In her latest film she takes on the role of cult character Mary Poppins.

And Emily Blunt looked like a real Hollywood leading actress when she entered the world premiere of “Mary Poppins Returns” in LA on Thursday night.

The 35-year-old English actress looked absolutely stunning in a sheer white dress with puffy sleeves and a deep V-neck that perfectly showcased her delicate cleavage.

In love! Emily Blunt looked like a Hollywood leading lady when she appeared with husband John Krasinski at the world premiere of Mary Poppins Returns in LA on Thursday night

There, Emily was accompanied by her husband John Krasinski, who looked dapper in a burgundy suit, polygon-patterned shirt and contrasting herringbone tie as he held his loved one's hand down the red carpet.

Surrounded by fans and photographers, the couple only had eyes for each other at the celebration. They looked at each other lovingly on the carpet.

In her white dress by Russian fashion designer Yanina Couture, the Golden Globe winner was a style icon.

Wonder in white! Emily looked stunning in a ruched white dress with flowing sleeves and a plunging neckline at the world premiere of Mary Poppins Returns in LA on Thursday. Gorgeous: The dress epitomised pure elegance, with a ruched centre and floor-length skirt, as well as full peasant sleeves. Partners in everything! The happy couple work closely together and have two beautiful daughters, Hazel and Violet. Supporting role: By her side was husband John, who looked dapper in a burgundy suit while holding his ladylove's hand. A bit of glitter: Emily's look also included dazzling chandelier earrings with a collection of rings

The dress embodied pure elegance, with a gathered center and floor-length skirt as well as long peasant sleeves.

Emily tied her vanilla locks back into a low chignon for an adorable undone touch and kept her makeup looking natural.

Her look also included dazzling chandelier earrings and an assortment of rings.

Emily enjoyed posing at the event with her friend Lin Manuel-Miranda, who plays Jack, the lamplighter.

The look of love! Surrounded by fans and photographers, the two looked loved up on the red carpet Like a fine wine: The 'Office' star teamed her burgundy polygon-print shirt with a contrasting herringbone tie while holding her ladylove's hand on the red carpet You're glowing, girl! Emily tied her vanilla tresses back in a low chignon for an adorably undone touch and wore her makeup with a natural shine Loving that shimmer: The Hamilton creator was joined by his wife Vanessa Nadal, who glowed in a shimmering one-shoulder salmon-colored dress Broadway's favorite bride! Emily beamed as she struck a stunning pose with her boyfriend and co-star Lin-Manuel A Hollywood icon! The legendary Dick Van Dyke looked chipper at the premiere No stranger to romance! The comedian played narrator and trusty chimney sweep Bert in the original film No way! Dick seemed speechless about the news that lead actress Emily told the experienced film star

The Hamilton creator was accompanied by his wife Vanessa Nadal, who glowed in a shimmering one-shoulder salmon-colored dress.

He also became friends with the legendary 92-year-old Dick Van Dyke, who appeared in good spirits at the event.

The comedian, who played narrator and loyal chimney sweep Bert in the original film, looked dapper in a navy suit, jazzed up by an aquamarine tie.

Even though Dick carried a cane, he was still quite lively.

Sealed with a kiss: Van Dyke kissed his wife and lovely companion Arlene Silver, who is 46 years his junior, on the red carpet Delighted! Dick was happy to be able to spend time with the exquisite Emily at the event A secret to be revealed! Co-stars Dick and Lin-Manuel seemed to get on splendidly during the event They went the extra mile! Emily Mortimer opted for a dress full of embellishments that was covered in pearls and jewels for a luxurious effect Artistic! Emily's on-screen sibling Ben Whishaw was chic in a white suit that looked like it was covered in graphite doodles

He made the most of the premiere, romping around on the red carpet, getting close to leading lady Emily, and kissing his wife and lovely date Arlene Silver, who is 46 years his junior.

Emily Mortimer, who plays an adult version of the character Jane in the film, also wowed in white.

She opted for an embellished dress that was studded with pearls and jewels for a luxurious effect, and her red clutch added a colorful accent that matched her cherry red lips.

Emily's on-screen sibling Ben Whishaw wore a sleek white suit that looked like it was covered in graphite scribbles.

Dressed to match! Matt Damon and wife Luciana Barroso were perfectly matched for their date night at the premiere.Sexy! Luciana gave a sexy glimpse of her side in a black spaghetti strap dress with lace panels down the side.Gray lady! Karen Gillan, of Dr. Who fame, looked perfectly demure in a cropped gray argyle sweater that revealed just a hint of her midriff.A perfect pair! Equal parts classic and fashion-forward, a steel brocade skirt rounded out the entire ensemble.Dyed red or not! Karen complemented her porcelain skin with a swipe of red lipstick that matched the velvet bow that held her luscious auburn locks together, as well as a tiny, red crocodile leather handbag.That includes two: John Stamos and wife Caitlin McHugh also enjoyed a night on the town and looked loved up on the red carpet.

Karen Gillan, known from “Dr. Who”, looked absolutely demure in her short, grey argyle sweater that showed just a bit of belly.

A steel brocade skirt was both classic and fashionable and rounded off the entire ensemble.

To show off her sense of style, she complemented her outfit with pointed patent leather ankle strap shoes for a little flair.

Karen accentuated her porcelain skin with a touch of red lipstick that matched the velvet bow that held together her luscious auburn locks, as well as a tiny red crocodile leather handbag.

Masterful monochrome: Beth Behrs paired a black and white bow blouse with textured blonde curls, pops of color, and block heels. Sleek! Arrow's Katherine McNamara looked chic in a fashionable little black velvet dress and pointed ankle boots. Elegant in ivory: Bellamy Young looked elegant in a crisp white pantsuit with matching heels and a shiny gold belt. Chic: Jordana Brewster looked chic in wide silk pants with a simple illustrated top. Sleek: She wore her hair straight and accessorized with pointed Mary Jane heels.

Matt Damon and his wife Luciana Barroso had a date at the event. They were perfectly coordinated for their evening: Matt was dressed all in black, while Luciana showed off a sexy side in a black dress with spaghetti straps and lace inserts on the side.

The 42-year-old Argentinian beauty wore a loose updo, applied fresh makeup and framed her face with gold hoop earrings.

John Stamos and his wife Caitlin McHugh also enjoyed a night on the town and looked rejuvenated on the red carpet. The Full House alumnus, 55, looked dapper in a pinstripe suit with a red pocket square, while Caitlyn wore an emerald green lace dress with a thigh-skimming hem.

Jordana Brewster wore wide-leg silk pants and a simple patterned top. The Furious 7 star wore her cinnamon-colored hair elegantly and pointed Mary Jane pumps.

Keep warm! Josh Gad, part of the Disney family through his roles in Frozen and the live-action Beauty and the Beast, bundled up in a black pea coat and plaid pants. Peek a boo! Lori Loughlin flashed a bit of skin in a striped blouse with sheer black ties. Lost! Set years after the original, Mary Poppins Returns features the magical nanny (Blunt) as she returns to the Banks siblings (Mortimer and Whishaw) to help raise their children. Tiny talent! Joel Dawson plays little Georgie Banks in the movie Little Star! Tiny Brit Pixie Davies plays the character Anabel Banks in the movie Cast! At the premiere, there were extras dressed as chimney sweeps and townspeople. Greetings from Russia: The Golden Globe winner's white dress by Russian fashion designer Yanina Couture was a model of style

The “Saved By The Bell” actress paired checkered navy pants with her little daughter’s beige and blue patterned blouse.

Beth Behrs paired a black and white pussy bow blouse with textured blonde curls, bold colors, and layered shoes.

Katherine McNamara from Arrow wore a stylish little black velvet dress and pointed ankle boots. Bellamy Young looked elegant in a crisp white pantsuit with matching heels and a shiny gold belt.

Lori Loughlin flashed some skin in a striped blouse with transparent black stripes. She combined the look with velvet leggings, over-the-knee boots, a Gucci belt and a matching chain bag.

Cute couple! Matthew Morrison and his wife Renee both chose a fashionable ensemble for the evening. Well suited! Lesley Ann Warren looked chic in a black suit with a double-breasted jacket tailored to her feminine figure. Old and new: Utkarsh Ambudkar from The Mindy Projects wore traditional Indian clothing for the occasion. Wright's stuff! Mark Wright from The Royals opted for a simple olive sports jacket with boots and slim trousers.

Lesley Ann Warren looked chic in a black suit with a double-breasted jacket tailored to her feminine figure.

Burgundy heels and curly chestnut locks completed the look, along with a red satin snap-button clutch.

Set years after the original film, Mary Poppins Returns follows the magical nanny (Blunt) as she returns to the Banks siblings (Mortimer and Whishaw) to help raise their children.

“Mary Poppins Returns” will be released in the US on December 19, 2018.

He makes her laugh: Billy Crystal wore a suit with sneakers while attending the event with his wife Janice, mama's daughter! Caroline Rhea looked great in red as she took her daughter Ava Rhea Economopoulos to the premiere She's got the blues: The little talent Ariana Greenblatt, who played the young Gamora in Avengers: Infinity War, looked adorable in powder blue

The post Emily Blunt seems radiant in white as she dances with hubby John Krasinski at Mary Poppins Returns appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

For all the discrete wonders of JS Bach's St. John Passion – the stirring solos, harmonically layered choruses, soaring choruses and piercing orchestral accompaniment – American Bach's performance on Sunday, March 10, reminded the enthusiastic audience at St. Mark's Lutheran Church in San Francisco remembers what a captivating achievement of musical storytelling this great work is. The composer's depiction of Christ's torment and crucifixion, which is now exactly 300 years old, seemed lively and eternally new.

While many took credit for the afternoon, Gregório Taniguchi's lyrically astute and emotionally penetrating account of the narrative evangelist was the defining center and driving force of the line. It's not often that a recitative can do so much, but this wonderfully expressive tenor used his crystal-clear German diction, modulating timbres and piercing line readings to enliven the intricate details of Christ's suffering, death and redemption. Taniguchi rarely attracted attention, his long black hair framing his striking, gaunt face.

Gregory Taniguchi | Photo credit: Sean Fitzpatrick

Equally convincing, in another respect, was baritone Jesse Blumberg, who sang two dynamic and captivating arias and brought a deep, conflicted dimension to the role of Pontius Pilate. When Blumberg's Roman governor confronted Jesus (baritone Mischa Bouvier, intense in his composure), their heated arguments created a palpable theatrical tension in the audience.

