WHEATUS POSTUS

"Wheat beer and women one hits on the bottom."

~What I heard a man in Germany say as a toast

Here I have considered a number of wheat beers that I drank during a year in Germany and Austria. Before reading, you ought to know these things: a.) Wheat beer is my favorite kind of beer, b.) I do not know more about beer than you, reader, know about beer, c.) I face-dove into a log in the forest when I was little and so can only respire out of one nostril, and I suspect that this inhibits my sense of smell and taste.

Erdinger (5.3% alcohol, Erding, Germany): The taste of alcohol in this one kicks like a surly donkey. Gather your taste buds off the floor of the barn and forge ahead—the flavor chills out a little bit and becomes bitter and spritzy, though never forsaking the pervasive and devilish smack of old-fashioned fire-water. Not the greatest.

Drink if you like: being kicked in the crotch by the Devil.

Franziskaner (5.0% alcohol, Munich, Germany): Relatively sweet. Banana-y and chocolaty at its center, like a delicious beer star whose nuclear core churns with bananogen and chocolelium. Mellow and complex, this is a beer which whispers its flavors to you while keeping its true personality hidden behind a veil of irresistible coquettery. Different tastes emerge variously during consumption, and always as sexy suggestions. Very good, great, shake its hand, slap its ass.

Drink if you like: unconsummated, ardent relationships with many delicious secrets.

Paulaner (5.3% alcohol, Munich, Germany): It is twilight. Doorbell rings. A man named Ted, standing nervously on a veranda framed by riotous ivy, mumbles a greeting and offers you a bouquet of cloves. With its scent come deeply felt memories of spices from the far East and that time you ate rust as a child. There's no complexity here, friend: eating rust was a straight-up shitty idea. Drinking this beer, however, could be a great idea. Go to the cinema with this simple stranger.

Drink if you like: Christian meekness.

König Ludwig Hell (5.5% alcohol, Fürstenfeldbruck, Germany): King Ludwig the Pale stands in the middle of a circle. "My name is Ludwig, and I am a beer," he stutters like a bitch-faced pansy. "Is that all you have to say to us, Ludwig?" asks the counselor. There is no give in her voice, no compassion in her gaze. A circle of eyes is fixed on the King. "No," he gasps after a pause. And this time with tremulous conviction: "My name is Ludwig, and I am a spicy beer." Now, why does this beer hide its attractive taste from us? Too coy to be great.

Drink if you like: Bitch-faced Pansies (the flower, Viola tricolor putensis -- similar aroma).

Franziskaner Dunkel (5.0% alcohol, Munich, Germany): The banana-y banana-iness of this beer bananas its way into your banana, bananalessly, until you can banana no banana in which bananas are not bananas. Banana told, there are better bananas out there.

Drink if you like: pineapples.

Weihenstephaner (5.4% alcohol, Freising, Germany): Its flavors must be sought after with the utmost care and delicacy, like truffles in the forest. A pleasant, mildly sweet bouquet dissipates moments after asserting itself, leaving in the mouth neither a good nor bad impression, but rather the absence of impression: a memory. Please drink this beer.

Drink if you like: being jilted at the altar by the love of your life, but having a sweet run of it up till then.

Maisel’s Weiße (5.4% alcohol, Bayreuth, Germany): Possessed of a lively, rooty, apricot-y, wonderfully bitter character that cockslaps your taste buds, hard, on its way down your gullet. Your taste buds touch the mushroom-shaped welt on their cheeks lightly with their fingers, their mouths slightly agape. “Holy shit,” they think, “I kinda liked that.” Indeed.

Drink if you like: the company of men.

Schöfferhofer (5.0% alcohol, Frankfurt am Main, Germany): Not unlike Franziskaner, except that this brew is up front about its aims and intentions. Sugary (but not overly so) and unabashedly wheaty, this beer drags you into a relationship marked by utter transparency, with all the dangers and sweet, sweet delights such transparency brings. So good.

Drink if you like: women/men who, forgoing pickup lines, just squeeze your junk and wink

The Slides of San Francisco: Children's Playground

Golden Gate park is home to many unique treasures, such as Bocce ball courts, a frolf course, and some beautiful but dilapidated Dutch Windmills.

Another treasure is the concrete slides of Children’s Playground. These slides are always teeming with diminutive thrill-seekers, so be prepared to wait in line, especially during the summer months. This can be a drag, but it also brings unexpected benefits.

