From the Vault of Art Shay: The End of the World

By Art Shay in News on May 25, 2011 6:20PM

A few years later, \<i\>Life\<\/i\> assigned me to cover the weightless experiments the real astronauts were going through en route to upcoming missions in space. You can see me floating as we came out of our training dive, but you can\'t see clearly the 250 exposure Nikon I\'m holding in my right hand.That\'s what you get when you hand your camera to an astronaut who\'s more interested in his own space mission than in mine. (Art Shay)

All the Chicago newspapers and wire services had failed to get into the Oak Park apartment, not far from Hemingway\'s early haunts, where members of a Doomsday sect were holed up waiting for the end. \<i\>Life\<\/i\> magazine assigned me to try for some pictures and an interview. I rented a ten foot ladder and climbed up to the sect\'s open window. (Nothing like furtively photographing sects, lawyers be damned.)\r\n\r\nThinking I had been drafted by God to send them a message - which I delivered with passion - they let me in and explained, as they stood in front of (honest) their cuckoo clock, that \<i\>Life\<\/i\> wouldn\'t be able to publish because of the Doomsday schedule. I was prepared. I told them a space ship was standing by at a remote Midway gate, to take my pictures into space (which they expected to travel through their evolution). There, heading for Mars, I continued bullshitting, they would travel to a galaxy far away and be published in the Intergalactic Issue \<i\>Life\<\/i\> was planning as we spoke. It sounded like a plan. Then I heard the magic words every photojournalist likes to hear on an impossible story: \"Where do you want to shoot us?\" (Art Shay)\r\n\r\nI didn\'t have the chutzpah to say, \"In front of your cuckoo clock- without breaking up,\" so I just sighted my Leica and Nikon around the room and moved my benighted kooks into position. As an earnest of God\'s hand in my work, the cuckoo clock providentially cuckooed 9 times.\r\n\r\n\"It\'s a sign from God that we\'re going to Mars,\" said an earnest freshman of the Trinity Divinity School. I slept soundly that night knowing I had furthered the legend of the afterlife.

Harold Camping said Monday his prophecy that the world would end was off by five months and Judgment Day actually will come Oct. 21. Camping said he felt so terrible when his doomsday prediction did not come true on Saturday that he left home and took refuge in a motel with his wife. (Is that square or what? His own wife!) Camping, an 89-year-old retired civil engineer (I think he designed the locks on Noah's ark. Our Noah.) appeared publicly for the first time to make his statement to the press at the Oakland headquarters of the media empire that broadcasts his message.

Presumably this media miscreant isn't AP, it's just AP making fun of someone else's media empire's cupidity. (For those of you who wrongly ratiocinate that cupidity has anything to do with Cupid or love shared under his tiny aegis, and don't like to look stuff up, cupidity means a strong desire for money. You know - avarice,greed.) That's why, as Woodfire Restaurant's resident novelist, Tom Papadakis, 27, has written, "of all the sins that escaped from Pandora's Box and got put back in, Hope is the only one that escaped. That's why we Greeks and so many Americans live in Hope. It's the only thing we can cling to."

When the original Napoleon felt death to be near around the time, but not the place, of the original Battle of New Orleans c.1812 - I mean the Emperor, not the delicious eponymous pastry concocted in its best variation by our own Gale Gand - he called in his own voracious media rep, Genevieve, who had a great ass of the school that would eventually draw strokes from Governor Ah-nold and announced: "Apres moi le deluge." I don't regard it as coincidental that Ah-nold and Danny DeVito, who was only a little shorter than Napoleon, played twin brothers in a popular movie. The rumor that DeVito is Ah-nold's love child by a previous housekeeper has been denied by a Shriver media consultant,

"Apres moi le deluge?" Meaning, "Why should anyone really care what happens in or to the world after I go? Let Noah's long-predicted flood come, go or whatever. No one should give a shit."

The trouble, as Shakespeare pointed out, is that Death is a bourne from which no one has ever returned, further implying over other airwaves that "Robin will be back after the break with the details." So what's a "media empire" to do for sustenance? Paging Rev. Camping. Paging Dr. Kevorkian. The market for cute stories about life after or during death is bottomless. (See below how Life Magazine sent me to cover one such tale in Oak Park.)

Stories about what happens to you after you die have a ready market - mostly because they're often based on religion - which has sold this corn as truth for millennia. The long white corridors with attendants in white flowing gowns, the 4 or 5 corpse-y old friends or relatives you might at the induction center, the feeling that you can fly. And now comes the Rapture in which you will be saved, refinanced and re-bodied, happening at the right time. You'll love it, I promise you. You buy tickets, in a sense, from the keepers of the gate.

Poor Bernadette. All she saw was The Lady who healed the sick and wounded at that Fountain. But her local Bishop Charles "Iron Ass" Bickford gave her Hell for her tale of Heaven and poor author Franz Werfel had to cop out in his cover blurb or be savaged by the church: "To those who believe. no proof is necessary. To those who don't, no proof is possible."

What's not to like about living forever in your prime? Here or in the hereafter which we're dying to see. Napoleon did it. Studs Terkel did it. Frank Sinatra did it. Kissinger is doing it. Jefferson did it. Clinton did it. Poor Tiger almost did it. But his birdie got holed out. Erection-of-the-Month poster child Dominique Strauss-Kahn got his pee-pee caught in a NY hotel where $3000 a night included everything, but what he lusted for.That's why New York governors go to Washington for $4000 room-and-broad when they get an erection.

(Diversionary James Monroe (Bronx) High school joke c.1939: Butler Jeeves excitedly notices his 70-year-old master has awakened with an erection. He asks, "Shall I fetch the madam?" "Oh no," says the old stud, "fetch me my baggy knickerbockers. We'll smuggle this one into London.")

The idea, I think, is to live here as if it were the hereafter and never going to end. Ideally, to have world enough and time. When Oct. 21 comes, the world will surely end again. Repent!

If you can't wait until this time every Wednesday to get your Art Shay fix, please check out the photographer's blog, which is updated regularly. Art Shay's book, Nelson Algren's Chicago, is also available at Amazon.