The Fight Against the Death Eaters

On my first night in the hospital this week, my doctor came around to talk medical stuff but got so excited by seeing me with the latest Harry Potter tome, which he had just finished himself the night before, that we really didn't talk much about illness but did go into our favorite characters.

"I've got 150 pages to go so NO SPOILERS!" I told him.

"Have you gotten to The Cave yet?" he asked in a voice filled with a trace of chilled awe.

"No, and don't say another word because I'm not reading it tonight. It feels too scary to be reading it at night in a hospital."

My physician is the same age as me, by the way, on the wise side of 50.

I'm feeling ridiculously grateful for all kinds of things right at the moment, including the fact that we have our own version of a Charles Dickens phenomenon, where people would wait on the docks in the 19th century on the East Coast waiting for the latest installment of his serialized novels. The emotional high point for me was the third book in the series, "The Prisoner of Azhkaban" where Harry finally found Sirius Black who loved him unreservedly like a good parent, after having been tortured by the Dursleys all his life. And like Dickens, Ms. Rowling didn't let that warmth and fuzziness last very long but plunged us back into some serious sadness.

The series is also funny and infinitely surprising. My favorite line in the latest book is "What do I care how he looks? I am good-looking enough for both of us, I theenk!" which is fabulously absurd but in context is quite an admirable remark.

What's also interesting is how connected the whole saga is to "current events." I'm not sure if it's intentional on Rowling's part, but her capturing of the zeitgeist of our "real" times is uncanny. I can't watch the Bush Administration, Berlusconi and Pope Benedict in Italy, Blair and his gang in England, without thinking "Death Eaters." They need to be fought in every way possible, and we can win, because as Dumbledore tells Harry, "You have a power that Voldemort has never had. You can love."

The subject of fighting for change, large and small, and unintended consequences is addressed in one of the most beautiful essays I've ever read by a San Francisco writer who I'd never heard of before, Rebecca Solnit. It's been reprinted on Tom Engelhardt's blog, and is called "The Great Gray Whale." Do check it out.

Medical Sabbatical

I've been having breathing problems for the last couple of weeks and finally got a chest X-ray today, which makes it look like pneumonia, so I'm being checked into the hospital for IV antibiotics and oxygen in about an hour. Since I HATE hospitals, this is not something I'm particularly looking forward to, but it looks like the only way I'll live another day.

Talk to you all later.

Buddhas, Etc.

My friend David Barnard always carries a pair of ear plugs when he goes to museums because he hates having to listen to docents, who usually have loud voices, explain what the art really means.



So I'm going to do the equivalent, and just show you a few of my favorite things on the third floor of the Asian Art Museum without too much commentary. Let's start with Ganesh, the Hindu elephant god which greets one at the top of the escalator.



This huge, absolutely glittering gold temple above is from Thailand...



...and across from it are scary demons from Cambodia.



From Nepal, there is a sculpture dating from 600 AD of a female goddess in the Buddhist pantheon.



In the "Jade Room" there is a beautiful little sculpture of Buddha with Big Ears.



Near the beginning of the China section of the museum, there is a long room that has a lot of natural light and a whole cornucopia of Buddhas.



My favorite is probably the large guy reposing above.



Now that the sand mandala monks have moved on, the big Samsung Hall was peaceful and uncrowded.



You could color in peace or if you were museum'd out, it was not a bad place to catch a snooze.

Girlie Art

Next door to the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House on Van Ness is a building that looks like its twin, The War Memorial Veterans Building. The history of how the two beaux-arts buildings were created is quite interesting, and for a detailed summary, check out the SF Virtual Museum on the web here.



Essentially, there were two groups in 1920 who wanted a big public space built, the veterans of World War I (which included the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars), and wealthy cultural patrons who wanted an opera house for the local symphony and opera companies. The two groups finally joined and started a public appeal for funds, but they started fighting amongst each other immediately for power and space. So in truly typical San Francisco fashion, it took twelve years to get the things built. Interestingly enough, that struggle continues to this day, with "society" encroaching on the veterans with each year.



The Veterans Building houses a weird mixture of uses, including a second floor "Green Room" which is quite grand and is actually painted green. It is usually rented out as a party space, for wedding receptions, and the occasional concert (though the acoustics are awful).



This weekend, however, it has been taken over by a pleasant group called The Whole Bead Show out of Nevada City. Their website can be found by clicking here.



There is something about narrow interest groups like Bead Enthusiasts that I find totally amusing and fascinating.



My friend Heidi Seward in Santa Barbara wrote to me yesterday with the following: "Just a note to say I continue to enjoy your blog, especially the photos of art and people! I am addicted and when you don’t post for a day or two, I really miss it." Now that is music to a blogger's ear, so the rest of this entry is just for you, Miss Heidi, with lots of art and people.



Near 16th and Mission is an art gallery called "THE LAB" which was having an opening for a number of artists, including my ex-next door neighbor, Kimberly Koym.



