Category: Art

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The Dating Game: Longing and Photographing

So Lucky Bachelor #13 had no problem around the size issues that I was anxious about. Actually I was kind of disappointed. I had pre-visualized the scene, “No, no, not that, get it away from me–help, help, somebody, help, police!” I wish I could tell you about what he does for a living and all the fascinating details of his job, but he’d get fired, would never talk to me again, have a breakdown and end up living in my basement. No wait, he’d have to get on the waiting list–the last one still hasn’t moved. I can tell you all about the most intimate details of my boring existence because I’m an artist and any controversy could only help further my ambitious 5 Year Plan.

I began photographing my “italian cypress” last week. (3 photos of hairy dude arranged to look like a columnar fastigiate. Remember the Katharine Hepburn interview with Barbara Walters?) I couldn’t find the right kind of point on my furry model for the top of the shrubbery, and he wouldn’t let me photograph the places which would have completed the picture perfectly. Whatever. He’s no longer so easily swayed to follow my commands. Gone are the days of complete subservience to my every aesthetic whim.

This project is a lot more difficult than I had anticipated. Rather than shooting a bunch of images and then assembling them into something–the form appearing out of my shuffling images around–I’ve already designed the final piece and am trying to find the right parts on my model to fit the picture. Poor D has to stand there with his hands over his head, or his leg on a stool, for hours at a time.

Rather than shooting something on D that’s shaped like the top of an italian cypress, I’m draping him in the same background fabric used in the other images in the piece, and kind of creating an area that approximates the same shape. What was the background will now be foreground, and create a kind of tension that’s going to make the piece much more dynamic visually.

For New Year’s Eve I was supposed to go to Bearracuda, but my disco nap gave way to sleep inertia and I ended up watching the fireworks from my window while flossing my teeth in my underwear.

I can’t take another year without a boyfriend. I feel very lost without a mate, yet I guess I’ve progressed to a point where I’m not willing to play house with just the first person–or second or third or fourteenth–who crosses my path. Alas, I keep plugging away… I just want something to feel, I don’t know, worth it all. Not really perfect, just sexually and intellectually challenging enough to warrant the huge chunk of time devoted to avoiding being productive.

I told my Married Man that I needed a break. It’s only been a few days and already he’s asking after me. I needed a break because, well, frankly he’s just so desirable. And so very NOT. He is married after all, so don’t get attached Little Bunny Coco. “Danger, Will Robinson!!” Aren’t there unmarried guys who read, direct plays, have seen Odd Man Out, paint, cook, are totally excited by me, and haven’t made porn films or been the Featured Bottom at some Bear Party Hug Thing?

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Dinner with Emily; The Dating Game: Juicy Forgotten MM#1 Details

Emily treated me to dinner at Chez Panisse Wednesday night, my second such treat in the last two months. While we didn’t get to sit at the Chef’s table, we did enjoy an equally memorable meal upstairs in the Cafe. I had the fixed meal: mixed greens; porcini mushrooms and polenta; ice cream and chocolate sauce. Getting the simplest-sounding dishes is key to understanding what they’re up to over there, and indeed, everything that could have been expressed in a salad of “mixed greens” seduced and wooed my tender taste buds into complete submission to flavor and freshness.

Emily might be showing with me next October at Mark Wolfe. I hope it works out, she’s hot! Her abstractions are painterly in a way that my work isn’t–gestural and worked, all about surface and color–but her use of line and the grid will play nicely against and with what I’m constructing.

So did I tell you? I’m having a solo show next October at Mark Wolfe Contemporary, 49 Geary, 2nd Floor. Mark your calendars! It’s my most ambitious project yet, and it’s going to take me about 8 more months to get it all shot, printed, and framed. The show seeks to expand the current bear stereotype of the Carhart-clad he-man: “tee-hee-heee” instead of “yeaaaaah.” Stay tuned for more details!

