Judge William Alsup has issued a temporary restraining order today staying eviction of the homeless campers on the BART property adjacent to Adeline Street on the Berkeley-Oakland border. Campers were represented by EmilyRose Johns, aided by Osha Neumann from the East Bay Community Law Center. The order will be in effect at least one week.

A prominent homeless camp in Berkeley that has been at its current location for most of this year was given an eviction notice over the weekend, but activists are rallying to keep it there.

The large camp has been at the iconic "Here" and "There" signs marking the Berkeley-Oakland border since mid-January, according to homelessness activist J.P. Massar. The camp is very visible to traffic entering Berkeley from Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Adeline Streets. 

Now dubbed "the Poor Tour," the camp grew out of a blend of homeless assistance and activism that started last year, when camps were initially established in the area of the Berkeley Bowl grocery store and the city's central coordinating office for homeless services called the Hub at 1901 Fairview St. 

At the time, participants said they were protesting the city's system for allocating aid to homeless people, calling it disorganized and difficult. 

The city of Berkeley raided the camp at several locations last year, at one point even arresting City Council candidate Nanci Armstrong-Temple and 70-year-old activist Barbara Brust. But since moving to the border signs along the BART tracks, the camp's residents have been able to camp mostly unimpeded. 

This apparently was partly due to confusion over who actually owned the land they were camping on. According to activists and residents at the camp, BART police arrived on Saturday evening and started putting up signs giving campers a 72-hour notice to leave. 

In a video posted by homeless advocate Mike Zint on Saturday, a BART police officer serving an eviction notice said BART didn't realize that it was BART property and that the transit agency had a memorandum of understanding with the city of Berkeley to maintain it, but the city asked BART to remove the campers. 

According to Massar, the group, which includes activists in the First They Came For the Homeless organization, has established a short list of rules for the camp, like forbidding drugs and keeping noise curfew hours and also recently added a porta-potty and hand washing station. Massar said there are about 25 people living there. 

Massar wrote in an open letter to BART directors Rebecca Saltzman and Lateefah Simon, who represent Berkeley, that the community there is peaceful and law-abiding. 

"This is cruel; this is inhumane; this is despicable. I implore you to stop it," Massar wrote. "These people have no place to go. There are no excess shelter beds in Berkeley. I know you are acutely aware of the extreme housing shortage in the Bay, and the desperate plight of homeless people as a result." 

BART officials did not return a request for comment today. 

Because the 72-hour notice was reportedly served on Saturday, the soonest the camp could be evicted would be Tuesday evening. However, such enforcement actions frequently come during the early morning hours. 

Activists have called for an "eviction resistance party" to begin at the spot on Tuesday evening and go "as long as necessary."

Dear BART Boardmember Lateefah Simon, 

I am afraid you will dishonor yourself if you join or participate in the campaign of political suppression waged by the city of Berkeley against the homeless organization known as “First They Came for the Homeless,” now in residence on BART land at Adeline and 63rd St. 

We met about a year ago when you were campaigning for your position on the BART board. I was involved in campaigning for Cheryl Davila for city council, which seat she won. When you and I spoke, I raised the issue of BART police and the brutality to which they too often lent themselves. You agreed that such police comportment had to stop. And we agreed it was wrong-headed and short-sighted to consider policing as a way of resolving social problems. 

At present there are two homeless encampments on BART land at 63rd St. in Berkeley, one on each side of the tracks where they emerge from the Ashby Station. They are separate and different groups. 

The encampment on the West side is that of the organization, “First They Came for the Homeless.” This is an intentional community, self-organized, autonomous in its ability to take care of its members, and disciplined in its ability to maintain itself as clean, free from drugs and alcohol, and collective in its self-governance. It is also a political community that has acted in Berkeley to bring to people’s attention, on a social and political level, the plight and condition of the homeless in this city, and in the country. As a model community, it presents itself as a role model to other groups of the homeless, for how to survive the dire straits that homeless people find themselves in. As Alex Vitale puts it, “homelessness is about a mismatch between incomes and housing costs.” It is not a policing issue. 

The city of Berkeley has been carrying on a campaign to suppress this intentional community for over two years because of the political position it takes, and because of the statement about civic derogation concerning the homeless that it represents. Since mid-2015, that group had been unmercifully and regularly raided by the police of Berkeley, and moved from one site to another, a campaign it escaped only by settling on the BART land at 63rd and Adeline. Only since then have they found the peace to live as a stable community. 

The group on the East side of the tracks is an ad hoc group, without the community organization that the group on the West side has. They do not know how to take care of themselves as well as the latter. It is for this reason that the woman died in that encampment two weeks ago. Members of the intentional community on the West side of the tracks have been working with this ad hoc group, to bring them to a state of consciousness equal to themselves. It is not an easy process. 

