these eyes ain't ever seen a party like this

Yes, I made it inside Salon Aleman, Eduardo Sarabia's tequila bar at the Park Avenue Armory, on the 14th. Yes, the same night of "The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black." And yes, that shit was hoppin'.
If I could, I would have lived at the armory these last few weeks, dance-danceathoning with Gang Gang Dance, modeling for Ellen Harvey ("100 Biennial Visitors Immortalized"), asking astute questions about Scarface (which I still have never seen) during Mario Ybarra Jr.'s tour of "The Scarface Museum," flitting about the looped braids and prayers of Mk Guth's "Ties of Protection and Safekeeping," umm sleeping over at Walead Beshty's 24-hour sleepover in the hugest space in manhattan just because... and so on, and so forth.
Essentially, the installations at the armory—an annex of the Whitney Biennial only open March 6-23— just blew my mind.
Why? Because of the creative unknown of each of these pieces. Much (most?) of what was on display at the armory was incomplete. A call, in solicitation of a response. The tentative putting of oneself out there, an act of hope, the nudging of the meatball. The x-factor being whoever the hell shows up.
The success of many of the pieces at the armory was derivative of the response of people. Which turned out en masse. Which made me very, very happy.
So free tequila, si! Voluptuous horrific stage show, latex body paint, pretty shiny things (devious smiley faces bouncing off all interior surfaces of an airport hangar in the middle of Manhattan). Easy sells, right.

Yet, the Park Avenue Armory is such a place that one cannot make it a destination unless it is part of the adventure—at least, that was the spirit that haunted these old halls on the night I was there.
The Field and Staff Room (the last room to the right, if you hang a left down the grand central corridor of the ground floor of the Armory)—was temporarily redubbed "Salon Alena," an oasis serving cerveza and "Tequila Sarabia," or so promised a pair of pink neon signs bracketing Sarabia's tiled Babylon Bar.
Folding aluminum tables topped with a checkerboard aplique, short stools in the shape of elephant feet, loud brassa, tequila, the cast of the neon glow, gave that room a warmth, that glow of life, in utter juxtaposition to the stoic, solid nature of the heavy, dark wood, the glassy-eyed trophies (a moose, two deer, an eagle, a buffalo) and the meticulously-painted oil portraits of wars, men and pride.
To hear these stately halls echo with the brassy tapestry of Latin culture—a DJ set mixed by sir Sarabia himself—it was the site of two great prides meeting.

street haunting

Couples coupling, hands groping, bodies in various states of undress. On benches, behind bushes, tangled and horizontal on the grass. I would have believed it on blind faith, sure, but Kohei Yoshiyuki's etheral black-and-whites certainly remove any doubt about the lively night scene of various Tokyo parks in the 1970s. Allegedly, after a gallery show in 1979, Yoshiyuki destroyed most of the photos and disappeared. (The plot thickens: supposedly Kohei Yoshiyuki is a pseudonym.) A first-rate sleuth at Yossi Milo gallery in Chelsea managed to track down the elusive artist and convince him to make a new set of prints. It's the first time these photographs have been publicly shown since disco died.

Bemused, dreamy-eyed, nostalgic for a decade in the way only someone who's never lived through it can be. Walking East on W. 25th Street, another instance of an unreal reality. Framed within the rolled-up gate of a corrugated steel facade, there's a man in an off-white lounge lizard's suit, playing a candy-apple red electric guitar, crooning that part of a song that isn't quite words but always builds up to something... He is standing on dirt, on a narrow lot, underneath a rusted section of the future-fab highline park, accompanied by a mic and an amp, a spotlight, and a theatrical grouping of forlorn-looking leafless tree props. A small sign says that he's an Icelandic performance artist, and he's going to play the same riffs in the same spotlight for six straight hours a day, ten days in a row. It's a project by CCS Bard, Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies (and Art in Contemporary Culture).

English Lit classes brainwashed me forever: I see forest, actual or allegorical, any shape or size—hell, you could say I see trees and I have flashbacks to scenes from King Lear, Walden, the Scarlet Letter. But there is something to it, the forest being a place apart from a society of likeness, apart from conventional rules, apart from judging, peering eyes. To find two such escapes in the middle of Manhattan yesterday felt good because I, for one, need to disappear sometimes and it's not easy here.

Post Script: I confess, I procrastinate. Meaning that the Yoshiyuki exhibit has closed and Kjartansson's sun has set. I wound down my day at a screening of Helvetica. It's an amazing documentary with the premise of being about a font but is really about the arc of graphic design ideology over the last fifty years (that I also blogged about in March). If you runrushgo!, you'll probably still be able to catch Helvetica at the IFC Center—although it's been there long enough that it's due to disappear any day.