Monday at 5PM on Market Street near Octavia, there was a small demonstration in front of the temporary offices for SF Pride, who are in charge of the annual June tourist gay parade extravaganza.
In an episode that should go down in the historic annals of PR Don'ts, the organization last week announced that the imprisoned soldier Bradley Manning would be a parade Grand Marshal this year, and then announced that it had all been a mistake. President Lisa Williams released a polarizing statement that included, "A staff person at SF Pride, acting under his own initiative, prematurely contacted Bradley Manning based on internal conversations within the SF Pride organization. That was an error and that person has been disciplined." This is just another example that we are living in a golden age of unintentional irony.
The entire affair is Joey Cain's fault, above right with friend Paul Bloom who insisted on a photo to prove that they were not the same person, as many people believe. Cain was the Grand Marshal Emeritus who nominated Bradley Manning in the first place, and he's also been on the SF Pride Board for a decade so he's fully aware of how dysfunctional the organization can be. For a detailed, funny account of what went down behind the scenes at SF Pride, click here for a Tim Redmond post. It ends with Cain's rueful remark, "“The worst part is that I’m part of the anarchist community, and I’ve always been out there arguing in support of Pride,” Cain said. “Then this is like, holy fucking shit, they just proved everything I’ve been trying to disprove all these years.”
Chris Bowman, above left, and a few Log Cabin Republican cohorts also showed up praising the decision to treat Bradley Manning as a traitor rather than an heroic whistleblower. Bowman gets points for using "egregious" in a sign, but demerits for spelling it "egreggious."
The most famous whistleblower in recent American history, Daniel Ellsberg above, also showed up at the protest. If I heard him correctly, Ellsberg told us that he'd been asked to step into Bradley Manning's place as Grand Marshal by SF Pride and he told them there was no way. Instead he will be marching in his first gay parade next month, except as part of a Bradley Manning support contingent denouncing the SF Pride organization.
"Bradley was much more courageous than me. I could have leaked the Pentagon Papers information much earlier and possibly saved lives, but I did not and it's weighed on my conscience ever since. Bradley's actions were heroic, and maybe they will save some lives."
The San Francisco Gay Pride weekend long ago devolved into a bland, corporate sponsored event with overpriced drinks for suburban young people, many of them heterosexual, who want to get drunk in public in San Francisco. Maybe it will be more interesting this year.
I attended the German baritone Matthias Goerne's Sunday evening concert at Davies Hall of Schubert's final song-cycle Winterreise, and the performance was magnificent, legendary. Though German Lieder recitals are close to the bottom of my list of cultural favorite things, so much has been written over the years about Winterreise and Goerne that it seemed time to give both a chance, and I am glad to have ventured out. Thanks also to Patrick Vaz who told me the 80-minute song cycle about a mopey man whose heart has been broken is as much a bleak Beckett comedy as it is a heavy, Germanic musing on mortality.
If you go to many classical concerts in San Francisco, there are a few people who seem to attend every one, while there are a few concerts which attract all the extremely discriminating musical connoisseurs you never see in public otherwise. Sunday's Winterreise was one of the latter events.
James Parr above is one of those people who seem to be at every concert. Last weekend, in fact, he was a Cultural Iron Man, going to Opera Parallele's Trouble in Tahiti on Friday, battle hymns on Saturday, a Bach organ mass in Davies on Sunday afternoon, topped off with Winterreise Sunday evening.
I listened to Winterreise repeatedly over the last week with a recording by tenor Ian Bostridge accompanied by pianist Leif Ove Andsnes. Bostridge is lovely, but the piano playing of Andsnes is breathtaking. At the live Sunday performance, the situation was reversed. Pianist and conductor Christoph Eschenbach was okay, but Goerne gave one of those performances that will stick in your brain forever. Looking like a big, tormented, German slab of beef, reminiscent of the antihero in Fassbinder's 15-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz telefilm, he proceeded to intimately guide the huge hall on a journey that was equal parts crazy, despairing, and beautiful.
