Stationery Store Blues

Moleskine journalist's notebook

Hardcover, 8" x 5.5"

Over at The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross has a plaintive post about changes to the Paper Mate Sharpwriter #2, a vital tool in his life.  The post includes a funny/sad video by Adam Savage, which I urge you to watch in full. Savage does not comment on one change, a new, blunter font used on the pencil itself, but I noticed.

I don't use this particular pencil, but of course I have a personal stationery tragedy. Sometime during the pandemic, Moleskine discontinued the classic journalist's notebook, which had a flip-over hard cover. I didn't go to j-school and never worked at a newspaper, so when I started reviewing, I found a notebook I liked to write in rather than using cheap reporter's notepads. I have not yet been in a situation where such a notepad would be useful, such as pursuing some unwilling public figure while trying to get them to comment on an unpopular subject. In such a circumstance, I'd probably be trying to get my phone in front of their face anyway.

I don't care about reviews telling me that there are notebooks with better paper than the Moleskine. I miss that notebook and learned it had been discontinued too late to try to buy up available supplies. 

It's true that Moleskine makes a miniature version of the flip notebook, but it is seriously too small to be useful to me either for concert notes or interview notes or reading notes. I have used the lined classic Moleskin as well, but my handwriting is not good and even though I am right-handed, I worry about smudging notes of already dubious readability during a concert. There's much less risk of that with a flip notebook. 

Moleskine also makes, or made, a soft-cover full-sized reporter's notebook, and one year I accidentally bought one of them. I took a look at it yesterday and saw that its first use for music-related notes was a season-announcement press conference at SFO. The first note reads:

- Pat, Pat, Pat, and Pat

Clearly, this was the press conference for the 2013-14 season; as announced, Patricia Racette had four roles in three operas. After Dolora Zajick dropped out of Dolores Claiborne, that became five roles in four operas.

After some investigation into alternatives to the journalist's notebook, I wound up using a soft-cover notebook that is sturdier than a reporter's notepad but smaller and much less stiff than a hardcover. It is intended to be used as a landscape-orientation sketch notebook, but I use it in portrait orientation. Nonethless, I miss the Moleskine notebook and wish they'd bring it back.

San Francisco Symphony Auditions

Davies Symphony Hall

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

San Francisco Symphony has a number of auditions coming up.

• Associate principal horn and assistant principal / utility horn. Two positions. This reflects the impact of hiring Diego Incertis Sánchez as principal horn: the principal should have input into hiring to fill the vacancies, because the principal will have a concept of how the horn section should sound and thus helps choose players who will create that sound.
• Associate principal bassoon. This position has been filled for the last year by former principal bassoon Stephen Paulson, so it appears he will be retiring from the orchestra after 48 years in that position.
• Section cello (multiple positions), perhaps reflecting retirements that haven't been announced yet.
• Section viola

 

The Best of 2025

Kang Wang as the title character

The Monkey King

San Francisco Opera

Photo: Cory Weaver, courtesy of SFO

 

SFCV published the writers' collective opinions of the best performances of the year. The Bay Area list is here. My five choices were these:

• Esa-Pekka Salonen's Mahler 2
• Poiesis Quartet at Noe Music
• The Monkey King at San Francisco Opera
• Pivot Festival, Carla Kiehlstedt's 26 Little Deaths
• Tartuffe, Pocket Opera

It was a tough call. Here's the rest of my long list:

• La bohème at SFO; a seriously great run, beautifully directed, with two terrific casts.
• MTT 80, a deeply touching celebration of the man.
  
• Parsifal at SFO
• Rigoletto at SFO
• Bluebeard's Castle at Opera San José
• Turn of the Screw at SFCM, better staged and conducted than what I saw at Santa Fe over the summer.
• John Adams third piano concerto, After the Fall, at SFS. I couldn't include the concert on my short list because the second half was (&)%$)_@_ Carmina Burana.
• Dalia Stasevska at SFS, in the Thorvaldsdottir cello concerto and RWV's Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis.
• Cabrillo Festival, Becoming
• Hello, Star at OP. Just a perfect 45 minutes of opera begging for a larger orchestra. A wonderful libretto, beautiful music, great direction on a tiny stage.
• Donald Runnicles and Irene Roberts at SFS

As you can see, I named four of the last six operas at SFO as among the best things I saw; Dead Man Walking was also superb. SFO had a stupendous year and in fact has been on a roll since the centennial season. Hats off to Matthew Shilvock and his team for this long string of artistic successes, which has also included a fair number of sellouts.

