It was nice this weekend to spend a little time not giving the slightest thought to debate, aside from texting Robbie to see how things were going up in Cambridge. Given that there were 2847 debaters in the varsity LD pool, it had to have been an interesting weekend, and an especially interesting weekend not to have been around. The best time to be in Cambridge is when there isn’t a tournament going on, in my experience. Given your experience with last weekend’s judging pool, you may now feel likewise.
New York City benefited nicely from the mass exodus of the debating hoi and the Speecho-American polloi to the shores of the Charles, leaving no one in Manhattan but Brits and various other non-English-speaking tourists. We stayed at the Sofitel, which is a French outfit, so even our room was foreign. We covered a relatively broad swath culture-wise: a jazz club one night (no one I’d ever heard of, but very entertaining); the Poussin exhibit at the Met plus a walkthrough of the Greek and Roman areas (much improved from the olden days); “Spamalot,” which thankfully appealed to a Monty Python hating spouse who nonetheless maintains serious reservations about Clay Aiken, who was perfectly fine if you ask me but who will probably never cross my radar again; the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art because, well, every now and then you need to break out of your parochial stupor; and MOMA for the first time since it’s been reengineered, and it is one crowded and, I hate to say it, rather bland building with enough plain white walls to convince you that you’ve mistakenly stumbled into some newly built apartment building they’re trying to rent. Of course, the MOMA has enough grist for the Caveman mill to last a lifetime, and I reacquainted myself with some old friends and found a few new, camera at the ready. I did manage to discover that the Old Baudleroo is wrong about Duchamp, whose first ready-made was not the urinal but a bicycle wheel years earlier. Baudrillard wrong about something? Sacre bleu! Of course, R. Mutt’s fountain is so much more entertaining than a bicycle wheel, but reality is reality, however much the O. B. might think otherwise. And imagine: people thought I’d be encouraging the Sailors to run the O. B. on nukes. As if some cranky old Gauloise-smoking art critic who thinks there’s no distinction between art and reality is the person I would turn to for political analysis. One titters at the thought.
So this week the Sailors are off (and some are literally off, with NoShow in France and Stealth in California, for instance), so there isn’t much going on in our neck of the woods. A PF chez tomorrow (and I’m still stumped on March, but at least there seem to be avenues to traverse, even if they really don’t lead to any particular truth), maybe someone will send me the odd case or two for the Bronx Scientology MHL this Saturday. I need to do a Nostrum, and seriously look at this @%#* Goy District stuff, which I keep putting off and putting off and, occasionally, putting off. It all seems so pointless; not the Goy, but the whole District thing. We’re feeding into this universe in which we are virtually no part at all. Schools in Missouri and Kansas have enough NFL points to launch nuclear missiles, while our poor district is lucky if we know how to find the point-entry page. The only person I know who really cares about points is O’C, our local Pomp and Circumstance scorekeeper, who knows every way under the sun to get points (talking to self in front of men’s room mirror while combing hair, 2 points; talking to self in front of men’s room mirror while someone is in one of the stalls, 4 points). Then again, Rippin’ does go so far as to list a front-page scoreboard of point leaders, so they must care too. Then again, I do like giving those acknowledgment stickers to people: Medal of Honor, Robe of Distinction, Crown of Thorns, etc. I hand them out at meetings and everyone complains that they can’t find their membership certificate so they have nowhere to stick it. So I give them alternate places where they can stick it, and that seems to do the job. Not that I’m being disrespectful here, but I do have a sort of “not wanting to be a member of any club that would have someone like me as a member” feeling about the whole thing, if you get my drift. But it’s okay. I’ll get over it a week or two after Districts. I always do.
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