Currently at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum are three concurrent touring shows that are installed a bit claustrophobically into the three separate rooms on the ground floor reserved for these kinds of exhibitions.
One of the shows, "The Elegant Gathering: The Yeh Family Collection" has even been divided into Parts 1 and Parts 2 as it rotates between the spring and the summer. Of the three different shows, this is the only one that strikes me as outrageously boring, though I'm sure the fault is entirely mine. If you are not interested in calligraphy and can't read Chinese, though, the chances are you won't be all that amused.
The second show is of contemporary Korean ceramics, and it has lots of great, fun, interesting pieces.
Unfortunately, the exhibit is all crammed together.
I wish the exhibitors had stored away the upstairs Korean permanent collection for a few months, with its thousand-year-old ceramics (above)...
...and allowed the contemporary ceramics some room to breathe.
The third show is a set of huge paintings by a famous 43-year-old Beijing painter named Liu Xiaodong about the land and the people impacted by the Three Gorges Dam project on the Yangtze River in China, which is currently displacing something on the order of two million people.
The paintings are absolutely wonderful and that's all I will say about them other than that you really should go and see them in person.
On Thursday the 13th there was a public reception for the artist (pictured above on the left with his wife), and anybody was invited for the price of museum admission.
There had been a "Monsoon" society party earlier in the week, with food and entertainment, but that cost $150 rather than Thursday evening's $5 admission, so this was definitely more of a people's affair.
Liu Xiadong (in the orange) was part of a group called the "Cynical Realists" in the 1980s but looking at his recent paintings there seems to be no cynicism to his work at all. His wife, Yu Hong (pictured with him above) is also an artist, and quite a good one too (click here for a website with examples of her work).
The soul of the party seemed to be yet another famous Chinese artist, Hong Liu, pictured above, who now teaches at Mills College in Oakland. Click here to get to her website to see her work and to read her bio, which snakes from country to Beijing to forced labor in the country during the Cultural Revolution and finally to UC San Diego in the 1980s.
That's where she met her second husband, Jeff Kelley (above), in art school. Mr. Kelley also curated this Three Gorges Dam show, and gave a wonderful speech saying essentially that ethnicity and social consciousness were some of the least interesting things about Liu Xiadong's work. "Above all, they're just some of the greatest paintings as paintings in the world right now."
To continue the family connection, Hong Liu's son, Ling Chen Kelley, played translator for the artist when he came to the podium for a short, sweet thank you.
In fact, the speechifying from everyone, including Museum Deputy Director Chris Hest, was brief and charming.
Plus, the beer was cheap and it wasn't too crowded, making for a delightful time.
On Monday, April 10th, for a few blessed hours, the Northern California skies cleared from their daily, unending rainstorms and all was well with the world.
Taking advantage of the lucky break, one of the biggest-ass limousines around stopped in front of San Francisco's City Hall, and the driver got out to unroll a red carpet for his passengers.
The party turned out to be a middle-aged wedding party...
...presumably there to apply for a license for matrimonial bliss.
By Tuesday the 11th, in time for the weekly Board of Supervisors meeting in City Hall, the skies had turned dark again and the rain resumed.
Stormy weather continued over a proposal to appropriate funds to the San Francisco School District in order to save the Civic Center ghetto grammar school, John Swett Alternative, on McAllister Street between Franklin and Gough, which is pictured above.
As part of a budget-saving move by the district, which has had severely declining enrollment, a number of schools were slated to be closed and/or merged throughout San Francisco according to a certain set of criteria that included enrollment figures and test scores.
The process was controversial, to say the least, but the John Swett closure has raised more than the usual amount of rancor because District 5 supervisor Mirkarimi had found through an extensive investigative process that the school board was playing fast and loose with their own rules and criteria when it came to shutting down the ancient, venerable grammar school.
What he discovered was that the school district offices (pictured above), which are located across McAllister Street from the school, wanted more office space and they were thinking of booting out the kids and the community so they could move in themselves, while never actually coming right out and admitting this was the case.
There had been long hearings on the subject in various committees, most notably the Budget and Finance Committee, where the reactionary Supervisor Elsbernd had been in the minority when it came to the idea of requesting that the school district keep John Swett open and appropriating the funds to help them do so. (Hey, it's mostly just a bunch of poor black kids, why should he care?)
Just as a vote was about to be taken on the measure, Supervisor McGoldrick intervened with a request that the usual rules about public comment on issues that had already been through committee be suspended so that a representative from the school district could speak.