If these encampments are raided by BART police, as promised by the police on Saturday, October 21, BART will be joining Berkeley’s campaign of political suppression, to BART’s and your dishonor. And the work to organize the ad hoc group, and bring it to a level of communal autonomy needed to survive, will be interrupted and ended. 

Lives are at stake. To raid these camps by the police will make the danger to lives only that much greater. Please do not lend yourself to this totalitarian campaign by the city of Berkeley.

Someone set fire to a rainbow flag and punched a volunteer outside the Pacific Center for Human Growth in Berkeley Friday, possibly a sign of political changes in the U.S., the center's executive director said Monday.  

At about 11 a.m. one of the center's volunteers heard a ruckus outside the building at 2712 Telegraph Ave. The center offers social and mental health services and is the third oldest LGBTQ center in the U.S., executive director Leslie Ewing said.  

The volunteer went outside and told the person to stop what they were doing, but the person punched the volunteer in the face. The volunteer was not seriously injured. 

Ewing said other staff members heard the noise. Some of them went outside and one staff member took a photo of the suspect. 

Based on the photo, police were able to make an arrest in less than half an hour after they arrived at the center.  

The fire set to a rainbow flag was quickly extinguished by firefighters.  

"Everyone's OK," Ewing said.  

Nothing like this has happened ever before at the center and it was a shock to staff members and others, according to Ewing.  

"It was a shock to our neighbors," she said. 

But afterward neighbors brought cookies to the center and showed that they support it, which Ewing and others very much appreciated.  

She said that this may be part of the changes that have occurred in Berkeley recently and around the nation since the inauguration of President Donald Trump. "People feel emboldened to do these things now," Ewing said, adding that the center's staff is strong. "We've been here 44 years and we're not going anywhere," Ewing said. 0555a10/24/17 

CONTACT: Pacific Center executive director Leslie Ewing (510) 548-8283 ext 213 or press@pacificcenter.org 

EDITORS PLEASE NOTE: Images related to this story can be obtained from the following Bay City News Service web links: www.baycitynews.com/images/102417BerkeleyCenter.jpg www.baycitynews.com/images/102417BerkeleyFlag.jpg  

Copyright � 2017 by Bay City News, Inc. -- Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. 

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A student jogging on the fire trails above the University of California at Berkeley Thursday fought off a man who sneaked up behind her and tackled her to the ground, campus police said today.  

The man tackled the woman, then tried to take off her shorts and fondled her, but she fought him off and he ran away, police said. 

The suspect is a man in his 50s, with a medium build, gray collar-length hair, a full gray beard and dressed in khaki pants, according to police. 

Anyone with information about this offense should contact campus police at (510) 642-0472 during business hours or (510) 642-6760 at other times.

Seeing how users of social media quickly come to resemble lemmings leaping off a cliff is disheartening, to say the least. One might decide to test the water, and thousands follow, right or wrong. Sadly, the righteous indignation over sexual harassment is being exploited by some as a vehicle for complaining about real or imagined personal grievances that have nothing to do with sex.

Now, outing producer Harvey Weinstein as the most prominent practitioner of Standing Operating Procedure in the entertainment industry is long overdue. As someone who went to high school in the Los Angeles area sixty years ago, I can to this day tell you the girls—friends of friends—who encountered what we used to call the casting couch, and which of them succumbed in order to get trivial parts in B-pictures. I can even name the moderately successful starlet we knew about who had a child after, shall we say, ultimately non-consensual relations with a famous leading man. 

It’s remarkable that this culture has endured for such a long time, despite widespread common knowledge and occasional minor exposés. Time and past time to bring it to light.

And of course it wasn’t just “the industry” and it wasn’t just employment. There was the athlete at my high school who married her much too handsome tennis coach right after graduation (though this story loses some of its power to shock given the current French president.) Anyone who’s ever been near academia knows about torrid relationships between professors and students, not all of them heterosexual or male-dominated. None of this is new, none has been much of a secret.

We could go on in this vein at great length and not run out of examples going back the sixty years I remember and much farther. Semi-coercive sexual conduct between people of unequal power has always existed and always been wrong, of course, and most often it’s men coercing women. It’s good to get it completely out in the open.

But it’s a crying shame that the bandwagon effect has induced many, many people, mostly women, to jump on #MeToo as a way of complaining about imagined slights or unwanted but non-sexual attention from men. Publishing so many of these bogus tales of woe results in diluting the perceived seriousness of the valid accounts of women who were grievously injured by Harvey Weinstein and his ilk.

