8th Wonder
I’m not going to say anything about friendpower’s NYE except that someone offered me $20 to play Radiohead’s "Karma Police." Which I did, right between Johnny Cash’s "Hurt," and an entire Black Tape for a Blue Girl album slowed down to 7 bpm. I guess some people’s idea of a perfect party is drunkenly singing along to the songs they would have been crying to in their Mom’s Jetta Sophomore year. Diff’rent Strokes!
Through the stress, I managed to have some fun, and thanks to the absorbing work I was putting in on the ones and zeros (we play CDs ya’ll), I entered 06 as sober as an Episcopal Bishop.
On Monday, I met some friends downtown, and watched King Kong at the largest, loudest theater we could find on short notice. The movie is quite a spectacle, and Kong out-acts everyone.
After the picture, I frantically scrambled to make it to a canceled rehearsal.
Sometime later I found my way up to Lincoln Square and joined comrades Irvin and Allie at the Chicago Brauhaus, a German Beer-hall with 50s vintage decor and clientele. As a little fellow at a Yamaha keyboard played polkas and torch songs, my trio wolfed down hearty meals of wurst, liver dumplings, headcheese, and sauerkraut all washed down with overflowing amber mugs of Spaten. Our diminutive waitress was very charming, and it was my guess that she spends her off-hours making toys at the North Pole. There was a couple clumsily making out at the bar, and I said a silent prayer of thanks for my New Year’s sobriety.
After our meal we strolled back to my apartment, and lounged in my sitting room while Irv and Allie argued archaeological ethics. Allie admitted that she had been on a dig where her party had unexpectedly discovered human remains. This discovery was covered up by the head professor in order to prevent the dig site from being claimed as a Native American sacred area containing the remains of an ancestor. This ethically uncertain cover-up, led Irvin to criticize all of archeology as an arrogant denial of a culture’s experience of death and the afterlife. Allie would not concede this, but did admit that archeology and anthropology were understood by her, and most colleagues, to be subjective disciplines hinging largely on the interpretations of the scholar, not objective observation. Her perception tells her that the people are dead and don’t care. We all resolved to be cremated.
Allie also told me about feminist-archeology, which focuses on the household rather than the broad "cultural meta-narrative." This discipline is what my white male friends and I refer to as "Loser’s Archeology," usually before we light a cigar with an Indian Treaty, and have another slice of Baby Seal Veal.
The evening closed with discussion of King Kong as an anti-colonial allegory. Then we smoked banana peels and looked at my Wheel of Time black-light poster while listening to Wish You Were Here. College is fun.
