It figures that my digital camera’s battery would die just before I arrived at the Charles Cowles Gallery last Thursday night for the opening of a new exhibition of photographs by Mona Kuhn, but for once the camera in my cell phone produced something like a clear picture, so I was able to secure this image of Kuhn and Frederic Tuten, whose short story “Self Portrait with Beach” accompanies the photos in the published catalog.
Then it was a dash down to SoHo, where Robert Anthony Siegel was throwing a party for his new novel, All Will Be Revealed, at the Desiron furniture showroom, of all places. (Turns out his sister works there!) Instead of just reading from the book, Siegel conducted a series of mini-lectures on some of its themes—late 19th-century pornography, spiritualism, and polar exploration—accompanied by slide shows. I wish there were more photos on his website for me to sample and show you, but the best ones all are NSFW, albeit in a historical mode…and in stereopticon format, to boot, so they were doubly impressive, except to Siegel’s young daughter, who sat very politely with her mother, author Karen Bender, until the first slide came up and said, “Naked? Ewwwwww!”