Critical Care

I don’t remember in which of my teenaged years I ponied up the spare change for my first magazine subscription, but I sure remember which publication got my dollars – “Rolling Stone,” of course!

Up until then, I’d sneak into my brothers’ unholy mess of a bedroom while they were at college, work or crawling through the local saloons and rifle through heaps of dirty clothes, stacks of albums and pillars of “National Lampoon” and “Playboy” before I found the current bi-weekly issue. Once they moved into pseudo adulthood and out of the house, they took “RS” with them, which is when I joined the ranks of the mag’s rolls.

One of my favorite parts of the pub was the record review section. Without such passionate, perceptive and influential critics as Robert Christgau, Greil Marcus, Charles M. Young and the one-and-only Lester Bangs, I may never have made such life-altering purchases as “Horses,” “The Ramones Leave Home,” “Never Mind the Bollocks” and “That’s Entertainment.” I rushed out to buy The Clash’s first American release, “Give ‘Em Enough Rope,” (the band’s eponymous debut would be released in this country shortly after) when I was advised that the LP announced its intentions with an opening gunshot of a rim shot and ratcheted up the two-man guitar attack from there. It was the beginning of a life-long love affair, as the framed “Black Market Clash” poster currently hanging in my living room can attest to.

When “RS” changed along with the culture, featuring more movie stars and pop tarts on its cover than real players, I knew it was time to move on and migrated over to “Musician,” as did some of “Rolling Stone’s” best writers like Bangs and Cameron Crowe. But “Musician” was never intended to be a fan mag and, as much as I liked their interviews and reviews, I found myself skipping over too many technical articles to justify the expense. That’s when I switched to “Spin,” which is where I’ve come to rest for over a decade.

But that rest has become increasingly restive. Their feature articles are fine, but I wish they’d drop the occasional fashion spreads (if I wanted to subscribe to “Elle” or “Glamour,” I would, fer chrissakes) and expand their coverage of live gigs from occasional to every issue. But the section that’s crying out for a real overhaul is the record reviews.

While “Spin’s” desire to review as many bands and their offerings as possible gets an “A” for effort, the result rates a desultory “D.” Jamming an average of fifty reviews (along with sidebars covering genre “essentials” and reissues) into a mere ten, six-column pages does a disservice to the musicians, the critics and the readers. Squeezed into an average of twenty lines, the reviewers are forced to use the crutch of comparison to give a sense of the artists’ soundscape. In the current issue (April 2010), I counted no less than three reviews that invoked Bob Dylan. Maybe none of these bands object to being put in the same company as the legendary Mister D., but if I decide to plunk down my money for their music, exactly which “Dylan” am I getting? The “Blonde on Blonde” Dylan? The “Blood on the Tracks” Dylan? The (egad!) “Christmas in the Heart” Dylan?

Hell, “Spin’s” reviews are so short, half the time I can’t even tell if the reviewer liked the record or not, which isn’t helped by the mag’s half-assed ratings system of ten gray dots, colored red in an ascending scale of approval, like some sonic SAT test.

Without expanded space for a thoughtful, in-depth record review, the artists’ individual creativity is short changed, the reviewers gets gypped out of the joy of turning an audience on to a deserving record or the satisfaction of warning them off a lousy one, and the music buyer is left wondering if maybe they can save a few bucks by canceling their sub and finding a better review site on the ‘net.

So “Spin,” do me a favor. Pick ten releases each month – twelve tops –then let your writers use their ears, heads and hearts to make their critical case. After that, I’ll be the judge.

Quotes and Unquotes

Unlike my “never trust anyone over thirty” generation, a recent poll of America’s teenagers showed a majority of them view their parents as their best friends and enjoy not only living with them, but spending their free time with Moms and Pops.

Which doesn’t mean that a cultural generation gap no longer exists, as my recent google search of most popular movie quotes points out. A glance at the top ten of AFI’s 100 Movie Quotes turned up a preponderance of dramas (eight in all) with two of the three top lines emoted by Marlon Brando. But a quick click over to the younger-skewing imdb shows their top ten movie quote pages lean heavily towards comedies (six, seven if you count “Pulp Fiction”) with Will Ferrell starring in four of them.

I bring up these factual flotsam and jetsam because the pieces of dialogue that stick in my head would never be found on either list. Any actor worth their thespian salt will tell you that, given a really juicy piece of dialogue, the trick is to treat it like a throwaway lest you ruin it with overstatement. To my mind, what defines a real pro is mouthing a few innocuous words that flash a glint of what really makes their character tick.

