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"Not Even Jackassable"
September 4th, 2008
We perused the recent SFist post about the pitiable state of San Francisco's streets with a certain sense of nostalgia for the good ol' days. You know, the days before this newfangled "asphalt paving" even entered the scene.
In the Year of the Gold Rush (1849-50ish), the city's population exploded from a cozy 500 citizens to almost 100 thousand - and not a single one of those gold-crazed invaders wasted a second thinking the state of the village's streets.
See, the streets in the good ol' days were good ol' dirt. And when the rainy season arrived, the torrent of horse, foot and cart traffic tearing through town trampled that sandy earth into a boggy quagmire.
How bad was it? Bad. Not to mention deep. Horses, mules, and countless drunken souls staggering out of saloons were sucked down into the street muck and drowned. This situation entered into legend, as historian Herbert Asbury writes, when "the mud at Clay and Kearny streets, in the heart of town, at length became so deep and thick that a wag posted this sign:
"THIS STREET IS IMPASSABLE; NOT EVEN JACKASSABLE"
In a vain attempt to ameliorate the situation, the city fathers (such as they were) dumped in piles of brush and tree branches, but any object that entered the muck slowly sank from sight and vanished forever.
Though the construction boom had caused the price of wood to skyrocket, streets constructed from planks eventually began to appear. This was an improvement over mud, but wooden streets - though reducing the risk of drowning (!) - were slippery when wet, prone to break under horses' hooves, and (on the rare occasions when they were dry) quite flammable. San Francisco's six major Gold Rush-era fires (1849 to 1853) sent miles of costly plank streets up in smoke.
That sixth fire must have been the charm for the city fathers. In 1854 that the miracle of the paved street arrived, first appearing on the block of Kearny Street between Clay and Washington, where City Hall (originally the Jenny Lind Theatre) once stood. Whew!
Bicycle over and pay your respects ... but watch the potholes.
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Kimberly Guilfoyle-Newsom-Villency Gets Fugged
September 4th, 2008
So, like - hmm. Wow.
Former First Lady of San Francisco and current Fox News on-air talent gets nailed over at Go Fug Yourself today, and rightfully so. Now a New York City resident, she was caught in this ensemble at some sort of American Museum of Natural History's Annual Winter Dance.
While we find it hard to believe that Guilfoyle-Villency - who does, in fact, posses almost impeccable fashion sense from what we've seen during her halcyon days as queen of SF - would wear something like this, did she attend Mission High? Because that is very Mission High.
Jennifer, your thoughts?
Update: She attended Mercy High, a Catholic all-girls school. Hot.
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Film du Jour
September 4th, 2008
We're sure most of you fresh kids have already caught this, but if not: behold. We came across it over at Spots. (An aside: did you know Gavin's Chief of Using Lawn Sprinklers At Night, Wade Crowfoot, is engaged? Pft. The nerve.) About the above ad, she writes:
Um, could they be more fabulous? No, they couldn't. I want to be friends with them and invite them to Sunday Dinner and take them to Le Club.
Totally.
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SFIAAFF Review: A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
September 4th, 2008
Last night's screening of Wayne Wang's A Thousand Years of Good Prayers on opening night of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival was a sheer delight. The film is based on Bay Area author Yiyun Li's book of short stories. Wayne Wang was there to present the film to us, and then he and star Henry O answered questions after the film. Afterwards, everyone headed over to the Asian American Art Museum for the big opening night Gala.
The film kicked off SFIAAFF's spotlight tribute to Wayne Wang. Wang will be in person at all screenings of his films: Princess of Nebraska-sister film to A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Joy Luck Club, and Life is Cheap... But Toilet Paper is Expensive.
Read about the film, the Q&A and the Gala after the jump!
The Film
In A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, actor Henry O's portrayal of the main character Mr. Shi, who steps foot in America for the first time to visit his newly divorced daughter Yilan (played by Faye Yu) in Spokane, Washington, had us laughing and crying at practically the same time. We could empathize with his quest to get to know his daughter again, whom he hadn't seen in twelve years. We had much less empathy for Yilan, perhaps because her relationship with her father reminds us of our own father/daughter relationship. We know that makes no sense, but human emotions are a strange thing. And that's why we loved this film.
