Thomas Wilbrandt

There are three levels of close encounter with an alien life-form. A close encounter of the first kind is a sighting. A close encounter of the second kind is physical evidence. And a close encounter of the third kind is contact. Hence the name of one of Spielberg’s finest films – and the only one that he wrote. A close encounter of the fourth kind, apparently, is owning a CD for which there is no record of or information about. The only reference I can find for anything close to this album is something called The Electric V, and features a completely different track listing and has a different cover and apparently mostly features electronic realizations of the music of Simon Jeffes, the leader of the charming Penguin Café Orchestra. That sounds great, but it’s not the disc I have.

What I have is called Transforming V and is a collection of largely electronic interpretations of Vivaldi’s music (although this is an acoustic treatment), much like Carlos’ Switched on Bach or Tomita’s The Planets. But Thomas Wilbrandt goes further than most interpreters and plays pretty fast and loose (or, in this case, slow and loose) with the original compositions, which is a good thing. Sometimes all that remains is the chord progressions or a certain ineffable essence of the original piece. This is a much more satisfying way to approach somebody as overly familiar as Vivaldi and gives the listener a chance to hear something new in a piece of music that has long ago been played into inaudibility. Not only are Wilbrandt’s realizations of Vivaldi’s pieces novel and entertaining, they even allow you to go back to the original source with fresh ears and hear it from a different perspective – something that none of the more faithful interpretations of classical chestnuts allow.

I once heard that David Byrne, when he was still at the Rhode Island School of Design, had an idea to become an undercover faceless corporate monkey, but he would do it ironically as a kind of grand performance art piece. Nobody would know that he was performing instead of being, and therein lay the art of the project. The more he blended in, the more successful would be the piece. He would spend his whole professional life faking a career while his real career, one step removed, would be hidden. His girlfriend convinced him that was a stupid idea and that maybe he should form a band instead. Byrne was a coward. I, on the other hand, had the strength of conviction to succeed where he balked. I buried myself so completely in my role, in my performance piece, that I was actually hired by the national corporate office of Price Waterhouse to be a proofreader. This is with absolutely no experience whatsoever. I didn’t have the temperament, and I didn’t have the wardrobe (my sole suit – a ghastly brown monstrosity – looked like it was stolen from a corpse three inches taller and thirty pounds heavier than me) and I certainly didn’t have the ambition to rise through the ranks of the corporate financial world (puh-leese), but somehow I put on a good enough show to get hired. The paragraph test they gave me was the first thing I ever proofread, and I made up most of the markings, but I managed to get the job anyway. It was one of my prouder moments.

I know it must seem like I’m dripping with sarcastic irony, but it’s really true, I really was proud to get a job that was so completely against my type and ambitions. Just goes to show how deeply alienated I was in NYC.

Anyway, I used to show up every day in my tie and jacket and take my place in a very small office with my coworker, a woman named Joanne. The fact that I had to wear a tie and jacket was ludicrous – except for coming up the elevator in the morning and going back down again at night, nobody ever saw me. I didn’t deal with clients, I didn’t need to impress anybody, but that’s the corporate climate, and I wasn’t about to buck it. It would’ve ruined my performance.

The job was pretty amazing. Apparently, Price Waterhouse’s corporate guidelines mandated a proofreading department, but almost nobody in the company knew such a thing existed, so the vast majority of my time there – well over 90% – was spent doing absolutely nothing but holding down a chair and collecting a paycheck. Most people assumed that since they had spellcheckers on their computers, if they fixed the typos, then the document would be correct. This is far from true. A couple of times, people sent us documents to proof as a mere formality and would get so offended at our thousand red marks that they’d never send it another one our way (curious but typical way to deal with advice). My grasp of grammar is fairly good – certainly better than most of the people in the company – and I could catch run on sentences and sentence fragments and, the most common and irritating error, disagreement between subject and verb. I know I’m opening myself up to ridicule by claiming to know grammar when I so frequently write ungrammatically, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t know I’m writing ungrammatically. I know my sentences go on far too long. I’m fully aware that my rampant use of nested paragraphs break up the flow so much that it’s sometimes difficult to even follow what I’m writing. That’s a choice on my part, and lends to the colloquial nature of my writing. If, however, I’m forced into the straitjacket of strict usage, I can usually make it feel pretty comfortable. And I can certainly enjoy ripping some so-called superior’s work to shreds and pointing out their (excuse me, his or her) vast lack of knowledge and finesse with the English language.

