Category: Art

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SuperModel SuperStar

My Superbearmodel, Jim Brashear, is performing tonight and tomorrow night at New College…

Jim Brashear in Bulfinch’s SMITHology (or, Reflecting Morrissey)
August 3 & 4 (Tues and Wed), 7PM
New College Theater, 777 Valencia (at 19th), San Francisco
$5-10 (sliding scale, no one refused)

also featuring a performance by Damon Smith: “This Little Dream of Mine”
part of the Experimental Performance Institute’s Faultline Festival, July 27-August 8

Whatever happened to The Boy with the Thorn in His Side? Besides his solo career… In a multimedia performance of song, poetry, movement, and video, Jim Brashear embraces, redresses, and violates the myth of Morrissey, refracting his misanthropy, self-loathing, and profound sentiment through the looking glass. Or something like that.

Jim Brashear combines his experiences in voice, poetry, and computers to create multimedia performance art. Since first opening his mouth in 1998, he has sung with Eliane Radigue, Eric Glick Rieman, Marco Eneidi, Coro Hispano, Blectum from Blechdom, and the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus. In October 2000, he performed Difference Engine, a multimedia operetta on Alan Turing, at the Mills College Concert Hall. He has also read and performed at New Langton Arts, Intersection for the Arts, ODC Theater, 21 Grand, Tehama Alley, and the Berkeley Art Center. Along with Kathy Lou Schultz and Robin Tremblay-McGaw, he edits and publishes Lipstick Eleven, a literary journal of experimental writing and cultural criticism. His chapbook Zealander will be published by Duck Press in Fall 2004.

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Gnocchi

Victor and Davide  were over for gnocchi with pesto and apple pie tonight. It wasn’t as difficult as I thought it was going to be to create a dinner for the specific palates and dispositions of my dear guests. I am so in awe of Victor’s beard. It’s like Antarctica was moved to the center of the globe, hanging from North America’s chin. Victor and Davide are great to watch together, Victor very relaxed and bubbly, Davide all fireworks from the small amount of alcohol in his skinny skateboarder dude body. Davide is moving in a few days, only a few blocks away really, but I’m going to miss him sitting all day in my kitchen with his laptop, or running stupid errands with me. It’s like having an Italian journalism major pet who talks about love and music instead of barking or peeing on my rugs.

Earlier today we went to Berkeley to look at vintage glasses with Emily, and had sandwiches and goodies at Fanny’s Cafe. Emily’s working on some new gouaches on paper that are totally dynamite and totally Emily, each work 2-sided, layers on layers of camouflaging and symbols or architectural allusions obliterating the previously and meticulously applied imagery. Sometimes her process of recording and then transforming is completely inaccessible, at other times you see it peeking through, but never banging you on the head. There’s so much intelligence and experience in her work. Davide wanted to go to IKEA to look at beds, so I tagged along through the awful maze. I really can’t go there again. The store’s the size of a New England state. I get all nervous and sweaty not knowing which way is west or how far away the exit is, or even if there is one.

I’ll be posting some big news on Saturday.

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New Work

I’m having a really exciting day in the studio today, finally these images are coalescing into something with meaning. I’ve been photographing D for the past few months, against backgrounds of brightly colored velvets–red, green and blue, the component colors of film light, TV light, projected light. Vague landscapes are emerging from tryptichs, cloud-like formations from other combinations, weird sensual forms. I don’t know yet what it all means, but it feels really good, and I really like looking at them. It feels like I’m back in touch with something again, a familiar engagement that I have new perspective on. D, D, thank you for your strange and wonderful genetic peculiarities.

Whew.

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Blue Skies

I’m sitting out in the garden today. I was going to photograph D, but sent him home after lunch, and asked if we could photograph tomorrow, so that I could listen to the wind in the yews, the many birds that have come to nest nearby, and watch the fruit fall from my plum tree. I did a big garden cleanup earlier in the week, and love when the garden is all clipped and fluffed–like my boyfriends, although their clipping is restricted to the neck up, no restriction on fluffing. My dsl was supposed to be back today, its fluctuations wilder even than the recent palpitations of my heart, but alas, the unsteadiness continues, and thus I sit, far out of the range of a dialup connection, my dsl no closer, watching this lovely hummingbird twitter around the lavender. The sky is that tv bluescreen blue today. I plan to photograph D tomorrow against an equally saturated blue velvet backdrop, using the fuzzy outline of his body as a blurry horizon, there, out there, visible but out of reach. I’ve rejected my plan to focus on the complete body, not just because I wasn’t happy with the results, but because representation seems too restrictive. I’m thinking now that I’d like to push in exactly the opposite direction and explore a deeper level of abstraction. Much of contemporary abstraction seems to be rooted in a design sensibility, removed from any sort of action, or radical gesture, or even engagement with materials. Perhaps I can comment on these tendencies, and retain a connection to gesture and metaphor?

