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CommentsTaking Issue
An Esoteric Newsstand Rises up for Oakland Insiders and Outsiders
“Choose one.” The young mom holds her tiny daughter so the child can peer into the basket of buttons. The toddler reaches down. I hold my breath. She pushes aside the “Old Hippie,” the “High Tech Idiot,” the “Take This Job and Shove It,” and a selects one that’s bright pink, quarter-sized, and reads “Brat.” Whew. It seemed risky. But no, the mom was confident. “I knew she’d go for that—for the color.” She pays, leaves with her happy little girl—and a large dog lumbers into the store, tail wagging.
“He belongs to the neighbor. He comes every day for a treat,” explains Noella Teele, co-owner, with Joe Colley, of Issues, the most comprehensive magazine store you are likely to find anywhere in the East Bay, if not the entire Bay Area. Located just off Piedmont Avenue, a few doors from Peet’s on the corner, it’s a place where dogs, babies and coffee are welcome; where you can browse with nobody following you around; and where you will find an esoteric selection of new and used books, a mixed bag of underground and outsider music, an assortment of classic and newly pressed vinyl LPs (and yes, they will sell you a portable turntable to play them on), a variety of international newspapers and some really unusual gift ideas, handpicked by Teele or Colley and reflecting their passion for “surrealism, psychedelia and the darker side of the New Age.”
Teele and Colley met almost two years ago when he moved into a cottage behind hers, just up the street from Issues. “Joe always talked about having a little shop filled with weird electronic equipment,” says Teele. His hobby is noise music. She freelances as a sound engineer and has a biweekly indie-music show on the nonprofit college radio station KUSF-FM, 90.3, where she is also the volunteer promotions manager. On New Year’s Day 2007, while having breakfast—and frustrated at not being able to find a copy of the British magazine The Wire, which had a story on Colley—lightning struck, and they both hit on the idea: “Let’s open a newsstand.”
“I think in any other neighborhood, it would have been a big risk,” says Colley. “But there’s so much diversity here and so much foot traffic, I had a gut feeling it would work.”
They don’t carry weird electronic equipment. They do have about 3,000 magazines ranging all the way from one called Sheep—The Voice of the Independent Flock Master to a seniors health and fitness magazine called GeezerJock, a huge selection of green and eco publications, and everything you’ve actually heard of, from Vogue and Oprah to Oakland Magazine.
They also have regular art exhibitions—fringe and underground, naturally; but intimidating?—never. Both Teele and Colley are warm, friendly and eager to share what they are passionate about, and they go out of their way to get what the customer wants, no matter how mainstream.
Issues, 20 Glen Ave., 8 a.m.–8 p.m. daily, (510) 652-5700, www.issuesshop.com.
—By Wanda Hennig
—Photography by Jan Stürmann
After adopting a 5-week-old daughter from Japan, Sharon Eisenhauer needed a baby bag that could meet all of her organizational needs and still appeal to her sense of style. So the Columbus College of Art and Design graduate decided to design her own. “I wanted to make something that was more feminine, more expressive,” she says.
It’s been three years since Eisenhauer, 46, launched Haiku, her Rockridge-based women’s bag company. Since then, her bag needs have evolved as her daughter has grown. “I morphed. She morphed. The bag morphed,” Eisenhauer says. No longer just a baby bag, her now-named Ultimate Messenger bag, which comes in bamboo green, midnight black and nightshade blue, can be used for work, hikes or bike rides—or to carry diapers, bottles and a changing pad, she explains.
Eisenhauer describes herself as a “hyper-organized” person, so she makes sure her bags have plenty of pockets, eliminating the need to dig around some massive cavity looking for keys or lipstick. Noting that they are made with washable faux-leather fabric, with decorative stitching details, Eisenhauer says her bags are designed to look as though a human being—not a machine—crafted them, she says.
In addition to the Ultimate Messenger, Eisenhauer has added other bags to her growing line, including one designed with her friend Rob Honeycutt, the founder and former owner of the Timbuk2 messenger bag company. Called the To-Go bag, it is smaller than the Ultimate Messenger and has become her biggest seller.
Although Eisenhauer sews the samples for her bags in Oakland, they are manufactured in China and Vietnam.
This spring she plans to come out with a new “Karma Neutral” bag made from sustainable fabrics, as well as a limited-edition bag by designer Matthew Langille. “It’s really whimsical and fun and very graphic,” she says of the artist’s design.
Haiku bags range in price from $42 to $99. For a complete list of shops where they can be purchased in the Bay Area, got to www.haikubags.com.
