Year: 2004

When visiting sculptor Joe Anton’s split-level rambler in Brooklyn Park, it might take a while for the subject to come around to art. Horsepower TV might be on, demonstrating the latest muscle-car trick modifications. You might need to help unload an awning from the bed of his Ranchero. Plaques in the rec room display his name on General Mills patents, the most recent for a machine that marks extruded cookie dough to show exactly where to slice it. You may unexpectedly receive a humongous bag of dehydrated strawberries or Green Giant asparagus spears.

The stainless steel sculptures, large and small, are everywhere in the Anton home. Mostly they show whimsical animals and humans—somewhat akin to Alexander Calder’s early wire sculptures, but constructed from a boggling array of household items. In Anton’s hands, common objects achieve a sort of visual onomatopoeia: forks become feet, spatulas fold into wings, spoons overlap to form reptilian scales, a caulking gun handle forms the beak of a penguin, spark plugs suddenly look strangely facial and snoutlike. Already loaded with gifts of food, I tried once to decline the offer of a sculpture, a frog made from forks, spoons and nuts. “Be a cheerful receiver,” scolded Anton.

The living room contains a steel mesh chair and a galvanized end-table made from scrap for which Anton dumpster-dives (an activity he refers to as “the fine art”). He takes the outsider artist’s benevolent view of utility: art doesn’t have to be useless. The chair is comfortable, the table functional. He once welded a figure of a firefighter onto a hot-dog skewer, the skewer anatomically located (if not accurate). It, too, bears evidence of regular use.

Anton’s gift for perceiving organic forms in almost any hunk of metal may derive from being “a machinist from birth.” But it also grows out of the way he lives, including his Tao-like version of Christian faith, the central doctrine of which is adaptability.

“A chameleon who can’t change colors is a dead chameleon,” he quipped. “You have to make yourself ready for a window to open, for an opportunity. God doesn’t test you. He gives you chances.”

Putting this faith at the center of their lives, Anton and his wife, Sue, are always seeking to know how their actions “reflect the mind of Christ,” as Sue puts it. Practically speaking, this means that if God provides you with chances for good fortune, you must also be alert for opportunities to do good. “We tithe. We go beyond tithing,” said Anton, without a trace of evangelical mania. “Does that make you a Christian artist?” I wondered. “And is this Christian art?” “That’s like saying if you’re a Christian farmer, you can only grow Christian vegetables,” replied Anton, clearly amused by the thought.

Windows of opportunity have indeed opened for Anton recently. While his work has sold mostly in the gift market, in February 2002 General Mills installed his first large commission, a four-by-eight foot stainless-steel abstract piece titled “Genesis.” This came to pass, he explained, when he called attention to an irritatingly blank wall near the human resources offices. Then a public-relations manager noticed that a flower he made from spoons resembled the Yoplait division’s trademark daisy. Rather than litigate for copyright infringement, she ordered 150 copies.

He still works as a machinist, but Anton has also become General Mills’ house sculptor of sorts, turning out extra daisies on demand and welding whimsical award plaques. At the moment, he’s working on a modular piece for 8th Continent, the soy milk division. This good fortune, however, has taken some serendipity out of his work. He orders spoons wholesale, in lots of four hundred. “You can only hit your kitchen drawer so many times,” he lamented.
—Joe Pastoor

Sleeping birds are vulnerable. This is why the lucky ones flock by the tens of thousands to roost for the night on the low, gnarled branches of the mangrove trees that flourish in the back bay waters of Estero Island, Florida, where I just spent a week with Jon and our kids.

In these quiet, tidal waters, masses of entangled leaves, boughs, and trunks spring out of the sea itself—there’s no ground at all above water. On the landless Bird Island, some fifteen thousand birds gather at dusk to nod off in peace. No ground, no predators. These birds are fearless for the night. How I envy those birds on Bird Island. The romance of it makes me shudder: What would my life look like if I erased all predators?

Oh Lord, I’d have my work cut out for me. Obviously, at this very moment, I’d eradicate my proclivity to sun rash (an unfortunate ailment I’ve passed along, much to her horror, to my elder daughter). Without sun rash, I could enjoy a week at the beach without red blisters, ice soaks, antihistamines, cortisone, calamine, and Desitin ointment.

What is sun rash, anyway, my daughter wants to know as her hands and feet swell and itch painfully with small blisters and under-the-skin bleeding. Is it some sort of allergy? Indeed, it is, known medically as the exotic-sounding “polymorphous light eruption.” When I was little, my mom used to call it “heat rash,” a term decidedly less flattering than either sun rash or polymorphous light eruption. Heat rash sounds oddly private, and vaguely unclean. We girls will take our sun rash, no matter how gruesome, to any form of “heat rash,” thank you. But if we had the chance to be as free of menaces as the birds on Bird Island, then we’d banish sun rash, and all other rashes for that matter.

