Modern Times at El Rio

Near the wonderful used bookstore "Dog Eared Books" at the corner of 20th & Valencia...



...stands one of the oldest left-wing bookshops in San Francisco, Modern Times, which dates from 1971.



Unfortunately, it looks like nobody's bothered to redecorate since 1971. With its ugly fluorescent lighting and slapdash attempt at retailing, the place has some seriously depressing vibes. On its website (click here), there are the following appeals on the Homepage: "We Now Carry Used Books! And we need your help! This fantabulous development is part of our greater plan to resuscitate the bookstore..." and "Help Us Keep Our Doors Open. As you may know, these are perilous times for independent bookstores..."



There is a small room in the back of the store where panels and author events are held. Thursday evening's panel was about the San Francisco Municipal Wi-Fi project, with an equal mixture of technical wizards and non-technical, low-income community activists trying to explain the world to each other.



According to my friend Kimo Crossman (pictured above on the right), "there was a lot of passion, which was good, but not a lot of reason, which was not so good." The panel was moderated by Annalee Newitz, the brilliant cultural analyst whose "Techsploitation" column is one of the major reasons to pick up the "San Francisco Bay Guardian." (Click here for her website.) However, she wasn't a very good moderator, allowing the non-technical activists to drone on endlessly about their various oppressions while ignoring the actual subject at hand.



We fled after only fifteen minutes for margaritas and enchiladas at the true ancient icon of the neighborhood, La Rondalla restaurant. This meant we missed the appearance of Ron Vinson, the dissembling chief of the strange little Department of Telecommunications and Information Services in City Hall (click here for their website). They are the crucial link in the wifi giveaway to Google and Earthlink, and though Mr. Vinson was attending the panel as a "private citizen in the audience," at some point he couldn't take it anymore and insisted on speaking. Since nobody else from the Mayor's Office or Google or Earthlink had shown up, that was fine with the panel. Unfortunately, he got caught in a number of fibs, and spilled the beans about "conditioned fiber," which means that there are a number of secretive deals his department has made concerning the extensive fiber optic network in San Francisco. It seems that the "conditioned fiber" cannot be used in competition with any private corporations. Ever. We've been sold down the river again.



We continued down Mission Street to the venerable dive bar El Rio for a party celebrating the launch of the new GavinWatch website, which has had more lives than a phoenix. It's a funny, well-written and critical look at San Francisco's mayor. (Click here to check it out.)



There was lots of signage hung up in the backyard patio...



...and in the disco dance room beside it.



It was an interesting mixture of the homespun and the sophisticated...



...and it was obvious that the GavinWatchers have definitely been paying attention.



A photography station was set up with a lifesize cutout of Newsom...



...so that you could have a picture with the "photo-op mayor."



Except for the food bloggers, who are a whole continent to themselves, just about everybody who has a blog in San Francisco showed up to the party at some point, including Greg Dewar (above) of the N Judah Chronicles (click here).



Eve Batey (above) represented a small contingent from the "San Francisco Chronicle," and best of all h. brown (below) got to meet the fabulous Beth Spotswood. (Click here to get to his funny account of the evening with great photos by Luke Thomas.)



Beth was so taken by the ridiculously handsome TV newsman Dan Noyes, who was attending as a civilian, that she jettisoned all of her old best friends for her new one. (Read all about it by clicking here.) It was a fun evening.

Global Warming and Vivienne Westwood

In Golden Gate Park, the cherry blossom trees have undergone an early blooming this year.



Thanks to global warming, the all-important Cherry Blossom Festivals in Japan are arriving ten days earlier than usual, according to a number of news accounts.



Wandering through Golden Gate Park is always a joy...



...except when trying to cross the miles of four-lane highways that snake through the place like poisonous rivers.



There is currently a raging controversy over whether to close a 1.7 mile section of roadway on Saturdays in the east end of the park as is now done on Sundays, giving walkers, joggers, bicyclists, roller skaters, and wheelchair riders a break from the "car is king" culture we live in.



However, the sense of entitlement among those who use the park roads for their personal use is not to be denied, and the socialite Dede Wilsey, along with other colleagues on the Fine Arts Museums board, has decided the Saturday park closure will not happen.



The craven "San Francisco Chronicle" is even editioralizing against the Saturday road closure in this morning's paper. Though there is a huge, new underground parking lot underneath the museum complexes, they still insist on having a freeway next to their institutions, the public be damned.



This seems like a cut off your nose to spite your face kind of gesture, since attendance on Sundays when the roadway is closed nearby is actually higher than on Saturdays when the roadway is open, but let's not look for logic here.



Recently, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco mailed me a membership renewal request, and though I'd like to rejoin, there is no way that I am going to do so if they insist as an institution on being such backward, ugly citizens. In fact, if I do return, it will be with a protest sign.



My artist friend David Barnard, who is chatting up one of the museum installers in the photo above, came up with a perfect compromise since it really is the rich bitches like socialite Dede Wilsey who are keeping this very modest gesture at car curtailment from coming to fruition.



"How about if they close it to all traffic except for limos and licensed town cars? That way Dede and her friends can have their cake and eat it too."



