Straphanger Joe Gets Nostalgic For ‘Julio and ‘Marisol’

An Inconvenient Ad

It’s Friday afternoon and I’m heading home late from work. The train is quiet at 5:35, only half filled. I’m standing even though there are two center seats available. Sometimes I just don’t feel like being sandwich filling.

I spot a poster across from me, where the maps sometimes are. There’s a picture of a penguin and a small map of lower Manhattan with the following words superimposed across the penguin’s body.

While we still have 4 seasons… you’ll still need us.

On the bottom is the Manhattan Mini-Storage logo.

Since when did global warming become the subject of humor in advertising? Cavemen are fair game. Models, the president (of course), animals of all sorts including dinosaurs, are also completely available as targets, but the concept of global warming? I haven’t seen Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, because it’s still too mind-blowing a concept for me. It scares me for what it means for my son and future generations. It’s too real–a long history of reading sci-fi come to life, and in the worst possible way.

I wonder what other people think of the ad–if people are thinking of it at all.

I usually read the ads on the subway. Sometimes for fun, sometimes because I’m bored, and sometimes because it’s too crowded and there’s no way I can get to my bag where my book is hidden, much less find a space to open the book in front of me and read it.

Sometimes I read them because I studied them once before as part of my work at Gay Men’s Health Crisis, doing AIDS prevention work, and I’m curious. Over twelve years ago I was part of a team that developed a subway poster campaign called “The Young Hot and Safe” campaign. Some folks didn’t like the images we put on the subways of two young men, two young women, and a young man and woman, kissing with safer sex messages as their headlines. I specifically remember a small bonfire a man made out of the ones he tore off a subway car on the platform at 14th Street, and the bomb and death threats we received daily for a few weeks at work after the campaign hit.

Ah, those were exciting days.

While we still have 4 seasons… you’ll still need us. 

Maybe that’s the point of the ad–to make me think of global warming, de-clutter my apartment, and subsequently use less light to search for all the things I can’t find now because my son’s Legos are all over the place. Do you think I could put Legos in storage?

As I come up from the underground in Queens and hit Roosevelt, I notice the cold. It’s much colder now. It’s uncomfortably cold but I’m okay with that. I’d rather have a cold winter. That’s what winter is supposed to be in New York City. Cold and windy, with maybe a little snow. 

–Joe Lunievicz

[image: NY Times]