Labor Day Weekend in Civic Center was all about putting up temporary structures.
There was a Will Smith vehicle, "The Pursuit of Happyness," being filmed at City Hall on Sunday, and it included lighting cranes beaming in the perfect light for an interior scene.
I didn't see this happening, but the description reminded me of how frigging stupid, hidebound and almost Kabuki-like in its traditions Hollywood filmmaking can be.
Did they learn nothing from Vilmos Zsigmond in the 1970s and his use of natural light? Why the hell do we need this mixture of reality (a City Hall office) and complete unreality (the lighting from outside cranes). Use a frigging virtual set. George Lucas does. Otherwise, go with capturing reality.
When I was extremely poor (very recently, in fact) and there were no jobs of any sort to be had in San Francisco, I did anything that paid me money, and that included being an extra on a couple of commercials and one movie.
It's interesting for a while, but then the day gets very grueling, very stupid, and you wonder how little your life and your time is worth as you and everyone around you are treated as cattle.
Albert Malkin, my fellow friar from "La Forza del Destino" at the San Francisco Opera, has been an 80's capitalist pig extra in the Financial District over the last week for "The Pursuit of Happyness." You can get his account here.
Being an extra at the opera is much more fulfilling. They also treat you like cattle, but it's INTERESTING.
Every year at about this time, there is the September Springing of the Tents for Rich People's Cultural Openings.
What's annoying is that the opera, whose opening is this Friday, commandeers the sidewalk across the street from my apartment for an entire week.
However, I just ignore the signage and walk where I please.
The Spanish-speaking tent builders certainly could care less.
Across the street from the Opera House there is ANOTHER large white tent.
This is for the opening concert of the San Francisco Symphony this Wednesday.
The Opera had the upper social hand for decades over the symphony crowd, which didn't even play when the opera season was going, but there was a crucial social readjustment 25 years ago when Davies Symphony Hall opened and the Symphony left the opera house it had shared for decades.
Some socialite obviously went to war with another socialite over their respective openings, and for years all of San Francisco society has lived with the absurdity of going to TWO expensive, society openings within three days if they want to be taken seriously. If anybody knows the real history, I'd be fascinated to hear it.
The insides of the tents are sort of ghastly, at least in my experience, with sort of mildewy smells mixed with catering dishes filled with rich food, and grotesque Stanlee Gatti designer creations stressing overconsumption, and scary society women who are mostly blonde second wives mixed in with the truly scary rich old buzzards who have survived their wealthy spouses who are usually accompanied by their mostly gay male "walkers." All of this takes place over upholstered plywood on an ugly tar parking lot.
The great temporary structure in the neighborhood is still David Best's "Burning Man" pagoda/temple in the Hayes Valley, which I wrote about in my very first posting here.
And though I hate to link to the hideous San Francisco Chronicle, they have a great cartoonist named Don Asmussen (the "Bad Reporter") who did a week-long "Burning Man" set of comics that are brilliant. He starts off as the perfect prude, and ends by calling his pants a "two-legged crotch burka." Click here to see them.
I have nothing to say about the New Orleans disaster and the outrageous Federal non-response that hasn't already been said. I tried watching the cable news on one of the evenings when the levees were just starting to break, but I found most of the anchors disgusting and their overwhelming excitement about "looters" to be poisonous.
So I started to get all my information from the blogosphere, as it's called, and the best place, bar none, from day one of the hurricane has been a blog called AMERICAblog: Because America Deserves The Truth! It's run by a writer/policy wonk out of Washington, D.C. named John Avarosis, a young, gay Greek-American originally from Chicago who has worked as a policy consultant for Madeline Albright, among other people.
He's been writing "Where the hell is George?" from day one of the hurricane, and posting more pertinent information than you can imagine. The only drawback with his site is that it's gotten TOO popular and the once-fascinating "Comments" sections underneath each of his posts have gotten too full and too dull. Click here to get to the site.
I'm a little reluctant to recommend the above site, "Rigorous Intuition," because frankly it's so terrifying. Written by a "cautiously pessimistic Canadian novelist and satirist" named Jeff Wells, the brilliant site is pretty much conspiracy theory central except that it's written with such low-key, classically Canadian restraint that you can forget that he's writing about George Bush Senior as a pedophile with satanic connections and then offering fairly rigorous proof of this little historical byway. Here's the first three paragraphs of his latest rumination on New Orleans:
I don't know what hurts more, my heart or my head.
How is it that one of America's great cities ceased to exist this week, but I can still watch Letterman tonight?
What do I do with this knowledge: there are more than a million internal refugees and estimates of 100,000 dead, and yet the Pentagon is "hurt" that the media is siding more with victims than federal authorities?
Read this site with great care. Though it's also getting a bit too popular, most of the commenters heed Mr. Wells' civilized style and write about outrageous things without getting too ugly and/or crazy. In fact, one of my favorite takes on the payback the Bush Cabal can be expecting was written by someone named "starroute":
The deaths of the innocent don't necessarily work to the advantage of their executioners.
I posted something the other day at the ezboard (though the last I looked, nobody had commented on it), suggesting that the the spiritual power of all the soldiers who have died in Iraq is being channeled through Cindy Sheehan -- and that this is what the magical/symbolic arm-wrestling over the field of crosses has been about.
The ghosts of New Orleans are notoriously uncontrollable. I see no reason why Bush/Cheney should expect to get any real advantage out of them.
Click here to get to this amazing, paranoid site that unfortunately makes as much sense as anything else right now.