The first is that there are always plenty of abandoned cardboard sleds strewn about!

The second is the opportunity to stand upon the shoulders of (tiny) giants to see farther and know more. Unlike the Seward Slides, these gray pythons don’t exactly ride themselves, and going to school off the failures and successes of small children in line before you will be essential to a smooth ride. Shallow chutes and low rails coupled with an unusual curvature force the uninitiated rider onto the shoulder or over the median. What’s more, the slide’s coarse terrain produces a lot of friction that can slow you down.

(treacherous terrain: rough and rugged, rugged and raw)

TYHIVN's advice: Cast a handful of sand onto the track before embarking to improve your velocity. Keep your sneakers tucked onto the corrugated board, shift your weight when you hit the turn, and resist the temptation to brake!

(on the shoulders of tiny giants, surveying the wreckage below)

The Slides of San Francisco: A Photographic Essay in Four Parts

I never learned to propel a playground swing on my own. I couldn’t master the weight transfer of the leg kick. Even today I still need someone to push me. As a result I got the majority of my jollies on the slide. I was lucky to grow up where I did. The concrete slides I became accustomed to as a child are a lovely and unique feature of the city by the bay. Bring a cardboard toboggan and ride the slippery slopes of the first installment of TYHIVN's very first service feature!

Seward Street slides - Seward and Douglass Street

The Seward Street slides are the big island of the SF Slide archipelago. These twin chutes are seriously steep in and of themselves, but the view of the downtown skyline and the East Bay reminds you that you are riding a slide on top of a mountain.


As if the vertiginous height wasn’t enough to make your knees knock, ole Johnny Law ups the fear factor! What I do is just make friends with whatever children and accompanying parents you meet there and strike a deal that they will say you’re with them if the cops show up.


While both runs are painted a patchwork of grey from snuffed out graffiti, TYHIVN has learned from a source close to us who frequented these slides during elementary school circa 1994 that they were originally painted yellow and red, and affectionately referred to as ‘mustard’ and ‘ketchup.’ Longtime neighborhood resident Matthew Pantell clarifies: "More like blood and bile." And indeed he is right. These slides are serious business.

Surprisingly, the Seward Slides were designed by a kid (ForUsByUS) in 1973. From the Noe Valley Voice:

The curved double slide, which is a favorite destination of many a Noe and Eureka Valley child, was designed by a 14-year-old girl, Kim Clark, who won a "Design the Park" competition. Clark grew up on Seward Street and attended nearby Alvarado School, where she participated in a special arts program pioneered by Noe Valley sculptor Ruth Asawa.

"Ruth Asawa and her kids were very involved in the Slide Park project," recalls Kim's mother, Annette Clark. "To have children participate in the design was part of the philosophy of the time, which emphasized learning through the arts. We were very conscious of giving children opportunities to do design work."

Clark adds that her daughter's winning slide design was inspired by a slide that many of the city's children loved at the old Playland amusement park at Ocean Beach, torn down in 1972.

Kim Clark, your vision has provided thrills aplenty and also a place for teenagers to drink forties at night. Thank you.

Recovered Crafts of Childhood: Let’s Call it a Draw

“We have suggested that within the apparent unity of the theological code, the fundamental difference of antagonistic class positions can be made to emerge. In that case, the inverse move is also possible, and such concrete semantic differences can on the contrary be focused in such a way that what emerges is rather that all-embracing unity of a single code which they must share and which thus characterizes the larger unity of the social system. This new object – code, sign system, or system of the production of signs and codes – thus becomes an index of an entity of study which greatly transcends those earlier ones of the narrowly political (the symbolic act), and the social (class discourse and the ideologeme), and which we have proposed to term the historical in the larger sense of this word. Here the organizing unity will be what the Marxian tradition designates as a mode of production.”
- Frederick Jameson, The Political Unconscious

“By the beginning of the ‘50s, the very nature of the sport was changing – and not for the better. Boxing had planted the seeds of its own destruction by televising boxing matches…fans were content to stay at home and watch the bouts for free – which is something like eating a ham sandwich with the waxed paper on as far as I’m concerned.”
- Angelo Dundee with Bert Randolph Sugar, My View from the Corner: A Life in Boxing

This circular drawing could have become a serviceable vehicle for the preparation and consumption of such a ham sandwich. Originally destined to be immortalized in plastic as a functional dinner plate, this round of paper was either forgotten or deemed unworthy by my parents. It was never forwarded on to the fabrication stage. Like Angelo Dundee’s ham sandwich, its use value is solely hypothetical.

