Lost in the Night

My life is based on a true story.

No, I didn't come up with that, I saw it on some kid's t-shirt while pounding the pavement for First Fridays with a friend from the county in tow. He'd accompanied my hired mouth to dinner before we set out in search of culture.

What we also found were scads of art walkers including plenty of fresh-faced students holding forth on the art they were seeing, the friends they'd just run into or where the party later on was going to be.

They blather, therefore they are.

Our first stop was at ADA Gallery for Rachel Hayes' "Straight Tipsy," which shared a lot in common with her 2011 show I'd seen there, "Chutes and Tears," done not long after the Japanese tsunami. Both relied on fabric -especially denim - and colored acrylic for bright coloring of the geometrically-inclined collages.

Overheard: "I like the less garishly-colored ones." Apparently, florescent pink is an acquired taste in art.

Replacing the departed Ghostprint Gallery was Unkindness Art and here's where I learned something tonight. A gathering of ravens is called an unkindness, much like a group of crows is a murder.

Art is so educational.

The new gallery had taken a page from Ghostprint's book, installing a tattoo artist in the back (I saw a person in the chair and heard the whirring of the needle) and showing bird-centric art up front, including a stuffed bird in an antique cage.

We'll call it a funky addition to the arts district.

Candela Gallery was mobbed (and as cold as a meat locker) for Louvier + Vanessa's show "Resonantia," gorgeous abstract photographs over gold leaf dibond.

The hook was how they were made and even after Vanessa herself explained the process to me, I'm still not 100% sure I get it.

Sound waves are sent through water which is then photographed with different results because various notes make different patterns. Sort of like seeing something invisible. Those photos were then somehow converted to soundscapes. Resonantia means echo, if that helps.

I listened, I really tried to understand, but it was above my head and I admitted as much to Vanessa, asking her how they'd ever conceived of such a thing.

"He's a scientist," she said, pointing at Louvier. Had to be, because only a scientific mind could come up with such an artistic concept.

There were twelve panels depicting the 12 basal notes of music (another teachable moment for me) as well as other images made from the sounds produced by, oh, hell, I don't know. Just go see and hear the striking gold and black images (yes, they also made an album of the sounds of the photographs and no, I can't explain that either) and then come explain it to me.

My partner in art and I briefly slid into the vintage consignment shop Souleil when we heard a voice singing but we were at the back of the store, so we could barely even see the guy with the gorgeous voice and eventually we gave up and left.

And if we thought that place was crowded, we found out what crowded really was at Gallery 5 where NYC artists Johnston Foster and Jimmy Joe Roche's show "Dirty Work Dirt Dogs" made for one big sweat fest as people moved between Roche's videos being shown on monitors and Foster's sculptures made using the detritus of a consumer culture.

His "Catch and Release" lay sprawled on the floor, a sculpture of a bloody shark split open with baby sharks spilling from its body. My favorites were "Pony Up," two horse heads made from such things as telephone cables, vinyl flooring and garden hose mounted to the wall facing opposite directions.

As many times as I've been upstairs at G5, this was the first time that the windows were gone, hidden behind a wall from which hung a large monitor showing Roche's "Homelands" video.

With all the people, I lost track of my companion while running into other people I knew and dodging roving bands of art students oblivious to anyone but their posse. Back downstairs, I talked to the dulcitar player, the former coworker (who'd also seen Cornel West yesterday) and the apron-clad dessert chef before going outside in search of my disappearing date.

He's not a small person, so I couldn't imagine how I'd lost him.

Eventually, the heat sent me outside for air where a line was beginning to form to get into the gallery, but I waited around, sure he'd come out any moment.

Going back in was problematic because of the line, so after 15 minutes, I crossed the street to Atlas to see "Performing Statistics," only realizing once I was there that I'd already seen the show - really more of an activist statement about stopping the school to prison pipeline - at 1708 Gallery back in June.

When I got back to G5, the line was even longer, so I staked out my territory as I listened to Dave Watkins begin playing inside. After years of watching him play, it wasn't hard to imagine the dumbfounded looks on first timers' faces watching as he built up layers of sound, playing and looping until he sounded like much more than one musician.

Still, my friend was nowhere to be found.

A group of young women (would it be wrong for me to think of them as an unkindness?) stood near me, trying to decide what to do next. They knew of no parties, but they wanted to have some fun. "I was too drunk to be in there with all those people," one whined. "I was just, like, I gotta go."

One of her friends said they needed to go elsewhere, so I watched as they began unlocking their bikes to leave. Maybe it was time for me to give up on finding my friend, too.

Walking down Marshall Street, I heard the girls coming up behind me on their bikes and I resisted an impulse to shout at them, "It's a sidewalk not a sideride!" because then I might as well tell them to get off my grass and do I really want to be that person? No.

As they turned onto Madison Street and hit the cobblestones, one of the girls wobbled precariously and another shouted gaily, "Embrace the cobbles!" without even looking back.

It was the most profound thing I'd heard anyone say all night.

Embrace the Cobbles: the perfect title for the true story of my life.