Take Steve Buscemi’s Mr. Pink in “Reservoir Dogs.” Up until the scene between himself and Mr. White (Harvey Keitel), where the two parse exactly how the hell their carefully planned diamond heist went so hideously wrong, he comes across as a hyperactive, motor-mouthed cheapskate who’s probably made it this far in the crime game due to sheer dumb luck, emphasis on the dumb. But as White runs down his remembrance of the blood-soaked massacre inside the jewelry store, Pink brings him up short with a pointed “That’s incorrect.” Not only are the two words intoned with the professorial air of an Oxford don, they’re a far cry from the profanity-laced tirades he’s been spouting off since the beginning of the film. Followed by his astonishingly accurate play-by-play and ultimately correct conclusion that he, White and the rest of their black-suited posse were, indeed, set up, you realize that Pink may just be the smartest color in this criminal Crayola pack.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” intoned by Javier Bardem’s preternaturally stoic homicidal maniac, Anton Chigurh, in the Coen Brothers’ “No Country for Old Men” is next on my list. You may (or may not) remember this line from the nail-biting scene between himself and the good ole boy gas station proprietor. The exchange starts innocuously enough, as Chigurh asks how much he owes for gas and a package of cashews, then quickly turns menacing when the owner innocently inquires after the weather in Dallas. Realizing he’s somehow gotten himself in serious hot water with a bad hombre, the owner falsely claims he’s getting ready to close up shop but, under Chigurh’s relentless questioning, starts floundering like a fish out of water. That’s when Chigurh comes out with the above referenced sentence, but not before slightly choking on one of those cashews. Accompanied by the faintest of gasps, it’s the first time you see a trace of emotion rattle the killer’s cage, even if it is only mild shock at what a simple-minded rube he’s playing with. Maybe Anton is a human being after all, instead of an air gun-toting automaton. (And for those of you who still haven’t seen this terrific flick, I won’t ruin it by commenting further.)

From the horrific to the hopeful, I’ll round out my top three with “Grand Canyon,” an episodic tale of how fate brings together various characters from opposite sides of the racial, social and economic chasm in modern-day Los Angeles. The film starts with wealthy lawyer Kevin Kline taking a wrong turn after a Lakers’ game, ending up on the mean streets of South Central, where his luxury ride promptly breaks down. Menaced by a group of young black men, one of them toting a gun, Kline is rescued by cowboy boot-wearing tow-truck driver Danny Glover. Wanting to show his appreciation for Glover’s one-man cavalry act, Kline takes him out for breakfast, where Glover reminisces about his late elderly father, whom he once asked how he accounted for his longevity as a black man in an often hostile world. “What was his answer?” Kline wants to know. Glover glances up from his plate and replies, “Habit.” Right there, you understand where Glover gets the cojones to not only talk down a pistol-packing car thief but survive, day in and day out, in the urban jungle of LA – keep your well-worn boots on the ground and get the job done.

They may not be on any list of quotable movie quotes, but these ordinary lines, and their extraordinary deliveries, do just that. Unquote.

Stretching a Point

A recent e-mail exchange with a friend found us both quoting that femme fatale of the Algonquin Round Table, Dorothy Parker. We also expressed our admiration for the film, “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle,” where the title character is played by one of cinema’s edgier actresses (employing an even edgier accent), Jennifer Jason Leigh.

In one particular scene where Leigh/Parker is engaging in verbal horseplay at said Round Table with the rest of the wickedly clever literati of 1920’s New York, someone is referred to as a genius, to which our darling Dottie indignantly replies, “No! I don’t think that word is elastic.”

I couldn’t agree with the Missus more. Some words in our culture have taken on a distinctly rubber band quality, stretched past the point of their original power until they’ve become a flaccid assemblage of letters.

One word that’s been unmercifully subjected to the rack is “love.” The Beatles may have been right when they wrote that’s all we need, but do we need it everywhere? Look, I love people, animals, art, literature, music, an ice-cold martini and free bar snacks as much as the next person, but I draw the line when that word is bandied about in business correspondence. Sorry to say, but I have to point the finger at my own gender for this gaffe:

“I’d love to see some copy versions on this by tomorrow” is an e-mail I’d get all too regularly from one of the young women in the marketing/sales department. Or, even more irritating, “I LOVED, LOVED, LOVED the creative you did on the ad campaign!!” Who knew that being praised for a job well done could set my teeth on edge. I half expected to see little hearts in place of the “o”s and often wondered if a love note from one of these “Marie Claire” devotees would take the opposite tack:

“David, I’d really value your input with the creation of a baby. Does convening a quick but productive meeting at ten tonight work for you? Please advise ASAP.”

