Joelle's walk: the anti-ad and U.H.I.D.
here on the street outside Schwartz is placed an odd adverting display […] the figure a man in a wheelchair, in a coat and tie, his lap blanketed and no legs below, his well-fed face artistically reddened with some terrible joy, his smile’s arc of the extreme curvature that exists between mirth and fury, his ecstasy terrible to see, his head hairless and plastic and cast back […] his oddly thick right hand the receptacle for the black spine of the case of some new film cartridge being advertised for distribution, the cartridge stuck like a tongue out of a slot in his (lineless) palm; except there is only this display, this ecstatic figure and a cartridge no feral vendor’s removed, no mention of title, no blurbs or quoted references to critics’ thumbs, the case’s spine itself bare black slightly pebbled generic plastic, conspicuously unlabelled.
Context
The sidewalk anti-ad: a wheelchaired viewer in terminal ecstasy offering an unlabelled cartridge — the attaché's face, the samizdat's blank case, and the A.F.R.'s wheelchairs fused into one 2-D display on the eve of I-Day. Film-as-object at its most sinister: distribution advertising that works by refusing every marker films use to be seen. "adverting" and "F.A.O. Schwartz" are as written.