Civic Center

Clangin' and Bangin' at Heart of the City

2012-02-01T14:33:00.000-08:00

Last year Kirby Lee Hammel and Jake Alexander, a pair of college student buskers on a piano and drum set, appeared at the Heart of the City Farmers Market in Civic Center and quickly gained the neighborhood's affection.

Besides the little kid above, who is reportedly an awestruck admirer who begs his mom to take him every Sunday to watch Jake on the drums, the crowd of down-and-out schizophrenics, substance abusers, and just plain miserable near 7th and Market have also become ardent fans.

Last Sunday, instead of their usual public acting out of various miseries, I saw many of the same characters sitting at plastic tables around the musicians, listening to the set and grinning from ear to ear.

Part of the reason for that is the style of music being played, which they describe on their website as follows:

"Clangin' & Bangin' started as a collaboration between pianist Kirby Lee Hammel and drummer Jake Alexander as an entertaining way to make some $ for school, hone their craft as musicians, and spread the good vibes of blues, honky-tonk and boogie music to the masses. Equally influenced by the music emerging from Chicago in the '20s and '30s, the pre-jazz era, and honky-tonks down in Texas, Clangin' & Bangin' takes to the streets like many of their idols before them."

Even more important than the jolly nature of this music is the sheer verve of the playing which sounds like a seamless combination of tight licks and improvisation. In a phone interview, I asked Kirby if they were playing standards or their own material, and he said it was a combination of both, with new additions to the repertory all the time, many based on repeated requests from the crowd.

Neither the Heart of the City Farmers Market or the city of San Francisco pays them for the 11AM-2PM gigs every Sunday and occasional Wednesdays, but both entities should seriously consider doing so, since this pair may be the best-sounding buskers I have heard in 40 years in San Francisco.

"Were you freaked out by all the crazies in the neighborhood when you started?" I asked Kirby, and he confessed there was some trepidation at the beginning but they soon realized their sounds made people happy. A more literal demonstration of music soothing the savage beast would be hard to find.

San Francisco Is Noir City

2012-01-30T18:41:00.000-08:00

The wildly successful, ten-day Noir City Film Festival wrapped up on Sunday at the Castro Theatre with a six-film Dashiell Hammett marathon.

Friday evening, the nearly full house was entertained by the Los Angeles chanteuse Laura Ellis, who has just released a "Femme Fatale" CD featuring torch songs from old films.

Noir City founder Eddie Muller (above right) introduced this year's Ms. Noir City, Helena Bianca, who modeled for this year's festival poster as the character Brigid O'Shaughnessy in Dashiell Hammett's old San Francisco apartment where he wrote The Maltese Falcon.

The featured film was the 1949 Thieves' Highway with Richard Conte as a WWII veteran, Valentina Cortese as a waterfront "working girl," and Lee J. Cobb as a Mafia distributor in San Francisco's old produce market which has since been supplanted by the Embarcadero Center. The trail of corruption and violence that surrounds a truckload of Golden Delicious apples that makes its way from Fresno to San Francisco is outrageously entertaining, and as the beautiful four-color program maintains, the film is "a masterpiece of proletariat noir."

At the end of Eddie's introduction to the movie, he was surprised with a commendation from the San Francisco Mayor's Office, extolling him for all his contributions to the city. "You are commended for such-and-such, and then there's some legalese, and it's signed by Mayor Edwin M. Lee." Muller was gracious about the official honor, but his eyebrows raised when he read the mayor's name, and he added, "I'd better keep my mouth shut here. Just remember, San Francisco IS Noir City, and that includes City Hall," referring I assume to the film genre's fascination with official corruption and double-dealing.

Dragon Pagoda Boat in Civic Center

2012-01-29T21:52:00.000-08:00

The two week period that is Chinese New Years has just begun, and a wildly decorative float was being erected for the first time in Civic Center Plaza in honor of the holiday.

I asked the security guard if the float was going to be part of the Chinese New Years Parade on February 11th, but he said the structure was too large and was only meant for Civic Center.

Presumably, the arrival of this new bit of civic decoration has something to do with San Francisco's first, long overdue Chinese mayor, Edwin Lee.

The Pagoda Boat is a colorful addition to the neighborhood, and helps assuage the feelings of loss from the three-headed six-armed Monster Buddha who left us last year so mysteriously and precipitously.

Flight from Redwood Shores

2012-01-28T09:08:00.000-08:00

A month-long contract job consisting of twelve-hour days in Redwood Shores has just finished, which means I can finally sleep again.

The best part of this occasional gig, besides being able to pay bills, is eating lunch outside on the deck of the Redwood Shores Public Library above.

It overlooks a tidal slough from the San Francisco Bay which is a marvel for watching birds, with different species feeding depending on how much water is covering the mud flats...

...including improbably graceful cranes who look like imaginary creatures.

Noir City X and the Mirkarimi Mess

2012-01-25T22:00:00.000-08:00

Noir City, the coolest film festival in San Francisco, is holding its tenth anniversary this week at the Castro Theatre. There are double bills and newly-struck, pristine prints of fascinating films, and a cheap admission price to one of the great movie palaces left in the world.

Festival founder Eddie Muller, above right, has created an interesting niche for himself as a film preserver, evangelist, writer and filmmaker focusing on the dark, fatalistic film genre from the late 1930s to early 1960s known as Film Noir.

I mentioned to him that somebody we knew in common had been caught in the maws of the Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi domestic violence inquisition. The scandal has become a tabloid sensation for the local media, partly out of political intent and partly because certain morality tales have their own celebrity momentum. "The entire story, with all its layers of corruption, is like one of your movies," I told Eddie, and he replied, "It's a demonstration of the maxim that in the world of Noir, there is no good deed that goes unpunished."

Music and Glamour at the Symphony

2012-01-23T20:11:00.000-08:00

Last week's San Francisco Symphony program was delightful, with four 20th century pieces that featured two glamourous female soloists, all conducted by the 34-year-old Pablo Heras-Casado from Granada, Spain. Pablo is pictured above left with the chamber orchestra which started the program playing Stravinsky's concerto grosso from 1938, Dumbarton Oaks.

This was followed Ravel's jazzy 1931 Piano Concerto, in an amazing performance by another phenomenal young female pianist named Khatia Buniatishvili from the Republic of Georgia. She didn't efface the memory of Martha Argerich playing the same score back in 2009 with Tilson Thomas, but she was virtuosically splendid and Heras-Casado gave the accompaniment some real snap.

After intermission, there was another short bit of Italian serial music from Luigi Dallapiccola, the 1954 Piccola musica notturna, which was a reminder of how little most twelve-tone music connects with my listening brain. Thankfully, it was short, and we went on to the 1916 Spanish ballet El Amor Brujo by Manuel de Falla with the "flamenco singer" Marina Heredia above left on a microphone giving a sensational performance of the four songs given to Candelas, who is sort of a gypsy Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands character, with a dead lover whose ghost won't get out of the way for her new one.

You've heard the Ritual Fire Dance music from this score whether you know it or not since it's as ubiquitous as The Flight of the Bumblebee, but oddly I had never heard the music live before and according to the program notes, the entire 30-minute ballet with vocal soloist hasn't been played in San Francisco since 1958 which is shocking since the music is so fun and accessible.

When listening to classical LPs as a precocious pubescent brat with my own stereo, I used to drive my family crazy with difficult music like Mahler symphonies and Britten's War Requiem, so it always made my Spanish-born mother extremely happy when I put on a recording of El Amor Brujo. She did everything but get her castanets out of the closet. She would have loved this performance.

49er City Hall

2012-01-21T10:36:00.000-08:00

San Francisco City Hall has been specially lit up this week in honor of the 49ers football team who are in the NFL playoffs for the first time in over a decade, and the lighting scheme is rather attractive. If only for the sake of the wonderful writer Jan Adams, who is a local, left-wing, lesbian, political organizing, Episcopalian football fan, may the 49ers prevail tomorrow afternoon against the New York Giants at Candlestick Park.

The Martyrdom of Saint Janacek

2012-01-19T22:02:00.000-08:00

Everybody was at the San Francisco Symphony last week, including the operatic actors Charlie Lichtman and Ron Mann above. They were featuring Janacek's late, great Sinfonietta and Debussy's incidental music to a weird, five-hour, pretentious performance piece from 1911 about The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastien.

Sitting across the aisle from us was composer John Adams, seen above with fellow composer Mason Bates. The two are sharing world premieres at the upcoming American Mavericks concerts at the Symphony later in the season.

The short first half of the concert, with Janacek's brass-filled Sinfonietta, was sensational, with extra horn players ringing the sides of the stage. Poor Debussy in the second half hardly stood a chance after that mighty blast.

Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien sounds like one of those fabulous messes that could only be accomplished by putting together lots of talented people on the wrong project, and one of the major instigators for Debussy's participation was Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, who was the model for Proust's homosexual aristocrat in Remembrance of Things Past, the Baron de Charlus. The dancer and poseur Ida Rubenstein mimed the titular saint originally, and the playwright was the poet Gabriele d'Annunzio, whose verse in translation is laughably terrible.

The performances in San Francisco were of the complete incidental music along with narration by recently retired mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade, along with beautiful solo singing by Karina Gauvin, Joanna Taber, and Sasha Cooke, all of whom walked on and off tall platforms above the orchestra with the chorus sitting in between them. There were also groovy string cheese video screens of different shapes above the orchestra with video and still projections by Anne Patterson, who directed the show. Unfortunately, for all the talent and good work involved, the evening was something of a somnolent failure.

Whenever I shut my eyes, the Debussy music would be evocative and soothing, but when I would reopen my eyes they would be to some beautifully declaimed French phrase by von Stade that would be translated as "I love you, my brother, in God, as a lily" or some nonsense and you'd wish they hadn't bothered with projected titles at all.

Many of the video sequences featured the San Francisco Ballet principal dancer Damian Smith (above left) in some kind of loincloth but his talents were sadly wasted, in that the choreography by Myles Thatcher seemed to consist of a lot of stationary writhing, and the focus most of the time was on Damian's armpit. Mr. Smith is a very handsome man and has a handsome armpit, but he's also an excellent dancer and it would have been nice to see an actual dance to some of the score.

I have no clue what Anne Patterson (above center, with MTT on her right), the director and designer of the production, could have done with this strange piece, but her tasteful choices were dull, and one almost wished for an oratorio-style sit and stand performance that simply concentrated on the lovely, unfamiliar music. I'm glad I heard and saw it, though, and the performers were beyond reproach. Even just speaking in French, amplified, Frederica von Stade is still a vocal goddess.

The Chosen Spot 3: Weill Hall

2012-01-17T20:24:00.000-08:00

The Joan and Sanford I. Weill Hall, a new 1,400 seat concert space modeled after Tanglewood's Ozawa Hall, is opening at Sonoma State University this September 29th with a concert by the pianist Lang Lang. He is a friend of the donor Mr. Weill, who among other positions, is Chairman of the Board at Carnegie Hall while wife Joan has a similar position with the Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre.

The all-wooden concert hall is visually and sonically stunning, with its wooden lattice work reminding me of the Luther Burbank Gardens and the local Arts and Crafts Movement in Northern California. There are very few buildings I walk into that feel holy, but this was instantly one of them. (The San Francisco Opera House is another, while Davies Hall is not, and if we're going to be making these kinds of comparisons, San Francisco's Old First Church on Van Ness feels holy while the Unitarian Church on Franklin Street does not.)

The hall is going to be the Santa Rosa Symphony's new home base, student groups will be using it for a variety of purposes, and the San Francisco Symphony has promised four concerts during next year's season. There is also supposed to be some synergy between Carnegie Hall through Weill's connections and the music curriculum at Sonoma State, and who knows how that will work out?

Most exciting is the prospect of the San Francisco Symphony possibly changing its Summer in the City Pops concerts, which are subsidized by taxpayers through the San Francisco Arts Commission, and engaging in a real summer music festival such as the Boston Symphony does every summer in the country in Tanglewood. The back of Weill Hall opens to the air, and there are concerts planned to include an additional 2,000 people on the adjoining lawn seating. After nearly forty years in the summer fog in San Francisco, I long for a sunny place to hang out nearby in nature while listening to music, and this would be a perfect opportunity.

There could be buses to take freezing city people into the warm country summer, with different neighborhoods and affinity groups having their own afternoons and evenings. In fact, if any of these pipe dreams come true, I promise to charter a bus so all the cool people can get lubricated and enjoy themselves and argue with each other about music, with a pickup and dropoff at Davies Hall.

The Chosen Spot 2: Green Music Center

2012-01-16T21:27:00.000-08:00

The reason I visited the Luther Burbank gardens on New Years Day was because my host and chauffeur Janos Gereben insisted upon it. Afterwards, we wandered around Sonoma County in his rental car while he indulged in an interesting relationship with his female-voiced GPS unit in particular and navigation in general.

Janos had invited me along principally so that I could take some photos for his San Francisco Classical Voice article about the upcoming opening of the $130 million Donald and Maureen Green Music Center on the campus of Sonoma State University. The theatre above was still having a front outdoor plaza installed but essentially the new concert hall, its lobby and adjoining fancy restaurant have been completed.

On New Years Day, there was a reception for donors, development people, publicists, and a few journalists, held in the restaurant space which is already being rented out for wedding receptions.

It's easy to see why as the place is beautiful.

There were speeches by University President Ruben Arminana above right, and Sanford I. Weill (sitting beside him next to his wife Joan) thanking all the donors and also threatening them with more outreach for funds.

The project started off with a large donation by Maureen and Donald Green (above right, with Arminana) for a new choral center on the campus twelve years ago, and somewhere along the way the plans became more and more ambitious, and the simple choral center had morphed into a major musical education complex with a serious, world-class concert hall at its center.

To complete the project, Sanford Weill and his wife Joan donated a huge sum last year and the concert hall has been named after them. It was a good investment, as the building is magnificent.

Listening to Sanford Weill above was a bit disconcerting, since the 72-year-old investment executive is a major poster boy for the recent excesses of Wall Street. The Weills bought a winery estate from Joe Montana in Sonoma County a couple of years ago for $31 million, which is how they became involved with the Green Music Center in the first place, and then they convinced their pianist friend, Lang Lang, to test drive the concert hall at midnight one evening. He was enraptured with the sound, and the rest is soon to be local history.

The Chosen Spot 1: Luther Burbank Gardens

2012-01-15T16:35:00.000-08:00

This New Years Day, an hour before dusk, I visited the Luther Burbank Home and Gardens in Santa Rosa for the first time, after passing signage for decades on Highway 101 marking the historical landmark.

Burbank, born in 1849, was a poor boy from a huge family in rural Massachusetts. His father died when he was 21 and Luther used his patrimony to buy his own farm and experiment with horticulture, at which he turned out to be one of the intuitive geniuses in world history.

With the $150 he made from selling the rights to his new Burbank Russet potato, which we are still eating now, Luther moved to Santa Rosa in 1875 and bought land for a small experimental farm which is where his home and Memorial Garden still stands in downtown.

For the next fifty years, Burbank created hundreds of new strains of fruits, potatoes, cacti, and flowers, becoming an admired worldwide celebrity while earning the scorn of professional academics. His Wikipedia entry notes:

"Burbank was criticized by scientists of his day because he did not keep the kind of careful records that are the norm in scientific research and because he was mainly interested in getting results rather than in basic research. Jules Janick, Ph.D., Professor of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture, Purdue University, writing in the World Book Encyclopedia, 2004 edition, says: "Burbank cannot be considered a scientist in the academic sense."

In 1916, Burbank married his much younger second wife Elizabeth Waters above, and after his death in 1926, she continued living in their home until 1977, commissioning a beautiful, Arts and Crafts Movement style memorial garden in the 1960s from local landscape architect Leland Noel which is featured in the first two photos above.

There is a metal sculpture of a lotus with a sundial in the garden by Harry Dixon (1890-1967) from the same Arts & Crafts movement, and the daily free admission to the gardens, the inexpensive plant sales, and the general vibe is welcoming and lovely.

It's easy to believe the characterization of Burbank by a friend of his, Paramahansa Yogananda, who wrote in his Autobiography of a Yogi:

"His heart was fathomlessly deep, long acquainted with humility, patience, sacrifice. His little home amid the roses was austerely simple; he knew the worthlessness of luxury, the joy of few possessions. The modesty with which he wore his scientific fame repeatedly reminded me of the trees that bend low with the burden of ripening fruits; it is the barren tree that lifts its head high in an empty boast."

Ornithomancy

2012-01-13T19:17:00.000-08:00

The birds of Silicon Valley are numerous, strange and enchanting, a welcome dose of the natural into the denatured digital world.

At the San Carlos Caltrain station, a group of pigeons welcomes us early every morning from their telephone line perches, looking like a John Cage musical score written after a consultation with the I Ching.

I have long felt that birds in nature were sending personalized, fateful messages but have never known how to read the omens other than a generalized, "be alert, something's up." It's reassuring to discover on the internet this evening that bird divination has a long, ancient history, and one of its many names is ornithomancy. There's probably even a school for it in the Bay Area since there seems to be a class for just about everything else.

Tetzlaff Plays Ligeti

2012-01-11T18:55:00.000-08:00

The San Francisco Symphony started the year with the irreplaceable Meredith above helping out subscribers in the lobby...

...while I tried to explain to the couple above why that Saturday evening's performance of the 1993 Violin Concerto by György Ligeti was such a big deal.

The soloist was the German violinist Christian Tetzlaff above, who gave one of those performances that are instantly legendary, and the final, fifth movement included a fabulous cadenza riffing on musical themes from the preceding four movements that was written by Tetzlaff himself. Everybody who was anybody loved it, including Janos and Lisa and Axel.

The following afternoon, between inaugurations, I saw Tetzlaff rushing down the sidewalk towards me on Hayes Street, possibly to pick up an espresso before another performance at the 2PM Sunday matinee. The only proper response seemed to be the Wayne and Garth "We Are Not Worthy" bow from the waist with both arms outstretched, and Tetzlaff burst into laughter. "Saw you last night, it was awesome," I told him, and it was.

A Tale of Two Inaugurations 2: Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi

2012-01-09T21:53:00.000-08:00

Three hours later, at Herbst theatre across Van Ness Avenue from City Hall, there was another inauguration. It was for ex-District 5 Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, who had just won a hard-fought election for Sheriff last November. Unlike the Mayor Ed Lee affair in City Hall, seating in the fancy old theater was on a first-come, first-serve basis, and they finally opened up the balcony for the decent sized crowd of about 1,000.

Both inaugurations had dark clouds over them. In Ed Lee's case, it was because his election was so blatantly undemocratic, with the old San Francisco political machine selecting him behind closed doors after Gavin Newsom left office last year. In Ross Mirkarimi's case, it was on account of a bombshell that had been exploded by Phil Matier (below left), the political gossip columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle that same Sunday morning. He reported that the San Francisco Police Department was deciding whether or not to arrest newly-elected Sheriff Mirkarimi for domestic violence against his new Venezuelan telenovela star wife. (Click here for the Matier & Ross hit piece.)

Matier was in the lobby of Herbst Theatre, talking closely with San Francisco Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White above right. The Chief also has a history of police coming to her house inquiring about domestic violence when she was reportedly bashing her husband with a pint glass back in 2005 (click here). Nobody was demanding her resignation over the issue at the time, but that's possibly because she is a part of the native-born San Francisco government cabal that largely and ineptly runs San Francisco.

The inauguration started with a sheriff's drill team leading the Pledge of Allegiance and then the young lady above singing the National Anthem a capella quite fabulously, and then there was an emcee and a promise of entertainment that included Puccini's "Un Bel Di" and a Persian Folk Song, which is when I remembered that Tiger's kitty litter across the street needed cleaning so I did so.

I returned an hour later just in time for the last speaker on the program, Sheriff Mirkarimi himself. I stayed for a couple of minutes of his speech and then moved on to The Green Room, where a free reception complete with wine and roving appetizers was going to be held.

Nobody loves the sound of his own voice quite like Ross Mirkarimi, but I was still surprised that his oration ran for a steady forty minutes. Meanwhile I chatted up the charming catering crew in the Green Room, waiting for the mobs to arrive.

They finally did make their entrance, and there were people you actually wanted to see like Glendon Hyde aka Annaconda above, a District 6 Supervisorial candidate from last November.

There was also a favorite sheriff's deputy, above left, who works at City Hall. It was the first time I had seen him out of his dorky sheriff's uniform and he looked sharp.

