On their blog site, the San Francisco Asian Art Museum had promised free temporary tattoos depicting the giant red lotus in Civic Center plaza with the museum's upside down logo in the middle. They were supposed to arrive in time for the Gay Pride festivities in June but there were unspecified problems in shipment, so they have only belatedly just arrived.
According to a Yahoo Answers page, "In Hinduism, the lotus (Sanskrit: padma) primarily represents beauty and non-attachment. The lotus is rooted in the mud but floats on the water without becoming wet or muddy. This symbolizes how one should live in the world in order to gain release from rebirth: without attachment to one's surroundings."
As my friend Patrick Vaz often puts it, "Good luck with that."
There are San Francisco summer camps for kids galore, offering everything from windsurfing lessons to French language immersion. The one I would have wanted to attend, though, is the Creepshow Camp at the Hypnodrome in the South of Market neighborhood.
The two-week theatre camp has been led for the last six years by Thrillpeddlers director Russell Blackwood (above, with Flynn De Marco), and according to their website:
"Young devotees of Horror, Sci-Fi and Suspense have a summer camp to call their own! Creepshow Camps face “fright” with curiosity and creativity, revealing the secret techniques behind scary entertainments’ vitality and power."
The camp ends with a half-hour play featuring all the campers, and this Friday it was called Adventure Club Strikes Back! by Michael Phillis, where The Mystery Club above foolishly explore a haunted old schoolhouse and are turned into zombies by a malevolent grandmother.
They are eventually saved by their rivals, The Adventure Club and The Danger Club above, and through a turn of events not to be revealed, there is pizza at the end for all, including the audience. This is Lunch Theatre done right. If interested, call Russell Blackwood at (415) 377-4202 about last-minute enrollment in the fourth and final session that starts on Monday, August 6th.
The Merola summer training program presented their second production at the Cowell Theater on Thursday night, an obscure Italian comic opera written by Mozart at age 18 called La Finta Gardiniera, and it was an astonishing, surprising treat. This was partly because of the music, some of which is as good as anything Mozart ever wrote, and partly because its cast of seven young singers not only sounded good but acted their stock roles of servants, courtiers, and nobility with unusual grace and intelligence. (Pictured above are Rose Sawvel as the cynical, savvy servant Serpetta, Gordon Bintner as the servant Nardo, Jennifer Cherest as the titular "Phony Gardener" Sandrina, Theo Lebow as the violent, tormented Count Belfiore, and Casey Candebat as the horny, old pompous Mayor. Pictured below is Sarah Mesko in the Drag King role of Don Ramiro.)
As Charles Shere writes at The Eastside View, "No lover of Mozart can afford to ignore La finta giardiniera, an opera at the exact emergence of the Romantic music drama from its Baroque and classical sources." The opera sounds and feels like a warm-up for both Cosi fan Tutte and Don Giovanni, though the libretto with all its unrequited, mismatched lovers looks back to Handel's time.
What makes this a strangely queasy comedy is that the plot starts with the tenor hero stabbing the soprano heroine in an irrational jealous rage and leaving her for dead. She subsequently tracks him down while he's wooing the mayor's niece (sung and acted brilliantly by Jacqueline Piccolino). This is all before the opening curtain goes up.
The first act proceeds along like an early Italian opera buffa, but is leavened with an exquisitely sad aria for the wronged heroine. The second act goes a bit crazy in a dark forest, where everyone ends up kissing the wrong person, and then our hero and heroine go mad. Jennifer Cherest was wonderful in the title role, playing a very strong victim with subtlety. Theo Lebow as Count Belfiore (above, in the unfortunate blonde wig) took one of the most unlikable potential roles imaginable and created a completely sympathetic character. There are a series of duets over the last thirty minutes of the show between the two, after they have lost their minds in the dark forest and think they are Medusa and Perseus respectively. After sanity resumes, the duet continues as a tentative reuniting. It was genuinely moving.
The conductor was Gary Thor Wedow (above left) who also conducted Don Giovanni for Merola some years ago. I like his Mozart, and though the orchestra sounded a bit ragged from a lack of rehearsal, it was a good ragged, lively and musical and interesting. Because there is no real orchestra pit at the Cowell Theatre, we were almost sitting in the harpsichord continuo players' laps. Apprentice Coach Francesco Fraboni had the honors for the first act of the opera, and Artem Grishaev took over for the second half. Grishaev was good, but Fraboni was fabulous. The director, Nicholas Muni (above, second from left) and costume designer Ulises Alcala, did a nice job creating a turn-of-the-19th/20th century steampunk look for the show which was whimsical while staying simple.
The bass-baritones Seth Mease Carico and Hadleigh Adams above were non-singing supernumerary servants throughout the show who were so distractingly handsome that one wondered why the various female characters weren't sighing over them instead of their supposed love objects.
If you can, check out the second matinee performance on Saturday the 4th at 2:00 PM. The chance to hear obscure Mozart done well, in a decent production with good young singers in a small theater, is a rare treat.
The federal government's war on California's medical marijuana dispensaries continues apace, with threatening letters sent to landlords, causing the closure this week of two long-time institutions, HopeNet on 9th Street in SOMA and the Vapor Room in the lower Haight.
Late Wednesday afternoon there was a funeral march from the Vapor Room to the Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue where the Justice Department and the DEA still have their offices.
The local Savonarola in the Justice Department is US Attorney Melinda Haag, caricatured above with the oversized puppet.
There is nothing worse than somebody perpetrating obvious evil while cloaking themselves in the mantle of moral superiority. Though Haag doesn't deserve Savonarola's violent end, she does deserve to be confronted and vilified everywhere, in public and private. She is causing real harm.
For instance, I have a medical marijuana recommendation letter from my general practitioner and have been using the extraordinary dispensary SPARC on Mission Street for the last couple of years. Though the facilities and staff couldn't be more charming, the block of Mission Street between Eighth and Ninth is definitely sketchy. However, the Justice Department has recently threatened the banks and the credit card companies into blackballing marijuana dispensaries, so now everyone has to walk around with large chunks of cash which is simply dangerous. Can you sue the Justice Department after you have been mugged, thanks to their insane policies?
The entire prison industrial complex, from the national to the local level, seems to be fed primarily by illegal drug users and dealers, and there is no way the system wants to change.
Here's a revealing detail. A San Francisco Examiner article by Ari Burack from October 21, 2011, reveals what tax money has been paying for in terms of local incarceration:
Two drug-related police scandals inadvertently have helped The City prepare for an influx of inmates under the state’s recently implemented prison realignment plan. The inmate population at San Francisco’s jails dropped sharply in early 2010 after the Police Department’s drug lab scandal came to light and again this year after allegations began surfacing about police misconduct during drug raids at residential hotels, Sheriff’s Department statistics show.
In other words, stop arresting unauthorized drug users and the jails and criminal courts empty out. Get on it, Assemblyman Ammiano and Supervisor Campos (pictured above). It's time for a sane drug policy for the 21st Century.
