Continue reading »]]> A few members of the La Peña Community Chorus and members of other Bay Area choruses joined together on the main stage of Earth Day in San Francisco on Sunday April 22 to sing “This Land is Your Land” simultaneously with similar groups in a number of other cities and countries.   This very short video (48 seconds) taken from the back row onstage carries the first verse or so, and is spiced up with still pix taken around the plaza during the Earth Day Festival.  It was a fun event that deserved a bigger crowd participating.

Continue reading »]]> The La Peña Community Chorus of Berkeley recorded these two pieces as a message of support for the people of Aysén, Chile, who have since the beginning of this year been in a state of confrontation with the central government. Lichi Fuentes, co-director of the chorus, and a native of Chile, organized the performance. I sing as part of the bass section of the chorus, but I’m not in this video because I’m behind the camera. Probably just as well from the musical standpoint …

The first song, Tu Cantar, has been called the unofficial anthem of Latin America.  My translation:
If your voice is yearning for release
And you want your passion to be seen
If your heart is burning up with love
And you can’t keep from bursting into song

Chorus:
The song you sing will carry in the breeze
One day all ears will hear your melody

When you see how trees come into life
When you see the light die in the sea
Then you’ll know how far you have to walk
From where you are to join the human race

[Chorus]

If you feel it’s not within your heart
To give some help to those who are in need
If your eyes can’t shed a hearfelt tear
You need to love yourself a little more.

[Chorus]

The second is Canción con Todos – Song With Everybody.  Translation by an anonymous member of the chorus.

I go out walking through the cosmic waist of the south.
I tread on the greenest part of the wind and of the light.
I feel, as I walk, all of America’s skin in my skin
And a river flows through my blood to end in my voice.

Sun of high Peru, face of Bolivia, tin and solitude,
A green Brazil kisses my Chile of copper and minerals.
I rise from the south, towards the soul of the entire Americas
Purest root of a call destined to grow and explode.

All of the voices, all of them! All of the hands, all of them!
All of the blood can become a song in the wind.

Sing with me, sing! Panamerican brother/sister
Free your hope with a call in your voice.

Continue reading »]]> With my family background of resistance and survival in Nazi Germany, I sometimes forget how many other dictatorships there have been and are, and how many other families resist and survive, or not.  A poignant testimony to the sufferings of the Argentinian people under the dictatorship there comes in a song by Victor Heredia, Ojos de Cielo — Eyes Like the Sky.  He wrote it in memory of his sister who was disappeared by the dictatorship.  We sing it in the La Peña Community Chorus in Berkeley, of which I am a member.  I don’t have a recording of the chorus’ performance, but I did have the good fortune to record a live solo performance by one of the chorus’ directors, Lichi Fuentes, a native of Chile.  Here it is:

The recording was made in the hall on the spur of the moment with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS10 on a tripod with a ball head. The translation in the video is mine.

Continue reading »]]> In October 2010, I had the honor to present a lecture on addiction at a psychiatric hospital in Victoria BC.  The 8 a.m. “Grand Rounds” lecture arose out of my work on addiction in connection with LifeRing Secular Recovery.  That chapter of my life story remains to be written.  My hosts, the able LifeRing Canada organization headquartered in Victoria, arranged to have the lecture videotaped and in due course posted it on YouTube.  Here it is.

I’ll be presenting a talk on approximately this same subject to a non-medical audience at the LifeRing annual meeting in San Francisco May 12, 2012.  For details and for more about LifeRing, go to the lifering.org website.

Continue reading »]]> A major public relations campaign by the Port of Oakland and its allies in the Chamber of Commerce and in Oakland’s political establishment either had no effect or backfired, as the size of the crowd that marched on the port on Monday December 12 easily topped the initial effort November 2.  Although there was some dispute whether the demonstrators shut down the port’s operation completely or only “sporadically” in the bitter cold and rain during the early Monday morning shift, there was no doubt about the shutdown during the 6 pm evening shift.  The port reportedly cancelled the shift, and in fact there was no traffic on Middle Harbor Road or Maritime Road other than demonstrators’ bicycles and the occasional police motorbike.  These major freight arteries belonged entirely to the people, marching several thousand strong.

Continue reading »]]> As part of a nationwide series of demonstrations aimed at stopping and rolling back home foreclosures, more than 100 people gathered in Oakland’s historic DeFremery Park on Dec. 6, and then walked half a block to the home of Gayla Newsom and her family, who have re-occupied their home that was taken away by Chase Bank.

Homeowner Gayla Newsom addresses Stop Foreclosures demonstration at historic DeFremery Park in Oakland Dec. 6

Continue reading »]]>

Angry tent, drawn by unknown artist (in Oakland?)

They say in the Occupy Movement that if you’re looking for its leaders, you should look in the mirror.  Taking that as a cue, I’ve rough-drafted the beginnings of a manifesto for the Tent Party, a political movement that doesn’t exist yet, but probably should.  The Tent Party embraces both action and advocacy.

Rough draft of Tent Party manifesto