| Saturday, December 13, 2003 |
02:29 - Greetings, comrade, from the Nerve Center
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How do I get myself into these things?
Last night I jumped at the opportunity to see a concert in downtown San Francisco-- a concert of Prof. Peter Schickele and the music of P.D.Q. Bach. I'd never seen it visually before, and in that lies its charm-- without the visuals I'd never really understood the appeal. Classical music-- with weird instruments! And the occasional unexpected bizarre chord or odd lyric! Huzzah! But it makes much more sense live. The guy's pushing 70, but he still makes quite an acrobatic little show of it-- he's a bearded little gnome of a man, and his absent-minded-professor act is the centerpiece of the whole show. None of it comes across on CD.
We enjoyed the show in the Davies Symphony Hall just off Van Ness, right across from City Hall. Gorgeous building, gorgeous concert hall. (The pipe organ in back is made of glass, for God's sake.) And when the good Professor came stomping in with a rickety wooden ladder which he used to clamber up onto stage, we knew it was gonna rock.
But that was only part of what made the evening so entertaining. See, I got to enjoy the concert-- and the car trips up to the city and back-- in the company of a friend, Van (who is generally pretty open-minded and willing to listen to reasoned arguments, for a world-traveling Europhile who intends to stay in academia for the rest of his life) and a friend of his... from France. This friend, whom I'll call Jean-Marie-Françoise-Sainte-Jacques for short, is a college student who has apparently lived here for most of his life, judging by his almost completely Valley-ified accent (in which only a vague sort of clipped timbre can be detected); and yet he's as close as I've ever seen to a dyed-in-the-wool French Socialist of the haughtiest caliber. It was quite the experience.
The first clue I had that the trip would be this interesting was when Van mentioned that the guy we were waiting for was a "Frenchman". (Van, refreshingly enough, has little more appreciation for the French than I do.) After the obligatory Sid Hoffman/Sid Fwenchman jokes, and after introductions were made, we piled into Jean's Jetta and headed north along 280.
The Jetta, it turned out, was intentionally bought as a political statement. "If you want a good example of this stupid American capitalist system," he said, "Car dealers always have this one car on the lot that's got like no features, which they can point to in the ads to say Look, these are the kinds of prices we have-- so they can get you onto the lot and then try to sell you a more expensive car. But I insisted on taking the teaser car; I don't need anything more than the basic transportation, so I got to screw with their system."
I was immediately fascinated. I sat silently in the back seat, imagining what the ideal car lot would be like in the Worker's Paradise. Oh yes: you might get lured onto the lot by the blue Lada, but the red Lada would prove irresistible.
All the way up the peninsula, Jean regaled us with P.D.Q. Bach music from his Discman, punctuating every odd chord or choral trick with a gush of praise for the man's sheer comedic genius. "Why hasn't this been published outside the U.S.?" he wondered. "There's hardly anything in it that even has any English lyrics. They could sell this in France or Germany without any trouble. Or someone else could do this sort of stuff." Uh huh, I chuckled to myself. Could is such a wonderful word.
Driving into San Francisco on 101 from the south, Jean sniffily pointed out how bad the traffic was and how dingy and run-down the city looked. "And this is the nicest city in the country," agreed Van. Jean simply exhaled huskily.
We reached the parking garage, parked, and walked out into the rain to grab a quick bite to eat before the 8:00 concert. The block of Hayes between Franklin and Gough is full of little cafés; we walked to the end, and saw a place across the intersection called the Pendragon Grill. As we neared it, though, both Van and Jean slowed their steps-- they'd seen the big American flag and eagle painted on the wall between the sidewalk and the awning. "On second thought, that place looks pretty scary," they muttered to each other, and turned on their heels to find another, less American place to eat, like "Absinthe" on the near side of the street. (If we hadn't found a suitable place, like the nearby little hole-in-the-wall staffed by Chinese folks who served Italian-style sandwiches and French baked goods under paintings of bare-breasted Hindu goddesses by some inept local artist, I would have gone back to the Pendragon just out of spite. But there was no need. I pictured what that would have been like. "It's okay-- they're with me," I'd have said, making the secret VRWC hand gesture which gained me entrance to this hive of jingoistic running dogs who dare to profane the sacred Market Street zone with their presence.)
Through dinner, I tried plying the humor. "Somehow I'd be just as happy if we had a resurgence of the kind of art that we used to think of as Art," I said, gesturing at the yellow-and-gold piece covering the wall behind me with the title Woman Birthing Herself. "There comes a time when you have to wonder whether postmodernity can be carried just a hair too far, y'know?" They smirked and nodded. There would be far too much ground to cover for me to try to make any real progress with these guys in one night, but I thought I'd at least try to plant a few seeds.
We went into the concert hall, where paintings of identical-looking clusters of flowers were prominently sold at the concession booth. My esteemed companions immediately took to mocking the paintings' pretentiousness, unoriginality, unimaginativeness-- at least the meme seemed to have stuck, I guess.
We ascended a flight of delicately-lit stairs circling the rounded inner sanctum of the concert hall. The broad curving window wall faced directly upon the San Francisco City Hall building, a gorgeous neoclassical structure that looks rather like the Capitol except with lots of gold leaf and an azure finish on the dome. It's stunningly beautiful, as a matter of fact. We all stopped at the window to admire it, between two tall Christmas trees hung with cards signed by local kids.
After a moment, Jean piped up. "It's really an un-American architecture, isn't it?" Van agreed, and Jean continued. "It's like something European. Look at those colonnades... that dome... it's really beautiful. Nothing American about it." We turned to go. He dug in one last stroke: "Good for them."
