Tab Hunter in The Castro

Noir City 5 continues through the week at the Castro Theatre, with last Sunday's program devoted to an early 1950s double bill starring Evelyn Keyes.



Miss Evelyn is a good girl who marries sailor Wendell Corey for three days before he's shipped off as a sailor where he disappears during the attack on Pearl Harbor. After taking on a new identity, he becomes king of the rackets in Honolulu.



11 years later, Evelyn goes searching for him, and even poses as a taxi girl in "Hell's Half Acre," where she dances with the Asian/Polynesian guys for fifty cents a dance.



The movie was fascinating, with poignant views of Waikiki beach pre-development and racial attitudes that were more nuanced than expected.



At intermission, there was a "special guest" who turned out to be none other than 1950s Teen Idol Tab Hunter, now 76.



Tab recently had his autobiography published, which was written with the assistance of Noir City host Eddie Muller, and they had become friends.



Tab is also neighbors with the 92-year-old Evelyn Keyes in Santa Barbara, where his "partner" visits daily and watches her old movies in a screening room with her. "Look at those tits," she reportedly says. "No wonder I was a star."



Eddie has written a book called "Dark City Dames" that includes a chapter on Evelyn Keyes, whose real life story and character is more outrageous than any film role she ever played.



Both Tab and Eddie were trying their best to be discreet about their old friend, but you could tell they were itching to tell a few stories. Finally, Eddie recounted how he would ask dumb questions during interviews with the old stars to get everyone comfortable, such as "What is your favorite word?" He related that one actress chose the word "harmony" and somebody else "poetry," but when Evelyn Keyes was asked the question, she answered without hesitation: "Cocksucker!"

Queen Beth in North Beach

Never having indulged in internet dating and/or sex, I still find it exciting and bewildering encountering people in the flesh who I have only known in the online world.



After being virtual pen pals for over a year with the smart, witty writer Beth Spotswood (click here for her blog), I finally met her on Saturday night.



The occasion was a celebration of Beth's 29th birthday at the Washington Square Bar and Grill, and the experience didn't disappoint.



Part of the fun was meeting the large cast of characters Beth has been writing about for the last couple of years...



...including her sweet roommate...



...along with her baby brother...



...and her best friend Zoe.



There were a few other bloggers at the event, including Sam Breach (above), who I think of as the Queen of the Food Blogs over at her magnificent "Becks and Posh" (click here), though she maintains that she doesn't covet that particular title.



Also present was Eve Batey (unpictured), who used to be the editor of SFist (click here) but who is now working for the San Francisco Chronicle's website, where Beth has just been hired for a weekly essay on their Culture Blog (click here for a sample). Eve's brilliant predecessor at SFist, Jackson West (above), also showed up for the party looking relaxed and charming.



Many of us drank way too much, but it was a young persons' party so it continued late into the night.



Even though Beth's would-be boyfriend, Mayor Gavin Newsom, was in Davos, Switzerland rather than getting hammered at the Tosca bar, we still made a pilgrimage there and continued worshiping at the altar of Queen Beth on the occasion of her birth.

Marsha Hunt at Noir City 5

With perfect timing, there was a light rainfall to slick down the streets for the fifth annual Film Noir Festival (click here for their website), returning to the Castro Theatre after a two-year exile.



Noir City 5 has received a huge amount of press attention in the last week, and probably the best article about the event was written by Max Goldberg in the San Francisco Bay Guardian (click here) detailing Eddie Muller, "The Czar of Noir," and his annual movie festival which seems to grow more ambitious every year.



A major part of the fun of this festival is the audience itself...



...which likes to dress up for the occasion.



The number of afficionados seems to get larger the further the original "Film Noir" period recedes (from approximately 1941-1959, with antecedents and "neonoir" successors all over the place).



The special guest for the evening was the 89-year-old actress Marsha Hunt, above.



Her movie career extends from 1935 (click here for the entire imdb.com filmography) to the early 1950s, when she ran afoul of the House Unamerican Activities Committee during the Red Scare because of her outspoken leftist beliefs and defense of her colleagues. After being blacklisted in the movies, all of her subsequent work was in television for the next forty years



There was a reception for fans and Marsha in the small mezzanine of the Castro Theatre, complete with the Marcus Shelby jazz trio, cocktails...



...and Miss Noir City 5, Ivory Madison (above), who posed as the femme fatale on this year's poster.



Marsha spent the entire time signing copies of a coffee-table book from 1993 that she wrote called "The Way We Wore: Styles of the 1930s and '40s and Our World Since Then" which according to Eddie Muller is one of the most brilliant, unclassifiable mixes of fashion, politics and philosophy every assembled (click here for the Amazon page where it gets five stars and is still a collectible).



"You don't have to be frumpy and uninterested in fashion just because you're interested in social justice," as Eddie put it during his onstage interview with Marsha between the two movies "Raw Deal" and "Kid Glove Killer."



Marsha not only looked supernaturally youthful for her age but her mind is still sharp and she's a graceful speaker with a streak of goodnatured humor.



"How did I get my start in Hollywood? How long do you have tonight, anyway? Hollywood has always been a very childlike place. Not childish, mind you, but childlike. For instance, if you give a child a plateful of food and tell them they can eat anything on the plate except for the spinach, then their immediate reaction will be to want the spinach more than anything. Well, some publicist friends of mine in New York talked me up in Hollywood, and then told everyone that I would never be available. In other words, I became the spinach, and everyone wanted me."



She had wonderful stories about the director Fred Zinnemann, whose first film as a director was "Kid Glove Killer," and Claire Trevor, her costar in "Raw Deal," and she seemed amused at how film noir, with its unredeemed characters going through their grim, fateful paces had become "such a cult, I guess you could call it."



The lady radiated such warmth and charm that you could believe it when she claimed that there was no personal bitterness over her blacklisting. "I spent the next 25 years working with the United Nations in its earliest years, and after being an actress with all its self-absorbtion, it was wonderful to be outwardly directed and give something back to the world."

Let Us Then Try

The weekly Quaker/Buddhist/What-Have-You Peace Vigil continues on Thursdays at noon in front of San Francisco's Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue.



