Over-packed room + Rude, late-arriving women standing directly in front of you as if you were there, not to see Lydia Davis read, but to stare at their buttocks = You stand up on your plastic chair, a socially unacceptable person at a posh and polite literary reading
A representative Lydia Davis story:
BORING FRIENDS We know only four boring people. The rest of our friends we find very interesting. However, most of the friends we find interesting find us boring: the most interesting find us the most boring. The few who are somewhere in the middle, with whom there is reciprocal interest, we distrust: at any moment, we feel, they may become too interesting for us, or we too interesting for them.
(taken from McSweeney's Internet Tendency, here: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2001/10/25davisweek4.html)
A New York City establishment. Didn't figure the name until I saw the physical sign hanging over the entrance: It's supposed to sound like "New Yorkian?"
Way crowded on a Friday night.
It was an elimination round for an ultimate slam poetry contest; I'm hazy on the details. 3 contestants had 3 rounds to win over 5 amateur (as in pulled from volunteers in the crowd) judges. Snapping of fingers by the audience may or may not influence the outcome. Same for booing of judges when scores seemed unfair.
I've never been good at listening to lyrics. Slam poetry is even harder for me. The atmosphere was lively. A wise-cracking emcee had plenty of punchlines. She even tried to get us to dance. At one point she asked for the house lights to be turned waaaay down so that she could croon some baby-making music. It turned out to be the Reading Rainbow theme.
Aja-Monet, youngest Nuyorican Grandslam Champion, was there as a guest. Girl sitting in front of our row let out a loud burp when Monet was about 2 lines in. Flustered her. She had to start over. Twas amusing. Talented woman is doing her MFA at Art Institute of Chicago now, I believe.
It ran from the late 70's to early 80's, i.e. the Downtown heydays. It seems a little bizarre now, I suppose, for us to imagine artists using cable TV as an art medium. After all, not many people use YouTube to make video art - by which I mean, not many artists tailor their video art to YouTube as a very specific medium. Sure, a lot of video art is uploaded onto YouTube, but that is not the same thing as using YouTube as a creative medium. Perhaps a parallel in the literary arts would be Rick Moody's "Twitter short story," which was basically just a normal story chopped up into disruptive blocks. Criticism from certain quarters pointed out readers' dissatisfaction at it not being "actual" Twitter fiction - but then no one seems to have figured out how to do it "right" yet.
Anyway. The exhibition was interesting on many levels. Davidovich took on the role of Dr. Videovich in his show, claiming to be an expert on curing TV addiction. (Levels of irony?) Many artists were guests on the show, including John Cage and Borges, if I am not wrong. I know I'm not really giving anything on the exhibition itself - it's hard to describe. There were a lot of physical objects, such as piggy banks shaped like TVs, fake wrist TVs, toy TVs with swappable "screens"...you had to be there, be surrounded.
Here's a taste, in which Herbert Wentscher traces the origins of video to Biblical times:
Yes, it is very much tongue-in-cheek. Nobody got a PhD out of it. Worry not.
And the other is not viewable online, even in this age (what does this mean?) when we say "everything is on the Internet."
A description that does it no justice: It's a video, comprised of snippets culled from 80's gay porn. There are no sex scenes; the snippets are from the "narrative" parts of the porn films. In just one of many badly-acted scenes, a guy in running attire awkwardly pretends to fall and hurt his hamstring, whereupon he is helped to the "infirmary" by two other men. In the background, sometimes there, sometimes not, is The Manhattans' hit song:
What at first seems incredibly cheesy and laughable made me cry when I read the placard, which reminds us to link the video to what was called the "AIDS epidemic."
