“The problem all began when we named the animals.”

That’s what the woman said to her friend, sitting next to me at  Elephant & Castle.

It was a remark to send your index finger twirling up beside your head. Unless, of course, you stop for a second and venture out from the thimble of our knowledge  into the vast ocean of thought.

A name is what defines you. Define means to separate. To isolate. When you reside as an indistinct particle of an amorphous whole, a peaceful atom within the white quilted comforter of life, you don’t merit a name. But when you become a distinct entity, you are required to carry one at all times.

So the process of naming is a process of separating, but more profoundly, it is a process of objectifying. Named, you are maimed. Named, you migrate from  the subject of experience to an object in the flow of experience. There’s a rock, a staple gun and Fred. I’m just one of the things that showed up, said Fred.

So what did the lady mean, nibbling on her Elephant & Castle Caeser Salad? By naming the animals, the animals went from being manifestations of life, citizens of a nation different but no less worthy than our own, to being objects. That’s not a person with a long neck and spots over there. It is a giraffe. That isn’t a being with four legs. It’s a dog. As soon as you turn animals into objects — and even the word “animal” objectifies them — the floodgates open. You can dominate, eat, kill, control them. You can even stick small Spanish guys on them and place bets. They are objects, after all. They have names to prove it.

Which explains the vast tapestry of death called history. Start naming people…Jew-Arab-Fascist-Republican-accountant…and people become things, with all the lack of rights and respect things are entitled to. The rest is easy.

In the Hebrew tradition, naming the Ultimate Reality is frowned upon. Any name you give the Unnameable limits it, objectifies it, and thus diminishes it.

Ironically, the name most often given to the Ultimate is “The Name.” HASHEM, in Hebrew. SHEM is the Hebrew word for “name”, deriving from the word NESHAMAH, which means soul. So from the Kabbalistic perspective, your name is your soul, and thus carries overwhelming importance. To change your name is to change the DNA of your soul.

The difference ends up being what you name. Give name to your being and your life is exalted. Give name to your category, and it promotes your thingness.

What’s in a name? It depends on what part of you you’re naming.

It was two grand old icons in their late model glory.

The theater, a grand birthday cake of architectural exuberance from the Twenties, whose Moorish Rococo witnessed vaudeville, only to be replaced by moving pictures, only to be replaced by Rev. Ike’s campaign to fleece the poor, only to be replaced by rock n roll.

 And Bob Dylan.

 There he was, still there, still skinny, still rocking, still His Bobness all these decades later.

 This is not the space to explain Bob Dylan. I could write a book about it. Actually, I did. (Oh, My Name It Is Nothing. The unsung words of Bob Dylan)

 This is a place of short, pithy observation. So what shall we observe of the man who is the foundation upon which rock is built? The man who is the oxygen within which rock n roll has breathed since 1964?

 He brought intellect, poetry, hipness, bohemian culture, ferocity and surrealism to the great American jukebox. He made an art form out of a bubblegum genre manufactured for adolescents. He could have left us in the Woody Guthrie folkie phase, walking the streets of Greenwich Village in boots and ragged jeans. He could have left us as the towering icon who, as one critic described it, “berserked himself into genius” and produced Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Re-visited and Blonde on Blonde all within 16 months, an upheaval of creativity that changed how we write, sing and hear music forever. He could have left us in the country-gentleman family-man phase he retreated into after the drug-addled fame that could and should have destroyed him. He could have left us as the born-again Christian only a nice Jewish boy in a lot of trouble could have become. He could have left us as the preternaturally weird, forgotten, mocked former Sixties icon in the Eighties, worshipped now only by a few in the US and more in England. He could have left us after his final resurrection into his greatest phase of commercial success.

 But he didn’t. He just stood there swaying fifteen rows from my son and me on the stage of the United Palace Theater, growling happily, banging on the organ, fronting “the best band in the land.”

 He had even outlived Rev. Ike, whose final justification sits on a sign in the opulence of the lobby. “I am not the opinions of others.”

 I wrote an inscription in a book for my son when he was born: “When’s he’s sixteen, may a Bob Dylan come along for him too.”

 It did. It just turned out to be Bob Dylan.

