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ShareFrom antiquity to the present, cultural theory has often fused critical and creative discourse, esoteric and exhibitionistic tendencies. Socrates and Diogenes first announced many of their most radical propositions from the Athenian marketplace. Thoreau sowed his solitary beans while remaining (as scholar Stanley Cavell suggests) just barely within his neighbors’ view. And now, as archivists of evanescent urban experience, as grazers of the public space (commercial, aural, textual), we have improvised 45-minute conversations for 30 straight days throughout New York City.
Half of these talks took place at a Union Square health-food store. After a liberal sampling from the bakery cases and deli counters, we would stake out a table in the crowded dining-area, inconspicuously assemble a low-tech recording device and resume our cumulative dialogue concerning fellow consumers (their ingenious salad-bar combinations), the urban scene (as displayed through glamorous floor-to-ceiling glass) and the aesthetic, ecological and interpersonal issues affecting our lives (terriers in turtlenecks, global warming, germs we sensed circulating on each other’s breath). Other locations included MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Opera House, Central Park, Prospect Park and a Tribeca parking garage.
For this PopMatters feature we have prepared a promiscuous, omnivorous talk. Perched atop the grocery store’s panopticon-like mezzanine, our gaze gets continually directed outwards (and inwards), not only over shelves and shoppers, but also the broader “consuming cultures” in which we find ourselves. Verstehen finds its late-capitalist venue, as we the consumers get consumed by reflections on the allure of passing patrons, of fashion trends, of social customs and taboos. This conversational flow oscillates between the sacred and the profane, the timeless and the timely—providing a model for pop theory developed not from the library or seminar room, but amid a mecca of 21st-century consumption.
7:27 p.m. Monday, 22 January
A: That guy’s leather neck thing turns me on. His earrings dangle like Buddha ears.
J: Yeah you’ve described how turned on you got by those skirt-boot combinations we’d…
A: Still just…
J: Perhaps everything turns you on right now. What about this bald man reading The Wall Street Journal?
A: I’ve noted him. Today I feel no distance between my face and others. I’ll give and receive glances all around a room. But the boot-skirt combo embarrasses me. It’s like getting psyched at auto shows.
J: Those girls work at a deep level of attraction. You have this roughness of leather boots, the smoothness of skin concealed by thin tights, and then the coarse fabric of woolen skirts.
A: Just as this Asian girl’s knees hanging like a broken woodwind instrument get me. [Pause] That girl in blue flats, talking to the customer we call my boyfriend. You say he’s hit the women hard this week?
J: Yes.
A: Always in the sweater which suggests a neck-brace?
J: He’s sat on that bench during his free time all week. He targets girls waiting for Jamba Juice. He plants himself then starts talking with the girl on his right, and when she rises to grab her smoothie and vanish, he’ll turn and find a woman to his left.
A: What you’ve called “the bench” looks uncomfortable. Space opens behind it, straining his back. Whether or not most girls care, this guy’s got stamina. But you also mentioned appealing on a basic level. Do you develop strategies for…
J: Hmm I wouldn’t think I had any, yet today I washed my snow-hat and scarf using generic woolite…
A: In a sink?
J: Yes Sharon’s bathroom sink. I pulled a bottle from the cabinet, and while my clothes washed in a machine up the block, I mixed two capfuls in her sink to wash my scarf and hat. Lots of black, lots and lots of blackness from… rather, clean water turned black. I’d hoped to dry the hat at the laundromat, but after 30 full minutes it still felt damp. So I’ve worn a face-mask.
A: The one you pretend to mug me in after long separations?
J: That’s right, except I don’t pull it down as I walk the streets. I bunch it around my forehead.
A: Like Ghengis Khan?
J: Exactly. Or prominent crown feathers. And more girls than ever look my…
A: Though…
J: Especially on the L-train.
A: did you consider drying clothes in a microwave? This can work.
J: Sharon owns neither TV nor microwave. She’s furnished her place the way I’d furnish a place, except she collects books. Each time my eyes move around that apartment they land on the word “modernism”.
A: Books stuck on shelves? Or…
J: She has, I’m not joking, six bookshelves in a tiny…
A: Today I helped Kristin assemble her first. I’ve also hand-washed clothes and and made black water. Once I didn’t wash my Diadora shorts for six months, so dark water leaked out.
J: Do you sense it’s blue dye from the shorts? Or could it…
A: I’d say…
J: be actual filth?
A: loose dye would’ve washed out with the previous owner. Just now I appreciate (or got turned on by) cute black little trousers—for women coming from the gym, though they’re not sweaty. I kind of wish we all dressed this way, and more important felt that…
J: Sure I imagine girls rinsing these pants in bathroom sinks all through the city.
A: Last night I dreamt of a woman our size who would catch me and throw me into the air. She seemed a friend (not my girlfriend), but she’d get this mischievous look then toss me. I kept giggling.
J: When when we bussed tables on Martha’s Vineyard, to relieve a busy shift’s tedium we’d step into the alley, where I’d cradle you and throw you a bit. We called that Bouncing the Baby.
A: Do you think I had a gay dream?
J: Not necessarily. That smiling woman reminds me of an L-train passenger as I rode to Union Square—clearly the partner of a Polish man studying English vocabulary. We couldn’t…
A: This Polish man sat there or you surmised from her appearance? The guy…
J: Yes. His girlfriend didn’t need to study or already had studied for the day.
A: And it seems counterproductive to study on the L, though I did, um, read Foucault’s book on prisons…