I’ve been deeply annoyed in the last couple of days by getting an email from a woman I hardly knew, an actor as it happens, someone I’d made the mistake of accepting as a “friend” before I noticed what an energy sink Facebook is and stopped looking at it. She told me to be sure and check out her latest Facebook post, which I made the serious mistake of doing. There she recounts, in lurid quasi-Victorian prose, a perfectly commonplace series of housemate disputes with a male co-tenant, but frames them as if they were sexual harassment. 

What did the guy do? Well, she says, he “exhibited aggressive and threatening body language, verbally hinted at threats” and more in the same vein. What exactly does it mean to “verbally hint at threats”? Not the same as making threats, evidently. I suspect he glowered at her, and who wouldn’t, the way she admits she was acting? 

Yes, she seems to have made him mad, but judging from accounts of a series of tiffs they had, which seem to be mostly over housekeeping standards, even a woman might have found her trying and shown it by body language. I did check with other women I know who had lived in the house with him, and none reported anything of an inappropriate sexual nature. 

And even if everything sexual she hints at but doesn’t describe in her “wink wink nudge nudge” story were true, which I doubt is the case, she could have moved out months before she did. She could have blocked him from her email, text and telephone, which she didn’t. She could have asked their landlord to evict him, which she didn’t (though landlords of consenting adults generally don’t regard themselves as being in loco parentis for their tenants.) 

Instead she waited two years before posting these unsubstantiated charges on Facebook. The man’s identity is thinly disguised, but will be obvious to their mutual friends. He has no real way of defending his reputation, since she doesn’t charge him with anything tangible enough to deny. Nevertheless, if I were to advise her, which I won’t, I would suggest that she retain a libel defense lawyer just in case. 

There are many valid reports of genuinely bad Weinstein-type situations in the #MeToo chain, and attention must be paid to them. But it is a serious mistake to encourage women to portray themselves as powerless victims as this one does, especially when nothing has actually happened. This particular case is more pathetic than shocking, but all women can and should learn to stick up for themselves in any situation. We are not victims by nature. 

A woman should be empowered, on her own, to firmly decline unwanted sexual attention, even if it means risking a career. For an excellent role model, women can look to Lupita Nyong’o’s op-ed in the New York Times, where she describes a series of encounters with Harvey Weinstein in which she maintained her dignity and physical safety and yet went on to a distinguished career. 

She deserves admiration for finally telling the story, but she, like thousands of other women who’ve survived similar threats, deserves even more admiration for courageously taking care of herself. He might be powerful, but she’s smart and she’s right, and that makes her even more powerful than he is in the long run. Everyone can learn from her experience. Also, however, it's important that the very real problems of both sexual harassment and sexual assault not be trivialized by those like my correspondent who try to attach these meaningful labels to every trivial argument.

The fake-news president needs to learn to keep his mouth-trap shut. Every time he opens his small face-hole, out come lies, misinformation, lies, and insults. When he should be consoling the families of soldiers killed defending our country, he pities himself for having to make the phone calls. When he should be offering to help victims of natural disasters, he blames them and gives himself an A+ for his effort.  

When he should be thanking the scientists, doctors, economists, weather analysts, diplomacy experts, and emergency responders who dedicate their lives to public service, he ignores their advice and claims he is smarter. You'd think the only thing he knows about is himself, because that's all he talks about. His words and tweets reveal an insecure man whose ignorance and bloated ego disgrace the United States of America and the values we stand for.

While we point an accusing finger at “big bad wolf” Russia for hacking our 2016 election and spreading fake news with internet trolls and paid political ads, we conveniently ignore our own mass propaganda efforts during the Cold, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars and many more too numerous to mention.

During the Cold War, the CIA orchestrated a relentless media blitz to shape American views of Russia. “Radio Free Europe” was created to wage a subversive campaign to weaken Communist satellite governments.

The crusade blasted anything from the “other side” as fake news, tactics that Trump has embraced on his twitter feed. As a former K.G.B. officer, Mr. Putin must have relished his own meddling as a long awaited payback.  

During the Vietnam War, progress was measured in body counts. Tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children were slaughtered to inflate body counts to satisfy the generals and political elite in Washington. 

In the Iraq war, an avalanche of fake WMD news, sealed the fate of Iraq and sent tens of thousands to their early graves – a sad indictment of the watchdogs who failed to accurately report on scheming politicians. In Afghanistan, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush jnr tried to convince a sceptical public that “we have the Taliban on the run.” “Embedded journalists” were encouraged to report “battleground successes.”  

16 years later, the corrupt Afghan government is clearly losing hearts and minds. More Americans and Afghans will die because no president has the courage to admit the war is lost.

Following his failed promises to repeal and replace the ACA, revise the tax plan, build his “beautiful” wall, Trump took aim at scuttling the Iran deal.

Ignoring the statements of his cabinet, who stated that Iran was in full compliance and unable to comprehend the complexities of the deal, Trump punted its fate to Congress.

