Earlier this week I took a walk around the perimeter of Berkeley’s fire-damaged First Congregational Church. These are impressions from the exterior. I’ve also had a chance to find out more about the details of the history of the church building complex.

First, press reports in the days after the September 30 2016 fire sometimes gave the impression that the whole church had burned. People out of town who know that I’m interested in Berkeley’s historic buildings called me to say they were so sorry to see a historic church was completely destroyed.

This was definitely not the case. First Congregational Church is a big complex and most of it is intact, although some unburned portions clearly have water damage. 

In fact, on Sunday a friend saw a curious sight. People were stopping their cars on Durant, north of the building, apparently looking for the location of the fire they’d heard had burned a church at Durant and Dana. Their attention was drawn to the vacant Trinity Church sanctuary with its battered exterior, across the street from First Congregational. They were ignoring the completely intact north wing of the First Congregational building behind them. 

The main part of the First Congregational complex has four elements built at different times, but architecturally so harmonious that they appear to be one structure. The complex is a “C” shape, with the open end facing a courtyard along Dana Street. The main sanctuary and clock / bell tower at the long center of the “C”. On the north is Plymouth House, a two story plus basement wing facing on Durant Avenue, connected to a chapel at the corner of Durant and Dana.  

On the south is Pilgrim Hall, another two-story plus basement wing, with a main entrance facing on Channing Way.  

Having watched the fire, and now looked at the aftermath, it appears that the southern / Pilgrim Hall wing was seriously damaged, the main sanctuary suffered some damage, and the north wing was untouched by fire, although there’s a smoke smell in the structure. (Please keep in mind these are just a layperson’s impressions, not an expert assessment.) 

Here’s an excerpt from the FCCB website, posted on Saturday, the day after the fire, by Senior Minister Molly Phinney Baskette. “There was heavy damage to the roof and second floor of Pilgrim Hall (the side of the building where the offices and Large and Small Assemblies are). Offices in that area are likely completely destroyed. There will be much water and smoke damage throughout that part of the building, perhaps on all floors. The roof and skylight over the Large Assembly are a mess, but the walls are intact.” 

The Pilgrim Hall building has definitely lost most of its roof and second floor offices. Here, the exterior walls—a brick veneer in front of wooden studs—look seriously damaged at the top where they met the now-vanished roof, but more intact lower down. The second floor appears entirely open to the sky—you can see sky from the street through the office windows. 

But because the fire apparently started in the attic or roof area of this wing, the lower floor and basement do not seem to be burned. In several of the “ground” floor windows, for instance, there are still sheer curtains hanging intact, the sort of interior fixture that would have been gone in moments if fire had burned into those rooms. Some of those curtains are in the east end of the building where the church library was located. 

On Monday I watched a crew from a fire recovery company at work in the wing packing and removing scores of boxes from the building. Each box was carefully labeled with contents, from office supplies to dishes to books. Unburned office equipment and furniture can still be seen through the exterior windows. 

It would seem certain that the lower floors and basement were deluged with water and fire debris pouring down from above. On Friday, during the fire, I watched smoke billowing and water cascading out of the main ground floor doors of the west end of the wing into the parking lot, and fire engines blasting water into the second floor windows on the east.  

But if the lower floors of the wing “only” have water damage, then it raises the hope that the much of the physical structure can be salvaged or reconstructed within the brick shell and exterior restored. 

Just north of the Pilgrim Hall wing there is dramatic visual evidence of how close the rest of the complex came to burning. On the southeast corner of the sanctuary wing there’s fire damage at the corner of the sanctuary roof and running up the seam between east and south roof planes. 

On Friday, during the fire, I watched from the west as smoke trickled out of this southern end of the sanctuary roof. Eventually, water blasted from inside through the shingles, evidence that a fire hose had been brought into the attic. If the fire had taken hold in the high attic of the sanctuary it’s quite possible the sanctuary would have burned and the fire could have easily spread to the north wing and even adjacent buildings. 

(One factor during the fire was the stiff wind blowing from the south, southwest. It carried smoke east / northeast across the intersection of Dana and Durant, and also into the Unit III residence hall complex across the street, which was completely evacuated during the fire. If the direction of the wind had been more westerly or northwesterly—or blowing south—smoke and embers could have easily rained down on adjacent blocks of large wooden homes, and apartment buildings.) 

What’s the condition of the sanctuary? From both inside and out, it actually looks largely intact. There doesn’t seem to be visible smoke damage to the interior, and the massive organ pipes still stand in the chancel. Phinney Baskette wrote: 

“The fire spread through the attic of Pilgrim Hall to the Sanctuary roof. The firefighters were able to contain it so it did not spread beyond the southeast corner of the roof, but there is significant water (and presumably some smoke) damage to the sanctuary, especially above the chancel and first few rows of pews. We will certainly be displaced from the sanctuary for a while.” 

There are several large patches in the arched ceiling where plaster has fallen and the wooden underlayment is visible. A much larger portion of the white ceiling is discolored in patches, along with portions of the walls. The front of the carpeted floor of the sanctuary is littered with broken plaster. Water presumably poured into the attic, soaked the plaster ceiling, and brought these portions down. This could, one imagines, have affected the integrity of more of the ceiling than the portions that fell. 

How did the fire start? Here’s another part of the posting from the Senior Minister. 

“Some are wondering what caused the fire. We have a pretty good idea, and it will be revealed in due time, but in order not to compromise the claim-filing process, I've been asked not to speak about it publicly yet. Please be reassured that it was not foul play or vandalism.” 

After looking at the building, I also had a useful conversation with Anthony Bruce, executive director of Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA). (Disclosure: I’m the current BAHA president). Anthony has a near encyclopedic understanding of the history of major buildings in Berkeley, and can quickly research what he doesn’t know. 

Here’s what I learned from him about the First Congregational buildings. 

The complex was created from four different construction projects over a span of a quarter century. The skill of the different architects and wisdom of the congregation in making all the additions work together and all follow a red-brick, Georgian, design motif, makes the different buildings work as one. 

As I noted in a previous article, First Congregation was the first church to organize in what was then the east part of the future Berkeley, adjacent to the new University of California campus. The congregation built a sanctuary and rectory on a large lot on the northeast corner of Dwight and Telegraph.  

Later, in the 1880s, the congregation moved to the corner of Dana and Durant, into a much larger new building designed by famed California architect, and Berkeley resident, Clinton Day.  

In the early 1920s—a period of considerable economic prosperity and also part of a heyday of institutional religion in Berkeley—the congregation began a series of projects that resulted in the current complex, and the demolition of the Clinton Day building. 

First, the present day sanctuary and clock / bell tower were constructed. The cornerstone is inscribed from 1924. The actual construction was finished in 1925, the same year the building permit was issued. The architect was Horace G. Simpson, who lived in Berkeley.  

The construction of Pilgrim Hall on the south followed quickly, in 1926, also designed by Simpson. Ironically, it was dedicated September 29, 1926, almost 90 years to the day before this most recent fire gutted the upper levels. 

The construction of Pilgrim Hall resulted in the relocation of what Bruce describes as a magnificent nineteenth century house designed by the famed Ernest Coxhead that originally stood on this corner. The house was moved a block north from Dana / Channing a block to Dana / Durant. There it stood for another quarter century, in use as a church Sunday School annex.  

In 1945, Scott Heyman—sometimes listed as a partnership of Ratcliff and Heyman—designed the chapel at the northeast corner of the complex, right at the intersection of Durant and Dana. It was constructed in 1948. 

The last piece of the interconnected complex to be constructed was the Plymouth House wing along Durant, on the north. It was built in 1955, again designed by Heyman or Ratcliff and Heyman. Plymouth House was built largely to serve the UC student population. 

Interestingly, this year’s fire is not the first in the complex. There was a major fire that damaged the sanctuary in 1967. In 1978 another fire damaged Plymouth House, and also affected the sanctuary. Both times the Congregation recovered and the buildings were restored. 

Traffic and circulation:  

As of this writing, Durant Avenue is open and unaffected by the fire aftermath, except for creating more difficult right turns from Durant onto Dana. 

Curbside parking and the right hand lane on southbound Dana between Durant and Channing are blocked off, so southbound traffic must stay to the left. 

The Channing / Dana intersection is now a “T”. Channing is completely blocked off between Dana and Ellsworth. 

If you’re driving through the neighborhood, it would be best to avoid both Dana and Channing in the church vicinity. Use Bancroft or Haste to head west, Durant or Dwight to head east. 

Further information: 

First Congregational Church has a “fire news” section on their website. You can check it for updates. 

http://www.fccb.org/fire-news 

You can also find a Flickr stream of photos of the fire and the interior after the fire at: 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/firstchurchberkeley/29806988030/in/photostream/ 

The initial presidential debate had a clear winner, Hillary Clinton.

The outcome of the vice-presidential debate was less clearcut. Many observers thought that Republican Mike Pence won on style points because Democrat Tim Kaine interrupted too often. On the other hand, Kaine seemed to score the most political points, repeatedly backing Pence into a corner, forcing him to “defend” Donald Trump and lie in the process. And Pence made the one obvious faux pas — attempting to defend Trump characterizing Mexican immigrants as “Criminals and rapists” — “Senator, you whipped out that Mexican thing again.” 

Vice-presidential debates seldom make a difference on a election day. Trump supporters will be pleased with Pence’s performance. Clinton supporters will be pleased with Kaine’s performance. 

Undecided voters probably turned off the debate and tuned into the MLB playoffs. But in days to come, these votes will hear the line, “Senator you whipped out that Mexican thing again,” and they will encounter Democratic videos reminding them that Pence could not defend Trump’s most outrageous statements. 

Bob Burnett is a Berkeley writer. He can be reached at bburnett@sonic.net or bobburnett.net

The initial presidential debate had a clear winner, Hillary Clinton. 

The outcome of the vice-presidential debate was less clearcut. Many observers thought that Republican Mike Pence won on style points because Democrat Tim Kaine interrupted too often. On the other hand, Kaine seemed to score the most political points, repeatedly backing Pence into a corner, forcing him to “defend” Donald Trump and lie in the process. And Pence made the one obvious faux pas — attempting to defend Trump characterizing Mexican immigrants as “Criminals and rapists” — “Senator, you whipped out that Mexican thing again.” 

Vice-presidential debates seldom make a difference on a election day. Trump supporters will be pleased with Pence’s performance. Clinton supporters will be pleased with Kaine’s performance. 

Undecided voters probably turned off the debate and tuned into the MLB playoffs. But in days to come, these votes will hear the line, “Senator you whipped out that Mexican thing again,” and they will encounter Democratic videos reminding them that Pence could not defend Trump’s most outrageous statements. 

Activists from racial equality and immigrant rights group By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) will call for the reinstatement of a Berkeley middle school teacher at a school board meeting this evening, an attorney representing BAMN said. 

Yvette Felarca, a teacher at Martin Luther King Middle School, can be seen in a widely shared YouTube video attacking a demonstrator at a neo-Nazi rally in Sacramento on June 26. 

On June 29, Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) superintendent Donald Evans and school board president Beatriz Leyva-Cutler issued a statement condemning Felarca's actions at the protest. 

"It is important to state that we do not support the use of violence in confronting free speech. We want our students to learn critical thinking skills and be able to engage in thoughtful and informed debate," Evans and Leyva-Cutler said in their statement. 

"While we may find beliefs espoused by racist and anti-immigrant organizations to be abhorrent, there are productive ways to respond to hate speech that do not involve violence," Evans and Leyva-Cutler said. 

Felarca was placed on administrative leave Sept. 21, BAMN attorney Ronald Cruz said.  

"BUSD's decision to discipline and suspend me for my off-duty political activities and my political affiliations and activism place Berkeley on the wrong side of the historic struggle to stop the rise of the far-right wing and their violent attacks," Felarca said in a statement. 

BAMN activists will hold a rally at BUSD's administration building at 6:30 p.m., followed by a "speak-out" to the school board during public comment at the meeting.

The water is flowing again today for dozens of Berkeley residents after crews worked overnight to repair a broken water main at the intersection of University Avenue and Grant Street, an East Bay Municipal Utility spokeswoman said. 

The 12-inch cast iron pipe broke and started leaking large amounts of water onto the streets at about 12:30 p.m. Tuesday, according to EBMUD.  

Crews repaired the pipe and water was flowing again today by 7 a.m. to the roughly 40 homes on Grant Street north of University Avenue that lost water service, EBMUD spokeswoman Andrea Pook said. 

University Avenue was closed to traffic in both directions from Martin Luther King Jr. Way to McGeen Avenue until early this morning.  

Currently, only one lane is open in each direction on University Avenue in the area because the water main is next to a storm drain, which is complicating the effort to refill and repair the road, Pook said.  

"We're working with the city of Berkeley to figure out how to make the repairs," Pook said.  

There is no estimated time for when all the lanes on University Avenue and Grant Street will re-open to traffic.

The water is flowing again today for dozens of Berkeley residents after crews worked overnight to repair a broken water main at the intersection of University Avenue and Grant Street, an East Bay Municipal Utility spokeswoman said. 

The 12-inch cast iron pipe broke and started leaking large amounts of water onto the streets at about 12:30 p.m. Tuesday, according to EBMUD.  

Crews repaired the pipe and water was flowing again today by 7 a.m. to the roughly 40 homes on Grant Street north of University Avenue that lost water service, EBMUD spokeswoman Andrea Pook said. 

