Weekend Signs of Berkeley

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Delaware at Acton. I don’t know anything about the art stump. But it looks like plenty of people in the neighborhood (kitty-corner from the North Berkeley BART station) do. And the stump is associated with someone named Stewie.

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Chestnut Street near Hearst. There’s enough space on the curb in front of a residence to allow two cars to park there. But that’s not to be left to chance or common sense. Hence the politely worded request (or strangely worded prescription) to barbarian drivers. We have a similar situation in front of our house. Since I’m annoyed with the daily traffic from BART patrons who use our street as a parking lot (sometimes with a pretty aggressive show of entitlement), I make it a point to park in such a way that just one car fits into the two-car space.

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Solano, between Ramona and Pomona (Albany, not Berkeley). Literary exhortation from local nursery: “In the spring, at the end of the day you should smell like dirt.” –Margaret Atwood.

Family Day in the Dump

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My brother John and nephew Sean are visiting for a week. As honored guests, we’re taking them to all our favorite local spots. Such as the Albany Bulb–the abandoned landfill on the bay just north of Berkeley. It is part of a state park now and has long since become the haunt of dogwalkers, strollers, postmodern nature lovers, scrap artists, and pagan cultists of various light and dark stripes (to judge from some of the artifacts dredged up from or hauled down to the dumpland).

An artist (artists?) whose anonymous work we see down at the bulb stencils well-known images onto chunks of concrete: Amelie, the French movie character; Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist and pop icon; and Mona Lisa, Leonardo’s girlfriend. Down at the bulb Saturday, John and Sean got right into the spirit of the place. John spotted a piece of likely debris in the underbrush and placed it in suggestive juxtaposition to Mona Lisa; Sean then supplied a piece of performance art.

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