Happy New Year everyone. Thanks for reading, and thanks for all the support during the good times and the bad. (This year had a lot of both.) Raymi often suggests I do a “best of” post, but don’t be confused, that’s not what this is.
January
The Stephen Sprouse retrospective “Rock on Mars” at Deitch Projects opens the year with a bang.
February
I kept telling Deborah I was too busy to even think about moving, but with the design and installation of the Sprouse show finally over, I’m out of excuses: Apartment hunting begins.
March
After the Sprouse Show comes down I get to visit Traffic Court
April
More apartment hunting before we finally sign a lease and then pack up and go.
May
Briefly settling in to our new apartment before leaving for Hong Kong to oversee the installation of another Sprouse show, celebrating our one year anniversary along the way.
June
The summer motorcycle accident and the surgery that followed.
July
July was slow, though I did manage to get out of the house.
August
My friend Brian comes and goes. August was for leaving.
September
With my foot on the mend, we skip town on a road trip to Michigan where Deborah falls in love with alpacas and I get back in the saddle.
October
Deborah’s parent’s find out about her “Secret Life”.
November
Time to break another bone. I’m not sure what was worse, the actual accident or the neurologist appointment that followed.
December
No much happening in December with a broken arm other than getting flashed on the subway.
And that’s that. Tonight is going to be low-key. The plan is to stay home, drink champagne, and watch the entire Season 2 of Californication. Hope you all have a great holiday. See you next year.
Despite knowing Stephen Sprouse for nearly twenty years, I didn’t meet his mother, Joanne, or his brother, Brad, or any of his other relatives until after he passed away. When we finally met, we all agreed that it was long overdue and regretted that it couldn’t have been under happier circumstances.
In the years since, there have been a lot of Stephen Sprouse projects and events — a book, a retrospective, the famous Louis Vuitton special collection, a museum show in Hong Kong, and so on — keeping me in regular contact with Stephen’s family. But regardless of the quasi-professional elements to our relationship, I have a lot of affection for them as friends and really enjoy getting together with them socially. Unfortunately it doesn’t happen very often and when it does, it’s always in New York.
“When are you and Deborah going to visit us in Michigan?” they always ask.
“Soon,” I always say.
Well, this year, “soon” finally came.
And so…
We checked out of western Pennsylvania’s beautiful “Ritz” Carlton Motel and were on our way.
A long haul, nearly 600 miles, from Daisytown, PA to Michigan’s Leelanu Penninsula and with a windshield full of bug splatter and the late summer sun setting in our eyes to slow us down, we were later than expected.
I called Brad along the way to give him a status update and let him know when to expect us. “Okay, we’ll see you when you get here,” he said. “Big Jo has a surprise for you when you get in.” (Big Jo is what he calls his mother, Joanne.)
Over the river and through the woods, we turned onto the long, tree-lined drive of Joanne’s beautiful lakeside home. “It’s the quintessential grandma’s house, isn’t it?” I said to Deborah. “Albeit with a few additions.”
Brad, Joanne, Brandon and Brandon’s girlfriend, Winnie, greeted us in the driveway. After the initial hugs and hellos, we were led inside where we sat around the kitchen table snacking on homemade pie while Joanne prepared the surprise.
Several minutes later, “Okay, follow me,” said Joanne, and she led us through the living room and down the hall. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
She pushed open the door to the spare bedroom revealing a floor-to-ceiling Day-Glo and neon rose radiating in all its luminescent glory. “Welcome to The Rose Lounge.”
“Wow,” was about all we could say.
Joanne told the story about how, when the big Stephen Sprouse/Louis Vuitton promotion ended, she contacted someone at Louis Vuitton to see about getting one of the neon roses that had been used in Louis Vuitton’s SoHo store, thinking it would be nice to hang it over the piano in her living room. But apparently she remembered the rose being much smaller than it actually was and was shocked when a delivery man came to her door ready to unload a seven foot square wooden crate. “Where would you like it?”
The crate sat in the middle of the house for a couple of weeks until finally, with a little rearranging and some help from Brandon and Brad, she managed to find a suitable place to hang it which, in the process, created the simultaneously cozy and intense “Rose Lounge” where we sat for a champagne toast and some chocolates to celebrate our arrival.
