The German literary critic Walter Benjamin, as much an avant guardian as anyone yet mentioned in these pages, once saw the revolution in an advertisement for this salt. Bullrich’s. He tells the story in his unfinished Arcades Project, his massive collage of historical ephemera drawn from nineteenth century Parisian street life. Benjamin left his manuscript of the Arcades Project in the hands of Georges Bataille, then a librarian at the Bibliotheque Nationale, while he attempted to escape Nazi persecution in America. He ended up committing suicide on the Spanish-French border, despairing this endeavor. His masterpiece languished in tantalizing obscurity for many years until it was published in German in the 1970′s and translated into English at the turn of the millenium. In the meantime, his work slowly attracted considerable interest among artists and radicals the world over. The story’s a bit longish, but has stuck with me for many years, so I’d like to pass it along to you. Here goes: “Many years ago, on a streetcar, I saw a poster that, if things had their due in this world, would have found its admirers, historians, exegetes and copyists just as surely as any great poem or painting. And, in fact,
