General comment: Lucky me. All the openings are in a two block area of the Mission. One stop arting. Now if I can only find a parking space...

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Jack Hanley Gallery : Andrew Mania.

Comment: Just when I start to think I've got a grip on this art thing, Jack Hanley throws me a slider-- English artist Andrew Mania's Klimty cool-dude floating head portrait paintings, several embellished with tiddly winks. The show's promotional brochure describes the way the heads float as "glittering disco ball limbo," a smooth turn of words, but frankly one that wouldn't have occurred to me had it not been suggested. As competent, seductive, and inviting to interpretation as these colored pencil and oil pastels are, the $1800 buy-in teeters me winceworthy (though it could be due in part to the dismal dollar/pound exchange rate). In any event, by opening night, nearly half the art was sold. Shows you what I know. Even so, sometimes I wonder who's calling the plays in the control booth.

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Low Gallery : Quantum Reality; Mars-1.

Comment: I generally wax more jaundiced than effusive, but the art of Mars-1 contorts my psyche to realms of otherliness that I had no idea existed. The interplanetary-- no-- extradimensional visions that this dude must have zipping around in his brain are remarkable enough, but then he goes and immortalizes them in paint so convincingly that we can all join in on the journey. I stare at his paintings thinking "Sure... I'll get there the next time Jet Blue has a fare sale," like I'm looking at actual places I can go, but I ultimately know I've been had. They're not real; they're Mars-1's mind.

That's not all. You've probably figured out by now that I see lots of art by lots of artists, right? Well, out of all the artists whose art I've seen, Mars-1 has come farthest fastest. You keep this up, Mars-1, and you're gonna send me straight to the penthouse suite of my adjective box.

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Mimi Barr Gallery, 3153 16th St., SF, 94103, 415.864.0115: Wonders Wow Wins.

Artists: Brion Nuda Rosch, Daniel James Burt, Paul Urich.

Comment: An eminently Barr-worthy show (or is it Mimi-worthy?). It's got one of my very most favorite ingredients-- lots of affordable art. Plus it's progressive, challenging, fancifully presented, easy on the eye sockets, and conclusively proves the age-old adage that art does not have to beat your ass to a pulp in order to make a point.

Paul Urich transforms the closet-- I mean "project room"-- into an aviary of deftly delicate tweet-centric compositions, complete with transcendent titles, and arted up floor. Daniel James Burt is taping his bloated outsized balls tighter than ever, and even gussying them with paint on occasion. But caution, Mr. Burt-- any antiquarian will tell you that masking tape has a rather short half-life. Meanwhile, a Zen parking lot attendant once told me that the secret to understanding Brian Nuda Rosch's art is letting go of trying to understand it. Then again, you don't have to understand these house paint rope ceramic vase drain resin paper blanket dirt oil enamel wood mattress fabric box expositories to appreciate them.

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Adobe Bookshop, 3166 16th St., San Francisco, CA 94103 - 415.864.3936: Peacocks, A Dance.

Performance artists: Visit urisov.com for information.

Comment: Another arcane Adobe original. No art, but rather a bout of ladder chanting-- song and verse harmonized by singer-dancer-performance artists standing on ladders propped against the bookshelves that line the store walls. All women, they periodically gesture, dance, climb, up, down, here, there, hither, yon-- you get the picture. All uttered words have been discovered, exerpted, compiled and rearranged straight out of books found on the store shelves.

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