Scores

            I have recently watched the trailer for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and by recently watched I mean I watched it two times before I began writing this post, and today I’ve watched it about seven times total. Yesterday it was closer to twenty times. This has been going on for the past few weeks, and is rapidly approaching an obsession or maybe it’s already gotten there.

            Now, before you cry something like whacko, might I say that I am not watching the trailer for its visuals at least not any more, I finished with that the first time through. I could practically recite it...”There’s a mole, right at the top of the circus. He’s been there for years.” Then the words How do you find an enemy. I could go on. I could also describe the scenes that play throughout the trailer, but I don’t have quite enough drive to do that and I’m already pretty sure it would bore you even more than my average post does.

            No, the reason I keep watching and rewatching the trailer is because of the score. It’s wonderful. All minor key with a violins screeching and morose melodies that lend an extra veneer of authenticity and gloom to the 70’s aesthetic of the film. I hope that it is the actual score for the film and not something they cooked up for this trailer as it is the main reason I am so excited about the film. Which got me wondering, how great a contribution does the score of a film make to its overall impact?

            Take for example Rosemary’s Baby. I have recently read the novel, one of the many underappreciated efforts of Ira Levin; whose books almost always made terrific films that outlived their literary source. It’s pretty good, actually, although a lot of the narrative punch is ruined by the fact that I’d previously seen the film and so the big reveal was…well…expected. However, rewatching the film, I am struck by something. It is, almost scene for scene, identical to the novel. Oh, Roman Polanski does things in the movie I would never have thought of, like using the shadows on the bedroom wall to indicate action in the next apartment or the odd collision between Rosemary in her bed and dreams. But, the dialogue is taken, often word for word, from the Levin novel.

Yet, the novel uses the old trick of horror novels, making the setting seem as real as possible so when they pull the rug out from under you it is even more shocking. But the film it is pervasively creepy from the very first frame, with the pink cursive lettering, which isn’t creepy or the shot of New York, again not creepy, William Castle’s name, which is only scary because it indicates this film might be terrible, and that lilting hummed lullaby…which is so unnerving. Indeed, the score is the best, most terrifying parts of the film and it is a film filled with terrific elements. But it’s the lullaby that most people remember, especially if they’ve seen that final scene.

Psycho is a similar story, its soundtrack one of those things everyone seems to remember. and there’s Twisted Nerve, whose theme is little more than the creepiest whistling you will ever hear. It’s so good Quinton Tarantino even used it in Kill Bill. Admittedly even the score can mess up a film especially if its too overwrought, but a good one remains understated but pervasive. Just like that of the trailer for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

On Being Welsh, Part 2: The Quickening.

(This title is a reference to the sequel to Highlander, which has the most memorable bad title ever)

I realize that a few days ago I wrote a rather oblique post about the dangers of being Welsh. I would like to make a fairly substantial restatement of things, in light of a youtube video I saw and a general change in my mood, though not necessarily a change for the better. I did however do some thinking and come up with a few cool (if slightly geeky) reasons why Wales is pretty awesome.

Our national flag is a red dragon that, in a myth defeats the white dragon of England. So HA!...despite England’s patron saint being a dragon slayer. It’s also the only European nation with a mythical creature on its flag, which is kind of neat, especially if you have a penchant for the fantastic.

Also,  our Sir Kay isn’t a prick, but a giant slayer who can grow at will and can use powers of fire and ice, so for those of you keeping score at home, that’s yet another source that George R. R. Martin has stolen from! Okay…it’s nothing like that but it is called a Song of Ice and Fire and it’s suddenly all the rage, so I’m making the stretch.

We also produced (in order of impressiveness for people who don’t watch ungodly amounts of British TV) Ruth Jones, Rob Brydon, Tom Jones, Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins, and Catherine Zeta Jones, which is really quite impressive given three all come from the same village.

Oh, and we use our little known and seldom spoken Gallic language to annoy foreigners.

