arte / acción / performance At The Contemporary Art Museum in San Jose

I saw a cool show at the museum of Contemporary art here in Costa Rica called arte / acción / performance . It consisted mostly of artwork relating to Flamenco dancing...

Leaving The Land of the Clouds

..It took 5 hours on a bus to make it down the mountain,we were literally driving in and out of clouds...it was unforgettable.

Playa Brasilito

Loving it here!

Zipping Above the Forest on a Cable

....Today Rolf organized a zipline canopy tour for me, a guy who is known as being "afraid of heights". They put up in a harness then hooked us up to a pulley and we flew above the trees, rivers, valleys, up to 400ft above ground and traveling at speeds up to 80km ph...it was so much fun and beautiful and exhilirating! More info here.

We finished with a Tarzan swing I can't believe I did this but I am SOOOOO glad I did!

Inside The Cloud Forest

Today we took a tour of the Monteverde Cloud forest, it was awesome! Breathtakingly beautiful. We saw 3 different Quetzals...these incredible, iridescent, red breasted, green bodied birds and a few other native species as well..we saw a hornet whose body was invaded by a fungus (very Alien) and a tiny little viper snake in addition to trees strangled by other trees, trees growing on top of other trees and shooting their roots down and all kinds of amazing greenery as we walked through the clouds enveloping the mountain.

Then we came back to my brothers where I made dinner and we watched Chicago. He liked the story but not the artifice and that's definately a place where we differ, pretty interesting trip so far!

Above The Clouds - Rainbow Valley Costa Rica

We finally arrived at my brother's guesthouse, "Rainbow Valley" , no he's not gay, but his brother is. It's incredible, I had no idea how cool it was here! In the photo above the roof of the cabin I'm in is at the bottom of the rainbow which I saw today...pretty cool! It's entered by a little bridge, it's carved into the hill and goes up above the trees , looking out over the gorge with a river directly below, followed by a valley, it's WAY high up. Off into the distance and a little higher up the mountains are surrounded by clouds and thats where the "Cloud forest" of monteverde is located.

My brother, Rolf, has had this place for about 4 years and is constanly adding onto it.....its pretty classy and well decorated. I'm impressed! It's only about 10 miles away from where we were last night but it was a 3 hour drive along winding roads, up and down mountains....it was really beautiful and it gave us an opportunity to have a pretty intense talk about our similar but different experiences growing up with the same parents. The roles we chose, the way we survived. Rolf was always the independent one, he stood up to my dad and my dad was constantly beating the sh#* out of him....you might call him stubborn, he just didn't like being told what to do.

Rolf was always very warm and supportive of me and he still is. He thinks its great that I'm an artist, carving out a life for myself on my own terms. Rolf had no problem accepting that I'm gay, he's met a few of my boyfriends and treated them all like potential future brother in law's. Rolf has always been a libertarian...he's got a very "live and let live" attitude and for that reason, Costa Rica suits him just fine. It's a good match and very lucky for me to have a brother as cool as him

River Rafting In Costa Rica

Today I swent river rafting with my brother Rolf, that's him doing the bucking bronco routine on the front of the raft. The company that we went with is called Desafio...more info here

Arenal Volcano

I arrived Tuesday in Costa Rica and qwe drove over the mountains to an active Volcano, we have a room at Essence Arenal with a Lava View andsure enough, we did see lava streaming down the side last night....its beautiful here!

Stuck in The Airport

Patti Smith Sings " You Light Up My Life" on Kids are People too...

This is just plain Gorgeous

Computer love (Part 1)

Is it possible to feel some kind of warmth through cold technology? Check out this live Kraftwerk video from 1981, somehow they are able to recreate the cool, smooth sound of the studio, but the vocals sound so warm and wanting...a perfect marriage of the made and the grown. Lately, as I have been looking into data dating I've gotten so turned off by personal profiles that are just a list of stats with some vague generically "hot" photos of body parts. It seems to be so easy for so many guys to sort of reach out and hide at the same time, to not get too personal or specific for fear of.....what? Someone might not like them? This is all so confusing and counter intuitive to me......it seems like one should be as personal as possible...to come across as unique, to give potential suitors something specific to respond to in your profile....

