Art by J. Fiber, close up, ink on paper. Cloud Nine is open until May 13

Anyway, I was at this opening (I'll have to borrow someone's snap since I didn't take any of the opening) and this show is called CLOUD NINE and it's at this Billyburg gallery, The Front Room, and it's crowded as shit, hot, the beers gone and I get introduced to this artist, Disney Nasa Borg, (?), and he's a surfer but he looks like he's from Road Warrior. So we're gabbin' about cold water when this angry little thing in glasses places herself in the middle of us, like a ref, looks up and says "excuse me but can I see the art?" and bulldozes her way to the big life size collage of a naked fat dude in a room encrusted with fast food wrappers. (by Cham Giobbi) She was a pisser that one. Why at an opening that is so damn crowded in a small room? It's not like I haven't seen it before but there is that simmering aggression of the desperate under appreciated artist that flowers in unlikely places. I appreciate her segway - so I went to the show the next day when the gallery was relatively quiet.

Photograph by Jung Nam Lee

What else can be said that the headline didn't take care of? I can't help it if there are times when art is just art and life is life and taking care of life or working on a film about doctors that I started and became all consuming and blotted out everything in it's path? I suppose working on a documentary is another form of long-form journalism. It's like I started it and it turned out I had to go to another country, medical country. But it's our country and it's our screwball heath non system and it effects everyone even if you don't think it effects you. It does. It surely will. It has more to do with art as much as it does finance. It's all connected. You'll see.

Translation dubbed into English from the Italian and scraped up by this network. (bullshit) Let's just say I had to tune the edit so lips and words almost sync up.

I go to see this show because veteran artist and facebook phenom, Judy Rifka, insisted I meet her there, a gallery I never noticed was there. I'd been on that street to see the skaters and bmxers in the railed platform park under the Manhattan Bridge. In fact, I love the location. There aren't other galleries around and the hood reminds me of Flight of the Concords, which in fact, was filmed close by. Jesse Edwards is a funny, experienced street tagger artist with what I would assume is shred cred. That appeared through one comment on YTube and some asking around.

I rarely attend these museum parties anymore but I wanted to see this show, "150 Diverse Black Males", and be in a crowd where I really didn't know anyone. Turns out I knew about two, and met more, but I was an observer to another part of art culture that was a complex video/doc driven black male experience mash. I really wanted to see what, and who, were a part of producing this ambitious project of identity.