Cosmic Country

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Ryan Wong, longtime member of the garage-rock outfit Cool Ghouls, recently released his first solo album, The New Country Sounds of Ryan Wong. “I grew up in Benicia and moved to San Francisco to attend SF State and start a band,” Wong said. “I knew Pat Thomas and Pat McDonald from high school. They were already putting Cool Ghouls together. I joined up and as soon as we’d written enough tunes for a set, we started playing clubs. We put some songs up online and things took off.”

Cool Ghouls lasted 10 years and made four albums, including At George’s Zoo, released a few weeks before the pandemic shut everything down. “We never officially disbanded,” Wong said, “but we stopped playing and writing songs together. Our tunes were a mix of genres: rock, soul, country, folk and R&B. Sonny Smith [producer of The New Country Sounds and the man behind Sonny and the Sunsets] liked our stuff. He produced our Swirling Fire Burning Through The Rye album. He was always telling me I should make a country music record. He said it would be great to have an Asian cowboy singer, although I don’t bring anything explicit about my Asian background into the lyrics at all.”

“I had a batch of country songs that didn’t fit into the stuff we were doing in Cool Ghouls,” Wong continued. “Some of them from a few years back, when I was bartending. I’d go home and, to wind down, I’d turn on my 4-track and write songs at 3:30 in the morning. I’d be kinda delirious. I sent Sonny the songs and he said, ‘Give me four more.’ I sent him four more and he said, ‘Give me another four.’ We chose our favorites from the demos I sent him and headed into the studio.”  

Wong, Smith and drummer/multi-instrumentalist Rusty Miller recorded The New Country Sounds of Ryan Wong at Speakeasy Studios, with engineer Alicia Heuvel. “She has a space in the basement of her house in the Mission District,” Wong said. “She was in a band called the Aislers Set. We’ve all known each other for a while, so it was a good fit. The wall is lined with posters from local bands. It’s an inspiring spot, with a live room and a tape deck. Everything was done in analogue. We’d talk over the songs, figure out what we were going to do and go for it. Sonny has a free-flowing way of working. He follows our inspirations, wherever they take us. He’d set the metronome and I’d play the songs live, with my voice and acoustic guitar. Then, we built everything around that.”

Wong added, “We finished it, just the three of us, over the course of two weekends. We went from morning to night, on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. All of the songs are either first or second takes. Sonny helped with the musical composition, figured out where to put the solos and if it should be played fast or slow. It was the first time I ever gave someone complete creative control, but it felt right.”

Musically, Wong’s songs are pure country, but his lyrics are more surreal than the usual country song. It wouldn’t be far off the mark to call them low-key psychedelic country. “I was reading Thomas Pynchon’s V. at the time I was composing the songs,” he said. “He’s brilliant in the way he can talk about a beer and get very cosmic about it. I like the idea that simple objects can connect you to infinity. It was also a response to mainstream country, which is more like pop music than traditional country.”

Goldmark’s bouncy pedal steel and Miller’s drum fills highlight “Yo-Yo,” a song about an uncertain relationship. Wong quietly sings the forlorn lyric, taking consolation in the knowledge that earthly life is often beyond our control. “Shadow” is an enigmatic country rocker with a simple, catchy melody and a vocal hook that embeds itself into one’s mind after a single listen. Wong playfully sings the single verse over and over: “You need a light, if you want to be a shadow.”

“Cold Beer” is a brief narrative in the tradition of Red Sovine’s truck-driving songs. Wong strums his acoustic guitar and recites the mysterious tale of a bar in the middle of nowhere, while a lonesome juice harp twangs in the background.

Wong released the album to all digital platforms this past May. The first 100 LPs come with a songbook that contains the sheet music and lyrics to all the songs, as well as drawings Wong made to illustrate them. “I was inspired by the old Folkways Records that came with lyric books and song notes inserted into the record jackets,” he said. “That speaks to my whole attitude about country music. I always liked songs full of emotion; songs that can devastate you, things like the George Jones song ‘He Stopped Loving Her Today.’”

Wong said he enjoyed writing and recording the country songs on the album, but has no plans to forsake the other styles of music he loves. “When I think about the many phases of my art, I think about Sonny,” he said. “He’ll do a country record, a new wave record or something else. I like having that freedom. When I play solo, I do songs from all the projects I’ve been part of. I am writing more country songs, but I also do weirdo pop songs. For me, how I’m feeling in the moment determines when and how they come out.”