However, there are some very good reasons why being Welsh is terrific, and they are all explained, very well in this youtube video by the great David Mitchell, who does so much better than I ever could. Also his videos are sponsored by a product that doesn’t even exist over here which is means I don’t really even need a disclaimer about it.  By the way, if you were interested, I would recommend the rest of David Mitchell’s Soapbox and the show That Mitchell and Webb Look, as supremely intelligent pieces of mindless entertainment. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bOqY2xSD6U 

This is Where I am Today

If I am to be completely honest with myself, I’ve never been very good at writing. I have that annoying habit one seems to inevitably acquire if one is in by any peculiarity British, with sentences that possess three too many clauses and a passive voice that has all the narrative drive of still life of Worcester. Really, whenever I read anything I’ve written I feel as though I’m swimming in molasses, unable to extricate myself. I’m not sure how to rectify this problem. It seems innate, like all those nervous impulses to shout out dumb things in the midst of grave or important events.

            I also developed an unfortunate disability where I absorb the topic and style of the thing that I have most recently read, and spills over into my own shabby prose with disastrous results. I am the type of stylist you might see in a back issue of Rolling Stone, imitation and purple prose coloring the story that is being read with an unfavorable hue (mixed metaphor and bad pun intended and presented as the primary example). I cannot honestly look at what I’ve written, and say that I enjoy reading it alone and in silence.

            However, it is better than the alternative, for my writing, when read aloud, makes my skin crawl. Especially if I am the one doing it. I falter on all the wrong words, read in a bleak monotone that renders the whole of it rather unpleasant, like slightly rotting meat. There’s always something slightly off in the prose and it was made worse by this, so that the listener will soon be clutching at their throat and scanning for the nearest exit.

            I attribute this mostly to my writing process, which uses one of two methods, neither of which are particularly flowing. The first is an odd stream of consciousness, what I utilize when a story is first forming and in danger of being lost. Here my writing is lightening, instantaneous bursts of prose that hit quickly and are gone. When the reverie is over, and I go back to survey the damage I am always dismayed. I have words, awkward phrasings, and peculiarly juvenile dialogue and progression. The story, or essay flops around in no order except one designed by a madman or a fool. And the vocabulary. It’s so limited, it makes me want to wretch, as though I’ve barely progressed from fifth grade when all my writing was scribbled on yellow legal pad.  The other way I write, is with slow deliberation, that always creates the kind of tortured manifestations most writers managed only when they were twelve and still drew pictures in the margins of their T. H. White impressions.

I despair when I look at my writing, and when I begin to pick it apart I wonder if I might not be better served going into medical school, for although it considerably more work, there’s the benefit that people expect to be unable to read what you have written.

On Being Welsh

Today someone stopped me to tell me that he approved of my shirt and the nation it thoughtlessly self-promotes my country of origin. And it made me realize that being Welsh is a lot like belonging to a club, a very exclusive, horribly uninteresting club. I mean, how do you sell it: “We’re Welsh! We’re just like the Scotts and the Irish but without the child obesity and the rampant alcoholism, and with loads of sheep! Actually, we’re just a smaller New Zeeland.”

            I bring this up because my nationality means a lot to me, but I am somehow embarrassed about being Welsh. It’s not like being Irish or English or even French or German, because although there are stigmas attached to each nation, you don’t need to explain them. You do if your Welsh, because everything that used to define your country was either taken or shared.

Take our greatest contribution to the Western Canon, the original mythology of King Arthur, which is always called English because of his status as the King of Britain, fighting the very Saxons who’d one day claim him as their own. But, we lost, fled or were engulfed by the new nation, and spent the next few hundred years getting screwed over by the conquers and then being screwed worse when one of our own. Thanks Henry, you did a bang up job.

Okay, this makes me sound like a curmudgeon, although I am one, which perhaps is a topic for a different time, but I just can’t really say much about Wales that’s well…substantive. We have our own language, but no one uses it, but all of our signs are in it, because we hate English visitors and hope they crash and burn. And on that cheerful note, I think I’ll bid you adieu.

