Month: January 2004

Dreaming of Disease

One of the more intense images at SF MoMA was a photograph of sugar and blood by Shimon Attie, from a series called “White Nights, Sugar Dreams.” Although not all his art deals with the subject, this image was a way for the artist to address and interpret his diabetes.

For viewers, the images not only offer a way to understand diabetes, but position diabetes as a metaphor for general illness, forbidden desire, and for discontent. Sort of like diabetes cookbooks.

Other articles delve further into Attie and his contemporaries, but the real impact for me was the way that his art acts as a bridge between his disease and the outside world. How does my art (not as good as Attie’s, but I long ago discarded the fear of mediocrity: there’s no wheat without chaff, and if my art is crap, at least I enjoy making it) work with respect to my particular ailments? (Yeah, sure, art can reflect health and joy and success too, but let’s be honest: the cool stuff is the conflict, the death, the things that disturb, sicken, fascinate, and madden.)

Anyway, I want to start creating more, not just in a blogging way– making prints or shirts, writing, going back to that Rojas translation. I’ll be posting, I hope, pieces of the Rojas translation, possibly in a new category, shortly.

Consuming San Francisco

I’m back, although having a hard time getting back into the blogging swing for some reason. I will post pictures later, and restaurant reviews, and thoughts on SF MoMA and art. But for now, I’m still a little dazed.

Every year I do my shopping after Christmas, because it’s cheaper and because I try to avoid stores during most of December, since it’s so insane and I hate the carols. Of course, lots of other people do this too: apparently December 26th is the 9th biggest shopping day of the year. So, come January, I’m as over-shopped as the rest of the country.

Fave items of consumption this past week: the Moon Metro guidebook, Aria, a store of bizarre crap, Modern Appealing Clothing, not to be confused with MAC the makeup shop, True Sake, which is quite friendly and helpful despite the complete ignorance of every single customer including me, and food-wise, Ozumo, restaurant of criminally delicious food: unagi topped with foie gras, hamachi collar with ponzu/veal jus, flights of sake, ginger sorbet with plum wine, perfect maki, perfect execution in the entire enterprise. Yes, that was my birthday treat.

Quite a lovely city for wandering, peoplewatching, shopping, and general consumer madness– or for that matter, general madness, since many of the world’s delusional schizophrenics seem to have settled on its streets to mutter at passers-by.

Thought and beauty will come later today, with any luck.