With South African soprano Pretty Yende as Violetta, American tenor Jonathan Tetelman as Alfredo, and Italian baritone Simone Piazolla as Giorgio Germont, all three making their company debuts, this new production of Verdi’s La Traviata capped off an exciting Fall season of San Francisco Opera’s Centennial year. Not only was the singing of the three principals in La Traviata sensational, the new production by director Shawna Lucey, the first to be built by the Company in 35 years, was impeccably designed and executed. Add in the acutely sensitive conducting of Music Director Eun Sun Kim and you have a La Traviata for the ages. -more-

These are the approximate words of my father when joking of calamity: "If everyone around you is panic-stricken, believing disaster is happening, and freaking out, and you're not, there is probably something wrong with you." (I can't reproduce his exact words--I have only a vague memory.) Of course, there are many men and many women who would never admit to being afraid. Yet all are at some point. But we should remember, a hard situation is very frequently not about us. -more-

For the third straight year the United States has experienced over 600 mass shootings in which four or more people, other than the attacker, were shot. Just recently, five people were killed in a mass shooting at Club Q nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colo.; six were killed at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Va.; four more were killed at the University of Idaho; and three were killed and two others wounded at the University of Virginia. This is intolerable. -more-

Worth Noting:

I think I caught every announcement and change, however, the long holiday weekend means some meeting postings will not appear until Monday. Check https://berkeleyca.gov/ for meetings posted on short notice. The Council will be approving adjustments to the AAO (Annual Appropriations Ordinance – City Budget) on December 13. Expect meetings of the Budget Committee to be posted prior to December 13. -more-

So much happened this last week it is hard to know where to begin. And much of it has been in the news already. Here is how the Tuesday evening, November 15, 2022 Berkeley City Council meeting rolled out:

Jennifer Louis’s appointment as Berkeley Police Chief was supposed to slide through on consent, with 21 other items and likely no comment from the council other than congratulations, but the entirety of the appointment broke open Monday afternoon when Nathan Mizell, vice-chair of the Police Accountability Board (PAB) ,sent out a press release published in the Planet and elsewhere. A dump of derogatory, racist texts alluding to arrest quotas sent by Berkeley police officers, which had been released by whistleblower Corey Shedoudy, a former Berkeley police officer who was fired earlier in the year, started circulating in emails on Tuesday morning. -more-

. FIFA, the sponsoring agency for world soccer, has a long history of corruption. Inexplicably, they chose Qatar to host the world soccer games which should have been automatically disqualified because of its soaring high temperatures. This is yet another chapter illustrating how one nation with incredible wealth could mistreat migrant workers with such callousness and inhumanity. -more-

Elections are over for the moment, and what, you may ask, have we learned?

Well, first, don’t trust either polls or the pundits who dote on them.

As Michael Moore presciently pointed out before the election: “…not only were the Republicans not going to clobber us in the House with 30 to 50 new seats, they might be in for an upset because it’s gonna be so dang close. And Trump’s mob of election-denying candidates were going to go down in flames. There would be record numbers of young voters, and women were on a rampage over the abolishment of Roe. The sword of vengeance would be theirs.”

Yes. And lo, the waves parted and we walked on water. Or something like that. The naysayers were wrong. But how about Berkeley?

Here in Berkeley, the only polls we have are those paid for by promoters, either for potential candidates or for proposed ballot measures. Apparently locals have lost interest in the city. There’s something very wrong with the way Berkeley is governed these days, which turns out to be a self-fullfilling prophecy. The only real race was in District 1, where the people most likely to be impacted by the Big Bart Boxes mounted a creditable attempt to unseat an incumbent, but failed, as is almost always the case.

In District 8, the race was to the swift, with attorney Humbert rounding up the usual suspects to pre-endorse him before the incumbent had even announced in public that she wasn’t running. -more-