Wheels on the BART go round and round

The story — by Rachel Swan in the Monday, Nov. 26, Chronicle — was supposed to be good news: Because metal has been shaved off the wheels of BART trains, rides are quieter. But not everyone is rejoicing. Jamey Brzezinski sees it as “the end of an era.

“I’m an artist and a musician . ... I have always enjoyed listening to the screeching of BART’s wheels, especially on curves. Like a guitar string, the wheels produce harmonics: tonic, thirds, fifths, minors and major sevenths that shift in and out of perception, sometimes punctuated by dissonant intervals.

“Often the timbre is very similar to the human voice. It can be really quite beautiful, like a recording of crickets played back at very slow speed. It is also reminiscent of some of the atonal vocal scores used in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.’ Think of the part when Dave the astronaut encounters the monolith and goes through the ‘time tunnel’ light show . ... I like to sing along, finding harmonies, especially when the wheels are really loud.” Brian Bringardner thinks it’s not quite in the holiday spirit that St. Paul’s Catholic Church’s Dec. 8 and 9 “An Afternoon With Santa” events — “Join other children for a birthday party for Jesus” says the flyer — costs $30 a kid. (The Noe Valley church, notes Bringardner, is where “Sister Act” was filmed.)

Craig Evans and Neil Evans drove up from Santa Cruz last weekend to see ACT’s “Men on Boats.” The Jaclyn Backhaus play is about an 1869 expedition down the Green and Colorado rivers; the Evanses’ great-great-grandfather, Frank Goodman, was part of that expedition. They’d seen the script for the play, but it was their first viewing of the performed work.

The standard Haight Street establishments — head shops and T-shirt shops and vintage — may be joined by a storefront genre new to the neighborhood. Hoodline reports that a Thai massage parlor is trying to get permission to move into the empty storefront that was once occupied by La Rosa on Haight Street. The city planning code prohibits massage parlors there, but the owners are hoping to get a variance.

Steve Indig, longtime producer of a joint birthday party for Elvis Presley and David Bowie, is waxing nostalgic this year with a Dec. 12 Elvis Presley Tribute (at the Make-Out Room), commemorating the 50th anniversary of Presley’s “’68 Comeback Special.” Leigh Crow, who calls herself Elvis Herselvis, will sing “If I Can Dream,” which was introduced on that TV show.

Indig says that the new song was intended to heal national wounds incurred by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Presley’s first recording was made in 1954; he died in 1977. Looking at a video of the performance, I think the occasion also marks the historic chronological boundary between thin Elvis and fat Elvis.

PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “You drink coffee when it’s light out. You drink wine when it’s dark out.” Man to man, overheard on Fillmore Street by Mary Bush

Gift guide: Whether the recipient of your gift is snapped into footie pajamas, or sitting in a chair with a crocheted shawl wrapped around her shoulders, there’s nothing like a pair of red boots to lift the spirits. Artist and designer Barbara Stauffacher Solomon waxes poetic about the power of that footwear in her new book, “Read Any Good Boots Lately?” — available at www.owlcavebooks.com.

The author claims that putting on red boots gives women the power to be free, and quotes Jacques Derrida, and later, Martin Heidegger: “In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the earth, its quiet ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field.”

If you take this advice, beware that footwear is like philosophy: It’s not one-size-fits-all, and you always have to consider how much room the socks will take up.

This was a pop-up shop open only in Union Square on Thanksgiving weekend, so I hope you’ve already stocked up. Surely people on your gift list will be delighted with the “smart water bottle that tracks your water intake, syncs to your phone and glows to remind you to stay hydrated.”

The only part of the digestive circuit ignored by this product is its final stage, the so-far tech-less tinkle.