Laurel Nakadate at PS1

Preemie

Posted on January 23rd, 2011 ~ 2:53 pm

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Hi Babies!

I thought I'd let you all know (even though many of you probably know already) that the PS1 contemporary art museum in Queens is showing the works of Laurel Nakadate. The show opens today and runs through August 8.

Laurel Nakadate has been pretty close to my heart ever since I saw her movie The Wolf Knife. The film is just unbelievably cool. That's all I can say about it.

Laurel Nakadate is a photographer and filmmaker. Her style is half documentary, half-artificial. Nakadate's themes aren't sissyish. But her work has a very strong, sexy, feminine edge to it that I just adore.

One of her photo projects was her taking photos of herself doing all kinds of crazy things in the houses of men she didn't know. There are quite a few shots of her in her panties.

A video project involved her going into girls' rooms, waking them up, and getting them to strip down to their underwear. Obviously this work involves panties, too.

I think one image that really illustrates Nakadate's edgy, sexy style is the photo of her riding on the railing of a bed of a pickup truck in white panties with pink trim, a blue t-shirt, and a cowboy hat. That's an image I only dream of creating in my stories -- except, of course, that my character would be wearing a diaper.

I feel silly making a remark like that. But, then again, I remember looking into the work of Nan Goldin only because I knew she did photography of transvestites. It turned out, however, that Goldin has affected my sense of imagery more than any other photographer I can think of.

Anyway, I just thought I would let people know about the exhibit, since there are some, not sissyish, but very sexy and feminine themes to Laurel Nakadate's work.

Be good, babies!

Preemie

Baby talk rocks!

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Preemie

Posted January 25th, 2011 ~ 2:30 am

Hi Babies!

I went to PS1 to see the Laurel Nakadate exhibit. And now I love her more than ever!

It was pretty cool. PS1 is a great place, first of all. For anybody who might not have been to PS1 before, it's basically an old public school that has been turned into an art museum. But the public school feel is still kept. The exhibition areas are all classrooms and hallways.

PS1 is in Queens, in a kind of spacious part of town. There's a bar just down the street from PS1 called Space Womb, which sounds like a terrific place for adult babies. But it's probably not for adult babies.

Anyway, the area that Nakadate's work has is two hallways and something like seven or eight classrooms -- which is a lot! But there's plenty to see! The hallways and rooms were all painted white, with white-painted floors. Many of the rooms had videos going on.

It was pretty interesting. The hallways are all lined with her new work, which is basically photos that she took of herself crying. She basically made herself cry every single day over the course of 2010. And then she'd take a picture while she was crying.

So the first hallway was kind of lined single-file with pictures. Then the next hallway was just lined wall to wall with pictures! It was a really incredible thing to see.

When I first got there, I went in to watch the video "Greater New York," which was okay.

When I came out of the video, Nakadate was there. She was talking with a group of people. There were four people, two men and two women, probably husbands and wives. They looked like they were in their mid or late 40s. I remembered one guy because a security guard had yelled at him because he was wearing his jacket.

The security guards were making everybody check their jackets. When the security guard had first seen me, he had yelled at me, too! I thought I was going to have to check my bookbag, too, which really scared me. Because what if the guys looked in my bookbag and found my Pampers Baby Dry diapers? But I didn't have to check my bookbag.

Then there was a really pretty girl security guard in front of the Nakadate exhibit. She was short, skinny, Latina, with crimpy-curly hair. Her security jacket was long and kind of baggy. She reminded me of all the girls I had a crush on in high school.

Anyway, it turns out that the two couples talking to Nakadate who had also been hassled by the security guy downstairs actually owned some of Nakadate's art works. So that was pretty cool. So they talked with Nakadate for a little while about everything. I just caught a glimpse of Nakadate and kind of smiled stupidly. She was wearing a really pretty black dress, and she looked very nice, as always.

I walked into another room and listened to the people talk with Nakadate. I probably could have stood around and listened, and nobody would have said anything one way or the other. Or, chances are, the two couples would probably have started talking to me, too. That's usually what happens. But sometimes I'm too shy to let it happen.

So I looked at some photos in another room while Nakadate talked with the people. There was a wall of photos where Nakadate strings her bras out in the wind in front of snowy fields. The opposite wall had a big wall-sized photo of Nakadate stretched out in a bikini on a bunch of rocks, with water pouring all over. And then there were huge fingerprints all over the photo, I think. In the corner of the room, on the floor, there was a TV playing a video.

