Ken Bullock reviews

Changes to Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service

2012-01-30T09:00:00.001-08:00

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Dear Google user, We're getting rid of over 60 different privacy policies across Google and replacing them with one that's a lot shorter and easier to read. Our new policy covers multiple products and features, reflecting our desire to create one beautifully simple and intuitive experience across Google. We believe this stuff matters, so please take a few minutes to read our updated Privacy Policy and Terms of Service at http://www.google.com/policies. These changes will take effect on March 1, 2012.
One policy, one Google experience

Easy to work across Google Our new policy reflects a single product experience that does what you need, when you want it to. Whether you're reading an email that reminds you to schedule a family get-together or finding a favorite video that you want to share, we want to ensure you can move across Gmail, Calendar, Search, YouTube, or whatever your life calls for with ease.	Tailored for you If you're signed into Google, we can do things like suggest search queries – or tailor your search results – based on the interests you've expressed in Google+, Gmail, and YouTube. We'll better understand which version of Pink or Jaguar you're searching for and get you those results faster.	Easy to share and collaborate When you post or create a document online, you often want others to see and contribute. By remembering the contact information of the people you want to share with, we make it easy for you to share in any Google product or service with minimal clicks and errors.

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Re: Around & About ...

2010-06-16T15:44:00.001-07:00

For music, dance and theater lovers: a rare Bay Area appearance of artists from the ancient, classical Noh theater of Japan: Theatre of Yugen presents Shinosuke Okura, Noh drummer (designated Intangible Cultural Property by the government of Japan), giving a lecture/demo on Noh music and philosophy, "What Is Noh?" this Sunday, 2-4 p.m., followed by a workshop (with flute player Narumi Takizawa) from 4-5. On Monday, 7-9 p. m. Kanze Noh actor Masashi Nomura (son of Noh actor Shiro Nomura) will conduct a workshop in Noh movement and singing, All will be held at Noh Space, Project Artaud, 2840 Mariposa St. in San Francisco's Mission/Potrero. (Lecture/demo: $20. Workshops, $50 each.Progressive discounts for taking two or all three:) Next Wednesday, June 23, Yugen will perform excerpts from MOON OF THE SCARLET PLUMS, a modern Noh piece telling the story of Crazy Horse, featuring Nomura, Okura, Takizawa, Native American performers and Theatre of Yugen actors. (Okura has spent much time playing with Native American musicians, and is associated with AIM founder Dennis Banks.) Nomura will dance a shimai from the Noh play TAKASAGO, and Yugen actors will perform the Kyogen comedy THE MELON THIEF. Koret Auditorium, San Francisco Main Library, Grove Street, off Hyde and Market. Free, (415) 621-0507; www.theatreofyugen.org

(On Saturday, June 19, at 4 p. m., Theatre of Yugen will perform 'The Melon Thief,' with a musical interlude by Shinosuke Okura and Narumi Takizawa at the Santa Cruz Japanese Cultural Fair.

And Tuesday, June 22, at 7-8 p. m. at Noh Space, another special event:

Acclaimed playwright and performer--co-founder of Berkeley's Blake Street Hawkeyes--John O'Keefe's performance work on themes from Japanese theater and myth, MYSTICAL ABYSS, directed by Yugen founder Yuriko Doi. Free.)

'Emmeline' at Cinnabar--A Brilliant, Moving Opera, Brilliantly Produced

2010-06-12T12:02:00.001-07:00

Cinnabar Theater in Petaluma was founded by an operatic baritone 38 years ago, and has produced many excellent operas in the old schoolhouse on a knoll where its performing arts series and school classes are held. But the current show, Tobias Picker's EMMELINE, in its West Coast premiere, is something else again.

Based on a true story, fictionalized by Judith Rossner, it tells the tale of a 14 year-old girl in 19th century New England, sent to a garment factory, where she's seduced and sent home pregnant--and the doomed romance that follows 20 years of spinsterhood, in thrall to her family's sense of shame, when the past boomerangs back into the present. Picker's music is, in SF Classical Voice critic Jeff Kaliss's comment on opening night, reminiscent at times of Benjamin Britten's operas. Sublime and relentless, it carries along a story which could prove melodramatic, though it finally touches on a genuine modern sense of tragedy.

