repost from this recording: Men Like Him...

San Francisco. March. 2013. Men Like Him

by STEPHANIE ECHEVESTE

Dating in San Francisco is weird.

He said after he sipped his second sazerac, that I paid for, on our first date.

I replied, agreeing without really knowing why. Wondering how many other girls, or boys, or in-between unidentifieds he had dated before me. How many he would date after me.

We first met at a bar. It was during baseball season and we were winning and everyone was excited. He claimed I was eyeing him and I never corrected his assumption because I wasn’t actually eyeing him. I was eyeing this other guy standing near him, probably a friend of his, and debating whether or not this Javier Bardem look-a-like was gay. I then asked all my co-worker friends whether or not they thought he was gay. No one knew. No one really cared because from afar you can speculate, fantasize and then move on. No harm, no foul, no expectations, no disappointment. That is dating in San Francisco. Before I knew it I was no longer drunkenly speaking German to my boss, but instead to this other Chris, who had been lingering near Bardem but was now sitting next to me. And who also, I thought, could possibly be gay...

Go to original at this recording to continue reading.

dolores park problems...

Dolores Park. March. 2013.

On a gloomy, fog covered day you can walk up to the top and look out onto the city and feel a little more at peace. You can sense the mist of the air on your face or the sweat on your brow, if you ran up, and look over the grass and the buildings and imagine the bay just beyond. How a dip into the water would freeze you instantly, no matter how fast you try to swim, and you think about the city as a lifeboat, a gentle palm of a cupped hand holding you in it's warmth so you don't have to fall into the turbulent waters. You can think beyond the work it takes to be here, the day to day drudgery of sitting behind a computer and doing whatever it is you do to earn a living, to pay your exorbitant rent, to purchase the amazing food. You let go of all the non-committal people that don't answer your calls or forget you had plans or flat out say they don't know yet because they don't know how they'll feel later, what they'll want to do. You pretend like you don't realize you are doing the same thing to everyone else. You deny the two-hour long waits for weekend brunch and the lines for handmade coffee or mediocre ice cream and the bicycle accidents you hear about all the time, that must be exaggerated. You dismiss the dates that never happened or the ones that went well and then never went anywhere else, or the people you've dated, the ones in which you invested your time and to whom you maybe even have opened up, the ones that you thought you could love that can never love you. You accept the randomness of the bars and the dichotomy of being so near everyone you've ever met, boxed in a 7x7 space, but still so far from everyone you've ever met, here. You may be alone or with a friend or with a lover. You tell yourself this is where you should go when you don't feel yourself, back to this spot when, on a gloomy, fog covered day, you feel hope and safety and a sense of place.

On a clear day, when you can see two bridges on either side connecting the top of the peninsula to other lands and infinite possibilities, when the sun is out and the wind is mild, you see a sea of people dressed or undressed, on blankets and pillows with tents and hula hoops and make-shift slip and slides. You see families and couples and big groups of friends drinking beer and wine and coconut water, with picnics of oysters or overpriced produce, Delfina pizza or those sandwiches from that place on the corner with the dutch crunch bread. People reading and smoking and writing and playing various instruments. Entertainers and entrepreneurs. You can't think because it is too loud. You can't sit because there is no space. You can't feel hope or safety because it is too infinite. You wonder why among so many things and people and possibilities you feel so alone. You wonder if you've ever really felt any different. If you'll ever really fit in. If you can ever accept your potential. You miss the lifeboat that held you safely and protected you from the unknown. You miss the fog and the gloom and the mist. You hope for rain.

the selfie...

Los Angeles. March. 2013.

I'm still throwing up inside my mouth because I actually typed that word. If you don't know to what I am referring, you either also have not been on the internet, do not have kids, or are in denial. I am currently pondering how this photo happened, and all the things behind the idea of a self-portrait taken on a mobile device and instantly uploaded for public consumption.

The facts:

I was at wedding.

