Category: Friends

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Di-Di Turns 5-0

Last night we celebrated my sister Diane’s 50th birthday. Princess DiDi threw herself a Hawaii 5-0 party, and asked everyone to bring Hawaiian attire and food. I went as the Professor from Gilligan’s Island, my logic being that since the Minnow launched from Hawaii, that the Hawaii 5-0 guys would have been looking for me. Okay, I don’t have a Hawaiian shirt or a grass skirt, although I did end up in one somehow at one point, so I had to push into earlier syndication. I met a wonderful couple from New York, a photographer, Bev, and a film editor, Donna, who are friends with the woman who is letting me housesit for her next month. A small world indeed. Among Diane’s many former boyfriends in attendance, my favorite was there (not pictured), a cute balding guy with a pot belly–yes, he should have been mine instead of Diane’s. There must be some genetic predisposition towards pudge that Didi and I share. Reese juggled outside, landscape artist/beargod Cevan beguiled inside, at one point someone yelled, “I get it–it’s the Professor from Gilligan’s Island!,” and much fun was had by all ’til the wee small hours of the morning…
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A Few Days in the Life

SATURDAY
BC and I took a break from our break and went to Yerba Buena and SFMoMA Saturday. We are like barnacles, indeed. There are some intriguing sculptures on display by Wang Du at YBCA, based on images taken from magazines and newspapers–a sculpture of a person, for instance will have the head cropped off and the forehead exaggerated, like in a newspaper. This kind of rendering in 3-dimensions of 2-dimensional representations of 3-dimensional space was very cleverly done, but didn’t move me quite like the nearby sculptures by Cornelia Parker, of charred fragments from two churches that had burned down: one a white church destroyed by lightning; and one a black church destroyed by arson. The fragments were hung from wire, separated and arranged in a cube-shaped configuration, the charred remnants of these violent actions re-organized into a beautiful and haunting presence in rational space.

SFMoMA has some humdingers on display upstairs, including some fabulous new work. I could stand for hours in front of Vija Celmins’ work. One, a painting of stars, and the other, of waves on the ocean, are so visually spare yet contain such profound serenity and beauty. Wangechi Mutu’s installation and collages were breathtakingly beautiful and unsettling. I was completely inspired and want to make work that is breathtakingly beautiful and unsettling. She is my new hero.

After bonding with the Vulva School at Kiki Smith’s show, and then getting to know Chuck Close’s nose hairs too intimately, we decided to save the Earthquake and Richard Long shows for later.

Later that night I picked up Hong-Xi and drove over to Nick & Jeff for a grand hot pot celebration to usher in the Year of the Dog.  Kiltbear was there, and was as cute as ever. Arf! Arf! Hong-Xi drank too much, the first time I’ve ever seen her drunk in the 20 years that I’ve known her.

SUNDAY
After dim sum with my dumpling Dean, Philip and I went to look at a house in Sea Cliff. Built in 1970 by Bruce Heiser, the house is like an elegant mod kwanset hut, with a wall of glass facing the street, an open floor plan with one level suspended above the center of the grand central space, visual themes of lines and curves that appear throughout the house as a curved wall of brick or a row of yellow glass panels, a tiny raised garden that you cross a sort of moat to get to, and a downstairs den with a wall of glass that is curtained by a waterfall descending from the moat above. It was nice imagining living in our mid-Century dream pad with our Tony Duquette furniture and Laurel lamps, descending the yellow shag carpeted spiral staircase to greet Goldie Hawn and Julie Christie in our matching Pucci scarves and Mennen Dry Looks.

