Breach of Close

Mandelstam, Cukovsky, Livshiz and Annenkov, 1914

The poets she chose to read that evening had all met violent deaths. One was killed in a duel, another committed suicide, and the third died, emaciated, cold and exhausted, in a transit camp on his way to imprisonment in Siberia. There was another writer, the old woman’s husband, who had translated the works of these poets from the Russian into his native Greek, and he also died an appalling death; that the aggressor was not a rival or a murderous state but nature itself (or, rather, nature gone awry) made it no less horrific. The Greek translations of the poems were read by a young man, himself a poet. He sat next to the woman on the stage of the small dark theater where the reading was held.

She had selected five or so poems from each poet, early and mature works alike, not necessarily the most well-known poems but suggestive of particular milestones in the poets’ creative and personal journeys. There were love poems and poems of resistance, but also poems that spoke of exile and disillusionment and the premonition of death:

And so I wait through the night for my guests to arrive
Rattling these door chains, these convict shackles

Seated at a table that had been laid with a black felt cloth, she would briefly describe these way-stations before beginning to read the poem. At times she would interweave these annotations with reminiscences of her husband and the life they had shared in the Soviet Union, where he had fled as a political refuge in the wake of the Greek Civil War and where he lived for decades in an exile no less painful than the ones in which the poets he translated had been subjected to.

These recollections seemed to come without plan or intent. Yet they felt entirely natural. It was if while reading she had been transported back to the small parlor of a modest Moscow apartment, where she would sit at the end of the day and listen to her husband read the draft of a translation he had worked on, commenting here and there on a particularly felicitous or unsuccessful rendition of an allusion or metaphor.

And then she would read us the poem. She read if she were reading a letter a solider on the front had written to his young wife at home or an entry from a lover’s diary, strange and familiar at the same time.

I had expected the Russian to sound different. Weightier, deeper, more resonant, heaving and slow and mighty, like a great river. But she spoke like a stream flowing past a bank of reeds, a soft, quick murmur of conversation. Perhaps it was physical. She was a large woman of advanced but indeterminable age. (Some woman grow frail as they age, others gain in stateliness, and she was one of the latter.) Or maybe it was just the burden of memory. Sometimes her voice would tremble as she told a story or read a line that moved her, but mostly she read as if she were in the kitchen talking to a sister or confidante neighbor in the very early morning and did not wish to wake her husband.

The Russian was a soundscape of texture and rhythm, imperfectly apprehended. Just as we need to have listened carefully to Bach many times before we truly hear the gigues and sarabandes in his suites, it is only when we have become competent in a language that we can truly hear its music. I know very little Russian. I could hear traces of seduction, rebellion and lamentation, and other voices, too, but they lay too deep within this unfamiliar but inviting carpet of sound for me to fully grasp.

The heavy-set dark-haired young poet with the neatly trimmed beard and somber black clothes who sat at her side had the earnest, inquisitive look of a young monk or philosopher excited by ideas but untested in life. After each poem was read in Russian, he would read the Greek translation. He had a hard, thick voice, all declamation. It was as if he couldn’t trust the poem to speak for itself. The antiphon of Russian and Greek was jarring not for the contrast in language but in tone, hers lute-like and intimate, his public and demonstrative, the stuff of marching bands. They seemed to be reading different poems.

There was still another poet present that evening. He, too, had died a horrible death, ravaged by a series of opportunistic infections (those were the early days of antiretroviral treatment, a time marked by much experimentation and little in the way of success). Cytomegalovirus caused him such intolerance to light that he didn’t want to leave his darkened apartment. An episode of delirium sent him on a spending spree that depleted his savings in a month’s time. He suffered necrotizing ulcerative periodontitis in which he lost most of his teeth and which in the end became so painful he could not eat. He told me he was no longer at home in his body. It had become an enemy internment camp, a place of senseless torture.

He was not present in the way the dead poets were, or the old woman’s husband, who had translated them, was. There was no voice to give shape to the words he had once written. But he appeared nonetheless. He came unsummoned, as an angel might, and stood alongside the other poets, he, too, “taking delight in the greatness of the plains/and in the cold, the snow, and the darkness.” He kept reappearing as the old woman read in Russian and the young poet translated in Greek.

I could not remember his poems. I must have lost them on one of the earliest of my many moves. He had copied them out by hand for me, the ones he had written to me or because of me, back then when we are together and ravenously in love. I think the poems may have wound up in a cardboard box which I left at my parents’ house but returned too late to reclaim. It was stupid on my part. But we have so little talent for conservation when we are young. We have not yet experienced the irrevocability of loss or realized the sad transience that inheres within our relationships and possessions. The sense of invulnerability that is part of our youth makes us less provident than we should be.

I kept his letters, though. The ones he wrote to me after I first moved here, years after we had stopped seeing each other (though we never stopped loving each other). Written in a sinewy austere hand on the yellow sheets of a legal pad, his words, too, traced the arc of a journey of cruel promise.

“Are you doing what you want to be doing?” he wrote. It was the kind of question he often asked himself. “I feel like I’m almost there… What I need is a huge nod in my direction—in the form, say, of an advance on a book deal—to let me know that the things that frustrate me (the job, the lack of $) are truly temporal…How I look forward to the happiness I think that’ll bring. Work, work, work! In the meantime there’s hope, hope, hope!”

The book deal eventually came through, for a biography of a well-known actor. Some of the reviews must have hurt—“The reader will feel the author’s failure as a biographer”, wrote one critic—but he was happy. He was doing what he wanted to be doing, earning a living as a writer. There was another book offer, again a biography of an actor.

I can see him now, writing in his tiny New York apartment—there was no proper bathroom, just a toilet, and the shower was in the kitchen—truly happy:

The excellent poorness, splendid destitution,
I live alone in it, somewhere—quiet, consoled—
the days and nights blessed.
The sweet voice of labor, guiltless.

Even when he became sick, he kept writing. Poetry, mostly, but also letters. It was the way he resisted the enemy to whom he’d been laid siege. Even in the last months of his life, his body in agony, he never succumbed to misery, never “asked alms from a shadow.”

“While I hope I go on beating the odds, holding out,” he wrote, “I know that I’m haunted by darker and devastating things. I think I’ve forgotten about them now, and I need to hear from you to keep it that way for as long as possible.”

I hope I didn’t fail him.

The quoted fragments of Mandelstam’s poems in this post are taken from a collection of new translations put out by Ugly Duckling Presse in its Eastern European Poets Series, available online. Highly recommended for anyone interested or engaged in the translation of poetry, as most of the poems appear in more than one translation (one poem, in fact, appears in five different translations).  

