Category: Friends

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Shostakovich and Plum Blossoms

Saturday night I had a wonderful evening with D&D, first dinner at Caffe della Stella and then Shostakovich at the symphony. The performance began with a piece for jazz orchestra, written when Shostakovich was very young, a very lively piece of music that segued into a violin concerto and finally the dirge-like 13th Symphony. The piece ended with a cellphone accompaniment from an audience member, extending the music firmly into our post-Cage era.

I’ve been photographing up a storm. Forget all the bears for a sec, I’m druelling over plum blossoms! In between rain showers, I’ve been teetering on top of a rickety ladder and shooting some medium format color shots of my Italian prune plum in bloom. They’re almost abstact, with wild punchy color and tree-ness that’s like in cubist space or something. Unlike anything I’ve done before. They look photoshoped, but are completely unmanipulated, shot with a very slow film, aperature wide open (as always), and literally from a bird’s-eye-view. I’ve decided to scrap my previous plans for my show at Meridian next month and include a wall of these photos. They’ll mirror formally the sound piece on the opposite wall, and play nicely against the exploding testicles grid to the right. You all must come!

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Single: Day 1

I’m on the plane back to San Francisco, contemplating the next stage of my life as a newly single homosexualist. But first, a bit about the last few days in New York:

Our last weekend in the Big Apple was shared with my old high school buddy Jason, now an environmental consultant working in Our Nation’s Capital. We spent the day visiting galleries and museums, and eating Cuban and New American cuisine.

Murray Guy on 17th Street had a show of photographs by Barbara Probst that we really liked. The subject of her photographs is the moment of exposure itself, and how our point of view affects our understanding of the image. She’ll photograph a scene with several cameras positioned at different angles, the shutters of the cameras released at the same moment. An array of five photographs, for instance, depicts the same girl, with hands up, but in one image it looks like she’s playing catch outside, in another it’s revealed that she’s standing in front of a backdrop and modeling for the camera, and in another it looks like she’s on the street and possibly in trouble. Any strict reading of the narrative is confounded by the different views.

We then hopped on the train for Long Island City and a visit to the Sculpture Center, where another old friend, Mary Cerutti is now the director. They have a fantastic group of works on display. A Scottish artist, Anya Gallaccio, cut down and reassembled a 30-foot tall weeping cherry tree in the central gallery space. The means of the tree’s support are all visible–large cables and big bolts used to piece the limbs back together. The piece elegantly represents our desire to tame nature, to create landscapes that mimic the natural, while drawing our attention to the extraordinary sculptural qualities of the tree itself. The smell is wonderful, too. There are also some fantastic installations downstairs: In one dark corridor of the industrial brick setting, Mary Temple has painted the brick and floor to make it seem that sunlight is streaming in through a nearby bricked-up arch, casting shadows of trees and shrubs on the walls and floor. The illusion is so realistic that you don’t notice it as anything extraordinary, even though it’s impossible. When it suddenly dawns on you that light can’t pass through brick, it’s quite magical. There were also wonderful tiny one-inch sculptures by Michael Ross, transforming found objects into wonders of form and color, and several other fabulous experiential installations that I’ll just have to tell you about later.

Here are some pictures of my new symbol, the weeping cherry tree that was cut to pieces and bolted back together, no longer blooming, but still solid and lovely:

P.S.1 is not far from the Sculpture Center, so we strolled over to see Peter Hujar’s work, and the Wolfgang Tillmans show. The Hujar images–portraits, nudes, abandoned places–were printed all the same size, each image formally framed with subject in the center and beautifully balanced, very poignant. The Tillmans show is a big survery of this young photographer’s work, and is dynamite. His subject is photography itself–the way a photograph conveys information, the subject, color, and the paper as conveyor of information and object. He addresses the entire process, from taking the image to how it’s presented. There are large color-field abstractions made from blowing up images so large that just the grain is visible and a single color, or very subtle shifts in gradation. Some pieces are called “Impossible Color,” and are indeed of indescribable colors made possible only through photochemistry. In other images, he exposed the paper with no negative, just light, the resulting image a record of his interaction and intervention. Some images are folded and creased, the paper a sculpture that interacts with the ambient light to extend the experience of “painting with light” into another dimension. Very clever, inventive, and smart.

