The Hillside Club

We’re famous.

7:30 p.m., May 23, benefit for Two Angry Moms, a film documenting what two moms did to get healthy food for their children in public schools, with Chef Ann Cooper of the Berkeley School District. Joan Blades of momsrising.org, chef Alice Waters and the filmmaker will speak after the showing. $10 at door; $5 for kids. Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Berkeley. Call 510 388 8932 or see www.hillsideclub.org

Peter Irons, civil liberties lawyer, author of God on Trial, discusses the religious right.  Doors open at 7.30, free.

New Media Wars: Amateur versus Auteur.  Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, discusses the democratization of media with Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media; Katie Hafner, New York Times; and Robert Scoble, The Scoble Show. Doors open at 5 pm.  $10 general public/$5 members.

Starts at 6 pm. Call Club for details.

Monica Scott, cello; Hadley McCarroll, piano. Fresh, innovative works by 20th century Eastern European composers. Concert starts at 8 pm. $15/10 members, seniors. More details here.

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On Monday April 30, at 7:30 pm, come and hear Alistair Horne, distinguished British raconteur and biographer (of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan), in conversation  with Lewis Klausner, former events manager at Black Oak Books. Horne will speak about his acquaintance with notables and his upcoming biography of Henry Kissinger. (Horne also wrote A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, first published in 1977, and now back in print due to popular demand, largely from US military officers.) $5 admission.

Spawned at the dawn of the last century, Berkeley’s Hillside Movement was an open revolt against the mindless consumerism of the Industrial Age. It off ered instead the inspired vision of a home life centered around the arts and creativity, and nurtured by a close relationship to nature. Bernard Maybeck was the chief architect and poet and naturalist Charles Keeler was its chief polemicist, who both lived the life they advocated. Join us for a talk and discussion on this chapter in Berkeley’s history by writer and journalist Tim Holt.
Admission $5, doors open at 7.30.

Our CyberSalon on Sunday April 22 covers “Savvy Solutions to Global Warming,” and will feature Felix Kramer, founder of CalCars; David Hammond, from UC Berkeley’s Energy & Resources Group; and Jane White, cofounder of Project 3650, an online animation project to call attention to global warming.

From 5-7 pm, $10 at the door for pizza, drinks, and a great discussion.

The Living New Deal: Excavating the Public Landscape of the Depression

In less than a decade, President Franklin Roosevelt’s various public works agencies radically transformed the United States, improving the lives of millions while setting the stage for the post-war economic boom. For the past quarter century, however, the New Deal’s ideological enemies have systematically rolled back and erased the memory of its epochal accomplishments without understanding how it profited them and continues to do so. Dr. Gray Brechin will discuss the Living New Deal Project - a statewide collaborative effort to document and map the physical legacy of the New Deal in California which, he hopes, will provide the foundation for a national inventory and for a discussion of the role of the public sector in a just society. He will also discuss how he believes many of the New Deal public works are a government-sponsored continuation of the Arts and Crafts Movement, and show examples in Berkeley.

Here is some biographical information:

Dr. Gray Brechin grew up in and witnessed firsthand the conversion of California’s Santa Clara Valley from carbon- to silicon-based life forms. That epic transformation required historical amnesia among residents and promoters alike in order to keep the speculative bubble inflating, as well as to deaden the pain that might be occasioned by recalling what Silicon Valley replaced in the course of its triumph. Witnessing that change - along with a 1985 sojourn in Venice - imbued Brechin with a lasting concern for the environmental costs of perpetual and heedless urban growth.

Brechin received a B.A. in geography and history (1971), an M.A. in art history (1976), and a Ph.D. in geography (1999), all from the University of California at Berkeley. Between 1978 and 1992, he worked as an architectural historian, critic, and televsion producer in San Francisco where he continued to develop his ideas on how humans use the earth. In 1978, he co-founded the Mono Lake Committee and in 1984-5 helped to break the story of the poisoned Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge in the San Joaquin Valley while working at KQED-TV. At that PBS affiliate, Brechin witnessed the commercialization of public broadcasting - a transformation as dramatic in its way as that of the Santa Clara Valley.

Brechin returned to the U.C. Berkeley Geography Department in 1992 to write a dissertation that would use San Francisco as a paradigm to illustrate how great cities use remote control technology and military force to exploit urban hinterlands. Published by the University of California Press in 1999 as Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin, the book spent sixteen weeks on the San Francisco Chronicle’s best-seller list; Gary Snyder called it “a great gift” and Jan Morris “one of the very best books I have ever read about a place.” A co-recipient of the 1992 Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize given by the Center for Documentary Studies, Brechin simultaneously collaborated with photographer Robert Dawson on a project documenting the declining environmental and social health of California. Also published by the University of California Press in 1999, Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream served as the basis of a three-year traveling exhibition of Dawson’s photographs sponsored by the California Council for the Humanities.

Dr. Brechin is currently a visiting scholar at the U.C. Berkeley Department of Geography and Project Scholar for the Living New Deal Project within the California Historical Society.