Wrenching the Castro into the news

Fresh paint, bright banners, million-dollar condos:
"These are wrenching times for San Francisco’s historic gay village..."

The Times story about the demise of gay neighborhoods is so squarely on the post-gay beat that I would feel obliged to blog about it even if it weren't so terribly askew in the context department.

Broadly speaking, Patricia Leigh Brown got the story right: the Castro has become a gentrified version of itself that is too precious and expensive to welcome gay refugees from those terribly benighted flyover states, and the need for such a mecca has diminished as those places have become less benighted.

The trouble with the story is that it mixes up distinct phenomena: gentrification, straightification, and Halloween, and it tries to freshen a story without acknowledging that it's twenty years old and far more complex than the story makes it seem.

The Castro is a neighborhood, not a museum. It changes gradually but sometimes radically. Since turning gay thirty years ago, it has followed the gentrification trajectory that has revived or plagued urban neighborhoods (depending on your point of view, which is probably determined by your income) since the Reagan administration at least. What happened in the Castro isn't very different from what happened in SoHo or the Haight Ashbury over the hill--in fact, according to Randy Shilts in his brief history of the neighborhood in The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, it was because rents were going up around Haight and Ashbury that young immigrant gays transfered operations to 18th and Castro. Like artists (which many of them were), gays made the Castro attractive and comparably safe. The neighborhood was unaffordable twenty years ago, a disappointment for young people who wanted to move there whether they were seeking refuge, community, easy sex, or all of the above. It became especially unaffordable, like most parts of San Francisco, after Marc Andreessen commercialized the Web browser twelve years ago. The idea that Arquitectonica condos mark some sort of sea change is nonsense.

the prospect of half-million-dollar condos inhabited by many straight people underscores a demographic shift.

Many straight people? This is reportorial laziness pure and simple, not just because of the safe, virtually meaningless "many," but because it smooths over the single most salient difference between the gays generally and the true victims of urban gentrification (primarily disadvantaged ethnic minorities but also young people generally and artists, though they're typically part of the problem). By and large, the gays have held onto the Castro. The blacks have not held onto the Fillmore. The Italians have not held onto North Beach. Yes, there are strollers and same sex couples marauding through the streets of Eureka Valley, but they were there ten years ago and they were there thirty years ago. As for the gays, the new arrivals may be unable to afford an apartment at Diamond and 19th (join the club), but their older gay brothers and sisters have double incomes, most of them have no kids, and they have jobs in venture capital and law and high-tech. They have stock options. They get their nails done. The gays are getting pushed out of the Castro and other gays are moving in.

And what about those huddled masses of young gay men and women, yearning to live in the gay ghetto? Brown clearly did not do her research at night. There are more fun parties, packed with younger and far more ethically diverse gay crowds, on almost every night, in the Castro, than at any time in my memory. 440 Castro (formerly Daddy's) is packed with kids on Wednesday nights. So is the Bar on Castro on Thursdays, the Cafe on Fridays. These multiracial young people may not be able to call the Castro home--yet--and they may never want to. But they sure do party there, and as the story reports from shrinks with the 'Net-addicted, depressed gay clients, the night life ain't nothing.

The last thing that bothered me about Brown's story is lumping in the Halloween debacle with the gentrification issue. Unrelated! Except, perhaps, if you're going to draw some sort of analogy with the uncostumed straight Muggles wrecking the party for the rest of us. Is the Castro in the grip of a crime wave, of which the Halloween shootings are an integral part? Show me the numbers. I'd be extremely surprised if crime rates in the neighborhood are significantly worse now than they were ten or twenty years ago.

I gave up on Halloween in the Castro long ago, and it had less to do with unwelcome heterosexuals than unparticipatory spectators, teenage rowdiness and, frankly, boredom. That straight woman whose babies wear "I love my daddies" t-shirts? At least she's trying.

