Authors: Alan Glynn
But had I boned up on him? Of course not. Wasn’t it enough that I shelled out $35 for the damn book in the first place? Now you want me to read it as well?
I opened
Raymond Loewy: A Life
at the first chapter – an account of his early days in France, before he emigrated to the US – and started reading.
*
A car alarm went off in the street and I endured it for a moment or two, but then looked up – waiting, hoping for it to stop, and soon. After a few more seconds it did and I went back to my reading, but as I refocused on the book I saw that I was already on page 237.
I’d only been reading for about twenty minutes.
I was stunned, and could not understand how I’d gotten through so many pages in such a short space of time. I’m quite a slow reader and it would normally take me three or four hours to read that much. This was amazing. I flipped back through the pages to see if I
recognized
any of the text and to my surprise I actually did. Because again, in normal circumstances I find that I retain very little of what I read. I even have a hard time following complicated plots in novels, never mind technical or factual stuff. I go into a bookshop and look at the history section, for instance, or the architecture section, or the physics section, and I despair. How is any one person ever again going to be able to come to grips with all of the available material that exists on any given subject? Or even on a specialist area of a subject? It was crazy …
But
this
– by contrast – this shit was
amazing
…
I got up out of my chair.
OK, ask me something about Raymond Loewy’s early career.
Like what?
Like – I don’t know – like, how did he get started?
Very well then, how did he get started?
He worked as a fashion illustrator in the late 1920s – for
Harper’s Bazaar
mostly.
And?
He broke into industrial design when he was commissioned to come up with a new Gestetner duplicating machine. He managed to do it in five days flat. That was in May of 1929. He went on from there and ended up designing everything from tie-pins to locomotives.
I was pacing back and forth across the room now, nodding sagely and clicking my fingers.
Who were his contemporaries?
Norman Bel Geddes, Walter Teague, Henry Dreyfuss.
I cleared my throat and then continued, aloud this time – as if I were delivering a lecture.
Their collective vision of a fully mechanized future – where
everything
would be clean and new – was showcased at the World’s Fair in New York, in 1939. With the motto ‘Tomorrow, Now!’, Bel Geddes designed the biggest and most expensive exhibit at the fair, for General Motors. It was called Futurama and represented an
imagined
America in what was a then-distant 1960 – a sort of impatient, dream-like precursor to the New Frontier …
I paused again, unable to believe that I’d taken so much of it in, even the obscure stuff – details, for example, about what was used as fill for the enormous land-reclamation scheme in Flushing Bay, where the fair had actually taken place.
Ash and treated garbage.
Six-million cubic yards of it.
Now how did I remember
that
? It was ridiculous – but at the same time, of course, it was fantastic, and I felt extremely excited.
I went back over to the desk and sat down again. The book was about eight hundred pages long and I reckoned that I didn’t need to read the whole thing – after all, I’d only bought it for background information and I could always refer to it again later on. So I just skimmed through the rest of it. When I’d finished the last chapter – and with the book closed in front of me on the desk – I decided to try and summarize what I had read.
The most relevant point I extracted from the book, I think, was about the Loewy style itself, which was popularly known as
streamlining
. It was one of the first design concepts to draw its rationale from technology, and from aerodynamics in particular. It required that mechanical objects be sheathed in smooth metal casings and pods, and was all about creating a frictionless society. You could see it mirrored everywhere at the time – in the music of Benny Goodman, for instance, and in the swank settings of Fred Astaire movies, in the ocean liners, nightclubs and penthouse suites where he and Ginger Rogers moved so gracefully through space …
I paused for a moment and glanced around the apartment, and over at the window. It was dark and quiet now, or at least as dark
and quiet as it can get in a city, and I realized in that instant that I was utterly, unreservedly
happy
. I held on to the feeling for as long as possible – until I became aware of my own heartbeat, until I could hear it counting out the seconds …
Then I looked back at the book, tapped my fingers on the desk, and resumed.
