NYC whirlwind woosh

I'm back! New York was a total giant PARTY the whole time. Let me say it again: PARTY PARTY PARTY PARTY. Lord, I don't realize how much I miss it when I'm away. I think it was a mix of me not getting fully used to the time change (four three hours ahead from the west coast) and sleeping only a few hours each night which wound up resulting in a state of constant semi-delirium. Fun delirium, trust me, but considering that this may constitute my "vacation" for the end of the year, I feel like I need an actual *restful* vacation after this frenetic one...If I ever do move my ass out there I think I will quickly learn a better way to pace myself apart from cramming it all in at once.

First off, the weather was absolutely spectacular and warmish for winter. Yesterday it felt like spring and walking in the Lower East Side with a friend was such a treat.


the grand entryway to PS1 in Long Island City, right outsida Manhattan...


Ran into friend Maureen (at right) at the PS1 opening of my show (which by the way, was not the best of my repertoire, but that wasn't my fault and we'll go into that at another time), who I met back in Honolulu over the summer when we were in the same show at the Contemporary Museum. Small world!


Alas, a trashbin in front of the Kara Walker mural in the lobby was the result of a raucous opening night featuring two bands (The Jewish and Jah Division), as well as a free bar that knocked me silly. Ouch! I won't be drinking ginger rum drinks for a very long time I bet...


Maureen + Kara Walker + trashbin


pretty people at the opening...


spoof rainbow pop rockers The Jewish are neither gay nor jewish. hence the complete irony, eh? they were totally brilliant...


check the pleated khaki slacks. PERfect.


It's the shoes that make the man.


JAH DIVISION: a dub/reggae joy division cover band. no shit. complete with psychedelics and guest featuring the drummer from oneida.






There was a day spent going through the Chelsea galleries, and overall it was OK. Not fab, just OK, considering how overabundant the art is. Best shows: Atelier Van Lieshout's "Slave City" installation that consisted of fullscale and miniature model proposals for a call-center-slash-agrarian forced labor camp. So wrong it's gotta be right.


Slave City

A pretty great Alan McCollum installation of thousands of drawings and a few sculptures, but then again I'm a sucker for his work so of course I love it. Went to White Columns gallery where I was hoping to be pleasantly surprised--I interned there in 1994 and it was considering the young cutting edge nonprofit space, but it now feels like any other old gallery. Trevor Paglan (who teaches at my school) had an awesome photo-based show where he covertly surveilled and photographed secret CIA bases. It was an instance where I felt overtly political content was pulled off really successfully and melded with great presentation and aesthetics. I was also pleasantly surprised by a Williamsburg gallery that showed a young French artist's strange confection of fictional Bauhaus-meets-Native American hybrid sculptures and drawings. One thing's for sure, it was great to see a lot of art in one afternoon, but it makes me exasperated to see so much crap, too (and there was a lot of it).


Another entire afternoon was spent making the trek up to the Bronx Museum for the final run of the "Tropicalia" exhibition originating from the Tate Museum in London and featuring radical aesthetic and musical experiments by 1960s Brazilian artists in response to both political oppression and Western Modernism. I finally got to see the Lygia Clark "hoods" and appendages that I've only see reproduced and I was really impressed--I could have made the whole trip up just to see these. Same for Helio Oiticicas "Parangolas," which used geometric and abstracted shapes as carnaval outfits, and his "Eden" installation, looking like a cross between a favela shanty and a Modernist abstraction. Ran into my old friend Mads Lynnerup and curator Clara Kim there, which was nice...Mads got into grad school at Columbia so he had to say bye bye to Frisco. Our loss, really. He rocks.


Lygia Clark's work: sensorial hoods and apparatus.


hotel room shenanigans. for some reason i stopped taking pictures after the first few days...

It felt like everywhere I went I ran into folks I knew. Williamsburg especially is like SF's Mission district that way...Amazing how quickly places get built up and gentrified, too...ugh. Oh the irony of being able to have good restaurants and boutiques, eh?

Yes, there's more text to read if you wanna...


Went out with an old boyfriend, James, a few times and it was great to see him. Funny how after seven years some people don't change (and he says the same of me of course). James is great. It's awesome we could reconnect and pick up again on a friendship. I've had something like 50/50 luck with keeping connections with ex'es and in most cases it's because some horrible psychic shock fallout happened and everyone behaved quite badly. oops.

Met up with another old friend, Michael, who I hung out with in the Czech Republic (the town of Plasy) back in 1999 when we did a residency together and it was also fab to reminisce and find out what happened to all those damn crazy artists running around in the old communal, crumbling 12th Century monastery we inhabited for a while.

I think I did a month's worth of socializing and drinking in the span of five days. Funny why I'm tired! The social rundown includes: Reena, Cathy, Judy, James, Michael, Maureen, Erin, Mads, Clara, Arnold, Karen, Alex, Max, Tim, and a few other new friends, too--usually made with some type of alcoholic concoction in my hand of course. Wheeeeeeeeeee! And there were people I didn't get to catch up with due to lack of time: sorry Marty, Zoe, Jack, and Jeff!

I should have taken more pictures of course. I'm a putz. I need a better camera that I don't hate. I start off with good intentions and then it goes downhill from there...

Tomorrow I jump back into all the projects and work I left behind. Welcome back, dammit!

I FUCKING LOVE NEW YORK.