Year: 2005

Today was pretty enjoyable. We got up early to get to the high school one of our members used to attend — a girls' Catholic high school. The building itself was gorgeous, all marble and dark wood. The students seemed to appreciate our music, and the member was obviously still recognized and remembered. Afterwards we went out for sushi with her father at a very nice sushi place in San Francisco — I had tempura and miso soup for the first time (mmm…), and the spicy tuna rolls were delicious.

The original plan had been to go to Stanford, hang out, and sing, but it was raining pretty hard so we decided to punt and head back to where we've been staying instead. We relaxed for a while, a nice antidote to the early morning, and then grabbed a quick supper before heading to a coffeehouse for our evening gig. An alumn{i,a,us} who is a member of an a cappella group called the Special Guests invited us to sing with them at a local coffee shop — they did a set, and then we did our set, ending with the Engineers' Drinking Song, to much general enjoyment. There seemed to be a lot of MIT, and specifically Chorallaries, alums around; either e-mail got sent at some point, or it's just an illustration of the predilection of MIT people to end up in California if they don't stay in Boston. The coffee shop was nice, and it was packed, which was a lot of fun. We sang well, too, sold a bunch of CDs (ah, crass commercialism^H^H^H^Hpersuading other people to help pay for our tour), and got to hang out with some cool alums — it was a good gig.

(As a side note, I'm still developing a feel for the demand for CDs — I brought the whole bag-full to the morning gig, figuring that high schoolers would want CDs and have the money to spend, and we sold two CDs, the first we've sold so far. I "learned" from that and, extrapolating from the fact that most of the other gigs in restaurants, etc. haven't netted any sales, only brought a dozen or so to the coffeehouse. We sold enough that I ended up needing to send somebody out to the car to get more. Nobody who wanted a CD didn't get one, though, which was good. Part of the problem was that I had a mix of old and new CDs, and the old ones don't sell as well, plus an annoying fraction of the CDs have cracked covers, which I don't like to sell. Not quite sure what the mechanism I should use to determine how many CDs I should bring… it's something you learn over time, I guess.)

The Chorallaries may be developing a barbershop auxiliary, at least if the impromptu practicing of "Coney Island Baby/We All Fall" is any indication ("…just like leading lambs to slaughter…"). We're not quite sure how to incorporate it into our concert, or how to explain the fact that the barbershop quartet actually has six guys (maybe like the "increasingly inaptly-named Hitchhiker's trilogy"). Eh, everybody knows MIT students can't count.

After the gig, came back and played Trivial Pursuit, Young People's edition, and watched Family Guy, which seems to be our routine. It'll get broken, though, since today was the last full day we'll be spending in the area. Originally the plan was to head up to Berkeley tomorrow, but given how bad the weather has been, the fact that we want need to be in Menlo Park at 5:30 PM to sing at a dinner with President Hockfield, and the variability of rush hour traffic, our plan is to get packed up in the morning and spend our time at Stanford hanging out, playing Frisbee, and maybe singing, before heading to the gig with Pres. Hockfield, and then on towards San Diego. Updates may be spotty over the next few days, since they may be over dialup — I have unlimited minutes and local access numbers, but I may not have time or energy. We'll see how it goes.

Discovered that I had forgotten my Blogger password, so had to go through the rigamarole of changing it. ::sigh:: I've decided to post here instead of to my Zephyr class to avoid spamming everybody's zlogs. Some time when I have free time (stop laughing!) I'll go through and find what I posted to my class yesterday and put it here, just to preserve continuity. There may also be pictures, whenever we get around to downloading them from the memory cards of the Chorallaries' digital cameras. (I am apparently the only person who brought a laptop on tour. I don't quite understand how these people survive it, sometimes. 😉

Today was a pretty good day — we've found our feet, so to speak, and are starting to get comfortable with San Francisco, so there was a lot less running around trying to figure out what's going on and where we're supposed to be headed. It felt a little bit like all we did today was eat — we got a late start this morning, so the first thing we did in San Francisco was have lunch at Chipotle's, a taqueria like Anna's, only better (though pricier, too). The food was really good, and the portions were huge. I had a burrito with black beans, lime-and-cilantro rice, fresh green pepper and onion, guacamole, and salsa, and I could have happily waited until lunch tomorrow for my next meal. Chipotle's rocked for very large values of rock.