Currently at the deYoung is an exhibit of the British designer Vivienne Westwood's "36 Years in Fashion," a touring show that has been around the world, most recently in Bangkok.



Though I have next to no interest in fashion, the exhibit of outrageous costumes ranging from her 1980s punk rock days to her couture for rich ladies in Paris period is stunning, and one of the most artfully installed shows I've seen in the museum. My only criticism is that the first half of the show is so dark that the place feels a bit like a haunted house display, and I was waiting for someone to trip and go flying through the spiked leather mannequins.



It was a relief to flee the place and hang out at the nine-hole golf course on the western edge of the park, where you can play a silly game, drink beer and eat barbequed pork sandwiches, and above all be away from the frigging cars that seem to define our civilization.

Steve Reich at the Ballet

The San Francisco Ballet just finished a two-week run of a pair of "mixed repertory" programs this weekend, and I caught the final performance of Program 4 on Saturday night, which was highlighted by "Eden/Eden," an astonishing ballet by the newly appointed director of the Royal Ballet Company in London, Wayne McGregor.



The music is by Steve Reich, taken from the the last piece in a trilogy of "video operas" he created with his wife Beryl Korot that was finished in 2001 and called "Three Tales." The pieces are about iconic moments in Technology in the Twentieth Century, namely the Crash of the Hindenberg, the Diaspora of the Bikini Islanders before the Atom Bomb, and the Cloning of Dolly The Sheep.



It is written to be performed by an ensemble of ten instrumentalists, five singers, and tape loops of speakers being interviewed, along with Ms. Kortot's "video art" on a big screen. I saw the first Hindenberg section performed by the San Francisco Symphony close to a decade ago during their American Mavericks Festival, and loved the music but found the "video art" a rather uninteresting and pretentious use of Adobe After Effects.



The British choreographer McGregor divorced the "Dolly" score from the "video opera," coming up with a few inspired visual projections of his own, and has created one of the wildest dances I've ever seen on the San Francisco Opera House stage. It was so good that many of the dancers who were finished after the first two pieces on the program (Paul Taylor's "Spring Rounds" and Tomasson's "Chi-Lin") snuck into the back row of the orchestra section so they could watch the piece for themselves, a gesture of respect I've never seen before.

The ballet will undoubtedly be repeated next year, and I can't recommend it highly enough. For the record, the great dancers Saturday evening were Jaime Garcia Castilla, Hayley Farr, Dana Genshaft, Gonzalo Garcia, Rory Hohenstein, Muriel Maffre, Moises Martin, Pascal Molat, and Katita Waldo, all of whom looked like they were enjoying themselves immensely with the fiendish choreography. The live vocalists were Christa Pfeiffer, Heather Gardner, Thomas Busse, Keith Perry, and Dale Tracy, with Gary Sheldon as the conductor. If I knew the names of the ten instrumentalists, they'd be in here too, because the performance was a corker.

Mendelssohn's Elijah

Three performances of Mendelssohn's grand oratorio from 1846, "Elijah," complete with a huge chorus and a half-dozen soloists, are being held this weekend at Davies Symphony Hall.



I had never heard the piece before, so upon finding out there were rush tickets available at the box office for $20, I decided at the last minute to attend the Friday performance. There are rush tickets available for this evening, Saturday, by the way, though not for Sunday afternoon's matinee, and I'd encourage you to run to the box office because it's hard to imagine a better performance of this music.



Though the two-and-a-half-hour oratorio was originally written in German, the premiere was for a music festival in Birmingham, England so that "Elijah" first appeared in English and some of its numbers have remained as religious choral and solo favorites in Britain and America to this day. As usual, George Bernard Shaw wrote the best commentary, while reviewing a performance in Albert Hall:

"There is no falling off in the great popularity of Elijah. This need not be regretted so long as it is understood that our pet oratorio, as a work of religious art, stands together with...the poems of Longfellow and Tennyson, sensuously beautiful in the most refined and fastidiously decorous way, but thoughtless. That is to say, it is not really religious music at all."

Shaw continues:

"The best of it is seraphic music, like the best of Gounod's; but you have only to think of Parsifal, of the Ninth Symphony, of The Magic Flute, of the inspired moments of Handel and Bach, to see the great gulf that lies between the true religious sentiment and our delight in Mendelssohn's exquisite prettiness. The British public is convinced in its middle age that Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun is divine, on grounds no better and no worse than those on which, in its callow youth, it adores beautiful girls as angels. Far from desiring to belittle such innocent enthusiasm, I rather echo Mr. Weller's plea that 'Arter all, gen'lmen, it's an amiable weakness.' "

The oratorio is a strange mixture of revolting Old Testament revenge tale (where "He had Jezebel thrown from a window, trampled by horses, and he fed her remains to the dogs" is a good thing) and Mendelssohn's music at its most beautiful. Or as Shaw puts it:

"A vigorous protest should be entered whenever an attempt is made to scrape a layer off the praise due to the seraphs in order to spread it over the prophet in evening dress...who informs the audience, with a vicious exultation, that "God is angry with the wicked every day." That is the worst of your thoughtlessly seraphic composer: he is a wonder whilst he is flying; but when his wings fail him, he walks like a parrot."

