Category: Art

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Impressionisms

Chrissy and I braved the chilly weather and hightailed it to the Camille Pissarro show at the Legion yesterday. I’ve never been particularly fond of Pissarro’s work, but appreciate his anti-establishment demeanor, elder Impressionist status, and for what he gave Cezanne. There’s a kind of tightness, or rigidity, that seems too perfectly confined by his framing, but when he does loosen up, the paintings are quite lovely, and at times the technique is just dazzling. But still, jousting with all those blue-haired ladies to get close to one of those things…

On to Impressionist offspring, Dean Smith and I saw Renoir’s Woman on the Beach, his last film in Hollywood, starring Joan Bennett, the darling of all the european ex-pats during those years, and who gave one of her most sensitive performances. “Go ahead and say it, I’m a tramp.” The story was pretty lurid for the time, with Joan married to a blind painter—she caused his blindness—but carrying on with Robert Ryan, who believes that the painter can really see, and is using his blindness to keep Joan from leaving him. He hoards his increasingly valuable paintings in a closet, the only record of what his eyes had seen. They all get along swimmingly and try to kill each other, and then in the sensational climax, the painter burns his work and, excited about the possibility of finally starting a new project and with flames leaping high into the sky, asks Joan to drive him to New York. She can do whatever she wants, he says, she’s free. Finally freed of him and the security that the paintings brought, she clamps her arm around him and off they go, destitute and with nothing but possibility ahead, just love and art in the city that never sleeps. Bye bye Robert.

How romantic. Sigh.

I would love to see the sequel, where they get to New York and discover how high the rents have risen since they moved to their shack on the beach and how impossible it is to get a show after all the galleries moved to Chelsea and painting became less about expression than cleverly manipulating the viewer and critic into embracing facile surface and commodity fetishism. They should have worked it out with Robert and stayed on the beach.

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The Chilly Apple

Chrissy and I went to New York last week, for legitimate theater and really super-crowded art shows. We saw Samuel Jackson and Angela Bassett in The Mountaintop, a fantasy about Dr. King’s last night in the Lorraine Motel. Jackson played MLK doing a Samuel Jackson impression, and Angela Bassett a foxy maid at the motel sent to tempt and comfort him on his last night. The next night we saw Relatively Speaking—three one-act plays by Ethan Coen, Elaine May and Woody Allen—a rollicking delight, Woody Allen’s farce snowballing to epically outrageous hilariousness; then we saw the powerful family drama Other Desert Cities with Rachel Griffiths, whom I can’t believe isn’t from southern California, Stockard Channing, Stacy Keach, and a radiantly burned-out Judith Light; and our final play, Seminar, with a crusty Alan Rickman sexually and verbally amusing and abusing himself and his students.

MoMA is like a zoo, with kids snapping photos of their buddies next to Starry Night and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. I spent much of the afternoon arguing with my dear old buddy Michelle about whether de Kooning was misogynist or not. As someone who slices up photos of hairy butts and makes flowers out of them, I thought the notion preposterous. He adored women, and that’s why they’re all exploded, slashed and fragmented, the center of the canvas, like he wanted to dive into them and be surrounded by those big balloon boobs. It’s the way that someone engaged with paint and expressionism would inhabit and represent beauty and desire. Where she saw rape, I saw love.

And I just love Michelle.

Brancusi dust

Nemr Poochie and Inna joined us for a foot-fatiguing day-long march through the Met. We saw a fabulous Renaissance portrait show, with countless Boticellis, well okay, like 5, and delightful portraits by Bellini, Dontello, Masaccio(!), and a portrait bust of baggy-eyed and full-chinned sex bomb Niccolò di Leonardo Strozzi by Mino da Fiesole.

The Guggenheim has a retrospective of just about all of the work ever made by Maurizio Cattelan, called “All.” The pieces are hung from the central rotunda of the museum by ropes, a dizzy assemblage of witty fabulosity experienced as your spiral up and down the ramp. He says he’s not going to be making sculpture anymore, and I am going to really miss this guy.

Nemr’s living in Brooklyn, in Williamsburg, right across the street from Thighs ‘n Pies. Or Pies ‘n Thighs. It’s classic southern food the way you rarely get it in the south, fresh, inventively prepared, not cooked to death. I snarfed everything that came close to the table.

