Catching myself falling from a skateboard

a performance in which I tried to time myself falling off a skateboard to the ten-seconds of the Polaroid self-timer. I set the timer by rotating a plunger that would methodically wind back before plunging down to push the Polaroid One-step shutter button. The camera is propped on a step of a wooden step-ladder, facing the wall with my 45-rpm phono player, with the Stranglers' cover of the Burt Bacharach/Hal David classic "Walk on By" grinding out.
The piece began with me in an angry state, pissed off and probably piss drunk. I played X-Ray Spex "Identity" while changing into my performance clothes--grey tights beneath my jeans and red t-shirt. [News of the death of Poly Styrene come on the day I update this entry: http://www.spinner.com/2011/04/26/poly-styrene-dead/]



On the wall are a poster from New York post headline about the Son of Sam, an Itek photo enlargement of a self-portrait in center, and a grid of previously taken Polaroid self portraits on the right side of the wall. Of the five photos I have documenting the performance, three of the five show the same wall as two of the pics here.

"I've been trying to invent characters, someone else who could speak my lines.
Not that they could say them any better, but that you would accept them, my words, more readily. Coming from me, they sound didactic. Coming from an invented character, the words and the character seem to strike more chords."

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