Koffi and The Patio Cafe

In the fancy Las Palmas neighborhood of Palm Springs, away from the main tourist downtown...



...at the corner of Alejo and Palm Canyon...



...there is a collection of designer antique shops called The Corridor (click here for their website).



Though one store specializes in Chinese antiques...



...that needs to sell its stock of faux Chinese tomb soldiers...



...most of the stores specialize in weathered Mexican furniture and objects that are often quite beautiful and not outrageously priced.



Even better than the stores, however, is a local coffee and pastry shop that was opened in 2002 by a couple of Palm Springs residents (click here for their great website).



It is usually packed to the gills in the mornings with customers...



...most of them gay men.



Even better than the upscale coffee shop is the central courtyard...



...with its huge lawn and picnic tables, where you can sit down and gossip with friends or read leftover newspapers (The Los Angeles Times and The Desert Sun along with a myriad of free gay rags).



The place also hosts a free wifi network so you see a cross-section of folk working on their computers and checking their email...



...when they are not fending off the multitude of dogs begging for treats.



The courtyard is a bit off the beaten path so you need to know about the place, but I can't recommend it highly enough.



The atmosphere reminds me of the Patio Cafe, an Arcadian place in San Francisco's Castro District during the late 1970s that similarly was a coffee and sandwich joint where you could take your goods outdoors to a beautiful lawn surrounded by flower beds.



Also adjoining the hidden back lawn and garden was a wonderful bookshop whose back doors led to a wide wooden staircase where beautiful young men would sprawl all afternoon with novels and capuccinos.



The lawn vanished soon enough and was replaced by a large outdoor restaurant for most of the 1980s and 1990s.



It was still called The Patio Cafe, and was quite successful, until the restaurant and the warren of hippie shops surrounding it were closed by the infamous Les Natali, who seems to be the Walter Shorenstein real estate mogul of San Francisco's gay world, shutting down places for redevelopment and then never reopening their doors, probably for tax reasons.



But let's not speak of dark people or dark things for the moment, and instead celebrate an oddly beautiful, spontaneously created hangout that reminds me of a vanished San Francisco Eden.

Flintstone Rocks and Desert Rats

We drove about 40 miles northeast from Palm Springs to Joshua Tree National Park...



...mostly to get a photo of Tony in his Gay Mafia T-shirt.



When people mention Joshua Tree National Park, it is usually with a tone of wonder in their voices and it was easy to see why.



The huge boulder formations popping up all over the high desert...



...look unreal...



...as if they have been assembled for another attempt at a live-action "Flintstones" movie.



We drove through about a quarter of the park, praying there wouldn't be car trouble out in the middle of some very lonely roads...



...and stopped at "Keys View," a terrifyingly windy lookout point where the vista stretched back to the Coachella Valley.



We drove back to Palm Springs through strange, bleak looking desert towns...



...like Morongo and Yucca Valley...



...passing a woman in need who looked too scary for the offer of help.

Giving Thanks for Golden Light

In 2001 I documented the world in photos and text for 365 straight days, editing the results into PowerPoint presentations every night. The project was eventually turned into 52 half-hour TV shows that ran on the public access station in San Francisco a couple of years later. "FotoTales," as it was called, also turned out to be a prototype for this blog.



November in Northern and Central California is subject to something called "tule fog," a dense, low-lying blast of water and air that changes texture every five minutes.



You can have fifteen feet of visibility one moment, and then the sun will be streaming through the mist in the next moment.



I played golf in a tule fog earlier this week at Lincoln Park, a San Francisco municipal course surrounding the Palace of the Legion of Honor Art Museum.



The poorly maintained course is bordered on three sides by cliffs fronting the ocean channel that leads to the Golden Gate Bridge, which can usually be seen from the vantage point above.



The place is like a poor man's Pebble Beach with even better views.



On the November day in 2001 when these photos were taken, the dense fog and the sun were creating light effects that looked unreal, as if they had been designed for an operatic stage.



The best effect was saved for the long, narrow 18th hole that led to the clubhouse.



The sun started shining between trees and mist and it looked for all the world as if God were speaking directly to us.



On this day, I give thanks to golden light.

Deputy Dawg

On Sunday there was a large line of men (with a few token women) in front of Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco's Civic Center.



They were waiting to take a four-hour written exam as part of a hiring process for the San Francisco Sheriffs Department.



I wished them all luck and privately hoped they would do better than their counterparts on the San Francisco Police Department which is one of the most outrageously lazy and overpaid groups of municipal employees in the country.



They refuse to get out of their patrol cars and actually interact with citizens, let alone engage in any proactive work such as a stakeout in a high-crime area. For instance, in the Civic Center every night, there are car break-ins galore and the broken glass from car windows looks like a fresh snowfall every morning. When my neighbor Holly, whose car has been broken into eleven times in the last three months, expressed her outrage to the Police Department, their official response was "maybe you should move to the suburbs." I'm not making this up.



