After a nutty ride in the back section of a Muni bus to the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood while seated next to an old hippie chick and her dog Luna...
...my neighbor Richard and I made a quick trek through the East end of Golden Gate Park late Thursday afternoon, trying to reach the deYoung Museum before it closed for the day.
Our main problem was that the flora in the park was more beautiful than anything in the museum, so it was difficult not to linger outside...
...but we finally did make it to the museum with a half hour to spare.
The large special exhibit in the basement is a retrospective of the gay London artists and lovers Gilbert & George, who were all the youthful rage in the early 1980s. Their schtick is fairly unvarying, rectangular panels that stack up into huge, billboard-sized canvases featuring block lettering, wild day-glo colors, naked representations of the artists over the decades, and intentionally shocking subject matter such as huge cartoon turds in the shape of a cross.
I expected to hate the exhibit, but instead found myself oddly delighted, by the scale of the work, the colors, and its sheer outrageousness. Also, watching the two artists looking like punked out art stars in the 1980s on their canvases, and then morphing into little old bank clerks in their present work is sweet in the context of all the "strong adult content," as the signage warns.
The artists are also very shrewd in their marketing, and at the gift shop you can buy everything from tote bags with "DEATH" block-lettered across it to ties and umbrellas featuring their colorful designs, though I didn't see any turd imagery being featured.
Next up at the deYoung is another marketing guru, the glass artist Dale Chihuly, one of whose sculptures has just gone up in the garden in front. I wonder what the gift shop is going to look like for that one.
Today was the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination, the third public murder of an American leader within a five year span, probably with the connivance of J. Edgar Hoover, the poisonous director of the FBI, according to my friend SFWillie (click here for his J'Accuse).
Gandhi and his philosophy of nonviolence was always one of King's major influences, but when the media retrospectives are revved up on anniversaries like today and King's birthday, they tend to focus on race rather than nonviolence.
This is partly because many racial attitudes have changed, while American militarism in its quest to retain empire is sadly unchanged from King's time, as Iraq clearly demonstrates. This is King on the subject of Vietnam soon before he was murdered: "God didn’t call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war . . .We’ve committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world."
And this little zinger: "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
For a good article on the subject, check out Jeff Cohen's "40 Years Later..." (click here), and to continue King's work, I highly recommend spending a little time with the old, nonviolent secular saints in front of the Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue every Thursday at noon.
As part of San Francisco Ballet's 75th anniversary season, three ballet companies from around the world have sent individual dances and dancers for an evening of international potpourri, and the program is being repeated this entire week.
First up is "A Delicate Battle" from The National Ballet of Canada, which is a bit of an overconceptualized mess by choreographer Matjash Mrozewski.
It starts off well enough with gorgeous dancers under a silver cloud and glittery snow coming down near the wings as they cavort to music from J.S. Bach's "A Musical Offering."
They are then joined by dancers in tuxedos and 19th century gowns performing some kind of hostile psychodrama mixed with a little dancing, and the glittery snowflakes take over the entire background for the rest of the ballet. The theatrical effect becomes so distracting, in a semi-psychedelic way, that it's impossible to concentrate on the dancers who in any case aren't doing much of interest. Plus, the music shifts from Bach to a contemporary piece by Gavin Bryars that sounds really boring after the Bach, which is certainly not Bryar's fault, it's just a bad juxtaposition.
The next company was none other than the New York City Ballet, who were a bit chintzy in their tribute, sending a simple complement of four dancers who alternate (on different evenings) a Balanchine pas de deux set to "Duo Concertant," a 1932 Stravinsky violin-and-piano work.
As it turned out, the performance was the highlight of the evening, and the two dancers, Sterling Hyltin and Robert Fairchild, were amazing enough they made me want to immediately move to New York.
Fairchild (above) in particular gave a performance that was the opposite of flashy, yet you couldn't take your eyes off him, there was such ease and balance and a magical kind of movement.
The buzz among the young dancers who'd seen the show the previous night was about the final piece, "Altro Canto," by a huge contingent from Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo.
(This is a parenthetical piece of advice to young heterosexual men. Take your female date to the ballet sometime. It makes them swoony and quite possibly horny. I've seen the evidence more than once.)
"Altro Canto" is an ambitious ballet to ten movements of miscellaneous Monteverdi (with additional tunes by Marini and Kapsberger, go figure). Maybe it was fabulous when danced with live singers and instrumentalists, as it was during its premiere in Monte Carlo, but the recording was so amped up that it sounded like Monteverdi on Steroids and threatened to turn into Enigma's "Principles of Lust" at any moment.
The choreography by the director of the company, Jean-Christophe Maillot, was hilariously godawful, sort of a combination of the worst of Maurice Bejart and the Joffrey Ballet. Even worse than the Eurotrash choreography, however, were the genderfuck costumes by none other than Satan's representative on Earth (according to Manolo the Shoeblogger, click here), Karl Lagerfeld. Do check out the program if you can this week. Even at its worst, it's lots of fun, and "Duo Concertant" is worth the price of admission.
Back in the Sexist Seventies, there was an amusing employee appreciation program where one could nominate one's favorite bus drivers for "Muni Man of the Month," and the selected operator would be treated to a thank-you lunch at a downtown hotel and their faces were plastered all over the bus signage. The program fell into disuse sometime in the 1990s, which is too bad, as now we're faced with the prospect of declining service while paying Muni's director Nathaniel Ford over $300,000 for doing not much more than adding a new layer of overpaid bureaucrats to management. Maybe they should consider an obvious public relations gesture and reinstate the program, while paying for the lunches out of their own overstuffed wallets.
My personal nomination for Muni Operator of the Month would be the lady above, who was driving the 47 Van Ness with skill and charm this morning. This particular bus line is usually filled with a bizarre mixture of homeless dragging all their belongings from one shelter to another, drunks, drug addicts, Silicon Valley employees on their way to the Caltrain station, people visiting the Hall of Justice for probation or jury duty, tourists, and the just plain crazy. This eccentric combination has driven a couple of the usual drivers to the edge of psychosis, but the lady above was filled with such good humor and joy that she effectively defused all bad situations. She even got out of the bus at one point to hug one of three blind people who had driven part of the way with us just because she loved them. "God is by your side," she said at one point to a friend, and I believed her, because He/She is definitely at her side.
