The University of California plans to appeal a court ruling it claims could shut UC out of some of the most lucrative investment opportunities on the market. 

At issue is the July 24 ruling by Alameda County Superior Court Judge James Richman who held that the university must disclose the “internal rate of return” (IRR) for its investments with various venture capital firms.  

UC claims that IRRs, used to determine the value of investments, are trade secrets and that the disclosure requirement could scare off the venture capital firms which sink millions of dollars into start-up companies, hoping to reap big payoffs if the up-and-comers succeed. 

“If [a venture capital firm] is presented with the opportunity of taking $10 million from a private institution that will keep the IRR secret and a public institution that is compelled by the courts to make it public, the [firm] will choose the private institution,” said UC spokesperson Trey Davis. 

The university, whose portfolio is valued at $53.3 billion as of June, claimed in court papers that forced disclosure could cost the university “billions of dollars in returns.” Any losses would impact funds for research and academic programs and the university’s $35.2 billion retirement fund, which serves over 170,000 employees. 

But representatives of the Coalition of University Employees (CUE) and the San Jose Mercury News, which joined UC Berkeley professor emeritus Charles Schwartz in bringing the action, said IRR disclosures by other public entities have not provoked retribution from venture capital firms.  

They also argued that the benefits of informing the public about UC’s investment decisions far outweigh any perceived risk of financial losses. Without a transparent process, they say, the powerful UC Board of Regents—many of them business leaders appointed by the governor—could direct public funds into poorly-conceived investments with their cronies in the financial world. 

“We’re afraid that they will just give the money to their friends,” said Mary Higgins, who serves on the executive board of CUE, which represents 18,000 clerical employees throughout the UC system. “There should be full disclosure.” 

In his 20-page ruling, Richman agreed with the plaintiffs. 

“The Court concludes that the public’s interest in [the release] of the IRRs clearly outweighs any public interest in keeping them secret,” he wrote. 

Part of Richman’s ruling rested on the finding that a host of public institutions—from the California State Teachers’ Retirement System to the University of Illinois to the University of Michigan—have made IRRs public without any ill effects. 

“None of [UC’s] ‘the sky will fall’ concern has manifested,” Richman wrote. 

The judge said he found “particularly persuasive” evidence that top venture capital firm Sequoia Capital had accepted a new $8 million investment from the University of Michigan after the school publicly released IRR information. 

But one day after Richman’s ruling, the University of Michigan received a letter rejecting the $8 million bid and asking the school to withdraw all its existing investments from the Menlo Park-based Sequoia. 

UC has filed a motion asking Richman to reconsider in light of the Michigan incident and of a decision by Portola Valley’s Three Arch Partners two days later to reject a UC investment in its new fund. 

“This ‘particularly persuasive’ evidence now supports the University, not the Petitioners,” the motion reads. 

But Mercury News attorney Judy Alexander said the Sequoia and Three Arch arguments don’t hold water.  

“Neither of them have much bearing on our case,” she said. 

Sequoia has stated publicly that it asked the University of Michigan to divest because of wide-ranging public information requests from the public and the press that cover much more than simple IRR disclosure, Alexander noted. 

The lawyer added that Sequoia, which also handles UC investments, has not asked UC to divest, despite the Richman ruling. 

Furthermore, Alexander said, Three Arch has said publicly that it rejected UC because it had too many investors bidding to get involved in its new fund, not because of disclosure concerns. 

“We didn’t have enough room,” Wilfred Jaeger, a founding partner at Three Arch, told the Bloomberg News service last week. 

But Jaeger said disclosure could make a difference in selecting future investors. 

“If that’s the distinguishing feature between investors, we probably would take that into account,” he said. 

If, as expected, Richman denies the motion for reconsideration at an Aug. 28 hearing, UC has indicated that it will take the case to the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco. UC’s filing is due Sept.. 8. 

At stake is $646 million invested in the “private equity” market with venture capital firms. UC’s private equity investments have gained an average of 32 percent per year over the last five years, surpassing a benchmark of 8.4 percent, according to the UC treasurer’s annual report. 

But CUE’s Higgins said she still has concerns about the management of an overall endowment that fell 10.7 percent last year—more than any of the other ten largest U.S. university endowments, save for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—before rising again this year. 

That concern was at the heart of the request Richman also granted to order the university to release records from a pair of Fall 2000 closed Regents’ meetings that resulted in the firing of UC’s internal equity investment staff and transfer of fund management to several outside firms. 

Richman ruled that while the law allows the Regents to remain in closed session when discussing specific investments, it does not shield general discussions of investment strategy. 

The university disputes Richman’s finding. 

“The meetings under contention relate to investment matters, so it’s perfectly appropriate for those sessions to be closed,” said UC spokesperson Davis. 

Alexander, the Mercury News attorney, said Richman’s ruling on the closed meetings covers new legal ground and could persuade the First District Court, which is not obliged to hear UC’s appeal, to take up the case. 

FRIDAY, AUGUST 15 

Reception for New BHS Principal, Jim Slemp The Berkeley High School PTA cordially invites the Berkeley High Community to a reception welcoming new BHS Principal Jim Slemp to Berkeley, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. in the lobby of the Community Theater on the BHS campus. Light refreshments will be served. To volunteer or for more information call Barbara Coleman, 704-9939. colemanbarbara@comcast.net 

Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh! Open to all youth familiar with the games, at 2 p.m. in the Story Room at the Berkeley Central Library, 2090 Kittredge. 981-6223. www.infopeople.org/bpl 

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.  

SATURDAY, AUGUST 16 

City of Berkeley Party For Your Health A free day-long health fair starting at 11 a.m. with information and activities on nutrition and fitness, breastfeeding, HIV, children’s head start, blood pressure checks, cholesterol/diabetes screening. Workshops, presentations, health food samples, children activities and live music. At San Pablo Park Community Center, 2800 Park St. For information call Joy Moore, 981-5364.  

Berkeley Association of Neighborhood Associations meets at 9:15 a.m. in the Fireside Room, St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. 587-3257. www.berkeleycna.com 

Tribute to Barbara Lee and Ron Dellums and fundraiser to combat HIV/AIDS in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia, from 4 to 8 p.m. at 5188 Coronado Ave., near 51st and Broadway. Cost is $20. 329-1314. 

Free Emergency Preparedness Class on Disaster First Aid, for anyone who lives or works in Berkeley, from 9 a.m. to noon at 997 Cedar St., between 8th and 9th Sts. Register on-line at www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/fire/oes or call 981-5506. 

Summer Days and Nights in Albany, a small-town street fair, from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Solano and San Pablo Aves. Features live entertainment including music, a lion dance, jugglers, and more. 525-1771.  

The Importance and Magic of Butterflies in the Garden A free presentation, from 10:30 a.m. to noon, with butterfly experts Andy Liu and Sally Levinson. Learn how to attract butterflies to your garden by creating caterpillar habitat. The presentation will include an amazing lifecycle video and live specimens of all life stages. This is a fragrance-free event. Please do not wear perfume, cologne, etc. Held at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. 548-3333. www.ecologycenter.org 

Acupuncture and Integrative Medicine College will hold an Open House from 9:45 to noon at 2550 Shattuck Ave. For more information or to register please call 666-8248. www.aic-berkeley.edu 

SUNDAY, AUGUST 17 

From Sheep To Sweater What happens to the sheep fleece? Find out as we demonstrate carding, spinning, weaving, felting and knitting, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area. Free. Wheelchair accessible. 525-2233.    

Urban Habitat Bicycle Ride  

Hop on your cycle and pedal to the restored wetlands of Oakland’s Arrowhead Marsh. Easy, flat, and accessible by public transit! 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. 415-255-3233. http://greenbelt.org/getinvolved/outings/green_reservation.html 

Free Hands-on Bicycle Repair Clinic, at 11 a.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Tibetan Buddhism, Robin Caton on “Sacred Breath” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

Eckhart Tolle Talks on Video Free gathering 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, AUGUST 18 

Teachers’ Eco-Networking Lunch High school and middle school teachers interested in environmental education are invited to EarthTeam’s 3rd annual luncheon, co-sponsored by the CREEC Network and UCB’s Env. Sci. Teaching Program at 11:30 a.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way, entrance on Dana. The free event will include a panel of teachers, each making short presentations about their areas of expertise, followed by questions and answers. For information call 925-274-3669. CindyS@earthteam.net 

www.earthteam.net 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 6 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. Volunteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

TUESDAY, AUGUST 19 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Sandy Nunn from Hospice will talk about their work and how you may want to volunteer. 845-6830. 

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

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 20 

“Good Morning Berkeley!” a networking event, from 7:30 to 9:15 a.m. The speaker will be Cynthia Meyer of Merrill Lynch, Oakland, on “Earn What You Deserve: 5 Practical Strategies for Developing Harmony with Money.” Cost is $10. At The Jazzcaffe, 2085 Addison. Wheelchair accessible. 843-8868.  

Berkeley Unified School Board meets at 7:30 p.m., in the City Council Chambers. Queen Graham 644-6147 or Mark Coplan 644-6320. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Sta- 

tion, corner of Shattuck and Center. Vigil at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www.geocities.com/vigil4peace/vigil 

Native American Games Make and play with traditional games of California Indians, including tule dolls, cricket, Indian football, stick dice and steal the stick, from noon to 2 p.m. at Lawrence Hall of Science. 463-5961. www.lawrencehallofscience.org  

Amnesty International Berkeley Community Group meets the first and third Wednesdays of the month at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, 1606 Bonita Ave., at Cedar St. Join fellow human rights activists to help promote social justice one individual at a time. 872-0768. 

Berkeley CopWatch open office hours 7 to 9 p.m. Drop in to file complaints, assistance available. For information call 548-0425. 

Berkeley Communicators Toastmasters meets every 1st and 3rd Wednesday at 7:15 a.m. at Hide-A-Way Café, 6430 Telegraph Ave. For information call Fred Garvey, 925-682-1111, ext. 164. 

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 Martin Luther King, Jr. Way. Meetings are held every Wednesday night at 7:30 p.m. at Epic Arts Studios at 1923 Ashby Ave. For further information on ways to get involved please call 644-2204.  

Community Dances, traditional English and American dances, at 8 p.m. every Wednesday, $9. 7 p.m. first Sunday, $10. Grace North Church, 2138 Cedar St. 233-5065. www.bacds.org 

THURSDAY, AUGUST 21 

“So How’d You Become an Activist?” with Jennifer Stone and David Solnit at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, 1924 Cedar St. at Bonita. Donation $5. Wheel- 

chair accessible. 415-927-1645. 

Friends of Strawberry Creek will meet at 6:30 p.m. at the West Berkeley Public Library Community Room, 1125 Uni- 

versity Ave., across from the Adult School. To confirm call 987-0668 or janet@earthlink.net or jennifemaryphd@hotmail.com or 848-7128. 

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 

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

ONGOING  

Free Marketing Workshops, sponsored by Sisters Headquarters, for women entrepreneurs, every Wed. from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at 643 17th St. Oakland. For information call 238-1100. 

Vista Community College Program for Adult Education (PACE) Enrollment through Sept. 6. PACE is a college alternative for adults with job and family responsibilities. Enrollment in American Sign Language classes is also being accepted. For information call 981-2864 or 981-2800 or email mclausen@peralta.cc.ca.us  

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. Call for an appointment, 428-2357. 

Free Energy Bill Payment Assistance The City of Berkeley has money to help low-income households pay their gas and electric bills. For applications and more information, contact the Energy Office at 644-8544. TDD: 981-6903. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/energy 

CITY MEETINGS 

Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board meets Mon., Aug. 18, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers, Pam Wyche, 644-6128 ext. 113. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/rent 

Citizens Humane Commission meets Wed., Aug. 20, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Katherine O’Connor, 981-6601. www.ci.berkeley.ca. us/commissions/humane 

Commission on Labor meets Wed., Aug. 20, at 6:30 p.m., at Berkeley Work-Source, 1950 Addison St., Suite 105. Delfina M. Geiken, 644-6085. www.ci.-berkeley.ca.us/commissions/labor 

Design Review Committee meets Thurs., Aug. 21, 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 Thurs., Aug. 21, 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 Thurs., Aug. 21, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Peter Hillier, 981-7000. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/transportation

This issue of The Planet marks a watershed. It’s the last one for which Michael Howerton is managing editor. The house joke is that we decided to hire him because we knew that if we didn’t like him he’d be gone soon. In fact, we had already decided to hire him when he learned that his historian wife had been awarded a prestigious fellowship to spend a year in Rome, and, oddly enough, he wanted to go with her. Because he seemed so well suited to the job, we decided to hire him anyway for the four month duration, and we haven’t regretted it. 

His best qualification has always been that he genuinely loves Berkeley, where he grew up. Besides that, though, he’s demonstrated many other virtues which have been essential to getting the new Planet launched. He’s well-educated and well-read (not always the same thing), qualities not needed for all papers but required in Berkeley where we have many intellectually fastidious readers. He’s curious—usually the first one out the door when we hear a siren or a crash on our horrendous Shattuck corridor. He’s patient, but not excessively so, with writers who are late on deadlines or turn in sloppy copy (it’s been know to happen, even at the Planet). He’s even been patient with a ridiculously demanding executive editor on occasion. He’s cool in a crisis, and we’ve had a few. For example, when the copy editor stood up from her desk after laying out an early issue and fell over in a faint, he got the paper out on schedule while she went off to the hospital in an ambulance. 

It’s hard to believe, but thanks to Michael we’ve actually got a routine going now. It no longer seems a minor miracle that bundles of newspapers come back from the printers on Tuesdays and Fridays. As our advertising grows, our page count has grown with it, and we’ve been able to expand the scope of our coverage. He’s brought in some good new writers, not much published elsewhere until he found them. He has a sure sense of what it means to be a community newspaper in a very unusual community, and that’s guided our decisions as we expand. 

Of course, the dark side of the house joke is that since we turned out to like Michael Howerton a great deal, we’re really sorry to see him leave. We do realize that he’d have to be crazy to pass up a year in Rome. 

Because he’s created such a strong foundation, we’ve been able to hire a successor managing editor with complementary qualifications, who will be able to build on the good things we’ve got going and add new dimensions. Richard Brenneman has had a long and distinguished reporting and editing career at excellent papers like the Sacramento Bee. Early in his career, he worked for a family-owned paper in Santa Monica, a town which is often compared to Berkeley, which gave him a strong interest in bucking the corporate media tide. We’re lucky to have him. 

Fortuitously, just as we were closing today’s letter page, we got a short letter in the mail which provides the perfect capstone to the work we’ve done under Michael’s stewardship. Here it is: 

“You put out one hell of a good community newspaper. Congratulations and thanks. Best regards, Ben.” 

We’re really proud to get such a letter from Ben Bagdikian, the dean of American journalism, and Michael Howerton deserves a lot of the credit. Thanks, Michael, for what you’ve done for the Planet. 

Since you’ve been here a relatively short time, and you’re going to Rome, we’re tempted to offer you the ancient Roman salute, ave atque vale ( hale and farewell). But we prefer the modern Roman ciao, which means both hello and goodbye. The underlying hope it expresses is that we’ll meet again before too long. And while you’re away, do write. The Planet would love to have a European correspondent. 

Becky O’Malley is Executive Editor of the Daily Planet. 

“Measure for Measure” has more than enough for a contemporary American audience: a corrupt official who tries to extort sexual favors, misguided attempts to legislate morality, squeamishness about the death penalty. 

There is obvious psychological interest in the puritanical deputy suddenly overwhelmed by lust and in a central figure, the Duke, who fears his own authority and prefers to rule by hidden manipulation. There are haunting meditations about death (“O but to die and go / We know not where”) that rival anything in Hamlet.  

None of this is enough for Daniel Fish, the director of the new production at Cal Shakespeare. He feels obliged to throw in interludes of pop music (at one point the whole cast sings along with Johnny Cash), clownishly contemporary costumes (Claudio, the young man condemned to death for fornication, is dressed for some reason for work at a fast-food stand), and a half-naked teenager who wanders through the production but doesn’t exist in Shakespeare’s text. (She gets one of the Duke’s most important lines, seriously undermining the complexity of the final scene). 

Fish’s sight gags pander to the audience. Some are simply irrelevant (a character chops up a watermelon to keep us from nodding off during one not-so-compelling passage). Others, like the executioner who wears a rubber George W. Bush mask, hammer us with over-explicit connections to today’s issues and push a delicately-balanced play into farce. 

Why, oh why, do directors feel compelled to tart up Shakespeare? Do they think we just can’t tolerate the unfamiliarity of the language or the strangeness of the plot in works? Do they think us too dull to appreciate the Bard’s richness and subtlety? Do they feel the need to compete with television? 

I didn’t hate my evening. The play, one of Shakespeare’s most ambiguous and disturbing, survives even Mr. Fish’s innovations. There was one compelling performance: As Lucio, Andy Murray has the energy and bite missing from Bruce McKenzie’s Angelo and Michael Emerson’s Duke. Carrie Preston also had a few strong moments as Isabella, the young woman who won’t sacrifice her virginity to save her brother’s life.  

The final unmasking scene was dramatic and effective, and there were the reliable pleasures of the lovely outdoor setting and the informal atmosphere (sip your wine as you watch the show). Still, this production makes one long for actors who can do justice to Shakespeare’s language and characters and, even more, for a director wise enough not to compete with him. Surely Cal Shakespeare can do better for us.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 15 

CHILDREN 

Dog Days with stories and songs at 10:30 a.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

FILM 

Czech Horror and Fantasy on Film: “The Fifth Horse- 

man is Fear” at 7:30 p.m. and “The Ear” at 9:30 p.m. at Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

Disinformation Film Series: “Hidden Wars of Desert Storm,” investigating the impact of the use of depleted uranium weapons on US troops, to be shown at 7:30 p.m. against the side of the KTVU Channel 2 building at 2 Jack London Square, Oakland. 528-5403. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Ben Harper and Jack Johnson at 6:30 pm at the Greek Theatre. 642-0212.  

Valle Son, from Cuba, with vocalist Lázaro at 8 p.m., at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $16 in advance, $18 at the door. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Malika with Riddimystics and Shashamani Soundsystem perform reggae at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $11. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Radio Noise, Shit Outta Luck, Shrinkage at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. All ages welcome. Cost is $7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Crooked Jades, innovative old-time and bluegrass, 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 

Jovino Santos Neto and Friends, Brazilian jazz pianist, at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$18. 845-5373.  

www.jazzschool.com 

Leonard Thompson at 9:30 p.m. at Downtown, 2102 Shattuck Ave. 649-3810. 

Carvell Wallace, Jaime Jenkins and Damond Moodie, at 8:30 p.m. at the 1923 Tea House, 1923 Ashby. $7-$15 donation requested, no one turned away for lack of funds. 644-2204. 

Ludicra, Brainoil, Worm- 

wood, Fall of the Bastards, In the Wake of the Plague 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. 

vSoul, featuring Vernon Bush, sing gospel, rhythm and blues and soul, at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Suggested donation $10. 649-8744. www.thejazz- 

house.org 

AC Dshe at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $8.  

848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

SATURDAY, AUGUST 16 

Jupiter Outdoor Fine Arts Show, from noon to 8 p.m. on Allston Way, between Shattuck and Oxford. Twenty-five Berkeley and East Bay artists will have over 100 works on display. 843-0410. 

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. 

FILM 

The Inquiring Camera: Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks - Part Three: “Rails” at 7 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 

“The Warriors” free screening of cult classic drama about NYC gangs in the 1970s, at 8:30 p.m. at the Long Haul, 3124 Shattuck Ave. Wheelchair accessible. 540-0751.  

www.thelonghaul.org 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

SEEN Festival 2003, roots and culture reggae at noon at People’s Park. 383-2949. 

Solstice, with Dan Cantrell and Ryan Francesconi at 8 p.m. at the 1923 Tea House, 1923 Ashby. $10 suggested donation, no one turned away. 644-2204. 

New Millennium Strings, Laurien Jones, conductor, Joe Gold, violin, Gwyneth Davis, ‘cello, perform at 8 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft, at Ellsworth. Suggested donation $10, children under 12 free. 524-4633. 

North Indian Classical Music, The New Maihar Band, Dr. Sisirkana Chowdhury, violin, and Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri, tabla, at 7:30 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Tickets are $12-$20. 415-454-6264. 

African Drum Workshop with Wade Peterson. Beginners from 10 to 11:30 a.m., experienced from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., at The Jazz House. Cost is $15-$25, and advance registration is encouraged. 533-5111. 

Ben Harper and Jack Johnson at 6:30 p.m. at the Greek Theater. 642-0212. 

John Stowell, innovative guitar featuring John Shifflet and Jason Lewis, at 8 p.m. at the Jazz- 

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

High Country, bluegrass band’s 35th anniversary, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $16.50 in advance, $17.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

African Rhythm Messengers at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Sol Americano, Dank Man Shank, Charles Cooper Quartet, at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $6. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Captain Fatass, 86 the Band, Little Fuzzy at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Brian Melvin at 9:30 p.m. at Downtown, 2102 Shattuck Ave. 649-3810. 

Annihilation Time, Iron Lung, The Gate Crashers, Out of Vogue 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, AUGUST 17 

Brian Wallace, Brush Painting Prints, opening reception from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. at Fertile Grounds, 1796 Shattuck Ave. 548-1423. 

FILM 

W. C. Fields: “The Bank Dick” 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 

“Crime and Forgiveness: Does Shakespeare Reject the Death Penalty?” California Shakespeare Theater’s InSight Discussion, led by husband and wife professors Hugh Macrae Richmond and Velma Bourgeois Richmond, following the 4 p.m. matinee performance of Shakespeare's “Measure for Measure.” Bruns Amphitheater, Gateway Blvd off Highway 24, Orinda. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Live Oak Concert, La Monica, period instrument sextet with soprano, performs works from the Baroque at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center. Cost is $10, BACA members $8, Students and seniors $9. Children under 12 free. 644-6893. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

New Millennium Strings, Laurien Jones, conductor, Joe Gold, violin, Gwyneth Davis, ‘cello, perform at 4 p.m. at Arlington Community Church, 52 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Suggested donation $10, children under 12 free. 524-4633. 

Ben Harper and Jack Johnson at 2:30 pm at the Greek Theatre. 642-0212.  

Egyptian Style Belly Dance at 7:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Rusty Evans and Ring of Fire, rockabilly, 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 

Caught in Between at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $3. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Jeff Massanari Trio blends classic jazz and originals at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Tickets are $10-$15. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Desperate Measures, Far From Breaking, Lights Out, With or Without You perform at 5 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

MONDAY, AUGUST 18 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“The Lighter Side of Crop Circles,” Ben Ailes discusses his photographs at 7:30 p.m. in the Central Library Community Room, 2090 Kittridge at Shattuck. 981-6100.  