In front of the Main Civic Center branch of the San Francisco Public Library today, there was a used book sale in progress.
For future reference, it happens from 11AM to 2PM on the first Friday of every month from April to October, meaning next month will be the last one this year.
It is put on by Friends of the Public Library...
...a group that is regularly vilified at the beginning of the public comments section at each Board of Supervisors meeting.
The guy going after them is tall, appears to be in his 60s, and is astonishingly articulate, but once you've seen him enough times on Channel 26, you realize he's a monomaniac.
The next big event for "The Friends" will be their annual monster used book sale at Fort Mason, a famous event that has always sounded a bit like the city of Boston's department store, Filene's, with its famous basement where women were known to tear clothing out of each other's arms in order to get the best bargain.
This event, which I just happened to stumble across, was petite and charming.
The best part was watching the book lovers just sitting down on the concrete...
...and perusing their possible purchases.
The prices, by the way, were $1 for a hardback, $.50 for a paperback which is essentially giving them away.
Most of the stuff they were selling was junk, though I was tempted to buy "How To Get Pregnant" just because I liked the title.
Still, there were a few treasures among the dross, and there were quite a few different sections from cookbooks to sci-fi...
...along with fiction and broken-up sets of classics.
The most interesting section actually looked like the three boxes full of comic books, or "graphic novels" as they were calling them. I asked the blonde French boy who was avidly going through the stacks whether he'd seen any Asterix and he quickly told me no, but gave me a big smile because I'd even heard of Asterix. (Thanks, Ellen and Pedro.)
I did manage to snag a treasure, a hardback copy of Italy's great classic historical novel, "I Promessi Sposi" or "The Betrothed" as it's called in English. Written in the 1820's by Alessandro Manzoni, for whom Verdi eventually wrote his requiem, it's a 600-page historical novel about Milan and environs during the year 1630, which ends with the plague hitting the city and the population going from 240,000 to 80,000 in six months.
I read the book in the early 1980s, when AIDS first appeared on the scene. I had asked my well-read friend Jerry Morgan whether there was a good book about The Plague. "I Promessi Sposi," he said without hesitation, and he was right. The book is above all an Age of Englightenment look at a very insane period, with Bread Riots in Milan, Crazy Convents, Evil Local Dukes, and finally for the last third of the tale, The Plague. Its hero and heroine are a peasant couple who are "betrothed" at the beginning of the book and are thwarted in their plans to get married every step of the way while taking in just about every misadventure of their times. If you're ever feeling ambitious about reading a classic, I can't recommend it highly enough.
Then I checked my email and found an idiotic and insulting note from my Congresswoman, Nancy Pelosi, on "How to Help the Hurricane Victims" in New Orleans. For some reason, this so infuriated me that I wrote her a truly nasty note back, which is below if you're in the mood for a rant.
Dear Congresswoman Pelosi:
Your "How to Help Hurricane Victims" email was both stupid and insulting.You don't even mention the fact that the levees weren't being maintained under YOUR watch, lady, as Minority Speaker, and you don't even mention the disgusting federal aftermath with its nonexistent help for the residents of New Orleans. Instead, you crow about how Dennis Hastert (who has already said New Orleans shouldn't be rebuilt) and yourself are being wonderfully "bipartisan."
And if you weren't such an enabling, goddamned idiot, you might know that one of the people you want us to send "Cash Donations" to is "Operation Blessing," a wing of Pat Robertson's empire. You remember Pat, don't you? The guy who is calling for the assassination of foreign leaders in public?
I don't think you have any idea of the depth of anger in this country right now towards ALL of you in the federal government at this moment. Frankly, I think it's time to toss out all incumbents, including you, and I will be doing my very best to make that a reality.
With Contempt,
Your Constituent
Michael Strickland
I wrote about a great art exhibit in the basement of City Hall last week featuring the work of blind and "visually impaired" artists. Click here to check out all the photos of the interesting art.
This evening there was an artists' reception being held by the San Francisco Art Commission and the Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired.
By 6:30, it was amazingly crowded and quite lively.
Though the speechifying had begun, and was its usual boring self, most of the crowd was ignoring the speakers and checking the art out along with each other.
There were also quite a few "Hosts" attached to the event, who were young and affluent looking.
I had no idea the event was going to be drawing in hipsters of all ages and genders.
Even this Charles Bukowski lookalike, who I'd met at a Mission Street art opening some months ago, was there. At the previous event, we took a Muni bus together after we'd smoked some marijuana and I listened to his very funny "dirty talk" about the strippers/hookers downtown on Geary Boulevard who he loved.
Most of the crowd, however, was much more proper and respectful.
The event also featured free Beaujolais wine...
...that was being liberally poured by a couple of beautiful young women.
They also fed the mob with fruit, treats...
...and even more substantial fare.
Of course, all this hospitality just encouraged people to socialize which prompted a chorus of "shhhhh!" moments from people who were actually listening to the boring speakers.
My friends Chris Okon and her Boyfriend Bill showed up because they had liked the photos on this blog.
Arriving late were a group of blind/visually impaired adolescents who were fascinating to watch.
This boy seemed to have the most sight left and was one of the leaders of the group.
There were also blind artists in attendance...
...some of them talking amongst themselves.
One artist's guide dog decided that he wanted the chair I was sitting in for his buddy, and he put his head right into my crotch.
Guide dogs, in fact, were everywhere, and though I'm not a big canine fan, it was wonderful to see them.
There's a reason that "Guide Dogs for the Blind" are some of the largest fundraisers in the country. What's not to love?
