Time (Zone) Travelin' (Caits in San Francisco): + Day Three: The First Dance

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"Day one, the first call started it all
your voice left me no choice but to pursue
nervous at the thought of meeting you
left the outcome to chance
day two come that first glance
day three the first dance..."
- Ursula Rucker...

[...whom I imagine MUST be talking about San Fran upon her first visit!]

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(I may have been a goofball this morning, but don't those photos fit with one of my favorite Frieda Kahlo pieces? I was yet to know that the day would find me viewing that piece up close in person, but apparently something told me the pose was to be captured on film. *coughI'MPSYCHICcough* Ahem. Commence to reading.)

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While New York doesn't blink twice, San Fran loves a white girl in a Dashiki. How many compliments did I get on my om steez? Five! But enough with the free-form jokes. Here is travel log transcriptions, straight from my journal to your inbox:

So here I am, off the BART at 24th Street The Mission stop, randomly picked in true adventure style, enjoying an iced coffee, which I'll have you know, is to-tally living up to the purporting of its gigantic sign bragging, "best coffee in the city!" Phil's staff is bizarrely friendly (indicator #4,503 that we not in NY, Dorothy) and the weather is a godly perfect warm/cool blend throwing down blessings. A good day to find oneself on a bench in the middle of a new city.

This morning I woke at 10am, finally well-rested and body-righted. After a few hours of the freelance grind and a half-planned trip to check out the Trust Your Struggle and friends exhibition (comforted in recognizable NY names- ups to EZC, etc!), Shruti arrives home just in time to scoop me up for a different day all together. Free admission at all museums! She was heading off to Yerba Buena, but I chose the $5 Frieda Kahlo exhibit across the street at MOMA, since I didn't catch it in Philly and have been bemoaning the missed experience for ages. We parted ways after a long trek on MUNI and I saved her number just in case my independent journey went awry.

The Frieda show was all it was cracked up to be. But did you not see that coming? I mean, it's Frieda Kahlo, for chrissakes. While viewing the work, I start to think about art as confession. I just read in Gala's blog this morning about women artists and our need to be confessional, to display our pain and wounds to the world at large. With paintings that are direct mirrors of her life (hence why she would not accept the title "surrealist"), I'm not sure there is an artist who does this more viscerally than Frieda (though I am also reminded of Anne Sexton, Audre Lorde and all of the other women writers I identify with, of course.)

Gala on Rukeyser on poem-as-confession:

"Muriel Rukeyser writes about the poem as a confession. The need for the poet to confess to feel whole. The way the confession of the unsayable is the breaking of a boundary, how poetry's breaking of boundaries is the tool for working for peace- for a common meeting space. I have always felt slightly ashamed about my needed to write things so openly, to put my inner intimacies and fears into public domains. It was for the first time, reading her words, that I realized how much putting my emotional truth into a world outside myself allowed me to relieve the weight of that truth from my insides- to give it life- the chance to work itself into a resolution."

Yes. Well put, Gala-girl. Us ladies have a very specific gift of turning pain into beauty, something that is even rarer in our male species counterparts (though they oft try to imitate but that damn ego gets in the way.) Before I left New York, Christina reminded me of the thin line between love and hate, how chemically these emotions live so close to one another in our bodies that it can become nearly impossible for their blood not to mix. Without getting too confessional on you, I'll just nod my head in understanding. Like Gala describes, I've, too, often felt ashamed of how I've put my bruises on parade. The awareness of the affect of one's journey on other's processes of healing melts away and I feel embarrassed about how little is kept private. Of course, we always chose what we show, but this idea of letting in and letting go is quite powerful. There are poems and writing I have never revealed to another breathing body for fear of how naked they are. I'm not ready to be this vulnerable for the sake of art, though I'm quite sure the rawness would move the reader more deeply than other constructed, considered work. When does one draw the line? Hard to know. The not knowing is part of the process, I suppose.

Coming across Frieda's "A Few Small Nips", up close and in-person was more difficult than I'd anticipated. Here she depicts herself splayed out, nude, full of bloody cuts leaking onto the white mattress. My gut turns over. Frieda painted this after learning of her husband's year-long affair with her sister. Each betrayal I've ever experienced wells in my throat like a tangle of hair and ocean salt. I find my forefinger and thumb pressed to the pulse in my wrist, as if to catch my own blood before it spills to the MOMA floor. Somewhere inside me whispers, "I know." Think of the line I wrote to Marbre in my poem for her I read last night,

"how many times we took the world
on our backs and swam upstream"

I so clearly, undeniably see myself and the women I love in the work of Frieda. Our collective bravery. It is at once astonishing and comforting. Frieda's face in her home movie crawls into my heart. What a gorgeous woman, uni-brow and all.

It takes me a moment to collect my thoughts after this viewing, but I find the clouds roll over in time as usual and I'm back in exploratory-mode. I wander downstairs and find the shock of a lifetime. There, on the MOMA SF floor, is my drawing professor from freshman year at college, Mary Temple's, unmistakable light installation, a fake-shadow of foliage painted on the wall! I am not allowed to snap a photo of the display, but capture the signage and text Alan the coincidence with an obscene amount of exclamation points. (The photo below was yanked from her website.)

Afterwards, with the stretch of the afternoon ahead of me, I hop BART to the Mission. Note that the transportation system here is not as easy as people have claimed, though I navigate it fairly quickly, snagging my monthly pass like a true, er, Francisco-ian? Not exactly sure what I'll find in the Mission, but have heard the name of the neighborhood in passing conversation with friends, so why not?

Upon exiting the train I listen to a voicemail from Rox C., one of my best homegirl, Yarrow's , best homegirls and I feel thankful for the extended family I've been promised. The rest of the afternoon was spent snapping photos of the incredible amount of murals that exist in the area. Mind-blowing and indescribable. Best to just look at the pictures below. Funny life as it be, I happen upon the show I originally intended to see today at the Galeria de La Raza, "On the Wall", and true to form, it is dope. Big ups to Trust Your Struggle. Holding it down. I'm sad to report that Ella's crappy digital camera did, in fact, crap out on me and half of the photos were not able to be imported. Among these were the TYS show shots. Apologies to those non-Bay dwellers interested in their beautiful cross-cultural commentary on immigration. So it is. Though I am particularly bummed about the photo where I was singing a duet with this mural dude. Ok, ok, universe! Another day in the Mission it will have to be...

And as you've guessed by now, I'm home safe at 10pm, a skip in my step and feeling cozy in my own skin. Found an email from a "fan" who had snuck into the back of the poetry reading I did last night just to catch me, offering up another feature spot (just before Digable Planets with Beth!) and a radio interview. Woo! Looking forward to tomorrow, which brings another show in Sausalito and a sleep-over at my family's house in Fairfax. This trip is gonna be bananas fun.

Enjoy the saved flick-age! Hint: be sure to click the photos to see the murals close up. Unreal.

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