Made of ticky tacky

Here’s a great marketing wheeze, clearly conjured up by advertising types who Don’t Have To Do It Themselves. Erect a small estate of perspex cubes, perhaps ten or so of them, each perhaps seven or eight feet in each dimension, along the pedestrianised shopping drag at 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica. Imprison in each of the cubes a willowy model, wearing some subset of Adidas’s new range of skimpywear from Stella McCartney, the selling of which is the point of the whole operation. Then have the models perform synchronised yoga routines, involving much stretching, bending, and hooooooooooooolding in positions which maximise the skimpyness of the skimpywear, and which without the intervening half-inch of plastic and swatch of lycra would be lucratively pornographic to the passers-by with pushchairs and dripping tacos. (Actually, it’s just the swatch of lycra that’d need to go.)

Then, conveniently forget that 3rd Street is where a significant proportion of Santa Monica’s homeless community essentially live — certainly where they ply the best of their trade during busy shopping weekends — and watch, paralysed with embarrassment, as a shaggy and neglected homeless man, himself perhaps the model for the Aqualung cover, sidles along the row of little boxes, stops beside one just as its inhabitant bends forward, legs splayed wide, hands grasping ankles and hair dangling to the floor, pushes his nose up to the perspex and ogles entirely without shame from the back, her disciplined upward gaze from between her legs meeting his theatrical downward leer, some combination of dedication and needing-the-money keeping her in place despite shocked gasps from the ad-hoc audience, the difference between his intent and theirs being little more than the presence or absence of polite inhibition.

Reader, I made my excuses and left.

And then came back the next day, this time with my camera, but the boxes had been dismantled by then. Bah.