Art sprouts

Hey, maybe it’s a good time to be SN&R’s arts and culture editor. Think of what you get.

On a given Friday, say, you get guest-listed for yet another solid, loosely rockist Jerry Perry-programmed evening at Old I, with Fresno’s Rademacher (the future, I’m telling you), Chico’s Machine Green, S.F.’s Girlfriend Experience and Sactown’s own Help Yourself. Then, the following evening, you get to zip from the Sac Shakespeare Fest’s breezy Land Park production of The Comedy of Errors straight to DJ Roger Carpio’s hipster-thicketed Blue Lamp birthday bash. On Sunday, you dip into an arty Ben Kingsley movie, while sitting back and letting your fellow reviewer and film mensch take yet more heat for his Transformers takedown of last week. (You do wonder what’s up with all the Transformers crybabies, for while you yourself enjoyed many a middle-school sojourn to Cybertron, you little Hasbro whore, you’ve since learned to keep some things in perspective.) Speaking of takedowns, or rock’em-sock’em robots, or whatever segue you prefer (yeah, it’s your choice, chief), you enjoy early access to the full report on Arco’s recent blood-soaked scissor-kick-a-thon.

Meanwhile, you have a professional occasion to parse the finer points of sausage parties. You sneak baffling or hilarious photo captions past the censors. Then you realize there are no censors. Fuckin’ A! You know that the origin of the phrase “fuckin’ A!” is generally attributed to Norman Mailer, because that’s the kind of stuff you’re (barely) paid to know.

Plus, you get to preside over d’ART, SN&R’s monthly Second Saturday supplement/sacred text/throwaway/ad-bait, and fill it up with your own scribblings, and stay late at the office yet again, goddamn it, to make sure it goes to press reasonably intact, and wonder if—seriously, people—it has gotten out of hand.

But that’s only appropriate, right? It’s like that masking-tape sculpture you found growing in Fools Foundation last week (see d’ART). It’s like the city’s arts scene itself. Randomly, organically, spasmodically, it sprouts. Yeah, good gig, this. Fertile.