On Ashby Avenue, one woman is paying tribute to the value of every human life by recording every death in Iraq. 

Since June, the woman—who wishes to remain anonymous because she said the identity of the war dead, rather than her identity, is what matters—has spent several hours a week compiling names of the fallen in the Iraq War and marking them on her front fence. 

Nobody is excluded from her memorial. The names of dead American marines bump up against Iraqi civilians, foreign nationals, and symbols representing the unnamed soldiers in Saddam Hussein’s army. 

The artist, who works as a retail clerk, was compelled to construct her monument after reading news accounts where the American or allied dead would get a brief biography, but Iraqi casualties would remain anonymous. 

“There seemed to be a real imbalance in valuing life,” she said. “It’s important to know their names and know they’re real people with families.” 

Her work is on display at 2231 Ashby Ave. As of Tuesday she had covered her fence with 37 cardboard panels filled with the names of the dead in illustrated tombstones. For Iraqi civilians that have not been identified, she marked their box on the panels as “unidentified civilian.” 

The memorial panels are spartan and posted haphazardly on her fence, but the artist said that is by design. 

“It’s not supposed to be a pretty display,” she said. “I wanted it to convey the sense of the chaos that is going on there.” 

Chronicling death has given her insight into the violent struggle in Iraq. She has had to add three panels since she debuted the memorial in June. In all, she said the total civilian and military deaths from the war number more than 12,000. 

The artist updates the wall every Wednesday. For the tally of Iraqi civilians killed she goes to IraqBodyCount.net, which keeps a running total, but doesn’t release names. To find out as many identities as she can, the artist surfs online news sources, and Iraqi political and social websites that often list casualties for various groups. 

From her hours of research of the war’s death stories, one in particular has stayed with her above the others: an account of an Iraqi man who was one of the few survivors of the accidental air bombardment of his grandchild’s wedding. 

“To think that he saw two generations of his family killed,” she said.  

The artist said she has gotten plenty of positive feedback on the memorial, and even received a note of praise from a passerby who happened to work for the Project on Defense Alternatives, her source for tallying the number of dead Iraqi soldiers. 

As the violence continues, the artist has decided to keep the memorial intact until the winter rains come. 

“I didn’t plan on having it up so long, but people are dying at such a rapid rate,” she said.›

Armed with a report that calls for slashing the city’s workforce by up to 35 percent, a team of Berkeley budget hawks launched its campaign Tuesday against a proposed $8 million in new taxes on the November ballot. 

“I can’t imagine how they would ask us to pay more, when they haven’t done enough to cut back,” said Trudy Washburn, a member of Budget Watch. 

The group, which includes former Mayor Shirley Dean, was formed earlier this year by homeowners concerned that city taxes were going through the roof.  

Although Budget Watch claims political independence, most of the 10 members listed on its budget analysis have long ties to the more moderate faction of Berkeley politics and many are involved in the Berkeley Alliance of Neighborhood Associations, which has also come out against the taxes. 

The group’s report charged that tax hikes were unacceptable as long as the city fails to tackle its bloated bureaucracy, search out new streams of revenue and reform its budget process. 

Since falling into the red in 2003, Berkeley has cut $14 million and eliminated over 100 positions. Still, the city faces projected deficits of $7.5 million in fiscal year 2006, $3.4 million in 2007 and $2.4 million in 2008 and 2009. In addition to a slumping economy and decreased state aid, the city has suffered from skyrocketing pension rates which have jumped 136 percent since 2003 from $5.8 million to $13.7 million. 

To close the city’s structural deficit without raising taxes, the group proposes that the city: 

• Reduce the number of city positions from 1,641 to between 1,000 and 1,300. 

• Compel city workers to give back more of their salaries. 

• Redesign the budget process to establish funding priorities and evaluate programs. 

• Demand that nonprofits and UC Berkeley pay at least a percentage of city fees and assessments. 

Their proposal comes just one week after Mayor Tom Bates released his Fiscal Recovery Plan, which argued that new taxes were essential to retaining public safety jobs and programs for youth and seniors. 

Bates argued it was Dean who deserved the blame for the city’s budget problems.  

“It’s disingenuous to be criticizing us for a problem she created,” he said. 

As mayor she signed the current round of union contracts that granted employees generous raises and improved retirement benefits. 

Bates said the Budget Watch recommendations were old news and the city was already pursuing many of them, including a new budget process and seeking added new revenues from UC.  

Also, the city won about $1.2 million in employee givebacks last year, but as part of the deal it negotiated away its right to seek further concessions for the duration of the contracts.  

Dean charged that the city’s right to re-open the contracts was crucial and that the city had squandered valuable negotiating leverage. 

Just because Budget Watch opposes new taxes doesn’t mean it wants to cut spending. For the current fiscal year the group actually proposed spending $900,000 more than the plan adopted by the City Council, with the money mostly earmarked for the police and fire departments.  

The group is opposed to closing a fire truck company and leaving seven police positions unfilled, both slated for the chopping block if city voters reject a 1.5 percent increase in the utility users tax.  

Also on the ballot are a 19 percent increase in the library tax, a 59 percent increase in the paramedic tax and a 0.5 percent increase on the transfer of properties that sell for over $600,000. 

If voters approve the new taxes, along with other local measures, Budget Watch estimates that average homeowners with a property valued at $243,00 would see their local tax bill jump from $4,879.62 to $5,240. For recent homebuyers whose homes are valued at market prices, Dean said they would pay upwards of $10,000. 

She warned high property taxes would remake Berkeley into a city of the very rich and very poor.  

To lessen the burden on taxpayers, Budget Watch wants to slash the city’s workforce. City workers currently fill 1,641 positions, comprising 75 percent of general fund expenditures. Last year their city-funded pension benefits amounted to 60 percent of the $10 million deficit in the city’s general fund.  

Berkeley has one city employee for every 62 residents—the most employees per capita in the East Bay. Budget Watch estimated that if Berkeley pulled even with Oakland, which is number two on the list with one city employee for every 95 residents, the city would have 1,073 full time equivalent positions and save $32 million each year. 

The long-term trend in Berkeley, however, has been towards adding positions, even as the city loses residents, the Budget Watch report concluded. 

Since 1980, it found that the city has added 237 positions while seeing its population drop by 18,000. 

Councilmember Gordon Wozniak, who is supporting two of the city’s four tax measures, lauded the group’s effort. 

“They should be commended for putting these issues into the public debate,” he said. “It’s as good as any staff report we get.” 

›

Developers of a proposed North Richmond casino filed a billion-dollar federal lawsuit Tuesday against the Berkeley developer of the Point Molate casino project and the world’s largest gambling empire, alleging that they illegally interfered with a pre-existing contract. 

The lawsuit came on the same day that lawyers for the City of Richmond, Berkeley developer James D. Levine and Harrah’s Entertainment defeated a ChevronTexaco attempt to block the City of Richmond’s sale of the Point Molate site for the casino project. 

The federal lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, seeks $200 million in general damages and $400 million each in punitive damages from the two firms. 

The suit charges that Levine’s Upstream Point Molate LLC and Harrah’s Entertainment enticed the Guidiville Rancheria band of Pomo tribespeople to break their casino deal with NGV Ltd., a Florida-based partnership. 

John Knox, a well-connected lawyer hired by the city to negotiate the casino agreement, had hinted at possible legal problems during an Aug. 31 Richmond City Council meeting when he noted that “another operator claims they had a deal with the tribe and are owed $2 million.” 

Knox downplayed the significance of the claim at the time. 

NGV Gaming Ltd. is a Florida limited partnership, with Noram-NGV LLC as the general partnership. Noram LLC is part of the multi-corporate empire which has evolved from North American Sports Management, which began as a sports talent management company. 

The interlocked corporations are the creations of Alan H. Ginsburg of Maitland, Fl., who has emerged as a major player in the Native American gambling boom, with casino ventures spanning the nation from the extreme Southeast to the far Northwest. 

Stephen Calvacca, an Orlando, Fl.-based attorney for NGV Ltd, said his client had an exclusive deal with the Guidivilles, a contract signed in July 2002 for development of a casino project in Solano County. The Florida firm only learned of the Guidiville’s pact with Upstream and Harrah’s to develop a casino in Contra Costa County when the story broke in the papers, he said.  

After their deal with Guidivilles fell through, Noram created a new entity, Noram-Richmond LLC, and inked a pact with the Scott’s Valley Pomo band and purchased a 30-acre site between Parr Boulevard and Richmond Parkway in North Richmond, announcing plans for the Sugar Bowl Casino, a 225,000-square-foot, 2,000-slot Las Vegas-style gambling palace. 

Noram’s venture is much further along in the development process than the Upstream/Harrah’s venture. The Bureau of Indian Affairs has conducted initial public hearings, the first step toward transforming private land into a tribal reservation. 

The San Francisco suit isn’t Noram’s first California legal battle. The firm filed a $6 million fraud action against the Central Valley Mewuk Tribe over the Mewuks’ failure to acquire reservation land for a proposed casino in Tracy. That action was settled out of court in November, 2001. 

The federal lawsuit, filed at 1:53 p.m. Monday, momentarily overshadowed the major legal battle Upstream and Harrah’s had won just hours earlier in a state courtroom. 

In an one-hour hearing in Martinez, Contra Costa County Superior Court Judge David Linn rejected the ChevronTexaco’s contention that the Richmond City Council had to follow state law and first offer the land to other public agencies before selling to a private developer. 

A public Richmond City Council vote on Aug. 31 had shot down the other leg of the oil company’s complaint, which had held that their earlier closed-door vote to extend Upstream’s exclusive negotiating rights had violated the state law. 

Linn said the state Surplus Lands Act—which mandates the offer of surplus land to other agencies—was trumped by the federal base closing statute, which calls for former military bases to be used to replace jobs and economic benefits lost when the military leaves. 

In the interim, the City Council and the casino developers hammered out a new Land Development Agreement (LDA) intended to address some of the concerns raised at the August council meeting. The revised agreement now heads for the Sept. 28 City Council meeting, where members have already signaled by a unanimous vote their intention to sign the deal with Upstream Point Molate LLC, the creation of Berkeley developer James D. Levine. 

Signing the land development agreement is no guarantee that the proposed 3,000-slots casino will ever be built. The Guidiville Band of Pomo tribespeople must first win federal approval designating the land a reservation, and then win federal and state casino authorizations. 

In an e-mail to constituents, Richmond City Councilperson Tom Butt said, “I have been contacted by hundreds of people both pro and con. No clear consensus of community opinion has emerged. . .although even those in favor of the project urge clear and unambiguous language in the agreement to protect existing open space and provide for its maintenance and public access.” 

