California magazine blog

Alice's Restaurant

For our latest issue, we sent former Berkeleyan editor Jonathan King to rummage around in the Chez Panisse Archives in the Bancroft Library. On the 40th anniversary of the restaurant, we were looking for a fresh take on a subject about which it seemed everything had already been written. While King admits that the patchy archives failed to shine much light on the genesis of the institution, he produced an illuminating article nonetheless. It is interesting, for example, just to behold the cast of characters who were there at the beginning. Not just Alice Waters, but also people like Tom Luddy, co-founder of the Telluride Film Festival, who helped attract an influential clientele to the fledgling establishment, the artist David Goines, who designed the sign and menus, and architect Jeremiah Tower, who, according to the legend, came in and "fixed the soup" a la Remy in the film Ratatouille.

Those characters all figure in the new book by Waters called 40 Years of Chez Panisse, a scrapbook, really, of artifacts and memories from those who were there, including an introduction by Calvin Trillin.

Trillin calls Waters the Emma Goldman of New American Cuisine, a revolutionary spirit forged by her student days at Berkeley at the height of the Free Speech Movement. And that is precisely where the book begins, with a picture of Sproul Plaza circa 1964, a crowd of protesters massed before what are now called the Savio Steps. Waters informs her readers she is "somewhere in that crowd" and recalls Mario Savio saying, "America is becoming ever more the utopia of sterilized, automated contentment." In her own life, she intimates, she was searching for a "contentment that was unsterilized, fertile and handmade."

She found it in the kitchen.

Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011

Christopher Hitchens, the prolific journalist and polemicist (among the targets of his pen were Henry Kissinger, Mother Theresa and Bill Clinton, his classmate at Oxford), has died at age 62. He was an occasional lecturer at UC Berkeley and an I.F. Stone Fellow at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Here he is in conversation with Harry Kreisler, Executive Director of UC Berkeley's Institute of International Studies. Hitchens, who was diagnosed with esophageal cancer last June. He seems to have written and published more in the interim than most writers produce in a career. It seems fitting that his latest book, a collection of essays entitled Arguably, is both a bestseller and, according to The New York Times, one of the 10 best books of 2011.

Famous Faces $1

California Book Company, 1967 Photo: Dennis Galloway

Berkeley in Books: Brautigan on Upper Sproul

The following passage comes very near the end of Richard Brautigan's 1971 novel, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966. In fact, it is the end, minus the final line. (Can't give it all away.) Brautigan, whose best-known works are the novellas, In Watermelon Sugar, and Trout Fishing in America, died in 1984, at age 49, in Bolinas, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His papers are housed in the Bancroft Library.

I've spent the afternoon at a table across from Sproul Hall where they took all those hundreds of Free Speech kids off to jail in 1964. I've been gathering contributions for The American Forever, Etc.

I like to set my table up around lunch time near the fountain, so I can see the students when they come pouring through Sather Gate like the petals of a thousand-colored flower. I love the joy of their intellectual perfume and the political rallies they hold at noon on the steps of Sproul Hall.

It's nice near the fountain with green trees all around and bricks and people that need me. There are even a lot of dogs that hang around the plaza. They are of all shapes and colors. I think it's important that you find things like this at the University of California.

Berkeley in Books: Whisky Oui Oui

A new title from Berkeley-based publisher Heyday has landed on the desk. It's called Paris Portraits by Harriet Lane Levy, who graduated from the University of California in 1886 and became part a small but influential group of Bay Area Jewish women--including Alice B. Toklas, Levy's O'Farrell Street neighbor, and Gertude and Sarah Stein, from Oakland--who were part of the avant-garde in 1920s Paris. Readers of the magazine may recall Levy's story from last year's Books issue.

This slender volume comprises a collection of sketches long housed in the Bancroft Library but never before published. Among the stories is the delightful one called "Supper in Montmartre," about a drunken soiree thrown by Pablo Picasso in honor of Henri Rousseau. Also attending were the playwright Guillaume Appollinaire, the painter, Georges Braque, and Gertrude Stein, who also described the party in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

Levy's account is more vivid. In it, she describes being hailed by Picasso from across the room as Braque plays the accordion. "You. Sing us a song. A song from America." After some confusion and hesitation, Levy rose to her feet and sang out: 

Oski wow wow
Whisky wee wee
Ole Muck I
Ole Ber-kley i
California
Wow!

"The full applause of Montmartre rewarded me," wrote Levy, who died in 1950 and bequeathed her art collection, including Matisse's The Girl with Green Eyes (not a portrait of her), to the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA).

