Category: san francisco

SF International Hip Hop Dancefest

Posted on by Liz

A few weeks ago Milo and I went to the San Francisco International Hip Hop Dancefest at the Palace of Fine Arts. It’s always an amazing show! It’s one of San Francisco’s great treasures, and this is year 20 of the annual festival run by Micaya. The festival itself conveys how deep the Bay Area community runs and fosters these strong ties across countries to other dancers. Really a beautiful community.

Highlights, Loyalty Dance Team from Murfreesboro, Tennessee’s performance of This Is Wakanda!!! So dynamic! So creative! The skill! They express such joy! Last year I loved their 101 Dalmations dance so much I became a staunch fan! Maybe that sounds weird, but it was a beautiful narrative transformation and celebration of pop culture. They are just superstars.

I also really loved Duwane Taylor (from London) in his piece It’s Time to Speak. It was incredibly moving. I think the first half, or certainly a long intro, of it was Duwane dancing but without speaking, enacting some of the history of black folks (I think, particularly in the United States, the Civil Rights Movement). He stood (silently) at a podium and danced out Martin Luther King’s speeches and assassination. He danced Malcolm X. He was dance-miming out a more and more impassioned protest at this podium that went faster and faster. Krump style dance with explosive, convulsive movement, he is really a genius! At some point the dance seemed to lead into present day struggles against police violence and police murder of black people. I would even say of disabled black people, which transcends the situation in the U.S. I wish for a video of this particular performance online because it was different than the earlier version I was able to find. Then, at some point Duwane did begin to speak, and rap. The civil rights movement improved things but here we still are in a world with such violent injustice. Speaking out and activism are just what we have to keep on doing.

Here is what looks like an older version of the piece:

Amenti Movement was also absolutely mindblowing. Emotional, intimate, I would even say it felt somehow they were dancing ways that men heal each other from a culture of toxic masculinity, and so many other damages, to one of tenderness and support, painful as that can be. Not sure if that was part of their intent, but it’s what I was seeing from their performance.

This would be incomplete without mentioning the cool as hell Hip Hop Nutcracker performance by The Tribe! Wow!!!! They took it to the next level. And you can still see this as it’s coming up December 16th in Redwood City at the Fox Theater!

Ifigenia in Aulide

Posted on by Liz

Last weekend I saw another opera production by Ars Minerva, Ifigenia in Aulide. I saw Circe a while back and it blew my mind! Ifigenia did not disappoint as with minimal staging and what must have been a tiny budget (for an opera) Ars Minerva was absolutely brilliant. It was like a mindfuck gem of genderbent baroque. If you know me you know those words are like catnip to a cat! Lots of operas have some sort of Furious Woman number (what my friend Lisa called a “rage aria”) but this was like one giant long rage aria. Like Hothead Paisan from 1738 came to visit. (You realize if we have any call to be Hothead nowadays, some chick from Italy in 1738, or Greece in 408 B.C., has several orders of magnitude more reason.) The music was composed by Giovanni Porta and the libretto by Apostolo Zeno. (Of course, I read about them on Wikipedia from the program notes before the show. Thank you Wikipedia!) I am not going to perfectly remember things, but here is a stab at a synopsis.

First of all there was an ominous “chorus” of people on stage a lot of the time in purple satin hooded robes and creepy tragedy masks. They also made me think of the kodama from Spirited Away. They were characters, chorus, props, and sort of the zeitgeist, very well done. I’ll say more about them in a moment!

We encounter Elisena who has been captured by Achille in battle (in either Lesbos or Thessaly, but I never got that quite straight.) She is now enslaved and worried about her fate. If she ever finds out her real identity she will DIE. Teucro loves her and she loves Achille.

I enjoyed the costumes and makeup very much by the way – each character was dressed in a distinctive color combo of velvet, some with a sort of tinfoil (but much classier) hats with very lovely styling — the warriors Achille and Agamennone with helmets and the Queen and Princess with more Lothlorien style elegant crowns. Ifigenia in particular had a cool Isis/Hathor crescent moon on top of her Galadriel headdress, kinda giving the impression of Cretan horns or a Minoan statue. Very beautiful! Ulysses and Teucro strode around in combat boots. Elisena had a super sexy red dress and no crown. They had unusual & gorgeous cyberpunk style makeup that matched their outfits – big asymmetrical swoops and hash marks accentuating cheekbones or facial lines – and Elisena’s face smudged in red like she was both enraged and had been running around like a maenid in the woods drinking blood. OK, now you have the fashion picture!

