The readymades on my neighbor’s lawn; or, The ghost of Duchamp alights in North Carolina briefly and is gone.

The night before trash day in suburbia rarely brings such exciting visions as this Duchampian fountain on my neighbor’s curb. A tremendous storm—the first rain in many weeks—had just passed through, and the porcelain sparkled as if some great wet mythic meteorological Tidy Bowl Man had scoured everything clean.

The Ready Made on My Neighbor's Lawn

In suburbia, on the night before trash day, the only sight more gratifying than a commode on the curb is three commodes on the curb:

Three Seats of Ease

The storm knocked over one of the toilets, shattering porcelain all over the road. The remaining johns stood silently by, two smooth white sentinels keeping watch over the night.

Urinals (Three, White)

Shattered Porcelain Dreams

This last photograph below is a bit of a time lapse thing. Perhaps a bit too poetically, I titled it Never Returning, the Spirits Depart the Fountain. I don’t know what it means. Then again, I don’t know what three toilets on the street mean either. Dave?

Never Returning, the Spirits Depart the Fountain

All photos posted to Flickr by Sample Reality.

It’s Not Looting If You’re White

My friend Adam pointed me towards another example of egregious racism in the mainstream press: the captions on photos of looters in New Orleans. Both pictures show residents of New Orleans wading through chest-deep flood waters, carrying various goods. According to the two AP captions, in the first photograph a young black man is returning from “looting a grocery store”; the caption of the second photograph (which shows a white couple) says simply that they are returning from “finding bread and soda” in a “local grocery store.”

Salon.com also has an article about the photographs of looters.