Big Shot Funeral

On Sutter Street, between Polk and Van Ness, at 2:15 PM Saturday afternoon, a street person bumped into a large vehicle parked in front of the storefront mosque (above), and its car horn alarm went off for the next five minutes.



Then, to add to the noise and confusion, at that moment a phalanx of motorcycle cops roared up Sutter Street out of nowhere, and jumped off their bikes in the Polk Street intersection so they could stop traffic for the 40 or so limos and cars with "FUNERAL" on their windshields that were passing by.



The only time I've seen this kind of fast-moving traffic control activity before is when United States Presidents or the Queen of England were visiting San Francisco. Traffic is also blocked in all directions for policemen's funerals when they've died in the line of duty, but that tends to be slower moving. This didn't seem to fit into any of those categories, however, so I just assumed it was a dead big shot with connections in either the political realm or the police department or both.



I certainly hope the citizens of San Francisco weren't having to pick up the bill for this special service, or I'm going to demand a police procession for my own humble remains. And I do hope whoever is paying for the service makes sure to include the time the various policemen took to get into their outfits, or they might be sued in the future. That's what's happening now in San Francisco where a class-action suit has just been filed by various police for all the time they've not been paid while putting on and taking off their uniforms. The chutzpah of these overpaid characters really is amazing, particularly when they haven't solved more than a half dozen homicides in as many years.

There Goes The Neighborhood

Working near 3rd and Bryant Streets for the last six months, I've been confronted daily by One Rincon Hill, a new 62-story luxury condo complex that is grotesquely overscaled for its location.



Looking up at the building on Friday morning, there was a noticeable flaw on its gleaming exterior, and I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing. Was that plywood over the windows in the middle right?



It certainly seems to be plywood. I wonder what's going to happen to all that lovely glass in the next earthquake.

Alan Gilbert at the San Francisco Symphony

The newly appointed conductor of the New York Philharmonic, Alan Gilbert, a mixed-race child of two NY Phil violinists, is conducting the San Francisco Symphony this week in a program of newish music by a composer named Steven Stucky, Mozart's Piano Concerto #18, and the second symphony of the Danish composer, Carl Nielsen.



The concert started out great with Stucky's short "Son et lumiere" from 1988 that takes the idea of using kitschy music that would be used at a "Sound and Light" show at a monument such as the Pyramids or the Eiffel Tower and then doing something with it. As my friend Charlie Lichtman commented, the piece sounded 1940s modernist, but in a good way, and it used a huge orchestra brilliantly. The composer (above, standing in the background) was even there to receive an ovation.



This was followed by a dull rendition of one of Mozart's less famous but extremely beautiful piano concertos, played by Richard Goode (above) with a plodding sense of plowing through the notes cleanly without an ounce of poetry. By the time the piece was over, most of the audience was starting to nod off on Wednesday evening which is not a good sign.



The conductor kept trying to inject some energy into the performance but everytime the soloist would take over, the dullness would return. Plus, as Charlie noted, he wasn't even "off-book," and was following a score closely throughout the entire piece. Maybe it was just an off night but I never want to hear Mr. Goode playing Mozart again.



The second half of the concert was devoted to Nielsen's Symphony from 1902, "The Four Temperaments," which is a wild, weird piece of music, sounding like a cross between Sibelius and Mahler, except with a sense of humor. (For a good essay by The New Yorker's Alex Ross on Carl Nielsen and a review of a performance by Gilbert and the Philadelphia Orchestra of the same symphony, click here.)



The performance was pretty good except when it got too loud in the first and fourth movements, where a lot of detail got lost in the clamor. Still, it was fun and exciting to hear the rarely played symphony, and enjoyable as always to watch the Mark Ruffalo lookalike (above) sawing away at his violin.

4000: Lights 4 Life

Crossing what I've come to think of as the Susan Leal Crosswalk in front of City Hall, a man in a wheelchair was making his way on Monday evening to a grim commemoration.



The Veterans For Peace (Chapter 69) and the Bob Basker Post of the American Legion (#315) were sponsoring a "temporary memorial and tribute to the 4000 Fallen Soldiers of the Iraq War."



