Flowers in the antics

Last Saturday went with my brother to see an installation by Kristian Burford in Chinatown. How long has Chung King Road been gallery row? Chung King Road is not really a road but a promendade and is an egg roll's throw from the Golden Dragon, the chinese restaurant of choice for our family for birthdays, visiting relatives, and death and wedding anniversaries. My brother read a write up in Friday's Calendar about this installation at the Happy Lion gallery. The title of the piece is a page long premise for a short story, the backstory as it were for the installation, the page begins"“Rebecca has returned to the house in which she grew up to convalesce after waking from a coma three months ago. She awoke to discover that her body was paralyzed from the neck down...” From the rest of the text we learn that the particular scene is on a weekend, when her relatives usually visit. Rebecca has been playing a game with her twin 7-year old nieces who are also her godchildren. In this game the girls dress Rebecca up and pose her as their favorite characters, adding dialogue and facial expressions. This particular afternoon the scene is from a photo book of ballet dancers Fonteyn and Nureyev which can be seen opened on the floor of the room. To celebrate their creation they have strewn the scene with flowers, one of the twins has left to try and steal some of her grandfather's roses but gets caught. It's been some time since her niece left, the other twin has inexplicably gone to hide in the closet. Rebecca realizes she's been left in an unseemly position, but she awaits eminent discovery without care. Gallery visitors view the tableau through a hallway door permanently ajar. In the mirror you can see that there's a wheelchair behind the bed. If you didn't read the lengthy title, maybe you'd imagine some romantically erotic episode, there are drinks perched on a bedside table, flowers in her hair and the floor, in lieu of a tutu the twins have made use of a negligé, there's an unmistakable smile on her face. But the viewer knows that it was 7-year old twin girls that posed her, one twin hiding in the closet, having fled presumably in a sudden fit of shame, the other twin seized in the spirit of play off to gather more flowers. What's to be made of all this polymorphous perversity? Prepubescent twins developing a penchant for role-playing, sadism? A grown woman with latent paraphilia, exhibitionism? pedophilia? And shame on us for just standing there gawking, wordlessly, through a barely opened door. I never read any V.C. Andrews, but maybe if I did, it would resonate. If I found the scenario even vaguely tittilating, how would I have perceived this differently? I love that the title is a short story and can imagine this guy being asked to do the windows for Barney's, because if I understand fashion at all, it's deeply psychosexual. I do love watching strangers in intimate actions and moments, picking their noses and smelling their fingers, looking out my window and seeing someone jack off in a car below just before he pulls a right turn. If this is all I took home with me, then fuck me, I'm a happy voyeur.

Parades go by

Last Sunday I watched most of the Long Beach Pride 2006 parade. It was longer than I expected, started around 10:30 lasted a couple of hours. Some things of note:

1. The Men of Mortuaries Calendar, a fundraiser for breast cancer patients. Brainchild of a mortician: calendar beefcake riding on top of a hearse. The calendar is a fundraiser for women battling breastcancer, according to the backstory broadcasted from the float, the mortician's sister had breastcancer.
2. The mysterious E3 ministries, with their floating E3 ball.
3. A whole lot of gay christians and some buddhists too.
4. Flying school. wanna learn to fly? Gays put the T back in piloT.
5. The usual assortment of twinks, kinks, and corporate sponsorship drinks.
6. I saw Gennifer Hirano, AKA Asian Princess, marching with the Cal State LB contingent. But did not manage to yell hello.

