"MY MEMORY TRANSLATES EVERYTHING INTO SOMETHING ELSE"

several days of rest (distance, testing, rehabilitation) still weren't enough for me not to feel what i felt at seeing a picture of the skyline of columbus, ohio on the cover of the sunday magazine yesterday. (or maybe they were exactly the amount of time necessary for the inspissation of that foggy sense of terminal disorientation -- and for boring myself into grasping at superficial symmetries.) one week earlier, we'd bought the paper at a market on lexington before having gone next door to have to flee the other clientele at joe coffee. there wasn't anywhere to sit and start the puzzle besides, but neither did we care to find out from the homo visiting from boston whether what he'd just recommended was, "like, a bar or a party" (as the two masc ues travel workout guys sitting across from him had just asked). the tall, beefy blonde behind the counter had laughed when we'd made an indiscreet joke about his other customers at the register just earlier, but we all knew that i wasn't doing myself any favors in making a lucrative marriage with that attitude -- and that those big, hairy arms of his were going to be hugging a big, hairy legacy endowment while i was still dreaming about getting mine (as it were). and that's what they call big city love.

i'd had my day of rest and my ice cream after fornino, and sunday was to be for getting back to business (two days ahead of time with the holiday!), which was probably going to mean just finally making it to the museum (where i really should have gone two days before). it had worked out, however, because she really wanted to see the yayoi kusama exhibition and, in addition to not having been able to go on friday, she had told me that she probably wasn't going to get around to going if she couldn't go with someone else. so we went to the whitney together on sunday after i had gone for a walk with my godson (on again off again weekend boyfriend and former tenant), the toy poodle called francis. i would have helped myself to the magazine if i'd found a copy at verb, but it had taken me long enough just getting coffee and i didn't want to take the extra time to look. we still needed to get bagels, and there would be a line at the bagel place too. but it was worth the second wait, because we had to wait again to get inside the whitney, and we got hungry while we were on line.

she knew kusama for her installations and had bought some books on the artist the last time she was on tour in japan. all of the rest of us liked her because marc jacobs did. the polka dot tentacles in the vuitton display windows, the profile in the paper, reminders (and more reminders) from friends with more self-determined taste, and we all finally made it that sunday. and we made a line. but my friend and i made the line just in time to get behind the woman from queens with four free guest admissions, so we would have to wait, but at least not to pay. and when we had made it through the line and around the second corner, we were standing right in the beeline of the couple of seniors that didn't want to wait until three-twenty to see the (already sold out) kusama installation that required separate admission from the general exhibition on the fourth floor and gave their tickets to us. plus, we had those bagels, which had taken over for friday's vietnamese sandwiches in my purse. not bad.

the exhibition wasn't bad either. kusama was prolific, and of the materials on display at the whitney, perhaps the most interesting were the personal items of kusama's that were on display to document her own documentation of the progress of her career from her youth through the time she spent in new york. the japanese american artist. and in an adjoining room, a slide show of photographs showing kusama dressed in a yukata and carrying a paper parasol as she walked through the city, an evocation of the same juxtaposition that was manifest in the staging of the exhibition itself at a museum dedicated to american art. kusama, as the sensation goes, currently resides in the same japanese psychiatric facility to which she voluntarily committed herself in 1977. her art, in retrospect, has been as much the changes in her process that were forced by the evolution of her social, psychological, geographical and spatial conditions as her output during any specific period -- the last examples of which i think the exhibition would have done well to do without. i think that i could, in one way or another, appreciate either virtuosity or revolution in every room of the exhibition until that last one, and both she and i were happy to leave it quickly behind us and exit to the elevators.   

the waits, i think, were worth it, but especially because the world's current fascination with yayoi kusama did me the favor of introducing me to sharon hayes, a collection of whose "speech acts" was being exhibited one floor down. "i march in the parade of liberty," the poster to the left of the elevators said, "but as long as i love you i am not free." and next to it, a bank of speakers delivered a recording of hayes' speech, the one that she delivered to an absent ex-lover on street corners throughout the city for the "event" described by the poster. i sat and listened to the entire voice over that accompanied a 33 minute film of the 1971 christopher street parade shot by women's liberation cinema and was reminded to remember the inherent politics of fucking. the means of reproduction. filling the park with the indignant contradiction of queer love. and when we left joe coffee and walked to the park to kill time until our time slot for the kusama installation, our indignance at the lack of more protest back at the coffee shop, at the branded reproduction of the liberated but impotent homosexualities of the new century, was so informed. that's how i remember it.

and i remember that the installation was unexpectedly anxiety inducing. we had to wait again, to go in one by one for our one minute each, and inside, although those fireflies on the water were dazzling, they were a lot to take in, and it was hard not to look at ourselves in all of the mirrors, and when we moved to look away into all of the lights in all of the refracted distances it was hard not to be distracted by the movement and not look back at what had caused it (which was us, of course, but each of us alone and in our turn). and in my turn, when my minute was up too quickly (which i knew it would be because i spent the entirety of it waiting for the door to open behind me and catch me off guard, and the waiting to wait before that was what had made us so anxious to begin with), when the minute was up i turned around too quickly on the catwalk and nearly had to grab a fistful of the dangling lights to keep myself from falling into the water, which, of course, wouldn't have kept me from falling into the water and which would have completely destroyed the installation. as it was, the person with the minute after mine was going to experience the fireflies in motion.

yesterday, before i got up to see that there was a picture of us on the cover of the sunday magazine, i'd been telling him about mine and her experience in the park between joe coffee and our escape from manhattan after the anxiety of the kusama installation. her in her shirt and tie and me with my purse with her half of an egg and cheese bagel inside of it. her with her coffee and me with the soda that the tall, beefy blonde had recommended. and all of the sunday tourists looking up at us to smile. because in that moment they realized it was ok, because, apparently, what they hadn't realized was that the dykes and the faggots were dating each other. he said that he'd laughed the first time he'd heard that, when he'd read it in my blog, and i told him sarcastic funny-like with a period after the one laugh in lowercase that the post wasn't written yet, although i might have written it already if i hadn't been wasting my time with him. ha. and whatever, i said, all good writing was just plagiarism with creative punctuation, thinking that i should definitely redact that line from the final version of the story.

"way to go ohio" is what it said over top of the skyline of columbus on the cover of the magazine. but seeing that picture with a different view of the skyline outside and down the street to the south only made me think of new york. and with everyone outside on the street dressed just like in the parade footage from 1971. i march in the parade of liberty, so i wish that to get to the crossword puzzle i wouldn't have to go through this picture. but then, remembering the sharon hayes exhibition that we'd visited one week earlier, i remembered what i'll say i'd forgotten until that morning when i knew i'd have to rewrite this whole thing so that it would be different from the one he'd already read: the big banner that was the thing that had most immediately and viscerally endeared me to the artist. "my memory translates everything into something else," which is to say, in my case, nothing new.