Tim Miller, at Yerba Buena all weekend

I had to dress up to see Tim Miller at Yerba Buena tonight, because my friends are so fashionable. Like, Page McBee and Michael Braithwaite are the cutest couple ever, both looking like andro Blythe doll with cooler haircuts and more plaid. Page is a writer working on a collection of poetic essays about the body and until recently was stirring shit up as a Bitch Magazine blogger, posting  a controversial piece about trans women that really should not have been controversial at all except for pesky 2nd wave feminism rearing its tranemy (that would be Enemy of Transpeople) head. Page is over the drama but check out the excellent, smart writing at http://bitchmagazine.org/post/transwomen-subvert-religious-imagery-be-still-my-heart.

Calender by The LGBT Collective of Madrid, sourced from Bitchmagazine.org

Michael is a brainiac and a painter whose current day job is organizing events at the San Francisco Zen Center. Their big January shebang is going to be Nick Flynn, a straight man who writes memoir, thereby making it safer for everybody else. He wrote the best titled book ever, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and will be traveling around reading from his new book, which is not out yet but stealthy Michael had a advance copy in her backpack! I would have stolen it but I don’t want the karma, man. Also present was Ben McCoy, the performance artist who just killed the crowd at the Porchlight Storytelling Series earlier this week with a story about actually being a MCCOY - you know, the Hatfields and McCoys. Ben talked about the feud, in which ‘bitches got killed” and brought it home at the end with tales of her own lunatic yet righteous temper, beginning with climbing onto a moving school bus to terrorize the child that called her a witch (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and ending with  more mature Ben getting a gang of teenagers who threw a chicken wing in her hair on the subway arrested! Take that, youth! You do not throw chicken wings in a girl’s hairdo! Ben is one of my most favorite performance artists ever. I miss getting to watch Ben perform every night like I did on Sister Spit, her amazing piece where she opens acting like she’s going to lip-synch Lady Gaga, shames the audience for falling for it, then proceeds to lip synch a spoken word piece about drag queen jewelry theives and how crappy the world is to transladies.

Ben McCoy recovers after bringing it hard at Sister Spit's show at The Lab, lifted from Mission Local

And finally there is Jerry Lee Manhattan, wiped out after doing the lighting for the Chanel party on Maiden Lane last night. Jerry Lee is a lighting designer and has done tech for The Sex Workers Art Show Tour, and curates music for the gigantic Homo-A-Go-Go queer arts festival that just moved to San Francisco this summer after a childhood spent in Olympia, Washington. Jerry Lee has the best eyeglasses. This is why I had to have an outfit to attend the Tim Miller show tonight, not to mention it is always nice to pay your respects to a performer by coming to their show in hot pink sequins with a bow in your hair.

Tim Miller started doing solo shows about being queer in the 80s, and his work at this point contains the history of all the work that has already happened, and I love the accumulation of real, lived life that builds throughout a lifetime of work created by artists who use personal narrative and the raw material of their own experience as the inspiration, the content and the delivery. Tim’s work is big - it takes on the enormity of the individual and multiplies it by taking on that individual’s place and time, making the circumstances, indivisible from the artist characters in the work as well. Lay of the Land, making it’s San Francisco debut this weekend is about Tim – Tim as a child choking on steak while his father is trying to get him to go to the ‘gender re-education camp’ that is a baseball game. It’s about Tim the queer, choking in the throat of America, and it’s about Tim’s dad, who saved him with a heimlich maneuver but not before preparing to give him a tracheotomy, wielding a knife in a moment that triggers recalls of Abraham about to slay his youngest son, prompting a psychedelic flash of all the myths in which the youngest, fairest, queerest get killed, bringing in

