Dean Smith and I went to Audium Friday night. Audium is an immersive sound experience, performed every Friday and Saturday night by Stan Shaff. It’s been around in its current incarnation since 1975, and you can feel the influence of the popular culture of the time–from the biomorphic sculptures lining the entrance foyer, to the Logan’s Run-inspired architecture. Stan is a kind and dedicated soul who is passionate about sculpting space with sound. He uses the term “cutting edge” a lot. In the foyer, one hears a clock ticking away and birds chirping around the room. The experience of the birds hovers between an acoustic representation of them in space to an awareness of sound being manipulated between the speakers, not quite locating the sound in reality. From the foyer, one passes through a wooden-beamed arch and into a sound labyrinth. The sounds of gurgling water guided us through the labyrinth and into the dimly-lit main theater. The theater is like the inside of a flying saucer, vintage 1975, with a domed suspended ceiling. 169 speakers are embedded in the sloping walls and suspended floor, or hang from the ceiling. Stan conducts from a pulpit-like incision in the wall. Gradually the lights are dimmed, the water volume turned up, and suddenly it’s like being in the basement of Wendy Carlos’ beach house–moog synthesizer melodies, tweeting birds, the pounding surf, even a kitty cat… all these sounds give form to the darkened space and our sight-deprived imaginations.
Hell, Champagne, Family Visits, Art Shows
Lately, when I’ve thought that maybe putting some stones in my pocket and walking into the Pacific would be easier than trying to get a New York show, my vision of hell pops up and steers me away from the water. I’ve never gone for those visions of hell that include fire and screaming naked people. In mine, all of my close friends, family, teachers, favorite writers and directors–all of us would be forced to watch my life projected in its unedited entirety on hell’s big movie screen. And the seats would be just like the SF Opera House balcony–all cramped and everybody’s elbows jabbed into the sides of their neighbors. There I’d be picking my nose, singing off key in the car, doing things in the bathroom I never imagined being seen—in Cinemascope. I could see Preston Sturges in the audience laughing at my first date, Einstein getting excited by my posing in the mirror, my mother weeping silently. Not that I believe in hell, or heaven, really. Well, maybe, it’s just all that Catholic indoctrination. Somewhere in the back of my head it’s still there, preventing me from answering the call of the waves. It’s ambition, albeit a very lazy ambition, as well as my fear of Hell’s Cineplex, this belief that this something that I have to say hasn’t found the right place yet, or a prospective buyer. They’re out there, though, and I’m still looking.
Speaking of… I saw Connie Champagne a few weeks ago, with my friend Doug. She performed as Judy Garland at the Columbarium, surrounded by adoring gay men and the ashes of their buddies. Convinced and confused by her illusion, guys kept periodically yelling “We love you, Judy!” Sincerely. She went through most of the standard Judy tunes, but knocked our socks off with a version of “Bohemian Rhapsody” that captured all of Judy’s mannerisms and quirks in a performance that was also pure bubbly Connie Champagne.
Big Chrissy and I played in the snow a few weeks ago, too, flying out to visit his family in the Quad Cities, Midwest. I don’t see how people can complain about snow, it’s the most beautiful thing to see.
My sisters visited for the New Year holiday, all of them, and Carol’s husband, Bruce, and mother-in-law, Margaret. Margaret took me and the Underbears out one night to Range, just her and the boys. I had this roasted chicken that was like something that made me believe we were in heaven right then and there. The skin was like paper, really good-tasting chicken-flavored paper, and the meat like butter. Margaret was the best house guest ever. She preferred the heat turned down really low most of the time, unlike every other person her age, and she kept buying me things and taking me out for expensive meals. We’d go out to a really expensive nursery to look at pots, I’d say, “Wow, isn’t that really expensive terra cotta sculptured pot amazing?” and the next thing I knew she was at the cash register getting it rung up.