Another word that’s been shot to hell is “assassination.” This term used to be reserved (and rightly so), for world leaders who were murdered for political reasons (e.g. Kennedy, Lincoln, Sadat, Bhutto, Gandhi). As much as one might like the music of Biggie Smalls, Tupac and John Lennon, they were not the targets of assassination but killed, the first two as a result of a pissing match between rival East Coast-West Coast hip-hop posses, the third at the hands of a deranged maniac. Their deaths were violent, untimely and a blow to the culture, but they didn’t knock political systems off their axis, provoke rioting in the streets or send world markets reeling.

Last, but certainly not the end of the list, is the word “evil.” To persuade all of us good citizens that the end was nigh, George W. Bush referred to the “Axis of Evil” in his State of the Union address in 2002, specifically pointing his finger at Iran, Iraq and North Korea. The dubiously elected “Dubya” may have been ready to soil his tighty whiteys over this triumvirate of mediocre madness, but this Catholic schoolgirl less so. “Evil” is a malevolent talent reserved for God’s only fallen Angel, whether he’s called Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub or Karl Rove. Hussein was a murderous bastard to be sure, but had as much hate for Muslim extremists as we do, Ahmadinejad is a squinty-eyed cur with a Napoleon complex, and Kim Jong-il is a delusional dwarf who I could take out in a mildly interesting street fight. To confer on any of these two-bit punks the label of “evil” is to debase God’s best and only nemesis.

As Mrs. P. herself would say, “What fresh hell is this?”

More of What I Fancy

It was British playwright George Bernard Shaw who observed that America and England are “two countries separated by a common language.”

And he wasn’t just whistlin’ Dixie. In fact, he was “spot on.”

On any fine day here in the States, I’d start up my car, tune the radio to NPR, take it slow over my parking lot’s speed bumps, mail a birthday card at the corner mailbox, wave to the school guard at the crosswalk, exit onto the expressway, finally make it to a nearby retail outlet after being confused by some crap directions, spend a little cash, throw my shopping bags in the trunk, return to my apartment, order Chinese take-out and that’s my day.

On the other side of The Pond, I’d start up the motor, tune the wireless to the Beeb, mind my car park’s sleeping policemen, post a greetings card at a pillar box, wave to the lollipop lady at the zebra crossing, exit onto the motorway, finally make it to a nearby retail park after being googled by some shite directions, spend a little dosh, toss my parcels in the boot, return to my flat, ring up an Indian take-away and Bob’s your uncle.

Even more intriguingly impenetrable is Cockney rhyming slang, where one word is replaced by a two or three word phrase in which the last word rhymes with the original word. Head scratching, no doubt, but a few pithy examples are: Climbing the “apples and pears” (stairs); That’s hard to “Adam and Eve” (believe); I like your designer “Steve McQueens” (jeans); What’s the “lemon and lime” (time); I scored some amazing “Bob Hope” (dope); I drank too much and got “Brahms and Lizst” (pissed).

But nothing belies the image of British propriety than their wanton way with profanity. You don’t have to be a loyal subject of Her Royal Majesty to interject one of these juicy nuggets into your next tirade:

Bum fuck Egypt (the middle of nowhere)

Face like a busted arse (very ugly)

Piss artist (heavy drinker)

Shit-hot (the best!)

Square root of fuck-all (absolutely nothing)

Fuck this for a game of soldiers (I give up)

Fuckwit (an idiot)

Hard shit (bad luck, used sarcastically)

Piss on his/her chips (ruin someone’s good time)

Rare as rocking horse shit (self-explanatory)

And on that saucy note, I’ll end my salute to the land of Parliament, pints and pork pies in the hope that, someday, I’ll get to visit my mate Nigel and hear my mother tongue spoken in all its gobsmacked glory. Now, if they could only do something about the bloody awful weather.

A Bit of What I Fancy

“Glor, someone stole 'haych.’”

This simple statement snapped me to attention for two reasons.

The “haych” in question was part of a very expensive movie encyclopedia I had to fight my former boss tooth and nail to acquire for my own writing needs, so I did not take it lightly when they were hijacked by my co-workers.

