Oh, Ed

I've been thinking about blog space to highlight my archives-- I've been around long enough to have a fair amount of work not internet available (particularly material from the late Bay Guardian). I interviewed Ed Ruscha in 2001 when he had a show of his print archives at the deYoung. Growing up in LA, Ruscha was an art god, and talking to him was a crushing disappointment—he's a man of few words and perhaps he was in a mood, but didn't give me much. Or so I recall. It took me months to make a recovery and continue to appreciate his work. As this is a Ruscha summer— he's got another big show at the deYoung, and one Crown Point Press, not to mention Gagosian in Beverly HIlls— it seemed like a good time to dig up that piece and read just what he said. Here's the latter half of the piece from the SF Bay Guardian, May 2001.

". . . . during a brief interview at the museum, Ruscha expressed that he’s not necessarily interested in being pinned down to particular influences, especially the West. "I don't know why people say that I'm so typically L.A.," he says with quiet, genuine disbelief. “I don't feel like it's my job to say what the city is like. It's my job to go off and let my mind wander, and I use the city as an excuse to do that.  But I see similar things when I go to New York. I see a lot of real vital imagery. Things that aren't so pretty but have substance to them, underpasses, oil spots, what have you. It's not just LA particularly, it happens to be that I live there.”

"Maybe my work comes out of a form of neurotic anxiety that exists in that city," he adds. "But it also exists on the road." Ruscha's work revels in the kind of odd visions seen on a road trip, and in biographical readings of his work, frequent mentions are made of his late 1950s car trips from his native Nebraska to California, along the now-mythic Route 66, an interstate dotted with the service stations, motels and billboards that have entered into his early iconography.

"Driving in the car is a rich kind of experience, it sets things flowing," the self-described “Ford person” admits. "I get on the freeway and as I'm driving, I start seeing things as material or possibilities for some kind of thinking. I write notes to myself when I'm driving so they're all totally scribbled. Once I got this notion 'boy meets girl' stuck in my head so I wrote it thing out. It's almost illegible and it had this force and presence to it that I enlarged the thing and made a painting from it."

As well as working in Venice, California, Ruscha has a house in the Mojave Desert, a place where he goes to get away from his daily studio practice. Fittingly, it’s set in a flat, barren landscape, and requires a road trip to get there. "I just love being in the desert," he says. "While I’m at my house there, I just engage in the events of plain living. There are usually fifty things to do--fix that latch on that door, I've got to do this and polish that. But it's a good feeling, just to leave the big city and go some place remote is inspiring."

He also cites the car radio as a source of inspiration. "The radio is the soundtrack for what I'm seeing. I like the idea of listening to the music and looking at this still scene out here. The idea that the music could be echoing that or the music was specifically written for that makes it something different. It kicks off something."

"There's one LA radio station that I like to listen to. It's actually two overlapping radio stations. When you get two kinds of music that are overlapping each other it's really interesting. Maybe a classical piano piece is overlapping with a country and western tune. Sometimes a voice comes in, a news report or something. It's completely chance. I like listening to stuff like that."

Ruscha’s work emerges from just such unexpected juxtapositions. It makes sense then that he approaches his work with instinct and a bit of restlessness. “All I know is that I can't exactly keep doing the same thing over and over again like a broken record,” he says. “It's so puzzling when you try to evaluate yourself. I just feel like there's lots yet to do and I don't know what it'll be. I've got no game plan or strategy." Somehow, you know that ambling road will continue to take him somewhere with major visual appeal."

Prince Moments: (Prince) Interactive (1994)

There was just an article in the NY Times about the online Prince Museum, which reminded me what a tech innovator the guy was. He utilized pixels for distribution and to enhance his brand, before people were talking about either of those things.  I was also reminded that he made a CD-Rom-- took me a moment to even recall the name of those discs. This was 1994, during the first dot com era, when digital experimentation was the bomb, and there were lots of opportunities to write about the stuff and earn one's keep as a freelance writer. (sigh)  When the disc came out, I talked an editor at SF Weekly to let me write a little review. (I probably wrote one for some other tech specific publication that existed back then.) I went back into my digital archives and found my take on (P) Interactive. I now wish I had the jewel-boxed thing to look at again-- probably sold it on Amazon somewhere along the line. ;-(  Here's a logy video tour of the Myst-like game. Please note: Prince was the symbol back then, so that's what the P stands for, fyi. Enjoy.

