Monday, August 08, 2005

The Hiatus continues: The Best of All This Is That

Index to the Paintings And Thumbnail Biographes of The Presidents Of The United States
This series is now complete.

All the Presidents have had their turn.

The list below provides links to the paintings and thumbnail bios, in order! /jack

POTUS 1: The First President Of The United States, Pres. George Washington a/k/a The General a/k/a The Father Of Our Country

POTUS 2: President John Adams, The Only President Defeated For Re-election By His Own Vice-President

POTUS 3: Pres. Thomas Jefferson

POTUS 4: President James Madison, The First President To Wear Pants

POTUS 5: Pres. James Monroe

POTUS 6: President John Quincy Adams - First Son Of A President To Become President And The First President To Become A Congressman Post-White House

POTUS 7: Pres. Andrew "Old Hickory" Jackson - The Star Of The $20 Dollar Bill

POTUS 8: President Martin Van Buren

POTUS 9: Pres. William Henry Harrison - The Drive By President

POTUS 10: Pres. John Tyler - The First Accidental President

POTUS 11: Pres. James Polk - The Man With The Mullet

POTUS 12: Pres. Zachary Taylor - The President Who Mostly Closely Resembled Mel Brooks

POTUS 13 - Pres. Millard Fillmore: Another Partial Term President

POTUS 14: Pres. Franklin Pierce - The Most Handsome President?

POTUS 15: President James Buchanan, The Man Who Left A Divided Country And War For Pres. Abraham Lincoln

POTUS 16: Pres. Abraham Lincoln - The Most Beloved President?

POTUS 17: Pres. Andrew Johnson - The Worst President Ever

POTUS 18: Pres. Ulysses Grant - The Man Inside Grant's Tomb

POTUS 19: Pres. Rutherford B. Hayes - "Rutherfraud"

POTUS 20: Pres. James Garfield

POTUS 21: Pres. Chester Alan Arthur - Accidental, Partial One-Term President, Owner Of Some Impressive Muttonchops, And Dandy

POTUS 22: President Grover Cleveland - The Man Who Was President Twice

POTUS 23: Pres. Benjamin Harrison - The Last Bearded President

POTUS 24: President Grover Cleveland - The Man Who Was President Twice

POTUS 25: President William McKinley - Puppet Or Visionary?

POTUS 26: President Theodore Roosevelt - The Roughrider

POTUS 27: Pres. William Howard Taft - Who Preferred To Be Remembered As Chief Justice

POTUS 28: President Woodrow Wilson - The President Who Short-Circuited & POTUS 28A: President Edith Wilson

POTUS 29: Pres. Warren G. Harding - He Never Lived To Rue The Day

POTUS 30: President Calvin Coolidge "Keep Cool With Coolidge"

POTUS 31: President Herbert Hoover - The Scapegoat

POTUS 32: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt - The Man In The Wheelchair Who Lifted The Country On His Shoulders; The Only POTUS To Win Four Terms

POTUS 33: President Harry Truman - "The Buck Stops Here"

POTUS 34: Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower - A Most Detached President

POTUS 35: Pres. Jack Kennedy - Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye

POTUS 36: Pres. Lyndon Baines Johnson - Majority Leader, Accidental President, Hawk

POTUS 37: Pres. Richard Milhous Nixon - Tricky Dick And The Comedy Of Errors

POTUS 38: Pres. Gerald R. Ford - Pardon Me, Mister President!

POTUS 39: President James Earl Carter - Not As Bad A President As You Have Been Led To Believe, But Rather A Victim Of Circumstance

POTUS 40: Pres. Ronald "Dutch" Reagan - B Movie Actor To President

POTUS 41: Pres. George Herbert Walker ("Read My Lips") Bush

POTUS 42: Pres. William Jefferson Clinton - The Comeback Kid

POTUS 43: Pres. George W. Bush - One Of The Nearly 5% Of Presidents Who Are Sons Of Presidents

Sunday, August 07, 2005

Photomontage: Presidential Contenders And Wild Cards

click to enlarge


Senators Kerry, Frist, Clinton, Edwards, Bayh, Biden & McCain, The Reverend Al Sharpton, Governors Romney and Bush, Former Governor Racicot, Former Mayor Giuliani.

