Commissioning a new opera remains a relatively rare thing nowadays: audiences have acquired familiarity with a given repertoire and they do not necessarily like to be pushed towards modern and unknown musics. Yet companies try to introduce fresh air in their program now and then, as the SF Opera did earlier this year with Dr. Atomic, and as the Metropolitan Opera in NY did last week with an American Tragedy. We saw the Met's new......

You probably haven't been to a vocal concert since your high school crush object sang that solo from Carousel in the annual choir festival. What relevance does choral music have to my everyday life? you ask. Well, how about a celebration of everyone's equal right to love? San Francisco's Volti, a new-vocal music group (the adjective "new" modifies "vocal music," not the group itself, which has been around for over 25 years), is performing the world premiere of No More To Hide: An American Wedding Cantata, in tribute to last year's same-sex marriages. No More to Hide sets to music a verse from 1 John 4:7 ("Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God.") and snippets from Leaves of Grass ("I dream'd in a dream, I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth.") -- and for you civil rights activists on a budget, will be performed for free at City Hall next Wednesday, November 16, courtesy of the Mayor's Office of Neighborhood Services and the Music@MONS program. (don't worry, folks, there's seats.) If you like to absorb your choral music in a more pastoral setting, Volti will perform No More To Hide, along with several other gay-themed works (more Whitman, and some Edna St. Vincent Millay) at St. Francis Lutheran on Mon. Nov. 21, which was expelled from the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America for ordaining gay and lesbian pastors in 1990, and thus was totally free to bless the same-sex weddings from 2004. Tickets available here (and also a Sunday performance in Berkeley). Picture of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, same-sex marriage no. 1...

We loves us a good piece of meat, but we can't stand buying the factory-farmed animal products we find in most stores. An American obsession with cheap meat has left us with powerful producers who use their government-approved anonymity to wreak all sorts of travesties. (Have you read Fast Food Nation yet? You should.) We try not to contribute to this karmic sinkhole, and so we were happy to see Marin Sun Farms at......

Anyone who reads our weekly movie posts knows that SFist loves the fantastic side of cinema. Give us a werewolf, serial killer, and a box of Red Vines and you'll see an all-to-rare smile cross our face. So we'll be smiling pretty big this week, with tonight's opening of the Fearless Tales Genre Festival (warning: painfully slow-to-load site) at the Victoria (16th Street just east of Mission) and the Castro. An intriguing mix of......

SFist Cares is going to tread a bit on the turf of SFist Watches: Movies and tell you about something you can do to support a good cause and still sit on your ass all weekend. Rock on. Artists' Television Access is presenting the Amnesty International Mini Film Festival, running this Saturday and Sunday. Films are $5 each, the price just covering the event itself. Cheap and requires no effort on your part whatsoever.......