City Hall Ghost Walk

In the San Francisco Examiner there was an announcement in the "What's Happening" section that there was a free City Hall Ghost Walk from 6:30 to 8:30 on Halloween.



Since the place is so full of spirits that any halfway sensitive medium can feel them during the middle of the day, I figured it might be fun and interesting.



It started well, with the beautiful building dimly lit and people handing out disclaimer forms that were quite amusing. "By joining the walk, I swear and affirm that I either have not been diagnosed with any of the following conditions or maladies, or they are under medical control: Angina, Apoplexy, Attention Deficit Disorder, Colic, Dizziness, Epilspsy, Extra-Sensory Peception, Fibrillation, Hyperglycemia, Hypertension, Hypoglycemia, Mental Instability, Nerve Damage, Paranoia, Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, Pre/Post-Menstrual Syndrome, Schizophrenia, Vapors."



The tour guide was dressed as death and at first was interesting, but soon became boring like any Village Explainer who is dully literal. It seems to be an occupational hazard of all docents.



The group giving the walk was called San Francisco City Guides, and was founded in the late 1970s as an adjunct to the Friends of the Public Library. It's become quite the empire with dozens of free-but-begging-for-donations themed walks scheduled daily around San Francisco year round. For $100, you can enroll in their initiation curriculum, and become a Boring Guide yourself. Click here if you'd like more information.



After learning that City Hall was the fifth largest domed building in the world, we decided to leave and not continue the spooky tour. We finally remembered those "Vapors" we'd had years ago.

Tonal Centers

A new piece of public art has gone up temporarily in the Civic Center Plaza, part of five works commissioned by San Francisco State University to commemorate the opening of the new deYoung Museum. Click here to check them all out. This piece, consisting of a bell tuned to an exact frequency, is by a Berkeley installation sculptor named Wang Po Shu who does very interesting stuff. Click here to get to his website.



There was signage next to the bell, with some bizarre English (the artist is originally from Hong Kong), and here are a few excerpts:

"In quakeland Californa, all public building to be built or retrofitted, will have their dynamic behavior studied by structural engineers to avoid destructive resonant harmonics with natural forces such as earthquake, strong wind, etc. Harmonic resonance is a reality that we are all born into, live and die with..."

"San Francisco City Hall is a floating structure since 1998, when its seismic retrofit of Base isolation method was completed. Set free from the earth, the building is allowed to move up to 27 inches in all directions when the earth quakes ... The City Hall Building's fundamental resonant frequency is centered around 2.7 hertz (Coutesy of Forell/Elsesser Engineers Inc.). This is musically the building's tonal center in other words. City Hall rings in this pitch when earthquake strikes. Or when enough of us sing together in this pitch, we can induce harmonic resonance from the building."

"The bell used for this artwork is tuned to City Hall's tonal center pitch, at 172.8 hertz on its sixth octave. It is tuned from a recycled bronze cupola bell cast by Fulton Iron Work Foundry of Michigan, from an unknown date, with an unknown history, except that it carries the marks of much abuses along its way.

Please feel free to sample the Tonal Center of the City Hall by pulling on the handle. And happy ring-a-sing-a-long!"

Meanwhile, a very jolly looking group of Mexican laborers was sitting on the red carpet that they were assembling in front of City Hall for a wedding party that evening.



Across the Civic Center Plaza, Bill Graham auditorium was hosting a "Public School Enrollment Fair."



It seemed an odd time of year to be holding such a thing, but I suppose there was a good reason.



To learn more about the annual affair, click here for the San Francisco Unified School District webpage explaning the event.



Teachers and admininistrators had volunteered to come help sell the virtues of their particular schools.



They were a pleasant looking bunch.



In front of the auditorium, a woman at an ironing board was giving out great signage to remind everybody to resist the Schwarzenegger Right-Wing Agenda Above All!



I spent the afternoon in the backyard of the Lone Star Saloon, contemplating the colorful agenda represented by Miss Avis, the Tarot Reader.

Penance and Warfare

In the hallway just off of the stage door of the San Francisco Opera is a bulletin board for supernumeraries where you can sign in and also get "notes" from the directorial staff on things to modify.



Grove got a note saying "Ron [the director] said to be more subtle when you tell the chorus not to eat the soup."



"Have you been an overacting thespian again?" I asked my fellow Friar and he confessed to no more than "acting just a little bit, they told me to."



Before the opera begins and between the large crowd scenes, many people hang out in "The Basement Lounge."



It's a large, brightly-lit, rather dingy space...



...that even includes a ping pong table for fast and furious action.



The new production of "La Forza del Destino," which is gearing up for its opening next Wednesday, is both a simple and lavish production, rather like the opera itself with its long, intimate stretches for one or two characters onstage being bracketed by scenes containing over a hundred choristers and supernumeraries.



