JACKADANDY

 Let it be known that your friend Jackadandy has stampeded past all the racehorses and onto the first page on Google Search and is now neck-and-neck with bullterrier Champion Souperlative Jackadandy of Ormandy. Hah!  Watch your heels, you tea-blooded cur! Jack the canny mongrel is on your tail!

Above, a figurine of the Champion Souperlative featured in the February auction of the Bull Terrier Club, to wit:

Eric at Eclectic Times alerts me (a week after the fact---I am SO not up on the news, sigh...) of the death of dancer/actress Moira Shearer. Shearer, of course, was famous for her starring role in the 1948 Michael Powell film, The Red Shoes, and though, yes, she could certainly dance and her redredRED hair could hardly have been more perfect for the part, it was Anton Walbrook as Boris Lermontov that stole the show for me. This, my friends, was a dandy. Although not a very nice one. But, Holy Spats, the wardrobe that man had! Pardon me, but I would both die AND kill for that wardrobe. And I'd look just as good as he did in it, damned if I wouldn't!

Fab pic above one of many from the film at powell-pressburger.org, including a number of Walbrook brooding (he never looks more dangerous as Lermontov than on the one or two occasions where he smiles) and just a tiny bit of that fabulous satin dressing gown he wears at breakfast. In this shot, Leonide Massine has just thrown a hissy and quit, expecting Lermontov to beg him to stay, but Lermontov responds with an icy (and characteristic) dismissal: "I think you have made an important decision."

Roger Ebert describes Walbrook playing Lermontov as "arrogant, curt, unbending, able to charm, able to chill." Powell himself wrote of Walbrook, "Anton conceals his humility and his warm heart behind perfect manners that shield him like suit of armor. He responds to clothing like the chameleon that changes shape and color out of sympathy with its surroundings."

Julian Craster (Marius Goring) has some fun "modern artist" duds in the film, and the sets and locations are something, as Ebert says, that you "bathe" in. But the funnest things to watch are two famous real-life dancers chomping the scenery and having a ball giving out-sized performances, like, Damn the camera, we're still going to try to reach the nosebleed seats in the balcony at Covent Garden: Tiny but towering Leonide Massine as choreographer Grischa Ljubov; and Ludmilla Tcherina as full-on prima diva and uber-femme Irina Boronskaja. ("I am---how you say---affianced!") Oooo, that wiggle in the walk! Yow!!

And, of course, the color. My goddess, the color...

If you are a glutton for such things, you can see Shearer's costumes by Jacques Fath dissected stitch by stitch at Fashion Finds.

And if you're into dommes, baby, don't miss the 10-second cameo of Madame Rambert playing Madame Rambert, with stick, giving class in the basement of the opera house in Monte Carlo.

 L.A. on Saturday I visited La Petite Geante, and when I arrived she immediately grabbed a shovel, dragged me into the back yard, and, beneath a young budding peach tree, dug up a bottle of wine. She'd been storing it for this occasion. I found it delicious, but she herself was just a little disappointed. A disavowed romantic, La Petite Geante is a person who has been disappointed as often as she has not.

We've been carrying on a conversation for at least a dozen years and it changes its focus with time, and disappointment is a subject that does not come up often any longer. The illusions have mostly been pitched overboard at our age. The discussion these days tends to circumambulate, in colors varying from concern to amusement, among techniques for preserving one's personal body and soul, to whether art can save one, to the older woman's burden of keeping the whole world from tipping so far on its axis that we all fall off. But mainly we consider, with great seriousness, get-rich-quick schemes.

In the insistent tide of the conversation somehow the business of the day never quite was realized, and instead we found ourselves doing neighborhood-y and art stuff, which was fine. And I noticed early on that every third person who came our way seemed to make a point of buttonholing La Petite Geante and attempt earnestly to engage her attention, to which she invariably made extremely pleasant but utterly vague response.

As this parade of mystery supplicants continued, to increasingly comic effect, without introduction, I finally had to make a polite observation as to her obvious popularity...?

La Geante has worked for several decades in casting, and also for the last several years has held a politically responsible position on a community council. She turned to me, in equal parts sanguine and embarrassed, and confided discreetly that when people approach her anymore she may, with the slightly less...vivid? is that the nice word? memory of one's 50s vaguely remember the person's face but has trouble placing it: Is this a neighbor whose potholed street she's working to get repaired, or an actor looking for work...?

Or both, of course. This is L.A., after all.