Poetry Express, with Judy Wells, plus open mic, from 7 to 9:30 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 

TUESDAY, AUGUST 19 

FILM 

The Inquiring Camera: “A Bibó Reader” at 7:30 p.m. and “Remembrance of Things to Come” at 9 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 

Ishmael Reed presents his new book, “Another Day at the Front,” with his daughters Timothy reading from her new book, “Shouting Out” and Tennessee reading poetry at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

Emily Wise Miller presents ”The Food Lover’s Guide to Florence” at 7:30 p.m. at Easy Going Travel Shop and Bookstore, 1385 Shattuck Ave. at Rose. 843-3533.  

www.easygoing.com 

Harry Potter Discussion Group at 7 p.m. Black Oak Books, 1491 Shattuck Ave. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

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

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Le Temps des Cerises with accordionists Daniel Thonon and Dominique Dupre at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Dayna Stephens House Jam at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Suggested $5 donation. 649-8744. www.thejazzhouse.com 

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

The Herms, Wolf Colonel, Fenway Park, Gran Unified Theory perform Indie Rock at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $6. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 20 

FILM 

Excess of Evil: “Salvation!” 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 

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 

Kimberly Snow reads from her new book, “In Buddha’s Kitchen: Cooking, Being Cooked, and Other Adventures in a Medita- 

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

“I Should Have Just Stayed Home: Award Winning Tales of Travel Fiascoes” with editors Roger Rapoport and Bob Drews, at 7:30 p.m. at Easy Going Bookstore, 1385 Shattuck Ave. at Rose. 843-3533. www.easygoing.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.starryploughpub.com 

Joseph Itiel reads travel stories from his new book, “Gay Traveler: Sexual, Cultural and Spiritual Encounters,” at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Tom Rigney and Flambeau at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson with Cheryl McBride at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Nels Cline Singers perform avant, free and improv jazz at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Sliding scale donation $10-$15. 649-8744. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Guy Klucevsek, accordion, 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. 

THURSDAY, AUGUST 21 

FILM 

The Inquiring Camera: “For One More Hour With You” 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 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Djelimady Tounkara, guitarist with the Super Rail Band of Bamako, from Mali, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Freight’s Fiddle Summit, with Alasdair Fraser, Bruce Molsky and Ellika Frisell, at 8 p.m. at the Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St. Cost is $17.50 in advance, $18.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Steve Poltz, Phil Roy at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough.Cost of $12. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

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

Greg Glassman, trumpeter, at 8:30 p.m. at the 1923 Tea House, 1923 Ashby. $7-$15 suggested donation, no one turned away. 644-2204. 

AT THE THEATER 

Impact Theatre, “Impact Briefs 6: Shock and Awe,” an evening of ultra-short comedies, directed by Joy Meads. Runs from Aug. 22 to Sept. 27, at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid. Tickets are $15, $10 seniors and students. 464-4468. www.impacttheatre.com 

Josh Kornbluth’s “Love and Taxes,” a tale of falling in love while wrangling with the Kafkaesque IRS. Runs Aug. 20 - Sept. 14. Performances Wed. - Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2:30 and 7 p.m. at Berkeley Rep, Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St. Tickets are $25-$40, available from 647-2949 or 888-4BRT-TIX. www.zspace.org 

Opera Piccola, “The Guests,” Aug. 21 at 7:30 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Theater. An ancient Iranian tale of hope for peace in a world of uncertainty, with traditional and contemporary music. Tickets are $15 for adults, $8 for seniors, students, available from 925-798-1300. For information on the production call 658-0967. 

Shotgun Players, “Mother Courage and Her Children,” by Bertolt Brecht, translated by David Hare, directed by Patrick Dooley. Runs Sat. and Sun. at 4 p.m. in John Hinkle Park, until Sept. 14. No show Aug 9. Show Sept. 13 is at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Free. 704-8210.  

www.shotgunplayers.org 

Stage Door Conservatory, “Bye Bye Birdie,” Aug. 15 at 7:30 p.m., Aug. 16 and 17 at 5 p.m., at the Julia Morgan Theater. Tickets are $13 for adults, $8 for children and seniors. 527-5939. www.stagedoorconservatory.org  

Teen Playreaders, “Bizarre Shorts,” a festival of brief and absurd dramas for a mature audience. Fri., Aug., 15 and Sat., Aug. 23 at 7 p.m. at the North Branch Library, 1170 The Alameda. 981-6250. 

Woman’s Will Shakespeare Company, “The Rover,” a restoration comedy by Aphra Behn. Sat., Aug. 16 at 8 p.m. in Live Oak Park. 420-0813. www.womanswill.org  

EXHIBITIONS 

ACCI Gallery Annual Seconds Sale Aug. 14 - 17. Gallery hours are Mon. - Thurs., 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Fri. 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Sat. 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. 1652 Shattuck Ave. 843-2527. www.accigallery.com 

The Ames Gallery, “Conversations with Myself” Works by Barry Simons. By appointment or chance. Exhibition runs until Aug. 15. 2661 Cedar St. 845-4949. www.amesgallery.com  

Berkeley Art Center, 19th National Juried Exhibition: “Works on Paper,” runs to Sept. 13. Berkeley Art Center in Live Oak Park, 1275 Walnut St. Open Wed. - Sun. noon to 5 p.m. Admission is free. 644-6893. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

Berkeley Historical Society, “Focus on Berkeley” A photography exhibit by the Berkeley Camera Club, Berkeley High School students and community photographers in celebration of the City’s 125th Anniversary. Exhibition runs until Sept. 13. Berkeley History Center, 1931 Center St. Sponsored by the Berkeley Historical Society,  

848-0181.  

Berkeley Public Library, “The Lighter Side of Crop Circles,” photographs by Ben Ailes. Runs until Aug. 30. First Floor Catalog Lobby, 2090 Kittredge at Shattuck. 981-6100. 

Kala Art Institute, Kala Fellowship Exhibition, Part II Runs until Sept. 6. Call for gallery hours. 1060 Heinz Ave. 549-2977. www.kala.org  

A New Leaf Gallery/Sculpture Site, “Four Elements of Sculpture: Fire, Air, Water and Earth,” Exhibition runs to August 31. 1286 Gilman St. Call for gallery hours. 527-7621. www.sculpturesite.com 

Red Oak Realty “Mixed Media,” by Stan Whitehead. Exhibition runs through Oct. 23, Mon. - Sat., 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. 1891 Solano Ave. 527-3387. 

Slater/Marinoff & Co., “All Animal Art” Forty photographers and artists have donated works to help fund the spay-neuter and food costs of the Milo Foundation’s work in finding new homes for abandoned dogs and cats. Exhibition runs until Aug. 31. Hours are Mon. - Sat. 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sun. 11:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. 1823 Fourth St. 548-2001. 

Sway Gallery, “Secret Summer” paintings, installations, collages, prints, drawings, and mixed media by Nana Hayashi, Greg Moore, Marc Snegg, Gab- 

rielle Wolodarski. Runs to Oct. 5. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. - 7 p.m. every day. 2569 Telegraph Ave. 489-9054.

It’s older than the Campanile, older than Sather Gate, older than the city of Berkeley itself. And on Aug. 30 Gorman & Son Furniture, a Telegraph Avenue fixture that grew out of a tragic fire and an immigrant’s pluck, will pack up and leave town. 

The shop, run by four generations of Gormans before owners Chuck and Andrea Rosenberg bought it six years ago, will move to 3400 Broadway in Oakland, and sit alongside the car dealerships of Auto Row. 

Berkeley old-timers said they are sad to see it go. 

“All of us newlyweds, 30 or 40 years ago, depended on that place to furnish our homes,” said long-time Berkeley resident Heidi Seney. “I’m going to miss it, because I thought it was an honest business, a good business.” 

The 2599 Shattuck Ave. building, a ramshackle wood structure that includes a converted horse stable and a hodge-podge of additions, dates back to at least 1876, according to a written history prepared several years ago by neighbor Patricia Dacey, with help from the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association, when the city moved to landmark the building. 

Chuck Rosenberg said he had an opportunity to buy the three-story structure when he took over the furniture business in 1997, but decided to rent instead. The old building, he explained, is susceptible to fire and earthquake. 

“We’re four blocks from the Hayward fault and if that ever went off...the building would collapse,” he said.  

About two years ago, the Gorman family sold the building to Berkeley developer Ali Kashani and local architect Kava Massih, who plan to restore the facade, spiff up the first floor retail space and put four housing units on the second and third floors, which currently serve as storage space. 

With the developers hoping to start work this fall, the Rosenbergs have signed a five-year lease on the 3400 Broadway property—taking up the residence of an old competitor that recently went out of business, the Saw Mill furniture store.  

Chuck Rosenberg said he’s been expecting the move for years and is looking forward to the new space. But he is eyeing a possible satellite store in the old Telegraph Avenue building when the restoration is complete. 

“Gorman’s is a Berkeley institution,” Chuck Rosenberg said. 

The store, according to Dacey’s history, began in 1876 as a small furniture and upholstery outfit operated by John Gorman, an Irish immigrant who made stops in New York, Chicago and San Francisco before settling in Berkeley with his wife Margaret Carter. 

Gorman’s first big break came during his first year in business when Berkeley’s old “Dumb and Blind Asylum,” which later became the California School for the Deaf and Blind, burned down. The upholsterer, who had learned his craft as a teenager in Ireland, got the contract for providing all the mattresses for the rebuilt institution. 

In the 1890s Gorman’s son Wesley joined the company as an undertaker. Undertaking and furniture-making were often intertwined in those days, according to Dacey’s history, as it was the local furniture-maker who was best qualified to construct coffins. 

Gorman’s served as an anchor for a Telegraph Avenue commercial area that was growing rapidly at the turn of the century. A May 1901 article from the old Berkeley Gazette newspaper chronicled the transition. 

“The heretofore quiet and unassuming neighborhood near Dwight and Telly has evolved into a busy and disquieting scene of commercial activity,” a correspondent wrote. “The click of the hammer and the hum of the saw” leads one “old resident” to “fancy that the business center will be transferred from Berkeley Station to Dwight Way and Telly.” 

As the district grew, Wesley Gorman’s son, Wesley Robert Gorman, succeeded his father in the firm, and his sons, Bob and Gary, ran the shop until 1997 when the Rosenbergs took over. 

Andrea Rosenberg said the couple had been looking for some time for a business to buy when they came upon Gorman’s, and were quickly enamored with the place. 

“When we walked in the door, I think the first thing we noticed was how great it smelled—the wood,” she said. 

After taking it over, the couple built on a long-standing reputation for honesty and customer service. 

General manager Bob Maass, who has worked at the store since 1975, recalls an elderly woman who bought a large mattress from the store several years ago. 

“A few weeks later she called and said, ‘This mattress has to be flipped doesn’t it? You guys do that, don’t you?,’” Maass recalled. 

So the staff drove out to her house and flipped the mattress—the first of many such visits. 

“She’d call every few months and say, ‘this is Grandma,’” Maass remembered with a laugh. 

Andrea Rosenberg said the locals, after all these years, view Gorman’s as a resource for all kinds of household projects. “People call us with the strangest things—‘I know you sell furniture, but you’ve been there for so long. Do you know someone who can refurbish a bathtub?’” 

At the end of the month, shoppers will have to take their questions—about mattresses and bathtubs—to Oakland. The Gorman’s staff is hopeful that loyal customers will keep coming, but they say they’ll miss the old green building on Telegraph Avenue. 

“You become attached to a building,” said Maass. “You become attached to the people you see everyday.”  

GET INVOLVED 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thank you for publishing Sharon Hudson’s lively and informative account of Berkeley’s planning process for large developments. It is truly shocking to learn how a few favored developers have been able to manipulate the process in order to supersize their buildings at the expense of neighborhoods throughout the city.  

We can thank Ms. Hudson and a handful of other dedicated citizens for calling these issues to the public’s attention, but we have to do more than that. Bad developments harm the city for decades! We must become active participants ourselves in monitoring and reshaping these proposed large developments. Do you live anywhere near a busy street? A commercial district? A building taller than two stories? Well, your neighborhood may be next on the list. The time to get involved is now.  

Doug Buckwald 

• 

CONTAMINATED LIVES 

The following letter was addressed to Mayor Bates and City Council members: 

A large number of residents of the Cedar/Shattuck area are very concerned about the health consequences of electromagnetic field emissions (EMF) from Sprint's planned base station antennae on top of Starbucks at 1600 Shattuck Ave. 700 neighbors signed petitions protesting the antennae earlier this year. 

Sprint announced an “information session” on this issue for Aug. 7. Instead of the community taking the lead with questions, the company set up six tables each staffed by a specialist on one aspect of the base station installation. The idea was to defuse the presentations so that only a few people would hear answers to specific questions and the group as a whole would neither be heard nor informed. (Same tactic used by LBNL in response to community concern about the planned nanotech facility.) 

Sprint is now collecting signatures at Andronico's and BART asking whether people want improved coverage for their cell phones. 

With revenue as its only goal, there is no concern in any corporation with the cumulative health effects of all the gadgets they produce, particularly the wireless ones. But EMF is known to have carcinogenic and other negative health effects, and since we are dealing throughout our lives with emissions from dental x-rays, mammograms, computer and TV sets, electric transmission wires, natural radiation during airline flights, radon in the soil, etc., we are accumulating a body burden that can only result in illness for many of us. 

The officials in our city have a primary responsibility to protect in any way possible the health and well being of its citizens. I hope, therefore, that you will do all in your power to stop the proliferation of any further contamination of our already highly contaminated lives. 

Joan Levinson 

• 

MISSING SOMETHING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

There is an old environmental adage, “Think globally, act locally.” Unfortunately, acting locally does not always appear to be in one’s own immediate interests, and many people find ways to rationalize non-action or opposition. Becky O’Malley’s editorial comment, “Maybe we’re missing something, but we’re still not clear how this award proves that 22 Big Ugly Buildings in Berkeley...will slow down development in the exurban fringe...” (Daily Planet, Aug. 1-4,2003) is a prime example of a common Berkeley rationalization. Ms. O’Malley asserts that urban fringe living and urban apartments represent such totally different markets that they have no impact on each other. There seems to be no recognition that if people aren’t living in Berkeley apartments then they have to be living somewhere else. And that further, if other cities take the attitude that they already have enough people, then that somewhere else is going to be at an urban fringe. If there is no choice but single family homes or low density apartments on the fringe, then that is where growth will go. It may not be our urban fringe, but it is still an environmental problem. 

The Planet (and its predecessor) has had numerous articles and letters on the evils of inappropriate neighborhood development and the sins of the Planning Department. The attacks on the Planning Department appear aimed at stopping growth rather than helping it do a better job, and what comes through loud and clear is “not in my back yard.” What has not come through is any evaluation of the environmental consequences of somewhere else. One letter writer even suggested that new towns should be built, and that environmentalists should donate more money to the Nature Conservancy to buy the land they don’t want built over. It is irresponsible to allow the debate to remain at this level of naiveté, ignorance and selfishness. 

Yes, I think you are missing something. If you want to convince me I am wrong, you need to replace the sarcasm about BUBs with a convincing, environmentally sensitive vision of growth outside of Berkeley. 

For the record: I live in a single family dwelling next to an eight-unit apartment in the flatlands of Berkeley. I have no financial ties or personal connections to Patrick Kennedy. I don’t think the GAIA building is ugly. 

Robert Clear 

• 

DERANGED PARENT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I hope Executive Editor Becky O’Malley’s superb editorial, “The Cassandra Factor,” (Daily Planet, Aug. 12-14) will be widely disseminated, the same way that the recent article about the wonderful UC Professor George Akerlof should have maximum exposure. As a new citizen of this country, I am like a child who finds that her father is gradually losing his faculties and is turning into a monster endangering the neighbors. I can feel hope, when I read articles like O’Malley’s and Akerlof’s, that a cure may be possible for my deranged and dangerous parent. 

Isabel Escoda  

• 

A CITY IN CONFLICT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As a bystander and observer of ongoing permitting and environmental review (CEQA) processes for the proposed housing project at 2526 Durant Ave., I can only say that what is assumed to be the inevitable result saddens me. I cannot accept that the only viable alternative to what may, or may not, be a housing crisis is to demolish the Blood House, which is one of only three remaining pre-1900 structures in the College Homestead Tract area. 

CEQA offers a process and a set of procedures to discuss competing values. But the City's process has become highly bureaucratic, technical, and without soul. The spirit of environmental law seems to get reduced to questions of definitions, e.g. what is and is not an historic resource, while meanwhile the fabric and texture of the town gradually and imperceptibly disappears.  

We seem to be a city at odds with itself, in endless conflict, following the processes and procedures required by law, but clueless about reconciling competing values. The Blood House could be saved through an infill alternative to preserve the structure on site or through relocation. Instead, if city recommendations are followed, the wrecking ball seems inevitable by a process that might be legally airtight but filled with holes of vision.  

I respect the need for housing, but demolition of the few remaining reminders of our past is too great a price. The Landmarks Preservation Commission  

denied the demolition permit for the historic Blood House. I hope the Zoning Adjustments Board will do the same on Aug. 28.  

Janice Thomas 

• 

A HIGH PRICE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Who in the world approved aluminum siding for the outside of Acton Courtyard on University Avenue? The Design Review Board? The Planning Commission? The City Planning Department? Not only is the building too big and the parking too little, it looks like something from a mobile home park of the 1970s. I’m a strong supporter of affordable housing (although I’d like to see more that’s suitable for families with children), but having to look at this monstrosity every day is a very high price to pay. 

Honor Thompson 

• 

CELLULAR LOGIC 

The following letter was addressed to Mayor Bates: 

Sprint Telephone has requested permission to install another cellular phone antenna in Berkeley. I object to their proposal. 

Dependence on the automobile has reduced the quality of life throughout the United States. Most cities had good trolley systems at one time. But the automobile offered freedom and pushed public transit out. The auto industry helped this process along by advertising and pressuring governments and has realized a hefty return on their investment. 

Communications is following the course taken by transit. Public telephones are being replaced by cellular phones because of the freedom they appear to offer. This freedom has come at a cost of overall quality of life. People talk on their cell phones in formerly public places such as the sidewalk, public transit, schools, and parks. Based upon our experience with the automobile, I don’t expect phone users to become more considerate over time.  

The communications industry will spare no expense as they attempt to convince the public to become cellular phone subscriber. I hope that our city government is insulated from the advertising barrage. Please weigh the drawbacks as well as the benefits when considering whether to encourage cell phone use within the city of Berkeley.  

Gregory Kalkanis 

After years of preaching by animal advocates, pet owners are finally getting the message and spaying and neutering their animals, and Bay Area animal shelters are getting smaller numbers of abandoned cats and dogs. The flip side is that the ones they do take often prove the most difficult to place, requiring considerably more human investment than newborn pups and kittens. 

That’s the reason why the diminishing number of critters has resulted in an explosion of volunteers at the Berkeley Animal Care Shelter, reports Amelia Funghi, who coordinates volunteer efforts for the facility which takes unwanted or abandoned animals from Berkeley, Albany, Piedmont, and Emeryville. 

Similar programs have sprung up in animal shelters across the country since the mid 1990s, playing a central role in slashing euthanasia rates. 

The first decision workers must reach when an animal shelter takes in an animal is whether or not the animal is immediately suitable for adoption or whether it needs additional care and training before it’s ready to go home with a family. If not, it’s up to shelter staff work to provide necessary training and human contact. 

Fughi said that because most hard-to-place critters are adult dogs or cats that have had limited positive interactions with humans, volunteers start out by playing with the animals daily to make the animals comfortable with two-legged types. 

The program is enjoying particular success in Berkeley, Funghi said, because residents have contributed to the shelter’s low euthanasia rate by “buying into the idea of adopting an animal from us.” 

One key factor in Berkeley’s success has been Funghi’s skill in recruiting volunteers, leading to an almost seven-fold increase in the last two years—from fewer than 50 in 2001 to 330 today—after the city hired Funghi in February 2001, to focus on getting the word out into the community. As a result, animals in the Berkeley shelter are receiving lots more play time and training. 

“People are responding to our outreach efforts,” Funghi said. “To make more animals ready for adoption takes a lot of work by a lot of different people, and volunteers have really come through.” 

A major focus of the volunteer program in Berkeley is direct human-animal contact as often as possible. Almost all of Berkeley volunteers do hands-on work with animals, walking and training dogs and petting cats. 

“I’ve made contact a priority so animals could really get the care that they need,” Funghi said. “I think that’s the most important thing in terms of helping animals move away from the shelter to live in somebody’s home.” 

Funghi and shelter director Katherine O’Connor have implemented a variety of special events and programs to keep Berkeley residents aware of the shelter’s presence and work. The mobile adoption program brings animals to the Fourth Street shopping district every Saturday to publicly display some of the potential pets at the shelter and appeal to people to adopt an animal. 

“I got involved when I saw the animals down on Fourth Street,” said volunteer Lucy Tyler. “I knew I couldn’t have a pet myself, but I wanted to help make sure the word got out to other people that would be able to take an animal.” 

O’Connor said that although very few people adopt animals directly from the Fourth Street station, many people come in shortly after seeing the mobile adoption team and choose an animal to take home. This, in turn, raises awareness about the shelter’s work. 

Additionally, partnerships with animal rescue groups allow the shelter to share resources and receive help with particular aspects of its work. For example, the Oakland-based Home at Last Rescue places almost all of the Berkeley Animal Care Shelter’s kittens, a number that has already reached 160 this year. 

“We do work with the humane societies and the Oakland and San Francisco SPCAs (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals),” Funghi said. It’s the partnerships that allow us to get more animals adopted and fewer euthanized.” 

In the film “The Sum of All Fears,” last year's Ben Affleck nuclear terrorism flick, actor James Cromwell plays a president up for reelection who in one scene recounts his political assets in a humorous speech to the press. That he admitted to smoking a little weed while serving in Vietnam, he jokes, should help his reelection campaign to carry California. 

If that’s true, chalk up one more electoral plus for Austrian native Arnold Schwarzenegger, the headline-writer’s bane; the actor who would be California governor shouldn’t have a problem with his appearance toking up on a big fat doobie as the star of the career-making 1977 documentary “Pumping Iron.” 

Nor should the hefty doses of steroids he admits taking back in his heyday as a world champion body-builder. That’s all behind him, he said when word of his former indulgence leaked out during his tenure as chair of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports under the first President Bush. 

Californians will probably tolerate his full frontal beefcake, too—another legacy from his doobie-puffing, ‘roid-popping days. 

Voters even seem indulgent when it comes to his widely reported grab-and-grope behavior and what some pundits are calling his “Nazi problem”—his Austrian policeman-father’s membership in Hitler’s party and Arnold’s own never-disavowed friendship with former Wehrmacht officer and Austrian president Kurt Waldheim. Comedian Bill Maher put his own spin on the issue by turning it into a joke: “Arnold Schwarzenegger—finally, a candidate who can explain the administration’s positions on civil liberties in the original German.” 

