Tuesday, October 31
dreamsequence
So I'm at another academic conference, except this one is also sort of a
talent show and film festival. The presenters include a bunch of my friends and
acquaintances from highschool and college, along with a bunch of actors,
musicians, and minor celebrities. We're in a big auditorium in the middle of
some kind of shopping mall complex. At one point, the members of Tool are
discussing a paper they co-authored, followed by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon in
a kind of hybrid Good Will Hunting / View Askew mode. Matt Damon has
slides. Then my friend John is presenting on a panel with George Lucas, and
George is being a complete bastard, making all these you only wish you were
as much of a scholar as me
sorts of comments. Finally I have had enough,
and in the middle of things I stand up and tell him off. God dammit, George, I
say, no one wants to hear it. Your last three movies sucked, and we all know
it, and this auteur pose of yours is just insulting. Shut the hell up. There
is this shocked silence, and then the crowd goes kind of nuts. Much to my
surprise, George Lucas hangs his head in shame. It's the end of the day anyway,
so the conference pretty much breaks up at this point. John shows me the
diagrams for the research model he was trying to explain, something involving
robots, deception, and the imputation of malicious intent. It's full of the
kind of mathematical symbols that you really need something like TeX
to render gracefully, except that interspersed with this there are a bunch of
little multicolored figures that resemble sprites from a Japanese NES RPG or
maybe an early id Software sidescroller like Commander Keen. I stare
at it for a while in frustrated incomprehension. Eventually someone points out
that it's time to start drinking, and everyone is headed for various parties.
I've promised to meet this girl in a warehouse attached to the mall to do
shots of something or another, but when I head that direction, I find that the
warehouse is swarming with off-duty cops and there are (cop?) bouncers at the
door. When I explain where I'm headed, they wave me through and say Don't
worry about it man, we're just here to catch our friend's band.