Monday morning I’ll be flying to Tampa, to visit my sisters, as well as my other siblings and parental units who are flying in for our semi-annual Komater convergence. My sister in law, Keith, is bringing along her mom, Joe (Joe Momma), and various siblings from her branch of the family tree, so it promises to be a pretty rowdy fun-filled event. I’m going to try to leave my laptop at home, so that I won’t be diverted away from my intent to get some reading done. Expect a full report on my return. Until then, you San Franciscans in your summer coats, imagine bobbing with me among the jellyfish on my innertube in that big warm bathtub that is the Gulf…
Midwest II: Party Food
So with our bellies and minds fortified for the trip, we made our way westward from Chicago to the Quad Cities, Land of BC’s people. As in Chicago, our trip was structured around food, specifically the food for Maggie’s graduation party–shopping, preparing, displaying and consuming. I was the official potato peeler, clocking in 15 pounds in 30 minutes, watermelon man, and sub-taster. Beth was the master organizer, calmly putting together her potato salad, ham and cheese sandwich materials, fruit salad, for 100 people, while hubbie Dan mowed their lawn and wacked the weeds of the entire block. Meanwhile, Momma baked the beans. The approach to foodmaking was the exact opposite of Alinea–that is, not messing with tradition. The potato salad had just mayonnaise and vinegar supporting and enhancing the delicate flavors of potato, celery and egg. The baked beans were just beans, brown sugar, and bacon. The ham sammies ham and cheese and mustard. And so on… A kind of unchanging and familiar yummy that warms the heart. I haven’t weighed myself yet, but I’m quite sure that there is much more of me than before the trip.
Stay tuned as Coco slims down…
Midwest Trip: Alinea
Well, I just had one of the one most interesting meals of my life. Last Wednesday. Not only meals, but experiences. En route to Moline for the graduation party of BC’s niece Maggie, we stayed the night with BC’s dad, Stephanie, in Chicago, and I treated them to a dinner at Alinea.
One enters the restaurant though a narrow hallway that, due to the height of the ceiling lowering quickly as one proceeds down it, disorients, like stumbling down the rabbit hole and into Wonderland. The entry is an appropriate introduction to a cuisine that takes the notion of food as sustenance and extends it into the realms of sensation and invention.
Our first course was a tiny amuse bouche consisting of a wafer-like cylinder dangling from a grape branch. Within the cylinder was an intensely sweet grape surrounded by a peanut butter, that we were instructed to nibble straight from the branch. Course after course followed, each more challenging than the previous. The snapper course was so complicated that I don’t think I can articulate what happened. The snapper was embedded, like the yolk of a fried egg, within a thin tofu crust, topped with a lemon curd, and surrounded by pickled cucumber, tiny soy beans and a soy milk broth, the air scented with a ginger essence that the waiter created by grating ginger over each of our plates. He also poured the ginger juice from the essence production into the soy broth. Another course was a single broccoli stem enveloped in a thin brioche, sauteed in clarified butter, topped with a single slice of candied grapefruit skin, steelhead roe sprinkled about, a grapefruit skin shmear on the side of the bowl, all the flavors assaulting the tastebuds from every conceivable direction. The bison was one of my favorite dishes, served on the plate as a flirtation with beet and blueberries. On the left of the plate was a slice of bison filet next to a pile of dried blueberry dust, to dip the bison in. Moving diagonally across the plate, there first was a sort of salad of bison meat and fennel, covered in a thin gelatinous layer of beet, and next a puree of beet swirled into a puree of fennel, and then a few fresh blueberries, and finally a perfect miniature golden beet at the far end of the plate. There was also a tiny smoking dish on the plate that we were instructed not to eat, that provided an accompanying scent; cinnamon bark slowly roasting on a heated stone. Oh wait, back up a few courses to the heart of palm dish. 5 tiny stands were placed before each of us, in a single row. We were instructed to roll the contents directly into our mouths. On each stand was a slice of heart-of-palm hollowed out and filled with first a lemon pudding, then a bulghar wheat and garlic filling, then a prune-plum filling topped with sliced olives, and the final one stuffed with a persimmon truffle mixture. There was also a course consisting of a cube of avocado, a tiny wedge of burned orange, a sliver of olive, and a tiny shaving of orange zest, presented bobbing at the end of a skewer arced toward each of our mouths. We were again told to pluck it directly from the skewer using only our lips. We had twelve courses in all, plus a few extras like a glass tube filled with sour cream, dehydrated strawberry, and argon jelly, which were sucked out of the tube to come together like a science experiment in the mouth. Perhaps the greatest was the simplest, a bowl with a small dollop of pineapple foam in one corner, and near it tiny spoonfuls of pistachios, a reduced Chartreuse sauce, shredded coconut, angelica leaf and something else that I can’t remember. Whatever intense flavor was swirled into the foam combined dynamically with the pineapple flavor in the mouth and then dissipated quickly. One course was just a strip of bacon. But it was impossibly thin, fried to perfection, presented dangling on a horizontal skewer, and infused with the flavors of apple, butterscotch and thyme. The rabbit course paired little coins of bunny with morels in a reduction of delicious deepness, topped with a single perfect piece of wild lettuce and a nasturtium flower. There was also a liquid chocolate cake, a sponge cake attached to a vanilla bean that was used to sop up something fabulous and vanilla that has already receded from memory… Our wines included an Austrian Grüner and an Oregon Pinot.
