Mozart in Berkeley

My oldest and a very dear friend and I went to see the Midsummer Mozart Festival in Berkeley tonight. The festival is the only one of its kind in North America to celebrate the wonderful Mozart. I especially liked it because the program we saw featured a ballet, two piano concerti, and two opera concert arias; all of the many facets of Mozart's creative genius.

The pianist, Seymour Lipkin, started off slow during the first half of the show on the Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major. Or, I just don't know my Mozart that well. Because after the intermission and bass concert arias, he knocked my socks off! For Piano Concerto No. 25 in C Major, his fingers skipped along the keys and my head bopped right along with them. He has been playing piano for a long time and wow, his hands can fly across those keys!

The bass singer, Jeremy Galyon, also blew me away. He had some funny hand gestures but, I have only seen one opera and he could have been performing as if he were in the operas, instead of on a stage surrounded by an orchestra.

At any rate, the beautiful music reminded me how much symphony soothes the soul and truly was enjoyable after so many days of confusion and turmoil.

Jewish Film at the Castro Theatre

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival has started at the Castro Theatre and I enjoyed a pretty heavy Argentinian film as well as a great short project, yesterday.

Te Extraño is an Argentine film about the Disappeared, of whom many were Jewish. The family in this film were Ashkenazi and were victims of this terrible epidemic when their eldest son, Adrian, was disappeared mid-film. The film was multi-layered, focusing on family dynamics, cultural identity, and Jewish and Latino displacement.

The first I heard of the Disappeared was through Sting's protest song They Dance Alone (Cueca solo). This film made it much more real for me. The film-maker truthfully and eloquently tells this semi-autobiographical story through the main character, a high school aged Javier (Adrian's younger brother), who is sent to Mexico in order to protect him from the political situation in 1970's Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Local terror

In reading An Interrupted Life, the diaries of Etty Hillesum, a Jewish woman from Amsterdam who died in the Holocaust, this line stuck out for me:

"...That doesn't mean you have to be half-hearted; on the contrary, you must make a stand, wax indignant at times, try to get to the bottom of things. But indiscriminate hatred is the worst thing there is. It is a sickness of the soul..."

She then proceeds to describe her views of seeing a nation as an undifferentiated mob rather than individual people. I wonder if this man had seen photos of each individual he wished to harm in this terribly scary attempt at "revolution", if he would have stopped thinking of "us" as an undifferentiated mob of nameless faceless "left-wing conspirators" trying to take over the government.

The nation's polarization is scaring me.

Tourists in My Own Town

My second cousin and her friend came for a visit from Wisconsin, starting on July 15th and ending on July 20th. We had so much fun, being tourists, seeing all there is for tourists to see in San Francisco. It charged me up! Check out some pics from the five day excursion through every neighborhood, tourist trap, windy and steep street... Call it an Ode to San Francisco.

Brilliant Ladies

Tonight was a meeting of some of the same great minds that made Cinco de My Friend's House happen a couple months ago. Five (and then six over the phone for a bit) of us met up on Eddy Street to share delicious food and hear about this.

My social media expert friend told us stories of how she shared the Social Forum tour schedule via Twitter and showed us an iPhone video of her train ride cross country to Detroit. A second friend from work told us about another amazing female co-worker from the former Soviet Union who has overcome a lot and is a real role model. And yet another friend from work told us about one of her favorite workshops at the Forum where the presenters talked about something we all suffer from as individuals, "movement makers" and communities: historic amnesia. Some of my favorite quotes of the evening were:
-Let's build "beloved communities".
-"One thing I learned from my time at Burning Man was that we're all burning, you might as well BURN BRIGHT!"
-We have to remember what we're doing here because otherwise we get buried in the weeds.

There were more amazing quotes but, I couldn't write them all down. At any rate, it turned my week from a 5 up to at least a 9! What can't we do if we collaborate and talk to each other about how we want to be the change we see in the world.

Check out this taste of what sounded like an amazing Detroit!

This is just a sampling of what the two women who attended USSF were talking about when they shared their experiences:

USSF People's Movement Assemblies: Easy as ABC! from US Social Forum on Vimeo.

Fourth of July on the Lake

For the fourth, I went up to my parents place, soaked in the heat that San Francisco lacks, hit up the tiny farmer's market that only comes out in Summer, got my hair cut for $20, watched a boat parade filled with sitcom-themed putters and party boats, ate masses of food including delicious organic mini sliders, and watched with my mouth wide open as the fireworks shot over the lake and their sound ricocheted off the mountains. Now this is summer.