But you haven't told us how the cop *reacted, Barry.
Or is this a deliberate leaving in suspense?
(Curious) Robin
----- Original Message -----
From: "Barry Alpert" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, September 09, 2009 11:08 PM
Subject: Naive Performance Snapped
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.
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