The person alerting me to this grievous crime was “Nigel,” a delightful chap who crossed “The Pond” as a relative lad but still retained his charming English accent. Never missing an opportunity to tweak his nose about it, I said, “Nigel, I know all twenty-six letters of the alphabet, and ‘haych’ isn’t one of them.” His reply to my good-natured teasing was always the same. “Glor, don’t make fun!”

Fun? Bollocks! I think I’m like most Yanks. We’re suckers for an English accent. I was supposed to be Nigel’s supervisor, but whenever he’d whine, “But Glor, I cahn’t,” in reply to one of my work-related requests, I’d let him off the hook. He could have stolen my lunch and I would have looked the other way.

Even more beguiling than the accent, though, were Nigel’s colloquialisms. If I expressed a wistful hope for, say, a new computer or the swift completion of a never-ending project, Nigel would bring me back to earth with a deadpan, “Not bloody likely.” “Are you mad?” was his comeback to any question he deemed silly, unreasonable or downright, well, mad. But the one word he uttered that never failed to slay me was “ta,” his appreciative response for the loan of a stapler or the offering of a coffee Nip. I used to keep a box of them in my desk drawer just so I could hear him say it.

Although I stayed pretty close to the Nige after he left the company, the passing of time did eventually take its toll, turning our cascade of contact into a trickle. But thanks to Facebook, that global, non-stop reunion party, I recently re-connected with Nigel to find that he’s moved back to Old London Town.

Scrummy! If I ever jet to Jolly Old, I’ll not only have a mate to get pissed with at the boozer, but I can take the piss by having a go with my British slang on the other punters.

More on that smashing subject in next week’s “The Bite.” Cheers!

Friggin' With the Riggin'

I hate to admit it, but the first time I saw a newspaper headline about piracy off the Somali coast, I laughed hysterically.

“Pirates?” I thought. “Real pirates? With shiny cutlasses clenched in their teeth, gold hoops dangling from their earlobes, squawking parrots perched on their shoulders, roguish patches over one eye and puffy shirts on their backs? Wow!”

The accompanying photo made my visual image even more delightfully ridiculous. Not to denigrate the damage that’s been done to shipping in that part of the world, but “pirate” seems a rather grandiose term for what amounts to a rag-tag group of high-seas hooligans.

Well hell, why not? Why shouldn’t a band of two-bit thugs glorify their job title? Everyone else does.

Have you noticed how many architects there are these days? And I don’t mean in the Frank Lloyd Wright vein. Type the word “architect” into a job board and you’ll turn up all sorts of busy little builders – systems architects, application architects, senior solution architects, information architects, data warehouse architects, etc. Why don’t these folks just cop to it. They’re computer geeks! Intelligent, essential and, I’m sure in some cases, very attractive computer geeks, but geeks nonetheless. I can only imagine that the genius behind such masterpieces as Fallingwater must be rolling in his grave.

Ranking right up there with all the “architects” are the “specialists.” From account executives to payroll drones, all the way down to the guy who delivers the company mail, everyone is a “specialist.” Or, they’re a “consultant,” a buzzword that actually means, “I’ve been unemployed for a long time, with no prospects on the horizon, so I’ll style myself a ‘consultant,’ even though my only consultations have been with Dr. Phil and a bag of Cheeto’s.”

Lately, I’ve been having problems with my own job title (copywriter), which I think is perfectly self-explanatory but, when heard instead of read, leads some people to believe I’m in the legal profession (copyrighter). So I’ve been toying around with changing it and adding a bit of cachet while I’m at it. Something like “English Architect.” Or “Scribe Specialist.” How about “Language Consultant.”

Wait. I have it!

I’ll be a “Copy Buccaneer.”

Aye, matey! A Copy Buccaneer!

Now pass me the grog.

Help Wanted, Indeed

Like a long-term marriage when you sense your partner’s waning interest in even your most fetching charms, I felt the same alienation of attention from the media company I faithfully served through the better and worse of 25 years. Luckily, I read the writing on the wall two years before the axe came down, so I was in better financial shape than some of my design department pals who also joined me on the chopping block at the end of 2007.

Ah well. Creative burnout had long taken its toll on my psyche and, after being a loyal handmaiden for a quarter of a century, I was granted a pretty sweet severance package, part of which was three-months of training at a high-end career counseling agency. I landed the gig at my old company fresh out of college after making one cold call, mailing an unsolicited resume and having a half-hour interview with the personnel director. As much as I detested the idea of going back to what amounts to kindergarten in order to land a position in a brave, new (and within a few months, totally tanked) job market, I knew getting a position wasn’t going to be as “falling off a log” easy as the last one. Besides, I adhere to the age-old motto, “If it’s for free, it’s for me.”