Unfortunately, we not only have the Iraq War and the withdrawal of U.S. troops to worry about, but the murderous lunatics currently in charge of the U.S. government and Israel now want to attack Iran, and they are not making their plans particularly secret. Another troop carrier division just left the San Diego region for the Persian Gulf last week according to friends of my mother.



At Chris Floyd's "Empire Burlesque" website (click here), he makes a chilling case for the disaster we are currently facing. Here's an excerpt:

"The very best outcome of a war with Iran – the most benign result possible to imagine – will be deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people and a floodtide of terror and carnage set loose on a world in overwhelming economic crisis. That is the best possible outcome. The worst is the slaughter of tens of millions of innocent people from the nuclear attacks that we know George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have advocated in their maniacal war planning: tens of millions dead, hundreds of millions poisoned, whole nations brought to ruin and a planet mortally sickened. Between these two poles of ungodly mass slaughter and unfathomable genocide lie the only possible realistic outcome of a war with Iran. And we stand on the very brink."

Another great piece worth reading is a recent Lance Mannion essay about "irrational hatred" by liberals towards Bush, and what a crock that particular meme is. Click here to check it out.



The next two months will pretty much tell the tale whether the madmen in D.C. can be restrained by other powerful forces there, or if we're all sliding into hell together. Do what you can, and praying's not a bad idea.

San Francisco Ballet's Opening Night Gala

The San Francisco Ballet opened its 2007 season with an Opening Night Gala at the Opera House on Wednesday evening.



For the wealthier patrons, there were a series of cocktail receptions, dinners, and a post-performance party held in City Hall and the Veterans Building next door.



For the not-so-wealthy patrons, you could buy a Standing Room ticket for $20 and not only enjoy the show, but you could help yourself to decent free champagne during the 7-8 PM Champagne Promenade in the Opera House lobby.



The standing room tickets were supposed to cost $25 for the Gala, but the San Francisco Examiner missprinted the price as $20, and the company honored the lower price which was sweet of them.



The company has also installed a two-tier pricing system this year where subscribers pay substantially less than single ticket buyers ($10 vs. $18 in the balcony, for instance) but this has had the unintended effect of making standing room tickets for the season $18, which seems like a drastic jump from last year's $10.



I pointed this out to a few people who worked for the company, and they were surprised at the news of the standing room price, so maybe this will be amended before the season actually begins next week.



There are plenty of serious balletomanes like Grove Wiley, above, who live on limited means and this price hike would just cut into part of the company's most dedicated audience.



But enough about money, this evening is all about looking at rich people and their costumes.



Upstaging everybody before the show began were a dozen impossibly good-looking young men who had been hired to dress in vintage red Cartier jeweler outfits.



They stood at each entrance to the auditorium looking immensely decorative.



Another one of the joys of the Gala is being surrounded by young San Francisco Ballet students who are wildly enthusiastic, excited...



...and often bitchily funny...



...especially when pointing out fashion disasters such as the lady above.



The Gala Program is usually a series of silly bonbons to keep the party crowd happy, but this year's version was better than usual.



Act I started with "Aunis," a 1979 French folk-dance piece by Jacques Garnier for three men set to a recorded accordion score. It was completely charming, and so were the dancers: Nicolas Blanc, Pascal Molat, and Pierre-Francois Vilanoba.



Then it was on to a Pas de Deux from "The Sleeping Beauty" which has one of my favorite and most frequent credits in classical ballet, "after Petipa," referring to the original old Russian choreographer. This was followed by a literal one-man show where a shirtless Davit Karapetyan choreographed, lit, costume designed and danced himself into outrageously convoluted positions to some recorded music from "Matrix Revolutions." It was short and sensational.



The following dance was a Pas De Deux from a Helgi Tomasson piece, which is always problematic because he's a very, very boring choreographer, and he's also the director of the company. This was followed by a 1976 Frederick Ashton homage to Isadora Duncan set to five Brahms Piano Waltzes, danced beautifully by Molly Smolen. Instead of being borderline ridiculous like Vanessa Redgrave dancing in the 1960s movie "Isadora," it was quite touching and beautiful. The final piece was another Helgi Tomasson number that unfortunately made the music of Benjamin Britten dull, which is unforgivable.



After intermission, there was another Pas de Deux "after Petipa" from "Giselle," followed by an odd, arty thing called "Bitter Tears" choreographed by "Choreographer in Residence" Yuri Possokhov for the soon-to-retire dancer Muriel Maffre. The dance has her enter in a huge 18th century hoop skirt where she flits around a countertenor (male soprano) who is singing an aria from an extremely obscure Handel opera "Tolomeo Re d'egitto (Ptolemy, King of Egypt)." Muriel sprawled on the floor at one point and slithered out of her hoop skirt whereupon she did all kinds of interesting movement while Mark Crayton sang on. And major props to Crayton for singing and dancing at the same time.



This was followed by a crowd-pleasing 1978 showpiece called "L'Air D'Esprit" choreographed by Gerard Arpino for the Joffrey Ballet, and danced extraordinarily well by Tina LeBlanc and Gennadi Nedvigin. A wonderful Pas de Deux from Christopher Wheeldon's "After The Rain" with music by Arvo Part was danced by Yuan Yuan Tan and Damian Smith. The bodies onstage all night were smashingly beautiful, but even by those high standards, Damian Smith stood out. As one elderly gentlemen next to me said at the end, "That may be a perfect human body."



The evening ended appropriately with the final movement of Balanchine's 1947 "Symphony in C" by Bizet, which was danced by almost the entire company. It was a fun evening.

The Madness of Seven Deadly Sins

The "Return to the Caffe Cino" book publishing event on Sunday at San Francisco's Main Library (click here to get to an earlier post about the anthology) was a huge success, with a good turnout for a warm afternoon, and brisk book sales for publisher Steve Susoyev above.



The highlight of the afternoon was a performance of the 1964 Lanford Wilson play, "The Madness of Lady Bright," about a demented New York drag queen reminiscing about his/her youth and the various disastrous loves of his/her life.