The "conceptual art piece" consisted of 4,000 plastic cups with tea candles in them.



To keep them from blowing away in the plaza's windy expanse, the small crowd was nailing the plastic cups into the ground.



The group seemed to be evenly divided between military veterans...



...and longtime peace activists.



Mayor Gavin Newsom made a quick pit stop to see what was happening before being whisked away by two drivers/bodyguards in his ecologically irresponsible black town car.



Cindy Sheehan, who is running against the war-enabling Nancy Pelosi for Congress, also appeared but she seemed to be there for the duration and was staying on the sidelines with Quaker friends.



People tried to light the candles but the wind was too strong to keep the flames going for very long. I left before the reading of the names of the last 1,000 young soldiers killed in Iraq while not so silently cursing everyone responsible for the abomination that is the United States invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Norouz Art Party at Mirkarimi's Office

On the third Friday evening of every month, San Francisco Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi's office hosts an art show with free wine and occasional food offerings along with lots of political gossiping.



This month's edition was unusually lively as the half-Russian, half-Iranian supervisor was hosting an Iranian New Year Party (Norouz) which had become entangled in a fracas with Mayor Newsom and one of his supporters, a wealthy Iranian woman named Turquoise Bridges. She has been holding an expensive fundraiser each year at City Hall for Norouz that this year included a special $500 admission for a meet-and-greet with the Mayor.



The party was originally scheduled for the same date as the Mirkarimi art party, but Newsom canceled for a Southern California event, so the expensive party was rescheduled to the next week. However, Ms. Bridges decided to lash out at Mirkarimi and accused him of trying to ruin her expensive Norouz event because he had not been invited to speak, and that was why he'd scheduled his free event on the same evening.



This is nonsense, of course, but the truth has never been much of an impediment for Newsom and his supporters. For a thorough and entertaining account of the entire affair, click here for an article with photos and lots of wild commentary at Fog City Journal.



The same site has an entertaining account of the art opening (click here) and the Iranian feast with music which was laid out after I had already left.



My concerns over Iran are not about who is the queen of the San Francisco expatriate community, but about the safety of those who are living in that ancient culture.



Certain lunatics in Washington, D.C. and Israel are currently hellbent on bombing Iran into kingdom come, and according to Allan Uthman they are demonstrably crazy and evil enough to go ahead and do so, no matter how disastrous and publicly unpopular the attack would be (click here for the whole article). Pray we get through the next year without it happening.

California Green 1: Transportation

Needing to visit my mother in San Luis Obispo after she had undergone a series of terrible surgeries, I hopped onto the Coast Starlight line of Amtrak in Oakland on Tuesday morning.



The train was on schedule for the very first time in my experience, and the reason turned out to be that instead of originating in Seattle, the line was starting in Sacramento because many of the tracks and tunnels in the Pacific Northwest have been destroyed by their rough winter this year, and have been out of commission since January.



So if you want to take Amtrak from Washington state or Oregon to Southern California, you need to take a series of feeder buses that will land in you Sacramento for the truncated Coast Starlight. When I asked an Amtrak worker when it would be fixed, he shrugged with sadness, and answered, "Three months, six months, a year...who knows?"



This hasn't exactly boosted ridership, and the train was half-empty. Plus, they had dispensed with the sleeper cars and its associated dining car so the only thing to eat on the train were microwaved hot dogs, hamburgers and pizzas in the crummy little snack area under the domed "lounge."



In a state and a country that needs to get off its addiction to oil fast, Amtrak's state of affairs is both stupid and shameful.



To add insult to injury, passenger trains have to wait out in open fields for long stretches at a time while waiting for freight trains to use the tracks which makes it impossible to adhere to any kind of a schedule.



It's also more than a little disconcerting to see one of the train's conductors wandering out in those fields to make a manual adjustment to the switching mechanisms. I haven't seen anything this antiquated since taking a train trip in the 1970s from Mexico City through the Yucatan jungle to Merida, and at least there were villagers hopping onboard to sell us food.



Since the Republican operative, Governor Schwarzenegger, seems to be doing everything in his power to keep a bullet train from north to south being built, how about just restoring slow and reliable train service instead? It would be a start.

