I’ve started sending out packets to galleries, feeling good about my new work and ready to work with a new dealer. I got a nibble from one of the 49 Geary dealers, who wants to meet with me and discuss a proposal for an installation. It’s in THE coolest space in the building, so I’m pretty psyched. Cross your fingers, pray to Allah, light a candle… I’m already thinking of doing some super gigantic piece that covers an entire wall, my obsession writ large, but of course accompanied by gorgeous and affordable little things. I tend to work better once I’ve established a structure or context for my art, and this space is a humdinger, so the creaky wheels of my creativity are turning once again.
Big Chrissy flew out to Chicago with me last week, for my cousin Dawn’s wedding, and to visit his family. We saw the King Tut show at the Field Museum. At one point I got choked up, remembering how I had ached to see the Tut show when it came to the US in the 70’s but had to settle for the National Geographic issue and the Steve Martin ’45. Aside from the elegance and intricate beauty of the objects, there was also a simplicity, in either expression or execution that touched me, particularly a portrait bust of Nefertiti that captured nobility, humanity and godliness, all at once, voluptuously. Seeing the various little sarcophogi for this pharoah’s viscera and that pharoah’s organs, I thought how sad it was that the egyptians spent so much time and energy preparing for an afterlife in Chicago.
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We had a few good meals out, no Alinea this time, but one memorable meal at a Mexican restaurant in Boy’s Town, or whatever they call the gay ghetto over there. Oh, and the boys are pretty hot. Like milk-fed steak-eating hot. Anyway, I had the chicken mole, and the sauce, in the dim light of the restaurant, was so black that no light was reflected. A dark plate was set in front of me on the table and I couldn’t see anything in it, only empty nothingness, which I prodded with a fork until I found chicken. It was like Hellen Keller’s trip to Mexico.
Katherine Hepburn was interviewed by Dick Cavett tonight on TCM. It was her first televised interview, from 1973. I’ve been watching the Cavett interviews and they’re fascinating. He chats with these stars for a full hour each. You feel like you really get to know them, relaxing into normalness with them. Hepburn was an amazing contrast to Bette Davis, interviewed a few weeks ago. While Davis seemed fully aware and in control of being and being seen as an icon, speaking cleverly and wittily, and clearly to future biographers, Hepburn seemed like somebody totally enmeshed in family life, just a lucky dame who made movies for a living, oblivious to being one of the greatest actresses of the 20th Century, her legs spread apart, one propped up on a table, hair a mess. At the end of the hour, Cavett started to say that the interview was coming to an end and Kate just hopped up and said “Okay, bye,” and ran off the set. Cavett didn’t even have time to finish his sentence. As he pleaded, stunned, asking “Aren’t you going to wait while I…?” she paused for a moment and said, “No, you take it from here,” and disappeared behind a curtain with a quick wave. He just looked at the camera and mumbled something about the interview continuing with Part 2 next week… Can’t wait!