Listen to ‘The New Country Sounds of Ryan Wong’ on Wong’s Bandcamp page: ryanwongmusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-new-country-sounds-of-ryan-wong.

Make Us Whole

Vanessa Gonzales is a special services aide at Lafayette Elementary School and a member of the California School Employee Association, the union for non-credentialed educators. Gonzales may already have a union contract that she’s satisfied with, but that hasn’t stopped her from picketing alongside her credentialed colleagues, who are waiting for a fair and competitive contract.

“I think teachers should get the raise they are asking for—they totally deserve it,” Gonzales says. “If you ask around, there’s a lot of teachers that don’t live by themselves. They live with roommates or significant others or parents. A lot of them have second jobs. Teachers bring work home with them. They need to prep for the next day, so they don’t have a lot of time after school for that.”

Gonzales, 28, lives with her parents and commutes to Lafayette each morning. She arrived in the district as an agency aid two years ago and liked the district so much that she accepted a pay cut to become a district employee. When her union for non-credentialed staff negotiated a pay increase bringing wages up from $19 to more than $25 and getting her back towards the agency wage she arrived with, she was relieved. “That was a huge bump and it meant a lot,” Gonzales says. “Now I want the teachers to get the raise they deserve.”

Gonzales’s colleagues—credentialed teachers and school professionals—are asking for a 14% pay increase, because they say the 12% increase the district has offered them is just not enough to put them on par with their peers in neighboring districts. The 12% increase also doesn’t make up for the cumulative losses from the last contract they signed to their own detriment, which offered them a significantly lower cost-of-living allowance than the state offered colleagues across the district.

Kristi Gingrich, the Lafayette Education Association president and a third-grade teacher at LES, joined the more than two dozen teachers and a similar number of aides, parents and students who stood in front of the school during morning drop-off last week. She carried a sign that said, “Lafayette teachers have the lowest earnings in the county.”

“We’re asking the district to prioritize teachers over other things, because teachers drive the classroom,” Gingrich says. “Parents support us and passed a tax parcel with the intent to help hire and retain teachers. Unfortunately, that money hasn’t surfaced on our salary schedule yet.”

Lafayette has a reputation for being one of the top school districts in the county and the state. It’s also thought of as an affluent case—yet nearly a third of its residents are renters, and a sizable number of families say they’re hanging on by a thread to make ends meet and stay in the community. Gingrich says the assumption that Lafayette teachers are doing fine because the school district is good and the median income of the city appears high compared to others is just plain wrong.

“We are part of a coalition of teachers in the county and we are currently the lowest paid district with that,” Gingrich says. “It’s misinformation to think that we’re well paid because we’re in Lafayette. We had to hire 50 teachers this year.”

While the 12% increase teachers have been offered may sound significant at face value, Gingrich says it’s not enough to make up for what amounts to a not-so-good deal teachers agreed to as they transitioned back to the classroom after the pandemic. 

“In February 2021 we were tired and were grateful to have our kids back in the classroom,” Gingrich says. “We’d worked so well with the district, we were proud to bring our kids back. We were talked into signing a two-year contract with a 2% COLA [cost of living increase].”

This meant that in 2022-23, as the state offered a 6.55% cost of living increase, the teachers in Lafayette were already locked into a 2% increase. “Those around us negotiated for a 7.5% and an 8% increase, and we’d already accepted the two. We had made a mistake,” Gingrich says. “We can see that there are huge surpluses in our budget every year. And now we’re asking our district to prioritize the budget and prioritize teachers who’ve invested years and years of their time in students, so that we can continue having successful students and great teachers.”

Another point of contention is the years of transferable service. Gingrich says that while surrounding districts have lifted the cap for numbers of transferable years, Lafayette is still at five. This means that if someone from San Francisco moved to the Lafayette school district with 20 years of experience, only five of those years of service would be reflected in their salary.

“There is a shortage of teachers—especially seasoned teachers with service experience,” Gingrich says. And, she doesn’t want teachers to be penalized for opting into the Lafayette School District.

