East Bay Magazine Summer 2020

THE IERE M E R P E I SSU July/August 2020

THE MAGAZINE OF OAKLAND, BERKELEY AND THE WORLD THAT REVOLVES AROUND US

Flashback

BACKSTAGE WITH ROCK PHOTOGRAPHER JOEL BERNSTEIN WINES OF CONTRA COSTA • COFFEE • CANNABIS • SAVING BOOKSTORES THE QUEST FOR A BLACK-OWNED NFL TEAM

Celebrating 30 years of helping clients invest and prosper

July/August 2020

WELCOME

SMOKE SCREEN

SNAP

SCORE

Oakland Cannabis Under Assault 22

A Letter from Our Editor 3

A Black-Owned NFL Team in Oakland? 26

Rock ’n’ Roll Photographer Joel Bernstein 4

CUPPA

The East Bay’s Culture of Caffeine 29

ART

Poster Politics at OMCA 6

UNCORKED

READS

How to Save Your Local Bookstore 10

Contra Costa County Embraces Wine Past 33

INTERVIEW

Author and Beekeeper Christine HyungOak Lee 36

STREAM

Online Movies from BAMPFA 16

PUBLISHER

CONTRIBUTORS

SENIOR DESIGNER

Rosemary Olson

Katherine Butler Katrina Fadrilan Amy Glynn Kary Hess D. Scot Miller Casey O’Brien Jonah Raskin Charlie Swanson Kelly Vance

Jackie Mujica

ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Karen Klaber

EDITOR

The Fine Art of Wealth Management

THE MAGAZINE OF OAKLAND, BERKELEY AND THE WORLD THAT REVOLVES AROUND US

Daedalus Howell

DESIGN DIRECTOR Kara Brown

COPY EDITOR Mark Fernquest

ADVERTISING DIRECTORS Lori Lieneke Lisa Santos

ADVERTISING ACCOUNT MANAGERS

PRODUCTION OPERATIONS MANAGER

Danielle McCoy Ben Grambergu Mercedes Murolo Lynda Rael

Sean George

CEO/EXECUTIVE EDITOR Dan Pulcrano

ON THE COVER Photograph: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, performing at Oakland/Alameda County Coliseum, July 13. 1974. Photo © Joel Bernstein 1974. Logo calligraphy: Mark Davis

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EAST BAY

welcome to the magazine

I

t was a hazy mid-morning at 63rd and College in Oakland—I was a relatively new father with a toddler son and a jones for Cole Coffee’s house roast.

I could count on a chocolate-and-coconut vegan donut from Pepple’s Donut Farm (where donuts are organically “grown”) to occupy my son long enough to buy me some time to squint into the gray sky and savor a grown-up moment of idle contemplation.

The line at Cole Coffee was brisk despite the fact that the barista, an apparent public policy wonk, had started a sidebar conversation with former Clinton-administration-secretary-oflabor-turned-Cal-professor Robert Reich as he waited for his coffee. Just as I was coming to appreciate the cafe’s intellectual

Katherine Butler is a writer whose credits include TV, news and more recently, humor essays on the terrible year 2020.

Katrina Fadrilan worked as a staff writer for The Daily Californian and has published works on a variety of platforms including the San Francisco Chronicle, the East Bay Express and HuffPost.

Amy Glynn is an award-winning essayist and poet; her second poetry collection, Romance

BY Daedalus Howell

rigor, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Michael Chabon trotted across the street toward Yasai Produce Market on College Avenue. I have no idea what the Telegraph Avenue author was chasing, but he seemed to find it as those baby blues brightened mid-stride. Later, at the same cafe, I’d meet and befriend Berkeley author Christine Lee, whose insights on the workings of the world could fill a shipping container of Moleskines (to wit, she’s profiled in these pages). If playwright Ishmael Reed had sat down at our table and shared his opinion of Hamilton, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

Clearly, the kid and I had strolled into a new level of cultural nexus—smarts, heart, art and BART, all within a few blocks.

The East Bay is one of the most dynamic

Language, is forthcoming from Measure Press in fall 2020.

Kary Hess has written for the North Bay Bohemian, the Marin Pacific Sun and the Petaluma ArgusCourier, and is the creator of SparkTarot.

Editor Daedalus Howell is the writerdirector of the feature film Pill Head and the author, most recently, of Quantum Deadline.

He’s also the editor of the North Bay Bohemian and the Marin Pacific Sun.

DON’T TOUCH My young son—the moment before he touched a Berkeley Art Museum painting.

PHOTO BY DAEDALUS HOWELL

Days

East Bay

places on the planet. It deserves its own magazine—this one is ours.

Editing a magazine is like hosting a dinner party—you curate a guest list, uncork some wine and hope you don’t make a mess of the coq au vin. If that metaphoric dinner party is here in the East Bay, however, you’d better be prepared to be delighted by unexpected guests, enchanted by rakish raconteurs and to engage in spirited debate.

For the inaugural issue of East Bay Magazine, our guest list includes a diverse cadre of Bay Area writing talent who aptly capture the region’s eclectic, inspiring and lunatic times with both style and substance.

Heady stuff. Did I say “idle contemplation” before? I meant “ideal contemplation.” In the East Bay, the moment never ends.

D. Scot Miller is the arts editor of the East Bay Express, the author of the Afrosurreal Manifesto and a regular contributor to several publications including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Open Space.

Casey O’Brien is an award-winning journalist with a focus on justice, equity and sustainability. She has been published in the Revelator, Sierra Magazine and Prism/the Daily Kos. Jonah Raskin writes the cannabis column for the North Bay

Bohemian and the Marin Pacific Sun, and performs his own poetry live with jazz all across the North Bay. Charlie Swanson is arts editor of the North Bay Bohemian and the Marin Pacific Sun. He also hosts a popular laserdisc podcast.

When he isn’t looking at movies and writing about them, Kelly Vance is looking forward to the next meeting of the San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle.

JULY/AUGUST 2020 | EASTBAYMAG.COM | EAST BAY MAGAZINE

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Sights of Sounds joel bernstein sees the light

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cclaimed rock ’n’ roll photographer and longtime Rockridge resident Joel Bernstein was still a teen when he asked Neil Young if he could play with Young’s new mother-of-pearl-inlaid Martin D-45 backstage. After a few minutes, when Young was called to go onstage, Bernstein quickly tuned the instrument and handed it back. Three years later, Young remembered the perfect tuning and asked Bernstein to be his guitar tech.

Bernstein continued carrying his camera as he toured with Young, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Prince, documenting both iconic moments and quiet, reflective ones from a vantage most fans never see.

Bernstein also captured images from the biggest stadium tour since the Beatles— Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s 1974 sweep—which became a blueprint for the 1970s model that followed. That model continued for four-and-a-half decades, until the crowded-venue experience came to an abrupt halt in the late winter of 2020, perhaps never to return.

Bernstein remembers how Dylan expected technical excellence as well as mind-reading abilities in on-stage troubleshooting, but Prince pushed the envelope the furthest.

“He had 60 channels of wireless in 1988,” he remembers. “All the microphones were wireless. All the guitars were wireless.

Nobody had anything like that.”

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BY Charlie Swanson

“He was very demanding,” Bernstein says. If a guitar string broke, an identical guitar had to be ready in a second. “Literally everything had to be backed up and double-redundant. It was like NASA. You just could not fail.”

The first camera Bernstein handled, at age 12 or 13, was his father’s 35mm single lens reflex.

Growing up near Philadelphia, Bernstein was inspired by photographs he saw in Time and Life, and he developed his low-key approach as a high school photojournalist.

“You can’t use a flash in a classroom, no teacher would let you do that,” Bernstein says.

Available light photography became a cornerstone of his visual style.

The first photos Bernstein took and developed himself were of then-obscure singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell. In 1968, when he was 16 and in 11th grade, Bernstein captured a picture of Mitchell sitting backstage that launched his career.

“She looked at the print and said, ‘That’s the best picture of me anyone’s ever taken, would you be my photographer?” Bernstein says.

From there, he began photographing Mitchell at venues such as Carnegie Hall, and became close with other singersongwriters in Mitchell’s circle, including Young, David Crosby and Graham Nash.

After spending about five days at the

University of Wisconsin at Madison, Bernstein visited Southern California to photograph Mitchell and never left.

“People say it must have taken a lot of courage to decide to do that,” he says, of moving to California. “But it was a no-brainer.”

For some 20 years, Bernstein toured with her and other folk and rock figures while taking intimate and free-spirited images of them onstage, backstage and everywhere in between.

His work also found its way onto many album covers, including Neil Young’s acclaimed 1970 album After the Gold Rush.

In many ways, Bernstein’s experience mirrors that of the teen protagonist in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, based on Crowe’s own experiences touring with musicians as a young journalist. In fact, many scenes in Almost Famous were visual re-creations of Bernstein’s photographs.

Bernstein moved to the Bay Area in 1973 at the invitation of Graham Nash, who had a home near San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park.

“I loved the light, as a photographer,” Bernstein says, of the Bay Area.

In 1996, he bought his home in Oakland, where he still lives today. “I have no interest in moving anywhere else,” he says.

While largely retired from taking photos, Bernstein still contributes to archives, box sets and other album releases, and his work is still on display in galleries and at art shows such as the Sonoma Valley Museum of Arts’ current exhibit, “California Rocks!

Photographers Who Made The Scene, 19601980,” on display now in-person and online.

“It is funny, I could have done this with people who would have faded into nothingness, and nobody would know who they are today,” Bernstein says, of his work.

“It’s just my good fortune that the people I was photographing when I was younger went on to these illustrious careers.” ❤

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Post This oakland museum’s political poster collection is now more relevant than ever

BY D. Scot Miller

A

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EAST BAY MAGAZINE | JULY/AUGUST 2020 | EASTBAYMAG.COM

BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL Offset lithograph paper by Elizabeth Catlett, 1972.

