25th Annual SF Zine Fest

The 25th Annual San Francisco Zine Fest on Sunday afternoon was a blast from the past in more ways than one.

First of all, it was being held at the 1892 Hibernia Bank building at Jones and McAllister...

...which was recently renovated as an event space after sitting vacant for decades.

Secondly, the free admission event was requiring all vendors and attendees to wear masks...

...which engendered immediate PTSD in those who were transported back to the bad old days of COVID's onset in 2020.

Security at the door, who were handing out snug black masks, explained that it was for the benefit of vendors who lived with disabilities and immunosuppression, but it felt strange and uncomfortable.

Though zine culture seems like vintage pre-internet, its current creators represent a physical corrective to our increasingly corporate, digital world.

In a side room I stumbled across one of the serious legends of alternative culture, V. Vale. I had no idea who the gentleman was until returning home and reading his bio at the RE/SEARCH website: "Possibly the ONLY surviving 70s punk publisher who never quit, V. Vale’s RE/Search continues to provide ‘Against-the-Status-Quo’ publications that stimulate the imagination and optimistic skepticism. Vale has been doing counterculture publishing since 1977, when he founded the Punk tabloid, Search & Destroy, San Francisco’s first. It was published at City Lights Bookstore, where V. Vale worked, and was funded by $100 each from Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. Then in 1980, V. Vale launched RE/SEARCH, which is best known for its impact on the total world of underground culture."

Also attending was another legendary publisher, Larry-Bob Roberts, who started the Holy Titclamps queer punk zine in Minnesota in 1989 and continued publishing it in San Francisco until 2003.

West Edge Opera 2026

West Edge Opera's summer festival this year at Oakland's Scottish Rite Temple has been a great success overall, with the only disappointment being the opener, Benjamin Britten's 1954 The Turn of the Screw. I was looking forward to the production because Britten is a favorite composer and the soprano Laura Bohn, heading a strong cast as the Governess, is one of my favorite singing actresses in the world. However, the show didn't work for me on any level. (All production photos are by Cory Weaver.)

The main problem is that over three-quarters of the live action takes place behind scrims on which videos are projected along with the two singing ghosts transmitted from a makeshift video room high in the hall. This creates a severe distancing effect for the audience, and half the time it's difficult to even discern whats going on or where each of the 16 scenes are supposed to be taking place.

Henry James's 1898 novella is famously ambiguous as to whether the erotically insinuating ghosts are real or are the invention of a sexually repressed young Governess, or both. The Britten version leans in the direction of the ghosts being real, and before their deaths having corrupted the abandoned children Miles and Flora. However, the director went with the hysterical young Governess interpretation, which didn't make much sense. The Freudian case study of an hysterical woman inventing sexual crimes feels like an outdated cliche, particularly in our Epstein saturated moment. Additionally, most of the sensual vocal music in the astringent score is between the boy soprano Miles and the ghost of Peter Quint, seen above in a strong, convincingly creepy performance by tenor Alex Boyer. Britten was also a bit of a tortured pedophile himself, and you can hear that anguish in his music in everything from Peter Grimes to Curlew River.

The second opera of the festival, Handel's 1711 Rinaldo, was a wildly colorful palate cleanser. The narrative about Christian Crusaders tangling with Muslim Saracens was updated to comic-book superheroes battling archvillains by director and choreographer Keturah Stickann in a marvelous production that worked splendidly. The production also featured six dancing supernumeraries playing Cops and Villains, and they were unexpectedly delightful, deserving their own shoutout: Ellis Broderick, Eden Magana, Elena Martins, Devon Martinez y McFarland, Christopher Nachtra, and Max van der Sterre.

The bottomlessly deep voice of contralto Sara Couden was perfect for the bumbling police chief Goffredo and countertenor Kyle Tingzon as our superhero Rinaldo proved that his star turn as Oberon in Pocket Opera's A Midsummer Night's Dream earlier this year was no fluke. Best of all, the comic-book concept was played straight, without campy, wink-wink asides, even though there was plenty of humor involved, particularly in some of the colloquial supertitle translations ("This is freaking me out").