MONDAY
Les and I took in a double header at the Balboa Monday night: a film about Cartier-Bresson; and one of the most interesting films of the year thus far, called William Eggleston: In the Real World. Isabelle Huppert appeared in the Cartier-Bresson film, among other artists and glitteratti, a gorgeous and smart French windbag, leafing through a book of his pictures, making wonderfully overwrought, gushy, and insightful statements about the images. The Eggleston film knocked my socks off. You get to follow around this brilliant artist and see his process, how he looks at everything, drawing our attention to the beauty in every single thing in sight. At the end of the film, the filmmaker tries to engage him in a discussion about dreams and representation, and Egggleston just says no, he doesn’t think like that, no, doesn’t see it quite like that–a man who sees and creates with his eyes and body with no need to distill meaning beyond what’s been seen and represented. In one amazing scene, he’s at the home of a young woman, at night, she’s in jammies and he’s sketching while she blabs on and on with music blaring and him occasionally mumbling something in acknowledgment or disagreement. There’s an understood intimacy between the two that’s never discussed and we’re never quite let in on. We already know he’s married–is this a lover? A daughter? It’s as interesting as his work, and functions in exactly the same way–no context, only intensity and strange beauty cropped from what’s been stumbled across.

TUESDAY
Davide came over last night and we watched Hinokio, a Japanesse film about a boy confined to his room following a car accident. Having lost his mom in the wreck, he blames his dad and refuses to leave the room or continue with his rehab. In a twist of the Pinocchio story, his dad builds a robot that goes to school for him, but that is controlled by the boy from a virtual control center in his room. It’s a very sweet and easy film about a boy who learns to live and love again with the help of Japanese electronics.

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Monte Rio, High Anxiety

BC and I went up to the Russian River this weekend, holing up in Monte Rio, Vacation Wonderland. The river was all swollen and muddy, the Rio Theater played Rent all weekend, and a new wine shoppe opened up right across the street. BC was a total wuss about hiking after the rain, but the weather was so beautiful and the scenery so breathtaking that I forced him to march up a hill near Goat Rock and enjoy the scenery. He seemed very relieved that the hill had a top, and was much more pleasant for the 20 foot descent back to the CocoMobile.

Big Chrissy contemplates the Little Chrissy… or is that him, too?

At lunch, there was a totally cute couple, one considerably older and heavier than his muscly young companion. They both wore wedding rings, had matching shoes inappropriate for Sonoma County, and moved through the restaurant without speaking. One ordered lunch and carried it to the table, and the other grabbed the flatware and poured milk and sugar into each of their coffees. Their roles were highly organized and developed with no verbal communication. It was so entertaining just watching them and their deep, calm connectedness. The older dude would occasionally throw his arms around his young mate, completely adoring him, while the younger dude continued with his lunch, acknowledging the embrace as a tolerable inconvenience, seemingly uncomfortable with the public display of affection, but obviously happy to be adored.

Yesterday I received an e-mail from one of my best friends in Alabama. She had inadvertently sent an earlier e-mail about seeing Brokeback Mountain, intended for me, to her sister. Her sister is a fundamentalist Christian who takes the Bible seriously. In the e-mail she described her longing for the kind of desire and intensity shared by Jack and Ennis. (She’s married with kids, but is openly, if not practically, bisexual.) Her sister, who is a lovely person, replied that she had never heard of the movie, was sad that the film made my friend feel so unsatisfied, and that she dislikes Hollywood for making films that are so unrealistic. It struck me that my friend was describing the exact same kind of longing experienced by Jack and Ennis, and how constrained each was by the desire to conform–well, or by the fear of the consequences of not conforming. The sister’s Biblical version of reality couldn’t allow her to even see my friend’s pained reality, which is right up there on the big screen. It’s her story. Just without a Jack(lyn) Twist.

The past few days have been a little rough. I haven’t been sleeping. I woke up early Saturday morning and looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize the person looking at me, frightened by the weary visage of someone I didn’t know. The person was so needy, anxious and fragile. And 40.

Sunday I was up all night. I lost 7 pounds. I should really start a fad diet, “Loco Coco’s High Anxiety Weight Loss Plan.” I spent last night alone again, and came to a few conclusions: I don’t like feeling so anxious about things that I have no control over; I can be more in control of what I need to be happy. Details to come, but I’m feeling much better today, and happy to see the clouds parting. My mid-life crisis seems to be less a single event than a series of inter-connected mini-crises, kind of like a cold you can’t shake. A-CHOO!

