Ties to Peace

A temporary war memorial consisting of approximately 3,000 ties was draped over the French sycamores in San Francisco's Civic Center on Saturday the 30th, and it will remain for the duration of the New Year's weekend.



There were a number of veterans' groups involved in the small event...



...but the main impetus seemed to be from American Legion Post 448...



...which is a local gay group named after Alexander Hamilton (click here for their website).



At 4PM somebody started reading the names of the 3,000 soldiers who have been killed in Iraq, accompanied by a small gong after a certain number of names were read.



It was heartening to see that the organizers acknowledged not only the American soldiers lost, but the beleaguered civilian populations of Afghanistan and Iraq, which the United States have been murdering for the last five years.



In a San Luis Obispo newspaper article a couple of days ago entitled "The Toll In Iraq," they listed 2,992 American soldiers dead, 397 coalition soldiers dead, and an ureliable number of thousands of United States soldiers wounded. Nowhere was the loss of at least half a million Iraqi lives even mentioned.



The best and bravest Western reporter in Iraq from day one has been Patrick Cockburn, writing mostly for The Independent in England, and often reprinted on his brother Alexander's Counterpunch website. He just wrote a clear-eyed obituary of Saddam Hussein and the future of Iraq which is highly recommended even though it's an honestly bleak picture (click here).



If the world were fair, George Bush (both of them), Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney would all be swinging at the end of the same noose as Saddam Hussein, since they've all been fellow gangsters responsible for the premature deaths of millions, but we don't live in a world that is fair.



Instead, in this country we are currently subjected to a televised state funeral fit for a Caesar, except that it is for the mendacious mediocrity that was Gerald Ford. Not only did he empower Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush Senior in the first place, but the man started his career as a cover-up artist on the Warren Commission. On my friend Willie's blog, he calls Ford "a good soldier in the army of evil" (click here for the post).



Also reporting on this event and a later demonstration is Jan over at the happening-here blog (click here), and Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque (click here) has an interesting discussion of Ford's role in the slaughter of 200,000 people in East Timor along with a couple of heady rants about Saddam Hussein's gangland execution and its coverage in New York's version of Pravda.

Dreamgirls in Cathedral City

For a Christmas afternoon treat, we drove to a bizarre mall in Cathedral City that contained the Coachella Valley's only Imax Theatre...



...along with stores, restaurants, housing...



...not to mention City Hall and the Police Department.



This blog's namesake signage turns out to be over a faux-Moorish/Spanish retail and entertainment complex...



...in the middle of the desert.



The complex was built in 1998 and is some weird new civic planning mutation where the Police Station looked like a cute set out of "Veronica Mars.




The entire complex is dominated by a multiplex movie theatre called the Mary Pickford, which is where we were headed to see the opening day of "Dreamgirls."



The movie was a huge disappointment, particularly after all the hype asserting that the filmmakers hadn't screwed up the material, but had delivered some kind of masterpiece.



The original Broadway musical was always a troubled show, partly because everyone in the production was taking way too much cocaine (that's what people were doing in those days), and Jennifer Holliday identified with the role of Effie White a little too closely. She was reportedly the poster child for an insecure, screwed-up, insane diva who made every performance a backstage drama that was more outrageous than her "And I'm Telling You's" signature aria.



I had the great good fortune to see the show in its original Michael Bennett staging, after the original cast flamed out in Los Angeles just after leaving Broadway. The production was recast and played for a number of months at the Golden Gate Theatre in San Francisco, and to this day it's still one of the handful of great theatrical experiences of my life.



The musical is written as an ensemble piece for six to eight characters and without Ms. Holliday swallowing the show whole, it was possible to see how brilliantly the piece had been put together. The book and lyrics were by Tom Eyen, an old gay avant-garde playwright from the 1960s/1970s being given his first (and last) Broadway gig. The music was by Henry Krieger who wrote a perfectly serviceable score that is in a Broadway showtune style circa 1980s (think Marvin Hamlisch's "A Chorus Line") but that also is fairly clever in its Motown pastiches, and above all allows for improvisation by the singing actors, which tends to characterize great black pop music. The staging by Michael Bennett was probably the most extraordinary of his career, a mixture of the minimalist (no set other than 2 twirling lucite towers filled with stage lights) and the maximalist (huge, simple props whisking on and off the stage like a dream).



The filmmaker should be commended for the casting which is strong from top to bottom, though Eddie Murphy is getting overpraised. James Thunder Early is one of the most interesting characters in "Dreamgirls," and can hijack a performance easily. The character is an unlikely, but fascinating version, of wild man James Brown who is being groomed to be a smooth Nat King Cole crooner for Jewish casino showrooms. His breakdowns, where the "soul" man can't be suppressed, are the heart of the musical.



