Berkeley, November 2010

Barry and I with some characters at the Dia de los Muertos concert

One Thursday I noticed they were doing flu shots at the JCC right after my exercise class, so spent $25 to have one.  These are free at home for people over 60, but I thought with our plans to visit NYC and stay close to our very pregnant daughter-in-law and shortly thereafter her baby, it was a no-brainer. They were advertising them at this price at the University Health Center, but the JCC is closer.  Barry forgot to get his there, so he had one recently at the local drug store for $30. A friend  tells me her doctor charged her $40!

The next evening we decided to see the movie "Social Network".  We went to the El Cerrito multiplex which is a little further afield than the 3 or 4 cinemas we frequent, and we discovered that you can order a meal and drinks to consume in the cinema.  There are broad benchtops between the rows which serve as your table top when they deliver your food.  In fact Charlie, our neighbour, had told Barry about this place during our first year here,  but somehow we have never gone. And this evening we had eaten dinner before we went out, so stuck to an ice cream for Barry and a decaf coffee for me, but we resolved to go there again and try it out, just for the novelty value. I saw some healthy looking veggie plates with hummus as well as pizzas and burgers, so if we do go we'll need to get there a bit early to check out the menu.  We enjoyed the movie, though it would be hard to like Mark Zuckerberg as he is portrayed. I suspect the version of reality depicted in the film will come to be accepted as the true history of the origins of Facebook, irrespective of what actually happened.  I have been looking at Facebook a bit more frequently since.  I started this blog as a substitute for emailing my friends about our travels, and no sooner did I begin than social media began to replace this form of communication.  I don't really do a web log: I am too far in arrears, too wordy, and not interactive, but it works as my travel diary.  I don't really want to use the features such as "liking" stuff and twittering about it, but am intrigued by how my  "friends" who do manage to find the time. Despite a long career in the computer industry (or maybe because of it?) , I just don't "get" Facebook. I am still an old media fan, I guess, rather than a native user of new media.

Church of Saints Peter and Paul, North Beach

Tai Chi in Washington Square

We had arranged to go to a Dia de los Muertos concert at Davies  Symphony Hall on Saturday afternoon, with Guy Emerson, a grad student from ANU who is here for a couple of months and enjoying Berkeley very much (he had joined our dinner for the GSI's the week before) . We decided to take a walking tour of the North Beach area in the morning - usually we don't choose morning walks that start so early as we like a leisurely start to the day on weekends, but to make the most of the day got ourselves out of bed and met Guy at the North Berkeley BART station quite early.  Rather than find the bus stop and pay 3 fares, we shared a taxi from Montgomery Station in downtown SF and got to North Beach early enough to grab a coffee in this
very Italian restaurant-rich neighbourhood.  There were several groups of mostly elderly Chinese doing Tai Chi in Washington Square in front of the church (Sts Peter and Paul) where the tour began - I took several photos of larger groups but however slowly I thought  they were moving, the photos must have come out blurred as apparently I deleted most of them which must have been really awful, and only this not very good one made the cut.

on

Mural featuring musicians, writers, boat builders of San Francisco

We have had this Walking Tour guide before - he led the Gold Rush City tour that we took with Ben and Lissy back in 2008.  I thought we spent way too much

Literary sculpture: looks like birds up there but it's books...

..and these words have fallen to the pavement from the books!

time in the church looking at all the sculptures and hearing about the origins and quirks of the different families and communities who had a hand in building it, and too little time looking at temples of the Beats such as the City Lights Bookstore - we didn't even visit the store, got no closer than across the road. But then I am much more interested in the cultural history than religious history.  And if Barry had gone into the store, judging by past experience there, he might never have left to continue the tour! Too much talking, not enough walking - and I just read my blog post about the earlier tour and discovered I said the same thing about that tour. I think this guy teaches history at a local community college - maybe I want a little less historical depth and more colour and movement.  We wandered about the area and were shown places (former tea rooms, ex-hotels, cafes, park benches) where the Beat poets hung out, wrote and read their poems, drank, listened to music from the '40s to the '60s- Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bob Kaufman, Jack Kerouac  and others. To encourage participation, the guide had prepared a little handout with significant landmarks and a poem by Bob Kaufman.  He asked us about what one line ("Mexico Mexico, fill my nostrils") might mean - Barry volunteered that these guys had been fond of travelling to Mexico for the drugs as well as the boys, so it wasn't exactly a mysterious line!  We heard how San Francisco had seemed a paradise of liberalism and freedom (as well as sunshine)  to these guys from the mid-West and the East coast. He shared with us his own discovery of the Bay Area and and generally managed to ignite some fellow feeling amongst us (especially the tourists ) for their excitement at finding a like-minded community in the Bay Area and never returning to their original home.


