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Pesca-vegie-occasional-bacon-itarian Homobots

Last night Dean & Mike came over for dinner. I inadvertently made exactly the same thing that I made for them when I had them over last time. In my baby-gay days, my older buddy William would have me over for lunch and always make the same thing for me, a sort of flavorless broccoli pasta and a green salad. Always. And he’d always ask excitedly how I liked the pasta, as if it were the first time for me to experience it, and I’d always find something positive to say, like “the broccoli was cooked perfectly!” I got a kick out of it, each time wondering if there would be some kind of variation. I attributed it to the onset of senility, normal for people over 45, I thought. And now I am William. The thing is, these guys are vegetarians, well, sophisticated pesca-occasional-bacon-itarians, and I’ve run through all my veggie standards, so maybe I’m seized by a lack of culinary exploration and not some nascent middle-aged senility… not quite William. I hope.

I wonder if I’ve already written a post about this?

We watched Funeral Parade of Roses, Toshio Matsumoto’s wild inversion of the Oedipus myth, set in the gay subculture of late-60s Tokyo. The fractured narrative and visceral imagery and occasional shots of the filmmaking process and interviews with the actors were simply electrifying. Nothing else is like it, well, I should say that nothing else that’s like it is terribly watchable, and certainly nothing as engaging from or about the gay community lately. Except maybe the lesbotic but more mainstream Blue is the Warmest Color, which so profoundly and intimately captured erotic awakening, and Concussion, examining the other end of the erotic timeline. The thing I love most about those two recent films is that homosexuality is incidental–no coming out stories, no suicides or conflicts over their sexuality, no tidied-up sexless made-for-primetime-viewing homobots, just real people struggling with real issues who happen to be gay. The queens in Funeral Parade of Roses put on the masks of another gender in order to simulate acceptability, and despite the artifice and posturing, seemed so sadly real, like killing one’s mother and sleeping with one’s father were not only plausible, but inevitable.

Earlier in the day a new buddy from the east came over for tea, let’s call him Bill Cosby. I had met him only earlier that morning online, and because we hit it off so swimmingly and he was leaving town the next day and I had but a teeny window of availability, I abandoned my cardinal rule of meeting in a public place where I could easily escape from, and asked Mr. Cosby up to the CocoPlex for a spot o’ tea and conversation. What a story he told me! He’s married, and to a woman(!), and has all these kids, and only came out of the closet a few months ago and is staying with his wife as they transition to whatever is to come. I admired his honesty and openness, and could sense the relief and enthusiasm he must be feeling to finally express a side of himself that’s been dormant for so long. He even blurted out that he’s a Republican. We were sitting on my back deck at the time and I quickly glanced around to make sure there were no neighbors passing by who may have heard his pronouncement, briefly fearful that my leftist credentials would be tarnished by association. I didn’t directly tell him that I’m a Prius-driving ultra-liberal socialist, but I did chastise him for supporting a fascist regime whose backward fantasy-based environmental, social and fiscal policies are going to take decades to unravel if the public ever wakes from its brainwashed tea party stupor.

Anyway, he’s sort of exactly the kind of middle-aged guy that I always went after during my halcyon twinkie days (balding, furry face, dark eyebrows, hairy forearms, yadda yadda, you all know my type) and now he’s, like, my age! I felt an instant affinity, having experienced the same thing with Bob, realizing I was drawn towards something else but not wanting to end such a beautiful relationship and eventually deciding it just wasn’t fair to anybody. He’s at the beginning of this process, and like a bad therapist, I told him what was going to happen by telling him what happened to me. A delightful man, starting a new life in middle age. Lou Grant said, “You’ve got spunk,” and so does this guy, a lot of spunk. Lou also said “I hate spunk,” but I love it, and am eager to follow this developing story.

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Small Works in Oakland

I have some photos in a little group show at the Mercury 20 Gallery in Oakland, pictures taken in Greece over the past 2 years.  Please check out the show, a sweet assemblage of Delectable and Collectible items.  I will be in the gallery this Friday, Jan 3 from 3-6, and later that evening for the Friday Art Murmer, from 6-9.  My photos are super cheap, $75 for small prints, $50 for slightly smaller ones.  Shop!  Shop!