In a Passion performance that provided several highlights, the aria that Blumberg performed with the American Bach Cantorei and three strings may be the standout. In this growing, sombre, beautiful litany, sung immediately after the evangelist proclaims the death of Jesus on the cross, the poignant majesty of Bach's genius emerges. Over an evenly flowing basic bass and a wafting decanter of strings, the soloist and choir searched for answers that only faith can answer. Here, translated from the sung German, is such an exchange in which darkness, light and mystery are connected:

“Am I now redeemed from death?” The soloist posed in a kind of musical transubstantiation of Christ’s suffering.

“In my final throes,” offered the refrain, “nowhere else can lead me.”

Right at the beginning, in the refrain “Lord, our ruler,” the Cantorei took up the musical complexity and breadth of the work. With a mixture of technical precision, transparent singing and dynamic responsiveness under the undoubted conductor and artistic director Jeffrey Thomas, the Cantorei created the far-reaching foundation of this passion.

The choirs and chorales had a radiant richness of sound and emotion. As the crowd mocked Jesus in Part 2, the Cantorei sang with a harsh, sarcastic undertone. In a moment that could have been channeled by Dickens, the singers blithely suggested drawing lots for the woven cloak worn at Christ's death. More than a few times, the work's narrative reveals the dark depths of human nature.

Yet even as he captured the profound suffering and anguish of Christ's final hours, Bach infused his passion with hope, faith, and transcendent visions. A shining star came early, in soprano Julie Bosworth's aria, “I too will follow you with eager steps.” Her bright, clear tone filled the church in a flowing line that became the vocal equivalent of a long, uninterrupted beam of light. Later, Bosworth brought a sense of fully committed immediacy to the number in a short but haunting devotional aria entitled “Dissolve now, my heart, in floods of tears.”

Among the other soloists, the amber-colored mezzo-soprano Ágnes Vojtkó made a strong impression with her poignant aria “It is fulfilled!” This echoes Christ's statement as his mouth is stuffed with a sponge soaked in vinegar.

The orchestra played with their usual grace and responsiveness, but not without some unsteady spots and problems with balance. The solo strings were particularly good, as was the even, smooth draw of the continuo parts.

Running two hours and 15 minutes, including an intermission, the St. John Passion requires and demands focused attention. The printed text in the program comprised eight pages, which are well worth reading to appreciate the sophisticated poetry of Bach's settings. Although the performance of American Bach was finely crafted in many details, it ultimately formed a unified whole. Regardless of the listener's religious orientation, this was a musically spiritual occasion.

The post American Bach Produces a Deeply Transferring St. John Ardour appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

John David Bruno “Bruno”

JOHN DAVID BRUNO “Bruno” Age 76 of Montara and La Quinta CA, died Saturday January 29 2022. Bruno was born in San Francisco on March 26,1945, and graduated from Archbishop Riordan High School. Then he enlisted in the US Army where he served for 2 years and learned to cook! Returning to San Francisco, he joined UA Local 38 Plumbers and Pipefitters Union in San Francisco and went to work for his father in the family business. After his father’s death J&D Plumbing continued doing commercial and residential plumbing along with a unique niche of trade shows and conventions. Bruno enjoyed a good restaurant and a good bar, cooking, crashing swimming pools, skiing in Tahoe, boating in the late summer and working on house projects. More than any of those he loved people. He had a unique magnetism and made a friend wherever he went. In 2013 he retired and moved to La Quinta CA for warmer weather and a world of new friends!. Bruno connected to people– being an inspiration, fun-mate, someone to always sit at lunch with, cheerleader in all endeavors, get-into-trouble-mate, teacher of life lessons that could only be learned from him. Most of all he was a devoted Dad, reveling in the lives of his four children, and a genuine friend and mentor to many young people who worked for him over the years.
Brother to Claudia Portacarrero ( Luis Oliva), he was preceded in death by his parents John and Effie Bruno. Beloved husband of Sheila Brogna Bruno and father to Karen Giannakopoulos (Nelson), Gina Bruno, Jenni Giannini (Mike) and Chris Bruno (Erica Hamilton). One of Bruno’s greatest joys was his grandson Carson Giannakopoulos, age 5.
It is said that on silent San Francisco nights if you stand near the corner of 3rd and Howard you can hear the pipes of Moscone Center singing his name. Loved by all, Bruno will be forever in their hearts.
The family is holding a private service.

Published by San Francisco Chronicle from Feb. 10 to Feb. 13, 2022.

34465541-95D0-45B0-BEEB-B9E0361A315A

The post John Bruno Obituary (1945 – 2022) – La Quinta, CA appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

John P. Galvin

February 3, 1928 – December 2, 2019

At home in San Francisco, December 2, 2019, at age 91. Beloved brother of Jim (Louise), Pat (Bunny) (both deceased), Helen (Gordon, deceased) Rainville, Neil (deceased) (Eleanor), and Dennis (Rita). Cherished uncle of many nieces and nephews and their families.

John was a native San Franciscan and a graduate of St. Paul’s Grammar School and Mission High, class of 1946. He was a U.S. Army veteran who served in the Korean War. He was a member of Plumbers & Steamfitters Local 38 and was a plumbing superintendent at San Francisco Airport for many years before retiring in 1990.

John was known for his good nature, sense of humor, generosity, and love for the outdoors. He was an avid outdoorsman whose life revolved around hunting waterfowl and big game, fishing, and preserving habitat. John was a founding member of the Oakland Associates Duck Club in Willows, California, where he spent his happiest times hunting and sharing laughs with his closest friends, including his best friend Dave Schurba. He hunted at Oakland Associates every weekend up to his 90th birthday, when he had to stop due to health issues.

Outside of duck season, John hunted deer at his camp in Mendocino County and in eastern Nevada. A deckhand as a youth on San Francisco Bay, John and his brother Pat would later own a fishing boat that they docked at Fisherman’s Wharf. John enjoyed sharing stories of the ocean, bay, lakes, and streams that he fished over the years, and his hunting stories will never be forgotten. John was a lifelong supporter of the California Waterfowl Association.

Special thanks to Flo, Joy, Cheenee, and Sutter Hospice. At John’s request, no services will be held. Donations may be made in John’s name to the California Waterfowl Association (https://www.calwaterfowl.org/donate/) or the charity of your choice.

Published by San Francisco Chronicle from Dec. 20 to Dec. 22, 2019.

34465541-95D0-45B0-BEEB-B9E0361A315A

The post John Galvin Obituary (1928 – 2019) – San Francisco, CA appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Aboard Air Force One
En Route San Francisco, California

2:07 P.M. EST
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  I got a couple of things at the top before I turn it over to the Admiral.  Thank you.
 
So, this morning, President Biden shared big news in his work to tackle climate change.  Over the past two and a half years, President Biden has delivered on the most ambitious climate agenda in history, from signing into law the largest investment in climate action ever, to including more than $50 billion in climate resilience, to taking bold action to reduce climate pollution across every sector of the economy, to protecting more than 21 million acres of public lands and waters, to restoring the vital role of science and guiding the Biden-Harris administration’s decision-making.
 
As a result of the President’s leadership and economic plan, energy jobs are on ri- — on rise across the country and we’re on track to cut carbon pollution in half by 2030.
 
And as you heard from the President a short while ago, we’re not stopping there.  The Fifth — the Fifth National Climate Assessment released today shows that not only is every region of a country already experiencing the impacts of climate change, we’re also making progress.
 
To keep building on that progress, the President announced more than $6 billion in investment to make communities across the country more resilient to the impacts of climate change, including by strengthening America’s aging electric grid infrastructure, reducing flood risks to communities, supporting conservation efforts, and advancing environmental justice.
 
Now turning over to the economy.  Today’s CPI report that came out this morning shows more progress bri- — bringing down inflation while maintaining one of the strongest job markets in history.
 
President Biden is delivering results for the American people. 
 
Inflation has fallen 65 percent since last summer.  Core inflation is at the lowest level in more than two years.  Wages are higher than before the pandemic. 
 
Gas prices are down by $1.65 from their peak after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, providing breathing room to families ahead of holiday travel.
 
Grocery inflation is at its lowest level in over two years.  Egg, milk prices are lower than they were a year ago.
 
President Biden will keep fighting to lower costs, from taking on Big Pharma to lower prescription drug costs, to investing in clean energy to lower energy bills, to cracking down on junk fees.
 
Unfortunately, that stands in stark contrast to what congressional Republicans are doing, pushing trickle-down eco- — wow, hold on, guys — economics by slashing taxes for the wealthy and standing with Big Pharma, oi- — Big Oil, and other special interests that raise costs for families.
 
Finally, I wanted to highlight that last Friday, the Major Cities Chiefs Association published data on violent crime for the first nine months of 2023 and compared it to the same period in 2022.  That data showed that violent crime, which fell in 2022, is continuing to fall in 2023.  The total number of homicides in — in the reporting jurisdictions dropped more than 10 percent.  Rapes dropped 7.6 percent, aggravated assault dropped 3.4 percent, and robberies dropped 2.5 percent.
 
The Biden-Harris administration’s investment, including the $50 billion from the American Rescue Plan, that cities have used to improve public safety is working. 
 
But, of course, we have more work to do.  And that is why the President has proposed more than 100,000 police officers that engage in community policing.  The President urges Republicans to support his proposal.
 
With that, I have the Admiral joining me today to — to speak to tomorrow’s summit with Xi and anything else on APEC that you may want to ask and, of course, the Middle East conflict.
 
MR. KIRBY:  Thanks, Karine.
 
I know you all heard from Jake yesterday about the — the meeting with President Xi and, of course, APEC.  I won’t be able to improve much upon what Jake said.  I’ll just tell you that going into APEC, I mean, the President really feels we got the wind at our back here. 
 
And with 21 economies, 60 percent of global economic output represented here in San Francisco, it’s — it’s an exciting time.
 
And he’ll be focusing, really, on three things.
 
One, not only improve and increase American investment in the region, but the region’s investment in the United States. 
 
Number two, lifting up and looking towards a vision for better international worker standards, cleaner environments, safer environments, collective bargaining, a chance for international workers to be able to compete on a level playing field.
 
And number three, building a more inclusive economy across the region.
 
Again, Jake covered all that yesterday.
 
I do want to just give you some updates on the Middle East if you’ll just bear with me here.  Since the very early hours after October 7th, the President has been personally engaged throughout the region.  There’s just been a lot of coordination, daily touchpoints with a number of partners all run out of the NSC, led by Jake Sullivan.
 
And he’s — the President has dispatched a number of senior officials to the region.  Obviously, Secretary Blinken has made a couple of significant trips there.
 
But that’s why I think you saw us announce earlier that the NSC Coordinator for the Middle East, Brett McGurk, is traveling to Europe and the Middle East this week.  And he’s leaving today.  He’s going to Belgium, Israel, the West Bank, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, and Jordan.
 