Tim Miller considers setting some flags on fire in Lay of the Land

images from The Brady Bunch and an obscure and totally creepy-amazing song by The Buoys called, creepily-amazingly, Timothy, about some coal miners trapped underground who decide to kill and eat the youngest, fairest, queerest miner, Timothy. It’s not a far jump from this to hate crimes and Tim has us all bear witness to some of the most recent atrocities – the decapitation of Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado; the Ecuadorean brothers read as gay on the streets of Brooklyn and beaten until one is dead and the other in a coma. Indeed, in Lay of the Land, anti-queer American culture is revealed to be one long hate crime, taking shape in the form of ballot measures like the recent Proposition 8 catastrophe, the passing of which prompts Tim to pull a lube-sized bottle of lighter fluid from his cargo shorts and consider setting the California flag on fire there on stage at Yerba Buena. But Tim has long felt the bear on the California State flag to be his spirit animal, and we are treated to tales of wild bear encounters and fantasies of bears text-messaging, and here is another thing I love about Tim Miller’s performance and about personal narrative based-work in general: the ability to follow a tangent through all its twists and loops, to trust the logic of it, to trust in the performer, really, that there is a pattern at play, only we can’t see it, we’re too deeply embedded in it, but we’re being carried through it by the artists’ wild vision and, as the whole work is ultimately about him, the artist, we always end up right where we’re supposed to be. I love the surprise and mystery of a tangent and Tim Miller’s work is full of them, witty and clever and high-energy, just like him, running around he stage like a kinetic maniac. He opens the whole show pretending to look for his Blackberry, which he claimed to have lost while talking to Annie Sprinkle, who is actually sitting in the audience, looking like a queen in feathers and velvet. The performer goes on to recount the many things he’s lost, such as his virginity in the Haight, and then realized he’s lost his right to marry (”Isn’t that careless of me!”) So much of the show is about queer marriage, an issue super close to the artist as his long-term boyfriend, the writer Alistair McCartney, is Australian and the couple live in fear of his visa being denied and having to split the country. And, as a queer who super supports gay marriage but it often frolicking amidst queers who poo-poo it as not radical enough for their care, it felt important to be presented with one of the real-life consequences of queers not being able to legally marry. I mean, I would firstly for sure sign on to the complete smashing of the state, but barring THAT happening any time soon, why not let everyone get married so there can be more big frivolous love parties? I personally would like to be able to abuse the privilege a la Elizabeth Taylor and countless trashy straight people and get married lots and lots of times! Plus doesn’t it just make you mad that a bunch of ignorant hicks in the sticks get to vote on whether or not you have the right to assimilate? It just steams me! Anyway, these are the sorts of things in my mind this evening after seeing Lay of the Land. It’s sort of amazing that Tim Miller is disappointed in the state and the nation for not supporting queers – I totally expect them not to, and it makes me wonder how and when that happened and if it’s not a little sad. Tim Miller is a real activist who has put his body on the line countless times during the AIDs crisis and during all the many fights queers are forced into to defend ourselves. He’s been arrested I think he said 11 times (once outside the Moscone Center) and sued the United States Government to get his NEA Grant back after it was vetoed by evil NEA chair John Frohnmayer. The NEA swiped Tim’s grant along with Karen Finley, Holly Hughes and John Fleck; thanks to judge Wallace Tashima calling bullshit on decency standards, the grants were reinstated but it took years. Tim talks a bit about the fight in Lay of the Land, crediting Tashima growing up in an American concentration camp for his sage views on mob rule. Tim Miller shows Lay of the Land Saturday 11/21 at Yerba Buena, and Sunday afternoon at 3 there is a performance featuring the maestro with the group of performers he’s been teaching and working with all week.  http://www.timmillerperformer.com/

I trust Eileen Myles’ writing more than anyone’s. She’s just so honest, she’s not afraid to make a goon of herself so she is utterly unafraid to call bullshit on any number of things, to recount moments painful or triumphant. She has a great piece about coming up against menopause and her car starts fritzing out like it too is having hot flashes and they’re in it together. She pitched it to all these magazine and no one wanted it but thank god she wrote it anyway, she just trusted it would find a home and it did, this collection I’m telling you about. Other pieces have been published, like the narrative about flossing her teeth, it’s about class, that one, because teeth are absolutely a class thing. Whether or not you have them, the shape they’re in, etc. You know, how dreams of losing your teeth are supposedly about money, they totally are, right, and this is really Eileen’s terrain. One of many of her terrains. She wrote about sleeping in a cardboard box designed for homeless people, that was in Nest, that great interiors magazine that went under, RIP. She writes a bunch about the filmmaker Sadie Benning, there are a ton of art pieces in the collection, though my favorite are the section titled Talks. I love listening to Eileen talk, period, just ruminate on anything and then when they get shaped into deliberate essays like these, part essay part dharma talk part philosophy part wandering total poetry – amazing. Eileen is so cool, the band Japanther just had her come into the studio and record one of her poems so they can wrap their sound all around it. Basically, I think you should buy this book immediately. You’ll feel smarter by the end of it, smarter and like a better person actually, like your heart got opened up alongside your mind. Yeah.

http://www.eileenmyles.com/

Nobody is endorsing this particular brand of magical blue cleansing balls.

The best show I remember from Bewegung was Charles Herman-Wurmfled, the jack-of-all-trades who went on to make a bunch of movies, first Fancy’s Persuasion, a classic in which he cast Justin Bond as the mom a la’ John Waters’ choice of Divine as the matriarch in Hairspray. After that he did Kissing Jessica Stein and next, amazingingly, Legally Blonde 2, but I remember when he hung a bunch of art involving blue maribou on the walls of Bewegung and in front of it I go-go danced, topless and painted blue, wearing shitty cut-off jeans and combat boots, to the sound of Hole blasting through my Walkman, while balanced on a cinderblock. A few other ruffians were similarly Smurfed-up and stuck on a block to dance to the beat of their own Walkman, while off to the side a cellist played elegant music. It was kind of amazing.