University Avenue was closed to traffic in both directions from Martin Luther King Jr. Way to McGeen Avenue until early this morning.  

Currently, only one lane is open in each direction on University Avenue in the area because the water main is next to a storm drain, which is complicating the effort to refill and repair the road, Pook said.  

"We're working with the city of Berkeley to figure out how to make the repairs," Pook said.  

There is no estimated time for when all the lanes on University Avenue and Grant Street will re-open to traffic.

Given the monstrous possibility of a Trump victory nationally, it may seem petty to worry about the decline of public ethics in this little town of Berkeley. But the local air has carried the stink of corruption for a while now. The city council majority has rubberstamped a string of high rise luxury housing projects, about the last thing this city needs. A former city planning official, Mark Rhoades, sold his contacts and insider knowledge to the out-of-town developers pushing these projects. The City Council majority is eating out of his hands.

Now there’s a candidate for city council in the district where I live whose ethics are, if anything, even lower. His name is Stephen Murphy. Stephen Murphy is dishonest, a hypocrite, incompetent, frivolous, truculent, unprofessional, incapable of showing remorse, and careless of taxpayer resources. That’s not my personal opinion, it’s part of the written opinion of the California Court of Appeals. How’s that?

Murphy, a lawyer, represented one side in a divorce case where the other side was old and ill. If the matter was delayed long enough, the other party might die. According to the affected family, who also live in this same district of Berkeley, Murphy deliberately dragged on the litigation. One of Murphy’s delaying tactics was to prosecute an appeal even though the time limit for filing an appeal had already passed. 

Murphy was able to get away with this normally dead-end maneuver (for a while) because the clerk of the family law court in Oakland had not kept a copy of the proof of service for the court decision that Murphy was appealing from. Murphy had actually received the decision. But the crucial fax cover sheet which was proof of service on him, and started the appeal clock ticking, was not in the court file that was sent up to the Court of Appeals. Unaware that the appeal was filed past the deadline, the judges of the Court of Appeals worked up the case and were preparing to render a decision when the other side hired a lawyer specializing in appeals. This lawyer smelled a rat and asked Murphy to please provide him with a copy of the missing proof of service. The court clerk who had neglected to keep a copy also asked Murphy the same thing. 

Normally this kind of request from one lawyer to another, or from a court clerk, is routinely granted as a matter of professional courtesy. I practiced law for 29 years and there must have been a dozen times when I or an opposing lawyer exchanged courtesy copies of papers that we couldn’t locate in our own files. But Murphy got on a high horse with the requesting lawyer and said he had no duty to send him a copy of the paper. And Murphy got cute with the court clerk, refusing to send the clerk a copy of the paper because allegedly personal and confidential notes had been handwritten on it. 

That’s already chicanery. But if Murphy had backed off and provided the missing paper at that stage of the proceedings, the appeal would have been thrown out of court. There’s no excuses for filing a late appeal. You snooze, you lose. So, like Trump when he’s caught in a trap, Murphy doubled down. He filed papers with the Court of Appeals in which he evaded the whole timing issue, launched personal attacks and threats against the other lawyer, and with slippery words lied to the Court of Appeals that the proof of service had never been served on him. Even when the missing paper finally surfaced and he was caught red-handed he made threadbare excuses and showed no remorse. 

In ordinary business or social life, that kind of behavior gets a person a reputation as a crook and a pathological liar. In the Court of Appeals, after bending over backwards to give Murphy every benefit of the doubt, the judges had this to say: 

“What is especially disturbing to us is Murphy’s steadfast refusal to acknowledge his breach of his duty to provide us with a document bearing on our jurisdiction and to express any remorse for that breach.” 

“Murphy aggressively and with remarkable temerity threatened [opposing counsel] with sanctions.” 

Murphy’s “response to us ‘was both truculent and dismissive.'” 

Murphy “repeated his personal attacks” on opposing counsel. 

Murphy “demonstrated no recognition whatsoever of the gravity of his misconduct.” 

Murphy “met our concerns with nothing but petulance and disregard.”  

The “degree of objective frivolousness is very high …. ‘no competent attorney could conceivably believe in good faith’ the appeal was timely.”  

Murphy displayed “steadfast refusal to recognize his conduct as blameworthy.”  

Murphy’s conduct displayed “‘dishonesty and lack of remorse.'” 

This conduct “has also harmed others….Other appellate parties, many of whom wait years for a resolution of bona fide disputes, are prejudiced by the useless diversion of this court’s attention…. In the same vein, the appellate system and the taxpayers of this state are damaged by what amounts to a waste of this court’s time and resources. … In this time of limited budgets and strained judicial resources, this court can ill afford to devote its attention to an appeal it has no power at all to hear.”  

For this conduct, the Court of Appeals fined Murphy $8,500 to be paid to the court, plus a portion of the opposing party’s costs and attorney fees to be determined by the court below. The $8,500 is one of the highest monetary sanctions ever imposed by the Court of Appeals. Only two out of a thousand appellate cases ever result in the imposition of monetary sanctions in any amount. 

As a lawyer, I find Murphy’s conduct appalling. I have been up against a number of lawyers at various times who have been rude, dishonest, and cut a corner or two. But I’ve never seen or heard of anybody who tried to defraud the Court of Appeals by hiding the court paper that would kill his case. That’s a truly Trumpian level of chutzpah. 

The Court of Appeals filed its opinion containing the above remarks on November 30, 2012, not even four years ago. This is not ancient history. When the East Bay Times first broke this story on Sept. 16 (this year), Murphy told an interviewer, “I’ve licked my wounds and moved on … I learned from my mistakes and moved on.” Murphy’s concern with his own wounds isn’t paired with a shred of concern for the wounds he inflicted on others. He refers to “my mistakes” but without specifying whether his mistake was doing the fraud or being caught. Like a true narcissist, he doesn’t apologize or try to make amends. He just “moves on,” like Trump “moved on” from his birther fraud. 

Stephen Murphy is now trying to “move on” to the Berkeley City Council. The family who were devastated by Murphy’s conduct have launched a website, http://www.stephenmurphy2016.org, expressing their opposition to his candidacy. Referring to the Court of Appeals decision, they write: 

The ruling reflects poorly on Mr. Murphy’s character, integrity, attitude toward the use of public resources, and fitness for office. 

It is for these reasons that our family, as Berkeley District 5 voters, cannot stomach the prospect of Stephen Murphy representing us on the Berkeley City Council. If he has any sense of decency, he will withdraw from the race. 

To that sentiment, which I second, I want to add my disappointment with the elected officials who have endorsed this rotten apple, with the employer who has put him in a position of administrative responsibility, and with the City Council member who appointed him to a city commission. A woman candidate with this stain on her record would be torn to shreds. But Stephen Murphy seems to wear teflon. His campaign chest is loaded with developer money. From the big developer point of view, a man who who would try to defraud the Court of Appeals — a man of big chutzpah, small brain, and no ethics — is perfect for the Berkeley City Council.

The cause of a massive fire in a historic Berkeley church Friday is still under investigation but preliminary estimates put the damage total at roughly $2 million, according to a Berkeley fire official.  

The three-alarm fire destroyed a large section of the First Congregationalist Church at 2345 Channing Way. It appears to have started near a brick chimney, but the damage is so extensive that a cause may never be known, Berkeley Deputy Fire Chief Donna McCracken said. 

"The amount of destruction, the depth and length of the burn," especially near the fire's potential point of origin, means that clues will be difficult to identify, McCracken said.  

The Alameda County Fire Investigation Task Force is conducting the investigation and it's unclear when it will release its findings, although foul play is not suspected. 

To fight the fire, Berkeley called in 12 fire engines, three fire trucks, seven ambulances and dozens of police and other emergency personnel from the city and Alameda County, McCracken said.  

"We had our entire department on that scene and we still had to provide emergency resources to our city," McCracken said. "There were lots and lots and lots of other emergency calls during that fire."  

To take the pressure off Berkeley responders, crews from the city of Alameda, Alameda County, Paramedics Plus, Oakland and the El Cerrito-Kensington and Moraga-Orinda fire departments fielded emergency calls during the course of the blaze, McCracken said.  

The fire ultimately destroyed an entire multi-story brick office building attached to the church, and part of the church's main sanctuary. 

"The fire in the sanctuary attic was caught quickly," McCracken said. "The sanctuary below got some water damage and fall-down from a little bit of debris but it's in better shape than one would expect."

A large water main break at University Avenue and Grant Street in Berkeley has closed the area to traffic while crews try to make repairs, according to a Berkeley fire department spokeswoman. 

A witness called in to report the break at about 12:30 p.m. and traffic is shut down completely in both directions on University Avenue between McGee Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Way.  

Also, vehicles are not allowed to cross University Avenue on Grant Street, Deputy Fire Chief Donna McCracken said. 

East Bay Municipal Utility District crews are en route and a cause for the break is not yet known, EBMUD spokeswoman Nelsy Rodriguez said. 

No time was given for when the streets might be re-open to traffic.  

h

In his Public Comment of September 30, [Christopher] Barlow [Partner, Wareham Development} stated, “The soil has been approved by the regulatory bodies for storage in Richmond and re-use in the garage project now under development in Emeryville.”
Also, in his September 30 letter to the City of Richmond, Barlow stated, “…the temporary storage at 505 Canal Boulevard has been approved by the Regional Water Quality Control Board...”

Based on the statement I received on September 30 from Bruce H. Wolfe, Executive Director of the SF Bay Regional Water Board, Barlow is flat out lying.

Wolfe wrote to me the following: 

The Berkeley Police Department this morning is reporting the closure of a portion of College Avenue due to a vehicle that has crashed into a building. 

The crash occurred in the area of College and Ashby avenues, according to the police department. 

College Avenue is currently closed between Russell Street and Ashby Avenue. 

Police said there are some fluids leaking from a vehicle involved in the crash. 

The roadway is being assessed for the presence of hazardous materials. 

There were no reported injuries in the crash, police said. The police department reported the crash at 6:32 a.m.

UPDATE: Other media report that the main sanctuary of First Congretional Church was damaged but not destroyed in Friday's fire. Contributions can be sent to https://www.gofundme.com/Berkeleychurchfire.

A four alarm fire gutted part of the historic First Congregational Church complex on Dana Street between Durant and Channing early Friday afternoon.

The blaze began in the southern wing of the "C" shaped building which the Church calls Plymouth Hall. That wing, with two stories and a basement level, contained the rectory, church offices, and meeting rooms. The wing appeared gutted by the fire, with the roof collapsed, eaves burning, and the sky visible from the street through second floor windows.

The fire went to four alarms, with Oakland and Albany engine companies responding. A brisk wind blew heavy smoke north and east and down to street level, forcing the evacuation of the four-building Unit III dormitories directly across the street. Several streets were closed in the vicinity. At the time of this writing Channing Way, Dana Street, Haste Street, Ellsworth north of Channing, and Durant Avenue east of Ellsworth were closed to through traffic.

By late-afternoon the fire appeared to have been suppressed, with engines pouring both water and foam into the damaged structure. 

Photographs of the early stages of the fire posted on other news sites appear to show the fire burning in its early stages at the western end of the Plymouth Hall wing, along Channing Way. 

The First Congregational Church Facebook page posted at about 2:00 PM that "what we know so far is that it (the fire) is related to work that is being done on the roof." Closer to 4 PM the Facebook page posted that a memorial service scheduled at the Church for Saturday was being moved to Kensington, and that the First Congregational congregation would worship Sunday at First Presbyterian across the street and Dana and Channing. 

The church sanctuary is a popular location for music concerts, and the New Century Chamber Orchestra website listed concerts scheduled there for for November. The congregation is known for its progressive values and programs. 

The center of the building is the large sanctuary of the Church complex. The fire appeared to have scorched the southeast corner of the sanctuary, and gotten into a portion of the attic. For a time smoke could be seen coming from the extreme southern end of the sanctuary attic and the roof was being drenched with water that poured off the steep roof on both sides. Later, water was visible being blasted through the roof from inside the building. 

The northern wing, which contains other meeting rooms and the church chapel and a childcare center did not appear to be visibly damaged. The northern portions of the building suffered a fire in the 1970s, but here later rebuilt on the interior. 

First Congregational is the oldest religious congregation in the campus area, dating back to 1873. Its founders included founders of the private College of California which first owned what is now the UC Berkeley campus. The first services in Berkeley were held in June of 1874. Services were first held in the current building in August, 1925. The next month during dedication celebrations the presidents of both the University of California and Stanford University were guest speakers at the church. 

The current neoclassical complex, with red brick exterior and white wooden details, is the third complex occupied by the church. It was built in the mid-1920s, designed by Horace G. Simpson. The original church was a small wooden sanctuary located at the northeast corner of Dwight and Telegraph. The congregation later moved in 1897 to an impressive wood frame neo-Gothic church at the present day location. That complex was torn down less than three decades later and replaced by the current structure. 

Plymouth Hall, the wing damaged by the fire, is especially historic in Berkeley. Seventy five years ago in May, 1942, the building hosted Berkeley's Japanese American families who were being sent into forced internment by the United States Government during World War II. 

Berkeley's Japanese-Americans were originally ordered by the government to register and assemble for deportation at a municipal fire station on Durant Avenue a few blocks west. Members of First Congregational opposed the deportation, and felt especially that the assembly point was inhumane. They offered Plymouth Hall as a location where their Japanese-American neighbors could come for the registration and to board the buses and trucks parked along Dana Street that would take them, under guard, to the Tanforan Race Track on the Peninsula and, later, guarded internment camps further inland for the duration of the war. 

