A Prayer for Iraq

The final Thursday noon peace vigil of the year took place on the 29th in front of the brutal Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue.



The massive, inhuman architecture of the building is perfectly consonant with the villains presently in charge of the federal government.



Though a number of us already assumed that this was the case, over the last year it has been publicly announced that our federal government is spying on all of us without warrants, paying journalists to feed us the party line, lying about everything almost reflexively, kidnapping people off the streets of the world and then torturing them at secret gulags, destroying the environment through extraordinary stupidity and greed, all the while looting the treasury for the Bush/Cheney cronies.



The tide, or in this case the tsunami, seems ready to turn however, partly because of fate such as the Katrina Disaster and partly because of the work of fairly selfless Radical Pacifists like the group of four "peaceworkers" who were kidnapped over a month ago in Iraq. Nobody knows who or why they were taken. The kidnappings could have been more economic than political, which seems to be a common occurrence in Iraq these days, or it could be a prelude to another American government psy-ops (psychological operation) outrage like the Nick Berg beheading. (Yes, the poor young man was beheaded but the internet video we were all forced to watch featured Evil Muslims who looked phony as did the internet "beheading." Hasn't anybody watched the crypto-fascist "24" TV series?)



The website to learn more about the Christian Peacemaker Teams is here. To learn more about what's going on in Iraq right now, Patrick Cockburn has a good article up today (click here). He's one of the few writers I trust on the subject and he's been there in the middle of it, unembedded. My prayer for Iraq is that we, the White Western JudeoChristian World, gets the hell out of that poor country and that we're gone by this time next year.

California Dreamin' on Such a Winter's Day

San Francisco has been buffeted by monsoons through most of the Christmas holidays, but there was a break in the storms on Wednesday, the 28th.



Not going anywhere for the holidays has been a complete tonic, with no stress and lots of leisure.



Plus, it's always fun to pretend to be a tourist in San Francisco...



...and take the ferry boat to Sausalito.



The excuse was to treat my friend Ellen to a 50th birthday lunch.



The view and the light...



...were extraordinary.



The 4:50 PM return trip from Sausalito to the Ferry Building...



...even featured a sunset...



...framed perfectly by that old suicide magnet itself, the Golden Gate Bridge.

Monster Japanese Screens

At the Asian Art Museum, a special exhibit opened this month called "Traditions Unbound: Groundbreaking Painters of 18th-Century Kyoto."



Kenneth Baker, the art critic for the "San Francisco Chronicle" gave the show a rave review and tried to explain why the paintings on view were "groundbreaking," with limited success. Click here for the full review.



The show has been divided into two parts with Part One on view through January 8th and Part Two from January 11th through February 26th. Though the official explanation is that the pieces are insanely valuable and delicate, so they can only be shown for a certain amount of time, the truth seems to be that they just ran out of room. The museum really should consider remodeling the first floor so they would have more gallery space for big touring shows, and less soaring hotel lobby/gift shop space.



Almost all of the Kyoto "paintings" are on gigantic folding screens that sometimes run the length of a 40-foot wall.



They are wonderful to look at, though the reflecting glass enclosing them gets annoying. The ideal experience would be to lay down on a Japanese mat, sipping on sake, while surrounded by these beautiful screens. Oh well, in an alternate universe somewhere.



On the second floor, where the rotating permanent collection resides, there were more monster screens in the Japan section of the museum.



Most of these were older than the Kyoto screens by 100 to 200 years.



The stables was definitely one of my favorites...



...as was the landscape...



...with the red sun.



In the Korea section of the museum, past this wall-size modern painting of a sacred mountain in North Korea...



...was my favorite monster screen.



It was from the 19th century and belonged to a ruler who longed for his days of scholarship and the accoutrements of the trade.



Can you imagine an American politician with the equivalent? I can't.

Happy Birthday, Buddhist Christmas Baby

My friend Heidi in Santa Barbara has had to compete with the Big J for birthday attention all her life, and in reality the historical Jesus was probably not born on December 25th like she was.



Heidi's been a practicing Tibetan Buddhist for some time, so think of this as a birthday card for her.



Since starting this blog, I've met some very interesting new people who I would also like to wish well.



Happy Winter Solstice to the East Coast Witch.



Feliz Hanukkah to h brown and his Burrito Salon Crew, along with Albglinka at Albert's World of Artsy Fun.



Peace on Earth to Markley and all of his Radical Pacifist friends.



Though I haven't met them, I get awfully good vibes from Peteykins in Washington DC and Lance in New York State and Kit in Buenaventura. Merry Christmas, Dudes.



And to the would-be revolutionaries like Kimo and Pedro and Clark and Eddie, Happy New Year. It's going to be interesting.

Coke in the Tenderloin

A large production crew from Los Angeles came to San Francisco last weekend for a four-day shoot on a huge, expensive commercial for Coca-Cola.



There were hundreds of extras involved in each day's filming...



...some playing participants in a mock parade...



...while most of us were stationed on the sidewalk as spectators...



...being herded around by young production assistants.



I joined the first day of shooting underneath a freeway around Harrison and Division Streets when the weather was so cold and so wet that it felt certain half of the participants were going to come down with pneumonia by the end of the day...



...particularly the poor, underdressed cheerleaders from the Crenshaw High School band who had been brought in from Los Angeles.



This last day of shooting was much warmer than the first and the rains were briefly in abeyance.



The block-long parade was being filmed on Taylor Street between Turk and Eddy Streets in the Tenderloin.



