Ward on the Street: Hope on a Thursday
Sometimes Thursdays sneak up on you.
You're just going about your day, wearing an outfit that involves pants from Target and a shirt you've had since high school, when suddenly, The Awesome strikes. Such was Thursday.
I'd planned on going home to unpack my kitchen (I moved 2 months ago) but got sidetracked and found myself amid sidewalk shenanginangs at the newly opened Hope Gallery, right on Chicken Corner near Chango in Echo Park. Fans of the Family Bookstore and record label Teenage Teardrops may already know gallery collaborators David Kramer and Cali DeWitt, and from the throng stuffing the space and spilling into the street, they—and the artists known as the Sumi Ink Club—are popular folks.
(Cali DeWitt, in a white hat, squeezes someone's face.)
Gallery openings are a crap shoot: Sometimes you do a lap or two and you're over it. Other times, there are mini-cupcakes in abundance and you find yourself chatting with Miranda July on the sidewalk about the function of the pancreas, and then a band sets up on the ground next to you and a hundred people crowd around it and someone hands out rocks and the crowd is now holding the rocks and transferring energy from them to emit sound waves and you're not even on hallucinogens. In this case, two questions remain: am I dreaming, and if not, why am I wearing such a lame outfit right now?
The best we can do in a city this large is always be prepared for surprise radness. (For more glimpses of the Hope Gallery, check out the slew of photos we took that night)
High fives,