It is a danceteria in the ruins of industrial civilization. A nightclub carved in an abandoned tunnel near the West Side highway and called, because we live in an era when iron has given way to irony, The Tunnel.

Once, in a haze of cigarette smoke, nightclub names evoked the exotic worlds of black and white movies: El Morocco. Copacabana. Latin Quarter. Eden Roc.

Now it is 1990, and a super-cool authenticity is found in the detritus of late capitalism: a colossal warehouse of sweat and electronica whose only nod to ancient nightclub glory is the VIP room.

In the VIP room, the A-list slithers in, in all three sexes. A VIP party is taking place, but not an important VIP party, because VIP parties go on in the VIP Room every day. The party is in honor of a half-sister of Liza named Lorna who sings too. Except Lorna is nowhere to be seen. Maybe she doesn’t exist. Or maybe she does, but tonight she is just an imaginary theme, an excuse to hold a VIP party.

At any rate, the A-list slitherers don’t care. They wear their virulent strain of fashion as proudly as they wear the virulent strain of boredom that infects such events, and has since, oh, Max’s Kansas City. They all know each other. They show up in the same circles, parties such as this in places such as this. Parties are the office they go to every afternoon when they wake up.

The lesson of the A-list slitherers is that they are simply functionaries. Flunkies in a marketplace of meanings. Extras in a living commercial for this night club.

The implied product of parties is happiness, but here in the VIP room of The Tunnel, the total quanta of happiness would not register on an electron microscope. What is taking place is commerce.

The Great Unwashed, whose money will soon be laundered, lays down cash at the door in exchange for a meaning: an experience of cool. The illusion of cool is created by the simple fact that an A-list exists and inhabits a VIP room they are not permitted to enter. Their own exclusion is the product guarantee of authenticity.

Meanwhile, up at the party, the exchange begins.

Lorna, the singing sister, couldn’t care less about the guests at her party, if she’s even there. She trades her slight frisson of fame for an infinitesimal boost to her career.

The slitherers couldn’t care less about Lorna, the singing sister. They trade their aura for a free place to conduct the business of being cool.

The owners of the nightclub couldn’t care less about the singing sister or the A-List. They trade some real estate and free drinks for a VIP room whose sole reason for existence is to create a class of people who won’t be allowed in.

I leave.

The bridge and tunnel crowd have begun assembling outside the Tunnel, lining up on a desolate street to entrust their destiny to a doorman. Some will not merit being admitted into a club that will then not admit them to the VIP room.

Humiliation, desperation, crushing prices and decibels are the payment. The truth embedded in the proposition? Same as it was on the leopard-striped banquettes of El Morocco: Enchantment.

In 1968, the established culture packaged and neutered a revolutionary movement known as Hippies. HAIR opened in lower Manhattan, and long-haired freaks were transported off the squalid streets and mattress-clogged floors of the East Village and onto the stage of the Public Theater, singing and dancing.   He who would blunt the ferocity of a social movement would turn it into a Broadway musical.

So, HAIR was a subversive cultural movement tamed into art. But, at the same time, it was a tame art form transformed into explosive art.  Broadway musical theater had never seen the crazy spontaneity of a Happening break the fourth wall of a theater. It had never sung and danced its way through a story without a “book” or logical story line. It had never filled a stage with explosions of four-letter words, unclothed bodies, hallucinations and anti-government slogans. Sociology was tamed, but art was energized.

Now we are forty years on, in the time of another unpopular war, and HAIR has been revived.  And it offers to one-hundred-dollars-a-ticket audiences all the revolutionary fervor of an American Idol show. Meaning, it is an act of cultural karaoke. Breaking fourth walls, sex talk and hints of nudity shock no more. The virulent anti-government rhetoric of the Viet Nam era and any semblance of flag abuse have been carefully scrubbed from the script to guarantee that. And The Hippie, once a walking, talking, drugged-out mockery of bourgeois values, is now a cliché suitable for costume parties, along with pirates and Elvis.

“Look, Maude, look at these wild hippies in the Hirschfeld Theater jumping into the audience and shaking their long hair. Look at the three seconds of nudity. Look at those cute anti-war signs. Look at the hallucinations. Isn’t it cute and zesty?”

