East Bay Magazine October 2023

SOUTHEAST

ASIAN CHEF

NORA HARON BLENDS CULTURES

Malay Her Way

CLIMATE CHANGER

Garbage is a manufactured product, created when otherwise recoverable resources are mixed and mashed together. Most rooms in every building in the whole country have a basket where this manufacturing begins. Discarded resources are put in one by one, then dumped into a larger bin, and then into a truck with a more modern body based on this one. A hydraulic piston smashes everything together. The objective is to pack in more cargo before the truck has to be driven to where it can dump onto the land, to be covered in a “sanitary“ way. Liquids leach out and make their way into the planet's

NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day from February 12, 2002, colored the methane in the Earth's atmosphere green, and an animation showed how it spins to the poles. NASA said, “Methane (CH4) is second only to carbon dioxide (CO2) in creating a warming greenhouse effect The largest abundance released by the US … is created when anaerobic bacteria break down carbon-based garbage in landfills.” [Emphasis added.]

water eventually. These “sanitary” methods of filling the land (hence “sanitary landfills”) also provide for anaerobic decomposition of organic materials – which makes methane.

Landfills are the largest human-created source of methane. In the short term methane is 80-100 times more powerful than carbon dioxide to warm the planet.

Making garbage changes the climate!

If you're not for Zero Waste, how

much waste are you for?

Urban Ore has been salvaging for reuse in Berkeley since 1981. We have 3 acres of secondhand goods, open 360 days a year until 5:00PM, 900 Murray St. near 7th x Ashby. Come shop.

Con ver sat ions

SAY WHAT ?

with

Strangers

In a previous life (aka, my 30s), I spent a lot of time in bars. Partly, because it was my job—first as bartender, then as nightlife columnist. It’s also where friends and I would go to flirt, commiserate or celebrate over a pint or a shot, often both. And because of the odd and unpredictable collection of people encountered if I ventured solo, bars were where I would delight in the sport of eavesdropping and/or talking to strangers. Then I called it research; now I call it “engaging with the community.”

My favorite types of bars were dives, pubs or neighborhood taverns, where you never knew who’d walk in. Or what the

conversation would be. The East Bay is rife with bars like this: Merchant’s, Heart & Dagger, The Fat Lady, The Avenue, Baggy’s by the Lake, McNally’s, Acme Bar and so on.

I’ve overheard fascinating tales from city officials, judges and attorneys at The Ruby Room by Lake Merritt and Uptown’s Cafe Van Kleef. I’ll never forget the insight I gained into the male psyche after listening to two dudes next to me at Ben ‘N Nick’s on College process their most questionable life decisions.

I fondly recall discussing H.G. Wells with an imposing man before he recited Shel Silverstein at Rob Dibble’s piano at The Alley on Grand. And I’ve chatted

about the pitfalls of nonprofit work, the merits of psychedelics and “death by coconuts” with the regulars at Hotsy Totsy.

Just like a bar, a magazine is a community gathering space. In its best form, that’s exactly what this magazine represents: a vibrant community with lots of personalities doing many different things, all collecting together under a common container. That’s the East Bay.

So come on in, grab a seat, and meet a skateboarder, a chef, a former cartoonist turned corporate strategist, a hard cider crafter, an FDR-inspired musician, a bagel maker and some rock climbers. Cheers!

— Samantha Campos

J. POET has been writing about music for most of his adult life and has interviewed a wide spectrum of artists, including Leonard Cohen, Merle Haggard and Godzilla.

KELLY VANCE, a member of the San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle, has been reviewing movies for Weeklys since 1982.

BRANDT

about

Bay Area.

MICHAEL MONTALVO is a U.S. Air Force veteran and Bay Area journalist with a background in criminal justice.

ANTHONY PIGNATARO is a journalist and author who really loves his girlfriend, Angie, and his cat, Gromit.

PHOTO BY SAMANTHA CAMPOS

Random connections are the spice of life

Hotsy Totsy Club has been serving the odd and unpredictable in Albany since 1939.

Over 40 Years of Meticulous Housekeeping

THE COOPERATIVE CLEANING COMPANY

Sarah Neil, CEO Then & Now

Anative of France, Sarah holds a master’s from Sorbonne in Paris, and speaks eight languages. With a background in art curation, and a collection of fine French antique furniture, Sarah’s homes have always been known for that certain ‘je ne sais quoi,’ and for being meticulously clean. So, when family and friends in Paris heard that she acquired the premier housekeeping company in the Bay Area, no one was surprised. “When I told them what I did they all said that it made perfect sense, and I guess it does. Now I do for the most beautiful homes in the East Bay and Marin County, what I have always done for mine.”

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Sarah 1982

Bagels Raising

How Emily Winston is building Berkeley’s Boichik Bagels while staying true to her vision

For Emily Winston, bagels are family. An onion bagel covered in chive cream cheese. An everything bagel loaded with lox and garlic cream cheese. A garlic bagel stu ed with tomatoes, capers, onions and chile cream cheese. All of these bagels are covered with a schmear that’s so thick it oozes out the hole in the middle when the two halves are pressed together until it’s flush with the top of the bagel.

Winston calls them “serious New York bagels.” They are malty and sweet, but still

By Anthony Pignataro

chewy with a blistered crust—much like a soft pretzel—and are so perfect after baking that they don’t require toasting, a food critic once wrote.

“These bagels are her kids,” said Rob Soviero, chief operating o cer of Berkeleybased Boichik Bagels, the company Winston founded back in 2017. “That’s a huge part of how we got to this point.”

A tiny, unknown Alameda pop-up just six years ago, Boichik today is a nationally famous bagel shop that while growing fast, is still dedicated to the simple, almost gentle vision of its founder.

“We’re never going to be a Noah’s,” said Soviero. “We’re not supported by huge investors, venture capital. Especially in the Bay Area, so many companies start o , look for VC money and then sell. But that’s not her vision. She just wants to get phenomenal bagels to as many people as we can.”

Winston, 45, is an engineer by trade. She studied mechanical engineering at Cornell and later transportation technology and policy at UC Davis. In interviews, she easily drops engineering phrases like “everything is a process” and

references Toyota’s famous “continuous improvement” maxim.

In 2011, she was living in northern California and working on a database for her aunt when she got the news that would change her life, and in turn, those of many, many others. The work she was doing paid well, but was boring, she recalled. It also allowed her to work remotely, and didn’t require anything near 40 hours a week to do.

Then that June, H&H Bagels closed its bagel shop on New York’s Upper West Side. Open since 1972, H&H was legendary with New Yorkers, and with Winston’s family, which lived across the Hudson River in New Jersey.

“We had our local bagel shop, and they were very good,” Winston said. “But H&H was our ‘special occasion bagel.’ Dad would take us—it was the ‘Holy Grail bagel.’”

Chewy and crusty and malty and sweet, the bagel was like a part of Winston’s family on big occasions. Now, it was no more. “At least it existed at home when I wanted it,” she said. “It hit me really hard when it was gone. Now, I can’t even go home and get it.”

