Civic Center

Strange Japanese Art 3: Gothic Lolitas

2009-11-22T11:37:00.000-08:00

A fashionista friend, Anthony Herrera, once despaired after seeing a group of young Japanese tourist women who were decked out in the latest of fashions.

"It's no fair. Their hair is perfect, their bodies are perfect, and their cutesy fashion is always more interesting than anywhere else."

He definitely has a point, and New People is a great place to check out that thesis.

You can buy tabis from the Santa Monica designer PNUT (above)...

...and accessorize them with the perfect socks...

...while reading about Plastic Culture...

...or buy a handmade Bumperboy mini-megazine...

...signed by its maker.

I felt old and unhip at the event, but enjoyed myself thoroughly watching the interesting characters...

...especially the women dressed in various subcategories of "Lolita" fashions...

...which extend from Goth Lolitas to Sweet Lolitas and every variation in between.

Strange Japanese Art 2: New People Bazaar Bizarre

2009-11-22T11:17:00.000-08:00

Kimo (above) invited me to an art opening on Friday at a new four-story complex on Post Street across from Japantown called New People.

The complex had joined up with a group called Bazaar Bizarre SF, which specializes in odd crafts, for a weekend "vertical artist village."

The SUPERFROG Gallery on the top floor was showing the work of seven contemporary artists from Tokyo (not pictured)...

...and there were exotic libations...

...being served gratis on each floor...

In the basement level, a Peruvian bartender was explaining the history of the Pisco Sour...

...next door to a beautifully designed 143-seat movie theatre which is devoted to screening Japanese films.

The design of the entire complex is about ten years ahead of anything else in San Francisco...

...and the consumer goods devoted to Japanese pop culture in all its manifestations are amazing to behold.

Even the stairwells are cleverly designed with whimsical line drawings...

...an innovation the Asian Art Museum should consider for its dreary stairway between floors two and three.

Strange Japanese Art 1: Dog Chasing

2009-11-21T11:41:00.000-08:00

On a whirlwind tour of the permanent collection of the Asian Art Museum this week, the most interesting "newly on view" section seemed to be in the Japanese wing on the second floor.

From the Avery Brundage collection, there is an amazing pair of six-panel screens from 1640 called "Dog Chasing."

It depicts a large stadium ground for people to watch the Samurai sporting event, which consisted of two teams consisting of 17 men each.

The wall signage tried to allay animal abuse revulsion with the following: "The riders used softly padded arrows in order not to seriously hurt the dog, which was released within a circle of rope to begin the game."

Next to the newly on view screens is one of Masami Teraoka's prints from the 1985 series "31 Flavors Invading Japan."

Around the corner is the most consistently fascinating display in the museum...

...a constantly rotating selection of Japanese bamboo baskets from a collection of 900 donated in 2001 by the ex-CEO of Neutrogena, Lloyd Cotsen.

The fly basket is some kind of genius.

Vistas de Buena Vista Park

2009-11-20T10:21:00.000-08:00

The first public park in San Francisco dates from 1867, when the area between the modern neighborhoods of the Castro and the Haight-Ashbury was called Hill Park.

In 1894, the hill was "forested" under the supervision of John McLaren, and renamed Buena Vista Park. According to a Neighborhood Parks Council history, "During Mayor Adolph Sutro's reign from 1894-98, San Francisco school children planted seedlings each Arbor Day."

New trails and erosion controls have just been installed on the east side of the park, but the place still has a wild feel to it, and its mixture of dogwalkers, marijuana smokers, tennis players, public sex enthusiasts, and street people doesn't feel all that different than 30 years ago.

What also remains unchanged are the views of the surrounding Bay Area, which are magical.

The Comedy of Otello

2009-11-18T20:59:00.000-08:00

The San Francisco Opera supernumeraries held a season-ending party at Fort Mason last weekend, and the evening ended with a very funny skit by Charlie Lichtman (above, dressed as a deviled egg). Charlie's only spear carrying this year was in Verdi's "Otello," which is currently running at the opera house this month, but the lighting is so ridiculously dark during the entire production that you probably won't be able to spot him.

One of the best bits in the skit was a chronicling of the onstage deaths in this year's season, from the smothering in "Gianni Schicchi" (above) to the suicide of "Suor Angelica" (below).

My friend Kimo called me at the start of the season and asked for suggestions on opera tickets. I told him to get a mini-series in the last row of the balcony on nights when they were featuring OperaVision jumbo screens. "The tickets are cheap and the sound is the best in the house. Plus, the screens are cool for closeups." He had an extra ticket at the last minute for "Otello" on Tuesday night, and invited me along, though it turned out to be a very odd evening at the opera.

First off, the orchestra under Luisotti and the chorus in their opening storm scene were beyond thrilling but for some reason the Globe Theatre like stage was barely lit during the entire production, so nothing made any visual sense. Then the three principals arrived in Act One, and were all disappointing in their own ways. None of them were terrible, exactly, but the tenor was a non-actor and his voice wasn't great enough to compensate, the Iago struck me as from the Telly Savalas School of Bad Bald Villains acting and his voice wasn't at all remarkable (this is a minority opinion), and finally the Desdemona was borderline ghastly and a terrible actress besides. Of all operas in the repertory, this is the one that demands and rewards great singing actors, but anything less can be depressing. (production photo above by Terrence McCarthy)

The oddness of the evening started with the unnnnngh-unnnngh-unnnngh humming sound that was coming from somewhere near us in the back balcony. During the loud choruses, it wasn't a problem, but the moment the music quieted down, we'd hear: "Un bacio....unnngh-unnngh-unnngh...un baaaacio...unngh-unnngh-unngh." We left after the end of the first act, even though the intermission was scheduled for after act two, because the noise was so seriously annoying.

