Dalai O'Brien Does Darfur

One of the oddest confluence of celebrities imaginable occurred in San Francisco's Civic Center Plaza on Sunday afternoon.



The Dalai Lama was finishing up the third day of a meditation/teaching he was hosting at the Bill Graham Auditorium all weekend to moneyed guests.



He must be a very holy person indeed to convey any spirituality in that strange, large barn of a building. Still, the authorities weren't taking any chances and everyone's bags were being thoroughly searched.



A block away, the passageway between the Main Library and the Asian Art Museum, which is usually Derelict Central, had been invaded by network television.



There were huge media trucks parked all over the neighborhood...



...readying themselves for Conan O'Brien's week-long appearance taping his show in San Francisco at at the Orpheum Theatre.



Back in the Civic Center Plaza itself, a Bike Coalition dude had set up an area near the children's playground where he'd look after your bike if you had cycled to the event being held that afternoon.



It was a "Stop Genocide in Darfur" rally...



...and it was very sparsely attended.



The crowd wasn't the usual anti-war protestor types that show up for Get Out of Iraq demonstrations.



In fact, it was overwhelmingly affluent looking young white people.



There was lots of signage and a few grotesque prop tents symbolizing various massacres throughout the last century, with the number of people murdered in each klling field looking disconcertedly like real estate prices ("Darfur: Over 400,000 Dead!").



I got the feeling that many of the people who did attend were uncomfortable at anti-Iraq protests because of all the icky ANSWER folk who yell rude things about Israel and their treatment of the Palestinians. The only problem is that the "Stop Genocide in Darfur" people are urging that the United States use their "moral authority" to make the U.N. and the rest of the world stop the slaughter in the West Sudan, and because of our invasion of Iraq, we have no Moral Authority. It's gone, over, fini. Paul Wolfowitz in charge of the World Bank pretty much puts the last nail in the coffin of whatever "authority" America once possessed.



Rounding up this afternoon of odd celebrities, I walked by a little tent surrounded by scary Secret Service types and yelled out, "Good luck, Senator" and then corrected myself with "Good luck, Governor" to Bill Richardson, the presidential candidate and current Governor of New Mexico who was to be the first speaker at this ridiculous event.

Impeach at the Beach 1

A sparsely attended rally in front of San Francisco's Federal Building on Friday featured a small blimp with "IMPEACH" written across it, while various speakers encouraged stragglers to visit Congresswoman Pelosi's office on the 14th floor to urge her to get rid of the criminals currently in charge of the United States.



The turnout and the vibes were much better the next morning at Ocean Beach, where a "human mural" was being assembled on the sand to spell out "IMPEACH NOW!" for a helicopter photo-op.



I exited the 5 Fulton bus at its final stop with a Dutch woman, Sandra Schaap, who was in town for a conference...



...and who had jumped on the bus simply because she wanted to put her foot in the ocean, which she misses terribly as she currently works at Emory Hospitals in Atlanta.



When I explained to her that she had arrived at Ocean Beach...



...just in time for a large "Impeach Bush" event...



...she was utterly charmed, and asked, "Do you ever have those moments where you find yourself wandering into exactly the right place you're supposed to be?"



After being introduced to the organizers, Sandra decided that since she had an orange scarf, she should join the exclamation mark group at the end since they were all dressed in orange jumpsuits like Guantanamo prisoners.



I left her with the orange people and walked down the beach looking for a letter that needed extra bodies the most.

Impeach at the Beach 2

I finally settled on the letter "W" and sat next to a sweet couple from the town of Richmond.



The weather could hardly have been lovelier for the late morning event...



...and the crowd was being serenaded by an exquisite ensemble of marimba players...



...which had a few people dancing.



There were thousands of beautiful young people...



...in every direction you looked...



...some of them exercising...



...and others just lounging on the beach.



There were interesting props on display here and there...



...along with a few killer T-shirts.



Plus, it was doggy heaven...



...with some of the best-behaved hounds I've ever been around.



The helicopter finally arrived around 11:15 AM and the crowd laid down in their etched-out letters...



...which was followed by another photo-op with everyone standing...



...and waving their arms.



The Dutch visitor Sandra crawled out of her orange jumpsuit looking radiant...



...as did most of the crowd.