California Green 2: Water

The state of California dodged a bullet this winter with rains that managed to erase three years of drought.



If these rains hadn't arrived this year, California would be looking at even more insurmountable problems than it already faces from its mushrooming population.



What surprised me most was the whining, from people who should know better, about how miserable they were from all the rain throughout the winter when in truth we should all have been bowing down and performing ritualistic dances for the rain gods who were blessing us with their bounty.



The train ride through the Salinas Valley, which usually looks brown and parched, was one of the most extraordinarily beautiful landscape vistas I've ever witnessed.



Just when you thought it couldn't get any more psychedelically green...



...the train traversed the Cuesta Grade between Atascadero and San Luis Obispo...



...where the state flower had run amok on the hillsides.



Even better, my mother was recovering beautifully from surgery and the world felt renewed.

Olympics in China, Torture in Tibet

On Monday afternoon about 100 people came marching down the sidewalk on Van Ness Avenue.



They were protesting China's heavy-handed occupation of Tibet, now in its sixth decade.



The expatriate California composer Daniel Wolf is proposing a personal boycott of all things made in China and he's probably on the right track (click here for the whole post on his brilliant blog, "Renewable Music.")



However, it's hard to act morally superior as a nation after what we've just done and continue to do to the sorry ex-nation of Iraq.



I'm not sure where the crowd of protestors were headed, though City Hall was probably the target..



The other day there was a crowd of about 50 people marching in a loop around City Hall chanting slogans protesting the invasion of Kurdish areas by Turkey.



In many respects, our world hasn't outgrown World War One and the weirdly reconstructed borders that came out of that disaster.



I wish we were further along in the story that Arthur C. Clarke told in "Childhood's End," where the overlords simply demand, "Stop war and then let your civilizations evolve."

Modernism at the San Francisco Ballet

The San Francisco Ballet's Program 5 is featuring two dances by the new wunderkind choreographer, Christopher Wheeldon, along with a world premiere by Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson to Rachmaninov's "On a Theme of Paganini," and finishes with the return of last year's sensation, "Eden/Eden" set to a Steve Reich "video opera" about cloning.



First up on Saturday evening was a twenty-minute "distillation" by Wheeldon of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, "Carousel" that was everything Program 4's "West Side Story Suite" was not. In other words, it transformed the material into both a concrete story and a total abstraction about young and heedless love, and it didn't have the dancers aping Broadway hoofers like "West Side Story."



Plus, we didn't have to go into all the wife-beating and miserable behavior that makes the musical something of a trial, but concentrated on the yearning essence. The choreography and dancing by Dores Andrea, Joan Boada and a huge company portraying everything from carnival crowds to the carousel itself was splendid.



This was followed by another Wheeldon piece, a short Pas de Deux set to a minimalist 1978 piano-violin duet by the Estonian mystic Arvo Part. The playing by violinist Roy Malan and pianist Michael McGraw, along with the dancing by Sarah Van Patten and Pierre-Francois Vilanoba, were beyond exquisite.



Though I'm sure it was just fine, I skipped out on the Tomasson premiere to go home for dinner, partly because I'd read between the lines in Rachel Howard's review at SFGate and also Jolene's account at "Saturday Matinee" (click here to get to her smart theater/dance/music blog where she's currently worrying about the future of "classical" ballet).



I wrote last year about Scottish choreographer Wayne McGregor's "Eden/Eden," where he used a Steve Reich piece written for chamber orchestra, five singers, and prerecorded tape loops of scientists talking about ethical issues around cloning and artificial intelligence. I'm impressed McGregor was able to get the rights to the music without using the video that was created by Reich's video artist wife, Beryl Korot, but am happy that it was possible because the ballet, complete with its own video projections by Ravi Deepres, is some kind of masterpiece of its own.



The dancers and musicians put their all into it, and the back seats of the orchestra section were crammed with young ballet students who had snuck in to see the piece for the nth time. Quite a few audience members hated the ballet, which is understandable because much of it is so fast and so brutal, but the style fits the material, and the entire thing is mesmerizing. You've got one more chance to check it out, Tuesday evening, the 18th, at 8PM. And how can one not like a ballet whose costume designer's name is listed as "Ursula Bombshell"?