Oh. I forgot to mention one of the most memorable things about my recent rendezvous with Married Man #1. Well, it turns out that he’s a bear porn star! I made him turn on one of his movies while we were defiling his marriage bed. Every so often I’d see through a jumble of legs and arms and thises and thatses and see our positions mirrored by what was happening on the screen, like one of those mirrors that replicate their reflections to infinity. He said the same kinds of things that porn stars say, too, like, “Yeah,” and those instructive comments that always crack me up, and of course the astute “you like that blankety-blank, yeah” observations. His star quality was apparent, and with a smoldering kind of warmth and understatement that had me believing everything he said–and clapping!

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Dolls, the Dating Game: #13, MM#1

It’s my yard so I will try hard To welcome friends I’ve yet to know! Oh, I’ll plant my own tree!
My!
Own!
Tree!
And I!
(pause)
Will!
(pause)
Make!
(pause)
It!
(pause)
Grow!

Dean and Doug and Big Chrissy came over for dinner and The Valley of the Dolls Saturday night. Earlier Dean received a favorable but unsurprisingly not-cogent review in Our City’s Paper by Our Big Art Critic. Mr. Critic wrote that, for Dean, “Thinking seems entirely subsidiary to process.” In reality, Dean’s mastery of technique allows him to articulate his ideas through a labor-intensive process that mirrors the complexity of his thinking. Our Critic is smart enough–I should say, learned enough–but he lacks an ability to connect with, or even see, what artists are doing or saying. He consistently compares art to work that’s already been written about–ideas that have already been developed by other writers. If he can’t think of a comparison, he writes stupid shit like that. I love Peter Schjeldahl, who writes for the New Yorker. Not only is he incredibly smart, but he consistently brings his personal experience and biases to everything he writes about.

Anyway, I want my dolls!!!! What a fun movie. I’ve been humming the theme song for days and twirling around my house in a technicolor-infused holiday spirit.

Bachelor #13 has made a few more guest appearances at Casa Coco. I showed him Uncut, not the John Greyson movie, but the stupid Italian penis exploitation-fest. For the entire film, our headless hero tries to get laid, while the camera stays trained on his pee-pee. It’s a nice enough peep to watch, especially his balls going up and down with his changes in vocal intonation. He’s stuck in bed following an accident in which he mangles his leg–his girlfriend is presumed dead, and the police are suspicious–yet his thoughts are solely on getting laid, and every attempt is waylaid in often hilarious situations–and that’s the joy of the film. Unfortunately, it takes a few silly turns that make it one of the dumbest movies I’ve seen. Plus he’s a muff trimmer, and you all know how I feel about that.

Speaking of muff-trimming, #13 spoke favorably of the film’s star’s “haircut,” much to my dismay. Clip your hair below the neck and suffer the consequences, bachelors.

Oddly, I seem to have most in common with Married Man #1. I’ll be seeing him again tomorrow night. He quotes Pinter, reads, knows stuff…

When did I get, where did I
Why am I lost as a lamb
When will I know, where will I
How will I learn who I am
Is this a dream, am I here, where are you
Tell me, when will I know, how will I know
When will I know why?
When will I know why…

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The Dating Game, Maybe, and Anselm Kiefer

So I’m not too sure if last night was a date, but I had a great time a’dining and a’movie-ing with a great fellow. I even got a great kiss at the end of the night, which, for me anyway, was enough to qualify the evening as a bona fide Dating Game episode. We watched Brick, a contemporary noir film set in a southern California high school. The narrative, dialogue, and plot development were straight from Cain and Chandler, and played out in a very straightforward way, with no mannerist or stylistic flourishes, or Shyamalan-esque twists of the genre, other than kids enacting a classic noir tale. A very smart and fun movie.

This morning I woke to an amusing note from a fellow on Bear411: “Let’s keep in touch. We have some similar interests!” I took a gander at his profile… “Sleazy top bear pig into watersports, smokesex, three-ways, groups…” Smokesex? I can’t even imagine what that could be.