Lady Bright was brilliantly performed by local luminary Trauma Flintstone (click here for his/her website), and was ably assisted by Tom Orr and Steven LeMay as The Boy and The Girl respectively, earlier incarnations of Lady Bright and various Loves of Her Life.



Even though the main character is an extremely pathetic drag queen, the piece was revolutionary when it first appeared. Open homosexuality on the stage had just never occurred before, particularly with a character flinging around the word "faggot" in every other line.



During a question and answer period with the audience after the performance, one 50-year-old gay man complained that when he was a teenager there were no "positive role models" since the only gay plays out there were "The Madness of Lady Bright" and "Boys in the Band," which are all about sad queens being mean to each other.



"Don't forget 'Fortune and Men's Eyes,' which was all about male prison rape," Steve Susoyev reminded him, and the 82-year-old playwright George Birimisa said, "when we were writing about gay stuff at the time, we were all homophobic, something I'm not very proud of, but that's just the way it was then." Trauma Flintstone added a perfect, updated coda by saying that he/she never plays the character as "pathetic because they're gay or transgender or what have you. I think this is just somebody who has made a few bad life choices," which elicited laughter from the audience, "and who fell in love with street trade, which is going to leave you very lonely. But this queen is definitely not pathetic on account of being gay."



Hopping across Civic Center Plaza to Herbst Theatre, I caught the second half of a performance by an amateur ensemble called "Symphony Parnassus" (click here for their website).



The conductor of the symphony is Stephen Paulson, who has been playing the bassoon for the San Francisco Symphony for 30 years and has headed this group for the last nine years.



The second half piece was Kurt Weill's "The Seven Deadly Sins," a late collaboration with Bertolt Brecht that's part ballet, part opera, and totally cynical morality tale as the Divided Anna (played by a singer and a dancer) leaves home and family in Louisiana to visit seven American cities where she engages in the aforementioned sins. The greedy family is written for four male voices which were ably dispatched by choristers from the San Francisco Opera: (from left) Jere Torkelsen, Torlef Borsting, Phil Pickens, and Kevin Courtmanche.



There was a production of the work last year at The Crucible, the Fire Art Warehouse in Oakland, but I thought the staging was dumb (click here for a review). This concert version was headlined by ex-"Phantom of the Opera" star Lisa Vroman, who sang beautifully and with perfect diction, and her divided self was played quite wittily by a mannequin. The orchestra was good, though I tend to prefer this music a bit less smooth and a tad more sleazy.

Stravinsky Ballet and Mozart Mass

There was an interesting program at the San Francisco Symphony this week of two major pieces by Stravinsky and Mozart that I had never heard before, the 1946 "Orpheus" ballet and a huge, unfinished Mass in C Minor from 1783.



Thanks to Rita at the SFist website, we had press seats in the twelfth row of Davies Hall on Friday evening, where the large chorus thundered the Kyrie Eleison at us.



Her very funny review of the concert can be read by clicking here.



The German conductor Ingo Metzmacher (above left) seemed to be having a wonderful time, and the ascetic Stravinsky ballet was an interesting pairing with the plush Mozart mass.



The Swedish soprano Camilla Tilling (above right), who sang Susanna in "The Marriage of Figaro" at the San Francisco Opera last summer, had the most to sing as a soloist and her voice was perfection in a slightly chilly way. Her Figaro in that production was the Canadian bass/baritone John Relyea, who was also on hand to sing all of about two minutes of music in the hour-long piece, which seemed rather a waste of his excellent abilities. The English soprano Sarah Fox (above left) wasn't in quite the same league, and her concert dress was something of a Golden Globes Fashion Disaster. It was a fun evening.

Return to the Caffe Cino

From 1958 to 1968, on Cornelia Street in New York City's Greenwich Village, there was a boho meeting place called Caffe Cino. The gay Sicilian-American, Joe Cino (below left) served cappuccinos, cannole and free theatre, and along with Judson Church and La Mama ETC, the tiny joint emerged as ground zero for what became known as the Off-0ff-Broadway Theatre. Short plays were performed nightly on a portable 8-foot by 8-foot stage without charging either rent or admission, and the performers were paid by a passing of the hat among the audience at the end of each performance.



According to Edward Albee (above right), who used to hang out there in the early 1960s, "[It] was where young playwrights who knew nothing about what they were supposed to be doing made exciting work, and the failures were as exciting as the successes. It was Eden. I miss it."



The place has fallen out of popular history, which may be corrected thanks to a recently published book by Steve Susoyev, above, who collaborated with the 82-year-old San Francisco playwright George Birimisa (below) on an anthology of plays that premiered at the Caffe Cino along with "memoirs" from the survivors of that time.



Through the miracle of Craigslist, I connected with the two editors last summer when their modestly conceived project had grown into a 500-page monster manuscript that desperately needed proofreading, graphics assistance, and copy editing.



The book was finally published last November in conjunction with a theatre festival in Boston that was performing a number of Caffe Cino plays, and to my utter delight the finished product has turned out much more beautifully than I had ever imagined. (Click here for the Amazon page.)



Many young people who eventually became famous were involved in the Caffe Cino scene, including a teenage Bernadette Peters in "Dames At Sea," which opened there as a smash success before quickly moving uptown. One of the memoirs in the book is by the director Robert Dahdah, who originally conceived most of the show but was never compensated for it. He settles a few old scores:

"When I found out that Jim Wise [the composer] had died, I called his collatorator, George Haimsohn, and I said, "Jim Wise is dead. Good." And he said, "Why good?" and I said, "Because he stole my talent, and he never recompensed me for it. And he's burning in hell." And, do you know, two weeks later I read George Haimsohn's obituary in "Variety." So they're both burning in hell but that doesn't do me much good."

In editor Steve Susoyev's introduction, he writes:

"For an early draft of this book, we pondered using the words "Dawn of Queer Theatre" in our title, and many participants ganged up to convince us that such a title limited and insulted the work that Joe Cino nurtured on his little stage forty-some years ago. William Hoffman wrote, "I'll be queer if it'll sell books," but in our first meeting he persuaded me that such was not necessary."

