Title: Boom

I will now attempt to explain the eidos of this blog, even though that was not my intent it seems to have happened anyway – I will proceed like a children’s puzzle where you have to circle the animals in the forest with a crayon if you can find their outline – look especially for the monkey:

Saturday – 10 am – rain

I just finished watching Kill Bill Volume one on DVD – what an amazing film – I only own one DVD – an Eddie Izzard tour video – I think I may need to own Kill Bill, but will wait until the special combined release comes out.

So we shook the tree and we were waiting for something to drop – which it did – and now comes the complicated process of decision. I got the nod that my application would be a welcome addition to the pool. I am working on my vita etc. this weekend and will get it in on Monday. I am making calls to my letter writers and getting my chickens in a row, but of course we shouldn’t count the ducks before the horse – and other anticipatory clichés all jumbled up together. The thing is I really like my life here. I love my home and my friends. But, as Sondheim observed in Into The Woods, “opportunity is not a lengthy visitor.”

Logistics – my lease is up at the end of August – I like living with Mary Beth – we seem a good match as roommates – actually close to perfect. Could I commute the three and a half hours to the ville – doesn’t seem sane. Could I sublease to a friend to save moving my crap – take the middle room for when I visit and pay partial rent to store my shit here. Fish are not easy to move. Nigh impossible.

In the comic book The Tick (who is nigh invulnerable)– one of the early issues – The Tick is out patrolling the city and he finds a would be super hero in need of help. Hanging from a cord between two buildings there is a man in a monkey costume. The Tick asks him his name and he says, “Brachiating Man”. “What’s the problem?” asks Tick. “I seem to have lost momentum.” Even if the Truman thing doesn’t work out, I seem to have recovered my momentum. This minor desk thing has given me a much need kick in the ass. Thanks to all of you so much for all your support – thanks for your phone call last night Jason – much appreciated.

Brad just called – requesting my presence at the coffee shop up the street. Perhaps in a bit. The schedule has been tight of late – Wednesday I took Angela out to Michael’s to spend a birthday gift certificate – we had high end low class food – (please explain) Filet Mignon wrapped in bacon and stuck with a toothpick (I would not have ordered it if I’d know it would come that way, but it was fine) and a whole fried catfish – with drinks fifty seven dollars (this is a Greek Restaurant though you’d hardly know it from the menu).

Thursday Beth, Angela, V, Taylor, Angela’s Nephew and myself went to The Chase, the hotel where Paul got married, to see a special screening of Harry Potter – a Webster Alumni association event hosted by our friend Nicole. At the last minute we decided to dress up – Vick went as Trilornie (sp), I went as Gilderoy Lockheart, Angela was Hogwart’s student number three, Taylor was Malfoy, Michael was Harry, and Beth was pissed (cause I told her we weren’t dressing up). In the adult costume contest V took first, I took second, and Angela took third. The trifecta! There were of course only three adult contestants so we had the asshole vote locked up.

I loved the film, a rough start transitioning to the new aesthetic, but overall I thought the tone was much more complex and interesting.

Last night we went to see David Sedaris do a reading and take questions at Powel Symphony Hall, great venue. I ran into John Wen, who I seem to run into all the time, and I got blast from the kville past by running into Lisa (record collection can’t stop talking, but about what we’re not sure-probably records - Lisa – BJ – who you went on that date with to Bogies). Lisa of the Bill and Tress punk party days, on the porch of The Cat House and Shangri-La, circa 1992 - drinking forties of old English with Jed & Jenny. Lisa just moved back from Minneapolis with, of all things, her husband. I gave her my card so we’ll see if we hear from her, it would be fun to catch up. We also ran into Karen and Eric, her friend from high school.

After the show Karen, Eric, Brad, Beth, Vanessa, Chris, Angela & I all went to The Southern Bell to sit on the back patio and have cocktails. Southern Bell has fabulous food and great atmosphere (fountains with rubber ducks bubbling under thick trees strung with lights like a Christmas in the deep south, while inside the queens gather round yon piano and revise Gershwin to include anatomical references), but be advised, the drinks are thermonuclear. We have established that I am a tolerant man. One Bombay Sapphire Gibson was absolutely enough for me. As the second one arrived – this time in a pint glass (demonstrating that the tender had some form of vendetta or crush) - Eric asked a fateful question, “Could someone please explain what the term postmodern means?” Karen and I held court, though I kept apologizing for my inept metaphors. The titanic of our conversation struck the berg of his questions in the icy waters of gin – there were few survivors.

Give us the quickest version humanly possible please. Victorian Hubris and nationalism builds into Modernist idealism betrayed as the Arthurian valorization of war runs smack into the brutality of the trenches and the fresh scent of mustard gas. There must be one big truth under all this crap and the modernist authorities will now hand that down. Whoops! Counter colonized, the little truths of global culture undermine the white man’s white whale. Logic too takes a hit as the Aristotelian hang over hits the platypus of particle physics, and we are forced to concede that the map is not the territory. Any discourse has a fulcrum on which it pivots. High and low, near and far, all have a center point around which they function. Unfortunately the act of looking for the center shifts it, because to look at a discourse you have to frame it inside a larger discourse. So then the center of your argument is shifted outside the parenthesis that you have just set and is moved to the assumptions that underlie the new discourse. By looking for the center you move it and it will always shift beyond the capacity of your discourse to capture. This is actually the “plot” of Adaptation – where do you start? At the beginning of time? Sedaris actually talked about this last night when he was talking about emotional rather than intellectual truth – which is why Adaptation is “saved” in the second half by the extreme intervention of plot – emotional rather than intellectual truth.

Example: We want to understand Hitler. We frame Hitler within the discourses of history. But the assumptions of the historical method will impose their own meanings on whatever we look at – and will include the personal histories of the historians and the history of history as a discourse and an academic concern and a form of political shaping in the master slave dance of power. Does this relegate the conclusions of the historians to opinion? No, they are chasing a center which is always moving and it’s moving in part because they are moving it, whereby the future changes the past – not what happened – but what it means.

Brad just called, “They are running out of coffee, you better hurry.”

Karen, “You’re just a neo-platonist in your assertion that there is a center at all.”

What a place to be out-ed in.

Me now, “I suppose I prefer neo-Kantian who clings to the idea that the phenomenal world can rupture and the noumenal can pour in across the abstract bridge of art.” The Tao which can be told is after all not the eternal Tao.