I've gotten a bunch of notices in my Inbox on Facebook, but i can't access Facebook: every time i've gone to the site, i'm told that the site is down due to maintenance and will be back in a few hours.

I've been really slacking off, but one reason really is that i'm in limbo: jury duty starts on Wednesday, and i don't want to get started on anything that might have to be put aside for two weeks. I just watched "Once" again, it remains a very charming movie, i'm thinking about it as an example of the situation of cross-cultural exchange, which is one of the themes of my proposed topic for the intercultural theater program at the Free University of Berlin... except that they're not calling it "intercultural", i got their prospectus in which there is the explanation that they believe that performance cultures have now become intertwined but they are trying to get away from the term intercultural. Anyway, by next October, there i'll be, in Berlin, as part of this new theater institute. But it's not "intercultural".

And last year (when i was first offered the appointment), i was asked to give my topic (which i am supposed to be researching), and i came up with "The Post-Modern Pastiche as Historical Signifier". The reason was that last year, i was thinking of the movies that people i knew had made (Todd's "I'm Not There", Julie Taymor's "Across the Universe", Ira's "Married Life") and also the theatrical "experiments" by so many groups like The Wooster Group, where there is a combustion of styles: the aim is not to create a unified aesthetic experience, but one which is far more uneven, because this is supposed to mirror the fragmentation of contemporary consciousness.

So that's what i told them i was doing.