Achilles shows up and sings to Elisena about how he loves Ifigenia and is going to marry her. Omg, awkward. Elisena then gets a damn good rage aria! She was going full tilt about how she would sacrifice herself on the altar in a blaze of bloody glory rather than watch her beloved Achille marry stuck up Ifigenia! Foreshadowing much?!

Actually, I wish I had the libretto and translation. By the middle of the opera I was picking up the Italian a lot better and thinking of how I would translate it myself. (I love to do songs and, with this sort of opera, half the words are going to be glory, sigh, lament, beloved, and weep, so you’re basically half done from the get-go.) The translation grew on me towards Act 3 and I thought it had some amazing moments so I’d like to read through it with more time and a dictionary and grammar at hand.

Ulyses then struts around explaining to Agamennone that they had to sacrifice Ifigenia their beloved daughter. The sacrifice for fair winds must be a princess of the blood of Helen! (GEE I WONDER WHAT ELISENA’S SECRET IDENTITY IS.) He is challenging Agamennone’s masculinity and leadership and sense of duty to the Greeks and (male) honor as he tries to amp him up and fails.

Ifigenia dances around like a modern dance music box ballerina sweetly singing of her innocent love and how being a dutiful daughter means her loving parents picked a good husband for her who is a hero and who she luckily came to fall in love with. Yay she is going to be a happy bride etc.

I forgot in my comments on the fashion and headdresses to mention the subtle brilliance of how Achille had her hair (up in a top-and-back ponytail, like the decoration on a greek helmet in itself!) There were lots of little details like this in the production that made me so happy. (ACHILLE WAS SO BRILLIANT OMG and you could tell she was running everything and the genius behind it all – from her mastery of the entire thing)

I think at this point Ifigenia has heard a rumor that Achille is actually going to marry Elisena instead of her. She has a rage aria and goes off in a huff. (Or maybe this was later?)

Achille and Elisena have a scene. He beats her up and it is quite horrible. The production somehow makes it clear that the whole opera is about toxic masculinity! Achille somehow did the most Liquid Sky level authentically horrible lesbian rape scene I’ve ever seen while singing GLORIOUSLY at the top of her lungs, manhandling Elisena, throwing her around by the hair, and tracing down her body with swordpoint. (!!!!!!!!!!)

Containing myself with difficulty . . .

Elisena is now super, super pissed. Bloody rage is sung. Her face goes through another 50 levels of insane and vengeful. I have to suppress the urge to cheer for her beautiful rage. She orders Teucro to go disrupt the wedding. Teucro, throughout, gives the impression of a smirking, drippy, creepy harasser, basically in a virtual fedora, oozing “m’lady” at the Renaissance Festival right before he mansplains to you why you should totally enjoy him stalking you. It made Elisena’s rage even better.

Ulises comes back to infuse Agamennone with more toxic masculinity. He must show his wife and daughter what’s what! While singing, Ulises threatens the purple robed masked chorus, grabs one, and beats (her) up. Just to give Agamennone a little example of the proper manly warrior king way to behave.

Agamennone then abuses Klytemnestra, singing Obey me!

Klytemnestra then has like, infinite rage arias and reprises of her rage!!! Oh, she’s pissed!

Angstamennone has some more nail biting freakouts! I think he changes his mind like 3 times about whether to send his wife and daughter home, or what.

Ifigenia desperately hopes it is all a lie. SHe offers herself to Agamennone while Klytemnestra continues to rage and says in despair that only death is left to her. I can’t remember their exact works but the trio (what do you call it when it is a duet but 3 people singing at once in counterpoint?) was really beautiful and moving. Agamennon freaking out with guilt, Ifigenia saying she would kiss the beloved hand that killed her, Klytemnestra giving epic side eye to her abusive murderous husband who cares more for war and its honors and duties than for his family.

I kind of lose the thread here, but Elisena runs off to tell the troops in the camp about this horrible plan to sacrifice Ifigenia. Achille sits on a rock with Ifigenia for their romantic duet. Ulises and Achille face off with swords! “A armi!!!” Achille slayed me with her singing again.

At several points when there is tension – like with Ulises arguing with Agamennone – or Klytemnestra and Ifigenia singing about duty and love – The chorus in their fated robes grab onto someone in the throes of their dilemma & sway with them – making me think of all the forces of culture and custom and public opinion operating to fuel their moral decisions. It was done so perfectly! Holding them back, seemingly sympathetic or supportive at times, but then entangling them in terrible complexity!

Klytemnestra and Ifigenia get another amazing duet where as they reach towards each other singing of their mother and daughter love, they are torn apart by the chorus at this point!