NOTE TO EXHIBITING ARTISTS: If you’ve shown your work in any exhibition during the past year, bring an invite to MoMA’s membership desk and get a $25 one-year membership!

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Buttons

BC and I started today’s adventure at Tender Buttons, a tiny store on the upper east side that sells buttons. They have buttons that were made for George Washington’s inauguration, buttons of intricately carved vegetable (palm nut) ivory, buttons made of horn, miniature 18th century portrait buttons, flapper stocking buttons from the 20’s, deco buttons of silver and lucite–a museum of fabulous tiny functional artworks.

We walked down Park Avenue and paid homage to Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building. The few elements–glass, bronze, tile, space, reflecting pools, columns–and complete lack of ornament create a harmonious and grand sculptural presence of form and meaning.

We visited a few more buildings, including the art deco General Electric building, with its zigzag motif evoking electricity, and crown of spires designed to complement nearby St. Bartholomew’s–the power of modern man firmly and phallicly towering over the power of the Almighty.

A bit further down the road, we made a brief stop to visit Nayland at ICP, and were briefly charmed by his graciousness and tour-de-force facial hair. Nayland, there should at least be a band named Nayland Blake’s Beard, or a wig and beard replica sold alongside Jeff Stryker’s penis! We checked out the contemporary African photography exhibit across the street, and then went DVD shopping near Bryant Park and scored several super cheap films, including a pirated version of the out-of-print Criterion Salo (which has sold for $1,000 on ebay). When I first saw it on the shelf, my heart stopped–Had I found the last cache of copies left in Region One? Should I buy them all and sell them on ebay and keep rent-bears into my old age? Well, it’s not even a copy of the Criterion release, filmed in a movie theater somewhere by someone sitting not quite in the center of the theater.

After a brief rest, it was back on the bus, for drinks with Donna and Bev at a lesbian taco bar in the West Village, and lots of laughs, drinks, dish about working for Louis Malle, and discussions of past life regressions.

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An Evening at Bill’s

Last night I had dinner at Bill Jacobson’s in Brooklyn. Bill’s this really interesting photographer who became quite well known for photographing blurry people. And things. During the height of the AIDS epidemic, his images were an especially poignant reminder of the people who were slipping away. Well, he’s now photographing things in focus, which is sending everyone into a tizzy. His recent work seems to convey the same sense of stillness and formal rigor, just lovely images. He looked at my slides and we ate takeout Thai in his studio. It turns out that he will be visiting with friends in San Francisco who live a block away from me, so it’ll be nice to hang with him back home, too. He’s a very sweet, intelligent, and talented man. I didn’t get to see much of Brooklyn on the way to his studio, but man, the area near where he lives is super hip. I was the oldest one in the subway, by about 20 years, and everybody had on fabulous outfits. This one guy had on a fake fur coat that looked just like a tailored gorilla suit. I have to have one.

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Breakfast, Biennial, Dinner

After breakfast and dish with Philip, in town for the day, at Florent, Michelle, BC and I checked out the Whitney Biennial yesterday. It was the worst art experience I’ve ever had. Day for Night is the title of the exhibition, appropriate for a show of childish effluvia masquerading as works of social and political significance. We started at the top and worked our way down, physically and metaphorically. By the time we got to the lower level, hoping there might be something, anything to take away, we just looked at each other and in unison said, “How sad.” Most of the work was hung in ways that affected neighboring art significantly, detracting from the artist’s intent, and some pieces that needed distance to even understand were hung with no room to step back. There were a few high points, like Rodney Graham’s projected image of a rotating chandelier, and Franceso Vezzoli’s hilarious trailer of the “remake” of Gore Vidal’s Caligula, but really, how sad that there are curators out there who think this is what’s happening in American art.

Later we met up with some friends, Bev and Donna, for dinner at Cafe Loup on W. 13th. This guy walked in who looked just like Cornel West, and then walked up to Donna and gave her a big kiss and said hi to us. “That was Cornel West,” Donna told us. Donna’s a film editor, and Bev is a photographer. They’re bright, fun dinner companions with many tales and many charms.

