cherokee st
i found myself cherishing the cherokee print bazaar a lot more than usual this year. it's easy to forget how cherokee-centered our art lives (our lives) used to be, but seeing the street energetic and bustling like how it was back then nodded my brain towards the past and gave a slight nostalgic sting to my heart. people talk about the foam days a lot still (and for good reason), but in reality what we had was an entire ecosystem that swelled and receded in a constantly unpredictable wave, and thus dictated the nature of our lives.
we were at foam at show time, to be sure, but we defeated the single bathroom line by taking a quick walk to fortune teller (the mighty three bathroom haver) and inevitably would run into people at a booth, get distracted, go back to the show after missing a band or two, and miss another band by sitting on the sidewalk to shoot the shit with whomever had the shit shooter at that moment.
roll the tape back even further and we'd be at blank space (cka shoes) getting rowdy in the unfinished basement, waiting for a master pieza order, looking for hi's to jinks. or roll the tape forward a bit and we'd be spilling out the side door at the juice trying to have a band that does not fit in the room go ahead and blast our ear drums anyway, all to drink and dance it off at b side immediately after. or roll it back again, and you'd have a bunch of punks trying to figure out what the hell melt is, and how the hell it's still open (we didn't have to wonder about that much longer).
even out of the main strip area we had san loo, grease 3, that weird art gallery where i played a show the day before the covid lockdown-- all gone now. we had a beach volleyball court at some point for some god forsaken reason! it was far from perfect, or rather wonderfully flawed. it was the environment that raised me as a south city artist and taught me what it meant to make music for the sake of music. i miss my art life revolving around cherokee and i miss cherokee's trajectory deciding what our lives were. i guess what we have now is a version of that, in a way.
/gemlog/