The two seem to revert back to their roles from twelve years ago, except that Mr. Shi has recently learned to cook and prepares large meals for Yilan each night. He still comes off as a strict, pushy parent who gets it all wrong, and Yilan is a sullen teenager who lies about her life and stays out all night to avoid connecting with her father. Mr. Shi is left to find connections with the random and colorful people in his daughter's town, but he tells her he'd rather "see the America that you're happy in."
The most lovely relationship that Mr. Shi has takes place daily on a park bench with an Iranian widow, who has come to Spokane to live with her son, daughter-in-law, and their newborn son. Through their limited English, they have a very touching connection.
Mr. Shi and Yilan do end up coming to a subtle closure when Mr. Shi finally is able to talk about the past, which he had always refused to do before. "It's a struggle just to survive. I only want to talk about happy things." Yilan had felt that because she was never exposed to the negative aspects of her parents' relationship, she never learned how to have a relationship of her own. We can definitely empathize with that.
The Q&A
When asked about his inspiration with taking on the film, Wayne Wang said he found himself in a similar situation when he and his wife got married and didn't tell his parents. They came to visit and did some snooping, like Mr. Shi does in the film, and his father said, "How can you get married with only $3,000 in your savings account?" Although it was annoying at the time, Wang said he can now see where his father was coming from.
When asked whether he has any daughters of his own, Henry O said he has two, but he's much gentler with them than Mr. Shi. But he does have one daughter over thirty who isn't married, and he worries a lot about her. O lived through the Cultural Revolution, which was brought up in the film, and he also lives in Spokane.
The Gala
The Gala was a huge hit, with delicious sushi, dumplings, and fruit and cheese. We hear there was alcohol but couldn't get anywhere near the table all night. There was an obvious joke made at one point about elbowing people to get up front, like the elderly Chinatown ladies. We didn't need the drink anyway.
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SFist Interviews Benjamin Shwartz
September 4th, 2008
SF Symphony Resident Conductor Benjamin Shwartz will lead the SF Youth Symphony on Sunday at Davies Symphony hall, in a program by Prokofiev, Bartok and Haydn. The orchestra musicians range from 12 to 20yo, and none of them was old enough to attend Benjamin's previous venture: Mercury Soul, a blend of classical music by 20th and 21st century composers with techno beats, performed, of all places, in a club, Mezzanine.
The mix sounded intriguing, and when we showed up there, there was a line the length of a football field out at the door. Alas. But the place was packed with a young, hip crowd there to see for composer/DJ Mason Bates spinning some neat beats. Shwartz was there conducting some chamber ensembles into pieces by Ligeti or Webern, and those are the composers that we had heard of; the rest was even more far out.
We asked Benjamin if his concert on Sunday was not too staid, after the invigorating Mercury Soul performance.
He laughed, as if Bartok or Prokofiev weren't 20th century enough. "This is part of the program going on tour this summer," he said, "and we're taking this and the next concert with the Youth Symphony to Europe in June and July. Bartok and Haydn, we don't play very much. It's all great music, and the youth orchestra has a different responsibility and a big and loyal audience. It's an educational institution, and it's part of our mission to introduce the musician to the canon of classical music. We try to play them new music as well, but in building an orchestra, we need to build the skills to play new, old music, and playing Haydn, Beethoven, develop the skills of an orchestra more than Bartok. People have to expand a rythmic sensibility to play Bartok, but it does not build the sound of an orchestra the way that Beethoven does. So with the SF Youth, we're a bit more conservative than other programs, we're more pedagogical."
Photo credits: picture of Maestro Shwartz (getting out of jail?) by Jennifer Hui Bon Hoa above; below Mercury Soul and Mason Bates by Guru Khalsa.
How about Mercury Soul, that was pretty cool, wasn't it?
"We were pretty stunned at how well everything went, given the number of moving parts and number of problems that could arise. Things went smoothly as planned and envisioned and we were delighted."
He added that the project "came about my meeting Mason Bates. We started talking about putting that project together. It came about asking ourselves: what do we want in a new music concert? We have felt trapped in new music concerts that were not fun and not an interesting concept. We would not want anyone to feel trapped in it. Also, we were trying to bring this music to a new kind of audience. There's been plenty of efforts to bring new music to classical music audiences. It has not worked very well. The people who love Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, do not necessarily like Ligeti. Mason and I share the thought that it's the non-regular symphony member, who might be more open minded, more attuned to this kind of music. That's the group that we were trying to reach."