As for the flip side, I am going to pass on flagging concerts I found disappointing or wrong-headed. There's not much doubt that the worst event of the year was Esa-Pekka Salonen's departure from San Francisco Symphony after just five years as music director. He reinvigorated the orchestra's programming, led many great concerts, hired many terrific musicians, and thanks to the short-sightedness of the board and management, which couldn't figure out how to fund his ambitions for the future, he is gone.

• Joshua Kosman's picks
• SFCV Los Angeles writers' picks
• Michael Strickland, SF Civic Center

A New Major Benefactor at San Francisco Opera

Jensen Huang, Lori Huang, and Matthew Shilvock

Photo: Kristen Loken / San Francisco Opera

Jensen and Lori Huang have made a multi-year commitment to donate $5 million/year to San Francisco Opera. If the names seem familiar, Jensen Huang is the CEO of Nvidia, which makes high-performance chips that are in great demand to power artificial intelligence applications and data centers. Nvidia has been in the news quite a bit lately. The Huangs are very wealthy. They were also honorary chairs of the honorary committee for The Monkey King.

San Francisco Opera continues to succeed in cultivating prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, unlike most Bay Area arts organizations. You might or might not have noticed that Dr. William and Mrs. William M. Coughran are major donors at SFO, and if you did notice, you might or might not know that Bill Coughran was a senior vice president of engineering at Google. He's been on the SFO board for a number of years.

SFO has now commissioned two operas based on classic Chinese novels, additional demonstrations of why diversity and inclusion are so important to the arts. Both Dream of the Red Chamber and The Monkey King have been artistic and commercial successes; The Monkey King is utterly sensational and the company could have sold out a few more performances. In past seasons, Omar and El Ultimo Sueño de Frida y Diego were also successfully artistically and commercially. This is why opera must include voices from all cultures.

After the jump is the press release from SFO about the Huangs' donation.

Museum Mondays

Cultural Merger at Crossroads, USA

Sherry Ann Boyd, Piecer, Richmond, CA, 1990

Irene Bankhead, Quilter, Oakland, CA 1990

Routed West, BAMPFA 

Berkeley, CA

November, 2025

Click to enlarge

 

Friday Photo (A Bit Early)

At the grave of Hector Berlioz (December 11 1803 - March 8, 1869).

His wives Harriet Smithson and Marie Recio are also buried here.

October, 2018

 

Belated Museum Mondays

Anna Nicholson

Untitled (Log Cabin, Barn Raising Variation)

Routed West

BAMPFA, November, 2025

 

Frank Gehry

Walt Disney Concert Hall

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

October, 2007

Well, damn, Frank Gehry has died. He was among the greatest architects of our time and certainly one of my favorites. There are few buildings I love as much as Walt Disney Concert Hall, one of the most beautiful buildings I've ever seen; a wonder in design, with so much detail, constantly changing in the light, a Gesamtkunstwerke in every sense of the word, since he designed the building, a fabulously intricate building, down to the fabric used on the seats.

Oh, and it has magnificent acoustics, at least for the audience. I understand from someone who has been there that it can be difficult for the musicians to hear each other on stage. The acoustics aren't quite perfect: the last performances I heard there, in December 2024, were of Schoenberg's mighty oratorio Gurrelieder, which has an immense orchestra and a big chorus. A friend and I agreed that at the sonic maximum, the hall was slightly overloaded and the sound became blurry. Regardless, the hall is still a marvel.

Practically speaking, I have to wonder whether there are any implications to the possible renovation of Davies Symphony Hall, here in San Francisco, since his architectural firm is one of two listed on the project. Davies is acoustically mediocre and dull to look at. A renovation would cost around a half-billion  dollars, not the ridiculous $100 million that I've seen bruited about (see Geffen Hall in NYC for why $500 million is far more realistic).

He won't be buried at WDCH, but Christopher Wren's epitaph in St. Paul's Cathdral, London, applies equally to Gehry: LECTOR, SI MONUMENTUM REQUIRIS, CIRCUMSPICE. ("Reader, if you seek a monument, look around.")

Walt Disney Concert Hall

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

October, 2007

 

Friday Photo

Pelicans

Elkhorn Slough

October, 2025

(Click to enlarge)

 

Belated Museum Mondays

Emma Hall (1878-1949)

Detail of a Double Wedding Ring Quilt

Routed West at BAMPFA

November, 2025