so tonight we had another of our bi-weekly meetings about the show we’re trying to put together. personally, i’ve been impressed that we’ve been actually meeting every two weeks. to me that’s a pretty decent level of commitment – having a core group of people that managed to show up regularly to talk about the same thing. i definitely feel like we’ve had some formless meetings (the one where we basically watched the oscars instead was kind of… less focused), but tonight was good.
for most of the meeting we went over stuff that we’ve been trying to pin down for a while. we’ve now got a tentative date and a tentative venue, but i think we’re all still kind of fuzzy on the actual parameters of this event we’re going to have. we sidestepped that issue by planning a party for three weeks from now. the idea behind the party is that it’ll be sort of a test run for the event itself – we’ll gather people around in a party atmosphere, and then at a certain point in the night we’ll pull everyone into the living room and folks will start performing (poetry, music, theatre, whatever).
the benefit of this particular way of looking at things is that pulling off a party at the yager house is a piece of cake, so taking it to that next level won’t be as hard as it would be doing the same thing in an actual venue.
the other, more palpable achievement of the night was that we picked a name for the whole… thing. the name-picking method was my suggestion. we grabbed a book (“skinny legs and all” by tom robbins) and people took turns opening it to a random page, pointing, and reading off the four words next to their finger. it’s a pretty cool way to get some interesting titles… after we had a list of about 20 good ones, we narrowed it down to “cathedral for a while”, which has a nice ring to it and fits with some of the ideas that we’ve talked about – i like the idea of making art that is both temporary and sacred, and our dada method of picking a title was appealing to all of us.
in closing, here are a few examples that i just pulled from “the demolished man” by alfred bester:
with the galaxy inside
clump of rubbery red
but it won’t help
as a war memorial
a make-believe detective
milk-white eyes disappeared
alleys were patched into
does murder turn the
and from “mort” by terry pratchett:
had a nasty forboding
away from the stranger
i just feel angry
rooftop height would have
he stuttered, trying to
the exact position that
effortlessly pronouncing a row
therefore it is prudent