A bride was posing in front of Nob Hill's Grace Cathedral between rainstorms on Monday and the brilliance of her white dress combined with sunshine just about blinded all of us on the California Street cable car. Good luck, young couple, and don't look so dour, Mr. Groom.
While researching the collaborative careers of the writers P.G. Wodehouse, Guy Bolton and the composer Jerome Kern for a production at the 42nd Street Moon theatre troupe, I stumbled across the fact that Wodehouse and Bolton had co-written a memoir in 1953 of their theatrical career during the first three decades of the 20th century in New York and London (click here for a short essay I wrote at the 42nd Street Moon site about it).
So I went to the Main Branch of the San Francisco Public Library to find the book and was informed that there was only one copy and it was in the "rare books/special reserved" section, meaning that you were not allowed to check the book out but would have to read the damned thing in the library among all the insane people and were not allowed to take it home.
Checking out the scene on Amazon.com, I found that the book had been reprinted in 1984 in a trade paperback edition and there were plenty of copies to be had for $6 and less, so its absence on the stacks in the public library was ridiculous. After finishing the book last night, which I can confidently state is the wittiest theatrical memoir ever written and which can't be praised highly enough, the fact that it's not on the shelves is just plain shameful.
Unfortunately, the San Francisco Public Library is afflicted with the same privatization woes as the San Francisco Zoo, which has been much in the news lately. The "Friends of..." groups are all about fundraising and marketing and of course that becomes their only purpose, rather than simple details like making sure there are basic books on the shelves or that animals are treated decently.
The local activist James Chaffee has been obsessed for years with the perfidy of the Friends of the Library (click here for his extensively researched website on the issue) and Willie Morrissey over at the SF Willie's blog takes a look at the sleazy Friends group running the public/private partnership of the San Francisco Zoo (click here). If you see the name Sam Singer involved as head of public relations on any issue, you can safely bet that his client is evil (one of his other major clients is the Lennar Corporation, currently poisoning Bayview/Hunter's Point). Willie has been living next door to the zoo since he was a child. It featured free admission for most of his life, and since he's no spring chicken, he knows the place well. His suggestion is to just get rid of the large animals, keep the small animal exhibits, and turn the place into a roller park for skaters and skateboarders. The idea is so good it will never happen, but click here to read his proposal.
I have been publishing "Civic Center" for a little over two-and-a-half years, with 540 different posts looking mostly at the arts and politics of San Francisco's Civic Center. On account of the unwieldiness of this mass of information and photos, I finally hunkered down over the last week and decided to label the posts into different categories. My first attempts were extremely detailed, with lots of categories and sub-categories and sub-sub-sub-categories, such as "music" leading to "San Francisco Opera" leading to "Puccini" leading to "Madama Butterfly," and so on.
After a day of this, I gave up because really, who the hell cares about my collected thoughts on Puccini? I certainly don't. Going back to the drawing board, I tried to come up with the smallest number of categories that covered all the posts, and have put those labels on the bottom of each one. So, for those deeply interested in local politics but completely uninterested in classical music, or vice versa, you can now sift through the backlog in a much easier manner.
The category breakdown (with the number of posts in parentheses), goes as follows:
Art (100), which includes the sub-categories of Asian Art Museum (20) and the SF Fine Arts Museums (11).
Books (29) has a sub-category for the SF Public Library (7).
City Life (157) is a catch-all for everything from a Punjabi wedding in Civic Center Plaza to a public school enrollment fair at Bill Graham auditorium.
Film (16) has a subcategory for the Noir City Film Festival (6).
The largest category, in a surprise to me, was Politics (207), with subcategories of Gavin Newsom (29), Peaceniks (74) which includes the Quaker Peace Vigil along with the many Iraq War protests, and SF Supervisors (56).
Journalism (57) covers both the trashing of much of the mainstream media along with links and words of praise for my fellow self-publishers.
Music (130) was probably the subject that interested me most, and the subcategories are four institutions, the SF Ballet (7), the SF Opera (59), the SF Symphony (40), and the Other Minds Festival (10).
Gays (46) and Nature (41) both turned out to be surprisingly large categories, and so was Palm Springs Life (44).
Rounding out the categories are Theatre (13) and Travel (22).
The most amusing aspect to all this labeling was watching how the categories overlapped, such as the May 2, 2007 entry "May Day" which has "Gavin Newsom, journalism, music, peaceniks, politics" as the markers, and they really do all fit.
Finally, I have no clue who is actually reading this publication, except for the couple of dozen people who regularly comment or have gotten in touch with me, but the latter group is so extraordinarily brilliant that I'm challenged every time to create a piece that is interesting, honest, amusing, and illustrative just so I don't insult their intelligence. Besides being a great deal of work, it's also been a hell of a lot of fun.