The huge chorus was extraordinary all evening, and though the soloists were never particularly thrilling, they were all better than competent.



The real hero of the performance was the 80-year-old vegetarian Jehovah's Witness conductor, Herbert Blomstedt, who was the San Francisco Symphony's music director from 1985 until 1995. Though Blomstedt's tenure here at the time mostly bored the hell out of me, there's no denying that "Elijah" is his kind of music, and I can't imagine another conductor in the world right now who I'd rather hear leading it. The orchestra all night had an energy and sureness of purpose that never let the large piece lag, and the audience walked out enthralled. Plus, Blomstedt is doing something right, because he looks better at 80 than he did at age 60.

Plain and Fancy

The Eureka Theatre is a small playhouse in the back of the Embarcadero Center complex on Jackson Street.



Its main tenant is an interesting local troupe called 42nd Street Moon that specializes in "concert versions" of obscure Broadway musicals spanning the entire 20th century (click here to get to their website and see about tickets).



This week and next they are presenting "Plain and Fancy," a successful-but-then-forgotten 1955 musical that the program essay calls "the best Rodgers and Hammerstein musical not written by Rodgers and Hammerstein."



It deals with a romantic couple of sophisticates from Manhattan who go to sell some family land in Pennsylvania Amish country, and get involved in some serious romantic melodrama with mismatched lovers, not to mention the usual cultural clashes.



It's an unusually gentle musical that doesn't stray into the sentimental. The production, as is usual with this troupe, plays the piece straight and it's well worth a visit.

Slide into Scandal

There is an expensive "speakeasy" lounge called Slide on Mason Street, behind the St. Francis Hotel and under the Ruby Skye dance club (click here to get to their website).



On Sunday evening, it was the setting for a "New Issue Launch Party" for Benefit magazine, the glossy rag which details all the good works and fancy parties in which the rich of San Francisco indulge.



If you were feeling adventurous, you could even enter via the titular slide from the ground floor to the basement club.



The party was also a $20 suggested donation benefit for something called the San Francisco International Arts Festival (click here to get to their website).



Tim Gaskin, the founder/publisher of Benefit magazine, has been in the news quite a bit lately since he's close friends with Ruby Rippey-Tourk, the woman at the center of the Mayor Newsom adultery scandal. He also just appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle after giving a series of private emails from ABC-TV's Dan Noyes to Andrew Ross in some attempt to embarrass Noyes that backfired (click here for the I-team website with all the emails here).



Gaskin is a publicist and a gay pop artist with his finger in a lot of local celebrity pies, so to speak. His contribution to the "Hearts of San Francisco" project, for instance, is called ""Women for Justice," which depicts Kimberly Guilfoyle Newsom as Frida Kahlo on one side and Kamala Harris as Billie Holiday on the other (click here to get to his website).



State Assemblyman Mark Leno was the only politician to make a brief appearance as he apologized for having to go to a Chinatown dinner which didn't seem to amuse him.



There were a meager selection of hors d'oeuvres passed around...



...along with the overpriced cocktails...



...but it all became worthwhile when Linda Tillery and members of her Cultural Heritage Choir assembled on the small stage for a musical set (click here for her website).



The San Francisco International Arts Festival was founded by the Englishman Andrew Wood (above) four years ago with the Edinburgh Festival as a model...



...but this year's edition, entitled "The Truth in Knowing/Now: A conversation across the African Diaspora" is being sponsored through a fiscal nonprofit headed by Krissy Keefer, who was last seen as the Green candidate for Congress against Nancy Pelosi.



As the befurred Mumba above put it, Ms. Tillery is a legend on the order of Nina Simone and hearing her live tends to be a special occasion, so if she does appear at the festival make sure to check it out.



The artistic director this year is Rhodessa Jones, above, who was beaming with such good energy that my friend Katja insisted on a photo.

Monday Market Die-In

At the triangular corner of Market, Post, and Montgomery Streets during lunchtime, an Iraq War protest took place on the fourth anniversary of our invasion of that poor country.



The protestors gathered around the McKesson Building skyscraper where the war-profiteering Senator Dianne Feinstein has an office.



However, the police didn't seem to care whether or not people blocked the entrance to the skyscraper so they didn't arrest anyone.



So the protestors moved their sheets and their bodies to the center of Market Street and stopped traffic for over an hour.



The bike messengers, who own the stairs around the Muni Metro station on Market, were kibbitzing humorously about the entire affair.



There were cameras everywhere, including in the hands of a cop making sure he recorded every one of the dreaded leftist protestors, and who knows where that tape will end up.



The 45 protestors in the street were taken away one by one...



...while a quartet of guys pounded out an intuitive drumbeat on the newspaper racks.



I worked a temp job at an ad agency all day a block from the protest.



In the downtime I checked out the coverage of the Sunday protest around the web and was dismayed by the snark.



The people who were arrested today at Market and Montgomery are not just celebrity hogs or making themselves out to be morally superior or trendy leftist whatevers.



This is a serious moment in time, folks, and worrying about the trivia of your lives doesn't cut it right now.