Update: One of the money shots is above. It was taken by David B Page and you can see others, including the crowd doing a quick transformation into "PEACE NOW!" Click here for the great photos.

Teachin' and Protestin'

The headquarters for the San Francisco School District is at the corner of McAllister and Gough Streets...



...which is across the street from where I live.



There are frequent organized protests in front of the building, usually in conjunction with the monthly Board of Education meetings, such as this one on Tuesday the 24th.



There was a table set up on Gough Street with loads of premade signage in about four different languages...



...covering a bewildering array of issues.



I asked a number of participants what they were protesting, whether it was something specific or "just everything as usual," and after laughter received a whole range of responses from "our 6% pay raise which has been in arbitration forever," to "the treatment of 'paras' (meaning 'paraprofessionals') to "oh, the usual."



For more information about the meeting, though not about the protest, click here for Kim Knox's account on the "Left in SF" website.



Though I hate the way the crowd baits passing motorists on Franklin Street into honking their obnoxious horns for two straight hours, the crowd itself was quite sweet, and even included the Raging Grannies in a sing-a-long. If any educators are reading this and want to explain further what the noise was all about, please do so in the comments.

Gavin and The Tiaras

Just before the Cherry Blossom Parade was about to begin at Civic Center Plaza on Sunday, Mayor Gavin Newsom showed up with his retinue of bodyguards.



No parade in San Francisco would be complete without politicians riding in open cars, and the newest Supervisor, the small business conservative Ed Jew, looked like he was ready to enjoy himself...



...as did Supervisor Mirkarimi...



...and Mark Leno, who is currently running against Carole Migden for State Senator.



Most ethnic identity parades feature Beauty Queens...



...and the Cherry Blossom Festival had literally dozens of them.



Mayor Newsom posed like a movie star with the various beauties in their tiaras...



...but seemed less at ease with the officials from Osaka who were attending the parade in honor of the 50th anniversary of San Francisco's sister-city relationship with their city.



In fact, watching Newsom posing...



...and uttering meaningless bromides to television reporters...



...just reinforced for me once again...



...that the guy is an empty suit posturing for the rich gangsters...



...who really run this city.

Multi-Culti Cherry Blossom Parade

The annual Cherry Blossom Parade in San Francisco this last Sunday is one of my favorite civic occasions.



The parade itself is fairly small...



...and features lots of children.



Just about everyone dresses in some kind of costume...



...and often plays a musical instrument.



What struck me as different this year was that this affair used to be much more strictly segregated to those of Japanese descent...



...but like much else in California the racial boundaries are blurring...



...and it was a heartening sight.



Most parades in San Francisco start downtown and end in the Civic Center Plaza...



...but the Cherry Blossom Festival Parade assembles in the plaza and then marches their way up to Japantown on Geary Boulevard.



There was a multi-culti Butoh troupe...



...and a Hawaiian dancing contingent...



...with multi-racial hula dancers.



The visual coup of the afternoon was Clarendon Elementary School...



...which has a Japanese Bilingual Bicultural Program...



...and an extensive supply of red caps.



The cherry blossom season has already come and gone (click here for "Vivienne Westwood and Global Warming") but it didn't matter. The parade looked and felt like Spring.

Yuja Wang Wows

The San Fracisco Symphony program last weekend looked a bit dull on paper, but turned out to be charming and thrilling in equal measure. The main reason for that was the official debut of a 20-year-old Chinese pianist, Yuja Wang, who was simply sensational playing Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 2.



The "San Francisco Chronicle" critic, Joshua Kosman, was also entranced and wrote a good appreciation (click here for the whole thing). What most impressed me was that I'd heard the same piece in 2001 in the same hall with Roberto Abbado conducting and a young Italian pianist Gianluca Cascioli as the soloist, and the piece was dull as dirt. This performance had most of the audience on the edge of their seats.



The conductor was the 71-year-old Charles Dutoit, who was in charge of the Montreal Symphony for decades, and who is presently headed to the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra for the next four or five years. Not only does Dutoit look as if he's been provided by Central Casting for the role of Distinguished Old Conductor, but he's a great musician.



