Product Displacement

Even though my wardrobe would give Tim Gunn the haute horrors, I do like to follow the vagaries of fashion, making note of what’s hip (minimalism), what’s hopeless (anything 80’s) and when the hell will this hideous style go away (Capri pants).

Words are a lot like fashion in that, to paraphrase Gunn’s “Project Runway” sidekick Heidi Klum, “One day they’re in, the next day they’re out.”

I remember when “ubiquitous” was, well, ubiquitous. “Resonate” hit a collective chord and then slowly faded away. “Synergy” was once a stock word with the Wall Street crowd as disparate companies tried to merge their misaligned missions. When AOL-Time Warner turned from a boon to a boondoggle, “synergy” became the Enron of English.

One word that seems in no danger of losing its allure anytime soon is “product.” Once reserved for things like glass cleaner and laundry detergent, “product” has become the little black dress of vocabulary – it’s safe to use on any occasion, but is completely lacking in color and nuance.

I first noticed this trend while watching “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” A forerunner to “Project Runway,” “Queer Eye” turned five gay men loose on one hapless hetero, making over his fashion, food, furniture, face and finesse. What should have been a great opportunity to educate their Trilby on such unfamiliar words as “bespoke,” “wasabi,” “étagère” or “toner,” instead became “product” pandemonium. Maybe they didn’t want to spook the straight guy, but I was a bit dismayed hearing these savvy Svengalis refer to everything from pasta to hair gel to fabric as “product.”

Because of its rote formula (how many times can you watch some poor bastard made uncomfortable by Carson Kressley’s quips), “Queer Eye” quit the air in 2007, but I believe they were the mavens who made “product” fashionable.

Normally, I would consider this fad just mildly distasteful, but when Hollywood studio executives, record label honchos and publishing CEOs start referring to movies, music and literature as “product,” I know we’re in desperate need of some major alteration. It’s bad enough to think of my daily meals as akin to floor wax, but the fine arts are one of the very few things (besides accessories) that set us apart from the other higher primates and should be shown the same reverence as the “Runway” panel does for a perfectly executed ensemble.

To quote the guru Gunn, choose the made-to-measure word for every object and “make it work.”

Pants on Fire

One of my favorite movie lines is drolly delivered by the perennially under appreciated Jeff Goldblum in The Big Chill:

“I don't know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They're more important than sex.”

Of course, “rationalization” is just a self-forgiving euphemism for the far more damnable “lie.”

Why do we lie anyway? After all, we were warned at a very early age that our pants would spontaneously combust or our noses grow to Pinocchio-sized proportions if we did. If that didn’t scare us to straight talk, how about turning into an LSD-crazed arachnid and weaving the proverbial tangled web.

Fact is, we’re all hard-wired dissemblers who are literally fed a falsehood in the womb. The placenta is provided by the paternal side of the partnership so, in order to perform its function without being destroyed as a biological invader, it cloaks itself in maternal chemicals. There’s even an area in our brain that governs prevarication. It starts to develop around the age of three or four (“Timmy, who broke the vase?” “The dog did!”), growing by leaps and bounds thereafter (“Tim, who drove the getaway car?” “Dougie did!”).

It’s interesting to note that women are believed to be the first fibbers, simply because they were the first talkers, and that it’s impossible to be a successful politician without telling a few whoppers. What this says about female politicians, I’ll leave to you.

Even the Almighty wasn’t foolish enough to forbid shaggy dog stories. The commandment reads, “Ye shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor,” not “Ye shall cut the crap.” The Good Lord knew that rampant honesty would be fatal to society. How many marriages do you think would still be standing if every husband answered the question, “Does my butt look fat in these pants?” and every wife answered the question, “Were you just faking it?” with the gospel truth?

Spouses, parents, children, friends, employers, the electorate and every sucker who’s born every minute aside, our biggest untruths are practiced on ourselves, as the above-referenced bit of dialogue attests. From evading those few pounds we put on over the holidays by blaming the clothes dryer to denying the cheating ways of a loved one when the sext message is staring us straight in the face, we are the Sovereigns of Self-Deception.