She does fairly sinister video art mixed in with cabinets, dioramas, and various scenic elements.



She's originally from Texas but went to art school in The Netherlands where she met her husband Pedro Murteira, a brilliant young artist from Lisbon, Portugal. Click here if you'd like to see some of his work.



Also part of the exhibition was a video/performance art installation by a Polish woman named Monika Weiss that was pretty cool.



She writhed around in the sheets while the live video image was projected on the wall.



Spectators were also invited to be part of the exhibit, but it was hard to compete with the artist.



Elsewhere in the room, a couple of sisters from Atlanta had put themselves naked on a pedestal.



They stayed there as bookends, looking quite decorative.



Pedro and I walked a block up Mission Street to another art opening at our friend Clark Buckner's place.



Clark and a partner took over the top floor of the Thrift Town building a year ago and have created a warren of art studios along with a couple of galleries.



The show was "guest curated" by a woman named Libby Werbel, and it was called "Comfort."



The curator had this to say:

Is the place where you live comfortable? How does personal space translate into public view? In this show, four artists investigate the fantasies and vulnerabilities at play in our ideals of home.

The usual gaggle of beautiful young people were in attendance.



And in a weird bit of synchronicity, there was another woman wrapped in a sheet on the floor.



The curator had this to say about the artist:

Gabrielle Wolodarski explores the limits and possibilities of articulating private matters in public settings. She spent the last month living in an installation at a gallery in Portland, and for Comfort has created a piece, which attempts to articulate this experience of living and creating in front of other people.

Wolodarski, huh? What are the chances that two women with Polish surnames would be on the floors of two art galleries a block away from each other in the Mission District of San Francisco?



Weird.

Iraq and the U.S. Press

The weekly peace vigil in front of San Francisco's Federal Building was a jolly affair on Thursday. Two pairs of European tourists, one from Scotland and another from Italy, happened to walk by and decided to join the group.



The shameless cheerleading and dispensing of Bush Administration lies by the majority of the U.S. press in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion is a pretty well-known story. What is possibly more disturbing is how the major television and print press suppresses any information that would help make any sense of all the mendacity.



The best example is the "Downing Street Memo," where the head of M16 (the British equivalent of the CIA) told a meeting of British leaders in 2002 after a trip to the United States that the Bush Administration had decided to "fix" the intelligence so they could invade Iraq, no matter what any evidence or non-evidence of weapons of mass destruction might show.

On a wonderful website called TomDispatch run by Tom Englehardt, there is a fuller explanation:

On May 15, Tomdispatch posted a piece Mark Danner wrote for the New York Review of Books on the Downing Street Memo, the first of a string of secret documents leaked to the Times of London from the upper reaches of the British government, which cumulatively offered an unprecedented look inside the Bush administration as it was preparing, 8 months ahead of time, to prosecute a war against Iraq. By the time Danner wrote his piece, the memo, released by the London Times on May 1, had already sped around the Internet, but had still not seen the print light-of-day in the United States. Neither the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, nor the Washington Post thought the notes of a meeting of Tony Blair's war cabinet in which the head of M16, the British equivalent of the CIA director, discusses recent high-level private talks in Washington, a memo with a classic line -- "But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." -- was fit enough to print or even highlight on their front pages.

Englehardt then reprints from the The New York Review of Books (prior to publication on August 8th) a great exchange between Michael Kinsley, the editor of the "Los Angeles Times," and Mark Danner, a brilliant writer and professor of journalism at UC Berkeley, where Kinsley defends not printing the memo and Danner disagrees. As James Wolcott wrote, "Kinsley comes off rather the worse in the exchange, if I may deploy a rare bit of understatement." For the entire exchange, click here.



Here in San Francisco, we suffer under the yoke of the "San Francisco Chronicle," which has long competed for the title of Worst Major Morning Daily in the World. Somehow, when the Hearst Corporation took it over about six years ago with Phil Bronstein, the ex-Mr. Sharon Stone as editor, the newspaper actually managed to get considerably worse, which frankly had seemed impossible. Their two "Chronicle Washington Bureau" writers are a couple of mealy-mouthed reactionaries named Marc Sandalow and Carolyn Lochhead (whose name I can't help but change to Blockhead in my brain every time I see it). I would give you links to some of their typical blatherings, but there's already enough stupidity and darkness in the world, so I will not.



The best stuff in the "Chronicle" is always buried somewhere, as the above chart taken from AP demonstrates. It was on page A9 last Friday, the 15th, and actually has a cute little chart showing it's "civilians" who are bearing the brunt of all the mayhem in Iraq.

I don't think the U.S. press is ever going to recover from its lies and omissions about Iraq. If you didn't trust them before, the last four or five years have been a real eye-opener.

Libraries and The Miserable Ms. Cohen

My friend Pedro Murteira wrote to say I should stop bothering the librarians at the Main Library and just use their horrible internet database from home to reserve whatever I wanted, and that the system works quite well.