Villains usually have the juiciest roles in superhero tales, and baritone Efraín Solís as the evil Argante and soprano Nikki Einfeld as the sorceress Armida inhabited their parts with amusing style and vocal beauty.

The production was also helped immeasurably by the colorful, outrageous costumes of Bethany Deal (pictured above). A special acknowledgement also needs to go out to trumpeters Daniel Norris and Rob Wilkins in the orchestra who did a splendid job in some of Handel's most festive music.

The final opera of the festival, American Apollo, was a complex, emotionally resonant triumph that premiered in Des Moines in 2024. The libretto by Lila Palmer is unusually intelligent, giving every character their due, and it's singable as well without a lot of extraneous text. The score by Damian Geter is written in a conservative, tonal idiom that manages to stay compelling throughout, and at times lyrically beautiful. You could hear the audience breathing a sigh of relief that it wasn't going to be a thorny musical afternoon in the theater. The narrative is fascinating, centering on Thomas McKeller, a young black man who was part of the Great Migration from Wilmington, North Carolina to Boston, Massachusetts at the beginning of the 20th century. While working as an elevator attendant at the upscale Hotel Vendome in Boston, McKeller was approached by the famous painter John Singer Sargent who asked if he would model for him.

Tenor John Bellemer did a fine job as Sargent, and soprano Marnie Breckenridge was reliably brilliant as the rich, eccentric patroness Isabella Stewart Gardner, who was building her Boston art museum, and was a close friend of the artist. In the opera, she watches with sympathetic interest the dynamic between Sargent while he was using McKeller as a body model for a series of murals commissioned by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. This involved erasing McKellar's face and black skin while having him pose as everyone from Achilles to Apollo.

Though Sargent has never been officially tagged as homosexual by historians, anecdotally among acquaintances it was well-known, and in this opera it is posited that the relationship between model and painter was an on-again, off-again love affair, interrupted by McKeller's fear of exploitation and then by World War One. When that war ended, Sargent reunited with McKeller and proposed that they travel through Europe together, but the young man turned him down, saying being a "kept man" would destroy him. Incidentally, a friend who saw the world premiere of this opera in Des Moines two years ago said, "This is a much gayer production than we saw in Iowa."

Markel Reed gave a magnificent performance as Thomas McKeller, and his baritone was one of the strongest voices to be heard in the entire festival. His final aria, as he discovered the nude portrait Sargent painted of him and kept hidden away in his private collection, was a fitting finale.

The new Music Director of the Oakland Symphony, Kedrick Armstrong, guided the 21-person orchestra expertly, and the scenic designer Nina Ball did an excellent job creating a unit set that could easily be everything from a hotel lobby to an artist's studio with the change of a few props and lighting. Finally, director Nataki Garrett created a sensitive, believable world onstage. Their contributions were a reminder that West Edge Opera is a serious local treasure, and you can still see all three operas in the festival's upcoming final weekend. Click here for tickets.

Treasures of the Pharaohs

A dazzling Egyptology show called Treasures of the Pharaohs opened at the deYoung Museum this week.

There's one major problem for San Francisco Fine Arts Museums members, though, which is that their membership is good for only one visit during the six-month run of the exhibit.

After their one visit, members can buy "discounted" $28 dollar tickets if they want to return, which feels like a middle finger, especially since there is no notice of this policy to be seen except in small print in the museum magazine.

I heard an unsubstantiated rumor from a museum employee that the policy was at the behest of the Egyptian government who want to maximize revenue.

It's too bad because this really is an extraordinary exhibit, and I only wish it had been installed in the usual basement space for traveling exhibitions rather than the narrow, strangely shaped rooms on the second floor.

Unlike the Ramses II exhibit in the same museum in 2022, which felt a bit like a crowded amusement park ride, this installation actually tries to teach Egyptian dynastic history.

The signage is excellent, though most of us barely looked at it while snapping pictures of the treasures with cameras and phones.

