Daily Archives: February 2, 2012
The Berkeley Wire: 02.02.12
The new agtivist: Adam Berman, faith-based urban farmer [Grist]
Dying dad, ex Pacific Steel, denied kidney transplant [ABC]
Energy Secretary joins groundbreaking for new LBNL facility [UCB]
Remembering Jane Imamura, 91, longtime Berkeley resident [Coco Times]
Long on the move, Bishop Berkeley finds a home on Cal campus [UCB]
Photo: Magnolia bud, by Sisterfish8/Berkeleyside Flickr pool.
Ex Berkeley teacher Marie Schumacher plays hometown
Back in the mid-1990s when Marie Schumacher was teaching at Berkeley’s King Middle School, her students didn’t know she was living a double life. By day she elucidated math and science for sixth graders, and by night she performed at venues like Albany’s Club Muse and Berkeley’s Rose Street House of Music. While honing her craft with bands like the retro-pop combo Agent 99, she started to develop her own book of tunes as a singer/songwriter.
Based in Portland, OR since 2000, the vocalist, guitarist, pianist and vocal arranger has maintained close creative ties to the East Bay through her long-running faculty position at Cazadero Music Camp. She plays her annual Berkeley concert Saturday February 4th at the Subterranean Arthouse with bassist John Foster, drummer Jon Arkin and guitarist Steve Gibson, co-founder and co-director of Berkeley’s innovative music program BandWorks.
Her latest album, “Island Set Aflame,” is the result of her revived collaboration with Gibson, with whom she often performed back in the 90s. While developing the new music in the fall of 2008, she received a jolt of inspiration from a spectacular brush fire that swept across Angel Island, with flames visible from her rehearsal. Crystallizing themes of destruction and creation, life and death, she wrote a series of thematically linked songs that Gibson set to beautifully latticed arrangements. … Continue reading »
Actual Café launches Bicycle Bingo fundraising parties
Actual Café has had a novel idea for groundhog day — which, as it happens is today — and for every week after today. The whole point of groundhog day, after all, is that it repeats itself.
The San Pablo Avenue café is launching “Bicycle Bingo”, a weekly fundraising bingo game and party that will benefit several nonprofits active in Berkeley and Oakland.
The event will feature the area’s only bicycle-driven bingo ball machine, and will be MC’ed by Berkeley’s Steffy Sue on the Uke.
“We like games and parties, and we like to support organizations who do good work in our own backyard, so this event is a no-brainer,” says Sal Bednarz, owner of Actual Café, which is known for its love of all things bike-related. “We want to help these organizations find a wider audience, and make it easy and fun for folks to give them some support (and maybe win a prize!).” … Continue reading »
Rare works from Serendipity Books to be auctioned
The collection the late Peter Howard amassed for Serendipity Books was so vast that it will take Bonhams six different auctions to sell it off.
Once stuffed into an old winery on University Avenue, the collection, estimated at one million volumes, has now been sorted – and resorted and resorted – for sale.
“The bookstore on University … is a warren of rooms filled to the roof with titles from the mundane and popular to the erudite and obscure,” Catherine Williamson, Bonhams’ director of fine books & manuscripts explained in the auction catalogue. “Peter wanted people to search for their books, looking carefully and hopefully finding not only what they were looking for, but far more.
“While working to clear the store in advance of this first sale (and the others scheduled throughout this year) we have found ourselves going over shelves once, twice, three times and on the fourth time finding something else worth pulling out and putting in the catalog. I‘m sure that is as Peter would have wished it,” said Williamson. … Continue reading »
Family and friends hold vigil for Berkeley skateboarder
Family and friends of 18-year-old Tyler De Martini congregated on a corner of Marin Avenue in Berkeley last night to remember the El Cerrito High student who died Wednesday after colliding with a car while skateboarding down Marin at about 7 p.m. Monday evening.
De Martini’s mother, Kim De Martini, as well as his girlfriend and other close friends, remembered a boy who was passionate about skateboarding, and had “a heart of gold”. Concerns over the safety of the intersection where the accident took place, at Marin and Tulare, were also raised.
A memorial service for De Martini is scheduled for 10:45 a.m. Friday at El Cerrito High School. Email teamtylertribute@gmail.com for more information.
See more photographs of last night’s vigil in Berkeleyside’s Flickr pool. Read full coverage of the vigil at Albany Patch.
New addition to North Branch library almost complete
While the reopening of the north branch of the Berkeley Public Library is still three to four months away, its new contours are apparent. Construction crews have completed the building and painting of two-story addition to the building, which will house a new multipurpose room, a teen reading area, and a staff room. … Continue reading »