In the lobby, we told the wonderful usher Martin Dias about the problem, and he got on his walkie-talkie. What was most surprising was that the serious musical purists in balcony standing room weren't up in arms, because the noise was very intrusive. Maybe they're all in New York seeing "From The House of the Dead" at the Met.

We went to the box office and asked to exchange our tickets for another performance, but the irreplaceable box office goddess Marcella Bastiani told us that was not possible. She could, however, get us some different seats for later in the evening, which is how we ended up comped in center orchestra for the third act, the great ensemble heart of the opera.

Unfortunately, there were still no lights on the stage, the principals were still essentially mediocre, and when the extremely hefty Otello rolled onto the floor having a fit, I have to confess to laughing.

Part of the reason for the laughter is that I played Otello in the "Season of Death" skit on Saturday, and had unintentionally done a perfect parody of the bad acting in the real "Otello." I believe my ad-libbed line after learning that Desdemona hadn't been unfaithful and before stabbing myself was, "Oh, Dio Mio, what have I done?"

Meet Vietnam 1: Apocalypse Then

2009-11-17T14:30:00.000-08:00

Hundreds of mostly elderly Vietnamese people surrounded San Francisco's City Hall on Sunday and Monday.

They were protesting an official trade mission from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam that included a reception in City Hall on Sunday afternoon...

...and an all-day conference at the Intercontinental Hotel on Monday partly sponsored by the American Chamber of Commerce in Vietnam (click here for the schedule of events.).

For the Vietnamese Americans surrounding City Hall, however, they were evil Communists and nobody should be doing business with them.

The security was massive but fairly relaxed since the average age of the protestors seemed to be about 75.

Like the Cubans in Miami Beach, the refugees from post-war Vietnam don't look like they are ever going to forgive or forget.

On Sunday afternoon in Civic Center Plaza, I ran into Stefan Salinas (above), an artist who sometimes works with a charity called the Blind Vietnamese Children Foundation (click here for their website). He was on his way to the reception but was fairly taken aback by the protests. I urged him to be brave and report back to me on what the whole thing was about.

It wasn't until Sunday that I realized that Patrick Dougherty's sapling sculptures looked oddly Southeast Asian, with their curlicued tops. They fit right into the protest.

Meet Vietnam 2: Capitalism Now

2009-11-17T14:07:00.000-08:00

Though the communists officially won the Vietnam War, from all accounts capitalism is making serious inroads.

An exhibit was set up in the North Light Court of City Hall which was open to the public on Monday until it wasn't.

The place was being guarded by about a dozen black-suited security men who looked like they stepped out of a bad international thriller starring Clive Owen.

The room was featuring crafts...

...and modern Vietnamese art...

...which was being represented by a fancy New York dealer.

Though City Hall is open for meetings until 8PM on weekdays, the entire rotunda was sealed off at 5PM for a sit-down dinner.

The scary security guys roamed the perimeter looking for terrorists and giving me and the camera the evil eye.

When I tried to take a photo of the entryway to the dinner, I was asked nicely by a deputy sheriff not to take a photo "for security reasons" which was ridiculous for a place which by definition is public. It made me want to join the old Vietnamese people protesting outside.

Disgusting Muni Passenger of the Month

2009-11-14T22:06:00.000-08:00

The loud cell phone conversation, filled with narcissistic tales of personal woe, was bad enough. However, it was when the young woman above kicked off her sandals on the 47 Van Ness bus this afternoon, and spread her ugly bare feet across the back row right into my face, that I decided my policy of not publishing unkind photos of people was about to experience a major exception. "I don't want to listen to your stupid personal life or study your knobby toes," I was tempted to say, but did not, so let this photo say it instead.

Dutilleux and Sibelius at the San Francisco Symphony

2009-11-13T16:20:00.000-08:00

The originally scheduled San Francisco Symphony program for this week looked interesting: "Shoreless River," a new work by the 39-year-old German composer Detlev Glanert, the Schumann cello concerto with the handsome young French soloist Gautier Capucon, and Sibelius' wonderful Fifth Symphony.

Unfortunately, the concert turned out to be snakebit. The Glanert piece was co-commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra in D.C., and they understandably wanted to give the U.S. premiere which hasn't quite happened yet. It was replaced by a 1964 orchestral work called "Metaboles" by the 93-year-old French composer Henri Dutilleux. I'd never heard anything by him before, partly because he hasn't written that much over his long career, being an exacting perfectionist when it comes to being published. There were plenty of interesting sounds in the 25-minute piece but at a certain point, the thread gets lost and so did my interest.

The next bit of bad news was that Gautier Capucon, the 28-year-old soloist making his San Francisco debut, had been rushed to a hospital Wednesday night with a medical emergency, leaving management and the visiting conductor Semyon Bychkov scrambling to come up with something to replace the Schumann.

They decided on Ravel's "Pavane for a Dead Princess" and "La Valse," which made musical sense next to the Dutilleux, but both pieces have been played way too often lately and the performances weren't particularly special, which isn't surprising considering the lack of rehearsal.

There were plenty of superlatives written about Bychkov's conducting of the orchestra in a couple of large Rachmaninoff pieces last week, so I was looking forward to hearing my favorite Sibelius symphony, but it was a bit of a train wreck. The Fifth Symphony is an impressive mixture of bombast and delicacy, all underpinned by a constant tension in the strings that presciently sounds like John Adams and a lot of the other postminimalists, not to mention tricky cross-rhythms that give the simplest musical materials their fascination. This music must be much more difficult to play than it sounds from the various great recordings that are out there because I have yet to hear a satisfying live performance over the years. Oh well, it's something to look forward to at a future old ladies' matinee, when I'll be the same age as everyone else in the audience.