One block makes a huge difference in the downtown Tenderloin neighborhood...



...and this particular block is one of the craziest in the entire city.



The San Francisco Chronicle's website has this to say in their "tour section" area:

Repeatedly described in most tourist guides as "the worst neighborhood in San Francisco," the Tenderloin thrives despite its bad rap. Sure, there are loads of drug dealers, addicts, prostitutes and mentally unstable street people, but if you can get past that, you'll find it is also one of the city's most exciting and diverse locales.

Getting its funky, florid nickname from the days when policemen were paid more to work its mean streets, thereby affording the cops better cuts of meat, the Tenderloin is moving up these days.

Most of the extras were suburbanites from around the Bay Area...



...and it was interesting to watch them calmly hang out...



...with speed freaks talking to themselves...



...and drunks in wheelchairs ranting as they passed by.



Actually, everyone got along just fine, partly because a parade...



...is usually amusing...



...and generally surreal.



Plus, the faux Miss New Mexico was stunning.



One of the parade contingents looked familiar to me, Cheer San Francisco.



I played on a short-lived, infamously fun softball team for a gay leather bar called Chaps back at the beginning of the 1980s.



During one game, a teammate from Hayward brought along some friends who were former high school cheerleaders and who wanted to take it up again.



To be honest, the team found them a little embarassing at the time, but in the intervening 25 years...



...they've become a small empire according to their website (click here), with chapters all around the country.



As some kind of karmic payback for the miserable Saturday, the shooting wrapped up early at lunch, and we were paid a full-day rate and sent home before the monsoons started up again. Hurrah!

The San Francisco WiFi Battle: Part 2

On last Wednesday the 14th, Kimo Crossman and I had lunch at Original Joe's in the Tenderloin, not far from where he lives on Market Street.



We walked the five blocks from the restaurant to City Hall, where there was a media frenzy in progress.



There had been a press conference about the infamous Bayview Station "cop videos" involving lots of questionable humor.



The Bayview/Hunter's Point neighborhood wasn't amused, the mayor and police chief Heather Fong got hysterical, and lots of absurd drama ensued involving the suspension and quick reinstatement of 24 policemen and lots of posturing by all kinds of spokesmodels.



The local media, as usual, didn't bother asking the obvious question. How can you have "community policing," the latest buzz phrase, when the overwhelming majority of new hires over the last five years have been from outside the city and county of San Francisco, worsening a nepotistic, lazy and out-of-touch police force.



It really might help to recruit some new officer from Hunter's Point/Bayview itself. Last I heard, it's not as if the neighborhood is suffering from too many jobs.



And the argument that San Francisco is too expensive for police and their families is nonsense. They all make more than most of my friends living in the city and have benefits galore.



Oh well, the old media is crumbling in front of our eyes, as evidenced by developments like Eddie Codell's "Geek Entertainment TV." Eddie was one of the organizers of WebZine 2005, which I wrote about earlier in the year here.



One of his first Quicktime movies is an interview with Kimo by Irina Slutsky that's very funny and conveys a lot of Kimo's charm. Click here to see it.



Kimo first got in touch with me at WebZine and then started hounding me with emails and phone calls when he started looking into the WiFi situation in San Fracisco. As a number of city officials have discovered, he doesn't take "no" for an answer very well.



At first I thought he was a complete flake but I turned out to be wrong.



Though he's amazingly naive about politics, particularly the institutional corruption at San Francisco's City Hall that probably dates from Barbary Coast days, Kimo is not stupid.



Supervisor Mirkarimi's aide, Steven, had the best line of the day which he uttered after being handed a four-page packet to brief the supervisor. "A really intelligent person like yourself going after bureaucrats? Gosh, the poor people. I actually feel sorry for them."



Because Kimo has thrown such a wrench into the works of whatever plan Mayor Newsom, his overseers and his minions were working out behind closed doors, there have been many rumors that Kimo was being paid by rival commercial entities.



Recently, he sent me the following note explaining who he was and what he was doing:

I am not a politico, just a techie. I've never done this before. I just want a good solution for San Francisco. And I'm not against antennas or against Google, and I am representing absolutely no other organization. I am not a conspiracy freak, just upset that the creation of a new de facto Franchise that sells the public's privacy for a free WiFi system is probably something that should have maximum public input.

WiFi has the ability to replace the following services: Cell Phone, DSL, Cable HSI, Cable TV, Land Phone Line, Alarm System Radio. So it's kind of a big dealio...

It's also a chance to roll out a diaster-proof communication system that the Public can use for Public Safety, unlike what happened in Katrina and 9/11. So far the City has been unwilling to seriously consider this option.

As I can attest, he's extremely determined, and once he discovered the local Sunshine Act legislation, his programmer's detail-oriented brain went into overdrive and he's been trying to get to the bottom of the mucky barrel with a host of document requests, which are making a number of people in City Hall insane.



On the Department of Telecommunications and Information website, in the TechConnect section (which is amazingly skimpy with its updated information), there is a recent "ALERT" in a box which takes one to a one-paragraph PDF that says the following:

Notice Regarding Unauthorized Posting of an RFP Draft

The City is aware that a copy of a draft document labeled “Confidential Draft – For Internal Review Only”, titled “City and County of San Francisco Request for Proposals for Wireless Tech Connect – Community Wireless Broadband Network”, and dated December 8, 2005, has been posted on a website that is not hosted or controlled by the City. This confidential draft is a document protected by the attorney-client privilege. The City did not authorize the person who obtained this document to view or possess it. The City does not consent to its disclosure on a website or in any other manner, and does not waive the attorney-client privilege for this document. All persons should disregard this document for purposes of reviewing or responding to any Request for Proposals that the City may issue in connection with a community wireless broadband network.