After the tour we walked a couple of blocks into Chinatown and chose a Vietnamese restaurant for lunch pretty much at random. We continued our quest for dry fried string beans to equal the first ones we ever tried  in NYC's Chinatown over 30 years ago : these were not terrible, maybe a 6/10 . They came with a tasty brown sauce and were clearly not a real version of the dry-fried dish, but we like green beans anyway. Then we walked half the way to the concert through Chinatown - there was a funeral procession in train so no taxis about on the street we were walking along, but we wanted to get there early as there were various activities with Mariachis, demonstrations of making pan de muertos (the special bread eaten on the Day of the Dead, formed using the knuckles) , which we missed, though we did catch various folkloric groups in costume once we walked a few more blocks and got a taxi - see the photos.

La Coronela

There were displays of papel picado, and various reproductions of Posada's famous engravings, including
some in 3D.  There was Mexican hot chocolate to sample and many multi-generational families there for the concert with kids dressed up for the occasion. The coronela pictured was particularly relevant as the concert ended with an abridged version of the music and ballet from Revueltas's La Coronela - the music and dancers told a story of the workers' triumph over the decadent bourgeoisie. Ballet (and dance in general) is not my favourite art form, and without the programme notes I would not have had the faintest notion of what the ballet was about.  Even with the notes, it was pretty unclear to me, though it received a standing ovation, but most things we see seem to - I think the San Francisco audience is a cheap date! The one other piece that received loud applause was Rosas's Sobre las Olas (Over the Waves), and it also a kind of collective sigh at the point where the introduction ends and a familiar tune emerges. I found a Russian army orchestral version on Youtube and can't resist putting it here: do have a listen and the tune will stick with you all day!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrFhfPYPUl4&feature=related

All of the music was by composers who had significant connections with Mexico, whether born there or not, and was very easy listening though we had only recently heard Revueltas's Sensemaya last time we were at Symphony Hall. There were lots of children, and I was surprised that most of them were very well-behaved through quite long stretches of classical music (though one little boy on the other side of Barry was rather wriggly and obviously very bored).

After the concert we wandered back to Union Square, found an authentic looking, if reconstructed,  diner (complete with classic car) where Barry ordered a hot fudge sundae (with 3 spoons) and we each had a drink, then Barry and I got the BART back to Berkeley, after pointing Guy in the right direction for his next set of San Francisco adventures.  Two activities in one day were enough for me, I guess I am getting old and lazy!

A couple of characters in costume : and note the papel picado in the background.

After last week's all star cast in Compulsion, my next brush with famous performers was at the SF Opera the following Tuesday evening, to see Alfano's Cyrano de Bergerac, featuring Placido Domingo.We drove in with Sonya and Philip and their friend Judy and encountered less traffic then we had expected (with five of us in the car, we sailed across the Bay Bridge in the car pool lane) and had time to kill at a bar before we ate, only I was not drinking so I could have some wine with dinner and not risk falling asleep at the opera.

We had a beautiful dinner first at Jardiniere, the very classy restaurant near the opera house where we have eaten with Sonya and Philip several times. It is always difficult to choose what to eat - it seems a good idea to have two starters as they always sound wonderfully delicious, but the mains are tempting too.  And the desserts are particularly good, though I usually just sample  OPs (other people's!)
Get a typical  menu here:
http://www.jardiniere.com/menu.html

The opera itself was very well-staged, most of it recitative with no memorable arias.  Domingo, 69 years old,  was in very good voice (though we thought his prosthetic nose was way deficient as he didn't look at all ugly), and Roxane, sung by Ainhoa Arteta, a Basque native who is something of a protegee of Domingo's, was also excellent. The standard of the productions here does set the bar quite high, even though the stage is quite small.  Again, I was struck by how only the designers or occasionally other non-singing members of the production team have ever worked in Australia - in the three years we have been attending performances, I don't think more than one or two of the dozens of singers profiled in the programme notes have ever been seen down under. It certainly leaves me questioning whether we are as world class in these arts as we like to think.  There was, however, a tribute to La Stupenda in the programme for the final opera of our season, so some Australians make the grade!

