Category: Berkeley

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Pac 10 Football

We’ve expended exactly zero words in this space on this year’s football season, college or pro. There is a local team worthy of regular comment–or ridicule–and that’s the Oakland Raiders. But enough about them. The two teams most avidly followed under this Berkeley roof are California, of the NCAA’s Pacific 10 conference, and Chicago, a founding club of the National Football League. Both perform their gridiron labors under the sobriquet “Bears.”

We don’t lose a lot of sleep over either Bears squad. They’re just not good enough to cause that or to merit it. But emotional attachments are hard to sunder and occasionally the teams are entertaining. Cal is a more immediate experience, seeing they play a couple miles from our house, close enough that when the stadium cannon is fired to celebrate a touchdown it’s clearly audible here.

The conceit for any fan of a decent college football program is that the team they follow is on the threshold or at least capable of greatness (some people root for teams that actually are great–such as the quasi-pro squads at schools like Florida, Texas, and the University of Southern California. I don’t know have any idea what it would be like to root for such a team, though a certain infuriating smugness seems to come with that rarefied territory).

California, at any rate, is a school with a consistently decent football program, a program good enough and rich enough that its coach is a millionaire and fans enjoy a week or two every season thinking that, “Gee, this year these guys are for real.” But Cal, millionaire coach and all, is also a consistently inconsistent team, capable of spectacular performances, weird lapses and blind stupidity–sometimes on the same play. The team won its first three games this year, badly abusing a collection of overmatched squads. Then it began its conference schedule with a game against Oregon in Eugene. Cal looked helpless and scored a single field goal while the Ducks ran riot. Cal made an identical impression against USC in Berkeley: a lone field goal while the Trojans cruised up and down the field at will. Since then, freed of expectations, the Bears have had an OK season. They lost to a good Oregon State team. They beat UCLA, Washington State, Arizona State and Arizona. Today they played Stanford.

Step back a moment from the Cal particulars. The rest of the conference has been pretty interesting.

Oregon demolished Cal, then went on to smash USC, the perennial conference power. It was Oregon’s year, until they played Stanford a couple weeks ago. Stanford whipped them.

USC lost an early game to Washington–continuing a string of seasons during which it has lost a close game to a weaker conference opponent (other upsets in recent years came by way of Oregon State and Stanford). Then the Trojans seemed to get back on track by dominating California. But USC didn’t really flatten anyone else. In fact, they got steamrolled themselves by Oregon in Eugene. And last week, Stanford not only beat them but racked up more points against them than any team in history. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of guys (by which I really mean: a more entitled-seeming group of fans).

So Cal vs. Stanford. The Cardinal took down Oregon immediately after the Ducks’ big win against USC, and then it simply overpowered USC. Both Oregon and USC stomped Cal. What chance could the Bears possibly have? Naturally, the Bears beat them. Not just beat them, dominated them — the 34-28 score hid the fact Cal held the ball for nearly 40 minutes out of 60 and got 31 first downs to Stanford’s 16.

Elsewhere, Oregon came from behind to beat Arizona and keep the inside track for the conference championship and Rose Bowl berth. But to get there, they need to beat Oregon State on December 3. It’s a home game for the U of O. I’ll give the edge to the Ducks over the Beavers.

But this is the Pac 10, so don’t bet on anything.

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East Bay Hipster Gulch: The Motel

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The Temescal district, the neighborhood surrounding Telegraph Avenue and 51st Street in North Oakland, has become a contender for the title of East Bay Hipster Gulch. By which I mean the area is characterized by lots of young folks hanging out, sporting the latest in fashion and barely rideable bicycles. In fact, the first Friday of the month is a phenomenon all the way up Telegraph from downtown to 51st. Galleries are open late, clubs are thronged, and except for the very wide well-paved street you might think you were in non-colonial Williamsburg–the one in Brooklyn.  

But traces of the avenue’s up-and-down history persist. Smack in the middle of a block that features an odd but cool gallery (it featured a live Halloween display with a young woman making like Norman Bates’s mother and spooking some visitors), a Burmese restaurant, and a good pizza-and-beer joint, you’ll find a rent-by-the-week motel. But like the rest of the area, it’s going through changes. I prefer to think of it as the Maya, but that’s because I formed my impression facing north. South-facing viewers see the Telegraph-Shattuck (those two streets meet, or diverge, a block away).