The twenty plays in the volume by the likes of Lanford Wilson, Sam Shepard, Doric Wilson, Robert Patrick and Tom Eyen, are stylistically all over the map. Ionesco's Theatre of the Absurd, along with Samuel Beckett, seemed to be the dominant influences but what links most of these plays are their desire to shock the audience. What's amazing is how shocking many of them remain.



Helen Hanft (in the two photos above) was one of the acting divas of Caffe Cino, and she recently played the same role in Tom Eyen's "Who Killed My Bald Sister Sophie?" forty years later. From all accounts, the performance was even better than the original. She's quoted in an interview in the book:

"When you saw me play Hanna forty years later, I didn't have to study my lines. The role is riveted in my soul, my brain chemistry. This is a woman with more than a blemish. She's deeply wounded. Outside the role, I was not the easiest person to get along with. I was very envious of people. I always felt like I was being deprived, a victim, when I was victimizing people myself. Toxic people are drawn to the theatre. They think they can get away with their toxicity there."

There are dozens of fascinating characters and stories that are mentioned in the "memoirs" that could fill entire books in themselves. For instance, the Harris family consisted of a World War II veteran, his wife, and their five kids in Florida who in the late 1950s decided to graduate from their amateur theatricals and move to New York City. The family was basically adopted by the Caffe Cino, and Walter Michael Harris (above right) was in "Hair" on Broadway at age 16.



Walter's brother George Harris III (the two photos above) became "the famous blond sticking the famous flower into the famous rifle at the Pentagon," in the words of Robert Patrick.



George then transformed into Hibiscus in San Francisco (above), the soul and co-creator of both The Cockettes and The Angels of Light.



Joe Cino (above), like many of his compatriots in the 1960s, took way too many drugs, principally speed, and in the dark, scary year of 1968, after the death of his lover from drug-induced sloppiness at a summer stock theatre, he committed suicide by locking himself in the cafe, putting Maria Callas on the jukebox, and trying to commit hari-kari. It took him three days to die in St. Vincent's Hospital, and a place and time were over.



At the San Francisco Main Library in Civic Center this Sunday the 21st at 2-4 PM, there will be a free public event with Steve Susoyev and George Birimisa talking about the book and the era.



Plus, there will be a performance of Lanford Wilson's "The Madness of Lady Bright," an important Cino play, done by the legendary San Francisco drag queen Trauma Flintstone. Be there or be square.

On The Job Learning

A ceremonial swearing in of new city commissioners took place this afternoon at San Francisco's City Hall.



The event, as usual, was held on the balcony in front of the Mayor's Office, and as usual the mayor was about fifteen minutes late.



There was an unusually large crowd of about 100 people for the affair, including Supervisors Dufty, Elsbernd and Mirkarimi.



The very odd Pat Murphy, who publishes the fairly demented San Francisco Sentinel on the internet, seems to have a man-crush on a new heterosexual Supervisor, Sean Elsbernd, now that he has had a violent break with Supervisor Chris Daly.



At one point, Mayor Newsom called Pat over so he could make sure that Murphy's portable tape recorder was on, so that it could capture the mayor's speech from the podium verbatim.



Gavin started off by congratulating the new commissioners for bodies ranging from the Taxi Commission to the Human Rights Commission. There has been quite a bit of controversy in the Board of Supervisors chamber recently over the Newsom administration's inability to fill empty comissioner seats, leaving incumbents "hanging" for years at a time on various commissions, either through inertia or out of political considerations.



With Board President Aaron Peskin at his side, Newsom didn't refer to the controversy, but did mention how unhappy he was about the board cutting the six-figure funds for imaginary new jobs that had been created for two loyal political hacks, Annemarie Conroy and Bill Lee.



Gavin then attempted a self-deprecating joke about having been appointed at age 26 to be the chair of the Parking and Traffic Commission by then-mayor Willie Brown, Jr. "I didn't even know that chair meant president, boy, did I have a lot of on-the-job learning to do." When there was dead silence, he dug himself in a little further. "I mean, we've been attempting to take our own appointments more seriously than that..."



Then he stumbled into, "Well, let's cut to the chase. Let's get you sworn in. You can either stand or sit, just put your hand up..."



It felt like he didn't even know half the people who had been appointed, let alone their names, and the ceremony was lacking any sense of dignity.



The Newsom Administration's youthful Karl Rove, Peter Ragone (above), didn't look amused by the performance. Wait until he catches a glimpse of Gavin's most Fervent Admirer Unleashed over at sfGate. (Click here to get to Beth Spotswood's brilliant debut post as a Paid Blogger.)

Darkness Cannot Drive Out Darkness

A Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday celebration has been held at the Bill Graham auditorium in San Francisco's Civic Center for a number of years.



There used to be a "Freedom Train" that started in San Jose and made its way up to the Peninsula, finishing with a march from the Caltrain station to Civic Center, but for some reason the march was canceled a few years back and now everyone is bused in on chartered Muni vehicles.



After passing through a metal detector at the doorway...



...you were ushered into the lobby, where there were a number of merchants selling afrocentric goods that included a line of T-shirts reading "I HEART Being Black," and of course Wells Fargo was there to do its corporate branding thing.



For whatever reason, the crowd was not as large as in years past, possibly because there are King celebrations all around the Bay Area now or because everyone is tired of the same old ritual.



The show started off with the Glide Memorial Chorus backing up a singer...



...while the Glide Memorial Band played on.



The Reverend Cecil Williams went through his usual routine, which was highlighted by the call-and-response with the audience over where they were from. "Who do we have from East Palo Alto?" he thundered, and there was a huge shout from the back of the auditorium. "Who do we have from West Palo Alto?" he continued, and there was hardly a peep, which was followed by general laughter.



Aaron Peskin, Sophie Maxwell, and Sean Elsbernd were the odd trio of San Francisco Supervisors who addressed the crowd. Elsbernd looked quite shy and unsure what to say, so he finally just told a short story about being a grocery bagger as a teen where Reverend Cecil Williams used to shop, "and he was the most wonderful customer there was."



They were followed by an advisor to Senator Feinstein who looked like Vernon Jordan, but wasn't. He announced that he was "very concerned" about the violence in America, about the violence in the streets of San Francisco, and the violence in Los Angeles. "What about the violence in Iraq that your Senator is doing nothing about?" I wanted to yell, but didn't.



