California magazine blog

April, June, and No Wonder

2012 is a leap year, which makes tomorrow leap day. February 29. You remember the mnemonic:

Thirty days hath September;

April, June, and November;

All the rest have thirty-one,

Save February, with twenty-eight days clear,

And twenty-nine each leap year.

Looking for something Berkeleyish to say about the calendar quirk, I found this buried in a readme file concerning a homework assignment for CS 61B, a course on Data Structure. The professor informed students that:

The Unix "cal" command will remind you of the number of days in each month. February contains 28 days most years, but 29 days during a leap year. A leap year is any year divisible by 4, except that a year divisible by 100 is not a leap year, except that a year divisible by 400 is a leap year after all. Hence, 1800 and 1900 are not leap years, but 1600 and 2000 are. (Implement this rule in your program even if you know information to the contrary.)

Got it? Me neither. It'd be much better if it rhymed.

Pancake Socialism

February 28 is National Pancake Day according to IHOP, aka the International House of Pancakes, although the date is far from universally recognized.

Some sources say that January 28 is "officially" National Pancake Day. Still others refer to a National Pancake Week, which is generally slotted in the lead-up to Mardi Gras. That makes some sense as Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, is also known as Pancake Tuesday. That's because pancakes were a way for the Catholic faithful to glut on fat (milk, eggs, butter, lard, etc.) before the fasting season of Lent began. (Carnival is Latin for "removal of meat.")

But I digress. The point, if there is one, is that if you go to any IHOP location tomorrow, you can get a free shortstack of buttermilks. They only ask that you consider making a donation to the Children's Miracle Network Hospitals, a charity founded by Marie Osmond (of Donny and Marie fame) and John Schneider (of Dukes of Hazzard fame).

Be warned that you can't collect on your free griddle cakes in Berkeley, since the IHOP on University is no longer there. These days, the old A-frame is occupied by North Beach PIzza.

Wondering what other connections I could draw between Berkeley and pancakes, I did the only sensible thing: I searched for the word "pancake" at the Berkeley Oral History Project. That turned up a few remarkably overexposed photos of cakes on the griddle by none other than Dorothea Lange, some handwritten letters from John Muir to his wife, and the following reminiscence by Sidney Roger, an old lefty journalist and Cal alum who 'covered the waterfront' for KPFA and other outlets. Remembering his old man, Roger told the Bancroft:

Gala Affairs

Charter Gala is fast approaching. The 2012 event in celebration of the University of California's 144th anniversary is scheduled for the evening of March 24th at the historic Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Registration opens on February 2nd.

The photograph above was taken at the 1946 Charter Banquet, also held at the Palace. That night the poet Robert Frost was awarded an honorary degree by the University and then-Governor and future Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Earl Warren '12 was honored as Alumnus of the Year.

This year, the Alumnus of the Year is Eric Schmidt, Google Executive Chairman and former CEO, who earned both a master’s degree ('79) and a Ph.D. ('82) from UC Berkeley.

War Classes Reunion

Due to a filing mix-up, the class notes for the World War II classes ('45-'47), including news of the 65th reunion, failed to make it into the latest issue of CALIFORNIA magazine. We hope that readers of this item who know alumni from those years will help to get a reminder to them. Here are the salient details:

The reunion luncheon will be held on October 7, 2011 at the Berkeley Marina Doubletree. The Straw Hat Band and Men's Octet will perform and the Master of Ceremonies will be Bob Katz. After lunch a campus bus tour will be available from the hotel.

The deadline for reservations is fast approaching. For information or to reserve a spot, contact Maya Goehring-Harris at University Relations. She can be reached at 510-643-8091 or via email: mgoehring@berkeley.edu.

Our apologies for the screw-up.

Bellflower: Baptism by Fire

 

What if the apocalypse happened tomorrow? That's the central question raised in Bellflower, an intensely earnest Sundance film co-produced by Lenny Powell ’08. The film, which premiered locally last Friday, follows two scruffy 20-somethings from the Californian suburbs in their quest to survive the anticipated end of the world and rule the post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Bellflower starts out as the stuff of masculine fantasy - think 70-ft flamethrower, whiskey tap on the dash and a grasshopper nosh fest - with strong undertones of hipster culture. Endless scenes of cigarettes, PBRs, and casual seduction, make the first half of the film look like an episode of Mad Men without the glamour. But everything is not as it seems. Even the apocalypse, it turns out, has some tricks up its sleeve. As the film teeters on the margins of art and chaos, the cast and crew explore the visual and metaphorical possibilities of fire and the characters’ youthful charm goes up in smoke.

Powell’s passion for filmmaking was ignited at Cal, where he took a sketch comedy DeCal and once set a neighbor’s abandoned mattress on fire. He ran into the film’s director and main actor, Evan Glodell, soon after graduation when the two worked on a low-budget horror film set in Southern California. “He said they were making a film, and that they had a real working flamethrower,” Powell says. “I didn’t believe him.”

At the start of production, Powell was an assistant but quickly became a key player in this brash and illegal venture.  The film ended up costing more than $18,000, most of it coughed up by the director, with the crew largely working pro bono. (It grossed $24,000 on opening weekend, according to independent film website Indiewire). Bellflower also impressed critics at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, which the crew, Powell said, “entered on a whim” last September.

The unexpected success hasn’t given Powell Hollywood fantasies. While he says he felt a  “huge sense of satisfaction and fulfillment,” seeing his vision splashed across the big screen, being on set was “actually really boring.’’

Bellflower will be playing at California Theatre in Downtown Berkeley and Theatre Kabuki in San Francisco for the next two weeks, depending on ticket sales.

-- Rachel Gross

Hardly Strictly Hellman

The 2011 Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival will be begin on Friday, September 30 and run through the weekend in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. This year's lineup will feature what has become the usual rootsy-eclectic mix--everything from Del McCoury to The Blind Boys of Alabama, Robert Plant to Emmylou Harris. As Sylvie Simmons reported in our Summer Music Issue, it's Harris who put the "hardly" in Hardly Strictly. Warren Hellman, the man who bankrolls the annual fandango, tells it this way:

“Emmylou agreed to come the first year, and I really wanted her to play bluegrass—as you know, she’s pretty catholic in her music—so I thought if I called it Strictly Bluegrass she would be shamed into it. But no. We tried it again the next year: No. So we changed the name to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and as soon as we did, Emmylou started playing bluegrass."

To read more, see "Hillbillionaire."

Leading Ladies

Throughout July the Pacific Film Archive will be continue its film series dubbed Japanese Divas, beginning on Saturday with a 6:30 screening of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950). The diva in this case: Machiko Kyo who would later star opposite Marlon Brando in The Teahouse of the August Moon. She played a geisha. Other themes in PFA's lineup for the summer include American Noir in Mexico and a retrospective on the career of famed Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci. See you at the movies.

Finale

Tonight marks the final night of the 54th SF International Film Festival. UC Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive, the exclusive East Bay venue for the festival, will show Aurora by Romanian filmmaker Cristi Puiu, described as an "unflinching and haunting investigation of what compels a person to commit the ultimate act." Sounds uplifting.