Reading Specialist Lindsay McCormick has worked at Lafayette Elementary School for four years. She’s among the teachers who weren’t able to transfer over credit for all years of service when she arrived in the district. McCormick says teachers face a very real dilemma. “Every teacher I speak with here loves their students, loves the community and wants to stay here more than anything. But when you see that you can get paid $30,000 more just by going to a neighboring district, it starts really causing us to prioritize our family’s needs over our professional needs.”

Superintendent Brent Stephens says the district remains committed to ensuring that teachers are paid competitively and that a sound budget is maintained in the future. “We see the same issue about competitiveness that our teachers do. Two years ago, in the pandemic, we entered into a two-year contract with our teachers,” Stephens writes. “Since then, the District received more money than we could have predicted, and now that the contract is open again, both sides want to make meaningful strides on teachers’ salaries. Our 12% offer is reflective of that commitment.”

Stephens calls the district’s current 12% offer “very strong” and says it will amount to “meaningful pay increases for teachers.”

Teachers say that although the district’s offer may seem strong, even the 14% they’re asking for is a concession they’re willing to make. “We’ll still be behind, but this will be a step in the right direction,” Gingrich says.

Gingrich and her colleagues remain hopeful that a win-win solution can be found. “None of us want it to come to that,” Gingrich says when asked about the strike. “We love the district, we love the kids; we just want a fair, competitive contract.”

Parents like Jeanine Smith, the mother of a Lafayette Elementary School student and a Stanley Middle School student, who joined the teacher’s informational picket line before school, say they’re on the side of the teachers.

“I support the teachers and advocate for them having higher salaries because they do such a great job teaching our students,” Smith says. “I would like to see all teachers make a great living, no matter where they live or where they teach.”

Khmer Graffiti

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Ask any American film fan, even the most adventurous arthouse enthusiast, what the name “Cambodia” brings to mind and they’ll probably blurt out The Killing Fields, Roland Joffé’s shocking 1984 dramatized account of the Khmer Rouge takeover in the 1970s. Or else they’ll mention one of director Rithy Panh’s documentaries on the same subject, à la S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) or The Missing Picture (2013).

However, times have changed. The Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive’s visiting series, “Cambodian Cinema: Rising from the Ashes,” suggests that an invigorating wave of new filmmaking is washing over that Southeast Asian nation. Cambodia’s tragic past will probably never be forgotten, but a younger generation is now busily telling its own stories in its own way.

Take White Building. The 2021 narrative feature, made with backing from Cambodia, France, Qatar and China, with dialogue in the Central Khmer dialect, looks at everyday life in contemporary Phnom Penh from the viewpoint of a young man named Samnang.

Samnang (actor Piseth Chhun) plays sandlot soccer with his friends—most of them are war orphans like himself—but his real passion is show business. He and his two pals diligently practice song-and-dance routines at home, then make the rounds of the nightclubs, hoping for a break. Every poor twentysomething in Phnom Penh seems to have the same dream: fame and fortune, on stage or in the movies. With luck, maybe one day they can afford to move to France or Thailand like some of their friends. In the meantime, Samnang chops meat at a butcher shop in the market. Like his neighbors in the title slum, he’s being evicted and can no longer afford to live in the city.

Director Kavich Neang, who wrote the screenplay with Daniel Mattes, had the bright idea to open the film with an overhead tracking shot of the rooftops of Phnom Penh, obviously shot from a drone. The city is old, crumbling, grimy, poorly maintained and utterly fascinating, thanks to the vivid camera work of Douglas Seok. Seok is an American, born and educated in Chicago and now based in South Korea.

The images give Neang’s cityscape a tinge of doomed romanticism. The movie is completely unlike a carefree coming-of-age pic from a wealthier society. No American Graffiti-style sightseeing here—what we see more resembles the diary of a former communist death camp, now caught in the claws of raging capitalism. White Building receives its Bay Area premiere Sept. 24 and 30 at BAMPFA.

Kavich Neang isn’t the only younger director itching to show off Cambodia’s new spirit. In the Oct. 6 program called “Cambodia: Developing the Next Generation of Filmmakers,” eight short-documentary makers display their wares under the banner of Phnom Penh’s Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center.

