Kung Fu Kiddies

At the San Francisco Asian Art Museum on the afternoon of Sunday the 30th...



...there was a kung fu demonstration in the ornate Samsung Hall...



...which looks pretty much the same as it did when this building housed the San Francisco Main Public Library.



The demo was introduced by Connie Yu, mother of the three performing children.



I have run into plenty of stage mothers in my checkered career, but this was the first time I'd seen a Kung Fu Stage Mother.



The kids were both cute and awesome in equal measure.



The program notes on the museum's website note the following:

"Siblings Chrystina, Michael, and Robert Yu – collectively known as Jiayo (“more power” or “more strength” in Mandarin) – will perform a dynamic demonstration of wushu in celebration of the Chinese New Year."

"Wushu is a form of Chinese kung fu embodying self defense, determination, and perseverance. It is a time-honored art form honoring the achievement of confidence, health, vitality, strength, power, and inner peace. With advanced skills, they wield weaponry such as chain whips, swords, staffs, spears, and graceful hand forms."

I discovered kung fu movies in 1972 as a teenager in Singapore just before kung fu movies were banned from the island nation because they were a "bad influence," and before they swept the Western world.



The movie palaces were ornate, 3,000 seat affairs with monster curved screens that were perfect for exhibiting widescreen Shawscope spectaculars. (The Shaw Brothers were the Hong Kong version of Warner Brothers during the 1960s and 1970s.) I was often the only gringo in the audience and was quite an object of curiosity.



I don't watch the movies much anymore because my loving Domestic Partner, though he doesn't have a racist bone in his body, hates the sound of the Chinese language, particularly when they are screaming at each other which happens quite a bit in kung fu movies.



Still, I did manage to make it to a multiplex with my friend Joshua last year to see "Kung Fu Hustle," which was easily my favorite movie of the year. It's a truly innovative cross between a Shaw Brothers Spectacle (including the casting of some of their old stars) and a Looney Tunes cartoon. Do check it out from your local DVD store.



And do check out part two of "Traditions Unbound: Groundbreaking Painters of Eighteenth-Century Kyoto" at the Asian Art Museum.



The second half of their installation of Monster Japanese Screens is up until February 26.

Five Favorite Funny Blogs

Though I spend most of my time in the blogosphere on political/journalism sites, they can get a mite dull and depressing, so it's good to have places to go that reliably make me laugh out loud and look at the world in a different way.

First off is Princess Sparkle Pony's Photo Blog created by Peter Huestis in Washington, D.C.



It's fun, well-written and fairly demented, sort of like Peewee's Playhouse for Genius Photoshoppers. Click here to check it out.



Similar in spirit is a site called Dependable Renegade (click here) which is put out by some woman in New York who calls herself "watertiger." It is sheer, unadulterated snark with dozens of wire service photos recaptioned each day with mean, terse text. Many people have tried the same thing, but watertiger is definitely the champion.

The picture above, for instance, is entitled. "That's some walking stick" and the text below the photo of the antiabortion rally reads "Wouldn't it be easier to just use a cane? (Roe v. Wade is 33 today.)"



Thanks to M. C- over at "The Standing Room" (click here), I've recently discovered two blogs that are devoted to fashion, which I could care less about, but they are written with such deadpan wit that both are indispensable.

First off, there's Manolo's Shoe Blog (click here), where somebody pretending-but-not-really to be Manolo Blahnik, the shoe designer, holds forth on footwear and other international fashion questions.



The primary joke is language-based, where the Manolo has decided not to learn any of those annoying little words in English like "a" and instead uses "the" for everything. On first reading, the joke is amusing, but incrementally and with each repetition, the joke gets better and more irresistable. After a while, it's hard not to speak and write like the Manolo too. Here's a sample:

Manolo says, the Manolo’s most recent column for the Express of the Washington Post it is now available for the downloading at their website. Today, the Manolo he discusses the “hip” shoes for the man.

"Dear Manolo,

Can you recommend a pair of hip shoes for a downtown sort of guy?

Robert

It is no secret that the Manolo he loves the shoes, but it is perhaps less well known that the Manolo he disapproves of the “hip” shoes for the men.

The “hip” shoe, it is the lamentable trend, with its gaudy colors, and its too-square-or-too-pointy toe, and the ridiculous exotic leathers like the iguana, or the ostrich, or the alley cat.

If it is your desire to look like the Argentine tango pimp then by all means wear the hip shoe.

However, if you wish to be taken seriously, as the adult man should naturally wish to be, then you should remain on the side of tradition."

"Give me spirit fingers dammit!!" (click here) is just about unclassifiable, written by an Australian living in Hong Kong, writing about fashion in Asia and beyond. His photoessays involving wire photos of insane fashion and cool, measured humor are unique.



For instance, his description of the this year's Lunar New Year is priceless, illustrated by Dogs in many outfits:

"Don't forget to offer up a blessing to the various deities that matter, such as the God of Wealth and his wonder dog Prosperity Pooch. Prosperity Pooch has the uncanny ability to sniff out sugar mummies and sugar daddies as well as track down freshly laundered funds for your taking."

Finally, there is a blog called "I'll Flip You. Flip You For Real." (click here) without many pretty pictures like the preceding four, but the young San Francisco writer Beth Spotswood doesn't really need them because her prose is often so brilliant.

A recent favorite is her description of Christmas with the folks in nearby Mill Valley, California where she grew up:

"Everyone thinks their family is weird, right? Well, mine’s weirder and here’s my favorite quote of the weekend. It's Christmas morning and my parents, brother and I are opening presents around the tree along with my uncles, Bill and Ted.
Yep. Bill and Ted.
Bill’s in town from Savannah and had shipped all of his presents in advance, one of them to my mother with the following card attached:

To Joanne, Merry Christmas! Love Chris and Martin.

My mother sits with the gift on her lap, looking slightly confused and innocently asks, “Who are Chris and Martin?”

With utter seriousness and mildly annoyed, my Uncle Bill sighs, “They’re my birds, Joanne.”

Chris Matthews, Begone

There is a boycott brewing over NBC's loudmouth commentator, Chris Matthews, host of "Hardball," who has lately been comparing Michael Moore to Osama bin Laden and cracking fag jokes on a right-wing radio show about "Brokeback Mountain," in between giving oratorical blow-jobs to our demented Commander-in-Chief. I've never been able to watch his TV show, or any of the cable TV news channels for that matter, without getting physically ill, but there are a number of people who have stronger stomachs than me who have decided enough is enough. Chris has stepped over the line, Dr. Laura Schlesinger style.



