Category: Friends

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The Stuff That Dreams are Made of & Cute Puppy Paintings

This weekend Big Chris, Nemr, Dean and I went downtown to the Old Mint for an exhibition of miscellanea related to the subject of San Francisco in film. The show is called “The Stuff that Dreams are Made of,” after Humphrey Bogart’s description of the Maltese Falcon. There are several installations, including a reproduction of said falcon, encased in a plexiglass vitrine. Another room contains a reproduction of the great portrait of Carlotta Valedez that once hung in the Legion of Honor of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In front of the portrait is the bench that Madeline sat on during her daily visits to contemplate the portrait, her bouquet resting on the bench, as if she had just left.

And speaking of Madeline, Kim Novak’s paintings are also on display, luridly colorful pastels of cute little animals, dreamy verdant forest- and river-scapes rendered in a soft almost psychedelic palette. In one room, there are portraits of various celebutante visitors to the SF Film Festival, where you could also get your picture taken next to a wax effigy of Clint Eastwood on the Red Carpet. The show delves into the early years of silent film in the city, where Charlie Chaplin actually got his start, but film noir clearly dominates the show. One could look out the window and imagine Nick and Nora pulled tipsily down 5th Street by Asta.

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Dean & Emily Shows

Dean Smith and Emily Wilson are two of my closest friends, and two of my favorite artists. They have concurrent shows on view now, across the street from each other, on Geary. Dean spends months making these meticulously hand drawn markings and squiggles on paper that eventually become something visually transcendent, topographies and landscapes beyond reference to anything specific. The expressive quality of his work is defined by an almost mechanical interaction with surface.

Dean’s show at Gallery Paule Anglim consists of three pieces, titled “three manifestations of anaglyphic space.” I know… but that’s Dean, be serious, he always has titles like this, he always makes us work. Each piece is reproduced from an original drawing that has been manipulated digitally to produce a three dimensional image when viewed with 3-D glasses, on hand in the gallery. One piece acts almost like a mirror, another zooms out in a rounded mound towards you, like a giant coconut but with a big “t” cut into it. You see fantastic geometric and biomorphic forms that seem convincingly of some other dimension, a dimension not only of sight, but of imagination… and at times even orifices.

Just seeing this work exhausted and disoriented me. All great work should make you sick like that. But get this, after Dean’s show, Big Chrissy and I made our way across the street to see the Adam Fuss show at Fraenkel, photograms made from animal intestines. And then a giant daguerreotype close-up of female gentle-talia! Ahhhh! Enough with the viscera! Get me to Emily’s soothing randomness!

So Emily’s markings are as expressive and seemingly random as Dean’s are calculated. She also creates abstractions, but with big sloppy dripping gestures. She finds inspiration in the cinematic expressions of Antonioni and Nicholas Roeg, and I think most apparently Godard, creating wordless narratives of emotional punch. But these guys rarely crack a smile, and Emily’s obviously having fun, with color, form, paper and canvas. Visiting her studio, you experience this work as it should be viewed, stapled to the wall or crumpled on the floor, stepped on, smushed, glued to the ceiling. Thankfully, Sweetow has resisted trying to contain this work in frames. Like following Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau around Milan in La Notte as their marriage crumbles, the viewer of her work stumbles through a sort of tapestry of graphic encounters, culminating in that final confrontation when Moreau reads Mastroianni the tender love letter he wrote to her before they got married. “Who wrote that?” he asks, not remembering. With Emily, though, we don’t forget who wrote it, or the sincerity behind the expression.

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A Walk In the Park with Peter

Chris and Peter, May 1987

Thursday I went for a walk with Peter. Peter’s my oldest extant buddy in San Francisco. We were twinkies together, our friendship going back to 1985, when we shared the coolest apartment in town with his cool black cat Francesca, who’d occasionally fall off the ledge of our living room windows. “Reeeee-OOOWWWWwwwww” we’d hear as she took the two story plunge.

Peter’s been losing his eyesight for years now, slowly, and is adapting to a distorted, gradually disappearing world. But rather than withdraw from life, he’s developed the wisdom and compassion of a contemporary bodhisattva, although I’m sure he wouldn’t like me using that term, but that’s what he is to me, someone bound for enlightenment, parsing out advice and wisdom to all who cross his path.

He’s such a vibrant presence, a 21st century Oscar Wilde, as smart as he is silly, immediately accessible and immediately intimate. When we were in Paris a few years ago, walking down a street in the Marais that he and Luis, his partner, had been down a few times already on their own, seemingly every shopkeeper, barkeep and waiter leaned out of his doorway and shouted “Salut Pierre!” “Bonjour Pierre!” like in a Minnelli musical, every one of them already bonded with this bon vivant. In a taxi, Peter engaged our driver using a vocabulary of about 10 words, “Paris… ah! Quelle belle ville! l’architecture! les musées! les gens! C’est magnifique!” and on and on, exclamation point after exclamation point. Because he couldn’t see our husky-voiced female driver, he kept addressing her as “Monsieur,” while she kept unsuccessfully and comically correcting in her deep manly voice “Madam! Madam!”

