InBerkeley

I think of InBerkeley as a scrapbook of life here, not from an insider’s perspective, but from a user’s perspective. I am rooted in the tech industry, where things get complicated, the same way Becky O’Malley’s editorial makes Berkeley complicated.

The insiders always talk down to the users, the way O’Malley condescends to me. It’s okay, because I understand it for what it is, it’s a defense, a wall that says “Don’t go here.” But Berkeley is part of the United States, and we have the First Amendment, so no matter what Ms. O’Malley wants, we’ll say what we have to say.

In a comment on my personal blog, JN Gross explained, in common easy to understand terms, why Downtown is such a mess.

The City is schizophrenic on the homeless issue. It is extremely ugly after night because the hard core element (there are not that many of them, but what they lack in numbers they make up in intensity) hangs out there. Over time their numbers have increased (at least in my experience) as the number of businesses close down. So were in a vicious cycle. I don’t take my kids there anymore when it’s too late because the atmosphere is really… unfriendly. On the one occasion I took my wife to dinner, an extremely aggressive vagrant proceeded to follow us around yelling obscenities and threats. It was not a pleasant experience, and I suspect this is a big reason the number of businesses is dwindling.

Yup. That more or less explains it. Until it’s safe and comfortable to go to dinner or a movie or just go for a walk Downtown, it’ll remain the way it is. It can’t change.

General

I may be a Berkeley noob, but I know how to use the Internets.

I have a vanity filter that watches for my name and today it found one in an editorial in the Berkeley Daily Planet. Hey they’re reading InBerkeley. Coool.

I admitted in my opening piece that there’s a lot I don’t know about Berkeley.

Becky O’Malley asks: “Well, do you want the long course or the short course about why downtown’s awful and getting worse?”

Let’s start with the short course.

“Just as many kids eventually figure out that all the great stuff on Christmas was actually provided by grownups shopping ’til they dropped and staying up exhausted until the wee hours of the night, people who enjoy Berkeley’s many virtues eventually learn that it takes a lot of work by a lot of grownups to keep Berkeley great.”

Oh that stings!

If you want the “long course,” you can continue reading on the Daily Planet site.

JN Gross writes: “The City is schizophrenic on the homeless issue. It is extremely ugly after night because the hard core element hangs out there.”

General

Local blogger Frances Dinkelspiel decided to find out:

Ross leveraged his knowledge of authors and writing to become a literary agency. As he explains on his website, his involvement with Cody’s gave him “a unique understanding of the retail book market, of publishing trends and, most importantly and uniquely, the hand selling of books to book buyers.”

Ross opened Andy Ross Literary Agency in Oakland in 2008. His clients include many iconic figures from the 1960s and Vietnam War era, including Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, Paul Krassner, the editor of The Realist, the 1960s political and satirical magazine, and Michael Parenti, the radical political scientist and historian.

Dinkelspiel also asked the question all of us who loved Cody’s have been wondering. What does Ross miss the most?

I have spent a lot of time soul-searching and wondering what I could have done differently. I haven’t found a satisfying answer to this. When I think about those 30 years, I still believe that we did some pretty good things. Cody’s meant a lot to a lot of people. Sometimes it makes me sad that we couldn’t keep Cody’s going for another 50 years. Wasn’t it Camus who said: “The struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart”? I’m just going to have to accept that and move on.

Photo by Steve Rhodes from Flickr

Arts, Business

Being on the business end of a  traditional Japanese “Machijirushi“ fighting kite can be quite a shock if you’re not prepared for it.  As you assume control of the main line from the person before you, you start to get the sense that perhaps you’ve bitten off more than you bargained for.  Standing there with the rope wrapped around you, your hands start to hurt through the heavy leather gloves, your arms begin to ache and strain and you literally have to use your entire body to anchor the line.  At times, it can feel almost as if the kite is about to drag you aloft, the pull so powerful you’re glad there’s someone behind you as a backup, just in case.   And you’re enjoying every minute of it.

The annual Berkeley Kite Festival is coming next month, and offers an opportunity to get up close and personal with some of the most serious kite flyers in the world.  Each year, a delegation from the Sode-cho Kite-Flying Society of Hamamatsu, Japan make their pilgrimage to Berkeley to bring us a bit of their kite-flying tradition, parading around the festival grounds, demonstratinge their kite flying prowess and drinking lots of sake.

Though dwarfed by the 430-year-old Hamamatsu Festival held each May in Japan, the Berkeley Festival in Cesar Chavez Park, next to the Berkeley Marina, reflects the more recreational kind of kite flying popular in this country, offering a chance to experience a much wide variety of kite styles, from the fast to the frivolous, in a street-fair-like atmosphere.

The Berkeley Kite Wranglers are the premier giant creature kite team on the planet, and will once again be out in force, taming creatures of all sorts to perform with balletic precision over the hills of this former landfill.  Their trademark Octopile can hypnotize you with its tremendous tangle of twittering tentacles.

The festival runs from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, July 25-26, 2009.  Bring your own kite, buy one there or just watch.  Avoid the traffic and either bike or walk there, and you can stop at the Sea Breeze Market & Deli to pick up some lunch on the way.

For more information, visit the Berkeley Kite Festival web page.

General kite festival

Spotted at an undisclosed location in the Berkeley hills. I hope the neighbors like the sound of a rooster crowing in the early morning. I know I do. Even though I grew up in a public housing project in Brooklyn, there was a run down farm across the street until the early 1960s. Really.

General

The owners of Berkeley’s Elmwood Rialto Cinema on College Avenue (above) are stepping up to take over the El Cerrito Theater which shuttered last month.

The closure of the El Cerrito movie house came hot on the heals of the demise of the Parkway in Oakland — a cinema that offered beer, wine and squishy sofas as well as an eclectic movie program. Both the El Cerrito and Parkway theaters were operated by Speakeasy.

According to a report in the East Bay Express today, Rialto Theaters, operator of Berkeley’s Elmwood Theater as well as Santa Rosa’s Lakeside, was chosen from among seven firms who submitted proposals to El Cerrito’s Redevelopment Agency and City Council over the last two weeks.

If all goes as planned, Rialto Theaters will take over the Cerrito Theater by early July.

The Elmwood Theater is a well-loved local institution with an exciting art-house program. This month, for instance, it was showing three foreign-language movies at the same time — Lemon Tree, Sin Nombre and Il Divo.

[Photo: www.berkeleyheritage.com]

Business