So the real question is: Will voters’ indulgence endure after they spend some time chewing on the fact that he was one of the state’s political elite sought out for support by Enron’s Kenneth Lay in the midst of his firm’s electricity rate manipulations—the same ones that landed the state in the fiscal crisis that prompted the recall drive that’s landed Schwarzenegger on the gubernatorial ballot? 

The Enron albatross isn’t unique to the actor. Richard Riordan, then another prominent GOP gubernatorial hopeful, attended the same Lay-led Beverly Hills hotel room strategy session as did Schwarzenegger and felonious former junk bond king Michael Milken, Lay’s mentor. 

According to multiple accounts, Lay called the May 11, 2001, meeting to shore up support for electrical rate deregulation from California Republican powerhouses. The meeting came three days after the Golden State suffered its third round of manufactured electrical blackouts, which only ended when the state agreed to finance continued power purchases through the country’s largest-ever bond issue. 

According to later press accounts, Lay had sought Schwarzenegger’s and Riordan’s support for his deregulation campaign since both men were widely perceived as probable Republican gubernatorial candidates. 

Enron and sundry other energy traders picked the pockets of California consumers and looted the California treasury through artificial price-inflating schemes carrying such sonorous handles as “Death Star” and “Get Shorty.” 

The media have also been notably reluctant to report on the simple fact that the state’s fiscal crisis was largely caused by folks like Schwarzenegger’s host at that private Beverly Hills confab two years ago. Huge electrical bills brought by state and federal deregulation of the utility industry were the main culprit—the fruits of laws pushed through by an acting governor-turned-president named Reagan and a non-acting governor named Pete Wilson, both members of Arnold’s own party. 

Until Enron imploded, Lay was a favorite of Republican politicians in search of cash. He was a close friend and major supporter of another Republican governor-turned-president, George W. Bush, who affectionately called the Enron boss “Kenny Boy.” 

Of course, ‘Ah-nuld’ isn’t the first actor to run for office in the Golden State. At one time the state had both a president and a U.S. senator who came to politics from the silver screen. 

Like another prominent GOP member, the beefy entertainer has been noticeably shy when it comes to candid interviews with the press. He announced his candidacy not at a press conference but on the “Tonight Show,” and the only interview he gave any reporter in the week afterwards appeared in a small Austrian paper. 

Most of the press coverage so far has been gushing, though noted uberconservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh has been cautioning his listeners that Schwarzenegger may be a liberal in Republican drag. 

And speaking of drag, Californians probably won’t be bothered by persistent rumors about the candidate’s sexual preferences—rumors ridiculed by his press agent and many who know the man. 

But Enron could be another story. 

Richard Brenneman is the incoming Managing Editor of the Berkeley Daily Planet.

Berkeley-based Youth Radio scored yet another journalistic triumph when the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) awarded the innovative program its Salute to Excellence honors for a radio documentary examining the violent culture created by the high murder rate in Oakland as seen through a teenager’s eyes. 

Youth Radio offers young people from around the Bay Area the chance to learn about radio broadcasting and then put their perspectives on the airwaves on KPFA, KQED, and National Public Radio. The NABJ award went to a collaborative piece entitled “Welcome to My World.” 

Gerald “Whiz” Ward II, Youth Radio’s broadcast training director, said that, as with many Youth Radio broadcasts, the program aimed to offer listeners a unique perspective on a newsworthy event. 

“There was always a lot of press coverage about all the murders going on in East Oakland,” Ward said. “As a group of young people, our kids wanted to show what it’s like for a kid that lives there, how kids are affected by the violence.” 

To provide that perspective, Ward interviewed Youth Radio student and East Oakland resident Bianca Yarborough and her mother. In the resulting piece, Yarborough chronicles her difficulties maintaining a normal life in the face of the violence in her town and neighborhood. 

“Even with all the murders and things in their minds, kids are still expected to wake up and go to school every day,” Ward said. “They need to maintain normal relationships, but they are often scared.”  

Making the honor doubly sweet was the fact that the “Welcome to My World” segment was created and produced primarily by students, many of whom were entry-level Youth Radio students at the time. 

Ward said that the idea for the piece came from the students in a beginning news reporting class roundtable discussion of important issues in their own lives. Yarborough herself was also a member of that beginners’ class. 

“The students really did this as their own project,” said Youth Radio development director Erin Callahan. “We’re proud of the award because it recognizes just one of the great things that talented kids are producing.” 

The NABJ awards committee cited the new spin Youth Radio took on everyday news as a major factor in their selection of “Welcome to My World” for the award. 

The Salute to Excellence, which usually goes to professional media outlets, aims to recognize programming that has taken an innovative approach to a story or explored it in more detail than most other news outlets would have done. 

“A program like Youth Radio winning the radio award is extremely appropriate,” said awards coordinator Warner Williams. “They are not the mainstream media, and that gives them a lot of freedom. They took a risk with the piece, and it paid off.” 

The Salute to Excellence award was presented to Ward at the NABJ’s conference in Dallas last week. Yarborough was unable to attend the conference because she was involved in preparations for beginning college fall. 

“It was an honor to be there,” Ward said. “It was an impressive assembly of great journalists. I was just really excited that they would recognize our work.” 

The NABJ award came close on the heels of the last in a long list of accolades presented to Youth Radio. The New York Festivals honored the program for excellence in communications media earlier this year, and Youth Radio staffers have won the prestigious DuPont and Peabody Awards in recent years.  

The parade of National honors has earned increased visibility for the program in Berkeley and around the Bay Area, and that, in turn, has helped the station grow and expand its ties with the community. 

Just last month, the station opened Airwaves Café, a weekend hangout for teenagers next to the Youth Radio office at 1801 University Ave. The café serves food and drinks and uses program students to DJ or perform music and poetry in a “safe space” for teens. 

Open from 6 to 11 p.m. on Friday and Saturday nights, the cafe is expected to grow as it gains popularity. Any proceeds from the café go directly into the main Youth Radio fund, which helps the station provide training to its students for no cost. 

“It should help,” Ward said. “It’s great because it provides a hangout space for teenagers, allows our students to practice their skills, and is good for Youth Radio on a whole. It’s a good addition.”

Confronted with a blistering state report on the state of Berkeley’s schools, Board of Education Directors took their first step toward addressing the 500 concerns raised in the evaluation by meeting with its authors earlier this week. 

Describing the mammoth 740-page report as “daunting” and “overwhelming,” the five boardmembers praised the document for providing a roadmap for dealing with district problems ranging from student achievement to employee training and financial matters. 

Berkeley Schools Superintendent Michele Lawrence opened the meeting by noting that no district in California has been able to meet the standards laid out in the report. She then passed out a battle plan from the report’s authors to boardmembers for dealing with approximately 20 percent of the problems. 

Instead of trying to tackle all the issues in the report at once, the list of “District Performance Standards” singles out 93 deficiencies in each of the report’s five categories—community relations, pupil achievement, and personnel, financial and facilities management—that should be addressed by October. Each category contains 15 to 20 problems to be addressed immediately and another 80 or so for later consideration. 

The district’s performance on each issue is rated on a zero to 10 scale as of last month. The document prioritizes each issue as a high, medium or low concern and assigns responsibility to a district administrator. They will be reevaluated again within three months. Standards highlighted in bold reflect issues the district had already begun to deal with before the report was released in May. 

Areas given the lowest possible rating, a zero, include the district’s ability to provide a “clear operational framework” for student body organizations that “deposit, invest, spend and raise funds” and the district’s maintenance of “project records and drawings.” 

On the plus side of the ledger, the district’s effort to “actively encourage parental involvement in their children’s education” is given the highest rating in the report at seven. 

The state says the district needs to focus on items rated a zero or one, while a two indicates that it’s in place in part and already being worked on. The state does not expect low-rated items to be completed by October, but does want to see progress.  

While a “one” rating calls for district personnel to attend training sessions and workshops to keep current in their field, district spokesman Mark Coplan said, “We don’t have any money for that. The dilemma here isn’t that we don’t want it. We have an $8 million deficit coming up this next year.” 

The state’s Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) prepared the report as the result of a deal brokered by former Assemblywoman Dion Aroner (D-Berkeley) between the school district and the state after the district was fined $1.1 million for filing late payroll paperwork. 

Thanks to legislation authored by Aroner, the state forgave the fine and instead put $700,000 of the money into the FCMAT report. The bill requires the district to spend the remaining $460,000 to implement the study’s recommendations over the next two years. FCMAT will file the first of four bi-annual reports on progress made on the report in December. 

At this week’s meeting, FCMAT official Joel Montero stressed that the report’s findings do not constitute “a report card” on the district. 

“Zero is not an F, ten is not an A,” he said. “It is a deficit analysis. It’s not designed to be a positive analysis. We analyze those things that we think need attention.” 

He added that the report’s rankings are not “very scientific” but that they allow for FCMAT to assess growth over time.  

School Board Vice President John Selawsky, armed with a copy of the report festooned with dozens of Post-it notes, asked Montero about the fiscal impact, for a cash-strapped district, of taking action on all the items listed. 

“There will be some fiscal impact,” said Montero. “You have to decide what you can afford, what’s important. Sometimes those are mutually exclusive.” Montero also encouraged the board to get over the initial sticker shock of the report. 

FCMAT, which conducts similar audits at districts all over the state, is used to being in an adversarial position with school board members and rarely holds public meetings with them. Montero described Berkeley’s plan for dealing with FCMAT’s findings as 100 percent better than what they usually get from most districts. He also encouraged the board not to rely on consultants to address the issues raised in the report.  

Boardmember Nancy Riddle said the report affirmed “what we already know or perceived,” but deemed it “managerially impossible.” 

Later in the meeting, Boardmember Shirley Issel asked Board President Joaquin Rivera to appoint a subcommittee on how to proceed with addressing all the issues raised by FCMAT. Rivera indicated that such a subcommittee should be in place in a matter of weeks.

University of California students who sued to block fee hikes will have to fork over the cash, at least for now. 

A San Francisco Superior Court judge denied their request Wednesday for an injunction that would have prevented UC from raising fees for law, medical and other professional students this fall. But while no immediate relief is available, the suit will go forward. 

“This isn’t an indication of how it will end up,” said Jonathan Weissglass, an attorney for the students.  

The suit, filed July 24 by students from UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, UC Davis and UCLA, also seeks refunds on spring and summer 2003 fee hikes for graduate and undergraduate students. 

Students claim the nine-campus university breached a contract with the students by raising spring and summer fees after students had already registered and been billed for classes. 

The suit claims, separately, that UC broke a promise to law, medical and other professional students that they would not face any fee hikes during their time at the university. 

“We all understand the university has a budget problem,” said Weissglass. “But the issue is whether the university can break promises to balance the budget.” 

The UC Board of Regents raised fees for the Spring 2003 semester by 11.2 percent in December 2002. In July, the board followed with a 25 percent fee hike, that jumped to 30 percent when the final state budget passed.

It’s time to tune out the bleating elites and vacant talking heads whose doomsday warnings about these exciting times raise questions about their sanity. They need to spend more time with their de Tocqueville, who could have warned them that here in America nothing is more chaotic than democracy itself. Let’s debunk five myths about the recall. 

Myth No. 1: The recall election is a circus. 

It’s a circus only to the degree that cynical, shallow media make it so. Especially the electronic media in which the ringmasters are the TV news directors—a species that wouldn't recognize a “serious” election if it fell on their empty heads.  

We’re now going to get civics lectures from a bunch of ratings whores who long ago traded in their Sacramento bureaus for freeway telecopters? 

Every election cycle attracts marginal and aberrant candidates, and the media usually ignore them after the one or two initial and totally predictable soft features. Angelyne, Gary Coleman, Larry Flynt et al. loom so large in this election only because the telephoto lenses remain so tightly locked onto them. 

The L.A. Times (and other major metros) have also helped promote the circus theme, giving undue attention to the carnival candidates. A strange twist, as this is the same Times that barred Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader from the presidential debate it organized during the 2000 campaign. Times management argued at the time that Nader wasn’t a serious enough candidate to warrant inclusion.  

Nader’s mistake, apparently, was to not have Gary Coleman chauffeur him down to Spring Street in Agelyne’s pink Vette. 

Myth No. 2: The recall election will throw the state into chaos. 

Whenever encrusted elites lose control of one of their processes, they always warn of chaos, catastrophe and dire consequences. Only they are wise enough to guide our lives. Nothing strikes so much fear into their manipulative little hearts as when the hoi polloi spin out of control— out of their control. 

An election in which pliant, predictable candidates are handpicked in backrooms and bankrolled by special interests, in which the victor comes to power through a $75 million campaign of slash-and-burn TV ads with a record-low turnout, well, that’s just one more serious and orderly round of balloting, we’re supposed to believe. But let just any dumb bastard citizen off the street run for office, totally beyond the reach of the party and lobbyist elites, and that is a sure sign that California is sliding into the sea. What has the establishment so panicked about this election is hardly the threat of chaos. It’s rather the unpredictability of the process and its outcome. Imagine electing some candidate that hasn’t already been bought and paid for. The horror, the horror. 

We’re told the recall is a hijacking, a coup, the illegitimate overturning of a legitimate election; ultimately, we’re warned, this is the unwashed and witless electorate running riot. Pundits beware: This “circus” election is likely to generate a bigger turnout than last year’s “official” contest. A staggering 90 percent of voters say they plan to cast ballots on Oct. 7. In a recent Gallup Poll, almost 70 percent of likely voters said they want to oust Gray Davis. 

Those who continue to insist this recall is a sham perhaps ought to take the advice Bertolt Brecht once gave the East German regime: Maybe the government should dismiss the people and elect a new one? 

The latest apocalyptic warning from the panicked elites is that with more than 100 names on the ballot, it could take 10 minutes (!) for a voter to go through and maybe 40 hours for some small counties to tally. As a reporter, I’ve been to more than one country where people braved jail and gunfire in order to vote, or even to just suggest an election should be held. Somehow I think the republic will survive if a lengthy ballot makes a few Californians late to Pilates classes on Election Day. 

Myth No. 3: Organized labor is the force behind progressive politics. 

It could be and should be. But it isn’t. Ask just about any group of frontline union organizers—those 60-hour-a-week troops who actually pick up the authorization cards—what they think of Gray Davis and they’ll start to gag. In private conversation, even the labor bosses openly disdain Davis. These are the same folks, after all, who every couple of years mumble the same pie-eyed gibberish about “taking back the Democratic Party.” 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But when served up the golden opportunity to dump a Lite Democrat like Davis (one who had to be threatened with hunger strikes before he signed pro-UFW legislation) and actually take a stab at remolding the party, the labor hierarchy still refuses to make the break. Instead, County Federation chief Miguel Contreras threatens that he will sink any Democrat who breaks ranks in labor’s defense of Davis. If only Contreras and the rest of Big Labor had been half that tough with the weenie governor during his first four years. Instead they now circle the wagons around Davis and begin their ritual moaning about right-wing conspiracies. It’s boring. And disheartening. 

What spectacular evidence of the political bankruptcy of the Democratic Party. Now all those “progressive” labor Democrats can spend the next eight weeks arguing over whether just to vote no on the recall or also vote affirmatively for Cruz Bustamante, the soporific darling of the anti-labor Indian casino lobby and dogged booster of the conservative Joe Lieberman. These self-styled progs are now reduced to almost comical blackmail: Support the most conservative and sluglike Democrat—Bustamante—or be accused of “spoiling.” Spoiling what? 

Myth No. 4: The Green Party is a viable alternative. 

This should be a historic opportunity for Green candidate Peter Camejo, who got 5 percent of the vote in last year’s gubernatorial election. 

Fuggeddaboutit. 

Camejo has pushed marijuana legalization and instant-runoff voting to the top of his agenda. These might be cutting-edge issues along the Venice boardwalk or in the UC Santa Cruz dorms, but they are not even remotely now on the minds of most California voters. The Greens’ preference for talking to themselves rather than to others destines the party to soon wash up and splinter like the Peace and Freedom folks. Eventually the California Greens will be meeting in one guy’s house with different sectarian groups caucusing in the living room and dining room. 

Myth No. 5: An independent governor couldn’t govern. 

Nonsense. Only a populist independent could break up the special-interest logjam in Sacramento. That’s why I’m pulling for Arianna, the most progressive candidate with the broadest appeal. When it comes to solving the state’s economic crisis, the most Arnold has offered is that he will make sure all Californians have “fantastic jobs.” Right. 

And Bustamante panders by vowing to roll back auto-registration fees. 

Only Arianna has addressed the 900-pound gorilla of California politics: Proposition 13. Her number-one campaign vow is to start collecting fair—that is, radically increased—taxes on commercial (not residential) property. She says if elected, she would take that proposal, along with measures for public financing of elections, and a guarantee of universal health care and adequate education, to the Legislature. If, as expected, the Legislature balks, Huffington says she would place the whole package before the voters as a set of ballot initiatives and would use her bully pulpit as governor to push for their approval. That’s a serious, responsible and plausible outline for deep reform. The only one on that very long ballot. 

But beware: To be successful, it would require actually trusting the voters. 

Mark Cooper writes for the LA Weekly.

I guess I’m just the kind of gal who likes to sleep around. I wasn’t always this way. From the time I was four, until I was eighteen, I had my own bedroom: two single beds, (one for an occasional invited friend to use), wall-to-wall closets and an orange and green shag carpet. I didn’t have to share it with anyone. I lived like a princess in my parent’s home for fourteen years. It’s the longest I’ve stayed anywhere.  

At college I had to share a dormitory room with another entering freshman, but that didn’t last long. By second semester I’d found a small private room for myself in an off-campus apartment. I moved several times during the next four years, but I always had my own place, unwilling, and unable, to share with anyone.  

After graduation, I rented rooms and houses in Virginia and California, and even when I married and became a homeowner, I always had a room in which to be by myself. 

Times are different now. I share a house with a wheelchair-bound husband, two helpers, a bird and a dog. On the weekends a small child comes to stay with us. I no longer have a room of my own. It’s not even clear that I have my own bed. 

After his bicycling accident, my husband wound up in a hospital bed in the middle of our living room. He could no longer go upstairs to our bedroom. Jerry, a home care attendant, moved in to help me with the daily chores of keeping my husband alive. I gave him our former bedroom. I couldn’t bear to be in that room. It held too many memories. 

I experimented with sleeping in our guest room, in my husband’s hospital bed, on the couch in the TV room, upstairs in the attic and on the futon in the nook. But nothing felt comfortable. When Harka, a second attendant, settled into our house to assist with the mounting responsibilities of taking care of Ralph, he took the spare bedroom. My choices of where to sleep narrowed.  

But I don’t care. After nine years of rotating sleeping arrangements, I’ve adapted. Ralph’s hospital bed is too narrow for both of us, so I only sleep there between the hours of 10 p.m. and midnight. Then, when Ralph’s attendants are ready to put Ralph to bed, I move to the couch or the futon. When Jernae, Jerry’s daughter, visits, I put her on the spare mattress in the attic. But inevitably she shows up beside me—on the couch or the futon, the hospital bed or even in the living room chair. There have been times when I’ve considered going down the street to sleep with my neighbor, but Mrs. Scott passed away a few years ago. Her bed was covered in homemade quilts and was well broken in. 

I’ve gotten used to sleeping around. I never know where I’m going to end up. The other night Jernae and I started out on Ralph’s hospital bed, then moved to the attic. But it began to rain and the pitter-patter on the skylights bothered us. We moved downstairs to the futon. Then the dog, (who ALWAYS sleeps with me, no matter where I am), needed to go outside. We migrated to the couch off the kitchen. When Whiskers barked, alerting us that she wanted back inside, Jernae and I hauled our pillows and blankets back upstairs to the nook. Naturally, Whiskers followed. 

Last month I went back East to visit family and friends. It was all I could do to keep myself from crawling into bed with my parents. And when I went into Manhattan to visit my friend Amy, we had no choice but to sleep together. The only other space available was her bathtub. But I didn’t mind. In fact, I was happy to share Amy’s bed. My only disappointment was that Jernae, Mrs. Scott and Whiskers weren’t there with me. As I said, I’m now the kind of gal who likes to sleep around.  

Ahmed Amin just wants to play football. He’s 17, and Cupertino High’s starting tight end. His older brother Hassan, 19, would rather chase girls around the DeAnza College campus. But Ahmed has to miss school and practice every third Wednesday to report to the INS office an hour away. And Hassan recently spent a night in jail for immigration violations. 

Last February, the boys went with their mother to an INS office in compliance with a new special registration policy. The policy requires males over 16 from a handful of countries—mostly Arab and Muslim—to report to the INS and have their paperwork scrutinized. Initially, Hassan didn’t have a problem complying. “I guess the policy was cool. I mean, a criminal wouldn’t go to an officer and say, ‘Sir, I'm a criminal—arrest me.’ We went in there voluntarily to tell them, ‘We're living in the United States legally. You know, do whatever with us.’” 

What the INS did was place the teenagers in deportation proceedings. Hassan was thrown in jail and Ahmed would have shared a cell with him except that the INS has no detention facilities for minors. The brothers went to be voluntarily fingerprinted, photographed and registered under the program, but were told they would be deported to Pakistan. 

Hassan couldn’t believe what was happening. “I had no idea that they were gonna detain me for a night—my brother had to get me out on bail for $4,000. That happened so quickly that I couldn’t even think what was going on. I was like, ‘This is just dreaming.’ I haven’t done anything. I haven’t ever been in this kind of situation. This is really happening to me. I haven’t done anything.” 

Their mother, Tahira Manzour, left Pakistan for the United States with her sons years ago. Hassan and Ahmad grew up in San Jose and are self-described American kids. 

The boys’ older brother, Imran Mughal, who is a citizen, petitioned for legal residency for their mother in 1998. The family says the lawyer told them the younger boys would be covered under their mother’s application. Years later, they found out that the brothers had to be petitioned separately to get temporary visas. Those applications were still pending at the time of the INS special registration, and the INS determined that the brothers were in the country illegally. 

Ahmad says he doesn't know anything about Pakistan or what he’ll do there if he’s deported. “I don’t even really speak the language, dude. How am I gonna survive? I haven’t seen my dad for seven years because my mom divorced him. If I live with my cousins, we’re probably going to stay for like two weeks and then me and my brother are on our own.” 

Hassan is close to completing the accounting program at DeAnza College and is afraid that his degree will be worthless if he's forced to leave. “The major I'm doing over here is totally different in Pakistan.” 

Between court appearances, the brothers carry on with their lives. Hassan is going to summer classes and handing out flyers for a regular dance party that he and his friends throw. Ahmed is on the football field most days of the week, vying for his starting position. His legal problems might threaten his standing on the team. “I told my coach that I have to go to court and the judge is going to decide if I can stay here or not. We don’t have any other tight end.” 

