In the middle of San Francisco is a big art complex, named after a Spanish language version of a very early discovery of cooking seasoning, which is called the good herb, or Yerba Buena. Yerba Buena is about four square city blocks, with fountains and pathways and several buildings that are build of unadorned concrete with big swatches of glass in them. Sort of like Lincoln Center, only about twice as big and without the grandeur of Metroplitan Opera, or even City Opera. Perhaps it is more accurate to say it is like the Jacob Javitz Center, without the mafia corruption, though I have no way of knowing if the Yerba Buena people are corrupt or not..

Anyway, a friend of mine had emailed me, via a defunct old email address at my old job, that another friend was having a show she curated come through town and the opening was last night. Because of the delay getting this information, I couind't contact either one directly, so I just showed up. I had to bamboozle the people at the door into letting me in without paying $24 dollars, which I did by cliaming I was supposed to be on the list, which I would have been if I had gotten in touch with my friend, so it wasn't exactly a lie. And boy am I glad I didn't pay.

The gallery was full of the kind of work I loathe. I guess it might be called post conceptual, or neo conceptual. But it was things like a pile of dirty lumber, a guy with a megaphone walking around with a basket of flyswatters selling them for a dollar each. There was a giant, expensive looking light display of a rack of flourescent bulbs over a big white piece of plastic, which even though Donald Judd did it better forty years ago, was probably the best piece in the show. There were pieces of sheetrock with a kind of poster about a psychedellic octopus. Several pieces had projection video, or scrolling text machines or music or other really expensive stuff. There was a box of rubber bands, with instructions to stretch them over your body, which I did.

There was a room there with people, I suppose playing hookers, in a bed, with sex toys strewn about and you had to wait on line and take your shoes off to go inside. Once you were inside, there were video cameras projecting you to a screen outside. There were nudie magazines on a coffee table. The prostitutes, or whatever they were, were men dressed as women, wearing lingerie.

After we got the hell out of there and came home, we slept and then went to an art show at an open studio. There was some really bad art of course, but the whole thing was quite sweet. Each artist puts out some selzer water and japanese crackers, or cookies and grapes, and you walk through a big warehouse full of tiny studios and look at the paintings. About one in twenty artists were actually good, though nothing jumped out at me. But one of them was a guy who it turned out had gone to prom with my honey, and her mom used to sit for Norman Rockwell. He crushed my hand painfully when he shook it. There's just no need to do that. Plus he had a stupid haircut.

Afterwards we went to buy a desk, which went smoothly, although at one point when he bent over there was a very sulphurous farty smell that I can only assume wasn't me, though I don't want to make slanderous accusations about a guy I don't know and suggest that something may have crawled up his ass to die.

Then we went to dinner and saw slides from kind of extended 7 month trip Sue and Tom went on, which took them bungie jumping in New Zealand, trekking in Burma, Patagonia, Brazil, India, Thailand, Australia, Chile and on and on. It was quite impressive and of course made me reflect on the need to travel to other lands and not live a cloistered life. It also was incredible photography, which they did on a digital camera, and presented on a laptop, and Tom said he has a video projector for a tv at home, which is what I want.