SMALL WORKS: Delectable/Collectible | Dec 19 thru Jan 4

MERCURY 20 GALLERY
475 25th Street, Oakland
Thurs – Sat 12 to 6pm

Oakland Art Murmur First Friday: Jan 3, 6-9pm

WORKS BY:
Julie Alvarado
Jo Ann Biagini
Eric Bohr
Nick Dong
Terryl Dunn
P.K. Frizzell
Kathleen King
Chris Komater
Leah Markos
Jill McLennan
Charlie Milgrim
Jann Nunn
Mary Curtis Ratcliff
Joanna Salska
Julianne Sterling
Kerry Vander Meer
Joan Weiss

Founded in 2006, Mercury 20 is a contemporary art gallery established, supported and operated by East Bay artists. Mercury 20 maintains a venue for artists to exhibit, develop, and advance their work and is committed to exhibiting art of diverse media and content. Exhibitions rotate every six weeks, and the gallery presents a well-attended opening event every first Friday in conjunction with the Oakland Art Murmur.

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Broadway, Burglary, and Sergeants Bert & Ernie

Big Chrissy and I took a trip to New York City for Christmas.  We had our luggage stolen from our hotel room, but we saw some great shows, were photographed by Bill Cunningham buying bananas in Brooklyn, and got to ride in a cop car!

The night our luggage was stolen, we made our way to the local precinct to report the burglary.  It was just like in Barney Miller, a shabby interior filled with wise-cracking, heavily-New-York-accented helpful cops.  They drove us back to our hotel in a real NYPD cruiser, but somehow the back seat was pushed forward taking up all the legroom, so Chrissy sat side-saddle and I in a lotus position.  Looking through the rain-smeared windows at the blinking lights outside I thought of Taxi Driver and Bernard Hermann’s haunting score.  “This is totally worth being burgled,” I told the cops.

We spent several hours with them at the hotel, as we waited for the fingerprint guy.  I told them that we had already fouled the crime scene and that fingerprints weren’t necessary and that in San Francisco the police would have never taken the theft of our underwear and socks so seriously.  “Aren’t there other crimes in the neighborhood that you guys should be looking into?  Rapes?  Murders?”  Sergeants Bert & Ernie looked at us gravely, “We take every crime seriously.”  Chrissy and I just melted.  New York cops are indeed the finest.

We saw Isaac Julien’s ridiculous but sumptuous installation at MoMA, supposedly about some tragic drowning, but really about Maggie Cheung flying over gorgeous Chinese scenery, the subject matter seemingly of no real interest to the artist or anybody there.  The Margritte show was just a delight, completely amazing the dazzlingly mature and inventive body of work that he produced from the ages of 28-30.  Walking through Mike Kelly’s retrospective at PS1, the only thought that came to mind was that suicide was inevitable.  Ah, Wangechi Mutu’s show at the Brooklyn Museum was the show for me.  First of all, nobody goes there, to the Brooklyn Museum, so you can really spend time with the work with no one taking pictures over your shoulders.  She creates collages and sculptural pieces that are simultaneously lovely and disturbing, two qualities that I strive for but rarely achieve.  I’m totally going to steal from her this year, so watch out…

On Broadway we saw two Pinter plays, No Man’s Land with Ian McKellan and Captain Picard, and Beyrayal with Rafe Spall, Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz. Pinter can create scenes that have nothing to do with plot or story, just language, how we use it, what it does… Of course there usually is some kind of story, but the dialogue is about the essence of communication and words liberated from silly things like narrative. We also saw the awesome Laurie Metcalf and Jeff Goldblum in Domesticated, which takes as its thesis the basic inessential and catastrophe-prone nature of the male of the species. We saw a couple of other things, but I don’t think they were all that memorable, so let’s move on…

We met up with Emily for a traditional Ukranian Christmas Eve repast at Veselka’s in the East Village, followed by American Hustle. As we left the movie, and once again Jennifer Lawrence was dynamite, after having eaten all the same things and with Chrissy and I about to explode, Emily announced that she was going out for dinner. What a metabolism! And she’s like this super skinny chick. “I’ll have what she’s having.”