If the brothers are deported, they’ll be going without their mother. She’s not affected by the policy, which applies only to males. The family was forced apart once before due to the parents’ divorce, a time Hassan remembers clearly. “We were living happily, but now the deportation policy has put us in the situation that our family is going to be separated again.” 

They’ll also be leaving behind a tightly knit circle of friends and, in Hassan’s case, a legion of girlfriends. One of Hassan’s friends, Benish, nearly fought back tears when she first heard he might be deported. “I’m gonna lose a friend. I’m going to miss him if he leaves,” she says. 

Between dance parties and football practice, the brothers have become their own public-relations machine, trying to garner support for their cause from teachers and the people in their community. In their rare down time, they reflect on what they’ll be losing and what it means to leave. 

Ahmad, half-smiling, stares at his lap and shakes his head. “I’m going to miss school the most because I've been in high school for three years and this is my senior year. I love school, man. High school is fun. My friends, football team, everything.” He looks up for a second and takes a breath. “My biggest fear is moving back to Pakistan. I don’t wanna move back.” 

PNS contributor Russell Morse, 22, is an associate editor for YO! Youth Outlook (www.youthoutlook.org), a publication of Pacific News Service.

Deep in the East Bay Express's Gary Coleman for California Governor issue, you find an interesting, and disturbing, passage:  

“[W]e’re pretty sure [Coleman’s] got the black vote tied up in October,” reporter Chris Thompson writes. “After all, who else are blacks gonna vote for—Bill Simon? … [B]lack voters will finally have someone they can believe in and will turn out in droves. Our analysis: Coleman wins big in Oakland and Richmond!” 

I suppose Mr. Thompson and all of my good friends over at the Express thought this was funny. I don't.  

I’ll return to that point in a moment, but, first, some background. A few weeks ago, working on its theory that the gubernatorial recall had caused California to “reclaim its rightful place as the wackiest state in the union,” the East Bay Express decided to join in the fun. They called former child actor Gary Coleman (from the old series “Diff’rent Strokes”) and asked him if he wanted to run for governor in the Gray Davis recall election this fall. When a surprised Coleman agreed, the Express sent out its editor and several reporters to collect the 65 necessary signatures on a nominating petition, paid the $3,500 filing fee, and got Coleman on the ballot. Last week the newspaper devoted their entire cover and news section to their caper, using it, as they wrote, to show “how absurd [California] politics have become.” 

It’s difficult to complain about the circus in town after you show up with greasepaint and a clown nose on your own face. Further, one wonders why the folks at the Express felt they needed to intervene to make that point, since there were several odd entries among the hundreds of California citizens making noise about filing to run for governor, including porn businessman Larry Flynt, porn actress Angelyne, and the watermelon-smashing comic Gallagher. Still, the East Bay Express’s reputation as a serious journalistic effort is its own to build or squander, as it sees fit.  

My problem comes with their choice of a black individual to use as their object of ridicule. Two centuries after our arrival in California, no African-American has served as governor of this state and only one has come close to winning—former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, who lost in 1982 and 1986. This is not because no African-American has been qualified to serve as governor in the 250 years since California became a state. It is because a majority of white Californians have not yet demonstrated that they will vote for a black candidate for governor. They might laugh about this in certain parts of eastern Contra Costa County. In certain parts of Oakland and Richmond—the places where Mr. Thompson says that there’s no choice but the ridiculous Gary Coleman—it’s probably not so humorous.  

The nomination of Mr. Coleman—whose character on “Diff’rent Strokes” was a barely-disguised reprisal of the old eye-rolling, mouth-poking black minstrel caricatures of the nineteenth century—opens the door for a descent into black-ridicule humor. The deliberately absurd picture of Coleman on the cover of the Express , grinning like a tom-fool, buck-and-wing coon from one of the old Harper’s slavery-day cartoons is a good example. For many of my generation, it is a hurtful reminder of the infamous photo of a slack-jawed drool-lipped, bleary-eyed old black man with a sheriff’s cap on his head, passed around by white Alabama and Mississippi racists back in the mid-60s to “demonstrate” why black people should never be considered for political office.  

Now comes this week’s East Bay Express “Bottom Feeder” column by Will Harper, which features a headline takeoff from one of Coleman's trademark “Diff’rent Strokes” sayings: “Whatchoo Talkin’ ‘Bout, Gary?” The use of apostrophes and misspellings to recreate language is only widely used in this country these days with African-American dialect. It’s used so often with African-American speech that my friend, Mr. Harper, probably didn’t consider its historic roots—the attempt to justify slavery by insisting that African captives were too stupid to grasp the intricacies of Western speech and therefore, by inference, Western technology and civilization. (Think for a moment of the national shouts of anti-immigrant bigotry that would have ensued if the Express had used that same technique to try to recreate the speech of Austrian immigrant Arnold Schwarzenegger.)  

Once you begin rolling down this road of ethnic “humor,” however, it’s hard to stop. In an item in their recall issue on why Californians should vote for Coleman over Schwarzenegger, the Express writes that “Schwarzenegger wasn't even born here.” Eight years after Prop 187, it’s another thing that’s simply not funny.  

Am I saying, therefore, that the folks at the East Bay Express are bigots? Nope. Just that their “Gary for Governor!” caper gave a lot of aid and comfort to people who are. One wishes that my good friends over there had thought a bit before they pulled the trigger on this issue. This one hurt, guys.

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The seventh exchange between Berkeley and Japanese progressives culminated earlier this month in an invitation for Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates to attend a mayoral conference in Hiroshima.  

“We want Mayors representing a billion people to issue a Peace Declaration,” said Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba, in extending an invitation to Bates. 

When a resolution asking the U.S. to stop the bombing of Afghanistan was adopted the Wall Street Journal labeled the Berkeley City Council “headless idiots.” But Japanese citizens opposing their national governments’ support for U.S. military operations saw it as a new tactic to enforce Japan’s constitutional provision that renounces war and states that no land, sea, air forces or war potential may be maintained.  

They invited Berkeley City Council member Dona Spring, who sponsored the resolution, to Japan. Unable to accept the invitation she sent two Berkeley Commissioners. Following that visit a Japanese delegation came to study and make a video about Berkeley’s system of citizen participation. Already some Japanese cities have started permitting public comment and rescheduled City Council meetings for evening session.  

For the last two years members of the Peace and Justice Commission have nurtured the citizen diplomacy, sending Commissioners to Japan and helping schedule events for visiting Japanese delegations. These visits cost Berkeley taxpayers nothing, as the Japanese have paid expenses for visiting Commissioners and have contributed to Berkeley’s economy by paying their own expenses during visits to Berkeley. At a time when creating peace solidarity is so important, the Peace and Justice Commission has managed to fulfill its mandate to promote foreign educational and cultural exchange at no cost to tax payers.  

This seventh exchange began with an invitation for Berkeley to send a representative to attend the 33rd National Assembly for Peace and Democracy. About 70 people attended a workshop on creating “Undefended Localities” laws based on the Geneva Convention, and heard about how provisions of Berkeley’s Nuclear Free Zone law could be used to campaign against nuclear weapons. 

About 600 people attended the Assembly, which pledged to involve Japanese activists in a series of international actions beginning with the Aug. 15 anti-war Festival in Seoul, South Korea. September will bring national actions across Japan opposing the Iraqi occupation and demanding a halt to environmentally damaging seabed boring for construction of a new U.S. military base. In Mexico anti-globalization protests will target a World Trade Organization conference, and in Manila, Philippine activists will hold an International Criminal Tribunal to gather information on Bush’s war crimes against Afghan civilians. 

October will see the another Japanese exchange visit to Berkeley, an international protest targeting the Pentagon, a conference in Cairo, the creation in Tokyo of an International Criminal Tribunal to investigate war crimes against Iraqi civilians, and the setting up of an international occupation watch center in Iraq. In November people will seek to convince the International Union for Conservation of Nature to protect habitat for the endangered Dugong, and December will bring the International Criminal Tribunal on Afghanistan to Tokyo. 

Following the conference, we made stops in Kyoto, where Amnesty International arranged a dinner with environmentalist and peace activists, and then Osaka, where a dozen activists working on a campaign to declare the City an Undefended Locality, a protocol of the Geneva Convention, watched the video on Berkeley and asked questions about the strengths and weaknesses of using Berkeley’s Nuclear Free law to campaign against nuclear weapons.  

The final stop was Hiroshima, where there were workshops on the war on Iraq, the use of depleted uranium, a moving display of pictures painted by survivors of the atomic bombing, a brief address to other international guest, and the presentation of a letter from Mayor Bates to Mayor Akiba of Hiroshima advising him of the Berkeley City Council’s endorsement of the second annual Peace Lantern ceremony. Mayor Akiba then requested an invitation be delivered inviting Mayor Bates to attend a Japanese-American Mayor’s conference. Before leaving Hiroshima I was able to witness the annual Paper Lantern Ceremony in which the park and the river are filled with candle-lit paper lanterns bearing messages of peace. 

Upon returning to Berkeley the invitation was delivered to Mayor Bates and I had the opportunity to see the cultural exchange continue by participating in a Peace Lantern Ceremony organized by Peace and Justice Commissioner Steve Freedkin. This fall the Peace and Justice Commission will consider further proposals to nurture citizen diplomacy, as Commissioners arrange scheduling for a Japanese delegation coming to Berkeley this October. 

Elliot Cohen is a member of Berkeley Peace and Justice Commission.

It doesn’t take long to be charmed by Point Richmond. Moments after leaving Interstate 580 and turning south, away from the sprawling unsightliness of the ChevronTexaco oil refinery, you are in a town square that seems to have escaped time. 

The downtown restaurants, stores and offices bustle with activity although there is very little automobile traffic and parking is rarely a problem. Many of the buildings—mostly brick and wood—were built in the early 1900s. And because downtown Point Richmond was the first-ever district to make the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, a good effort has been made to design new buildings that are architecturally consistent with the old. The focal point of the square is a statue of a Native American called “The Sentinel” which stands watch over the small park where residents sit on benches and chat or read the newspaper while sipping coffee. 

Many who visit Point Richmond to attend the popular community theater, enjoy the multiple restaurants or tour the area’s rich historical resources find themselves transported back to a more innocent time in the American consciousness when everybody knew their neighbors by name, the owners of the corner market remembered your kids’ birthday and the town barber has been cutting your hair since you were four years old. Surprisingly, those things still exist in Point Richmond. 

Of course, Point Richmond is not really a town. It’s actually a neighborhood of the City of Richmond. But try not to let that break the spell (an incongruous Starbucks Coffee House that opened last year on the square—to the chagrin of many locals—is startling enough). Perhaps because of its physical isolation, the small locality seems to exist not only apart from greater Richmond but the entire Bay Area. 

To the south and west is the Bay, to the north Interstate 580 and the oil refinery, and to the east the 295-acre Miller-Knox Regional Shoreline Park. 

“It has the feeling of an island here,” says Lora Bartlett, one of the founders of the Point Richmond Association of Mothers (PRAM). “So many people live and work here that many of us call it the last village in the Bay Area.” 

Thanks to lower-than-average home prices, large numbers of young couples were able to buy homes in Point Richmond in the mid and late 1990s (home prices have since caught up to the rest of the Bay Area). The result was something of a baby boom in the small community. Bartlett, along with some other new mothers, began PRAM in 1998. 

With a membership of 75 parents, PRAM fosters friendship, support and instruction for young families. Besides regular meetings and managing a number of pre-school programs, the group also delivers home cooked meals to families with new babies whether they are members of PRAM or not. 

Bartlett says the Point Richmond community inspires that kind of social participation.  

“This is an incredibly close knit community,” she says. “Where else can you live where the owner of the local market remembers your son’s name and his birthday?” 

Town barber John Viers, who has been operating the Park Place Barbers on the square for the last 41 years, agrees. A friendly and soft-spoken man, Viers always has a warm greeting when customers come in for a trim. The two-chair shop is comfortable and the brown metal National cash register that Viers has used since he opened the shop, gives the décor a sense of familiar continuity. “There hasn’t been any reason to get a new one,” he says with a shrug. 

The folksy charm offers its own rewards, and it’s not unusual for former Point Richmond residents to come from as far away as Sacramento and Oakhurst to have Viers cut their hair. “I just had a guy come in who moved to Castro Valley. He said people just aren’t friendly there the way they are here,” Viers says. “He needed a Point Richmond fix.” 

Point Richmond is perhaps best known as a popular lunch destination. When noontime nears, the nine restaurants in the small downtown fill up with refinery workers, City of Richmond employees and lab technicians from the new $18 million state DNA lab. 

However, the town has another life as a secret weekend getaway. The seven rooms in the 92-year-old Hotel Mac are booked a month in advance by Bay Area residents who come to Point Richmond to escape the kids, work stress or just to get away enjoy themselves. 

“We have people come here for a variety of reasons,” says hotel manager Griff Brazil. “They come to have a good meal in the restaurant and attend the Masquers Playhouse, or go to the Ginger Spring Day Spa. We even have people who are visiting San Francisco but want to stay here because it’s close and not as hectic.” 

In keeping with a turn-of-the-century town, Point Richmond is especially rich in history. It was founded as a railroad town in 1897 when the Santa Fe line chose nearby Ferry Point as the terminus of its transcontinental rail line. Passengers and goods were loaded onto boats and ferried across the bay to San Francisco. In the early 1900s, Standard Oil built the refinery which also added to the town. 

Homes began to sprout on the hills that rise up from the town square and soon, like many boon towns in northern California, Point Richmond soon acquired a bawdy reputation. Railroad Avenue, on the east side of the square, once sported as many as 20 bordellos along with a sizeable collection of taverns. One survivor, the Baltic, still operates as a restaurant and bar, but the upstairs bordello has long since vanished, according to owner Chuck Wise. 

While a bordello wasn’t unusual in Point Richmond at the time, it’s telling of the era that it was able to exist in harmony with the police station and jail, which was right next door.  

The Red Light Abatement Act of 1913 signaled the death knell of the bawdy houses, but bars remained a popular pastime in Point Richmond. According to second generation resident David Vincent, the town housed 64 taverns at the height of World War II.  

Richmond’s population exploded during the war as people from the South and Midwest flocked to the area in search of jobs in the four Kaiser shipyards. Those workers cranked out 747 Liberty and Victory ships for the war effort. 

The area is rich with World War II history. Near Point Richmond, military history buffs can tour the SS Red Oak Victory or the Rosie the Riveter National Historical Park, which was dedicated in 2000. 

Other points of interest include the Golden State Model Railroad Museum, the Point Richmond Historical Museum, which is housed in a surveyor’s shack built in 1902, or “just walking around the Point Richmond hills and enjoying the town’s sleepy atmosphere and breathtaking bay views,” Vincent says.  

For more information about historical resources in and near Point Richmond or local festivals and arts and crafts shows go to http://www.pointrichmond.com. 

Box Info: 

The second annual 2003 Point Richmond Music Festival will be held in downtown Richmond Friday, Aug. 16th. The music begins at noon and will continue until 7:30 p.m. Nine bands will play including Johnny Dilks & His Visitation Valley Boys, The Rhythm Doctors and the Masquers Stage One. Arts and crafts vendors will also be setting up booths along the sidewalks and streets.

A standoff between police officials and an armed suspect ended peacefully Monday after 24 hours of negotiations. 

Anthony Wade Arrington Jr., a 23-year-old Fremont resident, surrendered to the Berkeley Police Department’s (BPD) Barricaded Subject Hostage Negotiation Team (BSHNT) shortly before 12:30 p.m. on Monday, 24 hours after barricading himself inside a West Berkeley apartment with a firearm. 

Arrington walked out of the apartment unarmed and was handcuffed and led to a waiting police car without incident, said BPD public information officer Kevin Schofield. The standoff began at 11:54 a.m. Sunday when a resident of a building on the 1900 block of 10th Street called police to report sighting a man with a gun. 

BPD officers responding to the call were forced to dive for cover after a shot was fired from the doorway of the apartment building. One police officer sustained a mild head injury from a piece of shrapnel, but did not require medical attention. 

Meanwhile, Arrington had run back inside the building and locked himself in the apartment, refusing to surrender. BSHNT officials arrived at the scene within an hour. 

Neighbors said that the apartment where Arrington staged the standoff belongs to his girlfriend, who had reportedly been in the building before Arrington fired his first shot. Christine Davis, who lives directly beneath that apartment, said that Arrington and his girlfriend had been in the building together and that she had heard arguing from above. 

“I had been on the phone with (Arrington’s) girlfriend just an hour before I heard the shot,” she said. “She didn’t say anything was wrong, and then an hour later I heard arguing, but nothing serious—just an intense discussion. Then we heard the shot. I’m not sure what happened.” 

Davis said that after the first shot, Arrington called her on the phone and said “Chris, get out of the house, take all the kids and get out of the house.” Then he said “I love you.” Davis said that police later took another family in the building, a grandmother and some kids, out on a ladder. 

Davis said that Arrington had temporarily pulled his gun away from the window in order to allow her to escort her children out of the building. 

When it became clear that the standoff would last much of the night, BPD officials made arrangements for the Davises and other area families to stay in local hotels.  

“We were just sitting around until about 11:00,” Davis said. “Then they made arrangements for us to have a place to sleep. In the morning we came back and have just been sitting around waiting.” 

Police cordoned off the area between Ninth and Tenth and Hearst and University for the twenty four hours that the siege lasted, leaving many residents stranded. Attorney Bart Selden, who lives within the area, wasn’t allowed to drive his car out until morning. Ellen Gailing, a Richmond photographer, left her terrier Pepper in her car for ten minutes while she made a quick stop at Amsterdam Art when the shooting started, leaving Pepper marooned in the car until she finally got a veterinarian from Pet Emergencies on University to talk police into rescuing the stranded dog eight hours later. 

Schofield said that the police department’s hostage negotiation team, including mental health specialists, worked through the night to continue communication with Arrington, a process that he said Arrington was willing to participate in. Berkeley Police Negotiator Team Leader Rob Westerhoff led police talks with Arrington, and Westerhoff himself escorted the suspect to a police car after he surrendered. 

“He kept the lines of communication open with us the entire time,” Schofield said. “We knew that we would be able to convince him to come out peacefully at some point because as long as he was willing to talk to us, we were willing to talk to him.” 

Arrington was also speaking with his parents during most of the night from a cell phone in the apartment. His mother, Stephanie Braveboy of Richmond, said came to the area with several other family members and friends to try to reach him after her son called on her cell phone. 

His father, Anthony Arrington Sr., said that he had spoken with his son “five or six times” during the night. The elder Arrington also made a televised plea Sunday night for his son to throw the gun out the window of the apartment building and surrender. 

“He told me that he would give himself up if I escorted him out of the building,” Arrington Sr. said. “I just don’t know why it took so long for that process to happen.” 

Arrington Sr. described his son as a “kind and loving” person who generally stayed out of trouble with the police. “I was worried about him more than anything,” the elder Arrington said. “It was hard not knowing what he was going through to make this happen. I still don’t know what was going on with him.” 

Neighbors expressed similar sentiments about the younger Arrington, who Davis said had been dating her upstairs neighbor, for over a year. Most described him as a quiet person who participated in neighborhood life and took a special liking to area children. 

“He gave my son a Playstation a few months back,” Davis said. “They played together a lot. Something serious must have happened, because he’s not generally like this. Hopefully this can be fixed.” 

Police officers searched the apartment, where they seized a handgun. Upon his surrender, Arrington was taken to the Berkeley City Jail, where he was charged with assault with a firearm, felony possession of a handgun, firing a weapon into an inhabited dwelling, and a probation violation. 

Davis, an Administration of Justice student at Contra Costa College, said she was very impressed with the way the Berkeley Police handled the confrontation. “They did everything right according to the book,” she said. Her fiancé, Denmore Rice, commended police for “a remarkable job.” He and Davis plan to send a letter praising Officer John Nutterfield for his sensitive handling of the evacuation. 

Neighbor Jesus Avila, who said he’s lived at Finn Hall on Tenth Street with his four children for 14 years without seeing any previous violence, commented that the police “had the opportunity to take him down, and they didn’t do it.” He said that “in Oakland or San Jose, he’d be dead.” 

Davis agreed, adding, “but Berkeley, thank goodness, is still Berkeley.”

TUESDAY, AUGUST 12 

Bay Area Coalition for Head- 

waters meets at 7 p.m. at the Rockridge Library, 5366 College Ave., near Rockridge BART, Oakland. 835-6303.  

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

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 13 

“Grabbing Headlines With Street Theater: A Media Workshop for Activists” world premier video screening at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Gray Panthers, 1403 Addison St. 548-9696.  

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Sta- 

tion. Vigil at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www. 

geocities.com/vigil4peace/vigil 

Twilight Tour: Succulents for Your Garden at 5:30 p.m. at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Cost is $5, registration required. 643-2755. 

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 Martin Luther King, Jr. Way. Meetings are held every Wednesday night at 7:30 p.m. at Epic Arts Studios at 1923 Ashby Ave. For further information on ways to get involved please call 644-2204. 

Community Dances, traditional English and American dances, 8 p.m. every Wednesday, $9. 7 p.m. first Sunday, $10. Grace North Church, 2138 Cedar St. 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.  

Berkeley CopWatch open office hours 7 to 9 p.m. Drop in to file complaints, assistance available. For information call 548-0425. 

THURSDAY, AUGUST 14 

East Bay Watershed Forum Kick-Off Meeting from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at Oakland City Hall, Hearing Room 4. Agencies, organizations, and citizens interested in East Bay creeks and watersheds are encouraged to come. The Forum is a project of the new East Bay Watershed Center at Merritt College. It is envisioned as a network for local creek and watershed groups to share ideas, pool resources, and collaborate on projects. For more information, call 434-3840 or 434-3841 or email ecomerritt@aol.com 

“Doing it Right - Hiring a Licensed Contractor,” video presentation at 1 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5190. 

Lawyers in the Library, at 6 p.m. in the South Branch, Russell at MLK Jr. Way. 981-6260.  

FRIDAY, AUGUST 15 

Reception for New BHS Principal, Jim Slemp The Berkeley High School PTA cordially invites the Berkeley High Community to a reception welcoming new BHS Principal Jim Slemp to Berkeley, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. in the lobby of the Community Theater on the BHS campus. Light refreshments will be served. To volunteer or for more information call Barbara Coleman, PTSA Vice-President 704-9939. colemanbarbara@comcast.net 

Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh! Open to all youth familiar with the games, at 2 p.m. in the Story Room at the Berkeley Central Library, 2090 Kittredge. 981-6223. www.infopeople.org/bpl 

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.  

SATURDAY, AUGUST 16 

City of Berkeley Party For Your Health A free day-long health fair starting at 11 a.m. with information and activities on nutrition and fitness, breastfeeding, HIV, children’s head start, blood pressure checks, cholesterol/diabetes screening. Workshops, presentations, health food samples, children activities and live music. At San Pablo Park Community Center, 2800 Park St. For information call Joy Moore, 981-5364.  