I made my dress and I had not gotten a photo of it. So this seemed necessary.

I texted this photo to a guy that I (think) I am dating. He did not immediately respond.

Mitigating circumstances:

It was an open bar. They made stellar manhattans.

There was no one else in the bathroom at the time of (multiple, I'm sure) photographs.

I stood somewhere out of site while I picked the best filter and waited for successful upload as to not be antisocial or rude.

This was the only photo (I think) that I took of myself alone.

I later saw many selfies of other wedding guests on various social networks.

Everyone, and it does not matter who you are or what you look like or how old you are, wants an awesome photo of his or her self and there is no shame in that, but it is strange how prevalent the practice seems to be. My younger sister does it. My boss does it. My grandpa is probably doing it right now. The desire to photograph oneself seems to be universal, regardless of one's self-confidence, vanity, exhibitionism, or lack thereof. Why we think that we can take it ourselves is nuts, but we try and try and our efforts, for better or worse, make it on the internet for public view due to our own actions. It's like we want to be our own paparazzi. I don't really get it, but I also totally get it. I hate it and I love it and I think that it's actually a central part of being human. We are tapping into the very root of our primal being -  our need to carry on, our dream to last forever, if only in pixel form on the interwebs (because I highly doubt anyone has ever printed out his/her own selfie).

I wonder what future generations will be like with this ability capture one's own image, edit it, and proliferate it all from a small device in seconds. Will this speed up self-awareness? Will this encourage self-love? Will this practice increase or decrease vanity? Does it make us feel better about ourselves or worse? Does it depend of how we already feel? If we only take self-portraits when we feel awesome (or drunk), shouldn't that make us feel more awesome and isn't that a good thing? Is this just the evolution of centuries of ego-centric human behavior?

falling in love, again

Anywhere. Anytime. Anyone. Anyplace.

It's Valentine's day. But, instead of agonizing over who you love, or think you love, or who you think loves or doesn't love you, today's a great day to broaden your love circle and focus on the people that actually love and support you all the time, no matter what. We have relationships with so many people that get overlooked and it's a great day to tell your friends, family, co-workers, and, of course, lovers, that you love them. This really should be done always and often.

An equally important and usually ignored area of love is self love and love of place. So, go ahead and fall in love, again, with who you are and where you are, no matter where or what that is.

I was recently reading an article about consciousness and started thinking about how your physical environment affects how you think and who you are. I think about this a lot. I love travelling and I most love living in other places for extended periods of time, but I also love having strong social relationships and that takes time to create and nourish. Thus, having been in San Francisco for over three years has started to make me feel a little down and out, despite my amazing friendships and social support. I keep looking up flights and planning my escape. Yet, while I do think it is extremely important to change environments to induce creative and personal growth, and I do think consciousness is tied to physical being, I also believe perspective is a powerful tool.

Place is stationary and not something anyone can control. I can't change the location of certain things, and especially not people, but appreciating that I have those things to visit and people to reach out to (through maybe a dozen ways thanks to the internet) is important.  Even if I had a private airplane and could fly wherever I want on a whim, I still would feel torn between those places. I think it is mostly because different places bring out different pieces of myself.

I know part of my idea of myself is tied to the place where I am and I started to feel like I am not here or there and all these pieces of me are strewn out and being forgotten. I am different when I am physically in a different place. But, there's no reason I cannot bring all those experiences into where I am now. I'm not saying to live in the past, we all know how annoying that person is who goes on and on about what they did here and there, but instead reflecting on how I felt and what kind of person I was creating in those moments, in those other places. Because the fact is, if you have ever travelled, and especially if you have lived more than one place, sometimes there is probably somewhere else you think you'd rather be. Maybe there are people there that you miss, maybe you have a routine you got used to, maybe things just seemed better. Of course you cannot be in two, three, or four places at once, but you can concoct a recipe for feeling the way you did when you were there and  to allow yourself to bring that with you no matter where you are.

