Quips and Quotations (Free Enterprise and Free Spirits Edition)

 

Yes, April is just that, and while there's still time I thought I should post a poem--but which poem? There are so many. After much consideration I decided it would be nice to share what...

 ...one poet thought of...

...another.

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I
walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-
conscious looking at the full moon.
   In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the
neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
   What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping
at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in
the tomatoes!—and you, García Lorca, what were you doing
down by the watermelons?

   I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking
among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
   I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork
chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
   I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following
you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
   We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary
fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and
never passing the cashier.

   Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour.
Which way does your beard point tonight?
    (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the 
supermarket and feel absurd.)
   Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add
shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.
   Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue
automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
   Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what
America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you
got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear
on the black waters of Lethe?

--Allen Ginsberg, "A Supermarket in California", 1956

 

 

  

Vital Viewing (Mammon Mechanics Edition)

Today we again take up technology. Not the kind that you find in your home, but the machines out in the public sphere that just like any store or shop asks to be paid for services rendered, only there's no salesclerk, just you and a button, or a few buttons. Increasingly these machines accept plastic or paper money, but traditionally took coinage. So check your pockets for any loose change and lets see what it will buy us. 

Lets start with that most ubiquitous of coin-operated mechanical devices, the vending machine. How do one work? According to the following video, better than ever:

Well, that was certainly an upbeat look at the latest technology, wasn't it? So, you no longer have to deal with sticking your hard-earned nickel and dimes into a snack machine only to have that bag of Doritos or Nestle Crunch bar get tantalizingly lodged between the glass and the spirally thing? That's a relief!

Must be one of the older models. And that guy better be careful, or he could end up like...

...this unfortunate chap.

Ever fantasize about having a claw? Thanks to coin-operated technology, you can have the next best thing: 

Nice, and just think, unlike Freddy's claw, no teenagers were killed in the making of this video. Heck, the stuffed rabbit wasn't even damaged.

Though there were precursors, some going all the way back to the Roman Empire, the coin-operated machine era basically begins in the early 1880s, when London railway stations introduced devices that for a small price dispensed postcards and envelopes. This was the same decade that saw the invention of the electric light bulb, but the first vending machines were more like traditional clocks, relying on gears and levers and springs for the exchange of goods and services. Eventually, the technology evolved to the point where you had to plug them into a wall, but there are still a few that do things the old-fashioned way, such as those quite-common machines that dispense unwrapped gum and candy:

Since this video was first posted on YouTube in 2015, it's received an astonishing 98,167 views. In case you were thinking of making a purchase yourself, I'm sorry to say one or more of those 98,167 viewers have beaten you to it, and the machines are no longer up for sale.

Back to the big coin-operated boys, such as washers and dryers, which have a building all their own. Often a kind of a seedy-looking building. I don't think it's age. I think laundromats are built seedy-looking. It's in the blueprints. But that just gives them a kind of transient charm. Just the thing for transient relationships:

Well, I'm not going to take my laundry there. With all that singing, I wouldn't hear that little beep that tells me the load is finished!

Machines attaining human-like emotions has been a staple of science-fiction for what seems like forever. And usually those machines with human-like emotions end up wreaking havoc on humans with human-like emotions. Really, it's much better to build a machine with dog-like emotions. Those machines would be loyal and never turn on their human masters, as long as you kept them well-fed. Still, I can't help but wonder if the machines-wreaking-havoc-on-humanity genre is really what would happen if machines had hearts. Especially, coin-operated machines. Pay phones obviously can't feel, or else they all would have ganged up and beat the hell out of a cell tower by now. And anyway, when we humans experience heartbreak, we don't always take it out on others. We only do that 90%, maybe 91%, of the time. After that, we usually take it out on ourselves. And so too, I think, would a machine:

Many of you, maybe even most of you, will recognize the late Dom DeLuise, whose birthday falls today. But what about that talking weight machine? Whose voice was that?  

That coin-operated machine didn't say "Rosebud" before it ceased operation, but it could have.

Zero Zero Zero, Zero Zero Zero, Zero Zero Zero Gravity

 

That's one way to lose your cherry.

Then there's the Amazonian...

Wrong Amazonian.

No pussy there.

I guess there's nothing left for the meek to do but inherit the Earth.

Selling Your Sole to the Devil

 Have you heard the latest controversy? Last week,  as a promotional tie-in to his new video,  rapper Lil Nas X put on sale 665 satanically-modified Nike sneak--oops, I'm dating myself--athletic shoes, with a drop of human blood in each and every one, at $1,018 a pop. If all you Iron Maiden fans out there are wondering about the 666th, that's to be raffled off in the near future (so, in order to pull this off, did 666 different people get pricked with a needle, or did one person just get pricked 666 times? I can't help but wonder about these things.) As evidence that capitalism is still very much with us despite some devastating blows of late, all 665 pairs sold out in less than a minute. Not that every single customer that ordered one got it delivered to their door via Amazon or whoever, as Nike Inc.--which didn't authorize either the modification or the sale and certainly not the raffle--has won a temporary restraining order halting the delivery of the fallen angel footwear. The multinational corporation--headquartered in 14% Catholic, 30% Protestant, and 27% religiously unaffiliated Oregon but with most of its factories in Buddhist East Asia--is planning other legal action as well. I guess I can see where Nike is coming from. Nobody likes having their brand coopted, especially without their permission. That said, Nike should be careful about (as numerous biblical quotes put it) reaping what they sow, or (as Hesiod by the way of Edith Hamilton puts it) opening up a Pandora's box, or (as 1001 Arabian Nights by way of Sidney Sheldon puts it) letting the genie out of the bottle. After all...

...a certain Greek goddess might complain that it was originally her brand that was coopted.