Berkeley

Also, there is hardly any smoking except compared maybe to a true hippy enclave like up further north.

On the other hand if you're looking to hook up with other cute young things who would care less about your crappy job, berkeley is the place!

The UC theater is gone (woe!) but there're SO many others, and the Landmark ones tend to be pretty cool.

Shattuck has the movie theaters but otherwise can suck it, except for the nice indian eats.

Brewed Awakenings up north of campus is a great chill-out coffee joint with a pretty mellow vibe, and the other one on the same street has an intimate perfect for a date cafe vibe. The chinese resteraunt there is an overlooked family-run gem for good eats, especially their egg-based dishes tho I don't think they do the fried oyster omlettes.

A really nice electronics store for audiophiles some distance towards the freeway (on the main east-west drag, i forget the name) along with a a snazzy drive-in foster freeze type snack shack and oh! Hot Pot City with all you can eat/cook make yr. own stir-fry for roughly 10$.

Also lots of places make crepes. Yum crepes.

I don't remember much more at the moment except that the two Telegraph bookstores -- Cody's and the used one next to it -- pretty much rock. Also, don't buy liquor at the yuppie-mart, but the more generic place just a bit further north.

Also, the movie theatres sometimes don't have the films for "proles" and you need to go north through the underpass to see them in the adjoining town. Like "Centerstage" and "Dude, Where's My Car" didn't play in Berkeley at all.

fuck,

My favorite things in Berkeley (roughly in order): The Hearst Pool, etc. I guess I like the campus art museum and Moe's Books too.

Oh, hey, and is that public hot-tub thing a myth or not?

Also, er, The Gilman, I guess. For that sort of thing, y'know.

The Main Question: Do you have a car?

Also, if you can find a cheap arrangement, then you might even like the Haight in San Francsico more. There's much more going on in the City generally.

I ended up hating the whole Bay Area by the time I left last year (though I enjoy visiting again). There's just no edge and it gets pretty boring. and yes, there are absolutely no decent places to dance allowed in Berkeley except around stupid ass fucking drum circles and arrrrgggghhhhh. and everyone is smug and uptight, and nobody's getting any play, and people just stand around at concerts looking lame and, don't get me started about the behavior and even clothing associated with Silicon Valley ... OK, I can't talk about it anymore.

In my mid twenties I could only really deal with Oakland. I lived near Grand and Piedmont which is a terrific place, especially if you're within walking distance of Lake Merrit or the Grand Lake theater.

Actually I love Oakland, there is definitely a there there - Go Raiders!

Also, I have a shirt that reads: "Open Your Eyes and Recognize: Oakland 2000"

I co-DJed with a friend of mine at a bar in downtown Oakland on a Sunday evening a few months ago, while I was on my way down to my grandfather's funeral in L.A... and it's startling how much effort people there put into not publicly showing their enthusiasm over anything... my friend/DJ Jef was playing a lot of stuff the bar goers liked, but the groups would have to send out a dejected delegate out to ask not what he was playing but "confirmed that he was playing what he thought it was". "Oh yeah! I have that". That was my direct experience in Berkeley and San Francisco in the past as well.

Obviously there are exceptions, and if you already know good people in the Bay area, you're 90% better off then those who move to the Bay Area knowing nobody. I think San Francisco is the #1 town in the Least Friendly To Newcomers category.

Another word of warning for those tech-workers who are aspiring to move to the Bay Area to find a job... while there may be positions available in SF and the East Bay, most of them are in the San Mateo and Santa Clara counties...ie the Silicon Valley. If you want overpriced suburban malaise and long-ass commuting doldrums, this is as bad as it gets. Be very afraid.

Spencer, it sounds like you lived almost exactly where I did! Pretty nice about there, eh?

Yeah, supposedly there's this hot tub hidden somewhere on the north (?) side of Berkeley (like, the Grad Student sector, right?) that anyone can use anytime, if you can find it. I don't know though, come to think of it, that sounds pretty nasty. Who knows who's all been in there? Probably just a rumor anyway.

Moving from Oakland (but where?) to Berkeley is ill-advised under any circumstances...

RE: donut bitch & spencer, i don't know what to say about your experiences, but i got to disagree... could be your scene?

on second thought actually, don't answer that, that is pure theory and reads far less harmless than it really is.

db, if you DARE, send me a line next time you're coming to town and i'll forward you a calendar of things that are under the radar and (as i've been reading your internet postings for quite some time) i have a hunkering you may at the very least appreciate, and quite possibly enjoy. there is an enormous probability that the crowd will NOT suffer from the aforementioned performance paralysis affliction.

for example, the mono pause set (with alan bishop on vocals) at the sun city girls secret show last monday was a lot of fun. of course, it was really short but you know...

good night and to summarize my sentiment = stay in Oakland (where are you boxcubed?)

By the way, this only applies to SF and Berkeley. I found Oakland, Albany and many other Bay Area communities to be very vital.

Will do. Although the experiences I was relating were mainly outside concerts.

for example, the mono pause set (with alan bishop on vocals) at the sun city girls secret show last monday was a lot of fun. of course, it was really short but you know...

Mono Pause's show in Seattle earlier this year with Alvarius B and that Finnish retro-synth band who's name I forget was a can of frozen concentrated fun. Peter Conheim is one of the most talented people I know in the Bay Area, and I hope he can keep it going.

i live basically equidistant from grand lake theatre and piedmont ave. i don't have a car. basically what i think i was hoping for in a move to berkeley would be the opportunity to have alot of things to do, in walking distance (grand and piedmont are both kind of zzz) in the hours i have each night before its time to go to sleep and get ready for the next day of work. on weekends, i can reach anywhere in the bay, so that's not a prollem. i grew up living in san francisco, 5 blocks from amoeba on haight, and while i love that city, and thought it was the greatest place on earth (they tell you this all the time if you live there), i'm tired of it, and in no rush to go back. this is a move that i only want to last for a couple years, before i head east or out of the country (i was fixated on vancouver before finally getting confirmation from db that it is indeed perpetually rainy, which i can't deal with).

do you ever hang out at Kingman's Lucky Lounge? That is one of the best and most integrated bars I've ever been to in the country.

I would say move to Berkeley (Southside), but at least a mile from campus. Otherwise, it's hard to take a break from the student life.

tful282 w/ fred frith&mills college folx at ODC in the mission
tful282 w/ double u and california governor gray davis at gamh
the fucking champs/tful282/polvo (this was like 3-4 years ago?) at gamh

then there was a both show with three day stubble i missed cuz i was out of town... but my ex was there and ended up getting trashed and dancing on stage.

yeehaw.

best tful282 show = w/ the boredoms at the palace in 1995. the strangers tour... "more optigan!"

you live very near an ILM poster named "msp" as well as my XGF.

you should go to the 379 40th street next time Crack:WAR is playing and danse til your pants fall off. or not? they played 2 weeks ago with nam, kid 606, the lowdown, and a couple other folx...

i used to live 1 block from amoeba and haight... i'm not so keen on the upper haight, i'm in lower haight now and it's much more my scene. but i am an adult (30 y/o), i have college kids that live next door and one of the girls freaked out on drugs last night and i had to call the cops. it was 2:30am and she was screaming at the tops of her lungs about being killed.

(I'm thinking of moving there from dreary NYC, but maybe it's just the winter blues.)

access is given by code only. it's really hot (113 degrees), no clothing allowed, you have to shower before and after. it only seats 4 people. no talking, but you can chill out in the garden which is really cool. i have a rebuilt ankle (shattered it skateboarding) with a lot of titanium pins, screws and plates so i couldn't stay in too long or it gets really uncomfortable. there were about 10 people last night, 7 F and 3 M.

the rules:
"gender is an issue" (i wish i had the guidelines with me, it's at home, and very funny) so no fellas gonna get in the tub unless you know TWO ladies with the code. i went with two (female) friends last night and it was really cool. it's so funny, the comment above makes so much sense now. but really strange too. i expected some wife swapping/eyes wide shut ackshun but everybody's really mellow, not as many hippies as i would have thought, a lot of those pesky "anarchists" with their conditional anarchy, that "controlled chaos" and such.

also, the episode i described above w/ the screaming neighbor was actually sounds really exaggerated in retrospect, one of my neighbors is an artist and was hosting her bro and sis-in-law in town for the gallery opening and the sis got ripped on red wine and thought she could drive back to humboldt (6 hours) completely wrecked so they had to restrain her... this was all spelled out for me via an apology letter the next day.

oh well, i boiled my testes, it was fun, i will probably never go back, yay.

