The University of California announced Friday a $69 million settlement with the Bank of America in the ongoing Enron class action lawsuit. 

UC is the lead plaintiff representing Enron investors, who lost an estimated $25 billion when the energy giant went belly up in 2001 after listing revenues of $100 billion the previous year.  

The company’s collapse came amid allegations that executives manipulated balance sheets to artificially inflate stock prices. UC lost $145 million in what was—at the time—the largest corporate bankruptcy ever. 

The UC Board of Regents and a U.S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of Texas must now approve the proposed settlement. 

The Bank of America was not implicated in the fraud, but was sued in its role as an underwriter for Enron debt offerings. The $69 million settlement represented more than 50 percent of the bank’s liability for the investors’ total losses allowed under the 1933 Securities Act, according to UC spokesperson Trey Davis. 

“This is a positive development for shareholders,” he said. “Normally plaintiffs receive pennies on the dollar.” 

The settlement from Bank of America will be distributed to all plaintiffs, leaving UC with a total of less than $1 million. Nevertheless, UC attorney, William Lerach of San Francisco-based Lerach, Coughlin, Stoia and Robbins LLP, hailed the settlement and insisted it “will be the precursor of much larger ones in the future, especially with the banks that face liability for participating in the scheme to defraud Enron’s common stockholders.” 

Since Enron has no assets, the plaintiffs are targeting investment banks they claim facilitated fraudulent transactions that cost Enron investors millions. Among the key defendants are J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse First Boston, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Arthur Andersen. 

In 2002 UC reached a $40 million settlement with Arthur Andersen Worldwide. However, the company’s U.S. arm, which served as Enron’s outside auditors, remains liable. 

The Enron suit is part of a broader UC strategy to file lawsuits against corporations they believe defrauded the university out of roughly $1 billion in an investment portfolio that totaled $60 billion as of June 30. 

In addition to Enron, UC is the lead plaintiff against Dynergy, a former Enron competitor, and has filed separate suits against WorldCom and AOL Time Warner. 

UC claims to have lost $112 million from Dynergy and $353 million from WorldCom, both of which declared bankruptcy after accounting scandals. UC says it lost $450 million from the 2001 merger of AOL and Time Warner and accuses the company of falsifying financial results leading up to the merger. 

“These companies committed fraud and stole money from the University of California and we want the money back,” Davis said. “It’s a simple principle of fairness and justice.” 

The Enron case is scheduled to go to trial in October, 2006.ô

In a community marked by strongly conflicting visions of the city’s future, a young but powerfully connected organization named Livable Berkeley is striving to make its own stamp on the city of tomorrow. 

“Livable Berkeley believes that Berkeley is a lovely city with a very strong potential, and we’re working to help the city fulfill that potential and become as wonderful a city as possible,” said David Early, an urban planner in private practice who has lived in Berkeley for two decades. 

Early and his confederates glimpse some of that potential in the nine-story Seagate Building project, planned for Center Street just west of the Wells Fargo Building on Shattuck. 

“This is a very important project because it provides a new model and a type of housing not previously available in downtown,” Early said. “By offering for-sale units in an apartment configuration, they’re appealing to stable households with higher incomes—a new demographic.” 

By drawing in a more affluent group of residents, he said, the project will also contribute to the ailing downtown merchant community. “The project’s also attractive, bringing an architectural flair not seen in many projects.” 

Holding dual UCB master’s’ degrees in architecture and planning, Early runs Design, Community & Environment (DC&E), a planning and design consultancy that works mainly for governments and official agencies. Local clients have included the cities of Berkeley, Albany, Oakland, and Benicia.  

A recent major DC&E project of particular local concern was the environmental element of the UC Berkeley Long Range Development Plan. 

One of his senior DC&E staff members—and a member of the Livable Berkeley Board of Directors—is Erin Banks, a former Berkeley city planner and the spouse of city Planning Manager Mark Rhoades. 

Jennifer Kaufer, another Livable Berkeley board member, is the spouse of Aran Kaufer, a member of the city Landmarks Preservation Commission and employee of Berkeley developer Patrick Kennedy. 

Other well-connected members of the Livable Berkeley board include:  

• Ali Kashani, a former nonprofit developer who has now entered the commercial sector; 

• Todd Harvey, who works for Jubilee Housing, a non-profit developer; and 

• Dorothy Walker, who served until her retirement in 1995 as Assistant Vice Chancellor for Property Development for UC Berkeley and was the founding president of the American Planning Association. 

The organization coalesced from the Coalition for a Livable Berkeley, formed to oppose the November, 2002, ballot Measure P—which called for limiting new building heights to two and three stories along some of the city’s major thoroughfares. After the measure was rejected by 80 percent of Berkeley voters, some of the victorious foes united to form Livable Berkeley to keep the momentum going, said member Alan Tobey. 

“I was looking for a way to get back into Berkeley politics from a big picture, smart growth orientation,” Tobey said. 

Tobey, who’d recently retired as a tech manager specializing in small companies and start-up operations, said he had been active in Berkeley politics in the 1970’s, working for passage of the city’s Landmarks Preservation Ordinance and for the mayoral campaign of Loni Hancock. 

“Certain developers are members, even board members, but the group’s focus is much broader,” Tobey said. “I would hope it can be one of the few organizations in town that can have an integrating perspective, not just a narrow focus.” 

Initially, the group retained Allan Freeman to handle organizational matters. A UC graduate student from Southern California, Freeman had organized Livable Santa Monica to foster similar goals in Berkeley’s unofficial sister city. 

With Freeman recently graduated and gone, Jennifer Phelps, one of Early’s staffers, has picked up the organizational reins on a one-day-a-week basis. 

The organization’s membership currently tops 100, Early said, “and we’re growing. They include a broad range of backgrounds and almost all of them are Berkeley residents.” 

Livable Berkeley has already found itself at odds with at least one grassroots organization—PlanBerkeley—which seeks strict limits on developments in the University Avenue area. In an e-mail alert to Livable Berkeley members sent May 14, Freeman blasted PlanBerkeley members as “angry NIMBYs” and characterized their efforts as an attempt to resurrect Measure P “through the back door.” 

And while Early says his group strongly favors historical preservation, “there are people who have tried to manipulate the Landmarks Preservation Commission process solely to prevent development.” 

Early said he also doesn’t favor unrestricted development of five-story structures, “but there’s a small, vocal minority that feels two or three stories should be the maximum. Four or five stories is good for most of Berkeley.” 

Sitting at a table at a Shattuck Avenue coffee shop, Early said numerous studies show that the most comfortable streets are those with a one-to-one ratio between building-to-building street width and building height. 

“Here on Shattuck, the width is about 100 feet, but most of us would never say all of downtown should be 10 stories tall,” he said. 

Livable Berkeley sees affordable housing as perhaps the biggest challenge confronting the city. “Housing prices are out of control, and the city has to provide more housing opportunities,” Early said. 

New developments along the city’s’ major thoroughfares “offer an astounding opportunity to create more housing” said Early, an opportunity he said would also provided a much-needed economic stimulus to the city’s ailing retail sector. 

The group also wants to see a “world class transportation system” that will eliminate the need for single occupancy vehicles. 

“Livable Berkeley believes it’s not necessary for all of us to ride around in single occupancy vehicles. Right now I can get anywhere in Berkeley faster on a bike than you can in a car,” he told a reporter. 

For those who can’t peddle a two-wheeler, he points to Segways and jitneys as two alternatives. 

Another goal of the organization is the reorganization of the structures of city government to provide more transparency for developers seeking to build in the city. 

“The way it is now, Berkeley scares away a lot of developers,” he said. “It doesn’t serve the city to have all development in the hands of a small, self-selected group.” 

Other issues of concern to the group include open space—they want more—creek restoration—they like it—and the needed for more trees, plantings and plazas along major streetscapes. 

“We’re also tracking individual building projects, and we’re going to be more pro-active in city policy issues and in building community-wide discussion on subjects like design.” 

Livable Berkeley members are also tracking projects and issues as they come before the City Council, Planning Commission and Zoning Adjustments Board and making their opinions heard. A candidate forum is in the works for this fall, as well as a symposium and community meeting on downtown transportation issues. The group also publishes the quarterly Livable Berkeley Newsletter, available for downloading on their website, www.livableberkeley.org. 

“Growth and change are inevitable,” Early says, “and they provide the opportunities for making a very positive impact on the community.” 

ª

One of the City Council’s loudest and most prolific critics is seeking a seat on the legislative body she has relentlessly hounded for the past two years. 

Barbara Gilbert told the Daily Planet Monday she is joining the race to replace outgoing Councilm ember Miriam Hawley in District 5. The homeowner-heavy district in the north-central part of town—beginning at Vine Street and extending to the upper Solano Avenue business district—has spawned politically moderate councilmembers since it was created in 1986. 

While Gilbert is hoping to draw support from neighborhood groups who share her opposition to proposed property tax hikes, she acknowledges that she faces an uphill battle to defeat the current favorite, Zoning Adjustment Board member and local real estate agent Laurie Capitelli. A bipartisan cross-section of the council has already endorsed Capitelli. Councilmember Dona Spring is supporting the third candidate in the race, Green Party member Jesse Townley. 

Gilbert, a trained social worker and paral egal who spent four years muffled in the backrooms of Berkeley politics as a policy researcher to former Mayor Shirley Dean, has exploded on the political scene after Dean’s 2002 defeat.  

At times appearing as a one-woman crusade for government accountab ility and tax relief, Gilbert has shadowed the council, attending numerous public meetings, uncovering a costly city oversight, and questioning the sustainability of Berkeley’s high tax, high service government. 

She has criticized Mayor Tom Bates for beh aving in an “alarming, inappropriate and arrogant manner,” for his handling last year of the council’s debate of a library tax increase, described the Rent Stabilization Board as appearing to be “a bloated relic cow from another era that is getting fatter and fatter,” claimed the council was too scared to take on city unions and was ducking the recommendations of its budget commission, and most famously, in front of the City Council, accurately charged that Developer Patrick Kennedy wasn’t paying city assessments for the Gaia Building. 

Not surprisingly, Gilbert’s activism hasn’t won her many friends in City Hall. While councilmembers gave polite replies when told Gilbert was in the race, one council aide blurted, “Oh my God. God help us.” 

“She’s been a critical citizen,” Councilmember Hawley said. “Often, she has a point of view that is difficult to work with because she feels the council is doing the wrong thing or not paying attention to things.” 

For her part, Gilbert said the council would benefit f rom an unflinching voice of dissent.  

“I don’t think we’ve had an independent voice in the city,” she said. “People have private doubts, but are afraid to say things publicly.” One of her chief contributions as a candidate, she said, would be to offer cl ear policy positions and force Capitelli to do the same. District 5 has the usual parking, traffic and Creek Ordinance issues, but few endemic ones. Gilbert and Hawley both predicted the race would be fought on citywide concerns such as the budget and dev elopment. 

Gilbert opposes further university expansion and high density development on the fringes of residential neighborhoods, and wants to assess the effectiveness of the city’s economic development staff.  

However, the cornerstone of her campaign an d much of her last two years in public life will be that in an era of declining public revenues, Berkeley has avoided making the tough choices necessary to preserve its social programs without overburdening middle class homeowners. 

She opposes the four t ax hikes totaling $8 million in new revenue the City Council is planning to place on the November ballot. Instead she wants the city to extract further concessions from its unions, mainly to make them pay their retirement contributions. 

“I’m a very pro-u nion person,” she said. “But the world has changed and the kind of contracts the city of Berkeley has agreed to are unfortunately unheard of in the real world.” 

Gilbert, who chairs the Berkeley Alliance of Neighborhood Associations’ budget committee, has n’t sought endorsements yet, but has won praise from neighborhood leaders for her tough stands on city finances.  

“I think she’s worth supporting,” said Dean Metzger, the President of the Claremont-Elmwood Neighborhood Association. “She’s willing to spen d the time to dig up the facts. The problem is no one likes the facts she finds.” 

Capitelli has already wrapped up key endorsements from across the political spectrum and raised $13,000 for the race. A partner at Berkeley’s Red Oak Realty, Capitelli said he counts among his supporters Hawley, Mayor Tom Bates, councilmembers Gordon Wozniak and Linda Maio, Planning Commission Chair Harry Pollack and former District 5 candidate and noted preservationist Carrie Olson. 

The endorsement he lacks—and appears ce rtain to be denied—is from Dean, the former mayor who represented District 5 from 1986 through 1994 and out-polled her rival Bates in the district in 2002. 

Dean had no comment on whether she was considering a possible run for the seat or a candidate to e ndorse. However she said of Capitelli, “He has been described to me as a clone of Bates, and I tend to agree with that.” 

That doesn’t mean that Dean’s endorsement is necessarily going to Gilbert. Talk around City Hall is that the two have had a falling o ut since 2002. Asked about the reported rift, Gilbert wondered if her independent leap into partisan city politics had rubbed Dean the wrong way. 

“I do have strong opinions and I had not consulted her,” Gilbert said. “She may be miffed.” 

Dean, who conf irmed that the two discussed the race several months back, said she agreed with Gilbert about some things, but not everything. 

Rounding out the announced candidates for District 5 is Disaster Council member Jesse Townley. 

Townley works as the board sec retary of punk rock venue 924 Gilman Street, and is the former executive director of Easy Does It, a nonprofit that provides assistance and transportation for disabled residents. At 33 years-old, Townley, who has lived in Berkeley for 15 years, casts himself as someone who can work towards common sense solutions to the city’s problems and bring more young non-student voters into Berkeley political life. 

“I think people are excited that someone from the activist political art scene is running,” he said. In addition to Spring, Townley said he has won the endorsement of the Alameda County Green Party and is courting Health Commission member and former District 5 candidate Tom Kelly. 

Members of three city unions have voted overwhelmingly to ratify a deal that defers roughly half of their cost of living pay raises to help the city close a $10.3 million budget shortfall. 

Two city Service Workers International Union (SEIU) locals voted to reduce their pay hikes from five percent to 2.46 percent for the next ten-and-a-half months, when they expect to recoup the deferred percentage. 

Also, police officers voted 116 to 25 to reduce their increase from five percent to two for six months. Officers also agreed to an additional $646 cut per employee. 

The votes give the city one year of financial breathing room, and—city officials hope—increased leverage in exacting concessions from Berkeley’s three other public employee bargaining units that have resisted the city’s offer. 

“[The vote] was a pretty dramatic statement by the employees that they’re willing to get behind this,” said Deputy City Manager Lisa Caronna. “We’re hoping that the other unions that didn’t see it that way will reconsider this as a good option.” 

Last month, the city invoked a fiscal emergency clause for Public Employees Union Local One and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1245, forcing them to accept the same conditions agreed to by the SEIU employees. Both unions have hinted at taking the city to arbitration over the move. 

Berkeley firefighters, who don’t have a fiscal emergency clause in their contract and have rebuffed city requests that they defer scheduled salary increases, face $300,000 in budget cuts this fall. The cut is equal to the amount the city would have saved had the firefighters agreed to accept only a two percent increase, deferring the remaining three percent of their scheduled five percent increase. 

Caronna said the city still planned to offer the SEIU deals to Local One and IBEW Local 1245, which, if they accept, would shield them from layoffs this year and prevent the city from invoking the fiscal emergency contract until their contracts expire in 2008. 

Despite increasing political pressure on IBEW (which at 20 members is the city’s smallest union) and Local One (which as the representative of middle managers is the best paid among non uniformed personnel) neither group has shown signs of yielding. 

“The vote will have no effect on us,” said IBEW Shop Steward Rick Chan. “If you stand on principal, numbers don’t matter.” He contends the city has not negotiated with his union in good faith under the “meet and confer” process and has ignored the union’s offer to save the city money through voluntarily taking time off. 

In all, the salary deferrals and other employee related cuts will save the city $2.8 million, of which $1.4 million would go to the general fund. 

The deal, however, is only a one year stop-gap measure. With the city forecasting a $5 million deficit next year, Caronna said further union concessions might be required.›

EDITOR’S NOTE: It is not conventional for newspapers to turn over their editorial space to “politicians.” Papers are expected to maintain a detached approach to the issues of the day, and to assume that those who represent us are guilty until proven innocent. But the owners and publishers of this paper (which has never been accused of being conventional) have had a “Barbara Lee Speaks for Me” bumper sticker on their old red van since Barbara was the sole vote against the invasion of Afghanistan. Our senior editor, who was living in Napa at the time, remembers thinking that he wished she was his representative. Of course, we reserve the right to tell our Congresswoman if she makes any mistakes in the future, but today we’re very pleased that she’s written this guest editorial for us. Today, Barbara Lee speaks for the Berkeley Daily Planet.  

The violent death of San Francisco Police Officer Isaac Espinosa is a tragedy that has caused great sorrow. Of course, my heart goes out to the family of Officer Espinosa, to his fellow officers and to a community that seeks justice—just as every reasonable person does. 

Some in the community—especially his family and colleagues in the Police Department—have tried to build sufficient pressure to force District Attorney Kamala Harris to seek the death penalty, despite her clearly stated and long-held opposition to this ultimate sanction. She has been harshly criticized for remaining true to her pledge to the electorate not to seek the death penalty—in other words she's being asked to break her compact with the voters. 

I understand why the use of—or refusal to use—the death penalty arouses such strong emotions. But there is too much evidence that the death penalty is the wrong penalty for our society. I understand the enormous pressures on Kamala Harris when she stands for principle in the face of controversy. I salute her willingness to stand tall in the face of overwhelming criticism, and in so doing, she vindicates the most important principle of our representative democracy: Elected officials should stand by their pledges to the voters. 

Whether one agrees or disagrees with the death penalty—in this case in particular, or in general—we should all respect the district attorney for fulfilling her commitment to these voters. 

Congresswoman Barbara Lee represents California’s ninth district. ›

FINE ARTS BUILDING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am concerned that the quotation attributed to me in the article “Death of Fine Arts Cinema Ends a Legendary Tradition” (Daily Planet, July 2-5) may be misinterpreted. The quote, which follows a lengthy article covering every aspect from the cultural contribution of the theaters original owner, to the demolition and construction, might create the impression that I am adverse to the Fine Arts building. 

I want to emphasize that I have no problem with the size, appearance or number of apartments, etc. of the Fine Arts Building. My comments relate to my disappointment when I was told that a movie theater I was looking forward to attending is no longer being planned at that location. If the cost of outfitting the unfinished space as a movie theater is too expensive perhaps the space could be developed as a small supermarket. The new residents of Fine Arts building, as well as the thousands of residents in the surrounding area assure that of a place within walking distance where we could buy groceries and fresh produce would be both profitable and appreciated. 

Elliot Cohen 

• 

AC TRANSIT  

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In the article entitled “‘Scathing’ Report Blasts UC Developments Plan” (Daily Planet, June 29-July 2), it was stated that “AC Transit is considering a ‘bus rapid transit’ alternative...which would reduce the number of auto lanes on Telegraph below Dwight from four to just two.” This is not true. From Dwight Way to downtown Oakland, there are at least six, and often seven “auto” lanes on Telegraph, because one must certainly consider parking lanes as “auto” lanes. There are, however, only four or five traffic lanes. The proposal will not affect the number of traffic lanes, only the traffic mixture on them. The number of lanes available to autos would be reduced by approximately one third, rather than one half. Considering this reduction of lanes using the proper proportion may well reflect the percentage of travelers using bus transit compared to those using autos along that corridor, even without taking into account the ridership increases that improved bus service could bring. 

Bruce De Benedictis 

Oakland 

• 

CITY SALARIES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The recent revelation that the Oakland City Council voted to support keeping public officials salaries private is shocking but not surprising. 

Perhaps the Daily Planet could ask the mayor to make public a list of Berkeley’s officials and their salaries. It would also be educational to know how many more vacant positions there are that whose elimination will bring about further budget savings? 

I suggest that until we get real answers to these questions that we all vote against any further tax or fee hikes. Such knowledge of where our tax  

dollars goes would seem to be the foundation of a democracy. Even in Berkeley. 

Paul Rabinow 

• 

BURIAL GROUND 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

An American Indian burial ground in Lafayette has been dug up, having been hidden beneath a housing development known as Hidden Oaks. When it was dug up, there were 80 sets of human remains and artifacts. Despite the burial ground, there are still planned to build two dozen upscale homes. I hope that the City of Lafayette will respect American Indian burial ground as sacred and not be desecrated for a housing development. 

Billy Trice, Jr. 

Oakland 

• 

TERROR ALERT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The nightly news reported that for the July 4 weekend the color-coded terrorist threat level would not be changed. However, terrorists continue to target the U.S.A., so Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge issued a statement urging “…all Americans to be on the alert for signs of terrorist activity.” 

I inferred from this that if I saw a sign of terrorist activity it was my civic duty to inform the local police. Even if terrorists are prone to give signs of their activity I don’t think I’d recognize one if I saw it. Can there be a sign of terrorist activity and no terrorist activity? Can there be terrorist activity and no sign? 

Other people must be in the dark too. It would help if Mr. Ridge published an alphabetized list of terrorist activities together with their corresponding signs. 

It’s now July 6. Can I stop being alert then or should I wait for Mr. Ridge’s advice? And, why don’t the newspapers keep us informed as they do when they alert us to the possibility of fires, floods, and mudslides? 

Marvin Chachere 

San Pablo 

• 

BUSH TAX RECORD 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Our taxes have skyrocketed—thanks to George Bush. 

“Bridge toll goes up one dollar,” the headlines read. Now we have to pay one dollar more just to cross the freaking bridge? 

“Local school bonds pass,” says the news. Great. Now every house in town coughs up $100 a year more to educate our kids. 

