This weekend we are blessedly free of the noisy flying death machines known as The Blue Angels, the weather is perfect, and there are amusing free activities galore.
The week-long Litquake Festival is winding down tonight with its annual crawl around the inner Mission District, with two of my favorite bloggy people, Beth Spotswood and Julie Michelle, holding court on Clarion Alley at 6PM this Saturday evening (click here). At the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park on Sunday there will be free chamber music from a whole host of local music organizations (click here for more info). Enjoy.
A fundraiser was held at Buck's Tavern on Thursday evening to raise money to get the word out about the perniciousness of Propositions E and F. (Pictured above is Bob Planthold.)
There is a lot of garbage on the San Francisco ballot this November 8th, and I am not referring to the candidates running for everything from Mayor to Sheriff. Two of the more egregious propositions are E, which would allow the Board of Supervisors to tinker with any voter-passed legislation if they decided they didn't care for it, and F, which would allow the oxymoronic Ethics Commission make up their own rules about lobbyist registration.
Aaron Peskin above and the San Francisco Democratic Party have both come out against the measures, while the San Francisco Chronicle predictably endorsed both. Possibly the best explanation of why Proposition E is so dangerous came in a letter to the Editor at the San Francisco Examiner from Richard Reidy. Here it is in full:
"Supervisor Scott Wiener has placed on the November ballot Proposition E, which would enable the Board of Supervisors and mayor to modify or rescind any future voter-approved legislation — such as the rent-control ordinances and every other voter-approved ballot measure that might be approved by San Francisco voters.
If this measure passes, it will open the door to an eventual vulnerability for all existing ballot initiatives as well. It’s a real Trojan horse — once in the gates, the damage begins. Wiener’s initiative does not show trust in the voters. His excuse for Prop. E is that we, the poor misguided public, may be confused by too many complex ballot measures. Such thinking insults voters who do make the effort to understand ballot measures. It should not be up to the supes to overturn the will of San Francisco voters, or to amend voter-approved propositions."
Larry Bush above, a former aide in the Art Agnos administration, has started a website called CitiReport (click here) that features the best political writing in San Francisco, partly because Mr. Bush understands how the local kleptocracy actually works. His explanation of how John St. Croix and his Ethics Commission buries all inquiries was funny and depressing.
"They are required to put financial filing information online, but they have decided what that means is they put the information into digital form and if you want it, you have to come down to their offices and pick up a disc. It's crazy."
Last week's San Francisco Symphony concert was highlighted by the British composer Edward Elgar's First Symphony from 1908, in a beautiful, committed performance led by the young Russian conductor Vasily Petrenko. (The sculpture in front of Davies Hall above is by another great British artist from a poor family, Henry Moore, who was ten years old when the First Symphony premiered.)
The concerts were being promoted as a showcase for the American violinist Joshua Bell, but the short Meditation by Tchaikovsky and the 1904 Violin Concerto by Glazunov both sounded like elevator music.
I asked my music lover friend Jack Murray in Santa Barbara if he was a fan of Joshua Bell, and he replied, "I would be if he played anything I wanted to listen to, but he usually comes through town playing something like the Mendelshohn Violin Concerto. And Glazunov? We used to have a classical music radio station down here that I called All-Glazunov-All-The-Time. It put you into a coma."
The 35-year-old Vasily Petrenko (above, conducting the Shostakovich Eighth with the San Francisco Symphony last year) managed to make the concert special, with an opening "Festival Overture" from 1954 by Shostakovich that reveled in the bombastic paean to the October Revolution. It was as fun and well performed as when the legendary Mstislav Rostropovich conducted it with the Symphony in 2006, which is saying something.
Elgar's ambitious, hour-long First Symphony after intermission was a revelation, sounding as if the composer of "Pomp and Circumstance" was taking Mahler as his model. The long, twisty first movement, the grotesque scherzo, the heavenly adagio, and the crazy, semi-resolved final movement all were reminiscent of the Viennese Gustav while never sounding like anything other than the very British Elgar. The final Sunday matinee performance was sensational and made me look forward to hearing the piece again.
