Mixed Media: September 2026

The Adventures of Superfreak: My Childhood on the Hippie Trail

By Caleb Dardick

Everyone knows the Hippie Trail story: a VW bus, sex, drugs, and the overland road east. For Carol and Sam Dardick, that dream became reality when they dropped out of mainstream society and set off on a 20,000-mile journey from Amsterdam to India with their three young children. They promised their oldest son, Caleb, that the trip would be the adventure of a lifetime.

In his memoir, Caleb Dardick, a former Berkeley Director of Local Government and Community Relations, revisits his chaotic childhood as his family travels across Europe, the Canary Islands, Morocco, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. Rather than another account of adults chasing freedom, Dardick recounts the tale through the wonder-filled perspective of the child who lived it, with prose that reflects the emotional clarity of adulthood. The result is wildly fun and darkly humorous without romanticizing the mental illness, disability, and family instability that are central to the narrative.

Caleb’s father, Sam Dardick, M.A. ’60, who lives with polio, and his mother, who struggled with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, shape the journey as much as the road itself. To survive the chaos, Caleb transforms himself into “Superfreak.” Clad in a Superman costume, he navigates a world of jail breaks, spiritual seekers, and rock ’n’ roll. The Adventures of Superfreak tells a familiar story of mid-century counterculture—but it’s not one you’ve heard before.

—H.J. Valerio

Modernism: Born in California 

Environmental Design Archives 

You may not realize that the title of this exhibit at Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design is a play on words. After all, the Borns in question—Berkeley Professor Ernest Born ’22, M.A. ’23, and his partner and wife, Esther Born ’26—aren’t as well known as some of their contemporaries. Many of Ernest’s most ambitious projects, including proposed redevelopments of Fisherman’s Wharf, Alcatraz, and the Embarcadero waterfront in the ’50s and ’60s, remain unbuilt. But he had an essential role in the modernist movement. 

Ernest envisioned the grand entrance to the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition, updated the display furniture for Macy’s in Union Square, and designed the original signage for BART. He drew renderings for other architects, helping their ideas get made, and reimagined the look and feel of national journals like Architectural Record and the American Architect. Anyone who’s caught a train at the Glen Park BART station, which he designed, has seen his work. His projects were often photographed by Esther, a talented photographer and architect in her own right, who captured Luis Barragán’s early buildings as artfully as she did portraits of Frida Kahlo. 

“I think of him as an interpreter,” says Environmental Design Archives curator Betsy Frederick-Rothwell, M.A. ’02. “He’s really the visual communicator of these new ways of seeing and looking.”

“But it wasn’t just for architects,” adds Waverly Lowell, MLS ’79, the former director of the archive who acquired the Ernest and Esther Born Collection for Berkeley in 2001. “That’s what I love about it. It was anybody who took BART, or anybody who went to the fair in 1939, or anybody who shopped at Macy’s. They were all experiencing modern design.”

Modernism: Born in California, located in the Environmental Design Library in Bauer Wurster Hall, is on view until September 30.

—Esther Oh

Man on Fire (Spoilers!)

Starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II 

Man on Fire, a new action-thriller series based on the same book series as the 2004 Denzel Washington movie, is exciting. Intense. Well-written. But the best part is the main character himself, John Creasy, and the performance of Yahya Abdul-Mateen II ’11. Creasy is a PTSD-addled Special Forces veteran with a drinking problem. Four years after an operation gone tragically wrong, he lives a gray civilian life in Mexico City, punctuated only by traumatizing flashbacks. After trying to kill himself, he wakes up in the hospital to be greeted by an old friend, Paul Rayburn. Soon, he and Rayburn are in Rio de Janeiro, where Creasy is offered a job  by the Brazilian President to prevent a terrorist attack. It doesn’t go well. When a bomb goes off in a condo complex, Rayburn, his sons, his wife, and many others are killed—all except Poe, Rayburn’s newly orphaned teenage daughter. Creasy dutifully takes her under his wing and rains hell on the perpetrators. And this is just the first season. Netflix has hinted at a second season, and with 40 million views and the 8th spot on the list of most-watched shows of 2026, it’s hard to imagine it won’t come soon.