The emcee for the afternoon was a DJ from KMEL radio, and she introduced a 13-year-old rapper who had come up with a piece about Martin Luther King, Jr.



It was pretty lame so I went outside where the Cougar Cadet Corps from Alameda were jamming.



They seemed to be led by the young man above, and they played on the sidewalk in front of the auditorium for most of the afternoon, upstaging the entertainers inside.



They were marvelous.



A number of advocacy groups had also set up outside the auditorium, including a large contingent from the Lyndon LaRouche conspiracy folks, and the woman above who seemed to be publicly protesting a private sorrow.



The most impressive salute to the late Martin Luther King, Jr. that I encountered all day was a couple of blocks away on Ninth Street in the windows of the Quaker Meeting House.



Plus, this message is displayed every day, and not just trotted out for the occasion.

Uke Till You Puke

The coolest store in the Hayes Valley, Isotope (click here for their website)...



...sells "graphic novels"...



...and serves as a hangout spot for those who love them.



On Saturday evening a free-to-all party was held...



...hosted by the store proprietor James Sime (above)...



...and there were even free cocktails being served by the extraordinarily pleasant and beautiful Kirsten Baldock.



Entertainment was provided by an assortment of musicians who specialized in ukeleles and other odd instruments...



...and the surprise was how good they were.



Kelly McCubbin started the set with the memorable line, "Tonight we're going to uke till you puke." (Click here for his website.)



He was augmented, as Condi Rice would say, by the Five Cent Coffee band (click here)...



...and a musician listed as "Just Henry" (click here).



My favorite performer was the accordion player above who looked sort of sad and soulful, as if he were about to start crying and playing Jacques Brel. It was a great evening.

Mayor McChicken

At h. Brown's weekly Burrito Political Salon, there was a late arrival who announced that he had just spent a bunch of money renting a chicken costume at a Haight Street costume shop. It was to wear to the "Community Town Hall Meeting" in the Richmond District on Saturday morning that San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom was conducting in lieu of the voter-approved "Question Time" with the Board of Supervisors.



Unfortunately, the gentleman was feeling a bit under the weather healthwise, so he asked if anybody else would be interested in wearing the outfit outside of the Recreation Center on 18th Avenue, and a volunteer was coerced into the role. "Where's the costume?" he asked, and the response was "In my car," followed by "Try it on, dude!" In a spirit of civic duty, I also signed on to wear the costume in case the original volunteer chickened out.



There have been no early morning phone calls so I assume our volunteer is in front of the recreation hall even as I type. For a "Fake Question Time Drinking Game," check out Rita's contribution to the mockery of our mayor at SFist by clicking here. For a more nuanced appreciation of the Handsomeness of the Fiery Mayor, check out Beth Spotswood's "why is he in a crack alley..." by clicking here. I can't wait to see how this all plays out.

Waltzing to Guantanamo

After six years of solid evidence that the President of the United States is a complete psychopath, he still has his defenders in right-wing enablers like San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra J. Saunders.



Not many other people in the country or the world are buying their line of murderous crap anymore...



...and after Wednesday evening's speech by The Decider on the need for more United States troops in Iraq, there was an explosion of small protests across the country on Thursday...



...including this noontime group in front of San Francisco's City Hall, organized by the internet advocacy group moveon.org. (See Jan Adams' accounts of other Bay Area protests by clicking here.)



Traditionally protests are held on the Polk Street side of the building, which left a number of reporters, including the Channel 7 ABC news team, confused about where the scheduled protest might be until I gently clued them in.



Adding to the utter surrealism of the moment were two high school bands from Australia...



...who happened to be marching around the Civic Center Plaza playing "Waltzing Matilda"...



...complete with a drill team.



From what I could gather, the bands had played in the Rose Parade earlier this month in Pasadena, and then had gone on tour, ending in San Francisco for their last days abroad.



The San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau was somehow involved, and they were making a promotional video of the event with a freezing emcee in shorts.



A block away there was a large turnout for the weekly Quaker vigil in front of the federal building...



...where the informational flyers were noting that January 11th was the fifth anniversary to the day of the infamous Guantanamo prison in Cuba which is the flagship "store" for the United States' gulag of torture and murder.



It's long past time to put a stop to this.

A Bust for Harvey Milk 1: Press

A sculpture competition for a bust memorializing the gay martyr Harvey Milk opened up shop in City Hall on Thursday.



On the Van Ness side of the building, there are models of three proposed designs, and the public is encouraged to make comments about the different pieces. The sculpture model above is by Bruce Wolfe (click here) and the one below is credited to the Daub Firmin Hendrickson Sculpture Group, LLC (click here).



Whether the selection panel of Jeannene Pryzyblysky, Dugald Stermer (SF Arts Commissioners), Jewelle Gomez (Library Commissioner), Gary Nathan (Publisher of "Spectrum," a gay rag), or Dan Nicoletta (Friend of Harvey and the driving force behind the memorial), actually listens to the public is another story.



At noon there was a dog-and-pony show for the press that was attended by a number of old gay politicos, including Harry Britt, the rather inadequate replacement for Milk as Supervisor after his assassination.



Mayor Gavin Newsom started the proceedings by checking out the sculpture model by Cedric Wentworth (click here), though another scandal was brewing over his head.



It seems that the Police Department has not been bothering doing their job again, this time in the case of a group of Yale students who were beaten up by a group of local wealthy thugs over New Year's Eve in San Francisco (click here for an SFist wrap-up). On top of that, there were allegations of the epithet "fag" being thrown around by the bashers.



The freelance photographer Rink, above, who has been documenting the gay scene in San Francisco for over 30 years, pointed out some of the irony in the presentations.



Tom Horn, above, the wealthy, reactionary publisher of the Bay Area Reporter gay weekly, would never have been in agreement with Harvey's leftist politics.



The lesbian California State Senator Carole Migden droned on about being a great Friend of Harvey but in truth he loathed her (click here for a funny article that pretty much sums her up, via Beth Spotswood)...



...as he would probably be horrified by the politics of his current successor, Supervisor Befan Dufty.