And like a magnet somehow we ended up at First and Alameda, the edge of Little Tokyo, and I don't know why but it always happens and it always feels like home. I didn't even notice what's at the corner there now, where the Atomic Cafe was for so many years, with its hideously inappropriate neon nuclear missile. In 1972 it seems like we were at the Atomic Cafe every Friday night, eating niku nabe and listening to the only jukebox I knew at that time that played both David Bowie and Frank Sinatra. Apparently it turned into a punk joint in the 80s, but I was long gone by then...

I painted the image above in probably 2000, without realizing it was the Atomic Cafe but there you go... It's called "Test Site (Atomic Cafe)".

See some of my more recent paintings here.

I was commanded to write about patent leather shoes for Easter, which I didn't quite manage, but if you will allow me to split the topic, I note the following:

When my older sister was in high school, before I began there, the Dean of Girls forbade the female students to wear patent leather shoes for fear that the boys might use the shiny reflection to see up their skirts.

I kid you not. I don't remember the Dean's name, but I do remember she appeared to draw her eyebrows on with a ruler.

Above, an Easter morning long ago. A rare glimpse into Jackadandy's childhood, and evidence that hye did, indeed, have one.

I am---have you guessed yet?---the happy looking creature capsized in the center, the one having sprouted barely enough hair to retain a bow and envying vigorously my brother's neat little sailor togs. That's my sister with my neck in a lace-gloved hammerlock, stepping up bravely to her role as matriarch-in-training despite her disappointment that her parents had provided her with a little sister instead of a pony.

My brother, as usual, looks perplexed.

Behind us smiles our young aunt, a tomboy who loved horses and dogs and us. We adored her. Unfortunately, she grew up to be a fundamentalist Christian of a particularly virulent variety and is no doubt at this moment campaigning to remove what paltry human rights this nation allows me, if not for my outright demise.

Happy Easter.

I must blame Pretty Lady for bringing the subject up and then skipping off to the safer waters of the more generic "tease", as in the classic emotional tease, a blithe or narcissistic abuser of the ever-tender heart or precious ego. She leaves it, then, for Dandy to more fully address that "loathsome" but ever-popular variety of the tease known as---children, cover your eyes!---the "pr*ck tease." (Don't you love that fig leaf of an asterisk?)

The pr*ck tease, ladies and gentlemen, is not about the heart, the emotions, or even the ego.

It's about the libido.

Hormones. Chemistry. Gonads. The physical body. "Human sexual response", I believe they say. Forget the tender heart.

I've been there, my friends. I know.

I had my memorable encounter with my own personal Queen of the Come-On in that dumbest of towns, Las Vegas, so I probably deserved it. And unfortunately I must obscure the details---unfortunate because the details are colorful indeed, in this case---to protect the identity of the lady involved, because, after all, kiss-and-telling is against this dandy's Code. Suffice it to say that we had met only once before and had corresponded peripatetically at her whim, a whim which seemed to have only two modes: Full-On Flirtation, and Absent. And let me make perfectly clear: We were not talking Relationship here. That was never on the table.

So allow me to skip ahead to a prominent position at the bar at the Bellagio, by which time the heat was turned up to Full Scorch and she was all but pouring herself in my lap. Her foot was on my stool, my foot was on hers, and maybe three inches of hormonal hypercharge separated her eyes from mine. The feel of one another's breath was like a chemical firestorm. Each play of the conversational poker merely raised the ante higher: It was going to be all win, or all lose.

This wasn't flirting, people. This was foreplay.

We no doubt gave the patrons at the roulette wheels plenty to talk about as we tested the tolerance of uptown Las Vegas for noncommercial Lesbian Display. The bartender discreetly mixed the martinis and kept his gaze elsewhere. By the time we left it was not a matter of if, it was a matter of where. And I will note that my room was her decision.

But somehow, by the time the taxi arrived, we were starting to hear, for the first time, about the hockey-player girlfriend back home, and the Yes girl had reverted to the No girl once again. Being a gentleman I took care to ascertain that she did, indeed, mean No, and then bucked up, swallowed, and steered her to her hotel.

But she was not done with me yet, oh no. I will take responsibility for pulling her into the out-of-order photo booth but I promise it was under her imperial pressure. With the demi-curtain drawn she straddled me on the stool and...darlings, I was kissed. I mean kissed. That girl could kiss. She had a stud in her tongue and I ain't never met anybody who knew how to use one better. *blink*

But...*ahem*...leaving the gory details aside, the point is, there was nowhere to go with it. Because one moment she was putting her tongue down my throat, and the next she was saying, Gotta go! See ya!