We spent Christmas lunch eating Swedish meatballs in the West Village and seeing Jia Jiang-Ke’s completely depressing A Little Sin on those stupid little IFC screens that they should really only charge $5 entry to see, then meeting my brother Paul and sister-in-law Debbie at their hotel near Grand Central. Chrissy and I didn’t want to leave their room–unlike ours, theirs had a window. And a view. Not that ours didn’t have a window, or a view, of sorts. Our window opened onto a narrow eternally dark alley that only a pigeon could squeeze into, our view the filthy building windows next door, mounded with pigeon poop dating back to the early days of Broadway. We enjoyed a really great French dinner in the West Village, laughing and stuffing ourselves silly. The next morning we met at the big tree in Rockefeller Center and toured the murals in the GE Building, imagining what Diego Rivera’s mural there would have looked like. It was ordered destroyed by Nelson Rockefeller after Rivera refused to replace Lenin’s portrait with that of an anonymous face. The subsequent murals, by Josep Maria Cert, form an almost homoerotic allegory depicting big beefy white guys constructing modern America in loin cloths–just like I’ve imagined it…

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Two Weeks in Frisco

I’m not sure how the word “Frisco” became associated with a less-sophisticated appellation, but I warmly embrace it, in the company of every wisecracking dame and hard-boiled fedora-wearing tough-guy from Joan Blondell to Burt Lancaster and Edward G. Robinson, as the preferred nickname of our fair town. Stavros was here. And now he’s gone. Frisco just ain’t the same.

We spent a little weekend together in the Russian River, stopping in Petaluma and then driving through the Dry Creek wine country and doing some tasting. We stayed in Monte Rio, on the river under the redwoods at the Village Inn, where scenes were shot for the 1942 Bing Crosby Fred Astaire movie Holiday Inn, best remembered for the song “White Christmas.” Across the bridge, on the other side of the river is a little vintage quonset hut movie theater, The Rio, where we saw Don John. It’s so cold in the theater they give you wool blankets to snuggle up under. There were only 4 or so of us in the audience. This theater is a little gem, with murals painted by local artists, and the ceiling draped in the remnants of Christo’s “Running Fence.”

We saw the David Hockney show at the de Young. While a young student at the San Francisco Art Institute, working my way through school by cashiering at Marcello’s Pizza on Castro, one of the cooks at Marcello’s, David Dambacher, an older little man with a sort of nasally voice, took a liking to me, constantly bringing up “Daaaaa-vid.” Daaaaa-vid this and Daaaaa-vid that… David Hockney. They were friends in LA. I had never heard of David Hockney, which exasperated his attempts to impress me. I just thought, if this guy were a good buddy of this “famous” artist, what was he doing working as a pizza cook for $6.25/hour? One day he showed up while I was working and laid out a little picnic on one of the tables, with baguette, wine and cheese, and a monograph of works by David Hockney. A few weeks later at school, I noticed that my photos were missing from the darkroom drying racks. I didn’t think anything of it until I received a ransom note from David, demanding my body in exchange for my art. He continued aggressively pursuing me until one day I received a barf bag on my doorstep, covered in scribblings announcing that he was moving out of town and that I would never hear from him again, brutally assaulting my ignorance and failure to grasp the intensity and beauty of our potential coupling.

So, David Hockney. The show was great. Although he blew up these little iPad drawings into museum-ready numbered editioned prints, which completely turned me off. Rather than fully embracing a new technology, he merely made the same old stuff look like it was drawn by a robot.  Otherwise, the color and scale and vibrance of the rest of the work was just the thing to enjoy as a contrast to all the conceptual and abstract swaggering going on about town. One room in particular contained one of the most mesmerizing video installations I’ve seen in a while. On each of the 4 walls of the room he mounted a grid of flat-panel TV screens, each grid showing the same scene, moving slowly down a country road, but at different times of the year, each of the 4 scenes synched at the same point on the road. Such a simple gesture, walking down a country road, but executed with extraordinarily complex visual and digital engineering. I am so sorry I didn’t know who he was when I had the chance to get some real dirt on this guy 30 years ago.

My friend Emily took us to hear Cameo in concert at Yoshi’s on Halloween. I dressed up as a swinging disco dude, Michael Caine’s little brother circa 1977. My feet were so sore from my platform shoes that I didn’t dance. I don’t know how John Travolta did it. And my head was so itchy under my wig, I just wanted to go home and wash it. But I didn’t, afterwards we wandered around Castro Street and mingled with the other revelers, constantly scratching at my wig until finally limping up the hill to my house.