Unwilling to accept the loss, Winston set about replicating the H&H bagel formula—or, at least, producing a suitable substitute. For five years, she worked quietly, studying food manufacturing, experimenting with recipes, watching YouTube videos. Her bagels got better; her friends began raving. She took more baking and food preparation classes.

Her first real exposure to the public came in September 2017, at the Eat Real Festival in Oakland’s Jack London Square. Janelle Bitker, then a reporter with the East Bay Express, attended the festival, where she saw Winston and her new Boichik Bagels.

There weren’t many people standing around Winston, she said, but since she loved bagels—and especially New Yorkstyle bagels—Bitker quickly tried one. After taking a bite, Bitker—who today is senior editor for food & wine at the San Francisco Chronicle—closed her eyes.

“This is the real deal,” she thought happily. The next month, the Express published Bitker’s story, calling Winston’s bagels “a game-changer” and dubbing

them the “best bagels in East Bay.”

A few weeks later, Winston hosted a Boichik pop-up at her house in Alameda. Unlike during the COVID-19 pandemic, when it became common for chefs to hold pop-ups at their homes, the practice was still novel then. Bitker decided to attend, figuring she’d get to relax and enjoy the bagels. Though she arrived right at the scheduled start time, Bitker found more than 100 people already standing in line.

“Is this possible?” Bitker thought. “But within a few minutes she sold out, and everyone had to go home. Word traveled fast,” she said.

From there, Winston got a cottage food license, and then a regular food license. By late 2019, Boichik Bagels was up and running in Berkeley. The shop was small, but more people began to

notice. Just 16 months later, on March 8, 2021, to be exact, news from New York changed Winston’s life yet again.

“Emily Winston’s bagels are some of the finest New York-style bagels I’ve ever tasted,” New York Times food critic Tejal Rao wrote in a story titled, “The Best Bagels Are in California (Sorry, New York),” noting that “They just happen to be made in Berkeley.”

The compliment surprised Winston, she said. Though Rao had interviewed Winston prior to the article’s publication, she had only said her story was about West Coast bagels, Winston said. Nonetheless, Winston was ecstatic. “I can die a very happy and fulfilled person now,” she told The Jewish News of Northern California “There’s no greater honor for a bagel shop, no further accolade past The New York Times declaring my bagels the best.”

ENGINEERED PERFECTION A Baker-Bot robot arm hoists Boichik’s bagel boards from the rollers to the racks.

In just a day, Boichik Bagels went from a small but beloved East Bay institution to a national sensation. Demand for Winston’s bagels exploded, and growth was now inevitable, though it would take time. She also needed a bigger sta , not just to make the bagels that so many people were now asking for, but also to oversee the company’s day-to-day operations.

“Managing people is not my strong suit,” Winston admitted.

Through a mutual acquaintance, Winston began courting Rob Soviero, the former general manager of Oakland’s Tribune Tavern, to help out Boichik. Soviero, though being a “Jersey Italian”—as Winston put it—said he “didn’t do bagels.”

At the time, Boichik was adding a lot of products, but the line of customers to get bagels was considerable. The goal, Soviero recalled, was to get customers their bagels in just four to six minutes. Winston continued to press Soviero, and in the summer of 2021, he agreed to join Boichik as chief operating o cer.

“Her passion sold me on it,” he said. “I take her vision and try to make it a reality. And Emily is open to making sure we are a team, in every aspect. She has skills she doesn’t realize are management skills.”

In the coming months, Boichik grew from one store to four. Then in March of this year, two years after The New York Times article, Boichik opened an 18,000-squarefoot factory in West Berkeley. The exterior is covered with a bright blue mural of mixing bowls, rollers and boiling pots from artist Nigel Sussman. Meant to convey the bagel-making wonders within, the mural is industrial but still whimsical.

Inside, customers can watch the largely automated factory churn out bagels—a lot of bagels. In fact, the BakTek dual-lane dough-forming machine Boichik uses can churn out 12,000 bagels every hour, according to a June article on Engineering. com.

At top speed, the machinery can produce one board of formed bagels every seven and a half seconds, according to Apex Motion Control, which manufactured the BakerBot robot arm that hoists Boichik’s bagel boards from the rollers to the racks. Like something out of an auto-making plant, the Baker-Bot’s giant three-fingered hand can deftly spin as it picks up racks o the BakTek line, turn and pivot to slide them

into racks, then rotate up and wave to customers watching the process.

“That’s not going to be a fun job, to be picking those up o the end of the line and putting them on these racks,” Winston said in a promotional video for Apex. “My employees have more important things to do than lifting 15 pounds and lifting and pushing all day long. This would be a full-time job, just picking up the boards and putting them on the racks.”

Jewish, gay-owned and women-owned.”

At a time when right-wing idealogues increasingly make anti-Jewish, anti-gay and anti-woman attacks, Winston has openly embraced all three elements of her identity. “It’s important to maintain that visibility,” Winston told me. “But there really has not been pushback—this is Berkeley. As we expand, we might run into trouble. But so far we have not.”

As for using automation to make bagels instead of forming them by hand, Winston is unapologetic. “If the product is where I want it to be at the end, let’s bring equipment in,” she said in the Apex video. “Why not?”

For anyone concerned that the new automated factory will lower the quality of Winston’s bagels, Bitker said she tried them in the summer, after the Berkeley operation was up and running. “They’re still really good,” she said. “The factory has not decreased the quality at all.”

When asked if she’s happy with the factory so far, Winston was e usive. “I wish we could have a larger parking lot at the factory, but it’s amazing,” she said. “I’m afraid to change anything. I call construction the ‘8th circle of Hell,’ and I get to live there permanently now. It’s the price I pay. But I wouldn’t change anything so far.”

Though Boichik’s bagels are clearly her children, as Soviero observed, Winston’s vision for the company transcends being a bakery. In June 2022, The Daily Californian reported that Winston “makes it known that Boichik Bagels is ‘unapologetically’

14th century Europe were royal delicacies, they evolved in Poland in later centuries

“The Secret History of Bagels.”

That Winston is openly left-wing shouldn’t be surprising, given the history of bagels. Though the earliest bagels in 14th century Europe were royal delicacies, they evolved in Poland in later centuries as poor people’s street food, according to Ari Weinzweig’s 2009 Atlantic article, “The Secret History of Bagels.”

“Bagels also lean left because bakeries back in 19th-century Poland seem to have served much the same role cafés did in other countries—they were where young people in the Jewish community would gather to discuss new, radical political ideas,” Weinzweig wrote.

back in 19th-century Poland seem to have served much the same role cafés young people in the Jewish community would gather to discuss new, radical

First and foremost, though, the shop is Winston’s family, which has consistently

Boichik. Winston said she thought a lot

First and foremost, though, the shop is Winston’s family, which has consistently been in her thoughts while building Boichik. Winston said she thought a lot about her grandparents. Her grandfather, an electrical engineer who died when she was a teen, was definitely on her mind when she was immersed in the construction of the bagel factory. And the name “Boichik” itself, which is a Yiddish term for a teenage boy, actually came from her grandmother. When Winston had her hair cut short and o cially began identifying as a lesbian, she said her grandmother called her a “boichik.”

