Ray Pride

In a brightly lit storefront on a dark stretch of Damen Avenue during the Friday the 13th opening of Around the Coyote, two tall young brunettes in matching midnight-blue mechanic's jumpsuits are making change. It's the one-night launch of So-and-So's Button-o-Matic, aka "Chicago's Smallest Art Gallery." Christen Carter started Busy Beaver Buttons seven years ago, producing creative badges for bands, artists and other self-branding types. Carter and employee Rosie Saunders--"Rosie's a presser"--got the brainwave to market one-inch buttons with "wearable art" created by painters, illustrators and conceptual artists, their names signed along the rims. In two weeks, "when the new mechanisms" are installed, the pair will begin distributing to Reckless Records, Lula Cafe, Weekend Records, Atomix, Danny's Tavern and Barney's, among others. Tonight, however, it's like a Wicker Park twentysomething house party complete with keg and alphabet crackers and Cheez-Its. (Plus "Totally random persons" from ATC, as Saunders puts it). Twenty machines are in action, each a transparent bubble vending one button for a quarter. The opening's kind of a public tryout. "We're road-testing for the bad kids. I know which ones are the bad kids now," Saunders says. "We definitely had a lot of kink-working-out, so it's kind of good," Carter says. "We weren't sent some of the right parts." The yank and whir of the machines, the sound of quarters clocking, the raised voices, it sounds exactly like... "an art casino," Saunders says. There are a hundred or more designs in the quarter slots, including a surplus of anthropomorphized animals. I'm studying Arthur Jones' wide-eyed little bear. "A panda on acid getting a surprise enema in public," a pale woman with scarlet lipstick says over my shoulder. Jesse Vala's designs include a confused kitten on a field of blood red; Kim Ambriz has collected hogs in repose, and Andy Moran's work is all about a raccoon who's an impassioned lounge singer. (The other conspirators include Archer Prewitt, Jessica Abel, Butchy Fuego, Paul Koob and Matthew McClintock.) At the entrance, a (real) pit bull sniffs the ass of a black dachshund with identical coloring. Gambling compulsion sets in. "Gotta get more, gotta get more," a man says, shaking his head back and forth. "I'm going back in." "I got a complete set. It took me awhile," a grinning girl says, a fist filled with quarters, the other shaking out generic painkillers. "I want the owl--Is that what it is?" A tiny woman tells no one, "I don't know what the hell I have." It's an hour past the planned closing. "Ya wanna get beers 'n hang out here?" a bed-headed man asks his friends. Outside, in the cool air, figures passing, the pit bull's harness blooms with buttons. So it was fun? "It was more of a success than a disaster," Carter says. She thinks for a moment. Actually, it was "kind of an overwhelming success."

(2002-09-18)

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