Tuesday was the meetup of the socio-political comment board Plastic.com. We've had one national meetup before, where members in towns all over the world met up in their cities, and I was in the first one in Boston. It was such fun, three strangers, Xiamin and sydneyschafer and me. We hung out for hours and we just talked and we seemed to connect and it was fun.
So Tuesday Plastic and us did it again. I got to the Someday cafe in Davis Square first, the kind of place I like, with steamed everythings, no alcohol, some Toscanini's ice-cream, and all the chairs are mismatched comfy chairs. There was nowhere to sit close to where we agreed on meetup.com, but my old instincts of a thousand tiny gay coffeeshops in Amsterdam kicked in, my stalking instinct, my I'll-just-sit-here-on-this-stool-tillyou-leave skills. In a crowded cafe I had a table in ten minutes. Xiamin and sydneyschaefer came in, one by one, and we just easily connected again.
With an interruption. Four guys were very busy setting stuff up, but we didn'y understand what, and there it was: a big loudspeaker connected to a taperecorder, a full big drum kit, and a base guitar. So the two guys in black -- the base player even wore a baret and small dark sunglasses -- would play their drums and guitar, somewhat abstractly melody- and rhyth-wise over a backdrop of spoken word records from the fifties and sixties. The first one was a smoking-cessation record by a voice sounding so earnest it sounded like Dick Nixon, telling us that we will allow positive suggestions to enter our mind, and we will be free of the need to smoke, hypnotically, over and over. The other was a record of two sexologists ostensibly talking about preparing your children for sex but mostly about the evils of dancing.
The band was so completly earnest about this irony-laden sophistry that it became completly post-ironic. We ended up actually being able to evaluate it without giggling too much, just because they and the audience knew it was such a ludicrous idea.
I am not making this up. Any of it.