A stretch of river L: Navel-lint-gazing. On a brick and a TV show

Richard Estes, Telephone Booths, 1967. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. Click to enlarge. Image found here.

I greatly admire photo-realist paintings on an intellectual level: though not a painter myself, I deeply respect the technique and attention to detail--indeed, to the act of seeing--that such paintings require of their makers. But in the end, for me there is something a bit emotionally-chilly about them. They are, by their very nature, dispassionate, closely-, even clinically-observed moments put down on canvas that, in their attention to the scene's surface empiricism, tend to crowd out my attempts to feel an emotional connection to the scene depicted. I don't feel a human face in these paintings--or if one is present, it's turned away from me like those of the callers in Estes' painting. For me, these paintings ultimately are about themselves, their renderings of surface, their getting the plays of light and shadow just so, so it'll look just like a busy row of phone booths somewhere in a Western nation in 1967. While that's fine, when I look into these depictions of halls of mirrors that so many photo-realist paintings are in their essence, I don't see myself in any of those reflecting surfaces, no matter how hard they work to create the illusion that I should be able to.

On the floor by my desk, there's a brick that I occasionally stub my bare toes on. This is not metaphor or allegory: it is there. If I were a touch-typist, I'd be able to look at it as I write these words. (Yeah, yeah: You'll have to trust me on this.) It has made me feel everything from anger at myself for not remembering (again) to move it out of the way to curiosity about its past. For now, I'll put aside considerations of my shortcomings as a housekeeper and concentrate on the latter.

It is one of the thousands of bricks that, along with other fill and debris, was used to build levees and build up low spots along the shoreline of the Little Arkansas over 100 years ago when people began to build residences in this area. One morning this spring, I brought it home with me as Scruffy and I returned home from our walk. My intent was to see if I couldn't find out something, anything, about the brickyard that produced it and see if I couldn't prattle on here about what I found out.

Several toe-stubbings later and with it being almost August, this morning I finally got around to doing a bit of Googling around for an area brickyard, extant or not, with the name Mesch in it. No luck. I have my suspicions that it was used as a paver--it's very heavy for a brick its size (paving bricks are made to be much more dense than bricks used for buildings); one side is smooth and mortarless, and on the other, the name and two raised ridges bracketing the name on either side, along with some traces of mortar (a standard procedure for laying street bricks is/was to set them in mortar)--but beyond that, I cannot make it yield any more information. It is a messenger from the past that, in and of itself, bears no message from that past other than its materiality, its weight and mass, and the place where I found and from which I removed it--which itself is a sort of message (the brick's original intended use, I think it's pretty safe to say, was not levee-building).

None of that is invention. It is attention to these matters, in conjunction and combination with other matters from the past, that are at the essence of what we call History or, as Paul Ricoeur briefly defines it, "reconstructions of the past. . . . [Historians] owe a debt to the past, a debt of recognition to the dead, that makes them insolvent debtors" (Time and Narrative, 3.142-143). This one brick, if I just knew a bit more about it--its maker, the street (or building, as it may be) where it was originally laid, the circumstances that rendered it useless in its original purpose but useful in another--that knowledge would go far in aiding me, an occasional (very) casual historian, in reconstructing the history of my little section of the city of Wichita (once known, I just learned today, as the Peerless Princess of the Plains). This brick, in its small way and many, many degrees of separation later, in part helped make it possible for people to build a building on this site hard by the river from which I can write stuff about this same paving brick's having eroded out of a levee and--oh, the presumption!--presume that you still reading this have decided that that brick might be worthy of a bit of your attention as well (what Ricoeur calls the trace as "sign-effect" (3.120)--the trace in this case being the brick).

So: I look at this brick, grow curious about it, try to find out some things about it, make some reasonable guesses about it, and along with all that drag in a little Ricoeur. Navel-gazing on my part, sure, but I'm also hoping (again, if you've read this far) that some of this might resonate with you as well at some level.

All this brings me to the TV show: Mad Men

It may doubly disqualify me from commenting on this series that I've never seen an episode of it and have no real interest in seeing one. I hasten to add, though, that that's not a judgment as to its quality. But in my meanderings about the blogosphere I keep bumping into commentary on it; and I'm struck by how the topic of discussion in these pieces is, in so many words, "Aside from its fastidious attention to the material and socio-cultural details of the early '60s what does this have to do with me?"

Consider these two observations on the show which I bumped into this morning. The first is by Lance Mannion:

Mad Men is not about the time it's set in, 1960 in Season One, 1962 in Season Two, which begins tonight at 10 EDT on AMC.. The fashions, the trappings, the historical references, the depictions of the, to us, crazy social mores and ridiculously rigid but cartoonish gender roles, the glimpses at the pop culture and fads of the time are meant to place us in an alien world. The Madison Avenue and suburban Ossining are like thos planets on Star Trek where the inhabitants are living as if in Chicago of the 1920s or as if Nazi Germany won World War II or as if the Roman Empire never fell. All the attention to period detail is a trick. We're meant to think of Mad Men as a period piece but creator-producer Matt Weiner and his writers and designers and directors are inventing their own universe in which their are no real people. There are only roles for people to play.

Brendan Bernhard of the NY Sun (via James Wolcott), states things another way:

After all, how many times can you watch the show's star, Don Draper (Jon Hamm), furrow his brow, smoke an herbal cigarette while pretending to smoke a real one, and take a long, pensive pull on a fake alcoholic drink, and convince yourself that this is real drama as opposed to a televised version of an interior decoration magazine?

Yes. I would have said "photorealist painting" instead of "interior decoration magazine," but the ideas is the same: Cultural references as discreetly-deployed throw-pillows. Surface is all. If my meditating on a paving brick is navel-gazing, I get the feeling that watching Mad Men is akin to looking closely at the fibers and colors of the lint collected from the navels of these '60's-era folks. "White cotton! How very early-'60s!" But to what end? If, as Lance says above, it's the intention of "creator-producer Matt Weiner and his writers and designers and directors [to invent] their own universe in which their are no real people," then the makers of Mad Men aren't reconstructing the '60s--they are constructing it, which isn't the same thing as "a debt of recognition to the dead." The show ends up being a celluloid trompe l'oeil that no one contained in it is interested in examining and interrogating (which is, like, you know, what thinking human beings do to their environment from time to time) and thus leaves nothing for the viewer to do but admire. That, of course, is something, and not to be dismissed lightly either. But after a while, I'd think it wouldn't be enough.

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Semi-tangentially, Zunguzungu has a thoughtful meditation on his recent bike-trip along the C&O Canal and the Great Allegheny Passage and the (re)constructions of history he observed along the way. Well worth a visit over at his place, if you have some time to spare.