“Welcome to Michigan.”
Things haven’t been going so well since I returned from Hong Kong. This is going to sound absurd, but the night I arrived home and was looking out the window at the incident on the street, trying to figure out if someone got shot or stabbed outside the club down below, I leaned hard into the edge of the window sill for a better view and bruised my ribs. A sharp pop and I keeled over in pain. It’s been killing me ever since and makes it hard to sleep — which I haven’t been able to do anyway due to residual jet lag.
I’m still trying to find the best option for commuting into Manhattan from our new apartment. I have several options, but they all suck.
Yesterday it took me two hours to get home. The A train to Brooklyn stopped at the last stop in Manhattan due to “train traffic ahead.” Train traffic ahead is a catch all for when the trains are fucked up. “Please be patient” the train operator says. He said it several times over the course of a half hour. I was standing in the middle of the car, which made it difficult to get off, but I couldn’t stand there any longer with my bruised rib, exhausted from lack of sleep.
Excuse me, pardon me, excuse me…” I eased my way through the packed car towards the door.
“Dis is when da bullshit starts,” said one woman as I squeezed past her.
“No, the bullshit started a half hour ago,” I mumbled in response.
When I got to the top of the stairs and onto the street, I realized I was in the middle of Wall Street and wasn’t anywhere near another useful subway train. I decided to head back to the A train and wait it out, but soon realized I didn’t have any money left on my Metrocard. I’ve been living on a shoestring since losing my wallet and only had thirteen dollars on me. The Metrocard vending machine would only accept my ten dollar bill. By the time I got through the turnstile and down to the platform, the train was out of service and I found myself fighting a sea of people.
Back on the street, I started walking to the nearest F train — a good twenty minutes away, including a trip through Chinatown which, after just returning from Hong Kong, felt a little surreal. I’m sure if I took time to think about it, I might’ve found another option, but at the time it’s all I could come up with. In any case, with only three dollars in my pocket, the most desirable option — a taxicab — was out of the question.
Twenty minute walk to the F, fifteen minute wait for the train, transfer to the G and another 15 minute wait, then a fifteen minute ride and a ten minute walk home from my stop, it adds up.
I made it home and collapsed on the bed.
As soon as I get my new bank card and can take some cash out of the bank, I’m going to buy a new inner tube for my bicycle and give that a whirl.
Everyone I emailed this link to yesterday emailed back to say they’d already seen it, so maybe this is old news, but yesterday’s New York Times had an article about the Hong Kong show featuring a photo of the Stephen Sprouse installation.
Nice.
Sixteen thousand some-odd miles to Hong Kong and back again, parked in a cab at the doorstep of my new apartment — the one I moved into only two weeks before leaving for Hong Kong — figuring out the tip on a forty dollar fare, anxious to run upstairs and collapse into bed. I pay the cabbie, get my luggage out of the trunk, wheel it into my apartment building, ride the elevator up top the seventh floor, wheel down the hallway and knock on the door. Deborah, who had taken a separate flight earlier in the day, let me in, gave me a hug and said, Welcome home.”
“You too,” I said. “We made it.”
I absentmindedly patted my pockets — a habit I have when traveling to make sure I have everything — and realized my wallet was gone. Left in the cab that I took home from the airport, no doubt, destined to be picked up and rifled through by the cabbie’s next fare. The fifteen hour non-stop flight from Hong Kong had me discombobulated — groggy and confused with jet lag — and I’d let my guard down a few beats too early.
“Fuck!” I retraced my steps to the street, in the unlikely case I’d simply dropped it along the way and it might be lying on the ground waiting to be rescued. “Motherfucker! What a fucking way to end the trip.”
Deborah pointed out that it could’ve been worse — I could’ve lost my passport in Hong Kong — but I couldn’t see what one thing had to do with the other.
