2011 Summer The Soundtrack of Berkeley Archives

Summer 2011 Music Questionnaire

For the “Soundtrack of Berkeley” issue, CALIFORNIA magazine asked various alumni, faculty and others in the Cal community to tell us a few things about their musical tastes, past and present. Here are the results. Questions: What was your first concert? What was the first album you bought? What songs transport you back to your […]

Out of the Gate

Flying Back to the Cuckoo’s Nest It is the middle of the day and I am celebrating my 22nd birthday in the tasting room at a local distillery in my hometown of Alameda. And while it seems a bit strange to be imbibing so close to noon, I am doing it in an atmosphere and in […]

5 Questions for Michael Chabon

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novelist 1. The working title of your new novel is Telegraph Avenue. What would be the highlights of a Michael Chabon tour of Telegraph? Michael Chabon: On and around … take in a show at the Fox Theater, dinner at Flora. Check out InterPlay, former site of the Lamp Post Tavern, the Black Panther […]

What a Way to Go: Woman Who Created the Darwin Awards Wants to be a Winner Someday

Wendy Northcutt has made a host of obscure people famous, and although very few lived to savor their notoriety, she anticipates one day sharing their dubious honor. It almost happened when a recent heat wave gave her the idea to “air-condition” her sweltering home: She pried up an oubliette floor grate in her hallway, intending […]

Extra Innings

Thanks to donors, five Cal Athletics teams have a new lease on life. All five of the athletic teams Cal cut from its varsity lineup last September (see “No Joy in Berkeley,” Winter 2010)—men’s rugby, women’s lacrosse, men’s and women’s gymnastics, and baseball—have since been reinstated, and their restoration has about it the feel of a […]

Lonesome Road

Highway 50 through Nevada provides more than breathing room. Only the most torpid and soul-deadened of us have not heard its siren call: The Road. And we respond. That’s why On the Road is still in print. That’s why Harleys still sell. That’s why road-trip movies, no matter how inane, remain popular. We may be burdened […]

Rewind

I wanted to know how it all it began. I wondered when and why live concerts first appeared in Lower Sproul Plaza, and how that seed grew into the rich tradition we recognize today. The trouble was, so did everyone else—even those who were there from the start. My quest began with Country Joe McDonald, […]

Rockin’ the Plaza

In Lower Sproul, free concerts are a long (and loud) tradition. At five past noon, 15 students wait patiently at the south end of Lower Sproul Plaza. They stand facing an empty stage and, behind it, a quiet Eshleman Hall. Ferraby Lionheart is due to play. The assembled audience is small by any measure, but nonetheless […]

Spirit on a Shoestring

They may be poor, but the Cal Band is still the pride of California. Down in the basement of Cesar Chavez Student Center, students are gearing up for rehearsal. Instrument cases cover the floor and balance atop lockers. In what looks like a modern art installation, mounted sousaphones snake up and down the far wall. Robert […]

Off the Charts

How the forced eclecticism of KALX has forged a culture KALX, Berkeley’s campus radio station, broadcasts from a subterranean redoubt in the basement of Barrows Hall, in what used to be the business school’s career counseling center. These days, there is no number on the door, just a sentry window and a keypad on the wall. The […]

The Sound of Musicology

The Department of Music goes beyond performance To speak the words Berkeley and Music together is to risk a misspelling in the mind of the listener, who may hear B-e-r-k-l-e-e, as in the famous school of music in Boston. The confusion is unfortunate, since B-e-r-k-e-l-e-y‘s Department of Music is consistently ranked among the best in the […]

Hillbillionaire

Most people make mix tapes. Warren Hellman threw a music festival and invited his friends. Warren Hellman was driving home to San Francisco from Stinson Beach a while back when he saw a woman hitchhiking. He pulled over. “I said, ‘Are you an axe murderer or anything?’ She said, ‘No, I’m OK, are you?’ So she […]

Mix and Map

How can one communicate the essence of a city in 200 pages or fewer? Coming in at 157 pages exactly, Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, published by UC Press in November 2010, eschews the prepackaged narrative of Love and Haight and unveils the boundless complexity of the City by the Bay. This […]

Stepping Up

The AileyCamp summer program teaches kids more than dance. For the past ten years, about 80 middle-school kids have descended on Zellerbach Hall for six weeks during the summer. They dance as hard as they can all day, eat at the campus dining halls, and generally take over. They study modern, ballet, jazz, and African dance, along […]

Getting the Picture

A Berkeley rhetorician investigates a group of infamous photographs from the Cambodian Genocide. An estimated 1 to 2 million Cambodians perished under the rule of the Khmer Rouge Communist Party between 1975 and 1979, the victims of starvation, crude medicine, or political executions. Perhaps the best-known artifacts from the genocide are the mug shots of inmates […]

Counting the Days

How estrogen changes the way we think Any married man knows better than to blame a woman’s mood on her menstrual cycle. He also knows better than to tell his wife that her hormones are making her irrational. Now a new study suggests that the menstrual cycle may in fact affect a woman’s cognitive ability, but not […]

All Work and All Play

Berkeley graduate students discover a true calling for two orphaned dogs. As Allison Bidlack, Ph.D. ’07, bounced a tennis ball in front of the cages of an animal shelter, she caught sight of an energetic, brown pit bull/terrier mix named Seth. It was one of many days in 2004 that Bidlack spent scouring pounds, searching for […]