Hi!
Happy Spring!
It seems I’m due for a news report upon the fascinating topic about which I seem to know more than anybody: no, not the subtle nuances of every frame in the final scene of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. And no, not the ins and outs of gyro enjoyment. The topic of which I speak is moi.
Since December when I last wrote, a lot and a little has happened. I have been hard at work, and I have been destroyed by grief, not necessarily in that order. Jim’s and my precious dog Dory died, and everything leading up to the end of her life on February 25th and up through now has been colored by our extreme sadness. Listen, I acknowledge that this newsletter is a soft-pedaled, mildly entertaining form of self-promotion and quasi-literary schmoozing, so why would I bring all the sad stuff to the forefront when I’m trying to appeal to the masses? Somewhere I read iconic art writer Dave Hickey’sadvice to artists* that we should always smile and appear happy when we’re out at art openings and events—people are turned off by sadness and won’t want to work with us otherwise is the theory. I actually think it’s true, but if I’m really sad and for some reason force myself to go out, I always forget to do it the Dave Hickey way, and that’s what is happening here. Not me forgetting, really, but me just not doing.
With that out of the way, let us proceed with our regularly scheduled longwinded time-killer!
In January I was approached by Tupelo Quarterly, the digital child of the prestigious Tupelo Press, to be their Visual Artist of the Month. It was an honor, and I loved seeing my work laid out so beautifully on their site:
Soon after the Tupelo Glory faded, I was off to wonderful Providence, Rhode Island for 10 days in residence at the famed Wedding Cake House. I applied to the Wedding Cake House as an interdisciplinary artist focusing on my writing, and I was thrilled and relieved to be accepted to this great residency on those merits (rather than just my visual and performing art merits) for the first time! I was there to write, and indeed, that’s what I really did: while I was there, I started and completed the first draft of “Lewd Tomatoes,” Chapter 6 from my upcoming multi-genre memoir “More Than You Need to Know About an Artist You’ve Never Heard Of”. And that was between cooking a couple nights for the sweet & talented WCH gang, nightly dinners and artists’ presentations, a public presentation and open studio for the community and off-site visits with some of my best Providence pals Kate Irvin, Christopher James Beaudoin, Kent Stetson, and Joe Segal, a visit to Joe’s gorgeous must-see flagship store for his brand “Pretty Snake,” The Snake Den, and an outing one evening to see what a drag show at an arcade can be like!
When I returned to New York after my time in Providence, Jim and I had only a couple of weeks to get our shit together for a show we had booked at our beloved neighborhood art joint/bar/venue—Francis Kite Club—for February 23rd. Since the time when I did my residence there in the previous year, Francis Kite Club has upgraded their booking protocol, and when I went online to fill out my submission for review, I found that I was asked for a title and description of our show. Unprepared, I impulsively called our show “For the Children” and described it as an evening of songs on the theme of children and childhood. I DON’T KNOW WHY!
But Jim and I decided to stick with the title and theme, and I’m glad we did. Among other songs loosely tied to the theme, we included two songs that Jim and I had written about Dory, sung from her imagined perspective, Jim’s “Believe Me”and my “Don’t Go”. We did not realize at the time we planned the show how fast her decline was going to be. By the time the 23rd came around, we had already scheduled the appointment to euthanize Dory for two days after our show, and we were complete disasters. For us, the evening—supported (thank gourd!) by our dear friend, fellow songwriters group member, and music idol Amy Bezunartea—became an excruciating tribute to our daughter that we somehow made it through!
Before I knew what was going to happen with Dory, I had planned for a residency at Yaddo beginning on the 26th—one day after Dory’s vet appointment, but I was in no condition to go. I rescheduled my starting date for a few days later. When my new departure date arrived, I was in only slightly better shape, but I really had very little choice, so I left Jim behind with a beautiful, loving, largely untrained juvenile pitbull whom we mystically found abandoned on our block on the cold night before I was set to leave. (Jim fostered the dog, whom we named Van, for 3 ½ weeks, sending him off with his newly adopted parents the night before I returned.)
Yaddo is an amazing place, designed to nurture artists and provide us with the time and space we crave to produce our best work. Producing my best work was not what I was thinking about, though—I was just sad and missing my Dory & now my Jim, too. But I was there, and I also had a commitment to uphold—I had taken on an official position at Yaddodesigned to be a sort of welcoming figure who greets arriving guests and tours them around the grounds, among a few other minor tasks. I had to pull myself together. The first thing I did was to do this large brush and sumi ink drawing of Dory on paper. I haven’t done a figurative drawing with such deliberation in ages, but it just seemed the obvious thing to do.