He was perfectly correct, but part of the pleasure of being physically at a library is stumbling across books you would not have thought to ever read, or encountering a DVD of a movie that had never even crossed your radar.



I wrote last week about how the staff was so grouchy at the Main Library back in the 1990s and the private Mechanics Institute Library staff was so welcoming during the same time, but that somehow the opposite is now true. I've also noticed quite a few former employees from the Mechanics Institute now working at the Public Library.



One of them clued me in. "Inez Shor Cohen used to work here at the public library for a long time and she was a real piece of work, plotting with her cohorts how to make everyone miserable. Unfortunately, a few of them are still working here. Right now I've heard that they're having serious staffing problems at the Mechanics Institute and firing people without cause. It's not pretty."



Why are certain people so purposeful in spreading misery wherever they go and why are they so often in positions of power? My friend Jack Murray, a retired Proust scholar in Santa Barbara, writes that Voltaire's "Philosophical Dictionary" is "fun for an undergraduate or a cynical adult, but it wears thin after a while." Still, I'm sure Voltaire will have some answer to the above question. It's a subject with which he was well acquainted.

Heart of the City Farmers Market

In United Nations Plaza, between the Main Public Library, the Asian Art Museum and Market Street...



...there is a twice-weekly farmers market on Wednesdays and Sundays.



Farmers markets have recently become ubiquitous in various neighborhoods around San Francisco, but this one has been around longer than most.



It's certainly not fancy or very extensive in its selections...



...like the one on Saturdays at the Ferry Building, which you can read about at my friend Samantha Breach's fabulous food blog, Becks and Posh.



But the truth is that it's nice being around fresh food selling that isn't pretentious on either the part of the farmers or the consumers.



The market is also a serious public service since the only other grocery stores in the area tend to be the corner liquor store variety which don't particularly specialize in food.



Plus, the place has cut flowers for sale...



...along with orchids...



...and succulents.



There's also Indian vegetarian food cooked by a Sikh...



...and a masseur to work on your aching back after an afternoon of shopping.



What more do you need?

Mirkarimi, Suzuki and Maruki Art

Former District 5 Supervisor Matt Gonzalez started a monthly art opening on the third Friday of every month at his City Hall offices, and his wildly popular successor Ross Mirkarimi, above, has decided to carry on the tradition.



His offices, however, are very small in comparison with the other Supervisors, so the 5-8 PM party gets intimate fast and usually spills out into the hallway.



They were serving green tea and red wine...



...which the crazed writer h brown was enjoying profusely.



Usually, the art is overshadowed by all the political schmoozing, and Friday's event was no exception, but this time the art managed to hold its own.



There were a number of large murals created in 1950 by Iri and Toshi Maruki who had gone to Hiroshima three days after the bombing to visit relatives.



The pieces were genuinely disturbing, and a perfect reminder of the 60th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing on August 5, 1945.



There was another artist being honored, the 85-year-old Lewis Suzuki, whose large watercolors couldn't have been more of a contrast.



Suzuki made a late entrance...



...and was the immediate, shy star of the gathering.





It was a lovely evening.

Iraq and the Blogs

There was a small crowd at the weekly peace vigil in front of the Federal Building on Thursday. I asked where the big, blue "Quakers for Peace" banner was this week and was told it was with the Quakers who hadn't shown up, which gave everyone the giggles.



During the 1980s, my two favorite journalists were a couple of young writers in the weekly "New York Village Voice" named Alexander Cockburn and James Wolcott. Cockburn wrote a number of Washington, DC muckraking pieces with another writer named James Ridgeway and also did a weekly "Press Clips" column, which was an early examination of the mendacity of the mainstream press. He also was one of the first writers to suggest that Israel wasn't treating their neighbors the Palestinians very well, which was rank heresy at the time. The only other famous person of those years to suggest such a thing was Vanessa Redgrave, who was treated as a rank lunatic. Cockburn was eventually fired because he was paid to address an Arab-American group, or some such nonsense, and then was offered his job back when it turned out there was nothing unethical about his behavior, but he told the "Village Voice" to eff off and has made his way as a freelancer ever since, moving at some point to the country in Northern California.



James Wolcott wrote the "Television" column and used it as an excuse to pontificate on just about everything cultural. What he and Cockburn shared were extraordinarily elegant, funny and cutting prose styles that made the two of them stick out like sore thumbs, even among a number of other quite brilliant writers at the "Voice" of the time.

Wolcott moved on to "The New Yorker" briefly and finally settled in at "Vanity Fair" where he's written a monthly column for ages. Cockburn became a columnist for "The Nation" for which he has written even longer. Since I don't read either magazine (the former is too glossy and perfumed for my tastes, and the latter isn't glossy and perfumed enough), I basically lost out on two of my favorite writers for years.

However, they have both started blogs and it feels like having two old friends reappear out of nowhere.

Cockburn's site is a magazine style affair called Counterpunch, which has a lot of boring, predictable writers, but there are some major exceptions, especially Alexander Cockburn himself. The site has been down today, but it should be back up soon, so click here for a link.