Berkeley Association of Neighborhood Associations meets at 9:15 a.m. in the Fireside Room, St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. 587-3257. www.berkeleycna.com 

Free Emergency Preparedness Class on Disaster First Aid, for anyone who lives or works in Berkeley, from 9 a.m. to noon at 997 Cedar St., between 8th and 9th Sts. Register on-line at www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/fire/oes or call 981-5506. 

Summer Days and Nights in Albany, a small-town street fair, from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Solano and San Pablo Aves. Features live entertainment including music, a lion dance, jugglers, and more. 525-1771.  

The Importance and Magic of Butterflies in the Garden A free presentation, from 10:30 a.m. to noon, with butterfly experts Andy Liu and Sally Levinson. Learn how to attract butterflies to your garden by creating caterpillar habitat. The presentation will include an amazing lifecycle video and live specimens of all life stages. This is a fragrance-free event. Please do not wear perfume, cologne, etc. Held at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. 548-3333. www.ecologycenter.org 

Acupuncture and Integrative Medicine College will hold an Open House from 9:45 to noon at 2550 Shattuck Ave. For more information or to register please call 666-8248. www.aic-berkeley.edu 

SUNDAY, AUGUST 17 

From Sheep To Sweater What happens to the sheep fleece? Find out as we demonstrate carding, spinning, weaving, felting and knitting, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area. Free. Wheelchair accessible. 525-2233.    

Urban Habitat Bicycle Ride  

Hop on your cycle and pedal to the restored wetlands of Oakland’s Arrowhead Marsh. Easy, flat, and accessible by public transit! 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. 415-255-3233. http://greenbelt.org/getinvolved/outings/green_reservation.html 

Free Hands-on Bicycle Repair Clinic, at 11 a.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Tibetan Buddhism, Robin Caton on “Sacred Breath” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

Eckhart Tolle Talks on Video Free gathering 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, AUGUST 18 

Teachers’ Eco-Networking Lunch High school and middle school teachers interested in environmental education are invited to EarthTeam’s 3rd annual luncheon, co-sponsored by the CREEC Network and UCB’s Env. Sci. Teaching Program at 11:30 a.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way, entrance on Dana. The free event will include a panel of teachers, each making short presentations about their areas of expertise, followed by questions and answers. For information call 925-274-3669. CindyS@earthteam.net 

www.earthteam.net 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 6 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. Volunteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

ONGOING  

CodePink Women’s Activist Training Camp, Aug. 15 - 17. Join women of all ages and backgrounds for a weekend of activist training sessions and outdoor fun at Chabot Regional Park. Cost is $20-$50 sliding scale, includes campsite, trainings, and dinner on Fri. and Sat. nights. For information 415-575-5555. peace@globalexchange.org www.codepinkbayarea.org 

Summer Fun Camps for Children and Teens, from age five and up, are offered at Berkeley recreation centers through Aug. 22, Mon. - Fri., 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. The fee, including lunch and snack, is $77 per week for Berkeley residents. Sponsored by the City of Berkeley’s Parks Recreation and Waterfront Department. Applications for the camps can be picked up at the Camps Office, located at 2016 Center Street, or can be mailed upon request. 981-5150. 

Echo Lake Youth Camp For ages 6 - 12 at Echo Lake, near South Lake Tahoe. One week sessions are offered between July 7 and August 22. Cost is $235 per session. For registration information please visit the City of Berkeley’s Recreation Programs Office at 2016 Center St., or call 981-5150.  

Free Marketing Workshops, sponsored by Sisters Headquarters, for women entrepreneurs, every Wed. from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at 643 17th St. Oakland. For information call 238-1100. 

Vista Community College Program for Adult Education (PACE) Enrollment through Sept. 6. PACE is a college alternative for adults with job and family responsibilities. Enrollment in American Sign Language classes is also being accepted. For information call 981-2864 or 981-2800 or email mclausen@peralta.cc.ca.us  

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. Call for an appointment, 428-2357. 

Free Energy Bill Payment Assistance The City of Berkeley has money to help low-income households pay their gas and electric bills. For applications and more information, contact the Energy Office at 644-8544. TDD: 981-6903. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/energy 

CITY MEETINGS 

Board of Library Trustees meets Wed., Aug. 13, at 7 p.m., at the Central Library, 2090 Kittredge St. Jackie Y. Griffin, 981-6195. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/library 

Waterfront Commission meets Wed., Aug. 13, at 7 p.m., at 201 University Ave. Cliff Marchetti, 644-6376 ext. 224. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/waterfront 

Corporation Yard Community Meeting to address the storage facility and the placement of modular offices, on Thurs. Aug. 14, at 7 p.m. at the Assem- 

bly Building, 1326 Allston Way, adjacent to the Yard parking lot. Dori Reed, 981-6347. 

Commission on Early Childhood Education meets Thurs., Aug. 14, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Marianne Graham, 981-5416. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commis- 

sions/earlychildhoodeducation 

Community Health Commission meets Thurs., Aug. 14, at 6:45 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. William Rogers, 981-5344. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/health 

Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board meets Mon., Aug. 18, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers, Pam Wyche 644-6128 ext. 113. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/rent

On Sunday afternoon I heard a KQED broadcast of a taped lecture/discussion with author Salmon Rushdie. I wasn’t listening very carefully, and at first I thought Rushdie was commenting on the current state of affairs in occupied Iraq. Eventually I realized that the tape had actually been made sometime in February, before the U.S. invasion started. He was expressing his apprehension about what might take place after the war—destroyed infrastructure, civil chaos, rise of the kind of religious fundamentalism which has caused him a lot of grief in his own life—in short, everything that has indeed happened.  

The interviewer, KQED’s house liberal Michael Krasny, was expressing mild skepticism about Rushdie’s extreme apprehension—it couldn’t possibly be that bad, he seemed to be saying. It was a clear example of the Cassandra Factor at work. 

It never seems to pay to be prematurely right, as poor Cassandra found out many centuries ago. Her name has gone into popular culture as the original bad vibes babe, someone who can’t resist the negative remarks which spoil the party. In fact, in the old Greek story she had the peculiarly unpleasant gift of being able to foretell the future accurately, but in such a way that no one would believe her. 

George Bush takes full advantage of the Cassandra Factor. He and the crew of half-witted failed academics who are running his show make one appalling decision after another, with predictable consequences, but the American media are afraid to call attention to the obvious flaws in the proposals at the time they’re made. UC Professor George Akerlof has articulated with chilling precision the probable consequences of Bush’s cuckoo economic policies, and he’s undoubtedly right. His analysis was picked up by Der Spiegel in Europe and then by the Nation and the Daily Planet, but nowhere else in this country. No one wants to look like a naysayer. 

And the Democrats are no better than the media. If Gray Davis had an ounce of political courage, he’d be running against George Bush in the recall election. It’s all true, he could say, the California economy is tanking, our schools are broke, our roads are falling apart, but it’s because of the Republican derelictions at the national level. On the other hand, if Davis had any political courage at all, he wouldn’t be in this fix. The time to speak out about the consequences of the Bush policies was when they were proposed last year, but most Democrats, including Davis, were still too mesmerized by the post Sept. 11 patriotic frenzy to say anything much. 

Between them, Gray Davis and Cruz Bustamante now have the opportunity to let the people of California know what’s wrong, if they are brave enough to do so. If the two could develop a united message they could both run against Bush and his energy industry cronies like Enron—the cause of most of California’s current budget crisis. 

Under this scenario, the best thing that could happen would be for Dubya to come to California to campaign for Schwarzenegger, which is already a rumor in the press. We do have big trouble, Davis and Bustamante could tell the voters, but it’s something that Bush caused, and the remedy is to dump him and his friends. The last thing California needs, they could say with some confidence, is another one of Bush’s buddies in our governor’s chair. But instead they seem to be floundering around, with Davis especially trying to out-Republican the Republicans, and that won’t work. 

The only candidate so far who’s willing take the Cassandra role and tell the truth is another Greek woman, Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington. Because of the bizarre mathematics of the process, she might even have a chance to win. There are enough semi-plausible candidates that the margin for the winner could be pretty small, giving outsiders a better than average chance. And if the Hearst Chronicle is any sample, the press coverage of an election with Schwarzenegger in it will look a lot like People Magazine. If the race degenerates into a celebrity contest, Arianna might just turn out to be the most charming celebrity in the field. To my ear, her accent beats his any day. 

Becky O’Malley is Executive Editor of the Daily Planet.  

TUESDAY, AUGUST 12 

FILM 

The Inquiring Camera: “Intoxicated by My Illness” 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 Julia Vinograd, from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Mediterranean Cafe, 2475 Telegraph Ave. Free, open mic, poetry, prose, short fiction, amateur and advanced artists welcome. 549-1128. 

Raymond Francis discusses his new book “Never be Sick Again” at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861.  

Diana Winston, Associate Director of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship in Berkeley, will discuss her new book, “Wide Awake: A Buddhist Guide for Teens,” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698.  

www.blackoakbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

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

Dayna Stephens House Jam at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Donation $5.649-8744. www.thejazzhouse.com 

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

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 13 

FILM 

Excess of Evil: “The Brotherhood of Satan” at 7:30 p.m. 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 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.starryploughpub.com 

Café Poetry and open mic, hosted by Kira Allen at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Dona- 

tion requested. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Hookside, rockin’ a cappella, 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 

African Music Series: Pape and Cheikh from Senegal at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13 in advance, $15 at the door. 525-5054.  

www.ashkenaz.com 

Jules Broussard and Ned Boynton at 8 p.m. at Down- 

town, 2102 Shattuck Ave. 649-3810. 

THURSDAY, AUGUST 14 

FILM 

The Inquiring Camera: “The Damned and the Sacred” at 8:50 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 

Ved Mehta will read from “Dark Harbor: Building House and Home on an Enchanted Island” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698.  

www.blackoakbooks.com 

Grace Martin Smith and Richard Schwartzenberger, translators of “Listening to Istanbul: Selected Poems of Orhan Vei Kanik,” will read the poems and show slides of Istanbul at 7:30 p.m. at Easy Going Travel Shop and Bookstore, 1385 Shattuck Ave. at Rose. 843-3533.  

www.easygoing.com 

Stanton Friedman discusses the existence of a UFO cover-up and his new book “Top Secret/MAJIC” at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Lúnasa, high energy traditional Irish music, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $17.50 in advance, $18.50 at the door. 548-1761.  

www.freightandsalvage.org 

Danny Barnes, The Places at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082.  

www.starryploughpub.com 

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

FRIDAY, AUGUST 15 

CHILDREN 

Dog Days with stories and songs at 10:30 a.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

FILM 

Czech Horror and Fantasy on Film: “The Fifth Horse- 

man is Fear” at 7:30 p.m. and “The Ear” at 9:30 p.m. at Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

Disinformation Film Series: “Hidden Wars of Desert Storm,” investigating the impact of the use of depleted uranium weapons on US troops, to be shown at 7:30 p.m. against the side of the KTVU Channel 2 building at 2 Jack London Square, Oakland. 528-5403. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Ben Harper and Jack Johnson at 6:30 pm at the Greek Theatre. 642-0212.  

Valle Son, from Cuba, with vocalist Lázaro at 8 p.m., at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $16 in advance, $18 at the door. 849-2568.  

www.lapena.org 

Malika with Riddimystics and Shashamani Soundsystem perform reggae at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $11. 525-5054.  

www.ashkenaz.com 

Radio Noise, Shit Outta Luck, Shrinkage at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. All ages welcome. Cost is $7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Crooked Jades, innovative old-time and bluegrass, 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 

Jovino Santos Neto and Friends, Brazilian jazz pianist, at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$18. 845-5373.  

www.jazzschool.com 

Leonard Thompson at 9:30 p.m. at Downtown, 2102 Shattuck Ave. 649-3810. 

Ludicra, Brainoil, Worm- 

wood, Fall of the Bastards, In the Wake of the Plague 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. 

vSoul, featuring Vernon Bush, sing gospel, rhythm and blues and soul, at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Suggested donation $10. 649-8744.  

www.thejazzhouse.org 

AC Dshe at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $8.  

848-0886.  

www.blakesontelegraph.com 

SATURDAY, AUGUST 16 

Jupiter Outdoor Fine Arts Show, from noon to 8 p.m. on Allston Way, between Shattuck and Oxford. Twenty-five Berkeley and East Bay artists will have over 100 works on display. 843-0410. 

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. 

FILM 

The Inquiring Camera: Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks - Part Three: “Rails” at 7 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 

“The Warriors” free screening of cult classic drama about NYC gangs in the 1970s, at 8:30 p.m. at the Long Haul, 3124 Shattuck Ave. Wheelchair accessible. 540-0751.  

www.thelonghaul.org 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

SEEN Festival 2003, roots and culture reggae at noon at People’s Park. 383-2949. 

New Millennium Strings, Laurien Jones, conductor, Joe Gold, violin, Gwyneth Davis, ‘cello, perform at 8 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft, at Ellsworth. Suggested donation $10, children under 12 free. 524-4633. 

North Indian Classical Music, The New Maihar Band, Dr. Sisirkana Chowdhury, violin, and Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri, tabla, at 7:30 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Chirch, 2727 College Ave. Tickets are $12-$20. 415-454-6264. 

African Drum Workshop with Wade Peterson. Beginners from 10 to 11:30 a.m., experienced from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., at The Jazz House. Cost is $15-$25, and advance registration is encouraged. 533-5111. 

Ben Harper and Jack Johnson at 6:30 p.m. at the Greek Theater. 642-0212. 

John Stowell, innovative guitar featuring John Shifflet and Jason Lewis, at 8 p.m. at the Jazz- 

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

High Country, bluegrass band’s 35th anniversary, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $16.50 in advance, $17.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

African Rhythm Messengers at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054.  

www.ashkenaz.com 

Sol Americano, Dank Man Shank, Charles Cooper Quartet, at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $6. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Captain Fatass, 86 the Band, Little Fuzzy at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082.  

www.starryploughpub.com 

Brian Melvin at 9:30 p.m. at Downtown, 2102 Shattuck Ave. 649-3810. 

Annihilation Time, Iron Lung, The Gate Crashers, Out of Vogue 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. 

SUNDAY, AUGUST 17 

FILM 

W. C. Fields: “The Bank Dick” 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 

“Crime and Forgiveness: Does Shakespeare Reject the Death Penalty?” California Shakespeare Theater’s InSight Discussion, led by husband and wife professors Hugh Macrae Richmond and Velma Bourgeois Richmond, following the 4 p.m. matinee performance of Shakespeare's “Measure for Measure.” Bruns Amphitheater, Gateway Blvd off Highway 24, Orinda. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Live Oak Concert, La Monica, period instrument sextet with soprano, performs works from the Baroque at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center. Cost is $10, BACA members $8, Students and seniors $9. Children under 12 free. 644-6893.  

www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

New Millennium Strings, Laurien Jones, conductor, Joe Gold, violin, Gwyneth Davis, ‘cello, perform at 4 p.m. at Arlington Community Church, 52 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Suggested donation $10, children under 12 free. 524-4633. 

Ben Harper and Jack Johnson at 2:30 pm at the Greek Theatre. 642-0212.  

Egyptian Style Belly Dance at 7:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054.  

www.ashkenaz.com 

Rusty Evans and Ring of Fire, rockabilly, 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 

Caught in Between at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $3. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Jeff Massanari Trio blends classic jazz and originals at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Tickets are $10-$15. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Desperate Measures, Far From Breaking, Lights Out, With or Without You perform at 5 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. 

MONDAY, AUGUST 18 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“The Lighter Side of Crop Circles,” Ben Ailes discusses his photographs at 7:30 p.m. in the Central Library Community Room, 2090 Kittridge at Shattuck. 981-6100.  

Poetry Express, with Judy Wells, plus open mic, from 7 to 9:30 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave.  

AT THE THEATER 

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

Shotgun Players, “Mother Courage and Her Children,” by Bertolt Brecht, translated by David Hare, directed by Patrick Dooley. Runs Saturdays and Sundays at 4 p.m. in John  

Hinkle Park, until Sept. 14. No show Aug 9. Show Sept. 13 is at Live Oak Park, Shattuck and Berryman. Free. 704-8210.  

www.shotgunplayers.org 

Stage Door Conservatory, “Bye Bye Birdie,” Aug. 15 at 7:30 p.m., Aug. 16 and 17 at 5 p.m., at the Julia Morgan Theater. Tickets are $13 for adults, $8 for children and seniors. Box office opens 45 minutes prior to performance. 527-5939. www.stagedoorconservatory.org  

Teen Playreaders, “Bizarre Shorts,” a festival of brief and absurd dramas for a mature audience. Friday, August 15 and Saturday, August 23 at 7 p.m. at the North Branch Library, 1170 The Alameda. 981-6250. 

Woman’s Will Shakespeare Company, “The Rover,” a restoration comedy by Aphra Behn. Sat., Aug. 16 at 8 p.m. in Live Oak Park. 420-0813. www.womanswill.org

Glen Ellen, just north of Sonoma, resembles a tiny mountain village in which to hide, get lost, walk and hike, and create. It is all of that and a whole lot more, as both Jack London and M.F.K. Fisher discovered. 

A must stop is the Jack London Bookstore, owned and operated since 1972 by Winnie Kingman, who still collects and preserves London’s words and works in this home of the Jack London Foundation. Winnie’s late husband, Russ Kingman, once represented Jack London Square in Oakland, became devoted to Jack London, and wrote several books about the author and his works. After the Kingmans opened the bookstore, they moved London’s daughter Becky to live behind the store in an apartment that now houses the Jack London Research Center. Here you can view every book written about Jack London and even purchase a few first editions and related books and artifacts. 

Across Arnold Drive from the bookstore is Jack London Village, a romantic, rustic dark wood complex built partly by General Mariano Vallejo in 1840. The stone building was home to the Pagani family’s original Glen Ellen winery, which they abandoned in the 1950s. Local literary and ghost lore abound in the building. Do visit The Olive Press cooperative at the southern end of the building, where a person with one olive tree can bring their olives to be pressed into fabulous oil, and “community pressings” take place in November and December. The oils of local growers and pressers are available here, as are numerous olive-related ceramics, books, and art. 

Art studios come and go and are worth exploring, along with the Cellar Cat Café, an interestingly funky tablecloth café with the best Caesar salads in Glen Ellen. Co-chefs Polly Evans-White and husband Greg Burtt cook in the center room, with peaceful outdoor seating overlooking the creek for lunch, dinner, and Sunday brunch with live jazz. 

“Downtown” Glen Ellen is still its old self. Glen Ellen Village Market, the northern branch of the renowned Sonoma Market, is the only new building erected in years, and the best place to get honest sandwiches, salads, interesting takeout, soft drinks, wine, or beer for a picnic in the forest or at a local winery. 

The rest of this half-block village has become a gourmet ghetto unto itself, but without the traffic and parking problems all too familiar to habitués of College or Shattuck avenues. Anyone in search of a potent, inexpensive martini might check out the Jack London Saloon, a spiffed up version of the original but still worth a visit for history and an earful of local gossip.  

Culinary worthies include the Garden Court Café for true country fare from sumptuous salads, sandwiches, huge breakfasts and even chicken-fried steak; Saffron Restaurant for paella, goat cheese cannelloni, crab cakes, and Spanish and local wines; the revered Glen Ellen Inn for sensational so-called no-fat home cooking; Gaige House, one of the world’s great inns with its own in-house chef; and the new Sullivan-Birney winery tasting room. 

Driving up London Ranch Road a mile or so toward Jack London State Park, stop at Benziger Family Winery for a delightful experience for the whole family, with its educational vineyard, Bruno’s Nymph Garden, tram rides, and excellent wines. The nine children of Bruno and Helen Benziger now run the whole operation, as well as their Imagery Estate Winery on Highway 12, also in Glen Ellen. Several years ago the Benzigers sold Glen Ellen Winery to Heublein, and retained the home and original winery, which they have now developed even more beautifully into Benziger Family Winery. 

As you pass under the Benziger farewell sign reading “Thank You for Visiting our Ranch Home,” turn right and head up the hill to Jack London State Park ($5 per car admission, $4 seniors’ car). At the state park you visit London’s Beauty Ranch of oak, madrone, Douglas fir and redwoods with open land and streams, and take three different tours, ride horses, visit London’s Wolf House, his cottage, or visit the House of Happy Walls Museum. 

House of Happy Walls was built by his second wife, Charmian, after London’s death, and offers today’s visitors a collection of London memorabilia, including the souvenirs Jack and Charmian gathered on their South Seas travels. A .6 mile walking trail leads from the house to the Londons’ grave site and the ruins of their dream estate, Wolf House, which burned the night before they were supposed to move in. 

The quarter-mile Lake Trail follows the shore of the 5-acre lake London built to amuse guests, on up to the Mountain Trail and Upper Lake Trail, and includes some segments of moderately difficult walking. Between the trails and linking fire roads, the park offers visitors up to 10 miles of hiking possibilities, including a 1,700-foot climb for the heartier sort. Those needing assistance can ride the Wolf House Express, which runs for free from noon to 4:00 p.m. on weekends. The Cottage shows a French video biography of Jack London and a photo exhibit about the Londons. Dogs are welcome in the historic areas only, not on the trails. Bikes must keep to designated fire roads. 

For a special treat, there’s horseback riding through Triple Creek Horse Outfit, created by Sonoma natives Erin and Dominic Bettinelli, who now offer riding, for all abilities and ages, at Napa’s Bothe-Napa Valley State Park, Sugarloaf Ridge State Park, and here at Jack London, beginning at $40 for one hour, by reservation only (707-933-1600). 

Kathleen Hill writes a series of six Hill Guides to the West Coast with her husband Gerald Hill, including “Sonoma Valley—The Secret Wine Country,” from Globe-Pequot Press. 

A conservative legal group has sued the Berkeley Unified School District, claiming that it has violated California’s ban on affirmative action by seeking racial balance in its elementary schools. 

The well-heeled Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) filed suit in Alameda County Superior Court last week charging that the district’s student assignment policy—which requires each school’s racial mix to fall within five percent of the district-wide tally—violates Proposition 209. 

That measure, enacted by California voters in 1996, forbids racial preferences in public education, employment and contracting. 

“Berkeley Unified’s policy is discriminatory at the very core,” said Cynthia Cook, an attorney with the Sacramento-based PLF. “Whether a child is able to enter an elementary school in Berkeley depends largely on the color of his skin. That is a flagrant violation of Proposition 209.” 

The suit, threatened for years, sparked an angry reaction from school officials, who are mired in a deep financial crisis. 

