(8:45 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

I just want to walk around with you

Since Jared Sinclair has yet to walk the daunting two blocks to my house to pick it up, I listened to the EP Pirate Sounds by the now-defunct, Adam Robinson-fronted Bradley, Illinois, band Foxy. I'll admit that there were a couple disappointments -- what, no Jimmy Eat World cover? -- but I found the whole affair deeply satisfying. My favorite song remains "You don't send me flowers" (Adam, correct me on the titles if I messed up)--

We all learn these strategies for life.
Practice, practice, practice
but we never get it right.
And you don't send me flowers anymore...

My most vivid memory of hearing those songs performed live is at Adam's going away party, when he moved to Milwaukee -- "Robinstein's Drunken Drunken Drunken Drunken." T-shirts were made. Beer (I'll mention it for the first time on my blog, I believe -- all for Adam) was consumed. I was tackled by my now-colleague, Virgil William Brower. I met Monica Bennett, whose survey I recommend you take, there.

Adam didn't just throw parties. He made himself the main attraction. Back in the days of Trigger's, he was the events coordinator, and when he left, it just wasn't the same. No one could give a fuck about something stupid and make it work in the same way Adam could -- and I mean that in the best possible way. For a few months, for far too short a time, the Trigger's concept -- meals, readings, poetry contests, live music, Jeo-Parody, every damn Friday night -- worked, and it worked mainly because of Adam Robinson.

That remains my ideal for the University Without Condition (contrary to how it played out, my original vision was to wait until I was basically done with school, or until summer time at least, and do this stuff live, with a group of sweaty people, preferably in a basement.) No matter how impressive the University Without Condition becomes as a blog, or how long it lasts, it will still be just a stupid blog, and it will never be a substitute for a bunch of people squeezed into a room, listening to me rant about Zizek (whom I had only just discovered) or Bill Brower talking about how as a child, Foucault wanted to be a fish, "just for a moment, just to know what it would feel like," or how Hemingway's son was a transexual. A comment section is not the same as standing behind the microphone trying to come up with some kind of response to Fred's detailed questions.

We do what we can with what we have, but Adam and I have both sustained a fundamental loss. Is it possible to do something like Trigger's without a group that was already cohesive? Is it possible to do it when not everyone has had as powerful a teacher as Craig Keen? Is it possible when not everyone has the same wounds inflicted by the same bizarre culture?

Or is the real condition having a group of people living together in (dreaded word!) community, somehow able to pull together a big enough space to welcome others in? Is the real condition having a damn house in the suburbs with a big basement?

"One could write ... a short treatise on the love of ruins. What else is there to love, anyway?" -- Jacques Derrida

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