Somebody anonymously sent the document to Kimo and all of a sudden we have our very own "Pentagon Papers." There are also rumours that the City of San Francisco is going to sue Kimo for making them liable to lawsuits, which makes as much sense as the "attorney-client" privilege in the statement above.



On Friday the 16th, another oddly named Board of Supervisors group, the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFco) had another hearing into the secrecy of the WiFi process, and the three supervisors, particularly Mirkarimi, grilled the DTIS director Chris Vein fairly harshly.



Most of the same people who testified at Monday's Government Audit and Oversight Committee hearing came up to the microphone and repeated their testimony for Supervisors McGoldrick, Ammiano and Mirkarimi.



The vast majority of the speakers were extraordinarily articulate and were able to translate intelligently and calmly why the current process needed to be rethought.



For more info on this issue, there are a few good articles on the web. Jackson West from SFist wrote a really prescient guest column about all the players in this drama some months ago (click here). Renee Zelles at BeyondChron wrote a good wrap-up of the Monday Government Oversight meeting (click here). And an article just appeared in the San Francisco Bay Guardian detailing the ramifications of Friday's meeting (click here).



You're doing good, Kimo.

UPDATE: The RFP (Request for Proposal) has just been issued by the Department of Telecommunications, etc., and it's being universally reviewed as an inadequate disaster. Go to Kimo's blog (click here) for more information.

The San Francisco WiFi Battle: Part 1

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors have a number of committees that meet weekly or bimonthly and though a few have simple names like "The Land Use Committee," most of the others have convoluted titles like the "Government Audit and Oversight Committee."



The latter had a meeting on Monday afternoon, December the 12th.



There were a number of agenda items, but the one creating the most interest was an examination into the public process surrounding a potentially huge civic project creating a free wireless internet network, which had been proposed by Mayor Newsom in conjunction with Google, the internet Goliath.



The problem was that there was little to no public input into the very rushed process, and so the three supervisors on the committee -- Chris Daly, Sean Elsbernd, and Aaron Peskin -- were being asked to grill the director of the Department of Telecommunications and Information Services.



Chris Vein, above, was appointed by Newsom to be the "acting" director in May of this year. He's a smooth character who worked at the White House for a number of administrations doing god knows what, and he makes a point of secrecy even though at the hearing he denied that this was his modus operandi.



In other words, it smelled rather as if a fix was already in.



It certainly wouldn't be the first time that has happened in San Francisco.



Even though there were the usual non-profit types at the hearing, looking to consolidate their bit of power while blabbing on about the "digital divide"...



...the real digital divide was between the passionately committed geeks who had a visionary, utopian vision of the future and everyone else who had no idea what they were talking about, and who were stuck in very old ruts of how things are done.



One of the best articles on this local issue was in the Bay Guardian recently by Camille T. Taiara and Matthew Hirsch (click here), and it's worth reading in full. They quote Tim Pozar, pictured above.

"In the past corporations have had a bad track record on addressing digital divide issues," explained Tim Pozar, cofounder of the Bay Area Wireless Users Group, which has long been rebelling against the big telecommunications companies by setting up free WiFi nodes in different parts of the city.

Media democracy advocates worry that Newsom is taking a backward approach to reaching his stated goals. The city must figure out what the community wants TechConnect to do before it can determine how the network should be built.

"Wireless is just one medium out there," Pozar said by way of example. Fiber-optic cable performs better than WiFi for video streaming, he explained. That would be an important consideration if, say, San Francisco's public access TV stations wanted to use the network to reach residents who don't subscribe to cable, or if they chose to broadcast Board of Supervisors' meetings so that people could watch them from their work desks.

Indeed, San Franciscans shouldn't be limited to using the network only to receive content, they say.

About three months ago, Kimo Crossman, a San Francisco freelance software developer between jobs, decided to find out what was up with the proposed WiFi project, mostly out of enthusiastic interest.



He asked for a bit of information from the Department of Telecommunications, Etc. and was stonewalled, which annoyed him.



So he declared war on San Francisco bureaucracy and in the process of shining a light on what was actually going on with the RFP (Request for Proposal), he's spurred on a whole group of geeks who may actually help get this project done right.

To get to Part Two of the article, click here.

The Murder of Tookie Williams

On Tuesday the 13th at 4PM, there was a small demonstration at the corner of McAllister and Franklin Streets over the execution of Tookie Williams at San Quentin the night before.



There were about 50 protestors and twenty media people...



...which felt bizarre...



...an example of a manufactured media op(portunity)...



...at its most brazen.



One has to give the oganizers credit (click here to see who they are) for getting such a large turnout, however, from the mainstream press.



I'm opposed to the death penalty on two grounds: one, that innocent people have been and continue to be executed; and two, execution by the state is murder in my name and I actually take the Ten Commandment injunction "Thou shalt not kill" seriously.



James Wolcott wrote the following yesterday:

"I held out the fugitive hope that the moderate side of Schwarzenegger might prevail as his wife tugged him in the direction of leniency and mercy. What a fool I am. Whatever Maria Shriver said or didn't say was of no consequence, nor were the pleas for clemency from citizens, famous and obscure alike, who felt Williams had done enough good over the last twenty years to deserve having his life spared.