HAIR wasn’t cute and zesty when it shattered theatrical convention in 1968.  Hippies weren’t cute and zesty when Rado and Ragni turned them into singing dancing clichés in their iconic show.

Of course, what hippies mostly did while conducting their revolution was smoke cigarettes, take drugs, have sex and listen to records. So maybe permanent enshrinement in Broadway theaters was the least unhealthy fate awaiting them.

Give me a head with hair? Please, take it.

He is the head of General Motors.

He is leading America into “a new economic order, where the bonds of scarcity have been broken, and America is rolling in two-toned splendor to an all- time crest of prosperity.”

This was 1955. Harlow Curtice was head of General Motors and Time magazine’s Man of the Year. The magazine was ebullient. Soon, it gushed, Americans will need to spend “comparatively little time earning a living.”

Well, it is today, and many people actually are “spending comparatively little time earning a living,” But not from the “crest of prosperity” that was promised.

The “two-toned” splendor” of General Motors turned out to be a planned obsolescence in which cars were designed to conveniently break down in three years. It turned out to be a fight to the death against energy standards, a full-scale assault on safety standards, and the destruction of mass transit and trains. It turned out to be about a trillion lousy cars hot off the assembly lines of Michigan.

General Motors went financially bankrupt this week, following a half a century of just about every other kind of bankruptcy. Time magazine isn’t doing too well, either.

The acerbic, brilliant and clearly emotionally-stunted media provocateur, Christopher Hitchens, detonated a little cultural suicide bomb recently. He wrote an essay entitled: “Why women aren’t funny.”

Now, he went off the rails when responding to the obvious response to such a statement. Namely, that there are, well, funny women around — including professional comedians. He answered, in effect: sure, there are, but they’re lesbians (he actually employed a different term) and Jews. Uh, case closed.

But the sturm und drang that inevitably accompanies such incendiary pronouncements, or the incendiary pronouncements would never be pronounced, cloud an interesting truth at the heart of the argument. An evolutionary truth.

The fact is, men are egregiously unattractive when compared to women. And it is only by some ingenious sleight of evolutionary hand that women aren’t compelled  en masse to become gay.

So, the point is not that women aren’t funny. The point is that they don’t need to be. To fulfill their role in the biological imperative, that is, be attractive, all they need to do is show up. It’s wonderful that they do much else. But they don’t need to do much else.

Men, on the other hand, are driven by necessity to become funny. It is often said comedians are insecure, unattractive people who develop wit to compensate for other lacks. Well, men as a species are insecure, unattractive people who must develop wit to compensate for other lacks.

Humor is clearly a form of sexual play, and what is laughter if not an orgasm in the mind? A laugh is a short, surprising, violent overthrow of the stasis and status quo, a momentary release from order and structure.

“But he made me laugh.” It is a common phrase uttered by women about men otherwise deficient. And a statement never, ever employed by men when speaking about women.

So women aren’t funny, or at least they don’t need to be.

Dorothy Parker

But then along comes Dorothy Parker:

I like to have a Martini,
Two at the very most.
Three, I’m under the table.
Four I’m under my host.

Where else could flabby white guys in their forties be considered supreme athletes?

Golf is either a sport, a game, boredom framed in green, or as close to religion as it gets for secular guys with bad fashion sense.

We do know golf is the official pastime of the White Anglo-Saxon Ascendancy. Ironically, it is now dominated, as is America, by a semi-black man of near superhuman talents.

A New Age guru once spoke of golf. He said life is a game and in order to have a game, something has to be more important than something else. A golf course is just a field. So in order to create a game, you have say that mound is more important than this mound. Now, you could throw the ball over there, or simply walk over and drop it, but that wouldn’t be fun. So you hit the ball to the mound with a stick, because that’s fun. Except the guy who has the most fun loses.

Anyway, this is a column about meanings, not birdies, bogies and paunches. So I go for the idea of golf as a re-enactment of the primordial archetype of hunting. A group of men go off together into the woods of a beautiful morning. There is camaraderie and healthy masculine competition. The women have been happily and safely left behind in the cave (or split-level). The men carry their clubs on their backs and venture out with a single-minded fervor to hunt the prey. The clubs are gleaming metal (or forged from space-age composites) and the prey is nothing but a series of holes with flags sticking out. But the archetype holds. Men wouldn’t devote so much time, energy, money and vanished family time chasing a white ball unless an archetype was involved.