The town is definitely on my "If I Were A Rich Man..." list.

Wise man. :-) When I saw the Dead C used section I was in heaven.

There is an alternative as you can see pictures of the sculptures at the Burger King in Emeryville which is next to an utterly useless Tower Records. The big plus is that Trader Joe's is there too, $1.99 a bottle for Charles Shaw Merlot - buy it by the case!

Anyway, they're gone now I think? I haven't seen them in years. Remember the Red Baron Snoopy? The big ark? I loved those things.

and donut, unfortunately I'm done with papers, otherwise Hawaiian Gardens would be at the top of the list. It sounds like a converted Busch Theme Park.

i never knew big pun... sorry.

So...I'm now six weeks away from my move, and I'm freaking out just a little bit. Which I suppose is to be expected. Any genuine(!) practical advice on job/apartment-hunting from current or former Bay Area ILX0rs would be seriously, seriously appreciated. I guess the idea is to get a sub-lease/month-to-month place while we look for a longer term place to stay. The lady wants Berkeley, and I'm thinking SF or Berkeley. We want to have a look around Oakland more after we arrive, but our Oaklandish knowledge is severely lacking. I'm looking at craigslist, e-housing, calrentals...have I missed any out? gygax!, spencer, kris, boxcubed (still around?), sterling, Dan I, Sean, Leee to thread!

!!!!!

Don't forget BurmaKitty and Alex in SF!

Sorry, yes BurmaKitty and Alex in SF to thread too! And Honda!

Thanks muchly again, Sean - Whereabouts do you live (vaguely) if you don't mind my asking? Do you like it? Do many people get sub-leases and look for longer leases?

Well, we trawled around a fair bit at Christmas. We had a look at the Richmond, but it was a bit sleepy. I'm guessing a lot of the really nice districts are just a bit out of our price range (We paid £800/$1200 for a small 1 bedroom in London and we're looking to do the same now). My gf doesn't want to live in The Mission (!), although I could kind of like it. I also like the Haight, mainly for proximity to Amoeba - the same reason I like Berkeley. Choices, choices. I'm really excited though.

I actually like the Mission. If you can afford it, then try to live up the hill a bit West of the main stuff near Park Dolores. I'm not sure about housing prices, but for 1200/month you should be OK.

As for Berkeley, go North of campus. It's really nice there, lots of foliage.

I still like Oakland, near Lake Merritt too. It reminds me of Silverlake in L.A.

That was quick, Spencer! What happened?? :P

I live in Downtown Berkeley, in a pretty nice studio, on a month-to-month lease. I like it quite a bit, but it is expensive ($900). There's lots of great food around here, for one thing.

Kris.

The inner Mission area (I hardly think of it as the Mission) near Dolores Park that Spencer mentioned is really lovely. To me this is a very desirable neighborhood, but I'd be surprised if $1200 would get you into a one-bedroom there. Yet. The inner Sunset 9th and Irving area is cool too, and right near Amoeba. If and when I move at the end of the year, I'm not at all sure where I'll end up; SF really does have a lot of different sides. Luckily, most of them are pretty nice.

I was only being half-serious about Amoeba. I guess most of our money's going to go on rent, so it would be good to live within walking distance of places to eat, shop, see movies. That's why I had a few reservations about Richmond, for example - it's nice, but a bit disconnected from everywhere else. There are seem to be a lot of good places to pck from though, plus I've been living in a pretty dull London suburb for the past two years that I've been in the UK, and I want to live where life is fun again!

Don't get me wrong, the weather still sucks a*s!

if you stick to the inner richmond, though, (below 25th ave., say) you actually are very close to tons of places to eat & shop, and several excellent movie theatres. plus you're sandwiched in between golden gate park & the stunningly beautiful presidio. & very close to beaches (baker, china, ocean). the haight more or less borders the richmond district. if you want to go downtown there are several buslines, two of which run all night. you've got clement st., which = chinatown - the tourist nonsense + one of the best new/used bookstores in the city, 'green apple'. there is also a great russian neighborhood. & many watering holes, including at least a couple very u.k.-style pubs. to me, the richmond is by far the most underrated part of sf. & i think the mission is easily the most overrated.

i live in a different part of town now, but would be perfectly happy to move back.

sfgate.com has pretty good info on various neighborhoods...

Are you talking about Richmond the neighborhood in SF, or Richmond the city?

I used to rent in Oakland (Near the lake like Spencer Chow...except I was more near the Merritt Bakery/ Park and Third side). When I was looking to purchase a place to live in, I couldn't afford Oakland. It is not cheap. No where around here is. So I bought and live in San Francisco in the Mission. Like I said, it's not cheap.

I like living here a billion times better than living in Oakland, but this may be skewed by three factors specific to me:

1. I love fog. FOG are the first three letters of my personalized license plate...(Yes, I am FULL OF MYSELF and VERY ENTHUSIASTIC about it as are all californians with personalized plates!) The weather in Oakland is far superior to SF if you like sun and warmth without being too hot. SF has plenty of fog and often gets a bit chilly and the electric heaters they have in these places are expensive to run. The Mission is probably the sunniest neighborhood - which saves on electricity, but I still get my fog fix.

2. I work in Oakland at the police department and I like the "separation factor" of going to a different place when it's time to go home...this is a personal preference. Lots of police types like to live in the city they work in.

3. The Mission is a lot more like my favorite former home of Avenue C in NYC. I think I just like the vibe here better - more people - and I can walk to a zillion different restaurants and bars, some cool video stores, hip clothing shops, and of course the feminist run adult toy store. I noticed that when I looked for housing for my mom last week, each time we checked a place out for her I was counting the blocks to the nearest bar and was rating the place with the bar/block ratio as a huge factor.

ok...now I am re-reading item number 3...maybe I HAVE been working at the police department too long...

But on a serious note, if you are considering moving to Oakland and are looking at specific places please email directly and I'd be happy to give you some info about what the neighborhood offers - if you can't see my address here, there is a link on my homepage http://missionofburma.com/burmakitty.html near the bottom where it says "contact".

If I were to rent out my one bedroom unit to someone I would have to charge $2000 and then pray nothing broke down because there would be no money in the bank to fix it. If you find one under 2000, it is probably worth it.

I am sure many people have opinions on the Mission. BurmaKitty had no choice but to live here since she is the Mission of Burma worshipper...wait a minute...maybe I should be moving to Burma.

Excuse me I have a new thread to start...

1. Do a Masters in an important yet unfashionable field, e.g., Statistics. Do some original research with a well-connected supervisor.
2. Spend ludicrous amounts of money applying to a whole bunch of overseas schools.
3. Do those stupid multi-choice standardised tests. Do better on the Verbal and Writing sections than the Math section.
4. Get your well-connected supervisor's connections to go around saying how great you are.
5. Accept offer of admission to Ph.D. program of Department of Statistics at UC Berkeley. Forget to accept the offer of a fellowship until two weeks after the deadline, frantically make toll calls at stupid hours because of the time difference until you're assured of financial support.
6. Wonder what the hell you're going to do for the next three months.

Sadly my fellowship isn't enough to cover a $2K unit, which means unless I can get subsidies I'll head for the cheapest hostel I can find.

Best thing: My stock answer to the inevitable "where do you come from?" question ("um, Auckland") will now become hopelessly confusing if I can get the accent right ("um, OAKland, New Zealand").