To this day my family only eats off of a collection of about thirty plates that I made. The early works are largely studies of color – erratic rainbow scribbles that occasionally make it difficult to see what food, if any, is left on your plate. The later works are mostly paeans to my favorite shows, action figures, and athletes such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Inspector Gadget, and Will Clark. This boxing promotion was the last plate drawing I ever did.

My love for boxing was reared in the tradition of the Rocky movies: Crisp, clean blows traded swiftly, landed directly, articulated in a soundtrack of automobile accidents. This piece is therefore a tribute to the rigid organizational scaffolding that houses what is actually a messy and indeterminate sport. This drawing is basically a series of shout-outs to the delightful assortment of empirical outcomes (KO, TKO, Unanimous Decision, Split Decision, Draw) and rigid weight classifications (Heavy weight, Cruiser weight) of a brutal sport dependent on fallible human judgment and entirely inaccessible to statistical assignment or analysis.

In keeping with most of my childhood art objects, and what has become my favored interpretive stance on these relics, an orderly presentation belies a swirling set of contradictions lurking beneath. I am particularly curious about my decision to include that most unsexy of boxing outcomes, “Draw.” Unworthy of an exclamation point; bearing promise of nothing but a distant rematch. A humble declaration: “Draw.” Give me my money back.

As an imperative, this “draw” casts a new and revealing light on the social dynamics behind the production of this potential plate. I was literally being instructed to draw, to create, and it’s no surprise I buckled under this constant pressure to transfer my youthful creativity to the round page. Further evidence: the sloppy corrective lengthening pen strokes on the right side of the ring of emphasis lines emanating from “BOXING!”

The mode of production at work behind this drawing manifests itself in other striking ways that are less obvious. At first glance, the red mitten appears to be a poor rendering of a boxing glove. The oddly opposable thumb, however, leads me to believe it may be an unconscious rendering of an oven mitt. This oven mitt stands as an open acknowledgment of the purely functional value of the piece as dishware. Knowing that my work was destined to be a plate, this knowledge came to dominate what was now a self-aware artistic process. I was getting too old for this, and my mounting frustration with the limitations of the medium seeped into and corrupted my work. It’s no surprise that this round of paper was never shipped off to the processing plant.

I am proud, however, that this boxing promotion bares an uncanny and entirely coincidental resemblance to Kevin C’s glorious “Timeless Raps” graphic, which was created in MS Paint.

Reconfiguring the SLAB canon: Behold, the Butter-Yellow SLAB (Saussure, Lacan, Althusser, and Barthes)

“SLAB theorists commonly counterpose ‘theory’ to ‘history,’ as if historical research could not also be theoretical. I propose a more informative opposition. SLAB theory and its offshoots, in their deepest assumptions and their concrete practices, have consolidated a new scholasticism, a ceaseless commentary on authoritative sources. Poetics, on the other hand, frankly offers scholarship--an open-ended, corrigible inquiry that respects the reciprocal claims of conceptual coherence and empirical adequacy. Lacking a substantive doctrine, it does not have the answers ready before anyone has asked the questions.”

- David Bordwell, Historical Poetics of Cinema

Nearly one year ago, TYHIVN featured a photographic essay of the breathtaking SLABs of Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. Today we introduce you to a new slab on the block, the Butter-Yellow SLAB.
Often outlandish in appearance and decoration, SLABs are expected to display their elaborate custom plumage not with speed, but with a slow, signature gait. The object, of course, is to cruise as slowly and demonstrably as possible so as to showcase as much as possible the amount that the driver is generally said to be "flossin’". Thus, the exploration of new vertical dimensions by way of hydraulics, so as to perform the extended aesthetic of movement without whizzing out of sight.

Hip-hop has developed special names for this automotive crawling. A SLAB is said to “creep” or “tip-toe” along. While I have never seen the Butter-Yellow SLAB in motion, it is safe to assume that this vehicle might “ooze” or “smear” down the block. In a way that would make you believe the hand of God were spreading it across the pavement with a hot knife.