Hiroshi Sugimoto curated two of my favorite shows of last year, both at the Asian Art Museum, and still up to see. One is called “A History of History,” and includes highly refined objects, mostly Japanese antiques, from 500,000,000 years ago to the recent present, fossils that he relates to photography in that they were the first things to capture and preserve the essence of something once alive, a Nara period scroll in platinum and silver ink on indigo-dyed paper, with the entire bottom burned off that he unraveled and mounted on beautiful paper, his own photographs, one seascape arranged to be seen inverted through a Kamakura-era miniature pagoda that he’s retrofitted with a glass sphere–things that make thinking visible, he says. The other show is a display of avant-garde Japanese couture dresses, some of which he’s photographed, a few of the photos shown alongside the actual dresses. The dresses are all sculptural wrappings for the female form that seem drawn from history and science fiction–a dress that could also be a chair, a contemporary knit outfit with a tube-like bustle, another stuffed with padding to deform and disguise the body.
Speaking of galleries, I finally shlepped over to Margaret Tedesco’s 2nd Floor Projects gallery, in her apartment on 25th Street. Everyone should go, it’s a great space, intimate. One could say homey. Jill Miller was showing a body of work created as a result of the surveillance of several local collectors. She studied with a real private eye to prepare for the project, and the installation looked like something a real private investigator would have set up in his 25th Street Mission apartment. Jill was there, just absolutely gorgeous. I thought that she looked more like the person cast as the artist in the movie about her than the artist herself. The project seemed like a way of entrapping collectors into engaging with her work, very little of them actually revealed. We all do our best to get them to come see our shows–Jill printed a tabloid with pictures of them under surveillance and sent it to them, inviting them to see the show. Good for her.
More updates later…
The Happy Coco, Lost Rhoades, Webs, Nancy and Karen
This year has been tremendously satisfying creatively, but disappointing in most other of life’s departments. Well, it is time to put that all behind me and shove ahead, to end this cycle of dashed hopes, unrealistic expectations, and intense longing, to slap a smile on my face and let the song in my heart behold your adorable faces.
I read in the New York Times that Jason Rhoades died, some time last year and I must have missed the obituary. Jason was this really interesting creator of messy sprawling installations who went to the Art Institute when I did–I remember giving him a show when I ran the student gallery there. Unlike me, he had a really big career and died at 41. Reading of his death was like a kick in the pants–at least I’m alive and can still create and there’s the possibility that some day someone will buy it and more than 200 people might see it. My quest now is to find the right gallery to place it, in New York or Europe and good luck Little Bunny Coco. Do you know of any successful gallerists out there who have hairy chubby mates and watch blurry old movies? Those are the ones I need to go after…
I’m starting an ambitious new project, based on the theme of the “web.” I’ve been photographing spider webs, but will develop an installation that includes them and images of light passing through dewy body hair–science fiction, sexual fantasy, both? I’m intrigued by the idea of light falling on these delicate things, the magical wispiness of body hair that’s attached to these massive heavy forms, and the various traps and sensual signifiers that both represent, reducing the photographic image to just light and what happens to it as it bounces off and is enmeshed by each. I’ve also settled into an embrace of a kind of non-linear narrative, tossing disparate images and sounds together, bound really by the theme of my desire, to create an immersion into my sensual life–but framed and all pretty.
I’ve let go of the husband search for now. Omigod, the last guy I went out with sent naked pictures of himself to just about everyone I know, or have ever encountered, or heard of, casting his net so widely that I’m embarrassed by the seriousness with which I greeted his seemingly sincere appeals for my affection. I guess it’s normal to do this nowadays, expose yourself completely to the world in the hopes that someone will nibble. I’m done with the nibblers and for now, I’m through with love. I’ll never fall again. Said adieu to love, Don’t ever call again. For I must have you or no one, And so I’m through with love. Well, through for now. Today, that is.
