Picasso at the DeYoung Museum

I went to the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco on Sunday.  That's not really my point, but that's where I'll start.

I went to see the Picasso exhibit.  It's a timid approach to a very forceful subject:  A man who was a force of nature by the look of it.  

Picasso lived for a long time, 94 years I believe, a life span that started when cars were barely known to the world and ended after there were rockets transporting human beings into outer space.  He was artistically productive, kind of an understatement when you learn of his tremendous output and fascination with the purpose and meaning of art throughout his life.  What usually distinguishes Picasso in the minds of semi-art-literate people like me is his frequent depictions of subjects whose features look unintelligible and challenging, not beautiful.

I got to the museum with my companions, gained entry to the first gallery and put on my Audio Tour headphones and began to learn about the man and his art.  I exited the museum with new appreciation for his artistic viewpoint and his drive to change the way we see things. I felt like I'd entered a vortex, a black hole of artistic energy wherein Picasso had existed and stood his ground in the face of all the powers of god and nature and sucked them dry, painting the encounters or sculpting them. The body of work he left is powerful, moody, intense and thought provoking. Don't tell me it isn't.  He provokes your mind no matter who you are.  You may not like it, but he pricks you and you remember the wound.

What struck me about the things I learned about Picasso was his persistent ability and drive to depict his subjects as many things at once, to use them as prompts for our - the observer's - ability to perceive and connect ideas. African masks especially were huge sparks of his creative imagination, connecting him to the spirit world, changing dimensions of time and space and movement. His wife and lovers who were his muses at various times in his life took on various forms and colors depending on the political, social or emotional state of his life.

Underlying all the layers of meaning, metaphor and symbolism was one man's intellect attempting to understand the visible and invisible worlds we live in. He was driven to reach the most essential, most distilled concepts of death, love, war, time and immortality and express those ideas visually.

Many people have one good idea in their lives or none at all.  They just exist.  Most of us have a few quick thoughts that come and go. We have mild friendships, stay mostly out of trouble and try pretty hard not to rock the boat.  Picasso was a man possessed with the idea of not only rocking the boat but showing us all sides of the boat at once, its nuances, its meaning in spiritual terms, how it had once been a tree and had been shaped by hands and tools, how it feels, how the water splashes against its sides, how it sounds when the oars creak as we row.  All that in one complicated, deconstructed and reconstructed image.  Over and over a few thousand times.  When you get that Picasso was trying to do all that in his best works, you get Picasso.

But, as he said, and as is true for all creative effort, what we see as we stand in front of a painting or a photograph or hear in a concert hall is what the artist was wrestling with at that moment.  Now he or she has moved on.  We trail behind in the wake of their efforts, way behind. In the case of Pablo Picasso, he has moved on, but the enormous number of prints, images, canvases and forms that remained behind at his death provide an overwhelmingly complicated trail that shows where his mind went throughout his life and the huge scope of his creative energy.  It's a wonder any of his peers remained standing once he left the room.  I think we'll be reeling in his wake for a long time to come.

San Francisco: Enjoying A Summer Day

Yesterday we checked into our room on the 17th floor at the Serrano Hotel.  Woo hoo! Penthouse!  Not really, but it is much quieter up high and we can see a lot of rooftops and things way down below us.  It's a fine smallish room with everything we need.  A slightly reduced rate we found on the internet landed us there.  Very ornate lobby, with exterior of the building currently undergoing refurbishment, was built in 1926.  It's about three to four easy blocks off Union Square with three very close-by parking garages that you can use yourself without having the valet do it, which will save you $15.  

We walked over to Max's Grill about three blocks away. There's comfort food, large portions, with a menu that covers all the bases.  Unfortunately, our waiter was young and foolish and had to be asked to fill my coffee cup, my water glass, bring a fork, bring a bread plate and our bill even though we were definitely done for a while.  He also brought the wrong salad with the entree and spent a lot of time in the kitchen yukking it up with his buddies.  The food was actually good, but the silly server put a blot on the experience.