If you happen to use Intuit (Turbo Tax software makers), Verizon cell phone service, or are considering driving a Toyota, you might want to express your displeasure with their sponsorship of Mr. Matthews' show. Go to this website here, and there is plenty of contact information for you to do just that. I've despised Mr. Matthews ever since reading him for years as the Washington, DC correspondent for the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner during the 1990s. He started off years ago as an aide to the corrupt old Democratic pol, Tip O'Neill, and over the years Matthews has essentially became Pat Buchanan with a liberal figleaf.

Well, the figleaf is gone, and it's time to point our fingers at his inadequacies. Please join me.

An Old Wealthy Woman of Independent Spirit

When you are self-employed, and there is no work, it is always nervous-making.



On the one hand.



On the other hand, if you've been self-employed more or less for 30 years, you probably have a few wise ways of dealing with sudden free time, which mainly involve appreciating the freedom.



Today was my third day in a row of no work on a weekday and I was quite ready to relax completely and go with the flow.



Though I'm neither elderly nor female nor living on independent means, the entire day I felt rather as if I was an old wealthy woman of independent spirit.



It started with seeing the mostly Asian office workers doing their 10AM dancing Tai-Chi exercise routine in the middle of Civic Center Plaza.



It looked like so much fun that I joined them, though I got a few odd, penetrating looks from one of the three exercise leaders who were taking us through our very gentle paces. I finally realized it was because I was the only man among 50 women.



At City Hall acrosss the street, there was a large group of Asians waiting to get through the metal detectors. I turned to a lawyer/lobbyist who was waiting alongside and asked, "Do you think the group is political or a wedding party?" and one of the women who was part of the group turned around and laughed.



"It's a tour group from China," she told us and indeed it was.



I'm glad the ornate City Hall was worthy of all the crazed camera action.



On the second floor, the Rules Committee of the Board of Supervisors was meeting in Room 263. Aaron Peskin was beaming like a proud father over his new proposed legislation creating a new Port Commission. Sean Elsbernd looked bored and annoyed, and Mirkarimi looked cagey.



Peskin's charter amendment would explicitly call for various disciplines and areas of expertise for the proposed seven commissionners rather than the accumulation of political hacks that have worked there over the decades.



Since moving here 30 years ago, the official rallying cry has been to Save the Port and the Blue-Collar Shipping Industry, but that always struck me as absurd. Once the container cranes went up in Oakland and the infrastructure grew up around it, there was absolutely no more reason to drop off the manufactured goods of the world in San Francisco. It's time, and long overdue, to revamp the entire waterfront economy to a tourist/recreational one rather than a shipping one which left long ago.



I continued to the weekly peace vigil at the Federal Building.



Everyone was in a very photographic mood, and Larry took my photo with his new cell phone.



Wonderful articles went up on the internet this week by two of my favorite writers in the world: Molly Ivins on why she doesn't want Hilary or any other Democrat who has been an Iraq warmonger running for president (click here) and Gore Vidal relating the Fall of George Bush to grisly Roman history (click here).



Before the peace vigil, I waited for an hour for an inexpensive ticket to the Rhoda Goldman Old Ladies Matinee at the San Francisco Symphony.



The concert was an all-Russian affair (Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky) conducted by MTT in anticipation of the orchestra's tour to Hong Kong and Shanghai.



That is, if the orchestra musicians don't strike next week, which is a real possibility. Does that mean they would also cancel the special Chinese New Year's Special Concert? Yikes!

Noir City 4: Litquake

On Saturday afternoon of the 21st, the Fourth Annual San Francisco Film Noir Festival tried a change of pace.



They collaborated with a group of local authors who had started a literary festival in 2002...



...called Litquake, where they could create something as a group rather than spending so much time in the solitary act of writing.



The program was set in the lounge area rather than inside the large theater, presumably because they were using DVDs for the film clips, and there was already an A/V setup in the lounge with a very harassed operator who performed heroically, although all the films were in the wrong aspect ratio.



The emcee Peter Maravelis is the events programmer for City Lights Books, and he was quite brainy, though he kept getting writer's names and titles wrong in his headlong rush to keep the afternoon moving along.



The roster of local writers reading excerpts from various crime novels was certainly a starry one, lead by Joe Gores who has published a huge pile of novels including "Hammett," along with a range of television and film work.



He read from "The Maltese Falcon" by Dashiell Hammett, and claimed that the reason the movie was so successful was because John Huston did something revolutionary. "He just filmed the book. Period."



The next writer was Joyce Maynard, a novelist and journalist living in Mill Valley. Her tight red skirt and leopard-print blouse was definitely the sartorial highlight of the afternoon. She read from Raymond Chandler's "Farewell, My Lovely" which reminded me of how fun Chandler is to read.



The dapper-looking novelist Barry Gifford also works in film, co-writing a movie with David Lynch ("Lost Highway") and Matt Dillon ("City of Ghosts").



He pulled out a copy of a letter Raymond Chandler had written to James M. Cain when the former was adapting the latter's novel of "Double Indemnity." It was a really interesting description of how they had tried filming a few scenes using Cain's direct dialogue for the book but how it hadn't worked. What was beautiful as a clump of dialogue on the page merely sounded stilted on a film set.



He read from Cain's "The Postman Always Rings Twice" and the following film clip nicely illustrated his point. The scene was almost exactly the same as the written page, but not really. The dialogue was succinctly covering more territory.



Next up was Joe Loya whose memoir the emcee called "The Man Who Outgrew his Self," but Mr. Loya started his reading with a correction. "My book is called 'The Man Who Outgrew his Prison Cell' and it's about my time in San Quentin when I was a bank robber where I got up to 690 pounds and literally outgrew my cell."



He read from "The Asphalt Jungle" by W.R. Burnett, who I'd never heard about before but who had quite a career, writing "Little Caesar" in the 1920s and continuing on with the screenplay for "The Great Escape" in the 1960s.



Daniel Handler, the enormously successful Lemony Snicket creator, looked very pleased with himself, and why not? He read from Patricia Highsmith's first novel, "Strangers on a Train" which was later turned into the Hitchcock movie with Farley Granger.



He told a funny story about having two friends who didn't know each other who both happened to spend some time with Patricia Highsmith. "They both used exactly the same words to describe her, though. She was one of the most unpleasant people they had ever met in their entire lives."



"Strangers on a Train" was an odd choice for the reading because the book and the movie are so radically different. The book is naturalistic and deeply melancholy. In fact, what makes Highsmith's tales so disturbing is that she tells extremely macabre tales in the flattest, most naturalistic style possible.



