The San Francisco Symphony started the year with the irreplaceable Meredith above helping out subscribers in the lobby...
...while I tried to explain to the couple above why that Saturday evening's performance of the 1993 Violin Concerto by György Ligeti was such a big deal.
The soloist was the German violinist Christian Tetzlaff above, who gave one of those performances that are instantly legendary, and the final, fifth movement included a fabulous cadenza riffing on musical themes from the preceding four movements that was written by Tetzlaff himself. Everybody who was anybody loved it, including Janos and Lisa and Axel.
The following afternoon, between inaugurations, I saw Tetzlaff rushing down the sidewalk towards me on Hayes Street, possibly to pick up an espresso before another performance at the 2PM Sunday matinee. The only proper response seemed to be the Wayne and Garth "We Are Not Worthy" bow from the waist with both arms outstretched, and Tetzlaff burst into laughter. "Saw you last night, it was awesome," I told him, and it was.
Three hours later, at Herbst theatre across Van Ness Avenue from City Hall, there was another inauguration. It was for ex-District 5 Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, who had just won a hard-fought election for Sheriff last November. Unlike the Mayor Ed Lee affair in City Hall, seating in the fancy old theater was on a first-come, first-serve basis, and they finally opened up the balcony for the decent sized crowd of about 1,000.
Both inaugurations had dark clouds over them. In Ed Lee's case, it was because his election was so blatantly undemocratic, with the old San Francisco political machine selecting him behind closed doors after Gavin Newsom left office last year. In Ross Mirkarimi's case, it was on account of a bombshell that had been exploded by Phil Matier (below left), the political gossip columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle that same Sunday morning. He reported that the San Francisco Police Department was deciding whether or not to arrest newly-elected Sheriff Mirkarimi for domestic violence against his new Venezuelan telenovela star wife. (Click here for the Matier & Ross hit piece.)
Matier was in the lobby of Herbst Theatre, talking closely with San Francisco Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White above right. The Chief also has a history of police coming to her house inquiring about domestic violence when she was reportedly bashing her husband with a pint glass back in 2005 (click here). Nobody was demanding her resignation over the issue at the time, but that's possibly because she is a part of the native-born San Francisco government cabal that largely and ineptly runs San Francisco.
The inauguration started with a sheriff's drill team leading the Pledge of Allegiance and then the young lady above singing the National Anthem a capella quite fabulously, and then there was an emcee and a promise of entertainment that included Puccini's "Un Bel Di" and a Persian Folk Song, which is when I remembered that Tiger's kitty litter across the street needed cleaning so I did so.
I returned an hour later just in time for the last speaker on the program, Sheriff Mirkarimi himself. I stayed for a couple of minutes of his speech and then moved on to The Green Room, where a free reception complete with wine and roving appetizers was going to be held.
Nobody loves the sound of his own voice quite like Ross Mirkarimi, but I was still surprised that his oration ran for a steady forty minutes. Meanwhile I chatted up the charming catering crew in the Green Room, waiting for the mobs to arrive.
They finally did make their entrance, and there were people you actually wanted to see like Glendon Hyde aka Annaconda above, a District 6 Supervisorial candidate from last November.
There was also a favorite sheriff's deputy, above left, who works at City Hall. It was the first time I had seen him out of his dorky sheriff's uniform and he looked sharp.
There was a huge police presence all around the Veterans building, and it wasn't quite clear if this was meant as protection or intimidation of Mirkarimi, who they seem to despise.
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.
The public was invited to San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee's inauguration party in City Hall on Sunday morning but what the organizers failed to announce was that there were two tiers of "public," those who held red invitation cards from the Ed Lee Inauguration Committee, and those who did not.
If you were part of the latter group, officious characters insisted that you leave the main floor and take the elevator somewhere, anywhere away upstairs. The elevator stopped at the second floor, but after the door opened a bossy young man yelled at us that nobody was allowed off the elevator. Supervisor John Avalos happened to be standing right next to him, and he gave me a rueful grin, followed by a wave.
On the third floor, besides velvet ropes denying entrances to stairways, there was yellow "Do Not Cross" tape in front of the lighting systems set up for the show below, which didn't allow for even halfway decent sightlines for the peasants.
In all the years I've been attending and covering events at City Hall, this wide-scale exclusion of the public at a public event was a first, and not a particularly good portent for the next four years of the Ed Lee administration.
What made the situation even more grotesque was that Lee's short inauguration speech was reportedly filled with repeated assertions that he was going to be "The Mayor of the 100%."
This buzz phrase is particularly absurd considering that Lee was selected for office by old power brokers such as US Senator Dianne Feinstein above, who swore him into office this morning.
According to a number of witnesses, the inauguration was very much the Willie Brown, Jr. show, with the openly corrupt, influence peddling ex-mayor as emcee, which is almost enough to make one feel sorry for Ed Lee.
I left after the San Francisco Symphony trumpet fanfare on the main staircase led by Mark Inouye above as they musically introduced Ed Lee and his family.
This was mainly because there was no way to see anything unless one held a precious red ticket, although I heard later that there were video feeds in the South and North Light Courts off the main floor rotunda, but none of the gatekeepers were bothering to share that information with the public.
It wasn't the San Francisco Police Department that was keeping the great unwashed off the main floor in City Hall. Instead, they were were walking in pairs on the sidewalk around City Hall, smiling, being friendly, and otherwise not acting like the usual SFPD at all. The Sheriffs Department was handling security inside City Hall, and they were also in a jolly mood, but they also had nothing to do with the main floor velvet ropes.
Instead, it was volunteers from the Ed Lee Inauguration Committee who were playing bouncers. The young man above wasn't as obnoxious as most of these characters, many of whom seemed to consist of middle-aged Chinese ladies who had taken charm school lessons from Rose Pak. The whole event was very weird.
