Outside agitator invades Berkeley campus

[barondave]

With most of the family stuff out of the way (pictures later), Wednesday is my day to play tourist and hang out with friends. My niece went off to the 2nd grade and my cousin had lunch with her friends, so I decided to walk up Telegraph Ave to UC Berkeley. I haven't done this for years and years.

Telegraph Ave. is still funky in the way that Mpls has slipped away from. Only a few blocks around Cedar/Riverside have that incense-drenched aura of cosmic understanding, without the incense. Telegraph Ave has coffee shops, Thai restaurants, Thai-tie-dye emporiums, Swiss fondue, record stores (!) and the occasional peacenik hippy.

Arriving at the campus, I wandered around just a little. Didn't get very far in when a guy and a camereawoman finished a piece. I asked them what was going on, so they asked me if I'd like to be interviewed. Sure! I told them that I was from Mpls, and I'm clearly not a student, so what, if any, of the interview will be used is somewhat up in the air.

Still, if you're in the Bay Area and watch the Channel 7 News at 7 with Wayne Freedman ("Reporter, Golf Editor" brags his card)[***EDIT FROM DAVE'S COUSIN, CHANNEL 7 HAS NEWS FROM 5 TO 5:30 AND 6 TO 7***], then you may see me talking about the steps individuals can take to help reduce global warming.

Then stuffed myself at an All-You-Can-Eat Sushi place. Yum! I walked several miles and hope to have burned off room for the Indonesian restaurant picked out by vgqn as we go shopping and fooding with calimac and ambertatge and diverse others not on LJ.

Comments

[asimovberlioz.livejournal.com]

...record stores (!)...

That's one thing constant in Berkeley since the '70s. I lived in San Francisco from 1973-79, after which I moved to Minneapolis, and often took the bus or BART to the East Bay. Sometimes I'd venture there on a Tuesday, when Quinn Yarbro had regular at-homes at her house in Albany (a Berkeley suburb). Most times I'd stop in at The Other Change of Hobbit, which then was located just off of Telegraph, but moved some time later to bigger digs on Shattuck. I do hope you had the opportunity to look in on co-owners and trufen Tom Whitmore and Dave Nee. (Debbie Notkin, the third original co-owner, sold out her stake long ago, I think, or at least is no longer involved in the running of the store.)

But record stores. In those days there were Rasputin's and Leopold's, but the best selection of used classical LPs was at Moe's Books. Tower Records (z''l) had its store just to one side of Telegraph, and for a while in the late '70s even had a Classical Annex. The Musical Offering opened up around that time, carrying unusual classical imports; I don't know if they are still in business.

Nowadays of course the big presence is Amoeba Music. I was dumbstruck when I saw it the last time I was in the Bay Area, for ConFrancisco in 1993. They have since opened a store in The City, and now one in Hollywood, which I visit from time to time.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Hmm... I bought two CDs and managed to leave them in Mike's van. Neither are important, since I couldn't find the Those Darn Accordians disks recommend by the guy at Ameoba.

Longer trip report when I get back, maybe. Semi-relevant news: We failed to convince Ctein to waste his life on LJ.

[magscanner.livejournal.com]

We have your bag o' stuff, and if you want to see it again, send 100,000 ...um, just wait a bit. We'll figure it out.

I hadn't been to Amoeba in some years, and when Karen said it was time to go I was still stuck in the uttermost back room, looking at N'Orleans jazz reissues. I finally found, instead, a Beausoleil DVD and ran for the pay counter.

Jaykarta Indonesian restaurant, on University below Shattuck (very close to the dead husk of Gary Meyer's UC Theater): my new favorite central Berkeley ethnic restaurant.

To continue the fan history mumblings I started over on magscanner (and made noises about as we walked by the dead theater): Gary Meyer, before he actually got the money together to run theaters and films and film festivals and such, used to be an local film fan. He wrote some articles on SF films for fanzines I published thirty or forty years ago. Damn! now I'll have to go dig them out to see what he was saying.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Musical Offering is still there, thankfully: it's the only surviving classical specialty store in the area.

Moe's no longer carries recordings, though they do have sheet music.

Leopold's is long gone - Tower moved into their space some time before they disappeared. In that space their classical department was a large quiet cloister-like space upstairs, away from the hubbub.

Rasputin's is growing - there are at least four of them in the area that I know of, and maybe more I don't - but their classical selection, while of reasonable size, is very basic and primitive in content. Amoeba, almost all used recordings, is where the action is around here.

[n6tqs.livejournal.com]

Damn, sorry I missed you. I was having dinner by myself just around the corner at the time.

Oh, well.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Next time. LJ has replaced apas as the prime connector of fans in Real Life (tm), so by Friending a guy in Mpls... anyway... I suspect, more Bay Area fans will be eating there. All is not lost!