Perhaps Trump is unaware of our dark history with Iran, beginning with the overthrow of the democratically elected government in 1953 with the covert coup by the CIA and the British agency, MI6, which resulted in the theft of Iraq’s oil and the establishment of British Petroleum. The government was replaced by the US puppet, the Shah of Iran, who unleashed his secret police, the Savak, who rounded up and tortured tens of thousands of Iranians.

During the Iraq- Iran war, the CIA covertly provided massive shipments of arms including chemical weapons, to our former Iraqi ally, Saddam Hussein.

If the nuclear deal falters the US and Israel will be the losers. The US will remain isolated; there will be no appetite for further sanctions because most Western countries have already begun trading with Iran and establishing embassies. US companies will be excluded from such trading privileges. Iran will likely accelerate its nuclear bomb making capabilities and intensify their hostility towards Israel. They still recall Israel’s role in assassinating many of their nuclear scientists. If you're a supporter of the deal, contact your congressional representative before it’s too late.

It would seem that if mental illness is a brain illness, mentally ill people would at least do better than someone who has had a mechanically caused brain issue, such as a tumor, an aneurism, a stroke, or a bad blow to the head. All of the latter things can be assessed accurately with medical equipment.  

However, many people who have had brain cancer or another obvious brain problem live very productively. For example, Jimmy Carter, former President, recently recovered from brain cancer, and appears to be going strong. John McCain has brain cancer, and I hope that he gets well. He is still functioning as a Senator.  

Brain tumors don't usually create the behavioral problems of psychiatric illnesses. Many who have been treated for a head trauma have gone on to be productive, hold jobs, have children, and do all of the normal things.  

Perhaps, it is partly an issue of what area of the brain is affected. But I think there is more to it than that.  

People generally become diagnosed as "mentally ill" because of some type of behavior issue. In some instances, it is difficult for authorities to distinguish criminality versus a psychiatric problem. Certain things are different, in general. For one thing, a mentally ill person usually can't carry on a normal conversation. That person may be disorganized in her or his behavior. At some point, it will become clear that someone in custody for a nuisance or petty crime is not on a narcotic high as was probably at first assumed, and has a mental illness that caused her or him to act that way.  

Some types of obvious brain issues can create behavior problems, such as was first hypothesized about the Vegas shooter. However, much of the time, someone with mental illness has a brain that shows up on brain imaging as normal or close to it.  

Yet, medical science believes that mental illness is usually a brain disorder. Psychiatric medication much of the time brings a person back to a semblance of normal. It works for me.  

How is it then, that a person with a psychiatric illness who often has an intact brain does worse than someone with a tumor, an aneurism, or a stroke?  

In the case of mental illness, these conditions manage to infringe on the operating systems of a person's mind. Most physical brain problems don't touch the operating systems. The person with a physical brain problem will have certain things that don't work any longer. Such as, paralysis, memory problems, speech problems, cognitive impairments. In a schizophrenic all of these things work. Yet, the schizophrenic person, in the absence of treatment, is split off from reality.  

Once we are medicated, the psychiatric drugs become part of the disability. Medication may provide relief from some of the worst symptoms of the disorder. However, meds impair the functioning of the brain in general, making it very hard to perform at most jobs.  

Mentally ill people, specifically those with schizophrenia, may have impaired functioning in a number of areas in life. Many of us are socially impaired. We may continue to have impaired judgment, including while medicated. We may lack insight into ourselves. And we may be unable to adapt to many environments, and this includes but is not limited to work environments.  

I don't have a problem sitting in my home office dreaming up manuscripts to write. However, if my wife wanted me to take her to Lake Tahoe for a weekend, I wouldn't be able to do that. I don't have a problem budgeting what little money I have. However, earning money is problematic, other than the tiny bits that I get for some of my writing. I am not very adaptable.  

Socializing is a struggle. I don't dislike people. However, I have a lot of difficulty in social situations.  

Here are some environmental factors you should consider: A significant factor that contributes to the impairment of persons with mental illness is that the expectations for us aren't the same as the expectations for a nondisabled person. Secondly, there is outpatient institutionalization, which doesn't prepare a disabled person for a nondisabled work or social environment. Third, we could face rejection of peers we had before we became ill. In this case, we are without the peer support and advice that we might otherwise have. Finally, there is the social stigma in general, in which a mentally ill person can not get hired, and will likely be rejected by prospective mates, unless they too are mentally ill.  

To sum it up, there are three significant factors that work against mentally ill people: The brains of most mentally ill people aren't normal; medications to treat symptoms can cause other impairments; and, there are environmental factors.  

