10/2/02
Four eventful, or at least event-centered, days in a row, hence a certain lack of updating. Monday was my presentation in the visual narrative class (on Alberti's On Painting, to which I somehow connected some ideas from Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, and brought in a Velazquez painting and a panel from a Jaime Hernandez comic to illustrate what I was talking about; I think I may just have confused my classmates). Tuesday was Coco Fusco's class, to which I always look forward with the general attitude of a baby bird who hasn't been fed recently. This week we covered Alan Sekula's "The Body and the Archive," and then I woke up the next morning realizing a little art project I'd done recently was pretty much a concept-for-concept parody of one of the ideas he described.
Also went that night to see Melt-Banana at the Knitting Factory, which got so overheated Lisa had to leave the room before their set ended--guess those moshers generate more body heat than the usual Knit audience. And the new drummer seemed to still be adjusting to playing with them. Great show as always, though--I especially appreciated the songs where Yasuko O.'s voice was accompanied only by three screaming theremins and drums. Interesting to me how some of their live set is now practically a ritual, especially "RRaGG" (now third in the set instead of second, but they have to have been playing it for at least eight years now), the juiced-up classic-rock cover (this time we got "My Generation"), and especially the comedy routine where they play "His Name is Mickey," "We Love Choco-Pa," "Some Kind of I.D.," "Scrubber," "Screw, Loose," "First Defy" and "So Unfilial Rule" in a bit under two minutes... but I'm impressed that they're writing a lot of their best songs now (my favorite new one turned out to be "Tintarella di Luna" from one of their new singles).
Yesterday was Lisa's birthday; I cooked dinner with fruit-based stuff in mind, not realizing that the overall effect of sweet-and-sour tofu with pineapple + orange cake with orange frosting was going to be severe sugar overload. Oh well. Both came out okay anyway, I thought. And today was the inauguration of Columbia's new president, Lee Bollinger, in scalding-hot weather. I sat through about 15 minutes' worth of what-a-great-university boilerplate, then made a break for my office, resurfacing only when they were serving the "New York-style street fair" lunch. After which I suspect I'm not going to let myself eat anything but raw carrots for the next week. (Spent the afternoon and most of the evening sequencing the new Family Fodder single, details about which shortly.)