The music is middle-period Verdi which means it's one astonishing tune after another in the service of a truly insane libretto.



"La Forza del Destino" roams all over Europe during wartime (18th century) with each principal character taking on a new false identity in every scene.



It requires the four greatest singers in the world to really do it justice, and the only one I'd call great in this cast is the baritone, Zeljko Lucic, who has a voice that sends shivers down the marrow.



The diva, singing what I'll always think of as the Leontyne Price role of Leonora, is a soprano named Andrea Gruber from New York who seems to have sung in one too many "Turandot" productions. Most of her top range is just fine, but the middle and the great low notes (which Leontyne Price OWNED) induced some seriously ugly sounds.



It doesn't matter. The new production is visually quite arresting and varied, and the direction is smart. The "Rat-a-Plan" chorus in the middle of the opera, which often involves a hefty mezzo on top of a table singing nonsense syllables with choristers, is usually one of the most ridiculous scenes in all of Verdi. Ron Daniels, the director, has staged it as a march with a huge chorus of soldiers and camp whores marching from the back of the stage towards the audience and it works smashingly well.



The young Italian conductor, Nicola Luisotti, seems to be the real star of the show. His version of the famous overture last night was good enough that you wanted to stand up and applaud at the end. At today's rehearsal, he stopped the chorus and said, "you must sing the ultimate pianissimos here and then two measures later you must do the loudest fortissimos of your life, like you're screaming, [pause], but screaming beautifully, of course."



The costumes are heavy, expensive and uncomfortable, reminding me yet again that I'd rather play a peasant or a soldier than a pope or a king. The clothing is much more comfortable.



After walking in a religious penitents' procession to a spectacularly beautiful sensurround chorus (from onstage and off)...



...a few supernumeraries, including Ron Mann, become soldiers and they leave their penance behind in the excitement of war.

Norma Opens Part Two: The Blue Moon Group

For the second act of "Norma", the four Roman soldiers were transformed into Celtic Warriors (talk about going over to the enemy!) which meant going to the wig room. This is where people are tortured with sharp bobby pins, spirit glue, and tape among other skin-unfriendly items.



Most of the men's wigs for the opera looked as if they were supposed to be from the American Revolutionary era with small pony tails. This didn't make a lot of sense for Roman-occupied Druids, but there you have it. They must have run out of that style, however, because three of us were given amazingly fabulous, hideous wigs that looked like some kind of cross between Peter Frampton and Welsh Wench.



Back in the dressing room, three makeup women had stationed themselves in the showers.



They were there to pre-decorate Celtic Warrior backsides before we entered the stage for the infamous blue-paint-smearing scene as we prepared for war.



At the first "dress" rehearsal, it was decided that our white butts were a bit too big and a bit too shocking as we mooned the audience.



So the makeup women were sent in to make sure our butts were a bit darkened and decorated, which made for some giggly, surreal moments.



In truth, at that first rehearsal, we were all painfully shy in different ways...



...on how we would measure up...



...and if that beautiful trip to Italy had made us fat...



...or whether the entire scene would be completely ridiculous.



But we got over it, fast, like good Californians who had all been to a nude beach at some point or another in our lives.



It helped that the 13 Warriors were quite a varied group, ranging in age from Ralph at 62...



...to the 18-year-old Kurt.



The group was also about half homo and half hetero with a few guys that could be either.



What was most encouraging was that in San Francisco in 2005, nobody gave a crap about any of that.



Be whatever you want, was the attitude, just don't bang into me onstage, and do help me out like a buddy if things go wrong.



And things often do go wrong on stages, particularly operatic ones where the spectacle is usually so ambitious.



The sheer exhilharation of running around on stage with major professional singers singing in your ear and a symphonic orchestra playing at your feet is for me an unparalleled thrill, especially when the music is done well.



This production of "Norma" isn't great, by any means, but it's "not bad," and doesn't get in the way of the opera, which IS great.



Steve Winn, the reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote a very kind review today saying much the same thing.



Click here to check it out.

Norma Opens Part One: The Basement

The employee areas of luxury hotels are incredibly shabby and utilitarian, with exposed piping and vents that contrast mightily with the deluxe detailing of the guest areas, and the same is true of most live theaters.



The San Francisco Opera is no exception, with most of the employees relegated to the basement.



The chorus, orchestra, dressers, makeup and wig people, and the supernumeraries all mingle here...



...in various states of dress and undress.



My favorite thing about the basement is that there have been additions over the years, and they don't make a lot of architectural sense, so that even after 15 years hanging out here, I still get lost.



Just like the opera house itself, the place has some Serious Vibes where you can almost sense the glories and disasters that have taken place to various souls here over the years.



Plus there are secret areas galore, like this sub-basement which is deeply scary and has a secret passageway to the Veterans' building across the parkway.