And reached they did. Of course, playing music in a club, the audience was half-focused on the music, half-focused on getting drunk. We tried to listen carefully, but some just hung out with a beer in their hand. "We thought about that," says Benjamin. "We were trying to reach out to new audiences, specifically to people who had no idea about Ligeti, Dennehy, and we reached a lot of people that were excited. We also reach a lot of people who were not interested, we knew this would happen. It's fine with me, I hope that as we do this again, people would have a better idea for what we are up to, maybe more of the interested people and less of the people who where just out there for a beer. The old concept of music making, it's only in the 20th century that the concert hall became what it is today (silent, religious, dark). Mozart was not played in silent halls with arms folded, people were booing, cheering, eating drinking, it was quite a scene! Having that kind of openness in a venue, during a concert, it is a positive thing. We're not disappointed that some people decided to have a beer during some pieces, and listen during others. We did not feel that they had to watch everything with rapt attention. We're trying to provide the opportunity to hear the music. The turn out was spectacular, there were too many people there, it might have been a more musical environment if the crowds were thinner. I had to cut through the crowd, to get to Mason's rig, and talk to Mason, that was challenging to have that many people. It tends to make people bristle a bit."
As for the pieces they played, "we wanted a variety of things," he said. "The only ‘old' music was the Ligeti and Webern, between 50 and 80 years old. Everything else from the last 10 years. There are so many kinds of music, so many different styles. We could not have a little bit of everything, but we went for a sampling that gave a feel for the variety. So it could have been a whole concert of minimalism, or of serial avant-garde surrealism. The Tenney was quite accessible, an easy piece to listen to, the Dennehy was an extremely avant-garde, punk-influenced piece, also both written in the last 10 years."
Punk? "Dennehy is a composer that is skating the boundary (like Mason Bates) between classical and other musics. Mason is electronica. Dennehy is influenced by punk aesthetic, in your face, extremely aggressive, underground outsider feeling about his music."
We had seen Benjamin get off the podium during his Peter and the Wolf concert, to play the bass (not to sweep Mrs Brady off her feet, as SFist Rita reported). "Oh, you went to that concert! Yeah, the bass is one of my instruments. I played the piano, the flute and the bass as a kid, and I got interested in composing and conducting came last." So we had to ask about Mason Bates' impressive bassist, MarsBassMan, who jammed on top of Mason's beats. "MarsBassMan's name is David Arend, he and Mason met at Juilliard, they play together regularly."
Did Beni say that he used to compose? "Yeah, I was for a while very active as a composer, and I decided at some points that my skills were better spent as a conductor." He did study with Stockhausen, who "is absolutely insane, I mean, he was, it's sad to hear about his passing. He was a genius. He talked of not being from this planet, of being from Sirius, and being here to bring us otherworldly music, and as outlandish and silly as that may sound, there's some truth there. He was not interested in anybody else's music, he wasn't a scholar on Beethoven, or anybody else's music, even modern music. He wrote his dissertation on Bartok's sonata for piano and percussion, but he lived in his own very unique, perplexing, dazzling world of music.As a teacher, he was incredible in explaining his own work, his technique, his tools, his tricks. His composing process was shockingly labor-intensive. there is not a note in Stockhausen's output that is haphazard, out of place, that's here for whimsical reasons. Everything is thought-out, planned out. It might sound haphazard, but it's very methodical. And he was totally nice!"
Just like you, Benjamin!
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Celebrate L. Ron Hubbard's Birthday By Protesting Church of Scientology This Saturday
September 4th, 2008
Yesterday, it seems, was L. Ron Hubbard's birthday. Hubbard, as most of you know, is the author of the wildly successful Dianetics and founder of the Church of Scientology, a religion in which you achieve higher faith by giving them progressively higher dollar amounts. He would have turned 97 today. Born in Tilden, Nebraska, Hubbard served in World War I, attended George Washington University, was a member of the Explorers Club, and at some point came to the conclusion that purple alien unicorns ruled the Earth many moons ago. Or something like that.
It should come as little surprise that Hubbard was born under a Pisces sun.
Tomorrow, Saturday, there will be another anti-Scientology rally at the Church of Scientology headquarters in San Francisco. The same group responsible for last month's Scientology protest, Anonymous, will serve as hosts to this rally, which is aggressively titled "Operation Party Hard." The festivities commence at 11 a.m. tomorrow at the Church of L. Ron on Montgomery Street.
B.Y.O.B.
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