Archaeologists are the Artists of the Soul
While on an impromptu peripatesis in the environs of the world's oldest strip-mall (Grandview Heights Shopping Center, est. 1927; Ohio Historical Marker #34-25), David G. Smith and Donald E. Lavigne were pondering the genesis of modern American capitalism. In the course of their wanderings, this Aristotelian duo, almost in spite of the damp|gray uncertainty of the day, was lambasted by postcapitalist modernity's inevitably philosophemic materiality. Our heroes became aware that this would be no ordinary encounter with the Archaeological. The gloom of an overcast day amidst the pastiche of spa pizzerias and peppermint barbershop poles encrusting the stoai of the proud polis of Columbus quickly gave way to the joyous sodality of two old friends reunited over coffee and crosswords. These hapless surveyors, crowned by the pungent effects of Sumatra's roasted and boiled offspring, came upon a sight|site that offered an enigmatic response to the challenge of their bodily engagement. An atemporal causality engendered by the presence of the absent Ron Arps led to an inescapable answer to a question as yet only partially exposed to the efforts of their cognitive excavation. For, as it became clear that the obfuscating brick of an artigianal masonry boutique would join a two meter high window from the outside to the inside (or was it from the inside to the outside?), they began to reflect on the shadowy, self-reflective Forms emanating from the looked-at glass. A chorus of commuters and the ire of the eagle's dew resounded in their ears, shifting their double-consciousness from the surface to the depths of a revelatory spec(tac)ulum. The vicarious stratigraphy of their gaze was inadequately mediated, as is all materiality, by the interpretative agency of the camera's edge:
