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ALTON SCOTT drops a checker as Montel Holmes watches at Ala Costa Day Care, one of the programs eligible for emergency funds which City Council approved Tuesday night.
ALTON SCOTT drops a checker as Montel Holmes watches at Ala Costa Day Care, one of the programs eligible for emergency funds which City Council approved Tuesday night.
 

News

City Grants Urgent Child Care Funding

By DAVID SCHARFENBERG
Friday July 18, 2003

City Council voted unanimously Tuesday night to offer emergency financial assistance to eight local child care programs that face delays in state funding as a result of the budget stalemate in Sacramento. 

The vote drew cheers from about 60 parents and children who showed up to urge the move, chanting in Spanish and English and waving signs that read “Children First—Pass a Responsible Budget” and “Thank you city of Berkeley.” 

“I would not be able to go to work if I did not have a place for my children to go,” said Rosa Equihua, a Berkeley dental assistant who has two children in a pair of programs operated by the Bay Area Hispanic Institute for Advancement (BAHIA). 

“Without Centro Vida, I don’t know what would happen to us,” added Berkeley resident Yolanda Leon, whose daughter attends one of BAHIA’s programs. 

With no budget in place, the state withheld about $400 million in quarterly child care payments this month for roughly 400,000 low-income children across California, according to Michael Jett, director of the child development division in the state’s Department of Education. The delay will affect 288 Berkeley children, according to calculations by Mayor Tom Bates’ staff.  

Jett said some child care centers around the state have already announced closures and others could soon follow suit. 

“The centers are going to run out of money at some point,” he said. “It’s going to get desperate.” 

But Berkeley officials said the emergency city funding should help to shield the local programs, if they choose to take advantage of the offer. BAHIA Executive Director Beatriz Leyva-Cutler said she will seek financial assistance and Bates’ senior aide Julie Sinai said Ephesian Children’s Center in South Berkeley is likely to seek city help as well. 

Two other agencies reached by the Daily Planet said they will not seek city assistance in the short-term, but may request it later. 

Sinai, who has a child in a BAHIA day care program, learned about the state funding problem last week. A July 10 letter from Leyva-Cutler told parents the nonprofit would cut off services to state-subsidized, low-income children Aug. 1 if the organization could not secure a new line of credit, win an emergency loan or refinance one of its buildings in time. Eighty-three of the 135 children in two BAHIA-operated programs are low-income and qualify for state assistance. 

“We greatly regret having to take this action,” Leyva-Cutler’s letter read. “Never in our 28 years of services have we communicated such a drastic and dramatic action to families.” 

Bates responded with an emergency measure on the City Council agenda Tuesday instructing City Manager Weldon Rucker to offer either an advance on annual city grants or an emergency loan to the eight local child care programs serving Berkeley children. 

“I was just flabbergasted when I heard they actually were going to close,” said Bates. “I just tried to think outside the box.” 

Leyva-Cutler, who said BAHIA faces a delayed quarterly payment from the state of $151,000, noted that the emergency city assistance will allow BAHIA to keep its doors open in the short-term. But ultimately, she said, the state legislature must pass a budget. 

“We’re hopeful that the legislature will listen to this...and do something about passing that budget,” she said. 

Six of the eight child care programs that will qualify for city assistance — from a BAHIA’s day care and after school programs, which serve a largely Hispanic population, to Ala Costa Center, which serves the developmentally disabled — provide direct child care services.  

Two of the programs, the Oakland-based Bananas and the Berkeley-based Berkeley Albany Licensed Day Care Operators Association, provide low-income families with child care vouchers. 

Eric Peterson, program manager at Bananas, said the organization provides vouchers for about 65 Berkeley children. At least 30 of those children will be affected by the delay in state funding, he said.  

Peterson said he knew of no local child care centers that planned to reject Bananas vouchers in the near term. But when the checks stop arriving in mid-August, he said, they could have a change of heart. 

“It’s a distinct possibility,” he said. 

Peterson said Bananas, which receives about $1 million per month in state funding, does not plan to ask the city for a loan because the dollar amount involved is too high. But he did not entirely rule out a request for city help. 

Bates said he has concerns about making direct loans. Nonprofits that receive them, he said, may not be able to repay the loans in tough economic times. The mayor suggested he was more comfortable providing advances on the roughly $550,000 in city grants Berkeley is scheduled to dole out this year to at least six of the eight child care programs that serve the city’s low-income children. 

Holly Gold, executive director of Ala Costa Center, which serves 60 children, said her program should be able to make it through August without requesting an advance on the city’s $32,839 grant to the center. If the budget stalemate lingers into the fall, she said, Ala Costa may ask for help from the city. 

Gold said she has been disappointed with the state legislature’s inability to pass a final budget. The city’s action, which came out of the blue, she said, provides a stark contrast with what has happened in Sacramento. 

“I’m just so impressed that the mayor took the initiative to do this,” she said. “I just think that’s great.”


Berkeley This Week

Friday July 18, 2003

FRIDAY, JULY 18 

Cirque Noir Benefit for ACCI Gallery, a silent and live auction from 6 to 10 p.m. at ACCI Gallery, 1652 Shattuck Ave. Tickets are $20 per person, $30 per couple. Reservations suggested, 843-2527. 

“So How’d You Become an Activist?” with Tony Serra and Mary Ann Tenuto at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, 1924 Cedar St. at Bonita. Donation $5. Wheel- 

chair accessible. 415-927-1645. 

Women in Black Vigil, from noon to 1 p.m. at UC Berkeley, Bancroft at Telegraph.  

wibberkeley@yahoo.com 548-6310, 845-1143. 

Meditation, Peace Vigil and Dialogue, gather at noon on the grass close to the West Entrance to UC Berkeley, on Oxford St. near University Ave. Sponsored by the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. 496-6000, ext. 135. www.bpf.org 

Bastille Day Waltz Ball, lessons at 7 p.m., dancing with the Baguette Quartette at 9 p.m. at the International House, 2299 Piedmont. Cost is $20 at the door. 650-326-6265. www.fridaynightwaltz.com 

SATURDAY, JULY 19 

Berkeley Bay Trail Grand Opening Ceremony, at 11 a.m. at the southwest corner  

of University Ave. and West Frontage Rd., at the base of the pedestrian overpass. For information call Lisa Caronna, director of Parks, Recreation and Waterfront at 981-6700. 

YMCA Day 100th anniversary of the Berkeley/Albany YMCA. From 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. with entertainment and health scre- 

ening at the Berkeley Farmers’ Market, Center St. at MLK, Jr. Way. 548-3333.  

Free Gardening Class on Blooming Perennials and Shrubs, with Aerin Moore, at 10 a.m. at Magic Gardens Nursery, 729 Heinz Ave. 644-1992. www.magicgardens.com 

Free Emergency Preparedness Class on Earthquake Retrofitting, for anyone who lives or works in Berkeley, from 9 a.m. to noon at 812 Page St. Register on-line at www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/fire/oes or by calling 981-5506. 

Acupuncture and Integrative Medicine Open House with Dr. Andrew Karozos at 1:30 p.m. Open house begins at 10 a.m. at 2550 Shattuck Ave. Registration required. 666-8248.  

“Supressed Histories, Priestesses,” a slideshow by Max Dashu at 7:30 p.m. at Redwood Gardens Community Room, 2951 Derby St. Cost is $10-$15. Wheelchair accessible. 654-9298. 

SUNDAY, JULY 20 

Community Labyrinth Peace Walk, facilitated by Singer/ 

Songwriter/Activist Margie Adam, 2 p.m., North Berkeley Senior Center. Join Margie and a growing number of people who have found that walking the labyrinth, individually and in community, offers a powerful way to ground and focus healing and peace and justice work in the world. Free. Wheelchair accessible. Sponsored by the East Bay Labyrinth Project. 526-7377. 

Summer Sunday at the Peralta Community Garden Café, live music, poetry and refreshments, from 2 to 5 p.m. Since the Community Garden Café will be operated as a non-commercial grassroots effort it is dependent on volunteers and donations for performers and refreshments. Suggestions for programs and performers are welcome. Please contact Karl Linn at 841-3757. 

Lee Nichol on “Thought, Symbol, and Space” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812.  

Top of the Bay Family Day, Sand Sculpting Forget the beach, head for the hills to create the sand castle of your dreams, from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. Professional sand sculptor Kirk Rademaker hosts this hands-on outdoor workshop. For all ages. Lawrence Hall of Science, Centennial Drive. 643-5961. www. 

lawrencehallofscience.org/news/  

Eckhart Tolle Talks on Video Free gatherings, at 7:30 p.m. to hear the words of the author of “The Power of Now” at the Feldenkrais Ctr., 830 Bancroft Way. 547-2024. EdShorelin@aol.com 

MONDAY, JULY 21 

Berkeley Partners for Parks meets at 7:30 p.m. at the Corporation Yard’s meeting room, 1326 Allston Way. www.bpfp.org 

Berkeley CopWatch meets at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Volunteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

TUESDAY, JULY 22 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. 845-6830. 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 525-3565. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

Lawyers in the Library, at 6 p.m. in the West Branch, University above San Pablo, 981-6270.  

WEDNESDAY, JULY 23 

Botanical Garden Twilight Tours: A Walk in California with horticulturist Nathan Smith at 5:30 p.m. Free for members, $5 for non-members. UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Dr. Registration required. 643-2755. www.mip.berkeley.edu/garden  

Berkeley Food Policy Council meets at 7 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave., near Dwight Way. The Berkeley Food Policy Council (BFPC) is a coalition of residents, non-profit agencies, community groups, school district and city agencies to increase community food access and help build a healthy regional food system. Everyone is welcome. For information call Penny Leff, 548-3333.  

California Power: The Big Picture and How We Fit In, with Nettie Hoge, Executive Director, The Utility Reform Network, (TURN), at 1:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Sponsored by the Ber- 

keley Gray Panthers. 548-9696. graypanthersberk@aol.com 

South Berkeley Mural Project Community members are coming together to create a neighborhood mural on the side of the Grove Liquor Store on the corner of Ashby Ave. and MLK Jr. Way at 7 p.m. at Epic Arts Studios, 1923 Ashby Ave. 644-2204.  

Community Dances, traditional English and American dances, at 8 p.m. at Grace North Church, 2138 Cedar St. Cost is $9. 233-5065. www.bacds.org 

Free Feldenkrais ATM Classes for adults 55 and older at 10:30 and 11:45 a.m. at the Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut at Rose. For information call 848-5143. 527-5332. 

THURSDAY, JULY 24 

Organic Farmers’ Market from 2 to 6 p.m. in the Ele- 

phant Pharmacy parking lot, 1607 Shattuck Ave., at Cedar. 548-3333. www.ecologycenter.org 

“Science in the ‘Hood’” Rich Bolecek will speak about a community based, educational after-school program designed to decrease violence, from 7 to 9 p.m. at Berkeley Friends Meeting, 2151 Vine St. Rich Bolecek started and is the coordinator of this program which allows at-risk youth to develop positive skills in a tinkerer’s workshop with hands-on science, woodworking, art and other activities, using non-violent conflict resolution techniques.  

ONGOING  

Vista Community College Program for Adult Education (PACE) Enrollment through Sept. 6. PACE is a college alternative for adults with job and family responsibilities. For information call 981-2864 or 981-2800 or email Marilyn Clausen at mclausen@peralta.cc.ca.us  

Summer Fun Camps for Children and Teens, from age five and up, are offered at Berkeley recreation centers and include arts and crafts, swimming and tennis lessons, yoga, organized sports and games, and field trips. Program runs through August 22, Mon. - Fri., 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. The fee, including lunch and snack, is $77 per week for Berkeley residents. Applications available at the Camps Office, 2016 Center St. 981-5150. 

Echo Lake Youth Camp for ages 6 - 12 at Echo Lake, near South Lake Tahoe. One week sessions are offered through August 22. Cost is $235 per session. For registration information please visit the Camps Office at 2016 Center St., or call 981-5150. 

Free Energy Conservation Retrofits for Berkeley Residents CA Youth Energy Services is a nonprofit sponsored by the City of Berkeley that trains and employs high school students to provide conservation retrofits. Work includes weatherstripping, replacing lightbulbs with CFLs, cleaning refrigerator coils, replacing faucet aerators and showerheads with low-flow devices, installing earthquake preparedness measures, and a comprehensive audit. Available to home owners and renters. Call for an appointment, 428-2357. 

The Bay Area Shakespeare Camp for children 7-13 years of age covering casting, staging, costuming, and performing, in a series of five, 2-week sessions ending August 22. Sponsored by the Bay Area Shakespeare Camp and the Oakland East Bay Shakespeare Festival, in cooperation with the City of Berkeley Parks Recreation & Waterfront Dept. Camp will be held at John Hinkel Park, Southampton Pl. at Arlington Ave. The cost is $340 per session. Scholarships are available for eligible participants in Berkeley Recreation Programs. Call 981-5150 for scholarship details. To register for the camp, or for more information, please call 415-422-2222, or 800-978-PLAY. 

National HIV Testing Month The City of Berkeley offers free HIV testing. Drop in Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. and Wednesdays 6 to 8:30 p.m., during July, at 830 University Ave. at 6th St. For other days and times call the HIV Testing Information Line at 981-5380.  

CITY MEETINGS 

Civic Arts Commission meets Wednesday, July 23, at 6:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Mary Ann Merker, 981-7533. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/civicarts 

Disaster Council meets Wednesday, July 23, at 7 p.m., at the Emergency Operations Center, 997 Cedar St. Carol Lopes, 981-5514. www.ci.berkeley.ca. us/commissions/disaster 

Energy Commission meets Wednesday, July 23, at 6:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Neal De Snoo, 981-5434. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/energy/default.htm  

Mental Health Commission meets Wednesday, July 23, at 6:30 p.m., at 2640 Martin Luther King, Jr. Way. Harvey Turek, 981-5213. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/mentalhealth  

Planning Commission meets Wednesday, July 23, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Ruth Grimes, 981-7481. www.ci.berkeley. ca.us/commissions/planning 

Police Review Commission meets Wednesday, July 23, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Barbara Attard, 981-4950. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/policereview 

West Berkeley Project Area Commission meets Thursday, July 24, at 7 p.m., at 1900 Sixth St. Iris Starr, 981-7520. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/westberkeley  

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thursday, July 24, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. Mark Rhoades, 981-7410. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/zoning  


Kenney Cottage Serves as Rare Example Of Early Prefabricated Architecture

By SUSAN CERNY
Friday July 18, 2003

Before Berkeley became a fully built city and empty lots were plentiful, moving buildings from one place to another was common. Although houses were moved off University Avenue to nearby residential areas when University Avenue changed to a more commercial thoroughfare, a few residential buildings have survived this transformation. 

The recently demolished Doyle House, 1892, was one of these. Another residential building which has survived, although not in as good or even habitable condition as the Doyle House had been, is the Elizabeth M. Kenney-Meinheit Cottage. Despite its small size and humble condition, the cottage has interesting and significant historic connections. 

The Kenney-Meinheit Cottage was originally located at 2214 Addison St., east of Shattuck Avenue and next to Berkeley’s first volunteer fire department. The cottage was built in 1887 for Elizabeth M. Kenney, who operated a stationery store in the Southern Pacific Railroad Depot at Center and Shattuck. She and members of her family, including a nephew, James Kenney, who would become Berkeley’s first fire chief, lived in the cottage until 1898 when it was sold to Ludwig Meinheit.  

In 1906 Meinheit moved the cottage from the downtown to what was then a more quiet neighborhood on University Avenue. The Meinheit family, whose son William became a firefighter under James Kenney, owned the cottage until the early 1960s.  

Sometime in the early 1970s the former Kelly Moore Paint Company building was constructed in front of the cottage and the cottage, at the rear of the lot, was adapted as a separate storage structure and essentially treated as a shed.  

When a demolition permit application was reviewed by the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2001, Jill Korte, a member of the commission, determined that the seemingly unimportant storage shed was a rare example of an early prefabricated building system designed and manufactured by William H. Wrigley in Ocean View (now West Berkeley).  

Wrigley’s method of prefabricated construction was patented on Dec. 13, 1881, as a “Portable House.” Drawings and written explanation describe the modular system of upright posts grooved to hold vertical wall boards (panels). This created a double wall system that could be assembled off site. The Kenney-Meinheit House has no nails and is entirely built of redwood.  

Of the five known “Portable Houses” constructed in Berkeley only the Kenney-Meinheit Cottage still stands. However, a shipment of Wrigley’s “Portable Houses” were sent to Australia, so there may be some still standing there. 

Sometime in the next few weeks the Kenney Cottage will be moved again. Instead of being demolished, this example of perhaps the earliest prefabricated house in the country will be temporarily relocated (thanks to Director of Public Works René Cardineaux) to 1275 University Ave. on a small piece of city-owned land.  

Susan Dinkelspiel Cerny writes this in conjunction with the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association.


Fixing What’s Not Broke

Becky O’Malley
Friday July 18, 2003

The Feb. 20 press release just about said it all in the headline: “Mayor Tom Bates Launches Task Force to Fix Berkeley’s Broken Development Process.” But just to make sure we got the point, the subhead referred to “Berkeley’s dysfunctional process for approving building permits.” And then, in the body of the press release, “Developers, neighborhood preservationists, and city staff all agree that our permitting process is broken.” Anyone who still didn’t get it was invited to click over to a fact sheet, which told them that “it is generally agreed that the permitting process in the city of Berkeley is cumbersome, unclear, lengthy and often unfair to all those involved.” 

Yes indeed. It’s pretty clear that in February the mayor and his advisers thought that enough permits weren’t being granted and enough buildings weren’t being built in Berkeley. There’s only one problem with that analysis: it was data-free. Despite all the rhetoric, no real evidence was offered to support the conclusion that anything was broken. And obviously, the movers and shakers had never heard the old business saw “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” 

We have some facts now. The Planet commissioned Rob Wrenn to collect and analyze the city’s own data about how much development has been happening in Berkeley, and it is clear that a lot of development has been moving very quickly indeed through the pipeline. His study showed that developers usually get all or most of the special exceptions to the city’s standards which they demand. Close to 1,000 small apartments have been built recently or will be built soon. Only two big projects have been turned down, and one of the two is still in the works. 

Meanwhile, back at City Hall, the mayor’s Task Force on Permitting and Development has been slogging away at the task of fixing what’s not broken. The February press release said that “the task force has been directed to report back with specific recommendations … no later than four months from the date of its first meeting.” June 27 has come and gone, but the task force has barely started their discussion of large-scale development. The last meeting, on July 11, devoted just under an hour to the topic, but that’s about it. A great proportion of the nine previous sessions covered pressing matters like views, hot tubs and fences, which are more interesting to residents of single-family houses in the hills than to flatland neighbors immediately impacted by the buildings which some call BUBs, or Big Ugly Boxes. Citizens who have actually experienced the effects of BUBs on their blocks were not appointed to the task force, which is dominated by developers, builders, real estate agents, planners and politicians. 

One big problem jumps out of the statistics in the Wrenn report. The mix is all wrong. The BUBs contain too many expensive, tiny units appropriate only for well-off students and other young singles, and almost no housing for family groups. Only four units have more than two bedrooms. Even the “disabled” units in many cases are poorly designed, too cramped for someone who has both a large wheelchair and a sleep-over attendant. And we’re not building nearly enough affordable units of any size, if we want to maintain the diversity that has made Berkeley an interesting place to live. 

Meanwhile, demand for “market rate” apartments has been dropping. A study by RealFacts, a real estate market researcher, as reported in Thursday’s San Francisco Chronicle, says that rents in Alameda County have dropped by 4.8 percent. Some BUBs have big for-rent banners. It looks like we’ve built too much of the wrong thing too fast. 

Mayor Bates made a cameo appearance at the July 11 meeting. His contribution was that he thinks the city needs to develop a method for selling more units as condominiums. That’s the bailout for landlords when there’s a glut of over-built market rate rentals, for sure, but cracker-box condos don’t work for families. And condominiums are a notoriously poor investment for buyers. 

The Aug. 1 meeting is the last chance for the task force to try to grapple with the real problems of Berkeley’s development. People who care about the future of Berkeley should try to be there to tell the task force in person what’s really wrong, and how it should actually be fixed. (That’s Friday, Aug. 1, sixth floor of City Hall, 8:30 a.m.) 

During August the task force chair, Realtor Laurie Capitelli, will be drafting a report for review by the group in September. Citizens will still be able to comment in writing. The pages of the Planet are open for your letters and commentary. 

 

Becky O’Malley is executive editor of the Planet.


Arts Calendar

Friday July 18, 2003

FRIDAY, JULY 18 

CHILDREN 

Farm Friends Storytime at 10:30 a.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

FILM 

“Down by Law” with Tom Waits in a noir comedy, directed by Jim Jarmusch, at 8:30 p.m. at the Long Haul, a reading room, library and community center in South Berkeley at 3124 Shattuck Ave. Wheelchair accessible. Free. 540-0751. www.thelonghaul.org 

Restoration Pleasures: “La Maison du Mystère” Episodes 1-3 at 7:30 p.m., with Joel Adlen on piano, at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Flash at Cody’s with Alicia Suskin Ostriker and Jenny Factor at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Early Music Concert with period instruments. Works by J.S. Bach including Cantata BWV 210, “O, holder Tag, erwünsche Zeit,” performed by the Corde- 

lia Ensemble directed by Trevor Stephenson. Isabelle Metwalli, soprano and Trevor Stephenson, harpsicord. At 8 p.m. at Zion Lutheran Church, 5201 Park Blvd., Oakland. Suggested donation $10. 547-7974. 

Earl Zero, Soul Majestic and Prince Rastan present a night of classic Roots Reggae at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Quijerema, new Latin Ameri- 

cana music at 8 p.m., at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Norton Buffalo, harmonica and acoustic trio, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761.  

www.freightandsalvage.org 

Mark Hummel and the Blues Survivors perfrom Chicago style blues at 8 p.m. at the Jazz- 

school. Cost is $10-$15. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Adrian’s Music Salon, with the Alexis Harte Band and special guest Katherine Chase, perform folk and pop at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Suggested donation $6-$10 sliding scale. 649-8744.  

www.thejazzhouse.org 

Majority Rule, Del Cielo, Dear Diary I Seem to be Dead, Promise, and Takaru perform at 8 p.m. at 924 Gil- 

man St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5, $1 if wearing prom clothes! 525-9926. 

Paul Cebar and the Milwaukeeans and Amelia perform at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Michael Bluestein Trio at 9:30 p.m. at Downtown, 2102 Shattuck Ave. 649-3810. 

