Drink, Drive, and Call 911

On the 500-mile drive from Palm Springs to San Francisco...



...we kept noticing large illuminated signs along the highway encouraging us to rat out drunk drivers by calling 911.



In case you happened to miss these looming horrors, fixed signage with the same message was posted along the roadway and at rest stops.



The question that immediately arose was how do you tell the difference between a drunk driver and a crappy driver or even a dangerous one who weaves in and out of traffic?



As a non-driver, I can confidently state that I've been in more danger from sober, bad drivers than slightly drunk, skillful ones but in our new Nanny State, those kind of distinctions count for nothing.



Still, the new catchphrase we were sharing during the entire drive to San Francisco was, "I think it may be time to call 911, dear. That driver in the red truck who won't move over to the slow lane is a real asshole. He MUST be drunk."

Czech Art Glass

The Palm Springs Art Museum has a new director and a few newly spruced up galleries, including a small alcove devoted to "art glass."



The revelation in the group were a trio of pieces by the Czech husband-and-wife team of Jaroslava Brychtova and Stanislav Libensky, who just died in 2002.



Click here for a nice essay about Libensky and Brychtova (above) and and their professor in the 1940s and 1950s at the Prague Academy, Josef Kaplický.



Their modernist glass sculptures seemed to glow from the inside in the oddest ways imaginable...



...and made a lot of the other work look rather dull.



Also showing at the Palm Spring Arts Museum is a 34-piece exhibition, "Picasso to Moore: Modern Sculpture from the Weiner Collection" (click here for an interesting "Palm Springs Life" story about the exhibit and the Weiner family). The patriarch, Ted Weiner, was originally from Oakland who became a wildcatter in Texas and who grew into an extremely rich and powerful oilman (that's Ted below, fourth from the left, posing at the first Jewish country club in Fort Worth, flanked by Ben Hogan, Jack Benny, club pro Dick Metz, and producer Hal Wallis).



He started buying mostly modernist sculptures in the 1940s, and had promised his collection to Texas cultural institutions, but brought most of his art with him when he moved with his family to Palm Springs in the early 1960s, where he became one of the first trustees of the Palm Springs Art Museum. In any case, Ted's no longer around but his daughter Gwendolyn gives a major sculpture to the museum every year, which is nice since the collection is amazing, without a bad piece in the bunch. (The photo above, by the way, is from a recently published book from the Brandeis University Press entitled "Lone Stars of David: The Jews of Texas.")

Affluent Canyons 1

The condo my partner Tony bought in Palm Springs...



...is a modest little one-bedroom in a ten-unit complex with a swimming pool and 51 palm trees...



...but the neighborhood it is sitting in is quite a few scales up the economic ladder from our current and probable future estate.



Most of our neighbors own huge, detached homes...



...with small armies of Mexican gardeners taking care of their foliage and palm trees...



...for visits during Palm Spring's society "season," which starts about now and continues through April.



The neighborhood is bounded by Palm Canyon Drive (Palm Springs' main drag) to the east, the San Jacinto mountains to the west, and the famous Tahquitz canyon (below) to the south.



You'd think there would be nowhere left for real estate developers to try and create luxury developments in the neighborhood, but then underestimating the greed of real estate developers is usually a bad bet.

Affluent Canyons 2

On Christmas Eve, I decided to see if there was a shortcut of a hike to Tahquitz Canyon along the wash from Tahquitz Creek.



After startling hundreds of birds on various phone lines...



...and surprising a hobo couple who were having sex in the bushes...



...I came across a new, gated development called "The Canyons"



...complete with artful landscaping around its large walls.



The place gave me the creeps for some reason, and I continued toward Tahquitz Canyon...



...but after being frightened by what sounded like a rattlesnake along the pathway...



...I headed back towards the Indian Canyons and their affluent developments for safety.

Have Yourself a Gay Little Christmas

The incessant catchphrase among all things design and architectural in Palm Springs is "Mid-Century Modern," and the house above in the mostly gay Warm Sands neighborhood is a perfect example.



