Cat Video Festival Comes To Oaktown

(Above: Dusty the Klepto Kitty. Photo by Jean Chu)

More than 5,000 cat lovers are expected to descend on Oakland's Uptown district on May 11, when the city hosts the Bay Area premiere of the Internet Cat Video Festival.

Eighty videos of cats doing what they do best - being cute – will be projected in high definition by a 15,000-lumen projector onto the Great Wall of Oakland, a giant100-foot-by-100-foot wall on West Grand Avenue between Broadway and Valley Street.

"There's something going on in our culture were cats are really hot right now," says Issabella Shields, the Great Wall's Executive Director. "Instead of watching cat videos secretly in your cubicle by yourself and feeling guilty for wasting time at work, this is your chance to watch them outdoors with your friends."

Shields expects the festival to draw a diverse audience, including "Internet addicts, families who have cats of their own, and hipsters who think cat videos are ironic."

The festival, which began last year at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, will feature 80 of the most popular felines on the Web, including the Surprised Kitten, Henri the Existential Cat, and Dusty the Klepto Kitty, whose larcenous ways earned him an appearance on The Late Show With David Letterman.

"They flew us back to New York for the show," says Dusty's owner, Jean Chu of San Mateo. "Dusty flew business class; I flew coach."

Dusty will make a personal appearance at the festival together with some of his ill-gotten gains, which include 16 car wash mitts, seven sponges, 213 dish towels, seven wash cloths, five towels, 18 shoes, 73 socks, 100 gloves, one pair of mittens, three aprons, 40 balls, four pairs of underwear, one dog collar, six rubber toys, one blanket, three leg warmers, two Frisbees, one golf club head cover, one safety mask, two mesh bags, one bag of water balloons, one pair of pajama pants and eight bathing suits.

The videos, which begin at sundown, will be preceded by a festival starting at 3 p.m. that will include live bands playing cat-themed music, an "arts and cats" area featuring cat-themed works by local artisans, local food trucks, and animal rescue groups with cats and kittens available for adoption.

As the sun sets, the Great Wall's artist-in-residence group, Bandaloop, will perform a cat-themed aerial duet on the Great Wall, followed by the videos themselves.

Tickets to the festival are available at oaklandvidfest.eventbrite.com. Admission is $10 for adults; $5 for youths 16 and under. A limited number of VIP tickets, entitling the bearer to a beach chair in the front row, will be sold for $75.

In addition, the Oakland Museum – renamed Mew-seum for the occasion - will preview the videos on May 10, the night before the festival. Tickets are $25 and can be obtained at omcacatvidscreening.eventbrite.com. The preview will include a panel headed by Scott Stulen, Project Director of the Walker Art Center, the man who came up with the idea of a cat video festival in the first place.

"We put a press release on our blog with a call for nominations," he says. "Within two hours it had gone viral, and we ended up with more than 10,000 videos, which we narrowed down to 80."

They were inundated by requests for media credentials from all over the world, but Stulin was still unprepared for the number of peoples who turned out.

"We thought maybe a couple of dozen people would come out, get a case of beer, and watch some cat videos. But they just kept coming and coming and coming, to the point where it shut down the freeways. People were spilling out on the streets and onto the neighbors' lawns. It was the most attended, most media-covered event in the 75 years of the Walker Art Center."

Any downside?

"Only one: having to deal with the cats' agents. Yes, several of the videos have agents."

My Girls

It's been 11 months since my kittens Pepe and Sally were born and eight months since I adopted them, and my life has been turned upside down in the happiest possible way.

This is the first time I've had littermates, and the dynamic is different from anything I've ever known before. For the first time in my life, I am not the most important relationship in my cats' lives. Their most important relationship is with each other.

It warms my heart to see how much they love each other. They eat together, they sleep together, they play together, and they patrol my home together, sashaying through the room side-by-side as if they own the place, which, of course, they do.

Don't get me wrong: They have plenty of love left over for me. It's just that they're not dependent on me for emotional security, as my other cats were. They're dependent on each other.

The love they give me is purely because they feel like it, not because they have to. It's the highest possible compliment.

I see now that I was crazy not to adopt two at a time before. Believe it or not, two cats are less work than one.

I don't have to worry about entertaining them; they're happy entertaining each other. I don't have to feel guilty about leaving them at home because they're perfectly content with each other's company.

And I don't have to let them outside for exercise, as I did with my previous cats, because they get plenty of exercise chasing each other around the apartment. They're blissfully happy, and they'll live a lot longer.

So why am I telling you this now, instead of waiting a month until they're a year old? Because I'm so grateful to the rescue group that saved their lives and socialized them before they came to me, Island Cat Resources and Adoption in Alameda, and I want to give them a plug for their fundraising auction on May 4.