The two other pieces on the program were by Ravel and Richard Strauss from 1917, where both composers dealt with World War One by channeling French Baroque composers, Couperin in the case of Ravel ("Le Tombeau de Couperin") and Lully in the case of Strauss ("Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme Suite"). The playing was exquisite and a herald of good things to come later this week when Dutoit takes on one of the biggies in the classical music repertory, "The Damnation of Faust" by Berlioz. I can hardly wait.

Blue Angel Earth Day Massacre

I believe it was Gore Vidal who wrote that four of his favorite words in the English language were, "I told you so." And so I did, back on October 6, 2005 on the beginning pages of this photoblog (click here for a trip into the time machine).



The Blue Angels were performing their annual Fleet Week aerial displays in October, and I wrote the following: "Quite a few people LOVE the Blue Angels and their acrobatics and I've always tried to respect that, but frankly right now their "demonstration" is nothing less than obscene. It's an obscene use of our taxpayer dollars, an obscene waste of oil-based energy, and it's ridiculously dangerous to be practicing at low altitudes over a city."



And continued: "I wonder how many Americans would be quite so enthusiastic about this demonstration of military might and drill-team displays if murderous foreigners regularly flew over their cities and bombed the hell out of them, as we currently do with our FA18 Hornets in Iraq. Their "weapon load" is pictured above."



I even went to the trouble to write letters to each of the Board of Supervisors members pleading with them to prevent a San Francisco neighborhood from being turned into a fireball in the event of an "accident" such as happened yesterday in South Carolina. (Click here to get to the whole post, with lots of interesting comments from, well, everyone.)

But does anybody listen? Nooooooo. Please do me a favor, readers, and get hold of your local supervisor's offices and call the mayor's office and tell them it's finally time to politely disinvite the Blue Angels from endangering the entire city every year.

Left in the Dark

San Francisco Supevisor Ross Mirkarimi's office hosted their monthly art show in his City Hall offices on Friday evening.



It was an amiable crowd that spilled into the hallway outside...



...and happily the photography show, "Left in the Dark" was beautiful and interesting.



It consisted of large prints taken inside some of the single-screen movie theatres still standing in San Francisco, including a few heartbreakers like the Coronet Theatre on Geary Boulevard which is being demolished by a shady organization called The Institute on Aging.



The photographer is R.A. McBride (click here to get to her website and a slide show of all the theater photos), who is in the photo above on the right.



She even had a few photos of The Great Star theatre on Jackson Street in Chinatown where I used to go to kung-fu movies in the 1970s. This place actually had a curved, wide screen that was optimal for showing Hong Kong films made in "ShawScope."



At least the theater still stands and is used for Chinese opera performances, unlike the recently demolished favorite of mine at Polk and California, The Royal. Oh well, linear time moves on.

Raging Veteran Grannies

The Raging Grannies (click here for their website) performed a piece of street theatre in front of a Chevron station at 9th and Howard Streets on Thursday, and an AP photo of the demonstration made its way to one of my favorite blogs in the universe, Princess Sparkle Pony's Photoblog out of Washington, DC (click here to get there).



From the Chevron station, they marched up to the Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue to speak to Nancy Pelosi's office about "The New Iraq Oil Law" which has been written by the United States for the Iraqi legislature to pass next week.



The plan is to take the previously nationalized Iraq oil industry and give it away to the multinational corporations who are really driving this obscene occupation. There's a good article written on Counterpunch by Ben Terrall describing the San Francisco demonstration and the craven New Iraq Oil Law (click here to get to the article).



Though they were supposed to be dressed as oil plutocrats, in truth the demonstrators didn't really look like rich people...



...but their props were good and the balloons were colorful, and they seemed to be enjoying themselves on the plaza immensely.



The flag in the plaza was at half-mast on Thursday, presumably because of the Virginia Tech massacre, which left me curiously unmoved, perhaps because 185 innocents had been murdered in Baghdad on the same day thanks to our invasion and continuing occupation.



The best piece I've read about the domestic massacre was by Mike Daly, an angry New York Daly News writer, who wrote a column entitled, "Yes, Virginia, guns kill innocents" (click here for the whole thing). Here's an excerpt:

"Still love those guns, Virginia? Ready to admit that it's madness for any psycho to be able to saunter into a gun shop and acquire firepower capable of killing 32 innocents? Feel different now that the blood is the blood of so many of your most promising young people?