Church members from First Congregational and some of the nearby congregations of other denominations offered hospitality--food and other support--at Plymouth Hall during the assembly and deportation.

UPDATE

Berkeley Fire continues to work a structure fire in the 2300 block of Channing Way. At this time the fire is considered multiple alarms. Residents can expect to see and smell heavy smoke in the area.

Additional Fire units from neighboring jurisdications are responding to assist. They will be stagging on Dana between Dwight and Durant.

Dana Street is closed to all traffic, pedestrian and vehicular. Please avoid the area. Channing between Telegraph and Ellsworth is closed along with Haste between Telegraph and Ellsworth. 

Use alternative routes.  

We will continue to provide updates. 

Original Message: 

Today, at 12:34 p.m. the Berkeley Police and Fire Departments responded to a report of a fire in the 2300 block of Channing Way. BFD is working the structure fire. BPD is providing assistance with traffic control and evacuations if needed. Several roadways are closed in the area and alternate routes should be used. 

Currently, Ellsworth and Dana between Channing and Durant are closed as well as Durant between Ellsworth and Dana.  

We will provide updates as they develop. 

For full details, view this message on the web.

Berkeley firefighters are battling a four-alarm blaze at a church on Channing Way and Dana Street, a fire department spokeswoman said.  

The fire broke out at the First Congregational Church at 2345 Channing Way during the noon hour and quickly escalated. The blaze has spread to the attic and resulted in the partial collapse of a chimney, Berkeley Deputy Fire Chief Donna McCracken said.  

Both Dana Street and Channing Way are closed to traffic in the area and drivers are advised to use alternative routes.  

So far no injuries have been reported, McCracken said.  

KileyRussell0117p09/30/16

In the summer of 1960 I took the Erie railroad from Port Jervis to Chicago, my first trip away from home alone, to attend the National High School Institute in journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston.

It was an honor to be chosen as a Medill “cherub” and even better to get a $200 scholarship that covered all costs of five weeks on campus. Since 1931, the NHSI has enrolled high school students between their junior and senior years for an intensive learning experience in several subjects; the enrichment program now costs upwards of $5,000.

The news from Charlotte

The summer was transformative. Every day, we hundred editors of high school newspapers from around the country talked about current events and learned how to write news stories using the inverted pyramid, features, and editorials. We made friends and promises, led by the editors of two segregated high schools in Charlotte, North Carolina, scene of recent unrest following the police shooting of a black man, 43 year old Keith Lamont Scott.

That shooting gave me the goose bumps. I always considered Charlotte to be a liberal university city, a shining light of racial integration and harmony, because when I was seventeen, I had witnessed an historic meeting of minds from the “Queen City” of the South. 

The Medill admissions team had deliberately chosen two Charlotte applicants from segregated high schools, who had never met on their home turf even though each was the editor of her school newspaper. 

School integration was then the hot topic and hope of our generation, the war babies whose civic consciousness developed in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the 1954 the Supreme Court decision that overturned the doctrine of separate but equal. 

By the end of the NHSI program, the Charlotte cherubs were friends who vowed to return home and fight for desegregation. With a bit of research, I might be able to tell their stories, but I suspect they were players on the rocky road toward achieving school integration in Charlotte, legitimized in 1971 by another landmark Supreme Court case, Swann v. Charlotte, which upheld the school district’s busing program. 

After Swann, school districts in the South and across the country began to desegregate using busing; in Charlotte, push back culminated in 1999 with the Potter case, which ended mandatory busing of children on the grounds that the structure of dual school districts, one black and one white, had been replaced by a single district, thus achieving the goal of integration. 

This narrow interpretation, focusing on the administrative structure of a district, not the needs of students, began the slow re-segregation of the schools in Charlotte, until the present day when her schools are again de-facto segregated by class and race. 

“Once a national model for school integration, Charlotte schools have regressed,” writes Rev. John Cleghorn in an Observer op-ed, “In one in five schools, 95 percent of students are all of one race…. Charlotte’s retreat from desegregation is notable because, at one time, we soared higher than any other community. So our plummet is a greater, steeper disappointment.” 

Such is the social backdrop behind the death of Keith Scott, one of 708 citizens killed by police nation-wide in 2016 so far, according to the Washington Post database. By the time you read this, the number will probably have increased, and in each case, particular social and economic factors provide context for the shootings. 

Not just police killings, but all street violence including protests, terrorism, other criminal attacks, and gang warfare, have become a frame for the presidential campaigns, and we old folks who witnessed the election of Richard Nixon following the riots of 1968 are fearful that history will repeat itself, threatening the potential ascension of Donald Trump to the White House. 

This unqualified huckster is a climate change denier, race agitator, and notorious liar. How a wealthy egoist and reality TV personality became the darling of the white working class, or a segment thereof, is a subject worthy of a much lengthier investigation than this. 

The crab mentality 

Here’s my brief and personal take on race and the working class. Since my retirement in 2013, I have been fixing up my 100 year-old house, which requires constant investment of time, money, and energy. But last year’s repairs exhausted my ready resources. To stay within budget, I pitched in with the shopping at Home Depot, bricklaying, painting, sanding, staining, varnishing, cleaning up, and assisting the tile setter, the cabinetmaker, and my handyman who did the carpentry and plumbing. By the end of the year, tendonitis in my right hand required surgery. 

This year I waited six months on a roofer’s queue, followed by exterior painting, and currently I am working with a concrete contractor. In total, over twenty men have worked at my house over the last two years, and not a single one was black. The omission wasn’t intentional. My appliance repairman is African-American, and Nahman Brothers sends one of their diverse crew of plumbers whenever needed. I hire people based on recommendations, n, availability, and affordable rates. 

My landscaper and his family centered crew are Mexicans. All the specialists who worked on my kitchen are white, including my handyman, who is a semi-retired general contractor. I called him the other night to get his take on the first debate. “Trump is really dumbing us down,” he said. 

The painter is a Mexican who left his gringo boss to start his own company, the same as the concrete contractor. By sheer coincidence, I had met the latter’s ex- boss, who gave me a sky-high bid that I declined before I met his former employee. 

The painter told me last week that his father and brother were killed back home for money; he’s happy to work here and support his family. He says in America, if you don’t make money, you’re lazy. These are the workers that Trump wants to send back or keep out. 

Meanwhile, native born, unemployed young black men, are shooting each other on the streets while the building trades hunger for skilled labor. If homeowners have to wait six months to get a roof, there must be a shortage of roofers. 

When I was in business, my African-American accountant told me about the crab mentality, a folksy explanation of how envy destroys initiative, like crabs pulling down those that attempt to crawl out of a bucket. The moral of the analogy was vividly expressed at the City Council Tuesday night (Sept 27), when a South Berkeley community elder came to the microphone and mourned the death of a young black man who had been shot because he got a job. 

The Council had been listening to a report on Vision 20/20, a school and community program that supposedly addresses racial inequities but emphasizes readiness for college, not the trades, which prompted Susan Wengraf to wonder about the fate of the 11% who drop out of BHS and whether vocational education was offered. “When I went to high school, a long, long time ago,” she said, you could learn how to fix a car, do electrical wiring, and work with wood. “Not everybody is interested in academic achievement.” 

Wengraf’s comments prompted me to search the Vision 20/20 report and indeed the words vocation and trade yielded 0 results, labor only appeared as part of the word collaboration, the word manual only referred to text, job got 6 hits, but career came up 64 times. Methinks I smell a middleclass bias. 

Not everybody needs to go to college, but all young people should be able to discover and exploit their innate talents, and for many that means learning how to master tools and machines other than the gun. 

High schools and community colleges should step-up vocational training leading to jobs in the trades. The unions can help with expanded apprentice programs like the successful Biotech Partners, a community benefit of the 1992 Bayer development agreement. I was a member of the citizens advisory committee that recommended a job training program and other benefits. 

We can support the schools by voting YES on Berkeley Measure E1 and California Measure 55 and then advocate for vocational training. All levels of government should fund not only up-to-date machine shops in the schools but also a major effort to repair and rebuild our crumbling infrastructure like FDR’s CCC, a civilian construction corps that could provide jobs and instill pride in skilled labor. 

Trump, for all his appeal to the working class, would never try this, but Clinton would. The Democratic Party 2016 platform states, “We will put 

Americans to work updating and expanding our roads, bridges, public transit, airports, and passenger and freight rail lines. We will build 21st century energy and water systems, modernize our schools, and continue to support the expansion of high-speed broadband networks.” 

But even if a Democrat holds the presidency, little gets done in Washington because of political gridlock. A recent Harvard Business School report on national competitiveness, Problems Unsolved and a Nation Divided, found that “dysfunction in America’s political system is now the most important single problem facing America.” 

Right wing Republicans are pulling Congress down, like a bucket full of crabs. 

The Kennedy Kids 

Fate made me an educator, not a journalist, but the writing skills that I learned at Northwestern have served me well. The Medill faculty taught respect for the facts and a plain style that helped me survive graduate school, that great subverter of the succinct. 

They were a perspicacious bunch. For the final exercise, our instructors set up a news worthy situation and staged incident locations around the campus that represented the White House, campaign headquarters, a residence, and a hospital. The fictional event was the attempted assassination of then candidate Jack Kennedy, and the suspect was a disgruntled Cuban. We ran from one site to another, took notes, and returned to the class newsroom to write our stories on manual typewriters and to file them by a deadline. 

On a field trip to Chicago, where the Republican Convention nominated Richard Nixon, many of us had discovered our inner Kennedy kids, so the final exam was a rigorous test of detachment. Little did we know. 

We left Northwestern able to compose at the keyboard, a skill that found its way into most schools only after computers were introduced into the writing classroom. And we took with us a youthful determination to change our world. 

But school desegregation, the great enterprise of our generation, failed to unravel institutional racism in America. We overestimated the role that education could play in eradicating distrust and differences. 

We thought that integrating schools would inevitably lead to a more just society, but time revealed that desegregation was a necessary but not a sufficient cause for achieving equality. We underestimated the hard-core hate that we thought resided in only a small fraction of the white community, namely the KKK, and failed to anticipate the fear of the white middle class who fled to the suburbs, taking their financial support for urban schools with them. 

Without realizing it, we embraced W.E.B. DuBois’s notion of the talented tenth, whereby the educated African American elite would lead and elevate the rest of the race. Many liberals voted for Barack Obama, believing that a black president would serve as a positive role model, and he has. But very few young people can get into Harvard law school, and many others cannot complete a college degree. Those with other aptitudes need to follow achievable paths to financial security and self-respect. 

The Vietnam War overshadowed the civil rights struggle, fueled by the self-preservation of the baby boomers, who reached draft age starting in 1964, just when the conflict escalated. The assassination of the Kennedy brothers and Rev. King gave rise to a more militant black power movement. 

Other social concerns captured the front page: the women’s movement, gay rights and the AIDS epidemic, and the “war on drugs.” Race equality took a back seat as increasing numbers of black men were incarcerated in what Michelle Alexander calls The New Jim Crow in her 2010 bestseller. 

The Arc of History 

Rent Board candidate Igor Tregub quotes Rev. King in his email signature: “The arc of history is long but it bends toward justice,” a saying attributable to several people, and it’s not history that bends in some versions but the moral universe. 

Imagination shapes history as an arc, a serpent with tail in mouth, or a Gordian knot. Maybe human history is just a straight line of cause and effect after all, with progress occurring two steps forward, one step back. In the arc metaphor, justice appears like the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. 

The young activists who motivate the Black Lives Matter movement grew up with the slogan “No justice, No peace.” But October 2016 demands cool heads and no surprises or we may end up with the worst law and order president ever. Both cops and citizens need to cool it. 

Not just the campaign, but also the whole world is getting hotter by the day. Has anybody actually calculated the carbon footprint of a war? What the world needs now is peace, sweet peace, including peace on the streets of America. Let’s either reverse the proposition to honor first things “No peace, No justice” or better yet, honor the positive and work for both peace and justice. 

The last day to register to vote is October 24. 

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Toni Mester is a resident of West Berkeley.

P.S. on Tuesday: Since what’s below was posted on Saturday, things have gotten even more baroque. On Saturday night a quick glance at the New York Times provided an advance look at the bombshell in the Sunday issue: Trump used all those losses he racked up with his 90s bankruptcies to offset taxes on subsequent profits. What the newsies seem to be missing today is that all those deductible losses were on the backs of the people he owed money for work done. Stiff your plumbing contractor for a measly $100k and low and behold, you can skip some of your tax obligations for years into the future.

Quoting the master: “That’s business…I’m a smart guy.”

If you want to be really scared, you should make it over to the Berkeley Repertory Theater to see their dramatization of Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here”. The Chronicle reviewer, who increasingly seems to have a tin ear for politics, found it boring, but I expect she’s younger than I am and can’t recall past near misses with “right-wing populism”, AKA fascism. The only false note for the contemporary situation was that the hero was a liberal small town newspaper editor, a breed that has been almost rendered extinct in the world of big conglomerates and social media. They don’t make them like that anymore.

And it's not as if the big papers hadn't been warned. Take a look at this, from 1990:

Banks Approve Loans for Trump, But Take Control of His Finances, By RICHARD D. HYLTON

[Full disclosure: the reporter is my son-in-law.]

