as much as i complain about poets and the little social imaginationland i’ve constructed for myself here with them, the fact remains that i’m terrifically afraid of change. drop me into any other unfamiliar subculture and i completely freak, get all cranky and/or drunk, then bolt.
i guess there’s some kind of art gathering going on in the city this week, and so, as is typical with conferrence of creative types, there were some parties. my friend paul is in town, and this girl (becca) he knew back in LA (who apparently lived a block down hoover from me but who i never knew) invited us to a gallery shindig on the chelsea pier.
ok. before i start bitching, let me just say that as we were approaching the hudson, in the newly balmy (god, what passes for balmy these days with me) springish water-touched air, i announced to the group that the only real thing i wanted was to be on a boat, right then. and lo and behold, the very gallery we were headed to turned out to be on…a boat! damn! when do my ridiculous demands ever get immediately fulfilled! last night, that’s when (i tried to stretch my good luck by proclaiming that i wanted free alcohol, but that turned out to be a bust)
also, while we’re on the subject, i heard this snippet from a friend of becca’s (also from LA)
“i went through a phase where i only dated guys with boats. but then i realized that boats aren’t everything.”
with segues PERFECTLY into the point of the story, which is that I Don’t Understand Art People. i really thought i did! i had some sort of The Last Avante Garde type fantasy in which we could all drink and investigate the color orange together and i was ten times more talented/socially capable than i actually am and there wasn’t a dead mouse in my kitchen and i wore nice clothes and didn’t have a sore throat and actually even KNEW of a guy that had a boat.
there was a girl with an american flag bikini dancing on a pedestal, a bunch of french girls in paint and feathers who pushed in front of me at the bar and who i would have punched in the face if i wasn’t secretly terrified of all french people, loud house music, and mostly sort of “meh” art.
however, there was also a tugboat you could sit and smoke on, a dude with a long beard playing a portable electric guitar, beer mixed with whiskey (i hope) in gallon poland spring jugs down in “the murder room,” free scraps of cloth with things painted on them, a guy that yelled “EXCUSE ME SIR, WOULD YOU SHOW ME TO THE ENGINE ROOM” out in the darkness, and a good view of the LCD display at the Chelsea Piers, which intermittently flashed the word “SKILLS!”
afterwards, we went to an irish themed lesbian bar in park slope.
i guess it was a pretty good night.