“FBI asks police to step up local patrols,” said the radio this morning. How is this paid for? How do you think? More local taxes. 

“Sales tax goes up” is followed by “Property tax increase” and “State income tax rate change announced.” Not to mention all the interest on the two trillion dollars worth of loans we co-signed for so that Bush could purchase the Simple Life for Enron, Halliburton and Carlyle. 

George Bush claims that he has lowered our taxes? Bull dookie! He just serves them up to us in a different form. Sure we get $400 back from the IRS. And then we pay thousands more at the pump, in health care costs and wage loss.  

And factor in the sad fact that we are the ones who pay most of the taxes now. Corporations no longer help us out. In 1950, U.S. corporations paid 40 percent of all taxes (and despite this so-called tax burden, business and commerce flourished too. For them, the right to do business in a healthy American economy was worth every cent!) Now corporations only pay seven percent. And guess who pays the rest? You. Me. The bus driver. The small farmer. The postman. The night clerk at the convenience store. 

What can we do? For starters, let’s balance the federal budget. How? We could start by not buying the things that we don’t need. For instance, let’s stop squandering 60 percent of our income on buying overpriced, falsely advertised designer wars. 

Jane Stillwater 

Say good-bye to Hearst Avenue as you’ve known it—at least until 2007. 

Imminent changes to traffic patterns on Hearst Avenue and adjacent streets were discussed at a “Pardon Our Dust” meeting on June 21, hosted by UC Berkeley’s Facilities Services personnel in partnership with the city’s Office of Transportation staff. 

City staff is poised to surrender much of Hearst’s 2500 block to UCB’s contractors during construction of an 85-foot-tall structure known as the Davis Hall North Replacement Building (DHNRB) at Hearst and Le Roy. 

Councilmembers Betty Olds and Kriss Worthington attended, along with nine local residents. 

Security Fence Soon 

In late July or early August, we learned, a fence will sprout along the entire length of Hearst Avenue’s 2500 block between North Gate and Cory Hall. 

A crosswalk will be removed and pedestrians rerouted. “For safety reasons” access to Central Campus will be restricted to North Gate (at Euclid) or via the new stairway near Founder’s Rock, two city blocks east. UCB acknowledges that the detours “will be frustrating for some.” 

The fence posts will be anchored sufficiently far out into Hearst Avenue to create a “truck stacking” chute for eastbound construction vehicles involved with the demolition of old Davis Hall. Excavation (i.e., a 45-foot-deep hole) and eventual construction of DHNRB will follow. 

Creation of yet another UCB staging area on City property no doubt will be good news for custodians of the ailing municipal budget since (1) UCB’s contractor will pay high rent for street space, (2) parking enforcement personnel will have reduced routes, and (3) up to 40 percent of Northside parking meters are usually out of service anyway. 

A June 2001 Draft EIR warned the public: The DHNRB site is a very tight spot for a large construction project; having trucks offloading on Hearst Avenue essentially means shutting down at least one lane of the two-lane road for several hours at a time; because the trucks would be much wider than the average car, there would be a roadway impact; however, when the construction crane is actually lifting steel off the trucks, traffic would be stopped for safety reasons. 

Big Rigs On Small Streets 

After completing their loading or unloading, eastbound trucks are to proceed uphill to the Galey-La Loma traffic signal and then make three consecutive left turns on small streets before turning right (and west) back onto Hearst Avenue. 

For local residents, this “La Loma-Ridge-Le Roy loop” concept is deja vu all over again. A similar UC-city “partnership” subjected Ridge Road residents to a year-long siege during construction of the Goldman School of Public Policy annex in 2001-2002. 

At nearly 150,000 gross square feet, DHNRB is a project more than 12 times larger than the GSPP annex. 

So how many 15-cubic-yard trucks can residents expect to see rumbling down their streets, beginning as early as 7a.m.? The EIR tells us 4,400—but that’s just the excavation part. There are thousands more huge trucks with demolition debris and construction materials backhaul—for the next two and a half years or more. 

Why doesn’t UCB route vehicles back through Central Campus instead of looping through Northside residential streets? “The route is too narrow and winding for navigation by construction traffic,” UCB tells us. 

If ever there was a street plan designed to “externalize” UCB construction costs, this is it. 

Controlling Contractors 

Instead, residents were invited to serve as UCB’s “eyes on the street” to make sure that contractors behave according to the rules. “We can’t control 200-300 people as we can our own kids,” we were told.  

Where will the contractors park their vehicles? “We’re not providing anything on campus,” was the answer. “A lot location hasn’t been determined.” There was some talk about bussing in contractors who park at the Hearst and Oxford lots, but that too remains to be worked out. We also heard vague commitments to create “incentives to carpooling”. 

Displaced Commuter Traffic 

Although DHNRB will not be as large as the nearby Stanley Biosciences and Biotechnology Facility on Gayley Road, its staging requirements promise to impact commuter behavior and local residents far more severely than does the Stanley construction. 

Constrict the Hearst Avenue artery and traffic will seek ways around the blockage via adjacent residential streets. 

Barely mentioned at the meeting were the likely cumulative transportation impacts stemming from the upcoming Building 49 project at LBNL and the completion of the Stanley facility. All three projects will overlap. 

Will DHNRB trigger the “environmental train wreck” predicted by residents three years ago? It’s too early to say. But the “Pardon Our Dust” meeting offered very little assurance that the quality-of-life interests of local residents will be protected either by UCB and its contractors or the city’s transportation staff. 

Hauling away Davis Hall is just the start of what promises to be a very long haul indeed. 

UCB construction-related transportation impacts (both Northside and Southside) are scheduled to appear on the agenda of the next Transportation Commission meeting, to be held Thursday, July 15. 

Jim Sharp is a North Berkeley resident. 

What this country needs is truth and reconciliation. South Africa did it. So should we. 

What this country does not need is more killing. No more war making. No more death penalties, not even for certain mass murderers like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet, the Carlyle Group, Haliburton and anybody else that is pushing for the carnage that is occurring throughout the world as a result of our government’s foreign, domestic and covert policies. 

And what this country does not need is more prisons, or more prison torture, or more people making more money off of putting people in prison. In fact there are some people that need to get out of prison: like Mumia Abu Jamal; like Leonard Peltier; like every young promising mind that was robbed of childhood opportunities by an inequitable public school system, every young mind chased into a life of crime by a power structure that is afraid of an underclass that can think and organize and work for itself. 

And what this country does not need is another phony election, foisted upon the American people to convince them that democracy is alive albeit slightly  

flawed. Americans in 2004 will not pick their next president any more than my dog chooses what she eats for dinner. My dog would choose carrots and left over burritos were she to choose what she ate for dinner. Instead she eats processed dog food. My dog does not choose what she eats. I choose what she eats. 

And the American people do not choose their president. The power elite chooses the president. No self-empowered and self-respecting public would stand for an election where the top two candidates, the only two viable candidates, were in favor of expanding a war that most citizens think is wrong and many think is genocidal; where the top two candidates are unwilling to even consider a universal system of health care favored by the majority; where the top two candidates are on record supporting measure after measure that transfers wealth from the poor and working class to the wealthy. 

And what this country does not need is another 9/11, because the last one was used to take this country down the path of war and repression. At a time when the Bush administration wanted to establish a greater military presence in the Middle East (the plans for the Afghan invasion were on the table before 9/11) yet could not because of the political climate, 9/11 was the perfect catalyst for the U.S. military aggression that we see today. And whether you believe that the Bush administration was innocently caught off guard, or that they helped facilitate the attacks, it is indisputable that the Bush administration and the military industrial complex are profiting mightily from the attacks. And the rest of the world is suffering. 

Yes it is time that the truth come out in this nation: truth about the real motives of those in power today; truth about why wars are waged, about who controls the media and why and how, about who wins and who loses with globalization; truth about what happened on Sept. 11, 2001; truth about the real perils that are facing mankind in the near future (like the energy and population crises) and an honest assessment of what needs to be done so that solutions to these problems are effective, compassionate and sustainable. 

The United States government is not a democracy. It is a crime against humanity. It is time that those in control of the U. S. government be shown the door. The American people need to stand up for what is right for humanity and the world. We need to firmly, nonviolently and compassionately take control away from the corrupt men in power in Washington D.C. The world is begging us to do this. 

World power currently resides in the secretive halls of the Pentagon, in the secretive commissions of the Bush administration, in the secretive meetings of the World Trade Organization, and in the secretive back rooms of big corporations. 

Power in this world belongs in local communities. It is time that we create societies that govern themselves locally and with wisdom, where the intricacies of democracy are known by all and practiced daily in every corner of the nation and indeed in every corner of the world. 

This vision of a new country, of a new world with real democracy and local power can only evolve when retribution is an idea of the past, when citizens understand that every one of us can and must be a positive part of a healthy society. To say that we need a paradigm shift is to understate things a bit. 

It is time for truth and reconciliation. South Africa did it. So should we. 

George Palen is a school teacher and a Berkeley resident. 

If you’re yearning for a kinder, gentler, theme park, something that works for both children and adults but doesn’t cost a fortune, a week’s vacation time, or leave you too exhausted, this may be the summer to visit Bonfante Gardens.  

Bonfante Gardens is located an hour and a half south of Berkeley, near Gilroy. Opened four years ago by Michael Bonfante, who financed much of the project from the sale of the Nob Hill Foods grocery chain, it’s an enjoyable and intriguing place, interesting and varied, and small enough to be seen thoroughly in a day trip. 

Gilroy, half an hour beyond San Jose, is still an agricultural town, although increasingly ringed by subdivisions and strip malls. Bonfante Gardens is a few miles west, on Hecker Pass Highway headed towards Santa Cruz. The vicinity remains very attractive with oak studded hills, old farms, and country roads, but is rapidly being defaced with trophy home ranchettes and standard stucco-box subdivisions. 

Bonfante Gardens resembles, in the most positive sense, a well-run old-fashioned carnival set down in the midst of a botanical garden. It seems to find its precedents more in Victorian era promenades and traditional amusement parks than today’s hyper-excited and over-hyped theme parks. And it’s a nonprofit, dedicated to horticulture, education, and beautification. 

There were hundreds of younger children having fun when we visited on a not too crowded day. But it may not be the most exciting experience for older children. Your 15-year-old will probably not thank you for driving him or her an hour and a half south to visit rides called “Bulgy the Goldfish” and the “Garlic Whirl.”  

The park has about 20 rides. There’s a Ferris wheel and a roller coaster. Other rides modestly spin, fly, roll, and tilt. Swan paddleboats ply a lake and a midway offers games of chance and prizes (extra charge to play). Both adventurous and shy children should find enough to entertain them. There also seemed a good balance between rides for different ages, such as carousels of different sizes and speeds. 

Most of the rides reflect agricultural or historical themes from the Gilroy area, including a “Mushroom Swing,” “Apple & Worm” (the latter circling around inside the former), “Artichoke Dip” and “Banana Split.” These names may sound seriously silly, but the designs and appearance are charming, and it’s actually quite a relief to be free of the relentlessly branded, promoted, and oversold cartoon and popular culture characters found in other theme parks. 

A small open train, one-third scale and served by two stations, runs around the perimeter of the park. It takes only a few smoothly running but somewhat noisy minutes to complete its route. There’s also a small monorail on an elevated track. Both train and monorail, the latter high aloft, traverse the mammoth Monarch Garden greenhouse, which is filled with tropical trees and vines. 

Most rides were closed during our discount-price “Garden Day” visit but those that were running were fun, including the train, monorail, and “Rainbow Boats,” which bounced along a swiftly flowing channel past polychromatic plantings.  

The newest attraction is a thoroughly enchanting “Wild Bird Adventure,” a covered open-air pavilion in which scores of bright plumaged Australian Parakeets, Zebra Finches, Eastern Rosellas, and Cockatiels, free fly and perch on and around visitors. To hand feed them you can buy stalks of seeds for $1; you surely will, if you have children with you. 

Nearby are five different waterfalls where one can run along a path and through a tunnel behind the water and get thoroughly splashed, and the “Pinnacle Rock Maze,” a quite cleverly arranged set of twisting, sunken, passages with child-sized tunnels between them.  

An outdoor amphitheater accommodates a trained bird show through Labor Day. We did not see it, but judging from the cries of the crowd during performances, the program was a hit.  

There are also the “circus trees,” grown by California farmer Axel Erlandson starting in the 1920s. If you’ve been in the Bay Area long enough, you may remember these trees as part of now-vanished roadside attraction (known for a time as “The Lost World”) in Scotts Valley along Highway 17 headed into Santa Cruz.  

They are living trees, primarily ashes, sycamores, box elders, and cork oaks, grafted and grown together in striking shapes. They form arches, curves, hearts, figure eights, holes, swirls, zigzags, pieces of furniture and one truly incredible “basket tree” that combines six sycamores into an enormous, evenly perforated, hollow shaft like a hallucinatory baobab or something out of Dr. Seuss.  

The circus trees are scattered throughout the park. They pop up here are there in all their startling oddity without competing with the other ornamental plantings. Adults uninterested in the rides can get a lot of enjoyment out of the trees and other features of the gardens and the grounds. 

Some of the specialty gardens may not live up to their advance billing. I spotted just one water lily flower in the large lily pond when we were there in mid-June. But there are plenty of other attractive, interesting, well-kept plantings, some rarities that will excite garden enthusiasts, and scores of amusing and impressive topiaries that pop up throughout the park. 

Each garden has its sequence of ponds and cascades and the park is centered on a large lake fed by an impressively wide shelf of falling water. The architecture of the park is also intriguing. One of the train stations, for example, is a handsome pitched-roof wooden pavilion with a row of living redwoods stalking down the center. 

Both parents of small children and older visitors will be happy to know that plenty of picnic and seating areas are provided, some with quite clever child-sized seating. The park seems fairly wheelchair friendly and easy to get about, although the rides don’t really look accessible.  

There are several restaurants (barbecue, pasta, grilled meat, a taqueria), food stands, and beverage stops. The food we had was decent and not too overpriced, except for the soft drinks (nearly $3 each). Beer is sold in some of the eating places. Numerous and clean restrooms are available. There are several gift shops, as well as plants for sale near the exit.  

One of the few discordant elements, in my view, was the music that welled up here and there through the park from mushroom shaped outdoor speakers. The relentlessly bouncy yet ethereal beat had me peering behind the bushes searching for someone with a synthesizer. At one point a full-throated rendition of “Volare,” of all things, swelled out of the foliage.  

Some of the recorded ride narration is also hard to follow. But those are minor things compared to the overall appeal of the park. If you have a free weekend or weekday this summer, I think it’s worth the trip. 

TUESDAY, JULY 6 

THEATER 

Shotgun Theater Lab “Four Echoes” at 8 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. Free, sugggested donation up to $15. 841-6500.  

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

Tabitha Soren, “Recalling Democracy: A Snapshot of History,” color photographs, opens at The Photolab Gallery, 2235 Fifth St. Exhibition runs to Aug. 14. 644-1400. www.photolaboratory.com 

“Within Small See Large” rocks in Chinese painting opens at the Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

“The Korean Potter” opens at the Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

FILM 

Time’s Shadow: “Lyrical Nitrate” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Kirk J. Schneider introduces “Rediscovery of Awe: Splendor, Mystery, and the Fluid Center of Life” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Jazzschool Faculty at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Jazz House Jam hosted by Darrell Green and Geechy Taylor at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Donation $5. www.thejazz- 

house.com 

Edessa, Balkan/Turkish music at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Dance lesson with Ahmet Luleci at 7:30 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Veretski Pass, traditional Eastern European Jewish music, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50 in advance, $18.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Jackie Allen at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Jazzschool Tuesdays, a weekly showcase of up-and-coming ensembles from Berkeley Jazz- 

school at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Black Box Series of Creative Music at 8 p.m. at the Oakland Box, 1928 Telegraph Ave. Cost is $7. 451-1932. www.oaklandbox.com  

WEDNESDAY, JULY 7 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

Fire Arts Festival opens at The Crucible, 1260 7th St., Oakland. with fire and light artworks, workshops and lectures, through July 11. For details see www.thecrucible.org 

FILM 

Exploit-O-Scope: “The Mask” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

JoAnn Levy reads from “Unsettling the West: Eliza Farnham and Georgiana Bruce Kirby in Frontier California” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with Nazelah Jamison and Karen Ladson at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5-$7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Roy Tyler sings gospel music at noon at Oakland City Center at the 12th St. BART. www.oaklandcitycenter.com 

Club Tecknoir at 10 p.m. at the Oakland Box, 1928 Telegraph Ave. Cost is $4. 451-1932. www.oaklandbox.com  

DP & The Rhythm Riders at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Dance lesson with Pattie Whitehurst at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Mike Marshall and Choro Famoso, Brazilian fusion, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50 in advance, $18.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Improvised Composition Experiment, open jam session for out and experimental sounds, at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $5 to play or listen. www.thejazzhouse.com 

The Devotion at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $8.  

848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Whiskey Brothers at 9 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Jules Broussard, Ned Boynton and Bing Nathan at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. www.downtownrestaurant.com 

Blowout, modern jazz, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Fred Randoph Quintet at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Sotaque Baiano, salsa, at 8 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159. 

THURSDAY, JULY 8 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“Sacred Spaces,” an exhibition of installation works by Seyed Alavi, Taraneh Hemami, Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman, Rhoda London, and Rene Yung. Curators walk-through at 7 p.m. Exhibit runs through Aug. 7 at the Berkeley Art Center. Gallery hours are Wed. - Sun. noon to 5 pm. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

FILM 

Alternative Visions: “Love is a Treasure” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Tawni O’Dell reads from her new novel “Coal Run” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Word Beat Reading Series at 7 p.m. with featured readers Paradise and Charselle, followed by an open mic, at Mediterraneum Caffe, 2475 Telegraph Ave., near Dwight Way. For information call 526-5985.  

MUSIC AND DANCE  

Summer Noon Concert with Capoeira Arts Café at the Berkeley BART. Sponsored by the Downtown Berkeley Association. 

Hot Buttered Rum String Band, bluegrass, at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Ducksan Distones, featuring Donald “Duck” Bailey on piano, at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $8-$15 sliding scale. www.thejazzhouse.com 

The Latrelles, Bump at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Rushad Eggleston’s Wild Band of Snee at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Spyro Gyra at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Through Sun. Cost is $15-$26. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Megan Skalard at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Keni El Lebrijano, flamenco guitar, at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Da Cipher, hip hop, at 9 p.m. at the Oakland Box, 1928 Telegraph Ave. Cost is $10. 451-1932. www.oaklandbox.com  

FRIDAY, JULY 9 

CHILDREN 

Goofy Spoofy Storytime with reading of “Baghead” and “Plaidypus Lost” at 10:30 a.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“Whimsy” Works by Bay Area artists, reception at 6 p.m. at ACCI Gallery, 1652 Shattuck Ave. 843-2527. www.accigallery.com 

Fire Arts Festival at The Crucible, 1260 7th St., Oakland. with fire and light artworks, workshops and lectures, through July 11. For details see www.thecrucible.org 

Tanaka Ryohei, “Japanese Etchings” Reception at 6 p.m. at the Schurman Fine Art Gallery, 1659 San Pablo Ave. 524-0623. 

THEATER 

Alameda Civic Light Opera “Fiddler on the Roof” directed by Jeff Teague. Fri.-Sat. at 8 p.m. Sun. at 2 p.m. to July 25, at Kofman Auditorium, 2220 Central Ave., Alameda. Tickets arre $23-$25 available from 864-2256. www.aclo.com 

Aurora Theatre “Betrayal,” by Harold Pinter, directed by Tom Ross, at 8 p.m. and runs through July 25. Tickets are $34-$36. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

Berkeley Rep “Master Class” with Rita Moreno at The Roda Theater. Runs through July 18. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

California Shakespeare Theater “Henry IV” Tues.-Fri. at 7:30 p.m., Sat at 8 p.m., Sun. at 4 p.m. at the Bruns Memorial Amphitheater, through Aug. 1. Tickets are $13-$32. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org 

Contra Costa Civic Theatre “My Fair Lady,” directed by Michael Manley, through Aug. 14, Fri.-Sat. at 8 p.m., selected Sun. at 2 p.m. Contra Costa Civic Theatre, 951 Pomona Ave, El Cerrito. Tickets are $12-$20. 524-9132. www.ccct.org  

Prescott-Joseph Center, “Raisin” an adaptation of “A Raisin in the Sun” Fri. and Sat. at 7:30 p.m., Sun. at 4 p.m. to July 11, at the Sister Thea Bowman Memorial Theater, 920 Peralta St. West Oakland. Theater is outdoors, dress for cooler temperatures. Tickets are $5-$15. 208-5651. 

Woodminster Summer Musicals “Annie” at Woodminster Amphitheater in Joaquin Miller Park 3300 Joaquin Miller Rd., Oakland. July 9-11, 16-18, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $19-$31 available from 531-9597. www.woodminster.com 

FILM 

The Invention of Western Film: “My Darling Clementine” at 7 p.m. and “Pursued” at 9:15 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Bay Area Writing Project, Young Writers Group reading at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com 

By the Light of the Moon Open mic for women hosted by Karen Broder, at 7:30 p.m. at Changemakers Books, 6536 Telegraph. Skiding scale $3-$7. 655-2405. www.changemakersforwomen.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Steve Taylor, singer-songwriter, from 5 to 8 p.m. at International House, 2299 Piedmont Ave. 

South Austin Jug Band, Joe and Lucio, Happiness at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Lavay Smith & Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Swing dance lesson at 8 p.m. with Nick and Shanna. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Jefe Salsa, traditional rhythms from Cuba and Puerto Rico, at 9 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $8-10. 849-2568. 

