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      Where Has Tracy Chapman Been? Her Grammys Triumph Has Fans Wondering

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      Her triumphant performance at the Grammy Awards left fans wondering what she has been doing since she left the music world, and whether she might return.Tracy Chapman’s rare public appearance at the Grammy Awards on Sunday night — where she practically stole the show performing her 1988 song “Fast Car” with the country singer Luke Combs — left many fans wondering why she had largely stepped away from music for more than a decade.Despite some scattered performances on television and at awards shows, Chapman, 59, has remained almost entirely absent from the music world in recent years, having released her last studio album in 2008 and done her last tour in 2009. Since she first emerged in the late 1980s, she has always been known as a reclusive and private figure.“Being in the public eye and under the glare of the spotlight was, and it still is, to some extent, uncomfortable for me,” she told The Irish Times in 2015. “There are some ways by which everything that has happened in my life has prepared me for this career. But I am bit shy.”The acclaim for her Grammys performance — Taylor Swift could be seen singing along in the crowd — was a sign of how beloved Chapman remains. Combs’s note-for-note cover of “Fast Car” went to No. 2 on Billboard’s pop singles chart last year, and after the Grammys, Chapman’s original began shooting up iTunes’s download chart.After her debut LP, “Tracy Chapman,” was released in 1988 — and went to No. 1 on the Billboard chart — she released seven more studio albums. Her last, “Our Bright Future,” came out in 2008. Jon Pareles of The New York Times described it as a collection of “morose love songs” as well as “her latest utopian vision of a world without war or greed.”Chapman performed at the Kennedy Center Honors in 2012. Kevin Wolf/Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hundreds of Shadow Puppets Were Stolen. A Bystander Helped Crack the Case.

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      Many of the puppets were still missing, however, after the theft of a U-haul truck in San Francisco holding props for the critically acclaimed Persian epic “Song of the North.” It was unclear if the show would go on.Inside the U-Haul were nearly 500 handmade shadow puppets and dozens of masks, costumes and backdrops — the culmination of three years of painstaking labor, which, on Sunday evening, came to life in a balletic performance before a crowd of hundreds at a theater in San Francisco.On Monday morning, the puppeteers awoke to find the truck gone.At first, they hoped the truck, parked at a Comfort Inn in the city’s northeast, had been mistakenly towed, said Hamid Rahmanian, 55, an Iranian American artist and the creator of the show “Song of the North,” an adaptation of the Persian poet Ferdowsi’s 10th-century epic “Shahnameh” that combines shadow puppetry, animation and music.But when hotel employees reviewed the security camera footage, it quickly became clear that the truck had been stolen. “My face dropped — my hands became cold,” Rahmanian said. Then, more than 48 hours later, on Wednesday morning, he received a call: A resident had spotted the truck in the city’s west, and notified the police. Rahmanian rushed to the scene to find years of careful work strewn about the truck in a “shamble.”The thieves appeared to have rifled through the boxes inside the truck, throwing some things away, and destroying others, he said, noting that while the full scale of the damage was unclear, at least 200 puppets were missing, and all of the costumes were gone.The next stop on the show’s global tour was Seattle, where a performance was scheduled for Friday. It was unclear whether the show would go on.The San Francisco Police Department said that it had received a call Wednesday morning from a resident in Richmond, northeast of San Francisco, about a “possible recovered stolen vehicle.”The police confirmed it was the same U-Haul and were investigating. No arrests had been made. The department did not offer more information about the contents of the security camera footage.Rahmanian, who moved from Iran to New York three decades ago to pursue a career in graphic design, said he had created “Song of the North” over several years in an endeavor to adapt the “Shahnameh,” or “Book of Kings,” for a Western audience. “There is a misrepresentation of Iranian culture, and everything is very much politicized,” he said. “Iran is like a symphony. But we only hear one note.”His work has garnered glowing reviews and audiences in places including China, Poland and Iowa. The puppet performances can take years to lay out in storyboards and to design and choreograph, Rahmanian said, noting that “Song of the North” involves 352 frames and an ensemble of nine people whose actions must be precise to the inch. For the 83-minute duration of the show, he added, “they work like a Swiss watch.”The laborious, costly work has not been very lucrative, he said, noting that he preferred to keep ticket prices affordable so that families could attend the shows. “There is no sane person” who would do this kind of work, he said. “The math doesn’t work.” In part, that is why he and his team decided to rent their own U-Haul instead of hiring outside contractors, he added, saying, “We thought we’re going to save a little bit of money.”The puppets don’t “have any value for these thieves,” their creator, Hamid Rahmanian, said through tears.Richard Termine Just after 8:30 p.m. on Sunday, he and his team loaded their wares into the truck, which was parked near the Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, where Sunday’s show was held. They drove it less than a mile to the Comfort Inn, where they arrived at 9:13 p.m., Rahmanian said, noting he had felt