Above are some lazy shots of the food art pieces crammed into a gallery on the first floor of 3rd Ward in Bushwick. Of course I had to take these shots with Hipstamatic on my iPhone 3GS since we were in the heart of the hipsterland…which is no longer Williamsburg (too many strollers – not paid for by mom and dad, but from a real job) and is barely Greenpoint (the Polish diehards wouldn’t dare let gentrification happen past the Starbucks on Manhattan Ave). The starving artists and ironic t-shirt wearers have moved east.

I dug around the NYC event sites and the dozens of email blasts for something to do on a waning summer (yes, it’s still summer damnit!) weekend and found The Last Supper Festival 2010. It purported to feature live bands, DJs, new media artist installations, experimental films, a writing salon, and other random performance art – sounded perfect. Liz and I would find these events throughout SF – many of them being Burning Man derivatives – and have been hard pressed to dig up the same type of ADD-inducing nights in NYC. I’m sure we’re just not in the right crowd.

We jumped into a Zipcar (think 10-minute drive versus 40-minute train ride) and found 3rd Ward on a desolate stretch of warehouse Brooklyn. There was the requisite food truck – Jen-n-Outlaw’s Fish Fry Truck and Crawfish Boil – serving crawfish (duh), fried pickles, and maybe a po-boy with some meat or fish of suspect origin. The Naked Heroes were just finishing their rockin’ set that blasted out of the side windows.

We paid our $15 (could have been $10 with a donation to the Food Bank for NYC) and slipped into the 30-something crowd. We hit a small gallery to the left with a couple of not-so-interesting installations and one helmeted bike-rider with an ipad controlling music coming from his glittering bike with swipes of his fingers. In the next room we found a sprawl of food-related exhibits, from jiggling jello molds of the Mother Mary (Shelly Sabel, Aspic Ascension – Tastes Like Heaven), goblets and glasses made from sugar (Yuka Otani, Sweet Vessels), and a provocation around the future of food from IDEO-man Matt Brown (Matt Brown, Food and the Future of it). It did seem that we had missed whatever ‘event’ had taken place in this gallery – there were plates of curated junk food (from How to be a Junk Foodie) and a full-sized bed of half-eaten bread (from Glenda Reed’s Comfort Food). This was the most interesting of the rooms with interactive and edible displays, while the other two galleries where a bit thin on substance.

We pushed ourselves through the halls to find an outdoor garden filled with actual edible living green things from Slippery Slope Farm right next to the DJ and mob of throbbing dancers. We hit the other side of the building one more time to watch projected videos from Tupac and Jay-Z and a couple of live songs from Bodega Girls before jetting back to the Zipcar and the relative calm of Park Slope.

I was expecting a bit more based on all the artists, musicians, and organizations involved – maybe even another floor of galleries. SF has spoiled us for these types of elaborate events, but I’m still glad we experienced it.

– J F Grossen, Chief Executive Oenophile