what's in a word?: Be-In 2/6/2012 at Lambert Fine Arts with the Unbearables and others

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Be-In 2/6/2012 at Lambert Fine Arts with the Unbearables and others

Street Corner Theater™:High Drama in Low Places

I didn’t write the script, I only recorded the events.

Okay, sometimes the event isn’t on a street corner, or even on the street, but inside. If it’s inside, then the space it’s in matters. In the past couple of years I’ve shot The Unbearables at the Fales Library, at the Bowery Poetry Club, at the Fusion Arts Museum, at A Gathering of the Tribes, out on the street and greeting, meeting, eating and drinking. I’ve missed many events and regretted it. So I made it a point this past Sunday to get down to the Lambert Arts Gallery on Stanton Street, where a show of works by Shalom Neumann and Terrenceo punctuated the performance artists on one wall, and several poets on the other. The poets, whether they want to be considered part of that loose collective of defective drinkers and assertive writers called the Unbearables, all have pieces in The Unbearables Big Book of Sex, which is what they were reading from.

Four of them - Steve Dalachinsky, Susan Scutti, Jim Feast and Anna Mockler - stood on milk crates reading sequentially. John Farris, David Huberman and Tom Savage were reading a bit to their right. A half dozen Unbearables competing for the attention of dozens of onlookers who wandered through the narrow spaces grasping in comprehension was a sight.

I didn’t get the names of the performance artists. I’m thinking it was better than the football game people were going to rush off to see later that afternoon / evening: the arts in competition with itself. Except when it got too loud, it was a lot of fun. Plenty of people, a roomful of noise, music, poetry, visuals. I don’t know if my photos capture it at all, but I enjoyed myself.