Category: Travel

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On the Plane: New York Day 1

BC, you know, the one that I’m supposed to be separated from, and I are on the flight to New York City, for a three week stay in the West Village. Our purser’s name is Chad. His voice and entire being radiate calm efficiency and dedication to service. We’re staying at my friend, Lilly’s, who’s going to China for the month. Lilly’s a fascinating film maker, a passionate and intense woman whose films have focused largely on her Jewish heritage, both on very grand and very intimate scales. Very happy to be able to spend the evening with her before she sets sail for the Middle Kingdom.

Having dreamt about having a solo show in New York city since deciding to pursue being an artist, it’s with an unavoidable level of disappointment that I go there now, with the gallery closing and my show being canceled. Start spreading the word. I will not be a part of it. I had a dream that Michael Kimmelman’s review of the Whitney Biennial mentioned my show, telling people to head over to Chelsea to see where the real pulse was. I don’t know if I’ll have another opportunity to show in the center of the art world again, and am trying to be comfortable being a peripheral anomaly relegated to the artistic backwater that is San Francisco. I’ve asked my artist friends to make recommendations for introductions with dealers, and have at least one solid lead to follow. I’m not the aggressive type, you know, when it comes to approaching galleries, that is, so if all else fails, I’m going to love exploring the city for an extended period of time, and will get back to work in San Francisco renewed and invigorated. Or ready to take off for Italy.

Last night I watched Jacques Demy’s delightful Lola, which momentarily blew me out of the doldrums and into new wave paradise. Anouk Aimee plays Cecille, a dancer nicknamed Lola, who clings optimistically to the return of her lover and father of her child, who left 10 years ago after getting her pregnant and with the promise to return rich. Meanwhile, everyone falls in love with her, but this is Jacques Demy, so by the film’s end, the lover returns, sure enough rich, with all of Lola’s floozie dance buddies in tears and her many suitors heartbroken but wiser and off to all ports not Lola. I see Jacques Demy as a new wave anomaly of sorts. His films are almost postmodern in their appropriation (Lola is an ode to Max Ophüls) of style and content, but always with his unique fairy tale stamp.

Okay, three more hours to go. What shall we talk about? Do you have any more questions for me? Want to hear about my vestigial nipple? Well, I don’t have one, but at least two of my past lovers did. And I’m not one to kiss and tell. That’s kiss–make love to every day, devote every second to, spend two years looking for the perfect sofa with, break up in a public and painful confession of indiscretion–and tell. Oh, wait, I won’t be posting this for hours, so I obviously can’t answer your questions while I have all this time on my hands, so let me anticipate some questions for you, Dear Readers…

Chris, just how did you get the nickname ‘Coco’?
That’s a very good question! I was the first relative that my nephew, Nathan, addressed who had not only a single-syllable name, but one that began with all these consonants. There were “Ma-ma,” “Pa-pa,” “Di-di,” Nathan was even “Na-Na,” and then me. If you’ve ever babysat an infant, you suddenly realize how long 8 hours are. Sort of like being on a plane, but having to keep everybody amused. There I was, trying to get Na-Na to say my name, and he’d get the “C” sound okay, but I guess the two-syllable thing was already too heavily ingrained, and out came “Co-co.” “Chr-is,” I’d say. “Co-Co.” “Ch-ris.” “Co-co.” So it stuck.

If you were stuck on a desert island with only one person, who would it be, and why?
I’d love to get shipwrecked with Talullah Bankhead, because I’ve already seen how entertaining and resourceful she can be, fishing with her diamond bracelet in Lifeboat. If she somehow couldn’t make it, then I’d choose Bob Hoskins because in the absence of practical matters, like checking e-mail or having to work for a living, I’d just want to have sex all day, and he’s the only man who could ever please me. Isn’t he the son of a preacher man?

