Saturday, September 17, 2022 at 10 am - noon

Berkeley Neighborhoods Council

Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board Candidates Forum

Videoconference: -more-

The title implies that it might read like a Hallmark card. But "Love Letters to the Park" is a blistering indictment of Berkeley's $1,100,000 proposal to commercialize its most beautiful park, Cesar Chavez, a detailed description of the bewilderingly moronic city council that signed off on it, and the educated, thoughtful public that stopped it. It is a must-read for anyone interested in public process, legislative obfuscation, and grassroots organizing during a numbing, disorienting pandemic. It's beautifully illustrated with photographs of the small groups that came together to save it by the photographers who were there. -more-

I recently joined a Zoomchat that featured an appearance by Texas populist Jim Hightower, a master of snarky-twangy, tongue-lashing commentaries. Hightower is the activist author of a signature book with the audacious title: "There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos." -more-

Along with all those who love the art of cinema, I mourn the death, apparently by assisted suicide, on September 13 of Jean-Luc Godard. Moreover, as someone who was closely linked with Godard throughout his tempestuous film career, I feel his death in quite personal ways. While I always supported what Godard tried to convey of the world in political and cinematic terms, and in spite of having many personal interactions with him, I never found Jean-Luc Godard a warm, likeable human being. Quite the contrary. He was always cranky and elusive, even when he knew how much I understood and supported his efforts. Godard was the ultimate contrarian. If he asked you what you were doing, and you replied, “I’m teaching film,” Godard would pointedly retort, “I’m learning about film.” Thereby one-upping you and scoring brownie points. -more-

People who live with severe psychiatric conditions usually can't survive unless we receive treatment. Our treatment, if done with diligence and proactivity, can allow a mental health consumer to do very well. Yet, in addition to treatment, we must have good reasons to live. The treatment system provides treatment--something we must have. The system doesn't provide us with any ideas about what we want to do in life. That's up to us to decide. And the system could also stand in the way of achieving the goals that we cherish, goals that could make us much happier. -more-

Worth Noting:

The week ahead is packed and it is best to just quickly scan through the list. There are candidate forums Monday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday the 25th, City Council meets on Monday and Tuesday, Council committees are meeting Monday and Wednesday afternoon, a Webinar on Solar on Thursday, a Webinar on home hardening of decks and fences on Thursday, ZAB and the Mental Health commissions meet Thursday and the week finishes with Buffy Wicks is sponsoring an in-person event on region water system on Saturday and a Sierra Club clean up at Point Molate.

Leonard Powell is back on the Council agenda in closed session on Monday. The attack on Leonard Powell looks very much like a city bent on removing ownership of property from a Black homeowner in South Berkeley.

The Housing Element Draft Environmental Impact Report is a plan for adding 19,098 housing units not the RHNA 8,934. As stated at the Planning Commission in the presentation, the larger number is to push changing zoning in the City of Berkeley. The Comment Period ends October 17, 2022 at 5 pm. The document including appendices is over 500 pages.

https://berkeleyca.gov/construction-development/land-use-development/general-plan-and-area-plans/housing-element-update -more-

If John Adams had been content to offer a faithful operatic rendering of Shakespeare’s epic drama of Antony and Cleopatra, Adams would have created by far his finest opera in a career marred by several monumental failures amidst much, in my opinion, unwarranted public and critical acclaim. But, no, in creating this operatic Antony and Cleopatra, Adams couldn’t resist the hubris of trying to outdo Shakespeare by adding extraneous material to Shakespeare’s immortal text. Most egregious was Adams’ inclusion of a long, harsh speech in which Caesar Augustus boasts of Rome’s Empire borrowed from Virgil’s Aeneid. To make matters worse, the staging of this speech by director Elkhanah Pulitzer includes multiple superimposed close-up images of tenor Paul Appleby’s stridently distorted face as his Caesar forcefully hammers home his almost facist insistence on the greatness of Imperial Rome. Pulitzer even closes this borrowed speech from the Aeneid, (it is NOT in Shakespeare at all), with a close-up image of a mailed fist thrust directly at both the onstage Roman audience and at the audience in the War Memorial Opera House. Even the music Adams provided for this speech was bombastic and tedious to the maximum. This was indeed the low point in an opera that constantly veered back and forth between admirable moments and grievously marred musical moments of monumental hubris. -more-