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From Out of the Past, and an RGB Update

So yesterday I get a call. It’s Henry, a friend of mine from Amsterdam, who says he’s at the corner of 18th and Castro can he come up and say hi.

Henry is a cute Dutch truck driver who first appeared on my doorstep about 20 years ago, asking as I opened the door, “Are you Hans VdH’s friend, Chris? He said I can stay here…” Well, he was awfully sweet, so I let him stay a few nights and then asked my friend Augustine if he could stay with him for a while. Augustine replied, “Only if he fucks me,” which I didn’t relay to Henry but sent him off to Augustine’s where they ended up having a steamy affair and I got to focus on whatever it was that was preventing me from wanting the same from our 6’5″ friend. Yesterday we spent a nice afternoon reminiscing about Augustine and talking about his recent trip to Iran, where he had interesting experiences with Iranian men who have intimate relations with other men (Henry says they don’t call themselves gay–“only transvestites are gay”).

It sounded SO HOT!

A few days earlier the teenage daughter of my first true love and the very first to break my little heart, Sarah, stumbled across my blog! In kindergarten I kissed Sarah in the parking lot of Saint James Elementary School and declared my love for her in front of all the nervous Catholic parents. A few years later she announced that she was dumping me for her dog, setting the stage for complicated dramas to come. Sarah’s daughter has a blog of her own with all the requisite themes of an Alabama teen–music, boys and alienation. Sarah and I were supposed to be artists and move to Paris. Her daughter told me that Sarah did indeed become an artist–and a photographer to boot! Get that!

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A Gallery-ing With Emily

Emily and I went gallery hopping today. Our first stop was at Haines, for the Kota Ezawa show. He’s become this big art star since I last saw his work, so it was actually a little difficult to focus on the content because I was adding up all the red dots. His show is calledThe History of Photography Remix and consists of iconic photographic images culled from the history of art and pop culture. The images are scanned and then output as flat Matisse-like cutouts, abstracting the diverse imagery into a single cohesive cartoony vision. It’s conceptual work that aims to please, very slick and seductive, reductive in a way that plays to intellectual concerns and looks great with contemporary interiors.

The Katy Grannan portraits at Fraenkel are installed beautifully, with the walls painted gray and the lights dimmed. Her portraits are of individuals, mostly scantily clad, who expose themselves to the camera in either shallow water or this really uncomfortable-looking dark sylvan glade. The forest location seems like a trysting spot, hard to imagine as a place for a picnic, like the photographer and model sneaked off to this secluded woods together to strip and get all photographic.

The rest of 49 Geary was uneventful, except for running into Jack Fisher, who now has a gallery there. As I walked by and read his sign, I blurted out, “Jack Fisher–I used to garden for a Jack Fisher” and out walked Jack Fisher, whose garden I used to take care of. He’s been there since June, unbeknownst to me since I typically avoid that portion of the 4th floor because I can never sneak past my former dealer without being spotted and always get sucked into some endless conversation as the hours twitter away with me unable to get in an “I really must be going…” Anyway, it was great to see him there and chat, for he’s a swell down-to-earth fellow, sure to rattle the building with his eclectic tastes and honest vision.

The Luggage Store, our final destination, featured the work of three fairly obsessive artists in a show called Explosive Compulsive. The show included cut paper lattice diagrams of the human nervous system, big cut paper Rorschach-y things, and large surreal apocalyptic scroll paintings. I couldn’t tell who did what, but the artists were Jen Liu, Reed Anderson, and Adriane Colburne. Laurie and Daryl, the directors, told me that for the next show an artist is flying in an actual chunk of a New Haven, Connecticut street, and even recreating the weather conditions with snow and a cloud that he’s making with a “cloud machine.” The Luggage Store rocks!

