OLD WORLD UNDERGROUND WHERE ARE YOU NOW? part 3

at second glance, the lady at the drive through window at the starbucks on chili avenue in south rochester did not actually have a haircut that i like. but it was okay, and she'd done it herself -- which is to say that she'd stuck herself in rochester of her own volition, and although she didn't answer me when i asked her where she'd come there from, my bandmate answered our dykey barista la roux resoundingly when she asked us if we'd enjoyed the area. we made her an invitation to toronto, but she didn't take it.

i wondered, however, if she'd taken my debit card when we stopped at a perkins just past the border and i went in to use the toilet, not buy anything and realized it was gone. i might have noticed earlier if i'd tried to buy any of the postcards that i'd seen at the rest stop outside of niagara falls (our last minute run-in with rochester's last hope had been on our second coffee drive through, and the band was peeing a lot), but it's also possible that that's where i lost the card, in the parking lot when i remembered i'd wanted to take off my top layer before getting back behind the wheel. it might also have been at any of the toll booths along the highway in new york. but whatever, i'd just leave a credit card at the front desk of the hotel to cover the incidentals, and i'd call the bank after getting upstairs, where i would have already all but forgotten that barista.

toronto isn't the new york of canada, and i say so not to dispel any impressions that might be popularly held about the city, but because i found a comparison to be too simply multifariously made. new york is the new york of ontario, just like london is the london of spain, and although the tate and the reina sofia bear no comparison, london and madrid have them both, and both of them have the art gallery of ontario if they're willing to go to toronto. and although toronto may variously resemble both vancouver and chicago (which resemblances resemblances, for the record, aren't its unlikeness with new york), we only had twenty-four hours (during which we never went to the art gallery), and there simply wasn't time for making comparisons.

undeniably, however, toronto is a city of the sort that bears comparison with cities like new york, vancouver, chicago, madrid and london, and i say so only because of the glad day book store on yonge, which is where we decided to walk as we were walking east away from the thompson hotel toronto, the fashion and the gallery districts. there used to be a book store like the glad day on high street in columbus, until columbus decided to use what became its better gayborhood (i.e. nascent arts district) to try to become nothing more than becoming other cities. (ironically?) but fittingly, the glad day had sarah schulman's the gentrification of the mind on its featured display shelves, and everywhere else the shelves were filled with the sort of theory, photography, journalism, fiction and smut that used to distinguish an open book on high. toronto is a city like the rest of them, the likes of which haven't been seen in cities like columbus ever since those cities (ironically?) gave up on themselves and started trying to be like the rest of them.

there were other book stores i would have liked to have visited, but we only had (now less than) twenty-four hours, and before we could be concerned about being hungry we needed to be concerned with dressing ourselves for the rooftop bar and beyond (where the city would probably still have made sure that we had a good view of the cn tower). unfortunately, the queen didn't seem to have anything special prepared (although, granted, we didn't give her very much time). we didn't have much time for rest or freshening up back at the hotel, but we made what we could before going back out. and we hadn't made any inquiries into eateries in the area (or beyond), so we ended up sitting down in the bar at weslodge. (could she help us, the hostess had belatedly asked, and i'd told her that we were hungry, had seen a restaurant and so came inside.) the place wasn't bad, even if it was just a late, taxidermy-ed clyde common in custom leather tablet holsters for the wait staff. we had the beef tenderloin and the cornish hen. (i wasn't feeling the clams. they sounded okay, but...) and i might have preferred a roast chicken in little portugal, but at any rate i had the consolation of the conversation of those better heeled portuguese at the tables adjacent to ours and in the stools in front of the beards behind the bar.

what's else to say? touch down, look around, everyone's the same. but you know that dancers are disposed to fucking well. and so after we overpay for some bottles of steam whistle, bad service and a view included in the price of our room, i leave the band to enjoy the hotel and make my way to college and ossington. in the absence of the artist -- and without time to be concerned with finding bruce mcdonald and maureen medved, scott pilgrim or the arts districts so inspired -- i was happy for some fun. some easy vulnerability. courage and belonging, to the sticking point of an absconded community. and after the dances of three disco oracles and four hours of having fucked well, i left. o espirito santo on college. back to the hotel because we needed to check out in the morning, after which i only got one postcard written (all hail ms. toronto!), but we did eat arenas, because they're delicious and they're the new things to eat. then we were out. that was it. and toronto had been like any other city, although it was certainly not the new york of canada, nor the chicago, london, madrid or vancouver, bundle of high rise plate glass art galleries or not. but you play where the tour takes you. and who you are is who you'll be: the best haircuts, as they say, are taken.

