Play by the Rules

sometimes in life, you just have to play by the rules. not that interesting… but what is interesting, is the way that rules are communicated.

this fantastic sign at the peter and paul fortress in st. petersburg makes good use of a grammatical construction that emphasizes infinitive verb forms.

On the territory of the fortress, it is not allowed to:

-conduct meetings and demonstrations

-walk on roofs or cupolas

-walk about in a bathing suit

-drink spirits

-ski or rollerskate

… among other prohibitions.  Most excellent perhaps is that the directions are translated into English, but the forbidden activities themselves are described only in Russian and by charming (universally recognizable?) illustrations.

 

Delicious Poem Link #1

read this one. lick your chops.

 

ontology, or, a ballad of camping and new love

the peep-peeping is coming closer now, brimming
up in my brain and pulling me
out of sleep

supine in
rustling darkness i shift awake
alicia’s breath and eyelashes

painting tiny strokes on my cheek in
time with stalks of grass and rainfly and
summer bugs that have noises but not names

we are older than we’ve ever been
we are younger than our sometime selves
we are testing places that we’ve been before

and every one is new

categories flit apart, pause, recongregate,
vertebrates suckling at a watering hole:
Equus quagga, C. taurinus, Me and You

we are not shaken awake, here on this tilting plane
but sidled, slowly, into being
thises and thats with mesh and zipper boundaries

 

If I Were a Rich Man #43

Of all the things that a recent (and fantastic) mid-May trip to Santa Fe bestowed, my new-found love for the sopapilla may trump them all. For those of you other uninitiates, sopapilla is a square, buttered fried dough topped with smokey honey, and hopefully served piping hot and puffy just at the moment that you are about to faint from the heat of shoveling green chilies (another Santa Fe specialty) down your liquor-and-desert-parched throat. But frown not at the description of the sopapilla as fried dough! This is better than a doughnut and more glorious than funnel cake; the drizzled golden honey lends a nobility that powdered sugar just can’t muster, and the puffed layers of tender dough are more popover than cake.

Which begs the question, WHY HASN’T THIS BRILLIANCE HIT THE EAST COAST?

And, so, friends, future investors, and foodies, I present the latest and greatest scheme for capital appreciation:

¡Sopapilla!
A city street-corner storefront that, bolstered by an army of Mexican aunties, sleekster design, and gourmet honey, lets this southern cousin sing. A one-trick pony that needs no other tricks, ¡Sopapilla! will have the city-worn and drunk-munchy-begotten wrapped around the block day in and day out. Cupcakes are so 2006. The sopapilla is a sweet treat sans facade, down-home glory in its purest form: starch, fat and sweet. But carry-out food need not lead an unexamined life. Customers would choose from several flavors of plain or spiked butter (rosemary-lavender, candied orange peel, clove and cardamom) and a glowing panel of well-sourced honey. Who could say no to that? Interested investors, contact away– we’ll have this puppy up and frying faster than a back-up oil gasket blows.

 

the welcome (aloha)

“what is for some people a radical event may appear to others as a date for lunch.”
-marshall sahlins

we came round to the beach
hollering women
hailing the harvest:
oh, that we might have children by chieftans and gods!

so hoisting our hopes for
fat futures like
the flags of the season
we carried aloft

so high were our hearts that morning
that to the mass of us, bound tight
it seemed a lark
that gods should come
hanging their own pale flags
on our glassy horizon,
inching closer across the day

as they drew nearer
white
circled the island and
came alight, vast vessels
sailing into our proverbial inlet

we moved in
a mass of breasts and oocytes
wading waist deep
in exaltation

on the third day

we bore bounty to the ships
a grand lunch
heavy fruit

only to find

that godly as they appeared

the men ate,
mere mortals.

 

If I were a Rich Man #42: Tornado Burrito

It’s the melding of the Manhattan tossed-salad deli and Chipotle-whatever burrito chain. It’s the Coldstone of faux-mexican. A burrito spot that mixes together your selected-on-the-spot burrito contents, THEN wraps it.!!! The answer to all the times you’ve taken a bite of a brand-new burrito, only to get a mouthful of sour cream and nothing else.

Granted, Tornado Burrito is not for everyone. For instance, some people might like getting a mouthful of sour cream… I for one kind of like getting to peruse the layers contained in my burrito, and organize my bites accordingly. But, sometimes, there just isn’t time for this kind of pussy-footing: you just want deliciousness, in your mouth, NOW (I suspect this problem is more serious for meat-eaters, whose burrito contents are more seriously at odds with one another; but as a gold star steak virgin, I wouldn’t know).

In closing, I have to say, hats off to co-creators Alicia, Aviva and Matt: this one it is truly in the spirit of the If I were a Rich Manifesto. That is, if we were already rich, starting this business would def make us richer. Maybe not two-staircases-richer, but richer none the less. Also, we would be more confident in saying “yes, cream me” whilst ordering burritos.

 

If I were a Rich Man #41

Ok, here’s one for the ages (or at least bodegas in early spring): beer in those sport-top bottles (the ones they use to justify selling Poland Springs for $2 a pop). faster, more refreshing.

granted, drinking beer out of plastic is demoralizing, but… faster! more refreshing!! i want one right now!

