imagine this, or that

While driving today, I listened to "Imagine" on the John Lennon "Wonsaponatime" LP. It's a secular hymn, an ode. When I was young, I thought the lyrics were simplistic, almost trivial. Now that I am oldish, I seem to embrace the lyrics ever more. It's haunting. A lament. I wanted to pull over and weep. Why? for me? Or the planet. But I didn't. My eyes welled up, but I lumbered onward into the brilliant and lustrous day.

Yesterday, I noticed on a sidewalk the graffito "FAS." Was the writer so hurried that he or she could not complete "FAST"? Or tragically halted? Graffitus interruptus. Or was it the tag of Flemington Angus Smithson, WASP scion?

Imagine that.

the meat of the matter

A CSX train sat parked on the tracks. Some of the long freight train (may we / can we have a short freight train?) temporarily (of course it is "temporary"; if it were permanent, it would be a museum; a museum of what? industry? transportation? iron? or graphic arts?) resided on the rail overpass atop West Genesee Street, in Syracuse, just before Rosie's ("Gateway to Tipperary Hill") and the former residence of Denny's (how is it that a Denny's can't make it in that spot? presumably, too many post-bar-closing fracases, but it could also be mismanagement, lousy food, high prices, ennui). A black car, a tanker, sported white graffiti:

PORK   HAM   BACON

Each of the synonymous words was adorned with the same avatar, if you will, or icon, or branding: a pig's head (well done: simple, almost amusing, easily understood). (As I was driving by, and could not stop to take notes, though I suppose I could've pulled over on Erie Boulevard West [I do not remember my degree of manufactured hurriedness or perceived harriedness], I tried to remember the sequence of the three words. It might have been HAM PORK BACON, or any other three-card monte shift of those words you might want to entertain. Maybe, just maybe, the word PIG was posted, but I doubt it. That would not make sense and would spoil the poetic elegance and philosophical inquiry of our graffiti artist.)

I'm reeling (that's a tad overwrought) from the implications and questions posed by our anonymous poster, our unnamed herald, our silent partner or co-conspirator. Namely, are you telling me that it's all the same shit, the same stuff -- no matter the word, no matter how it is "branded," you anarchic quasi-commie? (I apologize if that is unwarranted; I admit "commie" is going to grow in harshness, what with the return of the Cold War, or the advent of the Chilly War.) Do you celebrate meat? Is meat a triumph of will and protean power and rugged foodist individualism? Or is this some sort of freighted (I can't help it, can I?) vegan diatribe, railing (there I go again) against meat and the purveyors of slaughter (with perhaps the added editorial on toxicity, because the tank car was carrying God knows what; not just air, right?).

Finally, where did you go? Was this a one-off you spray-painted by hand in Gary, Indiana, down the road from the home of be-LOVE-d Robert Indiana, and his eight-cent stamp of approval? Or is it part of your brand, repeated, exactly alike or as variations on a theme, in train yards from Oakland (California) to Newark (New Jersey)?

Bombing Berlin (My Word!)

Words are strange creatures, aren't they? I recently read this New York Times article about Berlin's attraction as a graffiti capital, as a place where "bombing," or graffiti-spraypainting, thrives, altering the urban landscape.

Approximately seventy percent of Berlin's urban landscape was altered by a different brand of bombing in World War II. You can still see pockmarked buildings as evidence, as well as the remains of the world-famous Kaiser Wilhelm Gedachtniskirche, not far from the Berlin Zoo and not far from KaDeWe, a luxury store ("it's da bomb!" in Eighties lingo), and not too far from the Opera, where a bad performance would bomb.

I have never gotten bombed in Berlin, and hope and pray not to when I am there next week (or else my ruination would indeed be more than seventy percent).

What words are on your mind?

Give me one.

It is as hard to proffer just one layered linguistic gem of a word as it is to eat just one cashew or one chocolate candy or one potato chip (or partake of just one of This Or That of a swarm of addictions, named and unnamed).

Give me one word of thy choosing , O Blogosphere! One word that ripples with ambiguity.

The pebble tossed into placid Lake Semantic.

Give me your one word.

This will be the easiest comment you ever posted.

Or the hardest.

LIFE, continued

I've told you before of the graffito LIFE in Burnet Park, once there, then gone, scrubbed, scoured, painted over.

I saw LIFE again yesterday.

LIFE moved (to at least two places) over on Hiawatha Boulevard, Syracuse, not far from the imagined world of Destiny USA. Emblazoned in uppercase letters amid industrial detritus, debris, and abandonment.

I was grateful to see some LIFE yesterday. It gave me some hope.

