Richard (Luckey) Perri portrait of Sterling Bunnell. Photo: Jonah Raskin.

Think of San Francisco artists and you’re likely to think of Ruth Asawa, whose work is currently on exhibit at SFMOMA, and Wayne Thieibaud, who had his first show in SF in 1960 and whose work is now at the Legion of Honor. To those artists add the name Richard (“Luckey”) Perry, whose colorful paintings are on the walls of the Italo Americano Museo in a show curated by Bianca Friundi, who recently told a crowd,“We’re proud to have Perri’s work here and to have him in person.”

The exhibit opened February 8, 2025 and runs until June 7, 2025. Wearing black trousers, a black jacket and a pork pie hat, Perri stood in front of his painting of Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill and talked for an hour about art and The City where he has lived and worked for decades.

Perri loves Italy; his father came from Sicily and his mother from Calabria. He holds dual citizenship: Italian and American. He might one day be forced to leave the US and go to Italy. It’s no secret that Perri also loves San Francisco. So no one was shocked when he told the audience at the Italo Americano Museo in Fort Mason, “I love this city.”

Perri doesn’t love all of the city’s 46.9 square miles.

He loves a particular slice of San Francisco that is vanishing but that hasn’t entirely disappeared. Perri loves the old San Francisco that once had a thriving waterfront, ships in the harbor, longshoremen and cafes like “Red’s Java House” at 38 Bryant that was founded during the Depression of the 1930s and that is still serving its signature sausage sandwiches on Mondays and the ever popular corn beef and hash on Saturdays and Sundays. “I express my attachment to this place through my paintings,” Perri says. “There’s a lot of freedom here.”

No one has captured in color the urban face of old San Francisco more faithfully than Perri and that’s no accident. For years he owned and operated a bar at Mission and 29^th Street where the regulars were, he says, characters out of the pages of Damon Runyan and had names like “Gorilla Dog,” “Indian Dave” and “Baldy Ray.” In their company, Perri acquired the nickname “Luckey.”

The Italo Americano Museo in Fort Mason’s Building C is exhibiting more than two dozen of his iconic canvases of landmark places like Red’s Java House and City Lights Bookstore on Columbus Avenue, plus San Francisco personalities like Gavin Newsom, and the poet, publisher, and painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as well as Sterling Bunnell, the Bay Area psychiatrist whose patients included a great many artists and writers.

Perri isn’t as well known as many of the places, such as Coit Tower, he has captured on canvases, and not as famous as some of the people, including ex mayor and now Governor Newsom, whose portraits he has painted. But neither is he a complete unknown. Over the decades he’s acquired a small devoted following.

Call him the peoples’ painter. Granted, he doesn’t paint workers or working class neighborhoods but he paints the places where workers have eaten and the streetcars that they’ve taken to and from employment. Perri’s studio on the second floor of the Odd Fellows Building on Seventh Street near Market, isn’t located in a neighborhood that’s a destination for tourists and foodies. Call it an outdoor living room for members of the lumpenproletariat.

Perri doesn’t have an agent and he’s not connected to a gallery, which enables him, he says, “to paint whatever I want to paint.” Not a single canvas exhibited at the Italo-Americano Museum has a price tag. “I’m not trying to sell my work,”Perri says. “And I’m not thinking about living a long life. I’m thinking about painting.” He adds, “But if you want to buy one of my canvases we can talk.” A quotation from Perri on a wall painted white reads, “I have more ideas and images in my mind than I have seconds in my life.”         At the age of 81, he’s still painting, still tapping into his creative energy. Years ago, during a bout with depression, Sterling Bunnell provided a dose of much needed talk therapy, but mostly Perri’s art has kept him feeling good about himself and the world. He’s been a lucky man.

Perri was born to a blue collar Catholic family; his father came from Sicily, his mother from Calabria. His father worked for the railroad and was injured on the job, an experience that his son has long remembered. Working class life could be precarious. Perri grew up in Rockville Center on Long Island, before the coming of Levittown, the suburban housing development.