COURTESY OF THE OAKLAND MUSEUM OF CALIFORNIA.

s Alabama State students, my parents were very active during the Civil Rights Movement. Not only did they march, boycott and attend the churches where King gave his famous speeches, they also bore witness as Stokely Carmichael, later known as Kwame Ture, succeeded John Lewis at the helm of The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and re-animated the term “Black Power,” first coined by Richard Wright. My mother was working in Watts as a probation officer during the 1965 riots, and my father helped

take over the administration building at Howard University just months before I was born.

Being a “Black Power baby,” I began to dig into the books, memorabilia and ephemera my parents, as organizers and protesters, collected at a very early age. On one occasion—I must have been around seven or eight—I came across a huge poster of what appeared to be my dad during that era. “Why would daddy have a big poster of himself?” I remember asking my mother.

“That’s Malcom X,” my mom replied.

“Your father used to emulate him in so many ways.”

That was the day that I learned who Malcom X was, and how much he looked like my father. Not only did my mom tell me who he was, but she gave me a kid-sized synopsis of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and told me that Alex Hailey, the author of the book Roots, which was an ABC television series at the time, wrote it. My initial understanding of my parents’ lives as protestors and activists began visually, like this, with me coming to them with a poster or a pin and a question.

A rather obscure art form in the digital age, posters of protest and resistance have always had a pedagogical purpose. They provide people who are not necessarily intellectually engaged with politics or protest a window into the times. From the 1950s until at least the early ’70s, posters were used as alternative media to champion the protests for equality, justice and representation that the mainstream news outlets didn’t cover.

Oakland Museum of California has collected many of these visual salvos in their online “All Of Us Or None” archive project.

Started by Free Speech Movement–activist Michael Rossman in 1977, the archive gathers posters of modern movements in

the United States. It focuses on the domestic political poster renaissance that began in 1965 and continues to this day. When Rossman died on May 12, 2008, his family donated the collection to the museum.

“We were approached by Michael Rossman’s family through an intermediary, Lincoln Cushing,” said Renee De Guzman, senior curator of art for OMCA. “We negotiated the acquisition of the whole ‘All Of Us Or None’ collection with the stipulation that the posters come completely digitalized. We found support to catalogue the collection and made it accessible online as completely and quickly as possible. The ‘All Of Us Or None’ collection, I believe, has enormous value as material evidence of historic efforts for political change and populist cultural expressions.”

The Archive contains posters from every aspect of progressive activity: movements of protest, liberation and affirmative action; trade union and community struggles; electoral and environmental organizing; community services; and visionary manifestos. It is strongest in works from the San Francisco Bay Area, but its scope is national: approximately one-quarter of its holdings come from out of state, primarily New York City, Boston, Chicago and Washington, D.C. These are complemented by a representation of international works.

The collection consists of approximately 24,500 distinct titles.

“The collection is searchable,” De Guzman said. “Rather than any one poster, I’d refer you to search under ‘gay,’ since it is the 50th anniversary of Pride this month. This will show how comprehensive the collection is on a wide range of communities and stories. I also appreciate that Michael Rossman collected material culture without any obvious

UNTITLED (BLACK FIST) Offset lithograph paper from 1971 (artist unlisted).

political intent, such as the Tom of Finland drawings.”

The online exhibition includes wellknown graphic artists such as Malaquías Montoya, Emory Douglas, Rachael Romero, Rupert Garcia, Yolanda Lopez, Favianna Rodriguez, Carlos Cortez, Nancy Hom, Juan Fuentes and Jos Sances, with pieces from collective workshops such as La Raza Silkscreen, the Royal Chicano Air Force, Japantown Art and Media, Kearny Street Workshop and Inkworks Press.

“One of my favorite posters, appropriate

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JULY/AUGUST 2020 | EASTBAYMAG.COM | EAST BAY MAGAZINE

7

poster illustrates both how that struggle continued and how the scope of the phrase widened to include the Black Power Movement.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Indian Health Service (IHS) and collaborating physicians consistently performed sterilizations on Indigenous women, in many cases without informed consent. In 1976, a U.S General Accountability Office (GAO) investigation found several Indian Health Service areas not in compliance with IHS policies concerning consent to sterilization. The investigation found that these four service areas sterilized 3,406 women between the years 1973 and 1976; 36 of those cases were women STOP FORCED STERILIZATION Screenprint, paper, under the age of 21. This 1974 from People’s Press, 1974. poster from The People’s Press informed indigenous women of the danger in a way no other medium at to the present painful moment, is the time could have. the panther image that came from voter Though Stokely Carmichael did organizing by SNCC in Lowndes County, reanimate the term “Black Power,” via Alabama,” De Guzman said. “The symbol Richard Wright, the raised black fist often connects the Panthers to the formal Civil associated with the term has a long and Rights Movement and shows that the ballot storied history all its own. It was the logo was as important as the gun. I showed it in for the Industrial Workers of the World our ‘All Power to the People: Black Panthers in the early 1900s. And it was known as at 50.’ Not only is it graphically fantastic, it is “The Popular Front Salute” used by antipotent and meaningful.” fascists during the Spanish Civil War. Printmaker and sculptor Elizabeth In the 1940s and 1950s, it moved on to Cattlet’s “Black Is Beautiful” comes from revolutionary causes in Mexico, popularized a time, not long ago, when the phrase was by the revolutionary print collective Taller considered controversial. The phrase itself de Gráfica Popular (The People’s Graphic was coined by writer and advertiser, Bill Workshop), of which Elizabeth Catlett was Allen, in the 1950s urging Black consumers a member. Not until the 1960s, when artist to stand against products such as skinand activist Frank Cieciorka produced the lighteners and hair-straighteners, and familiar, simplified version for SNCC, did allow their natural beauty to become the the raised fist become a symbol for not only standard in the community. Catlett’s 1972

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EAST BAY MAGAZINE | EASTBAYMAG.COM | JULY/AUGUST 2020

the The Black Power Movement, but for the Students For a Democratic Society as well.

The visual communication of the fist has been misinterpreted to mean that it promotes violence, but its wisdom is as old as civilization itself and has been passed down to oppressed people since the invention of language: One finger out of five is weak, but when banded together, they are made strong.

Covid-19 has exposed, in high and stark contrast, the inequities in our current systems, bringing with it both an awakening to old oppressions and the discovery of new ones concerning access to healthcare services and the overwhelming numbers of Black and Brown people who make up the essential workforce in this country. Sparked by the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police acting with no accountability, the largest global protests in modern history have occurred in the face of oppressive forces, signaling civil war and ravaging cities.

Oakland’s streets are filling up with thought-provoking, informative and breath-taking murals that visually illuminate an urban landscape scarred by fear, rage and police brutality. Just as with Occupy Oakland nearly a decade ago, the call for the preservation of the art of protest has sprung anew as a new generation of artists and print-makers take the forefront in a world where the digital, corporate world threatens their existence.

The “All Of Us Or None” poster collection illustrates how resistance to oppression, organizing for the betterment of all people and celebrating the differences between us are part of the fabric of this country, and make the world a better place.

These posters illustrate this constant, beautiful struggle. They also show how much we have achieved, reminding us that the fight is always worth it. ❤

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Love Bookstores

#We

AUTHOR Charlie Jane Anders, one of We Love Bookstores’ organizers, is most recently the author of ‘The City in the Middle of the Night.’

a movement to save the cultural heart of our neighborhoods

PHOTO BY SARAH DERAGON/PORTRAITS TO THE PEOPLE.

BY

10

Katrina Fadrilan

M

any Bay Area natives hold a special memory of their local, neighborhood bookstore; whether it was buying a copy of Howl from City Lights, relaxing in the hammock on the back porch of Feldmans and sorting through their new stack of books, or crowding into Moe’s with all 20 other UC Berkeley comparative literature majors for poetry flash on a Thursday night. In countless ways, bookstores color our lives.

Yet these landmarks are endangered. In fact, local bookstores were endangered

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EAST BAY MAGAZINE | JULY/AUGUST 2020 | EASTBAYMAG.COM

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‘We wanted to make sure bookstores would still be around once things returned to some version of normal.’

— CHARLIE JANE ANDERS

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long before the pandemic. First, there was the rise of the chains such as Barnes and Noble, and Borders. Then there was the gradual transition from print to e-books.

Along with, of course, the emergence of Amazon. So when the pandemic occurred and small, local, non-essential Bay Area businesses were forced to close, independent bookstores were placed in greater jeopardy. To help combat these dire circumstances, local writers and community members formed We Love Bookstores—a movement to raise money and support to help keep local bookstores open.

Charlie Jane Anders, a local writer and one of We Love Bookstores’ original organizers, explained the mission behind the movement.

“We thought we should do something else to help local bookstores,” she said.

“Bookstores have really, really thin margins.

They have high rents, they have high payroll costs and other costs, and they can’t change the price of the thing they sell. We wanted to make sure bookstores would still be around once things returned to some version of normal.”

These operational costs, alongside competing sales to online retailers, were only exacerbated by quarantine closures, forcing local bookstores—such as Berkeley’s 46-year-old University Press

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EAST BAY MAGAZINE | EASTBAYMAG.COM | JULY/AUGUST 2020

Books—to permanently close.

To prevent further closures and to help indie bookstores withstand Covid-19’s economic impact, We Love Bookstores hosts a series of fundraisers via Zoom, which people can register to attend on a donation basis. Alia Volz, a local author and one of the organizers behind We Love Bookstores’ events, explained the process of planning these fundraisers.

“Several of us will brainstorm to put together each event,” Volz said. “We’ll start tapping around names in an organic way from our contact list, trying to find a way to always make it inclusive, relevant, contemporary. One of the things that we’ve done from the beginning is pair authors like me, who are affected by Covid, with established, big-name authors to simultaneously boost that author who’s having a tough go at it and support indie bookstores.”