CAPTIVES OF SEXUAL ABERRATION

the band, five hours after being pulled over in willoughby, ohio, pulled into the parking lot of the lao thai restaurant on university avenue in rochester. after the owner finally figured out reconnecting his credit card machine, gay uncle fester let us stay parked in the lot of the restaurant while we walked through the "neighborhood of the arts" to the bachelor forum. empty. so we walked back past the art cathedral at the memorial gallery, where the seminarian we spotted up the stairs and down the hall from the set of locked doors we tried turned out to be a cater waiter. on and off the inner loop, a police cordon, and the wrong way down all the one ways. kodak. xerox. genesee. motel 6 and little caesars. visibly parked, making late night money at the hess. art attempts everywhere, but they don't seem to have done much for the stuff. the original boomtown bust. but you play where the tour takes you.

LLORA CUANDO TE PASE

i remember nothing of michael robinson's half of his (guided) q&a with fellow experimental filmmaker laida lertxundi and their wexner center guide other than his statement on karaoke as prayer. even if i hadn't the emotional wherewithal to process the significance of the guide's leading (and meandering) statements-as-questions on the filmmakers' use of music in their films, i still felt a deep sympathy for robinson's digressive statement (in response to the last question that the guide accepted from the audience) on acts of recitation in song wherein a singer is expected to act out the emotion of his medium. i hadn't recognized any of the cover songs in circle in the sand, and so i hadn't speculated on their significance. neither had i paid specific enough attention to the soundtracks of lertxundi's films to mistake one of the songs she'd used in one of them for a song by roy orbison and then to speculate on the significance of that artist's vocal range with the range of the films (as did a professor in the audience). there were probably tropes of experimental film making (and appreciation) that i didn't understand -- which is probably what's keeping me from articulating any greater or more significant speculations on either robinson's or lertxundi's presentations now. (and i speculated as much after the q&a to the phd candidate friend of mine who'd told me that this was an event that i shouldn't miss.) i couldn't, however, deny that i'd reacted to lertxundi's films -- or that tears could signify a wide range of...emotional states.

Su cine cuestiona la manera en que los deseos y expectativas del espectador responden de formas cinemáticas de narración de historias, y busca modos alternativos de vinculación de sonido y música con imágenes de hábitats naturales, situaciones construidas, y entornos cotidianos. Sus películas, filmadas en Los Ángeles y alrededores, crean una geografía paisajística que se transforma en estados afectivos.

[reaction] affected states. bettye swann singing "my heart is closed for the season" over a shot of the paradise motel showing its no vacancy sign, los angeles city hall reflected in a window. but remember: no hidden stories. why michael robinson didn't use the belinda carlisle song with which he chose to share the name of the film of his that was screened at the wexner center on monday is absolutely overt: he couldn't find a decent cover. but he did give us neil young via linda ronstadt: "there was a band playing in my head, and i felt like i could cry. i was thinking about what a friend had said; i was hoping it was a lie." still (or as a result, maybe) "all i can do is lock up my heart and get over you." and boy oh boy. you'd cry too if it happened. any other day, ms. lertxundi, but not that one. maybe it was an event not to miss, but the brutality of my sympathy for what i didn't even have the particular erudition to discuss with the rest of the crowd just made me want it off the fucking screen.

SPRING FEVER, REITERATION

they're advertising something on north high street between 15th avenue and iuka. "art that rubs off on you," the banners read in combination, in succession, as you pass. ungh. that's gotta be one controversial -- and confrontational -- exhibition. exhibit one...or art appreciation 101: pretense, in late winter, full of the joys of spring.