ICRA specializes in rescuing homeless cats. If they're young enough to be socialized for adoption, like Pepe and Sally, they're placed in a foster home for intensive TLC before going to their forever home – which, in this case, turned out to be mine.

If they're too old to be tamed, they're vaccinated and spayed or neutered and then returned to their original feral colonies, where they'll live out their lives under the watchful eyes of ICRA volunteers.

It's really the only solution to the massive cat overpopulation problem in this country, which forces animal shelters to euthanize cats by the millions every year.

ICRA has no paid staff, no shelter, no overhead of any kind. All its funds come from private donations, and all of it goes to the cats.

Its big fundraising effort of the year is the annual Champagne Silent Auction, which will take place at 7 p.m. next Saturday, May 4^th, at the Elks' Lodge in Alameda, featuring great food, great wine, one-of-a-kind items (including a football signed by Raider running back Darren McFadden) and the jazz stylings of guitarist Terrence Brewer. It's a lot of fun and for a great cause.

For more information, or to donate to ICRA's lifesaving mission, go to icraeastbay.org or call 510-869-2584.

Tell 'em Pepe and Sally sent you.

Happy Birthday, Habitot!

Who are the smartest people in the world? Toddlers.

They have to be. They face the daunting task of programming their own brains to create order out of chaos.

They have to learn cause and effect, up and down, in and out, hot and cold, light and dark, and thousands of other abstract concepts.

These are the make-or-break years. If they don't learn all they need to learn, they'll be playing catch-up for the rest of their lives.

Sadly, there are precious few resources for children under five – the age when child development experts say you learn more than you'll learn the whole rest of your life.

One shining exception is the Habitot Children's Museum in downtown Berkeley, where little ones can play at their own pace in a variety of stimulating environments. Among them:

·                     Finger painting and sculpture making in the Art Studio.

·                     Learning about gravity, motion and the power of falling water at the Waterworks.

·                     Learning where food comes from at the Back To The Farm exhibit, featuring a chicken coop, fishing pond, hay bales and child-size John Deere tractors.

And all this for a modest admission fee: $8 for kids, $10 for grownups. But Habitot also has free programs for the families who need them the most – the poorest of the poor.

They include families in homeless shelters, recently incarcerated mothers trying to regain custody of their kids, teenage parents who are still children themselves, and special needs kids who never go outside because they people stare at them and make them feel uncomfortable.

"More importantly, while the parent see their kids playing in the museum in a social way with other kids, they get tears in their eyes because they didn't realize what was possible for their children," says founder and executive director Gina Moreland.

"One mother with a 13-month-old baby carried it around 24/7 because there was no safe place to put it down, which meant the baby was missing out on crawling, which in turn is crucial in developing hand/eye coordination. She was thrilled to be in our infant/toddler area with clean mats for the baby to crawl on."

Habitot will celebrate its 15^th anniversary on April 20 with a birthday party featuring a giant birthday cake, children's songs in both Spanish and English, and a dance party. Admission for the day is free, thanks to a donation from ScholarShare.

There is no way Habitot could provide all these desperately needed services without our help. Yes, it could raise admission fees, but that would price it out of the reach of the very people it is trying to serve.

Government and foundation donations are both down. That leaves you and me. You can donate online at habitot@lmi.net or mail a check to Habitot Children's Museum, 1563 Solano Ave., Berkeley 94707.

Get creative! If your service club, church group, fraternal organization or just plain friends want to invent your own fundraising project, call Moreland at 510-647-1111 ext 11.

"We even take tiny BART tickets," she says. "Last year we raised more than $1,000 that way. There are so many ways to support us, even if you don't have a lot of money."

It's up to us, folks. So what if you don't have any small children of your own? These kids are the only future we have.

Santayana Was Right

                                                 (Above: Nell Gwynn)

With all due respect to President Obama, I think he's forgetting something when he calls for more emphasis on math and science in the schools.

Yes, they're important. They will be crucial to our kids competing successfully in the global market.

But will it also make them better citizens? Not necessarily. For that, they'll need to be well grounded in another subject, one that is getting almost no resources at all: history.

How can they tell where our country is going if they don't know where it's been? How will they be able to see through demagogues' lies if they don't know the real story?

George Orwell's Big Brother said, "He who controls the past controls the future, and he who controls the present controls the past." That was true while I was growing up in the 1950s, when the textbooks taught us the "Gone With The Wind" version of the Civil War: namely, that the slaves were happy with their lot, and the Ku Klux Klan were the good guys.

That myth made it much harder for everyone to face the truth about race relations in this country, and it delayed the march of justice for many generations.

The only protection against politicians' lies is a well-informed public. That means citizens who understand that the United States is NOT a "Christian country," as some claim; it's a country that was founded by Christians who were deeply skeptical of allowing any church, even their own, to dictate how everyone should act.