A few days ago Dean Smith and I, along with husbear Doug, and niece Jamie, visited the Anselm Kiefer show at SFMoMA. It’s a very powerful show, very beautifully installed, with lots of room to take in these very large works. They’re not just large physically, each is endowed with a heaviness of mood and content. The compositions are fairly uncomplicated, filled with magnificent brush work and dynamic materials. Despite the historical themes, Kiefer is always present as an artist, interpreter, and participant. They’re both grand and personal—like Elizabeth Schwarzkopf singing in your shower. We had an amazing dinner afterwards at Cafe Claude, which has become our little restaurant. I had a salad of greens, potatoes, bacon, and fois gras. Clothespin on aorta! This was followed by a seared tuna chunk swimming in a fabulous sauce of mushroom, cream, bacon again, and something else that overwhelmed the fish but was so delicious I forgot about the fish and just enjoyed it as a medium for carrying the sauce to my mouth. Liquid chocolate cake for dessert. This week’s food theme will be cruciferous and high-fiber.

Tonight I have a date with a gardener bear dude. Oh wait, I forgot to tell you about the little dude at Tower Market yesterday morning. He walked past me as I was making my cheese selection, and stared at me so intensely that I blushed and giggled, embarrassed that I could be the object of such a gaze. He was somehow in all the aisles that I ended up in, that same hungry look, the same blush and giggle, until I finally just walked up to him,

“Hi, I’m Chris.”

“Hey, I’m Chris, too! Are you single?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Oh, I’m not.”

“—-.”

“—-.”

I’m frankly not sure what would have been different if I had responded that I was also unavailable, but I gave him my card, anyway. He’s so cute! The kind of cute that hurts. And topples presidencies.

**Brring**

**Brring**

So that was Gardener Bear Dude, canceling. He’s sick. What to do tonight?

The adventure continues…

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My Day Without Art

Today is the Day Without Art, the day of action and mourning in response to the AIDS epidemic. It’s also Manny’s birthday–or would have been his birthday. We were together for 8 years, until he died of AIDS complications in 1992, making me a widower at 28. I’ve mentioned him many times over the years, since but a wee LJ laddy, and despite all the friends and lovers that I’ve lost, his death remains the most significant, the most disruptive and powerful event in my life–the knowledge that we lumps of carbon are so briefly animated, and then so completely disintegrate into absolute nothingness. I didn’t know what nothingness was, what being alone really meant or felt like. When I go to his grave, I don’t talk to him, or imagine that he can hear me, or that he’s waiting for me in some white cloud-filled hotel suite–I think of his beautiful body turning to dust below me, and how disorienting it is that I can still hear him calling my name, laughing. I close my eyes and feel him blowing in my ear, touching my cheek. Nothing remains of him, just what’s locked in my head, for me. Todays’ the day that I celebrate his birth, his life, and grieve what has been taken away from all of us so prematurely and so cruelly.

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Excuses and Recommendations

Although my life seems very full of activity and experience, I haven’t felt much of an urge to document it lately. Frankly, this single crap is the bunk. No matter what I tell myself, or you, I loathe the serenity that has settled on my home–everything orderly and predictable, low calorie, high fiber. Productive. I’d shuck it all for a furry femme-bear slobbering on my pillow right now.

In two days I turn 41. Prostate enlargement and cholesterol loom ominously over my psychic life.

Go see Dean Smith and Gay Outlaw’s show at Paule Anglim. Dean’s obsessively beautiful lines and liquid circles on paper play wonderfully against Gay’s pocked and probed 3-dimensional surfaces. Get thee to the gallery.

Of the billion movies that I’ve seen since my last entry, I highly recommend I Am a Sex Addict, by local filmmaker Caveh Zahedi, an exhilaratingly funny, inventive, and often squeamish comedy about the filmmaker’s obsession with prostitutes; and À Nos Amours, Sandrine Bonnaire’s extraordinary film debut as a 15 year old girl exploring sex and avoiding love in a story that seems drawn from real life, defying all cinematic narrative convention or cliche.

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Dean and Konrad Present

Dean and Konrad put together a knockout lineup of films tonight, presented to an intimate gathering of art world glitterati in Dean’s studio in Oakland. They ranged from a Melies film of 1906 to an Eric Saks film of just a few years ago, to Dean’s own film–from, what, yesterday?–all bound together by a use of animation or collage. Bill Morrison re-edited a deteriorating silent film from 1926, starring Boris Karlov and Lionel Barrymore, narrative intact, but with a level of physical disintegration that bordered on abstraction, parts of the film like looking in a funhouse mirror, or watching a movie while your house is on fire. There were a few films from the 50’s, cacophonous unions of image and be-bop, precursors to those iTunes effects, but hand-drawn, meticulous, gestural, like cool daddy-o. One of them, called Bop Scotch, fused images of sidewalks, terrazzo, concrete, stone, turning the ground we walk on into a crazy visual poem, man! Crazy!

