The Oakland Museum

I used to josh my black friends in the Bay Area that they should really name Kevin Roche's jewel of a museum the Huey B. Newton Underground Center for Underhanded Activities because the structure is a kind of inverted hanging gardens. Its class is evident from the first time you ascend the steps and see Benny Bufano's Bears, symbolic of the state of California and (nobly) saved from earlier WPA abandonment.
I have spent so many hours on natural highs in this museum that I don't know where to start ticking off its interior achievements. I say without fear of rebuttal that it is the single most satisfying "exterior" in American museum architecture. Only the Museo' Anthropologico in Mexico City, or the Miro' Foundation in Barcelona have given me more intrinsic joy.

I like its contents as well because they are crossover exhibitions. Oakland, having more than a PR problem with its abused minorities, has had to make outreach more than an annual report bromide. So I have seen black art, Mexican art, and Indian art in abundance there. But I have also seen natural history and plain California history, photography (will they ever cease "discovering" yet another lost photographer of the West?), advertising art, design art--as well as your first, run-of-the-mill painting and sculpture retrospectives.

Oakland is the Newark of the West, eclipsed by its better-known peers in San Francisco or New York. It is a kind of Camden of the Bay Area, always cowering before an insolent Philly. Try a day on Oakland, your next trip west. BART is unbeatable in getting there.

There's more to Oakland than where the A's play. There's the great art-deco Oakland Paramount, and Jack London Square. If you want to finally know what the word "cocktail" means, try one at sundown at the Sea Wolf restaurant there. The whole complex of waterside shops and restaurants is delectable, but a cool one at sunset in the Sea Wolf makes Venice look like a run-down Lagoonarama.