Last week found Out There reeling rooftop as we attended the press unveiling of a new Rooftop Bee Sanctuary and Cocktail Herb Garden at the Clift Hotel in San Francisco.
Hotel General Manager Michael Pace led the tour on a rainy weekday night up to the bees' new digs up on the hostelry roof. This involved taking the elevator to the 16th floor, attaining a terrace, then climbing a slippery steel ladder up to the roof.
Beekeeper Roger Garrison's hives are home to tens of thousands of the little buzzing creatures. Honeybees, these ones native to California, will fly up to three miles from their hives to find their pollen. The lazy ones scoot over to Huntington Park close by on Nob Hill, while the adventurous ones fly west to check out Golden Gate Park for the good stuff.
The hives face southwest so that the sun wakes them up in the morning to go out and forage. Just like OT! The Clift's bee program is a communal initiative with 10 other SF hotels. That's a lot of honey.
Back downstairs at the hotel's over-80-year-old iconic bar the Redwood Room, we dried off and dug into the new spring menu. The bees' handiwork can be sampled in two new cocktails, and we did: The 49er Tea Time, black tea-infused whiskey, housemade honey syrup, lemon juice; and the Peerless Purple, housemade lavender-infused gin, housemade honey syrup, lemon juice, lavender bitters; as well as in new menu items such as Compressed Watermelon Salad with lavender-infused honey, pumpernickel crisp, chevre, and Sausalito watercress.
The Clift's Executive Chef Thomas Weibull is also offering Adobo-Style Baby Back Ribs with red cabbage & lemongrass mango slaw, a Vietnamese Chicken Bun with pickled veggies & garlic chives, and a Pixto Platter, tapas with house honey. Try them all out during the Clift's Decompression Hour, Mon.-Thurs., 5-7 p.m. We came, we saw, we decompressed.
Talking Music
San Francisco Symphony music director Michael Tilson Thomas was invited by The New York Times to participate in their Look West speaker series, talks designed to bring innovators in the arts, media, and technology onstage for engaging discussions with Times journalists before live audiences through the Western U.S.
OT was in the house when the Times hosted the event in SoundBox last Tuesday, a conversation between MTT and Times classical music and dance reporter Michael Cooper. MTT, much missed in SF after three months off-podium, was his usual charming self, articulate and compelling when he spoke about the almost ineffable properties of classical music. Did it whet our appetite for some upcoming SFS concerts? It did.
Through April 10, MTT is leading two weeks of programs in anticipation of the SFS' tour to the east coast in April, which visits Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, and NJPAC. The first week pairs Schumann 's Symphony No. 2 with three lesser-known Copland works, and the second week features Mahler 's Das Lied von der Erde with mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke and heroic tenor Simon O'Neill.
From April 20-29 come guest conductor Pablo Heras-Casado 's two weeks, and as usual he brings programs featuring an array of composers. In the first week, he is joined by the amazing Argentinian pianist Ingrid Fliter, and during the second week, he leads the world premiere of much-buzzed-about composer Mason Bates' Auditorium, an SFS commission. It's time to attend the Symphony. Find tickets and info at sfsymphony.org.
Future Shock
"My Gaze///Yr Gaze" is a queer film series curated by Irwin Swirnoff on the first Sunday of every month at Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St. in the Mission. This Sunday, April 3, at 6 p.m., the series presents Speculative Genealogies and Precarious Futures, an evening screening of short films by Desiree Holman, Viet Le , and Rudy Lemcke . Ready for their descriptions? They're a mouthful!
Fantastical and absurd, Holman's "Troglodyte" (2005) investigates ideas of violence, sex, animism, and nurturance by animating a primal horde of chimp-like creatures. Lemcke's "(Orpheus) The Poetics of Finitude" (2014) poetically reimagines the Orpheus myth by juxtaposing his fantastical fairy world alongside Jean Cocteau's queer classic "Orphee." Viet Le's "Eclipse (Ruby)" (2015) takes viewers on a multisensory poetic journey of trans-diasporic movement and meaning accompanied by music from controversial, legendary musician Dai Lam Linh. The screening will be followed by a discussion with the filmmakers and guest curator Tina Takemoto. Free and open to the public .