“These right-wing Nazis are finally after us,” said Board of Education President Joaquin Rivera. “I’m disappointed that they’re doing this at a time that we’re trying to deal with so many other things. . .The timing is very suspicious.” 

District officials said they haven’t had a chance to review the suit and have not decided whether to challenge it. But at least one Board of Education director is eyeing a possible legal battle. 

“I am concerned about resegregation of the schools,” said Director John Selawsky. “I would prefer to fight this.” 

Pacific Legal Foundation won a similar case, Crawford v. Huntington Beach Unified School District, in California’s Fourth District Court of Appeal last year, and in August 2002, the state Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal—leaving the Fourth District ruling as the law of the land.  

UC Berkeley law professor Jesse Choper said the Huntington Beach precedent leaves Berkeley Unified with little chance of victory in court. 

“The Supreme Court has declined review—bye-bye, that’s the end of the case,” he said. 

PLF’s suit challenges the student assignment policy on behalf of Berkeley resident Lorenzo Avila, who has two sons, ages seven and nine, in the school system. 

Avila, an equal opportunity specialist with the federal government’s Housing and Urban Development office in San Francisco, said he sued because he believes the student assignment plan is clearly illegal and sends a message that students are only welcome at a given school if they fit the right racial category. 

“I don’t think we would want to convey to families that their children are less valuable because of their race or ethnicity,” he said. 

Avila is asking for a change in policy, attorneys’ fees and unspecified monetary damages. But the plaintiff said he will drop the damages request if the district dumps its student assignment plan. 

In 1968 the Berkeley Unified School District became the first district in the nation to voluntarily desegregate, and has been seeking racial balance in its schools ever since. The Board of Education drafted the current five percent policy, known as “controlled choice,” in 1995. 

Under the plan, parents fill out a form indicating their child’s race and listing their top three choices of elementary schools. But the district retains ultimate control, assigning students based, in part, on race. 

District officials have acknowledged that their student assignment policy is on shaky legal ground for at least three years. In 2000, former Superintendent Jack McLaughlin created a Student Assignment Advisory Committee composed of parents, school staff and community members, to weigh alternatives to a race-conscious plan.  

The committee initially recommended that the district stick with its current policy and risk a lawsuit. But a series of court decisions reinforcing Proposition 209 spurred a shift in thinking.  

Last fall, the committee recommended that the district drop race from its school assignment policy and consider four other factors: household income, parental education level, English proficiency and single-parent family status. Pointing to simulations of the proposed plan, committee members said it would maintain racial diversity in the schools.  

The Board of Education never cast a formal vote on the proposal, but three of the five directors—Rivera, Selawsky and Terry Doran—expressed strong reservations about a policy that did not make explicit mention of race. 

Rivera said last week that he is still concerned about an alternative plan. Weighing factors like household income and parent education level might yield racially-mixed schools today, he said, but that could change with time. 

“Any system that doesn’t use race doesn’t guarantee diversity in the future,” he said. 

Rivera pointed to a study, released last week, predicting that 40 of San Francisco’s 114 public schools will be “severely resegregated” this year under a 1999 court order ending race-based enrollment. Racial separation will occur, according to the report, despite a two year-old admissions policy that weighs socioeconomic status, academic achievement, language status and other factors. 

David Levine, one of the attorneys who represented a group of Chinese-American students who sued the San Francisco schools and forced the court order, took issue with the study, arguing that race is not the only valid measure of diversity. Economically and linguistically mixed schools are also diverse, he said. 

Levine also predicted that if Berkeley adopted a similar policy, it would not see such a stark racial resegregation. Berkeley is much smaller than San Francisco, he said, and parents would be less hesitant to send their children across town to a school that includes students of other races. 

PLF’s Cook said any new Berkeley policy that weighs factors like language and household income should pass legal muster, but she warned against any blatant attempts to use those criteria as substitutes for race. 

“Skirting around the edges of Proposition 209 or not complying with the intent of California constitutional law is not acceptable,” she said. 

But Michael Harris, assistant director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, said it would be difficult to demonstrate in court that the district was using other factors as mere “proxies” for race. 

“It would be very difficult to prove unless there was some documentation to [show] what they are doing,” he said. 

Selawsky held out hope that a June 23 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that allows the use of race in college admissions could set the stage for a challenge to Proposition 209 and, eventually, a vindication of Berkeley Unified’s current assignment policy. 

But legal experts note that the ruling allows for the consideration of race, but does not require it, and California voters have decided to forbid affirmative action with Proposition 209. The Supreme Court ruling, said UC Berkeley emeritus law professor John Coons, provides no basis for a challenge to the voters’ will.

IN LOCK-STEP 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

The fact that Attorney General John Ashcroft is now targeting lenient judges is very, very scary. Federal judges no longer can have discretion over handing down sentences in criminal cases.  

Nowhere in our constitution is the principle that everyone has to be in lock-step with one person.  

Where in the federal government is the principle of diversity and the market place for different ideas? 

Anne Smith 

• 

SENIORS ON HOLD 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

Many senior citizens are going without vital health care, groceries and recreation because they lack mobility alternatives. Seniors are the fastest-growing segment of the United States population, and those over age 85 make up the fastest growing segment within that population. With no family or nearby friends to assume the role best played by community transportation, the otherwise self-sufficient can end up warehoused in nursing homes.  

A wise investment, community transportation is a highly effective aspect of preventive health care that helps citizens, community and government to avoid more expensive emergency medical services.  

If the current administration’s vows that no Americans should be left behind are to be taken seriously, nonemergency transportation must be made a viable component of Medicare.  

Aging in place also means communities such as Berkeley will sustain their taxi scrip programs for needy seniors. 

At present Berkeley Paratransit Services seems to categorize seniors as either able to bus/BART or as disabled and thus eligible for East Bay Paratransit, a service that provides compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Traditional public transportation is often not a real option for seniors who are not “legally disabled.” Forty-foot fixed-route buses can be inaccessible due to several factors.  

It appears that concern for the taxi scrip situation (as it’s been euphemistically referred to) is on hold. Council went on its July 23-Sept. 8 vacation without even acknowledging the problem. On July 29 I was informed that eligibility criteria are being reevaluated by the Commissions on Aging and Disability (neither is scheduled to meet in August).  

It appears that the City intends to phase out seniors’ taxi scrip by selling tickets for use on East Bay Paratransit, a disabled persons’ service. 

Helen Rippier Wheeler 

• 

REMODEL WEST CAMPUS 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

I visited the site of West Campus where the BAS is housed at present. I was amazed how nicely it nestled into the neighborhood and what a great set up it is. It is a campus feeling with inside courtyards and picnic tables. It is attractive and very pleasant looking. There is a swimming pool. I spoke to one of the neighbors and she so much doesn’t want it to leave. 

Moving it to Franklin is creating so many problems and is downgrading the BAS as well as interfering with two neighborhoods who like the way they already are. The Franklin site is ugly and monolithic compared to the West Campus site. It would not be as nice for the students, there would be no swimming facility and the whole neighborhood is up in arms against it.  

There must be a way to remodel the buildings at West Campus and still have the BAS at its present location. It makes no sense to make such a major change that all of the involved players are opposed to for good reasons.  

This move seems only to satisfy the administration and in the end will cause more problems for all. 

Joyce Barison 

• 

SHATTUCK ANTENNAE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As a parent with a child at the Cedar Street Day Care Center, I’m concerned about the potential health hazard that an antenna on 1600 Shattuck Ave. would pose to schools and day care centers in the community.  

It is unfortunate to hear that city officials are not responsive to demands from the community for information to which they are legally entitled.  

I hope that city officials are forthcoming with the information and I plan to attend the City Council meeting and inform other parents at Cedar Street Child Care about the hearing.  

Michael Marchant  

• 

MORE ANTENNAE 

The following letter was addressed to Council Member Dona Spring. 

I am writing this email regarding an information session held by Sprint to discuss the antennae at 1600 Shattuck Ave. The session was held Aug. 7 at the Senior Center on Hearst Avenue. Please note that such a session should have been held in November 2002, not now. 

The meeting was not really an information session. Sprint had five or six separate tables at which there were one or two representatives. So, people were supposed to go from table to table to ask questions. By doing this, people could not hear the questions raised. Therefore, there could not be a dialogue between people and Sprint representatives. 

Neighbors started to arrange chairs in order to form an audience. But Sprint did not agree with this idea.  

Neighbors left the meeting quickly. One thing I remember was that Mr. Martin of Sprint said that we should have open minds and accept the antennae. Also, we learned that Sprint has put a table by the BART Station in downtown Berkeley and has collected signatures from people who have nothing to do with North Berkeley or 1600 Shattuck Ave. 

People had a discussion among themselves outside of the Senior Center. 

This was a short account of the (mis)information session by Sprint. 

Shahram Shahruz 

• 

BALLOT MESS LOOMS 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

What is the take on unmarked and/or unspoiled ballots? 

In 1998, Hawaii voters approved a new constitutional convention, but an interpretation of the state attorney general (backed by the state supreme court) that the blank votes counted as “no” votes, killed the convention.  

Gray Davis, plus unmarked and/or spoiled ballots will most likely win. By this I mean many voters will vote for more than one of the 100 plus candidates, or will neglect to vote on both of the two sections of the ballot. Hence, their votes will be nullified.  

The United States Supreme Court threw the last presidential election to one of the candidates on a technicality.  

Richard Thompson 

• 

RACE INFORMATION 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

People should understand that the “race information ban” which will be on the Oct. 7 ballot is as anti-Indian as it is anti-minority.  

Information on the health and education of American Indians will be denied if this initiative is passed.  

If people are concerned about the well-being of American Indians they should vote against the “race information ban.” 

Billy Trice, Jr. 

Oakland

Bay Area mothers successfully maintained the region’s reputation as the world’s premier area for breastfeeding mothers, but fell well short of beating their own world record. 

Berkeley’s breastfeeding moms soundly trounced rivals from Down Under, when they simultaneously nursed 684 babies in the Berkeley Community Theater Saturday, compared to the 48 women who participated in a similar event in Adelaide, Australia, earlier that day, taking the 2003 crown. 

However, Bay Area organizers had held out high hopes for beating last year’s record of 1,130 mothers and said they were disappointed that so few women came out for this year’s event. 

“We were expecting twice as many and got half as much,” said Ellen Sirbu, the director of Berkeley’s Women, Children, and Infants program. 

Many mothers said that the novelty of the breastfeeding contest had worn off and people were generally less excited because Berkeley already holds the world record. 

“I did it with all my friends last year,” said Berkeley resident Rachel Serant. “But this year they didn’t want to come back because it’s such a big production and it’s not really worth it to do it again. I kind of figured we weren’t going to break the record.” 

Sirbu, though, said that many women’s minds were on other topics, primarily the recall election facing California. 

“People are thinking about the recall and the state of affairs in California right now,” Sirbu said. “It’s easy to forget about other topics when that is persistently confronting you.” 

Still, organizers and participants emphasized that it was important to make their statement despite the decreased participant count. 

“684 is still a lot of women,” said participant Janet Magowan after successfully nursing her baby through the contest. “We are still forming a united front to show that breast feeding is important. Several hundred people are hard to ignore.” 

Breastfeeding is the best way to raise babies, advocates say, because baby formula simply does not approach the nutritional value of breast milk. Studies have shown that breastfed babies tend to be healthier and happier than those who are raised on formula. 

“Marketing and free distribution of formula, as well as commercials that make it seem like formula is better than breast milk, really hurt our push to show women that breast feeding is the best way to keep their babies healthy,” said Melody Hansen, a spokesperson for La Leche League, an international organization that advocates breastfeeding. “The United States has a very low rate of breastfeeding compared to a lot of other countries, so it’s important to get the word out.”

So Kennedy bails on 2700 San Pablo Ave. after overcoming the opposition of unappreciative locals. I just hope his counterpart in the White House takes a lesson from this! After five years and countless hours of his precious time why the sudden drop in interest when he’s only a few steps away from leaving his imprint for posterity on the West Berkeley landscape? Perhaps it’s true that he’s beckoned by the siren’s call challenge of developing yet larger oversized projects in a declining rental market but then again maybe there’s more to this story than immediately meets the eye.  

This property was a former gas station and is on the Cal EPA list of leaking underground storage tank sites. There is an attachment to the deed of 2700 stating that it has a history of petroleum contamination and among the documented residual contaminants is MTBE, a likely carcinogen notorious for its durability in soil and water. Although a partial cleanup of the contamination was done less than a decade ago, 2700 San Pablo has been allowed to seep contamination into the water table and ultimately into San Francisco Bay, a federally protected waterway, for many decades. A July 2000 study by the Environmental Working Group found that the majority of these sites that were closed (considered “safe”), were done so prematurely in sweetheart deals with the State Water Board and its proxy agents. A few days ago, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors endorsed the “precautionary principle” in dealing with pollution by writing it into their law. Basically it says that regarding pollution if you have a reasonable suspicion that something bad might be going to happen, you have an obligation to try to stop it. Might this be a harbinger of more stringent environmental oversight statewide? 

Unlike the San Francisco supervisors, Berkeley’s Toxics Management Division, under the aegis of the Planning Department (no conflict of interest there!) was only too happy to give it’s approval in covering up the toxic stew under 2700 San Pablo, reminiscent of the skateboard park fiasco—out of sight, out of mind. But I think Kennedy might have been facing at least one more hurdle from an outside authority. He would have had to get a discharge permit from East Bay MUD to pump potentially contaminated water from the subterranean garage into the city sewer. In the evolution of various proposals of the project the city’s Toxics and Planning Departments attempted to diminish and minimize this mitigation. At first the dewatering system was to be post-construction, incorporated somewhere in the design of the structure and maintained by nobody in particular. The Design Review Committee and Zoning Adjustment Board never found specificity about this element to be important. Ultimately the mitigation became little more than an afterthought—a possible procedure to be overseen by the developer during construction. But since EBMUD made a bit of a deal about discharging a few hundred gallons of contaminated water from the site in 1995 they might consider discharge of an indeterminate amount of potentially toxic water with MTBE in it to be a bit more significant problem, thus making issuance of a discharge permit less than certain. 

Another question that comes to mind is whether Kennedy can simply transfer his development permit carte blanche to a buyer. Is there no expiration date on the current permit? Would there be no review by the Zoning Adjustments Board? After all, conditions have changed in the neighborhood since the project got approval. In October 2000, during one of 2700 San Pablo’s development stages, then Planning Director Marc Rhoades told a group of us neighborhood “activists” that, by law, it wasn’t legal for planning staff to consider what the cumulative impact of 2700 would be in concert with future potential projects. At that time there was one proposed project nearby, 2575 San Pablo—over 40 units—that had received initial city funding. But somehow it was irrelevant. Now there’s yet another approved project and together they total about 170 units more than 2700 San Pablo, all within a block of each other. Can Planning continue to refuse to address the potential cumulative impacts of 2700 with other nearby projects or the cumulative impact of those projects in relation to 2700? Or for that matter, the cumulative impact of all other large projects in Berkeley? 

It seems to me that Kennedy and Jubilee Restorations might be being a bit optimistic in their hope to unload 2700 San Pablo. Far from having buyers flocking to their door, they might just have the proverbial albatross around their neck. 

Pete Teichner is a long time Berkeley resident and a concerned neighbor of the San Pablo site.  

Berkeley’s Aquatic Park was dark Saturday night, but the moon was bright and nearly full when about 400 locals pushed dozens of haunting, peace lanterns onto the park’s lagoon, the fulfillment of a Berkeley man’s promise to an aging Japanese woman. 

A mixed crowd, which included graying hippies, rambunctious children and elderly Japanese-Americans, gathered to commemorate the 58th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and make a statement about President Bush’s talk of a new generation of bunker-busting nuclear weapons. 

“The Bush Administration has done a great job of reminding us that the nuclear arms race is anything but over,” said organizer Steve Freedkin, vice chair of the city’s Peace and Justice Commission. “It’s part of why this touched a chord and so many people came.” 

Freedkin, who has been part of an ongoing exchange of peace activists between Berkeley and Japan over the last two years, said the lanterns have a storied history. 

“In Japan, floating lanterns has been a traditional way of remembering and honoring the souls of departed loved ones for a very long time,” he said. “Since World War II, it has taken on a special significance regarding the victims of the two atomic bombings.” 

The bombings, which took place on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945 killed more than 100,000 people, and those who attended Saturday’s ceremony said the United States has not done enough to memorialize the deaths. 

“It just amazes me how little we talk about it,” said Berkeley resident Sheila Sondik. 

Yachiyo Otsubo, 59, who has lived in Berkeley for more than 30 years, said she was an infant in her mother’s arms on a train about 100 miles outside Nagasaki when the atomic bomb tore through the city. 

She welcomed Berkeley’s lantern ceremony, which debuted last year, but said the rest of the nation has some work to do.  

“People in the Bay Area, they have a very good conscience and a good mind, but it doesn’t happen in the rest of the country,” Otsubo said. “We have to really expand this activity. . .so we can send a message to the rest of the country.” 

Participants began showing up at West Berkeley’s Aquatic Park, which sits next to Interstate 80, around 6 p.m. Saturday, piecing together about 260 lanterns made of recycled foam bases, pen cases and sheer onion skin papers. Messages, etched on the side by children and adults, read “Never Again,” “Peace” and “Use Your Words.” 

The program began at about 7:15 p.m. with traditional Japanese taiko drumming, an introduction by Freedkin, a speech by Hiroshima survivor Jack Dairiki and the reading of a message from current Nagasaki Mayor Iccho Itoh.  

“Fifty-eight years have passed since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but still today, the atomic bomb survivors continue to suffer from a mental and a physical wound that will never heal,” the message read.  

“The citizens of Nagasaki are determined to join hands with you and peace-loving people of the world and to work for the abolition of nuclear weapons and for the realization of lasting world peace,” Itoh said in his message. 

Freedkin said the Berkeley ceremony has its roots in his March 2002 speaking tour of Japan. During a visit to the Osaka International Peace Center, which chronicles the horrors of the atomic bombings and Japanese aggression in China, Korea and Southeast Asia during World War II, Freedkin said he met an elderly survivor of American fire bombing in Osaka. The woman said she was often too ill to attend annual peace lantern ceremonies honoring the war dead, and Freedkin promised to attend a ceremony in her stead. 

“I knew that meant we’d have to create one,” Freedkin said. 

Last year, about 100 to 150 attended the first peace lantern ceremony. This year, a larger turnout created some logistical problems—the sound system wasn’t quite loud enough to reach everyone and organizers ran out of lantern-making supplies. 

“We had a couple of things that didn’t go right,” Freedkin said. 

But Freedkin said one participant offered to lend professional sound equipment to next year’s celebration and another, who works at a wood shop, said he would provide supplies for new lantern bases next year. A third participant, from San Francisco, said she hoped to bring the festival across the Bay next year. 

“For every problem we had, just about, some solution came,” Freedkin said. 

The hitches in the program could not take away from the spectacle of the lamps that drifted across the lagoon, under a nearly-full moon, as three musicians played the shakuhachi, a mournful Japanese bamboo flute.

Space here won’t allow me to reply to all of the recent statements regarding city employees. While some have been empathetic to the plight of workers scapegoated for the budget problems, some others have wrongly characterized employees in labor unions as greedy, self-serving, and equivalent to welfare cheats. 

Workers, unpracticed in the art of manipulative speech and fearful of offending not only the executives but also Berkeley residents, are reluctant to raise a voice in self-defense. Though reluctant, I am compelled to speak. I have hoped that wizened citizens would strongly counter the outrageous moves to slander and destroy the progress made by workers to achieve a decent standard of living, but with the dogs of foreign occupations and economic wars nipping at their run-down heels, the stress-forced tunnel vision of the beleaguered allows malevolent machinations obscurity from intelligent scrutiny. Labor’s reliance on the social consciousness of the harried taxpayers may yet prove misplaced, in light of the history of successes by the ruling elite to shift the burden of their mistakes and reframe the issue of mismanagement consequences. Labor costs too high? Attack the unions and take away the laborers’ pay. Business bad? Sell phone cards and fast food to overseas troops. Vote too close? Get your debtors on the court to say “Get over it.”  

Workers are rightfully skeptical of the call to give away their modest gains. They recall the hedging and shifting statements by officials on the budget picture presented before and immediately after negotiations concluded. The ink on the workers’ contracts had barely dried when the bandwagon started rolling to negate the contracts. Workers have long warned the executives that some operations and practices were wasteful and bound to cause unnecessary expense. It is finally apparent to all that the warnings were not effectively heeded. It is immoral for workers to bear the burden of predictable mistakes made by the executive class.  

Also disconcerting, with this call to decrease our modest living standard, is the observation that the ruling class and non-union profiteers are not sacrificing anything except, temporarily perhaps, the unbridled concentration of economic power. Workers notice that neither executives nor non-union contractors are running to the finance office to return a dime of their executive compensation or profits.  

Citizens have often heard how difficult it is to keep $100,000 executives on the payroll, and how hard the executives work for the money. But even if one were to accept that the physical and psychological toll is necessarily greater for meeting-goers than for blue-collar laborers, and that you just can’t keep good help unless executive-level pay and benefits dwarf those of the peons below, one could question the equity of suggesting one class of employees being forced closer to the poverty line while the other remains comfortably far above it. Workers have not heard a single utterance demanding that the non-union contractors it employs return a percentage of their pay to the city. It is this missing sound, in the presence of the clamor of hogs at the trough, that has workers practically disbelieving that any fairness lurks in the hearts of those allied against them. What many sense is that there is avarice and an underlying desire to eviscerate the power of progressive individuals and righteous organizations.  

In contrast to the demeaning, fanciful image of unionized workers lounging at the overtime trough, Berkeley’s workers have spent much unpaid personal time to develop solutions to our city’s problems.  

A few of the solutions:  

1. Decrease cash outlay by (a) halting the prodding of staff and outside consultants ($90,000+) to install an inferior replacement (cost = $2-300,000) for the newly installed PSB antennae tower; (b) by ending the program to replace every City of Berkeley computer every four years; (c) by shelving the plan to go wireless in City Hall and the PSB until after security, propagation, and interface problems are solved. 

2. Increase revenue by (a) cheaply encouraging COB employees to spend more of their pay in town (many of my co-workers already spend at least $10 each day in town on food and beverages alone); (b) by selling items identified with our widely popular town as souvenirs (official logo on caps, jackets, coffee mugs, etc.).  

3. Improve economic utilization of resources (a) by deferring planned Corpyard transformation and saving relocation expenses; (b) by ending the use of outside electrical and telephone contractors doing work that city employees are capable of performing. 

4. Borrow and spend strategically (a) by borrowing money now while rates are lower; (b) by demanding better deals from vendors. 

Much like hapless soldiers dragged off to the swamps and sands of misadventures, unionized workers and social support agencies are pawns to the machinations of the leading hands. The potential demise of our recent gains is unlamented, and our extraordinary efforts unappreciated, save to further uplift the glory of those who may undermine our ascension.  