The Saint Patrick's Day Parade

Like many other Californians, I am a racial and ethnic mutt...



...which may be part of the reason I am fascinated by mono-cultures...



...and how they fare in the American, multi-cultural diaspora.



On Saturday, the annual Saint Patrick's Day Parade for Irish-Americans made its way up Market Street to the Civic Center.



It's always a jolly affair, with lots of children and families involved, often playing instruments or dancing up the street.



I played golf at Lincoln Park with an Irish construction worker the other day, and his tales of going back to the mother country 15 years after he arrived in California for economic opportunities were fascinating, especially since Ireland has changed so dramatically over the last decade since its joining the European Union.



"With the dollar being worthless right now, I can hardly afford the place anymore," he told me. "And where there used to be mass unemployment, there are jobs all over the place. It's strange."



One of my favorite groups in the parade was the "Los Trancos Community Band," which was an ecccentric looking collection of what looked like old hippies.



I wonder if they play "Danny Boy."

Return of The Blue Muse

Before the double-decker freeway that cut through the Hayes Valley came down in the early 1990s after it was weakened in the 1989 earthquake, the neighborhood was scary and crime-ridden, with crack dealing, murder and prostitution a daily occurrence. A rare oasis in the 1980s was the restaurant and bar The Blue Muse on Gough near Hayes Street.



As the neighborhood gentrified during the 1990s, with overpriced restaurants such as Jardiniere and Absinthe and Citizen Cake appearing, The Blue Muse felt oddly comforting and its bar became a sort of "Cheers" saloon for locals who could also eat a burger or appetizers at reasonable prices.



A couple of years ago, Sidney the proprietor (above) was bounced out of his lease without much warning and the space become a new restaurant called Breezy's that's more expensive and much less charming.



Finally, Sidney managed to find a narrow space on Grove Street in front of the Performing Arts garage where he reopened his restaurant a couple of months ago. The place mostly caters to older couples looking for an old-fashioned "fine dining" meal before the symphony, ballet and opera.



The restaurant is much smaller, but that's fine. Its bar area is cozy and gemutlich, and there's finally a place to gather with neighbors that's neither trendy nor overpriced nor filled with crazy drag queens like Marlena's down the street.



Plus, one of the coolest old food service dudes in town, Jonathan Kasper (above), is back in action on Thursday evenings. It looks like you really can go home again.

He's Got a Rocket in His Pocket

It was a bumpy night at the San Fracisco Ballet on Tuesday evening, which was devoted to "A Tribute to Jerome Robbins." The program featured his first ballet from 1944, the short collaboration with Leonard Bernstein about sailors on shore leave called "Fancy Free," continued with the 1970 "Into The Night" set to four Chopin piano nocturnes which he created for New York City Ballet, and finished with a "West Side Story Suite" which is a 35-minute condensation of the 1957 musical.



The first problem was when the big gold curtain got stuck and didn't want to go up. After a few hurried announcements over the loudspeaker and a ten minute delay, the curtain was raised into the flies where it stayed for the rest of the evening, leaving the undercurtain to do its job instead. Then, five minutes into "Fancy Free," a woman in a wheelchair in the rear of the orchestra section proceeded to pass out and thunk onto the floor, so we standees in the back watched fascinated as a small army of ushers and patrons attended to the poor woman before wheeling her out of the theater to an ambulance.



We didn't miss very much, because "Fancy Free" felt not only thin but just plain wrong at times. Instead of being a playful look at three sailors on shore leave in World War Two flirting with New York girls, it looked like they were trying to rape any woman who passed by, which was probably not what was intended. Plus, the Bernstein score was so derivative of Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Copland (at the end) that it was a little embarrassing.



"Into The Night," with its three elegant couples on a bare stage against a starry backdrop, fared much better and was genuinely beautiful.