Hypnagogy report 20071015

let me borrow a pile of rubble
Florida? Go!
there were all these arms that came out
they kicked sand in his face too--I want to hear
it makes me so upset I want to cry
It's People Magazine so you can't expect a reply to email. Don't believe what you hear at the farmer's market. Sit down.
In pictures is she all goofy? No, they all look like him.
We're all chasing the earth's shadow. What else are we doing up here?
What would you do if I wore this outside?
Everything looks OK, as long as you're 15.
Why else would you have water patience?

music review: Louis Lortie and the SF Symphony

Louis Lortie

On Saturday night I went back to ODC Dance Theater with James and our friends Barbara and Lyman for the third and final night of Donna Uchizono's "Thin Air." Rob scored us front-row seats and, at least for James (who danced with the Silesian Dance Theater in Bitom, Poland for the '99-2000 season), the show lived up to my hype. Beforehand we went to dinner at Walzwerk on South Van Ness and had the only mediocre meal I've ever had there. Don't go on a busy night; on a slow one, it's an ace kitchen.

The following day my old friend Emma Moon--another Yale-Juilliard-Yale boomerang--invited me to the symphony for a program of new music: Liszt's Totentanz, Beethoven's Choral Fantasy, and Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky. Most people probably don't consider any of that new music, but in fact I had never heard a note of it.

When the house lights dimmed and the concertmaster had tuned the orchestra, Kurt Masur came out with a diminutive man in casual black slacks and a black shirt. This guy was a little bit of a zhlub--not just the outfit but the careless management of his remaining hair. Oh shit, I thought as the audience applauded tentatively--Masur accidentally came out with the janitor. It seemed so terribly embarrassing for everybody, but only for a moment, because the janitor proceeded to sit down and play the living daylights out of the Liszt.

The soloist, Louis Lortie, was a total joy to watch--not fun like watching Liberace, young black & white Liberace with the dazzlingly anodyne smile and the wink, ever-ready no matter how many hundreds of notes per second his fingers are flawlessly and charmingly processing. What showed up on this guy's face was a performance unto itself, and a great performance, free of the laborious grimaces that disfigure the faces of so many pianists, and full of evidence, if his playing didn't already drive home the point, that every phrase of the music was part of an incredibly vivid and theatrical narrative. I found myself challenged, as a performer and as a listener, because the story on his face spurred me to listen for more, to hear better, to imagine harder, the way Jody Foster directed one of her child actors: "I want you to go out there and pretend really hard." Lortie is a virtuoso pianist, but more importantly he is a virtuoso pretender. And that's why his impersonation of the janitor was such a nice touch, because it said: It makes no difference what you see when I appear before you, for in a moment I will pull jewels, skulls, succubi, God and the blood-drenched history of Europe out of this piano. He made good on the threat, and when he was through, every single person in Davies Symphony Hall wanted to fuck him.

The Beethoven is a spectacular white elephant of a piece, a musical Moby Dick in its discursive structure and grandiosity. I enjoyed it, especially Lortie's solos, but through much of the piece, as through much of the Liszt, I was reminded of Josefa Heifetz's nasty observation that "variations aren't music." Alexander Nevsky was dazzling--my appreciation of Prokofiev only waxes and never wanes the more I hear. I hadn't heard the symphony chorus in many years and was delighted to see Apparition of the Eternal Church star Ron Gallman in the tenor section, and, newly installed at the first desk of cellists, my old conservatory, SF Symphony Young Musicians Award DC vacation, Lowell High and Juilliard comrade Amos Yang.

Dumbledore bats for our team

I'm reminded of Margaret Cho's response to the last Pope's homophobia: "Oh, you a real good judge of normal! Livin alone with all yo mens, in your gowns, surrounded by the finest antiques in the worl..."

Rowling Reveals Harry Potter Secrets

Saturday, Oct. 20, 2007
Time
By GINA ELLIOTT

...
The big revelation of the night came when she was asked if Dumbledore had ever found love. With a sigh, she seemed on the verge of saying no, but then revealed, "my truthful answer to you... I always thought of Dumbledore as gay." After a collective gasp, the audience roared with applause. Rowling was clearly astonished by the positive reaction and exclaimed, "if I'd known it would make you so happy, I would have announced it years ago!" She went on to say that she thought Dumbledore had fallen in love with Grindelwald, a Dark Wizard he defeated in battle in 1945, which possibly made it forgivable that he had not seen Grindelwald's true nature, because "falling in love can blind us to an extent."

