Some day soon take yourself a stroll from Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza down the east side of Telegraph Avenue. Thread through students and shoppers past a couple of blocks of funky bars and stores. Soon, you will come to Rasputin Music, the flagship of nine Bay Area music outlets. There, in the windows at 2401 Telegraph, you will encounter a colorful experiment in “counter-education.”

Rasputin offers window displays featuring Japanese internment camps, disability rights, Black Panther history, and, as of this writing, homeless art.

Chief Financial Officer, Jonathan Fernandez, 41, and Assistant Advertising and Promotion Director, Alle Emershaw, 24, with the full support of Rasputin owner and President, Ken Sarachen, provide Berkeley visitors and residents with ever-changing window displays inspired by Berkeley organizations unassociated with the University.

Jonathan told me that owner Sarachen, “was so nice that he let me take over all of the windows on Telegraph Avenue and is allowing me to build a Berkeley History Museum on the mezzanine.” In addition, “he is constructing a new building on the corner where he wants to put a ‘Free Speech Movement in Berkeley’ Research Facility”—separate from academia—using, “an amazing amount” of Berkeley historical documentation that he had collected.

Jonathan loves Street Spirit and hands it out at the counter. Because of this, when Christine Hanlon was featured in a Spring 2007 issue, he directed Alle Emershaw, whom he calls, “a miracle worker,” to create a window display of Hanlon’s artwork.

The second print exhibit Alle created was inspired by the April 2007 issue, dedicated to Art and Activism, displaying prints, posters, paintings, drawings by several artists, and Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP) informational collages that demonstrate the connection between homelessness and defunding of affordable housing. Alle culled quotes from Street Spirit and enlarged them for the display along with artists’ website addresses.

After buying this issue from a homeless vendor outside Black Oak Books, Jonathan realized some artists, “seriously care about people,” and are not, “self-centered, ‘I-want-to-be-a-great-artist-and-get-a-million-dollars-for-my-paintings’ people, which really surprised me.”

To show there are many artists concerned about homelessness, “We tried to get the largest number of people we could” in the available space.

“I think people take fine art seriously enough that students and visitors walking by will re-think their position on homelessness because these people we revere called, ‘fine artists’ take a particular position on homelessness.”

Jonathan noted Matthew Behnke’s photo of the shopping cart arch sculpture in the Albany Landfill community now destroyed for a running path. “That really hurt.”

Art Hazelwood (whose work is featured on page 5 of this issue of the Street Sheet), “ties freedom of speech and homelessness together” for him.

Alle Emershaw’s artful display of works by Arnold White, Jonathan Burstein, and Attorney Osha Neuman, and Malcolm McClay’s photos of numbered preventable homeless deaths march across the windows.

Do adjacent businesses complain about the homeless art exhibit or Johnny Allen Shaw’s video, My Big Fat Homeless Berkeley Movie? Jonathan laughed. “If I put ten homeless people along my windows,” (he considered hiring some), “that would hurt business.” A homeless art show is distant and safe.

On Friday, April 25, 2008, when I walked into his roomy second floor office, Jonathan was viewing several non-profits’ Websites, possibly for future window projects. He reported that the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA) has raised millions of dollars for orphans from wars occurring in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq. MECA’s website, reports, “We educate North Americans [about] the brutal impact of US foreign policy on [these children’s lives].”

Jonathan recently attended a MECA event at the College Avenue Presbyterian Church. Photography was displayed. Poets traveled from SUNY Buffalo to read. A 17-year–old Berkeley High School musician performed. “I have some understanding of music from working here, and he was incredible! I walked in not knowing what to expect. I left with tears running down my face. It was so beautiful. [The MECA project] is going to be a set of windows.”

Another display may highlight the work of Rosemary Stasek, former Mountain View City Council member and mayor who traveled first to Afghanistan after the Taliban were pushed back. Ms. Stasek, a friend of Jonathan’s, raised money to educate Afghani women. She set up schools in tents so that if the tents were blown up, other tents could be purchased for a few hundred dollars, and school could resume. “She is brilliant and does amazing things with her life.”

I asked Jonathan what motivated these displays.

“The huge amount of ignorance about what is going on in the world [understood] in a humane, loving, caring way.” News analyses reduce such issues to statistics and don’t present a human face. People don’t understand the humanity behind world problems.”

