VIEW ALL 200MOTELS' BLOG ENTRIES
I once had a fantastic career as an accessory designer. I learned to do styling working for the French and Germans trained me in industrial production techniques, where you have to be precise down to the millimeter. When I came to New York in the 1980’s, I immediately began working for the top Fifth Avenue fashion houses.
I had the eye and I had the hands. Unlike most designers, who are only trained to sketch, I could deliver a finished prototype made by my own hands. In addition, I could set up major production runs of hundreds of thousands or millions of pieces.
I was two expensive men wrapped into one efficient package. This earned me a lovely apartment on a tree-lined street on the Upper East Side, French and Italian suits, weekends in Paris and Miami, Mexican vacations and an exclusive gym membership.
My styling put millions of dollars in my boss’ pocket, and he certainly thought the world of me! “You have a job here until you retire,” he repeatedly told me. With that reassurance, I spent money like an Albanian drug baron, treating daffy, neurotic women to expensive dinners, nightclubbing, vacations, you name it…
Economic recessions were for idiot office clerks to worry about. I was a lynchpin of the industrial economy. I was flashing long green and I had gold credit cards up my butt when accountants and stockbrokers were homeless and sleeping on their friends’ sofas.
And I had an arrogant attitude to match. This is New York, after all, where you don’t worry about the next person. “Things are bad all over,” people would tell me, to which I responded, “I’m all right, Jack!”
The warning signs were gradual, imperceptible. First came the fax machines. I could take a piece of hardware that I needed, and instead of sending it UPS to a supplier, just make a photocopy and then fax it all over town. That was wonderful! Then, instead of just working with suppliers across town or in Rhode Island, I could get a much better price in Taiwan or Korea.
Then, instead of just getting components from Asia and doing the production here in New York, we would fax them a picture of the item and they would send back a complete sample with a cheap price the next day by Federal Express, as though they were right in the next building. Finally the whole production came in air freight from Taiwan or Buenos Aires, and wall we had to do was put store tickets on the merchandise, repackage it and ship it to the distribution center in Bentonville, AR or St. Louis.
What did I care if our once bustling factory was now an empty shell of a place, armies of production workers now replaced by a skeleton staff of packers? I was still getting my big check.
Then guess what happened. First the trend went from flamboyant original looks to basic, corporate looks that hardly changed from season to season. And second, the big chains that previously depended on us found that they could cut out the middleman, us, and do business directly with the orient.
I had not looked for a job for a dozen years, and when my company folded I was shocked to find that the once-thriving New York accessory market had shrunk to nothing.
I was forced to go back to school and get a paralegal certificate, and now I am one of the army of redundant bozos that I used to find so amusing. My great hands that used to draw sketches, make patterns, cut and sew? I use them now to type on a computer keyboard.
Nevertheless, I still have my looks and I have hope. I have got a comedy act going, and I have the inspiration to write, which is more than most people can say. I figure that when things shake out, I will claw my way to the top like I did once before, and this time bigger and better. Contrary to what F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, there can be second acts in American life if you’re determined enough.
What happened to the fashion sector is now hitting the media sector. Because of the blogs and the internet, a lot of people who thought that their careers were engraved in stone are now finding that the stone is just sand, and that the sand is being eroded by a sea of bloggers and internet performers.
There is a lot of talent out there in cyberspace that never before had a chance to emerge because it was too far from the center of power, or because the talent never took the trouble to claw itself up the corporate ladder.
It takes a different type of talent than just being a good performer or writer to emerge in the publishing or entertainment industry, in fact most people on TV or in publishing media are the exact opposite of artistic talent. They are corporate bureaucrats who are losing their stranglehold on media diffusion, and they are starting to stink from the stench of fear that they are emitting.
In his weekly column for The New York Post, syndicated columnist George Will, a useless appendage if ever one existed, inveighs bitterly against internet bloggers as essentially being non-authoritative and polluting people’s mind with worthless chaff that will render readers incapable of discerning commentary of real value, presumably his.
George Will has been around for a long time, making a good living writing pointless, unintelligible swill. The man might be authoritative (if he says so), but nothing he has ever written has ever made an impact on me, even if I could understand it. George Will is the perfect example of corporatist rubble just waiting to be swept into the dustbin of contemporary culture. Right along with him are the whole Op-ed page of The New York Times, which is itself an endangered species; Christopher Hitchens, who freely admits that he has never had a job in his entire life since he graduated from college except for posing as an authoritative expert – at what, I’d like to know! Tina Brown, that so-called brilliant media expert, is putting the finishing touches on just what the world needs least – another book about Princess Di, who was already stale copy when she was still alive. Talk about beating a dead horse!
The whole literary world as it is presently configured is eminently ready for a Big Bang of cataclysmic magnitude (cataclysmic for the jokers who are working there now), and as the Bible predicts, the first shall be last and the last shall be first, the walls will come tumbling down and the freaks shall inherit the earth.
As the old saying goes, How you going to keep the boy down on the farm after he’s seen Paree? No way are people going to sit still for business as usual after being exposed to a steady diet of lunacy on the internet. It’s going to take a whole new skill set to ride this baby!
Tags:
None
© All rights reserved.
Posted on 12/25/2006
(
Permanent Link
)
Read
422 Times
Send to Friend