DJ and Brook, jazz trio, at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Larger Than Life, Whiplash at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $10. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Palm Wine Boys at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Danny Caron at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Dave Matthews Blues Band and Doni Harvey perform from 5 to 7:30 p.m. in Baltic Square, in Point Richmond behind DeWitt Gallery and Framing at 117 Park Place. 236-1401. www.PointRichmond.com/prmusic  

Granola Funk Express at 10 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$7. 548-1159. www.shattuckdownlow.com 

Joshi Marshall Project at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Point Blank at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

SATURDAY, JULY 10 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“Summer Sky” reception from 7 to 9 p.m. at 4th Street Sudio, 1717D Fourth St. 527-0600. www.fourthstreetstudio.com 

Tabitha Soren, “Recalling Democracy: A Snapshot of History,” color photographs. Reception for the artist at 6:30 p.m. The Photolab Gallery, 2235 Fifth St. Exhibition runs to Aug. 14. 644-1400. www.photolaboratory.com 

“Vulnerability Two” A feminist visual artists exhibition, reception at 7 p.m. at Gravity Feed Gallery, 1959 Shattuck Ave. 644-4464. www.gravityfeed.net 

Richmond Art Center, reception for all artists with current exhibits from 3 to 6 p.m. at 2540 Barrett Ave., Richmond. 620-6772. www.therichmondartcenter.org 

THEATER 

San Francisco Mime Troupe at 2 p.m. at Cedar Rose Park, 1300 Rose St. www.sfmt.org 

Woman’s Will “As You Like It” Shakespeare set in 1960s London, at 1 p.m. at John Hinkel Park. 420-0813. www.womanswill.org 

FILM 

Bergman on a Summer Night: “Fanny and Alexander” at 1:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Bay Area Poets Coalition Open Reading from 3 to 5 p.m. on the lawn at 1527 Virginia St. 527-9905. poetalk@aol.com 

Gary Hart on “The Fourth Power: A Grand Strategy for the United States in the 21st Century” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

West Coast Live with Susan McCarthy, Andrea Marcovicci, Amy Farris at 10 a.m. at the Freight and Salvage. Cost is $15 in advance, $18 at the door. 415-664-9500 or www.ticketweb.com 

Kotoja, Afro-Beat, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Dance lesson at 9 p.m. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Sufi Poetry and Classical Persian Music at 8 p.m. with Hossein Omoumi, at 8 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, Cost is $20-$30. 925-798-1300. 

Our Lady of the Highway, American Starlet, Jeffrey Lucas at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com  

John Keawe, Hawaiian music master, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $16.50 in advance, $17.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Ofrenda with Jose Roberto Hernandez at 9:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12-$15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org  

The Rio Thing, Latin jazz, at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $3. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Sandy Chang at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Psychokinetics, Sol Rebelz, Mickey Avalon at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $7. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Post Junk Trio at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Carl Sonny Leland Trio “Boogie Woogie, Stomps and Rags” at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

The Soviettes, Sleeper Cell, Deconditioned, Words That Burn at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, JULY 11 

THEATER 

San Francisco Mime Troupe at 2 p.m. at Cedar Rose Park, 1300 Rose St. www.sfmt.org  

Woman’s Will “As You Like It” Shakespeare set in 1960s London, at 1 p.m. at John Hinkel Park. 420-0813. www.womanswill.org 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“Viva la Charreria Mexicana” a photography exhibit by Heather Hafleigh at Peralta House, 2465 35th Ave., Oakland. Opening from 2 to 4 p.m. Exhibition continues through Sept.  

Matrix 212: “Intention to Fail” film and videos by Eija-Liisa Ahtila opens at Berkeley Art Museum, 2625 Durant Ave., with an artist’s talk at 3 p.m. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

“Sacred Spaces,” an exhibition of installation works by Seyed Alavi, Taraneh Hemami, Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman, Rhoda London, and Rene Yung. Reception for the artists from 2 to 4 p.m. Exhibition runs through Aug. 7 at the Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. in Live Oak Park. Gallery hours are Wed. - Sun. noon to 5 pm. 

FILM 

Bergman on a Summer Night: “Fanny and Alexander” at 5:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

“Divided We Fall” a Czech holocaust drama, at 2 p.m. at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. Suggested donation $2. 848-0237. www.brjcc.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Cien Mil Palabras de Neruda” 100,000 Words of Neruda, a community poetry reading marathon to usher in Neruda’s birthday, from noon at La Peña. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Susan Halpern on “The Etiquette of Illness” at 7 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Sponsored by Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Poetry Flash with Al Young and William Minor at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Teka, from Budapest, at 7:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Americana Unplugged: Square Pegs String Band at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Deaf Electric, bi-monthly experimental electronic series at 7 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $8-$15 sliding scale. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Robert Lowery, Rev. Rabia and Virgil Thrasher, acoustic blues, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761 www.freight- 

andsalvage.org 

Jovino Santos Neto and Friends, Brazilian pianist, at 4:30 at the Jazzschool. Cost is $18. 845-5373. www.jazz- 

school.com

There’s a piece of furniture in the Art Deco exhibit that just closed at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco that seems to be deliberately designed for maximum use of precious materials. Come to think of it, there are several of those, the silver-plated canopy bed of some maharajah being a standout, if only because someone has to polish that big, complicated thing. But what I’m talking about was a writing desk, gesso’d and gilded with white gold, ornamented with ivory and rock crystal. It was built by one Sir Edward Maufe, out of ebony, mahogany, and camphorwood. 

Friends of mine received a dresser as a wedding gift; not at all Art Deco, but made entirely of camphorwood, and it looks and smells marvelous. The scent is a bit like the red cedar in your mother’s cedar hope chest, with maybe a bit of Vicks Vapo-Rub tang added—but only a bit, surprisingly. Seemed just the thing to store silks and woolens in, and in fact it’s supposed to be moth-repellent. 

Camphor isn’t quite so endangered as mahogany these days, and that’s largely because there’s so much of it living outside its home range of China, Taiwan, and Japan. It’s been planted as an ornamental and street tree in cities all over the temperate world, including here in Berkeley. They’re scattered around town, mostly on streets with old tree plantings; a row of good examples stands on the west side of Berkeley High, and there are several specimens, most in sad decline, in Martin Luther King Jr. Park just across Allston. They have brown, neatly furrowed bark, broad bases and rounded tops, shiny oval leaves and red-to-yellow new growth that looks pretty and optimistic. Their little white flowers aren’t spectacular; the black berries aren’t either, but are good bird chow. 

They’re a staple in cities and on streets of a certain age, and most of us don’t even notice them unless they’re picking up the sidewalk. If you see a tree you think might be camphor, it’s easy enough to be certain: pluck or pick up a leaf, crush it, and sniff. Every part of the tree has that volatile, scented oil in it. 

Camphor’s formal name is Cinnamomum camphora (sometimes seen as Cinnamomum camphorum) and yes, it’s related to the species that give us the spice cinnamon: Cinnamomum verum, Cinnamomum aromaticum (also called Cinnamomum cassia), Cinnamomum loureiroi (”Saigon cinnamon”), and several others. There’s a great heap of names in Latin and the various current languages that probably reflects the confusion, purposeful or not, that accompanied the precious stuff when it was part of the spice trade. 

Camphor oil is used these days mostly for “alternative” medicine and scent purposes. It was used externally for a long time against respiratory problems: Remember “John Brown’s baby had a cold upon its chest/And he rubbed it with camphorated oil”? It’s acknowledged as fairly toxic, and when externally applied or even just sniffed is usually diluted. I wouldn’t mess with it myself, but I freely admit that’s because I’m sure I had the lifetime maximum dose of Vapo-Rub by the time I was a still-wheezy 10-year-old. 

Quite a few of the camphors in Berkeley are senior trees nearing the end of their useful lives. I’m speaking in tree years, of course—think in decades and you’ll be in the right sort of Entish scale. They usually don’t get replaced with more camphors, mostly because they’re notorious for lifting pavement, and as you can see if you look at them in almost any curb strip, get nice wide buttress trunks that are squeezed and constrained by the sidewalks and curbs around them. 

It won’t surprise faithful readers to see that they’re invasive, too, mostly because of those tasty berries. (Some folks complain about black stains on pavements and cars from those, too.) They don’t get away here much, but are causing problems in the warmer bits of Australia and other semitropical places like Florida. Too bad; camphors are nice, stately trees in the right place, and even potentially useful when they give up the ghost, if the remains are milled for furniture. 

3

TUESDAY, JULY 6 

“Local Transportation Concerns” with Peter Hillier, Transportation Dept., City of Berkeley, at 5:30 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. Bring your list of issues, and food to share. Sponsored by Berkeley Ecological & Safe Transportation Coalition. 

Environmental Justice Workshop on Climate Change at 6:30 p.m. at the Elihu Harris State Building, 1515 Clay St., Room 1, Oakland. Sponsored by the California Air Resources Board. www.arb.ca.gov/cc/cc.htm 

Bamboo Building Strong as steel in tension, timber bamboo can grow three feet in a day, be sustainably harvested every year and uses a small fraction of the land required by trees. We will cover proper tool usage and joinery as well as design ideas that avoid the more difficult, time-consuming joints. From 7 to 10 p.m. at the Building Education Center, 812 Page St. Cost is $35. 525-7610. 

Adventure Racing 101 Learn about mountain biking, running, paddling and the equipment and skills involved, at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

“The Fourth World War“ A film about a war without end and of those who resist with powerful images from movements in Argentina, Mexico, Genoa, Iraq, New York, Palestine, Quebec City, South Africa and Korea. Benefit for SOUL/ 

Just Cause. At 9:15 p.m. at Parkway Theater, 1834 Park Blvd., Oakland. Cost is $7. vjmWest@yahoo.com  

American Red Cross Blood Services is holding a volunteer orientation from 9:30 to 11 a.m. at 6230 Claremont Ave. Volunteers are needed to support the more than 40 blood drives held each month. Advance sign-up needed. 594-5165. 

Organic Produce at low prices sold at the corner of Sacramento and Oregon Streets every Tuesday from 3 to 7 p.m. This is a project of Spiral Gardens. 843-1307. 

Phone Banking to ReDefeat Bush on Tuesdays from 6 to 9 p.m. at Cafe de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck Ave. Bring your cell phones. Please RSVP if you can join us. 415-336 8736. dan@redefeatbush.com 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers We are a few slowpoke seniors who walk between a mile or two each Tuesday, meeting at 9:30 a.m. in the Little Farm parking lot. To join us, call 215-7672.  

WEDNESDAY, JULY 7 

Twilight Garden Tour “Don't Water the Natives!” Debunk the “Don't Water the Natives!” and other myths about gardening with California native plants, at 5:30 p.m. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Cost is $12-$17. To register, call 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu  

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday, rain or shine, at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes, sunscreen and a hat. 548-9840. 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around Preservation Park to see Victorian architecture. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of Preservation Park at 13th St. and MLK, Jr. Way. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/wallkingtours 

“The Sixth Sun: Mayan Uprising in Chiapas” an assemblage of orginal and borrowed film footage telling the events of the Zapatista uprising on Jan. 1, 1994, at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St. in downtown Oakland. 654-9587. 

“A Greener Middle East” Meet Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian students who are participating in environmental internships in the Bay Area, at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. 848-0237, ext. 112. 

Berkeley Communicators Toastmasters meets the first and third Wednesdays of the month at 7:15 a.m. at Mediterraneum Caffe, 2475 Telegraph Ave. 524-3765. 

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6:30 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704. www.ecologycenter.org 

Fun with Acting Class at 11 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Free, all are welcome, no experience necessary.  

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. Vigil at 6:30 p.m. Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www.geocities.com/ 

vigil4peace/vigil 

THURSDAY, JULY 8 

“GMO Free Alameda County” a discussion of genetically-modified organisms and how to keep them out of Alameda County’s ecosystems, with Anuradha Mittal, at 6 p.m. at Café de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $15 and includes a GMO-free dinner. Reservations can be made by calling 843-0662. 

Dahr Jamail, “Direct from Baghdad” at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $10-$15 sliding scale. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

“Pocohontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur and Diplomat” with Paula Allen at 7 p.m. at Belladonna, 2436 Sacramento St. 883-0600. www.belladonna.ws 

Berkeley Farmer’s Market with all organic produce at Elephant Pharmacy parking lot, 1607 Shattuck Ave., at Cedar from 3 to 7 p.m. 548-3333. www.ecologycenter.org 

Grizzly Peak Flyfishers, a group dedicated to furthering the noble sport of fly fishing through education and conservation, invites you to its monthly meeting at 7 p.m at the Kensington Community Center, 59 Arlington Av. in Kensington. 547-8629. 

East Bay Mac User Group meets the 2nd Thursday of every month, from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at Expression Center for New Media, 6601 Shellmound St. www.expression.edu 

Tea Dancing and Dance Lessons with Barbara and Jerry August from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Cost is $5, includes refreshments. 925-376-6345. 

FRIDAY, JULY 9 

“So How’d You Become an Activist?” with Dave Lippman, aka George Shrub, the singing CIA agent, and Kiilu Nyasha, Black Panther veteran, at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, 1924 Cedar St., at Bonita. Suggested donation $5. 528-5403. 

Berkeley Critical Mass Bike Ride meets at the Berkeley BART the second Friday of every month at 5:30 p.m. 

Berkeley Chess Club meets Fridays at 7:15 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Players at all levels are welcome. 652-5324. 

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. People of all traditions are welcome to join us. Sponsored by the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. 655-6169. www.bpf.org 

Overeaters Anonymous meets every Friday at 1:30 p.m. at the Northbrae Church at Solano and The Alameda. Parking is free and is handicapped accessible. For information call Katherine, 525-5231. 

SATURDAY, JULY 10 

World Food Festival: Cuisine of India Cooking demonstration by Kasuma Sheth of Shakti Foods, at 11 a.m. A presentation on the Greening of Ethnic Restaurants project at 11:30 a.m. at the Saturday Berkeley Farmers’ Market, Center St. at MLK, Jr. Way. 548-3333.  

Walking Tour of Old Oakland “New Era/New Politics” highlights African-American leaders who have made their mark on Oakland. Meet at 10 a.m. and the African American Museum and Library at 659 14th St. 238-3234.  

www.oaklandnet.com/wallkingtours 

Oakland Heritage Alliance Walking Tour of Oakland’s Walkways and Streetcar Heritage from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Tour is limited to 20 persons. Cost is $5 for OHA members, $10 for nonmembers. For reservations call 763-9218. www.oaklandheritage.org 

Gardening for Wildlife Attract birds, butterflies and beneficial insects. Learn to diversify your garden by including California native plants that provide food, shelter, and nesting places for wildlife. Follow-up meeting with landscape designers on July 31. From 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Malcolm X Elementary School, 1731 Prince St. Free. 444-7645.  

www.stopwaste.org 

“Liquid Gold: How to Use Urine to Grow Plants (Safely!)” a talk and workshop at 10:30 a.m. at 1120 Bancroft Way, near San Pablo Ave. $15 donation, proceeds help fund City Slicker Farm’s urban farming demonstration programs. Registration required.  

info@liquidgoldbook.com 

Butterflies in the Garden Learn how to attract these beautiful creatures into your yard by providing the caterpillars with food plants and the adult butterflies with nectar plants, at 10 a.m. at Magic Gardens Nursery, 729 Heinz Ave. 644-2351. www.magicgardens.com 

A Cool Evening Hike Meet the mosquitoes, bats and woodrats; we'll be in the dark together listening to wildlife. This is a drop in program; no registration is required. At 7 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

All Together for Chiapas Benefit for Emergency Relief An evening of video, dance, spoken word and music from 7:30 p.m. to midnight at the Capoeira Angola Center, 2513 Magnolia St., West Oakland. Donation $7-$15, sliding scale, all proceeds to emergency relief. Sponsored by the Chiapas Support Committee. 654-9587. 

Campaign Finance Reform with Berkeley Fair Elections Coalition and Adona Foyle of Democracy Matters at 8 p.m. at Studio Rasa, 933 Parker St. 693-5779. 

Get Ready for the Breast Cancer 3-Day Learn about what gear is essential, packing and hydration at 10 a.m., with an optional training walk at 11 a.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Lavender Seniors of the East Bay, a group for gays, lesbians, bi-sexuals and transgenders over the age of 55, holds their monthly potluck at noon at San Leandro Community Church, 1395 Bancroft Ave., San Leandro. 667-9655. 

Yoga for Seniors at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St., on Saturdays from 10 to 11 a.m. The class is taught by Rosie Linsky, who at age 72, has practiced yoga for over 40 years. Open to non-members of the club for $8 per class. For further information and to register, call Karen Ray at 848-7800. 

SUNDAY, JULY 11 

Bay to Barkers Dog Walk from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Cesar Chavez Park, Berkeley Marina. Fundraiser for East Bay Humane Society. 845-7735. 

“Iraq: The Untold Story” A panel discussion with Clarence Thomas, Central Labor Council fo Alameda County, Barbara Lubin, founder of Middle East Children’s Alliance, and Emanuel Ashoo, Iraqi-American, all who have recently returned from visits to Iraq, at 2:30 p.m. at St. John the Baptist Community Center, 6500 Gladys Ave., El Cerrito.  

“Significant Roles of the United Nations” with Rita Maran of the United Nations Association, at 9:30 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Road, Kensington. 525-0302.  

Oakland Heritage Alliance Walking Tour of Mountain View Cemetary from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Meet at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave. Tour is limited to 20 persons. Cost is $5 for OHA members, $10 for nonmembers. For reservations call 763-9218. www.oaklandheritage.org 

Butterfly Habitat Learn the plants and butterflies and take plants home for your own habitat. From 10 to 11:30 a.m. in Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. To register call 525-2233. 

Hands On Bike Maintenance Class from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. Fee is $85-$100, advance registration required. 527-4140. 

Introduction to Drip and Sprinkler Irrigation A survey of innovative irrigation solutions that save water and money. A full range of irrigation products will be explained. The class will serve as an introduction to both sprinklers and drip systems. Appropriate use of each as well as system automation with valves, timers, and rain sensors will be covered. At 11 a.m. at Urban Farmer Store, 2121C San Joaqin St., half mile from Central Ave, Richmond. For reservations call 524-1604. 

Golden State Model Railroad Museum open from noon to 5 p.m. Also open on Saturdays and Friday evenings from 7 to 10 p.m. Located in the Miller-Knox Regional Shoreline Park at 900-A Dornan Drive in Pt. Richmond. Admission is $2-$3. 234-4884 or www.gsmrm.org 

Tibetan Buddhism with Erika Rosenberg on “Eastern Wisdom Meets Western Science” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812.  

www.nyingmainstitute.com 

MONDAY, JULY 12 

Women’s Cancer Resource Center, volunteer training, every second Monday of the month, from 6 to 8 p.m. at 5741 Telegraph Ave. To sign up call 601-4040, ext. 109. www.wcrc.org 

Berkeley Community Gardening Collaborative meets at 6 p.m. at Berkeley Youth Alternatives, 1255 Allston Way. 883-9096. 

Great Popular Fiction Bookgroup meets to discuss “The Rule of Four” by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason at 7 p.m. at Barnes and Noble, 2352 Shattuck Ave. 644-0861. 

Fitness for 55+ A total body workout including aerobics, stretching and strengthening at 1:15 p.m. every Monday at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5170. 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. Volunteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

ONGOING 

Berkeley Video and Film Festival is calling for entries. The deadline for last call is July 10. For information please call 843-3699.  

www.berkeleyvideofilmfest.org 

Luna Kids Dance Summer Camp for ages 9 - 13, from July 12 - 16. For information call 644-3629. www.lunakidsdance.com 

Interesting Backyards Do you have a really cool backyard project or unusual sustainable living practice that you’d like to share with others in the East Bay? Consider becoming a stop on the 5th annual Urban Sustainability Bike Tour on Saturday, July 31. Past sites have included features such as graywater systems, chicken coops, bee hives, solar installations and permaculture gardens. For information call Beck at 548-2220, ext. 233. 

www.ecologycenter.org 

Summer Reading Games at the Albany Public Library, through August 14th. For information call 526-3700. 

Medical Care for Your Pet at the Berkeley East Bay Humane Society low-cost veterinary clinic. 2700 Ninth St. For appointments call 845-3633. www.berkeleyhumane.org  

Radio Summer Camp, four day sessions through Sept. 6. Learn how to build and operate a community radio station. Sponsored by Radio Free Berkeley. 625-0314. www.freeradio.org 

“Searching Within” A free 9-week course starts on Thursday July 15, 6:30 to 8 p.m. at 2015 Center St. To make reservations call 652-1583.  

www.mysticweb.org 

Introductory Storytelling Classes for Adults offered by Stagebridge from June 29 through August on Tuesdays, 10 a.m. to noon at Arts First Oakland, 2501 Harrison St., at 27th St. near Lake Merritt. For information call 444-4755. www.stagebridge.org. 

CITY MEETINGS 

Council Agenda Committee meets Tues. July 6, at 2:30 p.m., at 2180 Milvia St., Sherry M. Kelly, city clerk, 981-6900. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil/agenda-committee 

Commission on the Status of Women meets Wed., July 7, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Ruby Primus, 981-5106.  

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

Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board meets Thurs. July 8, at 7 p.m. in City Council Chambers, Pam Wyche 644-6128 ext. 113. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/rent 

Commission on Early Childhood Education meets Thurs., July 8, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Marianne Graham, 981-5416. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/earlychildhoodeducation  

Community Health Commission meets Thurs, July 8, at 6:45 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. William Rogers, 981-5344.  

