Arts & Events

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-