We Love Bookstores has already raised thousands of dollars hosting multiple events including a virtual poetry reading with Daveed Diggs, Robin Coste Lewis and Danez Smith that raised over $10,000 for Marcus Books in Oakland, and a panel discussion with non-binary and trans writers with funds going to Adobe Books in San Francisco. These virtual events provide funding for local bookstores, as

well as opportunities for bookstores to connect with their communities during the current global and local political movements. Hosting community events that engage in the national conversation, indie bookstores serve as cultural hubs in their respective neighborhoods.

“There are parts of the Bay where there’s one indie bookstore and that’s the heart of the community,” Volz said. “It’s somewhere people can go to be part of the broader cultural conversation. Indie bookstores will find a way to develop an event series that matches the ethos of the community to what is going on the broader cultural dialogue.”

Despite the cultural significance of local bookstores, consumers increasingly rely on online booksellers, such as Amazon, due to their lower prices and favorable shipping policies. E-commerce sales have shot up by 30 percent since sheltering-in-place began, with books undergoing a 295 percent increase in sales growth—the highest increase in online sales of any product, including groceries, electronics, and health and beauty items. Furthermore, e-book sales skyrocketed by 777 percent from the first half of March 2020 to the first half of April 2020.

However, We Love Bookstores insists that the consumer experience of buying from a local bookstore is intrinsically more valuable than purchasing books online.

“Booksellers and bookstore owners, they’re doing this because they love books and they go the extra mile to help customers discover books that they might love; they get to know their customers in a really special way and you know you can just discover your new favorite author in a local bookstore,” Anders said. “A bookstore is a really magical place where you can just spend a lot of time surrounded by books and browse and discover something new that you never knew you were going to fall in love with.”

»

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Independent bookstores typically require their staff to possess extensive literary knowledge, as famously demonstrated by New York City’s renowned bookstore, Strand, which asks job applicants to take a lengthy book quiz.

“Indie booksellers are super passionate about what they do—it’s not a job that you do if you’re not passionate about it—and are going to have a tremendous catalog in their minds of what’s coming out, what’s new,” Volz said. “Amazon’s algorithm will pretend to do that; it lacks a personal touch and lacks insight and cultural context.”

Yet, indie bookstores patrons such as Volz don’t criticize those who look to online sellers to purchase their books.

“I totally respect and acknowledge that the cheapest option is the best option for some people,” Volz said. “But every penny you give to Amazon is a penny taken out of the pocket of an indie bookstore. Then you lose your bookstore. When they close, it’s not there anymore and something has died in the community.”

Speaking as an author, Volz still sees no value in selling books through major online

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retailers like Amazon over indie bookstores.

“The support of the indie community can absolutely make an author,” Volz said.

“When you have the indie bookselling community behind you, they are going to hand-sell your book, they are going to talk to people about your book. It’s a level of personalization and connection that you are not going to get from a website and not going to get from Barnes and Noble, either.

You can’t get it from the corporate world, it’s just not there.”

At the height of Bay Area shelter-inplace restrictions, sales of Volz’s new book, Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco, were threatened as she had to cancel her book tour. However, Patrick Marks, the owner of Green Arcade Books, reached out to her to ask if she would like to do a book signing out of the trunk of his car.

“I got to sign my first copies of Home Baked on the trunk of a car,” Volz said. “For weeks, [Marks] was the only person in the country who had signed copies. You have this personal relationship with booksellers.

Amazon can’t give you that.”

Considering the personal connections, cultural value and literary experience local bookstores offer, movements such as We Love Bookstores remain critical in helping to sustain the vibrancy and culture of Bay Area neighborhoods. We Love Bookstores recommends various ways to help them do so.

To support indie bookstores through We Love Bookstores, Bay Area locals can register and donate to upcoming events by visiting the movement’s website. They can also buy a gift card from a local bookstore and donate to the GoFundMe pages of bookstores such as Dog Eared Books and Alley Cat. Moreover, with restrictions being lifted, more bookstores are offering curbside pickup and deliveries.

“There’s almost always an indie alternative that will be good for your community and will help ensure that these cultural institutions that we rely on champion authors and bring authors to us, to our community, to help keep the culture updated, and fluid and moving,” Volz said. “In a lot of ways, indie bookstores are cultural arbiters.” ❤

The Silver

Stream

NOW PLAYING A still from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 French New Wave classic ‘Bande à part.’

BY Kelly Vance

C

ome on, admit it, you miss going to the movies. The $15 ticket price on a Saturday night, the $8.75 bag of popcorn, the enormous plastic cups of soda that invariably get spilled and the resulting sticky floors. The blaring pre-event “feature,” usually an infomercial for pre-teenfavorite websites and TV shows, blasting at top volume.

Followed by endless coming-attractions trailers (Tom Cruise! Margot Robbie! Those adorable Trolls!).

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COURTESY THE CRITERION COLLECTION

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‘It’s like learning to walk again,’ says BAMPFA’s co-interim director Susan Oxtoby. ‘We were presenting 500 programs a year, and our job now is to carry forward that tradition,’ now necessarily scaled down in the absence of daily-change live presentation. « And finally, the feature film itself.

Summertime at the multiplex wouldn’t be the same without SpongeBob Squarepants 3, Top Gun: Maverick, or My Spy, with the delightful Dave Bautista.

See what we’ve been missing out on?

Of course, there are other options for stuck-at-home, movie-loving audiences bewildered by conflicting shelter-in-place orders and confusing reopening-forbusiness schedules during the current pandemic. Seemingly every company that has anything to do with motion-picture entertainment has its own customized streaming platform these days, bringing movies to suit every conceivable demographic slice of the market, as an alternative to “temporarily closed” theaters.

But the Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive is different. BAMPFA’s “Watch from Home” program, which began streaming April 14 with the art-history documentary Beyond the Visible: Hilma Af Klint, takes aim, naturally, at the higher reaches of the cinematic universe. In keeping with its reputation as one of the world’s most-prestigious film museums, the Berkeley-based Archive is partnering with an impressive roster of releasing companies to bring its special brand of indie, foreign, classic and art titles to subscribers, for a fee— in most cases $12 for three days of access

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(BAMPFA typically splits the ticket price 50-50 with distributors).

According to BAMPFA media relations manager A.J. Fox, the Archive is currently offering product from Kino Lorber, Zeitgeist Films, Magnolia Pictures, Film Movement, Rialto Pictures, Juno Films, Neon Films, Arbelos, Icarus Films, Grasshopper Films, Argot Pictures and Milestone Films—with the possibility of additional releases to come.

No one knows more about the museum’s new streaming offerings than co-interim director Susan Oxtoby, who together with her fellow curators got Watch from Home up and running beginning in mid-April, under all-too-familiar lockdown conditions.

“It’s like learning to walk again,” says Oxtoby, who works from her East Bay home while the museum is closed for the interim. “We were presenting 500 programs a year, and our job now is to carry forward that tradition,” now necessarily scaled down in the absence of daily-change live presentation.

The museum’s website (BAMPFA. org) currently lists 18 films, chosen by the curators, for rent from its partners.

These titles will eventually be rotated out gradually, to be replaced by different films in the same vein—a mixture of the new and the classic, with the emphasis on

independent work. Nothing from the socalled “majors.” The films are supported by layers of extra features online, including live-stream talks and directorial spotlights, with the goal of continuing the Archive’s long-standing mission of fostering “thoughtful conversations on film.”

Users would follow a special link to the appropriate film’s purchase page, with the rental proceeds split between the releaser and BAMPFA.

So Many Choices, So Little Time The roster of rental streaming choices has the look of a typical BAMPFA schedule from the Before Time, when ticket buyers gathered in the museum’s auditorium.

There are three historical dramas from Hungarian director Istvan Szabó (Colonel Redl, Mephisto and Confidence). A classic French film noir: Jules Dassin’s Rififi. One film each by two of the Archive’s all-time most popular auteurs (Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders and Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó).

A documentary on the Black experience: Dawn Porter’s John Lewis: Good Trouble. A socially conscious drama from renowned British filmmaker Ken Loach (2019’s Sorry We Missed You). A World War II character study from contemporary Russian director Kantemir Balagov: Beanpole.

Also: The Grey Fox, a rarely seen 1982 indie drama by Canadian director Philip Borsos, starring real-life stunt-riderturned-actor Richard Farnsworth. A clutch of Chilean docs by the director of The Battle of Chile, filmmaker Patricio Guzmán: Nostalgia for the Light, The Pearl Button and The Cordillera of Dreams. Ursula von Rydingsvard: Into Her Own, a documentary on the German-American sculptor, by cinematographer-turned-director Daniel Traub. And a documentary profile of the late Pauline Kael, a woman who meant

»

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COURTESY OF ZEITGEIST FILMS

everything to BAMPFA and the city of Berkeley, as the early touchstones for her career as America’s most notorious film critic. What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, is written and directed by Rob Garver and distributed by Juno Films.

Spaceship Earth tells the documentary story of a group of “science hippies” who met in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury in the ’60s, moved to New Mexico and then Oakland before building their own sea-going ship and sailing around the world, and eventually gravitated toward an attention-grabbing, large-scale experiment. In 1991, eight members of the “cult”—none of whom reportedly used drugs or alcohol—went into a huge “biosphere” they had built in the Arizona desert. The goal was for them to live in the closed-system, sealed atmosphere for as long as possible, inside their own minireplica of the Earth—a test of long-term

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sustainability. How does it all work out?

Matt Wolf’s 2020 doc, released by Neon, is as suspenseful as any sci-fi spectacle.