anxious, given San Francisco’s reputation for crime, but told himself it was going to be fine in a parking lot.The next morning, the truck had disappeared.U-Haul did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday evening, but Rahmanian said that after the truck was stolen, the company had told him that it was not fitted with a GPS device and that it could not be located. Choice Hotels, which manages the Comfort Inn, also did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Abbas Milani, a professor of Iranian studies at Stanford University, said in an email that Rahmanian’s work offered an “antidote to the dangerous delusions of stereotypes” through an empathetic portrayal of Iranian culture. Rahmanian’s adaptations of the Shanameh, he added, “offered a rich tapestry of the joyous, even epicurean culture of Iran.”Rahmanian said he was particularly buoyed on Sunday evening, as the audience lingered in the lobby to discuss the show — which begins with a warrior imploring two armies to stop fighting. Two of the enemies then fall in love, he said, noting that “Song of the North” was ultimately a tale of forgiveness.It felt “cosmic,” he added, to wake up the next morning to find that even art didn’t appear to be safe from the ugliness of the world. “It doesn’t have any value for these thieves,” he said through tears on Tuesday evening, before the truck was located. “They’re going to open it up and realize, oh my god, it’s just puppets.”On Tuesday, Rahmanian said he would not press charges against those who stole the truck. He added, “I forgive you.” More

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      Terence Blanchard, Pushing Jazz Forward From a New Perch

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      The trumpeter and composer follows the premiere of two Met operas with an appointment as executive artistic director of SFJazz in San Francisco and a Jazz Masters honor.Two big announcements came down recently about the trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard — both monumental, neither one a surprise.In June, the National Endowment for the Arts announced that Blanchard, 61, would receive a 2024 Jazz Masters fellowship, the highest lifetime-achievement honor available to a United States-based improviser.Then a month later, as if a reminder that this lifetime still has a few major chapters ahead, the nonprofit organization and performance center SFJazz named Blanchard its executive artistic director. Hardly any other musician has so solid a grasp on the scope of what’s going on in jazz today — and no institution is as committed to reflecting, even goading, its growth.A six-time Grammy winner, Blanchard possesses one of the most commanding and slippery trumpet styles in jazz, and for almost a decade he has led one of its most reliable ensembles, the E-Collective, full of musicians a couple of decades his junior. He has written and recorded over 40 film scores, including for most of Spike Lee’s movies. Despite being a conservatory dropout himself, he has become a leading educator, helping shape programs at U.C.L.A., the University of Miami and the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz. And in recent years, he has made headlines for the back-to-back Met premieres of his two operas, “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and “Champion.”All of which makes for relevant job training for the new role. “The thing that I’ve always loved about SFJazz is that they don’t treat the music like it’s a fossil,” Blanchard said in a phone interview. “It’s a living, breathing, ongoing thing. And they respect young artists who are bringing something different to the table.”Blanchard is taking the reins directly from SFJazz’s founder, Randall Kline, who has run the organization since it started in 1982, always with a passion for what’s next. “I remember thinking how much I love that dude,” Blanchard said. “He was just a serious music lover who happened to be a promoter.”Blanchard onstage at the SFJazz Gala in June 2022.Drew Altizer PhotographySFJazz began as a jazz festival and traveling presenter around San Francisco. It convened a house ensemble of all-star musicians, the SFJazz Collective, in 2004, and opened the $64 million, state-of-the-art SFJazz Center in 2013. This week, Blanchard and Kline will both be at the kickoff for the center’s 2023-24 season, the last booked by Kline.SFJazz’s board chair, Denise Young, who led the search for Kline’s replacement, said Blanchard stood out because he “had a vision that matched what we believed was important to this music in these times.”Blanchard will relish the chance to pick up on one of Kline’s pet obsessions: bringing new technologies to the SFJazz stage. And as a musician who consistently uses his platform to speak about social issues — recording music with Cornel West, dedicating an album to the memory of Eric Garner, putting narratives of Black queer life into song — he’s also eager to confront questions of unequal access in a city where inequality continues to balloon.He’d like to keep SFJazz high-tech, but low-barrier when it comes to entry. To promote “outreach into the community,” he said, he envisions a matinee concert program directed at students in local high schools, and a series of traveling shows that might bring SFJazz-level talent into some of the Bay Area’s more neglected neighborhoods.Last week Blanchard stole an hour for an interview from his new office there. The building buzzed around him as the team prepared for the season launch, and by the end of the call an assistant was hovering, waiting to whisk him away to a donor meeting.Born and raised in New Orleans, Blanchard broke out on the New York scene in the early 1980s — the so-called Young Lions era, when many were longing for a return to the halcyon sounds of midcentury jazz. In 1982, he joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, taking over the trumpet