The "West Side Story Suite," which Robbins cobbled together for his "Jerome Robbins' Broadway" show in 1995 and which he restaged for the New York City Ballet, has been praised to the skies and since I mostly love the musical, I was looking forward to the performance, but it turned out to be godawful in all kinds of ways. First off, the orchestra under music director Martin West, didn't have a clue how to play the score. I've heard high school bands demonstrate a better grasp of its jazzy rhythms. Plus, the solo singing wasn't just inadequate, it was downright bad, though the troupe singing as a chorus sounded fine. Part of the problem is that though "West Side Story" has its operatic and balletic moments, it's still a Broadway musical, which is a whole different kind of singing and dancing than opera and ballet performers are used to. When Bernstein recorded the score with Kiri Te Kanawa and Jose Carreras, there was much the same problem. They didn't sound like Tony and Maria but rather like upper-class opera singers.



Similarly, the performers on Tuesday didn't look like jazzy juvenile delinquents but instead like exquisite ballet dancers. Plus, the staging was all wrong, with a hint of a set but none of the usual coups de theatre that make this piece so much fun onstage, such as colored streamers shooting from the flies during the dance in the gym, or the Jets and the Sharks climbing over a chain-link fence before and after the rumble. There was a fence onstage but the dancers just gestured towards it which was sort of silly, though not as silly as the final number, the "Somewhere" ballet which has always been the sentimental and gooey soft spot in what is generally a hard-edged show. The best version of "West Side Story" I've ever seen was in the late 1960s at a Santa Barbara Youth Theatre production, and I would urge you to see the show if it's ever performed by a high school or college with a good arts program near you. It really is the ultimate High School Musical, and tarting it up with professional ballet dancers and opera singers does the piece no favors.

The Governator Versus Educators

In an attempt to stave off a huge projected budget deficit this year, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the grotesque Republican governor of California, has proposed a $4.8 billion cut in education funds.



This was the governor who decided (unsuccessfully) to go after those well-known parasites of society, hospital nurses, and who has now targeted teachers and their support staff.



On Tuesday afternoon, a group of about 200 hundred teachers and administrators from the United Educators of San Francisco (click here for their nifty website) met in front of the California PUC building at the corner of McAllister and Van Ness, wearing pink to symbolize "no pink slips," which quite a few of the teachers have already received.



Though the PUC building has nothing to do with education, its headquarters does have a huge state seal above its stairway entrance that is great for photo-ops. Plus, the intersection gets lots of traffic and is perfect for a protest.



As the math teacher Matthew Hubbard writes at his "Lotsa 'Splainin 2 Do" blog (click here for the whole thing):

"Schwarzenegger says he's pro-education. Hell, so does Bush, and we know what a load of crap that is. Fees will rise, fees that were just reinstated to earlier levels, and students will take less classes, and less classes will be offered."

The protest itself was fairly jolly and featured a couple of teachers performing witty songs about the situation atop a flatbed truck that had been parked on Van Ness in front of the building.



Then there were the mostly dreary speeches, punctuated by the hypocrisy of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom (above), who is facing his own budget shortfall this year.



Much like Schwarzenegger, Mr. Newsom is cutting funds for those who most need it such as public health workers, while increasing the budget for what he considers necessities, such as six-figure aides to help him in his quest for the governor's seat, multi-million dollar wheelchair ramps in the Board of Supervisors chambers, and ridiculous, graft-ridden climate change initiatives.



Still, he was promising the protestors a one-time $30 million reinstatement of money from a municipal "rainy day fund" to replace the $40+ million in cuts that are being proposed by the state for San Francisco. He also made sure the crowd knew that he was disagreeing with Schwarzenegger "respectfully."



I was heartened by the homeless looking guy standing next to me who, after Newsom crowed about everything looking up for San Francisco's schools in every which way, heckled him, "That's because you're driving all the poor kids out of town."



There was a nervous chuckle from some of the teachers around the heckler, but Newsom received a mostly respectful reception even though his speech was the usual litany of cliches delivered with his raspy voice and pointed finger for emphasis.



After a couple of hours, the group walked a block up McAllister Street to school district headquarters on Franklin, where they were instructed to pop their pink balloons on a signal from one of the ringleaders during a district meeting. I hope it was a mighty sound.

Milk and Jones

A couple of hundred people showed up on Sunday to be extras in the "Milk" movie being shot by Gus Van Sant depicting a crowd in front of City Hall at the 1978 Gay Pride Parade.



