X marks the next hot spot

By | Friday, July 20, 2007

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It's 6 p.m. on a lazy summer Saturday. There are still prime daylight hours to be relished, ideally on a patio or poolside with a burger in one hand and a Bud in the other — yet, a handful of twenty- and thirtysomethings has opted to forgo the day's last rays and instead loom around the darkened bowels of a lounge in Northwest called Be Bar.

Their reasons for doing so vary, although they all spring from the letter "X" (and no, not in the naughty sense). That's the short-and-sweet name of the monthly party they're either investigating or participating in — a party that bills itself as a "21st-century live-art happening."

The house cocktail is a blend of graphic designers, DJs, dancers, multimedia manipulators, visual artists, and makers of apparel and handicrafts (the "art" part) who've been chosen to showcase their skills, mostly in improvisational bouts (the "live" part).

Other bars, boutique galleries and one-off's around town (Hirshhorn After Hours and Starscape, for example) have some of these ingredients, but rarely does one recipe pull them all together, which makes X's combo feel all the more fresh and distinct.

Here's what the concoction tastes like on this particular Saturday in June: Three graphic designers are huddled at what looks like a kitchen table, creating original artwork on their laptops based around three random words ("obesity," "orbit" and "omnipotent") that someone called the "curator" has just delivered. Above their workstation is a projection screen where patrons can watch their work, mouse-click-by-click. (Is that a doughnut or an eyeball? Oh no — is that Paris Hilton?)

In an alcove hiding behind the bar, a gentleman is blackening out segments he's sketched on a large piece of paper while a young woman next to him talks up her felt critters, cutesy earrings and mustache-shaped pins to an admirer.

Atop an elevated area to the rear of the venue, a musician is splicing together trippy beats in front of a large screen that's pulsating with abstract images.

Once the crowd has thickened a bit, a tribal belly dancer will also mount the stage periodically to writhe around — at one point with a gleaming sword atop her head.

Meanwhile, some patrons are engaged in a doodling game called Exquisite Corpse where, without looking at each other's segments, one person draws the head, another the torso, and another the legs of a body. Given the surreal forms produced (they're taped to the wall upon completion), it sounds about right when someone mentions that the concept was invented by surrealists in the 1920s.

Like the drawings produced in this exercise, X itself is a hodgepodge. Its eclectic elements don't mesh together smoothly and seamlessly like a martini. Instead, they're more like a chunky smoothie where each gulp produces slightly different effects; sometimes it goes down easy, a delight, while other times, it might taste odd or not to one's personal liking.

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