Saying Thanks to a Federal Worker

This January I visited the Social Security Administration offices at San Francisco's strange looking federal building on 7th and Mission.

There was misinformation on file about previous "credible" health insurance when I applied for a Medicare Part D prescription plan with Cigna, so in order to straighten things out, I waited with dozens of others for two hours to seek assistance from an SSA employee. Unfortunately, the situation was beyond the agent's capabilities so she set up an appointment with a specialist who could help. However, the first available date was three months later, April 7th, and this was before the Elon Musk DOGE slasher show had even begun.

After signing an online attestation form, the issue was mysteriously resolved with Cigna in late March. So even though there was no need to keep the appointment with Social Security, I went through the abusive, heavyhanded security gauntlet anyway.

The reason was to thank the beleaguered federal employees whose jobs are currently in peril and who are having to pick up the slack at a decimated organization.

Only people with appointments were being allowed to enter, so the large waiting room was emptier than usual.

When I was called to Window 8, the gentleman behind the bulletproof glass with wary, weary eyes asked for my birthdate. I explained that the issue had been resolved and I just wanted to thank him and his colleagues for continuing to help others in this time of chaos. The look on his face quickly went from confused to flabbergasted to smiling as I handed him a thank you card for the office. This might be a good time for you to also say thanks to a federal worker if you get a chance.

A Kickass Performance of John Adams's Chamber Symphony

The San Francisco Conservatory of Music offers free concerts for the public almost every day of the week and you can get tickets by making reservations at their website (click here). On Saturday evening, I was drawn to an orchestral concert led by student conductors because one of the pieces was the wild, rarely performed 1992 Chamber Symphony of local composer John Adams. Along the way, I ran into Chenier Ng, one of the most dedicated music lovers in the world.

The concert began with Haydn's Symphony No. 59, nicknamed "The Fire Symphony," in a surprisingly vivid performance conducted by Donald Lee III, who brought passion, interesting dynamics, and a liveliness that is often absent when San Francisco's professional ensembles play the composer's music.

According to the program notes, Lee is a multi-hyphenate musician: pianist, conductor, and vocal accompanist. If he can conduct Haydn this well, he can probably do anything.

This was followed by Adams's Chamber Symphony conducted by Chih-Yao Chang from Taiwan in an astonishingly accomplished, kickass performance. There is a well-known anecdote Adams tells about the genesis of this work. He was studying the score of Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony at home while his 7-year-old son Sam was watching TV cartoons with their manic musical soundtracks, and the two merged in his mind like a surrealist Looney Tunes animation. He also notes that "Despite all the good humor, my Chamber Symphony turned out to be shockingly difficult to play." No kidding.

Young musicians are often quite brilliant with contemporary music that confounds their elders and this performance was a good example, a more exact and exciting version than I heard 10 years ago at the SF Symphony. Concertmaster Aleksy Aretsky (above) was superb in both the Haydn and this outing, and Diego Rodriguez (above, back left) miraculously made my least favorite instrument, the piccolo, sound varied and gorgeous. This was especially important because at times the three-movement symphony sounds like a concerto for piccolo and chamber orchestra.

Conductor Chih-Yao Chang kept all the competing musical threads and cross-cutting time signatures clear, even when the score sounds like it's about to be a car wreck. He's got a bright future. I didn't stay for the second half of the concert, which was Beethoven's Egmont Overture and Piano Concerto #1 because no matter how good the performance, it would have sounded like weak tea after the Chamber Symphony.

Cathedral City Tesla Protest

We went to the weekly Cathedral City Tesla protest today...

...and joined a group of about 300 people lined along the sidewalk of Perez Road, a huge boulevard with no legal parking...

...many with signage.

This was all taking place in front of the only Tesla showroom and service station in the Coachella Valley.

"Chinga Tu Maga" is my new favorite tagline/T-shirt.

Palm Springs real estate has become too expensive so most of the new gay immigrants are moving into neighboring Cathedral City,

The area is feeling very much like an oasis for people fleeing the oncoming fascist Gilead.

This Sunday's weekly protest featured counterprotestors across the street for the first time, with idiotic signage that included "TESLA OWNERS LIVES MATTER".

My friend Rob McCann, a Canadian who worked for NASA and gained American citizenship years ago, made an appearance.

And so did innumerable fellow citizens who are doing their civic duty by saying pubicly, "No, I protest."

The Great Yes, The Great No

The Great Yes, The Great No, William Kentridge's new multimedia mixture of actors, dancers, singers, instrumentalists, animated projections, films, masks, drawings and stagecraft, was presented by Cal Performances at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall last weekend. (All production photos are by Monika Rittershaus.)

The loose, wandering narrative depicts a real-life surreal Atlantic Ocean voyage in 1941 from Marseille, France to the colonial Caribbean island of Martinique, with refugees fleeing the Nazis and the collaborationist government of Vichy France. For good measure, other historical figures joined the transatlantic voyage, with everyone from Frantz Fanon to Josephine Bonaparte making appearances. The major presiding spirit was the French Surrealist poet Suzanne Césaire (embodied here by Nancy Nkusi reciting her poetry) and her husband Aimé Césaire who had taken an earlier voyage back to their native island.

There was a panel discussion before Friday night's premiere with the South African artist William Kentridge who conceived and directed the two-hour spectacle with a small army of collaborators. He spoke of his influences, ranging from a Mayakovsky play that he'd forgotten and unconsciously reproduced to an a capella lament he heard at a South African funeral that struck him deeply.

There were so many unfamiliar references and digressions that I found it impossible to make much sense of the theatrical work, but it did not matter because there was so much to absorb and enjoy.

A few of my favorite things included the flat, black-and-white masks that were miraculously enlivened by the dancers Thulani Chauke and Teresa Phuti Mojela. In the photo above, they are twin representations of the Surrealist poet Andre Breton, who was actually on this voyage of the cargo ship Capitaine Paul-Lemerle. My favorite of the cartoonish historical figures come to life were Diego Rivera dancing daintily while Frida Kahlo swings a sledge hammer next to him, an apter symbol of their respective impact than is usually offered onstage.

I also loved the musical backbone of the evening, a seven-woman chorus with music composed by Nhlanhla Mahlangu, along with the animated supertitles that were wittily integrated into the extraordinary animated projections of archival photos, Kentridge's drawings, and surrealist films.

The entire cast was superb without exception.

A quartet of instrumentalists played incidental and accompanying music onstage, with Music Director and percussionist Tlale Makhene brilliantly driving the score along.

The narrative was not only about the transatlantic refugees from World War II France, but the underlying history of transatlantic voyages from Africa to the colonial sugar slave plantations of Martinique. Though not explicitly underlined, the parallels between the present-day fascist takeover of the United States and its own history of slave plantations were everywhere.

Cal Performances was one of the many commissioners of The Great Yes, The Great No, and it felt like a rare honor to experience this show on its worldwide tour.