“My grandmother was making fun of me, but in an endearing way, a sweet way,” Winston said. “It’s what every grandmother calls her grandson, like a cheek pinch. In a lot of ways, I did look like [a 13-year-old boy]. Unfortunately, she passed away before I got any of this open.”

As for her parents, who first introduced her to H&H Bagels decades ago, giving her a lifelong passion for true New Yorkstyle bagels, Winston said they’re very happy for her. “My parents are very proud of my bagel business,” she said. “They like my bagels better than any they get in New Jersey. There are still plenty of good bagels left, but I think they’re becoming more scarce, which is sad.” ❤

Soviero, Winston Soviero bagels summer take And

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By Anthony Pignataro

Lloyd Dangle was still a boy when his father took him to the Detroit Institute of the Arts. There, in the courtyard of the gorgeous white marble Beaux-Arts building that dated to 1927, Dangle gazed up at the massive Diego Rivera mural illustrating how the automotive industry works. The mural begins with ore in the ground and goes all the way to giant machines requiring hundreds of workers to operate.

“When I looked at this as a kid, I was fascinated,” Dangle recalls. “Then I’d look at a Rembrandt, and think, ‘Where’s the rest of the picture?’ That mural really had an effect on my life. What I’m doing is what Rivera did in that mural. What I do is not as pretty, but it works.”

Dangle is a unique, even unlikely, corporate consultant. For more than two decades, he skewered Republicans and corporate executives on a weekly basis as one of the most popular syndicated cartoonists for alternative newsweeklies, with a comic strip called “Troubletown.” But a dozen years ago, Dangle left that job and joined the corporate world he once lampooned. Today, he uses cartooning skills not to satirize corporate executives, but to help them strategize their futures.

“He’s a bit of a secret weapon to get people unstuck,” says James Young, principal with Tangible, a San Franciscobased product design agency. “He’s great at listening and getting people on track. He brings out the best in people.”

It’s a stunning turnaround that Dangle explains pretty simply.

“I was motivated because I had a kid and he was going to college, but I forgot to make money in my life,” he says.

An Oakland resident since 1992, Dangle and his partner recently traded their place in affluent, family-friendly Piedmont for a spot in the bit hipper but still walkable Adams Point. Though the move was only a few minutes away, it wasn’t easy. “We downsized quite a bit,” he says. “Lots of books, lots of art, furniture. We got rid of thousands of books. Our whole approach is to lighten up at this point in our lives.”

The move made sense, given Dangle’s son is now grown, and living in Berkeley.

Like his parents, he’s an artist, though with his own style. “He came up with his own approach to the world,” Dangle says. “I was always drawing around him since he was a baby. So was his mom.”

It’s difficult to understand now, with the instantaneous information overload of the internet and social media, that in those days, Dangle could make a living drawing one cartoon a week. But that’s what he did, as a syndicated cartoonist, from 1988 to 2011. It wasn’t an extravagant living by any stretch, but it was OK.

His comics were usually nine panels (sometimes more) squeezed into a one-sixth-page box that could fit easily on an alt-weekly page. They were black and white, with lots of people with disconcertingly skinny noses who looked crudely drawn unless one stared at them awhile and saw all the emotional quirks and nuances Dangle somehow squeezed in.

Dangle had total freedom to draw what he wanted, so “Troubletown” skewered Republicans most of all—President George W. Bush was a favorite target—but he also went after moderate Democrats, corporate executives and even just irresponsible

people in general. It was extremely leftwing, but also genuinely funny and all too often absolutely true.

He would draw a comic on Monday, which would then come out on Wednesday or Thursday. That was exciting, especially if it spurred letters to the editor. But by then, Dangle was already working on the following week’s comic.

As the internet really started taking off, he could draw a web-only version with color. Now, his weekly schedule was a 24hour one. But then people began making their own memes and sharing them on social media. By 2011, Dangle looked around, decided he didn’t want to be the last person on the sinking ship, and ended “Troubletown.”

For the next few years, work was inconsistent. One of his biggest projects was drawing the packing for Airborne Health Formula, a line of vitamin supplements. His original designs were almost pure “Troubletown,” with funnylooking germ monsters and people with skinny noses. But after the company bought him out, they made the packaging “more generic,” Dangle notes.

unique branding of Airborne has helped make selling products in retail history.”

–– Rider McDowell, Owner and CEO

Lloyd Dangle

NON-LINEAR Before he was a corporate consultant, Lloyd Dangle skewered corporate executives in his syndicated comic strip, ‘Troubletown.’

PHOTO BY TERRY LORENT

Then in 2014, an executive with Hewlett Packard asked Dangle to join their team. The job was simple: Dangle would attend high-level corporate meetings—at company expense—and keep a graphic record of what was discussed. Dangle, who was already making moves into corporate consulting, agreed. “The money is more than I ever made,” he says. “And the team was very nice. All the years I did comics, I was treated badly.”

Soon, Dangle found himself in “weird, tense situations,” which he says were addicting. These were meetings with senior leaders trying to reset their corporate relationships with customers, or each other. Hundreds of millions of dollars were often at stake. “There could be some intense anger, emotion, in these meetings,” Dangle says. “Those are my favorites because you see incredible change come over people.”

For the first year, Dangle says he spent a lot of time just trying to figure out what the executives were talking about. “You’d be amazed at how bad corporate meetings are,” he says. “They show PowerPoint presentations, and then everyone falls asleep. But I was always willing to ask a dumb question. And when I asked it, I found half the room didn’t know either.”

But Dangle wanted more. He didn’t just want to draw records of meetings; he wanted to use his consultation and facilitation skills to make corporate America better. He also knew that he could draw very fast, and he wanted to use that skill.

Dangle also now understood how corporate executives tried to communicate, what they were after and

why they were running into trouble. He wanted to help, so he started his own firm, Draw the Future. Unlike mere graphical recording, Dangle wanted to use his cartooning skills to help corporate executives strategize their company’s future.

“I call it ‘do-it-yourself futurism,’” says Dangle. “I try to help people who are ready for change. It requires a willingness to be vulnerable. I don’t tell people what the future is. But if they’re curious about what the future will be, I will work with them.”

Dangle says part of the reason his methods work is because of a mental process called “cognitive offloading.” The human brain often forgets ideas that are verbalized. When the same idea is captured in something tangible, like a drawing or a cartoon, people will remember not only the idea, but even things like where they were standing or sitting when they were first exposed to the idea.

Exactly which companies Dangle works for today is a closely guarded secret. He would not disclose his clients, past or present, saying all his consulting work is protected by non-disclosure agreements. In fact, when he asked an executive at one major company he’s worked with— definitely a name one has heard of—if someone would talk to me about his consultations, the mere request “caused consternation,” according to Dangle.

