The anxiety to communicate the threatening situation to someone spills into the future (onto the future reader), and the particular medium (the wall) is available accidentally and employed in a foreign manner: the present-narrative/transcription mode of discourse is uncommon to graffiti except in statements like "I am shitting". It is like writing a note in something not meant to be ink (you could use ketchup). This (like all) accident creates verisimilitude.
(Click to read)
Page 45 (footnotes 61-65) from an imaginary research paper on performance arts which require "remote and politically neutral venues" due to their controversial nature. To be left in a college library book on contemporary art.
The idea of this project is to leave illegible writing on the blackboards of local colleges. The object is to give the impression of actual words (I do not write them with any words in mind), so that those who see it engage in their own creative speculation about what it might say. Legible punctuation gives the text structure and suggests particular semantic content. Flashes of legibility in the words themselves, properly executed, may increase the intrigue. This one, written on a board in the Mount Holyoke library, is a question followed by a single word in parentheses. Is the word the name of the person who said the quote (in parentheses to remind the reader that she probably should have already known)? Is it an answer to the question, proposed in parentheses for the sake of gentleness?
A possible reading of the last line: "In short—Autumn?" (not intended).
A follow-up to my November 27th post "New business moving in". The sign I put on an empty storefront downtown to advertise an imaginary business was taken down last week. I assume it was the proprietor's doing. I put this letter where the sign used to be.
A good way of creating controversy is convincing others that controversy is already occurring.
The habit of referring to a demographic/population as a "community" suggests that it could be addressed as one. "Dear Leather Community".
I do not see Futura as a leather-shop owner's font, but I do not mean to generalize. I am not familiar with the leather community. Producing something other than expectations, perhaps, increases verisimilitude.
Another set of color samples with dramatic names, though some of them not more dramatic than actual commercial color names ("This is it!" by Sherwin-Williams, for example). To be left in the hardware store.
(Click to read)
Is the rise of connoisseurship a mass attempt to penetrate the purely symbolic experience of something like a bottle of nice wine? To begin, by careful training, to respond viscerally to our food instead of accounting abstract gratification from the knowledge of having consumed it? Like a character in Anna Karenina says, a cigar... there is pleasure... no, not pleasure, but the mark of pleasure. Writings such as the wine review above suggest that we are unfeeling towards good wine et cetera not because we have yet to cultivate our tastes (we would have too far to go, unless they're faking it), but because there is something wrong with us. We are simply not of the species who live with such intensity. Though I have never read a wine review with this sort of frantic zeal, in a way they all sound like this to me.
Posted in the Whole Foods wine section, above the Prima Toro. Tex submitted to various wine review publications.
(Click picture to enlarge)
An imaginary leather shop advertising its opening on the real window of what used to be a restaurant. I doubt the town of Amherst would actually allow this type of place to move in, if it can be judged by its neighbor Northampton, where last year a group successfully campaigned to prevent a porn shop from opening. Until the sign is taken down, passersby might think things about the possibility of a change in the atmosphere of the downtown area.
Four more colors from imaginary color-namers with poor commercial sense. This time the commentary note explains very little. Printed on heavy resume paper. I left it in the public library. Click for closeup.
I left this red folder in the middle of a street in Northampton. The packet contains a note from 'Francois' to 'Joseph', proprietors of an unnamed coffeehouse, complaining that a customer used too much sugar in his coffee: "Joseph- I saw some guy pour sugar into his coffee for like ten seconds! Doesn't he know it's bad for him?! He won't even be able to taste his coffee! I'm making a new sign. -Francois". I imagine Francois paying sixty cents for his new red folder in order to get it together, get more organized, for his new coffeehouse business venture. His disorderly nature prevails despite this rebellion: Francois loses the folder in the street. The new sign (above) is laminated, cheesily colored, and containing the quotation marks of mysterious purpose one often sees in public: we're "open"! Tips "please"!
Various anxieties are encouraged.
Note that "is for the convenience of" has grammaticalized (the process in linguistic history through which a word changes from conveyor of meaning to a grammatical function) into meaning just, "exists," thanks to obsequious commercial language.