(P) Interactive

Graphix Zone/Warner Brothers

P Interactive is a vanity project— and I don't mean Nasty Girls.  It's an ego-trip and a half into the mind of a multi-media auteur.  Who else but the mysterious and prolific composer, performer, film director and clothing designer could create a haunted Playboy mansion where digitized babes materialize from wall sconces, the waterbed love pit is hydraulic, and the soundtrack is packed with glam slam hits?  This CD-Rom is an electronic invitation into a florid, princely labyrinth that's a decorator world unto itself:  Gothic halls trimmed with golden Kama Sutra motifs, velvet curtains, and accessories by Headlines. 

            Everything here pertains to P, which is a surprisingly entertaining prospect.  You'll wander alone through his well-appointed recording studio, his empty black-lit disco or his library where you'll find a comprehensive career history starting when his name was Prince and his hair was funky.  Portraits of the artist blossom into video and song snippets or roast-like testimonials by colleagues like George Clinton (who calls him a “positive nuisance”).  A click upon P's curiously shaped guitar unleashes an audible songbook of his musical virtuosity.  There's even a treasure hunt game involving “the symbol” which unlocks an exclusive video peek (good luck getting to it).  The glossy, controlled experience is as interactive as you'll ever get with this secretive star. 

            Finding your way through this lavender cyberworld can give you a royal headache, but there are plenty of redeeming nooks and crannies that deliver delectable bad taste treats— like mutating, pill-shaped microphones and P's head bobbing atop a metronome.  It's in this arena that P Interactive is most appealing.  While the sound and computer generated animations are impressively crisp, it's P's incomparable sensibility that goes far beyond the limits of technology.  

Prince Moments 2: Under the Cherry Moon, 1986

The camera pans along the legs of a reclining figure. Sheathed in shimmery black spandex, the gender is unclear, even as the shot moves along to a taut bubble butt that's almost shockingly pert in its athletic androgyny. You seriously want your hands on it. Our eyes follow raptly along the body, to the torso, and soon we see the head on this body belongs to Prince, who is blithely lounging, with full awareness of his Brigitte Bardot moment of cinematic ass worship.

This is Under the Cherry Moon, ‘a film by Prince,’ from 1986, not Godard’s 1963 LeMépris. Yet strangely, there are plenty of parallels. Both are set at glorious French seaside resorts, have plots revolving around greed, and feature the cutest asses you’ve ever seen.

One of the things I most appreciate about the movie Prince directed and starred in is how it reveals his auteur dreams.  Who would have even thought Prince could sit through a film with subtitles? Or sit still at all? In the film, he does seem to be a busy guy, chasing tail (specifically tail attached to moolah), pausing only to bathe and the occasional reclining moment where we can see the irresistible appeal of his 27-year old booty. OMG.

It’s so strange to realize the film is 30 years old. It screened at the Castro the week that Prince would have turned 58. The film is mythic in my mind, an oddity that expressed a lot of what made him such an iconic figure for me—a dissonance between sophisticated musical genius and truly wacky visual aesthetics. (A friend reminded me of my take on Graffiti Bridge, Prince's 1990 film-- that it looked like they filmed the whole thing at Headlines, the Hot Topic of its era.)  Under the Cherry Moon is no masterpiece–the acting is choppy, the narrative puerile— but it is gloriously quirky and revealing of the artist’s psyche at the time. You might call it a playful narcissism, with Prince preening in ways that are irritating and lovable. At least that’s what came through at this viewing.

Lately, I’ve been listening to Parade, the fantastic album that accompanied it as a semi-soundtrack.  The music is sublime in a way that the film is so not. The two seem to have very little to do with each other. But that doesn’t discount what the film is as an artifact, a work unto itself.

During the modestly attended screening, I grinned with the onscreen pleasure that Prince certainly had cavorting in Nice, controlling the camera—the silvery French New Wave black and white cinematography lensed, and secretly co-directed by Michael Ballhaus, a Fassbinder collaborator (who must have been pulled in after Prince fired the original director, Mary Lambert)— and being sexy and silly. He hot rods through the beach boulevards in a vintage convertible Buick with a fittingly personalized license plate: LOVE. An American in Nice. There were moments where I laughed with Prince—particularly at the wacky way the song Kiss enters the narrative in the back of the convertible— but at times I choked back tears, overcome with the sadness of his passing.