Highlights include Minea Heng’s On the Move, a simple, lyrical glimpse at a roving family of farm workers; Guillaume P. Suon’s Bophana: Shadows and Lights, the historical backstory of the Bophana Center; and Cyclo, Cambodian Heritage, Vunneng Leng’s profile of senior citizen Pol Hort, a homeless cyclo driver who makes US$1.75 a day sweating on the streets and sleeps in his vehicle at night. After the screening, Bophana’s executive director Sopheap Chea appears in conversation with Stephen Gong of San Francisco’s Center for Asian American Media. 

Also in the series are a pair of somber history lessons. Davy Chou’s Golden Slumbers, on Oct. 5, and Rithy Panh’s Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy, on Sept. 30, are documentaries on the Khmer Rouge reign of terror, in which an estimated 1.7 million people—and the entire Cambodian film industry—violently perished. Salvaged scenes from such films as The Father’s Dagger, Safe Virgin and Out of the Nest are recalled by present-day survivors, as are the fates of Hout Bophana and Ly Sitha, a married couple of cultural martyrs, murdered by the Pol Pot regime. Lest we forget.

For more details, plus a complete schedule of showings, go to: BAMPFA.org.

Through Oct. 6 at BAMPFA.

Free Will Astrology: Week of September 20

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ARIES (March 21-April 19): So it begins: the Building and Nurturing Togetherness phase of your astrological cycle. The next eight weeks will bring excellent opportunities to shed bad relationship habits and grow good new ones. Let’s get you in the mood with some suggestions from intimacy counselors Mary D. Esselman and Elizabeth Ash Vélez: “No matter how long you’ve been together or how well you think you know each other, you still need to romance your partner, especially in stability. Don’t run off and get an extreme makeover or buy into the red-roses-and-champagne bit. Instead, try being kind, receptive and respectful. Show your partner, often and in whatever tender, goofy way you both understand, that their heart is your home.”

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): From May 2023 to May 2024, the planets Jupiter and Uranus have been and will be in Taurus. I suspect that many Taurus revolutionaries will be born during this time. And yes, Tauruses can be revolutionaries. Here’s a list of some prominent rebel Bulls: Karl Marx, Malcolm X, activist Kathleen Cleaver, lesbian feminist author Adrienne Rich, Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, artist Salvador Dali, playwright Lorraine Hansberry and dancer Martha Graham. All were wildly original innovators who left a bold mark on their cultures. May their examples inspire you to clarify and deepen the uniquely stirring impact you would like to make, Taurus.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Gemini writer Joe Hill believes the only fight that matters is “the struggle to take the world’s chaos and make it mean something.” I can think of many other fights that matter, too, but Hill’s choice is a good one that can be both interesting and rewarding. I especially recommend it to you in the coming weeks, Gemini. You are poised at a threshold that promises substantial breakthroughs in your ongoing wrangles with confusion, ambiguity and enigma. My blessings go with you as you wade into the evocative challenges.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Author Crescent Dragonwagon has written over 50 books, so we might conclude she has no problem expressing herself fully. But a character in one of her novels says the following: “I don’t know exactly what I mean by ‘hold something back,’ except that I do it. I don’t know what the ‘something’ is. It’s some part that’s a mystery, maybe even to me. I feel it may be my essence or what I am deep down under all the layers. But if I don’t know what it is, how can I give it or share it with someone even if I wanted to?” I bring these thoughts to your attention, Cancerian, because I believe the coming weeks will be a favorable time for you to overcome your own inclination to “hold something back.”

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): In her book Undercurrents: A Life Beneath the Surface, psychologist and author Martha Manning says she is more likely to experience epiphanies in “grocery stores and laundromats, rather than in the more traditional places of reverence and prayer.” She marvels that “it’s in the most ordinary aspects of life” that she is “offered glimpses of the extraordinary.” During these breakthrough moments, “the baseline about what is good and important in my life changes.” I suspect you will be in a similar groove during the coming weeks, Leo. Are you ready to find the sacred in the mundane? Are you willing to shed your expectations of how magic occurs so you will be receptive to it when it arrives unexpectedly?

