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Picture Perfect, for 40 Years
By Jim Shahin
Usually, in this column, I talk about myself.
But this being the 40th anniversary of the magazine and all, I thought I would talk about something different.
My picture.
See
it over there? On the top left-hand corner? Or maybe on the bottom
right-hand corner? Hard to say where it is these days. Playing peekaboo
with it is part of the fun.
Wheeee!
Fun, huh?
The real fun is that it isn’t actually a picture at all. Not in the photographic sense.
It is an illustration.
No
more of that stodgy exact-likeness-of-me stuff, what with all that
silly recognition hoo-ha. Nosireebob. We’re going for something a bit
more … what’s the word? Oh yeah — fun!
I’ll admit it, I fell into a little snit earlier this year when the magazine replaced my photo with a drawing, er, illustration.
I
said some things to the editor that I shouldn’t have. Things like
“editing under the influence.” And “crazy as a TV commercial mattress
salesman.” And “if you like it so much, why don’t you have them make an
illustration for your column?” And … um … wait a minute. According to my Mail Waiting to Be Sent folder, I never dispatched that e-mail. [To whoever edits my column: Please delete this entire paragraph before Sherri Burns sees it. Thanks. — Jim]
But I am over my pique now.
That’s because I prefer the anonymity that comes with being unrecognizable. See, the illustration does not look like me.
Those of you who recall the photo that used to run with this column know that I look exactly like Brad Pitt.
People
would come up to me and ask, “Are you Brad Pitt?” Sometimes I would
sign an autograph for them: “The first rule of Namibia is that there is
no Namibia. — Brad.” But, usually, I would just flash my
shy-yet-spellbinding Brad Pitt-ian smile and say, “You’ve got the
wrong guy. Brad is my brother, the ugly one.” (Ha-ha.)
But now I
don’t have to worry about that pestering. I can go to the grocery store
in peace. My wife is no longer portrayed tearfully or dumbstruck on the
cover of supermarket tabloids with a headline that reads something
along the lines of, “Is Jim Two-timing Jessica with Charlize?”
Actually,
the illustration goes beyond deconstructing my celebrity, which is a
post-modern-pre-retro thing to do. It is part of the joke.
See,
to run an illustration of a chunky, bearded guy who in reality is a
dead ringer for Brad Pitt — well, that is funny. So, the whole thing
has this synergistic holisticality to it. Know what I mean?
Okay, I don’t either. I lost myself at deconstructing.
Whether
clever or straightforward, the art accompanying this column through the
years has served as a road map of where we have been as a magazine.
Indeed, you might say, where we have been as a people.
When this column debuted nearly 14 years ago, its “art,” as they call “pictures” in magazine parlance, was designed to look like
a
refrigerator door with typical family doodads on it, most prominently
an arcade-type photo strip of me with my wife and then-toddler son.
Family values were front and center in those days, and the design
reflected the cornerstone of those values, which was the togetherness
that comes from putting stuff on your refrigerator. We were younger
then, but I still looked uncommonly like Brad.
In the mid-1990s,
as the culture soared with the dot-com boom, I soared with it. One
brutally hot Texas afternoon, a photographer snapped away as I jumped
on a backyard trampoline. The result was a whimsical shot of me
suspended in white space, leaping — or, as an airline magazine might
have it, flying. I wore a suit and sneakers, sort of business maverick.
Very Brad in Ocean’s 11.
Then came turbulent times and,
with them, a series of different headshots. To distract us from our
troubles, we — as a people and as a magazine — turned our attention to
celebrity. One time, I was flown to a studio filled with unbelievably
hip and beautiful people who ate little hip and beautiful sandwiches
and who tried to make me hip and beautiful. Which, of course, was easy,
because, regardless of the pose, I retained a certain something that
can only be described as Brad.
In other words, if you sawed into
the column, its artwork would be like tree rings, revealing the various
epochs that the magazine has lived through.
It is probably best
not to reveal the in-house particulars of those epochs, as I already
will have plenty enough fences to mend after submitting this column. [Art Department: Love ya. Really.]
Let me just say that anniversaries are times in which to reflect. And
on this, the magazine’s 40th, my reflections have led me to a
realization.
A picture is worth a thousand words — or, in my
case, a word count of 800. But when it is a face on a column, whether
photographed or illustrated, one thing a picture isn’t worth is getting
worked up about. It means you’re still working.
That, at any rate, is what I told Brad.
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