Wolcott's blog is sponsored by "Vanity Fair" and you can tell it's revived him as a writer/commentator. It's quite amazing how much he can write, so well. To get to the link, click here.



He has also provided a link to his latest column in "Vanity Fair" about the media and Iraq which is quite brilliant and telling. Here's an excerpt:

The truth is, Americans have been exposed to a diminishing picture of the human destruction in Iraq. As Sydney Schanberg wrote in The Village Voice, "Yes, some photos of such bloodshed have been published at times over the span of this war. But they have become sparser and sparser, while the casualty rate has stayed the same or, frequently, shot higher." This reticence reeks of bad faith. "If we believe that the present war in Iraq is just and necessary, why do we shrink from looking at the damage it wreaks? … And why, in response, have newspapers gone along with Washington and grown timid about showing photos of the killing and maiming?" Because, post-9/11, news editors and producers have been tiptoeing like ballerinas to avoid offending the Pentagon and the Oval Office, afraid of making a dreadful faux pas. While it's awfully decent of [NY Times columnist] Tierney not to advocate official censorship (which would be like a watchdog requesting a muzzle), journalistic self-censorship may be more pernicious than government censorship. At least the latter is honestly motivated by the dishonest self-interest of our elected chiselers to deceive the citizenry and get away with grand larceny. But the pale, apprehensive, hand-wringing, soul-searching self-censorship of editors and publishers trying to measure just how much unpalatable truth can be doled out to the public without upsetting their delicate digestive system serves no one's interest, not even their own. You might as well put Charlie Brown in charge.

For the full article, click here.

Searching for Voltaire at the Library

For decades, San Francisco's Main Public Library was in the building next door on the Civic Center Plaza that has been recently refashioned into the Asian Art Museum.



In the early 1990s, a plan was created to abandon the beautiful old building and create a brand-new, technologically sophisticated place that would be more pleasing to a group of rich people called "Friends of the Public Library" and less welcoming to the hordes of homeless poor people who essentially lived in the old library.



The New Main Library building was opened in 1996 and met with huge controversy. The most famous opposition was offered by the novelist Nicholson Baker, who wrote a couple of witheringly angry articles in "The New Yorker" magazine about the destruction of old books and the wonderful old card catalog because there was no longer any space in the new library. He even expanded his diatribe into a book called "Double Fold" which is reviewed here.



I always hated the place, partly because it smelled wrong, of plastic rather than dusty old books.



Its design seemed more suited for a Hyatt Regency lobby than a public library, and the wholesale destruction of a huge number of books in their collection struck me as criminal.



Among the things they replaced the books with was a bizarre wall of author names that were grotesquely inappropriate.



The staff at the time of the opening seemed overwhelmed by everything and were extremely grouchy, so I just never bothered using the place.



Plus, I belonged to a private library for over 20 years in the Financial District, dating from the 19th century, called the Mechanics' Institute Library. The place looked and smelled and felt right, and the majority of employees were an eccentric, charming and interesting group.



Places that deal with the public, however, have their own weird alchemy when it comes to staff, and unfortunately the new head librarian at the Mechanics' Institute, a truly horrible woman named Inez Shor Cohen, hired a few nasty cronies, the good librarians left or became fearful, and gradually the library became a miserable place to visit. It became all about punishment rather than helping people.



So I gave up my private membership a couple of years ago and started to use the Main Library, and to my utter amazement the opposite shift had occurred among the personnel. There are still a few stinkers working there, but the vast majority are sweet and helpful, even with crazy poor people crapping in their lobby.



Trying to actually find anything specific in the place, however, is a serious nightmare. Not only are books/CDs/DVDs mis-shelved, if they are shelved at all, but the many patrons contribute to the chaos with their own eccentric habits.



I asked for the help of this librarian in finding a copy of Voltaire's "Candide" a week ago and he consulted the computer database which said there were two copies sitting in the "Fiction" section. I went where I was directed but there were no copies, so he checked to make sure that they just hadn't been reshelved. No such luck. Then we tried the "Philosophy" section where the database directed him to a specific Dewey decimal number, but that was no use either. I just happened to look further down the aisle, saw Rosseau, and finally an old Modern Library paperback of excerpts from Voltaire's works, including the entire "Candide."



I felt sorry for the librarian, particularly since I returned the next week, wanting to find MORE Voltaire, who I am finding fascinating. Unfortunately, the library website has to be the worst designed database/website I've ever had the misfortune to use. For instance, in trying to reserve material, you have to go through three or four screens and just when you think you might be ready to meet with success, you click on what seems the obvious next choice and it takes you back to where you started.



Which is when you want to start screaming in frustration and pain. And just for the record, any additional Voltaire volumes were lost in "storage" somewhere, except for a two-volume translation of the "Philosophical Dictionary" which were hiding in the Bayview branch library. I've put in a special reserve for them to be transferred to the Main and will keep you posted.