You can hear some excerpts from the production and see a photo of Placido Domingo's nose at:

http://sfopera.com/o/296.asp

More Berkeley, October- Early November 2010

It is the season for the figs to ripen: the tree is very large and now that the rain has set in, the ripe figs sometimes split, and some ferment a bit where they are damaged. And the squirrels and birds get the earliest ripening and choicest ones near the top of the tree.  I took the video above from the kitchen window, before many figs at human level were ripe yet.  The squirrels here are very well fed, as you can see, and quite a bit larger than the ones seen in Mexico City, where the squirrel population in the Viveros is huge (I think I heard that they had imported few hawks or falcons to reduce the population recently). They are very scrawny compared to the Berkeley squirrel population, and also differently coloured - lots of black, grey  and brindle squirrels in Mexico City, here they all seem to be brown. Now (November) I go out every few days and pick up to two dozen  figs, and am using them in salads a lot and eating them as I pass them sitting in their wicker basket on the kitchen bench (or in the fridge on warm days, of which we are having fewer lately) . I give them away as well, and put out a bowl whenever we have visitors.  They concentrate their flavour after a few days, though I eat the ones which are split or otherwise damaged quickly, and there is always a percentage that go straight from tree to mouth - ah, the benefits of an organic garden!  Two years ago when we were in this house, I think we had a bigger crop and  found a few different ways to cook them: my favourite was to cut a cross in the stem end,  stuff in  some soft goat cheese and a sprig of fresh rosemary from the garden, drizzle with a bit of honey and a grind or two of black pepper, and run them under the griller for about 5 minutes. Lovely hot or cold, great at breakfast.

Though back in the routine of 4 exercise classes, 2 swims, choir rehearsals, etc., I haven't attended many Tertulias this semester. Being away on the East Coast for a month didn't help, then I had a few clashes with operas or plays.  But I managed to get to one in mid-October. I car pooled with Anne Shapiro  and a Latin American friend of hers to Oakland - we  misread the instructions, and got slightly lost - nothing whatever to do with me for once!  It was a very hot night, and most Berkeley/Oakland homes don't have air conditioning as it rarely gets so hot, so I was wearing a very light and open top and I sat near an open window and enjoyed a bit of fresher air. I found an article in the New York Times about all-time favourite pot-luck recipes, and modified the potato salad one below using multi-coloured teeny potatoes (including a purple kind which has purple flesh, not just purple skin, along with pink and yellowish skinned varieties) , which I left whole in their skins.The visual appeal was really good, everyone was fascinated, as much by the interesting potatoes as the taste. I was missing some ingredients so I substituted others, and didn't measure anything. I've made the salad again as part of a vegetarian dinner,and  followed the recipe more precisely with better results - there were no leftovers at all! Here is the recipe:

 

Warm Fingerling Potato Salad

July 8, 2010 by operagirlcooks

As featured in the New York Times Magazine

If you scour the internet (or your cookbook collection) long enough, you’ll find that potato salad recipes are divided into two main camps — chilled and slathered in mayonnaise, or warm and dripping with bacon grease.
I chose to go another route. My potato salad is sumptuous, savory, vegan, and gluten-free — how’s that for mass appeal!
I used fingerling potatoes, which hold their shape well when steamed, making them perfect for salad. They are dense and buttery as is, and coated with a warm cider vinegar dressing, they become irresistible. Capers, Dijon mustard, and kosher salt ensure a well-seasoned salad, and fresh parsley and chives really liven things up, cutting the richness of the dressing. Served at a potluck, this salad will disappear before you know it. You might want to double the recipe. Oh, and it gets better the longer it sits. What more could you ask for?
Warm Fingerling Potato Salad
serves 6
1 1/2 lbs. fingerling potatoes
3 Tbsp. olive oil
1 medium red onion, diced
3 Tbsp. apple cider vinegar
2 Tbsp. capers, rinsed and drained
2 tsp. Dijon mustard
1/2 tsp. ground black pepper
1/4 tsp. kosher salt
1/2 C. chopped parsley
1/4 C. chopped chives
1. Steam the potatoes for 20 minutes, or until you can easily pierce them with a paring knife.
2. While potatoes are steaming, heat the olive oil in a medium (10″) skillet over medium heat. Add the red onion, and saute until onions are softened but not browned, about 10 minutes.
3. Turn off the heat under the skillet and add the vinegar, capers, mustard, pepper, and salt. Set aside.
4. While they are still hot, slice the potatoes into 1/4″ rounds.
5. Add the potatoes, parsley, and chives to the skillet, and stir gently until all potatoes are coated evenly. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Source: http://operagirlcooks.com/2010/07/08/warm-potato-salad-recipe/