The death penalty must be abolished. No former movie action hero--or Yale cheerleader with enough psychological baggage to sink the African Queen--should be entrusted with the power of life and death over his fellow citizens. These are essentially frivolous, uninformed men playacting blue-suited roles of grave responsibility. And, no, I don't think Bill Clinton should have executed Ricky Ray Rector either. Capital punishment must be de-politicized, and as long as politicians make the final decision, depoliticization is impossible. So abolish it."

There is a scatalogical, nasty piece of work in the blogosphere who accurately bills himself as "The Rude Pundit" (click here to get to his site). On occasion, he's one of the most brilliant ranters on the internet and that's saying something. Here's a few excerpts from his take on the California governor:

"Man, the Rude Pundit wants Arnold Schwarzenegger to be in charge of all decisions of life or death. He wants that deep thinkin' demi-Nazi to walk from cell to cell at San Quentin and mark a chalk X outside each door. Because Arnold Schwarzenegger is just who we all want tellin' us who should live or die, who deserves mercy and who deserves death. Goddamn, what an easy world it'll be havin' Arnold Schwarzenegger make all those decisions.

Fuck, let's not limit Arnold Schwarzenegger to the executable on death row; send Arnold Schwarzenegger into hospitals so he can give the thumbs up or thumbs down to each person on life support."

"Who's been indirectly responsible for more violence since the early 1980s, Tookie or the Terminator? Tough question, no?

For, if nothing else, the Williams case has laid clear the absurdity of the governorship of Arnold Schwarzenegger. If you spend your life acting like an amoral, gun-firing buffoon, why should anyone expect you to act differently as the governor? That would require an act of clemency by the voting public, that might require you to say you wanted to redeem yourself for your past sins."

"And the most disheartening thing of all was how little was mentioned, in the cruel march to the death chamber, of how the ex-wife of one of Williams' alleged victims, Albert Owens (whose family is entirely fucked-up in conflict over the execution), called for support of Williams' efforts to redeem himself for his gang-building past: "I, Linda Owens want to build upon Mr. Williams' peace initiative. I invite Mr. Williams to join me in sending a message to all communities that we should all unite in peace. This position of peace would honor my husband's memory and Mr. Williams work."

"A call for peace to honor the dead? What fuckin' country does Linda Owens think she's living in? Not in George Bush's America, where more must die in Iraq to make sure the dead are honored. And certainly not in Arnold Schwarzenegger's California."

At one point during the media op protest in front of the California Public Utilities Commission building, this gentleman started an elaborate call-and-response chant with the crowd. "Hi-hi-ho-ho, the death penalty's gotta go" was one section, if I remember correctly.



For a more nuanced take on the whole subject, Alan Maass from The Socialist Worker has a great post up on "Counterpunch." Click here to read it.

The Temple Vanishes and Santa Arrives

The new block-long park at Hayes and Octavia Streets is suddenly looking a bit empty.



This is the spot where David Best's Pagoda Temple stood from June through November, a six-month stay that was quite a bit longer than the initially proposed three months.



The structure was probably one of the best-loved buildings in San Francisco to go up since the Giants new waterfront baseball stadium.



The combination of whimsy and elaborate detailing proved hard for anyone to resist.



It was time for it to come down, though.



The graffiti went from homemade and heartfelt...



...to crass tagging...



...which didn't show much imagination.



Plus, the recent rains were making sections of the roof seriously funky.



Still, if you're looking for something beautiful to look at in the park...



...the row of yellow leaved trees will do...



...particularly framed by their red cross-the-street companions.



For a truly crazed art experience, not to mention a cocktail, you should walk across Hayes Street to Marlena's saloon...



...a great neighborhood dive...



...where drag queens often perform on a makeshift stage above the pool table.



This is Christmas time, however, and the emphasis is on Santa.



Out on the smoking patio...



...there were additional glass cases to hold even more of the thousands of Santas...



...of every description...



...being festively displayed throughout the large space.



Do be sure to check it out...



...and tell Marlena Merry Christmas.

In The Land of the Peaceniks

The majority of people at the Thursday peace vigil at the Federal Building on Thursday were concerned with their four fellow religious peace workers who had recently been kidnapped in Iraq by god knows who.



There has been so much disinformation put out by the murderous, torturing criminals who are in charge of the United States and Great Britain over the last six years that it's impossible to believe just about anyone about anything.



The playwright Harold Pinter just used his Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech to maintain that murdering, torturing and mendacity is nothing new for the United States, particularly since World War II, and it was quite a speech.



I've seen excerpts across the blogosphere all week, but it's worth reading the indictment in full. Click here for a link.



The question is what can be done by the Unbelieving Fringe to change things in our own country.



The next day at h. brown's Burrito Salon, there was fervent political gossip galore. Some of us congratulated h. on a barn-burning column which starts off with an apology for crashing into a recent City Hall meeting roaring drunk, includes a jeremiad against Supervisor McGoldrick for destroying the homes of the parrots of Telegraph Hill, and finishes with a report card for the individual members of the Board of Supervisors which is quite a hoot.



Click here to check it out.

The Hummer and the Nightingale

On Grove Street between Van Ness and Polk, directly across from City Hall, there is a huge gallery run by the San Francisco Art Commission that sits next to a vacant lot.



Only about the first 20 feet of the one-story, block-long gallery can be used because the rest of the building is seismically unsafe and is reportedly set for demolition at some point in the future.