BurmaKitty - Hi! Thanks a lot for all that. if the offer's still good, I might drop you a mail slightly closer to the time I'm over there. I hope to god I can get somewhere for much much less than $2000, tho! Please don't frighten me, my parents do a good enough job of that! :)
I have had that feeling of "separation" between home and work too much, actually - it would be quite nice to be able live, work, and play in the same general area. Though hopping between SF and the East Bay seems more exciting than London suburb--->Central London. I hear the traffic in the Bay's pretty bad, though. Don't even get me started on how I am going to find a job...

Oh yeah, thanks.

ADVICE:

i'd try the SF Chronicle Sunday classified section which you can find on Saturdays (sometimes Fridays) in town. Craigslist is overpriced, as are managed properties (offices usually located on market street). every neighborhood in SF has lots of vacancies, def. a renter's market but the price is still somewhat inflated (relative). expect similar to london. sublets may be negotiable, ask the property owner/landlord when inquiring.

oakland, you can live cheap cheap near McArthur BART but i'm not sure what your lady's sketchfactor is. if low then you are set. if high, go berkeley. SF is safe pretty much anywhere... although it has been some time since i last strolled around.

i live off alamo square where it is pretty and fun and DANGEROUS. i miss my bed. come to me, baby put your arms around me. i will sleep well soon. i used to live in japantown. i used to live in the upper haight. i don't like the mission, too many yahoo!s and gravy trainers. i hang out in the tenderloin or oakland (east oakland/emeryville/downtown/mills college), usually for music related stuff.

send me an email for more info and i will send one back promise okay promise all right

Dangerous?

gygax - much appreciated (you've been missing around these parts lately?)-I'll email you soon.

Kyle- I will definitely drop you a line, many thanks.

Although this was somewhat prescient:
Don't even get me started on how I am going to find a job...

You know they've got this new bus on San Pablo now? the 72R. The R is for "Rapid".

GO BEARS!

Berkeley sued the State Government and forced Arnold to find "emergency funds" because they were going to have to close the fire stations! Sometimes I still like living here.

Although not tonight because some assholes threw shit at my car.

What would it be like to work in Oakland, I wonder? Andy?

at this point, the only place I wouldn't expand my job search to if I were you would be Marin and San Jose.

yuck.

at this point I'd rather work in oakland than berkeley if I had to deal with the public at all. because the public in berkeley consists of students, retired hippies, and people on mental disability, and you do not want to work in any service capacity with these people, believe me.

I know, that's what was yucky.

I heart Cody's.

SC: was it the same as the hot tub myth debunked upthread?

Another time he came up to me in Ashby BART and asked me if I was registered to vote. I told him I can't vote and he just stood there silently looking at me until I got on the train.

The third time, he saw me coming out of the movies and ran up to me, though apparently not recognizing me because he asked me about voting again and I gave him the same answer and a reminder that I had already told him. Knowing by now that he was definitely a bit weird, I put on my iPod and started to walk away, but he quickly caught up with me and shouted "next time you see me on the street, I'll be asking you if you like music. I usually sell music on the street, this thing is just a side project!". I nodded and walked on.

-- @d@ml (nordicskilla@hotmail.com), May 28th, 2004.

What is this? What is "the Hearst Pool"?

Reading upthread was funny. I like Piedmont a lot but I don't see what advantage there is to living there over living in Berkeley away from the campus. The movie theaters ARE great. And the food. And the video/book/record stores.

We have been hangin around in Oakland by the lake and liking it too, but it is missing...something.

How much does a 2bed lake view apt rent for in Oakland? Totally hypothetical.

necessary police presence.

I respectfully but completely disagree with this statement. Maybe a lonely stretch or some hidden embankment or something, but this part of Oakland is supremely safe. I used to walk around there at night all the time (and I wouldn't have hassled you - haha!) and the last time I was in the area it only seemed better.

Adam, the area around Piedmont Ave is just really idyllic in certain ways. It's a magical little street in its own little vally like f*cking Brigadoon or something.

xpost

*which is still pretty "eh..." but you know what I'm saying.

Kyle, you seem to have a simultaneous fear of both the ultraswank and the kinda-low-rent that makes I find endearing! :-D

I walk around bad neighborhoods all the time by myself. It's like a video game, but more immediate!

Are you being serious? Sometimes I don't get your old person's "humor", probably a generational thing. When i get better I'll show you some of the cool new dance moves.

http://ubl.artistdirect.com/Images/Sources/AMGCOVERS/music/cover200/drd300/d309/d309447d8ou.jpg
1982, modern method records

NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL OAKLAND!!!

Berkeley is NOT filled with hippies.

There's a hippie on my street. Also, old people. Also: the peninsula isn't all suburbs. I'd like to move to Pacifica: ocean! Fog! Gloom!

There's plenty of good food all over the Bay Area. Sheesh. I'm having a stinky cheese party tonight, BTW.

Adam, just cut down the trees and move them over to your new urban pad in the City. How do you marinate your flank steak?

We should do something soon.

Oh god I hope so! that would be my ideal home.

The Life and Spirit of a Remarkable Town

Photographs by Kiran Singh; text by Ellen Weis

FROG; 120 PAGES; $16.95 PAPERBACK

As Michael Chabon says in his wry introduction to this attractive and comprehensive portrait of the complex East Bay city and controversial college town, Berkeley is a place where "all of the things that drive me crazy are the very things that make this town worth knowing, worth putting up with, worth loving and worth working to preserve." The creators of "Berkeley" put on full- color display practically all the things that make up Berkeley: its diverse and divergent neighborhoods, from the flats to the hills; its stately architecture; its relationship to the UC Berkeley campus; its foodie passion, from Chez Panisse to the Monterey Market; its cultural life, from the Freight & Salvage folk club and the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra to the How Berkeley Can You Be festival. Sidebars on such things as Tilden Park, the Rose Garden and the Free Speech Movement add historical perspective.

These are still very interesting words.

Ah, I see. It's nice over there. Where did you do your groceries? I don't suppose there's any point in asking you how much you paid as it's probably all changed (and it just might not be polite).

xp

I know svend. I started that Oakland thread! I started an El Cerrito one as well. I guess I start a lot of Bay Area threads...oh well, I put in a lot of effort to move here, I'm proud to be proud I suppose.

Yeah, Colin lived there for a while. It was a giant old house. Five bedrooms. My rent was under $300!!! We had massive parties. I don't think I know anyone there anymore.

xp woah. the resto in question was the thai place opposite the movie theater.

The thai place across from Barney's on Piedmont? That place used to be good (3-5 years ago).

No, this is across from the Landmark theater and that ice cream place that is always PACKED.

Ahh, Fentons. *sheds single tear*

polyphonic, do you ride around in a big black bus? :-D

I'd rather not say, but probably.

-- .ada.m. (adamr...), January 20th, 2005 1:25 PM. (nordicskilla)

MacArthur is a nice 15 minute walk/5 minute bikeride from the "fun" part of Piedmont.

i know that hill very well s.chow, ilx0r/former oakland resident msp lived at the very tip top of it.

(thank you)

The Mysteries of Berkeley
Essay

Where passion is married to intelligence, you may find genius, neurosis, madness or rapture. None of these is really an unfamiliar presence in the tree-lined streets of Berkeley, California. For a city of one hundred thousand people—toss in another thirty thousand to account for the transient population of the University—we have more than our share of geniuses. The town, to be honest, is lousy with them. Folklorists, chefs, tattoo artists, yogis, guitarists, biologists of the housefly, GUI theorists, modern masters of algebra, Greil Marcus: we have geniuses in every field and discipline. As for neurosis, you can pretty much start at my house and work your way outward in any direction. Obsession, fixation, phobia, hypochondriasis, self-flagellation, compulsive confession of weakness and wrongdoing, repetition mania, chronic recrimination and second-guessing—from parents of toddlers, to fanatical collectors of wax recordings by Turkish klezmer bands of the 1920s, to non-eaters of anything white or which respires, to that august tribunal of collective neurosis, the Berkeley City Council: if neuroses were swimming pools one might, like Cheever's swimmer, steer a course from my house to the city limits and never touch dry land. Madness: a painful thing, which it does not do to romanticize. But it seems to me that among the many sad and homeless people who haunt Berkeley one finds an unusually high number of poets, sages, secret Napoleons and old-fashioned prophets of doom. The mentally ill citizens of Berkeley read, as they kill a winter afternoon in the warmth of the public library; they generate theories, which they will share; they sell their collected works out of a canvas tote bag. As for rapture, it is harder to observe firsthand, and is furthermore something that people, even people in Berkeley, do not necessarily care to discuss. But Berkeley is rich with good places to be rapt: at the eyepiece of an electron microscope or a cloud chamber, at a table at Chez Panisse, in a yoga room, under a pair of headphones at Amoeba Records, in Tilden Park, in the great disorderly labyrinth of Serendipity Books, on the dance floor at Ashkenaz while the ouds jangle and the pipes skirl, in a seat at the Pacific Film Archive watching Kwaidan (Japan, 1965). I'd be willing to bet that, pound for pound, Berkeley is the most enraptured city in America on a daily basis.