More music after my YMCA exercise class on Monday - Anne Shapiro, whom I originally met 3 years ago at the seniors' exercise class at the JCC and who introduced me to the Spanish Tertulia group, was singing at the Etude club, held in another Hogwart's style  hall near here in the Berkeley Hills, at lunchtime.  I don't belong to clubs at home, so have no idea if this kind of organisation exists in Melbourne - it seems a bit quaint and olde worlde to me, though at their procedural meeting before the concert started, they were discussing establishing an email list!   Sonya and I heard her lovely renditions of the Spanish songs she had chosen, along with a piano recital and a  harp and piano duet. Anne's diction is very clear, and assisted by the text of the songs and a rough translation, it was easy, and very gratifying for me,  to be able to follow the Spanish.She was a little concerned about her voice , having caught a bit of a cold, she thought from the fierce air conditioning in the car on the way to the Tertulia the previous week.



Barry's academic activities here are always in full swing throughout October and November. He went off to a conference in New Orleans for a few days and I dropped him off and picked him up again at Oakland airport. The run there was easy and fast on a workday around lunchtime, and I even found my way back from the airport to an X-Ray facility in Oakland without getting lost.  Mind you, there was awful traffic, apparently often experienced on this route, the Sunday afternoon I picked him up, so it took more than twice as long getting there this time - he would have arrived much faster had he taken the Air-BART bus-train combination  from the airport! (in case you are worried about the X-Ray, it was a check to establish whether there were any structural problems underlying my various episodes of back pain prior to going to see a physio or chiropractor, and there was nothing beyond the progressive wear and tear I have known about for ages.)

While he was away, Marisela Fleites-Lear came to stay for the weekend, as a close friend from Berkeley  had passed away and she will be unable to attend the formal memorial service a bit later in the year. I last saw her about a year ago when we visited her and John in Tacoma (I think there is a blog entry about our visit). She therefore had some commitments but we managed to get in a walk along the fishing pier at the Marina (I neglected to take any photos, however), dinner on Solano Avenue, and to catch the Woody Allen movie "You will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger".  We each had a fish dinner at a place I have seen but wouldn't normally have chosen, but the menu looked good and the fish was well cooked and presented with very nice vegetables, with  very affordable wine by the glass. Very Weight Watcher friendly, too. It was right across from the movie theatre at the bottom of Solano. We finished eating  in time to walk all the way up to the top of Solano Avenue and back again, noting all the delicious smells emerging from the more interesting ethnic restaurants we probably should have tried. The movie itself was the same comedy of manners movie he has been making the last few years, with some excellent performances from an all-star cast, even if most of them played rather unlikeable characters. Gemma Jones, who made an impression on me many years ago as the Duchess of Duke Street, Anthony Hopkins, Naomi Watts, Josh Brolin and various lesser lights all were looking for love, or more likely, escape from themselves.