The poetry reading referred to in the post took place on April 25, 2012 at the “104” Center for Arts and Letters in Athens as part of the monthly series of readings me ta logia yinete [1x2]. 

From Panayotis Ioannidis' series, "The New Economy"

No one explained to me when I was growing up that we were a family of very modest circumstances. Even if they had, I wouldn’t have understood. I never felt the absence of things. There was always food on the table, even if at times they were warmed up leftovers. As the eldest of three boys, I was bought new clothes now and then. My brothers were less lucky, though the start of school and sometimes Easter meant new clothes for them, too. We lived in a working-class neighborhood in the city. In the morning the air was redolent with the aroma of roasted coffee from the Maxwell House factory by the river; in the afternoons I’d come back home to the smells of sofrito and kielbasa. But I spent summers at my grandfather’s country house by the sea.

Oh, I knew that there were better streets in the city than the one we lived on, but I knew there were worse ones, too.

A disinterested observer would have pointed out that my brothers and I slept on a pair of sofa-beds in the living room. That the clothes were bought on sale from discount houses. That my mother was a fanatical coupon clipper, dinner was sometimes Taylor Ham-and-egg sandwiches, and my father, whom I rarely saw during the week because he so often worked late nights, drove a boxy embarrassment of a car.

The car was the only clue I had that we didn’t have much money. A red Rambler that always seemed to be dirty, however many Saturdays we spent washing and waxing it. Our car always stood out when we’d gather at my grandfather’s farm for some holiday. My uncles drove big shiny black cars that glided silently over the road, Chryslers and Cadillacs, with leather seats and electric windows. But then again, my father himself, a wiry fair-haired man whose mother spoke German, stood out among my mother’s lumbering Italian-Americans brothers, and our quirky car all seemed to me to be part of the package of who my father was.

I was happy growing up. We never lacked for toys, though looking back I can see that they were all inexpensive. Things like yoyos and tops and colored gimp we’d plait into bracelets. Occasionally something special like coloring sets or models of birds and monsters and knights in armor, though they were bought by my grand-uncle or grandfather and not my father. At Christmas we’d find things boards games like “Chutes and Ladders” and “Candyland” under the tree, and the Elgo red-brick-and-white-trim sets with which I would design and build suburban split-levels and ranch houses, the kind of house my father used to talk of taking us to one day.

There were treats as well, more often than not one of the dozens of ingenious ways that manufacturers had devised to deliver doses of sugar to kids: we slurped syrupy liquid from tubes of wax and picked off beads of pastel-colored sugar candies from a roll of paper. We sucked on straws filled with fruit-flavored sugar and clicked on dispensers that would disgorge a pill-sized sugared brick. I didn’t have music lessons or French, but I did have candy. We were fairly close to poor, but I never felt it.

I was telling this to a friend of mine who’s been laid off from his job. His wife still works and they’ve got some savings, but they’ve downsized, cutting expenses wherever they can. Kosmas is worried most about the kids. About the things they can no longer have. “But kids don’t really need that much,” I said. “A feeling they’re loved and safe and special. Regular times to eat. Hugs and kisses. But you know all this already,” I said.

“It’s different with my kids,” he said. “They’ve grown up having things, and now they’ll have to make do with less. A lot less. You and I didn’t have any standard of comparison. We grew up poor. But they didn’t. They have a standard, and it’s ‘now and then.’ And they’re not going to be happy with the ‘now’ .”

That made me think of something that the novelist Petros Markaris said about how Greeks once had a culture of poverty that helped them live well despite privation—and by well he didn’t mean materially. This culture of poverty has nothing to do with the now widely discredited theory first made popular by Oscar Lewis in his study of slum dwellers in Mexico City, the idea that the poor—“aliens in their own country”— have a distinct subculture marked by feelings of powerlessness, dependency and personal unworthiness. Markaris was talking instead of a set of values, including the importance of living in solidarity with others in community, which enabled Greeks for centuries to live, as philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin would say, poetically—literally so, when you think this is a country where ordinary people, even those who couldn’t read, would know the works of poets like in the songs they sang. It was a culture marked with the ability to celebrate the small things in everyday life and the resourcefulness to do it well with limited means.

This culture was subsumed, though not lost entirely, in the frenetic hyper-consumerism made possible by the inflow of cheap EU money. It was a sham prosperity, created by an economy fueled by personal consumption, construction, loans and a ever burgeoning public sector that generated jobs that served no productive purpose—a country where the public TV channels had twice as many as all the private channels taken together, a country where, as Stefanos Manos notes, the state-run Olympic Airlines was losing €1 million a day while the private Aegean Airlines was earning as profit of €100,000 a day.

It was a sham, but it didn’t feel like that at the time. Kosmas bought 60€ rugby shirts for his kid who’d outgrow them in a year. It felt real enough, this prosperity, though there were voices that tried to warn us that this perverse ‘model’ of development was unsustainable. Perhaps we had an inkling that things were not all right when we saw banks outdoing themselves in offering eortodaneia and diakopodaneia (the notorious “holiday loans” and “vacation loans”). We laughed, but perhaps there was the slightest undertone of concern in our laughter. Or maybe not. It’s hard to remember now what exactly it felt like then. Back then before the loss.

The signs of loss are everywhere to be seen, and most tragically in the recent unemployment statistics that speak of 20% unemployed. Everyone knows it’s higher; the numbers don’t include my friends Luiza and Marios and Leandros, freelance graphics artist, music teacher and translator respectively, whose commissions have all but dried up, or those, like Menios, who never had a legal job and so isn’t on the unemployment rolls.

I see this loss, too, in the neglect and abandonment that seems to be claiming ever greater swathes of the city. One usually thinks of “depressed neighborhoods” in economic terms, but it really is more than that. The psychological symptoms of apathy and self-neglect, the aching emptiness and evacuation of joy are just as present. It doesn’t happen all at once but there is a point when the encroaching sadness is impossible to ignore: the fungus of tag graffiti that soon covers every imaginable building surface, the proliferation of for-rent signs in the lobbies of apartment buildings, the permanent state of disrepair into which more and more buildings fall–the equivalent in concrete to the depressive’s disinclination to shave or change his underwear.

One sees this loss in the closed up shops in my (working-class) neighborhood in Athens. First to go was the pet shop and one of the butchers, then a hairdresser and the tailor’s shop and the hole-in-the-wall that serviced PCs, and then two florists in the space of three months. Luxury items in a crisis, you’d say, not surprising they were forced to close. But then the corner supermarket closed and then the dry cleaner’s. We still have three pharmacies in the space of four blocks; the profession, with an obscenely high state-guaranteed profit margin and protective legislation regarding operating hours, is still “closed” to real competition. I wasn’t sad to see the supermarket close. It was a dirty shop with grossly overpriced goods that exploited its singularity for a quick profit. The prices didn’t seem to matter back then, before. At some point they began to matter, though.