So is Effie, the fictional mixture of the Supremes' Flo Ballard and the self-destructive, still-surviving Etta James, and her usurpation by the prettier, "whiter" Deena/Diana Ross. I just wish somebody besides the writer/director Bill Condon had been put in charge of the project. Moving a camera in a 360 degree circle while somebody is trying to sing a musical number is mildly interesting the first time, annoying the second, and excruciating the fourteenth iteration. The musical direction is also awful, making everything sound alike, when the entire point of the score is the black/white/rough/smooth contrasts and how they work in both art and the public marketplace. So, nice try, Mr. Condon, you didn't fuck it up egregiously like the movie version of "A Chorus Line" but I'm afraid you didn't do the material justice.

Tahquitz Canyon Winter Solstice

Tahquitz Canyon lies just off the main drag of Palm Springs in the San Jacinto Mountains.



The canyon is under the jurisdiction of the very wealthy Agua Caliente tribe of the Cahuilla Indians...



...who closed it down to visitors in the late 1960s after thousands of hippies congregated there after a rock concert.



This prohibition didn't stop people from using the canyon as a homeless shelter, party spot or a make-out location...



...and over the next 30 years the graffiti and trash mounted up into an unsightly mess.



Finally, in the late 1990s, the tribe took some of its local casino earnings and hired naturalists to clean up the canyon...



...which they opened to visitors for paid guided tours in 2000.



I went on the two-mile hike in 2001 and was astonished by the beauty of the place...



...but the "interpretive" tour by the "Native Tribal" ranger, a young blonde man from Minnesota, was "Disneyesque" as one writer put it at trails.com, filled with groan-inducing puns interspersed with the natural history.



Hoping that we would snag a different guide five years later, a trio of us were delighted to find that the policy had changed in the intervening years...



...and that we were free to take the two-mile hike up the canyon unaccompanied...



...to a waterfall that was featured in the 1937 movie version of "Lost Horizon."



The canyon is named after a powerful Cahuilla Indian shaman ("witch doctor") who supposedly went bad and who continues to harvest the souls of the unwitting.



It seems that the energy is bad enough from this spirit that some Cahuilla Indians refuse to enter the place.



It's strange that one of the major streets in Palm Springs is named after a villain, Tahquitz...



...but it's oddly consonant with the naming of other major boulevards in the Coachella Valley like Bob Hope Drive, Frank Sinatra Drive, and the Gene Autry Trail.



My friend Willie remarked that the hike felt like returning to the womb and going up the birth canal, and the metaphor seemed apt.



There are also legends concerning earthquakes and how a roaring can be heard at the mouth of the canyon before a major temblor begins.



Small quakes have been shaking with some frequency lately in both the San Francisco Bay Area and the Coachella Valley, where there was a 4.1 last night on the 23rd.



Maybe the evil shaman Tahquitz can warn us, possibly by appearing as a burning bush (the above image was not Photoshopped by the way).

Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal has just written a slim memoir covering the second half of his life called "Point to Point Navigation," and buying a copy at the Peppertree Bookstore in Palm Springs gained one an invitation to an interview and a book signing with him. The event was held on a freezing cold Wednesday evening at a local arthouse movie miniplex called the Camelot that has a full bar in its mezzanine, and the audience was mostly elderly gay men.



Vidal arrived for the first visit of his life to Palm Springs in a wheelchair, either from a recent "titanium" knee operation or from diabetes complications.



In any case, the 81-year-old author was looking frail and beat-up, though his brain was as sharp as ever.



He wasn't helped by an upside-down microphone, or a bad interviewer in the person of George Englund, an old producer/director of crappy 1960s movies like "The Ugly American" and "The Shoes of the Fisherman."



The memoir is mostly a rumination on death, including those of his beloved aviation pioneer father Gene Vidal and Howard Austen, who was literally Gore's "domestic partner" since they lived together for 50 years while having separate sexual lives.



The interviewer George Englund kept trying to probe into Vidal's secret heartbreak over living with an alcoholic mother who married a succession of rich and/or famous men, but Gore wasn't having any of it. He referred to his recent move from Italy to the Hollywood Hills to finish out the "Cedar Sinai Hospital period" of his life. "It's only in Los Angeles, I've noticed, that you can hear ninety year old women whining about the mistreatment they received at the hands of their parents. Ninety years old!"



Englund didn't get the hint, and continued, "how did it really make you feel being a stepchild in all those families?" to which Vidal replied, "well, it was an easy way to acquire a lot of interesting relatives quickly." Englund pushed on, "but how were you treated by your stepfathers?" and Vidal replied, "They treated me with deference and distance as they could see I had very sharp teeth."



The memoir indulges in gossip about everyone from Garbo to Frederico Fellini to the assassins of JFK, and there's a few last-minute score settlings with the late Randy Shilts of the "San Francisco Chronicle" and Fred Kaplan who recently wrote a bad and inaccurate biography of Vidal.



However, there is not an ounce of self-pity or bitterness in the man and there never has been. It was an honor to see him in person again before he moves "graciously, I hope, toward the door marked Exit."

Roy Lichtenstein and The Donor Wall

The December 2006 issue of "Palm Springs Life" magazine has an article entitled "How to Buy Art" that contains "Tips from The Experts."



