GET HUBBIED

I drove out to CalArts. It is a skooch off the beaten track, but what glorious weather - it was like a vacation in an afternoon. I was a bit early, and it was a bank holiday so the halls were empty but for a few hard-cores, which served to up the atmosphere of my visit.

Abel will do a drawing of Liz and one of Jon - the portraits will form a diptych. He's thinking of using the charcoal pencil on pencil technique so that depending on where you are in the room, the imagery appears and disappears. This is as good a photograph I was able to get in the studio lighting, but its good enough to get the point across. Jon and Liz will be supplying Abel with a couple of images of each of them as teens to choose from. I like that they'll be rendered at the age at which they were on the verge of becoming adults, aptly since Abel’s work deals with this time in a boy’s life.

There are some curious titles in Abel’s bookshelf, one of which has the word Bride on it. Are there two copies of a book called "Terror Hospital"? There are several boy oriented books, even an author named Kidd, but I gotta borrow this one: "Some Faggy Gestures," by Henrik Olesen.

Abel's upcoming thesis show will be focusing on images of boys in water. The imagery in the painting and Cyanotypes are sourced from life-saving instruction photographs. Taken out of context, underscored and isolated by Abel, they become eerie and romantic. To me, the boys in his work communicate a wistfulness, a glorious naivete, a physical and spirited admiration of youth. The painted shirtless bodies with limbs flailing, posing or floating in water submissively held by another - they all capture some essence of boyhood communal innocence on the edge of being lost.

Abel's upcoming thesis show will be focusing on images of boys in water. The imagery in the painting and Cyanotypes are sourced from life-saving instruction photographs. Taken out of context, underscored and isolated by Abel, they become eerie and romantic. To me, the boys in his work communicate a wistfulness, a glorious naivete, a physical and spirited admiration of youth. The painted shirtless bodies with limbs flailing, posing seriously for portraits, or floating in water submissively held by another - they all capture some essence of communal innocence on the edge of being lost.

and the man himself

This is a graphic I found in one of the non-Braille versions of Boys Life. It reminds me of a family crest, or a wonderful tattoo

small but sure steps towards equal rights
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and of course this gives the Republicans something to moan about
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newsflash:

Supermodel Kate Moss has asked her friend Tracey Emin to create the artistic backdrop for her upcoming wedding to The Kills guitarist Jamie Hince. "Kate has agreed that Tracey will put her unusual artistic stamp all over the wedding, with no holds barred," a source told a Web site, apparently. "Tracey has so far been working on sculptures of the happy couple in preparation for the ceremony.

It already feels as if a fog has lifted regarding the role Joe will play, and its only our second conversation. It feels slightly useless to me now that I spend any time worrying about things - I chose all of these artists for a reason; I admire and trust them. Joe pulled open the dark curtains in my brain by simply saying that he would work between and around the other artist's ideas - it will be a part of his work to play off of the structure we create for him. In other words, it doesn't matter where the table/s are and how the guests move through the space and what the timing is like - Joe will be privy to all the relevant conversations about these things over the months ahead; his subsequent ideas/words will be the glue that binds it all together. But to put it simply, his role will be how to structure the monologue/dialogue with Jon and Liz and the guests.

Every time we meet something else will become clear. This process is certainly not boring. PS - My multi-talented friend Tif is back from Denmark and has agreed to help me this month with the project.

Valentine's day has come and gone. I spent most of that day looking at fonts online, but also took some time for a bit of reflection on loves past. February 14th is such a strange day for couples and non-couples alike. Some perceive it to be forced and commercial, which of course is true, but its also an opportunity to express love. Not such a bad thing.

I thought I'd share my moment of bought-and-paid-for romance. It was at the end of my big CoTour project. I happened not to be dating anyone at that moment and thought about how nice it would be to share that celebration of a job well done with someone special. It struck me instead to enjoy the fact that I wasn't with anyone and to purchase a fake boyfriend for a night, blur perception a bit. So I hired a male escort, Alex, to show up at the closing party for the event and instructed him to treat me like an adored girlfriend. The effect was exactly as I'd hoped: it confused the living daylights out of all my friends and family. My mom and my sister kept trying to get him away from me thinking he was some kind of stalker. Alex was certainly not my type, which served to increase mystique, but at a certain point I had to tell my mom and sis that he was paid for that they should back off and let me reap the rewards of my purchase. He brought me flowers, got drinks for me, put his leather jacket over my shoulders when it got cold and his arm around my waist, and he did it all with convincing starry-eyes. I know he was thoroughly amused, and I can't describe my elation; it was worth every greenback I laid down. At the end of the night Alex fetched his yellow corvette and we screeched away into that platonic night.

