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For more Hanukkah celebrations in the Bay Area, go to datebook.sfchronicle.com.
Dreidels and Lights Hanukkah Celebration and Menorah Lighting:
The holiday season begins at Bon Air with a celebration that includes a menorah lighting, dreidel kits and seasonal goodies. The menorah will be lit nightly at 5 p.m.
Foster City Outdoor Community Candle Lighting and Hanukkah Celebration:
Peninsula Sinai, the Peninsula Jewish Community Center,
Wornick Jewish Day School, Jewish Baby Network, and Jewish Family and Children’s Services present a community candle lighting and party with doughnuts, dreidels, live music, latkes, gelt, trivia and more.
7-8 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 1. Free, registration required. Leo J. Ryan Park, 650 Shell Blvd., Foster City. 650-212-7522. pjcc.org
Hanukkah Celebration at Stanford Shopping Center:
Celebrate the Jewish festival of lights with a live music and puppet show by Octopretzel, arts and crafts activities, dreidel games, and a menorah lighting ceremony with Rabbi Heath from Congregation Beth Am.
4:45-6:30 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 2. Free. Stanford Shopping Center, Palo Alto. 650-223-8700. palo altojcc.org
Beth Chaim Hanukkah Celebration and Menorah Lighting:
An outdoor holiday event with giant menorah lighting, live music from Nathaniel Markman, dancing with Bruce Bierman, Hanukkah treats, craft activities, hot drinks and more.
Novato Hanukkah Celebration and Menorah Lighting:
Featuring a drone menorah, LED lights and fire show, latkes, doughnuts, live music, and a public menorah lighting.
Anne Schrager is the calendar producer for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: listings@ sfchronicle.com
By Nicole Gluckstern
If you’ve lived in San Francisco for more than a few months, chances are you’ve heard of Burning Man, the quasi-autonomous zone and temporary city built each summer by more than 70,000 volunteers and ticketed participants in the Black Rock Desert of northern Nevada.
Love it or hate it (there are plenty of folks in both camps), there’s no denying the impact that Burning Man has had on the arts in the Bay Area and beyond. Multidisciplinary artists from all over have created unique structures, collective vocabularies and irreplicable experiences under its influence. It’s been a catalyst for bringing together some of the Bay Area’s most intriguing conceptual artists — and in some cases driving them apart.
Benjamin Wachs (a.k.a. Caveat Magister) has spent over a decade embedded in what he describes as “one of the most extraordinary underground scenes in the history of art and culture,” and lived not only to tell the tale, but to write about it in depth.
“Turn Your Life Into Art: Lessons in Psychomagic From the San Francisco Underground,” published this month by the Burning Man Project, is the culmination of Wachs’ many years participating in and documenting the vibrant underground arts culture of the Bay Area. It’s a companion of sorts to previous books written about the scene, such as 2013’s “Tales of the Cacophony Society” from Last Gasp press, and Chicken John Rinaldi’s self-published “The Book of the Is” and “The Book of the Un” (which Wachs edited). What Wachs’ book provides that’s different is a deeply philosophical approach to defining not just a sprawling, often contradictory scene, but also the steps required to both create and experience your own magical moments, beyond Burning Man or any of its offshoots or progenitors.
“It’s sort of an irony that pleases me very much that my Burning Man book (“The Scene That Became Cities: What Burning Man Philosophy Can Teach About Building Better Communities,” North Atlantic Press, 2019) was published by an independent publisher and my book on the independent art scene is published by Burning Man,” Wachs says with a smile in a Zoom interview.
Delving into what makes the Bay Area a unique epicenter, “Turn Your Life Into Art” is broken up into three major parts. The first third is devoted to exploring and defining what Wachs refers to as “psychomagical” experiences: how they manifest and what happens to the participants before, during and after an indescribable event. The next part is a consideration of the steps that go into creating these experiences, and the final one synthesizes the above with a rumination on how even as vibrant a psychomagical scene as San Francisco’s might eventually run out of steam.
While his book pinpoints 2015 as the moment when a flourishing San Francisco psychomagical scene began to dissipate — that year began with an experience called “Fallen Cosmos” created by the San Francisco Institute of Possibility, and ended with the
Turn Your Life Into Art: Lessons in Psychomagic From the San Francisco Underground implosion of a project known as the Latitude Society — he’s still hopeful that the lessons of creations past can be transmitted to future arts instigators.