I know this isn’t the greatest work of art, but it looks enough like her and is big enough to have taken up space in my studio the way Dory’s sweet, hovering spirit had/has been doing in my waking (and sleeping) dreams. It helped me relax a little bit about trying to carry on in the pursuit of art while everything else in me was saying that I needed to stop everything and grieve Dory. With her present in this way, I was able to get to work. And I did:
At Yaddo I mainly worked on my ongoing piece you have all heard about, “Then and Now (Everybody Loves Flowers #4)”. I spent a lot of intense time with a dense section of textiles that included embroidered daisies form the 1970’s, a half-finished embroidered pansy from Hope Senior Center where I teach, an ancient embroidered pillowcase end, and a lace-trimmed embroidered linen doily, sewing a variety of found sequins and crystals one-by-one on every bit of fabric left unadorned by the original anonymous embroiderers. It was great. The activity of sewing sequins on these powerfully loaded, beautiful found embroidered pieces is one of my favorite, most self-soothing things that I can do, even in the best of times. On this stretch at Yaddo, it anchored me and gave me the chance to sit still for hours, listening to music, singing, thinking about the beauty of each piece as I worked with it as well as the comfort and satisfaction found in this dream family I was creating within the whole project. And I thought about Dory and Jim and my family, even the ones I’m alienated from but mostly the real-life family who seems to have magically appeared but is actually the result of years of trust and love and treating each other well—and then choosing each other either deliberately or by default. THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN I SEW, SORRY!
You could look at it another way, though, and simply say that I worked like a bat out of hell and got a big chunk of that piece done. I’d say I’m about ¾ of the way done sewing on the sequins, so this could be the home stretch!
My studio at Yaddo was set up so perfectly for working on this piece—more so than any other studio I’ve used—so I resolved to put aside any other projects I’d imagined doing there just to take advantage of the opportunity. Every now and then, though, I did branch out a little, and I started messing around with some appliqued butterflies for a potential future project:
And I sat with this landscape-evoking arrangement of Huck-embroidered dish towels for the 2nd year in a row. (Maybe this is the final piece?):
AND I conned myself into revising “Lewd Tomatoes,” the chapter I had just written at the Wedding Cake Houseresidency, by committing to doing a reading of it for my fellow residents in an after-dinner presentation I shared with the sensational and spectacular author/poet/literary arts organizer/queer hero Michelle Tea.
I’m so glad my con worked, because that commitment forced me to polish up the first half of my previously unruly chapter to a presentable state that I felt proud enough of to present it to a room of fucking WRITERS who actually know how to write and publish and get awards for their beautiful and important writing, and it turns out they liked it! (Unless they were lying.) “Lewd Tomatoes” was a tough chapter for me to write, as it covers my romance and sex life from ages 19-29. If you do the math and you know me, you’re going to realize that that span of time includes my first years in New York complete with extreme drinking and angst-laden couplings on through my synchronized personal coming out to myself/going in the closet to everyone else with a fair amount of sex all throughout to be accounted for in graphic detail. I also include shoutouts to the motley crew of characters who influenced my feelings about my own sexual identity in those years, including my teacher Gerry Pryor, performance artist Annie Sprinkle, and author Andrea Dworkin. The accounts from my journals of my juvenile takes on these cultural heroes were easily as embarrassing to read aloud to my esteemed Yaddo friends as were the play-by-play accounts of my genital activities in those formative years. I thought I had it all together, but when I finished reading, I realized that my eyes were wet, and tears had been slowly dripping down my face the whole time. I just love discovering new ways of crying, don’t you?
My time at Yaddo soon ended, and after opening my studio for the gang and playing them a little song…
…I packed everything up and returned home to New York City! Since I’ve been back, I have been setting the stage and doing all kinds of preliminary preparations for an exciting thing I’ll be doing this coming October 25th in my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri. The official announcement of this exciting thing will come soon. Just keep your ears to the ground about what Counterpublic is doing and/or stick with me—I’ll be shouting about it as soon as I’m able. I’ll just give you this as a little teaser: for this exciting thing, I have taught myself how to make a top hat, because that particular accessory will be very appropriate to wear while doing this exciting thing excitedly!