(full story)

Emily Litella lives

Anyone who watched the original cast of Saturday Night Live, and many people who didn't, are familiar with Gilda Radner's persnickety and hard-of-hearing heroine Emily Litella, who appeared regularly as a commentator on Weekend Update and complained about contemporary outrages such as "busting schoolchildren" and "the deaf penalty" until Chevy Chase or Jane Curtin set her straight. (Wikipedia lists her other aural misprisions in an informative entry.)

Nothing she did on television is half as hilarious as this segment from her 1979 off-Broadway show Gilda Live, which I discovered courtesy of YouTube:



A year ago, not having seen the Radner act since adolescence, James and I put together this Emily L. tribute, set to the Lovermakers' tune "Shake That Ass," for Trannyshack's Hairisson Street Fair celebration Hair Ball.

Dance review: Donna Uchizono's Thin Air

Yesterday, since I wasn't going to a second showing of Appommatox, I was free to accept comps, from my old Youth Orchestra pal Rob Bailis, for a showing of Donna Uchizono's "Thin Air," which plays twice more at ODC Dance Theater (which Rob directs), tonight and Saturday.

"Thin Air" was the perfect antidote to my night at the opera, though at first I didn't recognize it as such. The piece started out with three dancers perched on ladders, bobbing their heads. They bobbed, then they kept bobbing, and when they were through with that they bobbed some more. I didn't think to check my watch but experientially it was about a quarter hour of bobbing. Then, very slowly, someone raised an arm. I thought Oh no. This.

Oh no quickly turned to oh my god. Somewhere early in the unfolding of her ideas (in my case, after the bobbing) Uchizono got our attention and she did not relinquish it until the house lights came up. She has a virtuoso sense of scale, zeroing in on riveting miniatures in one scene and zooming back out to big stark pictures in the next. Her use of video projection was actually poignant. I could try to describe some of her devices but choose not to, because there's so much pleasure in the surprise of watching them emerge.

That said, I'm going to go again Saturday and bring James. For the sheer concentration of interesting ideas, for the high success rate of its many experiments, you should go see this for yourself. So should the creators of Appommatox. Ticket information is here.

Opera review: Appomattox

Two friends from out of town invited me to the world premiere performances at the San Francisco Opera of Appomattox, the Philip Glass and Christopher Hampton work about Lee's surrender in the Civil War. I took the first opportunity, with my friend Myrlin from Short Mountain, Tennessee, thinking I would also go with Juliette, from Albion Ridge, tonight, if I liked it. Suddenly I find myself without Thursday evening plans.

Two caveats: One is that I cannot responsibly review the opera because I only got through the first half. I wrestled with my decision to desert at the intermission, weighing factors like my credibility as a critic, the $30 I'd paid Myrlin for his second senior rush ticket, and the possibility the opera would redeem itself in the second act. I finally decided that any work that had proceeded for its entire first half without a single interesting idea emanating from the stage or the orchestra pit was probably better left for dead on the battlefield.

The second caveat is that when I was a violin student Philip Glass was extremely generous to me. For my third-year recital at Juilliard, I put on "An Evening of American Music" and closed the first half with the Knee Play 4, an interlude from his first opera Einstein on the Beach in which Einstein plays violin to the accompaniment of a four-part male choir. As rehearsals started with the singers, I opened the Manhattan phone book, found the composer's number, called him up and told him what I was doing. He invited me and my singers down to his house in the East Village and we ran through the number for him. He not only gave us a coaching, but on the spot he composed for us a concluding passage that would make the interlude work as a concert piece. Later that week he sat for a telephone interview, which I printed in my program notes and which, if I can find the file, I'll post to my Web site one of these days.