He got out of Long Island as fast as he could, left the church and went west, attended college in Santa Fe, New Mexico and in Tempe, Arizona before enrolling at the San Francisco Art Institute. “I arrived with flowers in my hair,” he says. He joined the underground comic scene, met and worked with Art Spiegelman long before Spiegelman mined his father’s concentration experience and created the Maus comic books with Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. Spiegelman made art from the darkest of material.

Perri’s paintings might, on a first take, look realistic, but they’re not, especially not the colors. “They all express a certain mood,” Perri says. A journalist named Julie Zigoris noted that his paintings express both loneliness and a sense of nostalgia. That sounds about right, though one might also say that working class people are an invisible, palpable presence. The immense skies in Perri’s work have no matching colors that one might see and recognize in the skies above Russian Hill or Golden Gate Park, and his street cars look far more psychedelic than any streetcars that operate on Market Street.

The Dutch artist, Vincent van Gogh, famous for his sun flowers, blue skies and wheat fields with crows, has inspired some of Perri’s best work. “The application of the paint is the important thing,” he says. What he’s after is called “luminosity,” which he defines as the “spirituality of something that is gone.” Indeed, his art captures the luminosity of San Francisco. The word, luminosity, also provides the title of his book for sale at the Italo Americano Museo.

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Muhammad Abed El Rahman (left) and Saleh Bakri in ‘The Teacher’ COCOON FILMS.

Set in the hills of the West Bank, The Teacher, written and directed by British-Palestinian filmmaker Farah Nabulsi, tells the riveting story of Bassem (Saleh Bakri), a Palestinian high school English teacher struggling to inspire his students under the pall of Israel’s occupation. What’s it all for–the studying, the scholarship–if only to see armed settlers burn down your village olive trees and an Israeli government demolish your family home to make way for another illegal settlement. To the Palestinian teen who speaks in despair, as though old and tired with little for which to live, the middle-aged Bassem tells his student to return to his books to “regain control” in pursuit of an education that holds hope for a better life.

Although the film is Bassem’s journey of self-blame, new found love and quiet yet determined resistance, we also see events through the eyes of his prized student Adam (Muhammed Abed Elrahman), who becomes Bassem’s surrogate son replacing the one Bassem lost, the one we meet only through scenes that take us back in time.

Blessed with looks and smarts, the surrogate son Adam pours over his books at a desk in the dirt outside overlooking the village destined for erasure. His home is gone. The tractor left only slabs of cement under which Adam recovers a desk, a couch and a pair of binoculars that afford him advance notice of a looming threat or gut punch.

One measure of a good movie is whether you care about the characters or feel compelled to watch them, regardless of whether you agree with their choices or roles in the film, regardless of whether the character is a teacher invested in his students or a cunning Israeli intelligence officer who knows exactly which emotional button to push. For character development–raw, textured–The Teacher scores 10 out of 10, not only because Bassem is heroic, protective and ultimately selfless but because both he and Adam are tested in ways most of us never will be challenged, leaving us wondering what we would choose if we lived under occupation–the scorched land of nighttime raids and vigilante violence, where our futures are not our own, where the fork in the road between self-defense and vengeance sometimes merges and where the greater good beckons us to hush creeping doubts. Would we remember The Teacher’s words, “Revenge eats away at you and destroys from the inside.”

Reviewers from legacy media– New York Times, LA Times–criticize the movie for having too many subplots. “But a teacher-student bonding narrative, a legal procedure, a family tragedy, a romance and a kidnapping thriller are a lot to hang on one character,” writes NYT reviewer Ben Kenigsberg. “Nabulsi, unfortunately, muddles the story with multiple subplots, some inelegant acting and contrived English-language dialogue,” writes the LAT’s Carlos Aguilar.

Did these movie critics see the same film this reviewer saw?

Such undeserved criticism suggests the writers are imposing their detached notion of reality on a drama that is all too real. The critics’ desire for a less complicated storyline with more refined dialogue suggests colonization of the art form rather than criticism, for strands of multifaceted characters must not be removed to suit cinematic preferences for a formulaic Hollywood blockbuster.