The film is full of strange relationships and innuendos, with Prince as the constant object of desire. It starts with him being kept by a sexy wealthy matron, a lady in white. In the second scene, we all desire him: He's in the bathtub, wearing that wide bolero hat and not much more. He looks fucking amazing, taut and lean as he remained the rest of his life, and full of bravado. He’s so aware of his erotic charge, and deploys it with brazen displays of his flesh. Jerome Benton is literally his partner in crime, a man whose darker skin pumps up some racial subtexts—these are people of color, musicians, in snooty white Euro environs, a scenario that has some Josephine Baker overtones. Jerome caters to Prince as he bathes, tossing flower petals into the tub. This feels like a carnal bromance, and it gets even more homo as Prince slips on a rug and falls, naked, into the arms of Jerome, who gets a little lispy. Swoon.

Their relationship has a lot more heat than Prince falling for the bratty heiress Mary (a name Jerome intones like a kaween). It was Kristin Scott Thomas’s first movie role. She and Prince spar like junior high school crushes, more dorky than sexy.  The dialog here is at adolescent odds with the 1980s Euro trash stylings of the Nice party scenes, populated by lots of teased hair and unisex eye shadow. Mary enters her massive 21st birthday with an intent to shock, appearing in her birthday suit. That's the level of wit that the film plays with. Thomas plays her erratically—one could only imagine how her director coached her— but in that scene, she is so full of precocious life. The film sporadically exudes that spirit. 

I wondered how Kristin recalls making this movie, and how she even got there. The audition? Her relationship with her director/co-star? But it was Prince’s show, his vision, and above all, his godly physical presence preserved in cinematic splendor. It's so wonderful that it exists, a time capsule of his willingness to shake that ass, for a vision. For you.

[revised 6/12]

Daily

[For the past few weeks I've been implementing a meditation practice. It's not easy to just following my thoughts. Here's a short creative piece that attempts to capture the free floating anxieties ;-). ]

 

First thing: 15 minutes, on the microwave. It’s not long, but doable. Eyes closed though I was just sleeping, or at least halfway through the clock radio NPR chatter. One. Two. Three. Why is my breath so shallow? It should be more expansive than this, more about pulling in and letting go. Yoga class, remember? Six. Maybe it's the position, sitting here on the floor, atop this slightly squishy block. Seven. Or it’s a lung problem? Nine. A lump in my throat that feels like heartache. Why do I still feel heartache? Four. It's been weeks. He's got to realize he made a mistake. Seven. Maybe there’s a text. I’m not looking until this is over. Thirteen. Oops, wasn’t supposed to go past ten. One. Will I cave and send him an e-mail? I know I shouldn't.  Seven. My lower back. Oy. Nine. I need to write something short. I should write about this. It's contained. It's got structure. Twelve. Fuck! Dial it back to one. Let the thoughts go. Two. Still shallow. Five. That asshole on Scruff. Really, could he be any more stereotypical? Dick pic, disappearance. Ten. Composing between breaths just seems wrong. Mindfulness not multi-tasking! Three. Losing count. Nine. Earlier on the radio: A Berkeley high school teacher says he’s on "the back end of life". He's my age exactly. Seven. My morning shit moves into place. I can last fifteen minutes, though how far into this am I? Five, is that where I was? Six.  I bought cheap chairs online. A poor quality mistake. I should have held out for better. One. Will he ever see them? Two. Won't he be proud that I'm sitting here doing this? It was his idea in the first place. Five. Is there anything to eat for breakfast? Seven. How will I keep myself from looking at my e-mail once my eyes are open?  Eleven. Again!? I keep over counting. Back to the body. One. Legs cramp. Yawn. I break the spell that I’m barely in. Two. Does this even do anything? Three. The bed’s rumpled. I should wash the sheets. TODAY. Six. Back end of life. Did the guy on the radio really say "eternally single"? Eight. Despair. Ten. Maybe I can get my lungs to expand with practice. Four. Five. Six. Another heartache lump in my throat. Nine. How much time do I have left?

BEEP. 

Steve Wolfe (1955-2016)

I learned last week that artist Steve Wolfe passed. There was a notice on Artforum.com, though like Steve's thoughtful labor intensive work, it slipped into the stream of information with little fanfare. His extremely convincing facsimiles of books and records, elements of culture that define who we are, always had a way of seeming like they were objects that were close to me-- titles that spoke of a generation of thinkers. He lived in San Francisco, but also worked under the radar. I recalled writing a review of his work years ago, so dug for it in my archives of my hard drive. This was part of a two-show review that appeared in SF Weekly in July 1994. The other show was called "Special Collections," hence the concluding line.