Today I imagine LIFE was there, a little elusive, shrouded in twilight, but I did not see it directly.

I was cast into twilight. I am bathed in twilight.

I am living in a zone of twilight.

But LIFE awaits. . . as a statement, a fact, not merely posed as a question.

Life, The Serial

On my misty, coolish dogwalk tonight, I noticed that the graffito of LIFE with the "i" dotted with an "x," on a small electrical utility shed, was gone.

LIFE, vanished, without a trace.

As if LIFE were but a dream.

I miss LIFE.

Where'd it go, now that its resident surface is scrubbed clean, freshly painted, pristine?

Can LIFE even exist on such a pristine surface anyway?

LIFE, I was just getting to know you. I was on the cusp of what you wanted to tell me, who put you there, and why.

Now, it's like starting over.

a life exposed

At one point this afternoon, I wanted to surrender to the seduction of sleep. And why not? Spaniards have their siestas (some even go home, put their pajamas on, and have at it -- napping, that is). And why not? Armada or not, the Spanish have been around a long time, longer than our society, and seem to do just fine.

I think I was experiencing an adrenaline letdown after all the excitement and energy of preparing for an interview Tuesday at City Hall involving our company and several others, an interview not deemed important enough for one Common Councilor to attend and not important enough for another Common Councilor who was on the selection committee to do more than come late and then leave after 10 minutes or so, which infuriated me, a corporate bystander at this interview but one who had spent the previous day and more in prepping the team collegially. Uncommon Councilors. Dreadful.

Tonight's walk had its own revelation: remember that piece of graffito with the word LIFE with the x over the i? At first glance, I thought someone had tried to paint over the word, a cover-up of animate form. But, no, just the opposite. It seems that LIFE has been scrubbed to the bone, down to the bare cinder blocks, forming a faux bas-relief.

Was someone trying to clean LIFE, only to find that the background got scrubbed but LIFE persisted?

Did howling rains cause some kind of rapid-fire weathering? (Doubt it.)

Or was it like that all along, but I didn't remember it that way?

In reading "Proust Was A Neuroscientist," I am finding reinforcement in my belief that memory is always unreliable, a faulty archive.

What will LIFE look like tomorrow?

Signs of the Night

Tonight's walk:

Last summer's swimming pool, alabaster, empty, silent, bathed in light. Not one echo of August's rowdy, tense crowd simmering in a cauldron of raw longing, restlessness, and a dash of suspicion. Black elongated crosses demarcate depths and diving areas at the far end. A black wrought-iron fence guards the perimeter of the pool. The empty pool strikes a monumental pose. It looks like some kind of shrine with its radiance and stillness. A shrine to what? Snowflakes aimlessly fly about in the brisk wind. What if the pool were a sacred shrine, a local Taj Mahal? What if someone proclaimed The Burnet Park Pool as a tourist venue, designed by, say, Frank Gehry or Frank Lloyd Wright? Just saying so, people would think about it differently. But I don't need such proclamations. It is luminous and miraculous, just as it is.

Walking back home, the "clean, well-lighted place" (Hemingway's phrase) behind me, I see graffiti on a small concrete-block building housing electrical equipment. (Ever since my trips to Berlin, Germany, I'm more open-minded about graffiti.) The tag is:


L I F E


in urban blocky font, in black spray paint.

The "i" is not dotted.

Where the dot on the "i" would be, is a small x.

Which makes me wonder, yet again.

Food for Thought, and Thought for Food

By now, you've heard about the study in today's news concluding that obesity is socially contagious, as is thinness. The study is no Mickey Mouse effort. It covers some 32 years and over 12,000 people. It was conducted by Harvard Medical School and University of California San Diego researchers. (The figure shown is from James Fowler of UC San Diego, and it depicts the close correlation of obesity and social networks. Or so I gather. For all I know, it's illustrating vomit dispersion or aerial demographics of Berlin graffiti artists. It took years to create. Anyway, it's gorgeous, Jim.)

This story fascinates me on many levels.

1. I love the term "socially contagious." It's probably old hat to you hipper academics, but it's new to me. A cursory Google search yields hits related to obesity, homosexuality, gun violence, smoking, organizational misbehavior, substance abuse, and materialism. For starters. I'm sure I'm misstating or intimating core arguments incorrectly for each of those topics. But I predict this study will catapult the term socially contagious into the front lines of discourse, including as a weapon in the U.S. presidential election campaign (which really cannot claim to reach the heights of something called discourse). And then we will grow socially weary of this contagious phrase. (Perhaps you already have done so.)