An Advertisement for Myself & A Conspiracy

Postings will be light here because I've been working on a huge, paying job for a client since last Friday and it threatens to continue through this Thursday. By the way, I earn my living creating/tweaking PowerPoint presentations, making them look professional, legible and well, pretty. My rates are inexpensive and it can all be done over the internet, so if you ever have any PowerPoint needs, get hold of me at:

Michael Strickland
strickla@earthlink.net

Also, beyond the rotting Karl Rove news, there is some interesting speculation about the London bombings, whose official story is starting to look as weird and unconvincing as the 9/11 "offical story." Something's just not quite right here.

For an interesting description of the weird inconsistencies, check out this blog called The Dirt Files.

The Lone Star Saloon

During most of the summer, the western half of San Francisco is blanketed in fog, with the Civic Center, on the cusp of sun and gloom, usually whipped by intense winds.



Five blocks away to the south on Harrison Street between 9th and 10th Streets will get you to my favorite pub where it is usually reliably sunny in its back yard.



There is also a windbreak involving four walls.



The pub caters to the gay "bear" movement, which is an odd fetishization of large, hairy, bearded guys in reaction to the worship of slim, smooth and muscled guys elsewhere in the gay world. Think of James Gandolfini with a beard, and you'll get the ideal.



The commodification of small affinity groups stikes me as absurd, however. It reminds me of taking photos for an outdoor event at the Randall Children's museum, with about 100 parents and children of all races, religions and romantic preferences mingling happily, except for three women who sat underneath a banner in their own part of the lawn that proclaimed, "Lesbian Mothers of Twins."



On Saturday afternoons, from 3 to 7, there is a "beverage benefit," meaning all the beer you can drink for $8, which goes to a community group. This week's beneficiary were the Dukes and Duchesses of San Francisco, who didn't seem to be a very big draw.



Still, most of the regulars were there, and most of them could care less about the "bear" movement. They are an interesting crew of young and old...



...artists and computer programmers...



...psychic former hippie witches...



...all being attended to by Casey, The Bartender Dude who's a surfer at heart.



It was a charming communal buzz.

The Murder Cult

In the week after the United States government started bombing Afghanistan in October of 2001, a small group of Quakers started a weekly peace vigil every Thursday from noon to 1PM in front of the Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue. They have been there ever since. After the horrible bombings in London yesterday, it seemed like a good place to hang out.



I believe that the murder, torture or maiming of another human being is wrong, no matter who is doing it, for whatever reason. But we still live in a world where there is "good" murder (it's called war) and "good" torture (I still haven't figured that one out even with the guidance of the helpful Alan Dershowitz).



We will be getting plenty of bulletins in the weeks ahead about exactly how many unfortunate people died and were wounded in London, but I'm curious. How many people have been murdered by the British and United States forces (along with their contracted mercenaries) in Afghanistan and Iraq over, say, the month of June? Even though it's being done in our names and with our tax dollars, we'll probably never know.



There's another disturbing factor which I hesitate to bring up, which is the fact that I don't believe a word my own government says anymore about anything, which is stupid because SOME of it must be true. There's always been plenty of lying from the seat of imperial power in Washington, D.C. (LBJ and the Gulf of Tonkin, the scary Nixon years, for example), but with the current administration, lying about everything seems to be a reflexive habit.



And they seem to have a Cult of Death going on that is genuinely creepy. Our vile Secretary of State, Ms. Rice, went to the British Embassy yesterday and wrote in a book of condolences. (Thank you to one of my favorite blogs, Princess Sparkle Pony's Photoblog for the heads up, and photographer Larry Downing for the pic.) She writes "They will not have died in vain" which is essentially a threat of more institutional violence and horror.



I've been reading more Voltaire, who seemed to hate all organized religions with the exception of Confucians and the Quakers. A couple of paragraphs from an essay called "End, Final Causes" from his "Philosophical Dictionary" seem appropriate for the moment.

Sheep, undoubtedly, were not made expressly to be roasted and eaten, since many nations abstain from this horror. Mankind are not created essentially to massacre one another, since the Brahmins and Quakers kill no one. But the clay out of which we are kneaded frequently produces massacres, as it produces calumnies, vanities, persecutions, and impertinences. It is not precisely that the formation of man is the final cause of our madnesses and follies, for a final cause is universal, and invariable in every age and place; the horrors and absurdities of the human race are nevertheless part of the eternal order of the things. When we thresh our corn, the flail is the final cause of the separation of the grain. But if that flail, while threshing my grain, crushes to death a thousand insects, that occurs not by the determination of my will, nor, on the other hand, is it by mere chance; the insects were, on this occasion, actually under my flail, and had to be there.

It is a consequence of the nature of things that man should be ambitious; that he should sometimes discipline a number of other men; that he should be a conquereror, or that he should be defeated; but never can it be said: Man was created by God to be killed in war.