I introduced Stavros to chicken mole and dim sum on this trip. That’s like watching Vertigo for the first time. Twice. Which he hasn’t seen, actually, but I’m saving that for the next trip. We drank martinis with Dean Smith and Mike Kitchell, and I think all of us passed out during My Dog Tulip, which seemed an appropriate thing to watch and do after the Hockney show. We shopped at Macy’s. We had Little Star Pizza with my family and ended up with 2 whole leftover pizzas, the last 2 slices of which I’m currently nibbling on for lunch today. We saw Gravity in 3-D with Daniel. We went to my sister’s open studio and marveled at her ability to draw so fluidly with wire and marbles. We nibbled on free food at the Ferry Building and Trader Joe’s. I made a traditional bolognese meat sauce with texturized vegetable protein. Stavros made his famous eggs for breakfast and many recipes from his One-Spoon Project. We walked d’Auggie around the Castro together. We inadvertently staged an impromptu mini Danish film festival. We hiked with Big Chrissy and Small d’Auggie at Fort Funsten. We brunched with Dean and Chris at Kate’s Kitchen. We ate expensive pastries and drank coffee with Nemr and his current ex-husband at Craftsmen & Wolves and hung out with the hipsters on Valencia.

And now we talk every day via FaceTime and Skype, the vast distances between us seeming not so vast anymore.

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Six Weeks of Stavros

Well I’m back home. Summer is finally over and it’s like… November? I remember as a kid the seemingly endless number of days between the end of summer and Christmas. Now the calendar pages fly by like in a montage from a 1930’s sentimental romance, interspersed with spinning headlines and scenes of speeding trains and planes crisscrossing the planet.

Stavros came back with me from Greece and stayed for two weeks in San Francisco. I dropped him off at the airport a few days ago, our six weeks together having gone by way too swiftly. Since our romance has been framed essentially by vacation time, we’ve avoided a lot of practical relationship considerations in favor of complex getaways to increasingly romantic locations. I wrote a little bit about our first few weeks in Greece last month, now I’m going to get you caught up on some of the highlights of our final days there.

My days in Greece numbered, Stavros and I took a little road trip to explore Messenia, in the southwestern Peloponnesos, visiting the sister Venetian castles of Koroni and Methoni, hopping the walls of Nestor’s Palace, swimming in one of the world’s most beautiful beaches in Voidokilia, walking in the footsteps of Jesse and Celine from Before Midnight in Pylos, hiking along the waterfalls at Polilimnio, and exploring the ruins of the classical era theaters and stadium at ancient Messini and the many Mycenaean tholos tombs in the area.

I and my buddies Giorgos, Tassos and Stefanos attended a delightful performance by André Maia one night, a fabulous Portuguese actor and singer, with special guest Nena Venetsanou, at the National Conservatory in Athens, part of the Petit Paris d’Athènes festival. They performed works by Eric Satie, Kurt Weill, Michel Legrand… an intimate celebration of French song, shared with a tiny little audience in the conservatory where Maria Callas learned to sing. Maia really belted them out, like a bearded Edith Piaf, sort of wrapping his whole little self around each song, arms thrown up in the air, head tossed back, at times reaching histrionically towards that light above the audience that such performers ofter reach towards before they fold their bodies in half and drop their mikes to the stage as the audience erupts in wild applause. Venetsanou’s performance was considerably less frenetic, but soulful and moving, nonetheless. She appeared, sat down, bent her head over her guitar and emoted, beautifully.

Stavros and I took a drive out to Lake Vouliagmeni on probably the coldest wettest day of the summer. Or, considering that this was in October, one could also say that it was probably one of the warmer, milder days of autumn. The lake is fed by underground currents seeping through Mount Hymettus, and maintains a constant 75 degree temperature, and little fish nibble at your feet, like in Korean spas, munching at and smoothing away dead skin cells. The setting is gorgeous, at the base of the mountain, overlooking the sea, so the cold and rain didn’t bother us. The fish did, though—at least me. When you enter the lake, they don’t move away like normal fish, they stay there, hovering around your feet, like, “Hey guys, here’s another giant snack.” Their constant nibbling really annoyed me, so I squirmed constantly while floating around. But Stavros loved it, giggling and squealing, providing a feast for the voracious micro-piranhas.

