Blog of Our Nights

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art puts on this event called Nights every third Thursday from May to September and Amy and I finally decided we needed to see what all the hoopla was about. (Edhat has photos.) It helped that we won the tickets from KCRW, fully aware of how weird it is for Santa Barbarans to have to call an LA radio station to win tickets to a SB event. Supposedly we were going to be able to "Revel in the spirit of ancient and modern Mexico, inspired by the exhibition Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted," but mostly we got to stand around, look at the people being gorgeous or trying hard to be gorgeous (so often botox and plastic surgery does leave one with a hard look), listen to KCRW DJ Jason Bentley over a really loud sound system (and see him on stage, if we could draw our eyes past the firedancers--this was outside and not in the museum itself so no canvas was threatened), and drink mixed drinks with whacky names like The Sauza® Red Mask Tequila-tini or whatever mine was called, I think it was Picasso's Penis or something (I don't want to know if it was his blue or rose period).

I have to admit these kind of things--Santa Barbara's beautiful looking beautiful for each other--isn't really my cup of martini, even if you get to do it standing next to a Chagall (if you wanted to pick up someone who could be rugged under their Friday night finest even on a Thursday, you could cozy up to them in the Ansel Adams gallery, I guess). When you're married, that kind of thing sort of loses its charge. The kind of fun part is there are arts and crafts stations set up throughout the galleries, so you can make stuff like the still-life folk altar I threw together pictured up top. Maybe it's my generally ornery nature, but making art in groups, dressed up, while drinking, where everyone gets to watch your process and you have to reach over each other's art-in-progress to get the glitter glue...it's fun and all, but makes art a parlor game. As parlor games go it's better than Monopoly, but has about as much to do with art as Monopoly has to do with becoming a real estate tycoon.

I know, I know, just relax already and have another $7 cocktail, which isn't a terrible price, but when you spend $25 to get in (we were glad we won our tickets), and the event has alcohol sponsors, I expect something more (at least more food--very paltry presentations, if you ask me). It's the kind of thing the Film Festival pulls off so well, for free, but to a much more exclusive audience. (Although the amount of Film Festival folks wandering around was quite high--guess they're missing the jacked-up party scene.)

Then again, it might be cool to hear someone do a slightly different cover of Jonathan Richman at one of the Nights events:

Some people try to pick up girls
And they get called an asshole
This never happened in front of a Pablo Picasso