After that we went to the Museum of Modern Art. It was an interesting museum — I was pleased that most of the "modern art" actually managed to be aesthetically attractive as well as "modern." There were a couple of exhibits (eg. the exhibit of art made using experimental photography techniques) which didn't excite me, but otherwise I was quite impressed. One of the painters on exhibit based much of his work off photographs, to the point where you couldn't tell whether the thing on the wall was a painting or a photo unless you got close enough to see the brush-work. There was also an experimental, rather trippy, set of video collages based off the Winchester Mystery House which were interesting, and an exhibit done by an artist who took very (not exactly, but close enough) random words and phrases and put them in interesting contexts, like lab manuals and ketchup-bottle labels. One of the neatest things there was a set of videos taken in various rotating restaurants, all made at the same speed, focused on an unoccupied table, and displayed in a ring around you so that you could look any way and "be" in a different restaurant. Very cool. They also had an exhibit of art made using type which was interesting, though often hard to read — my eyes started to go wonky halfway through, partly because of the trippy art and partly because of the food coma from my burrito. A lot of the art felt like things William Gibson describes in his cyberpunk books. There was also a pretty cool gift shop at the museum — they had a set of chopsticks I thought about buying, but for some reason I'm leery of purchasing cooking utensils at an art museum. Form over function, and all that. Maybe I've just been hanging around with too many engineers lately.

It started raining as we were getting out of the art museum, so we dropped by a Starbucks and got hot drinks, and then took the bus to Ghirardelli Square for the informal gig we had planned. Because of the rain we couldn't sing in the square proper, so we ended up singing in the Ghirardelli ice cream and chocolate shop. It was crowded and there really wasn't enough open space for an a cappella group, but we made it work, and the people seemed to enjoy our music. The management was really nice to us — after we were done singing they brought out a humongous banana split with a half-dozen kinds of ice cream that we shared. (heart) Ghirardelli.

After that some of us considered having a nice seafood meal on Fisherman's Wharf. Since I'd eaten so much so recently (the burrito had nowhere near worn off), I wasn't terribly interested in another meal, so several of us walked around the piers and checked out the touristy trinket shops. We'd seen clam chowder in a sourdough bread bowl advertised by several street vendors and heard that it was good, so we eventually decided on that for our supper and set out to find someone who would sell it to us, but most of the stands had closed up because of the weather, and one of the sit-down restaurants we found which sold it was out of bread bowls. There's an incredible profusion of little seafood stands and small restaurants on that particular pier, though — they're packed in almost literally elbow-to-elbow — and we eventually we found a vendor, but there wasn't really a place to sit down and eat. We ended up walking along the pier in the rain eating clam chowder, and went to an In-and-Out Burger to finish our bread bowls while the vegetarian and kosher-keeping members of our group got food.

After that we found a Borders bookstore to hang out in while the members of the group who had opted for a more expensive seafood meal got the cars, and I picked up a Flogging Molly album I've been meaning to get for a long time, so we now have added Irish punk to the list of musical genres we can listen to on our car rides.

The plan for tomorrow as I understand it is to sing at Sacred Heart, an all-girls Catholic high school which is the alma mater of one of our members, and then go to Stanford and hang out and sing somewhere on campus. We've also got a gig in the evening with an alum (and maybe an alum's group) at a coffeehouse somewhere nearby, which should be fun. If I can find out what the coffeehouse is called, I'll post it for anybody who's in the area.

I should get some sleep — it'll be an early morning tomorrow so we can get to our gig on time. (Silly, it's not even 2500 local time…)

Just got back from the Shakespeare Ensemble's scene night. They did six scenes — four scenes from Shakespeare, a Marlowe scene, and a scene from a modern playwright whose name I didn't immediately recognize. The topic of the production was "Life, Love, Lust, and Regicide," a study of twisted relationships, and for the most part it worked pretty well. The scenes were chosen quite well, and most of the performances were quite good, although the first and the last scenes (the death scene from Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage, and the scene from Shakespeare's Richard III where Richard is wooing Lady Anne) were less than spectacular.