OK … the shapes and curves of streamlining created the
illusion
of perpetual motion. They were a radical new departure. They affected our desires and influenced what we expected from our surroundings – from trains and automobiles and buildings, even from refrigerators and vacuum cleaners, not to mention dozens of other everyday objects. But out of this an important question arose – which came first, the illusion or the desire?
And that was it, of course. I saw it in a flash. That was the first point I would have to make in my introduction. Because something similar – with more or less the same dynamic at work – was to happen later on.
I stood up, walked over to the window and thought about it for a few moments. Then I took a deep breath, because I wanted to get this right.
OK.
The influence …
The influence on design later in the century of sub-atomic
structures
and microcircuitry, together with the quintessential Sixties notion of the interconnectedness of everything was clearly paralleled here in the design marriage of the Machine Age to the growing
prewar
sense that personal freedom could only be achieved through increased efficiency, mobility and velocity.
Yes
.
I went back over to the desk and keyed in some notes on the computer, about ten pages of them, and all from memory. There was a clarity to my thought processes right now that I found
exhilarating
, and even though all of this was alien to me, at the time it didn’t feel in the least bit odd or strange, and in any case I simply couldn’t stop – but then I didn’t
want
to stop, because during this last hour or so I had actually done more solid work on
my book than I had in the entire previous three months.
So, without pausing for breath, I reached over and took another book down from the shelf, a study of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. I skimmed through it in about forty-five minutes, taking notes as I went along. I also read two other books, one about the influence of Art Nouveau on 1960s design and one about the early days of the Grateful Dead in San Francisco.
Altogether, I took about thirty-five pages of notes. In addition, I did a rough draft of the first section of the introduction and worked out a detailed plan for the rest of the book. I did about three
thousand
words, which I then reread a couple of times and corrected.
*
I started to slow down at around 6 a.m., still not having smoked a cigarette, eaten anything or gone to the bathroom. I felt quite tired, a little headachy perhaps, but that was all, and compared to other times I’d found myself awake at six o’clock in the morning – grinding my teeth, unable to sleep, unable to
shut up
– believe me, feeling tired and having a mild headache was nothing.
I lay down on the couch again and stretched out. I gazed over at the window and could see the roof of the building opposite, as well as a section of sky that had a tinge of early morning light slowly filtering through it. I listened for sounds, too – the lurching dementia of passing garbage trucks, the occasional police-car siren, the low, sporadic hum of traffic from the avenues. I turned my head in against the cushion and eventually began to relax.
This time there was no unpleasant prickly sensation, and I remained on the couch – though after a while I realized that
something
was
still bothering me.
There was a certain untidiness about crashing out on the couch – it blurred the dividing lines between one day and the next, and lacked a sense of closure … or at least that was my line of reasoning at the time. There was also, I was pretty sure, a lot of actual
untidiness
lurking behind my bedroom door. I hadn’t been in there yet, having somehow managed to avoid it during the frantic
compartmentalizing
of the previous twelve hours. So I got up off the couch, went over to the bedroom door and opened it. I’d been right – my
bedroom was a sty. But I needed to sleep, and I needed to sleep in my bed, so I set about getting the place into some kind of order. It felt more like work than before, more of a chore than when I’d done the kitchen and the living-room, but there were definitely still traces of the drug in my system and that kept me going. When I’d finished, I had a long, hot shower, after which I took two Extra-Strength Excedrin tablets to stave off my headache. Then I put on a clean
T-shirt
and boxer-shorts, climbed under the covers and fell asleep within, I’d say, about thirty seconds of my head hitting the pillow.
