It's the Culture: as seen @ The Wit

from the wall of the employee room at The Wit:

Words to avoid @ The Wit
yeah
you(s) guys
you know
sure
mmhmm.-
I don't know.
no
my bad
friggin'
shoot
fudge
"you know..."

USE
yes
my pleasure
of course
MADAM / MISS
SIR
"I'd be happy to"
functionality
may
assist
thank you
absolutely
certainly
gladly
"I can do that for you"

Data Loss

Winter retrospective

The Sphinx 2

The sphinx has seen them come and go. The strong and the wrong, the wise and the wicked, the haughty and the lowly. She has seen elegant structures and torrents of chaos. Great swirling embers of power, and heart, and loss. She has stood both outside the gate and inside the gate, and found them to be the same place. The sphinx has endured the chattering sandstorms of the ages, and has remained unmoved. In her defense, it must be noted that she is made of 270 tons of stone. The sphinx is mostly sedentary.

The sphinx has lived through alphabets and minarets, prophets and parapets; she has emerged smoothened and wizened and so free of fear. She has eaten the choking dust of memory and been fed. She has seen breadths of time lap against impossibly distant shores and even still, she has not yet seen everything. Why is there always something new? What fresh momentum moves these crossing currents, turns these driving wheels, dances these many, many feet?

It's worth considering that the sphinx may not know. Her tears are long dried, baking daily in the punishing heat. For all her years, what has she accrued beyond survey? Her untold wrinkles are untelling. What has she seen but the sights? The world is set in motion, adrift but alight, and our human countless nows weigh nothing.

Our time is weightless but our actions have force. We can run circles around the sphinx, but we can also run forward. Run ecstatic, run through the gates, run in time as though time could never catch up. No, the sphinx does not know. She will never blink or lift a paw. We are the ones, the sands that blow, and breathe, and build.

This Is Marketing 3

Business card, lobby, Beggar's Pizza, Blue Island IL


Banner ad, some old train, Union IL


Food vendor, Washington Park, Chicago IL


Website, Neptune NJ


Billboard, Baltimore MD

2008 Business Forecast - University of Chicago Graduate School of Business

After Slow First Half, U.S. Economy Will Grow in 2008

"A continued surge in exports and modest gains in business investment will support 2 percent real GDP growth for 2008, with about a one-third risk of recession that will be particularly acute during the first half of the year, said Michael Mussa, senior fellow of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. 'This risk reflects the danger that a number of things could go wrong and slow the economy below its stall speed.'"

"Marvin Zonis, professor emeritus of business administration, predicted that Democrat Barack Obama, senior lecturer at the Law School, will defeat Republican Rudy Giuliani for the U.S. presidency in November."

"'The next two quarters will be painfully slow, between 0 and 1 percent growth in GDP,' Raghuram Rajan, Eric Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance said, 'But barring a low probability default by a major financial institution, trend growth should resume by the second or third quarter of next year.'"

from Chicago GSB Magazine, December 2007

This Is Marketing 2

Come with me on a journey for a high-res picture of an office desk. Don't worry, it's for work. Ooh, here's one!

Sexy - It looks like money! Must know more.
Here's a product explanation:

Aha. It's an "office desk." You know, 办公家具. Who sells such beauty? Salama-Worldwide-Business, need you ask? Their slogan?

Couldn't have said it better, if at all. Must know more!
About us:

Perverse! But righteous. And curious. What other products might such a company offer?
Ooh, a wine cabinet:

It seems America has some catching up to do in the wine storage department.
Here, I've saved the best for last. Mmm, steel sheet soft bed. And the product explanation: so very true.

The Fundamentals of the Economy

We have

Welcome to the world and all of its gifts. Of skins and heart. Of caves and congress. Gently undulating flagstones that hold the rain and reflection, pine needle sprinkles, the cooling edges, the warmer front. Edible ice cubes in a drinkable drink. A moon that sees you in your bed and takes nearly a month to wink. A corridor of infinite direction and capriciously finite duration. The doors are infinitely ajar.

We have blades of grass that wave back at us and food that grows straight out of the ground. We have eyes that can see not only what is but what can be. We have coffee in the morning, pizza in the evening, and summer in the summertime. We have voices in our head and a song in our hearts. We have a rotating world and we sleep in shifts so the little ones will always be safe.

