Rytius Records (Substack Edition), Ch. 7.3a

Ch. 7.3: The Comedy Games: Tellem’s First Tragedy

7.3 The Comedy Games

June 2132

This debate was lively, and longlasting, and was most clearly expressed at the close of what came to be known as the Comedy Games—a series of presentations turning on the works of Richard Pryor, Plato and Thelonious Monk.

Tellem’s First Tragedy

May 31, 2132

Those rudimentary games were a direct response to Tellem’s First Tragedy, which is widely held to be the first exclusion attempted. Kloz Munro hosted Tellem’s presentation on a cool spring evening the last weekend in May, and a floral breeze wafted through the open doors and windows of Kloz’s Clauses, the second floor of a half-bombed machine-tool factory, in which the first floor had been used for storage, and the loading and unloading of shipments and orders. He lived and worked in the non-bombed half, an open space with no walls and enough room for his records, his drums, his bands, and his friends. Tellem had asked him to dim the room but for a spotlight shining down on an empty music stand. He approached out of the darkness and arranged his presentation papers on it. He started dramatically: “Disprove this.” He then went on to elaborate a hypothesis of the slow-motion collapse of the United States as a result of snakebearer social and economic policy.