Double Felix, BRAY, and Human Z perform at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $6. 848-0886.  

www.blakesontelegraph.com 

SATURDAY, JULY 19 

CHILDREN 

Kids on the Block Puppet Show, promoting acceptance and understanding of physical and cultural differences at 2 p.m. at the Hall of Health, 2230 Shattuck Ave., lower level. Sug- 

gested donation $3. Children under 3 free. 549-1564. 

Folktales and Crafts at 11 a.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

FILM 

Restoration Pleasures: “La Maison du Mystère” Episodes 4-7 at 7:30 p.m., with Joel Adlen on piano, at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Berkeley Arts Center Poetry Ensemble presents a Poetry Reading featuring James Schevill with Luis Garcia and Richard Denner. Reception and refreshments at 6:30 p.m., readings at 7 p.m., at the Berkeley Art Center. 644-6893. 

Poetry Flash at Cody’s with Joseph Di Prisco and Brian Young at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

African Drum Workshop with Wade Peterson. Beginners from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., experienced from 12:30 to 2 p.m., at The Jazz House. Cost is $15-$25, and advanced registration is encouraged. 533-5111.  

Elvis Costello and the Imposters at 8 p.m. at the Greek Theatre. 642-0212. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu  

Emeryville Taiko and Zan- 

Zylum Jazz Group at 8 p.m. at the Emeryville Taiko Dojo, 1601A 63rd St. Cost is $10. 655-6392. 

José Roberto Hernández presents Fiesta y Color de Latinoamérica at 8:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

City Folk, contemporary folk trio, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Rube Waddell and Go Van Gogh perform at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082.  

www.starryploughpub.com 

Jolie Holland, Sean Hayes, and Sam Edson, perform American country folk at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Suggested donation is $6 to $10 sliding scale. 649-8744.  

www.thejazzhouse.org 

Coto and Friends perform jazz and Afro-Cuban music at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Tickets are $10-$12. 845-5373.  

www.jazzschool.com 

Faraway Brothers, P-Funk Allstars, Dr. Masseuse, and The Spindles perform at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $6. 848-0866. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Native Elements, Warsaw Poland Brothers and Shrinkage at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10 in advance, $12 at the door. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Spencer Day at 9:30 p.m. at Downtown, 2102 Shattuck Ave. 649-3810. 

Born/Dead, Conga Fury, Chainsaw, Voetsek, Case of Emergency, Doppelganger perform at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, JULY 20 

FILM 

“Animal Crackers,” filmed and produced by Berkeley artist Kamala Appel, explores the factual and fantasy lives of Bay Area wildlife. Premieres at 3 p.m. at the Parkway Theater, 1834 Park Blvd., Oakland. Tickets are $5 at the door. For more information go to www.picturepubpizza.com 

Restoration Pleasures: “Sunrise” at 5:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Guided Tour of “Paul Kos: Everything Matters” at 2 p.m. at The Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu  

Zadie Smith introduces her new novel, “The Autograph Man,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

www.codysbooks.com 

Robert A. Rosenstone reads from “King of Odessa: A Novel of Isaac Babel,” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Cafe Belle: Open Stage Bellydance, featuring dancers from several Bay Area companies and schools, at 7:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $9. Fundraiser for Women’s Refuge of Berkeley for survivors of domestic violence. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Sally Light, lyric soprano, in a benefit concert for the Morde- 

chai Vanunu Campaign, at 3 p.m. at the Unitarian Fellowship Hall, corner of Cedar and Bonita. $10-$20 donation requested. 548-3048. 

Dan Joseph and John Ingle Duo, plus Christopher Williams, perform as part of the ACME Contemporary Composer’s Series at 8:15 p.m. at The Jazz House. Donations accepted. 649-8744.  

www.thejazzhouse.org 

Echo, Realistic perform at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $5. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Three Guitars, with Steve Erquiaga, Mimi Fox and Brian Pardo perform at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10-$15. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Faruk and Ali Sinan Erdemesel with Husmu Tusuz, Turkish Sufi and Gypsy music at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-176.  

www.freightandsalvage.org 

MONDAY, JULY 21 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Cynthia Lee, Professor of Law at George Washington University, will discuss “Murder and the Reasonable Man: Passion and Fear in the Criminal Courtroom,” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

James Gleick discusses his bio- 

graphy, “Isaac Newton,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Great Books Group meets at 7 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

Poetry Express, featuring Nathan from Berkeley Poetry Slam, from 7 to 9:30 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Beolach, traditional Cape Breton music at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-176.  

www.freightandsalvage.org 

Shaman Trance Dance with DJ Amar and Isis Rising at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $6. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

TUESDAY, JULY 22 

FILM 

Sarunas Bartas: “The House” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Berkeley Summer Poetry, with Sherilyn Connelly from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Mediterranean Café, 2475 Telegraph Ave. Free, open mic, poetry, prose, short fiction, amateur and advanced artists welcome. 549-1128. 

Jeff Tamarkin describes “Got a Revolution! The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Cajun Coyotes performs traditional Cajun music at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson with Patti Whitehurst at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Mimi Fox, solo guitar at 8 p.m. at Downtown, 2102 Shattuck Ave. 649-3810. 

WEDNESDAY, JULY 23 

FILM 

Excess of Evil: “Simon of the Desert” and “The Lash of the Penitentes” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Eddy Joe Cotton describes his life riding the trains across the country in “Hobo: A Young Man’s Thoughts on Trains and Tramping Across America,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with host Charles Ellik at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7, $5 with student i.d. 841-2082. www.starryplough.com 

Café Poetry and Open Mic hosted by Paradise at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Donation requested. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Open Mic Poetry with Kathryn Waddell, Kevin Johnson, Deborah Day, Charles E. Patterson, and Steven Kopel at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

Candles in the Dark: Poetry and Preaching in Wartime Reading and discussion with Dr. David Randolph, Kirk Lumpkin and David Madgalene from 10 am to noon at Pacific School of Religion, Lower Chapel, 1798 Scenic Ave. Free and open to the public. For information davidjrandolph@aol.com  

 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Chris Chandler and Anne Feeney, a collage of folk, poetry and politics, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee  

House. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761 www.freightandsalvage.org 

Balkan Cabaret performs traditional dance music from the cafés of Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia and Croatia at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Jules Broussard and Ned Boynton at 8 p.m. at Downtown, 2102 Shattuck Ave. 649-3810. 

Wits End, Riddled with Guilt, Jynx, And Ever perform at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Tele- 

graph. Cost is $6. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

THURSDAY, JULY 24 

FILM 

Restoration Pleasures: “La Maison du Mystère” Episodes 8-10 at 7:30 p.m., with Joel Adlen on piano, at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Macromatrix” Curator’s talk with Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson at 12:15 p.m. at The Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

Olympia Dukakis presents her autobiography “Ask Me Again Tomorrow”at 12:30 p.m. at The Berkeley Repertory Theater, Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St. Co-sponsored by Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Barbara Gates describes “Already Home: A Topography of Spirit and Place” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books, 1730 Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com 

Harlyn Aizley discusses her memoir, “Buying Dad: One Woman’s Search for the Perfect Sperm Donor,” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Rupert Isaacson discusses his new book “The Healing Land: The Bushmen and the Kalahari Desert,” at 7:30 p.m. at Easy Going Travel Shop and Bookstore, 1385 Shattuck Ave. at Rose. 843-3533.  

www.easygoing.com 

Haven Logan discusses the emotional blocks to physical health in her new book, “Cho- 

osing to be Well,” at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Summer Noon Concert Downtown with Upside Down and Backwards, harmonica and guitar, at the Berkeley BART Station. Seating available. Sponsored by the Downtown Berkeley Association. 549-2230. 

Negritude 2: Bahia Bacheche, an evening of music and dance from the African Diaspora, at 8 p.m. at the Black Repertory  

Theater, 3201 Adeline St. Tickets are $15 in advance, $20 at the door. 597-9806. 

Belshazzar’s Feast performs for a Ceilidh dance at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Beam, Liz Pisco and The Welcome Matt perform at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Mike Greensill, jazz pianist, performs at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Eileen Hazel, Helen Chaya, Jamie Isman, acoustic folk at 8 p.m. at the Tea House, 1923 Ashby Ave. $10 suggested donation, with no one turned away for lack of funds. 644-2204. www.folkdiva.com  

Keni el Lebrijano, flamenco guitar, at 8 p.m. at Downtown, 2102 Shattuck Ave. 649-3810. 

AT THE THEATER 

 

Aurora Theater Company, “Thérèse Raquin,” by Emile Zola, directed by Tom Ross. A sinister tale set among the  

lower classes in nineteenth- 

century Parisian society. Runs through July 27, at 2081 Addison St. Tickets are $32 and $34. 843-4822.  

www.auroratheatre.org 

Berkeley Opera, “Faust,” by Gounod, Jonathan Khuner music director, Ann Woodhead, stage director. July 18, 19, 25, and 26 at 8 p.m., July 20 and 27 at 2 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Theater. Tickets are $38 adults, $33 seniors, $16 children, $10 students and are available from 925-798-1300. 

www.juliamorgan.org 

California Shakespeare Festival runs through October 22. Performances this year will be Julius Caesar, Arms and the Man, Measure for Measure, and Much Ado About Nothing. Please call for dates and times. The Bruns Amphitheater, Orinda. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org  

Central Works Theater Ensemble, “The Wyrd Sisters” directed by Jan Zvaifler. Through July 27, Thurs. - Sat. at 8 p.m. and Sun. at 5 p.m. No performance July 24. At the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Tickets are $8-$20 sliding scale. For reservations call 558-1381. 

foolsFury, “Attempts on her Life,” by Martin Crimp, directed by Ben Yalom, July 18 and 19 at 8 p.m. at LaVal’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid at Hearst. Tickets are $20 general, $15 students, seniors. 1-866-GOT-FURY. www.foolsfury.org 

Woman’s Will Shakespeare Company, “The Rover,” a restoration comedy by Aphra Behn. July 19 and 20 in Live Oak Park. All performances are at 1 p.m. and are free. 420-0813. www.womanswill.org 


La Peña Founder Leaves a Cultural Legacy

By MEGAN GREENWELL
Friday July 18, 2003

When Hugo Brenni helped create La Peña Café in 1973, he intended it to be a small, local restaurant and performance space. Thirty years later, the retiring Brenni leaves behind a cultural center that has become a Bay Area landmark. 

La Peña, which means gathering place in Spanish, began as an idea to create a multicultural performing arts space that would allow artists and visitors to come together to exchange ideas and share in one another’s heritage. Brenni played a key part in the planning process, then took on the role of head chef once La Peña opened in its current Shattuck Avenue location, specializing in food from his native Chile. 

Brenni explained that the tradition of holding peñas began in Chile and Latin America, where villagers built temporary huts to create a community space to celebrate holidays. As larger cities grew up around what were once small villages, people retained the peñas to hold on to their traditional identity. The music and poetry that came out of such peñas mixed people’s cultural background with the new social dynamics of the big cities. But Brenni said that finding an available building in the East Bay that would meet the group’s needs was not as easy as organizers had hoped. 

“We had looked at three or four places that we couldn’t afford,” he recalled. “We were holding a benefit at the Starry Plough, and when we came out that night I saw the ‘For Rent’ sign on the space next door. The rent was cheap, so we began renting it and then bought it later.” 

Since La Peña moved into that empty space in 1975, it has become a popular cultural center where visitors can hear traditional Latin-America performers, many of whom infuse their work with commentaries on modern-day social and political situations. 

“What I think is that you can’t run a business without politics,” Brenni said. “Everything—the performances, the management, the restaurant must be tied in to politics. You can’t isolate a business from the world outside.” 

As such, La Peña has always been known as a politically charged hotspot of conversation and political messages. Photographs and paintings of radical leaders line the walls, and the brightly colored mural on the facade of the cultural center features a representation of Victor Jara, a Chilean musician who was murdered by the army serving under the dictator Augusto Pinochet. 

Like many of the artists who regularly perform at La Peña do through their work, Brenni expresses his heritage through his food. 

“I love to cook,” he said. “I love to serve people the food that they eat when they are listening to music or poetry.” 

Fittingly, Brenni did the cooking for his own farewell party, which was held Tuesday night at La Peña. Community members crowded into the space to present tributes to the driving force behind the center’s landmark status, and the newly created La Peña Community Hall of Fame inducted Brenni as its first member. Brenni said he’s much more comfortable in the kitchen, behind the scenes, than he is as the subject of so many accolades. 

“It is not about the rewards,” he said. “I have learned so much from the people I have been around. That’s the biggest loss for me, is all the people that have taught me what I know.” 

Now that he’s retired, Brenni is preparing to move back to Chile with his wife, Wanda. He sold his house on Wednesday, and will leave the United States in late August. 

But although he is retiring, Brenni’s future plans do not include a slower lifestyle. He will spend the first several months building his own house, then will look to get involved in the community much as he has done in Berkeley. Brenni and his best friend own a piece of land, on which they are considering building a cultural center similar to La Peña. 

“But no restaurants,” Brenni laughed. “No business. I’m going to have fun.” 

Meanwhile, La Peña will continue on without the man who created it, bringing in a new generation of staff members to further the center’s goal of combining people’s cultural heritage with modern social situations and ideals.  

“We need new people,” he said. “I’ve gotten old. They’re going to make it even better.” 

 

 

 

 


Letters to the Editor

Friday July 18, 2003

EAST TIMOR 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Two points in the front page story “Journalist Held in Indonesia” (July 11-14 edition) bear correcting. Paul Kilduff referred to “East Timor’s recent successful battle for independence.” That point of view is a familiar one in our time, when people take armed conflict for granted. However, in the case of East Timor, the people on that remote eastern tip of the Indonesian archipelago did not have to battle for their independence. In 1975, they had been granted independent status by the United Nations, in a decision agreed to by all the member states of the UN.  

Unfortunately, Indonesia moved in and incorporated East Timor as part of Indonesia. That status, another all too familiar instance of Might Makes Right, continued until 1999, when a free and fair election was held and the people of East Timor voted for independence. All that occurred without violence.  

Immediately after the vote, however, the Indonesian military slaughtered and forcibly expelled hundreds of thousands of East Timorese and destroyed virtually every building in the capital city of Dili. So even then there was no battle for independence. The UN successfully administered all aspects of reconstruction in East Timor for more than two years and assisted in setting up trials for the criminal acts of the Indonesian military. 

The second point is that the Free Aceh Movement is GAM, not GAB. 

Rita Maran, Ph.D. 

Lecturer, UC Berkeley 

President, United Nations Association—USA East Bay 

 

• 

ON THE BALLOT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

If the recall ballot gives us little choice other than Davis, Simon, Schwarzenegger or Issa, then I’m writing in “NOTA”—None Of The Above. If NOTA wins, then a new election must be held with different candidates. 

Bruce Joffe 

Piedmont 

 

• 

SAVE STRAWBERRY CANYON 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Please fight to save Strawberry Canyon from the planned overuse of this magnificent canyon by the university and LBNL. As longtime residents of Berkeley, we have many times gone for walks in the Berkeley Hills and enjoyed the riparian atmosphere of that whole region. It would be a shame to see it lost. Also, the destruction of habitat for the abundant wildlife in the creek area would be unforgivable.  

Please do whatever you can to save this beautiful resource.  

Stephanie Manning 

 

• 

STOP MEDI-CAL CUTS 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

As a family member who has a loved one in a nursing home, I feel the proposed 15 percent Medi-cal cuts will not only hurt nursing homes, but will also affect family stability on a daily basis, families who are already dealing with the emotional aspect of having their loved ones in a home. This cut will not only affect Medi-cal recepients, but also non-Medi-cal patients.  

Please spread the word and contact your district assemblymen. This issue is vital and will be devastating to the most in need in our society.  

You may even suggest to those representatives in Sacramento who support the 15 percent budget cuts to visit a nursing facility for eight hours, to observe the 24-hour staff working to meet the needs of loved ones and then to face the true reality of life on the other side.  

JohannaTurley  

Family Council Chairperson  

Berkeley Pines Care Center  

 

• 

CULTURAL CENTER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

My response to the writer who said that the Bolshoi Ballet, the New York City Ballet, and Yo Yo Ma would not have appeared in Bloomington, Ind.: I hate to burst your bubble, but they have indeed appeared in Bloomington. This year’s Bloomington schedule includes the Twyla Tharp Dance troupe and other performances too numerous to mention, including opera and jazz productions at Indiana University’s world-class School of Music.  

I agree, however, with Editor O’Malley’s point—that touring and university productions do not a great cultural center make. 

Carol Polsgrove 

Bloomington, Ind. 

 

• 

RESPECT CREEK ORDINANCE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The following letter was addressed to Jeff Philliber, environmental planning coordinator, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: 

We are writing to express our strong opposition to the proposed project that will result in the filling of a portion of Cafeteria Creek, a tributary of Strawberry Creek. Filling of creeks to minimize construction costs and building parking lots in creeks are completely unacceptable in the year 2003. The city of Berkeley has a creek protection ordinance that is intended to protect the creeks in the city of Berkeley. Even if not bound legally by the ordinance, we expect that the University of California would want to be a respectful “resident” of the city by complying with the letter and spirit of the creek ordinance. We are dismayed that the university would even conceive of such a project.  

We strongly encourage Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) to select an alternative that does not involve the destruction of a hillside and a creek. Other sites/existing buildings within LBNL, on the UC Berkeley campus, or in the city of Berkeley may be more easily used (and will be less environmentally destructive) for the additional office space identified as needed by LBNL. Your proposal does not present any more compelling rationale for the proposed project than cost and convenience. Such arguments are no longer an adequate basis for the destruction of natural habitat areas. The need to dispose of 26,000 cubic yards of hillside in the cheapest, easiest way is no longer adequate rationale for filling wetlands.  

Please rethink your proposal and abandon the preferred alternative. Your proposal is not the least environmentally damaging alternative and flies in the face of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). We hope you will rethink this project and choose an environmentally acceptable alternative.  

Strawberry Creek Affinity Group 

Fran Berges, Jane Eiseley, Nina Falk, Jane Kelly, Tom Kelly, Christopher Kroll, Bob Marsh, Patti Marsh, Fran Rachel, Eric Roberts, Carol Thornton, Christine Walter 

 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

There are four letters that describe Howard Dean’s conduct during the great moral challenges of our generation: A.W.O.L.  

He was born to privilege and received the fine education and other advantages that family wealth brings. Yet he absented himself from the great struggles for peace and justice that engaged the real leaders of our time. 

Howard Dean was nowhere to be found when others were putting themselves on the line to end the war in Vietnam, dismantle the apparatus of racial bigotry and fight the encroachment of corporate power and corruption. 

Dean has spent his life in a conventional, comfortable niche that required neither courage nor sacrifice. Now he advertises himself as a person of unusual vision and rectitude. The substance of his past and present actions suggests otherwise. 

As Vermont’s governor, he collaborated with Republicans to loosen environmental regulations and tighten social expenditures, turning his back on Greens and progressive Democrats. He pressured state monitoring agencies to rush approval of massive developments. One of his last acts in office was to reduce Vermont’s education budget. 

His fiscal austerity short-changes the public sector. It is a favorite of Wall Street bankers, but a bane to everyone else—workers, consumers, seniors, students, those protected by police, health and fire departments—whose well-being depends upon adequate public spending. He continues to preach this balanced budget dogma in the current recession, when deficit spending by the federal government is needed to lift the economy from its slump. 

He opposes cuts in military expenditures despite posturing as the peace candidate. He does not distinguish funding for counter-terrorism (a relatively inexpensive item) from bloated spending on weapons systems. 

He refuses to take on health insurance companies, even though their greed increases the cost and threatens the quality and integrity of American medical care. In drafting his health care proposal, he rejected the fairness, simplicity and efficiency of  

the Canadian single-payer model. His plan keeps intact the power of private insurers, and requires moderate-income participants to pay high premiums and deductibles. 

He favors erosion of the most important federal benefits for the elderly. He has stated his willingness to limit Medicare spending and raise the age at which workers become entitled to Social Security. 

He supported NAFTA, which undermines labor, safety and environmental standards throughout North America. He currently proposes tepid reforms to somewhat moderate the misery from global corporate dominance. 

He shies away from demanding that America’s wealthiest 1 or 2 percent give up a greater portion of their wealth to properly fund programs and institutions that could make possible a more secure and decent life for us all. 

Howard Dean does not deserve to be hailed as the best hope of American progressives for one simple reason: he is no progressive. He is an astute political operator. But his opportunism should be recognized and treated with appropriate mistrust. 

Randy Silverman


UC Regents Raise Fees 25 Percent

By DAVID SCHARFENBERG
Friday July 18, 2003

Mo Kashmiri, a third-year student at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law, may not be returning to school next month. 

Kashmiri said the 25 percent student fee hikes approved by the UC Board of Regents Thursday, which will hike his tuition by over $3,000, could force him to drop out of school for a semester and work. 

“I think it’s bullshit that students and families need to be in this situation,” Kashmiri said. 

“These cuts couldn’t be coming at a worse time,” he said. “With the economy going down, my father has been unemployed for two years.” 

UC students are not alone in their financial woes. Trustees of the California State University system, facing heavy state cuts like their UC counterparts, voted 11-2 Wednesday to increase fees by 30 percent next year. 

The UC Board of Regents Finance Committee voted 5-4 Wednesday morning to recommend a 25 percent fee hike and the full board approved the jump Thursday on a 13-3 vote. 

The Regents, in a lengthy debate on the matter Wednesday morning, acknowledged the pain the increase will cause. But most said the jump was unavoidable, with the governor proposing $300 million in cuts to the university and the legislature weighing additional reductions of $80 to $400 million. 

“We are facing a crisis situation and that we cannot deny,” said Regent Sherry Lansing. “I don’t know of any alternative.” 

Proponents argued that the university could not maintain its quality without a significant fee hike. But not all the Regents agreed. 

“What good is the quality if we’re closing people out?” asked Regent Ward Connerly. 

A parade of students echoed Connerly in the public testimony session, warning that fee hikes will force some students out of school and compel others to spend more time at part-time jobs. 

The 25 percent jump will raise fees by $960 for resident undergraduates, bringing mandatory system-wide fees to $4,794. Each of UC’s nine campuses charges additional miscellaneous fees, which bring the total average fees to $5,247 system-wide.  

Graduate students face average fees of $6,346 and law students will get bills for $15,966. 

The increase comes on top of a mid-year fee hike passed in December — bringing the total increase over the course of two years to almost 40 percent. 

Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, who serves on the Board of Regents, scolded the body for considering the jump. 

“No other group in the state of California is facing a 40 percent increase in fees,” he said. “It’s unacceptable.”  

Students could face an even steeper increase in the coming weeks. The Board of Regents gave the UC administration the authority to hike fees an additional 5 percent if the state budget picture worsens, as expected. 

