Rostropovich and Shostakovich, Round 2

Last week's all-Shostakovich concert conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich was just about perfection, but this week's edition was sort of a sprawling, fascinating mess.



We sat in the nosebleed section in Second Tier, where a private corporate event had commandeered one of the outdoor balcony areas away from the peasants who had paid $39 for the cheapest seats.



Though the party looked dreadfully boring, it was still a rather obnoxious sign of the privatization of public space (you're right, Friends of the Library gadfly James Chaffey, you're right!)



The concert started with "Suite No. 1 for Jazz Orchestra," a poorly digested Russian attempt at jazz circa 1934 that had the audience laughing, particularly when the Hawaiian guitar appeared in the third movement.



This was followed by Shostakovich's Second Violin Concerto from 1967, written for David Oistrakh. It was interesting music that probably gets better the more you hear it, but the soloist was the San Francisco Symphony's concertmaster, Alexander Barantschik, and he just wasn't up to the task. His playing was beautiful and he probably got every note right, but the piece really demanded a more gripping soloist who could take you into the heart of the music and its many cadenzas, and instead the playing just sounded dutiful.



After intermission came the choral Symphony No. 13, "Babi Yar," written to five poems by Yeugeny Yevtushenko in 1962. This is an amazing, powerful piece of music but like many Shostakovich symphonies, it went on way too long, particularly after the lengthy first half of the concert.



As if to one-up Benjamin Britten and his all-male opera "Billy Budd," Shostakovich wrote the piece for a soloist and chorus who were all basses. The soloist, a young Russian named Mikhail Petrenko, had a beautiful voice but like the violinist he seemed something of a lightweight. This music demanded a truly great performer.



The poetry by the glamour boy Soviet poet of the 1960s, Yevtushenko, by the way, reads like Rod McKuen verse in its English translation. I certainly hope it's better in Russian.



According to Wikipiedia, Yevtushenko is still alive and teaching at the University of Oklahoma in Tulsa and also at Queens College in New York. My, how the mighty have fallen.



If you get a chance, do check out the concert because your chances of hearing "Babi Yar" live in this lifetime aren't all that great and it is extraordinary music, but you might just want to sneak in at intermission.

Double L Eccentric Gyratory

Though huge chunks of steel tend not to be my favorite pieces of sculpture (get thee behind me, Satanic Richard Serra)...



...there is a huge piece by George Rickey called "Double L Eccentric Gyratory" that stands in front of the San Francisco Main Library in Civic Center which is quite amusing.



It consists of two 18-foot steel L's that move slowly with the wind but not in directions you would expect.



Last Saturday the 25th, crosswinds were whipping wildly through the Civic Center and causing some interesting gyrations.



While crossing the street, I heard a five-year-old boy asking his father to lift him onto the ugly base of the sculpture so he could play with it, but we both told him that was it was way too dangerous.



The defaced inscription notes that the piece was made in 1982 and that Carl Djerassi, the local "father of the birth-control-pill" millionaire, had donated it to San Francisco in 1997 for the opening of the new Main Library.



George Rickey didn't find his calling as a sculptor until he was in his 50's, which didn't much matter since he was born in 1907 and died at age 95 in 2002. He was part of a movement called "Kinetic Sculpture" that included Calder (Mister Mobile) as one of the patron saints.



Not many people stop to watch the sculpture, however, because the area around its base has become ground zero for some of the craziest street people in the neighborhood who like to congregate with each other.



Inside the library, while checking out a Weissmuller/O'Sullivan "Tarzan" DVD, the clerk kept looking around me to the lobby beyond with serious concern in her face.



Having heard any number of horror stories from library employees about crazy people using the library collection as toilet paper, I was certain that the big yellow puddle in the lobby was somebody who had decided to pee.



A security guard was curious why I was taking a photo, and I told him about this blog and how it was a shame some crazy had done that since the public bathroom was only twenty feet away. "Aw, that's not pee," he said. "Somebody dropped their cup of orange juice." We decided we were both relieved.

A Wake for Willie Watson

On Saturday, March 18th, after the Peace March...



...there was a wake held for Willie Watson...