There are other things I’d ditch faster, though, come to think of it. Based on today’s mail offerings, I’d erase the mean people from the law firm that handled my divorce almost four years ago—the ones who now send unpleasant letters regarding the obscene amount of money I still owe them and the inadequacy of my regular monthly payments. Maybe all bills could be eliminated.

But first I would erase my son’s melancholy for all things dead and gone: his first house, friends who’ve moved away, his homemade cardboard mailbox that I threw to the floor and broke (it still hurts to recall the snapping sound) in a sleep-deprived fit of frustration when he was three years old, and his several deceased pets, including Popsicle the parakeet who dropped dead while my son was traveling, adding shock and guilt to his inevitable heartbreak. I would get rid of it all, and more, until he was a free eleven-year-old boy, alight on a mangrove branch with his blond head tucked under a sturdy wing.

Though I imagine the melancholy could wait until I’d done away with assaults. The boys who jumped out at my friend and me in a haunted house twenty summers ago, grabbing us and tearing the buttons from our shirts, bruising our wrists, scaring us senseless before the next person who’d bought a ticket for fear stumbled down the darkened hallway. The crazed men who’ve assaulted so many women I know. The stepfather nicknamed Mafia by his friends, not enemies, who picked up my sister by her long straight hair. All assaults would be erased on my Bird Island.

And how about psychic assaults, those haunting bad memories and humiliations? I’d can them. The time my friend and writing colleague called from Knoxville to say our editor at Simon and Schuster had received our manuscript and was demanding a total rewrite. “She hated it,” drawled my friend. “Just hated it.”

It’s exhausting, this process of elimination. It’s not the same as feeling somewhere in your ancient psyche that the light is waning, and taking wing to a certain spot far out in the water where you know you will rest easy for the night, safe, fearless.

So I throw the mail in the mail basket and carry my daughter’s blanket up to her lofted bed. I tuck it in around the edges, smooth it out. I lie down with her while she reads Caps for Sale. A spray of freckles has emerged on the tan skin across the bridge of her nose (unlike her sister, she does not get sun rash). I run through all of the kids in my mind, their faces, their quirks. Who needs what, who’s doing okay, who’s struggling. Eventually, they all sleep.

Sleeping children are vulnerable. There is no Bird Island in sight, and only flawed parents to keep them safe. Let us rise to it, even if barely. That’s ultimately all I ask. That’s my real Bird Island.

With dark hair and a slightly rumpled appearance, Bob Daily has the low-key delivery you’d expect from a man whose job is not to seem overly amused by the jokes he writes for a living. Daily is a 1982 graduate of Carleton College, and a writer (and current co-executive producer) for Frasier. One day in late January, he left the balmy climes of Hollywood for an auditorium in Northfield, where he gave a talk called “Writing and Producing the Television Situation Comedy.” The live studio audience, as it were, was a capacity crowd of students. They asked the tough questions: How does one break into Hollywood? What is David Hyde Pierce really like?

Being a network sitcom writer is not easy these days. Reality shows are hogging prime-time real estate, while cable TV is snagging high-profile awards and thumbing its nose at the banality of network shows whose characters can’t swear or discuss their sexual exploits.

What’s a network comedy writer to do? For Daily, the situation isn’t as dire as it first appears. Good comedy, he notes, relies on more than shock value. One of the things common to most long-running comedies is writing that appeals to both the head and the heart, with jokes that work on more than one level. In other words, you can write a dumb joke about a smart subject, or vice versa, thereby appealing to both sensibilities. As an example, Daily offered what he thinks of as the perfect joke about highbrow post-modern composer Philip Glass.

In the scene, Frasier, Roz, and scriptwriters B.K. and Ed are working on a documentary about space travel. As they discuss the possibilities for the show’s accompanying music, B.K. suggests the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The recommendation is vetoed by Frasier, who finds it trite., B.K. tries again. “What about Philip Glass? You know, go completely minimalist,” he says. “It’s like space,” Frasier chimes in eagerly. “Now we’re cooking!” The scene continues with the characters ticking off obscure composers while Roz grows increasingly agitated.

“If we do a reference like that, we write it in such a way that even if people don’t know who Philip Glass is, they get it in the context and the attitude of the actor,” Daily said. “We don’t try to be snobbish, but if it’s constructed in the right way, you can do a smart joke without alienating your audience.”

However smart, can comedy really compete against, say, a bikini’d babe eating live minnows? Well, sure. Daily regards intelligent humor as both the past and the future of the network sitcom. Television executives habitually underestimate their viewers. The longevity of the witty, classy Frasier has proven that a show need not pander to achieve mainstream success. Classic sitcom formulas can spell success, as long as the writing sparkles and the acting is superb—take Everybody Loves Raymond and Friends as two beloved examples.

