Election Romance, October 28 2004
It was autumn in New York, 1992. I had been through 2 years of ill health and was now feeling good. It was one of the best autumns of my life as I so happy to just feel normal. In fact I felt beautiful.
And I was acting a bit here and there, encouraged by my dance teacher. One evening I was invited to a film program at the National Arts Club in Gramercy Park, where I would meet this director whose film was in the program and who was also casting a new film.
So I made sure I was memorable… I wore a stretch velvet black and white leopard print catsuit. Catsuits were big at this time. I probably looked like a cheap movie star, sort of how Sharon Stone once was, B-list.
The National Arts Club was historical and beyond gorgeous, a rather improbable place for a B-list anything. It had just been used by Martin Scorsese as a big backdrop in The Age of Innocence. It was very old New York and opulent.
As soon as I walked in I met a man I'll call Mr. Klein, who was the head of the film program at the club. Tall, terribly dashing, intellectual, a smooth operator. He got my card and called the next day and we saw each other for a spell.
The reason I recall him now is because it was election madness back then. We even watched the debates together.
I remember he took me to a Yom Kipper party at what was once Elia Kazan's flat in the upper west side. Very cool and well put together flat, full of Jewish democrats all riled up about the election, for Bill had been an impossible underdog from Hope, dogged by scandals like Jennifer Flowers even back then...
But then things were changing, the tide was turning and shit damn it looked like Bill might win.
I thought of him also when Al Gore announced his running mate a few years ago. I'll bet Mr. Klein and all those people I met that night were jazzed beyond belief. That whole memory is sort of bittersweet now.
Style, October 25 2004
When I first conceived of Lovelake, I thought about presentation. My idea was basically non-presentation. I would not make artists frame and this kind of thing. Everything would always go back to the work.
Of course I was wrong in thinking that this was non-anything. Everybody (and everything) has style.
I knew the room was small, so every single thing had to count. I couldn’t rely on any grand gestures or dollars spent. Since then I’ve learned that every space has its drawbacks and good points. There is nothing wrong with a small room. You never have to worry about filling it! And in fact since then, when I am faced with filling large or irregular spaces, I tend to make them enclosed in my mind. And it works for me.
These kinds of limitations are rooted in several things and one of them is collage. For years I filled small spaces and very specifically. I am not wayward or random at all in my photomontages. Many artists are and that’s why I make that point. Every centimeter counts. This sort of thinking just carried on into Lovelake.
While I did not hang any shows for years --- most of those years that I lived in New York --- clearly I was absorbing style every single day. And some very good style! You can’t go to the Met every week for eleven years and not get something. And of course not just the grand places like the Met, the Frick and the Morgan Library but also the rough and tumble like all those places in Alphabet City. It’s all this visual traffic somewhere in your head.
Of all the exhibitions we did at Lovelake, Randy Moe was perhaps my favorite. The hang was part and parcel with the work and in this, he and I thought very much alike, though divided literally by thick walls. I would show him again in a heartbeat and hope that it will happen someday.
Show Me the Money, October 24 2004
I hear about various meetings and panels which address how to keep and foster a creative class here in Portland. This town would be more artist-friendly, they say, if we do A, B and C…. cheap rents, grants where you kiss ass and put them on welfare.
What PDX needs to do is become a real market: buy art!
When artists move to NYC, they don’t go there for the cheap rents and the welfare. They go there for the market.
Market is not a bad word. It just means that little peons such as myself were actually in the same room as Gerhard Richter, Holly Solomon, Leo Castelli, Roy Lichtenstein and so on. We’re all there for the same reason --- an exchange of some sort revolving around art. And sometimes, yes, it’s show me the money.
I’m not saying that there are no nonprofits, absolutely not; I liked my Clocktower and Exit Art. But what’s wrong with fully expecting to work and work hard and then…. get paid! What we are missing here in Portland is the final part of that equation.
I’m not saying that I ‘got paid’ as an artist there. But someone did, didn’t they? Here, no one is really getting paid. Some of the most successful artists I know can’t get their teeth fixed.
Catch a Rising Star, October 14 2004
As I’m on rock n roll memory lane, I recall a concert series here in Portland called Catch a Rising Star. For the most part it was a chance to see people on their way up, though I saw Bryan Ferry too, already a huge star in the UK.
For 2 dollars you could see bands in an old, unrenovated theatre, the Paramount. It was a sleazebag place back then.