I don’t get many chances to experience art that I can enjoy for such intense visual thrills and physical sensations, and get to eat it, too. If only all ephemeral art were this satisfying, and edible.
Happy Cows Come From California
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Dean and Doug treated me and Big Chrissy to a memorable Memorial Day weekend, beginning with a wonderful dinner Saturday night of local crab. Doug skillfully prepared the crabs, bringing them to the table cracked and cleaned, but carefully reassembled with the artistry of a taxidermist. Everyone had his own way of eating the critters: Dean pulled all of the meat from his crab and mounded it into a very neat pile before slathering it in cocktail sauce and eating it all at once. Doug took a similar approach, but cleaned and mounded half at a time. BC and I just tore into ours and made big messes. I drank too much and broke a glass while cleaning the dishes, even with Dean hovering overhead. I sent them a few replacements yesterday, fearful that my dear friends would be forced to drink wine from mugs due to my impaired dishwashing abilities. Early the next morning after Freedom Toast we went for a hike in Marin, past many happy cows and an abundance of wildflowers. Doug, the botanist, provided us with the genus and species of every living thing we passed or stepped on.
Upon our return to civilization, we took in the new Star Wars movie with D. Star Wars, nothing but Star Wars, duh duh duh duh. The effects were pretty spectacular, but really, the first one was enough. Excuse me, Episode 4. Anakin tells Padme that together they can rule the galaxy and she shakes her head and replies, “I just don’t know you anymore.”
And so the summer begins. This year is going by way too fast. Or as Yoda would say, “By way too fast is this year going.” Make it stop. Stop it make?
People Move in a Hole in the Ground
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“New York, New York, it’s a fabulous town, the Bronx is up and..” all the restaurants have that offputting “choking victim” poster that scares me into suspiciously chewing my food very carefully whenever I’m in town. Apologies to all the swell New Yorkers we didn’t get to see, but this visit was for but a few days to see the new MoMA, Dia Beacon, the Christo/Jeanne Claude gates, and the Fra Carnevale show at the Met. I tend to fall victim to Stendhal’s Syndrome (Dizziness, panic, paranoia, or madness caused by viewing certain artistic or historical artifacts or by trying to see too many such artifacts in too short a time) when traveling in major cities. We did get to hang at the new MoMA with Joey, who is about as charming as they come, plus he has this totally adorable wisp of back hair creeping over his collar that provided pleasant aesthetic counterpoint to the cold modernist surfaces. We took a walk around the park and through the gates and met up with fellow SFite, Philip. The gates are quite successful as social art, and even aesthetically, too. The curtain of fabric creates an illusion of a low orange ceiling, and walking among them feels like a very regal or pomp-filled activity. And everybody’s smiling. The color and movement of the fabric stood out brightly against the dull gray of the landscape, and then even more so a few days later against the snow. After flying over Michael Heizer’s “City” on the way into town, we were treated to seeing the orange gates from the plane as we flew in on a very sunny day.