Dan Noyes on the local ABC news station recently did a story on the subject and you can get to a YouTube clip of it by clicking here. The best quote is from Andrew Korniej, a supernumerary at the opera whose car has been broken into repeatedly. "I think it's embarassing for the city." The out-of-shape suburbanites who tend to work as cops in San Francisco, however, have no shame. I believe living in the City and County of San Francisco should be a requirement for new hires because whatever the policy is right now, it's not working and every citizen knows it.

Manon Lescaut

Puccini's early opera "Manon Lescaut" opened a 7-performance run November 18th at a San Francisco Opera Sunday matinee.



Though the music is continuously interesting, the opera has to be one of the dumber pieces in the operatic repertory, and that's saying something. The original eighteenth-century novel by Abbe Prevost was probably quite interesting, painting a corrupt French society through the tale of a good girl on her way to the convent who goes bad, and then who gets punished way out of proportion to her actual misdeeds. Think "Moll Flanders," but tragic.



The French composer Massenet's greatest opera is his 19th century treatment of the same tale, and in that version the story sort of makes sense, but the Puccini version is a ridiculous mixture of highlights from the Prevost novel and the composer's own obsession with pathetic, masochistic, dying women.



The reason to see this production is on account of the superstar diva, the Finnish soprano Karita Mattila who is in her prime and who can seemingly sing anything beautifully. She is also a wonderful actress, though you wouldn't necessarily know it from this production where she appears as a Zombie Ingenue in Act One, an Idiot Kept Woman in Act Two, and a Dingbat Victim in Acts Three and Four.



The first act is supposed to be set at a country inn populated by students, gamblers, townsfolk and so on, but in this production you can't tell if the scene is supposed to be inside or outside, and the stage is so continuously busy it starts to look like Grand Central Station, except that everybody is dressed in beige outfits. That is, except for one weird guy who turns out to be the tenor, who is dressed in blue just so you'll know he's The Romantic Hero. I'm not sure how the scene could be staged intelligently, but the solution here seemed to be "keep it moving at all costs" and it screamed "OperaLand!"



The first act also had to contend with the Sean Panikkar effect (that's Sean above). He's a young Sri Lankan in the Adler Fellows program who keeps being given tiny parts that are usually the companion, the friend, the herald, what have you, and the problem is that his voice is so youthful, lyrical and beautiful, that the star tenor's entrace is usually a disappointment in comparison. This happened last year in both "Norma" and "Maid of Orleans." In the latter, his victim was Misha Didyk, the Ukranian tenor who is also singing the lead in "Manon Lescaut." Misha was fine on Sunday, even though he oversang at times, but we wanted to hear Sean!



The second act jumps in Time and Place to Paris, where Manon is bored with her glamorous life in the boudoir at the palace where she's being kept by a rich old aristocrat. There's an endless dance instruction scene where Mattila has been instructed to be gauche and clumsy, I suppose to show that she has no real class, but the scene doesn't work, possibly because Ms. Mattila is way too elegant and beautiful to be doing Lucy Ricardo very convincingly.



The third act at the prison in Le Havre was probably the best staging, with a dozen supernumerary women being led out one by one to be branded before being thrown onto a ship headed for The New World (in other words, Louisiana in the 18th century). There aren't that many supernumerary parts for women at the opera (big scenes are usually filled out by male soldiers, courtiers and clergy), so when juicy parts like these arrive, the ladies go at them with relish. The scene was effective and the inevitable overacting was kept to a minimum except for Branded Woman Number Seven or Number Eight who was so over-the-top that the balcony standees all started laughing. (Note to Overacting Super Woman: There is a tender love duet going on between the principals to your left while your arms and legs are thrashing every which way, which is sorta distracting.)



There were curtain calls before each intermission, which used to be standard practice at the San Francisco Opera, but which hasn't existed for years. I'm curious why it's made a comeback, and a clumsy one at that. The ushers were all opening the doors in the orchestra section at the end of Act One while a hysterical supervisor was stage-whispering, "No, No, there are curtain calls!"



I last saw this opera in a disastrous 1974 production at the San Francisco Opera with Leontyne Price, who was not only unbelievable as a French coquette but who was unintentionally pure camp. And how could she not be, since the opera ends in "The Desert of Louisiana," where Manon sings her dying aria "Sola, Perduta, Abbandonata" which translates as "Alone, Lost, and Abandoned." The latter isn't even strictly true since her poor young lover has gone mad and joined her in exile to The New World. Too bad they they left the bayous and somehow stumbled into the desert.

Oh well, the audience seemed to enjoy every minute of the schlock, and Ms. Mattila is worth seeing and hearing no matter what she does, even sola, perduta, e abbandonata.

Public School Enrollment Fair

At the Bill Graham Auditorium on Saturday the 17th...



...the San Francisco Unified School District was holding its annual Public School Enrollment Fair.



The auditorium was crammed...



...with parents looking for schools for their children.



Even though there was plenty of tension in the room, as people tried to figure out the labyrinth of options available and the many forms they were required to fill out...