Nancy Sinatra’s album How Does That Grab You makes me so happy. I don’t know what’s happening to me. I’m also listening to the Carpenters and totally loving them. Before Toddy Haynes’ film, they represented a kind of escapist alternate late-60’s/early 70’s universe–they and the Brady Bunch–that I felt no connection to or interest in. Now I hear Karen Carpenter’s velvety voice and the Carpenter’s simple but sophisticated arrangements and I am whisked away into their smooth comforting universe.
Something in the wind has learned my name
And it’s tellin me that things are not the same.
In the leaves on the trees and the touch of the breeze
There’s a pleasin’ sense of happiness for me.
There is only one wish on my mind:
When this day is through I hope that I will find
That tomorrow will be just the same for you and me.
All I need will be mine if you are here…
Last Chance!
Okay, SF friends, today’s the last day to see my show. It actually closed yesterday, but the gallery will be open today at 11, until I get there at 1:30 to take it down, so if you think you missed it, think again! Spend only half the day without art!
Come on down, Mark Wolfe Contemporary Arts, 49 Geary, 2nd Floor…
The Dating Game: Another One From Los Angeles
This morning I had breakfast with a guy who stirred that stupid part of me that I’ve been trying to calm since age 8. I was so overwhelmed by hormones and endorphins that I consciously had to not say “I’ve fallen in love with you” as we got up to settle the check. We’ve been chatting online for a few months now, he’s up from southern California for the weekend. (Yes, another one.) This morning’s breakfast was our first contact without computer screens between us. I’m salivating as I write this, a sudden hunger for his flesh, to lick the nape of his neck… I feel so victimized by evolution, by the years and years of subtle mutations that have resulted in the synaptic and hormonal storm that is raging in my body right now–and just to produce a few involuntary muscular contractions. Did anyone see La Grande Bouffe? It’s a story about several men who get together for a weekend to eat themselves to death. I could imagine our relationship following a similar narrative trajectory, the two of us collapsing from our inability to quell our insatiable hunger for each other. Despite my attempts at restraint I blurted out, “I think you’re just adorable” as I hugged him goodbye. For one second I didn’t feel in my life anymore, but in the big-budget romantic comedy version of it and I was Meg Ryan and the camera was circling around us as we kissed and I had finally arrived in the scene that I’d been preparing for all my life. I didn’t kiss him, the world stopped spinning, he walked off toward his destination without uttering “Coco, I think you’re adorable, too!” and I got in the CocoMobile and sped off into the gray day.
Other than meeting the Man of My Dreams, the weekend has been busy with visiting parents and sisters, my brother’s turducken, chipped dishes, Grace Cathedral, butter, a really good turkey pot pie last night, and Bob’s mom’s visit–all the exes giggling and hunkered down with Bob’s tarte tatin. I’ve had a birthday since my last entry. I’m now 42. Gloeden came to town from Chicago and charmed us with his intelligence and wit–Resse, especially. Reese told me later that he wanted him to move to San Francisco and go to his school and be his best friend. My show closes on Friday. No reviews, no sales. My next show will be in a padded cell with me the only audience.
My soon-to-be 80-year old mom asked the now 14-year old Reese if he had any girlfriends. “It’s complicated,” Reese replied. He went on to tell my mom about a schoolmate who had recently asked if he was interested in being her “friend-with-benefits” which segued into a conversation about how his friend could only be bisexual if she had produced orgasms with another girl. Reese insists on specificity in sexual matters.
Maybe when they release Max Ophüls on dvd will I find true happiness. Or if some money gets dumped in my lap–I know what to buy to make me happy. You’re all wrong and so are all of my therapists: I’m not the only person who can make me happy. It’s that guy from Southern California.