...at the venerable old San Francisco gay leather bar on Harrison Street, The Eagle.



The owners of the place (click here to get to their website) offered their large back yard for a "Celebration of Willie Watson."



The affair was a little tentative at first...



...and sadness at Willie's early death from Hepatitis C...



...kept many from getting too raucous too soon.



Doug from the Eagle proposed that everyone hold hands...



...and make one hell of a ruckus with our voices...



...but that felt a bit too touchy-feely for this crowd.



A chicken and ribs barbeque was started on the outdoor grill as various people went to the microphone to testify.



Fundi, a great friend of Willie's, started it off with a long, improvised, a capella song...



...that was a bit too self-indulgent for my taste, so I repaired to the bar for more cocktails.



The rest of the paeans to Willie were short, sweet, loving and good-natured, such as Bambi's recital of how Willie had taken him under his wing when he'd just arrived in San Francisco young, scared and alone.



Tim Miller told great stories from softball teams they had played on together.



This woman told of a spontaneous road trip she had taken with Willie from Chicago to San Francisco...



...while this gent told of his bar crawling adventures with Willie and then proceeded to quite beautifully sing "Rosie's Cantina."



Meanwhile, the barbeque continued to fill the place with great smells.



Jim the Sculptor announced that this event was putting the "fun" back in "funeral"...



...while the ancient Harry dispensed affection to everyone.



Doug told about playing music with Willie and announced that there were percussion instruments available for anybody who wanted to join in a drum circle.



At first, it was only Doug...



...and another musician friend who were playing the drums...



...but something magical happened over the course of the improvised percussion jam.



Half the crowd joined in...



...and they conjured Willie Watson's spirit right there.



By this time, I was blubbering like a baby because the moment was so beautiful.



When the time comes, I pray to get sent off even half as well.

Rostropovich, Shostakovich, Run, Don't Walk

For two weeks the San Francisco Symphony is playing the music of Dmitri Shostakovich under the baton of Mstislav Rostropovich, the famous Russian cellist and conductor who is one of the last living links to the late composer.



It sounded great on paper but the question was how together he would be at age 79, and though his skills as a cellist are commonly acknowledged as putting him into the pantheon with the greats of history, his conducting reputation has always been controversial.



So let's just get it out of the way. The current concert, which starts with a great, bombastic six-minute "Festive Overture" from 1954, that includes brass instruments wailing away at the climax on either side of the Terrace section, is just plain awesome.



The overture is followed by the First Piano Concerto from 1933 that is actually a concerto for piano, trumpet, and orchestra, and which is some freakishly original masterpiece that sounds like a cross between Prokofiev, Ravel and Britten, but which has a voice of its own.



Yefim Bronfman played the piano and was as astonishing as the conductor.



On a Wednesday night in Davies Hall, only the coolest of musical afficionados were represented, including the legendary Joe Harris, The Opera House Dresser, myself and Nancy F.



Plus, every other voice you heard was speaking in Russian which was sort of fun, like traveling to another country without walking more than a block.



I've come to Shostakovich by way of Benjamin Britten, possibly my favorite composer of the twentieth century. Though Britten never actually said it, I think the only contemporary who he accepted as a perfect equal was Shostakovich, and their careers overlapped completely, from the early 1930s to the mid-1970s.



The person who binds the two composers together most powerfully is Rostropovich, who was friends with both of them, and for whom both musicians wrote extraordinary works for cello. In Britten's case, he also wrote one of the great soprano parts in all of music for "The War Requiem" for Galina Vishnevskaya, Rostropovich's wife.



After Mstislav and Galina were exiled during the 1970s from Soviet Russia after defending their friend Solzhenitsyn a bit too vigorously, Vishnevskaya wrote an autobiography entitled "Galina" that is one of the greatest artistic and political autobiographies of any sort ever written. I cannot recommend the wild, score-settling, passionate and brilliant memoir highly enough.



After the completion of the performance of the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony, Rostropovich turned his back to the audience and went to each group of musicians in the symphony, making them take their individuals bows, and the audience went a bit insane. There's a Thursday matinee and another performance on Friday and Saturday. Definitely check it out. This is a bit of history that will never be repeated.

