the light slides away
stars glow in darkening blue
waiting for the moon
31 May 2014
30 May 2014
Friday photo 2014/22
Merrill's, on Market Street, San Francisco. I believe it's been torn down in the past year or two.
29 May 2014
28 May 2014
27 May 2014
fun stuff I may or may not get to: June 2014
Festivals
Early music fans will find a feast at the Berkeley Festival & Exhibition, 1 - 8 June; check out all the performers, exhibits, and fringe events here.
Cal Performances once again brings us Ojai North; the artistic director for this year's edition is pianist Jeremy Denk. That's 19 - 21 June on the Berkeley campus. Check out the details here; as usual, it all looks good, but some likely highlights are The Classical Style: An Opera (of Sorts) by Denk and Steven Stucky, based on Charles Rosen's celebrated book; the Uri Caine Ensemble performing Mahler Re-Imagined, on a bill with Denk performing Janacek's On an Overgrown Path and short works by Schubert; and . . . well, I see I'm going to end up just listing everything. There's also a concert featuring works by Timo Andres, Charles Ives, Morton Feldman, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Kurt Weill; and one with Denk playing the Ligeti Piano Etudes, Books I and II. The whole schedule, and other information, is available here.
Theatrical
ACT presents The Orphan of Zhao, in a new adaptation by poet James Fenton, directed by Carey Perloff and starring BD Wong, 4 - 29 June. More information here. This meets the criterion for things I list here – it's something I'd like to see – but I find myself baffled and annoyed by ACT and generally end up skipping their productions. They are, as far as I know, the only major local theater that still doggedly insists on an 8:00 start time for every night of the work week (they usually have exactly one 7:00 work night start time per play, for a "talk back"; most theaters here have one or two nights per week on which they acknowledge that some of us have to get up the next morning and go to work). And their ticket costs are much higher than any other theater around. I think of them as "theater for the Peninsula, only in San Francisco" – you drive into the city, you have a nice dinner at a semi-fancy restaurant, you get home around midnight, you stroll in to your tech job whenever. I guess it works for some people. Last year, on a Stoppard high after the second fabulous installment by the Shotgun Players of The Coast of Utopia, I decided to get a ticket to Arcadia at ACT. My calendar was clear on the one day with a 7:00 start, and there was a seat that was nearly perfect (front row center – "nearly" perfect because it was one in from the aisle instead of right on the aisle). Then I noticed the price, which was approximately what I'd paid for an entire season's subscription at Shotgun. And frankly, I've had better experiences at Shotgun than at ACT. I still haven't seen Arcadia. (The current show at Shotgun Players was mentioned last month: Daylighting, which runs until 22 June.)
Aurora Theater revives David Mamet's American Buffalo, directed by Barbara Damashek, 13 June - 13 July; details here.
San Francisco Playhouse revives the Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine fairy-tale musical, Into the Woods, 24 June to 6 September; details here.
Operatic
Opera Parallèle presents the American premiere of Anya17, a new work examining human trafficking. The music is by Adam Gorb and libretto by Ben Kaye, conducted by Nicole Paiement and staged by Brian Staufenbiel. That's 20 - 22 June at the Marines' Memorial Theater on Sutter Street in San Francisco; more information here. I don't know a whole lot about this one, but everything Opera Parallèle does is worth seeing.
The San Francisco Symphony presents a semi-staged Peter Grimes, with an excellent cast including Stuart Skelton and Elza van den Heever, on 26, 27, and 29 June; details here.
San Francisco Opera returns for the second half of its season. I'm very excited about the American classic from Kern and Hammerstein, Show Boat, directed by Francesca Zambello, with a fine cast including Heidi Stober, Michael Todd Simpson (in place of the previously announced Nathan Gunn), Bill Irwin, Patricia Racette, Angela Renée Simpson, Harriet Harris, and Morris Robinson; more details here.
They are also presenting La Traviata (details here) and Madama Butterfly (details here) – both beloved masterpieces, which are revived too frequently for anyone's good. Butterfly is a new production, designed by Jun Kaneko (I very much enjoyed his designs for The Magic Flute a couple of years ago).
