The Trial of Pelosi and the Arrest of Markley

Last Monday, there was a small antiwar demonstration in front of the Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue.



It included a piece of street theatre "judging" Congressswoman Nancy Pelosi and two hours later there was to be a "die-in" and civil disobedience arrests.



Like most of these cameramen, I didn't feel like standing around for two hours of mediocre street theatre before the handcuff action arrived, so I left pretty quickly.



On the way to the public library, I ran into Markley (pictured above), the Quaker organizer of the Thursday peace vigils in front of the Fed Building. He was on his way to the demo and was one of the people who were determined to be arrested in protest of Pelosi's stand on the Iraq war. Later in the week, I asked him for an account of the afternoon, and the following is his response.

"It was a good rally. We tried Nancy Pelosi in absentia - the testimony against her made for some rousing speeches. To nobody's surprise and a great deal of cheering she was found guilty."

"Then some of us approached the doors of the federal building, intent on committing civil disobedience. To my delight, we were let in. We had to show i.d. and go through the metal detector - but these days everybody has to do that.

Once inside, we stood around in the lobby, chatting. There were more marshals than demonstrators but nobody bothered us."

"At the planning meeting the night before we had decided that our civil disobedience would take the form of a "die in." We also decided that only a few people would go into the building. The rest would "die" outside - to give us greater media visibility since cameras are not allowed in the federal building (another rule not just for protesters but for everybody). This turned out to be moot, as there wasn't any tv or newspaper coverage of the civil disobedience at all - at least none I'm aware of. (Thus this is a scoop!)"

"Finally we were gathered. We decided to block the elevators. We lay down. A few of us had sheets to use as shrouds. Simultaneously the outsiders blocked the plaza doors.

It felt great, lying on the cool clean marble. Somebody started singing, "Ain't Gonna Study War No More." Somebody played a harmonica. I was amazed how easy it is to sing lying on your back. In that big space our voices rang out."

"A marshal read the statute we were charged with violating four times and ordered us to disperse. He said that those arrested by S.F. police outside would face lighter penalties and be released more quickly. I was dubious about that but both assertions turned out to be true. A couple of people left our group to join the others."

"I wasn't tempted to go outdoors because after all my beef is with the federal government and, even if it's not Nancy Pelosi herself, it's the feds I want to confront."

"One by one we were placed under arrest. Our hands were cuffed behind us and we were escorted 100 feet or so to a holding area. The plastic cuffs were cut off. Each demonstrator was photographed with a marshal. Mine was a tall and attractive young man, pleasant enough but unwilling to look me in the eye. Nobody in our group non-cooperated. We were courteous and so were the marshals."

"Seventeen of us were arrested inside. We agreed among ourselves not to pay the $125 fine so we will go to court - unless the charges are dismissed, which is likely."

"A slightly larger group was detained outdoors. I believe they were released without charges and, as promised, before us."

"But we were federal prisoners for less than an hour so it wasn't a big investment of time. Indeed, it was brief enough that I was able to get home using the Muni transfer I got coming."

"Friends and supporters from the National Lawyer's Guild were waiting on the plaza to give us hugs."

"Did our little civil disobedience accomplish anything? I don't want to claim too much. It's easy enough to dismiss - but I can tell you I found it enormously worth doing. I came out of the federal building refreshed, more determined than ever to work to end the insanity of war."

For those who are wondering why on earth leftist antiwar protestors would be making such a stink about the eminent Democratic congresswoman who is supposedly a rabid "liberal," there's a speech you ought to read that she delivered on May 24th of this year to AIPAC, the powerful Americans for Israel lobbying group which is currently under investigation for stealing state secrets. Click here to get to the "Common Dreams" website where there is a reprint of the entire speech along with an analysis by Mark Gaffney.



The speech pretty much gives the game away concerning why Democrats haven't been more forceful anti-Iraq-war advocates, the reason being that they are PRO-Iraq-war and are itching to get into Iran too. Here's the finale of Pelosi's speech:

"There are those who contend that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all about Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This is absolute nonsense. In truth, the history of the conflict is not over occupation, and never has been: it is over the fundamental right of Israel to exist.

"The greatest threat to Israel's right to exist, with the prospect of devastating violence, now comes from Iran. For too long, leaders of both political parties in the United States have not done nearly enough to confront the Russians and the Chinese, who have supplied Iran as it has plowed ahead with its nuclear and missile technology.

"Proliferation represents a clear threat to Israel and to America. It must be confronted by an international coalition against proliferation, with a commitment and a coalition every bit as strong as our commitment to the war against terror."

"The people of Israel long for peace and are willing to make the sacrifices to achieve it. We hope that peace and security come soon - and that this moment of opportunity is not lost. As Israel continues to take risks for peace, she will have no friend more steadfast that the United States.

In the words of Isaiah, we will make ourselves to Israel 'as hiding places from the winds and shelters from the tempests; as rivers of water in dry places; as shadows of a great rock in a weary land.'

The United States will stand with Israel now and forever. Now and forever."

Webzine

On the same spectacularly beautiful weekend as the peace march, the Love Parade, the Blues Festival at Fort Mason, and the Folsom Street Fair, a conference for self-publishers on the web was being held at the Swedish American Hall on Market Street near Church.



The event, called Webzine (click here for more info) was held annually for four years during the dot-com boom, supposedly as a geek/hip antidote to the "dot-com dicks," as the graffiti on Zeitgeist's front door once put it.



The event shut down after 2001 but has been revived this year, since even though most of the dot-com marketing jerks have moved back to New York after going through a lot of venture capital...



...the actual work of creating the internet-empowered future continues in the Bay Area without a hitch.



In fact, more has probably been accomplished since the hypesters left.



The Swedish American Hall itself was amazing on its own.



There were four floors of odd little rooms, most of them with lots of natural light.



The main hall was impressive with its skylights and beamed ceilings.



The stage was set up with huge Nordic King chairs which made everybody feel like Lily Tomlin's Ernestine when we sat in them for our panels. Pictured on the left, by the way, is one of the organizers, Eddie Codel, a genuinely amiable soul who has what is commonly acknowledged as the coolest website name in San Francisco, www.eddie.com.



The M.C. for the afternoon was an interesting looking author named Charlie Anders.



To get to his/her website, click here.