I have always found golf annoyingly hard. After all, there is so much world and so little hole.

Apparently, Mark Twain agreed. He called the sport — or game — of golf: “A good walk spoiled.”

It is a rite of passage.

It is a rite of Spring.

It is a right of college students to debauch en masse in sleepy beach towns.

I am thinking of Spring Break, as the plane noses down into Fort Lauderdale. Fort Lauderdale, where the boys are. Fort Lauderdale, where post-adolescent livers have marinated yearly in alcohol since the Thirties.

I myself have never partaken in the explosion of sand, sun, sex and hangovers known as Spring Break. But I wrote a commercial for it once. Actually, it was a commercial for Volvo. (See Paul’s Work at paulwolfeideas.com to view the commercial) The commercial was created to begin elevating the legendary Swedish bastion of safety and solidity up the ladder of sex and luxury.

Granted, this was no easy task. Volvos were boxier than a cardboard carton and as sexy as colon therapist.

But one day, in the charming old Swedish town of Gothenburg, the captains of Volvo woke up and realized safety only got you so far. To be precise, it got you to $30,000. Above that, you had to be sexy. You had to circumvent the cerebral cortex. You had to offer something far more ephemeral and mysterious than a good, solid car that saved your life. You had to seize people in the depths of their reptilian brains, where the alchemy of dream and desire mixes with strange, invisible passions and moves people to spend more than they should.

So where do you begin such an evolution? Volvo began it with a sedan called the Volvo 850. Dowdy by today’s standards, it was nevertheless a streamlining of the bunker on wheels college professors and proto-environmentalists had been driving around in since the 60’s.

So that was the car. What was the idea?  This is where Spring Break reared its crazy, youthful head. How better to change perceptions of a boring car for older people than for four strapping youths to motor it into the maw of  Spring Break?  A young man  forced to transport his buddies to the Dionysian Dreamland in his mother’s Volvo. Would it be a fiasco? Would the girls be turned off? Or would Volvo, and these healthy young men, triumph? Stay tuned.

To further upset expectations, we chose as director of the film, not an expected earnest, talented commercial director who would capture happy people and shoot the sheet metal in the gleaming liquid light that sends car clients into ecstasy.

We chose Bruce Weber, the famous fashion photographer.  Bruce Weber had made a name for himself capturing young people (well, mainly handsome young men) in intriguing, candid, spontaneous black and white moments. He had only dipped his toe into the film arena, with a few black and white documentaries, notably a cool capture of the jazz trumpeter and heroin addict Chet Baker.

The challenge, of course, was that Weber, as talented and unique as he was, had never done a commercial for a real product. In fashion, there is no product, except your imagination. In fashion, it really doesn’t matter what happens on the screen. You like it. That’s enough. It’s cool. That’s enough. It’s weird. That’s enough.

Fashion is the implication of a secret world far cooler and sexier than the one you inhabit.  Of course, look at a model on the subway without her makeup, or speak to one of Bruce Weber’s handsome young men, and you will see immediately, there is no such secret world. And if there were, it is not any cooler than the one you live in.  The illusion of fashion is a flimsy one indeed.

Oscar Wilde said: “We must forgive fashion everything, for it dies so young.”
But I digress.

So we had to move sheet metal. Selling a car involves engines and transmissions and side impact protection systems and warranties and leasing rates.

Bruce Weber would make the boys and girls look good in black and white. What would he do for Volvo?

Ultimately, the spot was successful. But not before some dramatic speed bumps on the Volvo trail. Hundreds of LA’s choicest specimens lined up in bathing suits along the streets of Newport Beach (an expensive resort masquerading as a cheap one) and four young men drove a white Volvo 850  past the gauntlet of smiling girls.

