It’s First Friday, the Shark Week of Fridays, and I’m really enthusiastic about tonight’s subfreezing goddamned art walk! But instead of bitching about the weather or the sell-out corporate weather shills they put on the local news instead of supporting the local indie meteorology scene, I'm doing something about it by determinedly pretending that everything’s OK. My role model is The Kansas City Star’s E. Thomas McClanahan, without whom we might believe a Republican administration had already lost a big war.
Best of all, my favorite city department, Regulated Industries, started cracking down on the serving of alcohol at gallery openings a couple of years ago. Which, in accordance with my new policy, is awesome. Apparently, Liquor Control operates on the adorable misapprehension that area galleries are swarmed by underage kids, which essentially means that I don’t get to drink at art openings anymore. That's like looking inside my bag of awesome and discovering that I’m still not out of awesome!
Back in 2003, I could cap off a night of First Friday art consumption by dumping a free beer on the pavement for my underage homies. Respectful and thrifty. This also demonstrated to my underage homies that I thought they were responsible enough for a drink now and then. Now my underage homies get age-appropriate Sunny-D or, in its absence, the purple stuff. Awesome. And I hope you like more awesome, because awesome is in summer reruns.
On the negative side of the ledger, how the hell else are you going to get kids interested in art? Shit, if it weren't for alcohol, I'd never have developed an interest in literature. But when I was 15, I used to hang out with all the hobos at the Martin Heidegger Reading Room at the downtown library, who would surreptitiously drink malt liquor from brown-bag-concealed bottles while talking about literary deconstruction. They'd get me drunk and say stuff like "Deconstruction is not an enclosure in nothingness but an openness to the other."
One thing led to another, and I seem to recall a slippery slope. One day, I came out of a blackout in the middle of a graduation ceremony, receiving a master's in comparative literature. So, really, fuck the bitch-ass Department of Regulated Industries. With all that society-affirming law enforcement and all the judgmental bitchiness, it's like the Aunt Esther of city departments. "Liquor Control, you so ugly, I could smash yo' face across some dough and make gorilla cookies." Sure, that might seem contrary to my new, positive outlook about things that suck, but keep in mind that, as with literary deconstruction, it's not an enclosure in nothingness; it's an openness to the other.
Here's your guide to a dry First Friday:
The UCP Bonfils Studio (125 E. 12th St.) has an open studio featuring a hard-to-pin-down number of new resident artists.
Images (1520 Walnut) is holding its 3rd-annual juried show.
Grand Arts (1819 Grand) has a show called From the Fat of the Land: Alchemies, Ecologies, Attractions. It's billed as a "laboratory-style" exhibition that will present finished works and works-in-progress that will be completed over the course of the show, which runs through July 27.
Cartoonist Charlie Podrebarac (the Cowtown guy) has an opening at the Dot Gallery (1517 Oak). His work is pretty fun.
The Dolphin Gallery (1901 Baltimore) has a group photography show.
The Greenlease Gallery at Rockhurst continues an exhibition by Sandra Murchison called Salvaged Goods.
That's it, yo. Stay in school. Only a real "dope" drinks malt liquor at the library.
like
dislike