...the atmosphere was still fairly festive.



This was partly because of all the homemade exhibits advertising the wonders of each school...



...which made the place look and feel like a demented High School Science Fair.



The options ranged from the Malcolm X Academy...



...to the Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy...



...to the more traditionally named Longfellow School.



Parents have two months, starting from today until January 19th to submit their applications to the school district with their seven ranked choices.



This is officially called Round One of the selection process for the next academic year and if you miss this particular window, your chances of getting what you want are minimal.



So good luck to everyone, and especially to Mike Lin on Potrero Hill.

Atlantic Crossing

At the San Francisco Symphony on Friday the 17th, there was the third of four performances of an interesting sounding program that consisted of "Russia," a short 1864 Symphonic poem by Balakirev, the world premiere of a piano concerto by an expatriate South African composer named Kevin Volans, and Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony.



The resident music director, Michael Tilson Thomas, was conducting and the piano soloist was a Montreal virtuoso named Marc-Andre Hamelin, for whom the concerto was written.



I have never heard anything by Balakirev before, but after the "boring tour of Russia" as the guy sitting next to me characterized the overture, I'm not sure I need to hear anything else. It sounded like subgrade Moussorgsky.



There was a funny juxtaposition, though, in two sentences following each other in the Symphony's program notes about the composer:

"If he [Balakirev] had flirted with drawing on folk music previously in his concert compositions, he now went at it with a vengeance. Shortly thereafter, however, Balakirev experienced a nervous breakdown."

The world premiere piano concerto was named "Atlantic Crossing" by its composer who became an Irish citizen in 1995.

"The sea voyage from Ireland to America has always held a special place in the hearts of the Irish. The hope of a new life, the escape from the Great Hunger -- all of these are associated with this journey, more than any other. This gave me an image with which to start the piece, although it is not to be regarded as program music."

Still, the image helped set the stage for a wonderful new piece of music that sounded like sort of a mixture of John Adams at his best and Bernstein's "Age of Anxiety" piano symphony and a voice that is all Volans' own. Plus, it had Bongo Drums!



The piece looked fiendishly difficult to play for both the soloist and the orchestra, and I can't praise Hamelin, Thomas and the entire orchestra enough. One was able to distinguish most of the insane time signatures, and even when the writing was at its densest, the performance allowed one to take in every detail. Plus, the slow lyrical section in the middle, after the crazed beginning, was unashamedly beautiful.



Like John Adams, Volans is something of a minimalist in his use of repeating patterns but like Adams he's very much a "post-minimalist." In the program he explained it this way:

"My idea of good compositional technique lies in choosing the right note for the right instrument at the right moment. This is what Morton Feldman called "artistry" -- an instinct for making the right moves. What was a good idea last week may be a bad idea this week. What's good at the beginning of a piece may be bad in the middle. If you choose the wrong notes at the wrong moment, you're wasting (y)our time."

"More interesting for me than what is usually called "craftsmanship" is the continual adjustment of grammatic structure to suit the material -- the vernacular. Hence, in part, my interest in African art and music. The beauty of the work is not in any underlying system but in its irregularity, in the continuous variation of detail and adjustment of scale to suit the material. This is what one could call in more commonplace terms its hand-made quality -- a quality notable by its absence in minimalism."

After intermission, Michael Tilson Thomas proceeded to conduct a surprisingly shoddy and vulgar performance of the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony.



Part of the problem was that the piece had been programmed only last March when it was conducted by the great cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich (click here to read my write-up from that definitive performance).



So here's an idea for the next "Keeping Score" television show. Rostropovich conducted this work in March 2006 with the San Francisco Symphony and MTT conducted the same work with the exact same orchestra in the same hall eight months later. Why did the two performances sound so radically different? In the Rostropovich version you could hear, feel, and think through a journey that made some kind of brilliant sense. I walked out of the hall convinced I'd heard one of the great pieces of music ever written. In the MTT version, most of the phrases were lovely on an individual level but they felt senseless when put together. It was just one stupid effect after another that bored and deafened me by the end.



There was signage posted at the grand staircase, by the way, at Davies Hall advising patrons that their presence in the lobby and the auditorium implied their consent to being photographed, videotaped, and recorded for every possible use by the San Francisco Symphony.



This seemed rather presumptious, but since I do the same thing on this blog, there's no room to complain. I'm wondering, though, if somebody was adamant about not giving their permission whether or not they could get a refund from the box office.



Speaking of the box office, they no longer sell the dozens of $20 Center Terrace "rush" seats two hours before the performance anymore. All Center Terrace seats are now purchased in advance and they're $25. However, even though the Symphony hasn't publicised this very well, there are still $20 rush seats, except now they are for the expensive seats that haven't sold in less popular programs. The "rush seats" are sold on the day of performance (box office opens at 10AM) and there is a "Rush Information Hotline" at (415) 503-5577 which will tell you the night before how it's looking for the next day's availability.

Nudes at City Hall

Early Friday evening at San Francisco's City Hall...