What’s the most memorable break-up you’ve experienced?
Alfonso, my hot Basque potato. He looked like Jean-Luc Picard (+25 pounds), and ran into the Pacific naked. We went to the beach together one afternoon, in Santa Cruz. There was a couple making love on the beach, under a blanket, very tenderly. I thought how wonderful, and looked over to Alfonso with hearts and stars bursting from my eyes, and he said, “The whore.” Later than evening, as we supped on a light but fiery Basque specialty, he suddenly leapt from the table and turned the gas on the stove. “Do you see that?” “Yes, Alfonso, I see that.” “But do you SEE?” “…?” “There is no spark–and without a spark, there is no flame.” I was so turned on by his inventiveness that I tore his clothes off and made love to him one last time before hopping in my car and driving back to the city in tears.

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A Day in New York, a Few in Chicago, a Few in Moline, and Lots of Snow

BC and I just returned from a visit to his relatives in Chicago and the Quad Cities. We took the long way, via New York, to visit the gallery where I’ll be showing in March, to make psychic adjustments to my proposed installation, and to see the Fra Angelico show at the Met. Fra Angelico is one of my favorite artists. His airy, colorful, spare narratives make heaven seem like such a delightful place, and Christians such pleasant people. The real discovery for me was his Christ with Crown of Thorns, a portrait of Christ with blood-filled eyes and tortured expression. Unlike most of his works that we know about, the figure in this painting isn’t located in any particular space, but presented against a dark background and brought dramatically into our world. His bright red lips and red eyes form an inverted triangle at the center of the painting with black holes for mouth and eyes that draw one into his suffering. And then, there are these incredible little curlicues at the ends of his locks of hair, a purely visual diversion from the point of the painting that reminds us that this is an aesthetic experience as well: the divinity and humanity of Christ echoed in the subject and physicality of the painting.

We also braved the crowds at the Van Gogh drawing show and the completely thrilling The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, an exhibition of photos taken mostly around the late 19th century documenting the immaterial world of auras, ghosts, ectoplasmic effluvia, and fluidic effects. “The Birth of Ectoplasm” was my favorite, with something that looked like cheesecloth coming out of some chick’s special place. Pornography for the spiritually enlightened.

We didn’t get to see much else, as we had to zip down to Chelsea and scope out the situation. Here’s the view outside of our hotel room window. BC wouldn’t let me include the picture of him in his undies opening beer bottles using the window sash.

The next morning found us in Moline, up to our ankles in snow. We crossed the mighty Mississip to visit the new museum in Davenport, the Figge, which is fabulous architecturally and spatially, but the curators should sell every one of their horrendous 17th century spanish paintings and focus on regional artists. Their Grant Wood room, for example, was so well thought out, presenting a wide range of work in the context of the countryside that inspired young Mr. Wood.

BC and I, and his darling sisters Beth and Margie, drove to Chicago to visit their Dad, Stephanie for the weekend. She was her usual glamorous self. I’m firmly convinced that her transexuality has nothing at all to do with her sexuality. She’s a transclothesual, cloaked in the trappings of an ideal femininity. Being a sucker for dinosaurs and dioramas, I dragged everyone to the Field Museum. On view was an exhibit about Pompeii, which included several very touching casts made from the voids in the hardened ash that had encompassed the bodies following the eruption of Vesuvius in 79.


Only three more months until my New York debut. Panic attack panic attack.

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Brief and Frantic

No, I’m not ignoring you. I’ve been out of town. In snow! Glorious one-foot deep snow! I could have shoveled everyone’s driveways and made a thousand snowmen. Instead, I’m back in balmy San Francisco, but am tired, haven’t read a paper in a week or any of your adventures, so I’ll catch up with you tomorrow night and post some pictures and notes from my journey east. Until then, a basketfull of kisses.

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Flux

Yesterday afternoon I watched The Innocents with BC, based on Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. The film is about a governess, Deborah Kerr, who believes that the children in her care are possessed by the spirits of the deceased former governess and valet. We get to see the ghosts, but are never convinced that the apparitions aren’t entirely in the head of the governess. She sees the children’s innocent play as increasingly sinister. When she kisses the boy, it’s alarmingly on the verge of becoming passionate. The dialogue cleverly empahasizes ambiguity, with the housekeeper admitting to having seen a ghost, but then saying “I know what I saw” when asked for confirmation. The governess is inexperienced, this being her first job–perhaps a metaphor for her sexual innocence. She first sees the male apparition at the top of a tower, the female one at the lake, like Freud wrote the screenplay, and further suggesting that we’re seeing the longings of the erotically repressed. It’s really a brilliant film, in stunning black and white Cinemascope, too, with so much queasy psychological depth to mull over.