The Measure of Seasons

Fall, for adults, is the slow dying of the year, shedding its plumage at the most beautiful moment only to entropy in the wheels of cars and the sides of the street. Brilliant heat gives way to quiet chill, light receding like the hairline of some middle manager, until the evenings are all but nonexistent. It means getting out winter clothes and winter gear. It means preparation, for a nearly endless array of parties and dinners that come up in the next season. Fall is all forethought, and no reflection. For Adults.

For children, fall is the beginning of the year, glorious in its promise, and dreadful for all those moments when you arrive in the new classroom with the new teacher, and desperately scan for a friend, as you notice other kids, who clearly had more foresight, already murmuring with one another in little groups. And just as you resign yourself to a friendless year, you hear a familiar voice and see a friend waving you over. And when leaves fall, its celebration, bounding through their piles that were painstakingly raked together by your parents destroying the mounds that seemed just like a burial of the season. Yet, when you do so, in that splash of color and motion that they make for a brief moment, it seems to breathe a new life into the brittle days. The wind cuts through you, as bold as you feel with a summer’s worth of scabbed knees and scarred limbs upon you, as you race through the last hours of evening sunlight. And even then, when it grows bitter and cold at nights, and you’re forced in earlier, there is still the anticipation: September for school, October for Halloween, November for Thanksgiving, December for the Holidays. Fall is the anticipation of the year. For Children.

For adults, winter is a drunken procession. There are parties and further parties, a hundred or so miserly visitations to the houses of friends or friends of friends, sometimes to those of acquaintances and the acquaintances of acquaintances. They drag along children if they plan to have a very good time, and sometimes one of their children will catch them doing something very stupid whilst they are very drunk. But there are also the evenings of chatter around a dinner table, with closer friends, the wine running like a river. Winter is all merriment, without even the chance for knowledge. For Adults.

For children, winter is partly exhilaration, partly boredom, the round-and-down, slip-shod maneuverings of a sled, and those long nights spent trapped in the basements of your parent’s friends, with their own children, struggling to not make conversation as you watch Disney films you’ve seen a dozen or more times or playing with toys that are like your toys, but that belong to another and so are to be either envied or scorned, and usually it’s the former. And these times, in carpeted basements so distinct from your own, with its cold cement floor, they drag on as though you were encased in amber, your movements measured not in seconds but eons. But then, with your friends or siblings, hiding out in the great snow trenches dug in the back yard, your brother on the hill, as always, raining down on you those specialties of his, snow packed with ice chunks at the center and you have to really concentrate not to be hit. So you spent most of the day with your face being driven right into the snow, and when alls said and done your cheeks are ruddy and your nose is scrapped, and while your drinking cocoa afterwards, you press the mug right up against your cheek. At those moments, those days, time is in free fall, and before you know it you’ve hit the bottom of break, and its school again. For children, winter is an interlude of tremendous velocity and, seemingly, endless excitement. For children.

Wonder Boys

            As I’ve mentioned before, way back in these posts, one of my favorite novels is Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys. A lot of that has to do with when I first read it, in the fall of sophomore year when my life wasn’t much better than that of Grady Tripp, the central character of the novel, whose life is rapidly deteriorating in the space of only a few days. It was also a time when I was pinning for Pennsylvania, a place that I can only seem to remember with the kind of nostalgia most people reserve for the 50’s (and of course, the novel begins in Pennsylvania in the late forties and early fifties) and a longing for college.

            For those of you who haven’t read the book, which will probably be the majority, it deals with a professor who has spent several years (I think almost a decade, though I might be wrong) working on his novel Wonder Boys. I particularly love the opening, which describes the author’s early life in Pennsylvania and the first real writer he ever knew, an H. P. Lovecraft style horror writer and professor of English at the local university. And to evoke the ending, I think I’ll have to quote the last few sentences, which don’t give much away:

“He has known a number of famous and admired authors in his time, and he likes to caution and amuse his young companions with case histories of the incurable disease that leads all good writers to suffer, inevitably, the quintessential fate of their characters. The young men listen dutifully for the most part, and from time to time some of them even take the trouble to go over to the college library, and dig up one or another of his novels, and crouch there, among the stacks, flipping impatiently through the pages, looking for the parts that sound true”.  

