As has become the custom in recent years, my family met at my sister’s house in scenic Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving dinner. Aside from rare quality time with my family, a highlight of any visit to my sisters house is poking around to see what my sister’s de-facto husband Dan has been up to lately.
“Folk Art” and “Outsider Art” are terms the art world attaches to work created by people who lack two things: money and ambition and although Dan lacks both, I’m not sure either term applies. He’s not eccentric enough to qualify as an “Outsider” and his work isn’t utilitarian enough to be considered true “Folk Art” so let’s just call Dan an artist, and leave it at that.
He makes things out of broken machinery, old bicycles, cloudy lenses, rusty springs and whatever else he finds while rummaging through life. When he saw me taking pictures of his various paintings and sculptures, he pulled me aside and took me to the basement. No disrespect to Dan, or what he makes out of what he finds, but his workshop is as interesting as his art. Looking around, it’s hard to tell what anything is. “Is that a tool? Is it a work in progress? Is it an unmolested turn-of-the-century widget?” Very often whatever you pick up is a carcass of something Dan made, then took apart again. “It used to be a bird, but I needed those springs for the motorcycle over there.”
He makes a lot of partially functional vehicles. That is, vehicles that often (but not always) roll and usually have something on them that if you push or pull or wind, will do something, although none are rideable in any practical sense. You’d never know it to hear — or better yet, see — Dan explain them, however. It’s easy to get caught up in his vivid descriptions and imagine these rusty jalopies puttering down the street, spitting oil and coughing smoke. If nowhere else, at least in a parade.
The backyard, too, is filled with rusty curiosities getting rustier. Jasper, my sister’s three-legged dog, followed us outside to smell a collection of sculptures I’m sure he’s smelled a thousand time before. Dan reached down and scratched Jasper behind the ear, on the side of his missing hind leg, and Jasper’s eyes rolled back in ecstasy.
“Did you take any pictures of the porch?” Dan asked.
Jasper sensed we were about to go back inside and rushed to take a quick piss. We waited for him to lift his stump and relieve himself then headed to the other side of the house.
“This is my favorite place in the world,” said Dan.
The next day we walked into town and Dan showed me a storefront in a historic stone building that he considered renting. It was a well-lit gallery space, about 500 square feet, with an equal size room in back. In the end, Dan didn’t think he could cover the rent selling his creations to tourists and he let the opportunity pass. The space was subsequently rented and now housed a smelly soap gift shop. Dan and I stood outside on the street while Deborah lingered inside the store.
The rent was 500 bucks. After looking at storefronts in New York with Deborah when she was thinking of opening a jewelry store, 500 dollars sounded like a bargain. “You don’t think you could cover that nut?” I asked Dan.
“Not without cranking out a bunch of cheap little knick-knacks to sell. Nobody spends a couple of hundred bucks on sculptures around here.”
“I see your point.” I said. “But, I don’t know, the stores here are nice enough, but there’s nothing here you would’t find in any other tourist town. I think you could create a really unique vibe.”
“I’m one hundred percent sure I could make an interesting space, and that people would definitely poke in to have a look, but I’m not convinced they’d buy what I’m selling.”
“Maybe you could paint little local landscapes. Those sell, don’t they?”
“Yeah, I suppose.”
“I’m always bewildered by how gift shops like this one thrive. It seems that no matter what else there is to see or do in any given artsy fartsy tourist town, women will always buy smelly stuff.”
Just then, Deborah stepped out of the store carrying a paper bag. She stopped on the sidewalk, unrolled the bag, put it up to her nose and sniffed. “I bought a soap,” she said.
Welcome to my new layout! A royal clusterfuck of useless features designed to entertain and amaze! Enjoy it while you can because after spending an absurd amount of time trying to get everything to work the way it’s supposed to, I’ve decided I prefer things to be more streamlined. Learning is fun.
Well over a year ago I did a freelance gig for a production company that was contracted by Radio City Music Hall to create video set elements for the legendary Radio City Christmas Spectacular. (Now in its 79th year!). I worked a solid three months in the sweltering heat of the summer creating animatics for a wintery North Pole scene featuring candy and elves and snow and presents. (In case you don’t know what animatics are, they are animated mockups designed to sort out as much of the look, feel and timing of a sequence in order to work out as many kinks as possible before shelling out a lot of money on 3D animation.)
When my mother told me she was planning to take my niece to see The Radio City Christmas Spectacular, I told her not to buy tickets until I checked to see if I could pull strings and get her a discount.
“Okay,” she said, “two tickets for me and two for yourself if you and Deborah want to come.” I was curious about how how my work turned out, but attending the show didn’t interest me much. I asked Deborah if she wanted to go, but she was even less interested.
