Jed & His Mighty Camaro & Other New Art Werks

A while back, Jed Drake, an old friend of mine from New Canaan, where we grew up among the high and mighty denizens of corporate-land, asked me to scan in a picture from our Senior yearbook so he could, I’m projecting here, luxuriate in the wayward youth of his high school years. New Canaan, for all of you not really interested in such things to know these facts already, was the home of Watson and Watson Jr, both of IBM fame, Noyes, who gave IBM, Mobil Oil and Westinghouse their look and feel, Johnson, he of the Glass House which is also in town, and Symington, Senator Symington to you, bub. Letterman lived there for a bit, Jack Paar too. Harry Connick Jr is a resident, as is Brian Williams, Glenn Beck, Paul Simon and Anne Coulter. Now there’s a group I’d like to see pull up to MacKenzies for the Sunday paper at the same time and bash it out with their views on the weeks events. Hey, I saw Letterman pull up there one Sunday, so it could happen.

Jed, back then, never did luxuriate in anything; he was passing through too fast to do any such thing, unless he had too many beers. Which was few and far between, as Jed never met a six-pack he couldn’t handle. But now, as a high-powered exec with many minions to handle and keep in line, including kids, I’m guessing he wanted to have that picture around to remind him of those 1970s. I got around to the scan too late — already on vacation, good scanner still in the office, time was not on my side, etc. — and so Jed got his wife to do it, which I didn’t know when I did finally scan it in at high-resolution and took the time to tweak the image a bit so it would look all dandy in his nice corner office.

That’s Jed there in the shadow of the window, huge freaking smile. Who wouldn’t what with that car, those cheerleaders, in that town? Yeah, yeah, it’s a Chevelle SS 396 w/ Cowl Induction, as Stu Young commented below, not a Camaro, as a handful of guys have since corrected me, not a Camaro. Like I knew cars back then? Or now? I could tell you who was in The Mothers Of Invention, that Max Ernst called his painting style, frottage–sexual innuendo embedded to disrupt the art establishment–and knew the words to Yes’ “Roundabout”, but don’t ask me what they mean. (While I could now ask Mr Anderson, as we rep him at Ted Kurland Associates, some youthful enthusiasms that I thought profound then should best be left unquestioned.) I could also tell you that since this was a bright sunny day, the shutter speed for this picture, if it was shot on Plus-X, was probably 200, with an f-stop of f16 or smaller. But cars, as you see, I knew a little more than squat. Which is one reason I’m taking the picture and Jed is in the picture. With the girls. Cowl induction? Sorry, but not in this kid’s lexicon.

Jed had done me a solid (a favor for all of those too young to have lived through the decade in question, the funk-filled ’70s) with some special ESPN event and I wanted to repay him with a little more than, what was now, looking like nothing. So I started futzing in the evenings with Photoshop and had me some fun. A month later, I mailed him out a suite of truely futzed-up images.

One of these days, in my ever-contracting spare time, I’m going to make some more art stuff from the yearbooks, whose shots, with my futzing, will expand a nice view under the banner of what the town fathers dubbed, “The Next Station To Heaven.” No, I’m not going to slice into that statement and tuck in some irony where you least expect it. There’s enough in the 20-20 hindsight, from out here in the 2000s, to add layers and layers of all sorts of unintended humor and irony. Not laughing with you…

Here’s a new futz of Jed with Stu Young hanging out at Senior Skip day 1974, which, if the two were 18 at the time, those beers were legal. But just barely. If you’d like to see the full art werk, just click on the Schlitz.