There is nothing like going to see art as an antidote to feeling you have centralized onto yourself. Apparently it's the root of all unhappiness and is probably best avoided. When you are feeling kind of maudlin and unrooted, and you are walking the streets alone after dark in a new city, there is nothing like taking in a bit of art to try to approach the transcendent and shake off your worries.

I had heard of show by a photographer, one August Sander, who was having a retrospective at what they call MOMA, even though it's not the real MOMA, its SFMOMA. Anyway, August Sander was supposed to be the best photographer of the decade, or the century, or something big like that. Sander has been dead for about 40 years, which meant he was missing out on his big retrospective. Which was a shame, only because he had busted his hump, trying to take tons of pictures of everyone alive. His dream was to have a giant exhibition of his work, which he never had while he was alive, but this was the biggest show of his work assembled. He was taking all these pictures in Germany right before WWII, and because he took pictures of real people, and by real people I mean blind, crippled, dwarf type people, the Nazis were not into him, because it sort of ran against the grain of the whole Arayan Super Race brand they were trying to build.

The museum looks like they just built it about ten minutes ago, but I think it is actually a few years old. Or maybe it was just renovated. Either way its all new and architectual if you catch my drift. It's all curves and angles and stupid recesses and hidden lighting, with giant slabs of black stone obscuring the view.

Plopped right in the middle of things is an airstream trailer, which is kind of nice, juxtiposed as it is against clean white walls. There is a lot of photography on permanent exhibition, plus in addition to the Sander show, there is a big one by Andreas Gursky, and he does oversize prints of crowds and repetitive architecture. Which is pretty hypnotic, and not just in the numbing sense, but also in the dizzying kalidescopic sense as well. SFMOMA also has some of the heavy hitters of 20th Century modernists, like Warhol and Koons and all those pop stars. There were a few powerful pieces that I liked, not so much the stars like Calder and Brancusi, but some of the lesser known stuff like Jim Dyne and Richard Artschwager, whose name I am spelling wrong.

There was a crazy thing some collective of artists did which somehow involved Cathrine Denueve. It had to do with a Japanimation character, where they built a coffin and created a whole life and death for this one female animated character. Which I didn't really understand.

Also I had just read the New York Times piece on Matthew Barney who did 5 Cremaster movies and is being hailed as the greatest artist of our time. He is extremely conceptual, with all kinds of layers of meaning and irony and self reflection built in to what he does, the kind of artist who you appreciate more the harder you try. Which I guess is what I don't do. Try I mean. Because I just can't get past his sculptures of Vaseline and Tapioca, let alone watch his movies, which, in case you didn't know, are named after the muscles in one's scrotum that lift and wrinkle and feature all sorts of crazy images mixed with violence and shocking activities. I think he is also maybe married to Bjork or dating her or something, which would earn him points in my view. But I don't care enough about his relationship to Richard Serra to want to see Serra throw clots of Vaseline off the balcony as a reference to Serra's early work throwing lead off a balcony, all as some narcissistic reference to his relationship to Serra and Art and big ideas.

Anyway, I didn't mean to get all digressive and bitter about art. Because other big events happened today. One was that my car arrived from it's cross country journey, so now I have to register, and get my California driver's license and all that. I also had to deal with the trucker who refused to deliver my car because he didn't want to take his truck into downtown and I have been taking practice written tests, which I haven't done since I was 17.

To celebrate the arrival of my car, I bought a cooked chicken. Which was pretty good eating, though it was kind of depressing since I don't have a plate yet, and my fork was dirty, and I didn't have any napkins to clean up with afterward, so I had to eat it with my claws, snarling to keep the rats away.

I also got an ominous note from my neighbor, asking if anyone accidently stole their Fed Ex. Which I didn't. Just yesterday I came home to a Post It on my door, which had a message that began Welcome Neighbor, which I thought was very nice, until I read on and it was telling me to take my shoes off when I walk around because the sound of my feet was bothering them.

There is some more stuff I should probably go into but this entry has gone on long enough with too many words and not enough pictures. Let me just finish up by telling you that I have, for the first, but probably not the last time, been singled out at work in a somewhat reverse discrimation sort of way, as a straight man, and a kind of lunkheaded one at that. The context was being at a meeting with several gay men, and they were debating a color for a tag that would go on a messenger bag, that they all liked but felt typical trogledyte American men would be put off by, because it was an unusual orange color. So they all turned to me, saying, "You're a typical American male, what do you think?" And it felt like they didn't mean that as a compliment, but I fought down the urge to disabuse them of the notion that I am a spokesman for mainstream America and told them I liked the color. Which I did.