The Founding Fathers had read their history, and they knew all too well what had happened in Europe, where religious wars devastated the population.

They also knew their ancient history, and they knew that the Roman republic was destroyed when it abandoned the rule of law, leaving Rome at the mercy of competing generals.

That's why they created three different branches of government and balanced them carefully so that none of them could overpower the other two.

But when a society forgets its past, it's forced to reinvent the wheel, re-fighting battles that everyone assumed were won decades ago.

Don't believe me? Look at the current efforts to undermine abortion rights, access to contraception, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Pernicious special interests are trying to undo these dearly won freedoms, and the greatest weapon they have going for them is our collective historical amnesia.

But apart from such practical considerations, there's one more reason to study history, which was best expressed by one of my college professors, John Morton Blum. He said, "When you come down to it, the best reason to is that it's so much fun!"

And he was right. What human mind, even Shakespeare's, could come up with stories that are as fascinating as those that happened in real life?

Take Nell Gwynn, the mistress of King Charles II, who balanced the rival interests in his kingdom by having two official mistresses: one Catholic and one Protestant.

An angry Protestant mob surrounded Nell's coach as it was entering the palace, howling, "Hang the King's Catholic whore!"

"Wait, good people!" cried Nell. "I am the King's Protestant whore!"

And they carried her into the palace on their shoulders, cheering all the way.

You can't make stuff like this up.

Thumbs Up

The Vatican might as well convert the Papal Apartments – a euphemism for a palatial 10-room suite featuring sumptuous furnishings and priceless works of art - into a museum and make some money off the tourists, because no pope is ever going to live there again.

They wouldn't dare, not after Pope Francis has set a precedent by refusing to move in and living instead in a simple, unadorned 2-room flat elsewhere on the Vatican grounds. It would seem too immodest.

You have to hand it to Pope Francis. Refusing to move in was a masterpiece of symbolism, in line with his theme of fewer regal trappings and more humility. He's clearly a very smart guy, but what else would you expect from a Jesuit?

Which brings me to my favorite Catholic joke, which I first heard the late Harry Reasoner tell on the CBS Evening News: A Dominican, a Benedictine and a Franciscan are arguing good-naturedly about which order is the holiest, and they finally decide to submit the question to prayer.

Suddenly, the heavens open up, and down flies a pure white dove with a slip of paper in its beak, which it lays at the feet of the three monks. It reads, "You are all equally favored in my sight. Signed, God S.J."

* * *

Meanwhile, the Westboro Baptist Church – that vile group of homophobes who picket the funerals of fallen American soldiers – have announced plans to picket the funeral of film critic Roger Ebert, who died last week after a heroic battle against cancer.

I knew Roger slightly, and let me tell you: He would have considered it an honor.

We were introduced by my college classmate, Gene Siskel, with whom Roger partnered in their groundbreaking movie review TV show for two decades until Gene's death – also after a heroic battle against cancer – in 1999.

What Gene and Roger did was amazing: no less than conducting a running, 20-year debate about art.

Granted, it's a popular art – the movies – but their debate was a serious one. Gene and Roger may have been partners on their TV show, but they were also rivals, working for rival newspapers. And they had very different ideas about film, which they expressed with a passion that sometimes made viewers think they disliked each other.

They didn't. Yes, they argued; but they argued like brothers. They had great respect for each other, both professionally and personally, and they both were right.

Now Gene has company in the Great Balcony in the Sky. Thumbs up to both of them.

                            * * *

Finally, a sad farewell to Annette Funicello, every Baby Boomer boy's first crush and an iconic figure to everyone my age, boy or girl. The most popular by far of all the Mousketeers, Annette grew up to become a gracious adult who bore the multiple sclerosis that eventually took her life with a dignity that surprised none of her fans.

She was called "America's Sweetheart" because she always seemed to be even prettier on the inside than she was on the outside. No scandal, no story of diva-like behavior, ever attached itself to her name. The only consolation is that her suffering is over. So long, Annette.

M-I-C. See you real soon.

K-E-Y. Why? Because we like you!

M-O-U-S-E.

The Kids Are All Right

I was driving home to Berkeley last Saturday night with George Cleve, the artistic director of the Midsummer Mozart Festival, and his wife, flutist Maria Tamburrino. We were coming back from Alameda, where we attended a retirement party for our mutual veterinarian, Dr. Alan Shriro of Berkeley Dog & Cat Hospital.

As we approached the corner of Dwight and Martin Luther King Way, a bus right in front of us suddenly hit an 18-year-old boy riding a bicycle, sending him crashing to the pavement.

The kid was lying crumpled on the ground, crying from pain and fear. Both he and the bus driver were in a state of shock. The victim struggled to get up, but he couldn't.