...District 5 Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi was hosting the monthly art show at his offices.



Most of the art has been pretty bad at these affairs lately, but tonight the quality went up a notch.



This month is featuring a group show of four women artists: Gail Camhi, Jacqueline Ruben, Heike Seefeldt, and Sue Vaughan.



Ms. Vaughan had my favorite work on the wall, a whole series of female nudes.



Sue was one of the campaign managers for Krissy Keefer, the Green Party warrior who ran to the left of Pelosi this last election.



They were both disappointed by their showing in the election, but in truth they and their friends did a great job, and Pelosi seems to have heard them because she's even making noises about becoming an antiwar warrior herself.



I had met Ms. Vaughan a number of times at h. Brown's Burrito Salon but she had never mentioned that she dabbled in art or the fact that she was any good at it. It was a nice surprise.

War and Peace 1

On Thursday at noon, November 9th, two days after the extraordinary U.S. elections that have finally given millions of people hope once again...



...the Code Pink antiwar group assembled for a rally in front of San Francisco's Federal building to urge Nancy Pelosi to be militant about getting the troops out of Iraq.



They assembled a small version of the Quaker public art/protest piece that has been sprouting all over the country, involving boots with the names of dead American soldiers attached, along with every other kind of shoe to commemorate the Iraqis who have been killed since the United States invasion.



Medea Benjamin was doing lots of speaking and trying to rouse the crowd into chanting symplistic rhymes.



I complained about Medea's annoying, amplified voice to the Peace Vigil folk who were standing at their usual spot on the other end of the plaza, and their wise response was on the order of "Code Pink? We cut them a lot of slack because they have such energy!"



It's good Code Pink is out there because getting out of Iraq is not going to be quick or easy, but for the sake of just about every human in Iraq right now, the sooner the Americans are out of there, the better for everyone.

War and Peace 2

San Francisco's Veterans Day Parade was held on Saturday the 11th.



A group of old military guys stood on a reviewing stand across from City Hall on Polk Street...



...warmly greeting each contingent...



...including a large band, marchers and leapers from the Falun Gong cult.



There were also large Junior ROTC contingents from various high schools.



These are controversial groups in San Francisco for promoting the military to youth...



...and the programs have just been discontinued by the local school board.



The latter action strikes me as both short-sighted and racist...



...since it's mostly white middle-class folk protesting the ROTC programs...



...and non-gringo youth who are involved in the clubs.



To really change our militaristic culture, maybe the peace activists should go after George Lucas and his "Star Wars" movies and see if they can get them banned...



...since they foster an attitude that war is just one big video game with cool explosions.



People are always going to be fascinated by war and its attendant paraphernalia, and to deny that reality is as absurd as the Renaissance Fair gunmen from Novato above.



Plus, as pure symbolism, the discontinuation of the Junior ROTC is awful and is going to backfire among all the right-wing idealogues who want yet another stick to beat up San Francisco leftists.



It would make more sense to have veterans from groups like "Swords to Plowshares" speak to the teenagers since they come by their peace activism from personal experience.



The speaker on the reviewing stand read the signage from this group as they passed...



..."Bring the Troops Home from Iraq Now"...



...and his commentary afterwards was on the order of "Boy, don't we all wish for that?"



Frank Chiu was there with leftover Daly signage cheering on the marching groups...



...and the veterans who are simply concerned with survival.

War and Peace 3

Because of a small airplane convention on Saturday, the Palm Springs Veterans Day Parade was held on Sunday the 12th...



...along Palm Canyon Boulevard, and it was even larger than the San Francisco affair.



The Southern California desert has long been extremely militarized, with a huge Marine base in Twenty-Nine Palms next to Joshua Tree National Park.



There are also weapons testing ranges pockmarked throughout the entire region.



We watched the parade from the verandah of the big Mexican restaurant in Palm Springs called Las Casuelas...



...along with Heidi and Steve, who are old friends from Santa Barbara.



When jeeps drove down the parade route carrying Marines who had been wounded and received Purple Hearts, Heidi burst into tears.



She's the daughter of a Marine lifer and was born on the base in Camp Pendleton while her mother was reading "War and Peace."



"It's so sad," she said between tears.



Her husband Steve, meanwhile, had darted to the sidewalk to look at all the military hardware which completely thrilled him.



This was in spite of the fact that Steve is a Vietnam Veteran who has been on partial disability most of his adult life and has had psychological problems from his war experience ever since.



He's a peacenik who loves the trappings of the military, and he even had us watch a double bill of "The Great Escape" and "The Magnificent Seven" later on television that evening.



There were old Pearl Harbor survivors marching and riding down the street, the last American soldiers who were actually in a defensive rather than an offensive war.



Two groups decided to proclaim their exceptionalism...



...which seemed somewhat ridiculous.



Even in Republican-dominated, military worshiping Coachella Valley, however, the Iraq War is looked upon with horror and revulsion.



The peacenik groups were warmly received...



...as was the Vietnam veteran and local vacuum proprietor who lives his life in public as Elvis.