"The selective spirit also emerges from Steve Wolfe's remarkable works on paper at the luminous new Daniel Weinberg Gallery.  Wolfe's literate renderings of book covers and vinyl record albums bear the markings of obsessive attachment along with the yearning to restore human dignity to the mass produced.  They are a deft combination of form and content.  Wolfe's mixed media work is initially misleading— they look just like actual book jackets.  The Untitled (Studies for New Directions), for example, frames together a series of lit classics, grouped by publisher.  Like half-finished mock-ups from the publisher's art department or books frayed with use, the cover designs for titles by Flaubert, Borges, Nabokov, Mishima and others, bring to mind immediate smarty pants connotations.  They're all those books you meant to read, but let fade on the coffee table.

In other pieces Wolfe recreates an arrangement of spines and covers that approximate the haphazard juxtapositions found on unkempt shelves.  (They're actually studies for sculpture ofthree-dimensional volumes placed in cardboard “product” boxes that are also rendered by the artist.)  One, for example, evocatively links a Warhol title with an children's undersea adventure.

Wolfe's choices of record subjects are equally astute and breathtakingly rendered.   The untitled works depicting Gertrude Stein Reading, Side 2, Society's Child by Janis Ian, or Jimi Hendrix's Are You Experienced? have a monolithic, award-like presence that only intensifies when you realize they were created with oil paint and black enamel grooved with the point of a compass.  The labor intensive trompe l'oeil tricks employed here spin into conceptual areas that push jeering appropriation into gracious new territory.  The meanings attached to these works may not be entirely obvious, but you just know they're something special. "

Prince Moments 1: Controversy

Dig this: In 1982, I had my first romantic encounter with Prince. No, sex wasn’t involved, but something deeper, something that felt a bit more like destiny. And it was on Valentine’s Day. One February afternoon that year, on my fifteen-minute break during my retail job at a mall bookstore, I spotted a rectangular piece of paper on the sidewalk. I picked it up and read the dot matrix-y type:

February 14, 1982 8 pm.

Prince – The Controversy Tour

With The Time

San Francisco Civic Auditorium

I felt like a winner, even if I wasn’t quite in the Prince camp. He was too new an artist to have fully imprinted on my psyche. But from radio airplay and music magazine coverage, I had enough lustful curiosity to appreciate his mixed race, lean-bodied, quasi-queer penchant for posing strap lingerie and shoulder pads, not to mention that dance floor funk. That photo of him in the shower with a cross had been brazenly wheat pasted to abandoned buildings around town, he was an artist to watch for more ways than one.

I felt guilty holding on to that wayward ticket— I could only imagine the effort and expense the buyer put into getting it. But what was I to do, return it?

Fuck that. I took it as a sign from above, and went to the show.

Actually, my attitude wasn’t quite that cavalier. I was a shy 21-year old who had moved to San Francisco for a sentimental education at a state school in a city that promised dance, music, sex and gay romance. Prince didn’t record D.M.S.R until the following year, but that mantra played in my head even though I may not have realized it had anything to do with him. Or with how significant a figure he would become as my marker of all of the above.

I knew there would be something liberating about Prince, and The Time, who opened.  That was 34 years ago, gasp, and I only recall fleeting details—feeling lost and alone in the cavernous space, the crowd dancing on the main floor to songs that were only just becoming engraved in my mind—When You Were Mine, Head, Dirty Mind, Do Me Baby.  Controversy. Performing them, Prince prowled the stage like a mixed race jaguar anbd he played his instruments like lovers. I danced, with my own sort of sweaty freedom, a small fraction of what he advertised. Was I dreaming or did he return my glance?

 He asked much better questions that were so of the era: “Am I black or white, am I straight or gay?” Clearly a flirt, he wasn’t about to answer conclusively.  He knowingly played both sides of the fence. His stage demeanor gave me direct permission to ogle his ass and the alluring hair on his chest—even if there was never substantiated evidence of male lovers in his entourage (it took decades for Frank Ocean to fill that zone). He seemed so confident, so alive. I was in awe, and in lust.

After the show, the sweat cooled quickly in the San Francisco night as I walked alone up Polk Street to the apartment where my roommates were undoubtedly watching MTV videos late into the night. It was a first encounter and I didn’t quite know what hit me other than the fact that I was in the presence of greatness at an early stage. I suppose I could have predicted that the music he would go on to make would have such a profoundly joyous, erotic influence on my life— and so many others. There would be countless nights of dancing, of singing karaoke at the top of my lungs, of obsessions with his style and protégés. How was I to predict seeing him decades later and basking in his amorous glow in a stadium full of those whose psyches he penetrated with songs I heard that magical first date?