The dressing rooms are presided over by the professional dressers, including my neighbor Phil.



One of the coolest people in the entire opera house is Bert, still working at age 82.



The first thing you do as a supernumerary is put on a distressed, flesh-colored T-shirt and then put on a makeup base all over your face and neck.



The second thing you do is walk down another hallway to the makeup room where a legion of artists wants to know if you start off the opera as a Celtic Warrior or a Roman Soldier.



EJ is a Roman soldier, who climbs up the ugly set with me in the second scene of the opera as we pretend we're hauling down a murdered comrade who is actually hooked up to a wire that is slowly lowered.



Lucas plays the Dead Roman more gruesomely with each repetition.



The production of "Norma" itself has been troubled throughout, with the singer who had been rehearsing Adalgisa for the entire last month being fired and replaced with a Russian diva at the final dress rehearsal, without explanation.



The tenor role in "Norma" is really difficult and completely thankless since the two sopranos get all the attention, but the Belgrade tenor Zoran was sounding pretty good. However, he pulled something during the dress rehearsal that, even in all the years of bizarre behavior onstage, I've never seen before.



Norma and her Roman lover Pollione are supposed to be finally reunited in love, honor and respect for each other as they take each other's hands and go to the bonfire to be immolated together in the final measures of the opera. At the dress rehearsal, however, he didn't even look at Norma during this moment and walked downstage as far as he could go, singing as loud as he could during the musical finale.



Poor Norma was stuck halfway up the stage, not sure what to do. He ignored her completely and finally started sauntering back upstage just as the curtain came down right on his head. Like I said, I've never seen THAT before.



Finally, it was time to go out and be "forceful, masculine, ferocious" as our director had instructed us. It was the opening of the show.

Open Studios: Part Three

In the "Mission 17" gallery, there had been a performance art happening/opening the night before, and the detritus of the project remained.



A couple of young guys were checking it out...



...along with their very sweet dog.



The email Clark sent out explaining the show started as follows:

Jonathon Tellier employs performance, installation, and mail-art techniques to explore nationalism, the ideological value of “unity,” and the purported division of the U.S. into “red” and “blue” states. Dressed as “Uncle Sam,” he has used balloons to distribute surveys in both “blue” (i.e., urban, coastal), and “red” (rural, inland) areas of California, with questions about America, faith, modernity, politics, fear, beauty, and violence.

The collected responses will be presented at Mission 17, and visitors to the gallery will be invited to contribute to the discussion with answers of their own. A video projection will show the artist as “Uncle Sam,” conducting his survey in San Francisco, Stockton, and on the steps of the State Capitol in Sacramento.

As part of the Open House, one artist was showing off sculptural forms that she had sewn together. "Is that a waterfall with heaven above?" I asked, and the artist replied that the clouds and the waterfall were two different pieces, but I was free to look at it that way.



Further down the hall in the final cul-de-sac, Jennie Ottinger (pictured above) was showing off her wonderful paintings.



Again, I'm not sure why I liked them so much...



...but they really stood out...



...even when it was just a painting of a dog pooping (entitled "Expulsion").



In fact, the quality of the art and the atmosphere of the space had improved exponentially over last year's event. It was quite fun.

Open Studios: Part Two

Clark Buckner is one of the major lessors for the Mission 17 space, and is a very interesting character. I met him about three years ago off of Craigslist when he was looking for help in scanning Polaroids at high resolution so he could blow them up and have fabulous Gerhard Richter blurry, arty color photos. They're actually quite good, and I'm still waiting to see his 20-foot naked dude collage (Hockney-style) which is a masterpiece.



At the moment, when he's not a philosophy professor at Mills College and running the galleries, he's doing video, multimedia, whatever art. Today he was projecting a conceptual slide show of scans from the mercenary "Soldier of Fortune" magazine with their pictures of Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell and homoerotica combat, along with scans from from military fetish magazines with hardcore gay porn images.



Clark, by the way, from everything I've been able to gather, is completely heterosexual. He's even recently married a genuinely likeable woman.



As somebody said at the Lone Star Saloon later, "Well, that's progressive, I guess." As the tiny sign noted on the doorway of Clark's studio, this "was not for family viewing" and I hope you haven't been fired for looking at it on the job.



Clark was talking with his next-door studio mate, Vogt (pictured), who was explaining what his artwork was trying to do.



He was using wood to create sculptures that looked intentionally like 2D drawings of 3D figures.



Now he was also starting to play with 3D/2D with porticos.



The above was a favorite...



...but I liked them all.



Sharing the studio with Vogt was Sarah Smith (pictured above).



She had a scraggly, wonderful set of drawings on the wall.