*grumble*

So in the end I'm not sure who got the most out of it, because, even though I was left teased to a point of raging frustration and had many a foul thought that night in the cold shower, I did end up with three paintings from the experience. Example above: "kissing amy/the golden stud". That last part being, of course, a memorial to what Jackadandy, on that night, was not.

Above: kissing amy/the golden stud. Copyright Dandy 2004. From the series, "love full of life". Pastel on paper, 5" x 15-1/4".

So, how was it for you? What happened that day when you sat down to write the first post on your new blog?

Above, you see my inaugural post, which was nothing more than an image of myself and the title, "hi. waving at you... :)". I'm reposting it to mark the anniversary of my starting this blog, exactly approximately one year ago.

That initial post turned out to be far thornier challenge than I had anticipated. I quickly banged up against the question, Who are the partners in this conversation? Who the hell am I speaking to? And which "me" am I going to be?

The blog is a peculiar form of writing. On the one hand, probably nobody is going to see it and you're tempted to treat it like a private journal. On the other hand, in fact the blog can be read by ANYBODY, should they find their way to it; it is published on the World Wide Web, for pete's sake. It could hardly be more indiscriminately public.

And, of course, you are free to create an entirely or partially illusory Self, if you are inclined. Pick a personality - one of your own, or, heck, make one up!

I made many false starts on that first post. Delete, delete, and delete some more. My words seemed to veer unattractively between the pompous and the apologetic. The right voice eluded me. I became exceedingly crabby.

Finally, I was sufficiently provoked by the existential challenge that I became interested in how others might have handled it.

I started flipping arbitrarily through blogs, diving into archives to pull up inaugural posts. Oh! Touching and painful! Hearts laid bare! Confessional doesn't half describe it. And brave! Hopes and fears for this personal New Enterprise were chronicled with great care, as neophytes sought to explain (to themselves? to that mysterious Someone who might be listening?) why they, humble, unproved soul, should be allowed across the threshold and given a place in the starry firmament that is the Great Blogosphere. Um, gee...can I come in...?

And most striking: The number of inaugural posts that were also final posts. Always lengthy; full of optimism, plans, trembling questions, and self-doubt; and standing, in the end, alone. A solitary post in an abandoned blog. The sum forgotten record of one heart's momentary yearning, memorialized in the Mystosphere in our own version of the ancient Roman portrait on a crumbling villa wall. Our era's cyber-archeology is already here.

Everybody's a writer after all, I guess. At least for the length of one post.

So, what happened with my own virgin effort, in the end? I suddenly noticed that the simple picture and title of the above post, which was just run up as a test while I was trying to figure out how to load images on this Blogger thing, said exactly what I wanted to say: Hello, I'm smiling at you.

And that's still what I'm saying.

So, I'd love to hear it, O fellow bloggers out there. Please tell me, here or on your own blog: What was that inaugural post like for you?

Alright, people, I'm dead exhausted and frazzled, my whole life is in a condition of lick and a promise (excuse me *ahem*), BUT---am I gonna be stylin' this weekend! Woo-hoo! Look out, ladies, Jack the Dandy has pulled it together!

What could possibly summon a dandy's inspiration more than a hotel filled with women, especially women of the femme persuasion? Nothing, you guess? Ah, you are so right. :) I was whistling at my own image in the mirror, croonin' to my shirts as I folded them so square...

I'm packed, mesdames, so watch out. Prepare to drop those gloves. ;)

I will not disclose the number of jackets, trousers, shoes I'm taking, nor how many dozens of socks or how tall the pile of pocket squares. I will, however, assure you that I am not past the airline luggage limit.

In honor of the women of Femme 2006, I post the image above: tumbling hearts/Las Vegas. Jackadandy 2006. Pastel on paper. 8-3/4" x 9-3/8". From love full of life.

Au revoir! A la voiture, Simone!

One marathon has been merging into the next to turn my life into One MegaMarathon, heading towards my show opening in less than a month. Pant, pant...

The latest leg of the marathon: I've been spending days on something I really, really hate, which is recording my paintings with photographs or scans, a tremendously technical, labor-intensive, nitpicky endeavor that never yields satisfactory results and that I detest. I hate, hate, hate it. Did I mention that I hate it? All this work, and the reproductions are never but pale, pathetic ghosts of the real thing, utterly without soul or substance.

So you better come to the show and see the real thing, people, because I'm probably never going to release most of the reproductions.

All of this done in preparation for taking the paintings to the framer's, which is also a marathon but quite a different activity! Saturday the intimidatingly talented Madame E. and I spent the whole day---the whole day---there, only taking a break so as to allow the poor proprietors to get some lunch.