Swearing In

The free tabloid "The Examiner" has a "What's Happening Today" page that is bizarrely useful. It lists events at City Hall, the governor and mayor's schedules, a few author readings at various bookstores, speeches at the Commonwealth Club, and usually a plug for a restaurant, and that's it.



Wednesday's listing was for the swearing in of new commissioners for the Asian Art Museum Commission to be held on the "Mayor's Balcony" in City Hall at 3:30 in the afternoon, which was being facilitated by this beautiful blonde.



There were about 50 chairs set up for the ceremony but the anticipated crowd never showed up, so the mayoral aides quickly had many of the empty seats pulled back and removed for what was essentially a photo-op.



The six commissioners were a motley crew, and they were joined by Brian Murphy, on the phone, who was being sworn in as a Department of Human Services commissioner at the same time.



This gentleman had just been hired as the Asian Art Museum's Chief of External Affairs. When I asked him how many people were on the commission, he told me "27."



"How in God's name does anything actually get done with 27 people?" I asked, but he diplomatically refrained from answering.



Gavin Newsom was about twenty minutes late arriving to the ceremony, so the small crowd chatted each other up while waiting for the ritual to begin.



Newsom finally emerged from his office, looking like his usual million bucks, and gave a short speech that was an odd mix of formal and informal. He also wondered aloud how anything could get done with 27 commissioners, but quickly corrected himself and said how much they had accomplished in the last couple of years without being specific.



Probably the best moment was when he first arrived and saw ex-supervisor and ex-assessor Doris Ward jabbering on her cell phone. "You haven't changed at all, Doris, have you?" he said, as he grabbed the phone out of her hand and proceeded to talk to the person on the other line, telling them that Doris would call them back after she had been sworn in as an Asian Art Commissioner.



He also introduced Supervisor Sean Elsbernd "who comes to all of these things, I've told him how important they are," which was an odd thing to say, since it was obvious that Elsbernd could care less about actually attending the event.



Finally, it was time to be sworn in clumsily with an "I do." And there you have your government in action.

Update: Mayor Newsom and various officials held a news conference today after the London bombings telling us that San Francisco was under "terrorist threat" because of all our "iconic sights" so they've added 100 overtime policemen to the streets today, and we're all supposed to call into the police and fire departments if we see anything "suspicious" on public transportation. This is not only absurd, but a ridiculous waste of money, and doesn't increase public safety one iota.

Update 2: For even more civic shame, check out what the newly elected mayor of Los Angeles did instead this morning at this blog. Instead of calling out the fascist police state, he rode public transportation all day and hung out with his citizens. All Gavin could do was be "iconically" self-absorbed and appeal to fear and paranoia. This is not a good sign.

Impermanence

The first Tuesday of each month features free admission to the Asian Art Museum, called "Target Tuesdays," presumably after the sponsoring retail chain. As you can see, it's quite popular. Since the museum receives a large chunk of city tax dollars every year, the fact that there is only one day a month for the peasants to enter without paying is actually rather grotesque, particularly since it's a weekday which eliminates the 9-5 working poor.



In the beautiful, unaltered old main library room which is now called Samsung Hall, there are often performances, art-making activities, and chances to interact with various masters.



Currently there are a group of Tibetan monks creating a sand mandala over the course of eight days.



When the Asian Art Museum was in an annex to the old deYoung in Golden Gate Park, there was an interesting incident during the creation of another sand mandala by Tibetan monks. I tried Googling to find an article about it, without luck, so this is from my memory. The monks had almost completed the gorgeous mandala over a painstaking two-week process, which everyone loved watching, when a crazy person charged the mandala, saying it was a "work of Satan," and she destroyed it.



The city's inhabitants and the museum officials were outraged and wanted to immediately punish the character, but the Tibetan monks refused to press charges.



In fact, they prayed for the woman, while explaining to everyone that the mandala was MEANT to be destroyed, and they started their work all over again from scratch. Two weeks later, when it was done, they ritually destroyed it themselves before putting the sand into the Pacific Ocean.



This is the fourth stop for the "Treasures of Tibet" show, and it's been dogged by extreme controversy from ethnic Tibetans, particularly when the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana refused to let the mandala makers there put up pictures of the Dalai Lama. Thankfully, that hasn't been an issue here.



Speaking of impermanence, the Hayes Green public art temple pagoda by David Best continues to evolve. I've written about it before here, here, here and here.



People are expressing a longing for the structure to be permanent, but chunks of it are already falling apart and are being held together by wire.



The graffiti is also becoming less elegant, but that's part of the reality of the structure too.



Larry Harvey, the founder of Burning Man, made a wonderful speech at the official opening about what he hoped the structure would incubate. He noted that most public art took years to get put up, usually because of bureaucratic hoops, and that it tended to be extremely expensive as the sponsors usually commissioned "famous" artists from elsewhere in the art world.



Harvey's vision was for temporary, inexpensive, interesting pieces of art by local artists, blooming all over the city. "And if somebody likes the art, they can actually buy some from the artist, and if that happens, this city could become an artistic center like we've never seen."