Another possible stumbling block is the proposal by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to award Casino San Pablo exclusive gaming rights for a 35-radius from their site overlooking Interstate 80 to the north of Richmond. 

That pact, currently stalled by Democratic legislators, would end the hopes of would-be developers of five other East Bay casinos now in various stages of the approval process—including two in Richmond, one in Albany and another in Oakland. 

Adding yet another complication is the Sept. 16 lawsuit filed in Alameda County Superior Court by California race track owners who are seeking to overturn the deals Schwarzenegger signed with the five tribes, including the band running the San Pablo cardroom and would-be casino, to grant them the right to build massive Las Vegas-style resorts with exclusive franchises. The tracks want their own slots parlors, and are pushing a constitutional amendment toward that end on the November ballot. 

And then there’s the bill sponsored by Democratic Sen. Diane Feinstein of California currently on hold in Congress, that would void earlier legislation by Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, enabling the Lytton Band of Pomos to avoid the lengthy recognition process to gain a reservation on the Casino San Pablo site. 

Meanwhile, ChevronTexaco is contemplating their next move. With their super-refinery just across the hill from the Point Molate site, the oil company looks at the Point Molate site as a security buffer, a concern shared by Coast Guard Capt. Gerald M. Swanson, Federal Maritime Security Coordinator for Northern California and the region’s ranking representative of the Department of Homeland Security. 

Dean O’Hair, spokesperson for the Richmond refinery, said the oil company is pondering its next move. “We still think that type of development is not consistent with the long-term operations of the refinery,” he said. ›

Though four decades have passed since the Free Speech Movement (FSM) rocked the world, many of the same threats that galvanized the movement then have returned full force, say participants organizing the upcoming 40th anniversary commemoration. 

Just as the movement was created in September 1964 by the attempt of Berkeley campus officials to bar recruiting tables for the civil rights movement from Sproul Plaza, similar dangers confront today’s activists, organizers said. 

“The 20th and 30th anniversaries were largely retrospective,” said Michael Rossman, who’s been devoting 10 to 12 hours a day for the last few months to arranging events for Oct. 5-10. “This year there’s widespread unanimity that we’re living in a really dangerous time.” 

Gar Smith, another FSM participant agrees. “Free speech is in pretty bad shape these days,” said the former Berkeley Barb editor who now runs The Edge, the online webzine of the Earth Island Institute, and in January 2003, co-founded Environmentalists Against the War. 

“It’s important to get today’s students involved,” said Peter Franck, a veteran of SLATE, a campus movement of the 1950s that paved the way for the FSM. 

“In these days of the PATRIOT Act and Cat Stevens getting thrown out of the country, it’s important to know you can change things through activism,” he said. 

“They can dragnet, dragoon and detain any American citizen,” Smith said. “They don’t have to worry about the election, because any time they want, they can declare John Kerry an enemy combatant and ship him off to Guantanamo.” 

SLATE veterans will be having their own gathering in parallel with the FSM commemoration. 

Calling their 40th anniversary fete “Free Speech in a Dangerous Time,” the organizers have assembled an impressive gallery of participants for the Oct. 5-10 event. 

The program opens Tuesday, Oct. 5, with a three-hour FSM and Civil Liberties poetry reading in the Bears’ Lair.  

Other highlights include: 

• A 6-7p.m. Wednesday concert in Sproul Plaza featuring Utah Phillips and other artists, followed by a 7-10 p.m. session in Zellerbach Hall featuring columnist Molly Ivins giving the Mario Savio Memorial Lecture and the presentation of the Young Activist Award. 

• Thursday afternoon panels on “How It Worked: Nuts and Bolts of the FSM” and “Berkeley and the Black Freedom Struggle: Then and Now” and an evening symposium on the beginning, meaning and consequences of the movement. 

• Friday, a series of panels, a noon rally around a police car in Sproul Plaza—a vivid reminder of the movement’s most memorable day—featuring speeches by movement veterans Bettina Aptheker and others, and a whole range of events in the evening, including a speech (sponsored by the Graduate School of Journalism) by Pulitzer-winning New York Times journalist Seymour Hersh, a dissection of that evening’s presidential debate by satirists Paul Krassner, Scoop Nisker and Kris Welsh, a rock dance featuring, among others, the Country Joe Band with Country Joe McDonald, and a film festival. 

• Saturday, 10 panels on modern civil liberties challenges, a panel of FSM veterans discussing “How the Spirit Moved Us,” satirical performances, a film festival and an archetypal event of the early ‘60s, a hootenanny, a communal sing-along. 

A detailed schedule is available on-line at www.straw.com/fsm-a/. Revisions will be posted as new participants are added, said Rossman. 

This year’s event is much more structured than the first decade anniversary, when many FSM veterans were engaged in organizing around the Vietnam War, then in the final stages. 

“This year’s event will be the broadest themed civil liberties event that we know of,” said Rossman. “It’s the best possible way to commemorate the signal victory of the Free Speech Movement.” 

Veterans will unite past and present when they recite the PATRIOT Act from the top of a squad car in Sproul Plaza, an event that will be accompanied by a surprise Rossman promises will be truly memorable. All he’d offer beyond that was the hint that puppets would be involved. 

“Personally, it’s been like too few people have started too late with too ambitious a program, but it gives me something to do besides sitting in the corner, chewing my knuckles as I piss and moan about what’s going on in the world today,” he said. 

Overworked or not, the volunteers have been attacking their challenge with something of the same vigor they used four decades earlier to challenge the administration and bring free speech to the UC campus. 

Marilyn Noble is recapitulating some of the same roles she played back 40 years earlier when she assumed the task of caring for the movement’s executive committee, gathering up food, cooking up a bottomless pot of soup and keeping clothes clean and suits pressed. 

“I’ve picked up three tasks this year,” she said. “Finding housing, feeding ourselves on Sunday morning when we have our own schmoozing day, and speaking on the ‘And the Spirit Moved Us’ panel on Saturday.” 

The ties forged in the heat of activities in the ‘60s remain strong today. 

“We’ve formed a loose friendship network,” said Rossman. “We have a mailing list of 1,300, and half of them were involved in the Free Speech Movement.” 

The list includes a third of the activists arrested in the Sproul Hall sit-in, he said. 

After the death of key FSM activist Mario Savio in 1996, the survivors incorporated the group as the Free Speech Movement Archives, and have been busily assembling documentation of the era, some of which is posted on their web site. 

Time has taken its toll as the “Sixties Generation” evolved into the “Sexagenarian Generation.” 

One of the harshest blows came earlier this year with the accidental death of UC Berkeley Reginald Zelnick, who had championed the students cause and announced the Faculty Senate vote that gave full backing to the movement on Dec. 8, 1964, and forced the administration to back down. 

Another casualty of the years has been the mimeograph, the machine that did what laser printers do today. 

“The Free Speech Movement produced over three million sheets of paper in over 286 documents,” he said. 

The archives turned up a 2.5-inch stack of mimeo stencils, and organizers are looking for a working machine so that today’s students attending the memorial can crank the handle and turn out their own copies of the seminal documents of the day. 

Organizers can be reach through the link on their website.›

Anna Singthonghack hates mopping up spilled soda. It takes too much time. Like the other night janitors in UC Berkeley’s Barrows Hall, Singthonghack has to keep on schedule so she can finish cleaning four auditorium-sized classrooms, 15 offices and three bathrooms between 5 p.m. and 1:30 a.m. 

When she finishes, she has an hour’s drive to Suisin City, near Fairfield. There, her day begins again at 7 a.m. Once her two children are out the door to school, she spends the rest of the day taking care of her husband, who is blind, until 4 p.m. Then she returns to work.  

She is the only one supporting the family. At $13.39 an hour, she just barely makes enough to get by, so any deviation from her schedule could spell disaster.  

“I don’t feel like there is any light,” Singthonghack said in broken English. The 39-year old woman fled Laos in 1988, and if life is less chaotic here, it’s still difficult.  

She earns $800 every two weeks after taxes which is barely enough to pay her family’s expenses.  

Like several other janitors cleaning the building Tuesday night, Singthonghack’s story is strikingly similar to those in a report released a week ago by several UC Berkeley sociology graduate students called “Berkeley’s Betrayal.”  

The report was co-authored by Barabara Ehrenreich, author of the best seller Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, and a former visiting lecturer at the university’s Graduate School of Journalism. It says the university “betrays” its low wage workers by paying substandard wages, overworking them, and failing to train them properly. It also says that there is a general lack of respect from the students, administration and faculty for the jobs they do.  

In a fact sheet released along with the report, the authors show UC Berkeley service worker wages lagging behind those in the private sector, public sector, and other area colleges. Custodians at Cal State-Hayward start at $13.33 per hour, compared to Berkeley’s $10.22, according to the report. The information was complied by AFSCME, the union that represents service workers on campus. The City of Berkeley starts custodial workers at $16.90, according to the same data.  

The state’s minimum wage is $6.75 an hour. 

The fact sheet also details how service and clerical workers have had their wages frozen since 2002. That year, inflation rose by 1.6 percent and in 2003 inflation jumped by 2.3 percent. 

For Singthonghack, and several of the workers interviewed in the study, low wages and no raises, along with rising costs, mean they’ve been pushed precariously close to the edge. Even as inflation has stayed relatively low, some basic necessities have nearly doubled in price since she started working at the university. 

Singthonghack pays almost double what she used to for gas. She estimates she fills her up Honda CRV twice a week at $26 a tank. It used to cost her $15 each time. She also crosses the Carquinez bridge and has to pay the extra dollar bridge toll. Parking at the campus recently rose from $32 to $35 per month. 

“Prices are going up, but the pay is the same,” she said. Her eyes were bloodshot from a lack of sleep.  

Recently, she said, she had to borrow money from a friend to buy her children new clothes for school. 

Paul Schwartz, spokesperson for UC’s office of the president, has dismissed the report, calling it “unbalanced and incomplete.” He said the report is written by “pro-labor” students who failed to take into account the other benefits the university offers, such as its health care and retirement packages. He also dismissed it for talking only to union employees, and said it failed to look at UC Berkeley in comparison to other top-notch universities.  

Schwartz said on top of a comprehensive benefits package for full-time employees, UC has tried to add certain perks in recent years as a way to mitigate the impact of the wage freeze. He said they have restructured the health care premium payments so workers who make less pay less. He said they’ve also put more money into retirement accounts and will give workers two extra paid days off. 

“We are not disputing that salaries are hurting, we are saying that it was an unbalanced report,” he said. 

But as the report outlines, some workers in Barrows Hall said wages are not their only concern. As Singthonghack cleans her section of the third floor, you can hear students in one of the lounges having a loud political debate. They come into the hall occasionally to go to the bathroom, gliding by Singthonghack but barely noticing her as she sweeps a part of the hall like a ghost.  