One of my favorite restaurants for traditional Greek fare is Bakalogatos, in Kypseli on Fokionos Negri. The restaurant offers takes on regional cuisines from all over Greece. Our bucatini with stewed goat and aged mizithra was one of the most memorable dishes I’ve experienced, the flavors and textures so perfectly balanced, the goat falling off the bone. Stavros looked at me as I was eating and, rolling his eyes, asked, “Are you going to cry again?”

My friend Panos swept me away one day for coffee talk at Terra Petra, a tony club in the hills surrounding Athens, and then to the Christian Boltanski show at the Onassis Cultural Center. Boltanski created an immersive installation using blown-up black and white images of the eyes (and noses) of 12 Greek citizens, printed on sheets and hung in rectangular configurations to create billowy rooms. The collective heartbeats of the 12 played softly in the background, while clocks ticked away, corresponding to the number of seconds of each person’s existence. There were no signifiers of age, character, fashion sensibilities… only eyes. (And noses.) Reducing their presence to eyes and heartbeats, their lives to passing moments, the installation was very moving, like we were in them, and while visually elegant, ultimately sad, the seconds of our lives tick ticking away…

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Mykonos and Delos

When I moved to San Francisco in the mid-80’s, Mykonos seemed to be on the lips of all globe-trotting homos of the previous generation. They’d return to San Francisco golden-hued, with their stories of nude beaches and dancing until dawn. Close to 30 years later, and at about the same age as those guys, I finally made it to Mykonos, this weekend with my little Stavros. I didn’t return with any golden hues, maybe a slightly pinker face, and it being October, no swimming, except for one Scandinavian skinny dipper. Off season there were fewer tourists, cheap hotels and places to sit for the sunset along the waterfront in Little Venice. The nightlife here is still great, or at least it sounded great, the thump thump thump of dance music all night blaring from even mom and pop convenience stores.

From Mykonos we took the boat to Delos, only about 20 or so minutes away. It’s where Artemis and Apollo were born, after Zeus got Leto pregnant. Zeus’s wife, Hera, forbid anyone on solid ground from helping her out, so Leto settled on Delos, which at the time wasn’t attached to the earth, a floating island.

Delos is near the geographic center of the Cyclades archipelago, and for a long time an important religious and political center, the meeting place of the Delian league, founded in the late 5th century BC, and the home of the Delian games. The island is a protected archeological site, and most of the ruins date from around 600 BC to the 2nd century AD. With no distracting contemporary structures, and so much of the town’s form and layout legible, one gets an incredible sense of what it was like to visit the island 2,600 years ago. The world’s oldest known synagogue is here, too. And it must have been the party island before Mykonos, judging from the many phallic representations and monuments to Silenus and Dionysos.

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J Jump Joyful Jumble Around

Here I am, back in Greece. While the Republicans hold the nation hostage back home, I’m sipping ouzo and enjoying the last warm days of a summer that keeps extending itself further and further towards Christmas.

The day after I got here, Stavros and I drove down to our favorite beach in Schinias, almost the only people on the beach. While bobbing around in the surf, a stray dog emerged from the pine trees bordering the beach, causing a bit of panic as we thought the pooch was going to snarf our picnic items, but instead he sauntered slowly down to the water, wet its paws, one at a time, looked us over, and then returned to the pines.

There was a very interesting series of exhibits in Athens last week, ReMap 4. Participating artists created temporary installations in abandoned buildings, apartment units, and other public and private spaces in the Kerameikos-Metaxourgeio neighborhoods. Gagosian and Peres Projects hosted installations, converting their spaces, like neocolonialist ambassadors of culture, into temporary New York-like sleek gallery spaces. James Turrell’s light installation was set in a lovely old building, but any trace of place was eliminated by converting the room into a dark characterless cube, the single window in the room emanating slightly changing blurry colors from a frosted glass plate. Turrell claims that this work is about space and the light that inhabits it, but it’s not. It’s about TV, only blurry.