Of course, the primary focus is going to be ensuring that we’re freeing the hostages, that we’re doing everything we can to get them released, including the Americans that are being held.  But he’s also going to be focusing on how we can contain this conflict and that we can prevent any further escalation as well as any effort by anybody to deepen the conflict.
 
We also are obviously going to keep working — and Brett will be doing this — with our partners on the humanitarian assistance front to make sure that the aid is getting in as well as people getting out.
 
I think you may have also noticed all — I’ll just draw your attention to it — Treasury Department issued another round of sanctions against Hamas today.  This is the third one since the attacks.
 
Together with our partners, we’re going to be decisively
moving to degrade Hamas’s financial infrastructure, cut them off from outside funding, and block the new funding channels that they seek to finance their terrorism. 
 
Now, on the hospitals, I can confirm for you that we have information that Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad use some hospitals in the Gaza Strip, including Al-Shifa, and tunnels underneath them to conceal and to support their military operations and to hold hostages.  
 
Hamas and the Palestinian — Palestinian Islamic Jihad — PIJ — members operate a command-and-control node from Al-Shifa in Gaza City.  They have stored weapons there, and they’re prepared to respond to an Israeli military operation against that facility.  
 
Now, to be clear, we do not support striking a hospital from the air, and we do not want to see a firefight in the hospital where innocent people, helpless people, sick people are simply trying to get the medical care that they deserve — not to be caught in a crossfire.  Hospitals and patients must be protected.  
 
And this just points out how challenging the military operation is, because Hamas has deeply embedded itself within the civilian population.  Israel has now an added burden that they have to — I’m sorry, they have an added burden, given the way that Hamas operates.  
 
But as we have been clear on multiple occasions, Hamas actions did not lessen Israel’s responsibilities to protect civilians in Gaza.  And this is something that we obviously are going to continue to have an active conversation with our counterparts about.
 
And then, just — just to touch on some of the figures over the last 24 hours: Some 115 more trucks carrying humanitarian aid were able to enter Gaza.  That brings the total now to around 1,100.  Again, we know it’s not enough.  We know more must be done.  We got to accelerate it.  We got to increase it.  But we’re up over a thousand trucks now that have gotten in.  
 
And then since the 1st of November, we are now aware of more than 600 Americans and their family members who have been able to depart and — and seek the support of our embassy team, our consular team on the ground in Egypt.  
 
Q    Kirby, just on the — on the —
 
Q    Hostages — on the hostages —
 
Q    Could I just — on the hospitals, first of all, what evidence or support or sourcing do you have to support the claim that you just made about Hamas?
 
MR. KIRBY:  Yeah, it comes from a variety of intelligence sourcing.  I think you can understand that we’re not going to be able to provide a whole lot of granular detail on that.  We have to protect sources and methods, but we were able to downgrade some information to be able to provide it with — for you today.  But it comes from a variety of intelligence methods of our own — of our own. 
 
Q    Does that change the idea of whether or not there should be a ceasefire at the hospital in order to get the patients out?  I mean, does this change the calculation?  Would you — would the U.S. support a —
 
MR. KIRBY:  Yeah, I think —
 
Q    — temporary ceasefire at this point?
 
MR. KIRBY:  I want to be clear, when we’re talking ceasefire versus pause, there’s a difference.  So, we don’t support a ceasefire.  We think that’s going to benefit Hamas.
 
Q    (Inaudible) pause?
 
MR. KIRBY:  But we do support these humanitarian pauses that the Israeli military put in place.  
 
Now some of them have gone up to seven hours a day, which is a good thing.  It’s allowing people to get out and to get to safety.  
 
As I said in my topper, and you heard Jake talk about this yesterday, we don’t support attacks on hospitals.  We don’t want innocent patients who are just trying to get needed medical care to be caught in the crossfire here.  And this does point to the added burden that the Israeli Defense Force has. 
 
As I said in my opening statement, now have information that confirms that Hamas is using that particular hospital for a command-and-control node and probably storage of equipment, weapons up underneath that.  This is — this is — that is a war crime.   That — that does make it much more difficult for the Israeli Defense Forces.
 
Q    On the hostages, it seems we’re getting closer to a hostage deal.  There seems to be indications and reports of that.  Can you give us any information about how that’s moving?
 
MR. KIRBY:  All I can tell you is that we are in active discussions as we speak, right now, with our counterparts in the region.  And one of the things that Brett will be doing when he goes over there is to continue to have that work, to continue — to continue that work.  So, it’s an hour-by-hour discussion.
 
I think you can understand why I wouldn’t get into too much detail about these active negotiations, lest I say something that — that puts them in jeopardy.
 
But as you heard the President talk about this earlier this morning, you know, we’re — we’re confident that we’re putting the energy and the effort into that, and we’re going to keep — we’re going to keep at it. 
 
Q    Is there anything to that Washington Post report about the possible exchange of around 70 civilian hostages in exchange for a five-day ceasefire?
 
MR. KIRBY:  Yeah, I’m just not going to get into the details.
 
Q    (Inaudible) on ICBC — the ransomware attack on ICBC.  First, did the U.S. give any sense of a warning to China about the vulnerability of that — of that ransomware?  And second, is that something that you would foresee coming up in the leaders’ meeting tomorrow?
 
MR. KIRBY:  I — I don’t — we’re wa- — aware of the attack and, certainly, we’re monitoring that.  I don’t have a lot of information for you.  
 
We — you know, the Treasurer is in touch with the financial regulators and with the market itself, but I really don’t have much more information on that.  It’s obviously something we’re going to watch very closely.  
 
And as for whether it’ll come up tomorrow, I don’t want to get ahead of the President and the discussion that he’s going to have.
 
Believe me, the agenda will be a very full agenda with President Xi.
 
Q    Does the President have plans to talk to Netanyahu before APEC gets underway, before his focus shifts to the summit in San Francisco?
 
MR. KIRBY:  I’m not aware of any calls on his schedule with Prime Minister Netanyahu as we’re speaking right now. 
 
But he has maintained a constant communication with the Prime Minister, and I have every expectation that they’ll be talking again, probably multiple times.  I just don’t — I couldn’t tell you exactly when that’s going to happen.
 
Q    And on the sanctions — the Treasury sanctions on Hamas — are you seeing any evidence that that’s having any impact right now?
 
MR. KIRBY:  Well, I mean, sanctions sometimes take a little while before you can actually see the practical impacts, and we’ve done three rounds since the — the attacks.  And oftentimes, the effect just takes a little while.  So, I couldn’t tell you one way or another how much impact it’s had so far.  But eventually, these things — they will certainly put a — will certainly put at a disadvantage their ability to fund themselves, resource themselves, provide capabilities to their fighters. 
 
We’ll — and, you know, this is the third round.  We certainly aren’t going to take off the table any additional sanctions. 
 
Q    In tomorrow’s meeting with President Xi, China’s Foreign Ministry says they’d like to see, quote, “concrete actions” in terms of U.S. support for Taiwanese —
 
MR. KIRBY:  Who said that?
 
Q    The Chinese Foreign Ministry said they’d like to see “concrete actions” in terms of U.S. support of the One China policy.  Whereas, as we know, the U.S. would like to see Taiwanese citizens being able to exercise their right to vote freely and fairly.  How do you square those two positions?
 
MR. KIRBY:  First of all, nothing has changed about our One China policy, and we have been crystal clear about that.  We
obviously don’t support independence for Taiwan. 
 
We certainly want to see Taiwan’s democracy continue to flourish.
 
We don’t — don’t want to see any cross-trade tensions that are solved unilaterally or upsetting the status quo in a unilateral way, certainly not by force. 
 
So, there’s no change to our One China policy.
 
Q    You said last week when asked about the President’s schedule that the luggage isn’t on the plane yet.  You didn’t want to — you said last week when asked about the President’s schedule for the conference that the luggage wasn’t on the plane yet, so you didn’t want to talk about it.
 
MR. KIRBY:  (Laughs.)
 
Q    Well, we hope the luggage is on the plane.  But I wanted to ask how fluid is the President’s schedule given the budget —
 
MR. KIRBY:  The President is looking forward to a good week in San Francisco and to a very robust agenda at APEC.  And  — and then I think I’ll just leave it at that.
 
Q    So, there’s no plans to possibly leave early, go back to Washington, or —
 
MR. KIRBY:  We’re — we’re focused on having a good week in San Francisco.  And — and I have no updates to his schedule to talk about.
 
Q    Related to Xi, what interests does China have in what’s happening in the Middle East right now?  And why has their approach been so different to the United States on that issue?
 
MR. KIRBY:  I’d have to point you to President Xi to speak to his views of what’s going on in the Middle East.  I won’t speak for another foreign leader.  And I certainly won’t speak for their comments and — and how they’ve reacted to what’s going on in the Middle East. 
 
All I can do is tell you what we’re doing, and I just did that.  And the President is going to stay focused on what’s going on. 
 
I have no doubt, Trevor, that — that the situation in the Middle East will come up in the context of the bilateral discussion with President Xi.  President Biden will be eager to hear President Xi’s perspectives on this. 
 
They have — they have lines of communication in the region in some ways that we don’t.  And, certainly, we would — we would welcome opportunities for — if China was willing to be helpful in — in making sure that Israel can get the support that it needs to defend itself and that we can get humanitarian assistance to those in need.
 
Q    And then also related to APEC —

MR. KIRBY:  And we don’t — and that we — there’s not an escalation or deepening or widening of the conflict by any other actor in the region. 
 
Q    And then related to — also related to APEC.  What discussions do you expect the U.S. delegation to have with the Russian delegation that’s on site?  And — and who is the senior-most member of that delegation?  And how will you be engaging with them?
 
MR. KIRBY:  It’s their Deputy Prime Minister, and I’m not — I’m going to blank on the name.  Their Deputy Prime Minister is representing them.  And we look forward to having them as part of this larger economic framework and discussion.
 
Q    Admiral — Admiral, President Xi has met with President Putin.  So, how is Russia and Ukraine going to come up in the talks between President Biden and President Xi?
 
MR. KIRBY:  I’m sorry, say that again.
 
Q    So, President Xi has met with President Putin and is keeping those lines open.  So, how is the fight in the Ukraine going to come up between President Biden and President Xi?  Like, what’s going to be discussed there?
 
MR. KIRBY:  Again, I don’t want to get ahead of the conversation that hasn’t happened yet.  I do think that certainly they will want to talk about what’s going on in Ukraine, and the President will make clear that we’re going to continue to support Ukraine against Russia’s aggression. 
 
And that — and, again, China could play a role here in helping us support Ukraine but also to — helping advance President Zelenskyy’s vision of a — of a just peace here for when — for when the conflict is over. 
 
But I won’t speak for the Chinese and what — what they will or won’t say about that.  But I have every expectation that the fighting in Ukraine will come up.
 
