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Printed in white on the inside of both temple pieces is SHURON 53/4 USA. The USA is in a generic sans serif type. SHURON, the company name, is more eccentric, complicated, a brand after all. The S and the H are in caps but the u, r, and n are lowercase, though printed the same size as the S and H. The 0 can go both ways. The name is definitely a homonym advertising fit. It might also be a pun on a founder's name. Several lines of frames retain "Ron" in their names. The style of my glasses is the "Ronsir." The "Ronwinne," an all wire frame, made its seven millionth sale on September 3, 1946. The brand itself, SHURON, has remained hidden, unlike the contemporary designer eyewear that prints its signature on the temple hinge or temple piece or even on the lens itself.
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"SHURON" makes me think too of the great lake, a lisp, slur and all. I picture a kind of lake like a lens draped over the bridge of the state's northern peak, wedged on Michigan's cheek. A pool of organically shaped glass, its surface glassy.
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Others have pointed out Superman's unique take on secret identity. That is he puts on a disguise when he masquerades as one of us, wholly un-super men and women. As a hero he is singularly maskless. His civilian glasses are his mask. The style of Superman's glasses is closer to the SHURON "Freeway" or "Sidewinder," a big, black chassis, plastic all around. In Clark Kent's case, glasses distort the visage if not the vision. I remember that the lenses of his glasses were crafted from the porthole of his childhood spaceship, all the better to surreptitiously deploy his heat vision, his X-ray eyes, without a tell-tale meltdown of the standard terrain material. No one could see how he really sees. Think about it. When Superman uses his X-ray vision all he would see is lead, as the vision would penetrate everything, layer after layer, until the beam ran into the lead layer somewhere that would finally stop it. Glasses do change a face but we read glasses in a certain way. "Weakness," in this instance, is the disguise. The glasses are a visible visual crutch perched on the nose. Helpless without them, stumped and stumbling. Those glasses also clue nearsightedness and manifest in the wearer a concave hunch. Picture books held up to the face; a kid bent over comic books. Superman adopted glasses as his disguise, an emblem of the vulnerability of mere mortals. The glasses show he sees us while he sees through us.
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Call 800-242-3636 and ask for John Rogers. He is the spokesperson for the SHURON Company. He wears glasses. He will point out that, to a certain extent, the company is now a costumer more than a regular manufacturer of eyewear. A company employee does nothing else all day but handle the liaison work with Hollywood, and Mr. Rogers will reiterate the company line that they are the source for "retro" eyeglasses. See SHURON frames, he says, in almost every major motion picture and TV series where "retro" frames are worn. The company could provide a list of such appearances. Their glasses are stars. They are the glasses of stars. Mr. Rogers is less sure who actually wore the frames before the frames settled into a fixed time, were indicative of an era. Kevin Costner, playing Jim Garrison in the film JFK, is wearing a pair of SHURON's Ronsir frames. Mr. Rogers is less sure that the real Mr. Garrison wore SHURON Ronsirs. But chances are he did. Style implies change, seasons. SHURON has been making the exact same Ronsir frame since 1947, but the frames they make today are encrusted with cultural quotation marks like the simulated jewelling available on SHURON's NuLady Deluxe line that was introduced recently as a "retro" style. My glasses grew into their self-consciousness. They were glasses, and then they were "glasses."
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I am not sure that Malcolm X's glasses are a SHURON Ronsir. The design of the device in the upper outer corner of the frame is slightly different. The studs on the temples too are a variation. These fittings are the showy side of the hinge apparatus. They are the decorative rivet heads. The business end of the hinge is hidden behind the frame and attached there and on the temple with two screws, each sunk into the plastic. The screws are set in reverse fashion. One screw is screwed inside out so you can see the slotted head. The other has been screwed from the outside in, its head hidden by the detailing devices mentioned above. In the detailing of my devices, the metal caps are horizontal and inscribed with parallel horizontal lines. The rivet on the frame then flairs out like a spearhead pointed toward the lens and the eye. This detailing, I imagine, is all proprietary, the actual trademarking subtleties of the manufacturer. Look closely at the famous picture of Malcolm X. The one where he is pointing up and outward. He is before a microphone, and his lips are caught forming a fricative, the upper teeth visibly biting the lower lip. Look! The temple piece and the frame piece appear to be capped by a device more diamond shaped, the arrowhead without the shaft, the mathematical symbols (> <), "more than" and "less than" aimed at the eyes. Spike Lee noticed the detail of the detail, or, at least, I think he did. The glasses Denzel Washington wears playing the character of Malcolm X seem an exact match for the ones Malcolm X wears as Malcolm X. I am amazed by this attention to detail. The glasses, and getting them right, are that important. In fact, the rivet heads' > and < are like two halves of the X separated and pointing at each other.
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It was Jack Rohbach who designed the Ronsir frame in 1947, the first frame to combine the wire rims with the plastic ones. At the nexus of midcentury the frames looked both forward and back. Their styling retained the feel of the recently successfully prosecuted war as well as the sensation of the industrial conversion of war production to civilian consumption. That is to say, the glasses' design seemed both serious and delirious. Their style became known as the "Clubman" as other companies-Bausch and Lomb, American Optical-knocked them off. SHURON popped in smoked lenses and called the resulting sunglasses "Escapades." By the mid-1950s half the frames sold in America incorporated the "Clubman" style. SHURON sold the sixteenmillionth pair of Ronsirs on August 6, 1971. Rohbach wasn't a NASA engineer but a vice president at SHURON. They were his glasses but they appealed to engineers. There is a redundancy in the design, a design to their design. They seem to articulate the mantra of the era, the very current hip ethos. Form follows function. Form follows function. These glasses look like glasses. The glasses are all about seeing.
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When combined in costume with a white button-down shortsleeved shirt and a narrow necktie or bow tie, the glasses in ensemble create a uniform for a type of crazy. I always thought that Edgar Allen Poe's great contribution to dramatic culture was an insanity that seems sane, that stems from rationality in the extreme. Add a flattop haircut to the above accoutrements and you have the recipe for an outfit of that brilliant insanity. It is the look Michael Douglas selects when dressing the part in the movie Falling Down. Logic run amok. The glasses, like the other details of the style, try too hard. They are so sane. It is the artifice of control out of control. They are not, not even in their fake wood or tortoise-shell variety, organic. They are the furthest things from organic. They speak robot, automaton, android, machine. A human so attired is aching to fly apart, to fall down, to stop making sense. The glasses are sensible to the point of senselessness. And the resulting explosion breaks up into all angles and lines-the jazzy cubist, vectors of the atomic age. The design of my glasses holds all its various parts of their construction in place, a very public architecture of tension, compression, gravity, and glue. My glasses are edgy, on the edge, sharp and turning sharper. There is the cliche gesture in the movies of the homely woman taking off her glasses, letting down her hair only to be transformed into a beauty. The glasses usually are the homely making part. Girls who wear glasses… A man puts on these glasses, my glasses, and he puts on the potential for frenzy, the spectacle of the berserk. The spectacles of the berserk, the eyewear of the berserker. The glasses are way too sane. Crazy, man, crazy.