Like the first time I saw Bowie, in the Station to Station tour, I thought I was behind the times and maybe too late. Not that many people showed up for this gig (1977), but I was mesmerized by him. His face changed constantly and he was many, many people. In a way it was like seeing Sinatra or Mel Torme....just a classic. Most people just didn’t ‘get’ him.
That same year or next, I also saw a triple bill in this series: Blondie, the Ramones and Tom Petty. In retrospect, maybe a strange bill. But for 2 bucks! Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers was a new band too, with only that single American Girl out. I remember that people in the audience hardly moved at all and that the whole thing was just like watching a film, the way people kept to their seats and "watched."
As I don't really "watch" rock n roll, this was difficult. But what is also strange to me now is how all of these bands, and anyone this old or established, would probably charge a lot to see them, whereas they were practically free back then when they were at their best.
Still, hardly anyone was there. Later on that night there was a party for the Ramones in a small flat. I spent most of the short party talking to Deedee Ramone in the kitchen. You might think this would be groupie heaven but I’m telling you, maybe 20 kids were at that party. Nobody cared about the Ramones then, especially here.
Oh! Didn't I Say, October 13 2004
On the Internet I came across bloggers giving out all this supposed info you didn't know about 80s bands. Most of it is too petty a past for me to lambaste, but when one writer said Gary Numan was gay, I was surprised. I don't think so. Silly and sly and sometimes just plain dense, but not gay.
Desperately I wanted to design record sleeves and work for a record store, summer of ‘78 in London. The record store Beggar's Banquet was not far from where I lived and they would start a label soon. They had several bands lined up for first singles… one by Tubeway Army. Would I like to check them out and maybe design that sleeve?
And so began my friendship with Gary Numan. He was sort of a regular guy, and I’m not much a regular girl. When I questioned his lack of smooth moves he said "Oh I fucked a girl before I ever kissed her." But still we hung for most of the summer and sometimes he could be quite sweet. That vulnerable thing about him is real. I returned to the States before Oh didn't I say (I'm over you) became a single.
Gary was well aware that he had few original ideas in his head. "But you don't need those,” he told me, "you just rip off from others, like Bowie did, and me, I'm gonna rip off Bowie." And that he did more than well, and he was not the only one.
Miss Austen, October 10 2004
Everyone has their own eccentric weaknesses, habits or what they call guilty pleasures. Something to fall back on. When I couldn't find a damn thing to read, I would go to Jane Austen.
And I've got plenty of other classics to re-read: every Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Nancy Mitford (if I need to laugh), D.H. Lawrence, George Elliot, Theodore Dreiser and on it goes. I’ll read a contemporary novelist too but as to Jane, I am on my second hardbound collection. Yes I read the first so much I broke its back. I had it about 14 years.
There is so much out there that maybe it is a crime to ever re-read. But I really do believe Jane made me into a better writer, if not a smarter person. She does not waste a word in a time when people could get quite winded at best. The words really flow well and even the idiots of her world give fantastic speeches.
I'll never forget how she felt to me when I first found her though --- I bought her on a lark at a thrift store on NW 23rd in 1980. The paperback was a quarter. I opened up the book and right away fell into the bit about a universally acknowledged truth regarding single men and their needs. I laughed but did not take it seriously. That quarter I spent slowly but very thoroughly changed my life. You could say it was part of my transition to New Romanticism.
I fully realize that Jane writes of courtship, not of relationship and boy, are they different. We never do find out what happens to the rest of her heroines' lives, the married part. That's kind of interesting. Back then a woman supposedly had no life till she is married and is a Mrs. But in Jane's world, it's all about the Miss.
My Harvard, October 7 2004
A smart friend once told me that people who put in a lot of dues into a system will support that system. It becomes their validation and they will justify it at great length and perhaps belittle those who don't take the same path.
I searched for an explanation as to why I got the complete makeover so often (and sometimes so unbelievably soon!) from certain people. Before you know it they're telling me what school I should go to, what new thing I need and how I should answer the "if you could do things over again" question.
Of course all those interrogations say more about them than they ever said about me, but it was unnerving. You're after me all this time and now that you have me I've got to get all new and improved? And at the academy of your choice?
Some of this was coming from insecurity and jealousy but there is also a secret cult of tradition--- and you could even call it the good old boys--save they're letting in girls now---who get ticked off with those who circumvent that system, who read books from their own booklist.
