A San Francisco Public Library free lecture series called "City Speaks" featured Mayor Gavin Newsom interviewing YouTube co-founder Steve Shih Chen on Tuesday evening.
The subject was "Politics in the YouTube Era," complete with a couple of video clips on the big screen behind them, including Senator George Allen's "macaca" moment.
Chen seemed like a fascinating character, describing the "eureka" moment of YouTube's creation as simply being sick of having to load a different player/driver whenever somebody sent video to be watched on a computer.
This seemed to go over Newsom's head and in truth he seemed more interested in the gossip and "gotcha" implications of the technology where anyone with a cell phone camera can catch you in an unguarded moment and post it to the internet.
"Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad idea, to live fully in the open, for politicians," Steve said, before laughing as he realized the implications of what he just said and to whom he had said it. This is a mayor who's way too fond of secrecy and back room deals and bad behavior behind closed doors while advocating that San Francisco's citizens be constantly monitored by public cameras.
They also showed the "1984 Apple" parody with Senator Clinton standing in for Big Brother, and Gavin seemed simply amazed that "some guy in his basement, I think in Illinois, could do this in a couple of hours and then thousands of people see it."
Earlier in the day, Newsom had attended a photo-op in the Tenderloin with another young technology CEO, Sanjit Biswas. He's in charge of Meraki which is building an ad hoc wi-fi network throughout San Francisco at a fraction of the cost of the Google/Earthlink project proposed by Newsom over the last couple of years. For some interesting techie articles on the project, click here for Erick Schonfeld at Techcrunch, click here for Glenn Fleishman at Wi-Fi Networking News, and click here for Marguerite Reardon at CNet.
Thank god for the technie activists who showed up at all the meetings and lobbied newspapers and internet sites to get the word out about what a disaster the Earthlink/Google deal would have been. That didn't stop the Chronicle, the Examiner, SF Weekly, City Attorney Dennis Herrera and Ron Vinson at the Department of Technology from vilifying them in every way possible. My friend Kimo Crossman should be given a medal and San Francisco's many thanks for his sheer stubbornness in the face of all that abuse, and it would be nice to hear a simple apology from Newsom, as in "I was wrong and they were right." A rational distribution of wealth would also be nice, but I don't see either one happening anytime soon.
There was plenty of excitement and anticipation involved with San Francisco Opera's ninth world premiere in its history, "The Bonesetter's Daughter" with a libretto by Amy Tan and music by Stewart Wallace. Because so many of the performers were direct from China, the opera company had even put up signage translated into Chinese all over backstage directing people to stage left and stage right.
I've seen all of San Francisco's world premieres since Andrew Imbrie's "Angle of Repose" in the 1970s, which was a huge bore since there are certain composers who are just not meant to be opera composers and the late Imbrie was one of them. Writing well for the operatic voice is a special gift, and he didn't seem to have it. Neither does Stewart Wallace, who penned the the drab docu-opera "Harvey Milk" in the early 1990s, and now is giving us another effort that is almost as bad. General Director David Gockley actually turned down the idea some years ago while he was still in Houston, but decided to give the green light when he moved to San Francisco since author Amy Tan is something of a local celebrity. He should have listened to his first instincts.
The opera is occasionally filled with actual Chinese music and musicians, and every time they are featured, you realize how interesting the story could have been with another composer. The production itself is fairly fabulous, with every singer doing a great job with their meager musical material, and director Chen Shi-Zheng enlivening the stage with projections and acrobats.
A couple of Asian-American bloggers, who are two of the smartest people about classical music that I know, were so flabbergasted by the final dress that they decided to describe their reaction in pictograms. Check it out. (Click here for "The Standing Room" and click here for the "Opera Tattler," who is pictured above, and who wrote a more measured review which you can get to by clicking here).
My only real questions are "why was the mink coat pinkish red?" and "did somebody really sing 'I want to vomit all over your family' or did I imagine it?" and "why does Stewart Wallace continue to get opera commissions?"