Then an instruction came down from the Volvo client: “Don’t show the kid’s tattoo on camera.” The comment wasn’t necessary. We were shooting about a thousand miles of film, and it would be easy to edit out any shot of the tattoo. No director likes client instructions. Unfortunately, Bruce Weber didn’t only dislike it. He freaked out. He considered the anti-tattoo injunction “homophobic”. How you conflate a family car not wanting to show a tattoo in a TV commercial with prejudice against homosexuals is anybody’s guess, but it was enough, as they say in the lurid parlance of show business, for Bruce Weber to storm off the set.  Cameras, grips, hundreds of nubile girls and a concerned band of advertising people stood on the streets of Newport Beach, wondering.

Of course, he returned, but the stage was set for upset.  The blow-up came in a conference room that night at the hotel in Laguna Beach after a simple request for more collaboration on the shoot. He had, frankly, a tantrum that was scary to anyone outside the medical profession. He finished the shoot, but there was little communication, and for a while, he actually refused to turn over the film.

Finally, he presented his edit, and the difference between the world of fashion and the world of ideas was laid bare. The commercial as finally edited would be a story, with a point and with humor. The boys’ wildest fantasy is enacted, the mother’s Volvo is a hit, and each step of the way, as youths mob the car, standing on the trunk and roof, necking and hula hooping, the driver’s mother calls to make sure they’re taking care of the car. At the end, on a cell phone on the beach surrounded by dozens of girls, Adam says into the phone: “Hi, Mom. Yeh, I’m wearing sun block.”

In Bruce Weber’s cut, there was no story, no arc, no humor and no point. He had taken his beautiful film and made a rock video. The kind of montage of images with no point that might run on a monitor in Banana Republic and be ignored by shoppers.

It was the beginning of Volvo’s ascent into luxury status, the end of Bruce Weber’s forays into real products, a lesson in the limits of fashion, and a memorialization of youth binging on the fruits of, well, youth. All in thirty seconds.

They were simple times. At least that’s the way they seem, now that they’re gone. They probably weren’t simple for those called upon to live them, but let’s agree, shall we, they were simple times. The war was over, prosperity lay like a ribboned highway curving endlessly into the future, men were men, women were women, and Cadillac was luxury. Cadillacs had traversed America’s roads since the dawn of the Twentieth Century, of course, but it was only postwar that they emerged, tail-finned and gunned by humongous V8s, as the pinnacle of American luxury. It was a vision of luxury very long on car and very soft on seat.

Oh, but things change.

A gas crisis gripped the nation. Cars lined up for miles, desperate for re-fuel. And in response, Cadillacs shortened. They went from being gas mass murderers to simply being gas guzzlers, measurable now in miles per gallon rather than gallons per mile.

Oh, but things change.

The 1970s became the 1980s, and a new, more suave notion of automotive luxury took hold. Ocean liner automobiles with miles of Crushed Corinthian Leather suddenly ceased being the epitome of luxury. High performance engines and precision European driving machines were. It was a rethink that catapulted an obscure, spartan little Bavarian soap-bar of a vehicle called BMW into the pantheon of ultimate driving-ness. And it relegated Cadillac to oblivion, an 8-cylinder ghost shadow-boxing in a Crushed Corinthian Palookaville.

Oh, but things change.

An American archetype re-emerged, re-born into a land of malls and suburban streets from sea to shining sea. It was the archetype of the rugged American individual navigating a hostile wilderness in his covered wagon. Cars began to disappear, and in their place came….trucks. Trucks which euphemistically came to be called Sport Utility Vehicles, and euphonically called SUVs. They were suddenly everywhere, massive and indestructible, off-road behemoths safely navigating the hostile wilderness as they pulled up to Starbucks.

Cadillac saw its chance, and in 1999, the Escalade was introduced. Of course, it was based originally on the rather prosaic GMC Yukon Denali, so they had to reconfigure and re-fashion it for Cadillac, and in the process, the luxury SUV was born. The Cadillac of SUVs. It is ironic that by fashioning a truck, Cadillac reclaimed its mantle of luxury, but such is life when you don’t live in simple times. Cadillac scored, and the rappers agreed. They drove Escalades down angry city streets, testing eardrums with sub-woofers and door panels with bullet holes. Even Madonna drives an Escalade to the Torah reading.

Oh, but things change.

The climate is askew, and the planet is threatened. The ravages of petroleum engines on our atmosphere and petroleum countries on our security has changed the vision of automotive luxury yet again. And Cadillac, having had its taste of Palookaville and found it wanting, is ready. Today, the cover of the august Wall Street Journal carried an ad for the new Cadillac Escalade, which proclaimed: “The world’s first full size luxury hybrid SUV.”

In the sheet metal of Cadillac, we read the tortured story of automotive luxury buffeted into contortions by the onrush of history. The mile-long luxury gas guzzler becomes the short luxury gas guzzler becomes the humongous luxury truck becomes “The world’s first full size luxury hybrid SUV”: the world’s first truck that’s also luxurious that’s also humongous that also energy conscious, shedding some of its petroleum to make the planet a better place for our children and our grandchildren.

Oh, but things change, this column predicts.

Soon, the world’s first full size luxury hybrid SUV will go back to its fins. But this time, the Cadillac fins will actually have jet packs in them, for flight not merely along the highways but into the skies and beyond, Cadillac luxury taking us into forever.

And they will be hybrid jet packs, of course.

“It doesn’t make me dream.”

She was dark and exotic looking, a major woman in advertising in Paris. And that was her response to an advertising idea. “It doesn’t make me dream.”

Had we been in America, her counterpart would have said: “I don’t think it’s on strategy,” or “I think it’s too generic,” or “It doesn’t communicate natural ingredients clearly enough,” or “I like it, but I don’t think you’ll ever get it past the client,“ or “I don’t think it’s in the brand personality.”

But in Paris, all the president of a major agency said was: “It doesn’t make me dream.”

In this comment is all you need to know about the difference between France and America. Truth in Advertising means you learn the truth of a culture by studying its advertising.

French culture, and the French psyche, revere the ideal, relish the theoretical and have a passionate love affair with philosophic absolutes. Facts are a bit downscale. Reality, a messy inconvenience. The famous quip about the French mind goes like this: “Sure, it works in practice, but I’m afraid it just doesn’t work in theory.”

It is the idea of the product rather than the product itself. An Air France commercial portrays sexy models sleeping on cloud pillows. (Not a gleaming plane or price from Newark to St. Louis in sight.) In a Paco Rabanne spot, a man and woman twirl slowly in the air having, well, sexual intercourse.

Hardheaded, repressed Protestant-Ethic America, on the other hand, is precisely the opposite. Just the facts ma’am, both in court and in commercials. Don’t give me some theory. I’m a practical guy. Don’t bore me with prissy intellectualizing or that effeminate stylishness. That’s way too…French.

You could never foist a George Bush on a country (aside from some handy intervention by the Supreme Court) unless you had a streak of anti-intellectualism and anti-sophistication a mile wide and 3000 miles long. From that ex-president’s tortured attempts to speak English, to the simply tortured Humphrey Bogart, to the don’t- say-much-but-shoot-when-I have-to Clint Eastwood, the dry, anti-intellectual, facts-only American archetype has ruled ever since the day the Puritans landed and made up a country from scratch.

Selling is second nature to the competitive, individualistic, rational Anglo Saxon mind. And America is one big sponsored universe. From the sides of buildings, to the screens of elevators, to the bodies of athletes, to the products placed judiciously in the frame of major movies, hardly an inch of real estate is free from some form of sponsorship opportunity.

France is different. With a left-wing soul and an idealistic DNA, they have always had a complicated relationship with money, and a positively hostile one to selling.  Commercials weren’t even allowed on French TV until 1968.

And then, it has always been illegal to denigrate your competitor in advertising. And it has always been illegal to give out a phone number and instruct viewers to CALL NOW! Sacre bleu! How do you run a country that way?

Here’s how. President NIcolas Sarkozy just reversed forty years of sex, wit, poetry and elaborate digital effects known as French advertising, and banned all commercials from four French TV stations during the evening hours.

The country that deep in its soul believes it invented human freedom just can’t seem to lose its distaste for manipulation in the realm of commerce. The stores aren’t even open Sundays, the day Americans devote to their religious observance: shopping.

But don’t get me wrong. America believes in the Rights of Man, too.

That’s an HBO series, right? I think I saw an ad for it.