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It is increasingly impossible to write intelligently about the presidential race, though many of us, some even in this issue of the Planet, continue to try. That’s because the familiar show that we watch every four years has disintegrated into a three ring circus, and what’s going on in each of the three rings is wildly different. 

In Ring One we have Ms. Hillary Clinton, daringly executing a solo turn on the high wire, in fact on the highest wire any female performer has hitherto attempted. So far, she’s been admirably cool and balanced.

So why have the guys in the bleacher seats been booing?

Well, she’s one of those annoying types, the Smart Girl in the Class. 

 

[Here I must admit that I successfully avoided co-education until I was 19, so I was never at risk of sharing the teenage angst caused by irritating the boys by being the girl who knew too much. But I’ve heard about it from my friends.] 

E.G., here’s a typical male reporter opining in The Comical last week: 

“Mama don’t preach: Clinton too often comes across as an ‘eat your vegetables’ politician, telling voters what she believes they need to know, rather than what they want to know.” 

Smart Girls become Preachy Moms, right? 

Paul Krugman in Friday’s NYT thinks that’s it’s not just anti-Girl stuff on the part of The Boys on the Bus. They remind him of “the cool kids in high school jeering at the class nerd. Sexism was surely involved but may not have been central, since the same thing happened to Mr. Gore.” 

But Krugman’s one of the smallish number of men smart enough to appreciate being married to a smart woman, one who even shares his byline sometimes, so what would he know? 

Hillary’s problem is not just Smart, it’s the bad combination of Smart + Woman—no matter what you do, you can’t please them. 

When I reached this point in my cogitation, I thought to google “Clinton smile”, trying to retrieve the many printed comments I’d seen on her womanly demeanor, especially during Debate Number One. "She smiles too much. She smiles too little. Her smiles seem insincere"…blah, blah, blah…. 

I discovered that Samantha Bee had beaten me to it, with a completely hilarious compendium of live pronouncements from a great variety of TV personalities on the topic of Hillary’s self-presentation. That’s all I’m going to say on this: You simply must watch it for yourself. It’s enough to say that that candidate Clinton never seems to please anybody, let along everybody. 

 

So that’s Hillary on the tightrope: too smart, too well prepared, too cheerful, too polished. Many are hoping to see her take a fall. 

In Ring Number Two you have a couple of jugglers, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. Every time he thows up a ball he seems to drop it—some suggest this might be because he’s an admitted stoner, which can kind of throw off your balance. 

Many of Jill’s ideologue admirers seem never to have seen her perform, but not to put too fine a point on it, she’s an idiot. It’s not just that she’s a vaccination denier or at least waffler, though she is. I watched her 20 minutes of fame on MSNBC on debate night, and she wasn’t able to tell the interviewer which of the two main candidates she thought would be the worst president. Really? 

And Johnson wasn’t able to name a single world leader past or present that he admires. Really? Someone on today’s Times op-ed page called him an idiot too. 

Forget about Ring Two, then. 

Which brings us to Ring Three. There you can see a great lummox with an orange clown wig swinging with one hand on a trapeze. Every 3.5 minutes he takes a flying leap out into the ring—but no one’s there to catch him. He hits the ground, bounces up and tries it again. How many times does he have to land on his head before they throw him out altogether? 

The last four days with Donald Trump have simply been beyond belief or description. The media persist in portraying what’s going on as a contest between him and Clinton, but he’s a show unto himself, not even in the same circus or perhaps not even on the same planet. 

It’s one thing to snuffle his way through the debate so that some more experienced than I are muttering about “blow”. Maybe he’s a closet Libertarian, exercising his freedom to use the old white boy’s drug of choice. 

It’s another thing to allow his opponent to lure him into the trap of demonstrating his sexism and racism in the debate. But his post-debate solo performance, culminating in his paranoid 3 a.m. tweets about Alicia Machado on Friday morning, defies rational explanation. 

And now he’s starting to go after Mr. and Ms. Clinton’s sex life. Or, more precisely, after Bill Clinton’s sex life. Even Trump hasn’t dared to say anything about hers. 

I confess, I used to mock Hillary for putting up with Bill’s womanizing. However, regardless of his sexual shenanigans he seems to be one of those men who like women with brains as well as bodies, so maybe that’s why she has stuck with him. She’s not been his only smart girlfriend—I recently learned, to my surprise, that a very brainy woman I knew in the 1980s, now a professor, was his steady squeeze when they were undergraduates together. 

It seems that men who lust after power also frequently lust after, well, just lust. At least three presidents in the last century had a little something on the side: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy—all of them good or even great at their job despite their peccadillos. We don’t think less of Eleanor Roosevelt or Jacqueline Kennedy because their husbands were philanders. 

It’s risky business for a thrice-wedded adulterer who’s scattered progeny all over the place to denounce a woman who stayed in a marriage with the father of her daughter and even managed to reconcile with him after he strayed. If his main advisers pushing Trump towards this strategy are Rudy Giuliani (whose second wife learned that he was divorcing her via a press conference) or Roger Ailes (subject of a multimillion dollar settlement in a sexual harassment case) or Newt Gingrich (who strayed as his wife was on her deathbed) he’s in even bigger trouble. 

It’s hard to believe that Americans are so stupid that they can be so distracted by Trump’s insane performance to the extent that they ignore the real and pressing problems that this election is about. Newspapers are now falling all over themselves to endorse Clinton, realizing perhaps for the first time that they’ve spawned a monster by devoting such a huge amount of ink to the seductive Trump sideshow. Let’s hope it’s not too late. 

Op-Ed: Laurie Capitelli is not a true progressive

Three-alarm fire damages Berkeley church

There are more articles to post today, but contrary to our usual practice I'm posting this issue now because of the fire at First Congo. We have a reporter on the scene and hope to show photos soon.

I don’t understand Robert Reich’s endorsement of Laurie Capitelli for Mayor of Berkeley. I have always had the highest respect for Robert Reich, shaken his hand, read a book or two, and read whatever he had to say in newspaper letters or articles. I don’t recall disagreeing with whatever he had to say. He is a relative newcomer in Berkeley and clearly doesn’t have the feel of the place. Laurie Capitelli, a real estate man himself, represents all that is wrong in new development in our little piece of heaven, which is being sold out to real estate developers, at a high cost to Berkeley’s citizenry. Maybe Robert Reich would tell us what thinking went into his thinking on this endorsement. I suppose politicians, like happy marriages, are alike.

UPDATE:

The City of Richmond has refused to grant Wareham Development a permit to store the PCB-contaminated soil in Richmond and has ordered them to remove it. In a letter dated September 30, 2016, Wareham has committed to contact the City on Monday to “confirm exactly which day that removal will occur.”

The letter also indicates that the dumping was “approved by the Regional Water Quality Control Board.” I am looking into by what authority the Water Board approved this dumping of PCB-contaminated soil in Richmond without a permit.

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Without informing the City of Richmond and without applying for the required grading permit, Wareham Development dumped hundreds of tons of PCB-contaminated soils excavated from a site in Emeryville onto a vacant lot owned by Wareham in Point Richmond within only a few hundred feet of homes and Washington School.

The dumping appears to be a conspiracy that may involve the U.S Environmental Protection Agency, the Bay Area Water Quality Control Board, the California Department of Toxic Substance Control (DTSC) and Wareham.  

 

This is reminiscent of the huge pile of soil deposited on the Bottoms Property next to Seacliff Drive at Brickyard Cove several years ago incompetently supervised by DTSC in violation of a permit for a relatively minor amount of grading. The soil formed a high flat-topped pad so large an d so high that they said it could be “seen from space.” Locals dubbed it the “extraterrestrial landing site.” Ultimately, the property owner was required to remove it entirely. 

 

Piles of toxic soil dumped in Point Richmond 

 

Danger warning signs indicate contamination with PCBs 

Wareham has made unsubstantiated representations that the soil “does not pose a risk to the school or to surrounding residences” and that it is “under the supervision of EPA, State, and an Environmental Consultant.” However, the Mitigation Negative Declaration for the site of origination, Emerystation West at the Emeryville Transit Center Project indicates the soil came from a PCB contaminated former Westinghouse transformer facility “Historically, Westinghouse conducted operations on the EmeryStation West building site that included maintenance and repair of electrical equipment such as transformers containing polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) fluids.” 

The documents states that the material will be “transported off-site to a permitted landfill for disposal,” and “The excavated materials would be shipped to appropriately licensed and permitted facilities. PCB-contaminated soil would be shipped to landfills permitted to accept PCB-contaminated waste.” 

Instead, it was dumped in Richmond. Richmond has enough of its own contamination and does not need to become a dumping ground for contaminated soils from other cities. Emeryville took Pixar (formerly in the Wareham Point Richmond complex)away from us and sent us contaminated soil in return. 

Unfortunately, Richmond has gained a sort of “wild-west” reputation where the word on the street is that permits are not required and codes are not enforced. Whether it is a building project, a grading project or a marijuana farm, you do the work first and then negotiate a permit if you get caught, which is usually unlikely. 

I will be pursuing changes to the Richmond Municipal Code that will mandate rigorous penalties and fines for grading and building without proper permits

Today in your on-line newspaper you posted serious allegations against Wareham Development made by Mayor Tom Butt of Richmond regarding the temporary storing of soil on one of Wareham’s properties in Richmond.

Wareham Development strongly disputes Mayor Butt’s assertions that Wareham “dumped” contaminated soil in Richmond. This is a complete misrepresentation of the facts.  

 

The facts are: 

· Clean commercial fill, removed from a parking garage under construction on Wareham’s land in Emeryville, is being stored temporarily on Wareham’s private property in Richmond before being returned to the Emeryville site for re-use in the same construction project. 

The soil will be transported off the Richmond site next week  

· We have never, and would never, knowingly dump contaminated soil anywhere, and especially not on our own land. 

 

Mayor Butt suggests a “conspiracy” with regulatory agencies. This is simply untrue  

The facts are: 

· The process of testing, removing and temporarily storing the fill on the Richmond site was approved by the appropriate regulatory agency and supervised by a professional environmental consultant. Though tests showed the fill to be below actionable levels, the consultant advised Wareham to secure the temporary stockpiles at the Richmond site according to accepted industry standards (ie. wrapped in plastic, secured, fenced and precautionary signs posted including very conservatively worded warning language). 

Mayor Butt accuses Wareham of making “unsubstantiated representations” regarding the safety of the fill in question. This is incorrect.  

The facts are: 

· Wareham Development provided staff in the City of Richmond with two sets of test results conducted by a professional environmental specialist. Both sets of results confirmed the soil temporarily stored on our property in Richmond is below actionable levels as specified by environmental regulations. The soil has been approved by the regulatory bodies for storage in Richmond and re-use in the garage project now under development in Emeryville. 

The Mayor is correct in one solitary detail. Wareham failed to verify in advance if a permit was required to temporarily store this clean commercial fill on our private property in Richmond. We were not aware we required a permit to temporarily store clean fill on private land. As soon as we became aware of the need for a permit (on September 29) we immediately made an in-person appearance at the City of Richmond permit center with our environmental consultant, met with senior city staff, provided the testing results for the soil and completed the application for a permit. The clean fill will be headed back to Emeryville for use in our garage construction project, as we always intended it would, within a week. 

Wareham absolutely regrets its failure to secure the required permit and any concern this storage has given our neighbors, elected officials and City of Richmond staff. But we also stand on our solid record of cleaning up more used real estate than any development firm in the East Shore. The company prides itself on its more than 40 year track record of being willing to invest in faded real estate assets, adapting them to contemporary use and thereby helping to attract jobs to Richmond, Berkeley and Emeryville, as well as other Bay Area cities.

There’s been lots of research about the disadvantages of too many stop and other traffic signs. The Netherlands and other countries have been at the forefront of getting rid of “excessive” signs. What researchers have found is that “[d]rivers will force the accelerator down ruthlessly only in situations where everything has been fully regulated. Where the situation is unclear, they're forced to drive more carefully and cautiously.”(1) ‘"When you don't exactly know who has right of way, you tend to seek eye contact with other road users,'' he said. ''You automatically reduce your speed, you have contact with other people and you take greater care."’ (2) 

Personally, we see this every day where drivers speed through the yellow, and even just-turned-red, traffic lights going up Marin, counting on the delay before cross-traffic takes its turn. If there were no lights at all it would be hard to imagine anyone speeding through an intersection. While this is an extreme example, as a bike rider, it is painful to have to stop at every block on a relatively lightly trafficked street such as Milvia because of the excess of stop signs, mostly at intersections where all four directions have a stop sign.  

In fact, it’s gotten to the point that now at intersections its necessary to have additional signage saying that, in those rare places where there is not a four-way stop, the cross-traffic does not have a stop sign, so that stopped drivers don’t start through the intersection thinking that cross-traffic will stop. So more instructions are required once four-way stop intersections are in place. 

 

(1) http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/controlled-chaos-european-cities-do-away-with-traffic-signs-a-448747.html 

(2) http://www.dw.com/en/european-towns-remove-traffic-signs-to-make-streets-safer/a-2143663 

Additional sources: 

http://www.citylab.com/commute/2011/09/shared-spaces/116/ 

http://thecityfix.com/blog/naked-streets-without-traffic-lights-improve-flow-and-safety/

Who is the funniest candidate for Berkeley mayor? I'm a serious student of local politics, and I think we need a rematch because even I can't tell. 