We got through most of the batch but, disappointingly, and for the first time, had to give up on one small piece after hours of trudging up countless blind alleys and dragging out almost every frame sample in desperation. We were reduced to casting about blindly for a dark horse, a wild card that would shock the package out of the impossible into the sublime. It didn't happen. The closest we came was a gilded wooden frame that, never mind its merits, would have cost $140 on a small, maybe 4 x 9-inch painting. That's $140 just for the frame, people. Not the glass, not the mat, not the labor---just a few inches of wood and gilt.

The sad truth is, I still would have said yes, if I had felt the frame was exactly right.

:(

Madame E., who is also known as my ace in the hole, is not often so without solutions. When I brought out the above painting (in a horrible reproduction. Don't look at it! It's making me cringe!) she immediately walked over and fetched some new-to-the-shop acid-toned brushed metal frames in candy colors, and laid them down on the table. I blanched, then laughed. They were incomparably frightful. "Goddamn, who would ever use something like this!" I scoffed. As she walked away I heard her murmur to no one in particular, "Just look in the mirror..."

*sigh*

So, um, yeah... I wasted my time trying numerous frames but of course ended up with a brushed metal frame the color of cotton candy, the very first one she had brought over. It looks like dynamite. Soooo right for the work... *blush*

It was time to leave when, on the final piece, past closing time, Madame E. suggested using black fake fur on the frame and I thought it was a great idea. We concluded maybe we should think about it a little more, and stumbled bleary-eyed out the door.

Above: fever chart/roller coaster, 2004. One of a pair of "fever charts." Pastel on paper, 11-1/2"h x 17-1/4"w. From love full of life.

Please forgive the awkward cropping; my fair companion is rather more reserved about exposure on the World Wide Web than your shameless friend Jack.

I am completely happy in white tie and tails, I admit it. Now, before you nigglers in the audience get started, I will myself point out that I am not exhibiting regulation wear, here. I have fully taken liberties. Yes, I have the traditional pique vest, but I am wearing with it (horrors!) a pleated formal shirt, rather than matching pique. And as well, my tie is satin and is frankly a little large, a little flowery, a little...well, queer, of course! *w* (Polyester? Pre-tied? I think not...!) The white linen pocket square is not visible here. Bringing together the range of white textures and shades: a fragrant gardenia in the lapel.

I will not obsess that somehow in the photo, regrettably, no white shirt cuff is visible. I should be embarassed to take your time with petty protestions that, in fact, great care was taken to ensure the jacket sleeves were exactly the correct length to allow that traditional flash of white. (*sigh* The best-laid plans...)

And how were we shod, Jack? In a pair of Giorgio Brutini dress formals, inexpensive but, oh, so delightful to my faggy self! Those subtle pleated swoops, the heel just a little too high for a "straight" man, still too butch for a "woman", and with a sole made for dancing - utterly queer, utterly Jackadandy.

Corinne is secretly an economist and frequently gives me reason to think, but I confess to being at least as inspired by her musings on lipstick and shoes. Such a frivolous dandy, lol! Her recent purchase of a pair of hearty cowboy boots meets with my approval. I have owned more than one pair over the years of a very similar construction, the undershot heel and snipped toe being precisely to my tastes.

Shoes and boots are not only a particularly favorite part of my wardrobe, they also are a perennial subject for my easel. The curves and planes of footwear are evocative of the human body, and the used shoe or boot carries all the personality of its owner. Someday I will indulge my long-lingering impulse to paint a series of anonymous thriftshop shoes.

It is a fact that, when I am in transition in the studio, or stuck and all else has failed, it is a pair of shoes or boots that I pull out and begin to draw. They never fail to warm me up and get the muse moving. In fact, the night I created the first sketches for my currently exhibited series love full of life, the session had begun with pages and pages of gestures of a pair of what we used to call vato boots that I've had forever and are no longer good for anything but posing. At what point during the session the subject shifted to queer love, I can't tell you, but there it is...

Above, a favorite version of boots I've drawn many times and which have finally graduated to a permanent installation in a niche in my living room. They are no longer wearable, but their inspiration, apparently, lasts forever.

las botas/las chingaderas, JD/CC 2000, pastel and charcoal on paper, 7" x 7".

P.S. I'll be showing a couple different versions of the boots at Open Studio at my place next week, as it happens. :)

...the Crochet Museum, that is, heh. At the Art Queen Saturday night. Polaroids by the talented portraitist Patterson Beckwith. This is rather later in the evening, when the sweater and scarf have become necessary and the hair is Beyond Hope. Patterson had a little line of delighted customers all night.

