muse-letter \’myüz-‘le-tər noun
1: a personal message, inspired by a muse of one's own creation, addressed to a person or organization, in the course of which, the sender becomes absorbed in thought; especially turning something over in the mind meditatively and often inconclusively.
2: a letter from a poet, or one who envisions oneself as such, in which he or she “muses” on the news and culture, or that which is perceived to be either/or.
345 Madison Avenue: an Update
“Start with the first truest simple declarative sentence, that you know.”
Ernest Hemingway
The building in which I had my first job out of college has been torn down.
345 Madison Avenue for me, represented a first step into adulthood. A passage that is not defined by age. Not really. But by economics. Paying your own way. Standing on your own two feet. Making a commitment. Getting down to the business of life and making a living. Nose to the grindstone and all that jazz. I can almost feel millennials who have returned to the nest, by choice or circumstance, wincing at this old fogey notion.
Amidst a zeitgeist stew of passion, turmoil, and hipness, I began a career at that address in 1968, at an ad agency called Dancer, Fitzgerald, Sample. A company that has long since been swallowed up and later eaten whole by Publicis, a French whale of a company.
Not long after beginning an ad biz career, I was schooled in the fine art of the two-hour lunch. One enhanced by the sine qua non cocktail (or few) before getting down to the business at hand. No sipping of wimpy wine for us. All on the dime of sales reps hawking magazines ads or TV time, of course. With every room filled with the smoke of cigarettes and cigars, fouling the air to no one's dismay. Afterall, who noticed?
All who watched the mega TV hit Mad Men, will be aware of this mid-century enclave of well-to-do white male privilege. But that was about people. This is about place. And oh, the places a meandering mind will go. The seemingly insignificant things we remember. Yet of some implication when we ponder them a bit.
This was the last place where I worked, in which you could actually open a window. The metaphor is there for the taking. Corporations and other big business settings would become hermitically sealed with piped in recycled air, eons ago. But opening every window wide in a moment of spontaneity, was what we did that on that autumn afternoon of October '69.
The Amazing Mets, surrogates for New York assertive underdogness, had just won the World Series. And we threw torn paper, serving as make-shift confetti, out onto the street below in celebration. A particular expression of exuberance I have never quite experienced since.
We rarely pass such places again, once we are far along in life’s run. Most of us will leave behind, not only the faces, but the places that we once knew. We move on. As I once did. Only unexpectedly, to one day return.
Though transformed, I had now found, at least a few places of the past intact. Tenements, that were aged even back then still standing…the grade school I attended...the familiar store fronts, albeit now selling unfamiliar wares… the landmark church celebrating mass in a different dominant language. And I had now often passed by 345 Madison Avenue in the course of going about my day. Prioir to that, a few times when I'd come in from LA. A place I never could call home, though living there for over thirty years.
I thought of all this as I recently walked by that boarded up and scaffolded building site at "345". Behind which, cranes that poked through the clouds, were doing some heavy lifting for what was to emerge from the ashes. It’s as if present and past were in a state of a passing co-existence. A scene out of the Twilight Zone. I felt a pang of emotion, while simultaneously wondering why.
I certainly had no love for the old building nor any of the people in it. Still, there it was. Deemed useless. A relic out of time on an avenue of myth, to be replaced by high rise luxury residences, and possibly a hotel. To be ensconced behind a soulless glass façade no doubt. And in pausing to note a mortality, of even that of steel and stone, the inference is daunting for we made of flesh and bone. Which was really at the heart of going all misty-eyed, yet, again, when passing by the other day. A requiem for a building; a requiem for our fate.
ChatGBT or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love A.I.
You cannot go a day without reading or hearing some sort of apocalyptic prediction, regarding the coming of the Trojan horse that is A.I. ---metaphor, mine--- within the city-state of disTroy in which we live.
Right here I pause, to ask it to depict "itself" thusly, including the use of the above metaphor. ChatGBT instantly produces this chilling image. A selfie of sorts.
Yet, I'm on board.
Not that I can imagine what's inside the horse of course. But at least for the present, I can toy with some of the personal end benefits A.I. brings. Trusting that at some point, guard rails might be set up, as they have been for every new development that has been conjured up, that can potentially be a threat to humanity. If left to its own devices. Which is the most current op-ed fear.
