Everybody Loves Raymond Pettibon

During the intermission for Blast Phemy, I thought I saw Raymond Pettibon standing in the aisle with his back against the wall fidgeting, gesticulating to some younger art-faggy looking cohort, standing next to him. I had a feeling it was Raymond Pettibon, because when I see Raymond Pettibon, I see him as somewhere on the spectrum between Geoffrey Rush and Clive Owen, maybe the eyes keening in a dual-processing kind of way, his gray locks formulating some kind of architectural argument, the perpetual upward swing of a maestro's baton. He was gesticulating, and I was sort of mad dogging him from across the room, back a couple of rows, and maybe he could tell that I was trying to read his lips, but he's mumbling so I'm trying to parse his gesticulations, but they are like cut-ups of Hart Crane or Henry James and can only be surmised as indeterminate totalities, dispatches from a black hole, and the only thing I can make out to which his blonde companion's head slowly lists and his eyes scan the stage in reaction to what he just heard, "I'd rather be blind than deaf" and then Pettibon repeats it a beat later as if he wasn't sure of the import of what he said when when he first said it. "Yeah, I'd rather be blind than deaf." And this reminds me of pre-dawn fishing trips to San Pedro, the way all dreams are just childhood memories of being half-asleep in the backseat, hot water in a thermos and cup-o-noodles, bits of dehydrated eggs, peas and carrots suitable for spaceflight, monosodiumglutamate, maybe the fog lit up by the lamps lining the palm-lined lane down to the harbour, and then the black shore and horizon that has never seen sunrise, and after the engine is shut off the distant crash of northerly waves on the breakwater.