But what was great was her monumental wood sculpture that looked designed to upstage her romantic friend's pieces. Actually, they were quite complementary, the difference between men's and women's shapes/forms never quite so well delineated.

Open Studios: Part One

At the corner of Mission and 17th Streets...



...there are a huge collection of art studios on the top floor of the large building that houses Thrift Town.



Some of them are simply cubicles but the lucky ones have streetside spaces...



...with beautiful light.



There is an institution in San Francisco called "Open Studios" every year in the autumn...



...where literally hundreds of artists in San Francisco open up their working spaces in their homes and studios over the course of three or four alternating weekends.



This Saturday afternoon the crowd was quite lively at Mission & 17th.



People were even buying art off the walls (after measuring it).



One of my favorite painters from the "old" space...



...has moved with two other artists down the hall where they built themselves lovely, swanky new studios.



The artist is a Brazilian named Sidnea D'Amico (pictured above)...



...and as you can see, she is not afraid of color.



I'm not even sure why I like her paintings so much, but I do.



They have an element of the Spanish painter Joan Miro...



...but they are completely her own.

Bad Bechtel

I spent the first three days this week working in San Francisco's Financial District for a health insurance corporation.



The job was to provide "Quality Assurance" on a revamped consumer website, and all I can assure you is that insurance companies should be out of the health care industry altogether. They are parisitical in the extreme, draining money, time and resources from actual health care providers and patients.




The proposed site that I am proofreading is so extraordinarily baroque that I am starting to become amused, but the idea of actually filling it out for real as a consumer also strikes me as absurd. It would take half a day to fill out and for anybody less sophisticated than the extremely web-savvy, the site would be impossible to navigate.



The company, which shall remain nameless, has offices in the Bechtel Building on 50 Beale Street across from the PG&E Headquarters.



Next door to the building is a plaza with foliage, benches and spindly trees.



A "Bechtel" train car sits at the back of the plaza that has a small history museum inside.



In the plaza, there is a tall middle-aged man of undetermined ethnicity who is the security guard in front of the ramp going to the underground garage. He stands at the entrance from 5 a.m. to 10 a.m., then sits in the train from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.



He wanted to know why I was taking the photos, and he told me in the politest way that he was supposed to tell me that taking photos of the Bechtel Building was not encouraged. "Why is that?" I asked him. "Well, after 9/11 and everything..." "Oh, please, the Bechtels probably engineered it, they've done things equally as evil..." I replied in a bantering tone, and he burst into laughter.



The two greatest sites for information that I know of on the internet are imdb.com, which is an encyclopedia about movies, and wikipedia.com which is the encyclopedia of one's dreams, with concise, informative essays that contain links galore to continue searching. Click here to get to Wikipedia's fine essay on the Bechtel Corporation.



The cliche about San Francisco and the Bay Area is that it is a leftist, hippie heaven when in reality some of the most reactionary people in the world happily make their headquarters here.



The family company grew large during the Hoover Dam project on the Colorado River.



After building oil pipelines to nowhere in Alaska, as part of World War II graft (a warmup for Iraq)...



...they joined somebody named John McCone and really got into the oil business, building refineries and everything that went with them.



Their latest "global footprint" was trying to take over the water system of a small city in Bolivia which fought back in riots when their rates tripled overnight. Now Bechtel's subsidiary is suing Bolivia for $25 million. Bring on the Bechtel Apocalypse! Where Private Enterprise Does It Better Than Government!

The Destiny of Norma

This afternoon in Zellerbach Rehearsal hall I watched Albert be a friar in the third act "begging for soup" scene of "La Forza del Destino." I'm the alternate, which means that in case Albert doesn't show up for a performance, I get to become Miss America.



The rehearsal was enlivened tremendously by the young Italian conductor Nicola Luisotti (pictured above), who is making his San Francisco Opera debut. The director, Ron Daniels, at one point last summer made the remark that "the conductor for this is really good, he's going to be great with this music." And I think he's right, though the tempos are so much faster than what was rehearsed earlier that the chorus and the principal singers were thrown way off balance today. Still, it's going to be exciting sounding Verdi, which is about as good as it gets.



After the rehearsal, I went for a couple of beers at the Lone Star saloon.



It was fairly empty, warm and charming.



Avis the Tarot Reader, looking operatic and colorful, presided over the backyard.



In the evening, there was an orchestral run-through of "Norma" on the opera house stage.



Two nights ago, we had the first dress rehearsal with loincloths and mud smearing and diva blood swapping, and it turned out to be completely fun. Here's a bit of what I wrote to our "captain" later that evening:

"Tonight was one of the most fun evenings of my entire life, possibly because I'm old enough to appreciate it. Sitting around virtually naked smearing stage mud on another dude's body in slo-mo, Burning Man stoned style, on the very front of the opera house stage, in silhouette, with a symphony orchestra playing Bellini and a male chorus singing in legato Italian about going to war with the Romans, well, it just doesn't get better than that, period.