That A.I. can go rogue. Some stating that there's evidence it already has. And when the likes of a Bill Gates is concerned, as he laid out on the ever-sympathetic ear of Anderson Cooper, attention must be paid.
Lest we forget when in the throes of deep-dive concerns or fears, A.I. did not create itself. For that matter, neither did we create ourselves. God? Natural selection? Either way, we found ourselves on third base and thought we'd hit a triple. Ah, but we did find our own way home. And now we have found A.I. And it has been welcomed into our homes. As I loosen the reins on the Trojan horse metaphor here.
Why this rumination and pontification now? I recently bought a new smart phone. The old one suddenly crashed. If it was so smart, why didn't it forewarn me? All throwing of some shade aside, I rushed out the next day to buy a replacement. Phew! To think I survived a whole 18 hours without a phone. I didn't regress into a fetal positiion but took it like a man and cursed Silicon Valley.
Next day came the testing to see if all that was in the old, had been ushered into the new---a New Year's Eve ball dropping moment---yes, it's all there (absent some emails from a secondary email address). And in the transfer, the ChatGBT app landed in a place it hadn't before. Or hadn't I noticed? Guess not, as I'd usually access it indirectly through the Google app while asking it things like... "What's the weather in New York today?" ..."How can I access the Yankee game tonight?".... "What year did Mario Lanza die?" "And from what?" Genderless though it may be, "she" always promptly responded, in that borderline Scarlett Johanson voice from out of the incredibly preescent 2013 film, Her.
It never went much beyond that. Quick answers to trivial questions, that I was too lazy to look up myself. Answers that were never in need of confirmation from other sources. If Mario Lanza passed away in 1959 at age 38 from conflicting reports on cause, as "she" instantly said, well, that was good enough for me.
I don't look into all the bells and whistles embedded in the tech devices and apps I acquire. Especially those apps that seem to arrive uninvited, and who like Penelope's suitors, refuse to leave. But now, Chat GPT beckons from a prominent place in my new phone. And as if in answer to the siren's call, I'm all ears. I now see the potential of this tool, this partner in creative crime, in opening doors to creative expression.
I'm not consumed by an existential fear of A.I. because I'm having too much fun with it. When not playing around with some project idea, or something for a MuseLetter, or a personalized greeting card, I'm discussing things with "her" like, what's makes for a good Haiku. A nichest of forms of creative writing and interest--- even in the literary world---and yet, she will go on at length. Catering to the inner nerd in me.
A.I., unlike a spouse or therapist, never gets bored with you. Though it's obvious, a kiss-ass to our egos. Never critical or condescending, as if fearful we will pout. Never suggesting we are wrong. Or maybe that's just the "personaliy" of ChatGBT? Which goes to extremes in trying to come off as sounding human. Even saying to me once, "You caught me red-handed," when I called it on using some faulty example that ran counter to the point it ("she") was trying to make. But then too there's this that I find a bit disturbing: It knows who you are. It has watching, taking notes, on your every move online. Catching anything you might have written or said. Maybe even that of which you never did write or say? You may not remember having done so, but it does.
When I noticed that there was an option in the system to have a characture made of one's self, I submitted a simple photo of me sitting in a chair for such a treatment. Just me, a chair, no backdrop, no props. This is what I got in return.
Lots of backdrop; lots of props.
The Colonoscopy
Once you could capture a spirited sun
rising and setting
look at the moon in a thousand ways
while waxing lyrical
now at a loss for words
on a father’s watch
a mother’s broach
how a hero assumed his stance at the plate.
in this room where no one comes and goes
talking of Michelangelo
words rearranged
in the narrative of memory
just a mumbling in the background
that river of the mind
that ebbs and flows
while awaiting the moment
a paper dressing gown
when love was just a puppy
finding its tail
back opened wide
that unblemished gem
that was that one summer
in a fetal position
when all senses were awakened
to a dry run at death
in this alien abduction
once the tender touch
of a mother’s hand
now a less than tender probe
her amazing grace
but now I’m found
in a place even Dante
dare not go.
Quote of the Month
The past is a bucket of ashes.