I don’t think I’ll be going to Lazy Bear, after all, folks. BC and I were going to go up on Friday night to spin to Martin’s spinning, and again on Sunday to stay the night, but watching the spiders eat the mosquitos, and the dragonflies mate seem more my pace right now. Oh, who knows, maybe I’ll see you guys this weekend.

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A Cough, A Vixen, the Valley, and Three Hot Dogs.

*cough* If this were a movie made before 1956, you’d know at this point in the story that I was going to die before the end. You know, that slight little cough that nobody notices, except you in the audience, and then makes perfect sense as I collapse in your arms and whisper “But darling, loving you from afar has been enough…” before dying of pneumonia, consumption, cacexia, or accute melancholia together with a guilt complex. *cough*

Thursday night I saw a magical version of Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen at the SF Opera, with Big Chris, Little Dave, and my big sister, Sue–sexy and very cleverly staged, and then woke early to join Mystery Bear for breakfast and my former teacher Larry Sultan’s The Valley series at SFMoMA. I’ve written about the images before, when a few were shown at Stephen Wirtz, but seeing them all together was quite exciting.

I went with Alex last night to the Giant’s game, not so much downing as felating three hot dogs, and Barry hit his 680th! The fireworks afterwards actually made me cry. Phenomenal. (Doo DOOOO do do do.)

Again, I run to Big Chrissy for solace and support. (And his dsl connection, since mine is down for the next few weeks.) I love him.

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Coco the Monkey and Kiki and Herb

My brain and body are hostage to this flood of chemicals. I feel like primitive man. If only I were australopithecus, and didn’t have to deal with reason. Or patience. Just “oooh oooh aaah aaah” and wild monkey love.

Last night Justin Bond swung into town with his Kiki and Herb act. Justin used to live in San Francisco, and started the act here, performing at Eichelberger’s Restaurant, and other venues. He fled to New York around the same time of the Great Exodus, when Michelle, Nayland, Philip, Darrell, Christian, and everybody who had anything interesting to say or do decided that they had to make it there or anywhere. San Francisco is a great breeding ground for talent, but we don’t know how to keep it here. So there was Justin, living his dream, having made it in New York, returning to a sold-out show in San Francisco, and Kiki was just as fabulous as ever, drinking, slurring and scatting her way through lounge act not-necessarily-standards on up to Kim Carnes, New Order, and Pink Floyd. I remember seeing Justin every day at the Cafe Flor, surrounded by his adoring flock. When asked why he was there every day, he responded, “Do you think I like coming here every day? I have to be here every day. I have to be seen.” Kiki introduces her songs with long drawn-out rambling and outrageous tales of her many husbands, inter-racial offspring, encounters with Grace Kelly and Billie Holliday, and warnings to the few young women in the audience, “Don’t do it!”

“DON’T DO IT!”

Wait, do it with me, climb up my hill, sweep me away, make me promises, eat bananas with me and drag me by my hair through the Castro jungle.

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O Solo Coco

O SOLO COCO

I am Coco, here me roar.

The house is almost together. I still need kitchen chairs, preferably Deco, chrome, and red leather; and a quarter-priced Saarinen Womb Chair if there is one to be found, for my office; and a ladle; and some napkins–but Casa Coco is where it’s at, baby!

First of all, since Bob has moved out, the toilet paper now rolls over the top of the roll, as God intended, the toothpaste is squeezed from the bottom of the tube, Mack hangs hung over the mantel, Jack Radcliffe protectively over the delicate California Faience, and the rest of my muses radiate their furry warmth from the remaining walls of the house.

