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Record of a good day
Nov. 9th, 2011 06:59 pmJust want to say, today was awesome. I met Lia and the Greeneling for lunch in San Fran. After food and a nice conversation, Greeneling had to go back to work but Lia and I spent the next few hours wandering.
We went to four different art galleries including the Xanadu Gallery (which is in a building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright). They had four different kinds of art, too. The first was full of pieces on the human form, including several made with two layers of fogged glass, so you could see a body's previous position fuzzily behind the second. The second was full of graphite sketches based on panoramic photos of San Francisco, but with the faintest surreal elements, like making several people in a picture of a BART station sort of ghostly see-through. The third was sort of message-based art... haikus in barcode form, braille and star charts overlaid on maps, sweaters made of rings of paper from the mail involved in mortgage agreements. And the fourth was the Xanadu, the most calming building I have ever entered, the most connected, truly lovely. The art there is all artifacts, tribal pieces, broken statuettes of deities... the name is truly appropriate.
We stopped to rest our feet and get something to drink in the cafe across from the Xanadu. I got a coffee with a shot of Irish Cream, so we had a short discussion of the merits of alcohol as a flavor instead of a drug. While there we also discussed different experiences of exposure to religion in youth, Illya Kuryakin and cakes. I'm not sure how cakes came up, actually. Oh! That was connected to the alcohol discussion because of the chocolate orange liquor frosting I once had on a birthday cake. Right.
And then we walked to the Prelinger Library and browsed for a short while. We read aloud to each other from The American Girls' Handy Book, which was terribly awesome and the scan of which I'm going to track down online shortly so I can have a copy on my iPod.
San Francisco is a beautiful city, full of things to discover, chock full of really random art. Lia is a wonderful wandering companion. Today was a pretty perfect day.
We went to four different art galleries including the Xanadu Gallery (which is in a building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright). They had four different kinds of art, too. The first was full of pieces on the human form, including several made with two layers of fogged glass, so you could see a body's previous position fuzzily behind the second. The second was full of graphite sketches based on panoramic photos of San Francisco, but with the faintest surreal elements, like making several people in a picture of a BART station sort of ghostly see-through. The third was sort of message-based art... haikus in barcode form, braille and star charts overlaid on maps, sweaters made of rings of paper from the mail involved in mortgage agreements. And the fourth was the Xanadu, the most calming building I have ever entered, the most connected, truly lovely. The art there is all artifacts, tribal pieces, broken statuettes of deities... the name is truly appropriate.
We stopped to rest our feet and get something to drink in the cafe across from the Xanadu. I got a coffee with a shot of Irish Cream, so we had a short discussion of the merits of alcohol as a flavor instead of a drug. While there we also discussed different experiences of exposure to religion in youth, Illya Kuryakin and cakes. I'm not sure how cakes came up, actually. Oh! That was connected to the alcohol discussion because of the chocolate orange liquor frosting I once had on a birthday cake. Right.
And then we walked to the Prelinger Library and browsed for a short while. We read aloud to each other from The American Girls' Handy Book, which was terribly awesome and the scan of which I'm going to track down online shortly so I can have a copy on my iPod.
San Francisco is a beautiful city, full of things to discover, chock full of really random art. Lia is a wonderful wandering companion. Today was a pretty perfect day.