Big Chrissy warming himself by the fire
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A Wedding in the Midwest

I spent a week in Moline and Chicago recently to attend the wedding of BC’s niece. And to help with the flowers, table settings, and then emergency wilted flower resuscitation. Everything came off splendidly—except the chicken, which I’ll get to in a bit—the bride swaddled in white, the groom surrounded by sexy 20-somethings, everybody dancing. I adore BC’s family, and their extended network of ex-husbands, childhood friends, and very sexually active octogenarian neighbors. It’s like stepping into a sitcom, every moment so filled with jolly repartee, bright bubbly guests, and hushed musings on So-n-so’s investment in African gold, brother What’s-his-face’s wife who hasn’t spoken to her husband in years yet still shares a bed with him, What’s-his-name’s squandering of his wife’s inheritance on the riverboat casino, the love child, the father who’s now a woman, the son without a father…

The chicken at the wedding was without a doubt the most challenging thing I’ve ever encountered in edible form. Overcooked, sauceless, characterless, flavorless and cold, accompanied by… what, I can’t even remember. Please, let me forget, but not without giving thanks to the brave chickens who gave of their breasts to our festive group mastication.

BC and I went out a few days before to dinner at the local steakhouse, accompanied by the bride’s mother and her current beau. The midwest is where you should always order steak. Mine was impossibly tender, like butter. I didn’t even need a knife. I completely ignored my dinner companions and made love to my New York strip, right there on the table, the juicy object of my ravenous appetite, slicing it into tinier and tinier mouth-watering morsels, hoping it wouldn’t end, licking my plate and knife as it disappeared forever.

Everybody in this area either works for, or has worked for, or their children will soon work for John Deere. Including BC’s stepdad, now retired, who took us on a private tour of the combine factory. We got to climb into a giant combine and were then driven through the plant in a golf cart and through the process of the combine’s creation. Most of the workers calmly pushed buttons that controlled machines that did the work that I had imagined the workers would be doing. The John Deere Company, with headquarters and factories and facilities all over the area, is hardly noticed, except that every other business is “John Deere” something or other. They’ve minimized their visual presence by integrating their buildings seamlessly, sensitively, and beautifully into the urban and rural landscape, as much a part of the community as the community is of it.

We got to see a wonderful show of chairs at the Figge Museum, “The Art of Seating,” including some of my faves—the Lavernes’ Lily Chair, Herbert Von Thaden’s Adjustable Lounge Chair, George Nelson’s Medium Arm Fiberglass Chair… I got in trouble for taking pictures. An attendant ran up three flights of stairs—perhaps she viewed me on some monitor somewhere, or someone alerted her to my violation via walkie-talkie—to breathlessly request that I please stop photographing the chairs.

After the wedding, we drove to Chicago to visit BC’s dad, who lives right around the corner from where the big Gay Pride parade was going on. We walked on over just as the parade was ending, wading through the one-foot deep mound of bottles and cups, and bumping into the drunken stumbling hooting half-naked proud homosexualists. I have never felt so old, so consciously not naked, or so far removed from anything resembling pride.

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Dresses and Wild Dinners

BC and I headed over to the Legion of Honor with Dean this weekend to see Pulp Fashion: The Art of Isabelle de Borchgrave. What is it with San Francisco and dresses? A few weeks ago we went to the Balenciaga show at the deYoung. Cristóbal Balenciaga created dresses inspired by Spanish culture and history, elegantly reducing the trills and elaborations into simple beautifully flowing lines and curves. Using only paper, Borchgrave recreates dresses made by famous designers or found in historical and allegorical paintings. While Balenciaga mined the rich history of Spanish couture to create something new and elegant, for me Borchgrave’s creations fall short of being transformed into something really new, just time-consuming reproductions that make me long for the real thing.

ForageSF is a local group attempting to connect San Franciscans with the wild food around them. Saturday night they sponsored a dinner for about 80 of us, structured around the theme of the morel mushroom. The menu contained a beautiful etching of morels, erroneously identified as “le morilles,” improper in gender and quantity, which pretty much set the tone of the meal. While most dishes were carefully crafted, and did contain many interesting ingredients, the foraged components functioned more or less as garnishes, sometimes completely lost. There were 8 courses. The first course was a crostino brushed with fresh bay laurel leaf infused butter, a really wonderfully vibrant flavor. The last course was a serving of perfectly ripe strawberries, dusted with fennel pollen, drizzled with balsamic vinegar and garnished with crème fraiche, each ingredient vivid and distinct. The dishes in between included: a galette of nettles on soggy puff pastry; a wild onion soup with not enough morel flavor to register on my palate; fried smelt; musty duck and mushy risotto; a salad of delicate wild flowers completely obliterated by delicious vinegared beets and a tangy champagne vinaigrette; and yet another rice dish, but this one quite good, with mackerel, sea beans, a quail egg and ponzu. I applaud the ambitiousness of their venture, and it was amazing that they were able to feed us all in a South-of-Market warehouse space, but I think the dishes would have been more successful if the subtle flavors of the foraged ingredients were allowed to shine through.

