Yesterday BC and I watched two films that pretty much spanned what was possible in 1972: Tarkovsky’s Solaris and John Waters’ Pink Flamingos. Both made extreme appeals to the senses, but in completely opposite ways. When I was but a wee art student, one of my roommates was a film student. She had never made a film, or even shot any footage, and yet she considered herself a filmmaker. I was confounded by her identity, as mine was so steeped in a physical engagement with my medium. Today I feel a kind of connection with her, in that I’m starting to think and see from a filmmaker’s perspective, but I haven’t begun making my film yet. I also loved how all the film students dressed–they all smoked, and wore vintage clothes and had Louise Brooks or Errol Flynn haircuts, and had way more sex than the photographers. Or maybe they just talked about it more: “You’re not a lover till you blab about it,” Bob says at the opening ofJack the Modernist. Speaking of Bob, did you see that he made the cover, the ENTIRE cover, of the BAR’s art section this week? Anway, the approach I’m taking to my film will be somewhat similar to Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, but gay, hairy, weird, very sensual, and funny. I want to put the fun back in “avant garde!” There will also be singing flowers, an animated sequence, and talking dust bunnies. But enough for now, I have to finish being a photographer… For the LAB show in Feburary, I’ve decided to make a kind of transitional piece, called RGB, like my current photo series, but consisting of one big triptych, B, and 2 videos, R, and, you guessed it, G. D of course will be my star, and there will be lots of gently blowing hair–your eyes must put them all together into one blinding white light of sensuosity! Stay tuned for more developments…
Bear Ballet
Dean and I schlepped down to Atherton, for a late-late summer dip in Sarah’s pool Monday–soon to be featured in Ruth Eckland’s video, The Bearable Lightness of Being. Here are some photos I took of Dean bobbing around…
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Vague Film Thoughts
I’ve been thinking a lot, about images, situations, what I want to say with my film–if I decide to make one, that is. Emily says that because that’s all I want to do is see movies all day that I’m headed in the right direction. Several themes have popped up, that I’ve investigated over the years already, but statically–like obsession, love, longing, the male body. I finally saw Polanski’s amazing debut feature, Knife in the Water, and was intrigued by the beauty and simplicity of the premise–3 people on a boat. The whole film seethes with the tension and inevitability of human nature. An image that keeps popping up is Maria Falconetti’s anguished face in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, one of the most moving cinematic gestures, conveyed through an almost claustrophobic 120 minute closeup of a face. I’ve only seen one convincing eroticization of the big hairy (and much older) male, and that was Mark d’Auria’s Smoke, which was booed at the screening that I, all teary and excited, attended. I’m also thinking of films with knockout performances like Günter Lamprecht’s Franz Biberkopf in Berlin Alexanderplatz, or Olivia de Havilland in The Heiress, Thelma Ritter in Pickup on South Street. Would I make love to my subject the way Hitchcock did with Grace Kelley in Rear Window, or just follow my Mastroianni and Moreau around like Antonioni? My heroes are as diverse as Wong Kar Wai and Rouben Mamoulian. Whenever I think of looking at a body in film, I see Brigitte Bardot in that fantastic first scene in Contempt, and collapse under the weight of these glorious visionaries. I’m swimming in the dense vision of others right now, waiting to see if there’s anything original that I might like to add to the mix. I know that I don’t want to make gay film festival tripe, or jump on the indie narrative bandwagon. Scott King’s delicious Treasure Island is a sort of model, for its gratuitous male nudity, density, and queasy sexuality, what an IMDB reviewer called “A treasure of bad film making.” I would so love to have that be my epitaph.
Who Needs Math
Instead of homeowork, Reese and I are updating the Fluffy and Ruffy Website. Here’s a sneak preview…
Two Sad Words for Today
Derrida died.