Peace March 2: Going Full Circle

We rejoined the Peace Parade at Stockton and Market Streets.



The plan was to find a musical group to march with, and though the group above was wonderful...



...the best band of the day honors went to this ensemble in white...



...playing klezmer-influenced pieces that were a delight.



As usual, the best signage...



...was heartfelt and homemade.



There was also a larger-than-usual Asian presence at the March...



...including East Indians and Pakistanis...



...along with a huge, colorful Filipino contingent.



The parade was also a good place to run into old acquaintances...



...such as Michael Faklis, above, who used to work tirelessly for San Francisco's public access station before he was recently fired by one of the worst thugs in the nonprofit world, Zane Blaney.



After crossing Market Street on Fourth...



...the march doubled back towards Civic Center along Mission Street.



We passed by the San Fracisco Chronicle building on 5th and Mission, which had some interesting signage of its own, not to mention the return of the Israeli flag wavers.



On Friday, there was a very stupid article in the Chronicle predicting that nobody was interested in going to anti-war marches anymore.



Then, when at least 20,000 people did show up, they put up a decent article about the event on their SFGate website, but they undercut their own writers with a blatantly false headline.



Above is a screenshot where the head proclaims "Nearly 10,000 anti-war protestors..." and the first sentence of the nicely written article states: "More than 10,000 enthusiastic anti-war marchers..."



The newspaper can't even get its propaganda straight, and they wonder why their circulation is declining on a daily basis.



The march eased up McAllister Street, where the A.N.S.W.E.R. organizers were running a gauntlet looking for donations...



...but we were saving our money for well-deserved sausages and garlic fries.

Peace March 1: Through the Tenderloin

The noisy, obnoxious media helicopters started hovering over the Civic Center neighborhood around noon...



...on Saturday, March 18th, when a march protesting the third anniversary of the Iraq Invasion was set to take place.



The starting and ending point for the march was at Civic Center Plaza in front of City Hall, which was being fortified against intruders by a small army of police and sheriffs deputies.



Also in front of City Hall was a small contingent protesting the protestors.



They were waving Israeli flags...



...and U.S. flags while singing an out-of-tune rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner."



Anyone supporting the murderous regimes currently in charge of Israel and the United States is probably delusional at this moment in history...



...so the large antiwar crowd simply ignored the lunatics, which seemed the most civilized thing to do.



Though the marching crowd couldn't have been sweeter...



...or more playfully charming...



...the police response was grotesque, with hundreds of them lined along the march route, scowling...



...along with dozens of paddy wagons and buses parked near the Civic Center to haul away citizens protesting their government's criminal behavior.



The parade route was interesting, starting up Larkin Street...



...and then turning down Eddy Street...



...through the heart of the Tenderloin downtown.



There was even a Green candidate for Senator with a whole host of Greenies marching behind his little pickup truck.



One of the best moments along the route was in front of the Hilton Hotel where striking hotel workers....



...were cheering and being cheered by the peace marchers walking by.



As the march neared the Powell Street shopping district, the police presence grew even more pronounced.



Property must be protected at all costs, including bankrupting the taxpayers with massive amounts of overtime.



Since we had walked the length of the march from the back to the front by this time, it seemed like a good time to pop into the Mac Store at Stockton and Market to play with the latest machines while waiting for the crowd to catch up.

There But For The Grace of God

The nicest part of the daily commute this month back and forth from Silicon Valley on Caltrain...



...is that it forces me away from the computer screen and either into the pages of a book (Agnes de Mille's series of autobiographies, starting with "Dance to the Piper")...



...or into meditating on the view outside.



The nastiest part of the commute is the San Francisco #47 Muni bus which travels down Van Ness Avenue to South of Market, stopping by the city jail and the homeless shelters before it reaches Caltrain.



On at least half of those trips, the bus is graced with at least one crazy person hauling bags upon bags of neither food nor clothing nor anything particularly useful, but precious junk nonetheless, sprawling across aisles and seats.



The gent above is the worst offender and I can't seem to go anywhere without sharing a Muni bus with him.



