Colonizing the Colonials (some more)

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Only the police seemed to mistake the New Langton and the Colony Room for a party. They appeared in their lumbering slow insistent investigative way to break up what they thought was an illegal rave. A quick look into the nearly empty space with a modest sound system and nary a glow stick in sight revealed their error and they moved on down Folsom toward the loud pulsing sound of parties permitted or not.

Not an underground club or even an edgy location in the now mostly lofted South of Market, New Langton is assuredly an art space (gallery, performance space, studio, whatever). The rough walls can't disguise the planned artifice of this reenactment/restaging of the infamous London drinking club. The "raw" quasi nineties performance art space only heightens the artifice of this self styled performance of social scene and milieu and at the same time deflates it a bit.

Being in a performance space prevents the kind of forced dialogue between social staging and performance that might happen if this project were to be put into a real bar or club, say the old Press Club on Post or the Redwood Room. In that setting the artifice would be another layer put on the artifice of the existing space with its own organic life. Of course those are not spaces of social and artistic discourse where art and alcohol and all intertwine. San Francisco is difficult that way. The social scenes are disparate, the watering holes unrelated to the arts patrons make or don't make. Despite best romantic efforts at restaging or inventing we have neither the pub/club drinking culture nor the gentle salon society to tie together a like scene.

But then this was before Emily Wilson appeared. (That amazing event's description coming in the fullness of time...)