If I had to make the call tonight, right after the standing-room-only show at the North Berkeley Senior Center hosted by the Gray Panthers on Wednesday, September 28, 2016, I might vote for Ben Gould, a clueless graduate of UC San Diego who thinks the citizens of Berkeley should be taxed more to pay for private housing specifically for University of California students even though...well, Ben, that's who's already paying for private University of California student housing, which we understand is hard to see from San Diego. Or from the Berkeley hills where you went out of your way to emphasize you grew up. It was a forgiving crowd at the North Berkeley Senior Center who seemed to appreciate that Ben was young enough to be kind of short-sighted in some charming but obvious respects. 

But Ben had some competition from what would be my second runner up, Bernt Wahl, who answered every question put before him by the elegant moderator, George Lippman, by emphasizing his status as an engineer who would solve problems "like an engineer" using a lot of "technology" like Uber and Lyft. I am not making that up. For the full comedic effect go to either or both Ben Gould's or Bernt Wahl's websites, where their own dubious prose is joyously unvetted by those proficient in media."I hope to pursue actionable legislation" is in the first paragraph of Bernt Wahl's June 2014 election website. Not making it up! 

But they had competition. Naomi Pete, a soft-spoken woman who seemed winded by having to participate at all, passed on more than one question claiming she just had no idea how to answer. Mike Lee alternated between being unintelligible to those of us in the back of the room and striking bellicose theatrical poses shouting repetitively into the microphone about marches and picket signs. Laurie Capitelli insisted that "house rules" were needed for commercial districts (?), while Jesse Arreguin claimed to have unilaterally saved Berkeley's landmarked downtown post office in front of dozens of grey-haired activists who actually did so. 

Local Commissioner George Lippman patiently and repeatedly clarified the questions from the Gray Panthers before bravely fielding buckets of questions from the audience, which lasted well 

over two hours with only one snarling disruption from a man who claiming everybody was being boring and exited while shouting about bathrooms but reminded us at the doorway that he loved us all, to resounding applause. 

There is some good news for those of you who cannot skate out of work during the day and missed the show. Most of the candidates do appreciate that we are situated in a housing crisis, even though the majority of them still think it can be addressed by peeling off one or two units in a luxury housing complex for the challenged group that has to live on slightly less than $100,000. That is what is considered affordable under the current equation. Not making it up! 

And more good news. Most of the mayoral contenders have heard of police accountability as an issue, and feel obliged to acknowledge its existence. Most of the candidates have heard the news that racial bias affects everyone thanks to well documented, researched, and replicated studies of not just police departments but also elementary school teachers, juries, and so forth. 

This represents a huge, undeniable change from previous decades of unwillingness to address the sheer idiocy of stopping and frisking a community's other-than-white people on the grounds that bias indicates that this is efficacious policy when in fact it is decidedly not. In the course of human events, this in and of itself is a marvelous turn. 

 

It is also good news that at least one mayoral candidate, Kriss Worthington, was relentlessly willing to compliment other candidates, notably Jesse Arreguin, when Arreguin's policy work in question was compatible with a progressive direction. This may sound boring, but it's miraculous to depressed observers of local candidates' behavior. Worthington was the only candidate with anything complimentary to say about others on the North Berkeley Senior Center stage, unless you count Mike Lee's willingness to compliment Mayor Tom Bates' heir apparent Laurie Capitelli's entirely theoretical support for ridiculous tiny houses, the obvious camel's nose under the tent for loosening developer restrictions and housing codes. 

These are troubled times. But comedy is there, rooted among the ordinary events of the day for your edification, nourishment, and pleasure. Show up! Fill out a question card. And above all, enjoy. These candidates certainly seem to think they are ready their close-up.

In that famous moment in O’Neill’s play about self-seduction and self-cockolding, Harry cries out, “What have ya done to the booze, Hickey? It’s got no kick to it.” And what have they done to our town? Where is the impressionist history that will trace our loss back to that never-never land known as berkeley (with a small b). Where is that famous artist who painted a psycho-history of machinic beasts to tell us, with his “paranoid method,” what we should have known all along, that something was being taken away. 

There is a plan afoot, a plan to "normalize" berkeley, to take it back into Berkeley (with a capital B). Hatched during the mid-1970s, the plan belched and coughed like an old V-8 engine firing on 6 cylinders, until the mid-90s, when it reached cruising speed, and swept away those chanting leftovers who kept shouting “Yuppies out of berkeley” along Telegraph Ave. 

A psycho-history would need all our voices to tell it. But just cast an eye over that endless flat plane of memory. The sign-posts still stand – the free speech movement, the beat generation, the Vietnam Day Committee with its massive weekly demonstrations on lower Sproul Plaza, the Panthers, the People’s Park people, community radio, the free schools, the free clinics, the free legal services. It was when we threw our arms around each other, and made a cosmic equation between history and family. It was when the little-b stood for "beacon," flashing at other cities across the nation who were all doing the same kinds of thing their own way. Back then, there was art to everything – the politics, the counter-culture, the protests against corporate control – and an open city of endless talk, when words actually built structures that people could live by. 

But it upset the elite. Secretly agreeing with Samuel Huntington, the elite too decided there was “too much democracy” – a sentiment Huntington expressed in his speech to the Trilateral Commission in 1975. They made a plan. 

Today, the plan has come to the point of threateneing to close Alta Bates Hospital. To close that hospital would be a slash at the body of civil society, an open wound, producing emergencies that will possibly die in traffic jams. Today, the nurses (the CNA) are playing "panther," stepping up en masse to defend us against this travesty. The nurses … ??!!! They had a rally on the fall equinox – to save how many people? from dying in ambulances? The Panthers had once attempted to defend us all against our own complexion-oriented violations of democratic principles. 

So what is the plan? It is nothing less than a plan to make the city "normal" again, a plan to get all the militants, the activists, the radicals with all their -isms, the counter-culture dreamers, and especially the black people, out of town. Time to get rid of that "beacon" crap, with its inventiveness and its community. 

The plan began with the MTC taking over ABAG. Indeed, ABAG was the turning-point. It had been originally invented by the counter-culture, the radicals, to coordinate their varous activities aimed at democratizing politics throughout the bay area. When ABAG started thinking about real public transportation, a network of small free buses serving the people by carrying them wherever they needed to go, the corporate establishment freaked, and stepped in, flashing state-priority badges. Nowadays, ABAG is the power behind the gentrification of these cities, ordaining massive market rate rent that it takes six-figure salaries to afford. We all know the other details because we live them: surreal bus schedules, a subway system that runs five lines on a two lane tunnel under the bay, the demise of low-cost graceries, and massive dislocation of long time residents, exiled to Martinez, to Modesto, and beyond. On top of which, we get the apologists and their silly little chant of “supplyanddemand (hic), supplyanddemand.” 

The story goes that the "normalization" plan got interrupted a couple of times (I’m not mentioning any names). Once was when a black mayor was elected who kept the small-b in place, and through many activist organizations helped activate it in other cities. It was an interlude of democratizers, the “people’s republic,” and the end of the Vietnam War. People hugged, smiled, and beat back the attempt to take over People’s Park. But they lost their first battle with the passage of the Costa-Hawkins Act, which banned rent control. Instead of housing being a human right, Costa-Hawkins affirmed that rent gouging was the real human right. 

In other words, that act held, in so many words, that though the majority of a city’s people were renters (as is the case in Berkeley), its city council would not be able represent or defend that majority. It was the opening shot in a process that went (past tense) from pro-democracy to no democracy. Today, there are efforts to try to find a loophole in Costa-Hawkins. Richmond (the Richmond Progressive Alliance), Oakland, some other cities are engaged in such a search. But not Berkeley (with a big-B). It has “normalization” on its mind. 

The first step in the original plan was to close down places that catered to group events, areas where families could get together and people could hang out. Iceland was one. The art theater on Blake and Shattuck was another. The “free school” was closed, and Vista expanded to proper bureaucratic operations. The University was a third casualty, transmogrified from free education and open libraries to an ID-governed enterprise that reduced students to raw material, education to debt, and learning to career-orientation. But mostly, families were left with few places to go, essentially condemning them to staying home, working two or more jobs. 

Next, a housing crisis was created. The fact that it was a planned crisis was not stated, but it was implicit in the fact that it was broadcast. In exaggerated tones, Plan Bay Area was given trumpets and fanfare, whose small print was an unrefusable invitation to land speculators. “Come one, come all, get your piece of the pie now.” The "liberated" landlords put their greed in overdrive, and made the bay area the most expensive place in the US to live. 

The stage had been carefully set, however. Only occasional new housing was built during the previous 20 years. If you let housing go for a couple of decades, and then create plans for massive new construction at market rate, poof, you have a housing crisis. Dislocation is the threat made by the mere promise of big hotels, luxury condos in Priority Development Areas, and $4000/month apartments. Before ground is even broken on those projects, those who live by art and wits are priced out and exiled, the early fruit of the normalization process. 

Today, people talk about how this just ain’t the same town any more. How did we let them take it away? One way is that too few really believed there was a plan. Many still don’t believe that the massive dislocation of longtime residents from the city is precisely what the plan called for. It all just looks so natural, the unfortunate outcome of economic "progress." Demand goes up, so rent goes up, and taxes go up, and richer people move into town while others succomb to insidious evictions as "isolated" incidents against which the city can’t (won’t) offer any defense. When small stores close because their rents go up, the city blames it on the movement to raise the minimum wage (carefully keeping silent about the Seattle counter-experience). 

Do you think that measure R was real? Something to Revitalize downtown? Something the Restore greatness as the “will of the people”? Forgetaboutit. Measure R was the prototypical normalization event. 

What’s the third step? We are living through it right now, and stepping over it at most choice locations. The homeless have been instrumentalized to make the un-normalized city unlivable. Any guesses why the homeless population has swelled to three times its size since 2010? Try looking back at the preceding paragraphs, where it talks about cost of living, rising rents, and the economic stresses of landlord harassment. That latter makes family life difficult and abusive. Teenagers leave the house to escape it. And the job situation is lousy. 

The homeless are the city’s secret weapon. Everytime they find a place to conjoin in community (such as Liberty City), by which to take care of themselves – be it under an expressway, or in a park, or on the Albany Bulb – they get booted out. All those places where they aren’t bothering anybody, the cops raid them, trash their possessions, and force them into areas where they will be bothering people. Or dying in public like Roberto Benitez (sp) did on Sept. 20 at Addison and San Pablo. 

A demand is thus created for the city to please hurry up and get rid of this problem. Not only does it give the city the opportunity to further criminalize the homeless, but it hooks people into a dependence on city government to protect them, thus reducing the chance that people will object to the plan and its developments. And those developments will drive those same people (the residents) out of the city. 

You don’t think the city is that conniving? There was a rent-controlled building on upper Durant that a developer wanted to replace with a new building. The fire department got the green light to use it for practice (while some still lived in it), wrecking part of it, and thus rationalizing its demolition. Or think about human waste. For years, the homeless have been asking for public toilets, which the city promised and never produced. So people piss in the street, and residents get upset – which is precisely the point. Yet the city can spend five times as much for police overtime as the toilets would have cost. Its irrationality is the secret rationality of the plan. 

During this latest phase, we get what is known as "input." The city sets up offices to take complaints and hear suggestions about neighborhood needs and interests. Even UC did that. They set up a neighborhood Board to gather opinions and suggestions about life in the university neighborhoods. “This is your chance to participate.” The ideas poured in, with zero follow-up. 

A city-staffed “Idea Center” was funded in South Berkeley to gather opinions and desires from the neighborhood for the Adeline Plan. The consultancy firm hired to incorporate it all listened too assiduously to the residents, and got fired. At the same time, developers come along with projects inside the plan-zone, and no one tells them to wait to see if their project will harmonize with the plan (still in formation). Since the city doesn’t stop them, it means the input for the plan was already disregarded. There will be no follow-up. At best, it is an insidious scam. What have they done to democracy? it’s got no kick to it. 

Lamely hiding their eyes, many people will scoff and say, “there’s no plan.” And you can ask anyone in the city council Machine if there’s a plan, and they will say no. But as an old truckdriver friend of mine used to say, “ If it looks like a plan, and walks like a plan, and quacks like a plan, it ain’t no goddam duck.” 

If "Development" is about market rate housing for Big-B Berkeley, neighborhood "Defense" against gentrification is about preserving little-b berkeley – providing housing for the people, especially the homeless and the dislocated (with rent at 30% of income), and organizing the communities to beautify themselves on their own. Forgetaboutit. The developers will promise 10% affordable housing, and then pay mitigation fees instead. The city’s people require 90% affordable, with a 10% sop thrown to those who can afford $4,000 a month.  

There are, of course, international aspects. You know what they are if you’ve been paying attention. If the TPP gets passed, we can kiss labor and environmental law goodby. We’ve already lost all democratic power over housing with the Costa-Hawkins Act, and the state’s density bonus. Only that famous artist, whose name is spelled in the first letters of the last four paragraphs, understood how our time melts and drips in golden iconicities off the table, into the abyssal silence undoing our small-b subjectivities, and leaving us to see ourselves from afar. 

But didn’t we once throw our arms around each other, and make a cosmic equation between history and family itself? 