Q    Given so much attention given tomorrow to the President’s meeting with President Xi, can you talk about the preparation and negotiations for the lead-up to tomorrow?  Was it a smooth negotiation?  Were there contentious points?  What were some of the things that were talked about about the two leaders sitting down together?  Like, give us a little bit of a sense of what we’re going to see in the choreography tomorrow and how that came about.
 
MR. KIRBY:  Well, look, I mean, anytime you do a meeting at the leader level, particularly between our two countries, you know, there’s weeks and weeks of discussion about what’s going to be on the agenda, what’s not going to be on the agenda, how we want the — the meeting to progress. 
 
And then, of course, it gets down to execution.  Once these guys sit down at the table — you saw in Bali, it went on for, like, three-plus hours.  These are two leaders that know each other well, known each other a long, long time.  They can be frank and forthright with one another.  I fully expect that that will be the case. 
 
I’m not going to get into the back-and-forth between the two teams about — about how the — all the modalities came into place.  But — but I think — look, I think the table has been set — again, over the course of many weeks — for what — what we hope will be a very productive, candid, constructive conversation here. 
 
The President wants to make sure that we’re handling this most consequential of bilateral relationships in the most responsible way forward. 
 
He means to compete with China.  He’s coming into this discussion, again, with the wind at his back, from an economic perspective.  He thinks the United States is well-poised in that competition with China.  He’s not going to be afraid to — to confront where confrontation is needed on issues where we don’t see eye to eye with President Xi and the PRC.  But we’re also not going to be afraid, nor should we be afraid, as a confident nation, to engage in diplomacy on ways which we can cooperate with China — on climate change, for instance, and clean energy technology. 
 
So, there’s going to be an awful lot on the agenda.  All of that was — was worked out between the two teams and baked in, and — and we’re looking forward to seeing where it’s going to go. 
 
(Cross-talk.)
 
Q    Will there be — are they going to wear matching outfits for the — for the family — for the family photo at the end?
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  What?
 
Q    I know.  It’s ridiculous.  (Laughter.)
 
Q    T-shirts.
 
Q    Yeah, matching t-shirts.
 
Q    So, there’s a tradition at the end of APEC that the leaders wear some kind of matching outfits.  But the last time it was held in the U.S., Obama — it was in Hawaii, and Obama did not want to have everybody wear Hawaiian shirts because he thought it was kind of embarrassing.  So, I guess there’s a question about whether or not there’s going to be matching outfits this year.  I don’t know.  Are they all going to wear aviators?  I don’t know. 
 
MR. KIRBY:  Well, you got me there.  I wasn’t aware of that one.  I’ll — I’ll take that back — 
 
Q    I swear it’s a thing.  I swear.
 
MR. KIRBY:  — and ask.  I — I take your word for it, but first I heard of that.
 
Q    Kirby, do you have any sense of whether President Biden will meet with the Taiwanese delegation that’s attending APEC?
 
MR. KIRBY:  Other than President Xi, I don’t have additional bilateral or even pull-aside discussions to speak to today.  I mean, there’ll be a lot of leaders here, and we’ll see how things shake — shape out.  But the only one that I — that I can speak to is the bilat with President Xi.
 
Q    On Indonesia, the President was seeking something like a free trade agreement regarding critical minerals.  He didn’t get it yesterday.  Why?  And is that going to be part of IPEF?
 
MR. KIRBY:  Is that going to be what?
 
Q    Part of the IPEF (inaudible).
 
MR. KIRBY:  Again, I’m not going to get ahead of the agenda here for the next few days.  I mean, we’ll — there’s a robust set of discussions, including on progress on the pillars of IPEF.  And we’ll have more to say about that in — in coming days. 
 
And as for critical minerals, there was a — there was a good discussion with President Widodo about critical minerals and making — making sure that — that we can work collaboratively in the region to provide more resilient supply chains for raw materials like that. 
 
So, I think that’s about as far as I’ll go. 
 
Q    On the choreography of the meetings with President Xi, do we know it’s going to work?  Are they’re going to have a handshake?  Are they going to give statements?  How long?  And also can you tell us where it will happen?
 
MR. KIRBY:  Again, I’m not going to get into much of the modalities.  I mean, there’ll be a — obviously a — you know, a classic bilateral discussion between the two leaders.  There’ll be an expanded bilateral discussion with the two teams, but beyond that — and then, you know, I think you’ll get a chance to hear from the President directly after that.  But beyond that, I’m — I don’t have more detail.
 
Q    On the aid trucks going into Gaza, you said 115 —
 
MR. KIRBY:  Right.
 
Q    — and that that’s not enough. 
 
MR. KIRBY:  That’s over the last 24 hours.
 
Q    Over the last 24 hours, but not enough, you had said.  Have you — do you feel that with these pauses that the pace has picked up a little bit, though — that that’s made a difference in the past couple of days?
 
MR. KIRBY:  What the pause have done — I would — it would be hard to draw a direct line between the pauses and the trucks going in.  The pauses are largely in North Gaza, so away from the Rafah Crossing. 
 
What the pauses have done, though, predominantly, is allow people in North Gaza to leave.  The Israelis now have two safe corridors — one to the east and then one to the west along the coast road.  And that’s opened up more avenues for people to move by foot. 
 
So, it’s really had an effect on — on getting people out of harm’s way, which we hope, just mathematically speaking, would help alleviate the risk — the greater risk of civilian casualties because now there’s now just fewer people in the crossfire. 
 
But it hasn’t really been tied to the Rafah Crossing.  That work is ongoing.
 
Q    So, going back to the Xi meeting, a slightly funner topic, but will —
 
MR. KIRBY:  More fun than the —
 
Q    Than the t-shirts?
 
MR. KIRBY:  — matching shirts?
 
Q    I know.  More fun. 
 
Will President Biden ask President Xi about pandas and getting more pandas for the U.S.?
 
MR. KIRBY:  We’re sorry to see the pandas go.  But, obviously, that was a sovereign decision by the PRC, and, of course, we have to respect that.
 
Q    Kirby, should — will there be any U.S. action against Ukraine if it’s found that they were at all involved in sabotaging the Nord Stream pipeline?
 
MR. KIRBY:  Again, I’m not going to get ahead of what’s active investigations here on the Nord Stream Two and the pipeline.  And I’m certainly not going to speak hypothetically about what the results of that investigation might be. 
 
What we’re focused on is making sure that Ukraine continues to get what they need.  And right now, that’s a — it’s a critical need as they are still fighting in this counteroffensive.  And without supplemental funding, you know, we’re going to — we’re going to have a harder time here.  The runway is getting shorter and shorter for our ability to support them.
 
Q    The President has a decision to make about a sanctions waiver on Iran that would free up $10 billion that’s frozen, I believe, in an Iraqi bank.  What’s he going to decide and what is the justification for?
 
MR. KIRBY:  Won’t get ahead of the President’s decision making. 
 
But I will tell you this: We continue to hold Iran accountable.  We’ve added force posture in the region.  We have sanctioned, in two and a half years, some 400 entities — 300 in just the last year alone — for all manner of Iranian destabilizing behavior: the way they’re treating their protesters, the way they’re supporting Russia, and a — and the way they’re threatening maritime shippin- — shipping in the Gulf Region.  So, we’re not turning any — nobody is turning any blind eye to Iran’s destabilizing activities.  We’re going to continue to keep that pressure on them.
 
Okay?
 
Q    Thank you. 
 
Q    Thanks, Kirby. 
 
MR. KIRBY:  Thanks. 
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  All right.  Colleen?
 
Hold on.  It’s a little bumpy.
 
Q    I know.  I’m leaning against the side.
 
So, on the — the CR, should the Hou- — should the White House have come out so strongly against the two-tiered CR, especially now that it’s looking like it might pass?  Where are — is the White House on it right now? 
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  Look, not at all.  Look, I’m — and I’m going to quote something that — that was — that was in the statement from Saturday, which is “House Republicans need to stop wasting time on their own political divisions, [to] do their jobs, and work in a bipartisan way to prevent a shutdown.”  So, that is still very true.  We are not going to back away from that. 
 
But we’ve — we’ve been saying, and you heard from the President yesterday, you heard from me yesterday as well: We are in touch with that — with both leadership in the Senate and in the House to talk about the best path forward for the American people.  That’s what we’re — we care about: How do we move forward for the American people?  And so, we believe that House Republicans need to continue to do their jobs, right?  We should not be here.  We should not be just a couple of days away — a place that we were before, as you all know, not too long ago — and — and so — in September — so, we should — they should get this done.  They should get this done.
 
Q    Do you think the President will support the two-tier?
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  So, they were having a conversation.  “They,” meaning the Democrats’ leadership in the House and the Senate, and obviously they’re going to be, from what I understand, voting on it today.  And so, we’re going to let that process happen.  We’re not going to get ahead of that process. 
 
The most important thing here is to make sure that we move forward and they — in the best possible way for the American people.  And that’s where we’re going to be on this.
 
Q    But the White House hasn’t given an indication to Democrats that they should or should not —
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  We’re letting —
 
Q    — be voting on this?
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  We’re letting the process happen.  We’re letting the conversations and — the conversation happen in the House and the Senate with Democrats.  And there’s going to be a vote, and we’re going to see how this turns out. 
 
Q    So, if Democrats support this, the President would sign this?
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  I’m not going to get into hypotheticals from here.  I’m going to let the process happen in — on the Capitol — right? — in Capitol Hill.  Let them have a conversation.  There’s going to be a vote.  We’re just not going to get ahead of what they’re going to decide to do. 
 
Again, we want to move in the best path forward for the American people.  That’s our — that’s our objective here.  That’s what we want to know.  
 
Q    But has the President talked to congressional Democrats about this?
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  So, as you know, our Legislative Affairs Office has been in touch with — with the leadership in Congress — and also — and also our OMB director.  We’ve been in touch with them for some time. 
 
Now, obviously, this is something that House Republicans have to fix.  We’ve been very clear about that.  And I don’t have any calls — we don’t have any calls to read out of any conversation that the President has had. 
 
But obviously, on this trip, he’s going to stay in close contact with the office of — his team — right? — Office of Leg Affairs.  He’s going to stay in close contact with congressional leaders as well.  Just don’t have anything to preview at this time.
 
Q    Sorry, I didn’t — I’m just — I just let everybody jump in. 
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  Yeah.
 
Q    But if this vote is happening in two hours — the White House hasn’t given Democrats any indication that the President would veto or sign this —
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  We —
 
Q    — even if they’re about to take a vote in two hours?
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  We’ve been — that’s not the first time.  Right? 
 
