disaster, a disaster like none we’ve ever considered, could strike. We know the chance of that actually happening is fairly remote, and that gamble is what keeps us going.

Then something like this happens. When we’re inescapably presented with the futility of our efforts at safeguarding ourselves, the real danger we face becomes apparent.

The truth is, no matter how many billions of dollars the government spends on Homeland Security, no matter how much our civil liberties are eroded in the name of public safety, and no matter how many layers of plastic we duct tape to our windows, there is no way to guarantee safety.

Life is inherently risky, but in that risk comes the vitality, the urgency, that makes life worth living.

If we spend all of our time obsessing over how to protect ourselves from every nebulous threat that exists in the world, we lose no matter what. Even if we do fend off those daily threats, no one defeats old age in the end.

So stop fretting. Get out there and live.

And leave the plastic sheets and duct tape for me.

Dude, You’re Gettin’ Derivative!

By now it’s all over the news… Benjamin Curtis, better known as Steven*, the “Dell Dude,” was busted last night in Manhattan for attempting to buy pot. This, of course, is Big News, and is getting lots of well-deserved media attention.

But what I find to be an even bigger story is the way that so many of the news agencies, having classified this story for their “Oddly Enough” columns, are slapping incredibly lame plays on the Dell pitchman’s famous slogan into their headlines.

At 4:19 PM today, I did a search on Google News for this story, and 32 results came back. (Your results may vary, as Google’s news system is continually updated.) Out of those 32, only 4 did not have the word “dude” in their headlines, and many, in fact, went beyond simply referencing the “Dell Dude” and attempted a “witty” variation on “Dude, you’re gettin’ a Dell.” Let’s look at a few. (This ought to be interesting to see how long these agencies retain their news stories, as well. I apologize if any of the links below are dead, which I assume will start happening approximately 5 seconds after I post this rant.)

CBS News
Dude, You’re Under Arrest!

A weak effort, especially for a major news outlet like CBS. I guess Dan Rather is in charge of their humor. (No, I take that back… Dan Rather actually can be funny when he wants to. Let’s blame Andy Rooney.)

CNN
Dude, You’re Getting a Record

An improvement. It’s a more accurate play on the slogan than CBS’s craptacular attempt. Makes me think that Steven’s goin’ vintage and throwing out all of his CDs in favor of vinyl, though. Next, we’ll hear, “Dude, you’re gettin’ a Texas Instruments!”

WOKR-TV and WXXA and Baltimore Sun
Dude… You’re Busted!

At least three separate sources all coming up with this same lame effort! OK, the Sun actually used a comma instead of points of ellipsis. Way to stand out from the crowd, Jack Germond!

New York Daily News
NYC Cops Tell Dell Dude: You’re Getting Arrested!

CBS should learn from this one. It’s almost as lame as theirs, but at least it gets the cadence right (sort of). As an added bonus, it allows the reader to envision the cops gleefully slapping the handcuffs on the “dude” and delivering this line without missing a beat.

WNBC
Dude! Dell Pitchman Busted On Pot Charges

Not really an effort to incorporate the slogan, but this is one of the countless stories that gratuitously dropped the word “dude” into an otherwise-serious headline.

WDIV
Dude, Yer’ Gettin a Cell! Dell Dude Arrested

Yes, now this is the obvious choice. I am really quite surprised that more outlets haven’t picked up on this one; it’s got everything! Spot on with the cadence of the slogan and what would seem to be the natural, obvious pun. Bonus points for actually using “yer’,” even though I would dispute that apostrophe placement.

* Update, February 12, 2003: Not surprisingly, Dell has removed their Steven page. But I’ll keep the link in the first paragraph anyway, in case they, like, mellow out, dude. In the meantime, once again Google saves the day with its cached version of the page.