Milk would probably have been far more comfortable with the current heterosexual Supervisors who try to fight for the powerless, Daly and Mirkarimi, who were both present but didn't speak.



The best presentations were by Anne Kronenberg, Milk's legislative aide in the 1970s, who seems to be aging well...



...and Stuart Milk, Harvey's gay nephew who had flown in from Florida for the event.



Supervisor Tom Ammiano actually was a Friend of Harvey and gave a fiery speech insisting that "homophobia" was still all around us.



The two main drivers behind the Milk City Hall Memorial Committee are Dan Nicoletta and Joey Cain, above. They have been trying to raise the approximately $100,000 for the sculpture from individuals (click here to check out their website), which seems appropriate.



Harvey Milk didn't live long enough to become a corrupt, thuggish old politician like Willie Brown, Jr., who had an expensive bust installed by wealthy "Friends of Willie Brown, Jr." within a few years of his departure from City Hall.

A Bust for Harvey Milk 2: Public

In the early evening, there was a public reception where everyone was met by a small army of volunteers wearing "Harvey Milk Memorial" T-shirts...



...and the Bob Ross foundation had paid for a nice spread of appetizers.



Best of all, there were a slew of old left-wingers who showed up...



...including the hyperarticulate and genuinely good activist, Hank Wilson, above.



As people chatted after not seeing each other for years, nobody was paying much attention to the official speakers...



...and when one of the orators started with the line, "If Harvey were running for office today..." he was heckled by my friend Dennis above, who yelled "...none of you would have voted for him."



Also making an appearance was the legendary Dennis Peron, who basically created the template for "medicinal marijuana clubs" thirty years ago.



A couple of the best election night parties of my life were hosted by Dennis Peron for Harvey Milk in his early runs for Supervisor, and what was amazing about them was that they were losing night parties yet everyone would walk out enthralled. Milk kept receiving ever-higher margins of the vote each time and uncorking really inspiring speeches at each one.



Peron moved to England for six months a number of years ago and has been keeping a low profile in public since his return. He didn't go into the reasons, but it probably has something to do with his marijuana distribution history, which included a very high-profile, three-story pot club at Van Ness and Market, which was closed down by the Feds about five years ago.



In any case, it was nice to see specimens of the turbulent San Francisco Gay 70's who had somehow managed to survive, and their presence was a worthy tribute to the spirit of Milk himself.

The Kronos Quartet Plays the N Judah

There were two firsts for me on Monday evening: going inside a synagogue, and hearing San Francisco's famous "avant-garde" Kronos String Quartet in a live performance.



Both experiences were more charming than anticipated.



Though we weren't allowed into the Main Sanctuary, the courtyard and the foyer to the imposing Congregation Emanue-El temple in the fancy Presidio Heights neighborhood felt unpretentious and welcoming.



There was amateur-looking art hanging on the walls...



...and lots of photos of VIPs past and present.



Best of all, the congregation has been subsidizing a concert series for the last four years called "Music at Meyer" (click here for the website) which features great performers with a top ticket price of $20.



Opening the series this year was the Kronos Quartet, a local institution for the last 30 years with a worldwide reputation, that specializes in the music of living composers (click here for their website). Though their main focus is contemporary Western "classical" music, they have ranged far afield to Jimi Hendrix, jazz and music from the Third World.



The Martin Meyer Sanctuary turned out to be a little jewel box of a theatre with seating for 375 in what looked like pews...



...with copies of the Torah shelved behind them.



Its major drawback seemed to be that the dressing room/green room for the performers could only be reached by going through a balcony lobby (that's Kronos founder David Harrington above being greeted by a fan).



The Kronos Quartet was once infamous, and criticized, for wearing hipster clothing and using lighting effects at their concerts, instead of doing the same old quartet black-tie and bright lighting routine but I found their theatricality actually helped with the presentation of the music.



Three of the four pieces on the program had actually been written for the quartet which is an amazing statistic, and even better, the program was simply great. It started with a "Nomatophobis" by an expatriate Australian named J.G. Thirlwell that was so good we all wanted to hear it again. I was bored to death by the Witold Lutoslawski String Quartet from 1964 (which was NOT commissioned by the Kronos but has been recorded by them), but as I said to my companion, it could have just been me. The final piece of the first half was Meredith Monk's first string quartet, which was slight but quite beautiful.



The great piece on the second half of the program was by local composer John Adams. His only foray so far into the string quartet, it is a 10-movement work called "John's Book of Alleged Dances." I've been listening to a Nonesuch/Kronos recording of it for years but to hear the work live was a serious treat, with a recorded syncopation track driving on the piece mercilessly.



There is a blog by Greg Dewar called "The N Judah Chronicles" (click here) and Mr. Dewar should see if he can use the final movement called "Judah to Ocean" as an anthem. According to Adams, it is "A piece of vehicular music, this one following the street car tracks down the Great Highway and the beach, where I used to rent a two-room cottage behind the Surf Theater and listen to the N Judah reach the end of the line and turn around."

Falun Gong Spectacular at the Opera House

When I started this blog about 18 months ago, one of my instant kinsman in terms of humor and sensibility was the anonymous author of a photoblog called "The Standing Room" (click here). His blog started off as an expose of the horrors of corrupt parking control officers in San Francisco whom the author had caught in the act of inventing tickets for unexpired parking meters. He mixed this subject with his other obsession, music, which he adores and knows more about than anybody I know in the world, and his tastes run from East to West, high culture to low. On Friday evening, the two of us went to one of the strangest evenings at the San Francisco Opera House imaginable, and a truncated version of the tale just appeared at the blog SFist (click here to get there). The full, uncut version, with brilliant commentary by M.C- is below. And he's also just posted it up at his own blog. Hurrah!



When we heard about the NTDTV Chinese New Year Spectacular at the Opera House this past weekend, we were absolutely certain we knew what to expect. In our tender youth, our parents dragged us to every Chinese cultural variety show that came through town—hell, we even performed in some of them! Chinese acrobats bent over backwards with giant porcelain vases balanced on their foreheads? Been there. Lithe ribbon-dancers with zither-strumming and pipa-plucking ladies as backup? Done that. Huge-headdressed Beijing opera singers twirling their long sleeves while a guy dressed as a monkey bounces around the stage eating a peach, accompanied by hella loud gongs and a blaring shawm? Yawn, so last 500 years.