On our last night, walking into one of my east village fave’s, Veselka’s, we were seated smack next to one of the many of Bob’s exes currently residing in the area. Of all the eastern european stuffed cabbage joints in all the towns in all the world, he walks into mine. Actually it was nice to see him without Bob–and as the newest member of the post-Bob club.
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The Dia Beacon is one heck of a museum. We took the train up from Manhattan, about an hour though the snow, snaking along the river through the beautiful and surprisingly rural countryside. The galleries are the size of football fields, with theme-park installations by Richard Serra, Dan Flavin, Louise Bourgeois, Andy Warhol, Michael Heizer, etc… We did get to see the White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art show at ICP, which Nayland was in, drawing from his bi-racial background and folk stories/storytelling. His work and William Kentridge’s animated films, well, and Cindy Sherman’s early self-portraits as bus-riders, bring narrative and experience together for me like the gothic novel. They were also showing Bellocq’s Storyville Prostitutes at ICP, which had a profound effect on me in college. The negative plates were found by Lee Friedlander in an antique store in the 60’s, and he printed up these amazing images of relaxed sexuality in the red-light district of early 20th century New Orleans. The Fra Carnevale show at the Met was super–with little Renaissance gems from Piero della Francesca and Fillipo Lippi. Then up to visit the Rembrandts and the Vermeers and my Italian faves.
On the first night in the city, I got a call from a Chelsea dealer who wants to show my work there. What is going on with my horoscope? He’s young, very young, 25, and cute, a fast talker, and has a super location. Plus he’s interested in installation! So I’ve been sending slides (unsuccessfully) to New York for like 100 years, and this guy stumbles across my site while probably looking for pornography. I seem to have no control over my fate. It blows around like a plastic sandwich bag in a tropical storm.
Christmas, Crabs and Pussies
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I love the idea of having a chopped down tree in the house, I love how it smells, and all the shoppers descending upon my neighborhood in their red felt hats, and the short days and long snuggly nights, and eggnog, Bobbie Helms and Brenda Lee, Garry’s latkes… Last year Ted was totally against Christmas. We had a fight when I tried to give him a present. We compromised when I told him that I had bought him a second gift–I honored his tradition by not giving him the alleged second one, and he honored mine by accepting the first. Bob was so freaked out by my wanting a tree, no not a tree, a representation of the triumph of the Christians, that I suggested we put a golden calf on top. (We even made a tangerine liqueur that year that we called “Golden Calf: The Drink the Israelites Worshipped” that we handed out as Christmas presents.) No more such boyfriends. My favorite Christmas, though, was with Bob in Florence, opening the windows of Palazzo Frescobaldi in the freezing winter to hear the town’s bells at midnight, just magical. Earlier we went all the way across town to buy an Iris Cake, supposedly a Christmas favorite of the Florentines, and ate the dry crumbly tasteless confection in our freezing romantic palazzo while the bells clattered away.
The season thus far has been a good one. Geoff’s intimate potluck, Garry’s greasy latke party, cooking crabs with D and BC, the annual trip to visit Big Chris’s family in Illinois… This time there was snow on the ground when we arrived, but it all melted in a few days. Having grown up in the south, I go wild in the snow, wanting to shovel all the neighbors driveways, and like a dog at the ocean, running around until I’m dragged into the house blue and shivering. Chris’ mom and sisters treated us to many homey delights, such as grilled cheese sammies, chili with real meat, cookies, lasagna, and Whitey’s malts. We spent a few days in Chicago with Chris’s dad, Stephanie. The new Millennium Park is a wonderful new public space, with a large polished steel bean-shaped sculpture by Anish Kapoor, pedestrian bridge and concert hall by Frank Gehry, and a whimsical and monolithic fountain designed by Jaume Plensa, consisting of 2 large video portraits of people smiling, facing each other across a shallow reflecting pool, water splurting down occasionally from their open mouths. One evening Stephanie’s friend Deirdre treated us to an evening at her “club.” We didn’t find out until we got there, in our blue jeans, our winter coats standing in briefly for dinner jackets, that the “Cliff Dwellers Club” is a swank private club founded in 1907 for people interested in the arts–like Roger Ebert, who’s a member. That kind of artist. Chris and I were the only ones who looked like we were involved in the making of art, the others all looked like lawyers. The club was hosting an exhibition of just awful paintings, but we had a nice dinner on the top floor of a building with expansive windows overlooking the Art Institute, the Field Museum and Millennium Park. Deirdre was a male economist and historian once, and became a female one about 7 years ago. She’s written many interesting books in her field, as well as a fascinating book about her experience becoming a woman, called Crossing: A Memoir.