I can't complain, however, as I have a cozy apartment with a wonderful view...



...that includes protestors in front of the School District headquarters chanting "We Want A Contract!"

St. Patrick's Parade

On the weekend before St. Patrick's Day in San Francisco...



...there is an annual parade that winds up Market Street from the Financial District to Civic Center...



...and the day is invariably wet, windy and cold.



On the few days over the years that it has been sunny and warm, the sunburns on all that beautiful, pale white skin have not been a pretty sight, so the bad weather is probably for the best.



Usually, these parades are way overpoliced but early this afternoon that didn't seem to be the case...



...and the reason turned out to be that a huge contingent of San Francisco's police force...



...was marching in the parade itself...



...many with their children literally in tow.



The Asian guy above, by the way, is actually San Francisco Police Chief Heather Fong.



Another formidable contingent consisted of San Francisco firefighters...



...who were throwing strings of green beads to the crowd...



...in a parade gesture straight out of New Orleans' Mardi Gras.



One firefighter broke ranks and made sure this little girl got some beads of her very own.



If you were no good at catching beads, you could always buy some...



...at one of the many vendor's tents set up in the Civic Center Plaza.



This vendor from "The Irish Castle" on Geary Boulevard was already drinking beer "just to keep myself warm."



Irish-American stereotypes about drinking didn't seem to offend anyone, as you can see by this Big Yellow Taxi with signage reading "A Drinking Fellow Calls a Yellow."



It's actually a very inclusive parade.



This marching band from San Mateo, for instance...



...didn't seem to have very many Irish-Americans involved...



...but everyone was cheering for them nonetheless.



I didn't stay for long, because the cold and wet turned into a virtual monsoon...



...and just looking at some of the outfits on the marchers was enough to give me pneumonia.

Haydn and Mozart

At Davies Symphony Hall, the San Francisco Symphony presented a delightful half-Haydn, half-Mozart concert all week long that was being conducted by a Viennese early music specialist, Martin Haselbock.



My friend Kimo and I checked out the last performance on Saturday the 12th.



As much as I adore Haydn's music, it has never sounded all that great in the concert hall to me, possibly because the venues are too large.



Even with the wonderful soprano Christine Brandes singing a concert aria and the stupendous Symphony Chorus essaying a short piece about "The Storm," the first half was a trifle dull.



Part of the problem became clear in the second half when the program was devoted to an early mass by Mozart, the "Coronation," and Haydn's classical style was suddenly infused with Mozart's particular genius. You could feel every ear in the hall perk up.



The greatest writer about Mozart was probably George Bernard Shaw, who started his career as a classical music critic for a number of London newspapers. Here are a few choice remarks from GBS, who was writing during the centenary of Mozart's death (this year the world is celebrating the 250th anniversary of his birth):

"Mozart came at the end of a development, not at the beginning of one; and although there are operas and symphonies, and even pianoforte sonatas and pages of instrumental scoring of his, on which you can put your finger and say "Here is final perfection in this manner; and nobody, whatever his genius may be, will ever get a step further on these lines," you cannot say "Here is an entirely new vein of musical art, of which nobody ever dreamt before Mozart." Haydn, who made the mould for Mozart's symphonies, was proud of Mozart's genius because he felt his own part in it: he would have written the E flat symphony if he could, and though he could not, was at least able to feel that the man who had reached that pre-eminence was standing on his old shoulder."

"The people most to be pitied at this moment are the unfortunate singers, players, and conductors who are suddenly called upon to make the public hear the wonders which the newspapers are describing so lavishly. At ordinary times they simply refuse to do this...You cannot "make an effect" with Mozart, or work your audience up by playing on their hysterical susceptibilities."

"Nothing but the finest execution - beautiful, expressive, and intelligent - will serve; and the worst of it is in that the phrases are so pefectly clear and straightforward that you are found out the moment you swerve by a hair's breadth from perfection, whilst, at the same time, your work is so obvious, that everyone thinks it must be easy, and puts you down remorselessly as a duffer for botching it."