Last night I dined at La Ciccia with Big Chris, Su-Chen, Emily and Dean, a Sardinian restaurant on 30th Street, spending about half what I spent with the foragers, and for a meal that was twice as good, simply perfection.  Every dish was loaded with flavor, the stewed octopus and calamari impossibly tender, the clams tasting of garlic and the sea, the different textures in the gnocchetti and pork ragu a delight on the tongue. Foragers, take note: let the ingredients do the talking.

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The Roman Spring of Coco Poofter

Bob, Reese, Jocelyn and I have returned from two weeks in Rome. It was the perfect time to be there, warm, everything in bloom, not yet crowded. Bob and I frequently traveled there when we were together, and this was our first trip back, indeed our first trip anywhere since our breakup in 2003. We all worked together as a team: I the documenter; Jocelyn the navigator; Bob the cook; and Reese… well, the teenager.

Much has changed since my last visit, including a major cleanup of all the monuments, a reorganization of the national museums, and some new museums for contemporary art, including Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI. The food was exactly the same, consistently amazing. Even a simple dish like rigatoni cacio e pepe brought tears to my eyes. Highlights were the sculptures of antiquity fabulously exhibited in a former power station, the Museo Centrale Montemartini; a day in the country of the Sabine women, eating lavishly of the bounty of the surrounding countryside—prosciutto and pecorino, artichoke fettuccine, cicoria, grilled bunny, house-made wine; the hilltop town of Montopoli; the 7th century Benedictine abbey of Farfa; gelato at Giolitti; Bernini and Borromini’s staircases and Pietro da Cortona’s ceiling fresco cycle at the Palazzo Barberini; carciofi alla giudia; fiori di zucca fritti; the Caravaggios all over town…

I revisited my old favorites: Bernini’s slyly subversive Apollo and Daphne at the Galleria Borghese, Daphne’s twig gently brushing between Apollo’s legs; Stefano Maderno’s tender and brutal Martyrdom of Saint Cecilia at Santa Cecilia in Trastevere; Bernini’s orgasmic Saint Teresa in Ecstasy at Santa Maria della Vittoria; Raphael’s brilliant frescoes in the Villa Farnesina and his proprietary la Fornarina at Palazzo Barberini; all of those humpy river gods and my guys Hadrian, Silenus and Hercules, all over town; the mosaics, 1st century BC frescoes from Livia’s Villa and the poignant hellenistic bronze Boxer of Quirinal at Palazzo Massimo alle Terme; the delighful turtle fountain in the Piazza Mattei…

It’s very hard to come back home to houses that are less than 500 years old and public sculpture that wasn’t created around Augustus’ time, but I’m settling back in. I’ve recreated most of the dishes I ate there, including the previously-mentioned rigatoni cacio e pepe, asparagus leek risotto, bucatini all’Amatriciana, artichoke fettucine, but I haven’t been able to find fresh squash blossoms in the corner store like I could in Rome.
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New York: Thursday

Thursday Big Chrissy and I hopped on the train to Philadelphia to visit the Barnes Collection and the Philadelphia Museum.  The Barnes will be moving soon to downtown Philadelphia, and we wanted to see the collection on-site, as Dr. Barnes intended.  I got a little tired of all the Renoirs—really, 10 good ones would have been enough, but there are over 100, sheesh—but peppered here and there among the Renoirs were Van Gogh, Modigliani, Cezanne, Matisse… and on and on.  The collection is hung is a very idiosyncratic way.  Dr. Barnes spent years arranging the work according to content, the way paint is handled, use of surface, etc.  The Foundation assures us that the new building will retain the layout of the current museum, but I fear it will no longer have soul, and certainly no longer as Barnes intended us to engage with this work, in a Disneyfied facsimile.

At the Philadelphia Museum, there was a knockout Michelangelo Pistoletto show, from his self-portraits of the 50s to collaborative actions of the 60s and 70s.  And finally, to see all those Duchamps!  And Eakins’ Gross Clinic!  And another moody stunner of a Van Gogh, of diagonal slashes of rain pelting a wheat filed glimpsed from his window at the clinic of Saint-Paul-de-Mausolée.