Reading Deirdre’s revealing book, in many ways a man’s perspective on an idealized and regressive womanhood, has brought up far more questions for me than answers. I’ve met only a few transgendered people, including Chris’ dad, with whom I’ve become quite close. As a creator of things myself, I’m interested in how one can create a new identity and gender, and am curious about what it’s all about. I’ve noticed that both Steph and Deirdre’s awareness of their feminine side developed alongside a fetishistic relation to women’s clothes. This is what intrigues me: both say that gender and sexuality are completely unrelated for them, yet Deirdre describes how her cross-dressing often culminated in a masturbatory event. Is the sexual desire for another directed toward the self? That is, the “other” that the self has transformed into? Neither woman seems particularly interested in sex anymore (they’re both in their 60’s, so maybe it’s an age thing), but I think if I suddenly had a pussy, I’d be using it.
Plan 1
I’ve decided on a tentative plan: For my 40th birthday (November, 2005), I’m going to start off with a few weeks in Rome. My last few trips there were about Caravaggio and Bellini, so I’d like to visit my old friends, but this time I’m thinking of following the della Francesca and Perugino trails, which will take me to Urbino, Arezzo, Perugia, Monterchi, Sansepolcro, Citta del Pieve, Spello and Panicale. Caravaggio and Bellini were big inspirations to me in my 30’s: Bellini with his exquisitely painted depictions of other-worldliness, and Caravaggio for his images so rooted in reality. The artists shocked me into an awareness of how art can structure experience and spirituality in such completely different ways. I’m drawn to Perugino and della Francesca for their serenity and simplicity. This is how I want to enter my 40’s–I want tranquility. There’s also a painting in a tiny convent in Florence that I’d love to revisit, by Perugino. It’s a crucifiction scene, but almost conceptual art. The cross is positioned in the center of 3 arches, with saints depicted under the flanking arches. The beams of the cross touch the edge of the arch, both on the sides and on the bottom, bringing the crucifix into our world, touching the frame of our space, but having nothing to do with where it should be accurately positioned visually. So perhaps a few weeks in Rome, and then spend a week working my way up to Florence and Arrezo, and then back to Rome for the final bacchanalia.
40 is a big deal for me. So excuse my ruminating on the subject of what to do for it so much and so far in advance.
Burble Burble
The Big Chrissy and I made our way north this weekend, to share a quiet moment between changing jobs and projects, and hopefully presidential administrations. We stopped at the Cornerstone Festival of Gardens in Sonoma, a collection of every-changing garden installations designed by top landscape architects and designers, including: Topher Delaney, one of my favorite minimalist garden designers; Claude Cormier, who transformed a dead tree with blue plastic Christmas bulbs; Roger Raiche, who brazenly announced the death of the formal garden by plowing his monstrous exotics through the entry garden at the GG Park Arboretum, much too closely planted, too, and through the lovely box hedges, but his contribution to Cornerstone whimsically integrated a large corrugated steel pipe into his interesting mix of color of form; and Andy Cao, who created a very sensuous hilly landscape drawing the viewer towards a hole, from which burbled the sounds of Vietnamese lullabies–just delightful. The rain was a special treat, and we pretty much holed up in our B&B, burbling our own lullabies by the River’s edge.