There was a huge police presence all around the Veterans building, and it wasn't quite clear if this was meant as protection or intimidation of Mirkarimi, who they seem to despise.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

A Tale of Two Inaugurations 1: Mayor Ed Lee

2012-01-08T19:25:00.000-08:00

The public was invited to San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee's inauguration party in City Hall on Sunday morning but what the organizers failed to announce was that there were two tiers of "public," those who held red invitation cards from the Ed Lee Inauguration Committee, and those who did not.

If you were part of the latter group, officious characters insisted that you leave the main floor and take the elevator somewhere, anywhere away upstairs. The elevator stopped at the second floor, but after the door opened a bossy young man yelled at us that nobody was allowed off the elevator. Supervisor John Avalos happened to be standing right next to him, and he gave me a rueful grin, followed by a wave.

On the third floor, besides velvet ropes denying entrances to stairways, there was yellow "Do Not Cross" tape in front of the lighting systems set up for the show below, which didn't allow for even halfway decent sightlines for the peasants.

In all the years I've been attending and covering events at City Hall, this wide-scale exclusion of the public at a public event was a first, and not a particularly good portent for the next four years of the Ed Lee administration.

What made the situation even more grotesque was that Lee's short inauguration speech was reportedly filled with repeated assertions that he was going to be "The Mayor of the 100%."

This buzz phrase is particularly absurd considering that Lee was selected for office by old power brokers such as US Senator Dianne Feinstein above, who swore him into office this morning.

According to a number of witnesses, the inauguration was very much the Willie Brown, Jr. show, with the openly corrupt, influence peddling ex-mayor as emcee, which is almost enough to make one feel sorry for Ed Lee.

I left after the San Francisco Symphony trumpet fanfare on the main staircase led by Mark Inouye above as they musically introduced Ed Lee and his family.

This was mainly because there was no way to see anything unless one held a precious red ticket, although I heard later that there were video feeds in the South and North Light Courts off the main floor rotunda, but none of the gatekeepers were bothering to share that information with the public.

It wasn't the San Francisco Police Department that was keeping the great unwashed off the main floor in City Hall. Instead, they were were walking in pairs on the sidewalk around City Hall, smiling, being friendly, and otherwise not acting like the usual SFPD at all. The Sheriffs Department was handling security inside City Hall, and they were also in a jolly mood, but they also had nothing to do with the main floor velvet ropes.

Instead, it was volunteers from the Ed Lee Inauguration Committee who were playing bouncers. The young man above wasn't as obnoxious as most of these characters, many of whom seemed to consist of middle-aged Chinese ladies who had taken charm school lessons from Rose Pak. The whole event was very weird.

X Marks The Sunrise

2012-01-06T20:15:00.000-08:00

Blurry eyed from not enough sleep Thursday morning, I absentmindedly looked out the window of a southbound commuter Caltrain car and saw a giant X in the sky. It was a vision straight out of a sci-fi movie, a sign from the heavens, or a paranoid's Contrail verification.

It certainly woke me up.

3 Cool Concerts Coming Up at the SF Symphony

2012-01-04T21:41:00.000-08:00

The next three weeks at Davies Hall with the San Francisco Symphony have all kinds of interesting goodies on paper. Starting Friday, January 6th through 8th, music director Michael Tilson Thomas leads the orchestra in the 1993 violin concerto by György Ligeti with soloist Christian Tetzlaff (pictured above left, with pianist Leif Ove Andsnes).

According to the BBC's Stephen Johnson, the concerto is "a kind of cornucopia of effects and techniques, a wild collage of atmospheres and colors. Among other effects, it uses microtonality, rapidly changing textures, comic juxtapositions...Hungarian folk melodies, Bulgarian dance rhythms, references to medieval and Renaissance music and solo violin writing that ranges from the slow-paced and sweet-toned to the angular and fiery."

Ligeti isn't somebody to listen to at home unless you have musical tastes way more advanced than mine, but his music live in the concert hall is invariably amazing. The second half of the concert is Tchaikovsky's first symphony, called Winter Daydreams, and it's one of his loveliest, most Russki scores.

The following week, January 12-14, is worth attending if only because MTT conducts Leoš Janáček's Sinfonietta, which will make you cry when you hear it live. The rest of the concert is devoted to Le martyre de Saint Sébastien, incidental music written by Debussy in 1911 to a mystery play about the famously pierced saint.

According to Wikipedia, "The first Gabriel Astruc production was attended by scandal (the Archbishop of Paris requested Catholics not attend because the dancer playing St. Sebastian was a woman and a Jew), the work was not successful and did not enter the repertoire; thanks to Debussy's score, however, it has been recorded in abridged and adapted versions several times."

There's a huge orchestra involved, along with a chorus and soloists such as the awesome soprano Sasha Cooke (above in red), and narrating the spectacle is the straight-out-of-retirement Frederica von Stade. The Symphony also promises that the concert "will be accompanied by a newly created multi-media treatment by imaginative, critically acclaimed director-designer Anne Patterson that features projected visuals and staged elements meant to bring the pageant-like, gothic, nature of the work to life," and let's hope it's fabulous rather than stupid.

The third week, January 19-21, will bring back the young Spanish conductor Pablo Heras-Casado (above left) conducting Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks, Ravel's Piano Concerto in G Major, and Dallapicolla's Piccola musica notturna. Best of all is the final piece, a warhorse I have never heard live, Manuel de Falla's El Amor Brujo, a gypsy ballet with "flamenco singer" Marina Heredia performing as soloist.

Click here to buy tickets at the San Francisco Symphony website, and if you're feeling poor, the day-of-purchase phone number for $20 rush tickets is (415) 503-5577.

Under the Polluted Sea Mural

2012-01-02T18:34:00.000-08:00

A wild new mural has recently appeared next to a vacant lot bordered by Market, Franklin and Oak Streets near the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

The imagery is of underwater creatures in a mixture of Mission District styles of graffiti and cartooning...

...created by the collective of artists above.

There is a shark sporting tattoos such as "Sink or Swim" underneath a ghost ship...

...which cleverly breaks the fourth wall and leaks oil onto the blacktop parking area.

Uptown Almanac (click here) thinks the mural is part of something called the "Sea Punk" movement...

...but it looks more like a whimsical, hard-edged look at the death of the world's ocean creatures thanks to the oil burning culture in which we live.

In a further irony, the mural is painted on the side of Wynn's Motors, a repair shop specializing in Japanese cars. Check it out the next time you're in the neighborhood.

Joya No Kane at the Asian

2012-01-01T09:52:00.000-08:00

San Francisco's Asian Art Museum has been offering an annual, participatory Japanese New Years Eve celebration for the last 26 years called Joya No Kane that involves ringing a Buddhist temple bell before the New Year to purify oneself of the 108 worldly desires.

The museum advertises the event as a family activity, so the place was crawling with kids on Saturday afternoon.

While waiting for their turn to ring the bell, the Cedric Westphal clan above was playing with colored markers and glue...

...while decorating an elephant in sparkly East Indian style.

We were given numbers on our entry to the museum at noon for a chance to ring the bell, but were running out of time so my math professor friend Matthew Hubbard (below right) pretended to be numberless and joined a female trio in the communal gonging.

Possibly he was expunging one of his 108 worldly desires.

Marching Systematically to Silicon Valley

2011-12-30T09:54:00.000-08:00

Besides the occasional beautiful sunrise, a Caltrain trip south to Silicon Valley takes one by Brian Barneclo's stupendously huge Systems mural near the San Francisco station.

Riding Caltrain is really the only way to see the mural up close since the railyards are fenced off to the public for obvious safety reasons, and even while riding the train, there is no way to see the entire System at one time. It's rather marvelous.

Caltrain Sunrise

2011-12-28T19:02:00.000-08:00

Not being a morning person, arising at 6AM to commute to Silicon Valley on Caltrain for a month is almost the definition of painful.

There are compensations, though, besides money...

...including a spectacular sunrise this morning as we headed south down the Peninsula.

The photographer Donald Kinney (click here) has long claimed that sunrises are more spectacular than sunsets, and he may be right.

Boxing Day in Sharp Park

2011-12-26T22:11:00.000-08:00

In the British Commonwealth countries, there is an official holiday the day after Christmas called Boxing Day, which has something to do with giving servants boxes from gifts and has morphed into a serious public shopping holiday over the years.

Three of us shunned the shopping experience and joined a horde of other cheap municipal golfers on Monday at the recently reprieved Sharp Park Golf Course in Pacifica, where it was easy to pretend we were golfing on Scottish seaside links, even though it was probably about thirty degrees warmer.

The course has been the subject of extreme controversy over the last four years because a consortium of "deep ecology" groups have decided that pristine nature is preferable to an inexpensive municipal golf course in one of Pacifica's main valleys, even though the exquisitely laid out Alister MacKenzie track has been there close to 100 years, and its presence has preserved the land from commercial development.

Mike Wallach above has been writing about the absurdist politics of the situation at his MW cellphone photoblog (click here).

He had an up and down day but managed to par the last hole, which as you can see made him happy.

Happy Heidimas

2011-12-24T19:46:00.000-08:00

Being raised a Southern California beach boy, Christmas has never had quite the same primal pull for me as for most White Northerners, and this week's gorgeous, drought-stricken, California weather has only been a reminder of that essential cultural estrangement.

The only person I still know from high school days, Heidi, is a California beach girl who became a Tibetan Buddhist woman.

She had the (mis)fortune to be born on December 25th, so let us all dedicate tomorrow to her, when the Buddhas will be celebrating Heidimas.

The Western Addition Fire

2011-12-22T17:21:00.000-08:00

Shortly after noon today, I noticed a plume of smoke that looked as if it was coming from my neighbors a block away.

The fire turned out to be about eight blocks away on the corner of Pierce Street and Golden Gate Avenue near Alamo Square in the Western Addition.

The large corner structure above was a four-story apartment building...

...and the word on the street was that at least two large residential buildings were destroyed.

There were stunned looking refugees wrapped in blankets being interviewed by the ghoulish looking local media...

...while a small group of neighbors and onlookers watched from a block away on Golden Gate Avenue, next to the Missionary Temple Christian Church where the Red Cross had set up a temporary shelter.

At a certain point, the San Francisco Fire Department retreated from trying to save the building and concentrated on containing the blaze instead.

Onlookers were equipped with everything from camera phones to iPads to record the event...

...and the San Francisco Police Department, to their credit, were actually being kind to everyone.

One of the few people who didn't look to be in a state of utter shock was the neighbor above from three buildings away on Golden Gate Avenue, who had hurriedly packed a suitcase full of valuables for a quick getaway in case the fire spread to his home. "If I hadn't managed to save my wife's camera, she would have killed me."

Condolences to the poor burned out apartment dwellers who have probably lost everything.

Solstice Homeless Requiem

2011-12-22T10:23:00.000-08:00

The Tenderloin-based San Francisco Network Ministries...

...in collaboration with the Coalition on Homelessness...

...held their annual "Interfaith Memorial for San Francisco's Homeless Dead" Wednesday evening in front of the Christmas tree in Civic Center Plaza while marking the Winter Solstice.

It was a small, solemn crowd that listened to various religious leaders give short homilies before reading the names of those who died this year while living in the streets of San Francisco.

After each name was read, the lady above would chime on a bell...

...as their souls would be acknowledged publicly...

...in an attempt at bringing light to darkness.

Kiddie Christmas Snow in Civic Center

2011-12-19T19:16:00.000-08:00

In his final days as San Francisco Mayor last year, Gavin Newsom hosted a public holiday party in Civic Center, complete with manufactured snow on a hill for a children's sledding adventure (click here for an account).

Though not a big fan of Newsom, I thought the event was charming and hoped it would be continued as an annual event.

Evidently the administration of Ed Lee has been listening to me, even though I did not support them for election, and they just brought the holiday party back for an entire weekend.

The event was still fairly unpublicized and underpopulated, which was just as well for those waiting in lines with their kids and grandchildren to sled down the hill.

The rules were simple and explicit.

You had to be a little kid to sled down the hill...

...but also big enough that you could make the scary ride on your own.

If you have children, keep an eye out for the event next year.

New Century Chamber Orchestra Celebrates the Holidays

2011-12-18T17:25:00.000-08:00

The San Francisco chamber orchestra's second concert of the season, heard at Herbst Theatre on Friday evening, was divided into Serious Music in the first half, and Holiday Bon Bons in the second, although the division turned out not to be as extreme as advertised. The evening started off with Prologue and Variations for String Orchestra from 1983 by Ellen Taafe Zwillich, the composer who used to be a mainstay of the old Bay Area Women's Philharmonic. She's the featured composer for the NCCO this year, and this piece sounded like everything I've heard before from her, which is well-made, pleasant in a mild Shostakovich way, and doesn't seem to go anywhere. Maybe a closer listening with the New Century this season will improve acquaintance.

The early Haydn violin concerto in G major with soloist Krista Bennion Feeney above was another story altogether. Feeney was the previous music director of NCCO, from 1999 to 2006, and her playing was lovely but what took the performance to a whole other level was the ensemble playing by the chamber orchestra, now under Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. This was some of the finest live Haydn playing I have ever heard, with all his humor and richness fully present. With apologies to the "original instruments" ensembles, this is what Haydn's music should sound like.

The same was true of Arcangelo Corelli's "Christmas" Concerto Grosso from 1690 which looked as enjoyable to play as it was to hear. The perfectly clear interplay between the various string sections and individual players was delightful to watch.

Presumably as a nod to New Years Eve in Vienna, the three final pieces were transcriptions of a couple of Brahms Hungarian Dances (Johannes Goes Gypsy!) and the overture to Strauss' Die Fledermaus. This felt almost like putting up Christmas decorations before Thanksgiving which mitigated some of the pleasure.

The signage in the photo above, by the way, was for an event on the second floor, and we were all tempted to check the event out just to determine whether it was a bash for professional baseball fans, extremely tall people, or simply an ambitious holiday event.

A Deanna Durbin Noir City Xmas

2011-12-16T12:04:00.000-08:00

The Noir City film festival was gearing up for its tenth anniversary this coming January 20-29 at the Castro Theatre with a Christmas-themed double bill last Wednesday. Both films starred the 1930s child superstar Deanna Durbin in 1940s attempts at "adult" roles, before the actress married her French director from "Lady on a Train" and moved to a suburb of Paris where she lives to this day, outlasting Greta Garbo in the Star Who Wants to Be Alone sweepstakes.

Eddie Muller, above right, the Czar of Noir and founder of the festival, is fighting a self-described losing battle against time and the digital age, which only makes his attempts at preservation more heroic. Muller's passion for 35mm film projected onto a large screen is shared by a wide range of Film Noir cultists and cineastes worldwide, and they tend to sell out the festival at the Castro Theatre every year.

"Lady on a Train" turned out to be a fascinatingly bizarre mixture of murder mystery, comedy, and musical. Seeing it in a pristine 35mm print on the huge 4:3 aspect ratio Castro Theatre screen, as it was intended to be shown, was a genuine San Francisco treat that exists in few other places in the world. Click here for Noir City X details, with highlights that include an appearance by Angie Dickinson in person, a restoration of the 1949 version of "The Great Gatsby" with Alan Ladd and Shelley Winters that hasn't been seen since the early 1970s, plus a Dashiell Hammett Marathon finale.

SECA at SFMOMA

2011-12-14T15:47:00.000-08:00

The Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA) is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year with the publication of an art history book detailing the award winners it has encouraged over the last half century, along with an exhibit on the fifth floor of SFMOMA.

At the press preview last week, Alison Gass (above left) and Tanya Zimbardo (above right), who edited the book Fifty Years of Bay Art: The SECA Awards, gave short speeches about the award's history and the four 2010 winners who were being given a concurrent exhibition of their own on the fifth floor. The women spoke in fluent ArtSpeak, dropping phrases such as "quotidian materials" and "ongoing modernist dialogue," and when director Neal Benezra went to the podium afterwards he asserted, "Those two are amazingly articulate." They were also perfectly comprehensible if one were fluent in ArtSpeak jargon but if not, not, as Gertrude Stein would say.

The book they edited is attractive, with lots of pictures and interesting historical tidbits, but the fifth floor exhibit is something of a misconceived mess. Instead of simply attempting a chronological look at award winners like the book does, somebody has decided to break various rooms into ArtSpeak thematic spaces with the signage above.

Some of the work is superb on its own, such as Heap of Elements for a Body, About to Act or Finished Activity by 2006 SEC Award winner Leslie Shows above...

...but much of the exhibit is later work by previous winners which doesn't make a lot of sense, such as the 1999 Loom by 1992 Winner Hung Liu above...

...or the 2004 Japanese Maple II by 1996 Winner Anne Appleby.

There is another problem, which is that the once-every-two-years SECA Awards go to anywhere from one to 5 artists, but the pool of nominees starts at around 250 and is slowly whittled down to 30 finalists. At that point, curators and members of the Association get into a chartered bus and visit the various finalists in their studios, who they then proceed to reject in favor of The Big Winners. This sounds much more like Discouragement than Encouragement of Contemporary Art. (The painting above is the 2003 Bronze Cowboy by John Bankston.)

In a footnote in the accompanying book, the authors admit:

"In contrast to the shows organized for the ICA Boston's Foster Prize or the Tate's Turner Prize, SECA exhibitions do not include the work of artists shortlisted for the award. The SECA shortlists were historically confidential and are largely absent from archival materials related to the group. The names of finalists appear in SECA publications from 1990 on. Since 2008 the shortlist has been included in the press release announcing the award recipients and posted on the museum's blog."

That must make the rejected artists happy. (Above is a small sculpture from 1977 Winner David Best before he started making temples at Burning Man.)

Here's a suggestion. Show the work of all thirty artists who make the finals every two years, and give prizes and more exposure to the Award Winners. Art is subjective as can be, so that one person's Best is not going to be somebody else's Best. For instance, the four 2010 winners are a strikingly anemic bunch, with the 2009 Twill Series (Jet Black) above by Ruth Laskey being one of the more vibrant pieces. A greater contrast among various artists would make everyone look better, and it might even encourage rather than discourage contemporary art.

A Tale of Three Symphonies 3: San Francisco

2011-12-12T17:20:00.000-08:00

The final subscription concerts of the year for the San Francisco Symphony took place last week before Davies Hall becomes all-Christmas all-the-time through December. It was a challenging program, starting with a 1906 Sibelius tone poem Pojhola's Daughter, followed by the two-year-old Violin Concerto composed by Esa-Pekka Salonen, the evening's conductor, and topped off with excerpts from Gotterdammerung, the final opera in Wagner's Ring Cycle.

Salonen, above right looking like a Finnish version of Seiji Ozawa in middle age, has been astonishingly successful over the last couple of decades, gaining praise in all quarters for his conducting while music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic for 17 years and then further praise for his own compositions. The opening Sibelius was wonderful and made me wish Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony were playing something more substantial by the composer.

The American violinist of the moment, and a MacArthur Fellow to boot, Leila Josefowicz above has been playing Salonen's violin concerto all over the world for the last two years with the composer conducting. It appears to be an insanely difficult work for a soloist who seemingly gets about two minutes of rest in the entire thirty-minute piece, often sustaining the entire sound with discreet backing from the huge orchestra. "How do you memorize something like that?" my friend Charlie wanted to know. "And how do you enter this music? It sounds like it was written for Martians."

I didn't find the busy, glacial, strange music all that difficult, but it was way too dense to absorb on a first hearing. I should have listened to the piece on YouTube ahead of time (you can do so by clicking here). In any case, it felt like a privilege hearing a composer and original soloist performing an ambitious work live.

After intermission, we were offered three raw, bleeding chunks from Wagner's five-and-a-half hour Gotterdammerung, including Christine Brewer above singing Brunnhilde's Immolation Scene at the end of the opera. Though Wagner opera excerpts have been symphony concert staples since the late 19th century, it still felt strange listening to this music completely divorced from the context of the opera house stage, particularly since the San Francisco Opera had presented a stunningly good "Ring" production five months ago across the street.

"This is a concert version! It's supposed to sound different than the opera house, and besides, I prefer Christine Brewer's tone to Nina Stemme," Goangshiuan next to me argued, to which my articulate reply was something on the order of "Bosh!" For the record, the performance by Brewer and the San Francisco Symphony under Esa-Pekka Salonen was just fine, but they didn't even begin to efface the memories of Nina Stemme totally commanding the San Francisco Opera stage this summer, or Donald Runnicles conducting a superb San Francisco Opera orchestra in the same music.