"Mixer" by Panayotis Ioannidis, from his series, "The New Economy"

In his visually arresting series of photographs of “The New Economy” Panayotis Ioannidis has delivered a moving and eloquent narrative of this loss and abandonment. His photographs of empty shop windows, with their flotsam of dashed dreams—a mascot doll from the Athens Olympics, a lone table soccer figure lying alone on a shelf like a discarded mummy of a discredited sect, burlap-wrapped crates, a scrap of a “Made in Greece” poster that stands like a memento mori on a bed of crumbled wrapping paper in a display window—each in its own way bears witness to the ruins of an impossible economy. There always seem to be something missing in these works: the casing for an electrical box, the seats in an open-air theater now given over to weeds and rust, a chunk of a decaying balcony, the nameplates next to the buzzers on a business building (the last in an intriguing Rothko-like composition in which the repeating vertical blocks of the absent nameplates is recapitulated in a graffito to the right).

Nowhere is this abandonment, however, more strikingly emblematic of the crisis than in his photographs of empty billboards. Billboards were once ubiquitous in the city, not only on empty lots along the expressways, but also on the roofs of apartment buildings along thoroughfares in the downtown area. Legislation against streetside advertising in the city curtailed the use of these billboards as advertising surfaces, but that almost seems irrelevant. Even without legislation, the budgets are no longer there to use them. In one shot, the uncovered grids of a pair of billboards sit like awkward crowns of folly on the roofs of dilapidated low-rise houses. The foreground of the photograph is dominated by a futuristic three-headed streetlight (financed no doubt in part by EU money) that rises up like an alien probe, an anemometer whose readings were taken but not disclosed. The empty billboards have become literally a sign of the crisis; like an empty picture frame in a gallery or on a living room end-table, they are sad witnesses to theft or loss, heralds, now struck dumb, of a culture of wealth to which we were unaccustomed.

Caroline May, from the Apartment exhibition

The woods lay at the end of a dead-end street. The asphalt ended somewhat awkwardly, unevenly and without a curb, as if the builders had suddenly changed their mind and abandoned construction. A tiny creek separated the end of the road from the woods, easily hurdled, but for a ten-year old who was always looking for an excuse to get away from his pesky brother and forever quarreling parents, it was an important demarcation. The creek marked the boundary between their world and mine.

I loved the woods, its cool darkness, the musky scent of the earth, the softness of the moss. Though I rarely saw an animal, I knew the woods were very much alive. I could hear it in the sounds of twigs creaking, leaves rustling, something scurrying past me, I could hear in the buzzing and hooting and squawking of birds and insects.  But there was something else I felt there, a kind of indefinable presence in the woods of some, what, spirit? I couldn’t have known, then, of course, but the Romans would have called it the genius of the woods, the instantiation of the divine in a particular place or person.

The woods didn’t extend very far. I could walk around the perimeter in a half an hour. And I quickly came to learn every path. Sometimes I played there with other kids but not that often. I preferred to be there on my own. It was a refuge of sorts. It was my place, or at least a place I had made mine.  There was a big rambling thicket, almost tall enough for me to stand in, and it had grown in such a way as to form three little interconnected enclosures. I cleared away the undergrowth, rocks and dead leaves, and made a three-room studio out of it. I called it playing fort but that it was really playing house by another name.

To get to my fort, I had to slip by the twin dangers of Sean McCann and Billy van Houten (or to be precise Billy’s German Shepherd, Raya), whose houses flanked the entrance to the woods. Both had attacked me in the past and I was sure they would do it again if they had the chance. Maybe they were just born mean, or were made to become that way, but the ten-year-old in me needed to have a better, more immediate reason than that. Raya had attacked me one day when I had gone to call for Billy. I was standing on a little hill at the edge of their property, calling out his name, when the dog rushed up the hill and started nipping at my calf. I was convinced that the little hill was where they had buried Raya’s puppies.

Kids want the world to make sense, even if the sense it makes needs magic to work. They want a reason, an explanation. Maybe that’s why they so easily believe they’re at fault when their parents separate. To suspend belief and tolerate uncertainty is something we acquire only as we grow older, and only through a process of watchful self-discipline.

The quantum ethics that mark the entangled state of everyday life is both the prerogative and obligation of adulthood. We learn, or should learn, that at times there’s no right or wrong or, rather, something can be right and wrong at the same time. We come to accept that he loves me and he loves me not. The fine line between the two, or between courage and foolhardiness, or altruism and self-deprecation, is no line. It’s more like the elusive, barely discernible boundary between the whites of two raw eggs on a saucer.

If, as Geertz said, “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun,” children weave theirs with borrowed threads. But these eventually fray. The last of the personae in the fables of my childhood that I was to abandon was that of my guardian angel. Maybe I clung onto him—yes, my angel was definitely a he—because I didn’t have an older brother who would protect me and teach me things.  My guardian angel didn’t do much. It wasn’t a voice of conscience, like in those silly cartoons in which a little red devil hovers about one ear and an angel in white about the other. No, mine was silent, but I felt that if I were ever in real spiritual danger, he would intercede.

The closest I came to having a real guardian angel was Ricky Morgan. He lived next door to us in the city. Though he was already in high school, he had taken a liking to me. I still don’t know why. Maybe he was missing a little brother. But whatever the reason, he watched out for me on the block and made sure nobody would pick on me.

I remember playing “King of the Stoop” with him.  This was the game where Ricky would sit in the middle of our brownstone’s stoop and I’d try to scale the steps and get past him to the top to claim title to the stoop. Without fail, of course, Ricky would grab me as I tried to sidestep him, and he’d wrap his arms around me and squeeze me until I’d say uncle. I resisted as long as I could. I didn’t want to give up. I loved being trapped in his arms, his wonderful protecting arms. I remember my crotch would swell, though I didn’t know what that meant, and I looked up at his face, at his broad cheekbones that seemed to me like mountain boulders, and I wished I could grow smaller and smaller until I could rest, like a baby eagle, sheltered within the indentation below his cheeks.

When I was eighteen I hitchhiked to San Francisco from New York. I might never have made it to California and would have probably returned home a few weeks later once the money I had with me had run out, had I not been lucky enough to catch a ride from a guy that was going straight on to the coast. The 1960s pink Cadillac he was driving broke down in Indiana, and he just bought another used car. (This was one of the few times in my life I was ever tempted to believe in fate).

