SFMOMA

Dan and I flew out to San Francisco early this morning for Liz and Pat's wedding on Saturday night. We left DFW at 7:30, arrived in SF at 9:30, and God bless the hotel front desk people, they let us check in to the hotel around 10:30 instead of waiting until 3 p.m.

After dropping our bags, we went out looking for food because it was 12:30 Texas time and we were starving. A woman at the desk recommended a diner up about two blocks, where we stuffed ourselves on breakfast food before heading over to Chinatown, which was up a giant hill and east about three blocks. We spent a lot of time there, walking around, looking at cheap Chinese-made toys and nicer home items and going into food shops where nothing was labeled in English but lots of stuff looked sort of illegal to sell. (Shark fins? Whale baleen?) I bought some little things for myself and Julie and tried some dim sum that probably would have been better if it had been pan-fried.

Then we figured since we were halfway to Coit Tower and Telegraph Hill, we may as well go there. So we did. We walked there. The hills here are ridiculous. I'm going out tomorrow with my little film camera (I left my big one at home because I haven't had enough time to test it out all the way) and hopefully I can capture the insanity. My calves are so fucking sore. I think all told we walked four miles or so, and a lot of it was up hills that had a 30 percent grade. Tomorrow I'm taking the public transportation.

We came back to the hotel, and I tried to take a nap but it didn't work, which is too bad because I don't think I really slept at all at Dan's parents' place last night, for a lot of reasons. The nap didn't work, but the giant bathtub made my legs feel better, and Italian food helped. I had to buy Excedrin to take care of the killer lack-of-sleep migraine, and then we went to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which is half-price Thursday nights.

I love modern art. I know a lot of people say that some of it is stupid, since some of it is absurd or looks like it could be done by anybody. That's part of what is so neat about modern art, though--it's not necessarily about the object or outcome, but at least partially about deciding that this thing can be art. Fountain by Marcel Duchamp is one of those things--it's a urinal he bought, painted "R. Mitt 1917" on the side, put it on a pedestal and called it art. It got removed from some exhibit when it debuted, I think, but this is a current version and now it's at the SFMOMA, so he wins.

There were also a few paintings that I'd seen before but just never realized how detailed they are in real life, like Diego Rivera's The Flower Carrier. I'd seen it in books, but up close the basket detailing makes it look three-dimensional, and the flowers look soft and feathery on the canvas.

Ladder for Booker T. Washington, by Martin Puryear, is part of the permanent collection at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and yet when we walked into the SFMOMA, there it was, hanging in the giant atrium space, on loan. It looks a lot bigger in the Modern, which has it in a smaller, starker place, but it was funny to see it here when I'm so used to seeing it at home.

Then there were other staples of the modern art museums, also represented at the Modern: Clyfford Still with his huge canvases and ragged streaks of colors; Roy Lichtenstein and his dots; Donald Judd with his stacked boxes hanging from the wall; Robert Bechtle and his photo-like paintings.

There were a couple of installations at the SFMOMA that I really liked and would have put in my house if I could figure out a way. My favorite was The Structure of Light by Alyson Shotz, a beautiful, swirling, transparent and sparkling example of form in air. (I can't find a big photo, but here's a little glimpse of it.) It was made of piano wires, strung with transparent beads, and it shimmered as you walked around it. I realize how dorky this makes me sound, but it reminded me of what I imagine the principles of physics look like.

Yeah, that was geeky.

Not as geeky as how excited I got as the special exhibit Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900. It showed diatoms, snowflakes, daguerreotypes of eclipses and photos of insects. A woodburytype (I dunno what that is) of the surface of the sun, an image of the Orion nebula, circa 1900. Lightening and electrical sparks, Trouvelot figures, electrical pulses of the heartbeat. Eadweard Muybridge's galloping horses and flipping gymnasts. Ernst Mach, of supersonic fame, and photos of flying bullets and the disruption of the air around them. Radiation emitted by things and x-rays of various items, including the fetus of a river dolphin and x-rays of x-ray tubes.

All of the images were beautiful, and also so familiar, especially to those of us who spent years in science books. The photos of cells don't look much different than photos of cells today, and x-rays are x-rays. We have more advanced imaging today, like MRIs and electron microscopy, but it was amazing to see these images and realize all of them were at least 100 years old. I just never think of close-up photos of the moon being taken during the 1800s. I couldn't find any prints in the museum store, so I ended up buying a book about the exhibit instead, so I can be geeky any time I want. I wish I could find giant prints to frame and hang on my walls, but no luck yet. I'm going to do some work with Google and see what I can find in the future, though.

Tomorrow we're getting up and Dan is heading off on a bike ride, across the Golden Gate Bridge and up Mt. Tam, which I stay over here and take photos and hang off cable cars like a rhesus monkey, just like Eddie Izzard said. Then we're going to hit up the California Academy of the Sciences, go drink with the wedding people and go find Halloween parties with a friend who went through BU's science journalism program the year before me.

Dan's already decided he wants to move here. As we're sitting eating dinner he says, "I wish the Chronicle weren't such a shitty paper, because I'd totally live here." I like the city so far. If I moved here and walked around all the time, I feel like I could cut out working out from my life. That could free up a whole, oh, hour and a half of my life every week. I could do a lot with that time. Like eat chocolate and seafood.