Red Hair posing in front of Marie T's painting

"I look too vulnerable, making myself obvious wearing outrageous red. Yet, I assume normality. As if I didn’t have a different edge on them. Exploit the fetish. Red Lips Red Eye Makeup Rouged Cheeks" April 1978

For the part of the barber in my envisioned performance piece, I shaved my eyebrows for the New Wave Show at the San Francisco Art Institute. In the self-portraits here, for the plaid shirted one I'm sitting in Debora's flat, her not my Patti Smith poster (were it mine I'd still be lamenting its loss from my collection!) for Radio Ethiopia on the wall. The black t-shirt photo is back to the flat on Pierce Street, with the backdrop the billboard paper my roommate Mickey had salvaged for use on theatre production sets.
4/8/1978: "Performance should have happened separately. In other room.
In other room would have been nice, would also have been nice if I could have been less tense. I was too worried about not having anything, built myself up to a real fever pitch, then got disgusted w/ myself and lost any self-confidence I might have had. I was a little ashamed of the fact that it was Patti Smith-to-the-tee, standing up there, reading from pages.
I had no delivery, don't think much stage-presence, though a lot of people were apparently effected. Received an enormous amount of cat-calling, retorts from the punkier side of the audience. I had to yell, there was no microphone. I was nervous and wired to the gills.
I would like to have used the reaction in a way towards my favor. Most people assume I was upset, etc. Maybe I was at the moment, but not necessarily, or at least, wholly, from them. I could have provoked a real sense of anarchy if I had allowed myself to. Thoughts go to the "performance" by Arthur Cravan--invited by Duchamp to speak in NY, he yelled obscenities and insults at the upper-class audience, causing immediate disarray and his inevitable arrest. A lasting impression.

The typewriter keys aren't for me. I write quietly, passively. No risks taken, peaceful mannerisms, go with the flow."

New Wave Show, April, 1978

Getting ready for the New Wave Show at the San Francisco Art Institute, I am bleaching my hair. One of the pieces I consider doing for the show is a performance piece wherein I act as a barber, cutting the hair of hippies for free. Moved to San Francisco in 1975, so I lived among hippies passed, present and wanna-be for a few by the time the punk rock norm of "Hippies Stink" came along.



By 1978 I'd already lived in several flats within blocks of the corner of Haight Street and Ashbury, for a while on Clayton & Haight, and a shorter while on the Panhandle at Fell and Masonic. My first gay bar hangout, Gus' Pub, was on Haight between Masonic and Ashbury; friends of Art Institute friends got me in and known by the bartenders so I could drink underage.



The flat in which almost all the 1978 self-portraits were taken was on Pierce Street, a block south of Haight. That's a few blocks east of Divisadero and Haight, amajor bus route crossroads: go west and you reach the Haight-Ashbury; south and you're in the Castro.



But the role of barber for hippies, for the New Wave Show at the SF Art Institute, kept hitting conceptual snags, as I write in my journal from late march, early April, 1978:
"Like the idea of making the barber booth into a skit. ... combine destruction w/ challenge. By what I choose to destroy, the hippies will have an inkling of what I don't like, wouldn't do, in a sense. The Grateful Dead as a Frisbee, etc., followed by the open invitation to chop hair.
"Most of all, I hate long hair. Are there any hippies here? No one leave, I want to see a hippie. I want to cut their hair off. A bona fide punk cut, right here. I challenge you, right here. I challenge you to let me cut it.
"I challenge you? Who am I? And what is it that I am doing? Do I have this right?
"What would you ask for in return for having your hair cut short?" " What would you want in return, outside of money?"
"You are great people, but I don't like your looks. I'd like to cut your hair off real short. I want to be responsible for your appearance. I bet some of you have Grateful Dead albums. I'd like to break every one of them over my leg. And that goes for the Eagles, Peter Frampton, Ronstadt, BeeGees/Sat. Nite Fever....
"And what if one enterprising individual wants me not to cut my hair for a length of time. "I will grow my hair an inch for each inch you let me cut off yours."

As it was, I read a tirade about gay sex fantasies, shouting above a hostile crowd. I was mad with myself for reading from sheaves of typewritten paper, a cut-rate Patti Smith. Sculptures were smashed; I slashed the painting backdrop I'd done for my Polaroids, which were were peed on by Freddy, the lead singer of the Mutants. I had to wipe the pee on the Polaroids off on my pants.