It’s a Small (Art) World
I logged onto DaddyHunt this morning to find an electronic “grope” from this smiley geeky chubby guy who has groped me many times before, but I decided on a whim not to ignore him again and to check him out–maybe he’ll be more appealing this month. In one picture of him in his bathroom, flexing his muscles like a circus strong man, there are photographs on the wall that look a lot like—Jumpin Jehosaphat, they ARE my work!! Two blurry plum blossoms and two blurry chest hair swirls from my 1997 installation Night of the Hunter! I immediately fired off a note thanking him for the grope and for supporting my work and invited him to see my show, up now through November 30 at Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art. This all sounds like the makings of a really great Judd Apatow–or David Cronenberg–film, with us at the end walking hand in hand at the mall or me splattered on the floor of the Kabuki Hot Springs having been swindled by the Eastern European art mafia. Hey, if it means another sale, I’ll do what I have to do. More later, as Collector Chub responds!
Coco’s Endless Opening
Okay, Cats and Kittens, tonight is First Thursday, the night that the downtown galleries stay open late. Mark Wolfe is going to be open until 8, so if you missed my opening reception last week, come tonight! 49 Geary, 2nd Floor. Here’s a link to some pictures that the wonderful fellows at ArtBusiness.com took at the opening (scroll down past the LincArt opening to get to my show at Mark Wolfe)… See you there!
Photo © Alan Bamberger ArtBusiness.com
Saturday Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner Dates
My breakfast date was sent straight from Central Casting—“Coco’s Dreamboat.” He lives in Southern California and came up to SF for a few days. We had met and chatted online only a few weeks prior to his trek northward. He stopped by my opening Thursday night and while smushing me between himself and Abearius in a Coco Sandwich, asked me to breakfast Saturday. He reminds me of the giant stuffed teddy bear that my kindergarten teacher let us all play on during recess—only he was all mine and I didn’t have to share him with all of those squealing tots. I fell in love. Really, I would have married him. Right then and there. We talked and talked, of ideas and music and art and infectious disease. I giggled like a girl, sappy music played in the background, the world was in soft focus, we embraced… and then off he drove to San Jose for his lunch date.
My lunch date was the terrorist that I told you guys about a few weeks ago—the one whom I thought had read Naguib Mahfooz and seemed to have a good head on his furry shoulders? Well, he not only adores Edina Monsoon, he aspires, unironically, to be her. He picked me up at lunch time to grab a bite before heading out to see my show. He had led me to believe that he was interested in buying my work. In the car, he asked me for a recommendation for his new car—a Maserati or a BMW? “I can spend up to a hundred.” I assumed that he didn’t mean $100, which is closer to what friends of mine have to spend on cars. He said that since his brother-in-law has a Hummer and his sister a BMW, and in his business he needs to drive something appropriate for his position, he needed to buy a gas-guzzling power symbol to display his status. I had thought he was just a bottom.
I was still trying tactfully to educate him on the great opportunity to educate his own circle about our responsibility to our environment and ending our dependence on foreign oil when he blurted out excitedly that he was about to set up production in China on a product that he was getting made for a fraction of the price that it would cost to be made here, “Dahling.” My mouth just dropped to the floor. Here I was with this person who represented everything that is wrong with the world. “Do you know what the real cost of production is in getting something made cheaply in China,” I asked? “I can just replace incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents, ride the streetcar downtown, and recycle, but you, you can make a real difference….” but I was cut off again. “Dahling, look at that gorgeous little converrrrtible over therrrrre.” I gave up.
At my show, he basically said that he didn’t understand it. He even pointed to the pretty paintings in the back room, “Now that’s art!” He actually said that. On the way back to the car, we walked by one of those dreadful 3-story antique emporiums on Grant Street. A few days ago, Big Chris had asked me, “Could you imagine anyone actually buying anything there?” Well, my little terrorist pulled me over to the window to show me a giant carved quartz eagle, wings spread over a cloisonne globe. “I bought a much larger verrrrsion of this a few years ago. Don’t you love it?” “Well, there is a place for it.”