On the rare occasions that we did get something to proof, we’d make a copy of it and face each other on opposite sides of our shared desk and take turns reading paragraphs aloud while the other one followed along, marking corrections as we went. The funny thing about proofreading is that, when you read something aloud, you have to read everything aloud, punctuation included. We had shortcut codes for punctuation, generally the first syllable, and would rip through the document dropping “com”s and “dot”s (not to be confused with dotcoms) throughout. And the financial documents we were given to read, besides being heroically boring, were filled with all sorts of unusual punctuation. Your periods (dots) and commas (com) abounded, of course, but there were also lots of more exotic punctuation marks that we’d have to note, like semicolons and colons and brackets and underlines and italics and so on. This made for a surreal experience, and anybody listening outside our door would think we were speaking in some kind of elaborate code. Which, of course, we were.

The actual job part of our job was pretty awful. There was one guy who used us pretty regularly when preparing large (100+ pages) detailed documents about 401(k) guidelines or amortization clarifications (as though that were possible). Knowing nothing about what we were actually reading, we’d plow through the gibberish, adding more gibberish of our own, and then send it back upstairs. It was exhausting and tedious, but, like I said, that only made up a tiny portion of our day. Sometimes entire weeks would go by with nothing to read. In fact, when they hired me, they warned me that if I was really gung-ho about proofreading (as if), then this probably wasn’t the job for me. I assured them confidently that I really didn’t give a rat’s ass about it, and so they hired me. Weird.

My partner was a trip. She wrote freelance for soap opera magazines during our long workless stretches, and told me endless stories about her cute little dog Pookie and all his cute little habits until I wanted to puke on her cute little shoes. She was a nervous, flighty type (one of my favorites), and once got on the wrong train during lunch by mistake and ended up briefly in Queens. She was so badly shaken by the experience (“I mean, Queens for god’s sake! I could’ve been killed!”) that she almost had to go home early to lie down. She hadn’t even gotten out of the station, just jumped on the next Manhattan bound train, but needed a valium and a week of therapy to get over the experience.

For my part, I spent our down hours writing long letters to everybody I had ever met, designing elaborate tape covers in Word Perfect, and trying to break into the corporate mainframe to scoop the Academy Awards. Because, even though I had absolutely no official use for it, I was given a computer, since that’s what the corporate guidelines dictated. Sometimes, during the long, lonely, achingly boring afternoons, I would slip into a bathroom and masturbate, just to break up the monotony (and because I was a 21-year-old overflowing with hormones.) I used to think I was freakishly perverse, but one day I heard a vice president polishing his bishop in the adjacent stall, and I knew I was not alone. It actually turned out to be a fairly common way to break up the day. The skirts would ration their M&M’s to get through the afternoon (one more memo and I can have a green one) and the suits would run into the bathroom between conference calls and wax their dolphin.

During my lunch hour, I often slipped up to Central Park, found a deserted knoll, and smoked a joint. There was a whole underground community of guys in suits who would slip up to the park during lunch and surreptitiously blow a bone (that’s my slang, although I’m sure there was also another kind of bone blowing going on up there) before heading back into their glass and steel monoliths for another round of ruling the universe.

I would always eat lunch as quickly as possible so I could walk around a little bit during my lunch hour. Our proofreading cell was an internal one (which is one of the reasons nobody knew about us), and lunch was the only time I could actually see the sun and breathe what passes for fresh air in Manhattan. On days that I didn’t head up to the park, I’d go to the local Sam Goody and flip aimlessly through the racks, looking for something interesting and almost never finding it. Sam Goody was too expensive and too pedestrian, but every now and then I’d find a hidden bargain, and The Electric V was one of them.

Eventually, like even the most successful Broadway runs, my performance came to a close and I bid farewell to my coworkers, raised a hearty middle-finger salute on my way into the subway, and threw away my brown suit, determined never to wear it again. The show was over, and I packed up my bags and headed for LA, determined to live an actual life and not just a postmodern pretend one.