My employer, the Food Project, has recently removed its name from the front of its crew teeshirts, leaving only a cream logo on forest green. A walk through Cambridge on a Wednesday afternoon demonstrated the surprising power of this image to evoke...
Communism: Emerging from the T. Adjusting to the light of Davis Square's afternoon. "Whooooa, Dooood!" Greenpeace on a sky blue polo shirt. Hobbit-head. Patchy facial hair. "Sick shirt, dude. Is that like, whoa, Greenpeace... cool stuff" Gesturing between our two shirts, inchoate expression of some perceived kinship they signify between this youth and me, which he apparently feels quite strongly. I'm still blinking, trying to figure out which corner of Davis I'm on, where I need to turn for the farmers' market. He has a folder. I don't want any more .org emails. "Hey do you know where--" "Dude, lemme see the back of your shirt. Whoa, is that, like, communist or something? I wanna join a commune. Yeah, brothah! He's shaking my hand. At this point I'm so interested I stop trying to get out of the interaction. "Well, we're an urban agriculture project. We hire youth--farms in the city--and, hey, actually would you happen to know where the farmers' market's at?" "Oh, yeah, dude, it's like just down that street--awesome--man!" Shaking my hand again. Sending me on my way. No listserve.
Environmentalism: Half a block further on. "There you are! Environmentalist, right?" As if it's my name, and we've spoken on the phone but never met. Or I'm holding a sign at the train station. The blue polo on a young woman this time. Eye makeup. We talk about Greenpeace's climate positions. They didn't support Lieberman-Warner, and she's so unselfconcious and obnoxiously eager that I sign up. I start to go into my beefs with the word "environmentalist," but again get too interested in what sort of person would pick this for a job, and why the glyph on my shirt triggered her like the PIN number unlocking some kind of numinous cultural capital. I let her talk, and take my name and debit numbers.
Tree Hugging: And after ten paces there's another one. "Greetings! Fellow treehugger!" Again pointing at the shirt. "I just signed up with you. Got a farmers' market to go to." "Oh... cool!" stepping out of the middle of the sidewalk, letting me pass. I've said the password, and I'm not sure if it was "already signed up" or "farmers' market".
Johnny Appleseed: I go into the T on the wrong side at Central Square. Have to re-swipe to change directions. And of course the system thinks I've just handed the pass back to a friend over the turnstile, and won't let me pass. Card already used, bold Helvetica on the LCD. I go back to streetlevel, and sit on a bench to wait. The man is overweight and grizzled under a stained and scuffed cap. He nods and smiles as I sit. "Your shirt," he says. "It reminds me of Johnny Appleseed." Just like that.
By now, I'm planning my call to the logo's designers: "You seem to have done a remarkably good job. This thing is evoking, like, mythic American heroes and stuff." And starting conversations with strangers right and left in this city of no eye contact, creating some kind of hole in the mesh of symbols coded to hyper-specific groups, and resonating in ways its designers never could have intended.
"I thought it was an apple at first," the man adds. "But now I see it's a pepper. Do you work on a farm?" And soon he's telling me about Western Massachusetts, the town where Johnny Appleseed began his journey, where this man grew up. And about Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, how to live there on the cheap, eating fresh fish and riding one's bicycle everywhere. He's only marginally interested in what I tell him about what the shirt originally meant, and I let him range far in the associations it occasions in him. By the time the train is ready to accept my pass again, he's rambled like Johnny through dozens of far-flung meadows of his memory.
Organic: The woman is manning the turnstile when I re-enter the T. "Hey, is that shirt, like, organic farming, or...?" She's not sure how to form grammar around the association the image creates, but seems compelled to vocalize it anyway. I launch into a Food Project sound byte, triggered by her smile and the jumbled keyword tag-cloud she addresses me with. Like the Greenpeace grunts, I activate at the password, the friendly smoke signal. The day of our Lynn farmers' market is her day off, the day she gets to spend above ground. "I'm coming and I'm bringing all my aunts and uncles," she tells me as we part. I walk away smiling at no one, astonished and delighted.