—James Pagett Tollen

The Atlantic Republic of Letters: Knowledge and Colonialism in the Age of Franklin

By Diego Pirillo

Respublica Litteraria may sound like a Harry Potter spell, but actually, it’s a Latin phrase meaning “Republic of Letters.” Berkeley Professor of Italian studies Diego Pirillo describes it as “a cosmopolitan intellectual community” between thinkers in colonial America and Enlightenment Europe. His book aims to place the Benjamin Franklins of the era within this intellectual community and illuminate how colonial governments “weaponized” knowledge to control their proto-nations. It uses the 18th-century city of Philadelphia, “the capital of the Republic of Letters in North America,” to do so. Part I examines the infrastructures of knowledge (letters, periodicals, encyclopedias, museums) that put the young city on the intellectual map. Part II uncovers the connection between the Republic of Letters and the broader American colonial project. It’s a complicated book—and not a short one. But with down-to-earth prose and an eye for storytelling, Pirillo makes it work.

—J.P.T.

Figaro Up, Figaro Down

Produced by Robert Richert

Tim Blevins was the rockstar of opera. On stage, his baritone voice rumbled throughout the theater. Off stage, he was a character of his own, practicing vocal warm-ups between cigarette and beer breaks. But behind the velour curtains of Blevins’ stardom hid a growing drug addiction. “It’s a lethal combo: sex, drugs, and opera,” he says in the documentary, Figaro Up, Figaro Down, produced by Rob Richert ’04.

The documentary follows Blevins’ rise to fame and takes you through how he lost everything—career, family, home—to drug addiction, sending him to live unhoused on San Francisco’s streets.

Director Javid Soriano was drawn to Richert’s screenwriting work, including The Last Black Man in San Francisco, which premiered at Sundance ’19. Richert helped Soriano bring a decade of footage into structural focus. “I was immediately drawn to the film’s visual ambition…and its potential to provoke positive social change and build bridges,” Richert told California. “Our hope is that it can continue to find audiences, opportunities to elevate Tim, and share the message of empathy and understanding for people who are experiencing addiction or homelessness.”

The film’s cinematography is striking: black-and-white shots portray Blevins’ present life of busking outside BART stations, while his past life is shot in color. These distinctions create a captivating representation of Blevins’ shame and longing for the past.

Most notable is the documentary’s scoring, which uses operatic numbers, sung by Blevins himself, to reflect his emotional mindset. Blevins’ vocal performances are as extraordinary as his life story, offering a hopeful message to those struggling with similar adversities. The documentary climaxes with Blevins’ 2016 performance at the Greek Theatre, where he later made up with his estranged family off-stage.

—H.J.V.

Carryout

By Hasan Dudar 

For the Idilbi family, their corner store is more than a business. After Palestinian refugee Ziad and his wife Salma flee war-torn Beirut, the Idilbis find themselves in Toledo, Ohio, hoping to build a new life together.

The Idilbi convenience shop is a window into the immigrant experience, capturing the family’s fight to establish themselves in America while they face racial prejudice, financial collapse, and cultural alienation.

Just as the family’s life doesn’t follow one perfect track, the collection of stories by Hasan Dudar ’13 resists a linear structure. Though they can be read chronologically, the chapters work as standalone pieces. Each story offers something different from the last, from characters’ shifting perspectives to experimental structures like journal entries.

Among Carryout’s wide familial cast, Walid, the youngest son, stands out. The central narrator grows up navigating life in America as the child of refugees. As he comes of age, grappling with his dream of becoming a writer and the expectations of his father, Walid searches for his place within Ohio’s Arab community and the legacy of displacement that shapes his family.

Dudar’s raw prose, complete with moments of witty humor, will have you rooting for the family’s victories and lamenting their losses. Despite the adversity the Idilbis face, Carryout illustrates, as the collection’s James Joyce epigraph puts it, why we keep going “on and on and on and on!”

—H.J.V.