So I listened to Nakadate talking. The art owning couples asked her what she was doing next. She said, "Well, I just got done with this recent project on December 31st. And I've obviously been getting ready for this exhibition. So now I feel like I need to take a little break. And I'm writing a screenplay, too."

The art owning couples said a couple more things to her and then wished her good luck. Then they all came into the room where I was hiding out and I got all embarrassed again. It wasn't the couples -- they were really nice. It was just me. I get so shy. So I hustled out of the room. As I exited, Nakadate sneezed. I didn't say "bless you."

So then I looked at some of the crying photos in the first hallway. Some of them were really cool. There were some really dark ones. There was one nice one where it was out on a street with a house full of Christmas decorations. One dark photo had a real close up of Nakadate's face. The other one was pulled back a bit, and you saw her whole body. I think she was naked.

In another photo, there was a beautiful view of an orange sunset. But it wasn't brilliant, vivid orange. It was pale orange, with mixtures of pale pink and purple. It was really lovely.

Then there was another photo of Nakadate crying in close up. It was really interesting, because her face was so wet and puffy. Some kids kept running back and forth in front of me. One of them wore a sweater with a skull and crossbones design on the front, so I thought he was pretty cool. The kids were all having fun. I smiled at them.

Then I turned left and went into the room full of the crying photos. So somehow Nakadate had gotten into that room by now. She was talking with a couple people. Then a really well-manicured, white-haired man in a grey dress coat and slacks and a pink shirt whisked Nakadate out of the room. He had his arm around her waist.

I watched Nakadate walk away. She looked really nice. I thought how interesting it is that some people really look like adults when they're dressed up. The way the dress held to the contours of her body, Nakadate looked very much like a grown-up woman. It was different from when I saw her at a screening of The Wolf Knife. At that point in time, she was wearing a plaid, flannel shirt and a denim skirt. She didn't look like a kid. But she looked like a hip artist. But in the black dress she looked serious, like a grown-up.

So I looked at the photos. In a lot of the photos, Nakadate is either naked or almost naked.

There were some interesting ones of Nakadate getting into or sitting in a bathtub. There was also an interesting one where Nakadate is crouched down before the bathtub while the shower is running.

There were some interesting ones of Nakadate on a plane, with the cloudscape out the window. There was one interesting one where it's in a dark room, but there is a line of gleams coming down that look like little rainbows.

Then there was one of Nakadate sitting in a chair, naked or just in panties, with a big hat with earflaps on. And in the background is a window with a deep blue night sky outside. I love that one. I also loved one that had a jagged flash of light across it. The whole image was blurry, with just a jagged flash of light across it.

I spent most of the rest of my time in the rooms watching videos. One video was called "Beautiful Places to Hide a Body or Make Out." It had a bunch of scenery shots that I thought were really nice. Some really good, deep shots of buildings and complexes of buildings. And then, in voice overs, there was a guy saying all kinds of porn stuff, talking about a girl's nice butt, or how she should "make her shirt go bye-bye." A woman's voice would repeat the porn stuff the guy was saying.

Then I went and watched the video "Good Morning Sunshine," which is the one where Nakadate goes into girls' bedrooms and tells the girls to strip down to their underwear. The first girl is wearing a really cute, pink set of pajamas. She's got cute, red hair. And she even has a teddy bear in her bed. She plays with her teddy bear while she's stripping down to her panties. She acts shy the whole time. Her panties and bra are both really cute. Hot pink panties and a pale pink bra.

All the time the girl is stripping down, Nakadate is saying all kinds of pushy stuff, kind of nicely though, like she's nicely bossing the girl around to make her take her clothes off. Then she sometimes repeats some of the porn stuff you hear the old man say in the "Beautiful Places to Hide a Body" video. I found her pushiness and porn language sexy. But maybe you aren't supposed to.

Anyway, then there were two more girls. The second girl wasn't too interesting to me. The third girl was very interesting. She is in the movie The Wolf Knife, and she kind of looks like a punky version of Clara Bow. Anyway, she was wearing a green Boston Celtics shirt with Snoopy on the front, and she said that her brother had given it to her. And she also wore white tights. She was pretty, but she was too shy to take off her tights.

After that, I found The Wolf Knife playing in another room. So I watched a couple scenes from that. It was getting close to the end, so I figured I'd leave, let the movie play out, and watch it from the beginning.

So I went across the hallway. Nakadate's other feature, Stay the Same, Never Change, was playing across the hallway. I didn't know much about that movie. In the first scene I saw, a daughter and father are watching a documentary about polar bears. In the next scene, it's the next morning and the daughter and father are eating Lucky Charms and talking about the documentary.

