“What Killed Cody’s?” Feature, 8/2
Attitude, not Amazon
With all this Sturm und Drang about Cody’s closing, I find myself thinking, “Thank God it wasn’t Moe’s, or even worse, Pegasus!” What killed Cody’s for me was not homeless or other kinds of street people, the ridiculous lack of parking in that part of the world, or Amazon.com. It was attitude! Okay, burn me at the stake, but in six out of ten dealings with the staff at Cody’s I ended up feeling like it was beneath their dignity to be of any help to me. And yes, the prices were pretty high, but I have always been able to pony up the dough to pay new cover prices at Pegasus. The difference was that I feel welcome at Pegasus. My dollars go to polite and friendly people. Bookstores take note: Amazon won’t take your customers — attitude will!
Geonni Banner, Point Richmond
Follow the money
The article states that “When street mayhem broke out on Telegraph several years ago, the thieves stole shoes, scooters, CDs. No one looted the bookshops.” It wasn’t respect that preserved the bookstores. Thieves steal what they can use and sell. If bookstores had been looted, Cody’s still would be in business.
Instead of Kant, Andy Ross should read Voltaire’s Candide. Andy is an innocent blissfully ignorant of the real world beyond his liberal clichés. If Andy were mugged, he would blame society, not the mugger. Customers don’t. They shop where there are fewer muggers, like Fourth Street. Andy is a decent, honorable human being who wouldn’t hurt a soul. I hope he doesn’t lose his house, but he should be teaching a course on Zen or on the evils of capitalism rather than running a business.
Daniel H. Brown, Emeryville
Greater efficiency?
Momentarily setting aside questions of social philosophy or metaphysics, let’s consider the physical reality of Cody’s Telegraph, on the site of a former Shell gas station. It’s a huge horizontal and vertical space, with a fair amount of the vertical unused. The children’s section alone, with its own window and where I’ve seen very few kids at a time (the avenue isn’t much of a children’s paradise), is likely the size of some entire bookshops in London, Paris, Tokyo, or San Francisco that necessarily use all their vertical space. Contrast this with, say, the multilevel design of Moe’s.
Anneli Rufus mentions the idea of shrinking the store, asking, “what’s better: a smaller, sparser operation, or a dead one?” I don’t think sparser. Probably denser and more solidly packed. But although I haven’t heard much discussion of this idea, it must’ve been a possibility that Andy Ross had to decide against.
Sandy Rothman, Berkeley
Back-door man
Andy Ross kills off flagship Cody’s bookstore with the “high overhead,” opens two new Cody’s stores with reduced labor costs, and has authors and politicians licking his hands. It’s puzzling. I remember sitting across from Cody’s at the break of dawn photographing his employees hosing down anyone near the bookstore in a sleeping bag. In those days I thought the police, the politicians, and the people would care. People, including your writer, refuse to see the calculating person huddled under the banner of a principled business others built. The scion of Ross department stores’ allegiance to profit is what governs his decisions. It seems appropriate that on the last day he had to creep out the back door.
Carol Denney, Berkeley
Good riddance
I started reading “What Killed Cody’s?” with a sense of sadness. But then the article reminded me what Cody’s stood for. Part of the low sales were due to UCB students who now have “no spare time for rioting.” A guest speaker there “nominated executed killer Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams for the Nobel Prize.” I have outgrown such juvenile antics and respect for depravity. So thanks for brightening up my day. No longer sad, I exclaimed aloud, “Good riddance.”
Sam Walters, Oakland
Life beyond Cody’s
I want to thank Anneli Rufus for doing a tremendous and thorough job on recording the demise of Cody’s and Telegraph Avenue. I recently drove up and down the West Coast, and everywhere I went people mourned the loss of Cody’s. I admit, I too got tired of the hassle of being asked for change, an average of seven times between parking my car near Andronico’s and making the hike up to Cody’s, sometimes very aggressively.
It’s totally heartbreaking to lose the place where I discovered weird little magazines as a teenager and met great authors like Kathleen Norris and Sherman Alexie. But today I needed some nonmainstream literature, so for the first time, I ventured out of my Telegraph Avenue comfort zone and found my way to MLK Jr. Way and the wonderful Afrocentric Marcus Books. The owner was helpful and positive, and there was ample parking in the neighborhood. I also discovered Walden Pond Books on Grand Avenue where I found plenty of radical literature to satisfy me, and at good prices. (Not to leave out the other great stores like Moe’s, Diesel, etc.)
