"The interaction I have with the imagery is a representational action of brief, efficient,and non-intimate interludes of a more notorious nature,"

says my friend, Tina Heringer. Woah!

This is the collage my friend Tina put up at The Revolution Cafe in San Francisco. It's called Strange Men I Picked Up On The Street, not because Tina bagged all these guys (she could if she wanted to, though I understand she's taken), but because she really really did pick them up. On the street. I saw her do it. I did not pick up any strange men myself. I just watched her technique and took lots of notes.



Here's how it all began. Tina found the central image first, in an alleyway. She mounted it upside down because, she said, upside down he's "the most vaginal man" she's ever seen. I have to agree with this, though the sharp-looking French woman who sat across from me did not. She thinks the upside-down guy's rather phallic. Which, okay.

Anyway, Tina found this image, then she found another, and then another. Strange men drifting all over the streets of San Francisco, peeking from dumpsters, lying around in bins. And it seemed like more than a coincidence to her, these men she was finding. So she started making a collage.



Tina began mounting the images on the cafe wall about three weeks ago, and the collage has been growing. I saw it at the beginning, when it was much smaller, though I only viewed it from a distance, as I was a little nervous about the "cool people" sitting at a table right in front of it. Then a couple of weeks later, to my absolute delight, Tina stopped by the bookstore and invited me to come over to the cafe and help out, if I could.

As we walked to the cafe she picked up a few men, including one on a greasy McDonald's bag containing several french fries. There were more men along the way, some ripe for picking up, and some not worthy.

That day at the cafe, a bunch of things happened. Four of those things were pints of beer, which is worth mentioning. Also worth mentioning was the cafe's weird looking A-shaped aluminum ladder with its confusing extension system consisting of pull-tabs and holes, a system much too complex to be understood by humans who are used to typing on keypads.

We took turns climbing this ladder-thingie to affix the pictures to the wall with the duct tape Tina'd brought along. Tina is afraid of heights, so for the time it takes me to down two pints (i.e. an hour and a half, when I'm being polite, which I was), I assisted, since the whole piece extends nearly to a piece of steel conduit which runs along the top of the wall at a dizzying height of approximately thirty feet, I'm guessing. This endeavour was made that much more heroic considering that the cafe floor is made of solid concrete, embedded with pointy spikes.



It wasn't until the final night, when the collage had grown to the gynormous proportions in the first pic, that I took these photographs. I showed up right at seven o'clock, when Tina said the band would begin playing. At nine o'clock, when the band did arrive, I spotted Tina and tried to take pictures of her, but Tina is not a woman who enjoys being photographed. In the few I got, she looks kind of skeptical and annoyed, so I did not post them. But imagine a tall woman in sparkling thigh-highs who looks like a cross between Maria Shriver and your fantasy sexy librarian. If you stalk her because of my description, I will kick your ass.

I sat with Tina for a while and was thoroughly blown away by the sheer number of men she'd picked up and by the amazing genius band (her sweetie plays the piano, and I was surprised to learn that my coworker, the lovely Miranda, would be singing along, which she did, expertly).

At the end of the evening I owed Tina a beer, and I was TIRED!! I had to cut out without saying good-bye, because yo, my number was just about up.

Flashback

I met Tina a couple of months ago, at work -- she was filling in temporarily, while we were short-handed. I liked her immediately & continue to like her, with immediacy, though it's tough to reach her by phone. Not that phone-reachability is a necessary virtue. Not like the-ability-to-pick-up-men. (By the way, she did not pick up many men at work, but she did pick up a few. She was very discreet about this.)

Soon, though, I hope to repay Tina by buying her a beer. It's the very least I can do, because I guess I figured out that all this stuff around us? Artists notice it and make us look at it, and when we start to notice it, too, life is worth living.