Let me look at my own history here and maybe that will give me some insight. I know that when I was in my 20's and very much unsure about my own sexuality I certainly didn't identify as gay and I was very reluctant to explore that side of my sexuality....for starters, Aids was rearing it's ugly head and well, that was a pretty good deterrent. I had girlfriends, many of whom had gay friends and I compared myself to those guys and concluded that I was nothing like them so, of course, I couldn't be gay and that was reassuring...but a little bit sad too because I knew I really was gay, but since I felt I was nothing like these gay guys that my girlfriends knew, I also felt that gay guys wouldn't be attracted to me so I better just forget all about that.

I tried to and couldn't and when I finally accepted, rather shamefully, that I was gay I immediately tried to conform and figure out a place for myself within the gay milieu. I pretty quickly figured out that I wasn't a drag queen or a sweater queen and I felt most comfortable around guys in leather bars and the newly happening Bear scene...although I am not by any stretch of the imagination a bear, as I was reminded by attending last night's Furball. I tend to like bearded guys in masculine drag and set about trying to figure out how I could make them like me....jeans boots and the motorcycle jacket that my high school sweetheart had given me were a natural, but when I hit upon the winning combination of ripped camo army pants and shaved my head i was in heaven....I had figured out how to look HOT! ....and that became my number one criteria for that final once over in the mirror before going out. Anywhere. Day or night. ....."Do I look hot?" I asked myself and more often than not the answer was "Yes"! I had found my uniform and learned not to stray too far from it.

Then, through my friend Mark, I discovered designer clothes. Mark took me to Jefferey and all the guys there had these four little stitches on the back of their shirt, or sweater, or vest and I wanted something with those 4 stitches too! I wanted Margiela! So I found some pretty butch pieces by Margiela including a brown leather bar vest and a tight dark green football jersey that looked great with my torn camos. Every time I tried on the Margiela football jersey with the camos in preparation for a Sunday evening at the Dugout and looked in the mirror, I was able to answer myself with "Hot" but then I started to think.....what if some hot leather bear that was interested in me noticed that my shirt had the same four stitches on the back that that faggy guy down the hall had on his shirts. I concluded that designer clothes were a dick softener and went back to my uniform and happily stayed there for years until this whole new crop of younger bear guys started showing up in their smart new Dries Van Noten sweaters and Patrick Ervill sport shirts and Surface to Air flannels and opening Ceremony fluorescent plaids. It was like my cage got unlocked....I had options, I could throw away the uniform.....I could be....me!

It took a hell of a long time to get here but I finally realized that people like me! They like me for how I stick out and not how I fit in.

To be continued.....

Data Dates (Computer love 2 )

When I first got a computer, in 2000...it was actually the day that my Boyfriend Bill moved to Boston, he gave me his old one and said "Check out The Cruising For sex website" So I instantly got online and started cruising and the next day I had my first hookup! I had found Computer Love! In an interesting aside i recently came across that across that same guy, using the same photos from 1999...I briefly considered going there again but....some memories are best not tampered with. I already had a digital camera, it was the size of a Walkman, but I think cellphones were too then. Anyway I started experimenting with self portraits...it was fun and easy, I'd do some shots then post them online or send them out to the guys in the chat rooms, some got no responses and some got tons so I kept refining my look so I could replicate over and over the kind of looks that got the best responses...and I had a LOT of sex...many of which were pretty much meaningless hookups, but nonetheless I had a lot of them. I figured out how to be desirable! Yay! That satisfied me, for a while. But then a boyfriend came along who wanted monogamy and strangely enough, when I thought about it, I did too. What a relief actually, i didn't have to concern myself with looking "Hot" and I came to accept myself more for who I was rather than for who others wanted me to be. I dress nicely and people compliment me on it I got some unique glasses and people in the check out line smile at me, strangers in bars point to them and give a thumbs up...it's all pretty amazing, I can be me and people will still like me! So how to translate all of this to the cold, hard stat and photo based computer world, that was my mission.

I looked at the postings on Big Muscle Bears, Bear World, Manhunt...etc etc and looked at my postings there and, yeah, I had figured out how to fit in, I used the photos where I almost looked like I could be mistaken for a guy in a standard porno photo shoot! Wow, how did that happen and how can i replicate that good day, or angle of light, or placement of my hands or whatever it was that made that happen....I took out the photos that showed some kind of personality and yup, got more hits! I was popular! I fit in! Yay! I was dancing as fast as I could ! But that got pretty old and I realized I had to be that person when I showed up oops, that wasn't much fun.