The Decay of The Upper Crust

2009-11-11T23:18:00.000-08:00

The sycamores in front of San Francisco's City Hall have received their pruning on one side of the plaza but not the other.

Under the newly poodle cut trees, the San Francisco Art Commission signage for Patrick Dougherty's "The Upper Crust" is decaying badly...

...but the willow sapling sculptures have survived quite beautifully.

The Art Commission has decided to keep the sculptures up until their one-year anniversary in February when they will be destroyed. If you're interested in photography, I highly recommend playing around this site over the next three months.

Palm Springs Pride Parade 1: Rainbow Seniors

2009-11-09T21:28:00.001-08:00

Coincident to our annual homeowners association meeting, the Palm Springs Gay Pride weekend was taking place, including a parade on Sunday morning down the main drag of Palm Canyon Boulevard.

What is most striking about the Coachella Valley gay scene is that it seems to be ground zero for married with grandchildren people of both sexes to finally come out fully in their old age.

Ancient gay baton twirlers for the Desert Winds Band, for instance, were an unexpectedly poignant sight.

There were square dancing contingents...

..."Rainbow Senior Center" denizens marching down the boulevard twirling massive rainbow umbrellas...

...antique car afficionados...

...lesbians and their animals...

...and a gay city council member driving down the street with his lover and their two children.

Palm Springs Pride Parade 2: Pecs and Parasols

2009-11-09T21:27:00.001-08:00

The theatrical gestures of traditional gay pride parades were also fully present...

...from fabulous drag queens...

...including representatives from various chapters of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence...

...who were playing with genderfuck in some fascinating ways.

There were also sprinklings of scantily clad young men...

...proudly enjoying their exhibitionism.

My favorite group was the Latino contingent, "BIENESTAR," who combined pretty young men...

...with drag queens and everyone else.

I wanted to join them marching up Palm Canyon Boulevard but my partner Tony chickened out. "We're not Latin," he said. "What are you talking about?" I asked. "You're of Sicilian ancestry. It doesn't get much more Latin than that," but he remained unconvinced.

Palm Springs Pride Parade 3: We Are Family

2009-11-09T21:12:00.000-08:00

An elderly couple marched down the street proclaiming their "marriage" of 30+ years...

...along with a contingent of lesbian LAPD policewomen.

The coolest moment for me was the entrance midway of the Palm Springs High School marching band into the parade. This group plays in virtually every function that marches up Palm Canyon Boulevard, but I was surprised to see the local public high school lending their presence to a still controversial event, and they looked like they were enjoying themselves immensely.

It brought home the fact that most young people aren't as stupid about gay stuff as previous generations...

...and it was enormously heartening.

I insisted on marching in the parade with some contingent, and we ended up joining the PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) group. Half a block into our masquerade, the Canadian woman above turned to us and said, "My son and his partner couldn't make it from Los Angeles today, so you can be my sons."

The Coachella Valley is still a Republican stronghold with too many hidebound Christians...

...but watching parents supporting their teenaged gay children by marching happily past hateful signage together was seriously inspirational.

Meeting of the Tribal Council

2009-11-07T09:56:00.000-08:00

Here in the desert paradise of Palm Springs, we are engaged in a ritual filled with treachery, double crosses, palace coups, and near fisticuffs.

I'm speaking, of course, about the annual Homeowners Association Meeting.

In a hotly contested compromise, I was installed as one of the three board members.

Pray for me.

Palm Springs Political Parties

2009-11-05T20:08:00.000-08:00

Unlike San Francisco, Palm Springs was having a contested, meaningful election on Tuesday for two Palm Springs City Council seats. The government has four council seats and a mayor, with two council seats alternating for four-year terms.

The basic clash of values on the surface in Palm Springs is between conservative Christian Republicans and liberal gay/lesbian Democrats, but of course it's not that simple. There are a number of tolerant, independent thinking Christians in the town and plenty of conservative, pro-capitalism gays and lesbians.

What the election really came down to was whether or not any challenger could take on the two incumbents. The first was Chris Mills (above) running as the Republican pro-developer architect from the megachurch Desert Chapel, or Ginny Foat as the preservationist, power brokering lesbian who can get things done.

The Mills election party was held at the downtown Palm Springs Hilton's small cocktail lounge off the lobby and was filled with very expensive looking people, with a few looking fairly drunk pretty early in the evening.

The Ginny Foat party was held in the nearby Hotel Zoso lobby, with lovely, expensive appetizers for anybody who felt like eating.

The people looked more pleasant than the Christopher "Chris" Mills party but there was no sense of real political purpose or passion. It felt very much about divvying up the public spoils.

One of the insurgency candidates, none of whom won, was David Carden, Jr. (above left with his longtime partner Dale).

The Stonewall Democratic Club, headed by George Zander (above right), and the Palm Springs Democratic Club, headed by Nikki Stone (above left), both endorsed Carden who on the surface is the ultimate crossover candidate to represent a whole host of constituencies in Palm Springs.

He's part Native American in a town that is half-owned by the Cahuilla Indians, he's a Vietnam vet in a place filled with veterans, and he's gay, which represents about 55% of Palm Spring's population.

Plus, according to everyone I spoke to during his losing night election party at Wang's in the Desert, Carden is smart and empathetic, and definitely not part of the old power structure.

A good way to assess grassroots politicians is in the quality of their supporters, and the small group at Wang's struck me as the coolest crowd of the night. I hope Carden runs again and helps to nudge the town's power structure out of some very old ruts.

Palm Springs Sunset

2009-11-04T21:53:00.000-08:00

There was a dramatic sunset in Palm Springs this evening...