Saturday, August 06, 2005

Friday, August 05, 2005

The Best Of All This Is That:My Worst Jobs, Part 1


While I am in transit on my vacation, I will be reprinting a few "old" nuggets. This is a story from the very week I started this blog. From All This Is That, Friday, November 19, 2004.


In 1983, I let an old college friend--McGoo--talk me into coming to work for him. I didn't last long. It was one of the most painful and hilarious experiences of my life. We were a magazine for construction professionals with a plan center (where they could view blueprints and create bids for various open-bid projects). Our job: to sell subscriptions and advertising in the magazine.

Jagetafuckinorderyet?
McGoo tried for a short period to not allow anyone to leave the boiler room until they had "an order." You were not allowed to take a whiz until you got an order. "For the good of the order" was our watchword. I never quite knew if that meant for us, the brother- and sister-hood of salespeople, or just for the order itself.

Of the five salespeople under McGoo, I was the only one whose salary/draw was not garnished.

Leads
In sales, it's all about the leads (as you know from seeing or reading Glenngarry Glen Ross). Of course, McGoo got the cream of the crop, and only so many would come in per week; the rest were continually recycled.

When you called the marks, you wrote down on the cards how they responded. McGoo would erase what you wrote, and nothing would happen. Then the card would be handed back out on two weeks later on Monday as one of your 20 "free" leads for the week. I would call someone at a construction company and their wife would answer and tell me that her husband had died last week. I would apologize and write on the card—remove from lead pool, customer died. And then the card would be handed out again that week as part of out precious leads (after that you were on your own, which basically meant calling everyone you knew in construction (for me that was approximately no one). Or, you hit the yellow pages which were even more fruitless than the worthless leads Mcgoo handed out. After he cherry-picked any choice ones that happened to fall in there.

Someone would call the poor widow every Monday morning. One guy told me that if we ever called him again he would come down and break our faces. I wrote that on the card. And I called him a couple weeks later.

The cards came back again and again. Finally, one really brain damaged guy came down with steam coming out of his ears and McGoo had to do some mighty fast dancing (natch', blaming it all on "those fuckin' morons in the boilerroom"). When you wrote TD on a lead, it meant you had been seriously turned down. In theory, the lead would lay fallow for a couple of months. But not under the McGoo system. A turndown was merely a moment of temporary insanity on the part of a recalcitrant customer, coupled with gross salesman incompetence. So you would end up calling the same guy every Monday and he'd tell you "nothing has changed. I still don't want the magazine, creep. Now don't call me again."

Your twenty precious leads would almost always dwindle down to maybe three real. if remote, possibilities. By this time, with a stack of turndowns, you were so desperate to get McGoo off your ass, you didn't try to sell them the real ripoff. . .you sold them the lowball subscription ($100). A lot of the guys were so desperate to salve Mcgoo that they would write up a fake sale. That took the heat off. But a couple weeks later when the cancelled subscription meant there was hell to pay. . .McGoo got his commissions early, so a cancellation meant they would actually dock him too.

Meanwhile, of course, McGoo's stack of leads were from people who sent in the fallout cards saying "Yes, I am interested in subscribing. Please contact me." So by the time we rolled in Monday morning (McGoo having arrived early to shuffle and cherrypick the fresh leads), McGoo would have four or five orders on the boards, and we would be in the hole. I forget what term he used for someone who didn't yet have an order, but it was something like shithead.

A conversation
"Jack get a godamned order on the books. Be a man."
"Christ, I'm trying, Jim."
"That's the difference between me and the rest of you shitheads. You're trying. You're dyin'. I'm doing. While you’re flogging the old salami, I’m soaking my hose in prime Grade A cooch."

Another Conversation
"I'm going to lunch, Jim."
"J'get a fucking order yet Jack?"
"No, but I'm hungry."
"Get back on the phone. Hungry salesmen make the best salesmen. No one cares whether shitheads eat or not. Get a fawkin' order and I'll buy you a fuckin' T-bone!"

