Fridays: Becky, a friend from the D & D Pub, has told me about the misadventures of her teenage kids, about her traumas with Spanish grammar, about her ongoing war with algebra, the skirmish of theorem and variable, but I've still not managed to see her fire-twirling troupe perform at a Friday event. And Karen and Dan, the friends who got me to dress up a bit and go see the Missouri Symphony, and, and, a big-deal concert competition at the Missouri Theater, had taken me along on a downtown art walk one Friday evening, where with a bit of wine and a dark night, I imagined vast catacombs stretching for miles under the city.
This July, in daylight and by myself, neither fire-twirling nor catacombs appeared when I covered the same ground at the North Village Art District's First Friday. But I found other connections, other unexpected links, whether from daylight, from the technology that has attached itself to me, of from disturbing sobriety. "Links? That sounds suspicious..." Yes, likely that might lead to an ambush of theory, a little later on. "Ambush?" you say. "That sounds--not good." Ah, don't run away. That's the point of ambush. For better or worse, enlightenment, epiphany, whether you exactly welcome it or not. But there will be plenty of pictures to distract you along the meandering path before that pit full of sharpened stakes claims us unwary tigers.
Here, already, one of my map scribbles:
(I've not exactly mastered the scribble part.)
And meander I did. I parked at Columbia College and wandered up the backside of the Arts District, past Koonse Glass, past the newly christened Rose Music Hall (more on that in another post), discovered that the fire station on 10th Street, which always has its own loud comments when I'm teaching in Dorsey Hall, has offices facing the other way, with flowerbeds enough forgotten that the day lilies and Queen Anne's Lace haven't been eradicated.
I wandered along watching people struggling to park, people who had lost the whole event, one guy telling the three who expected him to know, "I don't know where this First Friday is." I didn't scoff, out loud, nor help, though I wanted to say, "just walk uphill another block. It will be everywhere." But there was no way to win, intruding on the politics of that little foursome--the guy defensive, wanting help, wanting to not need help. I stepped off the sidewalk to avoid this interpersonal minefield, and trudged on up to Walnut Street.
And despite my not-generous, superior attitude with that foursome, um, I didn't see much of anything in the way of obvious, official art event.
Oh, there was this ballet school I hadn't expected (though "The Beach Salon"?),
and I'd forgotten that the bar that police raided a lot (which came in after the old, old Cork and Dart pub) had given way to The Bridge and a music academy,
Nice outside art, which reminds me a bit of all the neighborhood murals in Bogota, which I walked around taking pics of, not knowing I was supposed to be terrified of the kidnappers lurking in every doorway... (Ignorance can be its own grace.)
But the crowds? the scene where Becky might have spun fire on nights of darker inspiration? One guy singing to not-a-crowd...
Some pillow art, which delighted two young girls more than it did me...
that food truck that showed up, not in Olean, but at Art in the Park...
Rock Bottom, resolutely closed--none of this pretentious art goings-on within the hallowed precincts of comics and gaming. And me needing some 12- and 8-sided die for the next round of Serenity...
So...I fumbled around, legal pad in hand, not taking any notes, about ready to leave. I decided I'd try the art shop that last year had seemed the keeper of those vast subterranean chambers, those "caverns measureless to man," the tunnels that would give access to that "savage place! as holy and enchanted / As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted / By woman wailing for her demon-lover!", that is, to the Artlandish Gallery. This is the place that has shops above ground, an unpresupposing store front full of local arts and crafts,
handmade cards, things painted and constructed, lots of jewelry. It had been closed when Roz had been in town and looking for earrings. This would have been the place! But it is also the place that opens downward, into, not exactly a basement, not exactly tunnels, but to strange spaces below. Nor quite catacombs, but a unique space in Columbia. For First Friday, there was another guy-with-guitar down there, lots of open-front shops, and a bit of food,
And interesting stairs up and away...
Though my favorite at Artlandish was this Time Voyager in a far tunnel, where I sat down and munched on my cheese and artichoke dip and nice little tomatoes...
and in through some bland corridors, to find these:
Bronze, except for the much smaller Cerberus here. I browsed out, started a text and pic conversation with my niece about these pieces:
Ashton: Holy shit. Buy one.
me: I didn't even ask the price.
Ashton: They are seriously awesome
me: Should I go ask the price?