Hell, we don’t even like to call a lie “a lie” because of its shameful implications. Think I’m pulling your leg? Re-read this article and count how many times I did just that.

The Words Made Flesh

I like strolling through a good museum and I never seem to do it enough. Well, almost never…

It was the spring of 2008 when a friend and I flew down to Virginia to visit another friend, a retired Army officer who lives in Williamsburg. We landed on a warm, sunny April afternoon, which slowly turned overcast and then devolved into two days of heavy, steady rain. Our plans to spend most of the time either drinking around her pool or taking our potent potables to Virginia Beach were washed out, so we ended up touring every museum in the area, including Yorktown and Jamestown. As much as I enjoy imagining what life was like before modern conveniences made human existence both easier and more problematic, even I have a limit as to how many shards of pottery or whale bone buttons I can peruse in a 48-hour period.

At least we have objects like tools, apparel and even full-sized fossils of our forerunners to demonstrate how we evolved from apes in trees to cretins with cars. What scientists can’t tell us, and probably never will, is how and when we chattering primates became linguistic lords of the manor.

Oh, they have theories. Scientists always have theories. Here are four of them, in no particular order:

Animal Farm

Language is a behavior, not a physical attribute, so there’s no one part of our grey matter that governs it. Instead, it’s sparked by different circuits also shared by other species. My neighbors have a parrot named Nickie who can verbalize his burning desire for “carrots, carrots!” Our cousins the monkeys have different warning calls to distinguish between leopards, snakes, raptors or other voracious beasties. And check out the hanged dog look on Fido’s face the next time you berate him for pooping in your new shoes. Take all these verbal and non-verbal odds and ends and you have the makings for language. Of course, these furry and feathered critters don’t have the complex brains that would allow Nickie to tell Fido, “Yo! Fide! I saw your bitch smelling another dawg’s butt.”

Put Your Hands Where I Can See ‘Em

Once our ancestors stopped walking around on their knuckles, their hands quickly evolved into the mitts we know, love and use today, while it took many, many more moons before our vocal chords developed. It’s a possibility that the earliest form of human language was hand signals and those would have suited primitive hunters like their own fur coats. The first rule of stalking prey is “keep your big trap shut” so signing instead of saying, “The mastodon went that a-way,” would have put more meat on the communal rock slab. Once our throats got longer and our mouths smaller, signing may have became sounds, which would have made it much easier to gab while fashioning a flint knife or telling scary saber-toothed tiger stories in a dark cave.

Rock-a-Bye, Baby

Personally, I find baby talk annoying as hell (which is probably why I speak to infants as if they were college grads) but that lilting rhythm is an innate part of our behavior and may have been the antecedent to language. Not only is music and speech processed in the same part of the brain and used by species like birds to communicate, even the Big Kahuna of evolution, Charles Darwin, talked about early romantics singing love songs to each other before there was language. Who knows? Maybe there was a way early version of Zep’s “Immigrant Song.”

Mammal Babble

If singing or signing doesn’t do it for you, maybe this will. Killer whales in the same pod have a distinct dialect, which enables them to tell if another big bruiser is part of their tribe. Our ancestors also lived in small groups, so developing a distinctive sound for their own clan would have cut down on pesky visitors who tried to muscle in on their watering hole.

This last theory is the one that makes the most sense to me. In a year that’s seen vicious arguments over the building of a mosque near Ground Zero and stricter immigration laws in Arizona, the millennia-old motto, “Us vs. Them," still seems to be our favorite.

The "N" Words

From the halls of Congress to a town hall near you, it’s damned near impossible to go a week without hearing about a public official being brought up on ethics charges. Sometimes the accusation is as clear-cut as getting caught with their hand in the communal cookie jar but, more often, it’s a slyer form of chicanery, like giving high-paying government posts to family and friends or taking kick backs for maneuvering lucrative contracts into the waiting arms of a campaign contributor.

This is called nepotism and is considered a bad thing.

When listening to the advice of the many “career consultants” whose numbers have swelled along with the unemployment figures, it’s equally impossible not to hear them extol the virtue of tapping into your sources to land a job or build your business. This entails putting the arm on everyone from work associates to Grandma Nettie to get that all-important “foot in the door,” or linking into various forms of social media sites including Facebook, Twitter and, yes, LinkedIn.