The Neptune statue in front with the skimpy Santa outfit, however, is what you'd call more Late-Century Gay. Have a merry christmas, everyone.

We Paved Paradise

As regular readers know, I'm not a big fan of car culture, so I was dreading the 500-mile drive from San Francisco to Palm Springs on Saturday.



If there was a high-speed train to Los Angeles and then another train to Palm Springs, I would be one of its first and happiest travelers, but we don't live in that world right now.



Still, the skies and the countryside were so beautiful Saturday morning as we drove through the Livermore valley...



...and onto Interstate 5, that I uttered the foolish words, "This is going to be a really beautiful drive."



Unfortunately, we picked the wrong day for travel where three million SUVs packed with families were going to visit grandma...



...and at one point the traffic stopped altogether for an hour or so after a minor fender bender between a couple of vehicles.



What was even worse is that the San Joaquin Valley feels like being on a poisoned planet, with the air getting grungier and more polluted the further south you travel. The Grapevine pass above was invisible until we were a couple of miles away from it.



The air in the San Joaquin Valley is so bad that the Los Angeles basin looked like a pristine natural environment in comparison.



That is, until one runs into the Interstate 5 traffic around Magic Mountain where the traffic crawls in a stop-and-start manner for miles at a time.



Though the 210 highway wasn't much quicker when we turned east, the combination of mountains, light and a nearly full moon was fairly breathtaking.



Plus, you get to drive through towns with strange names like Azusa.



We're all complicit in this natural disaster...



...and I only pray that we change course during my lifetime.

Winter Solstice at The Eagle

The Eagle bar at 12th and Harrison has been a gay leather bar with a large backyard since the 1970s.



Even when I was of an age where it was fun hanging out at bars looking for possible love, friendship and adventure, the Eagle was never my favorite though I always did love their outdoor fire pit which reminded me of the fire pit I grew up with at a Taco Bell in Isla Vista near UC Santa Barbara.



The Eagle always struck me as a bit too "leather" and mannered and brutal to be a place where I wanted to be a familiar face, but when I received an email out of the ether last week to join them for a "Winter Solstice" party on the evening of December 21st with a live band, I figured why not.



The band included one of the owners of the bar along with six or seven other young male musicians who were having a blast playing together with electronic pulsers, drums, and various electronic guitars. They were being listened to by a small crowd of old gay leather queens, old gay hippies, and young boyfriends and girlfriends of members of the band.



Outside in the patio, there were about 30 young gays accompanied by their fag hag friends, and then closer to the firepit was a whole other subscrulture who were quite amazing. They were extremely butch lesbians dressed in black leather vests with cropped haircuts who looked exactly like the guys who used to hang out in this bar's backyard in the 1970s. Plus, they were joined by a couple of female-to-male transgenders which really gave the mix a distinct flavor of confusion, plus a few slutty, fat females who were caressing these butch women/men in extremely suggestive fashion.



I walked back home to the Civic Center thanking the gods that I was not only living in such a cool, strange place as San Francisco, but that we were at a moment in time where the witches in different tribes were starting to feel comfortable with each other.

San Francisco Ballet's "Nutcracker"

You know it's the Christmas season around the Civic Center just by walking down the sidewalk on Van Ness Avenue, where you will suddenly be surrounded by hundreds of beautifully dressed children, mostly girls, excitedly making their way to the Opera House where the San Francisco Ballet performs Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker" every year, usually twice a day.



In the fifteen years I've lived in the neighborhood, I've never attended a performance, figuring the show wasn't designed for a hardened cynic like myself, and the sight of all those kids wasn't particularly appealing.



However, a dozen online writers including myself were invited by the ballet company for a lovely reception with crabcakes and wine in a Ballet School rehearsal studio at their Franklin Street headquarters, and then treated to a performance with great seats in the orchestra.