Symphonic
At the San Francisco Symphony, Charles Dutoit conducts Beethoven's Piano Concerto No 2 (with soloist Kirill Gerstein) and the Shostakovich 10, 4 - 7 June; then Michael Tilson Thomas leads them into a bit of a Benjamin Britten festival, featuring works not only by Britten but by his contemporaries and influences: on 12 - 15 June there are excerpts from The Prince of the Pagodas, along with traditional music from Gamelan Sekar Jaya and also Gil Shaham playing the Prokofiev Violin Concerto No 2; then on 19 - 21 June they perform Copland's Danzón Cubano, the Shostakovich 15, and Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings, with soloists Toby Spence (tenor) and Robert Ward (French horn); then there are three performances of Peter Grimes, as mentioned above (under Operatic); then, on 28 June, there is a single performance of the Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes, with video by Tal Rosner, along with a repeat of the excerpts from The Prince of the Pagodas.
Early music fans will find a feast at the Berkeley Festival & Exhibition, 1 - 8 June; check out all the performers, exhibits, and fringe events here.
Cal Performances once again brings us Ojai North; the artistic director for this year's edition is pianist Jeremy Denk. That's 19 - 21 June on the Berkeley campus. Check out the details here; as usual, it all looks good, but some likely highlights are The Classical Style: An Opera (of Sorts) by Denk and Steven Stucky, based on Charles Rosen's celebrated book; the Uri Caine Ensemble performing Mahler Re-Imagined, on a bill with Denk performing Janacek's On an Overgrown Path and short works by Schubert; and . . . well, I see I'm going to end up just listing everything. There's also a concert featuring works by Timo Andres, Charles Ives, Morton Feldman, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Kurt Weill; and one with Denk playing the Ligeti Piano Etudes, Books I and II. The whole schedule, and other information, is available here.
Theatrical
ACT presents The Orphan of Zhao, in a new adaptation by poet James Fenton, directed by Carey Perloff and starring BD Wong, 4 - 29 June. More information here. This meets the criterion for things I list here – it's something I'd like to see – but I find myself baffled and annoyed by ACT and generally end up skipping their productions. They are, as far as I know, the only major local theater that still doggedly insists on an 8:00 start time for every night of the work week (they usually have exactly one 7:00 work night start time per play, for a "talk back"; most theaters here have one or two nights per week on which they acknowledge that some of us have to get up the next morning and go to work). And their ticket costs are much higher than any other theater around. I think of them as "theater for the Peninsula, only in San Francisco" – you drive into the city, you have a nice dinner at a semi-fancy restaurant, you get home around midnight, you stroll in to your tech job whenever. I guess it works for some people. Last year, on a Stoppard high after the second fabulous installment by the Shotgun Players of The Coast of Utopia, I decided to get a ticket to Arcadia at ACT. My calendar was clear on the one day with a 7:00 start, and there was a seat that was nearly perfect (front row center – "nearly" perfect because it was one in from the aisle instead of right on the aisle). Then I noticed the price, which was approximately what I'd paid for an entire season's subscription at Shotgun. And frankly, I've had better experiences at Shotgun than at ACT. I still haven't seen Arcadia. (The current show at Shotgun Players was mentioned last month: Daylighting, which runs until 22 June.)
Aurora Theater revives David Mamet's American Buffalo, directed by Barbara Damashek, 13 June - 13 July; details here.
San Francisco Playhouse revives the Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine fairy-tale musical, Into the Woods, 24 June to 6 September; details here.
Operatic
Opera Parallèle presents the American premiere of Anya17, a new work examining human trafficking. The music is by Adam Gorb and libretto by Ben Kaye, conducted by Nicole Paiement and staged by Brian Staufenbiel. That's 20 - 22 June at the Marines' Memorial Theater on Sutter Street in San Francisco; more information here. I don't know a whole lot about this one, but everything Opera Parallèle does is worth seeing.
The San Francisco Symphony presents a semi-staged Peter Grimes, with an excellent cast including Stuart Skelton and Elza van den Heever, on 26, 27, and 29 June; details here.
San Francisco Opera returns for the second half of its season. I'm very excited about the American classic from Kern and Hammerstein, Show Boat, directed by Francesca Zambello, with a fine cast including Heidi Stober, Michael Todd Simpson (in place of the previously announced Nathan Gunn), Bill Irwin, Patricia Racette, Angela Renée Simpson, Harriet Harris, and Morris Robinson; more details here.
They are also presenting La Traviata (details here) and Madama Butterfly (details here) – both beloved masterpieces, which are revived too frequently for anyone's good. Butterfly is a new production, designed by Jun Kaneko (I very much enjoyed his designs for The Magic Flute a couple of years ago).
