The little park between the San Francisco Opera House and the Veterans Building was roped off for an entire week for the construction of a huge tent.
It was being used as the setting for the 2007 San Francisco Opera Ball that included a cocktail reception, a sit-down dinner for 800 with 1,300 pounds of rack of lamb and 15 pounds of caviar among other delicacies, and after-dinner dancing to Bill Hopkins Rock'n Orchestra.
This was to celebrate Opening Night of the San Francisco Opera season which was starting off with an old, gaudy production of Saint-Saens' "Samson and Delilah," a sex-and-violence-and-lots-of-praying French Grand Opera spectacular from 1877.
I hosted a small party that included one handsome dude in a tuxedo...
...and three beautiful young women, and all it cost was $10 for standing room, which has to be the best deal in San Francisco.
We assembled in the box bar at intermission where we somehow snagged a table...
...and watched in amusement, horror and fascination at dozens of wealthy women who looked like nothing so much as drag queens with lots of money.
Upstaging most of the socialites, in fact, was my downstairs neighbor Morgan Jones channeling Josephine Baker.
The opera itself, what little I heard of it, looked pretty silly, with the diva Olga Borodina sounding fabulous and the debuting tenor Clifton Forbis sounding pretty awful. Still, the cheesy special effects finale with Samson bringing the infidel's temple down is always fun. For a very loosely translated and funny synopsis, click here for chorister Tom Reed's tour through mangled French.
In Kosman's review at SFGate this morning (click here), he writes "The Israelites and Philistines hurled their competing theological viewpoints at one another, and though of course the listener rooted for Jehovah's troops, it was perhaps more out of sentiment than dramatic urgency." To which I must add, speak for yourself, Mr. Kosman. The Philistines were much more fun than the Hebrews, with wild costumes, dances and orgies, not to mention a religious icon of their god Dagon that wouldn't have looked out of place in a Maria Montez movie. "Glory to Dagon!" indeed.
I wanted to play golf at the Lincoln Park Municipal golf course on Wednesday, before the ancient course is privatized and turned into an overpriced horror like the Harding course further south.
The greens were all being worked on, however, and had been replaced by 18 temporaries, so I continued walking along the shoreline trail known locally as Land's End.
The area has new signage, improved trails, and the local forests have been seriously pruned.
My favorite, non-euphemistic sign in San Francisco has remained, though.
The powers-that-be in California might consider some new signage as we're coming into deadly serious fire season for the next two months, and Bay Area skies are already grey with smoke from the "Moonlight Fire" in Plumas County hundreds of miles away, possibly mixed with a little seasoning from the fire east of Morgan Hill that started on Monday. (For great photos and maps, click here for a story in the "Sacramento Bee.")
Actually, fires have been raging out of control all year long in California, the most spectacular being the Zaca fire in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties which started on the Fourth of July and still hasn't been completely extinguished.
A Los Olivos rancher (white) and his Mexican laborers were arrested yesterday for being the originators of the fire while doing soldering work on the farm, but that strikes me as a bogus prosecution. California is as ready to ignite as Greece and the spark could be from anything.
One of my favorite photoblogs is called "A Change in the Wind," written by Kit Stolz about world climate change in general and Southern California in particular, where he lives in the mountains around Ojai. Stolz is the opposite of a ranter, which just makes his prose even more terrifying, rather like the 1950s sci-fi books by John Wyndham where everyone acts very restrained and British as the world quite emphatically ends around them. Check it out by clicking here.
After much wrangling by various impresarios on how to best mark the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love in Golden Gate Park, a gentleman named Boots Houghton stepped up and put on a free all-day concert with veteran musicians on Sunday.
It turned out to be a perfectly charming event with close to 100,000 people attending.
The only fly in the ointment in this City That Often Doesn't Know How was the Muni bus service, which instead of adding vehicles for this special event, actually cut them down because they were on a Sunday schedule, so there were huge clumps of passengers being passed by buses that were already packed to the gills.
So we grabbed the car out of the Civic Center garage and drove to the Van Ness and McAllister bus stop where we offered a ride to two older women from Russian Hill and Sacramento respectively.
The very proper-looking middle-aged ladies had both been hippies in their youth and had nothing but fond nostalgia for the era.
Our good deed translated into instant good karma with a parking spot just a block from the concert in Speedway Meadows.
Unfortunately, the flowered peace sign is no less relevant today than it was forty years ago...
...and absurdly enough, marijuana is still illegal.
There was less nudity than expected for such a warm day, though George Davis, who is running for San Francisco mayor on the single issue of clothing optional areas for Golden Gate Park, finally found the perfect place to campaign.
There was an amazing span of ages in the large crowd...
...being entertained all day by the makeshift bands who would play twenty minute sets.
I had to leave after an hour to attend an opera rehearsal...
...for Wagner's take on sex and spirituality, "Tannhauser."
The crammed 5-Fulton bus ride back to Civic Center was graced, however, with the perfect hippie dog.
The third in a series of weekly debates for San Francisco mayoral candidates took place in front of a tiny crowd in Civic Center Plaza Friday evening.
The big news of the week was that former Supervisor Tony Hall had dropped out of the race, in part because too many of his supporters were getting the squeeze from City Hall in terms of city contracts canceled, permits denied, and so on. The city's deeply compromised Ethics Commission also decided to send up a flare about improprieties committed four years earlier during Hall's previous supervisorial run.
Paul Hogarth (above) of the "Beyond Chron" site (click here) was the jolly moderator for the event.
Hall started things off by telling the group that he had qualified for matching campaign funds from the city before his decision to drop out, and that it takes a month for the funds to be disbursed, but that he was going to be passing it on to his fellow candidates as a group.
He then took issue with the quote from Eric Jaye, Gavin Newsom's version of Karl Rove, in that morning's San Francisco Chronicle: "Newsom's campaign manager, Eric Jaye, said Hall's exit will affect the campaign, though probably not the outcome of the election. "He was one of the last candidates left that wasn't named after a barnyard animal," Jaye said." Hall's response was that it's much better to be named after an animal than to be like Gavin Newsom, "who is just plain chickenshit."
In his three minute opening statement, h. Brown talked about the endemic corruption of the San Francisco Police Department where absolutely nothing has gotten better during Newsom's tenure. "It's the same dysfunctional commanders who have always been there, and nothing's going to change for at least the next ten years. They are only going to get more expensive while providing less and less protection for the citizens of San Francisco, not to mention beating the crap out of perfectly innocent people because they are on steroid rages, something for which they can't be tested in this town."
Wilma Pang, the music teacher, talked about her language skills and peace and love...
...while videojournalist Josh Wolf gave a stirring speech about the wi-fi initiative and how it could be done right, unlike the piss-poor initiative that Newsom crafted with Google and Earthlink, probably while he was drunk on a corporate plane with executives from the aforementioned companies.
Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai talked about the raw deal her southeastern Bayview/Hunter's Point neighborhood has been getting. "Newsom finally visited the Sunnydale Housing Project for the first time. Meanwhile, they are killing us with asbestos dust and pretending nothing is wrong."
The most poignant speech came from Harold Hoogasian, above, a native San Franciscan who has a chain of flower stores. His disgust with the thugs who run "the machine" in San Francisco was both angry and rueful. "In the last couple of decades, the cost of living for people in San Francisco has gone up 85% while the City Hall budget has risen by 500%. That money isn't going to help actual citizens in San Francisco, it's just going towards feeding the machine." He directed us to go to a new website called "Unplug The Machine!" which you can get to by clicking here.
