Dave Hickey

Art critic/writer Dave Hickey is visiting Penn right now. I was planning on going to his lecture tomorrow, but apparently my thesis advisor Colette pulled some strings and also got me invited to a faculty dinner with him at Pod. I can't afford to even breathe the air in Pod, but this is on the school's dime. I'm also supposed to visit Colette's Wednesday art writing class, which Hickey is sitting in on.

From the introvert's perspective, this whole scene seems rather forced. I love the guy's writing, but I seriously wonder if there's anything to be accomplished by playing the shmooze game for two days with a man who gives hundreds of these lectures every year --- to people a lot more talented than me. Part of my reticence is probably just a Protestant-work-ethic flare-up (Myers and Briggs might say it's the socialized latent J surfacing) that says "networking" is just another word for begging, and that it qualifies as selling your soul to the Man. Or maybe I'm just an insecure stoic and I hate criticism.

Playing:
Meshuggah - I
Mono - Walking Cloud and Deep Red Sky...