Chilean exile writer-director Patricio Guzmán’s three-part epic documentary The Battle of Chile (1975–79) shows how his beloved Latin American homeland descended into right-wing barbarism in the 1970s under the Pinochet military junta. Guzmán has played variations on that sad theme ever since (see Nostalgia for the Light and The Pearl Button, also on the BAMPFA streaming playlist). The Cordillera of Dreams (2019) is his latest, a beautifully shot, thoroughly melancholy meditation on Chile as it is today, still “dreaming” of the society that used to be before the golpe (coup), with the majestic, treacherous Andes mountain range as metaphor. One of Guzmán’s guides is Pablo Salas, a free-thinking videographer who somehow avoided being

ART HOUSE ‘Beyond the Visible: Hilma Af Klint’ is part of BAMPFA’s ‘Watch from Home’ program.

EAST BAY MAGAZINE | EASTBAYMAG.COM | JULY/AUGUST 2020

“disappeared”—he stayed in Chile and still records street demonstrations, adding to his large library of footage, an invaluable record of the people’s resistance. Cordillera of Dreams is distributed by Icarus Films.

Corneliu Porumboiu’s The Whistlers (2019) marks a departure for the director, one of the leading lights of the recent “Romanian New Wave.” Instead of revisiting the Eastern European settings of 12:08 East of Bucharest; Police, Adjective and his other politically tinged dramas, Porumboiu follows his undercover police detective protagonist Cristi (played by Vlad Ivanov) to La Gomera in the Spanishspeaking Canary Islands for a sardonic tale of international crime, complete with a femme fatale (Catrinel Marlon), a mocking motel keeper hung up on opera records (George Pistereanu), a Spanish drug ring and el silbo gomero, the islanders’ whistled secret language. The plot contains

enough twists and red herrings to confuse the casual viewer, but that’s probably the director’s point. Deadpan verbal humor reigns, along with a slow-but-steady accumulation of gunshot victims. Sample dialogue: “You trying to drive guests away with this music (a Maria Callas aria)?” “No, trying to educate them.” Presented by Magnolia Pictures.

Portrait of the Artist

Hilma af Klint is not exactly a household name in the visual-art world. The Swedish artist (1862–1944) grew up in an aristocratic family of naval architects and based her paintings on her studies of “atoms in the universe” and her spiritual investigations into theosophy and anthroposophy. Dismissed in her time for the seeming obscurity of her vision as well as for the fact that she was a woman in a European fine-art milieu dominated by men, Klint is generally recognized today as the first abstract painter. Director Halina Dyrschka’s 2019 documentary Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint treats us to a deep-ish examination of orderly geometric musings from the artist’s prodigious output—color fields, whimsical diagrams, nature studies and Klint’s dynamic, late-period works devoted to the subject of water. Although New York’s Museum of Modern Art evidently has had its doubts about the importance of Klint’s oeuvre, a growing body of contemporary art historians consider her the forerunner to such modern masters as Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky and Andy Warhol.

Beyond the Visible is a Zeitgeist Films release.

Extra Added Attractions

There are special, streaming perks for

BAMPFA members, including free films such as Mikhail Kalatozov’s live-wire 1964 dramatized portrait of revolutionary Cuba, I Am Cuba (June 20–21) and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso, an irresistible portrait of the artist at work, spontaneously drawing pictures with a marker and oil paints in front of Clouzot’s camera. The Picasso doc played in May, but there are plans to keep adding other member freebies in the coming months.

Also highly recommended for stay-athome aficionados is the online essay “Charm Offensive: The Films of Warren Sonbert,” a tribute by writer Max Goldberg to Sonbert, the late San Francisco creator of a series of magical, mystical shorts. Goldberg’s essay is part of the museum’s “Out of the Vault” project. Another pop-cultural treasure at your fingertips: “Off the Shelves: Pauline Kael and the Berkeley Cinema Guild,” an appreciation of Berkeley’s legendary film critic and movie-house operator Kael, by BAMPFA research associate Jason Sanders.

The Sonbert and Kael texts are just a small taste of the Archive’s voluminous holdings, now largely accessible from home.

Hint to programmers: how about a miniretrospective of Sonbert’s short films, or a tribute to the massively influential Kael in the form of a series of her favorite films?

CineFiles for Cinephiles

And then there’s CineFiles, an ongoing project of the museum’s Film Library and Study Center, likewise available online.

With the newly revamped CineFiles, film fanatics who want to learn more can look at reviews, press kits, program notes from film festivals and Archive screenings, and other documents related to Archive-inflected movies. CineFiles listings are elaborately cross-referenced, for those late-night excursions when you absolutely, positively

have to get the lowdown on, say, Paris Is Burning, Jennie Livingston’s documentary on the 1980s New York City drag scene.

Lots of people assume the Archive could just open its vaults and live off the accumulated hoard of its vast holdings, without looking outside, thus obviating the need to rent titles from other sources. “It isn’t quite that easy,” cautions A. J. Fox. Many of the movies in BAMPFA’s warehouses are fragile prints subject to varying degrees of rot and degradation, the notorious “inherent vice” of the art form in its purest state, à la highly flammable nitrate stock. The way to make BAMPFA’s stash more available to the public would be to digitize each and every film—an expensive, time-consuming project. So don’t expect to be able to browse through the Archive’s complete collection anytime soon.

It all boils down to this: duplicating the complete BAMPFA “shared entertainment experience” at home on your computer screen or home video setup is doable, but at best it’s a rough approximation. There’s really no substitute for watching a rare film restoration in the Archive’s screening room, with the filmmaker in person taking questions from the audience. Or enjoying a Japanese silent drama—for instance, director Gosho Heinosuke’s Taishō-era romance The Dancing Girl of Izu, accompanied by live performers vocalizing and playing traditional instruments. Susan Oxtoby realizes this. “We miss being together, sharing films with an audience.”

However, a significant part of the total package can be replicated online, with no physical distance barrier. Offers Oxtoby: “We have the potential to reach a broader audience with streaming.” So there’s an arguable upside to the pandemic for fans of classic, indie, foreign and documentary film. While we wait out the virus, the germ of cinematic creativity continues to thrive in public view. All you have to know is where to look for it. ❤ JULY/AUGUST 2020 | EASTBAYMAG.COM | EAST BAY MAGAZINE

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A

Up in Smoke

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PHOTO BY DIMITRI BONG.

BURNT Cannabis dispensaries, gardens and manufacturing centers were plundered during the recent protests.

Again

e

BY Jonah Raskin

I

llicit weed, black-market weed, flooded Oakland’s streets and suites before looters robbed cannabis and cash from local dispensaries during the riots following George Floyd’s murder.

Now, the city is even more saturated than ever before with illicit weed. Looters not only hit dispensaries, they also hit cannabis gardens, distributors and manufacturing centers. Reeling from the violence, Oakland and its citizens are haunted by the police department’s failure to protect private property. Something’s rotten and stinks like the Bay at low tide.

“Marijuana businesses are accustomed to being hit,” Dale Sky Jones tells me, during a long, one-sided phone conversation that might be called a rant. The Chancellor at Oaksterdam University—the world’s most prestigious institution devoted to the study of marijuana—Jones is outraged.

And rightly so.

“For years, dispensaries were hit regularly by cops with badges,” he says. “During the riots, Oakland cops did nothing to protect them. They circled their own wagons, defended themselves and watched robberies go unchecked. Don’t get me wrong—I like 911 and the police. I want

the looters arrived and the call for help went unanswered

them to be held accountable. The industry pays taxes and deserves a fair return.”

Tariq Alazraie, a friend and dispensary owner with an indoor grow operation, was kidnapped, pistol-whipped and robbed during the riots.

“I’m okay,” he tells me on the phone. “It added a little excitement to my life.”

Not since the 1960s—when Oakland’s Black Panther Party demanded “an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people”—have cops been so widely denounced for their misconduct and criminality.

Debby Goldsberry—a longtime cannabis activist and the CEO at Magnolia Wellness, an Oakland dispensary—describes the break-ins as the work of “organized gangs.” One wonders what savvy gang isn’t “organized.” As one marijuana dealer tells me, “I’d hate to be a disorganized criminal.”

On the phone, Goldsberry tells me that at least 39 cannabis enterprises were hit in Oakland, that many won’t be able to reopen and that cannabis companies that weren’t hit are helping those that were.

“Magnolia paid $400,000 in taxes last year and got no support from the cops during the riots,” Goldsberry tells me.

“The cops knew the riots were happening and could have warned us so we could have protected ourselves. They did nothing.”

Now, Goldsberry wants the city to waive fees for at least a couple of months so the industry can get back on its feet.

Cannabis dispensaries, gardens and manufacturing centers weren’t the only businesses thieves plundered during the riots. In the East Bay, at least 75 vehicles were stolen from a Dodge dealership. Pharmacies were looted. Prescription drugs, including opioids, found their way to Oakland streets already saturated with narcotics.

Go ahead and shed a tear or two for Oakland’s dispensaries, but don’t cry a river. In my view, they’ve been charging exorbitant prices for flowers, tinctures, oils and pre-rolled. A big part of the problem is the exorbitant taxes that Goldsberry and her ilk pay to state and local governments.

But the dispensaries haven’t exactly been charitable institutions either.

Compassion has sometimes taken a back seat to profits. In an industry where the black market makes up an estimated 70 percent of sales, a legitimate enterprise is a tough row to hoe. Oakland’s Harborside— one of the largest dispensaries in

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‘For years, dispensaries were hit regularly by cops with badges,’ says Dale Sky Jones, chancellor at Oaksterdam University.

‘During the riots, Oakland cops did nothing to protect them. They circled their own wagons, defended themselves and watched robberies go unchecked.’ «

branches in San Jose and Desert Hot Springs—was apparently hit by looters and "cleaned out." Some observers say windows were boarded up, though the company— founded by the legendary Steve DeAngelo, author of The Cannabis Manifesto —has issued no official information on the subject of looting. Under the heading, "We Stand by Our Community, Harborside's website says all the right things: "Our hearts and deepest sympathies go out to the families of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor.

We are saddened by the senseless deaths and by the deep pain and division we are seeing across the country." The site also says “Due to high volume, we are experiencing delays in our call center and home deliveries. We are working around the clock.”

