This next one, there's a lot of--
my husband's an artist, and I love stealing from artists.
We were talking about stealing earlier today,
and this one second is actually inspired
by this video artist Walid Raad, who you should all check out.
"Of the Millennial Promenade Along the River."
"Vendors line the promenade to serve passersby.
They sell pinwheels, pancakes, and roast meats of all kinds,
even sticks of prickly little seahorses.
One female vendor keeps peeled apples under her armpit
until they are saturated with her scent,
and then she sells them so customers
can luxuriate in both the scent of fruit and her ripeness.
Along the promenade, the rabble is enraptured
by the new tower across the river,
but the vendors grumble of slow business.
Officials installed cameras behind the vendors' umbrella
fringes to catch conspirators.
Today, there is no drama, so the vendors gossip.
It is true that the fried prawn vendor tilted his surveillance
camera so it caught nothing but the sun.
Officials executed him after they
watched the useless footage of a sun bobbing up and down for 100
days.
Why did he do such a stupid thing?
He was a saboteur, said one.
We should all destroy the cameras.
Everyone knows about them, and it takes away business.
Said a third, it was for personal reasons.
He was stupid in love, and his lover walked out on him for--
and the vendors stopped short, for the cameras
were recording."
"Of the Old Colonial Dutch Quarters."
"When I imagine this city, it is not the city
that I want but the city that I fear.
But I, too, have an obsession.
He is one of the painters who works in the Rembrandt factory.
He paints five Rembrandt self-portrait paintings a day,
which I hear are sold to rich townhouses and hotels
in a place called Florida.
He is renowned as the fastest painter in Shangdu,
and he has completed 10,000 Rembrandt self-portraits.
In the mornings, I walk past him when he is on his smoke break.
Today, I catch him sniffing his hand."