One tip is to "Get your interior designer onboard," says Alec Longmuir, director of Buschlen Mowatt Galleries. "If you are seeking decoration and the value of the artwork is on how it matches your upholstery, a good designer will help you. If your tastes are more serious, there are designers who understand fine art and have strong alliances with good dealers."



These words sprang to mind at the Palm Springs Art Museum (click here for their website), which is currently hosting a godawful show devoted to the Roy Lichtenstein print collection of a wealthy Portland, Oregon real estate development mogul named Jordan D. Schnitzer.



Lichtenstein (1923-1997) earned his way honestly into the art history books with his 1960s Pop Art blow-ups of (other people's) cartoon artworks (click here for his foundation website).



His brash moment in the art historical sun, however, turned into a repetitive, mannered style that looks like some ungodly combination of Peter Max and Andy Warhol over the next 40 years, with expensive 300-edition prints for people who wouldn't think of buying art without their interior designer onboard.



Or as the artist himself is quoted above one of his dumber large pieces, "I guess I like the activity of deciding to do a group of prints. I don't particularly like the activity of doing one print. It just interrupts my focus."



God knows, one wouldn't want Roy to lose his focus, but in truth, it was all about how much money the market would bear.



At the entrance to the exhibit in the front lobby of the museum, there is a large, beautiful stone wall that was covered with workmen on Wednesday.



It seems that a nearby wall with a listing of donors' names was not considered to be prominent enough.



The solution is to cover the beautiful old stone wall that dates from the building's incarnation as a natural science museum with some monstrosity spelling out the names of local philanthropists who have their tax accountant onboard when it comes to buying art.



Downstairs there was another show featuring second-rate art, but at least it was sincere in its badness....



The show, which sprawled all over the basement, was the 12th annual "Juried Exhibition" of Art Council members.



The results were being sold off with "at least 30% of the proceeds" to go directly to the museum.



There were awards given in various categories, and the above watercolor by Suzanne Blau Greenberg was given "Best in Show."



I didn't agree with that choice or Melva Head's "Variations of Klimt" receiving "First Prize"...



...since my favorite piece by far was the large painting above by Ron Meyers with a fabulous title, "Dyke With a Pearl Earring."

Mountain Lion Oasis

Driving east from Palm Springs on Ramon Road, you pass through the mostly Mexican town of Cathedral City followed by a small village adjoining a country club called Thousand Palms.



Just past the town are the Indio Hills along with a huge, free-of-charge wilderness park called the Coachella Valley Preserve.



There is a cute little Visitors' Center at the Thousand Palms oasis...



...that features terrifying signage for cowards like myself...



...along with tips for surviving a mountain lion attack.



The McCallum trail starts off through the Thousand Palms oasis...



...with its shaggy Desert Fan Palms...



...rising out of an ancient bog...



...created by the San Andreas fault.



We wandered further along the trail, directly above the fault line...



...passing large animal droppings which I feared belonged to mountain lions ready to attack.



A mile further is the McCallum Grove...



...which rests around a pond...



...teeming with plant life...



...and animal life, too, though I didn't want to think about that.



The place felt like the Sequoia National Forest of Date Fan Palms...



...with its corresponding holiness.



We drove back west to Palm Springs...



...with Mount San Jacinto looking more and more like the Coachella Valley's version of Mount Fuji.

Zombie Santas vs. Desert Santas

San Francisco celebrates the holiday season in many charming ways from zombie Santas...



...to Santarchy events...



...to Mister Leather Santa (above)...



...to major gay bar decorations.



Palm Springs, on the other hand, has holiday signage on banners along Palm Canyon Drive downtown...



...that includes a cocktail-around-the-pool-Santa.



The banners are created from original art created by local children for an annual competition.



Whoever has the signage concession for Palm Canyon Drive has to be making a small fortune because they change almost every week, but these children's art banners are my favorites so far.



It would be lovely if San Francisco could institute a similar program for their own children and downtown shoppers.



It's also wonderful seeing a dark-skinned Santa, drawn not from political correctness so much as mirroring a young artist's reality.

Escape from The People Mover

Transporting oneself from Civic Center to the San Francisco Airport...



...has become easy and inexpensive thanks to the new BART line that extends past Daly City to Millbrae and the airport.



Of course, the new line is a disaster in terms of ridership because the urban planners somehow didn't bother wondering if people would change their commuting habits, even though the northern Peninsula was already being well served by the buses of SamTrans and the commuter trains of CalTrain...



...not to mention Highways 101 and 280.



The original plan was to have BART stop a couple of miles to the west of the airport and then have people transported by "people movers" to the actual terminals, but after enough uproar the plans were changed so that the BART train actually pulls into a station just off the new International Terminal.



The traveler is then supposed to take the AirTrain people mover to the other terminals for domestic travel.



However, you should not, and I repeat NOT, take the billion-dollar AirTrain because getting from one of its stations to the actual terminal usually involves elevators, stairs, escalators and a ridiculous trip to the basement garage.



Instead, if you're going to Terminal 3, which houses United and American Airlines, continue walking gaily forward and follow the signage down various corridors until you finish the short trip.