If that statement has the ring of boosterism, then permit me to clarify my feelings on the subject of my adopted home: this town drives me crazy. Nowhere else in America are so many people obliged to suffer more inconvenience for the common good. Nowhere else is the individual encumbered with a greater burden of shame and communal disapproval for having intruded, however innocently, on the sensibilities of another. Berkeley's streets, though a rational 19th century grid underlies them, are a speed-busting tangle of artificial dead ends, obligatory left turns, and deliberately tortuous obstacle-course barriers known as chicanes, put in place to protect children—who are never (God forbid!) sent to play outside. Municipal ordinances intended to protect the nobility of labor in Berkeley's attractive old industrial district steadfastly prevent new-economy businesses from taking over the aging brick-and-steel structures--leaving them empty cenotaphs to the vanished noble laborer of other days. People in the grocery store, meanwhile, have the full weight of Berkeley society behind them as they take it upon themselves to scold you for exposing your child to known allergens or imposing on her your own indisputably negative view of the universe. Passersby feel empowered—indeed, they feel duty-bound—to criticize your parking technique, your failure to sort your recycling into brown paper and white, your resource-hogging four-wheel-drive vehicle, your use of a pinch-collar to keep your dog from straining at the leash.

When Berkeley does not feel like some kind of vast exercise in collective dystopia—a kind of left-wing Plymouth Plantation in which a man may be pilloried for over-illuminating his house at Christmastime—then paradoxically it often feels like a place filled with people incapable of feeling or acting in concert with each other. It is a city of potterers and amateur divines, of people so intent on cultivating their own gardens, researching their own theories, following their own bliss, marching to their own drummers and dancing to the tinkling of their own finger-cymbals that they take no notice of one another at all, or would certainly prefer not to, if it could somehow be arranged. People keep chickens, in Berkeley—there are two very loud henhouses within a block of my house. There may be no act more essentially Berkeley than deciding that the rich flavor and healthfulness, the simple, forgotten pleasure, of fresh eggs in the morning outweighs the unreasonable attachment of one's immediate neighbors to getting a good night's sleep.

The result, perhaps inevitable, of this paralysis of good intentions, this ongoing, floating opera of public disapproval and the coming into conflict of competing visions of the path to personal bliss, is a populace inclined to kvetching and to the wearing of the default Berkeley facial expression, the suspicious frown. Bliss is, after all, so near at hand; the perfect egg, a good night's sleep, reconciliation with one's mother or the Palestinians, a theory to account for the surprising lack of dark matter in the universe, a radio station that does not merely parrot the lies of government flaks and corporate media outlets—such things can often feel so eminently possible here, given the intelligence and the passion of the citizens. And yet they continue to elude us. Who is responsible? Is it us? Is it you? What are you doing, there, anyway? Don't you know the recycling truck won't take aluminum foil?

So much for boosterism. And yet I declare, unreservedly and with all my heart, that I love Berkeley, California. I can't imagine living happily anywhere else. And all of the things that drive me crazy are the very things that make this town worth knowing, worth putting up with, worth loving and working to preserve.

Part of the charm of Berkeley lies in her setting: the shimmer and eucalyptus sting of the hills on a dusty summer afternoon, hills whose rocky bones jut through the skin of Berkeley in odd outcroppings like Indian Rock; the morning fogs of the flatlands along the bay, with their smell of mud and their magically vanishing glimpses of Alcatraz and towers of San Francisco. But I have lived in places, from the Puget Sound to the Hudson Valley, from Laguna Beach to Key West, that rivaled if not surpassed Berkeley in spectacular weather, thrilling vistas, and variety of terrain. Not, perhaps, all at the same time, but to greater extremes of beauty. And yet a city with a beautiful site is about as reliably interesting as a person with a beautiful face, and just about as likely to have been spoiled.

Laid atop her remarkable setting between hills and bay, less consistently fine but at its best no less charming, is the built environment of Berkeley. The town, though laid out in the 1880s, boomed in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake and fire, when it was settled by refugees from San Francisco, fleeing hither under the mistaken impression that the jutting rock ribs of Berkeley's hills would be proof against temblors. The town grew explosively, to its borders, in the twenty years that followed, and as a result the architecture, especially that of her houses, has a pleasing uniformity of variation, with styles ranging from Prairie school to Craftsman to the various flavors of Spanish. There is even a local style—I live in an exemplar, built in 1907—called the Berkeley Brown Shingle, which combines elements of the Craftsman and the Stick: overhanging eaves, square-pillared porches, elaborate mullions and built-in cabinetry, the whole enveloped in a rustic skin of the eponymous cedar or redwood shakes. It's a sober style, at least in conception, boxy and grave and appropriately professorial, and yet after decades of benign neglect and dreaminess and the ministrations of an unstintingly benevolent climate, the houses tend to be wildly overgrown with rose vines, wisteria, jasmine, trumpetvine, and outfitted top and sides with unlikely modifications: Zen dormers, orgone porches, Lemurian observatories. Certain of her streets offer endless instruction in the rich and surprising expressiveness of brown, houses the color of brown beer, of brown bread, of tobacco, a dog's eyes, a fallen leaf, an old upright piano. The harmoniousness of Berkeley's streets and houses is far from perfect—there are tons of hideous concrete-and-aluminum dingbat monstrosities, in particular around the university, and downtown is a hodgepodge of doughty old California commercial structures, used car lots and a few truly lamentable late-sixties office towers. But even the most down-at-heel and ill-used streets offer a promise of green shade in the summertime, and many neighborhoods are densely populated by trees, grand old plantations of maple and oak, long rows of ornamental plums that blossom in the winter, persimmon trees, Meyer lemon trees, palm trees and fig trees, monkey puzzles and Norfolk island pines, redwoods and Monterey pines nearly a hundred years old. One of the remarkable things about Berkeley is that, in spite of its decided inferiority to its great neighbor across the Bay in clout, preeminence, population, notoriety and fame, it has never seemed to dwell in San Francisco's shadow (unlike poor old Oakland down the road). I believe that this may be in part due to the fact that when it comes to trees—a necessary component, in my view, of the greatness of a city—the Colossus of the West can't hold a candle to Berkeley.

But houses and tree plantations, like hills and foggy mudflats, are no reliable guarantors of the excellence of a place to live. That elusive quality always lies, ultimately, in the citizenry; in one's neighbors. And it is ultimately the people of Berkeley—those same irritating frowners and scolders, those very neurotic geniuses and rapt madwomen—who make this place, who ring an endless series of variations on its great theme of personal and communal exploration, and who, above all, fight tooth and nail to hang on to what they love about it.