I love that passage. It brings me back to a hundred times that I’ve been in there, in the dusty stacks of one or another of the libraries I frequent, feverously thumbing through a volume I’ve just picked up, wondering if I should include the book in my bag. It was actually the very way I found Wonder Boys, reading the last sentence, as I often do, to determine its worthiness, and this one immediately went in the bag.

It’s because of my deep affection for this novel that I approached the film version, which like the novel opened to critical praise and public indifference, with weariness. I often find the film versions to books horribly simplified, and these streamlined monstrosities frequently strip out the very parts of the novels that I loved. And I had a sinking feeling the very parts of the novel they would simplify in Wonder Boys were those I loved most, the beginning and the ending, as to do the book proper justice they’d have to use extensive and obtrusive flashbacks and flashfowards.

As such, I only watched the film recently, at the beginning of the school year actually. And to my surprise, I thought it was actually very good. Most of what it left out or changed from the novel was minor or necessarily changed to fit the adaptation. It had the same comic energy of the book and the almost screwball comedic styling that made the novel so memorable. Grady Tripp’s life spinning out of control was just as sad and hilarious as it had been on the page, although I will say I am an unabashed Michael Douglas fan, so that helped a bit. So to sum up, if anyone out there reads this post (which is far too short and really doesn’t do justice to either the book or the film) I would suggest you pick up a copy of the book or film from the Ithaca College library. Or I could lend you it. Although, I think that would be something of an impertinence, and I’d probably tell you no in any case. (That last sentence was, with the exception of the last clause, a joke.)

Colors: By Crayola

Let’s turn our attention now to the new fall lineup of crayon colors for the five hundred packs. First is the much-anticipated Eulogy: a dark grey, black crayon with hints of yellow to suggest remembrance. This is the perfect color to help your child come to grips with the somber emotions of death, loss, and the unfulfilled life in general. However, the yellow represents a counter point, showing the glimpses of hope and memory that permeate our life. Eulogy has been hyped around the Crayola factor since the reclusive and brilliant color engineer Jeff Remstein hatched the idea in nineteen-ninety-eight, the peak year for color design since the late sixties, when a new wave of color engineers came in and revolutionized color creation.

William M. Dearheart, a veteran of the drably colored fifties, says: “Jeff was the freshest face in crayons; it was like the New Wave all over again. He was the first to suggest the fully, fully realized collection of the one thousand or even twenty-four hundred pack. Just revolutionary stuff. Reminded me of the time April Fox [1] came into my office and told me about her new idea for a blend of red and orange to be a standard. I remember telling her then ‘April, you’re crazy!’ I didn’t want to make that mistake again, so I just leapt at the chance.” Jeff left the company in early two thousand and two, citing the stagnation of the color department as his main reason.

However, last year he returned to the company, now in charge of the entire color engineering department, saying he would bring “Rejuvenation and spunk back to color design industry” and many color ideas from his earlier stint have been resurrected, including this most revolutionary and special of all colors.

Another upcoming color is the equally hyped Graduation, described by Color Coordinator Janice Morrison[2] as: “A bright dark and sonorous blue of academy with uplifts of yellow around the tip and underlying color of black, with a side fringe of green, really an electrifying combination, giving you all sides of life, the highlights: fame and the like, the low points, and the suburban tranquility that is at the edges. I mean, like, two years ago, no way, that would have been a no go, way to inventive, almost a color overload.” Graduation is said to be Remstein’s favorites of his own designs, citing that “color overload”, the rich palate of colors from which this color draws so liberally from, to be chief in his love of it. In an interview earlier this year upon his retake of the color engineering division, he said: “I made Graduation during my own graduation ceremony, doodling on the back of a little leaflet they’d given us, and I mean, just your standard eight pack, but still, when I saw those colors together I though, wow, I mean that was graduation, right there, that was life. It was the sort of color that challenged that demanded, it was the type of color I wanted to make, and I just had. It was a goose bumps moment.”