SantaCon in Civic Center 2011

2011-12-11T10:46:00.000-08:00

The Santas arrived by foot, by BART, by taxi, and even by doubledecker tour bus...

...as they congregated in San Francisco's Civic Center around noon on Saturday.

The central plaza had been fenced off to protect huge party tents used for a wealthy person's event the previous evening...

...so the soon-to-be-drunken Santas took over Polk Street in front of City Hall instead...

...effectively blocking traffic on the four-lane street.

There was also some snow left over from a consular party at City Hall earlier in the week which provided the ammunition for a few good snowball fights.

The annual event has grown larger each year, and since it's decentralized and nobody seems to actually be in charge, the San Francisco Police Department can't play their usual extortion game of charging tens of thousands of dollars for overtime Event Security as they do with most parades and street fairs.

The thousands of Santas seemed to be mostly heterosexual young adults engaging in day-long pub crawls throughout various neighborhoods in San Francisco...

...while flirting up a storm...

...and presumably getting laid at the end of it all with chestnuts roasting on an open fire.

A Tale of Three Symphonies 2: Berkeley

2011-12-10T13:41:00.000-08:00

On Thursday evening, just about everybody who was anybody was at Zellerbach Auditorium for a concert by the Berkeley Symphony, featuring the West Coast premiere of Verge by the Chinese-born Californian composer Lei Liang, along with the 1985 Piano Concerto by Lou Harrison, and the Sibelius 5th Symphony from 1919.

The guest conductor was Jayce Ogren above, who gave a short talk at the beginning of the concert about the sound worlds of the three pieces, and how much he loved all of them. The affection showed, particularly in the opening Lei Liang piece for a string chamber orchestra. The composer writes: "The 18 strings are divided into antiphonal groups: left versus right, front versus rear. They diverge into various sub-ensembles, quartets, and also appear as 18 virtuosic soloists. Near the end, they converge into a singular voice." Amazingly, you could clearly hear all of that and more in the ten-minute piece, not to mention the Mongolian overtones the composer had in mind.

The pianist Sarah Cahill above was the soloist in the ambitious, four-movement Lou Harrison piano concerto which the great, recently deceased local composer wrote in 1985 for Keith Jarrett. Though Jarrett recorded the concerto in Japan (click here), he hasn't continued to play or champion the piece which is unfortunate because it's a major work by a vastly underrated composer.

Part of the reason for that might be explained by a letter Harrison wrote to a friend after he finished the concerto, which is in the archives at UC Santa Cruz:

"When keith, despite my repeating to him many times that he only had to ask a foundation to help (or arts council or various friends), did not pay me a cent for my piano concerto with selected orchestra I was angry -- look at the writing of the last page. This meant that I was unprofessional, but it felt to me like castration. BM even called Keith’s manager in the last stages, to hear the reply “there was no contract, was there?” Keith’s long phone call requesting me to write for him evidently did not at all mean that one professional was asking work of another, despite his long talk about why he was asking me, especially, to compose for him. So- to cauterize the wound. I did learn from both concerti, though, that concert grand pianos are not instruments at all -- they are symbolic fetishes, just this side of the holy grail. The steinway company was nervous that I required kirnberger’s no 2 temperament for carnegie hall. it was allowed, though, and it was a pleasure to hear keith play my standard use of the tuning."

The music of Lou Harrison above strikes me as almost the perfect antithesis to John Harbison's music, which was played by the Boston Symphony Orchestra the night before. The wonderful English classical music blog, On An Overgrowth Path, reprinted a fascinating interview with Harrison by Joanna MacGregor, and this Q&A jumped out:

How would you describe 'West Coast' music? What would you say is its essence?
Well, there's no one 'is' about it. I have defined it as being freer. We're not bound up with industrial 'twelve-tone-ism' quite so much as the East seaboard is, and also we're not afraid out here if something sounds pretty. I don't see that increased complexity is any solution at all.

Harrison also described the wisdom he gleaned from Mr. Twelve-Tone-ism himself, Arnold Schoenberg, when the latter was his teacher in Los Angeles:

"From Schoenberg, oddly enough, I learned simplicity. I got myself into a corner one day, so I took the problem to him. He extricated me by saying, 'Only the salient. Only the important. Don't go any further. Just do what is going ahead and in its most salient form.' In short, no complications - strip it. I've sometimes wondered whether, when I write a Balungan for a Javanese gamelan for only five or seven notes, it might have something to do with Schoenberg's admonition. When I left he said that I was not to study with anybody, that I didn't need that. He said, 'Study only Mozart'."

The piano concerto starts with a long allegro that sounds almost like Virgil Thomson or Aaron Copland at their most traditional with an Asian tinge to its sound, partly because of the "just intonation" of the specially tuned piano. The second movement "Stampede" is a thrillingly virtuosic duet for the piano and percussion, here played principally by Ward Spangler who was sensationally good. This music didn't sound influenced by jazz so much as it is jazz with an infusion of Indonesian gamelan. The short third movement was a case study in not being afraid of music which sounds simple and pretty, and the even shorter final movement was another piano and percussion duet that was so beautiful and energetically rhythmic that its sudden end was almost jarring.

The performance by both Sarah Cahill and the small orchestra was fabulous, and in a more perfect world, major orchestras all over the globe would be retuning a grand piano to "Kirnberger No. 2" and inviting Cahill to play what should be a standard work in the modern repertory. The concerto, in fact, has never been played by the San Francisco Symphony in the 25 years since it was written, which is something of a disgrace that could easily be rectified, particularly since music director Tilson Thomas was a friend of the composer.

The Sibelius Fifth Symphony in the second half of the concert was less satisfying. The strings were as superb as they had been all evening, but the winds and brass were off-pitch enough times that the quivering, climactic Sibelius sound world was more discordant than written. The conducting by Ogren was fine, and it was obvious he understood and loved the music, but the performance was a reminder that musicians like Mark Inouye at the San Francisco Symphony and Elizabeth Rowe at the Boston Symphony get paid the big bucks for a reason.

A Tale of Three Symphonies 1: Boston

2011-12-09T10:49:00.000-08:00

As part of the San Francisco Symphony's Centennial season celebrations, six major orchestras from around the United States are visiting Davies Hall with two evening's worth of concerts each, including new music written expressly for their various orchestras.

This week was the turn of the 131-year-old Boston Symphony Orchestra, and I attended the second concert on Wednesday, which featured the Fourth Symphony of the contemporary composer John Harbison, the second Suite from Ravel's ballet Daphnis et Chloe, and Mahler's First Symphony. (Click here to hear the whole concert archived at Boston public station WGBH from November 26th.) I had never heard the orchestra live before, and was happily overwhelmed by the clarity of sound the huge ensemble produced, particularly the winds section who at times bordered on the supernatural.

The orchestra's historic roster of conductors over the decades have included Pierre Monteux (who later led the San Francisco Symphony), Serge Koussevitzky, Charles Munch, and Erich Leinsdorf. Seiji Ozawa left the San Francisco Symphony and took over in Boston in 1973 where he remained for the next 29 years, reportedly overstaying his welcome by a number of years. James Levine, the Metropolitan Opera Musical Director, became the orchestra's first American-born leader in 2004, and the collaboration was reportedly a happy one until Levine's health problems knocked him from the podium over the last couple of years. Currently, the music director role at the orchestra is in a state of flux, so for this tour of San Francisco and other points south in California, the BSO asked Ludovic Morlot (the blonde above center and below right) to temporarily lead the ensemble.

The 37-year-old Morlot is a Frenchman who studied in France, England and America, becoming the Assistant Conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 2004 to 2007, and has just started his new post as the Music Director of the Seattle Symphony among other appointments. He very much seems to be on his way, and from the evidence of this concert, the success is deserved.

The BSO started a cycle of performances last year of all of New England composer John Harbison's symphonies, which will culminate in the world premiere of his sixth symphony next month. Harbison wrote his first symphony for the BSO as part of their own centennial season thirty years ago, his second symphony for San Francisco in 1987, and the third for Baltimore in 1991. He dedicated most of the next dozen years to his opera The Great Gatsby, which premiered at the New York Metropolitan to "a very mixed reception," and then embarked on the fourth symphony in 2003 for the Seattle Symphony.

The five movement, 30-minute piece starts with a hard-charging short fanfare that almost sounded like John Adams in his Harmonielehre phase. After that, the symphony meanders all over the place, and while always never less than interesting and well-written, I confess to just not liking Harbison's music, which flirts with jazz and atonalism while studiously avoiding beauty or fun. Still, it was good to hear, and the performance was energetic and committed.

The short Ravel suite that followed was stunning, and even though this music can be boring from its oversaturation on concert programs and radio, I will always remember the sound of this fifteen minutes and particularly Elizabeth Rowe (above center) on solo flute morphing herself into a babbling brook in the center of a huge, clear ensemble.

The Mahler First is a favorite piece of music, but as the gentleman sitting next to me in First Tier said, "There used to be 11 classical music stations in New York in the 1960s when I lived there, and at any one time the Brahms First was playing on at least two of them. That's what is happening with Mahler's First these days." Morlot conducted the piece almost as if it was Shostakovich (a major Mahler admirer), with whip-snap endings to musical phrases, and though it's not the way I'd like to hear the piece all the time, it was an exciting, convincing performance. And oh, the sound of that orchestra.

Q-School Tournament in La Quinta

2011-12-07T17:00:00.000-08:00

Professional golf's rules of inclusion are a shifting set of metrics that involve a mixture of the simple (top 125 on this year's US Professional Golfers Association money list are automatically eligible to play on tour next year) to complex (historical performance in major tournaments, injury exemptions, World Golf ranking, number of tournaments you commit to as a foreign player, you name it).

There are two other simple ways to obtain your tour card for the next year. Be in the top 25 of the money list in this year's Nationwide Tour, which is the golf equivalent of Triple-A pro baseball, and you're into the PGA tour. The other path is through something called the Qualifying School Tournament, a series of tournaments in warm weather states over the fall that filters out contenders for a grueling six-day final Q-School Tournament in early December. The top 25 players out of a field of about 170 at the end of those six days receive a PGA tour card. The next 50 also-rans are given entry into the Triple A Nationwide tour.

The cast of characters for this event is a fascinating mixture of accomplished old (in their 40s) golfers like David Duval and Lee Janzen trying to hold onto their tour cards after bad years, alongside young and striving athletes like Alexandre Rocha in the two photos above (with Dean Wilson on the putting green).

The tournament was held at PGA West in La Quinta, an upscale golf community in the southeast Coachella Valley in a beautiful desert mountain valley of its own. The strangest detail about the place was how empty it was. Even though million dollar homes lined every fairway of the two courses used for the event, I didn't see a single spectator sitting in any of the backyards. The reasons for the emptiness were a mystery. Possibly it was because the wealthy people who owned these vacation homes happened not to be visiting, or possibly they were just vacant. There are plenty of stories in this part of the Coachella Valley of people playing in the overheated real estate market who were stuck underwater with million dollar mortgages during the recent crash, and who simply walked away.

Not being able to persuade anyone in Palm Springs to make the trek to La Quinta to watch golf, I took a 90-minute bus ride on Sunday morning, and then hitchhiked for the first time in decades to PGA West itself. (Thank you, poor young Mexican man in the pickup and rich old white man in the Lexus for the rides to and from Highway 111.)

It was a remarkable experience. Not only was the tournament admission free, but there were so few spectators that you could be the entire gallery for just about any threesome of professional golfers that you wanted to follow. There were no scoreboards on the courses, which was annoying, but you could stick your head into the volunteer area at the central clubhouse and they would happily let you use their computer to look up scores.

It was also a surprisingly intimate setup where if you happened to cheer a golfer's birdie putt, they'd usually turn around and give you a wave. By the way, Alex Rocha above, who I did cheer on during Sunday's fifth round, made the top 25 by the skin of his teeth on Monday. Congratulations, kid.

Palm Springs Festival of Lights Parade

2011-12-05T14:50:00.000-08:00

Some of the more charming moments in Palm Springs occur during the many ambitious small-town parades that celebrate everything from Veterans Day to Gay Pride Day to the high school's Homecoming.

This Saturday featured the 20th annual Festival of Lights parade, which was a delirious mixture of marching bands...

...and brightly decorated vehicles that included Corvettes, dumpster trucks, big rigs, fire engines and buses, not to mention the dancing tractor below.

According to The Desert Sun, "The world's largest farm tractor makes an appearance at the Festival of Lights Parade. The tractor, made by John Deere, is 13 feet tall, 17 feet wide and 30 feet long. It's owned by Prime Time International, a Coachella-based produce company."

To add to the drama, huge Christmas balloon figures are led by teams from various neighborhood associations with ropes, which requires serious navigational skills to get around or under the street signals that stretch low across Palm Canyon Drive.

The wild winds whipping through California had recently subsided or the attendants to the monster nutcracker above would have risked being blown away to Indio.

The parade was nominally secular but plenty of Christian groups participated, including the bilingual Jews for Jesus sect above.

There were also plenty of local politicians being driven down the boulevard, but the only explicitly political message was the lunatic float above. Our funny group of middle-aged gay guys, led by the loud and consistently brilliant John Goldsmith, started the crowd booing at our intersection and reportedly the vehicle was met with similar reactions along the route.

After an hour and a half, Santa finally arrived on a Midcentury Modern rooftop, and the shivering crowd of about 50,000 packed up and drove away.

Dante Marioni Glass

2011-12-03T14:44:00.000-08:00

After our visit with Carol Channing, we went to the Palm Springs Art Museum, which features free admission every Thursday evening.

Steven Wibben above professed that he didn't much care for art glass...

...but found himself enraptured by a new blown glass piece called Reticello Acorn & Leaf by the 47-year-old Seattle artist Dante Marioni.

The vase would look perfectly happy in the Op Art of the 60s and 70s exhibit upstairs, as its design shifts from every possible angle.

A Carol Channing Christmas

2011-12-02T10:32:00.000-08:00

Whenever an ancient celebrity pops up in the news, who one could have sworn had already gone through the pearly gates, they invariably turn out to be living in Rancho Mirage. Such is the case with the 90-year-old performer Carol Channing above, who was arriving in Palm Springs' downtown Frances Stevens Park to light a huge Christmas tree on Thursday evening.

Channing was seated in a plastic chair behind the podium, looking a bit like a Pekingese that had been half-swallowed by an Afghan hound. It was a bitterly cold, windy evening and the fact that she had even shown up was a testament to her indomitable trouper status.

The newly reelected gay Palm Springs mayor, Steve Pougnet above, mildly berated the small crowd for not being livelier, and told stories about his adopted children and Carol Channing, where he sounded like a handsome version of former San Francisco Supervisor Bevan Dufty. "Carol and I did the tree lighting three years ago at the top of the tram, and while going up the mountain, my three year old daughter wrapped herself in Carol's white boa and Carol couldn't have been nicer to her."

Santa arrived on a fire truck and Channing was helped to the podium where she pushed a button to light the giant, rotating tree. We heard a rumour from a gentleman who seemed to be in the know that Channing was wiped out financially by her second husband/manager, Charles Lowe, who she divorced in 1998 after 42 years of marriage. Whether or not this is actually the case, Channing is still working at the age of 90. (Click here for details of her upcoming concert at the Agua Caliente Casino in Rancho Mirage.)

There's a wonderful quote from a 2006 article in the Austin Chronicle where Channing describes her initial mystic realization about the theater:

"My mother said, 'Carol, would you like to help me distribute Christian Science Monitors backstage at the live theatres in San Francisco?' And I said, 'All right, I'll help you.' I don't know how old I was. I must have been little. We went through the stage door alley (for the Curran Theatre), and I couldn't get the stage door open. My mother came and opened it very well. Anyway, my mother went to put the Monitors where they were supposed to go for the actors and the crew and the musicians, and she left me alone. And I stood there and realized – I'll never forget it because it came over me so strongly – that this is a temple. This is a cathedral. It's a mosque. It's a mother church. This is for people who have gotten a glimpse of creation and all they do is recreate it. I stood there and wanted to kiss the floorboards."

The 1956 photo of Channing by Carl Van Vechten above looked strikingly different from her 1960s incarnations, so it was fascinating to read the following in her Wikipedia entry:

"According to Channing's memoirs, when she left home to attend Bennington College in Vermont, her mother informed her that her father, a journalist who Carol had believed was born in Rhode Island, had in fact been born in Augusta, Georgia, to a German-American father and an African-American mother. According to Channing's account, her mother reportedly did not want Channing to be surprised "if she had a black baby". Channing kept this a secret to avoid any problems on Broadway and in Hollywood, ultimately revealing it only in her autobiography, Just Lucky I Guess, published in 2002 when she was 81 years old. Channing's autobiography, containing a photograph of her mother, does not have any photos of her father or son. Her book also states that her father's birth certificate was destroyed in a fire."

Suddenly, Jazz Baby in the movie Thoroughly Modern Millie makes some kind of demented sense. Click here for a Christmas treat.

Fleeing The Stacks

2011-11-30T09:57:00.000-08:00

Back in Palm Springs for a week...

...I went to the splendid main public library...

...which hosts the same kinds of crazies as the San Francisco Main Library but in a lesser ratio.

They also have one of the best pieces of signage ever on their library stacks...

...offering good advice for San Andreas fault country.

Central Cal Thanksgiving

2011-11-29T11:06:00.000-08:00

We drove south on Highway 101 the day before Thanksgiving, and the November light was spectacular.

We stayed on top of a hillside at my sister Hilary's place in the Central California Coastal town of Arroyo Grande...

...where there was a beautiful front deck to read the latest teen literary sensation, The Hunger Games, which was oddly appropriate for Thanksgiving with all of its foraging for food scenes.

The threatened Thanksgiving rainstorm never happened so we spent Thanksgiving morning on Avila Beach walking dogs such as Lopie, the Pyranees goat herding dog below. Hilary's husband Steve rescued him at a nearby lake when he was a lost and abandoned puppy in a mud puddle.

Steve recently retired from The Ocean, where he was a professional abalone and sea urchin diver for decades. "The odds for survival were starting to get smaller," he explained.

Thanksgiving was at my hardworking sister Susan's house...

...where kitty dogs hung out on the furniture all afternoon before the waves of relatives hit the sliding glass doors.

Old First Concerts Sounds Like Fun!

2011-11-28T09:00:00.000-08:00

On Sunday afternoon, November 20th, an annual fundraiser for Old First Concerts called "SOUNDS Like Fun!" was held at Old First Church on Van Ness and Sacramento with the jazz pianist Mike Greensill above acting as a lively, witty emcee. At one point he also pulled out a ukelele and sang, in an unexpectedly beautiful rendition, "I'm Through With Love."

Over a dozen musicians who regularly perform at Old First Church were asked to come up with something silly and fun, although about half of them played more serious offerings, including the opening Trio 180 with Ann Miller, violin, Sonia Leong, piano, and Nina Flyher, cello (above). They started the concert off with a pair of Trios on Irish Themes by the Swiss Frank Martin, whose music is always surprisingly enchanting, and followed it with "La Muerte del Angel" from Piazzolla.

The silliness came with Ann Miller above playing "Souvenir d'Amerique," an over-the-top Henri Vieuxtemps set of violin variations on "Yankee Doodle Dandy."

The Conservatory of Music's first guitar major graduate, Lawrence Ferrara, above, played minuets by Rameau and songs by Lennon-McCartney...

...and was followed by composer Elinor Armer (above left, with Caitlin Keen, viola, and Wendy Hillhouse, mezzo-soprano, on the right) performing Armer's "Eine Kleine Snailmusick," which was very funny.

After an intermission of wine and rich chocolates, there was a performance of the PDQ Bach Sonata Piccola with a rubberfaced Esther Landau above and a deadpan Sarah Cahill below, in an amusing parody of every Baroque concerto for a silly instrument that you have ever heard.

Cahill also paired up with cellist Victoria Ehrlich below for a too short excerpt from a Lou Harrison Suite for Cello and Piano. Sarah will be performing Harrison's piano concerto with the Berkeley Symphony on December 8th, so be there or be square.

Victoria echoed many of the other performers, who had all been asked by Greensill what the Old First Concerts meant to them. The consensus seemed to be, "Unless you're world-famous and have Management, there are sites to perform all over the Bay Area but not in San Francisco other than Old First Church. The place is irreplaceable."

The wonderful and ubiquitous Keisuke Nakagoshi, above right, played a Terry Riley four-handed piano piece, one of a set that Sarah Cahill recently commissioned, called "Cinco de Mayo" with Eva-Maria Zimmermann.

