InBerkeley

I hesitate to suggest you go to hear Michael Pollan speak tonight in Berkeley, not because he isn’t smart and entertaining, but because last time I went up to the campus to hear him hold forth, the place was so packed many of us were relegated to an ante-room and had to settle for watching him on small screens.

Still, that was a free shindig and tonight’s event requires one to buy a ticket, so Pollan’s enormous fan-base may not come out in such full force — even if he is on home turf.

“The Omnivore’s Dilemma” author and J-School prof will be talking about his philosophy—“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” — in Cal Performances’ Strickly Speaking Series, tonight at 8pm at Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley. Tickets cost $16–$30, (510) 642-9988, www.calperformances.org.

[Photo: Ken Light.]

Celebrity, Events, Food, Journalism, People, UC Berkeley Michael Pollan

This report is coming to you from your New York correspondent, here on family business…

The Breakfast-Cabal mail list is abuzz with news about helicopters flying over Berkeley today.

Art Medlar wrote: “…there’s no place to go to get an immediate answer to the general question, ‘what’s up with the helicopters?’ For the most part, the online edition of the Oakland Tribune tends to post breaking news long before either the Chronicle or the Daily Planet, both of which are equally hopeless on that front. Attempting to get the info from the websites of the actual news companies involved is beyond laughable.”

“It would seem like there’s an opening for someone like inberkeley.com to add a ‘helicopter’ tag and become the default source of info.”

Art, let’s see what the InBerkeley.com readers know about the helicopters…

David Rowland adds: “I live near Willard Park, and about once a year something happens that draws the news copters to our area. Although it’s very expensive to keep them up there, if nothing else is happening they will linger for hours, making square miles of noise. I have called the FAA noise complaint line and the individual stations when I can determine which are involved. I think the word gets through, and it may have some effect.”

General

The anti-torture policy will mean firing Igor

The Berkeley city council voted unanimously last night to agree to UN treaties on human rights, racial discrimination and torture. So that cell with shackles in the city hall dungeon will have to go.

Showing a small amount of sense, the work will be done by unpaid interns.

When I was called out for being too polite yesterday, I described the proposed policy was “ridiculous, a waste of time, a diversion from real issues, gestural politics at the worst”. It truly is laughable.

The other unanimous decision last night was to increase the parking fee to $1.50 an hour, and add 420 parking meters. That decision will have vastly more impact on the world.

Government

It’s the east end, not the Berkeley end, but still, it’s close…

See ABC7’s  live video here.

News

Bill Fujimoto, who left Berkeley’s Monterey Market earlier this year, has been hired as a consultant by Lafayette grocer Diablo Foods according to a report in Diablo Magazine:

Since Fujimoto’s arrival in July, Diablo Foods has begun offering more seasonal fare from such farms as Full Belly in Capay Valley and Goldbud in Placerville.

Fujimoto, shown above with his wife Judy, says he may open his own store, possibly in Contra Costa county.

Bill Fujimoto: what’s fresh now, June 24 2009
Monterey Market Mystery, June 12 2009

Business, Food, News, People Bill Fujimoto, Monterey Market

Eagerly awaiting the Berkeley reports

When I read the agenda for tonight’s city council meeting, I didn’t notice anything particularly newsworthy. There’s establishing Berkeley as a Tree City USA — no problem there. Even the parking amendments — increasing the rate to $1.50 an hour and expanding pay and display areas — struck me as ordinary council business.

I clearly need to take lessons in agenda exegesis because the proposal from the Peace and Justice Commission to have the city adhere to UN treaties completely passed me by. The Chronicle’s Carolyn Jones is more eagle eyed. The nub of the recommendation is: “That the Berkeley City Council affirm the value of localities complying with relevant UN Treaty recommendations”.

I’m all in favor of UN treaties on human rights, racial discrimination and torture, but why does a municipality need its own compliance with treaties aimed at sovereign states? I have friends that work in the UN, and the last thing that over-stretched organization needs is a deluge of reports from every city in the world with 100,000 or more people. Of course, there’s only one city in the world that would ever contemplate such a thing. I can just imagine the joy of a junior civil servant at the UN at opening her annual package of compliance reports from Berkeley.

I know there’s a history of Berkeley asserting itself on the world stage. Some of that is admirable, but the city really has more pressing problems than wrestling with national treaty obligations.

The city council meeting is open to the public and also available through a webcast.

Photo from United Nations Photo

Government

InBerkeley will always greet newcomers to the Berkeley blog world. So The Berkeley Blog is welcome (there’s also the much longer-running Berkeley Blog by Sylvia Paull — I guess the addition of “The” makes a difference).

The Berkeley Blog is subtitled “provocative thinking from UC Berkeley”. It’s early days, but the content on the site now is pretty thin. I hope as more content flows in, it will look livelier. It seems to have launched with one post per topic.

What’s slightly odd to me is that The Berkeley Blog hasn’t seized the opportunity to bring in the feeds of some of the excellent, well-established UC Berkeley bloggers, like Brad DeLong and Robert Reich. Perhaps that’s all to come.

UC Berkeley

The New York Times’ Economix blog has an interesting analysis of economic diversity at the nation’s top universities. Here’s the key table:

UCLA and UC Berkeley come out first and second, with a vastly higher proportion of Pell Grant recipients than any other leading university. Read the Times’ analysis for some thoughts as to why the two UC campuses are way ahead of others.