During this part, some workers from the museum decided that it would be a good idea to start mopping the floor. So they were mopping the floor while the movie was playing. It didn't matter very much. It was just me and another person, an Asian woman, in the room at that time.

Not long after that, the well-manicured man came into the room, I guess to check on how things were going in this part of the exhibition. I don't know. Maybe that guy is Nakadate's agent. I'm not sure.

Then in the next scene, another girl makes a hot boy out of some fabric and stuffing. And the hot boy is kind of her boyfriend love doll. So she dances with it and lays in bed with it. The girl is young, kind of vacant-looking, but pretty hot, with long, blonde hair and pale, blue eyes.

Around this point, a mom, a dad, and two little girls came into the video room. The older little girl, who was really cute with pink pants and shirt and long brown hair, sat right in front of me and tried to get my attention. I smiled and waved back to her. But I was too shy to talk to her -- or anybody.

Then in the next scene, the girl from the first part comes and finds the love doll in bed. And she straddles the love doll and kind of makes out with it a little bit.

Then later on, the other girl takes the homemade love doll to a drive-in movie. But on the way there, she meets up with some guy friend of hers who is at the drive-in without a car. So she takes him back to her car. So she and he and the love doll are all sitting in the backseat of the car. Then eventually the girl and the guy kiss a tiny bit.

Then there are some fireworks and the girl and guy go on a date to see the fireworks. Then the girl goes out with some other guy and the movie ends with a really beautiful sequence. Basically, the girl just sits in the back of the car as it drives through the city. The scenery is very plain and usual, but it's captured very beautifully. And, of course, it's wonderful to see the girl's face the whole time, too. Her hair is very beautiful and her face is lovely, and the light plays on her face in all kinds of lovely ways.

So that movie was over and I went and watched The Wolf Knife.

At some point a young set of couples sat next to me. One of them was a really pretty, blonde girl with pale skin and short hair. She wore a white sweater, black leggings, and a white, wool cap. We laughed together and looked at each other, sharing the laugh, at a couple parts in the movie. But I didn't say anything to her.

But I was focused on the movie, anyway. Now that I'd seen Nakadate's other work, I realized what a culmination of things this movie really is. She captures scenery in a very flowing, even, natural way, like she does in "Beautiful Places to Hide a Body." She manages to capture some kind of menacing, yet soft, sexual appeal like she does in "Good Morning Sunshine." She captures the quirkiness of people and the free-flowing way that people naturally move through the world like she does in Stay the Same, Never Change.

But she adds something else to it: a plot, a through-line. And I think it's cool that she does it. Plus, her free-flowing natural scenes are just unbelievably lyrical. There is an incredible scene where the two main girls of the film are watching lightning from an orange-lit facade that looks like a belltower in a Spanish mission. There is a really lovely scene where the girls are chasing a peacock. There are a couple scenes where one girl makes the other girl pose for a camera in all kinds of seductive ways.

There is a whole hotel scene where one girl tries to teach the other girl to strip, but the other girl can't do it. So the one girl does a really sexy strip, until she's just wearing a pair of pink panties. Then she goes and takes a shower in the panties.

Toward the end, there are a series of lyrical scenes with very simple, yet stunning images. There is a huge sports field, with a rolling lawn in the background. Then the girls sleep out a rainstorm in the back of a car. Then one girl drives around while the other girl is lying asleep in the back of the car. And the light from outside just plays across the girl's body.

Near the end of the movie, Nakadate and the well-manicured man came into the viewing room. By this point, almost everybody was gone from the viewing room except me. I felt stupid, because when Nakadate and the well-manicured man came in, a was really grooving to a cool song in the movie. This was when the girls were sleeping out the rain storm.

Anyway, the well-manicured man laughed and said something to Nakadate. Then they both left the room.

After the movie finished, I went back out into the hallway. I thought I would look at the crying photos again. But I suddenly felt too suffocated by all the people around me, and I had to leave.

So I went downstairs. I got my coat and left. I saw the well-manicured man one more time. He was looking back and forth for something. Maybe Nakadate. Then I left.

The exhibit was really good. I'm going to go back sometime within the next few weeks. It runs until August, so there's plenty of time.

Baby talk rocks!

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Preemie

Posted February 2nd, 2011 ~ 3:43 am

Hi Babies!

So, last night, Laurel Nakadate was at MoMA in NYC again to give a talk about the exhibition that she has going on at PS1. So I went to listen to her talk.

