Over the last few days, I've "done some art", plus seen one movie that wasn't quite art, but was entertaining: I went to a preview screening of P.S. Your Cat is Dead from actor/co-writer/director/80s hunk Steve Guttenberg. It's amusing, but I would probably wait to see it on video if I hadn't seen it already. The screening was organized by The New Festival, so it was a big gay crowd there to see him in person. The highlight of the evening was getting to talk to David Drake, whom we hadn't seen since attending his Son of Drakula at Dance Theater Workshop. People like David give me hope for homo culture and art -- he's a pretty face, but he's a smart guy who is much more than a pretty face. Another one of those is John Cameron Mitchell.
OK. Enough celebrity worship -- on to other things.
Several nights ago I saw a cool evening of music at Merkin. The first half was a collaboration of "live animation" by Pierre Hébert and music by Bob Ostertag called Between Science and Garbage. Hébert used an iBook plus web cam and a lot of objects and drawings to gradually assemble an animated film while we watched, using everything from drawings on paper to apples and Coke cans. They were selling Ostertag's CDs in the lobby, so I bought PantyChrist, which I always knew about but had never heard. It's wonderful -- a collaboration between him and Justin Bond. How could you ask for more? I'll put up some MP3s later.
On Friday we went to an opening for Stacy Greene at Plus Ultra in Williamsburg, then hopped back on the L to see puppet wizard Paul Zaloom at P.S. 122 featuring political puppetry and a gay Punch and Judy show, renamed "Punch and Jimmy".
Stacy's new work, as she has told me, is a new direction for an artist who already has worked in several media. We first encountered her at Plus Ultra's inaugural show, titled "Skank" where we picked up a copy of her Rorschach Striptease DVD. There are 3 photographs of abandoned drive-in movie theaters, then the rest of the works consists of pieces assembled from photgraphs on individual panels to form a sort of collage. My favorite piece in the show is called "Los Zapatos de Lorraine", in which the title comes from a pair of chintz-patterned shoes belonging to her aunt Lorraine in one of the panels.
Yesterday we went to a few Chelsea galleries. My favorite things I saw were Devorah Sperber at Caren Golden, Michael Wetzel at Clementine, and Kevin Landers at Elizabeth Dee.
Today we're headed out to Williamsburg to see some shows.