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

Two-by-Two Meeting of elected City and School officials to dicuss common concerns, Thurs., July 8, at 8:30 a.m., in the Redwood Room, 6th floor, 2180 Milvia St. 644-6147, 981-7000. 

West Berkeley Project Area Commission meets Thurs., July 8, at 7 p.m., at the West Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7520. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/westberkeley  

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thurs., July 8, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. Mark Rhoades, 981-7410.  

www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/zoning ô

Despite objections from several students, faculty and the Albany City Council, a University of California committee Wednesday approved UC Berkeley’s plan to demolish some of its most affordable housing and uproot one of the area’s last vestiges of farmland. 

However, the fight over University Village—a 77-acre plot just over the Berkeley border along San Pablo Avenue with apartments for graduate student families and 10 acres of agricultural research land—might be far from over.  

Residents of the 412 units of condemned housing have promised a legal challenge to the university’s Environmental Impact Report (EIR) and one Albany official hinted at doing the same. 

“It’s a possibility,” said City Councilmember Alan Maris. “Their EIR says traffic impacts are insignificant. They haven’t proven that to us.” 

The $268 million project, in the works since 1998, will come in two parts. Starting in early fall, the university will demolish and replace a row of 1960s-era graduate student housing. Two bedroom apartments that currently rent at $786 per month will nearly double to $1,302 to pay off the bonds floated by UC. 

Then in 2006, the university plans to move two little league fields to the agricultural land known as the Gill Tract, restore Cordornices Creek near where the baseball fields currently sit, and build roughly 800 new units of housing for faculty and mostly single graduate students. Some of that new housing would be on San Pablo Avenue above 72,000 square feet of new retail space that would include a mid-sized supermarket. 

The second phase of the project, which still requires official approval from the regents’ buildings and maintenance committee, was scheduled to begin this year, but UC Berkeley Assistant Vice Chancellor Tom Lollini said the university had floated too many construction bonds at other building sites to start the project at the present time. 

Also, Lollini said, UC has dismissed the Memphis, Tenn.-based private developer Allen & O’Hara and will likely develop the retail space itself through public financing. 

Agricultural researchers—who would probably be displaced to an East Bay Municipal Utilities District site in Pinole—and UC graduate students have opposed the plan from the start. The city of Albany, however, is a recent convert to the opposition camp. 

The Albany City Council supports relocating the ballfields to the Gill Tract, building the supermarket and replacing the housing, which is susceptible to mold, but has balked at UC’s refusal to pay development fees and mitigate costs for services to the proposed village, which is expected to house nearly one out of every four Albany residents. 

Environmental Planning Systems, Inc., the same consulting firm Berkeley hired to determine the cost of the university’s exemption from local taxes and assessments, found that the project would result in a net deficit of $713,000 to Albany’s general fund. 

“Right now the way things are heading the university wouldn’t be paying its fair share,” said Albany Planning Manager Dave Dowswell. Although Albany, with a population of just 17,000, didn’t have a budget deficit this year, Dowswell said the city “wasn’t flush enough to be put in that position.” 

Most egregious, said city officials, was UC’s refusal to compensate Albany for increased fire services. Not only could expansion at University Village result in a 41 percent to 83 percent increase in calls for service, according to a city study, but the five story buildings considered for San Pablo Avenue would require a ladder truck, which the Albany Fire Department lacks. Currently Albany depends on Berkeley to supply such equipment in case of emergencies. 

Councilmember Maris said UC’s original plans never contemplated five-story buildings. “It is shocking that UC would build up to five stories on San Pablo when our zoning code set height limits at 38 feet,” he said. 

Assistant Vice Chancellor Harry Le Grande told the UC Regents that UC Berkeley “does not typically pay for fire services in the community where we are,” and that “the university does not provide for all local services.”  

Lollini, who oversees university planning, highlighted a number of benefits Albany would gain from the development, including the new ballfields, restored creek, an infant/toddler center, a community center, and a redesigned street system for the village. He also said the development would net the city about $250,000 in sales tax revenue, although Albany City Administrator Beth Pollard estimated the revenues at significantly less: $16,000. Further negotiations between the city and university are planned before the second phase of the project begins. 

The regents’ committee asked tough questions of Lollini, but voted unanimously to approve with only Student Regent Matt Murray abstaining. Regent Joanne Kozberg complimented the campus on “a really good plan....The materials were very clear and it will make a contribution to the East Bay and university,” she said. 

But before UC can start construction, it will likely have to fend off a lawsuit from displaced graduate students. The Village Residents Association Committee for Affordable Housing has retained Stuart Flashman, an Oakland-based attorney, to challenge the university’s EIR. Flashman said if negotiations failed he would seek an injunction to block construction and argued UC had failed to address the impacts of displacing low income students. 

Although the prices for the new units will nearly double to $1,302 per month, Le Grande, who oversees residential housing, said they would still be about 23 percent below market rate, which he estimated at $1,709. “I think we’re being as responsive as we can given the cost of construction in the area,” he said. 

Longs Drugs is apparently coming to downtown Berkeley and checking its beer and wine selection at the door. 

The chain drug store retailer had threatened to pull out of a deal, nearly two years in the making, to bring an outlet to 2300 Shattuck Ave. at the corner of Bancroft Way, when the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) granted it a use permit that forbade the sale of alcohol. 

Had the deal fallen through, Longs would have been the fourth chain retailer this year to reject downtown Berkeley, which is ailing from an abundance of vacant storefronts. Already Gateway Computers, Eddie Bauer, and See’s Candies have closed shop.  

Last month, the City Council voted 5-4 to set a public hearing for later this month to see if it could salvage a deal for Longs. A five member council majority wanted to exact concessions from Longs in return for allowing it to sell alcoholic beverages just 700 feet away from Berkeley High school. 

However, in a letter sent to the city last week, Longs informed city officials that it was dropping its appeal of the ZAB ruling for the 15,500 square foot retail space at 2300 Shattuck, which has sat empty since 2001. 

Longs officials didn’t respond to telephone calls for this story. Jim Novosel, the project’s architect, said he received an e-mail from Longs executive David Greensfelder saying, “We plan to pursue our store without a liquor license as it is presently entitled (per ZAB).” Longs gave no explanation for its change of heart, Novosel said.  

Previously Longs had demanded an alcohol permit to preserve a standard product line. A company representative also said the expected sales tax revenue generated for the city would be less than the $100,000 previously reported. 

The plan to carry beer and wine ran into opposition from the Berkeley Unified School District and the Berkeley Police Department. Police Chief Roy Meisner wrote to the State Department of Alcohol Beverage Control (ABC) and the city’s planning department that alcohol sales at Longs would increase crime in the area that already experienced rates of police calls for drugs or alcohol 97 percent above the city average. 

Usually ABC grants alcohol licenses, but since the census tract where Longs will reside had already reached its quota, the city needed to agree to a waiver. 

School Board President John Selawsky, who engineered a board resolution opposing Longs, hailed the company’s retreat as “great news. The sale of alcohol so close to a school doesn’t make sense,” he said. “As long as there’s no alcohol I’m happy.” 

But Bonnie Hughes, a downtown resident who also opposed Longs, still wishes the retailer wasn’t coming to the city center. Although she’s happy the store won’t include alcohol, Hughes doesn’t think her neighborhood needs a chain drug store, especially with a Walgreens just three blocks away. 

“What the downtown needs are more interesting shops and Longs doesn’t fit that bill,” she said. 

Hughes, like many of her neighbors, is hoping for a produce store or public market to move downtown. 

Longs had offered to include a produce section as a concession in return for an alcohol permit. However, city officials don’t know if the company will proceed with that component of the store now that it has agreed not to sell alcoholic beverages. 

A grocery store has been one of the top requests from downtown residents, said Ted Burton of the city’s office of economic development. While a produce store is planned for the David Brower Center at Oxford and Kittredge streets, finding one for Shattuck has been difficult, he said, because supermarkets tend to demand parking and pay lower rents than downtown properties demand. 

Novosel didn’t have a timetable for when Longs would open its store. He said the building, owned by the Lakireddy family, needed considerable structural repairs and that Longs wouldn’t be able to begin its own building modifications for at least a year.›

The Fine Arts Cinema is officially dead, and Patrick Kennedy, the owner of the massive apartment and commercial complex rising on its former site, doesn’t hold out much hope for a new theater on the site—spelling the end of repertory cinema in the city t hat first raised it to an art form. 

“We’re advertising the space, and we’ll see what happens,” said Kennedy, “but there doesn’t seem to be much demand for single-screen theaters these days.” 

Kennedy said Keith Arnold, the theater’s last operator, had no tified him that he’s given up on reopening the Fine Arts Cinema in the building that bears its name. 

For serious cineastes—as the more erudite movie buffs often style themselves—a nondescript little theater at 2451 Shattuck Ave. was the Mother Church, th e creation of the founder of repertory cinema and the intended showplace of America’s premiere film critic. 

From the exterior, without the marquee, the Fine Arts Theater could have been anything: a discount outlet, an ice cream plant, a restaurant—some o f its various incarnations since the building first opened in 1923. 

But the building entered the realm of legend when Ed Landberg and his then-spouse Pauline Kael—considered by many cinematic aficionados to be the greatest critic in the history of Americ an film—saw its theatrical potential. 

In 1951, Landberg had opened the Cinema Guild and Studio in a small storefront at 2436 Telegraph Ave. Two years later he met and married fellow film fanatic Kael, then a single mother struggling to make her mark in c riticism. 

The Cinema Guild became America’s first repertory theater, showcasing foreign films with a much sharper edge than the cinematic treacle being dished out by American filmmakers caught in the paranoid grip of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his Red-b aiting goon squads. 

Their movie house, coupled with their incisive essays in program notes handed out at the theater and mailed to an eventual audience 50,000, sparked a revolution, elevating the tastes of American audiences and inspiring young directors to reach beyond the narrow confines of Hollywood commercialism. 

Repertory houses sprung up across the country, turning directors like Akiro Kurosawa and Ingmar Bergman into icons for a new generation. 

Frustrated by the limited space and poor sight-line s at their Telegraph Avenue theater, Kael and Landberg first gave serious consideration to the Shattuck Avenue building in 1957, on the closing of Glady’s, the restaurant which had occupied the site for the previous six years. 

By Nov. 3, 1961, when the building opened after a radical renovation and conversion to theatrical space, Landberg and Kael had divorced, but the traditions forged at the Cinema Guild were transplanted intact into a new setting much friendlier to viewers and films. 

The interior of the new Cinema Theater—which later became the Fine Arts Cinema—was far more spectacular than the relatively nondescript exterior, an Art Deco extravaganza featuring walls of glass, wrap-around mosaic panels, cathedral ceilings, six massive oak chairs desi gned by renowned Berkeley architect Bernard Maybeck, and a large bronze Tiffany chandelier in the lobby. 

According to the petition filed a year-and-a-half ago to landmark the building, the Cinema Theater was the first structure built in America expressly to showcase repertory films. 

In addition to Landberg’s usual revival repertory fare, the Cinema Theater also showed first-run films. 

Landberg’s most memorable offering at the Shattuck Avenue theater came in 1967, when for 41 straight weeks the screen g limmered with the haunting Japanese epic Chushingura, the longest art film run in the history of American cinema.  

That same year, Landberg’s lease ran out on the Telegraph theater, where he had continued to screen repertory fare. Abandoning that locati on, Landberg branched out to San Francisco, creating the Gateway Cinema in the Golden Gate Condominium Complex, which opened the next year. 

In 1970, Landberg’s cinematic empire-in-the-making collapsed in the wake of his second divorce, when he handed ove r the Cinema Theater lease to his ex, who—after failing to turn a profit—subleased the property four years later to the Mitchell brothers, San Francisco porn kings. 

The Mitchells offered hard core fare until 1978, when the building fell into disuse. 

Ala n Michaan of the Landmark Theater chain finally leased the structure, renaming it the Fine Arts Cinema and screening first-run art films for four years, until declining attendance led him to abandon the property. 

For five years starting in 1990, the buil ding became the Bombay Cinema, offering Hindi films to Berkeley’s sizable Indian population. 

Abandoned for another three years, the theater was reopened in 1998 by Keith Arnold and Josephine Scherer, who turned the ailing property into a financial and cultural success. 

The beginning of the end came in 2001, when developer Patrick Kennedy bought the Fine Arts and two adjacent structures. 

The controversial developer unveiled plans to tear down the buildings and replace them with the Fine Arts Building, a massive Disneyesque pseudo-Art Deco structure which would incorporate housing, a restaurant, an art gallery, and a two-screen theater so that Arnold and Scherer could continue to screen their art and repertory fare. 

There was only one catch: The two op erators would have to pay for fitting out the theaters, with costs estimated at $800,000 or more. 

Landberg’s daughter Leslie, born the year the Shattuck Avenue theater opened, enlisted the support of cineastes both from the Bay Area—most notably Lawrence Ferlinghetti—and from across the country in a drive to save the Fine Arts. But their efforts came too late, and they filed for landmark status only after Kennedy had already obtained his demolition permit from the city. 

The final blow came on March 3, 2003, when the Landmarks Preservation Commission voted five-to-three against Landberg’s proposal. 

The way was clear for demolition, and the walls came tumbling down on March 30, marking the demise of a remarkable era in the history of the American cinema. 

Patrick Kennedy, the Berkeley developer whose phantasmagorical 100-unit apartment and retail complex stands near completion on the site of the Fine Arts Cinema, offers a before and after comparison on his Panoramic Interests website. 

At www.panoramicin terests.com/projects/finearts.html, web surfers will find an architect’s rendering of Kennedy’s complex, poised directly above a photograph of the old theater. 

Of all the possible pictures of the building during its varied incarnations, Kennedy’s website offers only one—from the four years of the Mitchell Brothers’ tenure, featuring a marquee for a double feature: Captain Lust (the first XXX swashbuckler) and Hand Full of Diamonds. 

At the time the theater was demolished, Kennedy said the Fine Arts would be reborn in spacious quarters in his new building—but that plan has vanished because operator Keith Arnold couldn’t raise the $800,000 to $1.2 million it would have cost him to outfit the unfinished space Kennedy offered. 

“Anyone who crunched the numbe rs would’ve realized that it wouldn’t work. The theater simply can’t make that kind of money,” Landberg said. “It’s the same thing that happened with the Shotgun Players and the Gaia Building. Kennedy just uses these people for PR, then puts them over a b arrel to say ‘this is a done deal.’ But somehow it never is.” 

Landberg said she tried to talk to the Fine Arts operators before the demolition was approved, but Arnold only insisted she not try to prevent the demolition. 

“If I’d known about it six or ei ght months earlier, I think I could have stopped the demolition,” Landberg said. 

After the demolition Landberg said she thought of trying to run the theater herself. “The only way it could make it is if you ran it as a restaurant with a banquet room adap ted for showing films. I talked to exhibitors and figured I could make a go of it—but I’m a writer and visual artist, and I realized that it wouldn’t be healthy to take myself away form my art. [But] I’d love to see somebody else do it.”  

In San Francisc o, where most of the city’s venerable single screen theaters have already been closed and many demolished, voters may be offered a chance to spare eight of the survivors through funds from a mandated share of hotel room occupancy taxes, thanks to the efforts of Save Our Theaters, a group headed by media specialist Greg Stephens. 

Stephens has been gathering petitions for a November ballot measure, which would also give independent filmmakers a large return from the theaters in return for agreeing to film a third of their next feature in the city across the Bay. 

When Kennedy’s newest building opens—“We’re shooting for next month,” Kennedy said—the theater space will stand vacant like much of the other first floor cultural and retail space in the developer’s other downtown buildings—leaving Berkeley cineastes to mourn the loss of the city’s last repertory showcase. 

“It makes me angry,” said Elliot Cohen, a longtime habitue of the Fine Arts. “We lost an important cultural amenity.”P

Summit Health, the parent company for Alta Bates Summit medical center, was the target of a lawsuit filed in Federal court Wednesday that alleges the company overcharges uninsured patients and does not fulfill its obligations as a non-profit entity under U.S. tax law. 

The case was filed on behalf of Berkeley resident Duane Darr, an uninsured patient who was charged $4,600 for X-rays and other basic care after he slipped and fell in a supermarket last May. As part of the case, lawyers are seeking class action status for others facing what they say is similar treatment. 

According to the complaint, Sutter Health, which operates more than 20 hospitals, “has engaged, and continues to engage, in a pattern and practice of charging unfair, unreasonable and inflated prices for medical care to its uninsured patients who are generally the least able to pay these inflated and unreasonable charges.” 

The complaint also alleges that Sutter uses aggressive collection techniques when they go after the uninsured. 

Additionally, the complaint says Sutter Health does not provide the kind of charity care it should as a not-for-profit business. 

“Sutter has amassed and hoarded billions of dollars in cash and marketable securities which otherwise should be available to provide charity care to the uninsured whose care was contemplated by the provision of the tax exemption,” the complaint states. 

It goes on to charge that Sutter Health has more than $4.4 billion in assets and hauled in more than half a billion dollars in profit in the past two years, but only spent 0.6 percent of its revenue on charity care, or 40 percent less than the statewide average for other private hospitals. 

“I think it is surprising for many to learn that a hospital that enjoys a tax exempt status in fact makes almost half a million dollars in profits and dedicates little to charity and the people who are most vulnerable in our society,” said Kelly Dermody, of Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein, LLP, and the attorney who filed the case. 

Karen Garner, a spokesperson for Sutter Health, defended the company’s bill collection policies saying the company has an obligation to “collect payment from the patients who can pay all or part of their bill,” so the company can “keep its doors open.”  

When asked why the company made a half a billion dollar profit but still filed lawsuits or made negative credit reports against patients who hadn’t paid, Garner said she “could not speak to that,” and that “those are things that will be addressed at the appropriate time.” According to a report cited in the lawsuit, Sutter sued close to 300 patients for collections in Sacramento in 2003, and since 2002 has sued 134 patients in San Francisco.  

Garner did point out that the company prohibits wage garnishment, bench warrants and property foreclosures. She said Sutter Health has a number of community programs including their charity contributions to county indigent funds, support for community clinics, and a policy that allows low-income and the uninsured to apply for discounts or write-offs for their bills. 

“We have a long history of addressing community needs and our commitments are measured by more than charity dollars,” she said. 

Still, said Dermody, Sutter Health charges the uninsured 100 percent of what they call the “sticker” price for hospital bills, while they give private insurance companies and government third party payers (such as Medicare and Medicaid) significant discounts. 

“There are a number of major institutions in the health care industry that have bargaining power and can negotiate prices,” she said. “What is known in the hospital world is that no one pays the sticker price. The price itself is unreasonable. Unfortunately [the uninsured] don’t benefit from that. We believe those prices are illegal and discriminatory and bear no relationship to the cost.”  



Nothing can stop a group of determined Berkeley volunteers this summer, not even engine failure, monsoon season, or long hours in the hot, humid, sun. Not when the election is on the line. 

Stand Up! Florida (SUP), an East Bay group of 15 or 20 volunteers, many from Berkeley, are kicking off a summer campaign to ensure voters in Northern Florida do not suffer through the same kind of treatment that left thousands disenfranchised in the 2000 election. 

A federally registered political action committee, SUP has spent the past weeks sitting in front of community stores and going door to door, mostly in towns of 4,000-6,000 people, to register and educate voters about their rights in an important swing state that may once again play a critical role in an evenly divided presidential election. 

SUP representatives say they have chosen Florida towns and counties with large African American populations because it was black Florida voters who were most severely affected in 2000 during purges when thousands were turned away—or kept away—from the polls. SUP representatives will be in these communities all summer, until Oct. 4, the last day to register to vote. Some will be back for the November election. 

“We said, we are going to put our money where our mouth is and make sure [2000] doesn’t happen again,” said Aaron Rosenfield, an Oakland resident. 

For the past three weeks, group members said it’s been a rollercoaster of success and failure. After raising $2,500 dollars last weekend at a Berkeley fundraiser, SUP had to sink almost all of it into one of their cars in Florida because the engine blew up. At the same time, members said that almost every day they are able to register several people or help convince others about the importance of the election. 

“There are a lot of people who don’t trust the system,” said Erin Brandt, a peace and conflict resolution major at UC Berkeley and a Florida native. “They have other problems to deal with and it’s hard for them to make this a priority. They don’t trust the system because of the last election.” 

Co-founded by Rosenfield and Jeremy Bled, Stand Up! Florida was tossed around as an idea for a couple of years following the 2000 election, but came to fruition when Rosenfield and Bled were joined by other volunteers who agreed that targeting Florida for voter registration and education was one of the most direct ways to ensure a fair election. 

Kimia Mizany, who signed on a couple of months ago, said she became involved because she knew California will probably go to the Democrats, and voter initiative groups are in abundance. 

“[SUP] saw Florida as a unique place to operate, they thought it was very likely to be in the spotlight again,” said Mizany. “They wanted to operate in the place where they could be most effective, get your biggest bang for your buck.” 

Besides voter education and registration, SUP is also part of fight to challenge the state’s felon list, which many say was used to purge the voter rolls in the 2000 election. Investigations have shown that large numbers of citizens—mostly African American—were illegally kept from voting because they were mistakenly put on the list, which is 47,000 people long. 

“The felon’s list works in that you are guilty until proven innocent,” said Rosenfield. “If you are on the list you have to go to the supervisor of elections and prove your innocence. You should not have to prove your innocence in this country, but [in Florida] you do.” 