As it happens, psychomagic is not a term invented by or for the San Francisco underground. Wachs attributes it to avant-garde Chilean-French filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, who explained it as an act of creating “symbolically significant actions” that activate and engage the unconscious mind. To this creative process, Wachs applies a matrix of conditions that he has observed over the course of many events and experiences.
By parsing out the elements that such experiences have in common, Wachs is able to propose a formula of sorts for would-be creators to use as inspiration. It is not, he asserts, a “blueprint,” but rather a series of building blocks that can be stacked in multiple directions, while cautioning that “it’s important not to mistake the building blocks for the final shape.”
Among these are elements that will seem familiar to advocates of the Ten Principles of Burning Man espousing communal effort and immediacy. Or those of seekers from other eras, such as the San Francisco Diggers with their de-commodified free stores and their participatory “happenings,” and the Dadaists with their experiments in “anti-art.” Precepts such as being present in the moment, a heightened sense of vulnerability and “encouraging meaningful choices” are all just descriptive enough to provide both background context and a condition to aim for.
One of Wachs’ most interesting observations is that the numinous quality of a psychomagical experience can’t be achieved through the creation of a fantasy, but only via a “non-fiction.”
“You don’t want people to be suspending disbelief; the more people have to suspend disbelief, the less psychomagical it’s going to be,” Wachs explains. “Which means to create situations that break conventionality and that cannot be optimized for success.” This dictum places constructs such as “immersive theater” and escape rooms outside the psychomagical realm, partly because in order to be monetized, they need to provide replicable
In-person book and art discussion with Benjamin Wachs and sculptor Brian Goggin. 2-5 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 4. Free. Project Artaud, 401 Alabama St., S.F.
experiences with predictable outcomes.
However, a one-weekendonly event such as 2015’s “Fallen Cosmos” from the San Francisco Institute of Possibility, which invited people into a physical expression of the great Hieronymus Bosch triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” was not a carefully tailored performance piece so much as an abundance of possibility. Any individual traveling through might have a completely different series of encounters than any other, but any of those journeys held the possibility of transcendence. Or it could just be a fun time, the response to the experience being up to the traveler as much as to their guides.
Although Wachs declares 2015 to be the endpoint of a certain era of San Francisco arts, he points to existing projects and organizations as continuing on its traditions. Burning Man may have been physically canceled due to the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, but as an organization it has survived. The San Francisco Institute of Possibility continues to hold adventures in garbage boatbuilding. Newer-to-thecity conceptual artists such as Danielle Baskin and a smattering of “secret societies” continue to nurture the spark of creative abandon that inspired so many projects and pranksters over the years.
An infinite garden, Wachs calls it, just looking for a few more hands to tend it. Will reading “Turn Your Life Into Art” compel you to drop everything and join the circus? Wachs certainly hopes so, and he awaits your arrival there.
More than 10,000 people were interned at Camp des Milles, one of dozens of World War II detention centers in France. Many prisoners in this former tile factory near Aix-en-Provence were German artists who’d fled the Nazis, including Surrealist Max Ernst, photographer Hans Bellmer, poet and screenwriter Walter Hasenclever, and novelist Lion Feuchtwanger.
Despite the dehumanizing conditions, they continued to create: Internees performed plays and concerts; they decorated the factory’s walls and constructed sculpture out of leftover tiles. Today, the site houses a museum where visitors can view hundreds of artworks by these “undesirables,” such as a “Last Supper”-like mural depicting diners from different continents titled “A Banquet of Nations.”
The museum seeks to memorialize the Holocaust as well as prevent future genocides. It asks of the inhumanity, why here? And of the art, why here?
Meg Waite Clayton’s gripping eighth novel, “The Postmistress of Paris,” asks the same questions. Informed by real World War II actors and events, Clayton’s book offers an evocative love story layered with heroism and intrigue — the film “Casablanca” if Rick had an artsy bent. It’s a vividly rendered, dramatic world, even a bit escapist (as long as notes of rising authoritarianism from the present day don’t ring in your ears).