A person with a head injury or some other mechanical brain impairment must only deal with her or his neurological impairment, and does not usually face the environmental factors, or face brain function being suppressed by psychiatric medications.  

We should be able to give the president of the United States the benefit of the doubt that his statements are true until facts suggest otherwise. We can no longer give this president that benefit.  

Consider that in August 2017, those who track such things, reported that Trump broke 1,000 for false or misleading claims. Since then he continues his false statements. For example, he falsely claimed that Obama did not contact the families of fallen troops. And he said he spoke with the president of the Virgin Islands, which is him.  

Thus, we can assume that Trump lies whenever he opens his mouth unless what he said is corroborated by reliable sources.  

It has come to the point that no American or foreign leader can believe anything he says. Isn't this a sad commentary on the president of the United States and the supposed leader of the free world?

In Judaism, the period between the New Year and the Day of Atonement is known as the days of awe, when the observant delve into deep spirituality. It so happened that PBS broadcast the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary The Vietnam War during the days of awe, so I watched it religiously. 

It is a magnificent work that can be streamed on the PBS website for those who missed the original broadcast or rerun of the ten part series. The effect of watching over two weeks was cumulative. I was moved to tears in almost every segment, but the end, a reading by Tim O’Brien over footage of grunts walking forward into the jungle, followed by John Lennon’s “Let it Be” was simply cathartic. 

The film summarized the experience of the Vietnam War as a tragedy, and Aristotle’s theory of drama certainly applies here. When I was in grad school at the University of Michigan, I took a class in literary theory from an old professor who claimed to have taught Arthur Miller all that he knew about tragedy. We spent a month parsing the Poetics and learning all about pity and fear. We were young. What did we know? 

The documentary is infused with pity for the victims of the war, but we have to bring our own fears into this contemplation of the past, the fear that the fool currently occupying the presidency has so little understanding of history he is bound to repeat its mistakes. I asked a friend if she was going to watch, and she answered, “No I lived through it.” We in our seventies survived many struggles on the home front, but only the combat veterans actually lived through the Vietnam War. 

Burns and Novick rightly keep their main focus on the war itself with rare footage of key battles fought at close range like taking hills that were later abandoned. Maps locate the action, shown in unrelenting grime and gore, revealing the ugly reality of body counts and kill ratios, false metrics meant to mislead the American public into believing that we were winning. 

Portrait narratives run through the series, individual testimonies that provide continuity and personalize the war. About half of the stars are Vietnamese, former Vietcong, army vets, and refugees, whose stories create a balance of viewpoints among the former enemies. The war was theirs; it was their country that was torn apart, their land poisoned by defoliants, their cities destroyed by bombs that are still exploding, and their families murdered, displaced and ruptured. The Vietnamese people bore the brunt of the war, and the film never lets us forget it. 

The film’s distinction is its focus on Vietnam, not only the people but also the country, the landscape in war and peace; the film itself is evidence and a product of normalized relations that began in 1995 under President Clinton. The film’s shortcomings derive from that same humanistic orientation at the exclusion of economics, a focus that could have tallied not just the body count but also the budget fallout such as the war’s effects on domestic spending. The prolonged and hugely expensive campaign undermined President Johnson’s “war on poverty,” increased the deficit, and led to inflation. That’s a movie that somebody else will have to make. 

The criticism has already begun and should continue because the subject is big and complex, and many will be dissatisfied because their version of the war was inadequately represented. But Burns and Novick had to pare down a long history and a huge amount of material to shape a coherent and powerful narrative. There are unforgettable moments like the women truck drivers on the Ho Chi Minh trail at night and the Vietnam veterans tossing their medals into a trash heap in front of the Capitol. Little known stories are brought to light, like the siege of Huê, and infamous slaughters like the massacre at My Lai get the attention they deserve. Indelible photographic images are given context and meaning. 

In the eyes of some, The Vietnam War failed to be definitive, but it’s a monumental achievement nevertheless, one that will educate generations to come if our democratic freedoms survive. My viewing ended the night before a day of fasting and contemplation that was much needed. 

Written in 1948 during Franco’s Fascist regime in Spain, Albert Camus’s L’État de siège (State of Siege) may have gained a new relevancy in Trump’s America. Brought to our shores by Théàtre de la Ville-Paris, State of Siege was performed October 21-2 under the auspices of Cal Performances at Zellerbach Hall. Director Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota calls State of Siege “a grand allegory,” one that may help us face “the horrific perils such as we are now experiencing.” Though this play has clear albeit oblique references to both Fascist Spain and Nazi Germany, Camus’s State of Siege has eerie resonance in today’s world of Trump’s megalomania. Though nominally set in Cadiz, Spain, State of Siege offers a Kafkaesque view of totalitarian government everywhere it rears its ugly head. In some ways, this play reminded me of George Orwell’s 1984, for here too the meanings of words are turned on their heads. When a vote is scheduled in this play, one totalitarian functionary explains to another that the electorate is free. If they vote for the existing totalitarian government, he says, it proves they are free. If they vote against the oppressive regime, he says, it proves they are misled by sentimentality and are therefore not free. Such is the logic of dictators. I can imagine Trump saying this. 