Dean’s film was the most challenging for me. He made it with Bob, that is, former Mrs. Me, Bob, with whom I’m on very good terms I’m happy to report, but somehow his voice bugged me. Dean’s imagery was fabulous, culled and cropped from classic porn films, and kneaded into a narrative already so complex that Bob’s voice just bugged me, overcomplicating an experience that I was happy having without him. When his words were seen as text, against black, no other imagery, then it worked for me. His writing is so complicated, and so much about a clanging clashing commingling of words, that the clanging and clashing going on with Dean’s imagery was just too much stimulation. In the spirit of the evening’s entertainment, I’m going to mentally re-make Dean’s film and gag Bob and insert inter-titles of Bob’s text, white on black.

Prior to the screening, I chatted with a rather distinguished collector of my work who mentioned that recently, while entertaining a male visitor, the kind of visitor who receives compensation for visiting, on the way to the washroom noticed a piece of mine hanging in the hallway and asked, “Is that a ‘Chris Komater?'” I told him to tell him I work for trade…

—Image from Bill Morrison’s The Mesmerist (2003)

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Showtime, Tut, Helen Keller Mole, Kiss Me Kate

I’ve started sending out packets to galleries, feeling good about my new work and ready to work with a new dealer. I got a nibble from one of the 49 Geary dealers, who wants to meet with me and discuss a proposal for an installation. It’s in THE coolest space in the building, so I’m pretty psyched. Cross your fingers, pray to Allah, light a candle… I’m already thinking of doing some super gigantic piece that covers an entire wall, my obsession writ large, but of course accompanied by gorgeous and affordable little things. I tend to work better once I’ve established a structure or context for my art, and this space is a humdinger, so the creaky wheels of my creativity are turning once again.

Big Chrissy flew out to Chicago with me last week, for my cousin Dawn’s wedding, and to visit his family. We saw the King Tut show at the Field Museum. At one point I got choked up, remembering how I had ached to see the Tut show when it came to the US in the 70’s but had to settle for the National Geographic issue and the Steve Martin ’45. Aside from the elegance and intricate beauty of the objects, there was also a simplicity, in either expression or execution that touched me, particularly a portrait bust of Nefertiti that captured nobility, humanity and godliness, all at once, voluptuously. Seeing the various little sarcophogi for this pharoah’s viscera and that pharoah’s organs, I thought how sad it was that the egyptians spent so much time and energy preparing for an afterlife in Chicago.

We had a few good meals out, no Alinea this time, but one memorable meal at a Mexican restaurant in Boy’s Town, or whatever they call the gay ghetto over there. Oh, and the boys are pretty hot. Like milk-fed steak-eating hot. Anyway, I had the chicken mole, and the sauce, in the dim light of the restaurant, was so black that no light was reflected. A dark plate was set in front of me on the table and I couldn’t see anything in it, only empty nothingness, which I prodded with a fork until I found chicken. It was like Hellen Keller’s trip to Mexico.

Katherine Hepburn was interviewed by Dick Cavett tonight on TCM. It was her first televised interview, from 1973. I’ve been watching the Cavett interviews and they’re fascinating. He chats with these stars for a full hour each. You feel like you really get to know them, relaxing into normalness with them. Hepburn was an amazing contrast to Bette Davis, interviewed a few weeks ago. While Davis seemed fully aware and in control of being and being seen as an icon, speaking cleverly and wittily, and clearly to future biographers, Hepburn seemed like somebody totally enmeshed in family life, just a lucky dame who made movies for a living, oblivious to being one of the greatest actresses of the 20th Century, her legs spread apart, one propped up on a table, hair a mess. At the end of the hour, Cavett started to say that the interview was coming to an end and Kate just hopped up and said “Okay, bye,” and ran off the set. Cavett didn’t even have time to finish his sentence. As he pleaded, stunned, asking “Aren’t you going to wait while I…?” she paused for a moment and said, “No, you take it from here,” and disappeared behind a curtain with a quick wave. He just looked at the camera and mumbled something about the interview continuing with Part 2 next week… Can’t wait!

