Author Archive
July 28, 2018 by tomdalzell
Bulwinkle – Making Big Art Look Easy
“Then through all our proud land let us proudly proclaim / As we march to the front / “Remember the Maine!” Which is relevant because: I don’t simply confess, I proudly proclaim that I have posted about Mark Bulwinkle a great deal. When I was first kicking around the idea of Quirky Berkeley, I asked my mentor, […]
July 21, 2018 by tomdalzell
Metro Lighting – A Journey Home to Berkeley
This is a story about two American kids who grew up in the heartland. They came to Berkeley 28 years ago. They have raised/are raising three daughters. They had a dream of starting their own store, making and selling beautiful, sustainable lighting, handcrafted in California. They started small, working up to what Metro Lighting on San […]
July 14, 2018 by tomdalzell
The Fairy Garden at 1426 Parker
I walked the 1400 block of Parker Street in February, 2013. There was no small world, no nothing in front of 1426 Parker as there is now. Claire Ittner came across 1426 Parker for her Material Culture class with Margaretta Lovell. She told me about it – lucky for me! Liz Schultz began making this […]
July 9, 2018 by tomdalzell
Missing Body Parts: To Have Ten Toes
When I told my friend that my favorite missing body parts cultural artifact was the leg lamp in Christmas Story, it was not the truth. Because my friend doesn’t really talk to me and I don’t really talk to him, it could be construed as not a lie. It was a good cultural allusion, let’s […]
July 7, 2018 by tomdalzell
Body Parts (and Mannequins)
When I ran this picture a few months ago, a Quirky Berkeley adherent looked at it and wrote, “You should do a blog on body parts.” Bingo indeed. A brilliant idea. I could have looked at that bathtub of body parts all day and all night and not stepped away to see preparing a compilation. Some […]
July 4, 2018 by tomdalzell
Fourth of July Field Trip: The Avenue of Giants at Bell Plastics, Hayward
Reminder – it is the fourth of July and that means we honor a Quirky Berkeley tradition and go on a notional field trip. Dig the tubas! Or are they sousaphones? Our notional holiday field trip today isn’t far away, just 20 miles south to Hayward, to Bell Plastics at 2020 National Avenue. Plastics, you […]
June 30, 2018 by tomdalzell
Back to Amador Avenue – Clap if You Believe in Fairies
Welcome to Fairyland! This post is about things that are (a) behind a house, (b) inside a house, and (c) more or less 1900 miles away in Iowa. Fairyland shown above is behind a house on Amador Avenue. “OFFSIDE!!” you shout. The Quirky Berkeley rules explicitly say that things shown here must in Berkeley and must be visible from the […]
June 23, 2018 by tomdalzell
The Best Signs of San Pablo Avenue – Albany
Quirky Berkeley is about material culture. Signs are material culture. The theory of signs for the study of material culture is well-established. To borrow a phrase from John Jakle and Keith Sculle, signs are “signatures of landscape and place.” In August 2014 I posted on the signs of San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley. I have also posted […]
June 23, 2018 by tomdalzell
The COMPLETE Signs of San Pablo Avenue – Albany
For those few brave souls who launched here from the Best Signs of San Pablo Avenue in Albany post, you are saluted and beloved and admired. Hats off to you. Now – about 150 photos of about 150 signs, starting with the low numbers in the north and ending with the higher numbers in the […]
June 16, 2018 by tomdalzell