Tuesday, June 10, 2008

All Across the Telegraph

Telegraph Avenue as it strikes me today, minimally haunted in daylight...

Following a few floating notes, a harpist and vocalist began to play in the cafe downstairs.
There was an international music festival this weekend in various places around Telegraph Avenue and this was part of it. Saturdays such as this one, with its brilliant June sunlight and cool air, inspire me to praise God for the gift of cannabis. The medical grade active ingredient in the shortbread and jam cookie I'd eaten earlier, enabled me to forget the aches of life, to go deeply into its simple joys.

The hills overhead were still more emerald than gold. The famous entrance to Sproul Plaza, a notorious speakers' corner, is the terminus of the avenue that used to go on another block into what is now solid UC territory. I walk there often but rarely on weekdays at noon so I don't know, but my sense is that it still all happens here. I understand the perennial crank commentator Stoney Burke remains ambulatory and still puts in crabby appearances. An over-zealous middle-aged Asian guy gets up on a stool with an antsy sandwich-board screed now and then. His trademark chant of "happy, happy, happy" draws attention to his complaints against China, Israel, and the U.S. (I think). He seems terribly idealistic. Quite often the one called the Artist General plays a large zither with his self-invented bowed finger-extenders. His edgey political statements are available next to his transporting disks for sale.
Mystic arabesques, giant Steppes of jazz, bagatelles of the Turkish hookah, the hidden music of dreams, well up over the incessant traffic like plants over an abandoned way of life.

The first block has been surrendered to corporate franchise, anxious to grab the student cash flow. Some seem at least look stylish or vaguely innovative-- with reality TV screens or with third-hand appropriations of New Wave re-appropriations of Pop Art appropriations. (Gleaming plastic manikins in bright colors like an old Elvis Costello inner sleeve.) And then there is Walgreen's, neither stylish nor vague. Next to it the primordial Rexall sign remains over a new food market--a strange and nearly unprecedented venture for these parts. A relic of a defunct pharmacy, the orange and blue Rexall sign hovers over the block as it has since before Gary Snyder was the first cat to walk to class in sandals and beard in the mid-fifties.
Berkeley's bohemianism is ingrained indeed. Too often in recent times, however, the alternate conformity of youth is fobbed-off as bohemianism. At the same time it has gotten more and more difficult for the young to generate a new sub-culture. This is due to the constant appetite of the life-style entertainment media turning over every stone for something fresh to wear out into something phony and stale.
These first blocks exhibit some of the products of this process, from the precious athletic wear stores with blaring hip-hop, downward to the tattoo and piercing emporiums. The semiotics of rebellion have been marketed for so long no one really falls for them any longer. Everyone is enjoying everything ironically.
Then there is the long-standing issue of the rootless black-clad youth who used to appear on sidewalks in pigeon-like numbers. Perhaps they are the actual rebels--I can certainly see something heroic in the refusal to go along with things. There was a vibe in the early nineties though, when California's economy was hard-bit, when a lot of groups were out there with bad moods and pit bulls, that even a hoodlum priest like myself could not ignore.
The news is that it is not like that now. While the scene is at a low, with its dollar stores and palm readers, with its increasingly vacuous giant record stores--Telegraph is in fact now quite calm. Gone is the anarchy of old.
(A possible exception is the managed thug-life around the bars at night, with a shooting now and then. I'll examine it in a future entry.)
Squadrons of campus and city cops drive through continuously and bike cops show up like the hands of a clock. Buskers are hustled and spare-changers are fewer. Loitering in general is discouraged by dust-cloud generating sidewalk sweepers. Dubbed "green monsters" for their paint-color, these sweepers apparently function only during hours when folks would like to hang out. Between them and the marauding articulated buses that roar past, one could get the impression that someone must be making money from the increase in misery.

Craftsmen and quite a few others still peddle wares from sidewalk tables; the Krishna parade still bomps through. Even the Cafe Mediterraneum, last of the original Beat generation dives, has been re-tamed after it's wild and wooly recent past. Moe's is still thriving, a magnet for many . The old flag-ship building that was Cody's bookstore continues to be a nagging void. Before Peet's Coffee revitalized the corner of bordering Dwight Way, I wondered whether Berkeley was going to cede this block to Oakland.

And as I indicated, this Saturday miserable I was not. I was headed to People's Park where an music festival had a stage. Every few years I'm tempted to pronounce that the prospect of catching good music in People's Park has faded away. Then I'll see someone like Jonathan Richmond get a crowd dancing to his acoustic guitar and have to admit the Park is still beating.

An African-style band was setting up on stage as a drum circle turned the wheel of rhythm in the eastern grove. A sizable crowd had turned out and the mood was high. Hula hoop dancing was big. Booths and tables offered free food and good works to be done. I noticed a sylph-like girl with unusual green suede moccasins at the anti-apple-moth spraying table. Earlier today when we passed each other near the downtown post office. Her hair was long and blonde and fell exactly straight under a straw hat; she wore a long skirt that added to a willowy quality. She seemed lovely, individual, and doing her best to be free.
I headed for some shade near Hillegas where I happened to glance over my shoulder just in time to see a June bride in a billowing white gown walking into the Seminary chapel with her bridesmaid, to the sound of the festival drums. They sounded euphoric and inescapable.

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