The panel on which I was invited to speak was called "Neighborhood Blogging" and my fellow panelists were all much more technically savvy than me, creating complex community bulletin boards on their blogs, some with sophisticated search engines.



The gent on the right was Andy Bowser from Prospect Heights in Brooklyn, and he had a funny, lively brain. His community blog is here. Sitting next to him is Mike Lin, who has a Potrero Hill neighborhood blog that's one of the most charming I've ever seen. Click here to check it out.



The geeky characters attending were a sweet bunch, and they really were an antidote to the usual dot-com-a-go-go atmosphere attending so many of these events. Their pretty Webzine T-shirts, for instance, were being sold for $5. My only request is that the next edition be held during a cold, rainy month because nobody wanted to be inside on a perfect September weekend, particularly when there were so many interesting things to do outside.

The LoveParade Party

Starting from the other end of Market Street from the antiwar march, San Francisco's Second Annual LoveParade ended up in the Civic Center Plaza.



Here's an excerpt about the history of the event which is on their website (click here).

Loveparade is the brainchild of legendary Berlin DJ Dr. Motte, who founded the event in Berlin in 1989. Motte rallied with other cutting edge techno/house groovers to create a "house music demonstration," which evolved into a demonstration FOR something, namely tolerance, respect and understanding among nations. Speeches and pamphlets gave way to the music’s raw and powerful ability to unite. Thousands upon thousands have heeded the call since, filling the streets of Berlin where attendance topped 1.5 million in 2000. Dr. Motte's underlying principle that "music… speaks in thousands of languages and is understood by all" has never been more evident, a truth he saw first-hand while here in San Francisco to help us kick off the first ever Loveparade in the United States.

Using the universal language of music as both cause and expression, LoveParade is world famous not only for its eccentrically dressed revelers dancing alongside floats, but also for its celebration of diversity, promotion of tolerance, and fostering of community. Since 2000, the Loveparade concept has been exported around the world, to Austria, Chile, England, Israel, Mexico, South Africa, and the United States. All Parades share the same motto: to create an international web and platform for electronic dance music, with each city lending its own flavor.

Loveparade has become the annual electronic music mega-event for international followers of the European-bred movement of Techno. As the electronic music movement has diversified and matured, Loveparades have seen the inclusion of many genres under the electronic music umbrella, including house, techno, trance, new school breaks, drum and bass, jungle, and underground hip hop.

A few of the Peace March people leaked over into the Love Parade, and some of them looked quite charmed...



...while others looked horrified by the frivolity and the loud music pumping from 20 different floats ringing the plaza.



We had brought drinks in festive plastic stemware from our apartment a block away...



...and had a couple of Italian sausages from a great barbeque dude.



The event was amazingly well organized and the Civic Center Plaza was set up as comfortably as I've ever seen it for a big event, including this huge, open tent with tables on which to eat, drink, rest and get out of the sun.



There were also whimsical bits of furniture here and there...



...including art VWs...



...whose interiors people seemed to be using for medicinal herbal enrichment.



Every other person seemed to be documenting the event...



...which just added to the air of exhibitionism/voyeurism that was in the air.



Though the crowd was predominantly heterosexual...



...it also had a sizable gay contingent that happily mingled with everyone rather than ghettoizing themselves.



In fact, the crowd was about as mellow as this large a crowd could be...



...exuding youth, energy, a sense of costume and play...



...with many of them on mind-altering substances...



...putting out some seriously powerful sex vibes. What's not to like?

An Antiwar March

My friend Ellen Toomey and I have been going to public anti-Iraq-war marches in San Francisco for at least three years.



Though they don't seem to have done much good in actually changing the situation, let alone preventing the war, what they ARE good for is providing hope and a sense that one is not alone in the disgust we feel for our present corrupt, evil government.



On the walk from Civic Center to Dolores Park, where the march was to begin, we helped some ladies from Monterey and Mill Valley find their way.



I told them that the easiest way to actually enjoy the march was to find a good, live band and hang out with them.



As if on cue, we wandered into the march just as it was beginning and joined a wonderful collection of musicians.



They were actually two different bands but had decided to hook up together for a fuller sound.



Their pitch tended to be variable but it didn't matter. They sounded great.



There was the usual street theater...



...and amusing signage.



The organizers of the marches are a controversial old socialist group called A.N.S.W.E.R. who tend to upset the Jewish community because they are so anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian.



My problem with them is that they have absolutely the worst speakers imaginable screeching at the already converted at the end of every march instead of just playing some music or dispensing actual information.



Partly because the weather was so spectacularly beautiful on this Saturday afternoon, the number of marchers was huge.



It stretched from Dolores Park all the way to City Hall without a break.



From the roof of the Gay, Etc. Center on Octavia and Market, the endless stream of people was very impressive.



We didn't make it to Jefferson Park in the Civic Center neighborhood where the march terminated, partly because of the screeching speakers and also because we had to rest up for The Love Parade, which by a freak bit of scheduling was also marching up Market Street this afternoon from the Embarcadero to Civic Center.



This lady seemed to be dressed for both occasions. More to follow.

Basra Babylon

There's a blog called "Hullabaloo" where a writer named Digby writes mostly left-wing political essays that tend to get a bit blubbery (he writes too much), but when he's on, he's great. Click here to get to his site.

In the middle of an essay about "what are blogs good for," he wrote the following:

I realize that he is long out of fashion and probably politically incorrect to evoke in these conservative times, but I think that bloggers can be, at our best, the heirs to IF Stone, who famously said that the Washington Post was an exciting paper to read because "you would never know on what page you would find a page one story." Like Stone, we are always looking for the page one story that's buried on page 15. Our capacity to use collective energy to scour newpapers and other publications for the small details that can lead to a bigger story is one of the innovations of blogging. We are using the modern investigative tools at our disposal to follow up on the "shirt tail hanging out" as he used to call it --- the little detail that leads one to delve more deeply into the story and get to the larger truth. Technology, of course, is key --- but so is the aggregate energy of thousands of individuals putting it to work.

There was a particularly interesting Page 15 story this week about two British agent provocateurs in Basra, Iraq being caught by Iraqi police in Arabic drag in a car boobytrapped to the gills with explosives. There was a shootout and the Iraqis won. The British powers-that-be decided to take matters in their own hands, literally, and drove tanks into the walls of the local jail, incidentally freeing all the prisoners.

