Up Your Alley

(Video was flagged and removed, but it’s up again.)

Loose ends and old stomping grounds

My life is all loose ends these days, juggling my various obligations and income streams while getting ready to travel starting tomorrow, when I fly to San Francisco for a week. I’ll be staying a hop, skip and a jump from my old Tenderloin apartment. (Below, left: me in that apartment c. 2003-2004. Right: me now.)

My stay will intentionally coincide with the Up Your Alley street fair, which I loved attending when I lived in SF and have gone to the last couple years, though because I was working at the Houston Chronicle at the time, I wore a mask each year just in case, which proved quite liberating and fodder for the photo-paintings I was beginning to do.

Happy Puppy, No. 2, 2010. Inkjet and acrylic matte medium on unprimed canvas.

Cai’s Twister, 2011. Enamel, inkjet and acrylic on canvas.

This year I’ve no such just-in-cases, and I’m dying to gather new images — and to create as much fodder as possible for them — so we’ll see what happens.

Other anticipated art encounters include Man Ray | Lee Miller: Partners in Surrealism at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Cindy Sherman at SFMOMA, and perhaps the de Young’s installation of the Gaultier retrospective I so loved.

Oh, and the gay Malcolm X has a show at a gallery down the street from my hotel.