While traipsing around Chelsea with Liz, we ran into a most peculiar book, The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern America: A Guide to Field Identification, by Julian Montague. Liz, who is familiar with the artist’s work had actually been telling me about it, so when I saw it, lying there on the counter in a gallery I quickly snapped it up. I checked it out and found it to be a hilariously funny, incredibly thorough, taxonomic categorization of, well, stray shopping carts of Eastern America.
But it wasn’t until I saw this, by one of my favorite vloggers, Ze Frank, that I got to thinking: this is the kind of creativity that I truly respect. Sure, anyone can make something amusing and funny when provided with the correct subject matter, hell, give me an octopus wearing a monocle, an eight-armed tuxedo t-shirt, and a banana creme pie and I’ll have the room in stitches within minutes. But that’s too easy, there’s no challenge. I value the humorous attributes of even the most mundane situations.
Think about it, how many of us walk by abandoned shopping carts every single day. What is Tuesday morning to everyone on my block? This is the stuff that we’ve trained ourselves to ignore, the scenery that hits our brain stem and essentially stops there. But this is the stuff that our world is made of. This is humor that appeals to us on a basic level–and not a lowest-common-denominator level–material like this is accessible to anyone who has lived in a city or suburb. Brilliant.
I’ve been thinking about this recently because of Project 365, and how my photos are less than stellar. Of course, if I could narrate what I was doing as I was taking the images, they might be a little more, ahem, gripping. Though, probably not. There’s an old joke amongst my friends:
If Patrick tells a joke in the woods, and there’s no one there to hear it, is it still not funny?
I think I’m just a little stir-crazy. I have been stuck in a monotonous streak of work days since my trip to Florida back over New Years. But concerning my previous paragraphs, that’s no excuse as I’ve been explaining that there is magic in the monotony and that’s what I should try to exploit. Maybe I’ll do a retrospective on the moment 9:00 AM and take a picture of myself at the exact time I’m supposed to be at work in the morning. Knowing me, it will be a series of pictures of me wedged into a sliver of space on the N train.