Conversations in The Teacher resonate as familiar even in the most unfamiliar surroundings, where rough-around-the edges Palestinian teens stereotype Lisa (Imogen Poots), the blonde British school counselor as a mere do-gooder. “Miss United Nations has arrived,” joke the teens who call their teacher a “player” when between cigarette puffs he locks eyes with the British import. As for the subplots–the gun behind the bookcase, the woman who emerges in only a towel, the judge who delivers injustice – these are not disconnected B or C stories but deftly interwoven branches of the A story about survival and subterfuge under the boot of a brutal occupier. Life is not simple nor a singular line, certainly not when the path to decolonization can be uncertain and torturous, both for the colonized and the colonizer, though never in equal measure.

Nabulsi –who wrote the script in Britain during the Covid lockdown and met with checkpoint delays during three months of filming in the West Bank–adds depth to her story when she introduces the subplot based on the abduction of Gilad Shalit, a former Israeli soldier held captive for over five years in Palestine before released in a hostage deal that freed 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. In one of the most compelling scenes in The Teacher, a US American father, an Israeli resident whose son is held hostage by Palestinians, sympathizes with Bassem having lost a son, for in a metaphorical sense the American father also lost his son after the young man insisted the family emigrate to Israel following a Birthright Israel trip. Now the father, whose wife berates him – much as Basem’s wife berated her husband for failing to protect their son–finds himself a stranger in a strange land called Israel. No, he assures Bassem, he is not one of them, one of the heartless occupiers.

Nabulsi, the daughter of a Palestinian mother and a Palestinian-Egypian father, was born and raised in London, where she pursued a career in finance and worked for J.P. Morgan before becoming a filmmaker. She switched careers, from stocks to scripts, after visiting Palestine to trace her family history–a mother who fled to Kuwait following the ‘67 war, a father who emigrated to London to study civil engineering.

Nabulsi’s short film The Present–also set in occupied Palestine and also starring Palestinian actor Bakri– was nominated for an Oscar and won a BAFTA (British Academy Film Television Award). The Teacher–a suspenseful one hour and 55 minute drama– premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September of 2023, just weeks before October 7th. During shooting Nabulsi set up large black screens to cover actors playing IDF soldiers because she feared that if villagers thought the soldiers were real a hurricane of heartache would ensue.

Now–during the US-armed Israeli genocide in Gaza and emboldened settler movement ripping through the West Bank–it is hard to imagine Nabulsi entering the Israeli-controlled West Bank to film The Teacher. Fortunately, for us–the movie audience, for Palestine, the resistance, and for the solidarity movement, marchers across the globe, The Teacher can be livestreamed on several platforms or watched in theaters from coast to coast.

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This is the sixteenth part in a series about riding night trains across Europe and the Near East to Armenia—to spend time in worlds beyond the pathological obsessions of Donald Trump. (This week, Trump continued his shakedown of the Ivy League—notably Harvard and Columbia—claiming that receipt of federal grants gives Trump the right to oversee university curricula and hiring practices, even though the only major offered at the now-defunct Trump University was Bankruptcy Science.)

A rampart outside the strategic city of Erzurum in eastern Turkey, where John Buchan set the conclusion to his Great Game thriller Greenmantle, which I can recommend to anyone needing a break from Trump’s onanism. Photo: Matthew Stevenson.

The next morning, which was clear, cool, and sunny, I was out of my hotel at 7:45 a.m. and, when it opened at 8:00 a.m., in the lobby of the museum dedicated to the Erzurum Congress in July-August 1919. It was there that Atatürk resigned his army commission and stated the goals of an independent Turkish republic, which would reshape the politics of the Middle East, if not the world, for the next 100 years.

I realize Erzurum must sound like the end of the earth, and in many senses it is (an overnight train ride east from Ankara), except it can argued that battles fought here in these mountains decided not just the 1853-56 Crimean war and 1877 was between Turkey and Russia, but also determined the outcome in the East during World War I.

The hall looks like a high school classroom, with rows of desks for the delegates, and the surrounding storyboards describe the conclusions reached during the Congress.