But a computer-animated backdrop showing a angel flying down to Earth to rescue a dancer portraying a Falun Gong meditator being beaten senseless by Communist goons, together with a song proclaiming, "The Falun Gong is good!"?



OK, we admit it: that, we've never seen before.



It turns out that the NTDTV Chinese New Year Spectacular, now in its fourth iteration and presented in close to 30 cities around the world, is utterly unlike any other Chinese performing arts event we ever expected to attend. The 2-hour program is co-sponsored by New Tang Dynasty Television (NTDTV), The Epoch Times, and the Sound of Hope radio network.



NTDTV is an "independent, nonprofit Chinese language TV broadcaster" that happens to have been founded by Falun Gong practitioners, but they go out of their way in their wording to avoid any official connection between NTDTV and Falun Gong. The Epoch Times is "the most widely distributed newspaper in the world, publishing in 40 cities across 28 countries worldwide, and in 8 languages," available for free with practically no advertisements—think about those economics for a moment—also claims no official connection with the Falun Gong but coincidentally happens to have been founded by Falun Gong practitioners. (We are reminded of the Epoch Times reporter who heckled Chinese president Hu Jintao's visit to the US last year.) The Sound of Hope radio network provides "listeners with news and programming that is both honest and objective" and is run by... you get the idea.



(The Falun Gong, for those who have somehow dodged the tens of thousands of flyer-distributing adherents around the globe, is a fast-growing spiritual movement that has been banned and brutally suppressed by the government of the People's Republic of China.)



Armed with this knowledge, which we only learned after the show, did we finally understand why vignette after vignette of the two-hour NTDTV Spectacular extolled the virtues of practicing Falun Gong, cursed the demonic evils of the Communist Chinese government, and promoted Truthfulness, Compassion, Patience—three pillars of Falun Gong thought.



Our hosts for the evening were a lovely young couple, a Caucasian man and an Asian woman, both of whom comfortably delivered intro patter in fluent English and Mandarin. We didn't catch the Asian MC's name, but we were interested to learn later that the gentleman, Leeshai Lemish, is a reporter for the Epoch Times and in 2001 was one of 35 Westerners to be arrested and beaten for meditating under a banner that said "Truthfulness, Compassion, Patience" in Tiananmen Square.



The grand majority of the dozens of performers were dancers whose style incorporated some gestures from traditional Chinese dance, but which was clearly based in Western ballet technique. They came from a number of schools and troupes, including the Fei Tian Dance School, which is "known for celebrating virtuous deeds [and] reverence for the divine" and the Lotus Perfoming Arts Troupe, which, coincidentally, is "committed to celebrating the values of Truth, Compassion, and Tolerance."



The dances were generally choreographed for groups. Some were inspired by Tibet and Inner Mongolia (areas that, coincidentally, have also been infamously oppressed by the Communist Chinese government); others told narratives of various characters being rewarded for their embodiment of Traditional Chinese Values, namely, piety and faith in the "divine path."



Interestingly, SFMike pointed out that romantic love, which does feature prominently in plenty of traditional Chinese literature and theater, made not a single appearance on stage all evening. The only remotely sexy gesture was when one of the male dancers suddenly and bizarrely ripped off his shirt in front of his mother, who then tattooed four characters on his back as he gritted his teeth on a bloody rag.



Nearly all of the music was piped in over the sound system by a prerecorded orchestra with Western instrumentation, the exceptions being live performances by a 13-year-old harpist performing a work by the 19th-century Belgian composer Félix Godefroid, three singers with Western operatic vocal technique, and an accompanist performing on a traditional Chinese Steinway 9' grand piano. (To be fair, there was also one contemporary piece written and performed by an erhu player, with piano accompaniment.) No zithers, no wild Chinese percussion, and the only pipa to be seen was a non-functioning prop covered in glitter.



In fact, aside from the Falun Gong references, the unifying characteristic of all the evening's vignettes was the overwhelming preponderance of shiny baubles: one might add "Tiaras, Rhinestones, and Sequins" to the triumvirate of values. Stage fog was also used in abundance. Like little birds we were dazzled by all the small mirrors reflecting light at us, the shiny and brightly colored costumes in constant motion, and the smoke which often obscured the dancers' feet.



All of which led us to think, what an ironically apt metaphor for the NTDTV Chinese New Year Spectular. Under the glossy surface and behind the marketing fog of an event touted only as a New Year celebration of traditional Chinese culture, we actually find a 2-hour sales pitch for the Falun Gong. Though none of the ads mention the Falun Gong, when we asked New York-based SFist Mom whether she had ever heard of the Spectacular, her immediate response was, "Oh yeah, the Falun Gong show." Turns out SFist Mom and SFist Dad have been to performances three of the past four years, each time with a complimentary ticket provied by a Falun Gong member. (They add that this December's show was the most explicitly Falun-Gong-centered.)



It should be noted, too, that the traditional Chinese culture promoted by this show is not necessarily one that is recognizable to most Chinese people; indeed, none of the songs performed—with the exception of the Kanding Love Song that MC Leeshai sang as a joke—were traditional Chinese songs that people would recognize. They were all contemporary songs written by Falun Gong practitioners. (As SFist Mom said about the show, "It's not 'culture'... but it sure is colorful!") The expression “traditional Chinese culture and values” in this context, it would seem, equates directly with Falun Gong spirituality. Somehow, it was disturbingly reminiscent of these Traditional American Values we've heard a lot about in recent years.



Honestly, if a movement has to lure in unsuspecting audience members via a duplicitous bait-and-switch marketing campaign, perhaps “Truthfulness” should be replaced with “Truthiness.” Likewise, we’d be surprised if the program advertisers (like the SF Opera, who took out a full-page color ad in the inside back cover) and all the politicos (like Barbara Boxer and Gov Arnold), whose letters of support appear at the front of the program, were aware that they were implicitly supporting the Falun Gong.