The next week Myrna Santiago invited me to join Barry at a talk he was giving for her students and others at St Mary's College where she teaches.  She included me in the dinner she  had organised for the academic staff who have an interest in Latin America to meet Barry, at an excellent Thai restaurant in the nearby village of Rheem (I couldn't suppress an urge to sing "Install a Rheem..". For those non-Australians reading this, a company called Rheem supplies many of our gas water systems, and they have a catchy jingle. )  We took BART to a nearby town, a different line and direction to our usual service, and the train was very crowded as I guess it was the afternoon commute time. But whatever country we could see from the train looked really beautiful, and also what we saw from Myrna's car when she picked us up at the station and drove us to the dinner and on to the campus was lovely.  We really don't do any local exploring to speak of - if Barry is not working on a weekend we tend to gravitate towards San Francisco rather than other regions around the Bay. I guess we are both urban creatures - we don't often get out into the country in Melbourne either, much as I love the scenery when we do get out.  The talk was well attended and went well, and Myrna drove us home when it was over - she and Garrett live in El Cerrito, quite close really. Just on a geographic tidbit proffered by a former librarian from Cal, who gave Barry a lift home one day and was admiring our view over coffee and cookies,  el cerrito means the little hill - which we can see clearly from our kitchen window and today it is actually Albany.

One of the other activities Barry was involved in was a short conference on  Mexico: The Unfinished Revolution, held at Berkeley in conjunction with an exhibition on Mexico at the Bancroft Library (I haven't seen this yet so can't comment about it.  I tried posting something from the Bancroft's home page here, but I couldn't manage to insert it and continue adding text, so I had to delete the post and start again. I will attempt a kludge shortly, but if it doesn't work I will post the link instead. As you can see, I got the cartoon but I can't blow it up enough to read and translate the contents of the speech bubble for you.)

 As well as the academic papers which are Barry's domain, there were two events I participated in. The first was a public screening of  "The Storm that Swept Mexico", a 2-hour documentary about the history of the Mexican Revolution in which Barry was one of the talking heads.  His commentary was filmed last year at Berkeley, though the film has been 11 years in the making. The film even included interviews with several Mexicans who had taken part in revolutionary battles (who were very old then and have since passed away), lots of archival footage, and many different  heads, talking in Spanish and English.

The film will be screened on PBS television here next May.  It had its premiere at a conference at the ANU in Canberra a few days before we left Melbourne.  Kenn Rabin, one of the co-producers who is a well-known film maker and renowned archivist , was a guest at this conference, at Barry's suggestion, and brought an early copy of the film, not the final cut, to show there. I had been too busy at the time to go to Canberra with Barry to see it, so it was my first viewing.  It has quite detailed historical coverage of the first 10 years of the Mexican Revolution.  Very informative, lots about Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata and early presidents and dictators - Barry thinks it will be very useful for teaching about the Mexican Revolution, though the later years, covered thematically rather than in detail, interested me more. When Kenn came to Melbourne for a few days (and fell in love with our fair city, very gratifyingly) we had dinner together and I got to know him a bit, so it was nice to renew our acquaintance at the reception before the screening, and to be introduced to other key figures like the co-producer, and  the writer and arranger of the music (which is really good). Both at the reception and at subsequent meetings with Kenn, the difficulties of getting finance for making and distributing such an ambitious independent film project  have become much clearer to me. Any angels out there who would like to help out - please get in touch and I'll pass on your details to Kenn!

Sonya and Philip came to the screening and we went for  coffee and cake afterwards - it was their wedding anniversary.  Learning more than you wanted to know about the Mexican Revolution is probably not the most romantic way to spend an evening, I felt a bit guilty for inviting them to come!

This was on Thursday evening, and then on the Saturday night I joined Barry at the closing dinner of the conference, a very nice Mexican-themed meal in the Faculty club, another Harry Potter/Hogwart's  type of room.  A month later I am still looking at a vase of chilies, the last remaining parts of one of the very fetching floral table decorations which were offered to various people after the dinner (it felt like I had been at a Barmitzvah,  taking home a floral arrangement!)

Golden Gate at Sunset from Marin looking back to San Francisco

The next day I hosted an extra rehearsal for the altos from the East Bay Jewish Folk Chorus. We are quite a large group this year, nine of us, and we seem to have a lot of the melodies.  Some of the more experienced singers amongst us are a bit disappointed, finding the harmonies more interesting to sing, though I like it. In any case, there are quite a few new songs and new people, so the extra practice is welcome, and I have space here. Someone brings a keyboard and we work quite hard, taking only a little time for some nibbles or cake and a cuppa or some wine. We get to know each other a bit better, which I am sure helps us sing better. This first rehearsal was quite hard to coordinate, but now we are in a groove with a fixed time, so it's a lot easier to get us all together, or at least whoever isn't busy at 4.30 on Sunday afternoon.