This is called networking and is considered a good thing.

Or is it?

Looking back on my long years with my old employer, I can think of three instances when a chit was called in and a person or company was forced into our department’s ranks. The first was a young woman whose step uncle, a big shot in the company, had us create a junior designer position just for her. She was funny, sweet, kind and couldn’t design her way out of a brown paper bag. The second was also a designer, this one a certifiable psycho, who was in danger of being laid off until her boss hoodwinked my boss into taking her on. I had to spend a year sharing an office with this crazy bitch and held my breath every morning, convinced she was coming to work packing heat instead of lunch. The last was a printing company whose president was the friend of yet another of our corporate higher-ups. My boss and our print production manager were called into a meeting and not-so-subtly told to give this printer “special consideration” when bidding out jobs. I can’t say for sure what, if any, back door dealings were involved with this “arrangement,” but I can state unequivocally that the quality of our print materials sucked for years to come.

All of this begs the question: Why is “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” accepted in the private sector but condemned in the public sector? Isn’t it just as duplicitous to use a position of power, no matter how that power was attained, to give jobs to people and companies who are unqualified? Some might argue that, in the public sector, it’s our tax dollars that are being put to criminal use but, if you own stock in any corporation (and chances are, you do), your investment dollars are being used to employ equally incompetent nincompoops and hurting the bottom line.

An accountant in California recently posted an ad on craigslist, offering to pay three grand to anyone who could land him a job. The money would be handed over as soon as he signed the employment contract.

Would this be considered networking, nepotism or simply the nadir of merit?

Diving Into Dystopia

There is no word in the Russian language for “privacy.” That’s not surprising, considering Mother Russia gave birth to Big Brother.

What is jarring is that some tinpot dictator in a little Long Island town named Riverhead has no concept of the word, either.

Riverhead’s Chief Building Inspector decided to use Google Earth to take a satellite stroll through homeowners’ backyards and nail the folks who had pools but didn’t have the required permits. While the Chief Spy, er, Inspector admitted, “a lot of people don’t like the idea of an eye in the sky,” he also tried to put an altruistic face on this highly-suspect practice by adding that the fear of someone drowning outweighed the concern over privacy.

This guy must think we’re all wet.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, legislation was passed fast and fearfully in the name of keeping us safe from terrorism. The USA Patriot Act, which arguably did more to chip away at civil liberties than any bill passed before or since, enjoyed broad bi-partisan support and became law on October 26, 2001. The terrorists had, indeed, won.

Fact is, you cannot legislate against life, which is messy, chaotic and dangerous. Try as we mere mortals might to keep ourselves wrapped in a cozy cocoon, nature is a wild child and no manic Mary Poppins act is going to keep the cosmic kid from raising holy hell when the mood strikes.

What I find even more insidious is how politicians are now using the “fear factor” as an excuse to raise money for community chests ravaged by the current economic meltdown. If you want to pick my pocket just say so, but don’t hand me a line about protecting my health and welfare while levying a tax against tanning salons or using espionage to root out recalcitrant pool owners. (Note: Riverhead has already garnered a cool $75,000 in fines and permit fees.)

I’d love to lay this knee-jerk reactivism at the feet of our feckless leaders, but it seems we only have ourselves to blame. In an age when we rely on too many conveniences, take in too many calories and live too many years, we’re more than happy to leave our existence to elected court jesters who profess to really care about us. Too bad I don’t feel the same way about them.

We have a pool here at my co-op and, the other morning, a rat was found doing the backstroke in its well-maintained water. I wonder if he was just hot or on a reconnaissance mission.

You Bet Your Life

There are two American tourist destinations I have no desire to visit.

The first is Disney World. Me versus “The Happiest Place on Earth.” Wouldn’t that be a Mexican wrestling match.

The second is Las Vegas. I could contentedly go to my grave without witnessing the bizarre physical contortions of Cirque or the disturbing vocal contortions of Celine. As for gambling, it doesn’t do a thing for me. I can’t count fast enough to play black jack, can never remember the hand rankings in poker, and find feeding coins into a slot machine a crashing bore. I’ve been to Atlantic City and the odd casino down in the Caribbean, and found the only sure-fire transaction is handing over my cash for a couple of cocktails. After all, the first rule of gambling is “the house always wins.”

