RUDIMENTS, pt. 195
Making Cars
I got myself pretty far afield
in that previous chapter. It was
supposed to have been about
'efficiency' and somehow I
drifted from human paths to
suicide to finding dollars in
the snow. Oh well. Let's get
back to efficiency.
-
Nature always comes across,
and is portrayed as, super
efficient; no wasted morsels,
no extra effort. No right angles;
everything on a nice arc and
curve. The curve of a nice tree
branch, the slow wide wind of
a stream, the roundness of a
wet rock. (That's 'wind' like
curvy, not the wind that blows).
Nature is beyond doubt soft and
supple. Our designs, by contrast,
are edgings on glass. That's the
quotient of efficiency making
the difference. When I began
the previous write, I intended to
comment on the efficiency of the
entire life-to-death process, and
how pushing it along or advancing
it just causes difficulties and alters
the entire process. Interference
like that is never an efficient means
or reaching a desired result, no
matter what. I can remember when
shoes first began coming out with
plastic bottoms - molded, glued,
etc. - and how a guy I new started
saying right off, about them, that
it spelled, to him, the end of the
civilization we'd known until
then. He was a shoemaker, with
a shoe-shop at 7th ave and about
27th street, near what later became
a fancied-up Fashion Institute of
Technology, known as "FIT.' It's a
high-fashion designer school sort
of vocational in essence, and it
produces yearly bunches of those
odd clothing-designer and fashion
runway types - guys and girls and
most completely indeterminate sexuality,
I mean nearly impossible to tell most
of the time. They've got barricades
and dividers and entry gates right
there on the plain old city street -
a row of dormitories (there was a
student suicide a decade or so back,
right there too - a leap to the
sidewalk. I guess the hems didn't
meet, or some other major designer
problem. Too bad, isn't how one's
perspective changes everything.
I guess there's no telling for what
came out of God's toolkit of the
emotions). Anyway, this guy, Carl,
was a serious shoe-repairman. I
don't know if anyone has ever really
studied a shoemaker's shop, but they
were (I don't know about 'are')
completely of a kind - serious,
leathery smells, polishes, shoes,
thread, soles, buffers and stitching
machines and leather cutting saws
for the heaviness of soles and shoe
sides, etc. They somehow always
had a 'Cats-Paw' sign in place, some
sort of sole or shoe leather things.
There were always a few shoe-shine
chairs in place along his side wall,
really nice step-up seats, almost regal,
and a pedestal for one's foot while the
buffing and shining went on. Shoelaces
in a rack; leather twine and strips; None
of this can be recreated in just words -
the sounds and the colors and tones are
better than any I could aspire to putting
across. Carl's place was exceptional in
that the worn-out old wood of the floor
itself wore a sheen of polish from the
years - foot traffic having worn and
rounded the boards, here and there a
high knot still sticking up, polished
by shoe traffic. The thick, old glass
counter-top was worn and almost
fog-glazed by use; years of coins
and change and transactions. The
most ancient pawn-shop you'd ever
see would only run neck-in-neck with
Carl's Shoe Shop. 'Carl Can! He's the
Shoe-Shop Man!' (That was his pretty
dumb slogan, probably from the 1940's).
All of that depended on leather and the
old ways of shoes. Uppers and lowers
of quality and craft. Once he saw the
entry of plastic creeping in to his
'craft,' he was immediately able to
sense what inevitably did occur. People
coming in with plastic shoes, of which
the glued bottoms had separated from
the glued tops. They'd still want repairs.
He'd start forthwith telling them how
the shoe wasn't worth the repair, the
plastic was doomed, the shoe was shot.
Only later did it dawn on him to go with
the tawdry arc of degradation - so, with
his flat-faced vice, for $8.95 he shut up
and actually began gluing people's shoes
for them and getting them back to use
for the next day. He said it was an
act of desperation, hopefully his last,
before the entire industry closed
around him. That shop, some thirty
years later now, is still there, close to
the same, though smaller somehow
and more cluttered, it seems, with
crummy stuff. No longer does it have
the regal bearing of leather, spit, and
polish as it once did. A Spanish guy
owns it now - I still stop in, just to see.
Some used shoes are always for sale
on a small rack - nice, old, leather-style
shoes. He's expanded a lot now, into
watch repair, watch batteries and any
of those other small-battery replacement
jobs. A watch replacement is 6 dollars,
though once it was 8 - maybe a larger
battery, I never asked. And his shoe-shine
person now is a Spanish woman - maybe
it's his wife - I don't know. My point is,
the action and end results are pretty much
the same - shoes, shoe-repair, and some
profit - yet the efficiency factor is now
totally different. I'd have to say that I'm
not sure in which direction : Carl's was, in
its way, possessed of a completely different
time and feel, and thus an efficiency that
was completely at variance. He got things
done but it was all dark and smoky somehow,
and though 'efficient' in the old sense,
everything was slow and took time - a
thick and slow time that maybe it was
harder to slog through. This Spanish
guy's version of same seems lighter,
more airy, Things get done, and that's
it. The one thing I notice, and it irks me,
is the lack now of that 'Cat's-Paw' clock
that was on the wall. All of that old
logo-ideology is now gone - there was
always a bespectacled cobbler guy, in
a leather apron, on some sort of sign
back then, for something. That too is
now sadly missing. Let's just say it
was efficiently removed somewhere
along the line.
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