They finally "rescued" the two Brits from a Shiite "militia" house and whisked them away, precipitating some vigorous rioting by the local population who were not amused at the prospect of British posing as Arabs preparing to set off a murderous car bomb. The Iraqis have been claiming this kind of behavior was happening from the Americans, British and Israelis since day one of the invasion. Well, it seems they were right.



To read about more of the story, click here for a "Raw Story" account. For an explanation of what it all means, click here for Jeff Wells' "Rigorous Intuition" account, complete with censored photos of the two Brits. He ends his essay with this:

It doesn't make sense? Only if you haven't been paying attention. This is the subtext of the Iraq tragedy: blow up the Hajis and play the Sunnis on the Shias; create the chaos that introduces the conditions necessary for the long-game, and the long-held aspirations of the neoconservatives to divide Iraq into ethnographic bantustans.

I wonder what will be made of this story by those who think escalating bloodshed in Iraq is a measure of the failure of US policy, and not its success, and who believe black ops and false flags are figments of our paranoiac fantasies. Probably, as with so much that would bedevil their worldview if only they were intellectually honest enough to permit it, this too will be filtered out and forgotten. But our burden is we won't forget. And damned if the Iraqis will.

If you aren't too busy going to anti-war protest marches, The Love Parade, or the Folsom Street Fair this weekend, you can go to Webzine 2005 at the Swedish-American Hall on Market Street not far from the Castro District. On Sunday afternoon, I'm going to be a panelist on "neighborhood blogging." I'm a virgin panelist (for the very first time) so I'm both amused and nervous. To get to their website for more info, click here.

Unreality

A Will Smith movie called "The Pursuit of Happyness" that is set in San Francisco has been filming around town for the last month.



Though some of my favorite movies use their "real" locations brilliantly, this movie is doing the usual Hollywood routine of completely reinventing reality. The set in the above photos for example, are of a Bay Area Rapid Transit station in Duboce Park.



Not only are there no BART stations located in any parks anywhere in the system, but Duboce Park is way off the map for any actual BART route, which any person from the Bay Area would recognize in a second.



In another case of unreality, closer to the Civic Center, I went for a costume fitting on Ninth Street between Mission and Howard.



It was for Bellini's "Norma," where I'm cast as a non-singing Roman soldier and a Celtic Warrior.



The Costume Shop is totally exotic, with a vast warehouse on a number of floors filled with clothing of all description.



For rented productions, costumes often arrive with the set. For productions created in San Francisco, the shop creates them from scratch.



One scene in "Norma" has the Celtic Warriors dressed in what was described to us as a "loincloth," which gave me visions of Tarzan's outfit. Instead, the costume turned out to be more like a thong that resembled the bottom half of Raquel Welch's outfit in "One Million Years B.C." This is going to be profoundly embarrassing.

Religious Signage Dudes

On Sunday, September 18th, a Memorial Wall for the "homeless" who have died on the streets of San Francisco went up for a three-day period.



The occasion was marked by a processional, a reading of the names of the 149 dead in 2004 ("so that they do not pass from our midst unnamed and unmarked"), a dance by the Omega West Dance Company, and songs composed and sung by Linda Hirschorn.



The event was sponsored by a group called "Religious Witness with Homeless People," which has been around since 1993.



To check out their website, click here.



The counting of the dead on the streets, along with giving them the dignity of being remembered by name, was stopped for a couple of years because somebody interpreted California State law in a way that this activity violated "privacy."



Through the efforts of Assemblyman Mark Leno and Supervisor Bevan Dufty, along with San Francisco's Health Department, legislation was passed that allowed for the continuance of the memorial.



I felt very ambivalent about the entire public relations event for a number of reasons, and I shared my thoughts with the guys who were taking down the "Memorial Wall" on Tuesday afternoon.



"Let me start by saying that the distribution of wealth in this world, and particularly in the United States, is grotesque and needs to be changed radically and soon," I said. "However, I also think people should have the freedom to self-destruct if they really want to. That's part of what cities are for. Plus, all the homeless shouldn't be lumped together. Some people need and want help and others don't. They're self-destructive messes who sometimes want to get out of this world while taking as many people along with them as possible."



"You don't think there should be any services for these people?" one of the workers asked me, and I replied, "there are already a ton of services out there, and millions of dollars being spent, but they're going to scum like Cecil Williams and Catholic Charities with their overpaid management and institutional 'homeless' groups that have been around forever sucking up resources that change absolutely nothing."



This got a smile from one of the workers who replied, "we call them the poverty pimps, actually."



The disassembly of the panels was being handled with extraordinary skill so I asked them, "are you part of the religious group or are you professional signage dudes?" They looked at each other for a moment before answering, "Both!" which was totally impressive.



"I'd like to see something small and practical taking place," I added, "such as opening up a few bathhouses with toilet facilities and showers around the city, particularly at Ocean Beach, which could be staffed by homeless people who actually lived in the facility and who had a stake in keeping it clean and functioning."



"Good idea," they replied before posing for a group photo. Their obvious commitment to what they were doing was frankly inspirational.

The Island of the Holy Spirit

La Paz sits in a bay on the Sea of Cortez formed by Baja California to the west and a 40-mile long peninsula jutting north on its east. At the end of this peninsula is Tecolote Beach which has a few funky restaurants and boat services.



I jumped on a small panga that provided a four-hour circumnavigation of the huge Isla de Espiritu Santo directly north. (Please excuse the lack of accent marks and tildes where they belong. I don't know how to create them in this program.)



Joining me on the trip were a pleasant Mexican couple from Hermosillo, Mexico...



...and a glamorous looking pair of Italian tourists from Turin, Italy.



Our languages all afternoon were a funny mixture of Spanish, English and Italian as we tried to make ourselves understood.



Thankfully, our boat captain Sergio couldn't have been less interested in playing tour guide and hardly spoke three sentences all day. His looks reminded me, oddly enough, of the teenage murderer in Luis Bunuel's 1950 masterpiece about poor bad boys in Mexico City, "Los Olvidados."



There were a few times when we wished he was a bit more garrulous because without a word he would gun the boat for a sheer rock wall...



...and then veer at the last second into a cave filled with wildlife.