UC’s Vice President for Budget Larry Hershman warned that the budget picture will only get worse in the next two years and predicted further jumps in student fees. 

“This isn’t the end of budget cutting,” he said. 

But university administrators are considering more than just fee hikes. Two weeks ago, UC President Richard Atkinson floated the prospect of caps on student enrollment beginning with the 2004-2005 school year. On Wednesday, university officials raised the prospect of a surcharge on wealthy families. The university would become the first in the nation to charge high-income families more for an education if it adopts the policy. 

Financial aid will cover the fee hikes approved Thursday for students from families making $60,000 or less per year. Hershman said about 40 percent of families in the middle-income range — making $60,000 to $90,000 annually — will get grants to cover half the fee increase. 

Student Regent Matt Murray, who attends UC Berkeley, spoke out against the Regents’ decision to embrace fee hikes. But ultimately, he blamed the state legislature for considering deep cuts rather than raising taxes. 

“We’ll have to drop out of school so that the richest of the rich can buy another Mercedes-Benz,” he said.


Salary Hikes for City Staff Must Wait for Better Times

By BARBARA GILBERT
Friday July 18, 2003

Let me state at the outset that I am a strong supporter of the comprehensive employment benefit packages espoused by labor unions, progressive employers and proponents of the Western European style welfare state. 

These comprehensive employment packages consist of almost total job security, generous defined-benefit pension plans, regular CPI adjustments, employer-paid health insurance that extends beyond retirement, liberal disability and workplace injury policies, liberal leave policies for pregnancy, sick relative care, and the like, domestic partner benefits and many other job-related perks. 

City of Berkeley employees, while they will never get really rich on the job, enjoy all or most of these benefits—decent salaries, tremendous job security, peace of mind in their old age and fair working conditions. 

Around the world and in our own nation, employment situations like this are becoming rare. The famed welfare states of Sweden, Germany and France are failing because of economic downturns and demographic realities. There are simply not enough taxpayers and monies to support the generous benefit levels. In the United States, only about one in five workers has a defined benefit retirement plan, and fewer still have job security. 

Even with the program cuts, bureaucratic belt-tightening and fee and assessment increases that balanced the city’s 2003-2004 budget, the city still faces a $7.5 million deficit in fiscal year 2005-2006, $10.11 million in 2006-2007, $11.67 million in the next year, and $13.74 million in 2007-2008. 

Most (maybe 80 percent) of Berkeley’s projected budget deficits are attributable to salary/benefit increases negotiated last year by a generous council and community that was not fully aware of the looming economic crisis. These increases amount to about 6 to 7 percent annually, and compound over time. The logic of a CPI type-increase is to keep up with inflation. However, when there is deflation and economic recession, many of these increases make no sense.  

Unfortunately, city leaders have already embarked on plans to raise property-based taxes and assessments to address a goodly portion of this deficit. Berkeley’s property-based taxes, special assessments and fees are already the highest among neighboring jurisdictions—more than 10 percent higher than Oakland, more than 36 percent higher than Hayward and more than 41 percent higher than Emeryville.  

These are preliminary figures from a chart being prepared by the city manager, and it looks to me that the final figures will show that Berkeley is even more heavily assessed on a relative basis. 

I believe that our city leaders—city manager, City Council and union leaders—need to do the right thing and defer the generous but now inappropriate annual and compounding salary/benefit increase of around 6 percent. Such increases are right in good times, but wrong, wrong, wrong in a time of deflation and serious economic hardship faced by so many in our community. If these increases were deferred until better times, and a few other minor belt-tightening measures were undertaken, we could wipe out a goodly portion of our city deficit and avoid tax increases on an already overburdened and under-benefited taxpaying population.  

We would not have to fire one single person or decrease anyone’s salary or job security. We could save most of the worthy social programs of which our city is justly proud. This is the right thing and we should do the right thing! 

Barbara Gilbert, a longtime Berkeley resident and former mayoral aide, is a frequent contributor to the Planet.


Kenney Cottage to Move for Second Time

By MEGAN GREENWELL
Friday July 18, 2003

The historic Kenney Cottage will remain at 1725 University Ave. for at least a few more days. 

The cottage, which was designated a Structure of Merit by the Landmarks Preservation Commission last year, was originally scheduled to move five blocks down University Avenue on Sunday to make way for an affordable housing complex. But a permit application process that has taken longer than expected has postponed the relocation until the proper paperwork is in place. 

“The city will obviously grant [the permit] because they granted temporary space for the cottage,” said BAHA corporate secretary Daniella Thompson. “It’s just another bit of red tape that we have to go through.” 

When Affordable Housing Associates, Inc. (AHA) bought the former site of the Kelly Moore Paint store at 1725 University Ave. in 2000, they inherited the Kenney-Meinheit Cottage, a prefabricated panel house believed to be the oldest example of that type of construction in the United States. The cottage moved from Addison Street to the University Avenue site in 1906, where it sat behind a larger commercial building. 

Area historical activists rediscovered the cottage when AHA applied for a demolition permit to begin construction on the site, and the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA) filed an application to earn the cottage landmark status. The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the cottage—but not the site—as a historical landmark, meaning that AHA would be allowed to relocate but not demolish the house. 

“We had two options,” said AHA senior project manager Kevin Zwick, who is in charge of the proposed 27-unit affordable housing complex at 1725 University Ave. “We could dismantle, document and put the thing in storage or put it on a new site. We elected to move it to a temporary site until a more permanent site could be found.” 

Earlier this year, BAHA signed a contract with the city of Berkeley to become the temporary conservator of the Kenney Cottage and to assume responsibility for finding an interim location. BAHA found a suitable spot about five blocks west of the current site, at 1275 University Ave., and AHA took charge of securing approval for the move as well as providing necessary funding. Zwick said that AHA has paid about $30,000 to study the portability of the cottage, extensively document the construction and history and physically move the house from the old site to the temporary location. BAHA is currently working on finding a permanent spot for the cottage. 

Zwick said that AHA had hoped to receive the necessary permits to move the Kenney Cottage by July 20, but that soliciting necessary signatures had taken longer than anticipated. BAHA scheduled the relocation ceremony for Sunday and sent postcards to about 100 members inviting them to view the move and participate in the subsequent party at the new lot. On Tuesday, BAHA alerted members and area residents that the relocation had been postponed until further notice. Zwick said that AHA hoped to have all necessary paperwork on file with the city within a week or so. 

“The city of Berkeley has said that they are going to expedite the process as soon as a contractor can turn in the application,” he said. “It’s a long process that will probably end up taking a few more days.” 

Zwick said that AHA is interested in moving the cottage as soon as possible so the development company can begin construction on the housing development by September, calling the cottage relocation process “a major factor in the delay of the project.” AHA hopes to have the complex built by next year in order to house senior citizens and disadvantaged families. 

“It’s exciting that we can build this much-needed housing complex while preserving a historic landmark,” Zwick said. “This has been going on for about three years, and it’s very close to becoming a reality.”


Mime Troupe Show Lacks Vital Element: Politics

By ZELDA BRONSTEIN
Friday July 18, 2003

I’ve often thought that the easiest way of checking out the state of the American left is to go see the latest production of the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Last Saturday I caught the Troupe’s new show, “Veronique of the Mounties,” at Cedar-Rose Park. What this summer’s offering suggests, I’m sorry to say, is that these days the left and Mime Troupe alike are just going through the motions. 

To be sure, the Mime Troupe just going through the motions still affords considerable pleasure. Veronique serves up many of the company’s reliable crowd-pleasers: fine acting, cunning sight gags, eye-popping costumes, well-crafted songs and sets as wacky they are versatile. Most important, Veronique administers an ample dose of the Troupe’s signature razor-edged wit: a stream of zingy one-liners kept the crowd laughing. 

I laughed a lot, too, but by the end of the play I was too distressed to smile. For the Mime Troupe I cherish does far more than amuse; it also probes its audience’s most deeply held assumptions. Abandoning the smug pieties of standard issue agit-prop, it challenges us with riveting political theater peopled by complex characters who embody profound contradictions. 

Take the Willie Brown figure in the Troupe’s 1999 play, “City for Sale.” It would have been easy to portray Brown as a jerk pure and simple. Instead he, or more precisely, his female surrogate, is a (momentarily) rueful sell-out who confesses that “I wanted to be the people’s mayor, but then the party began.” Likewise, that same play’s representative yuppie comes across not merely as a self-absorbed agent of gentrifying consumerism, but also as a decent but naive young woman who’s never considered the full implications of her desire to own a loft in the Mission. 

Not that the Mime Troupe indulges in cop-out, post-modernist ambiguity. It’s clear that for all their complexities, some of the individuals in its imagined worlds are on the side of the angels, and others, such as Willie Brown, aren’t. What makes the Mime Troupe at its best worth our attention is that those characters who are on the side of the angels get the same treatment as those who’re not. In “City for Sale,” one of the most sympathetic figures, an aging hippy musician threatened with displacement by a heartless young developer, turns out to be that developer’s deadbeat dad. 

Not one of the characters in “Veronique of the Mounties” exhibits depth or interest comparable to “City for Sale’s” memorable creations. Here everyone is either a saint (the brave and selfless heroine, her intrepid and resourceful librarian-cum-bartender sidekick, the hapless Vietnam vet) or a sinner (Dick Cheney, Condaleeza Rice, authoritarian Homeland Security Forces, craven representatives of the media and Bible-thumping, gun-toting Christian fundamentalists). 

Veronique opens as the United States is “liberating” Canada in “Operation Frozen Freedom.” Fascism has come out of the closet: anyone who questions the Bush administration’s policies is sent off to “the camps.” Assigned to a secret mission in the United States, Canadian Mounty Veronique, we are told, has only one weakness: a hatred of America so visceral it repeatedly causes her to blow her cover. But since her animosity is directed at qualities the Mime Troupe’s audience also likely deplores—American militarism, consumerism, imperialism and other too-familiar iniquities—it doesn’t really count as a fault. A protagonist who simply mirrors her viewers’ proclivities is incapable of instructing them. For a company that specializes in didactic theater, that’s a problem. 

For a company like the Mime Troupe, which specializes in didactic political theater, Veronique has another problem: a dearth of real politics. The cast of characters includes only one activist, and she’s operating underground. Even more troubling, what ultimately saves the day is magic. I don’t want to give away too much; suffice to say that a tale in which the survival of freedom and democracy depends on a talisman is a tale born of political despair. It’s also a tale that cannot openly acknowledge the bleakness of its vision. If despair is where the Mime Troupe is at, then it ought to say so. Better a terrifying vision that might shake us into serious political action than a sentimental whitewash of impending disaster. 

Mime Troupe productions famously evolve over time. Let’s hope that Veronique morphs into a play that, in the spirit of the Troupe’s brilliant best, invites its most loyal fans to confront their own foibles and re-think their unconsidered pieties. At this moment, when we’re facing real, impending disasters, political and otherwise, we need a left that can face the music and, better yet, come up with some new and surprising tunes. 

Zelda Bronstein is a Berkeley writer whose work has appeared in Dissent, Film Quarterly and other publications. 


Albany Sculptor Brings Art Back to East Bay Shoreline

By MEGAN GREENWELL
Friday July 18, 2003

Pedestrians and bikers along the San Francisco Bay Trail in Emeryville will now be able to see an addition to the waterfront landscape: a dozen statues on posts three feet in the air. 

On Thursday afternoon, passersby along Interstate 80 in Emeryville could see Albany artist Tyler Hoare on a ladder propped up in a small boat, climbing to the top of posts that formerly held a wooden dock. Though the dock has been demolished and replaced, the posts remain, leaving Hoare platforms on which to place his newest series of statues. 

“[The posts] are perfect because they’re elevated and people can see them really nicely,” he said. 

The new works of art are all abstract sculptures of people in colors ranging from white to black to rainbow striped. The faces of the people look out on to the water, welcoming boaters returning to the East Bay. 

High winds made the task of mounting the statues a bit more difficult Thursday because of the relatively large waves that they created. But Hoare succeeded in climbing up his ladder to the top of each post, mounting a brightly colored creation on top of each and nailing it down with a hammer attached to his belt. 

“These winds are too strong,” he yelled back to the dock at one point, shortly before he made it to the top of the second-to-last pillar. 

Hoare is the same artist responsible for the Snoopy and Red Baron statues that stood in the Berkeley Marina from 1975 until 2000. Many residents and motorists grew to love the statues, which eventually came down because of high winds and were not replaced because of permitting issues. 

“I’ve seen the Snoopy statues, and so this is a fun little memory of them,” said Sam Chen, who took a break from jogging along the Bay Trail to watch Hoare mounting the sculptures. “I wish we had something like it still in Berkeley.”


YMCA Celebrates Anniversary

David Scharfenberg
Friday July 18, 2003

The Berkeley-Albany YMCA will celebrate its 100th anniversary with a YMCA Day in the Park Saturday. 

The free event, which will take place at Martin Luther King Jr. Park on Martin Luther King Jr. Way, includes music, food, a magic show and a blood drive by the American Red Cross. 

“The best way to recognize 100 years of programs, services and activities is with the community itself,” said Larry Bush, president and CEO for the Berkeley-Albany YMCA. 

The event will begin with a 7:30 a.m. yoga class, followed by an 8:45 a.m. Tai Chi course. The main festival will take place from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. 

Sponsors include KTVU, Channel 2, Wells Fargo Bank, Berkeley developer Panoramic Interests and Concord-based janitorial services company ConCar Industries.  

 

—David Scharfenberg


Keller Promises a Kinder, Gentler Times

By SHRIDAR PAPPU The New York Observer
Friday July 18, 2003

At 1 p.m. on July 14, Bill Keller stood before the top editors and managers of The New York Times in an 11th-floor dining room at the paper’s West 43rd Street headquarters. He was there, according to sources at the meeting, to offer an unvarnished version of the introduction he had given to staffers in the third-floor newsroom two hours earlier, when he was crowned the new executive editor of The New York Times. 

Like a latter-day Mikhail Gorbachev, charged with bringing reform and openness to the dark corridors of the Kremlin, Mr. Keller told them there would be no personal recriminations as a result of the previous scandal-rocked months at the paper under former executive editor Howell Raines, who was asked to resign when mounting trouble at the paper in the wake of the Jayson Blair affair threatened to swallow the paper’s leadership whole. He would not, he told his new subjects as they ate their lunches, “divide the paper into Friends of Howell and Friends of Bill.” 

He specifically rejected published reports that assistant managing editor Andrew Rosenthal was headed for career exile as punishment for being an ally of Mr. Raines and former managing editor Gerald Boyd during their tenure. He also rejected rumors about the existence of a list of “Howell hires” whose careers were now in dire straits. 

Looking at the group, according to sources present at the lunch, Mr. Keller said that he knew there were people in the room who had done “extraordinary work under extraordinary duress,” adding: “I admire people who can lead under duress.” 

In an interview, Mr. Keller declined to comment on his remarks. But, in a phrase, he articulated a connection to his staff that Mr. Raines could never accomplish. 

Of course, the newsroom was fresh from a slap in the face by its former boss—and some recriminations are different from others. 

In an interview on the Charlie Rose show three days before, Mr. Raines delivered a staunch, prideful defense of his tenure at The Times, in which he patted himself on the back for introducing a “performance culture” to a lackadaisical staff, only to be undermined in the schism created by those who clung to a parochial, New York–based Times folk culture. 

To many in the angered newsroom, the interview served as a moment of closure, a parting middle finger that summed up everything that had gone wrong within the paper since September 2001, and a reminder of why Mr. Raines could no longer be at the helm. Self-righteous, distant, admittedly arrogant and unapologetic for all of that, Mr. Raines had much to lose when the paper started to really fall apart—and a lot less to lose now. For Mr. Keller, there was an opportunity to draw the contrast brightly. 

“If—oh, hypothetically—somebody goes on television and trashes your staff, you stick up for them,” he said, speaking from his office on July 15, the same day The Times provided its own page 1 burial of its former leader in an article about the appointment. 

Though Mr. Keller said he didn’t “want to start off my new job with an argument with one of my predecessors,” he allowed that watching Mr. Raines’ interview had “dredged a lot” of the feelings about the former executive editor’s tenure to the surface. 

“The collateral damage, intentional or accidental, in all of the things that were said, were these people,” Mr. Keller said, gesturing metaphorically to his new staff. “You know, the notion that the people who knocked themselves out covering an endless scandal, an impeachment in Washington, an election, the Florida recount, a couple of Balkan wars that I remember—the notion that these people were in the least bit complacent or lethargic was insulting to a lot of first-class professionals.” 

And yet other, more recent stories hadn’t gone so well. Stories written by Jayson Blair, for instance, about the investigation into the Washington-area sniper attacks last fall; stories about military mothers waiting in vain for word on their missing sons. Stories by the celebrated Rick Bragg about oystermen in Apalachicola, Fla. Even a story by radio reporter Lynnette Holloway, which resulted that same day in a lengthy corrective article, about a music-industry executive and his efforts to stay on top of his business as an independent. 

Having, as he noted in his introductory remarks to the third-floor newsroom, developed a “perverse affection” for the phrase “no comment” over the past couple of months—roughly the time it became clear that he was a leading candidate to take the helm at the paper—Mr. Keller was now ready to speak out on the Blair affair and the toll it took on The Times. 

While saying he was waiting for the Siegal committee’s recommendations on how to prevent the Blair episode’s reoccurrence, Mr. Keller deemed Mr. Blair an aberration. He said that the case did, however, point up the basic vulnerability of the newspaper business, which places an implicit trust in reporters and their work. 

“Even after you’ve vetted somebody’s résumé, talked to their references, watched them during a trial period, looked over their accuracy records and so on,” Mr. Keller said, “it can still be not enough. You can do a lot of things to monitor somebody’s performance, but you basically trust them to do their job. We’re not going to start assigning minders to reporters or bug their phones. We’re not going to enact the Patriot Act at The New York Times. That would just be horrible! Who would want to work at a place like that?” 

Mr. Keller went on to call the actions of Mr. Bragg—Mr. Raines’ beloved star reporter, whose excessive use of stringers and subsequent claim that the practice was typical made him a pariah on 43rd Street—”outrageous.” 

“He didn’t just take something that everyone else does and push it a little further,” Mr. Keller said. “If anybody really had a sense of what he did, he would’ve been out of here in a heartbeat. The notion that these guys are somehow symptoms of how The Times did its work is ludicrous. So you don’t want to strip all the trust from the newsroom just because of a couple of rogues.” 

Watching Mr. Raines at a distance for nearly two years, Mr. Keller said, “confirmed my general sense that a centralized system that might work very well running an organization of 50 people doesn’t work that well when you have an organization of 1,200. And when you try and do that, you not only make people feel alienated and frustrated, you also cut yourself off from what really matters: the ideas that bubble up from below.” 

This was also his answer to the scandals that unseated Mr. Raines. The problem, to Mr. Keller, was not in the culture of The Times, but in the leadership of that culture. In short, these were aberrations—but there’s still “stuff” to do, some of which Mr. Keller began after he received a fairly undramatic congratulation from Mr. Sulzberger. 

“What kind of stuff? For starters, making my way around,” Mr. Keller said, adding that he was talking to “a lot of people whose judgment I respect” about “trying to do damage assessment, first of all. How wounded does the place seem now, after several weeks of Joe Lelyveld’s convalescence? Were there particular areas that will need particular attention? And started talking to people about putting together the rest of the hierarchy.” 

It was perhaps Mr. Raines’ behavior toward his staff after the Blair affair, not before, that made all this clear. Coming out of the now-legendary town-hall meeting on May 14, Mr. Keller remembered thinking that Mr. Raines would survive the crisis, because he was “a smart guy with extraordinary political instincts, and it was pretty clear the publisher at that point wanted to give him a chance. 

“What I underestimated at that point,” Mr. Keller continued, “was that quality that Maureen Dowd refers to as the Lord of the Flies quality, where on top of all the legitimate grievances, a lot of extraneous baggage and frustrations exploded up. It was clear that people at the paper were not going to let it go. There was a small part of me that thought of it as poetic justice. But there was a much bigger part that thought it was excruciating to watch, because I’m devoted to this place and a lot of these people. And I don’t know if you can really have friends when you’re the executive editor, but a lot of these people have been my friends until now. And it hurt to watch them.” 

Now, he must lead them. Even more, Mr. Keller has put himself in the uneasy political position of being a fixer, whose new regime brings with it both the great promise and the weighty expectations of something measurably better than what came before. He also enters an environment with an emboldened, more powerful staff, whose refusal to accept the apologies of Mr. Raines and Mr. Boyd, to put away the blame for Mr. Blair, helped topple their previous governor. Mr. Keller has promised a kindler, gentler Times. 

Indeed, the brutality of that organization as a place to work had been felt by many long before Mr. Raines took over. But somewhere in the Blair saga, it boiled over. Mr. Raines told Mr. Rose that he didn’t understand Times staffers complaining that they were being pushed too hard: “Because I can’t imagine anyone coming to work at The New York Times, accepting a job, unless they wanted to be measured against the highest expectations of the profession. Why join the New York Yankees if you don’t want to play on the field where Ruth and DiMaggio and Mantle played?” Finding the extent of the damage computes to another question: Can The Times be led? 

“I don’t think you should read what happened over the past few months as that people at this newspaper want it to be a democracy or run by plebiscite, or that they don’t want to be led,” Mr. Keller said. “They want to be led. Partly it’s a matter of how you lead people—how, over time, you trust their judgment—and a matter of respect, mutual respect ... And partly—and I don’t want to overemphasize the humanitarian aspects of the job, but letting people have a life and see their families and being attentive to their problems. 

“I’ve watched people here have kids in the hospital and come to work day after day and pour their hearts into the paper, when most people would have found this impossible to do,” Mr. Keller said. “When people give you that much, you have to give them something back. Yeah, you give them bylines and you give them the thrill of covering big stories. But you also have to give them a little. When you’re not in the middle of covering a terrorist attack in New York City, you have to give them an occasional weekend; once in a while, some time to go home early to watch their kids in the school play. That’s important. The place takes a toll on you.” 

It’s a toll Mr. Keller has felt himself. Business editor Glenn Kramon doesn’t question Mr. Keller’s ability to re-emerge from regime-change pundit and magazine writer to editor because he had, in his previous incarnation as Joe Lelyveld’s managing editor, worked with many of the same people before for a number of years. Simply put, Mr. Kramon said, “he knows the newsroom much better than Howell did.” 

Metropolitan editor Jonathan Landman called Mr. Keller “really smart” and a good listener, adding: “He’s personally secure. He himself doesn’t need to be the center of attention.” 