The following description of the present show appears on the San Francisco Art Commission website:

"This winter the Gallery at 155 Grove features Andrew Junge’s civilian Hummer H1. Created during his three-month tenure with the SF Recycling and Disposal’s Artist in Residence Program and standing over 6 ft. high and 17 ft. long, the Hummer is constructed entirely of Styrofoam scavenged from trash. To sculpt this work Junge bonded together thousands of individual pieces of shaped polystyrene and then hand-carved the vehicle brick by Styrofoam brick."

Alright, Houston, is this art or not?



Down the street at Davies Symphony Hall, the San Francisco Symphony is presenting an ambitious operatic double-bill this weekend of two Stravinsky pieces, "Le Rossignol" and "Oedipus Rex."



Last month a group of supernumeraries from the opera crossed the street to the symphony hall to help rehearse "Le Rossignol" with director Patricia Birch and her assistant Joe Duffy, pictured above, before the principal singers arrived.



Pat Birch has quite a wide-ranging resume as a director and choreographer over the years as the Symphony program relates:

"In a career that crosses all media, director Patricia Birch has earned two Emmy Awards, five Tony nominations, as well as Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, Barrymore, Billboard, and MTV awards, and a Directors Guild Award nomination and the Fred Astaire Award for her choreography and direction of music-driven projects ranging from Sondheim to The Rolling Stones. She has created the musical staging for more than a dozen original Broadway and off-Broadway shows, including You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, The Me Nobody Knows, Grease, A Little Night Music, Candide, Over Here, Diamond Studs, The Happy End, Pacific Overtures, They’re Playing Our Song, Gilda Radner: Live from New York, and The Great Ostrovsky."

Her staging was quite imaginative, but there were a couple of problems. The amount of stage space offered to her was absurdly small, particularly given the number of people involved, and her working style is to change everything on the fly, not just at every rehearsal but seemingly every fifteen minutes, which managed to confuse quite a few people, particularly those extras stationed at the moving screens that set the various scenes.



Her assistant, Joe Duffy, was wonderfully competent and patient within the daily nuttiness, but there was only so much he could do.



As part of the payment for our time, the supers were invited to the final dress rehearsal on the evening before the performances, and I invited M.C-, a fellow blogger who is one of the best writers on the internet, as he discourses about the travails of parking in San Francisco and the joys of listening to music around the world. Click here to get to his site, "The Standing Room."



"Le Rossignol" is early Stravinsky, written just before and after his "Rite of Spring" period, and it's exquisitely beautiful, strange music. Even listening to a tinny recording on a boombox during rehearsals, I fell in love with the piece, which is based on Hans Christian Andersen's gentle fairy tale, "The Emperor and the Nightingale."



Unfortunately, just like the semi-staged Gershwin musicals Tilson-Thomas performed earlier this year, the balances were all wrong. The orchestra was much too predominant and the chorus way too large.



Plus, putting the principal singers on a tiny raised stage behind the orchestra just didn't work. The staging was cramped and the voices, particularly the men with lower registers, didn't project out into the auditorium at all. The soprano singing The Nightingale, Olga Trifonova, had a lovely voice until she sang in the highest registers, when the sound was suddenly like an icepick to the brain.



In fact, even knowing the piece and what the staging was trying to do, the production still came across as very confusing. The Nightingale was being played simultaneously by a singer, a dancer and a prop bird which looked like a big white dove even though the libretto called for a small, grey nightingale. Even the contortionists, who were so amazing to watch in rehearsal, didn't read well as the Mechanical Bird from the Emperor of Japan.



Early on, M.C- leaned over to me and whispered, "Mike, the round scrim looks like a condom."



He was right, of course, and I spent the next fifteen minutes giggling at the incongruity. "Remember the gold coin condoms?" I asked him. "It looks exactly like one of those."



At the end of the night I said goodbye to M.C- and got to see his convertible, the subject of many indignities from corrupt parking officers over the last year.

Seance Concert 3: Toward The Flame

Real theatrical magic is rare indeed, requiring the perfect alchemy of performers, audience, crew, place and time.



So when the magic does occur, there is a feeling of the miraculous being encountered and an air of celebration.



The three "New Music Seance" concerts at the 1895 Swedenborgian church were quite definitely magical, though until they actually occurred, nobody involved was quite sure the event was going to come off all that well.



During the break between the second and third concerts, a delicious meal was prepared by Carol Law and Victoria Shoemaker...



...for the performers...



...and crew...



...who were happily intermingling...



...with the composers.



In many theatrical situations, there is an unspoken hierarchy of composers/writers, principal performers, lesser performers, and crew.



This evening none of those hierarchies existed. It felt like early 20th century bohemianism, which the combination of eccentric music and church only emphasized.



Another reason the concerts were so successful were the audiences, one of the most raptly intelligent and appreciative groups of people I've ever been around.



About a dozen listeners opted in for the entire marathon of three concerts, including the Hillbrands above. "Why are you here?" I asked them, and they replied that their son Kyle was studying to be a composer in Manhattan and he had taken them to an Other Minds Music Festival when he was back in the Bay Area. So they'd taken a chance and were having a great time.



Charles Amirkhanian, the Artistic Director, had a vision of the church in total darkness with circular seating around the grand piano, which would require titles of some sort since it would be too dark to read the program. The vision proved to be impractical, and the stage became more proscenium-style, with candles lighting the perimeters of the church which turned out to be a perfect visual touch.