Most of the people looked too old for the period, and there probably would have been much more nudity on a beautiful afternoon in 1978.



I ran into a couple of friends while walking by and found out that nobody was being paid for their services as extras, which seemed sort of crappy, but it's typical operating procedure for Cleve Jones, who was hired as an "advisor" to the film and who is being played by Emile Hirsch.



Jones was a young assistant to Milk, who went on to co-found the San Francisco AIDS Foundation in the early 1980s and the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt in 1985, two organizations that have siphoned off millions of donated and publicly awarded dollars over the decades without actually helping anybody with AIDS. Jones sold his interest in the AIDS Quilt in the 1990s to some foundation in Georgia on the condition that he receive $41,500 annually along with health insurance for life, and then he proceeded to retire young in Palm Springs. As I've told people for years, if you want to give money to an AIDS charity, give the money to somebody you know with AIDS who needs it. Otherwise, it's probably going to people like Mr. Jones.

Free Asian Sundays

Most art museums in San Francisco are subsidized by the local government, but they still charge local citizens quite a bit for entrance if you don't have an annual membership.



The Fine Arts Museums (the deYoung and the Legion of Honor) offer free admission on the first Tuesday of each month, but usually charge the unwashed masses a surcharge for entrance into any "special" exhibit.



The Asian Art Museum has also been offering free Tuesday admissions on the first of the month, through a sponsorship grant from Target stores, but they never bother with a surcharge for traveling exhibits, which is nice. Also, in a move that feels truly populist, they are changing their free day from first Tuesdays to the first Sunday of each month, starting in May (the 4th, to be exact).



This will allow working families to finally attend something together for free in San Francisco, which is a rare ocurrence. The other museums in town should take a look and follow suit.



The coolest detail about the Asian Art Museum is that the collection is both so extensive and so light-sensitive that rotating the artworks every six months makes the museum feel constantly fresh. Currently, many of the best works which opened the Civic Center location five years ago are back on view.



And do check out the special jade exhibit between the Korean and Chinese wings on the second floor. It's amazing.

Shirley Golub for Congress

The weekly Quaker peace vigil continues every Thursday at noon in front of the newly landscaped and still brutally ugly Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue.



I still think the powers that be should just turn the damned plaza into a skateboard park, for which it is ideally designed.



Recently the peace group has been joined by Shirley Golub (above on the left)...



...who is running against Nancy "impeachment's off the table" Pelosi for the Eighth Congressional District seat (click here to get to her campaign website).



She's not really part of the peace vigil, but has decided she likes the group, and has set up shop at the same time every Thursday to campaign, accompanied by Bush administration puppets in prison outfits.



Every day we spend in Iraq is another day of death and destruction and throwing billions of dollars away to war profiteers, and the repercussions will be horrifying. We've only begun to see them.

San Francisco Symphony's 2008-09 Season

The San Francisco Symphony invited the press to Davies Hall on Monday morning to announce their 2008-09 season, offering the scribes coffee and pastries...



...before ushering us inside the hall to sit onstage and listen to music director Michael Tilson Thomas and Executive Director Brent Assink (below) talk about next year's programs.



Though I've written plenty of rude things about Tilson Thomas' conducting on this blog (along with plenty of praise), I think the San Francisco Symphony has been tremendously blessed by his leadership over the last 14 years.



The last time I was in New York City some years ago was when the New York Philharmonic was announcing their upcoming season, and it seemed unbelievable how boring and conservative the vast majority of their programs were, and continue to be, while in San Francisco we get to hear a mixture of everything from tired old warhorses to world premiere commissions and everything in between.



This year, for instance, besides the usual Beethoven and Mozart and Tchaikovsky, there's music by Ligeti, Lutoslawski, Szymanowski, rare Leonard Bernstein, Carl Nielsen, Shostakovich, Ravel, Gabrieli, Prokofiev, Walton ("Belshazaar's Feast"), Thomas Ades, Jennifer Higdon, Oliver Knussen, Poulenc, Vaughan Williams, and world premiere commissions from Mason Bates (the young dude above) and the legendary Russian (Tatar) composer Sofia Gubaidulina who will be in San Francisco for a two-week festival featuring her music.