But that’s how it often is when you are employed by the government.  

So don’t fall for the line that your brother is too heavy to carry.  

Listen up Berkeley, your mind knows better. 

Patrick McCullough is an employee of the City of Berkeley and a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1245.

Just what’s so special about 2140 Durant St.? 

For starters, consider the building’s connection with two sporting legends, Seabiscuit and Reggie Jackson. 

A delightful example of the Art Deco style, the unique structure was built by Charles Howard, owner of the famous racehorse whose name graces Laura Hillenbrand’s best-selling book and the recently released movie based on the book. 

The building’s story begins in San Francisco in 1903, when Charles Howard arrived in the city and opened a bicycle repair shop where he also worked on automobiles. By 1905, 28-year-old Howard had convinced the owner of the Buick company (later to become General Motors) to give him the franchise for San Francisco. 

Ambitious, colorful and very successful, Howard soon owned dealerships in many cities. He was a rich man by the time he turned his attentions to building a grand showroom in Berkeley in 1930. 

The building later changed hands, and from the late 1960s until the 1980s, it housed the Maggini Chevrolet dealership. 

Reggie Jackson, “Mister October” to baseball fans, entered the picture in the late 1980s when he operated a Chevrolet dealership here.  

A designated City of Berkeley Landmark, the structure was designed by architect Frederick Reimers (1889-1961) and epitomizes the impressive showrooms built for the newly affluent and glamorous automobile industry. 

The one-story reinforced-concrete garage and showroom building is remarkable for its Art Deco style facade, featuring large display windows separated by tall, cast-concrete pylons, tinted light brown. Each pylon is composed of three vertical geometric ribs which rise above the cornice and end in a three-part scroll design. Between pylons, the walls are infilled with a brick and concrete zig-zag belt-course pattern. Transoms above the showcase windows are divided into narrow vertical panes by metal mullions which have a scroll design on the bottom. 

For many years the once-dignified Howard Automobile Company Building languished, largely unused and slowly deteriorating. Over the years several plans were floated for the large site at Durant and Fulton streets, but none included restoration of the building. Eventually a developer did come forth who carefully rehabilitated and restored the building with special attention to its Art Deco details, winning a Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association award for the effort. 

The completed restoration not only preserves an excellent example of an early twentieth century automobile showroom in the Art Deco style, but it also perpetuates, in a tangible form, the rags to riches story of Charles Howard and his famous horse Seabiscuit. From a different perspective, it contributes to environmentally responsible building practices, also known as “green architecture,” by retaining and reusing the materials used in the building’s initial construction. The building is currently for lease.  

Susan Cerny is author of the book Berkeley Landmarks and writes this in conjunction with the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association.

Mayor Tom Bates and State Assemblywoman Loni Hancock were in attendance last week as the West Berkeley Foundation celebrated the $65,000 in grants it gave to neighborhood groups this year. 

The group held its first ever “Grants Award Night” Aug. 6 at Rosa Parks Elementary School. 

This year’s gifts helped fund an art program at Rosa Parks, a weight machine for teenage boys at a neighborhood recreation center and new bingo equipment for the West Berkeley Senior Center, among other projects. 

“West Berkeley has experienced many changes in the last decade,” said the foundation’s Board President Lynn Berling-Manuel. “But our neighborhood continues as a gateway community of low-income families and many female single parent households and the need is no less great.” 

The foundation was created in 1993 by a city of Berkeley development agreement with the Bayer Corporation. The agreement ended in 2002 and the foundation is pursuing fundraising to continue its work. The group has doled out almost $1 million in grants in the last decade. 

This year, the foundation awarded 21 grants, ranging from $500 to $7,500.  

The recipients were Ashkenaz, Ballet Folklorico Youth Dance Project, BAHIA, Berkeley Bear Swim Team, Berkeley NAACP Youth Council, Berkeley Youth Alternatives, East Bay Community Law Center, James Kenney Recreation Center, Kala Art Institute, Lifelong Medical Care, Rosa Parks Elementary School Collaborative, Parent Resource Center, Racial Justice Program, Rebuilding Together, Stiles Hall Mentor Program, Strawberry Lodge Senior Housing, Tinkers Workshop, West Berkeley Senior Center Advisory Council, Wee Poets, West Berkeley Neighborhood Development Corporation, and YEAH!. 

— David Scharfenberg

Most reports coming out of Iraq are built around the casualties of American soldiers in post-war attacks. Deaths and injuries among Iraqi civilians, however, rarely make it to the pages of U.S. newspapers, even when the Iraqis are killed in the same incident—and even when major international newswires report these casualties. 

In late July, for example, the major story out of Iraq was the killing of Saddam’s two sons, Uday and Qusay, and his grandson, Mustapha, in a raid on a house in the city of Mosul. But Western media missed a crucial aspect of the story. 

Several reports of the sons’ deaths mentioned that some Iraqis celebrated the news in a traditional Iraqi way: firing guns into the air. What was missing in the coverage was that many Iraqis lost their lives in the celebrations. Al Mu’tamar newspaper, published by the Iraqi National Conference—the closest of American allies—quoted medical and security sources in Baghdad citing that 31 civilians were killed and 76 injured as a result of the revelry gunfire. No U.S. media reported such news. 

This kind of reporting not only gives American readers and viewers an incomplete story, but also furthers the mistrust of American media that is becoming more and more pervasive worldwide. 

Whatever the reasons for this trend, it is not due to lack of information. The stories of Iraqi civilian casualties are published and broadcast in the Arab and other international media, and the sources for these stories are none other than Western news agencies such as Reuters, Associated Press and Agence France Press (AFP). But these wire services’ reports of civilian deaths rarely appear in U.S. newspapers. 

On June 6, for example, the Arab and international press published a report from Reuters estimating the average Iraqi casualty count due to U.S. cluster bombs at 15 per day. The report quoted an official at Mines Advisory Group, who said his organization counted 80 killed and 500 injured between April 10 and June 5, 2003. Another article published July 6, based on information from Reuters and AFP, described a bomb that killed seven Iraqis and injured 40 of the new Police Academy trainees. This incident went entirely unnoticed in American media. 

Other ignored reports include the killing of a 70-year-old man and three of his sons by American soldiers in the town of Balad while the family was driving near an American patrol outpost on June 15, 2003. 

A review of the Arab press—counting only deaths that were a direct result of armed U.S. or British actions, and taking care not to double-count fatalities—reveals that since May 1, the day President Bush announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq, 245 Iraqi civilians have been killed as a direct result of military action or war-related events. 

This number is small when compared to the estimate of civilian deaths from the entire war, compiled by British-based Iraq Body Count, which put the number between 6,086 and 7,797. The extensive cross-checking and conservative methods used to obtain this estimate can be reviewed at www.iraqbodycount.org. From victims of remnant cluster bomblets—mainly children—to civilians caught in cross-fire or surprised by an American checkpoint, to victims of vengeful acts at the hands of the old regime’s victims, Iraqis continue to lose their lives as a result of the war. 

The ostensible American agenda in Iraq was to liberate the Iraqi people and bring democracy and accountability to the country. The military operation, after all, was named “Iraqi Freedom.” During the days of Saddam’s rule, no one in Iraq was allowed to say how many people were killed or why, but everyone knew. Ironically, now the information is available—but it seems that no one wants to know. 

Mohamad Ozeir is a longtime journalist and former editor of the Arab American Journal.

George Harrison, age 88, sat in his Brooklyn apartment and recited lines from Irish poet Patraic Pearse who, upon standing at the grave of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, executed by the British, wrote these lines, and Harrison wishes the Lord would make everyone in Washington read them: 

“The fools, the fools. 

They have left us our Feinian dead. 

While, where grass grows or water flows 

Ireland unfree will never be at peace.” 

This was in 1916 and it has kept them going until now, when the British finally are getting out. 

“The displaying of the bodies of Saddam’s sons was unnecessary.” George says. “I heard Pearse as I watched our people show them off. There are people of Iraq who have not come out of the mother’s womb yet who will come to ask questions of us 50 years from now. The women are the worst. They will come and they will ask. We think it will all go away. Time makes no difference.” 

Harrison is an example. He was indicted for gun running to the IRA in a famous trial in Brooklyn federal court a few years ago. At the outset, the federal prosecutor told the jury, “George Harrison has been running guns to Ireland for the last six months.” 

At which point, Harrison squirmed in anger and had his attorney, Frank Durkan, rise and announce: “My client is insulted by the prosecutor’s statement of six months. George Harrison has not been gun running for six months. He has been gun running to Ireland for the last 25 or 30 years.” 

The other day, Durkan went to Europe. For the first time in his life he went on a British ship, the Queen Elizabeth 2. Everybody had to hide this from his client, George Harrison, who would neither forgive nor forget if he found out. It seems like a small amusing thing. But fighting the British is a living thing with Harrison, and the problem with this is that he is a reminder of all those others everywhere. I don’t know much about Iraq at all. But George Harrison’s Irish emotion on behalf of the long dead is a passing argument when placed alongside the feelings in Tikrit. 

We called this incursion into Iraq “Operation Iraqi Freedom” or was it “Operation Iraqi Liberation?” The tough chins in Washington said that once the people knew that Saddam was gone, they would welcome us with open arms. Instead, they look on sullenly, and murder one of our soldiers every day or so. And they do nothing to improve things. Somebody pointed out yesterday that many weeks after the incursion, there still is no electricity in Iraq. 

The other day, we buried another American soldier, Spc. Wilfredo Perez Jr., 24. A few days earlier, there was a funeral for Pfc. Raheen Tyson Heighter. Right before that, Marine Cpl. Roberto Marcus was buried and there was a funeral for Marine Riayan Tejada at St. Elizabeth’s church in Washington Heights. 

At a recent service at St. Barbara’s church in Brooklyn, when the ushers passed out a sheet that said to pray for the men in Iraq, there was a list of 75 Latino names from the one parish. 

From a distance, from watching television news and reading, I hear and see a general or Defense Department politician skipping over words or mumbling and saying that there now is a “limited guerrilla war.” 

There doesn’t seem to be any such thing. I can tell you a little bit about a guerrilla war I know something about, the one in Northern Ireland. There were once 1,000 people in the IRA and that got cut down to maybe 75 men in three-man units, one not knowing the other. One of the IRA leaders insisted that 12 people would be all that was needed. Whatever, the British asked the IRA what it would take to make them stop. 

That was another guerrilla war lost by a major country. While Britain cut up Muslims in Malaysia so that they never came back, the rest of their colonial history is filled with being slaughtered in Iraq and Afghanistan. See Rudyard Kipling. The French could not win in Vietnam. The United States had 58,000 of our young killed there. And you keep reading of how well we are doing against Filipino guerrillas, keep hearing of it every year. Russia tried Afghanistan and caught a frightful beating. Russia now cannot handle Chechen guerrillas. The car bomb in Indonesia tells you how much helicopters and tanks can stop young men with bombs. 

The worst part is that these are Arabs who don’t let venom be ruled by a calendar. George Harrison, in his living room, is a small illustration of how long anger can be carried. In Iraq and the Middle East, surely somebody can come out of a dust storm to try revenge in a half-century or so.

Many of us know the Ocean View section of Berkeley primarily for its high-end shops, Spenger’s Fish Grotto, Bette’s Ocean View Diner, Peet’s Coffee, and the Crate & Barrel Outlet Store. But for West Berkeley writer/resident Barbara Gates, confrontation with one of life’s greatest terrors provided the springboard for an intensely personal search for understanding of place. The result is her gift to us, her readers, of an unexpected and compelling insider’s view of a multi-layered, multi-ethnic neighborhood. 

Though the pages of her sweetly revealing memoir, “Already Home: A Topography of Spirit and Place,” Gates offers a social, historic exploration of her ‘hood, beautifully written in a journalistic style that explains the migration of communities (flora and fauna, people, businesses and social movements) and celebrates the fundamental nature of extended family and home. Liberally intertwining Eastern philosophy with a dose of Buddhist-Jewish chutzpah, Barbara inspires us to stop, look, seize the moment, live more fully and honor the life that is all around.  

An East Coast escapee, Barbara and her husband, a lawyer, bought their 1894 Victorian in Ocean View back in 1988, before the last few vestiges of dirt paths, creekbeds and lots were paved over and before many of the upscale shops had moved in. Not long after they set up housekeeping, Barbara, at age 42, gave birth to their first and only child, a daughter. 

And then came the unexpected news, a diagnosis of breast cancer, and suddenly the very definitions of home, family, and community morphed, becoming important parts of her treatment, therapy and eventual recovery. 

Advised by a local acupuncturist to take more risks, Barbara, a self-proclaimed klutz when it comes to directions and maps, decided to venture out of her family nest and build a relationship with her Ocean View neighborhood by learning all that she could about its history, topography, biology, industry and people. 

While contemplating her mortality, she puts West Berkeley under a microscope, waking up early to study its wildlife, walking along its cracked sidewalks, talking with permanent and transient residents, visiting libraries, cemeteries, historical societies, and the Alameda County Recorder’s Office. She interviews government officials, tracks down death certificates, collects maps and old photographs and finally, coming home exhausted, she is lulled to sleep by the sound of trains chugging along the nearby Southern Pacific tracks. Barbara writes that “in my explorations of this home terrain, what I found outside led me to examine myself. What I experienced inside seemed to ripple out. I couldn’t go out without going in at the same time, go in without going out.” 

Barbara’s explorations take her back in time to 3,700 B.C. when Ohlone Indians lived alongside Strawberry Creek in a village built on the shellmound where today stands Truitt and White Lumber. She gives us the early Spanish explorers and later European settlers, the fishermen, farmers, tanners, coopers, and boat builders, along with their wives and children, churches and taverns. She takes us to the sand treatment plant, the East Bay Vivarium, the garbage transfer station, the homeless encampments, and the SPCA. We get to know the destitute person who sometimes sleeps in the back seat of Barbara’s car, the mailman who loves Barbara’s roses, next door neighbor Grandma Darlene, the twelve cats who sun themselves in an adjacent driveway, the people from the past who once lived in her house and within the surrounding block.  

After reading her story I could hardly wait to meet Barbara and take one of her walks with her. Although I was familiar with the area in which she lives, having worked in a small adventure travel firm on one of its side streets, I’d never taken the time to really look beyond the surface of this eclectic, diverse neighborhood. Heading toward Fourth Street, Barbara pointed out Finnish Hall (built in 1908), the Good Shepherd Church (built in 1878) and the First Presbyterian Church of West Berkeley (1879), later to become the St. Procopius Latin Rite Church, and now the new Coptic church of the Ethiopian community. 

She introduced me to an unnamed alley that wanders between residences and businesses, parts of which have only recently been paved. As we walked and talked Barbara zigzagged across the blacktop, sneaking peeks through fence slats into overgrown, manicured, sculpted and abandoned yards. 

We gathered plump blackberries hanging from chain link fences and scooted between cars and trucks, abandoned mattresses and couches. 

After heading north in the alley for as far as we could, we turned west across the train tracks to find ourselves in an industrial area full of clanging machinery, roaring furnaces, noisy lunch trucks, and burly men dressed in overalls and hard hats. Hollering above the din, Barbara explained that she has not fully come to terms with the spewing smokestacks and unpleasant odors that often permeate her neighborhood, but she is teaching herself to “…see them, to deal with their potential dangers, to stop paving over these unwelcome reminders of toxicity, of mortality.” 

Walking south along the pot-holed road that borders Interstate 80 and the railroad tracks, we came across an old station wagon with suitcases strapped onto the roof. 

“Look,” I shouted to Barbara, “there’s a chicken in the front seat!”  

It was the perfect metaphor for our walk: A wayward chicken that had found a home in a vehicle that looked as if it had traveled from somewhere faraway to the edge of the continent, parked on an industrial side street, behind the chic, expensive shops of Fourth Street. When Barbara scurried over for a closer look, a human form in the backseat made an effort to sit up. Two different species were co-habitating in the shell of something that was originally manufactured for another use; car, chicken and man epitomizing the multi-layered, interdependent community that is Ocean View. Glancing westward I could see exactly what the man and the chicken could also see just beyond the rushing traffic of Interstate 80: a wide blue expanse of the San Francisco Bay, and beyond that the Golden Gate, framing the vast expanse of ocean, fading distantly into the horizon.  

In sync, Barbara and I both took a deep, collective breath and headed for home.  

Ocean View will celebrate its 150th anniversary in October and November with a series of lectures and readings. For more information or to volunteer, contact Barbara Gates at bgates@gtcinternet.com or Stephanie Manning at bahaworks@yahoo.com. 

Barbara Gates will read from her work Wednesday Aug. 13, 7:00 p.m. at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, 601 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco; Sunday, Aug. 17, 7:00 p.m. at Point Reyes Books, 11315 State Route 1, Point Reyes; Tuesday, Oct. 14, 7:30 p.m. at Writers’ Group Evening at Barnes & Noble, 2352 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley.

To fans of science fiction and fantasy, Ursula K. Le Guin is a one-person institution, the author of over 100 short stories, 19 novels, 13 children’s books, two collections of essays and numerous poems and translations, as well as winner of the National Book Award, the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award, the PEN/Malamud Award and many other literary honors and prizes 

But for Berkeley, she remains a native-born born institution, the daughter of two luminaries of the campus scene, legendary anthropologist A. L. Kroeber—for whom UC Berkeley’s Kroeber Hall was named—and renowned writer Theodora Kroeber, author of “Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America,” UC Berkeley Press’s first bestseller. 

Born here in 1929, she attended University Elementary School located on Shattuck Avenue, Hillside School, Garfield (now Martin Luther King Middle School) and Berkeley High. 

Now a resident of Portland, Ore., she has fond memories of her Berkeley childhood. “It was wonderful,” she said. “Back then Berkeley was a very small town. 

“The Golden Gate Bridge was built while I was a child, but to get to San Francisco we took the ferry. There were no Bay or Richmond bridges. Going to San Francisco was an excursion, not a commute. Hinks was the only department store in downtown Berkeley. Up where we lived, on Arch Street, there was a dime store, a penny candy store, a drugstore and a small grocery. That’s all. Now it’s known as Walnut Square and the Gourmet Ghetto.” 

Le Guin always expected she’d go to UC Berkeley, but the year she graduated from high school her father received an appointment at Harvard. 

“My father said I was going to Radcliffe,” she laughed. “I had no idea where or what Radcliffe was. When I got there I felt like a foreigner.” 

From Radcliffe Le Guin went to Columbia and from Columbia she sailed to England to take advantage of a Fulbright Scholarship. On the boat to the British Isles she met her soon-to-be husband, historian Charles A. Le Guin. 

Ursula and Charles moved to his native state of Georgia and then to Moscow, Idaho. Forty years ago they wound up in Portland and she has lived there ever since. 

Le Guin started writing when she was five years old. However, it was years before she made a living as a writer. A French and Italian Literature scholar, she helped support her growing family (three children) by teaching, tutoring and secretarial work. Her first pieces were not published until she was 27. 

How did her childhood in Berkeley has influenced her writing? 

“Nothing specific,” Le Guin said. “But growing up in the hills on the edge of the continent, looking out to the west must have been influential. Berkeley was a beautiful place in which to live. The light reflecting off the water, the fog, the massive groves of trees… it was a magical place. And the campus was wonderful. It was our playground.” 

And what does she think of her native city now? 

“Berkeley isn’t my kind of town anymore,” she answered. “It’s so crowded, so fat-cat. How can you live there if you’re not rich? When I’m there I have to really look hard for the old Berkeley. The Bohemian Berkeley that I knew as a child no longer exists.” 

These days, she’s busy promoting her latest book, “Changing Planes.” This delightful series of fictional travel accounts is narrated by a tourist who has mastered the “Sita Dulip Method.” Sita Dulip of Cincinnati discovered one day while waiting for her connecting flight at an airport that “by a mere kind of twist and slipping bend, easier to do than describe, she could go anywhere and be anywhere because she was already between planes.” 

Le Guin’s fanciful descriptions of bizarre cultures mirror and satirize our own society and open up puzzling doors into the unknown. She creates imaginary worlds that address a multitude of topics: war, tyranny, the middle class, mortality, immortality, dreams, art, technology and the meaning and mystery of being human.  

Asked about her new work, Le Guin talks about the translations she has coming out this summer and fall. “The Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral,” the Chilean lyric poet who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1945, will be published next month by the University of New Mexico. Argentinean Angelica Gorodischer’s “Kalpa Imperial,” a science fiction/magical realism tale about a future empire, will be available Aug. 15 from Small Beer Press. Le Guin sounds just as excited about these translations as she does about her own writing. 

I asked Le Guin how she would suggest someone who is not familiar with her work to go about reading it.  

“Well,” she said, “if you aren’t a science fiction reader already, and I can’t imagine not being one, I’d suggest starting with my novel ‘Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand.’ But if you want to take a chance on fantasy then I suggest reading the ‘Left Hand of Darkness.’ It was my first big hit.” 

“What do you read in your spare time?” I asked. 

“Everything and everybody,” she answered. “Novels. Poetry. Lately I’ve been on a Jose Saramaga binge. Have you read ‘The Cave’? You should.” 

“Who do you admire?” I asked.  

“Virginia Woolf,” she was quick to say. “But I couldn’t read ‘The Hours.’ It pressed my feministic buttons that Michael Cunningham thought he could tell us what Virginia was thinking when she drowned herself.”  

Finally, I asked if she writes everyday. “Heavens no!” Le Guin shouted. “I’m not that methodical. I don’t do anything everyday except eat!”  

“Changing Planes” by Ursula Le Guin, published by Harcourt, is available in local bookstores. She has her own web site, http://www.ursulakLe Guin.com/ 

The scene of some of the most heated political confrontations of the 1960s, today’s Telegraph Avenue is once again a battleground—in which independent book and music retailers are facing off against “Big Box” and Internet stores. 

Telegraph Avenue’s 11 bookstores face daunting challenges. Large booksellers are making greater inroads in the East Bay. Barnes & Noble opened two book superstores in El Cerrito and Emeryville last year and Internet booksellers also continue to capture an ever-larger share of the marketplace. In the first quarter of 2003, Amazon.com achieved net sales of $1.08 billion compared with $847 million in the first quarter of 2002, an increase of 28 percent. 

“Unlike book superstores and Internet dealers, our buyers and clerks know what Berkeley and East Bay readers want,” said Doris Moskowitz, owner of Moe’s Books on Telegraph. “We have one of the largest selections of used books in the Bay Area, and we constantly rotate our stock. People come here from all over the world to find unusual used and new titles that they would never see at the large chains. They talk with our staff to find out what’s worth reading,” 

Andy Ross, president of Cody’s Books on Telegraph Avenue and Fourth Street in Berkeley, says Telegraph’s independent book and music stores do more than sell goods to shoppers. “We support the local economy because we pay local taxes, buy supplies from neighboring stores, bank at local banks, and employ the services of local workers. We chair committees, sit on non-profit boards, sponsor little league teams, and support PTAs,” he said. 