Off to the side of the Congress hall are the conference rooms where Atatürk met with other delegates, and on the walls around the museum are pictures of Atatürk in a topcoat and tails, carrying a walking stick and white gloves. (He was certainly the best-dressed nationalist revolutionary in history.)

From the Erzurum Congress came the organized Turkish opposition both to the failing Ottoman government and the leadership of Atatürk at the head the independence movement. It followed the Greek invasion in western Anatolia and the postwar western partition of the Ottoman Empire (drafted at Mudros in 1918 and ratified in the Treaty of Sèvres, although that wasn’t signed until August 1920).

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From the Congress hall, I biked across Erzurum, which by now was familiar, and went to the house where Atatürk stayed during the 1919 meetings.

Under the Ottomans, the house had been the governor’s mansion, but as Atatürk’s lodging during the Congress it has since become the Turkish equivalent of a “George Washington Slept Here” revolutionary war house.

On the walls were maps of the Turkish insurrection against the foreign occupation, and in a few rooms were wax figures of Atatürk conferring with his delegates and military staff, all of whom had come to swear their allegiance to Mustafa Kemal.

One of the framed exhibits includes the words spoken to Atatürk by the local military commander in the region, Kâzim Karabekir Paşa, who said:

I came here to express the respect and honor of all the officers and of the enlisted men under my command. You, from now on as was before, are our respectable commander. I brought the car of the corps commander and a cavalry troop to escort you. Paşa, we are all at your service.

It was the only mandate that Atatürk needed to take command in the war of independence, and since 1919 Turkey hasn’t shown much concern for democracy.

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At Erzurum Castle, two men in the ticket kiosk happily agreed to keep an eye on my bicycle while I walked the ramparts and climbed to the top of the watchtower from which there were panoramic views in all directions of the hills surrounding Erzurum.

From that perch it was easy to see why Erzurum was the strategic chokepoint in eastern Turkey, and the key to any military campaign in the region.

Before 1877, there were numerous battles for Erzurum between the Ottomans and either the Russians or Persians. After 1877 (which ended with the Russians withdrawing to Kars), there was a climactic battle at Erzurum between the Russians and the Ottomans in winter 1916, when the landscape and surrounding mountains were buried in snow.

The Russians captured Erzurum (it’s a forgotten battle in World War I), which had the effect of stopping the Turkish offensive in Sinai against the Suez Canal. Had Erzurum not fallen, the Turks might well have driven Russia from the war in 1916.

+++

Standing on the parapet and looking around at the surrounding snow-capped mountains, I remembered that the John Buchan novel, Greenmantle, ended with the Russian capture of Erzurum, in part thanks to the heroics of British spies Richard Hannay and Sandy Arbuthnot, who managed to steal from the Germans the defensive plans for the fortress city.

Buchan writes:

But my eyes were on the north. From Erzerum [as Buchan spells it] city tall tongues of flame leaped from a dozen quarters. Beyond, towards the opening of the Euphrates glen, there was the sharp crack of field-guns. I strained eyes and ears, mad with impatience, and I read the riddle.

“Sandy,” I yelled, “Peter has got through. The Russians are round the flank. The town is burning. Glory to God, we’ve won, we’ve won!”

Hannay and Arbuthnot went undercover into the Ottoman Empire to thwart German plans (the Ottomans were allied to the Central Powers) to foment rebellion in Muslim lands against their British colonial overlords. (In raising the alarm Buchan writes: “There is a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark. And that wind is blowing towards the Indian border.”) The victory at Erzurum put out the flames, at least for the balance of 1916.

The Buchan novel ends with Arbuthnot disguised as the German agent “Greenmantle” (who was himself killed earlier in the battle) entering Erzurum, as if on a Trojan horse. Buchan writes:

But as we drew out from the skirts of the hills and began the long slope to the city, I woke to clear consciousness. I felt the smell of sheepskin and lathered horses, and above all the bitter smell of fire. Down in the trough lay Erzerum, now burning in many places, and from the east, past the silent forts, horsemen were closing in on it. I yelled to my comrades that we were nearest, that we would be first in the city, and they nodded happily and shouted their strange war-cries. As we topped the last ridge I saw below me the van of our charge—a dark mass on the snow—while the broken enemy on both sides were flinging away their arms and scattering in the fields.