Touring the Crayola Department for Color Engineering last month, I could already feel the change, a new energy that has gripped the department, a coursing tide that has swept up everybody here. Even the interns have a new look of determination as they sashay down the hallways in their crisp Polo shirts and steaming trays of Starbucks mochas. Tom and Tracy[3], the twins who were giving me the tour, smiled at one another, Tracy nodding her head with the dimples forming quite lovely in the corners of her mouth, Tom turning to me and saying threw his own plaster stuck grin, “That’s Lobster Stew if I ever saw one.”

“Wouldn’t it need more red?” I asked, quickly ducking as a tray of freshly canvassed colors piled up on top of each other whirling down the corridor on a dolly trey pushed with the frantic effort of deadlines.

“Everyone says that,” Tracy shot me a grin, stepping to the side in time for another cart to whirl past her, nearly hitting me in the stomach, and she laughed[4], myself then blushing, as she said “It’s more of an orange, kinda brown with hints of white. But Remstein, he decided that Lobster Stew is a creamy off-white.”

“Like mocha.” Tom adds, stopping to talk to a flustered wire haired man with the grey streaks in his skin, who I swear I have seen talk to these two at least fifty times on the jaunt down this short angular hallway, a constant stream of small stops, Tracy and I talking quietly as Tom takes care of the harried man.

As we approach the elevators, I see the doors, newly designed as is this whole wing of the building, with painting utensils and tarps laid out on the marble[5]. They were covered by white boards, on which had every single color of Crayola crayon colored in, with the name and serial number of each under it, breathe taking in its sensory overload. I gasped and the two smiled between each other again as Tom reach out. “How many colors are there?”

“Two thousand one hundred and seven.”

“And counting.”

The Color Coordination Department first was founded in the early nineties, after the majority of New Wave colorists had retired, and the Crayola brand was attempting to bring in new blood. It was erected under the management of Julius Berkeley[6], who is the reason for the scoffed at tile and the boxy utilitarian shape of the building. It’s located about ten miles from the Crayola headquarters, just within the verdant auspices of Forks Township, Northampton County, Pennsylvania. It sticks out from the fields of Pennsylvania like a poorly formed metaphor in a well written paragraph, almost the epitome of the corporate footprint lodged within these pastures of nearly Germanic looks, even this close to the seaside, fields where the Amish actually look placed at their correct chronological and geographical order, indeed where you seem to peer over you’re wheel, looking in desperation for that Dutch windmill and Dutch milkmaid that you are sure are waiting just around the next bend.

And then, if you Travel down the rather ironically named Pastor Road, your eyes will be assaulted by that object of rectangular obscenity planted severely in the center of this pastoral paradise. The building itself looks like one of those Soviet block apartments on its exterior, all grey cement blocks and tiny windows cut in deep so that they provide about half the light of a normal window. Tom tells out of the corner of his mouth that the entire building was built by Berkley to destroy creativity. When I asked why color design building would want to squash the creativity of its members, he only said. “Berkley was fascist.” Tracy laughs, saying something about losing and Nazis that I don’t catch.

Another color being churned out this year is Ecstasy, a new color for what is being dubbed the “Adults Only” Crayola pack. Remstein has said of the color that it’s a delightful wicked color, a bright pink with “manic symphony designs” of lime-green running through it. It surprised the Crayola executives when it was introduced to them at the Color Conference last year[7] when it was introduced to them by a rave like display of seven nearly naked and definitely topless women dancing in smoke as a the color came to life on the wall behind these gyrating bodies. According to Tracy, who didn’t disclose how she knew, it received a standing ovation and instant approval. Remstein first came up with this idea as an attempt at the end of his original tenure at Crayola company to shock and disturb the execs, but he said that the idea being a hit “is probably just as good, I mean it was so much fun to come up with Ecstasy, like showing a side to color that your just don’t get in a kid’s box. It had verve, a kinda naked sex appeal, and I think maybe more colors should be like that.” The Adults Only Crayola crayons are scheduled to be in the final stages of design next month and in an “adult themed store near you” next February.