We have playing fields, most of them level, but all of them for playing. We have beckoning breezes that smell of heat, salt, winter, love or tortillas. We have fruited plains and fruity pebbles. We have made up questions so the answers will make more sense. We have sowing, ripening, and furrowing.

So here we have: a world of difference and a world of differences. A space and a space to dance. The brighter the sun, the darker the shadows. Don't forget the sun, don't resent the shadows. Don't forget, don't resent. Do. Don't forget to do.

thanks

but no thanks.

Welcome from October

the equator

We were learning about geography the other day, about physical boundaries versus political, when it struck me (for the first time) that the equator doesn't exactly exist. The equator is an imaginary line. Imagine! The borders of nations, like the borders of states and cities and etcetera, are imaginary as well. While we're at it, money is imaginary too, but through consensual hallucination, it is agreed upon to be real, though temporary. Like breath.

We take about six hundred million breaths in a lifetime. If eleven hundred people could breathe dollars for all of their seventy one years, we'd have a bailout package. It's like a t-shirt I saw on a corpse the other day: "Pain is weakness leaving the body." Do you feel stronger yet? Or are you pain-free, yet weak? I can imagine.

If you're anything like me, there was something in your childhood room that scared you. For me, it was a block, from the bin of blocks. This one wasn't a cube or conic or cuboid, but flat on two ends and oddly bent and unevenly curved in the middle. Once, in the throes of fever, I imagined that evil block filling my room up with gurgling otherness that flowed and pinned me tightly to the bed. Because I was a child, I never considered getting rid of it, though. Today, I see this block (as I write) and I see its long-dormant discomfort, the craft of its woodwork, and I see now it looks like a horse's front leg.

Physical boundaries are real, but vary with the changing landscape and are thus not entirely objective. Surprising! that the surface of the Earth, the solid ground you stand upon even now, is open to interpretation, while the imaginary lines of government are true, demonstrable, and held fast in the arms of the law. While we're at it, the law is real, temporary and consensual, but cops hate it if you call the law a hallucination. If you - Umm...I was just watching two women going through my recycling bin, picking out the aluminum cans. The fundamentals of the economy. Sorry, where was I?

If you're anything like me (though I do pray you are not), you are wishing fervently for things to stop happening. What is the deepest part of the ocean? Can I go there and hear nothing about anything, or will the other human-hewn waves, of radio and HD and satellite and cellphones sift their way downwards, where the information (sinking and clinging to the side of chinese Hannah Montana flotsam like the opposite of white blood cells) reveals itself to be a revolution of no reveal, late-breaking news both late and broken, unmissible and unmissed. Can we pour the emptiness, or fullness, of these days into this trench of deep, imaginary, sweet stasis?

Where am I going with all of this? Now you ask! OK, let's say you are holding a live wire and you wish to describe it. You hold it in your hands and it rattles your brain, melts the rings on your fingers, and rolls your eyes back into your head. Though you are robustly aware of an undeniable feeling of live-wire-ness, you'll likely have trouble coherently depicting this feeling. It's a lot like life. The experience itself has made unreliable your testimony of the experience.

It's sometimes said that your freedom ends where my nose begins. Personal boundaries are imaginary but certainly real. Personal space varies by culture - Latin cultures require less, European more. Cut me in half, though, and it would reveal more about me than about you, I imagine. The equator divides as it conjoins. But it doesn't properly exist, so no, it's not like us at all.

Another September Song

Now on this stage the planes alight, a sweeping and a shape,
the turning screws of another time tightening.
Hectoring drops of rain or sweat crash and splatter
and disappear, a hot griddle these thoughts, this time, alive.

We sweet, we offer this ripeness soon desiccant,
parenthetical fringes on autumn's billowy blade,
lowering light on the breakwaters, fading
into sharp relief, cold comfort, and hard candy.
It's this answer that reminds you to ask...

Smiling and circumspect,
watching the buses go by -
tectonic weights of why? and OK, and so? and so not.
If these wounds are treated, if they are at all,
they are treated as a dog at the heels,
down there at the heels.

