THE GOLD RUSH (1925) dir. Charlie Chaplin

nothing like a watching a silent film on a sunday evening with the los angeles chamber orchestra performing the original accompaniment! charlie chaplin's THE GOLD RUSH (1925) is a comedy at its finest. i almost cried at the end. i would have brought francine for the occasion, but she was nursing hungover at home (needless to say, silent film galas do invite fox furs). the cut we watched was as close to the director's cut you could get, pieced together from a two later versions of the film and a salvaged 35mm print from a private collection. the original cut has been lost to history. 

it was very comforting. i am happy right now. 

yayoi kusama / more polka dots

in my teenage-angst phase i had this poster above my bed for many years. the edges got so frayed by the duct tape that i had to throw it away. 

"yayoi kusama: flowers that bloom at midnight" is on exhibition at the gagosian gallery in beverly hills from may 30 to july 17. 

i'm a feather-cloaked mighty thunder.

i wore my techni-color dream coat last night at the opening at the gagosian in beverly hills. the cameraman who was taping the show followed me around everywhere. its such a showpiece. 

i bought it from my friend sielian, who owns a vintage store on melrose and doheny. she started out with a plot at the melrose trading post, until all the celebrities persuaded her to open a store in west hollywood. she's great. 

it's a vintage geoffrey beene swing-coat, from the sixties, in the vein of edie sedgewick, who in turn comes from a long line of dilettantes. you have to try it on to understand. once you put it on you feel like you are wearing a cloud. it imparts levity to my so-called life. 

by the way, the yayoi kusama show was all pathology and polka-dots; it made me want go insane too. she lives in an asylum, voluntarily, in tokyo. i thought maybe a polka-dotted dress would have been more appropriate for the occasion. i have this great de la renta one, but i'm not sure if it still fits. 

maybe it wasn't so genius, but i kept saying: "thoughts on dots?" while laughing hysterically (they caught this on tape, i know). it was almost a dr. seuss nightmare. no one answered, no one thought it was funny, but francine, my fox-fur sidekick from paris, replied: "no thoughts, but i'll have another plastic cup of that chardonnay, s'il vous plait." 

francis bacon II

high art meets photobooth. 

francis bacon

there's a new francis bacon retrospective at the met. i stumbled upon this picture of him posing next to meat. i think its pork. it must be pork. then look at the painting.

bacon once said that he wanted his pictures to "look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory, a trace of past events as the snail leaves its slime." 

a friend then told me that marcel proust had a similar childhood memory.  he discussed the trace of human slime, which he likened to that of a snail, except that he used the analogy to describe his first wet dream.