"Here's a not-at-all surprising fact about me & Liz: we love creating traditions & rituals. Serious ones, silly ones, whatever. Sometimes they last a very short time before petering out. Sometimes they last years. So it should further be no surprise that we have a Valentine's Day tradition.

But here's a maybe-surprising fact: our Valentine's Day tradition pre-dates our relationship. Or rather, pre-dates our romantic relationship. Liz & I, along with Liz's then-co-worker Jane, were casting about for something to do on V-Day, back in 2004. We were three singles, at least somewhat irritated by all of the coupledom around us being celebrated. We decided, simply enough, to go out for drinks. So we went to Hop Louie, a great divey bar in Chinatown. The evening was super fun. So much so that the three of us went back the next year (though by then, Liz & I were together). By 2005, you could no longer smoke in Hop Louie, but it was still a great night, filled with many whiskey sours, Glen the bartender's hilarious running commentary on what was on the teevee, and the occasional cartwheel.

We've gone back just about every year since. In 2006, Liz was in Germany for work, so Jane & I made plans to go on our own, only to find that Hop Louie was closed for filming. We still had a great night at Dinner Club M, but somehow it was reassuring that Liz seemed to be needed for the V-Day magic of the tradition. In 2007, we had to bail on Jane, as Liz was sick. So I went to the video store and picked up the very cute comedy Mystery Men. Halfway through the movie, lo and behold, there's a scene at, yes, Hop Louie! The tradition lives on! Jane has since moved to the Bay Area, but Liz & I carry on the tradition.

So what's this about serendipity? In an early meeting with Bettina, she told us about an earlier project, the HubbyCo CoTour, which included stops at some of her favorite east-side locales. I think you can guess which awesome Chinatown bar was prominently featured.

If you don't know Hop Louie, you should. And if you're there next year on 2/14, feel free to buy us a whiskey sour".

-JZ, 2/15/11

Just a shout-out to friends-of-this-project over at Dinner Party Download.

This week, they discuss an historical wedding both incredibly adorable and somewhat objectifying/exploitative: the 1863 wedding of Charles Sherwood Stratton (aka Tom Thumb) to Lavinia Warren. I know that there's a degree of objectification in most weddings -- with the couple as object -- but with some weddings this is more true than others. When PT Barnum organizes your wedding, there's more objectification than most. And when your wedding is a piece of art, there's also more objectification than most.

To be clear: I am not trying to make any point about being an object or a tool (relative to Bettina or to GetHubbied) in the way that I think most of us suspect that Tom Thumb was primarily a tool for Barnum. Bettina is incredibly respectful, and has gone to great pains to ensure that there's no trace of exploitation in this enterprise. But from the perspective of The Couple, it's hard, at times, not to feel instrumental.

As a special bonus, this week's DPD contains an interview with Chris Burden. (Which, in an oblique way, is yet another wedding reference, though perhaps only for one-half of the creators of DPD itself.)

Anyhow, check it out. Good stuff.

-JZ

She was 20 at the time

This is so uncanny, since Liz's Aunt looks a whole heck of a lot like my mom did in 1968, and its not just the hair. Odd that announcements back then listed the home address of the parents, though today there's more personal details printed about the couple. I love that there's a book of the month advertisement on the page.

A recent message from Ellen Marie:

"I wish I could bring to a marriage now a combination of all life has taught me so far—and those looks! And where did those 43 years go?"

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and my personal favorite line: ..."pigs in a blanket and the bleakness of the bouquet toss"

Here is the latest from Liz regarding how we address the ceremony's flow, aesthetics, content and guest arrangement. We've been in a spirited dialogue with Karen Kimmel, Miguel Nelson and Joe Sola, who are the artists dealing with these aspects of the wedding.

"Thank you all so much for all your ideas so far—you has given us so much to think about. I can’t say enough how pleased Jon and I are about the artists Bettina has selected for this project. Your ability to both critically examine the wedding in terms of the aesthetics and the content of the ceremony, with a deep sensitivity about how those two elements are fundamentally intertwined, is going to result in a radical reworking that we could never have dreamed of ourselves but that we really wanted, and we are SO excited about that. Jon and I need to sit down and talk all this through together, but these are my initial thoughts about what’s been discussed so far:

A couple of points:

One of the most important things we want to “solve” in the ceremony/reception is creating a space of family and community and folding in the “guests” as participants/support rather than “audience.” I am hopeful that will partly be achieved in the ceremony itself, but it can also be addressed by creating a space in which people feel moved to be a part of things---comfortable, taken care of, relaxed enveloped in a genuine sense of hospitality and beauty.