Elisena sings of her sudden pity for Ifigenia who is actually very noble in her willingness to be sacrificed for the common good (well, for … for someone’s good)

I think Klytemnestra had like 5 more rage arias in here. I loved her singing so much. She could just keep going forever, a beautiful voice, and her acting was great, giving the impression of someone super delicate, fierce, and tough all at once.

Then something happens offstage. Ulises runs in reporting something about how fierce Death has arrived for Ifigenia. BUT as you may suspect Elisena’s secret identity is that she is Helen’s secret daughter from another marriage and was originally named Ifigenia too. And she has just bloodily driven a dagger into her heart on the altar as the sacrifice. We see her at center stage kneeling with her head swathed in red gauze by the purple-robed Fates. Ifigenia and Achille are happily married. Everyone (except Elisena) sings a happy love song but you can cherish the rage in your heart for all the despairing girls who cut themselves you have ever known, because you know Klytemnestra is going to stab SOMEONE whose name starts with an A some years later no matter what ironic syrup is pouring from her mouth.

I can’t really speak to the excellence of the singing or music but I loved it a lot. The musicians were fabulous, I loved the theorbo & cello, harpischord also, and several times (especially with Achille, Klytemnestra, and sometimes Agamennone — and with Ifigenia’s song to her mother — Madre delitta, abraccia mi!) I would get the head to toe shivers involuntarily from the beauty and inevitability of the singing, or how the music all came together.

I also don’t know how the opera was originally intended to be performed but figured some of the parts played by women were meant to be sung by castrati. It really came out well. I wish this opera were running much longer so I could persuade everyone I know in town to go see it! Or that there were a video of it! Also, I have a total crush on Céline Ricci now as I picture her poking around in dusty music library basements (or the equivalent — like i like to do with poetry anthologies) and finding this stuff, seeing the potential in it, and making it real!

Infrastructure adoption

Posted on by Liz

I just went out in a light drizzle to check the storm drain nearest to my house, which I signed up to maintain a while back on SF Adopt-a-Drain. From this site, I get an email when major rain is coming. I forgot to respond to the last one, and then had to cross many intersections around Mission and 30th, enormous, roiling, leafy rivers which my new chair with its excellent clearance plowed right through. Finally as I came to “my” adopted drain I stopped (safely on the curb) and dug out all the leaves with my cane, flipping big globs of trash awkwardly onto the sidewalk where I left them neatly piled. (Unwilling to go so far as to go home and get a bag.)

Well, for a few minutes there I felt like my friend Crystal who keeps getting written up in the news either for shoveling snow in her neighborhood or for politically rustling everyone else up to properly clear the sidewalks.

My suspicion is that the guys in the restaurant on the corner saw me do this and came out to clean the drain afterwards. (Cannot help but be aware that many people would interpret my doing this normal and minor civic action as somehow full of pathos.)

The streets do get swept here every two weeks (by the absolutely adorable streetsweeping machines that I love to watch – what – I love trucks!) but since it’s a very long hill, a lot of leaves pile up during the first few rains. I’ll see tomorrow if the river re-appears or if the drain needs clearing again!

Another good “help maintain the city” tool I like and use: SeeClickFix. It is an interface to the city’s 311 service for reporting all sorts of issues. You can use the SeeClickFi phone app to take a photo and report stuff like sidewalk cracks, potholes, garbage, trees that need maintenance, and so on. Some of “my” issues get fixed and some don’t, but on the whole it’s a pretty nice interface where it is easy to see if there has been any action, or if others in the neighborhood agree about the issue.

Further adventures

Posted on by Liz

More early impressions of the Whill Model-CI. I took the J MUNI train to Dolores Park yesterday and it was pretty easy to do everything. I’m getting used to joystick driving, feeling more confident there.

The new MUNI cars are spiffy – clean and sparkly even. The large front wheels of the Model CI were great going over the gap between platform and train. In my Travelscoot I had to gun it at top speed to jump the gap. I especially like the new accessible button placement for the front of the train car. You can reach it whether you have the seats flipped up or not (while the old style cars have the button under the seats — you can’t get to it if you’re actually sitting on the seat, and have to yell to the driver instead.) The bigger windows on the car were great.

bus-button.jpg

(My ride home was also fine, old style train car, more crowded, but not hella crowded, and people moved aside for me. I did not run into anyone. Or, if I did, I then ate their souls and brain-wiped every witness so it’s more or less like it never happened.)