Probably the greatest bonding moment was when the youngest and cutest of our group, an 18-year-old from Lafayette named Kurt Krikorian, painted a happy face with mud on his own butt and you could see it through the whole opera house. I haven't laughed as much in a long time."

Unfortunately, tonight we had the first orchestral run-through of "Norma" (where we weren't running around in our loincloths), and we almost died of boredom. The conductor, an old Italian named Oleg Caetani (sounds like a shoe designer), paced the music at truly slow, lugubrious tempos, which is the quickest way to kill a Bel Canto opera imaginable. Yikes.

Schwarzenegger Is A Scary Replicant

Does anybody in California actually remember when Schwarzenegger was sort of sneaked in as governor in a right wing coup d'etat during a "special" election in November?



Was it even November? I can't remember and I worked at a polling place for that election in the Richmond District with a crazy but fabulous Russian Jewish woman named Olga who burst into tears when it turned out our young Chinese female colleague was being beaten up by her oafish young husband. Ah, the stories she could tell of abuse herself, but they were too, too much!



I cannot recommend either jury duty or working at a polling place highly enough as a serious civic duty.



You get to meet the entire world, high and low, and you're treated, ideally, equally.



Anyway, that particular election night I just assumed that the crazy recall attempt against Gray Davis had failed and the right-wingers who were trying to put in movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger were ridiculously wrong.



I believed that partly because an old Chinese woman had an absolute fit in the middle of the day in the middle of the rather nasty garage we were in on Sixteenth Avenue and Geary. "I'm a Republican, and I've always been a Republican, but this is bullshit!" she said.



Little did she or most of the rest of us know how bad "being a Republican" was going to get.



Across the street from my apartment on Tuesday evening was the noisiest demonstration I've ever heard.



Part of it was because there were too many dangerous women who had been handed megaphones, including this Filipina goddess who could inhale a puff of tobacco, and then yell, "When do we want that contract?" You couldn't help but yell back "NOW!" whoever you were.



The same fascist group who brought us the Austrian Poseur, Schwarzenegger, is now bringing us State Propositions in a "special" election designed to crush anyone who is not One of Them.



They're hoping that nobody will show up for the election, just like that "special" election which was Schwarzenegger's coup d'etat.



They're responsible for Propositions 73-78 this time around. Let's crush them electorally, make them small and ridiculous. With nurses, police, firemen, teachers and just about every working person in the world on our side, it shouldn't be all that hard.

Atomic Destino

Tuesday is traditionally Society Night at the San Francisco Opera and it also tends to be one of the emptiest audiences of the week, which meant it was a good night to check out John Adams' new opera again, "Doctor Atomic."



I wrote a review of it for somebody else's blog called "The Standing Room," which is written by a local singer who is absorbing all the world's music right now in a young, gluttonous rush and writing absolutely beautifully about it. Check it out by clicking here.



My account:

"I saw "Doctor Atomic" for the second time, or rather listened to it since I spent most of Act One laid out on one of the (lumpy) settees at the back of the top balcony standing room. This was by choice, since there were a number of seats and hardly any other standees.

The opera started even better than I remembered it, the Varese homage really working and the opening chorus about energy and matter starting off dark and rhythmic. In fact, the entire first scene musically pumps with a propulsive Adams minimalist energy, but then it very purposefully stops for the long alternating solos (not a duet, except for one beautiful small section) between Oppenheimer and Kitty.

The third and last scene in Act One has a wonderful beginning but it sags badly and for too long in the middle, like General Groves' stomach. In fact, the scene of General Groves talking about his diet is about when I wanted to yell, "Cut!" and finally we got to the John Donne Oppenheimer aria that ends the act and it was better than when I'd seen it before. The movement by Finley was more naturalistic and beautiful and the singer has gotten to know the music, which is just plain gorgeous, and he brings it out.

I spent the first thirty minutes of Act Two eating dinner at home across the street from the opera house, but then returned to the segue from the Kitty/Pasqualita the Mexican Maid duet to the tenor singing about not being able to get to sleep. Act Two feels much more of a through-composed 80-90 minutes of music and it is ambitious as can be, but it certainly has its longeurs.

Thankfully, the last thirty minutes, starting with the weirdly beautiful stooping female chorus, is masterful and I even got off the damned settee and watched the stage and the beautiful lighting until it was completely dimmed."

The "Vishnu" chorus, pictured above, was a total kick and oddly out-of-place in the dark last hour of the opera. It was staged like something out of a Maria Montez film, though I'm not sure that was intentional.



The ending, however, involved some of James Ingalls' most masterful lighting work. And lord, this opera's music is disturbing.