If there were a hundred good small cities in America fifty years ago—towns built to suit the people who settled them, according to their tastes, aspirations, and the sovereign peculiarities of landscape and weather—today there are no more than twenty-five. In ten years, as the inexorable lattice of sprawl replicates and proliferates, and the downtowns become malls, and the malls downtowns, and the rich syllabary of mercantile America is reduced to a simple alphabet composed of a Blockbuster, a Target, a Starbucks, a Barnes and Noble, a Gap, and a T.G.I.Fridays, and California herself is drowned in a sea of red-tile roofs from San Ysidro to Yreka, there may be fewer than ten. When the end finally comes, I believe that Berkeley will be the last town in America with the ingrained perversity to hold onto its idea of itself. This is a town—on the edge of the country, on the edge of the twenty-first century, on the edge of subducting plates and racial divides and an immense sea of corporate homogeneity—where you can still sign for your groceries at the store around the corner. A Berkeley grocer is a man who preserves such an archaic custom not in spite of the fact but exactly because it's an outmoded and cumbersome way of running a business.

It's in the quirky, small businesses of Berkeley, in fact, places like the old soda fountain in the Elmwood Pharmacy, Alkebulalian Books (specializing in books on the African diaspora), d.b.a Brown Records (just on the Oakland side of the city limits), or the Sound Well (used and vintage hi-fi and stereo equipment) that the tensions of Berkeley living, the competing claims on the heart of a Berkeleyite to follow one's bliss but at the same time to reach a hand out into the void and feel another set of fingers taking hold of one's own, are resolved. These are not merely retail establishments, poor cousins of Rite-Aid, Borders, Sam Goody's and Circuit City. They are shrines to the classic Berkeley impulse to latch on to something tiny but crucial—the warm sound provided by vacuum tube amplifiers, the mid-sixties sides of Ornette Coleman, the African roots of Jesus Christ and his teachings, or a perfectly constructed Black-and-White (with an extra three inches in the steel blender cup)—and pursue it with a mounting sense of self-discovery. And yet they are also, accidentally but fundamentally, gathering places; they all have counters at which the lonely amateur of Coleman or Marantz, the student of Martin Bernal can pull up a stool and find him- or herself in the company of sympathetic minds. Berkeley is richer than any place I've ever lived in these non-alcoholic taverns of the soul, these unofficial clubhouses of the oddball and outré. And it seems as if every year another one pops up, at the bottom of Solano Avenue, in a faded brick stretch of San Pablo Avenue, unfranchisable, inexplicable except as a doorway to fulfillment and fellowship. A business that would never thrive anywhere else, patronized by people who would never thrive anywhere else, in a city that lives and dies on the passion and intelligence, the madness and rapture, of its citizens.

permit me to clarify my feelings on the subject of my adopted home: this town drives me crazy. Nowhere else in America are so many people obliged to suffer more inconvenience for the common good. Nowhere else is the individual encumbered with a greater burden of shame and communal disapproval for having intruded, however innocently, on the sensibilities of another.

I still live there though and probably won't ever move away.

how self-satisfied!

(the essay, that is)Ä

One thing that I will say is that when I first arrived here in '96, it was the trees that drew me in. I remember thinking, "This is the only place in America where they built the city around the trees, not the trees around the city." I'm still here.

Maybe if Chabon ever tried riding a bicycle around town he'd appreciate the traffic grid. Berkeley hates cars, and that's the end of the story.

I personally think that most of the north half of oakland, berkeley, albany and piedmont/montclair are all just one place, and attempts to deviate the two are pointless. In fact, for me, all of that (including Berkeley) is North Oakland (including the super-rough parts of North and West Oakland), and then South/East Oakland, Alameda, San Lorenzo, and Castro Valley are South Oakland. Lake Merritt is the landmark that separates civilization from all those other people.

I currently live in Oakland. I can get on my bike and ride through Berkeley and arrive in Albany in maybe 25 minutes. Or, I can turn the other way and be at Lake Merritt, looking off into the wilderness. It's scary over there, and as you peek out at the horrors of El Cerrito, Richmond and San Pablo to the North.

God bless North Oakland.

you're right amoeba doesn't have headphones. maybe he means people with portables on.

The best thing is that when you've lived here long enough, you know which streets go all the way through the grid and which ones don't, so you don't get stuck on Telegraph, College, Dwight, Shattuck, etc.

Indeed. How is North Oakland?

Pretty good, though I moved up into the hills recently.

All the blocked streets and stuff end once you get to Alcatraz Ave. Everything below that is just your average grid with small pockets of eccentricity, but no arbitrary roadblocks. When it's 2 in the morning, I always drive through the "Do not enter" parts and feel like a criminal because I'm a huge wuss.

More Berkeley news: Mod Lang is moving to El Cerrito, of all places. What a bummer.

Yeah, they're quite the scourge. Tilden is great when it's empty though.

Kyle told me this. wtf?

Cheaper rent, and the area around El Cerrito Plaza has improved (There's a Peets now, which is usually a good sign).

my keyboard player went to tilden yesterday. she isn't a north face wearing doof. she might be a secret hippy though.

BTW, did anybody know about Mike Watt playing at some random place on Broadway next to God's Gym last week? I didn't go, just heard about it.

mike watt: was it banyan, and was it at 21 Grand?

i regret not going to chez panisse even more!

tell me it's over-rated so i don't kick myself even more brutally than i already have been for a year.

Did you get to the Pacific Film Archive?

ditto. the wife wants to go back and says that she remembers loving it and that we should go downstairs when one of the sets of rents are in town.

I have to say that I avoid telegraph when I can and have for a few years now. The last few times I went up there and actually walked the length of it I was shocked at how many empty storefronts there are; there are a LOT of empty stores in berkeley, but up there they seemed strangely conspicuous. And the stores that have opened up are weird, off-brand cheap shoe places, dozens of cell phone places. The only even slightly interesting shops are american apparrel (which I understand took almost a YEAR to open up there because of the city paperwork) and the Adidas store.

I'm sure the rents are still outrageous up there. A friend of mine opened a shop much further down Telegraph in Temescal a few years ago and pays what I still think is too much, but she said it was much, much cheaper than up in Berkeley. I think the property owners here are still deluding themselves that they have a neighborhood that people want to go to. With so many small businesses avoiding the area and moving to once-shitty areas like San Pablo and north oakland they've revitalized those neighborboods and created new, interesting corridors of shops and services.

Anyway I used to live near Telegraph, but never worked there; I know there are people here who have though. Thoughts?

Incidentally, Amoeba just combined all their used and new CDs, and apparently cut their stock in half, because combined it doesn't take up much more space than just the used stuff did before. hard times maybe.

I don't really know what college kids buy, but I'm surprised there isn't a starbucks up there.

College kids are too cool for Starbucks, rarely see many on the one on center street. Cafe Milano serves the telegraph need. If there's one thing I think Berkeley has enough of, it's coffee shops. And copy shops.

In the end, as long as the Cal college population is focused in the Southside, Telegraph is going succeed in selling food, Berkeley sweatshirts, and hippie trinkets to bring back home. But yeah, a lot of wasted opportunity.

They did what? oh fuck I haven't been in a long time, but that sounds horrible.

Also: Raleigh's had their liquor license suspended. Hahahahaha.

I used to work in an office on Oregon and Telegraph and the rent we paid was OUTRAGEOUS. We moved to Emeryville and paid 1/4th the rent. More fun to work near Whole Foods & Berkeley Bowl than Chevy's, unless you're one of THOSE people, but the rent made it impossible.

Businesses have been failing on the main drag of Telegraph (Parker to Bancroft) since I moved here in 1996, but it seems especially bad lately.

I'm pretty sure than Amoeba and Rasputins/Blondies/etc. own their respective buildings, so rent isn't really an issue. If Amoeba Berkeley is struggling, it's probably more of a sign of the times.

the guy that owns rasputins/blondies owns several buildings.

vCafe Milano serves the telegraph need. If there's one thing I think Berkeley has enough of, it's coffee shops. And copy shops.

copy shops, I agree with; the entire length of university ave is lined with them. I never need to make copies of anything. how these places stay in business is beyond me.

i wasn't necessarily advocating putting a starbucks there for the benefit of starbucks, I was just surprised there wasn't one. I don't think Cal students are that cool. Anyway there are three fewer coffee shops up there than there were when I went to Cal; back then we had that corner thing taht is now a Subway; Wall Berlin; and a cafe right on Telegraph adjacent to the old rasputin's location, across from the drug store, the name of which now escapes me. Maybe people drink less coffee now. maybe students only drink bubble tea and this is all the fault of the japanese like that other thread i didn't read suggests.

