than a whining brunch in the work country…but that was all later; first came

the early morning steaming ponds of Wall Spring, a trip down the pavements to Benicia,

radical dilation at Kaiser Ophthamology followed by a leisurely St. Valentine’s Day lunch

on First * and an even lengthier dinner at home with friends, all of which had their effects.

The next day we were out again, this time with son Bryan, and Sunday, for L. at least, it was the aforementioned working brunch. Tuesday began with dogs destroying the bedroom’s Tibetan rugs prior to that always fun ride into SF with its increasingly horrendous skyline and mazelike lack of access to what was once the very straightforward Third Street Corridor down to my old neighborhood which, in addition to having been rendered nearly impassible, turns out to have become something of a mecca for architectural abominations.   But Dogpatch

is home to the Minnesota Street Project, a worthy if perhaps belated attempt at preserving some semblance of a visual arts community within an increasingly venal and inhospitable city, although even there we failed to find much to offset the annoyances of the New Frisco

aside from Dennis Gallagher [and Dawoud Bey] at Rena Bransten

and Gregg Renfrow’s luminous show at Nancy Toomey Fine Art.

At Anglim Gilbert acid-washed  psychedelia by someone called “Carter” was, despite my reservations about one-named-ness, intriguing but pickings were, unless I’m just becoming increasingly indifferent to Contemporary Posturings, um, slim.  It ended up being too early for lunch at

Besharam plus taking the time would have put us into increasingly worse traffic so despite

being bedeviled by ever more byzantine road blockages we made it over to Brian’s

where one of Linda’s held pride of place in the side gallery while the main event, Dana Hart-Stone’s “The Life and Times of Plaid”, made for an engagingly impressive array.

We escaped new Frisco ahead of two o’clock if not the traffic to make it home in time

to have finished lunch in the remnants of the garden by four.  Come evening, having spent all that time staring out the car window, I revisited to the Tundra Quest, finding a near-perfect match for my criteria up in Oregon, but again at one of those dealers with almost comically overwhelmingly negative reviews.  This time at least they weren’t the Russian Mafia, but too sketchy to risk the trip…

*the 1/2 price bottle of Aria Pinot Cava at midday was an unaccustomed deviance…

 

So, onwards…