Bill Ryan
A second generation Irishman, who drove about a 1966 Cadillac convertible. Didn’t go to college. Black sheep of his family. About a week after I started at Construction Data, his salary was garnisheed by some credit card company. One thing Bill needed was that monthly cash infusion to keep things juggled. . .he worked his debtors in some sort of bizarre pyramid scheme. He had a volcanic temper and was endlessly tailed by bill collectors, repo men, and rumpled private detectives. He thought Keelin was way too hot for a non-Irishman.

Pat Sherwin
He made Willy Loman look like a superhuman dynamo. “I had some fucking scores, I tell you Jack. I was salesman of the year twice, got a new Buick once and a trip to Hawaii another time. And here I sit with a sick wife, a fuckin' basket of picked over leads and a fuckin' punk kid tellin' me what to do and insulting me. Life is the green-apple shits, Jack."

My First Day On The Job
I rolled into the office at 8:30. McGoo, was, of course, glad to see me, chatting me up, introducing me around and he was truly happy to have some sort of lit brother working with him. After maybe an hour, he tossed me a pile of stuff to read. I read it in ten minutes.

“OK John, you’re ready to go.”

He handed me a freshly printed stack of lead cards.

“Well, it’s about time to get you on the books today. I want you to close one of these before lunch.”

“Jim, I’d really like to listen to some of the other guys do this for a while. I don’t know what to say to these people.”

“John, you can do it. You’re selling something they want that will make them money, and in return they give you theirs. You can listen to the rest of us all fawking night and it ain’t going to help you a bit. You’ve got to start working those taps and coming up with a magic script. It’s not really all that different from sex. You get them interested, you talk to them, you woo them. And then when things have heated up, you close. An’ you know what? Every time you close it feels every bit as good as when you finally get to stick the old salami in the jellyroll.”

My First Telephone Call
“I’ve told every one of you sonofabitches that I didn’t want your goddamned magazine. EVER! I’ve told you never to call me. AND YOU CALL EVERY FUCKING WEEK.”

“I’m, sorry, Sir, but I was working with some information that said you might be interested in knowing more about Construction Data. Possibly I could send you a free copy of our magazine. Maybe you would like to come down here and tour our plan center facility.”

“I’m going to come down there and tour your heads if I hear from you assholes again.”

“Sorry you feel that way. If you ever do decide. . ." [CLICK].

Turndowns

I started to write notes on the card—saying don’t call this guy back. McGoo grabbed the card from my hand.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“Making notes. “

“You don’t need to write anything on that card, John. Just a note. This was a soft turndown, so you write STD on the card, date it, and put it on the bottom of your stack. We send the leads back in to the main office every Friday night.”

Under the McGoo system, a turndown was merely a moment of temporary insanity. You had to call back fairly soon. . .in McGoo’s theory, if you called back often enough, eventually the mark might think “Hey, these guys are persistent. They must have something good going here.”

McGoo plunged on with my indoctrination.

“So he says no Johnnie. Simply mark it STD. We’ll turn that piece of dog shit sooner or later. He’ll bare his sphincter and beg us to give him a poke. He will crumble and eventually beg for a solid rodgering at top dollar!”

“If he doesn’t come down and cave our heads in first. . .”

“Ah, you missed it. These guys are more hot air than salesmen. And that’s why we eventually triumph. These guys are construction people, we’re pros. Ok. You’ve plunged in. Now, you gotta start with the lingo."

"They say you called them last month, ok, fine. You tell them you are calling back because they did seem interested and you are in a position this week to offer them significant price breaks on Construction Data, if they are able to act quickly.”

“I can’t say that. . .you know. . .it just doesn’t fall off the tongue. Significant price breaks sound phony.”

“Johnnie, me boy. There is no shame in making money. One thing you’ve got to get over is feeling self-conscious or embarrassed. Feel embarrassed at being a goddamned shithead!"

