Three hours later, at Herbst theatre across Van Ness Avenue from City Hall, there was another inauguration. It was for ex-District 5 Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, who had just won a hard-fought election for Sheriff last November. Unlike the Mayor Ed Lee affair in City Hall, seating in the fancy old theater was on a first-come, first-serve basis, and they finally opened up the balcony for the decent sized crowd of about 1,000.
Both inaugurations had dark clouds over them. In Ed Lee's case, it was because his election was so blatantly undemocratic, with the old San Francisco political machine selecting him behind closed doors after Gavin Newsom left office last year. In Ross Mirkarimi's case, it was on account of a bombshell that had been exploded by Phil Matier (below left), the political gossip columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle that same Sunday morning. He reported that the San Francisco Police Department was deciding whether or not to arrest newly-elected Sheriff Mirkarimi for domestic violence against his new Venezuelan telenovela star wife. (Click here for the Matier & Ross hit piece.)
Matier was in the lobby of Herbst Theatre, talking closely with San Francisco Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White above right. The Chief also has a history of police coming to her house inquiring about domestic violence when she was reportedly bashing her husband with a pint glass back in 2005 (click here). Nobody was demanding her resignation over the issue at the time, but that's possibly because she is a part of the native-born San Francisco government cabal that largely and ineptly runs San Francisco.
The inauguration started with a sheriff's drill team leading the Pledge of Allegiance and then the young lady above singing the National Anthem a capella quite fabulously, and then there was an emcee and a promise of entertainment that included Puccini's "Un Bel Di" and a Persian Folk Song, which is when I remembered that Tiger's kitty litter across the street needed cleaning so I did so.
I returned an hour later just in time for the last speaker on the program, Sheriff Mirkarimi himself. I stayed for a couple of minutes of his speech and then moved on to The Green Room, where a free reception complete with wine and roving appetizers was going to be held.
Nobody loves the sound of his own voice quite like Ross Mirkarimi, but I was still surprised that his oration ran for a steady forty minutes. Meanwhile I chatted up the charming catering crew in the Green Room, waiting for the mobs to arrive.
They finally did make their entrance, and there were people you actually wanted to see like Glendon Hyde aka Annaconda above, a District 6 Supervisorial candidate from last November.
There was also a favorite sheriff's deputy, above left, who works at City Hall. It was the first time I had seen him out of his dorky sheriff's uniform and he looked sharp.
There was a huge police presence all around the Veterans building, and it wasn't quite clear if this was meant as protection or intimidation of Mirkarimi, who they seem to despise.
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.
The public was invited to San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee's inauguration party in City Hall on Sunday morning but what the organizers failed to announce was that there were two tiers of "public," those who held red invitation cards from the Ed Lee Inauguration Committee, and those who did not.
If you were part of the latter group, officious characters insisted that you leave the main floor and take the elevator somewhere, anywhere away upstairs. The elevator stopped at the second floor, but after the door opened a bossy young man yelled at us that nobody was allowed off the elevator. Supervisor John Avalos happened to be standing right next to him, and he gave me a rueful grin, followed by a wave.
On the third floor, besides velvet ropes denying entrances to stairways, there was yellow "Do Not Cross" tape in front of the lighting systems set up for the show below, which didn't allow for even halfway decent sightlines for the peasants.
In all the years I've been attending and covering events at City Hall, this wide-scale exclusion of the public at a public event was a first, and not a particularly good portent for the next four years of the Ed Lee administration.
What made the situation even more grotesque was that Lee's short inauguration speech was reportedly filled with repeated assertions that he was going to be "The Mayor of the 100%."
This buzz phrase is particularly absurd considering that Lee was selected for office by old power brokers such as US Senator Dianne Feinstein above, who swore him into office this morning.
According to a number of witnesses, the inauguration was very much the Willie Brown, Jr. show, with the openly corrupt, influence peddling ex-mayor as emcee, which is almost enough to make one feel sorry for Ed Lee.