If you are going to Terminal 1, the following are instructions for a fifteen-minute walk that will get you there without undue hardship.



First, walk diagonally past all the empty ticket counters in the useless, multi-biillion dollar International Terminal, which opened sometime around 2001 when foreign tourists decided the United States wasn't looking all that attractive as a destination anymore.



The terminal was never necessary in the first place because there aren't enough runways to expand capacity, and the ecologically minded Bay Area was never going to fall in line with Mayor Willie Brown, Jr.'s egregious plans to fill in a section of San Francisco Bay for a few new runways. His point man on the landfill project, by the way, was his legislative hatchet man with the hippy-dippy name Stuart Sunshine.



The saddest aspect is that the recent incarnation of San Francisco International Airport was just about a perfect little airport, with its three contiguous terminals along an arc and easy driving entrances and exits. Now it's an overbuilt, overdesigned mess that is a monument to graft.



"Mo" Bernstein was the Airport Commission President for decades but he died in 1991, when the post was filled by one of the more unsavory characters in San Francisco, Larry Mazzola, whose multigenerational family dynasty gains its power from the Plumbers and Pipefitters Union which he leads. That's the same union that was recently charged by the federal government for fraud after they siphoned off millions of dollars of pension money to their casino operation at Konocti Harbor in Clear Lake. It's also the same union that is trying to tear down its neighboring Civic Center Hotel on Market Street because it despises poor people and wants to put up luxury condos in place of the SRO hotel.



But enough nattering about San Francisco's casual corruption, you need to know the secret path to Terminal 1. Cross the empty terminal diagonally until you're following a back corridor with a San Francisco MOMA store.



When you smell the burnt coffee at the Emporio Rulli cafe, hang a left.



Look for the signage that directs you to "Domestic Terminals."



Take a long escalator ride...



...to a lonely corridor...



...until you hit Peet's Coffee, which means you're finally in Terminal 1...



...which is almost as empty as the International Terminal.



There is signage on the walls that the AirTrain people mover station "is Getting Closer!" in 2007...



...probably after another billion dollars of public funds have gone down a very corrupt drain.

Everybody's Talking

Cell phone use in public has become so acceptable that these two Pacific Heights ladies lunching on a rainy Tuesday afternoon on Fillmore Street didn't even bother talking to each other. Instead, they jabbered away on their phones next to us for a good hour.



If you want to hear other people's phone conversations, another good place is the 47 Van Ness bus line, which seems to have more lunatics per capita than any other public conveyance in San Francisco.



Winning the December award for most self-absorbed public monologue is the young woman below who let the entire front of the bus know all know about her creative funk.



"I have to do another painting for Independent Study, and I just don't know how I can, since I'm completely wrung out creatively," she was saying. I wanted to reply, "we all know the feeling, dear, now take that phone out from your ear, sit down, shut up, and meditate."

12th Other Minds Music Festival Part 2

The third and final concert of the Other Minds Music Festival was a Sunday matinee, and was probably the most interesting of the series.



Though I'm not a fan of lecturers telling what to listen for in a piece of music, nor panel discussions by composers trying to explain what their music is about, I had forgotten that the festival organizer Charles Amirkhanian used to be a KPFA radio host and that he is a superb interviewer, asking interesting questions with a grounding in dry humor.



The concert started off with a string quartet by the Canadian Ronald Bruce Smith (above, on the right) that he characterized as a mix of Ravel, Bill Evans and his own voice, and which he had written for the Del Sol String Quartet which was playing the piece. Though it was lovely, it still sounded a bit dry and academic, particularly next to the string quartet that followed by the great Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe (below, on the right).



The composer explained that his Quartet No. 16 ("one more and I'll be even with Beethoven, which is rather daunting") had a very explicit extra-musical program, being inspired by a book called "From Nothing to Zero." It's a collection of letters from mostly Muslim asylum seekers from countries like Afghanistan and Iraq who have been locked up for years in razor-wire detention camps in the Outback. Australia recently passed their twisted version of the Patriot Act called the Sedition Act, and several people wrote into newspapers after the quartet's premiere in Australia that Sculthorpe should be thrown into prison for Sedition. "Then there were letters following up asking whether the people who had applauded the quartet should be put into prison too," Sculthorpe added with a laugh.



The version heard at the Other Minds concert was the world premiere of a new version where an Aboriginal didgjeridu had been added to the score, with Stephen Kent playing the three differently tuned didjeridus in a virtuosic performance with the Del Sol String Quartet. Armirkhanian asked Sculthorpe how he could just add another instrument to a finished quartet, and the reply was that the piece had always moved with a low, resonant hum that tied it to the flat, Outback landscape and that the didjeridu fit his intention perfectly.



As it turned out, the didjeridu sounded completely organic, and the entire piece was indescribably beautiful. Amirkhanian, who tends to keep a poker face at these events, was blubbering with tears at the end of the performance.



At intermission, there was a special performance by a group of teenagers from Vacaville called VCS Radio Jazz from the Vacaville Christian Schools (click here for their interesting website).



