13.07.12 - A Shit Journey

I had to take back a lens that I had rented for my trip yesterday so I went down to Bryant and 18th on the bus. A woman got on who needed to use the ramp as she was on a zimmerframe. She looked old but was probably a lot younger than she appeared, wearing a man’s checked jacket over a nightie and no shoes just a pair of slipper socks. She sat down at the front and you could tell that people around her were immediately hit by an unpleasant smell. When she got off the bus one stop later she had left a smear of poo on the seat. Even just writing about it makes me feel sick; compassion and disgust were fighting for supremacy. Having got over the shock of seeing so many down and outs on the streets it now just makes me angry that Americans don’t see how bad their care system is. If it costs hundreds of dollars to visit the doctor for anything, however small,  then of course people aren’t going to go. I will never complain about the NHS again. And how people can campaign against changing the healthcare system is beyond me!
On the plus side my first story for NAM about the Hotel Frank boycott was published online today.
I walked up to SFMOMA (San Fran Museum of Modern Art); a Cindy Sherman exhibition is opening tomorrow and an exhibition on Mexican photography has just ended so only two floors were

 accessible. The nice woman at the audio tour desk gave me a ticket for free as I was considering just coming back another day. The collection is quite small and has Bay Area artists as well as big names like Rothko, Matisse, Picasso, Miro...The Bay Area artists were rather lacking compared to the international big hitters although there was one street artist who was interesting called Barry McGee (see picture). He draws things that he has seen around SF, mostly people but also signs and adverts. Then he frames each small picture and puts them all together in a montage. I liked the idea as it chimes with an idea I have of having lots of smaller photos hung in the same way.

My friend Emma Dell who is doing a PhD in Chemistry at Columbia in New York was arriving tonight so I headed home to prepare the cave. I was planning on hoovering but instead I ended up watching ‘Out of the Ashes’ a documentary on the Afghan cricket team. I have become obsessed with watching documentaries. They make it all the way to the Twenty20 World Cup, through three rounds of preliminaries and then eventually make it on a last minute wild card. It made me think that there must be so many half made documentaries, when the subject doesn’t make it or the story falls apart. If the team hadn’t made it through the first round then the story could have been dead in the water.

Despite having been in the city for almost a month now my knowledge on where to eat and drink is low so when I picked up Emma from the BART we headed off in what I thought was the direction of a fun neighbourhood but in fact turned out to be through a really grotty area. Not a great first impression for a New Yorker. Although she was seeing a very real side of SF. Part of her team works on alternative energies and the solar powered bus stops in SF are always used as an example of how to do things, so at least she was excited by seeing the real thing. We eventually found a Senegalese restaurant which turned out to be really fun and it was nice to eat somewhere a bit different.
New York is three hours ahead so we didn’t make a night of it, saving energy for a day full of tourist attractions tomorrow.