Since the arrival of Covid-19, some dispensaries have recorded hefty sales. The consumption of both weed and alcohol has risen dramatically all over the Bay Area. What else was there to do during the lockdown? Have safe sex? Read Mumbo Jumbo

by Oakland’s inimitable Ishmael Reed? Pass the bong and the edibles, darling.

The organized assault on dispensaries didn’t surprise me. Not long ago, a North Bay dealer drove to Oakland with a carload of weed, parked outside a dispensary and went inside to negotiate. Thieves broke into his vehicle, grabbed his weed and ran.

The guy drove home, told me his tale of woe and retired from the biz.

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Lest you think I have it in for Oakland, let me say that I love Oakland’s Jack London Square (despite London’s embrace of white supremacy), love the Oakland’s As and Oakland bookstores such as Pegasus.

Also, the City of Oakland has been exemplary in handing out “equity permits” to citizens who were victims of the drug war, arrested and sent to prison. Some citizens, including African Americans who received permits and opened dispensaries, were hit during the riots. Now they need help badly.

In the 1990s, I lived in a house near Oakland’s Rockridge Market Hall, one of the best places in the world to shop for food and drink. Briefly, I grew weed in the basement. Actually, I didn’t grow it myself.

Weedsters approached the woman who owned the house, fixed up her basement and grew a crop. In return she received $800 a month. The weedsters had the same kind of underground operation all over Oakland, and they’re still at it.

Not long after the recent riots, I talked with a forty-something-year-old African American who has lived in Oakland for decades, works from home as a techie and earns over $100,000 a year. We shared a pizza ($33.85 for a large) from Zachary’s on College Avenue.

“Congo” attended a Catholic high school and UC Berkeley. A Silicon Valley giant snapped him up after graduation. He can afford Zachary’s pizza and dispensary weed, but he doesn’t like shelling out top dollar for

pre-rolls, and, while he began to smoke as a teen, he has cut way back on consumption.

“Black-market cannabis is an essential part of the culture of Oakland, but weed isn’t really countercultural anymore,” he tells me. “It’s an anesthesia for the masses.

Also, the quality of the weed has declined.

It doesn’t look, taste or smell as good as it looked, smelled and tasted back in the day. A lot of weed is shipped out of state where it’s still illegal and you can triple the amount of money you can make in Oakland.”

Though he wasn’t smoking much weed anymore, he was protesting big time, inspired by heroes Malcolm X and Noam Chomsky.

“I went into the streets of Oakland with friends right after Trump came out and said, ‘When the looting starts, the shooting starts,’” Congo told me. “We were tear gassed and the cops used ‘flash bombs’ against us. It was crazy. I was shocked at the force the Oakland police used. Now, I think we’re all heading for total disaster.”

I hope not. I also hope that Oaksterdam University reopens its doors and that Dale Sky Jones gets to act like the Chancellor again.

Ever since the pandemic the school has only offered virtual classes, on both the business and the horticulture of cannabis.

Jones is proud of the way the institution responded to Covid-19.

“Students and teachers haven’t been tethered to the campus,” she says. “In some ways, classes have been better online than in person. There’s more opportunity for students to communicate with one another.”

Jones keeps a sharp eye on everything in Oakland.

“All of us in the cannabis industry are a scrappy bunch,” she says. “As a community, we need to rebuild, provide relief from taxes and give reassurances the police failure won’t happen again.”

Jones pauses a moment and adds, “We’re telling people: ‘Come to Oakland and buy cannabis.’”

Jonah Raskin is the author of “Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War.”

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Black Equity Matters could the nation’s first black-owned football team be based in oakland?

BY Casey O’Brien

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»

PHOTO BY DAVE ADAMSON.

TOUCH DOWN The African American Sports and Entertainment Committee has made the first moves to bring a Black-owned NFL team to Oakland.

I

n the wake of the tragic and violent death of Black father and community member George Floyd in Minneapolis, protests around the country—including here in the Bay Area—have led to major changes in racial justice and police policy, including the defunding and restructuring of local police departments, investment in Black-owned businesses and more. But now, Bay Area racial justice is entering a whole new arena: football. A group of Oakland business people have proposed bringing a new, exclusively Black-owned football team into Oakland to replace the Raiders.

The proposal, sent by the African American Sports and Entertainment Committee, is the first step in a long

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‘I have always looked at the process of purchasing a professional sports franchise as climbing Mount Everest, backwards, with no oxygen.’

— ANDY DOLICH, SPORTS CONSULTANT

«

process to bring the NFL’s first Blackowned team to the city. The NFL has acknowledged the proposal but not yet responded; it would require bringing a 33rd team into the league since at present no owners are interested in selling their team.

The group, led by East Oakland native Ray Bobbitt, hopes to remodel the Coliseum for the team and offer community and educational programs as well as football.

Bobbitt said the proposal would be “something historic in a historic city that has been a host city for 47 years. To occur in a community where people have fought for civil justice and social change for so long.”

Not everyone in the sports industry is sure the team is a viable reality. Andy Dolich, a sports consultant who has worked for various sports franchises including the Oakland A’s, the Warriors and the 49ers, is supportive of the proposal, but he isn’t sure it’s possible.

“This is a monopoly game played with incredible politics and unbelievable patience,” he said. “I have always looked at the process of purchasing a professional sports franchise as climbing Mount Everest, backwards, with no oxygen.”

The NFL requires that one person put up 30 percent of the cost of the team—likely over a billion dollars. In addition, the Coliseum is currently owned and operated by the Oakland A’s and the City of Oakland, and Bobbitt and his colleagues would have to get them on

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board. The global pandemic doesn’t make things any easier.

“The two situations we are dealing with every day, our social circumstance and our medical circumstance, are not a day from solution … football is a game where bodily fluids are exchanged on every play, so I don’t know how that would work,” Bobbitt said.

But as complicated as bringing a Black-owned team to a city with a barelyfunctioning stadium would be, Dolich doesn’t deny its symbolic power.

“I do think it is excellent in the focus of the social debate that we are having in our country,” he said. If the coalition gets the NFL’s approval for a 33rd team and finds a way to fund it, Dolitch thinks Oakland will come out strong for a new hometown franchise.

“It’s been hard for many of us who have spent time working for Oakland teams, and the millions of fans, coming to grips with the fact that two of our franchises are gone,” he said.

DC Livers, a Black sportswriter who has covered and consulted on racial equity in athletics throughout her career, is confident that the team is possible—and necessary.

“The concept of a Black-owned team is just long overdue,” she said. “I have been talking to a lot of athletes, and over the past years I have come to the conclusion that most Black athletes have outgrown the NBA and they’ve outgrown the NFL … they rely heavily on African-American talent, and it’s a broken model.”

Livers is confident a Black-owned team would treat Black players better.

“Why does the owner matter?” she asked.

“It really, really matters, especially with the NFL, because the ownership controls the team. They don’t even really consider them men, they call them pieces. It’s frustrating, it’s set up almost as modern-day slavery.”

Young Black athletes can get trapped in contracts that give them very little autonomy, she said. As Colin Kaepernick so famously demonstrated, players are often punished in the NFL for speaking out, especially on race. NFL players are 70 percent Black, while league CEOs and presidents are 100 percent white.

Livers doesn’t think money is an object.

“The money can be gotten,” she said.

“There’s enough Black millionaires, Black billionaires, where they can pool their money together and buy a team.”

The racism in the NFL institution, Livers explained, is a much bigger barrier.

“Owners are terrified that there could be any owners other than white owners, that people of color could invest in teams,” she said. “But the NFL should make available the opportunity for a Black-owned team, and Oakland would be a great place for it.”

With a long history of racial justice, from the Black Panthers to the Black Lives Matter movement, Oakland has long been a site for Black liberation.

“The messaging, the timing, the group— it’s all powerful,” Dolich said.

Whether the proposal moves forward or not—and if it does, it will be a marathon proposal of epic proportions—the concept is an important one.

“Africa will never need the world, but the world will always need Africa,” Livers said.

“Even if nobody ever gives African Americans reparations, even if everyone just said ‘we’re gonna leave you alone,’ we would still come back stronger, because the talent is there. If the NFL says they won’t give them a license, that’s the worst thing that they can do right now. It would be worse than Kaepernick.” ❤

O

ON

GRIND

CUPPA Coffee is the cornerstone of modern civilization.

east bay coffee culture continues despite covid-19

PHOTO BY NATHAN DUMLAO.

P

BY Amy Glynn

attern recognition 101: Jack London Square, early morning.

The steely grays of the sky and water meet the steely grays of the Bay Bridge in a fog dense enough to spatter my shoulders like rain—a fantastical composition of liquid; solid and vapor all in one color. By 10am the marine layer will be gone, replaced with high, brilliant skies. Beautiful in its own right, that high-def articulation of wave and girder, gesso-white gull feathers and grimy signage. But for now, nothing so crude as clarity. Glorious ambiguity, easy on the eyes, not revealing too much at once, leaving plenty to the imagination.

That’s what we’re about around here at 6:30 in the morning, and the perfect

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JULY/AUGUST 2020 | EASTBAYMAG.COM | EAST BAY MAGAZINE

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This is a truth East Bay coffee people seem to have internalized really well— our coffee scene is dense and diverse, but there’s gloriously little sense of any either-or mentality. «

beverage for that has to be the cappuccino, the beverage named for its supposed resemblance to the brown robes and cowl of a Capuchin friar. A drink named for a type of Franciscan, at the edge of the bay whose namesake was the great treehugger Saint Francis of Assisi, robed in a billowing white cloud. In this case, Blue Bottle’s Hayes Valley is in the mix (dense, viscid terracotta crema, fern-frond mandala painted in bright-white, aromatics favoring chocolate and baking spices; pretty impeccable), but it’s not the only game in town. Love North Beach all day long (I sure do) and give Seattle its propers, even though it’s always self-administered those pretty assertively, but Alameda County is God’s Country if your god is a coffee-god. And any proper love letter to the East Bay should arguably be penned in the sepia-rust color of good espresso.