...casting strange colors on swimming pools...

...like a desert aurora borealis.

Dia de Los Muertos at the Symphony

2009-11-03T10:09:00.000-08:00

The second annual "Dia de Los Muertos Family Concert" was presented at Davies Symphony Hall on Sunday afternoon, and the program was unexpectedly wonderful.

The music was conducted by a charming and audience-friendly young woman from Mexico City named Alondra de la Parra (above) playing infrequently heard music by the Latin composers Revueltas, Moncayo, Marquez (Mexico), Ginastera (Argentina), and Gabriele Lena Frank (currently Peruvian, but born in Berkeley to a Peruvian/Chinese mother and Lithuanian Jewish father, which pretty much defines multicultural). From the evidence of this concert, de la Parra is quite a talent, and symphony management should consider inviting her back for a subscription concert.

Plus, it was delightful to see a woman on the podium for a change, not to mention an audience that seemed to be equal parts Latinos and gringos. The orchestra also played Saint-Saens' fourteen-movement "Carnival of the Animals" with two young Venezuelan piano soloists, Kristhyan Benitez and Ana Karina Alamo and a newly commissioned narration between each movement from the Mexican novelist Laura Esquivel, who wrote the internationally successful "Like Water for Chocolate."

Esquivel read the pieces dressed as Catrina, the dandified upper-class female representative of death. Her narration consisted of a series of "calaveras," satirical poems in Spanish that are a Mexican Day of the Dead tradition. Catrina brought death to the various animals in the Saint-Saens' carnival, with a few managing to escape with their lives because Catrina was transfixed by her own reflection (fish) or was afraid of being hit in the head (mules).

Though most of the kids were well-behaved throughout the concert, this piece turned out to be the most difficult for many of them, particularly if they didn't speak Spanish, because the supertitles went quickly and the humor of the poetry was fairly sophisticated.

The lobby areas were decorated with altars for the spirits of the dead...

...including the above installation by Sunny Harker of skeletons on bicycles with metal wings, with each feather inscribed with the name of a person who had died bicycling.

The musicians seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely, including pianist Robin Sutherland (above) who was wearing an orange marigold in his ponytail. "Don't give an orange marigold to anybody in Mexico any time other than Dia de los Muertos," our conductor advised. "It won't be well received."

Before the concert, there were refreshments of hot chocolate and pan dulce, along with dancers from the Mission District's Mixcoatl Anahuac performing in the First Tier lobby.

It required some dexterity not to get poked in the eye by their long pheasant feathers that were flying in all directions.

My recently deceased mother was born and spent her childhood in Spain, but she often confessed that she really preferred Mexico and Mexicans. She also adored the ancient concept of Dia de los Muertos, so we once made a pilgramage to Lake Patzcuaro in the state of Michoacan where there is a famous tradition involving the Tarascan Indians rowing out to the island of Janitzio for an all-night fiesta for the spirits of the dead in the cemetery.

It's interesting to watch Dia de los Muertos bringing back "spirits" into the secular and commercialized Halloween tradition in the United States. So here's an ofrenda to Lucas Rebston (above), a fellow opera supernumerary who died a couple of months ago at age 53. He was an odd, ethereal character whose spirit was quite special. Hasta luego.

Art in Storefronts

2009-10-30T13:23:00.000-07:00

In an effort to put a band-aid on the blight of certain neighborhoods, local artists have been asked by the San Francisco Arts Commission to create "Art in Storefronts" in the Tenderloin, Mid-Market, Mission and Bayview neighborhoods.

Helen Bayly and Leanne Miller were working on an ambitious mural for Market near 6th Street, next door to Pearl Art Supply store, but seemed as if they were going to have trouble finishing it for the October 23rd opening fiesta.

That party was essentially just another photo-op for San Francisco's ineffectual mayor, Gavin Newsom, who was addressing a crowd on Market Street.

There's an election this Tuesday with two unopposed candidates for Treasurer and City Attorney respectively, along with five city initiatives, four of which deal with advertising in public spaces.

The worst of the measures is Proposition D, which would allow for bright, digital billboards along Market Street between 5th and 8th Streets which is somehow supposed to mitigate the empty storefronts and criminal lunatics who hang out on the three-block stretch. This would be about as effective as putting an anti-fungal cream on skin cancer. Please vote no on D.

Osmo and Vadim at the San Francisco Symphony

2009-10-29T10:57:00.000-07:00

Most of the beautiful usual suspects were at the San Francisco Symphony concert on Wednesday evening, which started with the San Francisco debut of contemporary Finnish composer Aulis Sallinen's first symphony. This was followed by the Sibelius violin concerto, with Beethoven's "Coriolan Overture" and eighth symphony holding down the second half.

This was the second week of concerts led by the Finnish conductor Osmo Vanska who is usually found at the Minnesota Orchestra where he's the music director. The reports on last week's concert of Adams, Tchaikovsky and Dvorak were all over the map, but mostly laudatory. The Sallinen symphony, which he wrote at the age of 35 in 1971, is a mostly tonal fifteen-minute piece that just gets more beautiful as it goes along, with tubular bells and a marimba playing off an extensive percussive section. The stamp of Sibelius was all over the symphony, particularly in its use of strings and horns, but Sallinen seems to have his own, otherworldly voice. Please, let us have one of his other eight symphonies or six operas, and bring Osmo back to conduct them.

The Sibelius violin concerto from 1905 is a dramatic, overplayed warhorse that I love, partly because it sounds so different depending on who is having a go at it. This week's soloist is the 38-year-old Siberian superstar Vadim Repin who played the piece exquisitely, with a total lack of schmaltz.