Reese has a problem with Mack’s appendage taking such a prominent place in the new decorating scheme, and strategically places a pillow on the mantel whenever he comes over. BC has suggested making a stand with a fig leaf to use whenever the need for propriety arises. 10-year old Reese and I have been debating aesthetics for the past few weeks. He’s convinced that I’m a pornographer, and resists my arguments about irony, context and beauty. (He says that I should be photographing him, “innocent Reese.” Now that’s irony…)

My new model arrived for his closeup on Monday. Perhaps I shouldn’t refer so obliquely to my complete erotic ideal. I’ve worshiped his likeness at Greek temples, fantasized about creeping under the toga of his twin in the Roman senate depicted in marble in the Capitoline Museums…

My Galatea…

Highlights of the weekend included a faboo Matmos performance on Friday. This dynamic duo presented a 4-channel video piece of a pretty boy slung over a man’s lap, ass in the air, being spanked–the sound of the slap repeated and processed and built into a head-bobbing dance beat. Spank me, Matmos! 3 other composers presented sound pieces that ranged from 50 minutes of scratchy feedback, to mesmerizing samples of sounds that faded slowly or instantly from the recognizable to the abstract, layered in a melange of cacophony and melody.

Mystery Bear was at the Matmos performance, and standing next to him during the 50 minutes of scratchy atonal feedback in the cramped unventilated space, I focused on the intoxicating sweetness of his smell. His arm hairs brushed against mine in soft contrast to the sound. I extended a single finger at one point, barely touching his forearm hair, my spine tingling, heart pounding, boxers rising…

Saturday I was treated to a faboo brunch with the effervescent Rootbeers, their charming friends, and Pat, Victor’s sweetheart of a Texas mom with the 10-gallon accent, and then swiftly back home just as another Victor whisked Davide from the airport to his new temporary digs in my studio downstairs. Now Davide is just about as adorable as Italians come, and that’s pretty dang adorable. He’ll be staying here for a while, so stop on over and say benvenuto! Sister Sue is also visiting. Good lord, this entry’s getting wordy. But hey, you haven’t heard from me in a long time, and I am sparing you the events of the past several weeks, so carry on, Gentle Reader…

Sunday Big Chris, Little Dave in from Sydney for a few days, and I, did (to use the Australian verb again) the gay parade and celebration. The Bears of SF were happy and bouncy and hot as, well, a truckload of bears. Then dinner with my brother and sisters, and dancing at Planet Big at the STUD where we hugged, bumped, and/or danced withKeanunear, Mamooshka and John, Kris and Truckerfucker, and Nick Dong. I wanted to take the go-go bear in the red jockstrap dancing in the cage above the dance floor home with me, but I’d be afraid to let him out of his cage. We were delighted to be treated to a private sex show in the back, which got kind of strange at one point, when Naked Exhibitionist Guy suddenly jumped off the lap of his poor would-be suitor and said something like “Don’t touch me” and took off. I didn’t think there were any breeches of etiquette to warrant such a disruption. We were pretty speechless. I mean, wouldn’t one assume when a person takes off his clothes and sits on a lap that it’s because he wants to be touched?

So I look forward to hearing about what’s been going on with all you swell cats and kittens. Maybe I’ll see some of you tonight at Kiki and Herb?

I’m gonna make it after all!
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Days of Ginger Wine and Hybrid Roses

Greetings from sunny Florida! Yes, that’s why I haven’t returned your e-mail. And your call. And not picked up that package. I’ll be home Friday, so ring me up then. I’m having a swell time, playing cabana boy at my sister Carol’s, watching sunsets on the beach, pruning everyone’s bay and citrus trees, drinking my niece’s homemade ginger wine…

A few nights ago we had dinner at a friend of Sue’s, a wonderfully eccentric fellow who raises chickens and corn out back, and hybridizes roses out front. Inside, he listens to Yoko Ono’s latest dance music cranked way up, and has mirrored the entire floor, walls, and ceiling of his fabulous little house, interspersed with sparkly glittery things, like walking into a Jack Smith film, or a Jerome Caja painting.

I’m being very low-key on this trip, or trying to be, but there’s always something too interesting to do. Tuesday we’re off to see an exhibit of Cabinets of Wonder at the Platt Museum. These “cabinets” were the forerunners of museums, collections meant to arouse a sense of wonder at the amazing objects on display. There was an interesting book a few years ago by Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, about the Museum of Jurrasic Technology in L.A., which is one of the most interesting museums I’ve ever been to–displaying genuine works next to elaborate fabrications. Read the book, and then go to the museum.

