On Sunday morning, May 7th, a lone bagpiper in full kilt drag played for a couple of minutes underneath my living room window before climbing into his car which was parked across the street.
The reason for his mysterious presence became clear as I passed through the Civic Center Plaza which was parked to the brim with police cars from all over the Bay Area.
They were mostly K-9 units and they had come for a memorial service for Sgt. Darryl Tsujimoto, a 15-year San Francisco department veteran and head of the canine unit. He apparently keeled over while conducting a trail scent training last week on Treasure Island. Though there was nothing particularly heroic about his death, expiring while in uniform is usually good for a memorial service involving hundreds of colleagues, and today's was being held in City Hall.
According to most reports, Sgt. Tsujimoto was a genuinely good man who obviously connected with dogs on a very special level. Even the creepy Department of Homeland Security showed up to pay tribute. Speaking of which, I wonder how these officers felt when they saw the horrible Abu Ghiraib photos involving police dogs. Ashamed? Interested?
The new Federal Building that has been under construction seemingly forever at 7th and Mission Streets is growing more imposing with each passing day. An all-glass-covered building in earthquake country doesn't strike me as the best idea in the world, but nobody asked.
I was on my way to meet up with my friend Kimo for the Second Annual Mermayd Parade (click here) that was supposedly marching from Yerba Buena Gardens back to Howard and 11th for the How Weird Street Fair, and Kimo had even brought along a mask because I told him admission was half-price with a costume.
We never did find the Mermayd Parade contingent, but instead stumbled across the opening event in the months-long Yerba Buena Gardens concert/event series, which is both free and outdoors.
Click here to check out the schedule, which has quite a few interesting items.
The concert area was set up with a gamelan orchestra, and we decided to check it out. More to come in part two.
Old First Church on the corner of Van Ness Avenue and Sacramento Streets has been the host to a series of chamber music concerts featuring classical, jazz, "world" and choral music for the last 35 years.
I've been meaning to attend a concert there for at least 30 years but somehow never got around to it until last Friday, May 5th, when the pianist Sarah Cahill performed a short program of works by modern (in other words, living) Italian composers.
The loss was mine as the 1911 church is a perfect place for concerts, and their pricing policy is beyond admirable.
As their website says (click here), "Old First Concerts is an important venue for performers, composers, and audiences who wish to experience music seldom offered by others, at prices which are affordable to all."
In other words, all seats for the mostly Friday evening and Sunday afternoon concerts are $15, and even less expensive if you buy a 10-ticket book.
Though I don't normally go to piano recitals, I trust Sarah Cahill's taste and enthusiasms completely, so this seemed like a good time to check the place out. (I wrote about her previously here, here, and here when she performed the "Seance" concerts for Other Minds Music.)
Cahill is a local legend who is intensely caught up in the music of her own time, evangelizing on a weekly Sunday radio show on KALW 91.7 from 8 to 10 PM, along with premiering and commissioning the scores of living composers. Click here to get to her website.
In fact, this concert, which was partly sponsored by the local Istituto Italiano di Cultura, featured one West Coast Premiere, three US Premieres, and two World Premieres. The eight pieces on the concert were all over the map stylistically, but they were each interesting, and by the time the concert was over it felt was if one's ears and brain had been cleared.
The first piece, "Madrileno" by Riccardo Piacentini was mostly very, very soft and delicate with Sarah occasionally standing up and strumming the piano strings a la Henry Cowell, and it also demonstrated the one shortcoming of the church as a concert venue. Though the acoustics were great, the traffic noise from the busy streets surrounding leaked through when the music was so quiet.
The wildly virtuosic second piece by Ada Gentile is "part of a project that, in the near future, will see the realization of a concerto for piano and orchestra," and if it's anything like this excerpt, it should be a corker. The composer Luciano Chessa, pictured above, has written a theatrical five-moment work for piano, three turntables and a chalkboard (!) about Virginina City, Nevada, and Sarah played the third solo piano movement, "Le miniere." It was interesting enough that I'd love to hear the entire piece. Check it out, Charles Amirkhanian.
Sarah introduced most of the pieces, and before Fabrizio de Rossi Re's "Hurucane ("Demon-Spirit of the Wind"), she mentioned that there was a character in the movie "The Courtship of Eddie's Father" who stated that one should do something that was scary once a day. "Well, this is the scary one because I have to improvise along with the composer's tape, plus I have to sing," as she put on a headset.
The concert ended with an encore where Sarah pulled out two score pages and said Andrea Morricone (son of Ennio) had just written them for her. "It's a short Ballade, I think from a film score he was working on, and well, this is the world premiere." The whole evening was very cool.
