The original plan to site the 2016 Postmodern Village conference at the Uni-Q® Campus Conference Center fell through when it was sternly communicated by the High Tush Technologies® Endowed Professor of Toilet Technologies that the conference center was understood to be booked up through July by this year's Flushing Daze, "the longest-running gathering of the deepest minds in flushing technologies, pooled in one place."
Far be it from the moldy old book folks to clog up the pipeline for presewering innovation. So, after long and difficult negotiations with the intransigent state agency that still owns the old relic, PMV's 2016 conference landed at the newly historical and always rain-soaked Llank-Freud Fite-designed Traditional Education Center.
The clean lines and coarse-grained, cantilevered cement slabs reminded us of our childhoods, both imagined and third-party confirmable, in which the future was sleek and bright and, optimistically, trouble-free. The '70s-vintage shag carpet, though, added to the give a sense of a "human" touch by that era's university first lady and later conservative, anti-feminist scion, Lillith Cashley, stank of mold. Decommissioned classrooms would have to do for presentation venues, and keynote speeches would have to be delivered in the building's lobby, which now listed distinctly southward as its exposed rebar rusted beneath. But the conference, at least, would still happen.
TEC's relatively remote position on campus and pre-ADA design meant leg-using attendees had to hike almost a mile from designated parking areas on the other side of campus, and wheelchair users had to literally be towed in by physical plant 4-wheel drive utility vehicles.
Unsurprisingly, and we think as part of a larger trend, no arrests were reported, though the delegation from the for-profit University of Chimera were found cornered by a possibly rabid opossum on the island of what was once the center's forward-thinking reflecting pool.
Once everyone realized that the possum was really just a government accountant, and the U of C conferees were merely being asked to provide testimony against their administration in a case of massive corporate fraud, we all relaxed and had another cup of Ho-Hex-Co coffee and a leftover chunk of flavorless chocolate chip cookie.
Proudly, the papers presented continue in a now long-running tradition of the intellectual avant-garde, challenging the very structures of institutional power that so rudely relocated us to this fascinating, crumbling, smelly, undecidably retro, Modernist hell by the massive power of pure critique.