The work of friends and teachers like Lari Pittman, Liz Larner, Billy Woodberry, Thom Andersen, or Cathy Opie had helped me to see where I was. Others, among them Mary Kelly, Mike Kelley, Catherine Lord, Allan Sekula, and Monica Majoli fed my attraction to violently close observation, to abjectly humorous truth-telling. The Bay Area art scene I could grasp seemed to me overly invested in its own local heroes, and prone to valorizing pretty, design-y, technophilic or conceptually lite art practices. I didn’t know jack! But people whose work I admired had chosen to live here, to stay here even if, maybe even because San Francisco was (and still is) a provincial city. B. Ruby Rich, Anna Halprin, Angela Davis, Judith Butler, Vincent Fecteau, Trinh Minh-ha, Dodie Bellamy, Kaja Silverman, Kevin Killian, Pamela Lee, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Larry Sultan, Moira Roth, Pauline Oliveros, Bill Berkson, and Connie Lewallen are some of those people…