As you may already know, David Foster Wallace, a pomo mofo1 if there ever was one, apparently committed suicide last week. To show our love for the author and his work, Available Light (with special guests) will perform excerpts from his work during our designated 60 minutes from 4 to 5pm on the Due Amici stage at Independents' Day this weekend.
Please join us for a rollicking good eulogy. This will be a one-time only performance.
Here's a picture of David Foster Wallace.
For more information about and remembrances of the author, please CLICK HERE for the NY Times. For more personal insights that may be "some kind of salve", visit McSweeney's by clicking here.
Here is a quotation from him that we particularly like and put into a show a few years ago.
Let's for a second imagine Joe Briefcase as just an average US male, relatively unlonely, well-adjusted, married, blessed with 2.3 apple-cheeked offspring, utterly normal, home from hard work at 5:30, starting his average six-hour stint in front of the television. Since Joe B. is average, he'll shrug at pollsters' questions and answer averagely that he most often watches television to unwind from those elements of his day and life he finds unpleasant. It's tempting to suppose that TV enables this unwinding simply because it offers a "distraction", something to divert the mind from quotidian troubles. But would mere distraction ensure continual massive watching? In a lot of ways, television purveys and enables dreams, and most of these dreams involve some sort of transcendence of average daily life. The modes of presentation that work best for TV - stuff like action sequences, the rapid-fire collage of commercials, news, and music videos, or the hysteria of prime-time soaps and sitcoms - are unsubtle in their whispers that somewhere, life is quicker, denser, happier, more interesting, more . . . well, lively than contemporary life as Joe Briefcase knows it.1. "Pomo mofo" being old BlueForms Theatre Group slang, now adopted by Available Light, the successor of BlueForms, (though successor may not be the right word, but I'll bet that's a more appropriate divagation for another moment) abbreviating and invoking "postmodern motherfucker". "Motherfucker" is not, in this case, slang not for one who has intercourse with those who have borne or adopted children, (that in and of itself is an insult dating back to the 14th century) rather a slightly pejorative substitute for any noun that needs emphasis, (making it an obscene pronoun, I guess) in this particular case, though, being a compliment since BFTG and now AVLT strive to emphasize the postmodern as a matter of course in their scholarly and research-based approach to the ensemble-oriented creation of new works of performance art (itself a somewhat pejorative term, but, lacking in this case any more accurate jargon, I'm gonna let it stand).