a company-wide (meaning 4 offices on 2 coasts) email awaited me this morning, saying, and i'm only lightly paraphrasing here,
To whom it may concern:
If you visited our Hoboken office in the last few months, you might have left or might know who left these lady shoes. Please advise what would you like us to do with them.
below is the ramble of response i sent to my fellow creatives.
where i come from, this kind of picture attached to this kind of email is, in some very definite kind of way, meant to be ironic (or, at the absolute minimum, postironic). but i'm trying to parse this photo through my usual lens and have run into a spot of trouble. please indulge me; anything you might have to say on the matter of the lost lady shoe(s?) of hoboken will be an enlightenment, i assure you. now, let's leave the message alone for now and start with the picture, in which we see the shoe: solitary, sensible, very shiny and yet, unavoidably, brown--it must be read for multiple meanings all by itself. it's actually a pretty proper taupe, isn’t it? one wonders if this lost lady shoe of hoboken isn't utterly the same color as the carpet it crosses daily on the way to the cubicle, and wouldn’t that be lonely; very sad. but then, next to it is the bag--and this is where things get lively again. are we not to assume that the shoe has been residing in the bag? also ... this is a little hard to make out, but it looks as if the garden of eden gourmet market's tagline is temptation in every aisle; and then the shoe is right there next to the bag, modestly shiny with its buffed-plastic veneer, yet so sensible with its non-slip rubber insets. its toe that is open but not too open. has this shoe walked through the aisles of eden's temptation, or is the shoe temptation itself?
To whom it may concern:
If you visited our Hoboken office in the last few months, you might have left or might know who left these lady shoes. Please advise what would you like us to do with them.
below is the ramble of response i sent to my fellow creatives.
where i come from, this kind of picture attached to this kind of email is, in some very definite kind of way, meant to be ironic (or, at the absolute minimum, postironic). but i'm trying to parse this photo through my usual lens and have run into a spot of trouble. please indulge me; anything you might have to say on the matter of the lost lady shoe(s?) of hoboken will be an enlightenment, i assure you. now, let's leave the message alone for now and start with the picture, in which we see the shoe: solitary, sensible, very shiny and yet, unavoidably, brown--it must be read for multiple meanings all by itself. it's actually a pretty proper taupe, isn’t it? one wonders if this lost lady shoe of hoboken isn't utterly the same color as the carpet it crosses daily on the way to the cubicle, and wouldn’t that be lonely; very sad. but then, next to it is the bag--and this is where things get lively again. are we not to assume that the shoe has been residing in the bag? also ... this is a little hard to make out, but it looks as if the garden of eden gourmet market's tagline is temptation in every aisle; and then the shoe is right there next to the bag, modestly shiny with its buffed-plastic veneer, yet so sensible with its non-slip rubber insets. its toe that is open but not too open. has this shoe walked through the aisles of eden's temptation, or is the shoe temptation itself?
3 comments:
My favorite part is when you call it a "pretty proper taupe."
often the choicest phrase just appears there, yeah? it's not the one you have to work for.
Hey, I love this post. It's m,y favorite from the past month or so.
That being said, I hope you like the final title.
--M
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