Tuesday, August 28, 2007

a weekend of live music

After two weekends of wonderful nature experiences, it was time to immerse myself in some live music. The weekend started out with a concert by Wilco at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley. Wilco, in my opinion, is one of the best live bands out there right now. And the Greek Theatre is legendary, known as one of the best outdoor concert venues around. It certainly is a beautiful and intimate theatre, although i have to say that the concrete benches are rather uncomfortable to sit on without some sort of padding. I can't complain, though, that it is a mere 10 minute walk from our house. Since Stella was unable to attend, I went with my friend Myra Melford, the wonderful jazz pianist who moved from NYC to Berkeley a few years ago to teach at UC Berkeley. She's generally not one for rock concerts (she said this is probably the first rock show she's been to in about 30 years), but she had an interest in Wilco and has performed with Nels Cline, the newest guitarist in Wilco. The concert was pretty great. This was, i think, my seventh time seeing them, and they get better each time. I love the way they vary the arrangements of the pieces from the studio recordings, and particularly when they deconstruct a piece in the middle, swirl it into chaos, then bring it right back on queue.

The following day Stella, Jeffrey & I went to check out a couple of the free outdoor performances that were part of the annual Downtown Berkeley Jazz Festival. The festival was almost exclusively area musicians, so I didn't know a lot about the various performers. But Saturday at noon was the band Disappear Incompletely doing jazz arrangements of songs by Radiohead, who I think are pretty great. They did a pretty interesting set, although I felt they may have been keeping things a little tame to appeal to a more general audience. The start of their set had some really interesting and adventurous arrangements of tunes like "Optimistic", "Kid A" and "Climbing Up the Walls", but the second half seemed to consist of more conventional arrangements featuring the bass player as a vocalist.

From there we wandered over to the Farmer's Market where mandolin great Mike Marshall, who lives in nearby Oakland, was playing with a Brazilian pianist. I've listened to Mike Marshall for over 20 years now, typically playing the style of "New Grass" that David Grisman pioneered. In fact, Marshall was in Grisman's quintet for a number of years. This set of Brazilian jazz, also with a clarinetist/soprano saxophonist & percussionist, was quite good, but didn't exactly blow me away. But it was a wonderful way to enjoy the California sunshine while enjoying some tasty crepes (both savory and sweet) from the Farmer's Market.

And finally, that night was the only non-free performance of the festival I attended - the Myra Melford/Ben Goldberg Quartet. This was held in the performance space of the Jazz School, an interesting music school in Berkeley dedicated to the study of jazz. It was a nice space with a cafe vibe. They did two sets with about 60% of the compositions by Myra and the rest by Ben. It was my first time seeing Ben play, although I have several recordings he plays on. It turns out he lives in Berkeley not too far from me. The concert was truly amazing and I thought everyone played exceptionally well. I am very lucky that one of my all-time favorite musicians lives in town and I'll get a chance to hear her perform so often now. She has two more gigs in the area in September that I can look forward to.

Thursday, August 23, 2007

and speaking of spiders...

meet Spider Pig, from The Simpsons Movie.

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

so many spiders

There are SO many spiders in California. All over the place. Almost every night just before we go to bed, we have to remove at least one spider from the bedroom ceiling.

Walking around town, you see hundreds, if not thousands, of webs in the plants in people's front yards. Next time we take a vacation, I'll expect our house to be completely filled with spiders and webs when we get back.






Most of them are fairly small and non-threatening. But I've seen quite a few pretty scary ones. The only one to worry about is the black widow, which is fairly common in California, but bites from them are still very unlikely.


If bad old horror movies have taught me anything, it's that one must always be on guard... you never know when a giant spider might creep up behind you.

Monday, August 20, 2007

Adventures at Point Reyes

On Saturday, Stella, Jeffrey and I took a long day trip to Point Reyes National Seashore. This large and stunningly beautiful area is just a bit north of San Francisco, and an hour drive from us in Berkeley. We started our visit with a picnic at North Beach, just one of thirteen beaches in the park.


After lunch we headed south to see the lighthouse. Known as the windiest place on the pacific coast, we had an amazing view of the beach we were just at.


Then we headed for the northern most beach, McClure Beach. It was here that I proclaimed "This is my new favorite beach in California". There's a quarter-mile hike down from the parking lot to a beach surrounded by beautiful cliffs.


At the southern end of the beach, there was a passage that led to another small but beautiful beach, only accessible when the tide is low. This was my favorite part.


We barely scratched the surface; there is so much more to explore at Point Reyes. I look forward to spending more time there.

Michael Chabon on Berkeley

Michael Chabon, the wonderful author of the novels The Wonder Boys (also a great film), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, The Mysteries of Pittsburg, and The Yiddish Policeman's Union, is a fellow resident of Berkeley. Today I came across a great little essay he wrote about our fair city. Originally printed in the March 2002 issue of Gourmet magazine, here it is, reprinted without permission.

The Mysteries of Berkeley

by Michael Chabon

Berkeley.

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 outr*. 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.

Originally published in the March 2002 issue of Gourmet

(c)2002 Michael Chabon

Sunday, August 19, 2007

Mount Diablo

This entry is really about a week late; we went to Mount Diablo just over a week ago. For me, it was a pilgrimage of sorts. When I was very young (2-5 years old in 1970-1973), my family lived in Lafayette, not terribly far from here. We used to have picnics at Mount Diablo, which we could see from our back yard in Lafayette. My memories of these trips are quite fuzzy at best, but my parents have assured me that wonderful times were had. So now, roughly 35 years later, we returned at last to Mount Diablo. The base of the mountain is only about 30-40 minutes away from us in Berkeley, which is nice. It's the tallest mountain in central California and on a clear day you can see as far away as Yosemite to the east. The weather was perfect - clear blue skies and warm, even hot, but not too hot. At some point during our ascent we stopped for a little picnic lunch.