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Storefront

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There’s a Saturday morning routine that takes us by a restaurant for coffee and pastries followed by a pause at the King Middle School garden (so the dog can watch the chickens) and a stop at the schoolyard to sit and consume previously mentioned food items.

Then there’s a Sunday morning routine: different direction, different cafe, no pastries, and no stops. But we do walk along the old Santa Fe right-of-way, and our path takes us past an old storefront on Hearst Street that has been turned into a gallery.

The picture above: the gallery a couple Sundays ago. I’m a sucker for artfully arranged miscellany, I guess.

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Your Berkeley Weather Outlook: Nice; Really Nice

At the risk of unleashing a wavelet of hate mail, here’s a quick take on the Berkeley weather for this week. Meantime, the calendar says it’s November. Please remind me of this when next I snivel about the cold and rain. Of course, in the next 48 hours I’ll hear someone spoil the party by saying global warming is responsible for the continued warm, dry conditions.

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Berkeley Halloween, Before and After

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Halloween morning on Holly Street. You can just feel the anticipation: tricking and treating, overindulgence, and vandalism just hours away. Late in the afternoon on the front porch, Kate and I carved pumpkins. Hers looked like something; mine looked like nothing you could describe. Then nightfall and the troops of costumed youngsters. Well, first we saw maybe a dozen kids make their way up the other side of the street who never made it to our side. Maybe they were scared of odd-numbered addresses. After that, infrequent visits by one or two kids at a time. One bigger group, including the neighbor kids, knocked at the door. By the time we realized no one else would show up, at 8:30 or so, maybe 15 or 20 kids had contended for the five pounds of candy we had (a jumbo-sized bowl was contributed by a neighbor a couple of houses down at whose door no one stopped, apparently).

An acquaintance on Facebook talked up a San Francisco neighborhood where residents get together to do a full-on trick-or-treat fest. Lots of decorations and the like. “Haunted houses, horror films projected on bedsheets, hundreds of happy screaming kids trick-or-treating with their parents. Real Halloween.”

Real Halloween? Maybe where he came from. But in that odd place and time I grew up–the suburbia of the American Midwest, 1950s and ’60s–the adults didn’t organize much beyond treats and defensive measures against kids who might not be satisfied with them. Unless their kids were very young, parents didn’t have much of a presence on the street. There were hundreds of kids out and about because there were hundreds who lived in any given half-mile radius, and just about everyone was out in search of loot. A generation later, when our kids were little here in Berkeley, that culture didn’t seem to have changed a whole lot. Bunches of kids out after dark, trooping up front walks to whatever welcome awaited them.

The latter-day neighborhood festival my friend talked about in San Francisco is very un-Halloween-like in those terms. I suspect it’s purely a reflection of a culture that has decided that fun is fun within bounds: organized and controlled. You wouldn’t want kids interacting with strangers on the scary night of all scary nights, would you? So if there were kids out anywhere last night, I think that’s where you’d find most of them–where the parents could make sure the program contained enough of the right kinds of entertainment, but not too much, and none leading in some unpredictable or untoward direction.

You could argue about the value of our old Halloween customs. It has never been a favorite occasion of mine, even with the candy. Maybe there are good reasons for that tradition of door-to-door greeting to die. But I think its disappearance is just one more bit of distance we put between ourselves and whoever else we chance to encounter–not just on Halloween, but every other day and night of the year. Another barrier, another measure of isolation. And it’s really too bad for the kids, too.

“Modern American life”–i.e., we parents and our fears, helped along by media that seize on the most lurid of crimes, paint them as the stuff of unversal reality, and suggest we’re powerless to respond rationally–has already killed pick-up sports, going to and from school without a chaperone, and free-style loitering, among other pleasures of youth. In addition to the sweets, Halloween night used to represent a chance to explore one’s surroundings (an impromptu geography lesson), a chance to judge neighbors by the goodies they’d offer (applied sociology), experience in dodging ne’er-do-wells and dealing with fear of the dark (survival training), and hands-on practice with negotiations and bartering (economics and entrepreneurship). All that on top of healthy exercise in the out-of-doors.

It’s all a shame. Almost as big a crisis as the tens of thousands of candy calories our household must now figure out how to consume.

