This just in: I’ll be teaching a workshop during the week of February 7th, as part of Professor Nitin Sawhney’s Civic Media + Tactical Design in Contested Spaces course at the New School for Social Research here in New York. I will be addressing Invisible Social Conflicts. Anxiety and anticipation accompany me for a walk through Central Park to stand beneath a pine tree as I am reminded of the Villa Borghese and a booking for an apartment in Paris that I need to confirm for march when I’ll be teaching at the Université Paris Dauphine. University teaching as performance art, I muse as I turn around with my hands above my head as I am taken hostage by an afternoon of scheduled phone calls and list making, going to great lengths to avoid primary concerns of the dishes, picking up laundry and refilling the fruit basket.
The neighbour’s child is a six months born again Janis Joplin as I strum my guitar to the five and dime spoken word by dwarf dog who someone forgot under dress circle seats two floors up. Sirens are carousing Yorkville’s carolinian carousel and the man upstairs wears the patience of the parquet to a size 0. I call M. who reminds me of our appointment tomorrow morning in Union square as a way to break even during these days of working from home that leave solitude standing in line for a one way ticket to Rome as home and M says, “You could always go to the supermarket” to which I laugh and say,”Tried that”, as I take note in doodle-long hand: Who are you calling invisible? What’s this I hear about social? Where did I last see conflict? And when’s for dinner? It’s like R. said earlier this afternoon: it’s all about the questions you ask rather than a destination you call answer. We were talking about law and my syllabus for Paris after which I went to stand out in the garden to admire the tenacity of bamboo trees as I thought this: it’s also about the questions you don’t ask, either because they simply slipped out of your mind for a packet of cigarettes or because they daren’t spin a bottle that may or may not stop at nothing to steal a kiss from truth. There is nothing like when exactly do you plan on getting around to adding “gardening” to saturday’s list? to get you going from [A]. the garden to [B]. back to your desk. Or [C]. None of the above as you care to forget that today is the day after Valerio’s birthday that you hope was happy all the same, your amnesia notwithstanding. You promise to ask yourself who’s birthday is it today? each day at a time from now on. You hear a voice that sounds remarkably like dwarf dog from upstairs saying, “Mine! Mine? Mine!” You agree not to disagree; after all, it’s the thought of asking that counts.
