In a reversal of its usual route, the annual Juneteenth Parade assembled in the Civic Center on Saturday morning and made its way up McAllister Street to a weekend-long street festival on Fillmore between Eddy and Sutter.
At the invaluable Juneteenth website (click here), there is a fascinating history of the annual celebration which started in Texas in the 19th century, has waxed and waned in popularity, and now looks ready for a resurgence as the great American festival day celebrating the end of slavery in the United States.
According to their site:"Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration commemorating the ending of slavery in the United States. Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19th that the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. Note that this was two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation - which had become official January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation had little impact on Texans due to the minimal number of Union troops who could enforce the new Executive Order. However, with the surrender of General Lee in April of 1865, and the arrival of General Granger’s regiment, the forces were finally strong enough to influence and overcome the resistance."
"Later attempts to explain this two and a half year delay in the receipt of this important news have yielded several versions that have been handed down through the years. Often told is the story of a messenger who was murdered on his way to Texas with the news of freedom. Another is that the news was deliberately withheld by the enslavers to maintain the labor force on the plantations. And still another, is that federal troops actually waited for the slave owners to reap the benefits of one last cotton harvest before going to Texas to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation."
I played for a softball team in the 1990s with a gay black Texan coach, Fred, who hosted a huge Juneteenth party in his backyard in the Haight-Ashbury every year, the first I had heard of the holiday which is marked by barbeques, special foods, and all kinds of handed-down-through-the-generations rituals.
It's interesting to read the defensive comments from white people on the Juneteenth article at SFGate (click here), essentially claiming that racism and slavery are ancient history, but their defensiveness just proves the point that we haven't graduated quite yet. A weekend celebrating the end of slavery in the U.S. is something we should all be taking part in.
The parade itself consisted of mostly vintage cars, including the Corvette Club above.
There were also plenty of politicians running for office, like Bevan Dufty above for mayor...
...and Supervisor Mirkarimi for San Francisco Sheriff on a hipster vehicle...
...along with Supervisor John Avalos for mayor walking the streets.
In conjunction with their big Bali exhibition this summer, the Asian Art Museum has enlisted a host of Balinese artists and musicians to come to San Francisco for demonstrations and performances. For the first part of June, Jero Made Renten, I Nyoman Sudirman, and Garrett Kam were in the lobby every day creating cosmological figures for a traditional Balinese offering to the gods.
"So are you really creating a cosmos?" I asked them.
The reply from one of the old Balinese gentleman was very funny. "Not really. To create an offering to the gods, we'd be using rice and feathers and branches, but here we're using Playdough. And there would be a second offering next to it with animal sacrifices like a chicken or roast dog."
"Oh, you must do one with a roast dog," I told him. "It would freak out everyone in San Francisco."
Upstairs in the beautiful Samsung Hall, a gamelan group from Santa Cruz, California called Anak Swarsanti was giving a lecture/musical demonstration.
The questions from the small audience weren't very interesting and neither were the longwinded answers from the leader of the group, but the musical excerpts were fun.
Be sure to check out the Balinese guitarist I Wayan Balayan's appearance on Thursday evening, June 30th. He was a sensation at this year's Other Minds Music Festival, and the MATCHA party atmosphere should be perfect for him.
A very cool piece associated with the exhibit is the online Bali Temple Explorer, which is one of the best uses of interactive video ever seen on the internet. It allows you to wander around a Balinese village temple at your own pace, you can listen to narration or not, and it has a magical, Myst-like feeling. Click here to check it out.
The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble consists of a dozen Bay Area musicians (including cellist Leighton Fong above) who program concerts mixing together brand new and older pieces of classical music. "Viaggio Italiano," the final concert of their eighteenth season, included the 2009 Brion by Harold Meltzer, a world premiere by Luciano Chessa called Come un'infanzia, the 1946 cello solo by Luigi Dallapiccola, Ciaccona, Intermezzo e Adagio, and finally Boccherini's Quintet #4 for Guitar and Strings from 1798.
I had never heard the group before, except at an Other Minds Music Festival concert earlier this year, and part of the reason is that they perform in the Green Room, the second story space at the front of the Veterans Building which is a delightful setting for parties but has horrendous acoustics in its long, high-ceilinged space. In a nice surprise, the music at this Monday evening concert last week survived just fine, starting with Meltzer's Brion which was a sextet divided into two contrasting sounds: mandolin and guitar bouncing off of a piccolo/alto flute, violin, and violoncello quartet. Melzer seemed to run out of ideas by the end of the twenty-minute piece but his musical ruminations on a Venetian cemetery really does sound beautiful.
After the Dallapiccola cello solo, which was very serious and very sad, followed by a very jolly intermission with a smart, interesting audience that all seemed to know each other, we sat back down and realized there were no musicians onstage but there were five draped sheets surrounding us. The house lights came down, lights under the sheets came on, and Chessa's programmatic piece about the Peralta Hacienda Historical Park in the Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland began. The first Andante movement progressed with the musicians playing underneath the sheets and one by one coming out and joining each other onstage.
The Italian-born, Berkeley-based Chessa writes in the program:
"Learning about the Peralta Hacienda Historical Park was just plain fortuitous: when my friend Josh became the Peralta caretaker, that's when I got my first tour of the Park [the photo above is of Peralta House volunteer Ben]...I could not have conceived a piece about origins without looking at my own...Half a meditation on history and half a gentle utopia, Come un'infanzia is a piece on Oakland's infancy, on my infancy, on infancy period."
The theatrical ending of the utterly charming quintet had each of the performers kneel down on the floor and unwrap a piece of cellophane while their compatriots continued playing their instruments. The five cellophane wrappers each held a large spinning top, and the piece ended with the performers playing the five tops together with an amusing range of dynamics that slowly diminished to a final spinning toy.
There was a free repeat performance of the Chessa and Boccherini pieces last Saturday at the Peralta Hacienda Historical Park itself, and I hope they went as well as the Green Room concert.
"Assassins," the dark 1990 Stephen Sondheim/John Weidman musical about Americans who shoot guns at Presidents, is in the middle of a month-long run at the Eureka Theatre in the Embarcadero Center. It's being performed by the San Francisco troupe, Ray of Light Theatre, who successfully produced the ambitious Jerry Springer: The Opera last year at the Victoria Theatre.
The production, musical forces and singing cast (including Alex Rodriguez above as attempted FDR assassin Giuseppe Zangara) are all excellent, and I particularly liked Greg Sottolano (below middle), who was alternately funny, sweet, lunatic and sinister as President McKinley assassin Charles Guiteau.
My problem with the show was the material, which strives to be an important commentary on the American political condition, but delivers instead a glib overview of presidential assassins as American celebrity wannabes. There's a lot more to these people's stories than a collection of grotesque, humorous tics and the vaudeville treatment comes across as unearned cynicism.
Then there's the little matter of amplification, where I have to join Janos Gereben and Lisa Hirsch, both of whom loved the show but decried the sound. Ray of Light is a young group who probably feel musicals should be electrically enhanced because that's what they have heard all their lives, but the Eureka Theatre is way too small to require it. The good singers and small musical ensemble would have been perfectly audible without the ubiquitous little microphones on the side of everyone's faces, and the good performances would have benefited from less intrusive sound.