The presentation, which was mostly an interview by Assink of Tilson Thomas, was mellow and good-natured with quite a few self-deprecating stories. One of my favorites was the announcement that the end-of-season festival would be a pairing of music by Schubert and Berg, two Viennese composers at opposite ends of the 19th century, and actually a fascinating pairing. When asked about the semi-staged production of Gilbert & Sullivan's "Iolanthe" which actually ends the season, Tilson Thomas admitted he was doing it simply because he adored the music. "I thought of a Berg and Gilbert&Sullivan festival, but somehow I couldn't figure out how to make it work."



The best story, however, came from the new Swedish chorus director, Ragnar Bohlin (above), about Ligeti's "Requiem" which is on a fascinating sounding program that includes Gabrieli, Ravel's Piano Concerto in G major with the legendary Martha Argerich playing, and Liszt's "Tasso; Lament and Triumph." Bohlin mentioned that an excerpt from the "Requiem" is used when the apes encounter the monolith in Kubrick's "2001" and that the music was written for a Swedish orchestra in the early 1960s, with two choruses combining forces for the piece. "The music is very, very difficult and the rehearsals were made even harder because there was construction going on in the concert hall. Finally, after about two weeks of work, a construction foreman poked his head through an open window into the rehearsal hall, and announced, 'We can't work under these conditions. It's impossible.' True story," Bohlin promised.



When it came to question time from the press, the first was from former Examiner and Chronicle classical music critic Alan Ulrich (above), which was a challenging demand to Tilson Thomas to know why, "with all of the many composers who could be honored this way, why did you choose Sofia Gubaidulina?" which left the conductor sort of nonplused.



I like Patrick Vaz's proposed reply to the prickly Mr. Ulrich: "Because we can; because she could; why the hell not?" (Click here to read his well-reported take on the same press conference.)



The new music director of the San Francisco Opera, Nicola Luisotti, has been asked to make his debut at the Symphony next March, and David Gockley (above, with Symphony President John Goldman) should try his best to get Tilson Thomas to cross the street and conduct an opera for him. How about Bernstein's "A Quiet Place," for instance? Tilson Thomas along with Dawn Upshaw and the Symphony are playing excerpts from the one "serious" opera Bernstein wrote before taking the program to Carnegie Hall's Bernstein celebration this fall. It would be interesting to hear.

Unwise at Any Speed

The Civic Center neighborhood was filled with old clunkers from the 1960s and 1970s this past weekend for the Harvey Milk film that was shooting around City Hall.



Coincidentally, a clunker of another sort was spotted in the neighborhood, the former San Francisco Supervisor Matt Gonzalez who has decided to run for Vice-President of the United States with Ralph Nader.



This is after not even being able to beat Gavin Newsom in a mayoral election, and then sitting on the sidelines for Newsom's reelection hinting that maybe, just maybe, he'd throw his hat in the ring, effectively ruining a lot of other people's chances at unseating the photo-op mayor.



Over at the amusing "Sweet Melissa" blog (click here), the author refuses to even write about their candidacy but does point out that the "Calitics" blog has the best headline on the subject: "Matt Gonzalez Quits Politics, Runs with Nader as Vice Presidential Candidate" (click here for the whole article with quite a few amusing comments).

Sibelius and Shostakovich at the Symphony

There were four pieces of music on last week's symphony program, and since none of them were much longer than 20 minutes, Patrick Vaz dubbed it a "Small Plates Program."



The opening was a five-minute piece called Agnegram by the symphony's music director, Michael Tilson Thomas, written for a long-time supporter, Agnes Albert. It was bouncy and nicely written, but so wildly derivative of other composers that it became sort of fun to start listing them all off in one's head.



The second piece was also by Tilson Thomas, "Notturno" for Flute, Harp, and Strings which he wrote for Paula Robison (above) who happens to be his sister-in-law by way of his domestic partner. (Actually, since gay marriage isn't legal, the phrase "in-law" is a misnomer. Is there a term yet for those related through domestic partnerdom?) According to its composer, the music "is a "virtuoso piece evoking the lyrical world of Italian music...The piece has a subtext. It's about the role music plays in the life of a musician and the role we musicians play (must play?) in life." For some reason, it gave me a case of the uncontrollable giggles.