And yet, by his own admission, Mr. Keller has some catching up to do. In the coming days, Mr. Keller said, he will travel to the Washington bureau, the always-discontented Times outpost that turned into a platform for anti-Howellian rage during Mr. Raines’ tenure. It was also the site of one of the decisive battles in the war for the soul of The New York Times when, on June 3, an angry meeting with Mr. Sulzberger took place that was widely believed to be the turning point. Two days later, Messrs. Raines and Boyd resigned. 

“I think a lot of people there felt roughed up during the Blair and Bragg thing,” Mr. Keller said. “But even before that, they felt alienated and angry a lot of the time. They managed to keep putting out a pretty damn good report,” he said, but they were doing it under strain. 

“Tensions always exist, because there’s a tug of war for control between Washington and New York. They were probably accentuated over the past two years, because you had three people in New York [Messrs. Raines, Boyd and Rosenthal], all of whom had Washington DNA and strong views of what was going on in Washington. I’ve spent time in Washington, too, briefly working in The Times’ bureau and on reporting work over the past two years. But I’m going to be much humbler in second-guessing the people we’ve entrusted to run the bureau.” 

Besides working on the psychological scaffolding of The Times, there are practical matters that Mr. Keller will have to address. He said he’s still trying to figure out the shape of the masthead: if there will be one managing editor or two, or if the second in command will even be called the managing editor. There’s also the reshaping of the International Herald Tribune, whose size and scope and allotted resources will have to be determined using both the business and the journalistic judgments of the institution. 

And there’s The Times itself. Mr. Keller doesn’t seem content to “add his ideas into the blend” that had been determined when Mr. Sulzberger brought on Mr. Raines as executive editor. 

He differs with Mr. Raines, for instance, on the matter of how you go about making The Times a national and international newspaper without compromising its identity. He dismissed the notion that The Times was a paper faced with either beating the New York Daily News on the Bloomberg administration’s latest machinations or reaching the 41-year-old mother of two in Houston, calling it a “false choice.” 

“New York isn’t just a locality we cover,” Mr. Keller explained. “It’s the financial and cultural capital of the country. It’s the source of enormous vitality and energy for the paper. I really don’t mean to diss any other paper, but I always thought one of the things missing from USA Today is any sense it’s anchored in a place. You get little nuggets from all the states and all over, and USA Today does some things very well and it’s a much-copied business model. So my point is to not trash USA Today. But when you pick up the national edition of the New York Times in California, it feels like a national paper. But it also feels like it’s anchored somewhere, in some place that matters. That’s true of The Washington Post, which is much less of a national paper and has decided not to be. It’s anchored in the political capital of the country, and that means there are certain kinds of stories that you want to know what The Post’s take is, partly because they have roots.” 

Mr. Keller’s own roots are not in the executive suites of The New York Times. 

“I spent the first 25 years of my career never wanting to be an editor,” he said, remembering the first editorial post he took, from Mr. Lelyveld, as foreign editor in 1995. “It’s one thing to face the theoretical question of not wanting to be an editor. It’s another asking if you want to be the foreign editor of The New York Times. That letter came from Joe—and he knew the most vulnerable moment to hit me. I had just finished the two most important stories I ever expected to have: the end of communism and the end of apartheid. There were other stories I certainly wanted to cover, but there wasn’t anything quite likely to live up to those. So the offer was intriguing. 

“If you can’t go cover the fall of communism again,” Mr. Keller added, as if unconscious of a simple narrative that might have carried him from those reporting glory days to his present position, “you might as well try something new.” 

This next story may have a familiar ring. 

 

Shridar Pappu covers the media for The New York Observer. 


Paul Simon and Me

From Susan Parker
Friday July 18, 2003

“Get your feet off the coffee table,” my mother often hollered at my brothers and me back in our home in the suburbs of Philadelphia. “You don’t live in a barn, do you?” 

Well no, but now I do, at least temporarily. This month I’m an artist in residence at the William Flanagan Memorial Creative Person’s Center in Montauk, N.Y. It’s a long name for a large white barn set in the middle of the forest at the eastern tip of Long Island. The center is funded by the Edward Albee Foundation, and Flanagan was a friend of Albee’s who passed away.  

Thirty-five years ago the famous playwright bought and converted this former stable and kennel to five bedrooms, two studios, kitchen, bathrooms, dining and common rooms, providing working space for 20 artists and writers each summer. I’m here with a sculptor who makes immense, whimsical statues out of large sheets of sponge and acrylic paint, a painter whose canvases are gray and knobby, an amusing Irish playwright and a short story writer. We share meals and ideas. We go to the beach together.  

Montauk is a busy place in the summer, full of tourists and celebrities. Yesterday Edward Albee came by the barn and I shook his hand. He asked me if I was having a good time and I said yes. After that I could think of nothing else to say. We stared at each other for a moment and then Edward went about his business. I wished for a new life in which I was urbane, well read and articulate. Maybe by the time he comes for another visit I’ll have something more interesting to mumble than just hello. 

Last week I stood in line at White’s Drugstore on the main street of Montauk and peered over the head of the very short man in front of me. When he turned around I tried not to stare. It was Paul Simon. I wanted to shout: “Do you remember me? I chased you down a long, dark alley in Philadelphia in 1968. I was the chubby girl in the purple mini mini mini skirt who cornered you at the end of the alley and demanded your autograph.” 

But I demurred. After all, I’m accustomed to hanging out with rock stars. Thirty-three years ago I shared a space in a Santa Cruz commune with a member of Captain Beefheart’s band. At least he said he was a band member. I never actually saw him perform in concert, and I never found his photograph on an album cover. 

Instead of re-introducing myself to Mr. Simon, I paid for my purchases, went outside to the boiling hot parking lot and proceeded to put anti-fungal cream on my lips instead of sunblock. Celebrities don’t affect me at all. I don’t usually even notice them. And the anti-fungal cream lip application probably helps keep them away.  

 

Oakland resident Susan Parker is ignoring important and non-important people equally while spending the month in Montauk, N.Y., as the guest of the Edward F. Albee Foundation. For information on this program visit www.pipeline.com/~jtnyc/albeefdtn.html.


UC Bans Student-Professor Dating

By DAVID SCHARFENBERG
Friday July 18, 2003

The UC Board of Regents voted Thursday to ban romantic or sexual relationships between professors and the students they oversee or can reasonably expect to supervise in the future. 

The new policy supersedes a patchwork of policies at six of the nine UC campuses, including a UC Berkeley measure that simply called on professors to disqualify themselves from overseeing students with whom they are in a sexual relationship. 

“A universitywide policy ensures that there will be a clear and consistent standard or behavior expected on every campus,” said UC Academic Senate Chair Gayle Binion, who helped draft the policy change and is a non-voting member of the Board of Regents. 

Critics, including 60 UC Berkeley professors who signed a letter opposing the wording of the measure before it passed, have argued that the new policy will “criminalize” a host of healthy, responsible relationships—including many between young professors and older students. 

But supporters say the policy is necessary to ensure professors do not take advantage of students. 

“The very integrity of the university’s educational mission is dependent on the accountability of a faculty member as a mentor, educator and evaluator,” Binion said. 

The new policy comes eight months after UC Berkeley law school Dean John Dwyer resigned after a student filed a sexual harassment suit against him. But UC officials contend that the new policy is unrelated, noting that Regent Judith Hopkinson brought up the issue at a meeting in November 2001 and again last fall. 

The new policy imposes a range of six possible penalties for a faculty member who engages in an unauthorized relationship, ranging from a letter of censure to dismissal from the university. 

The Academic Senate, which represents the faculty, approved the new policy May 28, leaving it to the Board of Regents for final approval Thursday. 

 

 


Republicans Praise Troops, But Neglect Fiscal Support

By CHUCK VINCH ArmyTimes
Friday July 18, 2003

In recent months, President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress have missed no opportunity to heap richly deserved praise on the military. But talk is cheap—and getting cheaper by the day, judging from the nickel-and-dime treatment the troops are getting lately. 

For example, the White House griped that various pay-and-benefits incentives added to the 2004 defense budget by Congress are wasteful and unnecessary—including a modest proposal to double the $6,000 gratuity paid to families of troops who die on active duty. This comes at a time when Americans continue to die in Iraq at a rate of about one a day. 

Similarly, the administration announced that on Oct. 1 it wants to roll back recent modest increases in monthly imminent-danger pay (from $225 to $150) and family-separation allowance (from $250 to $100) for troops getting shot at in combat zones. 

Then there’s military tax relief—or the lack thereof. As Bush and Republican leaders in Congress preach the mantra of tax cuts, they can’t seem to find time to make progress on minor tax provisions that would be a boon to military homeowners, reservists who travel long distances for training and parents deployed to combat zones, among others. 

Incredibly, one of those tax provisions—easing residency rules for service members to qualify for capital-gains exemptions when selling a home—has been a homeless orphan in the corridors of power for more than five years now. 

The chintz even extends to basic pay. While Bush’s proposed 2004 defense budget would continue higher targeted raises for some ranks, he also proposed capping raises for E-1s at 2 percent and for E-2s and O-1s at 3.2 percent, well below the average raise of 4.1 percent. 

The Senate version of the defense bill rejects that idea, and would provide minimum 3.7 percent raises for all and higher targeted hikes for some. But the House version of the bill goes along with Bush, making this an issue still to be hashed out in upcoming negotiations. 

All of which brings us to the latest indignity—Bush’s $9.2 billion military construction request for 2004, which was set a full $1.5 billion below this year’s budget on the expectation that Congress, as has become tradition in recent years, would add funding as it drafted the construction appropriations bill. 

But Bush’s tax cuts have left little elbow room in the 2004 federal budget that is taking shape, and the squeeze is on across the board. 

The result: Not only has the House Appropriations military construction panel accepted Bush’s proposed $1.5 billion cut, it voted to reduce construction spending by an additional $41 million next year. 

Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, took a stab at restoring $1 billion of the $1.5 billion cut in Bush’s construction budget. He proposed to cover that cost by trimming recent tax cuts for the roughly 200,000 Americans who earn more than $1 million a year. Instead of a tax break of $88,300, they would receive $83,500. 

The Republican majority on the construction appropriations panel quickly shot Obey down. And so the outlook for making progress next year in tackling the huge backlog of work that needs to be done on crumbling military housing and other facilities is bleak at best. 

Taken piecemeal, all these corner-cutting moves might be viewed as mere flesh wounds. But even flesh wounds are fatal if you suffer enough of them. It adds up to a troubling pattern that eventually will hurt morale—especially if the current breakneck operations tempo also rolls on unchecked and the tense situations in Iraq and Afghanistan do not ease. 

Rep. Chet Edwards, D-Texas, who notes that the House passed a resolution in March pledging “unequivocal support” to service members and their families, puts it this way: “American military men and women don’t deserve to be saluted with our words and insulted by our actions.” 

Translation: Money talks—and we all know what walks. 

Army Times is part of the Military Times Media group, consisting of Army Times, Navy Times, Air Force Times and Marine Corps Times. The Military Times Media Group newsweeklies seek to provide information of interest to military personnel and their families. 

 


Bush Administration’s Deceit is Old News

J. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR
Friday July 18, 2003

Dissemble: “To disguise or conceal one’s real nature, motives or feelings behind a false appearance.”  

 

George Bush, the Appointed President, is beginning to sound like the teenage boy arising from the back seat of his Friday night borrowed automobile. Asked to confirm the words spoken only a few hot moments ago, pre coitus bellum, he appears genuinely befuddled. “But I was horny then!” he seems to want to blurt out. 

“How can you hold me to what I said? I can’t even remember what I said!” How unfair. And so, once more, we enter the Dissemblation Nation, at the gallop. 

“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” Mr. Bush told us during last January’s address on the state of the nation. Uranium, he did not need to add, is a key component in the construction of nuclear weapons.  

One definition of the verb “to learn” in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language is “to become informed of.” And therefore, technically, little Mr. Bush did not utter an untruth. That the British were “informed” that Hussein sought uranium in Africa appears to be entirely correct. That Hussein actually sought such uranium is, of course, another matter. 

On such inspired cleverness at words, the balance of the world hangs. 

The attempt to disassemble the administration’s dissemblings begins to border on a Marx sketch (the brothers, not the economist). Groucho, as President Firefly of Freedonia in “Duck Soup,” opens a meeting of the Cabinet by announcing he will take up old business. “I wish to discuss the tariff,” announces a minister. “That’s new business,” says President Firefly. “No old business? Very well, then. We’ll take up new business.” The minister leaps up to reassert his wish to discuss the tariff. “Too late,” Firefly replies. “That’s old business already. Sit down.”  

President Bush tells us we must go to war in Iraq because Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, is developing a nuclear weapons program and is in league with the terrorists who bombed our country. He cannot provide details or verification of such claims—including releasing one or two mass destruction weapons sites to the UN inspectors—because to do so would compromise U.S. national security and endanger the pending war effort. Comes the war, we must stop raising questions about the reasons for the war, because to do so jeopardizes the lives of our boys and girls in battle. Now that the war is over, the administration wonders aloud why we are still talking about the rationale for the war because, after all, the war is over, and is therefore old business. “As far as the president’s concerned, he’s moved on,” says presidential press secretary Ari Fleischer. “I think the bottom has been gotten to.” Probably, but perhaps not the bottom to which Mr. Fleischer refers. 

But unlike so many of my liberal and progressive friends, I do not stand shocked at presidential lying. By this point in our nation’s history we should be accustomed to presidential deceit, going back, at least, to that often-quoted phrase: “I have not had sexual relations with that woman.” (No, not that woman ... the woman in question here being Ms. Hemmings and the president, Mr. Jefferson.) 

Neither am I upset, particularly, that the presidential deception helped drive us into war. Being honest, had I supported the war, I might not have minded so much how it came about.  

“Where are those Republicans who demanded Bill Clinton’s impeachment because he lied?” writes Daily Planet reader Bruce Joffe. “His [Clinton’s] lies were about a personal indiscretion that hurt no one but his own family. Bush’s lies have caused the deaths of over 6,000 people, with American lives still being lost every day, and no exit strategy in sight.” Understandable sentiment, true.  

The same, however, might have been said ... probably was said ... about Lincoln and the Civil War, which once cost some 23,000 wounded and dead, federal and confederate, in a single day astride a Maryland creek. The Confederate states seceded because of what they believed to be Lincoln’s position on slavery and black citizenship. And yet, to this day, 140 years after his death, we are still not certain of Lincoln’s position on slavery and black citizenship. Lincoln prosecuted the Civil War from beginning to end in deliberate obfuscation of his goals on one of the war’s most central points. I, for one, do not begrudge the end result.  

No, what disturbs me most, I think, is that having fooled us, the Bush administration now takes us for fools.  

“No one can accurately tell you that [the assertion that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons] was wrong,” Mr. Fleischer says. “The president said that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa. That still may be absolute fact.” 

My country, right unless someone can accurately tell us we are wrong. Now that’s a slogan to die for.  

J. Douglas Allen-Taylor is an Oakland resident.


Letter from Senegal Bush Brings Baggage to Africa

Friday July 18, 2003

The following is an anonymous letter from a resident of Senegal originally posted on the SunMt.org Web site: 

 

More than 1,500 persons have been arrested and put in jail between Thursday and Monday. Hopefully they will be released now that the Big Man is gone. 

The US Army’s planes flying day and night over Dakar. The noise they make is so loud that one hardly sleeps at night. 

About 700 security people from the U.S. for Bush’s security in Senegal, with their dogs, and their cars. Senegalese security forces were not allowed to come near the U.S. president. All trees in places where Bush will pass have been cut. Some of them have more than 100 years. 

All roads going downtown (where hospitals, businesses, schools are located) were closed from Monday night to Tuesday at 3 p.m. This means that we could not go to our offices or schools. Sick people were also obliged to stay at home. 

National exams for high schools that started on Monday are postponed until Wednesday. 

Bush’s visit to the Goree Island is another story. As you may know Goree is a small island facing Dakar where from the 15th to the 19th century, the African slaves to be shipped to America were parked in special houses called slave houses. One of these houses has become a museum to remind humanity about this dark period and has been visited by kings, queens, presidents. Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, and before them, Nelson Mandela, the Pope and many other distinguished guests or ordinary tourists visited it without bothering the islanders. But for “security reasons” this time, the local population was chased out of their houses from 5 to 12 a.m. They were forced by the American security to leave their houses and leave everything open, including their wardrobes to be searched by special dogs brought from the U.S. 

The ferry that links the island to Dakar was stopped and offices and businesses closed for the day. 

According to an economist who was interviewed by a private radio, Senegal that is a very poor country has lost huge amount of money in this visit, because workers have been prevented from walking out of their homes. 

In addition to us being prevented to go out, other humiliating things happened. Bush did not want to be with Senegalese or use our things. He brought his own armchairs, and of course his own cars, and meals and drinks. He came with his own journalists and ours were forbidden inside the airport and in places he was visiting. 

Our president was not allowed to make a speech. Only Bush spoke when he was in Goree. He spoke about slavery. It seems that he needs the vote of the African-American to be elected in the next elections, and wanted to please them. That’s why he visited Goree. 

Several protest marches against American politics have been organized yesterday and even when Bush was here, but we think he does not care. 

We have the feeling that everything has been done to convince us that we are nothing, and that America can behave the way it wants, everywhere, even in our country. 

Believe me friends, it is a terrible feeling. But according to a Ugandan friend of mine, I should not complain because in Uganda, one of the countries he is going to visit, Bush does not intend to go out of the airport. He will receive the Ugandan President in the airport lounge. 

Nevertheless, I think I am lucky, because I have such wonderful American friends. But there are now thousands of Senegalese who believe that for all Americans the world is their territory.


UC Berkeley Lifts Ban on Students From SARS-Affected Regions

By DAVID SCHARFENBERG
Friday July 18, 2003

With SARS fears dwindling worldwide, UC Berkeley has lifted the last of its summer school travel restrictions on students from the southeast Asian nations affected by the disease. 

The university came under fire in early May after announcing that it would ban students from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. On May 10, the campus partially lifted its ban, allowing about 80 students to attend the academic courses offered through the Berkeley Summer Sessions program. 

Students still faced a ban on attending English as a second language courses, slated to start in July. Normally, about 500 students from SARS-affected countries take the English classes, most of them signing up just before the session begins. On May 17, the university announced it was prepared to admit the 124 students who had pre-registered for the courses. 

This week, after U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lifted its last SARS travel alert, which pinpointed Taiwan, UC Berkeley announced that it would admit all summer school students. 

“The risk for the students has gone down dramatically since we started,” said Tomas Aragon, director of the UC Berkeley Center for Infectious Disease Preparedness and a member of the university’s SARS task force.


Director Mixes Fact, Fantasy in Wildlife Film

By MEGAN GREENWELL
Friday July 18, 2003

Kamala Appel hopes to educate people about animal life. Her medium? A “documentary” that showcases a rapping elephant seal, an aspiring Olympian otter and a lemur dating game. 

Appel, an Oakland resident and graduate of Berkeley High School, recently completed her first feature film, “Animal Crackers.” The movie blends fact with fantasy to create educational entertainment that features two of her favorite parts of life: animals and the Bay Area. The movie premieres Sunday at the Parkway Speakeasy Theater in Oakland. 

Appel filmed “Animal Crackers” at museums and wildlife preserves around the Bay Area, including Coyote Point Museum in San Mateo and the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito. She used footage of the animals in their habitats, then added animated clips to highlight particular ideas about each species. In one section, a group of lemurs holds a dating game to find mates for the alpha female and prevent their own extinction, a threat Appel said is very real. 

“It’s about protecting species and helping them survive,” she said. 

For her first full-length film, Appel took the unusual step of completing all the filming before writing a script. She spent hours watching the animals in their daily lives, then wrote lines for the movie based on her interpretations of the creatures’ characters to provide a story that was “true to the animals.” 

She also used a 50-person human cast in the film, which, she said, presented its own set of challenges. 

“There were lots of people who wanted to be involved, which was inspiring,” Appel said. “There were just a lot of people to keep track of since I was doing most of the filming and producing by myself.” 

But the best part of making the movie, Appel said, was the interaction with wild animals. “I got to go into restricted areas to watch them,” she said. “I’ve always been fascinated with animals, so it was a thrill for me to be this close.” 

Appel has been in and around the moviemaking business for many years. After graduating from Yale with a degree in American studies and a concentration in film studies, she headed off to film school at the University of Southern California, where she earned her master’s degree. She remained in Los Angeles and worked at several large production companies before deciding to go out on her own. 

“I did a lot of the business side of film to get a better sense of it overall,” Appel said. “But there was a reason I left Hollywood; I can do things on my own that I wouldn’t have been able to do there.” 

To that end, Appel has formed an independent company, Kea Productions, to release local filmmakers’ work. Appel also operates NuReel.com, which provides financial resources and mentors to people looking to break in to the film industry. One highlight of NuReel is its annual CineSurvivor contest, which draws film submissions in every genre, one of which wins the grand prize each year. 

Now that her project is complete, Appel will present “Animal Crackers” to large agencies in hopes of gaining more recognition for the film. She plans to use connections from film school to help her advance the project, and would like to continue filming Animal Crackers-type stories in the future. 

“I would love to see this become something regular,” Appel said. “I could go to different areas and focus on their own local wildlife. I think it’s got a lot to offer.” 

In the future, Appel aims to continue making movies full-time. “It’s a bit tricky because a lot of times to get higher salaries you might have to sign onto a project you wouldn’t do for free,” she said. “I would do projects that I might not do without the money, but I wouldn’t do anything I would be ashamed of no matter what the salary is like.” 

 

Animal Crackers premieres at 3 p.m. on Sunday, July 20, at the Parkway 

Speakeasy Theater at 1834 Park Blvd. in Oakland. Tickets are $5 at the 

door. For more information about the screening visit www.picturepubpizza.com or call (510) 814-2400. 

 

 

 

 


Deportation is a Daily Threat For Many Migrants

By CHELLIS GLENDINNING AlterNet
Friday July 18, 2003

The officer leans over the window. “Sir. Can I see your driver’s license?” 

A normal enough, though irritating, scenario for most of us. But from within the cab of the vehicle emanates an unbearable heaviness—the driver is Mexican, he doesn’t speak English. What begins as a routine traffic stop shifts to a search for immigration papers and, for many, a one-way ticket to the other side of the US-Mexico border. 

I know this because one Friday night last January my friends Alfredo and Miguel were picked up for driving an unregistered car outside the Supersave discount food store in Española, New Mexico. They were placed for the weekend in what was then called Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) hold at the Santa Fe county jail, and on Monday, before they could even contact the local immigration-rights group, each was given a hearing that lasted less than two minutes, and they were bused to the border. 