These people took a lot of time and energy out of their lives to help stop evil.



They cannot be thanked enough.

Sunday Peace March

A large protest march commemorating the fourth anniversary of the United States invasion of Iraq made its way up Market Street to Civic Center on Sunday afternoon.



The San Francisco Chronicle website announced that there were "about 3,000 protestors" but that number was a grotesque lowball as their own photos proved.



I'd say it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 to 40,000 people, but just like the police, "we don't do crowd estimates."



There was much clever signage including pre-made posters from Working Assets that read, "Another (fill in the blank) For Peace" where people wrote everything from "Wedding Planner" to "Giants Fan."



There were even a handful of brave reactionaries, though they were few and far between.



A new contingent to this seemingly endless series of marches was a large Iranian group looking fabulous.



There were also a number of good ragtag marching instrumentalists...



...and the group below won Best Band award...



...for their soulful brass.



No protest march would be complete, however, without hundreds of San Francisco police standing around looking unfriendly and useless while collecting lots of Sunday overtime.

Mixed Race Irish

Just in time, for the safety of delicate white Irish skin, the sunny weather in San Francisco turned into grey fog and howling winds.



This allowed the annual St. Patrick's Day Parade up Market Street to Civic Center to pass without serious sunburns.



St. Patrick's Day would also not be a good day to have your house burn down, since it seems that half the fire departments in the Bay Area are in serious attendance...



...showing off their babes...



...while drinking beer and listening to live Irish bands.



Still, this is California in the 21st Century and one doesn't necessarily have to be born Irish-American to join in the tribal fun.



A few blocks away, the gay leather bar The Eagle was hosting a free corned beef and cabbage feed.



The bar was playing Irish music over the sound system, not their usual fare, but they turned it off at one point...



...when the French Louisiana fiddler Brian Godchaux pulled out his instrument and serenaded us live in the backyard.



He was stupendous and even caused one couple to break out into a spontaneous jig.

Incompatible Activities

A Rules Committee meeting at San Francisco's City Hall on Thursday morning dealt, among other topics, with the woeful condition of the city's Ethics Commission which is kept deliberately underfunded and ineffective for whatever reasons by the powers-that-be in city government.



h. Brown has a funny and astute wrap-up at the "Fog City Journal" site (click here to get there for the full article) which explains much of the problem:

"Ethics' Executive Director John St. Croix was a man tip-toeing over a razor sharp picket fence. His department is sorely understaffed. However, it is intentionally understaffed so's it can't do what the voters wanted it to do when they passed Prop K that created it. You'd think St. Croix would want a full staff.

On the other hand, the man is an 'at will' employee and that means the commission can fire him at anytime. And the commission (appointees of Mayor, Board, Public Defender, D.A. and Assessor) is dominated by a Downtown thinking majority that doesn't want a stronger commission. Oddly, the Mayor, as a supervisor, supported making the Ethics boss independent and free of influence from Room 200. Now, as Mayor, Gavin's changed his mind."

h. Brown continues:

"So, you get the 2004-2005 Civil Grand Jury Foreperson (Mary McCallister) that studied Ethics and suggested full staffing and other changes to properly implement Prop K. And, Joe Lynn, Ethics guru (spent most of the last decade working at Ethics, first as staff, then as a commissioner), describing best practices at similar agencies around the state."

"And, Bob Planthold from the Sunshine Task Force (formerly, Chair of the Ethics Commission). And, Rick Knee who is also with the Sunshine Task Force. And, a number of City employees with anecdotal evidence of the inadequacy of Ethics.

You get all of these people calling for full staffing (they've been at 50% for 4 years because first, Willie Brown, then Newsom, refused to budget staff for them). And, you get St. Croix saying that he simply "wouldn't know what to do with them" if the Board voted full staffing.

It was sad."

The aforementioned Mary McAllister was the foreperson of the Civil Grand Jury in 2004-2005, and according to all accounts, she was a great one. One of her crusades was cleaning up the deeply dysfunctional Rec & Park Department and somebody had sent her a link to this blog's accounting of the PROSAC meeting the other day, "He Mowed My Ball!" (click here). According to Joe Lynn, her reaction was "SFMike really gets it!"



The agenda item had been called by Supervisor Daly and most of the discussion was about the Ethics Commission and its inability to police illegal campaign financing, which is a subject close to his heart since he was outrageously smeared by shadow groups during the last election. The commission tends to go after the most piddling of rules infractions committed by small, underfunded campaigns for not dotting their i's and crossing their t's, while not bothering to go after the more egregious abusers like PG&E and lobbyist Jim Sutton who have deep pockets and can hide behind a series of shells.



Though Mary McAllister spoke to the campaign finance issue, her real interest is in changing the structure of ALL city departments with a simple formulation of "Incompatible Activities" for each group, which at present doesn't even exist. Here's the issue in her own words:

"There continues to be evidence that the Commission is inadequately staffed. The voters mandated that the City develop Statements of Incompatible Activities for its city employees and public officials nearly 4 years ago. These statements have the potential to prohibit employees and officials from self-serving activities that are not in the interests of the public."

