Prisoners

B. had a friend in town this weekend, so we did some touristy things. Even though rain was in the forecast (and rain is pretty much a given for the first several months of each year), we woke up early with high hopes on Saturday. Our first stop was Louis', the little diner overlooking the Sutro Bath Ruins not many blocks from my own house. We drove by to pick up some carless friends, who were a little shocked that I was the only one in the car (B. and his friend had jumped out to get film at the corner Walgreens). "It's just you and me," I said, possibly quoting Captain Picard in that old Star Trek Next Generation episode where Beverly is caught in the warp bubble. They seemed to believe me, and the disappointment was palpable.

Many times over the weekend I would consider how different B. and his friends are from me. I feel like I struggle to be heard, or struggle to be taken seriously, or struggle to "be listened to." Without really being brought down into sadness, I still found myself wondering whether I was crazy, then remembering that I've had a number of my own friends who "listened" to me. To be sure, B. and his friends are largely extroverted and high energy, and in fact many are performers. While I am introverted and have certainly been accused of speaking low and in a monotone. (Some have even called me emotionless one day and then shushed me for being too excited the next.)

Breakfast at Louis' was wonderful (being essentially a Waffle House with a fantastic view of the Pacific), and then we drove across a rainy foggy Golden Gate Bridge, up, over, and down through slick eucalyptus trees into Muir Woods. The redwoods had few visitors because of the weather; now that I am back here where it is warm, I think I ought to have jumped off the path and rolled myself in the forest's mud. Instead, I stayed atop my shoes.

We drove back through Sausalito and across the bridge and to Ocean Beach again so that B.'s friend could dip her feet in the freezing Pacific, a brave feat. We walked through a wet Golden Gate Park, reaching the DeYoung museum too late in the day to enter and enjoy, and strolled through the Japanese Tea Garden. A trip to Amoeba in Haight, where I purchased an inexpensive CD of Dvorak's Dumky trio, ended the day.

We woke early the next morning to catch a 9:30 boat to Alcatraz. Miraculously, the weather cleared, and the entire day was sunny with puffy white clouds. The Alcatraz tour was wonderful; we listened to a tour guide (Ranger John) tell about escape attempts and then took the audio tour (enjoyable and well-designed, though I didn't learn much) through the prison building. The views from the island were stellar.

The boat dropped us back off at the piers, and we walked along Embarcadero and ate fish and mini donuts at Fisherman's Wharf. We got our free chocolate at Ghiradelli Square, rode the cable car back down to Market Street, ate Thai in the Castro, and called it a day.

I cried just a little that night out of frustration for some of the social challenges that weekend. B. and his friend were a little bossy. I am trying to be more decisive, even if it means I have to sort of make up what I want. So many people I meet just want things, and it seems so arbitrary and useless to me. But I'll continue to be a stupid follower if I keep bending to their wants. I'm discovering, though, as happened this weekend, that I'm not very good at pretending to want things; often, my ideas and suggestions are dismissed. People can sense I don't really want them. And, in fact, I can't say, "I really want pizza tonight," when it's clear that someone else wants Thai and will only pick at his pizza and sigh wistfully and say it's not my fault but he just wasn't hungry for pizza.

I couldn't give B. the best examples of why I felt bad. Certainly I had felt misunderstood and unimportant and alien. And thought about how I used to have friends. True, changing from clerk to manager at the Movie Groove drove me away from people and toward the antihuman tasks of inventory, marketing, and human management. True, I voluntarily turned even more inward when I was dating S. True, my current workplace does not encourage friendships; the 1.5 friendships I've developed here have required quite a bit of effort. And just yesterday 1 of those 1.5 asked whether it would be alright if we never talked about work again; to which I replied sure, but that we'd have even less to talk about and our silences would grow even longer . . .

I suppose that came as the final blow to the weekend's challenges: A friend says he no longer wants to listen, and I bow to his wishes. I understand, mostly, and don't hold it against him; we both hate work. And he's an extraordinary and beautiful creature and to some extent a kindred introvert and grump. Nonetheless, I had hoped for a refuge from the weekend, and he had reminded me how steel is our skin. Impenetrable, and our banging heads make a dull sound.

