I didn’t even know these pictures existed– I found them accidentally while digging through the external hard drive, hunting down weird crap from ages gone by. I’m not sure why their quality is so atrocious.
They are from a performance of a canto in Dante’s Paradiso. It was for a class at NYU. I had talked Sam Tregar, author of the rivetingly titled Writing Perl Modules for CPAN, into helping. Sam was supposed to wear a goofy white mask and scream through a megaphone, but earlier in the day, we were walking around Gramercy Park and there in the trash was a homemade hat. Attached to its top was a placard reading KOSHER 4 EASTER. Sam, a Reform Jew with nothing but hatred towards the Jews For Jesus contingent, fell in love. I think we took it to my apartment and disinfected it with Lysol.
I’m in the second picture wearing an ape mask and playing the banjo. I had bought the banjo a year before on eBay for about $99. What kind of banjo do you get for $99? One that will never, ever, ever stay in tune. So I stuck a pickup inside and ran it through a fuzzbox pedal and then through a deathmetal pedal. This was all connected to a big amp. The only sour aspect of this whole performance was that the amp never got turned up loud enough.
The next year, I took another class with the same professor and we read The Decameron. Again a performance was a required assignment. Sam helped out with that one, too– he wore his wife’s viking halloween costume and played bass through a broken effects board. This time we made sure the amp was deafening. Sam let me borrow a big lobster pot which I wore on my head. I bought an aluminum garbage can and made a breast plate of its lid and spent the whole performance alternately bashing my chest or the can with a hammer while screaming about The Sea. Through a distortion pedal. By the end, the can was about half its original size, and I believe that I had bruised my chest somewhat seriously. A big highlight of this particular nightmare was the special guest appearance of Kaia Wong of the awesome band Mixel Pixel, who had a boss electric violin that looked like a Romulan warship. She was also wearing many, many mirrors tied to her body. She played the fiddle part to that terrible song “Cotton-Eyed Joe” and I think had a death metal pedal.
Sadly, no pictures of this exist, but I swear it happened.
Not that it needs another blog post, but Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize has shocked my lefty brain. It was hard, so hard, to have lived through the chaos of the 2000 election and its aftermath. There was a general sense of deflation not so much at Gore’s defeat as Bush’s ascendancy. It was impossible to imagine where both men would end up in the year 2007.
Gore has, at this point, assured his reputation as a master of all causes true & pure and positioned himself as a force with which to be reckoned. It’s his game to lose, which is why, presumably, he’s not foolish enough to run for President. Gore’s triumph is as surprising as the complete self-destruction and perpetual humiliation which Bush will spend the rest of his life trying to live down. Frankly, in 2000, it was hard to imagine either men achieving much acclaim or ill-repute; both seemed like mediocrities running in the vacuum of an exiting Big Dog.
Bush appeared to be an idiot-savant heir apparent who was a little less racist and homophobic and classist than other men in his party and Gore was soft centre-left and incapable of campaigning. In his efforts to distance himself from any association with ideas Democratic or Clintonian, Gore was like a dog on its back, begging for the long hand of an imagined Middle America to scratch its stomach. They were, frankly, pathetic. It was inconceivable that one man would end up with a Nobel and the other would go down (at least for the next few decades) as the most unnecessary Presidential war monger in recent memory. (Shallow a defense as it is, let us remember that LBJ and Nixon inherited their idiotic conflict.)
This realization has dovetailed with my own recent thoughts about Boethius and his Wheel of Fortune. The Wheel has been hideously prostituted for television, but for centuries it had been a clever way of expressing the notion that once you’ve peaked there’s nowhere to go but down and once you’ve bottomed out you must also, inevitably, go back up. Both Gore and Bush make me think of– weirdly– Stalin. The Wheel of Fortune metaphor/image’s great flaw is that it ignores the impact of individual personality.
Which is to say, yeah, you might end up at the top of the Politburo, but how does an anonymous bureaucrat end up as an Iron Dictator who falls only upon death? How does a joke President end up destroying his reputation and the reputation of everyone who’s worked for him? And how does a guy best known for wearing too much makeup at a debate end up with a Peace Prize and the toast of the cognoscenti?
Or, to take another example of another candidate having his true nature revealed– would Gore have stood around, helplessly, as a deranged hippie was savaged by the police at one of his events?
