InBerkeley

Anyone who hasn’t yet been able to visit the Georgia O’Keeffe & Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities show at SFMOMA (you still have until September 7th), or who has, and whose appetite has been whetted for more natural beauty, there is a nice little exhibit for you slightly closer to home. Until August 9th a selection of Don Hazen’s photography is showing at the Vintage Berkeley wine store at 2949 College Avenue (between Ashby and Russell).

In beautifully textural local landscapes that range from the Marin Headlands to Mono Lake, and semi-abstract renditions of sea grasses in Pescadero and Sunol oak leaves, Don has managed to capture some of that elusive sense of light that distinguishes western landscapes from so many others.

After enjoying the photographs take advantage of the show’s location. Sample some wine and pick the brains of the knowledgeable staff.

Wine and photography. It’s not ‘Bread and Roses’ – but it’s close.

General Arts

After a four-month hiatus, Karma Kitchen resumes serving lunches every Sunday from 11:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. The luncheons are being hosted at the Taste of Himalayas restaurant located at 1700 Shattuck Ave. at the corner of Virginia St.

Reincarnation seems to be a recurring theme at Karma Kitchen, an unusual Sunday lunch service where virtually the entire kitchen and dining room staff are volunteers and the check reads $0.00 with only this footnote:

Your meal was a gift from someone who came before you. We hope you will pay-it-forward however you wish.

While most patrons pay it forward through monetary donations, Karma Kitchen has had its share of more creative alternatives. Professional musicians have played for their meals, photographers have brought prints of their photos, a couple who had driven in from Northern California brought two huge crates of peaches and each week people bring homemade jams and jellies.

Karma Kitchen first opened in Berkeley on March 31, 2007, by several volunteers inspired to seed the value of a “gift economy,” and ran for nine months until the restaurant that hosted it was sold, at which time it took a break rather than continue with the new owner. It restarted again in September, 2008 at its current location at Taste of Himalayas, and then, after a seven-month run, with the volume of diners and volunteers at a peak, Karma Kitchen shut down operations again.

“Our closing was in the spirit of a retreat. For the core team of volunteers, it was really important that we stayed connected and true to the original values of Karma Kitchen, and we didn’t want it to become mechanical in its operations,” said Pavi Mehta. “It became more important for us to really define what makes Karma Kitchen Karma Kitchen. It’s been really helpful in that sense.”

Also, on a more practical level, there were many things that the team wanted to revamp, and they had a lot of ideas that had been floating around that they didn’t have the bandwidth to follow up on while tending to regular operations. In addition to running the luncheon service in Berkeley, Karma Kitchen had started another operation in Washington, D.C. in February, 2009, and at the same time they were working with a team in Chicago that was also eager to get something similar off the ground there.

“There’s always challenges as you get bigger, and we wanted to keep the spirit of it being a very humble experiment, not something with franchising, but really individualizing it and keeping it real,” said Mehta.

Karma Kitchen is always looking for volunteers, and those interested in serving should use this online volunteer form to sign up to indicate their availability. If there is a match with Karma Kitchen’s requirements that week, their volunteer coordinators will be in touch with you.

Food, General, restaurants

Who knew there are roughly 1600 different kinds of bees in California?  I didn’t, and apparently neither did most professional bee followers.  This shocking news was disclosed in a recent UC Berkeley study that focused on urban environments, an area that until now had been neglected.

As this San Jose Mercury article makes clear, between 60 to 80 different bee species were found in each of the seven cities covered by the research.

Gordon Frankie, a UC Berkeley professor who headed the study, said prior to his research there wasn’t much information about bees in urban environments, only agricultural ones.

“Nobody really thought there were that many types of bees in urban areas,” he said.

Of the 4,000 known bee species in the U.S., roughly 1,600 have been identified in California. Unlike the non-native honey bee, which lives in hives and is social meaning it has a queen and drones, most of California’s native bees are solitary meaning the females construct a nest and there is no hive or division of labor and prefer to burrow in the ground or in trees.

Environment, General, Nature, UC Berkeley

Jack responds to our earlier post on how the homeless are treated in Berkeley:

I’ve been homeless in Berkeley for just over a year now. I can tell you firsthand what it’s like. It’s true that Berkeley gets some pretty hard-core homeless folks, including some of the “worst kind” and some that travel around.

But it’s not a town that has or does much for people that aren’t like that, either. That is, if you aren’t a drunk, drug addict, crazy, etc. There are “services” and “programs” and “options” for these that you just don’t qualify for, meaning that you’re mostly on your own.

City Hall and some business groups are doing a lot of Orwellian doublespeak on these topics these days. Yes, “numbers of homeless going down” DOES mean things like driving people outa’ town, jailing them, etc. I think a mere TWO “case study examples” have been used to “show” success stories of people that actually got off the streets into real housing and went back to work and/or “qualified” for benefits.

The rest of us are just stuck out here with increasing criminalization of things like sleeping anywhere and getting encroached and harassed more for just being outdoors all the time, but with usual human needs.

Berkeley also garnered some Fed $ for “homeless programs” but has been spending it on hiring “hosts” that walk around and have been told by their bosses to complain to the police about homeless people, so that they can be “enforced” against. Things like $200 tickets for sleeping on a sidewalk (no, there’s no law against that, but “obstructing a sidewalk” is illegal), etc. Why? Because apparently not enough citizens have been complaining and the biz owners wanted to arrange for more complaints.

This is Fed “Homeless program/services” money PAYING for employees to be used to complain to the police about homeless people. While these “success stories” of the employees (formerly homeless and/or drug program graduates) also get paid to just walk around and sit in cafe’s, etc. for hours at a time, too. Some solution and success, huh? At least until the funds run out, when they’ll then be “qualified” for… what?

At least then, remaining homeless folks won’t have that “service” inflicted on them anymore.

Issues