No problems navigating around the cafe. I practiced a few times at pulling the chair up to the table with the arms half-raised. If you have an iphone I think you can raise the arms, then steer the chair with your phone, but the remote steering doesn’t work from android phones yet. It worked ok to raise the arms a little, pull forward, then turn off the chair and pull the arms further back.

liz-in-powerchair.jpg

Then I zoomed around Dolores Park for a while. By this time I was in “sport” mode.
Eco mode – the highest speed is limited. Ignore it
Normal mode – high speed (setting 4) is 5mph. setting 3 is maybe 3mph
Sport mode – high speed is still 5mph. Setting 3 is 4 mph or so.

I didn’t notice any other differences between these settings.

OK so here’s the buzzkill moment – I was zooming down a long glorious hill on the highest speed and then – the chair downshifted on me! Slowed to a bumpy crawl! When I say to go 5 miles an hour, I mean it! Don’t decide without me! (I missed my train, as well as the fun of going fast downhill). Instead of zooming with the wind in my hair and feeling free, like a cyborg should, I was imagining some grim Authority Figures telling me that it wasn’t safe and I wasn’t allowed and then I imagined myself flipping them off!

You know what I’m going to say!!!!!!!

The motor controller should be hackable!

Or, at the very least, fine grained enough controls on the phone so we can program it to do what we want it to do.

Turbo mode!!!!! 6mph! And no sad, draggy-ass downhill downshift!

I’m not the first person to say this and I won’t be the last!

The battery was at 75% when I got home, seems fair enough but it depleted faster than I thought it would (it was not all THAT much zooming around the park.)

Picked up groceries today in pouring rain on an even steeper hill with leaves everywhere on the sidewalk. Also fine. I hung two bags off the back of the chair and had another heavier back on the footplate between my feet. It’s now feeling routine to switch to speed 2 when I go into a doorway. And I feel more at home on day 3 of driving around – it has started to feel like second nature.

Tea with Sumana and friends

Posted on by Liz

Mentioned during lovely tea “salon” at Le Marais with Sumana and many others:

  • Erma Bombeck. Wikipedia articles skimmed through on our phones. Several of us remembered liking her books when we were kids – according to Sumana the humor holds up well. I had a sort of visceral memory of a particular bookshelf in my grandparents’ basement that also held tattered paperbacks of Carlos Castaneda and some other books that must have belonged to my aunts when they were in college. (The better books were up on higher shelves all around the basement edge, hardbacks from the Heritage series which my grandma must have subscribed to mid-century; they were very nice with great typefaces and prints, and are why I read tons of Russian novels and Balzac and stuff like that in my childhood).
  • The Prey of Gods by Nicky Drayden. Science fiction I’m currently reading, set in approx. 100 years from now South Africa. It’s very good! Genetic engineering, AI robot assistant/pets, lots of species gone extinct. Youth coming of age, social chaos, weird espionage. There will be a sequel!
  • History of BART. Susan had the coolest damn thing which was a BART pen she was given at a BART station from answering a questionnaire. A little scrip rolls out from the barrel of the pen and lo! it’s a BART map! Adorkable. I recced the BART history book which I’ve now been given as a gift twice (and gave one copy away)
  • Jean Kerr, who wrote Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, which sounds familiar but I can’t really recall it. More 20th century humor!
  • Ruth McKenney, who wrote My Sister Eileen, another humorist and playwright
  • In this context, Sumana’s 18 short plays about Python which I hope she performs again!
  • David Graeber book Utopia of Rules, which looked good. I read some of Debt and some other book of his and thought they were OK. This looked maybe more up my alley though since I enjoy thinking about bureaucracies
  • Our friend Seth being a mime in Paris and my aspiration to join a MIT puzzle hunt team next year
  • The Wrath of Khan musical, which is AMAZING (the bits i’ve seen) Here’s a sample: Have I Still Got the Magic
  • The Play That Goes Wrong which Sumana recced and which sounds pretty good!
  • Perfecting Sound Forever
  • Tidelift as a way for open source software to be supported. You can sign up for it free which gets you a sort of audit of what packages you are using so that you can support their maintainers directly.
  • As always I recommended Happy Snak, my favorite SF book right now. I am trying to at least make it a cult classic. Best heroine. Best aliens. Best first contact. Best small business owner of a mall food court restaurant on an alien space station who becomes an unlikely diplomat and whose deep belief that everyone deserves the happiness obtainable from delicious, convenient, low cost snacks turns out to be revolutionary.

