Different takes on holiday music, one loopy, the other astonishing and clever.

First up is a production of Nutcracker that Maurice Béjart made. A very odd evening with strange musical interpolations, there is one very charming moment…the Waltz of the Flowers with accordion obbligato.

(If you’d like to see the complete Béjart Nutcracker, it’s here.)

Second up is my favorite holiday album of recent years, Béla Fleck and and the Flecktones – Jingle All the Way. Fleck’s nouveau banjo playing is always worth a listen, but this album is delightful with its cleverness and beautiful playing.

One high point is their take on Jingle Bells, complete with Tuvan throat-singing. You can listen to it: Jingle Bells. Another Tuvan-tinged chestnut is: What Child is This – Dyngyldai.  (Hit the triangle symbol to play…won’t work in Firefox.)

I think you can listen to the entire album for free at Yahoo Music. If you have a subscription, you can grab it at Rhapsody. And if you want to buy it, head over to Amazon.

Happy Holidays!

The Merola Opera Program, an arm of the San Francisco Opera, provides young singers with the opportunity for great training and public performances each summer. Some of them are named Adler Fellows afterwards and perform during the regular season at SF Opera.

While I was playing for one of their concerts the other day, I picked up the 50th Anniversary book which provides a fantastic and unique perspective on the program. Just looking at the roster of participants over the years is eye-popping – oodles of major and/or famous modern opera singers were there… some notable conductors as well. The program’s very first year (1957) had as a student  Jess Thomas, one of the greatest Wagner tenors ever.

Anyway, if you’re interested,you can get the book at some Merola performances ($20). The author Tracy Grant, was even there on Sunday. Not in the area? It might be available through an Amazon market place seller:

http://tinyurl.com/Merola-book

If you’re interested, Merola will be presenting Mascagni’s L’Amico Fritz next week, Così fan Tutte and the Grand Finale concert in August. More info here:

http://sfopera.com/merola.asp

[possibly resolved - updated below]

Amazing and disgusting news this weekend as it was revealed how homophobia has crept into Amazon’s book-selling practices. I’m sure you’re aware of Amazon’s book-ranking feature. Think of it as a mega-bestseller list. Whether a book has a book-ranking even determines whether you can find it using an Amazon search for books on a subject! It’s been discovered that, since at least February, Amazon has removed books with lesbian or gay subjects or themes from the book-rankings.

The list of books banned from the rankings is astounding. Here are a few that caught my eye:

• Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
• Maurice by E.M. Forster
• Unfriendly Fire by Nathaniel Frank (an exploration of gays in the military from a policy perspective – it has sold more copies than the Twilight books)
• A Boys Own Story by Edmund White
• The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
• Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx

What makes it even worse is that currently, when you type “homosexuality” in the Amazon search box, the number one result is a book on preventing homosexuality in children!

I’ve tried emailing Amazon but all I get is a robotic response. Getting the attention of a human at this internet behemoth is next to impossible if you want to question their business practices.

One of the more satisfying ways for internet users to express outrage is the creation of a Google Bomb. The most famous of these was when the number one Google result for “failure” was “George Bush”. 

Now we have one that’s been started which equates “Amazon Rank” to the practice of censorship. Please support this grass-roots action by clicking on the following link, which will take you to the full definition of “Amazon Rank”:

The consumer website, Consumerist, has a good round-up of the story thus far. (Consumerist is owned by Consumers Union, which, in turn, publishes Consumer Reports).

http://consumerist.com/5209209/gay-and-lesbian-books-lose-amazon-sales-rank-for-some-reason

update: There are a couple of developing ideas what happened at Amazon short of a massive religious right-wing conspiracy. First, a hacker named weez might be at fault for some mischief. The jury’s still out on whether he could have actually pulled off what he claims to have done. Second, a programmer on the French Amazon website might have caused the problem, a massive glitch. If’ we’ve been trolled, I’ll gladly say so, but still unexplained are why this has been happening for months and why some authors got emails from Amazon saying they were subject to this new “policy”.

another update 5.30pm PDT: Amazon has sent out a slew of emails blaming the situation on “an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error”. I’ve checked the books I listed above and some of the are indeed back in the book rankings. Not yet all, but it seems that Amazon heard the outrage and they are trying to fix things. Kudos to them and hoorah for us.