Part of my resistence to attending this "Nutcracker" was because it was a newish 2004 production, the fifth in the company's history, and it was choreographed by Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson. I think Tomasson has turned the ballet company into one of the greatest ensembles in the world over the last 20 years, for which he deserves all credit, but as a choreographer he bores the heck out of me, especially when he tackles a story ballet.



Nothing I saw last night made me revise that opinion, but the show and the performance itself was wonderful. The scenic design by Michael Yeargan, setting the tale in 1915 San Francisco, is sensational and the Act 1 finale in the Land of the Snow is close to perfection.



The presence of all the small children also turned out to be part of the amusement. They were amazingly well-behaved, and even when they talked, it was in their "inside voice" and often quite funny.



During the Arabian dance, two muscular, turbaned dancers brought out a large magic lamp that was emitting steam. Before Adeline Kaiser could rise out of the lamp to dance around in her harem outfit, the tiny girl seated behind us who looked like she was about four years old asked her mother, "What's in there?" "Shhhh...you shouldn't be talking." "Are they cooking a hot dog in there?" I'll never see another magic lamp in any movie or stage production without thinking the same thing.

Death Race 2007

Off the Polk Street entrance to City Hall, just below the Mayor's Office...



...there is a huge crosswalk with yellow flashing lights and occasionally a few motorcycle cops out to issue easy moving violation citations to people who don't stop for pedestrians.



However, there are no actual signal lights, which can confuse people who don't know the area and expecting people to stop for you as a pedestrian is always a risk.



Late this morning, Susan Leal, the head of San Francisco's Public Utilities Commission was hit by a vehicle while in this crosswalk, and supposedly thrown thirty feet through the air. She's currently at San Francisco General Hospital and is reportedly doing well. I asked about 40 people inside City Hall, from deputies to Supervisors' aides, if they knew any details of the accident, such as whether the car was going north or heading south of Market.



I couldn't find anyone in the building who professed to know anything, which seemed rather odd, even though Leal's PUC offices are on Market Street. Mayor Newsom recently announced he wants to kick Leal out of her job this coming year for unstated reasons, although a reasonable guess is that she somehow offended local crime syndicate Pacific Gas & Electric. Perhaps the poor woman was just upset after a particularly nasty meeting at City Hall and wasn't paying attention to the traffic.



Or it could be a case of yet another suburban commuter tearing through the Civic Center neighborhood with a cell phone glued to their ears, paying no attention to those annoying pedestrians. These same drivers try to run me down just about every day at the corner of Franklin & McAllister, oblivious to crosswalks and traffic signals.



Car culture really is toxic.

Oh, Lady, Lady, It's a Landslide and a Flood

Apologies for the sparse postings lately, my dearest readers. I've been working my teats off for the last couple of weeks for a couple of clients, and even videotaped 42nd Street Moon's "Oh, Lady! Lady!!" production at the Eureka Theatre on Saturday night (see simple set above). It's an extraordinarily sophisticated musical from 1918, a collaboration between the great British writers P.G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton with music from a young Jerome Kern.

Just as interesting to somebody suffering from a severe cold were two trashy made-for-TV movies about natural disasters on Saturday and Sunday night. First was "Landslide," about evil condo developers who blow up a bit too much of Diamondback Mountain during Phase Two of their project, bringing the mountain down over most of the characters' heads. It was so sincerely cheesy that it's an instant classic. Now we're watching the four-hour British "Flood," where London faces a storm surge, with Robert Carlyle and Tom Courtenay as two of the drowning rats.

Civic Center Xmas 2: Santa's at Marlena's

For an outrageously baroque Christmas display...



...there is no better place than the drag bar in the Hayes Valley called Marlena's...



...where Marlena his/herself has amassed a collection of Santas...



...that can only be described as encyclopedic...



...crammed into display cases, hanging from the ceiling...



...staring you down whether you've been good or bad...



...and even leering pornographically at you in the men's bathroom.