This is another powerful historical novel from Clayton, a Bay Area resident, whose best-sellers include “The Last Train to London,” “Beautiful
Exiles” and “The Race for Paris.”
When German-Jewish photographer Edouard Moss arrives at Camp des Milles in
Book Passage presents Meg Waite Clayton reading: In person. 5 p.m. Nov. 29. Free. Masks required. Book Passage, 21 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera. www.bookpassage.com
Book launch: Virtual event. 5 p.m. Nov. 30. Free. Registration required. Books Inc. www.booksinc.net
Lafayette Library and Orinda Books present Meg Waite Clayton: In person, 7-8:30 p.m. Dec. 2. $26, includes signed book. Masks and proof of vaccination required. Don Tatzin Community Hall, Lafayette Library, 3491 Mount Diablo Blvd., Lafayette. www.llcf.org
In conversation with journalist Julia Flynn Siler: Virtual event. 6 p.m. Dec. 7. Free. Registration required. www.keplers.org
In conversation with novelist Carol Edgarian: Virtual event. 7 p.m. Dec. 9. Free. Registration required. www.bookshopwestportal.com “The Postmistress of Paris,” he finds fictionalized Ernst and Bellmer at work on “an odd mural” of a skeleton being crushed by a boot. Creative work “staves off hunger and anger in equal parts,” explains Bellmer to Moss, who is still stunned by his arrest and the killing of his wife by Nazis.
Moss’ detainment stretches from days to weeks to months. He becomes desperate to locate his 4-year-old daughter, Luki, lost in the chaos of German occupation. Title character Nanée, an American heiress working for the Resistance under the code
name “Postmistress,” wants to help. The two had met years earlier at a Surrealist art show, where Nanée was entranced by a cryptic photo by Moss.
Nanée’s character is based on a real American, Mary Jayne Gold from Chicago, who used her family wealth to help journalist Varian Fry’s Emergency Rescue Committee save more than 2,000 Jewish artists and intellectuals. Fry and French Surrealist André Breton appear in the fictional world of the novel, joining Nanée’s salons in a crumbling rented mansion in Marseille, where they hang art from the trees and argue late into the night, even as their ability to mitigate German brutality crumbles around them.
Two thousand residents of the real Camp des Milles were sent to Auschwitz. French politician and Auschwitz survivor Simone Veil said at the museum’s opening that seeing the paintings got her “thinking about the suffering, but also the courage of those that painted them.”
Clayton’s book celebrates courageous acts, large and small, within the vast Resistance network from forgers, lookouts, drivers, mapmakers, innkeepers with secret rooms. And “The Postmistress of Paris” is an homage to the courage of creative acts, to the refuge of art and its reminder, or insistence, on our shared humanity.
By Kevin Canfield
Faith Jones’ childhood was shaped by twice-monthly letters from an amoral stranger.
The Children of God, the cult into which Jones was born in 1977, followed the depraved guidance of her grandfather David “Moses” Berg — a man she never met. In frequent missives he called “Mo Letters,” he encouraged members of all ages to have sex.
If “it’s practiced in love,” the Oakland native wrote, sex is good — “whoever it’s with, no matter who or what age.” His vision for a “sexy New Church” obliged both himself and his son Jonathan — Jones’ father — to have two wives simulta- neously.
As Jones recounts in “Sex Cult Nun,” Berg’s exhortations had predictably harmful results. Jones was a preadolescent the first time an adult cult member forced her to help him masturbate. Another cult member raped her several years later. In 2005, one of Berg’s handpicked successors, also a sexual abuse victim, killed his former nanny and himself.
The cult’s membership, spread across many countries, averaged about 10,000, which “it maintained for over four decades,” Jones writes. Since 2010, when the group apparently ended what she calls its “communal living mandate,” some former members have spoken of surviving ordeals like Jones’. The group is now called the Family International, a self-described “online Christian network.”
Jones, an attorney who got her law degree from UC Berkeley, tells her harrowing story in a brisk present-tense voice, lending her recollections a
Sex Cult Nun: Breaking Away From the Children of God, a Wild, Radical Religious Cult sense of disturbing immediacy.