In Wyatt Kahn and Wesley Martin Berg’s installations in a 19th century apartment building, the space was left untouched, the crumbling details of the building–wall trim, mosaic floors, lovely old doors and windows–creating a visually charged domestic backdrop for their enigmatic and intriguing forms. Kahn makes polyagonal canvases that are bolted together into single rectangular picture planes. Berg presented sculptures and paintings based on a single hobo-like figure, each work formed from gloppy black neo-expressionist strokes. The confident messiness of their gestures seemed well-suited to the dilapidated beauty of the building.

In a newer, but also crumbling sort of utilitarian post-WWII apartment building, an artist created intriguing drippy brightly colored flat rectangles and circular forms on the stairway walls and hallway. I don’t know who did them, but the aesthetic seemed borne of the site and situation, just the type of art that belonged on those walls.

After ReMap, Stavros and I went to his cousin’s wedding. My first big fat Greek wedding! The service was very wordy, the priest addressing the bride and groom for what seemed like an eternity, loopy fabric rings placed on their heads at one point, lots of hand and ring kissing, the couple circling around the priest… At the reception after, I was forced to do that Greek dance that you see in the movies. I had studied the foot movements for several minutes prior, sure that at any moment I was going to be pushed onto the dance floor, and thought I discerned a footstep pattern and was already dancing in my head, but as soon as I was up there, I’m sure I looked like an idiot. But what the heck, it was really fun. I even discoed and ponied with Stavros’ mom and sister. Stavros’ mom asked him if I were available as prospective husband material for his sister. Not eager to tell his parents that I’m prospective husband material for their son, Stavros sidestepped the question in a way that led to further delightfully silly complications worthy of a Rock Hudson and Doris Day script.

The day after we drove to the Peloponnesos, to the mountains northeast of Corinth, after a little dip in the sea at Kiato. We visited the Zaraka Monastery ruins, built in 1225 by the Cistercians, one of the few examples of western gothic architecture in Greece. Winding through the lovely wine country, we made our way to Lake Stymphalia. This was the site of one of Hercules’ Labors, the slaying of the Stymphalian birds, or “the giant chickens” as Stavros calls them. These were man-eating birds with bronze beaks and poisonous metal feathers, pets of Ares, the god of war.

Driving through the mountains and dense pine forests, past the ruins of ancient Feneos, we visited an artificial lake, Lake Doxa, and to a monastery in the hills above, Agios Georgios. The monk-in-training invited us in to see the really wonderful 18th century byzantine paintings in the church, and then to come up for some “candy,” as Stavros translated. The monks make a rose jelly that our trainee offered us samples of, totally yummy, so we bought a few bottles and enjoyed his delightful company and the fabulous view from his terrace overlooking the valley and lake below.

From the monastery we continued our drive through the hills to the picturesque little village of Goura, named after a hero of the Greek War of Independence, whose house still stands there. We checked into a hotel built of stone, peaked heavy-beamed ceilings, wood paneling, our room overlooking the fertile plain below and mountains beyond. The only other tourists in town settled in the room right next to ours and generated exceptionally loud lovemaking sounds twice, the first time for about a minute late that night, the second time the next morning for a quick 5 seconds, a shrill “eee… eeeee… EEEEEEE!” The same couple also sat directly next to us at the only restaurant open this late in the season, our shared intimate squeaks and squeals acknowledged by a slight nod to each other as we checked out and headed back to Athens.

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Mefistofele

My opera-enthusiast friends S+E invited me to the opera the other night, to see Arrigo Boito’s Mefistofele. It was my first time to sit in a box, and thus my first time to experience real air flow, perfect sight lines, actual leg room, and a comfy seat to boot. Not to mention completely charming and intelligent company. And my first time to stay completely awake during a 3-1/2 hour opera.

This was Boito’s only completed opera, yet he was an accomplished man of letters who, among other literary accomplishments, wrote libretti for several other composers of his day, including Verdi’s late masterworks Otello and Falstaff. Based on the Faust legend, the opera was a complete thrill, with opulent over-the-top sets that evoked a kind of 18th century La Fenice set in heaven, and this being San Francisco, gratuitous full-frontal (and plenty of dorsal) nudity and lots of lascivious behavior. The libretto was lusciously illustrated by the music, with trilly approximations of the emotions and subject matter, plus a few truly gorgeous arias and an ending that musically lifted us out of our seats toward redemption, right along with the repentant Faust.

