Le Jour du Depart! Monday, Apr 18 2011

It’s official at last. The best Monday in a long time. It’s the first day of my trip to Europe, after a mere 30-year delay. I’ll be meeting my brother and his wife Jane there. They’ve been renting an apartment in Nice for several months, welcoming numerous guests (location, location, location), and it sounds as though they’ve been having a wonderful time.  I’m taking my computer and am planning to chronicle my adventures by practicing my blogging skills. Why not? If a picture is worth a thousand words, then surely some words AND pictures will help me remember the trip. Funny how I don’t really get excited until the last minute. I even slept well last night, a rarity for an insomniac like me. I woke up for a minute, but listened to Gangaji on my iPhone and she seems to be my miracle tranquilizer.

So I’m packed and ready…just need to navigate the road to the San Francisco airport (an adventure in itself) and drop the car at the park and fly, and of course there’s the long flight across the U.S. and the Atlantic. If I remember that every step is part of the adventure, perhaps I can keep my equilibrium even with the  indignities of modern travel. It will be lovely to see Nice again.

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30s Black and White Photography DeYoung SF Sunday, Mar 22 2009

Okay here’s some of my favorite stuff–great black and white photography from Eastern  Europe in the 1930s. This from Germany, I think. A couple of years ago I attended an exhibit at the Guggenheim called Foto..about Eastern European modernism 1918-1945. One of my favorite time periods for photomontage, conceptual art, and film noir in the later years. Lots of exciting stuff going on– I’m very attracted to the region when “modernism” was taking hold.

There were quite a few different things to take in during my very short trip to the museum. I do miss aspects of city life–too bad San Francisco is such a long drive from where I live. It would help if I didn’t get lost so frequently while there. I have a map feature on my phone, but couldn’t find the hard copy map I had of the city before I left home…too late I remembered the coordinates I was looking for: Judah and Irving or thereabouts in the inner Sunset. Guess the best thing to do will be to leave the map in my car! I can find my way around New York very easily, since I lived there many years ago, and still feel quite familiar with the city. San Francisco on the other hand….

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Lobby Exhibit DeYoung SF Sunday, Mar 22 2009

Here we go…I’m capturing a few of the photos from the DeYoung. They were having a big flower exhibit there as well, with entries from florists, some of them quite dramatic. I liked being in the big space and seeing all of the people crowded together, looking at the exhibits and each other. Loved wandering about, and watching videos at the Warhol exhibit, of Nico, Lou Reed and other members of the Velvet Underground when they were first starting out. Also Merce Cunningham, and an avant garde musician whose name escapes me just now. There were quite a few aspects to the Warhol exhibit– including the  Factory years, Interview magazine, his early years in Pittsburg, his entree into New York (playbills and musical programs he collected), some of his big silkscreens of celebrities, multiple brillo pad blocks on silver foil, album covers he designed, strobe lights, the Rolling Stones singing from Between the Buttons (one of my favorite of their albums), a video of his lover sleeping…actually wish I’d spent a lot more time at that exhibit. Now I realize I’ll have to leave even earlier in the morning if there is a good exhibit. I want to see architect Maya Lin, who created the Vietnam Memorial. She’ll be exhibiting there soon.

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Yves St Laurent Retrospective at the deYOUNG Sunday, Mar 22 2009

Looks like the adventure I was longing for was short and sweet. Drove down the coast to SF on a rainy/sunny Saturday, listening to John O’Donahue’s Wisdom of the Celtic World.. and thinking about how it felt like being in Ireland must feel, with rocky cliffs and dramatic ocean for many hours. After accidentally giving $21 to the bridge attendant instead of $6 (he looked me right in the eye and kept it). I arrived at the DeYoung, and went through the YSL exhibit a couple of times, then cruised through some other art exhibits there and ended up at the Andy Warhol..which I liked quite a bit. Started to explore the city; got lost a few times, and ended up on the road to the Golden Gate bridge, so I resigned myself to going home, and grabbing some dinner in Healdsburg on the way, which was definitely easier. Even so, I didn’t get home until 11 p.m. so it’s a good thing I left the big city when I did. It was enough of a thrill to see the exhibits, all kinds of interesting looking people, and of course the sweep of the bay, and the pastel houses, skimming along the park. This morning the power was out at home, so I’m about to return there to see if it’s been restored. Meanwhile, listening to some great Sunday afternoon jazz right here in our little burg. Then back to the workaday world again…ah Monday!

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