----------------
Now playing: Mirah/Ginger Takahashi - Oh! September
via FoxyTunes
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Ontological control: Fiction polices reality in Lynn
Destiny is dressed all in black, with Hannah Montana as a glare-pink stencil face blazing across her shirt. "After this, I'm totally on break," she says. Her skinny arms pushing a rake through the topsoil her mom's wheelbarrowing into the new beds. Break over, Destiny pulls a scraggly pot-bound tomato plant from the plastic tray. I ask her if she knows how to transplant it. "Oh, yeah, like this." Deftly loosening the root-ball, tucking it into the ground. Destiny gives the soil a cosmetic smooth, says "I know" when Mom reminds her to pack it down around the roots.
Her mother, in the shade of the van's tailgate: "It's the same with me: I'm a city-country person like you, Robert. My parents had a farm, horses. It's hard. I'm, like, you know that neighbor who inspires everyone else to plant something. Yeah, that's always me. I'm just digging in the littlest space and planting things. So when I heard about this I'm like Yeah! Sign me up."
...
Behind the empty lot, piles of construction trash rise like hump-backed, flotsam-crusted sea monsters surfacing from the hot blacktop. A dessicated bus drags its wheelless rear, its windows smashed, its siding hammered and twisted into Gehry-esque wing-shapes. A pickup, a mere shell of rust, rides one of the waves of trash.
Her mother, in the shade of the van's tailgate: "It's the same with me: I'm a city-country person like you, Robert. My parents had a farm, horses. It's hard. I'm, like, you know that neighbor who inspires everyone else to plant something. Yeah, that's always me. I'm just digging in the littlest space and planting things. So when I heard about this I'm like Yeah! Sign me up."
...
Behind the empty lot, piles of construction trash rise like hump-backed, flotsam-crusted sea monsters surfacing from the hot blacktop. A dessicated bus drags its wheelless rear, its windows smashed, its siding hammered and twisted into Gehry-esque wing-shapes. A pickup, a mere shell of rust, rides one of the waves of trash.
"They must think Lynn is one giant dumpster," Destiny's mother is saying. "Everywhere they go, they just leave trash, trash, trash."
The film is called "Surrogates." This heaving trashscape is how the makers have envisioned the city, fifty years into the future. Spandexed humanoid robots have walked the streets for weeks prior to my arrival on the North Shore. One of the many storefronts advertising used electronics bought, and a slew of oft-questionable computer services, became a robot upgrade shop. We hear this from one of the earnest onlookers who clog the streetcorners as fictitious motorcycles scream through the streets, chased by choppers and obstructing the business district for days on end. For 20 minutes, we are trapped inside Flava'z, the local tag-themed scoop shop, while the chase unwinds and rewinds, the background traffic backing into place, then rolling when the camera rolls, and repeating, as bike and cop cars weave and screech through it. The business district is a gaping hole in reality, the fictitious violently keeping the quotidian at bay, with microphoned guards and cooperative local cops herding pedestrians and traffic, so that the future-dystopian theme feels not entirely distant.
...
On the Harvard bridge at sunset, later, an old friend and I spin our own fantasies of the future. Full of Syrah, soft tacos, and our long history of fantasizing together. Ours has always been the friendship of eager young boys. "Man, I been watching the news lately," he's saying. "It's all going down. I'm telling you. Well, going up actually. The gas prices, the sea level..."
The world's been ending for thousands of years. No reason it should stop now.
But with the wine and his high spirits, and the sailboats like snippets of wings on the sunset-bruised Charles, I play along, and I believe what I'm imagining. "There'll be rooftop gardens," I'm saying. "You'll look down on the city and no cars will be moving. All the fuel's used up. Everyone's an immigrant, come here from worse places in the South. People are selling things on the empty highways. Food's growing everywhere. You can't hear an engine or an automated voice. Just shouts in a hundred languages."