HOW TO SURVIVE A Q&A

it wasn't exactly funny, as it's said, but it did turn out to be an interesting coincidence that, before we left his apartment to walk to the wexner center, the artist had been telling me about an article that he'd been asked to illustrate, an article for a new homo mag that was being edited by some so and so who had been involved with some thing or another, and about how the prospect of being involved with its publication of the magazine wasn't unappealing, but that the article itself was...well...he was sure that i wouldn't like it. and even though i told him that i'd rather read the whole thing alone, apart (if i ended up reading it at all), he insisted on reading me the first paragraph, a cavalcade of tired, offensive stereotypes about angry lesbians and screaming trannies (and it wasn't that the transgendered were necessarily wont to scream, but man, latinas sure are), and out of the cacophony of those angry, tired, offensive stereotypes, the angry, tired, offensive author was trying to make his voice heard. it would seem that the community has become over-queered. it's no longer special enough to be a (not EVEN so straight acting) gay white male. the artist grabbed another snippet: the world -- as it was represented by the staff and the clientele of the bar-restaurant where the author worked -- was apparently at war with "normalcy." it was time that people started paying some attention to the...culturally disenfranchised mainstream homosexual? apparently he had been pushed off the top of the heap. thud. ...oof. but it wasn't even funny. i agreed that i was sure that i didn't like it, and we left to walk to our movie.

on friday night, the wexner center was hosting wu tsang, who was being hosted to introduce and answer questions about wildness, his first feature length film, which the wexner center was screening in conjunction with its hosting of tsang as the first of two visiting filmmakers events on its film and video program for march. the documentary takes its name from a tuesday night art party that tsang and his friends threw between 2008 and 2010, a party which was thrown at a bar called the silver platter, a bar which had established a special reputation for being a place of safe congregation for central american transgender residents of the macarthur park neighborhood of los angeles. tsang, who "has self-identified as 'transfemenine' and 'transguy'" (the independent, 2/5/2013), was drawn to the bar because of its story and its reputation, and became a regular customer because he was drawn to the spirit of its community. the silver platter hosted (and still hosts) friday night fiestas latinas, the spirit and performances of which made tsang think that the silver platter might be a good venue for a dance party that would also serve as a vessel for queer(ish) performance and performance art. the ownership of the silver platter was down, tsang's friends were down, and tuesday nights were slow. so tsang and his friends started throwing a party, and the party got really popular. the ownership was happy with wildness because wildness made tuesdays at the silver platter a draw. the ladies of the silver platter weren't necessarily unhappy with wildness either, because it wasn't like they were ostracized or excluded from the new tuesday nights, even as wildness gained popularity, and even if they weren't exactly incorporated either.

wildness is narrated from the perspective of the silver platter (herself), voiced in the film by a transgender guatemalan actress, a motif which seems to have been chosen by tsang and his co-writer roya rastegar (who had seen a rough cut of a proto-wildness that tsang submitted to the tribeca film festival when rastegar was a programmer there) because, well, otherwise the documentary doesn't seem to know what it's about. as i watched it on friday evening, it alternately seemed that wildness could have been a documentary about its namesake party, or it could have been a documentary about the experience of an underserved queer community on the front lines (and probably losing end) of gentrification; but as a whole, wildness was sufficiently neither. there's party footage, but the story of the party in wildness is limited to its occurrence, its rise and its discontinuation after tsang found himself temporarily on the outs with one of the bars' owners over an issue of inheritance following the death of the brother of the original owner. the ladies of the silver platter are shown posing and performing and are heard speaking in voice overs, but the only of them fleshed out as a person (and wildness skirts reducing her to not much more than a personality at that) is the transgender woman in charge of the door. what to do? make the movie about the bar, which was -- granted, admittedly and of course -- where the art party and its followers crossed roads with the neighborhood transgender community. but then again, although the silver platter is the bar in wildness, it's self-narration culminates in its assumption of the character of an otherworldly anybar, through which [wistful upward sidelong gaze] the people, the communities they come and go, they drink, dance and dream...if these walls could talk...the waves of time...bright lights and big cuddle at macarthur park!

