Bad News

I must admit that, even as a grown man, I am a big fan of Halloween. Of course, it has nothing to do with candy these days. No, but there is something intriguing about the theatricality of it all: one day out of the year, we allow ourselves to transform into someone or something else reflecting our own fantasies, fears, or fascinations. Even better are those costumes that require no small amount of effort and wit to cleverly pull off the portrayal of being that “other.”

A few years ago, I decided to attempt a costume that would embody something that permeates our everyday existence, weights on our minds, seeps into our every conversation, and yet is almost totally intangible. Of course, I am referring to bad news. It’s hard to remember a time in recent history that wasn’t particularly ripe with bad news, but this costume was meant to reflect the big contemporary events that were bringing us all down: multiple wars, pandemic fears, wild fires, global plots of terrorism, lead-filled toys poisoning our children… and let’s not forget the trivial day-to-day stuff such as homicide, car wrecks, a slouching economy, and round and round we go.

The first step in assembling this costume was research. To gather depressing national and international events, I turned to that August paper, the New York Times. Going through pages and pages of bleak scenarios, I copied the headlines from a diverse pool of negative news stories. Living in Cincinnati at the time, I aimed to make the costume particularly relevant to time and place. For this, I collected additional headlines from the Cincinnati Enquirer to add local flavor. Next, I treated the headlines as a typographic challenge and laid out a repeating pattern of text reflecting the look of an editorial design. Front page, editorial, side column–every story fits into a hierarchy. By screen-printing the pattern in black ink to a white T-shirt, it was born: Bad News.

I wore the costume to several Halloween parties that year. Nobody got it. At all. This lead to a lot of explanations and re-explanations on my part, but, of course, I was only too glad to discuss (what I thought was) my clever costume. Despite the fact that this particular news is getting stale, I continue to wear this shirt regularly, which leads to continued questions about its origin.

What was my personal favorite headline of bad news, you ask? That’s easy: “Flamingos Decapitated at Frankfurt Zoo.” It’s a cruel world.