Jesus (pronounced "Hey-Zeus"), a handsome, charming opera queen originally from Venezuela, was in line at 10AM to buy $10 standing room tickets for the opening night of the San Francisco Opera.
It's probably the best deal in town, and hardly anybody seems to know about it. The price for opening night standing room got jacked up considerably some years ago, but then it came down again a few years back.
Whatever you might think about the soon-to-be-departed general manager, Pamela Rosenberg, at least it can be said that her sympathies were democratic, and under her reign the cheap seats got cheaper.
However, Opening Night has nothing to do with the peasants and everything to do with what the odious "San Francisco Chronicle" calls "The Swells."
The evening started for many of them at a cocktail party at the Arabian Nights-themed tent and courtyard.
On the Grand Tier level, there was a whole collection of gawkers at the window.
They were watching The Swells in the courtyard below.
The coolest detail was the live camel hanging out at the entrance.
On the Grand Tier level, you can hang outdoors on the front balcony.
Tonight it had been commandeered by the Bravo! Club, which is a group designed for the "forty-and-under" segment of rich society families and those who want to be part of rich society families.
Not all that much has changed since the time of Horatio Alger, Jr., the nineteenth-century "dime novel" author who wrote 130 inspiring books about boys overcoming diversity through pluck and hard work, and usually outrageous good fortune at the end.
As Gore Vidal pointed out in one of his better essays, most of the tales end with the marriage of the hero to the Rich Daddy Boss Figure's daughter, and then he ends up on top. You might want to check out the Wikipedia bio by clicking here to read more about Horatio's rather obsessive teenage boy-love inclinations.
Birth, sex and marriage are pretty much the only ways to enter this hermetic world.
Also in attendance were the people who service the rich, such as this young man who sells outrageously expensive automobiles at a dealership on Van Ness.
I have been coming to enough of these openings since 1975 that I feel like part of the tradition myself, and say "Happy Opening Night!" to everyone I know, particularly those who work there, such as this head usher/ticket taker at the central orchestra lobby door...
...or the right-hand lobby coat check lady...
...or Pam Kaye, the scheduling guru for the opera company.
There is usually a beautiful, major floral arrangement in the center of the orchestra level lobby, but this year it was, well, come up with a cruel adjective on your own. The flowers were paid for by Mrs. Alfred S. Wilsey (in other words, the Evil Stepmother Dearest herself from "Oh, The Glory of It All" by Sean Wilsey, which I reviewed here).
I did see Dede in a big red dress dripping with jewels hustling up the stairs from the lobby to the box level, but then she seemed to disappear for the rest of the evening. She must have known I was going to be there as paparazzi.
At the Friday Salon in the Howard Street burrito parlor hosted by the brilliant political polemicist h brown (not pictured, but click here to get to his latest column)...
...a lively crowd had gathered...
...that included young City Hall workers such as Adriel...
...and Julian.
The brilliant publisher of SFist (click here for a link), Jackson West, had rolled out of bed for the Salon before visiting a friend in the hospital.
Krissy Keefer, a famous Modern Dance figure (as a choreographer and a dancer, click here for more info) from the Mission District, was berating h brown at one point, "Why don't YOU do something brilliant?" which made me laugh through my carnitas burrito and Bohemia.
In a further touch of celebrity, h brown's friend Angela Alioto was in attendance. For those not from San Francisco, Angela is the daughter of the late-1960s / early-1970s mayor, Joe Alioto, and has been a city supervisor, along with running for mayor herself a number of times.
In the evening, I went to my friend Clark Buckner's "Blue Studio" gallery at Mission and 17th.
It was a conceptual art piece by a couple who called themselves "leonardogillesfleur."
The only problem was that the female half of the couple had just gotten a job in New York and they had exited San Francisco before their fabulous opening, which meant that Clark had to do the installation at the last minute himself. He was not amused, though he "totally understood" the quick departure.