It, “breaks [his] heart” that students walking up and down Telegraph Avenue have no idea or consciousness that the freedoms they exercise, take for granted, and are so willing to give up didn’t exist 30 years ago.

Berkeley is more conservative than when he came in 1988. “If you make people pay $30,000 yearly for college, you won’t get people willing to take chances with their education.” As people age, they often acquire private property. This sometimes makes them prone to conservatism, exploitation, and support of the status quo, plagued by fears that “dirty” homeless people who do scary things will drive out business.

Jonathan told me his purpose was to create a series of, “educational projects.” “As the students walk to UC Berkeley, I want them to learn something they aren’t learning at the University—more real than any class they are going to take.

“The first exhibits I did were photographs of Telegraph Avenue, the street they walk on every day, and what the students were doing that many years ago.” He contacted photographers asking them to print undeveloped negatives from the ‘60s.

“Berkeley is the greatest educational community in the world.” However, many independent Berkeley educational organizations began, “as a counterpoint to the University,” in the ‘60s with SLATE, the new student left, precursor to the Free Speech movement, dedicated to ending nuclear testing, stopping capital punishment, and ensuring civil rights.

Michael Rossman, president of the Free Speech Movement—“an amazing human being and educator,”—encouraged Jonathan: “Rossman spent his whole life doing education outside of the system.” When a photographer told Jonathan that Rossman resided in Berkeley, Jonathan’s phone call prompted an invitation to Rossman’s house. Meeting Rossman a couple of years ago, “changed my life.” Rossman knows how to motivate people, “to think more clearly.”

Another inspiring individual, Ken Stein, “created an amazing window display on the disability rights organization, the Center For Independent Living. We called it ‘Berkeley’s Other Revolution.’”

Jonathan learned that at one time people at UC Berkeley with disabilities were not allowed to attend classes. Students with disabilities, lacking access, were locked in one residence hall. “They were going to the University, but they couldn’t go anywhere.”

What kind of person creates educational window exhibits on issues like disability and homelessness that break the mold for surrounding businesses?

Jonathan grew up in Claremont near Los Angeles and was conditioned to live out the American Dream.

After Harvard undergrad, the bastion of open debate where the administration let students explore any project they chose, Jonathan was accepted to Boalt School of Law. He imagined he was coming to a liberal place where people seeking meaningful lives attended law school because it was in Berkeley. “All I met there were people who wanted to be rich corporate lawyers or prosecuting attorneys.” Devastated, he quit.

Though he worked successfully in several businesses, with two small children, he started making tie-dye for extra money. Every weekend, he stood on the street talking to people. “Somehow it changed the person I was” into someone who was “trying to be helpful and supportive to the homeless people on Telegraph. There are a lot of vendors on the street who help homeless people every day [by employing them].”

“I found that the people on Telegraph were sweet people with interesting things to say, and they have problems” he couldn’t solve. He could, however, help with small acts that improved their lives.

Jonathan described his personal journey toward developing empathy—using creative thought to stand in the mind and heart of another, imagining how they feel or think. Suffering through a harmful, unhealthy relationship, he contemplated suicide.

Instead, he began developing an unusual level of compassion and caring for marginalized people and those living on the street. He began expressing the positive things he wanted to feel—love and kindness towards people. “Because I was hurting a lot, I could recognize hurt in others. I wanted to care for that hurt.”

He could understand how, as an adult, someone could be mentally wounded, ending up hopeless, too depressed to go to work.

“If you take the time to know the person a little, you are treating them like a human. Once you remove them from a category, like ‘homeless,’ you have to deal with exactly who they are—people just like you. They didn’t have opportunities you had. But, whatever happened, they are homeless. That could be you.”

I thanked Jonathan and Alle for their generosity in creating this display.

Said Jonathan, “Generosity only happens when it hurts. When you’re giving something you really need, that’s when you’ve been generous. If you’re giving something that you have in abundance, and it’s easy for you, you’re not being generous. You shouldn’t even be thanked for it.

“I’ll let you know when I’m doing something generous.” This effort seemed to Jonathan “a Nothing.”

“Rosie Stasek going to Afghanistan and [helping] people with her whole life and being—That’s Something!

“It hurts that this is the world we’re in,” he said.

Seated on Cathedral steps bathed in a golden glow, Jonathan Burstein’s homeless man seems to ponder that sentiment.

Carol

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