Finally to the Frida Kalho show at SFMOMA. Crowded but not crazy but very annoying the blockades of people shifting their gaze from the electronic tour device to the art and back to be sure they got it as instructed.

I had a good general sense of Frida Kalho before seeing the show but was really amazed by the layers of performance and engagement between her life and her work and range and depth of the work. We certainly do bury our interesting women behind their artist husbands be they Frida or Yoko.

So nice to see our lovely city part of the positives of this short marvelous life and career. Especially nice too to see the self conscious claiming of a particular Mexican/Hispanic identify in these times of melting merging and/or eradicating of identity. Might sneak back one more time before they clear the walls.

Also caught Half a Life the Chinese contemporary art show. A very clear window into the soul of post Mao China with all of its unsettled and unsettling qualities. Reminded me of the stories of Chinese Performance Artists risking their lives in expressions of their conditions be being sealed in concrete, floating in a bubble in Hong Kong Harbor or standing on melting ice with a noose around the neck. As observers, one might think that these visual artists would have a less dangerous relationship to the work but then after the fat grandson, the almost bobble head like repeated sculptural figures and Pol Pot like pile of heads and scary fabric woman again pink and the feather man there is the sculpture by Sheng Qi, My Left Hand showing the missing finger he cut off and buried in a flower pot before leaving China so that he would leave something of himself in China.

All that in the afternoon and then home to nurse my summer sniffles (hate this heat and do too much cold to compensate I think).

Today I managed to retrieve a recent online art purchase from the ridiculous Clayton Street Post Office without too much trauma and still have enough energy to get to Flore for much needed coffee and some brunch. Still struggling with the new menu. Tried to recreate my old favorite of smoke salmon arugula and scramble eggs with mixed success. But fortified, I did manage to make my way to Margaret Tedesco's to see and buy some art. I told her that I had not been there before but since then realized I had but in the dark and from another flow entirely.

Lovely to see some secrets that I coveted but will have to view at the museum I am afraid and to score some super deals on a couple of Anne McGuire pieces. Also just nice to spend some time with Margaret whom I always see and say hi but have little conversation with. All part of my fringe of the fringe identity which I have decided to unfringe. (A lot due to so much gay club life partying and mainstream working all these years...there is only so much time for partying, sex, work, writing and being artistically social and that is what gave.)

Tomorrow my Sharper Image reunion (I hope good material to finish or start a story) and then Dodie's curated show which ties so well to with my Kathy Acker piece, At the Altar. I may try to find a way to share with some of the folks.

OK. Time to start the Party...