Certain music that is beautiful and unchallenging goes well with the whole process of morning and waking up slowly. First on my list would be any of the dozens of Haydn string quartets. Most opera is too heavy for that time of day, but there are exceptions, such as Klemperer's all-star version of "The Magic Flute" (Gedda, Janowitz, Berry, Popp) with all the dumb dialogue taken out. Another recording I've been playing for years is Bizet's 1863 opera, "The Pearl Fishers."
I'd never bothered reading the libretto so I was clueless what anybody was singing about, and according to conventional opinion, it didn't matter. There are two Top 10 pieces of music in the score, the baritone-tenor duet that is only rivaled by Verdi in "Don Carlo" and a soft, tender tenor aria at the end of Act I that is unlike anything else in opera. Since the early-to-die Bizet really was one of the Gifted Ones, the rest of the score is also interesting and has great charm.
This was the first time for "The Pearl Fishers" at the San Francisco Opera, in a production borrowed from the San Diego Opera, with costumes and sets designed by the infamous British fashion designer Zandra Rhodes, who as you can see is not afraid of color.
After the monochromatic production of "Queen of Spades" last week, this psychedelic version of Orientalia was a complete tonic. The libretto, set in a 19th-century French fantasy of Ceylon, was pretty silly but we've all seen sillier (Massenet's "Herodiade" anyone?). What was so refreshing about the staging in this production, however, is that they resisted camping it up and played the story straight. It worked.
Even the ballet, which in operas are reliably dreadful, wasn't as bad as usual. The chorus was wonderful and not asked to do too many ridiculous things, and the principal singers were all fine, with one exception, the young tenor Charles Castronovo, who was simply awesome. Not only did he sing the entire opera with his shirt off, winning the Operatic Hunky Hairy Chest Award for the season, but his voice was perfect for this music: youthful, sweet and ardent.
My only complaint with the staging was the telescoping of Acts I and II of the three-act opera without an intermission.
Ninety minutes is too long to go without a break, particularly with this music. It's not the punishing Wagner after all. Not only were the standees getting a little tired and cranky but the Sunday matinee audience is predominantly elderly women who often need to take a pee. Cut them some slack.
There are two more performances of "The Pearl Fishers" this week, but they're sold out. Try standing room or one of the scalpers on the front steps if you're interested.
The Asian Art Museum has a special exhibit called "Tibet: Treasures from the Roof of the World." Ethnic Tibetans are not particularly amused by the exhibit since it's been assembled by the Republic of China with "stolen" items, which I wrote about here.
I started the tour by saying hello to Marlena in the cute museum cafe.
To get to the permanent collection, there is a large glass-enclosed escalator.
It's quite beautiful, but unfortunately it looks out on nothing more than the ugly Hastings College and the roof of the museum.
The museum should at least put a Japanese rock garden on the roof to give the escalator ride some visual interest.
At the beginning of the permanent collection, there is an amusing bit of signage, which states that there is no such thing as "Asia," which is a Western construct.
They explained that the collection was divided into a number of geographical groups, which are differentiated by different color schemes on their walls. It starts with India, goes to Southeast Asia (Thailand, the Philippines, etc.), and then travels to the Himalayas which is painted in a deep, terra red.
Tibetan art is not all pacific Buddhas.
In fact, there are a lot of demons involved.
My favorite commentary on the labels around the art tell us what they symbolize, and somehow it's never quite what's right in front of your eyes, as in "having sex."
I returned to the first floor for the special exhibit.
The three rooms of "treasures" really are extraordinary.
According to a catalogue, "Tibet's dry climate has preserved the brilliant colors of these tapestries to an astonishing degree."
They're not kidding. These 300-year-old pieces look like they were created yesterday.
The statues are wild...
...and so are the various "objets" like this huge horn and its skeleton holders.
Check it out.
The sumptuous chambers in City Hall where the Board of Supervisors hold their meetings has one huge drawback. Even though everyone is talking into microphones, the sound goes straight up into the high-ceilinged chamber and the audience can't hear a darn thing that isn't mush.