The only problem was that Vanska and the orchestra seemed to be playing another version of the concerto altogether, a wonderful interpretation on its own but not at all integrated with the soloist. There were a few moments, particularly at the end of each movement, where soloist and orchestra blended rather than contrasted but most of the concerto was a strange back-and-forth between restraint and excitement.

Cedric Westphal (above) had an amusing interview with Vadim last week (click here) where the violinist confessed to having just flown into Helsinki after performing in Melbourne, Australia, which was to be followed by a flight to San Francisco for these concerts. By Friday and Saturday's concerts, he'll probably know which continent he is in.

The great British pianist Stephen Hough is currently writing a blog for The Telegraph newspaper that is funny, smart and approachable (click here). In a recent post, he confessed:

"I don’t get Bach, even whilst I understand his towering genius...but I do get Mompou. Perhaps it’s like friendship, we just like certain people and not others; we resonate with certain composers; we are touched by the cracks between their notes; their music has a ’smell’ with which seduces us, leading us willingly into submission beyond analysis or logic. A composer we love is one where we treasure even the dross, even as we recognize that it is dross. Tchaikovsky is one such composer for me."

The composer I don't enjoy "even whilst understanding his towering genius" is Beethoven. The fact that his music is overplayed may be part of the problem, but it really is a matter of taste. My date for the evening, however, thoroughly enjoyed the Coriolan Overture and Eighth Symphony, and so did the "non-scary-German" over at Not For Fun Only.

The Friday repeat won't feature the Sallinen symphony, which is too bad since it is a rare highlight. The symphony will be played again at the Saturday concert at Flint Center in Cupertino, though, so if you live in the South Bay, it's highly recommended.

Doris Duke's Treasures at the Asian 1: Too Rich

2009-10-26T13:58:00.000-07:00

A new exhibit has opened for three months at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum called "Emerald Cities: Arts of Siam and Burma," which is a little misleading since there are no emeralds anywhere on display.

It would be more honest to call the show "Doris Duke's Southeast Asian Swag," since the vast majority of mostly 19th century objects are from her estate. Even better, they have become part of the museum's permanent collection, and after seven years of work by a small army of restorers and conservators, this is their public debut.

The American tobacco, energy and aluminum heiress Doris Duke lived a life that spanned most of the twentieth century, from her birth in 1912 in a Fifth Avenue Mansion in New York City to her death in 1993 at Valentino's old mansion in Beverly Hills.

There was enough scandal in her life for a dozen different people, including a messy death involving her illiterate, gay Irish butler named Bernard Lafferty, who was put in charge of her multi-billion dollar estate before he drank himself to death three years later in 1996.

Starting in 1935, during her round the world honeymoon cruise with Jimmy Cromwell, she became a collector and hoarder of Asian art, which quietly became one of the most valuable collections in the world.

How the best pieces ended up in San Francisco's Asian Art Museum is a story filled with all kinds of odd twists and turns. One of the most fateful moments was when the late museum board chair Jack Bogart went to New York in 1998 to meet with the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. He traveled there to see about getting a grant for the museum's move from Golden Gate Park into the newly revamped building in San Francisco's Civic Center.

Bogart was told that there was an entire coach house at the Duke Ranch estate in New Jersey filled with Asian art and the foundation was thinking of selling it at Christie's auction house. Bogart called the museum's chief curator, Forrest McGill (below), and asked if McGill had ever heard of the collection. "No, I've never heard anything about it, I'm sure it's nothing of much interest," he replied.

As he self-deprecatingly told a group at the press preview, "It was one of the biggest goofs of my entire career. When I did visit the Duke Farms myself in 1998, opening up the doors of this coach house which was the size of a train station was a bit like Ali Baba entering the cave filled with treasures. I could hardly believe what I was seeing."

McGill convinced the foundation that much of the art belonged in public museums, and a deal was struck to split the best parts of the collection with the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, offsetting their already existing Southeast Asian holdings. It started with a coin toss for first dibs, which San Francisco won.

In 1996, three years after Doris' death and before the estate was taken away by the courts from the butler Lafferty, a biography was published entitled "Too Rich: The Family Secrets of Doris Duke." It's a mostly sympathetic account by her godson Pony Duke (as you can see, I am not making that name up) and Jason Thomas, while also containing enough salacious tales to stuff a dozen old Harold Robbins novels.

Doris Duke's Treasures at the Asian 2: Siam

2009-10-26T13:57:00.000-07:00

The Duke fortune was created soon after the Civil War by a dirt-poor North Carolina farmer named Washington Duke who started the American Tobacco Company, a company that morphed into the American Tobacco Trust which owned and controlled 90% of the tobacco products in the world at the turn of the century. This was broken up in a federal antitrust action in 1909, at about which time the two sons Ben and Buck decided to diversify the family fortune out of tobacco and into energy (Duke Power) and aluminum (namely Alcoa). To Buck's credit, he knew that tobacco was killing his customers and he "decided to slowly liquidate his massive cigarette company holdings."

Just before Washington's death in 1905, Buck married his wild Irish mistress Lillian McCredy in New York but the marriage didn't last longer than a year, possibly because they were both serial adulterers and his detectives were better than hers. After the two Duke sons buried their father and gave a huge chunk of money to Trinity College, which was later renamed Duke University, Ben encouraged his brother to marry a more respectable woman, which is how Buck ended up betrothed to a Southern Belle widow named Nanaline Holt Inman. They had a single child together named Doris.