I didn't know what the format was going to be. But it ended up being a 45 minute presentation by Nakadate, where she showed photos and clips from her films, followed by about 45 minutes of a little panel discussion and Q&A with the crowd.

So Nakadate gave a pretty cool story about how she'd started working with video. I guess she'd gone to Yale to get her Masters. She was young and all alone. She was kind of depressed.

So she just kind of started meeting these guys on the street and asking if she could film them in their houses. I guess the first video she made was of going into these guys' houses and dancing with them to the Britney Spears' "Oops" song.

Anyway, so these guys were kind of old and out of shape. One of them danced around a lot. He looked like he was having fun! Another guy stood completely still. I guess he was trying to deadpan it. But it kept looking like he was going to laugh anyway!

I guess this video was from 1998. I can't remember when "viral" became a term for funny things on the internet that suddenly millions of people watch. But I definitely thought, while watching this video, that it was viral. And partly that was because the guys had that Star Wars Kid kind of appeal.

But it was also because Nakadate looked really sexy. She was wearing this tight pink shirt and this blue denim skirt. And she danced reall sexy!

So, she was pretty sexy. Well, you know, when she was younger, she looked different. If you saw her nowadays, you'd probably think she was really sexy! Anyway, I did.

I sat in the front row. I was sitting with all these guys and ladies who did all kinds of important things with art in New York City. Curators, Assistant Curators, Big Artists, all that kind of stuff. The guy who I had seen with Nakadate, the well-manicured man -- it turns out he's this guy named Claus. And he's the director of PS1! So he was there and he sat next to me. Then he went up and did the forum with Nakadate.

So I felt pretty cool with all these important people sitting next to me, just a tiny, little baby, you know. But then, before the show started, Nakadate came up to talk to some of the people in the front row. I felt shy, terribly shy, just having her that close to me. You know, she's very kind. I have a feeling she could be friends with anybody! But I just get shy.

But she's really sexy. And she was standing right next to me, talking to the guy and woman who sat next to me, about some really good interview Nakadate had given in 2006. And while she was talking, I was just looking at how incredible she looked in her jeans. Not that I was going to tell her that. But her legs are wonderful!

So, she gave her talk about the Oops video. Then she talked about some other videos she'd made while she was at Yale, and some people she'd met. One guy she'd met because she had dropped her keys down the elevator shaft in her building. She knocked on a guy's door and asked if she could use his phone to get her keys.

The guy had said, "Oh, I actually have a set of keys for your apartment." Okay... It was random. But it started a friendship between Nakadate and this man. They've been friends for a long time now.

Later on in the show, Nakadate actually showed another video that she had made with the man. It was a pretty cool video. The story was that the man said he was feeling a chemical imalance in his brain and that he needed an exorcism to get the balance back. So he laid down and did all this shaking around and repeating whatever Nakadate said to get the balance back.

Another series of videos that looked really cool to me was called "Beg for Your Life." In these videos Nakadate had some guys she'd just met let her come into their houses and hold a real gun (but it was "really broken") to their heads. They would then act out how they would act if they really had a gun to their heads and had to beg for their lives.

Some of those videos looked really interesting. Some of the guys were acting. Other guys looked genuinely uneasy. Other guys just kind of laughed and didn't take the thing seriously.

Nakadate also spoke about a series of photos she'd made where she re-enacted various murders in beautiful places. I can't remember what this one was called. The photos were really interesting. All of them except a couple were actually sexy. And if I hadn't been told they were re-enactments of murder scenes, I'd just have figured they were Nakadate laying out in various places and being sexy.

She was laying in all these natural areas in her panties and bra, and sometimes in just her panties, all stretched out, sometimes with her back arched.

There were ones that were unmistakably murder scene re-enactments. One was where Nakadate was tied to a tree with a red cord. She had a plastic bag over her head and she was slumped over. In another one, Nakadate was hung about halfway out of a dumpster. In another one, she was laying on train tracks, and done up with a bunch of red stuff to look like she had been smashed in half.

You know, Nakadate didn't talk about it too much, but there's another video she did where she had a guy chase her over a hill and then down onto the beach. But once she's on the beach, she gets captured. The guy grabs onto her legs. She tries -- really violently! -- to get away. But the guy doesn't let her go. Eventually the guy is dragging her away and she's clawing onto the sand to try and escape. But she just gets dragged away.