Q    No, I know.  But —
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  Right?  There’s been —
 
Q    — I’m saying, on something specific like this where there’s such a —
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  I hear you.  What — 
 
Q    — so much at stake on Friday —
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  And that’s exactly right.  And we shouldn’t be where we are today — right? — because so much is at stake.  We’re talking about vital programs for the American people.  You’re 1,000 percent right.  We should not be here.  And we’ve been very clear about that — very clear about that. 
 
But what we’re saying is: There’s conversations happening on the Hill.  Yes, the vote is happening — I don’t know — in two hours, at four o’clock, but there’s still conversations, right?  They’re still negotiating.  They’re still having conversations.  We’re just not going to get ahead of that.
 
We’re going to get the leadership in the Dem- — in the — and the Democrats’ leadership in the House and the Senate, make those — have those conversations.  We’re just not going to get ahead of that. 
 
What we want to see is a — the best path forward for the American people.  That’s who we’re putting first here.  That’s who is the most important thing.
 
We’re talking about critical, important programs that need to be funding — funded to keep our law enforcement on the — getting paid; to make sure our national security is — is in — is where it needs to be; to make sure education, food security, all of these things that are so vital to — to Americans.  That’s what’s our main priority, and that’s what we’re going to let the Democrat leadership in both the House and the Senate have those conversations.  And that’s what we want to see play out.  And so, we’re —
 
Q    So, would —
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  — not going to get ahead of that. 
 
Q    So, would the President be back in Washington, D.C., before a shutdown takes place?
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  So, I know he just asked — someone — Emily just asked that question.  Look, as you know, and you hear us say this all the time, the President is the president wherever he is, and that is the thing to remember. 
 
And he — he’s going to stay in touch, again, with his team back home at the White House.  He’s going to, you know, stay in touch with congressional leaders.  And he could do this anywhere, right?  He can sign a bill anywhere.  He can, you know, talk to them anywhere he is.  He can be president anywhere — anywhere in the country, certainly anywhere in the world.  So, that is not going to — that’s not going to change. 
 
Q    Karine, can I ask you — earlier today at his remarks, the President sounded a little hoarse.  He was coughing a lot.  Is he feeling okay? 
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  He’s feeling —
 
Q    What —
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  He’s feeling — he’s looking forward to this trip.  He’s feeling good.  You’ll see for yourself after the — after he has his meeting with President Xi, you’re going to hear directly from the President.  He’ll take a few questions in his solo press conference. 
 
The President — I just saw him.  The President is very much looking forward to this trip — this really important trip and consequential meeting with President Xi.  So, that’s what I can tell you.
 
Q    When was his last COVID test?
 
(Cross-talk.)
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  I didn’t hear that.  Sorry, Emily. 
 
Q    When was his last COVID test?
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  I — I can’t speak to that.  I — you know, if COVID — we’re in a different place with COVID, as you know — a very, very different place because of what this President has been able to do in getting COVID and getting this pan- — getting us out of this pandemic, getting COVID under control.  We are in a totally, totally different place.  And I think that’s important to note as well. 
 
So, we’re not in the same place where — obviously, I don’t think you test every day right?  So, we’re just not in that same place.  I just don’t have any — we don’t have anything to share with you on that.
 
Q    On Israel, Karine, you saw the protests today outside the White House.  But also, I haven’t heard anything from the White House on the death of a protester in California a few weeks back.  He sustained some injuries during a protest in California.
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  Can — can you say that one more time? 
 
Q    Yeah.  A 69-year-old California man was — he succumbed to injuries he sustained during a protest. 
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  Yeah, this is the — the Jewish American?
 
Q    Yes.
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  Yeah.
 
Q    Yes, I haven’t heard anything from the White House on him.  Has the White House reached out to his family or his community?
 
And then zooming out to the protests today that we saw, can the White House assure American Jews that they are safe in America? 
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  Yeah, so let me — let me touch on the first — the first question about the gentleman — the protester, the — the Jewish American.  It’s — it’s awful.  It’s devastating that happened.  Obviously, our hearts go out to — to the people who loved him, his family. 
 
And I don’t have a — we don’t have any calls to read out, but obviously, we are sending our condolences to the family with that horrific, horrific event. 
 
What I will say about the marches — that we welcome today’s march.  The President has been very clear about his unwavering support for Israel to defend itself against terrorism since Hamas — Hamas’s horrific terrorist attack on October 7th.  And President Biden has taken historic actions to fight hate, including antisemitism, announcing more steps to combat — combat it on campuses today. 
 
Federal, state, and local officials have made the saf- — the safety of this event a priority and have worked to ensure that necessary precautions are enacted and resources are deployed to ensure the safety of everyone attending — attending today’s march. 
 
We urge everyone to respect each other’s First Amendment rights and not to engage in escalatory behavior. 
 
And obviously, we take — we take any hate crime on any group very seriously.  And we’ve taken actions not just this year in the past couple of weeks, but obviously a year ago, we made — we were very clear about where this administration stands.
 
Q    And you were at a roundtable about it with Neera Tanden last week.  Can you just update us on how that —
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  Say that one more time.
 
Q    I believe you had an event with the Domestic Policy Advisor on this last week.  Can you just update us on any —
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  I don’t have anything to share.  But obviously, the team — the Domestic Policy team and other — other members of the President’s leadership — White House leadership are going to continue to have conversation with leaders in different communities, as they’re all dealing with what we’re seeing: the increase in hate in the different groups. 
 
And I’m — obviously, we’re going to continue to call out antisemitism.  We’re going to continue to call out Islamophobia.  And we’re going to continue to say, any — any violence, any hatred against any group is unacceptable.
 
Q    Along those lines, we had a poll today that showed that one in three Asian and Pacific Island people in the United States faced some kind of racial abuse.  I guess I wondered what’s your message to that community and specific — particularly as APEC is happening.
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  I mean, very sim- — very similar, right?  Any racism, xenophobia, intolerance is unacceptable.  We’re going to be — continue to be very clear on that.  This is something that the President has been clear on since he was running to be president back in 2017.  So, this is — we’re going to continue to be consistent there. 
 
So, President Biden and Vice President Harris have led a historic whole-of-government effort to combat such discriminat- — discrimination facing Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders.  That started their first week in office when the President issued a presidential memorandum leveraging the power of the federal government to stand against this hate.  The President also signed the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act into law and signed an executive order to reestablish the White House Initiative on AA and NHPIs.
 
And earlier this year, we released the first-ever National Strategy to Advance Equity, Justice, and Opportunity for Asian American, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islander communities.  The strategy details much-needer — needed investments from 32 federal agencies, including improved data, language access, and combating anti-Asian hate.
 
Q    And then, in San Francisco, homeless advocates have been advoc- — been pushing for a meeting with the President, especially given some criticism of a cleanup that’s been happening around the city ahead of this meeting.  Is he going to talk with them?  Like, what are his thoughts on this —
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  Like, speaking to the advocates?
 
Q    Speaking with homeless people, addressing the situation there, which is a big problem in San Francisco.
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  Look, here’s what I’ll say: The President has taken homelessness incredibly seriously.  And so, this year, the Biden administration — they announced an ALL INside initiative to aggressively tackle homelessness and build a country where every person has a safe and affordable home. 
 
The initiative is actually building on the American Rescue Plan, which — which made the largest single-year investment in ending homelessness in U.S. history and helped prevent a surge of homelessness as a consequence of the pandemic, as well as work being coordinated across federal agencies — including HUD and the VA, including HHS, including Treasury — to reduce homelessness. 
 
And let’s not forget: Earlier this year, as it relates to California, the administration provided an additional $96 million to communities across the state of California specifically focused on addressing unsheltered homelessness and homeless encampments. 
 
So, we believe Congress needs to act.  And — and they need to continue to do that to cr- — so that we can create millions of affordable homes, if you think about it; expand rental assistance; and provide communities with the resources they need to prevent and end homelessness.
 
Let’s not forget, the American Rescue Plan, which is — which is what his initiative is built on — only Democrats voted for it.  We’re the ones taking this very seriously.  Democrats in Congress are the ones taking this very seriously.  Only Democrats voted on the American Rescue Plan that actually have initiatives and provisions in there to deal with crime; to deal with homelessness, as I just laid out; to make sure we’re getting more police — more police officers in communities.  And that is something that Democrats led, not Republicans.
 
Q    How has the President prepared for this meeting tomorrow with President Xi?
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  Well, you know, the President has — when it comes to foreign policy and being a leader in this — in this space, this is the President — something the President has done as a senator, as vice president.  And you’ve seen him do this the last two years. 
 
And you’ve seen the — how — what his leadership — how this diplomatic — how diplomacy — pardon me — how diplomacy plays such an important role.  And he believes in that.  He believes in face-to-face conversation.  He believes in having those direct — direct communication with leaders.  And that’s what you’re going to see.
 
This is not cert- — certainly — obviously not the first time he’s spent with President Xi in his administra- — in his time as — as — in his administration.  And so — so, he takes this very seriously, right?
 
He’s going to meet with his team.  He’s going to — as he’s doing now on the plane, as he’ll continue to do even when we hit the ground, and as he’s been doing for the past couple of weeks and throughout his administration.  And — and that’s — I think you could — what you could expect is a — is a president that’s going to be prepared. 
 
And he’s going to be prepared not because he’s talking to his team and — and, you know, reading his briefing book.  It’s because he has the experience that — I would say, that many other presidents haven’t had.  Right?  If you think about him being a senator for 30 — 36 years, if you think about being a vice president for 8 years, that is experience that is so needed as a t- — in a time like this.
 
Let’s not forget: This is one of the most consequential relationships that we have — you think about China.  And so, this is going to be critical.  And you’re going to see a president that’s prepared and ready to have a direct and honest conversation.
 
Q    Karine, VOA reported this morning that the leaders will be meeting at a place called Filoli Estate.  Why was that chosen?
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  I — I don’t have anything to share on location.  I — I just don’t have — we don’t have anything to share about that.
 
Q    Just on the budget again.  I mean, as you know, we were here a month and a half ago.
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  Yeah.  Here in San Francisco, you mean?
 
Q    No, I mean on the budget.
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  Oh, I’m so sorry.  Budget.
 
Q    We’re not — we’re not in a position —
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  All I heard — all I heard —
 
Q    But I’m trying to project.
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  — was “here.”  We were here a month ago.
 
Q    We were at this point in time —
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  Yeah.
 
Q    — leading up to three days away from a potential shutdown.  Do you — can you give us a sense of sort of the m- — mood music?  Do you feel any better?  Does the White House feel any better about the situation now, as opposed to three days from the last one?
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  So, look, there’s conversations still happening, right?  They still have to vote on this at some point today. 
 
And so, we’re certainly — we — this is a president that’s always optimistic, but we also believe that we should not be where we are today. 
 
