Patrice Aphrodite Helmar

In the Sweetness of Time

I want to write about my experience attending the seven hour performance of Tom Kalin & Doveman’s, “In the Sweetness Of Time” before I forget what it was like. It’s a feeling, not unlike the urgency one feels when waking up from a dream, and wanting to write it down to remember.

When I was in second grade my grandfather died. Death of a grandparent is a fairly common occurrence for an eight or nine year old person. It was winter in 1989, and my large Irish, culturally Catholic clan arrived at our family home. My father and uncles started to build a coffin - looking back, this seems uncommon for that period of time. It may have been out of necessity, or frugality, or perhaps it seemed like a good sending off gesture.

My uncle Mark was a carpenter, and my father could fix anything. So for the week before my grandfather’s funeral, the kitchen, itself in a state of remodel, became a coffin workshop. A family friend, and several of my aunties sewed the satin lining. So all eight of my mother’s brothers and sisters were set to the work of making this last vessel for their father.

Friends and relatives filled the house that week, eating and drinking and telling stories in simultaneously hushed and loud voices. Often a cackle of laughter would interrupt otherwise solemn preparations. When the coffin was finished and ready to be taken to the funeral home, the men in my family loaded it up in the back of a station wagon. It was foggy that day, and the coffin jutted comically out of the trunk of the car. I imagine my youngest and most handsome uncle, Mark the carpenter, laughing nervously driving down the icy hill. I imagine my father sitting beside him smoking a rolled cigarette through a window just slightly cracked to sharp winter air.

The experience of spending seven hours in the gallery watching Kalin’s video projections, while listening to Doveman perform with a dazzling handful of musicians reminded me of a wake. A celebration of life and death. A closeness to friends, strangers, lovers, and family. A time to drink, remember, laugh or cry a little, and be near one another. It wouldn’t have worked in the same way in a larger space. The gallery, as one later arrival to the performance said so well, “feels like this is Tom’s living room.”

Yes, those who attended the show that evening, and stayed a little felt that familiarity. For some that feeling of closeness may have been repellent, and not everyone could stay. That a semi-public space became more private was signaled by friends sitting on the floor with one another, holding one another, shoes being removed, food and drink being shared, laughter and quiet conversations during songs.

Poems and stories were read, and we, the audience were set to remembering, not a single person - like at a funeral, but it seemed, everyone we’d lost. Not just those who have died, but also those who maybe broke our hearts a little.

The importance of being Gerry. 

Gerry Visco is unapologetically herself, irresistible to many in a city trying to desperately to be anything but. 

Her “Geriatric” burlesque performance is a celebration of the body electric, of aging on her own terms, and an undeniable, albeit, vulgar beauty. Visco thrives on autonomy and self recreation in a world where women are defined by their relation to men, youth, and visual aesthetic.

Gerry Visco last night in performance at Black Rose in the East Village. 

Halloween Parade in the West Village, NYC, 2015. 

7th Street meets Goldbelt Avenue | Juneau, Alaska. 2015.

Drinker at Le Petit Fer á Cheval in Le Marais, Paris, 2015.