You've been shrugging for decades as illegal guns from your state plague our city, killing and maiming and terrorizing New Yorkers by the thousands, at one point comprising 47% of the guns our cops recovered. You even yukked it up with a "Bloomberg Gun GiveAway" raffle at a gun shop that sold at least 22 guns used in crimes in New York."

I have been friends and work colleagues with Vietnam veterans for the last three decades, and though each of them has dealt with the horror of their experience in their individual ways, all of them were traumatized to some extent, and some of them returned in a very deadly mood. The term "go postal" stems from the fact that so many returning Vietnam vets procured jobs at the United States Post Office on their return, and some of them freaked out spectacularly. The tens of thousands of Iraq war veterans are going to be in a huge mess too, and nobody's really talking about it. As a society, we're going to be living with the repercussions for the rest of our lives.

Note: I posted an earlier version of this on Friday, but in an inspired bit of computer idiocy, I erased it on Saturday morning. So if you think the post has changed, you're right. And I hope it keeps Ms. Egan's brilliant comment when I try to repost.

A Wish for Damien

Apologies for the very light posting. I've been working my brain and my eyeballs into a computer frenzy over the last week for paying clients.



Here's a shout-out to Damien and his regal pussy, Jinx...



...and a wish that Damien gets a lung transplant soon and sticks around for many more moons.

Stravinsky and Takemitsu at the Symphony

The San Francisco Symphony has some of the most innovative and interesting programming of any symphonic organization in the country, and last week's program was a good example.



There were three fairly obscure pieces by Stravinsky, and for the crowd-pleasing concerto with a star soloist, they featured the clarinetist Richard Stoltzman playing the1991 "Fantasma/Cantos" by the recently deceased Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, which is not exactly the Mozart Clarinet Concerto in terms of popularity.



The first half of the concert started with Stravinsky's 1920 "Symphonies of Wind Instruments" which he wrote as a eulogy for Debussy followed by the all-strings 1928 ballet score for "Apollo," which was Stravinsky's first real collaboration with George Balanchine.



They are both ascetic pieces of music but quite gorgeous in their own way, and Michael Tilson Thomas and the orchestra played them beautifully.



My only criticism is that Tilson Thomas has become such a popularizer and pedagogue recently, with his television and radio series, that he can't seem to shut up, so we had to listen to mini-lectures by him before each piece was played, complete with musical illustrations.



The music certainly didn't need any special pleading and though I'm sure many people enjoyed the music appreciation mini-class, there were quite a number of us who just wanted to yell "Be quiet and play the music!" Particularly since the program notes are so well-written at the San Francisco Symphony, there really isn't any reason for these endless explanations.



The second half of the concert started with the Takemitsu, which was written for Richard Stoltzman (above) 16 years ago. Though I've enjoyed Takemitsu's film scores over the years, his "art music" has always left me cold, so the lush beauty of "Fantasma/Cosmos" came as a real surprise. Stoltzman obviously loved the piece, and gave a great performance.



Surprisingly the Takemitsu fit in seamlessly with the Stravinsky, and was a perfect lead-in to the large forces number of the concert, Stravinsky's short, exquisite 1930 "Symphony of Psalms" with its reduced orchestra and huge chorus.



The two Colossus Art Figures still alive casting as I was growing up were Stravinsky and Picasso, and the world is still trying to digest their art. I keep running across new (to me) Stravinsky pieces like "Song of the Nightingale" and now "Symphony of Psalms" that immediately jump to the top of my list of favorite Stravinsky scores. I wonder what's still in store.

You've Got to Get On to Get Off

The Gramophone video store on Polk and California (not pictured) has two-for-one rental specials on Tuesday and Wednesday, which has led to a few odd double bills at our house. My favorite this year was "Snakes on a Plane" followed by "United 93." One was supposed to be silly and the other serious, but they were strangely similar in many of their camera angles and uses of suspense. "Watch out, there's a snake behind you" and "Watch out, there's a terrorist behind you" are not all that different.



This week's double-bill of "Children of Men" and "Shortbus" was oddly complementary too. Both films are explicitly post-9/11 takes on society, survival and sex, with "Children of Men" being a fictional dystopia set in the UK and "Shortbus" a fictional utopia set in Manhattan. The latter is the follow-up project to John Cameron Mitchell's "Hedwig and The Angry Inch," and like that stage musical/film, it's probably going to become a deeply loved cult among young people who empathize with its troupe of troubled, pan-sexual characters.