I don't think Cal kids are that cool either, but I've never seen anybody with a Starbucks cup. Maybe it's cause we're too poor due to above. That might be a better explanation actually...Starbucks can't charge ridiculous prices when there are cheaper places around.

There's still a half of a cafe within Subway. Also some new cafe is opening up where La Val's was, I believe. I don't know how they're going to use all that space.

I thought that Rasputin's and Blondie's was owned by one guy, and Amoeba and Fat Slice was owned by another?

readers are actually very costly to make. I helped start Odin Readers (sorry) back in like 1994; you have to pay through the nose for reprint rights. it could be that copy shops aren't doing that any more; the reason we did was because kinkos and copy central hadn't been doing it and they got sued big time. but still, there are like 500000 copy shops up and down university. it's nuts.

coffee and subway together under one roof: this is one of the most stomach turning things I could think of.

I like the ideas of closing telegraph off to traffic and turning it into an open-air shopping district ala santa monica, but as long as there are obnoxious students and crazy people wandering around, it won't actually work unless you move shops in there I want to shop at. as it is, I go to moe's and amoeba and that's it.

and I'm not going to ameoba again until they undo this dumb used/new mix setup! (yes they did expand the dvds a little, but they're also putting in listening stations or something I guess)

I think closing off telegraph would be nice, and could be easily done (end it at Dwight where the street becomes two-way)...but wouldn't change much. Actually it would probably just make it more student/crazy people friendly.

(I asked him why there wasn't a single place open 24 hours here)

Shattuck has or had worse drug dealing problems than telegraph, particularly by the bart station. and it still smells like piss there. But they put a big ugly blue fake wood lookin sculpture down there and some banners of people sipping coffee so I guess that makes it the culture district. never mind that there's nowhere to park and places like Mod Lang closed up and moved away.

I actually do like living here though.

It actually seemed like they were actively working towards more cultural stuff, more than just banners with cello players. The UC theater is going to turn into some big jazz club.

And I like living here too, I'll likely stay after graduation.

No, it's because he's been trying to buy Wicked and make the entire block into Rasputins. Wicked will never let that happen though, they make too much money giving celtic bands to frat boys. And yeah, he left it vacant, but he put the fence up to limit loiterers.

The UC theater is going to turn into some big jazz club.

Really? The retrofitting will cost 250k or so, which is why UC Theater went under in the first place.

big ugly blue fake wood lookin sculpture

OTM

the owners of amoeba don't own fat slice, I don't believe.

You're correct, but I believe that Amoeba co-owner Dave Prinz is a part owner of Escape from New York Pizza.

putting in listening stations or something I guess

I fucking hate listening stations. I mean, unless it's a record player and some headphones.

Wall Berlin was my study hangout, I was bummed when it closed.

1) that i had actually missed the place in the year since i'd been there, and how it had gone downhill so fast!

2) how shitty and understocked amoeba + rasputin had become.

3) that people actually settle for the overcrowded crappy homogeneous coffee shops. are strada / milano / wall berlin (rip) / mediterraneum / etc etc who sell "cafe roma" really that different? shitty drinks, sneery non-english-speaking eurotrash staff, dirty as fuck etc etc

4) how much cooler northside seemed in comparison. i used to live at spruce + cedar. at the time it seemed like the boonies but now it's freaking hopping around there! also the regeneration of san pablo really IS amazing! cafe raj! and elmwood, rockridge, etc still cool as ever. but the whole telegraph alley, yeah, just sucks.

also WTF up w/ university? crepes a go go has turned into a pit! and no mod lang??

i've realized that the tower records actually is pretty good, obv not as good as amoeba + aquarius but ALMOST, when you get down to it. if anything it forces me to get out of my habitual electronic-buying and buy more jazz, reggae, rock, world, etc. the bookstore situation is fine, cafe situation is a little crowded but also fine (AT LEAST I DON'T FEAR GETTING STDS FROM THE TABLE AT STARBUCKS - LOOKING AT YOU CAFE MILANO )

it just needs one or two more cafes, a decent record store, better sushi ... perfect.

Mediterraneum and Milano are pretty bad.

Northside is really nice, but definitely not hopping. I think the restaurants have to close at like 8.

It is very hard to imagine what Telegraph will be like without Cody's. That was the place I first gravitated to when I moved to the Bay Area in 1987.

best breakfasts: either bette's cafe on 4th (you'd have to take a bus)...people swear by Rick and Anne's up by the claremont (haven't been there).... also, there is a little cafe that opened up by my house called guerilla cafe that does handmade waffles every morning and is really good.

wait, I used to go there every day (uh, 15 years ago). what's it like now?

Must see places: Berkeley Marina, 4th street, Elmwood/Rockridge

Berkeley doesn't really have a week's worth of tourist-y places.

I'm actually going to be very busy for most of the week, so hopefully I can avoid being bored - I suspect that breakfast will be pretty much my only free time.

A couple coffee shops that haven't been mentioned but should be are Cole Coffee on College and 62nd and Blue Bottle Coffee on Telegraph and 50th. Blue Bottle coffee can be found at most of the better restaurants around town, and also the previously mentioned Guerrilla Cafe.

Errrrr...a hat store just opened on Telegraph near Blake. I keep wanting to go in there and ask if they have any hats. There's the fondue place which I'm scared to try.

Cafe Milano is okay I suppose. There's another place further down Bancroft with a mezzanine that serves decent sandwiches. There's Ten Thousand Minds On Fire further down Bancroft, which has a great selection of books but is too expensive. You could probably walk down Durant to Shattuck and try Venus (where I've never been) or La Note for brunch.

You should really get away from the campus and visit Oakland and the "real" Berkeley. I know, you're busy and you don't have a car! My current breakfast places are Sconehenge and Lois the Pie Queen. I think they're too far for you.

I've just had some surgery so I'm not very mobile but email me if you want to meet for coffee or go to Amoeba or something. I've sat across the table from you at the Pint Pot (memories!) but we've still never really met!

I've just had some surgery so I'm not very mobile but email me if you want to meet for coffee or go to Amoeba or something. I've sat across the table from you at the Pint Pot (memories!) but we've still never really met!

I will email - not sure how it will pan out as my sister is very randomly also in SF on the weekend and then I'm going to be busy with this http://www.msri.org/calendar/workshops/WorkshopInfo/399/show_workshop , but it would be great to meet if it works out.

venus and la note are both very good, thanks for the reminder on those.

if you can walk across the campus when there are no students, it is very beautiful. when they are crawling all over it it kind of sucks though.

What are you talking about, that place has been there for at least ten years. I bought a hat there in 1996.

Get lunch at Chez Panisse cafe.

i miss you terribly.

xox,
m.

(also Adam if you're reading this - really sorry I never emailed, that week was completely mental, but next time...)

anyway I only came back to post that I heard a rumor that berkeley amoeba may be closing.

Well, they can still buy CDs at Rasputin's, which caters more to the average student's tastes than Amoeba does.

http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2010-02-11/article/34637?headline=A-New-Plan-for-a-New-Year

not a huge fan, but still a bummer to lose the daily paper

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/EarBud/archives/2010/04/19/924-gilmans-future-in-jeopardy

Bummer x2.

wtf? $31,000? I wouldn't be surprised if they raise the $, considering how many people support the place, but OTOH, fuck that landlord, how hard would it be to find another large space in the gilman area?

maybe they can get Billy Joe to kick in LOL

good, mid-priced italian in berkeley, albany, el c, or oakland?

Some may scoff but I've never had a bad meal here:
http://www.lococospizzeria.com/

got any particular meal recs? i'm not really a pizza person

Don't let the URL fool you, they have tons of pasta dishes on the menu:

http://www.lococospizzeria.com/menu.html

The pork sugo is fantastic.

oh yeah, i looked, i just wondered if there were partic dishes on their menu you liked

Fellini's -- has a decent selection of vegetarian and vegan options.

