I’ve
named two important things in my life: one I fumbled away years ago and I’m
still haunted by the consequences; the other I nailed and life bounced on
happily ever after.
Steven
Wolf Fine Arts was born in the fall of 2003. Because I’m contrary, I fought the
urge to name it something cool, an obscure form of measurement, or a phrase
that ends with project or productions. Even as I embarked on selling art by young
people, after years of selling historical works, I thought of the new as mostly
a marketing fiction. Not only did I open my gallery with a show of
appropriation art, new copies of old things, I saddled it with Fine Arts, a tedious anachronism that sounds
more like a sheet music store than the vaudevillian moebius strip
of intellectual pratfalls, which is how I like to think of it.
As
I began this blog, which will be largely devoted to San Francisco visual art
culture, I determined to make up for that big whiff. My first urge was to
co-opt a phrase I’d always loved from a play whose title I’ve long since
forgotten. The main character was a hapless woman in her thirties competing for
the title Miss Worthwhile.
Lowered expectations and the idea of writing in drag were the attractions
there. As I ran the name by friends, however, they were confused by it and
didn’t share my enthusiasm. Like the time I called my wife from a
thrift store excited by the discovery that I look better in butch clothes for
women than in clothes designed for men. Her short response ended on an up note:
“uh, huh.”
It
also seemed wrong to run with the first idea so I made a list starting with a
chestnut from my personal archive of things I know well, The Purloined
Letter by Edgar Allen Poe. This
tale describes with uncanny accuracy my life as an art scout, the job I had
before founding Steven Wolf Fine Arts. It’s an occupation where you look for
art hidden in plain sight: warehouse auctions, garage sales, flea markets,
semi-abandoned porches, half-open doorways, trash cans, dumpsters. I’m too
germ-phobic to drag-pile, as my friend calls dumpster diving, but I
loved the idea of seeing the thing that was invisible to others and meeting the
characters along the way.
My better half, a
seasoned blogger, convinced me that for simplicity’s sake my blog title should
also have a corresponding domain name. I discovered that while thepurloinedletter.com is taken, purloinedletters.com is not. I could have stopped there, content for a
while, but much as I love The Purloined Letter, its steam punk Victoriana seems as dated as
Steven Wolf Fine Arts. Moving on. 472 Fantastic Flavors was inspired by a teenage friend’s kitchen on Long
Island where I and the other neighborhood stoners gobbled up junk food from
candy colored cabinets that resembled the inside of a Baskin Robbins ice cream
shop. Domain definitely available. The craze on EBay for vintage tee shirts
advertising cigarettes with the phrase Alive with Pleasure drove me back to the Internet. While it and another
tobacco-inspired gem called flavorcountry.com were taken,
welcometoflavorcountry.com was not. Put it on the list.
Then things turned
maudlin. I recently made contact with a friend from high school whose
self-portrait on Facebook is the international sign for choking—a line drawing
of a man with his hands around his throat. This led to turningblue.com (available), which then led to the L7 song Whenwepretendthatweredead.com (also available). This line of inquiry was cut
short by a wince from better half, just back from a big night out, who asked,
“Just how deeply do you plan to wallow in teenage angst?”
A sculpture by a
student at CCA called Operation Ivy League led to Operation Ultra Knowledge, mercifully rejected by better half, who now sensed the need to monitor
her email from a seat next to me on the couch. Thus Operation Ultra
Knowledge improved to Operation
After Thought. Cute, but
hauntingly recherché.
I
cast about for lighter, sillier, more alliterative terrain. I searched through
corporate team building web sites, a well-known repository of unselfconscious
irony, and came up with School for Spies (domain taken). This turned into School for Saps and The Lamest Generation,
both taken as domains but also rejected by better half as being too cruel. When
I realized coffee's for closers,
a line from the movie version of David Mamet’s American Buffalo was taken, I demanded to know what exactly these
websites were doing with the names I needed to disseminate my unique and
special vision of the world.
Not
much as it turns out. Most of my fantasy domains including Stevenwolf.com are being warehoused. If my virtual downtown were real it would be a ghost town of half-open stores with half-empty
shelves run by absentee landlords.
Thepurloinedletter.com
provides some half-assed links to publishing sites and a Poe-inspired video
game. Alivewithpleasure.com
links to a few internet-building sites. My flavorcountry.com is a vicious landscape of aesthetic one-upmanship,
barely disguised gossip and over-the-top philosophical put-downs. The real one
is a directory of links to tasty foods and dieting info. Well, I guess that’s
funny. When Alex Baldwin intones Coffee’s for closers, he conjures up America the heartless, a place of
ceaseless change where only the corrupt survive. Coffee’sforclosers.com sells freaking coffee! On the Internet where a
felony is committed every nanosecond, being literal might be the worst crime of
all. Not even literally.com
does that. They sell travel information.
I
switched gears from this drain-circling exercise in negativity and came up with
the chirpy fireside sing-along,
which better half loved, but I knew needed work, so I colored it Japanese and
it became happy lucky sing-along
and then, after some indescribable, seriously opaque mental activity,
purloined puppy sing-along. Game
over, you say? Not quite. Better half took one look at that verbal cartoon and
said it’s always best to sleep on things before deciding, and so just before
giving myself over to happy dreams of Poe and puppies and a purple prose blog I
suddenly remembered a fragment from The Wire where one street dealer says to another, “shut up
you off-brand muthuhfuckah!”
To
the Internet! Offbrand.com, as you would imagine, is run by a bunch of
literalists anemically trying to sell clothes. Offbrandmutherfuckah.com and its
misspelled variants were still available. The problem, however, with a big
four-letter word in the title is that it promises so much. Graffiti tags and
rap songs pledge radical things they never seem to deliver. I concluded, better
to dress like a bourgeois and think like a radical, to paraphrase Flaubert.
Theoffbrand.com was available. According to the urban dictionary,
off-brand refers to “generic, cheap, shit, a brand of inferior quality.” When I
read the illustrating sentence, “That dude’s offbrand bullshit really made me
want to kick his ass,” I knew I’d found the one, a name to launch a thousand
rhetorical flourishes that look good on computer then curdle badly out in the
world but can’t be taken back because servers never die. It’s a special
feeling, the one. You know it in your stomach. I felt it once
on vacation with better half in Kauai. She was pregnant at the time. I was
driving north on the island where we had rented a house. It came to me, so
swift, so clear, that I had to pull over to the side of the road and whip out
my cell phone even though I was just a minute or two away. “I know what to name
junior,” I said. That’s what I called him before he was born, even though I didn’t
know it was a he yet. “Yes,” she said, skepticism diluted with mild curiosity
as she awaited yet another stab at ironic grandeur. “Ernest.” She paused and said,
“That’s good. I like that.”