The titles idea remained, however, so I created a series of screens to be projected with the names of the composers and their compositions. For the deceased composers, I animated photos of them young and old across various earth/air/fire/water backgrounds. For reasons of sheer practicality, the projector needed to be in the back of the church above the fireplace so that the images were huge, and the photographic ghosts flew to the ceiling and the altar. It was great, and a happy accident.



As an audience member, the musical revelation for me were the four works by Henry Cowell (1897-1965). It made me want to hear everything he's ever written. The composer was raised locally in Menlo Park by very interesting sounding bohemian parents, and he went on to basically invent modern American classical music. For more on Cowell, including his four-year incarceration in San Quentin for being a homosexual during the 1940s, there's a good biographical essay in Wikipedia (click here).



There's also a wonderful appreciation written by Kyle Gann (click here), the composer and music writer for the "Village Voice" during the rag's salad days. Two of Gann's pieces were also included in the concerts, including the eponymous "Nude Rolling Down an Escalator" for player piano, which was great, wild music.



The concept of a seance involves conjuring spirits and there were plenty of those popping in during the day and evening for different people. A friend in the Oakland Hills, Nora Ellis, had been living with one cancer or another for the last 20 years and she had survived through sheer force of will until her son was grown. She died during the night on Friday, just before the concerts, and made an appearance at the church while Sarah Cahill was playing on the strings of the piano during Henry Cowell's wild and weird "The Banshee."



The program notes from Cowell explain the myth:

"A Banshee is a fairy woman who comes at the time of a death to take the soul back into the Inner World. She is uncomfortable on the mortal plane, and wails her distress until she is safely out of it again. The older your family, the louder your family banshee will wail, for she has had that much more practise at it."

As the hours wore on, many of us became exhausted, but the pianist Sarah Cahill seemed to be gathering strength and energy as the night continued. She was literally radiant for the final "Graceful Ghost Rag" by William Bolcom. What an extraordinary day.

Seance Concert 2: Nude Rolling Down an Escalator

The three concerts making up the "New Music Seance" on Saturday, December 3rd at the Swedenborgian Church required a small cadre of professional friends and volunteers...



...including this piano tuner.



He was actually called back after the first concert because the cold within the church caused the high notes on the keyboard to go slightly out of tune almost immediately.



There was a professional videographer, Jonathan Doff, who was documenting the event with three large cameras and a rotating cast of volunteer photographers for a DVD.



Clyde Sheets was the production manager, lighting designer, and house manager all rolled into one. The way he dealt with a distinct lack of wattage (the circuits blew out at least three times over the course of the day) and the complex needs of the historical site was both calm and inspiring. I don't think I've ever seen a better production manager.



Some volunteers were helping to beautify the place...



...and also make food for the performers and crew during the marathon session.



Richard Friedman, the president of the Other Minds board, greeted the concertgoers and played usher when he wasn't attending to a multitude of other tasks.



The pianist Sarah Cahill was 17 years old when the local composer John Adams wrote a solo piano piece for her in 1977 called "China Gates" which was the penultimate piece on the last Seance program.



She has gone on to become one of the most articulate performers and advocates of modern classical composers in the world. To get to her website, click here.




Though Cahill performed the vast bulk of the music, there was also a violin and piano duo, Kate Stenberg and Eva-Maria Zimmermann respectively, who played relatively long (20 minutes) pieces in the middle of each concert.



Their first selection was Charles Ives' Second Sonata for Violin and Piano (1910); the second an amusingly lively proto-minimalist duet by the Danish Henning Christiansen called "Den Arkadiske" from 1966; and finally "Trois Regards" by Ronald Bruce Smith (1988), a very intense-looking Canadian composer in attendance at the concerts who had originally written the music for Kate Stenberg. I loved all three of the pieces.



Other Minds, a new music advocacy group, was presenting the concerts as a fundraiser for itself, and in the above photo the artistic director Charles Amirkhanian was showing off the Yamaha Disklavier, which could either be played live or preprogrammed like a player piano.

The programming was in the digital music format MIDI, which I learned about in the early 1990s at SF State's Multimedia School. Randall Packer, a composer himself, was teaching a course in digital audio that was fascinating but went way over my head. When he explained how musicians had gotten together in the early 1980s and created a standard set of numbers for digital musical notation, I asked him why the same thing hadn't happened in the digital graphics fields where there were so many competing file formats. "Musicians are usually nicer people," was his simple reply and one I've never forgotten.



Amirkhanian is a ferociously intelligent character with a dry wit. His brief professional bio on the Other Minds website (click here) reads as follows:

"When American composer John Cage died in the summer of 1992, the New Yorker ran an unattributed obituary: "His epitaph might read that he composed music in other peoples' minds." Reading this, Jim Newman suggested "Other Minds" as the name of the major international music festival that he was about to launch in San Francisco, with myself as Artistic Director.

This moniker fit aptly with my typical roster, as my lifelong specialty has been the showcasing, via radio, concert, and commercial recording production, the careers of originals and outsiders in avant-garde music. As an electroacoustic composer and sound poet myself, I served as Music Director of KPFA Radio in Berkeley from 1969 to 1992. In the Fall of 1992 I became Executive Director of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, California where I remained until early 1997."

Above, Charles was demonstrating the piano for the composer Gary Noland, an ex-Berkeley composer who now lives and works in Portland.



Noland had written a 15-minute piece for player piano in the late 1970s called "Grande Rag Brillante." According to the program, "The world premiere was broadcast live over KPFA FM to inaugurate its (then) brand new facility (in particular its Yamaha Disklavier grand piano) in Berkeley, California on October 4, 1991. The music is, without question, the longest and most technically demanding piano rag ever composed." The program note also claimed that Noland "has been called the most virtuosic composer of fugue alive today," which he later contested to me, but in any case the piece was extraordinary and lots of fun.