One of the most unique aspects of the Color Coordination department is their name tags. In most respects they are perfectly normal, the sort of picture that makes even the most appealing faces in the flesh look blemished and stretched or compressed or so washed out they look vampire-ish, the name spelt out in capitols and a bar code running along its inner edge. What separates them is that in the upper right hand corner of each, directly next to each persons picture is a dot of a certain color, a miniature version of the ones that cover the exterior doors of the elevators.

I first noticed this when Tom and Tracy had come to collect me for the guided tour, spotting the tiny marks as I shook hands but still to slickly nervous to ask as they brought me in through the imposing glass doors of the sore concrete thumb, gulping as I entered the lobby, filled with fern bushes and blue walls, and I hadn’t managed to work myself up about it until I had seen the elevator doors. Inside as we were heading down, I asked about the colors. Tracy laughed and pulled her name tag up so I could better examine the color. “Everyone here gets a color assigned to them after a few weeks.”

“It’s based on what people think your personality is,” Tom chips in, Tracy sticking her tongue out at him. “She’s brown.”

“I see, but what shade, chestnut or-“

            They laugh in unison. “Just brown, regular old eight pack brown.”

            “They’re vindictive bastards,” Tracy said, “They gave us eight pack colors because we were already on the fast track then.”

            I’m not exactly eloquent in person and only am able to sort of smile and nod in vigorous something or another, as they started a rant that seemed to have been preplanned, although more as inside joke then anything else as the elevator sedately moved to basement floor. All of a sudden Tom noticed me again fully and stopped the tirade. He sheepishly grinned and said “Sorry about that.”

            “Yeah, it’s just a bad subject to start us off on.”

            “It’s fine,” I say trying to recover some of my reporter-for-this-most-prestigious-newspaper by asking the first question to spring to mind. “What color do you think I’d get?”

            Tracy cocked her head to the side; Tom bit his lower lip and started to nibble on it. I waited through several seconds of uncomfortable silence.

            Tom spoke first, “Orange.”

            Tracy looked quizzically at him then said, “A dark blue. Maybe navy.”

            I smiles and wrote both the suggestions down.

            Crayola very rarely grants reporters access to the Color Coordination Department, and while there is no official stance, most think it has something to do with competition. After all, why let people see your brand new color ideas when you know that they’ll just be ripped off a few days after the report by one of the sixteen hundred different crayon manufacturers.[8] Yet there is not a disjointed feel to this tour, it’s a fluid and seamless as if they churn out these tours like crayon colors. Tom and Tracy handle it like old pros, moving effortlessly from their slick company talk to me, to the business tone they adopt when fellow employees rush up and quickly converse, the other of the wonder twins standing back with nonchalance and giving me a type of knowing wink I’ve only ever seen before in Yorkshire men[9] and whenever I caught a glimpse of myself in one of the glass of offices I could see only the curved c of my spine as I both went forward to hear and struggled back to stay as far from any actual contact as possible.

            This is the type of reporting that makes me antsy, the type where I look on the outside like one of those shy people who ends of slamming lead into the ceiling, walls, floor, and patrons of a post office, and on the inside I’m tapping my fingers anxiously on my jeans as I’m led through the phony wonders of America’s consumerist temples. But the Color Coordination Department is not phony, its wonderment is true, as I’m led onto a packed floor of marble tile, each tile hosting an art deco representation of the original eight crayons splayed out in a coronet. The insignia of the Color Coordination department is the doing of the “staff communist”[10] from the early twentieth century, the notorious and arch “satirical” color designer, Harman Frank. Frank was a German refugee, who came over to America just before the Second World War, although even his closest friends are unsure about his choice to move to America, despite an offer from a friend in England to stay there until Frank was able to return to Germany.