I endured a fair amount of jeering snobbery from Juilliard faculty and classmates for programming Glass--one of my collaborators on the program made a point of leaving the theater before Knee Play 4 began. But I loved Einstein on the Beach. I'd discovered the music when I was twelve years old and it had an absolutely druggy impact on my imagination. At twelve, I couldn't have put words to the experience, but I was hearing something genuinely revolutionary (whether Glass touched off the revolution or just popularized it), something revolutionarily clean, vital, downtown, Eastern, technological (despite relying almost entirely on the human voice and traditional acoustic instruments), neon and new. Einstein's hallmark was the radical transparency of its harmonic language after seventy years of musical drip-painting, clarity that put into high relief not only the strangeness of the libretto and the vividness of Robert Wilson's stagecraft but the newness and singularity of Glass's instrumentation and timbre. After all the Juilliard jeering I was afraid my love affair with Einstein couldn't survive whatever sophistication I'd acquired since the age of twelve, but I went to the BAM revival in the early 90s and loved every minute of it. I stand by Einstein, I respect Glass, and I hurl mean thoughts at all the snobs I went to school with.

That's part of what made Appommatox such a dismal experience, feeling in my own response to it the dismissal and derision with which my friends left the recital hall before Knee Play 4. The first act of this new opera was stupefying. How else can we receive a ten-minute scene in which the women sing "war is sorrowful" over and over again over utterly unilluminating harmonic noodling in the orchestra? It's either sublime simplicity or numbing insipidity, and judging from the response of the audience in the dress circle, most people got numb. Einstein too was built on repetition, but with the newness of the way Glass wrote for the voice and the freshness of the ideas he and Wilson manifested, the results were always intriguing if not downright beautiful. In Appomattox, scene after scene unfolded according to a formula of idea-free reiteration.

"It's pretty glum," said Myrlin at halftime. "But it's war, and war is glum."

OK, I'll swallow the glum pill. But at least give me some hope it will be good for me! It's 1865, the women are all dressed for a Victorian funeral, the set with its blood-red moat looks like it was borrowed from a modern-dress production of Turandot, the libretto reads like the remix of a History Channel transcript, and the accent coach and the production's grim determination to be historically accurate have Mrs. Lee belting out lines like "Husband, it is not RAAAAAAAAGHT for you to do so!"

What I missed in the second half: Lee and Grant negotiate a surrender (negotiations!). Interruptions in which racial injustice from the near and distant future is portrayed (education!). A looting scene, and then a reprise: women lament the tragedy of war, the orchestra noodles.

My recommendation: take the money you would have put toward a ticket and get the original recording of Einstein, with the surpassingly pure and luminous soprano Iris Hiskey.

Recommendation: Awesome NYC massage

On the flight to New York, I slept like the dead and woke up wounded. Something nasty happened to my neck that plagued me the entire week leading up to my concert in Boston, worsening the left-hand problem that put my violin career on its recent 8-year hiatus.


When I mentioned all this to my friend John Haas, he offered me a massage. He gives them out of a sweet little fainting parlor in his apartment on Rivington St. in the Lower East Side. He worked on me for a full two hours, which is far more than I can usually tolerate. I'm one of those massage sissies who thinks he wants deep tissue work but, once on the table, spends the hour squirming and saying ouch and ends up more tense than he began. John practically Rolfed me but his approach is so subtle that I was able to relax into it. I got up two hours later feeling like a resident of Gary Larsen's Boneless Chicken Ranch; once again I was able to breathe. (The hand was fine in Boston.)

John writes:

My rates are $ 90 1 hr ~ $ 120 1 1/2 hrs. My licensing & training include:
Amma-shiatsu, Deeptissue, Lomi~lomi, Pre-natal, hotstone, Swedish/Esalen, bodyscrubs. Table is heated. I travel.

Contact: John Haas
(347) 683-1727
dfaulken (at) gmail (dot) com

Boston poster

My movie Apparition of the Eternal Church is playing at the Boston University Messiaen Project international conference "Messiaen the Theologian." It's part of their three-year observance of Messiaen's 100th in 2008.

I spent most of the day working on this variation of the New York premiere poster and the DVD cover art. It will also appear on t-shirts for sale after the show, because documentary filmmakers gotta eat. I'm looking forward to the screening, after which I have 22 hours in which to get nervous about giving the Fantaisie premiere. The Fantaisie (1933) is one of only three pieces that Messiaen wrote for violin and piano, and that's including the single movement from the Quartet for the End of Time. There's no recording of the Fantaisie. So I'm guessing that even in a group of Messiaen scholars, the vast majority of the audience will never have heard the piece.

Click on the poster for a larger version: