Invisible Themepark

Category: ApexUSA

ApexUSA is a stab into the darkness, an attempt via ad images to locate the exact point in the 20th century when America reached its cultural peak.

Is a LIFE ad for Pullman coaches really indicative of what was going on in America in 1937? Isn’t that a distorted view? Yes. But a serious, tight-lipped historical account would be equally distorted. Pick your distortion.

This is not a yearning for the past. As time goes by, you gain some things, lose others. There are no answers here. Only evidence.

  • Faux Sixties Humility: Charlie Brown vs. Gen. Montgomery

    How to find that exact apex of U.S. culture?  Let’s go a little farther out, bracketing it with two extreme points, one at the end of World War II and the other squarely in the funky late 1960s.  Somewhere between these extremes lies the exact tipping point.

    1967:  Victims Rejoice

    The headline stating “Charlie Brown and Snoopy: Winners at Last” also highlights the Cult of Loserdom that was fetishized beginning in the mid-1960s.  Peanuts’ heyday was the 1960s and 1970s, and in many ways Peanuts encapsulates so many of those points that the Sixties held so dear:  Freudian psychology, juvenalia, faux humility.  We have this Naive Art style (contrast this with the draftsman-like art of cartoonist Winsor McCay in Little Nemo in Slumberland).  Everything in Peanuts is slightly askew, off-centered; it’s the let’s-not-get-to-the-point pose of the embarrassed, self-hating majority.  “A Charlie Brown Christmas” is held near and dear to the heart of so many millenials.  Recall, for fuck’s sake, the angst and tearing of garments in that TV special.

    LIFEMagazineCharlieBrown

    1944:  Winners

    Twenty-three years before, we have a true winner-takes-all LIFE cover featuring titanium-balled General Montgomery in his beret, lambs-wool coat, and cable-knit sweater. Somehow I doubt that the Cult of Loserdom got much fawning press back in 1944.

    LIFEMagazineGenMontgomery

  • The Moto Ritz Towers, 1937

    The Moto Ritz Towers, 1937

    Bruce McCall is the patron saint of secret infrastructure. His book, Zany Afternoons, is one of my most highly valued books. For some odd reason, most of my favorite books were on sale in the bargain bin at bookstores. This one was a mere ten bucks at Barnes & Noble.

    While there are too many great Bruce McCall drawings/comics to list, one of my favorite series of drawings is called “New York, Once Upon a Time”. He talks about a parallel universe of New York architecture that never was and never could have been.

    The Moto Ritz Towers in 1937 - Bruce McCall - Compressed

    There is the Ironing Board Building, instead of the very-real Flatiron Building. There is the Fifth Avenue Line Subway, 1901, which I believe has some vague connection to reality. And then of course there was the time that a portion of Central Park was turned into Jimmy Walker Metropolitan Airfield, back in 1931. Or how about Canal Street, 1934, which had a real canal in front, complete with ferry-trolleys plying the waterways. Of course, Canal Street did have to be drained in 1939 as a precaution against Nazi subs.

    The Moto Ritz Towers in 1937 is one of my favorite. As McCall puts it:

    Theater people had most of the top floors. They partied continuously. Coming up late at night was hell, you knew some of them were up there somewhere, on the way down. Woe betide the tenant whose driver was yellow. We had nothing but bad luck with ours. One of them–an ex-aviator, if you can imagine–would get halfway up, stop and vomit. Even when it wasn’t foggy. You often just left your car down on the street and took a taxi; those people would do anything for money. The ghoulish publicity after that first bad ice storm virtually forced the city to tear the roadway out. As a compromise there was talk at the time about guard rails. We didn’t want guard rails. The absence of guard rails, wasn’t that the whole and entire point?