It didn’t occur to me until our current Great Recession that I have been, in fact, an unrepentant gambler, wagering my home, my income and my retirement on the global crapshoot known as the stock market.

The suits that run Wall Street prefer to use words like “investing” or “trading,” but when you put your money down with no guarantee that you’ll see a return, that, my friends, is gambling. The analogy between throwing dice in “Sin City” and doing the same on “The Street” became even more apparent when not one hustler who ruled from the corner offices of Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers had to take the “perp walk” for losing their fellow citizens’ homes, jobs and shirts. In fact, the traders at the firms that didn’t go belly up continue to collect obscene salaries and bonuses. Once again, “the house always wins.”

The other day, I heard of a new hedge fund that aims to turn the stock market into the bookie parlor it’s been all along. Called Galileo, it will analyze sports probability and statistics, then put investors’ money on the outcomes of games ranging from tennis to baseball to golf.

Of course, when an interviewer asked why not just call this new investment gambling or sports betting, the CEO of Galileo replied, “We don’t gamble. We apply an intelligent process and we look for solid risk-reward opportunities.”

Wanna bet?

Rocks Off

If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed. -- Adolf Hitler

Back in 1938, the good folks at DeBeers must have had Der Fuhrer in mind when they hired the advertising firm of N.W. Ayer & Son to come up with a campaign that would convince the American public that diamonds were a "necessary luxury."

DeBeers, one of history’s most successful cartels that, up until very recently, completely controlled the world-wide production and supply of diamonds, saw their European market tank when Herr Hitler started getting feisty. Although the US was purchasing 80% of DeBeers' gems, we were terrible cheapskates. You can't make a bundle peddling small, poor quality stones that cost an average of $80 a pop, so that’s when DeBeers hired Ayer's to cook up a little marketing propaganda.

The result was a four-word tagline, sprung from the mind of a lowly female copywriter, that became the most recognized advertising slogan of all time:

"A Diamond is Forever"

This was the linchpin of a 50-plus years campaign, evoking the idea that chunks of carbon are rare, valuable and never to be parted with. Unfortunately for you, me and every other sucker who was lead to believe we were getting a solid bang for our bling, the slogan worked all too well.

Beginning with young American males, DeBeers convinced them a diamond engagement ring was a reflection of their true love and bigger was better. (When it comes to young American males, this precept doesn't only apply to diamonds, but that's another article.) Once they had that market cornered, they sold three-stone "Past, Present and Future" rings to long-married couples; dreamed up the multi-stone "Eternity Ring" to unload a glut of small diamonds mined in the Soviet Union; and even bamboozled unattached women into buying a diamond ring for their right hand as a statement of their gutsy independence.

But here's the thing with diamonds – they have no intrinsic value and their price depends solely on scarcity. Virtually every diamond that's been found and cut is still in existence, meaning the public holds 500 million carats of diamonds, more than fifty times what DeBeers produces in a given year.

If times get tough and you decide to pay the bills by unloading your ice, good luck. The retailer you bought it from won’t take it, not even a prestigious outfit like Tiffany’s. The best they can offer is wholesale, far below the 100 to 200% mark up they originally charged. Not only would they lose a customer, they’d gain a black eye. If you do find a reputable firm to take it off your hands, expect to get about $600 for a one-carat diamond that cost you $2000.

"A diamond is forever" alright. And we‘re forever stuck with them.

Showers of "Oy"

As I’ve made mention in a past article, I’m a big fan of “Seinfeld” and have watched the syndicated reruns so many times, I can quote whole episodes in my sleep. My hands-down favorite is what I call the “Hamptons Episode,” where a trip to that summer resort area by Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer involves an ugly baby, illegal lobster harvesting, a topless beach romp and the physical effects of cold pool water on the male member. (“It shrinks?” “Like a frightened turtle!”) Elaine echoes my own sentiment when she responds to this spontaneous biology lesson with, “I don’t know how you guys walk around with those things.”

