On Thursday morning the 21st, a small collection of notable Palm Springs citizens...
...gathered for the unveililng of a new public sculpture in the rose garden of lovely Ruth Hardy Park.
The emcee was Mike Stern who introduced the political celebrities and proclaimed how Art helped Tourism which was The Business of Palm Springs.
Ron Oden, the charming, openly gay mayor of the city was the next speaker. He's a controversial character lately, neither for his race nor his sexual preferences, but because he's been the front man for a couple of dreadful real estate development schemes that are going to obscure everyone's views of the beloved San Jacinto Mountains.
The four-foot high "Whirlwind VI" turned out to be a quite beautiful mirrored steel sculpture by Gary Slater from Tempe, Arizona.
Slater was genuinely pleasant when I spoke to him before the unveiling, but he looked shy and uneasy at the podium so he didn't stay up there long.
In his published Artist's Statement, Slater writes: "Whirlwind" is a series I started several years ago and the form of the spiraling steel reminded me of the whirlwinds that spring up in the desert in the summer."
"Whirlwind VI is so far the most dramatic of the series, with more blades than the previous "Whirlwinds."
My favorite feature of the sculpture is that it looks completely different from every angle, gracefully reflecting the world around it.
In the bowels of the Tenderloin district...
...across the street from the infamous gay porn Tea Room Theatre...
...the San Francisco franchise of the "Fringe Festival" set up camp...
...at the collection of small black boxes called the Exit Theatre.
The show I went to see, "21/One" by the Boxcar Theatre Group, was slated to take place in a Mexican bus cruising the streets of San Francisco rather than in one of the actual theatres.
My favorite detail about the Exit theatre complex was the signage on the door of their bathroom.
Usually, one is instructed not to flush various items down public lavatories, but here the problem seemed to be the opposite, so that one was urged to "Please Flush Toilet."
Groups of people were waiting outside on Eddy Street for the bus to arrive while being panhandled by the local denizens.
All attendees to the "21/One" play were issued nametags along with the option of unlimited beer and Jello shots for an extra $10.
The nametags were a brilliant touch because it helped confuse the already murky line between who were the actors and who were the audience during the following hour of a mock-bachelorette party gone amok.
This led to one of the greatest theatrical coups of my life. I was standing on the sidewalk with a very beautiful black couple named Lisa and Harold when the bus arrived from an earlier performance, and Harold darted between two cars to the bus. However, one of the empty cars had people in it and they started backing it up, nearly crushing Harold's knees in the process. Lisa and I both screamed and he escaped within an inch of serious injury.
The two of them sat behind me on the bus (which unfortunately WASN'T a Mexican bus as advertised) and looked slightly amused and slightly put-off by all the young white people's drunken foolishness which constituted the plot of the playlet as we drove through South of Market neighborhoods. About thirty minutes into the affair, Lisa turned around to the character playing the bachelorette's ex-boyfriend and started delivering scripted dialogue, and I don't think I've ever been so surprised and shocked in the theater. My fellow audience member was a brilliant plant.
More discombobulating events occurred as we pulled into a deserted parking lot and a huge animated projection with sound gave us a short history of the bachelorette's relationship with her ex.
This was followed by bits of thespian business created by actors in various locations around the city as we looked out the windows of the bus, which turned everything one saw on the streets into a potential piece of theatre.
As I stumbled off the bus, drunk from one too many Jello shots, I asked Lisa if the near-injury of Harold was real or staged, and she said, "Oh, that was very real." It was quite an amazing evening of theatre.
August was dull and unpopulated in San Francisco's Civic Center, with no opera, no symphony, no art openings, no ethnic cultural festivals, no politicians and no demonstrations. September has started off with a bang, however, and it's difficult to step out the front door without stumbling across some odd and interesting activity.
On Thursday the 14th there was an art opening at the San Francisco Art Commission gallery in the Veterans Building and it was mobbed.
The show was an annual juried exhibition of 26 young artists in fancy colleges like Stanford and the San Francisco Art Institute who were nominated by their professors for the $2,500 scholarship award.
$2,500 will hardly pay for a month's rent and tuition in the Bay Area, so the amount struck me as rather cheapskate.
Plus, the Murphy and Cadogan Fellowships in the Fine Arts awards are a branch of the monstrous San Francisco Foundation (click here for their website) which had assets of over $800 million in 2005 while giving out less than $20 million in "philanthropy," about 2.5%.
The crowd was young and cute but the vast majority of the art seriously sucked.
To check it out, click here for the SF Art Commission's page.
The next afternoon, at h. brown's Burrito Salon, the celebrity guest was Starchild (in the foreground), a District 8 supervisorial candidate running against the creepy Bevan Dufty. For an article on the exotic dancer/escort and some of his outrageous legal troubles with law enforcement in Fremont, click here. If I lived in the district, he'd certainly be my candidate.
Later in the afternoon in Civic Center Plaza, a group of bubble enthusiasts were having a get-together.
By bubble enthusiasts, I'm referring to soap suds, not economics.
San Francisco seems to have a niche group for just about everything...
...and to find a half-dozen people enjoying blowing bubbles with each other...
...was a happy occasion.
A few kids in the plaza felt exactly the same way.
Across from the bubbly plaza, there was another art opening at City Hall...
...in City Supervisor Mirkarimi's office.
The event was showcasing three different artists...
...and most of their efforts were even worse...
...than the expensive college effforts...
...across the street at the Art Commission gallery.
It didn't matter, since most attendees at these events are political junkies...
...who are there to schmooze and gossip with each other, not to look at the art.
As usual, Supervisor Mirkarimi was a calm, genial host...
...and as usual h. brown was flirting with all the pretty women while the recently-divorced-from-The-Sentinel Luke Thomas looked on.
Back across the street in Civic Center Plaza, a stage had been assembled...
...for a day-early celebration of Mexican Independence Day, el 16 de septiembre.
One of the local Spanish-language television stations seemed to be sponsoring the event...
...on what turned out to be a punishingly chilly evening.
Yolanda and her co-host introduced the Mexican consul-general in San Francisco...
...along with Mayor Gavin Newsom himself.
Gavin apologized in English for not speaking Spanish to the crowd, which was the language of every other speaker...
...and tried to make a joke out of the fact that he'd studied French and Italian in school which has since done him absolutely no good.
The short, clunky speech didn't sound much like English, either, since he kept using all those San Francisco Foundation nonprofit euphemism words like "partnering" and "celebrating diversity" and "stakeholders."
The Norteno band that followed him was a blessed relief.
