I’ve always been fascinated by the portrait illustrations of celebrities and public figures on the Wall Street Journal. Today, I decided to do some googling and found that this sort of illustration was called “stippling,” which Wikipedia says is “is the technique of using small dots to simulate varying degrees of solidity or shading.” I’d be very curious to see how I or some of my friends look in stippled form. The portraits done using the stipple technique are called “hedcuts” and has been used by the WSJ since 1979.

I spent some time looking through these WSJ portrait collections by illustrators Kevin Sprouls, Randy Glass and Noli Novak. Although there are plug-ins and methods on Photoshop to get very close to the stipple effect, it looks like the manual process is still very much preferred. And this also makes me wonder – do people featured as hedcuts in the WSJ ever get their own copies of the artwork? Do any of them hang them up on their walls or paste them in their press scrapbooks? There’s a pleasing quality to a stipple portrait that neither color photography nor caricature can produce – only the dramatic black & white photography might surpass it in terms of classiness.

On an unrelated note (or maybe somehow related, you never know), I happened to be flipping through Ian McEwan’s Saturday, which just arrived last week. I’m usually in the habit of juggling three or four different books at a time, reading bits from each depending on my ever-changing moods. I had (re)started on Saul Bellow’s Herzog a couple of weeks ago, but when Saturday came, I was eager to start on it and put the other books, including Herzog, on momentary hold. To my surprise, when I opened up to the first few pages of the book, I saw that McEwan had included, of all things, a passage from Herzog! And while a coincidence such as this may sound pretentious and hardly interesting, I thought I’d write the passage up here just so I can later recall it more clearly to see its connection to both books. Already the Vietnam-Iraq thing is very apparent, but hopefully there’s something more subtle there. Here goes:

For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organised power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do. As megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs. The beautiful supermachinery opening a new life for innumerable mankind. Would you deny them the right to exist? Would you ask them to labor and go hungry while you yourself enjoyed old-fashioned Values? You – you yourself are a child of this mass and a brother to all the rest. Or else an ingrate, dilettante, idiot. There, Herzog, thought Herzog, since you ask for the instance, is the way it runs.

Herzog, Saul Bellow, 1964

Today was the first time this year (or perhaps since we moved to Queens) that Andy and I managed to work out at the Astoria Sports Complex three times in one week. This may be a pathetic thing to be proud of, but going together to the gym each night is tough, especially when we have to fend off food coma from overstuffing ourselves at dinner, the temptations of wine and beer, and new episodes of House or a show on Bravo. And the fact that our gym isn’t the most pleasant of places – our $200 a year membership gives us access to rooms lighted in neon red and dim fluorescent bulbs as well as dated equipment, some that seem older than the gym itself (which recently had its 25th anniversary). But we’ve grown used to it, and even appreciated the recent replacement of the free weight bars that used to leave rust residue on our palms.

Andy and I take our pull-ups seriously. Before diving into the day’s designated muscle group, we always do three sets of pull-ups. I taunt Andy each time because I can eke out two to three more reps than him each set (I’m at 15 right now). In just six months, we’ve gone from barely doing five each set to easily doing a dozen – a feat we’ve proudly acknowledged to each other. Today, however, the pull-ups felt harder than usual. It must have been our soreness and the fact that it was the first time we were doing pull-ups more than twice in a week. By the time we moved on to the bench press, we were already tired. We pushed ourselves through our creative sets of bench press (10 reps of barbell and 10 reps of dumbbells per set, using 135 and 50, respectively – yeah, it’s light), we moved on to high pulls with a cable wire to work our traps. At that point, we both remarked to each other that this was probably the most we had worked out together since the summer of 2003, when Andy, Warren, Reggie, and I used to frequent the New York Sports Club in Rahway each night to lift for at least two hours.

“Remember when we did five chest exercises in one night and like four other exercises along with it?” I reminisced. Andy shook his head and recalled how much more we used to lift on each rep. We both agreed that that summer was the peak of our physical fitness.

“I remember when we drove out to Hidden Park afterwards on some nights and ran suicides for fun,” I said.

“Oh man, that was so stupid. Why did we force ourselves to do suicides?” Andy wondered.

We remembered how dark it got at the park since it had no lights, and yet, under the glow of the moon, we would run suicides and even play a game of free throws, each miss warranting another sprint. What difference four years makes. We used to be smoke-free, drank less, and took very good care of our bodies. An age of innocence, we both thought.

There was a time, I tell myself, when I used to run a 4.5 40-yard dash and even scored four touchdowns in one high school football game. I sound like Al Bundy in Married with Children. There was a time when running was a daily thing, and a set of squats at the gym didn’t leave me disabled for the next four days. I’m still young, and if I really wanted to, I could probably will myself back into shape. But the desire for such physical fitness isn’t there anymore. I’m content with keeping myself slim enough to keep my pants and not be too self-conscious about my stomach. I don’t think I’ll stop munching on the cheeses or straddling the moderation line once a week with the wine. I like going for the beer at 6PM each evening. There are numerous vices, but sometimes, I feel like the real vice is denying myself certain pleasures for the sake of vanity (sometimes justified as “health”). And then there are times like tonight, when I wished I was back at Hidden Park with my buddies happily running suicides and wishing we could stay outside in the summer night, sweaty, tired, and extremely fit.