Shocktoberfest at the Hypnodrome

Underneath a freeway South of Market, behind a faux antique store, somewhere around 10th and Bryant Streets, there is a jewel box of a theatre called the Hypnodrome dedicated to the horror genre known as Grand Guignol (click here for their website).



A theatre group calling itself The Thrillpeddlers (click here for their website) has been staging an annual show at the theatre for the last three years called "Shocktoberfest" that plays for about a month around the Halloween season. For this year's edition my friend Bill Selby had adapted a 1916 French play from the original Grand Guignol theatre in Paris by Andre de Lorde called "Laboratory of Hallucinations." (All of the press photos in this entry, by the way, were shot by David Allen and you can find more of his fine work by clicking here.)



The evening began with an original curtain-raiser by Rob Keefe called "First Day," and it was genuinely funny, partly because the horror and gore was kept at bay.



This was not true of Mr. Keefe's next original short play, "The Taxidermist's Revenge" which involved throat-slitting, blood-draining and embalming infusions gone awry. Since there are less than 100 seats in the tiny theatre and the actors are often only a few feet away from the audience, the gory effects were visceral to say the least. In other words, you could smell the stage blood.



The piece was enlivened by the performance of Russell Blackwood, one of the Thrillpeddlers founders, in the role of the mad taxidermist who fancies himself an artist. Blackwood gave a wonderfully over-the-top performance that was reminiscent of Vincent Price at his most queeny and Dr. Phibes. The way he rolled his r's on "Rodin! Rodin! Rodin! That's all anybody wants to talk about!" was worth the price of admission.



The main course on the program, "Laboratory of Hallucinations," seemed to be a French adultery play on the island of Corsica involving a witch (above) and a mad scientist, but it turned out to be a tale of insane sexual repression.



It was genuinely disturbing.



The mix of professional and amateur actors were surprisingly good, delivering the old-fashioned dialogue without camping it up...



...and they were certainly game for involving themselves in truly horrific special effects.



The actress above even held her breath while being drowned in a basin of blood from her dead and tortured brother that also happened to have his brain floating about.



I was sitting in the front row of the theatre with my friend Kimo, who was enjoying himself thoroughly until they took a drill bit to somebody's head before taking out his brain. It reminded him of the horrifying stories trickling out of Iraq about scores of bodies found everyday in Baghdad with signs of being tortured by drill bits. On an interesting website devoted to the Grand Guignol theatre in Paris (click here), which opened in 1897 and closed in 1962, there was a quote that echoed the unease felt by Kimo and myself:

"In an interview conducted immediately after the Grand-Guignol closed in 1962, Charles Nonon, its last director, explained: "We could never compete with Buchenwald. Before the war, everyone believed that what happened on stage was purely imaginary; now we know that these things--and worse--are possible."



Still, if horror entertainment is your cup of tea, this particular group and theatre are doing some amazing work. Their next show will be around Valentine's Day where I assume ripped-out hearts will be on the menu. As the motto states on their website, "Sissies Stay Home!"

San Francisco Election Night

District 6 Supervisor Chris Daly just survived one of the wilder re-election campaigns on San Francisco record.



An unholy alliance of right-wing plutocrats like Don Fisher and Dianne Feinstein, along with the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, the San Francisco Police Officers Association, and both daily newspapers spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and used hundreds of gallons of ink trying to sway 13,000 voters.



As the eventually victorious Daly was saying to a television interviewer, “Wow. They threw everything they had at us and we still somehow managed to win.”



Daly gave credit where it was due, to a huge groundswell of volunteers whose numbers kept doubling every time he looked around.



He seemed honestly overwhelmed by the outpouring of support from so many people, many of them strangers.



Daly’s wife Sarah started off the speeches, and because of some combination of exhaustion, emotion, alcohol or rage over the vicious attacks on her husband, she started with, “I shouldn’t be doing this, but I’m going to give the fuck you speech.” And so she did. While not politically the smartest thing to do in the world, the usually sweet and demure Sarah began a chant of, “To the Golden Gate Restaurant Association who don’t want to pay their own workers a living wage, fuck you. To the San Francisco Police Officers’ Association who don’t even care about protecting the people they are paid to serve, fuck you.” And so it went, with the entire crowd joining in on the profane refrain.



After that performance, her husband with the fire-breathing reputation came onstage and sounded like a sweet, mild-mannered milquetoast. He gave a gracious speech and thanked his parents behind him who had flown in from somewhere for the last two weeks, along with his paid staff (“who were starting to worry about unemployment checks, to tell you the truth”) and he didn’t go on too long, partly because Sarah insisted everyone dance instead of speechify.



One of the great sights of the evening was Abdul, above, dancing about in sheer delirious happiness onstage. If you’ve ever watched Board of Supervisors meetings on Channel 26, Abdul is always the first speaker during public commentary and is as much a San Francisco institution as Frank Chiu.



This was easily the happiest election night party I have attended since the wild, spontaneous street party that erupted in the Castro District when Clinton briefly turned the page on the awful Reagan/Bush era.



