A royal blue carpet was laid down on the Polk Street side of City Hall Wednesday afternoon...
...in preparation for one of the rich people's dinners and cocktail parties that precede the opening night gala of the San Francisco Symphony.
The decorating scheme had something to do with large spheres which rather reminded me of "The Prisoner" television show.
Outside, in front of one of the globes that have been erected proclaiming the usefulness of alternative power, an expensive car was being staged for an ad that was "Fueled by Fanfare," which I assume is still petrochemical in nature.
We were invited to cover the concert and parties as press, and my favorite part of the evening was the free wine and hors d'oeuvres in the press room, which was being presided over by Louisa Spier, looking fab in her toreador skirt.
It was also fun talking up the music journalists such as the fine writer Janos Gereben, although I did have to make a quick exit after a woman introduced herself as being from a local TV station which produces a Chinese New Year's Spectacular at the Opera House. Was I interested in writing about it? I didn't have the heart to tell her that I'd already covered the Falun Gong propaganda theatrical a couple of years ago with Sid Chen, and that our piece had set off a firestorm on the internet.
Also joining the press gang party was former Adler Fellow, recent winner of the Wagner Competition in Seattle, and all-around awesome soprano Elza van den Heever with a slimmed down figure and startling red dress.
The actual concert sounded a lot better on paper than in reality. As Kosman noted in the San Francisco Chronicle (click here), the best piece was the first, a short excerpt from Delibes' ballet "Sylvia," which made me want to see the Mark Morris production at the San Francisco Ballet all over again.
This was followed by Bernstein's arrangement of dance music from "West Side Story," which was fairly boring except for the orchestra snapping their fingers and shouting "Mambo" which they did quite well. Patrick Vaz claims that everyone is either a "West Side Story" person or a "Candide" person in a funny post at his "Reverberate Hills" blog (click here), and I think I'm going to have to call myself a "Candide" dude. After seeing the movie, Jerome Robbins' ballet, and now the "Symphonic Dances," I realize the only time I ever want to see "West Side Story" again in any form is if it's being performed by a high school or college theatrical troupe.
The second half of the program had Yefim Bronfman playing the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto while being drowned out half the time by the orchestra. For a nuanced review, check out Jolene (not pictured) at "Saturday Matinee" (click here), who was attending her first gala and who was bursting with excitement.
Visiting museums and attending theatre in New York City always brings home to me what a small, provincial burg San Francisco is in comparison.
A case in point is the Metropolitan Museum, situated on Fifth Avenue on the mideast side of Central Park, which doesn't intrude into the park and doesn't have a stupid parking garage. (If you need to be driven there, that's what cabs and chauffeurs are for.)
There is a "suggested donation" of $20 for entry but you can just about give them any amount you want and gain entrance.
The permanent collection consists of one famous piece of art after another...
...and best of all they are not obsessively protected by a phalanx of annoying security guards as is usually the case in San Francisco museums.
Plus, you can take flash-free photos anywhere and everywhere, except in the special, temporary exhibitions.
As in any huge museum, there's also plenty of junk, depending on your taste...
...including some colorful Jeff Koons monstrosities on the surprisingly small roof sculpture garden.
There were two special exhibits that were well worth seeing: "Art of the Royal Court: Treasures in Pietre Dure from the Palaces of Europe" and "Framing a Century: Master Photographs, 1840-1940." The former was room after room of astonishing Rennaissance Italian tabletops made of various gems and hard stones that looked like proto Arts and Crafts Movement furniture, except they were over 500 years old.
The photography show consisted of about a dozen images each by thirteen iconic photographers from Gustave le Gray to Walker Evans to Man Ray, all from the museum's permanent collection. It was a perfectly manageable show, not too large and not too little. Cumulatively, it was mindblowing.
There was also a fashion exhibit of designers influenced by comic book superheroes, but it wasn't half as fun as it should have been.
The weirdest disappointment was the huge J.M.W. Turner show. I've always loved the artist's paintings in reproduction, but in person, they looked sort of awful, and I found myself agreeing with the fine "New Yorker" art critic Peter Schjeldahl who closes his essay on the show with "Turner was the Damien Hirst of his time." (Click here for more.)
The Belvedere Guest House for Men dates from the late 1950s when the pencil factory heir, John Eberhardt, decided to build a dream palace for gay friends on Fire Island.
Eberhardt, pictured above, is now in his 80's, living full-time at his estate in Florida, but he can genuinely be called one of the fathers of Cherry Grove since he constructed about 50 of its beach shacks soon after World War II which are still standing in the small community.
Eberhardt also scoured the European continent soon after the war for objets d'art, and many of them have settled at The Belvedere.
Besides being a contractor, John was also a scenic designer for ABC and CBS in their early television days, and he became an expert with trompe l'oeil, which is featured all over the guest house in some of the oddest places.
In 1980, at age 59, he met a young hustler, Craig Burns, at a Manhattan gay bar and the two coupled up for the next thirteen years, where they both worked their brains out on Eberhardt's real estate empire. John legally adopted Craig in 1989, but the younger man left him in 1993 which is when things got a bit ugly. (For an account of the Court TV case from Palm Beach, click here.)
Craig sued for half of the estate in 1997, John countersued, calling Craig a "golddigger," and in the interim the Belvedere started feeling a bit like Miss Havisham's estate in "Great Expectations," becoming dusty, moldy and seemingly ready to fall into the Long Island Bay at any moment.
The good news is that the two men reconciled about three years ago, and Craig and his new partner have taken over the running of the Belvedere, which is suddenly looking great again.
They have restored much of Eberhardt's art, which really is sensational...
...and the impossibly over-the-top ballroom is looking spectacular again.
Plus, you can run around the grounds stark naked meeting interesting people from around the world.
The time to stay there is during the week when it's less expensive and also less frantic than during the weekends. I can't recommend the experience highly enough.
