CORPORATE STRATEGIST SPEAKS TO MIDDLE MANAGEMENT.

Good morning! Could you do me a favor? Let’s everybody place his sporty sunglasses on the back of his neck, as if the back of the neck had pupils (that required shade.) Thank you. I can observe quite brightly that everyone wore the company-issue salmon polo. Later on, it’ll be Middle Management!, on the loose!, at the coffee urn! (The selfies will be classic.) (I hope you charged your phones.) Sometimes we feel like deer, don’t we?, clipping out of the woods to gaze at the lumbering train as it staggers toward the destination. Deer and train; this is a useful dichotomy. The train—kind of like American commerce. It’s a deer-watch-train economy. (Granted, with some local variation.) We could call each customer “the little ceiling” or we could envision the whole sha-bang as “subsistence level consumerism.” The sheer amount of going concerns that orbit “the little ceiling of a subsistence-level consumer” and you, Middle Management!, will you, too, orbit? Don’t answer. Thank you. It gets so you can’t have a thought about the arts without yearning for a sandwich. The Dutch master, Peter Paul Rubens, for example: the extravagant mythology or (to be honest) a few hot corned beefs on rye, a few Reubens. You didn’t hear this from me, but that continental breakfast looked dangerous; “incontinental breakfast” sounds more like it. Anyone here an Arsenal supporter? (Don’t answer that question.) Anyone here a Walloon? (Don’t answer.) These are rhetorical questions. Where was I? Oh, yes. The Triumph of the Arts. Well, not recently! Do you dig-dug? Rock songs: GAH!: Rock songs. The arena rock wafting (GAH!) as you entered this training facility?  I think of it as an old black turd with white edges, kind of like a charcoal briquette, rotting in the weeds. I threw that Journey song—“Don’t Stop Believing”—into Google Translate and it returned a photograph of a whitening dark turd in Paris, 4^th arrondissement, near the Louvre. Anyone here have high cholesterol? This time you may respond (a show of hands.) Thank you, and you, and you, too. Yes, this information, senior management did ask me to report. High cholesterol, naughty naughty. (Ehhhhh. Siiiiike.) I’m not really the speaker. I’m not really from this company. And by the looks of things, I’m about to get chased in . . . three, two, one!


Cultural Affairs Week Editorial Schedule

March 2: Crows & Owls

March 3: I Eat Mushrooms!

March 4: Literary Magazines That Charge for Slush PileSubmissions

March 5: Corporate Strategist Speaks to Middle Management

March 6: Kits