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): “These are the bad facts,” says author Fran Lebowitz. “Men have much easier lives than women. Men have the advantage. So do white people. So do rich people. So do beautiful people.” Do you agree, Virgo? I do. I’m not rich or beautiful, but I’m a white man, and I have received enormous advantages because of it. What about you? Now is a good time to tally any unearned blessings you have benefited from, give thanks for them, and atone by offering help to people who have obtained fewer favors. And if you have not received many advantages, the coming months will be an excellent time to ask for and even demand more.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): My favorite creativity teacher is author Roger von Oech. He produced the Creative Whack Pack, a card deck with prompts to stimulate imaginative thinking. I decided to draw one such card for your use in the coming weeks. It’s titled EXAGGERATE. Here’s its advice: “Imagine a joke so funny you can’t stop laughing for a month. Paper stronger than steel. An apple the size of a hotel. A jet engine quieter than a moth beating its wings. A home-cooked dinner for 25,000 people. Try exaggerating your idea. What if it were a thousand times bigger, louder, stronger, faster, and brighter?” (PS: It’s a favorable time for you to entertain brainstorms and heartstorms and soulstorms. For best results, EXAGGERATE!)

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): If you buy a bag of popcorn and cook it in your microwave oven, there are usually kernels at the bottom that fail to pop. As tasty as your snack is, you may still may feel cheated by the duds. I will be bold and predict that you won’t have to deal with such duds in the near future—not in your popcorn bags and not in any other area of your life, either literally or metaphorically. You’re due for a series of experiences that are complete and thorough and fully bloomed.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Writer George Bernard Shaw observed that new ideas and novel perspectives “often appear first as jokes and fancies, then as blasphemies and treason, then as questions open to discussion, and finally as established truths.” As you strive to get people to consider fresh approaches, Sagittarius, I advise you to skip the “blasphemies and treason” stage. If you proceed with compassion and good humor, you can go directly from “jokes and fancies” to “questions open to discussion.” But one way or another, please be a leader who initiates shifts in your favorite groups and organizations. Shake things up with panache and good humor.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Novelist and astrologer Forrest E. Fickling researched which signs are the worst and best in various activities. He discovered that Capricorns are the hardest workers, as well as the most efficient. They get a lot done, and they are expeditious about it. I suspect you will be at the peak of your ability to express these Capricornian strengths in the coming weeks. Here’s a bonus: You will also be at the height of your power to enjoy your work and be extra likely to produce good work. Take maximum advantage of this grace period!

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): The British band Oasis has sold over 95 million records. The first song they ever released was “Supersonic.” Guitarist Noel Gallagher wrote most of its music and lyrics in half an hour while the rest of the band was eating Chinese take-out food. I suspect you will have that kind of agile, succinct, matter-of-fact creativity in the coming days. If you are wise, you will channel it into dreaming up solutions for two of your current dilemmas. This is one time when life should be easier and more efficient than usual.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): “When sex is really, really good,” writes Piscean novelist Geoff Nicholson, “I feel as though I’m disappearing, being pulverized, so that I’m nothing, just particles of debris, smog, soot, and skin floating through the air.” Hmmmm. I guess that’s one version of wonderful sex. And if you want it, you can have it in abundance during the coming weeks. But I encourage you to explore other kinds of wonderful sex, as well—like the kind that makes you feel like a genius animal or a gorgeous storm or a super-powered deity.

Homework: Spend 10 minutes showering yourself with praise. Speak your accolades out loud. Newsletter.FreeWillAstrology.com

Ruin and Renewal

Even regular visitors to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive may not realize that right around the corner is another local museum treasure: The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life.

Established in 2010 following the transfer of the Judah L. Magnes Museum to Cal Berkeley, the Magnes showcases “the vibrancy and diversity of Jewish life in the global diaspora and the American West through its holdings of art, objects, texts, and music,” according to official museum materials.

The original Magnes Museum, said Executive Director Hannah Weisman, was founded in 1962 in Berkeley by Seymour and Rebecca Camhi Fromer. One of the first Jewish museums in the United States, it focused on preserving Jewish materials from around the world through a post-Holocaust lens.

The collection continues to expand, and includes items from both everyday and religious life, including candlesticks, spice boxes, marriage contracts, textiles—even kosher serving dishes from the ocean liner Queen Mary. It also contains rare books, alongside paintings, prints and drawings, Weisman said.

One of the most significant donations to the Magnes occurred in 2018, when the daughter of photographer Roman Vishniac, Mara Vishniac Kohn, donated his archive of thousands of images and negatives, some of which had never been printed.