Sometimes these layers fall away
and the hands of the clock fall off, reaching up
for you to catch them;
or they will catch you.
Anyway, someone will be caught.

The last cone flowers dust the last bees' knees
and here we stand, always within
and beckoned, to the fuzzy orange distance,
and there we go, always without.
That head of steam,
these feet of thunder,
this sweetlight portrait.

A little circle

I wish I were smarter -
Why didn't my wish come true?
I wish I were dumber -
Then I could believe in wishes.

Unconventional Speech

Countryfolk! I stand before you tonight as a humble remainder of the hope that was this Nation's legacy, the pride that is this Country's most forgivable venial sin, and the embodiment of the idea that things will get better as a direct result of the actions of government.

When I began this primary season more than 40 years ago, I was like you - way down there in the audience, wearing a silly hat, uncertain and underfunded, wondering how I was going to secure reliable help to care for my summer home in the off-season while I was criss-crossing this great Nation, not attending Congress hardly at all. Now of course I am up here with you today, and I thank you for your support, and for these supports, without which this platform would literally fall down, injuring many of you, and myself, for I am with you all the way.

My opponent would have you believe that he (or she, though in fact this time it's a he) has all the answers. Of course he's wrong, because I have all the answers. Can there be two correct answers to the same question? Well, yes and no. I won't pretend to tell you, and won't even actually tell you, that we live in a world without shades of meaning. I haven't forgotten the lessons of Nuance-Gate. As per regarding the fact of clarifyingment, I offer you this analogy - when you drive - and I have driven, believe me, in my own car and with me at the steering wheel - when you drive - you drive like I have, with respect, experience, and most importantly, in only one direction at a time. It is in this direction I will drive this Country.

Some have said, and this despite my having met most of you personally - not to mention that you didn't say it to my face - some have said that I am out of touch with the concerns of the average citizen. I reject this position with every fiber of my suit. Would you really rather have a president who knows the price of a tomato or a president who knows what to do when our great Nation's banks start caving in? Anyhoo, you might even say that a guy with multiple homes has an even better idea of the troubles a homeowner faces in these difficult times. Sure, I've never pumped my own gas. Why would I want to? But I am told it is expensive. In fact, I had to attend three extra fundraising dinners, where the food was frankly abysmal, just to pay for July's airplane fuel. So I feel your pain, and am raising money to assuage that pain. I hope to lead by this example.

As I stand before so many familiar-looking faces, I am brought to mind of my travels across this great Nation, and the stories that I thought were interesting enough to remember. I have met this Nation and her people, a mildly-irritated people with burning questions and a persistent rash of troubles...

I have met the silver-haired iron worker in Harrisburg with the heart of gold whose health care plan is too meagre to replace it with a less malleable metal alloy.

I have chatted up the watery-eyed waitress in Cheyenne who makes so little that after taxes, she had to pay me for my coffee and coq au vin.

I caught a nasty cold from the toddler in Huntsville who asked me, in the tiniest of voices, why her mommy and daddy couldn't afford a unicorn when they had six jobs, three alimonies and a ranch - sorry, a ranch house.

I knocked back some beers with the dudes from the line in Mt. Pleasant, men whose hard work at the Studebaker factory, year after year, goes unsung, unappreciated, unsold and unpaid.

I gakked a bag of meth with a group of young baseheads in Council Bluffs who are so disenfranchised that they can see no future for themselves in this Nation which is for them, a Flophouse without Pity.

I roughed up a man in Minot who said some awful things about my wife. I'm not gonna stand for that. He better get an absentee ballot, because he's not going anywhere soon.

I shared a BBQ with the brave firefighters of Amherst who have suffered a budget reduction of 770% and are now forced to douse fires with Faygo Red Pop, enduring a crippling shortage of CO2 tanks and massive ant problems.

I took tea with the animal psychic in Santa Fe whose cats are so upset at the idea of my opponent's tax plan that they can barely finish their dry food.

I texted with a young man from Beaumont who wanted to know Y x$ 4 CL B/C I wana B N GIN IR. It was sad really, but hard to say why, specifically.

I played phone tag with an old woman from Nantucket who asked me why her cereal is so expensive. Her answering machine kept cutting me off when I tried to explain the complex global economic factors involved, so let me now offer this to the dear lady: please consider a less expansive lifestyle. At your age, you've had your turn. Move over.

