Brian D.'s Profile

3/19/2013

I can't say anything about the food because I didn't eat here. I went for the performance art! The second floor has recently become an experimental theater/performance/cabaret space, which I'm guessing is the initiative of the "new management" mentioned in other reviews. The night I went the offering was "Two Towel Margarita: A Performance by Travis Boyer." It happened three times during the night, at 9, 10, and 11. (Between and during the performance it was just a party, with people standing around, drinking, and dancing. The music was really fun.) I thought from the title that it was going to involve serving some weird margaritas but it turned out to be body shots. What Travis Boyer did was he took his shirt off and lay back on a table, and an assistant held a plastic bag over his head, and people stood in line to take turns drinking tequila off his chest. Like I said, this was not what I was expecting and it did not sound appealing, but I came for the experience so I had to do it! When it got closer to being my turn I could get a better view of what was happening. Travis Boyer has a weird-looking torso. Not fat and not skinny but with fleshy lumps around the midsection and bony up at the shoulders, as well as an unusually deep chest cavity. As people walked up to slurp tequila out of the gully in his chest, his weird torso was jerking and writhing this way and that, as if he couldn't breathe (because of the plastic over his head) and he hated being there. It made me feel uncomfortable and a little nauseous. But it was too late to turn back. My turn. His cavity got refilled and I bent down to drink. Wow!! It was so disgusting! I don't even like tequila to begin with, and this was cheap stuff, mixed with the artist's rank sweat. When I was drinking my lips and tongue touched his clammy flesh a little bit. I was trying to avoid this but with him writhing around like he was my attempts were futile! Damn it was gross. But performance art is supposed to move you out of your comfort zone so in that sense it was definitely a success. I drank two beers after that but I couldn't wash away the flavor of sweaty tequila. And even though I brushed my teeth super-thoroughly that night I was still thinking about it in the morning. ISA left me with a horrible taste in my mouth AND a satisfyingly memorable experience. That's not something you can say about every restaurant!

7/3/2014

As I begin to write this I'm thinking about all the things I've seen and heard at Issue Project Room, both in their old location at the old can factory in Gowanus and their new digs in a stately bank building in downtown Brooklyn.. and the sheer diversity of the offerings here boggles the mind. I can remember a quartet of electric guitars playing incredibly loud experimental contrapuntal pieces, installations of drone-making devices, extremely rude and dirty performance art, a marathon performance of a Milton Friedman string quartet.. if it's live and edgy and and electronic and weird, Issue Project Room is a good home for it.

I went there last night for the first time in a while (I heard they had problems securing the vaulted roof of the bank, and were closed for renovations) for an evening of "internet as poetry." I wasn't in the best disposition for it.. there was a torrential downpour outside, and my feet were totally drenched, what's more because I'm about to leave the country for two weeks I stopped buying groceries a week ago and I've been trying more restaurants in my neighborhood, last night I tried a Chinese place, New Peking, that looks totally run of the mill but had great reviews on Yelp--I'm not sure what these people were thinking, my sesame chicken was totally normal, which means heavy with sweetness and stickiness and fat, not in a great way, so I felt bloated and dazed when I arrived at Issue Project Room all wet. I tried to mitigate the effect with a large can of grapefruit radler ($6) but I think that just made it worse. The first act was Bunny Rogers, who was not only reading from her poems but singing and dancing and displaying a sculpture, two pastel wicker chairs that were woven kitty-corner to each other. There were dramatic costume changes--from Disney princess get-ups to a lounge lizard white leisure suit. Plus, a live piano player on a baby grand! Certainly not your average poetry reading. The poems were good too, though I wonder if all the drama of the performance distracted from the reading part, rather than enriching it. After a brief intermission, during which I guzzled water but still felt like garbage, was Kevin Bewersdorf, who is notorious, apparently, for not using the internet for five years. But now he's back on it, and read some poems--a slammed a few, freestyle--contrasting the ideas of the web (soft) and the net (hard). "babies are perfect. babies are on the web" I noted on my phone, transcribing his words, and I still don't know what they mean, but it sounded cool. He didn't really seem to know how to read into a microphone well and a lot of his words got lost, in fact I think my favorite part was the very beginning when, un-amplified, he made a Santa Claus "ho ho ho" that boomed in the old bank's vault. Christmas in July!

Speaking of which.. the space doesn't have any ventilation or AC that I could discern which makes for some sweaty summer nights.. so i might wait til yuletide to return.

p.s. I love the multicolored stretched fabric parallelograms hung around the room.. it's just for acoustic purposes, but it looks like a cool show of monochrome paintings!