No Kings 3 in San Francisco

The most poignant moment I saw at the No Kings 3 march up Market Street on Saturday afternoon was a lone man holding a sign with a picture of Alex Pretti, the Minneapolis intensive care nurse murdered by federal ICE agents.

Most of the other thousands of Unpaid Protestors were either expressing rage or dark humor or both.

I ran into Jan Adams, my favorite political blogger, and after a hug we shrugged our aged shoulders together in a gesture meaning, "Well, here we are back on Market Street for the umpteenth time."

One of my favorite marchers was the gentleman above who had rigged up a portable sound system playing upbeat music ranging from Aretha Franklin's Respect to Queen and Davie Bowie singing Under Pressure.

There was lots of anger being expressed...

...at having a credibly accused pedophile rapist blowing up the world.

In a nod to conservation, Austin was recycling his homemade sign for the third straight No Kings march.

At the end of the march, many forewent the speeches in Civic Center and went to Hayes Valley for al fresco food and drink, where I spotted the signage, "IF KAMALA HAD WON WE'D BE AT BRUNCH RIGHT NOW".

Weekly Resistance

The weekly protest against the U.S. fascist federal regime takes place at the intersection of O'Farrell Street and Van Ness Avenue every Saturday afternoon from noon to two.

The homemade signage is sincere...

...angry...

...and sometimes misspelled.

Mark your calendars for March 28th when there will be another mass protest across the country and the world against the sociopaths in charge of the U.S. government. Doing something rather than stewing in despair is good for your mental health.

Balanchine at the SF Ballet

An all-Balanchine program being performed this week at the San Francisco Ballet is all about big ballets with lots of dancers in each of the trio of works. It started with the 1967 Diamonds which is usually performed as the finale to Jewels, right after the dreamy Emeralds and the jazzy Rubies. (All production photos are by Lindsay Thomas.)

The ballet evokes the dazzling luxury of Imperial Russia to the music of Tchaikovsky's Third Symphony, minus the first movement. What stood out was the joy of simply watching Balanchine's use of bodies as architecture, and also how peerlessly he married music and movement. The dancing by everyone was first-rate and so was the orchestra under conductor Martin West.

Balanchine's first ballet created in the United States, the 1934 Serenade, is a calmer beauty for many women and a couple of men. Set to one of Tchaikovsky's loveliest set of tunes, the Serenade in C Major for Strings, the ballet started off with a large group of motionless women with their right arms outstretched to the horizon before moving into more abstract physical architecture and a yearning story that is not explicit.

The one male-female duet was danced by Wei Wang and Jasmine Jimison. Wang has become one of my favorite dancers in the company, and in this performance I realized he may be the best partner in the whole company, lifting women effortlessly in the air as if they were a delicate feather rather than visibly gearing up for a heft.

The final ballet was the 1958 Stars and Stripes, orchestrated by Hershey Kay to music by John Philip Sousa. Kay was an indespensable figure in New York City, orchestrating ballets and musicals, including Bernstein's On The Town and Candide.

The ballet is meant to be comic and lightly ironic, with one amusingly uniformed regiment after another taking the stage. However, with fascist politics presently dominating the country, presenting a United States flag-waving romp does feel a bit tone deaf, as does the company's continuing plans to perform at the Kennedy Center in May. Check out Rachel Howard's well-written review and discussion of the topic at the SF Chronicle.

When a black curtain was raised near the end of the piece, revealing a huge United States flag, for some in the audience it felt a bit like watching Springtime for Hitler. (The above photo is by Austin Newsom.)

An Homage to Sarah Cahill

The pianist Sarah Cahill has been thinking about grief over the death of loved ones and a sense of loss as the United States government dismantles its already threadbare support of the arts with the closing of the Kennedy Center, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and other cultural institutions. For Monday's SF Conservatory of Music Faculty Artist recital on the 11th floor of the Bowes Center, she performed a recital entitled No Ordinary Light consisting of a series of homages to various dead people. Looking at the program, I feared it was going to be a succession of dirges, but instead the selections were extremely eclectic, ranging from the 17th century harpsichord piece Tombeau de Mr.de Chambonnieres by Jean-Henri d'Anglebert to the 2025 Prelude: Hammer the Sky Bright by Samuel Adams commemorating composer Ingram Marshall, complete with a recording of wind and foghorns nestled in the piano strings.