the thing is, wildness is the kind of film that gets making right now. if, arguably, a party like wildness probably took its opportunity to be discontinued more because queer(ish) hipster dance parties got co-opted by mainstream party culture (just before hipster androgyny hit the racks at mainstream retail outlets and three years after "hipster" ceased meaning anything other than a picture of a certain kind of partygoer in a certain kind of outfit) than because of personal (and personnel) complications at the bar where it was hosted, then (tribeca worthy) art films about trannies, hipsters, gentrification and immigrants are, along the same trajectory, just now coming into their cultural cachet. and don't get me wrong: i liked it. i think it's worth seeing (and i think you should see it). i wouldn't say that wildness is an important film, but i do think that its subjects are important to discourses (discursions) on contemporary queer identity and queer(ish) art (...parties). after the wexner center's screening of wildness (and after the subsequent q&a and reception with the director), the artist and i went back to his apartment, where he proceeded to dig up the issue of interview in which he remembered having seen a photograph of tsang after having seen the director in person. in his portrait, the artist is shown topless and arms akimbo -- highlighting the transguy's runway perfect breasts -- in a pair of high waisted shorts by american apparel and a pair of ankle strap heels by christian louboutin. i don't mean -- at all (...but at all) -- to argue in defense of "normalcy" (oof!). but i do mean to question the stunningly appalling sensationalization (and sensationally successful marketing) of those issues and identities with which a film like wildness takes issue and self-identifies.

no one (...but no one) should take the artist wu tsang to task for taking advantage of his art market moment. he's currently being shown at the whitney (after being featured in the 2012 biennial), and it's year old new york news that he's the artist "soon to be featured in every show in town" (galleristny.com, 2/14/2012). his whitney exhibition is coming to the wexner center in the spring. and i don't think that wu tsang is unaware of the cultural wave of time which has carried him to artistic prominence. ten or so minutes of wildness is devoted to the question of sam slovick, the freelance journalist whose "best tranny bar" contribution to la weekly's 2008 "best of l.a." issue caused the organizers of wildness to mount a online "fuck sam slovick" campaign in response to his aggressively transphobic depiction of their bar. "Finally!" the article begins, "A crossroads convergence of self-involved, art-damaged 20-something kids and Third World gender illusionists at a water hole whose geography transcends the expanse of Silver Lake proper." significantly, tsang doesn't try to defend his friends as far as they're depicted in wildness. if anything, the interviews with his party co-conspirators seem to reify their status as self-involved, art-damaged 20-somethings. one of them, accordingly draped in a black pleather vest and a tank top, questions how any of the ladies of the silver platter could possibly have considered the planners of wildness to be interlopers. as if there were somehow money or power behind him??? [cue unironic explosion of the hipster art party] 

i wonder, however, why the artist seems to feel the need to defend himself. he was asked, during the q&a that followed the screening of his film, why he'd not restarted wildness after he'd gotten himself back into the good graces of nora, the current owner of the silver platter. the thing was, he said, that he'd wanted to. it was that the other three were touring internationally as djs, and he'd had the editing of the film... i don't doubt that wu tsang feels an affinity with the trangender community of the silver platter and of macarthur park. i suspect that he even feels an obligation. but at the q&a that followed the screening of wildness at the wexner center on friday evening, he gave no conscionable explanation as to why he hasn't tried to reinstate any hip kid, grassroots activity around the silver platter since the beginning of his meteoric rise -- which, although it has drawn attention (and likely customers) to the bar, appears to have eclipsed his direct involvement with its community. a party is one thing. those of us who feel a certain compassionate intoxication at the visuals of the art party at the bar in wildness know exactly how queer(ish) performance and queer performance art parties come and go. they're meaningful to whom they were meaningful because of their certain ephemerality, because their ephemeral moment meant our youth (however self-involved and art-damaged). but what's the real story -- or at least the whole one -- behind the closing of the legal clinic that was founded by tsang et al. at the height of the party? without begrudging tsang his success or overestimating the power of the party to effect real social change, surely it isn't without justification to ask why the project of wildness seems to have had nothing real to do with promoting or protecting the agency of the ladies of the silver platter.