She continues:

"An example of such activities is that Building Inspectors in San Francisco have a lengthy history of using their authority to obtain building permits for their own personal properties. Common sense might suggest that such blatant demonstrations of self-interest would be illegal. Unfortunately the City Attorney has advised the city that unless employees and officials are explicitly informed in advance that such acts are inappropriate, the city is unable to sanction these actions.

Nearly four years after the voters of San Francisco did what they could to mandate a remedy, these Statements of Incompatibility still do not exist. This is just one of many functions of the Ethics Commission that is not being performed because it does not have adequate staff to do so.

In general, the Ethics Commission staff is unable to perform random audits of many of the laws that it administers. Statements of Economic Interests are not reviewed, nor is any attempt to made to determine that they are on file in city departments, as required. Citizens who request such statements, as permitted by law, are often turned away empty handed. Investigations are initiated primarily in response to complaints. This puts the Commission in jeopardy of being a tool for political vendettas rather than a means of preventing conflicts of interest and campaign finance violations."

I missed meeting Mary McAllister at the Rules Committee, but an odd coincidence occurred an hour later at the Quaker Peace Vigil in front of the Federal Building a couple of blocks away. A woman approached the group and asked if she could join us, I enthusiastically welcomed her, and after chatting each other up for ten minutes, we had a blinding realization. "Are you Mike?" she asked. "Are you Mary?" I responded. Our subsequent embrace was spontaneous and heartfelt.

Slow Fire

There is an old industrial section of San Francisco near 16th and Harrison Streets which is on the cusp of the Mission District and the South of Market neighboorhoods.



It has changed radically over the last three decades as industrial manufacturing migrated to other, less expensive locations in the Bay Area and beyond.



The dot-com gold rush during the late 1990s also focused on the area, with factories being transformed into offices, fancy restaurants and "live/work lofts for artists."



The latter were in many cases simply a real estate zoning scam that took advantage of legislation spurred by the granddaddy of live/work artist lofts, Project Artaud (click here for their website).



According to the history section on their website:

"In 1971, a group of artists moved into the then vacant building and named it after the avant-garde French theater artist, Antonin Artaud (1896-1948). In 1989, full legal status was granted to Project Artaud,
thus defining the new live/work code for the city of San Francisco.

Today, there are over 70 individual artists' live/work studios occupied by visual artists, sculptors, writers, photographers, print makers, performing artists of all disciplines, electronic media creators, as well as film/video makers."

According to stories I've heard over the years, the residents' association meetings can be hellish, since everyone is an egomaniacal artist, but somehow the place has survived.



There is a large theater on the Florida Street side of the building which has been home to a whole host of theater troupes along with touring shows, and one of its most distinguished presenters over the years has been the Paul Dresher Ensemble, which specializes in theatrical "new music." (Click here for their website.)



Their first great success was in the late 1980s with "An Electric Opera" called "Slow Fire," written by Dresher and its solo performer, the unclassifiable singer/dancer/actor Rinde Eckert, and they toured with the piece worldwide for 10 years before retiring it in 1996.



The collection of musical rants around the character of Bob and his Memories of Dad was a bit too "arty" for my tastes, but the music is great, and this brief revival (through Sunday) is probably your last chance to see this landmark work live with the original performers, which is reason enough to check it out.

Naan-N-Curry

An auto repair shop was turned into a doomed restaurant location at the corner of Van Ness and Turk a few decades ago by then-celebrity chef Jeremiah Tower, who owned Stars Restaurant around the corner. He called the huge barn "Speedo 690" and it wasn't a success.



The place went through a number of identities before becoming a Lyon's Restaurant through most of the 1990s, and then a "Noodle House," followed by a Mexican restaurant, and now the fourth Bay Area installment of a Pakistani/Indian restaurant called "Naan-N-Curry."



The food is inexpensive in contrast to most of the restaurants in the neighborhood, and it's outrageously tasty.



May it survive the doomed restaurant location and feed the Civic Center spicy food for many years.

Ferry Boat Mantra

For pleasure and relaxation after a nasty day at work...



...there is hardly a better antidote than a ferry boat ride on the San Francisco Bay.



The destination doesn't particularly matter since the journey is the point. Bon voyage.

BattleCry

A contingent from the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence stood on City Hall's Polk Street steps at noon on Friday...



...along with a half-dozen leftist groups such as World Can't Wait.



They were protesting a Texas "youth ministry" called Teen Mania, which was holding an event called "BattleCry" in San Francisco at the Giants baseball stadium on Saturday, and at a pray-in directly in front of San Francisco's City Hall on Friday afternoon.



The only problem was that the Christians were late, and there was nobody to protest against at noon, except for one lone gentleman telling everyone that there was going to be an earthquake soon in San Francisco and that we were all going to hell.



This must have been disappointing for all the local television stations who had sent out photographers looking for a wild confrontation.



At some point between two and three in the afternoon, the Christian teens finally arrived with their signage...



...and their T-shirts, whose backsides read: "WARNING! This teen is branded by God. This teen will be seen changing this generation, preaching the Word of God, laying hands on the sick, walking by faith, lying in purity, standing for the truth, and demonstrating the unconditional love of Jesus Christ."