Hitchcock, on the other hand, enjoys adrenaline and cartoonish characters, such as Marion Lorne above as Bruno's Mom, who in the book is depicted as a slightly distracted socialite.



Winning the hunk-a-chunk award was the author Robert Mailer Anderson who has written an interesting sounding novel called "Boonville."



He read from a Cornell Woolrich short story that eventually became another Hitchcock film, "Rear Window."



Winner of the most beautiful voice of the afternoon was Los Angeles writer Gary Phillips with a rich bass-baritone reading the wildly violent and misogynistic prose of Mickey Spillane, who according to the program is still alive at 87.



The excerpt was from the final scene of "Kiss Me Deadly" where an evil woman bursts into flame and Deserves It!



According to Phillips, the 1955 Robert Aldrich version kept the title and the name Mike Hammer, and that was about it, though the movie clip was the finale of the film where the bad girl opens a box and it has Nuclear Material which makes her burst into flame. And she Deserves It!



Michelle Tea introduced an excerpt from Jim Thompson's "The Grifters" with the comment, "Let me get this over with quickly so we can get to the fabulousness of Angelica Huston," and she'll get no argument from me.



The final reader was Peter Plate, who in a tour-de-force performance recited a large chunk of Charles Willeford's "Miami Blues" from memory.



It was the scene where a handsome young psycopath (played in the 1990 movie by Alec Baldwin at his sexiest) gets off a plane in Miami, has a Hare Krishna put a candy pin into his new suit, which irritates him enough that he breaks the Hare Krishna's two fingers. It was quite a rousing way to end the afternoon.

Everybody Is Somebody's Terrorist

Hours after making a brief appearance at the weekly Peace Vigil in front of the San Francisco Federal Building...



...with those well-known terrorists, the Quakers (click here for a short essay by a Quaker about being under federal surveillance for 350 years)...



...I went to the monthly art opening at Supervisor Mirkarimi's offices in City Hall.



The one-man show was entitled "Everybody Is Somebody's Terrorist"...



...by a young artist named Andy Diaz Hope (click here for his website).



It was both sinister and witty in about equal measure.



The artist himself has the following explanation of the show:

"Terrorists are the new enemy. They could be anybody. Lawless fanatics, they place no value on life, not even their own. Once someone has been labeled a terrorist they become one-dimensional; their personal history, their love of family and country, even their politics and religion are eclipsed by the public perception of irrational fanaticism. As the government continues its War on Terror, who will fall under its scrutiny as traditional terrorists become harder or more difficult to find?"

"The teachers' union has been called a terrorist organization. Past allies have migrated from freedom fighters to terrorists relative to their alignment with current US policy. Protestors advocating pro-choice, anti-war, anti-globalization, and homosexual rights have all been called terrorists. Labeling a person or group a terrorist, justly or not, immediately creates a massive character deficit that is almost impossible to overcome."

"Depending on your point of view, almost everyone can be considered somebody's terrorist. Environmentalists may consider big business as globally, economically or environmentally terrorist. The businessman might consider Greenpeace operations as terrorist acts. The aging baby boomers look at a group of teenagers dressed in street fashion and cross the street in fear."

"Local economies in developing countries embrace busloads of fat American retirees, while the local residents complain as their landscapes and livelihoods are replaced by high rise hotels and private beaches they will never see the inside of."

"Everybody is Somebody's Terrorist is a series of hand knit balaclavas representing a variety of socio, economic, or political groups that someone might consider terrorist. Each mask is the subject of a series of photo essays and videos that explores our relationship to that group and the ideologies it represents as well as our comfort level with extremity of the label of terrorist."

The artist seemed to be having a great time at his own exhibition...



...which has already been seen at a fancy-schmancy gallery in Manhattan. Check it out.

Noir City 3: Coleen Gray

The 4th Annual San Francisco Film Noir Festival (click here for more info) is taking place this year at the under-renovation-yet-again Palace of Fine Arts, visionary architect Bernard Maybeck's elegaic attempt at recreating a vanished classical world at the cusp of World War One.



To read more about the place, the Bernard Maybeck Foundation has a short history of the decaying-and-restored palace here.



An interesting note from their site is a description of Maybeck's original vision of his building's demise:

In succeeding years, the Palace became exactly what its creator had intended, a vast ruin whose somewhat garish colors bleached to sunset tones of russet and ochre. Asked in old age what he felt should be done about the collapsing Palace, Maybeck characteristically responded:

I think the main building should be torn down and redwoods planted around—completely around—the rotunda....As they grow, the columns would slowly crumble at approximately the same speed. Then I would like to design an altar, with the figure of a maiden praying, to install in that grove of redwoods...I should like my palace to die behind those great trees of its own accord, and become its own cemetery.

Nonetheless, Maybeck made several attempts to rebuild variants of the Palace in permanent materials, and, at the end of his life, he changed his mind and asked the governor to preserve the Palace.

The main building he is referring to is a thin, curved structure with enormously high ceilings. Most of it has become the very successful "Exploratorium" children's science museum and another section houses an approximately 1,000 seat theater that is used for anything and everything, though its wide stage and terrible musical acoustics (because of the high ceiling) make it better for some events rather than others.



I first went to the festival in its second year when it was held at the Castro Theatre, and was astonished at how popular the series was.



The huge Castro Theatre would sell out for most of the Film Noir Festival programs even though they consisted of obscure films from the 1940s and 1950s that were essentially B-films.



The third annual festival moved its operations to the much smaller Balboa Theater in the Richmond, where the last four days of this year's festival are also being held.



The move wasn't made because the Castro was too large, but because the 16-year-veteran programmer of the Castro, Anita Monga, had just been unceremoniously ousted from the job which had made her a national legend.



To read more about the controversy, there's a San Francisco Bay Guardian wrap-up here, and to read an appreciation of why she was so legendary, there's a good appreciation here from the San Francisco Festival which promptly handed her the "Mel Novikoff Award" after her dismissal.



Anyway, she is currently programming the Film Noir Festival for Eddie Muller, which is part of why it's so interesting.



Another reason the festival is interesting is because of its audiences...



...who often identify in some way with the "film noir" era.



Above all, the festival is interesting for all the ancillary folk it brings in, such as the "M is for Mystery" bookstore where author Matthew Kennedy was signing his year-old biography, "Edmund Goulding: Hollywood's Genius Bad Boy."



Goulding had directed the first half of the January 16th double-bill dedicated to actress Coleen Gray. She was an ingenue in one of the darkest big studio films ever made: "Nightmare Alley" starring Tyrone Power as a sexy carnival hand whose rise and fall is horrific.