They were followed by violinist Victor Romasevich above, a San Francisco Symphony member who played some deliciously schmaltzy pieces by Tchaikovsky with his dear old mum, Lena Lubotsky, on piano.

The concert ended with a pair of songs by cabaret star Wesla Whitfield above, who is married to emcee Greensill. She sang "Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf" and then a plaintive version of "It's Not Easy Being Green," which was fairly amusing.

For a schedule of Old First Concerts, which has been presenting music since 1969, click here. They are a low-cost, local treasure often taken for granted when they should not be. Some of the greatest performers and composers from the Bay Area and beyond use the venue as an incubator, its acoustics and intimacy are perfect for a wide range of music, and the ticket prices are under $20.

The Thanksgiving Tree of Civic Center

2011-11-23T09:34:00.000-08:00

On Sunday, a huge tree was installed in Civic Center Plaza, and since there is supposed to be a separation between church and state, this is in no way a Christmas tree.

Plus, its appearance was grotesquely early in the "Holiday Season," when people haven't even done their Thanksgiving shopping.

Maybe it's the beginning of a new tradition, The Thanksgiving Tree of Civic Center.

May you get through the holidays with minimal psychic damage and scary family dynamics, with love and joy as the mainstays.

The Dog Killer and the SF Art Commission

2011-11-21T21:41:00.000-08:00

The 59-year-old Brooklyn-based artist Tom Otterness above (click here for his website) has forged a very successful career as a maker of cartoonish bronze sculptures that often look like outtakes from a Ziggy comic strip. Governmental bureaucracies in charge of public arts funding love his work because it's whimsical, inoffensive, and he's a brand-name artist who has created work for the feds (a courthouse in Los Angeles, for instance), the state (in Sacramento, among other capitals) and cities (famously in Manhattan's 8th Avenue/14th Street subway station).

Otterness also occasionally puts in digs at capitalism in his cute sculptures, and this is one reason the right-wing New York Daily News calls him "depraved" (click here). The other reason is that a conceptual art piece Otterness created in 1977 when he was a 25-year-old immigrant to New York City from Wichita, Kansas consisted of adopting a shelter dog, tying the animal to a fence, and then shooting it for a looping film for a gallery. At the time, art critic Gary Indiana in the New York Village Voice wrote a condemning article about the stunt, but then somehow people forgot about it in the age before the internet, and Otterness reinvented himself as a successful public sculptor over the last three decades.

The news of the dog killing has been resurfacing in recent years with animal rights activists especially upset, such as the woman above who was at a special San Francisco Art Commission meeting last Wednesday afternoon urging the group to cancel their two contracts with the sculptor. It seems that on the Art Commission's recommendation, both the General Hospital rebuilding, and the proposed Chinatown Central Subway to Nowhere have $750,000 contracts for sculptures with Otterness for their new spaces.

The Brooklyn library, through a patron, commissioned bronze statues of two lions and their cubs from Otterness a couple of years ago for the same amount, but animal lovers caused an uproar when word spread about the artist's dog killing past, and the commission was eventually cancelled. In September, Joshua Sabatini at the San Francisco Examiner picked up the story and the tabloid paper produced a lurid front page to trumpet the tale (click here). Since that time, members of the San Francisco Art Commission have been in public relations spin overdrive trying to figure out what to do.

Finally, behind closed doors, a decision was made and offered up to the full commission by President PJ Johnston. He is pictured above left next to the similarly abbreviated JD Beltran, the interim Executive Director of Cultural Affairs who replaced Luis Cancel, the Brooklynite who was recently ousted from the high-profile post for absenteeism and the bullying of influential staff members.

PJ Johnston is a fourth-generation San Franciscan and son of a former California State Senator. He has a "communications" business that does public relations for outfits like Stellar, the New York developers of Parkmerced, which is in the process of evicting its elderly tenants from their 1940s garden apartments so they can build high-rise housing.

While doing research for this post, I stumbled across an online article in 7x7 (click here) by the society columnist Catherine Bigelow that chronicles PJ's 40th birthday two years ago at the Purple Onion nightclub which seemingly everyone who is currently in charge of San Francisco attended. The photo above is of PJ and Chinatown fixer Rose Pak, and the photo below features former mayor Willie Brown Jr., Tosca owner Jeanette Etheredge, PJ, and Richard and Eleanor Johns, who are recent controversial appointments by Ed Lee to the Historical Preservation Board and the Airport Commission.

Captain Greg Suhr, the newly appointed San Francisco Chief of Police, was there, and so was Steve Kawa, the Mayoral Chief of Staff under both Newsom and Lee. Seemingly the only person who wasn't there was Ed Lee, or maybe photographer Drew Altizer just didn't get his picture. In Bigelow's article, there is a quote from former Mayor Willie Brown, Jr., once again reveling in his own corruption.

“If you know PJ like I know PJ, then you’d agree that we are all amazed he arrived at this moment tonight,” teased Mayor Brown, referring to PJ’s active lifestyle. “We’ve actually long been celebrating his eventual demise because of all the secrets he has on us!”

PJ announced that he was offering a motion for the General Hospital contract to continue forward, but that he was recommending the cancelation of the MTA subway contract. There were a few timid demurs and questions from the commissioners, but this looked and sounded very much like a rubber-stamp commission, and they quickly passed the motion 11-1.

This didn't make the animal activists particularly happy, as the Solomon-like decision to cut the baby dog in half seemed rather grotesque, but the reasoning was as much economic as anything. San Francisco had already paid Otterness $375,000 for the General Hospital sculptures and wouldn't get anything back if they pulled out now, so the reasoning was, "let's not let our moral fervor get in the way of fiscal prudence."

The questions of how these commissions were approved and vetted never came up, and neither did the central question of why San Francisco government agencies who constantly preach "hire local and buy local" don't do the same thing with publicly funded art. PJ Johnston mentioned at one point that "hiring only San Francisco artists would be illegal because there are federal funds involved," missing the point completely.

Infusing and circulating money into the local economy through local grants should be mission statement number one for any San Francisco bureaucracy, particularly an arts commission, and it's not as if the Bay Area doesn't have enough great creative artists needing work. Johnston also mentioned that "San Francisco is an international tourist destination, and we should have world-class public art," implying that the local stuff was too provincial. In truth, there's nothing more provincial than requiring a New York imprimatur for something to be considered "world-class," and the idea that an international tourist would travel to San Francisco to see anything sponsored by the San Francisco Art Commission is seriously delusional.

To add to their problems, the Arts Commission has fallen under the eyes of open government activists Peter Warfield and Ray W Hartz Jr. (pictured above flanking an unknown lady). These are the people who take the time to sit through boring meetings and pore through self-serving, poorly written minutes in order to inform the clubby bureaucrats that what they are doing is illegal and completely against the spirit and intent of open government laws. The minutes of Wednesday's meeting were filled with notifications of expenditures but in some cases without any amounts or explanations for what the money was being spent upon. This did not amuse Mr. Warfield or Mr. Hartz, who politely expressed their displeasure at every moment that public comment was legally required, an activity that brought them nothing but disdain from the commissioners, even though their motives are ethical and, in a minor way, heroic.

Norman Fischer and Schoenberg's String Quartet No. 1

2011-11-20T00:37:00.000-08:00

On a rainy Friday evening, with Turandot at the San Francisco Opera, a Brahms German Requiem at the San Francisco Symphony, and a famous Dutch recorder virtuoso at Herbst with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, I figured there would be about three people at the chamber music recital a couple of blocks away at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and that my friend Charlie and I would be two of them. Instead, the largest of the concert halls at the Conservatory was about three-quarters full.

(The photo above is of a San Francisco Opera logo that was tattooed into the arm of a pleasant middle-aged lady sitting in front of us.)

"Why are there so many people here?" I asked a Conservatory faculty member we keep bumping into at Conservatory concerts. "It's Norman Fischer!" he exclaimed, literally. "He's extended the whole role of cello playing in our time." I had never heard of the musician before (pictured above left with pianist Jannie Lo and violinist Noemy Gagnon-Lafrenais) but the exclamation turned out to be justified. He's an electric musician, who obviously thrills and excels at playing in small musical groups.

The San Francisco Conservatory started a Masters program in chamber music in 1985, building on a visionary program called Chamber Music West that started in the mid-1970s. (Click here for an unusually well-written press release from Joe Sargent about Norman Fischer and the history of the program.) One of the school's current programs involves inviting guest stars to come for a few weeks at a time to conduct master classes and play music with faculty and advanced students.

Both Lo and Gagnon-Lafrenais, pictured above in her beautiful concert gown, are students in the chamber music program, and they almost overpowered the Beethoven trio just trying to keep up with Fischer's deep, rich sound. It didn't matter as it was a lively performance and it was obvious that both performers were having the time of their lives playing with Fischer.

The second piece was a Duo for Violin and Cello from 1925 by the Jewish Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff, a composer featured at a concert last month by Ensemble Parallele that also included a solo performance by Axel Strauss (above left). The music was dedicated to Leos Janacek, a gesture of respect from a minor modernist to a major genius who hadn't been widely discovered yet, and the four-movement piece was constantly interesting music with lots of folk elements.

Strauss held his own against the dynamic cellist and their interplay sounded almost improvisatory. It was in this performance that Fischer started stomping his foot down at certain moments as if he was at a fiddling hoe-down, and instead of being annoying the gesture was exciting.

The second half was the reason to choose this concert over all others this evening, a chance to hear a Schoenberg String Quartet played live. I read Thomas Pynchon's precocious genius first novel V. at an impressionable age in the 1960s and there was a detail from the first chapter that was memorable. The Whole Sick Crew, a group of wannabe artists in the 1950s in New York City, are described partying in this descriptive paragraph:

"The party itself, tonight, was divided in three parts. Fergus, and his date, and another couple had long retreated into the bedroom with a gallon of wine; locked the door; and let the Crew do what they could in the way of chaos to the rest of the place. The sink on which Stencil now sat would become Melvin's perch: he would play his guitar and there would be horahs and African fertility dances in the kitchen before midnight. The lights in the living room would go out one by one, Schoenberg's quartets (complete) would go on the record player/changer, and repeat, and repeat, while cigarette coals dotted the room like watchfires and the promiscuous Debby Sensay (e.g.) would be on the floor, caressed by Raoul, say, or Slab, while she ran her hand up the leg of another, sitting on the couch with her roommate--and on, in a kind of love feast or daisy chain; wine would spill, furniture would be broken; Fergus would awake briefly next morning, view the destruction and residual guests sprawled about the apartment; cuss them all out and go back to sleep."

The detail that got me excited at age 16 was not the intimation of orgiastic sex, though that was titillating, but the fact that they were having sex with background music supplied by the scary Austrian serial composer Schoenberg, via his severe string quartets (repeatedly). Now this sounded beyond cool.

Schoenberg's 1907 String Quartet #1 was one of his most ambitious works, stretching for about fifty minutes without pause in total concentrated frenzy. It's tonal, before he invented/codified twelve-tone music, but just barely. I own a recording that I've probably listened to twice in twenty years and probably turned off before the piece was through because it required too much concentration and sounded depressing.

With (left to right) Conservatory teacher Ian Swensen, violin, his student Joseph Maile, also on violin, and Pei-Ling Lin on viola, Norman Fischer led a performance that was one of the most extraordinary things I have ever heard. The quartet is dense, ambitious, successful, and bizarrely contemporary, and at least in this performance the fifty minutes stood outside of time. The entire ensemble was extraordinary, with a special shout-out to student Pei-Ling Lin on viola who sounded like a musical master on the order of Fischer himself.

Gay Marriage, Narcissism, and Twinklelights at SFMOMA

2011-11-17T10:21:00.000-08:00

Hidden in an alcove on the second floor landing at SFMOMA is Country Dog Gentlemen above, a 1972 painting by Roy De Forest which is the favorite of Patrick Vaz's godson, and one of mine too. Patrick and I went for a quick lunchtime stroll through the museum, and had repaired to the De Forest after laughing our way through a couple of other shows nearby.

First and worst was The Air We Breathe, an ugly, amateurish wall installation on the second floor landing purporting to address in poetry and images the thorny issues of gay marriage.

The banality of the pieces was almost breathtaking...

...and as a same-sexer, as Gore Vidal would put it, I felt a twinge of Gay Shame.

San Francisco's weekly gay free newspaper, the Bay Area Reporter, has a surprisingly good arts section under the editorship of Roberto Friedman, and his art writer Sura Wood bends over backwards trying to be kind to the pathetic exhibit but even she finally gives up (click here).

On the third floor, there is a large exhibit devoted to the photography of Francesca Woodman, a defiantly neurotic narcissist, expensive art school division, who killed herself via defenestration, jumping out of a Manhattan loft window at the tender age of 22 in 1981. According to Wikipedia, her artist father "has suggested that Woodman's suicide was related to an unsuccessful application for funding from the National Endowment for the Arts."

The photographs are mostly small black-and-white nudes of herself looking alienated in grubby surroundings, and if Sylvia Plath and Diane Arbus are your cup of tea, this exhibit might be deeply affecting. The phrase that came to my mind, however, was the evil Oscar Wilde quote, "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing."

Above the entrance to SFMOMA, there are a collection of twinkly LED lights which Patrick first assumed were installed for the Christmas holidays.

They turned out to be a 3D light sculpture installation by Jim Campbell called Exploded Views.

You have to station yourself on the second floor landing just in front of the dreary gay marriage exhibit and the wonders of Exploded Views come into focus. It turns out to be a looped film of dancers from Alonzo King's LINES Ballet moving through air and light represented by the twinkling LEDs.

It's very cool, but be sure you find the right place to view it because otherwise they really do just look like holiday lights.

On the fourth floor, there is a huge exhibit of black paintstick drawings by the sculptor Richard Serra, which just about define monochromatic. They gave this Philistine the giggles, but Patrick Vaz, with his usual rarified discernment, was appreciative:

"The spareness, the ambiguous black shapes (both graceful and massive), the sense of space, and of space being emptied out and carefully but subtly arranged, and of high-minded if obscure philosophical purposes, all reminded me of the ink drawings of Zen monks. Given the reputation for brutality and sheer mass that Serra’s sculptures have, it’s sort of surprising to find in the drawing exhibit the peace-inducing atmosphere of a Japanese garden."

Click here for the whole essay, and here for a laugh-inducing interview between SF Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker and the artist.

Schubertiade at the Symphony

2011-11-15T10:44:00.000-08:00

Last week there was a strange all-Schubert concert at the San Francisco Symphony that consisted of an overture to both a failed play and opera, a piano quintet, and finally a string quartet rewritten by Gustav Mahler for a large string orchestra.

The overture was to an unproduced opera called Alfonso und Estrella and then reused as the overture to a failed play, Rosamunde. In the amusing program notes by James Keller, he writes, "Schubert displayed an unerring talent for selecting librettos that were deficient in either plot or literary style, and often in both." The six-minute piece for full orchestra came and went under Michael Tilson Thomas' direction, and then everybody walked off the stage.

Entering after them were (left to right above) concertmaster Alexander Barantschik, violin; Peter Wyrick, cello; guest artist Juho Pojhonen, piano, looking about 14 years old; Scott Pingel, bass; and Jonathan Vinocour, viola. They played the forty-minute Trout Quintet, written by Schubert for friends to play at home together. This is lively, young people's music, and it was played that way by just about everyone in the quintet in a very enjoyable performance.

The only problem is that Davies Hall is a 3,000 seat barn, not a living room, so much of the individual sounds were lost as they tried to fill the auditorium. It was still fun to hear the performance, and the audience, which seemed to be filled with Goldstar newbies, applauded between every one of the movements on Saturday night. There's a false ending in the final Allegretto which was also the occasion for misplaced applause, which stopped when the musicians started laughing with each other as they continued to the end.

Schubert died in 1828 at the age of 31, either from typhoid fever, tertiary syphilis, or mercury poisoning trying to treat the latter condition. Much of his work wasn't performed publicly until after his death, including the 1824 string quartet, nicknamed Death and the Maiden. Gustav Mahler, who liked to tinker with the scores of everyone from Mozart to Beethoven when he was a conductor, "upscaled" the string quartet into a symphonic piece for string orchestra in 1894. Apparently the entire reorchestration wasn't played until 1984, so the performance felt like something of a modern novelty.

I prefer the original string quartet version, partly because it's grittier, but was glad to be listening to the pumped up version in Davies Hall. The second movement Andante was exquisite, and the entire performance was interesting.

Sarah Cahill Plays Pre-Maximalists at Old First Church

2011-11-14T12:29:00.000-08:00

Old First Church, at the corner of Van Ness and Sacramento, not only attends to the spiritual needs of its parishioners and the material needs of poor people, but it also attends to the cultural needs of its surrounding community by allowing Old First Concerts the use of its lovely space for a Friday night and Sunday afternoon musical concert series (click here for their upcoming calendar).

The eclectic music concerts started in 1969, and have somehow survived for 42 years while charging the public very little money. The $15 ticket price, in fact, just went up a whopping $2 to $17. You can also attend a $25 fundraiser this coming Sunday the 20th where wine and chocolates are promised along with an amazing array of musicians, from jazz pianist Mike Greensill and vocalist Wesla Whitfield to cellist Vicky Ehrlich and pianist Sarah Cahill playing chamber music of Lou Harrison.

As part of the series, Sarah Cahill (above) performed a recital of contemporary piano music last Friday at Old First that was a combination of bracing, lovely, and ear-cleaning. All of the composers on the program are still living, and though many of them flirt with Minimalism in terms of repetitive patterns, a better name might be what composer Paul Dresher has coined as a joking rejoinder to "Postminimalist," which is "Pre-Maximalist." The major common thread that tied the program together was that Cahill knows all the composers and loves their music. In some cases, she even commissioned the pieces we were hearing, such as Paul Dresher's 2011 Two Entwined and Ingram Marshall's 2008 Movement (Deep in my Heart) which are part of Sarah's A Sweeter Music omnibus of contemporary piano music about peace.

The concert started brilliantly with the New Zealand/American composer Annea Lockwood's 1989 Red Mesa, a 16-minute tone poem about the American Southwest desert that managed to avoid every pictorial cliche while still evoking the desert with clarity. It started with Sarah playing repetitive notes on the keyboard and then playing inside the piano itself, at which she is an old hand after years of Henry Cowell, and then layering on the complexity until a very rich climax diminuendos into more soft, single, repeated notes. Click here for Lockwood's website which has musical samples and photos of her Burning Piano performance art pieces which predate Burning Man by decades.

This was followed by Victoria Falls, an early piece by New York based composer Evan Ziporyn "when he was a 25-year-old graduate student at UC Berkeley, which he doesn't list in his collected works because he forgot about it and doesn't even have a score, but I do," Sarah explained. The Africa influenced piece was rhythmically jubilant and a delight to hear. Ziporyn might want to get a copy of the score the next time he's in the Bay Area playing gamelan orchestra, which has been his mature musical obsession.

Two short pieces followed from Japanese composer Mamoru Fujieda's Patterns of Plants, a mammoth undertaking he started in 1995 that attempts to describe the biometric properties of flora in sound. Last month Sarah recorded a set of excerpts on a CD for the Tzadik label at the UC Santa Cruz recital hall, and though the evanescent, sweet sounding music doesn't do much for me, I trust Sarah's taste and figure the problem is mine.

After the enjoyable Dresher and Marshall pieces, Cahill was joined by Regina Schaffer (above right, with page-turner Kelsey Walsh on the left), another Bay Area pianist who focuses on new music. The pair played four-hand transcriptions of improvisations by Terry Riley that were so insanely virtuosic that Cahill's assertion that Riley was able to play them with only one pair of hands seemed impossible.

Both the 2000 Waltz for Christmas and the 2003 Etude from the Old Country are also extremely lively and fun, and it's good to hear that Cahill and Schaffer are going to be recording a collection of five of these pieces soon. The old San Francisco hippie "Godfather of Minimalism," as Sarah referred to the composer of In C has a literally groovy website (click here), where you can see what he's up to next.

Arthur Elrod 1: 350 Via Lola

2011-11-12T12:21:00.001-08:00

The Architecture and Design Council at the Palm Springs Art Museum initiated their series, Architecture+Design 101, with a lecture about the work of interior designer Arthur Elrod. This was followed by a tour of his 350 Via Lola home from the 1960s in the nearby Las Palmas neighborhood.