The Glass Rooms of the Whirling Mechanism

Dreaming of the Whirling Mechanism

The whirling mechanism is just a dream machine. Richard Isen who I used to carpool with claimed it was lucid dreaming, but how do you know it's not one of those stock dream sequence tricks, a dream within a dream, that this lucid dreaming isn't just a dream itself, or how do you know that you're darkest wish isn't to lose control of the storyline, willing submission, an afternoon matinee. Last night I dreamt I drank a corona well after midnight in the beer garden at the lonestar. It was empty except for me and three other strangers, no music, no conversation, just cigar and cigarette smoke curling in the flood light and a disco ball hanging motionless from the aluminum beam that sometimes holds a vinyl tent when it's raining. Then there was just me and the crazy guy, sitting in the corner, emphezema, a backpack. What was that, he asked, eventhough I had said nothing and it was otherwise completely silent. So I talked to the skittish stranger, kind of wild-eyed, maybe marginally paranoiac, wild gesticulations, and sometimes he'd jump off the bench and wave his arms to punctuate his statements. He'd written and performed a one-man play once at Bindelstiff, the title something like as seen from ten floors above the tenderloin. He said he'd recently rediscovered old 16mm footage he'd taken from way back in No Haven, Connecticut. And just then the motor in the refrigeration unit came on and I said it sounded like a projector. He jumped up and waved his hands in the air. His friend earlier that evening had shown him digital movies, candid footage he'd shot of him and some other friends and he said it was good. It was good, he liked to say, the way I think Lou Reed intoned It was alright, like not quite a revelation but certainly a comfort. And no matter how vaguely syntaxed and conveyed his utterances, somehow I knew what he meant. On the topic of the internet and blogs he wondered what privacy meant anymore. And I said somewhat unrelatedly how I never bought the alarmist idea that we live in a culture of constant surveillance, there's not enough manhours to mine through all that footage, I said. He said that was a refreshing thought and it put him at ease. Thanks, he said. We talked about how unimpressed we both were by Brokeback Mountain, agreed that there were more memorable short stories from Annie Proulx's Wyoming Stories. Fassbinder the sadistic and the prolific. V for Vendetta, go see it I said. I think he claimed he was 49, but looked more like 59. He's been reading Henry Miller and the autobiography of St. Theresa of Avilla, some kind of celibate sensualist mystic. Later I bought him an apple fritter at the donut shop, where they were fresh out of the vat at 2 am, still warm in our mouths. He said the chinese place next door, across from the Quaker meeting house, was really pretty good, always a big lunchtime crowd, the food always really fresh (I tried it the next day for lunch and it was pretty good--maybe he wasn't that crazy after all). He likes to walk around the city this time of night. His friends think he's raging against the dying of the light, trolling for catharsis in SOMA, but he just likes the empty quiet streets, maybe sometimes he'll find some interesting signage and take a picture with a disposable camera. I said that the city shows it's true self on quiet nights like this; It's a lonely town, I said and he agreed and said this city has been hard on him. So I walked with him for a few blocks, smoking and talking. He said there's amazing mosaic work in the hallways of the courthouse, I pointed out how the new federal building with it's gaping hole of a breeze way looked like a huge spy camera, too which he quipped that he'd been telling tourists that the assymetrical rooftop structure was a landing pad for space shuttles. I finally got to my building and said I was turning in. The dreamtime stranger extended his hand and I returned an unexpected hug and an even more unexpected kiss. Stay out of trouble I said, and it was the first untrue sentiment all evening. The whirling mechanism is just one of those beatnik dream machines, spinning lights, mirrors and fur, the hypnotic murmur of dappled, restless light, bars shutdown for the night and car lights weaving slowly homeward.

back in the LBC

Made it down to LA last Monday night, despite having forgotten how exactly to get to the 5 Interstate from the Bay. It's been years since I took the low road to LA. Thrice we missed the interchanges, sometimes unwittingly. Forgot that that entrance on the I-80 only goes to SF--remembered that we pass the windmills and balloon festooned high wire powerlines but forgot it was on the way to San Ramon and not Fremont--lastly it took us a few miles to realise we were headed North to Stockton. Me and Ji Sung left leisurely at 1 or so from Emeryville, so it was only fitting that we meandered our way down. Thank god I wasn't driving on my own, because I would have followed every wrong road to the mountains or the sea before turning around--call it carefree optimism. The 10' uhaul was only half full so we were averaging about 70 and made it down to LA by 9 or so, missing the evening commute traffic.

For now, home is the lovely Long Beach, a molotov cocktail's throw from the lovely OC. I'm running on the beach where nobody swims or surfs--I've seen a bumper sticker, a different kind of civic pride: picture white old-english on black: Long Beach: If It Swims It Dies. According to the local surf reports LBC usually has the lowest bacteria counts, I guess surfers love to congregate around sewage outlets.

Tomorrow I am thinking of going to the original original Tommy's burgers for their anniversary 60 cent burgers--of course it might cost me ten bucks in gas to get down there at Beverly and Rampart when there's a Tommy's within walking distance from my Brother's.

So Long Sucka Free City

So long sucka free city,
all you homos and shemales,
though the weather's always shitty,
the sun shines from your tales.