A SLAB discovery of this magnitude forces the SLAB connoisseur to re-imagine the long-standing neighborhood SLAB canon. Not only does the butter-yellow SLAB stand as a serious Clinton Hill contender, its creamy pastel color threatens to overthrow everything we thought we knew about the SLAB-as-transcendent-acronym. As mentioned in the original SLAB post, this acronym dwarfs its own word components (Slow, Low, And, Bangin’) to achieve a descriptive whole greater than the sum of its parts. The Butter-Yellow SLAB embraces and enhances this effect by dressing itself as another well-known slab – a slab of shortening.

Ill-fitting panels cleave from each other and sag slowly to the asphalt, the rear wheel already swallowed by the smooth inexorable melting of the creamy body. If SLABs were designed to drive slow and low, and indeed they were, then the moist, oozing body of the Butter-Yellow slab is in a constant state of becoming.

* * *

In other SLAB news: The Golden Supreme Slab has been been spotted around the neighborhood sporting what appears to be a new paint job.


Did the Golden Supreme Slab get a new paint job? Closer inspection reveals: no, no it did not.

The Contemporary Sonic Interloper

“The thing that both Herc and Jones did was release the music on the record from linear and temporal constraints. But Herc, Flash felt, was sloppy. The break went around, but it never came back on beat because Herc was dropping the needle all over the place. Flash saw Pete ‘DJ’ Jones seamlessly extending disco records by mixing two copies of the same record, and realized he could apply the same technique to the music he really loved—the breaks Herc was spinning. Flash wanted to lift these slices of recorded time out of the progression of time, to re-enclose a song’s break in a perfect new loop.”
- Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop

In the beginning, Hip-Hop DJs dealt in smooth transitions, looped breaks, and unexpectedly delightful musical pairings. Sadly, this legacy of erasing music’s temporal constraints has been forgotten. Today, overdubbed shout-outs of record labels, rap partnerships, and even dates are all-too-common. The contemporary DJ has abandoned euphony for dissonance, swapping the skills of subtlety for the pure artifice of self-promotion.

The “added value” of a DJ’s performance on a mixtape, the radio, or in person now amounts to little more than a haphazard, disorienting assortment of sirens, airhorns, and gun-shots. While I will admit that nothing gets me pumped quite like the complexity of a high-fidelity gunshot (shell casings trickling to the floor have an especially bone-chilling effect), these sounds are surely a sign that the DJ is no longer the smooth operator he once was. He has become a frustrating interloper. A trigger-happy bullhorn-blaster.

And yet, the interruption and casual defacement that has become the currency of the mixtape game has also become an art form unto itself. Below, please find a couple of these DJ noises for your enjoyment. My hope is that by extracting these jarring, ephemeral disruptions from their background beats, they too can become…timeless.

Readers are encouraged to pass along their favorite DJ noises to be posted at TYHIVN!

Failed Publishing Ventures: "Does not a great business make"

“The process of the specialization of ‘literature’ to ‘creative’ or ‘imaginative’ works…is in part a major affirmative response, in the name of an essentially general human ‘creativity’, to the socially repressive and intellectually mechanical forms of a new social order: that of capitalism and especially industrial capitalism.”

- Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature

"It's a wonderful iconic brand. But we have struggled for years with advertiser commitment and this year was not a particularly good one. We believe future prospects are not much greater, so we can't sustain the business."
- Charles H. Townsend, president and CEO of Condé Nast

And so, a Haiku/Photo mash-up eulogy:

Neons strike contrast

With a sterile surrounding,

A messy coda

I like candy, plus eulogy for the hyphen

"I need candy,
Bubblegum and taffy,
Get in my way, punk,
You gonna get your ass beat,
Nasty."
~MC Pee Pants

When the rough cave-hands of a cave-man slapped cave-pigment on a cave-wall, they did two related things. They:

1.) ushered in the beginning of the end of prehistory, mainly because they
2.) recorded, in the absence of written language, historical occurrence

What then if we assign depictive historiography, the most primitive of human historical techniques, the task of depicting one of the most primordial human urges--the urge to eat, for example, or the urge towards companionship with fellow humans, or the urge to rut, or the urge to have Jolly Ranchers and Starburst Tropical Fruit Chews rain from the sky directly into our gaping, indiscriminately churning mouth-hole? Some cave-man-ass-shit, that's what. Electric cave-painting is what; the pre-historical moment caught in the glowing pixelated gaze of digital history:

Cave art by Deniz Cebenoyan

Publishing Conversions!: Friends of the Library

"A small magazine of big ideas."
- The Crier

Publishing Conversions!: Curiosity did not Kill this Cat

"I was born two weeks after the Titanic sank. Make of that what you will."