Actually, that’s not 100% true. There are certain occasions when I would be ecstatic to sport a Mister Johnson, and it’s whenever I receive an invitation to that most dreaded of female-only festivities, the “shower.”

The origins of this four-hour form of torture are a bit vague. The word itself seems to come from the Victorian-era practice of putting gifts inside a parasol which would then be opened, “showering” the bride-to-be with largesse. Presents must have been much smaller back then, because getting crowned with a Crock Pot wouldn’t be the best way to start a life of wedded bliss, although having the bloodied guest of honor whisked away in a speeding ambulance while her bridal party starts a betting pool on whether she makes it to the wedding day would certainly relieve the tedium for this writer.

The earliest use of the word in print occurred in the June 4, 1904 edition of the “Michigan Evening Press”: “The ‘shower parties’ that through mistaken hospitality the wedded couple are forced to attend…”

What a minute. What?!

I don’t know what the hell was going on at the turn-of-the-20th-century, but I do know the only modern shower participant who’s more than happy to attend is the one walking away with all the loot. By the time the maid of honor and bridesmaids have fought it out with the bride over which hideous, overpriced dress and accessories they’ll be forced to wear in public (not to mention memorialized for all time in photos and video), they’d be just as happy to flog the little dear as fete her.

As for the guests, their fun begins with the bridal registry and the fervent hope there’ll be something left besides the “I Don’t Want to Look Cheap” salt and pepper shakers and the “There Goes My Bridgework” fine china setting. With gifts in hand, the guests are welcomed and then entertained with sophomoric shower games (although I do get a sick thrill out of seeing the bride wear the dreaded “Bow Bonnet”), served a menu that assumes all women enjoy nibbling greens and overdone salmon, and then get a ringside seat for an hour or so of “ohhing” and “ahhing” as the wife-in-training rips off the wrapping paper on a bath towel set or a toaster oven.

(Don’t even get me started on baby showers. At least towels and toasters I know about. Diaper genies, breast pumps and that disgusting plastic thingee that suctions snot out of an infant’s nose I wish I never knew about.)

But for my salad bowl and tongs set, the absolutely worst part of these segregated soirees (besides the exclusion of anyone with a “Y” chromosome) is the shower libation of choice – champagne punch. With a sickly sweetness that would send a non-diabetic into a coma, it’s usually served in small glasses so that, God forbid, none of the women become “tipsy.” Believe me, there’s not so much as a headache in the whole punch bowl.

There was a time not so long ago when “Jack and Jill” parties were in vogue, but that quickly passed. Men are no dopes. They’re not going to blow a perfectly good Saturday or Sunday afternoon kvelling over kitchen utensils or playing “Bridal Shower Bingo.”

Now that the season of showers are upon us, a trip to Stockholm to check out a sex change operation has a certain appeal yet seems a tad drastic. Maybe a cucumber, a trucker’s cap and NFL season tickets would be enough to discount me from the deluge.

Following Suit

The French are in the middle of a cultural merde storm with a bill being hotly debated in parliament that would ban the wearing of face-covering veils such as the niqab or burqua in public. Secularists to the soul (God bless them) but with the largest Muslim population in Europe, the French are walking a political tightrope that would put Philippe Petit’s stroll between the Twin Towers to shame.

I’m not going to weigh in on this touchy subject because, for starters, I don’t live in France, but I have a suspicion the real reason a large majority of the French back the ban is sartorial. In a country that not only coined the term haute couture (loosely translated as “high sewing” or “high dressmaking”) but protects its criteria and use by law, the deliberately gruesome burqua must be particularly offensive. I know when I strolled down the Champs Élysées wearing a perfectly acceptable American ensemble of jeans, top and leather boots, I felt déclassé to say the least.

Lately, I’ve been giving this idea of banning a certain article of female clothing much thought. The only problem is, some of the elected officials who’d have to get behind the prohibition are its most ardent adherents.

If you haven’t guessed by now, I’m talking about that ubiquitously horrendous combination of blazer and pants that’s come to be known as “The Hillary Suit.”