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Berkeley Halloween, Before and After

halloweenam103109.jpg

Halloween morning on Holly Street. You can just feel the anticipation: tricking and treating, overindulgence, and vandalism just hours away. Late in the afternoon on the front porch, Kate and I carved pumpkins. Hers looked like something; mine looked like nothing you could describe. Then nightfall and the troops of costumed youngsters. Well, first we saw maybe a dozen kids make their way up the other side of the street who never made it to our side. Maybe they were scared of odd-numbered addresses. After that, infrequent visits by one or two kids at a time. One bigger group, including the neighbor kids, knocked at the door. By the time we realized no one else would show up, at 8:30 or so, maybe 15 or 20 kids had contended for the five pounds of candy we had (a jumbo-sized bowl was contributed by a neighbor a couple of houses down at whose door no one stopped, apparently).

An acquaintance on Facebook talked up a San Francisco neighborhood where residents get together to do a full-on trick-or-treat fest. Lots of decorations and the like. “Haunted houses, horror films projected on bedsheets, hundreds of happy screaming kids trick-or-treating with their parents. Real Halloween.”

Real Halloween? Maybe where he came from. But in that odd place and time I grew up–the suburbia of the American Midwest, 1950s and ’60s–the adults didn’t organize much beyond treats and defensive measures against kids who might not be satisfied with them. Unless their kids were very young, parents didn’t have much of a presence on the street. There were hundreds of kids out and about because there were hundreds who lived in any given half-mile radius, and just about everyone was out in search of loot. A generation later, when our kids were little here in Berkeley, that culture didn’t seem to have changed a whole lot. Bunches of kids out after dark, trooping up front walks to whatever welcome awaited them.

The latter-day neighborhood festival my friend talked about in San Francisco is very un-Halloween-like in those terms. I suspect it’s purely a reflection of a culture that has decided that fun is fun within bounds: organized and controlled. You wouldn’t want kids interacting with strangers on the scary night of all scary nights, would you? So if there were kids out anywhere last night, I think that’s where you’d find most of them–where the parents could make sure the program contained enough of the right kinds of entertainment, but not too much, and none leading in some unpredictable or untoward direction.

You could argue about the value of our old Halloween customs. It has never been a favorite occasion of mine, even with the candy. Maybe there are good reasons for that tradition of door-to-door greeting to die. But I think its disappearance is just one more bit of distance we put between ourselves and whoever else we chance to encounter–not just on Halloween, but every other day and night of the year. Another barrier, another measure of isolation. And it’s really too bad for the kids, too.

“Modern American life”–i.e., we parents and our fears, helped along by media that seize on the most lurid of crimes, paint them as the stuff of unversal reality, and suggest we’re powerless to respond rationally–has already killed pick-up sports, going to and from school without a chaperone, and free-style loitering, among other pleasures of youth. In addition to the sweets, Halloween night used to represent a chance to explore one’s surroundings (an impromptu geography lesson), a chance to judge neighbors by the goodies they’d offer (applied sociology), experience in dodging ne’er-do-wells and dealing with fear of the dark (survival training), and hands-on practice with negotiations and bartering (economics and entrepreneurship). All that on top of healthy exercise in the out-of-doors.

It’s all a shame. Almost as big a crisis as the tens of thousands of candy calories our household must now figure out how to consume.

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New Ho Ho

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A sighting on our weekly Friday night stops in Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood. One of many restaurants in the area and part of an almost equally large group we have not yet tried. “New Ho Ho”? Somewhere, there’s an original Ho Ho Restaurant, I guess. And the “Ho Ho” part? The Chinese version shown below, shot with exceedingly slow shutter and excessively moving hands, gives a hint. The character for “ho” is repeated (you can just make that out in the red characters above the awning). “Ho” apparently means “good.” I don’t know whether doubling it means “extra good.” Or maybe “greasy spoon.”

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The Reward

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A basic Berkeley bike ride: Start at my house, 120 feet above sea level. Take your favorite route up through the neighborhoods towards Spruce Street, one of the main roads into the hills (I ride up the north, purely residential end of Shattuck Avenue to Indian Rock, then to Santa Barbara, then the short, sharp climb up Northampton to Spruce). At the top of Spruce, roughly 2.2 meandering miles from home and at an elevation of about 800 feet, turn right on Grizzly Peak. The direction you’re conscious of going is up; you may not perceive until looking at a map later that you’ve been riding mostly north on Spruce and that as you climb the ridge on Grizzly Peak you’ve doubled back south. After the first quarter-mile on Grizzly Peak, you get to a long stretch where the climb is pretty gentle. You’re around 960 feet or so when cross Marin Avenue and just under 1100 as you approach the Shasta Gate into Tilden Park. Then you plunge down past the intersection with Shasta Road and climb again to the city limits and cross Centennial Drive where it tops out on its ascent from the UC-Berkeley campus, elevation about 1250 and about 5 miles from my front door. The road then climbs more twistily, steadily and steeply–though far from punishingly steep–for another 1.7 miles or so to the top of the road–a shade under 1700 feet.