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Summertime pictures

Here we are, leaves falling all around us, the last of the heirloom tomatoes ripening on our window sills… I thought I’d share some photos of a few of my summer-time adventures as we head into the fall and tanlines start to fade.

The summer began with a solo show at Meridian Gallery, “Spring,” in conjunction with a solo show of Dean Smith’s recent films. I previewed some new work, 10 color photos of plum blossoms, hung in a single row. I paired them with a grid of testicles,Symplegades, named after the clashing rocks that Jason and the Argonauts had to navigate in their quest for the Golden Fleece. 12 tiny speakers hung on an advacent wall, each played the sound of a man breathing, like flowers sprouting from the gallery floor, boy bees doing their thing. The dating game was in full swing, love was in the air…

For the 4th of July, I drove up the coast with Bachelor #8, staying in a former boys’ school about 20 miles north of Jenner. Isolated, just the sounds of peacocks–what is that sound called, that “pk-KAW pk-KAW?”–and the ocean… a Quinn Martin production of a contemporary gothic romance…

D and I visited his mom in Reno, taking side trips to Virginia City–a Silver Era town preserved in aspic and salt-water taffy–and Carson City for the museum, which has great dioramas and presentations about the history of the area, and an actual fake mine below the museum!

I mentioned my trip to Alabama and Florida to hang and sweat with the folks and sibs. I didn’t tell you about the annual ball-races that are held in my sister, Carol’s pool, of which I am reigning champion. The goal is to ride a pilates ball as far as one can across the pool without falling off. I’ve made it 3/4 of the way with my deceptively spastic frantic leg and arm waving technique. It’s not as easy as I make it look.

My little brother Mark turned 40 last month. We’re now the same age until November. He was like my twin growing up, we were in the same grade and everything. His buddies threw a big party that went until 6 in the morning, a rollicking affair with a “roast” by his friends, dancing and much merrymaking. Here we are as kids, the sheik and the clown, and below are pictures of us at 40…
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SFMoMA, Tomatsu, Davide

Dean Smith and I met last night for a very thorough tour of Matthew Barney’s installation at SFMoMA. We really put a lot into it. His work demands it. It takes and takes, asking so much of its viewer, and at times seemed worth the investment. Otherwise, if you’re not willing to read about what he’s up to, or call the special cellphone hotline at various points in the museum, the work itself doesn’t seem to contain or convey much about experience or form. Sometimes the sheer theatricality or spectacle, or ambition, is thrilling, but I don’t know, sometimes it seems like he just needs a good editor. Like ditch the photo stills from the films. The films are great, but the stills don’t extend the narrative or experience, they just locate the work as a capitalist venture, okay, consistent with his underlying themes, but if I were the King of the World, I’d strip it all down. I bumped in Jonathan Katz and suggested that Barney should really make a gay porn film to end his career–all this struggle building up to some revelatory Man-on-Man action. Björk and the kids can sing at the commitment ceremony. I see blubber, lots of slippery blubber.

I’d really never think of re-imagining someone else’s work, or sexual idenity, but my obsessive compulsive side just can’t take it when I get near a Matthew Barney.

Downstairs, one is treated to remarkable photos from Japanese post-war photographer, Shomei Tomatsu. This is what inspired my Barney rant–his work is so moving, and like, there, in the image, contained within the frame. The content and formal qualities support and extend each other. The images are of the effects of the atomic bomb, the influence of American military and pop culture, and the impact of the Japanese economic boom–quietly powerful works that stand in stark contrast to the grand empty gestures upstairs.

Tonight Davide came over for L’Avventura. Rather than focus on the isolation, desolation, and impotence of the characters, I got lost in Monica Vitti’s hair–the way it reflects light, defies gravity–kinetic and wild, yet always with form and visual dazzle. It deserves its own Special Mention at the Cannes Film Festival.