Symphonic
At the San Francisco Symphony, Charles Dutoit conducts Beethoven's Piano Concerto No 2 (with soloist Kirill Gerstein) and the Shostakovich 10, 4 - 7 June; then Michael Tilson Thomas leads them into a bit of a Benjamin Britten festival, featuring works not only by Britten but by his contemporaries and influences: on 12 - 15 June there are excerpts from The Prince of the Pagodas, along with traditional music from Gamelan Sekar Jaya and also Gil Shaham playing the Prokofiev Violin Concerto No 2; then on 19 - 21 June they perform Copland's Danzón Cubano, the Shostakovich 15, and Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings, with soloists Toby Spence (tenor) and Robert Ward (French horn); then there are three performances of Peter Grimes, as mentioned above (under Operatic); then, on 28 June, there is a single performance of the Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes, with video by Tal Rosner, along with a repeat of the excerpts from The Prince of the Pagodas.
26 May 2014
Poem of the Week 2014/22
Ashbah
The ghosts of American soldiers
wander the streets of Balad by night,
unsure of their way home, exhausted,
the desert wind blowing trash
down the narrow alleys as a voice
sounds from the minaret, a soulful call
reminding them how alone they are,
how lost. And the Iraqi dead,
they watch in silence from rooftops
as date palms line the shore in silhouette,
leaning toward Mecca when the dawn wind blows.
Brian Turner
The sense of dislocation in this poem begins immediately: the title of this English-language poem is not an English-language word. Ashbah, we are told in an endnote, is Arabic for ghosts. This poem presents a haunted world, lacking in palpable physical presence: there are the ghosts of American soldiers we hear of in the first line and the Iraqi dead we hear of later (just as many of us think first of our own dead, later of those killed by us), and also the disembodied voice from the minaret, the soulful call, the desert wind and then the dawn wind; even the date palms are seen only in silhouette. The physical place is described in general terms, mostly lacking descriptors that might give us a vivid visual sense of this foreign (to most of us) but very specific place: Balad. Turner mentions the desert, streets, narrow alleys, a minaret, rooftops. But I think most of us will have a sharp awareness that we can supply no concrete mental image here, outside of a generic "middle eastern" stage set. (The possibility that we will come up with a "colorful" moonlight-on-the-minarets image is undercut by one of the few concrete details: what the desert wind blows down the narrow alleys is random trash, just as in any run-down section of any city.)
But Balad, in Iraq, is the location of a major American military base, a central hub for US military operations in that country. There will be exceptions, but most of us readers will feel a further sense of dislocation, between what the Iraqi inhabitants know, and what US military personnel active in the area know, and the little most of us know about the place, despite its importance in our lengthy invasion of that country. A strength of this poem is that, no matter what your opinion of war in general or the Iraq invasion in particular, it concentrates on (and therefore you are forced to see) the sorrows, the spiritual devastation, of war – it is about suffering rather than policy, soldiers and citizens rather than generals and presidents, swept away by larger currents.
We hear nothing in this poem of those living in Balad, outside of the unseen muezzin whose cry is a reminder to the Americans of their alienation from this culture. The ghosts of dead American soldiers wander the streets, deracinated, trapped far from home, exhausted, uncertain. The Iraqi dead feel a bit more present there on their native soil (that's the slight difference in weight between the terms used: ghosts for the Americans, the dead for the Iraqis); they look on in silence, feeling – what? Are they judging the lost Americans, pitying them, feeling contempt for them, or anger, or merely looking on in indifference? All of those things? We can only guess. The poem insistently reminds the reader (again, there will be exceptions to my generalized "reader") that this is an alien culture, with different beliefs and customs: the minaret, the soulful cry (soulful, meaning not just filled with deep emotion but literally a call to fullness of the listener's soul; the call from the minaret is the daily reminder to faithful Moslems to turn to Mecca and pray). But even more, cultural conditioning aside, even if we were there, immersed and aware, the essential mystery in each person would cause him or her to react differently, individually, to this scene of disruption and loss. We know a bit more about the American ghosts (we can see that they would be exhausted, alone, and lost in a land where they are ashbah), but we cannot know for certain about any of them. The mention in the last line of the trees leaning towards the holy city of Mecca and of the dawn wind suggests a different world, one renewed and based on a sense of sacredness, but it is too late for these unknown and unknowing dead.
