Monday, July 28, 2008

The Butterfly Shopping Cart of Gothic Street

Returning from a bill paying jaunt to Serio's today I took a walk down State Street, right on Trumbull and right onto Gothic St. Across from the courthouse I encounted the shopping cart. It was chained to a no parking sign. Carl Russo, poet and officer of the court, came out the courthouse door and yelled at me jokingly. "Hey what are you doing to my cart?!" "I'm taking its picture," I said. "It's been there for two weeks, " he added. "Maybe it's some kind of guerilla shopping cart art." I surmised.

The cart had some garbage in it which I cleared away for its close-up.

Who would litter in the butterfly shopping cart?

It reminded me of my trip to Boston with Mo yesterday. We delivered an ironing board and iron with her signature smashed glass mosaic to a show called "A Woman's Place" at the Bromfield Gallery in SOWA (South of Washington she explained). The white wooden pedestal we brought was inexplicably not big enough to position the ironing board on, so we had to just put it right on the floor. Mo said that the pedestal often says something to the effect of "Hey, I'm a work of art. Not just an ironing board, so don't paw me." Later we discussed the correct grammatical usage of single quotes vs. double quotes. To wit, single quotes are used when someone speaks within a phrase that is already in double quotes. For example: Larry said, "Ghandi said 'an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind,' but in fact it would only leave the world without depth perception." I wondered aloud what happens grammatically if the quote in single quotes within the double quotes has another quote within it. In any case, the ironing board (and iron) looked better on the floor anyway.

So I thought perhaps people would have been less likely to litter in the butterfly cart if it was on a pedestal. And even less likely if it had been in a gallery, pedestal or not.
The butterfly shopping cart encounter reminded me of something I'd found online a few weeks ago about a guy who locked two chairs to a pole in San Francisco and spraypainted Starbucks logos on them. People would visit the chairs when they were in SF and have their pictures taken on them and email the pictures to the guy along with an update on any Starbucks chair related news and their overall condition.

It's a lot more fun to pay your bills at Serio's than online or by mail. It makes it feel like 1968 or something.

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