Incognito

Tonight I traveled without going very far from my doorstep, into a world of carefully mussed hair, intricately planned dishevelment and the droning mediocrity bred by the cult of celebrity.

Yesterday, a friend mentioned that Vincent Gallo's band was playing the local contemporary art museum this evening. "My god, he's such a freak show," were my first words, followed shortly by hours of deliberation over attending. I had hoped for some sort of excrement-flinging masturbatory orgy of chaos but, sadly, I knew what I was getting into after reading some overblown and pretentious statement about how his work, like countless others, defies definition and resists the banal, albeit accurate, description of improvisation. I also knew that, by simple virtue of the fact that it was held at the museum and it was Vincent Gallo, the famous-for-knowing-someone-famous-hipster-god, I would be swimming in a sea of blindly-administered haircuts and short-sighted and narrowly-ironic rehashing of terrible clothing trends from the darkest depths of the 60s, 70s and 80s.

All these things bore themselves out to be true. There were no surprises. There was no innovation. And I was angry that the hall was packed with people who tried so ridiculously hard to look as though they didn't try at all because someone with a modicum of indie cred had slapped together a drug-induced slumber of a band. Perhaps they were all there for the hope of fecal-flinging, just as I was. Perhaps I'm no better for having went, myself, regardless of my desire for circus antics.

I did, however, not go running to the nearby watering hole upon hearing that that is where Gallo eventually surfaced. Instead, Remy, B, and myself returned to the really real world of the here and now and ate flaming cheese at a Coney whilst talking about social injustice, gender inequality and breeds of dogs. I would surely prefer to feel my legs sweating against the plastic booth seat, cast in the glow of a sickly orange flourescent "OPA!" with ranch dressing smeared on my right breast and thigh than to travel again to the hip side of town.