(2004-05-12) Chabon Loves Berkeley

Michael Chabon loves Berkeley Ca. If there were a hundred good small cities in America fifty years ago - towns built to suit the people who settled them, according to their tastes, aspirations, and the sovereign peculiarities of landscape and weather - today there are no more than twenty-five... When the end finally comes, I believe that Berkeley will be the last town in America with the ingrained perversity to hold onto its idea of itself... It's in the quirky, small businesses of Berkeley, in fact, ... that the tensions of Berkeley living, the competing claims on the heart of a Berkeleyite to follow one's bliss but at the same time to reach a hand out into the void and feel another set of fingers taking hold of one's own, are resolved. These are not merely retail establishments... They are shrines to the classic Berkeley impulse to latch on to something tiny but crucial - the warm sound provided by vacuum tube amplifiers, the mid-sixties sides of Ornette Coleman, the African roots of Jesus Christ and his teachings, or a perfectly constructed Black-and-White (with an extra three inches in the steel blender cup) - and pursue it with a mounting sense of self-discovery. And yet they are also, accidentally but fundamentally, gathering places (Third Place); they all have counters at which the lonely amateur of Coleman or Marantz, the student of Martin Bernal can pull up a stool and find him- or herself in the company of sympathetic minds. Berkeley is richer than any place I've ever lived in these non-alcoholic taverns of the soul, these unofficial clubhouses of the oddball and outre.