Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss

(If it means anything to anyone, I snapped these photos in rabid succession while reading about the minimalist and eclectic Robert Wilson, a piece in the recent The New Yorker by Hilton Als, especially “Einstein On The Beach”.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/09/17/120917crat_atlarge_als

The New York Times was relatively unimpressed.

Sometimes you have to cut and paste not merely click.

Now, a couple hours later, it actually looks more like twelve tables and six people although some of those six people might be the same person twice, if that is even possible. To what extent are we the same person twice, or more like a river, changing all the time? Sometimes I cannot help but feel that I am wasting all of my time.

 Fifteen tables and nine people?

I left the fifth and final shot of the series of five “unslugged” such that it would preserve the exact time stamp, a Saturday around 2.

Eighteen tables and fifteen people, comprising “Five Tables At A Cafe”, the article referenced three types of shots in “Einstein”, close-up, medium-shot and something the scope of which compares to the fact that Wilson grew up in Waco, Texas. That triggered my impulsive intrusion into the lives of my fellow Cafe Society members. Coinky or not, the last group, in the interior section where I was, left directly after this shot. I was shooting the couple against the window; between them you can see what used to be the entrance to the famous social media social network company, for what that’s worth -less than fifty billion dollars I would think.

I was shooting the couple, across the room, not the nearer group of actually three women (we see two here). Before I started shooting, some time before, I noticed the woman in green and that she was wearing a sorority shirt but it featured a Native American motif; I am guessing Florida State Seminoles, and almost had the nerve to approach the table and question her about it).

edit to add, a few minutes later: this is gratuitous non-coincidence just an overlap or something but I started quoting some old song lyric, because partly because the script for “Einstein…” apparently has some lyrics flung in there, but didn’t remember what I was referencing and when I typed in the lyric fragment to the search-injun it reminded me that it was Fleetwood Mac “Over My Head” by Christine McVie and that the first couplet has “paradise” and “cold as ice” and I thought of the fact but fairly trivial thing that when Wilson was a special ed teacher and trying to connect to his students he created, according to Als — maybe referencing the two or three other primary researchers writing about Wilson — a character named Ice Man, who carried blocks of ice “like suitcases” (which I couldn’t quite picture — did he fasten them with handles?). Also, and only my coach and my freshman roommate still recall this, my mock-nickname in high school, rhymes with “Weiss”, _ _ _. The true obsessive then searches for any other overlapping reference to “christine mcVie” and “einstein on the beach” but I will stop here.