“We’ll do whatever we can to help facilitate your travels, mom, but I think we’ll pass on the show.” Bah, humbug!
As a small cog in a gigantic wheel, I couldn’t get a discount. ‘”Sorry, mom, no luck. So much for being a big shot.”
“That’s okay. There’s been a change of plans, anyway.” It’s difficult for my mom to get around these days and she had second thoughts about fighting the New York City holiday crowds. “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
I didn’t give the show any more thought. At least not until the other day, when I was surprised by a last-minute invitation to the Christmas Spectacular’s opening night, along with passes to the after party. I had to decide right away. “What do you think, Deborah, you want to go?”
“Okay, why not.”
A colleague of mine would meet us underneath Radio City’s marquee an hour before showtime with the tickets. It was dark and rainy and, as showtime neared, neither of us felt like leaving the apartment. That happens a lot — too much these days — but we drank some coffee and pushed each other to move.
Deborah injured her foot recently. She’s not sure what’s wrong with it, and is waiting to see a podiatrist. In the meantime, she tries to stay off of it as much as she can. We arrived a few minutes early, and waited in the crowd that was smushed together under the awning, out of the rain. Deborah’s foot began to ache. “I should’ve bought some aspirin,” she said.
“Wait here, and I’ll go find some.”
I had to walk several blocks before I found a deli that sold pain relievers. Three dollars for two pills? Are you kidding? Outrageous! I didn’t have time to argue so I paid the extortion money and headed back to the theater. When I found Deborah she was standing next to a middle aged woman with long frizzy hair dyed jet black. Deborah nodded toward the woman and gestured to me that the lady was nuts.
“Who, her? Why what happened?”
The woman had been standing in the middle of the packed crowd with an open umbrella. Deborah got her attention, “Excuse me,” she said, pointing upward toward the awning. “You probably don’t need your umbrella.”
The woman’s eyes widened, her nostrils flared and she began to shake. “I am an actress!” she said. “I need to protect my hair from the humidity. Why don’t you mind your own business!”
Did she really say that? Deborah looked around to see who else might’ve heard the exchange.
“I was trying to be polite,” Deborah said to the woman.
“Well, you weren’t very, so mind your own business,” she said again.
“Listen, I was just trying to be helpful. You don’t have to be a fucking bitch about it.”
“No, you’re the fucking bitch.”
Deborah looked around again, and caught eyes with another woman standing nearby who just shrugged and smiled and did her best not to get dragged into anything. Deborah laughed. The actress mocked her laugh. Deborah shook her head and and that’s when I showed up.
“I think therapy is helping,” said Deborah. “Before, I would stewing about something like that for days. Now I can just call a woman a fucking bitch and be done with it.”
Progress!
We sat with Bob, a fellow freelancer who worked with me on the animatics, and his partner, Jim. Deborah was thumbing through the program and came across an ad for Peter Pan starring Cathy Rigby.
“Cathy Rigby?” said Deborah. “Isn’t she like seventy years old?”
“She’ll never grow up,” said Bob. “She’s Peter Pan.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” said Deborah. “She used to do Tampon commercials.”
We laughed at the thought of Peter Pan doing tampon commercials.
“Don’t worry Peter, you can still go swimming and do all the things you always did.”
“They have wings!” said Bob.
The show itself held no surprises — an over-the-top, candy-colored, seizure inducing schmaltz-fest. Until the end, of course, when they put on the famous “living nativity” scene featuring live animals and little baby Jesus. The scene is introduced by Santa Clause who, predictably tells the audience not to forget the true “reason for the season.” In other words, never mind all the time, money and effort that went into the previous hour and fifteen minutes, the true meaning of Christmas is this: real live camels!
What can I say about the after party? You know how it goes, showgirls, ingenues, glamour-pusses. Snorting cocaine off well-toned asses, sipping champagne from shoes. Well, okay, maybe not.
I ran into another colleague of mine, Adam, who worked in the theater non-stop for the past three weeks doing final tweaks. He said he became so comfortable wandering around the empty theater that he was upset to see all these people in off the street invading his home.
“What kind of changes have they been doing?” I was curious to know.
“Remember the animated sign that says THE ROCKETTES that rises from beneath the stage? Well it was supposed to be an actual sign, a set piece. The thing was built and everything, but they were having trouble figuring out how to get it on and off stage so at the last-minute they decided to make a 3D animation instead.”
“Pretty soon the entire show will be animated,” I predicted. “The Rockettes and everything. It’ll be The Radio City Christmas Spectacular Movie…In 3D.”
“They’re halfway there already.”