on saturday evening, the day after the wexner center hosted wu tsang, the new school in new york streamed "a conversation with david france and jim hubbard" as part of its series revisiting the aids crisis. i haven't seen either how to survive a plague or united in anger, but i tuned in online hoping to learn...something. about act up, about the experience, about the legend of art and activism. unfortunately (for me, anyway), the conversation was largely technical. and unfortunately, although both directors are in a position to reposition the aids crisis within the social history of the twentieth century (a position which i understand them both to understand), ironically, neither of them seemed to like the difficult questions either. when they were asked why people of color, women and the transgendered were underrepresented in the leadership of act up and in both of their films, neither director gave an unqualified answer, seemingly for fear that aspersions would be cast, not on their messages, but on their art. gallingly, gay african american moderator tony whitfield seemed embarrassed to have to serve the directors with the question. the best that either director did to address the issue (and i can't say which one it was because i'd stopped paying attention to the video stream at that point) was to say that the educated, privileged (and male) were the only ones with the means to be able to sacrifice the time and resources to the cause that they did. no one, i think, meant to indict either director -- his methods or his compatriots -- with any question, but a less defensive response would probably have gone a long way to ease the tension in the auditorium (and in the chat room) and to further conversation. maybe france and hubbard feel threatened by the war on normalcy. (not even funny?)

on saturday evening, during the q&a with france and hubbard at the new school in new york, i thought again about the q&a with wu tsang at the wexner center. in response to a question about...i forget. it was actually two questions, and the one that i remember was the one about a statement by tsang in wildness about how his chinese father's never having taught him chinese had left a void within him that he had filled (had facilitated filling) by establishing and building relationships, community. the other question must have had something to do with editing? i don't remember. but i do remember that in his response tsang brought up jonathan oppenheim, editor of paris is burning, and i remember the preemptive -- and emphatic -- statement that tsang proceeded to make to distance wildness from any comparison with that film. paris is burning -- that queer(ish) performance and performance art darling of the aughts -- a documentary about the ball culture of certain african american and latino gay and transgender communities in new york in the 1980s, has been criticized for its failure to interrogate white heterosexuality. that failure, critics say, has made it too easily palatable for privileged, white audiences. wildness is not the los angeles latina paris is burning of the 2000s. okay. but what jenny livingston (a privileged, white lesbian originally from beverly hills) did in 1990 with paris is burning is apparently something that neither david france nor jim hubbard seems (i haven't seen their films) to have been able to do in the second decade of century twenty-one: namely, to depict (at all) a minority queer experience in the decade which, for many intents and purposes, has underscored the popular american consensus on glbtq. i understand tsang's desire to insulate himself from certain criticism, but i wonder who he assumes his audience to be at the whitney, or at sxsw...or at tribeca. the comparison between wildness and paris is burning would, in fact, appear to be most apt in its description of the similarities between the criticism that the two films would draw. unfortunately, to the extent that tsang's film does speak for itself in its elucidation of the experience of the ladies of the silver platter, it doesn't speak to its director's ardent denials of what it's not. and at the wexner center on friday evening, the director didn't say anything else either.

i should have talked to tsang at the reception after the film and asked him to say something myself, one on one. but wu tsang, to his absolute credit, is someone with whom i didn't want to talk at a reception at the wexner center, but rather at a party like wildness, at a bar, on the street, somewhere more charged with our nostalgia for the milieu of the party. i did, however, ask him a question during his q&a. he'd actually started editing wildness as a media intern at the wexner center in 2010, which he'd disclosed during his introduction to his film (and his thanks for making it possible). so following on a question to which he'd responded with something about the community in l.a. i asked him to give us a sense of his picture of the community, as it were, in columbus, ohio. i'd hoped to indict his audience there at the wexner center, or maybe to have the director rail at me for my assumption that his audience there was of the privileged variety that would only see his film to feel good about bearing witness to the experience of people with whom they'd never deign to associate -- and afterwards return to their salaries, the theory of their graduate programs, to the gym and to the esthetician. tsang very tactfully refrained from a real response. his time in columbus had been cut short by the death of the owner of the silver platter and by concommitant questions about his party. no one should take wu tsang to task for his success as an artist, but i don't think that anyone in the know can deny that he knows his audience well -- and plays to it at the same time that he makes a point of swearing it off.