Peter has what my friend Steve calls an “outdoor” voice. In museums, he is allowed to view sculptures with his hands, and since he’s often not aware of the volume of his voice, or the proximity of his fellow art enthusiasts, after he’s fondled a statue’s privates and when he thinks he’s whispering to me “Oh my, those Gauls were really hung!” he’s actually addressing an entire room of people who then all turn to look at my deeply red, but delighted face.

Having lost so many friends over the years, I’m so grateful to have him in my life, a life that flickers in Technicolor whenever I’m with him.

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A Death in the Family

My dear friend Robert Schatz died, of a heart attack. Robert was of a generation of gay men who experienced the first wave of sexual liberation, a generation that sadly has few remaining. In the 80s, when I first met him, Robert prepared to die. AIDS was considered a death sentence back then. I remember in the mid 90s when new medical cocktails became available and suddenly, after preparing to die, he had to prepare to live, and a different kind of struggle ensued. With Robert, as indeed with most of his generation, you could discuss a Bette Davis movie and a Maria Callas aria easily in the same sentence, and with many exact quotes and exaggerated swishy trills. He was one of the subjects of some seminal gay documentary in the 70s—was it Gay USA? I remember being so soothed by his calm voice, and looking up to him as a kind of role model. He was really one of the most pleasant people I’ve ever known, always so easy to be with, despite his habit of talking with his mouth full and spewing bits of food in your face. I’m so sad to think of him not around anymore, but considering that he didn’t expect to live to his 40th birthday, he had a hell of a run. Goodbye, Robert, I really loved you and am going to miss you so much.

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Ricky & Toby & Eddie & Liz & Me

Ricky, an old buddy from high school was in town last week. A few weeks before he sent me a cryptic note on Facebook, using a different first name and 28 years after I’d frankly thought about him, asking if I remembered him. I said I didn’t know Ricky Blah-blah, but I did go to school with another Blah-blah. He was indeed that other Blah-blah. There were only something like 30 people in my graduating class, so it’s not that difficult to remember any particular one of them. He was a sort of Totoro, hovering in the background with his big smile and jiggly belly, occasionally saying something really smart or witty. I remember entertaining a brief attraction to him, but then he had an eye operation and disappeared before graduation, and that was that.

In the intervening 28 years, he’s sung with opera companies, unknowingly lived two blocks away from me for a few years, bought a house in Atlanta, was a steer-wrestling gay rodeo star, plays countless instruments, sustained an intimate encounter with Eddie Fisher, and is now a systems engineer doing one of those jobs where my eyes glaze over and I start thinking of the laundry I have to do when being told what it is. So what he does, despite his generously dumbed-down layman’s explanation, remains a slight mystery, although it is now taking him practically around the world, a world he’s never explored despite his extensive and interesting life experiences.

When he told me his Eddie Fisher story I nearly had a heart attack. “You had intimate relations with someone who had intimate relations with Elisabeth Taylor??” (I’m paraphrasing here.) He seemed so blasé about it, yet I fired question after question about the details and mechanics, about Carrie and Debbie, if Eddie was gay or just impaired… “I met him at a dinner party at Armistead’s.” Armistead again. Again, my mouth dropped to the floor. “???” “I don’t kiss and tell.” Well, it was a little too late for that, I was already blogging in my mind. His list of celebrity encounters was impressive, the closest I’ve come to intimacy with the stars.

So then he tells me that he had a crush on me in high school and, get this, lived alone! The clouds parted and the sun’s rays beamed me back to those sexually frustrated years and I imagined having sex every day, like, every day, with a real person and not just the imagined someone of the better part of my youth. Maybe we’d be married by now and I’d be a gay rodeo star, too.

Maybe I’d have left him for Eddie Fisher.

We spent a few days together munching and touristing around the bay area, and I developed such an instant and deep fondness for him. He’s from a part of my life that’s supposed to be over, how cool to have it resuscitated. He’s still a big teddy bear, only now he carries one around with him, a real one, named Toby, who’s accompanying him on his travels. Toby is a posturpedic, or is it orthopedic?, something -pedic teddy bear designed to be both furry companion and pillow. Sort of like a mini-Ricky.

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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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New Years Ramblings and Rumblings

Turning 46 has been a little strange. Actually, turning 39. Then 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45 and now 46. It seemed for the longest time that so much was to happen in the future: having a gallery in New York; getting my MFA; lunch at el Bulli. Prior to 39, failure hadn’t mattered that much to me, there was always time…

Last month I dined with a group of delightful, erudite, charming, and, thankfully, mostly older A-gays. (You can read an older post here for details about this particular society.) I sat next to the real life inspiration for the Tales of the City character played in the television series by Bob Mackie, “Rick Hampton.” His manner was the perfect combination of bitchy and clever—engrossingly intimate and effervescently droll. Nestled in the comforting fine wine and witty banter of the previous generation, I was temporarily relieved to feel not yet old guard myself.

