I’ve been doing the electrician thing for a little while. I was once afraid of heights, but lighting has taken care of that with lifts, ladders and climbing up things to hang focus. I’ve done plenty of climbing up to higher places than OSHA approves without a harness for a few years in Los Angeles, but it wasn’t until last night, when our rental lift wouldn’t charge that I thought about earthquakes in relation to this habit. I’ve spent the last couple of days working at the Cathedral of our Lady of Los Angeles for the Shakespeare Festival of Los Angeles production of TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA in the courtyard and the rig is all trussing. And, we climbed it, cause what are you going to do? It wasn’t particular comfortable, and it took a little longer than we thought it might at first. We got up there and I looked out over the 101 highway and out towards lincoln heights and the Arroyo Seco and I thought, shit, if there were an earthquake we could be in deep shit… or dead. There wasn’t an earthquake AND i refrained from conversing about it until I got down.
In high school my friend Paul and I referred to each other as being super sarcastic. This was when we were so sarcastic, we weren’t being sarcastic.
Recently my fiancee and I discussed the idea that things were becoming post post modern. My preferred example is that when hipsters wear ironic tee shirts or truckers caps it is no longer ironic, but rather because this is what hipster’s wear. People don’t live in lofts because it is an economical alternative to apartments or single family homes anymore, but because it’s a loft and living in a loft is cool. We like open spaces in our homes now, so an extra large studio apartment… ahem…loft, that was converted from an old office building that has been vacant for years, sounds like a good idea. These are examples of post post moderism, things that have gone past being ironic, to just being representative of woever was trying to be funny and ironic before.
In my time at calarts I’ve run into two very good examples of this. First was back in November with the whole Homecoming fiasco. Beyond the slurs, hate language and vandalism of the posters was the inability of most people to get it. We had no intention of having a homecoming as is traditionally thought. The idea stemmed from an idea of super charged unity that traditional homecomings invoke, but beyond that we solely wanted to hang out. But this irony was lost on the student population.
The second example is much more recent. I’ve recently become engaged and since both myself and my now fiancee have been students at CalArts I posted a message about it in a discussion group on MySpace for CalArts students. To attempt at being funny I used the head line “CalArtians buy into Convention”. It was ironic because Marriage is a convention and we at Calarts are also pushed away from conventions. But this was lost on those responding. People either didn’t get it, or were angered by it.
We’re coming into an era of post post moderism where every parody becomes reality over time (The Daily Show and the Colber Report vs. the news media: Steve Colbert speaking at the White Hosue Press core Dinner, Jon Stewart on Crossfire). This time portion of the equation is becoming shorter and shorter.