There’s a sea change happening now in both local and national politics, and it’s happening not a moment too soon. However, just like the “Lord of the Rings” movies, the struggle has only just begun.

San Francisco Election Day

Hundreds of election poll workers descended on City Hall at six in the morning on Tuesday the 7th and the vast majority were very sleep-deprived.



Working an election is like a grueling version of jury duty with its outlandish range of people, from the old to the young, the smart to the simple, the sympathetic to the annoying.



The group I spent my morning with, waiting for an emergency assignment to a troubled precinct, was a trio of altogether delightful women in their fifties and sixties.They included the lovely native San Franciscan (Irish division) above, Nora the Hispanic Mission District Goddess, and Marilyn who had just arrived from New Orleans two weeks earlier to make a new start in San Francisco after losing everything in Katrina.



A huge collection of alternate clerks were soon dispatched to precincts all over the city as the polls opened at 7AM...



...leaving about fifty "inspectors" who had presumably been trained to jump into emergencies.



At first the election department employees only asked for volunteers, and I followed the military maxim to "never volunteer for anything."



At 11AM, I was finally asked to use my "great communicator skills" to help out at a precinct on Ellis Street in the Tenderloin. An Elections Department driver dropped me off next to a gentleman pissing on the sidewalk in front of the high-rise poor people's hotel whose lobby was hosting the precinct. The place was in utter disarray, with boxes and ballots strewn everywhere, none of the legal signage posted and an absent "inspector" who had gotten into a fight with his superior and then had to be removed by the police.



The insanity was compounded not only by the interesting looking residents who were hanging out on sofas and chairs around the small lobby, but by the large, elderly Ms. Pappas, one of the poll workers. She was sitting behind the Eagle voting machine and was yelling at voters in a thick Greek accent that "You do it WRONG!" whenever the machine would spit out an "overvoted" or "undervoted" message, which was quite often. She was being counseled not to do this by a young Russian man, who was an Election Department supervisor sent to this disaster zone for damage control.



Another "alternate inspector" had also been dispatched to the precinct from City Hall, and I told her, "Doris, take charge, the place is yours." We proceeded to restore some order for two smart, determined Asian high school students and the quatri-lingual Vietnamese clerk, Jade. Unfortunately, Miss Doris turned out to be a toxic combination of incompetence and bossy control freak, so after three hours of wanting to strangle her I bowed to everyone, told them they were fully staffed and doing a great job, and returned to City Hall.



At about 6PM, I was asked to go to a precinct in Bayview/Hunter's Point, the very dangerous (particularly for white strangers) neighborhood in Southeast San Francisco. I decided to be brave and got into a van that was being driven by a Hispanic teenager who had just gotten into an accident with the same van, which made it almost impossible to open the passenger door.



When it became clear that the young man was tired, agitated, a bad driver, and didn't really know where our destination was in Bayview, I ordered him to turn around and return me to City Hall. "I didn't feel safe in my task," I explained, and no further explanation was needed.



At the 8PM closing time, just when the dozen or so alternates in City Hall thought they might get to go home, most of us were dispatched to help various precincts in their closing procedures. I was driven to the basement of the Haight-Ashbury branch library on Page Street and helped the inspector, Nancy Kramer, with her tasks.



One of her adult clerks had gone to lunch and never come back and her other adult clerk was a classic Haight-Ashbury flake who decided she was tired and didn't feel like staying late. The saviors of the precinct were once again two high school girls who by law had to leave at 9PM.



Nancy was obviously a smart, capable lady but the combination of not eating all day and sleep deprivation had taken their toll, and her ability to think had just about vanished, as had mine. To add to the nightmarish quality, San Francisco closing procedures involve a grotesquely byzantine series of plastic bags, signed seals, arcane accounting, and dozens of picayune details.



Somehow, by 10PM, the two of us managed to get through the ordeal and sign off all the ballots to a deputy sheriff. It was time to finally find out what had actually happened on election day.

Voting Instructions

A few years back, after the dot-com crash and the post-9/11 tourism crash, when jobs in San Francisco of any variety were just about nonexistent, one of the few paying gigs left in town was working as an election clerk at a polling place.



My first experience was as an alternate clerk who was sent to a disaster zone in the Tenderloin district where a number of workers hadn't shown up, and the few who did were either drunk at 7AM or dealing with severe dementia. Matters weren't helped by the fact that two precinct polling places were put into opposite sides of the same old people's housing highrise which managed to confuse everyone, particularly the elderly residents themselves.



That was an election during the institutionally corrupt Willie Brown Jr.'s reign, when there was a new election director every year just to make sure things were as disorganized and ripe for malfeasance as possible, and this particular election they ran out of ballots at many polling places, possibly because one of our demented workers managed to spoil at least 300 ballots all on her very own.



My polling place adventures have become less extreme since then, partly because conditions in the Department of Elections have improved since the crooked Mr. Brown departed from office, but it still felt a bit like watching sausage made every election. It's an imperfect business at best.