Last night my brother made gumbo for his wife Keith’s birthday, burning the roux and everything. My sister found a recipe for a Texan-Italian cake, celebrating Keith’s cultural heritage. There is a community for every food, evidently. Which reminds me, not that this has anything to do with anything, but the other night I was talking to BC and Philip about my “last taste” obsession, and I wonder if anybody else does this: When I eat, I scope out the situation and eat around what I anticipate to be the last bite, building up to a sort of taste-bud crescendo. With tempura, it’s always the shrimp that’s last, typically preceded by the broccoli. I can’t put down a bag of Barbecue-flavored Low Fat Baked Kettle Chips before finding the chip that has the most barbecue powder on it. Both the sight of it and the taste give me the sense of finality that I seem programmed to need.

I wrote my first art review, for Stretcher. It should be coming out in the next few weeks. I’m very sensitive to what a work of art is communicating, but generally tend to make statements, grand unsubstantiated claims or biases, and am not very good at elaboration, so getting past 50 words was brutal. I ended up writing in a style that I thought contained my voice, and then grabbing a thesaurus to make it sound grown-up. You’d be surprised by how many synonyms there are for “experience” and “shape.”

BC and I made plans to visit his family in Illinois in early December. We’ll be flying to Moline via New York, stopping overnight to see the Fra Angelico show, meet with Mr. Gallery Director and take pictures of the space. The gallery has expanded since February, so I may need to alter my proposed installation. We won’t have time to see anybody, but I’ll be back in March for a longer stay.

I’m growing my beard back. Flux, a constant state of flux–that’s the state that I’m going to reside in for a while.

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New York Apartment Swap

Nuevo Yorkers! I am looking to maybe swap apartments with someone for the first two weeks of March next year. If you are interested, send me an e-mail, or if you know of anyone else who might be interested, please pass on my e-mail address to them. It’s a great time to be in San Francisco, as that’s when the city’s flowering plum and cherry trees will be blossoming, and my own garden will be a tranquil oasis from the bustle of New York city. I live just a block above the main drag of Castro Street, and one block from the geographic center of the city, so it’s easy to get anywhere from Casa Coco. Plus, there’s a big friendly bear staying downstairs in my studio who could help with getting you settled.

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Birmingham: The Men of Pinson–Eugene, Pat & Paul

My mom and dad take several walks around the block each day with their little mammal, Bootise. Occasionally a neighbor or two will wave and amble over for a little roadside chat. On one of our walks, just pulling up to a house around the corner from ours, in his black pickup, was the cutest little bear dude, who hollered, “Where y’all live?” I responded that my mom and dad lived around the corner, on Red Hollow Road, but that I was visiting from California. I denied my San Francisco home by omission, fearful that my homo status, too swiftly confirmed, would put a premature end to our discourse. In Pinson, everybody from San Francisco is gay. It’s a southern custom to embrace the general, and discard the specific if potentially uncomfortable. He introduced himself as Eugene, and said that he, his wife and “little boy” were living temporarily in his mom’s house since his own burned down a few months ago:

“I was making m’self some bacon ‘n eggs, and fell asleep, and when ‘ah woke up, the house wuz on fiar. Yep, we lost everythin’, ‘cept ourselves…”

I of course immediately fell in love, and imagined myself engaged in all sorts of intrigue to rebuild that house with me in it. He had the look of a Pinson man: easy going, slow talking, small beer-belly, sun-burned neck, round pink face, slight ever-present smile, baseball cap, t-shirt, jeans, unshaved–in other words, just dreamy. He’s what all of us queens try so hard to look like, he just does it by being. I suppose my attraction to his type mirrors the gun moll to the gangster–a dangerous attraction to the other and the extreme.