Some thoughts in 1978 about my Polaroids

"...was doing some research on Schwarzkogler and Documenta 5 today [Jan./Feb. 1978]. I realized how very different my work is from those who inspire me. A new name to add to the list is Arnulf Rainier, whose black-paint-smeared-bodies photo were shown at Rene Block along with Schwarzkogler's and Nitsch's in the early summer of 1976 (apparently their last summer, as the gallery was closed when I was in New York in the fall.)
R.S.; Vito Acconci; Arnulf Rainer; Joseph Bueys (sic); Lucas Samaras: :All these men's work I admire and respect and revere, only my attempts seemed so facile when looked at in the context of theirs. Mine has evolved down into a fetishistic recording of how I have changed over the series of days, weeks months.

"and it seems so much like I don't understand their work at all. For the most part, in the things I read today, all the work, (with the exception of Acconci) was regarded as "rhetorical" (concerned primarily with style or effect; showy or over-elaborate. web Am. Her. Dictionary) Overindulgence with the self.
"yet that work fascinates me.

"So what is the work that I do as a result of my study interest in these figures, to whom the name Genesis P. Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti must be added? I take miniature portraits of myself in a an always uninvolved way. Uninvolved in that I shoot relatively without much prior thought, in a method/with a camera that requires little involvement on my part for the completion of the "final" print. My pictures are in occasionally handsome color in order to accentuate my hair, which probably receives more care than any other part of my body. Certainly more attention. My body usually never deviates from a frontal position. Poses.
"In a sense, the photos now are more what I wanted than ever before, because they are delivered immediately to me, I am able to change a pose if the print is not too my liking. So, now that I have total control, why is it that I am turning out such simplistic, on the verge of being cute photos? I almost do not accept them as my own."

Come join us for the launch of the third volume of the Gay City anthology series: RE-PULPED! Editor Vincent Kovar and Gay City's deputy director Peter Jabin are joined by a number of writer/artist contributors this evening to celebrate the publication of Gay City, Volume 3: Re-Pulped (Gay City Health Project). A collection of photographs, comics, stories, essays, and poetry, this anthology also includes selections from contemporary artists and queer pioneers, all working across genres to redefine what gay was, is, and might be. Copies of volume one and volume two will also be available!

Come meet the talented contributors, our fantastic sponsors and the dedicated staff of Gay City Health Project. Seattle's Gay City Health Project is a multicultural gay men's health organization working to promote the health of gay and bisexual men, and to prevent HIV transmission by building community. For more information on this vital group and its work, please see www.gaycity.org—and be here at Elliott Bay in Seattle.

Start: Sat, 08/21/2010 - 7:00pm

Location:

The Elliott Bay Book Company
1521 Tenth Avenue
Seattle, Washington 98122

Punk Queer Lives.

"No one claims the title of punk, I wonder if anyone ever did. The media called us that, they built up an image of one-minded automatons, bred on violence to all. I remember reading an interview, before the rise of the punk movement, an interview with the Dictators, a hard rock group from New York. They were vehemently anti-gay. This disgusted me then and it does now. It represents a return to imbecility, to censorship. The new right. I am a member of the new right and I want you dead. I hate your guts. I hate the fact that you will all probably go home and put on your Eagles or Grateful Dead albums, so you can remember what real music sounds like. I'd like to break every single album by those and any other band which promotes mainstream bullshit, whose prime occupation is boredom of an unaware sort. I'm bored, but I know why. It's because of people like you."

typewritten journal, 1977-78

Fire Engine Red Hair

A postcard collage from 1978 with "ransom note" lettering, my "fire engine red" hair secure under clear packing tape...



...and the press-type lettering we used back in the seventies--small sheets of letters that you'd try to keep in a straight line but invariably fail at. The plastic sheets would buckle with the pressure of the rubbing stick, making it hard to keep straight (pardon the expression).

late '77 Land camera Polaroids

in the fall of 1977 I moved back to Florence, Massachusetts, into the home of filmmaker Tom Joslin and his partner, Mark Massi, where these pics were taken. I worked that fall at Hampshire College in the photo department, checking out equipment, getting film developed for students, being the resident punk. Mark and I were closer; Tom was teaching at Hampshire, and Mark more the house husband/artist. Mark is likely the person shooting these self-portraits for me.



Tom and Mark were profiled after their deaths in 1989 from HIV/AIDS in the documentary Silverlake Life: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108138/

and speaking of Multiple Male Orgasms!

the link on Amazon for my name as a contributor to Gay City vol. 3, Re-Pulped, takes one to a list that includes the title Multiple Male Orgasms. Would that it be me!

Or that I would be as clever as that to have grown for self-portraits in 1978 with a Polaroid One-Step to having an M.A. in Psychology and having had orgasms with multiple men. Oh, wait, I did do that, didn't I?