So, after ninety days of prep in writing a riveting resume, crafting a killer cover letter and winning over even the most inane interviewer, I was armed and ready to hit Monster, Careerbuilder and other boards in search of my next dream job. What the good folks at the agency didn’t warn me about was the moronic and, in some cases, laughable compositions that pass for job postings.

By trade, I’m an advertising copywriter, so it’s a mite off-putting to see at the top of the list of qualifications, “Excellent command of the English language,” followed by “Knowledge of spelling, punctuation and grammar a must.” No! Really? Whodda thunk that a copyrighter wuld need them thar skils?.

Another real turn off are postings that recruit for a copywriter, until you get past the above-mentioned drivel and discover they also require a knowledge of Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator and, oh say, a background in print production would be nice, too. In other words, they’re not looking for a copywriter, but a whole design services department rolled into one, underpaid scribe. Good luck with that.

But the posting that had “reject” written all over it was on behalf of an agency recruiting for an interactive copywriter who would work on banner ads, blogs, micro-sites, etc. Good enough. But here comes the deal killer: “You will be writing against almost impossible deadlines.” Well hell! Let me rush my resume right over to that agency! There’s nothing like setting me up to fail before I’ve even settled into my cube. No wonder I’ve seen it re-posted three times in as many months.

I’ve heard a lot of bellyaching from employers about the dearth of desirable candidates for what few job openings they have these days. Allow me to play “Dear Abby” and offer management a piece of advice:

If you want to meet me, court me and make a proposal on what I can promise you will be the beginning of a beautiful relationship, you better come to my door looking like George Clooney and not Alfred E. Neuman.

Oooh Melisma! Oooh Misery!

There’s a pestilence afoot in our fair land, and it’s infected million-selling vocalists, “American Idol” contestants and singers of “The Star Spangled Banner” at sporting events from sea to shining sea.

And its name is…“melisma”! (Cue scary music.)

The musical term may be a new one on you, but if you’ve heard Mariah Carey, Jennifer Hudson or Beyonce (and, unfortunately, that’s almost unavoidable), you’ve heard melisma.

Derived from the Greek word “melos,” meaning melody, melisma is the intoning of a single syllable between several different notes, usually at the end of a verse. (Think of how singers stretch the word “free” while caterwauling the national anthem as your five-dollar ballpark beer gets warm.)

Melismatic singing was handed down from one ancient religious practice to another, starting with the Greeks’ Eleusinian Mysteries, then on to the Muslims, Hindus, Jews and eventually winding up in Western Europe’s Gregorian chants.

Probably the most iconic rendering of melismatic singing is the Christmas carol “Angels We Have Heard on High,” where the “o” in the word “gloria” goes on longer than I’m sure yours truly ever will. Another extended example is from Handel’s “Messiah,” in which the word “born” in the choral work “For Unto Us a Child is Born,” is trilled for a strangulating 57 notes.

The point of melisma in religious practice is to induce a hypnotic state in the listener. Today, the point seems to be the inducement of a full-bore stupor.

Melisma made its way into America’s pop mainstream through gospel music, introduced by such R&B singers as Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder, who made their vocal bones in the Baptist church. Adapting the sacred into the secular, these singers used a deft hand with melisma, putting the vocal technique at the service of the heart and soul of the song, not the other way around. The pop singers who currently rule the charts have turned what should be the icing on the cake into the whole damned dessert. No wonder every “American Idolator” strains their chords to emulate these goddesses of gargle, or why lyricists rest on their laurels, safe in the knowledge that the words don’t really matter much because they can barely be understood.

Just like a kid who throws her arms in the air while riding a bike and shrieks, “Look Mom, no hands!” so do today’s divas hope to dazzle with long-suffering syllables and exhibitionist acrobatics.

I think it’s time they put the training wheels back on.

Just Your Type

Want to make a graphic designer salivate like one of Pavlov’s dogs? Say the word “typography.”

We’d be eating pizza around a conference room table at my old company when someone would bring up the subject and the graphic designers would get all slack-jawed and glassy-eyed. Sometimes, I’d say the magic word myself just to see a string of mozzarella glisten from their lower lips. Ask them what was so enchanting about a group of glyphs and the best they could muster was some mumbo-jumbo that sounded more like a mysterious incantation than an enlightening explanation.