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New York: Monday to Wednesday

I’m still in New York, still freezing.  Big Chrissy and I saw an interesting show at the Guggenheim, Chaos and Classicism, focusing on european art between the World Wars.  Pictured above is Renato Bertelli’s Profilo Continuo del Duce (1933), a dazzling futurist portrait of Mussolini included in the show.

Manet’s Devant la Glace, (1876) was also on display at the Guggenheim, a vigorously painted portrait of a woman at a mirror, her back to us, a private scene of observation.  The tension between surface and subject is heightened by our own position of surveillance.  First Picasso’s women, and then John Currin’s at Gagosian continued our engagement with the female form, the latter like viewing a pornographic Saturday Evening Post.

Moving on to the male form, we stopped by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery for the Jess, Joe Brainard, and John O’Reilly show.  While each artist utilized collage to create works of tender sensuality, John O’Reilly’s layered and sliced imagery haunted me the most, sublime juxtapositions of sexual, erotic and aesthetic experience.

At the Music Box on Tuesday night, we saw La Bête, a satire set in the 17th century, with Joanna Lumley in her Broadway debut—and boy does she make an entrance, in a billowy shower of gold.  The play is presented entirely in rhymed verse, whimsically and cleverly illustrating the triumph of mediocrity over quality.

The next day we stepped back another century for Jan Gossart at the Met, and forward again for a fabulous restored Velasquez portrait of Philip IV.

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Makropulos, Clomiphene, and San Francisco’s Finest

Dean W and I saw Leoš Janáček’s The Makropulos Case last week at the SF Opera.  It’s a stunning opera—visually, conceptually and musically—about the meaninglessness of a life without end, without enduring love.

This weekend I went a-gallery-hopping with Emily and Big Chrissy.  Nothing really exciting, except for a fascinating show by Ishan Clemenco at NOMA Gallery of chalk drawings on light filters and film.  Ephemeral and delicate, their existence impossible to imagine outside of the show—just for us.  Oh, and Bruno Fazzolari’s show at Jancar Jones, a small grouping of paintings with colorful squiggly gestures and jiggly lines that almost coalesce into something recognizable, and a perfume that when sprayed at Emily, coalesced into too much association.  And stayed with us the rest of the afternoon.  Bravo, what a great show.

Earlier in the day, I was told by my then current paramour that he was feeling depressed.  I promised to return as soon as I could to check in on him, and that we would have the evening to spend together to get to what was going on.  After galleries, I ran up to his place to check in on him, and in his place found used condoms and condom wrappers scattered about.  Actually, they weren’t scattered about—not by him, anyway, and not to begin with—they were in the trash, which I had dumped out on the floor before tossing them onto his bed.  Then I called and left a message on his voicemail, an angry but concise admonition saying I looked forward to hearing about the DNA I had just encountered.  See you at 6, honey.

I went on to Chris J’s 70th birthday party, with Big Chrissy and my sister, June.  Chris lives in an environment that seems dreamed up by Armistead Maupin.  From a south-of-Market alley, you pass through a low-ceilinged walkway into a lush garden, with overgrown tropical plants and a giant redwood tree, a koi pond and bridge, antique asian garden ornamentation, lanterns, and oversized mirrors that extend the garden into impossible space.  Hovering over one side of the garden, above the entryway, is a quaint little Victorian cottage.  To the left is a showroom featuring asian and european antiques.  The showroom is a cavernous space, a giant fireplace on one side, flanked by 2nd floor balconies overlooking the main gallery, packed with polychromed crucifixes from 16th century Genoa, antique phalluses, masks, japanese pottery…  Chris lives in an apartment adjacent to the main gallery, stylishly decorated to match the asian sensibility on display next door.  A magical space.  I mingled with the glamoratti of the San Francisco landscaping world, as well as old buddies that I hadn’t seen in decades, all of us middle-aged and beyond, and looking it with our graying whiskers and expanding waistlines.  Except for Michael Brown, who looks exactly like he did when we tossed dough at Marcello’s Pizza 25 years ago.

When I got home, he was there, my depressed paramour, in my bed. He claimed that he didn’t know how the condoms got there. The used condoms in his studio apartment.  Where he lives alone. We’d been through this before, so I calmly, no, hysterically and yes, okay, histrionically, asked him to leave, that I’d finally had enough.  Get out. I left the bedroom to cool off and when I came back he was in the kitchen, trying to cut his wrists with the wrong side of the knife.  I rolled my eyes and asked for the knife.