“When it comes to choosing local stores over their Internet competitors, people should think about the social balance sheet. Since 1998, Cody’s has hosted 1,300 author readings and community events. Last year, we brought in almost $1,000,000 in sales and property taxes that support schools, social services, and public agencies,” said Ross. 

“We also paid out over four million dollars in wages and benefits, most of which were recycled into the local economy. In contrast, since its inception, Amazon.com has offered no culturally enriching activities nor paid any taxes or wages that benefit the East Bay,” Ross said. 

To compete, Telegraph Avenue booksellers have developed niche specialties. Shakespeare & Company offers an eclectic range of used, out-of-print, and rare books. Shambala specializes in books that present creative and alternative ways of transforming the individual, the society, and the planet—many of which are published by its sister company, Shambala Publishing. Cartesian Bookstore specializes in used philosophy and theology books, while University Press Books offers a large collection of scholarly books for thinkers, writers, and academics. 

Used and new textbooks are available at Ned’s, Cal Student Store, and Campus Textbook Exchange. Amana Christian Bookstore stocks religious tracts. And, true to its name, Revolution Books specializes in revolutionary and radical politics.  

Telegraph’s Music retailers face challenges not only from the big box giants but from new technologies as well. Just four months ago, Apple Computers launched iTunes, enabling computer-savvy consumers to download virtually any song for just 99 cents. For the price of a CD, a consumer can now assemble a custom collection of favorite hits that can easily be stored on a computer hard drive or downloaded to a portable player. That’s in addition to countless other systems, many of the them illegal, for music fans to obtain their tunes online at no expense. 

Marc Weinstein, co-owner of Amoeba Music on Telegraph and two other locations in San Francisco and Hollywood, believes that iTunes and other forms of music downloading actually help his business. “Through the Internet, people now have access to music and bands that they’ve never heard. When they find something new, many people come to us to buy the original since the sound quality is better on a CD and we go deep into the musicians we carry.” 

Weinstein opened his first retail store on Telegraph in 1990 when huge chains were swallowing up smaller ones and independent stores. Weinstein and his partners saw the need to offer music other than what the major labels wanted people to hear and to create a wide selection of new and used music in one location.  

“Every style of music imaginable is well-represented at Amoeba. There is truly a feeling of unity and cultural diversity at the store. I have friends all over the world who come to the Bay Area to perform. Amoeba Music is usually on their list of places to visit because of their unique vast collection,” said Randy Porter, education director of the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra  

Rasputin Music, which began on Telegraph Avenue in 1971, has found retail success with a strategy similar to that of Amoeba: wide selection and knowledgeable staff. There are now Rasputin Music stores in Berkeley, Campbell, Newark, Pleasant Hill, San Lorenzo, San Francisco, and Vallejo. 

“Telegraph Avenue’s independent book and music stores have discovered that highlighting diversity and contributing to local culture are not revolutionary acts but essential for achieving success in today’s retail marketplace that the big players dominate,” said Roland Peterson, executive director of Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue Business Improvement District. 

Patrick Galvin works with the Telegraph Business Improvement District (TBID) to help get their message out to the community.

Growing up in Berkeley, my friends and I sometimes amused ourselves by creating elaborate histories for the familiar homeless people who were fixtures of the Elmwood district. 

The leather-skinned man with the plastic sword and breastplate had been a warrior in Mongolia before his tribe was exiled. The guy with the red beard who spent his days in the Claremont branch of the library was actually a millionaire who’d lost his mind after seeing his family killed in a car crash. 

We were well enough trained to know that we shouldn’t talk to strangers, but these people who spent their days killing time on the sidewalks (just as we did) were more fascinating than frightening. 

In his new book “Punk Chicken and Other Tales,” Stephen Lestat depicts the world of Berkeley’s homeless from the inside. In a loosely connected train of short stories, Lestat lets us “normies” (as he refers to people with homes and jobs) take a peek inside the parallel universe that we are both surrounded by and inured to. 

In a voice entirely free of self pity, Lestat describes his life on the streets with as much buoyant good humor as if he were writing a memoir of his days on the Broadway stage. He brings the reader into a world where shopping carts are “minivans” and people communicate with the world through their scruffy, homeless pets. 

Overzealous police officers, hunger pangs, and the disdain of “normies” are merely minor inconveniences in Lestat’s basically sunny life. He and his friends pursue a joyfully insouciant alcoholism; the author happily touts the virtues of cheap wine and month-long benders with none of the opprobrium typical of the moralistic mainstream media. 

At times, however, the writing is overly precious to the point of condescension. In self-conscious asides Lestat calls attention to every small joke or minor pun he makes. The tone can be exceedingly didactic, as if the readers are a bunch of children, gathered ‘round grandpappy to hear delightful yarns about the old days. 

Lestat’s strength is his ability to evoke a crystal clear sense of place. His description of a southern meal at a homeless shelter leaves the mouth watering for a taste of peach cobbler, and as he describes the constant, shifting search for sun and shade, the reader can almost hear the rattling of nearby shopping carts. 

The stories of his compatriots are particularly vivid, and for those of us who know Berkeley well, the descriptions of folks like the Hate Man and the Sewer Sisters will feel like meetings with old friends. 

Unfortunately, this immediacy is also the book’s failing, and it is a crippling one. Lestat obstinately refuses to go beyond the most superficial layer of introspection. Perhaps it is an armor built up against the indifference of the normie world, but Lestat seems unable or unwilling to allow the reader access to his thoughts. He alludes to the fact that many homeless—the pierced and tattooed Gutter Punks in particular—live on the streets by choice, that they enjoy the freedom and camaraderie of rootlessness. 

This would have been a fascinating subject to explore, but Lestat always skates across the surface, preferring instead to detail the specifics of yet another beer run, or the tiresome antics of a predictably quirky pet squirrel. 

At no point does he tell us how it feels to be homeless; never does he let himself be vulnerable enough to detail the fear, the cold, and the loneliness that being homeless must doubtless entail. Instead, after the umpteenth description of the excellent bouquet from a bottle of screw-top wine, after the millionth reference to a box-camp as a “castle,” Lestat’s forced good humor wears decidedly thin. 

Further preventing Lestat from providing what could be a penetrating glimpse into street life is his equivocation about what sort of narrative he has created. In a breezy “disclaimer” he states that the book is a work of “faction,” that the stories might be either fiction or memoir and that he cares little about the distinction. While imaginative digression surely has its place in memoir, it is a technique best used to help deepen the reader’s understanding of an author’s emotion or motivation. In Lestat’s hands, this fictive blend only layers apocryphal action sequences on top of real ones, to no greater effect than the accretion of narrative bulk.  

“Punk Chicken” provides a shifting kaleidoscope of characters who fade in and out of frame just as they would on a typical Saturday evening stroll down Telegraph Avenue. In the end though, Lestat and his comrades are just like the homeless people I saw as a child: bright dramatic shells that left me wondering about the minds inside.

Daughter, sister, wife, mother, grandmother, capitol punishment abolitionist, gardening activist, Buddhist, private investigator, author and Berkeley resident Melody Ermachild Chavis has written a brief but important book about Meena, the young Afghan woman who founded RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. 

Targeted for the adult and young adult market, “Meena, Heroine of Afghanistan,” is an easy-to-read, informative story with a glowing introduction by Alice Walker. 

Chavis, author of 1997’s “Altars in the Street,” a chronicle of her time spent living and raising her family in South Berkeley, begins her Afghan tale in 1969 when 12-year-old Meena is suffering from a near fatal bout of typhoid fever. After miraculously recovering from typhoid, Meena vows that she will use her second chance at life for a purpose “larger than herself.” Islam is a “soft thread in the fabric of life” within Meena’s large and extended clan. Her father, an architect, has two wives who live with him and their ten children in a family compound in Kabul. Although neither mother is educated, they encourage Meena to stay in school even though she is at the prime age when many Afghan girls enter into arranged marriages. 

Chavis chronicles Meena’s high school achievements as well as the larger historic changes happening in Afghanistan during the 1970’s. As the accomplished young woman was preparing to begin her studies at Kabul University, the Soviet Union was building up its political power base within Afghanistan. 

A decisive moment came in 1977, when Meena connected with eleven other women who recognized the need for Afghan’s daughters and mothers to lead the fight against both Soviet and fundamentalist repression. Together, they formed RAWA with the goal of restoring democracy to Afghanistan by restoring the right to vote, which was taken away from Afghan men and women in 1964. They pursued equality and social justice for women and advocated for a secular government, with religious freedom for all. 

Within two years the Soviet-backed political party had carried out assassinations of intellectuals and democrats, and no one was safe. In February 1979 the U.S. Ambassador was kidnapped and murdered and soon two successive Afghan presidents were killed. Soon after the new Afghan regime signed a treaty with the U.S.S.R., Soviet troops invaded in December, and anticommunist Mujahedeen Islamic rebels, launched their war against the Soviet occupiers. Massive anti-Soviet demonstrations took place in Kabul as Meena warned her compatriots that despite Soviet oppression, fundamentalist rule would be worse. 

Her predictions came true and in 1982, along with thousands of other Afghans, she fled to refugee camps along the Pakistani border. Meena and her fellow RAWA expatriates set up schools, workshops, orphanages and a hospital and made repeated dangerous clandestine journeys back to Afghanistan to help those trapped within their homeland.  

Then, on February 4, 1987, at the age of 30, Meena disappeared on a secret operation. Her body was later discovered in a vertical grave inside an abandoned house. 

RAWA continues on with her mission and Meena has become the symbolic martyr of their cause. 

Inspired to work toward world peace by the events of Sept. 11, Chavis discovered that Meena’s story had not been told. She contacted RAWA members, raised the funds necessary to travel to Pakistan and Afghanistan and spent months interviewing the men and women who knew and worked with the slain advocate of secular democracy. Much of her funding came from the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, a national organization that practices socially engaged Buddhism with headquarters in Berkeley. 

Chavis has pledged to donate all author royalties to aid RAWA’s medical and education projects. As Chavis says, “No matter what your thoughts on the war, we should be sending something other than bombs to the Afghan people.” 

For more information, go to www.rawa.org or www.afghanwomensmission.org. 

Black Oak Books will commemorate the terroist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 with a reading by Chavis on Sept. 11, 2003, 1491 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley. 486-0698. For details go to: www.blackoakbooks.com.

With over 450,000 books housed in a nondescript storefront on University Avenue, Serendipity Books is simultaneously one of the largest and least known bookstores in the Bay Area. 

Serendipity owner and founder Peter Howard has devoted the past 40 years of his life to maintaining his book business, which centers on out of-print and rare editions. The store does the majority of its business with university libraries and academics around the world, meaning it conducts very little of its business with walk-in customers. 

But for those who do venture into the store at 1201 University Ave., the rewards are plentiful. Every wall of the 7,500 square foot store is stacked from floor to ceiling with unique books, with additional materials on rolling library-style shelves and scattered on every flat surface in sight, including the floor. Though to an uninitiated visitor the space looks to be in a constant state of disarray, Howard claims he can locate books on any subject matter and by virtually any author. 

To this end, the store is named Serendipity because of the ostensible lack of order among the books and the special discoveries it can lead to. 

“Great and ceaseless care has been taken, almost unconsciously, to ensure that books will be found when and where one least expects them—but they will be found eventually,” reads one of the two guides to the store, entitled “How to Find Books Despite Peter Howard.” 

Howard, regarded as a skilled appraiser of antiquary printed materials, buys and sells books with customers around the world. On Sunday, for instance, he bought 8,000 books from the family of a deceased individual who Howard said had “the most incredible library I have ever seen.” Last month he bought 30,000 books from a university. 

Serendipity is also a major book supplier for several universities, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and UC Berkeley. Howard prides himself on his ability to “research almost any printed document of any era, in any language,” and to “evaluate and sell almost any printed item.” 

Serendipity is part of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA), a trade organization dedicated to preserving ethics and facilitating trading between antique book stores. Howard served as the elected governor of that body from 1979-1981, and was president from 1992-1994, positions that have assisted him in making major deals because he knows most other major players in the antiquarian bookselling scene. 

The Serendipity store, which is a converted winery that still has a wine barrel hanging from the ceiling, is both a major supplier of rare books and a friendly neighborhood spot for book lovers to browse. 

Howard and his small staff serve lunch every day at 1:00 p.m. and invite any customers present at the time to join them. Many local artists, book sellers, and academics drop by throughout the day to greet Howard and chat about his recent acquisitions and sales. 

“I know all my long-time customers,” Howard said. “I can help people better if I am familiar with who they are and what they’re looking for.” 

On any given day, Howard sits and chats with friends or new acquaintances about any book, any author, any literary genre or style. One of his favorite conversation topics, though, is baseball. An ardent San Francisco Giants fan who has season tickets to Pac Bell Park, Howard’s store sports memorabilia from over 40 years of Giants history. He is rarely seen without his Giants baseball cap, and laughs that he offers price breaks if the team is playing in the playoffs at the time. 

“This is just work,” Howard said about his store. “Baseball, though, is what keeps me going.”

In California, where one out of four residents is foreign-born, the entry of an Austrian Hollywood superstar and a Greek anti-corporate pundit has electrified the messy recall contest. But will their gubernatorial bids make immigrants the swing vote at the ballot box in October? 

Both Arnold Schwarzenegger and Arianna Huffington touted their immigrant roots when they launched their candidacies. Though fewer immigrants know about Huffington, or even that she is an immigrant, Schwarzenegger’s success story does resonate among California’s foreign-born. 

Raymond Virata, a Filipino-American graphic designer in Daly City, at first found it hard to think of Schwarzenegger as other than a pumped-up superstar with grandiose ambitions. 

“You laugh at first because you think of an actor like (former) Filipino president Joseph Estrada who was a joke,” Virata says. But on second thought he is struck by the fact that Schwarzenegger is “a self-made man,” a bodybuilder who came from Austria and really made it. 

“Perhaps immigrants buy into the American dream much more than Americans who have been here two or three generations,” concurs Firoozeh Dumas, the Iranian-born author of the memoir “Funny in Farsi.” 

Dumas likes the idea that California’s next governor just might have a foreign accent, remembering how her parents struggled with their thick Iranian accents in blonde, blue-eyed towns like Whittier, Calif. 

But, “there is a hierarchy of accents,” Dumas warns. “When someone with a pronounced Middle Eastern accent runs for governor, I’ll know change has really come.” 

This “hierarchy” may be hindering Hispanic and Asian immigrants’ instant identification with European immigrants Schwarzenegger and Huffington. 

“It’s interesting—they both have these strong accents like most immigrants do,” says Pilar Marrero, political editor of the influential Spanish-language daily La Opinion in Los Angeles. But, she adds, “Most immigrants in California don’t sound like Arnold or Arianna.” 

For Marrero, the true immigrant story is Cruz Bustamante’s. “That the son of a working class immigrant family from a small town in the Central Valley can have a shot at being the state’s first Latino governor—now that’s exciting, that’s a real immigrant dream.” 

Schwarzenegger’s big hurdle with Latino voters is his admission that in 1994 he voted for the divisive Proposition 187, which cut off social services to undocumented immigrants and angered Hispanic voters. 

His campaign manager, former California governor Pete Wilson, was the main sponsor of Proposition. 187. “The Republicans are utterly clueless about Latinos and other immigrants,” says Roberto Lovato, a Los Angeles-based political consultant. “They hope that star power can erase the effects of repressive power like Proposition. 187.” 

But Schwarzenegger has powerful name recognition—celebrity estimated by some experts as worth hundreds of millions of dollars if paid for in advertising. In San Francisco’s Chinatown, for example, everyone knows the Terminator. 

“Arnold is a household name not just because of his movies, but also because an ad he did for an instant cup of noodles company was broadcast all over mainland China,” says Leon Chow, a community organizer with the Chinese Progressive Association. “In Chinatown, perhaps only 20 percent may know the name of the governor,” Chow adds. 

For some, it’s not Schwarzeneger’s celebrity but his politics that appeals. 

“Russian immigrants like Arnold not because he’s an immigrant or famous, but because he’s conservative, and we have conservative values like freedom and family,” says Janna Sundeyeva, publisher of the Russian newspaper Kstati in San Francisco. “And as an Austrian he understands the value of good public education.” 

Hispanics and Asians traditionally have low turnouts. Only 32 percent of Asians and 26 percent of Hispanics voted in 1996, compared with 68 percent of whites. But can the candidacies of two non-politicians galvanize Hispanic and Asian voters, who are 14 percent and four percent of the state's voters, respectively? 

They can, says David Lee, who heads the Chinese American Voter Education Committee, but not because they’re immigrants. 

“You will see a different kind of voter turnout—maybe those who normally don’t vote and are maybe less concerned about issues, but are drawn by star power,” Lee says. “With ‘Da Terminator’ in the race, turnout will likely increase as the media go bonkers over his candidacy.” 

But in a system where immigrants often feel left out of the electoral process it is no coincidence that the two high-profile immigrant candidates are both not career politicians. “Their candidacies are an indictment of bureaucratic politicians,” says Arvind Kumar, editor of the San Jose monthly India Currents. 

Though he thinks the recall is “a costly waste,” Kumar hopes Huffington and Schwarzenegger can energize the debate. “What's interesting is that they come from opposite ends of the political spectrum, proving you cannot put immigrants in a box.” 

PNS Editor Sandip Roy is host of “Upfront,” the Pacific News Service weekly radio program on KALW-FM, San Francisco. PNS Editor Ciria-Cruz is also a longtime editor for Filipinas Magazine

The Board of Education will discuss a blistering, 740-page state report on the Berkeley schools Wednesday night. 

The report, prepared by the state’s Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) found shortcomings with everything from school safety, to payroll administration to the district’s special education program. 

Problems range from uncertified fire extinguishers, to payroll failures to a lack of adequate teacher training on special education. 

“For a community that prides itself on inclusion and diversity and calls itself progressive, it’s hard even to come up with a scathing enough adjective for Berkeley’s public school record on students with disabilities,” said Julia Epstein, communications director for the Berkeley-based Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, in a statement last week. 

The FCMAT study was funded through a September 2002 bill, authored by former State Assemblywoman Dion Aroner (D-Berkeley), that forgave a $1.1 million fine the school district owed the state for filing late paperwork in 2000, and poured $700,000 of it into the FCMAT report. The bill requires the district to spend the remaining $460,000 to implement the study’s recommendations over the next two years. 

FCMAT’s study included findings in five areas: community relations, personnel management, pupil achievement, financial management and facilities management. 

FCMAT began work with the district in October 2001, coming on board as a financial adviser one month after the Alameda County Office of Education disapproved Berkeley Unified’s faulty 2001-2002 budget.  

A year later, Aroner’s bill gave FCMAT the broader responsibility of conducting the wide-ranging study it issued last month. FCMAT officials, who worked with four subcontractors to complete the report, will be on hand at the Wednesday night meeting to discuss their findings and expectations for change over the next two years. 

The meeting begins at 7:30 p.m. at Old City Hall, 2134 Martin Luther King Jr. Way. 

—David Scharfenberg

Robbery with a Caddy 

Two men brandishing a gun and driving an old Cadillac stole a pair of purses early Tuesday morning, according to police. 

Berkeley Police Department spokesperson Officer Kevin Schofield said the two men pulled up alongside two women in the 2400 block of Telegraph Avenue just before 1:00 a.m. Tuesday, and one leapt out with a gun, demanding that the victims turn over their purses. 

The suspects made off with the purses, which included over $100 in cash, in an “older gold or gray” Cadillac and were last seen heading north on Telegraph, according to Schofield. 

The witnesses described the robbers as men in their twenties, one of medium build and one of large build. Police had not made any arrests as of Thursday afternoon. 

—David Scharfenberg 

Vodka heist 

A young man, described as 16 to 18 years old, entered Andronico’s Market at 1850 Solano Ave. Tuesday afternoon and stole six bottles of vodka, according to police. 

Berkeley Police Department spokesperson Officer Kevin Schofield said the burglar, described by witnesses as 5 feet 8 inches tall and 140 pounds, was wearing a white t-shirt and baseball cap, with dark pants. 

The burglar escaped on foot and was last seen fleeing west on Solano Avenue. Police, responding to a 1:31 p.m. call, could not find him, Schofield said. 

—David Scharfenberg 

Mid-day robbery 

A gun-wielding robber made off with an undisclosed amount of cash in a brazen mid-day stick-up on the corner of Curtis Street and Bancroft Way Wednesday afternoon, according to police. 

Berkeley Police Department spokesperson Officer Kevin Schofield said the robber approached the victim from behind and demanded money, before fleeing westbound on Channing Way. 

The suspect was described as a 25-30 year-old male, 5 feet 5 inches tall, 150 pounds with brown eyes, a medium build and “a round face.” The robber was wearing a cap with a visor and a short-sleeved shirt, according to police.  

—David Scharfenberg 

High-speed chase 

A 50-minute high-speed chase stretching from Berkeley to Sacramento came to an end just before 2 p.m. Thursday, according to the California Highway Patrol. 

According to Officer J.D. Cook, an unidentified suspect driving a stolen car got on Interstate Highway 80 and was pursued by CHP officers at speeds up to 110 mph. Cook said the suspect was taken into custody near Sacramento. 

No further information was immediately available. 

—Bay City News

Armed robbery 

A late-night armed robbery on Sunday left a couple missing their wallet and purse. 

At 1:44 a.m. Sunday, a suspect jumped out of a gray or blue early model BMW and approached a couple walking near the corner of Hearst Street and San Pablo Avenue. 

The suspect, described as a black male, 5’10” with a medium build and wearing dark-colored clothing, threatened the couple with a handgun and demanded their wallet and purse, said Officer Kevin Schofield, Berkeley Police Department spokesperson. 

The man then jumped back in the BMW, which was driven by another man. Police officers were called to the scene but were unable to locate the car or anybody matching the suspect description. Nobody was arrested. 

Vehicle Windows Smashed 

Someone broke into four vehicles parked near Haste Street and Dana Street early Saturday morning, according to Berkeley Police. 

At 2:19 a.m., police officers were called to the scene, where they found four cars with smashed windows. It was unclear what was taken from each vehicle. Officer Kevin Schofield, Berkeley Police Department spokesperson, said that the suspect, who was not found, was a male of unknown race wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and carrying two bags. 

Guitar theft 

After a man allegedly broke into a house on Saturday morning, neighbors detained the suspect and had him arrested. 

A resident of the 2600 block of Ellsworth Street called the police department on Saturday morning to report a burglary in progress. The suspect, Scott Swick, 22, allegedly entered the house through an open front door and took an electric guitar. Neighbors kept the man in the front yard of the house until police officers arrived and arrested him. Swick was booked into the city jail.