Well, later on, during the panel discussion, Claus was talking with Nakadate about this. Claus seems like a pretty cool guy. He was wearing black pinstripe pants and a black jacket and dress shirt, with a silver tie. He has a German accent. He's really gentle-mannered, and his tan face always gets red. There was another guy, a young man whose name I forget. He was also beautiful.

Oh, heck. They were all beautiful!

But, anyway, Claus was asking Nakadate about danger. Because, you know, another thing that Nakadate did was go to truck stops and ask truckers if she could film them inside their trucks. And most of the time they were nice.

But once a trucker tried to lock Nakadate in the truck with her. He had some kind of computerized dashboard. And you press one button and it locks everything. Well, the guy pressed the button, so he could lock Nakadate in. But Nakadate saw what button they guy had pressed. And she pressed it again and got the hell out of the truck. And after that she stopped doing the truck stop thing.

In this same vein, Claus said, "I remember when you had that article in the New York Times. And I'd heard that it was going to be in the Times. Well, I was happy. But I thought that it would be in the Style section or something like that. But it turned out to be in the main part of the paper!

"And then later on I heard that your parents had read it. And that article discussed a lot of the kind of dangerous stuff you'd done for your art, like the truck stop stuff. And, so, what was your parents' reaction to the work?"

Nakadate said, "Well, the reaction from my father was pride."

Pride! I thought, when Nakadate said that. From her father! I kind of blanked out for a second, thinking that. Well, I don't know. Because my dad drove trucks. So I've always loved and hated truck stops. I can tell you, though, that my dad absolutely hated truck stops.

But, anyway, Nakadate said, "My family had always given me stength and confidence to do things, even when they didn't agree with the things I did." Well, that sounded nice. It's nice to hear people say that kind of stuff about their parents.

So then another series of photos that Nakadate talked about was her Love Hotel series. The idea was that she was going to go with her boyfriend at the time to Japan. They were going to go to Love Hotels and do all kinds of kinky sexual things. And Nakadate would tape it.

But then Nakadate's boyfriend broke up with her right before the trip and Nakadate had to go all alone. But she carried out the Love Hotel project all by herself. She said that she figured she would go to the Love Hotels and have sex with an imaginary person, a ghost. She took photos of herself in all kinds of sexual positions in a number of different Love Hotels in Japan.

She looks terrific in these photos. I believe she really was acting like she was having sex with a ghost. But the photos don't strike me that way. She looks in some photos like a person just being in a hotel. The facts that she's in only her panties and bra most of the time, and that she's naturally sexy, make her look, therefore, like she's being sexy. But in other photos, she's posed seductively. And of course, that's reall sexy.

My favorite photo of this series is where she's on her knees, looking out the window. She's wearing a white bra and white panties, and the panties are just really nice on her bottom. It really excites me.

Of course, personally, when I see white panties that are just right on a girl's bottom, the next thing I think of is what she'd look like in diapers. So, whenever I see that photo, I always imagine what it would be like to see Nakadate on her knees on a bed, looking out a window, wearing a white bra and a big, puffy diaper. Something, I'm sure, Nakadate would not like to hear.

Another underwear work that Nakadate did is where she tossed her underwear out the window of a train. She had taken a train to a few different places across the U.S. She was on the train for thirty days. And each day, she threw a piece of underwear out the window. She threw out a lot of really sexy, feminine, brightly colored lingerie.

The photos are sexy in their own way, because the underwear is Nakadate's, and because the underwear itself is hot. I'm sure other people must agree with me when I say that just seeing sexy underwear in the store is enough to make me hot. Seeing sexy underwear in the Victoria's Secret window or in Bloomingdale's or Target or what have you. It makes me hot! Then, again, seeing the green pack of Pampers Baby Dry or the purple pack of Luvs or the pink pack of Pull-Ups does the same thing to me.

When the question and answer session had come around, a girl in the audience asked Nakadate why she'd thrown underwear out the window, and why it was hyper-feminine underwear.

The girl who asked this question was herself cute. She looked brainy, with pale, soft skin, brownish hair, and chunky glasses. She wore a cute, green sweater and a matching scarf. When the show was over, she stood up and put the cutest, beret-style, pink, knit cap on her head. She was just darling.

Nakadate answered, "Well, really feminine underwear, the really sexy kind, is one of the true joys of life. So I felt like it was a real sacrifice to throw all that cute stuff out the window every day."

The beautiful man beside Nakadate said, "Well, that's true. If someone saw that along the tracks, they'd probably pick it up and take it. There'd be no way you'd ever get it back. Maybe you'd stand a chance if you threw granny panties out the window. But not sexy panties like those!"