Pair Strongarms Victim’s Cash 

Two men approached a pedestrian walking along Bancroft Way near Ellsworth Street shortly before 6 p.m. Monday and strongarmed him into handing over his cash. 

Probationer Flashes Privates and Blade 

Police arrested a 31-year-old Berkeley man in Civic Center Park at 7:14 a.m. Tuesday on charges of indecent exposure, brandishing a deadly weapon, and probation violation after a woman called to report that he’d exposed himself to her, then flashed a blade. 

Toothbrush-Chewing Bandit Foiled By Karate Kick 

While a mob of fans was thronging the intersection of Telegraph Avenue and Haste Street Tuesday in hopes of obtaining an autograph from a former president, a short, rotund felon wearing a three-quarter-length black leather duster and chewing on a toothbrush attempted a strongarm robbery of one of the crowd. 

The would-be victim told officers he warded off the bandit with a well-placed karate kick, said police spokesperson Officer Joe Okies. 

Pursesnatchers Land in Juvie 

A trio of young robbers landed in juvenile hall after they relieved a woman of her purse near the corner of Parker and Ellsworth a few minutes after 7 o’clock Tuesday evening. 

Police captured the youths and escorted them to new quarters in Juvenile Hall. 

Duo Nabs Victim’s Keys 

Two juvenile strongarm types relieved a man of his keys in the parking lot of the University Avenue Andronico’s Park & Shop shortly before 9 o’clock Tuesday evening. ›

Berkeley Police expect 40,000 spectators for the city’s annual Fourth of July fireworks extravaganza on the Berkeley Marina this weekend, according to police spokesperson Officer Joe Okies. 

The show—scheduled to commence about 9:30 p.m.—will trigger temporary changes in city traffic flow, with access to I-80 blocked at University Avenue and Gillman Street throughout the 30 minutes of pyrotechnics. 

Police will close off access to the fishing pier at 5 p.m., and will close the marina itself to traffic when the parking lots are filled, which typically happens about two hours later, Okies said. 

Marina vehicular traffic will be closed from 45 to 90 minutes after the show to allow pedestrians safe passage out of the area. 

Okies said the surest ways to attend the event will be on foot and via bicycle. 

Neither alcohol nor so-called “safe and sane” privately fired fireworks will be allowed—the latter are banned throughout the city at any time—and plenty of Berkeley’s finest will be on hand to make sure the rules are followed. 

—Richard Brenneman›

The media chatter about Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 comes down to three basic issues: 

• Is the film 100 percent accurate, or is it fundamentally misleading?  

• Can it sway the undecideds and thereby affect the election itself, or will only partisans fork out their money for a ticket? 

• Is this a legitimate use of a medium whose role is to entertain us, not ridicule the government or lecture the populace? 

Those three media preoccupations largely miss the point, however. Moore’s brilliant political achievement—whether intended or not—doesn’t happen directly on the screen, and it’s not likely to show up in weekend polls.  

This is not an electorate easily swayed by reasoned discourse. If it were, the war on Iraq might never have been initiated. The winning formula for this election won’t be convincing the formerly hostile; it will be mobilizing the already convinced. 

Moore may conceivably nudge a few undecideds, but his real accomplishment may be firing up his own partisans, especially the cynical young and the economically ignored. By legitimizing their anger and alienation, he may motivate them to participate in what otherwise seems to many of them a futile electoral exercise.  

Not only will this be an election campaign to mobilize the partisans; it will also be a tug of war to define the subject matter. Is it the economy, stupid? Is it wounded pride and feel-good patriotism? Is it fear of terrorism? The war on evil? Iraq? Torture? Education? Abortion and gay marriage? Civil liberties? The Ten Commandments? 

We’ve all grown accustomed to manipulation by carefully posed photos, orchestrated “messages of the day” and focus-grouped slogans for which candidates pay consultants exorbitant fees. They’re the essence of contemporary American politics, but no one would maintain that they are exercises in reasoned debate. Rather, they are attempts to stake out territory as one’s own, with little or no regard for policy content.  

“The Education President,” for example, makes no pretense of telling the voter what the candidate would do for education—only that he’s a guy who really, really cares a whole lot more than his opponent about that issue. For instance, here he is reading to a grade-school class. 

The key to those “messages of the day” is to grab the initiative; to make sure that the contest is fought in your home stadium. And that’s where Michael Moore has thrown his monkey wrench into George Bush’s finely tuned campaign machine. For no matter what you think of Moore’s arguments, no matter what you think of his film’s persuasiveness, no matter what you think of his factual assumptions...Michael Moore has rewritten the agenda. He has seized home-field advantage. 

No doubt the disintegration in Iraq softened the opposition for Moore. But both in his film and in the buzz surrounding it, he has brashly commandeered attention. The press, the public and especially the Bush White House, normally so adept at guiding the media discourse, must deal with Moore’s images and his issues, and that can only work to John Kerry’s advantage. 

A White House that stage manages every single photo op to the tiniest detail (and a press corps that compliantly retails those images) is now forced to contend with unscripted, real-world images—sometimes as goofy as the official photos are saccharine. 

Moore’s issues, too, are in the national spotlight, driven partly by attempts to suppress them or challenge them. Did the president’s negligence or his loyalty to the Saudis or the bin Laden family distort his response to 9/11? The answer is debatable, but the focus now, belatedly, is on the question itself. Was the war in Iraq all about the poor being cajoled into risking their lives on behalf of oil plutocrats, ideologues and defense contractors? Once again, Moore’s answer is not as significant as the fact that the question is being asked—and heard. 

If the White House had its way, this campaign would not be waged on issues like the undue influence of Saudi potentates or greedy defense contractors...or on economic equity...or whether the president was on autopilot while New York and Washington burned.  

But for the past week (and, with its unprecedented box-office popularity, for the foreseeable future), those have indeed become issues in this campaign, whether John Kerry raised them or not—and whether or not Michael Moore has every last one of his facts right. What’s more, the issues are being addressed not in Washington code talk but in language and images familiar to the average dude. 

That is Michael Moore’s great achievement. He got the White House and its allies to lunge for his bait. It’s rather like an animal trap—the more aggressively the prey fights back, the more tightly bound it becomes.  

Brilliant. 

Peter Sussman is a Bay Area writer and editor currently working on a book of the letters of another great American provocateur, Jessica Mitford.›

The Berkeley Unified School District passed a $46 million budget for its general fund Wednesday, its first balanced budget in three years. 

If the Alameda County’s Office of Education certifies the budget, which it has rejected every year since 2001, Ber keley will have to meet fewer bureaucratic reporting requirements, Superintendent Michele Lawrence said. 

The district has approved about $14 million in cuts and budget shifts over the last three years to balance its books. However, it still lacks the req uired three percent rainy day reserve requirement. 

Unlike past years when cuts meant rising class sizes and diminished programs, this year’s budget was relatively controversy free, since the district managed to trim about $6 million through savings, cost shifts and cuts mostly affecting classified employees. 

Class sizes will remain the same next year at ratios of 20 students per teacher for kindergarten through grade three, 30:1 for grades four and five, 32:1 for grades six through eight, and 33:1 for t he high school. 

Last week the board placed an $8.3 million tax measure on the ballot for November that would lower class sizes and restore some of the programs cut in recent years. 

Lawrence, who is touting a new round of financial planning, warned that although the district appeared on sound fiscal ground for the next two years, structural deficits would return in fiscal year 2007. 

“Unless we get more revenue, we’ll be in the same position we were two years ago,” she said. 

›

Alameda County’s almost 1,500 General Assistance welfare recipients were issued a temporary reprieve, at least for this year, after the County Board of Supervisors voted last Friday to maintain the program even in the face of severe budget cuts.  

The decision will ensure that General Assistance recipients will receive their monthly stipend year-round instead of having it cut off after nine months. The decision, say advocates, is extremely important for many on the GA rolls who are teetering on homelessness but able to stay housed and fed because of the small monthly stipend. 

However, the decision by the board and the Alameda County Social Services Agency, which administers the money, puts the county in a difficult position because it is now betting on future money to pay for the still existing $5.2 million deficit that was to be filled by the cuts. 

According to Sylvia Myles, the public information officer for the Alameda County Social Services Agency, the county is hoping to receive waivers pending on the federal level that will provide savings in other program areas and in turn allow the county to divert that money to GA. 

“We have taken quite a risk,” said Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson, adding that “I don’t think there was any disagreement that it was the right thing to do.” 

Advocates and recipients alike said they were relieved but still concerned that they could be facing similar cuts next year. So in the meantime they have agreed to convene a task force along with the Social Services Agency to evaluate GA. 

“I’m relieved, deeply relieved,” said Patricia Wall, executive director of the Homeless Action Center, a Berkeley-based advocacy law firm. “I don’t think anybody honestly wanted to make the cuts, I’m glad we came to the right conclusion.” 

›

Imagine lunch hour at a Berkeley middle school: Eighth graders tossing salad side by side with cafeteria workers, seventh graders eating the chard they grew in the school garden while receiving a geography lesson, sixth graders sorting seeds to plant for the next harvest.  

Every morsel is organic, locally grown and guaranteed not to plunge Berkeley Unified into bankruptcy. 

For 15 years that has been the dream of Chez Panisse owner Alice Waters, and now, after revolutionizing American cuisine, the Berkeley chef is fronting millions to turn her dream into reality for Berkeley students. 

In an agreement signed Wednesday, Waters—through the Chez Panisse Foundation—committed herself to raise nearly $4 million over the next three years and an undetermined sum through 2014 to reinvent the school lunch at Berkeley Unified, and she hopes, ultimately, across the country. 

“The intention is to teach school lunch as a course,” she said. Waters, a former Montessori teacher who chose not to send her child to Berkeley public schools, envisions Berkeley students from kindergartners through high school seniors taking an active role in their school lunch. Students would plant seeds, raise crops, cook food, learn about sustainable ecosystems, and—as they advance—study nutrition as part of their classroom curriculum. 

The program will start at Martin Luther King Middle School, where Waters has funded the school’s edible school yard program for nine years and starting in 2005 will help run its new dining commons. By 2007, the district plans to expand the program to two elementary schools.  

LeConte, one of the first schools to have a garden, has been selected as the first elementary school for the Waters program, Superintendent Michele Lawrence said. Meanwhile, Waters, the Center for Ecoliteracy, Children’s Hospital of Oakland, and Berkeley Unified teachers and staff will devise a nutrition curriculum throughout the district. 

Waters has not only guaranteed the money to furnish the King cafeteria and edible school yard, she will pay for the curriculum development team and provide more than $800,000 to cover the projected operating deficits for moving to locally produced, freshly prepared organic food. 

When the program is complete, every school in Berkeley will have its own garden and full service cafeteria where students can play a leading role in providing for their nutritional needs. 

“The plan is to engage every single solitary kid,” Waters said. “This seems like the one permanent solution for the obesity epidemic in our country.” 

The Center for Disease Control reported that the U.S. spent $75 billion in 2003 treating obesity-related health problems, and although Berkeley might be a far cry from Houston, the fattest city in America three years running according to Men’s Fitness magazine, Berkeley’s youth are not immune to the national trend. 

About 15 percent of Berkeley youth are obese, roughly equal to the national average, according to Kate Clayton, the city’s Chronic disease Prevention Program Manager. “Unfortunately, some of the uniqueness that we have here is not reflected in better health and nutrition,” she said.  

Results from the 2001 California Physical Fitness Test found that students in Assemblymember Loni Hancock’s district, which all of Berkeley and 12 other East Bay cities, are only slightly fitter than the state average. Twenty four percent of students in Hancock’s district were deemed overweight compared to 27 percent across the state. African American and Latino children were more than twice as likely to be overweight than white children, according to the report. 

Superintendent Lawrence hoped that if after 10 years of private funding the Berkeley program showed improved levels of student fitness, the district would receive state and federal funds to continue it. The agreement signed Wednesday didn’t include measurable standards for determining fitness. 

While never the paragon of culinary excellence, school lunches have deteriorated nationwide. Many cash-strapped districts have fallen prey to stingy federal and state school lunch programs that act as subsidies for large corporate food processors to provide food that offers little flavor or nutritional value. Such has been the case in Berkeley, where students at King and the elementary schools have been eating re-heated, pre cooked meals for years.  

The food at Berkeley Unified has been slowly improving, but lunchroom finances continue to suffer. This year the school’s cafeteria fund is $300,000 in the red, after the deficit topped $600,000 last year. 

To make freshly-prepared organic food a financially viable option for a district that loses money selling a lot of cheap prepackaged lunches, Waters estimates she will have to raises “tens of millions” over the next 10 years. 

She listed philanthropists Robert Wood Johnson and the Kellogg Foundation as possible contributors, and said she has spoken with a United States Senator who offered to seek federal funding. 

The foundation has raised around $400,000 a year for the King cafeteria and others projects in Northern California, but Waters is confident her concern over obesity will make the fundraising drive a success. 

“My plan is that in three years we’ll have millions to fund the entire program,” Waters said. “If not, I’ll have to sell my home.” 

›

BERLIN—In electric transition, the multicultural capital of Germany is now home to a gay mayor, almost as much sushi as strudel, and more Jews than anyone has seen since Adolph Hitler.  

Six decades after the Holocaust, Germany has Europe’s only expanding Jewish population and has surpassed Israel as the chosen destination of Jewish refugees. While France reels from anti-Semitic violence and a new Moscow Human Rights study predicts that Russia’s 50,000 skinheads could double within the next two years, Jews are settling in nearly every corner of the birthplace of Nazism.  

In an existential twist of history, these Jews—predominantly from states of the former Soviet Union—receive rent, health care, higher education, unemployment benefits, and German language classes. Germany feels safer than Israel to them and has a more relaxed attitude than the Jewish state toward mixed marriages.  

It’s been 13 years since Germany made this commitment to rebuild a Jewish community, and most Germans appear to support official hopes that the country can regain the part of its national identity lost in the gas chambers. But that identity is certain to be as different from the pre-war German Jew’s as Goethe was from Tolstoy. Forging it will be up to people like Tamara and Lion Chamilov and their 23-year-old son, Alexander. 

At 49, Tamara speaks perfect English. Her 50-year-old husband is a violinist and Alexander has been studying clothing design. Before the Russian Mafia strong-armed her husband and his father out of their leather and fur business, they had what Tamara calls a “very good life” in Naltchik, near Chechnya. Tamara taught school with a five-year, post-graduate degree. Unlike most of Germany’s new Jews, Tamara and her family are religious. Known as “mountain Jews,” who originated in Persia, they practiced their religion in a Jewish district alongside observant Muslims and Christians.  

At first, the family of four (one son died in an auto accident) received shelter and the equivalent of $1,200 per month from the government. Today, they live near Berlin in Potsdam in a three-story apartment building with 27 other immigrant families. The state covers their $327-a-month, three-room apartment with one bath. Tamara and her husband each receive about $360 a month in unemployment benefits when out of work, which is most of the time. During their first five years, health care was free; it remains affordable at the equivalent of $10 a quarter. 

With German unemployment at about 10 percent and Russian Jewish unemployment at 40 percent, Tamara lucked out several years ago when she landed a contract job tutoring at a nearby boarding school. But the contract ended, and except for looking after two small children three hours a week for $150 a month, she has been unsuccessful at working in her profession. Lion had no work for four years, then played with a Berlin orchestra on a contract that ended last May. Unable to afford his salary, the orchestra turned to social services, which provided it. Like 75 percent of their counterparts, the highly educated Chamilovs have to accept German welfare to survive. 

“If social services stops giving us money, we cannot live,” says Tamara.  

Her dream is to get permission from the German minister of education to tutor English. Then, the family would petition to move to Berlin, close to Lion’s father and greater job opportunity. Aware that the United States is not accepting Jewish refugees from Russia in the numbers it welcomed when the Soviet Union first collapsed, Tamara still dreams of joining close family in Kentucky.  

“I visited Louisville once,” she says, “Oy vey, Louisville! So beautiful and so much opportunity!” 

Before Hitler, about 560,000 Jews lived in Germany, connected emotionally and materially to its cultural life. Afterwards, 15,000 Jews remained. Today, there are about 190,000 Russian Jews in Germany, only 70,000 of whom are involved in the official Jewish community. They watch Russian television, tune in to Russian radio, and intermingle with Russian cultural groups. The dwindling German Jewish population chafes at the overwhelmingly secular Russian complexion of the state-supported Jewish community. 

“This is not paradise for Russian Jews,” says Judith Kessler, sociologist and editor of the monthly magazine, Jewish Berlin. “They are safe and they are not starving. But they sit in their flats, strangers in Germany. After anti-Semitism and a secular state, they can’t be expected to cross a border and suddenly want religion. I’ve been telling them for over a decade—without success—to lower their career expectations. Only the future will tell if they will create a new Jewish community or break off by themselves.” 

Hilary Abramson is a San Francisco journalist and contributing editor to Pacific News Service.›

Since drama in real life does not come with a sound track—nor promos to get you in the proper frame of mind to interpret what is to come—its true import is often lost on us in the fleeting moments of the actual experience. That is even more true in these days of Internet blogs and 24-hour cable, where a gaggle of honkers following the parade rushes to interpret—the latecomers helpfully providing interpretations of the initial interpretation—so that we come away with our common sense numbed, all remnants of our own initial impressions irretrievably lost. 

And so it was this week with that brief, but telling, Baghdad minuet, America returning sovereignty to the Iraqis, with Mr. Bremer bustled out the door and onto the plane, coattails a-flapping, all before the last, sad sound of the summer band had cleared our ears. 

So let us take note of the moment, quickly, before it is lost to memory. 

What we witnessed behind the Green Line this week was a defeat—a resounding, embarrassing full-frontal defeat—for the administration of George W. Bush. And any attempt to label it otherwise is pure spin. 

For the Bushites, the Gulf War, the Sequel, was fought in anticipation of two historic moments…some cynics might call them “photo opportunities.” The first anticipated moment was actually a collection of victory visions—American tanks rolling unimpeded along the Tigris River roads, drivers grinning, all thumbs-up; the cheering crowds greeting U.S. soldiers along the way as town after town fell to our advance; the triumphant entry into Baghdad itself; the toppling of the statue of Hussein-the-dictator’s humbling capture in the spider hole—all culminating in the fighter-jet flight, the pilot suit, the strut across the deck of the Lincoln, hurrahs from the thousand sailor throats, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED waving from the battlements. 

The second anticipated moment for the Bush administration was to be the transfer of power to a free Iraq. Here the United States was to show it was a world power unlike all other world powers—dynastic Egypt, imperial Rome, and colonial Europe never gave up their territories without a struggle, and absent insistent demand. But the United States would be different and in one telegenic moment—Marines at attention, U.S. and Iraqi flags snapping side-by-side, and with a simple, symbolic handshake the powerful U.S. envoy passing over to the new Iraqi president the reigns of power. Here, our little brown brothers. Join us in the circle of freedom. A photograph for the ages, for both political posters and history books. 

In calling this an anticipated photo op, I do not mean to be disparaging. It is in such encapsulated moments—some merely symbolic—that humans mark our history. While the soldiers on each side had their own personal memories, for most Americans the end of the U.S. Civil War is marked in two recorded events: Lee bending over the little table in the Appomattox Courthouse study, putting pen to the papers of surrender—and, only a few days earlier, Lincoln walking amidst cheering crowds of former African captives through a fallen Richmond down to the Confederate capitol building, setting himself, just to see how it fit, in the chair where Jefferson Davis had so recently ruled. Little John-John saluting at the funeral of his president father. The flag-raising at Iwo Jima. The firehoses and police dogs at Birmingham, the horses and police-clubbings at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The last helicopter rising above the roof of the embassy at Saigon. King thundering at the Washington Monument. Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin seated at Yalta, the Last Great Alliance of East and West. Snapshots of recorded history. How humans mark our way through time. 

But some of these events come with no anticipatory fanfare and so we were all initially caught off guard, when the moment of transfer actually came. I was flipping channels while I cleared old files off the computer—not really paying much attention to what was happening on the television screen—and for a little bit I was not quite sure of the headline crawling below the talking head. “U.S. Transfers Power To Iraq.” “While the scheduled date for this transfer was actually two days from now,” the on-the-scene reporter was explaining, “the new Iraqi government was already in place, and so the Bush administration decided there was no need to delay. One of the considerations was that—in moving up the transfer of power two days early—the administration would thwart the anticipated buildup violence leading up to that event.” 

The transfer itself was not broadcast live for security reasons, we were told, and reporters were put under a shroud of military-imposed silence, forbidden to announce the event until Ambassador Paul Bremer, administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, had the chance to flee the country. 

And so we have lived long enough to see the ignominy of the official representative of the United States—the pre-eminent military power of our time—ducking and running for cover from those whom the president continues to call, dismissively, “thugs.” And all the Marines and Tomahawk Missiles and fighter bombers were not, apparently, enough to protect him. 

It is all only symbolism, of course. Though the non-Christian “heathen” rage in Fallujah and Najarif and the suburbs of Baghdad, they have no power to cross the so-called Green Line. Unlike Vietnam in the days of Tet, there is no room-to-room fighting along the polished hallways of the American Embassy. The danger was never that violence would interrupt the ceremony of the torch-passing itself, but that the violence outside would overshadow it…that it would be the horrific rather than the handshake that the networks would cover. And so, with a growing pan-Arabic, pan-Muslim insurgency spreading like burning oil across the sands of Iraq, the Bush administration decided to cut it short, hustling to the airport lest the plane take off without us, tossing the keys over the counter on our way out of the hotel. 

It is only symbolism, of course. 

But a potent, powerful symbolism, nonetheless—an encapsulated moment of the American experience in Iraq. And it did not go nearly the way the Bush administration had planned. 



