Image “Carrie – One Blip Before Her Sleepy Face is Lickety Split From The Cake, You Bet The Cat Will Land With a Fliff But Fuck No For The Perfume or Steak” by Merkley???
This week’s SF Chron column is not called “Naked In My Sink For Merkley???” as it says on the front page of SF Gate right now (it’s cool — love ya, guys!), but is actually called There’s Something About Merkley??? Local underground cult erotic photographer opens up to Violet Blue. In it:
* We learn about his sodden, tawdry Mormon past.
* We find out what the deal is about his friendship with Gwen Stefani.
* I do a photo shoot with Merkley??? and while he’s straddling me squished into my kitchen sink (I almost fit), my across-the-block neighbors stop watching me stick out my nipples with my .45 in hand while sprinkled with bullets long enough to yell at us through my open window.
* I discover that my house is a veritable peepshow, and has been for a while. I hope that the naked girl observed previously in my kitchen was a certain *blonde*. You know who I mean. It is possible.
* Merkley??? answers questions posed to him by the people on Twitter when I openly invited the Twitterverse for questions. Yes, he answers *your* craziest questions.
* Merkley??? turns out to be fucking hilarious and frighteningly brilliant.
* I pretty much am about to excise his brain from its cozy cranial cat tower of hair and run off to Mexico with it to get married in a back alley and return it three months later in seriously used condition, subjected to a series of unspeakable erotic and sexual intellectual events, hand-wrung through a Mexican divorce and only slightly re-hydrated with agave tequila so it survives its solo Greyhound bus ride home.
* You should really buy his book.
When the photos go up, I’ll tell the whole story of the shoot here. In the meantime, buy his book, and do not miss this fantastic interview:
When local erotic photographer Merkley??? held the opening party for his self-published, gorgeous, glossy oversized hardcover book “111” — appropriately at art gallery 111 Minna — it was madness. The crowd was overflowing; people were lined up around the block and in the streets. All to see and buy his book containing 111 outrageously symmetrical portraits of 111 naked local girls on sofas (you can see some of, and purchase, this NSFW book here). Some are simply posed, while others are impossibly paired with flying cats and dogs, groceries (like chihuahuas on cheeseburgers), or whatever bizarre piece of whimsy entertains Merkley??? at the moment.
Like many, I discovered Merkley??? on photo sharing site Flickr, where he’s got a preloaded cult following and each OCD image is wrapped with a cranky, funny, and often obscenity-laced title, or by commands like, “Turn your Safe Search off unless you hate naked girls with groceries” or “Show your uncle that you don’t give a fuck about Wall Street.” There’s always more on his blog, and he is fun to follow on Twitter. His stream is full of amazingly hot local girls of all orientations shot in their homes and at many places you’d recognize — local eateries, Mission bars, bus shelters — places many of us can’t believe he got away with carefully constructing shots of nude babes and Fig Newtons. But, sometimes his photo stream contains an album cover he’s created for a band, or pictures of his friend Gwen Stefani.
The only way to make sense of this was to “go native.” I got lucky; local pinup site Zivity set me up for a shoot with the guy that all my friends and I had been trying to make sense out of. (Plus, he’s made all of us go, “Damn, we sure have a lot of hot women here.”) It was only after I was naked in my own kitchen sink at the end of our 6-hour photo shoot (most of it was setup), posing with my smaller .45 and piles of bullets (I have a stockpile in case there is a zombie uprising), while bearded Merkley??? stood on my counter far above me snapping photos, that it all converged in that only-in-San-Francisco kind of way.
Across my backyard, heard through my kitchen window, someone shouted “Hey! Merkley???!”
It was my neighbors, whom I do not know. But everyone, it seems, knows Merkley???.
“Oh, hey!” He waved back. Afterward, clothed, I found myself on my neighbor’s back deck having a drink with Merkley???, looking down into my own kitchen. “Oh, wow,” he said. “I was at a party here once having a drink in this same spot with a friend and we were like, ‘Look, there’s a naked girl in that kitchen.'” I’m pretty sure my reply was, “Uh.” Then he told me about his Mormon past, and I thought about his tagline, “I may not be God but at least I’m real.” At that moment, the fact that Merkley??? is an iconic San Francisco artist suddenly made perfect sense.
I asked him a few questions, and so did everyone on Twitter when I told them I’d be interviewing the bearded dude who makes girls in every SF zip code drop trou in exchange for a few erotic photos, the kind where anything in the realm of the surreal (or real) can happen to them. It’s long, but worth it:
Violet Blue: My friend dressed up as you for Halloween to try and get hot girls back to her apartment and get their clothes off. It didn’t work. Do you have advice for her?
Merkley???: Are you joking? Every year I get a handful of people threatening to dress up as me for Halloween, which makes it very confusing when I encounter beardy homeless dudes on/near Halloween not knowing if they are one of my asshole friends or not. Tell your friend that unfortunately it’s not my Texas/Bee Gees/homeless oil tycoon look that gets the clothes off. If that is truly her goal, next year she should dress up like Photoshop.
VB: What do you love — or not — about shooting in San Francisco? (…read more!)