We are the pro-tenant, progressive Rent Stabilization Board slate of Christina Murphy, Alejandro Soto-Vigil, Leah Simon-Weisberg, and Igor Tregub (“CALI” for short). Our track record of success in our collective efforts to fight for Berkeley’s most vulnerable has earned us the endorsements of Senator Bernie Sanders, the Sierra Club, the Berkeley Tenants Union, theAlameda County Democratic Party, the Alameda County Labor Council, Councilmembers Jesse Arreguin, Kriss Worthington, and Max Anderson, and many others respected community leaders. 

All four of us believe that housing is a fundamental human right, and were elected as the pro-tenant slate by the 2016 Berkeley Tenants Convention. The convention had a record turnout, with nearly 400 diverse community members committed to protecting rent control and tenants’ rights. As we all know all too well, Berkeley is facing an unprecedented housing crisis that is pushing out our seniors, working families, differently abled, and low-income communities – communities that make up the Berkeley that we love. 

To help protect the Berkeley we love, the four of us will actively work to defend rent control and strengthen tenant protections. In the past few years, the City has been proposing the demolition of rent-controlled units, further decreasing current or potential residents’ options for affordable units in Berkeley. Some of these proposed demolitions have also come at the price of evicting tenants out of the property in order to make the building eligible for demolition. We will work with the City to find alternative measures to addressing the needs of the property owner and the building that does not have to result in the loss of affordable units, or the eviction of tenants, some of whom have lived there for decades. 

With the aging of Berkeley’s rent controlled housing stock, we need to make sure that these units are not only up to code, but also in safe and habitable living conditions for our residents. We are aware that there are some property owners in Berkeley who are low-income, and may find it difficult to finance repairs or improvements, but we are excited to work with tenants and property owners to ensure that their homes are in good shape. 

The Berkeley Rent Stabilization program offers a very unique service that many residents and property owners in California do not have. For that reason, it is extremely important that Berkeley residents be aware OF and take advantage of the various forms of education, programs, and services the Rent Board offers. We will work to expand and improve the current services [that the Rent Board offers], while paying particular attention to tenants and small landlords – two groups that make up an important part of the fabric of our Berkeley community. We seek to be your voice on the Rent Board!  

More information about us is available at www.berkeleyrentboard.org. We would be happy to answer any of your questions at CALISlate4RentBoard@gmail.com. 

To ensure that Berkeley is a place that we can all call home, please vote for the CALI Rent Board slate – Christina Murphy, Alejandro Soto-Vigil, Leah Simon-Weisberg, and Igor Tregub – on November 8!

To be Jewish, or even to have Jewish heritage, is for many of us to acquire a necessary sensitivity to ethnic antagonisms in connection to mass movements. The Trump campaign invites scrutiny in this regard. Exhibit A: the candidate himself famously indulges in racial and ethnic slanders. Exhibit B: the Trump candidacy is enthusiastically promoted by nazi revivalists who organize under the flags of a European "identitarian" movement that has acquired support throughout Europe and that now appears in the US at Trump rallies, on campuses, and in Sacramento stabbing queer communists. 

 

Our sensitivities to ethnic purists, born of long historic trauma, risks devolution into a kind of numbness and inattention to the real movement of society. To Trump's supporters and detractors alike, some of them anyway, he symbolizes the recurrence of a white-led cleansing. Does he actually herald it? What if the real threat is elsewhere? What if defeating Trump makes no real difference? Is Trump actually relevant? 

 

At the end of her essay "The Arc of History", Toni Mester expresses her fear of a Trump presidency in a curiously round-about way: As a warning and admonishment to Black activists: "The young activists who motivate the Black Lives Matter movement grew up with the slogan No justice, No peace. But October 2016 demands cool heads and no surprises or we may end up with the worst law and order president ever. Both cops and citizens need to cool it." (Mester does not explain why "cops" would fear a Nixonian "law and order" candidate.) 

 

Whites, Mexicans, African-Americans, blacks, and "I" 

 

Mester's "singling out" of Black people (to borrow a phrase) is peculiar. It comes at the end of an essay about Mester's personal account of race and class. In her essay, Mester marks the business savvy of whites (though they might sometimes set their prices too high), the work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit of Mexicans, and the utility and folksy wisdom of African-Americans. On the other hand, there are the "blacks".... 

 

In Mester's essay there is an interesting way she uses words to describe Black people. "African-American" occurs twice and each time describes people she has personally hired. On the other hand, she uses "black" many times, to describe people who are shot by the police, segregated, unemployed, shot by other "blacks", imprisoned, or guilty of militancy. In her usage, "black" also describes President Obama in his alleged capacity as a failed role model for other "blacks". Finally, "black" are the subjects of the Black Lives Matter movement. 

 

The essay, written in the first person, holds a special place for Mester's "I" as both employer and taxonomist of various other ethnicities. "I" hires "African-American" appliance repair and plumbing services, Mexican landscapers, white handymen, and an entrepreneurial Mexican painter (who underbid his "gringo" former employer). "I" is a cautious shopper, building wealth. "I"'s biggest fault, if any, is a tendency to work too hard. ("By the end of the year, tendonitis in my right hand required surgery.") 

 

Mester has thus laid out a kind of ethnic or racial hierarchy, each group characterized by its position as buyers or sellers of labor. This is, evidently, the story of race and class: "I", the successful propertied class and primary buyer of labor; whites selling their labor for the highest prices; Mexicans coming up next as the discount rate underdog; African-American sole proprietors -- all the successful races differing in their degree of success. And then there, on the other hand, are Mester's "blacks" -- the ones who are told to "cool it", lest Trump be elected. 

 

A Capitalist Just-so Story 

 

Mester offers to diagnose the plight of Black people this way: 

 

1. School desegregation, Mester ahistorically asserts, was expected to "inevitably lead to a more just society, but time revealed that desegregation was a necessary but not a sufficient cause for achieving equality".  

 

-- Nevermind that no civil rights leader ever viewed desegregation as anything but one battle in a much larger struggle. 

 

2. Like "crabs in a bucket", Mester tells us, Black people fail at selling their labor because they pull one another down out of envy. She writes: "my African-American accountant told me [...], a folksy explanation of how envy destroys initiative, like crabs pulling down those that attempt to crawl out of a bucket."  

 

-- Nevermind that when crabs in a pot pull at one another it is not out of envy and not a symptom of destroyed initiative -- it is the effect of a collective scrum to escape intolerable conditions. It is a reflection of ambition, drive, and effort deployed fruitlessly against an externally imposed, unwinnable scenario. 

 

3. Mester is confident that Black poverty must be the result of laziness because: "[the Mexican painter she hired] says in America, if you don't make money, you're lazy." In fact, Mester is confident poor blacks are leaving money on the table because "If homeowners have to wait six months to get a roof, there must be a shortage of roofers."  

 

-- There are two contemporary accounts of a supposed labor shortage of construction workers. In one account, there is a tiny nationwide shortage of around 200,000 workers - equivalent to about one tenth of one percent of the US workforce. In another account, there is no evidence of a shortage at all since construction wages are not growing particularly fast. Further, Mester doesn't explain how a Bay Area roofing contractor with no waiting list is supposed to remain in business for long. 

 

Overall the message is clear. In Mester's world view, a world of employment awaits Blacks who, alas, just don't try. The evidence against that view is no problem for Mester who is telling a just-so story: pinning Black unemployment largely on certain anecdotal accounts of Black morality that suit her fancy. 

 

Trump's Mirror 

 

A mirror shows the viewer a faithful self-image but reverses the chirality. In the image from a mirror, left becomes right, and right becomes left. 

 

Mester's view of race and class has an eerie degree of similarity to that of Trump's supporters.  

 

1. In Trump-land, whites are hard-working high achievers... 

 

2. ... but Mexicans enter white labor markets and drive down the price of labor ... 

 

3. ... and while you can find respectable, well-spoken African-Americans, in the eyes of many Trump supporters the bulk of Black people are shiftless and incorrigible. 

 

Mester differs with Trump's most alt-right supporters on two key points: 

 

Difference 1: The place and role of Jews in the race/class hierarchy. If the alt-right crowd places Jews near the top of the hierarchy, it is of course only to repeat vile conspiracy theories. 

 

Difference 2: While Mester would try to preserve but humanize the present by deploying Black labor for affordable and timely rooftops, Trump's alt-right fans would happily expel Jews, Mexicans, and Blacks, then get on with such work on their own. 

 

In a sense, Mester and the alt-right largely agree on a diagnosis. They differ on the prescription. 

 

This is especially bad because in neither case is the prescription really grounded on a scientific, historical, factual basis. If we accept as a starting point those claims which both Mester and the alt-right believe, we have no convincing -- which is to say truly arguable -- reason to pick one over the other. Mester's ethnic liberalism and the alt-right's white nationalism are equally plausible responses to a faulty way of parsing "race and class". 

 

"Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?" 

 

In pre-capitalist history, the divisions of people into peoples proceeded on the basis of language, familial relations, history, intra-group social practices, geography, and appearance. Relations among these "races" were understood in terms of territory, dominance and subordination, conflict and trade. 

 

One of the revolutionary transformations of capital has been the recasting of "race" as an economic demographic within a universal population. From at least the time of plantation slavery, race has been socially managed primarily as an object of ledgers, census rolls, sub-populations, and comparative economic assessments. Races today are a problematic of concerns such as market access, household wealth, education credentials, proportional representation.  

 

So alien was that shift from prior pre-capitalist concepts of race that whites had to invent the "orient" and the "negro" to implement their patterns of trade, extraction, war, and enslavement. In the 20th century, racial "identity" -- race at the heart of the self -- had to be newly invented to establish both segregation and the struggle for civil rights, separatism and integration, nazism and multi-cultural capitalism.  

 

Capital has thoroughly integrated disparate concepts of "race" without needing or bestowing any internal coherence to those concepts. We might say one day that race is a biologically false category and on another that race is a medically essential category. The degree to which society is successfully "race blind" is said to be determined by observing, measuring, and comparing racial differences. We're led to unanswerable questions of innateness vs. inequity to explain the performance metrics of capital: property and crime, income, wealth, credentialization -- all as applied to demographic sub-populations. 

 

It is within that incoherent, fundamentally capitalist story of race that both Mester and the alt-right stake their strikingly similar claims about Jews, whites, Mexicans, and "blacks". Each of them assert the same demographic "facts" as central to understanding our collective state of affairs. Both factions in this dispute share, in the end, the same uncritical view of capital. 

 

The approach the two of them use is as old as fascism itself. We can say, not too arbitrarily, that the fascist governance of race and capital found its perch in the U.S. during the Great Depression, around the time of racially separatist New Deal policies, and the judicial reform of those vagrancy laws which suddenly threatened large numbers of unemployed whites. Not long after that, the U.S. built its first concentration camps for expulsion of Japanese. In subsequent years, the U.S. would go on to practice eugenics, apartheid, ghettoization, and mass imprisonment.  

 

Capital can't -- and doesn't need to -- get its story straight. We can't expect Mester or the alt-right to carve out a coherent position when they are both using the incoherent "race" pastiche capital has produced. When promoting racial difference is useful for the exploitation of labor, capital promotes racial difference: slavery, vagrancy law, barriers to immigration for poor people. Conversely, when erasing racial difference is useful for exploiting labor, capital does that instead: union-busting, block-busting, affirmative action. Race flexibly serves capital as both problem and solution -- whichever is needed to perpetuate and intensify the exploitation of the proletariat. 

 

Black Lives Matter but Trump doesn't 

 

There is one more thing upon which Mester and the alt-right apparently agree: Black Lives Matter activists ought to "cool it". For Mester, the rebellions associated with BLM threaten to usher in a Nixonian law-and-order candidate (Trump) and, anyway, are a dubious tactic. For the alt-right, BLM should cool it because they are on the wrong side of history in ethnically European territory. Nevertheless, both Mester and the alt-right wind up siding with the elected officials and the chambers of commerce in their view of BLM rebellion. 

 

Whatever their flaws and risks, BLM rebellions are -- at least in the short run -- bad for capital. History tells us that negative relation of rebellions to capital determines their repression. With or without Trump, barring the overthrow of capital, race will either be produced or be erased in political fact -- whichever helps to support profit at the cost of laborers. BLM, on its capitalist face, is already a multi-faceted, self-contradictory brand, useful in fashion, media content, expenditures on repressive policing. 

 

I can't say whether BLM should "cool it", "intensify it", or do something else entirely. I don't mean it is not my place -- if I knew the answer I would say. I just don't claim to know. 

 

I can say that no matter whether Trump or Clinton is elected makes no difference for the working class: it is the imperatives of capital, not the rhetoric of politicians that dominates us. 

 

 

"I know they buried her body with others
Her sister and mother and 500 families
And will she remember me 50 years later
I wished i could save her in some sort of time machine
Know all your enemies
We know who our enemies are
Know all your enemies
We know who our enemies are" -- Jeff Magnum ("Oh Comely"). 

This essay is in response to Toni Mester's "SQUEAKY WHEEL: The Arc of History", published in the Daily Planet on September 30, 2016) 

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Whew! Even though I expected Hillary Clinton to win the first presidential debate with Donald Trump, watching it was a nerve-wracking experience. Here are my first thoughts about the debate:

1.Hillary had the best demeanor. In general, Clinton came across as composed and cheerful. Trump came across as angry and, occasionally, disdainful.

2.Trump interrupted Clinton either by talking over her or by making snide comments such as, "that's called business,by the way" -- when she noted that Trump "was one of the people who rooted for the housing crisis."