“A lot of his work is sensitive,” says James Young, the executive who did muster the courage to speak with me about what it was like to work with Dangle, though he would only speak generally. Young says his company, Tangible, was going through “big changes” and needed help focusing

its corporate goals. “These were pretty high-stakes meetings,” notes Young. “He knows how to bring people along to consensus.”

Young says Dangle’s use of cartoons to show executives what they’re trying to achieve is remarkably different from typical corporate meetings. “Usually people are having circular conversations in boring conference rooms while watching bullet-point slides,” says Young. “That’s how business works.”

Dangle’s work is also, to be clear, different from art itself. Where Dangle once spent his days drawing cartoons which were then published in alt-weekly papers and posted online, available for free to whomever wanted to see them, these days the work he produces is secret and proprietary. And when the need for the drawings ends, they’re placed in special bags and shredded, like so many confidential documents. Sure, they may be photographed for internal company reports, but the originals are always destroyed.

“It’s not about artwork,” Dangle says, a little too simply. “They’re property of the company.”

So does Dangle, who seems happy with his life as a corporate consultant—even if he does admit that corporate meetings are too often horrible—regret his old “Troubletown” days?

“Sort of,” Dangle admits. “I was the person who ran into a bar and started a fight, then ran out. But I was in the studio doing the next week’s comic when the bomb went off. I contributed to outrage culture. In that way, I was ahead of my time. I do miss it, but not that much.” ❤

«

Dangle says part of the reason his methods work is because of a mental process called ‘cognitive offloading.’ The human brain often forgets ideas that are verbalized. When the same idea is captured in something tangible, like a drawing or a cartoon, people will remember not only the idea, but even things like where they were standing or sitting when they were first exposed to the idea.

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NewDeal

Musician Alexis Harte reflects on the nature of private and public property

BY j. poet

Alexis Harte said his latest song, “Your Rose Garden,” was inspired by an evening he spent in Berkeley’s Rose Garden. “I grew up in Berkeley and started playing guitar when I was 14,” he said. “The Rose Garden was a place of refuge for me.”

“During the pandemic, it became a refuge for me again,” he added. “I’d be with people, but not too close to them. I’d watch the sunset, enjoying the beauty of space and the full range of folks you find up there, from Nobel laureates to the same goofball teenagers I once was. One afternoon, there was a guy up there, kind of a tech bro. I saw him lean over to the woman he was with and say, ‘When I make my first billion, I’m gonna buy this place from the city so we can enjoy it without all these other people around.’ My hackles went up. I wanted to tell him he can’t buy it, because it’s already his, and it’s mine, too. That’s the beauty of it.”

The incident in the garden caused Harte to reflect on the nature of private and public property. “I got to thinking about our needs for public spaces and how, in the New Deal days, people paid a couple of dollars in taxes and helped build public spaces like the Rose Garden,” he said. “We all contributed a little bit and got something none of us could have bought on our own. It’s the best we do as a culture. New Deal projects like the Rose Garden exemplify those values beautifully.”

LIVING TRIBUTES Harte’s latest song, ‘Your Rose Garden,’ inspired by Berkeley Rose Garden, will soon be the subject of a short film.

PHOTO BY MORGAN STETLER

« Harte acknowledged how the Great Depression created a socioeconomic climate ripe for the New Deal, saying: “Franklin Delano Roosevelt had the foresight to know what future generations would need. During the Depression, roughly 12 million Americans were out of work. His administration created jobs for most of them, including artists, sculptors, painters and filmmakers. When Harry Hopkins, who was FDR’s man in charge of job creation, was asked why so many artists were included in jobs creation, he responded, ‘Hell, they’ve got to eat just like other people!’”

“FDR’s administration created the Works Progress Administration and financed murals by Diego Rivera, photos by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, paintings and murals by Jackson Pollock, and bas reliefs in high schools, like the ones at Berkeley High, created by Lulu Braghetta,” Harte said. “The WPA also built parks like the Rose Garden. They did it all over the country, putting people to work by building these amazing things that we’ve enjoyed for almost a century now.”

“We don’t do that anymore,” he added. “Despite impossible odds, (President Joe) Biden is trying, but we need to continue to fund larger projects that provide jobs now and create lasting benefits for people into the future. It’s not rocket science. The country did it before, so I know we can do it again, if the will is there.”

While Harte’s song, “Your Rose Garden,” isn’t exactly folk, the backingband tracks are kept low in the mix for a sound that resembles a Woodie Guthrie tune that might have been written at the time the Rose Garden was being built. Harte’s vocal is complimented by country-style fingerpicking on an acoustic guitar.

When he finished the song, Harte contacted his friend, director Josh Peterson, about making a film to compliment the values of the New Deal expressed in the lyrics. “It’s going to be a short film based on the song, but not really a video,” Harte said. “We got a grant from UC Berkeley’s Chancellor’s Community Partnership Fund, and we’re working with the UC Cinematic Arts and Production Club, a hands-on student filmmaking

group that will help with archival research and production support.

“We’re also seeking contributions from the community, in the form of old family photos and home movies of people enjoying the Rose Garden over the last 90 years. It’s not going to be a documentary, but it will have some archival aspects, with montages of everyone’s experiences there. People can send things to our website: yourrosegarden.com/share,” he explained.

“We’ve also been partnering with the Living New Deal,” Harte added. “That organization has a comprehensive list of the thousands of New Deal projects around the country: buildings, parks, schools and playgrounds. We’d ultimately like to provide a platform for other songwriters, artists, filmmakers and storytellers to create living tributes to the New Deal and the great things it did for this country.”

Listen to ‘Your Rose Garden’ and Harte’s other songs on his Bandcamp page, alexisharte. bandcamp.com/track/your-rose-garden. Harte’s website is alexisharte.com. More information about the ‘Rose Garden’ film and project can be found at yourrosegarden.com.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt had the foresight to know what future generations would need. The country did it before, so I know we can do it again, if the will is there.

ALEXIS HARTE

Wheels

of

Wisdom

Skateboarder Rob Ferguson guides the next generation

Whether aware of it or not, everyone has mentors. Most have mentors in the workplace, school or generally in life. Oprah Winfrey had heart-to-heart talks with Maya Angelou, J.J. Abrams got intergalactic advice from Steven Spielberg and even the X-Men had to deal with Professor Xavier always nagging them.

Robert (“Rob”) Ferguson, a Bay Area native and skateboarder who was born in Castro Valley, has been mentoring since he

was a young and skinny teenager. It wasn’t until a city official familiar with Ferguson asked him to start a program while he was at San Francisco State University, that he began teaching students how to skateboard.

The sport of skateboarding has long been viewed as an alternative pastime, dominated by free spirits and rebels. But, as with any discipline, skateboarding takes persistence, dedication and guidance. In the annals of skateboard history, mentors have played pivotal roles in nurturing

BY Michael Montalvo

talents and steering novices. The mutual respect between mentor and protégé is evident in the relationship shared between Ferguson and his charges.