Then Barry was off again, this time to a Mexican historians conference in Queretaro, Mexico, and for a whole week.  I managed to get a ticket to see Compulsion at the Berkeley Rep on the Wednesday night, which took a lot of calling and a fortuitous visit to the theatre box office after my swim the day before, just as someone called in a cancellation, as the entire season was booked out. Sonya and Philip and two of their friends were going that night, and we all had dinner at a Chinese restaurant before the play. It starred Mandy Patinkin and was a very interesting play indeed. He was absolutely stunning- my seat was in the middle of the front row - Berkeley Rep is theatre in the round and I have never been so close and felt so overwhelmed by the sheer force of a performer. There were two other actors, each of whom was also very good in multiple roles, and marionettes which worked brilliantly.  The play is based around the story of Meyer  Levin, who brought the Diary of Anne Frank to the attention of the English-speaking world, though the protagonist is called Sid Silver. Anne Frank is portrayed by a marionette and voices off.  The play raised a whole lot of questions about truth and fiction, universal versus Jewish values, obsessions in general. I thought it really worked well - one of my best ever nights at the theatre. Quoting from the an interview with the playwright,Rinne Groff in the playbill:

"Meyer Levin wrote a book called Compulsion about Leopold and Loeb


Here is a link to get you started if you are interested in the play.  I do hope it comes to Melbourne - I am certain it will come to New York.

http://www.berkeleyrep.org/season/1011/4543.asp

On Friday of that week I had invited Betsy, Nancy and MD (the car poolers to my Y exercise classes last year and occasionally again this year) and Sonya to lunch - the Friday morning class was cancelled as the Y was preparing for their Halloween festival, but we decided that shouldn't stop us having lunch anyway.  I made mushroom soup which was a big hit.  At the Monterey market they have so many varieties of mushrooms that I am stunned into indecision and end up choosing the familiar ones I feel safe with. But when I went shopping for stuff for the lunch, I noticed they were selling big bags of exotic mixed mushrooms, probably yesterday's, very cheaply, maybe only $2.49 a lb, so this solved my dilemma. I also bought an assortment of fruit that looked and smelled good, including some imported blood oranges from Australia.  I made a lot of soup using sauteed leeks and the carefully washed and sliced/chopped mushrooms, with stock and powdered skim milk, lightly thickened with a roux, and it was really delicious. I also served some spanakopita with a salad of various mixed leaves and some cherry tomatoes and some figs  from the garden.  Betsy avoids eating members of the shade family (eggplants, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes)  as doing so assists her arthritis, but I figured she could avoid the tomatoes and didn't include anything else dodgy. I made a fruit salad and popped in a couple of ripe feijoas from the garden, and served orange and almond cake on a plate with some of the sliced blood oranges. We sat on and on around the table talking about plays and shows and operas we had seen, books we had read, the state of the nation etc - most enjoyable.

A day after Barry returned from Mexico we had his Graduate Student Instructors from this year and last and a couple of others for dinner. Most were vegetarian or preferred to eat kosher, so I prepared a vegetarian meal, which made for a relaxed evening for me as I had done most of the preparation beforehand. As well as another pot of mushroom soup , spanakopita and a mixed salad, I made the potato salad, sticking more closely to the recipe this time.  I also was planning on making some kind of ratatouille, but when I was at the market I saw the most appealing little yellow and green button squash, so decided to make a "deconstructed" ratatouille: I prepared the onions/eggplant/ multi-coloured capsicums/tomatoes (no mushrooms as we had the soup)  as in ratatouille, incorporating lots of herbs from the garden, but used that as a bed and laid out the vivid frilly-edged little squash on top and baked the whole thing in the oven the day before. Then I crumbled a little bit of tasty cheese on top when I reheated it on the night. It looked really nice, really showing off the fall produce to advantage. One of the guests brought a fruit salad for dessert and I made an apple cake with grannies from the garden, another nice evening. Two of the guests had newish babies but only Sarah  brought Eleni - Bea and Dani left Emmet with her parents, I think, so although they had a more relaxed evening, I didn't get much granny practice in.

