The 2012 City Arts Festival, now fading in our memories, really put the “city” into an arts fest. A number of arts installations were squirreled away into secret locations that you had to wait to hear details about. It was fun; it felt like you were invited to a “happening.” You’d show up on a sidewalk somewhere and eyeball others standing around, trying to discern if they were in on it.
One of the shows was Erin Jorgensen‘s Waiting for Signs, which took place in a tattoo parlor on Olive Way. Tucked away in the back was a surprisingly realistic studio apartment (or live-in radio studio) that Jorgensen and friends had constructed. Before the show began, Jorgensen was getting the finishing touches on a tattoo herself, as befits a performer known as a “punk marimbaist.”
People clustered around, sitting on the floor up front, as Jorgensen launched into late-night radio broadcast mode. She sings in English, French, German…and anything else she cares to. It’s not necessary to understand the words, really–as a musician, Jorgensen is used to communicating through sound, phrasing. Wherever you walked in from melted away in the face of this voice of world-weary experience.
This time, the songs came with confessional, spoken-word arias: conversations, interviews, philosophizing, all in a late-night minor key, about that time someone worked at a strip club, that time someone went to their first addiction meeting. One voice discoursed directly about signs and coincidences, synchronicities we can’t help but find meaningful. In this noir landscape, the signs marked the last exit, last straws, last hopes.
It was a short show, relatively speaking. But a month later, its taste of whiskey and stale cigarettes, buzz of speaker or needle, and pulsations of neon instruction, still inhabit an imaginary place where Hopper’s Nighthawks actually open up.