The only fact Sergio insisted we know was that Espiritu Santo was not one island, but two, with the smaller, more northern one called "La Partida." I tried to get the translation of "partida" from the Hermosillo couple and the best I could gather was "broken," which was an interesting concept, being on an island broken off from the Holy Spirit.



At the very north of La Partida were a pair of rock outcroppings where there was a huge sea lion colony and where we stopped to jump in the water snorkeling.



There were plenty of pretty fish to admire in the sea, but that's not what we ended up concentrating upon.



Somehow this particular trip had become a fad among Japanese tourists and we were surrounded by a dozen large boats servicing Japanese scuba drivers who glided below us taking underwater photos.



On the return trip south on the eastern side of the island, we stopped for a ceviche lunch on a deserted beach.



Though hotter than hell, it was extraordinary.



After our return to Tecolote Beach and several large beers...



...I jumped on a bus back to La Paz and chatted up a young couple who were diving instructors from Quebec and Japan respectively who were taking a very leisurely trip down the Pacific Coast from Long Beach, California to Panama with many stops along the way.



I remembered what it was like to be young, improbably beautiful and filled with adventure.

Peace and Quiet in La Paz

The city of La Paz, Baja California Sur in Mexico has a population of about 200,000 people, but the adjective "sleepy" hardly does the slow-moving place justice.



100 miles to the south, at the very tip of California, is "Los Cabos," a 40-mile stretch of real-estate development, timeshares, Jack Nicklaus golf courses, Home Depot and Costco, overpriced restaurants, an environmentally stressed ocean and an air of American ambitious desperation that is uneasily blended with Mexican fatalism and entropy.



I came to to La Paz about 25 years ago on a trip with my mother, and what's astonishing is how little the place has changed, at least on the surface.



There are few places one can make that statement about in California, in either the U.S. or Mexico. The waterfront walkway was blown away in La Paz a couple of years ago in a hurricane, but the replacement was a perfectly graceful job that didn't increase hype or tourism.



Other than a few flights from Los Angeles, there is no way to get to La Paz directly by plane from the United States, so you have to rent a car in Los Cabos or jump on a Mexican bus for a three-hour ride through the desert.



My friend David Barnard spends two or three weeks here in the winter every year walking, swimming and painting, and he probably puts it best. "The secret to La Paz is that there is NOTHING to do." It's been a tonic.

Touching The Whales

When I started looking at blogs about a year ago, I found that the best way to discover who I was interested in reading was to follow a link from a blogger I already trusted and enjoyed, and if our tastes happened to coincide I'd create a bookmark. James Wolcott, a great writer currently at the creepy "Vanity Fair" magazine and a heavy hitter in the blogging world, gave a recommendation to a blog by somebody named "Lance Mannion" months ago and after checking it out, I've been reading Lance every day since.

His style is that of a friendly newspaper columnist (think Jon Carroll in the "Chronicle") who gets to write about whatever happens to interest him, which can be politics, literature, pop culture, being a husband and dad, the pleasures and difficulties of living in the middle-of-nowhere-upstate-New-York, and his genuine pleasure in women both physically and intellectually. His writing style tends to be in short, punchy sentences that are simultaneously graceful, and he's always a pleasure to read. His "comments" section is also one of the better groups on the internet, with pleasant, smart people who know how to add information and occasionally disagree without being nasty.

If "Civic Center" is modeled on anyone's blog, it's Lance Mannion. To get to his site, click here. He also put out a challenge about a month ago, asking for vacation stories that he could pick up on voyeuristically. Since I'm in La Paz, Baja California for the week, I thought I'd take him up on it.



The following photos and tale are from a trip to La Paz made earlier this year in February. I'm not a big fan of guided tours or expeditions for a whole host of reasons, but I signed up for a "whale watching" trip one day. It was expensive ($100), the van driver/tour guide was a creep who wouldn't shut up, the 5-hour-each-way trip across the Baja peninsula in a crowded vehicle was grueling, and my companions for the day were a very mixed bag, to say the least.



They included a large, snotty family from Mexico City, a French hairdressing mogul and his wife, and a group of conservative old farmers from Alberta, Canada. When we arrived at the small village of Puerto Lopez Mateos on the north end of Magdalena Bay, we were split into two groups and I went with the Canadians so I could act as translator for Modesto, the Mexican fisherman who was taking us out onto the lagoon and who didn't speak any English.



I wasn't expecting much, because most of the the whale watching stories I've heard over the years are tales of frustration. "Look, there's a whale!" somebody yells and by the time you've turned around to look in the direction of the pointed finger, there's a splash to see and not much more. This trip was altogether different.



Gray whales annually migrate from the cold Arctic waters to have their babies in a small number of lagoons on the Pacific Ocean side of Baja California, the most famous of which is called Scammon's Lagoon where there are expensive eco-tours and many rules about how far one must stay away from the whales and their babies at all times. In the southern lagoon of Magdalena Bay, venturing out from the mud roads of the tiny fishing village of Puerto Lopez Mateos, the rules are much more Mexican, meaning that rigorous safety, insurance worries and overprotective caution hardly exist.



There were other tour groups who arrived at the same time as us, but it wasn't that crowded on the lagoon, maybe a dozen small pangas, metal fishing boats each holding 6 to 8 people. Our great fortune was having Modesto as our host, because it was obvious he LOVED the whales and they loved him back.



After a tourist frenzy of half a dozen boats surrounding one mother whale and her baby subsided, Modesto had me explain to the Canadians that we were going to get away from everyone else and go to the mouth of the lagoon where we could visit unmolested.



He actually signaled the whales with a message from his outboard motor in a rhythmic pattern, and unlike many of the other guided pangas, we spent our entire two hours hanging with one mother and baby whale pair after another.



The arrival of the first pair of whales was completely terrifying, because they swam directly under our tiny boat, and all it would have required was a flip of the tail or a good bump to send us all flying into the water.



Actually, what they were looking for was to play...



...and to be touched...



...and to have their baleen massaged.



Above all, they wanted the barnacles on their skin scratched off at which Modesto was a master.



No wonder they loved him.



The barnacles were called "el ojo de ballena" or "the eye of the whale" because they were hollow in the center, and were a prized trophy at the end of the trip.



The entire two hours had an air of completely unreality, as if one was living in a fairy tale.



Looking at these and other photos later was the only confirmation I had that the adventure actually happened.

