Cal Culture

In early 1918, a 26-year-old Russian émigré named Maurice Fruit enrolled as a freshman at UC Berkeley. He threw himself into campus politics, helping organize a socialist club and announcing to a dean that he was “thoroughly in sympathy” with the Bolsheviks who had just seized power in Russia. He also claimed to have been friends with Leon Trotsky.

The UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive exhibition Way Bay is a love letter to the Bay Area. Showcasing works created by local artists, or else inspired by the bay and the artist’s journey through, it runs until June 3, 2018, with several community participation events along the way. Works will be switched out during the summer and the exhibition will continue until September 2.

Viral killer, qu’est-ce que c’est?

President Trump, as usual, dominated the news this week, first with his “Fake News Awards.” As Ed Wasserman, dean of the Berkeley J-School pointed out in a panel discussion last year, “fake news” as Trump uses it is simply “a catch-all, a pejorative, for news that you don’t like or you disagree with or that you mistrust” as opposed to, well, demonstrably fake news, like the story,

The radio station we now call KALX began life as an oddity in the basement of Ehrman Hall, a dormitory on Dwight Way. It had at its disposal a collection of records, mostly classical, a couple mics, a cheap recorder, and a Corina cigar box containing the most basic of mixing boards. The year was 1962.

This was not a sanctioned operation. It was not a political statement. It was barely even art. Radio KAL was, in fact, the work of geeks; driven, visionary, persistent, highly resourceful geeks.

The poem was originally titled Easy Rider. Westering, as it is now known, is probably the first poem Nobel Laureate in Literature Seamus Heaney wrote in Berkeley, after arriving here from Belfast in 1970 for a stint as a visiting professor in English. The poem’s original title evokes the 1969 film of the same name, starring Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Jack Nicholson. In it, the trio motorcycle east from L.A. through the nineteen-sixties America of new styles, hair lengths, music, political activity, and sexual behavior.