In the very front, now nearing the city ramparts, was one man. He was like the point of the steel spear soon to be driven home. In the clear morning air I could see that he did not wear the uniform of the invaders. He was turbaned and rode like one possessed, and against the snow I caught the dark sheen of emerald. As he rode it seemed that the fleeing Turks were stricken still, and sank by the roadside with eyes strained after his unheeding figure …

Then I knew that the prophecy had been true, and that their prophet had not failed them. The long-looked for revelation had come. Greenmantle had appeared at last to an awaiting people.

But this “Greenmantle” was a member of his majesty’s secret service, who was doing his best to make the eastern world safe for colonialism. I know it will sound far-fetched to say, but there’s a direct line in those mountains and then in the sand from Erzurum in 1916 to Gaza today.

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The organist and organ pumper. Dom Bedos de Celles, L’art du facteur d’orgues (1766-1778).

If the organ is the King of Instruments, its monarchy is built on deception. The largest, most technologically complicated, most tonally diverse, and most visually stunning of musical objects, the organ was often held to be an earthly symbol of perfection. It stands motionless in its balcony and from its glittering array of pipes produces awe-inspiring music without the slightest intimation of effort as seen and heard from below.

But behind the gleaming façade, relentless work is required if music is to be made. Without breath the King cannot speak, not to mention sing. In the European millennium before the advent of electricity, the seemingly effortless majesty of the organ’s voice relied on real work by real people. From the seemingly luxurious position of industrial modernity, few have bothered to consider those who labored behind the scenes.

We should thank the late Walter Salmen, the assiduous and imaginative social historian of music, for dedicating one of his last books to the subject: Calcanten und Orgelzieherinnen: Geschichte eines “niederen” Dienstes (Organ pumpers [both men and women]: History of a lowly service). He was one of the first to look out for those who raised the wind by pulling ropes, pushing bars, or treading beams that lifted the bellows, sometimes, but not always, aided by the mechanical advantage provided by pulleys. These people were paid next to nothing during their lives and were duly forgotten by history. Constructed from dozens of telling examples extracted from archives and from musicological studies often only tangentially related to the organ, this slender book makes us reconsider the terms and conditions of labor on which the instrument’s sonic identity was founded.

These workers were the lowliest figures in any musical establishment in town, court or church. They often worked in dark, vermin-infested chambers, bitterly cold in winter and brutally hot in summer. Surviving payrolls show just how little money they made: usually a small fraction of the organist’s salary, often less than a tenth. Organ pumpers—called “blowers” in British English (even though they didn’t do any blowing themselves)—had little chance of improving their social standing or that of their families. Although some were, or became, instrument makers, they were, for the most part, stuck in a dead-end job, essential but replaceable.

The continuous of hours of tuning and voicing the pipes necessary when organs were being installed or renovated required vast amounts of pumping during long hours each day and extending across weeks. Accurately calibrating the pitch demanded a wind supply as reliably steady as possible.

According to surviving accounts, J. S. Bach tested the lungs of a new organ by first pulling out all the stops and playing massive chords on the manuals and pedal. The organist’s feet operated the largest pipes that sucked huge quantities of wind. Whenever Bach attempted this trademark stunt, someone had to be working hard behind the scenes.

Given the expense of hiring a pumper, pre-industrial organists practiced at home on stringed keyboard instruments— harpsichords, clavichords, and by the 19^th-century pianos—kitted out with pedalboards. Even for the organist, hearing the instrument come to life under his fingers and feet was a rare privilege. Before organ wind systems were electrified, the Kings of Instruments remained silent for far longer stretches, resounding only during religious services, concerts, job trials, or special demonstrations for visiting colleagues, patrons and princes.