H
ERE IN THE
N
ORTHVIEW
M
OTOR
L
ODGE
everything is drab and dull. I glance around my room, and despite the bizarre patterns and colour schemes there’s nothing that really catches the eye – except of course the TV set, which is still busily flickering away in the corner. Some bearded, bespectacled guy in a tweed suit is being interviewed, and immediately – because of the central casting touches – I assume he is a historian, and not a politician or a national security spokesman or even a journalist. I am confirmed in my suspicion when they cut to a still photograph of bandit-revolutionary Pancho Villa, and then to some very shaky old black-and-white footage from, I’d guess, about 1916. I’m not going to turn the sound up to find out, but I’m pretty sure that the spectral figures on horseback riding jerkily towards the camera from the middle of what seems like a swirling cloud of dust (but is more probably the peripheral deterioration of the actual film stock itself) are incursionary forces all riled up and hot on Pancho Villa’s tail.
And that
was
1916, wasn’t it?
I seem to remember knowing about that once.
I stare at the flickering images, mesmerized. I’ve always been something of a footage junky, it never failing to strike me as
astonishing
that what is depicted on the screen –
that
day,
those
very moments – actually happened, and that the people in them, the extras, the folks who passed fleetingly before a camera and were captured on film, subsequently went on about their daily lives, walked inside buildings, ate food, had sex, whatever, blissfully unaware that their jerky movements, as they crossed over some city street, for
instance, or got off a tram, were to be preserved for decades, and then aired, exposed and re-exposed, in what would effectively be a different world.
How can I care about this any more? How can I even be thinking about it?
I shouldn’t let myself get so distracted.
Reaching down for the bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the floor here beside my wicker chair, it occurs to me that drinking whiskey at this time is probably not such a good idea. I lift the bottle up anyway and take a long hit from it. Then I stand up and walk around the room for a while. But the dreadful hush, underscored by the humming of the ice machine outside and the violent colours now swirling all around me, have a distinctly disorienting effect and I judge it best to sit down again and get on with the task in hand.
I must keep busy, I tell myself, and not get distracted.
OK – so, I fell asleep fairly quickly. But I didn’t sleep very well. I tossed and turned a lot, and had weird, disjointed dreams.
It was after eleven-thirty when I woke up – which was only about what, four hours? So I was still very tired when I got out of bed, and although I suppose I could have held on for another while longer, trying to get back to sleep, I knew I would have just lain there, wide awake, replaying the previous night over and over in my mind, and of course putting off the inevitable, which was to go into the
living-room
, switch on the computer and find out whether or not I had imagined the whole thing.
Looking around the room, though, I suspected that I hadn’t. Clothes were folded neatly on a chair at the foot of the bed and shoes were lined up in perfect formation along the floor beneath the window. I quickly got out of bed and went into the bathroom to take a leak. After that I threw cold water on my face, and plenty of it.
When I felt sufficiently awake, I stared at myself in the mirror for a while. It wasn’t the usual bathroom mugshot. I wasn’t
bleary-eyed
or puffy, or dangerous-looking, I was just tired – as well as all the other things that hadn’t changed since the day before, the fact
that I was overweight, and jowly, and badly in need of a hair-cut. There was another thing I needed, too, but you couldn’t tell it from looking at me in the mirror – I needed a cigarette.
I tramped into the living-room and got my jacket from the back of the chair. I took the pack of Camels out of the side pocket, lit one up and filled my lungs with rich, fragrant smoke. As I was exhaling, I surveyed the room and reflected that being untidy was less a lifestyle choice of mine than a character defect, so I wasn’t about to argue with
this
– but I also felt quite strongly that
this
wasn’t what counted, because if I wanted tidy, I could pay for tidy. What I’d keyed into the computer, on the other hand – at least what I remembered keying in, and hoped now I was remembering
accurately
– was definitely something you couldn’t pay for.
I went over to it and flicked on the switch at the back. As it booted up and hummed into life, I looked at the neat pile of books I had left on the desk beside the keyboard. I picked up
Raymond Loewy: A Life
and wondered how much of it I would actually be able to recall if I were put on the spot. I tried for a moment to conjure something up from memory, a couple of facts or dates, an anecdote maybe, an amusing piece of designer lore, but I couldn’t think straight, couldn’t think of anything.