Eddie Muller interviewed the 83-year-old Coleen at intermission, and it was quite sweet since the two obviously adored each other.



At one point, Eddie mentioned that she seemed to have more energy than anybody else he knew, and wondered how on earth she did it at her age. The question didn't feel like hyperbole because she was radiating extraordinary energy from the stage.



Coleen thought about it for a moment, and said it was "genes, and eating right is probably important, and so is knowing how to be happy."



She had a long career in movies and television from the late 1940s up until her last marriage in the late 1970s. In the Film Noir program, there's a good article by Karen Burroughs Hannsberry with some choice quotes. One of my favorites was about her appearance in 1960's "The Leech Woman," a campy horror film that has become a cult classic. "No matter what I did, I did it with the utmost sincerity," Gray recalls. "But it was so much fun. Sometimes we had to stop the camera to stop laughing."

"I'm very grateful to have had the privilege of being in motion pictures at the time that I was," Gray says. "And I'm also grateful that I have other interests in my life. Life can be very rich, and I've had a charmed life."

Noir City 2: James Ellroy

On Sunday the 15th, the 4th Annual San Francisco Film Noir Festival had a special guest, the author James Ellroy.



After being introduced by Eddie Muller, the host/oganizer of the festival, Ellroy proceeded to recite the title of every one of his published "masterpieces" in a virtuoso display of memory and oratorical skill while rocking back and forth on his feet.



I thought he must be drunk and/or coked up, but finally remembered that he had stopped drinking altogether in 1975. As recounted in his short memoir, "My Dark Places," he thereupon became a "swinger" sex addict for a while in Los Angeles with many of his fellow AA participants.



Ellroy told the audience about his shameful first trip to San Francisco. "I was 23 years old in LA and got really, really drunk with some friends and the next thing I remembered, I was waking up naked in a bed with a 300 pound woman. When I put on my pants, there was a wad of cash which hadn't been there before. I ran out the front door and found out that I was on Fell Street in the lower Haight. I'd never even been to San Francisco before. At least I can be thankful it wasn't a 300 pound guy."



Ellroy introduced a 1953 noir film "Split Second," which he claimed was his third choice when Eddie asked him for a selection. "It's pretty lackluster," he said, "but it's fascinating in its own way, especially since nobody at the time knew anything about the half-life of atomic bombs."



Even though the print was terrible, the movie was fascinating, with a group of hostages taken to an atomic bomb testing site by a mad-dog killer who had just broken out of prison. To add to the weirdness, the movie was directed by Dick Powell and stars Alexis Smith as a good girl who's really a bad girl, along with Jan Sterling who's a bad girl who's really a good girl. Plus, there's an atomic explosion used for cheesy suspense, so what more can you ask for?



Ellroy came back onstage for a stand-up interview with Eddie after the film, and he was simply extraordinary. His brain is very dark, quick and funny, and he has an unusual ability to speak in full sentences on the fly that are a pleasure to listen to.



Early in the interview, Ellroy stated "Film noir is dead," which set Eddie back for a moment since he's dedicated most of his life to the genre, and at this year's festival has even tried to expand the "noir" label to include "proto-noir" films like Ben Hecht's 1934 "Crime Without Passion" and "post-noir" films like Sean Penn's directorial effort, "The Pledge."



"It's dead, Eddie. You can dress up in your suits and fedoras and so on, but film noir died in 1959 and it's over. Get used to it."



After announcing the news that Ellroy was moving from Kansas City, where he's been living for the last decade, and moving to San Francisco in February, they opened the questions up to the public. One woman asked, "I've read most of your work, and knowing it, I can't imagine why on earth you'd be moving to San Francisco." His response was classic, uttered almost tragically as if he were in a "noir" film himself. "A woman," and then he hung his head.



I asked him if he was going to include the Bush family in the third installment of his "Underworld USA" trilogy which started in 1995 with "American Tabloid" and continued in 2001 with the publication of "The Cold Six Thousand." The final installment is supposedly arriving within the year. They are a brilliant take on American history from 1958 to 1973 told from the point of view of "bad men" who are variously in the employment of Howard Hughes, the CIA, the FBI and organized crime. Even though the books are excruciatingly violent and profane, I can't recommend them highly enough. As the London Sunday Telegraph wrote: "One emerges breathless, shaken, and ready to change one's view of recent American history."



Ellroy's answer to my Bush question was "No, I can't use them. They're still alive, which would mean defaming them. Which is a real shame. The next book goes up to 1973 and unfortunately G. Gordon Liddy's still alive. What a character that fucker would make!" Somebody else asked him if Bruce Willis was still going to make an HBO series out of the books, and Ellroy answered, "HBO can humanize a group of Italian thugs in New Jersey, but asking them to do a 25-hour series humanizing a group of thugs who ended up assassinating the Kennedys was just too much for them, Bruce Willis notwithstanding."



There are a couple of Ellroy fan websites that are amusing and have more information on the writer: click here and here.



Here's an excerpt from his one-page introduction to "American Tabloid":

America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. We can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception.

Jack Kennedy got whacked at the optimum moment to assure his sainthood. Lies continue to swirl around his eternal flame. It's time to dislodge his urn and cast light on a few men who attended his ascent and facilitated his fall.

They were rogue cops and shakedown artists. They were wiretappers and soldiers of fortune and faggot lounge entertainers. Had one second of their lives deviated off course, American History would not exist as we know it.

It's time to demythologize an era and build a new myth from the gutter to the stars. It's time to embrace bad men and the price they paid to secretly define their time.

Here's to them.

Falun Gong and the Politicians

In front of San Francisco City Hall on Tuesday the 17th, there was a press conference consisting of speeches, predominantly by Asians...



...defending District 6 Supervisor Chris Daly from a very public trashing...


...by a local ethnic rag called "Asian Week."



Click here to get to the would-be damning cover article by Samson Wong and click here to get to their editorial which has a few hilariously hypocritical statements.



My favorites are:

"Last year, he single-handedly destroyed the longstanding community service provider, West Bay Pilipino Multi-Service Center. This year he has told adherents of the Falun Gong sect that he will investigate the venerable Chinese New Year Parade, which is subsidized by the city...Why is he doing this? With the West Bay Pilipino Multi-Service Center, he claimed the organization was mismanaging public funds, even though federal and state regulators cleared the organization. With the Chinese New Year parade, he is making accusations of discrimination, even though the Falun Gong’s claims of human rights violations are occurring in another country — not here in America, much less San Francisco..."

"Even the confrontational Rose Pak, who has been the biggest champion of the Chinese New Year Parade, has been noticeably quiet about the parade’s policies banning the Falun Gong’s politicking. Daly has sent a chilling message to any recipient of city funds: You must kowtow to the powers that be or face the consequences. That is a sorry state of affairs, particularly for the current target of his ire, San Francisco’s Asian American community."

So, another section of San Francisco's Asian American community rallied to say the charges of racism were ridiculous crap. The West Bay Pilipino Multi-Service Center, by the way, was the group of Pilipino seniors who were discovered last year to be participating in a Medicare scam with cash kickbacks for taking expensive, unnecessary tests. Also, calling Rose Pak "confrontational" is a bit like calling Chairman Mao "determined."



At writer h. brown's weekly Burrito Salon last Friday...



...there was quite a bit of talk about the Falun Gong because h. brown has become obsessed with their persecution and the way local politicians have been bought off and intimidated by the Chinese government to say nothing about their treatment.



Along with his brilliantly shrewd political friend Janet, whom he met at computer classes at the Jewish Community Center not long ago, h. held court in his usual stream-of-consciousness style at the Salon. He has been neglecting his own website, The Bulldog (click here) for a couple of months while writing a weekly column for the SF Sentinel, but he's back after having being unceremoniously fired from the online rag by Pat Murphy for the third time.



Here are excerpts from h. brown's latest column about Falun Gong and the Politicians:

"What a world we live in when an old guy on welfare living in a San Francisco SRO cubby hole can sketch out a plan to overthrow the government of the most populous nation on the planet and nod to himself that he has a pretty good chance of success. And, … can do this while working to prop up the Venezuelan government. Here’s the way I have it mapped out."

Whine to Daly

That’s worked out well for me in the past and it worked out great this time too. In print, of course. I seldom call or see all these people I write about but I spend more time with them then any of their families in another sense. I watch them on the tube constantly and critique their performances with little favor for alliances, sensibilities & often, common decency. Hey, you do what you do, I’ll do what I do.

"So, I write about these people and sometimes they respond and over the years a person builds relationships of various sorts, sometimes just around a single issue. None of these issues is as important as the treatment of the Falun Gong by the Chinese government and the challenge to that government by 6th District’s bold young supervisor, Chris Daly, on behalf of the 110 million members of that persecuted sect."

"Daly is da Man to the Falun Gong and he should be. He carried their banner against not only the Communist government, but against the economic interests of high ranking members of his own local Democratic Party machine (read Dionne Feinstein & hubby, Dick Phlegm). Daly withstood a heavy lobbying effort directed by the local Chinese Consul who fielded Rose Pak to run roughshod over Aaron Peskin & Jake McGoldrick, convincing them to close their ears to the cries of the suffering millions."

"Peskin & McGoldrick were simply the most prominent of the Progressives to fold to the Commies. Sandoval voted against the Falun Gong too. Later newspaper reports from around the entire country described a full-scale PR campaign paid for and orchestrated by the Chinese government, within the United States, upon local governmental units to deny adoption of the Falun Gong resolution or rescind resolutions already adopted. The principle tool employed by the commie’s henchmen was to threaten economic harm. Does it work?"

"Well, Microsoft is just, like, all over the paper the last week for aceding to PRC demands that they unplug a blogger who was critical of the government. The AP reports that Microsoft also erased ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ from their Chinese dictionary. Not to be outdone, Google erased ‘the Dalai Lama’."

"Well, I say these fuckers are out of time. We start the effort right back where it began. Back in the chambers of the Board of Supervisors and the same resolution. Our corporations and leading politicians only care about profits. We already knew that. What we need, is for our directly elected neighborhood Board to reflect the actual sentiments of the people of the City of St. Francis. Watch the vote and watch the Mayor’s reaction."

"As a supervisor, Newsom voted against the Falun Gong without comment. Only Daly, Gonzalez and Ammiano voted in favor of the resolution at that time. A year or so later, Mark Leno told me that if he had it to do again, that he would vote in favor of the Falun Gong. Now, Newsom is Mayor and being groomed to replace Feinstein. Nothing is more important to her then the continued prosperity of Dick Blum’s, URS corporation, latest tip on the family’s financial spear. You see how Blum fought to keep his seat on CALPERS? That’s a trillion dollars, folks. Uh huh, you heard me right. A trillion dollars could overthrow the government of China."

Daly to investigate PRC lobbying and more

"During the Board’s Roll Call for Introductions, Tuesday (1-10-06) Daly called for a committee hearing on the influence of lobbying by the People’s Republic of China aimed at defaming and mischaracterizing the Falun Gong. Kids, this could be as big as Watergate. It is clear that a totalitarian regime that tortures and murders its own citizens has been conducting an intense propaganda campaign from sea to friggin’ shining sea. Locally, we’ll find out just how much money PRC bag lady, Rose Pak has given to Aaron Peskin and Jake McGoldrick over the past 4 years. This newest defense of free speech and expression should begin in San Francisco. It should begin with a population that overwhelms the public hearings on the persecution of the Falun Gong and cries out that taking bribes from tyrants will not be tolerated. Get the PRC, their goons and their paid-off politicians off the backs of the 110 million Falun Gong."

Daly to reintroduce Falun Gong Resolution

"Every year, Aaron Peskin & Gerardo Sandoval & Sophie Maxwell & Jake McGoldrick vote to condemn the present Turkish government for refusing to acknowledge a genocide that took place under the Ottoman Empire (extinct now for some 80 years). Not just these supervisors. All of the supes always vote for this. Without fail."

"The Turks pretty much ignore the entire yearly affair. After all, they are a different people with not only a different form of government, but even a new alphabet and language. They’d consider lobbying local politicians to refuse to vote for the resolution of censure to be interfering in local politics. And, they’d be right."

"The PRC has no such compunctions. It is amazing that the land of Bush’s Department of Homeland Security would allow such an obvious foreign counter-intelligence operation to exist. Imagine if Fidel Castro lobbied for the SF Board of Supes to pass a resolution condemning the United States for invading Cuba in 1961? And, offered money to everyone the way Rose Pak does. Why’s she get by with it?"

"Money. Profits for URS & Feinstein & Blum and a host of others. For Microsoft & Google and their shareholders. Because there’s no labor like slave labor when it comes to manufacturing blue jeans or cell phones. Ethics and morality go out the window when the dollar winks."

"So, Daly will reintroduce the resolution calling upon the Chinese government to cease the harassment, imprisonment, torture & murder of members of the Falun Gong. I look forward to watching him question FBI agents & SFPD intelligence officers as to the level of infiltration the PRC has managed to gain into organizations like the Chinese Chamber of Commerce which, last week, again banned the Falun Gong from the New Year’s Parade (run, surprisingly enough, by Rose Pak - Peskin, who co-starred her in his Comcast puff piece on D-3, will likely ride in Pak’s open yellow limo."

"What will the vote be? Peskin, McGoldrick, Sandoval & Maxwell are the original votes against the Falun Gong still serving on the Board. We’re about to find out how they feel about Pak’s ‘red envelopes’ this year. Daly & Ammiano survive as the original ‘Yes’ votes in favor the the Falun Gong. This will get very interesting. Wonder if Peskin will use his power as Board President to delay the hearings until after the Parade? It would be about right in line with Aaron’s continued downward spiral. So far, he’s expanded the power of the Mayor, extended old monopolies and created a new one, signed the death warrant for a dozen neighborhood hardware stores and is negotiating to tear down the podium where the President of the Board has sat for a hundred years or so. … I mean, jeeeze, you talk about leaving your mark. Why not take down all the flags too? And, the rails? More symbols and barriers that separate people."

That’s a sample of my ’shame’ card

"I’m trying to shame Peskin, et al into supporting the Falun Gong. It’s the right thing to do on so many levels. Imagine supporting a government that bans the word ‘democracy’."

The final speaker at the press conference was Supervisor Daly's wife, who started her remarks with, "Gosh, I wish somebody had told me that Chris was racist towards Asians before I married him since I'm half-Chinese myself."



Though the passing back and forth of their new baby when he started wanting mommy looked like a photo-op, it was actually pretty obvious that the new daddy was deliriously in love with his new son. It was a pleasure to watch.

Noir City 1: Farley Granger

Under a full moon on Friday the 13th...



...the 4th Annual San Francisco Film Noir Festival opened up a two-week run at the Palace of Fine Arts in the mudlfats of the Marina. For a schedule, click here.



The lobby, which usually feels like an airplane hangar, has been decorated to feel like a 40s/50s nightclub, complete with a band playing.



The opening night double-bill consisted of two Farley Granger movies, Hitchcock's 1948 "Strangers on a Train" with Farley as a handsome tennis pro getting entangled with charming psychopath Robert Walker, and Nicholas Ray's 1951 "They Live By Night" which was remade in the 1970s by Robert Altman (as "Thieves Like Us").



At intermission, there was an interview by "Producer/Host" Eddie Muller and the 80-year-old Farley Granger himself.



Though his memory seemed to be getting a bit hazy on account of age, repeating phrases and stories a number of times, he looked great and exuded pure charm.



He had an interesting career, starting off as a pretty-boy movie star before getting his twisted Hitchcock roles in "Rope" and "Strangers on a Train" and playing one of the leads in Visconti's "Senso." In the 1960s his movie career collapsed for some reason, possibly because he moved to New York and devoted himself to theater. He made a number of movies in Italy in the 1970s, including a few famous Spaghetti Westerns, and then worked in a lot of television.



"I much prefer working in theater to making movies. It's just more fun. In movies, you often start by filming the ending, and then the beginning and then some of the middle. It used to drive me crazy. But I love the theater and a live audience. Even those productions that were disasters, perhaps especially the disasters, they are some of the most wonderful memories. For instance, I was in a very, very bad musical version of 'Pride and Prejudice' with Hermoine Gingold and Polly Bergen. The show started with a ballroom scene and I was dancing with Polly. I started the song, "It's a beautiful night for a ball..." and then whirled Polly around who sang "It's a poyfect night for dancing," and that's when I knew we weren't going to be running for very long."



There were plenty of funny stories about Hitchcock (he HATED Ruth Roman) and Nicholas Ray ("he just sat in a corner at my friend's house drinking and staring at me") and has just finished writing a memoir. I can't wait.

The King of Love Is Dead

There was a news report recently about the National Security Agency being caught in a massive spying operation against a Quaker group in Baltimore, Maryland.



To read the entire disgraceful story from a site called "Raw Story," click here.



I asked the weekly peace vigil protestors in front of the Federal Building in San Francisco whether they had heard about this story, and the response was half yes and no.



When asked if they thought they were under surveillance themselves, their response was surprisingly uniform, on the order of: "I'd be extremely disappointed if I WASN'T."



The custodians of our war-and-oil-based economy are not at all frightened of America's supposed enemies.



Instead, their real unease is with those who question the very basis of all their assumptions with their talk of peace and love, such as Cindy Sheehan, seen here at a Well-Lighted Place for Books reading from her new book last week, and answering questions from the overflow audience.



It's good to remember that Martin Luther King, Jr. was always considered more threatening than Nikita Kruschev by many in the U.S. government.



There's a wonderful political blog put out by a trio of women in Washington, DC called "firedoglake" (click here) and I'm going to lift a few of my favorite MLK quotes from their appreciation this morning.

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."

"A time comes when silence is betrayal...."

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us."

At a Quaker blog, Merle Harton, Jr. writes about his uneasiness with the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday ("Walking Pastwards") and it's a brilliant essay. Click here to check it out.



The title of this entry is from a Nina Simone song written after MLK's assassination. It's my friend Ellen's newly traditional holiday music, and a great choice for everyone. Frankly, you can't go wrong with Nina Simone.

Seven Deadly Sins

Charlie Lichtman is a fellow supernumerary at the San Francisco Opera, and together we decided to venture to the wilds of West Oakland for a "Fire Opera" version of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's last collaboration together, an odd, beautiful opera/ballet called "The Seven Deadly Sins" from 1933.



The event was being presented by "The Crucible," (click here to get to their website) an art school/collective housed in a 56,000 square foot warehouse two blocks from the West Oakland BART station. They specialize in building and burning things, hence the classes in glass blowing, welding, blacksmithing, jewelery fabrication, neon art, etc.



They may possibly be a wonderful, egalitarian, creative group, but at least for this production, they were truly terrible hosts and event managers. Along with the tickets in the mail, there was a page of printed instructions which included the following: "Please don't be late. Doors open at 7pm and seating begins at 8pm. Latecomers will not be seated. In fact, come early! Leave yourself plenty of time for having a pre-show drink and settling in. We will be serving beer and wine. Thre will be Crucible demonstrations, and fire sculptures to enjoy. There will also be a Registration desk where you can sign up for classes!"



What they didn't mention is that there were two tiers of tickets: "General" and "Reserved" seating, with the former going for $25 and on the VIP Saturday Night the reserved going for $100 a pop. What this amounted to was a huge group of "swells" eating and drinking and chatting while the $25 plebes stood in a line on a concrete ramp for an hour and a half watching their more expensive betters cavort. Brecht couldn't have staged it any better if he had tried, down to the truly terrible pop music they were playing over the loudspeakers for the two hours before the show.



The most grotesque moment was after finally trying to find a seat in the crammed bleachers which were already filled to the brim with the swells, the "Producer & Designer" of the show, Michael Sturtz, who was also The Crucible's "Founder & Executive Director," gave an inspirational speech. He told us the three meanings of the word "crucible" and somehow ended up lecturing the crowd, which had just been divided by his stupid staff between the rich and not-so-rich, that there was too much commercialism and moneygrubbing in America. We needed to follow our "heart" and our "art." This was one of those moments when I had three simultaneous wishes: a ripe tomato, a strong arm, and accurate aim.



The performance of the opera itself was a mixed bag. The conductor, director, and the singers were all from the San Francisco Opera and there wasn't a weak performance in the bunch. The pick-up orchestra from the Oakland East Bay Symphony sounded smashing, and the acoustics in the big warehouse were surprisingly good.



The direction had its moments of theatrical wonder, and it used the long runway stage between the two sets of bleachers quite intelligently. However, there was too much padding of a perfectly constructed 50-minute piece, including an endless succession of 1950's videos at the beginning showing ironic American materialism, and long slapstick sequences between "sins" that tended to stop the piece cold.



According to a review of the Lotte Lenya version at Good-Music-Guide (click here to get to the entire, interesting article), the plot goes something like this:

"A young woman, represented by the practical Anna I (originally sung by Lotte Lenya) and the impulsive, flighty Anna II (danced by Tilly Losch and choreographed by Georges Balanchine) leaves her two brothers and parents and sets out on a journey through American cities to earn money for the family to build a house.

In each city Anna II succumbs to one of the Seven Deadly Sins, and has to be reined in by the sensible Anna I, so that their ultimate goal can be achieved. The massive irony is that this goal is by no means virtuous. To make their fortune, men are seduced, robbed, blackmailed and driven to suicide by the two Anna's.

Brecht's message is clear. Capitalist ambition is the greatest Deadly Sin, and ultimately, in a capitalist world, the wages of such sins is success."

In this version, Catherine Cook sang the Practical Anna wonderfully, but unfortunately she was more glamorous than the Plain Jane Crucible glassblowing instructor, Lee Kobus, who played the Dancing Anna. Thus the libretto didn't come across too well.



Special mention should be made of the four male singers who were Anna's "family," sung by Jere Torkelsen, Eugene Brancoveanu, Joe Meyers, and Kevin Courtemanche in a triumphant rendering of the as-written drag part of Mom.



Instead of dancing each scenario, there were "fire opera" tableaux instead. Easily stealing the show were the three large black women making up the "Harlem Shake Burlesque" troupe who appeared during the "Pride" section. Click here for their website which is quite entertaining. Also notable were the "Xeno" troup (click here) during the "Gluttony" section doing a quasi-Cirque trapeze routine that was gorgeously conceived and executed.



Sitting right in front of us was the new General Manager of the San Francisco Opera, David Glockley. Hey, David, how about a production of this or any other Kurt Weill opera while you're at it? This music is great and deserves better treatment.

Save Our Schools

On Wednesday the 11th, in front of San Francisco City Hall, there was yet another protest...



...that was really a photo-op...



...which included a number of official speakers...



...at an amplified lectern.



Before the speeches started...



...the kids in the protest group were chanting "Save Our Schools!" with the repetitive fervor of children singing "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall."



They were absolutely great.



A few of the younger ones got tired...



...especially during the speeches...



...but there were plenty of mom's laps to sleep on.



The protest was in response to the San Francisco Unified School District Board announcing just before Christmas that enrollment was down, particularly in the elementary schools, and that 19 out of 27 schools were up for closure and consolidation with other schools.



It didn't help that the departing Arleen Ackerman, a pompous and authoritarian ass who has been the San Francisco School Superintendent for the last half a dozen years, had just been given a golden parachute in the neighborhood of $300,000 for getting out of town.



Big city school superintendents are like Major League Baseball managers in that there only seem to be about a dozen names considered in this country whenever there is a vacancy, and their terrible performance in one city doesn't seem to preclude them from getting a job in another.



I asked my friend Willie why they were so often such terrible people, and his sensible reply was as follows: "They probably started off as teachers who hated teaching, so they brown-nosed their way into Administration as soon as they could."



"Then the successful ones brown-nose their way for years further up the administrative food chain, and finally what you're left with is a political, sycophantic psychopath in charge of everything."



District 5 Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi has been rightly outraged that the burden of the school closures falls disproportionately on poor black and Latino kids, and he's been meeting with parents and teachers from all over the city.



Particularly outrageous is that many of the schools slated for closure have been improving by leaps and bounds. Superintendent Ackerman had many faults, but at least she wasn't the outright incompetent criminal that her predecessor in the job was, and San Francisco public schools have actually gotten better during her tenure.



Mirkarimi isn't a very good public speaker, shouting too much into the microphone, which is too bad since he's got one of the most beautiful baritone voices around. Possibly the most charming moment in his speech castigating the powers-that-be for destroying so many communities was when he confessed that this kind of speechifying in public still made him nervous.



District 9 Supervisor Tom Ammiano, who used to be a school teacher and once sat on the School Board, made a good, short impassioned speech about why keeping these schools was so important.



He explained that schools are an integral part of a neighborhood and its history and its inhabitants, their "heart," and used the example of Douglass School in the Castro District being kept open through lobbying by Harvey Milk.



Looking relaxed and much less troubled than when he was mayor of San Francisco, Art Agnos gave a short speech as a Potrero Hill resident fearing the consolidation of two schools. For more info about this group, check Mike Lin's blog trying to "Save Daniel Webster Elementary School" (click here).



Agnos gave an interesting talk about schools being the soul of a city, and insisted that the school district needed to get more people to stop sending their kids to class-segregated private schools throughout town, and the way to do it was by making the schools better, not worse.



A Potrero Hill mom talked about how happy she was that her kids were in a public school but how ridiculous these closures were.



On Thursday evening, the 12th, there was a raucous School Board meeting that solved nothing, but the depth of anger over the autocratic process seems to be have finally registered upon the elected members, so that they resolved to put off all decisions for a week while there is emergency behind-the-scenes consulting. There's an interesting account of the meeting by Jacob Schneider at "BeyondChron" (click here).



These kids are the future of this city, so somehow spending $15 million dollars on Harding Park Golf Course while not coughing up $5 million to keep successful schools from closing strikes me as misplaced priorities, at the very least.

Slatkin at the Symphony

On Thursday the 12th, there was a Rhoda Goldman matinee at the San Francisco Symphony attended by mostly elderly women.



There was a short note printed in the program that read as follows: "Mikko Franck is unable to appear with us this week because of illness. We are grateful to Leonard Slatkin for stepping in at extremely short notice to conduct these concerts."



This is roughly comparable to replacing Madonna in a movie role with Meryl Streep at the last minute. (That actually happened in a 1999 film called "Music of the Heart," a not-bad feel-good movie about a violin teacher in a Harlem elementary school directed by horrormeister Wes Craven.)



Slatkin is an old pro who conducted the St. Louis Symphony for decades, with which he recorded a whole slew of American classical music which have themselves become classics.



Currently, he's the conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C.



Slatkin didn't change the scheduled program, which consisted of a couple of warhorses that have been played to death, Ravel's "Mother Goose" ballet and his orchestration of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition." Whether you're a classical music fan or not, you've heard bits from both of these pieces on the radio or in television ads over the years.



Between the two Ravel pieces, there was an early Bartok violin concerto which was fairly dull, at least for Bartok who is one of my favorite composers.



The "Mother Goose" ballet was exquisitely played, and made me wish that the San Francisco Ballet would take it up some day. I heard "Pictures at an Exhibition" played live by the Symphony in 2003 with Roberto Abbado conducting, and found it incredibly boring. Slatkin, however, pulled off a miracle. He and the orchestra made the music sound new, fresh and exciting, which seemed impossible, and by the rousing finale at "The Gates of Kiev" the entire audience was ready to jump to its feet and start screaming with pleasure.



There are two more performances, on Friday the 13th and Saturday the 14th, and since the usually sold-out Thursday matinee had lots of empty seats, I assume there are plenty of seats left for these performances too. Run, do not walk, to this performance. It really was extraordinary.

Lookit! Part 2

The Reno Fun Train left the snow at the Sierra foothills.



According to the bartender in the dome car, this was the most low-key group he'd ever seen on the Fun Train.



One of the reasons seemed to be that most of the passengers had stayed up all weekend and drank too much in Reno, so the majority of them were in their seats sleeping.



This worked out well since we were able to spend the whole day in the elevated dome car, which usually gets too full.



We chatted up a programmer from Citrus Heights, an ugly suburb next door to Sacramento. She told us that downtown Reno had become frightening to her because all the riff-raff was being allowed to hang out freely. "It didn't used to be that way. The casinos wouldn't allow it."



There were plenty of people who were still ready to play cards...



...and happily drink the afternoon away.



...until the sun went down.



At Sacramento, half the passengers exited at their great old train station.



The destruction of American passenger rail service during the last half of the 20th century is one of the great shames of our time, involving greed, stupidity and above all short-sightedness.



Besides employing lots of people, including Regina, who was working her first run ever as an Amtrak employee...



...it's also ecologically superior to car culture in every way.



Plus, there is a sensuality about train travel...



...with its constant movement...



...and the squeezing past fellow passengers in crowded aisles...



...that is unparalleled except while traveling on a boat, which has a very similar feel. Check it out.

Lookit! Part 1

The Reno Fun Train chugged across the Eastern Sierra desert...



...along the Truckee River...



...on its way back to the San Francisco Bay Area.



Amtrak has daily service from San Francisco to Reno and back, but its schedule is completely unreliable.



Part of the reason is that the train going west starts in Chicago, so its arrival in Reno during the winter is often not just a few hours late but occasionally twelve hours or two days.



In that case, Amtrak sticks their passengers on ugly buses and takes them to Sacramento, which is sort of missing the point of taking the train in the first place.



So I cannot recommend the "Reno Fun Train" on the weekends or the "Snow Train" during the weekdays any higher (click here to get to Key Holidays, a family outfit that puts these trips together).



It's not only inexpensive, but their brochures actually say "No Buses!"



The specially chartered train, with its private cars, only runs for about three months during the winter.



I've taken the trip twice before over the last ten years, and on the last trip there was an old woman who was overwhelmed by the beauty of the scenery who amused the heck out of us.



I don't know if she was senile, or had always been somewhat simple, but her enthusiasm was that of a five-year-old.



Every time she saw a beautiful bit of scenery...



...and there was plenty of it...



...she would yell excitedly to her friends, "Lookit, lookit, lookit!"



I was with my loving Domestic Partner, along with my friends Joshua and Markus, and we must have heard "lookit" close to 200 hundred times.



Ten years later, the phrase is still an inside joke for all four of us...



...partly because I still can't think of a better way to express enthusiasm for a beautiful sight.



It's certainly better than listening to "docents" reading sonorously from scripts over the PA system about the history of the Donner Pass...



...which was what was inflicted upon us this year during the crossing of the Sierras.

The Biggest Little City in the World

Reno, Nevada is on the cusp of radical change...



...and not just because the railroad tracks that used to go through the middle of downtown have finally been moved to an underground trench below.



The casino economy is dying because the vast majority of Reno's traditional gambling customers are now going to Indian casinos in Northern California instead.



At the same time, the California diaspora continues and lot of San Francisco Bay Area people seem to have recently moved to Reno in order to afford a house.



This has led to casinos being decommissioned, and rather than being blown up as in Las Vegas, they have been turned into housing condos.



Though downtown is currently dead and sort of creepy, it's possible to feel that the place is going to revive in an enjoyable way with its new residents.



Rink On The River, an outdoor ice skating rink set between the Cal-Neva parking lot and the Truckee River, was one of the first places I've seen in downtown Reno that looked specifically built for the locals, and it was completely charming.



Up the street, there is the largest bowling alley I've seen in my life.



Actually, it's called the National Bowling Stadium, and mere mortals are not allowed to bowl in it as the place is used exclusively for tournaments.



It felt like the Wimbledon of Bowling.



On Sunday morning, the 1,000+ Reno Fun Train revelers sleepily crawled out of their beds and went to the station where they were serenaded by The Funatics.



Amazingly, the train was only ten minutes late and an extraordinarily beautiful ride through the desert and the Sierras began.

On The Train to Reno, Part 2

The Reno Fun Train started climbing through the Sierra foothills...



...which were almost psychedelically green.



Though most of the passengers were fairly advanced in age...