The group of about 100 was asked to take off their shoes at the entryway...

...and looking at the custom carpet, you could see why.

The home, with all its furnishings, has been kept virtually intact by Bill Hamling, who was a friend and client of the late designer.

Hamling, who can be seen in a YouTube clip describing the house (click here), is currently in an assisted living faciity, so the residence is on the market.

At slightly under $2 million, the place is an odd historical bargain, so if you have an extra million dollars lying around, call realtor Nelda Linsk above at (760) 325-8600.

According to a Desert Sun article by Judith Salkin about this tour, Arthur Elrod was born in Atlanta in 1926, studied design at Clemson University in South Carolina, then made his way to California after World War Two to study at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles.

During a stint working at the upscale San Francisco furniture store W&J Sloane, Elrod met Hal Broderick, and the two of them started an interior design business in 1953 in Palm Springs called Arthur Elrod and Associates.

According to Adele Cygelman's book, Palm Springs Modern (click here for a PDF with a chapter on the famous Elrod House by architect John Lautner):

"They opened Arthur Elrod Associates on Palm Canyon Drive, a design studio and furniture and fabric showroom. Elrod became the design king of the desert. He did second houses, third houses, spec houses, country clubs, experimental houses, and hotels. Elrod was charming, handsome, and worked tirelessly for his A-list clientele. He hired talented associates William Raiser and Steve Chase, and nurtured local artists and artisans."

Arthur Elrod and William Raiser became romantic partners as well as colleagues, and it was while they were on their way to work early one February morning in 1974 that their Fiat sportscar was hit by a drunk driver. Elrod, 49 and Raiser, 58 died relatively young in a freakish turn of fate.

Arthur Elrod 2: A Subtle Opulence

2011-11-12T12:20:00.000-08:00

The master bedroom closets at 350 Via Loma still house a few wildly representative pieces of 1960s clothing.

They surround a central set of transparent drawers that are illuminated from the inside.

The morning's lecturer, University of Arizona professor Peter Wolf, is quoted on the Palm Springs Art Museum website: “Few designers have transformed American interiors to the extent Arthur Elrod did."

"With his uncanny ability to combine luxurious furnishings and informal lifestyles, Elrod created his own decidedly glamorous—and distinctly American—version of modernism. And one that has stood the test of time. The Hollywood Regency look so popular today, an eclectic mix of the highly decorative tempered with the sobriety of modernism, is something Elrod mastered in the 1950s."

"Upholstered pieces were plush despite their crisp lines, with fabrics ranging from muted desert hues to Jack Lenor Larsen’s bright psychedelics. Highly polished lacquers were used for case goods and, in some instances, for wall treatments and architectural elements. And Elrod designed it all, including the floating cabinetry and pierced room dividers that would remain among his signature touches.”

My favorite parts of the interior design were actually the exteriors.

The integration of indoor and outdoor spaces is seamless...

...and the pool area looked beyond fabulous.

Palm Springs Art Museum 3: Blast from the Past

2011-11-10T11:10:00.000-08:00

The Palm Springs Art Museum assembles smart, interesting exhibitions from focused areas of their permanent collection in a way that San Francisco museums should study.

Currently, across the lobby from a surprisingly wonderful Andrew Wyeth touring show, there is an exhibit called Blast From The Past: 60s and 70s Geometric Abstractions, curated by the museum's Katherine Plake Hough.

The Optical Art, Kinetic Art, Minimalist, Hard-Edge and Color-Field pieces are bracing when facing each other...

...and though there are works by famous artists like Frank Stella's 1970 Grid Stack above and William Turnbull's 1961 lithograph below...

...much of the pleasure of the exhibit is finding interesting work by artists who you have never heard of before.

The 1970 Elusive by the Russian/Israeli/Canadian artist Kesso Eloul above...

...the 1975 Night by American Leo Maranz...

...Lunar Circuit by the Russian-American Helen Garardia...

...and the piece above by the recently deceased Colombian artist Omar Rayo were a just a few of my favorite things...

...along with Light Disc, a 1960 sculpture of painted nails on burlap over wood by the German artist Gunther Uecker.

Palm Springs Art Museum 2: Sid Avery's Celebrity Candids

2011-11-09T08:59:00.000-08:00

Adjacent to the Palm Springs Art Museum's outdoor sculpture gardens is a simple cafe.

The place is currently decorated with candid celebrity photos from the 1950s and 1960s by Sid Avery...

...a Los Angeles photographer who pioneered the transition from movie star studio glamour photos to more candid shots of celebrities going about their daily business. That's Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward above, presumably cooking breakfast.

Avery died in 2002 at the age of 83 after a long career as a photographer, where his career extended from the Army Signal Corps in World War Two to his Hollywood work that was sold to mass circulation magazines, and a subsequent stint as a director of TV commercials at the end of his life. (Above is Tuesday Weld looking at a Tuesday Weld paper doll book.)

Though I had never heard of the photographer before, he was responsible for a famous series of photographs on the set of "Giant" in Texas, including this iconic shot of Elizabeth Taylor above.

He also captured Kim Novak looking vaguely distressed...

...Debbie Reynolds and Fred Astaire conspiring backstage...

...and the incomparable Eve Arden kissing her second husband Brooks West.

Palm Springs Art Museum 1: Sculptures Staring Back

2011-11-08T11:15:00.000-08:00

The Palm Springs Art Museum opens the doors to the public for free every Thursday from four to eight in the evening during the weekly Villagefest street fair a block away.

It's a populist gesture that is paying dividends because the museum seems to be thriving, with new donations of both money and extraordinary family collections increasing every year. (Above is "Shovel Man," a 1974 piece by James Surls.)

The core of the major modern sculptural collection that is being amassed at the museum comes from Gwendolyn Weiner, the heiress to a Texas oil fortune. She's donated and lent a number of Henry Moore sculptures, such as the 1939 "Stringed Instrument" above...

...along with dozens of other 20th century masterpieces, including the 1962 William Turnbull mixed media piece above.

The museum also rotates the displays of their sculptures from inside the four-story building to outside sculpture gardens where they tend to look completely different. Above is another Weiner donation, the 1955 "Woman of Herero Tribe" by Gerhard Marcks.

A Robert Arneson piece that seemed a bit aggressive inside looks happy standing in the garden...

...and so does the Betty Gold 1982 "Monumental Holistic XIV" above.

Some of the hypperreal sculptures were unsettling, such as the 1990 John De Andrea piece above.

A very funny Duane Hanson sculpture above of two middle-aged American tourists sitting on a bench in shorts has been installed in different locations around the museum over the years.

Last Thursday the piece was stationed in the entrance lobby of the museum, and it was more amusing than usual watching tourists who looked exactly like the sculptured figures standing in front of them, wondering if they should be offended.

Palm Springs Gay Pride Weekend 2011

2011-11-06T14:04:00.000-08:00

The migration of gay people retiring to Palm Springs continues at an accelerating pace.

They seem to be coming from all over the country and the world as if there were some siren broadcasting a secret signal.

In fact, the place is reminiscent in mood of the Castro neighborhood in San Francisco back in the 1970s, except everyone is about 40 years older.

In Palm Springs, Gay Pride Weekend follows Halloween and precedes Leather Pride Weekend. "It's the holy trinity of gay holidays around here," somebody remarked at a lovely party given by Steven Wibben (below center) before Sunday morning's parade.

The Palm Springs High School Marching Band and the Desert Hot Springs High School Marching Band were both featured today, sandwiched between drag queens, religious groups ranging from Buddhists to Methodists, animal rights activists, politicians, and somebody who had a float just because it was his 50th birthday and he wanted one. Like every other parade I have seen on Palm Canyon Drive over the last five years, from Homecoming to Veterans Day, this morning's promenade was beyond charming.

Palm Springs, Desert Fashion Plaza, and Prop J

2011-11-05T09:49:00.000-07:00

Desert Fashion Plaza, a block-long shopping mall in the center of downtown Palm Springs, has sat empty like a rotting white elephant for close to 15 years while a series of dubious redevelopment plans have been considered and rejected for the area over the last decade. The latest installment in the saga is a 25-year one-cent sales tax increase, Proposition J, that is being proposed in this Tuesday's election which will supposedly give the city the funds it needs to create a vibrant downtown.

Many residents are not buying into the plan, principally because it guarantees $43 million upfront to the multimillionaire real estate developer John Wessman who has owned the site since 2002. Wessman's initial proposal was to have a mixed condo-retail complex that was six stories tall, even though there was a 35-foot height limit in downtown, and the plan would have effectively destroyed the San Jacinto mountain views for anyone not staying in the place.

The site originally housed the luxurious Desert Inn Hotel complex, one of the old movie star hangouts, but 1978 brought Proposition C which lowered property taxes and which hit municipalities hard. So Palm Springs turned to redevelopment plans and made a deal with the DeBartolo family, owners of the San Francisco 49ers, to build a huge shopping mall which was completed in 1986.

According to most accounts I have heard from people who lived here at the time, the complex was quite beautiful, with marble floors and Saks Fifth Avenue and I. Magnin as anchor clients. "I hate shopping malls," one elderly gentlemen told me, "but that was the only one I ever liked." However, it was not a success in the long run for a number of reasons, including the fact that they charged for parking in their underground lot. In Southern California, free parking is considered a god-given right.

Another factor in its decline was the fact that the upscale clientele they were counting on had mostly moved further southeast in the Coachella Valley to Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert and La Quinta, where fancy new shopping malls were also being built. Desert Fashion Plaza soon became a ghost town. Eddie DeBartolo, with Willie Brown, Jr. leading the charge, put a measure on the California state ballot in the mid-1990s to allow gambling on his properties, but the measure failed, and they sold the empty shopping center to a San Diego corporation in 1998 for $20 million. Subsequently, it ended up in the hands of John Wessman in 2002 who has been blackmailing the city into providing public funds for essentially private plans.

On Wednesday afternoon, there was a protest against the Prop J proposal and the hanging of a huge sign on an abandoned Bank of America building on Palm Canyon Drive touting the measure. Wessman and his supporters countered with signage and a protest of their own, although their promise of new jobs rang a little hollow since all the construction companies that were being paraded on the street were from other towns rather than Palm Springs.

People are so sick of the dead shopping mall in the center of town that they are ready to vote for the measure just to get "something" done, even if it's just another dumb shopping mall.

Others are urging a no vote and starting from scratch, using eminent domain to take the property from Wessman at its appraised price of $16 million.

The possibility of the latter happening is just about nil since Wessman is nothing if not politically connected. It will be interesting to see how it all turns out, just as it was interesting watching the newswoman above try to walk in her provocative outfit.

Pretty Palm Springs Politics

2011-11-03T13:28:00.000-07:00

Fleeing the putrid political scene of San Francisco, I took an Amtrak train and bus to Palm Springs which is unearthly beautiful right now.

Of course, even paradise has politics, and there's a doozy of an election happening down here too. More to come when I can tear myself away from the poolside.

The Music of Nicholas Pavkovic

2011-11-02T12:42:00.000-07:00

The composer Nicholas Pavkovic above (click here for his blog that contains a full roster of musical samples) just had a triumphant weekend at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he graduated last year in compositional studies. Pavkovic, originally from the Midwest but now living in San Francisco, won the Conservatory's annual Highsmith Award for orchestral music with "Angelus Novus," which was played by the Conservatory Orchestra on Saturday. On Sunday evening an entire concert was dedicated to his compositions with a starry roster of performers.

Sunday evening began with an ancient digital technology, the Marantz Vorseter, playing "Contraption No. 1" on Piano, which was a disconcerting way to start a concert since there were no performers on the stage other than a piano and the weird-looking contraption that was playing it. Things picked up with "Eight Figments for Wind Quintet" played by Gina Gulyas, Sydne Sullivan, Nick Litwin, Sarah Burgstahler, and Georgeanne Banker above. Possibly because Nicholas has written extensively for film soundtracks, short "figments" seem to be one of his favorite musical structures. They were performed beautifully and the music was constantly pleasurable.

This was followed by the premiere of a "Rhapsody for Viola and Piano" being played by no less than Jonathan Vinocour above, the new principal violist at the San Francisco Symphony...

...in a duet with the Symphony's longtime pianist, Robin Sutherland, who performed the piece in his bare feet which was oddly charming.

Vinocour is such a great, passionate musician that he is always a joy to watch, and his interplay with Sutherland in the dense, pretty music was exciting.

After intermission, an entire chamber orchestra including a harpsichord and harmonium under the leadership of Qinging Qian arrived onstage for a recently composed one-act opera, "Sredni Vishtar." It's taken from the macabre Saki story about a boy under the thumb of a hideous, puritanical guardian aunt. The boy, Conradin, has a polecat ferret hidden in a shed and he gives the animal the name Sredni Vishtar, invents a religion, and prays to him for salvation. His prayers, in the end, come true when the ferret fatally attacks the guardian and we leave our young hero happily buttering his toast.

The libretto by Jim Coughenour is very skillful and the musical orchestration is superb, but I'm not sure the way it's currently meant to be performed quite works. The contralto Sara Couden above is asked to play both the boy and his guardian and also act as spoken narrator, and though Sara was never less than interesting, it was difficult to tell who she was supposed to be at any one moment. There were also difficulties in making herself understood as the Spoken Narrator because her diction and projection were weak, which wasn't at all a problem when she was actually singing.

Pavkovic might want to consider breaking the roles up into three different cast members, one a Narrator, one a contralto for the guardian, and one a soprano or boy treble for Conradin the abused young man. The music and the libretto are already perfect as is, but having one singer try to carry it all off is practical in some regards but not necesarilly artistically.

The final piece was a Concertino for Piano and Percussion with Keisuke Nakagoshi (above with his back turned) as piano soloist, and it was sensationally fun, propulsive music, with elements of jazz, Stravinsky, and Britten making themselves heard. It was an exciting ending to a lovely concert.

Indian Summer at Patricia's Green

2011-10-30T17:05:00.000-07:00

The monumental "Ecstasy" sculpture in the Hayes Valley park called Patricia's Green was taken away a week ago...

...as the lady in the wheelchair was pointing out to her extremely sweet caregiver.

The small park didn't feel particularly bare, however, because the warm weather over the last couple of weeks seems to have brought the whole neighborhood out of doors.

Plus, the area is being inundated with young tourists flocking to the pop-up businesses near the park along Octavia, such as the newly opened Suppenkuche Biergarten above...

...which already has a line down the block to get in on a sunny afternoon...

...that almost stretches to the fancy Smitten ice cream stand fifty yards away.

If you're feeling poor, you can also buy your own ice cream and beer from a local corner grocery and happily sit on a bench watching the world go by.

Snowboarding at The Pioneer Statue

2011-10-29T18:41:00.000-07:00

A snowboarding tournament was supposed to start at noon today in Civic Center...

...but they seemed to be having technical difficulties at about 12:30...

...possibly because the Seattle-based group putting on the exhibition wasn't expecting temperaturees in the high 70s.

A pair of emcees were keeping up an entertaining patter but lunch seemed more urgent than waiting around for the daredevils.

Update: An acquaintance, Beth K., happened by at about 1PM and said the snowboarders did finally appear and were gifted athletes who were a joy to watch.

Downtown Throwdown on Saturday

2011-10-28T22:55:00.000-07:00

An urban snowboarding exhibition out of Seattle called Downtown Throwdown just had its sixth annual tournament, and they've added San Francisco as a satellite city for the first time.

Tomorrow (Saturday) between the Asian Art Museum and the Main Library, from noon to four, we are in for a treat according to the Transworld Snowboarding site. "In the past 5 years this event has grown from a great local event to the biggest and most respected urban snowboarding event in the world, with a focus on the up and coming snowboarders who are shaping the industry."

"It's gonna be BANANAS!" the site also promises.

According to their website, "Snowboy Productions was started in 1997 by Krush Kulesza...and has become the premier event production company for boardsports and youth culture in the Northwest."

It's free, there will be beautiful young athletes performing amazing physical feats on fake snow, and it's being billed as explicitly hipster. I'll be checking it out and if you're in the neighborhood, you might want to do the same.

The Sidewalk Bicyclists of Van Ness Avenue

2011-10-26T19:30:00.000-07:00

Being a pedestrian on Van Ness Avenue is terrifying enough dodging bad automobile drivers while crossing streets, but lately the real danger has come from bicyclists speeding up and down the sidewalks.

The San Francisco Police Department could care less and yelling at the bicyclists doesn't seem to do much good, so I am going to start a monthly Sidewalk Bicyclist Hall of Shame as a simple form of anger management.

It's particularly irritating being narrowly missed by a bicyclist who is decked out in full safety gear, including a helmet. "Glad you're feeling safe, you jerk. I'm not."

Harbison, Rohde and Schulhoff at BluePrint

2011-10-23T19:31:00.000-07:00

An unusually entertaining concert inaugurated the BluePrint new music series' 10th anniversary on Saturday evening. The evening at the SF Conservatory of Music started with mezzo Julienne Walker above singing five John Harbison songs from poetry by Elizabeth Bishop. The musical writing for a seven-person orchestra struck me as well-done, dry and academic, which didn't seem to fit the poetry at all. Even though Harbison was trying to be bluesy at times (two of the poems were written for Bishop's friend Billie Holliday), the attempts meerely highlighted that rhythm wasn't necessarily his strong suit.

The next piece on the program, a "Concertino for Solo Violin and Small Ensemble" by Kurt Rohde (above right with BluePrint general manager Jacques Desjardins) that premiered last year was the diametric opposite: propulsively rhythmic, filled with energy and color, and as rich and unacademic sounding as you can imagine, which is ironic in that Rohde teaches at UC Davis and the Conservatory.

Rohde claims the three-movement work isn't really a violin concerto, but it is. The writing for the solo violin, composed for Axel Strauss above, is virtuosic in the extreme and underpins the entire twenty-minute piece. The first moment has an almost gamelan brightness, the slower second movement shimmered in all kinds of interesting ways, and the final movement felt like we were on a very entertaining, retooled John Adams Fast Machine. The performance by Strauss and the eight-member chamber ensemble (William Cedeno, Jeannie Psomas, Masako Iguchi and Alex Wadner, Paula Karolak, Patricia Ryan, Eugene Theriault, and Carlin Ma) was so exciting and expert I can't imagine it being played better.

After intermission came a concerto by Erwin Schulhoff, this time for piano and small orchestra (about 40 players), with a stunningly good Keisuke Nakagoshi (above) as the soloist. Schulhoff was a Jewish Communist composer in Prague at a time when that wasn't the safest thing to be, and he died at age 58 of tuberculosis in a concentration camp in 1942. The undated [in the program or the internet] Concertino for Piano and Small Orchestra sounds like an interesting mixture of early, sarcastic Prokofiev and Shostakovich along with a mystical vein that feels more Bartok. The ten-movement piece would switch gears from soft, spare and yearning to jazzy, driven and wild at a moment's notice and was a complete pleasure to discover.

The final piece was a scene from an upcoming Ensemble Paralle production in February of John Harbison's 1999 Metropolitan Opera commission, "The Great Gatsby." The opera is being reorchestrated by Jacques Desjardins from 120 instruments to 35 in order to give the piece a better chance at a performance life. The scene that was performed certainly had a huge amount of energy, especially when Erin Neff and Bojan Knezevic starting singing the parts of Myrtle and Wilson right before a car crash.

Conducting all this disparate music, brilliantly, was BluePrint artistic director Nicole Paiement (above left).

She was self-effacing all evening long, pushing her soloists and ensembles into the limelight, but the triumph of the evening was definitely hers. I can't wait to hear what she does next.

You Look Familiar

2011-10-22T00:19:00.000-07:00

A photography exhibit by 19 Bay Area artists focusing on various subcultures opened this month in the basement of San Francisco City Hall, and much of it is lovely, including the large black and white photos of Alameda teenage baseball players by Lisa Levine above.

The exhibit is being presented by the San Francisco Arts Commission and PhotoAlliance, and it's hard to know who to blame for the nonsensical ArtSpeak describing the exhibit on the signage. Here's a sample:

"From fashionistas to sports fans, and from mountain climbers to rockabilly swing dancers, how do we identify people who look familiar to each other? If familiar faces are not present in the photographs, what kind of residues do groups leave or what objects could be attached to a place as a signifier of a shared activity or event? What kind of places or objects define a group?"

San Francisco's North Beach attracted a couple of photographers, with Dennis Hearne presenting pictures of the Cafe American Social Club at the Cafe Trieste on Upper Grant Street (the two photos above).