Let us acknowledge impermanence and let a hundred sculptures bloom.

Citizens of the Universe

I love the Fourth of July holiday, probably because I've always associated it with a midsummer festival rather than "patriotism." Plus, it was nice contemplating the specter of total collapse which is currently haunting the evil Bush Administration.



I've started reading Voltaire for the first time, beginning with the short essays that make up his "Philosophical Dictionary." Not only is the 18th-century philosopher eminently readable, but his views are shockingly up-to-date. Here are the last paragraphs of his essay on "Country," written in the 1750s.

"But which of the two is to be preferred for a country -- a monarchy or a republic? The question has been debated for four thousand years. Ask the rich, and they will tell you an aristocracy; ask the people and they will reply a democracy; kings alone prefer royalty. Why, then, is almost all the earth governed by monarchs? Put that question to the rats who proposed to hang a bell around the cat's neck. In truth, the genuine reason is, as we have said, that men are rarely worthy of governing themselves.

It is sad that often, to be a good patriot, we must become the enemy of the rest of mankind. That good citizen, the ancient Cato, always said, in speaking to the senate, "Such is my opinion, and Carthage must be destroyed." To be a good patriot is to wish our own country enriched by commerce, and powerful in arms. It is clear that one country cannot gain without another losing, and cannot conquer without making men unfortunate.

Such is the condition of mankind, that to wish the greatness of our own country is often to wish evil to our neighbors. He who could wish that his country should always remain neither greater nor smaller, neither richer nor poorer, would be a citizen of the universe."

I think it's long last past time for all of us to become "citizens of the universe."

The Pearl Fishers

Certain music that is beautiful and unchallenging goes well with the whole process of morning and waking up slowly. First on my list would be any of the dozens of Haydn string quartets. Most opera is too heavy for that time of day, but there are exceptions, such as Klemperer's all-star version of "The Magic Flute" (Gedda, Janowitz, Berry, Popp) with all the dumb dialogue taken out. Another recording I've been playing for years is Bizet's 1863 opera, "The Pearl Fishers."



I'd never bothered reading the libretto so I was clueless what anybody was singing about, and according to conventional opinion, it didn't matter. There are two Top 10 pieces of music in the score, the baritone-tenor duet that is only rivaled by Verdi in "Don Carlo" and a soft, tender tenor aria at the end of Act I that is unlike anything else in opera. Since the early-to-die Bizet really was one of the Gifted Ones, the rest of the score is also interesting and has great charm.



This was the first time for "The Pearl Fishers" at the San Francisco Opera, in a production borrowed from the San Diego Opera, with costumes and sets designed by the infamous British fashion designer Zandra Rhodes, who as you can see is not afraid of color.



After the monochromatic production of "Queen of Spades" last week, this psychedelic version of Orientalia was a complete tonic. The libretto, set in a 19th-century French fantasy of Ceylon, was pretty silly but we've all seen sillier (Massenet's "Herodiade" anyone?). What was so refreshing about the staging in this production, however, is that they resisted camping it up and played the story straight. It worked.



Even the ballet, which in operas are reliably dreadful, wasn't as bad as usual. The chorus was wonderful and not asked to do too many ridiculous things, and the principal singers were all fine, with one exception, the young tenor Charles Castronovo, who was simply awesome. Not only did he sing the entire opera with his shirt off, winning the Operatic Hunky Hairy Chest Award for the season, but his voice was perfect for this music: youthful, sweet and ardent.



My only complaint with the staging was the telescoping of Acts I and II of the three-act opera without an intermission.



Ninety minutes is too long to go without a break, particularly with this music. It's not the punishing Wagner after all. Not only were the standees getting a little tired and cranky but the Sunday matinee audience is predominantly elderly women who often need to take a pee. Cut them some slack.



There are two more performances of "The Pearl Fishers" this week, but they're sold out. Try standing room or one of the scalpers on the front steps if you're interested.

Tibetan Treasures

The Asian Art Museum has a special exhibit called "Tibet: Treasures from the Roof of the World." Ethnic Tibetans are not particularly amused by the exhibit since it's been assembled by the Republic of China with "stolen" items, which I wrote about here.



I started the tour by saying hello to Marlena in the cute museum cafe.



To get to the permanent collection, there is a large glass-enclosed escalator.
It's quite beautiful, but unfortunately it looks out on nothing more than the ugly Hastings College and the roof of the museum.



The museum should at least put a Japanese rock garden on the roof to give the escalator ride some visual interest.

At the beginning of the permanent collection, there is an amusing bit of signage, which states that there is no such thing as "Asia," which is a Western construct.



They explained that the collection was divided into a number of geographical groups, which are differentiated by different color schemes on their walls. It starts with India, goes to Southeast Asia (Thailand, the Philippines, etc.), and then travels to the Himalayas which is painted in a deep, terra red.



Tibetan art is not all pacific Buddhas.



