The city smells like trash but otherwise it is a beautiful afternoon. I bike from the Embarcadero to the Dogpatch in a not very direct way, this is not Brooklyn and I don’t know it like that. I park my bike and lock it. I know I am in the right place because there are people milling about who look like me: hipsters in t-shirts and jeans and sneakers, some with geometric tattoos and others with cool haircuts. Maybe this is Brooklyn.
The San Francisco Art Book Fair is in an art gallery and event space on Minnesota Street called the Minnesota Street Project. It is a two-storied hall with rooms jutting off either side. There is a wooden staircase on the far end that is also bleacher seating. I walk in and the place is packed. The vendors are set up one after another behind tables stacked with all sorts of books: expensive-looking hard-covers, glossy art journals, zines printed on construction paper. There are more than 100 vendors set up, some from as far away as Italy, others from just across the Bay Bridge.
Between the tables goes the crowd. There is a lot of saying excuse me and shimmying to get by. I stop at some tables and leaf through some books. I almost buy a collection of emails from artists to artists, I almost buy the complete record of Keith Haring’s journals, I almost buy a poster of a skull swallowing the Statue of Liberty. Mostly I look about to see if this fair is for everybody and decide mostly it’s for white people, probably ones who went to college, probably ones who read the New Yorker and have opinions about public radio. I am all of those things. I am the correct audience.
But am I the correct audience to a talk about slow and violent hardcore music in turn-of-the-millennium Italy? I thought I was.
Were I an endorsed critic, one who is paid to provide unique analysis and thoughtful opinion, I would maybe insert here certain failures of this lecture and then expound upon them. But I am neither paid nor endorsed. So maybe it is enough to say terms are not defined, thesis not explicated, and conclusions not drawn.
What is successful is the frequent pauses to play thumping and dark European techno tracks. I enjoy watching the audience of art-professionals nodding their heads to 200 BPM and laughing to their friends as they do so, as if to say, I can hang! I imagine what hanging looks like in the industrial European clubs where probably you’d be ostracized for wearing ear plugs and leaving the dance floor after only one song. The lecturer tells us of an all-night party held once a year in a club with a glass roof and when the sun comes up all the fogged-up condensation drips and the club rains sweat.
She says the music is violent and I don’t disagree but I am not sure why it is violent. She says it is slow but she plays fast tracks and slow tracks and doesn’t say which fall in the genre and which don’t. I am confused but I don’t want to be.
Michele Rizzo - Higher | Music Lorenzo Senni
Defining terms is important, especially when the implication of those terms lands unequally. I don’t know if I can stomach an artist talking confusingly about violence in a small and historical subgenre of dance music when she doesn’t define what violence is and makes no mention of who or what it is inflicted upon.
I walk out of the lecture room disappointed and see my friend at the end of the hallway sitting on the bleachers cross-legged. She looks somehow both calm and angry. She is still wearing her scrubs from the hospital and tells me she’s just fallen in love with everyone here: everyone is so attractive.
My friend changes out of her scrubs and we walk to a bar stopping for chocolate along the way. I order vodka and she has beer. She tells me a patient that day had awoken from a black-out walking on the freeway. She had been sexually assaulted. My friend performed the rape-kit and got her a meal.
We leave after two rounds because my friend has to go back to the hospital. There is a clerical error and the patient hasn’t been discharged yet. My friend goes inside and fixes what needs to be fixed. She comes back and says the woman doesn’t seem to mind spending a longer time there. She is homeless and I imagine if I lived on the street, I might come to value being inside any building at all and if I were a victim of violence, all I’d care about is relief.
July 19, 2019