I’m sure we talked about things that weren’t books, plays, or software projects, but I didn’t take notes on those things so have no idea what they were.

liz-dolores-park

A bowl of smoky air

Posted on by Liz

We are the place where the smoke gathers as it tries to pour out of the Bay but can’t. The wind has been blowing from the east and northeast for a while, so even he brief west wind didn’t help, as the air that blew into town from the ocean was just more smoke from earlier in the week.

air quality chart

It is sobering to think of all the people in the Camp Fire area, and the people between there and here, breathing this toxic soup. I have inhalers, air filters in the house, and a good mask. I’ve barely been outside all week. My chest hurts and eyes are burning. It has got to be doing damage to people.

In the respirators, everyone looks a little like the people in Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.

liz-mask.jpg

Secrets of married life

Posted on by Liz

It is very strange and mostly nice how everyone responded to our getting married! So glad that we ran off secretly so as to keep all that minimal.

Meanwhile, last night we read some very terrible poetry by that lawyer poet mayor of SF, which led us to try and find songs to sing his horrible sonnets to as we obsessed over the meter, and a particular poem about Andreé’s Pigeon which led us to get extremely obsessed with S. A. Andrée’s disastrous Arctic Balloon Expedition of 1897. Tonight after dinner and some excellent pastries and explaining everything about how our day went to each other, I showed off my complex bugzilla queries and Danny is explaining his AMAZING command line email system and fixing a bug in it while also showing me his Beeminder logs.

We are also planning our Vallejo honeymoon cruise since we miss marina life and would enjoy hanging out with the radioactive waste of old nuclear submarines and derelict buildings that are slowly gentrifying into breweries.

City Hall

Posted on by Liz

Just Danny, me, my cyborg steed bedecked with flowers, and a looming bust of Edward Robeson Taylor, lawyer and poet & mayor of San Francisco in a time of disaster and deep political corruption.

liz-and-danny

We had a lovely wedding at City Hall with my sister as witness and then went to hang out at the Cliff House and Land’s End.

It was fun to elope – we didn’t tell anyone except my sister and our kids, not until the last minute.

Looking forward to many more happy years together!

city-hall-wedding.

“San Francisco, O glorious city of our hearts that has been tried and not found wanting, go thou with like spirit to make the future thine.”

Dreams of stairs and elevators

Posted on by Liz

Strange dreams of scootering down Valencia, not Valencia Street as it is now, but alternate-Valencia of around 30 years ago, out to do a quick errand, nearly but not quite picking up a nice brown striped scarf with fringe that was hanging over a bench (I figured that I should leave it for someone who needed it more). Everything was shut, and the streets were empty and ghostly in the middle of the night. The night had a wistful quality. Bright, moonlit, the iron gates with angular and scrolly shapes lit by soothing neon. I was happy to be there.

On my way to do this errand, I went up a side street, noticing that it was Elizabeth Street (which exists in the approximately correct location in the dream!) Elizabeth Street turned into mansions, difficult to navigate cobblestones, and ended in magnificent yet hostile giant flights of stairs going up the steep hillside. It was one of those wide multi-stage stairways meant to be monumental and beautiful, all in marble, spreading out over the hillside. I swore a lot & turned around.

I went back to the building where I was going to meet Danny to watch some scenes from a film be made (for a sequel to Superman where Superman was Jet Li, but in a powerchair). I had left this scene to do my errand and it was time to go back. There was no obvious way in, so I sneaked in via the back entrance and freight elevator, ending up in a back room, with people working, a tour group with badges coming through. I mingled successfully as if I had a right to be there, explored that level of the building, and found a second freight elevator to take me back to the film production studio. (Quite proud of sneaking back in successfully without fuss.)

In the studio as we sat in uncomfortable folding theater chairs, Danny explained things to me about what the film crew was doing. I was excited to see Jet Li. The people on stage kept trying to shoot a tiny part of one small scene where the actors were going down a hallway. I realized I was probably not going to see Jet Li do any sort of amazing martial arts from his powerchair because it was going to take all night to shoot the hallway scene.

It can be boring to read about other people’s dreams. They are so personal. Mine are often set in large rambling building complexes: 30 years after moving out of my housing co-op, I still get “like the co-op, but different” dreams. While I was walking pretty well for a few years I would still be using my wheelchair in dreams. I sometimes dream in Spanish, and I can read and write in my dreams. I’ve written stories and poems while on the verge of waking up and then quickly scribbled them in real life. And while I’ve been 99% using scooters since 2012, I still dream myself in my manual chair much more often. It still has a more “me” feeling sometimes. But this was a scooter dream!

The things that happen in my dreams feel like memories, not real memories, but like real feelings. They are atmospheric. If I dream of a completely non-existent person, I feel sad when I wake up that they don’t exist, but also amazed that our minds can come up with an impression of an entire human being. Dreaming of Alternate Not Quite Valencia Street gave me a specially happy and centered feeling this morning.