More pictures from the weekend are here.

Vampire reviews

As my dad pointed out recently, reviews are often about one person trying to sound fancy. True dat. And mea culpa and will likely continue to bea culpa. I'm not exactly sure why I do reviews, because reviews are almost always local, and the things I review often have little impact on the real world. (How much does the real world care, for example, that some string players performed some old Beethoven quartet on a certain weekday in February 2007 in some hall in San Francisco?)

On the other hand, I want to share and spread creative processes, even when they are not my own. It's certainly not a new idea that reviewers and art critics are creative vampires. Sometimes we're simply sucking the lifeblood out of others, but sometimes the vampirism is more complex: we're trying to mix that stolen blood with the blood of the uninitiated to bring them into our coven.

With that in mind, here are capsule reviews of several shows I've seen in the last (very busy) couple weeks:

Itzhak Perlman and Rohan De Silva at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley performing Schubert, Franck, Foss, and a half-dozen transcriptions. I bought tickets to this concert last year as a mini-subscription that got me into a good seat for Kiri Te Kanawa and Frederica von Stade. After those lovely ladies of voice, I wasn't too excited about going to see "merely" a violinist, but I was happy to discover that he was playing the Franck violin sonata, which I just played with a friend in December. It was fun to watch and listen to the pianist with the sonata so fresh in my own mind, and fun to see how he faced some of the same challenges I did. (If any pianists are interested, I made several notes at intermission.)

The Artemis Quartet at Herbst Theatre in San Francisco performing Webern, Beethoven, and Schoenberg. These were four nice-looking performers with a great stage presence. The stringy concert ("Where are the singers?") was deeply improved by the Webern, which brought up the same questions I jokingly ask myself when I listen to Strauss's opera Daphne: Why isn't all music just plain beautiful? Why does most music just sit there?

The St. Lawrence String Quartet at Herbst Theatre in San Francisco performing Chausson, Shostakovich, Haydn, and a new work ("Songs from the Diaspora") by Roberto Sierra. Though the program notes assured me that the quartet was quite at the top of its field (and I checked and rechecked several times), the Larrys made my memory of Artemis like unto a god. The Larrys suffered from incredibly graceless tics. Even though an Artemis dropped his bow in a display of unnecessarily visual passion, the Larrys gesticulated wildly after every single phrase, then rushed to reset their bows and instruments in order to gesticulate into the next phrase. Their singer was similarly affected: she sucked her bottom lip in over her teeth and created a V shape with her mouth that certainly leads to no known vowel.

And then, behold, last night there was Susan Graham singing Les nuits d'etes with the San Francisco Symphony. Cheap rush tickets plopped us into the first row, just feet from this beautiful woman with grace and relaxed confidence from her head to her heels. Stunned, we bought CDs at intermission (the nuits for him and Ned Rorem songs for me -- if anything will help me love him, it is She) to be signed by her after the concert. As she signed, I confessed my difficulty with Rorem, and she told me that these songs had spoken to her almost immediately. Then she signed B.'s, and they chatted about Handel and countertenors and Ruggiero in Alcina (which recording is integral in one of my lengthening life's most precious moments: driving along the coast around Bodega Bay, tempted to sadness by ocean clouds and the area's quiet abandonment, listening to Renee Fleming, Natalie Dessay, and Susan sing these extraordinary da capo arias, some quite lively and addictive and some spread out and luxurious with longing). Then we bid her goodnight and wished her well until we meet again after Iphigenie at San Francisco Opera in June.

After the concert, I tricked B. into a nearby karaoke bar. I said a coworker was having a birthday party. When we got there, there was no party. I mumbled that we must have been early, and we sat down. A minute later, B.'s friend, secretly in town from New York, sauntered in. Later, the happy friends dueled for high notes in "Climb Every Mountain."