chair from Wynton Marsalis, his childhood friend. Then he followed Marsalis onto the roster of Columbia Records, where he recorded a series of straight-ahead albums with a quintet he and Donald Harrison led.While Marsalis doubled down on Neo-Classicism, founding and directing Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York as a beacon of tradition, Blanchard has veered toward the cutting edge. With his E-Collective, he has emulated Blakey in one crucial way: His side-musicians are all significantly younger. On other fronts, Blakey wouldn’t recognize much of that quintet’s tool kit: the electronic effects, the hip-hop backbeats, the swatches of distorted guitar and electric bass.So there’s something poetic about seeing Blanchard — the Young Lion-turned-innovator — land at SFJazz, which has long been positioned as a kind of left-coast alternative to Marsalis’s JALC. “The idea was eclecticism: Don’t fly the flag of one thing,” Kline said in an interview. “San Francisco at the time had all these amazing scenes going: There was an Asian American jazz scene, there was this kind of trad-jazz scene, there was this hard-core avant-garde thing going, there was Brazilian music and Afro Cuban music.”To the extent that SFJazz has developed a winning formula, Kline said, “it’s been a formula around being open.”That conviction came in handy when Blanchard was invited to SFJazz in the mid-2010s for a series of artist residencies. He had recently composed “Champion,” which tells the tragic story of the world champion boxer Emile Griffith, and an opera company in San Francisco was hoping to stage it. The center had never done an opera before, and sure, this wasn’t exactly “jazz,” but it was just the kind of ambitious project that the center was built to handle.“The thing that I’ve always loved about SFJazz is that they don’t treat the music like it’s a fossil,” Blanchard said. “It’s a living, breathing, ongoing thing. And they respect young artists who are bringing something different to the table.”Ike Edeani for The New York Times“It fit so perfectly with our programming aesthetic, and also getting creative around the space,” Kline said. “It was just as good as it gets.”When Blanchard had first been approached about an opera commission in the early 2010s, he was thrilled. His father had sung opera, and he had grown up hearing Puccini and Verdi in the house, along with the sounds of jazz and Black popular music. But he wasn’t sure where to begin.So he did what he’d done at so many inflection points throughout his career: He went to his teacher, Roger Dickerson, a now 89-year-old composer and pianist and a New Orleans music giant in his own right, who had helped Blanchard write his first large-scale compositions.“He told me, ‘Stop thinking about writing an opera, just tell a story,’” Blanchard remembered. “That was extremely helpful for me, because then I wasn’t trying to live up to something.”“Tell your story” is, of course, a catchphrase among jazz musicians. But partly thanks to his work with Dickerson, Blanchard has developed a special aptitude for using music to narrate ideas and convictions — which swiftly moves listeners past any fixation on genre. Dickerson also thinks of it as a reminder that complexity, nuance and misdirection don’t have to dilute narrative drive — or even relatability — but can in fact enhance a story line.“He could pick up on little things that I would show him, and very quickly discover the inside meaning of it. That is, make it his own,” Dickerson said in an interview, remembering Blanchard’s interpretive skills even at age 16. That ideal — learn the fundamentals, and then make something undeniably yours — is something that Blanchard has passed on to his own students.Ambrose Akinmusire, who studied with Blanchard in the 2000s, remembered him stopping class whenever he heard students making direct references to old jazz tropes. “We don’t do that here,” he recalled him saying.On the flip side, Blanchard remembers having to convince the cast of “Fire” that they should draw upon their whole musical lexicon. “I’m listening to them warm up, and I’m realizing a lot of those singers grew up in the church, sang gospel, some of them were jazz singers — but they were all taught to throw that away when you sing opera,” he said.“I said, ‘Listen man, bring all of that back to your performance. This is a current story, so hearing gospel in the middle of this is no problem. Hearing you sing a blues phrase, because you’re a jazz musician, is no problem. And, man, I can’t tell you the type of performances we got out of people.” More

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      David LaFlamme, Whose ‘White Bird’ Captured a 1960s Dream, Dies at 82

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      As a founder of the San Francisco band It’s a Beautiful Day, he was at the center, if not in the forefront, of the Haight-Ashbury acid-rock explosion.David LaFlamme, who infused the psychedelic rock of the 1960s with the plaintive sounds of an electric violin as a founder of It’s a Beautiful Day, the ethereal San Francisco band whose breakout hit, “White Bird,” encapsulated the hippie-era longing for freedom, died on Aug. 6 in Santa Rosa, Calif. He was 82.His daughter Kira LaFlamme said the cause of his death, at a health care facility, was complications of Parkinson’s disease.Mr. LaFlamme had seemed an unlikely fit for the role of flower-power troubadour. He was a classically trained violinist who had performed with the Utah Symphony Orchestra. He was an Army veteran. “When I was a young man, I carried my M-1 very proudly and was ready to do my duty to defend my country,” he said in a 2007 video interview.But the times were the times, and in 1967, the year of the Summer of Love, he and his wife, Linda, a keyboardist, formed It’s a Beautiful Day. The band bubbled up from the acid-rock cauldron of the Haight-Ashbury district, which