Opening Night of the Opera, Finale

The actual opera on San Francisco's 83rd Opening Night was "The Italian Girl in Algiers," a comic opera written by the 21-year-old Rossini.



Rossini was given extravagant gifts by the gods, but he was a working musician, a son of musicians, and he literally composed his brains out, writing 30 operas from the ages of 18 to 36.



Then he retired, exhausted, after finishing his grand final opus, "William Tell," for the Paris Opera, which ended by being the bedrock influence for all of 19th Italian opera, in particular for the other great Italian composing god, Verdi.



His health pretty much failed him for the next 15 years and he yo-yo'd between Bologna taking care of his father and one Italian spa town after another. His better spirits returned eventually and he moved with his second wife back to Paris in 1855 where he had a totally brilliant second act in his life.



He didn't bother writing music for the stage anymore, but took his vast, accumulated wealth and lived beautifully, creating a weekly artists' salon for those HE considered the artistic elite, with special chamber concerts in the living room with songs he'd written for favorite performers. It sounds like a beyond-wonderful way to age, especially since he didn't have to churn out any more operas for impatient impresarios. Click here to get to the Wikipedia biography which isn't bad.



The intermission bells started being tinkled by real people on real bells.



I went to the Box Bar and was invited to join a table by the Groves, who used to live in Palo Alto but were now living in Atherton. They were a charming couple who seemed to know quite a few people, but who obviously weren't taking any of the "society" stuff very seriously for one second.



A friend of Mrs. Grove came by to say hello and was asked, "Are you still doing Pilates?" and the answer was "no" with a rueful shrug.



I left without staying for the second act.



Olga Borodina, the Russian mezzo-soprano diva, is truly one of the many faces of God, and she sang beautifully besides, but I'd much rather be listening to her singing something like Marfa in Mussorgsky's "Khovanschina" than trying to sparkle in Rossini.



The tenor, a last-minute replacement, was in way over his head. The rest of the cast was just fine. The direction was stupid, incoherent and full of schtick that encouraged bad chorus acting, which was somewhat offset by the fact that the set and costumes from the Santa Fe Opera were simple, whimsical and beautiful.



I'm taking off for La Paz, Baja California tomorrow for a week. I may be writing the blog from down there or I may not, depending on mood and technological whatevers. One truth, however, is that it's just about impossible to take a bad photo in Baja California. I promise to do my best to stray a little off the beaten path.

Opening Night at the Opera, Part II

The north corridor of the orchestra level at the San Francisco Opera House is where the "carriage entrance" resides.



There were quite a few gawkers assembled to watch The Female Swells and their gowns.



In essence, Opening Night at the Opera is Halloween for rich women in San Francisco.



Some wear the expensive rags quite well.



Others don't.



It was a little discomfiting watching this parade while in the midst of "Class War," where the current powers that be want to eliminate the Estate Tax forever.



You get the feeling that these people are almost as clueless as Marie Antoinette once was.



In the 1970s and even the 1980s, there was usually some protest group on the sidewalk of Van Ness Avenue on Opera's Opening Night, always including an anti-fur group.



I'm afraid the anti-fur zealots need to make a comeback because fur has become the new, old fad among rich ladies in San Francisco.



Every other woman seemed to be wearing one tonight. It looks like they need to be shamed publicly all over again.



What looked to be a statuesque model sat down next to me on the upholstered bench and methodically took out material from her way-overdesigned dress that had gotten stuck to her sparkly jewel shoes.



Her male companion looked like a young Hollywood mogul and he watched her perform this practical ritual in what appeared to be a state of fury.



Those who seemed to be having the best time this evening were pretty young women...



...who didn't seem to have much to do with "society" at all.

Opening Night at the Opera, Part I

Jesus (pronounced "Hey-Zeus"), a handsome, charming opera queen originally from Venezuela, was in line at 10AM to buy $10 standing room tickets for the opening night of the San Francisco Opera.



It's probably the best deal in town, and hardly anybody seems to know about it. The price for opening night standing room got jacked up considerably some years ago, but then it came down again a few years back.



Whatever you might think about the soon-to-be-departed general manager, Pamela Rosenberg, at least it can be said that her sympathies were democratic, and under her reign the cheap seats got cheaper.



However, Opening Night has nothing to do with the peasants and everything to do with what the odious "San Francisco Chronicle" calls "The Swells."



The evening started for many of them at a cocktail party at the Arabian Nights-themed tent and courtyard.



On the Grand Tier level, there was a whole collection of gawkers at the window.



They were watching The Swells in the courtyard below.



The coolest detail was the live camel hanging out at the entrance.



On the Grand Tier level, you can hang outdoors on the front balcony.



Tonight it had been commandeered by the Bravo! Club, which is a group designed for the "forty-and-under" segment of rich society families and those who want to be part of rich society families.



Not all that much has changed since the time of Horatio Alger, Jr., the nineteenth-century "dime novel" author who wrote 130 inspiring books about boys overcoming diversity through pluck and hard work, and usually outrageous good fortune at the end.



As Gore Vidal pointed out in one of his better essays, most of the tales end with the marriage of the hero to the Rich Daddy Boss Figure's daughter, and then he ends up on top. You might want to check out the Wikipedia bio by clicking here to read more about Horatio's rather obsessive teenage boy-love inclinations.



Birth, sex and marriage are pretty much the only ways to enter this hermetic world.



Also in attendance were the people who service the rich, such as this young man who sells outrageously expensive automobiles at a dealership on Van Ness.



I have been coming to enough of these openings since 1975 that I feel like part of the tradition myself, and say "Happy Opening Night!" to everyone I know, particularly those who work there, such as this head usher/ticket taker at the central orchestra lobby door...



...or the right-hand lobby coat check lady...



...or Pam Kaye, the scheduling guru for the opera company.



There is usually a beautiful, major floral arrangement in the center of the orchestra level lobby, but this year it was, well, come up with a cruel adjective on your own. The flowers were paid for by Mrs. Alfred S. Wilsey (in other words, the Evil Stepmother Dearest herself from "Oh, The Glory of It All" by Sean Wilsey, which I reviewed here).



I did see Dede in a big red dress dripping with jewels hustling up the stairs from the lobby to the box level, but then she seemed to disappear for the rest of the evening. She must have known I was going to be there as paparazzi.

