I’d meant to mention I caught the Matthew Barney/Björk collaboration Drawing Restraing 9 on Wednesday. And I have to say, I’m a little surprised: It was over two hours with perhaps 5 minutes of dialogue. The rest was ship imagery, Japanese dancing, abundant supplies of vaseline, sea urchins, and flensing. Lots and lots and lots of flensing. If this were a court of law, I’d find Matthew Barney had flense rea. If it had gone on much longer, I’d need to spend some time in a flensory deprivation tank. It was flense dense. It was braised flensing on a bed of flensed greens with a side of flensing in flense sauce. There was some flensing.

Anyway, it was two hours and change of this… and yet I wasn’t checking my watch. I’d go so far as to say I liked it. And I have no idea why. My best guess, though, is that it’s a kind of visual equivalent of what Proust does to you on the verbal front. You bury your head in À la recherche de temps perdu for a couple hours, you find you’ve suddenly developed, at least temporarily, a hypersensitive eye for detail. You develop a little internal monlogue characterizing whatever you see or do in lapidary detail. And spending a couple hours locked into Matthew Barney’s eyes hypertunes you into the forms of the world around you for a while thereafter.

It’s either that or I’m discovering my latent flensing fetish.