Ends

Ralph and I went to visit For-Site’s Lands End installation at San Francisco’s Cliff House on Friday. The Cliff House, perched on a bluff at Lands End, with stunning views of the Pacific Ocean and Seal Rocks, for years was the restaurant that one brought one’s parents to when they visited town, but has been sitting vacant since the end of 2020. The For-Site Foundation has taken up temporary residence with a series of site-specific art installations decoratively aestheticizing the human impact on climate and what’s left of the natural world.

All of the work is beautiful and beautifully installed, each piece framed by the architecture and views. Doug Aitken’s single channel video installation, migration (empire), features various examples of migratory wildlife filmed inside vacant hotel rooms. The video allegorically and poetically references humankind’s steady seizure of and intrusion into the animal kingdom.

Andy Goldsworthy coated a single long table and adjacent dining booth tabletops with a thick layer of white clay. As the show has progressed, the white clay tablecloths have cracked, like dry riverbeds, or overbaked meringues, our current drought conditions in California rendered as conceptual frosting.

Also… well, there are many other wondrous works of art, and it’s an entertaining show, well worth seeing, but with West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin now determining the destiny of our planet’s climate, it seems hopelessly pointless. Antarctica is melting.

Ralph and I met years ago, at a party at my friend Sarah’s house. I was immediately attracted to him. He’s an artist, a creator of interior spaces that blend whimsy and sophistication. His own home is a micro-museum of homoerotic imagery, photography, and tableaux of taxidermied animals, figurines, and other found objects, arranged in such dense and numerous sculptural installations as to make it almost impossible to take it all in during any one visit. I’ve never experienced such an environment, so much meaning and invention packed into 800 square feet.

Following a few exploratory romantic excursions, I told him a few days ago that I’m not feeling up to dating. I frankly don’t know exactly why–and did you ever think you’d hear me say that? He’s sexy and stylish, a fuzzy ex-New Yorker, engaged with film, art and design, just the kind of guy who ticks off a lot of my boxes.

Over the course of 20 years, my friendship with BC has evolved into a comfortable and loving companionship that has weathered exchanges with outside suitors, lovers, and wanna-be boyfriends. During the pandemic we’ve spent days in our respective homes, and nights together, me snuggled with our pups d’Auggie and Zoobie in his guest room on Twin Peaks. My frantic multi-decade search for a perfect companion has yielded only frustration, yet somehow, without trying, and despite years of resistance, a structure of domestic harmony has settled upon me, despite myself. At 56 I can’t imagine trying to know someone as deeply as I know BC, or, indeed, to give that up. In The Odyssey, Homer describes an ideal of like-mindedness in marriage, homophrosyne. After so many years of wandering, my Penelope awaits on Twin Peaks?

Or Midge. Once BC and I had an argument after watching Hitchcock’s Vertigo. I remarked how like Midge I thought I was. He scoffed, completely perplexed, insisting that HE was Midge, and that I was Scottie. Midge was an artist, lived near the Art Institute, bubbly, cute, sassy, driving a sporty little car. I was totally Midge. Midge and Scottie had dated, in the past, just like us. Years later I asked BC why he hadn’t seriously dated anyone else since our breakup. “You know there’s only one man in the world for me, Johnny-o,” he replied, quoting Midge. In the film, Scottie frantically chases after an illusion, while Midge watches, helpless, eventually fading into the shadows as Scottie struggles to give form to his obsession. I’m Scottie, for sure, and if BC’s not my Penelope, he’s definitely my Midge.

So it seems that my Dating Game has wrapped up another season. Like an enduring British sitcom, maybe there will be future episodes, rehashing old themes with half laughs and treacly sentiment. Or maybe I’ve jumped over the shark too many times already?