Down the hall, at the Michelle O'Connor Gallery, a group of five young artists calling themselves "100 Ft. Whale" was opening an art show.
The group (Sarah Applebaum, Alex Clausen, Sherry Koyama, Julia Petho and Allen Stickel) had a Mission Statement that went something like this:
"What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid." -- Moby Dick
Through painting, drawing, photography and scuplture, the artists in 100 Ft. Whale examine the elusive relationship between nuance and numbers, qualified and quantified, and desire and digits in search of the 100 foot whale and all that as yet remains unsaid.
One of the more striking pieces was this huge tapestry.
Being a very sloppy journalist, I forgot to take down the name of the artist. If anybody can fill me in, it would be appreciated
On the opposite wall, there were three large drawings by Allen Stickel.
Two of them depicted very alienated young people in a suburban setting, which was probably Colorado according to the artist.
Having grown up in a similar suburbia in Southern California...
...I could relate.
In the middle of the room, another one of the artists had built a circular playhouse with ladders and a roof.
Sherry Koyama had done a couple of pretty installation things.
The entire show felt "juvenile" in a good way. (In this context, "juvenile" has to be [mis]pronounced with a French accent, "joo-vah-neel" to fully convey the concept.)
I said goodbye to Clark and promised to see him at his next glamorous art opening (and they are glamorous, in their own way). Click here for a link to his Mission 17 website.
On the windswept plaza in front of the Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue, a woman was asking a small crowd to dig deep into their pockets and give whatever they possibly could for New Orleans charity.
The group she was speaking for was named B.I.G., which stood for Blacks in Government. Here's a bit of their history from their website:
When coupled with the fact that no single civil rights organization has as its sole objective the preservation and enhancement of Black civil servants, it became apparent that Black civil servants had to unite and protect themselves. To some, this meant jeopardizing their careers. To others, it meant duplicating some of the efforts of other organizations. To still others, it meant very little, they felt (as some Blacks do not) that it would be a wasted effort.
Nonetheless, Blacks In Government®, was organized in 1975 and incorporated as a non-profit organization under the District of Columbia jurisdiction in 1976. BIG has been a national response to the need for African Americans in public service to organize around issues of mutual concern and use their collective strength to confront workplace and community issues. BIG's goals are to promote EQUITY in all aspects of American life, EXCELLENCE in public service, and OPPORTUNITY for all Americans.
The Civic Center chapter of B.I.G. was throwing a hot dog fundraiser in the plaza to raise money...
...and the crowd got even smaller as the wind tore through the plaza...
...and the rock trio started to play.
Watching the federal reaction to the disaster in New Orleans, what I kept thinking about was the poor Iraqis who have been putting up with the Occupation run by many of the same villainous fools who have done such a disastrous job in the Gulf.
The outrageous violence, the lack of empathy for other human beings, the extraordinary greed and graft fueling everything, and above all the sheer stupid incompetence of the Occupation finally registered after watching a week's worth of the Katrina aftermath.
I'm also not the only one with this particular thought running through their head. Tom Englehardt, at his website, writes a very elaborate essay about what the Iraq and New Orleans disasters have in common that is pretty brilliant. Click here to read the whole essay.
Here's an excerpt:
Think of our last two years in Iraq, which has left the world's most powerful military running on baling wire and duct tape, as a kind of coming attractions for Katrina. In fact, so many bizarre connections or parallels are suggested by the Bush administration's war in Iraq as to stagger the imagination. Here are just six of the parallels that immediately came to my mind:
1. Revelations of unexpected superpower helplessness: A single catastrophic war against a modest-sized, not particularly dramatically armed minority insurgency in one oil land has brought the planet's mightiest military to a complete, grinding, disastrous halt and sent its wheels flying off in all directions. A single not-exactly-unexpected hurricane leveling a major American city and the coastlines of two states, has brought the emergency infrastructure of the world's mightiest power to a complete, grinding, disastrous halt and sent its wheels flying off in all directions.