Krista Perkins focuses on Catholic kid rituals in the same neighborhood. I loved the photo above of a girl in what looks like a confirmation dress shooting hoops.

Jackson Nichols has a series of photos documenting the Portuguese community's Holy Ghost Fest around California (those are real women in the Barbie capes above).

The most remarkable photos are a large trio from Robyn Twomey who had a photo assignment from Fortune magazine about the medical marijuana trade, where she met a number of interesting characters suffering from things like leukemia who swore by the herb as their only relief.

She's one great photographer.

Anybody But Lee For Mayor

2011-10-20T10:48:00.000-07:00

In Civic Center's Heart of the City Farmers Market on Wednesday afternoon, a half-dozen young people were handing out leaflets for Leland Yee for Mayor, including the gentleman above right who was having a difficult time convincing the gentleman on the left that Yee's promises to help the middle class in San Francisco was going to do anything for him.

I asked Gerald above why he was shilling for State Senator Leland Yee for Mayor, and the answer was that he had worked for him, and liked the man. "Good answer." When asked about candidate Jeff Adachi, Gerald said he'd worked for him too and seriously respected Adachi. With that, I decided to put Yee as third on my ranked choice ballot, mostly because he has an outside chance to beat the current Mayor Ed Lee.

As you may have heard, Ed Lee was selected at the beginning of this year in a sleazy coup d'etat by old-time power brokers as an interim, caretaker mayor when their previous puppet, former mayor Gavin Newsom, bolted for the Lieutenant Governors seat. The promise was that he would not run for Mayor in this November's election, using his incumbency as a weapon, but Lee was talked into breaking that promise and he's now the clear front-runner. The only way he can be beaten is if enough San Francisco voters follow an "Anyone But Ed Lee" strategy, imitating the voters of Oakland who did something similar to front-runner Don Perata in his election for mayor in that city.

In other words, don't vote for Lee (above center) as your first, second, or third choice for Mayor. I am voting for Jeff Adachi as my first choice, but I encourage you to vote for whoever the heck you like other than Ed Lee, who has made no pretense that he's a puppet for Willie Brown, Jr., Rose Pak, and a whole host of the most corrupt, established, pay-for-play power brokers in this city. By marking Ed Lee anywhere on the ballot, you are basically voting for four more years of the same Willie Brown/Gavin Newsom political machine which is a depressing, ugly prospect. Vote for change instead and maybe even a little hope.

Britten, Vishnevskaya, and Shostakovich's 14th Symphony

2011-10-18T19:38:00.000-07:00

The musical works of the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich (above left) and British composer Benjamin Britten (above right) are still being absorbed by the culture at large even though it seems to me they were unquestionably the two greatest composers of the mid-20th Century. Though both were successful in their own time, performances of their music are still lagging behind Mahler and Brahms symphonies, for instance, or Strauss and Puccini operas, even though Britten and Shostakovich are better or equally great composers, something I am reminded of every time their music is played live.

Last week, the San Francisco Symphony conducted by James Conlon (above left with baritone Sergei Leiferkus), played Shostakovich's penultimate, 14th Symphony for the first time, 42 years after it was written in 1969, which is rather shocking because it's a masterpiece. The symphony consists of a cycle of eleven songs traded between a baritone and soprano that focus on death as an unwelcome reality. It is scored for nineteen strings and a percussion section, which managed to sound like everything from the quietest string quartet to a full-bore symphonic presence.

Shostakovich dedicated the symphony to the living composer he most admired, Benjamin Britten, which was a mutual feeling. When Britten heard a concert version of "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" in 1936, he wrote to a friend:

"Of course it is idle to pretend that this is great music throughout--it is stage music and as such must be considered. But I will defend it through thick & thin against these charges of "lack of style"...The satire is biting and brilliant. It is never boring for a second, even in this concert form...The eminent 'English Renaissance' composers sniggering in the stalls was typical. There is more music in a page of MacBeth than in the whole of their 'elegant' output."

Shostakovich decided he was in the presence of greatness upon seeing the score for Britten's pacifist "War Requiem" in 1962, which he thought the greatest work imaginable (Dmitri was right). His only complaint with the piece was the angelic boys' voices singing a prayer at the end which promises some kind of healing and transcendence over death. Dmitri didn't buy that for a second, so with his body falling apart while sitting in a flu-quarantined hospital at the age of 63, he put together a suite of poems about death by Garcia Lorca, Apollinaire, Rilke and Kuchelbeker in Russian translation. They are angry, philosophical, political, despairing, sad, and in the final duet, almost sarcastic. The music is simply phenomenally interesting, and Shostakovich dedicated it to Britten.

(Pictured above are Mstislav Rostropovich, David Oistrakh, Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich.)

The great cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, the Bolshoi diva Galina Vishnevskaya (pictured above with Britten and his tenor lover Peter Pears), were the real glue that bound the two composers. Britten wrote music specifically for Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya, including the female soloist role in the "War Requiem" while Shostakovich also wrote pieces for both of them, including the soprano soloist in the 14th Symphony. Rostropovich died four years ago, but in the year before that he conducted two weeks of all-Shostakovich concerts with the San Francisco Symphony that were revelatory.

So were the performances last week, with Olga Guryakova above tearing into the poems with such intensity, commitment and power that you could swear you spoke Russian by the end of the hour-long symphony whether or not that was true.

The veteran baritone Sergei Leiferkus was perfection, and was a reminder that there are certain kinds of Russian music that really should only be sung by Russians.

The string ensemble was astonishingly good, with concertmaster Alexander Barantschik digging into the piece in way I had not heard from him before, and the two violas, Jonathan Vinocour and Katie Kadarauch above, created small miracles together throughout.

After intermission, the orchestra played the Ravel orchestration of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" but it didn't make much of an impression, even with its huge orchestra, because the Shostakovich was still in our brains.

Note to the New Century Chamber Orchestra: When you're feeling ambitious, please program this piece which was essentially written for your ensemble.

15th Century Korean Ceramics for Your Monday Viewing Pleasure

2011-10-16T18:42:00.000-07:00

The Ecclesiastes quote, "There is nothing new under the sun," is perfectly demonstrated at the Asian Art Museum right now at their Korean "Poetry in Clay" exhibit.

The ceramics in all these photos are from the 15th century, which in Korea's long history is the beginning of the final Joseon dynasty that stretched into the twentieth century.

Korean culture seems much older, deeper and sturdier than most of its Western counterparts.

This style of ceramics became so popular in its time that it was used as an offering for government taxation, but too much of it ended up being pilfered so they incorporated the name of the government bureau to which the tax tribute was being sent into the design.

Think of an ancient, elegant version of "This towel belongs to Holiday Inn."

I am a member of the Asian Art Museum and live a couple of blocks away, but don't attend very often, partly because of the airport security style shakedown one encounters from the guards on entering the museum.

This special exhibit from Seoul is so cool, though, that I've decided to make a visit to it as part of a weekly routine, on the way to the Heart of the City Farmers Market on Sunday mornings.

Beautiful Weekend Activities

2011-10-15T11:09:00.000-07:00

This weekend we are blessedly free of the noisy flying death machines known as The Blue Angels, the weather is perfect, and there are amusing free activities galore.

The week-long Litquake Festival is winding down tonight with its annual crawl around the inner Mission District, with two of my favorite bloggy people, Beth Spotswood and Julie Michelle, holding court on Clarion Alley at 6PM this Saturday evening (click here). At the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park on Sunday there will be free chamber music from a whole host of local music organizations (click here for more info). Enjoy.

No on Propositions E and F

2011-10-14T12:42:00.000-07:00

A fundraiser was held at Buck's Tavern on Thursday evening to raise money to get the word out about the perniciousness of Propositions E and F. (Pictured above is Bob Planthold.)

There is a lot of garbage on the San Francisco ballot this November 8th, and I am not referring to the candidates running for everything from Mayor to Sheriff. Two of the more egregious propositions are E, which would allow the Board of Supervisors to tinker with any voter-passed legislation if they decided they didn't care for it, and F, which would allow the oxymoronic Ethics Commission make up their own rules about lobbyist registration.

Aaron Peskin above and the San Francisco Democratic Party have both come out against the measures, while the San Francisco Chronicle predictably endorsed both. Possibly the best explanation of why Proposition E is so dangerous came in a letter to the Editor at the San Francisco Examiner from Richard Reidy. Here it is in full:

"Supervisor Scott Wiener has placed on the November ballot Proposition E, which would enable the Board of Supervisors and mayor to modify or rescind any future voter-approved legislation — such as the rent-control ordinances and every other voter-approved ballot measure that might be approved by San Francisco voters.

If this measure passes, it will open the door to an eventual vulnerability for all existing ballot initiatives as well. It’s a real Trojan horse — once in the gates, the damage begins. Wiener’s initiative does not show trust in the voters. His excuse for Prop. E is that we, the poor misguided public, may be confused by too many complex ballot measures. Such thinking insults voters who do make the effort to understand ballot measures. It should not be up to the supes to overturn the will of San Francisco voters, or to amend voter-approved propositions."

Larry Bush above, a former aide in the Art Agnos administration, has started a website called CitiReport (click here) that features the best political writing in San Francisco, partly because Mr. Bush understands how the local kleptocracy actually works. His explanation of how John St. Croix and his Ethics Commission buries all inquiries was funny and depressing.

"They are required to put financial filing information online, but they have decided what that means is they put the information into digital form and if you want it, you have to come down to their offices and pick up a disc. It's crazy."

Bell and Petrenko and Elgar

2011-10-13T12:33:00.000-07:00

Last week's San Francisco Symphony concert was highlighted by the British composer Edward Elgar's First Symphony from 1908, in a beautiful, committed performance led by the young Russian conductor Vasily Petrenko. (The sculpture in front of Davies Hall above is by another great British artist from a poor family, Henry Moore, who was ten years old when the First Symphony premiered.)

The concerts were being promoted as a showcase for the American violinist Joshua Bell, but the short Meditation by Tchaikovsky and the 1904 Violin Concerto by Glazunov both sounded like elevator music.

I asked my music lover friend Jack Murray in Santa Barbara if he was a fan of Joshua Bell, and he replied, "I would be if he played anything I wanted to listen to, but he usually comes through town playing something like the Mendelshohn Violin Concerto. And Glazunov? We used to have a classical music radio station down here that I called All-Glazunov-All-The-Time. It put you into a coma."

The 35-year-old Vasily Petrenko (above, conducting the Shostakovich Eighth with the San Francisco Symphony last year) managed to make the concert special, with an opening "Festival Overture" from 1954 by Shostakovich that reveled in the bombastic paean to the October Revolution. It was as fun and well performed as when the legendary Mstislav Rostropovich conducted it with the Symphony in 2006, which is saying something.

Elgar's ambitious, hour-long First Symphony after intermission was a revelation, sounding as if the composer of "Pomp and Circumstance" was taking Mahler as his model. The long, twisty first movement, the grotesque scherzo, the heavenly adagio, and the crazy, semi-resolved final movement all were reminiscent of the Viennese Gustav while never sounding like anything other than the very British Elgar. The final Sunday matinee performance was sensational and made me look forward to hearing the piece again.

Pop-Up Meal, Museum and Mayor

2011-10-11T22:10:00.000-07:00

The pop-up phenomenon is currently sprouting in a parking lot next to Patricia's Green in Hayes Valley, with a small space given over to the odd food truck parked under Eine's graffiti art...

...along with a strange looking ice cream vendor and an artisan coffee stand...

...next to a cargo container that houses the gift shop for the roving, pop-up Museum of Craft and Design.

The latter institution is in its third temporary location, after a storefront in the Castro followed by another one on Third Street near SFMOMA.

The Hayes Valley site seems to be their first outdoor location, and it opened this summer with a piece by the local artist Andy Vogt (above).

That piece has been succeeded by Fluxus, a latticed wood structure by architects Nataly Gattegno and Jason Kelly Johnson.

You can walk around the structure which is unexpectedly fun because the latticed woodwork is painted in bright oranges and reds.

On Saturday morning, a young docent was lecturing to a bored group of children...

...while the dude above manned the gift shop.

Also arriving in perfectly color coordinated orange was Andy Blue and a group of Avalos for Mayor supporters who were bopping around town on bicycles, with one of them towing a good sound system. They fit right in.

For more pictures of Everywhere for Avalos Day, click here for a gallery at Fog City Journal.

Silicon Valley Death Trip

2011-10-09T11:09:00.000-07:00

Brian Barneclo's 600 x 40 foot "Systems Mural" has been finished in a more minimalist three-color palette and design than originally proposed. It works beautifully on this huge scale, providing a mysterious backdrop for arrivals and departures to and from San Francisco and the Silicon Valley.

The atmosphere in the Valley last week was shadowed by very public death dramas that couldn't have been more different from each other yet felt connected through time and place.

The most heart-tugging demise was that of "Broadway Bound," a sea lion who had been shot in the face by someone, and who then pulled herself out of San Francisco Bay and somehow crossed eight lanes of traffic on Highway 101 in Burlingame. (Click here for an article by Carolyn Jones.) At the end of the week, she was euthanized and the possible feel-good story turned into a sad tale.

Later in the week and further down the highway in the Cupertino/Sunnyvale area of Silicon Valley, a middle-aged black quarry worker named Shareef Allman went insane at a 4AM work meeting on Wednesday, and proceeded to shoot close to a dozen of his mostly Hispanic co-workers, murdering three of them. He managed to escape through the suburbs on foot like a trapped animal for the next 24 hours before being killed in a barrage of bullets in a stranger's driveway by three deputies who stumbled across him.

On the same Wednesday, there was the announcement of the death of Saint Steve Jobs the Evangelist in Palo Alto, which brought forth a huge outpouring of public grief and testimonials to his greatness. Part of the intensity of that reaction was because Jobs had been dying publicly from pancreatic cancer for the better part of a decade, and watching his health ebb and flow had become something of a morbid global spectacle. I am glad for his sake that it is over, and that he managed to accomplish what he was put on this planet to do.

Carrying a Torch for Renee Fleming

2011-10-07T19:17:00.000-07:00

I am currently one of a half dozen supernumeraries who carry phony torches during Act One of the Donizetti opera, "Lucrezia Borgia," which is being remounted at the San Francisco Opera as a diva vehicle for Renee Fleming above. Renee recently announced via Twitter that this is her last bel canto opera performance, so if you're interested, there are two shows remaining this Saturday and next Tuesday.

Though the opera libretto and the production are completely ridiculous, there are a number of wonderful singers who are getting better with each performance, including Ms. Fleming, who seems as gracious and unpretentious backstage as she was twenty years ago.

Friends who have seen the opera, with outrageous costumes by the director John Pascoe, have mostly enjoyed themselves, though not necessarily for the right reasons. For a wonderful take on the pleasant absurdity of the production, click here for Patrick Vaz's description at "Reverberate Hills." Patrick usually is very serious about his cultural intake and doesn't have much patience for camp, but he found this particular performance thoroughly amusing.

Thanks to Mike Harvey for the backstage photos above.

Laguna Beach, Disneyland, and Afghanistan

2011-10-06T06:30:00.000-07:00

This evening's Episode 27 of FotoTales is a wild one, starting off with a strange film festival ten years ago in Laguna Beach...

...put on by a group of Orange County rich people.

There's also a section set in Disneyland...

...where we stumbled across a Wear Red if You're Gay Day.

9/11 was less than a month earlier, and the scaremongering was in full gear as was the beginning of revenge which continues to this day.

The half-hour show is on Comcast's Channel 29 tonight (Thursday) at 7:30 PM, and you can check it out online by clicking here.

Ades and Stravinsky at the Symphony

2011-10-04T21:33:00.000-07:00

Last week's San Francisco Symphony concerts were the last to be conducted by music director Michael Tilson Thomas for a month, and they showed off both his weaknesses and strengths. The Saturday evening performance started with Mozart's Haffner Symphony, and though MTT is getting better with some of the core 19th century repertory, Mozart is still completely out of his grasp.

Mozart's music, when well played, should make you want to dance since most of the musical forms he uses are based on dance rhythms. If Mozart's music is played exceptionally well, it tends to lead to reveries about romance and love and sex, and if conducted by somebody who really understands it in their bones, the music can break your heart.

I am sad to report that Tilson Thomas still hasn't gotten to the "want to dance" stage, which says nothing about him as a conductor because MTT has a lot of company in making Mozart sound deadly dull. He is a very tricky composer in his simplicity, and Charlise above seemed to agree.

Following the Mozart symphony, three screens scrolled down from the ceiling, and we were treated to a new short piece for large orchestra entitled "Polaris" by the British composer Thomas Ades with an arty three-screen video by his lover/partner/husband/what-have-you (the program didn't specify) Tal Rosner. The video was inoffensive and silly, a mixture of geometric screen savers and ocean scenes filtered through what looked like generic Adobe After Effects layers. It ended with video of two women on a cold beach with windswept hair who finally walked together holding a seaweed rope between them. "Lesbian love is the only true love," I found myself muttering.

The only "multimedia" video that I have actually enjoyed over the last couple of decades was the multiple-screen stage for Paul McCartney during his 2002 solo tour. The huge bank of screens could shatter into 200 different images or comfortably become a single large one, and it was used so intelligently that it was transfixing. The multimedia accompaniment to "Back in the U.S.S.R" was easily the wittiest parody/embrace of Soviet Socialist Realism that has ever been produced.

So it can be done. The high art world, as opposed to the popular art world, just hasn't figured out how quite yet.

Still, it was lovely to have the lights dimmed over the stage on account of the video, which allowed one to just listen, and the music by Thomas Ades (pictured above right with Tal Rosner on the left in the colored tie) was beautiful, with an accessibility I had never heard before from this composer. The music of Ades is usually too dense for me and has never paid off in terms of much sonic pleasure, but this was completely different, channeling Benjamin Britten, especially in his use of the brass who were stationed across the Center Terrace area behind the screens.

After intermission, Tilson Thomas led one of the greatest renditions of Stravinsky's "Petrouchka" imaginable, and it was obvious this is music he does understand and can communicate. Though the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra is a sturdy, sometimes inspired ensemble, they have never sounded as exciting as the San Francisco Symphony in this music last week. I kept wishing we could see the Ballet's recent production of the ballet with this orchestra and this conductor in the pit. Now that would be something.

Professionally Bad Drivers

2011-10-03T19:14:00.000-07:00

Some of the worst drivers in the world end up in San Francisco, including people who are paid to know better.

On Saturday afternoon, a truck parking next to the Costco didn't seem to care that his trailer was knocking down whole sections of trees.

Harrison Street between 10th and 11th Streets was suddenly covered with branches all over the sidewalk and the gutter.

Sunday morning at McAllister and Van Ness, a San Francisco Parking Control officer apparently rear ended some civilians.

The couple in the car got out to inspect the damage in the middle of the street and after a couple of minutes, they drove to the curb.

The Parking Control officer also went to the curb, and on her way came close to broadsiding a car and knocking over a bicyclist in the bike lane. Be careful out there everyone.

Asian Art Museum 2: Poetry in Clay

2011-10-01T12:06:00.000-07:00

A small but magnificent Korean Buncheong Ceramics show opened recently at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum.

Instead of being installed in the lobby galleries where traveling special shows are usually exhibited, the ceramics are in the Korean wing of the permanent collection on the second floor. It's a little tricky finding the space since there's a dearth of signage, but the easiest way to get there is by taking the grand staircase above towards the Samsung Room.

Then you can walk back along the loggia to a pair of glass double doors which enter directly onto the Korean wing.

Most of the rare Korean treasures are on loan from the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul...

...and though most of them are from the 1400s, they look startlingly modern.

To emphasize that point, a number of 20th century ceramics from both Korea and Japan that were influenced by the early Joseon dynasty style are included in the exhibit almost as ringers...

...though they don't look intentionally archaic so much as emphasizing the bizarre modernity of Korean ceramics from 700 years ago.

The designs tend to be playful and sketchy, with various animals well represented...

...including what looks like a dog about ready to despoil someone's lawn.

For more on the "Poetry in Clay" exhibit, click here for a description by Janos Gereben.

Asian Art Museum 1: Upside Down Rebranding

2011-09-28T20:55:00.000-07:00

A press and photo scrum was invited to the Asian Art Museum on Tuesday morning...

...along with a full roster of local dignitaries that included SF Chief of Protocol Charlotte Schultz (standing above), the three Asian-American San Francisco Supervisors (Chu, Mar, and Chiu), and the Asian-American San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee.