Nakadate and Claus laughed and agreed. Nakadate said, "And plus, I just thought the bright colors looked really pretty against the landscape."

Nakadate talked a lot about her films, Stay the Same, Never Change, and The Wolf Knife.

She showed the doll scenes from Stay the Same, Never Change. I liked them even more this time around. Plus she showed the scene where one of the girls keeps laying on a car's hood, slumping down off of it in a sexy way, and then standing up and laying back down on it again, all while some guy secretly watches her from another car.

Claus said, during the panel discussion, "That was my favorite part of the movie."

But while I was watching it I thought of the scene I had just written for my story "HKM" for Sissy Kiss. In that story, a girl makes out with a decal on a van's hood. I thought that had just come from nowhere. But obviously it had come from Nakadate's movie. The dolls, too -- in a way. Ugh... when will I ever be original?

Nakadate showed a few clips of the film that she had actually cut out of the film. In one cut clip a girl is supposed to be crying over some dead dogs. But Nakadate couldn't get the dogs to keep playing dead. They kept on getting up to play with the girl.

Well, I thought Nakadate's story was hilarious. But what I really loved about that clip was the girl's skirt! It was so fluffy, and it was made out of all these nice, pastel colors! It looked like the perfect mix of babyish and girly-cool.

Then Nakadate showed another still from a piece she'd cut out of the film. A pretty girl stood in front of a troika-like amusement park ride. That image I liked a lot because the girl was pretty and the ride was cool. The cars of the ride were that metal-flecked blue and were shaped like future sports cars. Plus, the overall atmosphere of the still reminded me of the videos for "Blurry Eyes" and "Honey" by L'Arc en Ciel.

So then Nakadate showed the first few minutes of The Wolf Knife. There is one really tense moment where an older man sits down next to a younger girl. He pulls a pair of panties out of his shirt pocket and asks the girl what she thinks of them.

The man is the girl's mom's boyfriend. The man said he'd bought the panties for the mom and he wanted the girl's opinion about the panties.

The scene is awkward, and a lot of people don't like the man. But I identify with the man. I haven't ever sat down next to a young girl and handed her a pair of panties.

But I have, for instance, gone into Victoria's Secret, gotten into lingerie, and asked the workers there if they could tell me how I looked. Some girls liked to look at me in lingerie. Others did not like it. And their reaction to me was the same as the reaction the girl had to the man in The Wolf Knife.

But, even more than that, I have gone into lingerie stores, and asked the girls if they could look at me to tell me if the lingerie fit me alright. Then, when they looked at me, I was actually wearing diapers. There is a Japanese lingerie store in the city where the girls don't mind me a bit. They say I look cute. We've even kind of become friends.

Well, you know, I don't just look. I buy. But I try on, too. Absolutely! I went into these places to get approval for wearing diapers. For being a boy and for wearing lingerie and diapers. And the girls at this Japanese lingerie store are always very understanding of me. They like me!

But I've gone into other clothing stores and gotten dressed in girls' clothes, in clothes that obviously showed my diaper. And I've walked all around the store, as a boy, dressed in girl clothes, showing off my diapers. Nobody says anything. Well, I guess my body actually looks pretty good in girl clothes -- and in diapers. But my face, ugh. Puke. I'm a boy, alright. Barf.

But the way I've acted in girl's clothing stores and lingerie stores is really kind of -- well, I've pushed people's boundaries. Just like the guy in The Wolf Knife. So I identify with him.

Anyway, then Nakadate talked about her new work, where she cried every single day in 2010 and photographed herself. The photographs are really beautiful. Some of them she showed again, and they really are more beautiful than I'd remembered.

Nakadate said that she'd gotten to thinking about Facebook, and how everybody is always smiling on their pages. Every picture is a smile. People are miserable, but that's not what they show. So Nakadate figured she'd do a kind of reverse Facebook and cry in all her pictures. You know, the work is about a lot more than that. But I can see what she's talking about.

The work is monumental. As the panel discussion had started, Claus had said, "When I started out planning this project, I'd told Laurel, let's just put everything you've done in here. And then I saw how much work she'd actually done! I'd known her work rather well. But I hadn't realized she'd done so much!

"So then I said, Well, let's devote a proportionate amount of space to the amount of time Laurel had spent on each project. But with the crying project, there really were 365 photos. One for each day. We got just a little more than a hundred photos to fit in the spaces.

"But this is the largest exhibition by the youngest artist in the history of PS1. It's hard to believe she's only 34, and that she's done this much work."

Baby talk rocks!

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