Despite their current dominance, reality shows probably won’t stay hot forever, Daily said. He cited a truism he learned from a friend: “Hollywood is a place where people run to wherever lightning has recently struck. As soon as people heard about reality shows, everyone ran to that spot, but I think most will disappear eventually.” Then, too, clever writers may begin to crib from reality TV’s playbook. Daily said he knows of at least two pilots being created presently that are ripping off Survivor—shows set on a desert island.

Daily will put his theories to the test this May, when Frasier takes its final bow. He recently inked a deal with Paramount that gives him two years to formulate ideas for series and pitching them to networks, in hopes that one will make it on air. “The odds are always against you in something like that. But there’s a great tradition of comedy at Paramount—Taxi, then Cheers, then Frasier,” he said. “I want to keep that going if I can.” He hesitated. “Got any ideas?”—Erin Peterson

I had a ticket. I had a ticket, and a pseudonym. At this and all other New York City fashion week events, I was G— T—, a high-ranking executive at a nice Midwestern cosmetics firm for which I do some grunt work. I’m not sure what she does there, but she—meaning I—sure raked in the invitations. I’d even RSVPed, and now if I could just get up to the table of perfectly manicured hostesses checking people in for the Rosa Cha show, I felt certain they’d upgrade me from standing room to a seat along the runway.

Really, they could have crammed a lot more people in if this were Glamorama and not the Bryant Park tents. In New York, if you don’t rate front row seats in clear view of the press, you don’t rate at all.

I’d managed some pretty decent seats in earlier shows; at the Lloyd Klein show, I was briefly wedged behind super-socialite Jocelyne Wildenstein, the walking plastic-surgery cautionary tale who is openly referred to as “the cat woman.” I also had my nose in the hair of a lanky brunette who may or may not have had a bit part in Monster’s Ball.

“It’s ahwlreddy 9:20 and the schedule says nine,” a Brooklyn-bred newbie next to me whined to her boyfriend. I gave her a withering look. “These things never start less than a half-hour late,” I said, not exactly trying to be helpful. A huddle of art students spoke in luscious Brazilian Portuguese on the other side of me.

Rosa Cha swimwear does not quite cover the most beautiful butts in Rio, and was drawing a big crowd—whoops, there’s Ivana. Hold the phone, it’s Cuba Gooding. Hello, Beyoncé. Pick your seats, Toni Braxton and Venus Williams—but once the celebrities were all in, they were sure to usher in the designer’s countrymen, and me, of course.

Except moments later, clueless Brooklyn and her date inexplicably appeared on the other side of the ropes, gliding into the darkened entryway. I saw strobe lights. I heard the jungle beat. I’d been shut out of Rosa Cha.

I was supposed to be scoping out bathing suits for our campaign’s upcoming shoot in Miami, not craning to see past the two techies apparently tapping a direct stream on the lobby monitor. “Dude, did you see who’s in the front row? Pharrell Williams,” said one. “What show is this anyway?” Nerds. “Rosa Cha,” I replied, a little snottily. I wondered if that was rain I was hearing and if I shouldn’t just call it a night. The color on the screen was whacked and you’d need to wear three of those suits back at Lake Calhoun anyway.

But it was raining, and raining hard, and we were all stuck there under the vestibule until it eased up, even the A-listers when they came samba-ing back from carnival. I talked to a young woman whose boot-cut Miss Sixty jeans, peasant smock, and Ducati head wrap struck the perfect balance between somebody and anybody, who told me that her Yorkie, Nikky, had watched three shows from the comfort of her bowling-bag carrier. “So how does she like this scene?” I asked. An amputee stumped incongruently by.

Miss Sixty began to gush, then caught herself. “Oh, she loooves fashion… except for the noise, of course, and all these people, and…” she sniffed. She had a gold sand dollar around her neck, and dangly oversized monogram earrings.

I did not ask what the P was for, nor the V. I did not ask who Pharrell Williams was, though his posse was blocking the door. Rain or no rain, I had not gotten into Rosa Cha, and I was out of there. “Excuse me,” I said, trying vainly to nudge past a hip-hopper with a snake tattooed on his neck.

“Psst. That’s Pharrell Williams,” said someone at my elbow. I looked at him blankly. Outside on the steps, a herd of teen-aged boys with cameras jostled. “Pharrell, Pharrell!”

“He’s my cousin,” one of them said, and looked at me hard, to see how gullible I was, and how starstruck.

“Sure,” I shrugged, a Minnesota girl in the Big City. “Just folks.” And I crumpled up G— T—’s invitation and made a dash for the train. —Jennifer Gage

Say what you will about David Denby, at least he doesn’t pick his nose and eat it. We can make this postulation with a fair degree of confidence for the simple fact that, were he to engage in such behavior, he would almost certainly write about it. Denby is the sort of memoirist who believes that every personal action must be revealed and examined, no matter how repellent (or mundane).