Bud, 2011

I understand that the mid-life crisis is supposed to peak around this time, and that for most of us, mediocrity suddenly becomes fun. I’m kind of stuck in wanting all this specific stuff to still happen, but am getting really nervous about it not happening now. Do I shift my expectations and just continue what I’m doing, or do I do something entirely different with more realistic and actually achievable goals?

On the left is a photo of one of my new pieces, hanging in my studio—Bud. It’s of my Foreign Correspondent’s head, the day he bleached it blonde and ran off to the Folsom St. Fair in leather chaps and a rash.

deKooning’s first New York show was at age 44 Raymond Chandler started writing at 45. This is my “nam-myoho-renge-kyo,” my soothing mantra. In a few years, I’ll be chanting something about Grandma Moses…

A few weeks ago my bears and I took a drive up the coast for a hike and lunch in Guerneville at Boon. Boon is a gem of a restaurant, a foodie oasis in a desert of hamburgers and iceberg lettuce. The ingredients are from local farms, and are integrated into dishes that vibrantly highlight individual flavors. We had brussels sprouts deep fried in olive oil; a salad of calamari, white beans and arugula; macaroni and cheese with wild mushrooms; truffled french fries; a pork belly panino; and a chocolate brownie wading in a little balsamic reduction puddle and topped with sea salt and whipped cream.

My family came to visit for Thanksgiving. I jammed 24 of them into my living room for a sit-down dinner. My nephew Nathan slaughtered the turkeys a few days before, two free-range moderately buxom beauties who, during their eventless lives, enjoyed the Sonoma County air and grass in blissful gobble-gobble obliviousness to their digestive fate.

I saw Le Quattro Volte the other night. What a satisfying film, probably my favorite of the year, after Wong Dong-Li’s Poetry. It’s about the transmutation of a goat herder into a goat, a tree, and ultimately charcoal. Each stage is so attentively and patiently observed. A scene of the townsfolk presenting a Passion play in the streets focuses on a dog poking around, aware of absolutely every person, animal and thing, the goats looking on as if viewing a theatrical production with the dog the absolute center of attention. A lot of critical attention has been directed towards The Artist, another film that uses no dialogue, but I feel like this film brings to mind the true essence of silent cinema, where the narrative unfolds visually and the audience reads by observation. An understanding that people are—or can be—intelligent guides the film’s narrative, kind of like what the Republicans don’t do.

My niece and nephew had a baby. It’s one of those perfect little babies that squeaks and smiles and gets everybody talking about poop and breasts and flexibility.

My Foreign Correspondent moved. He got a job in New York and sold his possessions and moved within a week. His ability to shift gears so radically and decisively left me dizzy. And a little angry. Like, why couldn’t he do that with our relationship? Sigh.

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Armistead sighting!

Dean Smith came over tonight for dinner, dish, and Silent Film Night at the CocoPlex. We walked down to Molly Stone’s to pick up some pecorino for my fava bean and basil pasta, and turning the corner to pick up some fettucine I bumped into Armistead pushing a cart down the aisle. “Hey Armistead, it’s Chris!” I said, as if we were old friends. Realizing quickly that I had only been introduced to him once about 15 years ago, I quickly added “Bob Glück’s old boyfriend” and stuck out my ice cold hand, chilled through and through by the frigid pecorino. While shaking his hand, and thinking of Bob’s advice on finding something positive to emphasize in a critique, I told him how impressed I was with how efficiently his books had been scrunched into a 2-1/2 hour musical. He was generous and sweet, and just so adorable. Why didn’t I go after HIM when I had the chance instead of Bob? I thought… Back to Dean and the checkout line, I saw Armistead again on the other side of the store and ran across and blurted, “It was the pecorino.” “Huh?” he asked. “My cold hand, I was holding this pecorino, I’m not the walking dead.” It all didn’t come out quite right and through his befuddlement did I see him glance at my crotch?

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Commonwealth

BC, Hong-Xi and I had dinner at Commonwealth last night. The interior is white, the wall facing the street all windows, half frosted to eliminate the outside distractions of passing autos and hipsters. There’s not much to distract from the food, which is fresh, flavorful and inventively prepared and presented. We had the fixed price menu, 6 courses, plus an amuse-bouche of corn and basil that amused our bouches, and set the tone of the meal to come: a delicate melange of vibrant flavors. Our first course was salmon tartare with beets and sorrel, presented under a frozen dome of horseradish. You break the frozen dome and mix the pieces into the tartare, chilling the salmon with a breath of chilly horseradish. It was stunning, visually and sensually. The whole meal was like that, dish after dish of colors and flavors and textures that delighted the tummy and the eye. Molecular gastronomy intruded only a little bit, with a few foamed and frozen things, including yummy frozen popcorn flavored nuggets served with the peanut butter semifreddo, but this restaurant is where you go to experience food transported, not transformed, transported into the realm of extraordinary.