When offered a month-long job in Redwood City, the first feeling was relief at being able to pay some bills, followed by dread at the two-hour commute each way from San Francisco on a mixture of Muni, Caltrain, and a shuttle bus. I also wondered how long into the month before Caltrain killed someone on the tracks during rush hour, an unfortunately regular occurrence. The answer turned out to be five days, as a northbound train hit a rental car on the tracks in Palo Alto Friday at 5PM, killing an elderly tourist who was waiting in a traffic jam (click here).
The northbound train we were waiting for was supposed to arrive at 5:29 in San Carlos, but after an incomprehensible announcement over loudspeakers and unreadable signs indicating "ALL TRAINS DELAYED," a group of passengers decided to try San Mateo's SamTrans bus system instead. After twenty minutes, a bus came by with Daly City BART Station as its final destination, and we proceeded to inch our way north on Camino Real, finally arriving at Millbrae's BART station over an hour later.
This was followed by another long wait until a 10-car BART train arrived, which took us to the San Francisco airport, where we waited for another twenty minutes. Finally, the damned BART train started on its journey and I arrived home in Civic Center, having traveled about thirty miles in three-and-a-half hours, all the while cursing Silicon Valley and its pathetic excuse for a public transportation system. The next time a public official natters on about being "transit first" and an environmentalist committed to getting cars off the road, I may just smack them.
Ten years ago, I shot anywhere from ten to two hundred digital photos of San Francisco and the wider world for 365 straight days. It was an attempt both to capture time and revolutionize photojournalism, back in the days before photoblogs and the practice of posting pictures of perfect strangers on the internet became ubiquitous. Not knowing what would be important to viewers in the future, I tried to capture a bit of everything, from the mundane to the sensational, and a major surprise was discovering how much of each day we flush from our brains each day. Editing the photos in Photoshop every evening before turning each day's collection into a PowerPoint presentation the next morning, the recurring thought was, "This all happened today?"
The year-long project started without any clue what the various storylines would be. A few of the narratives turned out to be the California energy crisis created by Enron, the collapse of the dot-com boom in the Bay Area, the increasing corruption of the financial services industry which I witnessed first-hand creating propaganda for Wells Fargo Bank, and the world before and after 9/11. There were also recurring characters who were friends, crazy people on the street, Muni bus riders, coworkers, and family. It turned out to be a very rich stew.
After finishing this ambitious project, I joined the public access TV station in San Francisco which had just opened a new studio at Market and Valencia Streets, and turned the 365 PowerPoint shows into 52 weekly, half-hour episodes that mirrored a year. This involved a good deal of editing, mostly pruning the text, and then scoring the shows with 365 different pieces of music which were half classical and half everything else under the sun. The title theme, a glorious trumpet fanfare from Britten's obscure opera "Gloriana," is the only recurring music and it's great fun. After its first showing, I spent the next year polishing the entire series and rebroadcast it in that revised, final form.
Ten years have passed since April 2001 to March 2002, so it seemed a good time to rebroadcast the series again. BAVC (the Bay Area Video Coalition) is now in charge of public access TV in San Francisco, and they are helping to export the old digital videotapes into more current formats.
The show started broadcasting with Episode 1 last week and a new episode will appear every Thursday at 7:30 PM on Channel 29 via Comcast cable in San Francisco. Check out our recently vanished world.
Update: For reasons unknown, the show wasn't broadcast tonight (Thursday). However, you can watch it streamed online from the BAVC site on your computer where it probably works better anyway. Click here for Episode 1. Click here for Episode 2.
The music of the 18th century Austrian composer Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) is some of the best company imaginable. The composer conveys a singular mixture of sanity and humor, two virtues that tend to go hand in hand, while still being endlessly inventive.
He was a gifted poor boy sent off for a musical education at the age of six, where he spent a lot of time starving. He then became a musical freelancer as a young man where he also spent a lot of time wondering where the next meal was coming from. This all changed when he became music director for Count Morzin in 1760, and then for the fabulously wealthy Esterhazy family where he spent the next thirty years in palaces out in the Austro-Hungarian provinces. As the Wikipedia entry puts it, "Isolated from other composers and trends in music until the later part of his long life, he was, as he put it, "forced to become original."
Upon the death of his patron Prince Nikolaus in 1790, Haydn had a fabulous late career for twenty years, writing music for rich Londoners who worshiped him as did a large public in Vienna. He wrote his final symphonies and string quartets, two forms he essentially invented in their modern form, along with two huge Handel style oratorios, "The Creation" and "The Seasons."
This last weekend, "The Creation" was performed by the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra led by the conductor Nicholas McGegan (above right) with eighteenth-century instruments and historically informed performance practices. The result was great. I heard this piece played by the San Francisco Symphony conducted by Helmuth Rilling ten years ago, and that performance was so ponderous and solemn I did not make it past Part One of Three.
Last Friday night at Herbst Theatre, the first of five performances around the Bay Area, was a wonderful antidote, filled with liveliness, humor and sheer beauty. I wasn't crazy about the sound of the soprano soloist above right, Dominique Labelle (a completely subjective opinion that wasn't shared by most), and thought baritone Philip Cutlip (above middle) was a little underpowered, but it didn't matter because they were more than adequate, and the orchestra and the chorus led by Bruce Lamott (above left) were superb.
Best of all, the tenor soloist Thomas Cooley above was sensationally good, and you could follow just about every English word he sang without looking at the program.
The oratorio, by the way, was written bilingually in English and German taken from big chunks of the King James Bible version of Genesis and Psalms, along with bits from Milton. We are given the Six Days In The Beginning and then Part Three is the sex and love music of Adam and Eve. As my friend Charlie above put it, "this sounds like pure Mozart Papageno/Papapagena from 'The Magic Flute'," an observation seconded by Axel Feldheim.
Again, according to the Wikipedia entry, "In 1760, with the security of a Kapellmeister position, Haydn married. His wife was the former Maria Anna Aloysia Apollonia Keller (1729–1800), the sister of Therese (b. 1733), with whom Haydn had previously been in love. Haydn and his wife had a completely unhappy marriage, from which the laws of the time permitted them no escape; and they produced no children. Both took lovers."
From the evidence of Part Three of "The Creation," not to mention the historical record, Haydn managed to enjoy himself sensually quite happily over a long life. You can hear it in the music.