            One reasons for his decision to emigrate to America was undoubtedly the Color Coordination Department of Crayola, which was even then the most interesting of the crayon color maker, with over twelve colors in their general rotation, and fifteen available to the connoisseur of such things. But Frank’s entry into the business also marked the beginning of various austerity measures within the Color Coordination Department of Crayola. The architect of most was the controversial “color magnate” Joseph H. Manning, a frequent foe of Frank’s[11]. Eventually, and in no small part thanks to Manning’s help, Herman Frank was brought before the House’s Un-American Activities Committee and blacklisted.

            According to Dearheart: “Frank’s blacklist, if I’m honest, almost killed the industry. It was such a blow to all of us who’d grown up with Frank’s colors splashed all over our scrap paper. I know he was my inspiration for entering the damn business, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one feels that way.”

            Certainly among Frank’s admirers is Jeff Remstein, who when asked his favorite color created in the last century, immediately said “Herman Frank’s Lilac Sonata. It was such a pure color, a dark teal inspired by Monet’s visions of his Lily Ponds, and it really captures that sense of stillness. Frank was the master, no question.”

            Remstein leaves an instant impression on you. When Tracy and Tom dropped me off in his office, Remstein had his back to us, looking over the vast Color Coordination department, with what seemed like a million color engineers mixing and toiling away, eager to impress the man in designer spectacles and Milanese fitted clothes. Remstein turns around with a grin, and slapped his hands around mine. He gave me a grin like the Vegas strip. It’s like meeting the president. Dearheart says that the first day he met Remstein, “I was instantly amazed. Remstein, he’s got the magnetism of Patton, he made everyday feel like it was one in the trenches. It was a war, even with the virtual monopoly of Color Coordination. It was a war against boredom, against repetition, against ourselves, and love him or loath him, Remstein made every damn person feel like a vital cog in his grand design.”

            Remstein was eager to go over the whole fall line up of colors. He described each new addition to the twenty-four hundred pack in the kind of detail that _____ ______ Review of Books[12] has called for years: “A florid and verbose prosaic style, putting us in mind of a latter day Ben Johnson, although lacking the obsolescence”. As we finish, Remstein leaves me with the general theme of this year’s colors. “It’s a bold reinvisioment, but also a return t basics. It’s about raw emotion, and droll touches. In one word it’s absolutely paradoxical.

            Not everyone is as enamored of Jeff Remstein as his fellows at Crayola. His most outspoken critic is the notorious color engineer, Omerta. Omerta, who got his name from supposed mob connections on his father’s side and, to quote him, “Art school pretensions and general bullshit”. In the color creation field, he first gained true notoriety for his “Classic Reds” range, consisting of the normal five crayon box that “had an artistic repetition of the classic red, the color I always seemed to run out of. It was sort of a personal collection, I admit, maybe even selfish”. However, it did earn him a place in the new school of color creation, and was the centerpiece of the Omerta exhibition at MoMA last year. “I found it simply sublime,” says Martha Kopek, the curator who really pushed the Omerta exhibit. “After the maximalist approach of Jeff Remstein, this was a breath of fresh air.”

For himself, Omerta thinks Remstein is “a grand standing fool, who cares more for publicity then for art or color creation. He rarely even makes the colors, just spews out a bunch of platitudes and random color combinations, then tells his ‘wizards’ to cook it up. And well, that’s missing the point, isn’t it?”

Omerta has a clear vision of what he wants to do with the dying  company Royal, a crayon maker from the early 1800’s and a once formidable rival of the Crayola, but ever since the Remstein tenure, there’s really been no contest to speak of in the Color Creation business. But Omerta has big plans for his newest color collection, a follow up to his Classic Reds”, yet in his words “it’s more mainstream, definitely less personal”. Simply entitled, the classics, this is a five color box, representive of the minimlist approach Omerta has been trying to master. A simple Blue, Yellow, Black, White, and (of course) Red. Omerta chose to not include Green or Violet, as they were, in his own words, spoiling the line.