When State of Siege opens, a comet dramatically roars overhead, frightening the locals, who superstitiously construe it as an ill omen. However, a local nihilist, appropriately named Nada, declaims to anyone who will listen that they are already in deep shit and don’t need a comet to bury them deeper in excrement. Nada, a frizzy-haired maverick played with great panache by Philippe Demarle, eagerly climbs a scaffolding to harangue the locals with his nihilism. Initially, Nada’s rant against superstitious fear of the comet and his assertion that he believes in nothing, strike a somewhat sympathetic note. Later, however, when the existing “do-nothing” government is overthrown by a usurper known as The Plague, we begin to see Nada’s nihilism in a different light. In fact, it is soon seen as fitting right in with the totalitarian regime instituted by The Plague. When the Plague’s secretary, an avatar of death played as a glamorous blonde bombshell by Valérie Dashwood, listens to Nada’s nihilist assertions, she says, “This one seems to be the kind that believes in nothing, and that kind always proved very useful to us.” As for The Plague himself, as played by Serge Maggiani, he speaks in a soft, oily voice, and, with a twinkle in his eye, he almost beguiles the locals into believing he has their interest at heart. The populace thus colludes in its own oppression. The plague is both a physical or medical epidemic and a psychological one, based on fear. If the populace fears becoming infected, they will blindly do whatever they are ordered to do by the authorities. The man called The Plague is the cruel embodiment of this regime based on fear. 

As staged by Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota, State of Siege is a profound experience of ‘total theatre’. Two years ago, Demarcy-Mota brought to Cal Performances his wonderfully provocative production of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of An Author. State of Siege is an even more provocatively physical production: it assaults our sensibilities with noise, movement, special effects, music, and even dance. (At one point, snatches of the instrumental opening bars of the aria “Casta diva” from Bellini’s opera Norma are heard, though why is an open question. Is it because The Secretary is about to proclaim all love-making prohibited? The words “Casta diva” mean “chaste goddess.) The Secretary also proclaims that everyone must obtain a Certificate of Existence, and to do so they must first obtain a Certificate of Health. When a citizen complains that he couldn’t get a Certificate of Health until being issued a Certificate of Existence, the totalitarian world-order takes on a distinctly Kafkaesque double-bind.  

Meanwhile, a pair of young lovers, Victoria and Diego, passionately plight their troth and initially obtain the permission to marry from Victoria’s father, the Judge. However, under the regime of The Plague, The Judge, played by Alain Libolt, does an about-face and rescinds his permission for them to marry. “The law is the law,” he states. Love is now outlawed, he sententiously points out. Victoria, played by Hannah Levin Seidermen, and Diego, played by Matthieu Dessertine, go back and forth over how to combat this regime that threatens to suppress their love. In the end, Diego joins up with a group of rebels who have fled Cadiz by moving to a ship offshore. There, on the open sea, beneath an open sky, they breathe the air of freedom denied by the “law of the land” in totalitarian Cadiz. For Camus, the sea and the sky allegorically present an infinite horizon of freedom. State of Siege can be seen as a cri de coeur for all rebels to return to nature for inspiration in their resistance to oppression.  

At Victoria’s urging, Diego overcomes his fear of being infected, and he realizes that the love he shares with Victoria is the root of everything that is morally right in this world. Thus, he must fight any totalitarian regime that seeks to deny love. Overcoming even the fear of death, Diego refuses to accept a compromise offered by The Plague and The Secretary. Holding Victoria hostage, they offer to release Victoria and spare Diego’s life only if Diego promises that he and his beloved will flee Cadiz and cease their rebellion, thus handing over Cadiz to the totalitarian authorities. Diego refuses this compromise, asserting that some causes are worth dying for. Realizing that their game is up, The Plague and The Secretary abdicate their rule over Cadiz, though they kill Diego in a parting shot even as they move on. As The Secretary says, “As long as I can remember, it has always been enough for a man to overcome his fear for the machine to start to go wrong.” The ‘machine’, as she calls it, is the plague of totalitarian rule. However, for Camus, the plague has no power over the man who claims his own freedom and the freedom of his fellow men. 