Leave it to Amirkhanian to feature a Christian high school avant-garde music troupe in the atrium of the Jewish Community Center.



The group has been molded by a new music enthusiast named Ralph Martin (I believe that is him on the right in the photo above).



They were performing the World Premiere of their "Electrical Resonance Symphony" whose four movements were entitled "Alternating Current, Radio, The Ether, and Resonance" respectively.



It was astonishing both as a piece of music and as a performance, as the boys employed saxophones, trumpets, clarinets, guitar, bass, vintage microphones, radios, portable TVs, electric fans, laptops...



...not to mention two theremins, brilliantly played...



...and for the piece de resistance, a Tesla Coil that crackled away in awesome arcs for the final movement. The ghost of Tesla seems to be everywhere these days, in the dedication of this symphony, as the guiding spirit in Thomas Pynchon's new novel "Against The Day," and to ruminations about Free, Cheap Energy for All which Tesla had discovered and promised to the world before being thwarted by J.P. Morgan, Thomas Edison, and J. Edgar Hoover among many other villains. Click here for a YouTube video about the visionary which is fascinating.



The second half of the concert was devoted to a German duo called Moving Sounds, which consisted of Markus Stockhausen (son of the famous Karlheinz) on various trumpets and Tara Bouman on various styles of clarinet.



They played a series of short, meditative pieces that were surprisingly harmonic, and finished with an improvisation which they prefer to call "intuitive music" that was theatrical and moving, with Tara starting at the back of the auditorium slowly approaching Markus on stage as they "intuited" each other's presence. The fact that both of them are young, tall, gorgeous to look at, and with an undeniable stage presence helped bring the festival to a glamorous close.

12th Other Minds Music Festival Part 1

The most prestigious "new music" festival in San Francisco, Other Minds (click here for their website), has been installed for the weekend at the new Jewish Community Center at the corner of California and Presidio.



The organizer of the event is Charles Amirkhanian, a composer, former KPFA radio host, archivist, and all-around genius/provocateur who invites anywhere from six to a dozen composers from around the world every year to spend a private week at the sumptuous Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, followed by public concerts of their music.



Though the 450-seat hall wasn't full on either Friday or Saturday night, there was still quite an amazing turnout for a stormy holiday weekend with concerts featuring Modern Classical Music.



Amirkhanian likes to mix up the roster of composers not just by nationality but by age, mixing older established masters such as the Danish Per Norgard (pictured above)...



...with younger musicians, such as the Norwegian composer/vocalist Maja Ratkje, above on the right.



The first half of Friday's concert featured the Del Sol String Quartet performing with their usual virtuosity (click here for their website). They played a violin and piano duet by the Australian Peter Sculthorpe, and the recently composed Quartet No. 10 by Norgard. They were both lovely, almost traditional pieces, but the highlight for me was Maja Ratkje's "gagaku variations" for accordion and string quartet, partly because of the Norwegian accordion soloist Frode Haltli.



He not only looked like a young Peter Berlin, but he coaxed sounds out of what is considered a humble instrument that were almost unbelievable. At times, the accordion sounded as if an entire orchestra were playing a complex piece by Ligeti, but in truth it was only Frode.



I didn't stay for the second half of the concert, partly because of the weather, and partly because Other Minds concerts are notorious for going on much too long. A friend who did stay wrote:

"Too bad you missed the fire alarm that interrupted the Daniel David Feinsmith premiere of his "Elohim" quartet last night. I overheard someone say to David as we were waiting outside in the rain, "Well at least they got most of the way through the piece, right?" to which Mr. Feinsmith responded, "no, they're about 1/3 of the way through." It turns out we had only heard 2.5 of EIGHT!!! movements, of which "the last is the longest." It wasn't a bad piece, though; just a little long, and it felt longer because it was at the end of a long program that included a fire alarm."

Saturday evening's concert started with a three-movement a capella choral piece by Per Norgard called "Wie ein Kind" that was performed by a San Francisco chorus named Volti (click here for their website) that specializes in new music.



The middle movement was from a Rilke poem, and the two outer movements were from the schizophrenic Swiss artist Adolph Wolfli (1864-1930) who was Norgard's inspiration for a number of works in the 1980s. The final verse, as printed in the program, goes as follows:

"G'ganggali ging g'gangali g'gang
ga g'gang
g'gang g'g'g'g'g'gang g'gang
g'gang g'ganggali
g'gang galili ging g'g'g'g'g'gali ging
g'gung g'gung g' "

The piece was wonderful, as it turned out, and the performance by Volti was perfection. Please bring them back, Mr. Amirkhanian.



Special props to Lara Bruckmann above who sang beautifully and on pitch when called for and cackled/sang like a madwoman when that was also required.



This was followed by a series of pieces by Maja Ratkje which had been written for a Norwegian trio consisting of a saxophone, accordion, and double bass called POING, with vocal contributions and "found sounds" by the composer herself.



Though some of the music tried my patience...



...the performers themselves were extraordinary to watch and hear, and of course anything involving Frode Haltli is essential.