2. Planning ignored: It's now notorious that the State Department did copious planning for a post-invasion, occupied Iraq, all of which was ignored by the Pentagon and Bush administration neocons when the country was taken. In New Orleans, it's already practically notorious that endless planning, disaster war-gaming, and the like were done for how to deal with a future "Atlantis scenario," none of which was attended to as Katrina bore down on the southeastern coast.
3. Lack of Boots on the ground: It's no less notorious that, from the moment before the invasion of Iraq when General Eric Shinseki told a congressional committee that "several hundred thousand troops" would minimally be needed to successfully occupy Iraq and was more or less laughed out of Washington, Donald Rumsfeld's new, lean, mean military has desperately lacked boots on the ground (hence those Louisiana and Mississippi National Guards off in Iraq). Significant numbers of National Guard only made it to New Orleans on the fifth and sixth days after Katrina struck and regular military boots-on-the-ground have been few and far between. No Pentagon help was pre-positioned for Katrina and, typically enough, the Navy hospital ship Comfort, scheduled to help, had not left Baltimore harbor by Friday morning for its many day voyage to the Gulf.
4. Looting: The inability (or unwillingness) to deploy occupying American troops to stem a wave of looting that left the complete administrative, security, and even cultural infrastructure of Baghdad destroyed is now nearly legendary, as is Donald Rumsfeld's response to the looting at the time. ("Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that's what's going to happen here." To which he added, on the issue of the wholesale looting of Baghdad, "Stuff happens.") In New Orleans, the President never declared martial law while, for days, gangs of armed looters along with desperate individuals abandoned and in need of food and supplies of all kinds, roamed the city uncontested as buildings began to burn.
What, facing this crisis, did the Bush administration actually do? The two early, symbolic actions it took were typical. Neither would have a significant effect on the immediate situation at hand, but both forwarded long-term administration agendas that had little to do with Katrina or the crisis in the southeastern United States: First, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was relaxing pollution standards on gasoline blends in order to counteract the energy crisis Katrina had immediately put on the table. This was, of course, but a small further step in the gutting of general environmental, clean air and pollution laws that strike hard at another kind of safety net -- the one protecting our planet. And second, its officials began to organize a major operation out of Northcom, Joint Task Force Katrina, to act as the military's on-scene command in "support" of an enfeebled FEMA. The U.S. Northern Command was set up by the Bush administration in 2002 and ever since has been prepared to take on ever larger, previously civilian tasks on our home continent. (As the Northcom site quotes the President as saying, "There is an overriding and urgent mission here in America today, and that's to protect our homeland. We have been called into action, and we've got to act.")
I don't know if the half-mast flag was for the old, racist Rehnquist of the Supreme Court, the New Orleans dead, or just as a whim, but I'd like to dedicate it, as the sign says, "To All Lives Lost In Iraq."
On my way to the Main Public Library to return a DVD of a terrible Debra Winger - Theresa Russell vehicle from the 1980's called "Black Widow"...
...I walked through the Civic Center Plaza.
The summer fog hasn't really lifted quite yet in San Francisco and the metamorphosis into the splendid weather of Autumn certainly hasn't arrived.
The trees that are planted in the Civic Center Plaza are ornamental chestnut trees (thanks for the info, David Barnard), and I've always hated them.
In Northern California, which is filled with trees that don't lose their leaves during the winter, the designers of Civic Center decided on the ornamental chestnuts because that's what they have in Paris, and the buildings in Civic Center are meant to be French Beaux Arts.
The problem is that the chestnuts are deciduous and do lose their leaves. Plus, they look quite grim during the winter with stark, spindly branches, and their depressing appearance is furthered along by an aggressive pruning regimen by the city.
Still, on this particular evening, a blast of light somehow made it through the fog...
...and it illuminated the leaves, some of which were turning an autumnal brown.
So I took a few photos of what looked like a psychedelic leaf show.