“It is the routine invisibility of workers in the eyes of the university that many experience as the most painful form of disrespect,” write the authors of the report. 

Singthonghack said no one has been explicitly rude, but when she enters a messy classroom, she said she considers it a sign of disrespect. In Singthonghack’s largest classroom, which seats 100 people, papers were strewn all over the desks and a super-sized Jamba Juice cup was on the professor’s desk. It took her several minutes to clean all this up before she got to her scheduled duties of mopping, sweeping, emptying the trash, and cleaning the blackboard. 

Down in the basement, Shirley Rew, 54, agreed that students fail to notice them. One night, she said, she was taking out garbage and said hello to a student escort waiting outside for two girls. 

“He didn’t even blink,” she said. “But I tried not to let it bother me, because I have a lot of respect for myself.”

Berkeley is California’s most “teen healthy” city, according to a study released Wednesday by advocates of student health services and contraception. 

Get Real About Teen Pregnancy, a campaign launched by the California Wellness Foundation and the California Adolescent Health Collaborative, ranked Berkeley tops out of 55 California cities with a population over 100,000 in providing health services to its youth.  

Berkeley has also boasted the lowest teenage pregnancy rate since 1997 of any California jurisdiction with a health department. 

The news couldn’t have come at a better time for city officials, who are pushing a $2.2 million tax measure to preserve youth programs they say the city would otherwise have to sacrifice to pay off its budget shortfall. 

“The investment Berkeley has made in our young people has paid off big time,” Mayor Tom Bates said at a Wednesday press conference. “Anyone who says we put all this money for youth services but we never see any results, well now we see the results.” 

Special praise was reserved for the Berkeley High School Health Center. The 13-year-old clinic is funded with public and private money and offers students access to medical care, counseling and contraception.  

The Get Real findings come on top of a report from Berkeley’s Health Department which found that the city’s teen pregnancy rate has decreased 45 percent from 16 percent in 1994 to 8.8 percent in 2001. 

Dr. Poki Namkung, the city’s health officer, attributes the drop to the wealth of services available to teenagers and the city’s multi-faceted approach to dealing with teen sexuality. 

“Our services run the total continuum of family planning,” she said.  

In addition to educational programs and professional support, the city offers free birth control, including access to the morning-after pill. 

Namkung said the city has lost out on some federal aid because the Bush administration has allocated more federal dollars to programs that require recipients to teach solely abstinence. 

In 1998, she said, the California Legislature rejected federal funding because of limitations on what types of programs it could support. The pot of money in the Federal Abstinence Only Until Marriage program has grown from a few million dollars to over $30 million last year. 

In addition to professional care, Berkeley operates numerous peer support groups at Berkeley High. City of Berkeley Domestic Violence Counselor Katie Turchin said her involvement in Peer RAP (Relationship Abuse Program), has helped her deal with past abuse. 

As a Peer RAP volunteer, Turchin tours different schools in the district and talks to students about bullying, domestic violence and emotional abuse.  

“Before I got involved I didn’t realize this type of thing was so common, but now that I understand it better I can help my peers,” she said.  

Graham Heimler, a Berkeley High junior has an easier job. As a member of Peers Advocating Sexual Health Now, he and other members visit freshman classes and engage them in a three-day discussion on sex. 

“The discussions are remarkably mature and the students are open to talking about anything,” Heimler said. 

The report ranked cities on 13 variables that covered two main categories: Access to health services and youth development opportunities. 

Next after Berkeley in the rankings came Pasadena, Fullerton and Burbank. San Francisco finished tied for 25th place and Oakland finished 40th. 

›

After weeks of speculation Councilmember Maudelle Shirek officially entered the City Council race in District 3. 

The 93-year old incumbent filed papers to run as a write-in candidate Thursday morning, more than a month after she was disqualified from the ballot for not having enough valid signatures from members of the South Berkeley district. 

City Clerk Sherry Kelly confirmed that this time Shirek had the requisite number of signatures and would be listed as a qualified write-in candidate. Also running in District 3 are community activist Laura Menard, Rent Board Chairman Max Anderson and Green Party member Jeffrey Benefiel. 

In a brief press conference after filing her papers, Shirek said she was “still the best vote on the council” and still represented the “wants and needs” of the people in District 3 

Shirek didn’t detail her thought process in opting to run for an eleventh term in office, but said she had a lot of encouragement from throughout the district. 

Even before Shirek was disqualified from having her name on the ballot, many of her longtime political allies had abandoned her for Max Anderson, the chairman of Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board. Anderson has garnered the endorsements of Councilmembers Dona Spring, Kriss Worthington, Linda Maio and Mayor Tom Bates.  

Progressives Spring and Worthington have expressed dismay that Shirek’s voting record had grown more unpredictable and less progressive in recent years. 

Shirek did pick up the endorsement of Councilmember Gordon Wozniak Thursday, who called her “an independent thinker”.  

“She has a lot of institutional memory and has been asset to the council on some issues,” said Wozniak, considered one of the more conservative members of the council. 

Also by Shirek’s side Thursday were her campaign manager Michael Berkowitz, and longtime friends Jesse Anthony, a member of the Zoning Adjustment Board, Barbara Lubin of the Middle East Children’s Alliance and Jackie DeBose, whose husband Charles will serve as campaign treasurer. 

›

Berkeley non-profit developer Affordable Housing Associates (AHA) is one step away from breaking ground on a long-delayed senior-housing project after the city won its latest court battle against a group of neighbors. 

In a strongly worded opinion, a three-judge panel of the California Court of Appeals dismissed the neighbors’ complaint which asked Berkeley to perform the most stringent type of environmental review for the development scheduled to rise at 2517 Sacramento St., the former Outback Clothing Store.  

The neighbors sued the city last year over the development, arguing that in approving the project, the city neglected the possible existence of toxins at the site, misapplied state housing law and failed to consider the aesthetic effects of a building that rises up to 50 feet near a residential community of 17-foot-tall homes. 

They wanted the city to perform an environmental impact report (EIR), requiring the developer to respond to resident complaints or consider alternatives to the project. As it does with most infill housing projects, the city required the less-stringent mitigated negative declaration. 

Lead Plaintiff Marie Bowman didn’t return phone calls to the Daily Planet after the ruling was released. Previously she had indicated she might appeal the case to the California Supreme Court. Bowman has until Nov. 1 to petition the high court to hear the case. 

Bowman’s decision last year to appeal a superior court ruling against the neighbors—a rare step in Berkeley development battles—has proven costly to the city. AHA Housing Manager Kevin Zwick, though, said the added hassle might be worth it. 

“We think the opinion is so strong it will deter other groups from trying to go down this route,” he said. If the Supreme Court opts not to hear the possible appeal, Zwick said, AHA could begin construction on the 40-unit affordable housing complex by November. 

AHA is now asking Berkeley for $727,000 from the city’s housing trust fund to offset added costs from construction delays, Berkeley Housing Director Steve Barton said. Should the Supreme Court choose to hear an appeal, he said, further delays could cost the city an additional $500,000. 

On the key question of whether concerns over the development’s aesthetics were enough to require an EIR, Justices Laurence Kay, Timothy Reardon and Maria Rivera sided with the city. 

“We do not believe that our legislature in enacting CEQA... intended to require an EIR where the sole environmental impact is the aesthetic merit of a building in a highly developed area,” they wrote. “To rule otherwise would mean that an EIR would be required for every urban building project...if enough people could be marshaled to complain about how it looks.” 

The justices also found that there was no risk from hazardous materials at the site, which is a former gas station, and that the city’s need to meet its state-mandated quota of affordable housing units justified its calculation of bonus units given to the project as part of a state law. 

The University of California Board of Regents voted overwhelmingly this week to raise the grade point average requirement for incoming freshmen from 2.8 to 3.0 beginning in 2007. 

No one present at the regents’ meeting—either supporters or detractors—expressed the opinion that the decision had anything to do with raising the academic standards in the UC system. 

Instead, while supporters said the grade point increase was necessary because of state budgetary constraints and to bring the UC system into line with California’s Master Plan for Higher Education, detractors called it a continuation of UC’s ongoing diversity wars which would result in a disproportionate loss of new African-American and Latino students. 

In a statement issued by the university system following the vote, UC Academic Council Chair George Blumenthal said that “our faculty worked in a very committed fashion to develop a plan that would emphasize academic achievement in high school, have the least negative impact on any one demographic group, and provide adequate notice of the changes to students.” 

The UC system-wide Academic Council is the administrative arm of the Academic Senate, which recommended the freshmen eligibility changes to the regents. 

After the regents voted 14-6 for the increase, a crowd of some 25 to 30 student protesters stood up from their seats in the auditorium of UC San Francisco-Laurel Heights, chanting “Education is a right, not just for the rich and white” and “Is diversity what you fear? We know you don’t want us here.”  

California’s higher education Master Plan, adopted in 1960, sets a target for UC eligibility of 12.5 percent of all California public high school graduates. But when the California Postsecondary Education Commission (CPEC) found last spring that more than 14 percent of the 2003 high school graduating class were UC eligible under the existing standards, the regents moved forward to modify those standards. Modifications adopted by the regents at their meeting last July are expected to cut between 4,600 to 4,900 high school students statewide out of UC eligibility by the fall of 2005. This week’s grade point average increase is expected to cut off between 700 and 750 more. 

Hardest hit are expected to be African-American students, who are projected to drop from 3.1 percent of UC eligible high school seniors in 2003 to 2.7 percent in 2007 under the guidelines adopted in July and this week. Latino student eligibility would drop from 15.5 percent to 15.1 percent, while Asian student totals would rise from 31.4 percent to 32.1 percent and white student totals would rise from 47.7 percent to 47.9 percent. The totals are contingent on each ethnic group retaining the same test scores in 2007 that it had in 2003. 

Several of the regents appeared to be swayed by the presentation of UC President Robert C. Dynes, who emphasized that his office would continue to monitor UC eligibility statistics. If the percentage of eligible high school seniors dropped to 12.5 percent before the new GPA guidelines went into effect for 2007, the regents could quickly lower the GPA again at its discretion, he said. 

Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, an ex officio member of the board, called the data on which the board made its decision “flawed.” 

“At the moment that we need to put more and more students into the UC system, we’re cutting back,” Bustamante said. “No one said that they were not eligible, because they are. No one said that they couldn’t succeed, because they can succeed. And yet, we’re going to take 5,000 to 6,000 students and take them out of the system. It doesn’t make any sense.” 

Bustamante said that the only thing that pleased him about the vote was that it only passed 14-6. “Usually I can only get two to four votes for my views on these types of issues,” he said. 