Now Heather lives in Toronto, where she runs Toronto Free Gallery www.torontofreegalery.org  an art spaced dedicated to showing work that deals with social justice, cultural, urban and environmental issues. TFG is sandwiched between a tattoo parlor and a Caribbean patti take-out joint, and the owners of the take-away place did a Caribbean  patti workshop as a part of the current exhibition curated by Maiko Tanaka, Tejpa Ajji and Chris Reed. It’s that sort of true community space. The current exhibition, Toronto Free Broadcasting currently has  an open call out for instructional videos and a bunch already received are up on their site, assisting with hands-on problems like How to Break Into a Hotel Room, as well as more conceptual issues like How to Become a Hot Chick or How to Ruin a Relationship. http://torontofreebroadcasting

Emory Douglas, Hallelujah! The Might and the Power of the People is Beginning to Show, from The Black Panther Newsletter, May 29, 1971

Heather Haynes is also publishing the art, media + politics magazine Fuse, which has an awesome cover story on the art and career of Emory Douglas, the Black Panthers’ Minister of of Culture and the creator of all of the movement’s amazing graphics, an excellent mix of pre-punk folk art depicting yelling ladies and kids bearing protest signs, beaten pigs and of course Huey P. Newton with a gun. Some looks like zine art and some like  propaganda and all are so full of beautiful energy and dynamic gusto. They look like they could have been created yesterday and, in the words of the artist, “You’re talking about unemployment, decent housing, dealing with the prison industrial complex, and the disproportionate number of people of color dying in the military. All those things still exist today.”

When Sister Spit was just in Cleveland some local queers gave us the hard sell on their town and claimed it to be akin to San Francisco in the 60s or the East Village in the 80s. I don’t think this is true, but the rumors are coming in that this might be the case for Winnipeg. Writer Eileen Myles was just up there reading from her brilliant new book The Importance of Being Iceland (so brilliant it made me cry in the tour van three different times with three different emotions) and she said it’s like the coolest place ever, and an article in Fuse that talks about the scene also makes it sound like one of those beaten down cities that eventually produces some cracked-out cultural diamond. But my favorite part of the article is the bit about how someone vandalized a new and heinous luxury condo development with the tag BAYAREA! Ouch. The truth hurts. http://www.fusemagazine.org/

Did you have your picture taken tonight at our Halloween party / Fall Members Opening? The full Flickr set is here!

Cristy Road's Christie Rd.

The rest of the room half-plastered in Cristy’s artwork is wallpapered with various posters of glamorous women, mostly Madonna, as Cristy’s roommates are a gaggle of punked-out fags not too punk to love Madonna. They are, after all, drag queens as well as punks and on my visit one, a fashion designer, was holding white denim vest tricked-out crusty-style in patches and studs, under the kitchen sink, dying it sepia with tea. The other were sprawled in the cavernous living room, stoned and eating coffee cake and giving themselves clay masks and watching The Golden Girls amidst the decor – a live iguana, clown dolls, a crazy mannequin named Pompeii, a gun vase stuffed with glittery fake flowers. Diana Ross posters hang on walls, Hole, too. Perpetually exhausted as the endless tour rolls into its seventh week, I had tugged my luggage through the Hasidic Brooklyn neighborhood Cristy lives in, and she rewarded me by making me a giant cup of Cuban style coffee like her grandmother makes, in a metal espresso pot thick with sugar and cream. Even though this tour has given me a caffeine tolerance that has rendered Red Bull useless, I sip the Cuban coffee respectfully, knowing that it has the power to Fuck Me Up.

Cristy Road's art on Cristy Road's walls.

I haven’t seen Cristy since the Sister Spit European tour one month ago, but it seems longer than that. On that tour, girls would show up at our shows in Vienna, Germany, London, wearing t-shirts with Cristy’s art on it, looking at her the way she looks at Billy Joe. When you are a struggling, working artist just trying to get your work out there, keep it out there, pay the rent, it can feel like, What am I even doing this for who cares it’s not curing cancer or feeding people or anything. And to go to a whole other land and learn that your work has, without you knowing, traveled overseas and joined up with other subcultures hungry for awesome representations of girls, queers, people of color, all of them rising up in the streets, marching and dancing and making out, all while looking totally cute – it is sort of a major personal revelation and it was mighty cool to get to see that happen with Cristy.

Cristy Road

That night at the Sister Spit show at Bar Sputnik in Brooklyn, Cristy guested with us, climbing on stage in a little plaid dress and peaked cap, looking like an adorable punk room gnome, she read from Bad Habits while flashing images from the book behind her on the stage. The novel, so autobiographical Cristy jokes about it before reading every time (”The narrator is Cuban-American, like ME! And she is in her twenties, like ME!”), details a lost but dogged young female punk’s immigration from Miami to New York City, broken down from an abusive relationship but determined to find her way out of it, even if she has to utilize some rickety coping mechanisms (cocaine, one night stands) to get there. The piece she performs features the narrator discovering that its her own body that contains all the potential for joy and pleasure and she doesn’t need any other person to access that. I’m talking about masturbation, and Cristy talks about it in her native style which is a excellently odd mixture of super heady, almost academic-speak soon to be exploded with curse words, slang and plain-spoken dialogue delivered in Cristy’s affected stoner accent, to the crowd’s delight. The piece crescendos with the narrator climaxing to the strains of Iron Maiden leaking down from the metal head upstairs. And I say as she exits the stage, Cristy Road: Keeping masturbation metal. If you happen to live in Gainesville, Florida you will get to see Cristy’s work live and in person. The rest of us will have to settle for visits to her web site, http://www.croadcore.org/, to gaze at girls with melting faces and other bizarre and beautiful works.

Cristy Road

Loves it!

Richard Long, Chalk Circle, 1986; Collection SFMOMA; Mrs. Paul L. Wattis Fund purchase © Richard Long

On the second floor:

Katharina Fritsch, Kind mit Pudeln (Baby with Poodles), 1995/1996. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, Germany

I was walking down Market Street on Saturday just taking in the day with my sometime colleague Bradford Nordeen. He and I have co-authored a groundbreaking article on “The Cinema of Whitney Houston” that is supposed to appear in the October issue of L.A. based art and culture magazine Animal Shelter. So there we were fresh from shopping when we saw this classic car parked on Market Street. (Wait, I forgot to say that if you are interested in bargains, get yourself down to “Agnes B.” on the first block of Grant, they are going out of business and everything, everything is 70 per cent off!) It’s a shame they are going out of business but now their prices are sort of in the Ross Dress for Less category. Well back to the car.

This painting has everything in it — maybe it's Market Street itself– from the Ferry Building through the tweaky village of the Castro!

Tourists from dozens of nations saw a photo op and brought out state of the art Leicas, Panasonics, Nikons to do it justice.

Meanwhile the driver played it cool, making a long and involved cell phone call in the shade behind the wheel and making as if he didn’t notice he was, like Britney Spears in “Gimme More,” the center of attention.  I admired his cool in more ways than one–he was rather like Jean Paul Belmondo in A Bout de Souffle.

If you remember, San Francisco was having a rare summer’s day full of heat and sun. The fake fruit attached to the roof of the car, along with a dramatic growth of plastic flowers and Christmas tinsel, gave it the Brazilian air of one of Carmen Miranda’s headdresses in her 1940s Fox Technicolor musicals like The Gang’s All Here. It was almost more than the eye could take in, and my mind flashed on how labor intensive this work must be.

The famous postacrd houses on Alamo Square that symbolize “San Francisco” to many.

Photographers were urging their friends to pose in front of this imposing piece of Bay Area visual culture, so I got Bradford to stand there and say cheese, I think spoiling a man from Greece who was similarly urging his girlfriend to say, oh I don’t know, feta I suppose.

There's Bradford. You can sort of see the car's hood which depicts a vertiginous hill swoop of the cable car halfway to the stars.

Finally I climbed around the hood and stood in traffic attempting an impromptu al fresco interview of the driver. My status as reporter for “Open Space” has given me more cojones than formerly, though I haven’t actually been shy in thirty years.
“Do you live in San Francisco?” I asked.  Driver nodded briefly and clicked off his cell phone.  “Yes.”

Driver's side. Golden Gate Bridge, then what's that thing in the middl?

“Did you customize this car yourself? Are these your paintings?”
“The postcards, “ as he called them, “were all done by a girlfriend. I did the stuff on top—“ —the living sculpture of what would you call it?  —like a fruit meadow— “and also the rhinestones.” I don’t have good pictures of the rhinestones, but rhinestones big as cobblestones decorated the hubcaps and bumpers of the car.  Well, here you can see a hint of them:

Rhinestones like hailstones fall on the crab on the fisherman's wheel down at Fisherman's Wharf, and Alcatraz to the left.

I was so flustered however I forgot to ask the driver what his name was, so I appeal to my readers —whose car is this?