4 & 5 May 2007

The LAB, San Francisco

Watchword Press held the second of their literary art shows "Whole Story" at the beginning of May. The event's goal is to join visual and performance artists with writers and create a unique event featuring the resulting collaboration. In this case, artists were invited to read and react to my story "A Concordance of One's Life".

If some of the images make little sense, it helps to read the story first. An introduction to it and a link to its text can be found here. More information on Watchword and Whole Story is available here, and their art and photo gallery of the event is right here.

Photos

Britta Austin with her fabulous creation.	Fortune cookies made from pages of an index.	The family from Golden Dragon.
Arthur Lyman Buford: Person of the Year. Courtesy Carolyn Boyd	Some astounding works by George Pfau (left) and Alexandra Pratt (not pictured). That nameless chump on the right's just blocking good art.	A Concordance of One's Life: The Gold Anniversary Edition. Andrew Touhy jumps in the pool with his own humorous take on the story.
The limp skeletal remains of Ken James and the Fellow Travelers Performance Group.	"... and soon they're fucking their brains out like spring rabbits!"	Thu Tran sings Dylanesque odes to Arthur Lyman Buford.
Organizer Laurie Doyle imagines Chi-Tung's desk at home.	Foggy Falls looms large; no see-also reference required.	The silk-screened poster Watchword used to advertise the event. Courtesy Watchword Press
Pins handed out for everyone to proudly wear. Courtesy Watchword Press	Tatiana's collage captures all the story's elements in a compact space. Courtesy Tatiana Perfilov	Aaron Thomas Nelson's Joe Doogan discovers brain-eating Concordance tourists in a post-apocalyptic future. Courtesy Aaron Thomas Nelson
A panoramic view of the entire gallery. In the full view, I'm the one standing in the center wearing a hat and a tie and a blank look of disbelief. Courtesy Jesse Clark Studios

Sightings

• Jesse Clark and Dafna Kory designed a rather unique installation: a miniature video display inside a wall-mounted Chinese take-out container. The headset played soothing and quirky music to video of tourists admiring an unidentified view and taking pictures of themselves. Experience the video here.
• Jack Hanley gets some shots of the artwork (scroll to the bottom of the page). The book jackets blanketing the floor is ZYZZYVA editor Howard Junker's installation. If you think the painting on the wall looks like Peyton Manning, you are correct; Mike "True Arm" Trudy is a dead-ringer for the Super Bowl XLI MVP.
• The Chronicle surprised everyone involved and ran a full story on the event in their weekend insert 96 Hours. Somehow their reporter managed to flub the basic premise of my story. Be it known that the SF Weekly got it right, although their article is no longer available online. (Watchword has a reprint available.)
• Leah Garchik of The Chronicle mentions the show only in service of relating the "humorous" anecdote of art viewers standing on Howard Junker's installation ... some bad news for you, Leah: the installation was billed as a rug of book jackets. People were standing on them all weekend long.
• Howard Junker, incidentally, announced his installation on his blog and has a couple of photos of crowd dynamics at work upon it.
• Sonya Worthy discusses the event on her blog People Reading. She got a good picture of the Golden Dragon family's worn-out copy of the Concordance.