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This and That

One week has gone by since arriving in New York, and it seems that a few years have trickled by in our little apartment on the Hudson–so much in such a short span of time. BC and I had a really bumpy ride last week, with a lot of post-breakup stress and anger burbling to the surface and splashing all over us. The great thing about being here together is that we can’t avoid dealing with the things that we’ve so skillfully avoided since first meeting. The drama has mostly subsided, and it’s been at least three days since I last told him that he needed to fly back to San Francisco.

We met up with the ever-charming Joey on Friday to check out the Armory Fair. It was exhausting, but fun, and dishing with Joey made it even funner. I discovered Michael Van Ofen (below) at the Sies+Höke booth. He paints in very broad minimal strokes to create portraits and landscapes with much visual depth, vigorously luminous surfaces, and emotion. Barry McGee’s installation at Deitch was just a knockout–yaay for that Frisco kid!

Joey took us out the next night to the gayest Italian restaurant that I’ve ever been to, with a dj and everything. BC dressed appropriately in his new pink Izod sweater. Tagging along were Joey’s cutie-pie husband, Mr. Bear, and their smolderingly hot buddy, Cubby. I had the Gnocchi Shenequa, which one must order by saying, “I’ll have the Gnocchi Shenequa, girl!”

Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian, fellow San Franciscans, had an interesting show at White Columns that ended Saturday, introducing New York to their lives and work, with samples of their ‘zine and art from their collection. I still haven’t done the Chelsea galleries, so that report will come soon–there’s an awful lot to see. This week’s list includes the Munch show at MoMA, the Goya show at the Frick, and the Whitney Biennial.

We spent one day with my old San Francisco buddy, Michelle, in her new digs in Jersey, visiting her horse and bonding with her dogs. She showed us a fabulous scrap book that she recently found in a flea market, of clippings from newspapers and magazine from the 30’s. We were mesmerized by what amounted to a porn collection of the time–images of bathing beauties, and legs, legs, legs! She’s recently completed a new art work in bronze, a sculpture of a bunny in an impossibly tight corset. All of Michelle’s work is beautiful and well-crafted and conceptually rich, queasy fetishistic objects and images for big bad kids. Dana, her husband, has the most complicated train set that I’ve ever seen. It’s half completed and fills a quarter of their garage. He has a mini-elevator with several levels of track, to add or take away trains. Each train is individually controlled and programmable to travel different routes, all trackable on a laptop. He and BC bonded over their mutual obsessiveness, while Michelle and I slipped outside to mentally landscape her yard.

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New York: Day 2

Lilly needed a bit more time last night to prepare her apartment for her housesitters, so we ended up watching the Oscars in our hotel room with some fabulous steamed dumplings and a salad from the local Dumpling-eria, and a velvety Bordeaux. I’m still rattled by Lauren Bacall’s fractured delivery of that bizarre tribute to film noir. ? This morning at the diner there was a Power-Breakfast going on at the next table. A man and a woman, both dressed in black, placed an electric candle on their table that changed colors as they slipped phrases like, “She can’t wear that dress again, she’s already worn it twice,” and “Run with it, darling.”

We spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon with Lilly, walking around the Village and noshing before putting her on the plane to China and settling into the Lilly-Pad. Lilly lives in a community of artists housed in a former Bell Labs building, remodeled by Richard Meier in the 1970’s. The ceiling of her apartment is like rippling waves, echoing the flow of the Hudson just outside the window.

We had a very easy day, just stocking the fridge, finding the wi-fi hotspots in the apartment, and getting caught up with nothing in particular.

Tomorrow it’s up to the Cloisters.

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Fale Film and Keith Hale at Paule Anglim

Last night I saw one of the most interesting documentaries. Philip had a few problems with it (“I hated it!” “No wonder he could never finish a film!” etc…) and BC actually left after an hour into it, but I was much bemused and bedazzled. The film, F is for Fake, is about an art forger and his biographer, who’s also a fake, but it’s actually about Orson Welles and his profound storytelling ability and exhaustive cutting technique, and the new lady in his life. The filmmakers consistently bring to our attention that this is a film, itself a representation of reality, a fake, not real, and the story that’s being told wavers between documentary and fiction, reality and illusion. It’s all elusive, and intensely entertaining. Orson presides pompously over his dinner companions at a restaurant, with his black cape and hat, and when the waiter approaches he turns his head from his stream of blather to murmur quickly to the waiter to please take away the salad and bring him the steak au poivre.

