A Grand Day Out

The music is eerie, bouncing off the walls of the nearly empty parking garage. She is just a child, playing her heart out in a drafty somewhat creepy space. We're in the city to see the Alice Neel portraits at the DeYoung Museum, bold work that I remember from the sixties. I remember a sense of excitement, an innovative personal approach to portraiture, a commanding intensity. What I don't remember at all is how dark her outlook seems, how unhappy everyone looks, how joyless it all is. The brushstrokes make me want to run my tongue over the canvas, the drawing--such sure lines of thick black paint--takes my breath away, and I want to feel something other than the heaviness that follows me around from face to face, but in the end I feel more sad than anything else.

When you leave home for the day, you see many interesting things. The Extra shows my first sighting of a self-driven car! At first I thought the thing on the top was a Google camera, but it is some sort of sensor, a gadget that constantly spins as the car moves along. We couldn't get close enough to see if anyone was inside, or where they were sitting, and the good news is that it didn't crash into anything while we were watching.