John Cleese as Q tells me I'll be singing koyaanisqatsi
“Yahoo Serious Festival. I know those words, but that sign makes no sense.”
Sunday morning I was woken up in the middle of a dream, which is a good thing because I don’t remember them otherwise. Dreams are silly things to write about, but sometimes, well, it’s just fun to share when it’s this odd:
John Cleese, dressed as his role of Q from Die Another Day, but clearly still John Cleese and not Q, calls me over from the stage where I had been rocking out with a band, to tell me that I wasn’t thinking big enough.
“I was about to play some Jeff Buckley. I’m good at that,” I say.
“You can do so much more,” says the mustachioed, three-piece-suited John Cleese, placing an arm around my shoulders.
He walks me to a large side room. It’s black and metalicky, and dramatically lit. In it, in the center, is one of those evil-villain-or-possibly-Minority-Report interactive media podiums. John Cleese and I step up. We’re surrounded by large plasma screens, fit together like a halfdome . . . and playing on the screens, a different scene on each one, are scenes from koyannisqatsi.
John Cleese says, “You will be singing koyaanisqatsi. Specifically the piece ‘Pruitt Igoe.’”
If I blink in my dreams, I guess I stopped at this point.
“I will teach you how to sing it. It’s really not very hard.”
“Pruitt Igoe,” I’d like to point out now but didn’t in the dream, is, but for some oo’s, completely and complicatedly instrumental. I have terribly aural dreams and could hear the whole complicated thing playing as its scene scrolled by on one of the evil-villain-media-podium screens. “Pruitt Igoe” would be impossible to sing unless John Cleese intended to flay my vocal chords and teach me to vibrate the fillets independently.
Then his rationale: “Listen, the point of koyaanisqatsi is so clear. The film’s advocacy of Presidential voyeurism is a public good.”
“Presidential voyeurism?”
“Is a public good, yes,” says John Cleese.
And before I could find out what Presidential voyeurism was, whether it was me or us peeping on the President or the President peeping on me or us, I woke up.
Nonsense, all of it, right? Except it ends up really messing with me. Pruitt Igoe was a housing development in St. Louis known as one of the worst engineering disasters in history.
It was demolished in 1972 after twenty years of blightedness. It was originally built in two sections, one for whites, one for blacks. It was an f’ed up place. But what gets me is that this disaster was designed by Minoru Yamasaki. You know, Minoru Yamaski, architect of . . .
So now I’m stuck with that indelible dream-ink of: the Pruitt Igoe/World Trade Center disasters and “Presidential voyeurism”.
Where does one go from there?