Though the story of Bay Area coffee largely begins in 19th-century San Francisco, with the Hills Brothers’ and Folgers’ empires pioneering ways to preserve, mass-produce and massdistribute pre-ground coffee to gold prospectors and the towns that leapt up in their wake, the East Bay has cultivated a very large-and-looming influence in a relatively short period of time. If the first wave was San Francisco’s, Oakland and Berkeley ran the second.

The book of Genesis opens on April 1,

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1966, when second-wave luminary Alfred Peet opened his doors in North Berkeley.

Add Carlo di Ruocco’s entry onto the scene with Oakland’s Mr. Espresso in 1976, and the begats keep coming. Blue Bottle.

Bicycle. Highwire. AKA. Slojoy. From Artis to Zolo, the East Bay’s proliferation of third- and fourth-wave coffee roasters— strongly led by Berkeley and Oakland— rivals anyones.

Third-wave-and-beyond coffee, loosely defined as having an intense focus on the craft and sourcing of the product versus the “experience” of it, can be a mixed bag (occasionally the fetishist vibe is intense enough to make me feel a little skeezy about how much I am enjoying my coffee). But honestly? Most days I’m disinclined to put anyone down for valuing craft or focusing on mindful sourcing. (I confess I’m not above rolling my eyes at ultra-florid tasting notes, or tapping my toes when that attention to detail means it takes 20 minutes to get my order, or questioning my allegiances when “grabbing coffee” for two becomes a $15-dollar event; nobody’s perfect.)

And hey, in a coastal region, the urge to look at “waves” is understandable, but it forces certain oversimplifications. Peet’s wasn’t ever exactly Starbucks (even though their stories are famously enmeshed), but it stopped feeling like a local East Bay institution a long time ago. Blue Bottle,

despite being an Oakland native, arguably went to school in San Francisco, and somehow it feels slightly off to either claim it as an East Bay entity or to exclude it, since the “fourth wave” seems to have included the aggregating and corporatizing of the third (think Blue Bottle in Tokyo or micro-produced, single-origin Kenyan beans on the shelves of your local supermarket or big-box store).

However you want to define the terms while you’re standing at the edge of the Bay with your cappuccino or your swanky pourover, one thing that becomes clear is that waves have complex behaviors. They interact, intermingle, influence each other and occur simultaneously. Some have more energy than others. But they’re all the same water.

This is a truth East Bay coffee people seem to have internalized really well—our coffee scene is dense and diverse, but there’s gloriously little sense of any either-or mentality. Producers speak of one another with respect, and seem to celebrate their small differences and distinctions (and enjoy one another’s craft and imagination). At Red Bay, in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood, you can bag a supremely tasty and visually stunning charcoal latte and know you’re supporting a community-minded, Black-owned indie business and helping to enable their continued efforts to support other local foodies, activists and artists.

Head over to Slojoy on Webster and grab a wonderfully rich and non-sugary mocha and take advantage of their sweetnatured pay-it-forward program (you can pre-buy a drink for some unknown stranger who comes to the window after you; it’s lovely). Getting your beans from sustainability-conscious, blend-forward Bicycle Coffee in pandemic times can be a huge blessing for the sequestered; Fair Trade certified organic beans are available for eco-friendly, cyclist-delivery to your door. North Berkeley’s Artis up-levels

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the definition of “fresh” by roasting same-day.

If you’re like me and grew up in the East Bay in the 1980s, you might have had certain coffee allegiances. They were likely to be cafés versus “brands,” unless you were a card-carrying North Berkeley Peetnik (when I lived in Boston after college my Oakland-native roommate and I found that even a couple of hyper-frugal grad student types could phone in an order for a couple pounds of Peet’s Arabian Mocha Sanani and have FedEx second-day the beans for less than it cost to score way crappier beans at the local shop. It seriously helped with morale).

I didn’t question the provenance of the beans at Café Milano or Edible Complex or Café Roma—as a teen I wanted to know how solid of a latte they made and what kind of people hung out there (especially around UC Berkeley, people’s coffeehouse preferences seemed like a meaningful comment on their personalities—the question functioned almost like the Harry Potter Sorting Hat). Ambiance ruled. The actual coffee mattered, but it was honestly secondary, and mostly over-roasted enough that one could be forgiven for not discerning huge differences.

In this supremely weird moment, the “experience” piece is pretty thoroughly upended—and perhaps that is an additional opportunity to enjoy a coffee moment that has become more about our relationship

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with the stuff in the cup. The scene is less about the scenery these days. With “good coffee” being much more the rule than the exception, quality alone is unlikely to distinguish a coffee business around here. And with small businesses gravely endangered by our current situation, we’re more inclined to be discerning about where our limited discretionary funds go. And that can (and arguably should) be about the people involved in the complicated chain of events between someone harvesting coffee cherries and you finger-signing a touchscreen.

For me these days, that often means skipping the roaster-purveyor paradigm and going to my backyard indie café, Lafayette’s Papillon, where the draw isn’t a pristine terrarium-landscape of glass and hardwood and bromeliads clinging to the walls or a monomaniacal obsession with single origin Superbeans (truth be told, I don’t even pay attention to where they source them). It’s the quirky assemblage of huge-hearted local owners who came here as refugees, local elders debating politics, local artists whose canvases and textiles are available for sale and half-feral local kids. It’s the regular meeting place for multitudes of writer’s groups, afterschool academic tutors, Scrabble games, kvetch-sessions and timid first dates.

It’s not glamorous. It is, like the town, a mix; maybe a little provincial, but also surprisingly cosmopolitan.

During the lockdown, patrons have taken advantage of the large adjacent parking lot to create an outdoor, socialdistancing-friendly simulacrum café— most mornings you can find a diverse and robust group of locals (and cyclists from nearby trails) latte-tailgating outside; one of my friends now brings extra camping chairs and spare disposable masks, but also upturned wastepaper baskets for end tables, small area rugs he collects off Craigslist and even a lava lamp (hooked up to his car) for ambiance.

Which brings us back to where we started, and perhaps where all human things start: pattern recognition. You don’t have to be a student of Gestalt psychology to understand human minds enact the same patterns over and over—we need them, and we do whatever we have to do when there’s disruption to a pattern we depend on. Café culture is a mainstay of coastal-California life, one that provides a lot more than just access to coffee. Local coffee shops provide many of us with satellite office spaces, artist’s mini-retreats, extra living rooms, exposure to live music and poetry, gallery walls, activism rally points and community hubs.

Coffee is a fundamentally social beverage in a lot of ways, even when our social structures are under siege by, say, a virus. If we drink alcohol to blunt the edges and get a brief respite from life in our own heads, it’s likely we gravitate toward coffee for the opposite reasons—we feel sharper, more grounded, keener, energized, more capable. But as much as that’s the work of alkaloids on the nervous system, we also find the ritual itself meaningful and activating. Right now, participation in sober social rituals seems more meaningful than ever, as does being mindful about how and where we spend our petty cash. In this regard, as in so many, we’re an enviably wealthy region. ❤

PHOTO BY ROAD TRIP WITH RAJ

Coffee is a fundamentally social beverage in a lot of ways, even when our social structures are under siege by, say, a virus.

GaragisteBay

SIGN OF TIMES Contra Costa County wines make a splash.

yes, there is good wine coming out of central coco county

PHOTO BY ROAD TRIP WITH RAJ

I

’m on a small stage in a swanky art gallery fashioned from an orphaned Wells Fargo branch—there’s a weird and wonderful installation in the vault, snacks are being served from the teller’s counter, paintings and sculptures spring up like a flush of tasty wild mushrooms from the decaying remains of Finance and all of this spells a metaphor we definitely need more of. A live jazz band pauses its set of bossa and old-school swing.

I’m pairing a flight of local wines with a flight of local poets, hoping to illustrate five characteristics common to both

BY Amy Glynn

crafts: words like tension and structure and typicity. While each poet reads, the audience tastes a sequence of small-batch wines—a sauvignon blanc whose fresh grassiness strikes a surprising accord with certain nostalgic childhood reminiscences; a pinot noir whose endless unfurling layers are more than a match for a poem of lists and litanies. Out of five wines and six writers, you’d expect at least one or two to fall a little flat, but guess what—the harmonies are impeccable.

Admit it: you are not imagining this scene taking place in Lamorinda.

But it is. And those wines are garagiste creations made within the American Viticultural Area that encompasses the fraternal-triplet municipalities of Lafayette, Moraga and Orinda.

The portmanteau Lamorinda AVA encompasses 30,000 acres, with about 140 acres under vine across 46 vineyards. The typical Lamorinda winegrower is working with a backyard vineyard—the area’s rich in large-but-“unusable” steep-sloped parcels where vines find an agreeable, if complicated, home. Winemaking here is almost entirely micro-scale.

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« “Micro” is the operative climate

descriptor, too—this tiny area has successful plantings of chardonnay and pinot noir, malbec and sangiovese, cabernet franc and petit verdot, sauvignon blanc and zinfandel, among others. Positioned between the coast ranges and Mount Diablo, the AVA combines steep elevations with mixed inland and coastal weather influences that vary widely over shockingly small distances.

