I had a couple of very strange dreams last night. One concerned my favorite teacher from high school -- the only person that I still think about from high school, actually; I've fallen out of contact with all of my friends from those years. In this dream I learned (from a girl in my class) that the teacher had been having sex with just about every other girl in the high school except me, and everyone but me knew it.
Weird.
In another dream, my friend Portia, the one down in Los Angeles who a few weeks thought I behaved badly (and with whom I still haven't spoken about it -- she's never home when I call!), had some kind of secret ceremony, like a wedding or another rite of passage, that I saw photographs of.
Dreams about secrets...and my finding out about them. What does that mean? Right now I don't think I'm keeping any secrets and I don't think I'm on the verge of finding out about any -- but then they wouldn't be secrets, would they? These dreams relate to something else; I just don't quite know what yet.
I have a theory about American celebrity culture: everyone thinks that everyone else is having a more interesting life. (My corollary to this is that everyone thinks that everyone else is having more sex than they are.) I base this speculation on purely anecdotal evidence: in the past, whenever I've felt depressed and as though my life was pointless, I went out and bought People magazine, which never interested me when I was in another frame of mind.
Does anyone else out there not entirely get Suck? Sometimes I read it and I think, "Hey, cool," and other times I read it and think, "What the hell does that mean?" And I look around, as though other Netizens are sitting right there and judging my comprehension level, and I grin and nod as though I had any clue about what the Sucksters wrote.
I'd chalk it up to being too old and too square, but I like most alternative music, so I can't be that old and square. How truly alternative alternative music can be if it appeals to Johnson-baby yuppies is a question for another time...or, perhaps, a Suck column.
Actually, one of my film teachers at De Anza postulated that the avant-garde, once the incubator for the outrageous, the far-out, and the cryptic, has burned out. There is no time lag now between being avant-garde and being mainstream -- grunge immediately became a fashion statement instead of being counter-culture. It took 25 years for the Beatles' "Revolution" to sell Nike shoes; it took about a day and a half for Saks' Fifth Avenue to set up "grunge salons" and sell you overpriced dirty jeans.
Maybe to be avant-garde you have to be not only "different" but outright offensive -- art exhibits using corpses instead of incredible simulations, that kind of thing.
Why I worry about the avant-garde, I have no idea, as I have no desire to be alternative or underground or anything other than mainstream and commercial. (Whether I can be mainstream or commercial with my sense of humor is another story.)
A couple of days ago someone wrote me in response to an entry and asked if it was true someone had solved Fermat's Last Theorem. I've tried to respond to you, honest, but the mail gets forwarded into an endless loop and I get huge "unable to deliver this mail" automated responses.
In answer to your question: I seem to remember that a British mathematician proved a theorem that was integral to proving Fermat's Last Theorem, and the mathematical community was sure that if this proof held up, then Fermat's could be considered solved. However, I don't remember when this happened, the mathematician's name, or the name of the other proof, so basically this has been less than helpful, I guess.