If you knew these people like I know these people then you would know, like I do and am telling you now, that this Nation is hard-working, optimistic, resourceful, caring, energetic, and in deep, deep trouble.

And that's why tonight I am honored to accept whatever it is that you want to give me, for I am a politician - without your approval, I'm just a guy who talks a lot about what is wrong with our great, messed-up Nation. Thank you and good night. Try the veal.

The Television Revolution

The first letterbox debate.

Just imagine...

Greetings

Life is sweet. So's the iced tea. So good so far.

Goal Post

Do you remember the day we tore the goal post down?
Then do you remember the next day when we tore the goal post down again?
How about the third day when we were feeling lazy so we waited in the car across the street while the goal post company finished their re-installation, then, before the cement dried, we tore it down?
The fourth day it was getting a little tedious but look - there's another goal post on the opposite end of the field! We tore that one down too.
On the fifth day we were really exhausted so we just intercepted the goal post truck and threw the disassembled bars around until they were good and dented.
The sixth day was Sunday, we did nothing but pray.
That seventh day we were feeling well-rested, so we tore both goal posts down, trashed the gym and beat up the groundskeeper.
Don't you remember any of this? Really? I do, like it was yesterday, though it was really seven days ago.

This Is Marketing 1

FSI, January 2008. Man, that looks cozy. A dog, a cat, and a kid in a 300-square-foot cinder block apartment. Seriously, Howie, we've got to get out of here.


Postcard, February 2008. Interesting angle and scale with that golf cart patch. Eccentric shadow work, too. It's a shame their cars wouldn't fit, though perhaps they live on the golf course. It is worth mentioning that Tom and Mary did find love in the world's cleanest garage, and enjoyed many more happy years together, six to be exact.


Scrap of paper, March 2008. Speaking of the search for love, this piece of guerrilla marketing was found crumpled on the street, hopefully not dropped by its target audience, here known as "female." An exciting, timeless mix of scribbled screed and interweb. Take a dollar to Kinko's, use the free paper cutter, and never be lonely again.


Storefront, July 2008. Oh, that scrappy little CVS and their "can-do" attitude! Give the people what they want with a no-nonsense sign that even the drunk can read. Clear, inexpensive, eye-catching asterisks. You had me at "*****Liquor****."

America, Totally

You should totally come to America where the streets are paved with pavement. No one steals the sewer covers and it wouldn't matter anyway because the streetlights stay on all night. All drivers are licensed and so are the dogs! They even have dog weddings. Nobody eats them or the cats, even though they totally could.

You should totally come to America where you can drink the water, right from the sink! Who would believe? Plus it smells so good in America. In the morning it is bacon and lilacs, afternoons tomato sauce and sunshine and in the evening wafting pot roast and ozone. The food is plentiful and cheap, mostly a dollar if nutrition is not a priority. Do you like corn syrup? You should totally come to America.

You should totally come to America. Who told you it is not safe? Did you know you can carry a gun almost anywhere? Plus there are police all over the place, everywhere you look! The thieves always get caught because they can't afford gas for the getaway car. Why, you have a greater chance of being robbed by some guy in an office that you'll never meet. Are you afraid of that? Don't worry about it, it will probably never happen. Most likely never, almost hardly. Doesn't hurt anyway.

You should totally come to America where the sun always shines - at least it does on the shows I watch. The houses are numbered, in order, and the carrion often leave you alone. One eensy caveat: It is true that if you become sick you are totally on your own. But the air is clean, the mosquitos are healthy and the food has so many preservatives you may certainly live forever!

They've got Motown and Jerry Springer and R. Kelly and Adam Sandler and Highlights Magazine and Tom Waits and Check Into Cash and Netflix and baseball and caffeinated gum and chocolate chip cookies and meat-flavored water and Swiffer and Clapper and Twitter and Napster and Webster and Fluffernutter and you can worship whoever you choose even if it's a kumquat that looks like Don Knotts and no one will tell you not to, and then you can sell it on Ebay!!!

You should totally come to America. You can be anything you want to be here, someday even an American. They'll let anyone in. Probably even you. It's the greatest thing this side of the Atlantic and that side of the Pacific.