You can watch a live webcast of the city council’s meeting tonight.
There’s a half-hour long closed session that will be webcast from 6:30. The open session starts at 7pm, with a 51-point agenda.
Old Town's Building 5 in the 1940s
To most of us in Berkeley, the spread of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab on the hill over the university is a bit of a mystery. Yet on the 200 acres of LBNL there are 4,000 employees and a maze of buildings.
Sitting at the center of the lab site is a group of buildings known as Old Town. LBNL, with support from governor Schwartzenegger, representative Barbara Lee and the mayors of Berkeley and Oakland, have applied for $45 million in federal stimulus funds to demolish and clear the site for redevelopment. The lab’s news site reports:
Old Town has been in disuse for several decades. “It was already known as Old Town 30 years ago,” said Andy Sessler, Berkeley Lab’s director in the 1970s. “We tried to have it changed, tear down old shacks, put up new buildings or green fields, but we just couldn’t get any support for these activities.”
The need for new space on the Berkeley Lab site is acute. While the university and much of the rest of the Bay Area economy is struggling, LBNL’s focus on energy research has led to a comparative flood of federal research funds. In addition, the lab has already received $130 million in federal stimulus funds, most of it for construction and infrastructure improvements.
Berkeley Arts and Letters joins the Berkeley Cybersalon to host a book reading by Scott Rosenberg, co-founder of Salon Media Group and Salon.com and author of Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters. Say Everything chronicles blogging’s unplanned rise and improbable triumph, tracing its impact on politics, business, the media, and our personal lives. What blogging has become, Rosenberg says, is a new kind of public sphere — one in which we can think out loud together.
The book reading takes place Wednesday, July 29 at 7:30 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Berkeley. $10/general, $5/Hillside members and students at Brown Paper Tickets. (Tickets at the door pending space available.)
We sent a crack investigative team down to Chez Panisse to sample the mulberry ice cream.
The report: The cone was small, the ice cream purple. It had a sorbet-like texture, not too sweet. The cone was dipped in sugar and had a surprising sweet spot at the bottom.
The general appraisal: Vive la Panisse! 
In honor of Bastille Day today, Chez Panisse, Berkeley’s most famous foodie haunt, is serving mulberry ice cream cones outside the restaurant from 12.00-3pm — or until they run out. Price: $2.00. (Or so says they say on their Twitter feed.)
Chez Panisse also has a snazzy new Gallic-inspired website. Although very slick, it doesn’t, to my mind, convey any of the flavor the place. The branding strategy is a little fuzzy if you ask me (but that’s probably the subject of another post).
The Berkeley Art Museum has posted a virtual tour of their planned new building by Japanese architect Toyo Ito. The proposed site is on Oxford Street, between Center and Addison. The current building on Bancroft Way does not meet seismic standards, and renovation costs would equal or exceed the cost of a new building.
The New York Times architecture critic, Nicolai Ourousoff, recently profiled Ito, writing:
His work can be maddeningly difficult to categorize. No two Ito buildings look exactly alike. There is no unifying aesthetic style, no manifesto to advance. You can never be sure what Mr. Ito will do next, which can be thrilling for architects but nerve-racking for clients (another reason, perhaps, that his work isn’t better known).
What his buildings do share is a distrust of simplistic formulas. His career can be read as a lifelong quest to find the precise balance between seemingly opposing values — individual and community, machine and nature, male and female, utopian fantasies and hard realities.
His ability to find such balances consistently has made him one of our great urban poets, someone who has been able to crystallize, through architecture, the tensions that lie buried in the heart of contemporary society. It makes his work especially resonant today, when much of the world is drawn to one form of extremism or another.
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