The anguish over the issue was summed up by regent Judith Hopkinson. While calling the eligibility increase “an emotional issue for everybody,” and noting that “the lack of diversity is the biggest single failing we have,” she said that “to think we’re going to get financial support from the state over 12.5 percent [of California high school seniors] is irresponsible.” 

Hopkinson said, “The state is putting UC in financial jeopardy because of the lack of fiscal support. This is a very dangerous place for us to be.” 

She said that the regents “ought to be consistent” in their treatment of the higher education Master Plan, noting that “we set aside the Master Plan [during the state budget deliberations] to accommodate the governor in his Higher Education Compact.” 

Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez, ex officio member, pointed out that because of the error rate in the CPEC statistics, “we could already be at the 12.5 percent mark.” Nuñez offered a substitute motion—easily defeated—to postpone the GPA increase until an evaluation of the existing changes could be made following the 2005-06 school year. 

UC staff members said that because the regents did not want to pass any eligibility changes that would affect students currently in high school, changes made following the 2005-06 school year would not be able to go into effect until late in the decade.  

Nuñez, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell, student regent Jodi Anderson, and regents Odessa Johnson and Frederick Ruiz joined Bustamante in voting against the GPA-raising proposal. Regent Ward Connerly, who is often the flashpoint of these discussions, was absent from the meeting when the discussion and vote took place. A representative in his Sacramento office said that Connerly had to attend another appointment during the time of the vote. 

A series of largely student speakers blasted the proposal in one-minute public presentations to the regents before the vote. One student noted that “the GPA increase is part of an alarming trend on UC campuses that includes the raising of student fees.” 

Charles Schwartz, a retired member of the UC Berkeley faculty, said that there were “sizable errors” in the CPEC eligibility study, and called the budget issue a “phony argument.” A crowd of some 50 to 75 spectators offered their approval or disapproval during the meeting, hissing or snapping their fingers in derision or breaking into applause at different points. 

›

The East Bay Municipal Utilities District (EBMUD) reported Thursday that there is no “public health risk” despite complaints of strange-smelling and bad-tasting water. 

The unusual smell and taste of local tap water were the result of seismic retrofit wo rk around the Claremont Tunnel, the agency reported. 

But while the California Department of Health has ruled EBMUD tap water “safe to drink,” EBMUD telephone operators were cautioning customers not to drink any water that “seems to be ‘funny,’” or “if th ey experience conditions of the taste or odor of their water being ‘off.’” 

Complaints about a possible contaminant that tasted like petroleum in EBMUD water began coming in to the company on Tuesday afternoon. 

An EBMUD spokesperson said the retrofit work on the tunnel, which brings water from east of the hills into Oakland and Berkeley, could go on “for a while.” She added, “It’s a long tunnel.” 

—

A divided City Council Tuesday followed through on a plan to save the city $40,000 by putting a civilian in one of the Fire Department’s top jobs.  

But instead of winning praise for sticking to its commitment to cut expenses, councilmembers drew fire fr om the city’s Personnel Board and two firefighters who argued the plan would imperil emergency planning and deny minority firefighters their best shot at a promotion. 

After a lengthy discussion, the council voted 7-2 (Kriss Worthington and Betty Olds vo t ed no) to approve the new position of fire prevention manager. 

The controversial new Fire Department job was a product of an agreement between the city and the Fire Department last spring to cut $500,000 from the department while leaving basic services i ntact.  

The cut was authorized as part of a city plan to close a $10 million budget deficit. 

Instead of shutting down a ladder truck or engine company, the city and Fire Department agreed to eliminate an assistant fire chief position, and to eliminat e t he city’s Office of Emergency Services by consolidating it into the Fire Department’s Fire Prevention Division. The consolidation created the post of fire prevention manager, a civilian who would also assume the duties of fire marshal, previously performe d by an assistant chief. 

By installing a civilian rather than a Fire Department official as the fire prevention manager, the city stands to save $40,000 a year in lower pension benefits. 

The council lauded the deal in May, but this summer the city’s Per sonnel Board came out against it. 

“We’re concerned that a civilian employee doesn’t have the expertise and experience a uniformed firefighter would have,” Personnel Boardmember Hank Silver told the council. 

The board requested that the council del ay a vote until the board conferred with the city’s Disaster Council, which had come out against the plan. But City Manager Phil Kamlarz, citing the need to move forward and honor the council’s budget balancing plan, opted to take the matter before the co uncil Tuesday. 

“What we are upset about is the short-circuiting of the democratic process,” said Boardmember Chuck Robinson. 

Even more important, said Berkeley firefighter David Ross, is that the new position denies him and his two fellow minority firef ighter s in the Fire Prevention Department the chance at a promotion to department head, which had historically been held by a minority. 

“We’ve been excluded from the hiring process,” he said. 

Gil Dong, first vice president of the firefighters union, sa id Acti ng Chief David Orth told firefighters in March that William Guerlich, the city’s emergency services manager, would fill the new position. The announcement sparked protests from the union, which insisted the city hold an open competition for the jo b.  

The union contends Guerlich is untrained to serve as fire marshal and that instead of consolidating the positions, the city could save even more money if it assigned one of the remaining four assistant chiefs as fire marshal, or if it reinstituted th e positi on at a lower salary. 

Acting Fire Chief Orth insisted Guerlich would face competition, as required for civil service jobs. With the recent retirements of Chief Reginald Garcia and an assistant chief, Orth has been filling both the jobs of fire m arshal an d assistant chief. 

Even with an open competition, Guerlich would seem likely to get the nod. Since his position is being consolidated with the Fire Department, he would conceivably be out a job if he wasn’t named to the post.  

Councilmember Betty Olds l ed the charge against giving the position to a civilian. “This man or woman will be fire marshal 75 percent of the time and disaster planner 25 percent of the time. It just can’t work that way,” she said. “Things won’t go well.” 

Councilmember Gordon Wozn iak replied, “Everyone these days has to do two jobs; it’s called multi-tasking.” 

Also holding the line on retreating from its decision last June was Mayor Tom Bates. “We accepted in the budget that we are going down this path,” he said befor e the counci l vote. 

Cannabis Quota 

Medical Cannabis supporters dominated the council’s public comment period, but their pleas did not sway the council from authorizing staff to draft a proposal establishing a quota of three pot clubs in Berkeley. 

“Th is is essenti al medicine. If you limit it in Berkeley there won’t be enough medicine to go around,” said Angel McClary Raich, a medical cannabis patient and a party to a cannabis lawsuit before the Supreme Court this year.  

The proposal would also requi re clubs to be located a specified distance from schools and each other. The council will vote on the final resolution sometime next year. 

Councilmember Linda Maio said she proposed the ordinance to prevent cannabis clubs that have been shut down by a si milar law in O akland from relocating to Berkeley. 

The city officially recognizes three cannabis clubs within city limits, though a fourth club is believed to exist on Shattuck Avenue north of University Avenue. 

Councilmember Kriss Worthington called th e measure “a so lution in search of a problem.” He said he wasn’t against a quota, but he thought three clubs were too few and any new regulation effort should include a provision to increase the number of marijuana plants patients can grow. 

Utility Unde rgrounding 

Afte r four years of struggle, residents of 105 homes near the Kensington border voted 73-to-21 to establish the first district to bury its utilities underground.  

The 79 percent approval was far greater than the two-thirds majority needed to establish the district. 

Households in the Thousand Oaks Heights Undergrounding District will be required to pay an average of $21,000 to cover the costs of the project, estimated at $2.3 million.  

An initial payment of between $500 and $2,500 is due wi thin six months. Carol Bledsoe, a member of the Steering Committee that pushed for the undergrounding said supporters were working on a plan to help neighbors who might have difficulty making payments. 

Recently, the city mailed residents information on financial options—including reverse mortgages—for residents who don’t have funds available to pay for the project. 

A second-year UC Berkeley undergraduate took his seat Wednesday night as Berkeley’s youngest-ever planning commissioner. 

Appointed by Berkeley City Councilmember Kriss Worthington, Joseph Fireman is the first student ever named as a sitting member of the panel. 

“Six students have served as commissioner for one night, and one served for two nights, but he is the first to serve as a full-time commissioner,” Worthington told planning commissioners when he introduced his appointment. 

“I appointed him because when I sat down with him and asked very detailed questions, he gave me stunningly detailed and considerate answers,” Worthington said. 

Fireman replaces Rob Wrenn. 

Also joining the panel for the first time was Helen Burke, appointed by Councilmember Linda Maio to fill the seat vacated by Zelda Bronstein. 

Burke, who graduated UC Berkeley with a degree in planning, served 17 years with the Environmental Protection Agency. A member of the Sierra Club, she has been active in the movement to daylight the city’s creeks. 

“I’m glad to be getting back to my planning roots,” she told her fellow commissioners. 

During a meeting that lasted less than an hour, commissioners enacted three sets of minor wording changes to clarify existing zoning laws and delayed acting on a fourth at the request of current Planning Manager Mark Rhoades. 

The commission also agreed to vote on the zoning overlay to the University Avenue Plan on Oct. 12 without a preceding public hearing. 

On that same date commissioners will hold a public workshop on proposed zoning ordinance amendments on parking requirements raised by the Mayor’s Permitting Task Force. 

The most controversial item on the agenda wasn’t up for formal action. 

After the city Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) spent four grueling years hammering out proposed amendments in the city’s landmark ordinance and zoning ordinance mandated by the Permit Streamlining Act, the fate of their work now rests in the hands of the planners. 

Carrie Olson, landmarks chair during the revisions, Becky O’Malley, former commissioner, and preservation activists John English and John McBride urged planning commissioners to adopt the proposals. O’Malley is executive editor of the Daily Planet. 

“These represent a really complex package, a very delicately balanced compromise,” English said of the proposals. 

“Let’s take a look at what we’ve got,” said McBride, who attended most of the sessions of the LPC subcommittee that drafted the proposals. “It would be really great to see it move forward. It satisfies what the state requires to bring about prompt handling, and the zoning amendments really do matter to make it truly effective.” 

The Planning Commission indicated a strong desire to hold both a public workshop and public hearings before enacting any revision, and Rhoades said the earliest possible date for either would be Oct. 27. 

While Rhoades suggested conducting a hearing before the workshop, commissioners seemed more inclined to do the reverse.

Berkeley’s Public Art Committee gave a weak thumbs up to the 175-ton, 20-feet-high quartzite and bronze memorial to the late Berkeley-born environmentalist David Brower. 

The memorial was bankrolled by Brian and Jennifer Maxwell, creators of the Berkeley-based Power Bar sports nutrition giant. Mayor Tom Bates has said he hopes to install the work at the Berkeley Marina.  