at the reception that followed the screening of wildness at the wexner center, i passed on my opportunity to talk to wu tsang. i could have talked to him about his experience with trying to sustain a free legal clinic for immigrants and trans people and passed whatever information i was able to get to my father, who has expressed his interest in founding an institution along those lines in columbus to his retirement. but as we were at the reception at the wexner center, i really just wanted to take his picture. he's stunning, he was impeccably put together, and there in the antechamber of the gallery he cut the perfect picture of the artist. and on friday evening at the wexner center, to my own discredit, i was principally concerned with matters of art. i didn't make the approach to get my photo because i hadn't brought my phone.

the question that lingers is if i'm happy with it. are we happy with it, the art that the gallery complex deigns to consider appropriate to our experience of the community, as it were, at our crossroads convergence of our self-involved, art-damaged selves, our gender illusions, the illusion of gender, its queer performance, performance art, activism, commercial queering, our war with normalcy and the rest of the world. rail and indict. q&a.
  

THE TIME AND THE TEMPERATURE

i was walking in the rain from a bus on high to the library on front, and it must have been a while since i'd been been down that stretch of broad street on foot (if it's dry i bike, and i won't take broad), because i saw something there that i hadn't seen before, although it's apparently been there since the end of january. and what's there now near the corner of east broad and south lazelle is a sign, and the sign reads "tehran, iran" at the top, plastic part of it, below which (in real time) a scrolling display gives the time and the temperature in the city named by the sign. not so surprisingly, "the time and the temperature" -- as the sign is called -- is a part of "finding time" (columbus' bicentennial public art project)...although our being well into 2013 might (jocularly) call the timeliness of the piece into question (and even after we acknowledge that we weren't quite so far into the year when the sign first went up). pittsburgh artist jon rubin created the the piece to be "pro-conversation." i haven't heard much on the street so far, but maybe people just need, er...time. but now people on the street in columbus (or on east broad street, anyway) will be reminded of the time (and the temperature) in tehran, a city of over twelve million people, which makes it the fifth largest city by city proper population in the world.

ROTHKO BEFORE ROTHKO; or, WAY TO GO OHIO, part 13

that first part isn't, however, really my title. i have to admit. the one who really came up with it was that art history phd candidate who showed us around the prado on that...memorable friday afternoon that the 2011/12 christmas saga spent in madrid. but regardless of his ability to give the show a memorable title, he wasn't going to be showing us around the rothko exhibition at the columbus museum of art when we finally got ourselves together to get together to see it on sunday -- which isn't to say that he didn't go (he came), it's just that twentieth century american art isn't his thing. and appearances aside (he was beside us in front of many of the paintings on display), i have to admit that it's not exactly my expertise either. i'd just been riding past the rothko banners on the front of the museum for a month, and that phd candidate had given the show an interesting epithet (even if it had been given to imply that the show wouldn't be that interesting). anyway, we went. it was something -- but not in the figurative sense. "rothko before rothko," which the museum is calling "mark rothko: the decisive decade 1940 -1950" went something like this:

The years 1940 – 1950 were crucial in the development of Mark Rothko’s universally recognizable mature color-field paintings. Fueled by the anxieties of the late 1930s and the years of WWII, in the 1940s, Rothko’s figurative imagery became increasingly symbolic and dream-like. By 1947, Rothko and his artist colleagues and friends such as Adolph Gottlieb were eliminating all elements of the human figure from their work. As a consequence, nonobjective compositions of indeterminate shape and colors emerged and filled the picture plane. Rothko finally landed upon a new way of painting — using blocks of color which for him contained a “breath of life” he found lacking in most figurative painting of the time.

and that, i suppose, is how we experienced it, although the universal significance of myth and the transformative power of color seemed to have overslept that day too. (i think that i spent more time reading placards than i did trying to read anything into the paintings.) still, it was nice to have gone. we talked about gorky (and i realized that we were talking about the other gorky), and then there was one of his paintings. there was a woman with a hat, but by a different fauve than the one you probably know. in the atrium, the museum was setting up for a wedding. i liked the screen printed and rhinestoned portraits of oprah and condoleezza near the staircase, and i liked the classically inspired, brooklyn sourced portrait of the local ignoble that's above the landing.