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Coco Does Bama III
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Breaker 1-9 for a radio check. My dad still has a CB radio. And an 8-track player. He’s this interesting combination of intellectual and redneck. He drinks Paisano, and is currently reading A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. He threw out my Highway 69 sign. I hate him for that. The term “69” took on great significance to my little high school buddies, after Carla, a senior, expressed her ignorance as to its sexual connotation. We would go on outings to Eckerd Drugs and buy suggestive items that cost 69¢, comparing our finds at the end of the spree. When Jason told us that there was a Highway 69 in Alabama, we had to go. He, Ginny, Susan, Jaydie, and I drove there one night, and stole 5 signs from the highway. We’d park the car by a sign, pop the hood, like we were having engine trouble, sexy Ginny played the lady in distress, so that people would look at her instead of me, and I climbed the sign and unscrewed it from its pole. By the 5th sign, I needed only 45 seconds. When I asked Dad where the sign was, he said “I threw it out.” My parents live in this huge house, with tons of space, and they toss out a sign that was leaning against the wall of my closet, sorry, my former closet, occupying no space. James promised that the next time I visit we’d take a trip to Highway 69 and reclaim a sign.
My brother Mark brought his wife and little 8-month old daughter, Cassady, to our high school reunion. Because the baby was in town, my sisters in Florida flew up. Cassady is so beautiful and happy, she squeals and squeaks and laughs and dances because that’s all she knows is how to be beautiful and happy.
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Coco Does Bama II
Susan and I and her son, Jimmy, 16, drove around Pinson one night, the little suburb of Birmingham that I grew up in. It recently incorporated, and there’s a hot runoff election going on now, with the candidates going door-to-door and hurling all sorts of small town accusations at each other. The Pinson that I knew, of little houses with field-stone foundations and small businesses, has been covered over by strips malls and 4-lane roads. Downtown and Triangle Park don’t exist anymore. When Food World (or -Giant, or -Land) opened, it effectively closed downtown, even luring several of the businesses, like the flower shop where I got all of my high school dance boutonnières, into their ugly building. Convenience and progress at the expense of identity and charm.
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So Jimmy called me “sir,” and I almost had a heart attack. “Jimm-meh, don’t call me sir, please.” “Yes, Sir, I mean, Mr. Komater, I mean, Chris…” His mother, Susan, was one of my best friends, from a family with deep southern roots. They lived in a cool log cabin in the woods. Susan and her husband now occupy a double-wide that they parked on Susan’s parents’ property. In high school, Susan wanted to marry an effete poet and live in a trailer park and have a million kids. She loves Jesus and is open about being bi-sexual, although she’s married with 2 kids and doesn’t have a practical outlet for her homosexuality. She’s one of the great wits of the south, spinning long and fabulous yarns out of her wild experiences. She’s had a book in her for about 30 years, and is just in the process of writing it. I guarantee another Confederacy of Dunces. So anyway, after chicken pot pie and Ambrosia at the Dawg House (“What can I getcha, babe?”), we made our way to one of the massive warehouse-type churches on Pinson Parkway to watch her church’s softball team, the Agape Underdogs. We made it just as the game ended and the team was giving post-game thanks to the Lord, only an hour into play. In lieu of 9 innings, when one team gets 11 points ahead, they call it quits. The Agape (pronounced “ah-GAH-pay”) Underdogs have never made it past a few innings, although they sure try. We piled into the car and drove to Trussville, where Lisa, whom I haven’t seen in about 23 years, and who had the biggest hairdo in the south (“closer to the Lord!”) now runs a massive hair salon, called Kuttin’ Up. She has 60 employees working in what’s more like a theme park than a salon, offering everything from hair cuts and body waxes to massages and spray-on tans. We watched Lisa effortlessly give a woman who rode in on a motorcycle a fabulous wind-blown mullet, all the while entertaining us with stories of her 3 kids and cheatin’ husbands and boyfriends.
I had dinner with Pete and his lover, Jim, and James, the fugitive, one night on Birmingham’s Southside. It was pasta night at Silvertron, all pastas $7.95. I had spent the whole day trying to find the perfect southern place to eat at, but they were all closed on Monday night, or just open for lunch. Anyway, Pete is just adorable, and with hardly any detectable accent–strange for an Anniston boy, and Jim’s really easy-going and sweet. They compliment each other nicely—and don’tcha wanna just lick them forearms?
Much to my delight, the Vulcan, a colossal iron sculpture of the god of the forge, towering over Birmingham’s Red Mountain and commemorating the prosperity that the iron industry brought to the region, had been restored. His naked ass hovers directly over my high school, and during my school years, I’d frequently look to that big iron butt for inspiration and solace.
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