Mama Buzz Café

“Coastal Oil: Deep Mystery.” Splashed across the front page, the dark, murky tease of a headline makes a huge deal out of our uncertainty about oil reserves around U.S. shores. It feels like I’m watching Fox News. Are we seriously talking about where to find more oil? Tell me this is a joke… not some slick, twisted joke.

Also slick and twisted is Mama Buzz Café, at 2318 Telegraph, where I drilled for my coffee this morning. Entering to smooth Roots beats, I pumped out Tiger by the Tail coffee (don’t know what that is but it muddy and does the trick). Mama Buzz is exactly that, the mother of a buzz in Oakland. This is a tangible nexus for the Art Murmur crowd, and I pecked at my laptop with gutter punks, hipsters, artists in stained pants, and felt like I was sitting in the secret breakfast spot of every good pulp novel detective. Free wifi, plug-ins galore (you mean a place that actually wants me to sit here as long as I want???), and a back porch if you want to breath fresh air (or smoke) while you dig into the latest zine. The girl next to me brought in a whole box of blueberries to go with her coffee. As I sat, the music flowed smoothly from Roots to Talib Kweli to Arrested Development. The dining room, with its hipster survey of seats from church pews to 50’s diner chairs, doubles as an art gallery, and the walls are lovingly covered by some of the best, unframed art that Oakland has to offer. Want to know what the scene is producing these days? Come get your buzz on right here.

As for the headlines, there are some amazing stories about eradicating child slavery in Nepal and drug firm buyouts. I can’t take the headlines today. They don’t make sense. “I read the news today, oh boy…” sang those Beatles, and that’s kind of how the morning went. Luckily, Mama Buzz was there to rub the aching head.

Enjoy your break slow, dear reader. After all, if the front page is our mother, we’ll be sliding through the morning on oil, spending our energy pondering corporate takeover ethic. Mama!!!

Breakfast in the Bay: Making sense of waking up since Tuesday, 2008.

Mudrakers Cafe

Ah, control. When I was a teenager I had this great T-shirt with kitschy adolescent quote on the back: Control is an Illusion. Picking up the newspaper today, it seems, as Bob Dylan said, “I was so much older then/ I’m younger than that now.” The first is, “Fed ‘difficulties’ abound.” The first notch in my T-shirt’s sleeve, this article bemoans the inability of our government to control the current financial crisis. I am still baffled by the media’s belief, apparently shared by politicians, that they can somehow “solve” America’s financial difficulties. Didn’t they read my T-shirt? Next is, “Techie with a grudge,” an article about a somehow endearingly defiant SF employee making six figures who decided to hack the city’s payroll and communications network, denying access to all officials. Underneath those, I read about national furor over The New Yorker’s impending Obama cover and the possibility of Belgium’s breakup as a country. I mean, governments seem to be having a rough time with their image today. The illusion dissolves.

At one point, journalists prided themselves on being “muckrakers.” Riffing on this idea, today’s coffee destination calls itself Mudrakers. Mudrakers Café, at the corner of Telegraph and Stewart in Berkeley, has fantastic pleather chairs, cafeteria-style tables, and the strangest 80’s rock grooving through the morning. I got the feeling I was back in college, stopping in for a slice of pizza between classes. A sign on their window boasts organic, fair trade coffee, but beyond that I had no idea what it was. It was tasty, but even though I drank it in-house I had to use this styrofoam cup. The coffee cake, however, was moist and rewarding. There is a lot of well-lit space, free Wi-fi, and a fun display of Arab-American art on the walls, but somehow I couldn’t shake the cafeteria feeling, so it was hard to be comfortable or stimulated. Folks came in and out without much fanfare, and it felt like a good place to stop in for a break from work. If someone would please turn off that pop-jazz saxophone. But then, control is an illusion.

Enjoy your break slow. After all, if the front page tries to control our morning we’ll be broke, stolen, misrepresented, and maybe, if Belgium is any flagship, without government. Perhaps control is an illusion…

Breakfast in the Bay: Making sense of waking up since Tuesday, 2008.