I stayed in San Francisco for a year. I came out in the city, but I never once stepped foot in a bar. Instead I went to the parks. To the woods. I must have been desirable or just plain young, or maybe it was San Francisco and before AIDS, but it was so easy to have sex. I would just hang out along one of the paths in Lincoln Park and sooner or later, but usually sooner, an attractive guy would come by and we’d hook up.

The Barberini Faun

My straight friends (and indeed, some of my gay friends) couldn’t understand why I’d want to have sex with a stranger in a park, with all the risks that doing so entailed. Like running into a petty thief or sadist or some sick twisted, sexually messed up punk looking to vent his rage on some gay guy. Or even worse. I told them I just could just as easily run into them in a bar.

The sex I had in the park was different from what happened in a guy’s bedroom. It was hungrier, more rushed. And admittedly more uncomfortable. Although there’s an erotic edge to being undressed in the woods, relinquishing the trappings of culture in an environment (relatively) untouched by culture, the woods are fully of prickly, abrasive, and jagged surfaces. Cranach’s nymph of the spring may be lying blissfully content on the forest floor, naked save for a flimsy, near transparent slip, but that’s an allegory. Flesh was not made to rub against bark, nettles, gnarled roots and pebbles.

I was lucky. I never got hurt. There were a few obnoxious, arrogant, selfish or pathetically needy men among the (larger in number) decent guys I met. Maybe I had a guardian angel. In fact, the Christian tradition of guardian angels, like many of the more populist traditions of the early Church, was appropriated from Roman religious practices, specifically, from the genii. There were genii of the forests, too, of course, spirits that dwelled in remote woods and who could, if needed, guide a man in the hour of need. Maybe there was a forest spirit in those places. A faun.

If there had been, he would look like one of photographer Caroline May’s subjects. For years she’s been taking photographs of hustlers, sometimes in parks and–in a recent series of photographs exhibited  at the Apartment–in the woods.

May’s faun wears nothing but a beltless forest-green pair of combat pants, revealing a ripped torso, flaring lats and a geometric tattoo on his muscular shoulder. He wears his pants low, below his hips. In one photograph, we see the beginning of the furrow between the cheeks of his ass; a small triangle of downy hair rises up his back from the crack like some small reminder of his caprine ancestors.  In another, this time shot from the side, half of the crescent of his buttocks is revealed. This is a very sexual faun, “well-practised in the secrets of the thickets”, as Nonnus had said of another faun in his Dionysica.  More teasingly so and less lustful than the Barberini faun (who seems so awash in pleasure as to be utterly oblivious to his surroundings), but definitely sexual.

May’s faun is at home in the woods. He is the spirit of the place, the genius of the woods, It’s his playground. You see it in then way he lounges against the tress, his mouth slightly open, his head cocked to the side as if he had just heard someone approaching. Maybe he’s not looking for sex, just looking out for the others. I’d like to think so.

Marianne Breslauer, portrait of Annemarie Schwarzenbach

Nikolas and I went to see Christopher Nolan’s Inception last week. Maybe it was the hype that preceded the release of the film, or the expectation created by pictures like Memento and The Dark Knight, but it was a disappointment for both of us. The film started out fine, the first twenty minutes or so an engrossing puzzle that introduced some intriguing notions, such as the one which gives the film its title—the implantation of an idea in a person’s subconscious. But it then quickly settled down into a smart variation of the classic action-heist film, laden with (admittedly spectacular) visual effects of characters fighting it out in zero gravity and a city folding over itself like a Murphy bed, and replete with chase scenes, shoot-outs and an attention-getting score, all of which in itself isn’t that bad and certainly makes for good entertainment. But it was spoiled by the heavy-handed exegesis that Nolan spoon feeds the audience via the Q&A exchanges between dream-thief Cobb and his dream-architect, I-just want-to-understand-Ariadne. My friend Georgia told me she wanted to see the movie again, because she didn’t really “get it” all the first time; I told her she needs to hone her note-taking skills. And not take the movie too seriously, because true to the genre, the movie doesn’t always take itself too seriously. There was something very Die Hard-ish in the scene when Eames whips out a grenade launcher and says, “You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.” Maybe I laughed more because it was seeing it with Nikolas, who has little truck with pretension in any form, but lines like “Wait, whose subconscious are we going through exactly?” ache for a smirk.

Nolan’s notion of inception, the implanting of an idea in another subject’s dream, is very much similar to the concept of the meme that Richard Dawkins described in The Selfish Gene. Memes are units of cultural content that are passed from one mind to another. They can range from something as grand as a belief in one god or the symbol of the pentacle to a melody or a fashion like wearing your pants sagging below the buttocks or a habit of speech, like the intonation used by younger Americans to turn every other declarative sentence into a question, as if they needed the constant reassurance of their interlocutor in order to continue their narrative. Dawkins argues that the replication and propagation of these units follow similar principles of natural selection that govern the evolution of organisms. And indeed the film makes use of the notion of differential fitness and replication, as when Cobb asks, “What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient… highly contagious,” perhaps echoing Malcolm Gladwell, who argued in The Tipping Point that the rapid spread of certain ideas and behavior and even products can be best be understood as social epidemics, as “outbreaks of contagious disease” and who once said “a meme is an idea that behaves like a virus–that moves through a population, taking hold in each person it infects.”

But Cobb is wrong, I think, when he says, “positive emotion trumps negative emotion every time.” It’s the other way around. Think of the ease with which prejudice is disseminated and beliefs such as “Jews control the media” or “gay teachers recruit kids” take root. Witness the speed with which a disturbingly large proportion of Americans came to believe that Obama was not born in the United States or that Islam is fueled by hate. No, negative emotion trumps positive emotion every time, mostly because it finds a fertile environment of fear and insecurity and ignorance in which to grow and because the natural predators of these prejudices – critical thinking, scientific literacy, and knowledge — are relatively scarce in the population at large.

Inception, of course, this first implanting of the idea, is in itself not enough for the idea to truly take root. It must be reinforced, repeated, often in different guises and different voices. Repetition is the core of propaganda. And of verbal bullying, too, which in a way is just a cruel, forcible inception: a kid who’s repeatedly taunted will have a hard time not believing, if only on some subconscious level, that the names he’s being called have some element of truth to them.
I had a nemesis in junior high school who would call me a fairy. I had only been going to the school for a couple of weeks—we had just recently moved to the suburbs—when he started. I suppose I was somewhat androgynous-looking for my age, which nowadays might even be cool but back when I was a kid was something that set me apart in a very negative way. I was also kind of smart, which in the backwaters my parents had moved us to also marginalized me. Fairy. I hated the word, its connotations of effeminacy and weakness. The only fairy that came to mind was Tinkerbell. And who wanted to be compared to that?