Thankfully, today's music was a tonic, spent in rehearsals for Bellini's "Norma" and Verdi's "La Forza del Destino," both of which are premiering within the next couple of weeks.



The costumes are lavish in an insanely operatic way for this new production of "La Forza," and the brief ecclesiastical pilgrimage is going to be quite something.



Our favorite flagellant, by far, is the beautiful trapeze artist, Miss Cat, who knows how to drape herself over a cross.

Teens Having Sex: No on Proposition 73

The Golden Gate Chapter of Planned Parenthood consists of eight clinics in the Bay Area, including this one on Eddy Street between Van Ness and Franklin in San Francisco.



Since 1929, the organization has been advocating family planning, which very roughly translates into "how do you have sexual relations without getting pregnant?"



This has not made them popular with many organized religious groups or right-wing political groups over the years, particularly since 53% of Planned Parenthood's budget for family planning (at least, the Golden Gate Chapter) comes from government funds. Check out their four-page annual report, which is on their website here, because the info is fascinating.



The latest assault on reproductive rights has arrived in the form of Proposition 73, which is part of Governor Schwarzenegger's loathsome group of state propositions in his "special election" scheduled for November 8th of this year.



Proposition 73 proposes an amendment to the California state constitution that would require the notification of all parents of minors (under 18 years of age) contemplating an abortion. The only exception would be those minors who were savvy enough to go before a sympathetic judge and get a special dispensation, which of course is absurd. Click here for more information about the opposition.



The three major guys (and yes, they are all men) bankrolling Yes on Proposition 73 are conservative Catholics: James Holman, a whacked out publisher from Coronado Island; Don Sebastiani of the Sebastiani wine family; and Tom Monaghan, the Midwestern millionaire who used to own the Domino Pizza chain.



As Miss Julie, the head of Training at Planned Parenthood, puts it: "You've either got a relationship with your teenager, or you don't. You can't legislate one." The statistics about notification in California are interesting: 60%+ of minors who get abortions do so with the support and counseling of their parents and that number goes up to 90% when you're talking about 14- and 15-year-olds.



The percentage that interests me is how many of those 30%+ who currently don't involve their parents are the children of conservative religious patriarchs/matriarchs who would literally beat the holy hell out of them if they confessed to having sex, let alone being pregnant.



Some years ago I went to Siggraph, a computer graphics convention in August in Orlando, Florida where it was as hot and muggy as you'd expect. I ended up spending the entire week at the huge, beautiful hotel swimming pool, day and night, and saw an interesting phenomenon.

The computer graphics people occupied about one-quarter of the hotel but the remainder of the guests during the week were attendees at a "Schlotzky Deli" convention along with their families. Over the weekend, they were replaced by a "Spirituality Conference" which was a three-day event for Christian families with workshops on moving to Christian ghettos on the island of Antigua and other odd subjects.



The Schlotzky Deli convention families were a varied lot of all colors and religious persuasions from the entire United States and they were a pleasure to hang with at the swimming pool. The "Spirituality" Christian families were all "white" and from the Southeast, mostly from Florida, and were not a pleasure at the swimming pool, mostly because the children were weirdly out of control, screaming their lungs out, getting into bloody scrapes, and being seriously guilt-tripped by tight-lipped parents. I also noticed that the rebellious teens in the Christian family groups all seemed to be wearing heavy metal and satanist T-shirts and doing everything they could to upset their parents, which was not the case with the Schlotzky Deli clans.

You can make your own conclusions, but what I came away with was that enforcing one's religious values forcibly on your children and the society around you makes for some seriously screwed up people.

Please vote no on Proposition 73, and tell everyone you know to do the same. Unfortunately, the polls currently have it tied evenly between the "yes" and "no" sides, mostly because the idea of "parent notification" is appealing. The reality, however, is not.

Guerra, guerra! Sangue, sangue!

The weekly noon peace vigil in front of the brutal Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue was marked by the noise of F/A-18 Hornet fighter jets screaming low in the sky overhead.



It was the start of a two-day marathon practice session for the Blue Angels, a Naval air show contingent, who put on a show over San Francisco Bay for "Fleet Week" every year.



Last year, they didn't show up and took their act to Hawaii instead. Though a number of fans were furious and blamed the "San Francisco liberals" for the snub, their absence couldn't have made me any happier.



They have always made me feel like an old Vietnamese woman living in the Tenderloin who remembers the sound of American jets as a prelude to bombs or napalm being dropped. Actually, they make me feel like a skittish cat, completely unamused by rattling windows, not to mention all the premonitions from the page 15 stories I've read in newspapers over the years about crashes at air shows around the world.



Quite a few people LOVE the Blue Angels and their acrobatics and I've always tried to respect that, but frankly right now their "demonstration" is nothing less than obscene. It's an obscene use of our taxpayer dollars, an obscene waste of oil-based energy, and it's ridiculously dangerous to be practicing at low altitudes over a city.



