Not gonna lie: I'm super tired of experiencing plain old bad taste. I don't know if the people I'm around are too drunk to notice, or if their desire to be drunk/ cool/ seen/ (all of the above) supersedes a desire to be in a pleasant environment. Maybe it also has to do with Santa Barbara being a small town with businesses that close soon after they open. Maybe this is why they close. Maybe not though, cos this is Santa Barbara, and I am one of the few people I know who seem bothered. Keep reading.
There's a new place in the Funk Zone of Santa Barbara that is trying to offer something new, hip, artsy, and just overall funky. My most recent interaction with this place involved their single occupancy bathroom which contains a toilet, a urinal, a sink, and a piano. The bathroom is large enough to put at least two stalls in, but instead, this establishment opted for the piano. There are so many things wrong with putting a piano in a bathroom-- sanitation alone should have been a thought. But what do you get when you put a drunk ass and a piano together? Now, imagine that happening in a bathroom. A bathroom that locks from the inside, which you are waiting to use. A bathroom you are waiting to use, but can't use because someone is "playing" (with) the piano. And what about when one of the two women that was using the bathroom opens the door, but the other woman won't stop playing the piano with drunk concentration? So much drunk concentration in fact that she doesn't see you've walked into the bathroom, and have asked her to please stop playing with the piano so you can piss (yea, that thing you're supposed to do in a bathroom besides playing a piano). Bathroom piano? I vote nay, it's not a good idea. How about try to be cool in another way? Well, they do.
The first time I went there, it was the soft opening (though I didn't really hear of them having a Grand Opening, so IDK what happened with that). The people who attended were a mix of scenesters and Santa Barbarans in their later twenties and on. I've been looking for a cool bar in Santa Barbara where I could feel comfortable, and hoped that this would be the spot, but quickly saw that it was not. In keeping with the exposed brick, concrete floored, industrial look of the bar, were large, acrylic pops of color over screen prints of nameless Native American faces. Canvas after canvas lined the brick walls completing the look of.... real America? Hardcore America? American grit? More like American habit of cultural appropriation.
It's my instinct to be automatically suspicious of anything Native, ethnic, cultural, etc when it's in a setting of pure decoration. It's hard to explain: it's more of a feeling. In this case, I'm basically at a pricey hipster bar, and this is the shit on the walls. Nothing that explains the faces in the pieces. At the time, the piano in the bathroom didn't even stick out as something "different" because the wall decor was so distracting. Native faces modge podged onto a canvas with magazine prints, stencils, under acrylic paints, like comic book Warhol. Dang.
A few weeks later, I returned to the bar for a birthday celebration, and the artist was in the house. I approached him and amicably started a conversation in hopes of feeling comforted by the creator himself. NGL, I didn't have high hopes. The artist was an older, white man dressed in a bright green, sleeveless pullover cardigan with a screen printed native man wearing a feather headdress on the side. He completed his look with a light colored fedora, maybe it was straw, matching the color of the print on his sweater. He appreciated being identified as the artist behind the canvases, and when I said I wanted to ask him about his "inspiration" for his subject matter, he smiled and was ready to enlighten me. I told him that his choice of using Natives in pop art was "bold" and before I could actually ask a question, he proudly said that he's heard that before. "Why did you do that?" I asked. I couldn't hear much of what he said over the noisiness of the crowd, but I definitely heard him say that he's part Native American and that it all started with his screen printing work in fashion. He had been screen printing Natives on t-shirts for quite some time apparently. Fashion, the trillion dollar industry that has a bad habit of calling patterns "Aztec" and "Navajo", selling tribal jewelry, socks, and underwear at Urban Outfitters.
I reiterated how his subject matter, or at least who he puts on his canvases is quite shocking, and he answered with another nod and smile saying "Yea, I know, I know" like he's some sort of pioneer doing something amazing for humanity. The conversation was going nowhere and seemed to be giving him encouragement, so I politely excused myself. Before I could go, he pointed at two sheets of white paper taped to the wall next to the exit. It was his "About Me" and price list. He's slangin' his art for up to $8,500.00 under titles like "Vivre 805" (pictured above), "144 Cowboys and Abandoned America", and "Chief Wallace" (yes, he native'd himself, and was promoted to chief).
The image above is his logo... like drippy Wonder Bread. Wonder Bread was white bread,
right? When I looked at his site, I scrolled through his pieces for sale, and it kinda goes something like: native, native, native, Michael Jackson, native, native, Kobe Bryant, native.... Oh, and then there's the one where he makes himself Chief Wallace. What bothers me the most is how he can stick a Native face on a piece, like it's just a thing.... No names. We know Michael, Kobe, and we know what a Native person looks like so why even acknowledge who they are-- they can be whoever we want them to be. Like magic. They're just there. For decoration.To be superimposed over Louis Vuitton print, cos that's profound. Fortune behind the unfortunate? Not too different from Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens rocking bindis at Coachella and the MTV awards cos it's sexxxy. Forget any cultural or religious "symbology"-- rock it out in the name of art, fashion, and self expression. That's hawt.
Judge for yourself: You can check out all this stuff online at walliceisart[dot]com -- I'm obvi not gonna link you, but that's where all of it is at. .
So I'm sure I'll be at that bar again because that's where my friends are, and they're there because one of them in particular really wants people to be there (cos he works there). I don't like being there, and I am not impressed by their service, food, drinks, or atmosphere. I try to have a good time, and don't like having conversations about the place at the place. That's just awkward. Their Yelp score has thatm at 4.5/5, with 6 reviews. I am not one of the reviewers (yet). I'm disappointed that we go there, and pay. Considering the experiences I've had there, I always walk in feeling uncomfortable and ready for something to offend me. The only comfort I do feel is my discomfort, if that makes sense. And when things to do awry, I'm right there to say "yup, I told you so". So far though, those moments have only happened to me, and like I said earlier, no one else really seems to care. I've been accused of "feeling too much" and "not letting things go". Maybe that's true, but that's why I have this blog. :)
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