The Hiding Gallery

poster for this "event"

I went to this little opening at the Hiding Gallery with my friend Sarah yesterday. Sarah has been sick. I didn't see her message that said "my head is killing me. I don't think I can do this tonight" so I showed up at her place, and she decided to come anyway. The whole time I was spewing platitudes about how it would be good to go out and do something and that it would make her feel better. She thought her head might be hurting from painkillers already, so I suggested she get a VitaCoco. We both did. She thought that hers tasted "weird." We switched. I couldn't tell if the one that was hers tasted weird or not because now I had been told that it tasted weird. I have a feeling something like this happens every time two people drink coconut water.

 We got to the place on Ellery and discovered it was basically an apartment building, which was pretty much expected. Some girls were using a lighter to prop the door open and we decided to smoke a cigarette. Then Tao Lin, Rion Harmon, and some bearded guy showed up. Rion said hello and Tao asked me if Andrew Weatherhead was coming.

When we got to the space there wasn't much to see.  Some of the art that was up was interesting. Tao Lin's collages were reasonably funny.

“middle-aged bluefin tuna ‘squandering’ its life-savings, risking its life ‘big time,’ & abandoning a ‘very successful’ career in ‘the arts’ (via ‘abandoning life’) to ‘parachute amidst mountains deforested & painted neon colors by an unrelated ‘middle-aged bluefin tuna with a “very successful” career in “the arts”’ because it ‘honestly didn’t know what else to do with its life,’ according to the 260-word New York Times obituary of it published two days after this photograph” by Tao Lin

Sarah really liked something else that I can't remember. She didn't want to drink because of the headache. I awkwardly got a glass of wine. I spoke to Rion for a little while and he introduced me to Lacy and another girl who I called "Macy" later because I thought she was Lacy and I had gotten Lacy's name wrong. I think Rion realized he didn't have much to say to me when I told him I just graduated from NYU. I sent Andrew a message asking if he was coming. Sarah and I got bored and began walking around. We went to the steep ladder that went to the roof. It looked something like this:

scary ladder

Sarah didn't want to climb it. We went into another room where a band was playing. Sarah asked if we should dance. I said, "Only if the music gets good." It didn't. We went back to the gallery/room. I got a beer. The bartendress/beer-giver-outer asked me if there was lipstick on her face because a Budweiser had cracked open and she was sucking its contents out of the side. I said, no, just here (pointing at my lips) on your lips. I think she was really hamming it up for tips. Eventually went to the roof even though Sarah was scared of the ladder, smoked again, rolled a joint, passed it around. The girl I called Macy told us there was a trampoline on the roof, at the far end, if we could "batman" over the dividers.

"No shoes. One person." When Sarah got on she instantly reverted to being an 8-year-old girl and I thought maybe I had done something good and made her feel better after all. I jumped for about 30 seconds because I was "not in the right state," but I smiled a little, and then did several backflips. When we got back across the roof Sarah began to get really scared about whether she could make it down the ladder again or not. Rion et al started laughing about it. She laughed, said, "O I made it. I'm doing it." etc. as she climbed down. As we came down the hall, 4 guys who walked out of the set for a movie about the lives of Brooklyn's cattle riders showed up with embroidered cowboy shirts, fu manchus, and all. As he walked into the room, the third guy from the set said "This is a lot bigger than I expected." We went in afterward, and Sarah made it clear to me that it was too much, and we had to go.

I told her I couldn't tell what she wanted, ever, and then she was very frank about how genuinely scared she was about going down the ladder and how rude she thought people were being for laughing at her. I said I was sorry. I said I think people were laughing to try and comfort her and assure her that it wouldn't be that bad going down the ladder. She didn't agree. She took some books from the hall. (Art in Theory 1900-2000,  Harrison and Wood. El Sid Saint Vicious, David Dalton. A Philosophical Enquiry, Edmund Burke. Runaway Ralph, Beverly Cleary.)

“2x hamster swimming at ~4:30 am in the giant swimming pool (~5% pictured) of the mansion they’ve been ‘squatting’ (to some degree of the conventional slang-meaning of the word) in for 13 weeks (after escaping from a 10-gallon fishtank in an adjacent mansion’s 8-year-old girl’s 1st-floor bedroom) because due to their size they can ‘pretty easily’ hide whenever they ‘sense’ that a human being is near and also the new mansion has no cats or dogs and is ‘very messy, with “piles of clothes” “in range” in almost every room and hallway’ and there seems to always be fresh Wendy’s or Arby’s leftovers in the private movie theatre in the basement where also it’s almost always dark to a degree that you can’t see a hamster even if it’s ‘walking around’ idly’" by Tao Lin

On my way out Andrew called me, but I just missed the call. I saw he messaged me that he was at the party. I messaged him saying I "had to leave because my friend had to leave," and then corrected to "my friend wasn't feeling well*" Andrew said it was David Fishkind who was calling me "to say hello." That seemed odd to me because I've never met David Fishkind and based on the stuffiness and obviousness of how hard I try on my blog, I didn't think that Fishkind would want to talk to me. I basically didn't think that anyone wanted to talk to me, especially Rion/Tao Lin. I wondered if there was some joke Andrew/David were playing on me, trying to get me to say "sick," which is something I don't like saying but seem to say a lot around Andrew. I wondered if my stomach hurt because of the "weird" coconut water.

When we got back to Manhattan Sarah and I got a crepe that I said I would pay for. I didn't have any cash so she payed for it, and I ate most of it and felt bad. She said she had a great time. That it was good to go out so she could remember why she doesn't go out. I did several backflips.