Skateboarding, inherently, is about more than tricks and competitions. It’s a medium for self-expression, a way to navigate one’s environment and a means to challenge traditional norms. It’s always been an embodiment of grassroots counterculture. But with figures like Ferguson, it’s also becoming a structured, educational pursuit. His

SHREDDER MENTOR

Skateboarder Rob Ferguson runs Rob’s Skate Academy in San Leandro and Concord.

approach, combining the physical rigors of skating with mindfulness, encapsulates the essence of modern skateboarding: It’s both a sport and a state of mind.

The Bay Area has spawned skateboarding legends for decades, including Mike Carroll, Jake Phelps and Steve Caballero, who was one of my favorite playable skaters in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2

Ferguson was a finalist coach before the COVID-19 pandemic postponed the events and then limited the participants in the last Olympics. During the pandemic, Ferguson taught others through social distancing videos and instructed his students while wearing masks.

"I began coaching kids who lived down the street and earned a few bucks from that,” said Ferguson. “I continued teaching kids when I was in college. It had always been a dream to have my own

indoor skate park and a space to teach kids to skateboard.”

In 2002, a 15-year-old Ferguson went door-to-door with a sheet of paper offering services like babysitting, dog walking or lawn maintenance. One of those people who lived six houses down turned out to be the general manager of Orbit Skate Shop, Sal Sadd.

“We became friends from there, and since then he has been involved in every event I’ve done here at the shop since 2003,” said Sadd. “He has great energy with the microphone and knows how to interact with the kids. Rob is a pillar in the community.”

For almost 30 years, San Leandro has been home to the Orbit Skate Shop. Since 1995, Orbit’s skate team has included Travis Sparaco, JT Miller, Matty Jessee, Curtis Ocampo, Daris Marshall and Ferguson.

For six years, Ferguson has been the creator and owner of Rob’s Skate Academy—like a skateboarding Hogwarts—which started in Oakland and then relocated across the street from the Coca-Cola factory in San Leandro. A second location opened at the Sunvalley Mall in Concord this past July.

Ferguson has coached numerous skateboarders, including Minna Stess, a 17-year-old professional skateboarder who made her X-Games debut in 2019 at the age of 13.

Ferguson’s motto for mentoring is "mindfulness through skateboarding," which teaches people how to cope with failure and disappointment, channeling that disappointment into further progress in both their skating and personal lives.

“The hypermasculinity that’s instilled in men today from role models like Andrew Tate is absolutely devastating,” said

ON DECK Skateboarding is more than just tricks and competitions.

PHOTOS BY MICHAEL MONTALVO »

Ferguson. “It’s killing our men. That’s why men have the highest incarceration rate. It’s teaching men not to talk about their feelings or communicate in a healthy way.”

Ferguson’s sta visits schools every weekday. They serve the Oakland Unified School District, West Contra Costa Unified and San Leandro Unified districts, and work with schools in San Francisco, Hayward, San Mateo, Pleasanton Hill and Concord.

“We have contact with the after-school directors,” said Nathaniel David Stark, general manager of RobSkate in Concord. “So we’ll set up clubs, bring out ramps and teach kids how to skate. They love it. I always say skateboarding is 30% physical and 70% mental. It’s about breaking through that barrier in your mind. You have to commit.”

Raised in Danville, Stark met Ferguson 10 years ago at the age of 16 when he worked for Ferguson as a skate instructor at a summer skate camp. Like Stark, Ferguson has become close with numerous skaters in the community, including author Karl Watson, who recently wrote a children’s book about learning the basics of skateboarding called, My First Skateboard

“Watson is like an older brother to me and a true pillar within our skate

community,” said Ferguson. “I could write a novel on all the reasons why I love the guy. I’m beyond stoked he wrote My First Skateboard. I make sure every kid that crosses our path reads that book!”

While Ferguson didn’t have a book to teach him how to skateboard, he did have his own “Mr. Miyagi” (Karate Kid) role model, who was one of his neighbors.

“It was a guy who believed in me,” Ferguson said. “Ultimately, he would always ask me to learn a new trick, and then he would make sure I did it over and over again until I landed it for him.”

The skateboarding community has changed rapidly since the ’70s and ’80s, from teaching methods to the skateboarders themselves.

“It’s really cool to see how much it has changed over the last 15 years—the explosion of female skaters, LGBTQ and trans skaters emerging in the fold in the vernacular, being seen, and being recognized as skilled skaters and a part of the misfits’ pantheon of our society,” said Tion Torrence, a skateboarder and former manager of hip-hop artists. Ferguson traveled across Canada as Torrence’s tour manager.

“I’ve been able to watch him grow from having a handful of skate camps around from Walnut Creek to San Ramon and

beyond, to becoming good friends,” said Torrence, who’s been friends with Ferguson since 2005.

One of Ferguson’s many future goals is to have five indoor skate parks in the Bay Area. They are even discussing the potential for franchising and looking to travel across the U.S. and internationally. Ferguson’s team wants to provide more career opportunities for skaters to work full-time within the industry on a competitive salary.

They also have a long-term vision of opening the first extreme sports and science community center in the Bay Area or anywhere they can. Ferguson and the academy would like to elevate the sport of skateboarding to the same level as traditional sports within schools and create district leagues. The hope is that schools will begin o ering scholarships for skateboarding.

The growth of skateboarding, from the streets of the East Bay to becoming an Olympic sport, has been a testament to its appeal and adaptability. With mentors like Ferguson and Torrence, the future not only looks bright but also inclusive, structured and immensely promising. Skateboarding has always been about pushing limits. And with its current trajectory, it seems the boundaries are endless. ❤

I began coaching kids who lived down the street and earned a few bucks from that. I continued teaching kids when I was in college. It had always been a dream to have my own indoor skate park and a space to teach kids to skateboard.

ROB FERGUSON

Walls of

In the heart of residential North Berkeley lives a cluster of unexpected giants: giant hunks of rhyolite, lava remnants created by volcanic eruptions 10 million years ago. Their history is visible on their surface, starting with the flat planes and edges sanded to smoothness as the boulders were carried along the Hayward fault, eventually landing in what is now Berkeley’s Northbrae neighborhood.

Over the millennia, humans have sought out these boulders for their own purposes, both practical and recreational, and left their marks on the rock. The Huichin band of the Ohlones used them to grind acorns into fine flour with a pestle in order to leach out the acorn meat’s bitter tannins—at Mortar Rock Park, one can see the deep holes worn into the rock over hundreds of years of grinding.

As the 20th century rolled around, these boulders became an open-air laboratory for early mountaineers and rock climbers. In the 1930s, pioneers of California climbing experimented with new techniques and gear such as pitons, metal spikes hammered into seams and cracks to act as anchors to protect climbers from falls.

With these new protection techniques, Berkeley-based climbers like Dick Leonard and David Brower were able to complete first ascents of High Sierra peaks that had been thought unclimbable. Their practice pitons left scars in the stone that one can still find in the nooks and crannies of Indian Rock and Cragmont Rock parks.

