Scenes from EXIT Art, where Ava Luna played and people watched Obama on the big screen.
Some thoughts.
- So many people that the bar ran out before the open part was even done and they had to close it to restock.
- Delicious vegetarian chilli, screen-printing, 300 radical political posters around the walls.
- Sake2me is a kind of attempted-trendy sake-based soda (soda-based sake?) that comes in flavors like “green tea” and should be probably avoided unless wine coolers are proving too strong for you.
- R. Luke Dubois put everything in context by displaying the most-used words of each president’s collected State of the Unions and reciting representative quotations from each.
- Ava Luna played with such simple, magnetic freshness of sound and approach — revival tent charisma with old spirtual/gospel backup, rammed through a vigorous post-punk rhythm section — that the iffy acoustics of playing in an enormous gallery space, and the rough edges of new innovation, mattered not at all.
- The most important election in memory gave us our most promising leadership.
- Even outside, later, people screamed from cabs, high-fived on the subway, hugged and fist-pumped and grinned like crazy.
- I’m still a little stunned and amazed.