Also attending the concerts was Bunita Marcus, who wrote a lovely set of variations to John Lennon's "Julia."



From Emeryville, Daniel David Feinsmith had two pieces performed, "Amalek" for player piano and "Self," which required Sarah Cahill to recite a poetic essay by Emerson while playing clusters of notes on the piano.



The church only held seating for about 100 people, so that the place was literally packed to the rafters for all three concerts.



The first two pieces were called "Stars" and "Sunburst" from 1926 by Dane Rudhyar, a composer more famous for the dozens of books he wrote on the subject of 20th century astrology, which he essentially created by injecting the notion of "free will" into the equation. He died in San Francisco in 1985 and is still revered by his followers.



There couldn't have been a better start to the first concert than Rudhyar's music, which was played exquisitely by Sarah.

Seance Concert 1: Walk in Beauty

At the corner of Washington and Lyon Streets, on the cusp of the two wealthy neighborhoods of Pacific Heights and Presidio Heights, stands the Swedenborgian Church and its garden.



The small, beautiful church dates from 1895, according to a brilliant essay by James Lawrence, a former pastor of the church. "Founding pastor Rev. Joseph Worcester sketched the original schema and then brought together in an historic collaboration architects A. Page Brown, A.C. Schweinfurth, and Bernard Maybeck, and artists Bruce Porter and William Keith to produce a new expression in religious architecture."



Along with a number of other people, I spent all of Saturday from 10AM to 11PM, working on a fundraiser for the Other Minds Music Festival. It consisted of three separate classical music concerts, starting at 2PM and ending at 10:30PM, that were billed as a "New Music Seance."



The major bulk of the programs were solo piano pieces being played in a tour-de-force marathon by the local pianist Sarah Cahill. Half of the pieces were by deceased "maverick" composers of the 20th century such as Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, Leo Ornstein, Erik Satie, Ruth Crawford, Alexander Scriabin, Lou Harrison and John Cage, and the other half were by living composers who were being presented as their successors.

The match between the musical program and the Transcendentalist Swedenborgian movement, with its Arts and Crafts Movement church, turned out to be serendipitous and everyone who attended the concert could feel it.



In the program, the pianist Sarah Cahill acknowledged her inspiration for these concerts:

"I would like to send special thanks to Helene Brewer, who attended this Swedenborgian Church in 1910, at the age of three. It was she who suggested we explore this setting for the new music seance. Now 98, Helene Brewer is a scholar of Transcendentalism, and with her passion for Emerson and Ives, her adventurous tastes in new music, and her teachings about Transcendentalist writers, she is a constant inspiration."

Emanuel Swedenborg was a Swedish "scientist, philosopher and mystic" according to Wikipedia (click here for the full article) and lived from 1688-1772. The list of his admirers over the centuries is bizarrely impressive: Emerson, William Blake, Johnny Appleseed, Yeats, Carl Jung, Helen Keller and Jorge Luis Borges, among many others.



From the Lawrence essay:

"A group of Stanford researchers put together a massive data program to see if the computer could reasonably calculate the IQ of history's great minds. The test places three titans in a fuzzy tie for first place: John Stuart Mill, Goethe, and Emanuel Swedenborg...While devoting most of his career to the development of Sweden's mining industry, Swedenborg racked up an amazing list of additional accomplishments. In the natural sciences alone, for example, he formulated an atomic theory of matter, was the first to correctly identify the function of the cerebral cortex and the ductless glands, introduced the first Swedish textbooks on algebra and calculus, founded the science of crystallography, and designed and oversaw the construction of what is still the world's largest drydock. Other more personal accomplishments such as playing the organ and speaking nine languages also clearly point to the prophet's broad intellectual genius."

"Throughout Swedenborg's single-minded quest for knowledge, one consideration overrode all else: his search for God. Moving generally from the world outside to the world inside, Swedenborg was convinced that the Divine could be approached and discovered through a naturalistic scientific process.

After 25 years of this searching, he concentrated all his efforts on one final locus of meaning in the physical universe: the human body. He believed that if human anatomy was analyzed closely enough, the location of the soul could be determined...And he did find the soul, but not quite in the way he expected."

"At this point, he was a middle-aged bachelor scientist, arguably Europe's most brilliant thinker, investing the totality of his creative energy into discovering the actual location of the soul and thereby coming face to face with God. As he pressed further into contemplations upon human anatomy, his inner life erupted with dreams and visions that led him into an intense and meticulous personal introspection.

This year-long process culminated in a Christ vision of such extraordinary power that it changed Swedenborg's life in two dramatic ways. In his outer life, he dropped his former scientific pursuits for the writing and articulation of a spiritual understanding of life. His inner life underwent an unprecedented series of paranormal experiences that left him with an idiomatic capacity of second sight, unique in the annals of psychic phenomena."

"Swedenborg claimed continuous access to the spiritual realm, and in this highly clairvoyant and clairaudient state, he penned thirty volumes in which he explained the nature of life as perceived from his remarkable vantage point.

While traversing new spaces, he retained his careful observational style and scientific focus. Swedenborg retained his sanity during this phase. Although resigned from all duties associated with the mines, he made his most solid civic contributions after intromission into the spiritual realm."