In other news, I was proud to have my dear friend and rock idol Neal Medlyn perform my original, “Smoking Song” as part his absolutely stunning and spectacular show, “Neal Medlyn Has a Job” at Joe’s Pub on April 15th. The show was an array of songs on the theme of work, sang from the perspective of a real-life security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Neal). Sounds simple, but for those of us artists and lovers of art who struggle to make a living working day jobs and side hustles (everyone I know), it was deeply moving, inspiring, and ovation-inducing. I hope Neal has the chance to do it again, and all of you out there get the chance to see it.
Speaking of side hustles, who out there needs a wallet??
I recently stocked the shop with three of my House of Larréon Handmade Kamp Kraft Hi-End GREEN Leather Wallets™️. Green wallets have been scientifically** proven to bring their holders more GREEN! More cabbage! More Do-Re-Mi! More MONEY!!! Jim & I have been using my beautiful handmade green wallets for years, and maybe we’re not rich, but at least we haven’t gone completely broke—and going broke used to feel like an imminent possibility for us for many years. I CREDIT THE WALLETS FOR OUR HUGE SUCCESS!
You can read more about the wallets in the SHOP, but I’ll just tell you that they are entirely made by hand using upcycled authentic Coach brand leather samples and plastic lanyard lacing. Each one takes about 10 hours to make beginning to end. And yes you are correct, I am telling you this, so you will understand why they are not that cheap. But as your grandmother always told you, a House of Larréon Handmade Kamp Kraft Hi-End GREEN Leather Wallet™️ is a bargain at any price!
Maybe House of Larréon can be categorized as a side hustle for me, but wouldn’t you agree that it is the most glamorous and elegant side hustle there is? It’s also fun! One of my favorite parts of the Larréon Lifestyle™️ is when people send me pictures of themselves wearing their House of Larréon finery in the wild! Here are a few that were sent to me recently:
I mean just look at how elegant everybody looks!! If you would care to exude similar je-ne-sais-quoi effortless chicness in your jour-to-jour fashion life, just check out my SHOP where many of the t-shirts and accessories are in stock that you see modeled by the Wilhelmina supermodels above.
Did you forget about Dory? I didn’t. I will leave you with a song I recently wrote about her. It was a real squeak & snotter when I tried to sing it for our songwriters’ group a couple weeks ago, but someday I hope to get it together & sing it out as a tribute to our prized beauty of a soul, our daughter, our Dory Lee Linda Andralis Krone.
Thanks so much for reading this, if you did. If you did read it, thank you in advance for not telling me that I need to tone it down. If you didn’t read it, thank you in advance for pretending that you did. And to both categories of (non)readers, please send me updates on what you’re doing, and I will actually read it!
*Addendum: while I was still working on this newsletter, I took a break to go out to celebrate my friends Dean & Grace’s birthdays at a beautiful pizza party in their backyard in glorious Gowanus. The party was filled with all kinds of (mostly queer) artists and art world people like curators and art administrators. The conversations I had there were fun and stimulating, and sometimes even felt networky in only the most pleasant of ways. But nobody was pretending to be happier than they really were. I think Dave Hickey’s rule about seeming happy all the time so as to benefit your career is out the window, at least for the time being. Too much is fucked up in our world, particularly in our specific world of queer people whose lives are immersed in art, to act like things are OK. The NEA is basically gone. All of the institutions I care the most about have had their grants RECINDED after having been promised significant amounts of money. And we are all aware that the way we as artists are being affected is only the tiniest example of all the ways the Trump administration is illegally and immorally ruining the lives of disenfranchised (and all) people in this country. To show up at a party and hear “miserable” as a response to “How are you doing?” felt validating and correct. We have enough to deal with and enough work to do to fight this—and to just get through the days; I personally don’t intend to exhaust more of myself by putting on a show of non-depressedness just so some curator who is also depressed might find me more appealing. I don’t think the world of depressed partygoing curators are expecting that either, are they?
In conclusion, LET’S KEEP FIGHTING AGAINST THIS ADMINISTRATION AND FOR JUSTICE AND FREEDOM FOR ALL PEOPLE! There is no way to do it perfectly—I have been attending as many marches and protests as I can and not doing much else except for a message to a representative here and there. Letter-writing with Vote Forward. I pledge to do more and to continue to speak up in the moments when I witness injustice and hate rhetoric. I hope you will, too!
** “Never trust facts, because they are so often wrong”—Ruth Gordon
Oh, and please follow me on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube if you are so inclined.
Thank you, and good night.