I wonder how many Americans would be quite so enthusiastic about this demonstration of military might and drill-team displays if murderous foreigners regularly flew over their cities and bombed the hell out of them, as we currently do with our FA18 Hornets in Iraq. Their "weapon load" is pictured above.



One of the most literally beautiful examples of Swords turned into Plowshares is the Army Presidio, dating from the 19th Century, which has recently been decomissioned and become an interesting mixture of national park, housing, George Lucas' new digital empire headquarters, plus offices for what feels like half the non-profits in San Francisco.



The cast of the San Francisco Opera's production of "Norma" had been exiled for two weeks to a large, empty old building that served as a rehearsal hall.



The days had become so beautiful and the view of the bay so exquisite, that it was hard to concentrate on a "gritty, warlike" version of "Norma" inside.



Catherine Naglestad, the diva singing "Norma" was hanging out on the front lawn with a scattered group of choristers.



Hallie, the stage manager who looks too pretty to be a stage manager, dragged us in finally for the three-hour rehearsal.



The bottom of the food chain, the "production assistants," were excitedly getting ready...



...and so was my downstairs neighbor who is singing Clotilde, Norma's maid, which is actually a large, small part.



Filling in for the older bass/baritone who wasn't showing up until the final rehearsals was Joshua Bloom, a young Australian singer who is in the opera's apprentice program. We all wished they'd just keep him in the role because his voice has sounded so incredibly beautiful.



There were lots of people keeping musical time during the rehearsal, including Ian Robertson the chorus director on the left, Oleg Caetani the Italian conductor in the middle, and the seated Sarah Jobin who is going to be replacing him midway through the run.



At one point, Norma declares "Guerra" (war) on the Romans and proceeds to slit her hand with a sword.



Half a dozen Celtic Warrior supernumeraries, including myself, have been directed to go up to the diva and smear our hand against hers, parade the bloody mess around the stage, and then smear it all over our faces.



It sounds way too much fun, which is an odd thing to say after a visit with a peace vigil and a diatribe about the Blue Angels.



However, we need to figure out how to sublimate that blood-lust that is in all of us, use it creatively, and how to play games with it.



What we have to do above all is stop murdering people with bombs in the name of the state. And it needs to stop now.

La Forza del Gustavo

The Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall is turning 25 years old this season and it is looking as silly and clunky now as when it first went up. Damn you, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill for such a lousy piece of architecture.



I've heard enough great performances here over the years, however, that I actually have good feelings about the building.



The lobby is open and during the day filled with light, but I've never thought it a particularly good idea to have walls of glass in earthquake country.



The fixturing and much of the design screams Marriott Hotel 1980.



The concert this afternoon was Gustav Mahler's "sprawling" Fifth Symphony, which goes on for about 80 minutes with lots and lots of musicians in the orchestra.



The cheap seats in the hall are in something called the Center Terrace, where you sit behind the orchestra, facing the conductor.



As long as there's not a soloist at the very front of the stage, these can be some of the best seats in the house and they're only $20.



I have a hard time listening to Mahler without feeling like a precocious, angst-ridden adolescent all over again. It's actually dangerous, neurotic music for that age group, but what the hell?



Mahler didn't really become a mass movement composer worldwide until LPs arrived on the scene (LP standing for "long playing," of course). Leonard Bernstein's championship of the composer in the 1960s, along with his epochal recordings of the complete symphonies in 1967, basically thrust Mahler's music into an orchestral limelight which it hasn't left since.



With money from my first job bagging groceries, I bought a stereo and then lusted for months at a local record store over the Bernstein Mahler set, which was probably the plushest boxed set ever produced, all black, with something like 13 LPs inside, priced at $100 which was a small fortune then. Finally, after many months, the set was reduced to $33 and I bought it, to the amazement of the staff, especially since I didn't know who the hell Mahler was or even what his music sounded like.



I decided to learn the music methodically, listening to the first movement of the first symphony a half dozen times before going to the second movement, which didn't need as many repetitions to absorb, and then I hit the third movement which is an insane mixture of Frere Jacques, a funeral march, and klezmermania. I was thoroughly hooked.



The set got thrown out a San Francisco window a decade later by somebody I didn't want to have sex with anymore, which was just as well.



I find that all music, if you play it too often, needs a rest after a while and that's what I've been doing with Mahler mostly ever since.



However, the chances of hearing this music live, played by an ensemble as good as the San Francisco Symphony, doesn't happen all that often, so the occasion was a treat and the performance was masterful.



Michael Tilson-Thomas' rendition wasn't as schmaltzy as I'm used to, but that was okay since I'm no longer an angst-ridden adolescent. What MTT is great at is rhythm, and this music often seems to be going in three different time signatures at once, which can turn into sonic mush pretty easily but not in his version.



