One week has gone by since arriving in New York, and it seems that a few years have trickled by in our little apartment on the Hudson–so much in such a short span of time. BC and I had a really bumpy ride last week, with a lot of post-breakup stress and anger burbling to the surface and splashing all over us. The great thing about being here together is that we can’t avoid dealing with the things that we’ve so skillfully avoided since first meeting. The drama has mostly subsided, and it’s been at least three days since I last told him that he needed to fly back to San Francisco.
We met up with the ever-charming Joey on Friday to check out the Armory Fair. It was exhausting, but fun, and dishing with Joey made it even funner. I discovered Michael Van Ofen (below) at the Sies+Höke booth. He paints in very broad minimal strokes to create portraits and landscapes with much visual depth, vigorously luminous surfaces, and emotion. Barry McGee’s installation at Deitch was just a knockout–yaay for that Frisco kid!
Joey took us out the next night to the gayest Italian restaurant that I’ve ever been to, with a dj and everything. BC dressed appropriately in his new pink Izod sweater. Tagging along were Joey’s cutie-pie husband, Mr. Bear, and their smolderingly hot buddy, Cubby. I had the Gnocchi Shenequa, which one must order by saying, “I’ll have the Gnocchi Shenequa, girl!”
Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian, fellow San Franciscans, had an interesting show at White Columns that ended Saturday, introducing New York to their lives and work, with samples of their ‘zine and art from their collection. I still haven’t done the Chelsea galleries, so that report will come soon–there’s an awful lot to see. This week’s list includes the Munch show at MoMA, the Goya show at the Frick, and the Whitney Biennial.
We spent one day with my old San Francisco buddy, Michelle, in her new digs in Jersey, visiting her horse and bonding with her dogs. She showed us a fabulous scrap book that she recently found in a flea market, of clippings from newspapers and magazine from the 30’s. We were mesmerized by what amounted to a porn collection of the time–images of bathing beauties, and legs, legs, legs! She’s recently completed a new art work in bronze, a sculpture of a bunny in an impossibly tight corset. All of Michelle’s work is beautiful and well-crafted and conceptually rich, queasy fetishistic objects and images for big bad kids. Dana, her husband, has the most complicated train set that I’ve ever seen. It’s half completed and fills a quarter of their garage. He has a mini-elevator with several levels of track, to add or take away trains. Each train is individually controlled and programmable to travel different routes, all trackable on a laptop. He and BC bonded over their mutual obsessiveness, while Michelle and I slipped outside to mentally landscape her yard.
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