Failed Publishing Ventures: "Little Local Angle"

"Mark no longer works here. We did not run your story as there was little local angle in it. Best regards, Liz R, managing editor"

- Liz R., Managing Editor

Queens Native Murphy Grabs Bonds’ Historic Blast

By Martin M

Matt Murphy of Elmhurst was just passing through San Francisco’s AT&T Park on his way to Australia when Barry Bonds’ 756th homerun tore through the sky and into his lap. Next thing he knew, he was on the bottom of a pile of desperate fans.

"I just curled up under a bleacher and immediately there was a 30-person dog pile," Murphy told the New York Daily News. "I kept yelling, 'I got it! I got it! ...Get the bleep off of me, get the bleep off of me!'"

Murphy, who wore a Mets jersey atop a Mets t-shirt to the Giants-Nationals game on the night of August 7th, defended the ball from a horde of rabid fans, one of whom claims to have recovered his shoe, until he was escorted away by SFPD on hand at the stadium.

"I feel like I won the lottery," Murphy said.

Authorities estimate the ball could be worth anywhere between 1/2 and 2 million dollars. Murphy, 22, has promised to split the proceeds from the ball with his friend who attended the game with him, Amir Kamal, 21.

Fans who were in attendance recall an ugly fight for the valuable souvenir.

“Coming out of the pile, [Murphy] looked pretty messed up,” recalls Lynne Podesta, a firefighter in the Hayward Fire Department in Alameda County, who celebrated her birthday at the game on August 7th. She was seated in the first row of the center field bleachers – where Bonds’ 435-foot record-breaking blast landed. The fifth-inning homerun places Bonds in sole possession of the number one spot on the all-time home-run list ahead of Hank Aaron.

“I didn’t know [Murphy] was the one who got it,” said Podesta. “I just thought he was some kid who had been in the fight.”

“The kid behind us, the ball hit off his hand. That’s what made it go cockeyed and allowed [Murphy] to get to it. As soon as the ball was hit I stood up with my glove to try to catch it but I was getting pushed away. Then they had the scrum, and everyone piled on top of each other. It was incredible.”

Matthew Pantell, a native San Franciscan and first-year University of California San Francisco medical school student, attended the game with his father and brother. He witnessed the historic moment from high above the action, perched on his seat in the very last row of the stadium in left field.

“The whole stadium was standing and chanting ‘Barry’ in between pitches,” said Pantell, who nearly missed the game to study for an Anatomy test. “As soon as the ball landed, down in the bleachers there was this visible wave of motion, this big ripple effect of people as everyone converged on the ball.”

“There’s something great in that he just happened to by passing through. It’s part of the magic of baseball that anything can happen,” said Pantell. “And if it had to be caught by someone from out of town, at least it wasn’t a Yankee fan.”

The Purloined Gyro

“What could be more convincing, moreover, than the gesture of laying one's cards face up on the table? So much so that we are momentarily persuaded that the magician has in fact demonstrated, as he promised, how his trick was performed, whereas he has only renewed it in still purer form: at which point we fathom the measure of the supremacy of the signifier in the subject…But a suspicion occurs to us: Might not this parade of erudition be destined to reveal to us the key words of our drama? Is not the magician repeating his trick before our eyes, without deceiving us this time about divulging his secret, but pressing his wager to the point of really explaining it to us without us seeing a thing? That would be the summit of the illusionist's art: through one of his fictive creations to truly delude us.”
- Jacques Lacan, Seminar on The Purloined Letter


I was first introduced to the precious Gyro Girl ad campaign by long-time friend and distinguished author of the hilarious Commedia Dell'Farte, Dr. Poopshadow. As younger gentlemen, we relished the opportunity to snicker knowingly over the air-brushed absurdity of these posters. While I can’t speak for the Doctor, I suspect our long-standing fascination with the Gyro Girl had less to do with adolescent lust and much more to do with an inaugural confrontation with Camp. These posters were probably funny for the same reason that retro “Spam” Miracle Meat t-shirts were funny for a thirteen-year-old in 1997.