Civic Center Xmas 1: Two Trees

My friend Ellen Toomey just had a birthday where she didn't do much to celebrate, but added, "At my age, it only makes sense to have a party and make a big deal of it every three or four years. I feel the same way about Christmas, by the way. Every year is too damned much."



Feeling the same way, I haven't quite decided yet if this is one of those years to ignore or celebrate the season, but thanks to the City and County of San Francisco at least there's a large "holiday" tree to cheer up the vagrants sleeping nearby.



Next to the children's playground on Civic Center Plaza, somebody has put something called the Childrens' Community Tree...



...along with decorations made by children that anybody can hang on the thing.



It's completely charming.

Institute on Aging's Parking Clout

Finding a legal parking spot for residents and visitors in the Civic Center neighborhood can be challenging, what with confusing signage, shortly timed meters, smash-and-grab thieves who break into car windows without any response from the police department, plus a cavalcade of events in the surrounding cultural institutions that can create a perfect parking storm.



This Sunday, there was a new wrinkle, when signage suddenly appeared on McAllister Street between Van Ness and Franklin Streets announcing that nobody was allowed to stop from 9AM to 4PM without any explanation.



It seems there was a 21st annual "Cable Car Caroling" fundraising party for the Institute on Aging being held for families in the Green Room at the Veterans Building (click here for more info on the event).



From what I could piece together, an Institute on Aging board member asked for a favor from a ranking friend at the police department who unilaterally decided to prohibit all parking on the block during the day on Sunday so that motorized cable cars would have a place to hang out before and after they took family groups to go caroling at various senior centers.



So, if you were hoping to arrive early on Sunday and snag a parking spot before going to the opera or the symphony that afternoon, forget it.



Or if you happened to live on the block and wanted to use a car that afternoon for grocery shopping, you could also forget it.



The Institute on Aging is a large nonprofit that grew out of the Goldman Institute on Aging that has set up shop in the inner Richmond neighborhood of San Francisco, and just torn down the Coronet Theatre in anticipation of building a huge senior housing and research center in a manner that has alienated most of their neighbors (click here for a 2006 Fog City Journal article about that kerfluffle). I've talked to the War Memorial administrators and to the p.r. people at the Institute of Aging, and none of them were even aware that this parking disaster was taking place, so let's just hope it was a momentary lapse on Sunday, because this kind of behavior is certainly not winning them any friends.

Update: I wrote earlier on this post that the The Institute on Aging was an offshoot of the infamous Buck Trust from Marin County, but I was misinformed and have updated the preceding paragraph. There is also a long comment from Cecily Peterson, Communications Director of the Institute on Aging, that takes issue with my characterization of what happened.

Fantastique Friday 2: Hector Berlioz

The greatest autobiography written by a musician has to be "The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz," which were first given a good English translation in 1969 by David Cairns, who went on to write a recently published, massive two-volume biography of the composer's life.



The autobiography's first paragraph is as follows:

"I was born on 11th December 1803 in La Cote Saint-Andre, a very small French town. During the months which preceded my birth my mother never dreamt, as Virgil's did, that she was about to bring forth a laurel branch, Nor, I must add--however painful the admission to my vanity--did she imagine she bore within her a brand of fire, like Olympias the mother of Alexander. This is extraordinary, I agree, but it is true. I came into the world quite normally, unheralded by any of the portents in use in poetic times to announce the arrival of those destined for glory. Can it be that our age is lacking in poetry?"

The 600-page tome just gets better, and funnier, from there.



In the last San Francisco Symphony concerts before Davies Hall turns into a Christmas Factory, Michael Tilson Thomas led the orchestra, chorus and three male soloists in Berlioz's early works, the 1830 "Symphonie Fantastique" and the rare, incidental music from 1832 to "Lelio," which is a play about the artist going from The Abyss to Transcendence through love.



For some reason, they played the two pieces ass-backwards with "Lelio" first and the "Symphonie Fantastique" after the intermission.