As the “energy crisis” rolls on and the environmentally oblivious continue to waste gas on SUVs, Hummers and RVs, the most critical dissent one hears in the broader public forum is a mild protest with respect to the price at the pump (Democrats love to jump on this bandwagon). What a revolutionary cry! As if releasing federal reserves and reigning in the power of the oil corporations slightly were enough to bring back the good ol’ days of American prosperity and that nostalgic heyday of the car culture. Meanwhile, the American public is carefully guarded from knowledge about the real costs of petroleum (economic, political, social, medical, environmental, military, etc.) and the indisputable geological truth of the finiteness of a resource we continue to splurge as if there were no tomorrow. And the inevitable consequences this will have to our geopolitical status are woefully ignored and swept under the rug by all quadrants of the political spectrum. 

In contrast, I would like to submit that not only is it whimsical and ecologically destructive to waste oil on such non-essential and/or inefficient uses of oil, such as the private automobile, air travel and excessive reliance on electricity, but that this waste is actually a security threat and, therefore, effectively unpatriotic—even subversive! Yes, the American life-style is most definitely and undeniably a threat to ecological integrity (what there is left of it!). But there is—in a very myopic American sense—something even more pressing to consider. The common sense fact that our national defense relies on the use (and therefore supply) of oil seems to escape everyone in the discussion of the pros and cons of wars for oil. As if it were a luxury to get oil from Saudi Arabia and we could really do without it, if we wanted to. This is no trivial matter. And it is no coincidence that our international strategy has revolved around this fact, ever since the end of World War II. Every president since FDR, Democrat or Republican, has recognized the significance of securing the oil supply. It is a seldom observed fact that Germany and Japan lost the war largely because they did not have their own supply of oil and were unable to secure it through conquest (of Azerbaijan by Germany and the Dutch East Indies by Japan). Just think what might have been, if Hitler had lived in Saudi Arabia! 

This does not mean, of course, that I am trying to defend the occupation of Iraq. But consider this: “The United States … is currently [2001] producing oil at the rate of about 2.8 billion barrels per year; if that rate is maintained in the years ahead and no new deposits of oil are discovered, U.S. reserves—estimated at 28.6 billion barrels in 2000—will be fully depleted by 2010.” (Michael Klare, Resource Wars) That pretty much means that six years from now (2004) we will be fully dependent on foreign oil. Is there anyone out there who really believes we can convert our technology to alternative, sustainable sources in the next six years—even if we wanted to? So what will our options be then? Realistically speaking we will need to somehow procure foreign oil or turn to nuclear power (which is clearly not a desirable—and perhaps not even feasible—option). Otherwise, in six years, whoever is in control of oil in the Middle East (if not us) will pretty much be able to roll right over us. This sounds to me like squandering oil now is somewhat anti-American! Maybe the oil companies are really a communist conspiracy! And their pro-car and sprawl culture, speed-worshipping propaganda is meant to blind us to our own ill fate.  

Instead, I believe we should be saving every bit of oil we can get our hands on (especially our own supplies), put it in the reserves and protect it with our life’s blood because we are bound to need it to protect our lives! And given the trend of increasing anti-American sentiments worldwide, growing by leaps and bounds with each passing day thanks to our current president and his neo-con lackeys, we are going to need every bit of it. This is a frightening prospect considering the nonchalance of our attitude about using oil for any frivolous reason.  

So the next time you see a Hummer or an RV racing down the highway, feel free to roll down the window and yell out: “You anti-American, unpatriotic swine! Don’t you know there’s a war on terrorism going on? If you want to waste gas, why don’t you go and live with the Arabs? You’re going to get us all killed!” 

Berkeley can eliminate its budget deficit and provide better governance by shifting some of the government functions to community associations. A voluntary civic association would be formed in each council district. The association would be able to raise revenue for civic services without being bound by state laws that have put local governments in straitjackets. 

The root of the fiscal crisis in California is that the state constitution, especially Proposition 13, has cut off the natural source of local public revenue, the land value generated by civic services. Public services such as streets, parks, schools, security, and fire protection make the area a better place in which to live and work. This raises rents and land values. It is both efficient and equitable to finance city services from the land values it generates. 

The property tax prior to Prop. 13 was bad in taxing both the value of buildings and other improvements along with the land value. But instead of just exempting buildings, Prop. 13 capped the property tax. The state later added to the problem by taking away some of the property tax revenues from the cities and counties. 

But voluntary neighborhood associations are not bound by such fiscal shackles. Residential associations are free to raise their revenues as they wish. A community association may tap local land values to raise revenues for its neighborhood services. Shifting some city services to neighborhood civic associations would also bring government closer to the people and empower the local communities to provide more effective security and public works. 

A community association would be created in each council district in Berkeley. Each association would have a board of directors, which could also be called the community council. Each resident, including tenants, would have one vote, and also, each owner of a house or business property would have one vote. So an owner-occupant would have two votes, one as resident and one as owner. 

The city would then transfer authority and funding for some services to the community association. These could include street maintenance, some policing functions, and some zoning decisions. For example, a public hearing for new construction, if it is not a major project, could be done by the association, since this mostly affects the neighborhood. This would not only save the city some revenue, but also reduce the time obligations of the city council. The community association would also enable more Berkeley residents to be active in civic affairs. 

Some residents would choose to not join the association. The city would therefore create a partnership with the associations to represent non-members and share the financing and decision-making between members and non-members of the community associations. Non-members would be subject to extra city charges to help pay for the community services jointly financed by the city and the community association.  

The funding difference would be that city taxes penalize enterprise and community development, whereas association assessments could enhance jobs and housing. Berkeley's taxes on real estate fall on improvements rather than land value, so they punish developments that provide housing and jobs. In contrast, if the members of a district wish to encourage housing and employment, it would be able to tap its local land values instead of imposing added costs on construction and improvements. 

Proposition 13 has disempowered local public finance, but community associations can once again empower cities and neighborhoods. Berkeley can lead the way to better public finance and more community spirit by empowering the neighborhoods.  

Berkeley resident Fred Foldvary teaches economics at Santa Clara University. 

›

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am pleased to read the letters and article in the Daily Planet about the Rent Board. It is telling that the reasoned arguments are the ones critical of the behavior of this city agency. 

It is truly unfortunate that so much antagonistic law has been codified. Rent control, on the face of it, does make a certain sense. Creating an expensive bureaucracy that criminalizes the business of landlords does not. Rental Ordinance rules are designed to entrap landlords, and opportunistically levy unusually high penalties too feed a bloated city agency. They are not an honest result of “progressive” thinking. They are more like a war conducted by people who started out resenting paying rent and just never grew out of it.  

The logic ignores the real costs of owning property and rent control as an economic force itself. No sensible property owner can afford to rent a vacant unit at anything but the very top of the market precisely because, once it is rented, the rent is then fixed until the next vacancy comes along. If the rent is too good a deal, that may never happen. Good deals are, unfortunately, serious traps for Berkeley landlords to avoid. That is why prices in Berkeley stay at their highest during periods in which there is a glut of rentals on the market.  

Property ownership, particularly of smaller properties, is often a family owned business. It is a way to have an investment in the future while raising children. It is a way to fund their college. In some cases, it is a way to continue working in the non-profit sector or, for example, as an adjunct faculty at a state university, where there are no job protections. For some people, it allows for a socially beneficial and/or artistic career without having to ignore one’s personal responsibilities. For immigrants, it is the primary mechanism to become empowered in a society, economically and politically, and it is that for all low-income people. 

Ideologues frequently like to describe the world in the most simplistic terms. For them, it is a “my way or the highway” situation, because to them the world is essentially harsh, and lacking in subtleties. Personally, I find this the most destructive impulse among many of those who describe themselves as progressive. They have heroes and villains and that’s it! In the world described by the Berkeley Rental Ordinance, it is painfully obvious that the Rent Board sees itself as the champion of the always-victimized tenant against the always-greedy landlord. Real life, of course, does not toe this version of a line in the sand. 

You have to wonder then, about the wisdom of appointing teenagers to the Rent Board. However, there is a possibility for a greater wisdom here. How about starting an initiative to the voters to redirect the rental registration fees that fund this multi-million dollar agency and pour them right into our public schools. This would solve the school districts budget crisis, allow for improvement, and greatly improve access to quality public education for all. Since education is the best route to social justice and a better life, everyone would benefit. Let’s stop wasting money and preserve the quality of our schools!  

Tom Ferentz  

A FEW POINTS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

A few points I would like to make: 

1. The U.S. has moral and legal responsibility to finance humanitarian relief and economic reconstruction, and must involve and employ Iraqis in the reconstruction process.  

2. The U.S. must take full responsibility for abuses of Iraqi prisoners. Senior officials must be held accountable and systemic problems must be recognized and remedied.  

3. A recent State Department terrorism report shows that in 2003, worldwide terrorist attacks were at a 20-year high.  

4. War has increased anti-American sentiment and destroyed international norms and laws regarding preemption and torture.  

5. According to the 9/11 Commission, Iraq and Al Qaeda have no connection.  

Warren W. Wright 

Oakland 

• 

BIG UGLY BUILDINGS 

Editors, Daily Planet 

Big ugly buildings (BUBs) seem to be sprouting like weeds all over Berkeley. I suggest the City Council pass at least a one-year moratorium on the approval of new BUBs. That way we can take a good look at the BUBs already in the pipeline and see if we want more. I’m afraid if we don’t do this we’ll wake up one day and find that all our thoroughfares have become urban canyons and most of what’s left of Berkeley’s small town character will be lost forever. 

Michael Fullerton 

• 

TELEGRAPH T-SHIRTS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I have to agree with the recent letter writer who was outraged by the Telegraph Avenue t-shirt vendor who is selling shirts that poke fun at Native Americans. Surely the vendor in question knows by now that only white males are allowed to be the butt of the joke in politically correct Berkeley. And I was doubly offended by the vendor’s latest insensitive t-shirt: a parody of the “Cal” logo, substituting “Hell” for “Cal” (in resplendent gold-and-blue Golden Bear colors no less). As a Satanist-American, I feel that comparing Cal to Hell perpetuates negative and demeaning stereotypes about the netherworld. 

Ace Backwords 

• 

PENSION CONTRACTS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The Alameda County Board of Supervisors acted totally irresponsibly and illegally without approval of the property owners when it approved pension contracts allowing employees to retire at age 50 with full pension. 

With that one stroke, they ensured that half the county employees would be retired on pensions and not providing any needed county services. 

It also ensured that county services would have to be cut back and that property owners, who had already paid for those services, would have the right to sue the county to recover those services and void the union contracts that now hold them in involuntary servitude to pay for pensions they never approved. 

You can’t tax property owners to pay for pensions. It is inherently unconstitutional. You have to pay the employees first and let them pay for their pensions. 

When the Alameda County Board of Supervisors sides with labor unions to pay back political contributions and does this at the expense of residents and property owners, this is massive political abuse and they deserve to be sued. 

Stephen Jory 

• 

TWENTY OPINIONS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

1. Mr. Sukoff (Daily Planet, June 29-July 2) rattles off 20 opinions (not observations). One main theme is that Berkeley does not truly tolerate opinions varying from the progressive left. Did Mr. Sukoff fail to notice that his article got published? 

2. I have found that Berkeley is a community with very strong morals and values. They aren’t the same morals and values held in, say, Crawford TX, but they’re held just as strongly. If Mr. Sukoff is intimidated by this, he should work up the courage to challenge them instead of simply saying that nothing can change in Berkeley. 

3. Berkeley activist population is certainly larger than Mr. Sukoff’s guess of 1,000, if the enormous crowd that showed up at Fahrenheit 9-11 is any indication. Going to that movie is activism, voting is activism, talking with your neighbor is activism. Sukoff shouldn’t undermine the power of the small good acts we all do with his own cynicism. 

4. He thinks politics in Berkeley is bad? I lived and worked in DC for three years. Politics is blood sport. In the words of Harry S. Truman: “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” 

5. I’m really glad that Berkeley city employees are not overworked, are well-paid, not constantly threatened with firing and assured a comfortable retirement. We should all be so lucky. 

Anita Sarah Jackson 

P.S.: I don’t hate Emeryville. 

• 

FAHRENHEIT 9/11 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I agree with Andrew Sarris’ conclusion in his middle-of-the-road review of Fahrenheit 9/11 (Daily Planet, June 29-July 2) that the documentary is “one of the most thought-provoking releases of the year.”  

Among the thoughts provoked in me is Moore’s astounding feat of portraying how a totally American coup took place while still on-going; and that the coup took place with the complicity of every single Democratic senator.  

I was also astonished to see the courage and persistence the Black Congressional Caucus demonstrated trying to get redress for 40,000 disenfranchised African American Floridians whose nullified votes gave Bush his Electoral College majority. I hadn’t read or seen before any mainstream coverage of what they did and what they said.  

Their integrity, however, couldn’t overcome the post-1968 policy decision of the Democratic Leadership Council not to fight for civil rights any more. This decision, as it turned out, delivered Bush unto us.  

I was also struck by Bush’s lack of affect upon hearing the news of the second plane attack on the World Trade Center. He showed neither sadness, nor anger, nor resolve. Instead, I thought he looked shifty or maybe guilty.  

Moore’s achievement, driven by his authentic patriotism, is also a unique milestone in that just going to see it is a political action in itself.  

Now that these truths are outing into collective consciousness in wide waves, the next dot to connect is what to do about/with them, given present political options.  

The left has now boosted Kerry’s chances and perhaps generated some leverage to nudge him from his comfy center-right perch. Can we get Kerry to repudiate the Patriot Act? It’s the least he could do for us.  

Maris Arnold  

• 

CLEVER PROPAGANDA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It’s nice we’re all so jolly and jizzed over Michael Moore’s new movie. 

But is anyone else uneasy that a self-important filmmaker who’s been a little lax when it comes to intellectual discipline is having so much influence on the debate about this war? 

Didn’t you find those record-breaking lines at local theaters somewhat embarrassing? After all, we do read around here, we don’t need great big pictures.  

Alarms should go off when we find ourselves getting all tingly over Moore’s divining of motives or conjuring up perfect connections between ambiguous facts. He himself has backpedaled some from claims he made during the pre-release promo tour. 

Moore is more just a clever propagandist, a fantasist, than a real documentarian. That’s fine, but I hope we and our children remember the difference. 

James Day 

• 

MORE OBSERVATIONS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Since I have known Albert Sukoff for at least 30 of his 40 years in Berkeley and since he and I both have planning degrees from UC, I have to offer a couple of observations about his op-ed piece. First, Berkeley may indeed have a bloated city bureaucracy, but the fact that “Hayward is six times larger [in area] than Berkeley...” probably simplifies rather than expands the need for city administrators. Berkeley zoning staff, traffic engineers, and police spend a lot of time trying to sort out the problems caused by congestion in a city with no place to grow. Second, I suspect, without checking the statistics, that Berkeley has lost population because of the decline in household size, caused by gentrification of historically low-income neighborhoods and the move of some families to the suburbs in search of “better” (or at least whiter) schools. The number of households and cars belonging to households has not declined. In saying that “those who might otherwise live here must drive here...” Albert seems to buy without question the university’s inferences that the increase in faculty and staff commuters is the result of city’s policies. The problem is that the free market, that Albert so much worships, has placed the cost of Berkeley housing beyond the reach of most who live on university salaries. If the city is at fault it is because among the reasons affluent buyers push up the price of housing are that the NPO and Berkeley zoning and traffic controls, while sometimes annoying, have made so much of the city a nice place to live. 

Christopher Adams 

• 

SOLANO AVENUE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In response to Peter Klatt’s letter, following mine (Daily Planet, June 29-July 2), I hope I made it clear that we welcome La Farine, but oppose the granting of another food service permit, which their proposed tables would require. 

I heartily agree with him that to solve Berkeley’s budget problems we must increase retail trade. Berkeley residents probably spend tens of millions of dollars each year in Emeryville and El Cerrito, because that’s where the stores are. Big stores. And Berkeley derives no revenue from that outflow of money.  

The most obvious solution to this problem lies at the foot of Gilman, where everything west of Seventh Street is a wasteland of scrapyards and shanties. This freeway exit could become a bustling hub of commerce. 

To those who dream of the emergence of light industry there, I have a wake-up call. Light industry has gone south of the border or half way around the world. 

Jerry Landis  

• 

TAKING ON THE BIG U 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thank you for your splendid editorial (“The Local Press Takes on the Big U,” Daily Planet, June 18-21) that addressed Chris Thompson’s hysterical journalism regarding UC’s expansion plans (East Bay Express, June 16), which includes building faculty housing in Strawberry Canyon. We wish to point out that Thompson’s ranting reproval of Berkeley residents’, and especially the Committee to Minimize Toxic Waste’s (CMTW’s), tactics in opposing UC management, has no basis in fact. In particular, his statement that CMTW members “carp about Lawrence Berkeley Lab-not to get anything done, but merely to hear themselves squawk”, shows a total ignorance (ie., lack of journalistic research) of the fact that the CMTW was founded in the early 1990s to fight the university’s plan to build a replacement facility for the storage of all it’s Berkeley Campus laboratories’ toxic and radioactive waste in Strawberry Canyon just catty-corner from the Haas swimming pools. 

This first battle was won by the CMTW and was followed several years later by another victory, the closing, Dec. 31, 2001, of the Cal-managed Lawrence Berkeley Lab National Tritium Labeling Facility, who’s legacy waste remains in the soil, groundwater and vegetation of the Strawberry Creek watershed. So much for our “tactics,” and, for those interested, check out our fact sheets and the “Contamination Chronicle” on LBNL.  

Gene Bernardi  

Co-Chair Emeritus 

Committee to Minimize Toxic Waste,  

• 

IN NEED OF AN EDITOR 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In the June 29 issue, Albert Sukoff offers 20 observations after 40 years in Berkeley. He needs an editor, or he needs my unified field theory of Berkeley ethnography that explains everything, even our struggles over questions like “you want coffee?” or “who lives, who dies and whose deck view has monetary value?” 

For more than a hundred years, eager students from across the U.S. and the world have completed their studies at UC Berkeley. All were blessed. Some never left. Rather than just basking in the rarified air of western imperial education and then going out in the world or back home to make it a better place, these ingrate graduates, seduced by the climate no doubt, bought real estate and settled down to the great and good goal of making Berkeley heaven on earth, with excellent property values. 

Attending a City Council meeting is like going to an experts convention. The guy on your left is a PhD, the woman on his left is an “alternative realtor,” the next concerned citizen over is a doctor, next speaker is a lawyer, a government rep, a university rep, a technician from the Lab, and yes, a lot of activists making themselves useful. But contrary to Mr. Sukoff’s observations, it’s not always how hard your butt to sit past midnight, it’s also how thick your wallet and it’s not just a bunch of dilettante activists, Berkeley includes plenty of wannabe town burghers. 

The town suffers from the opposite of a brain drain—just too many darn smart citizens for good order. So, I’m suggesting a repatriation campaign. I will offer 10 dollars to the first Berkeley graduate still on the voter rolls after 20 years who goes forth, back to Iowa or Hillsborough or Bali or wherever in the provinces you came from to perform Berkeley’s good works where they’re needed.  

Then maybe this place built for the university can get back to its real job of gouging students. 

Hank Chapot 

Central Campus Gardener 

• 

WASTEFUL SPENDING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

BUSD claims to be short on money. Yet, BUSD continues wasteful spending. 

Three to four years ago, BUSD put in a covered eating area with benches and tables at Willard. Now, BUSD plans to rip out those tables and replace them with nothing. BUSD will be ripping out some of the gorgeous roses in front of Willard to plant new ones. Why? 

In schools, our kids are taught about California, its special climate and the benefits of our native plants. Yet, BUSD insists on planting more and more lawns. In the last year, BUSD planted a new lawn at the high school, a new lawn at King, and now this summer, a new lawn is in the works for the front of Willard. Grass is water-wasteful. (Just ask EBMUD.) BUSD mows its lawns with gas lawn mowers and weed whackers. The U.S. is in our second Middle East war in 12 years because of oil. And the prediction is that scarce water in the parched west will be the basis of new wars. Water and gas cost money, and gas powered tools emit greenhouse gasses. So why is BUSD planting more lawns? BUSD should consider drought tolerant and beautiful native California bunch grasses, which don’t need to be watered and don’t need to be mowed. 

We’ve had an energy crisis for several years. Yet, the brand new building at Berkeley High uses as much electricity as the entire rest of the campus. That new building has increased the high school’s power bill by 100 percent. What happened to energy conservation? 

Willard was allocated $465,000 for this round of improvements to the grounds. Then Willard was told there was only $362,000 to spend on actual work. What happened to the other $103,000? Rumor has it, BUSD spent $103,000 (25 percent) of Willard’s allocated funds for consultants and architects. Why? 

BUSD doesn’t seem broke the way it’s spending money. Maybe, BUSD should practice what it teaches our kids: the four Rs. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and Rot. Reduce through conservation precious resources such as gas and water, Reduce what’s spent on consultants so there’s more money for teachers and students. Reuse materials and supplies we already have, don’t tear out benches, seats and existing plants which are perfectly functional. Recycle and rot. Every year in June, dumpsters arrive at each school. Hundreds of dollars worth of stuff is thrown away, which three months later, is replaced with new stuff. We can only dream that some day schools will really reduce, reuse and recycle and all the cafeteria waste will be composted rather than ending up in the landfill. 

More of us need to speak out against the waste in our schools. And BUSD needs to take active steps to wisely use the resources and money we have already given you. 

Dan Peven 

?

