Dear friends, here is a strange artifact of #globalization -- I purchased this vintage reproduction Royal Crown Cola Original 1905 Formula here in a supermarket in Baku. It is semiotically engineered to awake a certain nostaligia in an American, I suppose - a turn of the century, pre-corn-syrup era of "authenticity" -- enormous air quotes there -- but how does it slot into the symbolic order outside our borders? In the second photo you can see that this piece of Americana was bottled in Poland for the Polish market. Are the Polish yearing for an American past of whislestop tours and bunting, lemonade and firefly - dotted evening porches? It seems doubtful. Then somehow this brown-glass symbol of grammophones and spats was trans-shipped to a nation on the outermost periphery of Europe, where the reference it makes to a lost America of shortneck bottles and straw boaters cannot possibly signify. And it was four bucks. #semiotics