Martin Wong

Seventeen years ago, AIDS killed Martin Wong, an artist I'd never heard until a New York Times critic raved about a retrospective of his work at the Bronx Museum of Arts.

Here's what he looked like before he joined the Cockettes and left San Francisco:

Wong fancied himself as a rodeo cowboy after moving to New York.  Note the weird little demons that float around him. He was HIV positive by the time of this self portrait.

Divine may have influenced Wong to move East.  Wong was a member of the Cockettes when Divine visited San Francisco in 1970.

Wong called himself the "Human Instamatic." He painted in Loisaida, a mostly Puerto Rican neighborhood and hung out with taggers, or graffiti artists.

Wong shifted his focus to Chinatown once the gentrification of the Lower East Side began.

There aren't many women in the show.

He obviously preferred painting men, including Bruce Lee.

Wong celebrated multiculturalism decades before it became politically correct.

It isn't difficult to interpret his shout-out to the Statue of Liberty.

Wong painted bricks, an unlikely subject, painstakingly well.

Like sign language, tabloid humor, books, eight balls and constellations, they're a common motif in his work.

Firefighters and prisons were among Wong's obsessions.

He and and Miguel Pinero, who wrote the prison drama Short Eyes based on his own incarceration experience, were boyfriends.

This penis hangs in a separate gallery.  More bricks!

Wong's biggest work hangs in the museum lobby.  It reminds me of Lolita.

When Wong got sick, he moved back to San Francisco so his parents could take care of him. His last works are utterly bereft of color.

Wong would have been 70 in July.

David Bowie (1947 - 2016)

 Same old thing in brand new drag comes sweeping into view

As ugly as a teenage millionaire pretending it's a whizz kid world

You'll take me aside, and say

"Well, David, what shall I do? They wait for me in the hallway"

I'll say "don't ask me, I don't know any hallways"

But they move in numbers and they've got me in a corner

I feel like a group of one, no no they can't do this to me

I'm not some piece of teenage wildlife

NOBODY ever wrote more brilliant rock 'n roll lyrics.

My hero is gone.  Rest in peace,  Aladdin Sane.  You are forever tattooed on my left hip.

Post-Christmas Hangover

I never pass up an opportunity to visit Maspeth, Queens on a Saturday night.  Steven and Andrew invited me to experience the Suspended Forest with them.

There were hipsters galore, including a young woman with a box camera who stood apart from the selfie universe.  Everything old is new again.

It smelled great wandering through the alleys of discarded Christmas trees hanging upright from the ceiling.  Artist Michael Neff gathered them from the streets of Brooklyn.  

Thom arrived late but laid down on the floor as instructed.

The Knockdown Center, an old door factory, housed a couple of other exhibits, too.  Just look at the size of the place.

No contemporary art scene is complete without an ATM. Ka-ching.

Visitors were invited to stuff messages into Bloch, a tree trunk that a couple of Swiss artists have been towing around the world.  Here's what their project looked like in Berlin.

Carvings, some more primitive than others, adorn Bloch.

Mixed media artwork hung in a more traditional gallery space with much better lighting.

On our way to Williamsburg, for an excellent Mexican meal at Zona Rosa, we passed some interesting street art.