At the top we took in the magnificent views and hiked the "fire trail" around the peak.


All in all, an outstanding day!

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Monday, August 13, 2007

What Are You Grateful For?

The other night we decided to try out the local vegetarian restaurant called Cafe Gratitude. We enticed young Jeffrey by telling him it would be like Seva in Ann Arbor, which he loves. Man, were we wrong. Some people may complain that Seva is too "crunchy"... Cafe Gratitude makes Seva look like McDonalds. It's the most "crunchy", politically correct, new agey place I've ever been too. My inner hippie loved it; my inner cynic wanted to puke.


Their whole philosophy is based on "the being of abundance" and being grateful for all that you have in the abundance and bounty of life. It actually started out as a board game called The Abounding River Board Game before it became a restaurant. The food is purely vegan and is all "live food", meaning it has been cooked, if at all, only at temperatures below 118 degrees. Each item on their menu is named something like "I am abundant", "I am accepting" or "I am whole" and as the server brings you your dish they say "you are divine" or "you are sublime" or whatever the name of your dish is. Throughout the experience I was simultaneously enchanted by how positive it all was and nauseated by how sickeningly new agey it was. The food was quite good, but not amazing. Although it was slightly on the bland side, I felt like I was eating about the healthiest I've ever eaten.

I would have been enthralled by this place 20 years ago. Now, perhaps I am a little too old & cynical to not smirk a bit at their over the top sincerity. And that, I realize, is probably my loss.

But I'll leave you with a few questions from their employment application. Tell me if I'm being too cynical.

"What inspires you about the possibility of sacred commerce?"

"What are your thoughts about service as an expression of spirit?"

"What can you say about your ability to love and be great with people?"

"What do you love about yourself?"

"In life, how do you get in your own way.what stops you?"

Sunday, August 12, 2007

My First Earthquake

Earthquakes happen all the time here. Most of the time they are so small that you don't feel them. Once in a while one happens that you can feel, although still quite small. Last night was one of those earthquakes. I was in bed reading and heard a rumble and felt the house shook. It was over in an instant - for a moment I thought someone had slammed a door really hard; it was that quick. But yet it was unlike anything I had ever heard or felt. I asked Stella, who was drifting off to sleep, if she felt or heard anything. She hadn't and I said that I might have felt an earthquake but wasn't sure. I made a mental note to look online the next day and see if there was any seismic activity around 11:45 on Saturday night. And sure enough, there was an an earthquake that measured 2.7 centered in El Cerrito, less than three miles from us.

I wondered how long it would be before I experienced my first earthquake. I find it kind of exciting, in a weird way. Let's just hope all future ones are all small like this one, although experts think a big one is likely in the bay area within the next fifteen years or so.

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

From Jules to Jules

It's now final... I've sold my house. I received my copies of the final closing papers yesterday. It's a little bittersweet. Sweet in that I am finally free of it, particularly in such a poor housing market. Bitter in that I loved that house and put a lot of work into it and I lost quite a bit of money on it. But hopefully the new owners will get some enjoyment out of the work I put into it, particularly the gardens and the deck.

I never met the new owners, but heard their interesting story through a neighbor who knows them. Apparently a woman is buying the house to rent to her daughter and her daughter's girlfriend. The daughter's partner is named Julie. She is in the process of becoming a man, upon the completion of which she will be known as Jules. So the house passes from Jules to Jules. And, apparently, it's Julie (Jules) who really liked the gardens at the house. So there is some unique kind of continuity there, since there will still be a Jules there tending to the garden.

Tuesday, August 7, 2007

Enjoying Berkeley

We had our first local visitor to the house - my friend Myra Melford, the wonderful jazz pianist who now teaches at UC Berkeley. She stopped by on saturday to see the house and catch up, as it had been nearly a year since I've seen her.

Later that day, Stella, Jeffrey & I went to Tilden Park, which borders Berkeley in the hills to the east. It's quite large and is really a wonderful place! I'm so thrilled to have such amazing beauty so close to my home. We first hiked a trail in middle of the park, taking many photos along the way:


Finally we made our way up to the highest point in the park, on a trail called "Sea View". The views were stunning, although by this time the fog had already enveloped most of San Francisco.


The view east of Mount Diablo isn't too bad either:


All in all, a truly wonderful day in California.

Welcome to Berkeley

It was my third or fourth night in Berkeley when it happened; hopefully it wasn't the official welcome wagon. I was walking home from the grocery store, about 4 blocks away, with a bag of groceries in each hand. It was shortly after dark. As I walked up Cedar street, a well traveled street in the neighborhood, i felt a sharp pain in my back that propelled me forward a bit, causing me to stumble but not fall. An instant later, the car drove by me and I heard someone say "Whoa, we got him!" and they laughed as they drove off. And I realized that someone shot me in the back with a pellet gun. A few days in Berkeley and I'm already the victim of a drive-by shooting - shot in the back by a pellet gun! Fortunately, it really didn't hurt and left no marks. It surprised me more than anything else.

This is definitely a much more urban environment than Ann Arbor. Welcome to Berkeley - here's your pellet-gun shot in the back!