Vishniac (1897-1990) was a Russian-Jewish photographer whose professional life began as a documentarian. Born in St. Petersburg to a wealthy family, he lived in inter-war Berlin before emigrating to the United States in 1940. His many photos, literally tens of thousands of images of Jewish life in Europe before the Holocaust, have become iconic, receiving international recognition for his depictions of shtetlach and Jewish ghettos. His images document the rise of Nazi power as he captured the growing, ominous signs of oppression and antisemitism.

His book A Vanished World, published in 1983, is one of the most detailed pictorial documentations of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe in the 1930s.

But during his long life, he documented much more, and the Magnes Collection has mounted an exhibition of photos taken on journeys to post-war Berlin in 1947 and post-war Jerusalem in 1967. Called “Cities and Wars: Roman Vishniac in Berlin and Jerusalem (1947/1967),” the exhibit includes 40 images never previously seen by the public—large black-and-white prints from negatives shot in Berlin—along with digital displays of color slides shot in Jerusalem.

“The Roman Vishniac Archive is incredibly wide-ranging,” Weisman said. “This exhibit gives people a view of his work that is not necessarily as well known.”

Magnes Curator Francesco Spagnolo, who has studied and admired Vishniac’s work for years, has taken great care in curating “Cities and Wars.”

“Berlin was his home from 1920 to 1939,” Spagnolo said. The exhibit also displays an enlargement of a 1947 Berlin map, along with a “few seconds” of Roberto Rossellini’s film Germany, Year Zero, shot in the same year in Berlin. “People wanted to see the collapse of the Third Reich,” he said.

The color slides of Jerusalem were perhaps taken as “field notes,” he suggested, part of a project that did not materialize.

The connection is, of course, that both cities are shown in the wake of war’s devastation: Berlin post-World War II and Jerusalem after the Six-Day War. Yet Vishniac himself “did not make the connection, as far as I know,” Spagnolo said. Some of the images make the relationship explicit: A horse draws a “taxicab” in bomb-blasted Berlin in one black-and-white photo; in a color slide from Jerusalem, a horse draws some kind of equipment along a damaged street.

Spagnolo grew up in post-war Milan, yet another city heavily impacted by war. Milan is a “city of hills,” he said, and after World War II, a new hill was built in his neighborhood, “but the urban texture was completely destroyed. Growing up in Europe in the ’60s, war continued to be very present,” he said.

The Berlin photographs express Vishniac’s ambiguity about what he was seeing, Spagnolo said, adding, “1947 Berlin is a Berlin without a wall. Life is struggling to re-emerge.” Weisman noted that one photograph shows a woman in a fur coat, carrying packages and smiling at the camera—in front of a church that had been bombed to ruins. 

Vishniac likely was mourning the city that he knew, but knew that the city had been destroyed and that “it was an essential destruction, which must be celebrated,” Spagnolo said.

The Jerusalem slides also show destruction and survival, but in a somewhat different context. “Prior to 1967, all sacred sites were not accessible to Jews,” Spagnolo said. “Showing bulldozers taking down the separation walls was symbolic … but once again, war was reconfiguring the urban landscape.”

All the exhibit photos are captioned and all sites are identified “if possible,” he said.

Spagnolo went on to note the range of Vishniac’s work, including that which is not included in “Cities and Wars.” “He was a science photographer and a pioneer in photomicroscopy,” he said. Vishniac also made significant scientific contributions to time-lapse photography. His portraits of people such as Albert Einstein and Marc Chagall are considered classic, and in his adopted American home he captured New York’s Chinatown and Harlem nightclubs.

Since the Magnes also supports research, and the gift of the Roman Vishniac Archive is one of the four largest gifts UC Berkeley has ever received, the museum will undoubtedly mount future exhibits showcasing other aspects of the photographer’s work. But “Cities and Wars” offers a present opportunity for those unfamiliar with his work to take it in for the first time.

It’s also an opportunity to become acquainted with other exhibits at the Magnes, Spagnolo said, “as there is no comparable collection not embedded in a research institution.” As soon as the current exhibit opened, Spagnolo said, students from multiple disciplines began viewing it, including those from the freshman seminar Things Fall Apart.