But the committee’s two-one vote to accept the piece was heavily qualified, with proponents unsure where to place the controversial creation by Finno-American sculptor Eino. 

“I don’t think this is a very good piece,” said Bonnie Hughes, one of three civic arts commissioners who attended the Public Arts Committee meeting Tuesday morning. “I have a lot of problems with this.” 

Hughes cast the lone vote for rejection. 

But even Jos Sances, committee chair, and Arts Commissioner Chair David Snippen expressed reservations. 

The lone member of the public to speak at the meeting told the committee that “when I saw that globe and the figure of a white man on top of it, I immediately thought of the image of the white man dominating the world.” 

A similar complaint had been expressed in writing by Peter Selz, founder of the Berkeley Art Museum and a former curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who called the work another “general on horseback.” 

Richard Duane, a lawyer who represents Jennifer Maxwell and the estate of Brian Maxwell, who died earlier this year, objected to Selz’s imagery. 

“It’s not a general on a horse,” Duane said. “When I see it, it makes me think of what Brower was all about.” 

Nobody’s ever seen the finished work, which remains disassembled in a San Francisco warehouse. 

All three panelists wondered if the Berkeley waterfront was the best site for the massive work. 

While both Hughes and Snippen expressed aesthetic objections, Commissioner Sances said “to me, aesthetics are in the eye of the beholder, so that’s not our role.” 

“We’re not a hundred percent in favor of it, obviously,” said Snippen. 

The main reason for the yes votes seemed to be the feeling that because the city couldn’t afford its own monument to the noted environmentalist, the Maxwell offering was the best alternative. 

The decision was handed on to the full commission, which met the following evening. Because there wasn’t time to schedule a vote—which requires public notice beforehand—no final action could be taken until the commission’s meeting on Oct. 27. 

Commissioners were presented with strongly held views during their Wednesday evening session, said Snippen. 

Only Duane and Ken Brower, the environmentalist’s eldest son, spoke in favor of the statue. 

Speaking in opposition were Marina residents Janet Cobb and Paul Caner and his spouse. Selz and Carole Schimmerling also spoke out against the work. 

Snippen said he is hoping for input from the Waterfront Commission and eventually for an opportunity for the two panels to exchange views on the sculpture and his hopes to create a waterfront sculpture walk. 

“It’s also hard to make a decision without seeing the sculpture. All we’ve seen are some sketches and computer renderings. Before we vote, I’d like to see the disassembled work,” he said. “I think a site visit is very appropriate.” 

The pieces are currently stored in a warehouse in the San Francisco Presidio. 

“Ultimately, the commission will make its final recommendation to the City Council, which will have the final say. Before we vote, I’d like to have as much public input as possible,” Snippen said. 

With Mayor Tom Bates a strong proponent of the blue-and-bronze creation, Commissioner Hughes said she feels approval is a foregone conclusion.›

An Afghan shepherd stands in the countryside strumming a homemade guitar, an instrument he’s cobbled together out of a rusted oil can and some wire. The tune he plays is simple but full. 

“He’s representative of how people live there. You get whatever you can and make what you can of it,” said Cliff Orloff, who, with his wife Olga Shalygin, filmed the man as part of their documentary Afghanistan: A Fragile Peace. 

The Berkeley couple’s 30-minute documentary focuses on the country’s challenges as it gears up for presidential elections Oct. 9. It is scheduled to air on KQED Channel 9 on Sunday, Sept. 26, at 2 p.m. 

Two years after the fall of the Taliban, warlords continue to control most of the nation, the economy is propped up on opium cultivation and foreign aid, and a disarmament program has failed, the filmmakers say. 

But these realities, they note, are juxtaposed with Afghans’ hope that their country will soon know peace and democracy. 

Shalygin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, and Orloff, a former business and engineering professor at Cornell, Princeton and UC Berkeley, hope their film will help bring Americans’ attention back to Afghanistan. 

“I think that most people think there’s war in Iraq, and Afghanistan is over—it gets so little press,” said Orloff. “In fact that’s not true. It could blow up at any minute.” 

The piece is a follow-up to the couple’s 2002 PBS documentary Afghanistan, Winning the War, Losing the Peace. The couple returned to the country in April to shoot the new film over three weeks.  

“We found that things are booming,” said Orloff. “The stores were filled—two years ago they had nothing. But when you dug beneath the surface, you saw that opium represents half the country’s economy.” 

The warlords were quiet, and things seemed peaceful, he said. But that was largely due to the fact that they had huge poppy businesses to protect. 

“It’s not nearly as rosy as people think,” Orloff said. 

In the rural areas, where 80 percent of the population live, not much has changed in terms of infrastructure, said Shalygin. Most villages don’t have water, schools or medical clinics. And people are still threatened by roaming gunmen. 

The couple interviewed everyone from shepherds to a warlord to a university professor. They spoke to Afghan women, too, who said their equal rights, while protected under the country’s new constitution, still aren’t guaranteed. 

“Unfortunately, just because we create a constitution doesn’t mean it’s immediately in practice,” Shalygin said. “I was still blown away that even two years after the collapse of the Taliban women are still wearing the burkas.” 

The filmmakers aren’t new to Afghanistan. Shalygin became familiar with the region as a photographer for the Associated Press. She was part of the AP’s Moscow photography team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for its coverage of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Orloff first traveled to Afghanistan in 1971, and says he was impressed by the Afghan people’s generosity and hospitality. 

The husband and wife team financed the project themselves, with Orloff writing the script and narrating and Shalygin filming. 

Since 1997, when they met through an Internet dating site, they’ve also produced documentaries on Cuba, the Yanomami Indians of South America, and the lives of women in Uzbekistan. 

Although the presidential election in Afghanistan promises to capture U.S. headlines, the filmmakers believe it is unlikely to bring legitimacy to whoever holds the office. Instead, power will remain with who has the gun, they said. 

“There’s a big push by the U.S. to make it happen,” Shalygin said. 

“So Bush can say, ‘See, we brought democracy there,’” Orloff added. 

But they believe that developing Afghanistan—bringing security to the people, setting up basic infrastructure like electricity and water, and educating the 80 percent of the population that is illiterate—would be a 20-year commitment. 

From the filmmakers’ perspective, the U.S.’s mission there is far from over. 

“It’s not an easy fix,” said Shalygin. 

›

My grandfather, before he died, told me his own repertoire of stories about the Che Guevara he knew, when Che was even younger than the twenty-something traveler portrayed in the new film The Motorcycle Diaries. 

Many of my grandfather’s stories had to do with Che’s eccentric parents. Even people with sketchy knowledge of Che’s biography know he came from Argentina’s upper classes. That bit of biography accounts for one of the clichés that have begun to cling to Che’s popular image. When young people the world over plaster Che’s posters on university walls or wear his face on their t-shirts, they are often paying homage to a revolutionary who purged the baggage of his privileged upbringing to become a “pure revolutionary.” 

But as New Yorker staff writer Jon Lee Anderson’s biography has documented, this notion, however convenient to the manufacture of the Che myth, doesn’t exactly fit. According to my grandfather’s stories, it may be that the revolutionary in Che owes as much to his parents as it does to forging fires of history or experience.  

My grandfather, the law professor Ángel B. Chávarri, was a contemporary of Che’s and their families became acquainted in the 1930s and 1940s in Alta Gracia, a small resort town in Argentina’s central sierras. My great-grandfather had tuberculosis and was prescribed the healthy air there. The Guevara family lived there to assuage Che’s asthma. My grandfather remembered Che as a “rambunctious rapscallion,” a grade-schooler who, despite his asthma, was notorious for his mischief.  

Che’s parents—who eloped and married against the wishes of their families, with Che’s mother already pregnant—were eccentrics, almost misfits, and had a much more hardscrabble life than your typical Buenos Aires aristocrats.  

Che’s mother for one, despite her poverty, used a long cigarette holder, slicked her hair back so that it stuck to her skull, wore un-ladylike trouser suits and drove the family’s dilapidated convertible herself through the town’s streets. For the time and place, her behavior was thoroughly unconventional.  

Che’s father, who had a temper, was a cerebral dreamer who tried and failed at various business schemes, including yacht-building. His hobbies included graphology, the science of studying handwriting to determine an individual’s character.  

Che’s father applied his temper in an episode that is still part of oral tradition around Alta Gracia. During World War II, a group of Argentina’s many Nazi sympathizers gathered regularly at a hotel to hear broadcasts from Europe. Che’s father was an ardent aliadófilo, as partisans of the allies were known, and with friends carried out a raid on the hotel. They scaled to the hotel’s roof to disable the radio antenna and then, for good measure, they slashed the tires of the cars parked outside.  

Despite his bravura, Che’s father, like many dabblers, never found real success, and the Guevaras weren’t wealthy, whatever their pedigree. In Alta Gracia, the man who delivered wood fuel for heating and cooking refused to unload orders at the Guevara place unless they paid him in cash.  

Che happened to be born in Rosario, upriver from Buenos Aires, because his parents stopped there hurrying back to civilization from a yerba mate (a native plant taken as tea in South America) plantation they tried unsuccessfully to run in Argentina's still wild northern frontier. In his pursuit of the frontier lifestyle, Che’s father—Ernesto Guevara Lynch—was following in the footsteps of his own adventurous grandparents, who lived in Gold Rush-era California.  

Coincidentally, Che spent his first days of life in the same Parisian-style apartment building where my mother was later born in downtown Rosario. A few years ago, a handful of Cuban military officials were there on a pilgrimage and rewarded my uncle—who still lived in the building—with a box of Cuban cigars after he let them in and showed them his own apartment.  

“The Motorcycle Diaries” will not be the last rendering of Che designed to appeal to romantic ideas of revolution; “Che,” a film still in the works and rumored to be starring Benicio del Toro, will likely pick up where director Walter Salles leaves off. “The Motorcycle Diaries” was conceived by Brazilian director Salles as a kind of portrait of the revolutionary as a young man. His effort to popularize a new, humanized version of Che is positive.  

“The Motorcycle Diaries” shows that the “real” Che wasn’t just the steely-eyed leftist icon in beret and olive uniform. Closely examined, Che’s background reveals an even deeper lesson for activists who wield his image: sometimes models for rebellion are closer at hand than one may imagine. Che’s parents, down-on-their-luck aristocrats who refused to bow to convention, in their own subtler ways, were revolutionaries of a kind.  

Pacific News Service editor Marcelo Ballve’a family were neighbors to the Guevaras. 

›

Sometimes, getting the whole story out of the daily newspapers is like reading a book after one of your children has gotten to it and torn out half of the pages. You’ve got some gathering and pasting-together to do, if you want to make some real sense out of it. 