"Shortbus" also has its actors actually having sex onscreen rather than simulating it, which I found both genuinely shocking and charming. In fact, there's never been anything quite like the first ten minute montage of this film, with most of the major characters being introduced while having raw, graphic sex that is variously homo, hetero, and solo. Check it out.

Britten's "A Midsummer Night's Dream"

The San Francisco Conservatory of Music is performing Benjamin Britten's 1960 opera version of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Cowell Theatre in Fort Mason this weekend, and it's a very mixed bag of the good and bad.



The setting has been moved to a mythical Asian island, which does no harm at all to the music or the story, and if the set design, lighting and stage movement hadn't been so clunky, the concept could have been brilliant. Britten had just finished a long Asian tour in the late 1950s where he was bowled over by the gamelan orchestras he heard in Bali. On his return to England, he incorporated many of the Asian sounds into his own music, most notably in the full-length ballet "The Prince of The Pagodas" and the three "Church Parables (Curlew River, The Burning Fiery Furnace, and The Prodigal Son.)."



The Asian sonorities also appear in the Fairy Music in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," which is about as far away from Mendelsohn's version of the same tale as you can get. Britten's music for Oberon, Titania, and the Fairies is strange, spooky, and iridescently beautiful. It's written for three different types of soprano: a countertenor (male) for Oberon, a high, silvery soprano (female) for Titania, and boy sopranos for the Fairy Chorus. Disastrously, in this production, they used adult female sopranos for Oberon and the Fairies and just about wrecked their music entirely.



In fairness, Kali Wilson performing as Oberon and Madeline Cieslak performing as Titania were both wonderful singers, but the strange beauty of a pair of male and female soprano voices intertwining was lost.



Also lost was the magic of The Fairy Chorus, which was simply atrocious and it wasn't the student performers' fault. Instead of looking and sounding like magical, ethereal creatures, they looked like they had wandered onto the stage from a bad Maria Montez movie. Plus, the sound of their voices was completely wrong, heavy and insistent where it should be light and delicate. I understand the reason for the casting, since there are probably no 13-year-old boy students at the Conservatory of Music, but there is a great Boys' Chorus in town who I'm sure would have been happy to help out, and if you are supposedly a serious music conservatory, the first rule of thumb should be "Don't Fuck Up The Music!"



Even worse than their sound, terrible overacting and ugly costumes was their faux Balinese Dance Movement, credited to Assistant Director/Choroegrapher Heather Carolo. Note to Heather: There are plenty of great Asian dance troupes in the Bay Area who would love to have given you some pointers, but if you're not going to do stage movement right, then please just don't do it at all.



Also defacing the production was a tall, female Puck (above) which was written expressly for a teenage boy acrobat to speak/sing while tearing around the stage. Instead, Laura Pyper threw in a few tentative cartwheels and a badly amateur performance.



I had drug a number of friends with me to the Friday evening performance, including the playwright George Birimisa (above on the left), and he was ready to bolt after the first act. "I could do better stage movement as an 80-year-old cripple than this crap." I urged him to stay because "the evening gets better," I said with more hope than conviction.



And serendipitously, I turned out to be correct. The four lovers (Pedro Betancourt, Alvin Tan, Jessica Hatley, and Jenna Yokoyama) were all wonderful singers who would have been even better with a decent director. Their music is mock-heroic and discordant for most of the first two acts when everybody is in love with the wrong person, but their quartet as they wake at the beginning of Act Three singing "mine own but not mine own" had me in tears.



The real stars of the show turned out to be the Rude Mechanicals with an absolutely standout performance by Paul Murray as Bottom. He was funny, musical, and he even danced better than the silly Cobra Woman Fairy Chorus.



The ridiculous Pyramus and Thisby play-within-a-play they perform is one of my favorite moments in Shakespeare, and Britten's version, with its parodies of everybody from Donizetti to Schoenberg, is one of the greatest and definitely the funniest stretch of music he ever composed. The performance on Friday was good enough that my seatmate George Birimisa was laughing out loud and the audience went out on a high.