This is something that — when you think about — when you think about the CR, when we think about where we are, we should — there was a deal, as you know, earlier this — earlier in the spring — or late spring.  And we believe that the President got involved — right? — and made sure that a deal was done.  And we believe a deal is a deal.  And now we are in a situation where we shouldn’t be — we really shouldn’t be.
 
But I’m not going to get ahead of conversations.  I’m not going to get ahead of the vote.  Let’s see what happens. 
 
But we have to be optimistic.  This is important to the American people.  This is important to our national security.  This is important to our veterans.  We’ve got to make sure that we deliver for the American people and do the job that they sent us here to do. 
 
And that’s for Congress to do.  Congress needs to make sure that they deliver.  So, we’re going to let — we’re going to let the Demo- — the Democratic House and Senate, the leadership there, have those conversation, have those negotiations. 
 
And hopefully we come to some sort of resolution here on behalf of the American people.  That’s what we’re
talking about.
 
Q    What about — what about dealings with the new Speaker?  I mean, is it better or worse than —
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  I’m not going to — I’m not going to, like, publicly judge the relationship that the President has or that the White House has with the — with the new Speaker.
 
What we want to make sure is that the work for the American people get done.  That is the most important thing.  And that’s what we want to get.  That’s what we want to see.
 
Q    Karine, I want to ask you — DailyMail.com, through a FOIA request, obtained photos of the cocaine that was found in the White House in July.  Is there any update on that investigation?  Are the photos helping anything?  Have there been any chan- —
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  I would just — I would refer you to the Secret Service.  That’s their — that’s their — that’s in their wheelhouse.  So, I’ll — I’ll leave it to them.
 
Q    Is it frustrating for the President that the polls show that a majority of Americans think that, you know, the administration isn’t doing that great on the economy when we have near — unemployment is, like, a historic low and inflation is falling?
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  I mean, look, as you saw — I — I just mentioned at the top that CPI — right? — which is incredible, important data — came out. 
 
And here’s what we think the President is getting for results for the American people.  Right?  Inflation, in the pandemic, has fallen 65 percent since last summer, which is what I mentioned at the top.  Core inflation is at the lowest level in more than two years.  Wages are higher than before the pandemic, accounting for inflation.  Gas prices are $3.35, down $1.65 from their peak after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, providing breathing room for — to families ahead of the holiday travel.  Grocery inflation is at a lowest level in over two years.  Egg and milk prices are lower than a year ago. 
 
And, look, we understand.  We get it, right?  The pandemic had a lot of strain and caused a lot of pressures for families and Americans.  We get that.  That’s why the President did what he did, which — I — we were talking about the American Rescue Plan — the first piece of legislation that he signed into law to get us back on our feet, right?
 
So, that is — so, we get that.  We get that Putin’s inva- — invasion, war in Ukraine that caused the prices to go up.  That’s why the President has taken these kind of historic steps when it comes to — whether it’s the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, whether it’s the Inflation Reduction Act — to make sure that we’re doing everything that we can to make — to make Americans’ lives easier.
 
Whether it’s healthcare; whether it’s bringing down gas — gas prices; whether it’s making sure that, you know, unemployment — if you look at unemployment, it’s under 4 per- — 4 percent, which is — it’s been doing that for more than 20 months.  That’s important to note.  More than 14 million jobs created. 
 
That is Bidenomics.  That is what Bidenomics has been able to do. 
 
But, of course, we understand — right? — we see and understand that some Americans are still feeling it out there.  But this is a president that’s taking this very, very seriously and doing everything that he can.
 
One thing that he says all the time: He believes that every American should feel like they have the dignity to be able to feed their family, to be able to earn — to earn the wages to make sure that they can live their life that they see fit for themselves and their family.  And that’s important to the — to the President.
 
Q    On the UK cabinet shuffle.  Does this change anything between rela — with relations between the two countries?  And also, I think it’s the King’s birthday today.  I think he’s turning 75.
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  Wait, it’s whose birthday?
 
Q    Charles.
 
Q    I think it’s the King’s birthday tomorrow.  Any birthday wishes?
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  Wait, to who?  I didn’t hear you. 
 
Q    The King.
 
Q    King Charles.
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  Oh, King Charles.  (Laughs.)
 
Q    He’s 75.  Maybe the President, a fellow November baby, has some birthday wishes?
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  Well, happy birthday to the King. 
 
So, as far as the — the UK government obviously inf- — informed us to the changes to the Pri — that — to Prime Minister Sunak’s cabinet.  We look forward to continuing our cooperation with the Prime Minister and the new cabinet, including new Foreign Secretary — new Foreign Secretary David Cameron, on a range of important priorities.
 
Certainly not going to speak to, you know, the — the internal workings of another government’s political — political governance.  I’m just not going to speak to that. 
 
All right.  Okay.
 
Q    Thank you, Karine.
 
MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  Thanks, guys.
 
Q    Thank you.
 
2:50 P.M. EST

The post Press Gaggle by Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and NSC Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby En Route San Francisco, CA appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

My grandfather died before I was born, and he remains to me a mostly mysterious figure. As is true of many people born poor who are committed to bettering their lot, his hours were taken up with work, family, and church; not much was left for that luxury item we call personality. A big man with paws for hands, in 1926 he got a job with the Consolidated Gas Company as a digger, busting up roadways and digging trenches for the laying of pipe. With his wife he raised six children in a two-bedroom apartment on 145th Street in the South Bronx. During his working life, he went to Mass on Sundays; during his brief retirement, he went to Mass every day. When I asked, people would tell me, “Your grandfather was a very good man,” and leave it at that. He left behind few stories.

But one story about him has stayed with me. He worked six days a week, but on some Sunday afternoons he would take the subway into Manhattan and visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He often went alone, because no one else in the family wanted to go with him. But his most frequent companion was my mother, who as the fifth child and fourth girl was perhaps the least regarded member of the family and wanted attention. After he died, she reflected on those museum afternoons.

“He didn’t say anything,” she said. “He would just walk through the galleries silently. He never pointed out particular paintings or statues, or expressed any particular enthusiasm. I wish I had asked him why he went—but I never found that out. He must have gotten something out of it, because he went over and over again. But he had no words.” My mother was to study at City College and become an elementary school teacher. She would visit museums all over the world, sharing her thoughts about art with anyone who would accompany her. I have her journals; they are about the art she saw. Art became a part of our family life. And behind it all was my mother’s unsatisfied curiosity about what motivated her father, the silent man in the museum.

There is always a residuum of mystery in individual choice. But I now see one obvious reason why my grandfather came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art: He had been invited. A group of wealthy men had built the institution in the hope that men like my grandfather—ditchdiggers, pipe fitters, bricklayers, and others who labored to manufacture, build, and repair—would learn of the glories of men and women who likewise worked with their hands: artists. But the story of the museum begins far away, in Paris, and with Richard Morris Hunt, the man who more than any other brought the fine arts to New York City.

Standing in the Place du Palais-Royal in Paris, you feel that you are in the very heart of Europe. The palace before you, with its arcaded gate and porticoed wings, was once known as the Palais-Cardinal. It was built for Richelieu, the notorious minister, who crossed this square again and again to consult with Louis XIII. Baptized anew during the French Revolution, it became the Palais de l’Égalité. Now called the Palais-Royal, it houses the Council of State as well as France’s Ministry of Culture. Facing it from across the square is the Louvre. Architectural historians, noting the rusticated columns, figured sandstone panels, and exuberance of the Louvre facade, will assign it to the reign of Napoleon III, who expanded and updated the Louvre. But to the average tourist, it might as well be Louis XIII. It features the same Lutetian sandstone, aged to a dark creamy yellow, as the rest of the Louvre. The columns, the framed and aediculed windows, the sculptured antefixes, all proclaim “French Classicism”—or in simpler terms, “old and glorious.”

The tourist assessment is basically correct. The Napoleon III additions to the Louvre are not just an extension; they are a continuation, a culmination even, of centuries of uninterrupted aesthetic evolution, the millennium-long tradition that makes France the most beautiful and most visited nation on Earth. Which makes it all the more remarkable that this facade—the Pavillon de la Bibliotheque, with its portal, whose mansard roof is studded with angels and acroteria, arched windows and columns, and half-dressed allegorical nymphettes holding up the attic—was, in part, the work of a twenty-six-year-old American named Dick Hunt. This young man, endowed with a hint of genius and old-fashioned American hustle, had entered the École des Beaux-Arts eight years earlier in 1846, the first American ever to be accepted at the school. Before being accepted, he had been rejected; when the rejection note came, he declared to his diary in a fit of defiant resolution, “Today we begin truly to study architecture.” He spent a year traveling, reading, and sketching in Europe, then sat for the exam again and was accepted. In his atelier studies—École students worked directly in master architects’ studios—Hunt became the favorite and protégé of Hector-Martin Lefuel, who would be named court architect to Emperor Napoleon III in 1853. The emperor wanted new personal apartments and an extension of the Louvre to the Tuileries. To be his assistant for this illustrious commission, Lefuel hired Hunt, assuring the self-proclaimed “Green Mountain Boy”—Hunt was from Brattleboro, Vermont—a fine career in the French civil service as a government architect.

One should not overstate Hunt’s contributions to the Louvre project. There are stories that Lefuel, to gratify his young assistant, let him design the whole of the Rue de Rivoli facade; but Lefuel was the prevailing creative force on the project. And yet Lefuel, writing years later, did not hesitate to credit his understudy: “My greatest work was done while my dear Dick worked with me, and he can justly claim a great share of its success.” Hunt would later be elected a member of the Institut de France, an immense honor previously accorded to only one other American: Benjamin Franklin.

Hunt’s work at the Louvre might seem a curious footnote to Parisian history. In fact, it was an enormously consequential event in the history of American architecture and the civic life of New York. Hunt held a government post in the Ministry of Public Works in Paris, and Lefuel begged him to remain. Hunt loved the City of Light. As a government architect he was expected to socialize with, and employ, painters and sculptors; the architect, in Beaux-Arts philosophy, was master and disposer of all the other arts. Imagine designing in Paris at the dawn of the Belle Époque, commissioning work from Monet and Renoir and Rodin to decorate the nation’s buildings! But Hunt wanted to go home. In 1856 he left the city of Victor Hugo and Charles Garnier and boarded a steamer for America, where, he assured himself, “there would be demand for a first-rate architect.”

After six months drafting for the U.S. Capitol expansion then under way, Hunt moved to New York City and hung out his shingle. “It has been represented to me that America was not ready for the Fine Arts,” he wrote to his mother. “But I think they are mistaken.”