Contra Costa County is a land of tensions and counterpoints, physically, socially and culturally. It always has been. County boundaries encompass a human population of 1.2 million. Though it’s somehow perceived as an inland region, it has extensive waterfront on the San Francisco, San Pablo and Suisun bays (the name literally translates to “against the coast”)—but Mount Diablo’s influence is also undeniable. The county’s a weird mix of wealthy bedroom communities and complicated urban centers, farmland and heavy industry—think Kensington and Blackhawk and Orinda, but also Antioch and Richmond; Brentwood cherry orchards and cornfields, but also Walnut Creek shopping malls, Martinez oil refineries and Clayton mercury mines. And certainly, grapes—there are hundred-year-old zinfandel, carignan and mourvedre plantings, artifacts from a prolific winemaking past before Prohibition turned growers’ attention to pears and walnuts. A handful of larger producers still source fruit from these hillsides (Cline Cellars comes to mind, as well as Rosenblum and Viano), but high-priced residential real estate has reduced viable acreage, while Napa and Sonoma counties have risen as the pre-eminent zones for high-end wine. So it’s easy to forget that the present proliferation of micro-producers isn’t exactly a new phenomenon.

Contra Costa winemaking is a bit of a study in the beauties of disadvantage (and already the contradictions start rolling in, because “disadvantage” is a funny word to describe anything about living in, say, Lafayette). Growing grapes in almost pure sand takes some moxie (sand is supremely

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uninterested in holding onto water), but some 130-year-old carignan and zin vines in Antioch survived the Phylloxera epidemic because the vine-killing lice are deterred by it.

In high-cost-of-living zones where a home vineyard is essentially a lavish hobby, one tends to keep things tiny and homemade and sustainable. And when a vineyard isn’t To-Kalon, or even Cline, and maybe isn’t making money hand over fist, but also has no obligation to systematize or validate the expectations of a large market, it can stay experimental. Contra Costa’s microproducers have no particular reputation to live up to—it’s an unsexy region, considered a provincial backwater by many.

Winemaking culture here is not established the way it is in Sonoma or Napa counties; we had it, but it died out during Prohibition.

This unsexiness can be a marketing hurdle, to be sure, but in Lamorinda, people aren’t typically making wine because they are laboring under the illusion that it will net them huge piles of cash. They’re doing it for the same reason poets write poems: They love the craft and have a desire to communicate something about their relationship with their world.

So at the podium in the bank-turned-artgallery, I’m talking about Thal Vineyards’ sauvignon blanc in terms of its relationship with place, the way the wine is interpreting the site on which it grew, before turning the microphone over to a poet whose work investigates the first-generation immigrant identity and how people hold onto increasingly multiple identities. And it makes a stranger kind of sense than I could have anticipated—the wine’s notes of hay and linden, Meyer lemon and grapefruit, nectarine and aromatic herbs seeming to anticipate the poet’s observations about how languages and cuisines intermingle as families uproot and resettle.

I’m thinking, as we sample Meadow View Winery’s award-winning chardonnay, about the excitement of upended expectations when the nose of a wine sets you up to expect one

thing and the palate delivers something totally different (chardonnay does very intriguing things with clay-dominant soils)—and then feeling the same delight as a poet pulls off the same trick, setting up and thwarting one lyric or narrative expectation after another.

The Los Arabis pinot noir becomes a foil for discussing nuance and sensory accord (pinot’s phenolic complexity still baffles me—you can sum up an albarino in a couple of words, but try to get at the heart of a good pinot noir without having to visit a forest, three different orchards, the candy store, a stone quarry and grandma’s kitchen all at once). Raisin d’Etre’s garagiste malbec lights up a discussion of tenacity, of how struggle defines character. And Thal’s cabmerlot blend underpins a “50-50 blend” of poets, husband and wife, who alternate readings that are as seamlessly iron-fistmeets-velvet-glove as the wine’s own duality-duet of tannins and fruit, leather and velour, juiciness and astringency. It’s not just a miracle, but the miracle of the same miracle occurring in totally unrelated media, effortlessly simultaneous. One could be forgiven for feeling as though the universe were ... well, patterned.

Contra Costa County is re-embracing its winemaking past in spite of a high cost of living and producing, a “residential” context especially in zones like Lamorinda. Sure, sometimes the neighbors feel the need to pearl-clutch about non-residential activities such as technically having a crushpad where your Tesla is supposed to be. Also, there’s the complex growing situation — fire, seismic instability, slopes too extreme for machines, expanses of mean clay or water-shedding sand, killing frosts, triple-digit heat waves.

The ethos and esthetic of these varied small producers runs the gamut, from the unfined, unfiltered, wild-yeast driven to the hightech; from rustic to elegant; from traditional to innovative to … retro. Virtually any Contra Costa locavore can find something to love in this county’s low-visibility, but extremely well-crafted, wines. ❤

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PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR Christine Hyung-Oak Lee’s memoir, ‘Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember,’ marked an auspicious start to her life as a writer.

Of Books and Bees

an interview with berkeley author/beekeeper christine hyung-oak lee

BY Kary Hess

T

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decision to rebuild her brain—and her life—for the success she desired. It is a story we may relate with right now. Here, she talks with East Bay Magazine about her journey after the trauma, how she focused her healing and the ways her urban farm and life as a beekeeper have intersected with her writing life and contributed to her process of recovery.

EAST BAY MAGAZINE: You wrote about your experience having a stroke as a young woman in your memoir Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember.

After your stroke, you rebuilt your brain to be a writer. When did you realize that was even possible?

CHRISTINE LEE: I had a left thalamic

stroke at the age of 33, and it left me with a 15-minute short-term memory. I was so brain-damaged, I couldn’t hold a conversation, or read a story—all of which

are memory exercises. I was an MFA student in creative writing at the time, but for the first few months of my stroke, I was unable to write fiction, and could only write short blog posts, recording the thoughts that came into my head rather than communicate a constructed narrative.

Even during those early months, I wrote every day, even if it took me forever, on an anonymous blog called “Writing Under a Pseudonym,” as Jade Park.

Around six months into my recovery, I was well enough to remember what it was I used to be able to achieve, and what I could no longer do. It was a dark time because my abilities were gone, but my memories of those abilities began to return. I became depressed. I wondered what the point of living was if I couldn’t be the person I used to be. I would eventually learn that this was

PHOTOS COURTESY OF CHRISTINE LEE

hese days, we are all trying to adjust to “the new normal,” an altered world that is very different from the way it used to be. Berkeley resident and author Christine Hyung-Oak Lee knows something about waking up to the “new normal.” When she was 33, Lee suffered a stroke that left her brain-damaged with a short-term memory of about 15 minutes.

After beginning the long process of rehabilitation, the UC Berkeley and Mills College graduate eventually realized that her brain was not going to go back to the way it used to be, and she was going to have to prioritize her healing goals to achieve her biggest priority—becoming a writer.

In her book Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember: The Stroke That Changed My Life, Lee shares her story of grief and her subsequent

grief and that a transition was beginning.

When you lose everything, it becomes very clear what the most important things are. And for me, that was my ability to write a narrative. And I measured my recovery by that return. I wrote every day, even if it was nonsense. I was determined to rebuild my brain to become a writer.

I was aware my brain was building new neural paths and demonstrating neuroplasticity, and that what I did would affect the building of those new pathways.

When you lose everything, you move forward with your eyes on the goal. My goal was to recover who I was—but what happened was that I became a new person.

And fortunately, writing was central to the new person. It was like a second chance to retrain my brain to build skills.

EBM: What was that first year after the stroke like?

CL: The year came in stages. In the first two months, I was blissed out, honestly. I was in a state of mind that people pay great sums to achieve: I was not aware of the past, nor could I plan for the future. I was living entirely in the present tense. So I had no worries. I didn’t have capabilities, but I didn’t know enough to realize these lost capabilities.

I am an avid cook and in that first couple of months, I couldn’t cook. Not because I didn’t know how to turn on the oven, but because I forgot I’d turned on the oven as soon as I walked away. I burned food. I scorched pots that contained water that had boiled for who knows how long. I turned on the mixer to mix cake batter, the phone would ring, and when I returned whenever I returned, I’d find the mixer running. I’d wonder who turned on the mixer. And I suspected it was me. The mixer would be hot to the touch. So I stopped for a while.

Earlier, I spoke of that dark time when I was healed enough to remember the past and take into account my deficits. That was when I really had to double down on my

‘I was determined to rebuild my brain to become a writer. I was aware my brain was building new neural paths and demonstrating neuroplasticity, and that what I did would affect the building of those new pathways.’ —CHRISTINE LEE efforts, even if I was in a deep depression. I had no control over my emotions—I would fly into a rage with the tiniest provocation, and then burst into tears when someone said something hurtful to me. I had no resilience and I had no access to my bank of witty comebacks to deflect pain. I was probably hell to live with in those first stages of recovery—first, because I had to be tended and watched, and then because I was both so despondent and incapable.

I call that first couple of months my “infancy.” And I call the next few months, my “toddler years.”

Towards the end of the first year, I had regained enough skills to manage my dayto-day life. I still couldn’t write, but I could read People magazine. I couldn’t balance a checkbook, but I could go to the store and find my way back home.

It was a rebirth.

EBM: Your stroke gave you the opportunity to relearn language. When you were recovering, you couldn’t remember the word for “eggs” and instead called them “shell bells.” That sounds very poetic—do you think the process of creatively finding words again like this was part of what contributed to your rebirth as a writer?

CL: I think the ways in which my brain recalled language was admittedly beautiful, even if frustrating at the time.

Honestly, I didn’t creatively find words at that time—“creative” implies

intention and construction. And I had no intention of being creative. I wasn’t a poet. But—what it did teach me is HOW language is constructed, and how stories are composed—that stories are spliced together into a narrative and structure in order to make the most impact on a reader.

It was a strange lesson in craft. And in that sense, it helped my writing. Or perhaps, it is because I am a writer today that I can look back and unpack it as such.

EBM: How is your life different now because of the stroke?

CL: My life today is very different from

before the stroke. And I don’t know if it was because of the stroke that my marriage was destroyed. I had a baby and got divorced six years after the stroke. Maybe the stroke was a direct cause, even if there was a six-year lag. But I am as a person living my life every year as if it were my last. I choose a year because living every day as if it were my last might lead to some disastrous decisions!