When government agents escorted them over the Santa Fe Street Bridge to Ciudad Juarez, the time was 10:00 p.m., the temperature, 36 degrees. Having just left a mid-winter warm spell in the north, they were wearing only thin nylon shells for coats. Having just wired most of their week’s earnings home to their families in Sinaloa and Chihuahua and spent the rest on groceries, they arrived in Juarez with zero dólares. 

Deportation is the predictable result of any arrest for violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act. According to the 2000 Census, the United States is home to between 6 and 9 million undocumented people, and while Mexicans represent between 39 and 55 percent of this population, 90 percent of those arrested for illegal entry are Mexican nationals. 

Migration from south of the border has flowed in a steady stream for as long as there has been a wealthier nation to the north, but numbers increased dramatically in 1994 after the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Touted for its potential to raise the standard of living of Mexicans by providing an explosion of new industrial jobs, NAFTA has actually had the opposite effect. 

Work in the corporate maquilas—factories that popped up to take advantage of lax labor and environmental regulations—typically pays US $1.20 an hour. According to a study by the Center for Reflection, Education and Action in Hartford, Conn., to support a family of four with such salaries would require five workers. 

Also, as US tariff-free, corporate-grown agricultural products like corn and wheat poured into Mexico, over 1 million campesino families were driven off their lands from the competition. Since NAFTA’s January 2003 phasing-out of protective tariffs on coffee, 600 farms collapse each day. The World Bank describes Mexico as “one of the most inequitable economies in Latin America;” the average urban dweller subsists on $1.90 a day; in the countryside $1.30. 

As a result, every year since 1994—by boat, underground pipeline, or desert trek—increasing numbers of Mexicans have been risking life and limb to enter the United States to find work. As Miguel puts it, he came north because back home people ‘cannot even afford to buy toilet paper.” At this point, the third largest source of national income, just behind tourism and the illicit drug trade, is money sent home by migrants. 

And for those migrants who are undocumented, deportation is a daily threat. Miguel has been sent back eight times, Alfredo more than 20. His most spectacular deportation was an INS-sponsored airplane ride from Sierra Vista, Ariz., 229 miles to El Paso, Tex., and then—as if Juarez, across the border from El Paso, were not far enough from Sierra Vista—607 miles farther south to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. Upon arriving at the airport, Alfredo called his employer-patron in Phoenix and, using money he wired, hopped a bus to Agua Prieta where he began the journey north all over again. 

The lesson? The urge to save loved ones from starvation is irrepressible. The meaning of the word machismo comes into stark focus. Rather than the modern emphasis on insecurity-laced male bravado, the term originally meant the act of taking care of one’s family, and with their do-or-die dedication, Alfredo and Miguel present perfect examples of this quality. “For every barrier that’s set up,”Alfredo says, “there’s a way around it.” 

Case in point: When he and Miguel found themselves mounting the bridge to Juarez, they were already plotting their return. They hitched a ride west to Agua Prieta, where Alfredo has family. It was the weekend of February 1: not a good time to cross. President Bush had just aimed his “weeks-not-months” ultimatum at Iraq. North Korea was hauling its stockpile of nuclear fuel rods out of storage, and eight European countries had signed on to go to war alongside the US. To boot, rumor had it that the Bush administration was considering closing the border completely. No one in, no one out—except for roundups and mass deportations, like in the 1930s. Border patrol officers were nervous and on edge. 

The way around this new edginess was to trek up through the Arizona desert via an extremely treacherous route near Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, and—along with 38 fellow hopefuls, mostly small farmers from the states of Chiapas and Michoacan, as well as from Guatemala and El Salvador—this they accomplished. 

In today’s environment of heightened fear of terrorists, though, the Bush administration is attempting to make the trip even more difficult. In June 2003, the Department of Homeland Security’s reconstituted INS, the Bureau of Immigration and Citizenship Enforcement (BICE), beefed up the “sealed-border” strategy that had been implemented, curiously, since NAFTA’s initiation. 

Beginning in 1993, massive budgetary increases laid the ground for the new effort. The INS bank account swelled from $1.5 billion in 1993 to $4.2 billion in 1999 to $6.3 billion in 2003, and the number of agents inflated from 980 in 1994 to 2,264 in 1998 to more than 9500 this year. Programs like Operation Gatekeeper (1994), Operation Safeguard (1995), and Operation Rio Grande (2001) turned the region into what Jennifer Allen of Southwest Alliance to Resist Militarization calls a “war zone” with “solid steel walls, stadium-style lighting that dots the landscape, 30-foot tall surveillance towers, underground surveillance towers, underground surveillance equipment, and armed military troops.” 

The new BICE initiative, Operation Triple Strike (OTS), adds another 200 agents beyond the extra 385 already hired in 2003, making the border army the second largest federal law enforcement agency in the US, with more agents than the FBI. OTS also increases surveillance with the addition of two new helicopters to Arizona’s fleet of nine. In keeping with the current lunge to dismantle civil liberties, OTS legalizes anti-immigrant raids in the interior—in neighborhoods, bus depots, and work sites—and sanctions racial profiling of passengers at airports. 

Under the guise of preventing the injustices of human smuggling and saving migrants’ lives, the strategy of sealing the border and slashing civil liberties, in effect, ups the ante on the possibility of deportation—and pushes determined machos and machas alike to more lethal crossing routes and into the hands of more repressive smuggling rings. 

The good news is that to salve the immense human suffering that has erupted since the implementation of NAFTA, Arizona human rights workers and faith-based groups have begun to provide water tanks in the desert and offer shelter, telephone access and roving medical assistance. 

Grassroots organizing to challenge the politics of US policy at the border is also mounting. Speaking to the 2001 United Nations Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa, activists from the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (NNIRR) in Oakland, Calif., demanded that the US abide by the International Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, to which it is a signator. NNIRR also called for the right of displaced persons, asylum seekers, trafficked people and migrants to move freely across international borders. Perhaps most dramatically, the organization pushed the boundaries of the accepted, “individual-choice” conception of “migrant” by highlighting “the interconnections between globalization, displacement and migration.” 

Meanwhile, on July 8 Alfredo and Miguel’s friend from Sinaloa, Eduardo, made his final telephone call to us in Española. He was in Nogales, Sonora, about to launch north. In hopes of passing below the hypervigilent radar of the border patrol, Eduardo was planning to walk for three nights and two days through the treacherous Arizona desert in temperatures upwards of 110 degrees. 

As a near-full moon rose into the night sky of July 12, Alfredo and Miguel took off to pick him up in Phoenix. They chose the northern route, hoping to skirt detection by avoiding Albuquerque and Interstate 40, making their way instead through the less-patroled Navajo Nation. They were driving a 1986 Cutlass Supreme— with an outdated license plate. 

 

Chellis Glendinning is a psychologist and writer. Her latest book is “Off the Map: An Expedition Deep into Empire and the Global Economy.” 


College Athletes Show Campers the Way to Play Threat of Deportation

By MEGAN GREENWELL Campers the Way to Play
Friday July 18, 2003

This summer, nine-year-old Sara Lopez hopes to perfect her foul shot, hit a home run and learn to swim the backstroke. Through UC Berkeley’s Blue Bears program, Lopez will become that three-sport athlete for two weeks alongside hundreds of other kids her age. 

The Blue Bears, designed for children aged 9 to 11, is one of a dozen youth camps sponsored by Golden Bear Youth and Outdoor Programs, which operates from the Golden Bear Recreational Facility. The camps offer children aged 5 to 18 the chance to work with skilled counselors on sports ranging from soccer to rugby, lacrosse and tae kwon do. 

Many parents of the program’s younger participants—separated into groups called Explorers (aged 5 to 6) and Blue Cubs (aged 7 to 8)—say the camps at Strawberry Canyon are a good summer daycare option because they allow the 

children to run and play. 

“I’m a single mom, and I work all day, but I didn’t want my daughter to be inside at a daycare center during the summer,” said Sara’s mom, Esperanza Veracruz. “Here she has fun.” 

From a list of sports, Blue Bears campers choose six activities to work on during their two-week session. Older campers focus on fewer skills and spend more time on each, allowing them to practice for extracurricular teams during the school year. 

“I want to play lacrosse when I get to high school,” said Matt Kiplin, a 13-year-old Blue Grizzly. “When I’m at camp I get to practice with lots of good people, and they make me better so I’ll make the team.” 

The Golden Bear instructors are mostly college students, and many play a varsity sport at UC Berkeley or other colleges. 

“It’s cool to learn sports from people who play them in college,” Kiplin said. “They really know what they’re doing and they’re young so they’re fun to work with.” 

The counselor positions at the summer camps are among the most popular summer jobs for older area teenagers. High school students can begin work as a counselor-in-training after their freshman year, then become a full counselor as a college student. 

“It’s fun to teach kids how to play better,” said Liam Reilly, a sophomore midfielder on the Carleton College soccer team. “They really want to learn the skills, and they make the day a lot of fun even though it’s tiring. It’s much better than working in a store inside somewhere.” 

UC Berkeley will host six sessions each of the Explorers, Blue Cubs, Blue Bears and Blue Grizzlies camps by the end of the summer, each of which will attract children from around the Bay Area. Registration for the later camps is still open, but each of the two June sessions attracted more than 100 campers. 

One of the newer Golden Bear program offerings is the Skateboard Elite Team and one-day skateboard clinics, which are camps for children ages 8 to 16. Participants work at the Golden Bear Recreational Facility’s skateboard park with skilled instructors—many of whom have competed at national level skateboarding events.


Summer Noon Concerts in Downtown Berkeley

Friday July 18, 2003

The Downtown Berkeley Association (DBA) presents Summer Noon Concerts 2003, a unique series of nine free concerts, Thursdays at noon in June & July, beginning June 5th. From Rhythm & Blues to Brazilian capoeira, these concerts at the Downtown Berkeley BART Plaza (Shattuck Ave. at Center St.) are a showcase of the culturally rich performing arts in Berkeley. This outdoor summer celebration of Berkeley-based musicians & dancers is just a small sampling of the performing arts happening nightly in clubs, cafes, schools, theaters and concert halls in Downtown Berkeley. 

 

On Thursday, June 5th, our concert series opens with Rhonda Benin and Soulful Strut performing some of the best in R & B, with a splash of jazz and a solid helping of the blues. Soulful Strut appears regularly at many Bay Area nightspots such Enricos Sidewalk Café and Restaurant. 

 

On Thursday, July 31st, our concert series closes with SoVoSó, a highly visual and imaginative a capella ensemble that sings a compelling mix of jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues, world, pop, and improvisational music. The ensemble is made up of former members of Bobby McFerrin’s Voicestra, and McFerrin says, “SoVoSó is tight, soulful, and a whole lotta fun.” 

 

This event is easily accessible by transit and there is one hour free parking daily from 9 am to 5 pm in Center Street Garage. Seating will be available. 

 

For a complete schedule of entertainers for the Downtown Berkeley Summer Noon Concerts 2003 visit the Downtown Berkeley Association website at www.downtownberkeley.org 


Berkeley Mourns Loss Of Local News Anchor

By FRED DODSWORTH Special to the Planet
Tuesday July 15, 2003

Saturday afternoon more than 200 people gathered to remember the man who for 10 years anchored KPFA radio’s morning newscast. By listeners and by co-workers, Chris Bruney was alternately described as a trusted morning companion and a talented newscaster who brought warmth and depth to his broadcasts. 

A Berkeley resident since his days as a student at Cal, Bruney died July 8 of a heart attack while sitting behind the wheel of his car at Grand and Telegraph avenues in Oakland. He was 44. 

Surrounded by signs proclaiming “Shut Down the War Profiteers!” and “Yes On M—We Support Safe & Affordable Housing,” a cross-section of East Bay activists and journalists filled the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists for the memorial service. Young men and women sat side by side with elderly Gray Panther-types, all gathered to celebrate Burney’s life.  

Kellia Rameres, who anchors KPFA’s graveyard shift, remembered Bruney fondly. Speaking at length on his long, curly black hair, black leather jacket and tight blue jeans, Rameres painted a picture of a man far too young to be the subject of a memorial service.  

“He’ll be sorely missed,” said Philip Maldari, co-host of KPFA’s “The Morning Show,” in a tribute to Bruney broadcast July 9. “Getting to the station before 5 o’clock in the morning, putting together an incredible newscast at a time of day most of us can’t even open our eyes much less try to understand what’s happening in the world.” 

“The response from listeners was immediate and very heartfelt,” noted Aileen Alfandery, KPFA’s morning news co-host. “People were shocked because Chris was their trusted companion in the morning. They woke up to his voice, they brushed their teeth with his voice, they were fighting the commute. So they felt a very personal sense of loss when they heard the news about Chris.” 

At the service Alfandery read from a few of the scores of calls and e-mails received by the station.  

“A man I never knew died yesterday, and I am heartbroken. I heard his voice in my room for two years, yet if I had passed him on the street, I would not know who he was,” wrote Jennifer G. 

Jolayne C. e-mailed: “Those of us that you can’t see … feel as if you are part of our family. We listen every day to what and how you say things to us. When we no longer hear your voice, our lives are changed.” 

Like so many of the KPFA family, newscaster Larry Bensky has been at the station for several decades and worked with Burney for the last 10 years. 

“He was a wonderful man,” Bensky said after the service. “I think anybody that was here today got a sense of the depth and complexity and warmth and talent that he had. He’ll always be missed, and he’ll always be in our minds. 

“We live in such a trans-substantial media, where our presence is electronically ephemeral … it’s there and then it’s gone, or can be gone,” said Bensky. “It’s a very humbling feeling to contemplate that kind of thing. [Just like life] only more so.” 

“It’s a huge loss,” Alfandery said of how Burney’s death will affect the KPFA news operation. “Not only to the KPFA family and our listeners, but very practically speaking, we have lost a 10-year veteran, morning newscaster.”  

In recent years KPFA has been criticized for lack of staff diversity and for the stranglehold longtime staffers exert on programming at the station. Burney, as an African-American, represented an audible voice for diversity during the morning prime-time drive slot.  

“KPFA, throughout the station, has always been committed to affirmative action, and if you look around and see the diversity of our reporters and our on-air persons, you’ll see that it’s always a consideration,” said Alfandery. “There’s such a tiny little space in the media for progressive and alternative viewpoints, there’s a lot of pressure on the very few outlets that there are, and KPFA definitely feels that pressure. And [there’s] a lot of varying viewpoints about how we go about serving that progressive commitment. So I don’t think it’s any surprise that people would feel very passionate about how best to do that, and will be very explicit about their passionate feelings. We will be looking to hire somebody to follow on in Chris’ footsteps, who’ll have their own style, but have the same dedication to news and progressive journalism that Chris did.” 

“That’s something that Chris would have insisted on,” said newscaster Max Pringle. “Keep the diversity in that position. It’s important to us as a radio station to reach out to the various Bay Area communities. The person that is sitting in for him now, Kelly Denson, is an African-American woman … I think they’ll insist on keeping that diversity.” 

Chris’s mother and father, Joseph and Elaine Burney, came from Southern California for the memorial service.  

“I was very surprised that he was this well known and loved in the area,” said Mr. Burney. “You know, we live in Anaheim—KPFA is an FM station, we don’t get it over there. We never knew that he lived this life, that he was so well loved. We were quite pleasantly surprised about that.” 


Berkeley This Week

Tuesday July 15, 2003

TUESDAY, JULY 15 

Free Emergency Prepared- 

ness Class on Disaster First Aid, for anyone who lives or works in Berkeley, from 9 a.m. to noon at 997 Cedar St., be- 

tween 8th and 9th Sts. Register on-line at www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/fire/oes or call 981-5506. 

Peach/Stone Fruit Tasting at the Farmers’ Market, Derby St. at MLK, Jr. Way. 548-3333.  

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 525-3565. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. B. K. Bose will speak on “Yoga for Health” at 10:30 a.m. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, JULY 16 

Twilight Tour: Magnificent Monocots Anthony Garza talks about interesting and unusual grasses and succulents, at 5:30 p.m. at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Registration required. 643-2755. 

Aquatic Park Natural Habitat and Lagoon Water Quality Study by Laurel Marcus & Associates, will be discussed at 7 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Public comments welcome! For information call 981-6437. 

South Berkeley Mural Project Community members in South Berkeley are coming together to create a neighborhood mural on the side of the Grove Liquor Store on the corner of Ashby Ave. and MLK, Jr. Way. Meet at 7 p.m. at Epic Arts Studios at 1923 Ashby Ave. For further information on ways to get involved call 644-2204. 

Free Lead-Safe Painting and Remodeling Class Learn how to detect and remedy lead hazards and conduct lead-safe re- 

novations for your older home, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Temes- 

cal Branch Library, 5205 Tele- 

graph Ave, North Oakland. For information or to register call the Alameda County Lead Poisoning Prevention Program at 567-8280.  

Free Feldenkrais ATM Classes for adults 55 and older at 10:30 and 11:45 a.m. at the Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut at Rose. For information call 848-5143. 527-5332. 

Community Dances, traditional English and American dances, 8 p.m. at Grace North Church, 2138 Cedar St. Cost is $9. 233-5065. www.bacds.org 

Berkeley Communicators Toastmasters meets at 7:15 a.m. at Hide-A-Way Café, 6430 Telegraph Ave. For information call Fred Garvey, 925-682-1111, ext. 164. 

THURSDAY, JULY 17 

EBMUD Water Tunnel Construction Project Informational Meeting at 7 p.m. at Chabot Canyon Racquet Club, 7040 Chabot Rd, Oakland. 287-1301. 

Friends of Strawberry Creek will meet at 6:30 p.m. at the West Berkeley Public Library Community Room, 1125 University Ave., across from the Adult School. To confirm call 987-0668 or janet@earthlink.net or jennifemaryphd@hotmail.com or 848-7128. 

Berkeley Liberation Radio 104.1 FM meets at 7 p.m. at the Long Haul Info Shop, 3124 Shattuck Ave. 595-0190.  

Lawyers in the Library, at 6 p.m. in the Claremont Branch, Benvenue at Ashby, 981-6280. 

FRIDAY, JULY 18 

Cirque Noir Benefit for ACCI Gallery, a silent and live auction from 6 to 10 p.m. at ACCI Gallery, 1652 Shattuck Ave. Tickets are $20 per person, $30 per couple. Reservations suggested, 843-2527. 

So How’d You Become an Activist, with Tony Serra and Mary Ann Tenuto at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, 1924 Cedar St. at Bonita. Donation $5. Wheel- 

chair accessible. 415-927-1645. 

Women in Black Vigil, from noon to 1 p.m. at UC Berkeley, Bancroft at Telegraph. wibberkeley@yahoo.com 548-6310, 845-1143. 

Meditation, Peace Vigil and Dialogue, gather at noon on the grass close to the West Entrance to UC Berkeley, on Oxford St. near University Ave. Sponsored by the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. 496-6000, ext. 135. www.bpf.org 

Bastille Day Waltz Ball, lessons at 7 p.m., dancing with the Baguette Quartette at 9 p.m. at the International House, 2299 Piedmont. Cost is $20 at the door. 650-326-6265. www.fridaynightwaltz.com 

SATURDAY, JULY 19 

Berkeley Bay Trail Grand Opening Ceremony, at 11 a.m. at the southwest corner of University Ave. and West Frontage Rd., at the base of the pedestrian overpass. For information call Lisa Caronna, director of Parks, Recreation and Waterfront at 981-6700. 

YMCA Day 100th anniversary of the Berkeley/Albany YMCA. From 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. with entertainment and health screening at the Berkeley Farmers’ Market, Center St. at MLK, Jr. Way. 548-3333.  

Drawing in the Garden Art Class with Rita Petit. Drawing with paper and pencil. Peralta Community Garden, Hopkins and Peralta. No charge, donations gratefully accepted. 665-8466.  

Free Gardening Class on Blooming Perennials and Shrubs, with Aerin Moore, at 10 a.m. at Magic Gardens Nursery, 729 Heinz Ave. 644-1992. www.magicgardens.com 

Free Emergency Preparedness Class on Earthquake Retrofitting, for anyone who lives or works in Berkeley, from 9 a.m. to noon at 812 Page St. Register on-line at www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/fire/oes or by calling 981-5506. 

“Supressed Histories, Priestesses,” a slideshow by Max Dashu at 7:30 p.m. at Redwood Gardens Community Room, 2951 Derby St. Cost is $10-$15. Wheelchair accessible. 654-9298. 

Acupuncture and Integrative Medicine Open House with Dr. Andrew Karozos at 1:30 p.m. Open house begins at 10 a.m. at 2550 Shattuck Ave. Registration required. 666-8248.  

SUNDAY, JULY 20 

Community Labyrinth Peace Walk, facilitated by Singer/ 

Songwriter/Activist Margie Adam, 2 p.m., North Berkeley Senior Center. Join Margie and a growing number of people who have found that walking the labyrinth, individually and in community, offers a powerful way to ground and focus healing and peace and justice work in the world. Free. Wheelchair accessible. Sponsored by the East Bay Labyrinth Project. 526-7377. 

Summer Sunday at the Peralta Community Garden Café, live music, poetry and refreshments, from 2 to 5 p.m. Since the Community Garden Café will be operated as a non-commercial grassroots effort it is dependent on volunteers and donations for performers and refreshments. Suggestions for programs and performers are welcome. Please contact Karl Linn at 841-3757. 

Lee Nichol on “Thought, Symbol, and Space” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812.  

Top of the Bay Family Day, Sand Sculpting Forget the beach, head for the hills to create the sand castle of your dreams, from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. Professional sand sculptor Kirk Rademaker hosts this hands-on outdoor workshop. For all ages. Lawrence Hall of Science, Centennial Drive. 643-5961. www. 

lawrencehallofscience.org/news/  

Eckhart Tolle Talks on Video Free gatherings, at 7:30 p.m. to hear the words of the author of “The Power of Now” at the Feldenkrais Ctr., 830 Bancroft Way. 547-2024. EdShorelin@aol.com 

MONDAY, JULY 21 

Berkeley Partners for Parks meets at 7:30 p.m. at the Corporation Yard’s meeting room, 1326 Allston Way. mail@bpfp.org, www.bpfp.org 

Berkeley CopWatch meets at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Volunteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

ONGOING 

Marine Biology Classes for students age 8 to 10, Tues., July 15 to Fri., July 18, 9:30 a.m. to noon at the Shorebird Nature Center, 160 University Ave., at the Marina. Cost is $45. For information call 644-8623. www.cityofberkeley.info/marina  

Summer Fun Camps for Children and Teens, from age five and up, are offered at Berkeley recreation centers and include such activities as arts and crafts, swimming and tennis lessons, yoga, organized sports and games, and field trips. Program runs through August 22, Mon. - Fri., 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. The fee, including lunch and snack, is $77 per week for Berkeley residents. Pick up applications at the Camps Office, 2016 Center St. 981-5150. 

