New Year's Eve redux

Dr. Bombay's
8:35 AM

Now playing over the in-house system: my new least-favorite version of Mood Indigo. It is, if you can believe it, a cross between eighties hair-metal and barbershop. A genuine stylistic disaster area, ill-conceived from da capo. Someone should quietly wrap a full roll of yellow police tape around this song. But still, I have to say . . . it's fascinating in a morbid way, like slowing down near a car wreck, or witnessing an execution. It's hard to turn my ears away.

How to explain last night? Remember when I told you about my well-documented winter holiday? Well, it fell to Josh to take the whole goddamn variegated mess of footage and edit it together into a 26-minute film. Vlindinhauer, Vlindinhauer's wife M, Josh and I screened the world premier last night. Nota bene dear reader, that they three were all in Boston and I'm here in Bedlam- I mean Atlanta. So circumstances required us to video-conference the event.

There were at least two distinct successes last night:

1. The film itself was brilliant. I told Josh it's the best thing he's done that I'm aware of. It was so good we watched it twice.

2. The strangeness of videoconferencing a social event quickly became a source of entertainment in its own right.

Please don't ask me to explain all the reticulate meta-levels of hypercommunication that were inter-knitting each other at every turn last night. All I'll say is that the videoconference itself was being filmed. And it wasn't long before the film of the vidoeconference was being used in the videoconference.

Stir well. Repeat as necessary.

If that doesn't sound like fun to you . . . well, maybe that's why you weren't invited, sunshine.

Even if I were able to 1) reconstruct for myself and 2) explain to you the myriad levels of communication that were being juggled last night, like maybe by drawing you a Venn diagram or something, I wouldn't do it. I swear to god it would make your head explode.


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Now playing: Naima by Coltrane. Once while I was at Hampshire I had the great pleasure of playing (bass on) this song with Yusef Lateef. Only, he had reworked it, putting it in 5/8.