It’s Friday at 4:30 p.m., which means tasting time is about to begin at Oakland’s Linden Street Brewery. Arrive a few minutes early and you might catch owner Adam Lamoreaux and his brewing partner, Carey Peterson, sweeping the joint, getting ready for the bunch of eager imbibers who invariably gather. At some point, they fire up the ’cue for the happening that over the past few months has become an informal tradition for friends, neighborhood businesses and people who’ve got word of their weekly barbecue blow-off. Lamoreaux developed a passion for craft beers while in the Navy, stationed in Alameda, between 1992 and 1997. He trained as an engineer. “But I knew I wanted to be a brewer,” he says. He paid his dues working at the Steelhead Brewing Company in San Francisco and Boonville’s Anderson Valley Brewing Company. Two years ago he found “the perfect location for a brewery”—an industrial-chic warehouse complex several blocks west of Jack London Square. In November 2007, he and Peterson moved in the brewing equipment they purchased from Bison Brewery in Berkeley.
Lamoreaux and Peterson, who have known each other since their teens, expect to make four seasonal brews and, within the next two years, produce four flagship beers. Their first was the naturally carbonated, unfiltered Urban People’s Common Lager, which Lamoreaux calls a hybrid—“sulphury and crisp, like a lager, with the aroma of an ale.”
The plan is not to turn Linden Street into a brewpub, Lamoreaux says, but rather to have Linden Street beer on tap in every Oakland pub. “We’re not looking to provide competition for the bars. We need them.” Meanwhile, they expect to keep the Friday open house going. There’s gotta be some downtime for them to raise a glass to their success and say “Cheers!”
Linden Street Brewery, 95 Linden St.; (510) 812-1264, www.lindenbeer.com.
Bantering with the audience at the Montclair Jazz and Wine Festival, emcee Jim Bennett allows as how he has so many jobs he has trouble keeping track of where he is. Besides working as an engineer at KQED-FM, 88.5, the longtime Oakland resident is on the faculty as a sound engineer at the Jazzschool in Berkeley. And for 26 years he has hosted a weekly jazz show, Forms and Feelings, on KPFA-FM, 94.1, where he was general manager for nearly five years.
Bennett’s current pet project, In the Moment, finds him lugging his recording equipment to clubs to capture live jazz performances for broadcast on KCSM-FM, 91.1. “Presenting live music is the aspect of music that I enjoy more than anything else,” says Bennett, who started playing music as a teenager before gravitating to the engineering side. “The studio environment can be a little cold and challenging for many musicians. The immediacy comes back when people can perform before an audience. Sometimes it’s hard to capture lightning in a bottle in the studio, but on any given night in a club, you can catch fire.
“The fact that the Bay Area has a 24-hour jazz station, KCSM, means the music can be heard. And it can be heard by younger folks—that’s very important in terms of jazz having a future.”
Bennett is actively looking for sponsors for the show, which, he says, is currently dependent on his own limited resources and the good will of the “incredibly generous” musicians who are willing to let him record and broadcast their performances for free. “I want to be able to pay the musicians something for their performance,” he says. “The best thing I’m doing is being able to give a voice to musicians. The state of the music industry makes it such a struggle for musicians to be heard. When I record a band performing live and put it on the radio, there’s no expense, and it’s reaching people sooner. And there are probably a lot of people who don’t get out much and who really appreciate the opportunity to hear live music.”
In the Moment (www.myspace.com/inthemomentkcsm) airs at 8 p.m. Sundays on KCSM-FM, 91.1.
IN THE SCENE
Jasper, an energetic young boxer, bounds in the door at Just Pet Me, with his mom, Nicole Bardeau, in tow. As Jasper goes off for a day of fun at this downtown “country club for pets,” Bardeau heads to the office with one less thing to worry about.
“We live in Sacramento,” she explains. “But I work here in Oakland. He comes three days a week, and it’s saved our lives!”
Launched in November 2007, Just Pet Me has grown to 500 member families from all over Northern California, drawn by a unique range of dog and cat services that include comfy overnight accommodations (even “slumber parties”), grooming, training and play, play, play.
Just Pet Me is the brainchild of sisters Julie and Ruby Liu, Southern California natives from a seriously animal-loving family. They looked at a lot of cities before choosing Oakland, where, with the help of designers and architects recommended by the city, they transformed a former auto parts store into a deluxe pet paradise—complete with full agility course, indoor play area and outdoor play yard with trees and state-of-the-art, easily cleaned artificial turf. “I traveled through California trying to understand the various neighborhoods,” says Julie Liu, “and found that people up here really love their pets, to extraordinary lengths.”
