Why I hate Abercrombie: or, gagging and coughing on my way to work.

I have about had it with the goddamn Abercrombie and Fitch flagship store, guys. It's bad enough that people--excuse me, not just people, but midtown tourists, on whom I love to lavish contempt because I'm a New Yorker and they're not, and because they clog up the sidewalk with their slow-ass walking and sudden stops in the middle of a crowded corner and cause me to almost lose my balance as I swerve out around them daily on my hurried route to and from work--line up literally around the block to get in all day every day. And it's obnoxious enough that the reason they line up for the overpriced and not-all-that-cool merchandise inside is because they post a shirtless beefcake in the store to chat with the ladies and get his picture taken. Seriously. See the above picture. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to beefcakes, and I certainly don't want to give the impression that the sight of a hot piece of manflesh doesn't get me excited, but when it's being blatantly used as a ploy to get me into a store, that kind of makes me angry. From the perspective of someone who hates to see anyone's sexuality being blatantly abused to sell stuff, it's just kind of gross.

But if those were the only obnoxious things about the store I probably wouldn't mind so much. It's the fact that apparently the lines that beefcake draws are not enough for them. Whoring out a man's body is not enough for them. Oh no. They can't stop there: they also pump the scent of their godawful cologne out of all their doors in clouds so thick that I literally cannot walk through them without gagging. It makes the entire corner of 56th and 5th reek at all hours of the day. I can't figure out how the tourists can sit/stand/lounge around for the hours they typically do waiting to get in without passing out from lack of oxygen. No, I am not exaggerating. It is really that bad. And the cologne in question is AWFUL. It's like Preferred Stock mixed with lead or something. It smells like metal and fakery and is completely unsexy. And they pump it out into the already-polluted Manhattan air like it's a tonic for what ails people.

I guess maybe the idea is that the scent of the collogne, when combined with the lure of the hunk of man-meat inside the store, will inspire in women an overwhelming pseudo-sexual urge to go inside the store and buy things. On a social acceptability level, I guess this works. There are people lined up out there all the time. But, really, it's a bad plan: researchers in Chicago have found that the smell of men's cologne actually reduces blood flow to the vagina (no blood flow, no arousal).

Take that, Abercrombie.

Sorry to those of you not at Literary Death Match on Thursday...

For those of you who weren't there, just check this out:
Bobby McFerrin Plays the Audience



And for those of you who were at Lit. Death Match, or who care to read some rambling pseudo-poetry-cum-argument, here you go:



On the abstract use of language in poetry:
or, why Abraham Smith deserved to win Literary Death Match #16.


To use words aesthetically, he says,
is unacceptable.
The universally recognized meaning therein predisposes
the free flow of sound to strike the listener
or reader
as confusing. As nonsense.
To use words as nothing more than aural blocks in a polyphonic structure,
to deny their universal subjectivity,
is to set oneself up for failure.
The audience will be baffled, annoyed.
Words have meaning, he said.
One cannot use them so.

Banana.
Delivery truck.
Deer, swallow, rotator cuff.

Doesn’t work, he says.
Should be illegal.

But I must then ponder the meaning of poetry as Art
in its most specific Platonic form.
Poetry as a vehicle,
--a delivery truck--
with which to bring up, display, impart
an idea.
Simple enough.
But how to transmit this idea
from the ether to the eye?
Therein lies the dilemma, the argument, the very breast meat.
The Art.

It must be said that language,
the most baldly literal medium for such a transmission
from ether to other,
surely muddles abstraction.
How can one submit as mixed media
a collection of letters, which, to every eye and ear,
unfailingly signifies a concept—perhaps not identical but nevertheless uniform?
Deer is not a series of sounds,
he would argue,
but as literal a form as the human figure in oils,
brought about by phonics and working as its own agent in
a pre-existing paradigm separate from its aesthetic parts,
and, therefore, unacceptable as abstract form or media.

But I say (for the sake of argument only,
for I do not enjoy an more than he does the experience
of being shouted at by some wheezing Alabaman poet
jerking and twitching on stage to the sound of his own
fiddle-like voice, deeply involved in the tones and arcs of his musicality,
“Tick, bladder, bucket, kitten-sack!”)
But nonetheless...

…nonetheless, (for this idea is itself such a one as must be transmitted)
I must argue
that the finest and tightest-held hope
of artists, the dearest ideal of Art,
is that of the ineffable spirit who can wield the idea, the concept, the Point of It All,
so powerfully, flawlessly,
using whatsoever he will to transmute his idea from the ether to the observer,
and still, against all odds, be understood.
He makes Art.

To transcend the paradigms inherent in the medium one has chosen,
to showcase, whether it be via such an easily and perhaps even cop-out-edly accessible
form as the human figure or, in this case,
the vagaries of the English language and its tonality, consonant-laden ends and nonsense grammatical structures,
the idea, pure and shining and pinhead-small
against the black velvet backdrop of the void,
and to force into the materials at hand the meaning therein…
That, right there, is Art.

Surely we must—those of us with the desire to create, at least, who
fling ourselves into that dark shadow of predefined mindsets,
screaming desperately at nothing—
concede that words can be whatever we ask of them
if we have but the power or the genius or the tenacity or the obliviousness
to try and fail and try again to make them something other than their signifieds.
And surely those who can do so, or who dare even make the attempt,
are such folks as we can only respect and vaguely wonder at,
minds, like jaws,
agape.

I must then write it, though it pains my practicality:

Deer. Deer. Swallow.