California magazine blog

We're Number 2

The results of the pre-season Pac-10 media poll are in. Talking football, of course. FWIW, here's how the seers see it:

2009 Pac-10 Media Poll (first-place votes in parenthesis)
1) USC (28)   316
2) California (3) 277
3) Oregon (1)  250
4) Oregon State  216
5) Arizona State 155
6) Stanford   150
7) UCLA    145
8) Arizona   142
9) Washington  74
10) Washington State 35

The Show Goes On

Sad news today: Merce Cunningham, the great choreographer, has died. He was 90 years of age.

But artists live on in their art, and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company is scheduled to perform Nearly Ninety at Zellerbach, on March 26 and 27th, 2010. The show is performed to a score by -- get this -- "underground rock legend Sonic Youth, former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, and mixed-media sound composer Takehisa Kosugi." Even at 90, it seems, Cunningham was on the cutting edge.

Buried in the Atlantic

In a blog posting on the website of The Atlantic Monthly, writer and UC Berkeley alum Erik Tarloff eulogizes his beloved alma mater in response to the State of California's recent budget cuts. "Absent an unlikely, massive injection of private funding," Tarloff writes, "the university is on an inexorable glide path downward."

Chancellor Birgeneau has responded to the blog posting, insisting that the University will maintain its excellence but that it may lose its public character. "While in the short-term we must deal with a severe and rapid loss in funding from the State," the Chancellor writes, "we are confident that because of our academic preeminence and the loyalty of our alumni we will be able to devise a robust long term financial model which will make us progressively less dependent upon State funding.  Indeed, we have been working on such a financial strategy for some time."

In the end, the two writers largely agree; the budget cuts are egregious and short-sighted. The difference is simply that Birgeneau refuses to accept the decline of Berkeley's prominence. One hopes he's right, but the question remains: What does it mean when Berkeley, which likes to think of itself as "the world's leading public institution," is no longer public?

What Animals Do?

How do animal behaviorists define behavior? Berkeley's Daniel Levitus wanted to know.

30,000 Scientologists Can't Be Wrong

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Steven Chu
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Joke of the Day

Jon Stewart banters with current Energy Secretary and Nobel-winning Berkeley physicist Steven Chu. Among other things, Stewart tells Chu that he's the first member of the Obama cabinet who appears to have a pulse.

Comics are mean.

We see London, again

Courtesy of the Oakland History Room of the Oakland Public Library, we featured Jack London on the Collections page of our Naked Issue, posing in some strange kind of proto-thongish skivvies for the photographer Arnold Genthe. Little is known about the photo, except that it was part of a series Genthe shot in 1904 and labeled simply "Athletic Studies."

We called it, "I see London...."

In case you're wondering, Jack London is one of Cal's most famous drop-outs (in a school that has lots of those). The young writer spent six months on campus before joining the Klondike Gold Rush in 1897. And the rest, as lazy hacks like me like to say, is history.

We only ran one shot of the nearly nude London in the Naked Issue, but the library was kind enough to send us four to choose from. And here they are. Enjoy. 

Angkor what?

This was found in the latest edition of eGrad, the Graduate Division's newsletter, which is edited by former California magazine editor and Cal alum, Dick Corten. If you've been on campus this summer, perhaps you noted the resemblance between the scaffolded (I think I made that word up) Campanile and a certain Khmer temple. Go here to see a side-by-side comparison. Uncanny, no?

Sather Tower, June, 2009. (Photo: Dick Cortén)

Postcard from Colombia

Here's a note from one of our far-flung correspondents former interns and current Berkeley j-school student, Madeleine Bair.

I'm here interning with the Bogota chapter of the Associated Press. The chief of the bureau is the only other norteamericano and English language writer, otherwise there are three South American reporters who write for Spanish-language newspapers, as well as Colombian photographers and a TV crew. I'm learning that it's quite a bit harder to find stories to write for the AP's English subscribers, as American audiences don't care about daily news from Colombia, and are tired of hearing of tragedy, war, and corruption in Colombia. One of my stories to come out soon in Spanish is on a campaign to recall Bogota's mayor, which began on Facebook. I'm also hoping to go to the coast to the birthplace of cumbia music, which is experiencing a rediscovery among hipsters in the U.S. Aside from work, I'm highly enjoying Bogota, which is a big beautiful metropolis, and am discovering great music here, sounds that fuse folkloric music with hip hop, electronica, and other modern genres. You can see my photoblog, at www.madeleinebair.com/colombia, which is just a way for me to practice my photography and point a camera at interesting things and people. -- Madeleine

Are you a California reader? Been somewhere interesting lately? Why not send us a "postcard"? Write to californiamag(at)alumni.berkeley.edu or the old-fashioned way (with an honest-to-god postcard) at California Magazine, 1 Alumni House, Berkeley, CA 94720. We'd love to hear from you.

A fault runs through it

Frequent California contributor and Berkeley J-school grad, Tim Lesle, has posted an article to his website about the one thing no one in the East Bay (except geologists like Phil Stoffer) likes to think about: the Hayward Fault. The following is an outtake from part three of "Devoted to a Fault." For the full story, start here. 

::::::::

Phil Stoffer pulled his car up to the lot attendant just outside Cal's Memorial Stadium. “I’m a geologist,” he told the attendant, who shrugged and waved him in. Stoffer walked into the northern end of the stadium. ...  At section KK, he began to climb the bleachers.

He stopped on the very top, at a long yellow bench. Row 74, section KK. Behind the bench was a five-foot cement wall, the outer rim of the stadium. It was split vertically into two pieces.

“That,” Stoffer said, “is probably the most famous spot on the Hayward fault.”