Echo Lake Youth Camp for ages 6 - 12 at Echo Lake, near South Lake Tahoe. One week sessions are offered through August 22. Cost is $235 per session. For registration information please visit the Camps Office at 2016 Center St., or call 981-5150. 

Free Energy Conservation Retrofits for Berkeley Residents CA Youth Energy Services is a nonprofit sponsored by the City of Berkeley that trains and employs high school students to provide conservation retrofits. Work includes weatherstripping, replacing lightbulbs with CFLs, cleaning refrigerator coils, replacing faucet aerators and showerheads with low-flow devices, installing earthquake preparedness measures, and a comprehensive audit. Available to home owners and renters. Call for an appointment, 428-2357. 

Free Quit Smoking Class on six Monday evenings, from 6 to 8 p.m., starting July 14th, at the South Berkeley Senior Center. To register contact the Berkeley Tobacco Prevention Program, 981-5330 or QuitNow@ci.berkeley.ca.us 

National HIV Testing Month The City of Berkeley offers free HIV testing. Drop in Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. and Wednesdays 6 to 8:30 p.m., during July, at 830 University Ave. at 6th St. For other days and times call the HIV Testing Information Line at 981-5380.  

CITY MEETINGS 

City Council meets Tuesday, July 15, at 7 p.m. in City Council hambers, Sherry M. Kelly, city clerk, 981-6900. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Berkeley Housing Authority meets Tuesday, July 15 at 6:30 p.m. in City Council Chambers, Sherry M. Kelly, city clerk, 981-6900. ww.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/housingauthority 

Citizens Humane Commission meets Wednesday, July 16, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Katherine O’Connor, 981-6601. ww.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/commissions/humane 

Commission on Aging meets Wednesday, July 16, meets at 1:30 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. Lisa Ploss, 981-5200. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/commissions/aging 

Human Welfare and Community Action Commission meets Wednesday, July 16, at 7 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. Marianne Graham, 981-5416. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/welfare 

Design Review Committee meets Thursday, July 17, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Anne Burns, 981-7415. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/designreview  

Fair Political Practices Commission meets Thursday, July 17, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Prasanna Rasaih, 981-6950.  

www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/faircampaign 

Transportation Commission meets Thursday, July 17, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Peter Hillier, 981-7000. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/transportation  


Letters to the Editor

Tuesday July 15, 2003

STRAWBERRY CREEK 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I moved to Berkeley a year and a half ago and have been happy here, especially because of the beautiful, natural setting. I live at Strawberry Creek Lodge, which is a private senior housing project near University Avenue. One of the amenities which makes living in a small studio apartment more than tolerable is Strawberry Creek, which flows along the rear boundary of our property.  

Our rear garden is a treasure, with large trees and the sound of flowing water. Recently we have had a wonderful restoration of the creek bank habitat, featuring native shrubs and plants. A variety of birds inhabit the thickets along the creek and one day I saw a heron flying over our buildings. A few yards downstream is the city of Berkeley’s Strawberry Creek park. Here the creek continues to be daylighted and provides a natural feature in a valuable recreational space, with a footbridge over the creek and facilities for picnics. 

But, alas, there are also problems with the creek. One is water quality. The water is not safe, even for pets, and we do not know what pathogens may be flowing past our garden from leaking sewer lines and the University campus upstream.  

A potentially more dramatic danger from the creek is posed by the winter rains. The creek flows through a culvert which ends at the upstream end of our garden. Sections of the culvert, built a century ago of non-reinforced concrete, have already collapsed. To our east, this culvert passes under several houses, and still further upstream, Strawberry Creek flows underground behind the Civic Center. When the rains come, we fear that this may be the year when the flood waters will undercut the bank and cause a collapse, either of the end of North Valley Street, or perhaps one of the houses that were built over the creek to our east. The city of Berkeley has thus far avoided responsibility for repairing the culvert while the neighbors and their insurers continue to seek a solution. 

If LBNL is allowed to pave a valley which is part of Strawberry Creek’s drainage, and remove trees and carve away a hillside next to the creek, what will happen when the rains come? Answer: The water that would have been held by the soil in the valley and the trees on the hillside will hurtle down into Berkeley, hastening the collapse of the culvert, deepening the creek bed and undercutting the urban infrastructure along its course. And the water will be burdened with more dirt and more contaminants, making it a threat to humans, animals and birds. 

It is ironic that at the same time that citizens of Berkeley have been organizing to improve and restore the creeks that flow through the city, LBNL has been planning to literally wash out these efforts by destroying a part of the drainage basin upstream.  

Jane Eiseley 

 

• 

CONSIDER ENVIRONMENT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am concerned about the recent proposal by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) to create a parking lot by completely filling in a beautiful wildlife corridor valley with live oaks and an active creek with 2,000 truckloads of earth from the excavation of another site. The proposal for this variance is part of an old long-range building plan, not the current plan that is under way.  

There are, some LBNL employees suggest, other sites that could be used for the office building—if they can be cleaned up. However, it is possible that they may be so contaminated that it would be safer to let them decay in place rather than remove them.  

I think any proposal from LBNL should consider the whole range of planned construction. It should also evaluate the impact on wildlife in the corridor and establish whether it is safe to continue construction on this site in a landslide area with limited access near an earthquake fault. 

Kathy Sawyer 

Oakland 

 

• 

HYPOCRITES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Where are those Republicans who demanded Bill Clinton’s impeachment because he lied? His lies were about a personal indiscretion that hurt no one but  

his own family. Bush’s lies have caused the deaths of over 6,000 people, with American lives still being lost every day, and no exit strategy in sight.  

Billions and billions of our hard-earned, tax-payer dollars are being wasted because Bush swore to the American people and to the United Nations that the threat of weapons of mass destruction was imminent in Iraq. Those Republicans who defend Bush now should be exposed as shameful hypocrites and accessories to the crimes of the Bush administration. 

Bruce Joffe 

Piedmont 

 

• 

STICK TO FACTS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I didn’t care for the tone of Becky O’Malley’s July 8 editorial “Four Myths About Berkeley.” When is Berkeley’s civic discourse going to rise above rabble-rousing sarcasm and rash exaggeration and pay some attention to actual facts? 

For example, take Myth 1. Yes, Berkeley was once a suburban place, and when it was a new suburb, just as elsewhere in California, the new development process was heavily influenced by profit-taking on the part of land owners and speculators. That’s a one-time situation. We’re built now, there are no farmers left who can cash out and retire rich. Now Berkeley is an old suburb, and like all the other old suburbs in California and elsewhere, it is left with the problems of finding its soul and maintaining its infrastructure. 

And no, the 1970’s Traffic Management Plan did not transform the “urban grid pattern” into “quiet cul-de-sacs served by fast through streets which move autos around quickly.” What it did was to raise NIMBYism to an art form and balkanize the city. Like most after-the-fact redesign efforts, it took something that wasn’t working and made a mess of it. In the modern suburbs, those fast through streets are routed past back yards and lined with high, sound-deadening walls that also do a good job of keeping children and pets away from the traffic. In Berkeley, they were created out of built-up residential streets, and that’s what they still are, with heavy traffic running past people’s front yards with no protection whatever. Where they work as fast through streets, the fast traffic is detrimental to the life of the neighborhood; when they don’t, the congestion is just as bad for the neighborhood, plus it’s miserable for the travelers. 

As much as anything, I think that Berkeley needs more simple civility. We need street travelers—drivers, bicyclists, skateboarders, pedestrians, wheelchair users—to always remember that their obituaries aren’t going to include their personal best time to get across town. We need planning advocates and city commissioners who understand that nobody has all the answers, but anyone may have some of them. We need discussions where people listen and learn, and when the right answer is “no,” acknowledge the fact and sit down. We need to remember not to defend high-flown theories to the death and instead try to act pragmatically. 

And, we need responsible local journalism that promotes discourse rather than deadlock. Is that the Daily Planet? 

David A. Coolidge 

 

• 

OFF THE MARK 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

“Four Myths About Berkeley,” (July 8-10 edition) is so divorced from reality in one of its arguments that it calls into question the logic and thrust of the entire editorial. 

I refer to the rant about Berkeley’s allegedly limited culture, which Ms. O’Malley compares to that of Lubbock. The same issue that featured Ms. O’Malley’s imperious but wacky conclusion also contained a full page Arts Calendar and a four-page section devoted to local authors as well as an impressive list of Berkeley’s book sellers.  

These items alone reflect Berkeley’s vibrant civil society and active artistic life, and they contradict Ms. O’Malley’s dismissal of this city’s culture. She is so off the mark that she makes suspect her argumentation on other issues. 

Stanley Lubman 

 

• 

HOUSING MANAGEMENT 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

On this coming Tuesday’s Consent Calendar, the City Council as Housing Authority is being asked to approve a contract which will turn management of the city’s 75 public housing units over to Affordable Housing Associates (AHA) for the whopping sum of $425,000 per year. 

This amounts to nearly $475 per unit per month and covers simple, routine maintenance, finding tenants for vacant units, monitoring leases and “maintaining positive relations with the tenants and the Public Housing Resident Council.” In a letter to the Housing Authority just last month, the Resident Council protested the shifting of management duties “to a company [AHA] that has proven to be less than desirable.” They also point out the inferior workmanship and lack of accountability for maintenance that AHA has done in the past on the public housing units. 

The Resident Council is a HUD-mandated board elected by the public housing residents to “be actively involved in HA’s decision-making process and give advice on matters such as modernization, security, maintenance, resident screening and selection,” and HUD strongly supports and encourages resident management of public housing. Berkeley’s Resident Council has shown its commitment and desire to work with the Housing Authority on management issues. To this end, they have applied for and been granted nonprofit status. The city manager has stated that “any input into changes concerning public housing operations shall be made only through the officially recognized Resident Council,” but their protests about 

transferring the management to AHA have gone unheard. 

I’m not sure how the city advertised this request for a property manager, but I’m sure that somewhere in Berkeley there is a property management team willing to work with the residents on the management of these units for a lot less money, and HUD supports such partnerships as long as the Resident Council remains the governing power of the partnership. Transferring the management to AHA or any entity which is not subject to public input or comment and which has no accountability may seem like an easy way to remove the Housing Authority’s administrative responsibilities, but it also removes any hope that the residents have for the dignity and respect that comes from self-determination. 

Rhiannon 

 

 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Reportage of rental housing news is always useful and of particular interest to disabled persons, working women (a term less obscene than working mother), families and senior citizens. May I add to the recent series a few related facts: 

1—The term “studio,” bottom line, is a euphemism for a room, usually with bath and food preparation provision. Indeed, it can be quite a small room. 

2—Section Eight, bless its heart, is the federal government provision for low-income persons to pay one-third of their income (e.g. wages, pension) while the feds subsidize the balance. Utilities in senior projects are included and seniors’ medical expenses are first deducted in computing rent he pays. 

3—At present there are many needy and worthy persons and families waiting to receive a chance at a Section Eight voucher. The next voucher lottery may not be held for two years (per housing director, July 8, 2003, City Council). Meantime, the Berkeley Housing Authority’s vouchers are gradually being dribbled away to project developer-managers (see, for example, July 15, 2003, and past agendas). 

4—The Berkeley Rent Board’s main function is rent stabilization. However, it also provides renters with some regulatory protections, only a few of which apply to Section Eight renters and the owners-managers of Section Eight buildings, projects, units. 

5—Senior citizen renters in Section Eight projects (and other senior  

housing) should be vigilant in resisting the controlling intrusive “senior home mentality,” which landlords and their quasi-professional staffs may wish to impose. 

Helen Rippier Wheeler


Arts Calendar

Tuesday July 15, 2003

TUESDAY, JULY 15 

FILM 

Sarunas Bartas: “Few of Us” at 7:30 p.m at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Tom Stone recounts his misadventures in “The Summer of My Greek Taverna,” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Stephen Hall talks about difficult questions in “Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human Life Extension,“ at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Kurt Popke, Sue Owens Wright and Kathleen Antrim present their new suspense and mystery books at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

Berkeley Summer Poetry 7 to 9 p.m. at the Mediterranean Café, 2475 Telegraph Ave. 549-1128. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Cena de Despedida, a fare- 

well dinner for La Peña founder Hugo Brenni, with Chilean folk music, from 6 to 9 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. For reservations call 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Tom Rigney and Flambeau perform traditional Cajun and zydeco two-steps and waltzes at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson with Diana Castillo at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Smog and Joanna Newsom perform at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082.  

www.starryploughpub.com 

The Dayna Stephens House Jam at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. 649-8744.  

www.thejazzhouse.org 

Duncan James, solo guitar, at 8 p.m. at Downtown, 2102 Shattuck Ave. 649-3810. 

WEDNESDAY, JULY 16 

FILM 

Excess of Evil: “Incubus” at 7:30 p.m., with Producer An- 

thony M. Taylor in person, at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disa- 

bled, youth, $8 adults. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Gail Tsukiyama reads from “Dreaming Water” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Christopher M. Sterba discusses his new book, “Good Americans: Italian and Jewish Immigrants in the First World War,” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Berkeley Poetry Slam Battle of the Bay with host Charles Ellik at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7, $5 with student i.d. 841-2082.  

www.starryploughpub.com 

Roger Mitchell introduces his new series of books, “SUV Trails,” at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

Tongues United open mic hosted by Brownfist Collective at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $5. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

An Evening with Noel Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul and Mary at 7:30 p.m. at Downtown Oakland Unitarian Church, 685 14th St. near MLK. Concert and reception benefits One Heart for Kids, Streetcats Foundation and Teen-Anon. Tickets for this solo concert are limited. Student advance tickets are $14, regular advance tickets $19.50, special advance reception and concert tickets are $40. For ticket information email oneheartforkids@yahoo.com or call 464-4677.  

Brenda Boykin and Big Soul Country perform blues and jazz for West Coast swing at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Swing dance lesson with Nick and Shanna at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Jack Williams, folk fusion, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. 

www.freightandsalvage.org 

Jules Broussard and Ned Boynton at 8 p.m. at Downtown, 2102 Shattuck Ave. 649-3810. 

Growth of Alliance, Gorilla Math, Stiletta and KOI perform at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $6. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

THURSDAY, JULY 17 

FILM 

Aki Kaurismäki: “Juha” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-0808.  

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Kavita Daswani draws on her multi-cultural life in India and the United States in her first novel, “For Matrimonial Pur- 

poses,” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Nicholas Howe, Professor of English at UC Berkeley, reads from his new book, “Across an Inland Sea: Writing in Place from Buffalo to Berlin,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Summer Noon Concert with Los Soneros de la Bahia, traditional Mexican music and dance, at the Berkeley BART Station. Seating available. Sponsored by the Downtown Berkeley Association. 549-2230. 

Jamie Laval, celtic fiddler, performs at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Landmark Music CD Listening Party, from 6 to 8 p.m. at Jupiter, 2181 Shattuck Ave.  

Ian Moore, Steve Turner and Marc Olsen perform at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $12. 841-2082.  

www.starryploughpub.com 

Keni el Lebrijano Flamenco Guitar at 8 p.m. at Downtown, 2102 Shattuck Ave. 649-3810. 

FRIDAY, JULY 18 

CHILDREN 

Farm Friends Storytime at 10:30 a.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

FILM 

“Down by Law” with Tom Waits in a noir comedy, directed by Jim Jarmusch, at 8:30 p.m. at the Long Haul, a reading room, library and community center in South Berkeley at 3124 Shattuck Ave. Wheelchair accessible. Free. 540-0751. www.thelonghaul.org 

Restoration Pleasures: “La Maison du Mystère” Episodes 1-3 at 7:30 p.m., with Joel Adlen on piano, at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Flash at Cody’s with Alicia Suskin Ostriker and Jenny Factor at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Early Music Concert with period instruments. Works by J.S. Bach including the rarely performed Cantata BWV 210, “O, holder Tag, erwünsche Zeit.” This cantata will be performed by the Cordelia Ensemble directed by Trevor Stephenson. Isabelle Metwalli, soprano and Trevor Stephenson, harpsicord. At 8 p.m. at Zion Lutheran Church, 5201 Park Blvd., Oakland. Suggested donation $10. 547-7974. 

Earl Zero, Soul Majestic and Prince Rastan present a night of classic Roots Reggae at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Quijerema, new Latin Ameri- 

cana music at 8 p.m., at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10. 849-2568.  

www.lapena.org 

Norton Buffalo, harmonica and acoustic trio, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761.  

www.freightandsalvage.org 

Mark Hummel Quartet, harmonica virtuoso, performs at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10-$15. 845-5373.  

www.jazzschool.com 

Adrian’s Music Salon, with the Alexis Harte band and special guest Katherine Chase, perform folk and pop at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Suggested donation is $6 to $10 sliding scale. 649-8744.  

www.thejazzhouse.org 

Majority Rule, Del Cielo, Dear Diary I Seem to be Dead, Promise, and Takaru perform at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5, $1 if wearing prom clothes! 525-9926. 

Paul Cebar and the Milwaukeeans and Amelia perform at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Michael Bluestein Trio at 9:30 p.m. at Downtown, 2102 Shattuck Ave. 649-3810. 

Double Felix, BRAY, and Human Z perform at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $6. 848-0886.  

www.blakesontelegraph.com 

SATURDAY, JULY 19 

CHILDREN 

Kids on the Block Puppet Show, promoting acceptance and understanding of physical and cultural differences at 2 p.m. at the Hall of Health, 2230 Shattuck Ave., lower level. Sug- 

gested donation $3. Children under 3 free. 549-1564. 

Folktales and Crafts at 11 a.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

FILM 

Restoration Pleasures: “La Maison du Mystère” Episodes 4-7 at 7:30 p.m., with Joel Adlen on piano, at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Berkeley Arts Center Poetry Ensemble presents a Poetry Reading featuring James Schevill with Luis Garcia and Richard Denner. Reception and refreshments at 6:30 p.m., readings at 7 p.m., at the Berkeley Art Center. 644-6893. 

Poetry Flash at Cody’s with Joseph Di Prisco and Brian Young at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

African Drum Workshop with Wade Peterson. Beginners from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., experienced from 12:30 to 2 p.m., at The Jazz House. Cost is $15-$25, and advanced registration is encouraged. 533-5111.  

Elvis Costello and the Imposters at 8 p.m. at the Greek Theatre. 642-0212. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu  

Emeryville Taiko and Zan- 

Zylum Jazz Group at 8 p.m. at the Emeryville Taiko Dojo, 1601A 63rd St. Cost is $10. 655-6392. 

José Roberto Hernández presents Fiesta y Color de Latinoamérica at 8:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

City Folk, contemporary folk trio, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Rube Waddell and Go Van Gogh perform at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082.  

www.starryploughpub.com 

Jolie Holland, Sean Hayes, and Sam Edson, perform American country folk at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Suggested donation is $6 to $10 sliding scale. 649-8744.  

www.thejazzhouse.org 

Coto and Friends perform jazz and Afro-Cuban music at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Tickets are $10-$12. 845-5373.  

www.jazzschool.com 

Faraway Brothers, P-Funk Allstars, Dr. Masseuse, and The Spindles perform at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $6. 848-0866. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Native Elements, Warsaw Poland Brothers and Shrinkage at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10 in advance, $12 at the door. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Spencer Day at 9:30 p.m. at Downtown, 2102 Shattuck Ave. 649-3810. 

Born/Dead, Conga Fury, Chainsaw, Voetsek, Case of Emergency, Doppelganger perform at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, JULY 20 

FILM 

“Animal Crackers,” filmed and produced by Berkeley artist Kamala Appel, explores the factual and fantasy lives of Bay Area wildlife. Premieres at 3 p.m. at the Parkway Theater, 1834 Park Blvd., Oakland. Tickets are $5 at the door. For more information go to www.picturepubpizza.com 

Restoration Pleasures: “Sunrise” at 5:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Guided Tour of “Paul Kos: Everything Matters” at 2 p.m. at The Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu  

Zadie Smith introduces her new novel, “The Autograph Man,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

www.codysbooks.com 

Robert A. Rosenstone reads from “King of Odessa: A Novel of Isaac Babel,” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Cafe Belle: Open Stage Bellydance, featuring dancers from several Bay Area companies and schools, at 7:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $9. Fundraiser for Women’s Refuge of Berkeley for survivors of domestic violence. 525-5054.  

www.ashkenaz.com 

Sally Light, lyric soprano, in a benefit concert for the Mordechai Vanunu Campaign, at 3 p.m. at the Unitarian Fellowship Hall, corner of Cedar and Bonita. $10-$20 donation requested. 548-3048. 

Dan Joseph and John Ingle Duo, plus Christopher Williams, perform as part of the ACME Contemporary Composer’s Series at 8:15 p.m. at The Jazz House. Donations accepted. 649-8744.  

www.thejazzhouse.org 

Echo, Realistic perform at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $5. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Three Guitars, with Steve Erquiaga, Mimi Fox and Brian Pardo perform at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10-$15. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Faruk and Ali Sinan Erdemesel with Husmu Tusuz, Turkish Sufi and Gypsy music at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-176.  

www.freightandsalvage.org 

MONDAY, JULY 21 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Cynthia Lee, Professor of Law at George Washington University, will discuss “Murder and the Reasonable Man: Passion and Fear in the Criminal Courtroom,” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

James Gleick discusses his biography, “Isaac Newton,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Great Books Group meets at 7 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

Poetry Express, featuring Nathan from Berkeley Poetry Slam, from 7 to 9:30 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Shaman Trance Dance with DJ Amar and Isis Rising at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $6. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

AT THE THEATER 

 

Aurora Theater Company, “Thérèse Raquin,” by Emile Zola, directed by Tom Ross. A sinister tale set among the  

lower classes in nineteenth- 

century Parisian society. Runs through July 27, at 2081 Addison St. Tickets are $32 and $34. 843-4822.  

www.auroratheatre.org 

Berkeley Opera, “Faust,” by Gounod, Jonathan Khuner music director, Ann Woodhead, stage director. July 18, 19, 25, and 26 at 8 p.m., July 20 and 27 at 2 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Theater. Tickets are $38 adults, $33 seniors, $16 children, $10 students and are available from 925-798-1300. 

www.juliamorgan.org 

California Shakespeare Festival runs through October 22. Performances this year will be Julius Caesar, Arms and the Man, Measure for Measure, and Much Ado About Nothing. Please call for dates and times. The Bruns Amphitheater, Orinda. 548-9666.  

www.calshakes.org  

Central Works Theater Ensemble, “The Wyrd Sisters” directed by Jan Zvaifler. Through July 27, Thurs. - Sat. at 8 p.m. and Sun. at 5 p.m. No performance July 24. At the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Tickets are $8-$20 sliding scale. For reservations call 558-1381. 

foolsFury, “Attempts on her Life,” by Martin Crimp, directed by Ben Yalom, July 18 and 19 at 8 p.m. at LaVal’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid at Hearst. Tickets are $20 general, $15 students, seniors. 1-866- 

GOT-FURY.  

www.foolsfury.org 

Woman’s Will Shakespeare Company, “The Rover,” a restoration comedy by Aphra Behn. July 19 and 20 in Live Oak Park. All performances are at 1 p.m. and are free. 420-0813.  

www.womanswill.org 


Bay Trail’s Newest Section Completes East Bay Link

By MEGAN GREENWELL
Tuesday July 15, 2003

The San Francisco Bay Trail now stretches through Berkeley, completing the north-south connection between Albany and Emeryville. 