And so I recently fell back in love with San Francisco, where I currently live and work. I made a conscious effort to appreciate my surroundings and enjoy my neighborhood. Visiting new neighborhoods or meeting tourists or recent transplants is a great way to do this. In doing so I fell back in love with myself. Last weekend I took a long stroll down Valencia, a street I used to leisurely walk down quite often, but as of late haven't had time to really enjoy. I ran into an old friend from Spain at my favorite book store and we had a long coffee chat. I remembered that I am spontaneous and fun to be around. The weekend before that I spent a whole day in Chinatown and North Beach and went to my favorite pastry shop, café, book store, bar, and little Chinese shops. I enjoyed reading a book at the bar and remembered how much I love being alone, amongst strangers. The other day I stopped into a new bar on my street and chatted with the bartender, who actually is a good friend, and then made new friends. I remembered how much I love to meet new people. This weekend I'm planning a bar crawl (including pika pika and karaoke, naturally) in Japantown with some friends. I will probably drink too much, be too goofy, make lots of random connections and end up singing silly songs with my friends, but I know I will be being myself and loving everything about it.

Everyday I take a second to focus on the beauty of Bernal Heights from the foot of my office building and then I look at the sky. No matter where you are on Earth, there is a sky above you and it is usually indistinguishable. I honestly have no idea where I took this photo of clouds. It could of been in my parent's backyard, in one of the many places I have lived or visited, or here in San Francisco. You could be anywhere, but you are here now, and once you fall in love with wherever that is, again (because I know you moved there for a reason) you will love yourself more. No more  wishing on a star; stars travel fast and so can you, to that person you love to be, to a person you may have almost forgotten.

when the lights go down in the city...

Washington, D.C. / San Francisco, CA. Various.

I have overlapping memories of walking through, or floating under, Leo Villareal's installation at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. Every time I am in DC I stop by the National Gallery, partially just because I like going back and forth under Multiverse. I enjoy the piece because it reminds me of airports (the moving walkway obviously helps). Usually I am alone at the National Gallery and usually I am alone at airports.When in Multiverse, all these moments blend together and create a unique kind of solace, a silly pleasure in being completely free amongst so many strangers and amid so much art. It makes me feel like I am a tiny, yet significant light in this big huge world; a small, blinking unit in all this organized chaos.

I am thrilled that Villareal is designing a light sculpture on the Bay Bridge in San Francisco.  The Bay Lights will be lit March 5 and the best thing about it is that there is no need to go back and forth underneath to experience its charm. The installation is designed to be viewed when you are looking at the bridge, not when you are on it. I can gaze from my favorite spot on Bernal Heights, or when I am riding the J Church, or maybe, on a clear day, from the garden rooftop of my office. I may even start planning dentist visits after dark as that is my best enclosed view of the Bay Bridge.

The idea of 'turning on' the space between San Francisco and the East Bay is interesting. It will literally illuminate the space between us. We will have an unavoidable piece of public art that connects us and maybe encourages a free flow of ideas and people. Instead of being here or there, the journey will be noted as a part of the environment. Bridges are connections that often get a bad reputation for being a congested, temporary, tunnel of pain - that place you have to go through to get to the place where you are going. One time I went over the bridge only to come back with firework burns on my upper thighs after a fourth-of-july party gone bad. Most recently, I endured a nauseating three hour journey to Oakland airpot, most of which was spent just waiting to get onto the Bay Bridge. I have vowed never again to drive over that huge thing. It is difficult and often ensures pain. Still, some of my best memories are on that bridge: Convincing one of my best friends to give someone (who is now his significant other) another chance when they had first started dating, blasting 90s tunes while speeding, singing Young Americans worse than anyone with another friend as we embarked on a Reno adventure, realizing I am happy and I am a creator and I have a day job and all of that is ok, being all alone in a car. Alone again, but still amongst so many people, stuck in their own cars, in their own heads.