“I took your Vicodin,” he said.

Where? How many? I had a prescription that my oral surgeon gave me last week following a wisdom tooth removal. I checked them, they seemed all there.

“Oh, is that your Vicodin? I took something from the cabinet.” I went to the cabinet and noticed the empty bottle.  You took my Clomiphene??  Do you know how expensive that is?  How many?

“7. What’s Clomiphene?”

I ignored the question.  I don’t know if that’s a lethal dose, I have to call 911.  I called.  “What’s Clomiphene?”  the operator asked.

It’s a fertility treatment for women.

“Do you have a roommate who wants to get pregnant?”

No, it’s mine.  I use it because my testosterone level was low.

“A fertility treatment for women?  What does this have to do with your testosterone level?”

It works this way in men, increasing their testosterone level.

“Oh, that’s great.  We’re sending someone out immediately.  Is he suicidal?”

Are you suicidal?

“No, I just want to sleep.”

No, he says he was just trying to sleep, but earlier he was depressed and then I went to his house and found these used condoms and confronted him about them.  I think he’s been cheating on me.

“I’d say you’re probably right.  Well, the paramedics will be there any minute.  Stay with me, let know if he looks drowsy.”  There was a knock at the door.  6 police officers came up the stairs. 6 incredibly handsome burly pink-faced men in black.

“What’s the problem?”

I batted my eyes. He took an overdose of Clomiphene. I pointed at  him.

“What’s Clomiphene?”

It’s a fertility treatment for women, induces ovulation.

“Why did he take it?”

He thought it was Vicodin.

“Why do you have it?”

My testosterone level was low, it stimulates testosterone production in men, even though it wasn’t designed to do this.  My doctor is at the forefront of studying this drug’s effect on testosterone levels.

“How is that working for you?”

Fine, thanks.  I blushed.  The paramedics then arrived, 6 more guys in my little bedroom.  6 more handsome burly lifesavers. “What’s going on?  What did he take?” one of them asked.

He took 7 Clomiphene.

“What’s Clomiphene?”

“Evidently, it induces ovulation in women,” the first police officer replied.

“Who does it belong to?”

“Him.”  All 12 guys looked at me.  Before they opened their mouths to ask, I blurted, It also increases the production of testosterone in men.  My testosterone level was low.  It’s an alternative to taking testosterone shots, inducing the body to produce it naturally.  But could we really stop talking about my testosterone level?  Is he going to die?  Do you have to pump his stomach?

“That’s so interesting,” one paramedic said, “I haven’t heard of Clomiphene being used for low testosterone levels.”

“Yea,” said another.  A third cleared his throat, then turned to my suicidal bed guest.  “Are you suicidal?”

“No, I just want to sleep.”

Earlier he was depressed and then I went to his house and found these used condoms and confronted him about them.  I think he’s been cheating on me.

“I’d say that’s a good guess,” he snickered at me under his breath.  Turning to the furry little man who was supposed to love me and only me forever, he said “Okay, let’s get you to the hospital.”

And away they went.

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Fabulous abjection

Michelle Rollman and Scott McLeod stopped by yesterday to deliver one of Michelle’s artworks from the 90s. During that time, Michelle produced a remarkable series of storybook stuffed animals: velveteen rabbits in stocks, dunce caps; in bondage; often anatomically correct in particular areas… fabulously, lusciously abject.

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Bunnies in Dendur

And it’s back to New York for Big Bunny and Little Bunny, aka me and Chris V. We flew in last night directly over Manhattan—the night was so clear that the city was perfectly illuminated against the black of the water, like a giant Lite-Brite map.

We’re staying in my friend’s place in Westbeth, with a view of the Hudson and Hoboken. Diane Arbus killed herself here, Merce Cunningham had his studio here, and the vacuum tube and transistor were invented here.

Today we went to the Met to see the Vermeer show. The Milkmaid is on loan from the Rijksmuseum, so the Met’s gathered together all of their own Vermeers and those of a few of Vermeer’s contemporaries. Seeing his work in the context of his contemporaries makes his paintings all the more magical.

We also saw Robert Frank’s amazing photo series The Americans, and got sidetracked by Egyptian funerary portraits, French deco, Damien Hirst’s shark, and the best spiced apple cupcake with cream cheese frosting.

On the roof, Roxy Paine created a jumble of welded stainless steel tree-like trunks and limbs, meandering all over the roof garden, a glimmering aesthetic briar patch.

Time for a little rest, then back to the city that never seems to sleep.