“It’s about simplicity, it’s about the user creating their own colors, it’s about experimentation and freedom. Any fascistic designer can producer a bland and useless creation, but I feel our users are better suited to know what the color they’re looking for is. And if they can’t find it in our box, it’s a lack of their damn imagination and skill. Besides, have you seen the basic colors for Crayola recently? They’re shit, I mean totally useless. The red doesn’t look like red, its too light, almost orange, and yellow is so sickly you can’t see it on white paper.” On a spectrum, he shows me the difference between the Yellow from his “Classics” and the standard Crayola yellow. “See how much richer the color is? How it just shouts to you? Well, I don’t see how a company that can’t get that, the simplist color really, correct, how is it going to stay in business?”

Remstein, meanwhile, is unmoved by such statements. “Our colors have always been the most lustrious on the market, and we have always possessed the lion’s share of variety, not to mention originality. Going back to basics is pointless, you have to be in constant state of advancement, or the form simply disinigrates. If Omerta had his way, we’d still have all grays in our boxes. Well, I say, to hell with blandness. I want some epizazz in my crayon box!”

The Crayola collection will be on show from August 16^th to the 22^nd of September at the Louvre in Paris, before going on general sale October 1^st.

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[1] The self-described “foxy feminist” leader of the New Wave color engineers, who was responsible for many of their greatest achievements. She would go on to be influential in the color coordination of the earliest LGBT, meeting two of her later spouses there, Mike Jones and Beatrice Threepenny, whom she married only last year. She was also the mentor to the young Jeff Remstein, before the Number Controversy, which severed their connections.

[2] The cousin of noted and notorious Kyle Morrison, of Late Night with Kyle Morrison fame.

[3] Known throughout the entire department as the Wonder Twins, a reference neither of them actually got until they were explained it by the “retro guru” Casey Dearheart, daughter of the Jurassic William M.,

[4]Tracy has the kind of sweetly innocent smile that unfailingly reminds one of a childhood sweetheart.

[5] “Bubblegum pink,” Tracy had said as we had entered the department, Tom explaining how that was the left over from the old management.

[6] Julius Berkeley is the well known butt of jokes around the office, mainly for his role in the repression of design that characterized his tenure as Color Coordinator head, including the issuing the replacement of the traditional eight crayon box with one that consisted simply of black white and variations of grey, during the World War 2.

[7] You might remember hearing about the event, held for the first time outside the United States, in Toronto where the small color collective Bonanza Tones (created with help by Jeff Remstein himself) who held the most lavish event since the 1976 Color Conference in Las Vegas where the entertainment included a short film on color by Stanley Kubric and a surprise appearance by Frank Sinatra, this one had nearly 4 million spent on several indoor fireworks displays, and that was for the low end color peddlers arena spread out overt six warehouses.

[8] Everyone around the Color Coordination Department calls this the Willy Wonka Theory. They all laugh when I quiz them about it, saying that it would have taken months for any competitor to duplicate the colors. They say its more about the actually disturbance of the color creation process. Tracy summed it up for me by saying “You wouldn’t want a bunch ignorant philistines coming in all the time and mucking with your writing right? Well, for most of us that’s the same thing..” Clearly, she is naïve of editors and their red pens.

[9] For those who have never been to Yorkshire, I can say only that it was one of the most arduous and painful experiences of my life, which by the wa

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y includes numerous trips to France. Although France was still worse.

[10] Harman Frank was not a communist. He was a self-identified anarchist and is defined by his biographer, Charles Manning, as a “probable socialist”.

[11] Frank, who died broke, was heard cursing Manning on his deathbed, though his landlady refused to repeat whatever he’d said.

[12] EDITOR’S NOTE: The editor felt that it was relevant to delete the name of a competitor magazine, in the interest of balance for this piece.