Substituting for Sol Gabetta, who recently gave birth to her first child, cellist Joshua Roman gave a finely honed rendition of Antonin Dvorák’s great Cello Concerto in B minor. In a series of San Francisco Symphony concerts at Davies Hall, October 19-21, Joshua Roman teamed up nicely with conductor Krzysztof Urbanski, avoiding the mismatched difficulties that plagued the team of Urbanski and violinist Augustin Hadelich ten days or so ago in Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. Though I laid most of the blame on Hadelich for that highly unsatisfactory rendition of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, conductor Urbanski must shoulder some responsibility, for, ultimately, it is up to the conductor to bring in line a recalcitrant soloist. Happily, with Joshua Roman as soloist in Dvorák’s Cello Concerto, there was no need for Urbanski to right the ship, for Roman and Urbanski seemed to be on the same course from the outset.  

Under Urbanski’s lead, the orchestral introduction in the first movement was spot on, with a lovely melody for low clarinet and bassoons. Once Joshua Roman entered, his burnished tone gave notice of great things to come. And come they did. Roman may not have the robust, eminently physical attack of a Rostropovich or a Gauthier Capuçon, but Roman holds his own in matters of finesse. His was a deeply sensitive, finely nuanced rendition of the Dvorák Cello Concerto. And if one missed the robustly physical attack of a Rostropovich, a Capuçon, or, for that matter, a Jacqueline DuPre, conductor Urbanski supplied just such a robust attack whenever the orchestra launched out in full blast on its own. There seemed to be an implicit understanding between Joshua Roman and Krzysztof Urbanski, in which Roman offered finesse and Urbanski supplied the occasional big bang. Together, they presented a most satisfying Dvorák Cello Concerto, and the audience responded with a standing ovation. As an encore, Joshua Roman eschewed the more flashy material and opted instead for a highly introspective Sarabande from Bach’s Cello Suites.  

After intermission Urbanski returned to lead the orchestra in the Overture to Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. In this Overture, with the help of his fellow Mason Emmanuel Shikaneder, Mozart incorporated into his music the Masonic Order’s preoccupation with mystical symbolism regarding the number three. Thus, the Overture begins with a prophetic proclamation of each of the three notes of the tonic triad; and later these three chords are heard again, this time in the dominant key of B flat. Meanwhile, there is fine interplay with the violin section and quite a bit of stimulating counterpoint. Urbanski led a taut, concisely dramatic rendition of this wonderful Mozart Overture to The Magic Flute. 

To close out the program, the San Francisco Symphony performed Witold Lutoslawski’s Concert for Orchestra of 1964. Before embarking on this piece, conductor Urbanski took the microphone to offer some remarks about how Lutoslawski structured this work. Urbanski then had the orchestrate play examples of each of the structures he had pointed out. This little exercise was mildly illuminating, though some of what Urbanski said got lost in the less than perfect public address system emanating from the hand-held microphone. Or maybe it was partly lost due to Urbanski’s Polish accented English. Still, give the man credit for seeking to engage his audience in the niceties of musical appreciation. Urbanski is certainly an engaging, charismatic conductor, though I don’t share with my colleague Joshua Kosman a full-blown man-crush over Krzysztof Urbanski. Nor do I offer Urbanski gushing praise for everything he does. (Witness my remarks earlier in this article about the mis-matched teamwork of Urbanski and Augustin Hadelich.) In any case, Urbanski led the San Francisco Symphony in a convincing rendition of Lutoslawski’s Concerto for Orchestra. This work may not be one of my favorites. Nor, for that matter, is Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, on which Lutoslawski’s is modeled. But I believe Urbanski when he says how deeply he loves the music of his Polish homeland, not only this Lutoslawski work but also Penderecki’s Therody for the Victims of Hiroshima, which Urbanski conducted here ten days ago, and what a privilege it is for him to present this music to San Francisco audiences. We are indeed fortunate to have this opprtunity. 

To cap off their weeklong residency at UC Berkeley, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed Johannes Brahms’ Symphony No. 2 in D Major and his Symphony No. 3 in F Major on Sunday afternoon, October 15, at Zellerbach Hall. Having heard Riccardo Muti conduct the CSO’s Friday evening concert, which featured a superb performance of Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4 in E flat Major, “Romantic,” I couldn’t resist taking advantage of an opportunity to hear this great orchestra once again, even if Sunday’s all-Brahms program was, to my mind, the least interesting of the CSO’s three concert programs here.  

Sunday’s concert began with the Brahms Symphony No. 3, about which I have very mixed feelings. I love the first and third movements, but I find the second and fourth movements turgid and, quite simply, boring. This symphony opens with three loud chords for the winds, and these chords offer a motto for much that ensues in the first movement. A sweeping first theme is heard in the strings against the three notes of the motto in cellos and basses. The second theme enters in the clarinet and then in oboe and cello. These two melodic subjects are developed while the motto repeatedly asserts itself, first in the oboe, then in the horn. The recapitulation section uses the motto as preface to a coda, and the first movement closes with the first theme repeated.  

