The wine was flowing, cheap and plentiful. The food? Thrown together. Not Michael’s usual spread, no carefully considered dishes that made you remember why communal eating matters. The kind of afterthought that tells you nobody’s heart is really in it anymore.
The audience. Fuck me, the audience. The Game of Thrones Burning Man type has fully taken over. You know the ones, tech money masquerading as bohemian, people who think buying a fur coat and some goggles makes them transgressive, who treat counterculture like a costume they can put on and take off. They were there… not for the art.
The night had no rhythm. No flow. Things just happened, one after another, with all the cohesion of a YouTube playlist on shuffle. Performances as content blocks rather than parts of a conversation.
I was thinking about the early salons. When the room felt electric with possibility. When people came to take risks and fail interestingly rather than to pad their CVs with another line item. Before it became another stop on the San Francisco arts tourism circuit.
Now Rebecca Chaleff and Rebecca Ormiston brought actual commitment to their work. And Richie Rhombus, that magnificent storyteller, got up and reminded everyone what this whole experiment was supposed to be about. Not polish. Not professionalism. But risk. Raw, uncompromising risk. For maybe twenty minutes, the original energy of the early salons came flickering back. The room woke up. The Burning Man types stopped checking their phones.
It mattered. Briefly, it mattered again.
And then Vivek Narayan closed out the night with something genuinely wonderful. The kind of performance that justifies the whole salon concept, why we started this in the first place, why it mattered before it got colonized by people who think radical art is something you consume between DJ sets.
Problem was, by that point, half the dilettante crowd had already drifted off. They’d gotten their wine, their Instagram moment, their chance to tell people they support experimental art. Their Ubers had come. They had other parties to hit, other scenes to be seen at, probably something with better lighting and DJs.
The people who actually gave a damn stayed, but we were a smaller group by then.
Franconia Performance Salon #13: performances by Nathalie Brilliant, Yula Pauly, Richie Rhombus, Omer Gal, Rebecca Chaleff, Rebecca Ormiston, and Vivek Narayan
A ritual is the enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth. And since myth is a projection of the depth wisdom of the psyche, by participating in a ritual, participating in the myth, you are being, as it were, put in accord with that wisdom, which is the wisdom that is inherent within you anyhow. Your consciousness is being re-minded of the wisdom of your own life. I think ritual is terribly important.
Joseph Campbell