…and, to conclude the way we began, this has all been
about nothing, just time spent driving between airports
or restaurant queues, performances with applause
and indifference to it, where arguments that matter
are not over politics or morality but whether we ought
to enter parking spaces from the front or rear or how
the this might combine with the that – mangos, from
a specific New York City fruit shop, for example, will
leave you one bite shy of sexual climax. Saul Austerlitz
found a “relentless pursuit of the prosaic”, an antidote
to lumbering epiphanies that afflict the arts. Nothing
beyond rug-tugging meta with no metamorphosis,
nothing beyond a city’s heat-map: the drycleaners,
subways, half-empty cafes, taxis, movie theatres,
local peculiarities, accretion of minor and imagined
slights and faux-pas leading usually to unmitigated
catastrophe – plotless nothings stirred by the sly
encephalography of comedy to pitched battle with
the instigators of everything, and still they wind up
debating how close a second button down a shirt
should be to the first, and such yada yada yada…