My rhythms were off-kilter and I couldn’t sleep. I lay restless in bed for a few hours, but it was useless. It was Friday night and I could hear a crowd outside a bar on the street seven floors below. People were arguing, then yelling, then screaming. Was that a car door? Did someone get shot? Stabbed? Punched? Deborah woke up from the screaming and we looked out the window together. It was dark and hard to see what was going on but when the cops, fire truck and ambulance arrived, flashing red, there was enough light to see that a guy was sprawled on the street. We watched him get lifted onto a stretcher and loaded into the ambulance, and we continued to watch until the street was clear and the sun began to rise.
Welcome back.
Deborah called her parents the next day to let them know she was home. After giving Deborah a detailed recap of the grand finale of American Idol, her mother said, “We were worried that you got burned with acid.”
There had been an incident in the Mong Kok area of Hong Kong while we were there — someone had thrown a bottle of acid off a roof and injured something like 60 people. Although we’d visited Mong Kok a day or two earlier, obviously neither of us had been among the injured. Deborah was surprised that her mother had heard about it.
“No, we didn’t get burned with acid, mom,” said Deborah debating whether or not to tell her about the shooting or stabbing or whatever it was the previous night on the street where we live.
Although I didn’t get to see too much of the “real” Hong Kong, the trip itself was pretty spectacular. My final days were so tightly scheduled I felt like a traveling Head of State. At two-fifteen arrive here, 3 o’clock head over there, five forty-five line up there, at six o’clock get led to a special “artists area” on stage left while the real Heads of State give speeches and cut ribbons. Deborah sent me a text to tell me she’d made it as far as the big glass doors of the gallery entrance, but was having trouble getting any further.
“I’m stuck onstage,” I said. “As soon as I get free, I’ll find you and get you in.”
When the speeches were over the big name artists were introduced to the crowd and posed for pictures while I sweated under a bank of floodlights, waiting to be released. The artists finally finished mugging and we were led through the crowd via a corral of velvet ropes.
I spotted Deborah who had managed to fight her way inside without my help.
Hurried along by men with walkie-talkies and women with clip boards, I called to her and pointed, “I have to go this way. Meet me over there.”
She was having none of it and pushed her way through the crowd, hopped the velvet rope and gave me a hug. “This is crazy,” she said.
We rode the escalator to the second floor and made a beeline for the Sprouse room. Deborah hadn’t seen it yet and I was anxious to show her what I’d been doing while she had been sunning poolside, buying Chinese chatchkas, arguing with Bangladeshi tailors, and eating mangos all week.
“Wow, cool,” she said.
The show was crowded, but not so crowded that they couldn’t have invited a few more people — like, say, the young Hong Kong artists who’s work was in the show, but for reasons I don’t quite understand, didn’t make the list. “Wait,” I said, when one of the girls who works in the museum told me that. “There are artists who actually have pieces in the show who weren’t invited to the opening?”
She nodded.
“I guess they do things differently in Hong Kong.”
She shrugged.
Champagne glasses constantly filled, like a bottomless cups of coffee at iHop, Deborah and I mingled and people watched — Hong Kong socialites, fashion victims, reporters, movie stars, politicians — I introduced Deborah to various people I’d met during the course of work.
“There she is,” said one. “You’ve been hiding her all this time. I was beginning to wonder if she really existed. You should bring her out with you more often. I mean look at you, you’re actually smiling.”
He would’ve seen her sooner if I’d had enough clout to get her into the assorted parties dotting the perimeter of the main event. He would’ve seen her later, too, if I’d been able to get her into the dinner party after the show. I felt guilty leaving for such a star studded and swanky affair without her. “It’s okay,” she said, “I’m just glad I was able to get into the show. I had no idea it was going to be such a scene. Have fun at dinner, you deserve it. I’ll see you back at the room.”
I kissed Deborah goodbye and was directed by a line Chinese women in tailored dresses pointing the way to go like game show models pointing at a new car. Down a hall, make a left, to another hall, to a table with a guest list, pose for a quick photo by a guy documenting everyone as they arrived, then up a special elevator to a restaurant on the 28th floor with a staggering view of Hong Kong. I found my place at one of four long banquet tables lined with illuminated Murakami placemats while Murakami himself sat just a few seats away.
