Art-tari

All this writing about time travel must've caused me to fall into some kind of time-hole over the weekend, as evidenced by the above black-and-white picture of me playing an Atari 2600. Actually, that's not true; it's just another of the pieces on exhibit at MOCA (my--I never get tired of saying this--neighborhood museum of contemporary art). Scott and I had another Visiting Poet in town over the weekend, Zachary Schomburg (actually, I found this picture--and copy it here without his permission--on his blog), who is a very exciting young poet and all around awesome guy.

Zach currently lives in Portland--though he's been on the road for a while now--so, personally, it was nice to be reminded that there are young people like me in the world (he's maybe 5-6 years older than I am). For someone as blandly hipster-ish as I am, it's actually possible to feel somewhat unique in Miami, but there are really entire cities and communities of people just like me in other parts of the country. So it's good to remember that (though--and this kind of came up in conversation, as it often will when discussing Portland and the aforementioned people-like-me--it's hard to make a strong argument, or any argument, that I should somehow prefer Portland, or prefer Miami, except that Portland is, like, the whitest city ever, and Miami has lots and lots of diversity (the moral being that I should both recognize my inherent blandness, Miami's awesome different-ness, and just get over all of it already)). And his poetry--a lot of short, often prose-poems, surreal narratives--is great! You should check out his books and his press, Octopus Books.

While playing the Atari game/artwork at the museum, Scott, who is also in his early thirties (I am not in my early thirties, but Scott and Zach are), said to me something to the extent of "You've probably never even played an Atari before, have you?" One of those generation of five-years-later kind of things. But, of course I was able to reply, emphatically, "I certainly have! Back around the turn of the nineties, my older brothers and I asked for a Nintendo. In response to this, our father went up into the attic and came down with an Atari, so we played that for a while, until one of the paddles broke, and then, I think, finally Dad caved and bought us a Nintendo." Which is a fun story to tell.