So that shortly I was under instructions to return, soon talking with the sculptor, Chris [and now I've lost his card and his last name, but he's married to a prof in my very same English Dept.], who said this favorite guy...
is 2500$, to which Ashton intoned, "totally worth it, but Mike put me on a budget." (The Cerberus silhouette, by contrast, is 65$.) I asked Chris whether if I won the lottery, and if I decided to still live in Hallsville, he would be willing to make an up-sized bronze Pegasus or dolphin or sea serpent, but he said the technique might lose its intimate character. I talked about growing hedge-roses through the guts of such critters; Chris talked about using one for a barbeque. (I also mentioned I'd only found him because of that one sign; he was glad, since it had been an expensive little deal, just for this event.) Hmm...
Off to the last stop, the Orr Street Studios.
These are what they sound like, an assembly of art studio spaces, with some open spaces for display and events. Eye-catching, some of the inner studio doors (Ashton loved the doors, too, but they aren't for sale)...
Today, a table from the Bur Oak Brewery, offering samples of their locally brewed beers. I tried the strange, fruity Lily, thanked the guy pouring, but didn't tip him. He had no info at all about the Brewery, which would have been as tasty as the beer. (Even from their website, I find I can "rent out the brewery" for an event, but there's no address on page, and the map, um, it's some place east of town, not quite to Rt. Z.
Brochures here and there tell more about the Studios, like their Hearing Voices, Seeing Visions series, which had included Gladys Swan: "Her Western epic, A Dark Gamble, was published by Serving House Books in 2015." One Amazon reviewer called this "Gilgamesh on the western frontier" [huh. I once wrote a poem playing with Gilgamesh. Wonder what I did with it?]. And of course, Ken was there, former owner of Acorn Books, and Mike, a CC art teacher, and various folks I recognize in or out of coffee shops downtown.
I resumed the phone-exchange with Ashton, sending some of the pump art that was on display in one hall (seems like with Ashton and Mike I spent an afternoon looking for oil can art assemblies someplace in Minnesota, as part of her steam-punk phase):
These in the 600-850$ range...(I didn't get one as a surprise holiday present. Sorry...).
And now, out of all this? Writing in blog form seems appropriate here, since it feeds not only off the visual, but also from the hyperlinks (no paragraph is an island unto itself--isn't that how the poem goes?) that share the immediate text with all the web, link by link, till all trace of one clod, one muddy argument, is washed away in the near-infinite sea. And suddenly, we seem ripe for Latour, his flat ontology, his networks that link one to another to another--a great way to define human community. Useful, yes, if one wants to diagram community, or knowledge systems, or knowledge production, in all their messy, non-linear, hypertext glories. Of course, such maps (always remember that this too is metaphor) would need to include the nuance of relative strengths in the links, the basic asymmetries of all relations--what love, friendship, hatred, disdain, is ever the same from different faces?
Yet too much such links let us pretend that the nodes between the links are separate, are, at least from one view, closed entities, "black boxes"? (Unfair to the later Latour, who goes past his own early ANT, especially in his An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence). For the black boxes have to themselves become "fuzzy," become ontologically unstable.
[Uh-oh, you begin to suspect...
]
But let me try this out--instead of network, let's think "contact zone," which, after all, is in the title, way, way up to the top. Ok, contact zone is this messy place where everything blurs, where all the borders get fuzzy, borders like dog/human, kid/adult, expert/local, me/you, me/not-me. Even borders like flesh-machine, which is Donna Haraway's cyborg--or me glued to my cell phone with Ashton, or our sculptor Chris who "thinks" and "feels" through the bronze and the blow-torch. And this way of seeing things escorts us right into a different sort of reality (which in academic-speak I should label ontology).
Here's my inspiration and source for these notions--certainly Haraway again in When Species Meet, in which she talks about "contact zone," as particular, not abstract, as "historically located, multispecies, subject-shaping encounter...fraught with power, knowledge and technique, moral questions" (205). She goes on to cite Mary Pratt's notion that "A 'contact' perspective emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other....It treats the relations ...in terms of co-presence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power" (216). Great stuff.
(When Species Meet, lecture excerpt, 2 min)
It doesn't seem all that useful to go into some retro-Marxist view of privilege and class, nor to simply assert that we might identify network or community, but more to consider the way that art, people, plants, buildings, ideas, entertainments, and even, very much so, technology, shape this afternoon's reality, this 'mode of being.' There, were the stakes in the pit all that sharp?
How interesting things become, when reality itself becomes plural.
later, bob
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