Doug swam from Alcatraz to Aquatic Park this morning. Along with several hundred other clearly insane people, as part of the Escape From Alcatraz Triathlon. Dean, BC and I dragged ourselves out of our respective beds and converged at the shore to cheer him on, or to bury him. Doug emerged from the water to experience the city’s enveloping fogginess as something actually warm. Hugging him, his body temperature seemed somewhere between a shaken martini and a stirred one. Dean brought along a thermos of warm water and dumped it on him, to help the warming process along. Or is this the kind of thing that induces heart attacks? Whatever, it worked, and Doug’s emersion from the frigid bay proved to us all that even Alcatraz couldn’t have contained Dean’s he-man husband. That is, if he had been a high-security prisoner and the year was 1936 and he figured out how to escape somehow and got down to the water and swam to the city.
Saturday, BC and I high-tailed it over to SFMoMA to see the Lee Miller retrospective. I was very moved by her sensibility, and how her sexuality dovetailed so nicely into her imagery. She captured her interests with a seemingly casual immediacy but framed with a rigorous formal elegance and precision. This image could be her bending towards or away from the lens, fitting for one who moved so effortlessly between the front and back of the camera.