Chris Veit performed his Wonder Valley Love Story. On a low stage he and a comrade wore boxes over their heads that covered them to their hips, with openings from which their arms flopped and flapped earnestly. The cartons were painted deep colors, one red and one blue. To a seamless, even-tempered soundtrack that included large doses of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, the two spun and danced side by side in separate circles, occasionally attempting an awkward embrace. Very simple, but cumulatively sweet and sad, tragic and funny, extending far beyond any particular Wonder Valley love story.

Update: View a snatch of Chris Veit and Cristy Carter's performance on YouTube.

“'There is a large network of people who take dandyism very seriously, and who consider themselves to be dandies every day of their life,' she explains. 'They were partly excited, and partly skeptical of a woman running a club that was devoted to the dandy. But I don’t call myself a dandy — I call myself the enabler of the dandy.'”

MS: Was he a top or bottom? What was he interested in?

MJ: When I was on the radio show in Denver, the question was asked: Did you practice safe sex? I said, 'We used a condom once." The talk show host goes, "You mean he wore the condom once?" I said, "Uh, no, I did."

"I just need a trim. The cut is fine, I like the cut. I just need it trimmed back."
"Okay, you want to keep the cut."
"Yes, I want to keep the cut."

I spent several hours last week in an interview with a fresh-faced young fellow from Kansas, where he's completing his doctoral dissertation on the "existential geography" of my community. Ostensibly he was interviewing me; in fact, we gabbed at a breakneck speed in a fairly equal exchange of idea, observation, obsession. I've never previously met anyone who has expended as much thought or done as much research as I have on, yes, the "existential geography" of this very peculiar little corner of the round earth. We plumbed one another for corroboration of our own ideas and for new information, and ended up in my studio where I showed him the material form of my thoughts, the course my current work is taking.

For, yes, I am still/again caught in fascination with the lines of inscrutable destiny that have intersected here, in the strangeness of this unnatural rural slum, this edge-world tidal zone between orderly civilization and Nothingness, where claims of territory play out at historically glacial and now precipitous speeds. But the difference is, I am no longer writing about it, reducing it to verbal form; nor defending it, reducing it to envirosociopolitical form. I am instead going into the studio, opening it up, and seeing what happens.

The ideas have been building up into several inches of flow around my ankles, as my years of intense experience here flood up in new configurations. I've been searching for the visual form, the format, trying to take all those documents and histories, encounters and campaigns, smash them up, and let them emerge anew. I could feel I was on the right path but it still felt uncomfortable, definitely not yet there.

But a few days after our young friend from Kansas left I saw suddenly, while walking through my house on some entirely unrelated task, the opening, the visual shape that will lead into the land of the secret language of this work. And now I move confidently, with no assurance I will have a coherent result but certain that I am doing the right work and that I have - something. And that's all that matters.

Above: A sumi ink sketch from the new work.

So much sadness, when the two people you love most in the world have made each other cry.

Hours and hours in the studio tonight, keeping the darkness outside.

Well. Jack has met a minor milestone in hys little career.

I've been informed that Ms. Mita B. was told to her face that she "musta been drunk!" when she decided to purchase the above painting, my cabin with vandals.

!!!

I have arrived. ;)

I told you the work was provoking conversation, lol. Ms. Mita, the wife of a retired art instructor and no shrinking violet, took the opportunity to dispense a little light and art education in the direction of her doubter.

Educand inquired some time back if this painting was inspired by a break-in at my place. Actually, it wasn't. I haven't been broken into since I moved out of the city. (Knock on wood, crosses fingers.) The fact is, the cabins here are so permeable that "breaking-in" is really a matter of interpretation. Which is kind of the point. We're all vandals here. Petty or grand, gang members or curious tourists, pack rats or squatters, needy scavenger, academic, or artiste, everybody peeks in the windows, everybody kicks the debris, everybody takes home a little something - or a lot something, if you need a door or window or even a roof.

My personal specialty is rusty bedsprings. But I never break windows, and never use cabins for target practice. We all have our standards, after all.

On the other hand, one tends to be extremely careful around any dwelling that appears inhabited. You never know if it's going to house a meth lab, or wild dogs or bobcats or survivalists.

Ms. Mita, who has lived here 29 years, doesn't find this painting scary. She confessed the red "explosion" feels more like a twinkle, to her. That Ms. Mita is perceptive, drunk or no. In truth, this painting started with a sparkle. A sparkle and an explosion are not so different, to me. :)

Above: cabin with vandals, JD/2007, ink on kozo-shi, 20" x 15". Shown here mounted. See a bigger version on my Other Website aqui.