Dopo on Piedmont, ate there tonight.

we ended up at mangia mangia, bc it was close - so mediocre, particularly for the price

yeah that isn't very good, sorry.

Cross-posting with the SF thread: I have an extra ticket for Einstein on the Beach tonight, ilxmail me for details.

damnit missed this. how was it?

Incredible.

Wait, I mean, you didn't miss anything.

Ken Sarachan's still got it!!

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/twenty-five-year-record-store-feud-spins-again-rasputins-rubble-on-telegraph-and-haste/Content?oid=4235876

Loved this piece about the man behind the fish house:

http://www.berkeleyside.com/2015/11/30/how-quirky-is-berkeley-eugene-tssuis-fish-house-part-1/

awesome

that's around the corner from my house. weirdly I saw that house randomly, maybe 20 years ago...and then couldn't find it for years, to the point where I thought maye I'd hallucinated it; until I moved into the neighborhood 4 years ago and there it was.

It's kind of cruddy looking from the outside to be truthful.

lovin this dude

https://www.berkeleygarages.com/

nice, is that yours? they should put mine on there before we redo it. it looks like shit. there are some good ones in my neighborhood though.

nah. i live in oakland now, but i miss riding my bike around berkeley neighborhoods like these

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/17/magazine/california-high-school-racist-instagram.html

discus (sorry for Albany content but iykyk...)

Holy shit— I remember reading about this as it was going on and I was about to leave the state, but it's much more intense a story than what I read then.

Albany is a really gem of a place, tho— used to love going to Schmidt's or the Hotsy Totsy.

crazy, I have a kid a few years younger than these kids, and live in Berkeley but somehow managed to never hear about this particular issue. Still finishing up the story. I've been worried about instagram dumb shit for a long time though, particularly when my kid was in middle school (which would have been around 2016 I guess). I'd seem some of the shit some of his friends posted back then and it was borderline, and sometimes over the line, misogynistic claptrap.

A few minutes earlier, Val Williams, the district superintendent, had sent out a communitywide email announcing that a “rope that looked like a noose” had been found hanging from a tree at a park next door to the high school. It turned out to be a rope swing, but by the time Williams sent out a correction about an hour later, tensions inside the mediation session, already at a peak, had reached a boiling point.

overreactions like this by administrators is clearly not helpful for anyone

it may be a school policy to pass on any reported threat or harassment incident … we have a negative one, don’t pass on reported threats only confirmed ones, but i know some schools have positive ones (main campus has one for any reported burglary or assault, even if it is never corroborated by any witness)

I would jump on any chance to get out of school, I would've been on of those absences

i mean exactly!

Ugh, I lived on Evelyn near Gilman for a stretch (so just south) and have only the fondest of memories :/

I know HR people are important for corporations and organizations, but in my experience they are unnecessarily harsh, mostly looking to punish people instead of trying to understand them

My best friend graduated from Boalt Hall Law School at Berkeley and served as an HR person for a while, but he was always very understanding

actually a lot of the heat is coming from inside the house which is why i should get these posts deleted, we’re supposed to stand union strong

I def wouldn't want to be in school administration these days because there doesn't seem to be a well established standard rubric for what should or shouldn't be communicated out. Berkeley High had what turned out to be a legitimate shooting threat a year ago and they didn't tell anyone until after the person had been apprehended; people were fucking pissed about it and how it was swept under the rug (the kid had ghost gun and AR15 parts, and was trying to recruit other students to shoot up the school; one had turned him in). The new principal at Albany High at least sounds like he's learned from watching this situation spiral out of control.

Really interesting to read the first part of the thread, one forgets sometimes how "Berkeley is dying" has been a thing people say for a really long time

It's dead now though. this year is the first time in 30+ years I seriously thought "alright that's enough, I would like to live elsewhere". Probably not going to move though.

I was just there and it was great (but I don't live there, I can only speak from the perspective of a frequent visitor)

yeah the things that drag on the city are things that are issues for residents more than visitors (failure to keep up infrastructure, largely). lots of things that are sucky are basically things that have always been sucky; IMO crime is seems about the same as it's ever been, maybe there was a dip for a bit there in the 2000/2010's or something. the city government has always been and continues to be utterly useless and annoying.

the traffic circles are fairly new and also super annoying!

the absolute worst one is the one they put right by Berkeley Bowl West. They already put in awful curb bumpouts that meant when you turned right coming out of BB you often hit the curb; then they stuck an approx 3x3 circle (demarcated not by concrete but by some kind of industrial rubber) in the middle of the intersection, making the space even tighter. The city's hostility toward automobiles is really annoying. They've removed like 75% of the parking downtown, ensuring that I hardly ever go there.

there are 2 blocks downtown on kala bagai way that require you to BACK INTO A PARKING SPOT. first off: people who back into parking spots anywhere are the worst humans on earth. The city requiring people to do this is just fucking stupid, I have absolutely no idea why they did this.

anyway i sound like a grumpy old man now which I guess I am, and that's what happens when you live in a town for over 30 years.

They installed mandatory back in spaces on San Pablo in Oakland by the Building/ Planning/ Fire dept … I just ignore the sign and park normal

back up spots on haste next to people’s park too

also fuck Rasputin for using the old Cody’s space as a warehouse, they should let me in there with a shopping cart

actually the back in spots on haste kinda make sense from a… topological (?)point of view.. the street is one way and if they had oriented the spots to make it easier to pull in, the cars would all be facing downhill… which is something that maybe new planners try to avoid? if you were to pull into these spots as they are. It would be like a greater than 135 degree turn so kinda awkward. idk.

also fuck Rasputin for using the old Cody’s space as a warehouse, they should let me in there with a shopping cart

seriously, it was nice when that was open as a store; dude has been hoarding great LPs for a million years and you could find great copies of so much stuff. it's hard to believe it functions better economically as a storage space than an actual store. That space is great, just utterly wasted opportunity. someday he will die and someone will do something with it.

the spots on haste were reversed, those used to face a normal direction from what I recall. or was haste a 2 way street? I really can't remember. I do remember you didn't have to park like that there and now you do, hence, I do not park there.

I think it must be a traffic-calming measure. The three-block stretch of Bay St west of Laguna St in SF was converted to back-in parking after two kids were injured there one morning on their way to school

also fuck Rasputin for using the old Cody’s space as a warehouse,

i was just by there again a few hours ago and it annoyed me all over again. The original idea behind that space when he took it over was to have a bookstore, record store, cafe, and performance space. It's absolutely perfect for that, and I would imagine that something like this could do well, particularly if it stayed open late (like until midnight). Why he didn't do this is beyond me. I hope someone does.

Didn't Rasputin have an L.A. location back in the 80s? I used to know one of the buyers there.

No, forgive me, I was thinking of Aron's.

Why he didn't do this is beyond me. I hope someone does.

Well, he opened the Mad Monk Center for Anachronistic Media, which did some of what you're talking about, but it failed as a business and closed quickly. Ken doesn't know how to make a business like that.

yes, that's what I was referring to (meaning, why he didn't do what he said he was going to do in the first place; the answer is clearly 'because he is a dumbass').

caught the aftermath of this; headed down here to catch a movie at 8pm last night and the entire outdoor mall was roped off and swarming with more police than I have ever seen anywhere. if I'd bothered to look at nextdoor (or, apparently, twitter, which I can't look at now since I deleted my account) before we left I wouldn't have bothered.

https://www.sfgate.com/news/bayarea/article/one-person-stabbed-during-civil-unrest-at-bay-18333550.php

(article makes this sound less awful than what I heard from people who were there, which was that it was basically a riot involving up to 400 kids...people in the movie theater were evacuated when someone came in and said "there is a massive fight happening, everyone has to leave now"...and people were like "why are you sending us out into a fight?" though apparently this fight also spilled over into the theaters themselves)

there wasn't even any looting????

there was apparently a fair amount of small theft in bay street and then further theft after the principals moved over to target in emeryville, where apparently they were riding bikes all over the store. but it seemed more like...terrorizing people

a gun went off at bay street and then a girl got stabbed in the neck, haven't heard any update on her condition. Kamilah Priforce, quickly becoming one of my least favorite local politicians, is all over nextdoor talking about the pain these kids are in. I'm like, I saw these kids, they did not look like they were in pain. they were having fun.

