The mini-conference that brought me to Berkeley on Monday and Tuesday ended fairly early, and I took the opportunity to wander the streets up into the Berkeley hills. This is something I used to do all the time, but haven't in years.
I started out by heading out of the campus on Piedmont Ave., passing by the Greek Theatre, which I hereby dub the “scene of the crime” from end of my time here.
At the northeast corner of the campus, Piedmont becomes La Loma and heads up into the residential neighborhoods of the Berkeley hills, an area that is apparently called La Loma Park. I always enjoyed wandering through these streets, which start out very much like city residential blocks and get more and more sparse and wooded, yet somehow remaining “part of the city.” Again, that is a bit different from Santa Cruz, which feels like a town squeezed between the ocean and the mountains and redwoods. I do walk downtown and along the shore a lot, but the hills here just haven't seemed as interesting to explore. As I write this article, however, I will note that the sunsets here in Santa Cruz are better than they were in Berkeley apartment.
Beyond Cedar Street, the city-block feel ends and La Loma continues up a steep hillside with retaining walls on one side and rails to another.
It is a view I remember quite well. The first time I wandered up this way, I was simply curious to see where this ended up – indeed, I never really “planned” out these walks and simply relied on my strong sense of direction to get me home again. Around the corner, the road comes to the top of the steep canyon cut by the Codornices Creek, with spectular views of the bay.
]It is hard to get a sense of the canyon from a photograph, unless you place it in context, such as the houses built along the steep grades. What looks like a flat ranch from the top of the canyon turns out to be a five-story monster built into the hillside:
This view is from the street below, Shasta Road. Shasta and LaLoma aren't actually connected, but one can make use of the numerous public staircases throughout Berkeley. In this case, I took stairs descending from La Loma to Rose Street, which then connects to Shasta. At the bottom of the stairs, one can see the supports that hold up La Loma on the side of the hill:
Upon seeing the support structure, I was immediately reminded of the architecture of Gaudì at the Parc Gruel, which I visited in 2005.
Longtime readers have already seen some images of Gaudì's residential architecture, in the context of parabolas (indeed, both “parabola” and “Gaudì” are among the most popular search terms by which people reach this site). The connection to Gaudì is not one I would have made while I was still living in Berkeley, having not yet visited the Parc Gruel or Barcelona in person.
I eventually made my way back to campus via Euclide Ave and Scenic Ave. “Scenic” is a very bold name for a street, and more the most part it doesn't live up to its name, except for a couple of blocks near the Pacific School of Religion, whose main walkway I crossed often.
Driving out of Berkeley on Telegraph Ave. towards highway 24, one cannot help but notice the incredible contrasts between the neighborhoods in the hills and those in South Berkeley and northern Oakland. I still think that it all fits together, somehow.
All fun aside, I did find the large monochromatic works interesting in the context of the full retrospective, especially when several large examples were placed around one of SFMOMA's spacious galleries. The retrospective also gave the opportunity to see Marden's remarkable transition in the late 1970s and early 1980s with his interest in Asian calligraphy and his adoption of more complex images filled with organic curves. He continus to use this style to this day, as in the recent 7 Red Rock 2 (2000-2002), shown to the right. He did have an interesting digression in his work into complex series of crossing lines, such as the 4 and 3 Drawing, shown below. This was probably my favorite from the exhibit:
Our main routes into San Francisco are highways 1 and 280, which together form the Junipero Serra Freeway upon entry into the city. This is an amazingly scenic freeway, traversing the largely undeveloped valleys along the San Andreas fault south of San Francisco. 280 splits off to the right to become the Southern Freeway, as illustrated in the map below (pay no attention to the “official” names that no one actually uses).
Usually we take the 280/Southern Freeway route, which crosses highway 101 and empties out in downtown. This time, we stuck with highway 1, which continues north as the Junipero Serra for a few meters before becoming 19th Avenue in the Sunset distrcit. Big mistake. We got stuck in traffic all the way to Golden Gate park. Interestingly, the highway 1 freeway was originally supposed to continue all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge. The stub of the highway 1 freeway and US 101 / Golden Gate Freeway (Doyle Drive) does in fact exist, but is disconnected from the highways in the south of the city:
But they have nothing to do with today’s story. Instead we left highway 1 at Golden Gate Park and headed to the Haight district, home of the Haight/Ashbury neighborhood of 1960s fame, and more recently of Amoeba Music, San Francisco. Amoeba is one of the best brick-and-mortar music retailers left, at least here in California, and they do carry and extensive experimental-music selection. I was there to make sure that 
The tiny bit that remains of the Central Freeway (the section north of Market was recently demolished and converted into Octavia Blvd, see this article at 
This is a rather abstract representation of his “almost all-analogue synth studio.” Mars kitty can be seen in the bubble at the lower right (and in the enlarged clip to the right). The overall composition suggests a blend of the CatSynth banner with my 
It's really not hard to create ones own syndicated channel like this with Flash, dynamic HTML/Javascript and the APIs provided by YouTube and other video sites. What interests me more are a few of the videos themselves, such as the work by 1st Ave Machine and others, which remind me that I still want to do more experimental video and animation work to complement my music. I've been spending much time back exclusively with music and sound (and trying to sell the CD lately), but there are some upcoming video opportunities I might want to consider…