Quick as a flash, Maria jumped out of my car and rushed over to him. Putting her arms around him, she comforted him, warning him not to move and reassuring him that he was going to be OK because he was responding clearly to her questions.

It worked. He calmed down and waited for the paramedics to arrive, which didn't take long thanks to some other heroes on the scene.

They were half a dozen guys from In-And-Out Burger, not much older than the victim. They were wearing their In-And-Out Burger shirts and hats and riding in their In-And-Out Burger cookout trailer.

As soon as they arrived on the scene they immediately took charge. One young man called 911, while the others fanned out, laying flares and directing traffic away from the accident.

Thanks to their quick action, the paramedics soon showed up and took over. They ascertained that the boy wasn't hurt too badly, but they decided to take him to the hospital anyway just in case.

And me? What did I do to help?

Absolutely nothing. While the guys from In-And-Out Burger were taking care of business, I was still fumbling with my cell phone, trying to figure out how to call 911. I had panicked, and I was useless.

I'm not trying to beat myself up – I think my discombobulation was a common reaction – I'm just trying to say that if you have any doubts about the younger generation, don't. As the Who used to sing, the kids are all right.

* * *

OK, having said that, let my warn you: Don't drive anywhere near Berkeley High School at noontime or 3 p.m., when school lets out.

You could find yourself trapped for a half hour – and often even longer - in a sea of students who keep crossing the street nonstop, regardless of the traffic lights. And there's nothing you can do about it. They just keep coming. And coming. And coming. And you keep waiting. And waiting. And waiting.

I don't blame the kids; I blame the school administrators. They've received tons of complaints, especially from local merchants, but they haven't lifted a finger to try to solve the problem.

I don't know if it's because they lack jurisdiction over what the kids do once they step off campus, or if it's because they don't have the money to hire crossing guards. But would it be asking too much for them to hold a school assembly and educate their students on the importance of being good neighbors?

So Let It Be Written, So Let It Be Done

It's time again for that annual Easter event, the marathon 4½-hour showing of Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments" Easter weekend on ABC.

Why ABC shows it on Easter is beyond me, since the story really is about Passover. Fortunately for the network, Passover and Holy Week overlap this year; but that doesn't usually happen.

This year, I propose a drinking game: Every time a character utters an outlandish line, you take a drink. For instance:

"Catch a lotus and you catch a wish!"

"Are you a master builder or a master butcher?"

"A charging chariot knows no rank!"

And my favorite: "Oh, Moses, Moses, you stubborn, splendid, adorable fool!"

Needless to say, "The Ten Commandments" doesn't have anything to do with religion. It's about what most Hollwood religious movies are about: sex, sex and more sex, all dressed up in Biblical trappings. And DeMille was the master.

The most elaborate scene is the big orgy going on at the foot of Mount Sinai while Moses is up on the summit getting the tablets. It took more than three weeks to film, and according to Charlton Heston's autobiography, the process was so grueling, one of the female extras was overheard complaining, "Who do I have to [sleep with] to get OUT of this movie?"

Incidentally, Heston wasn't DeMille's first choice to play Moses. He wanted William Boyd, television's Hopalong Cassidy, but Boyd turned him down.

Anne Baxter wasn't the first choice to play Nefretiri, either. Audrey Hepburn was slated for the role, but DeMille vetoed her at the last moment for being "too slim."  (Cecil liked his leading ladies voluptuous.)

The movie is a treasure trove of bad acting, and the worst has to be Heston himself.

"That Chuck Heston is a nice guy," said fellow actor Aldo Ray, "but what a hamola!"

There's a longstanding rumor that one of the 25,000 extras was a young man named Fidel Castro, playing an Egyptian soldier. In her autobiography, Shirley MacLaine said she asked Castro about it when she met him, and she received an ambiguous answer.

So how did DeMille achieve the movie's crowning special effect, the parting of the Red Sea? Simple: They poured 300,000 gallons of water into a tank and then played the film backwards.

Incidentally, you won't be seeing the entire movie Sunday night. Even 4½ hours (including commercials) aren't long enough for the whole thing, so ABC always cuts a few minutes here and there to squeeze it into the time frame, leading one critic to quip, "It's been trimmed to seven commandments."

I don't mean to pick on DeMille. Sex-and-sandal movies have been a Hollywood staple since the silent era.

But if you're in the mood for a truly religious film, a handful do exist. Among them: "Monsieur Vincent" (about Saint Vincent de Paul), "Francis of Assisi" (which affected actress Dolores Hart, who played Saint Claire, so deeply that she quit Hollywood and became a nun), "The Passion of Joan of Arc,"  "The Passion According to Saint Matthew" by Pier Paolo Pasolini, and – believe it or not – "Monty Python's Life of Brian," which has more true spirituality in any given five minutes than "The Ten Commandments" has in 4½ hours.

Happy Easter, and happy Passover, too.