December 2000 Archives
Umbrellas
Friends, I wish to bring up a question I find most vexing, a question I shouldered yesterday at the same moment as I raised my Japanese golfing umbrella to the heavens in the face of an unexpected rainstorm.
Now as most of you know, I have a day job in the financial district, working Monday to Friday in the World Financial Center. Some of you don't have day jobs, but take it from me, they're not hard to understand. The idea is that the place you work and the place you live are two different places; that you travel to the former from the latter in the morning, and retrace your steps in the afternoon. The vast majority of people in the financial district on any given weekday fall into this category; the remainder are generally tourists who have come to gawk at the Statue of Liberty and carrying a chip on their shoulder about not having got a place on the first ferry of the day to Liberty island. (Only the first ferryload per day is allowed up to the crown.)
So what I wonder is this. How can it be that you never see people with umbrellas if it isn't raining, but everybody seems to have an umbrella if it is?
I hope you see where I'm coming from here. If it's not raining in the morning, you don't see people with umbrellas. But come the afternoon, when they leave their offices for the commute back home, they all seem to have procured one. Where do all these umbrellas come from? They're not the three-dollar jobs you buy on street corners, they're the really large golfing umbrellas which are 90% of the width of the sidewalk and which generate a ballet of ducking and arm-raising between the sorts of people who are normally at pains to avoid each others' eyes. It would probably be really quite amusing to watch if it weren't for the fact that it was pissing it down with freezing rain a few drops of which have managed to make their way down the inside of your collar and are meandering down your spine, soaking your shirt and rapidly approaching the waistband of your underwear.
You can see why people want those big umbrellas, though. You take one of the little black numbers out into any self-respecting New York storm, and it will be torn to shreds within five minutes. Not that a shredded umbrella really affords much more protection than one fresh from the little Asian woman from whom you bought it: the lashings of near-horizontal rain mean that it will protect one small spot on the back of your head if you're lucky. Even with a monstrous motherfucker of an umbrella everything below your thighs can be considered write-off territory.
But anyway, the logistics of umbrellas. We assume that people only have a finite number of the things. Now if you work in the corporate communications department of a bulge-bracket investment bank, you can simply nab yourself a freebie umbrella any time it rains from the dedicated storeroom downstairs. But most people don't have access to such a treasure trove.
Which reminds me: the New York Stock Exchange does a roaring trade in umbrellas. It, like, sells them, for cash, from the little shop the tourists flock into after taking their free tour. And most of the time, it's not even raining. Let me ask you this: do any of you know a single person who would pay $17.95 plus tax to parade around in the rain with that dreadful sub-IBM striped logo and the worse slogan "the world puts its stock in us"? I mean, that ranks below "banking on success" in the world of dreadful cliched financial puns.
I have a feeling that the people who buy NYSE merchandise fall into two camps: German tourists, on the one hand, and New Yorkers, on the other. The former we can safely put to one side, on the grounds that no one has ever been able to fathom the internal workings of the mind of the German tourist. The latter we can suppose fall into two categories of their own. The first would be the poseur, who thinks that if he wears an NYSE sweatshirt in a nonchalant enough manner while playing frisbee in central park, some nubile blonde rollerblader will see him and automatically think him loaded enough to be a possible date. The second would be the die-hard capitalists, who wear it as a sign of allegiance to the hegemon that is multinational global capitalism and the longest bull market of the century. In this respect they're a bit like the people who wear Tommy Hilfiger t-shirts because they think they're cool.
But back to the umbrellas. The point is, there are a lot of asymmetrical days -- days when it's raining in the morning but not in the afternoon, or raining in the afternoon even though it was dry in the morning. Don't the people who take their umbrellas into work in the morning take them back home in the afternoon even if it's stopped raining? But you never see them, these hordes with their rolled-up umbrellas. Maybe they leave them at work -- that would explain where all the umbrellas come from on the days when it starts raining around midday.
But how do they know? How many umbrellas would you need to own to make sure that you'll always have one at home if you need it and one at work if you need it? I mean, what if there are, like, four or five days in a row where it rains in the afternoon but not the morning? How many umbrellas can you reasonably keep in the office until everybody thinks you're a complete nutcase? And have you ever seen offices filled with umpteen umbrellas? I don't know. Maybe there's a roaring trade in people biking their umbrellas back home in the middle of the day when they realise they won't be needing them that afternoon. Or maybe these umbrellas all dismantle, like those rifles you see in movies, and pack up into a common-looking briefcase. I can see it now -- the first thing you learn when you come out of your MBA programme and you start your job at Goldman Sachs is how to dismantle and put back together again a full-sized umbrella in less than 15 seconds. Get it done in single figures and you automatically get a job on the bond-trading desk; take more than half a minute and you're a junior equities analyst for at least a year.
Friends, there's a whole world out there we have no idea about. Go out there and explore it, I implore you! And tell me where the umbrellas go when it isn't raining.
Posted by Felix at 12:39 EST | Comments (2)
The art of gift giving
I have an old LP at home, I can't play it, because I don't have a
record player. But it's sitting there all the same, a 12-inch plastic
pill which never fails to make me happy when I'm feeling blue. It's
a recording of Shostakovich's 10th symphony, the final movement of
which is one of the most uplifting pieces of music ever written.
The funny thing is, you can't short-cut it. If you try to just play
the final movement, it doesn't have anywhere near the same effect.
It's like going to see a Lars
von Trier film: the ending is only devastating because you've
been through the beginning with him.
It's the same with presents, at least a certain type of present,
given to a certain type of person in New York or London. I'm thinking
of glamorous twentysomethings here, the sort of people who are often
seen sporting a Gucci lariat chain or a Tiffany dog-tag bracelet.
Wearing the jewelry, or the Prada sunglasses, or the Burberry bikini,
is just the final movement in the symphony. Beforehand must come the
giving itself, which has to be imbued with the perfect combination
of occasion and diffidence. The giver has to make the givee feel important
and special, but also has to be careful not to build the whole thing
up so much that the gift itself becomes anticlimactic.
Then there's the really crucial part, the presentation of the gift.
There are more glamorous places to find jewelry than Tiffany, there
are higher-quality sunglasses than those found at Prada. But nowhere
else has the branding that these places do.
The branding is a multi-layered thing, which includes everything
from name-dropping in Brett Easton Ellis novels to glossy advertisements
in Vanity Fair. But a crucial part of it is the gift-wrapping, the
perfect presentation of every present in beautiful branded boxes.
There's something very un-English about all this, it must be said.
I grew up feeling that even if a gift was simply bought at a shop,
there was always a personal touch in the wrapping. Getting the store
to wrap your present for you would be like typing a birthday card.
I suppose it's the genius of Tiffany and Gucci that they have managed
to transcend the bathos of in-store wrapping and turn it into what
is probably the most important part of the gift. The eggshell-blue
box, the silver embossed logo, the layers of tissue paper: all these
serve to bring the recipient into a state of perfect heightened sensitivity
to whatever lies inside. Done properly (and it's always done
properly), this kind of presentational foreplay to a large degree
makes the actual present inside irrelevant. Whatever it is, it will
be the climax to the act of unwrapping, emotionally spotlit, the center
of attention.
We're all familiar with the idea that it's the thought that counts.
As consumerists, however, we also understand that actually, the gift
itself is pretty important too.
But the true genius of the way in which certain luxury brands refract
our postmodern society is only fully revealed when we finally realise
that it's not the thought, and it's not the gift: it's the wrapping
that really matters.
Posted by Felix at 2:21 EST | Comments (0)
RSS - All blog entriesFelix Salmon: Recent posts
Felix's del.icio.us links
Archives
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License