I skipped the after party and went back to the hotel room to spend my last night in Hong Kong with Deborah. I tried to describe the dinner and told her about the famous Hong Kong actress, and the famous Hong Kong ballerina. Told her about the famous French pianist, Michel Dalberto, who impressed the crowd with a performance of Chopin and Debussy and told her about the curious Asian pop that the DJs played too soon afterwards causing everyone to groan. I told her about the scallop carpaccio, about the beef tips and white asparagus, about sitting next to Paige, an animal lover and strict vegetarian, while being served foie gras, and about the white chocolate and mangos.
I didn’t do a very good job of describing any of it to her, really. Didn’t do a very good job of describing it to you either. But there it is.
I hope I can make it through work today without falling flat on my face in the middle of the afternoon.
I’m leaving Hong Kong today and I don’t have time to edit my blurry photos from last night’s opening and gala after-party before I catch a plane home to New York. But since the show is now officially open, I can post a couple of photos that I took the other day during the brief time between the installation being (nearly) complete, and it being overrun with reporters, photographers, politicians, artists and socialites.
(I found this photo of Mr. Henry Tang, Chief Secretary for Administration touring the Sprouse room with Bernard Arnault, Chairman and CEO of LVMH — i.e. the richest man in France.)
Here’s one of the Murakami room, too:
And Richard Prince:
See you in New York.
Had just enough time yesterday for a quick trip to Macau which, if you don’t know, is a Special Administrative Region like Hong Kong. First settled by the Portuguese in the 16th century, it was handed back to China in 1999 making it the both first and the last European colony in China.
The fact that it’s a Special Administrative Region meant that we had to get our passports stamped on both ends of our journey. We knew that, of course, and were prepared for it, but we weren’t prepared for the long lines which added another hour to the trip.
While on the ferry we were shown a video of how to sneeze into a tissue, and how to properly dispose of it afterwards. We were handed special health declaration forms by a woman in a mask and rubber gloves. At the ferry exits in both Macau and Hong Kong, there were two men in lab coats and face masks manning an infrared scanning device, surrounded by several armed military personnel, also wearing face masks, standing ready to escort anyone who showed up hot on the scanner to a quarantine camp. Thankfully, we waltzed right through.
Not sure what to expect at the airports when we fly home tomorrow.
The ferry terminal is walking distance to several large Las Vegas-style casinos which would’ve been fun to see at night, but since we were there in the daytime, we opted to head for the historic district, instead, which is also walking distance to the ferry terminal, but not without working up a sweat in the relentless humidity while dodging hundreds of speeding cabs and gazillions of scooter-riding kids. Scooters are definitely the way to handle the narrow and bumpy streets that wind up and down the hilly city. It made me wonder why I didn’t see more of them in Hong Kong.
I was scheduled for a special dinner back in Hong Kong so we didn’t as much time as I would’ve liked, but I’m glad we went. It’s a lot more different from Hong Kong than I expected. I read that Macau is one of the wealthiest cities in the world — and was told that despite being hardly more than a shoe box (granted a luxurious shoe box) Macau’s Louis Vuitton store is the fifth busiest in the world. But like Las Vegas or Atlantic City, Macau’s gaming cousins in the U.S., Macau’s high rolling wealth is offset by ramshackle outskirts, including entire blocks of corrugated metal shacks and dilapidated apartment buildings with birdcage balconies.
We arrived back in Hong Kong with just enough time for me to shower and change for a special VIP dinner at a private residence located at the top of Hong Kong’s famous peak. Tried as I could to finagle an invitation for Deborah, too, I just don’t have that kind of pull. The party doesn’t know what it was missing. Deborah was jealous of course — being picked up by a limo, served a bottomless glass of champagne and a delicious meal in a beautiful house with a beautiful view among famous artists, designers, VIPs, CEOs, and Hong Kong socialites — but I was equally jealous of her, with time to herself to luxuriate in the hotel without feeling like a fish out of water the way I did — trying to explain who I am or why I’m here.
To simply say, “I designed the Stephen Sprouse room,” was enough for some — “Oh congratulations, the room looks great” — but for one Chinese writer from Shanghai in particular, I needed to provide a full length resume and she still didn’t seem to understand why the hell I was there. Understandable, I suppose, in a room full of people where just a name should suffice.