A Burrito, A Bicycle, and an Art Show

At the Friday Salon in the Howard Street burrito parlor hosted by the brilliant political polemicist h brown (not pictured, but click here to get to his latest column)...



...a lively crowd had gathered...



...that included young City Hall workers such as Adriel...



...and Julian.



The brilliant publisher of SFist (click here for a link), Jackson West, had rolled out of bed for the Salon before visiting a friend in the hospital.



Krissy Keefer, a famous Modern Dance figure (as a choreographer and a dancer, click here for more info) from the Mission District, was berating h brown at one point, "Why don't YOU do something brilliant?" which made me laugh through my carnitas burrito and Bohemia.



In a further touch of celebrity, h brown's friend Angela Alioto was in attendance. For those not from San Francisco, Angela is the daughter of the late-1960s / early-1970s mayor, Joe Alioto, and has been a city supervisor, along with running for mayor herself a number of times.



In the evening, I went to my friend Clark Buckner's "Blue Studio" gallery at Mission and 17th.



It was a conceptual art piece by a couple who called themselves "leonardogillesfleur."



The only problem was that the female half of the couple had just gotten a job in New York and they had exited San Francisco before their fabulous opening, which meant that Clark had to do the installation at the last minute himself. He was not amused, though he "totally understood" the quick departure.



Down the hall, at the Michelle O'Connor Gallery, a group of five young artists calling themselves "100 Ft. Whale" was opening an art show.



The group (Sarah Applebaum, Alex Clausen, Sherry Koyama, Julia Petho and Allen Stickel) had a Mission Statement that went something like this:

"What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid." -- Moby Dick

Through painting, drawing, photography and scuplture, the artists in 100 Ft. Whale examine the elusive relationship between nuance and numbers, qualified and quantified, and desire and digits in search of the 100 foot whale and all that as yet remains unsaid.

One of the more striking pieces was this huge tapestry.



Being a very sloppy journalist, I forgot to take down the name of the artist. If anybody can fill me in, it would be appreciated



On the opposite wall, there were three large drawings by Allen Stickel.



Two of them depicted very alienated young people in a suburban setting, which was probably Colorado according to the artist.



Having grown up in a similar suburbia in Southern California...



...I could relate.



In the middle of the room, another one of the artists had built a circular playhouse with ladders and a roof.



Sherry Koyama had done a couple of pretty installation things.



The entire show felt "juvenile" in a good way. (In this context, "juvenile" has to be [mis]pronounced with a French accent, "joo-vah-neel" to fully convey the concept.)



I said goodbye to Clark and promised to see him at his next glamorous art opening (and they are glamorous, in their own way). Click here for a link to his Mission 17 website.

We're All Iraqis Now

On the windswept plaza in front of the Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue, a woman was asking a small crowd to dig deep into their pockets and give whatever they possibly could for New Orleans charity.



The group she was speaking for was named B.I.G., which stood for Blacks in Government. Here's a bit of their history from their website:

When coupled with the fact that no single civil rights organization has as its sole objective the preservation and enhancement of Black civil servants, it became apparent that Black civil servants had to unite and protect themselves. To some, this meant jeopardizing their careers. To others, it meant duplicating some of the efforts of other organizations. To still others, it meant very little, they felt (as some Blacks do not) that it would be a wasted effort.

Nonetheless, Blacks In Government®, was organized in 1975 and incorporated as a non-profit organization under the District of Columbia jurisdiction in 1976. BIG has been a national response to the need for African Americans in public service to organize around issues of mutual concern and use their collective strength to confront workplace and community issues. BIG's goals are to promote EQUITY in all aspects of American life, EXCELLENCE in public service, and OPPORTUNITY for all Americans.

The Civic Center chapter of B.I.G. was throwing a hot dog fundraiser in the plaza to raise money...



...and the crowd got even smaller as the wind tore through the plaza...



...and the rock trio started to play.



Watching the federal reaction to the disaster in New Orleans, what I kept thinking about was the poor Iraqis who have been putting up with the Occupation run by many of the same villainous fools who have done such a disastrous job in the Gulf.



The outrageous violence, the lack of empathy for other human beings, the extraordinary greed and graft fueling everything, and above all the sheer stupid incompetence of the Occupation finally registered after watching a week's worth of the Katrina aftermath.



I'm also not the only one with this particular thought running through their head. Tom Englehardt, at his website, writes a very elaborate essay about what the Iraq and New Orleans disasters have in common that is pretty brilliant. Click here to read the whole essay.

Here's an excerpt:

Think of our last two years in Iraq, which has left the world's most powerful military running on baling wire and duct tape, as a kind of coming attractions for Katrina. In fact, so many bizarre connections or parallels are suggested by the Bush administration's war in Iraq as to stagger the imagination. Here are just six of the parallels that immediately came to my mind:

1. Revelations of unexpected superpower helplessness: A single catastrophic war against a modest-sized, not particularly dramatically armed minority insurgency in one oil land has brought the planet's mightiest military to a complete, grinding, disastrous halt and sent its wheels flying off in all directions. A single not-exactly-unexpected hurricane leveling a major American city and the coastlines of two states, has brought the emergency infrastructure of the world's mightiest power to a complete, grinding, disastrous halt and sent its wheels flying off in all directions.

2. Planning ignored: It's now notorious that the State Department did copious planning for a post-invasion, occupied Iraq, all of which was ignored by the Pentagon and Bush administration neocons when the country was taken. In New Orleans, it's already practically notorious that endless planning, disaster war-gaming, and the like were done for how to deal with a future "Atlantis scenario," none of which was attended to as Katrina bore down on the southeastern coast.

3. Lack of Boots on the ground: It's no less notorious that, from the moment before the invasion of Iraq when General Eric Shinseki told a congressional committee that "several hundred thousand troops" would minimally be needed to successfully occupy Iraq and was more or less laughed out of Washington, Donald Rumsfeld's new, lean, mean military has desperately lacked boots on the ground (hence those Louisiana and Mississippi National Guards off in Iraq). Significant numbers of National Guard only made it to New Orleans on the fifth and sixth days after Katrina struck and regular military boots-on-the-ground have been few and far between. No Pentagon help was pre-positioned for Katrina and, typically enough, the Navy hospital ship Comfort, scheduled to help, had not left Baltimore harbor by Friday morning for its many day voyage to the Gulf.