In junior high I had many many crushes on such guys. One such crush was on Pat & Paul, the Pauley twins. Already larger than life at 15, they totally idolized the Dukes of Hazzard–they even had the same car. They wore matching cowboy shirts and red handkerchiefs around their necks, and tettered around in big boots. They liked me because I talked different from them, and they would hoot and holler every time I addressed them as “you guys.” They formed the bulk of my early teen fantasies, me of course playing kissing-cousin Daisy to their Bo & Luke. There have to be gay versions of these beautiful creatures, I’ve yet to find them…

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Birmingham: Visit with Friends

I made my way to James’ new digs in Crestwood, a gay bachelor pad seamlessly woven into a comfy middle class milieu, that he shares with two other dudes. Aside from the guy sleeping on his bed when I arrived, he’s also seeing a Russian dude who lives down the street whose name sounds like “florist” without the “fl,” and a “fuzzy bear guy.” James, now waiting tables and moonlighting his prodigious talents as wigmaster and costume designer, is never far from mass quantities of physical attention. Indeed, he yawned frequently at dinner, prompting my question, “The guy on the bed?” and his affirmative nod. James’ status as a fugitive from justice is near an end, so soon he’ll be able to visit California again without the fear of being apprehended. James and I have gone years at a time without keeping in touch, but we share a connection unhindered in the slightest by distance of time or space. In high school I felt obliged to accommodate his attraction to me, and let him advance his talents upon my person one night. I wasn’t terribly interested, but at that age biology rolls along independent of thought, and roll along I did, for something like 3 hours. His interest, knowledge and dexterity astounded me, but I was saving my heart for Potsie, who, unbeknownst to me at the time, was to toss it out the winder and onto the freeway shoulder where it would be flattened with the other road kill in the coming months.

Susan and her daughter Casey, who is a dead ringer for Reese Witherspoon, came over for a brief visit with my mom and dad, and then they swept me away to the Cedar Post Restaurant for eggs, grits, sausage, and biscuits, and then a drive around town. The town that we grew up in, Susan and I, is called Pinson. Its recent incorporation as a real city, with a mayor and everything, was prompted by Birmingham’s annexation of nearly every surrounding township. Unfortunately, Pinson’s status as a city has been accompanied by a complete loss of civic visual identity. The charming old buildings downtown were bulldozed to make way for shopping plazas that have already gone bust. Triangle Park is still there, but with no context since they widened the highway. The Old Rock School is now just the face of a megachurch called the Rock Solid Church. Attaching a new building to the old mimics the vernacular use of field stones to face the sides of buildings or foundations. I suppose it’s nice that they saved the old rock school, but my attachment to community and place seems to be a quaint romantic and outmoded alternative to progress and convenience.

Anyway, Susan is a neo-gothic heroine who slaves away at two minimum-wage jobs to pay the mortgage on her trailer and support her two kids and decidedly less ambitious husband. She has a brilliant wit and is a writer of extraordinary talents, yet her novel remains unfinished. Often times when I visit her, I listen to her richly embellished and ornamented tales of life in Pinson and dread the moment when she says, “Well, I’d better get on home…” I have yet to meet her husband, well, since he said he’d kill me and all, but he seems to have mellowed since the divorce, remarriage, and his wife coming out, and maybe next time we’ll finally get to connect. He told Susan of his fears that she was probably going to up and leave him and run off to San Francisco with me. She’s Cinderella in that trailer, with absolutely no idea that in San Francisco she would be a queen.

April, whom I visited later in the afternoon, is, I think, one of the great southern beauties, with an uncanny resemblance to Ricky Lee Jones. We sipped wine on the veranda of her beautiful old brick house near Highland Park, and swatted mosquitos while talking of our impending middle age and various ailments.

I was deeply humbled by my visits with James and Susan, and how hard they have to work, and how much real talent lies fallow due to the distractions of survival and the lack of creative outlet. April seems very comfy and happy, with a doting husband, great kids, and solid teaching career.

Next Chapter… The Men of Pinson Valley.