So if you’re keeping track of all that, that’s a climb of something like 1550 vertical feet in 6.7 miles right outside the front door. Again, the way it unfolds with its long, gradual stretches is not a killer. But it’s not a bad workout, either.

When I first went up Grizzly Peak, in 1980, I think, I was stunned by the views. The road clings to the western slope of a very steep ridge, so you have a pretty much wide open view across Berkeley to the Bay and beyond. About a quarter-mile or so before the top of the road, where the pops over a last little rise before leveling out and pitching down toward toward the Claremont/Fish Ranch saddle, there’s a nice turnout with a stone wall. I used to stop there every time I went up the road to take in the view. I thought of it as my reward for working to get there. It was also a good place to take a breather. Then at some point I became more focused on getting up across the top as quickly as I could, and I didn’t stop there much anymore.

Today I did. For a minute. To see the view. To drink in the warmth of this amazing October day. To take a couple of pictures. It was a good reward.

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A Stroll in Berkeley, or The Hostile Inebriate

For the late afternoon dog walk, we took a fistful of bills out to mail and walked downtown. We stopped at the PG&E office, then the post office. Then we decided to get what’s going to pass for our dinner tonight at Top Dog, just up Center Street from downtown Berkeley. Lots of Cal fans were walking the other way from the football game; the home team had given the visitors from Washington State an ugly thumping (the score was 49-17, but Cal, coached by a local gridiron millionaire, repeatedly committed stupid personal fouls and during one stretch appeared to stop playind defense).

Anyway. As The Dog and I waited outside Top Dog, a young woman wearing a Cal sweatshirt and seated at the open front window repeatedly sang, “We beat the Cougars! We beat the Cougars!” During her fifth or sixth round, I finally responded. “Yeah — everyone does.” Washington State’s known mostly for the big scores its opponents run up; its unofficial mascot is the crime-scene silhouette. She looked at me and said, “Yeah, isn’t it wonderful?” She explained that she’s from Seattle, which is University of Washington. She loves it when Huskies maul Cougars.

Kate came out of the restaurant and we walked up to the west entrance to campus to eat our hot dogs on the steps up there. It was a nice open-air repast as the sun got lower. Along the drive leading into campus, I heard someone angrily say, “F—!” I looked over, and a wiry guy with long hair and a beard, maybe in his early 40s, was walking toward us. He got to the top of an adjacent set of steps about 30 feet away and asked if we had a cigarette. Neither of us wanted to engage the guy, and we both shook our heads no. “What?” he said, and started to walk toward us. “No,” Kate said. He stopped and looked away. I had taken out my camera to take a picture of the sunlight on the steps. “What’s that?” he asked, and started to walk toward me again. He wasn’t menacing, exactly; more like drunk and challenging. “A camera,” I said. When he got to within about five feet of where I was sitting I put up my hand and said, “Back off.” He advanced another step. “You taking a picture of your dog?” “Yeah,” I said. “See?” I pointed the camera at him and took a shot. Simultaneously, he flipped me the bird, then stalked off cursing. Kate said, “Let’s get out of here.”

If things had gone any further than that, I would have called the cops. As it is, I have a nice likeness of my new friend as a keepsake.

We walked toward home, careful to take a different route from Mr. Finger’s. A large, fluffy cloud floated south over downtown. The setting sun illuminated it, creating a soft top-lit glow. Just another evening in the city.

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Berkeley: Friday Night Light

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From the Martin Luther King Middle School yard this evening. A lovely, long sunset and red dusk. So far, this has been some kind of ideal October: lots of rain for an early end to the fire season, and plenty of warm clear days. It’s just a little cooler and a little darker day to day, though, and we’re just a couple of weeks away from having to push the clocks back. Late twilight: love it while you can!