The soloists were wonderful, especially tenor Stanford Olsen, whose Fisherman's aria at the beginning of "Lelio" was so beautiful that the audience applauded the singer before MTT had a chance to move on to the next movement.



Also fun was Dwayne Croft, last seen as Robert E. Lee at the San Francisco Opera in "Appomattox" singing a "Brigands' Song" over a huge male chorus and orchestra.



After the intermission, where everyone wandered around ogling the giant Christmas trees in the lobby...



...Tilson Thomas led the orchestra in the famous "Symphonie Fantastique" (you know some of the music whether you're aware of it or not).



Unfortunately, I had forgotten how much I hate most of MTT's conducting of Berlioz. He smooths out all the weird parts, gets lost in the details, and doesn't seem to follow any overall structure. In other words, he does the unforgivable, which is to make Berlioz boring. I feel rather bad about writing this, since my free ticket was provided by the press department at the symphony, which is rather like being invited to someone's home for a lovely dinner and then spending the evening talking about how bad the food is. So take this curmudgeonly minority opinion for what it's worth, and since the performances were being filmed for the "Keeping Score" PBS series, you can make up your own mind when it's released on DVD.

Fantastique Friday 1: Off The Point

The Civic Center neighborhood on Friday night was a hive of activity. Live 105 was presenting its annual "Not So Silent Night" rock concert at Bill Graham, Debbie Reynolds was trying out a new show for Las Vegas at the Herbst Theatre, it was another Homo Night at the Opera featuring "The Rake's Progress," the Symphony was presenting an all Berlioz program (which I'll write about in part two)...



...and if this weren't enough activity, the Hayes Street merchants from Franklin to Laguna were hosting a "block party."



At the shuttered grocery store near the corner of Hayes and Laguna, an art show called "Off The Point" was having an opening party.



A group of artists with studios in the Hunters Point Shipyards decided to have a Christmas gallery on Hayes Street for the first time and had sent me an invitation to come check it out.



There were a few nice pieces here and there...



...but most of the art was fairly ghastly.



When I took the photo above of the man intently studying a wall hanging...



...the woman on the left sitting on the wooden block snarled at me, "No photography of any sort is allowed!" with a very nasty sense of entitlement.



This made it much easier to turn right around and walk outside, where I hung out with a bunch of cute, drunk and stoned skateboarders who were making fun of the art. Off the point, indeed.

Opera Season Wraps Up

The repertory system at the San Francisco Opera means up to four shows share storage space for sets, costumes, casts, and their makeup, and it can get cramped quickly to say the least, but the season is thinning out.



This week there are only two shows left, the superb production of "The Rake's Progress" which has no supernumeraries, children or dancers in Dressing Room 7, and five performances of "Madama Butterfly" with two casts.



The second cast made their debut tonight and I felt sorry for Marie Plette having to follow Patricia Racette's performance on Saturday afternoon, which was an instant legend partly because a lot of opening performance journalists saw it. Ms. Plette sang beautifully tonight and played the part as a much more vulnerable character than Racette, but following that legendary performance from Saturday afternoon must have been difficult. In fact, even Racette herself couldn't duplicate it on Wednesday evening, when her voice wasn't doing everything the diva was wanting it to do. (She's an intelligent, veteran singer who knew how to "make it work.")



Opera is much closer to athletics than most people realize. (The Chinese have always known this.) Great singers are like tennis players or a baseball hitter who sometimes get into a rare zone on a particular day, which is why people pay to go to live events. Nobody really knows when the magic is going to happen.



If you're in the mood, check out the Racette matinee on Saturday at 1 PM. Maybe her instrument will be willing again, and she can take down the house in a paroxysm of sound and emotion. And I'm definitely going to be standing for the final performance of the season on Sunday afternoon for the superb "Rake's Progress" which may have been this year's highlight.