If you’re a fan of the incredible Maysles documentary, Grey Gardens – Criterion Collection’ target=_blank>Grey Gardens – Criterion Collection’ target=_blank>Grey Gardens, check out this fascinating interview with the woman who bought the Beale mansion in 1979.

Sally Quinn on Owning the Beale Mansion

We were out at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco yesterday to see what was commonly thought to be the next-to-last day of an exhibit of some drawings from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. That meant we stood in line for close to an hour which also meant that we had time to leisurely observe the rooms which we normally rush through and that I had plenty of time to fiddle with the controls on my camera. Even though the ISO is pushed too high, I liked the way this one turned out. The painting is “Portrait of a Young Man with a Green Book” by an anonymous painter in the 16th century.

If you’re interested, the Da Vinci notebook drawings will still be on view for a few more days. Call the museum for the exact closing date. Amazing stuff…

FAMSF: Legion of Honor

On a recent visit to the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, I took some shots with my camera phone. Never thinking that the camera phone was much good for anything besides as pictorial memos or to-do items, I was intrigued by the more creative possibilities:

One of the exhibitions going on is called “The Art of Participation”. One of the participatory events is taking portraits of visitors and then displaying them in rotation as part of a piece by Jochum Gerz called “The Gift 2000/2008”. We did it so if you go you might, as Bush quipped, witness our public hanging.

(By the way, the site displays pictures differently now: if you’re using a java-enabled browser, clicking on a picture will open it in a temporary window. To dismiss the photo, just hit “escape” or the “x”. Also, POTD means one of my photos of the day. One of my NY resolutions was to practice more taking pictures.)

SFMOMA

This one has been making the blog rounds the past few days: Erik Solheim took pictures of the view from the same place on his balcony for a year and then made a beautiful video showing the entire year in 40 seconds. There’s also a 2-minute version:

And, by the way, HAPPY NEW YEAR!

How Erik Solheim did it

Check it out: Wilbur Hall’s comedy vaudeville act abusing a violin (and a little later, a bicycle pump). It’s amazing that he’s actually a really good player. Even more so when you learn (according to Wikipedia) is that his first instrument was trombone.

tidbits: The British composer, Oliver Knussen, mentioned in an interview that this video was a source of inspiration for his violin concerto, which is how I came to find it. Hall played with some great bands, Paul Whiteman’s. Whiteman was the guy who got Gershwin to write his Rhapsody in Blue. Wikipedia also says that Hall reprised this bit on The Gong Show in the 1970s…

So it’s finally come to an end. This weekend it’s time to say goodbye to Opus, whose final strip is running in newspapers and online.

On August 31, Opus was told to choose his final resting place because that’s where he’ll spend ‘forever’. You can see the end here. The final panel is online here. If you need to be caught up, Salon also has the comic back to mid-2007 here. Also interesting is the Wikipedia entry.

I’ll miss ya, anchovy-breath.

On August 20, 21, 23 & 24, some movie theatres will be screening the third Cirque du Soleil film, Delirium. This one documents the final performance of Delirium in London this past April.

While not one of the grand chapiteau performances, this is sure to be entertaining in the ways that are unique to Cirque du Soleil. While music has always been central to the Cirque experience, for Delirium it takes center stage. Designed as a concert to play arenas, it includes music, some of it drawn from past shows, dancers, acrobats and multimedia stuff.

You can search for movie theatres and buy tickets through the Delirium website. In the SF Bay Area, several movie houses are using digital projection.

(And to think, I almost went to work for these folks twice.) 

Delirium website

Cirque du Soleil website