I couldn’t imagine that being a fairy had anything to do with having sex with guys. Which wasn’t surprising, since I didn’t have much idea about sex in general. I still thought that a baby came into being when God placed it between the couple as they were in bed, lying on their side looking deep into each other’s eyes in a moment of intense intimacy and spiritual communion. I remember feeling proud and awfully grown up that I had figured this out, but it must have been implanted by one of my more religious minded teachers. Though I probably added the part about their looking into each other’s eyes. Maybe even the bed, too. Views like this did nothing to better my reputation in the schoolyard.

The use of fairy as an epithet has probably gone out of fashion, a meme on its way to extinction. Gay actors and athletes have come out, and there are even gay superheroes, a small number, yes, but enough to weaken the equation of gay and effeminacy. And even if it hadn’t, androgyny has itself become a meme with positive connotations, at least in some cultural ecospheres. Fairy may be gone, but I’m sure other epithets have taken their place. Like bacteria who develop antibiotic resistance there are certain memes, often the darkest and most hateful, which have proven themselves extraordinarily adaptive to the efforts of liberal society to combat them. Bullies will never be at a loss for words.

The photograph reproduced in this post is one of 160 works included in the Berlinische Gallerie’s major retrospective exhibition of Marianne Breslauer’s oeuvre. This remarkable portrait is of Breslauer’s close friend and fellow photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach, whom she once described as “neither a woman nor a man, but an angel, an archangel”. A number of her photographs can be seen online at the Fotostiftung Schweiz.

Diem Chu, Zodiac Crayons

I catch myself slipping into bouts of nostalgic reverie for the games and clothes and food of my childhood, tugged into a dreamscape marked by remembrances of seersucker shorty pajamas, erector sets and meatloaf sandwiches with ketchup on Wonder Bread—the white bread, of course, the kind that after a few quick chews would ball up in your mouth into a spongy wad.
 
These childhood memories date me as if they were radioisotopes. One of my fondest remembrances was a field trip we took in the third grade to a Hostess you-get-a-big-delight-in-every-bite cupcake factory! I can’t recall what the point of the trip was. They may have intended us to marvel at the technology of American food manufacturing. I grew up in the iciest moments of the Cold War—we were told at school that there was a nuclear bomb housed in a silo in the Soviet Union that was inscribed with the name of our neighborhood—and patriotic field trips were much in keeping with the Zeitgest.

What I do remember was the factory itself, a Leger-like landscape of monstrous tubes and conveyor belts and the intense aroma of chocolate that blanketed the main production hall. (The Twinkies must have been made on a different shift). And, of course, the cupcakes themselves—straight off the conveyor belt, still warm enough that the characteristic seven squiggles of icing atop the cupcake hadn’t yet set and the cake inside was still gooey.  Even though these still are being made, I can’t imagine any American grammar school class now going on a field trip devoted to learning about junk food. Judging from the incidence of child obesity in the United States, this kind of instruction is now being done at home.

I don’t know if these episodes of nostalgia come from spending more time with my four-year old godson or just getting older. About the latter I harbor no illusions; most of the toys of my childhood are now only available as collector items on e-bay. It’s just as well that I can’t easily buy back the objects of my childhood. I know that I cannot re-experience the delight and marvelous company that these toys and books and games of my childhood gave me as child. Don’t expect magic if you can’t eat a cupcake without thinking about fiber and saturated fat. There’s no going back to the playground. Even for a visit.

That said, I’m sad that they no longer make Venus Paradise color-by-numbers sets. They were extraordinary pencils. I remember their soft core (they didn’t break easily), the deep warmth of the colors, the smooth color laydown.  When I think of these pencils now, I’m reminded of the rich saturated colors of a Douglas Sirk film or Todd Hayne’s stunningly beautiful homage to the director and his cinematography in Far from Heaven.

I don’t recall any of the scenes I penciled in, except for one with the Capitol building in Washington that I remember only because of the seemingly endless expanse of sky I needed to fill in. Even as a child I wasn’t patient with such repetitive tasks and much preferred coloring in the smaller shapes that would eventually reveal a face or flower.

The Venus pencils defined my sense of color as a child. Orange was always Sarasota orange.  Red came in four shades—poppy red, Hollywood cerise, cherry red and Indian red—as did green: emerald green, deep chrome green, lawn green and French green. It was only years later that I figured out why they called it French. The shade resembled a chartreuse. Until this discovery, however, I just thought that springtime in France must be truly remarkable (the pencil was often used in coloring in gardens). There was also smoke grey and midnight black and a dozen other colors. Sky blue, of course. 

For me, each had a character of their own, like the astonishing figures of the Chinese zodiac that artist Diem Chau has carved out of Crayola crayons. The elongated, intricately animals— a yellow-green lion, an apricot ox, a green-yellow dragon and the others—look like delicate columns in a tiny temple.  Ornate and richly expressive, they seem to draw character from the very color from which they are carved.

I wonder if the Venus Paradise pencils would have exercised the same kind of magic on Harry as they did on me. Of course, Harry’s too young for a color-by-numbers kit, but I’d have saved it for later. But the truth is I don’t really know if he’d have liked it. I’m always somewhat at a loss when it comes to buying presents for him. Though I’m fairly good at imagining how a friend lives and what he’d like as a present, I can’t do this Sichhineinversetzen with kids. They’re like another species to me.

I got him the next best thing to a Venus Paradise set and even easier.  It was a box of crayons and a coloring book. The book featured a pair of similar drawings on facing pages, one colored in, the other with only the outline of the composite shapes.  The images were simple but with just a twist of complexity to keep them interesting: a monkey in a bell-boy’s uniform, a snake with a long red-and-white barber-pole scarf, an ambulance with a big red cross emblazoned on its hood. My friend Dieter, who’s a teacher, had told me that kids his age could do things like copy a circle and make a cross and draw a man, so I figured that coloring in a cross would be easy.

I opened the book to the page with the image of the truck, took out the red crayon and slowly colored in part of the cross. I gave him the crayon so that he could complete the cross. He began with short strokes back and forth, which he quickly elongated however into sweeping zigzags that whizzed out of the cross, across the circle of white in which it was inscribed, and down the hood and then back. “Well, now that’s very pretty. We’ll do the tires, now, ok?” and handed him the grey crayon. “But let’s try to keep within the lines.” Harry repeated his centrifugal zigzags, but describing a more modest arc. Progress, I thought. 

He moved onto the ambulance driver. He did a bit of the man’s jacket and then, pointing to the driver’s face asked, “What’s this color?”    “It’s flesh,” I said, “we don’t have this color.” Venus Paradise did. #14 natural flesh. Crayola surely had it, too, but in the big box of 64, I imagine. “Maybe you could use orange,” I said. “I promise, next time I come, I’ll bring more colors.”