New Series Finished, New Chairs on the Way
My new series is finished. Almost. The chromes are at the lab now, being scanned. Sadly, the lush and saturated type-R print is no more, and until Hasselblad comes out with a digital back that costs about $44,000 less than what they want now, I’m stuck with scanned chromes and digital C-prints. I can’t afford to print everything full-sized, and am printing smaller test prints, and a few full-sized images that I’ll have framed to show visitors to my studio. Most of the pieces are triptychs, with each image between 20 and 30 inches square (so between 5 and 8 feet wide). I envision one piece in particular at 12 feet wide, but I may scale it down. My last 13 foot tall piece (pictured at left) is still in my closet. I’ll post some of the images next week.
Domestic news: my vintage EMECO 1006 chairs arrive today!!!! (e-Bay.) People can sit at my table now, and not be worried about torpedo blasts! I am also getting a flokati rug for my office. I imagine myself sprawled Jane Rusell-in-The Outlaw-style on its fluffy white expanse as I balance my check book.
Olympics, Baskets, Lone Star, Mike Leigh
Big Chrissy and I are watching the Olympics on the big screen. D is safely locked up for the night–I’ve left messages with his doctors and will talk with them tomorrow about new med strategies and phasing out the shock treatments. BC and I are watching beach volleyball, which had to be dreamed up by some straight dude. Did you catch Misty and Kerri rolling on top of each other after their win tonight? Did the ancient Greeks play beach volleyball naked? Thank the gods for Greco-Roman wrestling–and that hot Polish dude. Isn’t there dude beach volleyball? Why isn’t that aired during prime time? My and BC’s comments are pretty much restricted to basket sizes, butts, and back hair. Did you know that one group in the ancient Olympics used to award crowns of celery to winners of their particular event? When I went to Greece a few years ago, Chris loaned me his cell phone for emergency use–“Chris I’m calling you from the Parthenon!” “Chris, that’s the sound of goats in Arcadia!” He tells me he’s still paying off the bill for all of my emergencies.
This weekend we picked up little Geoffy and swept him to SFMoMA for the William Eggleston show. Man, what color. I’m so through with black and white. For a while, anyway. Geoff’s really such a fun guy, like a big kid. He gave us some candy that he brought home from the Mother country, and I ate a whole bag of the colorful shiny chocolate thingies today. I know, I should be injecting botox into my face before my high school reunion, not 500 grams of saturated fat. I got to see him again on Sunday when Dean Smith called from the Lone Star and told me to get off my butt and get on over to the bar. I had been hiking with D earlier and recovering from massive quantities of dim sum from Ton Kiang. I want to die in Ton Kiang—a steamed barbequed pork bun stuffed in my mouth and a smile on my face. So I rushed on over and joined Dean and his lover Doug, BC, Davide, looking frighteningly stressed out–aren’t they taking care of you in your new home? You need to come back home to 20th Street and chill, dude!–and lots of bloggers glimpsed and waved or winked at. Is it always that crowded on a Sunday afternoon? What fun! Denny, the namesake of Bob’s recent book, was there, and we commiserated on our Bob-lessness, and another Bob, former media curator at SFMoMA and perhaps interested in bears too late to take an interest in what I’m doing, but it was nice to see him in a different context.
Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party is coming out on dvd, and if you haven’t seen it, you should. Alison Steadman’s performance is one of the great comic performances of the last century–just brilliant. She was Mike Leigh’s Dietrich.
Emily Reads!
After photographing D today–blue and belly–I swept Emily away to the movies. Nervous about what was to be her first public reading, she asked if I would see Garden State with her and then have dinner at Alma before, to get her mind off of her nervousness. I seem to be good for that, perhaps because we spend so much time talking about our boyfriends. Emily and I share a kind of depression fetish, so there’s always much to discuss: T’s new SSRI, C’s anger and transsexual dad, D’s shock treatment. BC, my own sweet sad one joined us at Alma, and then we headed over to Adobe Books for the reading. First let me back up and say that Garden State didn’t leave much of an impression. Fine performances, yes, and Peter Saarsgaard is just a sheer tortured pleasure to watch, but the story was only as moving as the central character was captivating, which wasn’t very. I didn’t even want to project onto him. So back to the reading… Emily was last–after R’s mock sound installation for 2 voices and M’s science-fiction stroll through post-something bad San Francisco–and a good thing, because her reading was a knockout. She read from a story about her debt, hilariously chronicling her mother’s encouragement in its accumulation and mismanagement. She’s like David Sedaris, only complex and screwed up.
