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NAIVE PERFORMANCE SNAPPED Numerous signs surround the used books gathered by the city of Greenbelt Maryland for their Labor Day Festival, insisting that potential buyers NOT touch them until 6 PM. Having arrived late at 5 PM in terms of acquisitive behavior observed on past occasions, I’m pleased to have a chance at the best items. One can walk among the boxes. I observe enforcement of the rule by the book sale organizer and his staff. Even my request to shift a box which partly covers a promising-looking group of art and photography books fails to move the powers-that-be. So of course I’m delighted as a consumer of performance art when I sight an armed police officer enter the field of books within a county whose forces have acquired an outrageous reputation over the years. My convenient working definition of performance art as “framed behavior” comes to mind as I alert another slightly bored veteran of such sales to the impending “action”. Will the rather naive book sale organizer attempt to enforce his order on an agent of law enforcement whom we witness pick up a number of books? We laugh as the organizer does risk approaching the cop, and I collect another example of naive performance art in daily life for a future theoretical occasion. Barry Alpert / Silver Spring, MD US / 9-9-09 (5:59 PM) Wish I could have preserved this unannounced performance on video, but I simply wasn’t packing. I make no claim that I’ve written prose poetry on this occasion, but didn’t want to let this sequence of visual and auditory images pass without record.