I honestly don’t know exactly where I ended up last Saturday night. All’s I know is my friend Hilary and I felt like staying out late, so while getting gas at the newly remodeled Dunkin’ Donuts/Citgo at Ashland and Grand, we texted a bright young art-student friend and asked him where the party was. In the meantime we hung out in the parking lot, listening to disco hissing out of speakers on the space-age gas pumps, doing some primo people watching.
“Your girlfriend sure is taking a long time in there,” I said.
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The fingerpainty tribal floor-to-ceiling murals looked pretty labor-intensive, albeit hideously ugly. But that’s my only complaint. A bearded guy with longish hair in a panama hat, a string of jade beads doubled up around his neck, and a kimonoesque shirt strutted around with a bottle of Veuve like the pied piper until he’d attracted a bevy of thirsty rats. I was one of them. After politely waiting my turn for a swig, I asked him to tell me a little bit about himself. “My resume is long and hard,” he said.
“What do progressive, fringe artists within an urban context . . . have in common with folk artisans living in developing countries?” the flier for the event asked. And it answered: both groups “challenge norms” and “defy corporate globalization.”
The show was part of the Version festival, an 18-day-long art, activism, and media convergence that’s organized in large part by my friend Ed Marszewski. Version is much more than an event. It’s a hook-up, freak-out, no-holds-barred, get-it-out-of-your-system-so-you-can-relax-for-the-summer free-for-all that everyone’s invited to. I wait all year for it to come around, and every time it does I take a deep breath, like I’m about to get on a rollercoaster or jump into a cold lake. Then I take the plunge and let the collective experience overtake the mundane concerns of my everyday life. I never know what’s going to happen or even if I’m going to be OK afterward. And there’s still more than a week left to go.
