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International news and tobacco
The news stand on Twenty-second Street and Second Avenue is a space densely, superlatively self similar. It is the most temporary of permanent structures, a space rented and unchanged, filled with constantly shifting but indifferent goods: cigarettes, newspapers, magazines, a few bags of peanuts, cans of Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite. A sheaf or two of scratch-off cards in a spectrum of hot glossy colors set at intervals with metallic ovals. It is no different from any other news stand: it’s not in the nature of news stands to differ from each other any more than it is in the nature of their contents to vary in ways more radical than an advertised degree of intensity or the color and contour of its exterior wrapper.
A pair of dead eyes float above the register, whose corresponding hand, when directed, moves with the slow, automatic motion of a machine, one which can no more be charged with laziness or distraction as with familiarity or self-knowledge. Behind him are arrayed the cigarettes: long, square, tall, stubby, with flip-tops or shoulder cases, arranged in five long rows of uneven height, behind each front box governmental warnings zip up in compressed letters the length of the sides of the boxes behind; they are motley in color, traveling with an interval of darker shades of mint, touching on a sturdy red or a streak of Southwestern pastels, and popping out again with a blue-red-yellow trim along a continuous body of shiny bleach white. Their alternating but homogeneous shapes assemble a pattern of rooftops against a crease of sky, like one glimpsed down the side street on this block in East Gramercy.
Opposite them are vertical shelves stacked with magazines, some printed heavily with news already beginning to be stubbed out; and the others with carbon-pure expanses of ageless flesh pressing fervently against elastic waistbands or through pale onionskin blouses. At their feet are stacked piles of thick, unfeeling newsprint: describing identical stories in flavors ranging from extra mild to merely light. This wall of text circles the store: a neatly gridded cycle of gently variegated repetition: mounting from crisp stacks and scaling the walls to the ceiling, as if to enclose by means of their woven substance alone a precisely demarcated, fluorescent flat of linoleum. A strangely blank and unadvertised space in which someone can find himself hopelessly unidentified, unannounced, individual; where temporariness is constantly conscious, laminated against the threat of each declining sun. By morning, only this floor will be unchanged, while cartons of cigarettes will have burned, and the papers will have tumbled down from their rack, no longer tangible instruments of current information – with the iteration of a digit above the fold, they will pass into utterly ephemeral and endlessly redundant textile matter, bounded on every side by their unsold duplicates, and tossed against the back of the shuttered stand, next to a loading crate and a heap of slick black trash bags.