And speaking of contemporary interiors, my bedroom is unseasonably bright and mod now, with my new triple-tiered 3/4 Coco-sized Modeline globe lamp!

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D, Chris, Chris, Chris, Brett, and two more Chrisses

D and three of his Chrisses–me, BC, and a super sweet lumberjack-y dude friend of D’s–went to see Brokeback Mountain yesterday. I had already written my LiveJournal entry about the film, in my head, prior to seeing it, but mentally tore it up as I shlepped my weeping Chrissy from the Embaracadero over to the Ferry Building for lunch. Yes, I would love for love between men to be repesented as incidental one day, and for the phrase “but I’m not queer” to be something that filmmakers would find way too regressive to have their characters actually say, but until then, I’m content to be moved to tears by the frustrated longing and epic one-night stand of these two sheep-boys.

Another surprise, and Davide, you’re going to be thrilled to hear me say this, was Spielberg’s Munich, with a screenplay by Tony Kushner, which, although still presenting the nuclear family as the core of the universe, was an utterly absorbing and fascinating film. The point of the film is that violence only begets more violence, and in an extreme deviation from Spielberg’s typical point of view, there aren’t just good guys and bad guys. This point is demonstrated elegantly through the transformation of the central character from idealist patriot to shattered exile. At the end of the film, his wife watches him as he makes passionate and detached love to her, his mind focused on the brutal deaths of the hostages and kidnappers, observing his dual and conflicting roles as murdering patriot son and life-giving father.

D wanted ham last week, so for the next month or so I’ll be making hammy things. I baked a ham like my mom and dad make for New Year’s, with pineapple rings and maraschino cherries. It’s like meat candy. My daphne odora “rubra” opened today, and its scent is filling my house with an intoxicating lushness–a contrasting high note to the smell of the ham and split pea soup simmering in the kitchen. The winter is my favorite time of year for sniffing. There’s the smell of wet leaves, Presto logs, and moist bark, daphne in January, sarcacoca… I imagine that the few pollinating insects left in town are lured like little buzzing zombies to these intensely fragrant blooms. The smells of winter are like a musty armpit, upstaging the stimuli of the other senses.

If I were the type who made New Year’s resolutions, and I’m not, so I won’t, but if I did, it’d have something to do with being more like the kind of person who makes New Year’s resolutions.

After meeting two more Chrisses, I bumped into cutie pie Brett Reichman at a party last night, one of my favorite artists, forever pixie-like. He’s finally left Rena, who sold his work but rarely showed it, and will be showing at Paula Anglim in April. Mark your calendars, lads and lassies–Brett’s work is a technical and conceptual tour-de-force, stimulating to both eye and mind.

I really wanted to tie all of these disparate thoughts together, but there’s a bear in the bed.

I’ll be a-gallerying on Thursday with Emily, if anyone would like to tag along…

Quote of the day:

Why can’t we shoot a few counterrevolutionary elements? After all, dictatorship is not like embroidering flowers.
–Yao Wenyaun

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Landscapes

OMG–last night Davide brought over the creepiest English horror film–The Descent. It’s a film about redemption and forgiveness–that is, the utter impossibility of them. A group of chick spelunkers get lost in an Appalachian cave, and then encounter flesh-eating cave-dudes–and each other. All the male energy is out of control and destructive, while the chicks are powerful and smart and capable, but ultimately doomed. There is an overwhelming birth metaphor, with the girls squirming through tight passages, everything red and bloody. Just when you think our hero(ine) is about to be reborn, shimmying up one final vagina and out through a mesh of pubey shrubbery, she wakes, back in the bloody womb of the cave. There is no escape, only surrender to the reality that life is tough and the flesh-eating cave dudes are going to get you sooner or later.

Moving right along… I’ve just uploaded, for you viewing pleasure, and prior to public release, the latest Marjorie Wood Gallery exhibit. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Kathryn Van Dyke’s LANDSCAPES, and an essay by Arnold J Kemp, EPSIODES. Take a break from whatever you’re doing and be momentarily swept away by the lush imagery and prosaic stylings of these talented aesthetes…

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Hey Mambo!