But I feel like I’m running some scam on them. It’s hard to do…”

“The only people in this room who should be embarrassed are the people who don’t get an order. Now, I want you to get started again. Would a drink help? I’ve got five bucks. Let’s go across the street, I’ll have a club soda and you can have. . .what do you like to drink?”

So we went for a drink, McGoo, recently hooked up with AA, telling me all the while that I would make the breakthrough.

Some Advice from Mcgoo
“Once you get that first order. . .Johnnie me boy. . . you will become an inhuman selling dynamo.”

“I’m not quite there yet.”

“Johnnie, me boy, you don’t even need to sell this thing. . .it sells its fucking self. You are barely even a salesman! All you have to do is punch in a few numbers and start writing orders. You are going to get on the books big time.”

Back at the office, I glumly stare at my pathetic short stack of leads. OK. Number two.

“Like I said the last time, my husband died last year. I’m 75. Why would I need a five hundred dollar construction magazine?”

So I wrote STD on the card and put it at the bottom of the deck.

“John, my boy, you aren’t taking them all the way. You get their pants down around their ankles, and you don't stick it in! If you need a little hand on these, I’ll be your closer.”

The Business Cards, or, How I became Jack Brummet
The next day, McGoo handed me business cards.

“Jack Brummet. Circulation marketing and feature article writer?”

“I like that, yeah, Jack. John is a pussy name. Jack’s the name of a man's man. These are constuction guys. ”

I became Jack. And I still am.

My First Order
Later that day I closed my first order. I sold one year at the “full boat” price. I was “on the books” and flying high. 1 year= $549. 6 mos= $299. 6 mos=$100.

I was on the books and on top of the boilerroom board, until McGoo closed three in a row to remove me from my perch. I was on my second day. McGoo put the heavy pressure on Bill Ryan.

“Jaysus, Bill, Jack, a total frigging rookie comes in here and closed on a full boat. What have you done for me today?”

Within two hours, Bill had closed two big orders, put his name at the top of the board for the day, and departed work. The two orders were utterly bogus. Bill just signed up a couple of his leads for subscriptions.

"We'd Like To Put An Article About You In Our Publication"
As a fellow lit-brother to McGoo, I was ahead of the other salespeople in one regard. One regard I was never much able to capitalize on: we would write articles for our magazine, if we could get the contractors or suppliers to buy a large subscription or ad schedule. I would write absurd puff pieces on these various dimwits that they could pass around to their friends and family. Alas, my heart was in that even less than in selling overpriced subscriptions and advertisements.

Cancellations and deadbeats
Every two weeks, in came an accounting from the main office of people you sold to who had cancelled. Or who were deadbeats. Your commission was then deducted from your account, and you were in the hole. The Deadbeats, you called yourself.

It was always agony and explosions of anger on cancellation day. And whenever you lost a commission, McGoo lost his sales manager cut too. By the time half these cancellations rolled in, people had forgotten they had faked them in the first place. Bill Ryan specialized in writing up phony orders for corporations. The companies would actually pay the subscription about half the time. It was always a dark on cancellation day--especially for those of us who never made the nut, and were always underwater on our commissions.

Pat Sherwin, probably about 65 or so, was the hardest hit. He had an invalid wife and was just barely holding it all together. When he got cancelled, he was utterly gripped with panic and fear. And McGoo felt that those twin emotions were the best sales motivational tool ever developed. Pat would nearly be crying, having just lost $500 in commissions. McGoo would always offer to buy you a drink and tell you his solution to the problem. The solution was invariably "sell more!"

Ain’t nothing going to happen here boys, ain’t nothing going to happen until I hear those phones dialing Dialing DIALING!!! I’ve walked in here about five times this morning and no one is on the motherfucking phone.

"NO ONE IS ON THE PHONE!!! What the fuck do you think? You think the fuckin’ customers are just going to call in and throw money at you? I’ll listen to you The Fuckin' Sales Force complain just as soon as I see they are actually working. I got three orders this morning while you were shaking off your goddamned hangovers!"

"I want every phone nigger in this room to book at least $250 by lunch. The orders are out there. The only question is are you men enough to close them? Or are you going to stand here all day blubbering about a bunch of goddamned cancellations?"