I didn’t bring more crayons the next time I came, but I brought more colors. I thought maybe he’d be bored with more crayons. (Dieter later told me I needn’t have worried; kids, he said, were more comfortable with repetition than we are.) I brought finger-paints instead and a big block of paper. I had hoped Harry would draw a sun or a stick tree or even a simple cross, but instead he covered the page with swathes of thick color. Admittedly with a good deal of gestural vibrancy, but there was no figure.

But he liked dipping his fingers in the paint and swiping it across the page. Maybe it was just the pleasure of getting messy, but he seemed genuinely intrigued by the colors that emerged when we mixed paints in the plastic bowls. We gave them names. Lemon yellow and cherry red and navy blue, though I had to explain what the navy is.  

The day I bought Harry the finger paints I also stopped by the men’s department. Buying clothes for me is like grocery shopping.  I tend to buy whatever I’m running low on, and often in quantity, and I usually resort to the utilitarian and monochrome. My friend Jonas, who’s the personification of understated sartorial elegance, says I dress as if I were living in a black-and-white movie. A black-and-grey movie, to be more precise. He says there’s a reason why the shades of grey— the greys of ash and lead, of charcoal and slate—are all cold and somber and that I need to add some color to my life.  I told him I had.

The following is a near complete color list of the Venus Paradise pencils, put together by a member of the online Wet Canvas community:

1. Deep Yellow
2. Sarasota Orange
3. Poppy Red
4. Hollywood Cerise
5. Orchid Purple
6. Navy Blue
7. Peacock Blue
8. Emerald Green
9. Deep Chrome Green
10. Photo Brown
11. Chestnut Brown
12. Midnight Black
13. Ultramarine Blue
14. Natural Flesh
15. Lawn Green
16. French Green
17. Smoke Gray
18. Blush Pink
19. Cherry Red
20. Arizona Topaz
21. Indian Red
22. Sky Magenta
23. Cotton White
24. Lemon Yellow
25. ?
26. ?
27. Sky Blue

Thomas Demand, Tavern 3 Klause 3, 2006

Yesterday I was cleaning out a closet I rarely use and ran across the issue of a design magazine that years ago had run a feature article on my flat. Well, our flat back then.

I sat down on the floor and opened the magazine to where the feature started. What first struck me about the glossy full- and half-page photographs of the flat was the eerie artificiality of the space that they depicted. Every light is switched on, as if in readiness for a grand party: the meter-long recessed kitchen fluorescents, downlighters, uplighters, tracks and table lamps, the nautical bulwark wall mounts. Halogen spotlights cast ovals of light on the warm amber of the polished wooden floors, as if demarcating the spaces where an actor will deliver his monolog. There are even tea candles burning in spice jars in the bathroom.

There are other feigned signs of life in this melancholic narrative tableau: a cast-iron frying pan on an unlit gas hob and a dozen small red tomatoes strewn across the kitchen work surface. Four perfect pomegranates sit at equal intervals along a narrow shelf. A brilliant but unnatural hazy glow emanates from the fireplace but the fire is neither the theatrical blaze of a roaring fire fed by properly dried oak nor the last sighs of a fire expended in embers.

Despite the furniture and pomegranates and daisies, despite the Uzbek prayer rugs and the dracaenas one has the impression of a haunting emptiness to the place. This is a party where even the hosts have not shown up. A play stuck in the moment after the curtain has gone up but the actors have not yet appeared stage.

The flat has been purged of all traces of the untidiness of everyday life. The day’s unopened mail, yesterday’s newspaper, kitchen dishtowels, a book left half read. The wine glass that doesn’t fit into the dishwasher and is left unwashed in the kitchen sink. Nothing is out of order, everything is lined up as it should be: the Breuer chairs, like over-disciplined Teutonic soldiers, in perfect parallel to the monastery dining room table, the rattan tray in the bathroom on which lie perfectly aligned stacks of decorative soaps and a small white ceramic vase with daisies. There is no dust on the shelves, no smudges on the windows, no chips in the wood, no stains or smudges on the floor. And of course, no people.

I was reminded of the photographs of Thomas Demand, whose work I had seen in Berlin in November at an exhibition at the Neue Nationalgallerie. Demand is known for his large-format photographs of scenes that he has painstakingly reconstructed in life-size scale in cardboard and paper from photographs he has found or, as in the case with several of the photographs in the Berlin exhibition, had been published in newspapers because of the notoriety of the events they depicted, such as the ransacked central offices of the Stasi or a tavern in Saarbrücken where a young boy was murdered.

His unpopulated reconstructions expunge the dirt and details left by the protagonists of these scenes. Papers are scattered all over the Stasi office but nothing is written on them. The shopping list in the tavern’s kitchen pantry is empty, and despite the box of cigarette lighters, there is no ash in the ashtray. The stunning clarity and remarkable color of these photographs underscore the thingness of these idealized objects and the silence of the rooms that contain them. They are the visual equivalent, as Adrian Searle noted in The Guardian, “of the inert affectless prose of a police report.”

The photographs of my—our—flat had a similar feel of artifice and hollowness, though the crime that was later (or then being) committed had nothing of the violence and tragedy of the events behind Demand’s photographed reconstructions. But they did serve, as perhaps Demand’s did for the German visitors to the exhibition who knew these events, to thrust me back to the time when I first read opened the magazine.

In his illuminating and beautifully written Photography, A Very Short Introduction, Steve Edwards describes the paradox that a photograph is at the same time both a melancholic “memento mori for the viewer’s own death, reminding him or her that all things pass and fade” and a means by which the past is restored and “blasted” into the present.

My initial fascination with the aesthetics of the photographs soon gave way to indignation as I began to recall how incensed I was when I first read the article. Much time has passed since then, and I can’t and don’t want to feel as angry as I was then, but the photographs of the flat did rekindle the sense of betrayal I felt when I first read the article.

The feature spanned eight pages, most of which as I said were devoted to photographs of the flat, along with floor-plans and a shot of the veranda, and an interview with the architect who designed the renovation. My lover. In the interview, he talked about the design choices he made, the lighting design, and the problems with renovating a landmark building. He mentioned how the whole building had been bought by a group of friends, and how important that was: “It means a lot that the person living on the floor below you isn’t just some stranger who just happened to move in but a good friend.”

About his lover who lived in the same flat as he did and who shared, if not in the renovation work than certainly in the cost, he said nothing.

Buying the flats – we bought two, one for the house and one for his studio and a guest room – was an expression of our commitment to each other and a reflection of the confidence we felt in the future of our relationship. It was our big common project. I was angered by M’s failure to acknowledge this. I felt betrayed. And disappointed – I had thought him more courageous. But he said, “My personal life has nothing to do with my work as an architect.” When I pointed out that other articles in the same magazine talked about “the architect at home with his wife and family,” he replied, “I don’t want to get into a fight about this,” and left the room. We never talked it about it again.

