-The website says the talk starts at 7pm. The receptionist says it starts at 6:30 so we go downstairs where we sit and wait for 30 minutes.
-A woman dressed all in black stands in front of the waiting audience and takes a photo on her iPhone.
-A pretty girl with half a shaved head is sitting a few rows in front. She looks familiar.
-I go to the toilet and pass the thick yellow piss of a person whose hangover is still in control of his bodily functions.
-I'm looking at the pretty, shaven headed girl and as two people arrive at the talk behind me, she turns around, catches my eye and waves. I'm flustered and look around to see if she is waving at the people behind me. When I turn back, she's stopped waving and is facing forward again. I still can't work out if I know her, and if I do then I've just completely blanked her.
-The chairs for the audience are plastic and thick-legged and kind of orthopaedic in vibe.
-This talk is part of ART2, a month long project in New York organised by the French Embassy. The logo for the project is apparently three apples (as in the big apple) and three Eiffel towers (as in Paris).
-Just before they start the talk, they turn all the lights off and it becomes very hard to see my notepad.
-The director of the Drawing Center does an intro where he basically admits that the talk has nothing to do with the programme of the gallery but they are doing it anyway, I guess the French Embassy can pay pretty good rates. He uses the term 'Interesting canopy'.
-The French curator or organiser or whatever does an intro but doesn't stand up. I'm at the back and I can't see where she is sitting. I'm confused about where her voice might be coming from.
-Weirdly (for a curator) she is talking quite directly about her research interests in the first person ('I was interested'), rather than in the passive ('It was interesting'), which is ironic since I can't identify where or who she is.
-The artist is a big German man, with a wide face and huge, meaty fists.
-The curator is still going on her intro. She is basically reading out an essay to or at the artist who nods and occasionally confirms details.
-Neither the curator nor the artist are miked up, and when the curator finally asks the artist a question it's very hard to hear him.
-The artist refers to his own work as revolutionary.
-'EXIT' signs in the U.S. (as in fire exit signs) are red (as opposed to green in the U.K.). The 'EXIT' sign is right behind the artist and makes the whole thing look a bit seedy.
-To be honest I'm only half listening to the lecture because to listen properly requires serious concentration with almost lip-reading type focus on the mouth of the artist as he speaks. When I can hear what they're saying it seems like they are having a hard time making a conversation about the material under discussion.
-Occasionally latecomers arrive from a corridor at the back of the room. They are all, without exception, formally dressed, middle aged French people whose shoes click on the polished concrete floor as they enter.
-I think I don't know the girl with the shaved head. I think she just reminds me of a friend's ex-girlfriend. They moved to Japan and she dumped him for another guy and then moved to Australia and got married.
-Since I got to the U.S. I've been having dreams where I pick a gravelly, metallic wax out of my ears. In the dreams, when the wax finally comes out it is a moment of release, almost a kind of jouissance, and when I awake I am disappointed it wasn't real.
-On screen: a drawing with the words, 'WORK IS ACTION', 'SPACES', 'PROCESSES' and the word 'OUT' upside down.
-The ear wax dreams remind me of dreams I used to have where I could suck my own dick. They recurred a lot, to the point where the dreams took the form of me dreaming that I remembered dreams of me sucking my own dick and was surprised to find that I was able to manage it in real life (in the dream).
-I feel radically under dressed. The person doing the AV is in a dress and heels.
-The artist tells a story about Marcel Duchamp phoning him up and asking to meet him, but the artist was too busy and then Marcel Duchamp died. 'Too bad' says the artist.
-On screen: an unexplained image of a building that the artist may have designed?
-The curator unexpectedly opens up to questions from the audience. The first questions are things like, 'What is on screen?' 'What is that building?' and 'Is this something you did?'
-It turns out that the artist hates this building he designed, 'They ruined it, take the image away now.'
-Someone in the front row leans forward and I see the curator's face for the first time.
-Someone asks a question in which they keep addressing the artist by his first name and then the question just turns into a story about how the questioner went to see one of the artist's exhibitions in 1989 and thought it was great.
-An ex-girlfriend of mine once pulled a long hollow cone of wax from my ear with tweezers, like 2cm long, all in one huge piece. I can remember her saying, 'Wow' and it felt amazing and at the time we were very much in love.
-I don't have the dreams where I can suck my own dick any more. As I remember, I think I only had them when I was in long term relationship.