The other dilemma presented by the ceremony/reception is: How might we bring a sense of ritual and the sacred to a secular ceremony (because the fact is, we are still opting to have a “ceremony” and call it a “ceremony”). Is there a secular vocabulary that exists (or that you/we can invent) that will bestow a sense of the gravity of the undertaking and mark this rite of passage for us and our friends and families. (Jon will probably take issue with my invocation of “sacred,” but I can’t really think of a better word for it.) FYI, the definition of ritual is: “a set of actions, performed mainly for their symbolic value. It may be prescribed by a religion or by the traditions of a community. The term usually excludes actions which are arbitrarily chosen by the performers.” This latter point is important to point out because I think we have to fold people in by drawing on the somewhat familiar, lest it become too unfamiliar/non-shared and thus too “performancy.” The idea is that we capitalize on values and gestures that we already all have, or at least recognize, even if they aren’t typically used in a wedding.

This is all to say that I think that Jon and I are pretty much willing to throw most conventional wedding tradition out the window if it means we can achieve the above two things (with the caveat that we recognize that making things too unfamiliar might scare the guests a little, and we want people to be comfortable.) So, to answer your specific questions:

I initially like the idea of the ceremony as a course as part of a long dinner, especially because of the ritual tradition of feasting/food and how that might be part of the larger ritual of the marriage. There is huge history, in terms of food and ritual, to draw on (even in the most quotidian Sunday service, one drinks wine and eats bread, right?) and it could be employed in a really interesting way that would be familiar and comforting to people. There is also, of course, the clichéd metaphor of marriage/love/commitment as metaphysically “nourishing” and “sustaining”—something, again, that would pretty much resonate with everyone, I would think. So, incorporating it into the framework of a shared meal could be a really beautiful gesture of tying together all the themes we are trying to bring to the forefront. I also like the idea of a multi-course journey a lot—I think that could be a really interesting way to get people to come together through a shared experience of participation.

My concerns about it would be: What does Joe Sola think about this? Is the idea interesting to him, and would he want to work with it? If the wedding is a long dinner, does that mean everybody sits at their assigned place for most of the night? Because it is also our wish that we get people to circulate among each other and come together as a larger community—not just pockets of people who already know each other. (This treads a fine line, though, because we don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable my making them talk to strangers all night either…) Would the evening be so rigidly orchestrated as to be exhausting for guests after a while? And, yes, would I be too nervous by course 4 that I would not be able to say my vows?

I love the idea of having the table set-up as sculpture. I initially (even before Get Hubbied) really wanted long tables because I wanted more of a sense of “feast” and “dinner party” and not a sense of corporate hotel ballroom wedding, which is what those round tables suggest to me. I know there are serious space constraints what with the way the larger room is set up, especially with the columns, and that long tables are likely not possible. But if we can get to the ideas of hospitality, party, community, etc., with an interesting configuration, I am all for that. Forming a big circle around the dance floor/ceremony space, which was Miguel’s initial thought, is appealing--it’s definitely that kind of spirit which I’d like to foster, even if that’s not the configuration we ultimately choose.

I know that Karen is working out something amazing for the floral/aesthetics and, honestly, given her work I’m pretty sure I’m going to like whatever it is she’s thinking about doing. I do also love the idea of the Woolly Pockets, especially because, and I think I mentioned this before, Jon and I were initially really set on having the ceremony outdoors, so bringing in plants and flowers into the space in a way that they are very layered and dense like nature itself (even if that means we are using stencils or paint or paper or whatever Karen decides she wants to work with) instead of just a flower arrangement here or there is super appealing to me and will be very beautiful.

Many, many, many thanks!

Liz"

The Center for the Arts, Eagle Rock, will be the location for GET HUBBIED. Its signed sealed and yet to be delivered - but it will. Continued thanks to their entire staff who have been so open-armed and enthusiastic about this wedding project and patient with me, Jon and Liz with all the meetings, questions and time spent.

They have even offered above and beyond to promote and house a one month exhibition of all the art works, films and ephemera from the day, the day being: September 24th of this year! So, its a very happy announcement indeed.

The exhibition will open 2 weeks after the wedding to allow for film editing, photo printing and organization for the show. Of course I will be posting news as it arises.

Click for their website