The unseen and poorly remunerated work that made these events possible was often part-time employment for gravediggers, sextons, and bellringers. Organ pumpers were typically gathered from society’s margins: drunks, cripples, homeless, the aged, the infirm—and women. Women have long been, and often still are, the most invisible of laborers, even when fulfilling myriad tasks in plain sight in the home. It is therefore hardly surprising to discover that the female labor pool was crucial for organ pumping. Otherwise forbidden to take part in the divine service, women were frequently allowed to tread or pull the bellows, unseen and therefore unoffending. When those male pumpers with permanent, life-long positions died, their widows were typically pressed into the same poorly paid service to support themselves even unto their own deaths. The downtrodden did the treading.

In the Fall of 1831 in Walenstadt, encircled by the sublime Swiss scenery of mountain and lake, Felix Mendelssohn treated himself to what he called, in a letter home to Berlin, as “a private three-hour organ session.” The famed musical tourist described how the bellows had been operated by “an old, lame man; otherwise, not a single person was in the church.” Even if do the wind work, few music lovers would turn down the chance to eavesdrop on one of the greatest musical geniuses. Still, three hours is a very long time for a disabled senior citizen to do a job that can be quite taxing even for the fit. When I played on that same Swiss organ a few years ago, I simply flipped a switch and had at it.

Mendelssohn’s Walenstadt vignette teaches us anew that, uniquely among musical instruments, the organ could not be played alone. Someone else had to be at work.

Though not needing massive training, raising the bellows did require some skill. Archives record many complaints of incompetent or, in the case of schoolboys forced into service, rowdy bellows pumpers, who, through their missteps or mischief, blasted big holes in the music or even damaged the bellows themselves.

Dale Beronius, “Organ pumper,” Saturday Evening Post (1927).

An avid organ tourist, Mendelssohn’s recounted to his diary a visit to St. Paul’s Cathedral in London in September of 1837. At the end of the Sunday service he sat down on the bench and launched into Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in A Minor (BWV 543). In anticipation of this performance, all the important musicians of London had joined the huge congregation to hear the German virtuoso dazzle, especially with his feet.

Unaware that it was a huge European musical celebrity who was draining the wind from the bellows past the usual midday quitting time, the on-the-clock pumper left his post. As the wind gauge fell, the church’s aghast organist, Henry Smart, who was standing beside Mendelssohn, pulled frantically on the notification bell signaling the pumper to get busy again. Just as Mendelssohn came to the fugue’s daunting final pedal solo, the wind gave out. Smart dashed after the errant pumper, but out of sympathy for the poor man, Mendelssohn refused to play on. As he left the cathedral, Mendelssohn watched a furious mob of congregants shouting “Shame! Shame!” at the pumper for his dereliction of duty, committed within a few bars of the end of one of Bach’s thrilling fugue. The person on whose labor Mendelssohn’s performance relied had been the only one who could not enjoy the music directly. Shut off in his chamber, only able to hear muted strains of Bach over the respiration of the bellows and the clacking of the organ’s action, the pumper simply believed that he had fulfilled the terms of his employment and worked long enough on that day of rest.

In the decades after this dramatic unveiling of hidden organ labor in the world’s most populous city, various technological development tried to replace the human pumper. Motors powered by water or petroleum were tried but did not take hold. It was only across the first third of the 20^th century that pumping was electrified, eventually reaching rural churches.

Salmen’s purview doesn’t extend across the Atlantic but if it had, he would have found nostalgic accounts of youthful organ pumping by various captains of American industry, as well as a Secretary of the Treasury (George Courtelyou), and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court—Edward Douglass White, likely a Klan member who hailed from Louisiana and who, as an associate, had signed on to the majority opining in Plessy v. Ferguson of 1896. The history of enslaved organ pumpers has yet to be written.

Recent decades have witnessed (as in, actually seen) a return to human organ pumping. This movement (literally) seeks to replace the iron lung of the electric blower by returning to more flexible, feeling, if also fallible, people-powered winding. It is no longer a rare occurrence for pumpers working at antique or antique-inspired instruments to be acknowledged by audiences. At the dedicatory recital in Rochester, New York, a copy of a European organ from 1776, the two bellows operators, both students at the Eastman School of Music, were called to the gallery rail after the music had concluded to take their bows. They were not paid for their services.

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