The Liu sisters spend lots of time learning about each new critter and configuring just the right program for them, considering such issues as how they act with people, how social they are with others of their species and whether they’re spayed or neutered. And if a family pet emergency arises, they’re on the spot. “The most important thing to us is the relationship with the families,” says Julie Liu. “They know they can call us early in the morning and late at night, seven days a week, and find one of us.”
Best of all, as the eager Jasper attests, there’s none of that “kennel guilt” about leaving your animal companions at Just Pet Me. “You don’t have to feel guilty if your dogs are here, because they really are having a lot of fun,” says Julie Liu. It’s not just the pets that have fun. “We have the most incredible dogs and cats,” she says. “How many people have jobs that they love, and where they receive a lot of love?”
Just Pet Me Country Club, 2545 Broadway, (510) 500-5595, www.justpetme.com.
Michael Pollan is a food writer who doesn’t mince words. As a journalism professor at UC Berkeley and author of five books on food production, including the best sellers The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World and The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, the Berkeley resident offers food for thought on agriculture in America.
If I knew what you know about America’s food sources, would I be too grossed out to eat?
Some people have read my accounts of these journeys along the food chain and they’ve become vegetarians. It didn’t have that effect on me, but it changed the way I eat. I really can’t eat fast-food hamburgers, and you know what I really can’t stand? Your basic cheap eggs.
Because they come from unhappy chickens?
They come from battery cage operations. The way they raise [chickens for] eggs is really brutal and kind of disgusting.
What got you started writing about the beef industry?
Harris Ranch on Interstate 5: I’ve passed that place and thought, “My God, this is how we raise beef in this country?” I don’t know how you could drive through that—that stench and that scene and say, “Boy, I really feel like a steak right now.” But lots of people do. It’s apparently a very successful restaurant.
But you still enjoy a good cut of meat every now and then?
I’m happy to eat grass-finished beef and pasture chickens. Berkeley Bowl has Panorama grass-fed beef, Estancia (from Uruguay), and then there’s the local Marin Sun Farms, which you’ll see on menus and [their meats, poultry and eggs are] available at the Ferry Building farmers market. We’re very lucky that there are very good alternatives in the Bay Area.
What about pork?
Niman Ranch pork is a very sustainable product. I’ve been to the farms in Iowa where that’s grown. They live outside, they farrow; they have their babies outside in these little huts instead of these brutal cages that are just a little bigger than their own bodies.
What struck you most in your travels across America?
The landscape in Iowa in April was very striking. It’s black. There’s nothing green there because all of it is corn and soybeans. And they don’t get planted till late spring, so before that it’s just naked soil. There are no horses anymore, no meadows, no chickens, no orchards—corn has just taken over this landscape. It’s a monoculture, and monocultures are striking landscapes, for as far as you can see—the same thing. It’s very dreary.
You’re a wordsmith, and your wife, Judith Belzer, is a noted nature painter. You must be drawn to one another, pardon the pun.
There’s a lot of cross-fertilization that goes on in our work. A normal workday is, I’m writing upstairs, she’s painting downstairs, and we meet for lunch and grunt at one another because we’re too absorbed in what we’re doing. But there always comes a time when she reads what I’m writing and I look at her paintings.
—Photography by Jan Stürmann
OAKLAND MADE
Haiku Bags: Poetry in Motion
After adopting a 5-week-old daughter from Japan, Sharon Eisenhauer needed a baby bag that could meet all of her organizational needs and still appeal to her sense of style. So the Columbus College of Art and Design graduate decided to design her own. “I wanted to make something that was more feminine, more expressive,” she says.
It’s been three years since Eisenhauer, 46, launched Haiku, her Rockridge-based women’s bag company. Since then, her bag needs have evolved as her daughter has grown. “I morphed. She morphed. The bag morphed,” Eisenhauer says. No longer just a baby bag, her now-named Ultimate Messenger bag, which comes in bamboo green, midnight black and nightshade blue, can be used for work, hikes or bike rides—or to carry diapers, bottles and a changing pad, she explains.
Eisenhauer describes herself as a “hyper-organized” person, so she makes sure her bags have plenty of pockets, eliminating the need to dig around some massive cavity looking for keys or lipstick. Noting that they are made with washable faux-leather fabric, with decorative stitching details, Eisenhauer says her bags are designed to look as though a human being—not a machine—crafted them, she says.