“Seeing that I’m sure as hell never gonna get any work dancing, I guess that’s good news for me.”
There’s not much to say about the after party, really. Free food and drink is always good. Half the people were totally decked out, the guys in festive suits, the women in sequined dresses. The other half, myself included, were schlubs. Various Rockettes could be seen posing for photos, instantly snapping into toothy showbiz poses as soon as anyone lifted a camera. Bob spotted a young woman on the other side of the room wearing a hat from the wooden soldier routine. “She’s gonna get in trouble,” I said, then did my best impression of a 1930s choreographer: “There are a hundred girls out there hungry for your job!”
Deborah spotted her favorite Rockette. “There’s my girl!”
“Go ask for her autograph,” I said.
“Ha, yeah,”
“Go say hello,” said Bob. “She’ll be flattered to know she stood out.”
Deborah thought about it for a second or two but just laughed and shook her head, no. “She’s not as magical in real life.”
“As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments. Our lives aren’t prepackaged along narrative lines and, therefore, by its very nature, reality-based art–underprocessed, underproduced–splinters and explodes.”
– David Schields.
And here we are. Behold my explosion.
The above quote is from a book by David Schields called “Reality Hunger: A Manifesto.” I haven’t read it. Another David Schields book I haven’t read, called “Enough About You,” has sat on my bookshelf since 2002. I know the year, exactly, because it’s a hardcover book and I bought it new. I don’t often buy hardcovers. It’s rare that I care enough about a book not to wait for the paperback to come out. Hell, more often that not, a book will be out forty or fifty years before I read it. I once toyed with the idea of applying to an MFA writing program. The application requirements included a 1000 word reaction paper to something written within the last ten years. Nothing on my bookshelf fit the bill so I headed to my local bookstore’s latest releases table. I felt like an intern going through the slush pile. “Fuck it, I can’t afford grad school, anyway,” I’m sure I said, before wandering to the aisles of books edited by time.
So why did I spend 22 bucks on a new hardcover less than 200 pages long that I never finished reading? Well, 2002 happens to be the year I started blogging and I felt inspired by a quote that opened the book:
“I know of nothing more difficult than knowing who you are, and having the courage to share the reasons for the catastrophe of your character with the world.”
– William Gass.
I could have just written the quote on a piece of paper, or enough of it at least to google it when I got home, but I didn’t want to risk it. In desperate need of reassurance, I found the quote energizing. I could flatter myself that I engaged in a noble pursuit, courageously standing naked before the world. “Réalisant mon espoir. Je me lance vers la gloire!”
Reading the William Gass quote now, it doesn’t hold the same power for me that it did ten years ago. After all, sharing the catastrophe of your character with the world these days is as simple as updating your Facebook status.
Not that blogging ever really took courage. Back then, the only people who read my blog, or even knew it existed, were other bloggers spewing the same flotsam I was. Not to mention that I was in the midst of an existential crisis and didn’t have a lot to lose anyway.
For some reason, however, although I have far fewer readers now and am hardly sharing anything with “The World” I feel like it actually does take courage to write. Even though I’m not sharing any great catastrophes (or perhaps it’s because I’m not) it feels like I’m at a podium with the house lights on.
But with no work to keep me busy, eating more peanut butter than is good for me, I turn to writing again regardless. If only I hadn’t lost so much momentum.
Courage! Today is the first day of the rest of my site.
Recently, I attended the New York premier for a movie called Cargo, written, produced and directed by some friends of mine. I was an extra in a club scene, but I don’t think I made the final cut beyond perhaps a few frames of the back of my head. Actually, I’m not even sure the head I saw was mine since I don’t really know what the back of my head looks like. (And honestly, the older I get the less I want to know.)
My truck, on the other hand was impossible to miss. It had a featured role and even got to do an action scene. (The movie was shot over a year ago, but I’m still finding small pieces of the rear window caked in fake blood.)
I was so late to the premier that I nearly didn’t make it. When I arrived the ushers were seating a group of Russians that had been waiting on stand-by. I literally got the last available seat. When I sat down, my phone buzzed, but I didn’t notice it. My friend Paul was texting me from the other side of the aisle.
Although knowing my truck was featured made me especially excited to see the finished product, I worried it would make it difficult to enjoy the movie purely as a movie. Thankfully it was a compelling film and I got caught up in the suspense without even trying.
It wasn’t until everyone began filing out of the theater that Paul finally got my attention. “Hey, Jamie, what are you doing here? Did you work on this movie or something.”
“A peripheral player, as usual,” I said. “Although my truck had a principal role.”
“Was that your pickup?”
“Yeah.”
“They bought you a new window, I hope.”
“Hell yeah. How about you? What are you doing here? Do you know these guys?”