Theatrical Alchemy

The San Francisco Opera's production of "Madama Butterfly," originally conceived by the British director Ron Daniels, was created in the mid-90s when the company had to vacate the opera house for retrofitting, and they put on a season at Bill Graham, the Orpheum, and the Golden Gate Theatre, which was used for a four-cast rotating Broadway style version of "Madama Butterfly." (Think Baz Luhrmann's Broadway "La Boheme," but it was much simpler.)



The production is wide and shallow (just like the Golden Gate Theatre stage), and totally serviceable, but it's been used so many times that everyone is sick of it. So when there was an announcement that there would be a "reprise" production of "Madama Butterfly" from last year with the same diva, Patricia Racette, nobody expected anything particularly special.



Theatre has its own alchemy, however, and the performance at the ungodly operatic hour of noon last Saturday was one of the most extraordinary events in my 30 years of opera attendance at the house. The possible contributing elements are the following: 1. This was Runnicles' last opera as music director this fall, and he's filled with emotion; 2. Racette is one of the greatest sopranos in the world, completely in her prime, but she doesn't get the attention of somebody like Renee Fleming which is sort of ridiculous, so she has something to prove; 3. Brandon Jovanovich as Pinkerton has sung in Walnut Creek and San Jose, so making a debut at the Big House in the Big City had to be important for him and he not only came through, but his offstage "Butterfly's" at the end of the opera, filled with pain, was basically the last straw for everyone. I wanted to wipe the tears floating down my face and tickling the beard which was underneath a Kabuki black veil, but I remained a professional and didn't move.



In my first year as a supernumerary in the early 1990s, I was the last person picked to be a Cursed Slave in an "Elektra" production directed by Andrei Serban starring the Welsh soprano Gwyneth Jones, who had been singing with a monster vibrato for about ten years in San Francisco before showing up late in her career to sing the titular role with an absolute laser beam of an instrument, which she used to legendary effect for the next ten years. The young conductor at the time was a baby-faced Christine Thielemann, who's about to take over Bayreuth. The Clothilde was Nadine Secunde, Aegesthis was James King, and Klytemnestra was Helga Dernesch. The cursed slaves were invited to hang out on stage for the curtain calls and when Gwyneth arrived, the opera house let loose with an ovation and a rush of energy I haven't experienced again until Saturday, when the Fifth Maidservant of "Elektra" (Patricia Racette) came back in her prime and received a similar ovation as Butterfly. It was, as they say, awesome. And just to confirm that I'm not being completely subjective, check out Kosman by clicking here and Janos Gereben by clicking here.

Photos The Phone Made

In a dark alley South of Market among the weird street interchanges of Gough, Mission, South Van Ness, and Otis...



...John Gruenwald runs a stone lithography, intaglio, and letterpress studio for art printing...



...and walking up the scary stairway to the second-floor loft feels very New York and insiderish.



Gruenwald and his wife were hosting an art opening this weekend for David Anthony King (pictured above on the right)...



...with a whimsical show on the nature of photography called "Photos The Phone Made."



The printed artist's statement at the front of the room was both brilliant and hilarious, starting with:

"For a very short time (yesterday, this morning), it is still possible to take bad photos with a cell phone camera."

"Pictures with unreliable color, exposure and focus. Photos that appear not so much blurry as smudged and which sometimes look more like a painting. Suggestive of one of German painter Gerhard Richter's photo derived works."

"These photos are composed of pixels so large you can practically count them. However, the latest model of the phone that made the pictures in this book has increased its camera's resolution from a half to one and a half megapixels. A three-hundred percent increase in quality in one year...Soon all of our connective and communicative devices will be assimilated by the phone. Resistance is futile, to quote the Borg."

The essay ends with:

"Even if film is dying and the camera as it was once understood is at death's door, photography will no doubt continue as long as mediated experience is found to be useful and inspiring."

"Can you see me now?"

The fabled art opening staples of cheese and crackers and wine were upgraded on Friday to a whole range of delicious appetizers accompanying a nice selection of beer and wine. The evening couldn't have been lovelier.