Bishop Arrested by Homeland Security

Atop San Francisco's Nob Hill, directly across from one of the old centers of municipal power, the Pacific Union Men's Club...



...stands another monument to community power, the 100-year-old Episcopalian Grace Cathedral.



After a couple of decades of being led by an amiable lackey to the wealthy, Bishop William Swing, the diocese just survived a controversial and contentious election of a new bishop this summer that threatened to tear the entire Episcopalian movement apart.



There were five candidates, and two of them were openly gay, which the conservative wing of the worldwide church abhorred. The choice settled finally on a relatively young cleric working in Alabama, the Rev. Marc Handley Andrus, who is white and heterosexual, which was seen as an appeasing gesture to the outside.



In reality, he was chosen simply because the local clergy in the Bay Area thought he was the best person for the job, who would actually pay attention to the work they were doing with their congregations. Their faith was rewarded on Thursday the 7th by the bold announcement that he wanted to lead a procession of the faithful from Nob Hill to the Federal Building in the Tenderloin to join the weekly peace vigil protesting the Iraq Invasion.



The long-standing cleric who actually runs Grace Cathedral, Dean Alan Jones (on the left, above, standing next to Bishop Andrus) "disagreed on tactics" with his new Bishop and offered the crowd of 200 a prayer on the front steps of the church but politely declined to be involved in the protest.



Bishop Andrus then offered a lovely speech about a bishop he had known who was one of the most adamant opponents of women being ordained in the church, but who eventually officiated personally over the ordination of his daughter. "Have you changed your mind, bishop?" he was asked, and in reply he said, "No, but I am acting from my heart."



Talking to Episcopalians on the route down the hill over the controversy, there were a variety of reactions to this rift, ranging from "it's good to be part of a church that allows for these kinds of disagreements" to "Dean Jones has always been a horse's ass."



The sight of an Episcopalian bishop with staff and full regalia marching through the Tenderloin was oddly surreal and wonderful.



The diocese had obtained a permit for use of the Federal Building plaza for the early afternoon...



...and the crowd was charming as it shivered slightly in the shaded expanse.



There was quite a bit of media there, including Steve Rubenstein of "The Chronicle" (on the right above, click here for his truncated story) and Jan Adams of the indispensable "happening-here" photoblog (on the left above, click here for her brilliant account of the event).



There were also lots of law enforcement men standing around...



...led by a Homeland Security guy puffing away on a cigarette the whole time who looked almost comically evil, as if he'd been hired to play the bad guy in a Steven Seagal movie.



The government also had undercover photographers taking pictures of every individual in the crowd, and they were not even remotely subtle in their subterfuge.



Bishop Marc, as he likes to be called, gave a short, sweet sermon that involved another disagreement with a more conservative colleague who had somehow mixed up the Old Testament of Vengeance with the New Testament of Mercy.



This was followed by a Eucharist conducted with army surplus canteens, which was a brilliant touch.



Markley Morris, the Quaker organizer of the weekly vigil on Thursdays in front of the Federal Building, gave a short speech on his horror at the entire phony "War on Terror" in the United States before receiving the host.



He then went to one of the doorways of the Federal Building and laid down on the ground, wrapping himself in a sheet as if it were a shroud.



He was soon joined by Bishop Andrus himself, who adjusted the cross around his neck so it wasn't splayed across the sidewalk.



Bishop Andrus soon decided that he was more comfortable sitting rather than laying, and he was joined individually by people who decided they had the courage to be arrested.



As a young man standing besides me stated, "I would love to join them but I can't. I'm in the Coast Guard and they'd kick me out."



This was an extraordinary act of courage by the new Bishop, one that should be emulated by the leaders of American clergy of all faiths everywhere, because unfortunately the newly elected Democratic majority in Washington, D.C. is just as much the War Party as their Republican counterparts.



If that seems hyperbolic, read the recent interview with Dennis Kucinich (click here) about how the Democratic caucus wants to throw even more money at a military solution to the Iraq War.



It's amazing that the majority of the American population, even after five years of steady propaganda by the elites running the current United States Empire, don't support the current Iraq Occupation on any level.



A polling organization called World Public Opinion has just released some startling findings which should light a fire under the backsides of a few politicians (click here for their site):

"A new poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org finds that three out of four Americans believe that in order to stabilize Iraq the United States should enter into talks with Iran and Syria, and eight in ten support an international conference on Iraq. A majority also opposes keeping U.S. forces in Iraq indefinitely and instead supports committing to a timetable for their withdrawal within two years or less."

Thank you, Bishop Andrus, for your leadership and welcome to San Francisco.

California Impressions

This week in San Francisco has been summer in December with spectacular northern light.



I went to the deYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park to see the Ruth Asawa retrospective, but it turned out to be quite awful, either because her art isn't aging very well or she was a second-rate hack in the first place or she hasn't been well-served by the curators of this show.