Well, I weren't so clever as to have written a book about it, and I can't brag that my bisexuality in mind has led me to a fourth edition Updated for Women!

But there's some Lurid Images! Sensational Characters! and Scandalous Storylines! to be had in Vol. 3 but nothing to tell my nieces and nephews to stay away from.
http://www.sgn.org/sgnnews38_25/page5.cfm

Gay City Anthology, Vol. 3: Re-Pulped

http://www.amazon.com/Gay-City-Re-Pulped-Vincent-Kovar/dp/1452874298

Polaroid: Instant Joy

A.M. Richard Fine Art
328 Berry Street, 3rd floor
Brooklyn, NY June 19-July 31

Billboard remnants salvaged from trash yards.
Mickie collected them for stage environs; I repurposed for SX-70 backdrops and wall coverings.

scanning pics... assembling for files... digitizing the Polaroids
Though I wear a Union Jack pillow case on my head, I quote the French writer, Roland Barthes, from Camera Lucida: "The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed (that we can sometimes call it mild does not contradict its violence: many say sugar is mild, but to me sugar is violent, and I call it so)."

Herve Guibert on Polaroids, from Ghost Image

Confuse the Issue is the scrambled message spray painted on the back of my suit jacket, worn in the attic space of Tom and Mark's house in Northampton, Mass., in Fall 1977. Mark was an avid photographer; there is a section of the Deleted/Extra Scenes on the dvd of the documentary, Silverlake Life, describing Bo Huston and Elaine Mayes going through a cache of photos after Mark had followed Tom in passing from HIV. Mark and I shot lots of the Land Camera Polaroids, and I first began the SX70 self-portraits in my bedroom at their home that fall.



"The pictures weren't good, but it was fun to operate. It was expensive as well, but you didn't have to wait, any reality could be handed back to you at once, in reduced form. Polaroid was initially marketed as a child's toy, though it was an instrument for pornography: it freed the amateur from the constraint of the laboratory....

"It was also suggested that ... photographers work on themes, the self-portrait for example, since the Polaroid lent itself well to this solitary activity--there were no witnesses, and one had total control over the image and over what one wanted to leave behind as image."

(pgs 130-131, translated by R. Bononno, Green Integer 17, 1998)

Barthes on portraiture, sort of

"The portrait-photograph is a closed field of forces. Four image-repertoires intersect here, oppose and distort each other. In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art. In other words, a strange action: I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture (comparable to certain nightmares). In terms of image-repertoire, the Photograph (the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter."
pgs. 13-14, translated by R. Howard

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

I am introduced to the book after reading Herve Guibert's Ghost Image.

I entered the San Francisco Art Institute without a camera, my 35mm art student camera having been stolen out of my car as I moved into my first apartment. Left with a Polaroid and a Kodak Instamatic, I made do.

Journal entries on photography, summer 1978

September 16th, 1978

The sx70s, besides being expensive, are too small to work in the context I want. The Rudolf Schwarzkogler impact is impossible. The sx70 looks like a joke, turning the idea into a hand-sized image, something clearly distilled into an object/commodity.

September 8th, 1978

Began shooting nudes...looked to Schwarzkogler for images to steal/inspire. I guess I feel I should question their success, and deliberate on them more.

I can't keep up the pace of photo-making due to the cost, and realistically, to ideas.

Several people, on seeing my new sx70s, have said that they're glad I'm shooting again. What should they care.

August 5^th, 1978

I look at my photos and think, well, what is the point?

Were would I even want to take them, why should I want to take them out of their cheap snapshot realm? Why belabor such a point? And why go on… with school, art trendies, etc. My desire to take pictures-usually there is no ‘photograph” I want to shoot, just want to participate in the act. The setting up, the posing for time.

August 2^nd, 1978

Journal notes to cover up the lack of assertion/immersion into photo-taking. My favorite series of previously taken instamatic stuff, other than the highly successful perspective series, was the close-up one taken at Peter’s house on Clayton. The prints were never any good, the negatives are horrible, but I like the content/concept. The size when enlarged is dramatic to say the least.

I have no tripod-other method is to tie it down. Earliest photo arose from a need to act in front of camera, as the camera was a fixed object, a recorder. Later, camera moved to a tripod and background, foreground, no ground became controllable. Less action, more focus on detail, environment/mood. Earliest express little more than documentation.

Is there a themeology class, similar to Paul Kos’s syllabus, this fall, where I can practice photo in a non-photo context. Sculpture-Jim Pomeroy.