Climbing techniques have continued to evolve—modern climbers generally use either permanent, drilled-in bolts or removable “cams” and “nuts” that leave

BY Sonya Bennett-Brandt

less scarring on the rock—but much of the essence of Yosemite climbing is founded on the techniques developed in North Berkeley by the Cragmont Climbing Club.

Now, Berkeley’s rock parks bustle with people taking advantage of everything these friendly neighborhood behemoths have to offer: climbing, scrambling, people-watching and panoramic views of the bay. Indian Rock Park in the evening is full of runners jogging up the carved stone steps, friends sitting atop the rock to wait for sunset, puppies in training digging in the wood chips below, kids rock-hopping and the odd teenager carving their initials into the stone. And then, there are the boulderers—those who seek the thrill of rock-climbing without venturing far from the ground.

Bouldering is a puzzle-solving oriented type of climbing. The goal »

CHALK HANDS Boulderer Ross Graham works on a traverse at Indian Rock Park.

Berkeley’s rock parks are a wonderland for climbers of all levels

is to get from point A to point B— sometimes above, sometimes to the left or right—without touching the ground. Berkeley’s outdoor bouldering holds appeal for a wide variety of ages and skill levels—there’s always a contingent of graduate students sharing strategies and analyzing their body positioning, kids appreciating its "The Floor is Lava" appeal (a misleading image here, since the walls are actually lava) and seasoned Yosemite climbers staying in shape when they’re out of the valley.

In fact, one of the beginner-friendly walls in Mortar Rock Park is named “Little Half Dome,” after the iconic Yosemite landmark. One will see everyone from chalked-up acrobats moving gracefully across vertical rock like lizards to first-timers breaking in the grippy rubber on their new climbing shoes. Generally, boulderers try to complete “problems,” specific routes with a set beginning and end, which each climber might do with a slightly different sequence of moves. Boulder problems are often

named with the flair of racehorses—at Indian Rock, one can find “Tea for Two'' and “Embryonic Journey”; Mortar Rock features “Baby Nat’s Plague” and “Sunshine Elluminati.”

Boulder problems are rated by difficulty, with “V0” being the easiest. The hardest route in Berkeley, the “Impossible Wall Traverse” at Mortar Rock, is a V13 completed successfully by only a handful of elite climbers. But if one is a first-timer seeing if they might catch the bug, they should ignore the established routes and just see how far they can get without touching down.

Berkeley’s urban bouldering is especially beginner-friendly because one can make their way along the sides of the rock without getting too high off the ground. Then they can try moving sideways, not up, traversing paths that keep them no more than two feet above the earth. The white chalky spots are clues, revealing the most useful handholds discovered by past climbers following the same route.

When minute rock features are the difference between “sending”— completing—a boulder problem and falling, climbers become amateur geologists. As they climb, they may notice the quartz-rich pocket that makes a great handhold but scrapes fingertips, or the planar flow banding, layers formed in the rock as the viscous volcanic flow cooled and fractured, too smooth for fingers to catch on but just ridgy enough for climbing shoe to stick to. Thanks to the Northbrae Rhyolite’s high silica content, even the tiniest nub can hold one’s weight, if they dare trust their feet.

Berkeley’s rock parks are all scattered within a mile or two of each other— Indian Rock and Mortar Rock are just across the street from each other on Indian Rock Avenue, and Cragmont and Remillard Rock Parks are a five minute drive away. Tiny Grotto Rock Park is right in the middle, on Santa Barbara Road.

To boulder, one will need at least climbing shoes. If someone wants to be able to try climbing more than a foot or two off the ground, they could consider borrowing or renting a crash pad to fall on. And finally, they’ll want climbing chalk to keep their hands dry—and to let them leave their own temporary mark on the ancient boulders of North Berkeley. ❤

INDIAN ROCK Climbers squeeze into this crack for ‘Embryonic Journey,’ a V3 boulder problem.

A Call Authenticity a

LAKSA LOVE For chef Nora Haron, blending cultures is part and parcel of having grown up in Singapore.

Call Authenticity for a

Chef Nora Haron and Nusantara cuisine that transcends borders

Late 2000s Clement Street housed Singapore Malaysian Restaurant. If the dry heat led to caving in the East Bay, the mie tek tek at Padi in San Leandro provided comfort. And having overcome heat, terrible parking and an awful drive from anywhere else in the Bay Area, making a stop at Jayakarta in Berkeley was a reward—not accounting for the long lines customers would’ve had to wade through.

All these locations closed either during or previous to the pandemic. This part of Southeast Asian cuisine is marked more for its precarity than its longevity in the Bay Area. Chef Nora Haron has a theory why.

Haron, director of culinary for Killiney Kopitiam USA and SanDai Restaurant + KopiBar, claims a number of these restaurants served the 2% of the Southeast Asians from the Malay Archipelago, as opposed to the 98% of the Americans, who comprise the majority of her customers. It’s a continuous battle to balance those two interests.

An early example she points to in her career is the initial frustration she felt when serving Hainanese chicken. She says, “With Drip Line, I remember when I first did the chicken rice, the Hainanese chicken rice, and you know you serve room temperature cold chicken? And

BY Marie Johnson

rice pudding. And some of these recipes came from previous connections. She often mentions that the sambal grits were inspired by her relationship with her ex-husband. It’s been written that her Indonesian concha is a mixture of her and her partner’s cultures. In finding these connections and servicing the customer base she’s acquired, Haron opposes the requests she receives for authentic Nusantaran cuisine. In response, she often asks, for whom is it authentic?

the Americans look at that like, are you serious? You’re serving me this? So at Drip Line, I had to fry that chicken to make it palatable for the Americans.” It’s not a revision she objected to, however, as her calling card is bridging elements of other cuisines with Nusantaran dishes.

Some of these dishes include: otak otak with trout, ribeye satay, laksa albondigas, bubur ayam with Mexican rice and horchata with Indonesian black

There’s a history regarding this call for cuisine authenticity. Most food historians note the inception of fusion food with Wolfgang Puck’s Chinois in Santa Monica, fusing elements of Chinese food with French cuisine. Many saw fusion as a way to make a name for themselves, whether or not the fusion dish was itself an original invention. After a while, according to the writer Jaya Saxena, the world oscillated back to a call for authenticity by the early 2000s.

Saxena writes, aided by apps like Foursquare and Yelp, anyone could be considered a food authority, and calls for an “authentic experience” were an aesthetic overture. Using the example of Mexican food, she states, “It is based on a preconceived notion of what ‘real’ Mexican food is, regardless of what relationship the diner has to Mexican cuisine in the first place.”

SANDAI COLORS The Nusantara region of Southeast Asia is known for bridging different countries’ influences into the cuisine.

It’s an aesthetic overture as much as it was a call for overcorrection for food media’s past faults. But in its efforts for overcorrection, Saxena argues it resulted in people wanting to admonish white chefs for getting famous cooking “ethnic” food and constraining non-white chefs to abide by said preconceived notions of authenticity. At this moment in time, calls for authenticity have been reduced to conservative and millennial outrage fodder, and the pendulum has effectively swung back.