"You could be halfway out of the hole if you just got on the phones. Dial for dollars, boys, starting now. "
---o0o---

Thursday, August 04, 2005

Painting: The Family


Click image to enlarge

Poem: The Man In The Mirror

There's a civil war in his head:
Lobe against lobe.

But even when you erase it,
Or stamp out the memory,

It's still
Out There,

Because it if it once was
It still is.
---o0o---

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Can You Hear Me Major Toms?




Our tattered space shuttle, spinning 220 miles overhead, shed a few unexpected parts when it took off. . .tile, insulation, and the like. A chunk here, a tile there, and pretty soon you're talking real trouble.

Yesterday, they sent astronaut Steve Robinson on an extra-vehicular spacewalk to pull out two chunks of "gap filler," (space-caulk?) that were dangling from the shuttle: Mission Accomplished.

NASA, however, in the news this morning, said that they may need another walk, because a "thermal blanket" outside the craft had been somehow compromised.

NASA seems to be whistling in the dark on the matter of our deconstructing shuttle. I wonder just what the astronauts are thinking?

A couple of days ago, I saw a bumper sticker I liked on an old car:

Honk if anything falls off

---o0o---

The Time I Got Drunk With Roy Rogers

In July 1971 I had just graduated from Kent Meridian High School. My Uncle Gould (1919-1988) and Aunt Henriette Brummet (the bride he brought home from Germany in WW II) invited me to their ranch in the desert between and east of Los Angeles and San Diego. They grew avocados. I had never been outside the northwest before. A 25-hour Greyhound ride deposited me in Oceanside. Road runners scurried in front of the jeep as we drove up to the house which was circled with orange trees. I spent my days swimming in their pool and driving their jeep, and hiking in the barren, rolling hills. I drove to the nearby observatory at Mt. Palomar [1] one day, where the students and scientists gave me the grand tour.

My Aunt and Uncle gave me a choice: we could go to Disneyland or visit Tijuana. I chose Tijuana, of course, and made the first of many trips to Mexico.

Gould had retired from the Army and was able to go to El Toro, and use the P.X. and officers club. We went there twice for dinner. My long hair was just as popular with the retired officers as it was with my Uncle.

The Vietnam war raged on under President Nixon. I had recently been trained as a draft counselor, and had applied to my draft board for consideration as a conscientious objector [2]. Needless to say, this did not sit well with my uncle. After jousting the first couple of nights, we finally reached a most tentative impasse; an armed truce.

Most days, my Uncle worked the ranch, and my Aunt worked at her beauty parlor in Bonsall. I was on my own. My Aunt's mother--Muti--was there and we spent our days swimming, puttering around the house, picking avocados and oranges, and drinking beer. We knew about five words of each other's language, but made it work. She called me the milch-brudder (because I liked milk) and I called her Bier-frau because every day at 5:00 she brought out the stoneware mugs and poured the first of several Lownbraus as we sat in chairs and watched the sun slowly recede over the dusty ochre hills.

Out in the orchard (or whatever they call an avocado plantation) one day, Uncle Gould and I bumped into Roy Rogers, whose estate bordered my uncle's ranch. I was a little in awe, of course, I had grown up watching Roy, Dale, Trigger and Bullet Saturday mornings.

My Uncle was going into town for parts and Roy decided to join us. We jumped in a dusty station wagon and headed down the long trail that led to the road into town.

After making various stops in town, and waiting as Roy signed autographs for a family of tourists, we hit the package store where my Uncle purchased various potions, including a few bottles of Mateus [3], one of which we corked and passed back and forth on the ride home. Roy told us a story about a couple of movies he had starred in with Trigger.

I was not an experienced drinker. Yes, I got drunk with Roy Rogers, but to the best of my recollection, he remained sober as a judge. I was shocked when one of them lobbed the empty Mateus bottle out the window into an arroyo. I did not make a total ass of myself or demand to be taken to see Trigger at the Roy Rogers Museum (I would go there later in the week).