That said, if you're a big fan of sequins, be certain not to miss next year's Spectacular when it comes around—we swear to the high heavens you won't ever see anything quite like this again! Just go with the knowledge that the NTDTV Chinese New Year Spectacular is not at all a traditional celebration of the Chinese New Year that reflects the experience of most Chinese people.

<

Disclaimer: M. C— holds absolutely no affiliation with or admiration of the oppressive Communist government of the People’s Republic of China. Likewise, he has had no previous encounters with the Falun Gong.

For an official (non)statement by NTDTV on the relationship of the show to the Falun Gong. click here.

From Governor Moonbeam to Drill Instructor

San Francisco City Hall was the scene of quite a bit of pomp and ceremony on Monday with the Board of Supervisors being newly installed for the year at noon, and voting unanimously to re-elect Aaron Peskin as the Board President.



Each of the supervisors was given time to make whatever remarks they felt were appropriate, but I had to turn off Channel 26 (San Francisco's Government TV) when Bevan Dufty started giving us a little bit too much information about his busy, busy life which sounded like a cheesy remake of the 1978 Perry King/Meg Foster vehicle "A Different Story" (click here for the joke to make any sense).



Mayor Newsom showed up in the Board Chambers for the first time in two years and made a few gracious remarks about "working together." He really is being advised terribly on rejecting the monthly "question time" with the supervisors that was recently approved by San Francisco voters, because the camera loves him, which is really almost all that counts.



At 3:30 the same afternoon in City Hall, there was another inauguration, this time for the former governor of California, Jerry Brown...



...who has just been elected as the state's new Attorney General after having finished up two terms as the Mayor of Oakland.



While Mayor of Oakland, Mr. Brown's most famous initiative seemed to be the creation of a military school for "at risk" youth.



This was quite a cry from the left-wing, Governor Moonbeam reputation that dogged him during his two terms as California governor and his attempts at becoming President of the U.S.



But as an old friend of his standing next to me said, "In truth, he's always been a very conservative person by nature."



Mayor Newsom gave a short speech that was inaudible in the balcony due to strange acoustics...



...and then Brown was sworn in by his niece, Judge Katherine Kelly, with his new wife by his side.



Then a chorus sang a few Gregorian chants, perhaps a nod to Mr. Brown's Jesuit past...



...but also redolent of the old-fashioned Irish Catholic Mafia who have always been major powers in San Francisco.



Brown then gave a speech which was also inaudible thanks to the sound system...



...before everyone crossed the street to the Green Room at the Veterans Building for a serious celebration.

San Francisco School Board Installation

The fairly new Tenderloin Elementary School on Golden Gate and Van Ness Avenues was built after years of pleas and organizing by inner-city parents, and the structure turned out to be one of the prettiest and most useful structures that have gone up San Francisco over the last decade.



It even has a large library where the Junior ROTC can plot its comeback after being banished recently by the San Francisco School Board.



On Friday evening, the large auditorium was packed to the walls with friends, family, and politicos for an "installation" of three new school board members.



Mayor Gavin Newsom had almost as ugly an election last November as George Dubya, with the local voters repudiating virtually all of his candidates and positions. His one successful endorsement was for a woman who works in his office, Hydra Mendoza (what a name!), who won one of the three school board seats.



So Mayor Newsom showed up for her installation, and was seated next to his archenemy, Supervisor Chris Daly, who was there for the installation of his friend Jane Kim. (The third new board member, Kim Shree-Maufus, is on the right.)



The event was slated to begin at 6PM, but a high school band was still playing music at 6:30, and the ceremonies hadn't even started.



Daly was hosting a party for Jane Kim at his offices in City Hall after the installation, but I wasn't able to attend since duty called in the form of a "Chinese New Year Spectacular" at the San Francisco Opera House.



The SFist blog had provided myself and M.C- (whose music blog can be found by clicking here) with $168 press tickets for the New Tang Dynasty TV 2007 Spectacular in exchange for an article about the event.



Little did we know that the Spectacular was actually a Falun Gong propaganda piece, and easily the most demented piece of entertainment I have encountered since walking into a Mexican wresting arena (Lucha Libre) in Acapulco 30 years ago. When M.C-'s undoubtedly brilliant article is finished, with photos by yours truly, you will be alerted.

Peace Protest 1: Lt. Watada and the Unitarians

In San Francisco's Japantown Mall...



...with its bare, spare "Peace Plaza"...



...a small group of supporters of United States Army Lieutenant Ehren Watada met on Thursday morning in preparation for a peace march.



Lt. Watada, a US Army infantry officer stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington, "has refiused to deploy to Iraq with his unit because he believes the war there is illegal," and a huge groundswell of support among Japanese-Americans has emerged. (Check out their website by clicking here.)



They were joined by a few other organizations, including "Declaration of Peace" (click here for their website).



The march clambered over the hill to the Unitarian Church on Geary and Franklin...



...where they were to join a group of Unitarians at noon before continuing on to the Federal Building for a peace vigil and "die-in."



Comedy ensued when the small group of Unitarians couldn't quite get their act together as they dithered over signage and exit times.



They were a very pleasant bunch, however, and one East Bay gentleman was eager to show off his Father Bill O'Donnell T-shirt. "His presence is definitely hanging about today," he declared about the recently deceased activist Catholic priest. (Click here for a nice obit by Stephanie Salter).



Meanwhile, the Lt. Watada supporters stood out in front of the church waiting for the Unitarians to get their act together.



They finally started telling Unitarian jokes on the order of "they must be trying to come to a consensus on what they believe."



Also with the Lt. Watada group was Rebecca Solnit, on the left above, who is one of my favorite writers in the world (click here for a listing of her books).



Putting any semblance of journalistic distance and objectivity aside, I finally marched back into the church lobby and told everyone, "Let's go. Now! They're starting to make Unitarian jokes out front so let's get it moving."



Finally, the united groups marched down to Van Ness Avenue...



...where there were alternate cries of "slower" or "faster" among the crowd, depending on who thought they were in charge.



Finally, they arrived at the Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue...



...and joined the Quaker peace vigil and a number of other groups. More to come.

Peace Protest 2: Moving to the Center

In front of the Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue every week...



...there is an hour-long peace vig