The Joe Lynn Memorial at The Disco Tomb

The overdesigned, overpriced, useless and architecturally absurd Gay, Etc. Center on Market Street started off on the wrong foot and is aging terribly, transforming into a strange, hollow shell within a decade.



I haven't ventured into the place for years but stopped in Saturday afternoon for a memorial for Joe Lynn, the former San Francisco Ethics Commissioner, lawyer, gay activist, and all-around empathetic genius.



Unfortunately, the memorial was being held at the newly branded "The Center" whose only saving grace is that it is called the "Charles M. Holmes Campus," referring to the pioneering San Francisco gay pornographer Chuck Holmes of Falcon Films who happened to die of AIDS just when the capital campaign for the new building was at its most intense, and whose estate decided to donate a huge chunk of money in exchange for naming rights.



The people at the memorial were a wonderful bunch, friends and allies, such as Dance Theater's Krissy Keefer above...



...and Oliver Luby...



...and a boatload of leftist politicians who went out of their way to pay their respects and pontificate into a microphone.



As something of a connoisseur of memorial services, however, I'd rate the event as something of a disaster. The people were fine, and so were the food and drink, but the ugly Gay Center building and particularly the hideous second floor theater room defeated any real conjuring of Joe Lynn's spirit.



The nicest moment was when the speakers stopped blabbing at the microphone for a second and the singer Garrin Benfield above serenaded us for a moment.



The true presiding spirit of the affair was h. brown, above, who had announced in an earlier email to all his friends that he was already shitfaced drunk hours before the memorial began. Since he has some serious experience being in that condition, he was paradoxically one of the most clear-eyed observers of the entire event, hanging on the fringe of the ugly room nursing more booze and offering hugs and jabs in equal measure. For his charming account of the afternoon along with Luke Thomas' photos of all the political celebrities who showed up, click here.

The Last Waltz Salon for Joe Lynn

La Reina Taqueria on Howard near 12th Street was host to a huge, raucous farewell party on Friday afternoon for the former lawyer and San Francisco Ethics Commissioner Joe Lynn.



Joe (above) has lived next door to the taqueria for years, but is moving out of his apartment for the Maitri hospice facility at Duboce and Church while he undergoes experimental treatment for leukemia.



The crowd was mostly left-wing politicos and journalists, who tend to be fractious individuals by nature, with feuds and rapproachments galore.



Joe, however, has always been less controversial, and seems to be just about universally loved and respected.



Until about a year ago, La Reina was the scene of a weekly "political salon" hatched up by Harold Brown and Adriel Hampton (above right) who used to meet for lunch when Adriel was working for the Fang Family era "San Francisco Examiner." Currently he's working for the San Francisco City Attorney as an investigator, and running for Congress in the East Bay's District 10.



The weekly lunches lasted about three years, but the host h. brown (above right) who is a self-acknowledged alcoholic, kept picking fights with his friends and people stopped coming. Nevertheless, I loved the gatherings because there were such interesting people, particularly Joe Lynn.



About an hour into Friday's fiesta, San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi gave a speech thanking Joe for his assistance at the Ethics Commission a few years ago. Adachi was running for office against Kimiko Burton, whose campaign spending went over a certain limit and nobody in City Hall seemed to care, particularly at the Ethics Commission which is supposed to be monitoring those things.



Joe gave a speech of his own about good government and how it can work in San Francisco, with specific strategies and policies that went over my head but which was probably understood by the vast majority in the room who are specialists in different kinds of political transparency and reform.



He also thanked and encouraged two of his young proteges, David Waggoner and Oliver Luby above. "They really are the hope of the future, their work is just outstanding."



"Bay Guardian" publisher Bruce Brugmann also gave a speech whose punchline was essentially that "Joe Lynn has always been too good a person to be in the political world."



I went to a Halloween "farewell party" for a friend, Larry Hunnicutt, who was gradually dying of AIDS complications in the 1990s. He had invited all his old friends from Texas and everyone assumed this would be the last time we would see him outside of a hospital. Nine months later I ran into Larry on the sidewalk looking great, and I couldn't help but blurt, "How did you crawl out of the grave?" It turned out he'd received the new AIDS cocktail just as it was appearing for the first time to the public, and his immune system had returned. I'm hoping the same for Joe.

Spiraling Echoes in City Hall

On Thursday, February 12, there was an opening reception in San Francisco's City Hall for the unveiling of a "sound sculpture" by the locally based and internationally renowned sound artist Bill Fontana.



There are eight highly specialized speakers called transducers mounted around the perimeter of the top of City Hall's rotunda using a technology called echolocation which are beaming a strange cacophony of sounds that include running water, bell alarms, and a variety of bird sounds among others. (For a good description of the piece, click here for an article by Johnny Ray Huston in the Bay Guardian.)



The experience is enhanced if you have a keen sense of hearing like Oliver Luby above or my friend Louisa Spier, both of whom kept saying, "Wow, do you hear that?" to mystified expressions from me and a few other old friends who are half-deaf in one ear or another.



There were speeches from the new head of the Art Commission, Luis Cancel, along with an apologetic speech from Mike Farrah, the head of the Mayor's Office of Neighborhood Services, telling us how much Mayor Newsom was moved by the sound sculpture but for reasons we didn't quite catch, he wasn't able to attend. Finally, Bill Fontana gave a short speech but he spoke in a mumble and the acoustics in the rotunda made it impossible to understand a word.



I returned to City Hall the following week to hear what the rotunda sounded like without the opening reception crowd, and it was possible to pick up quite a bit more of the sonic action. I ran into Mike Farrah who had a big grin on his face as he watched me trying to follow the sounds around. "Is this driving the people who work here nuts or do they like it?" I asked him.



"They seem to like it," he told me, "especially the bird sounds which tie into the nest sculptures going up across the street." The sonic installation will be continuing Monday through Friday until May 8th, and it's worth hearing just for the invisible birds from the oversized nests.