This Weekend: San Francisco’s Eighteenth Annual Pistahan Parade and Festival & San Jose Jazz Festival

Niece G is back in town!  Yay!

This Saturday and Sunday is the Eighteenth Annual Pistahan Parade and Festival at the Yerba Buena Gardens (on Mission between 3rd and 4th Streets).  Self has missed this for the last four or five years, boo.  She’s not going to miss it again.  Niece says she can meet us there.  Son wants to take Amanda to see the city.  And self badly wants to see the exhibit on 17th century Dutch and Flemish painters at the Legion of Honor.  Whew!  She can’t believe all these good things are happening —  at the tail-end of summer!

Here is more information about the Pistahan:

San Francisco’s Annual Pistahan Parade and Festival

Saturday, Aug. 13 and Sunday, Aug. 14

Yerba Buena Gardens

The Dance Pavilion is one of the main attractions.  There will be Open Ballroom Dancing —  Tango, Latin, Line —  performed by the Filipino American Ballroom Dance Club.  There will also be the Sampaguita Dancers, and Mission District Fil-Am Seniors, as well as many other dance clubs, performing folk as well as cultural dances.  On both Saturday and Sunday, there will be a Latin dance class led by instructors from Cheryl Burke’s Dance Studio.  Various youth groups will get to show off their HipHop skills.

Performances begin at 10 a.m. Saturday and continue until 5 p.m.  There’s also an Adobo Cook-off, at 12:30 p.m.

The following day, Sunday, there’s a calamansi cooking demo, at 1:30 p.m., as well as a balut-eating contest, 1:30 p.m. on the Bayanihan Stage. At 3 p.m. Sunday, performances give way to “Open Public Dancing.”

Here’s the link to the official Pistahan website.

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Also this weekend, Aug. 12 – 14, is the San Jose Jazz Festival.  Multi-talented Filipino Jazz musician Bo Razon will be performing at the Festival tomorrow, Friday, 8 p.m., at the Salsa stage with members of Santana and the group Karabali.

Bo Razon has performed with renowned artists like Patti Austin, Julia Fordham, Michael Shapiro (who will be performing with him tomorrow) and Earl Zero, among others.  Over the last few years, Bo has performed in World Music concerts in Paris, Barcelona, and Madrid.  From 1998 to 2006, he taught Afro-Latin rhythms and the music of the African diaspora in the Americas at the College of Music at the University of the Philippines.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

Still Reading Paul Fussell: A Chapter About Poppies

On this Fourth of July, self is still reading Paul Fussell.

Oh, she did a little writing, of course (added a paragraph to putative novel-in-progress which, if she can only finish it will, self hopes, be grreat!  Or, if not great, at least make her a ton of money!)

She also watched a little of the Redwood City Parade:  beautiful chestnut horses with the stars and stripes painted on their rumps!  Awful stink of horse manure!  The Leland Stanford, Jr. University Marching Band (Crazy as always!  Luuved the guy with the floppy pink bunny ears!  Just loved him!).  New this year:  The Sheriff of Redwood City got to ride on his own float.  Or, at least, self doesn’t remember him doing that last year.  Then, hubby and self walked to City Pub and had excellent cold pints of Hefeweizen and plates of fried calamari and crab cakes.  Everything was so excellent and self got a little sleepy.

On the walk back to the car, we passed an exhibit of antique cars.  Next to one of the cars was a donation box for the Wounded Warriors Project.  Self was happy to plunk down a couple of dollars.  In fact, she wishes she could have plunked down a $20, but all she had in her wallet at that moment was $5.

After getting home, self still had to water (for it is very veeery hot!).  And then she took a break from watering to continue reading Paul Fussell.  She doesn’t know yet if he is genius or just eccentric (OK, maybe he is genius), but now she’s on a chapter where he talks about flowers and the importance of flower imagery to all (good) war literature.

For instance, the rose, especially the red rose, is terribly iconic in English literature.  But poppies are, too, as witness their proliferation in writings about Flanders fields.  But the poppies cannot be California poppies —  that is, they cannot be “orange or yellow.”  For a poppy to be considered a true “Flanders poppy,” its flowers have to be a “bright scarlet.”  Or something to that effect.

So now self is trying to remember “Restrepo” (great war documentary she saw with hubby yesterday) and trying to re-capture the imagery.  Well, granted, there are not too many flowers in the cinematography for that movie.  There are a lot of shots of dry brown hills, and later, there is snow.  So perhaps snow is emblematic of something.  In fact, if self remembers correctly, one of the platoon gets killed in the snow?