OK, but what did I expect? I was tired. It was as if I’d gone to bed at midnight, and now I was up at three in the morning trying to do the
Harper’s
Double Acrostic. What I needed here was coffee – two or three cups of java to reboot my brain – and then I’d be fine again.
I opened the file labelled ‘Intro’. It was the rough draft I’d done for part of the introduction to
Turning On
, and I stood there in front of the computer, scrolling down through it. I remembered each
paragraph
as I read it, but couldn’t have anticipated, at any point, what was going to come next. I had written this, but it didn’t feel like I had written it.
Having said that, however – and it would be disingenuous of me not to admit it – what I was reading was clearly superior to anything I might have written under normal circumstances. Nor, in fact, was it a rough draft, because as far as I could see, this thing had all
the virtues of a good, polished piece of prose. It was cogent,
measured
, and well thought out – precisely that part of the process that I usually found difficult, even sometimes downright impossible. Whenever I spent time trying to devise a structure for
Turning On
, ideas would flit around freely inside my brain, OK, but if I ever tried to box any of them in, or hold them to account, they’d lose focus and break up and I’d be left with nothing except a
frustrated
feeling of knowing each time that I was going to have to start all over again.
Last night, on the other hand – apparently – I had nailed the whole goddamned thing in one go.
I stubbed out my cigarette and stared in wonder at the screen for a moment.
Then I turned and went into the kitchen to put on some coffee.
*
As I was filling the percolator and preparing the filter, and then peeling an orange, it struck me that I felt like a different person. I was self-conscious about every movement I made, as if I were a bad actor doing a scene in a stage drama, a scene set in a kitchen that was improbably tidy and where I had to make coffee and peel an orange.
This didn’t last for very long, though, because there was an
incipient
old-style mess in the trail of breakfast spoor I left behind me across the work-top spaces. Ten minutes saw the appearance of a milk carton, an unfinished bowl of soggy Corn Flakes, a couple of spoons, an empty cup, various stains, a used coffee filter, bits of orange peel and an ashtray containing the ash and butt-ends of two cigarettes.
I was back.
Concern about the state of the kitchen, however, was merely a ploy. What I didn’t want to think about was being back in front of the computer. Because I knew exactly what would happen once I was. I would attempt to move on to the rest of the introduction – as though this were the most natural thing in the world – and of course I’d freeze up. I wouldn’t be able to do anything. Then in desperation I’d go back to the stuff I’d done last night and start
picking at it –
pecking
at it, like a vulture – and sooner or later that, too, would all come apart.
I sighed in frustration and lit up another cigarette.
I looked around the kitchen and considered tidying it again, returning it to its pristine state, but the idea stumbled at the first post – the soggy bowl of cereal – and I dismissed it as forced and unspontaneous. I didn’t care about the kitchen anyway, or the arrangement of the furniture, or the alphabetized CDs – all of that was sideshow stuff, collateral damage if you like. The real target, and where the hit had landed, was inside there in the living-room, right in the middle of my desk.
*
I extinguished the cigarette I’d lit only moments earlier – my fourth of the morning – and walked out of the kitchen. Without looking over at the computer, I crossed the living-room and went into the bedroom to get dressed. Then I went into the bathroom and brushed my teeth. I came back into the living-room, took the jacket I’d left draped on a chair and searched through the pockets. I eventually found what I was looking for: Vernon’s card.
Vernon Gant – it said – consultant. It had his home and cellphone numbers on it, as well as his address – he lived on the Upper East Side now, go figure. It also had a tacky little logo in the top right corner. For a moment I considered phoning him, but I didn’t want to be fobbed off with excuses. I didn’t want to take the risk of being told he was busy or that I couldn’t meet him until the middle of next week – because what I wanted was to see him immediately, and face to face, so I could find out all there was to know about this, I suppose, smart drug of his. I wanted to find out where it came from, what was in it, and – most important of all – how I could get some more.