Consider the recent tale of the street shrines. 

Monday’s San Francisco Chronicle brings us the story of a memorial in the parking lot of SBC Park in San Francisco, held for a young Redwood City man who was stabbed to death following a Giants baseball game: “[Timothy] Griffith’s parents, along with dozens of relatives and friends, returned to the stadium parking lot Sunday for a vigil. They cried and hugged, left flowers and candles, and talked about a sensitive, funny young man who had a lot of friends rooting for him to put his troubles behind him.” A photo with the story shows a small gathering around what the paper calls a “makeshift shrine” of balloons and flowers along a fence near where Griffith was killed. 

The week before, the San Francisco paper had reported on another memorial shrine—this one in the small town of Arnold in Calaveras County, put togehter for 24 year old California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection firefighter Eva Schicke, who died in last week’s Stanislaus National Forest fire: “[On] Tuesday evening, just after dusk…candles from a roadside memorial flickered in a cool breeze that hinted of autumn. [Fire Captain Andy] Murphy and a small group of young colleagues stood nearby in their dark blue uniforms; their badges, adorned with black sashes of mourning, reflected the headlights of passing cars. A bouquet of remembrance balloons blew in front of a floodlight aimed at a flagpole where a picture of Schicke was pinned at eye level, casting a shadow over the group.” 

Two California communities a long distance apart. Two tragic deaths. Two similar community shrines, as mourners spontaneously find common ways to vent their grief and to memorialize their fallen friends. 

Now comes Oakland where street shrines, it seems, are no longer welcome. At least, not by the police. 

On the same day as the Chronicle ran the Schicke story, the Oakland Tribune brings us a far different announcement under the headline “Shrines To Victims Are Not Long For The Streets” and the subhed “City cops seek swift removal of impromptu tributes, which chief says beget further violence”: “In the wake of a shooting at a street shrine that killed an Oakland man and injured five others, Police Chief Richard Word on Thursday ordered his officers to remove the impromptu memorials. Although the city and police department had allowed the shrines to remain on public and private property for as long as six months, the violence earlier this week prompted Word to change the policy. ‘They seem to be a magnet for violence,’ Word said. ‘You can almost count on some sort of retaliatory violence while people are mourning at these shrines.’ Word said his officers would first ask friends and family members to remove the pictures, stuffed animals and religious items. If they do not, the police will take the items and keep them until they are claimed by the family. But Word said bottles of liquor and drug paraphernalia, which are often a part of the shrines, will be thrown away. Many of the mourners have also begun spray-painting slogans of remembrance and gang graffiti around the shrines.” 

Keep those last two sentences in your mind—the thing about the liquor and drug paraphernalia and the spray-painted slogans—plus that interesting phrase from the chief of “you can almost count on...retaliatory violence...at these shrines.” We'll talk about that when we have a little bit more time. 

Anyway, according to the Tribune story, Chief Word’s actions came after someone—police say they were gang members—shot at mourners at a 94th Avenue and A Street memorial shrine just two hours after shots were fired by what police say were rival gang members at the Hayward funeral of a reported gang member. Also, the Tribune reported that the chief took these street shrine ban actions on his own, without discussions with either Mayor Jerry Brown or the Oakland City Council (the Tribune didn’t mention whether he talked with City Attorney John Russo). 

If the chief’s policy stands, mourning street shrine memorials will be allowed all across California, presumably, but not in Oakland, where there is so much to mourn. 

As always, a little further explanation is in order. 

Mourning shrines became part of Oakland’s street scene only relatively recently—by recently, I mean in the last 25 years. I don’t remember them when I left in 1969, but by ‘88—when I returned from Southern exile—they were a common fact of Oakland life. Although you can never know the meaning of every gathering of flowers and stuffed animals and candles and sympathy cards sidewalk chalk drawings you pass, the shrines mostly seem to be associated with violent deaths—sometimes by gun or knife, sometimes by auto accident. 

There are so many of them in such widespread locations—and they rise so spontaneously—that like funeral rites themselves, the shrines seem to be fulfilling some necessary human function in our lives. 

Perhaps part of it is accessibility. In earlier times, to paraphrase DuBois from Souls of Black Folk, most people were born and lived and then died all in the shadow of the same hill or tree, and so their burial plot was a natural gathering point for those who were closest in their lives. In Carolina, burial plots were sometimes in families’ back yards. But we are so scattered, now, in these new times. Who knows where people are buried? Who can get there, if we knew? The street shrines, at least, mark places that are in full view, where we can easily go, and pay our respects. 

But the shrines also are a commentary—sometimes the family’s and community’s only available commentary on the manner of the death. In that way, they may be both a memorial and a protest—a crying out of “why?”—in a visible way that cannot be ignored. One the most poignant ones I remember was for a young girl who was killed by a car while walking by the public housing project on 77th Avenue and Bancroft in Oakland. I remember the shrine for the flowers and candles that stayed up for many weeks afterwards, but also for the ghastly bent railings of the project’s iron fence, just behind the shrine, caused by the car after it hit the girl and, unaccountably, left unfixed by the city for months and months. That one, yes, and also the shrine on Seminary Avenue where U’Kendra Johnson died, the young Oakland High graduate who was killed when she was hit by a car with a drunk driver fleeing from a high-speed police chase. 

Most of Oakland’s memorial street shrines have nothing to do with retaliatory gang violence but there is nothing in Chief Word’s announced statement that he is making such a differentation. We can expect, then, following the chief’s orders, Oakland police officers will tear down street shrines—all street shrines—regardless of the cause of the victim’s death, and regardless of whether such shrines in and of themselves are likely to lead to further violence in our streets. 

Clearly, there’s more to talk about, here, both by the Oakland City Council and by Oakland citizens. This is not Chief Word’s decision to make on his own. No, not at all. More on this—much more—later.?

7. Right Of The Media To Report Facts, And Not Be Killed 

Freedom of the press is a basic right to be exercised by the media and by the people: the media to report, the people to read, look, and listen. It was enshrined in the First Amendment, the U.N. Charter and the ICCPR because a free people must be able to hear many versions of “the truth” in order to decide whom to believe, and whom to vote for. 

The Homeland Security Act of 2002 (6 U.S.C. § 101) calls for development of “a comprehensive plan” for “securing ... information technology,” seen as a clear violation of the First Amendment.  

By Sept. 15, 2001, a few reporters questioned what George Bush did immediately after 9/11. When their questions were published; they were immediately fired in Texas, Oregon and San Francisco. 

Report 7.2 

Customs Seizes FBI Documents Sent to Journalist: John Solomon (Eric Lichtblau, “FBI Admits Secret Seizure of Documents from AP and Opens an Inquiry,” New York Times, April 24, 2003.) 

Report 7.3 

Immigration Officials Detained Resident Journalist: Roger Calero (“Journalist Wins Fight to Remain in United States,” The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, May 20, 2003.) 

Report 7.4 

U.S. Guards Threatened BBC Journalists on Guantanamo Tour (Vikram Dodd, “American Military Bans BBC Crew From Guantanamo Bay for Talking to Inmates,” Guardian, June 23, 2003.) 

Report 7.5 

U.S. Fire in Iraq Killed Seven Journalists (“IFJ Calls For Iraq Probe After Palestinian Journalist Shot Dead By U.S. Troops,” International Federation of Journalists, Aug. 18, 2003.) 

Report 7.6 

U.S. Censored Embedded Journalists (Peter Phillips, “Corporate Media and Homeland Security Move Towards Total Information Control,” Dissident Voice, April 26, 2003.)  

Report 7.7 

U.S. Detains Iranian Journalists 126 Days (“Freed Iranians Accuse U.S. Of Torture,” Agence France Presse, Nov. 4, 2003.) 

8. Right To Privacy from Surveillance  

Immediately after 9/11, Bush called on Congress to swiftly pass the Patriot Act (“Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism”), a 131-page bill that became Public Law 107-56. The act expanded the powers of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, which created a court to oversee FBI surveillance in foreign intelligence investigations.  

The government established a new technology called MATRIX to make it easier for local, state, and U.S. law enforcement agencies to exchange information, without an avenue for public review. 

Constitutional scholars found that the Patriot Act violates the constitutional right to privacy in the First and Ninth Amendments, U.N. Charter Art. 55, and ICCPR articles. 

Report 8.1 

Attorney General Implements His Registration System (David Cole “13,000 Arabs and Muslims in U.S. Face Deportation and John Ashcroft Attempts to Expand Patriot Act,” Democracy Now!, June 9, 2003.) 

Report 8.3 

Immigration Failed To Notify Non-Citizens of Second Registration (“As Immigrant Registration Deadlines Loom Once Again, ACLU Sees Trap for Arabs and Muslims,” American Civil Liberties Union, Oct. 30, 2003.)  

Report 8.6 

Judge Limited Patriot Act Application; Then Amended Opinion (Linda Deutsch, “Part of Patriot Act Ruled Unconstitutional,” CNN.Com, Jan. 26, 2004; Humanitarian Law Project v. Ashcroft, 309 F.Supp.2d 1185).  

Report 8.7 

Federal Legislation Threatens Right to Privacy of Medical Records (P.L. 107-56; Citizens for Health et al v. Tommy Thompson, Secretary of Health and Human Services, No. 03-2267, April 2, 2004.) 

9. Right of Libraries Not To Report on Readers 

The Patriot Act expanded the FBI’s authority to obtain people’s records. Section 215 lets the FBI seize any record of any entity, including libraries and bookstores, without proving the person whose records are being sought was involved in terrorism.  

Section 215 allows the FBI to obtain whole databases, including records of citizens not suspected of any wrongdoing, and forbids anyone to say their records were searched. 

By October 2002, the FBI had visited 178 libraries to ask for their records. Many found ways to object, relying on the constitutional right to read involved in freedom of the press, the right to privacy, and ICCPR arts. 17-19. 

Report 9.1 

FBI and Homeland Security Checking Out Library Patrons (James Ridgeway, “FBI Snoops at Libraries,” Refuse and Resist, Apr. 8, 2003.) 

Report 9.3 

Republicans Change Rules To Keep Library Oversight (AP, “Bush Prevails as House Refuses to Curb Patriot Act,” FreeRepublic.com, July 8, 2004.) 

10. Right Of Universities To Accept Foreign Scholars And Students 

Since 9/11, when foreign students have been accepted to do graduate work in U.S. universities, they must go to the U.S. Consul in their country to apply for student visas. Consular officials have the new Government Technology Alert List (genetic engineering, biochemistry, microbiology, flight training, neurology, urban planning, etc.). And they have the List of State Sponsors of Terrorism (Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, N. Korea, Sudan, Syria.)  

