fun with prismatron
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.
He had found the VCR on the street too. Brown found almost everything on the street. The mismatched furniture in his back alley apartment played musical chairs with the disgraced items he saw seductively posed on gaudy lit circles of pavement. The dusty books he took home just needed a wipe with a wet cloth before he put them on little Aztec piles beside his mattress. The occasional roach refugee he blasted with his trusty Raid, but still… Garbage here seemed cleaner - less brown sludge, less dull and gross - than he remembered from his few visits to grand old Kiev. Supposing he remembers them at all. Here he tried to wipe his old world memories, flooding his mind with new narratives. This was after he fled his mother. Left her in that macrobiotic commune in Oregon. She bought it with the money they made back home in the Ukraine. Apparently the favorable mention of an obscure grain in a popular no-carb diet bible had sparked so much interest in the meager harvests of their ancestral land that his father had been able to simply buy their way into America, the perplexing country Brown was now attempting to understand, on film, in magazines, on the street.
This city, he often thought, recycles itself; one person’s clutter becoming another’s until everyone is connected in a nostalgic downward spiral of ironic lampshades, dorky pastel record covers, and faux-leather bowling bags from drowsy upstate suburbs. The lady walking just ahead of him, the sad one who looks like she had a very slow day in high-end publishing, she just stopped and hunched, peering between some stale Staples boxes. This constant spying, downcast eyes roving between the base metal of parking meters, for Brown too had become second nature. After the Delicious Dumpling restaurant closed, the other Chinese would be here, their shopping carts parked just behind them, crouching, gently grazing the almost body sized black bags, collecting the drinking containers tossed out after SoHo’s more adventurous shoppers had drunk their last canned sip of too sweet moccachino here, in the no man’s land he now called home.
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