In addition to the Ultimate Messenger, Eisenhauer has added other bags to her growing line, including one designed with her friend Rob Honeycutt, the founder and former owner of the Timbuk2 messenger bag company. Called the To-Go bag, it is smaller than the Ultimate Messenger and has become her biggest seller.
Although Eisenhauer sews the samples for her bags in Oakland, they are manufactured in China and Vietnam.
This spring she plans to come out with a new “Karma Neutral” bag made from sustainable fabrics, as well as a limited-edition bag by designer Matthew Langille. “It’s really whimsical and fun and very graphic,” she says of the artist’s design.
Haiku bags range in price from $42 to $99. For a complete list of shops where they can be purchased in the Bay Area, got to www.haikubags.com.
—By Ellen Keohane
New Brew on Linden Street
It’s Friday at 4:30 p.m., which means tasting time is about to begin at Oakland’s Linden Street Brewery. Arrive a few minutes early and you might catch owner Adam Lamoreaux and his brewing partner, Carey Peterson, sweeping the joint, getting ready for the bunch of eager imbibers who invariably gather. At some point, they fire up the ’cue for the happening that over the past few months has become an informal tradition for friends, neighborhood businesses and people who’ve got word of their weekly barbecue blow-off. Lamoreaux developed a passion for craft beers while in the Navy, stationed in Alameda, between 1992 and 1997. He trained as an engineer. “But I knew I wanted to be a brewer,” he says. He paid his dues working at the Steelhead Brewing Company in San Francisco and Boonville’s Anderson Valley Brewing Company. Two years ago he found “the perfect location for a brewery”—an industrial-chic warehouse complex several blocks west of Jack London Square. In November 2007, he and Peterson moved in the brewing equipment they purchased from Bison Brewery in Berkeley.
Lamoreaux and Peterson, who have known each other since their teens, expect to make four seasonal brews and, within the next two years, produce four flagship beers. Their first was the naturally carbonated, unfiltered Urban People’s Common Lager, which Lamoreaux calls a hybrid—“sulphury and crisp, like a lager, with the aroma of an ale.”
The plan is not to turn Linden Street into a brewpub, Lamoreaux says, but rather to have Linden Street beer on tap in every Oakland pub. “We’re not looking to provide competition for the bars. We need them.” Meanwhile, they expect to keep the Friday open house going. There’s gotta be some downtime for them to raise a glass to their success and say “Cheers!”
Linden Street Brewery, 95 Linden St.; (510) 812-1264, www.lindenbeer.com.
—By Wanda Hennig
—Photography by Lara Hata
—Photography by Lara Hata
ABOUT A JAZZ PRODUCER
Jazz in the Moment
Bantering with the audience at the Montclair Jazz and Wine Festival, emcee Jim Bennett allows as how he has so many jobs he has trouble keeping track of where he is. Besides working as an engineer at KQED-FM, 88.5, the longtime Oakland resident is on the faculty as a sound engineer at the Jazzschool in Berkeley. And for 26 years he has hosted a weekly jazz show, Forms and Feelings, on KPFA-FM, 94.1, where he was general manager for nearly five years.
Bennett’s current pet project, In the Moment, finds him lugging his recording equipment to clubs to capture live jazz performances for broadcast on KCSM-FM, 91.1. “Presenting live music is the aspect of music that I enjoy more than anything else,” says Bennett, who started playing music as a teenager before gravitating to the engineering side. “The studio environment can be a little cold and challenging for many musicians. The immediacy comes back when people can perform before an audience. Sometimes it’s hard to capture lightning in a bottle in the studio, but on any given night in a club, you can catch fire.
“The fact that the Bay Area has a 24-hour jazz station, KCSM, means the music can be heard. And it can be heard by younger folks—that’s very important in terms of jazz having a future.”
Bennett is actively looking for sponsors for the show, which, he says, is currently dependent on his own limited resources and the good will of the “incredibly generous” musicians who are willing to let him record and broadcast their performances for free. “I want to be able to pay the musicians something for their performance,” he says. “The best thing I’m doing is being able to give a voice to musicians. The state of the music industry makes it such a struggle for musicians to be heard. When I record a band performing live and put it on the radio, there’s no expense, and it’s reaching people sooner. And there are probably a lot of people who don’t get out much and who really appreciate the opportunity to hear live music.”
In the Moment (www.myspace.com/inthemomentkcsm) airs at 8 p.m. Sundays on KCSM-FM, 91.1.