If a student is from one of the countries on the second list and is studying one of the “sensitive” subjects on the first list, the Consular officials send the application to Washington for review, which can take six months or more. 

Physics Today said in 2003 said these rules could affect 600,000 foreign students. In 2002-2003, students from Middle Eastern countries, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia faced six to 12 month delays. Most of those delayed were from China, India, or a Muslim or Arab country. 

These actions violate the academic freedom incorporated in the First Amendment, and the right to travel (see 11.) 

Report 10.1 

New Student Exchange & Visitor Information System Targets International Students (Robert M. O’Neil, “Academic Freedom and National Security in Times of Crisis,” Academe, May/June 2003.) 

Report 10.2 

Foreign Scientists, Technology Students at Risk: Adrian Ow Yung Hwei, et al. (Mark Clayton, “Academia Becomes Target for New Security Laws,” The Christian Science Monitor, Sept. 24 2002.) 

Report 10.3 

Mandatory Security Checks Hit Certain Foreign Students: 600,000 May Be Affected (Jim Dawson, “Post-September 11th Visa Woes Still Plague International Students and Scientists,” Physics Today, June 2003.) 

Report 10.4 

INS Detained Kuwaiti Immigrant Mathematics Professor: Hasan Hasan (Ben Ehrenreich, “Passport to Hell,” Orange County Weekly, Oct. 11-17, 2002.)  

11. Right To Travel  

More than 25,000 non-citizen airport personnel have been laid off under post 9/11 rulings of Department of Homeland Security and Transportation Security Administration. There are no statistics indicating that this has heightened airport security.  

The right of people with passports to travel to and from the U.S. was reaffirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in the late Cold War period. The right to travel within the U.S. and to the U.S. without unreasonable search and seizure is part of the Fourth Amendment protections. The ICCPR articles repeatedly spell out this right.  

Report 11.1 

Activists Kept Off Airplanes: Nancy Oden, et al. (“Caught in the Backlash,” American Civil Liberties Union, Nov. 2002; “Protesters Detained in Milwaukee,” The Progressive, April 27, 2002.) 

Report 11.3 

INS Stopped, Deported Syrian-Canadian Man to Syrian Jail: Maher Arar (Arar to Sue Ashcroft,” CBC News, Jan. 22, 2004.) 

Report 11.4 

U.S. Denied Entry to Ex-UK Official, Spanish Lawyer, British Journalist: Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, et al. (Lara Flanders, “Security threat? Bernadette Devlin McAliskey Barred Entry to the U.S.,” CounterPunch, Feb. 22, 2003.) 

Report 11.5 

Bush Preventing U.S. Citizens from Traveling to Cuba (Cindy Domingo, “Peace & Freedom,” WILPF, Winter 2004.) 

To be continued... 

Berkeley resident Ann Fagan Ginger is a lawyer, teacher, activist and the author of 24 books. She won a civil liberties case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1959. She is the founder and executive director of the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute, a Berkeley-based center for human rights and peace law. 

Contents excerpted from Challenging U.S. Human Rights Violations Since 9/11, edited by Ann Fagan Ginger (© 2004 Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute; Prometheus Books 2005) Readers can go to http://mcli.org for a complete listing of reports and sources, with web links. 

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Speaks Loudly with Big Stick 

Reversing the maxim of Teddy Roosevelt, a not-so-gentlemanly and highly verbal fellow engaged in verbal disputation with another fellow Sunday evening near the Top Dog South on Durant Avenue raised a large stick and threatened to beat his co-antagonist. 

Since the fellow receiving the threat saw that the stick-wielder’s buddies were willing to add their own muscle to the incipient fracas, he fled the scene and called police. 

Before officers arrived, the adversaries decamped, said Berkeley Police spokesperson Officer Joe Okies. 

Purse Snatcher Succeeds 

A 20-something male grabbed the handbag of a woman walking along Fifth Street near its intersection with Camellia Street then jumped into a white car and fled. Police haven’t identified a suspect. 

Greeted with a Bang 

A resident who lives near the corner of Le Conte and Euclid avenues received a somewhat disconcerting surprise on responding to a doorbell ring late Monday afternoon. 

Opening the door, the resident received an explosive greeting, which, upon further investigation, was revealed to have been a firecracker. 

Since fireworks are banned by municipal ordinance, police were summoned to the scene, only to find that the key piece of evidence had auto-destructed and its igniter had fled forthwith. 

Citizens Corner Crook 

When a 20-year-old bandit tapped the till of the Enterprise Rent-a-Car location at the corner of Oxford Street and Berkeley Way whilst strongarming an employee Monday afternoon, civilian passers-by raised the hue and cry, surrounding the suspect and enabling police to make an arrest, said Officer Okies. 

Wrong Place, Wrong Time 

Police who stopped a suspicious looking fellow near the corner of Shattuck Avenue and Kittredge Street found out just why the aforementioned fellow had aroused their attentions. 

When a quick search turned up unspecified stolen property and the ubiquitous drug paraphernalia, the ambulatory felon compounded his fix by offering up a name not his own. 

He was given ample time to ponder his foibles in the municipal hoosegow. 

Citizen Tip Catches Robber 

An alert citizen, outraged at seeing a bandit rob a victim in a wheelchair near the corner of California Street and Alcatraz Avenue, made a call to 911 at 5:47 p.m. Tuesday.  

Officers were quickly able to identify the 33-year-old suspect and haul him off to jail, said Officer Okies. 

Berkeley High Brouhahas 

Police were summoned to Berkeley High School twice after classes closed Thursday afternoon. In the first instance, two boys had attacked another, with two others joining in. The arrival of officers quickly set things aright. 

Just minutes later came a second report, and officers arrived to find a sizable crowd encircling young female combatants. Finding no ambulance-worthy injuries, officers left the discipline to school officials.›

MEASURE H 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Let’s hope that the citizens of Berkeley will evaluate Measure H fairly before falling prey to such specious arguments summoned up by a recent letter to the editor. I doubt that an anti-Semitic and racist homphobe candidate could qualify for public financing. It takes 500 $5 donations to qualify to run for mayor, a high threshold in comparison to Maine (where it takes 50 $5 donations to run for similar sized jurisdictions). There hasn’t been a single case of an undeserving or undesirable candidate running in a statewide race in Maine.  

The argument that incumbents will not need to be responsive to the community is patently false. The situations in Maine and Arizona do not support this contention, and neither does it hold water theoretically. A challenger would easily defeat an unpopular incumbent as they will both qualify for the same amount of funding. It simply does not follow that an incumbent who is not responsive to his or her constituents would have an advantage over a challenger willing to address the needs and wishes of the voters. 

Finally, the idea that elected officials, who are freed up to serve their constituency by public financing, would be so burdened by the cost of it that they would not be accountable is another red herring. The cost of public financing is very small (approximately $5 per Berkeley resident) and will add immeasurable value to our democracy. 

Darcy Crosman 

• 

DRAFT PROPOSAL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

When I was in college I wrote a speech for my class assignment (1961) and in that speech I predicted a war of attrition in Vietnam. The real reason in my mind that we would break the financial back of the communists in Russia. I really think it helped as the U.S.A. has the greatest logistic ability of any country now or in the past. 

We lose many more people every day to automobile accidents. The difference in war is that they are all young and haven’t realized their full potential. They are also almost insanely brave. 

Why not start the draft at 62 for all of us that are fit for line duty and the rest for planning and logistics? We older folks know how to avoid risks and yet get things done. Our loss would not be so destructive. It might even save Medicare or SS. In the revolutionary war the old folks acquitted themselves well.  

I like the fact that the government is trying to keep the conflict overseas, this is tradition and it has always worked for us and is working now. Fight over there not here. 

One atom bomb would make our efforts fruitless. Therefore I recommend that we take what ever action that is necessary to prevent hostile fanatics from acquiring dangerous weapons. Look what Pakistan was doing. It is such a danger to everything including all of our information on computers and millions of lives. Recovery would almost be impossible. Please block the highway so we do not get run over by crazy people. Remember the “Old Man of the Mountain.” Just a different non-terrorist old man’s view. 

Lowel M. Somers 

• 

GUN FACTS 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

I read the Sept. 10-13 issue of the Daily Planet and I have to ask, do you have a fact checker? 

Read the following line from article “Police Special Unit Accused of Improper Search and Detention” by Matthew Artz: 

“Within seconds, Tweedie said, a team of five SEU officers had battered down her door, shoved her to the kitchen floor and pointed their M-40 carbine guns at her. “ 

M-40 Carbine guns? Who makes up this stuff? Either the SEU had MP-5 submachine guns or they had M-4 carbines. They did not however have “M-40 carbine guns.” That makes about as much sense as calling a particular car a “Mazda rx-70 car automobile.” 

Brent Mattis 

• 

MORE MEASURE H 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Keith Winnard’s letter about Measure H on Sept. 17 states common concerns about public financing of campaigns—that fringe candidates might get public money, that it is somehow a gift to incumbents, and that it costs too much. Fortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. 

Measure H is based on the extremely successful Clean Money, Fair Elections systems used in Arizona and Maine. Like their systems, Measure H requires that participa- ting candidates show they have a broad base of public support by gathering a substantial number of signatures and $5 contributions—100 for city council candidates and 500 for mayoral candidates. Only candidates with substantial support in the community can reach those thresholds. They are even higher than those of Arizona and Maine, where fringe candidates rarely receive public funds. 

The miracle of public financing is that candidates with a broad base of public support actually get enough funding to compete against incumbents and wealthy candidates. In Arizona and Maine, more women and minority candidates are able to run for office and more challengers have defeated incumbents. In Arizona, the percentage of races decided by money dropped from 79 percent to only 2 percent. In other words, public financing allows elections to be decided by issues, not money. No wonder voter turnout increased by 20 percent. 

As for the small cost of public financing: Arizona and Maine both have sound, balanced budgets passed by diverse and talented officials elected without private funds, providing the services their people want. California doesn’t. The federal government doesn’t. The city of Berkeley doesn’t. Is this a coincidence? 

The real question isn’t how we can afford to have public financing of campaigns. It’s how can we afford not to? Vote Yes on H. 

Trent Lange 

Vice President, California Clean Money Campaign 

San Francisco 

• 

BROWER MEMORIAL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

A double thanks for the two Brower Memorial pieces published in the Planet pages so far (“Brower Memorial May Land at Berkeley Marina,” Daily Planet, Sept. 21 and “350,000 Pounds of ‘Spaceship Earth,’” Daily Planet, Aug. 6). 