In fact, there are a lot of demons involved.



My favorite commentary on the labels around the art tell us what they symbolize, and somehow it's never quite what's right in front of your eyes, as in "having sex."



I returned to the first floor for the special exhibit.



The three rooms of "treasures" really are extraordinary.





According to a catalogue, "Tibet's dry climate has preserved the brilliant colors of these tapestries to an astonishing degree."



They're not kidding. These 300-year-old pieces look like they were created yesterday.



The statues are wild...



...and so are the various "objets" like this huge horn and its skeleton holders.



Check it out.

San Francisco Government TV

The sumptuous chambers in City Hall where the Board of Supervisors hold their meetings has one huge drawback. Even though everyone is talking into microphones, the sound goes straight up into the high-ceilinged chamber and the audience can't hear a darn thing that isn't mush.



So if you actually want to hear the details of a meeting, it's best to go home and turn the dial to Channel 26, the home of San Francisco Government TV. It's the municipal version of C-Span, offering live meetings without any commentary.



At first glance, the meetings are numbingly boring and painful to watch, but once you get to know the players and fall into the jerky, slow rhythm of a legislative session, it becomes truly fascinating.



The Budget and Finance Committee hearings over the last couple of weeks, where each city department tries to justify their expenses, and then usually pleads for more money, has been a real primer in how government actually works. Supervisor Tom Ammiano, the gay, leftist supervisor who is chair of the committee, has been really impressive keeping the three-ring circus in motion, and he's been around long enough not to put up with a lot of the usual mendacity. He's joined on the committee by the great leftist Ross Mirkarimi, the seemingly senile Jake McGoldrick whose voting patterns are getting more reactionary every day, and the two Gavin Newsom allies, Sean Elsbernd and Fiona Ma who can be counted on to be as politically self-serving as possible.

Having all this on television is actually quite revolutionary, since it becomes so obvious who the old-fashioned sleaze characters are and who are the people trying to actually change things for the better.



In the category of incompetent, nepotistic, old-fashioned San Franciscans, there's probably no better example than Annemarie Conroy, who was appointed years ago to be a truly terrible Supervisor, then put in charge of Treasure Island scams during Willie Brown's corrupt reign as mayor, and is now in charge of "Emergency Services," the group who couldn't even get out a tsunami warning a couple of weeks ago though they have many millions of dollars in their budget.

Speaking of sleaze, there is some breaking news on the internet about the identity of the White House officials who outed the CIA agent, Valerie Plame, during the runup to war in Iraq. It seems that it was none other than Prince of Darkness Karl Rove, who is about to go down hard. Click here for a link to the news.

And by the way, this latest unraveling of the thread of Bushco corruption was predicted by the great Gore Vidal back in 2003 in an interview with Marc Cooper of the LA Weekly.

Cooper: Yet you saw in the '60s how the Johnson administration collapsed under the weight of its own hubris. Likewise with Nixon. And now with the discontent over how the war in Iraq is playing out, don't you get the impression that Bush is headed for the same fate?

Vidal: I actually see something smaller tripping him up: this business over outing the wife of Ambassador Wilson as a CIA agent. It's often these small things that get you. Something small enough for a court to get its teeth into. Putting this woman at risk because of anger over what her husband has done is bitchy, dangerous to the nation, dangerous to other CIA agents. This resonates more than Iraq. I'm afraid that 90 percent of Americans don't know where Iraq is and never will know, and they don't care.

To read the whole interview, which is prescient in all kinds of ways, click here.

Litter It Is Loveliest

As someone who has never been able to wrap my brain around the proper usages of "who" and "whom," no matter how many dozens of times it has been explained to me, I have some sympathy for the many writers on the internet who fall into the it's-its conundrum.



Here's a word of advice. If you find yourself hopelessly confused on the issue, then just don't ever use an apostrophe with "its" ever again. If you mean "it is," then just write "it is" rather than "it's," which is the proper contraction. If you are using "its" as a possessive, as in "its beauty and its craftsmanship," it also doesn't have an apostrophe. There. Problem solved.



Still, it is amazing that the signage which has been displayed all over San Francisco's City Hall for the last month has the "it's" mistake on every last piece of glossy, expensively printed material. And nobody caught it. At the Mayor's Office of Neighborhood Services, which sponsored the art event, I asked if anybody had pointed out the boo-boo and was told no.



The signage was directing people to the top floor of City Hall where there was an art show that was put up in concert with the "World Environment Week" festivities at the beginning of June.



The exhibit featured sculptural art from a show in Hamburg, Germany where all the pieces were constructed from "recycled" materials.



Some of the pieces were quite beautiful.



Others were what I would call Tormented Teutonic.





A chair made out of used books was wonderful.



Possibly the most amusing piece was a deconstructed bathroom sitting on the floor surrounded by the Beaux Arts splendor of City Hall. It brought to mind all kinds of metaphors but I think I'll leave that one alone.



The show isn't (is not) going to be up much longer, so check it out soon.