A cacophonous protest started in front of the San Francisco School District building...
...on the corner of Franklin and McAllister at about 6:30 PM on Monday the 23rd.
The group of about 200 students were objecting to a proposal at that evening's Board of Education meeting...
...that would ban the Junior ROTC from the San Francisco School District by the end of the 2006-07 year.
The reason for this action was not to protect students from being dragooned into Iraq and wherever else the United States empire happened to be invading...
...but to take a stand against the military's discriminatory "don't ask, don't tell" policy.
This strikes me as ridiculous grandstanding on the part of the Board.
The junior ROTC, in my experience, has always been for the geeky and nerdy, and it allows them to be part of a group, to have uniforms, and to accomplish things together with discipline.
In San Francisco, it also seems to be predominantly populated with Asian kids, which came as a surprise.
Next door on Franklin Street, another young group filled with discipline and pretty costumes was just getting finished with a parents' recital at the San Francisco Ballet School.
This group seemed to be a bit paler and more prosperous than their protesting neighbors next door, but in essence they were the same.
They were a shared interest group filled with disciplined youngsters, outrageous costumes, and group activity.
As long as it's the kids themselves who want to go to ballet school or the junior ROTC, rather than their parents forcing them into something for their own reasons, leave them be.
In 2004, the San Francisco Opera produced a fine version of "Billy Budd," an opera from the 1950s composed by Benjamin Britten with a libretto by E.M. Forster that includes the phrase "beauty, handsomeness, goodness" being addressed to the angelic Billy by the demonic Claggart.
I was among a couple of dozen supernumeraries (who are simply non-singing extras in opera-land), and we were referred to throughout rehearsals by the staging staff as "Super Seamen," which gave us a few giggles. I couldn't resist the opportunity to design a T-shirt based on the double entendre, though it takes some courage to wear it. However, today is my birthday, and it seemed a perfect time to sport the thing.
When I was learning to read at about age 6, the only story that stuck with me as an actual story was about a boy who couldn't decide what he wanted to be when he grew up. He longed to own a grocery store like his father but he also wanted to be a fireman like the guys down the city block. The entire tale was about his despair in trying to make a decision.
He finally became a grocer like his father, married and had children, but was still vaguely dissatisfied. At the end of the tale, he moved to the country and opened a grocery store there, and guess what also happened. The small town had a volunteer fire department.
I'm not sure why this "you can have your cake and eat it too" story resonated so strongly with me, but I realized today that I'm actually living the tale for real. Trying to make a living as a performer/artist is a brutal business, which only the truly lucky and gifted do well, but I get to be an amateur actor on a great stage. Journalism as a profession doesn't strike me as all that appealing, with editors and owners shaping one's stories, and not even being able to write one's own headlines or pick one's own photos.
Thanks to this photoblog, I get to be a "citizen journalist," and it's immensely fulfilling. Since I honestly believed at this time last year that I would not be alive to to see 2006, time has become so rich it's amazing. Now that I know my chances of living for quite a few more birthdays is real, there's an extra seasoning to each day too.
Katherine Braziatis, above, was a great, beloved supernumerary at the opera for many years. She battled breast cancer a few years back and won, and then drove head-on into a huge truck in her hometown of Ada, Oklahoma last week, which killed her instantly. Though I don't need any more reminders to treasure each day, this was yet another wake-up call. "La Forza del Destino" is more than just a great Verdi opera.
At noon on Thursday the 18th, a full-fledged photo-op was underway in Civic Center Plaza.
Even Frank Chiu, the legendary schizophrenic who can smell unexposed video from 5,000 feet, was in attendance.
The event was to announce a pilot program using biodiesel fuel in a few neighborhoods...
...in a few fire engines and emergency vehicles.
This was one of the most aggressively obvious television photo-ops I've ever seen.
The tiny crowd listening to the speakers could barely understand a word, because the microphone was strictly for show, and the sound went straight into the video cameras' feed.
The odd Pat Murphy of sentinel.com, a local political site, stood watching and taking notes throughout the entire affair, but he ended up just printing the Mayor's Office press release rather than writing an article pointing out the hypocrisy of the moment.
Though nobody was mentioning the subject at this tightly managed affair, the elephant in the room was Gavin Newsom's recent stabbing in the back of the Bicycle Coalition who had been working on "Healthy Saturdays" for years.