That damning designation is a bit unfair. Yes, ever since Hillary Clinton decided to seriously pursue her own political career, she’s been seen exclusively in the eponymous suit (at least she dropped the all-black look awhile ago and branched out into color, although that orange number was a poor choice), but this has been the “uniform” for all serious female pols since they were permitted to wear pants on the Senate floor in the early 1990’s. (And wasn’t that mighty white of their male counterparts.) It’s also become the go-to get-up of any woman in corporate America who’s looking to take a hammer to the glass ceiling.

I don’t get it. If a woman can wear only one type of apparel to prove her worthiness, is there that much difference between a business suit and a burqua? Isn’t it just as repressive for a woman to be required to cover her whole body to gain acceptance, as it is to ape the look of a man?

I wish I had a solution to fascist female fashion in all its guises, but Coco Chanel I am not. Maybe it’s about time women themselves cut the burquas, business suits and ties that bind.

All Fired Up

I think if you ask most Americans, Christmas would be their favorite holiday, with Thanksgiving coming in second by a drumstick.

This has always stumped me.

Just when Mother Nature (in the Northern Hemisphere) is nagging us to slow down, eat less and sleep more, we contrary critters bust our guts with over laden tables, break our budgets with over-the-top gift lists and try and beat the clock to get it all done before the designated day.

What fools we Americans be, especially when the greatest national holiday is a scant two days away.

That’s right my fellow revolutionaries, the Fourth of July is almost upon us and more red, white and buzzed I could not be!

Who needs to labor over turkey with all the trimmings when a package of hot dogs, a bag of chips and a cooler of cold ones is all it takes to get the party started? Who needs twinkle lights when fireflies are working their natural magic? Who needs to gather around a roaring fireplace when you can sit under a star-filled sky and still break a sweat?

Not me, that’s who!

And I haven’t even mentioned the Fourth’s best treat of all – fireworks! Lucky for me that Long Island just happens to be the home base of the world’s pre-eminent “First Family of Fireworks,” the Gruccis, so I’ve been witness to some spectacular pyrotechnic displays over the years, including the Bicentennial blowout of ’76, and an international exhibition at the old Shea Stadium, where I spied patriarch Felix Grucci handling some explosive device with a smoldering cigarette dangling from his lips.

But the show that blew my Keds off was held on the playing field of our local public high school when I couldn’t have been more than four or five years old. Keep in mind that back in the day, before we became such collective fraidy cats and allowed “The State” to nanny us to death, fireworks were easily accessible to all and sundry. It wasn’t unusual for our parents to give us a dime so we could buy “punks” at the local candy store, making the lighting of firecrackers more efficient. In fact, if you read the following day’s paper and didn’t see a few stories about kids blowing off a finger or two or taking out an eye, you knew it was a pretty shabby Fourth.

So it was also run-of-the-mill that you’d have a local fireworks show where the audience was seated mere yards away from where the explosive action was due to take place. What I wasn’t prepared for was a large grid, set up mid-field, that had all manner of contraptions lashed to its frame. As I anxiously waited for the sun to set, one of my brothers patiently explained that, before the skyward portion of the performance, there was a ground display. Not knowing what the hell he was talking about, I figured it was just one more thing, like that damned lingering sun, holding up the sensational skyrockets.

Ah, the ignorance of youth. Not only was the ground show far superior to the aerial display (we could actually feel the heat of the burning chemicals), it was the first and, unfortunately, last time I saw that most magnificent of razzle-dazzlers, the Catherine Wheel.

Named after “the breaking wheel,” an instrument of torture that, legend has it, carried off the soul of the martyred Saint Catherine, this firework is constructed either as a cross with a fifth wheel in the middle or a star. I don’t recall which version was ignited that long ago night, but it was truly an awesome sight.

Since New York is one of four states that ban all consumer fireworks completely (bastards) and the annual Grucci show at Jones Beach has been cancelled due to the shitty economy (goddamn Great Recession), looks like fireworks in my neck of the woods will be light on the ground and the sky this year.

Two hundred and thirty-five years ago, the colonists started a revolution because they didn’t want to pay their taxes. This Fourth, I say we man the barricades and demand our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of a few lost limbs.