I left after the San Francisco Symphony trumpet fanfare on the main staircase led by Mark Inouye above as they musically introduced Ed Lee and his family.
This was mainly because there was no way to see anything unless one held a precious red ticket, although I heard later that there were video feeds in the South and North Light Courts off the main floor rotunda, but none of the gatekeepers were bothering to share that information with the public.
It wasn't the San Francisco Police Department that was keeping the great unwashed off the main floor in City Hall. Instead, they were were walking in pairs on the sidewalk around City Hall, smiling, being friendly, and otherwise not acting like the usual SFPD at all. The Sheriffs Department was handling security inside City Hall, and they were also in a jolly mood, but they also had nothing to do with the main floor velvet ropes.
Instead, it was volunteers from the Ed Lee Inauguration Committee who were playing bouncers. The young man above wasn't as obnoxious as most of these characters, many of whom seemed to consist of middle-aged Chinese ladies who had taken charm school lessons from Rose Pak. The whole event was very weird.
Blurry eyed from not enough sleep Thursday morning, I absentmindedly looked out the window of a southbound commuter Caltrain car and saw a giant X in the sky. It was a vision straight out of a sci-fi movie, a sign from the heavens, or a paranoid's Contrail verification.
It certainly woke me up.
The next three weeks at Davies Hall with the San Francisco Symphony have all kinds of interesting goodies on paper. Starting Friday, January 6th through 8th, music director Michael Tilson Thomas leads the orchestra in the 1993 violin concerto by György Ligeti with soloist Christian Tetzlaff (pictured above left, with pianist Leif Ove Andsnes).
According to the BBC's Stephen Johnson, the concerto is "a kind of cornucopia of effects and techniques, a wild collage of atmospheres and colors. Among other effects, it uses microtonality, rapidly changing textures, comic juxtapositions...Hungarian folk melodies, Bulgarian dance rhythms, references to medieval and Renaissance music and solo violin writing that ranges from the slow-paced and sweet-toned to the angular and fiery."
Ligeti isn't somebody to listen to at home unless you have musical tastes way more advanced than mine, but his music live in the concert hall is invariably amazing. The second half of the concert is Tchaikovsky's first symphony, called Winter Daydreams, and it's one of his loveliest, most Russki scores.
The following week, January 12-14, is worth attending if only because MTT conducts Leoš Janáček's Sinfonietta, which will make you cry when you hear it live. The rest of the concert is devoted to Le martyre de Saint Sébastien, incidental music written by Debussy in 1911 to a mystery play about the famously pierced saint.
According to Wikipedia, "The first Gabriel Astruc production was attended by scandal (the Archbishop of Paris requested Catholics not attend because the dancer playing St. Sebastian was a woman and a Jew), the work was not successful and did not enter the repertoire; thanks to Debussy's score, however, it has been recorded in abridged and adapted versions several times."
There's a huge orchestra involved, along with a chorus and soloists such as the awesome soprano Sasha Cooke (above in red), and narrating the spectacle is the straight-out-of-retirement Frederica von Stade. The Symphony also promises that the concert "will be accompanied by a newly created multi-media treatment by imaginative, critically acclaimed director-designer Anne Patterson that features projected visuals and staged elements meant to bring the pageant-like, gothic, nature of the work to life," and let's hope it's fabulous rather than stupid.
The third week, January 19-21, will bring back the young Spanish conductor Pablo Heras-Casado (above left) conducting Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks, Ravel's Piano Concerto in G Major, and Dallapicolla's Piccola musica notturna. Best of all is the final piece, a warhorse I have never heard live, Manuel de Falla's El Amor Brujo, a gypsy ballet with "flamenco singer" Marina Heredia performing as soloist.
Click here to buy tickets at the San Francisco Symphony website, and if you're feeling poor, the day-of-purchase phone number for $20 rush tickets is (415) 503-5577.