Berkeley in the Fall

I got back from the East Coast to a very busy time, and to mostly lovely weather.  October 1 is Barry's birthday, and he had booked us into a very well reviewed "Cat on  Hot Tin Roof" and a  pre-show dinner at a fancy seafood restaurant in San Francisco for the day after, a Saturday.  But on Friday evening he got a call from the theatre saying the performance was cancelled because the lead actor had been in an accident, and although they refunded our tickets, we were left on Friday evening trying to find seats for the next evening to a show we both fancied. We tried various performances we liked the sound of, but couldn't find anything available, so decided to try something different, a  Magic Bus Tour through space and time  back to San Francisco in the '60's.  We thought it might be something like one of Rod Quantock's shows (a Melbourne reference, never mind, it can't be explained), but basically it was a bus which picked us up in Union Square which had blinds on the window serving as projection screens.  Films (a collage of historical documentary footage, TV interviews and other linking commentary) were projected onto these and while the bus was in transit and when the bus arrived at a destination of interest, up went the blinds and we watched the streetscapes to a recorded commentary.  At one stage the hostess on the bus donned a costume for a few minutes. There was footage of  the Summer of Love, the psychedelic shop fronts of  Haight Ashbury,  happenings in Golden Gate Park, the British Invasion and the impact of Rock'N'Roll on the generation coming of age in the 60's, the civil rights movement, drug culture - though we also looked at at important economic institutions in the Financial District, Chinatown, sites of demos etc. The  several themes - the advent of youth culture, the generation gap, the music, the anti-Vietnam War, anti-draft movement, the psychedelic experience were explored from different angles and it was all quite well done. The written programmes handed out were in 3D as was the paint job inside the bus, but we had to take our special specs off to watch the video as that wasn't.

This was a mid afternoon trip, and so we had a little time to kill before dinner at Farallon, which we wasted wandering about, though it was quite chilly. San Francisco was very much cooler than Berkeley that day. With no play to go to, we had longer to spend over the meal than we had planned, so we told them when we arrived and they seated us in a different area where we had a great view of everything going on and were able to enjoy the meal with no sense of urgency or rush.

I had missed the first rehearsal of my choir (the East Bay Jewish Folk Chorus), which was on my birthday while I was in NYC, but started my season by going to the rehearsal at the JCC on Monday night.  As always, it was sheer pleasure to be singing and seeing my friends again for the new season.  I had listened in advance to some of the music, which Achi, the Director,  posts on a web site so we can download the scores and the MP3s of our parts.  I  was already a bit familiar with a couple of the Hebrew songs and one of the Yiddish ones, Lomir Ale in Eynem, which it seems to me is always sung at Jewish weddings and Barmitzvahs in Melbourne - though none of the other singers had ever heard it, so presumably it is a lot less popular in California! We have a couple of concerts scheduled for the beginning of Hanukkah, and Barry thinks Tom Lehrer's  "I'm Spending Hanukkah in Santa Monica" will bring the house down. Here is a youtube of the song - and I think Achi's  four part choral arrangement will sound pretty good.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSCmZU0eFJg&feature=related


As we each had periods when we knew we'd be travelling, we had booked operas and theatre to fit around the absences, which at time  perhaps led to a greater concentration of arts than is ideal.  In this week, we had an opera on Tuesday evening (a lovely performance of the Marriage of Figaro at the SF Opera House, see the link below:

http://sfopera.com/o/295.asp

The conductor, Nicola Luisotti, took it all at breakneck speed, and the sets looked just a little bit tired, but I always enjoy this Mozart romp and the singers pretty much did it justice without being spectacular. The subscription department rings you up and very charming young men talk you through the options for making up your season, and though we decided it was too expensive and we wouldn't subscribe this year, we have ended up with even more expensive seats this year, having vowed not to go back to the still expensive but very uncomfortable seats we have had in the past two years - no leg room for us, and we're not that tall! At least in these seats we are comfortable.