 

advancing

exacting, you say, like writing with a knife

down the rabbit hole, alice is
keeping her temper
steeling her proportions in line

meanwhile, i am writing you
all out of proportion

i think your ratios
are thought like mine

i like your amounts, your ordinals.

i link our thinks to other things,
inordinately,

the down-in, keeping perfectly

newly tempered, i write:
i want to touch you, exactingly.

 

google poems

I once spent an entire twenty-four hour period composing a series of short poems in a terrific new genre that I invented on the spot. Seriously, this is good enough to grant a gratuitous use of the word terrific, ala early Woody Allen.

Google poetry. Try it. You’ll like it. It’s fun.

The premise is that you google [no, no capitalization] something. Something that you wouldn’t ordinarily, being well-trained in the art of internet searching as you are. And then, delighting in the mis-use of a tool so integrated in our daily lives, you revel anew in the fecundity that your search turns up.

Latour wrote that the (perhaps never-existant) modern era was characterized, in part, by a “crossed-out God”. Almost twenty years on, in the digital or cyber or google age (did you hear that post-China hack, they’ve got the CIA working on their security now?), we may as well say that we are characterized by a God super-imposed with a google search box. The Information Age. There is nothing that our finger tips can’t find. Not with the truthbox at hand.

What I like about these little poemettes is that in their creation, there’s an aspect of inverting what it is that we use google to do. Usually, we take a piece of information, or the idea of a piece of information — a lack [speaking of which, go, right now, to your local library and check out "As She Climbed Across the Table," which was my introduction to Jonathan Lethem, and is utterly fantastic]– and use google to fill in that lack. What I mean is, we know what we’re looking for. We have a place, and sometimes even a shape or color or pillow in our brain all picked out for it. But, with these little guys, well, it’s the opposite. You take something that you know, or a place in your brain that it has never occurred to you might harbor a lack, and you google it. You google the shit out of it. And out comes a whole slew of words and meanings, and symbols and mismeanings that you could never have anticipated in shape or color or resting place. What it does, I think, is toss up in the air just what we might mean by “information”.

I’ve found that the oft-forgotten “i’m feeling lucky” button on google’s home page provides a nice shortcut by selecting one definitive and unexpected result (for instance, look what “oft-forgotten” just turned up for me!). The titles of the poems are the phrase that I googled, the first lines are the from the websites that “i’m feeling lucky” turned up.

Some samples:

my mother’s golden watch

Blonsky’s father also punched Golden’s mother during the Caribbean scuffle,
proving once again
that families and happiness are
absurd categories of generalization,
that it may or may not ever be okay to hit a girl,
and mostly,
that anything that happens once
may as well happen again.

floozy, you’re such a floozy!

Sure Chad, I’ll do another 10 hours in the nugget pit.
squishing up close to nuggets, touching nuggets,
nugget nuggets, nuggets inside, nuggets touching nuggets.
nougat.
nugget flippers, nugget baskets, golden gleaming glowing nuggets,
florescent nuggets, nugget nuggers, nugget huggers,
sluggers eating nuggets, nugget-lovers slugging sluggers, slugger-lovers hugging nugget-sluggers. nugget pluggers.
chewing, chipping, flipping, dipping. nugget nugging, nugget nipping.
nugget nugget nugget nugget
tug it tip it flip it dip it.
hours in the nugget pit, nugget sit, licking, liking, nugget spiking. nugget nipping nugget sipping . new nugget nitching, nice nugget milking. nugget hug it nugget lug it.
10 hours in the nugget pit.

flattered obsolescence

The official publication of the American Culture Association

 

If I were a Rich Man #40

So… say that your name is K–, and the one thing you REALLY want in life is an accordion, because there’s just something about accordion music that makes you think of the Old Country and people you might be distantly related to laughing and dancing in the sunshine under an olive tree.

Now, say that you happen to be a broke-ass graduate student with no time on your hands, but sometimes, every now and then, you like to think that one day you might learn to play the accordion. Not now, of course, but some time. And you can’t stop thinking about that Saturday morning your last weekend in —, when you saw that beautiful used accordion at the flea market for $40 dollars. Why didn’t you just buy it? Because of the plane trip back, because of your student loans? Well, it doesn’t matter, the fact is, you didn’t, so every now and then, when you think of it, or your roommate drags you to hear a Klezmer band play (because for some reason the shaggy-haired girl she’s sleeping with is reading ironical queer confessional prose as part of the same event), you go home and search for accordions on craigslist.

…regardless of the fact that it’s nearly impossible that someone in a 30 mile radius would be selling a working accordion for less than $100, but a girl can dream… a girl can DREAM!

Which brings me, dear reader, to If I were a Rich Man #40:

Will someone please invent a web application that acts as a craigslist filter? You enter your city, your price range, and a search term or two, and then, when something that hits the sweet spot pops up, an email with a link to the post lands in your inbox.

This is brilliant, people, brilliant.

All you need is a clean interface, a pinch of branding, Ads by Google, and you’re in business.

WE’RE in business! And maybe K– will get her accordion after all.