The succession in the family business and the bulk of the Duke fortune were supposed to go to Ben's son, Angier. However, in 1923 the young heir got into a rowboat at a yacht club near Greenwich, Connecticut along with two male friends and three women. The group had been drinking champagne all night and were on their way to Angier's 76-foot yacht, Althea, for his favorite pastime, "Diddling at dawn." The rowboat overturned and Angier drowned. After the accident, Buck rearranged his financial empire so that everything would go to his beloved daughter Doris through a series of complex, legally ironclad trusts. This didn't sit very well with his wife Nanaline who despised her own daughter and favored her son Walker from her previous marriage, but Buck made sure the stepson received only a relative pittance.

The biography hints that Nanaline probably poisoned Duke in his final years, and when he came down with pneumonia in 1925, she had the butler open all the windows and turn off the heat in the sickroom of their New York City penthouse as a winter storm arrived in the city. "In the South we believe that a sick man needs fresh air," she told the startled butler as she wrapped herself in a fur coat and watched her husband die overnight. The only object Nanaline bequeathed Doris in her own will, by the way, was that same coat.

Partly just to get away from her mother, Doris married the handsome socialite Jimmy Cromwell (above) when she was 21. His family fortune had dissolved in the Crash of 1929, but he managed to keep up appearances well enough that nobody was aware of it. They embarked on a globetrotting honeymoon cruise on the "Conti di Savoia" luxury liner where Doris was filled with hope for the future, for all of 12 hours. As the bio puts it:

"Jimmy entered the stateroom and looked at Doris, who was waiting in bed in her negligee. He seemed very dashing in his morning coat. He looked at his bride as she waited for him to say the romantic words of love that an adoring groom might say on a wedding night. Instead, he lit a cigarette, sat on the side of the bed, leaned toward his excited bride, and said, "My darling, what might I expect my annual income to be?" Doris Duke's body turned cold. "I told that son of a bitch to go straight to hell." He went to the ship's bar."

Sexual desire was sublimated into shopping as Doris bought treasures throughout their eastward honeymoon cruise, which is how her Asian art collection began. "In Bangkok and Shanghai, Doris continued her haggling as she acquired priceless antique rugs, the finest of ivory, tiles, and jade. Every ship that sailed west from the Orient that summer carried crated treasures to be delivered to Duke Farms." It was when they arrived in Honolulu in August of 1935 that she discovered beach boys, surfing and sex.

Her first escort and lover was the Olympic swimming star and surfing pioneer Duke Kahanamoku. From that moment on, she never looked back.

Doris Duke's Treasures at the Asian 3: Burma

2009-10-26T13:16:00.000-07:00

The 1940s for Doris Duke were packed with enough drama to fill a trashy television miniseries. In fact, a four-hour version of her biography was made in 1999 with Lauren Bacall as the elderly Doris and Richard Chamberlain as her sinister butler Bernard. Doris was simultaneously carrying on affairs with Duke Kahanamoku in Hawaii, the British politician Alec Cunningham-Reid all over the world, not to mention a dalliance with Erroll Flynn, all the while trying to get a divorce from her despised husband which she successfully managed in Reno in 1942.

From there, she went to Europe for World War Two where she was pursuing Cunningham-Reid while working for the OSS in Cairo. During that same period, she met the infamous Domican playboy Porfirio Rubirosa "with the Rolls-Royce of genitalia," who became her second husband after she paid $1 million to his mistress, the French actress Danielle Darrieux.

The marriage didn't last long, but the two stayed friends, and from there it was on to a series of adventures with the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Louis Bromfeld in the 1950s, a handsome gay decorator named Edward Tirella in the 1960s who Doris accidentally murdered when she crushed him against the gates of her Newport estate in 1966 with her car, and finally paid companions in the 1970s and 1980s from Harlem who would entertain her after all-night sessions at Studio 54. To say that the rest of the Duke family was scandalized and horrified by her behavior would probably be an understatement.

The last chapters of her life were spent mostly at her Shangri-La estate on Diamond Head in Honolulu where she collected odd people, dangled money in front of them, and then banished them into exile. She had conceived two children with Duke Kahanamoku in the late 1930s, but had aborted the first one and intentionally miscarried the second, a daughter who lived two days and who she named Arden. In the final years of her life, a young Hare Krishna con woman named Chandi Heffner convinced Doris that she was the living reincarnation of that daughter and Doris legally adopted her.

This didn't work out very well, and a couple of years later Chandi was banished from Shangri-La. Doris tried to disinherit her, but legal adoptions cannot be undone, so that Ms. Heffner ended up with about $65 from the estate after Doris' death. Chandi also brought in the notorious butler Bernard Lafferty who basically took over Doris' life in her final years, keeping all family and friends away from her sickbed in Beverly Hills, and making sure she was pumped to the gills with a variety of drugs.

The final quote in the book is from an anonymous relative:

"I don't care whether Bernard snuffed the old girl or not. She was a selfish, self-centered old bitch who never did anything for anyone. If Bernard Lafferty can use some of her money to do some good in the Duke name, I don't care if he fed the old girl champagne and Valium and pills until her stomach exploded."

The authors go on to explain, "Of course, that relative is not in the will."

Happily, the residents of San Francisco are a part of Doris' bequest, thanks to the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Her collection is extraordinary and feels right at home at the Asian Art Museum. May her next incarnation be a little less troubled.

La Fille du Regiment with Les Enfants du Paradis

2009-10-24T11:16:00.000-07:00

Some productions at the San Francisco Opera are better seen from the top balcony's standing room section rather than a good seat in the downstairs orchestra section. It is easier from far away to suspend disbelief while watching an older, hefty opera singer playing a slim, youthful character, and to ignore excessive mugging or a wooden performance. Above all, there is the sound which travels up from the stage, hits the roof and back wall of the last balcony, and then reverberates directly back into your ears with a clarity that is breathtaking. (Production photos below by Cory Weaver.)

