After a lovely dinner Tuesday night with Heather and Tim where we plotted and schemed over goodies at Tangerine, I went home and watched 3000 Miles to Graceland. It wasn't even a guilty pleasure, it was merely a regrettable choice. It probably didn't help that I loathe all the actors.
Aimee and I did much better with Big Fish the next evening. I have a weakness for fairy tales as Tim Burton tells them, and I was delightfully entranced from beginning to end. Everyone was fantastic, especially that Ewan McGregor chap. And the super-romantical parts were cute and all, but what really got me were the depictions of relationships where the love was quiet and true and deep and lasting. I felt like a teenager seeing Edward Scissorhands for the first time all over again.
I took an art break from work on Thursday to run over to Andrea Schwartz and submerge myself in Lori del Mar's paintings. Her canvases reminded me of Gerhard Richter's in the way that color shimmers from beneath their clean surfaces or peeks out at the uneven edges. But then del Mar lays patterns on top that are evocative of antique wallpaper, dew-wet spiderwebs, tiny organisms. Calming and beautiful.
That evening I walked past an impromptu skateboard check in the old Four Walls gallery space, freshly occupied by Juice Design, to check out black and white photos by Ray Potes and work by graffiti artist Bigfoot One. I like how Potes arranges his pictures in an orderly jumble and leaves you to sort out the melange, naked breasts next to street kids next to a beach sunset, all very Wolfgang Tillmans. As for Bigfoot One, what's not to love about a yeti?
Speaking of Tillmans, after helping my dad celebrate his 70th with a Just Desserts chocolate cake after lunch on Saturday, I drove back up through the city and stopped at CCA to look at their Likeness: Portraits of Artists by Other Artists exhibition. It was fun trying to see who I recognized among the subjects, though many were unknown to me and moved me nonetheless. I had been thinking about Mapplethorpe's photograph of Louise Bourgeosis recently and oh frabjous day there it was, sly grin on her face and all.
I spent the rest of the afternoon having a very exciting cat-bathing experience that left me so worn out all I could do with my evening was lie on the couch and watch Abbas Kiorostami's Taste of Cherry. It was just the thing, a gorgeous, multi-layered meditation on death and life. I remembered the time I spent at SFMOMA last year sitting next to his Sleepers, a film of a young couple in bed projected onto the floor of a pitch-black gallery. It was a piece I kept coming back to over the course of a number of visits, and as I watched the casual way the bodies of those lovers intertwined in their slumber I recall feeling very much at peace at the same time that I could have cried with wanting that experience for myself. Not long after, for a few brief moments, I did have it, and I was so happy. Then I blinked and it was gone.
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3000 Miles to Graceland
Big Fish
Ray Potes
Likeness
Taste of Cherry