This year I attended a four-hour course in order to be an alternate "Inspector," which is not what it sounds like. The Inspector is the head person at each precinct who is supposed to be there from the beginning (at 6AM) to the end (usually around 10PM) running the polling place. What "alternate" means is that I'm going to City Hall at six tomorrow morning, where I will probably be sent to some hellhole where the Inspector has shown up drunk, doped or crazy, or simply hasn't shown up at all. I'll be sure to document every strange moment.



In San Francisco, you can vote in the basement of City Hall for a couple of weeks preceding the election, so go today if you want to miss out on the madness tomorrow.

As for the issues and candidates, I'd encourage you to read h. brown's informed and hilarious recommendations (click here for candidates and here for propositions) that includes phrases like:

Board of Equalization, District 1

Hey, I don’t even know what the hell the ‘Board of Equalization’ does. Sometimes they send me threatening bills accusing me of not paying taxes on my extensive oil and gas holdings but other than that, they’re a complete mystery to me.

The Democratic candidate isn’t a mystery. She’s a shill for the local SF Downtown cabal and has been for many years. The Republican is, well, a Republican. Sooo, since I’ve decided that the task of the Board of Equalization is to keep things unequal on the side of the rich, I’m endorsing Libertarian, Kennita Watson in an attempt to instill some chaos. That, and there’s no Green candidate.

Also, check out Mike Lin's Potrero Hill neighborhood blog (click here) which has a heartfelt plea on the San Francisco School Board races.

Finally, if you live in District Six, please vote to re-elect Supervisor Chris Daly. While working on this blog over the last year, I've met him in person a number of times, and the fire-breathing monster that he is portrayed as by the local mainstream media is pure crap. He's a good, charming person, and smart as a whip. His major opponent, Rob Black, who used to work for the loathsome Supervisor Michela Piers-Alioto, has run one of the most disgusting campaigns seen in this city, fueled by heaps of cash from some of the most reactionary figures in San Francisco. Black has even resorted to paying the homeless to pretend to be "Volunteers for Black" holding up signage around town (click here for the photo and story on SFist).

So, I'll see you at the election night parties.

Native Indian Cultural Event

On the same rainy Thursday as the die-in at the Federal building, the politically well-connected Friendship House Association of American Indians (click here for the website)...



...assembled four tipis (their spelling)...



...around Civic Center Plaza, along with dozens of tented booths.



It was for the second annual "Native Indian Cultural Event" (click here to see coverage of last year's much more modest "event")...



...and unfortunately it was a complete washout.



The rain and howling winds didn't stop the dancers, however...



...or the live singers and drummers sitting underneath a tent.



Mayor Gavin Newsom was slated to attend the event...



...though I'm not sure he actually showed up and subjected his hair gel to the elements.



Better luck next year, Native Indians.

Die-In at the Federal Building

The five-year-old peace vigil in front of San Francisco's Federal Building continued its weekly sojourn at noon on Thursday...



...and it was a cold, wet hour for the participants.



When I asked the vigil organizer, Markley Morris, if we were going to lunch afterwards at a nearby Vietnamese restaurant, he replied, "Oh no, today we're going to get arrested."



It seemed that Markley was part of another peace group that was planning to have a "die-in."



The details of how it was going to be accomplished were still being decided at the last minute, whether to lay down inside or outside, who was to participate and who were there as watchers.



Somebody had also contacted quite a few media outlets, and a few television cameramen showed up to collect footage of the "die-in."



One of the Quaker peace vigil activists confessed to me that she thought the timing for this was terrible, with the election coming up next Tuesday, and Congresswoman Pelosi already being demonized across the country as the symbol of far-left "San Francisco Values."



Though I agreed with her to a certain extent, in truth it doesn't matter. Pelosi is as corrupt, venal and warmongering as anybody on the Republican side of the aisle, a fact that was only reinforced by a letter recently sent by her office to me. The missive was in response to a hand-delivered letter from Markley and myself expressing concern about all the saber-rattling over Iran and the rumors swirling about that the United States was thinking about using nuclear weapons against that country. (Click here to see our excellent adventure delivering that letter to Pelosi's office last April.)



The following was her response:

"Thank you for contacting me to express your support for H Con Res 398, which expresses the concern of Congress over Iran's development of the means to produce nuclear weapons. I appreciate hearing from you, and I agree with you."

"H Con Res 398, introduced by Representative Henry Hyde (R-IL), calls for Iran to honor its stated commitments to grant International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors unrestricted access to nuclear sites. It also urges the President and the international community to take all appropriate measures to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear devices."

"Iran armed with nuclear weapons is an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States and our allies in the region. It is critical that we work with our allies to resolve these issues and lead a global effort to prevent Iran from obtaining technology necessary to build nuclear weapons."

In response, I'd just like to say to Congresswoman Clueless and her even more clueless staff that "I don't agree with you." My clearly stated fears are about the United States attacking Iran with nuclear weapons, a serious possibility, not Iran attacking the United States or its allies (read Israel) which at present is not a serious possibility.