—By Mary Eisenhart
—Photography by Lewis Smith
—Photography by Lewis Smith
IN THE SCENE
Just Pet Me
Fido and Fluffy Never Had It So Good
Jasper, an energetic young boxer, bounds in the door at Just Pet Me, with his mom, Nicole Bardeau, in tow. As Jasper goes off for a day of fun at this downtown “country club for pets,” Bardeau heads to the office with one less thing to worry about.
“We live in Sacramento,” she explains. “But I work here in Oakland. He comes three days a week, and it’s saved our lives!”
Launched in November 2007, Just Pet Me has grown to 500 member families from all over Northern California, drawn by a unique range of dog and cat services that include comfy overnight accommodations (even “slumber parties”), grooming, training and play, play, play.
Just Pet Me is the brainchild of sisters Julie and Ruby Liu, Southern California natives from a seriously animal-loving family. They looked at a lot of cities before choosing Oakland, where, with the help of designers and architects recommended by the city, they transformed a former auto parts store into a deluxe pet paradise—complete with full agility course, indoor play area and outdoor play yard with trees and state-of-the-art, easily cleaned artificial turf. “I traveled through California trying to understand the various neighborhoods,” says Julie Liu, “and found that people up here really love their pets, to extraordinary lengths.”
The Liu sisters spend lots of time learning about each new critter and configuring just the right program for them, considering such issues as how they act with people, how social they are with others of their species and whether they’re spayed or neutered. And if a family pet emergency arises, they’re on the spot. “The most important thing to us is the relationship with the families,” says Julie Liu. “They know they can call us early in the morning and late at night, seven days a week, and find one of us.”
Best of all, as the eager Jasper attests, there’s none of that “kennel guilt” about leaving your animal companions at Just Pet Me. “You don’t have to feel guilty if your dogs are here, because they really are having a lot of fun,” says Julie Liu. It’s not just the pets that have fun. “We have the most incredible dogs and cats,” she says. “How many people have jobs that they love, and where they receive a lot of love?”
Just Pet Me Country Club, 2545 Broadway, (510) 500-5595, www.justpetme.com.
—By Mary Eisenhart
—Photography by Lewis Smith
—Photography by Lewis Smith
DIALOGUES
Michael Pollan: Omnivore
Michael Pollan is a food writer who doesn’t mince words. As a journalism professor at UC Berkeley and author of five books on food production, including the best sellers The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World and The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, the Berkeley resident offers food for thought on agriculture in America.
If I knew what you know about America’s food sources, would I be too grossed out to eat?
Some people have read my accounts of these journeys along the food chain and they’ve become vegetarians. It didn’t have that effect on me, but it changed the way I eat. I really can’t eat fast-food hamburgers, and you know what I really can’t stand? Your basic cheap eggs.
Because they come from unhappy chickens?
They come from battery cage operations. The way they raise [chickens for] eggs is really brutal and kind of disgusting.
What got you started writing about the beef industry?
Harris Ranch on Interstate 5: I’ve passed that place and thought, “My God, this is how we raise beef in this country?” I don’t know how you could drive through that—that stench and that scene and say, “Boy, I really feel like a steak right now.” But lots of people do. It’s apparently a very successful restaurant.
But you still enjoy a good cut of meat every now and then?
I’m happy to eat grass-finished beef and pasture chickens. Berkeley Bowl has Panorama grass-fed beef, Estancia (from Uruguay), and then there’s the local Marin Sun Farms, which you’ll see on menus and [their meats, poultry and eggs are] available at the Ferry Building farmers market. We’re very lucky that there are very good alternatives in the Bay Area.
What about pork?
Niman Ranch pork is a very sustainable product. I’ve been to the farms in Iowa where that’s grown. They live outside, they farrow; they have their babies outside in these little huts instead of these brutal cages that are just a little bigger than their own bodies.
What struck you most in your travels across America?
The landscape in Iowa in April was very striking. It’s black. There’s nothing green there because all of it is corn and soybeans. And they don’t get planted till late spring, so before that it’s just naked soil. There are no horses anymore, no meadows, no chickens, no orchards—corn has just taken over this landscape. It’s a monoculture, and monocultures are striking landscapes, for as far as you can see—the same thing. It’s very dreary.
You’re a wordsmith, and your wife, Judith Belzer, is a noted nature painter. You must be drawn to one another, pardon the pun.
There’s a lot of cross-fertilization that goes on in our work. A normal workday is, I’m writing upstairs, she’s painting downstairs, and we meet for lunch and grunt at one another because we’re too absorbed in what we’re doing. But there always comes a time when she reads what I’m writing and I look at her paintings.
—By Ginny Prior
—Photography by Lori Eanes
—Photography by Lori Eanes
