San Francisco
An evening at davies symphony hall
An Essay
6:30
I make my way to Downtown Berkeley BART to meet a friend, Paige. We will travel to Davies Symphony Hall to watch the San Francisco Symphony play the score to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I catch her in the first car, and spy violet and grey parallelograms marching up and down her ankles.
“Nice socks,” I say. Outside, the sun is setting.
—
(Six-thirty in Muncie, Indiana, and Roy Neary is sitting down to, I imagine, dinner with his family, with fantasies floating closer than he might think.)
—
A bit past seven, and speeding towards the concert hall, towards Devil’s Tower and answers to questions newly flowered. The lights of Oakland seem inverted in the windows of the train, as if we were going around a particularly steep curve. We float in the air, if the stark interior lighting of the car is to be ignored.
—
(Roy scurries frantically about, bulling through and breaking loads of things in an effort to create that masterpiece, so he views it, of a Devil’s Tower model.)
—
7:40
We’re here. Davies Symphony Hall is situated amongst what one could consider the cultural corridor of San Francisco, or at least the presence of City Hall, with its Beaux-Arts architecture, and Van Ness arrowing off into the distance, marked by headlights, would make it seem so. City Hall is lit up in red and blue, and our approach via Civic Center Plaza makes for a nice aesthetic, what with the lights in the trees and the fact that we’re the only people here. We hear only the wind in between snatches of our conversation about jazz, and this wide expanse of trees and light and lights in trees seems to be distilled down to some nearly-intangible cloud of happiness. In German, to say that one is on holiday, one says ich mache Urlaub—I make holiday—and it does feel like we are making more of one with every step we take. Time beats on, though, and we can’t be late. Davies is right around the corner, fortunately, looking very much like a flying saucer in the night, given appropriate lighting, a fact which is not lost on the concert staff.
Our student tickets have us seated in the loge, giving us access to an antechamber leading to said loge, on whose walls hang a series of paintings of flowers. Red velvet is everywhere; we feel out of place amongst such luxuries, and after finding our seats, make straight for the outdoor balcony on the top floor. It is expansive, or feels so, with glass paneling, and City Hall cuts an imposing figure above the knots of nearly-late arrivals. They gather on the street corners, and, when the streetlights permit, surge forward, funneled by the pedestrian crossing, towards the hall.
—
8:00
Back inside, we see a prerecorded video on the screen, in which the principal tubist, standing across from the hall, plays the alien motif, and, after a few repetitions, the hall responds with a dazzling array of multicolored light, all reds and violets and blues and greens, and we are off.
~9:00
Time has grown far fuzzier ever since the event has begun, and the conductor is beating his baton to actual, honest-to-God bar lines passing across his stand. The fabric banners which hang far above us redirect sound and carry us, like sails, further into Wyoming, into some great mystery.
—
(Claude Lacombe gives Roy Neary one last look before he steps onto the alien saucer, lit up in violets and blues, towards his dream, away from what he has known, this earth.)
—
<11:00
Suddenly the night feels far too short, and time slips away with every stop the train makes. Paige and I engage in conversation, words racing against time and the train, trying to compress my regard for her and our friendship into what remained of our adventure, forming ever-more tangential, inaccessible thoughts, Roy Neary racing to Devil’s Tower before the governmental net grows too impenetrable—
She stops me with a hug. The train slows to a stop. We let go, and look deeply into each other’s eyes. A rest. The conductor prepares the downbeat again.
“Bye,” I say, and step out.
Words: Stephen Yang