Prof. Irene

I had to take this class for an Art History credit that I really didn’t want to take. When I was at the first class, the Teacher–Irene–assigned the class this horrible problem solving paragraph that we had to read and deduce the locations of various rooms so that we could draw a layout of a building. Strangely enough the assignment was to be done inside examination booklets–that’s how important this first day assignment was to our grades.

When I was in my dorm room I just couldn’t seem to get this project together. We had to do the assignment in pen and I kept screwing everything up.

Next thing I recall is that I’m at Irene’s. A lot of my friends from high school are there as well. It’s a big party like we used to have, except this time Irene and her 60-something friends are all here with us. My friend Marcel is having a great time chatting about the humorous things that have happened to him while playing shows with his bands and this group of older men is listening to him intently. One of them–who looks a lot like Syd Barrett does in photos taken recently, balding and with a bulging belly.

It seems that Irene’s friends were all musicians that worked with these big experimental musicians in the 1960s. I remember that Irene began trying to explain to me what my art needed in order for me to develop and grow. She gave me this stack of books to read and also had me flip through a book of drawings that almost seemed like an animated flipbook. I noticed that my friend Phil–an animator in another local art school–was standing beside her.

When I leave Irene’s the snow is so heavily packed on everything and the ice is so thick on my car windshield that it takes me forever to get the car ready to go. When I get in the car, suddenly my old friends Geoff and Simon are with me. I can’t seem to drive or see out the windshield–I start to drive in reverse dangerously what I recognize as a city street in Toronto. Cars are whizzing by us and I’m desperately trying to force my dream self to drive this car properly, but I can only seem to turn it into the next driveway (very badly). Simon tells me that Geoff now drives in reverse to save gas money.

Suddenly I’m walking with all these books with Marcel to Irene’s house. The path is through what looks like an old English university campus. All the buildings are covered with ivy. When I get inside the house, there are paint dropsheets everywhere. It seems that Irene has suddenly decided to repaint all the walls. The guy who looks like Syd Barrett is there. He stops us and says we can’t go upstairs to see Irene. Marcel and I sit down and start talking with him. The old man is interesting to talk to because of all his stories about recording musicians and whatnot, but he’s also a real asshole to us. He tells me that musicians today can never touch the kind of experimental stuff that he recorded in the 1960s because we can’t comprehend the attention to detail taken in the past, etc etc. I remember listening to him like I would listen to anyone I don’t agree with–I nod and say, “Well, that’s your opinion.” I eventually get so tired of listening to him that I stand up to crawl over the bed in the way of the staircase.

Then I woke up.