You've never been to Washington D.C., have you? I thought really loudly to his retreating back.
The concert got started inauspiciously enough. The assistant to the Professor warmed up the crowd by making derisive statements about "Mr. Schwartza-- whatever his name is," which elicited a chorus of hisses from the three rapidly filling tiers of seats; then, when Schickele took the stage, he opened with a description of George W. Bush's upcoming book (Profiles in Courage, which covers some of Bush's most admired historical figures, such as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Attila the Hun, and so on), which he would purportedly be presenting at the University of Southern North Dakota "just as soon as the troops come home from Iraq". (Next Thursday, we're led to believe, he said.) Appreciative chortles all around. Likewise when Schickele introduced the "Freedom Horns".
In the intermission, while Van was in the bathroom, Jean tried to ply me with disgusted observations regarding "Altria", a company whose logo adorned one of the art exhibits advertised in the program booklet. "It's a front for Philip Morris," he said. "This company has gone around buying companies like Kraft, Nabisco, Maxwell House, Oreo... now you can't even give your kids a candy bar without the money going to fund cigarettes." I tried to humor him by making fun of the company's logo (which looks even dumber in grayscale), but he was not to be deterred from his main point, which I neglected to point out was rather silly in light of the fact that America is far and away more smoke-free than, say, France. He ranted on for a few more minutes about the evil of Philip Morris, its intransigence, the necessity for its destruction, Jean's inability to find any products he was comfortable buying anymore, and so on. Finally I said, "I guess it'd be better if those products didn't exist at all, then, huh?" He winced. "I dunno," he snapped, and settled sullenly into his seat to wait for Van to get back.
The concert went on. At last it ended, and we thronged out with the happy crowds of old rich bourgeoisie, against which we looked like ragamuffins off the street. (The usher, on showing us into our nosebleed seats, had welcomed us through the doors by saying, "Can I help you guys find your seats? Um.. I mean... gentlemen?") We found our way back to the car, snickering over the worst of the puns. (How are piccolos made? They're cooked over a bonfire on a Sicilian beach, in a cauldron filled with olive oil, in what's known as the Mediterranean Flute Fry.) One of the long, rambling stories about the finding of a certain P.D.Q. Bach piece had ended up with the Professor standing in a room in a building that was being demolished; at one end of the room was a safe with the door standing open; next to it there was an Indian woman who appeared to be hiding something in the folds of her robes. Deciding which to search first, Schickele decided, "better the safe than the saari." Groans and giggles alike had ensued, of course; but in retrospect, Jean said, "I was wondering why he said Indian woman. I was thinking, is this the kind of racism that's normal in New York, but that he wouldn't realize isn't welcome here in California?" Phew. I'd hate to see this guy watching South Park.
As we drove back down 101, after Van had idly remarked about Canada being "just like a State, except bigger and cleaner," Jean burst out with "I really envy Canada's political stability. There's only been one political party in power for like ten years now, and even though the current PM is more conservative than the previous one, they're still from the same party-- so same-sex marriage will still be passed and so on. There's no actual opposition to worry about." Uhhhh... huh. "Yeah, I hate those damn opposing viewpoint things," I growled from the back seat. Jean visibly recoiled, but went on. "At least they get to accomplish things without having to argue so much." Or words to that effect. (It's over a day ago now; the memories are losing their coherence in my synapses. "That's stability for ya," I said, and settled back into my seat to let my mind wander far away from the People's Republic of San Francisco. I was only dimly aware of the conversation's turn a few minutes later, when Jean expressed dismay at the fact that there was a mall called "Fashion Island"-- including locations bearing the same name in Los Angeles, no less. "I mean," he said, "I can see fashion in San Francisco... but Los Angeles?" I tried to interject something about 'Scuse me, I sorta thought there was this thing about, like, all those movie stars and stuff in LA?, but they had already moved on to the next topic.
Said topic was a tirade on Jean's part about some tutoring program sponsored by UC Berkeley, which competed with the tutoring program he himself was participating in on the side now that classes at De Anza have let out for the term. Apparently, from what I picked up, the evil UC can afford to pay its tutors $14.50 per hour, whereas the community college can only afford more like $10. The tutors had gone on strike, evidently; and Jean said that the UC had reached a deal with them. But apparently the deal was struck too late for the tutors to call off their strike, so it went ahead as planned-- "And now," Jean fumed, "The evil capitalistic UC gets to gloat that it has the moral high ground because the tutors went on strike even after the deal was agreed upon." Somewhere deep in my nose a tiny little violin played a sad, sad tune upon a thin silky hair. The evil capitalistic UC Berkeley. I love that concept.
Finally we arrived back home, and Jean took his leave. There wasn't much to say. I'd done my part-- tried to bridge the gap, though I'd given no reason for them to suspect that there was a gap at all, by (for instance) pointing to a poster taped to a lamppost south of Market that said Free government-run health care for everybody, and intoning "Free health care for some, miniature American flags for others!" .... but it was clear that I was some kind of stubborn kook who refused to see the light embraced by this enlightened 19-year-old. And the fact that I have friends who treat the word "capitalist" as a good thing would only ensure that I'd be hitchhiking home.
If nothing at all else, I can take comfort in the fact that one day this guy will have to get a job. And if he loathes America so much, there's clearly no reason for him to have come here to go to community college, is there? Surely there are ample opportunities elsewhere.
But no P.D.Q. Bach. Isn't that a bitch?
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Brian Tiemann