“War is in the news right now,” Weisman said, and the images are, indeed, eerily evocative of ones seen every day on news feeds. “Admission is free, and this is a show for everyone.”

‘Cities and Wars: Roman Vishniac in Berlin and Jerusalem (1947/1967),’ at The Magnes Collection of Jewish Life and Art, 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley. Through Dec. 14. Open Tue-Wed, 11am to 4pm; Thur, 11am to 7pm; and beginning Oct. 8, Sun, 11am to 4 pm. Admission is free. magnes.berkeley.edu

Blossom & Root

The number of Bay Area plant-based restaurants contracts more than it expands. Although Greens is still going strong, Gracias Madre recently closed in San Francisco’s Mission District. In the East Bay, Temescal’s Kitava opened earlier this year as the restaurant most likely to remind visitors of Cafe Gratitude, which closed in Berkeley back in 2015. Kitava’s menu forefronts plant-based dishes but also includes bowls of sesame chicken or tuna poké.

With the arrival of Susan Virgilio’s Blossom & Root, plant-based diners can not only rejoice in her philosophical approach to eating healthy meals but also in the way her chef, Jen Sopinski, manifests that vision on the plate. From a light and creamy gazpacho ($10) to a substantial poké vegetable bowl ($24), the dishes easily rival similar fare at restaurants like Greens and Millennium.

Eight years ago, when one of her daughters became vegan, Virgilio began cooking vegan meals for her family. “Everyone was extremely grateful because I am way better with lentils or chickpeas than I ever was with chicken or beef,” she said. Over time the flavor profiles became more interesting and the Virgilio family’s diet incorporated more options for dinner. That they all began feeling healthier was an unexpected benefit.

Opening her own restaurant was part of Virgilio’s own personal evolution. No matter what season is at hand, people in Danville love to go out to eat. When the six Virgilios did, they often found as few as three plant-based options on a menu and sometimes only one, as an afterthought. “They’d take all the good stuff off the salad and give us the leaves,” she said. Or, the vegan options remained the same year after year.

Blossom & Root is located in a landmark downtown building. “I tell people I’m in the little red hotel, and they know exactly where it is,” Virgilio said. Irish immigrants who built the railroad that ran from Pleasanton to Walnut Creek lived in the building before it became a hotel and then a restaurant. “Another draw is, I wanted people to feel like they were coming into a house, like you were coming into my home,” she said.

The interior walls of Blossom & Root are covered in a riot of cheerful, if competing, wallpapers. Devotées of Laura Ashley’s plush floral prints will delight in the abundance everywhere of petals, stems, vines, branches and leaves. Brightly colored bottles line the shelves of the centrally located kitchen, where diners can observe the chef up close. The spirit of a comfy, Gilded Age tearoom has been summoned up in these dining rooms.

The robust beverage menu features beer, cider and wine, and the cocktails and mocktails are made by a resident mixologist. I tried a fizzy, refreshing cucumber mint “nojito” ($8) and took a sip of the seasonal shrub ($8) with a dash of elderflower syrup. Both beverages were adorned with thick copper straws and decorated with a sprig of mint or a thinly sliced spiral of cucumber.

The gazpacho looked freshly puréed, tomato-red with circular drizzles of a lemon crema and balsamic vinegar. The flavor held herbs and spices in balance, neither overpowering with heat nor bland.

Entrées, listed as “Large Plates,” include a masa cake mole verde, grilled vegetable pasta, a crispy maitake sandwich, a creamy herb farro and a burger made with chickpeas, black beans and shitake mushrooms. Virgilio believes there’s a place for Impossible Burgers and the like in plant-based dining, but she wanted Blossom & Root “to focus on and celebrate the vegetable, the fruit, the legumes.”

The mushroom steak salad ($28) was a mix of little gems and radicchio, watermelon radish, fennel, fried onions, and blue cheese crumbles and cherries, with grilled maitake mushrooms. My favorite dish was the summer poké ($24), with its exceptional housemade ponzu dressing. Every vegetable in the bowl was lovely to look at and even better to eat.


Blossom & Root, 411 Hartz Ave., Danville. Open for dinner Wed-Thur 5–8:30pm, Fri-Sat 5–9pm, Sun 5–7pm. 925.854.2059. blossomandrootkitchen.com.

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