Also on the program: the 1972 Hommage à Fauré by Robert Helps (click here for the wonderful Robert Helps Web Monument created by adoring colleagues); the 1990 Homage to William Dawson by Zenobia Powell Perry, the evening's audience favorite with its jazzy rhythms; two pieces by Lou Harrison, the 1952 Fugue to David Tudor written in an uncharacteristic twelve-tone style and a lilting tune for the 1948 Hommage à Milhaud.

Cahill commissioned both the Samuel Adams piece and the 2001 Holding Pattern by composer Maggi Payne in honor of Ruth Crawford Seeger. It involved putting small battery-powered devices called e-bows to rest on the strings which are then somehow manipulated into strange tones operated through the pedals. "I can't believe they still work after all this time," Cahill told us. The piece was very strange but sort of fabulous.

The finale was Maurice Ravel's 1917 Le tombeau de Couperin, with each of its six movements dedicated to friends who had just perished in World War One. The orchestrated version seems to be on the program at the SF Symphony every other month, but this was the first time hearing the original piano version. Though I still don't quite get the work, it is obviously a favorite piece of music for Cahill and many others. Maybe one day I'll feel it.

Davóne Tines & Ruckus: What Is Your Hand in This?

I went to operatic bass-baritone Davóne Tines' performance at Herbst Theatre on Saturday evening expecting an ascetic art song recital and was instead happily astonished by a brilliantly conceived concert that included a seven-piece band and a huge amateur chorus. The San Francisco Performances show was entitled What is Your Hand in This? and it often felt like a distilled, 80-minute version of Taylor Mac's 24-hour extravaganza, A 24-Decade History of Popular Music.

Tines is an interesting artist who was one of the major highlights of the 2017 SF Opera world premiere production of the John Adams opera Girls of the Golden West. Playing the escaped slave Ned Peters, he sang the aria What to a Slave is the Fourth of July? taken from the famous speech by Frederick Douglass. Besides appearing in other mostly contemporary operas, Tines composes and creates thematic musical programs of his own, including a Paul Robeson tribute that has been touring the world. Robeson could and did sing everything from Jerome Kern to Mussorgsky, and the same seems to be true of Davóne Tines.

His collaborators for the evening included the Julliard professor/poet/composer/bassist Douglas Balliett (with the frizzy hair above), who composed and created most of the musical arrangements for the show, and played electric bass. (Also pictured are Paul Holmes Morton on guitar and Clay Zeller-Townson on winds and percussion.) The band is part of a New York City group called Ruckus that specializes in lively, reworked arrangements of early music composers such as Handel, who also made his way onto this program as a foundational inspiration for many of the gospel tinged songs. At first, it was a disappointment that Tines and the band were amplified since Herbst Theatre is on the small side and Tines's voice is capable of filling the Metropolitan Opera House, but the sound mix was good and it allowed for Tines to speak and croon softly. When opera singers try to cross over into popular songs, it usually doesn't work well but Tines seems to have no difficulty singing in a multitude of styles.

In each of its stops on the show's national tour, which is celebrating and examining this nation's 250th anniversary, they have invited a local amateur chorus to join them. In San Francisco it was the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts Concert Choir, led by Michael Desnoyers. They were fabulous, especially in an improvisatory, aleatory account of Julius Eastman's Buddha led by Tines.

Elsewhere they helped to provide the sensation of being at a congregational church where everyone in the pews knows someone in the chorus. Tines also had the audience join in as the congregation with the title song, What is Your Hand in This?, composed by Tines himself and arranged by Baillett, It is very much a call-and-response gospel sermon that's probing in its simplicity. What is my hand in this? / While you listen to this song, / Will you try to right your wrong, asking, / What is my hand in this?