Then on Thursday night we went back into San Francisco's Civic Centre area to a Symphony concert, the first half celebrating Latin American composers Revueltas, Villa-Lobos and Varese, the second half Beethoven's 7th. The Varese piece, Ameriques, was scored for a very large orchestra indeed, including nine percussionists, one of who plays both a siren and sleigh bells. I quote from the programme:

In Music Since 1900 , the encyclopaedist Nicolas Slonimsky, famous for his ability to compress much meaning into few  words, summed up Ameriques by remarking that it was "titled in the plural to embrace all Americas, abstract and concrete, present and future, scored for a huge orchestra and set in dissonant harmonic counterpoint built of functional thematic molecules, proceeding by successive crystallizations in the sonorous mass of organized sound."

The audience at its premiere in 1926 certainly wouldn't have expected to hear anything like this at a symphony concert, and as I hadn't looked at the programme in advance, nor did I, but I liked it. Michael Tilson Thomas (or MTT as he is generally referred to), the director of the SF Symphony, conducted Beethoven 7 at a cracking pace, but maybe not as fast as I expected from having heard him before. It is a lovely work and I hear new things in it every time I hear it performed, however familiar it is.

Cute little electric run-around parked in our street

Last time I mentioned the opera neighbourhood, I may have posted a photo of the electric car share parking spots.  In our very own street there are now two electric cars, both seem to belong to the same house - the smaller one is advertised for sale, and is a sweet little thing with lightweight mesh seats which caught my eye as it was very badly parked near a busy corner. Lately I have seen it parked in the carport where you can see the larger car being charged.

More conventional-looking electric car charging in carport.

Our young cousin on the Marsh side, Stephanie, recently went on a Birthright trip to Israel and met a new friend there who lives in San Francisco.  She was visiting Ilana for a long weekend and came to spend Friday with us in Berkeley.  We had breakfast together, then Barry gave her a campus tour while I went off to my exercise class and to give blood at the Albany Y (the post-donation snacks at the Melbourne Blood Bank are much healthier, and the staff are friendlier too, I must say). Then I picked her up and we had lunch at home and spent a couple of hours getting to know each other a bit ( we last met when Steph was a teenager - now she is finishing off  her MA in Arizona). We headed off to get some sea air, in short supply in Phoenix, with a walk out along the fishing pier and through the Berkeley Marina, then went off to College Avenue to look at the shops. We parked near the famous ice-cream shop Ici, and ogled the queue along the street and the flavours of the day posted on the lamp post outside (see shot of this I took with the iPhone) when our phones started ringing.

Flavours of the day at Ici on College Avenue.

We got a series of calls from Barry (who had been into San Francisco to meet a colleague) and  Ilana, who were each coming in from San Francisco to join us for dinner and a show. We left the Elmwood area where we had been wandering and picked them both up from the downtown Berkeley BART station (and in all this gallivanting, I didn't get lost even once - very proud of myself!) We ate at one of Barry's favourite restaurants, Adagia, across the road from campus, and walked down for the show afterwards. A few days earlier Barry had spotted that Circus Oz was performing at Zellerbach Hall on the UCB campus, and we had booked tickets because we thought it would be a really different experience for the girls in particular.  And it was - really a lot of fun, amazing feats of balance, tumbling, juggling, music etc. Some of the dialogue  or commentary was a bit hard for us to hear, let alone understand - and we speak the language - but the words were not the main source of entertainment.  The girls seemed to enjoy it and we all laughed a lot, and gasped a fair bit too. Afterwards we dropped them at the BART station to return to San Francisco, after a very full day all around.

Ilana, Barbara, Stephanie, Barry at Circus Oz

Lincoln and Nina, some neighbours that Sally and Monica had briefly introduced us to, invited us over to their house for drinks on Saturday evening, which was extremely pleasant: sitting on their deck  a few houses higher up the same hill we're on towards sunset, looking at the magnificent view, discovering interests in common and listening to the deer crashing about in the woods below. Lincoln is an archivist, writer  and collector of political posters.  He has a studio with great capabilities for reproducing and digitising images - this is another field that has been transformed by the advent of the Internet and all the digital technologies which are enabling the preservation of what are, after all, essentially ephemera, but which tell so much about popular culture and popular movements all over the world.  He highlighted how in the post war years in the USA, with McCarthyism and the stultifying conservatism of those years, there was virtually no political poster making at all, and that it was with the rise of youth culture and music that poster art came roaring back.  Reminded me of our mystery bus tour!