3.Although the Trump campaign has made a lot of fuss about Clinton's supposed "stamina" problem, it was Trump who wilted in the last half of the debate. 

4.Clinton repeatedly trapped Trump with his own words: "Donald thinks that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese." (Trump denied this but it's verified by his Tweet.) 

5.Roughly one-quarter of the way through the debate, Clinton stood up to Trump: "Well, Donald, I know you live in your own reality, but that is not the facts." (sic) 

6. After Trump blamed the supposed failings of the Obama Administration on Clinton, Hillary quipped: "I have a feeling that by the end of the evening I'm going to blamed for everything that ever happened." Trump responded, "Why not?" Clinton laughed, "Why not? Yeah, why not?" And the audience laughed with her. Clinton continued, "... just join the debate by saying more crazy things." Hillary won every round from that point forward. 

7. Trump failed to explain why he has not made public his tax returns. When Clinton speculated that "he didn't pay any federal income tax," Trump quipped, "That makes me smart." 

8.Roughly half way through the debate, Trump's responses began to ramble. He didn't do a good job explaining "people who were stiffed by you." He didn't explain why he believe his "stop and frisk policy" was legal even though it has been ruled unconstitutional. Trump failed to explain why, until recently, he continued his "birther" campaign. (Clinton called this "a racist lie" and noted, "he has a long history of engaging in racist behavior.") 

9.When Clinton noted, "Donald supported the invasion of Iraq," Trump denied it. When the moderator, Lester Holt, questioned Trump about his statement, Trump again repeated his denial, rambling for several minutes. Trump concluded with, "I also have a much better temperament than she has, you know?" The audience laughed at him. Clinton laughed and shook her head in disbelief, "Whew, OK." 

10.At the end of debate, Lester Holt reminded Trump that he had said Clinton, "Doesn't have a presidential look." Again, Trump rambled trying to explain himself. Clinton nailed him: "He tried to switch from looks to stamina, But this is a man who has called women pigs, slobs, and dogs. Trump defended himself by attacking Rose O'Donnell: "I said very tough things to her, and I think everybody would agree that she deserves it." 

At the beginning of the debate, Hillary Clinton addressed the audience; "You have to judge us, who can shoulder the immense, awesome responsibilities of the presidency, who can put into action the plans that make you life better." Most political observers thought Clinton won this debate, came across as more presidential. (So did CNN viewers, [http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/27/politics/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-debate-poll/] 62 percent though Clinton won.) Round one goes to Clinton. 

 

---

Bob Burnett is a Berkeley writer. He can be reached at bburnett@sonic.net or bobburnett.net 

It is harder than it was in the not so distant past for those with psychiatric illness to survive, live independently, and remain in a non-institutionalized situation. Various parties within the government and the business community have created rules and have created a scenario in which persons with disabilities, especially psychiatric, are being forced out. This entails submitting to institutionalization, excessive supervision, and the segregation that exists (which is partly classist segregation and partly segregation by means of keeping us sequestered by mental health treatment organizations).  

And, under Trump, if he is elected, it will get far uglier.  

Mr. Trump has made his stamp on the social environment even before being elected. Even if he is not elected, American culture will be changed for the worse for years to come.  

I don't know exactly what happened to this man. About ten or fifteen years ago, he was known by most people as a very ambitious billionaire who had major successes in real estate. Over time, his image, if not his personality, darkened. His battles against Rosie O'Donnell about fifteen years ago seemed to mark the beginning of his public combativeness.  

He seemed to feed off having a television presence, one in which he was known for being a showman and for acting like a tough businessman. In the past, he may have even been on friendly terms with the Clintons. Then, at some indefinable point, the Darth Vader thing seemed to happen.  

My point is that Donald Trump has awakened evil forces within our society. This began when white racists were outraged that an African American person had become our President. Trump tapped into that hate, fed on it, and fanned its flames. And now, those inclined to be peaceful, kind, and nonviolent, are going to be forced to live in this new, oftentimes hostile environment that is coming about.  

Disabled people already had a full plate with changes that have come about through newer technologies, social media, more restrictions in society, and more complexity to sift through, in the quest to get basic needs met. Add the new, hate politics and you are creating a very harsh environment to which to adapt.  

Persons with psychiatric disabilities doubtless will have difficulty with all of this. Some have seemed to disappear, possibly incarcerated, institutionalized, or deceased. I have seen a generation of high functioning mentally ill adults seem to dematerialize.  

At one time, there was a highly active, creative, and odd (sometimes odd is good) class of mentally ill people. Many were eccentric. Some, admittedly were just plain weird. At one time, it was okay to be a little weird. Now things are more conformist.  

The government has become more violent, and it seems to intentionally spit out of the system those who aren't able to obey ridiculous and sometimes impossible rules, or fake it.  

My wife and I paid an outrageously high electricity bill, possibly caused by the smart-meter that P G and E installed. Now we are in trouble because we paid this ridiculous sum. If we had obeyed the unspoken rules, we would be tearing our hair out, overdrawing our bank accounts, and we would be delinquent on our P G and E. That doesn't work for me--the electricity bill comes right off the top along with rent at the beginning of every month.  

Society is denying many of their right to exist. If you look at cities harassing and persecuting homeless people, you will see part of this. If you look at the "social engineering" that seems to be taking place, there isn't a niche provided for people with disabilities.  

We have to get by as best we can, and if we have parents or other family who be of emotional support and physical help, if we can maintain our recovery despite disturbing content when we watch the news, if we can obey all of the rules given to us, some of which are nearly impossible, if we can take our medication as prescribed, and if we can avoid making trouble for the good working people, then, maybe, we can get by. 

In the Muslim world, the tale of the inspired but tragic love of Layla and Majnun holds a place in the popular imagination similar to that held in western culture by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. However, the tale of Layla and Majnun, which originates way back in oral tradition in the Arabian peninsula, predates Shakespeare’s play by more than a thousand years. The ill-fated lovers Layla and Majnun have been celebrated by Turks, Arabs, Persians, Indians, Pakistanis and Afghans; but perhaps the most influential version of this story was a Persian one by Nezami Ganjawi (1140-1209 BCE). Another influential setting of this story was by Azerbaijani poet and philosopher Muhammad Fuzuli (1483-1556), whose work was later set to music by Azerbaijani composer Uzeyir Hajibeyli (1885-1948) in an opera, Leyli and Majnun, which premiered in Baku in 1908. Since then, this opera has opened every season at the Azerbaijani State Opera and Ballet Theatre; and it is a source of immense pride to all Azerbaijanis.  

In 2007, Silk Road Ensemble, a group founded by Yo-Yo Ma to foster cross-cultural musical relations, created a chamber arrangement of Hajibeyli’s opera, and Silk Road performed this suite in many concerts around the globe. Dance choreographer Mark Morris loved the music and decided to create a new work for his dance company, paring down the music of Hajibeyli’s opera from three and-a-half hours to one hour, with singers performing Fuzuli’s mughams or modal songs in the Azerbaijani language. As sung by noted Azerbaijani vocalists Alim Qasimov as Majnun and his daughter, Fargana Qasimova, as Layla, Mark Morris’s Layla and Majnun received its world premiere under the aegis of Cal Performances at Zellerbach Hall on Friday, September 30. 

In Middle Eastern musical tradition, the mugham is a branch of the large form of music known as maqam or modal structure. Historically, mugham is performed by a trio consisting of a singer playing gaval (frame drum) and two instrumentalists playing tar (lute) and kamencheh (spiked fiddle). In this Silk Road performance of Layla and Majnun, the tar and kamencheh were featured, played exquisitely by Zaki Valiyev and Rauf Islamov respectively. However, Silk Road performed an arrangement of Hajibeyli’s music by Alim Qasimov Johnny Gandelsman, and Colin Jacobsen that offered scope to western instruments, perhaps especially the cello, which opened the work and closed it with poignant solos played by Karen Ouzounian. The singing of Alim Qasimov and Fargana Qasimova was achingly beautiful and passionately gripping throughout; and it formed the backbone of the musical score. Their songs have some affinities with the “Aman” laments in the Greek Rembetika tradition from Smyrna and Istanbul. 

Perhaps the nearest cousin, so to speak, of this Layla and Majnun would be Sergei Prokoviev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet, which I once saw danced by Rudolf Nureyev in his own choreography. However, the presence of two singers portraying Layla and Majnun takes the audience deep inside the subjective suffering of these two lovers separated, like Romeo and Juliet, by their families. The result is a work of searing emotional intensity. Layla and Majnun tugs at your heartstrings. 

The plot, a tale of young love, is simple. Boy meets girl and they fall head over heels in love. The boy, barely in his teens, declares his love publically, proclaiming it aloud in verses extolling Layla’s beauty and grace. Her parents find his behavior scandalous, and people give the boy the epithet majnun, which means “one possessed” or “mad.” Layla’s parents forbid her to see Majnun. Separation only makes the boy and girl love each other more. Mark Morris develops the story in six episodes. In the first, boy meets girl and they fall in love. Next, her parents disapprove of this love and forbid Layla to see Majnun. In the third episode, entitled “Sorrow and Despair,” the lovers individually express their sadness. Next comes “Layla’s Unwanted Wedding,” a marriage forced upon her by her parents. Majnun comes to the wedding and initially rebukes Layla, thinking she has consented to this marriage. She assures him it is against her will and she will always remain faithful to him and him only. Her husband will never touch her, she declares. This episode featured exciting dancing by the love triangle consisting of Layla, Majnun, and the unnamed bridegroom. The dancing here was agitated, with strenuous lifts, as the two men vied with each other over the recalcitrant Layla. In the next episode, some years later, Layla, still a virgin, dies heartbroken yet steadfast in her love for Majnun. In the sixth and final episode, entitled “Majnun’s Madness,” Majnun weeps upon Layla’s grave, vowing to love her eternally.  

The dance vocabulary in Laya and Majnun is eclectic. Aside from the angular shapes of modern dance, there are elements of folk dance with giddy, jumping movements. There is also one stunning moment straight out of classical ballet, when Majnun slowly takes leave of Layla while extending a leg behind him in high arabesque while Layla mirrors his gesture but extends her leg inward, thus offering an inverted image of his move. 

At this world premiere, I was accompanied by noted dance writer, choreographer, and filmmaker Kathryn Roszak.. After the performance I asked Kathryn how, from her dance background, she responded to this Mark Morris production. Did she like it, I asked, and did it open new ground in the career of Mark Morris? 

 

Kathryn Roszak:  

 

Mark Morris is known for his intense choreographic relationship to music. In fact, he is recognized for his operatic works such as Dido and Aeneas. Although he has occasionally used recorded music, he has expressed a strong preference for working with live musicians. It is no surprise then that the impetus for Layla and Majnun is the music, and Morris makes a strong statement by embedding the musicians in the center of the stage with all the choreography seeming to flow around this central musical source. The singing evokes for me the blues, jazz, or even flamenco. 

The choreography was challenging, for the dancers had to negotiate a multi-tiered stage set. Happily, the dancers made these multi-level transitions seamless. The work aims for a kind of operatic integration with a large painting by Howard Hodgkin illuminating the backdrop and costumes also by Hodgkin echoing the clothing found in Persian miniature paintings. The Hodgkin painting was beautifully lit to underscore the emotional tones of the story. However, the painting is very abstract and not quite in the same world as the music and costumes. The black jazz shoes worn by the dancers also pulled us out of this created world, and bare feet would have been more effective.  

Given that Morris’s Layla and Majnun seeks to create its own world through dance, music, and visual design, I wonder if the proscenium presentation is the right one for it? There is something distancing about watching all the dance and music from afar. There were rapturous moments in both the music and the dance, and one wished to be closer. The proscenium had the effect of making the work theatrically self-conscious. Layla and Majnun might be even more wonderful if presented in a more intimate space including comfortable cushions and carpets, with the audience surrounding the dancers and musicians. Layla and Majnun was yearning to tear itself out of the proscenium and become even more of an integrated feast. 

The choreography in places echoed whirling dervishes and quoted communal folk dance elements, which is a Morris strong suit. The hard, geometric, modern dance lines in the choreography were sometimes at odds with the intimate sensuality of the music. There were gorgeous moments for the ensemble, which at times resembled a Greek chorus, with waves of undulating movement blending with the imploring vocalizations in the music. The text was surprising and wonderful: “I need this sorrow because this sorrow needs me.” The final dance sequence embodies the sacrifices of love, and the dancers had a moment to throw themselves with abandon into the choreography. The second to last male dancer was outstanding and gave himself to the moment entirely. That moment of complete abandon, on its own, was worth the price of admission. 

 

James Roy MacBean 

 

Your remark, Kathryn, about whirling dervishes is insightful. I’ve read that there is a Sufi interpretation of the Layla and Majnun story that sees it as an allegory for the Sufi mystic’s deep communion with God in the ecstatic whirling of the dervish. Surely, there is a yearning here for the transcendental. The lovers long not only or necessarily for consummation but also, and at a deeper level, for transcendence. I thought Mark Morris did a good job of suggesting some kind of transpersonal element, firstly, by having different dancers portray the lead characters in each of the six episodes. Secondly, although Layla and Majnun are initially differentiated from the chorus by their long scarves (hers red, his white); at a certain point all the dancers wear long scarves, thus multiplying the Laylas and Majnuns, as if the two lovers projected their love onto all humanity, and perhaps even to God who has fated them to love one another. 