4. Looting: The inability (or unwillingness) to deploy occupying American troops to stem a wave of looting that left the complete administrative, security, and even cultural infrastructure of Baghdad destroyed is now nearly legendary, as is Donald Rumsfeld's response to the looting at the time. ("Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that's what's going to happen here." To which he added, on the issue of the wholesale looting of Baghdad, "Stuff happens.") In New Orleans, the President never declared martial law while, for days, gangs of armed looters along with desperate individuals abandoned and in need of food and supplies of all kinds, roamed the city uncontested as buildings began to burn.

What, facing this crisis, did the Bush administration actually do? The two early, symbolic actions it took were typical. Neither would have a significant effect on the immediate situation at hand, but both forwarded long-term administration agendas that had little to do with Katrina or the crisis in the southeastern United States: First, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was relaxing pollution standards on gasoline blends in order to counteract the energy crisis Katrina had immediately put on the table. This was, of course, but a small further step in the gutting of general environmental, clean air and pollution laws that strike hard at another kind of safety net -- the one protecting our planet. And second, its officials began to organize a major operation out of Northcom, Joint Task Force Katrina, to act as the military's on-scene command in "support" of an enfeebled FEMA. The U.S. Northern Command was set up by the Bush administration in 2002 and ever since has been prepared to take on ever larger, previously civilian tasks on our home continent. (As the Northcom site quotes the President as saying, "There is an overriding and urgent mission here in America today, and that's to protect our homeland. We have been called into action, and we've got to act.")

I don't know if the half-mast flag was for the old, racist Rehnquist of the Supreme Court, the New Orleans dead, or just as a whim, but I'd like to dedicate it, as the sign says, "To All Lives Lost In Iraq."

A Glimpse of Autumn

On my way to the Main Public Library to return a DVD of a terrible Debra Winger - Theresa Russell vehicle from the 1980's called "Black Widow"...



...I walked through the Civic Center Plaza.



The summer fog hasn't really lifted quite yet in San Francisco and the metamorphosis into the splendid weather of Autumn certainly hasn't arrived.



The trees that are planted in the Civic Center Plaza are ornamental chestnut trees (thanks for the info, David Barnard), and I've always hated them.



In Northern California, which is filled with trees that don't lose their leaves during the winter, the designers of Civic Center decided on the ornamental chestnuts because that's what they have in Paris, and the buildings in Civic Center are meant to be French Beaux Arts.



The problem is that the chestnuts are deciduous and do lose their leaves. Plus, they look quite grim during the winter with stark, spindly branches, and their depressing appearance is furthered along by an aggressive pruning regimen by the city.



Still, on this particular evening, a blast of light somehow made it through the fog...



...and it illuminated the leaves, some of which were turning an autumnal brown.



So I took a few photos of what looked like a psychedelic leaf show.

Temporary Structures

Labor Day Weekend in Civic Center was all about putting up temporary structures.



There was a Will Smith vehicle, "The Pursuit of Happyness," being filmed at City Hall on Sunday, and it included lighting cranes beaming in the perfect light for an interior scene.



I didn't see this happening, but the description reminded me of how frigging stupid, hidebound and almost Kabuki-like in its traditions Hollywood filmmaking can be.



Did they learn nothing from Vilmos Zsigmond in the 1970s and his use of natural light? Why the hell do we need this mixture of reality (a City Hall office) and complete unreality (the lighting from outside cranes). Use a frigging virtual set. George Lucas does. Otherwise, go with capturing reality.



When I was extremely poor (very recently, in fact) and there were no jobs of any sort to be had in San Francisco, I did anything that paid me money, and that included being an extra on a couple of commercials and one movie.



It's interesting for a while, but then the day gets very grueling, very stupid, and you wonder how little your life and your time is worth as you and everyone around you are treated as cattle.



Albert Malkin, my fellow friar from "La Forza del Destino" at the San Francisco Opera, has been an 80's capitalist pig extra in the Financial District over the last week for "The Pursuit of Happyness." You can get his account here.



Being an extra at the opera is much more fulfilling. They also treat you like cattle, but it's INTERESTING.



Every year at about this time, there is the September Springing of the Tents for Rich People's Cultural Openings.



What's annoying is that the opera, whose opening is this Friday, commandeers the sidewalk across the street from my apartment for an entire week.



However, I just ignore the signage and walk where I please.



The Spanish-speaking tent builders certainly could care less.



Across the street from the Opera House there is ANOTHER large white tent.



This is for the opening concert of the San Francisco Symphony this Wednesday.



The Opera had the upper social hand for decades over the symphony crowd, which didn't even play when the opera season was going, but there was a crucial social readjustment 25 years ago when Davies Symphony Hall opened and the Symphony left the opera house it had shared for decades.



Some socialite obviously went to war with another socialite over their respective openings, and for years all of San Francisco society has lived with the absurdity of going to TWO expensive, society openings within three days if they want to be taken seriously. If anybody knows the real history, I'd be fascinated to hear it.



The insides of the tents are sort of ghastly, at least in my experience, with sort of mildewy smells mixed with catering dishes filled with rich food, and grotesque Stanlee Gatti designer creations stressing overconsumption, and scary society women who are mostly blonde second wives mixed in with the truly scary rich old buzzards who have survived their wealthy spouses who are usually accompanied by their mostly gay male "walkers." All of this takes place over upholstered plywood on an ugly tar parking lot.



The great temporary structure in the neighborhood is still David Best's "Burning Man" pagoda/temple in the Hayes Valley, which I wrote about in my very first posting here.



And though I hate to link to the hideous San Francisco Chronicle, they have a great cartoonist named Don Asmussen (the "Bad Reporter") who did a week-long "Burning Man" set of comics that are brilliant. He starts off as the perfect prude, and ends by calling his pants a "two-legged crotch burka." Click here to see them.

Disastrous Times and The Book Lovers

I have nothing to say about the New Orleans disaster and the outrageous Federal non-response that hasn't already been said. I tried watching the cable news on one of the evenings when the levees were just starting to break, but I found most of the anchors disgusting and their overwhelming excitement about "looters" to be poisonous.