I also loved the student orchestra who were playing fiendishly difficult music where every instrument is exposed. They weren't perfect by any means, but their enthusiasm for the music was in evidence, and in sections they were just plain fabulous. I heard new things in the score that I had never encountered before. Thanks to them and their very good conductor, Andrew Mogrelia, who was the chief conductor at the San Francisco Ballet for a couple of years recently before a mysterious disappearance. The opera will be repeated Saturday evening at 7:30 and Sunday at 2:00 with alternating casts, and the tickets are only $20, which is an insane bargain, bad fairies notwithstanding.

Mean Streets

The wild new glass-and-steel Federal building at 7th and Mission Streets is almost ready for its grand opening.



It will be interesting to see if the area, with its exquisite old buildings, will manage to stop being such mean streets.



Across Seventh Street from the Fed building, a new "mid-century modern" store has opened...



...that features gorgeous reflections on its front doors.



At the same time, most of the old-fashioned sex parlors on Market Street...



...seem to be closing down.



Maybe the blue building on Market between Sixth and Seventh, which was rehabbed during the dot-com boom and has stood empty ever since...



...will finally get some inhabitants.



Currently, there's an art gallery installed on the ground floor...



...with a mission statement attached to its front desk.



There was a group show art opening on Thursday evening...



...with most of the usual suspects in attendance.



My favorite paintings were by the beautiful Brazilian painter Sidnea d'Amico, above left.



She has a studio on 17th and Mission Streets, which is another Mean Intersection of Streets.



Across from the gallery on Market Street, a nightclub with the ironic name of "Etiquette"...



...was being readied for a grand opening next week.



Further down Market Street, we walked the two-block gauntlet of theatrical substance abusers and schizophrenics who act out on lower Taylor Street so we could eat at Original Joe's, a great Tenderloin restaurant caught in a time bubble. If you have the courage to venture through tne neighborhood, I can't recommend the place highly enough.

Rites of Spring

One of the final events of the Palm Springs White Party was the outdoor Sunday afternoon and evening T-Dance held in a downtown vacant lot.



The $100 admission price seemed a trifle steep for yet another disco event, but I suppose the ferris wheel was some compensation.



We returned instead to our swimming pool, complete with misters...



...and blooming cacti on the patio.



Even more satisfying was the nightly appearance of a tiny frog no bigger than a thumbnail with a huge voice that could be heard a block away, even over the distant thumping of the White Party sound system.



We dubbed him Freddy The Frog and had conversations with him after he'd take his ritual swim in the pool.

The Rainbow Gestapo

The daily newspaper in the Coachella Valley, "The Desert Sun," (click here) published a fabulously paranoid and inflammatory letter to the editor on April 4th from Palm Springs resident Patrick Phelps.



Patrick writes, in part:

"It seems the only things that matter and get approved are gay and lesbian projects. How are they getting away with it? Now they want another gay/lesbian gala called the Diversity Festival. And the taxpayers will foot that bill, too...

Palm Springs used to be a nice place, but sadly with the Rainbow Gestapo trying to dictate protocol and resident procedures, they are chasing the hetero population away. But then, maybe that is their master plan...

I, for one, will not drown in this rising rainbow ocean. I have rights, too. Maybe I'll run for City Council. I couldn't be any worse than the current members."

There have been many outraged letters printed over the course of the week decrying the bigotry of Mr. Phelps and though I should be filled with indignation too, "The Rainbow Gestapo" phrase instead just gives me the giggles. In fact, I want to design the T-shirt.



This local controversy arrives just in time for Easter Weekend which marks the annual return of The Palm Springs White Party, where 20,000 guppies in the rainbow ocean wriggle in from all over the world to strut their gym bodies at a series of huge parties set to terrible disco music for 72 straight hours.



It was started in 1989 by a Los Angeles queen named Jeffrey Sanker (above), who has become the production-meister of gay circuit parties around the world from Provincetown to Rio de Janeiro (click here for his website, complete with frightening music).



The main headquarters for The White Party is a large, corporate Wyndham Hotel complex and the pool is quite a scene. In fact, I may return on Saturday afternoon to capture the full weirdness of The Rainbow Gestapo in action.

Palm Springs Trailer Trash

Fleeing the bicyclists versus suburban motorists war in San Francisco, we flew to Palm Springs for some peace and quiet.



There are ten units in The Four Seasons, a pretty little complex one block away from the San Jacinto Mountains, where my partner Tony (above) bought a one-bedroom condo last summer. The place is pretty evenly divided between those who rent out their places to visitors and those who live in their apartments year-round.