This Tuesday, if you're a San Francisco voter, please join me in voting for Pelosi's Green Party opponent, Krissy Keefer. This awful congresswoman does not deserve anybody's support.



I didn't stick around for the actual arrests at the "die-in" so I will quote from an account that Markley sent via email.

"The first-Thursday monthly die-in was a success. Those committing civil disobedience lay down in front of the plaza door of the Federal Building. We covered ourselves with sheets. Some of those standing vigil read names of the U.S. and Iraqi dead. Elizabeth Boardman was dressed in black, veiled, carrying a child-like bundle, wailing and keening. I thought all of this was effective and moving."

"We lay there perhaps 20 minutes. We were read a warning three times and then taken into custody. Instead of plastic handcuffs our hands were tied behind our backs with white shoestring-like cords and we were walked into the Federal Building. Six of us were arrested."

"At the die-in last year, those arrested outside were arrested by city police but today the jurisdiction was federal police. The federal police were pleasant and treated us well. One policeman told us that the dozen or so federal police involved in our arrest had all done military service in Iraq. One told about being sent to New Orleans for a month following Katrina."

"We were charged with "Failure to Comply with Lawful Orders of a Federal Police Officer." If we choose not to pay our $125 fine - I believe all of us are refusing to pay - we will be sent a court date in Magistrate's Court right there in the Federal Building. This happened last year and some of the defendants had charges dropped because the arresting officer had failed to fill in one of the boxes on the Violation Notice."

"Today they checked the notices diligently. One option, rather than paying a fine, is to do community service for a registered non-profit such as AFSC. When my info was being taken I declined to give my SSN. The officer said he couldn't release me unless I gave it. I was damp enough that I decided not to fight it. He showed me that the portion of the Violation Notice with this info was blacked out on all copies but the original, so I felt better about giving it."

"So this is the first die-in. The up side of only six being arrested is that it makes it easier to double or triple our number on the first Thursday next month, December 7, Pearl Harbor Day."

Bill Clinton Comes to Civic Center

On Wednesday the 1st at 5PM, a rally was held in San Francisco's Civic Center urging the passage of California State Proposition 87, which is basically a call for a windfall profits tax on oil companies to fund programs for alternate fuels.



A couple of thousand people showed up in the hopes of seeing the rock star of Democratic politics, former president Bill Clinton, who has been stumping for the proposition.



An emcee announced all the excitement that was to ensue, including performances by famous musicians and speeches from famous politicians.



Any excitement in the crowd was soon deflated by the first speaker, Phil Ting, who is running for re-election as Assessor of San Francisco.



Not only did he have an annoying, squeaky voice on the microphone, but he droned on incomprehensibly about how this was an issue that was especially meaningful to minorities and "people of color."



The very smart and amusing group of spectators surrounding me all looked at each other with a "what the hell" gesture since air pollution from burning fossil fuels is a non-racial issue if ever there was one.



Stephan Jenkins, the lead singer for the "alternative" rock band Third Eye Blind was next onstage and his acoustic performance was simply dreadful with each dull song sounding the same. The only political commentary from him was the repeated statement, "We must be doing something right with this proposition because the oil companies have spent one hundred billion dollars to defeat it." Being an international rock star seems to have fostered a confusion between the amounts "million" and "billion."



When Jenkins asked the crowd what they wanted to hear next, after about five songs had already been played to little effect, the Croatian law student above yelled, "Silence!"



Next up was San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, who uttered inanities...



...that were amusingly reflected by the sign language interpreter.



Finally, he left the stage after introducing the singer Bonnie Raitt.



Now this was a professional, who knew how to check out sound balances with the tech guys while keeping up an amusing musical commentary for the crowd...



...and then pitching into an inspired account of Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth."



After two songs, she exited and various dignitaries took the stage to tell us that Clinton was a little late, but he was on his way.



We were then subjected to a stupid speech by San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, who repeated the trope that this was an issue that was especially important for "people of color," and then we listened to "Desperate Housewives" co-star Eva Longoria give an impassioned speech in English and Spanish about why we should vote Yes on Proposition 87.



"Is Gavin having sex with her too?" somebody in the crowd wanted to know.



Finally, a good hour late, The Big Dog Clinton himself showed up...



...and the media swarm went into overdrive.



Clinton is an extraordinary speaker, who talked about hope and the future and how not to fear that future. His advocacy of Proposition 87 mixed quotations from Machiavelli and down-home Arkansas jokes in a manner that was direct, simple, funny and smart.



By the end of the twenty-minute speech the entire audience was inspired and ready for action in a way that none of the previous speakers, with the exception of Bonnie Raitt, could summon. It made us all want to vote for him again.



Plus, he waded into the crowd at the end, starting off at the area which I had just foolishly vacated in order to miss the crush of people exiting. "Clinton came right up to us and shook our hands," my speech-listening compatriots told me on the plaza afterwards. "It was great."