The second movement opens with winds heard in four-part harmony. After some elaboration of this first theme, a second theme is heard in the clarinet and bassoon. The mood is meditative, though broken occasionally by vigorous outbursts from the violins. Then earlier materials receive some rather academic treatment, until the first theme returns to close out this movement. The third movement opens with a lilting, sweeping melody for cellos, decorated by arpeggios in the other strings. Here conductor Riccardo Muti employed broad, sweeping arm gestures to emphasize the expansive melodic line. The violins then repeat this melody before engaging in a fanciful dialogue with the cellos. The opening melody is then heard in flute, oboe, and horn. A second theme enters in waltz time for the woodwinds. To close out this lovely third movement, the opening melody returns, first in the oboe and, finally, in violins and cellos.  

The fourth and final movement brings about a change in mood. Now the music is dark and foreboding. The first theme is heard in strings and bassoons. Then a second theme, quite solemn, features strings and winds. But a sudden storm interrupts the solemnity in an outburst of strings and woodwinds. When the storm subsides, a stately melody ensues in cellos and horns, then is repeated in violins and woodwinds. This music moves from tenderness to feverish; but in the end a note of resignation dominates, as the work closes with a somber reprisal of the motto that opened this symphony. 

After intermission, Riccardo Muti returned to the podium to lead the CSO in Brahms’ Symphony No. 2 in D Major. This symphony has a refreshingly pastoral tone. It opens with bucolic horn calls and woodwind chords after a three-note introduction in the cellos. A soaring melody is heard in the first violins, establishing a sunny, happy mood. A lovely song ensues in the cellos and violas, then is repeated by the flutes. In the development section, there is a bracing passage for three trombones. After extensive development, the two main themes return, before a tranquil coda features a beautiful horn solo. This movement ends with a serenely sustained chord in the woodwinds. The second movement maintains the idyllic tone of the first. The cellos offer a gentle, reflective melody soon taken over by horn, oboes, and flutes. A second theme, also lyrical, enters in flutes and oboes. Massed strings assert a third subject, quite passionate in mood. However, the idyllic mood eventually prevails.  

The third movement offers a kind of brief scherzo. An opening theme is heard in the woodwinds, with pizzicato accompaniment by the cellos. Two trios ensue, separated by a restatement of the opening melody. The fourth and final movement opens with a melody for strings, taken up by the full orchestra. There is a sweeping quality to this initial statement. A second subject, heard in the woodwinds, offers a more subdued mood. Then a stately theme is presented in the violins, and a gay mood prevails. A joyful repeat of the opening phrase of the third theme brings this symphony to a happy end. Throughout this Brahms Symphony No. 2, Riccardo Muti led the CSO with both broad sweeping gestures and acute attention to detail and nuance. This was Brahms at his best. Bravo, Maestro Muti!

Théâtre de la Ville of Paris has staged creative productions here before--an impressive version of Ionesco's 'Rhinoceros' with something like virtual automata for the beasts, and more recently a fine version of a truly great play, Pirandello's 'Six Characters in Search of an Author's in 2014.

Now Cal Performances has brought them back this weekend with their production of Albert Camus' fourth play, 'State of Siege,' 1948 ('État de siège,' The original meaning closer to 'State of Emergency'), about a Spanish city--Cadiz--reduced to silence under authoritarian rule when a comet is seen overhead, and a citywide gag rule is declared concerning the omen, with a chorus parroting: "Nothing's happening, nothing will happen!"  

Camus' play, with affinities to his novel 'The Plague' ('La Peste'), is stylized in many respects, including some pantomime besides the chorus. Originally staged by the great mime and director Jean-Louis Barrault, it was criticized at the start of the Cold War for its Spanish setting instead of its parable of resistance being placed in Eastern Europe. But Camus proved adamant, citing the reasons to criticize Franco's Spain--and perhaps revived uncomfortable memories of the debacle of its Civil War, the failure of the first front against fascism. 

Théâtre de la Ville's excellent director, Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota, has said the play is "a distorted mirror of a nightmarish future in which a city is reduced to silence and submission to authority." 

He and his company are specialists in true spectacle; they'll theatrically transform Zellerbach's big stage into a genuine event. 

In French with English supertitles. 

(At 6:30 on Saturday, in association with the Department of French, there will be a roundtable of professors from both Berkeley and Davis at the Durham Studio Theater on campus, "From Totalitarianism to Rebellion," on the contemporary relevance of Camus' play. Free.) 

Saturday at 8, Sunday at 3 at Zellerbach Hall (U. C. campus off Bancroft Way west of Telegraph). $24-110. calperformances.org or 642-9988