Bruner Blog

For our friends who are wondering how Adi is doing, she is loving her Avid video editing workshop that began this week in Portand, Oregon. She recently went to a book opening there and wrote this email and said I could post it to the site, after I asked (she wanted me to emphasize it was written as an email, not a blog post):

hiya,

Just came back from Powell’s Books where Lewis Lapham [editor-in-chief of Harpers] introduced his new book, Theater of War. I was really interested to see him, but was also interested to see how many and what kind of people show up. It was quite amusing. LL didn’t blow me away, as i’ve been reading his writings in Harpers a lot so he didn’t say anything that was new to me. The book is about US foreign policy of the past 50 years and it’s mostly (if not entirely) his writings compiled. He said the book came out in France under the title of Jihad Americane [sp?] weeks before the US release.

He was extremely cynical of course and a bit too bitter about the administration (imagine that if i say so…). The crowd loved it and i was laughing, too, though. Anyway, the place was packed, and it was a large floor. Crowded with hardcore left coast liberals which was funny to see. LL said maybe this war hoopla will bring the political consciousness and interest out of people. I wish he was right and then we probably wouldn’t even have to be afraid of a Bush reelection. I was at the bookstore for like 1 1/2 hours, there were lots of questions, the inevitable conspiracy theorist person also asked his question about a Bush/Cheney/Ashcroft/Rummy conspiracy about Sept 11 for which LL said he was very suspicious of these people [the administration] but he’s not a conspiracy theorist. So the whole thing felt like an early SZDSZ [Hungary’s Free Democrat political party] meeting. I was glad i went.

Of course finally had the chance to look around a bit downtown, it’s incredibly cute. The people are obviously very different than New York and SF. Haven’t seen many fat people! I’m surprised. Everybody looks outdoorsy of course, tanned, healthy and very much laid back after the people in NY. And everybody’s very nice, they smile at you and say hello on the street, very scary. In the meantime i’m trying to avoid contact with other people, like you do in NY. Amusing.

The Northwest Film Center will have some good screenings next week, dance films (documentaries mostly), and the week after it’s a week of Dovzhenko films, who was a Soviet director (post-war). I’m actually thinking about going to Gogol Bordello on Sun, but don’t know yet. it’s not so far.

All right, want to go get some sleep before my dawn waking hour. Last night i watched Showgirls on cable, everything was edited out. It became such an unerotic film, it lost all its energy. Oh well.

Bye love, hope you had fun at Nick’s!

adi

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 3rd, 2002 at 6:10 pm and is filed under aa-home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.