Supervisor Sandoval made a motion for the suspension of rules, which didn't set too well with some of the other supervisors.
Chris Daly, the chair of the Budget Committee, stood up to speak against the motion, stating quite calmly that representatives from the school district had been invited to speak in committee any number of times and that the issue had been thoroughly discussed from all sides, and that this last-minute interruption just felt like "sandbagging." (I may be wrong about this, actually. It could have been Mirkarimi who used the "sand" word.)
In any case, this really set off McGoldrick, whose heart is often in the right place but who is by nature essentially a blowhard. He started to give an absurd speech about how offended he was by the word "sandbagged" and how there was such a thing as courtesy and "noblesse oblige" and that the board deserved to hear the school district out.
By this time, most of the male supervisors were standing at their desks looking like bulls ready for some head-butting. Board President Peskin got involved in an angry way when he pointed out that nobody from the school district was actually even there at the hearing. McGoldrick replied that he'd just gotten word about this and there would be somebody at the hearing eventually, but that didn't fly so well.
Mirkarimi then gave an impassioned speech on how the school district had broken their own rules and cooked their own books to close John Swett and how it was a grotesque act that needed to be stopped.
The motions for suspension of the rules didn't pass and the actual vote went ahead with 9 voting for the appropriation to save the school, including McGoldrick, with Supervisor Elsbernd dissenting.
There was plenty of other action throughout the meeting, including a resolution going after the health insurance giant Brown and Toland who are refusing to allow doctors to practice at the community Chinese Hospital unless they became "exclusive" Brown and Toland providers.
There was plenty of chicanery, too, with misnamed bits of legislation that were designed to screw the general public in service to the small percentage of people who have more money than the rest of us. To read the great h. Brown's profane predictions on these votes and issues at his San Francisco Bulldog site, which all came true more or less, click here.
My favorite moment was during the commendation period, where a father-and-son coffeeshop team were being honored and McGoldrick insisted that the old guy sing "O Sole Mio" as had been promised. As you can see, the serpentine Supervisor Dufty wasn't particularly amused when exactly that occurred.
Part of the frustration with passenger train travel in the United States is because freight trains have the right-of-way on nearly all of the lines, causing inevitable delays in every itinerary.
The Feather River Express excursion was scheduled to arrive at the small Sierra town of Portola at 4:30 PM on Saturday, with the 600+ passengers being transported an hour's drive to the southeast for an overnight stay in Reno.
After innumerable stops in the middle of nowhere waiting for freight trains to pass by, the Express actually pulled into Portola four hours late on Saturday. A couple of the the buses had left for other duties, stranding a few dozen passengers in Portola overnight.
Besides getting into Reno very late, there was the Daylight Savings changeover to contend with, so it was a very sleep-deprived group that assembled for the return trip to Sacramento and the Bay Area.
As usual, it was the younger passengers who seemed the most affected...
...while many of the more elderly in the group...
...were looking like a million bucks.
Most of the passengers were train geeks...
...who were obsessed with the minutiae of train travel.
My first question to any stranger on the train was whether or not they were train geeks, and most of them admitted that they were a bit obsessed...
...though they all had stories of compatriots who were even more obsessed for which there was a special name. They were called "foamers," as in "foaming at the mouth."
One gent in the smoking car was wearing a sweatshirt that read "I've spent most of my Time & Money on Trains. The rest I've just wasted."
Though most of the "foamers" were male...
...there were exceptions to the rule, such as the female engineer Lynn, above...
...who had married the Livermore native, above, with a wedding on the Niles Canyon Railway two years earlier.
As we went through the many tunnels carved into the canyon...
...there was narration over the speaker system that was blessedly brief and informative, delivered by the central gent above in a great, gravelly voice.
When somebody asked Henry Luna, one of the hosts, if the organizers were all model train freaks, he replied that they were actually more interested in the real thing. "There's a club for everything, though," he continued. "There's a club for people who collect ticket stubs, a club for schedule collectors, a club for just about anything you can think of."
My favorite new category was something called "chasers," people who obsessively travel to remote places to take pictures of rare trains in their natural settings. This Feather River excursion had attracted a few legendary "chasers," including the person above, who had driven all the way to Portola and back along Highway 70 to capture this moment.
It sounded a bit like bird-watchers venturing into remote locations trying to see a particular group of birds in the wild, such as the bald eagle sitting on top of the tree in the photo above. The fact that there is a wholly unknown human subculture that includes legendary "chasers" makes me unreasonably happy, as if discovering an entirely new species.