Hunt made an impact immediately, building what would become one of the great places of nineteenth-century New York: the Tenth Street Studio Building, the first structure in the city custom-built for artists. Commissioned by James Johnston, a patron of culture whose brother John was to be the first president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it soon became the center of the city’s art scene and put Greenwich Village on the map. Large arched south-facing windows—a design later used for New York City public schools—brought light into the workspaces, half of which also sported residential accommodations. Saturdays were open studio days, which brought crowds—and sales—to the artists who set up shop there. All the apartments opened onto a central glass-covered court, where exhibitions were held. The whole was so superbly conceived and designed that it housed two generations of American art: Winslow Homer, John La Farge, Sanford Gifford, and many others became Tenth Streeters. A great deal of the art on display in the American Wing of the Met was produced in that building. Frederic Church held his famous 1859 exhibit of The Heart of the Andes here; promoters asked viewers to bring opera glasses, to examine the painting in greater detail. In a later exhibit, The Heart of the Andes hung opposite Albert Bierstadt’s Lander’s Peak. On the wall between was Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware.

Hunt was not the type to miss out on the fun. He rented a space in the building and set up his architectural firm, hiring as his assistants Henry Van Brunt, George Post, and later William Ware and Frank Furness, all of whom went on to storied careers. “Thus,” Van Brunt reminisced, “we together entered upon an era so rich, so full of surprise and delight, that it seems, as we look back upon it, as if once more in the world the joy of the Renaissance, the white light of knowledge had broken in upon the superstition of romance.” By bringing the French atelier system to America, Hunt, it is said, founded the first American architecture school. William Ware would later hold the nation’s first professorship in architecture, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then found the nation’s first university department of architecture, at Columbia. One can fairly say that architecture as a profession in America was born in Hunt’s suite on Tenth Street.

Hunt brought in commission after commission, giving his young apprentices much to do. “You have got to work,” was his professional advice; “you have got to work at day, and you have got to work at night.” Hating interruptions, Hunt perfected the eight-minute New York lunch—a chicken sandwich and a cup of tea. In order to submit designs for public monuments and open competitions, the master architect often worked through the night. “Work, work, keep on going,” he would say. “That is the best rest you can have.” But he was the furthest thing from stern. He was “irresistible in his vitality and unique and charming in his presence,” observed contemporaries, “a bundle of joyous energetic nerves,” and a “vitalizing and enchanting personality.” “He had the power,” wrote the sculptor Karl Bitter, who would provide the sculptures on the facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “to kindle enthusiasm in others.”

Apprentices and visitors were amazed by his capacity to express himself, not only in conversation, but on paper: Chiding an assistant for getting a curve wrong, he could lean over the paper and render any line with a single stroke. “Like this!” he would say. Anything he saw, or even remembered, he could draw. “A pencil in his hand,” said Van Brunt, “was a magic wand, which chastened the buoyancy of his imagination and made him a scholar.” And when work was done, the man’s vitality overflowed. He made his love of food and wine into a perennial cause for a feast, bubbling up his famous oyster stew and mixing his secret-recipe champagne punch. “Artist you are,” he told his fellows, “and like artists you should live, full of life and merriness.” He was a bachelor and not even thirty, but it seemed no one had lived so much. He had seen the barricades rise in Paris in 1848; hosted Daniel Webster, who in his old age would stay with the Hunts; sketched the reliefs of Cleopatra and Caesarion at Dendera on the Nile; encountered Bedouins, pistol in hand, when crossing Sinai by camel; spent Easter at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem; taken classes with the greatest architects of France, Garnier and Lefuel and Viollet-le-Duc; swum in the lakes of Switzerland; and gone to vespers in the Sistine Chapel. He had done it all, and in the excitement of a fine conversation, a notable restaurant, a good club, receptive company, or a productive artist’s studio, his lust for life could not be contained.

It was not all bliss, however. Architecture is the most political of arts, and politics is the art of the compromise. Hunt had work building houses and shops, but contemporaries suspected that American residential and commercial architecture was no place for a man of Hunt’s genius. In Paris he had worked on the Louvre; in New York he had to settle for drawing up a Coal and Iron Exchange for the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company (now long since razed to the ground). A staunch supporter of Lincoln (who lost New York City by almost two-to-one margins twice) and the Republican Party, Hunt had great difficulty getting commissions from New York’s Democratic Tammany Hall establishment. He entered a competition with a plan for a new building for the National Academy of Design and lost. He submitted drawings for the Robert Fulton Memorial, the Union League Club, the American Institute, and the American Museum of Natural History, and received none of the commissions. There was talk of converting the 62nd Street Armory—now Central Park’s headquarters—into an art museum under the auspices of the New-York Historical Society (then the possessor of the largest art collection in New York). Hunt submitted not only a design for a building facelift, but also a full master plan for a gargantuan museum, Louvre-like in look and scale. Part and whole were rejected. He would become the nation’s most famous architect anyway. His work on the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, that triumph of Beaux-Arts architecture known as “the White City,” made him a national hero. America’s grandest house, the Biltmore, is his work; so are The Breakers, Marble House, Ochre Court, Chateau-sur-Mer—the houses that make Newport, Rhode Island, America’s bastion of Belle-Époque grandeur. Denied most public commissions, Hunt became “the architect who gilded the Gilded Age,” the man who made private houses monumental. But his real project was to create a culture of fine art in America, starting with a great art museum that could promote it, the museum that would become the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In 1869, the aging Ralph Waldo Emerson met Hunt in New York and confided to his journal: “One remarkable person new to me, Richard Hunt the architect. His conversation was spirited beyond any that I remember, loaded with matter, and expressed with the vigour and fury of a member of the Harvard boat or ball club relating the adventures of one of their matches; inspired, meantime, throughout, with fine theories of the possibilities of art.” A glittering conversationalist, Hunt became America’s foremost public proponent of art, occupying the place in this country that Oscar Wilde would occupy in England a generation later. The differences between Hunt and Wilde were significant, however. Wilde, an Irishman, a poet, a homosexual, and finally an outsider in English society, viewed the arts as modes of personal superiority: art as idleness, genius, personal luxury. Hunt was a builder and a businessman, overseeing complicated projects that required hundreds or thousands of employees (two thousand men were employed to build The Breakers) and cooperation from bricklayers, stonemasons, painters, plumbers, lawyers, and many others. Art for Hunt was not lonely genius but effective collaboration. They looked their parts, too: Wilde had his long locks and silk scarves, whereas Hunt’s alderman goatee made him look like a fire commissioner borrowing his rich friend’s coat. Wilde became the aesthetic icon, but Hunt’s artistic model was probably more effective, and it had important social effects.

Winifred Howe, in her admirable A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, furnishes us with memoranda from the museum’s first organizational meetings. Hunt contributed a distinctive vision. “It is our aim,” he declared, “to have, at no very future period, a museum similar to the Kensington Museum in London.” The Kensington is now called the Victoria and Albert, but its very first name, from when it was an offshoot of London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, is the most revealing: the Museum of Manufactures, drawing on the etymology of the term, facta (made) and manu (by hand). It was a museum of handicrafts, a visual encyclopedia of everything that human beings could make with their hands. It was conceived as an institution for working men, and its founder Henry Cole not only curated the collections but established the opening hours so as to be “most convenient to the working classes.”

Hunt had a practical reason for desiring such a museum. As a Beaux-Arts architect, he had a hand in every design feature of his buildings: His sketches specify bannisters, plumbing fixtures, lighting, window sashes, wood paneling, slate shingles, marble revetments, and more. He sketched the sculptures, stained glass windows, and paintings he wanted. But he depended on an army of artists and craftsmen to execute these visions. This necessity made the Beaux-Arts style the most social of all styles, one that required an entire society of workers. It is the democratic style, and not only because the ancient Greek democracies provided much of its visual language. Ordinary people love opulent buildings like the Metropolitan Museum of Art or Grand Central Station; they also play important roles in the construction of those buildings. Modern styles presume an architect working with machine-made parts, with human automata putting the pieces together; the Beaux-Arts style depends on laborers who rise to become artisans and artists, who acquire skills and, over time, dignity.

Hunt’s artistic vocation was inseparable from business; indeed, it was itself a business. And he had a group of businessmen by his side, working to establish the museum. William C. Prime, first vice president of the museum, opined in 1888,

The life blood of modern commerce and industry is the love of beauty. This mighty city, its wealth and power, rest on this foundation, trade in beauty, buying and selling beauty. . . . Consider for one instant what is the trade which supports your long avenues of stores crowded with purchasers. . . . Enumerate carpets, upholstery, wall papers, furniture, handsome houses, the innumerable beauties of life which employ millions of people in their production, and you will realize that but for the commercial and industrial love of beauty your city would be a wilderness.

That same night, the lawyer Joseph Hodges Choate, a friend of Hunt’s who had put Boss Tweed in jail, enthused that the plan was

gradually to gather together a more or less complete collection of objects illustrative of the history of art in all its branches, from the earliest beginnings to the present time, which should serve not only for the instruction and entertainment of the people, but should also show to the students and artisans of every branch of industry, in the high and acknowledged standards of form and of color, what the past had accomplished for them to imitate and excel.

The ambition to tutor craftsmen is still evident in the collections today. Have you ever wondered why the Met has so many “period rooms” filled with furniture? Hunt and his philanthropic allies believed that Americans needed to learn how to make fine furniture, and the Met was the place to learn it. Consider the Costume Institute and the Persian carpet collection. Hunt believed that the museum should collect textiles so that Americans could become expert tailors, designers, and upholsterers. In its earliest years, the Met held classes not only in drawing and painting and sculpture but in tile-laying, metallurgy, carpentry, and plumbing. Plumbing! It made sense: Hunt created custom designs for bath fixtures, but there weren’t enough skilled workers in lead, copper, cast iron, and other metals available to produce the beautiful kitchens, bathrooms, and laundry rooms he wanted. In his vision, the Met would be the place where plumbers would be trained to be artists capable of the most ambitious designs.

Once the doors opened, the Museum was celebrated as “a great thing for the working-men, artisans, artists, and art-lovers of New York.” We find reports of this sort: “The Trustees take especial satisfaction . . . in observing the number of artisans who visit the Museum.” The museum prided itself on its “school of design for arts and trades.”

Today, perhaps too much under the influence of the Oscar Wilde theory of the arts, we split the arts from the trades, just as we tend to split the Beaux-Arts architecture of men like Richard Morris Hunt from the progressive Victorian era of social improvements in which it developed. But it is no accident that the same era that produced labor laws and public sanitation and free schooling also produced buildings like the New York Public Library, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the San Francisco City Hall, and so many other remarkable buildings. Many of the same people championed both tendencies, and considered themselves allies.