also produced the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and other groups.The band never found the commercial success of its hallowed San Francisco contemporaries. Its debut album, called simply “It’s a Beautiful Day” and released in 1969, climbed to No. 47 on the Billboard chart. “White Bird,” sung by Mr. LaFlamme and Pattie Santos, did not manage to crack the Hot 100 singles chart, perhaps in part because of its running time: more than six minutes, twice the length of most AM radio hits.Even so, the song became an FM radio staple, and an artifact of its cultural moment.The LaFlammes wrote the song in 1967, when they were living in the attic of a Victorian house during a brief relocation to Seattle. The lyrics took shape on a drizzly winter day as they peered out a window at leaves blowing on the street below.White birdIn a golden cageOn a winter’s dayIn the rain“We were like caged birds in that attic,” Mr. LaFlamme recalled. “We had no money, no transportation, the weather was miserable.”He later said the song, with its references to darkened skies and rage, was about the struggle between freedom and conformity. In an email, Linda LaFlamme said that she considered it a song of hope, and that the only rage they had felt was about the Seattle weather.Still, the song, with its pleading chorus, “White bird must fly, or she will die,” seemed to echo the mounting disillusionment of 1969, as marmalade skies turned into storm clouds with the realities of drug addiction and social turmoil, as epitomized by the bloodshed at the Altamont rock festival that year.“It was a very solemn period of music on that first album,” Mr. LaFlamme said in a 2003 interview published on the music website Exposé.“If I would have kept going that way,” he added, “I would have ended up like Jim Morrison, getting more and more into that personal torture trip.”It’s a Beautiful Day’s debut album, released in 1969, reached No. 47 on the Billboard chart. But the band never found a fraction of the commercial success of some of its fellow San Francisco bands.Columbia recordsDavid Gordon LaFlamme was born on May 4, 1941, in New Britain, Conn., the first of six children of Adelard and Norma (Winther) LaFlamme. He spent his early years in Los Angeles, where his father was a Hollywood stunt double, before settling in Salt Lake City, where his father became a copper miner.David was about 5 when he got his first violin, a hand-me-down from an aunt.“I began fooling around with it on my own and taught myself to play ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,’” he said in a 1998 interview. Formal training followed.After joining the Army — he was stationed at Fort Ord, near Monterey, Calif. — he suffered hearing damage from the firing of deafening ordnance. He ended up in a military hospital in San Francisco, then put down roots in the city after his discharge in 1962.He found lodging in the same house as his future wife, Linda Rudman. “By the second day that I was there, she and I had already written a song together,” he said.In 1967, Mr. LaFlamme formed a band called Electric Chamber Orkustra, also known as the Orkustra, with Bobby Beausoleil, a young musician who played bouzouki and would later be convicted of murder as a follower of Charles Manson. A run with Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks followed before the LaFlammes formed It’s a Beautiful Day.The band got its break in October 1968, when the promoter Bill Graham had it open for Cream in Oakland. It’s a Beautiful Day signed with Columbia Records soon after.The band’s second album, “Marrying Maiden,” rose to No. 28 on the album charts. But by then the LaFlammes had split up and his wife had left the band. (They divorced in 1969.)It’s a Beautiful Day carried on with varying lineups and released three more albums, including “At Carnegie Hall” in 1972, before disbanding a year later.In addition to his daughter Kira, from his first marriage, Mr. LaFlamme is survived by his third wife, Linda (Baker) LaFlamme, whom he married in 1982; his sisters, Gloria LaFlamme, Michelle Haag and Diane Petersen; his brothers, Lon and Dorian; another daughter, Alisha LaFlamme, from his marriage to Sharon Wilson, which ended in divorce in 1973; and six grandchildren.Mr. LaFlamme released several albums over the years, including a solo album in the mid-1970s called “White Bird,” which included a disco-ready version of the original single. It actually outperformed the original, peaking at No. 89 on the Billboard Hot 100.But, he said in 1998, “It was a very difficult period musically, because during that period disco music ruled the earth.”“It was really the day the music died,” he said. More

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      Living a ’60s-Style California Dream in 1998

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      It’s not easy to do your job when everyone around you is having a good time.I hugged my father goodbye in Dublin and boarded a plane for New York. My best friend from college was with me. We had student work visas and a vague plan to make enough money to spend the summer in California. We had visions of swimming in the Pacific and walking across the Golden Gate Bridge.After a visit with my cousin in Manhattan, we flew out to San Francisco. It was gray and cold. The hostel on Market Street was more than a little depressing, so we ended up staying with two girls from Ireland in a tiny room on the top floor of a house in Berkeley.The four of us slept on the carpet and shared a bathroom with a bunch of students. After several sleepless nights, I found a thin foam mattress in a thrift shop and carried it upstairs.We fell in love with vibrant Berkeley and spent as much time as we could in its music stores, bookstores and cafes. It was 1998, but the earthy scent of Nag Champa lingered in the air, just as it must have in the hippie days.For a few weeks I commuted on a BART train to a monotonous telemarketing job in San Francisco. Then came a brief stint at a sleazy burger joint off Union Square. In Berkeley I worked at Blondie’s Pizza, which I enjoyed, but none of the jobs paid much, so I kept looking.One Wednesday afternoon I spotted a flyer pinned to the window of a yellow building four blocks from Mission Street: A company called Peachy’s Puffs was hiring young women to sell cigarettes, sweets and other novelties at events and clubs in the area.Curiosity and the need for cash propelled me through the door and into a dingy office. Lining the walls were glamour shots of women resembling movie stars from decades earlier. The job interview was quick and to the point. A dark-haired man seated behind a cluttered desk ordered me to twirl around.