This Sunday afternoon concert was the fifth and last that was going to be used for a recording of the entire Mahler cycle. The audience was as quiet as I've ever heard them until the pianissimo finale of the famous "Adagietto" movement when somebody waited while the last, lone strings died out, and waited some more, while the sound barely quivered in our consciousness, and waited some more until "COUGH/HACK/COUGH!" exploded through the house.



Tilson-Thomas grimaced and then cued the lone horn player who was to start off the final movement without a break, but he came in totally off-pitch. The look on MTT's face at that moment was a priceless "Arrgh!"



In the early evening, I returned to the building for a "La Forza del Destino" rehearsal for the San Francisco Opera.



In the back of Davies Symphony Hall are a number of large rehearsal halls where the opera sets up shop during the season.



I've been cast and then cut from three different parts in the opera already, as a friar, flagellant, and soldier respectively. In one case, this led me to call fellow friar Albert a "motherf---ing, backstabbing Thespian," which he deals with amusingly on his blog here.



However, this evening I was recast as a Religious Pilgrim in KKK drag.



We'll see how long this part lasts before I'm told that the costume department can't find any outfits my size, which is the usual white lie one is told rather than "get out, we want somebody else."



The scene we rehearsed was at an outdoor cafe where the chorus is singing a beautiful plea to God ("Pieta, O Signor") while Pilgrims and Flagellants march around their long, raked table and even walk down the length of it like strippers.



Albert The Thespian is the last Pilgrim to make the crossing and he has a funny description of it on his blog:

I get to be the very last Pilgrim sashaying down the long table (aka: runway) and of course I am loving that. This scene is totally reminding me of when I was a little boy parading down the hallway in our little Queens apartment, pretending to be in the Miss America Pageant.

Doctor Atomic Preview

The greatest "classical" composer in the world right now happens to be a local Bay Area guy named John Adams, who has been producing one masterpiece after another for the last thirty years, from huge orchestral works to chamber music to electronic MIDI music to full-length operas, and that's only a partial listing. His first two operas, "Nixon in China" (yep, about Nixon's trip to China) and "The Death of Klinghoffer" (yep, about the Achille Lauro terrorists and the old Long Island tourist they threw into the Mediterranean) are both wonderful, radical pieces that get better with each passing year. His third opera, "Doctor Atomic," about the creation of the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, has been commissioned by the San Francisco Opera and premieres on Saturday night, October 1st.



On Wednesday, the San Francisco Opera Guild sponsored a lecture on the new piece, with Gloria Christison, their Community Outreach VP, introducing the speaker for the afternoon at the fancy basement auditorium in the Main Public Library.



The packed house was mostly elderly...



...and literally well-heeled.



The lecturer was an important local pianist named Sarah Cahill, and she took us on an intelligent tour of John Adams' career with a number of musical examples that she played on the sound system, which she probably should have cranked up louder.



What was most interesting were the musical examples from the new opera, "Doctor Atomic," that came from John Adams' computer where he orchestrates his pieces using the MIDI system. The pieces were so extraordinary-sounding that it made me really want to see the piece NOW, so at the end of the lecture I went backstage at the opera house and got my name put on the list for final dress rehearsal tickets for that evening.



I wrote to a friend later that night with an account of the opera which follows:

We were all sitting in the grand tier section and after the first act I decided I couldn't stand the director Peter Sellars' stupid schtick, which involved a dance company and an incoherent libretto, a mixture of found historical material and poetry (Baudelaire and Muriel Rukuyser). So I moved to the balcony where I got to spread out in the last row on the center aisle all by myself. It was, as they say, heaven, particularly for an Adams queen like myself.

The music is extraordinary and rich, though complex as hell, and the further one got away from the silly dance stuff and bad super acting and weird supertitle text, the more impressive the staging sometimes became. When the women's chorus came in late in the second act singing that amazing music while doing a strange little stoop, it was totally enchanting for reasons that are impossible to explain. The finale, with its fabulous lighting, short amazing outburst from the chorus, extensions of time, and people just being still, was a total coup de theatre. I loved the effing thing. But I will never get nearer to this production than the last row of the top balcony.

Actually, the opera is very brilliant and very disturbing. And it doesn't even have its ideal cast or ideal director. The wife, Kitty Oppenheimer, was written for the arty mezzo-soprano diva of the moment, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who IS awesome in performance. But she threw out her back and her doctor told her not to move, essentially, for six months so she canceled everything. So some woman who has a decent voice is singing it, but the part is hugely difficult and meant for a major singer. Actually, the same could be said for the rest of the cast too.

The orchestra and the chorus, however, are both performing in a league they've rarely ventured into. They're just plain awesome.