Kenneth Baker, the art critic in the "San Francisco Chronicle," wrote a sidestepping review where he tiptoed around the subject of Ms. Asawa's legacy, possibly because she is so beloved in San Francisco, by Society Queen Dede Wilsey and Mayor Newsom, among others. Baker wrote the following:

"But walk into the de Young's dramatically lighted presentation of Asawa's sculpture and a deflating impression of work locked into a period asserts itself irresistibly. We cannot help but see a kind of arrested lava lamp peristalsis in elaborately crafted hanging sculptures such as "Untitled (S. 250)" (c. 1955) and the late '60s "Untitled (S. 044), in which translucent globules interpenetrate."

Opening at the same time next to the Asawa exhibit was a show called "California Impressions," which consisted of thirty landscape paintings of California, mostly from 1880-1920, collected by a rich Marin County woman named Wendy Willrich.



When the local fine arts museums present a show based around a collector, it's usually in the expectation of a gift, either in cash or art or both.



Most of these shows tend to be provincial and pathetic, but Ms. Willrich's collection turns out to be the exception to the rule. It's wonderful.



Plus, she came by it honestly, after taking a "personally inspiring" class at the Oakland Museum, with its great collection of California art.



Starting with her first purchase at Butterfield's auction house in 1966, she made an annual purchase of beautiful and undervalued (because they were by little-known West Coast artists) paintings, and the deYoung show is the culmination.



The museum has produced a hardback catalogue of the collection that's only $25 which would be a perfect Christmas gift for anyone nostalgiac for California.



The show, and the walk through Golden Gate Park afterwards, just served as a reminder that this place really is an earthly paradise that hasn't quite yet been destroyed.



Though there are a few people and a number of animals in the paintings...



...there are no cars...



...the bane of California and the wider world.



I walked west and reached Ocean Beach...



...disturbing a seagull...



...on its way back to sea.

Putting Their Best Foot Forward

The San Francisco Opera has a young professionals training course called the Merola Opera Program, named after their first General Director Gaetano Merola. About 25 years ago, the company added what amounts to a graduate school for a dozen singers every year called the Adler Fellowship Program, where a wealthy patron basically supports a young singer for a couple of years.



Last night at the Opera House, there was a concert called "The Future is Now: Adler Fellows Gala Concert" where the students strutted their stuff in a selection of complete opera scenes that were bizarrely eclectic, ranging from a long chunk of Handel's "Alcina" to the murder scene in "Billy Budd." (But did we need Gordon Getty's "Plump Jack" AGAIN? I know he hands out a lot of money and everything, but really...)



They were accompanied by one of the great pit bands in the world, The San Francisco Opera Orchestra which was being conducted by its outgoing music director, Donald Runnicles. Stars of the evening in my completely biased, subjective opinion were Elza van den Heever in "Alcina" and Sean Panikkar in "La Boheme." Congratulations to everyone, though, and good luck in your hard, competitive artistic life.

Advent Sunday in the Hood 2

San Francisco Opera supernumeraries (non-singing extras, often carrying spears) have an annual Christmas party where "Hammy Awards" are given out for each production in the season, usually to somebody who unintentionally falls down a flight of stairs or otherwise calls attention to themselves in some fashion.



It seems that I received one of the awards for the last-minute substitution in the middle of this summer's "Madama Butterfly" run (click here if you missed the story), but didn't go to the party. This was rather like a Best Actress nominee who doesn't show up at the Oscars because she figures she doesn't have a chance, and then wins the whole enchilada. (If you're interested, you can read an account of the awards ceremony on the supernumerary website, "Spearhead News," by clicking here.)



During the Advent Sunday matinee of "Carmen," I went backstage to the opera house basement canteen and picked up the award with as much over-the-top appreciative hamminess as could be mustered in front of a large group of supernumeraries who were conducting a bake sale. The papparazzi went mad.



Then it was off to Civic Center Plaza, passing newsracks with nicely stenciled journalism brands that also included a well-done "9/11 Was An Inside Job" logo.



In the plaza itself, there was a diarist contemplating her life under the large, public Christmas tree...



...along with a cute young couple clumsily playing frisbee...



...and a scattering of hobos, as Beth Spotswood calls them, sleeping on the lawn.



Not only was it warm, but the light all day couldn't have been more exquisite.



The Civic Center farmers' market was thinning out at 3PM...



...and the vendors were starting to pack up their goods.



The Lone Star Saloon south of Market on Harrison Street...



was jammed for a beer bust...



...which was being presided over as usual by Avis the tarot reader.



Then it was on to a small jewel box of an Anglo-Catholic church on Fell Street between Franklin and Gough called Church of the Advent of Christ the King (click here for their website that includes a sampling of music)...



...where there was an Advent mass being conducted with an eight-member professional chorus singing polyphonal music by Palestrina, Benjamin Britten and other masters. At times, their soloist lines intertwined with the voices of the small congregation who were an extraordinarily in-tune group.



I stood next to Carol Schaffer, above, who had just finished being a Gypsy chorus girl all afternoon at the San Francisco Opera's "Carmen," and who was in absolutely superb voice.



