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October 13, 2005
Dream, Dream, Dream
Although we missed the Laurie Anderson opening, we were invited to a screening of her hour-long high-definition film "Hidden Inside Mountains" at the Sean Kelly gallery last night. We drank wine and nibbled at chicken-on-a-stick and tried our best not to stand out like sore thumbs while Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson and friends circulated about before and after the screening. We didn't know a soul and didn't feel like risking mortal embarrassment by talking to anyone. Other than that it was fun pretending to mingle with the artsy folk. The film itself was beautiful and largely abstract, sometimes with English and Japanese text (haiku) superimposed. Anderson plays with shadows, movement, and language, and there are plenty of self-reflexive references to art and film and spectatorship. I would love to see it again.
The entire exhibit, along with the film, arose out of a series of dreams that LA was having. There's a large book with illustrations of dreams and simple written explanations. The centerpiece of the show is a looping film of a dream-like scene in a dark room that includes LA herself watching the scene in the foreground.
In "Hidden Inside Mountains", one scene in particular reminded me of sick dreams I used to have when I was little. In these dreams, my body is gigantic -- blown completely out of proportion (I can only see part of it at a time) -- and my skin is unnaturally smooth and blank. I'm like a cartoon or a parade float. Something about the vision is grotesque and wrong. (In retrospect, it makes sense: I was projecting an image of myself that reflected how physically wrong I felt at the time. The repulsion I felt was the nausea.) The scene that reminded me of this in the film is of a man dressed in white. He lies down in front of two perpendicular screens -- as he does so, you notice that a camera on the floor near his head is transmitting real time video to the two screens. Once he's lying down, he opens and shuts his eyes, and a grotesquely large image of his head fills each screen. It was disturbingly familiar to me. It works as a metaphor for dreaming while at the same time clearly evoking that sense of distortion and dislocation you sometimes feel in a dream. There's also the sense of being both in the dream (at the mercy of it) and outside of it (aware that you're dreaming) at the same time.
After drinking a reasonable amount of free wine, we wandered through the meat packing district throngs, aimlessly looking for something worthy of a post-gallery visit with famous people. Pastis was packed with people from out of town. Another place required cash and we didn't have any, so we started walking south. I had no idea where Fatty Crab was, but it appeared out of the blue so we got to try it sooner than expected. The menu is one of the more unusual ones I've seen. For starters, we had quail egg shooters (good if you like raw quail eggs -- not sure I'd do that again) and an oyster omlette. The omlette had a nice sauce on top and had a bite -- Derek liked it more than I did. Both of the entrees we had were great: slow cooked pork ribs in delicious sauce for Derek, and "Nasi Lemak" -- coconut rice with chicken curry and a poached egg -- for me. The meat was falling off the bone in both dishes, and sides on mine were good, too. Interesting side note: The waitstaff was all male, young, and damn good-looking (Derek mentioned it -- I was just quietly enjoying the scene).
Posted by csageday at October 13, 2005 12:00 AM