The ‘Bean Scene’ Sprouting in O.C. : Coffee Bar Discovers Loyal Following for the Alternative Arts

It’s probably the only art gallery in the county where one can find an impromptu game of soccer, played with wadded aluminum foil, at 3 in the morning. It’s certainly the only one where you’ll hear the Swamp Zombies singing their acoustic juvenilia in praise of coitus, or where you can hear a nice Jewish boy howling the blues on a one-string “unitar.”

While the recession has caused several local art galleries to close in recent months, the tiny, out-of-the-way Black Market Art Gallery has trouble fitting all its patrons through its doors on Friday nights. Since opening 14 months ago, live performances at the late-night Coffee Bar have been an integral part of the alternative art offered by the gallery, which more typically features looming canvases with titles such as “Struggle With Darkness” or works made with “found art” collected from the shoulders of county freeways.

The Black Market fashions itself after Paris’ famed 19th-Century Salon des Refuses that featured art rejected by the prestigious Academie Francaise. The performing arts featured at the Black Market were equally in need of a home when the gallery opened, since there has been practically no local venue for original music and poetry since Safari Sam’s in Huntington Beach closed in 1986.

Now, Black Market owners Charles and Connie Yoon say they’re delighted to see the idea spreading. The Yoons’ immediate Costa Mesa neighbors include Diedrich Coffee and Espresso Bar (which last year started evenings of poetry and music), the recently opened Blue Marble Coffeehouse and Rock N Java, which opens Saturday. (Rock N Java’s proper grand opening will probably be the following weekend, with an acoustic performance by Social Distortion leader Mike Ness). In nearby Newport, the Alta Coffee & Roasting Co. also features evenings of poetry and music.

It’s the new coffee culture, or as Black Market fan James Iansiti (who helped organize Diedrich’s music shows) put it at last Friday’s Coffee Bar, “There is no scene without the bean.”

That night perhaps 150 listeners either crowded into the gallery or stood outside to see the Swamp Zombies and Joel Easton, whose one-string “unitar” and six-string guitar excursions into “death folk, gutter blues and hard-core country gospel” proved surprisingly fresh and impassioned. (Easton won first place in the “special instrument” category at the Topanga Folk Festival earlier this month.)

Along with music, the Yoons also host poetry, modern dance, performance-art pieces and just about anything else they can fit into their cramped facility.

“We all call Connie and Charles Mom and Dad because they opened up their doors for all this here,” Iansiti said. “There’s a family feel here late at night, a glimmer of hope for people who didn’t have anywhere in this county to go.”

The Yoons hardly seem like the standard-issue mom and pop. Connie, 28, used to hang out at the fabled Costa Mesa punk haven, the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Charles, 26, sports spiky, bandanna-ed hair and a patch-laden Vespa jacket.

Both have a long devotion to art. Connie spent a decade taking arts classes at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa. Charles had been on his way to becoming a doctor, having earned a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences from UC Irvine before deciding to follow his heart into music and painting.

The couple met five years ago while “slaves of Aaron Brothers,” as Charles describes their tenure at the retail art-supply store. With no money or business experience, they struck out on their own, running a custom framing shop out of an apartment. In 2 1/2 years, they built that business into their present Atomicframe shop that adjoins Black Market Gallery.

The Yoons know that fostering an alternative scene in staid Orange County is not easy. They also believe that when you work at something unreservedly, the world makes way for it.

Sitting on the floor of their framing shop last week, Charles said, “Because I’m an artist and musician myself, I’ve always wanted to have a place that’s an alternative venue, not just another bar. I feel that the music, painting, sculpture, dance, performance art, poetry and all is all in the same realm of art. There are separations made, but I don’t think there should be, so when we designed our gallery it was with doing everything in mind, to be a place where all things artistic can happen.

“Here, we’re always looking for people who are really working on the edge of things, going beyond the boundaries. I’m always looking for the new artist that has something that’s going to blow everyone away, that’s so different that it becomes the next thing. The new awakening of art--that’s what we’re looking for.”

