The Prepaid Musician Plays Bad Music

First, San Francisco.
Second, architecture.
Third, theater.

A city requires wonder. It has mythology and those who seek out myth and find themselves in cities may reflect and refract their relationship to the past as it enmeshes with the liveliness of a place. Cities are agonistic to routine, they weave differences into the everyday, web checks and balances onto the social fabric of life. San Francisco is a city suffused with the outline of myth but apathetic to the celebrity of it, making the everyday strange, long, and enchanting here. It asks that I constantly reconsider what I know–sometimes in event, sometimes in boredom. Wonder is anterior to passion says artist Mary Kelly in her Concentric Pedagogy; it has no opposite. This space is San Francisco so much as any space here is, it asks wonder of its inhabitants, please come as an open viewer porous to change.

Architecture need not be entirely completed.
It should leave space for improvisation
and the inevitability of future change.
Architecture must also be
a little humorous, surprising, and informal.
–Open Architecture

The score for an evening; or Theater

A group of people sit in a room and they talk about plants, and things that grow, and communication systems we cannot see, and senses that we cannot defend ourselves from such as a gentle touch or a pleasant smell that brings back a memory once long blocked out. They pass around some warm food, they sit close to the ground, they move around and stretch out and feel their blood circulate through their bodies and wonder if the others around them feel that too. Somebody is prompted to share something deeply lost to time, something long misplaced, and something newly inspiring. The others chime in–

A handful or two of grass and air
is enough for prayer and compassion.
Put away the loaf, the wine, the fruit,
until the day of rejoicing and dancing
and arms wildly waving branches.
On this night, no table
bright with Falerian wine and poppies;
and no weeping; and no sleep.*

And they will return to chatter and eventually, after the evening drags on into very dark hours, one by one, they say goodbye and return to their lives in which they are now a little different than before.

*excerpt from The Fall of Europe by Gabriela Mistral, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin
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Climate Control is a gallery and contemporary art project space. For the moment it is also a space with 3 names; Climate Control, Being in life without wanting the world and Fear.