Yet there's humor, and wonderful little moments: Emmeline, smiling in the housing for the oppressive factory, when she sees her own face for the first time in a mirror--and, years later, smiling again at a simple tune on a harmonica, played by the young man she falls for. An unusually balaced opera, musically and dramatically.

Superb singing and acting by the principals, in particular the remarkable Carrie Hennessey, who runs the gamut of the years as Emmeline, a part Patricia Racette (now at SF Opera as Marguerite in a fine FAUST) originated at Santa Fe. Excellent small orchestra, conducted by Nina Shuman (Samuel Bill's arrangement) and chorus, many the young students of Cinnabar's own program, playing and singing the factory girls their own age. Excellent stage direction by Cinnabar artistic director Elly Lichtenstein. Picker has also composed an opera to Dreiser's AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY. This packs a similar social--and emotional--wallop.

Petaluma might seem a ways off--really not so far--and if you go, you won't forget a great, yet intimate musical and dramatic experience. Through June 13. $32-$38. (707) 763-8920; www.cinnabartheater.org

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San Francisco Choral Artists

2010-03-24T22:16:00.000-07:00

San Francisco Choral Artists, directed by the dynamic Magen Solomon (in her 15th year at the podium), has just completed a local tour in honor of their silver anniversary, including a rare Marin County appearance at St. John's Church in Ross, that featured two engaging commissioned works that followed a jaunt through 20th century masterworks of the art, what composer-in-residence Brian Holmes whimsically called "a Golden Oldies show."

Not so much a jaunt after all, but a chronologically arranged trip through dense musical territory, some of it familiar only by analogy to many of its listeners. Starting with a vigorously bi-tonal Charles Ives Psalm 67, from the 1890s, though unpublished till 1939, the program progressed through a Webern piece from 1908, just before atonality, on to Debussy's medievalist Trois Chansons; Poulenc's intensive Lenten Motets; a kind of intermezzo with Gene Purling's arrangement of A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square; Hindemuth's wartime-composed Six Chansons, from Rilke; Elliott Carter's delightful setting of Emily Dickinson's Musicians Wrestle Everywhere; three of Britten's spirited Five Flower Songs (Evening Primrose from John Clare) and Vaughan Williams' Three Shakespeare Songs from 1951, the first, Full Fathom Five, from Ariel's mocking ditty in The Tempest, which has been called one of the great melopoeic verses in European prosody.

All of which laid the groundwork for a half-century leap to Christopher Marshall's The Big Moroccan Sea, commissioned by SFCA from a collaborator they've just named their first composer-not-in-residence, a New Zealander, by way of Samoa, now teaching in Florida.

Based on a news clipping, The Big Morocco Sea conveyed both immensity and intimacy, rendering that impersonal story transparent to the vast expanse of ocean and sky, out of which came the moving words of a nameless castaway (fine singing by tenor Devin Caughey) from a note left on a boat adrift over trackless waters. But this is no outcry in an empty abyss. In constant movement, with ceaseless, practically subliminal activity, the voices all around the soloist parse his story into syllable and sound, darkening then glistening, shifting with the currents, abruptly spiraling up as the wind and waves swell ... a unique and moving experience.

Brian Holmes, who teaches physics (and the physics of musical instruments) at San Jose State University, set Four e. e. cummings songs: in just, hist whist, when god lets my body be--and buffalo bill's ... certainly exhibiting, again, that whimsicality the composer of Fun With Dick And Jane (an opera) and Hums and Songs of Winnie The Pooh (a song cycle in German) freely banks on as his coin of the realm, as it were ... But as Magen Solomon pointed out, deeper, sometimes darker themes emerge. As the cummings poems do themselves, Holmes' settings rhythmically and harmonically play off old forms; by refreshing them, there's immediate insight into the world of childhood, to a folksy (and Halloweenish) awareness of evil--and byplay with a sense of mortality, both in nature and as a sidelong glance to what happens to the too-perfect hero, as in buffalo bill's: "jesus he was a beautiful man"--as an Asian American singer steps in for the blue-eyed impresario
of the Wild West Show, only to be quickly potted by a tall soprano with a toy carbine, the unfortunate hero-substitute sprawling across the pews as the choir intones the conclusion.

Keep an eye out in June for 25 by 25 by 25, Choral Artists' celebration of their 25 years, with a choir of 25, featuring 25 premieres they've made--new pieces by Brian Holmes and Christopher Marshall (something about a pork pie in Samoa ... )

sfca.org