In the patron lounge area, there was one woman who was just absolutely fabulous. She had to have been someone important, or rich, or both, for she was wearing those big bug-eyed black glasses that only the ultra-wealthy seem to wear, a fashion sensibility of a world far from my own. She could very well have been Cindy Sherman dressed up as a society matron, if she wasn’t the actual society matron that Sherman aimed to replicate. Her bronzed face was framed by a perfectly shellacked conch of a hairdo, the bodice of her embroidered dress clinging tightly to her slim figure and hanging from a stiff collar that rose behind her head like those on silver-suited spacemen in the 1950s.

Most everybody else was dressed elegantly in black, except for me in my Mossimo corduroy jeans and Zara gold velvet jacket. I was going for the look of someone–maybe a film director or famous artist–for whom fashion is irrelevant, yet I fear that all I pulled off was Country Bumpkin.

The image above is “Witches Going to Their Sabbath” (1878), by Luis Ricardo Falero.

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Birmingham New York

Big Chrissy had to meet with a client in Birmingham, so I tagged along to visit mom and dad for a few days, in Pinson, about 20 minutes northeast of the city. Chrissy is the first of my friends in San Francisco to go back home with me, so of course we had to get fried green tomatoes at the Irondale Cafe, barbecue at Dreamland, a trip up to the Vulcan to get a closer look at that big iron butt, and drives past the countless predatory lending establishments along Highway 75 between Centerpoint and Pinson.

We even saw a praying mantis at the 16th Street Baptist Church. My friend, Susan, who endearingly calls Big Chrissy “sir,” pointed out that it looked like it was praying. Language and meaning coming together on the site of one of the most tragic incidents of the civil rights movement, we all three looked at each other, “Oh, that’s why it’s called a praying mantis.”

A schoolmate of mine has been the mayor of Pinson since 2004, when the city was incorporated, paradoxically following the near complete disappearance of much of what was a quaint old town. Susan assures me that Main Street is experiencing a sort of mini revival, but the shopping centers that have displaced the little old businesses there are eyesores, with nothing to distinguish them from similar such symbols of American convenience that have destroyed the old small town urban experience across the country.

It is sort of overwhelming, coming from arid golden-hilled California to drive through acres and acres of lushly verdant rolling hills, hysterically chirping cicadas, green grass. It is a beautiful state. Fireflies twinkled on and off in the forest behind my parents’ house at sunset, dogs meandered by without leashes, it rained.

On the way home, we stopped in New York City for a few days, seeing a few plays, including Tennessee Williams’ rarely produced The Two Character Play, and the awesome and inimitable Cicely Tyson, Vanessa Williams and an adorable Cuba Gooding, Jr in The Trip to Bountiful. We also saw The Weir and Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike with David Hyde Pierce and not Sigourney Weaver.

At the Met we saw a dynamite photography show about the American civil war. My favorite image was a portrait of Frances Clalin Clayton, by Samuel Masury. Frances fought alongside her husband on the Union side, until his death in battle, disguising herself as a man named Jack Williams. In the picture she’s sitting with her leg crossed over her knee, suggestively (to this contemporary viewer) holding the hilt of her sword between her thumb and index finger, a hauntingly contented sliver of a smile on her face. She could be the subject of a Cathy Opie photo.

We also saw yet another Edward Hopper show at the Whitney, this time drawings and studies for paintings, as well as paintings. An obviously gifted illustrator, Hopper is just plain boring. I love his work, though, precisely because it’s so boring–just paint, light, space, location, depth, masterfully conveying a sort of intimate blandness. I like just not thinking sometimes, you know?

James Turrell’s show at the Guggenheim was thrilling, just a few pieces taking up the entire museum. He converted the central atrium into a theme park art ride consisting of giant concentric rings of color extending down from and around the naturally lit translucent window in the center of the ceiling, the rings slowly shifting through the pastel corners of the spectrum. While the colors of the room shifted, people laid on the ground looking up, their friends all changing colors, taking unauthorized photos with flash, the guards yelling constantly to stop taking pictures…