“You’ve got a pretty cute body!” he said, looking me up and down.As I filled out some paperwork, he told me to come back on Friday in a nice dress, so that I could go to the Furthur Festival. I had no idea what this festival was, but I was game. He also instructed me to buy new shoes and a flashlight. Then he scribbled an address on a scrap of paper and told me to get a vendor’s permit down the street.When I mentioned the Furthur Festival to my friends, they were thrilled on my behalf. It was almost impossible to get tickets for the event, they said, not to mention expensive, and the Other Ones, a band composed mainly of surviving members of the Grateful Dead, would be headlining.My pals were so excited that they planned to catch a ride to Mountain View, where the festival was held, and camp outside the gates of the Shoreline Amphitheater, where they would be able to hear the music for free.On Friday I was back in the dingy office in San Francisco dressed in a pink vintage frock, a knee-length shift dress that cost $15 in Haight-Ashbury. I complemented it with my worn-in combat boots, since I couldn’t bring myself to spring for new shoes.My appearance failed to impress the man who hired me. He looked me over with a neutral expression, handed me a heavy tray stacked with candy and grudgingly ordered me onto the minivan idling outside.Nervously, I climbed aboard. Three young women seated in the back wore colorful makeup to go with their bright, low-cut belly tops, short pleated skirts and platform sandals. They sat upright, trays on their knees, and eyed my chunky old boots with disdain. Just before the driver slammed the door, a woman in a red flapper dress joined us.On the long drive to Mountain View, I wondered at the exorbitant candy prices. Who would pay $5 for a packet of M&M’s? And I was somehow supposed to sell everything in my tray, or I wouldn’t make any money.The traffic grew thick near the festival grounds, and I began to get a sense of what was going on. This was a movement of sorts, and the movement involved thousands of people of all ages, many of them modern-day hippies in flowing skirts, summer dresses, tie-dye shirts and sandals. There were even a few colorfully painted Volkswagen buses along the road. Everybody glowed.On a grassy hilltop inside the gates, I set down my overflowing tray. Music blasted from large speakers. I sat next to Nubia, one of my new co-workers, and for a while we watched the people dancing in the California sunshine, their bodies loose and happy.I thought of how reserved the Irish are on the dance floor, unless they’ve been drinking. Here, the crowd was alive, energetic and buzzed. White-bearded men twirled with barefoot children. Dreadlocks bounced on bare shoulders.By the time Rusted Root came onstage, Nubia and I could stand it no longer. We jumped up and started dancing with abandon. The air smelled of patchouli. After a while, she lifted her tray and went back to work, but I couldn’t stop. I had barely sold any candy, but I didn’t care.As Hot Tuna played, a few people approached me. Smiling, they plucked packets of candy from the assortment and asked how much they cost. They shook their heads at the price and many walked away.“Overpriced,” I said to the next customer.“A rip-off,” I said to another.And then I started giving the candy away.My offerings were met with warm embraces. A few people even told me they loved me. They called out to friends, waving them over.Darkness fell as the Other Ones took the stage. Their soothing jams sounded like prayers as I danced in the evening chill. My candy was all but gone, but my circle of friends had increased.Grateful for the M&M’s I had given her, and observing how cold I was, a young woman removed a green woolen blanket from her shoulders and draped it across mine. She told me her name was Rose and said the blanket had been knit by her Irish grandmother. She insisted I keep it, even as I objected. We took photos together, our smiles wide, our bodies close.I made no money that day. In fact, I owed the Peachy’s Puffs company $40, which I paid on the spot. It was worth every penny.Carmel Breathnach is a writer and teacher in Portland, Ore. Her work has appeared in The Irish Times, Huffington Post and Beyond, among other publications. More

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      Book Review: ‘Who Does That Bitch Think She Is?” by Craig Seligman

