Comments (0)Cable Fog
August 28, 2009Abe Novick
Special to the Jewish Times
It’s become a tradition to go to the shore every summer and, while staring into the rhythmic surf with its endless sequence, being reminded of the cycle of the Hebrew year, its ongoing pattern and its onward projection.
Like the ocean, on Rosh Hashanah, the last day is connected to the first. But how do we reconcile time when an altered state of reality poses as the past and a present is seen through the lens of an unavoidable media?
That same Sunday I looked out onto the infinite horizon, a wireless link connected me and held me captive both to an imaginary, bygone world of Baltimore, along with one I thought I had left behind.
On AMC’s “Mad Men,” a dapper Don Draper headed down to Baltimore and the prized London Fog account, a Baltimore business.
In another part of the wireless world, the day’s news from Baltimore was of the contemporary nasty and brutish reality of shootings in the city.
Juxtaposed and spliced, the past and the present clashed. The wireless world was whizzing the stuff of “The Wire” back from the series’ syndicated turf, streaming it in living color.
Once Baltimore was known for providing manufacturing jobs with companies like London Fog. The snappy dressers of “Mad Men” and cool veneer they wear covers what lurks underneath and truly troubles them. The sharkskin lends a protective coating like the sheen layered onto the slick ads they create. The airbrushed prints, their coifs and clipped speech are camouflage for what lies they labor over in their lives.
Mimetically, “Mad Men’s” sleek style is all the rage and is depicted in an article and flamboyant spread of Annie Lebovitz’s photos in the current “Vanity Fair.”
Doubtless, the show about the early 1960s will influence 2009’s Fall Fashion, which is ironic, as now I’ll see people in Baltimore dressing the part, based on a show whose narrative just illustrated how Baltimore once was the home of London Fog and a locale where admen could manipulate a public into buying their wares.
It’s a contemporary show about a long, lost world, where men who create ads for us to see that world through will now influence real people living in the same city that’s since lost the manufacturing base.
But perhaps we should be placated. At least it’s not the harsh and violent world many viewers and the world now associate with Baltimore.
When Anthony Bourdain recently did a segment on his show for Travel Channel, Baltimore was described as the home of “The Wire” and a violent world of crime. His skewered view is tainted, not by reality, but by what he knows from fictional television programs projected through HBO.
While there’s realism in “The Wire,” Mr. Bourdain’s take is indicative of how we base reality on fiction. It’s the inverted method from which life is consumed and lived.
I escaped to the beach to get back to nature, yet couldn’t help being reminded, due to the jolting tide, of technology drowning us. Rather than fight the current, we resignedly brought our devices with us.
How does one reconcile the past on Rosh Hashanah, in light of our divided lives, which are bifurcated due to fiction’s invasion into reality?
Time will tell. There are two days to dwell on the subject — one for the past to flow into the next day’s future.
Abe Novick writes monthly for the BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES on the intersection of American and Jewish culture.