So there is life beyond Cody’s for eccentric bibliophiles like myself, but these places will go the way of Cody’s if they are not supported. So this Walnut Creek person is saying, make the effort and keep your local independent bookstores alive!
Michaela Brasesco, Walnut Creek
A Boomer’s lament
During the ’60s and ’70s, the “Young Turks” of the college campus thought themselves wiser than their elders, and demanded of the administration and the professors the right to dictate the terms of their own education. One upshot of this was that the great classical writers, such as Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius, Tacitus, and Cicero, were assigned to the basement of the educational system. Their brilliant, if somewhat conservative messages were abandoned in favor of smarmy populists of the moment and selfish hedonism. But the moment fades, and so does the transient populist. However, the destructive changes to the educational system remained in place. The wisdom of some of the greatest minds in history is now all but forgotten. The Boomers created a society where you can find out the facts on everything, but understand the true value of nothing. That the Critique of Pure Reason was left unsold on Cody’s shelves is the predictable result of the denigration of Classical Studies. Nature abhors a vacuum. Where there is no Socrates, that is where you will find the fundamentalist wax strong. You think Shakespeare is dull? Wait until you get a load of nonstop “Jesus saves.”
We live in a country founded on principles of freedom but where wisdom is allowed to die, said freedom will accompany her to the grave. A dirge for Cody’s may bode one for us as well. “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” (William who? Never heard of him. Oh well, who cares?)
P.S. Yes, I am a Boomer.
James Fenton, Oakland
Advertise or die
Thanks for running the fine bit of reportage by Anneli Rufus about the truly saddening demise of Cody’s on Telegraph. But while Ms. Rufus delineated the root causes of the closure quite well, she failed to note the rationale penned by the publisher/editor of the Berkeley Daily Planet. For those who didn’t see it, Becky O’Malley wrote in an editorial that among the reasons Cody’s didn’t survive was owner Andy Ross’ failure to advertise in her newspaper. Right, Becky, placing ads in your pathetic rag surely would have compensated for the unpleasantness precipitated by those delightful denizens of the avenue that for years have alienated so many. Yep, ads in the Daily Planet would have sent former Cody’s patrons right back to shop on lovely Telegraph!
Dan Spitzer, Kensington
R.I.P.
Another great bookstore bites the dust. … How sad that we are losing the great book and record stores that exposed people to stuff that didn’t make the best-sellers lists and stores that had staff who were thoughtful and passionate who didn’t hesitate to make suggestions. … The world is a sadder place without Cody’s. R.I.P.
Mike Wallin, Santa Monica
Bums, dogs, and filth
The article on the Cody’s bookstore should have put more emphasis on the situation at the Caffe Mediterraneum, comparing it with what it was twenty years ago. Telegraph is lined up with bums, dogs, and filth; people who buy books aren’t going to run that gauntlet.
Leo T. West, San Leandro
“Dealing in Death,” Feature, 7/5
Hang on to your sword
The ruling class in this country is bent on disarming the people; in this attempt, helped by the so-called “progressives.” The “gun controllers” aren’t concerned by the ever more heavily armed police forces or the US military, for they’re the same “support our troops” crowd. Most of the gun shops have been forced to close by the ever more restrictive laws, ordinances, and regulations as well as abusive taxes.
In this area Don Perata, the hypocrite gun-packing senator, with his fellow “gun controllers” Sheila Young, San Leandro’s mayor, and Ellen Corbett, the assemblywoman, sic the ATF’s dogs on Trader Sports. A few years ago the city also imposed a heavy special tax on the business; the harassment never stopped.
Siegle’s, one of the biggest gun shops in Oakland, was forced to close, among many others; the murders in Oakland keep on going up nevertheless. The criminals know that law-abiding citizens don’t carry guns and even in their homes they’re constrained from using them.
If the state were interested in reducing the crime rate, all it had to do is to remove from the books the laws that prevent the people from using their guns to defend their life, their family, and their property; but the state wants the people to be dependent on the police who always show up after the crime was committed. However, that’s not the ruling class’ concern, for its members are well protected. What’s important to it is to propagate the acceptance of ever-bigger police forces, and eventually a police state or even a military regime to combat the crime that the very capitalist state creates by increasing poverty, exploitation, corruption, unemployment, outsourcing, the elimination of pension plans, overall high prices, and low wages and all of its maladies.
Once, I saw a great bumper sticker at Siegle’s. It read: “Those who turned their swords into plowshares will soon plow for those who didn’t.”
Leo T. West, San Leandro
“What Killed Cody’s?” Feature, 8/2
And it’s dull
“What Killed Cody’s?” is the ubiquitous question posed by one of those bombastic, overbloated, long-winded, self-aggrandizing, and exquisitely biased editorial columns-posing-as-a-feature news story so typical of the East Bay Express. Well, not what — but who! So sad to say, but Cody’s killed itself through the self-inflicted but very exact same powerfully prodigious and supreme hypocritical pretension of elephantine proportions so typical of Berkeley generally. If Cody’s died the unsuspecting victim of some nebulous, mass-marketed, retail-redundant apocalyptic doomsday — as the piece so stupidly suggests — then it’s one of its own self-propagating reproduction.
Victimhood is, after all, part of what Berkeley in sum total’s all about! Cody’s closure (10 July 2006) unleashed, supposedly, “a prodigious spate of soul searching, finger pointing, and general lamentation on the part of the bereaved masses.” That lead-in alone typifies to perfection the perpetually in-denial hypocritical pretension permeating the entire town so profusely. The tragic but thus-far escaped reality is: Cody’s committed a kind of retail bookselling hara-kiri prompted ultimately by its own in-denial hypocritical pretension — and whimsical but obsolete wishful thinking!
There was copious finger pointing and laying of blame, yes, but scarcely any “bereaved masses” (unless you honestly consider that paltry, hoary, mournful turnout of nodding “silver heads” and flashing “bifocals” as comprising a representative sample of the missing imaginary hordes) and precious little, if any, real “soul searching”! It’s impossible to search (without some thoughtful self-inspection and introspection) an equally missing imaginary soul which simply doesn’t exist — or, if it did ever exist, has now become essentially extinct!
Making a public and vocal spectacle of the sad demise of a failed but venerable and dearly beloved bookstore’s “wake” was supposed to be “history in the making,” you see, rather than the epic embarrassment it was in reality — yet another blatantly but pathetically conspicuous manifestation of that supremely egocentric, egotistical, epic hypocritical pretension that so perfectly epitomizes Berkeley’s true intrinsic essence.
“When Berkeley looks in the mirror,” the Express gushed lavishly, “it perceives a book town, a lit-cred Lourdes linked with so many bards and rebels and laureates alive and dead that reciting their bibliographies would take all day. Not just uninflected authors but, to a large part, activist authors with a cause. Rare is any city so spellbound by its own legacy. For better or worse, Berkeley is a living theme park, forever conjuring a heyday that Cody’s crystallized.”
That paragraph alone crystallizes the eternal but mostly unjustifiable and self-adulating, self-congratulating, self-flattering, and now self-eulogizing, self-deluding, and self-indulgent but wholly ILLUSORY self-hype and overblown puffery that Berkeley so typically wallows in — that “ineluctable” but self-destructive dissipation into which Cody’s has itself now inescapably plunged! Berkeley’s essential sum and substance is, quite predictably, possessing in reality so precious little to be “spellbound” about.
Comparing Berkeley to Lourdes is itself the height of self-glorifying blasphemous conceit: but the bygone “heyday” of Berkeley’s supposed olden but not-so-golden times past of yesteryear’s “rebel monoculture” of “activist authors” with causes — as is being “the heart and soul of ’60s counterculture … in the heart of America’s most unique and intellectual community” — are long since gone (as is the supposed “number-one academic bookstore of America” and so-called “legend” of Cody’s Telegraph) and never to return!
Accosting unsuspecting people, inflicting and forcing itself upon them against their will and wishes, being a pestering imposition on itself, and even the whole wide world at large — that’s so precisely what Berkeley and its most sacrosanct establishments are all about! Cody’s “didn’t survive because we just blew it; it didn’t survive because people weren’t reading those books,” owner Andy Ross admitted if unwittingly. Then why in God’s name persist with attempting so stupidly to impose “THOSE books” (by Abbey, Aeschylus, Ginsberg, Hesse, Kant, Mae Brown, Marx, Spiegelman, whoever!) — those obscure and outdated books — upon a reading public so resolutely disinterested in and indifferent to them? But then, why confuse the issue further by mentioning God, since even the most hard-core, intolerant, tie-dyed-in-the-wool Berkeleyite fanatic is too contemptuously, presumptuously and self-proclaimed superior to conceivably believe in the potential existence of any supreme being more powerful than their terminally pompous self, God forbid!
Cody’s committed suicide simply by attempting so absurdly — much like those die-hard, dogmatic, intellectually derelict remnants of the Socialist Workers’ revolutionary vanguard still pestering emerging Downtown BART riders to this day — to perpetuate the passé!
That’s where that epic hypocritical pretension comes into most conspicuous play: Berkeley fritters away its time (and lifeblood) so futilely (and so self-destructively) to no decent effect with incessant negativity, boastfully “skewering” capitalism (whilst Cody’s whines about failing to rack up capitalist profits), corporations (whilst Cody’s whines about failing to compete successfully in the corporate world), Christianity (whilst Cody’s should’ve perhaps engaged in some good old-fashioned Christian conscience-examination and prayed for a self-preserving miracle rather than whining), and conservatism (whilst Cody’s hosted its lengthy, ritualistic litany of “revolutionary” anarchist promoters and then whined when some reputedly anti-Salman Rushdie “terrorist” firebombed its storefront in 1989) — just like multiple Telegraph Avenue merchants have whined over the years about rampaging rioters running amuck, smashing and looting their own storefronts. But wasn’t the anti-Rushdieite just another “activist” rebel with a “cause” and the looters running riot merely urban guerrillas with “causes” of their own? Yeah, apparently anarchic revolution (that lamented long-lost “radical chic”) is really hip and cool so long as it shatters storefronts other than your own!
“Cody’s died the death of a thousand cuts, from a thousand blades,” the Express proclaimed insipidly, assigning lame blame — in true whiner-victim style of the present-day’s fashionably but witlessly unthinking politically correct — to chain stores, changing times, cultural illiteracy, cultural shifts, Internet bookstores — all preposterously epitomized by the like of the “comfortable,” “climate-controlled” environment of Barnes & Noble Bookseller in Walnut Creek of all places! Excuse me, but what about that burgeoning Barnes & Noble Bookseller in downtown Berkeley on Shattuck Avenue? Isn’t it, too, yet another of those vaguely ambiguous and nebulous “they” — culprits responsible for Cody’s demise?
Recently I relocated to reputedly “upscale” Walnut Creek after subsisting in the hellhole pits of both Berkeley (for an inauspiciously unlucky thirteen years) and El Cerrito (for seven years) and I can personally attest that the overpowering appeal of finally escaping the epic in-denial hypocritical pretension of Berkeley had absolutely nothing whatever to do with the more scrupulous appeal of supposedly comfortable, safe, “climate-controlled [chain-store] environments” in which, incidentally, I still cannot even afford to shop, much less frequent! For me, the last straw prompting me to vacate the increasingly filthy and violent Oakland-Richmond corridor of the coastal “flats” and retreat to the comparatively paradisiacal Ygnacio Valley was being rousted late at night on the Ohlone Greenway by some uptight cop (cruising the trail for easy marks) for upward of an hour for resorting to an abandoned shopping cart to haul some groceries — ironically, in sight of yet another reward poster for yet another murdered kid that petty, penny-ante cop was most certainly too distracted to “safeguard and protect”! Poor priorities are simply another matter of import the mindless Utopia of Berkeley remains in denial about!
Well, apart from its warmer weather, what’s so attractive about homicide-free Walnut Creek are indeed its cleaner, safer, and purely peaceful streets, yes, but also its truer sense of “community,” wherein people fraternize and socialize amongst each other — with some hospitable and neighborly semblance of courtesy, civility, and respect for personal space as well as, yes, even polite society! — all without unduly accosting and pestering one another to no purpose, as is so habitual in Berkeley. And its canal cyclist and pedestrian trails are blocked to vehicular traffic, including cop cruiser cars!
That fanciful Express-defined “community” is that long-lapsed Utopian place where supposedly “unique people did unique things” — and in reality that translates quite collectively into hoodlums and their cop counterparts; grungy “gutter punks”(both before and behind storefronts), and other assorted uncouth “individualists” and “personalities,” so endlessly obsessed with their own self-fascination that they feel uncontrollably compelled to snidely accost, annoy, badger, bully, curse, harass, heckle, pester, piss at, sneer at, spit at, swear at, taunt, and threaten if not outright attack unsuspecting passerby who (naturally not wanting to be bothered) happen to object or take exception to all their cheap come-ons, ear-grating performing, ineffectual petitioning, junk-peddling, pseudo-intellectual posturing, and generally making an unwanted and unwelcome imposition of themselves on anyone and everyone in close proximity.
Cody’s killed Cody’s, not by a “thousand cuts,” but rather by a single lethal slash to its own throat — by attempting to impose upon its unreceptive public, much like Berkeley’s more abusive, boorish, obnoxious, overbearing, and vulgar aborigines, its own epic but passé hypocritical pretension. And that sort of intentional imposition not only wears extremely thin but becomes over time extremely tedious, tiresome, and utterly DULL!
Joseph Covino Jr., Walnut Creek