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      WHO DOES THAT BITCH THINK SHE IS? Doris Fish and the Rise of Drag, by Craig SeligmanFrom wee-hours cabaret to prime-time reality TV to fiercely contended children’s story hour at the local library, the American drag queen’s journey has been a long and bumpy one.For Doris Fish, alter ego of Philip Clargo Mills, it began not in America but Manly Vale, an apt-sounding suburb of Sydney, Australia,and ended in AIDS-ravaged San Francisco, 1991 — with resurrection, one source maintains, as a ghost composed variously of golden sparks and Evian water.I had not known of Fish before reading the journalist Craig Seligman’s minutely observed new biography of him (though some friends used the female pronoun, “he never wanted to be a woman — he never even wanted to seem like a woman,” the author writes). I finished it persuaded this was a life well worth examining, if only because his peers are so often celebrated, or excoriated, in aggregate.Most of Fish’s performances are unrecoverable, but those that can be scratched up are indelible. Best known, in a limited way, is probably “Vegas in Space,” a posthumously released and deeply weird 1991 sci-fi comedy about male earthlings who undergo sex-change operations so they can travel to a female-only planet (something about recovering stolen jewels…).Promoting the movie during its production period on a Pittsburgh morning show in 1986, Fish gamely endures being treated like a talking zoo animal by the gawking hosts and awkwardly grinning housewives. There’s also a choppy video out there of his swan song, “This Is My Life,” fervidly performed in a caftan and satin gloves at the benefit from which the book takes its name. He was months from death.Born in 1952, Philip was the middle child of six in a tolerant Catholic family that permitted a marijuana plant on the premises. He played a high-kicking chorus girl under a priest’s tutelage at his all-boy school’s year-end musical with more enthusiasm than most of his classmates. Remarkably indifferent to the prospect of arrest or social censure, he joined a local troupe called Sylvia and the Synthetics whose outré antics had me scrawling exclamation points in the margins.One female impersonator’s considerable male member was tucked through his legs to simulate a tail. Another pinned back her hair with swastikas. Another bit into a dripping sheep’s heart to punctuate a lovelorn ballad, blood dripping onto her ball gown like one of the less tasteful Valentine’s Day bitmojis. There were flash mobs of Marilyn Monroe impersonators and teetering pyramids of performers on quaaludes. “Everything was permitted,” Seligman writes dryly, “including ineptitude.”After working for the Florence Broadhurst wallpaper factory, from which he filched metallic powders for his cosmetics, Philip/Doris moved to San Francisco, money sewn into his pockets by his loving mother, Mildred, and found his true calling. Mostly this was what was then called prostitution, though in Fish’s hands it seems more like a kind of sexual nursing. He specialized in relations with those society often rejected, the obese or infirm. (There was a green-card marriage to a lesbian, one of the few survivors of his circle who declined to be interviewed here.)He acted as “comedy model” for a greeting-card company called West Graphic, portraits that Seligman compares to the work of Cindy Sherman. He wrote a popular column for The San Francisco Sentinel, then an essential gay weekly. And he performed in a group called Sluts a-Go-Go, emulating faded stars of the ’30s and ’40s while occasionally brushing up against rising ones of the period (Robin Williams, Lynda Carter). The Sluts and their associates were equal-opportunity offenders, doing racial as well as gender impressions, spewing double entendre and sometimes seeming to positively assault their audiences with sensory overload, exaggerated glamour and flagrant disregard for safety codes.Though revolutionary in his in-your-faceness, Fish was not particularly political; the sincerity such activity requires was anathema. One of the more intriguing aspects of his foreshortened life was an attitude described here as Romantic Cruelism: a pose of complete indifference or dark humor even in the face of tragedy.Fish displays it when his parents divorce; when a younger sister dies after a mysterious illness; and when one Synthetic, who had been a childhood friend, perishes in a fire: “Burnt to a cinder in a room full of exotic drag. All they found was a tooth,” as Spurt!, a local punk zine, callously memorialized. “The young don’t know what to do with endings,” Seligman writes, and there were so many more to come.“Who Does That Bitch Think She Is?” revisits and draws from a 1986 profile of Fish that Seligman wrote for skittish editors at Image magazine, a weekend section of The San Francisco Examiner. Aside from overuse of the words “notoriety” and “notorious,” it is confidently written, wistful and quite personal; Seligman’s now-husband, Silvana Nova, was part of Fish’s scene.The author of a previous book comparing Pauline Kael and Susan Sontag, Seligman diverts here and there to Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp,’” but spends most of his time simply retracing Fish’s footsteps. At times these seem akin to the old Hans Christian Andersen version of “The Little Mermaid,” whose heroine is granted the power to walk out of the water, but only with the pain of swords going through her. (In one parade, Fish’s elaborate costume included fiberglass “legs” that drew blood from his own, covering the stains with black tights.)Seligman’s own stance is mostly one of wary wonderment, that drag queens have gone from “totally beyond the pale” to mainstream acknowledgment, “from feared freak into object of fascination,” from the shaky spotlight to — however contentiously — the kindergarten rug. He piles a lot of historical weight on Fish’s shoulders, but his subject carries it like Joan Crawford in a padded Adrian frock.WHO DOES THAT BITCH THINK SHE IS? Doris Fish and the Rise of Drag | By Craig Seligman | Illustrated | 352 pp. | PublicAffairs | $29 More

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      ‘Try Harder!’ Review: California Overachievement Test