The program notes explain: "America's music at the founding of the country was the music of dissent. We celebrate this tradition." Early in the show Tines introduced The Liberty Song from 1770 by John Dickinson, which contains the lyrics: In Freedom we're born and in Freedom we'll live. / Our purses are ready. Steady, friends, steady. Not as slaves, but as Freemen our money we'll give.

The irony, Tines noted in his narration, is that Dickinson actually owned slaves when writing The Liberty Song. Attending this concert and watching the Bad Bunny Super Bowl event the following afternoon were similar, powerful cultural events. Without hammering obvious political points, both shows were profoundly political, complex, and hopeful, amazing feats while a racist madman currently steers our unsteady ship of state.

Tesla ICE Protest

The weekly anti-fascist protest continues from noon to two in front of the San Francisco Tesla showroom at the corner of Van Ness and O'Farrell.

The energy was supercharged at 12:15 this afternoon on account of the murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis by a federally employed ICE psychopath on Wednesday, January 7.

Just like the 2020 George Floyd murder by a Minneapolis policeman, Good's murder was captured on phone video by citizen bystanders.

Even more disturbing were the lies afterwards, served forth by the gargoyles of the Trump administration, which basically amounted to "Are you going to believe The Official Story or your own lying eyes?"

Their mendacity has crossed a line, and we will see how the backlash plays out.

One frightening detail that sticks in my mind was a quote from JD Vance crowing about the passage of the Big Beautiful Bill and that the most important item was the monstrously huge funding of ICE operations for the future.

It behooves all of us to show up to every protest and organizing event we can in an attempt to thwart these villains.

Civic Center Christmas Tree Lighting

A large crowd assembled in Civic Center this evening across from City Hall for the annual Christmas Tree lighting.

Free presents were promised for the first 500 kids...

...and the line for the giveaway literally stretched around the block.

The San Francisco Boys' Chorus sang Christmas carols from the small stage set up in front of the tree...

...while a contingent of tap dancing Christmas trees from Alameda arrived to perform after them.

The many children in the audience were well-behaved, though some of their parents looked to be at wits' end.

There was an amusing magician who made snow appear out of nowhere along with a musical combo...

...and a comedian emcee who was delightful interacting with kiddie volunteers, including Justin from the SF Boys Chorus above.

He eventually introduced the new San Francisco Mayor, Daniel Lurie...

...who then invited about two dozen other local dignitaries to the stage, including California Assemblyman Matt Haney and SF Fire Department Chief Dean Crispen.

Finally, after a communal countdown, the huge tree was lit for the year and a merry time was had by all.

San Francisco No Kings 2 March

We took the Muni underground to the Embarcadero station Saturday morning with thousands of others.

The plan was to meet up with friends at the monster naked lady statue.

The crowds were huge and from every demographic imaginable.

Earlier anti-fascist demonstrations in San Francisco have been skewing older, but this march up Market Street was filled with younger people.

Nobody seemed to be sure whether the starting time was supposed to be 1:30 or 2:00 PM. In any case, the march started late, and the crowds surging from behind made us claustrophobic enough that we took a detour through side streets to the front, passing a few bands and drum circles along the way.

The weather was warm and the community spirit was joyful.

Being part of this huge mass of humanity joining together in public rather than stewing away in horror at home was exhilarating.

There were a wide variety of inflatables marching down Market Street, and it seems only a matter of time that this mendacious administration demonizes them, just as they did with stories of furries invading children's classrooms demanding kitty litter.

The homemade signage and costumes were amazing...

...the T-shirts appropriately profane...

...and even gym queens were representing.

I have a number of friends who would not attend the march because they or their foreign-born spouses are currently dealing with visa and green card issues, and who knows if they're going to be tackled by ICE goons at immigration court?

If you have not seen the recently released Paul Thomas Anderson movie, One Battle After Another, I urge you to do so. Loosely based on a Thomas Pynchon novel about retired youthful leftist revolutionaries who are forced to jump back into the fray in middle age, it captures our current moment with bizarre prescience. The movie does so with juvenile, absurdist humor that almost matches the grotesque insanity unleashed by the lunatics currently in charge of the federal government.