There were also large red flags that looked like refugees from a roadshow production of "Les Miz"...



...along with signage spelling out the mathematics of marriage.



The Battlecry website is amazingly sophisticated, with blogs and video of Friday's City Hall "action" already posted. (Click here to get there and check it out.)



In fact, the entire operation struck me as bizarrely slick, with a lot of money involved to get these Young Christian Warriors pumped up.



At one point, a large group formed a huge circle in Civic Center Plaza holding hands...



...and I found myself in the middle, half expecting dodgeballs to be flung.



Thankfully, there were still a few Sisters around to offer salvation.

He Mowed My Ball

On the ocean cliffs above Land's End, where the San Francisco Cemetery once hosted the dead, stands one of the most beautiful municipal golf courses in the world, Lincoln Park.



Like many other municipal departments in San Francisco, the Recreation & Park Department is woefully screwed up, with terrible leadership and too many workers who just plain don't give a damn about what they are doing.



This Monday there were actual maintenance workers on the course mowing some of the fairways, a sight I had never seen before, but in every case they were completely oblivious to what was going on around them. Golfers were forced to play around the maintenance workers as they glided around on their noisy machines wearing heavy-duty headphones. Zak Salem, the worker above, was so out-of-it that he proceeded to drive his mower over my tee shot on the Par 3 17th hole, disintegrating my golf ball in the process.



This wasn't out of malice so much as sheer stupidity, which also extends to the huge muddy ruts he was leaving just yards from the 17th green with his equipment.



Because the maintenance is so bad on San Francisco municipal courses, very few people play them anymore, which means that the city takes in less money, the deficit rises, and the death spiral continues. There is a plan afoot to give away these public resources to a "non-profit organization" who would presumably do a better job, but recreational access for local teenagers and citizens without much money would be sharply curtailed.



I complained about the situation to Lance Wong, the amiable head golf pro at Lincoln who is not a municipal employee and who has no say over the maintenance crews. He suggested I attend a meeting where the "Golf Fund" was being discussed at City Hall on Tuesday evening by a group called the Park, Recreation and Open Space Advisory Committee.



Their acronym, believe it or not, is PROSAC and the group didn't look like they particularly enjoyed each other.



We heard a sketchy presentation about the proposed handover of public golf courses to something called the "National Golf Foundation" from the Rec & Park representative above, Dawn Kamalanathan. She made it sound as if this was already a done deal and her contempt for everyone was palpable.



A quintet of leading citizens from the beachside town of Pacifica, ten miles south of San Francisco, had arrived at the meeeting because they wanted to "have a seat at the table" when this transfer was discussed. For some reason, having to do with a bequest in the 1920s, the Sharp Park golf course and recreational area is under the thumb of San Francisco's Rec & Park Department. This would be analogous to Oakland being in charge of Golden Gate Park and then doing zero maintenance on the place because they had other priorities.



The mayor of Pacifica, Julie Lancelle (above), gave a sweet, politically sensitive, and charming speech about Sharp Park and its importance to the town, and Dawn's ears perked up when she heard that Pacifica was prepared to take over the financial burdens of the area.



After the Pacifica contingent had given their polite speeches and requests, I stood up and said what they hadn't dared to bring up, which is that the maintenance by San Francisco's Rec & Park Department of Sharp Park is shameful. "And so is the maintenance at your San Francisco courses." I told them about my experience at Lincoln Park on Monday, and ended with "He mowed my ball!"

The Eroica Trio at The San Francisco Symphony

This week's program at the San Francisco Symphony looked dull on paper, but it turned out to be a thoroughly enjoyable concert.



The first piece was Opus 2 of the British wunderkind Thomas Ades, his 1990 Chamber Symphony, which he wrote at the age of 18 after giving up a solo piano career. After hearing his Chamber Symphony, I can finally understand why everyone got so excited when Ades burst on the scene. Though the symphony is written for only 15 instruments, the mixture of density and clarity is amazing, and the piece often sounds as if there are 80 instruments playing.



This was followed by Beethoven's 1804 Triple Concerto for Violin, Cello, Piano and Orchestra which can be very boring music, but not at this performance, especially with the Eroica Trio playing the soloist roles while looking like a concert hall version of Charlie's Angels.



The Eroica Trio has probably played this concerto innumerable times since forming in 1991, but they attacked it as if it was the freshest, most exciting music around and the feeling was infectious. The orchestra, conducted by the interesting Alan Gilbert, backed them up beautifully.



Mozart's 1788 final symphony, "The Jupiter," followed after intermission and it was fine, but I may have heard this piece once too often. Plus, I will probably never get Sir Thomas Beecham's recorded version, which I grew up on, out of my brain.

Summer Camp

A Summer Camp Fair, with activity options for San Francisco City and County children was held at the Bill Graham auditorium in Civic Center Plaza last Saturday. It was hosted by a group with a mouthful of a name: "San Francisco’s Department of Children, Youth and Their Families." (Click here to get to their elaborate website).



Here's a branding tip, folks, which is to keep your name consistent. Does it have an ampersand or the word "and"? Is it "Their Families" or just "Families"? And what consensus-by-committee came up with that dumb name in the first place back in 1989?