Back to the hotel to change and then cab over to the Orpheum Theater to see Wicked, a musical stage play.   Theatergoers thronged the lobby before the show looking to see who was looking at them and also looking for cast members.  Turns out, this play is becoming a bit of a Rocky Horror Picture Show type cult experience.  When the main players made their first appearances on stage, the audience shrieked and applauded in delirium and loved every big scene exuberantly.  

Lots of fun, no catchy tunes really, not compared to the Phantom or Les Mis, but still very imaginative.  My favorite character was Glinda the Good by a mile.  Elphaba (the Wicked Witch of the West) was great, too, but Glinda was hilarious.

Took a while to get a cab back to the hotel.  Lots of barricades going up along Market Street were for the next day's Gay Pride parade.  Note to self:  Try to catch a glimpse of it some other year.

Luxuriant sleep in a king-sized bed was blessedly wonderful.  I plan on carrying the bed home on top of my car when we check out in the morning.

This morning, we walked over to the cool Italian-style espresso cafe on Union Square plaza.  We pretended we were back in Paris as we enjoyed a petite dejeuner (sweet roll, cappucino, OJ) and watched the city awaken.  The weather was spectacularly perfect.  No breeze, gentle warmth, blue skies and lots to see including a few shrieking schizophrenics and unfortunates tuning into their own time zones and scrambled wavelengths.  It's all part of the deal when you walk around downtown.  Beauty and ritz right next to the broken and blitzed.

We made our way along Geary across town in our car to meet friends at The Cliff House Restaurant (actually called Sutro's Cafe), listening to the incomparable KFOG radio.  The clear sky seemed to lend a finishing sparkle to city parks, brass railings, chrome handles and the thousands of windows in buildings all across the avenues we traversed.  The whole city gleamed and beckoned as great cities do when they are just stretching awake for the day.

The Cliff House is the third iteration of that building and was last remodeled in 2004.  The first two versions burned down, sadly, as they were much more elegant-looking buildings back then.  Nearby, the Sutro Baths (big indoor swimming pool where folks lounged around alluringly in baggy woolen swimming suits) lie in ruins, and the one-popular Playland that occupied a large area opposite the Pacific Coast Highway and Ocean Beach is now replaced by a large housing development.

The Cliff House is home to three dining spaces, and on Sundays you can also opt to have a buffet brunch in a fourth.  We snagged a table for the four of us on the airy and modern Terrace level right by a window and watched the restless ocean currents tugging and shoving against craggy rocks offshore.  My chicken cobb salad was light, well prepared and delicious.  The mimosa was very gentle, shall we say.

In contrast to last night's dinner, our waiter remembered everything and had one of those clever crumb scoopers to keep our table linen crisp and clean).  Replete, we organized ourselves and headed for the DeYoung Museum to see the Great Impressionists exhibit from Paris.

In a nutshell, the place was packed and everyone was tall.  We all noticed it.  Somehow, we got peeks of all the famous paintings on display done by Cezanne, Monet, Manet, and others.  There they were, Whistler's Mother, The Birth of Venus and The Dance Lesson.  Each piece was brilliant in its own right;  we saw about 100 works, I think, which was dazzling.  The viewers were all rapt and respectful, but there were lots of them.

Pooped by then, we left the museum display, sagged into cafe chairs on the wide veranda.  We refreshed with a glass of mineral water and a bowl of cherries.  Good-byes all around then, and we split up to head in our separate directions, satisfied with a fine afternoon spent with interesting friends.

Sunday in Golden Gate Park is unusually quiet and refreshing as one main avenue running the length of it is closed to cars.  The weather was still perfection itself, so walking back to our car parked a half mile away was a pleasure.  Bicycles, skaters, walkers, joggers and humans moving in lots of other ways formed a gentle stream along the route.  The park looks lushly green everywhere thanks to frequent and deep spring rain this year.  

Dinner at the Daily Grill on Geary was good but more expensive than we'd wanted.  It was stuffed full of people not too long after we arrived, proving again that getting places early in the city pays off well.