For three hours on midday Tuesday, a seemingly endless chain of book-clutching fans threaded their way up Haste Street toward Telegraph Avenue in hopes of receiving an ink scrawl and a handshake from the man on the second floor of Cody’s Books. 

William Jefferson Clinton had come once more to Berkeley, this time to promote the sale of My Life, the autobiography that’s already set a slew of records in its first week of release. 

Clinton’s first-day sales of 400,000 set an all-time record for a non-fiction hardback—though the numbers still pale in comparison with the five million first-day sales of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. 

David and April Dumas came from Pinole—David in a wheelchair. “We came because we missed his presidency,” he said. “We’re kind of fond of peace and prosperity.” 

They were among the lucky ones who’d received a ticket guaranteeing them a good chance and an autograph, a handshake and the famed Clinton smile. 

But those in the second, parallel line of non-ticketholders we re less fortunate, even though scores had camped out overnight—making for that rare occasion when people with homes outnumbered the homeless in the Telegraph Avenue sleeping bag count. 

Michael Bono, a semi-retired San Francisco cabbie, arrived by BART Tu esday morning and joined the line at 6:45 am. “I was thinking of camping out, but I didn’t,” he said. “I’d already tried to get an autograph in the city, where he was doing a signing at Book Passage, but they were already sold out.”  

Berkeley native Alaina Slothers had staked out her spot on the sidewalk Monday night, and 16 hours later she was still unsure about whether she was going to get in. 

“I’m going to be a little bitter if I don’t,” she said, adding that if she did make into the store, she’d be fine and forget all about her grogginess and general discomfort. 

Darnette Sheard-Collins and her 6-year-old son Dunavin brought along a chair from their home in San Ramon. They sat and waited, Dunavin slumped in his mother’s lap, exhausted and somber.  

They’d found their spot at 1 a.m., hoping to get an autographed volume for Sheard-Collins’ husband, who’d been deployed to Iraq earlier this month. 

Others came to protest—though from the left, unlike so many of Clinton’s more familiar adversaries. Some, like Dan Ashby, Jennifer Kidder and Herb Behrstock, had come to recruit phone bank workers for the Kerry campaign. 

“We’ve never seen anything like this, nothing of this magnitude,” said Andy Ross, the owner of Cody’s. “It’s been the biggest challenge and largest event in the history of the store.” 

After arriving in a motorcade, surrounded by Secret Service, Clinton’s first sight as he stepped out of his limousine to the cheers of the throng was a Nader For President sign.  

The ex-president signed 1,200-1,300 books, Ross said. The store recorded sales almost as large when Jimmy Carter and Muhammad Ali came to sign their autobiographies, but with Clinton, “we could have sold 5,000 if he’d stayed longer.” 

Ross said his two stores fielded about 20,000 pho ne calls concerning the event in the days before Clinton’s appearance. 

Because the Secret Service refused to allow the ubiquitous Berkeley backpacks inside the store, Ross rented a Hertz truck and equipped it with shelves so his staff could check bags, p acks and parcels.  

Inside the store, the signings went down with assemblyline efficiency. Bookholders were subjected to an intimate sweep by metal-detecting wands in the hands of gimlet-eyed Secret Service agents. 

Store employees then escorted the lucky ticket-holders upstairs, where one staffer took the customer’s book and opened it to the title page, then passed it on to a second staffer, who handed the book on to a third, who slid the book onto the table in front of the former president—where a man held the front cover down while a smiling Clinton deftly scrawled out his signature, then offered the grin-and-grip—a radiant smile and a genteel handshake—before the cover-holder slid the now-signed book to yet another staffer who passed it back to the n ow-beaming buyer. 

“The Secret Service told us that ours was the most successful signing they’d ever seen,” Ross said. “They told us we’d set a new standard.” 

Those who left with autographed books could immediately turn a handsome profit, with buyers ou tside willing to fork over $300 a copy for resale over the Internet. 

Petra Creer, who usually sells the Street Spirit newspaper, had been hired by Darryl Randol, who runs SwissLuxury.com, to buy signed books so Randol could turn around and sell them on h is website for $600. Randol was going to give Petra $40 for every book that she convinced someone to sell. 

When last seen, Randol was trying to entice a pre-teen boy into selling him his book. 

It was when the Secret Service finally told Clinton it was t ime to depart that he proved himself a real mensch, said Ross. 

“He insisted on going outside to see all the people who hadn’t been able to get in, and for about a half hour he was out there, shaking hands,” Ross said. 

One of those he greeted, the friend of a Daily Planet reporter, had been camped out all night. Her adventure ended up not being in vain. The former president signed her book. 

o

I had dinner with Bill Clinton this week, a good friend for the last 36 years—though he’s always been better than me about keeping in touch. 

When he lost his fight for re-election after his first term as governor of Arkansas, he paid me a visit here in Berkeley—and while we were hanging out, he showed me the apartment building on Derby near College Avenue where he stayed one summer. 

He sent me a whole lot of Beethoven when I passed my Ph.D. orals at UC, and later, he invited me to his first presidential inauguration. He was a great help when my father was dying. 

During his terms in the White House, I wrote him a lot of long letters. He’d write back within a week (a short letter, half of it typed, half a P.S. in longhand). Over those eight years, a group of us old friends would get together with him whenever he’d be in town. 

The man’s got a great heart, and it really bothers me when his critics say he’s insincere, that he really doesn’t care about people. I’ve never known anyone who cares so much about people…and he’s been that way since I first met him in 1968 when we were Rhodes Scholars in the same class at Oxford. 

His political gift is like a great singer’s—it’s a talent, a gift for people. He wasn’t a radical in the ‘60s, nor later. Basically, he’s a Fullbright-style progressive populist, born of rural America. 

The tradition starts with Andrew Jackson and it’s Southern. Elvis is an artist in that tradition. What Bill had, and still has is that earthy, humble-folks emotional penetration. He really gets it how people feel, how groups of people feel, and why their leaders take the positions they do. 

One of the first things I noticed at Oxford was the way someone he’d just met would suddenly be telling him the most important things in their lives. People were always saying, “You know, I never told anyone that before!” 

I discovered someone who’s powerfully intuitive and hugely intelligent—he reads as much as any intellectual, but he’s really a man of action. The thing that’s hard to believe is how much energy he has—all kinds of energy, stamina like an ox—but most of all, his heart is big and generous, and people respond to him in kind. 

I saw it Tuesday outside Cody’s Books where Bill was signing books here in Berkeley. A young man walked up the sidewalk holding a copy of “the book” in his hand. A woman approached him who seemed agitated, disturbed. It was obvious she wanted the book. 

And he just smiled and gave it to her. 

That kind of thing happens a lot around Bill. 

He used all that when he was in the White House. He worked hard to understand how the Israelis feel, and how the Palestinians feel, and then worked to help them understand a little about each other. 

All that said, it’s somewhat maddening and somewhat just plain weird, knowing someone as famous as he—for one thing, the Secret Service makes it so nobody knows exactly what a former POTUS (that’s president of the U.S.) is going to be doing, not exactly—not even people who’ve been invited to see him. 

So I got a call at 4:30 Monday afternoon saying there was a chance I’d get to see him if I came to the San Francisco Ferry Building at 7 p.m., where he was signing copies of his autobiography at Book Passage. That’s ALL they’d divulge. 

When I got there, I learned the store had vastly oversold him—instead of the 2,000 he’d been scheduled to sign, the store had handed out 4,000 tickets, maybe more. When I got there at 7, I ran into my friend Jeremy—whom I know from swing dancing (the guy can go down into the splits and rise back up, no hands involved)—and he had ticket number 3,723, and Bill had already signed it. 

But he hadn’t been able to sign them all and there were hundreds, maybe a thousand people around the side of the waterfront building chanting “Sign our books, Sign our books, Sign our books, Bill, Sign our books.” 

The Secret Service took about six of us who’ve known him since way back to some picnic tables by Hog Island Oysters, where Hog Island and Slanted Door fed us more protein than I’ve had in years. 

We’d all known him since forever. There was Susan Mase, a recently-retired San Francisco schoolteacher who’d gone to kindergarten with him; Abby Ginzberg, a documentary filmmaker who’d been at the London School of Economics at the same time we were at Oxford; Martha Whetstone, an old friend from Arkansas who now runs the San Francisco Bar Association, and Dan, who works with Martha. 

Willie and Linda Fletcher sent their regrets—it was their thirty-fifth anniversary, and they went where they were sure to be fed, to Chez Panisse. Willie was another Rhodes Scholar from our class who’s now a Berkeley resident serving on the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and holding a professorship at Boalt Law School. The Justice Fletcher and Ms. Whetstone had run Clinton’s Northern California campaign back in 1992. 

Bill was in great form. We talked about seeing him on television, how he’d done on Oprah, on Rather, on Larry King.  

He’s always been good company, but it wouldn’t be politic to go into any specifics of our dinner. He’d never forgive me, and neither would any good Democrat.  

I can tell you that at the end, he turned to me and asked, “You want a book, Paul?” 

I hadn’t arrived in time to buy a copy, so I was glad when he hauled one out and signed it. I took it with some trepidation. 

“You’re in it, Paul,” he’d told me this when I saw him last summer in New York—which made waiting for his memoirs to hit the stands a little like waiting for a tidal wave, both for me and most probably thousands of other FOBs—“FOB” meaning “Friend of Bill.” 

When Clinton began his run for the White House back in 1991—running full tilt, that is—journalists coined the phrase to describe people like me who seemed to be showing up all over the place. The FOBs were really a journalistic artifact. 

Reporters needed to talk to people who knew him when, since Clinton was “new” on the national scene and the reporters who covered presidential politics were caught with a candidate quite unlike Gephart or Harkin or the other usual suspects already familiar to them.  

They already knew that Clinton talked a great game, but could he be trusted? We said yes, and the FOBs saved him in the New Hampshire primary. 

Journalists continued digging us up, and one after another, we vouched for him whenever they came with questions like, “Do you trust him?” or “Did he inhale?” I answered that second one by saying that if you know anything about marijuana and you’d inhaled yourself, you weren’t likely to remember what anybody else had done. 

When 1991 came round and the only issue on which he was really vulnerable seemed to be Vietnam and the draft, a lot of journalists started calling—even one particularly hostile hack who staked me out in hopes of getting some detail that could get blown up into a federal case against him. 

Since he’d written a letter to my draft board in 1969 vouching that if he’d ever seen a true conscientious objector, I was one. I was a natural for them. 

If you were of draft age during the Vietnam War and had to decide what you’d do when the time came when they called you—or if you can imagine it—you should know what a dilemma we faced. It was simultaneously an academic question and a life-or-death decision. 

Since most of us came from very patriotic families, we cared how they felt about our decisions. 

Bill’s Oxford roommate Frank Aller, whose father was a career civil servant, became a draft resister in protest against the war, and a few years later he shot himself. My own anxieties about the war made me so depressed that I ended up hospitalized for a while. 

It’s a subject only Dostoyevsky could do justice to; when I read The Idiot some years later, I was reminded uncannily of my time at Oxford. 

So when Bill told me I was in his memoirs, I wasn’t looking forward to reliving those times and being flooded with all those feelings. 

That said, Dostoyevsky didn’t write Bill Clinton’s memoirs. The book isn’t “deep”—but is good; it’s penetrating, in fact, it’s gripping. He’s a political animal, and his account of 1968 has a sweep worthy of a fine historical novelist. (Read from his father’s death, p. 112, through p. 145.) It’s as good as The Year of the French, if not on a par with The Red and the Black. 

For those of us who knew him, Bill’s My Life is like a look into a fourth dimensional mirror—a weird angle on your own life, seen from a perspective that’s amazingly consistent and informed by an analysis that is sane and refreshing and impressive. 

Paul Parish, dance critic for San Francisco magazine, has lived in Berkeley since 1973. He covered the first Clinton Inaugural Ball for the New Yorker and Ballet Review. He also teaches dance history at Berkeley Ballet Theater, and tends bar at the Faculty Club. 

Does anybody know a nice sophisticated term to substitute for “Wow!”? Aurora Theatre’s current production of Harold Pinter’s play Betrayal deserves the best: the very best. The most frequently performed of all the famous British playwright’s works, it’s hard to imagine a more effective presentation than the one we have right here in Berkeley.  

Producing Director Tom Ross has guided a top-notch cast through a sterling production of Pinter’s backward-told tale of a marital affair. It’s a seemingly straigh tforward narrative of the seven-year relationship between Jerry and Emma, his best friend’s wife. It’s told, however, from the end to the beginning. The play opens with the couple meeting in a pub two years after their affair has ended and works its way back to the drunken pass which started the whole thing off. 

It’s a “seemingly straight-forward narrative” only because you may well find yourself engaged in vigorous debate after the play is over about what was really happening with these people. Just as in life, in this drama things don’t always add up quite the way people say they are.  

For example, both couples have children, which appears to be the unspoken rationale for the fact that Jerry and Emma don’t even discuss divorcing their spouses and marr ying each other. Curiously, though, the point is really made only by the stage setting; the production is opened by a background video showing little kids at play. But the most effective, as well as poignant, reminder of the affair’s potential damage is probably the assortment of children’s toys dangling from the center of the staging area.  

Carrie Paff and Christopher Marshall play the two lovers, and Charles Shaw Robinson is Robert, the cuckolded husband. (Jerry’s wife, Judith—who never appears in the play—is dismissed as irrelevant on the basis that she is a physician and “absorbed in her work and the children.”) Another factor in the situation is the concern the couple would presumably have felt toward Robert. Whatever his wife may feel about their m arriage—it’s not awfully clear—he and Jerry have been closest friends for decades with an intimate professional relationship. For such articulate people, it seems surprising that there is almost no soul-searching and neither Emma nor Jerry show any reluct ance to enter into the affair.  

In all fairness, it should be pointed out that these people are supposed to be middle-class Britishers, a group not much known for throwing their emotions about in public. (The accents are so well done that you could spend significant time prowling through the biographies in the program in a fruitless effort to determine which side of the Atlantic the actors themselves come from.) 

Jerry seems to have harbored strong feelings for Emma for a very long time, which come out o nly when he gets drunk at a party. It’s Emma’s willingness to respond to his drunken pass—since she is played as apparently sober and quite surprised by his behavior—that ultimately leaves her the most unknown character among the three. What is her motiva tion? Is she actually in love with Jerry? Or has she simply grabbed at a chance to enrich an emotional life grown stale from familiarity? 

You could even argue (and “argue” is the operative word) that Jerry, the best friend, expresses far more concern for Robert than does Emma, Robert’s wife. When Robert confronts Jerry (and Robert’s pain is evident), at one point Jerry quietly acknowledges, “And I was your best friend.”  

No heroics. No drama. And the closeness between them appears to be based on a very real compatability; even at this horrendous moment, Jerry catches himself trying to get Robert’s opinion about another writer. 

But what about Emma? Does she lie to Jerry about when she told Robert about the affair? Why does her marriage end two years aft er she has broken it off? 

This apparently simple and very human drama—albeit extremely well written and performed—becomes increasingly complex as you think about it. 

It’s definitely worth seeing. 

›

FRIDAY, JULY 2. 

CHILDREN 

Celebrate Independence Day with a reading of “F is for Flag and L is for Liberty” at 10:30 a.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-3635. 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

Henry Navarro, contemporary Cuban artist, solo exhibition opens at La Peña and runs to August 2. www.lapena.org 

Works by Ellen Russell opens at ACCI Gallery, 1652 Shattuck Ave. 843-2527. www.accigallery.com 

FILM 

The Invention of the Western Film: “The Big Trail” at 7 p.m. and “The Last Outlaw” at 9:40 p.m. at Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

THEATER 

Aurora Theatre “Betrayal,” by Harold Pinter, directed by Tom Ross, at 8 p.m. and runs through July 25. Tickets are $34-$36. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org  

Berkeley Rep “Master Class” with Rita Moreno at The Roda Theater. Runs through July 18. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

Berkeley Rep, “21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com” Thurs., Sun. at 7:30 p.m. and Fri. and Sat. at 8:30 p.m. Tickets are $25-$35. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

Shotgun Players, “Quills” by Doug Wright at the Julia Morgan Theater. Runs Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. through July 3. Free, donations accepted. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Johnny Talbot & De Thangs, blues band, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Kaki King at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $16.50 in advance, $17.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Flair, Mojo Apostles, Collisionville, Jules Worsley at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Angel Spit at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Marcus Selby Trio at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Jason Broome and Emaline Delapaix at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Off Minor, Strong Intention, Amanda Woodard, Navies at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

Mood Food at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Elemnop at 9:30 at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $7. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

SATURDAY, JULY 3 

CHILDREN 

“Wild About Books” storytime with singer/songwriter Bonnie Lockhart at 10:30 a.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6223. 

FILM 

Bergman on a Summer Night: “The Magic Flute” at 6 and 8:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

West Coast Live with Kerry Getz and The Palm Wine Boys at 10 a.m. at the Freight and Salvage. Cost is $15 in advance, $18 at the door. 415-664-9500. www.ticketweb.com 

Anthony Brown’s Asian American Orchestra at 2 p.m. at Oakland Asian Cultural Center, 388 9th St. Free, reservations recommended. 637-0455. www.oacc.cc 

Samantha Raven at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Cascada de Flores, Cuban and Mexican traditional music, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $16.50 in advance, $17.50 at the door. 548-1761.  

www.freightandsalvage.org 

Wadi Gad, reggae, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

The Rich McCully Band, Dylan Thomas Vance at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Maria Marquez Quartet at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Kurt Ribak Trio at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Beth Waters, Buchanan, Scribe at 9:30 at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $8. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Drop Dead, Lights Out, Look Back and Laugh, Desperate Measures at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, JULY 4 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Pansy Division, The Quails, Veronica Lipgloss & The Evil Eyes at 5 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

Americana Unplugged: The Earl Bros. at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Mal Sharpe’s Big Money in Jazz Band at 2 and 8 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $5. 238-9200.  

MONDAY, JULY 5 

THEATER 

Shotgun Theater Lab “Four Echoes” at 8 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. Free, donations welcome. 841-6500.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Actors Reading Writers “Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace,” stories by Heidi Julavits and David Sedaris, at 7 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. 

Poetry Express featuring Stephanie Manning, from 7 to 9:30 p.m., at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. berkeleypoetryexpress@yahoo.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Bill Bell Quintet “The Jazz Connection” at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

TUESDAY, JULY 6 

THEATER 

Shotgun Theater Lab “Four Echoes” at 8 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. Free, sugggested donation up to $15. 841-6500.  

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

Tabitha Soren, “Recalling Democracy: A Snapshot of History,” color photographs, opens at The Photolab Gallery, 2235 Fifth St. Exhibition runs to Aug. 14. 644-1400. www.photolaboratory.com 

“Within Small See Large” rocks in Chinese painting opens at the Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

“The Korean Potter” opens at the Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

FILM 

Time’s Shadow: “Lyrical Nitrate” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Kirk J. Schneider introduces “Rediscovery of Awe: Splendor, Mystery, and the Fluid Center of Life” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Jazzschool Faculty at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Jazz House Jam hosted by Darrell Green and Geechy Taylor at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Donation $5. www.thejazz- 

house.com 

Edessa, Balkan/Turkish music at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Dance lesson with Ahmet Luleci at 7:30 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Veretski Pass, traditional Eastern European Jewish music, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50 in advance, $18.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Jackie Allen at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Jazzschool Tuesdays, a weekly showcase of up-and-coming ensembles from Berkeley Jazzschool at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Black Box Series of Creative Music at 8 p.m. at the Oakland Box, 1928 Telegraph Ave. Cost is $7. 451-1932. www.oaklandbox.com  

WEDNESDAY, JULY 7 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

Fire Arts Festival opens at The Crucible, 1260 7th St., Oakland. with fire and light artworks, workshops and lectures, through July 11. For details see www.thecrucible.org 

FILM 

Exploit-O-Scope: “The Mask” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

JoAnn Levy reads from “Unsettling the West: Eliza Farnham and Georgiana Bruce Kirby in Frontier California” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with Nazelah Jamison and Karen Ladson at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5-$7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Roy Tyler sings gospel music at noon at Oakland City Center at the 12th St. BART. www.oaklandcitycenter.com 

Club Tecknoir at 10 p.m. at the Oakland Box, 1928 Telegraph Ave. Cost is $4. 451-1932. www.oaklandbox.com  

DP & The Rhythm Riders at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Dance lesson with Pattie Whitehurst at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Mike Marshall and Choro Famoso, Brazilian fusion, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50 in advance, $18.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Improvised Composition Experiment, open jam session for out and experimental sounds, at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $5 to play or listen. www.thejazzhouse.com 

The Devotion at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $8.  

848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Whiskey Brothers at 9 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Jules Broussard, Ned Boynton and Bing Nathan at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. www.downtownrestaurant.com 

Blowout, modern jazz, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Fred Randoph Quintet at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, JULY 8 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“Sacred Spaces,” an exhibition of installation works by Seyed Alavi, Taraneh Hemami, Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman, Rhoda London, and Rene Yung. Curators walk-through at 7 p.m. Exhibit runs through August 7 at the Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut Street in Live Oak Park Gallery hours are Wed. - Sun. noon to 5 pm. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

FILM 

Alternative Visions: “Love is a Treasure” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Tawni O’Dell reads from her new novel “Coal Run” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Word Beat Reading Series at 7 p.m. with featured readers Paradise and Charselle, followed by an open mic, at Mediterraneum Caffe, 2475 Telegraph Ave., near Dwight Way. For information call 526-5985.  