The Spy Who Loved Him

Back in our "Truth and Lies" issue, we tracked down author and ex-CIA agent Bob Baer, the man who served as the model for the George Clooney character in the movie Syriana. The interview isn't online but if you save back issues, see Spring 2010, page 80.

Baer's not a Berkeley alum (although he did do some coursework here) but his wife Dayna is. Now the couple has come out with a book called The Company We Keep: A Husband and Wife True-Life Spy Story. Yup, she was an agent as well.

This is from the publisher's About the Book page:

... if his career was everything a spy might aspire to, his personal life was a brutal illustration of everything a spy is asked to sacrifice. Bob had few enduring non-work friendships, only contacts and acquaintances. His prolonged absences destroyed his marriage, and he felt intense guilt at spending so little time with his children. Sworn to secrecy and constantly driven by ulterior motives, he was a man apart wherever he went.
 
Dayna Williamson thought of herself as just an ordinary California girl -- admittedly one born into a comfortable lifestyle.  But she was always looking to get closer to the edge.  When she joined the CIA, she was initially tasked with Agency background checks, but the attractive Berkeley graduate quickly distinguished herself as someone who could thrive in the field, and she was eventually assigned to “Protective Operations” training where she learned to handle weapons and explosives and conduct high-speed escape and evasion. Tapped to serve in some of the world's most dangerous places, she discovered an inner strength and resourcefulness she'd never known -- but she also came to see that the spy life exacts a heavy toll.  Her marriage crumbled, her parents grew distant, and she lost touch with friends who'd once meant everything to her.
 
When Bob and Dayna met on a mission in Sarajevo ...

You get the idea. "It's chick lit," Baer told The Washington Post. The chick flick can't be far behind.

Cal Hoops and Women's History

The Cal women's basketball team takes on #2 Stanford in Stanford tonight at 8PM to conclude the regular season. The young Bears' squad enters the game ranked sixth in the Pac-10.

There's a lot of history to this match-up. The teams first met at the Page Street Armory in San Francisco on April 4, 1896 in what is considered the first women's intercollegiate game ever. Alas, Stanford won. A new children's book commemorates that contest (and just in time for Women's History Month and March Madness). Written by Sue Macy and illustrated by Matt Collins, it's called Basketball Belles: How Two Teams and One Scrappy Player Put Women's Hoops on the Map. A timeline at the end of the book reminds readers that women did not receive basketball scholarships until 1973 and that the sport did not enter the Olympics until 1976.

As groundbreaking as that game may have been, however, it wasn't the first time the University of California women (or men for that matter) took to the court. According to the Centennial Record, "The first team to represent the University in basketball was composed of women students who played their first game on November 18, 1892, losing to Miss Head's School, 6-5." The University would not officially field a men's basketball team until 1912.

Anna Head's school was the precursor of what is now Oakland-based Head-Royce School. (The boy's school was founded in 1971 and named for Miss Head's brother-in-law, the Berkeley-educated philosopher Josiah Royce) A new residence hall is now under construction next to the former site of Miss Head's School on Channing Way. Due to be completed in 2012, the new dormitory will be aptly named Anna Head Residence Hall.

 

Berkeley in Books: Greil Marcus in the Real World

Greil Marcus, prolific cultural critic and dean of rock journalism in America, attended Berkeley in the sixties, earning degrees in American Studies and Political Science. His works include the highly regarded Mystery Train (1997) and, most recently, When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison (2010). The following is taken from his 1992 book, Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives.

In the summer of 1964, after my freshman year at the University of California at Berkeley, I went to work as an intern in the office of Representative Philip Burton, Democrat from San Francisco. After a year of being constantly reminded that "Berkeley isn't the real world"--and this was the year before the Free Speech Movement, with its months of student demonstrations, made Berkeley a watchword, or a warning, all over the world--of being told that Berkeley was smug, self-referential, an intellectually closed place that saw itself as, and for that matter was, a complete exception to the rest of the country, I learned something about Washington D.C.: it wasn't the real world, either. It was even less so, despite its absolute conviction, its almost absolutely seductive conviction, that it was the world. Washington was far more insular than Berkeley, more petty, status-mad, and gossip-driven. Sucking up to professors, hinting at how "close" one was to this charismatic lecturer or that world-famous scientist, was one thing; sucking up to power was worse, and as opposed to Berkeley, in Washington no one was outside the game.