He doesn’t mince words when discussing why Orange County hasn’t exactly been a center for such art: “That’s because Orange County is like the hub of all bourgeois activity.”

Added Connie: “Anybody who has any artistic inclinations, I think, moves up to L.A., San Francisco or New York. They don’t want to stay here and create a scene. They want to go where it’s already established.”

Charles continued: “I think that’s fear. You’ve got rich people, and they set up their community here so it excludes a lot of the more artistic community. It’s kind of scary, living in a Gestapo kind of society almost.

“Personally, I’m not afraid of anyone, so that’s why I decided this is the time and place.” . . . They feel that’s starting to happen, citing their coffee cohorts as well as the original music shows coming into the nearby NYC club and Newport Roadhouse. Rather than feel encroached upon by having three other bean-scene venues within a mile of theirs, Connie said, “We all feel we’re working with each other.”

Charles said: “It’s better to work together in this situation than to compete. If we can make a community of what we want to do, in the long run it’s going to be harder for the bourgeois people who don’t like what we’re doing to weed us out, because we’re going to have strength in our group of people. That’s always been my dream for Orange County.

“I think people have just been waiting for this scene to happen, for the first person to jump in the water and say it’s not that bad.”

So far, the Yoons say, the Coffee Bar has received only positive responses from the people who flock to it, and it hasn’t had any run-ins with officialdom. The police who patrol the area, they say, have all been friendly to them.

In its 14 months, the Black Market has hosted a virtual who’s who of Orange County original music, including Eggplant, Lovingkindness, Bazooka and the Dead Sea Squirrels. The Yoons also have presented an ambitious series of evenings, dubbed “Cafe of Nightmares,” at the NYC dance club, drawing up to 600 people to art and music events.

“At the first one, we had a modern-dance piece with seven dancers,” Charles said, “while a rock-climbing friend of mine as part of the dance was crawling up on the ceilings, 30 or 40 feet up there soloing without any ropes. Where else can you see that? At the most recent one, while a bunch of people were waiting outside, (dancer) Tracy Fitzpatrick pulled up in a U-Haul truck, rolled the back of it up and did her dance inside the truck while other dancers were on the roof.”

Their next NYC show on July 17 will feature the Fitzpatrick Modern Dance Troupe, a fashion show from London Exchange (a local clothing retailer), and the bands Lave las Manos, Lovingkindness, Bull Taco and Smash Palace, all for a $5 admission (the Friday Black Market performances have a $2 suggested donation).

The Yoons hope to open an adventurous large-scale arts center of their own some day, funded by selling franchises of their successful framing shop.

“I’d like to get a huge location for Black Market Art and set it up for all different kinds of things,” Charles said, “like what we do here but on a bigger scale--have dance performances, plays, poetry readings, bands, hanging art and sculpture, not in a sterile situation, but a place where people can go and get their minds blown by new artists, and where artists can feel free to take new chances.”

They have consulted with former Safari Sam’s owner Sam Lanni, whose plans for a similar facility in the late ‘80s were shot down by various planning commissions and city councils he approached. Charles doesn’t plan for his project to be similarly nipped in the bud.

“Let me put it this way: When we do what we intend to do, I ain’t telling no one. We’re just going to do it, and then let them worry about it later. Because once you get the ball rolling, it’s hard to stop it. But if you’ve got to go through the (red tape) first, they’ll cut you down before you can even get started.”

Others’ projects may go foundering or unattempted for lack of government funding or grants. For the Yoons, though, “it wouldn’t even occur to us to ask for grants,” Connie said. “I guess a lot of artists depend on it, but we’re just really do-it-yourself kind of people. We don’t like to compromise . . .”

“And,” Charles noted, “we don’t like to have to wait around for something to happen.”

* Black Market Art Gallery, 130 E. 17th St., Suite I, Costa Mesa. (714) 631-7094. Coffee bar entertainment every Friday from 10 p.m. Admission: $2 donation.