----------------
Now playing: M.I.A. - Bird Flu
via FoxyTunes
...
On the Harvard bridge at sunset, later, an old friend and I spin our own fantasies of the future. Full of Syrah, soft tacos, and our long history of fantasizing together. Ours has always been the friendship of eager young boys. "Man, I been watching the news lately," he's saying. "It's all going down. I'm telling you. Well, going up actually. The gas prices, the sea level..."
The world's been ending for thousands of years. No reason it should stop now.
But with the wine and his high spirits, and the sailboats like snippets of wings on the sunset-bruised Charles, I play along, and I believe what I'm imagining. "There'll be rooftop gardens," I'm saying. "You'll look down on the city and no cars will be moving. All the fuel's used up. Everyone's an immigrant, come here from worse places in the South. People are selling things on the empty highways. Food's growing everywhere. You can't hear an engine or an automated voice. Just shouts in a hundred languages."
----------------
Now playing: M.I.A. - Bird Flu
via FoxyTunes
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
The city coming down like cats and dogs
A week and a half here and the clouds above the North Shore are boiling outside the train window, over the anonymous metal creatures spindled and crouched along the shore. I lower the free newsweekly and look. It is printed on thin paper and the pages are broad. It smells like a newspaper, soft and a little sour. The train rushes on over the water. Every page of the magazine tells me what to do, what to eat, what beer to drink, and where to find out about more things to eat, drink, bike, and dance. With the help of such magazines, coworkers, shopkeepers at shops I like, the crooked-streeted city's beginning to fall into a recognizable order, a grid of cool and culture.
I'm a creature of desire here, a hungry prowler nosing the streets for masa meal, local eggs, raw milk, lard, a bicycle, knives, plantains, ripe avocados, wi-fi, ball jars, wine crates I can put plants in. The list expands and contracts, like breathing. I get off the T and walk. Heavier, I get back on the T again.
There is something troubling in this relentless search for the city I imagine, hidden beneath the surfaces of the city as it first appears. The first city is chaotic as a human being; the imagined city as orderly as the news. As my feet work themselves over the streets, the imagined city irrupts more and more into the first city, like the logic of dreams sloshing over into the cacaphony of waking.
...
Francisco is middle aged and smiling. He looks down through the chainlink fence. I put my hands in the chainlink and pull down. My body rises, so I can look at his rows of neat, bushy tomatoes. Francisco's wife moves behind him. She does not speak, but only smiles. He gives me radishes, a big bundle. In the kitchen they become small, without the greens. I met him because I saw his tomato plants from across four loud lanes on Monsignor Street. His whole yard is growing tomatoes and other foods. We talk for a few minutes. His corn seed comes from his father, in El Salvador. The corn kernels will be not yellow, but black. "You cannot get that kind of corn here," he says. I say, "That's good that you're growing those. Carrying on the old variety." I want to tell Francisco something about the people who know nothing of his country or its corn, who would be very excited by the lime green sedgy stalks in his highwayside garden. But I do not want to appear as if I know more about his corn and the meaning of his corn than he does.
I put the radish greens in a plastic bag I keep in the freezer for stock. They are fresh and prickly, and obscure the ends of onions, garlic skins, and cilantro stalks that fill the bag. By now, down in the basement kitchen across the street from my room, the sharp leaves are crisp with frost.
...
At an Indian market in Brookline we buy two perfectly ripe mangoes. They come from a cardboard box of perfectly ripe mangoes in the back of the store. Also we buy peppers, slim and dark green, dozens of them in a plastic bag. One is enough to season a whole meal. The grocer tells me their Hindi name. In English, only "Hot!"
...