7). Bay Street has been the target of looting, violence and massive brawls mostly by unaccompanied juveniles. Are there any programs, policies or technologies you would consider exploring to deter this behavior that ultimately hurts Emeryville and the resident amenity and retail tax revenue this shopping center generates for the city’s general fund?

As I have mentioned in the League of Women Voters candidate forum, they are kids, our babies, and often there is a racial component wherein a group of predominantly Black and Brown children are viewed and treated differently than a gaggle of White children.

However, they still pose an issue, and social disturbances should not be allowed to continue unabated.

I’ve discussed this issue with a current councilmember and they stressed that Emeryville residents would not be open to surveillance that infringes on their privacy rights. I see their point; however, there are things we can still do.

I strongly support additional security cameras subsidized by the city in places where there are crimes, violent and nonviolent, and that includes the kids at Bay Street mall.

I have scheduled a Safety-Action Community Forum at Bay Street mall for October 28th, 2022 wherein matters like these are discussed and I will introduce the idea of a reporting system wherein facial recognition is used to identify participants involved disturbing events at places like Bay Street, and if they happen to be minors, their schools are alerted to their behaviors almost instantly.

As it relates to privacy, as long as those being recorded have access to their data, we can create a system that is humane but precise in its responsiveness in addition to preventing other crimes like child sex trafficking.

I strongly support additional security cameras subsidized by the city in places where there are crimes, violent and nonviolent, and that includes our young people at Bay Street mall.

https://evilleeye.com/news-commentary/2022-emeryville-city-council-candidate-questionnaire-north-hollis-resident-kalimah-priforce/

So many red flags there..

definitely a bunch of child sex trafficking will be prevented ... I mean, isn't that why people go to Bay St ... to engage in child sex trafficking? It's not really about Ikea and the Apple Store and I forget what else is there ... also ugh at "our babies" ... it bothers me because it's this very binary way of responding/viewing behavior that is actually more complex & nuanced. They are not "babies" ... they have agency and are capable of doing fucked up shit.

those are a bunch of absurd solutions. the real solution is have the cops actually detain people when they break the law. one person witnessed a cop watch one teen beat another one senseless, he never intervened, never crossed the street, just stood there watching. no one was arrested after this fracas.

i mean is this a black politician actually saying he wants facial recognition with cameras? what the ever living fuck. that's preposterous. I do think cameras help (they put them in the park near where I live after several daytime shootings, one of which happened during a kids birthday party) and the violence dropped immensely; but there's no facial recognition involved, the police can just review the footage after an incident.

Um, just here to point out that teenagers certainly have agency, but that trauma has ways of showing itself in the strangest of ways— sometimes by engaging in disruptive, anti-social behavior that then traumatizes others.

Looks like People's Park days may be numbered... they're turning it into a Mad Max compound

UC Berkeley takes over People's Park with walls of shipping containers

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/uc-berkeley-takes-over-peoples-park-18589002.php

It's not an especially nice park, but the University has so many other properties nearby... not sure why they're so adamant about this parcel

they want to force more students to pay for expensive housing

I'm in full support of putting student housing on this, but there is a court injunction preventing it right now, so why they are bothering with this absurd farce at the moment is beyond me.

They should just tear down the eyesore Ken S built at 2501 Haste St and put the housing there

that thing looked better in the plans than it did in the execution

they should preserve that public bathroom, I imagine more drug transactions have occurred there than almost any place on earth

i will miss being able to park easily there, no one seems like to park next to PP but I've never had an issue.

I'm in full support of putting student housing on this, but there is a court injunction preventing it right now, so why they are bothering with this absurd farce at the moment is beyond me.

Like, I definitely spent a fair amount of time there when I ran away from home as a young’un, it has a lot of memories for me and I learned a lot there, but I realize that my reasons are mostly sentimental and a hatred for Cal

your memories are also outdated because it's just a place where people deal meth and fentanyl now (and where people die), and not somewhere travelers and kids who don't have anywhere to go hang out.

no shade at table but keeping California looking the same for sentimental reasons is at the root of a lot of problems

akm otm there. this park hasn't been that in a long time.

So the solution is to let a university build hideous housing on the site? Please.

yes. reducing homelessness will help reduce drug overdoses.

If you look at the images on google map, it's been a construction site for a long time... trees cut down, etc.

the university doesn't offer enough housing for students. housing in this town is nuts. the city has done some stuff to alleviate this: changing zoning laws to allow for multi-residence units in neighborhoods where people were adamantly opposed, etc, which is good. but it's still not enough. now, Cal could just drastically reduce their admissions and size, but they aren't going to. These students need somewhere to live. I would rather they not be forced into homelessness or into illegal living situations where they pack 10, 15 students into one bedrooms (which is something that was happening). There are also other plots of land where Cal should be developing student housing, I agree; but this is a good location, not too far from campus.

They cut all the trees down a few years ago and the place is not unlike that giant hole from Parks and Rec.

there will also be supportive housing for the homeless in this lot.

public activists can still go meet two blocks away at Willard Park, which is an actual public park and not a private lot already owned by the university

whatever, we pretty much don’t see eye to eye on anything else so i wouldn’t expect any different here.

Students should be homeless

Students can live in the shipping containers!

Students shouldn’t be homeless, but neither should people who use drugs. That should go without saying?

I remember the 'no blood for volleyball' protests in the 90's.. it does seem like the battle for People's Park was just a struggle for struggle's sake, about the way that Berkeley was inevitably changing

I think I saw the Beatnigs play on that stage once, but I don't have a lot of holy memories of the place

Students shouldn’t be homeless, but neither should people who use drugs. That should go without saying?

lukas, I assume that we have both been around the block several times. any project like this that includes promises (even contractual promises) of affordable housing or housing resources for the unhoused or whatever? there is often little follow-through, or the number of units is cut, or the rents go up within a year or a few years, or whatever. building more housing, even affordable housing, isn’t a panacea! and i simply do not believe Cal or the city has the interests of the unhoused and people who use drugs in mind.

I get it, these programs aren't perfect. For one there's no legal mechanism yet to guarantee that affordable housing stays affordable housing.

I do think building a LOT of housing *would* really help in a lot of ways. The Bay Area has been adding office space and jobs like crazy for two decades and housing hasn't nearly kept up. Guess what, homelessness went up in the same period.

This is what drives me nuts about the people who show up to fight new apartment buildings. Where were you when Google was adding enough office space for 10,000 new jobs?

Not speaking directly to Berkeley, but we can't ask for-profit developers to do the right thing.. they'll always do what's most profitable, which is fancy apartments with kitchen islands

We need publicly-funded housing developments, not 'private/public partnerships'. Essentially, we need housing projects, although they don't necessarily have to resemble the Stalinist apartment blocks of the Great Society. But this being the Bay Area, people will widely approve of truly affordable housing - just not next to them

There's a guy over to my left yelling "oil derricks are affordable" let's look into it.

although they don't necessarily have to resemble the Stalinist apartment blocks

The student housing units surrounding people's park did kind of feel like stalinist towers prior to their makeovers!

Just moved to southwest Berkeley after 2 years in oakland and a decade in SF. Does anybody have any inside info on whether the Missouri Lounge is gonna reopen or not? I can see that there's lots of construction going on in the old patio area but can't tell the timing or nature of it. I've found some interviews with the owner talking about remodeling but all of those are a couple years old at this point.

I haven't heard about reopening, I just assumed it was a long covid victim

Now that you live there, you have to call it 'The Misery'

It’s reopening, they are just taking their time because they own the building.

Welcome to the neighborhood fetch

The Misery is great on a weekday afternoon.

Thanks, akm! I'm digging the quiet mix of residential/commercial in my area and the low police presence compared to all of my previous neighborhoods in the bay area.

I had so many memorable nights at Misery Lounge …