sippey.com

telling simple stories

A couple of friends of ours are the super geniuses behind Paulson Bott Press. Pam Paulson and Renee Bott work with artists from around the world to create limited edition intaglio prints out of their studio in Berkeley. For years I’ve been telling them that they should be blogging – they’re both chock full of personality, have great stories about the artists they work with, and the process of printmaking is super photogenic.

They finally took the leap earlier this year, and they’re not disappointing. Renee’s latest post, Getting to Know Ross, is about how they convinced painter Ross Bleckner to come make prints with them.

As huge admirers of Ross’s work, we decided to invite him to our studio. I found an address for him by sleuthing the Internet and wrote a letter introducing myself and asking if we could meet. I explained that Pam and I were going to be in New York in two weeks. The days passed and we never heard back from Ross. Time was running out. Katrina Traywick, our sales director at the time, was quick to point out that everyone in New York has their phone numbers listed (even famous people)*, and sure enough, I found his phone number in the white pages.

It’s a great post – a simple story told from a personal point of view, simply illustrated with photos (one of which I’m particularly fond of), giving a behind the scenes look into how something wonderful happened. As friend of the show Andrew Anker posted earlier this week, blogging is no longer a technology – it’s a state of mind. And I love seeing more great people – like Pam and Renee – enter that state of mind.

* Trina laughs at this now. But it worked then!

so long, front row video.

The video store around the corner from my house is closing, after being in business 26 years. I won't miss it.

mitch kapor is a very patient man

One of the great ongoing Berkeley sagas that Berkeleyside has been covering (well!) is Mitch Kapor's desire to build a home in North Berkeley, on a very odd lot that honestly would benefit from having a new home on it. But he's been having a hell of a time with it, thanks to the "Not In My Backyard" attitude of my fellow Berkeley citizens...except this time, the NIMBY's don't actually live in Kapor's back yard.

An unusual factor in the case is that immediate neighbors to the proposed home have publicly expressed their support for the Kapors’ plan. In his opposition brief to the court, Mr  Kulkari cited City Councilmember Linda Maio who remarked at the April Council appeal meeting that in her 20 years as a member of the Zoning Adjustment Board and City Council, this was the first time all immediate neighbors supported a project while other residents, who did not reside in the immediate vicinity, objected. Mr Kulkari compared the BHP group to “armchair planners” who were “raising their subjective objections from a comfortable distance away from the project location”.

Berkeley is fractal. Our city council isn't afraid to play armchair foreign policy...so our citizens aren't afraid to play armchair city planners. See also Michael Chabon's ode to Berkeley: "Nowhere else is the individual encumbered with a greater burden of shame and communal disapproval for having intruded, however innocently, on the sensibilities of another."

no toyo ito for BAMPFA

The Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive won't be getting this:

Kenneth Baker in the Chronicle:

Museum Director Lawrence Rinder explained the decision to change course - taken by the chancellor, the museum's board president, its chairman and Rinder himself - as a consequence of the global economic downturn over the past two years.

"It is ultimately the chancellor's decision," Rinder said, "but I agree with his analysis. ... We had set some interim fundraising benchmarks to have a standard by which to judge our success. ... The trigger point was in November, this month. By then we had brought in about $81 million toward our $200 million capital campaign. ... The gap was just too great, looking forward." The $200 million included anticipated cost overruns.

funeral for analog tv

The Berkeley Art Museum is hosting a Funeral for Analog TV on Tuesday, February 17 with Bruce Sterling and Paul Saffo.

While Analog Television has not been a good friend to us all, it has been important to each and every one of us. Analog Television is survived by its wife Digital Television, and its second cousin Internet Television. In a soap-operatic melodrama fit for TV itself, Congress has debated changing the official date for the switch to digital television; however this event will proceed on Feb. 17 because we prefer to bury a fresh corpse rather than wait for the walking dead to fall over.

holy mother of god they're nuts

This ranks as one of the craziest videos I've ever seen.

Some of the commenters aren't fans of the couple minute preamble of them suiting up in powder blue and heading to the top of the hill, but I think it's perfect -- it adds a nice sense of ritual to the insanity of what they're doing.

The road they're on is a few miles from where I live -- it's Claremont Avenue, and hey start at the top of the hill at the corner of Claremont and Grizzly Peak Boulevard, and then head straight down to Russell Avenue; that's the Claremont Hotel they zoom past right near the end of both runs.

Here's the Google topo map of the route...

It's absolutely nuts to do that on a skateboard.

mahjong: contemporary chinese art @ berkeley art museum

I had a chance to preview "Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection" this weekend at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum. It's an amazing show, well worth the trip to Berkeley.

In 141 works by ninety-six artists, the exhibition Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection represents the historical span of art from the 1970s to today in China and demonstrates the dramatic evolution that has occurred, with artists exploring new materials and concepts far from what might have been imagined by even the most clairvoyant. As Chinese art emerged from the boundaries of state-sponsored and state-defined aesthetics to the complex initiatives of individuals with new intentions and motivations, it is possible to see the growth and development not only of art but of a nation.

I want to go back and soak it all in again. I have had very little exposure to what's happening in China's art scene, other than what Vanity Fair covered last December, and the show just blew me away...

casual carpool, serendipity and radovan karadzic

"Casual carpool" is one of those (sub)urban fabric things that makes life in the Bay Area go 'round...and occasionally makes it just a bit more interesting. Every morning commuters gather at one of a couple dozen sites in the East Bay, matching up drivers with passengers to make the trip across the Bay Bridge. Passengers get a free ride into the city, and drivers get passage into the H.O.V. lane, and a free ride through the toll plaza. I've been doing casual carpool (as a passenger and a driver) on and off for about the past 10 years, and every once in a while something extraordinary happens.