Also in the Lawrence essay is a history of the church based on Swedenborg's writings that is fascinating, particularly the split in North America:

"The core issue in which all splinter issues were rooted involved the authority of Swedenborg. By the time the split was complete in 1890, Swedenborg had been dead for more than a century, and many prominent people in the church were cross-pollinating Swedenborgian ideas with much of the rest of the exciting intellectual climate of the nineteenth century.

Swedenborg wrote with tremendous conviction and spiritual authority; many of his serious students felt the need for strict adherence to his writings. In other words, a battle royal shaped over the infallibility of Swedenborg."

"From the Pennsylvania region, the Academy Movement sounded the call to arms for complete fidelity to Swedenborg. The many Swedenborgians repulsed by this attitude congealed geographically and spiritually around the Boston Swedenborgians. A century later, the Pennsylvania and Boston power centers still exist, and the two movements have experienced a stormy relationship. The two North American sects have since evolved into classical portrayals of the age-old tension in exoteric religion between the purist and eclectic tendencies of the human spirit. As is true in almost all branches of all great world faiths, the conservative movement is today stronger and larger than its liberal step-sibling."

The San Francisco church has a great little website (click here) depicting its history which includes this appreciation for the original pastor who was a close friend of the naturalist John Muir:

"Worcester drew up the plans for the church himself. He "had his notion that the way to the door should lead through a garden in which the grass should be ever green, in which the first roses should bloom, in which the birds should gather to bath[e] at a fountain, in which the vines should start on their clinging course, holding fast to the bricks of the church, as the men and women should hold fast to the Bible. He pictured a church interior in which there should be no pretense, no plaster, no paint. He saw the heavy, timbered roof supported by great trees cut from the forest and the thick walls of concrete." (San Francisco Examiner, September 30, 1895) According to legend, Worcester himself went into the Santa Cruz mountains and selected the eight Madrone trees that support the roof."

"Worcester's architect, Page Brown, reportedly criticized his plans severely, especially perhaps the idea of leaving the bark on the interior beams. He reportedly expostulated to his theological client that, "This is not architecture!"-- to which Worcester made his now legendary reply: "I care nothing for the canons of architecture. The building must teach its lessons." When later told of the incident, Brown's chief architect responded, yes, he knew it was not architecture. It was, moreover, the poetry of architecture. According to Charles Keeler, one of Maybeck's closest friends, the budding young architect was deeply affected by his encounter with the gentle minister's ability to create wonderful feelings in his architectural endeavors and that Maybeck's own ideas were forever changed after seeing Worcester's Piedmont house in the early Eighties."

As it turned out, the small, historic church could not have been any more perfect for a Transcendental Musical Seance.

The Blue Angel Campaign and Basement Art

I went to San Francisco's City Hall this week to see about the mechanics of putting a measure on the ballot.



The measure is to politely disinvite the U.S. Navy Blue Angels from flying over the city of San Francisco on its annual Fleet Week visits for the next 10 years. I've written about this issue before here and here.



The nice lady at the Elections Department office gave me a schedule for the November 7, 2006 election.



There is also a June 6, 2006 election scheduled earlier next year, but the deadline for the submission of 10,486 valid signatures is February 6, 2006 which wouldn't give me enough time to collect them.



In the City Hall basement where the Election Department has its offices, two new photo exhibits had gone up on the walls.



One exhibit was a polemical series of photos and true-life tales...



...that documented the poisoning of Amazonian Indians by large oil firms.



I had difficulty with this exhibit for a number of reasons, one being that it felt very much like well-intentioned "outsiders" photographing the exotic South American Indians being victimized.



At least they have municipal marches with banners that say "Texaco Never Again" unlike communities around the San Francisco Bay Area such as Pittsburg, Martinez, etc. that are being poisoned daily by some of the same oil companies.



On Kit Stolz's "A Change in the Wind" blog (click here), he quoted the novelist James Lasdun writing in Granta, and one part stuck with me:

"Our apocalypse may be more reputably accredited than theirs [scientists over evangelicals], but my guess is that the susceptibility to either vision has the same psychological basis: guilt. Precisely because there is still intact wilderness in this country, still visibly in the process of being annihilated, you cannot live here without an overwhelming sense of the destructive nature of your own species. You can explain it in terms of divine purpose or human folly, but you can't pretend not to be part of it: you drive, you fly, you live in a heated building; one way or another you are implicated. We expect to pay a price. Depending on one's temperament, this will articulate itself either in terms of the Book of Revelation or the science pages of The New York Times."

This photo exhibit sets up the familiar scenario of the Evil Multinational Oil Company oppressing the poor, brown victims of the world. What it leaves out is that we're all implicated.



We can't even begin to control the oil corporations here in the United States, where they currently own the federal government. So how are we supposed to help people in the Amazon? Maybe if our society didn't burn up so much precious fuel driving children to schools and having Blue Angels air shows, we wouldn't be poisoning ourselves quite so quickly and completely.



However, that would require serious, systemic change and that scares the hell out of people.



There was another photo exhibit nearby that included a book where you could write down your greatest fear.



The photos were quite wonderful...



...and even at their most pathetic...



...the photographer displayed his human subjects with serious respect for them.



It made for an interesting contrast with the Amazonian Indian photos...



...where the people were mostly presented as simply victims...



...rather than as people who can fight back for themselves.



When I have the Blue Angels petitions ready to go in January of next year, I'll put out a call on this blog for some volunteer gatherers. This is going to be a lot of work, but why not? Let's tend to our own garden for a bit.