Speaking of books, I’m reading The Confessions of Max Tivoli, a book about a man who starts life with the body of a 70 year old, and develops backwards, physically, as his mind develops normally. It’s just delightful, very inventive, with dazzling prose. Plus it’s set in an historically accurate San Francisco of the late 19th Century, which is fun to imagine, and there’s much about love and longing that’ll just break your little heart.

So anyway, the thing I love most about being in Florida is all the guys walking around without shirts on–or much of anything else. For those of us living in chilly climes, it’s like going to a bathhouse. I am in a constant state of titilation. And of course I cruise the scantilly clad dudes with the bellies and the beards, only these aren’t the Lone Star versions, these are the real (and straight) prototypes. Sigh. “Look and perspire, but don’t touch the Hell’s Angel, little Chrissy.”

I would love to talk about the distressing and amazing Sopranos episode tonight, but I’d blow it for those of you back home who don’t have an east coast feed. It’s about to start–go watch it and we’ll chat when I get home. Oh Adriana…

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Mr. Triathlete

Mr. San Francisco Triathlete was a total doll, and a real pleasure to photograph. He’s very skinny and muscly and clips his chest hair–hence a real challenge for me to photograph, but he had this very interesting head, balding and craggy, with very closely-cropped blonde hair, and a nice face with lots of character. I started by having him get into all these strange unfamiliar and completely artificial poses, in his little biking outfit, and then decided to photograph him in profile, channeling some obscure Flemish or Florentine master. I was using a film that was new to me, the first time actually that I’ve ever used anything but Fujichrome 64 Tungsten in the studio, so I’m a little nervous about my metering. Look for the image in the July issue of OUT Magazine!

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Alexis, OUT, Reese, and Sam

A-gallery-ing today… Alexis Rockman’s show at Catherine Clark really rocks. He is such a great painter. The canvases in the show are comprised of virtuoso gestures that convey so much about paint and experience. I looked at one little mutant fish in the corner of one painting for several minutes, confounded by how he could have loaded that much color in the brush and achieved such a gestural quality with so much detail and depth. I bumped into Catie’s husband, Ray, who’s having a career in New York now, from this coast, after getting the boot from Haines. He says a New York Times review of his current show is a possibility. Yay, Ray. Jeffrey Frankel is showing Felix Gonzales-Torres, and I’m warming up to him, Felix, not Jeffrey, although I used to be Jeffery’s gardener, and set off his alarm I don’t know how many times while he was out of town, each time having to wait for the firemen to save me. Gonzales-Torres’ work is also very gestural, but simple. Not in a bad simple way, but pared down, just the material to say what’s necessary. One floor work is a mound of candy equivalent in weight to the weight of him and his partner (both now deceased). The viewer is invited to take a piece of candy from the pile, which is replenished by the gallery, and maintained at the specified volume. I got a little teary, eating the sweet candy, thinking of the dead lovers, the space that they formerly occupied, the unchanging space of the piece, and the lack of an artist’s hand or presence in the work… I didn’t see much from San Franciscans that was impressive, which has been the case for some time. Vic Muniz’s show at Bransten, large photographs of toy soldiers arranged to resemble famous paintings and portraits was impressive, like much of photography today that relies on awesome scale–clever and grand.

Monday I’m photographing a triathlete for OUT Magazine. They’ve commissioned 4 artists to photograph 4 different gay athletes. I’m not sure yet if I’ll be photographing mine in a straightforward manner, well, straightforward for me, or for a triptych, or just very oiled-up. In order to prepare for Mr. SF Triathlete, tomorrow I’ve had to cancel plans with Victor, poor dear, with whom I’ve been meaning to get together for forever. Hopefully next Friday he and I can see Mean Girls with Reese.

Reese appeared on stage Friday night, as the sad clown star of Caravan of Dreams at the Marsh. Afterward a lady praised his mournful rendition of Bad Luck in Love, to which he replied very seriously, “I studied 4 years with the Boy’s Chorus of San Francisco,” a total diva at 10.

So I’m seeing tons of movies these days, and need to go, actually to watch Sam Fuller’s Pickup on South Street, which has one of the top ten screen deaths–Thelma Ritter’s at the hand of a cowardly Commie.