So if you actually want to hear the details of a meeting, it's best to go home and turn the dial to Channel 26, the home of San Francisco Government TV. It's the municipal version of C-Span, offering live meetings without any commentary.
At first glance, the meetings are numbingly boring and painful to watch, but once you get to know the players and fall into the jerky, slow rhythm of a legislative session, it becomes truly fascinating.
The Budget and Finance Committee hearings over the last couple of weeks, where each city department tries to justify their expenses, and then usually pleads for more money, has been a real primer in how government actually works. Supervisor Tom Ammiano, the gay, leftist supervisor who is chair of the committee, has been really impressive keeping the three-ring circus in motion, and he's been around long enough not to put up with a lot of the usual mendacity. He's joined on the committee by the great leftist Ross Mirkarimi, the seemingly senile Jake McGoldrick whose voting patterns are getting more reactionary every day, and the two Gavin Newsom allies, Sean Elsbernd and Fiona Ma who can be counted on to be as politically self-serving as possible.
Having all this on television is actually quite revolutionary, since it becomes so obvious who the old-fashioned sleaze characters are and who are the people trying to actually change things for the better.
In the category of incompetent, nepotistic, old-fashioned San Franciscans, there's probably no better example than Annemarie Conroy, who was appointed years ago to be a truly terrible Supervisor, then put in charge of Treasure Island scams during Willie Brown's corrupt reign as mayor, and is now in charge of "Emergency Services," the group who couldn't even get out a tsunami warning a couple of weeks ago though they have many millions of dollars in their budget.
Speaking of sleaze, there is some breaking news on the internet about the identity of the White House officials who outed the CIA agent, Valerie Plame, during the runup to war in Iraq. It seems that it was none other than Prince of Darkness Karl Rove, who is about to go down hard. Click here for a link to the news.
And by the way, this latest unraveling of the thread of Bushco corruption was predicted by the great Gore Vidal back in 2003 in an interview with Marc Cooper of the LA Weekly.
Cooper: Yet you saw in the '60s how the Johnson administration collapsed under the weight of its own hubris. Likewise with Nixon. And now with the discontent over how the war in Iraq is playing out, don't you get the impression that Bush is headed for the same fate?
Vidal: I actually see something smaller tripping him up: this business over outing the wife of Ambassador Wilson as a CIA agent. It's often these small things that get you. Something small enough for a court to get its teeth into. Putting this woman at risk because of anger over what her husband has done is bitchy, dangerous to the nation, dangerous to other CIA agents. This resonates more than Iraq. I'm afraid that 90 percent of Americans don't know where Iraq is and never will know, and they don't care.
To read the whole interview, which is prescient in all kinds of ways, click here.
As someone who has never been able to wrap my brain around the proper usages of "who" and "whom," no matter how many dozens of times it has been explained to me, I have some sympathy for the many writers on the internet who fall into the it's-its conundrum.
Here's a word of advice. If you find yourself hopelessly confused on the issue, then just don't ever use an apostrophe with "its" ever again. If you mean "it is," then just write "it is" rather than "it's," which is the proper contraction. If you are using "its" as a possessive, as in "its beauty and its craftsmanship," it also doesn't have an apostrophe. There. Problem solved.
Still, it is amazing that the signage which has been displayed all over San Francisco's City Hall for the last month has the "it's" mistake on every last piece of glossy, expensively printed material. And nobody caught it. At the Mayor's Office of Neighborhood Services, which sponsored the art event, I asked if anybody had pointed out the boo-boo and was told no.
The signage was directing people to the top floor of City Hall where there was an art show that was put up in concert with the "World Environment Week" festivities at the beginning of June.
The exhibit featured sculptural art from a show in Hamburg, Germany where all the pieces were constructed from "recycled" materials.
Some of the pieces were quite beautiful.
Others were what I would call Tormented Teutonic.
A chair made out of used books was wonderful.
Possibly the most amusing piece was a deconstructed bathroom sitting on the floor surrounded by the Beaux Arts splendor of City Hall. It brought to mind all kinds of metaphors but I think I'll leave that one alone.
The show isn't (is not) going to be up much longer, so check it out soon.