Layla and Majnun was preceded on the program by Bayati Shiraz, a brief medley of Azerbaijani folk songs sung by Kamila Nabiyeva and Miralam Miralamov, accompanied by Rauf Islamov on Kamencheh and Zaki Valiyev on tar.

Opens September 30 at the Shattuck Landmark

Cameraperson, filmmaker Kirsten Johnson's self-styled "memoir," is like an album of old photos (or a family member's summer vacation slideshow—anyone old enough to remember those?) but enhanced with sound and the added dimension of time.

The title, Cameraperson, is Johnson's jibe at yet another male-centric industry. All too often, "cameraman" is the title that women filmmakers are forced to bear. This film will help change that.

"The joys of being a documentary cameraperson are obvious and endless," Johnson writes, "I get to share profound intimacy with the people I film, pursue remarkable stories, be at the center of events as they unfold, travel, collaborate, and see my work engage the world."

Over the past 25 years, Johnson has racked up an impressive resume, providing cinematography for films like Michael Moore's Farhrenheit 9/11 and CItizenfour, the powerful, award-winning documentary profiling NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

 

 

 

It could be argued that a self-curated smorgasbord of a filmmaker's "best moments" is inherently self-aggrandizing. But Johnson's career (reflected in a wide variety of globe-spanning assignments) justifies this retrospective. 

The snippets intentionally come complete with loose ends. Scenes that start with an unsteady camera being positioned on a tripod are soon disrupted as the camera is picked up and carried to a new position. These moments could have been edited out but they were retained to underscore the practical—and occasionally ragged—roots of the image-making process. 

At the same time, thanks to the filmmaker's keen eye and steady tripod, many of Johnson's images could stand alone as exceptional still photos. 

The raw footage also contains raw sounds, recorded in-the-moment. The unedited background noise includes the rustle of wind, the barking of unseen dogs, and the sounds of the filmmaker herself—breathing hard after a camera-hugging run, gasping in delight, giggling to herself, and exchanging words with the people she's filming. 

By its very nature, Cameraperson is a hodge-podge of a film. Its vignettes hop-scotch around the world, bouncing from one venue to the next without rhyme, reason, or any clear sense of narrative or thematic direction. So don't try to navigate the flood: just go with the flow. 

Johnson's collection of "best moments" begins with the chance encounter in Bosnia as an old shepherd appears, balanced on his pony as he guides a colony of sheep down a country road. 

This is followed by an expansive scene in which a thin ribbon of asphalt underlines a green landscape immobilized beneath the visual weight of an immense, cloud-filled sky. The shot lasts for many minutes during which almost nothing happens. A single car grinds by, headed down the road until it disappears in the distance. Eventually, a second car comes and goes. 

Is that all there is? Just wait. Suddenly, from out of nowhere, a brilliant twist of lightning breaks loose and stabs the landscape. It is a stunning and awesome moment caught on film and captured in time. A brief pause and the thunder arrives, filling the soundtrack. A moment's pause and the clip ends with an unexpected but perfectly human coda: the sound of the filmmaker sneezing twice in the cold air. 

In the US, Johnson visit's Wounded Knee; in Egypt, Tahrir Square; in Liberia, Hotel Africa, a site of executions during the civil war. Her camerawork takes us to Afghanistan, Bosnia, Colombia, Liberia, Myanmar, Nigeria, Sudan, Uganda, Yemen, Manhattan and Brooklyn. 

At one stop in the Balkans, a statue of a prayerful Madonna bows her head in a church. Behind the statue, a brick wall appears to be splattered with patches of blood. 

We meet Bosnian survivors of Serb ethnic cleansing. 

We watch media censorship enforced on Johnson while covering a trial at the Pentagon's Guantanamo Bay prison. We hear the voices of government minders as they force her to erase images of certain parts of Gitmo. 

There's a remarkable interview with an unwed teen from Alabama trying to deal with the impact of an unwanted pregnancy. The interview is made more powerful by the fact that we only hear her tormented voice as the camera focuses on her hands, twisting helplessly in her lap. 

There is a grim meeting with prosecutors in a county evidence room as they display the evidence (torn clothing and a long, bloodied chain) used to convict the man who killed James Byrd Jr., by dragging him to his death behind a pick-up truck. 

Michael Moore appears in front of the US Capitol with a young marine who explains how the military "gave us a Media Card that pretty much tells you what you can and cannot say to the media. Basically, you can't say anything bad about the military." (So much for the myth that our soldiers are "fighting for our freedoms.") 

Cpl. Abdul Henderson, tells Moore he will refuse orders to return to Iraq for another tour of duty. Instead, he's prepared to face imprisonment. "I will not let anyone send me over there to kill other poor people—especially when they pose no threat to me or my country." 

Over the course of this 102-minute film, Johnson's clips keep returning to Bosnia, including visits to the numerous enslavement and mass-rape sites. 

War crimes investigators Johnson interviews raise the issue of "human rights PTSD." "Once you've heard thousands of stories [of murders and rapes] and put them inside of you," one strong but weary woman confides, "what is your channel to let it go?" 

Children are born in front of Johnson's camera. One newborn opens her eyes and stares directly—and curiously—into Johnson's lens as she draws her first breaths. We watch as a Nigerian baby, delivered lifeless, is resuscitated by a patient nurse calmly standing in a pool of his mother's placental blood. 

We meet the filmmaker's twins. And we watch Johnson's aging mother as she slowly sinks, beyond reach, into the shuffling confusion of Alzheimers. 

Late in Cameraperson, Johnson returns to Bosnia to visit a Muslim family she met five years earlier. The encounter provides a warm human moment as the family watches the movie they appeared in. (The children are especially amused to see five-years-younger versions of themselves on the screen.) Delighted that the American filmmaker remembered them, one woman expresses the hope that someday Johnson's own children will venture to Bosnia to visit the family in order "to see how peasants live." 

The final scene—filmed on a crowded street in a Monrovian marketplace in Liberia—is a wow-inducing panorama of sights and faces with Johnson's lens following first one profile, then another. As traffic blurs past in the foreground in a whirl of color, Johnson's camera fixes on different individuals who pop out from the crowd to capture the eye. It's a stunning accomplishment of "found art" caught, on-the-fly and served up in real time. 

Sometimes, the work doesn't make it to the screen. Johnson three spent years filming the lives of a pair of teenagers in Afghanistan only to scrub the project when one of the girls said she feared appearing on screen might put her life at risk. 

The list of people featured in the film ends with a poignant salute to "the people whose names I never learned." 

In the film's production notes, Johnson provides additional insight into the complex role of a documentary filmmaker. Here are some of Kirsten Johnson's thoughts about the challenges and frustrations of her work: 

• The people I meet are often in immediate and often desperate need, but I can offer little material assistance. 

• I can and will leave a place I film—whether a war or a refugee camp—while the people I film cannot.  

• I shift the balance of power by my very presence. 

• My work requires trust, intimacy and total attention. 

• I traffic in hope without the ability to know what will happen in the future. 

After watching Cameraperson, my only concern is that the success of Johnson's "memoir" may inspire others to start compiling collections of "best moments" from family vacation outings and patching them into feature-length compilations that friends and family will be invited to watch. (Were this to happen, a younger generation would finally experience the living hell of having to endure a modern incarnation of that dreaded late-20^th century bugaboo—the "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" slide show.) 

In San Francisco Opera’s new production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, which opened Wednesday, September 28, an old codger, one Don Pasquale, gets his world turned topsy-turvy when he foolishly weds, or thinks he weds, a much younger woman. However, the wedding itself is a mock ceremony designed by Don Pasquale’s physician, Dr. Malatesta, to trick Don Pasquale and demonstrate to the old codger that he is better off not getting married at his advanced age. There, in a nutshell, is the basic plot of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, an opera buffa composed late in Donizetti’s illustrious career. 

Conducted by Giuseppe Finzi and staged by director Laurent Pelly, this Don Pasquale boasts a uniformly splendid cast. Italian bass-baritone Maurizio Muraro is superb in the title role; baritone Lucas Meachem unerringly portrays the scheming Dr. Malatesta; soprano Heidi Stober does a star-turn as Don Pasquale’s would-be bride, Norina; and tenor Lawrence Brownlee makes a stunning SF Opera debut as Norina’s young lover, Ernesto. Rounding out the cast is veteran bass-baritone Bojan Kneževic as the fake notary summoned to perform the mock wedding. 

Dr. Malatesta’s plan to trick Don Pasquale centers on having Norina pretend to be the doctor’s sister, Sofronia, just released from a convent and offered to Don Pasquale as his prospective bride. The ulterior motive behind this plan is not simply to teach Don Pasquale a lesson, but also to pave the way for the young but impoverished nephew of Don Pasquale, Ernesto, to gain the don’s permission to marry Norina and receive as a wedding gift a considerable portion of the don’s great wealth. To accomplish all this, Dr. Malatesta coaches Norina to pretend to be the extremely shy, convent-raised Sofronia when she meets Don Pasquale, then turn on him and take the upper hand as soon as she’s ‘married’ to him. This abrupt turnaround takes place at the beginning of Act III, and here director Laurent Pelly literally turns Don Pasquale’s world topsy-turvy. The chandelier which hung from the ceiling in the first two Acts now is placed on the floor; and a shabby upholstered chair in the don’s living room now hangs upside down from the ceiling.  

As Norina/Sofronia, soprano Heidi Stober was magnificent. Never has her clear, bright soprano been shown off to better advantage than here. When we first see her as Norina, Stober’s character is full of restless energy, pacing back and forth in anxiety over a letter she has just received from Ernesto bidding her a sad farewell. Norina loves Ernesto and is desperate at the news of her beloved’s imminent departure. Stober launched into her monologue with great passion and vocal agility, expressing her emotions in exquisite bel canto vocalism. Later, when portraying the shy Sofronia, Stober toned down her voice, reducing it to a modest whisper. Still later, once ‘married’ to Don Pasquale, Stober turned herself into a veritable she-devil, bossing the old codger around and imposing her will in every aspect of managing his household.  

In the role of Don Pasquale, Italian bass-baritone Maurizio Muraro gave a sterling performance, at once decrepit with age yet vain and full of bravado that he might yet marry and have children, even at the age of seventy. A winning touch in his efforts to appear younger was his donning a wig that looked for all the world like a Donald Trump wig. Muraro gave a highly nuanced vocal performance, his voice now brimming with hope and false confidence, later whining, befuddled and pitiful when he sees what his bride is really like.  

As young Ernesto, tenor Lawrence Brownlee was impressive in his San Francisco debut. Brownlee’s bel canto vocalism, his richly textured tone and extremely wide range stood him in good stead as Ernesto, a character who runs the gamut of emotional mood-swings. In director Laurent Pelly’s staging, Ernesto is portrayed as a somewhat lazy freeloader, and Brownlee lounged around the set convincingly in this interpretation. Yet Brownlee’s singing was ever clear, brimming with vocal color, and powerful. Here, in Lawrence Brownlee, is a major bel canto talent! 

Lucas Meachem , as always, gave a stalwart performance. He winningly portrayed the scheming Dr. Malatesta, his baritone voice brimming with energy as he brilliantly schemed to outwit Don Pasquale and bring Norina and Ernesto together. In the end, Malatesta’s plan works to perfection. When he reveals to Don Pasquale that the marriage was a hoax, the don is so relieved to learn that he is not legally married to Norina/Sofronia that he agrees to let Norina and Ernesto marry and offers them a generous wedding gift.  

Conductor Giuseppe Finzi led the orchestra in a brisk rendition of the score, and Chorus Director Ian Robertson’s Opera Chorus sang well as the many servants hired by Norina/Sofronia to run Don Pasquale’s household. The spare sets were designed by Chantal Thomas. Don Pasquale continues with five more performances through October 15. 

 

The Castro Theater's celebration of Anna Magnani, the dazzling diva of Italian film, has now crossed the Bay to Berkeley's new art museum/film house. 

In addition to stunning 35mm restorations of the four Magnani classics screened in SF (Bellissima, Rome Open City, The Passionate Thief, and The Rose Tattoo), BAMPFA is now showcasing an additional 13 works (some so rare that they have not been screened for more than a half-century). 

BAMPFA's retrospective of Magnani's film career—"Anna Magnani: Eternal Soul of Italian Cinema"—includes a total of 17 films over a run that continues through December 4. 

In addition to the four memorable features mentioned in our previous Movies in the Margin, BAMPFA is showing the following films: Teresa Venerdi (Vittorio De Sica, 1941), Full Speed (Mario Mattoli, 1934), Bellissima (Luchino Visconti, 1952), The Peddler and the Lady (Mario Bonnard, 1943), The Bandit (Alberto Lattuada, 1946), Angelina (Luigi Zampa, 1947), Many Dreams Along the Way (Mario Camerini, 1948), Volcano (William Dieterle, 1950), The Golden Coach (Jean Renoir, 1952), … And the Wild Women (Alberto Castellani, 1959), Mamma Roma (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1962), The Fugitive Kind (Sidney Lumet, 1969), 1870 (Alfredo Giannetti, 1972), Wild Is the Wind (George Cuko, 1957). 

Several of the films will be screened more than once. For additional information on each of these films and a full list of BAMPFA screening dates, see: http://www.bampfa.org/program/anna-magnani-eternal-soul-italian-cinema