This campy effect is achieved in part by the peculiar advertising parity amidst an ostensibly eclectic oligarchy of corporate Gyro suppliers. While more careful inspection reveals that this gal is specifically endorsing “Kronos,” this brand, like all Gyro brands, plays a nearly inaudible second fiddle to the “Gyro as basic foodstuff” declaration. This commercial team-up figures the Gyro as an essential food element rather than a food compound (which is what it is), effectively aligning the Gyro, despite containing a diverse array of ingredients and pre-packaged preparation, with the wholesome appeal and collaborative publicity of the raw and semi-raw materials market. Take milk, for example. Milk the food presents a unified, brandless front. A victory for milk is a victory for all milk brands. Meats have long pursued a similar strategy. Like a battalion of British redcoats, Beef (“it’s what’s for dinner”) and Pork (“the other white meat”), have honorably cast their lots together, launching a single, upright, frontal assault on the American public, whether by choice or because government subsidy mandates it. Gyros have chosen to deal in the same semi-brandless currency. The result is the feeling that one might wait in line to receive a bushel of gyros along with some toilet paper and bread.

Satisfied with this campy arithmetic, I put the issue to rest. Only recently have I stopped to consider my true delusion. This handsome woman (and really what other word but “handsome” can be applied to her flawless visage?) had obscured the real mechanism of the Gyro’s appeal beneath the symbolic act of revealing. On the surface, the Gyro Girl ads recall a simpler time when advertising was a straightforward and unself-conscious business – the kind I was quick to associate with campiness. I now see, however, that the imprint of the Gyro Girl ads on my own consciousness is the result of a more nefarious symbolic structure. Like Poe’s purloined letter, the most effective hiding place for this deceit was right out in the open.

Performing a Freudian double-clutch, the Gyro Girl superficially sells Gyros to you with her good looks. Meanwhile, she is actually selling you to Gyros. Her seductive smile, arched eyebrow, and prelapsarian skin call out to hungry men everywhere. What these men don’t see are the Gyro Girl’s jeans, fastened with a thin alligator-skin belt well above her midriff, in direct conversation with Meg Ryan in “When Harry Met Sally.” What they don’t see is her wedding ring and another thing they don’t see is the toddler clamped to her leg. All along, her delicate form suggested she was about to take a bite! But she’s not about to take a bite! She is about to make you take a bite! The Gyro Girl is not Eve! She’s the snake!

After years of chuckling at the Gyro Girl’s pathetic innocence and naïveté, I have only now seen the illusionist’s art: that she is the one laughing.

Latin Rhythms Heat Up Summer Nights In Queens

"The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It is a very mean and nasty place It will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me or nobody is going to hit as hard as life. But it ain't about how hard you hit, it is about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward, how much can you take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done!" - Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa, Rocky Balboa

“In five years, we’ve only had two or three fights. It’s a very good average.”

The White Noise of Atlantic Avenue

"Toyota Celica...A long moment passed before I realized this was the name of an automobile. The truth only amazed me more. The utterance was beautiful and mysterious, gold-shot with looming wonder. It was like the name of an ancient power in the sky, tablet-carved in cuneiform. It made me feel that something hovered. But how could this be? A simple brand name, an ordinary car. How could these near-nonsense words murmured in a child's restless sleep, make me sense a meaning, a presence? She was only repeating some TV voice. Toyota Corolla, Toyota Celica, Toyota Cressida. Supranational names, computer-generated, more or less univerally pronounceable. Part of every child's brain noise, the substatic regions too deep to probe. Whatever its source, the utterance struck me with the impact of a moment of splendid transcendence...I depend on my children for that."

- Don DeLillo, White Noise

Self-Parodic Filth: Only in New York

“It is not so much an empirical as an analytic judgment, not a historical statement, but a definition, to say that the intentional fallacy is a romantic one.”

- William K. Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley, The Intentional Fallacy

“…the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin – or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins.”
- Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author

A new home in an old apartment and a windowsill in a communal airshaft. A plastic bottle cap, a q-tip, a cigarette butt, teeth-marked chewing gum in the shape of a worm, and a forgotten Funyun (peeking out from behind the gum). Romantic yes, but more so it would seem a profoundly human impulse to search for some intention behind this work of art.

This gritty tableau reeks of premeditation. Its feigned mélange of stereotypical filth items is a monument to the impossibility of intentional randomness. Its flavor is as artificial as the gum’s pink color. Perhaps the only things missing are a carefully-placed banana peel and a prophylactic wrapper.

However, the installation’s banality is its greatest triumph. It’s only message: someone had fun here – either in the great deceit of its arrangement, or the more unlikely possibility that each of these treats was actually savored and blithely discarded.