The (Falun) Gong Show

The annual Falun Gong show has installed itself this week at the San Francisco Opera House before wandering on to stints in San Jose and Sacramento. It used to be called "The Chinese New Year's Spectacular" but has been rebranded as "Shen Yun," with an "all-new show."



Sarah Crompton in the London Telegraph reviewed it in February 2008 with a few choice words:

But what I really object to is that such a politically motivated performance is being smuggled on to stages around Europe in the name of family entertainment. And at the group's first performance in Britain on Friday at the Festival Hall, I was not alone. While many of the audience - the majority of Chinese origin - applauded, others were appalled. In such a context, any judgment of the piece's artistic merit seems beside the point, but it is a horribly Disneyfied version of the traditional Chinese culture it seeks to celebrate.

Introduced by two constantly smiling bilingual presenters, the singers wear a strange mixture of old-fashioned Western garb (purple crinoline, white evening suits) and the dancers appear dressed as Tibetan monks, ancient warriors, flowers and the like in brilliantly coloured silks. They perform against bright slides, across which flying Buddhas or spirits occasionally zoom into view, to unintentionally comic effect...The result is one of the weirdest and most unsettling evenings I have ever spent in the theatre.

To get a full dose of the strange cultiness of the group, click here to go to the source, the Shen Yun blog detailing the awesome triumphs its three different companies are having in every one of its touring cities. For the best description of the show, Sid Chen's account from January 2007 with photos by yours truly is still the best.



You're not going to be reading any of this in your local newspapers, by the way, because the show has done some serious saturation advertising in the print media this year, including the full front inner page of the Sunday Chronicle Datebook, a four-page color insert in the San Francisco Examiner, not to mention big buys in the "alt" media. Buyer beware.

Happy New Year

Posting has been light because I have had a painful deadline on a paying project for the last 10 days, and next Monday I am going to join a Federal bureaucracy for three to four months, so that might cramp my style a bit too. We shall see.



In the meantime, here are some shots from 2007's New Years Day on San Francisco's Ocean Beach.



Hope your new year is bright and beautiful.

Christmas at the Contemporary Jewish Museum

The Contemporary Jewish Museum in downtown San Francisco opened its doors on Christmas Day to the public with an offer of free admission to the year-old building, which prompted a huge line that snaked across the large stone plaza in front of the museum.



The $47.5 million building consists of the brick facade of a 19th Century electrical substation designed by Willis Polk that was somehow integrated with two dark, torqued cubes on their sides by starchitect of the moment Daniel Libeskind.



From the outside, the design looks rather fun, but inside it's something of a disaster, with most of the space devoted to a large lobby and sloping walls that feel more claustrophobic than liberating, not to mention impractical for displaying art. In its ugliness and uselessness, the building's only competitor in awful new San Francisco architecture is probably the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender What-Have-You Center that opened on upper Market Street in 2002.



The security at the entrance was also extremely invasive, though the guards were for the most part a jolly crew.



We were given a timed entry sticker for a Maurice Sendak exhibit that was scheduled for two hours after our arrival, but there was no way we were going to wait that long, so we didn't see any "Where The Wild Things Are" sketches. We probably never will, since this is not a building that's high on the list for a return visit.

Christmas Buddha Baby

The Asian Art Museum is filled with Buddhas from a variety of cultures, traditions and eras.



My Buddhist friend Heidi in Santa Barbara shares her birthday with that other famous spiritual teacher, Jesus...



...and in honor of the occasion we found a small statue of the Baby Buddha's first Holy Steps.



May peace and good will prevail...



...on Heidi's holy day...



...and good wishes to her and humanity on surviving another year.

SF City Hall Christmas Lights Gone Berserk

San Francisco's City Hall has been lit up green and red for Christmas this year.



At certain points, it looks like odd Chinoiserie as if designed for a delirious production of Puccini's "Turandot."



From other angles...



...it looks a bit like Satan's Lair.



For the first time ever, the insanely expensive, high-tech, solar-roofed, bizarrely lit new Muni bus shelter on the corner of Van Ness and Grove actually looked like it belonged in the neighborhood.



From this time onwards, it shall be known as the Christmas Shelter.