2. The concept is hardly surprising. After all, sober people choose sober friends; boozers hang out with other drinkers; gangstas congregate with other gangstas; willowy ballet dancers associate with other willowy ones. From what I discern, though, this research says it goes deeper than that. The study seems to say we don't merely reinforce and validate each other's behavior but actually cause it by setting social norms. (I'm only surmising this, based on the linked summary. Don't ask me how or why. What do I look like a sociologist?)

3. This underscores the need for social research on eating. Here's what I mean. My eighth-grade science teacher, Mr. Charles Robinson at Burdick Junior High School in Stamford, Connecticut, extolled the virtues of how we eat, not just what we eat. He pointed out the healthy habits of ethnic and ancient groups who ate as a group. Eating for them was (is) communal, unhurried, and entirely social. Contrast that with modern America: eating is solitary, fractured, rushed, or distracted (or some mixed salad of all those adjectives). There's no doubt in my mind that cancer research should focus more on how we eat at least as much as what we eat. That's why, if I owned the company, no one would be allowed to eat at their desk while working, ever, and a lunch break with real food would be mandated.

Chew on that.

Random(ly) House(d) Observations, Berliner Edition

Sometimes even I am amazed by my own recall. I just knew "Travel Is So Broadening" is the title of a work by the too-often-ignored Sinclair Lewis, but I had not read it in decades. I further recall this work (was it an essay or a short story? Sinclair Lewis experts are invited to chime in) was scathingly ironic, lampooning the small-mindedness of American provincials. It is an oft-repeated phrase, and it turns out travel typically broadens in ways we least expect it. So, here are some observations posted by a jet-lagged chronicler of the sundry and the not-quite-sun-dried (it was often cloudy and rainy in Berlin):

• If you are at a crosswalk in Berlin and the light for pedestrians is red, you wait. You wait until it is green. You might even do this if it is 1:30 a.m. (0130 hours) and there are no cars, trams, or other people passing by.
  
• Berlin is awash in, or littered by, or trashed by, or enlivened by graffiti. Take your pick as to how you describe it. The kindly and intelligent man who drove me in a taxi to Tegel airport attributed such wall writings to "the Americans." I doubt it. I'll take the blame for my countrymen for some of it, but there must be lots of copycats galore. Plus, I believe the Berlin Wall had graffiti on it almost from the start.
  
• I have a balancing act going on in my brain. Berlin the orderly versus Berlin the anarchic. And maybe both elements need each other.
• In Berlin there is no east or west. Isn't there an Easter hymn that goes something like that? (The link gives you a sample of the tune.)
  
• At rush hour people do not rush nearly as madly as they do in New York; they barely rush at all. In fact, during my taxi from the airport to Friedrichschain I wanted to scream, "Step on it, mach shnell, fraulein!"
• Smoking cigarettes is in, nearly everywhere. It didn't bother me nearly as much as I felt it might. I wanted to smoke a Cuban cigar. Never got around to it.
• It was hard for me to measure the weight of history or how it was viewed by those around me. For example, when I related to the taxi driver how I remembered when the Wall when up, and how I was afraid, and thought it was World War III, he glibly said something like, "That's what the Russians said." Hmmm. He might've been my age. He said he had lived in Berlin since 1960, I recall; born maybe 100 meters north of Berlin. I do not know how to read these verbal tea leaves. I liked him and shook his hand with both my hands when I departed. Yes, I tipped him.
  
• The unemployment rate there, he said, is 18%; my research supports him. It did not strike me as a depressed city economically but rather as a vibrant and creative hub.
• The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is compelling: blocky, harsh, somber, engaging, textural. At first, I was alarmed and rather horrified to see young people (ostensibly tourists in their teens or twenties) playing what resembled a casual game of "hide and seek" among its gravestone-like pillars. Were they being disrespectful? My gut feeling was, yes. I was tempted to lecture them, but how, and exactly why? Besides, maybe they would've declared that their response demonstrated a triumph of life. (Most likely, they hadn't thought that far.) To be honest, I don't know what they thought or felt. It was not a place of total silence or solemnity, but it was an eerie refuge amidst an urban din. You were drawn to it. A dark sense of place is evoked.
  
• Passing through the Brandenburg Gate was like passing through a time warp, though a Times Square atmosphere prevailed. It was cool.
• On the plane, in the toilet, a sign said "Toilet Paper Only." Man, I had to keep my legs crossed for nine hours! That was rough. I guess I took that "following the rules" bit a bit too literally for my own good.

"Lost in Translation" was one of the movies for the flight back. Perfect.

Laugh. Or....
Else!

p.s. As the day ends, my search of a fellow blogger's site summons me to find the luminous amidst the gore on this feast day of John the Baptist.