This was an attempt to close a small section of the 60-foot-wide roadway named after JFK in Golden Gate Park on Saturdays, and after Supervisor McGoldrick passed legislation in the Board of Supervisors to make a trial run at this, Newsom vetoed it principally because the major donors of the new de Young Museum had a hissy fit, and above all these are the people who he represents.
This made for a difficult photo-op earlier in the morning, which happened to be Ride Your Bike to Work Day.
It seemed that Gavin rode his bike to City Hall from home on Thursday, and then posed in front of City Hall with a large group, including various local politicians who had biked to work and members from the Bicycle Coalition.
According to a bike guru I met who was at the event, the female head of the Bicycle Colation proceeded to tell him in public how unhappy she was with the veto.
She was followed by Supervisor McGoldrick who was polite until he wandered onto the subject of "Healthy Saturdays" himself.
He was followed by Supervisor Chris Daly who just said into the microphone "Healthy Saturdays," the name of the park road closure initiative, and he left it that.
The biodiesel fuel photo-op was marred only by the gentleman above who twice walked by the small, assembled crowd and in a rich, resonant voice yelled "Politicians Lie...And Then People Die! Politicians Lie...And Then People Die!"
A large bodyguard chased him off so that other politicians could mouth platitudes for the video cameras.
Gavin Newsom has been groomed for some time to be the charismatic new figurehead for the rich gangsters who run the Democratic Party. If you don't believe me, click here to get to a Huffington Post essay proposing Gavin for President with Gore as Vice-President, I kid you not.
All praise to those environmentalists who have been working for years to make municipal fuel cleaner and less polluting...
...but Gavin's crowing and taking of credit for any of this was frankly disgusting.
He's as empty as they come.
A motley, multiethnic crew was setting up shop for a demonstration in front of San Francisco City Hall around 1PM on Monday the 15th.
The thinly attended event had lots of signage...
...in its attempt to protest government cuts in housing for people with AIDS.
They were also objecting to people with AIDS being evicted, which struck me as a bit narrow in focus.
Who cares if it's somebody with AIDS that is evicted by a greedy landlord? It's just as miserable being evicted when elderly with dementia, with bad diabetes, with serious depression, or a whole host of other maladies.
Across the street, another demonstration filled with cute young white people was just finishing. It was an amalgamation of the Sierra Club and a whole host of other environmental organizations, along with grandstanding local politicians, who were demonstrating for "Clean Energy."
Again, the focus struck me as ridiculously narrow, and strictly for show, since the supposedly enlightened and liberal San Francisco can't even close down a half-mile section of roadway in Golden Gate Park on a full rather than half-weekend basis.
Legislation by the Board of Supervisors, a timid six-month "trial period," with obscene concessions to Supervisor Alioto-Piers wielding her Disabled Placard, was vetoed by the supposedly liberal Mayor Gavin Newsom later the same day.
Two of the best thinkers and clear, popular economic writers of the 20th century just died within a week of each other a couple of weeks ago. John Kenneth Galbraith was a Canadian who moved to America in the 1930s, and Jacobs was a New Yorker who moved to Toronto in the 1970s (she had a draft-age son). I've read a half dozen books by Galbraith and they were all wonderful, but I'd never checked out Jacobs. However, the quotes from some of the best obituaries made me want to literally check her out at the library.
She came to fame as the woman who stopped the infamous Robert Moses from putting a freeway through Greenwich Village and then writing the seminal book decrying "urban redevelopment" in a book from the early 1960s called "The Death and Life of Great American Cities."
I've been reading her last book called "Dark Age Ahead," published in 2004, and though it's as chilling as the title implies, it's also brilliant and mind-bending. Here's a quote:
"One can drive today for miles through American suburbs and never glimpse a human being on foot in a public space, a human being outside a car or truck. I have experienced this in suburban Virginia, California, and Massachusetts, as well as suburban Toronto. This is a visible sign that much of North America has become bereft of communities. For communities to exist, people must encounter one another in person. These encounters must include more than best friends or colleagues at work. They must include diverse people who share the neighborhood, and often enough share its needs."...
"Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities. Highways and roads obliterate the places they are supposed to serve as, for example, highways feeding the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge wiped out most of the formerly large Bay Ridge community in Brooklyn...Other forces, acting in concert with automobile culture, have also been pervasive. Along came sterile housing tracts set in isolating culs-de-sac, and shopping centers whose only ties to localities were the dollars of local consumers. These, often enough, erased community hearts and landmarks, as if to make sure that marooned vestiges of what had been lost were also lost."
