Next door to the Amtrak train station on the San Francisco waterfront, a 40-foot retro rocket sculpture has been created by Five Ton Crane, a group of Burning Man associated artists for a year-long installation, and it's stunningly playful.
The artists Sean Orlando, Nathaniel Taylor, and David Shulman (above), along with a crew of over 60 volunteers, originally created the sculpture for the 2009 Burning Man festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert.
In the desert, you could walk inside the rocket as if you really were going to take off, but insurance and permit considerations made that impossible along the San Francisco waterfront.
Accordingly, a kiosk was built by Alan Rorie with graphic design by Jody Medich, displaying the daily intergalactic schedule for the Raygun Gothic Rocketship.
The retro rocket's placement next to the Amtrak station is an unintended bit of irony since rail travel is experiencing a back to the future moment right now, although the United States is falling behind the rest of the world in that arena with each passing day.
Maybe that's why the kiosk designers insisted that "Earth" was a "Local" stop.
I was taking a train on Friday morning, just before the rocketship's official installation, and talked to a European tourist family who were going to Los Angeles via an Amtrak train to Bakersfield followed by a bus ride to downtown LA. When they asked me what they were getting into, I replied, "It's very, very old-fashioned and slow. Pretend you're in a Hollywood movie from the 1940s and you should have a good time."
The European patriarch talked about how his family was on their way home from a trip to Shanghai. "Ten years ago China had no modern rail infrastructure. Now they have high-speed trains going at 270MPH everywhere. It's amazing."
Meanwhile, in California, it is taking forever to start building a modern railway system while the state chokes on its own exhaust. I wish the Raygun Gothic Rocketship engineers and artists were in charge.
The Merola Opera Program, San Francisco's summer training institution for budding opera stars, staged the Donizetti comedy "L'Elisir D'Amore" this weekend at the small Cowell Theatre in Fort Mason with two rotating casts in the principal parts. The chorus for both casts consisted of Merola singers who had already performed in a concert at Herbst Theatre last month, and they were wonderful, though you could hear some of the larger solo voices booming out of the choral mix.
The opera is essentially a sweet village romance between a haughty heroine sung by Nadine Sierra and the love-sick peasant hero Nemorino sung by Daniel Montenegro, who were both superb (pictured above).
There is also Belcore, an egomaniacal young military sergeant sung by Benjamin Covey and Dulcamara, sung by Thomas Florio above, who is an old mountebank selling a secret elixir that turns out to be Bordeaux wine. The production, directed by Nicola Bowie, set the piece in World War Two San Francisco which was fine, but then decided to further complicate things by having the village be a theatre troupe, a concept which made no sense whatsoever and which was frequently just ignored.
Still, the sets and costumes were brightly pretty, and the orchestra led by longtime recital accompanist Martin Katz (above) was fun, partly because they were essentially sitting in the audience's laps between the stage and the first row. Watching and listening to cellist Emil Miland from two feet away, for instance, was a treat.
The real highlight, though, was the singing of Daniel Montenegro, who simply has a gorgeous tenor voice that he never pushed or strained. What is it with the Merola program and their string of great Mexican tenors lately? David Lomeli, Eleazar Rodriguez, and now Daniel Montenegro are certainly a formidable trio. Montenegro has the added advantage of sweet, boyish looks which are perfect for young romantic heroes in the opera world.
The second cast had a different set of strengths and weaknesses, which are well detailed by the Opera Tattler (above) and Axel Feldheim at Not For Fun Only.
On Wednesday evening, after federal Judge Vaughn Walker declared California's Proposition 8 unconstitutional, there was a march down Market Street from the Castro to City Hall. Unfortunately, the evening was grey and freezing cold, and the political speeches mostly uninspiring while solemnly invoking the ghost of Harvey Milk.
One of the few in the crowd carrying on in the spirit of the very un-solemn Harvey Milk was Anna Conda/Glendon Hyde (above), the Tenderloin drag queen, performance artist and poor people's political activist. Anna is running for Supervisor in District 6 this November, and good luck to Ms. Conda & Mr. Hyde.
During the San Francisco Gay, Etc. Pride Weekend at the end of June, somebody spray painted the above slogan onto a few sections of sidewalk on McAllister Street near City Hall and the California Supreme Court (below). Since then, the stencils have been fading slowly while attracting the occasional "---- IS GAY" graffiti.
The last time there was a major ruling on the California Proposition 8 gay marriage issue in May of 2009, there were thousands of demonstrators in front of the California Supreme Court building above, and across the street in Civic Center Plaza. Today there was nobody outside, and after dispensing with belt, coins, and camera for the metal detector, it turned out nobody was inside the building either.
Of course, I had forgotten that this was now a federal case, so that any demonstrators would be a block away in front of the old federal building on Golden Gate Avenue.
There were a handful of religious bigots with large signage and a young man named Luke Otterstad (below) who was being interviewed for the television with his new fiance Nadia Chayka.
He was probably from a network of Ukrainian Baptist Churches in the Sacramento area, who for reasons unknown are the most insistently public Proposition 8 defenders in San Francisco.
The federal judge, Vaughn Walker, has recently been outed as a gay man himself, which is probably confirming all their worst suspicions about conspiracies most foul.
The crowd in front of the federal building was mostly media...
...along with a few people who were ready to pose for them.
At about 1:45 PM, with the foggy wind howling through the plaza, the news spread through everybody's mobile devices that Proposition 8 had been declared unconstitutional and there was general rejoicing.
Some people wondered whether or not they could walk over to the Clerk's Office at San Francisco City Hall and get a marriage license.
The best instant legal analysis of the ruling I have found is by Brian Devine (not pictured) at the Calitics website (click here), where he explains:
"Most of the decision (the first 109 pages) is the "factual findings." This is crucial, and here's why. On appeal, Judge Walker's conclusions of law are basically irrelevant. Questions of law are decided fresh on appeal, and the trial court's thoughts on the law are entitled to no deference. On the other hand, only a trial court can make factual findings. A Court of Appeal must give great deference to the factual findings of the trial court, especially when those findings are based on the credibility of witness testimony. Judge Walker knows this. He knows that his primary role in this case is to weigh the credibility of the evidence that was presented at trial, and apply the facts that were proven to the law. But the law--unlike the facts--ultimately will be decided by nine Justices at a higher pay grade. Consequently, we should be grateful to Judge Walker for carefully and diligently going through the facts of the case, creating a detailed and compelling record for the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court."
At 4:00 PM, I went to the San Francisco Clerk's office with my "domestic partner" to see about getting married, but in the interim a "Stay" had been put on the decision by Judge Walker until both parties make their case for staying the decision until it is heard by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals a half dozen city blocks away.
A sweet, regretful clerk told us we couldn't fill out paperwork if requesting a "same-sex" marriage, and so the civil rights saga continues.