MUSIC AND DANCE  

Summer Noon Concert with Capoeira Arts Café at the Berkeley BART. Sponsored by the Downtown Berkeley Association. 

Hot Buttered Rum String Band, bluegrass, at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Ducksan Distones, featuring Donald “Duck” Bailey on piano, at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $8-$15 sliding scale. www.thejazzhouse.com 

The Latrelles, Bump at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Rushad Eggleston’s Wild Band of Snee at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Spyro Gyra at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Through Sun. Cost is $15-$26. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Megan Skalard at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Leo King, guitar, at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Da Cipher, hip hop, at 9 p.m. at the Oakland Box, 1928 Telegraph Ave. Cost is $10. 451-1932. www.oaklandbox.com ›

Buckwheat is not a cereal. The word cereal comes from the name of the goddess of wheat, Ceres. Buckwheat is not related to wheat. Edible buckwheat, Fagopyrum esculentum, is not in the family of grasses, Graminae, from which spring all our cereals, including corn, rye and barley. It is not even in the same order, Poales. Rather, it is part of the rhubarb and sorrel family, Polygonaceae, order Polygonales, as is the wild buckwheat, genus Eriogonum, whose flowers ornament our gardens. 

What has taxonomy to do with growing our own food? Well, some people have great difficulty in digesting cereals, especially wheat. What can they substitute in order to receive the same satisfied feeling, the same energy, that a chunk of bread provides? Buckwheat might be the answer. 

Fagopyrum esculentum, a cultivar (that is to say, a cultivated variety bred by humans) grows globally in cool temperate climates, making it ideal for Berkeley, filling the gap between early potatoes lifted in June, and fava beans which are sown in October. Raw buckwheat seeds from an organic food store germinate in a week, and flower within a month. The plants are fragile-looking, with heart-shaped leaves, totally unlike a cereal. Tiny pink buds open into small, five-petalled flowers. Seeds are surprisingly large, like plump pyramids, resembling those of the beech tree, called mast. The common name is said to derive from this, and the Latin (Polygonaceae) also obviously refers to the shape of its seeds.  

Growing one’s own cereal substitute in relatively little space is a satisfying experiment for the home gardener. Temperamentally serene, buckwheat does well in a large pot, looks pretty, and does not seem to mind being crowded. If the crop fails, as crops do from time to time, Berkeley’s own Natural Grocery on Gilman Street carries in bulk both raw and toasted organically-grown seeds, which in spite of their size are softer than other whole grains, and can be easily ground into flour in a coffee grinder. 

Nutritionally, buckwheat compares favorably with the cereals, and is a superior source of fiber, having four times the amount found in wheat. When it comes time to cook, think Russian. 

›

Buckwheat 

Pancakes 

Grind the seeds and mix to a paste with water. Make the batter a little thinner than for regular pancakes. Pour into a well-seasoned, lightly-oiled pan. If the batter is thin enough, the edges will be lacy. Cover with a lid and cook over a medium to brisk flame for at least three minutes. Turn and cook for two more minutes, lid on. Remove the lid and finish cooking if necessary, turning the pancake until it is crispy and browned on both sides. It will still be soft inside. 

Buckwheat pancakes take all kinds of treatment, from a small amount of salt and butter, to jam or honey, and of course sour cream or yogurt. They are sturdy enough to accommodate more substantial fillings, such as spicy potatoes or sauteed mushrooms. Roll up and serve these with home-made tomato sauce. Or top the pancake while it is still in the pan with well-cooked ground beef, sauteed separately with salt, ground allspice and black pepper. For those who fear mad-cow disease, Andronico’s lean ground sirloin is inspected twice. Sprinkle the top with chopped red onion and add a splash of tahini to complete the dish. 

Buckwheat may not be a true cereal, but as a substitute, it has been serendipitously named. As for the fiber—that’s real. 

›

FRIDAY, JULY 2 

West Coast Contact Improvisation Dance Festival, with five days of classes, discussions and jams at 8th St. Studios. Cost is $350 for a 5-day pass, or $75 per day. 415-789-7677. www.wccif.com 

Berkeley Chess Club meets Fridays at 7:15 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Players at all levels are welcome. 652-5324. 

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. People of all traditions are welcome to join us. Sponsored by the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. 655-6169. www.bpf.org 

Overeaters Anonymous meets every Friday at 1:30 p.m. at the Northbrae Church at Solano and The Alameda. Parking is free and is handicapped accessible. 525-5231. 

SATURDAY, JULY 3 

Sick Plant Clinic The first Sat. of every month, UC plant apthologist Dr. Robert Raabe, UC entomologist Dr. Nick Mills, and their team of experts will diagnose what ails your plants. From 9 a.m. to noon at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Dr. Free. 643-2755. 

It’s the Bees Knees (and Other Parts) Look at bumblebees and other native Hymenoptera - we'll catch and release! Learn their importance in our local, and urban, ecosystem. This is a drop in program; no registration is required. From 10 a.m. to noon in Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Putting Pollen in its Place Wind, water, bugs, birds and bats all play roles in setting seeds. See a slide show about their work and then visit some flowers yourself on our trails. This is a drop in program; no registration is required. From 2 to 4 p.m. in Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Bake Back the White House A neighborhood bake sale and parking lot cafe to promote a sustainable society and a politics of peace. All proceeds to Moveon PAC. From 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Berkeley Cohousing Community, 2220 Sacramento St. 

Walking Tour of Jack London Waterfront Meet at 10 a.m. at the corner of Broadway and Embarcadero. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/wallkingtours 

Circus Chimera a family-friendly circus performs on the grounds of Portola Middle School, on Moeser Lane El Cerrito. Tickets are $6 in advance, $10 at the gate; free for children under 2 years old. The schedule is July 3, 4:30 & 7:30 p.m.; July 4, 11 a.m., 2 and 6 p.m.; July 5, 12:30, 3:30 and 6:30 p.m. Advance ticket sales will benefit efforts to renovate the historic Cerrito Theater, an Art Deco-era movie house. Tickets are available from Jenny K, 6927 Stockton Avenue, El Cerrito. 734-3194; Leena’s Café, 10833 San Pablo Avenue, El Cerrito, 237-7409; Albertson's, 1000 El Cerrito Plaza (customer service desk).  

Yoga for Seniors at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St., on Saturdays from 10 to 11 a.m. Open to non-members of the club for $8 per class. 848-7800. 

Car Wash Benefit for Options Recovery Services of Berkeley, held every Sat. from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Lutheran Church, 1744 University Ave. 666-9552. 

SUNDAY, JULY 4 

Fourth of July at the Berkeley Marina from noon to 9:30 p.m. A free-admission, alcohol-free event, with two stages of music, arts & crafts, and activities for children. Fireworks at 9:30 p.m. Sponsored by the City of Berkeley. 548-5335. 

The Fourth in People’s Park with five metal/punk bands and four standup comics, from noon to 6 p.m. http://geocities.com/ 

july4thconcert 

“Military Families Speak Out” a special 10:30 a.m. service with the parents of Sgt. Evan Ashcroft killed in Iraq on July 23, 2003, at 10:30 a.m. in Fellowship Hall, 1924 Cedar St. at Bonita.  

“Palestine and Israel 2004” Karen and Craig Scott describe their visit to the Middle East at 9:30 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Road, Kensington. 525-0302.  

Free Sailboat Rides between 1 and 4 p.m. at the Cal Sailing Club in the Berkeley Marina. Bring warm waterproof clothes. www.cal-sailing.org 

Tibetan Buddhism, with Sylvia Gretchen on “Freeing Emotional Energy” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

MONDAY, JULY 5 

Interdependence Day Hike This is a drop in program; no registration is required. From 10 a.m. to noon at Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

The Oakland/East Bay Chapter of the National Organization for Women meets at 6 p.m. the first Monday of each month at the Oakland YWCA, 1515 Webster St., Oakland. The executive director of Medical Students for Choice will be the speaker at our July meeting. 287-8948. 

Baby Yoga at 11 a.m. and Yoga and Meditation for Children at 2:45 p.m. at Belladonna, 2436 Sacramento St. 883-0600. www.belladonna.ws 

Fitness for 55+ A total body workout including aerobics, stretching and strengthening at 1:15 p.m. at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5170. 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. Volunteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

TUESDAY, JULY 6 

“Local Transportation Concerns” with Peter Hillier, Transportation Dept., City of Berkeley, at 5:30 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. Bring your list of issues, and food to share. Sponsored by Berkeley Ecological & Safe Transportation Coalition. 

Bamboo Building Strong as steel in tension, timber bamboo can grow three feet in a day, be sustainably harvested every year and uses a small fraction of the land required by trees. We will cover proper tool usage and joinery as well as design ideas that avoid the more difficult, time-consuming joints. From 7 to 10 p.m. at the Building Education Center, 812 Page St. Cost is $35. 525-7610. 

Adventure Racing 101 Learn about mountain biking, running, paddling and the equipment and skills involved, at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

“The Fourth World War“ A film about a war without end and of those who resist with powerful images from movements in Argentina, Mexico, Genoa, Iraq, New York, Palestine, Quebec City, South Africa and Korea. Benefit for SOUL/ 

Just Cause. At 9:15 p.m. at Parkway Theater, 1834 Park Blvd., Oakland. Cost is $7. vjmWest@yahoo.com  

American Red Cross Blood Services is holding a volunteer orientation from 9:30 to 11 a.m. at 6230 Claremont Ave. Volunteers are needed to support the more than 40 blood drives held each month. Advance sign-up needed. 594-5165. 

Organic Produce at low prices sold at the corner of Sacramento and Oregon Streets every Tuesday from 3 to 7 p.m. This is a project of BOSS Urban Gardening Institute and Spiral Gardens. 843-1307. 

Phone Banking to ReDefeat Bush on Tuesdays from 6 to 9 p.m. at Cafe de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck Ave. Bring your cell phones. Please RSVP if you can join us. 415-336 8736. dan@redefeatbush.com 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers We are a few slowpoke seniors who walk between a mile or two each Tuesday, meeting at 9:30 a.m. in the Little Farm parking lot. To join us, call 215-7672.  

WEDNESDAY, JULY 7 

Twilight Garden Tour “Don't Water the Natives!” Debunk the “Don't Water the Natives!” and other myths about gardening with California native plants, at 5:30 p.m. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Cost is $12-$17. To register, call 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu  

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday, rain or shine, at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes, sunscreen and a hat. 548-9840. 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around Preservation Park to see Victorian architecture. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of Preservation Park at 13th St. and MLK, Jr. Way. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/wallkingtours 

“The Sixth Sun: Mayan Uprising in Chiapas” an assemblage of orginal and borrowed film footage telling the events of the Zapatista uprising on Jan. 1, 1994, at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St. in downtown Oakland. 654-9587. 

“A Greener Middle East” Meet Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian students who are participating in environmental internships in the Bay Area, at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. 848-0237, ext. 112. 

Berkeley Communicators Toastmasters meets the first and third Wednesdays of the month at 7:15 a.m. at Mediterraneum Caffe, 2475 Telegraph Ave. 524-3765. 

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6:30 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704. www.ecologycenter.org 

Fun with Acting Class at 11 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Free, all are welcome, no experience necessary.  

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. Vigil at 6:30 p.m. Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www.geocities.com/ 

vigil4peace/vigil 

THURSDAY, JULY 8 

“GMO Free Alameda County” a discussion of genetically-modified organisms and how to keep them out of Alameda County’s ecosystems, with Anuradha Mittal, at 6 p.m. at Café de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $15 and includes a GMO-free dinner. Reservations can be made by calling 843-0662. 

Dahr Jamail, “Direct from Baghdad” at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $10-$15 sliding scale. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

“Pocohontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur and Diplomat” with Paula unn Allen at 7 p.m. at Belladonna, 2436 Sacramento St. 883-0600. www.belladonna.ws 

Berkeley Farmer’s Market with all organic produce at Elephant Pharmacy parking lot, 1607 Shattuck Ave., at Cedar from 3 to 7 p.m. 548-3333. www.ecologycenter.org 

Grizzly Peak Flyfishers, a group dedicated to furthering the noble sport of fly fishing through education and conservation, invites you to its monthly meeting at 7 p.m at the Kensington Community Center, 59 Arlington Av. in Kensington. 547-8629. 

East Bay Mac User Group meets the 2nd Thursday of every month, from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at Expression Center for New Media, 6601 Shellmound St. www.expression.edu 

Tea Dancing and Dance Lessons with Barbara and Jerry August from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Cost is $5, includes refreshments. 925-376-6345. 

ONGOING 

Vista College Study Abroad in Mexico Live with a family and learn language skill in a two-week session in July in Guadalajara. For information please call 981-2917 or visit www.peralta.cc.ca.us/interntl/studyabr.htm. 

Berkeley Video and Film Festival is calling for entries. The deadline for last call is July 10. For information please call 843-3699. www.berkeleyvideofilmfest.org 

Luna Kids Dance Summer Camp for ages 9 - 13, from July 12 - 16. For information call 644-3629. www.lunakidsdance.com 

Interesting Backyards Do you have a really cool backyard project or unusual sustainable living practice that you’d like to share with others in the East Bay? Consider becoming a stop on the 5th annual Urban Sustainability Bike Tour on Saturday, July 31. Past sites have included features such as graywater systems, chicken coops, bee hives, solar installations and permaculture gardens. For information call Beck at 548-2220, ext. 233. 

www.ecologycenter.org 

Summer Reading Games at the Albany Public Library, through August 14th. For information call 526-3700. 

Medical Care for Your Pet at the Berkeley East Bay Humane Society low-cost veterinary clinic. 2700 Ninth St. For appointments call 845-3633. www.berkeleyhumane.org  

Radio Summer Camp, four day sessions through Sept. 6. Learn how to build and operate a community radio station. Sponsored by Radio Free Berkeley. 625-0314. www.freeradio.org 

“Searching Within” A free 9-week course starts on Thursday July 15, 6:30 to 8 p.m. at 2015 Center St. To make reservations call 652-1583. www.mysticweb.org 

Introductory Storytelling Classes for Adults offered by Stagebridge from June 29 through August on Tuesdays, 10 a.m. to noon at Arts First Oakland, 2501 Harrison St., at 27th St. near Lake Merritt. For information call 444-4755. www.stagebridge.org. 

CITY MEETINGS 

Council Agenda Committee meets Tues. July 6, at 2:30 p.m., at 2180 Milvia St., Sherry M. Kelly, city clerk, 981-6900. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil/agenda-committee 

Commission on the Status of Women meets Wed., July 7, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Ruby Primus, 981-5106. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/women 

Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board meets Thurs. July 8, at 7 p.m. in City Council Chambers, Pam Wyche 644-6128 ext. 113. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/rent 

Commission on Early Childhood Education meets Thurs., July 8, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Marianne Graham, 981-5416. www.ci.berkeley. ca.us/commissions/earlychildhoodeducation  

Community Health Commission meets Thurs, July 8, at 6:45 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. William Rogers, 981-5344. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/health 

Two-by-Two Meeting of elected City and School officials to dicuss common concerns, Thurs., July 8, at 8:30 a.m., in the Redwood Room, 6th floor, 2180 Milvia St. 644-6147, 981-7000. 

West Berkeley Project Area Commission meets Thurs., July 8, at 7 p.m., at the West Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7520. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/westberkeley  

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thurs., July 8, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. Mark Rhoades, 981-7410. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/zoning ª

Last week, while everyone in Berkeley stood in line to see Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, my husband and I went to the Albany Twin theater to see The Mother. We often go to this movie house because it regularly features films that aren’t shown in other locations. I’d read a review in the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle about The Mother. The little bald man was jumping out of his chair, clapping. Although this action does not necessarily guarantee that the movie will be worth seeing, I decided to take a chance. The subject matter intrigued me. 

The Mother is a British import about a passionate affair between a widow and her daughter’s lover who is half her age. The review said that British stage actress Anne Reid “…deserves a standing ovation for taking off her clothes and revealing the lumpy figure of an older woman who eschews exercise and a cosmetic surgeon’s scalpel.” That quote alone made me want to see the movie although I see plenty of similar body types at the public pool where I swim. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a voyeur. But at the DeFremery Pool in West Oakland there is not much in the way of privacy or services unless you consider automatically timed showers and doors on the toilet stalls amenities. And swimming, unfortunately, is not an exercise that necessarily lends itself to weight loss or a svelte body. I imagine that most of the people who swim there are like me: Once they finish their workout they go home and eat the entire contents of their refrigerator and then ferret through their cupboards for more. Swimming is an activity that makes you feel good, but not necessarily look good. 

But back to The Mother. I went to the show with optimism because I really did want to see sex performed between a middle-aged woman and a much younger man. I’ve had my fill of the reverse, Hollywood handsome older men with gorgeous, bosomy young nymphs and I’m sick of it. Bring on the lumps and wrinkles. Show us how the Brits do it. 

But I was disappointed. Not that the movie didn’t give what the review said it would: carefully rendered shots of an imperfect, needy body and hot sex between a 60-year-old woman and a 30-year-old man. But it was the extraneous stuff of the film that got in the way and was bothersome. I can live with the unsatisfactory relationship between the depressed, lonely mother and her equally depressed, immature adult children, but what annoyed me was the depiction of a brief affair the woman has with a man of her age. The filmmakers chose to make this a laughable, pathetic alliance, one that no one in their right mind would find appealing. It is painful to watch, and a disservice to all of us who are growing old. And in case you don’t think you belong in that category, think again. We’re all going to get there. Maybe the writers and directors of The Mother believe they will die young and leave a beautiful corpse, or that a pill will be invented once they reach 35 that will keep them from entering the dreaded category of middle and old age, but chances are they will someday look like the wrinkled elderly man and woman horrifically depicted in their movie. 

In the end, The Mother does exactly what Hollywood often does, makes fun of sex between the rusty. I guess I’ll give up on my quest to see a realistic movie about this subject, and go back to swimming a lot of laps at the public pool. The next time I go to a film that claims to portray credible, candid grown up romance, I’ll do what my husband always does when viewing such topics: He falls soundly asleep and wakes up when it’s finally over.›

There have been a number of sideways glances in the liberal press (yes, there is a bit of a liberal press, still) at the rowdy proletarian gusto with which Michael Moore goes after his targets in Fahrenheit 9/11. I often count myself as one of the genteel middle-aged ladies in matters like this. Still, I can’t go along with Ellen Goodman’s call for more sweet reasonableness in the effort to change hearts and minds. Or rather, I’m afraid that only sweet reasonableness won’t do it. 

Now, you understand, I haven’t yet made it over to see F9/11. Among other things, I’m too old to stand in line for very long. So I’m relying on the opinion of My Daughter the Professor, who herself is now 40ish, but not yet too old to stand in line for a movie. She says that the most impressive thing about it was not the film itself, which is predictable, but the audience, composed, when she saw it, of 20-somethings, all excited and ready to do something.  

The “preaching to the choir” metaphor has been much employed by the movie’s critics on the left, but it misses the mark. This is America, after all, the last stand for religion, but for pluralistic religion, not state religion. We have the highest percentage of churchgoers in the modern world, but also the most different flavors of church. It’s the same way with politics, which is why we appear to have two parties, though many leftists will say we have only one. What we really have is at least 20 parties loosely grouped together most of the time into two, with the occasional third group. The Democratic Party has traditionally been the most heterogeneous, but there’s also a world of difference in the Republican Party between the Wall Street bankers and the Texas evangelicals, for example. In the next election, the principal challenge for Democrats will be to get everyone in all the congregations up out of their chairs and singing along. 

In the Bay Area we’ve probably got more political harmony than anywhere else in the country, and we’re itching to take our tunes elsewhere. So okay, you, a typical Bay Area person, have been to seen F9/11 by now. Maybe you stood in line to see or even touch Chairman Bill. So you’re energized, loaded for bear, ready to roll, jazzed up in fact. (Sorry, I don’t know the more youthful equivalents of those somewhat hairy expressions.) 

What can you do? There are many fine organizations ready to use your money and, even more important, your labor, for the noble endeavor of registering voters. MoveOn.org is organizing phone banks for July 11, to call people in swing states. DrivingVotes.org claims on their web site that registering voters in swing states is the single most effective way to defeat Bush. They give you everything needed to join voter registration drives in swing states, including connections for putting together road trip with your friends. They’ll even help you make new friends: Their web site boasts a terrific ride board where “tours” are orchestrated. If I got my act together, I could get on a trip out of San Francisco on July 7 to go to St. Louis, my birthplace, and have a nice family reunion with my cousins at the registration drive. There are also local voter registration drives sponsored by groups like the Wellstone Democratic Club and the NAACP, though we hope California is not a swing state.  

But after registration is over, then what? A friend who lives in a swing state called me up in the middle of the night last week because she’d had a flash of inspiration about what they really needed there. Registration is fine, she agreed, but what about election monitoring? So the Planet did a little checking. As usual, most of the early action is on the Internet, but there’s not much of it that we can detect. The non-partisan New York based Center for Democracy has monitored elections around the world, and seems ready to tackle the U.S. now. They started by tracking the Dade County Florida primaries in 2002, following up on the scandals of 2000. But is that enough? Are there other organizations working on this? Some, of course, are going after voting machine problems, which is certainly needed, but who’s checking up on the old-fashioned low-tech ways of cheating, like scaring off minority voters? 

The Democratic Party ought to be leading this effort, but if they are we haven’t heard about it. One F9/11 segment showed the Congressional Black Caucus trying to alert Congress and the country that Bush was stealing the 2000 election in Florida, while the other Democrats looked on as if they were stuffed. How can we be sure this won’t happen again? One project is described on page four of this issue. Tell us if you hear anything else useful.  

—Becky O’Malley›