Healthwise, I’m fine now. I closed the hole in my heart that caused the stroke—the clot—to travel into my brain. I still easily tire, and I’m now an introvert in comparison to my pre-stroke extroverted self. It’s the same and very different, all at once.

EBM: What are you currently writing about and where can we read it?

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consistency and a sense of progression. I think that comfort is a big part of why backyard farms have experienced a great resurgence during the Covid-19 pandemic.

It feels like sanctuary, reassurance and independence during stressful times.

Because the garden gave me comfort, it allowed me space to relax. And the space I created expanded my mind and gave me the room to be the writer I wanted to become (and am still becoming).

Eventually, my urban farm pervaded my entire life and identity, and I began to see all the ways in which it was intersectional with the way I see the world and how I live my life and all the metaphors within.

EBM: Tell me a little about a typical day in your life as a writer and an urban farmer.

THE BUZZ Author and beekeeper Christine Hyung-Oak Lee went from BuzzFeed to the buzz of bees.

«

CL: I am writing my novel! And the topic is a guarded secret for now. But I do have an ongoing column at Catapult Story called “Backyard Politics,” which details my life as an urban farmer and the way I view the world through my bees, chickens and foodscape. I am obsessed with my bees.

EBM: I know that these days part of your life is working on your urban farm, specifically with bees.

Is there a link between urban farming and writing for you? How do the two intersect and inform each other?

CL: Who knew that urban farming would intersect into my writing life? When I began the garden and got chickens and then bees, it was merely to soothe myself and undertake a project that I hadn’t been allowed while married. My life had fallen apart, and seeing a tomato grow was extremely comforting and gave me

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CL: Every morning is chores! I feed the chickens and check on the garden. I walk by my hives to examine the bee traffic. It has also become my morning meditation— after my cup of coffee, I walk the garden.

Spring is a busy time—chores at that time of year are heftier—there’s more beekeeping work as the bees expand after a cold winter, and there is a lot of work with the soil and with planting. But for the rest of the year, I walk the garden and do maintenance. Summertime and fall are enchanting because I never know what I’ll find in terms of what’s ripe!

I try to write every day, even if it’s low-stakes writing in my journal. I try to write in the mornings before my day-job responsibilities. In the movies, they like to show writers typing away furiously, but it’s honestly not like that for me. I look like I’m not doing much when I’m writing.

EBM: Can anyone train their brain to think differently? To become a writer? Or to change fundamental ways of thinking they maybe didn’t realize they were carrying?

CL: I was brain-damaged (to this day, I like to say, “I have brain damage!”) and was able

to heal my brain to not forget the writing and to retain writing skills. But I don’t think that I “think differently” than I did before, despite what the apple slogan says.

I have different skills than I did before.

But I still think the same way—I’m rulesbased and perfection-driven and find it challenging to understand that there is more than one right way to do a thing.

Like how we can’t change our bodies, but we can build strength and skills, I do think writing can be taught. I do think skills can be built. And I do think that people can adapt their behavior—otherwise, there’s no hope of doing things like erasing racism.

We always have to live with hope and with the goal of bettering ourselves and bettering our world. These things: knowledge, resilience, compassion and persistence, are also key to writing.

Writers must be knowledgeable about the craft of writing and the world around them. We must be resilient so that we can get back up. We must be compassionate because our writing must have a universal message buried in our narrative that hopefully aims to better the world. And we can never give up. These are all things, too, that helped me in my recovery. In that way, my stroke helped me to become a better writer, too. But it needn’t have been a stroke—every setback is an opportunity, and every setback in each and every person’s life contains lessons.

Christine H. Lee is an urban farmer and the author of the memoir, “Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember,” featured in Self magazine, Time, The New York Times and NPR’s Weekend Edition. Her writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and she is currently a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Saint Mary’s College of California’s MFA program.

Lee is currently editor at The Rumpus and writes about her urban-farming experience in the column “Backyard Politics” at Catapult Story. A novel is forthcoming from Ecco/HarperCollins.

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Denial a ‘presumed positive’ story

BY Katherine Butler

Day One It’s allergies.

You wake up and stare at the bright morning sun.

Are you awake? Have you slipped through the multiverse into an alternate time frame with a pandemic and a living sock monster as president?

It’s hard to tell, because your head feels like it’s been filled with balloons and rainwater. Your sixyear-old calls out to ask if he can watch Pokémon before homeschooling, even though this will cause him to behave like he’s been on a bender with an English punk rock band from the 1980s.

You say, “Yes” and sit up. You’re an underwater sea creature who has flopped onto the beach, and now you’re going to dry out in the sand for a bit.

Shit, your allergies are really acting up.

Day Two It’s fatigue.

40 EAST BAY MAGAZINE

| EASTBAYMAG.COM | JULY/AUGUST 2020

»

PHOTO BY COTTONBRO.

SICK OF IT Does she or doesn’t she … have the coronavirus?

Your allergies are not only acting up, they’ve decided to turn your sinuses into a Quentin Tarantino fight scene. You drag your husband and child to the local cemetery for a refreshing, be-masked constitutional, since the odds of social distancing are higher amongst the dead.

What kind of a weirdo in a mask goes to a cemetery during a plague? You walk among the gravestones and note a family made up of three Ezras and two Calebs. Like your son’s

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« kindergarten class. Christ, what kind

of a monster thinks about dead children during a graveyard walk in a pandemic?

Later that day, you’re tired. It must have been the gravestones. You need to lie down.

Day Three It’s perimenopause.

Your head is still living its best life underwater, and now you’re achy and cold and hot. This is the strangest allergy-sinus-infection you’ve ever had. You take your temperature and it’s 99.6. Is that a fever? Or is it a hot flash? Has the perimenopause finally found you? Your chin sprouts hair while gray hair weaves like a crown around your head.

You text three of your friends, a pediatrician, a pediatric pulmonologist and a pediatric nurse practitioner. They all tell you to call your actual doctor. You do and don’t pick up when she calls back, because who blocks their number these days but spammers? She leaves a message, clearly annoyed you didn’t pick up. Fine, you don’t need her. You take your temperature again and it’s now 99.8. You panic and race to call the doctor. She graciously takes you through a checklist of questions, but you can’t get tested. You’re not sick enough. She tells you to quarantine for two weeks. You’ve been quarantining for three. In a flurry of thinking, you try to remember the last person you saw whom you hadn’t seen recently … or did you?

You forget to ask if you’re presumed positive.

Day Four It’s pregnancy.

You’re no longer fevered, but you’re so tired that your bones are asleep. The last time you felt like this, you were pregnant. But you can’t be pregnant, so instead you decide this is all in your head. The fever, the aches, the chills and the bone-fatigue. There’s no way you have this.

You develop a pregnancy cough.

42

EAST BAY MAGAZINE | EASTBAYMAG.COM | JULY/AUGUST 2020

Day Five It’s a flu that makes you exhausted but not exhausted enough to take to bed all day, like you could do that anyway with a six year old PokémonI-mean-child to homeschool, and job to not do, and an internet to scour for descriptions and diagnosis of Covid-19.

It’s mono. You sleep.

Day Six It’s imaginary.

You don’t have mono, but you don’t have the coronavirus either. You’re ridiculous.

You can tell because when your friends ask how you are and you tell them, you’re convinced they don’t believe you. You’re not crazy sick. You’re reading terrible, terrible stories about really sick people.

This is surreal and so awful for everyone, and now you are a poser, a malingerer and a couch-fainting wannabe. You suck.

Day Seven It’s menopause, bitch.

You are horizontal on the floor, since reclining in bed is only for the truly sick. Screw perimenopause, this level of exhaustion is from the mythical Isle of Menopause, the one next to Wonder Woman’s. Why else are you this scattered?

If this ever ends, you vow to slay older age.

You’re going to get better and become a health goddess, a wise advisor like Michelle Obama. (Praise be.) Still on the floorboards, you tap one finger on your device, googling if you can dye your hair gray like Keanu’s super-cool girlfriend, the artist who is probably at this moment reclined in bed eating grapes with Keanu. At the same time, your six-year-old jumps on your head.

Day Eight It’s real.

You text one of your medical providers (of the friends who are medical providers) in tears. Health is a dream. Why do you feel this badly? She yells at you over text, or is she really yelling? You can’t tell. Of course, you would test positive, if you qualified for a test, which dammit you don’t. She’s so positive you would test positive that she’s talked about you at the hospital as “the friend who thinks she’s not positive though she’s showing every symptom of Covid.” You believe her; the truth, at last. Congratulations, you caught the virus and it was mild.

Day Thirty-three It happened.

Slowly but surely, you have regained your energy. You argue with your spouse, who still thinks “we don’t know what that was.” Your lungs still feel dipped in ice, but sure. You agree that you both had “a virus but maybe not THE virus” and leave it at that. You take your cousin’s husky for a walk on a country road. Somehow, she escapes from her leash, bolts through a pack of enraged riders from the Tour de France and then continues scampering happily up the middle of the road. She fears nothing! You chase after her so fast that you think your lungs will explode. They don’t, but they hurt for days afterwards. Still, you are so freakin’ lucky.

Though you’ll only know when the doctors know what the antibodies know.

Right?

Katherine Butler spent her formative years as a Hollywood comedy writer, building a resume filled with joy and #metoo land mines. She has also cultivated a close, personal relationship with Joan Didion. Not really, but she did once see Dame Joan in Central Park and waved to her. You can follow her at @kathiebutler or visit her websitewww.: katherine-butler.com.

Photos by: Cali Godley

Thanks to all visitors of East Bay Regional Parks.

Together in nature, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll get through this. We appreciate your commitment to the Regional Parks, practicing social distancing and wearing face coverings in outdoors when appropriate. Providing access to parks in the East Bay is our commitment to you. To learn how you can support your parks visitâ&#x20AC;Śwww.regionalparksfoundation.org

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