Yesterday, BC and I attempted to drive to Inverness for lunch and a hike (don’t laugh) at Dean & Doug’s with Kathryn Van Dyke, Bob Ortbal, and an artist friend in town from Switzerland, Roland, but about halfway there got a call from Dean saying the roads were flooded and to turn around. I was quite content to get back to my bed to mope and read. Later, Philip made the most incredible meal for us–“California” Cassoulet, Greens & Citrus Salad, Fig-Hazelnut Linzertorte… Chez Philipe is my favorite restaurant!

I’m feeling a bit better and ready to get back into the swing of things. Never having paid much serious attention to astrology, I do seem to be a textbook Scorpio–dark, deep, slave to my loins kind of thing. I should just shut up and make with the horizontal mambo already. Mambo!

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I Made You Out of Clay

Garry, the Thinking Man’s Bear, made latkes last night to celebrate the 5th night of Hannukah. The latkes were great, as usual, except for the sweet potato experiment, which didn’t quite come together, although I applaud Garry’s bold attempt to push the tradition into new culinary territory. As the evening wore on, I kept wondering why my speech seemed so slurred and everyone was getting blurry–didn’t I have just 3 little glasses of wine? It wasn’t until chowing down on the evening’s dreidel winnings that I remembered the slivovitz!–the fiery eastern European plum brandy that reddens the nose and blackens the reputation! Garry had poured me maybe one? two? little glasses and I am grateful that Big Chris pulled me from the party at just the right moment, before my interpretive dance number. Among the in-focus bloggers that I remember bumping into: Rootbeer1, QBear, Gabecentric, FoodpoisoningSF, BearBear… Tomorrow BC and I are going to see Kiki Kiki Kiki Kiki Kiki and Herb at Herbst Theater! The hottest ticket in town!

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Brief Interactions

So Emily, BC and I went to see Good Night and Good Luck tonight. Eh. It didn’t seem to have much to say that was new or even pertinent–historically or artistically–but it was nicely shot, just ultimately forgettable. Unlike the interesting film by Sokurov that I saw earlier, Moloch, about a dreamy weekend in the alpine retreat with Adolph and Eva, and friends. Presented as a straightforward linear narrative, no one seems to really communicate. Instead, the film is a series of brief fragmented interactions. In one amazing scene, Adolph lectures Eva like a madman, a truly terrifying figure, and she responds by playfully kicking him in the butt as he bends over. He then chases her around the room in his undies. His madness remains something that she sees directed at the world, and she just ignores it, the Final Solution just an impediment to intimacy with her führer. The interview with Sokurov on the dvd was just silly, though. Some artists, especially artists who make such powerful works, should keep quiet. Mark Twain said that keeping one’s mouth shut and being thought of as stupid was preferable to opening one’s mouth and confirming it. Well, Sokurov spent the first 20 minutes talking about why he couldn’t tell us what his movie was about, and the remainder of the interview discussing why the soundtrack and dialogue had nothing to do with the film. Nyet, Sokurov, nyet!

So anyway, at the restaurant after the movie with Em and BC, this guy walks by, kind of a big hunky older biker type with a long beard, very handsome, and I smiled and said hi, not because I knew him, but he reminded me of a plus-sized version of my friend Eric, whom I like and don’t get to see enough of. He smiled, walked by and then turned around and said, “You seem really familiar, do I know you? What’s your name?” I told him I was Chris and shook his hand and told him no, I didn’t know him and he went on his way, perhaps perplexed by all the warm familiarity that I was projecting his way. I don’t know why I’m writing about such a stupid mundane encounter, but our brief interaction seemed framed by a potential for intensity that we grappled clumsily and hastily to acknowledge and understand. “Who are you?” I wanted to answer, “Someone who could love you,” but realized that being there with my boyfriend necessarily precluded such a response, and off he went, forever.