Will Hollein bring diversity to the Met?

The fat September Vogue includes writer Dodie Kazanjian’s “Meet Max Hollein, the Metropolitan Museum’s new director.” Hollein, of course, has moved from here to there.

Much of the story consists of biographical detail covered in this newspaper when Hollein became director of the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco in 2016. But we San Franciscans, always preening, are almost always mesmerized by the “selfie” principle: How do we look to others?

The story begins with a description of Hollein approaching Dede Wilsey, “the imperial president and main patron of the Fine Arts Museums,” to tell her he was considering the Met job. As we know, she was gracious in urging him to take it, and highly complimentary. “Max likes to run things,” Wilsey told Kazanjian. “He’s always way ahead of everybody in his thinking.” Hollein is described as brimming with ideas, credited with bringing contemporary artists — and the forthcoming Muslim fashion exhibition, subject of another Vogue story — to the Fine Arts Museums.

Vogue isn’t usually a hell-raising publication, but the profile points out that Hollein, like every director of the Met before him, is male; and European, like half the Met directors who preceded him. “You have to be an institution that embraces diversity,” Hollein tells Vogue.

While a search committee at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco is looking for a new director, we might keep that in mind. Around here, it’s been all white males from day one.

OK, I’m taking a leap here by revealing myself as a philistine. We loved the after movie meal and didn’t love the pre-meal movie, and that’s the honest report card on Saturday night’s Film to Table dinner at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive.

To get to the best part first, after “La Notte,” which is set in Milan in the early 1960s, Joan Ellis and Patrick Hooker, who run and cook for Babette, the cafe at BAMPFA, served a family-style Italian dinner to 28 people. At a long table, we were mostly surrounded by people we’d never met.

The food was said to have been inspired by the movie, but in fact the only food specifically mentioned in the movie was a prosciutto sandwich. There was sure more than that at dinner, not a fancy banquet but a bountiful feast, with shared platters brimming with figs and prosciutto, tomatoes, some kind of Italian version of ratatouille, osso buco and saffron risotto, and then fruit and tarts. Passing the platters forged an intimacy with one’s neighbors.

The menu may have reflected the region, but it sure didn’t reflect “La Notte,” a much-praised Michelangelo Antonioni classic I found slow-moving and selfconsciously bleak. Set in a city where modernity is changing the skyline — there are lots of scenes of buildings, construction sites — it’s about “the disconnection of people from their changing landscapes,” said lawyer and legal scholar Bill Turner, who was sitting next to me, about their “alienation from the architecture and soulless buildings. People are lost, and don’t know who they are, and don’t know what they care about.”

Dinner was about connections, sharing, discussing things — the wildfires, urban planning — larger than individual existential crises.

On the opposite side of the table was Bill Stewart, a professor of forestry at UC Berkeley. “When do you get to talk to forestry people about Antonioni?” said Turner. “Come to Berkeley.”

Sunday afternoon, we headed off to Orinda to see Cal Shakes’ production of “The War of the Roses,” Eric Ting and

Philippa Kelly’s adaption of Shakespeare’s three Henry VI plays plus “Richard III,” reviewed by Lily Janiak. The more than four hours of the production passed quickly, what with plenty of fighting and killing to see, and the program to consult so as to understand who was killing whom and why. Although seeing it during the day meant we couldn’t see the dramatic lighting, it meant we were able to read the synopses while watching, handy for following the action.

The company’s managing director Susie Falk invited the audience to respond aloud during the production, as would an audience in Shakespeare’s time. When Richard III was surrounded by the spirits of the people he had killed, though, everyone was way too well-behaved to cry out.

So I’ll do it today: Flippers! Non-applauders are treasonous! Fake news!

PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “Why would anyone read a book while sitting in front of a perfectly good TV?” Woman to woman, overheard outside Mrs. Dalloway’s bookstore by Leslie Piels