Cowgirl's bo-hunk's robots 'n' stuff

Christian Crumlish

Last week I went to SF and finally met the honest-to-god Amazonian bitch-queen of the blogosphere, the Reverse Cowgirl her ownself, squiring her aptly named boyfriend, Christian Ristow around the grungy tearoom teabagging and teaspoon-heating' Tenderloin Rx Gallery, where three diabolectronicoes were showing off their kinetic art.

A daily self-portrait for three months running in a gilt frame. Enormous flapping dragonflies. An electronic monkey on your back wagging its tail in synch with your heart-beat or the megahertz hum, its limbs flailing in rough accord with your own, dangerously to one hipster's eye at one point. Fuzzed out TV monitors blaring. A suggested cover that doubled as a two-drink minimum.

Ristow shows off an enormous mouth, shell-casing teeth moving independently like a player piano in a soothing undulating rhythm until the jaw would unexpectedly snap shut with a loud crunchy clang. The mouth had a warmup ignition sequence and several times Ristow fretted over people flipping the switch to start it up wrong or a metal stay (I don't know the right name, mechanical klutz that I am) that should have been removed from one of the jaw pinions before the thing tried to move.

The mouth is beautiful too.

He also showcased a giant metal hand that would occasionally drum loudly on that metal surface it rested on, unless I hallucinated that.

I'm working on streamlining my digital picture-taking (see Scot Hacker for more stuff like "The Achilles heel of digital photography is that there's no risk/no expense, which encourages you to shoot five variants of everything, rather than one well-conceived shot. Nobody has any time, so the collections never get edited properly and you end up with mountains of superfluous bits to surf through in the future."), and recently bumped down the default resolution to take pictures more tailored to the web, where most end up (the rest are deleted or kept as image or composition fodder for paintings that never get painted). This means that instead of 93 shots on my big flashcard I get, I don't know how many, at least 263. I felt no inhibitions about taking pictures.

I started in downtown Oakland with some shots of the sky and some buildings, then I narrated the rapid transit under the bay
and short walk to the gallery, and finally I took a bunch of shots of the show. Later I selected the 105 shots that looked best, exported them from iPhoto at an even smaller res, and then tediously uploaded them all to my TypePad blog (there has to be a better way), and you can see the Robots gallery there now.

What else? I met the beguiling and technosavvy eroticon Violet Blue of Tiny Nibbles (the Cowgirl provided URLs with each x-pollinating introduction), and witnessed another fellow introduce himself to Susannah as a fan and kind of a stalker. I wondered if he meant lurker but Kowpie didn't think so.

It was like a live version of my blog. She introduced me to her fan and mentioned Radio Free Blogistan (much as she often links generously to me, my Salon Blogs A-List connection) and after contemplating my not tall, not female, not sex-discussing-reputation having self briefly he turned his attention back to the not obscure object of his not stalking desires (much as I imagine her copious readers glancing at her link to me and moving quickly on).

Meeting people in person is great. Let's hope it never goes out of style.