Berkeley Reporter

by Steed Dropout
Jan. 21, 2013
PizzaBerkeley, Ca

ONCE MEAGER, SOUTH SIDE PIZZA BAKES OUT

South Side’s piece-meal pizza offerings are about to make piece while warring.

For thirty years South siders, could choose between fat and fit at Telegraph Avenue’s Fat Slice and Blondies. But three new pizza chains you’ve never heard of have turned this U.C. student enclave into the university of pizza.

Three new South Side pizzerias answer the persistent question, “when oh when, will we get some good pizza on Telegraph?”

20 feet from Pieology's brave opening. Photo by Ted Friedman.

Continue reading “South Side Berkeley Pizza Wars” »

by Steed Dropout
Jan. 12, 2014
Berkeley, Ca

DAY OF THE LIVING DEAD

Those Med heads who could soon become dead heads, gathered on the Caffe Mediterraneum’s [historicTelegraph Ave. hot-spot] mezzanine, Saturday, to re-create the spirit of possibly the greatest med-head ever, Jean Margron–1931-2013.

Med heads were joined by more than 125 of Margron’s friends, making this the mother of all med gatherings. The three-hour celebration, which climaxed with deflated balloons signifying surrender to death, turned the downstairs Med into a ghost town.

Ghosts of the Med, according to legend, live behind the Med mural, but emerge at Med tables where they engage in conversation with the living. Margron, who died at home surrounded, characteristically, with a harem anointing his brow, joined table #2–after the ceremony memorializing him–to perform his raised eyebrows routine and reassure his friends, who depended on his presence for peace of mind.

Jean Margron, 1931-2013. Photo by Ted Friedman.

Continue reading “Ghosts in Berkeley” »

by Steed Dropout
Jan. 10, 2014

CHEAP EATS

Let’s say you eat on Telegraph for the same reason you live in a nearby cheap student apartment. But let’s say you’re still a foodie (on the cheap, of course) and you find yourself an economic captive in the student ghetto and that you sometimes worry about how your life (on the cheap, of course) has turned out–that you’ve been spoiled by your forty-year extended student sojourn and that you may awake some morning when the good cheap food goes away, like Buddy Holly. You still have Holden Caulfield, though, and Dustin Hoffman playing an “outside agitator” in “The Graduate.” You recall how you first identified with “The Graduate,” especially when you lived in rooming houses near campus. The outside agitator meme could only take you so far. You are maybe agitated but you’re no agitator. You know real agitators. You love these agitators, but you are not like them, preferring self-absorption. You long ago ran ran out of excuses for living here, entrapped. Only the mirror can undo you, revealing that you are an old perv. But then you live among pervs and their one underlying principle is opposition. If you have oppositional tendencies in youth (I did), you cannot expect to just grow out of it, although oppositional personality disorder applies mostly to adolescents. What happens when these oppositionals grow up? They move to Berkeley where oppositional personality disorder is a Berkeley trope and you die an old hippy.

These views may be catching, but they are mine alone.