the afterlife of shows

On what happened instead, and my reluctance to see the show again— It strikes me that the life of a show unfolds afterwards, if it’s any good, if it can generate this kind of afterlife. Therefore there’s something unpleasantly forensic about going to see it again because it lives in the ripples of conversation and walking and the flow of images and associations and remembering and forgetting that constitute waking life. Like a little innoculation of dreaming into the everyday, that gets assimilated slowly (or fast if it’s junk food packaged art).


There’s an organic shape to seeing something once, then dreaming, arguing it through in the memory, and something about wanting to see it twice (to get it right?) is weirdly fixative (I think of butterfly collections, taxonomies, choloroform— in a Victorian mood tonight) against the experience of actually seeing a show which happens for most people once.

Or maybe it was just too cold and rainy.

This is some very strange process, this not-quite-functional internet attempt at blogging. I write online when I have access then in Word, to paste, when it cuts out. It’s an ungainly to and fro-ing, navigating the fitful flickering of the signal and gobbling the bytes when they’re there. I liked it better in Vancouver where I did have reliable wireless and could edit, and spend time in each entry, go back, revise, play— here it’s more the anxiety of getting the thing up, and having to sit hunched on the bed (no desk) to post. plus I am in some kind of jet-lag vortex, awake when I should be asleep and vice versa. Right now it’s nearly 4am, madness hour, and I’m really hungry. Nothing to be done about that.