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Birmingham Day 1: Home

I arrived in Birmingham around 3:30 yesterday afternoon. Dad picked me up at the airport and drove me home. I’ve lived in San Francisco for 21 years and I still call this place home. I’ve always envied people who are really of a particular city, who can say, “I’m from Rome,” or “I’m a New Yorker,” because they were born there and inherited an identity specific to place. I was born in South Bend, Indiana, but moved to Alabama when I was 2, and to Birmingham when I was 14, then to San Francisco at 18. So really, I lived here for only 6 years, but the years from 13-18, pretty big ones. While I lived here, I could only think of finding a community that had never voted for George Wallace and recycled. It’s only been in coming back every few years that I’ve come to filter an appreciation of the culture and environment through my relation to it as someone neither fully inside nor outside of it.

Over the next few days, in addition to my parents, I’ll be spending time with three very dear old friends–Susan, James, and April–each with deep roots in southern soil. I had wanted to visit Lisa, the vivacious owner of the “Cuttin’ Up!” hair salon, but she just burned herself a few days ago after heatin’ up some hair-removal wax in the microwave, spilling the concoction all over her hand and arm, the main tools of her trade. Actually the main tools of her success have been her flirtatious wit and stunning looks, so I don’t think her business is going to suffer.

Mom and Dad are like the Loud Family, not of Lance fame, just in terms of volume. My mom told my dad last night not to wake me up in the morning and let me sleep in, as we did a lot of yard work, and then stayed up late watching Giant, but at 7 they were yelling affectionately at each other and their dog, Bootsie, the morlock, rattling windows, slamming doors. It’s relatively quiet now, and I’m looking out their front window at the lovely hickory, redbud, pine, and oak trees, and the thriving dogwood which sprouted out of the crotch of a particular oak shortly after we moved in. There’s also a big hickory that was struck by lightning the weekend that we moved in, shearing off half of the tree and leaving a semicircular shell of a lower trunk supporting the great mass of the remaining crown. I keep telling my dad to take the tree down, that it’s going to fall onto their bedroom in the next storm, but I think he sees it as mirroring their own struggle in this environment, and thus it stands as an ever-leaning monument to their fragile triumph.

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Back in Town for a Bit

The scenes from New Orleans are out of a post-apocalyptic film, people firing on helicopters, bodies floating down the street–while our president eats cake. I read yesterday that it was going to take 4 days for certain supply ships to arrive. 4 days. We could capture a foreign capital in that time. I watched Laurent Cantet’s Les Sanguinaires last night, a tiny gem of a film about a group of friends trying to get away from all the pre-Millenium hysteria by spending the week on a remote island, only to discover that they can’t get away from each other, or human nature. D and I saw Junebug earlier in the day, a totally delightful film about what binds a family together and how oblivious people can be to what’s in front of them. It’s a very complex film with amazing little details and perfomances, presented in a very simple narrative. I think that I prefer to lose myself in films these days. They end.

I had a wonderful time in Florida. The hurricane made it a bit windier, and there were actual waves at the beach, but the Tampa Bay area remained just out of Katrina’s path. Karl, my dad’s cousin from the old country, came down from his adopted home of Canada for the week. He had recently visited the town in Slovenia that my dad’s side of the family is from, and shared pictures of people who all looked like my brothers and sisters, as well as photos that my grandmother took when she returned to the family home in the 50’s (she emigrated to the US while in her late teens), and pictures of my great great grandmother and her family. I also discovered that another of my dad’s cousins was part of the naval team that captured the German submarine that led to the solving of the German “enigma” by Alan Turing and hastened the end of WWII–an actual war hero in the family. I thought we were all active pacifists. And I also learned that our hero’s family is from East Moline, as the name would suggest, a town just east of Moline, the town where my boyfriend Big Chrissy’s family lives, and where I visit all the time! I’m sure that the next thing I’m going to discover is that Chris and I are cousins and that our love is rooted in a genetic twist of Freud’s ideas about narcissism.

I’m leaving for Alabama next Wednesday to spend some time with Mom and Dad and my sweeter than sweet tea southern buddies.

Pictures and stories ahead…