The mangoes become salsa. My housemate asks how this has happened. Our other housemate, who claims ignorance on kitchen matters and has played along in spinning the tale of Robert the head chef who must be consulted in the smallest cooking decision, gets her customary sass back, cutting me off as I begin to answer: "Well, you just cut them up--" I'm saying, when "Don't you even try to impress us, Robert," she says, and over my protests, "Even I've made mango salsa. It's like the most basic thing in the world." A third housemate looks skeptical about this. As we finish the meal, the sun is gone on the rooftop and the Citgo sign looms brilliant and close above the fens. The mango salsa, along with the yam curry we carried up the precarious back stairs, is mostly gone. The skeptical housemate asks if we can make, like, American food? Next time? So we do. We make hamburgers. With sweet fries and ketchup mixed with ginger, cilantro, the Indian hot pepper and lime.
Local season hasn't started yet for us. The city's too new, and the sudden bracing onslaught of ethnic groceries and fractious culinary histories and personalities takes precedence. After all, we are hardly locals yet.
----------------
Now playing: Steve Reich - Piano Phase
via FoxyTunes
I'm a creature of desire here, a hungry prowler nosing the streets for masa meal, local eggs, raw milk, lard, a bicycle, knives, plantains, ripe avocados, wi-fi, ball jars, wine crates I can put plants in. The list expands and contracts, like breathing. I get off the T and walk. Heavier, I get back on the T again.
There is something troubling in this relentless search for the city I imagine, hidden beneath the surfaces of the city as it first appears. The first city is chaotic as a human being; the imagined city as orderly as the news. As my feet work themselves over the streets, the imagined city irrupts more and more into the first city, like the logic of dreams sloshing over into the cacaphony of waking.
...
Francisco is middle aged and smiling. He looks down through the chainlink fence. I put my hands in the chainlink and pull down. My body rises, so I can look at his rows of neat, bushy tomatoes. Francisco's wife moves behind him. She does not speak, but only smiles. He gives me radishes, a big bundle. In the kitchen they become small, without the greens. I met him because I saw his tomato plants from across four loud lanes on Monsignor Street. His whole yard is growing tomatoes and other foods. We talk for a few minutes. His corn seed comes from his father, in El Salvador. The corn kernels will be not yellow, but black. "You cannot get that kind of corn here," he says. I say, "That's good that you're growing those. Carrying on the old variety." I want to tell Francisco something about the people who know nothing of his country or its corn, who would be very excited by the lime green sedgy stalks in his highwayside garden. But I do not want to appear as if I know more about his corn and the meaning of his corn than he does.
I put the radish greens in a plastic bag I keep in the freezer for stock. They are fresh and prickly, and obscure the ends of onions, garlic skins, and cilantro stalks that fill the bag. By now, down in the basement kitchen across the street from my room, the sharp leaves are crisp with frost.
...
At an Indian market in Brookline we buy two perfectly ripe mangoes. They come from a cardboard box of perfectly ripe mangoes in the back of the store. Also we buy peppers, slim and dark green, dozens of them in a plastic bag. One is enough to season a whole meal. The grocer tells me their Hindi name. In English, only "Hot!"
...
The mangoes become salsa. My housemate asks how this has happened. Our other housemate, who claims ignorance on kitchen matters and has played along in spinning the tale of Robert the head chef who must be consulted in the smallest cooking decision, gets her customary sass back, cutting me off as I begin to answer: "Well, you just cut them up--" I'm saying, when "Don't you even try to impress us, Robert," she says, and over my protests, "Even I've made mango salsa. It's like the most basic thing in the world." A third housemate looks skeptical about this. As we finish the meal, the sun is gone on the rooftop and the Citgo sign looms brilliant and close above the fens. The mango salsa, along with the yam curry we carried up the precarious back stairs, is mostly gone. The skeptical housemate asks if we can make, like, American food? Next time? So we do. We make hamburgers. With sweet fries and ketchup mixed with ginger, cilantro, the Indian hot pepper and lime.
Local season hasn't started yet for us. The city's too new, and the sudden bracing onslaught of ethnic groceries and fractious culinary histories and personalities takes precedence. After all, we are hardly locals yet.
----------------
Now playing: Steve Reich - Piano Phase
via FoxyTunes
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