I know--you all expected me to tell you a story about how we got trashed and headed into a San Diego bordello. We didn't. All I really remember is that Roy was a sweet man who told some great stories. He was remarkably upbeat for a guy whose life was marred again and again by tragedy.

We saw Roy Rogers a couple more times while I was there, but nothing memorable happened. He was just a very nice, corny guy with a heart of gold. Look him up on the internet. Roy starred in dozens of horse operas (that is, low budget films) and had a long-running show on television. His excellent country recordings in the 30's and 40's with the Sons of the Pioneers became best sellers. You may have heard "Cool Water" and "Tumbling Tumbleweeds." The music is solid roots Americana (I have two of their albums on my iPod). Roy also recorded a wonderful LP about Pecos Bill, with song interludes by the Sons. I had a dub of that album and played it many times for my children Colum and Claire. I don't think I even told them Roy and I spent a little time together in the desert.

[1] Palomar was famous because the the (5.1 m) Hale Telescope (f/3.3)-- was the world's largest telescope for 45 years (1948-93).

[2] In the end, the Draft Board never gave me a hearing. I had already sent them a copy of The Bible and numerous other documents, as well as a long essay on why I didn't believe in making war. It's just as well my case never came up because it was always difficult for me to be 100% conscientious objector. It was The Nazis that poked holes in my philosophy. I could never truly reconcile my pacifism with the fact that shortly before I was born we had to stop The Nazis. To successfully press your case as a C.O., you needed to be against all war under any circumstance. I could never make that complete leap. In the end, my draft lottery number was 186, and I was off the hook unless President Nixon went bananas and escalated the war. By 1972 that was no longer an option for him, since he would spend the rest of his Presidency embroiled in the Watergate Cover-up.


[3] A Portuguese "rose." Portugal actually makes some great wines (their No. 1 customer is France), but Mateus is not one of them. It is probably not even good enough to call a gateway wine. But this was 1971.
---o0o---

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Further Ruminations On Enumclaw And Beastiality

Click image to enlarge [1]


Beastiality is not kosher [2] according to The Pentateuch:

"Do not have sex with any kind of animal.
You would become unclean by doing so." [3]

[1] Illustration from The Brick Testament. Is that bunny in line, or what?
[2] According to the same source, of course, neither is shellfish, pigs, or menstruating women (until they have waited seven days, ritually bathed, and sacrificed two animals at the temple. In fact, any chair a woman in menses sat in was unclean.

[3] Leviticus 8:23
---o0o---

The Posies Interviewed By London Rock Daily



Do you feel that the time away, and the work you and Jon have done with REM, Big Star and your solo stuff has actually grown the reputation of The Posies?

KS: The time off didn't really harm anything, if anything it made us appreciate what we have, it seems to have made some people appreciate what we do and because we've not been that available it gives the air of being something pretty special this time around. We feel quite appreciated now! And I think those old records have a sort of persistance - they're records that people recommend to each other on a frequent basis. They're 'best kept secret' records. And I was surprised when I saw a recent sales report of 'Frosting On The Beater' (the band's 1993 classic) - it sold quite a lot in those intervening years.

Click here for full interview.

Click here to listen to an acoustic live track.
---o0o---

Painting: The Grey Landing Party



The Grey Landing Party
Click image to enlarge

Monday, August 01, 2005

Poem: Liftoff


For months, tarped and strapped
I sat on the pad at Cape Canaveral.
The NASA crew held me tethered
At T Minus Ten and counting
The last seconds before mounting
The sky. I achieved ignition
To staff the next shuttle mission
(The first true solo flight) and weathered,
With no Icarus wings, the pitch and roll
And re-entered the atmosphere charred. I flapped

Back in, soot-covered, alive and hale
And showed that it could be done
By sheer will (and some astral projection).
My aorta and skin were checked and sealed
Before I lifted off, wobbled and peeled
Away from Florida with a silent scream.
The G-force sent me into a dream
From which I emerged with a quick injection.
In seconds I had zipped past the clouds, gone
Weightless and laughing at the inhuman scale.
---o0o---