But I eventually saw (around 2001) that maybe I had a bit of this malady. And not about school, but about New York. Like New York was my own Harvard. I can only see this now with the passage of time. Dues are being paid from day one in that town, from day one. My health goes downhill, jobs are tough and getting by can be a full-on engagement. Just to cross the street can be challenging. Oh but I am in the Center of the Universe so it's OK, right?
For years I take it for granted that this is a great experience, the only one in fact, if you want to be a real mover in the art world. When things happen there, even if it is just in some dump in the East Village, it matters. ‘Cause it's in the press, ‘cause they say so, ‘cause I am part of that culture too. But privately I do recall thinking but that was just some stupid ass lame party. It just happened to be in New York, that was all, but that was enough.
Some desperadoes say that all the good artists come out of the same 4 art schools. Yes, you hear that. And that's what they want to believe. But in fact the world's hottest living artist (and that would be Gerhardt Richter) came out of no hip art school at all.
Burnside, 1980
Mt. St. Helens, October 4 2004
I remember the last time Mt. St. Helens went off in a big way.
At the time I lived in a big punk house on NW Kearney and 23rd, along with Tom Robinson, Pat Baum, Rozz Rezabek, and Bill Mscichowski. I heard a big but muffled BOOM, like the sound of a distant bomb. I raced outside and slowly the rain began to fall: giant flakes looking kind of like snow but very grey. They didn’t melt though. They were sooty to the touch and covered our lawn.
That soot followed us everywhere. For weeks it laced our sheets, even though we ditched our shoes at the door. You couldn’t escape it.
The best part was the ghost town PDX became at this time. No cars were allowed, as it destroyed the engines and the paint jobs. Being a total pedestrian, I think of this as the time when we ruled. It leveled that playing field in a way. People were stripped of their cars and however it made them feel and whatever they thought it did for them. They slugged around while I did my usual book. We saw each other through that grey fog. Like London but oh so different!
We were supposed to wear gas masks or some sort of protection, hence the masks you see on the people in the photograph. This was Burnside in 1980. I love the gentleman who must be a member of an orchestra, obviously put out but refusing to wear a mask. This was shot by Rupert Jenkins who was a member of Friction, a gallery I was a part of here in Portland in the early 80s. He is no longer a photographer and now runs a non-profit gallery in San Francisco.
The volcanic action of Mount St. Helens influenced me in many ways. Up until that time I had my issues with various disasters and would not move to San Francisco, much as I wanted to. The earthquake you see. Portland was like the sleepiest and safest place on the planet. Then the mountain blew and changed all of that. I left Portland about one year later.
Death Scene, October 1 2004
One afternoon last week I noticed that the backyard was more quiet than usual. My eyes scanned everywhere including the big Oak tree in front of my neighbor. This houses so much life and has made me aware of just what one big tree can harbor. In this Oak I saw a hawk, one foot on some prey.
For hours he fed on a bird, I couldn’t tell what it was. Slowly, methodically and very aware of me whenever I came out but not ready to budge. Eventually his beak was encrusted with downy feathers. If he moved many feathers descended down into the sky, of a grey color, probably of a blue jay. I was upset at first but the hawk must eat too.
As it turned evening I went out again and called out to him: ‘WHEN are you going to leave?” He took off and left a dust of downy feathers, some all smeared on the limb of his death scene.
For days after my yard has been almost silent. Evidence everywhere of a major kill --- downy feathers covered my yard, in the crevices of trees and those of the neighbors. It is only just the past 2 days that life has returned.
I’ve read of Pale Male, the hawk of Manhattan who has spawned a family right on Fifth Avenue. I could kick myself for having not paid him mind while I lived in New York. I was very sick in ’91, the year he arrived and just knowing that he was there with his struggle while I was there with mine tears at me.
Maybe I was also so nonchalant as I grew up in the country and saw hawks everyday. But now my interest in birds is intense enough that I can see myself arriving in New York and going straight to the Met like usual, but checking out Pale Male on the way.
I shouldn’t pledge allegiance to any bird perhaps and certainly no Jay Bird, who steal and eat from nests themselves. But the Scrub Jays in my yard are very intelligent and entertaining. They are the town crier. When my mate sets fire to the outdoor grill they scream bloody murder. They tell the entire neighborhood. But when I go out there and stand next to the fire and squawk back, they cool off in an instant.
More recent entries: September 2004
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