Monday, and the return of rigor. Such as it is defined these days. Gone the armies of grey-flannel men pouring from the subway steps, pushing through the revolving doors into spare vast lobbies clad in travertine with a Calder revolving on high, then pushing into the elevators that arrive like amphibious vehicles to ferry them to the battlefield. No briefcases in hand, no newspapers tucked under the arm, no hats, no cologne of Brut and Winstons, no vast spaces with glowing ceilings with ringing phones and clattering keys. In the space between my car and the door of the 333 I never meet anyone. Half the days the office is dark.
I work here. This is my lobby. There are many like it but this is my own.
Some day I will not work here. There are several possible reasons why. I don’t think about that day, because there isn’t any point. If I do retire, or am nudged out - actually, they’d have to get me down to the lobby, open the door, throw a treat and then lock it when I scampered after the snack - then all of this will be come THE PAST very quickly, and it will never be the same if I return. The rote habitual assurance of placing my card here and summoning an elevator, or opening the door to the gym, will be gone. I’ll be fine. But downtown will be dead to me for the first time in my life.
I used to go downtown when I had no place to work, just to have coffee, write at Peter’s Grill, go to the big record store, or walk around the skyway and look at things, marvel at the bustle and tall towers. I can’t see doing that should I be cast out.
Our newspaper is undergoing big structural changes. Or so I hear. We get a lot of memos. There are new positions created, people assigned to new tasks. Periodic town halls where we’re kept up with the process. Nothing seems to have changed, but I get the feeling that there’s going to be a day soon that resembles the last scene in “The Abyss,” where an enormous structure rises from the deep and beaches all the ships and redefines everything.
I don’t like that movie, by the way. I saw it again the other night, and thought the same thing - it’s Cameron’s apology for the gung-ho nature of Aliens, with the same soldier we admired cast as a twitchy paranoid bent on doing Bad Nuclear Things. Don’t buy Mary Mastrioni at all. Secondary “working class underwater characters” all one-note. Ed Harris is great, of course.
So I don’t know anything except that they’re serious about expanding the paper and its mission. We’ve had a series of set-pieces in the form of Town Halls: introductions to the general new objective, rollout of a series of mission statements and core values; inauguration of a regular awards ceremony to recognize employees who are advancing or embodying the values; panel discussion with the owner. It’s steady and deliberate. I think I’ll look back at how it was all reshaped and think, this has been done very well.
Here’s the thing, though. The most recent announcement said we’d handed branding strategy over to a PR company, and everything was on the table - including the name of the paper.
(Sharp intake of breath)
We’ve all seen how that goes: venerable name turns into something gaseous and meaningless that ends in a vowel, and squanders a century of brand identification. We were American Zinc and Tungsten, but now we’re Cafena! The Chicago Tribune did this and came up with TRONC, with sounds like a Troglodyte anesthetic.
“StarTribune” contains the two DNA sequences at the heart of the paper: the Star was a scrappy, loud, tabloid that would run a headline like “Four Dead in Auto Mayhem” in big wood. The Tribune was the sober, sedate, middle-of-the-road-but-enlightened newspaper, absorbing the same ethos from the Journal. When the Star and Tribune merged, the Star name went first - party because Star-Tribune scanned better, but also because the paper had dedicated readership that identified with its character, and putting it first meant its personality wasn’t going to be a trailing afterthought.
I’d hate to see it go.
But. If there’s a way to alter the brand according to the new mission, and anchor it in the past, it’s . . .
Well, I can’t say. But I’d bet money that my idea is one of the names they’ll consider.
While walking to the car on Friday I did a search to see if the domain name for the brand I made up was available. It was. I considered buying it, and waiting for management to ask if they could have it.
Sure! On one condition.
Actually, quite a few.
This year we'll begin our weeks with a look at the logos of 1934. The Gazette of the Patent Office printed hundreds of trademarks to nail down the style and look and text for the owners, and thus provided a fascinating record of commercial design. The question for the year: how many of these still exist?
Typical mispelled-for-impact pun name:
The designer may have torn his hair out when the client insisted on putting that blade over the W. "But in the others it's part of the letter, see?"
"I don't care, doesn't look right."
As you might expect when it comes to razor blades, it's a dead brand.
Ratio of live brands to dead brands so far: 3:6.
An unheralded, underrated noir!
Aren’t they all? Every time I read a review of any movie that doesn’t star Bogart or Ladd or Eddie G, someone says it’s underrated and unjustly ignored. Well, Deadline at Dawn is more or less perfectly rated.
It's about this lug, who just pulled a little robbery. We're in Times Square.
Can’t place that cover of Look - it would be late 45 or early 46 - but the background has something interesting, a reference to something I saw a kid reading the big New Yorker book of cartoons:
Do you see it? Does it make you want to go hiss Roosevelt?
Anyway, here's the problem:
It's a Cornell Woolrich story run through the Flowery Dialogue machine, and that gives it a unique quality. It was shot entirely on the backlot, not a bit of actual NYC, but they did their best:
There wasn't any Redicks.
But there was a Nedicks. So this is like looking at a 555-1212 number on a phone dial, or seeing a Howard Jensen's restaurant.
Anyway: it's not very plausible, overwrought in times, wordy and pretentious in others. The radio version . . . now that's the one. That's the one.