The pianist Sarah Cahill came to my apartment on Thursday to talk about "A Sweeter Music," her amazingly ambitious project of the last year where she has commissioned 18 composers to write piano music on the subject of peace. The composers are an interesting mixture of the obscure and the celebrated: Meredith Monk, Frederic Rzewski, Terry Riley, Yoko Ono, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Pauline Oliveros, Peter Garland, Kyle Gann, Paul Dresher, Carl Stone, Ingram Marshall, Jerome Kitzke, Phil Kline, Mamoru Fujieda, Larry Polansky, Michael Byron, The Residents, and Preben Antonsen.
So far, Sarah has received 11 of the 18 scores and they range in style from angry and confrontational to the complete opposite, such as Terry Riley's "Be Kind to One Another" rag which the composer characterizes as "pro-peace" rather than "anti-war." Cahill has already fallen in love with the music.
One question is if a piece of music can even be thought of as political, especially without text.
A number of the composers are incorporating language into their pieces, as Frederic Rzewski did in his 2005 round, shown above...
...and even sign language within Larry Polansky's 17-part "Numbers for solo piano (and invited speakers)."
The brilliant young composer Preben Antonsen, a student of John Adams, has written a piece that starts off in exquisite beauty and ends in great violence, which Cahill has asked him to consider changing depending on who gets elected president this fall.
The four-figure commissions are being subsidized in a few cases by individual affluent patrons, but most of it is coming out of Cahill's own pocket "with the assistance of some stocks left to me at age 9 by my Nixon-supporting grandfather which seems like a good use for them."
It wasn't until we were at lunch that we both realized the date was 9/11. Sarah's husband, the video artist/director John Sanborn, had been offered a good job at the Comedy Central network, so they moved to Manhattan in 2001. Here's her account of that annus horribilis:
"We lived on 21st Street between Broadway and Park. My daughter was in preschool on 14th St (she was three). Right after September 11th, I would take her to school in her stroller, past Union Square, plastered with flyers of missing people, along 14th Street, which was the boundary: no one was allowed to cross that line unless they lived below 14th Street. So we would see the rescue workers coming off duty, and the fire engines and military vehicles, and the makeshift shrines, and I kept trying to protect her from the thick smoke and the news about body parts and terrorists and the endless footage of the planes going into the buildings. She and her preschool friends played games where they would rescue people from burning buildings. I got e-mails from some friends saying "Well, it's about time! The United States has been so brutal towards the Middle East, no wonder we've been attacked!" but mostly people were just shocked. I'll never forget looking down Broadway towards where the World Trade Center used to be, and the smoke pouring from the blankness.
Comedy Central was having a difficult time after that, and soon they closed the division that John was heading. We came back here to Berkeley, and he made a film called MMI, which is about our 2001: the death of his father, the deaths of our two dogs (both died in New York), the World Trade Center attacks, our move across the country first east and then west. It ends with the nine-foot Baldwin being hoisted out the window of our "loft."
"A Sweeter Music" takes its title from Dr. Martin Luther King’s Nobel Lecture: "We must see that peace represents a sweeter music, a cosmic melody that is far superior to the discords of war." Sarah wrote to me about her initial impetus:
"It was Rzewski's arrangement of "Down by the Riverside" which first gave me the idea of "A Sweeter Music." After reading news about the latest deaths in Iraq, I would sit down and play his music as a kind of catharsis. And I kept thinking that there needed to be more pieces like this, which are composed in response to a particular war (in this case the Vietnam war, during which "Down by the Riverside" was often sung in protest marches), but can still provide solace and inspiration thirty years later and beyond. And I know a number of composers who, like me, feel so frustrated and helpless in the face of a senseless war, a completely insane and unprovoked and costly war, and need to express their response in some form. So I really left it to the composers whether their work would be "anti-war" or "pro-peace."
This historic musical omnibus is still gestating, but you can hear portions of it starting this fall for free at Mills College on November 24 (click here and go to the bottom of the link for more info). There will be another set of excerpts performed through Cal Performances at UC Berkeley on January 25th, and at Merkin Hall in New York City in March. It should be an extraordinary experience. (To get to Sarah's website with further links, click here.)
