HELL IS A PLACE FOR ME AND MY FRIENDS...

(***DISCLAIMER***I have retired "it's been a minute," when it comes to the frequent dispatches from this humble web log. Stating the obvious is a pet peeve of mine. But it's been a hairy year and the time to trim is now. So, let me wipe the cobwebs from my respective critical orifices and get down to the business of observation. If you are a new reader: WELCOME...and just give me a chance.)





So 2009 is here for another what? 36 hours? The year leaves me raw and cracked open with growth and insights that will carry me into a brighter, better year. The first fun event of 2010 is to of course check out Shizu Saldamando's new THERE IS A PLACE exhibit opening this Saturday at Steve Turner Contemporary (6026 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90036 (across from BCAM at LACMA). But before I look to 2010, I have to pause on some recent visual stimulation of the latter part of 2009. And since I'm already on the topic...

November came and went and the thing that left me seething with jealousy was the big welcome Los Angeles received at the Guadalajara Book Fair. I am okay to admit it, jealousy, envy, schadenfreude--all those emotions that fire those funny little synapses of dopamine into our brains--we all got it and the fact that all my LA friends and other national makers and breakers got to go and I DID NOT tightened those needles into my frontal lobes big time. Oh well, how can anyone have foreseen that gay marriage is okay in I <3 DF anyway? The time for returning to Mexico was not yet mine, but I was happy for friends Sandra De La Loza and Shizu Saldamando doing the 18 With A Bullet exhibition at the Cam Contemporáneo Arte space in the GDL (along with LA artist Juan Capistran). There's nothing like photo albums to make you feel like you were there.

Shizu and I are friends. She is the most well adjusted Morrissey and Smiths fan I have ever known. I grew up listening to Morrissey and The Smiths like every other brown kid in Southern California and I am sadly still interpellated by all the arrested development the Moz wails on and on about through barbed satirical lyrics. I was greatly influenced by the man and the band. I picked up The Portrait of Dorian Gray in high school because of Morrissey. Every brown kid now in the current state of Californian education that is born with a chance will be saved by the literary influence this sullen Manchurian has. Excuse the hyperbole, I’m a Pisces Rising.

So it has often been fun geeking out to Morrissey trivia with Shizu over the course of our friendship. All this gives me an entry point to the creative process behind this collection of queer intimate moments set to bed sheets.





The bulk of Shizu’s work has focused on making Latino youth cultures visible in such a way that utters a basic quotidian ontology; a visual murmur that reveals a lot without revealing the secrets of our complicated public identities and the scary abyss within our very private selves. It is through what I see that I can’t help but assert narratives onto these images—perhaps the first couple met at the Blur concert in 1996, except they were there with different partners. What if they are a few degrees removed from the same ex? To quote Blur’s popular genderqueer club anthem “Girls and Boys”: love in the nineties is paranoid.

However, what’s so magical about Shizu’s images is that they capture a kind of serenity that is often too elusive to experience as queer lovers in the material world. What is so covetous for me (as a peace-seeking queer) is the lack of paranoia here, even as the couple is presented as pieces of an otherwise unseen public. One in which Shizu tells me is a “space that is often antagonistic.” These moments on the bed sheet softly intimate that we adjust our way of seeing so that we can locate hope that the public space be merciful towards the lovers we observe, who not so incidentally happen to be gender minorities, women and queer people of color.

But I’d like to go beyond the banality of intimacy here and offer another reading that brings intimacy in a different way that adds to queer romantic rapture. I have to bring it back to the state of fandom, of being fanatical, of being the #1 fan. That set of feelings that come with gushing, twitching and stalking the object of our admiration and affections. Have you ever seen early Morrissey live performance videos and the bum-rushing of his err-bum onstage? That's because I like to think that queers make good, rabid fans, especially since as adolescents we tend to offset our outsider feelings of robust alienation with quiet, desperate longing. We make good fans because we act out emotional misfires and general fuckery on those that we love and that do not love us back. Most of our unwilling receptacles of our adoration nary have good reason for such worship—I mean, these crushes don’t sing, dance, act or write but we deem them crushworthy nonetheless. Then there are the capital-A Artists like Morrissey that literally offer in the form of “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out…” a vehicle needed to indulge in the melancholic search for sweet oblivion.

A first foray into fandom takes place in private—by pushing play on the CD deck, the iPod, and dare I say, the turntable. For me, this experience began in my bedroom with my Kenwood system and headphones handed down to me by my older brother, Jaime. The bedroom has a bed and that bed has sheets that witness, enshroud, embody the most intimate of acts. I appreciate Shizu’s use of the bed sheet as they operate as the placeholder of a secret affection transpiring between the gay and lesbian couples in her work. The private sphere of the bedroom is a place where many an awkward queer youth have reigned supreme be that with hairbrush in the mirror singing along to some stubborn torch song (like the young lad in Morrissey’s Last of The Famous International Playboys video) or making love to the mirror Superstar-style with the hopes of attracting a same-sex mate (just like the howling desire felt in “How Soon Is Now?”). Who of us that haven’t spent hours of practicing our Blue Steel gazes can cast the first stone?

I would like to cast the bedroom as the site of transgression, the private domain for queer youth; the last bastion before stepping into hostile domestic and public spaces shared by family members and ordinary citizens. It is the last over the shoulder peek at the mirror. The private and the public meet in Shizu’s work—the imaginary longing finding its tangible parallel in public and challenging invisibility with a stolen kiss, a tender moment, an embrace kept intact, never broken by what public spatial implications tend to do to its queer denizens.

Happy New Year. Be nicer to yourself.