The Contemporary Jewish Museum in downtown San Francisco opened its doors on Christmas Day to the public with an offer of free admission to the year-old building, which prompted a huge line that snaked across the large stone plaza in front of the museum.
The $47.5 million building consists of the brick facade of a 19th Century electrical substation designed by Willis Polk that was somehow integrated with two dark, torqued cubes on their sides by starchitect of the moment Daniel Libeskind.
From the outside, the design looks rather fun, but inside it's something of a disaster, with most of the space devoted to a large lobby and sloping walls that feel more claustrophobic than liberating, not to mention impractical for displaying art. In its ugliness and uselessness, the building's only competitor in awful new San Francisco architecture is probably the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender What-Have-You Center that opened on upper Market Street in 2002.
The security at the entrance was also extremely invasive, though the guards were for the most part a jolly crew.
We were given a timed entry sticker for a Maurice Sendak exhibit that was scheduled for two hours after our arrival, but there was no way we were going to wait that long, so we didn't see any "Where The Wild Things Are" sketches. We probably never will, since this is not a building that's high on the list for a return visit.
By coincidence, I saw "The Hurt Locker" and "Avatar" in the same 24-hour-hour period and the differences were instructive. "The Hurt Locker" stars Jeremy Renner (above) as an American demolition expert in 2004 Iraq for whom war has become an exhilharating drug, and his performance is the kind that creates movie stars.
Though the movie is intelligent and brilliantly directed by Kathryn Bigelow, it's also an Iraq War movie that The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times can love. Politics don't ever into it, and the point-of-view is completely and artistically through the very subjective eyes of three American soldiers. The Iraqis remain The Inscrutable Others throughout, and most of them want to kill our heroes for reasons that remain completely unexplained.
"Avatar," James Cameron's sci-fi follow-up to "Titanic," turns out to be not only the most expensive movie ever made up to this moment, but also one of the most matter-of-fact in its hatred of American imperialism. The baddies who want to rape the planet of Pandora for an oil stand-in called Unobtainium aren't even a global, mixed lot. They're the current corporate/military mindset of America and the movie doesn't make any bones about it.
The Pandora art direction was a bit too Laguna Beach hippie-dippie for me at times, where everything was filled with mystical light, and I was expecting whales and dolphins to be leaping through the air at any moment. That didn't matter, though, because the alternative universe is loads of fun to wander through, particularly in 3D, and the theme of the blending of races and cultures was handled beautifully. Best of all was the ending (SPOILER ALERT!). Instead of never-ending war, which is where "The Hurt Locker" leaves us, the ten-foot tall People of Pandora escort the remaining American imperialists into their spaceships with instructions not to return. I pray the same happens soon for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Later that Wednesday, San Francisco Supervisor David Campos (below) hosted a holiday party out of his City Hall office...
that featured extraordinarily good homemade Mexican food...
...and political junkies of all sorts, from current officeholders like Supervisor Eric Mar (above center)...
...to observers like Hope Johnson...
...and people running for office next year such as Steve Ngo...
...and longtime local gay activist Michael Goldstein for the Community College Board.
Scott Wiener, one of the candidates for next year's District 8 election, always reminds me of that famous Diane Arbus photo, "Jewish Giant," except that he's better looking.
I introduced Theresa Sparks, the recently appointed President of the Human Rights Commission, and a candidate for Supervisor in District Six, to Michael Nava (below), the only candidate I actually care about next year.
He's running for an empty Superior Court Judge seat, and he's an artist with a wise soul. I can't think of a better combination.
For inexplicable reasons, the fact that a new pop star calling herself Lady Gaga has appeared out of nowhere to sell out two shows...
...at the large, ugly Bill Graham Auditorium in the Civic Center on Sunday and Monday cheers me no end.