we went looking for the cafe and found a print of a photograph by diane arbus, the freakish surreality of which had been inoculated by its incorporation into a series of interactive exercises for children (which were in the hallway outside of the interactive area for children than might have displaced the old cafe since i'd last been to the museum). around the next corner, on the way back to the lobby, the adults have their chance to interact. the museum wants money, because it wants to get rid of the sculpture garden (and erstwhile outdoor cafe seating) to erect another wing. i didn't pay any attention to what the museum was going to put in the new wing post-erection because i was disappointed when the switch next to the scale model didn't turn anything on.

it doesn't matter, of course. if they make it, people will come. like the poster (sell those weddings!) of the bride and groom seated in front of a wall of too glaringly lit paintings says, "vibrant city vibrant collection." do you want to live in a vibrant city? then maybe you should make sure your museum has a vibrant collection. but even that doesn't matter. whatever part of its collection the museum decides to put in its new wing will be vibrant as a rule, because, of course, you live in a vibrant city. rothko! you probably ate dinner at a restaurant in a vibrant arts district on the saturday night before the sunday that brought you to the museum.

But while everyone agrees that “vibrancy” is the ultimate desideratum of urban life, no one seems to be exactly sure what cultural vibrancy is. In fact, the Municipal Art Society of New York recently held a panel discussion—excuse me, a “convening”—of foundation people to talk about “Measuring Vibrancy” (it seems “the impact of arts and cultural investments on neighborhoods ... is hard to quantify”). In retrospect, it would have been far better to convene such a gathering before all those foundation people persuaded the cities of the nation to blow millions setting up gallery districts and street fairs.

Even ArtPlace, the big vibrancy project of the NEA, the banks, and the foundations, is not entirely sure that vibrancy can be observed or quantified. That’s why the group is developing what it calls “Vibrancy Indicators”: “While we are not able to measure vibrancy directly,” the group’s website admits, “we believe that the measures we are assembling, taken together, will provide useful insights into the nature and location of especially vibrant places within cities.”

What are those measures? Unfortunately, at press time, they had not yet been announced. But a presentation of preliminary work on the “Vibrancy Indicators” did include this helpful directive: “Inform leaders of the connection between vibrancy and prosperity.” Got that? We aren’t sure what vibrancy is or whether or not it works, but part of the project is nevertheless “informing” people that it does. The meaninglessness of the phrase, like the absence of proof, does not deter the committed friend of the vibrant: if you know it’s the great good thing, you simply push ahead, moving all before you with your millions.

This is not the place to try to gauge the enormous, unaccountable power that foundations wield over American life—their agenda-setting clout in urban planning debates, for example, or the influence they hold over cashstrapped universities, or their symbiosis with public broadcasters NPR and PBS. Nor is this the forum to salute them for their many positive contributions to society.

My target here is not their power, but their vacuity. Our leadership class looks out over the trashed and looted landscape of the American city, and they solemnly declare that salvation lies in an almost meaningless buzzword—that if we chant that buzzword loud enough and often enough, our troubles are over.

of course, that's to say nothing of art itself (or the other stuff, like the owners of the bookstore that doesn't exist anymore in the arts district). but you can read the rest of thomas frank's article on cultural vibrancy (originally published at the baffler) alongside that article by adriana camarena on gentrification and food culture in the mission district of san francisco (originally published in n+1) in the current issue of utne. it just so happened that i had read it myself a couple of days before going to see "rothko before rothko," and that just so happened to make my sunday in columbus, ohio where, although the art museum wasn't charging admission, it was generally serving patrons who didn't need to spend their weekend days serving the likes of...ourselves (which, after a week of discussing the philosophy of humor as it pertained to the academy awards, did more than just do another nice trick).
  

It is time to acknowledge the truth: that our leaders have nothing to say, really, about any of this. They have nothing to suggest, really, to Cairo, Illinois, or St. Joseph, Missouri. They have no comment to make, really, about the depopulation of the countryside or the deindustrialization of the Midwest. They have nothing to offer, really, but the same suggestions as before, gussied up with a new set of clichés. They have no idea what to do for places or people that aren’t already successful or that have no prospects of ever becoming cool.

in the meantime, there's here and us, wherever and whoever that might be (and regardless of how awfully, self-deprecatingly salutary that may be or sound), and since, well, it's unfortunately all the same, maybe we should have something to say about it.