There are lots of gold objects and jewelry, which drew chrysophiles (a new word for me too) like moths to a flame.

My favorite piece was the above coffin lid from the 21st Dynasty, hidden in the back of a small room. Don't miss it.

Mexico City Morning

We walked to the main drag of Mexico City, Paseo de la Reforma, this morning and were astonished to find that tens of thousands of bicyclists, rollerbladers and joggers had taken over the street while pedestrians walked alongside on wide sidewalks. We had stumbled onto Muévete en Bici, a car-free event on 55 kilometers of downtown Mexico City streets every Sunday from 8AM to 2PM. The separation of pedestrians (slow) and bicyclists/joggers (fast) made the whole event work in a way that San Francisco's occasional Sunday Streets do not.

Our destination was the Museo de Arte Moderno in Chapultapec Park...

...which was one of the most beautifully designed, medium-sized art museums I have ever encountered.

There was a special exhibit devoted to Remedios Varo, the Spanish surrealist who fled Nazi Europe for Mexico City where she worked until her death in 1963.

More impressive was their permanent collection of Mexican artists from the first half of the 20th century, including the great Juan O'Gorman's 1949 La Ciudad de México...

...and David Alfaro Siqueiros's 1947 El diablo en la iglesia (The devil in the church)...

...along with José Clemente Orozco's frighteningly pertinent 1947 El tirano (The tyrant).

There was even a sweet 1953 Naturaleza muerta by Frida Kahlo to complement her 1939 keystone masterpiece in the collection, Las dos Fridas.

The painting traveled to SFMOMA in 2008 (which I wrote about here), but it was in a crowded, poorly designed Kahlo retrospective. At the Museo de Arte Moderno, the painting is given its own dark room which is hidden in plain sight so it remains uncrowded. There was a comfy bench to rest on in front of the painting, and some people sitting on the floor. Everyone was quiet as if we were all communing with a holy shrine. It was one of the great art museum experiences of my life.

Across the Paseo de la Reforma was the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo devoted to contemporary Mexican art.

The wild, wonderful architecture was more interesting than most of the exhibits. However, like the Museo de Arte Moderno, admission is free all day for everyone on Sundays, yet another example of how much more progressive Mexico is feeling these days in relation to the regressive United States.

We have been staying in the touristy, upscale Zona Rosa section of town but finally found a great, autentico Mexican restaurant in the neighborhood filled with locals. What made it even better was that the majority of workers and customers were gay, but we also saw cops, friends and lovers of every persuasion eating and drinking there.

I'm not going to name the place because United States hipster expats have been invading the city for the last decade and I don't want to add to the despoliation. Let's just say it's close to the Insurgentes metro station.

Austin finished the day's adventure at CHU-CHO, a dessert parlor that has put chocolate, ice cream, and churros together. As their signage states, "Un churro cada dia le da alegria" (a churro a day brings happiness).

Chiharu Shiota Exhibit at the Asian

San Francisco's Asian Art Museum is hosting Two Home Countries, an exhibit of the work of the 54-year-old artist Chiharu Shiota, who lives in both Germany and Japan.

The signage on entering the exhibit was amusing. Instead of "Don't Touch The Art!" we were offered positive reinforcement instead.

The caution was necessary because the first installation, Diary, surrounds the viewer in an 88-foot web of red yarn that feels magical.

Embedded in the thickets of yarn are pages from recovered diaries of Japanese soldiers in World War Two along with journals from post-war Germans.

The exhibit also features drawings...

...and a video of the naked artist being bound with strings, which is reminiscent of performance artist Marina Abramović, one of Chiharu Shiota's mentors.

This exhibit debuted last year at the Japan Society in New York City, along with a one-man, English-language stage show adaptation of Yukio Mishima's 1956 novel Kinkakuji (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion). Reviews of the play were not particularly favorable, but the set design by Shiota consisting of strings transformed by lighting and projections were universally praised. You can see for yourself through July 27th at the Asian.