Partly, I think, I disliked the Richard III scene because I did the exact same scene, in a very similar context, last year, and our version was (IMNSHO) much better. At the beginning of the play, Richard, at the time the Duke of Glouchester, kills the King of England and his sons, one of the latter being betrothed to the Lady Anne. The scene in question opens with Lady Anne walking with the entourage taking the dead king's body to be buried, bemoaning her loss and cursing Richard. By the scene's end, however, Richard has convinced her that he killed her husband because he loved her, and has practically married her (hence its inclusion in a selection of scenes about twisted relationships). It's a wonderful, disturbing scene, which very much relies on Lady Anne's obvious revulsion at Richard — the audience needs to feel, fundamentally, how horrific it is for Richard to be wooing her practically over the body of her dead father-in-law, whom he killed. (Richard is depicted as being twisted and physically deformed, making it all the more abhorrent.)

Frankly, I didn't get any kind of emotional connection from this scene in the Shakespeare Ensemble production. The version of the scene I was involved in was very stereotypically Shakespearean, and so perhaps this was a more minimalist version of the scene, but even so I didn't quite buy it. Both the actors stumbled over their lines, Lady Anne especially so — if she was trying to achieve the effect of halting speech because of tears, she wasn't acting obviously grieved enough otherwise for me to buy it. Richard, too, lacked emotion, and the two together lacked any sense of chemistry. There was no sense that Lady Anne was revolted by Richard — she was simply indifferent. Richard gave no feeling that he was even pretending to like Lady Anne, so it was no surprise when he revealed in the closing monologue that he didn't. The actors weren't willing to get close to each other — they kept each other at arm's length, not because of the feelings of their characters, but simply because they weren't willing as actors to do so. It's not an easy hurdle to get past, but it's something good actors need to be able to do. They just didn't emote, and the scene fell flat.

I'm not sure whether the first scene suffered from being poorly acted (not likely, since the actresses were quite competent, though the scene did lack some of the physicality that the better scenes had), being written by Christopher Marlowe (thus setting off my "hey! this isn't Shakespeare!" radar, since I didn't realize until about twenty minutes in that there were playwrights other than the Bard represented), or simply running afoul of the fact that it was the first scene in the production, and so my brain hadn't quite gotten over the fact that these people were talking funny. Perhaps it was all or none of the above. Dido was also one of the few plays presented I hadn't been exposed to before, so it could have been any number of things. It depicted less a twisted relationship, and more a twisted relationship's aftermath. I didn't particularly care for the scene presented — stripping a climactic scene of its context can be dicey, too, since we don't have the emotional attachment to the characters that we would have if we'd seen the whole play — but I'm not sure it was anyone's fault except my own.

The other scenes were quite good. The second scene, from All's Well that Ends Well consisted of a marvelous exchange on virginity between Helen and Parolles — the former (I gathered, having never seen or read the play) wanting to marry the latter, and the latter being somewhat oblivious (or immune) to the advances of his would-be lover. It demonstrated, if nothing else, that Shakespeare is still bawdy even to modern ears. The interplay between the two was wonderful — Helen was wonderfully coy, and the whole scene was amusing. I think having seen the full production I would better appreciate this scene, but even on its own it stood well (no pun, of course, intended).

The third (perhaps the "middle," scene, thematically), was from Michael Folie's Dust, in which a man and a woman lying in bed argue about their relationship. The actors did a very good job at building their respective characters and in their interaction with each other — it is no doubt somewhat akward to be lying half-clothed on a mattress with another person, surrounded by a couple dozen people you've never met before, but the actors seemed comfortable. The scene had a much more redemptive theme than the others; though the relationship was perhaps somewhat rocky, it was growing as well.

It ws, overall, a fun show. I'd like to be more involved with theater here, although it would take time I just don't have at the moment — perhaps over summer, or next IAP. I think it would be a lot of fun, especially since the plays done out here will be in different styles and emphasize different themes than they would back in Iowa. It'd be interesting to see how the experience is different.