I finished the sculptures for my show Flashlights and then drove up to San Francisco to install them. My life had been on a nonstop train for the previous few months, with my dad in hospice, then dying, then planning his memorial, then leaving on tour for 6 weeks, then coming back home and working on the work for my show for another month. The show opening was the light at the end of that long tunnel.
I finished the work on my birthday, and had some friends come over to see the work, before I drove it up to SF. Here's Harlan playing through the Leslie.
Drove the car full of work up to SF.
I had some last minute soldering to do up until the minute the show opened
There was a great turnout of people for the opening.
Afterwards we had dinner at Mission Chinese.
The next day we went up to Point Reyes and got a bucket of clams for a picnic.
Paige, Thea, and Maya
Paige and Gabe
Sam Benzoni!
On my last night in the bay, I went to go see my friend Nina. She'd gone through an awful immune system crisis a few years ago, and went blind as a result of it. She was staying at a dormitory school for the blind in Albany. I picked her up and we went out to dinner and she caught me up about her life.
I got to see her dorm room, and she demonstrated the braille typewriter she'd been learning to use. A big part of the program is learning how to read and write braille.
I told her I was planning to darn a sweater Gabe had given me
And she showed me this darning job she'd done a few years before.
On the way back to LA, I decided to take Highway 99, through Fresno. There was a place I'd known about for years but had never been to, the Forestiere Gardens.
They were the remains of a series of tunnels dug by an Italian immigrant who had moved to Fresno after living in New York City, where he worked digging the Subway tunnels.
They say that he bought land in Fresno, planning to farm it, and when he arrived he found arid, infertile soil. He recalled the coolness of the subway tunnels, and figured that if he dug his own tunnels, he could plant his farm underground
Digging the tunnels became an obsessive activity he continued until the end of his life.
The tour takes visitors down into his living quarters, which received ample light from atriums and were indeed much cooler than the ground above.
I stopped in Visalia, a town I'd visited once in high school after watching the movie Ken Park.