Last minute advisory: bay area

If you read this Sunday morning find a way to get to the DeYoung Museum's free grand opening party today.

You will not find anyone so prejudiced against the new museum as me. I loved the old building. It was part of my family, and it was beautiful, and it was historical, and as far as I was concerned there was nothing wrong with it. I still wish they had managed to save some of the old building in some way, and I think they screwed up by not doing so. But. The new building looks very little like the drawings, and very little even like it did itself in the construction process. It's a knockout, it's huge and comprehensible and beautiful and modern and has all the continuity a person could desire and did I also remember to say it has a wild sense of humor? The building is amazing, and who'd ever have thoguht of making a consistent design motif the theme of the museum? Circles, in regular and nearly-regular arrays, cut out of thick sheet copper (intended to grow a patina), or printed on a wall, or blown in candy-colored glass for ceiling lights -- even the cafe is beautiful and the food is good and not cheap but not nearly as expensive as at the Getty (we left Santa Cruz late and we were ravenous by the time we'd seen the feather weavings and the baskets and the wall paintings in the Native America section, which neatly segued into Modern America).

This weekend is the free grand opening and we made it up there in spite of the rumors of rain, the flat tire, the band review (I got to see the new piper and she's really quite respectable (but tiny, tiny, dwarfed by the Daniels), and our new drum major's Native American profile kicks glory, and the middle schools are really good this year and it seemed like more than half the bands were playing Souza marches or King marches and is there a reason for that? -- I'm not complaining, and the nice fellow was ecstatic to hear so much Souza)

The line was longer than any line I've been in, including Disney, Star Wars, Van Gogh . . . but it was maybe twenty minutes in line before we got in, and we were entertained by a manic fellow with hula hoops and a marimba band and a speech from the director of civic affairs for the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums who said "This is my party and you're all invited!" and it was like a party. I usually have one or two nice conversations in a museum but there were lots of them. A woman disagreed with my judgement that one young woman in a Sargent portrait was angry, angry, ANG at being exploited like this by her parents, and I puzzled along with a fellow who had two Ghanaian "medicine dogs" at home as to what they were meant for, and had a wonderful time with somebody's four-year-old daughter (hey Kip if you ever happen to need babysitting in California . . .)And sambaing stiltwalkers and Mayan sawdust sidewalk painters and well. It was fun. We looked at almost everything. Not the Queen Hatshepsut exhibition and not all of the American art exhibit. But the modern art, the African, Oceanic, Native American, African, New Guinea, and Textile exhibits.

Fortunately for me we have to return.

Oh, and there were two wonderful surprises: chlorophyll printing which Frank has promised to figure out how to do it -- printing a photograph on a leaf, using the chlorophyll oif the leaf for pigment! and a big old Wally Hedrick painting ("Madame Nhu's BarBQs" if you're a follower of Beat art), Wally Hedrick being one of my father's oldest friends who died a couple years ago. I got all excited and had to explain to Frank who was with us all about how Wally is a part of his family history.

It's really a grown-up little museum now.

(I will continue the talking to myself series tomorrow, in case anybody wonders)