So i started taking a different approach. In addition to my stats and the phrase "Workout 5 times a wk" I started doing a little bit of real heartfelt writing, I put in things like "I'm not too concerned with how often you go to the gym" and "age and looks irrelevant, attitude is" and all of a sudden I got a whole different batch of responses. Instead of pictures of a pretty dick or torso and a list of stats followed by "Into?" I got face pictures and real sentences and paragraphs and people saying how nice it was to come across someone who seemed like a real human being instead of a one dimensional cardboard cutout. I've even met some of these guys and had some great times,not as many as before but I'll take quality over quantity any day.

Bette Davis on Dick Cavett

Damn this bitch is Smart!

The Decorator

Special thanks to my new favorite blog Sissydude for this one

Malcolm Mclaren Interviews Maison Martin Margiela 2005

There was a great exchange between MMM and MM in 2005 in the NY times style section...heres the link

Malcolm McLaren's Last Playlist

The NY Times posted the playlist that Malcom McLaren put together for Dries van Noten's 2010 Fall men's show...heres a link to it

Beach House Zebra Cover

Zbornak @ Cake Shop "Queers, Beers, Rears"

last night I had the pleasure of seeing the debut gig of Boston Band Zbornak at Cake Shop's monthly Queer punk Rock party Queers, Beers and Rears" info here.

They are a supercool band fronted by Greg Der Ananian, who was born to lead a band. Drumming provided by the always awesome Kevin Kelley Kenkel. My friend Richard (aka Designerman) joined me and took me to an amazing dance party in the basement of a dominican restaurant on Rivington street. God, i love this concrete jungle where dreams are made of! Thanks Everybody!

Bromosexuals

There is an interesting article in the NY Observer about the trend for gay men to be more just plain regular guys who watch baseball and dont have every line of dialogue from the Golden Girls memorized....you can read the article HERE

Lissandro Kael On Made In Brazil

These are from a blog I follow called "Made In Brazil"....you can see more HERE

Malcolm McLaren R.I.P.

Unbelievable what this guy was responsable for, the Sex Pistols, Adam and the Ants, buffalo gals...and Bow, Wow, Wow....the pop group fronted by the teenage Annabella Lwin. I also loved his interview with Maison Martin Margiela from the NY Times Style mag 5 years ago

Wag More, Bark Less

Life is too short to wake up in the morning with regrets, so love the people that treat you right, forget about the ones that don't.... Believe that everything happens for a reason. If you get a chance take it.. If it changes your life then let it...

Cheryl Donegan

I First met Cheryl back in the mid nineties when she was famous for her video "Head" Where she drank a liquid out of a hole in a plastic bottle then spit it back in...it's brilliant in it's simplicity, immediateness and directness. Since then I've followed her work often scratching my head and wondering how did she get HERE?. and how did she get HERE?

Instead of capitalising on her early success as a video artist Cheryl followed her own path and did what made sense to her, constantly challenging and defying people's expectations of her but listening to her own inner voice. Needless to say this has completely confounded the artworld and made her a hero to myself and countless other artists.

I was lucky enough to be invited to Cheryl's studio today and was surrounded by one of the best contemporary painting shows that's up right now. It's fascinating what she is up to and what she's making and how she got there, but the bottom line is that these are some great paintings and I'm sure we will be seeing them in a gallery soon.

Here's to my hero Cheryl!

Kati Kovacs

Check out this awesome hungarian pop singer!

Ken Price & Josef Albers at Booke Alexander

One of the weirdest pairings right now in a new york art gallery has to be Ken price and Josef Albers. Maybe it's only superficially weird. Albers of the crisp Homage to the square paintings and price of the funky west coast ceramics. Actually the surface of the price ceramics are not unlike the Albers paintings color wise, and the colors do similar things on the price ceramics. And price has the square holes mimicking the center of the Albers paintings...well I could go on and on riffing like this but the best thing to do would be to get over to Brooke Alexander gallery in Soho...info here

Otto Dix at Neue Gallerie

this crazy english queen was walking around saying " This is the worst art I've ever seen...everyone is so UGLY!

Luisma Molinari is HOTT!

I say a little prayer

It's so cool when guys are confident enough in their sexuality that they can play around like this. Hot!

Petey Welcomes springtime

My friend Robert Buck sends me a calender each year of shots of his dog Petey, this is the April shot

ABC No Rio

I was walking past ABC No Rio on Rivington street this morning and saw this amazing crochet cover for a bike. On the way back to my studio I noticed that all opf the windows were covered with something similar. I love my neighborhood! I love springtime!