Logo culture mythos meme

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.

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