These short trifles were followed by a genuine masterpiece, Sibelius' Symphony No. 7, which he wrote in 1924 before sinking into an alcoholic stupor for the next thirty years. It's a really tricky piece to play and absorb, with short, ruminative phrases that keep turning into something else. The big brass resolutions that Sibelius promises, and which he usually delivers in his other music, never does get resolved in this one, ending instead with real, beautiful bleakness. I don't think Tilson Thomas quite gets this music, but the orchestra's rendition of the last five minutes was masterful and the concert was worth it just to hear that finale.



After intermission, they played Shostakovich's relatively short, five-moment Symphony No. 9, and you can hear why it got the composer into trouble yet again with Soviet authorities after its premiere in 1945. Instead of writing a heroic Victory Over The Nazis Symphony, complete with chorus and bombast, which is what he'd been hinting at creating, Shostakovich instead produced a giddy little piece of music with a first movement that could be played at the circus. This is followed by alternating slow, sad movements, and progressively bouncier music, ending with a finale that had the guy sitting next to me almost jumping out of his seat and dancing. Tilson Thomas definitely understood this music and the performance by the orchestra was great.

The Legend of Saint Harvey Milk

A line of trucks was parked on Van Ness in front of City Hall on Friday, and I assumed they were setting up yet another large, corporate party in the City Hall rotunda.



Suddenly, a gust of wind blew the covering off the backside of one of the trucks, and I saw a hand-painted sign that read "GAY PRIDE." After a moment of total disconnect, my first thought was, "Gosh, that sign looks old-fashioned," and then realized that it was purposefully old-fashioned and that the trucks were hauling movie equipment for the Gus Van Sant film, "Milk," about the gay San Francisco Supervisor who was assassinated in 1978 along with Mayor George Moscone.



It's very odd to have lived through a dramatic series of historical events, playing one's own bit part, and then watch the legends and stories accrue to those same events as manufactured mythology.



All San Franciscans were invited to be extras at a march in the Civic Center neighborhood a couple of weeks ago, to recreate the spontaneous candlelight march from Castro and Market to City Hall on the night of the assassinations, but I decided not to take part for a number of reasons. For one, I didn't feel like staying up all night, but it was also because time's river really has moved on.



My downstairs neighbor Richard, who lived through the same period in San Francisco, and has wicked stories about everybody from Cleve Jones to Dennis Peron, asked me, "Do you remember what the Castro was like in the late 70's? Everybody was young! There were virtually no old people except for the straight families who hadn't moved out yet." His memory is right, and there's no equivalent in San Francisco anymore, certainly not in the Castro. The only neighborhood filled with young people is the Haight-Ashbury, who are trying to follow an even older template, the 1960s hippies.



I've discovered over the years that politicians can have good politics (in other words, I agree with them) but still be miserable people as human beings. The reverse, interestingly enough, is also true. Harvey Milk, however, had both good politics and was a wonderful human being, with a rare mixture of fervor and humor. In 1976, a year before he was finally elected to the Board of Supervisors, I ran into him at the San Francisco Opera where he had a subscription in the Balcony Circle. I was in the top balcony standing room with Dennis, my boyfriend at the time, for Britten's "Peter Grimes" featuring a performance by Jon Vickers from which I still haven't quite recovered. Harvey came by after the first act and tapped us on the shoulder. "I know the couple next to me are not going to be showing up. Why don't you join me?" That's how we ended up in the front of the balcony sitting next to a future legend and listening to a present-tense legend.



One of the worst side effects of Milk's murder was the ascension of the reactionary hack Dianne Feinstein into the mayor's chair and subsequent U.S. Senate seat, even though she was mentor to the assassin Dan White. Still, Dianne was about the only amusing character in the forgettable "Harvey Milk" opera by Stewart Wallace that premiered in Houston and San Francisco in the early 1990s. Let's hope Gus Van Sant does a better job with the myth.