As in a scene drawn by Goya, we are wrenched out of the familiar and into a strange, eerie landscape with a slightly fantastical vision, both intimate and distant, of the ordinary, largely anonymous soldiers and citizens whose lives were cut short by war. I find a great and even-handed sense of compassion rising from this poem.
Brian Turner is a contemporary American poet. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, and Infantry Division. Before that he had been deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Division. In the United States today is Memorial Day, an annual commemoration of the military dead that began after the Civil War. This poem is for that occasion. I took it from Turner's first collection, Here, Bullet.
The ghosts of American soldiers
wander the streets of Balad by night,
unsure of their way home, exhausted,
the desert wind blowing trash
down the narrow alleys as a voice
sounds from the minaret, a soulful call
reminding them how alone they are,
how lost. And the Iraqi dead,
they watch in silence from rooftops
as date palms line the shore in silhouette,
leaning toward Mecca when the dawn wind blows.
Brian Turner
The sense of dislocation in this poem begins immediately: the title of this English-language poem is not an English-language word. Ashbah, we are told in an endnote, is Arabic for ghosts. This poem presents a haunted world, lacking in palpable physical presence: there are the ghosts of American soldiers we hear of in the first line and the Iraqi dead we hear of later (just as many of us think first of our own dead, later of those killed by us), and also the disembodied voice from the minaret, the soulful call, the desert wind and then the dawn wind; even the date palms are seen only in silhouette. The physical place is described in general terms, mostly lacking descriptors that might give us a vivid visual sense of this foreign (to most of us) but very specific place: Balad. Turner mentions the desert, streets, narrow alleys, a minaret, rooftops. But I think most of us will have a sharp awareness that we can supply no concrete mental image here, outside of a generic "middle eastern" stage set. (The possibility that we will come up with a "colorful" moonlight-on-the-minarets image is undercut by one of the few concrete details: what the desert wind blows down the narrow alleys is random trash, just as in any run-down section of any city.)
But Balad, in Iraq, is the location of a major American military base, a central hub for US military operations in that country. There will be exceptions, but most of us readers will feel a further sense of dislocation, between what the Iraqi inhabitants know, and what US military personnel active in the area know, and the little most of us know about the place, despite its importance in our lengthy invasion of that country. A strength of this poem is that, no matter what your opinion of war in general or the Iraq invasion in particular, it concentrates on (and therefore you are forced to see) the sorrows, the spiritual devastation, of war – it is about suffering rather than policy, soldiers and citizens rather than generals and presidents, swept away by larger currents.
We hear nothing in this poem of those living in Balad, outside of the unseen muezzin whose cry is a reminder to the Americans of their alienation from this culture. The ghosts of dead American soldiers wander the streets, deracinated, trapped far from home, exhausted, uncertain. The Iraqi dead feel a bit more present there on their native soil (that's the slight difference in weight between the terms used: ghosts for the Americans, the dead for the Iraqis); they look on in silence, feeling – what? Are they judging the lost Americans, pitying them, feeling contempt for them, or anger, or merely looking on in indifference? All of those things? We can only guess. The poem insistently reminds the reader (again, there will be exceptions to my generalized "reader") that this is an alien culture, with different beliefs and customs: the minaret, the soulful cry (soulful, meaning not just filled with deep emotion but literally a call to fullness of the listener's soul; the call from the minaret is the daily reminder to faithful Moslems to turn to Mecca and pray). But even more, cultural conditioning aside, even if we were there, immersed and aware, the essential mystery in each person would cause him or her to react differently, individually, to this scene of disruption and loss. We know a bit more about the American ghosts (we can see that they would be exhausted, alone, and lost in a land where they are ashbah), but we cannot know for certain about any of them. The mention in the last line of the trees leaning towards the holy city of Mecca and of the dawn wind suggests a different world, one renewed and based on a sense of sacredness, but it is too late for these unknown and unknowing dead.
As in a scene drawn by Goya, we are wrenched out of the familiar and into a strange, eerie landscape with a slightly fantastical vision, both intimate and distant, of the ordinary, largely anonymous soldiers and citizens whose lives were cut short by war. I find a great and even-handed sense of compassion rising from this poem.
Brian Turner is a contemporary American poet. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, and Infantry Division. Before that he had been deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Division. In the United States today is Memorial Day, an annual commemoration of the military dead that began after the Civil War. This poem is for that occasion. I took it from Turner's first collection, Here, Bullet.
25 May 2014
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