"Naturally, then, we do not hear much of Mozart; and what we do hear goes far to destroy his reputation. But there was no getting out of the centenary: something had to be done. Accordingly, the Crystal Palace committed itself to the Jupiter Symphony and the Requiem; and the Albert Hall, by way of varying the entertainment, announced the Requiem and the Jupiter Symphony."

The San Francisco Symphony should get some credit for varying the fare a bit. As Jack Murray said when giving me a birthday present many years ago of a Pergolesi "Stabat Mater" recording, "yes, it's a 'Stabat Mater' but it's an UP 'Stabat Mater.' " The same could be said for the "Coronation" Mass, which is what might be called an "UP" mass, and the performance was swift, fun and beautiful.

Suburban Crash

Walking over the 101 Freeway overpass from San Carlos to the Redwood Shores business park, I noticed a disaster.



There had been a crash, and a woman was being strapped onto a stretcher. There was no sign of any other car.



The crash and attendant emergency vehicles were creating a multi-lane traffic jam that stretched northbound on 101 as far as the eye could see.



If you have never read the British author J.G. Ballard's 1960s sick fantasia novel on the erotic ramifications of car crashes, I'm not sure I would really recommend it because the book really is seriously twisted.



So is the 1990s David Cronenberg film adaptation which keeps all the gore/erotica but jettisons the grotesque celebrity angle of the book. (One of the heros masturbates repeatedly to the idea of smashing into Elizabeth Taylor's limousine at Heathrow Airport.)



Still, both the book and the movie get close to something profound about car culture and its essential sickness.



You'll never look at the world quite the same way again.

Two Willies

It's a joy to be around people who are capable of original thought and who haven't had that particular gift knocked out of their heads by a lifetime of indoctrination at school, at work, and in groups of people.



Willie Morrissey, above, is one of the most surprising and insightful thinkers I have ever met, leavened by a deadpan wit that has a playful, childish silliness to it. (All my favorite thinkers are amused by their own brains.)



Willie has just started his own blog, inspired by this one he claims, and I can't wait to see how it evolves. One of his first posts showed the connection between tennis great Pancho Gonzales and painting legend Wayne Thiebaud in the form of an old character at the Golden Gate Park tennis courts. It's pretty brilliant.



Click here to check it out so far.



I met Willie while playing on a softball team for The Lone Star Saloon years ago which is where I met another original thinker, Willie Watson, above. He was a fine athlete, musician, filmmaker, along with being a municipal slave for San Francisco's Muni bus system.



He died young last week on his couch. Besides being an original, a kindler, gentler soul than Willie can hardly be imagined. Rest in peace.

City and Suburb

For an old client, I've agreed to spend a month going onsite to their famous company in Silicon Valley.



Not being an automobile driver, I took the old-fashioned Caltrain down to San Carlos from San Francisco...



...and then walked a stormy half-hour through the arid suburban business parks which don't even have sidewalks on many of their streets.



Silicon Valley's business parks, or campuses as they like to call them, are bizarrely antiseptic sprawls with seemingly strict racial stratification.



Most of the businesses seem to consist of white folk, including a few Europeans, along with a huge percentage of East Indians. Mexicans are the slaves who keep the places running, from food service to landscaping.



The business parks look like a David Cronenberg film such as "Scanners" where terrible things are happening behind moderne glass and steel.



It was a relief to return to San Francisco's Civic Center..

.

...where there was a multi-racial collection of teachers marching on the San Francisco Unified School District building across the street from my apartment.



They were chanting, "What do we want? A Contract! When do want it? Now!"



It wasn't particularly imaginative but they seemed to be having a great time strangling traffic on Franklin Street...



...and of course the police were loving every minute of it since they got to overpolice yet another demonstration and make lots of overtime while they were at it.



There was a San Francisco Board of Supervisors Budget Committee meeting on Wednesday the 1st where the supervisors grilled the police spokesmen on why their overtime was so out of control, and the response was on the order of "Those anti-war protests are getting more violent all the time," which of course is crap.



The vast majority of the San Francisco police force live in the suburbs and treat the city as if they are an occupying force. They're also lazy as hell, so if you're a criminal, you really don't have to worry about them much, other than the fact that they are bankrupting the city's budget.