But, back to the flowers of World War I.  In a book about World War I, The Challenge of the Dead (Fussell describes it as “sentimental, elegiac”), the author, Stephen Graham, “produces a book of 176 pages without once noticing a poppy, although he chooses to notice plenty of other indigenous flowers, including roses and cornflowers.  We can guess that he omits poppies because their tradition is not one he wants to evoke in his book, the point of which is that survivors should now imitate the sacrifice of the soldiers, who in turn were imitating the sacrifice of Christ.  There is something about poppies that is too pagan, ironic, and hedonistic for his purposes.”

!!@@##

Hoooly hot-popcorn analysis!  Care to run that by self again?

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

On Michael Mann and His New Movie

“Public Enemies” is a long movie.  And what makes it seem even longer is the fact that we all know how it’s going to end.  And no matter how cool Johnny Depp is, at a certain point one wonders whether all this is just much ado about nothing.  (Blonde woman seated in the row just ahead of self was on the edge of her seat the whole time, hand pressed to her cheek.  Clearly, there are many Johnny Depp fans who will not share self’s opinion!)

Spoiler Alert!

Self was saddest when Stephen Dorff (Hey, Stephen, where you been hidin’ lately?  You ought to appear in more movies!  Seeing as you still got your looks!) got knocked off.

Marion Cotillard is great.  Johnny Depp is as expected.  Christian Bale is intense and angry as expected.  Final scene outside movie theatre has shades of Brian de Palma’s Eliot Ness movie, “The Untouchables.” Self liked that John Dillinger liked watching movies, as it reminded her that Dear Departed Dad loved movies, a love which he passed on to self.

Let’s see, what else?  The white-haired detective at the end is pretty good, though self doesn’t know his name.

Channing Tatum was in it for all of two minutes.  With his hair dyed a coppery gold and wearing an atrocious blue suit, he was almost unrecognizable.  Why bother putting Channing Tatum in a role where he doesn’t have to do anything (except run around in an orchard)?  What a waste of eye candy!

There were a few other actors self recognized, in itsy-bitsy roles:  Emilie de Ravin (“Lost” and “Brick”), Giovanni Ribisi (“Saving Private Ryan”) and Leelee Sobieski, who is gorgeous but who self hasn’t seen in a movie in years and years, and who has almost no lines to utter.  There was also the guy who plays Faramir in “Lord of the Rings.” (Apologies, dear blog reader, this is about the second or third time that self has seen him in a movie since “Lord of the Rings,” but his name never registers)

Self supposes everyone did it just for a chance to work with Johnny Depp and Michael Mann.

OK, after a certain point, self got bored.  She yawned; her eyelids fluttered (but didn’t actually close, as happened during “Up” —  points in Michael Mann’s favor)  It felt like she was being hit on the head repeatedly:  “Isn’t John Dillinger cool?  Isn’t Johnny Depp playing John Dillinger cool?”  Yeah, yeah, self gets it!  She gets it!  She hated that the music always started up with the rhapsodic elements, just when John was in mortal danger!  Michael Mann’s best movie is still (at least in self’s humble opinion), “Last of the Mohicans”, with Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeleine Stowe.  Now, that was a story that deserved the epic Michael Mann treatment.  The “Miami Vice” movie wasn’t bad, either —  it, too, was epic, but in a campy, “gran boffo” sort of way.

And, having said all that, self just wants dear blog readers to know that hubby and son liked the movie enough to give it “three out of four stars.”

Let’s see, self’s favorite movies (so far) this year are:

• “Land of the Lost”
• “Moon”
• “Star Trek”

The Redwood City 71st Annual Fourth of July Parade was excellent.  Leland Stanford, Jr. Marching Band kicked off the proceedings.  They stopped almost directly in front of where hubby and self were standing and played a song  —   out-of-tune as usual; perhaps that is part of their charm.  Miss California (not the one of the gay marriage quote, but a brunette) was on a float!  Hubby was so excited he barely had time to snap a few pictures.  And it was great fun to see some men in kilts playing the Scottish bagpipes, and another group in pioneer garb who called themselves the “Sons of Union Descendants of the Civil War.”  There was also a group that played the Jackson Five song, “ABC.”  And that was the one and only reference to Michael Jackson during the entire parade.

Afterwards, hubby and self settled in at City Pub for Cajun Fried Calamari, crab cakes and beers, and guess who should show up but the Notre Dame de Namur University librarian, Ruth, and her boyfriend.  Ruth is extremely sweet.  It’s not her fault that, a couple of months ago, the library tried to charge self nearly $200 for a book that self had actually returned.

Self is now cooling her heels at home.  Son took off on a bike ride.  Hubby is watching wrestling.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.