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      This documentary from Debbie Lum goes inside a top-performing San Francisco public high school to see how students are preparing for the future.The coming-of-age documentary “Try Harder!” from the director Debbie Lum (“Seeking Asian Female”) immerses us in the world of elite college admissions at one of San Francisco’s top-performing public high schools: Lowell High. Equal parts vérité character study and probing meditation on the virtues of success, the film follows a group of five delightfully earnest overachievers who have internalized, to a stunning degree, the necessity of getting into Stanford and Harvard and other top-tier colleges. Watching these bright, motivated young people apply for and be admitted to (and rejected from) the Ivy League has all the energy of a high-stakes poker game and a reality competition show combined.The film mostly takes place inside the school, yet its inventive and unexpected visuals manage to avoid classroom banality. When the camera zooms in on the science posters on the walls around the student (and aspiring brain surgeon) Alvan Cai, as he gushes about Lowell’s beloved physics teacher Mr. Shapiro, the close-up transforms these dog-eared microscopic images of biology into sharp abstract paintings. Lum and the cinematographers Lou Nakasako and Kathy Huang skillfully harness the depth of field of their images to routinely point us toward a wider view that the Lowell students often lack.As Lowell has a majority Asian American student population, the film briefly takes up the complex well of anti-affirmative action sentiment among some Asian Americans, but its attempts to use Lowell teachers as talking heads on this topic feel stunted and confusing. (Here Peter Nick’s film “Homeroom” pairs nicely as another Bay Area-set doc that examines youth politics to greater satisfaction.)However, Lum smartly interrogates the “tiger mom” archetype by presenting more than one kind of Asian mother, and focuses on the experience of a biracial student (Rachael Schmidt) to debunk the myth that Black students only get into Ivies to meet quotas. Quiet yet assertive, “Try Harder!” itself succeeds at not trying too hard.Try Harder!Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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      If Remote Work Empties Downtowns, Can Theaters Fill Their Seats?

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      Since the pandemic, San Francisco has embraced work-from-home policies. Now venues and concert halls are wondering if weeknight audiences are a thing of the past.SAN FRANCISCO — As live performance finally returns after the pandemic shutdown, cultural institutions are confronting a long list of unknowns.Will audiences feel safe returning to crowded theaters? Have people grown so accustomed to watching screens in their living rooms that they will not get back into the habit of attending live events? And how will the advent of work-from-home policies, which have emptied blocks of downtowns and business districts, affect weekday attendance at theaters and concert halls?Nowhere is that last question more urgent than here in San Francisco, where tech companies have led the way in embracing work-from-home policies and flexible schedules more than in almost any other city in the nation. Going to a weeknight show is no longer a matter of leaving the office and swinging by the War Memorial Opera House or the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall.“As people work from home, it is going to change our demographics,” said Matthew Shilvock, the general director of the San Francisco Opera. “It’s something that could be a threat. We’re all trying to wait and see whether there’s a surge of interest in live activity again or is there a continuation of just being at home, not coming into the city from the suburbs.”Arts groups are trying to gauge what the embrace of more flexible work-from-home policies will mean for their ability to draw audiences in a city whose housing crunch has already driven many people to settle far from downtown. Close to 70 percent of the audiences at the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Symphony — two nationally recognized symbols of this city’s vibrant network of performing arts institutions — live outside the city, according to data collected by the two organizations.“As people work from home, it is going to change our demographics,” said Matthew Shilvock, the general director of the San Francisco Opera, which presented a new production of Beethoven’s “Fidelio” this fall.Cory Weaver/San Francisco OperaSome economists see the trend of remote work persisting. “It’s likely we are going to have more people working from home than other places,” said Ted Egan, the chief economist for the city and county of San Francisco. “The tech industry seems to be the most generous for work-from-home policy, and employees are expecting that.”Twitter announced in the early months of the pandemic that it would allow almost all of its 5,200 employees, most based at its San Francisco office, to work at home permanently. At Salesforce, which has 9,000 employees, employees will only have to come to work one to three days a week; many will be allowed to work at home full time. Dropbox, which has its headquarters in San Francisco, also has adopted a permanent work-from-home policy. Facebook and Google, both of which have a significant presence in San Francisco, have implemented work-from-home policies.Egan said that the trend might pose more of a problem for the city’s bars and restaurants than for its performing arts institutions. “My suspicion is that performing arts are going to be less sensitive to working from home than other sectors,” he said. “It’s not the kind of purchase you do after work on a whim, like going for happy hour.”Attendance has been spotty as this city’s art scene climbs back. Just 50 percent of the seats were filled the other night for a performance of “The Displaced,” a “gentrification horror play” by Isaac Gómez, at the Crowded Fire Theater. “We had sold-out houses on Friday, Saturday and Sunday and much lower participation on Wednesday and Thursday night,” said Mina Morita, the artistic director. “It’s hard to tell if this is the new normal.”There were some patches of empty seats across the Davies Symphony Hall the other night, as the San Francisco Symphony presented the United States premiere of a violin concerto by Bryce Dessner, even though it was the third week of the long-delayed (and long-anticipated) first season for Esa-Pekka Salonen, its new music director. The concerto, with an energetic performance by Pekka Kuusisto, the Finnish violinist, was greeted by repeated standing ovations and glowing reviews.Attendance in October was down 11 percent compared to before the pandemic, but the symphony said advance sales were strong, suggesting normal audiences might return in spring.Twitter announced in the early months of the pandemic that it would allow almost all of its 5,200 employees, most based at its San Francisco office, to work at home permanently.Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency, via Getty Images“The audience is back,” Salonen said in an interview before he took the stage. “Not what it was, but they are back. Some nights have been a little thinner than others. By and large, the energy is good. Our worst fears have been dispelled.”The San Francisco Opera also began its new season with a splashy new hire: a new music director, Eun Sun Kim, who in August became the first woman to hold the position at one of the nation’s largest opera companies. She conducted a new production of Beethoven’s “Fidelio” this fall that incorporated chain-link fences and flickering video screens to update the story of the liberation of a political prisoner.Even so, the opera, which can seat 2,928 with Covid restrictions, sold an average of 1,912 tickets per show for “Fidelio,” its second production of this new season. That’s better than its second production in 2019, Britten’s “Billy Budd,” a searing work that does not always attract big crowds. But it drew fewer people than the opera’s second production in 2018, “Roberto Devereux,” which sold an average of 2,116 tickets a performance.“The urgency to be bold, to be innovative, to be compelling to get audiences to come back or give us a try for the first time has never been stronger,” Shilvock said. “There will be a hunger for things that have an energy, that have a vitality, that give a reason to come into the city.”Even before the pandemic, cultural organizations were dealing with challenges that threatened to discourage patrons, including a stressed public transportation system, traffic, parking constraints and the highly visible epidemic of homelessness. And many institutions were struggling to make inroads in attracting audiences and patrons from the tech industry, which now accounts for 19 percent of the private work force.Now, facing an uncertain future as they try to emerge from the pandemic shutdown, arts organizations are embracing a variety of tactics to fill seats..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Hope Mohr, the co-director of Hope Mohr Dance, said that her organization was spending $1,400 per night to livestream performances, so audiences could choose between coming into San Francisco or watching from their living rooms.“A hybrid experience — I have to do that from now on,” she said. “My company usually performs in San Francisco, and I have audience coming from all over the bay.”These calculations are taking place in an atmosphere of uncertainty and anxiety. It is not clear how much these early attendance figures represent a realignment, or are evidence of audiences temporarily trying to balance their hunger for live performances against concerns about the spread of the Delta variant — even in a city where 75 percent of the eligible population is fully vaccinated. Lower attendance figures have been reported by performing halls across the country.“The audience is back,” Esa-Pekka Salonen, the music director of the San Francisco Symphony, said. “Not what it was, but they are back. Some nights have been a little thinner than others. By and large the energy is good. Our worst fears have been dispelled.”Christopher M. Howard Opening nights have found performers relieved to be playing to real crowds again and audiences delighted to be back. “The convenience of at-home entertainment has made it not as desirable for some folks, ” said Ralph Remington, the director of cultural affairs for the San Francisco Arts Commission. “But that being said, even though the density of the numbers isn’t as great as it was prepandemic, the audiences that are coming are really enthusiastic.”Advance sales for “The Nutcracker” at the San Francisco Ballet, with one-third of the tickets going for just $19 a seat to help bring in new patrons (the average ticket price is $136), have been moving briskly.Danielle St. Germain-Gordon, the ballet’s interim executive director, said she hoped that working from home had made people eager to break out of their increasing isolation. “I would do anything to get out,” she said. “I hope that’s a good sign for our season.”At the height of the pandemic, about 85 percent of San Francisco-based employees worked from home; that number is about 50 percent now, said Enrico Moretti, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley.“I think it’s possible that people are not going to commute from Walnut Creek at night to go to downtown San Francisco for the opera to the same extent,” he said. “But I don’t expect those office buildings will sit empty. There will be other people moving into them.”The Magic Theater, a 145-seat-theater in Fort Mason, just beyond Fisherman’s Wharf, has been experimenting with different kinds of programming, such as a poetry reading, and pay-what-you-can seats to lure patrons who live — and now work — far from the theater.“This is going to be an interesting year for everyone,” said Sean San José, its artistic director. “Are people going to come back? The zeitgeist is telling us something. Maybe we should listen. This ain’t a pause. We have got to rethink it.” More