I spent last weekend and most of May Day working my brains out on a corporate presentation that a British telecommunications company was giving to a Philippines mobile phone company, and halfway through my research, I realized that the project was a bit like "bringing coals to Newcastle," since the Filipinos seemed to be so much more sophisticated about cell phones than the West.
Possibly because they had such crappy phone service for most of the twentieth century, the Philippines have embraced cell phones with insane exuberance and become the "fastest thumbs in the world," text-messaging each other for everything from teenage dates to assembling in central squares and toppling a government. They also have been inventing amazing new ways to use the devices that are about ten steps ahead of everybody else in the world.
In other words, we're in a Brave New World, and the huge May Day immigrant marches throughout the United States are yet another indicator of that shift.
Though the San Francisco Chronicle put the mostly Hispanic crowd at San Francisco's Civic Center at 30,000, in truth there were over 100,000 people coming in and out of the square all day.
Many of them were wearing T-shirts with American flags on the front and "Un Dia Sin Inmigrantes (A Day Without Immigrants)" on the back.
Why did nobody tell me to wear white?
The appropriation of the US flag by the marchers was fascinating since its meaning seemed to be so different than the usual divide of leftist peace protest marchers and right-wing America-Uber-Alles patriots.
There was also some pointed political signage such as this piece pointing out the irony of the United States being sanctimonious about borders after it has invaded so many other countries' borders in the last century (not to mention stealing the Southwest from Mexico not all that ago).
There was also a poster in Spanish accusing the Bush & Company of being "Wanted for Multiple Murders."
These schoolgirls were holding a homemade sign commemorating the recent teen martyr Anthony Soltero. He was an [American-born] Hispanic 14-year-old in Ontario, Southern California who committed suicide in April with his father's shotgun after being outrageously harassed and threatened by school administration thugs who were after him for being a "ringleader" in an earlier student walkout during the Los Angeles immigration protests.
A
lso being commemorated was Santos Reyes, one of the more egregious examples of California three-strike sentencing gone amok. Mr. Reyes was sentenced to 26 years in prison after taking a driver's test in place of an illiterate cousin after being busted for two non-violent robberies in his teen years 13 years ago.
One thing about this rally that unfortunately was no different than most political rallies in Civic Center: too many boring speeches (in Spanish) preaching to the already converted.
The large crowd on the Polk Street steps of City Hall had a better idea.
They were listening to a sound system that was blaring Mexican pop music.
As usual, the police presence at the event was grotesque in relation to the peacefulness of the crowd.
It was hard to find an open restaurant to grab lunch, because somehow over the last decade every kitchen in California seems to be staffed by Mexicans, no matter what type of food is being cooked, while gringos tend to populate the front of the house positions.
For once, though, the Children's Playground in Civic Center Plaza was charmingly filled to the brim. For a take on this angle and much more, check out one of my favorite local blogs called "happening-here," written by a lesbian election consultant named Jan who obviously adores Hispanic people and culture. She's also a good photographer and an unusually clear writer. Check "The nanny took the day off" by clicking here.
The San Francisco Film Festival is in its 49th iteration this year, mostly unspooling lots of foreign films for two weeks at the Kabuki Theatres in Japantown.
The director of the festival for years had been Peter Scarlet (what a great name), a well-regarded cineaste who decamped for Paris about five years ago, and who is now in charge of the Tribeca Film Festival. He was replaced by a woman who was despised by just about everyone in the universe except for the public relations people she hired at great expense to burnish her own personal image.
The public relations attempt eventually failed, and she was replaced this year by a New Yorker named Graham Leggat, who seems quite smart and interesting in his interviews.
He also helped put up a piece of public art for a week which consisted of a slide show projected onto the side of City Hall of photo collages by a local artist named Lucy Gray which featured the Art Cult Actress of Our Time, Tilda Swinton.
It seemed that Ms. Gray had taken photographs of Ms. Swinton on the set of a recently completed movie called "Thumbsucker."
She also had taken a number of photographs of Route 66, and she was unsatisfied with both of them as they stood, so she went into Photoshop and combined the two collage-style. For a more complete explanation, click here.
Tilda Swinton's cinematic career began with her being the muse to Derek Jarman, a gay British filmmaker who died of AIDS in the 1990s after making "Caravaggio" and "War Requiem" and "The Tempest" and any number of important, arty films.
It's embarrassing to admit, but I may be the only homosexual with artistic pretentions in my age range who has never seen at least one Derek Jarman film, but there you have it. I have instincts about these kinds of things and I know I would hate them.
Still, I'm tempted to see them only because Tilda Swinton really is extraordinary to watch on film. "The Deep End" and the recent "The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe" only confirmed what I'd noticed when she would do brief bits in bad Hollywood films like "Vanilla Sky."
You couldn't take your eyes off of her.