BC and I had earlier high-tailed it to Paule Anglim for Keith Hale’s opening. Keith and I went to school together, but I always forget this because I saw the work of the artist “Keith Hale” before I realized that was the name of the little dude that I chatted with at lunch time, and imagined someone so different making the pictures that I never connected the real Keith Hale to the artist. It was nice to see him again, and nice to see his new work. He’s in Paule’s small room, just a dozen or so paintings, mostly of lunar surfaces, very delicately and meticulously rendered, with the addition of images of tiny orchids, pansies, and little singing cowboys in gay rainbow kerchiefs. I thought a lot about how large a part the moon played in my own adolescence, and then split to pick up burritos before connecting any more mental dots. We didn’t have time to make the rounds either, Orson was waiting.

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Slow Club, Columbarium

Philip and I went to the Slow Club for brunch today, and then slowly made our way to the San Francisco Columbarium on Loraine Court. The Columbarium, a perforated Victorian genie bottle housing cremated remains, built in 1897, is all that remains of the 167 acre Odd Fellows Cemetary near present day Geary and Stanyan Streets. The graves were moved to Colma, supposedly, in the late 20’s and early 30’s to make make way for the city’s westward expansion, and the many faux Mediterranean micro-villas and French mini-chateaux that would house the Richmond district’s mid-century pioneers. Reflecting the city’s limits of expandability, the Columbarium is almost filled to capacity, with windowsills and bookcases and every nook and corner being converted into usable niches. There are several styles of formal funerary design that give way to a very inventive and creative contemporary lexicon of niche design that incorporates photos of the deceased as well as trinkets that were of some significance to the dearly departed or their survivors. It’s the Afterlife’s Playland-At-The-Beach.
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D, Shrimp, Cheese, Neel, Davide

Friday night was D’s birthday, and since he wasn’t in the mood to compete with Reese’s attention demands, we celebrated last night. He invited several charming friends of his and their dogs over to a dinner that I made to his precise specifications, “Spaghetti–NOT fettucine, NOT penne–spaghetti, and a Caesar salad, with SHRIMP–BAY shrimp,” etc, etc… He asked to watch Meet Me in Saint Louis after dinner, which gave the atmosphere an even more festive pall. What a strange film. It’s almost like a vaudeville show, with intensely entertaining musical interludes woven into and around several potentially volatile plotlines that fizzle out before anybody gets too upset–except Margaret O’Brien, that is, who flips out at the prospect of moving to New York after big sis Judy serenades her with “Have yourself a mery little Christmas,” and destroys the snow people on the lawn out front with a bat. And the color and costumes are fabulous. Dean told me it was the best birthday he’s ever had. It was the dogs. He’s a real dog person. He’s so hairy that I think they look at him as one of their own. I was very happy to have made him happy. He can be a tough cookie to please.

BC and I did make it to Neel Eargood’s show on Polk yesterday (731 Polk, Tues-Sat 10-6, through 3/31). He’s created gridded works of stained glass and metal that float in space as rolled or delicately undulating sheets. He combines colors, or just patterns in clear glass, so that lights falls on and through the works in very beautiful ways. His titles are often hilarious, if not self-referential, like “Gimme Some of That Hot Cubic Tube.” Cara Barnard and Duane, the artists showing with him, create abstract graphic forms on paper and canvas that render in two dimensions a flatness and organic weirdness that extend Neel’s play with light and form into the Freudian. Get thee down to Polk Street, LJers and support our very own Neel.

Later, I had a lovely complaining session with Davide over coffee at that place next to Superstar on Castro, which used to be a really nice cafe with comfy seats and good panini, but is now a place with okay panini and seats that are not only uncomfortable, but are like 4 feet off the ground, inducing vertigo and dangly feet. I love talking with Davide, and am grateful for his emotional breadth.

I didn’t make it to any other exhibitions this week, but will make it to first Thursday openings this week. Come along.