Art & Kindness (First Warm Night)

So I get this e-mail from my friend Mike. It goes something like “Firstwarmnight.com, Come out to party, Celebrate, Drums, Dreams, Drones, bla, bla…” It looked kind of interesting, and it didn’t have that typical culture-mining, hipster taste to it that by now is a complete turn off to me. But what really made me sign up were the words “brass band” and “flame throwers,” which reminded me of a similar event I went to on the Meat Packing District some years ago organized by some Iranian guys.
A couple of days later, it’s Saturday afternoon, and I’m standing on the corner of Houston and Chrystie, where there were already about 30 policemen waiting for us. Police State anyone? Soon, a few butterfly-winged ladies lead us into a Brooklyn bound F train, and out on the Smith/9th stop on Red Hook, a neighborhood that I'm really fond of. A good sign already.
Now I realize it’s more that a couple of hundred of us, and we are walking down the middle of the ghetto right through a couple of fútbol matches towards the piers. A very good sign.
A couple of people from the neighborhood saw my face, and immediately started asking me questions. “¿Y esto qué es? ¿A donde se dirigen? ¿Y... són maricones?” To which I burst out laughing. I told them “¡Aqui hay de tó!” Next thing I know, three drunk gang members have joined us, and are dancing Goran Bregoviç's "Mesceçina," while riding giant stuffed animals, and hitting each other with them. A really good sign.
There were iconoclastic urban cheerleaders, industrial pixies, reformed capitalists, poetry veterans, comedians on holiday, corporate serfs on retreat, neighborhood people, and just plain citizens! No posing, no attitudes. Everybody was civil, everybody was merry-making, and everybody was NICE! That's right, strangers talking to each other for no reason, other that sharing the same space-time. It was spontaneous (if you ignore the two months planning). It was creative. It was joyous, ephemeral, wild, and it was GENEROUS. Yes, generous, the one thing that is missing from most public art, these people had by the truckload. Public Art Fund, get off your ass, and take a good look!
People were sharing food, water, hugs, kisses, capoeira skills, music, art, you name it. Some people (ehem, cheesy hipsters) might think of this kind of event as being done for its own sake, or worse yet, for no sake at all, but I think it is done for very specific and necessary reasons.
Firstly, people crave real congeniality. Everybody was acting the way they act when they are on vacation. In other words, engaging on a personal level, and not trying to make a buck. Usually on the train, or at bars, openings, and so on, one of the first things people ask you is what you do for a living. A most disgusting habit when it is used to decide which turn the rest of the conversation is going take. Not only did I NOT hear the ubiquitous “What do you do?” I don’t even think anybody cared! Was this really New York?! (Don't get me wrong, I still love this city).
Secondly, no person can keep his, or her, guard up forever. This can be the most fatiguing thing about living in a city. We all need to let go, and just accept and be accepted. One of the most gratifying of all sensations is when you have no reasons to prefer this, or dislike that. You just give into a genuine curiousness about your fellow human beings. You want to know how they feel, and how they think. It is the reason why you travel 6,000 miles to strike up a conversation with a rickshaw driver, when you don’t even talk with the guy that drives your bus every day.
Thank you everybody. It was great, it was special, and it was memorable.

PS Did the flame throwers ever show up?

Den of Lions

My first lesson on working on Public Commissions:
DO NOT trust the engineers. They will always try to screw you.
This is something I had seen a professor of mine go through. It eventually grew into a huge public battle, which he lost. I did not quite grasp the many manifestations that this type of ignorance can mutate into.
So, yes, I got the commission, and yes, I eventually got the architect excited about my idea to the point that he saw it as enhancing the appearance and function of the building. But then came the technocrats (calling them bureaucrats is a disservice to semantics).
Basically, because my piece involved the heavy use of some of their materials, so that we could do something significant in scale, they waited until I went ahead with my bid, and then, did not allocate any construction funds for those areas. In other words, by letting me “spend” from my moneys to do the preparatory work which he was supposed to do in the first place, he kept me from spending money on other areas of the building that were going to serve to frame and contextualize the piece (the nature of the approval process necessitated this for reasons far too long and boring for this context).
So to sum it up: one person with ZERO artistic training, who could not even begin to comprehend all the conceptual aspects of the work I am proposing to do, and who controls all the financial aspects of the project, decided to wage a budgeting war with the guy who has the least money to dispose of. It was carnage.
I’ll just say this: Art has been taught, tried, and tested on universities since there first were universities. Engineering has only been taught in universities for the last two hundred years. Therefore my field has a more solid academic foundation that his. This, however, didn’t keep him from trying to tell me which symbols to use, and how to go about designing things. Of course, I totally blew him off, and now I’m paying for it. You should see what he did to the architect’s design….