It’s never easy to identify at which exact point a relationship begins to unravel. Oh, there’s no mistaking the rent that infidelity makes in the fabric of two lives lived together. But those first frays are hard to see. Or if we do see them perhaps we edit them out as we interpret and construct and re-present the relationship to ourselves and others. Like Demand’s photographs or those of my flat.

An old house in Kerameikos

I once met a guy in Atlanta who had disappeared. He had taught English at a university in New England, had a wife and friends, traveled to conferences and wrote papers. Then one day he left. No forwarding address, no farewell letter. Only the Social Security Administration knew he still existed as Richard Phelps (I’m making the name up of course, he didn’t reveal his former name to me). I imagine his wife had called the police and filed a missing persons report. I don’t know how much the police actually looked for him, but he was never “found”. He kept in contact with only two or three friends in whom he had an almost blind faith and whom he trusted would never reveal his current whereabouts. One of these was my friend, Eric, with whom I had traveled to Atlanta for a conference and who introduced me to Richard.

Many of the unexplained disappearances documented in sites (a long list on Wikipedia) are not in fact that hard to explain. X disappeared on an expedition in Borneo, or Y was lost kayaking in some god-forsaken canyon in the wilds of Manitoba or Z went missing on a walkabout in the Australian outback.  It doesn’t require much imagination to piece together their last hours. These are accidents of fate. With somewhat more difficulty you can explain even the case of Trevor Deely, aged 22, who disappeared after a Dublin Christmas party. You think, ok, maybe he got drunk and fell off a bridge and drowned. But Richard Phelps was different.

Richard went to Atlanta to start a new life. I mean, a life radically different from the one had lived in New England, complete with a black lover 25 years his junior. (This was not the reason for his disappearance; he only met Michael after he had been in Atlanta for a couple of years). Richard said he hadn’t really thought much about where he’d go. He said he just wanted to be somewhere that was warmer than Boston, but I don’t think Atlanta was all that random a choice. He could’ve settled down in Montgomery, Alabama or Jackson, Mississippi, but he didn’t. Atlanta is arguably the most Boston-like city in the American South, and in Richard’s case, this was not coincidental.

The circumstances of Richard’s life may have changed—he was living in a bungalow on the edges of the city and didn’t have a tweed jacket in his closet—but I don’t he managed to entirely shed his former self. There are some things that are so indelibly ingrained in the way you think and feel and talk and move that they stay with you even when you’ve rejected them. Things like how polite you are to shopkeepers, how you react to a compliment or an insult or a flirt, or whether you lick the rim of a yogurt container after finishing its contents, habits reinforced by countless repetitions that they’ve become part of who you are. No, not part. They are who you are. And it requires too much effort and discipline to change. When I swim, my left catch is shallower than my right and I don’t roll as much on one side as the other. I’m aware of this and try to compensate. I can do it for the first kilometer of a swim, but then I lapse into my familiar but inefficient stroke for the next two. A coach would tell me to stop when my stroke starts decaying, rest and start again. But that’s just the point when the endomorphins have kicked in, and though the hydrodynamics of my swim suffer, I keep swimming because it feels so… comfortable.

Even though I’ve lived in Greece half my life, I will never pass for a Greek. Friends have said I speak better Greek than they do; this, of course, is just a nice compliment about how much better I speak Greek than other Americans they’ve met, but it also means I speak a “proper” but highly unidiomatic Greek. And I’m not even sure about the “proper” part. I occasionally make mistakes that native speakers never make. And the language, however well I can use it to explain, seduce, cajole, argue or negotiate, still isn’t second nature to me. Switching from English to Greek feels like getting on a heavy clunky city bike after having ridden a titanium-frame racing bicycle.

That night in Atlanta Richard made us pork chops and mashed potatoes and a salad of shredded red cabbage, apples and grated carrot. Fairly generic-American, I suppose. But I remember he talked a lot about Milton.

As I think back to that evening I recall an old house I had walked by near the Kerameikos metro stop. The elements have worn away most but not all of its façade of a grander past. Traces of this past remain, enough anyway to imagine its history. And even when the last remnant of the stucco column decoration crumbles, the arrangement of the front windows, its high ceilings and back courtyard will bear witness to its past. It can never shed its past entirely. It will never become an ordinary building.

Iman Maleki, Composing Music Secretly (1996)

I’m luxuriating in a marvelous piece of Baroque music that I discovered quite by chance while browsing at the Metropolis: Adam Michna’s The Czech Lute (1653). Despite the title, there is no lute to be heard. Rather it’s a suite of thirteen arias each prefaced with an instrumental introduction, set to the rhythm of a dance and sung in a kind of musical dialogue.  I’ve tried to track down the text for these songs, even recruiting the help of our librarian (the titles of the songs indicate that the suite is a meditation on the mystic marriage of the human soul with Christ), but in vain. Perhaps it’s better that way. Not knowing the words I can write my own. At turns, joyful, beseeching, serene, plaintive, the arias sound like the conversation of courtship—fragments d’un discours amoureux set to music, though more tendresse than angoisse.

The music itself is a reconstruction of fragments of the original. As Michael Pospíšil  writes in his liner notes for the edition, the music for the Czech Lute was not originally printed as a complete score, but instead divided and printed in three books; one book for the vocal parts and texts, another for the basso continuato accompaniment and overture, yet another for the instrumental parts. The first two books were damaged, the last lost. In supplying the missing instrumental ritornelli, Pospíšil drew inspiration from the practice of music-making in 17th century Bohemia and in particular the convivium of a Marian brotherhood at table. He writes, “the convivium was the ideal occasion for people of different classes to play together, forgetting for a moment the social gulf between them. A favourite piece would “travel” round the table, changing according to its difficultly, the mood of those present, their ability and – not least – the instruments being played.” There was apparently room at table for both the virtuoso and the apprentice.

In 15th century Florence, Marsilio Ficino, the guiding light of the Florentine Renaissance (and beyond), had also called the artists, musicians and poets that he had invited to the Villa Careggi convivium. At these gatherings, each of the guests at table —poets, singers, musicians, philosophers—would contribute to the occasion with his own talent and inclination. In Ficino’s words, “The Convivium is rest from labours, release from cares, and nourishment of genius; it is the demonstration of love and splendour, the food of good will, the seasoning of friendship, the leavening of grace and the solace of life.” (in Noel Cobb’s translation, cited in Darielle Richards’ “Convivium with J. R. R. Tolkien: An Old Idea Coming of Age”, an interesting text in which she explores Tolkien’s literary fellowship, the Inklings, and imagines what a modern-day version of the convivium might look like and could offer us).