UC Berkeley

We try not to stray into neighboring cities, but the video of the protest at Whole Foods Oakland is just too wonderful to miss (hat tip Lisa). It’s a strong, performance-art-like response to Whole Foods CEO John Mackey’s opposition to healthcare reform.

It doesn’t reach the extraordinary brilliance of the Sound of Music performance in Antwerp (below), but I would have liked to have been in Whole Foods when it happened.

Events, Food

Berkeley, as we know, has more than its share of well-regarded authors. A cluster of them have had the call from Hollywood recently and the resulting movies will hopefully be appearing at a theater near you soon.

This month’s Diablo Magazine rounds up the movies that have emanated from four noted Berkeley writers.

The screenplay for “Where the Wild Things Are”, directed by Spike Jones and adapted from the much-loved children’s book by Maurice Sendak, was written by Berkeleyite  Dave Eggers.

Berkeley resident Ayelet Waldman recently attended the premiere of “Love and Other Impossible Pursuits” based on her novel of the same name.

Her husband Michael Chabon is seeing two of his books translated to the silver screen: “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay”, directed by Stephen Daldry, and “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union”, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen.

And Michael Lewis, who also lives in Berkeley, is hoping to see Brad Pitt play the role of Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane in an adaptation of his bestselling book “Moneyball”.

[Photos, left to right: Waldman, Chabon, Eggers and Lewis.]

Arts, Books, Celebrity, Movies Ayelet Waldman, Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, Michael Lewi

Design by FMG Architects

The Transbay Blog covers transit issues far better than anyone else. If you’re wondering what happened to the Bus Rapid Transit plan, which would connect downtown Berkeley to San Leandro, read Transbay Blog’s definitive update. The BRT plan looks like it is being diminished by AC Transit’s budget problems. Transbay Blog’s conclusion:

It is incredibly sad that the State of California’s theft of transit funds has put AC Transit into such a difficult position, pitting the hardship of a disenfranchised ridership against a good project that will attract more people to transit. If we lived in a state and nation that truly recognized the value of good transit — and that put its money where its mouth is on the same — we would not be allocating untold billions of dollars to new freeways, while artificially forcing transit agencies to make the difficult and unfair choice between running current service and setting aside a modest sum of money for future investment.

That should unfortunately cheer the vocal Berkeley groups that have opposed BRT. Transbay Blog did a detailed rebuttal of the BRT naysayers last year.

Transport

Overheard today on the Twitterstream:

TheKatzer: Last day at Lawrence Berkeley Labs, with the best transmission electron microscope in the world, but the most terrible office coffee ever.

ccmarshall: http://twitpic.com/j5n5w – Great drawing I found on the ground when I was on campus (UC Berkeley) today.

Berkeley Tweets

The announcement by philanthropist Warren Hellman (left) that he is pledging $5 million to kick-start  a new online Bay Area news service in conjunction with KQED, UC’s journalism school and possibly the New York Times has prompted a variety of responses.

Robert Gammon in The East Bay Express probably came out most strongly against the initiative, saying it represented a threat to Bay Area journalism as well as to the long-term fortunes of journalism students in the area.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given his position as an adjunct professor at the J-School, Silicon Valley new-media consultant Alan Mutter passed no comment on the development and merely reported it on his blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur.

Susan Mernit, who is about to launch hyperlocal blog called Oakland Local, was ambivalent on her own blog, but concluded that, “As much as I worry that Hellman’s project will suck $$  from my own little project and other wonderful smaller sites I see emerging, the Hellman project feels  more like a replacement for something we’ve lost — the big (bloated?) newsrooms of the corporate papers — not the local sites that are close to their community.”

All the major news media have reported the initiative whose website can be found here and its Facebook page, launched just today, has already attracted about 240, mostly encouraging, followers.

Journalism, Non-profits, People, UC Berkeley, University Bay Area News Project

Just before 6pm fire crews were responding to a car on fire on the upper deck of the Bay Bridge.

[Source and pic: ABCNewsBay Area]

News, Transportation Bay Bridge

A coffee insurgency may be in the making as startup coffee impresario Phil Jaber readies his first foray into the East Bay with a new Philz Coffee store to be located at 1600 Shattuck Ave. at the corner of Cedar, site of a former Starbucks Coffee Cafe de la Paz, and just a stone’s throw from the original Peet’s outlet.

I have never tasted Philz coffee, but their web site emphasizes the “special customized blends” used to make every “hand-crafted to your liking” coffee drink, and describes their drinks this way: “The amount of beans we put into each cup is equivalent to 3 cups of your normal coffee so you will be as high as a plane!” The web site sells T-shirts and other swag, and even features a cartooned Quentin Tarantino quote about their mocha drink.

Since opening his first store in 2003, Jaber has expanded to six outlets in San Francisco and down the peninsula in Palo Alto and San Jose, and Philz has generally gotten good reviews, so they must be doing something right. And all their shops feature free Wi-Fi.

Watch out Peet’s. Here comes Philz.

General

If you want to catch up on the protests yesterday at the university, zunguzungu does the best job I’ve seen. There’s a great juxtaposition, as well, of a photo from yesterday and a photo of Mario Savio speaking from the same spot in 1964.

UC Berkeley

My teenage son and I like this piece of street art which is on the old photo-processing shop on the corner of Ashby and Telegraph. It puts us in mind of the notoriously successful British street artist Banksy.

We’d like to know more about it — the artist, the message? Anyone?

Update:  Thanks to reader Cleita we have the answer we were looking for. The artist is Jesse Hazelip and you can find out more about him and his work on his website here.

Art