A utilitarian-minded person beholding the New York Public Library regards the opulent design as wasteful excess. Could not the public libraries and museums have been simple brick barns, with more room for books? And the extra money given to the poor? The short answer is “no.” Beauty was part of the Progressive Era. Progressive leaders had the works of John Ruskin on their shelves. They saw too much of life dominated by the machine, and their answer was to humanize with nature and beauty. They recognized that machines could provide steel frames, uniform bricks, and square-cut ashlar. With the time and money saved by the industrial process, they aimed to reinvest the fruits of progress. Every visible surface was to be coated with human handicraft: paintings, carvings, mosaics, tapestries, words. They saw humans choked and paddocked in suffocating cities, and they supplied nature, parks, and suburbs. They saw man’s day mechanized by work, and they answered with leisure. Everywhere they sought balance, redressing the deformations of machine society. Le Corbusier and others would come along and say that none of this was acceptable. We live in a mechanized society, and there is a steel frame behind every Beaux-Arts facade, so, they insisted, we should strip away the sculptures, the paintings, the inscriptions, the mosaics, to see the naked steel and industrial concrete, and be satisfied with a screen of industrial glass. Men of the machine age should have nothing made by hand, only machine-made things. But this is stupidity, not honesty. We need beauty, nature, craft. Everywhere one looks today, those who can afford to do so live where beauty, nature, and craft thrive. Those without means live where everything is made by machine.

The Progressives wished to elevate the poor and address inequality. Skilled labor—the bedrock of the Beaux-Arts movement—was an important instrument of this kind of progress. The arts were not a philanthropic diversion from moneymaking, but rather a part of the same human expressiveness that drives commerce. For this reason, the Met embraced art, labor, craft, and commerce, the whole sweep of human activity. To return to Choate: “It is this same old-fashioned and exploded idea, which regards all that relates to art as the idle pastime of the favored few, and not, as it really is, as the vital and practical interest of the working millions, that has so long retarded its progress among us.”

This democratic vision led the trustees to offer classes at minimal cost; to expand opening hours to make the museum available to working people; and most of all—a policy in recent years vehemently opposed by the museum’s very different modern directorship—to make admission free. More than anything else, this policy carries with it the bouquet of the founders’ original idealism. As Hunt said, “By the Great Caesar, if this country doesn’t take up art, we’ll make it! We’ll educate it! We’ll show it what a great and glorious thing it is!” Free admission exemplified this spirit of evangelization on behalf of beauty. (In 2018, to their shame, city officials authorized a required entry fee for the first time in fifty years, exempting only residents of New York State.)

As one of the founding members of the Museum’s board, and the country’s most famous architect, Hunt might well have expected, when the board planned a building to house the museum during the 1870s, that he would design the structure. He was disappointed. By the terms of the museum’s charter, the city would build the museum on city land in Central Park—and the city would choose the architect. The city chose Calvert Vaux, the architect for most of Central Park. Vaux’s efforts to blend the aesthetics of the Alhambra, Central Park’s Dairy, and a New England brick factory created what James Jackson Jarves called “a forcible example of architectural ugliness.” Renovations have exposed some elements of Vaux’s original structure, so visitors to the Met can make up their own minds about its merits. A second building, by Theodore Weston, attempted to blend Vaux’s brick walls and Ruskin-inspired arches with Classical details. The design was effective but unspectacular. Meanwhile, Hunt looked on with increasing exasperation as Weston, a civil engineer with minimal architectural experience, struggled to manage the project. Luckily, like the city and its wealth, the museum continued to expand. By the 1890s the board realized that it needed a world-class building, which required a world-class architect. A change of law allowed the Met’s board to hire its own architects, instead of receiving them from the city’s Department of Parks, and Richard Morris Hunt became the third architect of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was sixty-six, only a year from his death. But he had long thought about the museum, and he designed not only a new Fifth Avenue entrance, with its Great Hall and Grand Staircase, but a new master plan, which remains the basic plan in use today.

We can marvel at Hunt’s achievement, the grand building that contemporaries described as “his monument.” His Fifth Avenue facade is imposing but beautiful, its elements familiar and yet exotically exuberant; the deep bays, low arches, and oversized acroteria are all unusual. The long climb to enter a building whose interior is entirely screened evokes aspiration and mystery; entering through the doors and stepping into that Great Hall, one has the feeling of stepping through a magical portal. The Great Hall is both a soaring temple and a homely, darkened cave; grand and comfortable, it remains to this day both the museum’s entrance and its heart. It offers an architectural presentiment, as Hunt intended, of just how great and glorious a thing art is.

In Hunt’s hands, it was a great and glorious thing, a civilization-wide effort. He rallied the era’s robber barons, whom he called “the New Medicis,” and encouraged them in their responsibility to create enduring beauty that would enrich the life of the city. And he enrolled the apprentice stonemasons, who would at first carry and place the stones, and then in time learn to shape them with greater skill and command a greater wage. Hunt’s student Frank Furness created my favorite image of the Great Hall of the Met: a simple charcoal sketch that shows the space as it was being built, with brawny men lowering the giant limestone rails into place on booms, as the newly formed arches rise up above them. That great museum, in other words, was built by—and for—people like my grandfather. It is a sad sign of our times that the museum just recently published a book titled Making the Met, with reams of information about directors and curators and favored minority groups and famous exhibitions—and not a single word about the builders, the blue-collar workers whose skill made the place such a thing of beauty, and for whom the museum was originally founded. They were elided, forgotten, supplanted by the managerial class and its preoccupations.

We can be sure that Hunt would not have forgotten the men who built the Met. He died in 1895, at the age of sixty-seven. Overwork—he had written on his tombstone Laborare Est Orare, “to work is to pray”—almost certainly contributed to his death. His final years saw him working obsessively on the Biltmore and the Columbian Exposition in Chicago (both with Frederick Law Olmsted), on the American Academy in Rome, and on his master plan for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His death produced a unique tribute, worth considering at length. It came from the workers at the Biltmore and reads as follows:

Whereas, the great Architect of the Universe has in his wisdom removed our fellow laborer, Richard M. Hunt, from this earthly mansion to a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens; and
Whereas, his fame as an artist and his devotion to and his accomplishments in his profession are known to the world, but his generosity, sympathy, and services in behalf of the worthy laboring men of all classes are only known to those whose good fortune it was to be under his immediate supervision;
Therefore we who have worked under him, deeming it fitting that we record our love for and appreciation of him, have
Resolved, that in his death our country has lost its greatest architect, and our skilled workmen, artists and sculptors have lost a kind, considerate and constant friend; for neither his great fame nor his wealth ever caused him to be forgetful, indifferent, or careless of the rights and feelings of his fellowmen and laborers who were aiding in an humbler way in erecting these beautiful buildings, which, only marvellous genius could have imagined and planned;
Resolved, that to him more than any other man of our time all the representative workmen of this country are indebted for the elevation of their trades and arts to the position which they now hold in the ranks of the great army of skilled workmen.
Resolved, that we tender his afflicted family our deepest sympathy and that a copy of these Resolutions be sent to his widow.
Dated at Biltmore, N.C. August 1st, 1895.
B. Worth … for the carpenters
J. Miller … for the stone carvers
J. O’Neill … bricklayers
J. C. Thompson … painters
G. Bartigate … stone cutter
L. Bowen … electricians
S. J. McKeon … plumbers
E. D. Holt … tile layers
R. J. Miller … marble cutters
P. F. Jones … coppersmiths and slaters
S. C. Gladwyn … wood carvers
J. Mortimer … plasterers
P. McNiven … stone setters

We can add to this tribute the name of my grandfather, Frank Costello, signing for the diggers and the pipe fitters.

John Byron Kuhner owns Bookmarx Books in Steubenville, Ohio.

Image by Store Norske Leksikon, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped. 

The post The Males Behind the Met by John Byron Kuhner | Articles appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — Before John Burris became the go-to lawyer for Northern California families grieving a loved one killed by police, the civil rights legend was a child suspicious of the Santa Claus narrative.

He didn’t understand why Santa was white. He was confused by Santa’s modus operandi — landing on rooftops to slide down chimneys to deliver presents? The Burris family had no chimney.

“I could not accept it,” he said, “because it didn’t make sense to me.”

For nearly 50 years, the San Francisco Bay Area native has poked holes into narratives that did not add up, namely those of law enforcement accused of using excessive force. He estimates he has represented more than 1,000 victims of police misconduct, in California and elsewhere.

He helped win a civil jury verdict of $3.8 million for the late Rodney King, a Black motorist whose 1991 beating by four Los Angeles police officers — captured on grainy camcorder video — shocked a public unaware of the brutality routinely inflicted on Black people. His practice also negotiated nearly $3 million for the family of Oscar Grant, a young Black man killed by a Bay Area transit officer in 2009 in one of the first police shootings recorded on cellphone.

But Burris prides himself on the smaller cases that have made up his career, and even at 77, he still travels to stand with clients at news conferences. Video evidence has helped enormously in altering public opinion, legal observers say, but so have attorneys like Burris who refuse to stop pushing, one police department at a time.

“The police were untouchable,” said retired U.S. Northern California Judge Thelton Henderson. “John was a part of changing all of that, changing and showing what the police department is like.”

As Burris prepares to hand the reins of his practice to a younger generation, he sat for interviews with The Associated Press and reflected on a career that started with accounting before landing on police accountability as a way to improve his community.

Burris grew up in the working-class city of Vallejo, the oldest of six.

DeWitt Burris was a tool room mechanic at a naval shipyard with side businesses in landscaping and fruit-picking, which John Burris did not enjoy. Imogene Burris was a psychiatric nurse technician at a state hospital who taught her children that everyone deserved fair treatment.

John Burris was a big reader and as the Civil Rights era progressed, a speech class at Solano Community College showed him that people listened to what he had to say. He later graduated with advanced degrees in business and law from the University of California, Berkeley, yearning to do more.

It bothered him that the proud men he admired, including his father and uncles, had served in the U.S. Navy but in menial roles because of their race. It burned him to learn, as a lawyer, that police beat and belittled Black fathers in front of their children.

“Police didn’t have to do certain things,” Burris said. “I could see how Black men were treated in the criminal justice system. I understood it was the destruction of the African American family that was taking place.”

San Francisco Mayor London Breed, 48, grew up in public housing and recalled Burris as someone the Black community could go to for help.

“There were certain attorneys that had a solid reputation, and he was one of them,” she said. “It was a big deal that he was African American.”

Now, prospective clients crowd into the small waiting area of his law firm before they’re ushered into a conference room with expansive views of west Oakland.

The walls are studded with news articles chronicling legal achievements, proclamations of honor, and court illustrations of significant trials. One section is dedicated to Rosa Parks, the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis, and other civil rights heroes.

“I cannot be tired, I cannot quit,” Burris said, “because they did not quit.”