The newest addition to the Bay Trail is part of a plan to link the entire Bay Area waterfront, connecting 47 cities in nine counties around the Bay. 

In the East Bay, the trail is part of the Eastshore State Park. The new section forms part of an 8.5-mile walkway that passes through Oakland, Emeryville, Berkeley, Albany, El Cerrito and Richmond. 

On Monday afternoon, various bikers, joggers and skaters made their way along the new trail hugging the Berkeley coastline. John Wotkyns was one of them. He skated along the trail enjoying the mix of the warm afternoon and the bay breeze. He said he has already become a fan of the local portion of the Bay Trail. 

“I love it,” he said, pausing a moment during his afternoon jaunt. “It's a great addition. I'm very happy with it." 

Citizens for the Eastshore State Park, the City of Berkeley, and Bay Trail officials will hold a ceremony marking the opening of the new section of the trail on Saturday. The opening, which will be held at 11 a.m. at the southwest corner of University Avenue and West Frontage Road, will feature guided tours of the trail for all interested community members. 

The new section of the trail, which stretches from University Avenue to Ashby Avenue along the Bay, was completed late last month after two years of work by the City of Berkeley, the East Bay Regional Park District, the Eastshore State Park, and the California State Coastal Conservancy, as well as several advocacy organizations. The $4 million project was funded by the city with help from a federally aided California Department of Transportation grant. 

“Berkeley residents and visitors alike will benefit from the improved access to our waterfront and new recreational opportunities,” said City Manager Weldon Rucker. 

Though Saturday’s ceremony will mark the official opening of the trail, Berkeley residents have been using the new scenic path since its completion. The trail is designed primarily for pedestrians and bicycles, and sections of the path completed earlier — including those in Albany and Richmond — have been favorite sports for roller bladers, joggers and dog-walkers.  

In addition to being a recreational area, city and park officials hope the new section of the Bay Trail will aid those traveling from place to place by bike or on foot. In a press release, Lisa Caronna, the city’s director of parks, recreation and waterfront, said that the path would enhance safe access to the bay and offer alternatives to traveling by car. 

The Berkeley section of the trail connects to another recent waterfront project as well: the Bicycle-Pedestrian bridge that stretches over Interstate 80. A key feature of the new section of Bay Trail is its connection to that bridge, which will allow easy access from the Berkeley Aquatic Park to the waterfront. 


Advertising Fraud Strikes Daily Planet

By DAVID SCHARFENBERG
Tuesday July 15, 2003

Scam artists placed two fraudulent advertisements in the Berkeley Daily Planet in late June and early July in an apparent bid to bilk readers out of money or personal financial information, said Daily Planet publisher Michael O’Malley. 

The ads used the names of two legitimate lending companies—E-LOAN, based in Dublin, Calif., and Nexity Bank, based in Birmingham, Ala.— but provided false phone numbers. 

The appearance of the ads has raised questions about the Daily Planet’s advertising policies and concerns about what might happen to readers who provided a credit card number, a social security number or other sensitive information to the alleged con artists. 

“Whatever private financial information they gave to people is probably either being used or sold to a thief,” said Gail Hillebrand, senior attorney with the Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports. 

Hillebrand said the paper should have known something was awry when the advertisers, identifying themselves as Greg Lee in the case of the false Nexity ad and Peter Grange in the case of the fake E-LOAN ad, used credit cards with other peoples’ names to buy the advertising space.  

O’Malley, who later discovered that the ads had been purchased with stolen credit card numbers, apologized for the fraudulent ads. But the publisher, who bought the paper from Big Foot Media in December, a month after it closed in the face of poor advertising revenue, said it would have been difficult to detect the fraud given that the alleged scam artists used the names of legitimate companies.  

O’Malley, who owns the paper with his wife, executive editor Becky O’Malley, also addressed concerns that the incident will shake reader or advertiser confidence in the newly reborn paper, which began publication in April. 

The decision to publish a story on the fraud, O’Malley said, “certainly indicates that we take this seriously.” He also pledged that the newspaper will be more vigilant in checking the legitimacy of the ads it runs in the future. 

“We’re going to be a lot more suspicious,” O’Malley said. 

The fake E-LOAN ad ran from June 13 to July 8 in the Daily Planet and the false Nexity ad ran from June 27 to July 8. Both were large ads that appeared in the classified section in the back of the tabloid-style paper. The Daily Planet notified the Berkeley Police Department and pulled the ads last week when it discovered the fraud, which cost the paper $1,530 in advertising space. 

O’Malley said he discovered last week that a similar fraudulent ad ran last fall when the Daily Planet was under different ownership. 

Cindy Russo, senior vice president of operations for Nexity Bank, said fraudulent ads using the bank’s name have appeared in a series of small newspapers in 10 to 15 states across the country, including California, Florida, Tennessee and Virginia since June. 

“These guys are well-organized,” she said. 

Russo said the con artists have stripped the company’s logo from its Web site and used her name and that of Nexity CEO Greg Lee to place the fraudulent pitches. She said Nexity has traced the two toll-free numbers listed in the fake ads to a pair of cell phones in Canada but that the two phone companies which operate the phones, Sprint Canada and Bell Canada, have declined to shut them off without a court order. 

Nexity, in the meantime, has contacted the FBI and Royal Canadian Police, among other agencies, but have seen little progress in the case. 

“Law enforcement up there is not real helpful,” she said, referring to Canadian authorities. “No one is being physically hurt, so it’s off the radar screen.” 

The FBI and Royal Canadian Police did not return calls for comment. But Rolando Berrelez, assistant director for the Federal Trade Commission’s midwest regional office in Chicago, Illinois, said con artists often set up shop in Canada or other foreign countries to evade law enforcement and cut costs. 

Russo said the con artists have been promising loans to callers, requesting two monthly payments through the Western Union courier company and then disappearing. She said she did not have any knowledge of widespread identity theft by the con artists, but noted that they have been paying for newspaper ads with stolen credit card information. 

The Daily Planet discovered that the Nexity ad in its paper was fraudulent when Ronda Gieryn, a business manager from Waltham, Mass., called last week to report that she had received a credit card bill for $2,400 worth of advertising services that she had not requested, O’Malley said. 

The fake E-LOAN ad was also purchased with a stolen credit card, O’Malley said. 

E-LOAN spokesperson Tiffany Kelley declined to discuss the case and E-LOAN attorneys did not return calls for comment. 

“This matter is under investigation and therefore we can’t comment on it,” Kelley said. 

One of the two numbers listed in the fake E-LOAN ad had a Canadian area code, from the Ottawa area, suggesting another scam based north of the border. 

Calls to the fake E-LOAN numbers listed on the Daily Planet ad turned up a voice mail message telling callers they had reached “E-LOANS” and asking them to leave a name and phone number. 

A call to one of the fake numbers listed on the Nexity Bank ad was answered by a man claiming to be Greg Lee — matching the name of Nexity’s actual CEO. But the man said he was a “third party consultant” who would accept loan applications and forward them to Nexity and other financial institutions. He said he would require an applicant’s name, address, social security number and other basic information to procure a loan. 

Jim Ewart, legal counsel for the California Newspaper Publishers Association, said newspapers fall victim to all sorts of false advertising. While they face no legal liability, he said, newspapers can face a blow to their reputations. 

“They find themselves in the worst possible position because they want to protect their readers and their credibility,” he said. 

The Daily Planet is not the only local newspaper to run fake ads using the names of real financial institutions. Advertising account representative Fernando Laughlin of the East Bay Express said he ran a fraudulent Bank One ad for four weeks in May. Joyce Garmon, who heads the classified advertising department at the Oakland Tribune added that her newspaper ran a fraudulent Capitol One pitch several months ago. 

“It’s pretty prevalent,” said Garmon, noting that she has come across the scam many times in her 20 years in the newspaper business. 

Laughlin said the Express has begun asking for photocopies of the front and back of driver’s licenses and credit cards before processing a sale. The system, he said, prevented the weekly newspaper from running a Nexity Bank ad in June. 

But Laughlin said one problem is that sales representatives, working on commission, find it difficult to turn down lucrative ads proffered by scam artists who send mass faxes attempting to place costly, long-term ads. 

“Any sales rep who gets a fax like that is doing backflips,” he said. 

Steve Blackledge, legislative director of the California Public Interest Group said his organization’s research shows that the average victim of identity theft spends $1,000 and 175 hours clearing his name. 

“Newspapers need to make sure they are running advertisements from legitimate companies,” he said. 

Hillebrand said any readers who fell victim to the fake ads should change bank accounts if they provided account numbers, obtain a credit report to see if their credit cards have been misused and place a fraud alert on their credit reports. With a fraud alert in place, readers will receive a telephone call anytime there are attempts to open new lines of credit using their personal information.


Connerly Effort to Ban Race In Admissions is Uphill Battle

By ARI PAUL
Tuesday July 15, 2003

Pro-affirmative action groups cried tears of joy when the Supreme Court upheld diversity as a compelling state interest, and there was a collective sigh of relief signifying that all those years of appeals, debates and rallies on frosty Michigan winter days had come to a glorious end. But it may not be over yet. Ward Connerly is back. 

For Connerly, today is 1978 all over again. Bakke upheld affirmative action, but the maverick dissenting California regent created a grassroots movement for a state ballot initiative to ban race-based admissions in all California schools. The question got on the ballot, and the people voted against affirmative action. 

Connerly’s Sacramento-based American Civil Rights Coalition can appear to be a segregationist juggernaut with its proven record of being unfazed with the Bakke decision and ultimately killing the only successful integration system the University of California ever had. 

“The Court may have allowed racial preferences with their decision, but they did not mandate them,” Connerly said when he announced his plan to begin a signature drive in Michigan. “The people still rule in this country, not robed justices.” 

But while he has a big victory under its belt, must pro-affirmative action and progressive groups worry that history will repeat itself, leaving the Grutter decision as a dead letter? Will Ward Connerly have his way? The situation is much different now for Connerly than it was over two decades ago. It’s 2003 and it’s Michigan, not California, where the political landscape is, as some have put it, bi-polar. 

The Michigan Republican Party is uninterested in helping Connerly’s effort. “We don’t think it’s valuable to keep stirring the pot on this issue,” Greg McNeilly, spokesman for the Michigan Republican Party told the Detroit News. “Public policy should be focused on healing the racial divide, and that’s not something accomplished by Mr. Connerly’s initiative.” 

Michigan Republicans walk a fine line. Because the state is equally divided between right and left, an alienation of minority voters would cost Bush 18 electoral votes in 2004, which could very well hand the Democratic candidate a presidential victory. 

And corporate America, another necessary ally, will probably not get involved. Though big business has always found themselves aligned with conservative financial interests, dozens of Fortune 500 companies filed friend-of-the-court briefs in favor of Michigan’s policies citing a need for a diverse work force. Therefore, it seems unlikely Connerly will woo many corporate firms into his movement. 

Then there’s another problem Connerly faces: those pesky activists. Shanta Driver, the spokesperson for the student interveners in both Grutter and Gratz, said, “Acting now is the key to victory. We can defeat Ward Connerly’s anti-affirmative action ballot proposition before it ever gets off the ground, but only if we act decisively now. Any business, institution, or individual that funds the attack on civil rights will face a consumer boycott and pickets organized by the youth of the new civil rights movement.” 

Is this something Connerly and the ACRC should take seriously? Can student activists really get in his way? 

Yes, in fact, two student groups at the University of Michigan—Students Supporting Affirmative Action and the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action By Any Means Necessary—were instrumental in bringing thousands of students to rally outside the Supreme Court and bringing the issue to the forefront of campus debate for as long as the cases have been going through the appeals process. 

If there is one thing Michigan student activists are not known for, it’s being quiet. So if Connerly wants to go through with this, he’s not going to go without a fight.  

Connerly, once the champion of social conservatives, finds himself friendless in the contemporary affirmative action affair. Perhaps his 15 minutes of political fame are over, sealed with a protest in Ann Arbor this week and Dear John letter from the GOP. 

The possibility for a state ballot initiative banning affirmative action in Michigan is very real, but at this point in time, it’s a pipe dream.  

 

Ari Paul is a freelance writer based in Ann Arbor, Mich.


Bates Suggests Ordinance To Curtail Newspaper Theft

By DAVID SCHARFENBERG
Tuesday July 15, 2003

City Council will weigh an emergency loan for eight Berkeley child care programs Tuesday night, vote on changes in the city’s rental housing safety program and consider taking the first steps toward an ordinance prohibiting the “unauthorized removal” of free newspapers. 

The push for an ordinance has its roots in Mayor Tom Bates’ theft of about 1,000 copies of the Daily Californian, UC Berkeley’s student newspaper, the day before the Nov. 5 mayoral election. The publication had endorsed Bates’ opponent, then-mayor Shirley Dean. 

Bates admitted to stealing the papers in December, apologized, plead guilty to petty theft and paid a $100 fine. The mayor also pledged to speak about the incident in the Berkeley schools and said he would push for a local ordinance outlawing the practice. 

City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque has raised doubts about the validity of a Berkeley law on the issue. 

“I had explained to the mayor that if he had been prosecuted under the state theft statute, that would suggest it was already a crime under state law and generally it is illegal for local government to write a criminal statute that duplicates state law,” Albuquerque said. 

The city attorney referred Bates to the Alameda County District Attorney’s office which told the mayor it would not make a determination until after the passage of an ordinance. 

Bates had indicated that he will ask City Council Tuesday to provide City Manager Weldon Rucker with a copy of a San Francisco ordinance stating, in part, that the “unauthorized removal” of free newspapers infringes on “the public’s right to express and exchange diverse ideas and opinions.” The San Francisco ordinance would serve as a guide in the development of a similar Berkeley measure. 

The mayor’s office, in an emergency measure inserted Friday, is also calling for Rucker to work with eight local child care programs that face delays in state funding for low-income children as a result of the budget stalemate in Sacramento. 

Julie Sinai, senior aide to Bates, said the city is considering emergency bridge loans or advances on municipal grants to the programs — six of which are actual child care centers and two of which provide vouchers for low-income kids. Sinai said the delays will affect funding for 288 Berkeley children. 

“The anxiety level of my staff, the parents, the children...it’s a total disruption,” said Beatriz Leyva-Cutler, executive director of Bay Area Hispanic Institute for Advancement, or BAHIA, which operates two of the affected child care centers, serving 135 children. She said the impact of the delay has been powerful. “If the city comes through with this loan for us, that would certainly be our saving grace.” 

Leyva-Cutler said the institute would normally receive a quarterly payment of $151,000 from the state in early July, part of a $474,000 annual payment. Without the funding in place, the center is refinancing one of its buildings, drawing on parent donations of food and even staging a car wash to raise cash. 

“It would simply be unconscionable to allow hundreds of children to suddenly lose their child care,” said Bates, in a statement. “Parents would have to miss work, employees would be laid off, and children would be left home alone.” 

City Council will also consider a pair of changes to its rental housing safety program. The program, approved in August 2001 after a rash of devastating house fires, has three basic components — educating tenants and owners on safety issues, annual certification by owners that their units meet safety requirements, and periodic city inspections of apartments. 

Last week, the city’s housing staff presented the council with a change in the certification provision. Property owners who find no safety violations, under the new policy, would no longer have to certify the safety of their units to the city. Council, which voted 7-2 to accept a “first reading” of the new measure last week, will vote on final approval Tuesday. 

Zoning Adjustments Board member Andy Katz, who helped create the rental housing safety program in 2001, said the change would eliminate an important safeguard for tenants. 

“Before, landlords were affirming under penalty of perjury that the unit was safe to live in,” he said. 

But Berkeley housing director Steve Barton said the requirement has created reams of paper work that keeps the program’s small staff from conducting the more important work of inspections. 

City Council will also consider reducing the fees that property owners must pay to subsidize the program. Landlords reacted strongly to a new fee structure put in place in May that shifted the financial burden for the program from the city to property owners. 

Council is also expected to approve a $50,000 study of the monetary value of the police, fire, sewer and other services it provides for UC Berkeley. Under a 15-year agreement that expires in 2005, the university pays the city about $500,000 annually for those services, a figure that Rucker’s chief of staff Arrietta Chakos has labeled “woefully inadequate.”  

The study, to be conducted by Economic & Planning Systems, Inc. in Berkeley, would provide the city with data to use in negotiations on a new 15-year deal to expire in 2020.


Police Blotter

By DAVID SCHARFENBERG
Tuesday July 15, 2003

Gunshots disrupt party 

 

Gunshots broke up a large southwest Berkeley party early Saturday morning, but did not appear to injure anyone, police said. 

Police received a flurry of 911 calls after gunshots broke out at about 2:04 a.m. at a party on the 1400 block of Fairview Street, according to Berkeley Police Department spokesperson Officer Mary Kusmiss. 

“Neighbors told police that they heard some commotion and yelling and possible bottles breaking and then heard pops, or loud bangs,” Kusmiss said. 

Fourteen police officers responded to the call and many fled the party as police arrived. While none of the witnesses who spoke to police saw the shootings, several indicated that a group of Asian men in their early-20s in a compact, gray or light-colored car may have fired the shots, according to police. 

Two of the officers on the scene found about six shell casings from a “larger caliber semi-automatic weapon” on the block, Kusmiss said. 

The case is still under investigation and there are no confirmed victims of the shooting. Kusmiss said investigators are reasonably certain that the shooting was unconnected to the apparent border feud between drug dealers in North Oakland and South Berkeley that erupted in mid-June but has been quiet for the last three weeks. 

Kusmiss said the description of the alleged shooters, as well as other factors she would not name because they might jeopardize the investigation, led to the conclusion that the party shooting was unrelated. 

 

 

Alleged burglar arrested 

 

A 23 year-old Alameda man was arrested Sunday evening on suspicion of two “hot prowl” burglaries in Berkeley, police said. 

A hot prowl burglary, in police lingo, is a burglary that takes place when the victim is at home. 

A 28 year-old Berkeley man entered his home on the 2400 block of Blake Street at about 6:42 p.m. and found a man walking down the stairs with a backpack in his hands and two sets of headphones around his neck. 

The resident told the thief to drop the backpack, which he did, dashing out the front door shortly thereafter, Kusmiss said. When a police officer arrived to take a report from the resident, he heard talk on police radio of another hot prowl burglary at 7:10 p.m. 

A 30 year-old woman on the 2300 block of Ellsworth Street said she grew concerned when she heard her dog Wendel barking in her bedroom. 

When she went to quiet her dog, she found a window open, a screen removed and a chair on the ground outside, next to the window, according to police. When Wendel continued to bark in the direction of the bed, she suspected that a thief might be in the area and yelled for him to leave. 

“All of a sudden, she saw a male suspect jump over her bed, as he had apparently been hiding behind it,” Kusmiss said. 

The resident grabbed the front of the suspect’s shirt and tussled with him, but he broke free and escaped through the front door. 

A patrol lieutenant later found a man who fit the description of the burglar in People’s Park, and the two victims positively identified 23 year-old Billy Ray Jennings. 

Jennings was booked for two counts of burglary and a parole violation. 

“Good work by those astute residents,” said Kusmiss. “And thanks to the dog.”


Berkeley Radio Pirates Broadcast Despite FCC Intervention, Threats

By AL WINSLOW Special to the Planet
Tuesday July 15, 2003

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been trying to silence Berkeley’s pirate radio broadcasters for 10 years. The broadcasters continue to broadcast, but they say it’s getting harder. 

“[The FCC] is starting to pick on people who have property, who have something to lose,” said labor activist Michael Delacour, who quit Berkeley Liberation Radio (104.1 FM) last year after being threatened by the FCC with a fine of up to $100,000. 

“I was afraid they were threatening my retirement,” said Delacour, 65, who receives a pension from the Boilermakers’ Union. 

A current broadcaster—“Captain Fred”—said the ranks of Berkeley Liberation Radio have thinned and that some local pirate stations—such as Queer Kids Radio and Vulcan Radio, an anarchist music station—went off the air entirely after getting an FCC letter. 

“Typically, what happens is they get a letter called a notice of liability and a letter threatening dire consequences if they don’t go off the air,” Captain Fred said. Another broadcaster—“DJ Advocacy”—added: “Usually, for most people, that’s all the warning they need.” 

DJ Advocacy said broadcasters use pseudonyms because, “Basically, the FCC doesn’t know who we are. They didn’t know where to send the letter to, so they sent it to Delacour.” 

The May 6, 2002, letter to Delacour, five-time Peace and Freedom Party candidate for mayor and Berkeley’s best known usual suspect, reads: 

“[The FCC] has received complaints from residents ... concerning interference to reception of FM broadcast signals ... investigation revealed that you lease space at Skyline Studios ... and that that space is used by the illegal radio station known as Berkeley Liberation Radio ... You are hereby officially advised that operation of radio transmitting equipment without a valid license ... may subject the operator to penalties of a maximum criminal fine of $100,000 and/or one-year imprisonment, a civil forfeiture up to $11,000 or seizure of the equipment for the first offense.” 

When shown the letter, the Berkeley civil liberties lawyer David Beauvais said, “They’re intending to chill people out with it. That’s the point.” 

The radio station is breaking the law, he said, and the FCC is enforcing it. “It’s a civil disobedience kind of thing, and when you do civil disobedience, you’ve got to take your lumps,” Beauvais said. 

The FCC made good on its “seizure of the equipment” threat Dec. 11, storming the Berkeley Liberation Radio station at 2427 Telegraph Ave. at 55 Street. The pirate station now operates in another location. 

The station has no paid employees and costs $600 a month for rent and $20 for a phone, according to Captain Fred. 

What is broadcast is virtually anything. Berkeley pirate broadcasters have aired a Marxist interpretation of the news, regular readings of articles from the local newspapers, shows on animal rights, parenting, bicycle liberation and the experiences of gay Afro-Americans, articles by adult film actress Nina Hartley, programs by the Peace and Freedom Party and the Libertarian Party, and an on-air appearance by then-Mayor Shirley Dean. 