I saw the fourth performance on Thursday evening of Donizetti's "The Daughter of The Regiment," an 1840 French operetta with dialogue, that particularly benefited from standing with the "children of the gods" for a couple of reasons. The set, consisting of huge topographical maps that created peaks and valleys, was perfectly beautiful from above. With OperaVision screens to our left and right, it was easy to confirm early reviews that there was a lot of overacting onstage, but it was easily ignored.

The real reason to be up there, however, is because the difficult-to-sing music is being performed at legendary levels by the debuting Diana Damrau as Marie and Juan Diego Florez as Tonio, two tiny singers in their prime with unbelievably supple and beautiful voices.

Florez is a known quantity, having already titillated New York Met audiences with 9 high C's in a row and then encoring the aria. Here he's matched and then some by Damrau in her role debut, who is asked to sing rambuctious marches, death-defying trills, and gentle arias one after the other. I was standing by an elderly gentleman who had seen everyone from Beverly Sills to Joan Sutherland in the role over the years, and his jaw literally dropped during the evening.

The opera was conducted by another beautiful young European, Andriy Yurkevych, the music director of the Ukranian National Opera, and he did a superb job, never letting the piece lag. The mostly male chorus was also excellent, particularly since they were choreographed all night to be in one absurd, painful position after another. Also standing out was contralto Meredith Arwady as a very funny rich aunt/mother with a bottomless voice.

There are three more performances: Sunday matinee at 2 on October 25, Wednesday at 7:30 on October 28, and Halloween night at 8. From the looks of Thursday evening's performance, they are not selling out, which is too bad. This is one of those productions where an elderly gentleman is going to be saying thirty years from now, "Ah, but you should have seen this with Damrau and Florez. Now that was something."

Music for 16 Futurist Noise Intoners

2009-10-22T10:42:00.000-07:00

The coolest music concert of the year was held last Friday evening at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Entitled "Music for 16 Futurist Noise Intoners," it was part historical recreation of an Italian Futurist concert from 1913, and also a leap into the present with contemporary composers creating music for 16 reconstructed "intonarumori."

According to a short, interesting Wikipedia entry, "Each instrument was constructed of a parallelepiped wooden sound box with a metal radiating horn on its front side. Inside the box was a wheel that, when turned by means of a crank or electric button, caused a catgut or metal string to vibrate.

The wheel could be made of either metal or wood, and the shape and diameter of the wheel varied depending on the model. At one end of the string there was a drumhead that transmits the vibrations to the speaker. The pitch of the vibrating string was controlled by both the speed that the wheel was cranked and by the tension of the string, which was controlled by a lever on top of the box. The lever allowed the performer to play glissandos or specific notes, and also allowed the performer to change the pitch by small intervals. The intonarumori often had a range of more than an octave."

Futurism was a short-lived, wildly influential art movement of the early twentieth century which flourished in Italy before the advent of World War One. The poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote the infamous Futurist Manifesto in 1909, which among other things, "rejected the past, celebrated speed, machinery, violence, youth and industry; and sought the modernisation and cultural rejuvenation of Italy." His musical equivalent was Luigi Russolo who wrote a manifesto in 1913 called "L'arte dei Rumori," or "The Art of Noises" which is an amazingly prescient work that anticipates the ideas of John Cage among many others.

Here's another excerpt from Wikipedia: "Russolo claims that music has reached a point that no longer has the power to excite or inspire. Even when it is new, he argues, it still sounds old and familiar, leaving the audience "waiting for the extraordinary sensation that never comes." He urges musicians to explore the city with "ears more sensitive than eyes," listening to the wide array of noises that are often taken for granted, yet (potentially) musical in nature. He feels these noises can be given pitched and "regulated harmonically," while still preserving their irregularity and character, even if it requires assigning multiple pitches to certain noises."

The period holds a fascination for many people, particularly RoseLee Goldberg (above), who wrote a book in 1979 called "Performance Art from Futurism to the Present," which is still in print in its third edition. After a career as a curator in London and New York, principally at The Kitchen in the latter city, she created a biennial arts festival six years ago in New York City called PERFORMA, which is having its third edition this November. The theme this year is Futurism on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Marinetti's Manifesto.

The organization is attempting to branch out to other cities and institutions, so that this year there was a week-long symposium at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art called "Metal + Machine + Manifesto = Futurism's First 100 Years," with Friday's concert at the Novellus Theatre the obvious highlight. Goldberg was extremely fortunate to partner up with the Berkeley-based Italian composer, scholar, conductor and performer Luciano Chessa (above) who has also been fascinated by the period all his life. He not only wrote a doctoral dissertation at UC Davis on Russolo, but has just finished the upcoming UC Press book, "Luigi Russolo Futurista. Noise, Visual Arts and the Occult."

Chessa, directing instrument builder Keith Cary with additional help from Dna Hoover, recreated the whole set of 16 intonarumori for the first time in history since their destruction in World War Two, a process which required a lot of detective work. "A major breakthrough was realizing one of Russolo's primary sources was the set of Leonardo da Vinci's noisemakers," Chessa states in the program.

I went to the concert fearing it would be painfully loud but instead the opposite was true. As Chessa wrote to me when I asked if there had been any amplification used at the concert:

"Absolutely no amplification of any sort for anything, including voices, etc., not even a subtle reinforcement. It was all 100% acoustic. These instruments were originally built for Italian opera houses. It's not that they are soft (we had to run rehearsals in the evening because, in the place where they were housed, the neighboring 9 to 5 offices complained!) but of course they are not as loud as stadium amp towers. I quickly realized playing them in large spaces, instead of being an issue, offered my project another angle: I decide to embrace their features. There is plenty of ear-popping loud music out there. Why couldn't this project be different? Not weaker: just softer and subtler? This was not about blasting loud noises, was not about power: it ought to be about the depth of the grain of noises. More than simply aural education, it was about sustainable, organic, gourmet noises..."