The Weekend and the Emeco 1006 Chair
The weekend was been quite fun–is it over already? We got an early start on Thursday with the Bruce Conner films at SFMoMA. Bruce was there, introducing 14 shorts from the past 40 or so years. I had seen or slept through most of them in art school, and it was thrilling to see them again, and while awake, and with him there. The first film was the most memorable, editing like fireworks, images flashing quickly by to the sound of Ray Charles singing “What I Say,” live in concert. My other fave was a film set to the tune of Devo’s “Mongoloid,” with all found imagery from strange science and health films, or people engaged in meaningless and unexplained exertion–a very clever wedding of sound and imagery. How wonderful to have an icon of 20th Century postwar art still here in our town. Big Chrissy and I then had dinner at Zuni with our bridge partner, Sarah, and her friend, Ruth, who is a very interesting and engaging filmmaker. I told her about the bear show, and she has an interesting idea for a film that she’d like to include in the show, so I’ll be meeting with her in a few weeks to see if it would work out to include her. I think we’re going to call the show “Hairy Bodies.” How does that grab you?
Friday Reese performed in his drama workshop’s summer show. The kids wrote and performed a piece called “Kid’s News.” One piece of news concerned the disappearance of George Bush, with Condoleeza Rice, “head of security,” reporting in a very deadpan voice, “The president has been missing for three days, and no one seems to know where he is,” and another about the retirement of the Ice Cream Man, with several kids screaming hysterically about the different flavors that they were going to miss, and the news announcer declaring, “Well, folks, you heard it here, they all scream for ice cream.” My favorite commercial was for Old Old Navy, with the kids dressed up like old people, “I got my Hip new Hip at Old Old Navy!” I joined up with the boys later on at Jack and Steve’s for the opening ceremony of the Olympics. I almost cried, I’m such a sucker for pomp. And man, Greece really pulled it off, with the fabulous centaur, the monolithic cycladic sculpture breaking down into other sculptures, and Bjork’s dress smothering all the athletes. I want a dress like that!
Saturday morning I saw Open Water with Dean, and loved it, especially the creepy scene in the pitch black storm, our doomed divers and the sharks swimming around them illuminated only by the lighting! Aaaaaaaah! What’s that bumping against my leg?!!!!! Later that night BC and I saw a hypnotic butoh performance by InkBoat, called “Ame to Ame,” which means “Candy and Rain” in Japanese, two words sounding the same but having different meaning. It was the most romantic butoh I’ve ever seen, “romantic” not being a term I’ve ever thought of in relation to butoh. Two dancers, one male and one female, alternately mirrored and repelled each other’s actions, a meditation on desire and illusion. Among the words that appeared in the music that sound the same in Japanese but have different meanings were “river” & “skin,” “flower” & “nose,” “belly” & “field,” and my favorite, “hair” & “god.” Hey, it’s the same in my language, too!
Today I shot a few more rolls of D, this time with a red backdrop. I’ll be winding up the photography on this project this week, and hope to finish it before the end of September. In addition to my composite Red, Blue, and Green pieces, I’ll be making a central piece consisting of images from all of the pieces, bringing them all together into some wild new 3-colored form. Yeah baby!
It is just an amazingly beautiful day today! I love living here! I love you! And I’ve finally figured out which chairs to buy for my kitchen! Yes, the main obstacle between me and my divorce party–3 aluminum “1006” chairs made by Emeco! Unfortunately they are $330 each, but I’m hoping to find some vintage ones for considerably less, like $30 each, okay, $75 if you insist. They were designed for the Navy just after WWII, and the design hasn’t changed at all in all those years. They were made to withstand torpedo blasts, so I’m sure that there are some out there somewhere in good shape.
Find this chair for me:
Blue, Blue, Blue, I’m in Love With Blue
I completed several new pieces today, and decided to name my new series RGB. Here’s a preview of a blue piece. (These images are scanned from my chromes on my super crappy transparency scanner, and the actual prints will contain details and colors that you can’t see or imagine due to the technological limitations of my mockup process.)
