Supporting The Arts: A Fine Hipster Tradition

Art galleries are a little-known staple of hipster culture.  Not the art galleries around Union Square that have old people in dark blazers greeting you at the door before you come in to look at crappy amorphous sculptures and Bob Ross paintings.  I’m pretty sure those don’t appeal to anyone.  I mean the smaller, privately-owned galleries littering the city in the Mission, TL, and downtown areas like White Walls/Shooting Gallery, Fecal Face.Gallery, Park Life, and the recently lost Receiver Gallery.  The main allure is the opening parties every month or two, defined mostly by free entry, free beer (or at least a lenient BYOB policy), and being surrounded by other sexy young hipsters.  It’s the greatest thing to happen to America in a long time, and if that’s not reason enough to go, then you can just march right up to your room, mister.

Last Friday was the opening of Syzygy at The Lab on 16th & Capp, nestled cozily in the armpit of the Mission district.  Syzygy is “a kind of unity achieved through coordination or alignment of two or more things without the loss of identity” (http://www.thelab.org/events/395-syzygy.html).  There were ten artists featured, each utilizing different mediums, and each elaborating on the theme of syzygy.  

All of the pieces had something unique going, including a few video and projection installations, some ridiculously intricate collages, and an asteroid of penises.  What’s that?  Oh yeah, just an asteroid of penises...  You’re intrigued?  Fuck, I wish I’d remembered to take a picture or something... oh, wait, here you go.

Ha, yeah, that was something.  Can’t you just, like, totally imagine the artist who made it, like, changing into a fairy princess costume and, like, dancing around it with a magic wand, totally blessing all of the penises?  ... No?  Are you sure?  Yeah, well...

That.  Just.  Happened.

Anyway, the artist who seemed to get the most attention was a local and possibly Irish man, Flynn O’Brien, whose project, ‘Walk It Out’, had a constant swarm of people standing a polite distance away from the pictures, not realizing that no one could see, thus perpetuating awkwardness for those who might want to take pictures.  Lucky for you, he has a website, http://flynnpobrien.blogspot.com, and I took this:

Each picture is a set of photos taken every 20 seconds or so in the course of a walk, then overlapped as lighter exposures and separated into individual frames to indicate a distinct time frame.  Each collection of images represents the entirety of the walk, each set in a distinct location.  The effect is a strangely familiar, somewhat psychedelic representation of a an almost-recognizable environment, like a park in San Francisco, a cemetery in Colma, or a city street in Almeria.

I sat down with Flynn to interview him after the show.  I even thought up some really fascinating questions I was looking forward to discussing.  We had a great interview at the bar/restaurant Range on 20th and Mission, and though I couldn’t hear everything he was saying, I was confident that the mic on his shirt was picking up every word.

The next morning, I went to transcribe the interview, and realized how very wrong I was.  I listened for a few minutes to the murmurs and mumbles that I had recorded instead, and assessed that I was recording from the built-in mic which was in my lap, thus recording the ambient noise you hear in a restaurant, and whatever noises a lap makes.

Here's a photo of Flynn creeping about the gallery.  I was actually taking a picture of that rat tail, and this photo happened to be way better than the picture I took of Flynn later than night after the interview, as it happened to be in front of a different art gallery five blocks away... I know how confusing that would've been for you.

Anyway, I know there’s an astounding number of people who read this, and last week when I promised you an interview, I wasn’t lying.  I got the interview, but then God intervened, and forced technology to fail me.  That said, I sat down for an interview with Myself to figure out what went wrong.

Me:  So, what happened to the recording of the interview?

Myself:  The voice recorder was recording from the built-in microphone instead of the one clipped to Flynn’s shirt, so I couldn’t hear anything.

Me:  Wow, that’s rough... did you test it out before you left?

Myself:  ... No, but it worked fine last week.

Me:  Are you sure it was plugged in all the way?

Myself:  Yeah, I’m not that stupid.

Me:  ... Did you check?

Myself:  I don’t want to do this right now.

Me:  Okay.

From what I could derive, it kind of just sounds like I didn’t even have the mic plugged in all the way, and I’m just in denial about it because it’s such a stupid mistake.  I guess we’ll find out next week.

Speaking of which... NEXT WEEK:  Have you heard of those giant concrete slides on Seward Street?  Me neither.  I’ll go and tell you whether or not they’re fun.