The old man always came unexpectedly into the subway compartment, stood in the middle of the car and started his job. He sold Asian souvenirs that made a sound. From one station to the next, he underwent small performances in which he demonstrated his objects. He reached into a large shoulder bag, pulled out an object, demonstrated it in action and at the end he commented on his act by announcing the price: one fifty. Always one fifty. The variety of offers was even more convincing due to the single price, as there was no qualitative reading out between different prices and objects. It was possible to concentrate on the ritual of the presentation completely unaffected by price-performance comparisons and to get involved in the surprising variety of objects conjured out of the sack and their sounds.

The result was something like a spoken basic rhythm and a tonally very surprising contrast through the sounding objects. He presented them relatively unambitiously and not out to demonstrate them soloistic. This apparent distance to the objects and his sonorous and emotionless announcement of the ever-constant price made the performance something very special. After a few moments something unusually different emerged. The acoustic utterances of his objects were at times quite funny and unpredictable (i.e. the sounds were not readable from the visual appearance), but despite this subliminal humorous tone, a great seriousness in his action, a deep poetry of the moment was created. The rattling of the driving noises and the squealing of the brakes on the New York subway resulted in a new synchronization with a different rhythm beyond the everyday and at the same time in the middle of its center.

New York, October 1992