The vast majority of people living here and staying as guests are charming and the communal living arrangement seems to work well, except when it doesn't. This winter, a right-wing couple from Southern Oregon rented out one of the units for three months, and have been acting as if they own the entire place. It was when they invited another couple from Oregon to join them for the month of April that tensions finally boiled over, because their friends arrived in a monster honking recreational vehicle which they proceeded to park under the 51 palm trees in the front yard, blocking everyone's view.



"We pay a lot of money to live in a beautiful place with a beautiful view," the association President explained to them, "and we're proud of it. Now please move that hunk of metal somewhere else because we're sick of looking at it." Call me elitist, but it was a proud moment standing in solidarity with my fellow owner, and after threats that "there would be consequences," they moved the ugly heap to the street around the corner. Now, if we could just figure out how to keep self-righteous Redwood City mothers in their SUVs from ever leaving the suburbs, the world would be an even more beautiful place.

Hypnodrome Head Trips

The strange little Grand Guignol theatre tucked underneath a freeway near Bryant and Tenth called the Hypnodrome...



...is performing a new show through the spring called "Hypnodrome Head Trips," which is a rotating series of playlets that are insanely eclectic and uneven (click here to get to their website).



My partner hated the show because of the hammy acting style but I ended up enjoying most of it thoroughly.



Possibly the most interesting piece is the curtain raiser, an improvisatory "new music" composition by composer John Zorn which consists of any number of players, instrumentalists and vocalists being led through a "game" where the conductor holds up a series of flash cards that start and end sounds, or asks for a crescendo/diminumendo and other musical instructions. It felt like we were at the Other Minds Music Festival, but hipper.



The pianist from Mills College (above on the left) learned the complex "game" in about fifteen minutes right in front of us, and performed the ten-minute composition along with a soprano and a saxophone player.



The conductor, Jamie Moore, above was a complete delight as he crouched, suddenly straightened his long frame, whipped flash cards around and beamed in maniacal delight at the sounds that were coming forth. The performance and performers are different every night, and they are worth the price of admission.



The remainder of the first half of the program were two installments of a five-part serial by Jonathan Horton about a mad scientist, his frustrated protege daughter, and a severed head. Russell Blackwood (above on the left), who is the guiding spirit behind the theater troupe, was as usual the highlight of the piece as he channeled Vincent Price at his most maniacal. There was also an intervening slide show of a hell-and-damnation Chick pamphlet cartoon, but the piece needs to be rethought because it's not all that amusing.



The second half starts with a 1950s sex-and-violence piece from the Parisian Grand Guignol called "Orgy in The Lighthouse" by Alfred Marchand. It's adapted by Eddie Muller (above), the founder and guiding spirit of the annual Film Noir Festival in San Francisco, and though it wasn't scary enough, it certainly was sexy.



Much of the sexiness was due to Eric Tyson Wertz (above) who is obscenely good-looking with his clothes off. The fact that his day job is as a physicist in a Silicon Valley lab only makes his exposure that much more titillating.



The final playlet is an original by Rob Keefe called "The Empress of Colma" about a trio of insane drag queens in grandma's basement in Colma who are delusional about their sublime beauty. It was jarringly out of tune with the rest of the evening, but I found it very funny, and this time Russell Blackwood channeled Vincent Price at his queeniest. It's something to see. (A few of these photos are publicity stills by David Allen. Thanks, David.)

Uni and her Ukelele

On an early Saturday afternoon day so beautiful it made you want to move to California...



...Uni and Her Ukelele had set up an impromptu sound system and was serenading a good crowd of folks enjoying the Hayes Street Green.



Uni also appears in a trio called The Paper Dolls whose myspace page asks the question: "3 ukeleles, 3 blondes, can you handle it?" (check out their website by clicking here).



Two-thirds of The Paper Dolls were present and they had recruited a saxophonist friend to join them.



"We'll call you a Paper Boy instead," she announced before telling the crowd this was her last song and that she was selling CDs "so stuff her hole" because she was saving up one dollar at a time for her first trip to Europe.



So we bought a homemade CD, beautifully packaged, for $5 and it's turned out to be quite wonderful. Check it out by clicking here.