“I know the publicist.”
The lobby was crowded with people discussing the film and standing in line for the chance to congratulate to the filmmakers who were standing against the wall being photographed. Paul and I made small talk while the crowd slowly carry us past the cameras, through the front doors and onto the street. Standing under the marquee, I realized I should probably go back inside to offer congratulations, too, however, I was afraid that if I went in, it would take me an hour to get out again.
“What are you doing now? Are you heading back to Brooklyn?” I said, hoping we could split the cost of a cab, although in retrospect it was a silly notion. For one thing, Paul was unlikely to splurge a few extra bucks on a cab but also, it wasn’t even 10:00 yet. A mover and shaker like Paul was just getting warmed up.
“A friend invited me to a burlesque art party,” he said. “Are you up for it?”
“A burlesque art party? Sure, yeah, why not?”
It was a nice night, and as we walked from 13th Street to SoHo, I called Deborah to let her know I’d be late. At the same time, Paul called his friend to see about getting me on the guest list.
“Victor?” Paul’s said. “Vector?” The street noise on Paul’s end and the music on the other end made it difficult for Paul to hear. “Text it to me.”
The text came through. I was to pretend my name was Hector Alvarez while Paul was given a Jewish-sounding name. “I don’t think I can pull that off,” I said, and we debated over the names. It turned out not to matter because, when we finally arrived, Paul’s friend simply met us outside and led us past the doorman. “They’re with me.”
“Todd, this is my friend Jamie,” said Paul, and then it dawned on him. “Wait, you guys know each other, don’t you?”
It turned out we did. All three of us had worked together on the Stephen Sprouse exhibit at Deitch Projects.
“Todd actually lived near you for a while,” said Paul.
“Where do you live?” said Todd.
“In Brooklyn, near the Navy Yard.”
“Ah, okay yeah, I used to park my RV over there. I lived in an RV for a couple of years. It was a good deal. Just me and my dog.”
“Yeah, you and that fucking dog,” said Paul. “I still have teeth marks from that fucking thing. I visited Todd at the RV one night, Since I’d never met the dog before, Todd decided he better put a muzzle on him. A pit bull. He’s ferocious. A soon as I walked in, the thing came flying at me and tore into my leg.”
“He couldn’t get the muzzle on in time?”
“No, I mean he bit me through the muzzle. Right through the fucking muzzle.”
The gallery was filled with elaborately costumed performers, some danced on pedestals, some acted out abstract scenes on the floor and a few others mingled with the crowd. Essentially, the whole gallery space was a stage and we had to keep moving to avoid being absorbed into the show.
Todd introduced us to a short Asian girl dressed in some sort of Thai ceremonial garb. “Ah yeah, the married girl,” said Paul. They had met at a bowling party a few months earlier where Paul spent the whole night working his moves only to hear her say at the end of the night, “Okay, time to go home to my husband.”
The girl giggled as Paul told the story.
We were introduced to a couple of more dancers and given inside information on a few others. “That one is a thirty-year-old virgin. Don’t tell her I told you that.”
When a guy in a blindfold took to a nearby pedestal and began to strip down to a saggy pair of underwear in slow motion, we decided it was time to snake our way to the rear of the gallery where a makeshift bar was set up to sell cups of wine for 5 dollars each. Paul’s friend got us each a free cup.
“Five bucks?” said Paul. “That’s pretty steep, isn’t it?”
“It’s a fundraiser,” said Todd. “They’re trying to raise money for the gallery.”
I felt a little guilty, but I took the free wine anyway. Cups in hand, we slipped into a back room were it was quiet enough to talk. A grainy black and white video of a dozen dancers frolicking in a park was projected on the wall. “If you see a naked guy in this video,” said Todd, “That’s me.” He broke into an unsteady dance routine.
A good looking couple sat on a couch under the screen, making out. “Are they part of the show?” I asked.
Todd shrugged.
A drunk guy stumbled into our little group and pointed into the other room where one of the female dancers was in line for a drink. “I’m gay,” he said, “but look at that ass! It’s so perfect, I want to bite it!”
“Is it making you question your sexuality?” said Todd.
“I don’t know, I don’t know, look at it!”
Although I was fairly certain he wasn’t one of the performers, he began to twirl and totter around the room, mumbling about that ass until he collapsed on the couch where the couple was kissing. “Did you see that ass?” he asked them, sounding half asleep. “Perfect.”
Halfway through a second free cup of wine I called it quits. “YOu want this?” I said, holding the cup out to Paul.”
“It’s really bad, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll take it.”
I said my goodnights, made vague plans to hang out again, and went outside to flag down a cab. No luck, so I walked.