The call for authenticity is also difficult to accomplish, as many chefs have pointed out, where do their histories fit in? Haron echoes this sentiment, saying, “There is this whole struggle with ‘your food is not authentic.’ Says who?” For a number of chefs, their cuisine cannot be delineated from one country to the next.

The Nusantara region of Southeast Asia is known for bridging different countries’ influences into the cuisine, and this is not including the influence of the many different colonial overlords. For Haron, blending cultures is part and parcel of having grown up in Singapore. From the Nusantara region alone, there are more than two dozen different laksas—spicy noodle soups—particular to a specific country or city, and it was important for Haron to introduce a Nusantara-Californian laksa in the Bay Area.

As far as Haron’s life story goes, her great-grandmother, grandmother and great-aunt came to Singapore on a boat from the Islands of Java to meet her greatuncle, who was waiting for them. Years later, her grandmother met her Keralabased Tamilian father there, who was working as a chemist for the British in the former British crown colony of Singapore.

Fast forward many years and to a new country, with Haron living in the Bay Area. Along the way, she’s taken a circuitous path to becoming a chef. She initially worked in fashion. When she was working in Italy, she rediscovered her love for food and returned to working in that industry. Her mother, a cook herself, wanted her to do anything but. And in many ways, certain conversations repeat themselves. So eventually she was sure to have the “Do you really want to do this?” conversation with her own kids.

Haron’s oldest son, Mohammad Haadee, is a barista, while her second son, Ali Haadee, makes the croissants for the Kopi bar. Her youngest, Nile Dunning, works at SanDai during the summer. She stresses how her daughter, Ameera, tried everything before working as her sous chef. Ameera Haadee helped her mother with the opening of both Killiney Kopitiam in Palo Alto and SanDai in Walnut Creek, the latter of which is living up to its name. SanDai, 三代, meaning “three generations” in Mandarin, continues a legacy that includes her mother’s inspiration, Haron’s recipes and her family working in the restaurant.

Legacy, while prescribed in the name of the restaurant, is not as relevant as

Haron’s desire to make Nusantaran cuisine in the Bay Area, and she is aware of the spotlight on her. She never stops moving, with a number of new projects, which include television. This past August, SanDai celebrated its own SanDai festival to celebrate the independence days of this region, and Haron, alongside Amanda Teckler, is moving forward with opening new locations, even though plans are slowed due to current market conditions.

The next location in the works, modeled off of Killiney, is opening in Valley Fair in 2024. In the meantime, if one is visiting SanDai, it’s suggested to pair the cuisine with a riesling, try the urab salad or get the laksa with a summer sling. ❤

TIGA NAGA SanDai’s Dragon Fruit Three Ways, with ice cream, meringue and dust.

PHOTO BY ADAHLIA COLE

Tenacious Focus

BY Lou Fancher

If it wasn’t a ridiculous, horrible idea, Bex Pezzullo might have named her company and the fine hard cider she crafts, “Tenacious Focus.” Instead, the hospitality and beverage industry veteran applied greater wisdom, selecting Sincere Cider and demonstrating the combined qualities— tenacity, focus, sincerity and wisdom—to produce a line of ciders that has swiftly risen to become a top California brand. »

PHOTO COURTESY OF SINCERE

SWEET HEAT

Sincere Cider makes a line of hard apple cider with ginger juice and agave.

How Bex Pezzullo crafted a line of fine hard ciders, Sincere Cider

Throughout the Bay Area and statewide, Sincere Cider can be found at Whole Foods, BevMo!, Lucky, Safeway, Raley’s and Berkeley Bowl, as well as multiple restaurants, liquor stores, bars, clubs, cafés and hotel dining rooms.

Sincere Cider is made with culinary apples from Washington’s Yakima Valley and fermented with a French chablis yeast. The company’s flagship flavor is Sincere Cider Dry Apple. But a new line introduced for summer 2023 expanded the frame with three season-inspired flavors: Granada, a savory mix of cider, Seville orange zest and pomegranate juice; Pine-Apple, a cider infused with juicy pineapple and foraged spruce tips available only in springtime; and Ginger Agave, a combination of hard apple cider with ginger juice and agave the company says is “heat meets sweet.”

Pezzullo certainly experienced heat, if not sweetness, while sweating in an Oakland garage through an arduous product development process—testing, trial and error, starting over and eventually finding success as she sought to perfect a Class A cider that has elegance, finesse and balance, and uses 100% whole ingredients, single-strength juices and can be infused with botanicals.

With a background as a winemaker and decades working in the hospitality and beverage industry, she canned her first batch and launched Sincere in March 2020. The plan was to travel in

her customized van to o the grid food festivals, concert venues, restaurants and locations throughout California to introduce her product.

“I was all in,” Pezzullo says, “but then the pandemic. Lockdown hit one week later. I had sunk my life-savings and had a warehouse of apple juice and aluminum (cans). My industry was events and restaurants, and those were all closed. I got pushed o a cli , but I was like, I’ll be damned if this is going to stop me. My parents instilled a can-do attitude. In companies I’ve worked in, they’ve always called me a force of nature. If I say I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna do it. I have this vision and luckily, it’s also really fun and charges my battery.”

A primary factor supercharging her energy is busting into the maledominated brewing industry as a woman-owned, LGBTQIA+ California cider brand.

“I try to identity first as a businesswoman, because that’s where the greatest pendulum shift can happen,” says Pezzullo. “Less than 2% of breweries nationwide are wholly owned by women. And less than 10% when you add in spousal ownership. I identify as a queer woman, and that’s very important. But if I change the narrative for one marginalized group, like women, a lot of ships will rise. Equality means equality.

“I put women first because there’s disadvantage for women owners and

producers. When I was coming to cider,

producers. When I was coming to cider, it was Goldilocks. I made bad wine in my garage, and was bummed I couldn’t try again until the next harvest, so I thought of making beer. But the culture was very ‘bro’ land; there was nobody who looked like me. It was a testosterone-filled space. Making cider, I met apple growers who ran matriarchal orchards. It was more fun to be in that space,” she continues.

Although she mentions fun often, there’s serious science, savvy and expertise applied in every corner of Sincere’s operations. Product, visual design and branding created with designer Molly Russell avoids the primarily cartoony or alpha-male vintage gas station aesthetics of competing brands and presents a crisp, bold, vibrant and infinitely iterative white/orange/ green graphic profile. The website and ordering process are similarly streamlined, but thorough.

Specific to the product, the apples from the Pacific Northwest are curated for the perfect blend of acidity and bite. The yeast is approachable and has the delicious expression of a fine chardonnay. Attention is paid to appearance, but never at the expense of flavor. A fall/ winter cider on the horizon, Blood Orange and Rosemary, was developed to capture the fruit’s vibrant orange-red color and balance the savory notes of fresh apples blended with the tang of citrus and hints of rosemary.