Though I probably will never drive myself across that bridge, I will certainly stare at it, from afar, and ponder the significance of painful, and pleasurable, journeys, and all those feelings that happen in between pain and pleasure, the ones that get lost because we are so focused on what we want or don't want. Or think we want. The space between is sometimes the best part.

Learn more about the project and the artist in Adam Fisher's piece in the NY Times Style Magazine, in which I took this delightful quote:

“what I was doing at Burning Man suddenly I started doing all year long." - Leo Villareal

If we could all be so bold.

asterisms...in Berlin

Berlin. August. 2012.

Last August while in Berlin I stopped by one of my favorite art galleries - the Deutsche+Guggenheim. The current show happened to be a commissioned body of work by Gabriel Orozco: Asterisms. Later, the Guggenheim in New York also exhibited the show, resulting in a less-than-desirable review in the NY Times by Ken Johnson.

 "The transformation of detritus into art and chaos into order resonates, for example, with ancient alchemical procedures in which the processing of low-value stuff into priceless material is supposed to have the magical effect of advancing undeveloped souls toward higher orders of consciousness. But any such flights of interpretive fancy are left for viewers to supply, since Mr. Orozco has not framed the project in ways that would connect it to psychological or spiritual spheres. Imaginative liftoff stalls at ground level." - Ken Johnson, Swimming to Shore

While I somewhat agree with Johnson's assessment, I had a very different experience. Instead of consciously ascending to the top floor of the Gugg in NY expecting to see Art, I locked up my borrowed bike on Unter den Linden, wandered into a familiar yet foreign place, floated through the room of found objects, then drank a cappuccino in the gift shop and tried to read German fashion magazines. Not that the experience was trivial, but I just wasn't making it more than it needed to be.

When I first moved to San Francisco I taught 'found art' classes to children. While I've taken some art classes and had been making art in a printshop in Bilbao for the previous year, I didn't think I was the most qualified. I founded my curriculum in my knowledge of the Duchamp's ready-mades, Dadaism and the cultural theory of Adorno (not that my students ever had any idea, but there was a reason behind the cutting and pasting, the de/re-construction). I was helping those kids relearn what art making was - creation (through critical thinking) -  instead of fearing it (like I sometimes did and often still do). We would think about context and connections, but mostly I just wanted them create without fear. To get to a place other then wherever they were. And accept that, enjoy it if they could.

Back to Asterisms. When I wandered into the gallery I wasn't thinking about anything. I was present and able to look at each object, and everything all together, without any preconceived notions. But of course I was thinking about something, and of course I had preconceived notions - these things can't really be erased... they are sometimes just firing off in your subconscious until they resurface again. Like now, I think about that show and how real it felt. All those things just sat there waiting to be reckoned with. If they hadn't been collected and assessed and transported by Orozco and his team, they'd still be sitting on the beach in Mexico or hanging out in a baseball field in New York. But instead they were laid out in this art gallery in Berlin and I was there, too, looking at them. Or walking around them. Or maybe thinking about them and where they had been before they were in that new place. Being objects they are simply used. Nature, man-made materials, human remains, whatever the substance--they are inanimate. Or at least we don't know them to think or talk or move around on their own. And that is what I liked most about the exhibit: I was able to see objects as objects regardless of their origin without being told the context. I got to create the context. I got to reconstruct what I wanted them to be. I liked the colors. I liked that I could just look deep into something and see things and imagine and enjoy the pleasure of it. And I'm sure I thought about consumption and culture and decay, but I mostly remember looking into the colors.

I'm glad Johnson mentioned the video “Whale After Waves” (2012). I stood there for a while watching the sea gulls. I stared at the video and thought about  how I've been in many planes and have landed in all these places and someday I'll be in the ground, landed forever, as we all will be, and that will be that. And maybe a part of me will have an interesting color and be displayed by some future artist that collects things. And that is ok. It's not anything more than what it is.

(On the note of collecting, my flatmate has a blog about things he collects. It's pretty funny.)