A lot of it is for enjoyment, Delacour said. “It’s a form of therapy. You can sit in a room and talk for a couple of hours without anyone interrupting. You can be the disc jockey you always dreamed of since you were a kid.” 

Tony McNair, a Berkeley homeless activist, was alone in the one-room station at 11 a.m., broadcasting the tape of a San Francisco anti-war rally. He said about a dozen men in blue jackets with FCC or U.S. Marshall written on them, came in carrying sledge hammers and a battering ram. 

“They yanked me out by the shirt and slammed me up against the wall and held guns pointed at my head,” McNair said. “They kept saying, ‘Who are the leaders? Who are the leaders?’” 

McNair said the raiding party turned off the station and removed all the equipment, including a computer and its records. He was let go an hour later, after an Oakland policeman ran a warrant check on him, he said. 

The station, though, was back on the air in four days and continues to broadcast. 

It now costs about $1,000 to fully equip a micropower station and the cost is about to plunge again, according to Free Radio Berkeley founder Stephen Dunifer. 

Barred by federal court order from broadcasting, Dunifer is collaborating with other transmitter engineers throughout the country to find ways to reduce equipment costs. 

“We’re ready to introduce a $100 kit that, with other equipment you can get at a hardware store, will let you broadcast four to six miles, which is really all you need, for $500,” he said. 

“As long as equipment costs can be kept low, these raids are really not that effective. They cost a lot and there is the indirect cost that storm troopers coming in and stealing a microphone is not the best image the FCC wants to project in terms of free speech issues,” Dunifer said. 

Dunifer advocates flooding the country with so many micropower stations the government will be powerless. “If it becomes popular enough, mainstream enough, the FCC could face having to go into a rest home to stop an 80-year-old woman from broadcasting Glenn Miller,” he said. 

Because they come and go so often, it’s hard to estimate how many unlicensed stations operate in the country. Dunifer estimates hundreds. One Web site lists 21 by name in California, including six in the Bay Area. The FCC regularly reports shutting down about 200 a year. 

Broadcaster Suzan Rodriguez, using her real name—“I don’t care who knows who I am”—said prior to her regular Friday morning show on Berkeley Liberation Radio, “We’re not going to just roll over.” 

“Micro-radio is the last platform for the people to have a voice in a country where the government is bent on gagging our voices. Dissent is the American way. Our country was founded on dissent,” she said. 

Meanwhile, it’s not certain the FCC has rid itself of Delacour. 

“Actually, I made a bad decision,” he said about quitting the station. “I had other things going on, like fighting an eviction, but I wish I’d stayed with it and not chickened out.”


3045 Shattuck Project Draws Public Hearing

By ANGELA ROWEN
Tuesday July 15, 2003

The months-long battle over the fate of the property development at 3045 Shattuck Avenue may be resolved July 24, when the Zoning Adjustment Board is scheduled to hear arguments from owner Christina Sun and the property’s neighbors. 

The board decided Thursday to proceed with a public hearing, voting to hear more evidence before deciding on whether or not to declare the project a public nuisance and force Sun to demolish the unit or scale down the three-story, mixed-use project. 

The controversy has pitted Sun against her neighbors, who say the size and design of the proposed building, which is located in a commercial area in South Berkeley, conflicts with the character of the nearby residentially zoned neighborhood. They have argued that the city has grounds to stop the project and call for a public hearing, claiming that Sun intends to convert a two-story single-family dwelling unit into a group-living accommodation, a change of use that would require a use permit and public hearing. 

Following repeated complaints from neighbors about Sun’s intended use — and culminating in testimony from a former tenant of Sun that suggested the residence was used as a group living accommodation in the past — the planning department issued a stop work order on the project, stating that Sun provided “incomplete information” on a building permit application. 

On that application, submitted to the planning department in March, Sun stated that the building was a single-family residence and would remain so after the proposed renovations were made. Neighbors have insisted that the size and design of the proposed buildings indicate that she in fact intends to rent out the rooms to separate individuals, which they say would qualify it as a group-living accommodation. 

Unable to resolve the issue, the Planning Department referred the matter to the Zoning Adjustment Board, which will decide if Sun violated the zoning code by providing false information on her application regarding the question of use. If the board finds that she did, then it can declare the property a public nuisance and order Sun to start from scratch, which means that she will have to undergo a public hearing. 

Although neighbors have tried for about five months to get the city to call a public hearing based on other factors — including rear yard space, height, size and parking — the board is only being asked to decide whether or not the unit was used as a group-living accommodation or a single-family dwelling unit at the time she applied for the building permit.  

Neighbors will likely present evidence that former tenants signed separate lease agreements and paid for their utilities and other expenses separately. Their evidence includes statements made by a former tenant, who testified before City Council last month and told city staff members that he signed a separate lease and paid for his utilities apart from other tenants in the building. Project opponents will also try to show that Sun is proposing to use the building as a group-living accommodation in the future, pointing to her plan to build six bedrooms and several additional rooms that can be converted into bedrooms. They also say the plans indicate that there is no master bedroom and that the rooms can be easily converted into kitchens, two of many factors in the plans that they say suggests use as a group-living accommodation. 

Rena Rickles, the neighbors’ attorney, said in a recent interview that the board should have no problem deciding on the issue. “The floor plans make it clear to anybody that this could be nothing other than some kind of group living/border house/multiple dwelling unit,” she said.  

But Sun said that she was never told her floor plans were a problem when she submitted the floor plans to get her permit. “It is unfair for them to change their minds after the permit has already been issued, when they initially said it was okay,” she said. 

Sun said that she signed a deed restriction to ensure that the building would only be used a single family dwelling unit. Sun also said she will present statements from two other tenants proving that the building was used by a household, indicating that the tenants shared water, power and house phone bills and shared household items, and therefore qualified as a single family dwelling unit. 

Sun said she is “terrified” by the prospect of having to start the process all over again, and said if the city forces her to scale down her project to two stories, she would not be able to afford it. 

“It would cost a half a million dollars,” she said, adding that she has already spent about $500,000 of the total $700,000 cost of the project. Sun, who said she mortgaged her home on Carleton Street to pay for the 3045 Shattuck development, said she believes her opponents will try to stall the project long enough to make it financially unfeasible for her to continue. 

“They are trying to bankrupt me by stalling this as long as possible,” she said. “I think at the next hearing they will bring up all these other issues and try and convince the board to continue the hearing. But then the board goes on recess until the end of August. It might not even decide until October.” 

By that time, Sun said, she will be financially broke. 

The zoning ordinance defines a group-living accommodation as a building that is designed for accommodating residential use by persons not living together as a household. A household is defined as an entity made up of one or more persons and usually characterized by those maintaining the same rental agreement and sharing living expenses, such as rent, food costs, and utilities. By contrast, a single-family dwelling unit is defined as that which is occupied by one household, no matter how many individuals are within that household.


Africa’s Problems Remain After Bush’s Visit

By EARL OFARI HUTCHINSON Pacific News Service
Tuesday July 15, 2003

Africa was in big trouble before President Bush’s recent five-day trip to the continent, and of course it still is now. But Bush could have done more. A few platitudes about the crime of slavery, the devastation of AIDS and other diseases, doublespeak on a possible U.S. peacekeeping force in Liberia and the saber-rattle of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe did nothing to point the way toward solutions to Africa’s colossal problems.  

A United Nations report issued the same week of Bush’s visit found that 20 African countries ranked dead last on a list of economic development rates for the world’s nations. At their present rates of growth, it will take these nations a century to achieve universal primary education, and 150 years to cut poverty in half and child mortality by two-thirds.  

Much of the blame for the famine, disease, poverty and corruption that seem endemic to many African countries can be dumped squarely on the backs of a long parade of African dictators, despots and demagogues. While the five carefully handpicked nations that Bush visited have stable, functioning democracies, and, with the exception of Nigeria, have relatively good human rights records, they are aberrations. Africa’s dictators have killed, maimed and terrorized their citizens, rigged or rejected free elections and systematically looted their countries’ treasuries while living in palatial splendor. Their greed and dictatorial rule have locked their nations into destructive and near permanent cycles of poverty, war, disease and dependency that have become Africa’s trademark.  

Meanwhile, Africa’s military rulers have squandered millions of their countries’ meager funds on sophisticated weapons, mostly to keep themselves in power. They have turned the Congo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and now Liberia into killing fields.  

Then there’s the AIDS epidemic. Nearly 70 percent of the estimated 36 million persons worldwide afflicted with AIDS/HIV are in sub-Sahara Africa. In South Africa, more than 10 percent of the total population has HIV/AIDS. Only a tiny fraction of those with the disease have any hope of getting the potential life-sustaining anti-retroviral drugs. While Bush’s pledge of $15 billion to fight AIDS and other diseases in Africa and the Caribbean is much needed, Congress has yet to cough up the money. The first dollars will not flow until Oct. 1, the start of the next fiscal year. By then, thousands more Africans could be dead from the disease. Bush, and the African leaders who wined and dined him, made no mention of the stalled AIDS funding.  

Also, Bush is asking for $5 billion to fund his proposed Millennium Challenge Account to spur development in poor nations. The hitch is that Congress must approve the funds, and even if it does, the money is not exclusively earmarked for African nations. Bush made no mention of this initiative during his Africa visit, nor gave any indication that the United States would drastically raise the amount of foreign aid it gives to Africa. Nor did Bush call on Japan and the wealthier European nations to increase their aid to Africa. According to the U.N. report, these nations could and should double their foreign aid to spur African development.  

If Bush offered nothing new to African nations during his visit, why did he go? The continent is of vital potential economic and strategic importance to the United States. It contains a vast portion of the world’s copper, bauxite, chrome, uranium, gold and petroleum supplies. The growing list of pro-U.S. African client states provide President Bush with reliable political allies in his war against terrorism and the fight against Muslim fundamentalism, as well as potential military bases.  

Africa was also the perfect public forum the president could use to self-promote and evangelize against AIDS. This spruced up his image as the “compassionate conservative.” Furthermore, Bush hoped his Africa foray would play well with African American voters. It didn’t. In a BlackAmericaWeb.com poll taken during Bush’s trip, nearly 90 percent of respondents said they still oppose his policies.  

African nations remain firmly locked in the grip of terrible poverty, disease, war and autocratic rule. The United States and wealthy nations can help lift that grip by massively increasing investment in African agriculture, transportation, manufacturing and technology; restructuring Africa’s crushing debt; encouraging greater regional integration and cooperation; condemning African nations’ disastrous military arms race; and, most important, challenging African nations to establish real democratic rule. Bush’s visit offered little hope that any of this will happen.  

 

Earl Ofari Hutchinson (Ehutchi344@aol.com) is a political columnist and the author of “The Crisis in Black and Black,” published by Middle Passage Press.


‘Attempts on Her Life’ Returns For Encore at LaVal’s

By BETSY HUNTON Special to the Planet
Tuesday July 15, 2003

After a smash success last summer with “Attempts on Her Life,” the foolsFURY company has been invited to take the production to the Humboldt/Blue Lake Dell’Arte EdgeFest on July 27. On the way there, they’ve stopped for a brief run at LaVal’s Subterranean—really brief: They’re packing up and leaving after the coming weekend. It’s not really clear why they’re doing such a hit-and-run act in Berkeley, but if we raise enough fuss, maybe we could get them to come back. 

It would be worth it. “Attempts on Her Life” is a fascinating and entertaining piece of theater. This is not to say that it’s totally comprehensible. For one thing, it’s not about attempts to kill a woman. It’s funny (there’s some other stuff in it, but it’s really quite funny much of the time) and a great evening’s experience. Afterward you may spend some time trying to figure out what on earth it was all about, but the nice thing is that you’ll still have had a good time.  

And it probably isn’t exactly wrong for a play to leave you thinking it over after you leave. 

Ben Yalom, the company’s artistic director, says quite accurately, “While our work at foolsFURY sometimes gets characterized as ‘avant-garde’ or ‘experimental,’ we’ve always been highly dedicated to the idea that a strong narrative and accessible storytelling are essential, whatever else we may be doing on stage.” 

Would that all “avant-garde” groups were equally dedicated! 

Some of the play’s publicity has miscalled the title “17 Attempts on Her Life.” It’s not what the renowned British playwright, Martin Crimp, intended but it would make the course of the action a little more comprehensible. There are 17 separate segments in which the extraordinarily talented ensemble portray different, unnamed characters who discuss and attempt to establish the identity of a woman, Annie. However—and it’s a big “however”—her attributes and behavior are entirely different in each segment. There could be endless speculation about their problem—in one scenario, she’s actually an expensive brand of a new car. In others, you could argue that they’re attempting to create a fictional character for a film. But taking the segments one by one is probably the easiest way to deal with the issue. That’s how it’s played, and it works. 

What sticks in your mind and leaves you chewing on the play, however, is the underlying cohesiveness of the plot. If this were simply 17 totally separate playlets, it would be a far easier production to forget.  

FoolsFURY is dedicated to a new mode of acting called “physical theater.” As demonstrated in this production, it is a flow of movement which is almost dance-like as the actors change from one remarkable pose to another. Director Yalom gives his ensemble credit for working out the complex set of movements which are so beautifully, and effectively, designed. Remarkably enough, their complex work appeared to be flawless. However, dwelling on this important aspect of the production must not leave the impression that this is a performance of mime. The movements are intimately and effectively related to the dialog.  

Although all six actors participate in most of the movement, only four are identified as members of the ensemble:  

Lindsay Anderson, Rod Hipskind, Stephen Jacob and Csilla Horvath. Two others are defined as “performers”: Jessica Jelliffe and Alexander Lewis who perhaps do less movement and more straight acting than do members of the ensemble proper. Be that as it may, it’s a very strong cast. Since each of the actors portrays many different characters in the course of the evening, it is impossible to identify exactly who does what.  

If people are going to insist on doing post-modern work—and it looks like it’s here to stay—it would be a vast improvement if they’d follow foolsFURY’S lead and find materials that work on enough levels to keep the audience involved. It makes a significant difference.  

 


Summer Noon Concerts in Downtown Berkeley

Tuesday July 15, 2003

The Downtown Berkeley Association (DBA) presents Summer Noon Concerts 2003, a unique series of nine free concerts, Thursdays at noon in June & July, beginning June 5th. From Rhythm & Blues to Brazilian capoeira, these concerts at the Downtown Berkeley BART Plaza (Shattuck Ave. at Center St.) are a showcase of the culturally rich performing arts in Berkeley. This outdoor summer celebration of Berkeley-based musicians & dancers is just a small sampling of the performing arts happening nightly in clubs, cafes, schools, theaters and concert halls in Downtown Berkeley. 

 

On Thursday, June 5th, our concert series opens with Rhonda Benin and Soulful Strut performing some of the best in R & B, with a splash of jazz and a solid helping of the blues. Soulful Strut appears regularly at many Bay Area nightspots such Enricos Sidewalk Café and Restaurant. 

 

On Thursday, July 31st, our concert series closes with SoVoSó, a highly visual and imaginative a capella ensemble that sings a compelling mix of jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues, world, pop, and improvisational music. The ensemble is made up of former members of Bobby McFerrin’s Voicestra, and McFerrin says, “SoVoSó is tight, soulful, and a whole lotta fun.” 

 

This event is easily accessible by transit and there is one hour free parking daily from 9 am to 5 pm in Center Street Garage. Seating will be available. 

 

For a complete schedule of entertainers for the Downtown Berkeley Summer Noon Concerts 2003 visit the Downtown Berkeley Association website at www.downtownberkeley.org


Opinion

Editorials

Police Blotter

By DAVID SCHARFENBERG
Friday July 18, 2003

Watermelon Heist 

 

A tall, thin, mysterious watermelon thief struck Andronico’s Market on Solano Avenue early Wednesday morning, according to police. 

Berkeley Police Officer Mary Kusmiss said a witness called authorities at 3:35 a.m. to report that a man had taken a watermelon from a bin on the south side of the 1850 Solano Ave. store shortly before a “suspicious” van left the area. 

An Andronico’s employee also reported seeing a man, about 18 years old, with at least two watermelons, getting into the van. In the end, police determined that a total of three watermelons had been swiped at a value of $15. 

“These are very large items to take off with,” said Kusmiss. “It’s not very common.” 

Kusmiss said witnesses saw only one man and there is no evidence, at present, that a second person was driving the van. Police had no suspects in the case as of Wednesday afternoon. 

 

Eat and Run 

 

A Domino’s Pizza deliveryman arrived at a house on the 1600 block of 63rd Street Tuesday night at 10:45 to deliver two pizzas at a value of $36 and found a woman sitting on the steps, according to police. 

The woman, described as about 20 years old, 5 feet 2 inches and 200 pounds, met the deliveryman on the sidewalk and said she had ordered the pizzas, police said. The deliveryman gave the pies to the woman, who said she had to go inside to get money. 

But the woman turned and ran west on 63rd Street, before going south on California Street and disappearing. 

“An area check conducted by two assisting officers did not turn up a woman or any pizza boxes,” Kusmiss said. 

 

Stolen plate and drugs 

 

A patrol officer grew suspicious when he saw a gray Ford van traveling east on Parker Street with no front license plate early Tuesday morning, police said. 

The officer ran the plate on the back of the van and learned that Emeryville police had reported the plate stolen. The officer stopped the driver, 31-year-old Berkeley resident Leonard Hutton, at the corner of Parker Street and Warring Street. 

Hutton gave the officer his license and said he had just traded his computer for the van, Kusmiss said. 

The officer ran the license plate and found that Hutton’s license was suspended and he had two warrants out for his arrest — one for possession of the drug crystal methamphetamine and one for possession or drug paraphernalia. 

A search of the van turned up more crystal methamphetamine and a glass pipe for smoking the drug. Police determined the van was not stolen. 

Hutton was arrested and his dog, a pit bull, was placed in a local animal shelter. Kusmiss said that Hutton, if he gets jail time, will be able to pick up his dog upon release.


Carcinogens in Bay Fish Alarm Local Consumers

By FRED DODSWORTH Special to the Planet
Tuesday July 15, 2003

In the face of growing evidence that our bays and oceans are badly mismanaged on every level, selling seafood to informed and concerned diners is a task akin to a steelhead trout swimming up one of Berkeley’s culverted and polluted creeks to spawn. 

On Friday, Oliveto Café and Restaurant launched a three-day Oceanic Dinners program and hosted a brief seminar on the state of our local, coastal fisheries. The same day, the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit research organization based in Oakland and Washington D.C., held a press conference at the Berkeley Marina to discuss a new report warning of the dangerous levels of carcinogenic compounds known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBEDs) found in San Francisco Bay fish. 

“There are no easy answers to these problems—the problems of over fishing, coastal development and pollution,” said Elizabeth Sturcken of the Alliance for Environmental Defense. Sturcken spoke at the Oceanic Dinners program at the College Avenue restaurant on Friday. “Fish play a critical role in our ocean ecosystem, and the ocean in turn sustains us in many ways. Without the ocean, basically, we would all be dead.” 

She said that not only does the ocean produce most of the oxygen in the world, it also absorbs most of the carbon dioxide. 

“And of course the oceans provide us with fish, a healthy and delicious form of food,” Sturcken said. “Fish are really a critical part of our coastal and ocean ecosystems. Data shows that the oceans and fisheries are really in a crisis. We have moved so far away from a healthy and abundant ecosystem that we’ve kind of forgotten what that really means anymore.” 

Despite growing concern about our coastal and oceanic environment and due to cyclic oceanic trends, decreased pollution compared to 30 years ago and new regulations limiting the fish harvest, the health of the local coastal ecosystem is better than it’s been in decades, with more fish and visibly healthier fish. Even as far north as Washington, the number of wild salmon returning to spawn is twice what it was in the 1930s. Sturcken put those numbers in perspective by noting that the number of salmon in those rivers in the 1930s was only 10 percent of the salmon population in the same rivers during the 1800s.  

While the fish may be more plentiful and more healthy, eating them is not necessarily so.  

“Mercury and heavy metals accumulate in animals at the top of the food chain,” said Sturcken. “There are a bunch of fish that have been labeled as ones to watch out for. That’s going to be swordfish and marlin and king mackerel and shark and tile fish.”  

Tom Worthington sells fish to many of the Bay Area’s finest restaurants through his company Monterey Fish Market. He also is concerned about the concentration of pollutants in all large fish. 

“The one thing I would say to you is vary your diet all the time,” Worthington said. “Even the slice of swordfish once in a while is not going to do harm to you, but eating it all the time, yeah, it’s going to build up in your system and it’s going to cause problems. If I was talking to anyone who was thinking about having children, I would point them away from all sorts of things we eat, not just fish that have mercury in them.” 

Not only women in their childbearing years, but children also are at risk from the accumulated pollutants found in almost all our modern foods. 

“I would never eat a farmed salmon,” said Natasha Benjamin, Fisheries Program Officer for the Institute for Fisheries Resources. “The levels of PCBs in farmed salmon are skyrocketing. Let alone the artificial colorants that damage your retinas, and the antibiotics. I eat [wild] salmon. Basically that’s the only fish I’ll eat regularly. I eat tuna maybe once every few months, a small piece, and a little bit of mahi mahi, the dolphin fish. Some people say ‘Don’t eat fish.’ I would never say that. Sardines are rich in Omega-3s, there’s a lot of health benefits there, [also] anchovies.” 

Despite the daily dose of doom and gloom research scientists serve up for our consumption, there are both bright spots and effective action plans each of us can take.  

“It actually does come down to every individual and the decisions you make and the people you talk to. When you go into a restaurant [or grocery store] ask questions and turn your head away when they don’t have the right answer,” said Worthington. “A restaurant hears that enough times and they feel like, ‘There’s that damn question again. We got to start bringing in the right fish. We can’t bring in farmed salmon anymore. We’re just going to use wild salmon from now on. Hook and line caught.’ That’s how it’s done. Learn more, use your voice, write your letters, use your dollars. It’s amazing to see what has happened over the last few years on this. At Monterey Fish we’ve been talking about this forever. Now we’re hearing about it from New York, we’re hearing about it from L.A. Slowly but surely these things do become a revolution and people make big changes.” 

“It’s all about moderation,” said Benjamin. “There’s a report that just came out that said women should not eat a lot of meat and dairy and fish, in general, if you’re of the childbearing age. They can eat hormone-free, antibiotic-free poultry. I eat organic milk and wild salmon. Once every four months I eat a little tuna. I eat organic vegetables, organic fruit. It’s an expensive hobby eating. I’m lucky I can eat those things. A lot of people don’t have those choices. There’s a lot of good stuff out there. We’ve got to keep the positiveness because otherwise people are not going to eat it at all and then there’s no economic incentive to protect the resource anymore.”