America you can hurry while you drink a cup of coffee. So there for you is my one typical thing.
But today my goal was that I needed to charm Hano so that he would give me the donkey head. He already promised that he would give it to me, but when he made this promise, he sounded reluctant. I think perhaps he does not trust me with it, because I have told him too many stories and he thinks I am a criminal. I told him for example what I do when I must style a shoot that has no budget and we need for example an anonymous black sweater: I buy it from the Gap, and I use it in the shoot, and I make sure that the model is not stinking it up with her armpits when we are in the sun all day on the beach at the Howard Johnson’s at Asbury Park in New Jersey, and then I return the sweater to the Gap for the full refund. Hano said, when I explained this to him, that one day I would be arrested. He is never alarmed, but this story about the Gap alarmed him. And I think when I asked him would he give me the donkey head, he thought, Oh no, Ana will lose it to the police.
My idea was to bring therefore breakfast to Hano, as a charm, because he goes always early in the morning to his studio without eating. So I stopped at a Chinese bakery and spent ten dollars on rolls. Ten dollars buys a gargantuan bag of Chinese rolls, but even after I bought the rolls, I felt that I needed more of a charm. So I bought also crabs at the Chinese fish market. The blue crabs, that are alive. They were very hale, and did not have even bubbles at their mouths, even though they were in a tub without water and it is August.
With the crabs and the rolls I arrived finally at Hano’s lobby, and got the visitor pass, and took the elevator up. He has a studio on the ninety-first floor of Tower One at the World Trade Center. It is so tall, this Tower One, that you must change elevators at a sky lobby on the seventy-eighth floor. And you meet always the ugliest people there. But this is where Hano has his studio, down the hall from the boys who did the balcony thing. I came to his door, and he was at work on something that was built from glass.
“Hi, Hano! I have brought you breakfast.”
“Hi, Ana.”
“What do you mean, ‘Hi, Ana,’ as if every day I am coming and it is not a surprise to see me. You! How are you?”
“You called ahead and I am getting you past security, so it cannot be a surprise.”
“You can try despite this to be happy.”
This is how he is, always not impressed. To make his point he scrubbed his glass sculpture for a while still before he got up to kiss me. Hano has all of his hair shaven off, and he has the eyes that often gay men have. Weiß’ du, the deep eyes, with dark eyelids and very feminine eyelashes. With these eyes and his hair shaven off, Hano looks like a man from the future. He said “Hi” while he kissed my cheeks.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Yes, Hano. Look what I have along for breakfast! Delicious.”
“God in heaven! They live. They are a wonderful blue. We perhaps can boil them alive in my coffeepot?”
“Do not be this way. Act surprised at my crabs. What sort of demon are you that you every day eat blue crabs for breakfast and are not surprised when I bring you beautiful crabs as blue as the sky?”
“Look, Ana, it is August and the sky is gray. I am surprised. Do you have butter for these crabs?”
“Do not be this way. I have also along twelve kilos of Chinese pastry.”
“God in heaven, breakfast!”
“Now you act surprised.”
We sat on the floor and ate the Chinese pastries. Hano makes recreations. He sewed a recreation of the golden dresses from this painting by Klimt with the many girls and then hung them on a rack under the plastic dry-cleaning bags. This sold for many thousands of dollars. He did the same for this Raphael with all the philosophers. But now he is tired of clothes and dry-cleaning bags, and he wants to build a glass freezer. What he imagines is to recreate the menu of a Dutch still life, with pheasant and fruits and bread. And then he wants to put all of it in Ziploc bags and freeze it in a glass case, like leftovers. But this was very difficult. Because his freezers have mist and icicles. So while we ate, we put the blue crabs into one of his failed glass freezers.
HANO MOLTKE explains the pantomime eyes (early August 2000):
Ana had seen the donkey head at one of my parties in Red Hook. When she asked if she could borrow it for a shoot, I said by all means. I only wish that she had not made this gesture with the blue crabs. What does she want me to think? “Oh, Ana, you are so surreal, because you brought me live blue crabs.” I already knew that she was a little bit of a fiend, without the crabs. She is proud that she is a fiend. In the morning, if she needs to go downtown, she waits for a businessman to hail a cab on 2nd Avenue, she asks him if she may share the cab, and when they have gone almost all the way downtown and have stopped in traffi c, she gets out and walks away. She does not say anything or pay anything, she only walks away. She thinks that businessmen will not chase her, because they are too rich and too busy. I told her that someday she would be arrested, and she laughed at me. So she is a little bit evil, I think.
But the donkey is a little bit evil too. Michael and I bought it in Honduras, and I paid too much. But one feels silly in these villages trying for a bargain, and how could I resist a stuffed donkey’s head? Originally it had glass eyes, with corneas that were orange, but those I took immediately out, because they made the whole donkey look haunted by regret. When we were back in Red Hook, Michael and I had it over our dishes, with no eyes. It was very spooky. But then the cord that held it up over the dishes snapped, and the donkey head in the middle of the night fell down and broke Michael’s porcelain. Also the hide got wet and started to smell funny. Michael said that the donkey was therefore a thing of evil and must go to my studio.
But it was Michael who found for me at a yard sale the plastic eyes from a pantomime horse, which I sewed over the original eye sockets. And now the pantomime eyes give the whole donkey head a comic appearance.
I asked Ana, while we ate the Chinese breads, for what did she need to borrow the donkey head, and she said, “It is for the New York Times Magazine.” This is standard for her, to hide at first her true motive, until you have agreed to her plan. Ana asked me to do her a favor and lend her the donkey head, but in fact the favor is not for Ana, it is for the New York Times Magazine. Someone has a new line of denims for winter, and Ana wants to do a shoot inspired from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. So she needs my donkey head, because of this donkey man who is in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She wants to have a model in her shoot who will be naked, except that he will wear the jeans, naturally, and the donkey head. And he will float in the middle of a flock of fairies, who will be nude except for their wings. It all seems very crass to me, but Ana must have quite a budget, and so for her it must be a triumph. Every photographer whom I know is obsessed with this New York Times Magazine.
ANA KAGANOVA explains her obsession (early August 2000):
Tja, I have to make money somehow.
NADINE HANAMOTO explains Jennica’s obsession (early August 2000):
Jenny hasn’t told you how obsessed she was about George when we were in high school, and it’s because she’s embarrassed. It didn’t start on the day of Loma Prieta, either. Loma Prieta was just what brought it to the surface. We were sitting in my car a few minutes after the earthquake, listening to KGO. And the callers and the reporters were like,