So I started to get all my information from the blogosphere, as it's called, and the best place, bar none, from day one of the hurricane has been a blog called AMERICAblog: Because America Deserves The Truth! It's run by a writer/policy wonk out of Washington, D.C. named John Avarosis, a young, gay Greek-American originally from Chicago who has worked as a policy consultant for Madeline Albright, among other people.

He's been writing "Where the hell is George?" from day one of the hurricane, and posting more pertinent information than you can imagine. The only drawback with his site is that it's gotten TOO popular and the once-fascinating "Comments" sections underneath each of his posts have gotten too full and too dull. Click here to get to the site.



I'm a little reluctant to recommend the above site, "Rigorous Intuition," because frankly it's so terrifying. Written by a "cautiously pessimistic Canadian novelist and satirist" named Jeff Wells, the brilliant site is pretty much conspiracy theory central except that it's written with such low-key, classically Canadian restraint that you can forget that he's writing about George Bush Senior as a pedophile with satanic connections and then offering fairly rigorous proof of this little historical byway. Here's the first three paragraphs of his latest rumination on New Orleans:

I don't know what hurts more, my heart or my head.

How is it that one of America's great cities ceased to exist this week, but I can still watch Letterman tonight?

What do I do with this knowledge: there are more than a million internal refugees and estimates of 100,000 dead, and yet the Pentagon is "hurt" that the media is siding more with victims than federal authorities?

Read this site with great care. Though it's also getting a bit too popular, most of the commenters heed Mr. Wells' civilized style and write about outrageous things without getting too ugly and/or crazy. In fact, one of my favorite takes on the payback the Bush Cabal can be expecting was written by someone named "starroute":

The deaths of the innocent don't necessarily work to the advantage of their executioners.

I posted something the other day at the ezboard (though the last I looked, nobody had commented on it), suggesting that the the spiritual power of all the soldiers who have died in Iraq is being channeled through Cindy Sheehan -- and that this is what the magical/symbolic arm-wrestling over the field of crosses has been about.

The ghosts of New Orleans are notoriously uncontrollable. I see no reason why Bush/Cheney should expect to get any real advantage out of them.

Click here to get to this amazing, paranoid site that unfortunately makes as much sense as anything else right now.



In front of the Main Civic Center branch of the San Francisco Public Library today, there was a used book sale in progress.



For future reference, it happens from 11AM to 2PM on the first Friday of every month from April to October, meaning next month will be the last one this year.



It is put on by Friends of the Public Library...



...a group that is regularly vilified at the beginning of the public comments section at each Board of Supervisors meeting.



The guy going after them is tall, appears to be in his 60s, and is astonishingly articulate, but once you've seen him enough times on Channel 26, you realize he's a monomaniac.



The next big event for "The Friends" will be their annual monster used book sale at Fort Mason, a famous event that has always sounded a bit like the city of Boston's department store, Filene's, with its famous basement where women were known to tear clothing out of each other's arms in order to get the best bargain.



This event, which I just happened to stumble across, was petite and charming.



The best part was watching the book lovers just sitting down on the concrete...



...and perusing their possible purchases.



The prices, by the way, were $1 for a hardback, $.50 for a paperback which is essentially giving them away.



Most of the stuff they were selling was junk, though I was tempted to buy "How To Get Pregnant" just because I liked the title.



Still, there were a few treasures among the dross, and there were quite a few different sections from cookbooks to sci-fi...



...along with fiction and broken-up sets of classics.



The most interesting section actually looked like the three boxes full of comic books, or "graphic novels" as they were calling them. I asked the blonde French boy who was avidly going through the stacks whether he'd seen any Asterix and he quickly told me no, but gave me a big smile because I'd even heard of Asterix. (Thanks, Ellen and Pedro.)



I did manage to snag a treasure, a hardback copy of Italy's great classic historical novel, "I Promessi Sposi" or "The Betrothed" as it's called in English. Written in the 1820's by Alessandro Manzoni, for whom Verdi eventually wrote his requiem, it's a 600-page historical novel about Milan and environs during the year 1630, which ends with the plague hitting the city and the population going from 240,000 to 80,000 in six months.



I read the book in the early 1980s, when AIDS first appeared on the scene. I had asked my well-read friend Jerry Morgan whether there was a good book about The Plague. "I Promessi Sposi," he said without hesitation, and he was right. The book is above all an Age of Englightenment look at a very insane period, with Bread Riots in Milan, Crazy Convents, Evil Local Dukes, and finally for the last third of the tale, The Plague. Its hero and heroine are a peasant couple who are "betrothed" at the beginning of the book and are thwarted in their plans to get married every step of the way while taking in just about every misadventure of their times. If you're ever feeling ambitious about reading a classic, I can't recommend it highly enough.



Then I checked my email and found an idiotic and insulting note from my Congresswoman, Nancy Pelosi, on "How to Help the Hurricane Victims" in New Orleans. For some reason, this so infuriated me that I wrote her a truly nasty note back, which is below if you're in the mood for a rant.

Dear Congresswoman Pelosi:

Your "How to Help Hurricane Victims" email was both stupid and insulting.You don't even mention the fact that the levees weren't being maintained under YOUR watch, lady, as Minority Speaker, and you don't even mention the disgusting federal aftermath with its nonexistent help for the residents of New Orleans. Instead, you crow about how Dennis Hastert (who has already said New Orleans shouldn't be rebuilt) and yourself are being wonderfully "bipartisan."

And if you weren't such an enabling, goddamned idiot, you might know that one of the people you want us to send "Cash Donations" to is "Operation Blessing," a wing of Pat Robertson's empire. You remember Pat, don't you? The guy who is calling for the assassination of foreign leaders in public?

I don't think you have any idea of the depth of anger in this country right now towards ALL of you in the federal government at this moment. Frankly, I think it's time to toss out all incumbents, including you, and I will be doing my very best to make that a reality.

With Contempt,
Your Constituent
Michael Strickland

Blind Artists Reception

I wrote about a great art exhibit in the basement of City Hall last week featuring the work of blind and "visually impaired" artists. Click here to check out all the photos of the interesting art.



This evening there was an artists' reception being held by the San Francisco Art Commission and the Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired.



By 6:30, it was amazingly crowded and quite lively.



Though the speechifying had begun, and was its usual boring self, most of the crowd was ignoring the speakers and checking the art out along with each other.



There were also quite a few "Hosts" attached to the event, who were young and affluent looking.


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