Though I'm not much of a fan of High Episcopalian services and Christian dogma, through some combination of all the beers drunk at the Lone Star Saloon...



...plus the candles, incense, and extraordinary music bouncing polyphonally through the small, high-ceilinged church...



...there was a long moment when it was easy to see and feel God, not to mention Mother Mary and Baby Jesus too.

Advent Sunday in the Hood 1

Christmas has arrived in the Civic Center, and one of the earliest commercial exploitations of the season has been by the San Francisco Symphony, which is sponsoring "Christmas parties" for children at $32 a person.



The program presumably involves music, amongst the face-painting activities and the Henry Moore statue scrambling.



On Hayes Street nearby, the children's parties often repair for more treats...



...on the trendy shopping area between Franklin and Laguna...



...where a store called Scandinavian Details had a window display of Swedish stuffed toys called "Pee & Poo."



At Flipper's outdoor cafe, I met up with Kimo Crossman and James Chaffee, two notorious City Hall good-government gadflies who were enjoying a rare victory after the Rules Committee of the Board of Supervisors had voted last Thursday in their favor (click here to see a video stream of the complete meeting from the San Francisco government TV website).



The dispute was over the city's practice of taking every document, whether it was originally in Word, Excel or whatever software program, and converting it into Adobe PDF documents which were then printed out and handed over. This made for a ridiculous amount of work for city bureaucrats and it also left out a lot of data that is included in certain documents, such as formulas in Excel sheets for coming up with numbers, commentary by interested governmental parties on documents, and so on.



In any case, Gloria Young, the Clerk of the Board had gone to the City Attorney's office who told her that for confidentiality purposes nobody could have original files, which was disputed by commenter Joe Lynn at the meeting with the analogy that it was ridiculous for somebody to go upstream at a campground for a crap to then complain about the water being polluted at his campground when he returned. "Make sure you put all legally confidential information in separate documents, and you won't have a problem."



The commenters at the meeting were a formidable roster of the usual good-government gadflies who one doesn't want to piss off because they show up at meetings, come prepared, are articulate, and are generally relentless. Besides Joe Lynn, Kimo and James, they included Doug Comstock, Richard Knee, Allan Grossman, Marc Solomon and a half dozen others.



We then visited a store on Fell Street between Gough and Octavia that opened a year and a half ago (click here for their wonderful website and be sure to read the "Staff" section).



It's definitely the coolest place in the Hayes Valley...



...and I write that as someone who is completely uninterested in comic books or "graphic novels"...



...even after all the attempts to seduce me with their charms by my Portuguese illustrator friend, Pedro Murteira (click here to get to a website dedicated to his awesome work).



Their are groovy couches to lay around on and hang out...



...and a balcony where their are live artist demonstrations, bands, and fabulous Events.



When artists have an in-store appearance, they are asked to create an illustration on toilet seats with Sharpies, and it's quite a collection.



Check the place out.

Expatriate Russkis at the Symphony

The very famous Russian expatriate pianist and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy is in town this week conducting the San Francisco Symphony in an all-Russian program.



The first piece was a 15-minute United States premiere by another Russian expatriate, a 36-year-old named Victoria Borisova-Ollas who lives in Sweden. Called "The Kingdom of Silence," it was sort of a post-minimalist version of the modern Slavic mystics like Arvo Part and Henryk Gorecki, and it was altogether beautiful.



Unfortunately, both the beginning and the end of the piece were extremely quiet and delicate, which meant that it was difficult to ignore the cacophany of coughing audience members that seem to be so plentiful during the holiday season.



Also unfortunate was Joshua Kosman's review of the piece in the "San Francisco Chronicle" this morning where he wrote: "The opening and closing chapters are stretches of tinkly landscaping from a snow globe music box. In between, the orchestra gathers itself into big crescendos, then recedes, in neat alternation. None of it makes much of an impression."



Ignore him. It was a wonderful piece of music that I wanted to hear again immediately.



Following "The Kingdom of Silence" was Rachmaninoff's "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini," which the composer wrote in 1934 after he had moved to the United States.



Whether you know anything about classical music or not, you've heard "Variation 18" in the piece, one of the most voluptuous and overplayed tunes of the 20th century. In fact, its inclusion in the Reader's Digest Condensed Music 10-album set which belonged to my grandfather was one of my first doorways into classical music.



It was performed by a 27-year old Macedonian named Simon Trpceski with insane aplomb, making the virtuosic "Atlantic Crossings" of a couple of weeks ago look almost like child's play.



I had never heard it played live before and it was completely amusing.



After intermission was the San Francisco Symphony premiere of Tchaikovsky's Symphony #3, The "Polish," which is the unloved stepchild among his six symphonies.



It was easy to hear why, as the long piece meandered all over the place in five movements, ending with a finale so over-the-top that the audience roared rapturously at its final crescendo.



Still, it was fun to hear something new from an overplayed composer, and there were moments such as the fourth movement Scherzo that were amazing. There are $20 rush seats available for this evening's Friday concert at the box office, so if you're in the mood, do check it out.