VIRB

Tonight I went to see my friend Jerel's show at Studio Soto in the south end. It was a group of people doing durational performance pieces. Usually, I'm not one for performance art, but there were two things that were really good. First was Jerel's performance. He sat in the middle of the room in a meditative pose, while a video camera filmed the room and him, and then the image from the camera was projected on the wall in front of him. Jerel's image remained frozen on the screen, but everyone that was moving in the room was reduced to a group of gray Atari-ish squares until they stood still for a period of time, then their image would be recorded, and once they moved away, they would slowly fade from the screen. I never figured out if your image would remain longer if you stood still longer, but Jerel has a way of making you feel very contemplative when you observe one of his pieces so I wasn't concentrating on figuring out the video.

The other thing that was good was this girl who was walking around the gallery and she would come up and just barely touch you and sort of put her chin over your shoulder and stare at you. And make these sweet, loving faces. And not say a word. Your bubble was totally invaded. She wouldn't stop until you walked away. Most people would laugh and move quickly away from her. It was amazing how quickly you could become insanely uncomfortable with the situation. When she got to me I made it through about 7 minutes I think. The real problem was, I developed this huge crush on her, just from that. And it's stupid. I feel like the guy at Centerfolds when I went there with Mario and Jeff. He sat at the end of the stage and told every girl she was beautiful and asked her where she hung out and told them all he wanted to hang out with them. And he didn't seem to get the act, or the fact that he didn't have a shot at it. But never the less, I was pretty smitten. There was a point where whe was standing in front of me, face to face, and her nose was past my nose, and we were staring into each other's eyes, not in a romantic way at all, there were about 20 people watching, and I was trying to concentrate on my breathing and trying not to laugh. I finally gave up when I felt like I was going to pass out. My breath was so short, I got light-headed. And my pockets were all wet from my sweaty hands being stuck in them. We were close enough to kiss, and she smelled real nice. It didn't help that I overheard Elizabeth say, "He totally likes it."