On their website, part of their mission statement proclaims:

DCYF achieves its mission by:

* Strategic stewardship of the city’s landmark Children’s Fund
* Creating innovative partnerships within government and with the community
* Researching and promoting policies and a shared agenda to make San Francisco a family-friendly city

I'd say they were falling down pretty badly on the job since 1989 with that last bullet point.



Private organizations had set up booths throughout the auditorium...



...and they ranged all over the spectrum...



...from little girls who love animals...



...to would-be windsurfers...



...to "Camp E'Ete" for the francophiles...



...and a fantasy camp for Sword-and-Sorcery Princesses.



The San Francisco Recreation and Park Department had a large area on a platform in the back of the auditorium where they were having people fill out elaborate forms for a database that would allow families to sign up online for Rec and Park summer camps at a discounted rate.



This is a new system with a fairly short enrollment window, from 1-6:30 PM, March 5 to March 16, at the following locations: Randall Museum (closed Monday), SOMA (6th & Folsom), Richmond Recreation Center (18th Avenue & Clement), Palega Recreation Center (Felton & Holyoke), and from 1-4 PM, Kezar Stadium (Stanyan & Waller) and The Lodge Annex (Stanyan & Fell). You can register after March 16th, but you chances of getting your children into the more popular programs will decrease.



And this is the mountain of paperwork they want you to provide:

* Proof of age: Copy of a birth certificate or passport for anyone 18 years of age or under
* Proof of residency: A utility bill that matches your address to your name or the name of the head of your household
* State of California issued driver's license or Identification Card - Your utility bill must match this address and the name of the head of household
* Emergency Contact Information
* Proof of Immunization (for children under 5 years of age)
* E-mail address (if you have one)



Outside of the "Silver Tree Day Camp" in Glen Canyon, all the activities in the Rec and Park pamphlet seemed to be taking place in the western section of San Francisco, mostly in and around Kezar Stadium in Golden Gate Park.



If you happen to live in the eastern part of town, such as the Mission or Bayview/Hunter's Point, you are just plain out of luck.



This doesn't seem quite fair.

From Sleeping Beauty to Spider-Man

The Civic Center neighborhood was hopping with Culture Vultures all weekend, and I happily joined in the fun.



The opera house was hosting the San Francisco Ballet all week in their revival of Tchaikowsky's three-act "Sleeping Beauty." Friday night featured the "A" cast with Yuan Yuan Tan as Princess Aurora and Tiit Helimets as The Prince, and the level of dancing by the entire cast was very high, with special shoutouts to Muriel Maffre as an imperious Lilac Fairy and David Arce as the Cutest Corps de Ballet Dude. The sets and costumes were also just the right degree of lavish.



Traditional ballet still gives me a slight case of the creeps, though. Dancing en pointe has an element of Chinese foot-binding to it, and the many exposed ribs and collarbones on the ballerinas hints unpleasantly at anorexia. However, I'm in the minority, and the sold-out house looked to be having a marvelous time.



On Saturday evening, the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall continued with its final performance of "A Flowering Tree," conducted by its composer John Adams, and a second hearing confirmed the beauty and wonder of the piece. Two favorite moments were the rhythmic opening of the second act where the great bass Eric Owens as The Narrator was dancing along to the music in improvised pleasure, and the Fourth Transformation finale for orchestra and chorus which sounds like some wonderful fusion of Prokofiev, Sibelius, and Ravel while being pure John Adams.



On the same evening, as part of the week-long NoisePop festival, there were rock concerts galore at small clubs in the neighborhood like The Rickshaw Lounge on Fell Street.



Further up Fell Street there was a party being held at the Isotope comic book lounge (click here) for WonderCon attendees. "We're going to be packing the shop wall to wall with sexy nerds and nerdettes for one of our six hours post-convention celebrations that are the stuff of comic industry legend," their website promised.



And they weren't exaggerating, as the place was packed with sexy young nerds and nerdettes.



The guest of honor was the legendary comic book writer J.M. DeMatteis (pictured below) whose fascinating career can be digested over at Wikipedia (click here to get there).



My favorite detail in the Wikipedia bio is that DeMatteis is a follower of the late guru Meher Baba whose "Don't Worry, Be Happy" billboard in San Francisco in the late 1960s was one of my favorite pieces of public art. For a fascinating bio of this avatar of God, click here.

ComMUNIty

The usually crowded, psychotic 47 Van Ness Muni bus was unexpectedly pleasant on Friday afternoon as we watched the young man above interview a Mexican passenger in good but terribly accented Spanish.



He had joined a couple of classmates in "A project designed to bridge connections between MUNI passengers by promoting an artistic atmosphere within MUNI." Good luck, you say, but in their own way they were succeeding. Two of the artists sat across from us on the bus, and we joined in their "artistic atmosphere" by filling out a short survey ("What is your greatest fear/hope?" for instance) while being drawn on a sketchpad.



The results of their labors are going up at a blog called "COMMUNITY" which you can reach by clicking here. So, if a shy young woman hands you a list of presumptuous questions and starts drawing your likeness, do join in the fun.

