Berkeley

I often like to say that The Daily Californian was my real journalism school. In the spring of 2001, my second semester as a Berkeley student, we had an editor in chief named Daniel Hernandez, or as he was sometimes known among his mates from the paper, “Street.” Having a nickname like that gave him, at least to me, a sort of a respectable rugged journalistic air about him. I never knew much about him, and never had the chance…

You know, there are days when it feels like the whole world is smiling on you. Yesterday I went for a run at about 7 pm up in the Berkeley Hills on the side of Strawberry Canyon. As I was coming down the hill, the sun was setting over the Bay and there were wild blackberries blooming on the trailside. I love this place.

This past weekend, my grandparents moved out of their home in the Berkeley Hills of nearly half a century. As many of you know, that house is very near and dear to my heart. As I told them, if they were selling it (they’re not), I would sell everything that I owned to be able to keep that house in our family. On Monday evening, I took a tour of the house, in its empty and soon-to-be-rented state, and went…

Veljo and I walked around Telegraph and around campus this afternoon. Seeing Cody’s in its dying days is quite sad — many of the bookshelves, particularly in the back of the store are totally empty. It looks like they’re going to turn that space into two retail locations. They also had a slide show of some of the early days of Cody’s playing on a computer there — before it was Cody’s it was a Shell station. Who knew? Also…

While today is a celebration of all my friends who are finally graduating Berkeley, there’s also a tinge of sadness. Cody’s Books, my all-time favorite bookstore is closing its flagship store on Telegraph Ave. on July 10. While my local favorite bookstore growing up was Dutton’s in Brentwood (Los Angeles), Cody’s was always my real favorite. It was the bookstore of choice of my grandparents, longtime Berkeley kids since 1921. Many a birthday/holiday present has been bought at Cody’s —…

Ron Thompson’s Feet, Caffè Trieste, Berkeley Photo by Alan Wiig

Here’s an awesome photo of my favorite bridge. The Chronicle published it today in conjunction with this piece saying that the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge won’t be done until 2013. Most interesting part comes from the timeline: November 1998: Residents of San Francisco, Oakland, Emeryville and Berkeley vote that passenger rail service should be “part of the redesign of the Bay Bridge” — an advisory measure initiated by Willie Brown. Awesome!

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,…

THE SCENE: Cyrus and Alan are waiting in line to buy $11 worth of vegetables at Berkeley Bowl on an early Saturday evening. They’re talking about how the parents of Cyrus’ friend Monica have a ginormous house in Castro Valley. A guy standing one checkout aisle over turns to Cyrus. GUY : Is ginormous in the dictionary? CYRUS: I don’t know. But it should be. GUY: Yeah man, we already got Webster’s on that. CYRUS: What about the Oxford New…

For those of you who don’t know who he is, he’s done a great series in The Atlantic over the past few weeks. He’s appearing at a Cody’s Books event on Tuesday, Feb. 7: BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY tracks AMERICAN VERTIGO: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville. For the past year celebrated philosopher and journalist Bernard-Henri Lévy has been traveling in the tracks of another Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, who in 1831 wrote what remains the most influential book about America,…