Money Mark, music producer and longtime Beastie Boys collaborator, stood on top of his stool in between playing his keyboard and banging his drums to make kazoo and beat-box sounds by inserting a small microphone directly into his mouth.
Money Mark, the Money Mark, made crazy avant-garde, improvised music for the two dozen or so kids who came out to Planet Rooth Studios in North Park last Saturday night. Most of us were at the gallery for Harry the Hat’s Holiday Party, a second art opening for the North Park artist’s solo show and a holiday celebration for those of us who didn’t have anywhere to go eat turkey and open presents. The Money Mark part of the show was a last-minute, super sweet surprise—thus the embarrassingly slim crowd.
By the end of the night, thanks to chat after chat with Gustaf Rooth, Planet Rooth’s eccentric Sweden-born owner who was wearing two hats that night—a wool beanie underneath a top hat with a long yellow feather sticking a foot into the air—I was convinced of a deeply underground and highly under-acknowledged Ray at Night Renaissance going on right under everyone’s noses. And it wasn’t just the Money Mark performance or the free booze that got me going.
Rewind just a few hours earlier on the day of the show. I was right next door to Planet Rooth, at 4 Walls Gallery, taking part of an impressively fresh month-long performance piece organized by 4 Walls curator, Elliot. The gallery had been temporarily transformed into a hair salon and art movers and shakers—the likes of Hugh Davies, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and Patricia Frisher, founder of the San Diego Visual Arts Network, just to namedrop a few—were invited to get their hair done, gossip about the San Diego art scene and be recorded for the duration.
Emily Fierer of North Park’s Spacecraft Studio, a gallery just down the street on North Park Way, wondered in about mid-do. It was amazing how quickly we both seemed to forget that every word we said was being recorded by the little microphones clipped to our chests, transcribed then eventually sold publicly as part of a larger transcript to the highest bidder.
If my loose-lipped bitching about the scene is any indication, the end result, which will be auctioned off during January’s Ray at Night, will be a pretty telling examination.
After the hairdo, I went with Emily to see Brian Dick’s show at Spacecraft. No real surprises there—Dick’s still hooked on the found-object mask project, which I’ve seen a few times already—but Emily and Chris Puzio, her husband and co-owner and curator of the gallery, promised that the next few shows are going to be good (Tania Candiani, a Tijuana artist who is called on to do her installations across the globe, is on the list).
I hung out and had olives and tea with the creative couple, admiring the smooth concrete floors they designed and built themselves, then headed back to Planet Rooth.
Money Mark aside, Harry’s work was really the main attraction of the night. One side of the space was reserved for his more whimsical and fantastical ink and watercolored prints. The other side showed off his more commercial surf and beach works—gorgeous ink and watercolors done in an art nouveau style. At one point in the night, a woman in a green skull cap and a floral gold and brown shall covering her shoulders wondered in. The likeness of the woman to a woman in one of Harry’s beach paintings was uncanny. The lady pulled me aside after I demanded to take her picture in front of the canvas and explained to me how connected she felt to Harry’s work. She had even handwritten him a story trying to explain how much she felt his work was like her life.
Crazy stuff happens on Ray Street these days, I’m telling you.
Across the street, at Rubber Rose, I managed to slip in right before 10 p.m. and check out the current exhibition, a meticulously hung show by LA artist, Plasticgod, featuring rows and rows of small-scale paintings of popular icons, some as well-known as David Bowie, others as obscure as Napoleon Dynamite’s girlfriend, with her fanny pack and all.
“Good night my quiet geniuses,” I half-drunkenly whispered to Carly and Leigh, the fiery young owners of the Rubber Rose, as I headed back to Planet Rooth.
Leigh laughed and the two shut off the lights to the gallery/sexuality shop and went home.
Before the night was over, a cute punk-rock couple wondered in to Planet Rooth. The guy rolled up his sleeve and showed me his new tattoo, it read “Riki owns me” and had birth and death dates underneath. It turns out that down the street at Scolari’s Office, a local artist was giving people tattoos to help raise funds for Riki Watkins, a 25-year-old woman who was allegedly accidentally shot to death by her sister’s boyfriend a week earlier. Watkins worked at Kadan Club in Normal Heights and Commonwealth Cafe in North Park and, as the newly inked guy explained, a lot of local kids knew and loved her. His eyes were swollen and red from what I imagined must have been a pretty teary situation over at Scolari’s.
It wasn’t the first time I’d seen red eyes because of Riki. I had witnessed Riki’s effect on people at Kadan a few nights earlier. I was at the bar for a new electro night called Double Ds and a young couple was crying as the bar. When I inquired as to why, the guy told me Riki had been like a sister to him. He took a few shots of whiskey to numb the pain and before the night was over was dancing around with his shirt off, his nipples pressed against his chest thanks to a clear strip of plastic tape and his underwear pulled up to his armpits. He told me Riki would have wanted to see him happy.