Finally on the road back to my house, he said, “Dahling, I know something’s wrrrong, what is it? Arrre you okay?” I was thinking “How did I get to this place in my life, with this wretched person? How can humanity be saved?” Instead I smiled and said, “Oh, it’s just having my show up and having worked so hard on it, I’m just a bit exhausted…” blah blah blah. He touched my hand and squeezed it. “I really like spending time with you, Chrrrris.” My “goodbye” has never held such finality.
I had but a few hours to recuperate before dinner with my third date of the day, my Paris Hilton. Seeing his hybrid pull up to my house set my mind at ease, and we motored with a minimal impact on San Francisco’s fragile ecosystem to catch Dan in Real Life. Mick Lasalle, the Chronicle critic–whom he knows, of course–had raved about how inventive the film was, but at every inventive moment, the film steered right back into familiar territory and ended exactly as it was supposed to and the way we all figured it would. It was a fun film, sure, and well-acted, but inventive?
We held hands in the movie, had sushi afterward, and then made out back at the Coco Pad, but I was still too emotionally exhausted from my show opening and my lunch date with the eco-terrorist to let lips or hands stray too haphazardly into any belted or zippered erogenous zones from which there would be no return. We chatted and kissed, chatted and kissed, chatted and kissed. Famous locals kept slipping off his tongue. I’m usually so compelled towards completing a pass that I had to keep thinking up new ways to avoid going to second base. “I’m thirsty, would you like anything to drink?” “I have to pee.” “Is Steve Carell just really good at being depressed or is he a truly versatile actor?” “Are Anna Paquin and Alison Pill the same person?” “Have you packed for your trip yet?” …”Um, Chris, do you realized that you’re talking to me while my tongue is in your mouth?” Finally, he got it and left, his shirt untucked and covering any embarrassing displays of intention as he lumbered down the stairs, and I fell onto my bed… zzzzz.
Pizza, Tales, Gigggles, 21 Year Olds
Can there be a better pizza in town than Little Star? (I’m talking deep dish here.) The crust is like running through the corn fields at dawn with nothing on except a chopped tomato and mozarella blanket. I had 4 pieces last night–half of a large pie. Since Viccolo closed, I’ve been in pizza limbo, yet Little Star is a little slice of heaven right here in San Francisco.
Reese and BC and I have been watching “Tales of the City” on Friday nights. Reese gets kind of bored and starts doing contortions on the floor, and covers his eyes during the nudes scenes. When it was broadcast originally on Channel 9 (the year Reese was born, I keep telling him) I remember they used some sort of optical zoom to crop the nude parts out. Reese resists his time as much as we yearned for it.
I finished my sound piece for my show yesterday. It’s an hour of me giggling, that I plan to play as a loop during the course of the show. I love the idea of it catching, and everybody giggling at my opening. Since I’ve never sold a sound piece, I plan to distribute free CDs, “Chris Komater Giggling,” at the opening, so you can giggle along with me in the privacy of your own home and think of my furry flowers. And for nothing!
I have a 21 year old chasing after me. A 21 year old. I keep telling him that my stepson has more in common with him, and that he should chase after his boyfriend, the one he already has. That seems to turn him on more, my repeated rejections. And he keeps asking for pictures. Like everytime I see him online, “Do you have any pics?” I don’t get it. And he’s always always horny. What is that nogoodnick boyfriend for? I tell him, more or less, look, grasshopper, we’ll have a few laughs, and then what? I’ve had my laughs, I want a boyfriend, you already have one, now scram. “lol, UR hot!”
I’m Going to Write About Something Other Than Men or Flowers Someday
There are about two more weeks before my solo show opens. I’ve never been so nervous about a show before. It’s all up there, my obsession, my avoidance, my garden, my flowers, my dying plum tree, how I’ve tried to carve a Cinemascope experience out of what’s in my backyard and bed… I’ve tried to make things pretty, D’s big butt, Chrissy’s crack, to impose order on the romantic chaos that feeds and propels my desire and expression. Is anybody going to see anything? Feel anything? Will anybody buy it? Write about it? Stay tuned!