Berg founded his cult in the 1960s, recruiting early members in Southern California. In the early ’70s, under investigation for charity fraud, he fled the U.S. Although Jones never met Berg, who died in Portugal in 1994, his dictates defined her youth.
Jones’ family lived with other members in Asia in the 1970s, when Berg codified a bizarrely named sex scam. “Flirty Fishing” compelled female members to sleep with men who might help fund the cult, which also supported itself by farming and selling Christian music recordings. Jones’ mother landed several “fish” over the years.
Jones’ childhood was filled with distressing incidents. At 4, with her parents’ encouragement, she watched her mother masturbate her father. Mischievous behavior earned her a spanking with a hunk of wood “with the words ‘Rod of God’ burned into the handle.” In her preteens, adult members forced her to French-kiss them. When she was about 20, Jones confessed to kissing a young man outside the cult. As punishment, she was forced to move to a new home where she was excluded from the group’s social activities. The “true believer,” as she describes herself then, began questioning the cult’s bizarre tenets. When she made it known she was leaving, a cult member raped her.
The abuse she suffered makes relationships very difficult, Jones writes: “Vulnerability no longer feels like a choice, but an inability.” She’s duly proud that she took control of her life — her book’s epilogue is titled “I Own Me.” Jones earned her high school equivalency diploma, worked as a bartender while attending Monterey Peninsula College and graduated from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. “I turn thirty in law school” at UC Berkeley, she writes. Jones was older than many of her classmates, but she didn’t mind: “We form study pods, share notes, and go for beers after finals.” Since then, she has worked as a lawyer and business coach.
Why would an organization so clearly constructed to satisfy its founder’s desire for power and sex attract thousands of devotees? Some followers sought freedom from societal expectations. Others, Jones writes, needed someone who would “tell us what to do and what is true.”
As she demonstrates in this powerful book, Jones figured out the truth for herself.
In an arguably unparalleled career, Brooks has created a legacy of film and comedy work that should forever be regarded as essential to the medium. From his early days as a member of the storied writers’ room for Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” to his run of making classic films like 1974’s “Blazing Saddles” and 1987’s “Spaceballs,” Brooks has lived the kind of life that merits the nearly 500-page length of his new, delightful memoir.
Among other honors, Brooks is but one of a handful of people in show business to achieve the coveted EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony award wins), so it’s understandable that the comedy legend would title his tome “All About Me.” Ironically, however, much of the book’s best material focuses on the talented collaborators and funny friends who have
populated his difficult-to-believe-it-actually-happened life.
Be it his love for longtime spouse Anne Bancroft, his enduring friendship with his “2000 Year Old Man” partner in crime, Carl Reiner, or the impromptu series of lunches he once held with the master of suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock, Brooks is generous with his praise and steadfast in his belief that no comedy icon ever achieves great heights alone.
In detailing his storied rise from summer shows in the Catskills’ borscht belt to becoming one of the genre’s most beloved names, Brooks also dedicates some serious ink to sharing his insights on the art form. In exploring, for instance,
All About Me! My Remarkable Life in Show Business why Adolf Hitler proved to be such a fruitful source of material for the decidedly Jewish comedian, Brooks showcases his expertise, as well as his reverence, for pushing the boundaries of the medium to great effect.
Naturally, any memoir penned by a 95-year-old is also going to feature a lot of loss, but Brooks writes both like a man grateful for his blessings and one unwilling to saddle his final years with regret. As a consequence, few words are devoted to more solemn subjects, such as Bancroft’s death from cancer in 2005, but many are shared in service to deconstructing some of his most cherished material.
In fact, it is these passages, dedicated to such topics as the enduring humor of flatulating cowboys, the less-than-scrupulous real-life Broadway producer who inspired “The Producers,” and how Brooks convinced Orson Welles to take a role doing voice-over work in “The History of the World: Part I,” that ultimately shine the brightest. Delivered with Brooks’ indefatigable brand of silly, slyly brilliant wit, his revelations on the craft of comedy serve as the backbone of a memoir that deals equally in punch lines and pearls of wisdom.
A wonderful addition to a seminal career, “All About Me!” is not only a worthy summary of all Mel Brooks has achieved but also a lasting testament to the laughs he’s had along the way.