The concert started with a reconstruction of a 1916 piece by one of the original Futurist composers, Paolo Buzzi, called "Pioggia nel pineto antidannunziana." It began with Luciano striding onto the stage with a megaphone, loudly declaiming a parody written by the composer of a famous poem (La pioggia nel pineto) by Gabriele d'Annunzio, "who the futurists hated because he was too traditional and neoclassical (later, d'Annunzio became the main poet for Mussolini's regime). It's a surreal abrasive poem about pine needles, with a chemical formula of an acid, and a reference to Turpentine, etc..."

Chessa then turned around and conducted San Francisco's Magik*Magik Orchestra, who were playing the various intonarumori with skill and evident delight, evoking Russolo's "six families of noise":
1. Roars, Thunderings, Explosions, Hissing roars, Bangs, Booms
2. Whistling, Hissing, Puffing
3. Whispers, Murmurs, Mumbling, Muttering, Gurgling
4. Screeching, Creaking, Rustling, Humming, Crackling, Rubbing
5. Noises obtained by beating on metals, woods, skins, stones, pottery, etc.
6. Voices of animals and people, Shouts, Screams, Shrieks, Wails, Hoots, Howls, Death rattles, Sobs

Thirteen pieces written expressly for this concert by a range of composers followed, with varying success. A few of the pieces were dull and self-indulgent (I'm looking at you, "Text of Light") while a few others sounded like instant classics. The most successful for me were pieces that integrated the intonarumori orchestra with traditional instruments, such as John Butcher's "penny wands and native string" featuring the composer on saxophone, Elliott Sharp's "Then Go" with the Korean singer/dancer Dohee Lee giving a mesmerizing performance, and conductor/curator/composer Luciano Chessa's "L'acoustique ivresse (Les bruits de la Paix)" which was a beautiful song for bass (Richard Mix, above left) and noise intoners set to a poem by Buzzi called "Russolo."

My favorite piece that used the orchestra of intonarumori alone was by Mike Patton, a former rock star with the groups Faith No More and Mr. Bungle. Entitled KOSTNICE, the music was strange and exquisite.

You only have two more chances to see this concert, once at Town Hall in New York City in November as part of the Performa 09 festival, and again in Milan in December. San Francisco's Magik*Magik orchestra will be traveling to Manhattan for the concert, but reportedly not to Italy, which is too bad. There were a few funny moments when some of the young performers, furiously cranking their wooden box instruments, looked like they were in one of Wilhelm Reich's infamous orgone boxes. I'd love to see what they look like when even more expert on their various noise intoners.

James Ellroy and the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy

2009-10-20T19:03:00.000-07:00

Litquake is a week-long party for writers and their admirers in San Francisco, and this year was their tenth anniversary, complete with a free, fat program listing their gazillion sponsors and book readings by writers throughout the city.

Last Thursday evening, the Books Inc. branch on Market Street in the Castro was host to James Ellroy, the 61-year-old Los Angeles crime novelist who has been getting more ambitious with each book. The reading in a small room in the back of the hot, muggy store was packed, and it didn't help when the young store manager insisted on reciting to us all the upcoming readings in a voice so monotone and devoid of emotion that it was almost comical.

He was finally replaced by James Ellroy whose public persona is completely over the top. After a diatribe against the "Internet Invaders who are making your brains about this small," he started on a paean to the wonder that is Alfred P. Knopf, his publishers, and the Borzoi book label. "I've written some pretty good books, some good books, some great books, some near-masterpieces, some masterpieces, and now I have outdone myself with my greatest masterpiece, 'Blood's a Rover.' Buy it."

After a tumultuous life growing up in Los Angeles, including his mother being murdered when he was ten, Ellroy stopped drinking and pill popping and became a golf caddy writing crime novels in his afternoons and evenings. He first connected with a mass audience with "The Black Dahlia," an historical metafiction about a real crime with the addition of fictional characters. He continued in the same vein with "The Big Nowhere," "L.A. Confidential," and "White Jazz," which was a trilogy about institutional corruption in Los Angeles that featured serial killers, a Walt Disney character, Communist Jewish screenwriters, and the fabulously corrupt Captain Dudley Liam Smith of the LAPD.

In 1995, "American Tabloid" was published, a shocking history of the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s culminating in JFK's assassination. One of the book's many contentions is that Joseph Kennedy, along with Meyer Lansky, was one of the original organizers of Organized Crime as we know it, stemming from Prohibition days. When his son Bobby decided to go after gangsters as Attorney General, Joseph's old partners in crime weren't amused. By the final pages, there isn't ONE plot in motion to kill JFK, but half a dozen.

The protagonists are middle-level henchmen of various powerful nasties such as Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover, the Kennedy clan, the CIA, and their pornographically violent adventures through the 1960s in the United States are literally mind-blowing. Not only has Ellroy done his research, paying for a team of assistants according to his own account, but his evocation of the nastier underbelly of recent political history feels very dark, funny, and right.

"American Tabloid" was followed six years later by "The Cold Six Thousand," which spans the time between JFK's assassination and the twin murders of RFK and Martin Luther King, Jr. The language and the situations become even more stacatto and extreme than the earlier book, involving many of the same characters. Eight years later, thanks in part to a breakup with a San Francisco woman he fell in love with, Ellroy has finally finished the trilogy with "Blood's a Rover," published last month. According to one review, the novel takes us into the heart of Nixonian hell. I'll wait until I'm feeling stronger to begin reading.