I try to identity first as a businesswoman, because that’s where the greatest pendulum shift can happen. Less than 2% of breweries nationwide are wholly owned by women. I identify as a queer woman, and that’s very important. But if I change the narrative for one marginalized group, like women, a lot of ships will rise. Equality means equality.

BEX PEZZULLO

“The guiding principles for me are the culinary influences of season and the best ingredients. It’s more savory than cloying, gloppy, candy bar-in-a-can cider,” Pezzullo notes. Recently, she says she’s even seen cider as outrageously promotional and stunting as what she recalls was a Jolly Rancher Fire Flavored Cinnamon Donut cider. “It was over the top. Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should,” she adds.

Which is where integrity and focus come into play. With “money coming back faster,” meaning a significant bump in sales and profitability, Pezzullo can more easily splinter off into new flavors. There’s an essentialism and practicality that protects her from the candy bar rabbit hole, arguably stemming from food insecurity and other deficits she experienced during her childhood, which set her priorities as an adult on sustenance, conviviality, community and connection.

Recently, Pezzullo donned renter’s “handcuffs,” signing a lease for a place in North Oakland to call home after the last few years of living in a van and couch surfing with friends and family members. “I’m still going to go out in the van,” she promises. “It’s become a part of my identity. I actually sold that first van in December and upgraded to a 37-foot class A. I wanted more space and comfort and to stay longer in spots and get out of stealth camping. I spent February to July this year moving up and down the coast of California.”

Now, she’s selling the 37-footer and looking to replace it with a decommissioned ambulance or first responder vehicle to build out a hybrid. “My family thinks I’m insane, but selling, buying and rehabbing vehicles is for me like trying on shoes. It’s OK to do. I’m still committed to going off the grid to find people to connect to. I like people who are with the wind. When I hit the road, I found freedom. I signed a lease, but I still want both,” she admits.

As for the future, Pezzullo says, “We’ve gotten to a point where I’m not bailing water out. I can sit back and decide the kind of company I want to create. My job is to determine how Sincere Cider

interacts with women-owned businesses, LBTQIA+ communities, nonprofits or other outliers who need us to support them, and I get to think about what employees are going to look like.

“A lot of people hire in-field reps, but I view it as a horizontal organization. It’s not about sales alone; it’s how can Sincere give the first hires agency and be authentically present to communities that

have welcomed us? The boat is planing now that I’m not struggling so much,” she continues.

Asked what she is most proud to have achieved, Pezzollo says she’s pleased to have created a grownup product that is made with integrity, balance, fun and playfulness. That, and her tenacity. Adds Pezzollo, “I set out to do this, and I’m actually doing it.” ❤

FORMER WINEMAKER Bex Pezzullo with cans of her company’s flagship flavor, Sincere Cider Dry Apple.

Vanities

Writer Tom Wolfe is the subject of ‘Radical Wolfe’

BY Kelly Vance

Nobody cares very much about essayists these days, let alone newspaper and magazine feature writers, no matter how outrageous they try to be or how much they’re followed in the classroom or the barroom. So in a way, Radical Wolfe—a documentary profile of Tom Wolfe, written by Berkeley’s Michael Lewis (Moneyball) and directed by Richard Dewey—is a postcard from another land, a stimulating, if ultimately wistful, look back at the last world-famous American reporter and his times.

PHOTO COURTESY OF KINO LORBER

BONFIRE LIGHTER American journalist and phrasemaker Tom Wolfe penned popular stream-of-consciousness social commentary.

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Phrasemaker Wolfe (1930-2018) gave the lexicon “the right stu ,” “the me decade,” “radical chic,” “masters of the universe,” “social x-ray women” and countless other arrows from a bottomless social commentary quiver. Basically, this native Virginian, Yale-educated darling of the New York literary establishment was a witness, a gadfly, a spy—the only person at the racetrack, the NASA launch or the art gallery who saw it his way, wrote it up in hypercharged language and called it out in no uncertain terms. His motto came from Honoré de Balzac: “I belong to the party of the opposition.”

From an enormous field, the filmmakers of Radical Wolfe select a familiar-looking montage of images from the latter half of the 20th century—was there ever a time so frantically busy?—plus a list of talking heads who give the impression of treading softly for the camera—author Gay Talese is the most enthusiastic cheerleader—while adding up Wolfe’s greatest hits.

A job at the New York Herald Tribune led to one at Esquire magazine, where Wolfe employed his onomatopoeic arsenal of interjections in sensational scene-setting, gleefully defying the classic “inverted pyramid” rules. His stream-of-consciousness accounts were an immediate hit with the public and

publishers. And in the ’60s, Wolfe’s feature stories became best-selling books, à la The Kandy-Colored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, about Southern California hot-rodders, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, about San Francisco hippies.

“[Wolfe] showed non-fiction writers how much is possible in the form,” says Lewis, whose 2015 Vanity Fair mag tribute to the white-suited dandy is the genesis of this doc. Also among the onscreen admirers: historian Niall Ferguson, journalist Gail Sheehy and Terry McDonell, Wolfe’s editor at Esquire Actor Jon Hamm contributes readings from Wolfe’s work, giving the film an appropriate Mad Men tilt.

Not every writer in Wolfe’s orbit was a fan. His real or manufactured feuds with Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, John Updike, J.D. Salinger and the entire sta of The New Yorker—Wolfe described that august publication as a “mummified relic”—kept gossip columnists in a feeding frenzy.

One of Wolfe’s hairiest dust-ups came in 1970, when he wrangled an invitation—he admits he stole it—to composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein’s fundraising soiree for members of the Black Panther Party, in the maestro’s posh Park Avenue home. When Wolfe’s

reportage was published as Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers, he gu awed at the spectacle of e ete “leftist” white socialites sipping cocktails with leatherjacketed Black revolutionaries.

Ostensibly the writer was out to expose rich culture-tourists attempting to buy their way into the equal rights clean-plate club. College professor Jamal Joseph, a former Panther, is not amused—he argues that Bernstein’s event benefited the Panthers’ programs and that Wolfe “put a derisive label on good work that was happening.”

The Right Stu , Wolfe’s most famous book, takes readers into the mind-frame of America’s astronauts at the height of the space race. But the resulting movie can’t escape being a commercial for the military-industrial complex. His first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, is a richly woven satirical masterpiece of crime, politics and greed, set in go-go ’80s New York. However, it was followed by a toothless film version.

Seen from today, Wolfe’s star gleams brightest in his role as a prose stylist who made the world safe for first-person journalistic shenanigans. His underlying conservatism, as highlighted by his contemporaries, is part of the entry fee to his fan club. Radical Wolfe lays out the story frankly, with benefits. ❤

“[Wolfe] showed non-fiction writers how much is possible in the form,” says Lewis, whose 2015 Vanity Fair mag tribute to the white-suited dandy is the genesis of this doc. Also among the onscreen admirers: historian Niall Ferguson, journalist Gail Sheehy and Terry McDonell, Wolfe’s editor at Esquire . Actor Jon Hamm contributes readings from Wolfe’s work, giving the film an appropriate Mad Men tilt.