Thus, fourteen pages into American Sucker (Denby’s second memoir; his first, Great Books, chronicled his return to Columbia University at the age of 46 to reexamine the works of Western Civilization) we are treated to Denby’s brief-but-harrowing addiction to Internet pornography. Denby being Denby, this revelation is naturally accompanied by a disquisition on how Plato, Hegel, and Nietzsche might judge these activities, which is either comically self-important or one of the most ingenious meta-commentaries on masturbation we’ve come across in some time. Then, on page 53, Denby informs us of his inability to fall asleep without a cocktail of Xanax and NyQuil, the latter described as a “slimy, licorice-tasting liquid that provided an instant of nausea” (hey, Dave, they also make it in cherry, which goes down much easier). Incidents of impotence, acts of adultery, and even an extensive paragraph on his upset stomach and the successful treatment thereof (Tums and a bowel movement, if you’re scoring at home) follow on with depressing regularity. It gets so predictable that when Denby writes “I climbed into a king-sized bed, but I was unable to sleep,” the reader speculates on which of two possible remedies will be employed to meet the challenge: self-love or over-the-counter cold medication?

Ostensibly an account of its author’s debacle on the rocky shoals of the New Economy, American Sucker seeks to place Denby in the role of the crash’s Everyman, in which he is swept up in the mass delusion of a never-ending expansion, then treated badly by the manipulative hedge-fund managers and stock analysts who withheld vital information or flat-out lied to the stock-buying public in a desperate attempt to keep the money flowing. Never mind that the average investor lacked both Denby’s loss-padding book deal and his personal access to the era’s key financial gurus (he lunches with Merrill Lynch stock evaluator Henry Blodget, dines with ImClone CEO Sam Waskal, and even scores a meeting with SEC Chair Arthur Levitt, Jr.). While briefly acknowledging the advantages he holds over his fellow losers, Denby still offers the grandly condescending hope that “some aspects of my behavior will inspire self- recognition…” Well, okay, maybe masturbating to the Internet rings a bell.

American Sucker is a book that inspires sorrow, pity, and ultimately anger, but mostly for the reader who has to endure it. Dilatory, repetitive, and endlessly self-reflective (Denby cannot pass a street corner in New York without recalling how, six months earlier, he was on the same street corner, no doubt remembering an even earlier visitation at that identical location), the memoir meanders through the author’s divorce and what could charitably be called a midlife crisis. Denby wanders from tech conference to tech conference, willfully blinding himself to the glaring signs of impending market doom, and while he certainly wasn’t alone in this regard, it doesn’t speak well for Columbia University that an individual who passed through its marble halls twice could be so infuriatingly stupid. He searches for philosophical certainty and understanding, but ends up offering bootless profundities that are hard enough to read, let alone understand. (“Time, properly speaking, has no volume, no body; it has no speed.”) Inspired by the long-dreaded loss of his home—tragically, he was forced to move from a large Upper West Side apartment to a somewhat smaller one a few blocks away—Denby ventures into a bizarre extended metaphor concerning casual china (“When a teacup cracks, one thinks of death”), at which point the reader wishes this guy would just buy a red sports car and get over it already. (He does, in fact, spend several pages mooning over the Audi A6—whether this is simple automotive lust or a desire to demonstrate his understanding of Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class is an open question.)

The low point—and in a book that shamelessly posits the “practical limit on greed” to be two homes and $5 million in liquid assets, that’s saying something—comes in a chapter titled, simply, “September 11, 2001.” The attentive reader, having felt rising dread as the chronology moves ever closer to that date, is compelled to read on, if only to see how Denby can take the nation’s darkest day and yoke it to his favorite subject (Denby). True to form, Denby suggests that one of the ways to combat Islamic fundamentalism would be to, well, send Denby overseas to “make the case for secularism, for free speech, for transparency… Who better than me?” Who indeed? Sadly, after deciding that such an endeavor is not to be, Denby at least vows that he will no longer “be quite as passive as I was before September 11.” Thus is born another knowledgeable investor.

Denby is not a terrible writer; he’s not even a terrible thinker. There are flashes of insight here, but they’re so few and far between as to make the reader crave the next nauseous self-revelation, or something meretricious to add the vital spark to an otherwise sluggish flow of detail. (A chapter devoted to the physical workings of fiber-optic cable is sure to try the patience of even the most determined reader.) At one point, venting his anger at the corporate malfeasors whose actions directly affected his portfolio, Denby rails, “Some of the insiders stole from us—from ordinary shareholders, and in some cases from employees, too. They stole from me.” The reader, having lost countless hours to the writer’s ceaseless examination of the writer’s navel, can finally feel some empathy. After all, we’re victims too.