This morning on my way in I picked up two passengers, and with the radio tuned to our local NPR affiliate (I'm fairly certain that there's a law on the books in Berkeley that states that casual carpool vehicles must have their radios tuned to NPR), we made our way to the bridge.

The lead story in the 8:00 hour was, of course, the arrest of Radovan Karadzic, the man behind the three-year siege of Sarajevo and the massacre at Srebrenica. As the story began, a gasp came from woman in the back seat of the car, and while the story played on she interjected with the occasional sotto voce "Oh my God" and "Finally."

When the story ended, she offered up an explanation. "I worked for the United Nations for two years collecting evidence for the case against against Karadzic," she said. "I've waited a long time for this."

Every once in a while casual carpool produces nice little moments of serendipity...and I'm sure the occasional missed connection. This morning took the cake for me: this stranger had devoted two years of her life to the case, and I got to witness her hearing the news of his arrest for the first time. As the kids would say, [this is good].

As she got out of the car at 2nd and Howard, I offered my usual "Have a great day."

"I already am," she replied.

cody's sold to yohan

The Chronicle covers the sale of Cody's to Yohan, Inc., the Japanese book distributor.  In it, there's a sad quote from Andy Ross about his surprise to San Francisco's reaction to the Cody's that opened in the city...

"I thought we would just open the doors (in San Francisco) and everyone would pour in. That was pretty stupid. Cody's was so well-branded in Berkeley that I took it for granted, but still there are a lot of people in San Francisco who don't know that the store exists."

Just like the micro-climates, there are micro-markets in the Bay Area.  This shouldn't have been news to him...  But at least there's a decent ending in this for Cody's, and the 4th Street store is still one of my favorite places to buy books.

cody's, dead and buried

Cody's Books on Telegraph Avenue closed last month, causing untold numbers of hands in Berkeley to wring with self-righteous indignation at the heartless march of capitalism, the encroachment of mega-onliners like Amazon and the decline and fall of literacy in west coast civilization. 

There's been plenty of press coverage of the Berkeley icon's closing; Anneli Rufus' long and thoughtful piece in the East Bay Express is the best one I've read yet.  She covers the sturm and drang of the demise of Cody's with just the right amount of gentle skewering...

When Berkeley looks in the mirror, it perceives a book town, a lit-cred Lourdes linked with so many bards and rebels and laureates alive and dead that reciting their bibliographies would take all day. Not just uninflected authors but, to a large part, activist authors with a cause. Rare is any city so spellbound by its own legacy. For better or worse, Berkeley is a living theme park, forever conjuring a heyday that Cody's crystallized. "Tie-dyed Tears," one blogger proclaimed.

Worth reading if you spent money at Cody's, have ever stepped foot on Telegraph Ave., or have an interest in retail bookselling...

gourmet ghetto

Turnhere.com has a great short (3:47) video on the Gourmet Ghetto in Berkeley; the eight square blocks of foodie heaven just up the street from where we live.  (The guy in the beret is a fixture outside the original Peet's; he's about as Berkeley as you can get.) 

See also, in case you haven't read it already, Michael Chabon's fantastic essay The Mysteries of Berkeley.

ski jumping riot

The Bay Area's all a-twitter with news that the steepest couple of blocks on the Fillmore Street hill in Pacific Heights will be turned into a ski jump later this month so that Icer can hawk their line of gear, MTV can shoot a half hour special, and has-been Olympic star Johnny Moseley can celebrate his 30th birthday.  Neighborhood residents are flipping out (pun fully intended); especially the couple that's scheduled to wed that Saturday in the neighborhood.

The best bit in the Chronicle story, though, was this -- the ski jump thing's been done before, about 70 years ago in Berkeley, and it led to a very Berkeley outcome...

In February 1934, the Auburn Ski Club of Truckee put 43,000 cubic feet of snow  --  four times the amount headed for Fillmore Street  --  on six Southern Pacific boxcars and shipped it to the steep slopes of Hearst Avenue, just north of the UC Berkeley campus, for a ski jump demonstration. About 45,000 people, including thousands on Tightwad Hill, gathered to watch the novelty.

But in true Berkeley fashion, the event ended in a riot. College students, many of whom had never seen snow before, stormed the barricades and launched an enormous snowball fight, disrupting the event before it could finish.

Here's to history repeating itself, with thousands of Pac Heights residents, led by the bride and groom, storming the slopes and pummeling Moseley and the Icer crew with snowballs.  Now that I'd pay to see.

local excitement

So the big news in North Berkeley this week was the guy who drove his SUV through the front door of the Starbucks that's literally up the block from my house.  Photo and excerpt swiped from the Berkeley Daily Planet story (emphasis mine)...

An SUV driver battered his vehicle through the doors of the Starbucks at Solano and Colusa avenues Tuesday morning, scattering a dozen or more customers who leapt out of the way and jumped through open windows as he backed up and tried it again.  “He appeared to be aiming for the counter,” said Berkeley Police spokesperson Officer Joe Okies.  After the second try, the driver backed out and sped away northbound on Colusa Avenue, leaving parts of vehicle scattered inside and outside the coffee shop.

Either the guy really hates coffee, or maybe he got the Scharffen Berger story wrong?  Whatever his motivation, thank God no one was hurt...

slugworth!

And now for something completely different, Hershey announced yesterday that they're buying Berkeley-based Scharffen Berger.  I'm anxiously awaiting the Berkeley City Council measure that will officially condemn the sale of the gourmet chocolatier to corporate shills that exploit children by selling them non-organic snacks laden with refined sugar and saturated fats.

I haven't been on the Scharffen Berger tour, but I hear there may be a chocolate waterfall involved.