The famous food writer Anthony Bourdain had a book signing last week during lunchtime at A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books on Van Ness.
The back room, where Bourdain did a short reading and then answered questions, was packed to the gills, with lots of student chefs from the nearby California Culinary Academy in attendance.
Bill Selby, above, is a total fan and credits Bourdain with transforming him from a lifelong scared, picky eater into someone who will put just about anything into into his mouth.
One of the many fans in the room waiting to get their book signed was none other than San Francisco Supervisor Tom Ammiano, the old friend and protege of the martyred Harvey Milk.
On Friday evening, there was an art opening in City Hall that was much more downscale than the corporate event being set up in the rotunda for a corporate party later that night.
It was one of District 5 Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi's monthly "art" events held in his City Hall offices.
This month featured an exhibition devoted to Harvey Milk memorabilia.
Though I didn't see Supervisor Ammiano at the event, there were certainly a lot of political stalwarts attending such as Marc Powell and Jane Morrison...
...along with political aides from Supervisor Chris Daly's office...
The exhibit itself was fairly pathetic, but it did remind me of what was so radical about Harvey.
What people don't remember is that his being a hippie probably scared off more voters than his being an open homosexual.
When he was first running for office, and losing, and having great losing night election parties that were usually hosted by the infamous marijuana activist Dennis Peron, he was quite defiantly a leftist hippie fag.
By the time district elections of San Francisco supervisors arrived in the late 1970s (for the first time, before their repeal and subsequent reinstatement), Harvey was prevailed upon to cut his hair. Because the district had been carved almost deliberately to have a "gay" seat, the competition was odd and fierce. One of his major opponents was a conservative gay real estate speculator named Rick Stokes who argued that Harvey was a terrible example of a "respectable" homosexual.
Milk won that election, passed the pooper scooper law for dogs, and was soon shot by fellow Supervisor Dan White, turning into a handy martyr for the gay civil rights movement which was just starting to explode all over the world.
Now that he's an Official Martyr, he is the subject of movies, television programs, an opera, books, and god knows what else.
I remember him simply as a good person, who liked to drink, was funny, gave great impromptu speeches and who didn't live long enough to become a sleazy politico which seems to be the fate that befalls most of his colleagues in the end.
Postings have been light here and will probably continue to be so for another week while I work as a lackey to the rich.
Not literally, but in a sense all working class folk are lackeys to the ownership class.
Or as John Lennon once sang, "you're [we're] all fucking peasants as far as I can see."
This is the way it's always been in our particular Western culture, and it probably always will be.
People have been trying to change the situation to a more equitable and civilized status for centuries...
...but though the players have changed, the structure has remained the same.
Along with working too hard lately for paying clients (who in truth are somewhere in the middle of the food chain), I have also been impersonating an 18th-century lackey in Sevilla, Spain for a production of Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro" at the San Francisco Opera.
The production opened last Saturday and has about another 8 performances over the course of June.
The young cast is sexy and in good voice, the direction by John Copley seems to be amusing the audience no end, and the music is possibly Mozart's best.
Or, as Pauline Kael once wrote in the context of a particular Buster Keaton movie, "arguably Mozart's finest, but amongst the Mozart riches who can be sure?"
The peace vigil in front of the Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue continues and so does the hideous occupation of Iraq by American, British and a dwindling number of other troops from around the world.
This weekly hour-long vigil, which meets every Thursday from noon to 1PM, started during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and horrible events just keep overtaking that defining moment.
After the vigil, a loose group of individuals from different religious groups at the vigil share a cheap lunch at a neighborhood Vietnamese greasy spoon on Golden Gate Avenue, headed by the spiritual father of the group, Markley Morris above.
What's probably most delightful about the group is how individual each person is. Instead of groupthink, which is what the vigil represents in some respects, everybody seems to have their own opinion about everything which is delightful.
On Friday afternoons, from 1 to 3 pm, the local political polemicist h. brown holds an invitation-only political salon at a South of Market burrito parlor.
Anywhere from two to thirty people show up on any given Friday, and it's usually a very lively crowd.
Though the group is almost monolithically "progressive" in their politics, they also think very much for themselves and the arguments can get quite heated and very funny.
h. brown is retiring from the fray in San Francisco in the fall to go live at some hippie hot springs up north where he can write his novel about all the ghosts of dead friends who need to see the light of day through his imagination.
Before doing so, however, he's decided to dedicate his life to getting Krissy Keefer, who is part of this crowd, elected to Congress as the Green candidate against Nancy Pelosi this November.
Click here to check out her website.
Whether you're on the left or the right of the political spectrum, what a treat it would be to see the last of Nancy Pelosi who stands for nothing but enablement and accommodation for the worst tendencies of our new corporate state.
Yesterday, Congresswoman Pelosi tried to harness the power of the blogs and wrote an idiotic piece of pablum on the Huffington Post entitled, "Zarqawi's Death Should Be a Call for Debate on Iraq Policy."
As a number of commentators pointed out, her words rang a bit hollow after having voted for every appropriation ever proposed for the Iraq adventure, not to mention her "let's bomb Iran speech" in front of the Israeli lobbying group AIPAC recently. Click here to read Pelosi's post and the wildly derisive comments from all over the political spectrum.
Krissy Keefer from the Green Party would make for a nice change.
On 6/6/6, which in California at least was Satan's Election Day, the San Francisco Opera presented its second of six performances of Tchaikovsky's early Grand Opera, "The Maid of Orleans."
The Kosman review in the San Francisco Chronicle had warned that the production was "dull and misguided," and though he's right, I thoroughly enjoyed the evening.
The raised stage floor with a couple of moving pillars worked fine for the second half of the opera, where the story is hopping from battlefield to cathedral to village square, but the first act really needed a serious forest and the second act needed a serious palace to even begin to work dramatically.
A couple of dancers/supers with a map just didn't cut it. Plus, having the chorus sit on their behinds onstage for the entire opera doesn't make for a lot of dramatic excitement for anyone.
The first two acts are well-constructed, in a sort of "Don Carlo" lots-of-major-characters with political and ethical problems kind of way, but the last two acts are wildly ridiculous. Act Three starts with a battle where Joan of Arc falls in love with the knight Lionel, who has been pinned to the ground by her sword. Of course he falls back in love immediately, and God is not amused.
The reason to catch one of the last performances is that musically, there's hardly a weak link in the entire cast, Runnicles the conductor seems like a genuine Russian madman, and Dolora Zajick has a blast with the wildly ambitious role.
And I sort of like the idea of Joan of Arc having a boyfriend and burning at the stake a la "Norma" for him. It shows human feeling.