If That Is What You Believe, Then Say So

The weekly Thursday peace vigil at noon in front of San Francisco's Federal Building continues to grow.



Meanwhile, we are treated to the craven journalistic idiocies of writers like Carolyn Lochhead of the "San Francisco Chronicle."

(02-25) 04:00 PST Washington -- While Democrats on Capitol Hill are denouncing President Bush for sending 21,500 more troops to Iraq, both parties are skirting the question of what comes next...

If violence resumes, or a high-profile assassination triggers upheaval, as the National Intelligence Estimate warns, U.S. public pressure for a withdrawal likely will increase.

But none of the diplomatic or military groundwork to mitigate the attendant dangers has been laid.

"At that point you're not drawing down as part of a phased and carefully worked out policy," said Steven Simon of the Council on Foreign Relations. "You're drawing down because your domestic politics really shove you in that direction. And that's not a position in which the U.S. should be."

In the same Sunday "Chronicle," there was an essay by Anna Badkhen with a truly absurd headline: "IRAQ WITHOUT WAR: Would things be better, or worse, in Baghdad four years later if the United States had not invaded?"



At Chris Floyd's great leftist polemical site, "Empire Burlesque," he quotes a writer named Arthur Silber about what all this rhetoric evades, and it's a doozy of an essay (click here to read the whole thing).



Floyd writes:

"Arthur Silber, as always, talks good and damning sense about the maddening moral idiocy of the entire American establishment and the whole "national debate" about the Iraq war. He limns with brutal accuracy the inability of our movers and shakers -- and most of the public they manipulate so thoroughly -- to comprehend the true nature of this bloodsoaked hell: that it is a monstrous crime, conceived in evil, steeped in murder, breeding death, brutality and corruption in everything it touches."

"Silber's penetrating ire is sparked off by the witless flap over John McCain's remark about the "waste" of American lives in shoddy execution of the war...From the pathetic little media spit-up over the remarks of McCain and Obama, Silber moves on to a more sweeping look at the many malign effects the war crime is inflicting on America and the world, as well as examining some of the unspoken assumptions that drive the bipartisan arrogance and ignorance of U.S. foreign policy."

"Here's a brief glimpse at one of Silber's insights: Moreover, this catastrophe without end has severely damaged our nation's military, making us more vulnerable to actual threats we might face in the future. And no, Mr. Bush, Senator Reid, and assorted "major liberal bloggers," the answer is not to enthusiastically and very expensively create a still "bigger military." We already spend more on defense than most of the rest of the world combined. Why in God's name should our military, in the words of Chalmers Johnson, regularly "deploy[] well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in other nations" -- and why should we have over 700 bases in 130 countries around the globe? There is only one reason for insanity of this kind: we are absolutely convinced we are "entitled" to rule the world, by military force on a scale never before seen in all of world history. If that is what you believe, then say so -- and be damned."

Floyd continues:

"That last line says it all. It's time to stop all the baby talk, time to strip off the sugar-coating over the reality of what these policies really mean, and have always meant. And it's time -- way past time -- to damn the authoritarians, the imperialists, and the silk-suited murderers for what they are, and drive them out of office, out of public life, and into the prisons where they belong."

Between Mr. Floyd and Mr. Silber, they pretty much say it all.

A Flowering Tree

The United States premiere of a new opera/oratorio, "A Flowering Tree," by local composer John Adams was performed by the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday night, with the composer himself conducting.



It was exciting being part of the premiere since this music, some of Adams' best, will probably live forever.



As the conductor Mary Chun stated, "this is prime Middle Period Adams. I can't wait to hear what he does next."



The sound of the piece is similar to Adams' Christmas oratorio, "El Nino," with three vocal soloists joined by a large chorus and orchestra. However, "A Flowering Tree" is less disjointed than "El Nino," and overall a much gentler, smoother piece of music.



The opera started as a commission for "A New Crowned Hope" music festival in Vienna last year celebrating Mozart's 250th that was being led by the librettist and director of "A Flowering Tree," Peter Sellars.



It was initially supposed to last under an hour, but the opera kept growing and ended up being about two-and-a-half hours long with one intermission.



The story is from an old East Indian fable about a poor girl who can transform herself into a magical, perfumed tree and back into a human. A spoiled prince falls in love with her, marries her, loses her, goes mad when she gets stuck in mid-transformation and disappears, and finally heals her with love.



The critics in Vienna hated "A Flowering Tree" for its ultra hippy-dippy, multi-culti, California melding of cultures (there are choruses in Spanish and Indonesian dancers doubling the singers), but I'm here to say that it's one of the most exquisitely beautiful pieces of music Adams has ever written, and that's saying something.



The only fly in last night's ointment was the fact that the starting time was moved from 8:00 PM to 7:30 PM, the unofficial reason being that there were parties for donors scheduled for every evening after the performances with the composer, who just turned 60 on February 15th. This led to an army of latecomers clomping in during the "Flores, flores!" chorus which was fairly annoying. Otherwise, it was just about a perfect evening. Happy birthday, John Adams. I can't wait for your Late Period.