The event was the unveiling of a new rebranding initiative for the institution, and Museum Director Jay Xu gave a speech filled with a lot of marketing buzzwords to the accompaniment of a very plain, ugly PowerPoint presentation.

The moment finally arrived for the literal unveiling of the new logo that represents the "Asian For All" theme that is being newly embraced, with Jay Xu and Edwin Lee doing the honors (above).

The logo was fairly ghastly, an upside down A with the word "Asian" floating somewhere to its right, designed by the London branding company Wolff Olins.

This was the same company that was responsible for the almost universally loathed logo for next year's Olympics in London (above).

Nick O'Flaherty, the Strategy Director for Wolff Olins was in attendance, and told us that the upside down A symbolized "ALL" in mathematics, which seemed to be news to everyone in the room except for the people who had approved the design.

The real question is why the Asian Art Museum decided to hire a London firm for close to half a million dollars in the first place. The San Francisco Bay Area probably has as many great graphic designers per capita as any comparable spot on the globe, and there are even quite a few who are Asian-Americans who understand Pacific Rim cultures in a way that Wolff Olins is not going to be even close to mastering.

On a sheerly practical level, the logo looks like hell to work with. "Why are there different spaces on the various collateral pieces between the upside down A and Asian?" I asked a few museum employees, and the consensus seemed to be that having Asian too close to the upside down A which looks like a V makes it look like "Vasian," which could be extrapolated into (Asian) Invasion, not a happy branding message.

Mayor Lee gave a speech at one point and said, "Charlotte and I have discussed how important the museum is for our local economy and its international visitors. Soon there is going to be a huge show about Bali." Nobody corrected Mayor Lee, but just about everyone in the room knew that the Bali exhibit had come and gone over the last six months, and had just been shipped out in anticipation of a new show devoted to East Indian Royalty.

The whole exercise was sad, because the Asian Art Museum deserves to draw more visitors. Their special exhibits are hit and miss, but often spectacular, and the rotating permanent collection is probably the best of any museum in the Bay Area. Do consider becoming a member in spite of the silly new logo.

New Century Chamber Orchestra's 20th Anniversary Season

2011-09-26T21:00:00.000-07:00

Artistic organizations, like businesses and human lives, have their own ups and downs and it's particularly fun to be around any group that is on an upward trajectory. For instance, the New Century Chamber Orchestra, a conductorless string ensemble, has had three music directors in its twenty-year history, starting with concertmaster Stuart Canin for seven years and for the last three years, the violin soloist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg who has brought a whole new level of energy to the group.

Last Tuesday, there was an open rehearsal for their 20th anniversary season's first concerts around the Bay Area, and it was fascinating to watch the give and take between Nadja and the various members of the orchestra on everything from tempo to expressive choices.

After the rehearsal, a dozen of us were invited to talk with Executive Director Parker Monroe, Board President Paula Gambs, and Nadja herself (above left), who turned out to be funny and smart. "I'd never been a conductor or a music director before this, so I asked various friends in the industry for advice. 'Beware of your Board,' was instruction number one, and 'Don't become personal friends with your musicians' was instruction number two. Those are probably good pieces of advice, but I didn't follow them because I was blessed with a great Board of Directors led by one of the most wonderful people I've ever worked with, Paula Gambs. Plus, I loved my fellow musicians in this ensemble on first sight, so there was no way I could keep them at arm's length."

Executive Director Parker Monroe also shared the startling news that while most local arts organizations have been struggling mightily in the last three years of recession, the Nadja-led New Century Chamber Orchestra has produced a remarkable statistic. "67 is the number," he said. "Our attendance is up by 67% and our donor base is up by 67% over the last three years. It's amazing."

The orchestra went on its first tour last winter to the Midwest in the middle of a blizzard, and still managed to sell out houses and thrill audiences who weren't used to classical music groups playing with their intensity. "When I went to the first rehearsal three years ago," Nadja related, "the rehearsal space was in a glass room where strangers could walk by and look at you as if you were fish in an aquarium and the sound was ghastly. I asked why they were rehearsing in such a crummy location, and the response was on the order of 'We're lucky just to have this place for rehearsals,' and my response was 'Well, that attitude is your first problem.' "

On account of a cold that arrived with a whammy on Saturday, I didn't make the concert this weekend of Bloch, Mendelssohn, and a modern "Carmen" reworking by the Russian Rodion Schedrin, but the accounts from Axel and Jeff and Joshua made it sound wonderful.

SF Symphony's Magnificent Mahler Third

2011-09-23T11:13:00.000-07:00

Even by Mahler's expansive standards, his 1902 Third Symphony is a gargantuan, overstuffed spectacle with six movements that span over ninety minutes, performed by an enormous orchestra, a mezzo-soprano soloist (Katarina Karneus below left) and a huge women's and girl's chorus.

The last couple of Mahler performances of Symphonies #2 and #5 I have heard conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas above were disappointing. There were sections of the large symphonies that were spun out and played beautifully while at the same time there wasn't much coherence overall, so I went to Wednesday's opening performance of the Mahler Third without many expectations.

The performance turned out to be stunning, majestic, and eccentric all at the same time, and even though the supposedly ninety-minute piece clocked in at just under two hours, the long performance somehow never dragged. It felt like we were hearing it for the first time.

The chorus sat in the center terrace for the entire performance even though they only sang for about five to ten minutes, but it was pleasing just to watch them in expectation. The two chorus directors, Ragnar Bohlin of the SF Symphony and the recently ousted Susan McMane of the San Francisco Girls Chorus did a great job, and the "Ding Dong" chorus (not to be confused with the "Wizard of Oz" version) was flawless.

All the soloists within the orchestra stepped it up a notch, including principal trumpet Mark Inouye above, who sneaked out of the orchestra in the middle of the performance to a corridor behind the center terrace section where he played one of the most beautiful solos ever heard in Davies Hall. It was a special evening.

9/11: The Aftermath

2011-09-22T11:20:00.000-07:00

When creating the daily photo journal of the world ten years ago that became the 52-episode FotoTales video documentary, I had no idea what I would be capturing. Almost midway through, the 9/11 attacks occurred and it seemed a good idea to document the daily aftermath for the next six months, in those long-ago days before the Orwellian Department of Homeland Security was created.

Watching it again for the first time in seven years has been disturbing and amusing in about equal measure. There are so many bizarre details from those days that are easily forgotten.

What was clear from day one was that the Era of Bullydom was about to be unleashed, and that the media in conjunction with the incompetent, lunatic, and sadistic Bush administration were not to be trusted for one second. We're still living in that world and it's probably helpful to reexamine its early days.

Episode 23 of FotoTales can be watched online by clicking here. That episode starts with the Opening Gala of the San Francisco Opera, which was "Rigoletto" that year, and ends with 9/11. The stunned week after is detailed in Episode 24 which you can watch by clicking here. Episode 25 will be broadcast tonight (Thursday) at 7:30 PM on Comcast Channel 29, and can also be seen by clicking here.

The New SFPUC EcoPalace Arises

2011-09-21T11:18:00.000-07:00

The on-again, off-again plans to construct an expensive, ecologically advanced new headquarters for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission are not only on-again, but the building is slated to be completed by next summer.

According to Dan Schreiber at the SF Examiner: "The cost to build the project is estimated at $140 million, but the bill rises to $205 million once design services and things such as furniture are added to the mix. Planners had estimated the cost at $190 million."

The original plans were scrapped and construction was suspended in 2008 because the newly appointed SFPUC director Ed Harrington decided that it was another one of Gavin Newsom's outrageously expensive pie-in-the-sky initiatives and he temporarily pulled the plug. Harrington never stated that publicly, since he'd just been appointed to the position by Newsom, but it was fairly obvious when reading between the lines.

The escalating expensive design was "modified" after plenty of lobbying for the project to continue, including Chronicle architecural critic John King back in 2008 (click here).

The pagoda style finish at the corner of Golden Gate and Polk above is rather stylish, but creating a completely transparent, 13-story glass building for a rich, powerful city department that has flourished on backroom deals for decades seems like something of an architectural oxymoron. It's a good bet there will be serious curtain hanging within a year of its being inhabited.

The Galaxy Is Destroyed

2011-09-19T18:22:00.000-07:00

In San Francisco, it seems to take forever to tear any existing building down, which is either a good or bad thing depending upon your point of view. For instance, the Galaxy Theatre multiplex at Sutter and Van Ness closed for business in 2005 and it has taken six years to start taking the building down.

The architecture by the local firm KMD Architects appalled a lot of people when it went up in 1983, but I was always amused by the glass children's building block aesthetic. Still, it's not a major loss, such as losing the Coronet on Geary five years ago or the palatial Fox Theatre on Market in the 1960s. (Click here for a wonderful website devoted to movie theatres called "Cinema Treasures.")

The colored windows were recently removed and the building is being gutted from the Hemlock Alley side (click here for some photos at The Tender).

Going up on the site will be a generic 13-story, 107-unit apartment building designed by the San Francisco-based Cristiani Johnson Architects, seen in illustrations above on Van Ness and Sutter Streets. The plan is to have it completed by early 2013.

SF Symphony 100th Season Preview

2011-09-18T12:07:00.000-07:00

The San Francisco Symphony, including publicist Louisa Spier above left, hosted a reception in the basement of the Main Library last Tuesday in honor of the publication of "Music for a City, Music for the World," an authorized history of the institution's first 100 years written by Larry Rothe (below).

Cedric Westphal had a funny distillation of the large, lavishly illustrated coffee table book at SFist (click here):

"...if there is a drinking game associated with the book, it is to gulp a shot every time a music director is said to have brought the orchestra up to national status and recognition. You'll drink to Alfred Hertz, Pierre Monteux, Josef Krips, Seiji Ozawa, Edo de Waart, Herbert Blomstedt and MTT."

There is an associated exhibit at the Main Library which mainly served to remind me that I am old and have been listening to live concerts by the San Francisco Symphony for almost half of its century-old existence. As a teenage hitchhiker from Southern California, I remember buying a standing room ticket at the San Francisco Opera House for one of Seiji Ozawa's concerts in his love-beads and Beatle haircut first season. Ozawa announced that he was going to focus on Berlioz and Haydn that year, and that first concert consisted of Bernstein's "Chichester Psalms," one of Haydn's 100+ symphonies, and Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique" in a sensational performance.

At the reception, we were joined by the Symphony's current principal trumpeter Mark Inouye above who turned out to be as charming as he is musically gifted. Inouye told a few stories involving his Giants Rally Rag and tuxedo, along with a recurring practical joke involving standing for applause with his brass section. I am not sure the tales were meant to be shared, so ask me in private if you're dying to know what he said.

After being wined and dined, there was a talk between the author Rothe and Symphony archivist Joe Evans (above) about the process of digging through a century's worth of ephemera to find historical treasures.

A couple of years ago, during the announcement of the programs for the 99th season, a number of writers complained about how boring most of it was and asked if all the exciting stuff was being held back for the 100th anniversary season. The answer then was "no," but they weren't really telling the truth, because this year is jammed to the gills with musical goodies.

I went to the opening concert of the season last Thursday with Yo-Yo Ma playing the Hindemith cello concerto in a great performance of music that doesn't do much for me, though it does for counterpoint enthusiast Jeff Dunn (click here) who thinks it is one of the greatest concertos of the 20th century. The second half of the concert had MTT conducting the Brahms First Symphony in a surprisingly good performance. I haven't been convinced by Tilson Thomas in a lot of 19th century music, so this felt like a good sign.

Here are a few of my favorite things, on paper, that are scheduled for this fall: Mahler's gargantuan 3rd Symphony is coming up this week (September 21-25); the Symphony-commissioned "Polaris" by British composer Thomas Ades with "moving images" by his partner Tal Rosner (September 29-October 1); the great young conductor Vasily Petrenko conducting Elgar's First Symphony and joining with Joshua Bell in the Glazunov Violin Concerto (October 5-9); James Conlon conducting Shostakovich's Symphony No. 14 (October 14-16) and then jumping in as a substitute for Fabio Luisi with Verdi's Requiem (October 19-22); a Symphony commission of a new work from the amazing composer Sofia Gubaidulina (November 17-20); and Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting Sibelius, his own Violin Concerto, and excerpts from Wagner's "Ring" (December 8-10).

This is without even mentioning the special party guests who will be playing in Davies Hall this year, which include the entire orchestras of Cleveland, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, many bringing brand new music written for their respective ensembles. Click here to buy tickets or call (415) 864-6000. If you are feeling poor like me, Center Terrace seats behind the orchestra are a wonderful deal at $15 a ticket, and you are basically sitting in trumpeter Mark Inouye's lap.

Pissing on Muni

2011-09-16T22:48:00.000-07:00

An empty Muni bus with a crowd on the sidewalk is never a good sign, particularly when it's flanked by paramedic trucks from the Fire Department.

"What did you do this time?" I asked an acquaintance who was part of the crowd at the corner of Van Ness and McAllister on Wednesday afternoon.

"I didn't do anything. There was an old man in the front of the bus who stood up, pulled out his willie, and started pissing all over the bus and the people on it."

Tourists were taking photos of the paramedics who were carrying the probable old drunk off the bus onto an upright stretcher.

Other passengers (above right) were pointing out items belonging to the pisser that had fallen out of a bag onto the sidewalk, which seemed awfully civilized of them.

Paramedics, who I believe are paid quite a bit less than their police and fire counterparts, always strike me as the coolest, calmest, level-headed public safety workers of San Francisco.

SF Opera's 9/11 Part 2: Opera in The Park

2011-09-15T16:36:00.000-07:00

Opera in the Park was started 40 years ago by the longtime San Francisco Opera General Director Kurt Herbert Adler, and the free Sunday concert in Golden Gate Park has become a beloved, popular institution.

Tens of thousands bring blankets, portable picnic tables, food and drink to listen to a program that usually consists of a parade of well-known arias and duets by opera stars who are singing in the opening operas of the fall season.

This year the City and County of San Francisco and the San Francisco Interfaith Council partnered up with the opera to present a "Civic Observance Commemorating the Tenth Anniversary of 9/11," hijacking the usually festive occasion for an overlong, solemn bore punctuated by dreary speeches from political dignitaries such as appointed Mayor Ed Lee (above) and various religious leaders.

The performance started with the orchestra playing the interminable, dull "March of the Priests" from Mozart's otherwise sparkling Magic Flute. This is a slow, Masonic march written so that that the chorus and supernumeraries can get into position on the stage, or in this case so a procession of political and religious dignitaries can make their way through a pathway in the large crowd.

Nowhere in any of the subsequent speeches was it acknowledged that faith-based true believers were mostly responsible for the 9/11 disaster, nor was there any sensitivity to those in the audience who might be offended that religion was being shoved down their throats at an official government commemoration. More than half of the faiths on display, for instance, still look upon homosexuality as an abomination. As a gay man, I felt more in common with the crazy drag queen who was wandering around the concert above than I did with any of the religious speakers.

Happily, I was invited to a picnic by a group of opera supernumeraries who had set up camp near the stage, including the glamorous Jenny Jirousek above.

SF Opera Music Director Nicola Luisotti led us in yet another rendition of The Star Spangled Banner and then into a performance of Mozart's Requiem. Though bowing to nobody in my love of Mozart's music, the lugubrious Requiem is not a favorite.

The chorus, under director Ian Robertson (above right), performed heroically after a week of daily rehearsals and evening performances of Turandot, Heart of a Soldier, and Lucrezia Borgia. The four soloists, Nadiene Sierra, Maya Layhani, Daniel Montenegro and Ryan Kuster sounded great but they were hidden behind the orchestra while the interfaith leaders were seated in front. This made it easier for the latter to go to the microphone and give a reading between each movement of the Requiem, which helped to make the piece feel even more interminable than usual.

After intermission, a Fire Department official above offered a long, mawkish speech about our heroic public safety workers.

This was the point where the beautiful and kind Irene Bechtel, above, finally lost a bit of her patience. "This is turning into overkill," she said.

SF Opera General Director David Gockley above has been doing a great job in his position over the last five years, wooing wealthy patrons into major donations and keeping a sharp eye on artistic quality. This Opera in the Park concert was a miscalculation, though, with enough maudlin flag-waving and uplifting Americana tunes in the second half of the program to stuff a Thanksgiving turkey.

Though it was a treat to hear great singers such as baritone Thomas Hampson above, the injection of solemnity into Opera in the Park was just wrong, no matter what the date. This is not Texas but San Francisco, where many of us associate 9/11 with the beginning of an unending, amorphous War on Terror that is politically, morally and strategically dubious, and certainly not as something to be celebrated. For an interesting take on the 9/11 commemoration, click here for Jan Adams' Enough Killing, which pretty much says it all.

SF Opera's 9/11 Part 1: Heart of a Soldier

2011-09-14T18:36:00.000-07:00

When the news appeared last year that the San Francisco Opera had commissioned a world premiere opera about a "hero" from the 9/11 World Trade Center disaster ten years ago, I picked up the James B. Stewart book on which it was based, Heart of a Soldier. It's the biography of Rick Rescorla, an athletic Cornwall teenager in the 1950s (above, age 16) who joins the British military at the end of their empire days and whose violent adventures across the world end with him dying on 9/11 in one of the World Trade Center towers after saving thousands as part of his security chief job.

Stewart is a business writer who in 2001 noticed that Morgan Stanley's thousands of employees all seemed to have survived while the employees on the floors above and below suffered severe losses. The major reason for their survival turned out to be on account of Rick Rescola (above on bullhorn, with Jorge Velasquez and Godwin Forde, who also both died in the tower). He insisted on serious quarterly evacuation drills for the firm, partly because he was obsessed with the idea of a plane being driven into the towers with explosives.

The book started as a long New Yorker article with the major source of information being Rescorla's widow, Susan (above), who Rick had married two years earlier (#2 for him, #3 for her) soon after his receiving a diagnosis of prostate cancer. Susan is shoehorned into the book's narrative, with alternating chapters about her failed marriages with unreliable characters. None of these stories have absolutely anything to do with the central Rescorla saga, so in both book and opera Susan simply serves as The Romantic Interest in the Last Act. She seems to see her widowhood to The 9/11 Hero as a vocation, and according to the opera program:

"She is actively involved in several projects about her husband and those inspired by him, and she recently published a book, Touched by a Hero, about her experiences and hundreds of others who were touched by her husband's story. She also became a board member of the National Foundation of Patriotism in Atlanta."

The opera starts with Rick as a boy, worshiping Yank soldiers stationed in Cornwall prior to D-Day and skips over his first posting with the British Military during The Cyprus Emergency of the late 1950s (click here for an amazing website called Britain's Small Wars filled with first person accounts of those "Small Wars"). Britain had just been kicked out of Egypt and had moved their Mideast military HQ to Cyprus just as it was about to explode into a last spasm of centuries-old Greek/Turkish antagonism and war. Rescorla was an interrogator which probably means he was a torturer, doing the dirty work of fading Empire.

He moved on to the Northern Rhodesia Military Police in 1961, when it was in the last three years of its century-long existence, since the country was about to become independent Zambia. This was a period where proxy wars between the U.S. and Russia were being fought throughout poor countries all over the world and Northern Rhodesia was no exception. Whether Rescorla was torturing and murdering black Africans in their own country is unclear in the book, but it seems a distinct possibility.

Even though the opera hops from one hot war spot to another, all the fighting is with unseen foes, as if to assure us that no actual poor, dark foreigners were harmed in the making of this production. The book is also fairly negligent in this respect, but it allows for more ambiguities in the characters' feelings about their soldiering.

The major relationship in the book is between Rick and Dan Hill, an American CIA soldier of fortune who was doing anti-communist reconnaissance in Africa and bumped into Rescorla on a rugby pitch. A lifelong friendship was born, with the omnivorous reader Rescorla playing tutor with Kipling and Shakespeare to his lower-class American buddy. One of the lost opportunities in the opera, in fact, is that the story is crying out for a major hetero bromance duet such as exist in "Don Carlo" or "The Pearl Fishers" and we never get to hear it. (William Burden as Hill and Thomas Hampson as Rescorla in Cory Weaver photo above.)

After their African adventure, Hill talked Rescorla into joining him in Officer Training at Fort Benning in preparation for the next great war, Vietnam (Rescorla above in a famous AP photograph, looking like a movie star). He was an inspirational leader in an early, savage battle which is recounted in the "Once We Were Soldiers" book and movie. Rescorla and Hill are eventually respectful and sympathetic to their Vietnamese opposition, figuring correctly that they are going to win because it's their own country. None of that subtlety, however, seeps into the opera, which is more interested in the triumphal mythologizing of a Hero.