It was around this time that I noticed how publishers were giving readers a brief history of the typeface* used in the book they just polished off. These usually involve the unpronounceable name of the font’s 15th century creator and adjectives such as “bold,” “clean” and, my favorite, “readable.”

Well, shouldn’t all fonts be “readable”? Of course, but they also need to be “legible.” Is there a difference? As it turns out (and much to my surprise) yeah! Legibility and readability are two different, yet connected, optical animals. Let’s boil ‘em down and see why:

Legibility is the province of the typeface designer, who’s charged with creating a font where each character is distinct and recognizable. Think of them as the architects of the alphabet. One of the earliest, most-well known typeface designers is the 16th century Parisian Claude Garamond, whose Roman types are still admired and used today for such essential elements as the small bowl of the “a” and the small eye of the “e.”

Readability is the domain of the typographer, who assists readers in navigating around a page without causing the eye any sudden stops, starts or collisions. By selecting the right font and type size for the job, not to mention using the correct spacing between letters, words and lines, the typographer acts as the text’s traffic cop. If the columns of a magazine, newspaper or the page of a book can be read for long minutes with optimal comfort, then the typographer has safely directed your peepers through a busy information intersection.

If that isn’t clear (and I hope it’s a sight better than the well-meaning yet undecipherable gibberish I’d get from the designers), here’s the bare bones after the boilin’: “Legibility” is about perception; “readability” is about comprehension. If letters are seen clearly, they can be understood absolutely.

Got it? Good. Now go track down a designer and break it down for them.

* This blog uses Arial, designed in 1982 by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders for Monotype Typography. A contemporary sans serif design, Arial contains more humanist characteristics than many of its predecessors and as such is more in tune with the mood of the last decades of the twentieth century. The overall treatment of curves is softer and fuller than in most industrial style sans serif faces. Terminal strokes are cut on the diagonal which helps to give the face a less mechanical appearance. Arial is an extremely versatile family of typefaces which can be used with equal success for text setting in reports, presentations, magazines etc, and for display use in newspapers, advertising and promotions.

Art, In So Many Words

After three torturous years of algebra, geometry, chemistry and Spanish (which I still can’t speak a word of), I did what any sensible high school stoner would do and loaded up my senior year’s academic agenda with classes that were either a cake walk (music appreciation), a no brainer (typing) or just plain fun (art).

At least, I thought art was going to be fun. Turns out it was more hard work than I imagined. No one told me about perspective (there’s math in art?!) or that some mediums are more suited to an individual’s hand than others (papier måché is just gross). Maybe because I’m a writer, but pen and ink appealed to me the most. My fifteen minutes of Warhol-like fame came as the result of a p & i drawing of a firebird (inspired by the album art of Jefferson Starship’s “Blows Against the Empire”) that not only earned me an A+ but a prominent place in the annual art fair, held in the venerable school library.

If I had known about Jenny Holzer, perhaps I would have used that pen and ink to get my aesthetic point across using both words and media.

After bouncing around a few Midwestern universities, Holzer attended the Rhode Island School of Design (launching pad for many a great artist and musician, most notably The Talking Heads), but found her muse at New York’s Whitney Museum during an independent study program. With a reading list heavy on Western and Eastern literature and philosophy, Holzer had the simple yet brilliant idea that complex thoughts could be boiled down into phrases any average Joe could understand.

Calling the project “Truisms,” Holzer printed these seemingly random thoughts on white paper using black italic script and anonymously wild posted them throughout the city on building facades, signs and telephone booths (remember those?). Provocative phrases such as “A Man Can’t Know What It’s Like to be a Mother,” “Money Creates Taste,” “A Lot of Professionals are Crackpots” and “Freedom is a Luxury Not a Necessity” prompted passersby to take out their pens and write responses or their own “truisms.”

That was in 1978. Over the intervening years, Holzer ramped up her delivery system – metal plaques, sandstone benches, sarcophagi, LED signs, laser projections on mountainsides – for such projects as “Inflammatory Essays,” “Living Series,” “Survivor Series” and “Laments.” Through it all, she has held true to the belief that language is her art and semantics her aesthetic.

Since 2001, Holzer has stopped writing her own texts. “I found that I couldn’t say enough adequately, and so it was with great pleasure that I went to the texts of others.”

I still have my pen and ink supplies. Anyone got Holzer’s e-mail address?