I got out and enjoyed a couple of different art museums in San Francisco that I hadn’t been to before. I took the bus to the Museum of Craft and Design in Mission Bay where there were two exhibits to explore. One was a series of concrete journals, visual diaries, created by an artist named Anne Hicks Siberell. It was an interesting exhibit, about a half a dozen of the several dozen journal pages in exhibit caught my eye, including one that had a an open switchblade knife and a key labeled ‘Office’ embedded in it.
The other exhibit called Fight and Flight, Crafting a Bay Area Life was much more intriguing to me, with a huge variety of soft and hard sculptures. I was particularly drawn to a series of three wall hangings with words made out of zippers, the sentences were from from letters written by Emily Dickinson to her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson. I really had to concentrate to decipher the individual letters and the words as a whole because of the way they are arranged on the hangings, but that made me focus even more on those individual words and their overt, and potentially covert, meanings. There was also a wall of posters that were hung around the Mission Bay neighborhood in 2020 with different ideas about community, freedom and oppression for readers to contemplate. It was very powerful. Finally, there was a piece made from broken wine and beer bottles stitched with wire. The piece was suspended from the ceiling and shaped in a way to mimic fabric. I was intrigued by the shadows it created on the wall, similar to the paper items in the Biophilia exhibit I saw the last time I was in San Francisco.
While I was at the museum, I saw a flyer for an exhibit at the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, called What are Words Worth (yes, a great play on words!) Since it was only a few blocks away, I headed over to check it out and I was so glad I did. The exhibit features an array of prints, drawings, and photos that center around the written and spoken word. I didn’t have time to watch much of the film shorts in the screening room, the small part that I did see was intriguing. There were several art pieces where artists had taken every day items such as newspaper articles, concert posters, record covers (The Velvet Underground’s I’m Waiting for the Man single was a simple, yet powerful example), and science book and highlighted certain words to create poetry from those words. It was so intriguing and made me think that you can find poetry anywhere and make poetry from anything.
From there, I walked to Yerba Buena Gardens to enjoy a Sudanese band, Salma El Assal & the Sudan ensemble. The music was invigorating, and it was particularly wonderful to see lots of people, mainly women, getting up and joyfully dancing along.
When I got back home I started watching Painkiller, the new Netflix limited series about Richard Sackler, Purdue Pharma and the OxyContin scandal. I intended to only watch one or two of the episodes, but was completely captivated and eventually had to make myself stop so that Otis and I could get out for a walk. I’d learned a lot about the Sacklers a few months ago when I read the outstanding, but very depressing, book Empire of Pain. The series was nowhere near as in-depth as the book, but did give a good overview of the history of OxyContin, and its devastating outcomes. Each episode begins with a parent, usually a mother, reading the disclaimer that not all characters in the series are real people, then they go on to look directly into the camera and talk about the child that they lost due to OxyContin. It’s absolutely shattering. It was also weird to watch Matthew Broderick play such a horrible person, it’s bizarre seeing him in his 60s when I still think of him as teenage Ferris Bueller dancing to Twist and Shout in Chicago. To help shake off some of the slime I felt from watching the devastating impact of the Sackler family, Otis and I went for a walk to China Beach, where the grey, foggy weather and stark driftwood sculpture mirrored my mood.
