This ain't no party . . .
by Jerome du Bois
First some housekeeping: no more comments. If you have something to say, you may email us; but don't bother unless you use your real first and last names and an email that won't bounce back to us -- and you must have something to say. No more wasted words.
We ourselves emailed Greg Esser and Phil Jones not long ago. Mr. Jones finally got back to us, and we gave him a couple of options to meet, and plenty of time. No reply. And Esser's been mum since the get-go. That's okay, we'll keeping hammering away at both of them. Today, if one Googles <"roosevelt row" phoenix>, the first entry is The Evans-Churchill Draft Plan. That's great. Read it; then read the two entries beneath it. We're here for the duration. We want accountability. Step up, Esser; step out, Jones.
We cruised Grand Avenue yesterday, and I'll report on what we saw in just a minute, but this morning Catherine was rereading Ted Decker's self-serving puff piece about Beatrice Moore in shade, and almost immediately came upon this:
. . . Moore's activist efforts on behalf of artists and the arts in downtown Phoenix, and their re-gentrification of the once-blighted, closed-in Grand Avenue are noteworthy.
This means, readers, that the pictures you saw in our earlier pieces are the AFTER shots. Ted Decker is not blind; he visited Moore's studio; he knows gentrification when he sees it; therefore he is lying. Grand Avenue is closed-in and blighted now, and he damn well knows it.
Yesterday, one of the first things we saw -- sorry, no photo -- was some kind of ugly pink open rectangle plastic extrusion, like part of a child's plastic fort, covered with black graffiti, hanging from the "d" in The Lodge's carved wooden sign. The Lodge itself protrudes from its wedge-shaped corner, and there was this . . . obscenity, like a dirty diaper, at 2 PM on the Sunday after September First Friday. We have no idea when it was put up there.
The Lodge is run by Mykil Zep, whom Amy L. Young describes this way:
. . . ever the groovy cat, [Mykil] strives to present a myriad of bold, pop-based art with extreme talent and DIY sensibility, including his own works as well as fashion and live music.
She also writes, about the Grand Avenue crew:
Luckily, we have a superb community-minded, active force of residents to be a part of the process and keep interest and integrity within our city limits. There's not a lot comparable to being part of a diverse neighborhood.
Did I mention this was Sunday afternoon? Even if that thing had been put up there an hour before, why did no one on this committed, artist-filled, re-gentrified strip take it down? The street was not completely deserted, after all.
Just down the diagonal we saw that the Cone Gallery had its door open, and a tiny sandwich sign outside, unreadable from more than four feet away. Inside, it looked as dark as any roadhouse on Buckeye. It looked as bad as Modified -- pure boondock riverbottom dive. Shadowy figures milled around inside, but it was impossible, from across the street, to see what was going on. (I doubt they were mourning the victims of Beslan.) Why would an art gallery be so dark? I felt like shouting, "Hey, somebody come take this thing down!" But some of them had surely seen it -- you couldn't miss it. What lazy bums.
Down at the Paper Heart we marvelled again at how bland, how beige it was. All that window space along Grand, a tree-shaded sidewalk, a great outside South wall to paint another sign on for the visitors coming from downtown (amazing they didn't already do that). Nothing appears in any window to attract the eye or the attention. And Scott Sanders claims they do art, music, food, and performance here. Really?
Every time somebody interviews these Grand artists they rave about the wonderful old buildings. But they don't do anything with them. "Re-gentrification" reminds me of San Francisco's Painted Ladies, the lovingly- and sometimes wildly-painted Victorians found all over that town. Paint! Paint! Paint! Artists ought to know paint! But the eye encounters grime, dirt, and dullness. Neon! (Right, C.P?) When Steve Gompf said that the district did not want to become "yuppified," he was saying that they'd rather be lazy and irresponsible loudmouths than proud entrepreneurs.
Finally, we visited Beatrice Moore's Stop'N'Look. We parked at the corner and walked over. (As we did, a dark red pickup truck pulled up to a stop sign cattycorner across the street.) Last week there was a handwritten note about a September Jeff Falk installation. That was replaced with two handwritten sheets of paper. One announced that the window was undergoing renovations (in case nobody noticed it was empty) until October 1; the other announced a Jeff Falk political installation beginning then, and not in September.
As we walked back to the car, the dark red pickup, which had been idling during our examination, made an intimidating U-turn from the main street, coming around close to our car, and pulling up to the stop sign. We continued toward our car. The man inside the pickup idled for a moment, then drove away.
He didn't say anything, and he didn't get out of the pickup. Maybe because he saw that I was carrying The Stick. And that's why I always have it with me, as well as other handy, hidden items.
So this is as good a place as any to say to any stranger:
If you see us on the street, in a gallery, in a museum, in a restaurant, in the grocery, in a parking lot, in a bookstore -- anywhere -- do not approach us, no matter how friendly your intentions. We're not friendly, we don't want to talk to you, and we're both armed.
Hope that clears it up.
Posted by Jerome at September 6, 2004 10:15 AM | TrackBack