The opera depicts the Vietnam battle scenes mostly in loud music and strobe lights, but once again the Vietnamese are The Invisible Enemy. After Vietnam, Hill and Rescola went their separate ways in the United States, and at one low, alcoholic moment Hill stumbled across a group of Muslims on prayer rugs on the side of the road praying to Mecca, and it stirred something in him. He became a Muslim and eventually went to fight with the CIA-sponsored Afghanistan "Freedom Fighters" against the Russians.

The short second act of the opera mostly focuses on Susan and Rick's late-in-the-day romance, which might have benefited from casting a great old diva in the role since it's short, showy, and there are only two high C's. Plus, there aren't that many leading diva parts that are expressly written for a middle-aged woman (Britten's "Gloriana" is the only one that comes to mind), so it seemed odd to cast Melody Moore, who is just a few years out of the Adler young singers program.

The performances of everyone in the show, from principals Thomas Hampson, William Burden, Moore, and a large cast of subsidiary characters and chorus, were completely committed and superb. They were so good that they managed to get me over some of the bumpier parts. Director Francesca Zambello conceived of the project as an opera in the first place, and her staging was slick, clever, and sincere. A friend noticed an oddity, however:

"This is a really interesting piece of post-feminism, especially given that it has a female librettist and female director. Women apparently exist only to say come back, and to be loving (and interfering). This certainly wasn't the 60's -70's I remember."

The music by Christopher Theofonidis is bright, dramatic and accessible, using a lot of the sound world of post-minimalist John Adams without the genius. I heard the first two performances of the opera and the music mostly improves on acquaintance, which is a good sign. To hear more of Theofonidis' music, click here for an extensive selection of audio excerpts on his website.

Critical reaction has been all over the map after the premiere of "Heart of a Soldier" (click here for Opera Tattler's handy Media Round-Up) with the bashing probably outweighing the praise. I thought the opera and the production was mostly successful on its own terms, though the straining for hagiography did get to be a bit much. The worst decision was to preface each performance with the audience singing The Star Spangled Banner with the orchestra and a cheesy video of Old Glory waving in the wind. The skillfully telescoped libretto by Donna Di Novelli didn't indulge in any of that kind of jingoism, and it does the opera a disservice. Wrapping yourself up in a flag is not the only valid reaction to the events of ten years ago.

(All SF Opera production photos by Cory Weaver.)

Brian Barneclo's Caltrain Mural

2011-09-12T20:17:00.000-07:00

My contract job in Silicon Valley ended last week, just in time for the opening of San Francisco's Social Season, which will allow me to give faithful readers more cultural and political fixes. (The San Francisco Opera's 9/11 is coming, I promise.)

One of the joys of the last week of the contract job was taking Caltrain every morning, and watching Brian Barneclo's huge mural along the tracks near the downtown Caltrain station evolve.

Aidan Vaziri wrote an informative article about the piece at SFGate a couple of weeks ago (click here) with the following quote from the artist: ""It's all about this wall," he said. "It's just so perfect. In my mind I think, why wouldn't it have a mural?"

The article also mentions: "It took three years of negotiations with the city's Redevelopment Agency and the Mission Bay Community Advisory Committee to secure permission from the wall's owner at the Crescent Cove apartments and then Caltrain, whose property the piece faces. Barneclo said he was determined to see the project through."

Barneclo is an authentic outsider artist, who doesn't go through commissioning committees whether they be from the Art Commission or Burning Man or any other institution. "It's all about this wall." I admire him enormously and am thrilled that San Francisco Caltrain passengers are soon going to be dreaming of this mural as they sleepily pass by.

SF Symphony's Free Concert in Civic Center

2011-09-11T00:32:00.000-07:00

Thursday at noon in Civic Center Plaza, the San Francisco Symphony played a free, hour-long concert.

It was part of their continuing 100th birthday celebrations that started with the previous evening's Opening Gala that went late into the night.

I asked Symphony staff member Jeffrey Davis above how much sleep he'd gotten, and he admitted that it wasn't much more than a few hours.

When I asked the two gentlemen in white dinner jackets if they were musicians or on the garbage detail, they answered "Both!"

KDFC announcer Rik Malone was the pre-concert emcee and announced that The Sustainable Partner was PG&E, which was handing out metallic water bottles at a booth which you could fill with Hetch Hetchy tap water from a truck on Larkin Street.

Like La Boulange and Ghirardelli Chocolates, who were both giving away treats, PG&E ran out of their freebies rather quickly and the people in line above were turned away.

The concert started with a singalong "Star Spangled Banner" again, just in time for the arrival of two friends above from the weekly Quaker Peace Vigil a block away. They sang lustily as if to demonstrate that peaceniks are both patriotic and musical.

The concert continued with John Adams' Short Ride in a Fast Machine and Axel Feldheim (above left) along with his very funny Symphony chorister friend arrived on cue.

Lang Lang repeated his performance of Liszt's First Piano Concerto, and the chorister asked, "Wouldn't it be marvelous if K.D. Lang married Lang Lang? Then she'd be K.D. Lang Lang Lang."

For a fuller description of the concert and Mayor Ed Lee's arrival, click here for "Not For Fun Only."

San Francisco Symphony's 2011 Opening Night Gala

2011-09-09T17:00:00.000-07:00

In celebration of its 100th anniversary, the San Francisco Symphony Opening Gala hosted a suitably lavish affair with a cocktail party in the San Francisco Opera House foyer, followed by two separate sit-down dinners in City Hall and a Stanlee Gatti decorated tent in the Davies Hall parking lot.

There was also a symphonic concert that was appropriately overstuffed for the special occasion, starting with multimedia waterfalls of historical imagery on the walls which set the scene for the first half's traditional Star Bangled Banner singalong, a beautifully played version of a suite from Copland's "Billy the Kid" ballet, followed by Lang Lang playing Liszt's garish First Piano Concerto in a good, fairly restrained performance.

The concert started about fifteen minutes late so the socialites could make their way from their dinners into the auditorium, bringing the piano in from the basement for Lang Lang took another fifteen minutes, and conductor Michael Tilson Thomas yakked quite a bit to the audience so it was close to nine-thirty before the first intermission even took place.

This didn't seem to bother the crowd, most of which were admirably attentive and quiet for the entire concert, which ended up clocking in at about three hours.

There were roving bands of professional photographers walking about taking photos of local celebrities and social register types, and since I was carrying my camera, various people kept mistaking me for one of them and requesting that I take photos. "Take one of that woman in the orange dress, which is the silliest thing here tonight," one elderly woman demanded.

The lady above on the left grabbed my tuxedo and said, "You have to take a picture of my granddaughter and myself," and then she dragged me almost the entire length of the lobby to do just that. How could you say no, particularly since the San Francisco Symphony had comped me to a ticket for the evening?

The second half of the concert featured superstar violinist Itzhak Perlman giving a dutiful performance of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, followed by Britten's "Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra," which I had never heard live before. As if this weren't all enough, MTT gave a speech thanking everyone in the building, especially local composer John Adams who was in the audience. Then the orchestra played Adams' "Short Ride in a Fast Machine" with a multimedia accompaniment (above) that wouldn't have been out of place at a Pink Floyd show.

The party tent afterwards looked festive, with live cotton candy spinning at the entrance...

...and bizarre monumental flower arrangements as decorative elements.

The most charming party was outside, though, on a closed-to-traffic Grove Street where pizza ovens had been built in the middle of the road, and lights strung up over a series of tables.

Charlotte Schultz above was co-chairing the evening's festivities and was still looking full of steam at midnight. I am not quite sure how the woman does it.

The Sausalito Art Festival

2011-09-08T09:47:00.000-07:00

My partner received a pair of comp tickets to the annual Labor Day Weekend Sausalito Art Festival this year, so we climbed aboard a ferry boat on Monday to check the event out for the first time.

The day could not have been lovelier and it was a pleasure escaping from San Francisco's traditional Labor Day fog into Marin County sun.

The Art Festival started in 1952, probably as a homegrown bohemian affair, and has grown into a slick, corporate sponsored event that charges $40 admission. According to the program, beneficiaries of the festival's proceeds have ranged from deserving charities such as the Sausalito Chamber of Commerce to the Rotary Club of Sausalito.

There is a juried competition for the 275 artists from around the country who sell their wares in little white tents. Most of the art was priced between $500 and $1,500, and for the most part looked like the heavily commercial pieces you can see in galleries at Fisherman's Wharf or in downtown Sausalito. You will have to take my word on this, since the program asked that photographs of the art not be taken without the artists' express permission.

That was fine, since the real focus of the event seemed to be eating, drinking, and listening to music played by famous old rock musicians.

Monday's headliner was Kenny Loggins of "This Is It" and "Footloose" and dozens of other hard-to-eradicate earworms.

Sitting in the music tent was tricky, because festival-goers had staked out places at various tables and were looking for empty chairs with eagle eyes. We happily stumbled onto The Pier Lounge, just behind the musical performers on the water, which had its own seating and cocktail lounge.

The people watching was fun, although I think we were one of the only gay couples in the entire festival, which seemed odd.

Most of the attendees looked as if they were about to audition for "The Real Housewives of Marin County."

In fact, the vibe can best be summed up by a woman in her 50s on the ferry boat who was telling her friends, "When I was young, I used to think I was going to marry a rich hedge fund manager and we were going to live in Sausalito happily ever after. I guess that's not going to happen."

San Francisco Symphony's Free 100th Birthday Bash

2011-09-07T14:37:00.000-07:00

A large stage, sound booths, and chairs have started going up in Civic Center Plaza today in preparation for tomorrow's noontime free concert by the San Francisco Symphony, highlighted by superstar soloist Lang Lang playing Lizst's First Piano Concerto.

The event is being offered to the city's citizens in celebration of the Symphony's 100th anniversary this year, following a lavish opening at Davies Hall this evening with members of San Francisco's Social Register greeting each other after a seasonal absence at their various summer homes.

In the meantime, an event planner from the Symphony was asking somebody at Classic Party Rentals, "should we put down chairs or will people bring their own blankets?" I put in my two cents and said very few people would have the foresight to bring blankets and lawn chairs to the event, and on my way back from the Heart of the City Farmers Market, it looked like they were going with the plastic chairs on the hard-packed dirt option. Bravo.

The Sharp Fox Grows Up

2011-09-06T18:11:00.000-07:00

Sharp Park municipal golf course is in downtown Pacifica but is part of the sprawling San Francisco Recreation and Park empire, which is embroiled in lawsuits about the course from environmental legal extortionists spearheaded by the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity.

I golfed there on Sunday morning as a guest of the mobile phone photoblogger Mike Wallach, who has been covering the Sharp Park morass for some time (click here).

On the seventeenth tee, a fox who looked like a grown-up version of the animal I'd seen two years ago (click here) walked over and checked us out, probably looking for food.

There was signage at the starter's window stating, "DO NOT FEED THE FOXES!" so we didn't, but it was certainly tempting.

Asian Art Museum 3: Japanese Design

2011-09-05T10:01:00.000-07:00

The Japanese wing is also featuring contemporary works, such as the sculpture by Hoshino Kayoko above...

...a large screen by Okura Jiro above...

...and a 1995 waterfall painting by the New York-based Senju Hiroshi.

And of course the rotating Japanese basket collection demonstrates once again...

...that Japanese design is usually twenty years ahead of the rest of the world.

In the lobby, a museum worker was handing out questionnaires, and one of the questions was whether or not we preferred the museum experience to be lively and filled with people or if we preferred it to be quiet and solitary. Unfortunately for the institution, I much prefer the latter, which doesn't help their bottom line or longtime survival.

Asian Art Museum 2: Korean Minimalism

2011-09-04T18:09:00.000-07:00

The beginning of the Korean wing on the second floor looked like a conceptualist exhibition...

...that belonged in a Museum of Modern Art...

...with pieces of blue tape and cheap looking photos on display instead of the usual thousand-year-old muted celadon ceramics.

On the Asian Art Museum blog, cristina explains:
"In preparation for the exhibition Poetry in Clay: Korean Buncheong Ceramics from Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, museum staff have removed all of the permanent collection artwork from the Korean galleries and tucked them away in storage."

A new installation of contemporary Korean art devoted to vases...

...has just been installed in the remaining section of the Korean wing...

...and the mixture of ceramics, drawings and paintings are beautiful and thoughtfully displayed.

A highlight are a series of "Translated Vases" from 2007 made of celadon shards with gold gilt on their edges by Yeesookyung (below).

She also has some large-scale sculptures on the loggia level but there's no special signage so I missed them,.

Asian Art Museum 1: Sunday Afternoon

2011-09-03T11:30:00.000-07:00

On the way to the Heart of the City Farmers Market last Sunday, I stopped in for a quick tour of the Asian Art Museum's rotating permanent collection to see what was "newly on view."

On the top floor, there's an exhibit of prints by Abdur Rahman Chughtai (1899–1975), who was Pakistan's preeminent 20th century artist.

A Chinese American board member raised in San Francisco once told me that many older Chinese don't like coming to the museum because much of the ancient art feels like it is haunted by spirits. Passing the Philippine burial urns near the elevator always reminds me of the truth of that superstition.

In the Thailand room, one of Doris Duke's recently acquired treasures (above) is newly on view, and it's a stunner...

...as is a collection of Indonesian head dresses...

...and a trio of Tibetan hangings nearby.

The ancient Chinese art room is filled with bronze age objects that look like they are from a different culture and time altogether...

...and some of the vases look like they could be from Native American cultures, which makes the Bering Strait theory of migration from Asia to the Americas all the more persuasive.

Party Tents and Public Mayhem

2011-09-01T06:31:00.000-07:00

Tonight's Episode 22 of FotoTales documents the tents going up around Davies Hall and the San Francisco Opera House in anticipation of their opening night parties ten years ago.

Labor Day Weekend 2001 seemed to be full of mayhem, including an argument between the San Francisco Police and the San Francisco Fire Department over who was responsible for a belligerent chronic drunk making a spectacle of himself in the Castro District.

There was also a young man who discovered his stolen bike at Church and Market and who engaged in a public brawl with the thief...

...followed by a car crash at Gough and McAllister that involved a cab and a fire hydrant. You can see it all on Comcast Channel 29 at 7:30 PM or watch it anytime you want online by clicking here.

Lone Star Light

2011-08-30T20:35:00.000-07:00

The usual crowd at the Lone Star Saloon's Saturday afternoon beer bust were no longer there this last weekend, either because they were doing their laundry or they had become clean and sober, moved away, joined other scenes, or died.

The small backyard with its tall windbreak was sunny late into the afternoon which at the end of a classically San Francisco fog-ridden summer made it a lovely place to drink beer in public.

Plus, the studious bartender could not have been more pleasant.

Weather Channel Flash Update

2011-08-28T16:50:00.000-07:00

There were many incidental pleasures watching wall-to-wall Weather Channel coverage of Hurricane Irene this weekend: the multi-colored charts and graphs and spinning weather systems, the endless cliches, and of course the absurd sight of a reporter standing outside in a hurricane telling the public that they need to hunker down at home and stay out of the dangerous open air.

The weather reporter above, stationed in Virginia Beach on Saturday, was particularly plaintive, calling it "depressing" that nobody was listening to his on-air warnings of gloom and doom, and were instead driving their cars around to look at devastation. In the middle of his diatribe a trio of young men ran behind the reporter and one of them took his pants down and flashed the live Weather Channel feed. It was stupid, brilliant and hilarious all at once.

Systems Mural Project Arises

2011-08-27T11:21:00.000-07:00

Commuting on Caltrain back from Silicon Valley last Wednesday, we passed a new loft development next to the downtown San Francisco station at 4th and Townsend.

The back of the development is a windowless, curving brown wall that stretches for 600 feet along the train tracks.

A long-delayed dream of painter and muralist Brian Barneclo started going up Tuesday morning on the wall...

...and judging from the illustrations on the Systems Mural Project website...

...this could easily be his masterpiece...

...following his huge breakthrough on the FoodsCo wall on Shotwell Street in the Mission (click here for a "Civic Center" account of that 2006 mural).

Alien Invaders Pour Concrete

2011-08-24T20:21:00.000-07:00

A decade after the doubledecker freeway was torn down in the Hayes Valley, residential buildings are finally being erected as infill. Last Saturday an army of concrete trucks took over Franklin Street between McAllister and Golden Gate Avenue where they hooked up with a trio of concrete pourers that looked like a cross between the aliens in Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" and the monster spiders in Verhoeven's "Starship Troopers."

The day-long foundational concrete pouring wreaked havoc with traffic on the one-way Franklin Street, but it was fun to watch, rather like a concrete truck version of the Fred Levine classic for two-year-old boys, "Road Construction Ahead."

Critics on the grass alas

2011-08-23T20:07:00.000-07:00

How pleasurable it is that the 1928 Stein/Thomson opera, "Four Saints in Three Acts," can still inspire both worship and outraged indignation. (Pictured above in the Ensemble Parallele production are left to right Michael Strickland, Heidi Moss, Eugene Brancoveanu, Charlie Lichtman, Joe Meyers and Maya Kherani.)

The longest, funniest, and best informed essay is by Patrick Vaz at Reverberate Hills where he coins the newly classic phrase:

"The St Ignatius of Eugene Brancoveanu...was particularly fine – vibrant and sensitive and pointed – in Pigeons on the grass, alas, which is the Nessun Dorma of avant-garde opera."

Also appreciating the recent production was composer and writer Charles Shere at Eastside View:

"It's one of the great operas not only of the 20th century but of any, and productions are rare, and this one is worth seeing."

(Pictured above are left to right Brendan Hartnett, Heidi Moss, Jonathan Smucker, and Eugene Brancoveanu.)

Two other writers were similarly amused by the production and the piece, Cedric at SFist and Charlise at The Opera Tattler. (Pictured above are Kalup Linzy and the ensemble in Luciano Chessa's prologue opera A Heavenly Act.)

Thankfully, it wasn't all kittens and roses. Joshua Kosman, the classical music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, was "livid" after Sunday's performance, according to a friend sitting nearby. He starts his review with:

"Four Saints in Three Acts," the cloying little theatrical concoction by composer Virgil Thomson and librettist Gertrude Stein, is the grade-school pageant of the operatic repertoire. You don't so much attend to it - at least not if you're an adult - as pat it on the head, coo indulgently and wait for it to be over already."

And though he bends over backwards to be kind to some of the singers and the production, it's clear Mr. Kosman doesn't quite get Gertrude Stein and hates the simplistic sounding music. He's certainly not alone in that view, and in fact half the cast felt the same way going into rehearsals, but the opera has an amazing, powerful charm when you live with it every day. Forty-eight hours after the last performance and I am still dealing with all the lovely earworms that arrive unbidden in my brain. Patrick and Charles are right, it's a great piece.

(Pictured above are Michael Strickland and Michael Harvey about to fry Eugene Brancoveanu in the electric chair.) The great production rehearsal photos above are by Steve diBartolomeo.

Four Saints and a Cop in Three Acts

2011-08-20T11:48:00.000-07:00

"To know to know to love her so" is the first line of Four Saints in Three Acts, the 1928 opera by Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein. Getting to know the opera after two weeks of daily rehearsals with Ensemble Parallele and the director Brian Staufenbiel (above center) has fulfilled the predictive nature of that opening line. Hearing this opera sung repeatedly by a superb cast of a dozen singers over and over has been an immersive education and a joy.

We moved from our rehearsal space at SFMOMA to the surprisingly lavish Novellus Theatre at Yerba Buena Center across the street this week, and opened with a sold-out preview performance on Thursday evening and an official opening on Friday. (Left to right above, Brooke Munoz, Nicole Takesono, Joe Meyers, Eugene Brancoveanu, and Brendan Hartnett.)

The production design is about as far as can be from the cellophane original but it's elegant, beautiful and fits the piece perfectly. (Dancing the tango above are Eugene Brancoveanu with Heidi Moss, and Nicole Takesono with Joe Meyers.)

I am one of two evil supernumeraries (above left, with Mike Harvey on the right and Eugene Brancoveanu as Saint Ignatius in the center) who move furniture and singers around while occasionally playing a cop and a baliff and, during the tango, an Isadora Duncan dancing male couple. Yes, I am having too much fun.

The great production rehearsal photos above are by Steve diBartolomeo.