Michna’s brotherhood of musicians and Ficino’s Careggi were not only loci of learning but also a community of friends. And I thought, leaving the cinema where I had seen Milk with the Crew of Four G’s—Georgia, Giorgos, Giannis (the Short) and Giannis (the Tall)—how apt a description convivium would be for the early days of the gay Castro community so inspiringly rendered in the film. Milk’s circle of activist friends in the Castro—the Harvard graduate, the hash dealer, the dancer, the runaway kid from Phoenix who used to turn tricks on Polk Street—form a community of friends that if not for their sexual identity would probably never have come together. Almost certainly not in the straight world. (Curiously enough, the convivium is also used in ecology to denote “a population exhibiting differentiation within the species and isolated geographically, generally a subspecies or ecotype.”) Granted, Milk and (I think to a lesser extent) his campaign provide a kind of social glue that binds them together more closely. But still, this community of friends is quite remarkable for its heterogeneity and cohesiveness.

What is fascinating about this group of engaged friends is how its members learn and, particularly in Cleve’s case (the kid from Phoenix) come of age. I think of the gay friends and lovers with whom over the years I have sat at table. Dispersed in time and place, these men are my own convivium. They have shown me wonderful things and taught me much about life and music and food and architecture and a hundred other things, even though none sought to be nor donned the persona of a teacher.

I grew up in a working-class family where music was something you heard on a TV show. We didn’t have a stereo system or even a phonograph. If I listen now to Michna’s Czech Lute, it is perhaps because of Keith, or at least Keith was the first to nudge me along a path of musical exploration. He was a man I met and fell in love with at college. He wrote poetry and played the guitar. Though he mostly played his own compositions, sometimes we would sit on his bed in the dorm and he would play pieces from Bach’s works for lute, his mane of black hair glistening with the sweat from our lovemaking. The music was entrancing, though admittedly I was in a post-sex euphoric high. He would play parts of it again for me, and point out the rhythms of the sarabande and gigue. Though you’ll never know how much, I thank you, Keith…

And David, who initiated me into the finer points of Lucille Ball’s comedy;

And Daniel, who showed me that the space that isn’t contained in a sculpture is just as important as the space that is;

And Tom, who first showed me that sex isn’t just fucking;

And Eric, who taught me that sauces are created, not spooned out of a jar;

And Mischa, who helped me see things like bowls, ears, legs, and beaks in letters;

And Eugene, who made me confront the racism I never suspected I harbored;

And Jacek, who unlocked desire in ways I never imagined possible;

And Jörg and Giorgos and Dieter and Nikolas, who continue to nourish and teach me.

P.S. The image in this post is a work by the Iranian photo-realist artist, Iman Maleki. Though probably not the intention of the artist, the work dramatically depicts the potentially subversive nature of the music, knowledge and friendship of the convivium.

The group exhibition Unconfined is now showing at the renovated Poulopoulos hat factory that houses the City of Athens Cultural Center “Melina”.   The show brings together works from 30 Greek and international artists under an umbrella theme so general and vague that little sense is gathered to answer Vangelis’s disarmingly naïve but nonetheless pertinent question, “what is it all about?” No matter. At a buffet like this, one is lucky to savor the odd dish or two that surprises and delights the palate. And there were a few that made my visit worthwhile.

The metaphor of a transportation network as a circulatory system (exactly the same words are used in Greek) is perhaps an overtaxed image. But in the work of Kasahari Miyuki Vein—colored pencil on paper—the conceit is beautifully and provocatively rendered. Looking at the work from the distance, it looks like a cutout of flesh marked by veins and arteries. You discern eddies of tallow and misty pools of soft powder blue in this expanse of white, all threaded with weaving red and blue lines that meet in dense colored nodes and then again diverge.

Miyuki Kasahari, Vein

As you near the drawing, you can see the outlines of the geography of this flesh emerge. It’s a dreamy landscape of deltas, bays, rivers, and lakes. You notice the markings of a map that name various locations and nodes within the soft tissue of the hide. Upon closer inspection you see it is in fact a superimposition of several maps across time and space: names of Roman towns, patches of a London street map, a Japanese map, a hand-drawn map showing directions (to a dinner party perhaps?). Except that the notations are written in reverse, as if the flesh had been flayed and turned inside out. It is simply beautiful and a wonderful representation of the very human need to map and share experience. But it is also about how the places that have shaped our identity are mapped — physically inscribed within us — as memory.

I thought how my sexual awakening is indelibly mapped to San Francisco, where as a 17-year-old taking a year off before college (not by choice, but that’s another story) I was lucky to (literally) fall into the arms of a man who made being gay seem as natural and life-affirming as the morning call of a songbird. And not without a dose of humor, unfortunately one that I could only appreciate in retrospect. He was my landlord and I had gone up to his apartment to ask for a can of paint. Landlord probably evokes the wrong impression. He was not more than 25, a tall thin man with long blonde hair. He wrote down the request on a notepad and returned to the minestrone he was preparing, which he invited me to share. After we had finished eating, he asked me to help him change the sheets on his bed. Although the request sounded strange, I thought, “well, he did feed me after all,”  and I went to his bedroom to help him make up his bed. Once the bottom sheet was tucked in he took me in his arms like a basketball and tossed me gently onto his bed. I remember saying, “Michael, I don’t know if I’m gay”. To which he replied, “Oh, we can worry about that later, can’t we?”.  But I didn’t worry afterwards, and the city became a playground I eagerly explored and subconsciously mapped.  Michael’s top-floor Haight studio, Donald’s apartment overlooking the bay, the city’s parks and ocean beaches, the Castro district (joyfully evoked in Gus Van  Sant’s Milk).

Back to the exhibition. Yet another artist’s book, this one by Jenny Bakalouma. The Book. A book in steel, whose pages look like tanned hides or sheets of rusted metal. Two pages are exposed and visible to the visitor. On one of them we see an intriguing symbol that rises from the page like an embossed branding:  a mix of Arabic serifs and the strong verticals and horizontals of a Chinese ideogram, embellished with a handful of tiny circles. It could be an alchemist’s shorthand or alien musical notation. In any event, undecipherable, as inexplicable as the patterns described in the plate reproduced in the (this time, real) book that sits beside the steel book and presumably serves as an explication de texte for the work: a topography of scrapings and erasures and a mysterious constellation of black dots set in a terrain of the emerald green and burnt sienna of corroded copper. Another map, perhaps, but inaccessible. An artist’s joke on our need for a key to orient ourselves? In any event, an intriguing piece.