In their deliberations, I hope that Civic Arts and Waterfront Commissioners acknowledge that (1) Berkeley’s waterfront already has a fine example of plop art, and (2) a big yellow legacy from PowerBar magnates Brian & Jennifer Maxwell still adorns the eastern face of Berkeley’s tallest downtown building. Wouldn’t it be nice if both Spinnaker Way and downtown Berkeley could avoid the fate of that no-man’s land in The Great Gatsby?  

Above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground. 

The memory of an energetic local entrepreneur and the spirit of David Brower deserve better. The Commissioners (and the Mayor) should follow the lead of the San Francisco Arts Commission and decline the Eino sculpture. 

It’s time for the PowerBlight sign to disappear too. After all, since March 2000 we’ve been gazing at a Shirley Dean-era rooftop advertisement now owned by a subsidiary of breast-feeding pariah Nestlé SA. 

Jim Sharp 

• 

GRANDSON RESPONDS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As grandson of Jerome Blank, I would like to second my mother, Marcia Blank Kelly, in her praise of my grandfather and his contributions to his lifelong home, the city of Albany. 

However, in fairness to the rest of the Blank family, it should be noted that the Daily Planet made an overreaching inference in titling my mother’s September 21 letter to the editor “Blank Family Response.” In fact her letter was simply an individual’s opinion, not a collective, “official” statement. 

Michael Kelly 

San Jose 

• 

MEMORIAL SUGGESTIONS  

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thank you for informing us about the 350,000 pound monstrosity that the Power Bar folks are now trying to pawn off onto the City of Berkeley and have installed on the Marina. Recently this statue was rejected by the San Francisco Art Commission as unsuitable and out-of-size to be put on public display in their City. This oversized piece is allegedly a memorial to the late David Brower, a dedicated environmental activist. I’m sure that in his heart of hearts he would have much preferred to be remembered by the preservation of some open land, such as the Albany “Bulb” or perhaps by the draining of the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park. 

Check out the environmental waste created to build this 175-ton absurdity: a solid one-hundred ton piece of quartzite was mined in Brazil and then shipped thousands of miles to California. Thousands of tons of copper ore and tin ore were mined, then smelted, refined and then cast to form the sixty ton bronze base for the massive quartzite piece. This heavy bronze base was then also shipped to California, where a sculptor then combined the two pieces to create his massive statue of a bronze Brower climbing on a quartzite earth. Ravaging the planet to supposedly honor a man who opposed ravaging the planet. It sounds like a plan-ET to me.  

Well, the wealthy PowerBar folks are just trying to wash away a little of their personal greed-guilt by commissioning this over-sized piece of “environmental art.” Why don’t they just keep it in their own living room to impress their friends and relations? This imperial art piece would better befit the memory of Napoleon or Genghis Khan. Or perhaps it could be reshaped and recast into a tableau of “Mission Accomplished” and then donated to the City of Crawford, Texas for the soon-to-be-former-President Bush to gaze at when he visits. Or for a more local touch, it could be re-sculpted into a “Censorship Accomplished” memorial showing Mayor Tom Bates tossing bundles of the Daily Californian newspaper into a Berkeley dumpster.  

James K. Sayre 

Oakland 

• 

CREEK ORDINANCE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Next Tuesday, September 28, 2004, the city council will hold a hearing on the City of Berkeley’s Creeks Ordinance. Writing about the public debate that led to this meeting, Council member Mim Hawley writes that the amended creek ordinance has unleashed unusually strong opinions. This is because, for any of the more than 2,000 property owners who have a creek running through (or under) their property, the message the current ordinance sends is fear. Fear that a protracted process will be required to rebuild homes and businesses damaged in a disaster, and exacerbate trauma. Fear that improvements to our properties that make sense from an urban and neighborhood perspective will not be possible. Fear that the city is focusing its creek policy not on pressing issues that holistically affect the urban watershed, like crumbling culverts, contaminated runoff and sewers leaking dangerous effluent into waters where our children play, but rather on abstract, absurdly utopian visions of creeks carving deep channels where condemned homes and businesses once stood. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. I urge all sensible Berkeley citizens to show up to next Tuesday’s special session (held at Longfellow school auditorium) and urge the council to establish a new precedent that calms, rather than inflames a potentially acrimonious public-policy debate. To this end: 

Urge the council to maintain the integrity of the city’s municipal code and treat all non-conforming setbacks identically by affirming the language of Section 23.C.04.090, which establishes a clear and equitable policy for reconstruction non-conforming structures after a disaster. 

Urge the council to decisively reject the focus on a thirty-foot setback from culverted creeks, which threatens to distort what began as enlightened public policy. 

Urge the council to develop a revised creek ordinance that builds on its original purpose, which is to holistically manage the urban watershed according to best practices. 

Kevin Powell 

• 

MEADOW PROJECT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I’m dashing this off to you because as I write a great gnashing of earth, rabbit warrens, baby frogs and handsome reptiles is taking place in West Berkeley between Frontage Road and the marina by the name of “habitat restoration” for $1.3 million to be completed in the spring of 2005 by CalTrans and East Bay Regional Parks via Cherokee-Simeon in exchange for other destruction of land elsewhere.  

This beautiful meadow has been growing for many years, maturing and becoming yet more beautiful with each passing season; a wild place where the Ohlone never tread—so how could it be named “restoration” when it was part of the bay without any vegetation at all? 

Now it reminds one of Palestine and Iraq—so un-Berkeley—so much so that it is unbearable to witness. 

The plant life is so beautiful and the little animals so dear cry out in pain and I cry out on their behalf for loss of certain habitat in favor of an uncertain future in this drought season—already five years—and who knows when new “native” plants can grow? 

Catherine Schaaf 

• 

EXPENSIVE BAD TASTE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Concerning the Brower memorial: 

• It does not have to be called “art” or “Art.” (In fact, Dubuffet said: “Art is best when it forgets itself.”) 

• It can be called an “object” or a “discrete object” or a “memorial” or “reminder” or something else. 

It is a “tourist draw.” 

• Paper and brass explanation items can guide people to a hoped for interpretation. I would include copies of all criticisms and objections. 

• Placement in Berkeley does not necessarily have to be forever. You can say that it might be stored again after one or five years. There could be a review process every year perhaps. The voters could vote on it every year. It could be placed on a flatbed trailer and pushed around Berkeley by hand for a while (no gasoline!) It could stay in different areas for a week or so on the trailer. 

• If it is “clumsy” or “pretentious,” that is OK. “Outsider” art is very charming.  

I am not for or against the Brower memorial. Some might call it “expensive bad taste.” 

Richard List 

• 

SCHOOL WOES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Over the past 10-12 years, we have given the school district over $200 million for school construction. North Berkeley has two brand new schools, Cragmont and Thousand Oaks. Thousand Oaks was completely landscaped. In South Berkeley, LeConte got a new front door, and a lawn. John Muir has a fence which looks as though you need a tetanus shot to approach it. Emerson is a slab of concrete. At Willard, the school district painted over our mural, detroyed our garden, removed one of the basketball courts that community members use on the weekends, and can’t even pick up the garbage which accumulates on all sides of Willard. The destroyed garden sits there, like a gaping wound. When is the school district going to respect our community? 

On the November ballot, the school district wants us to fork over more money. There doesn’t seem to be a good reason to give the district more money. We’ve gotten a pretty bad deal already. 

Dean Olson 

• 

NO PARENT LEFT BEHIND 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Kudos many, to the new candidates for the Berkeley School Board and to the staff editor of The Jacket, Berkeley High School’s newspaper for the recent positive comments to this, our local newspaper. 

As a teacher, secondary counselor and school disciplinarian in the Los Angeles Unified School District, I support your efforts “raising the bar” to do whatever can be done to lessen the achievement gap among Berkeley High School students. 

However, given the focus of a much smaller and possibly workable community, it also seems obvious that you must seek the root of the problem, which is often the support level of the home environment. We all know that the attitudes and support tools which students bring to school can vary just as greatly as your achievement measures show within the schools. Therefore, rather than continually focusing on placing the blame solely on the school and its environment, regarding curriculum and other factors, attempt getting more parental and home environment support, thus creating more accountability and responsibility within the total school community. 

We often hear much misappropriation and misrepresentation among the specific cultural groups regarding AP and other college credit classes at Berkeley High School. Do these also reflect the same numbers with regard to the local school board and parent organizations? It might be time to move forward and insist on some changes, which could in turn produce much better support. 

Initial success must start at home, so let’s push for the change! 

Michael J. Parker 

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The recent commentary on the Albany Waterfront constitutes a tsunami of disinformation (”Magna Plans Imperil Eastshore Park,” Daily Planet, Sept. 14-26) The commentator accuses environmentalists and their allies of striking an unholy deal with Magna, owner of Golden Gate Fields. Nothing could be further from the truth.  

The writer falsely claims that Mayor Tom Bates and the environmentalists agreed to support a Magna waterfront development in Albany in return for Magna selling its Gilman site for ballfields. 

(The commentator also alleges that the current habitat restoration at the Berkeley Meadow is an effort to destroy habitat. This misguided notion is corrected at the end of this piece.) 

This ballfield conspiracy theory is constructed of whole cloth. The truth, while not as racy, is that the environmentalists, especially Norman LaForce and the Sierra Club, and Robert Cheasty and CESP, and Golden Gate Audubon, worked hard to create ballfields at Gilman Street. Mayor Bates helped facilitate the effort. The East Bay Regional Park District bought the 16 acres of parking lot from Magna with the understanding that they would be converted into ballfields. Magna got paid for land it did not need and that would be hard to develop. No conspiracy, just a plain purchase. 

The very dedicated ballfield user groups stepped forward to promote and run the fields in an agreement backed by Emeryville, Berkeley, Albany, El Cerrito and Richmond, under a lease from the Park District.  

As you might guess, it took an extraordinary display of selfless action and regional cooperation for these groups, the five cities and EBRPD to help make this happen. They rose to the occasion, putting up funds and expertise to expedite these much needed playing fields. Everyone worked hard to make this happen and each deserves thanks for this public-spirited endeavor.  

But there never was a deal to support Magna in bringing development to the Albany shoreline. Look at the facts. 

First, CESP and the Sierra Club support open space and shoreline park, not development. For the last 20-plus years they have consistently pushed for park and open space along the East Bay shoreline.  

Second, in the event that the racetrack leaves Albany, CESP, the Sierra Club, Citizens for the Albany Shoreline (CAS) and others support a concept plan that allows modest development, to meet the city’s economic needs by replacing the revenue Albany now gets from its waterfront.  

This concept plan would place approximately 85 percent of the land owned by Magna into the Eastshore State Park. About 15 percent of the Magna land would be used for the replacement development. The development will be toward the freeway, not on the shoreline.  

This plan was created for CESP in 1985; it is not some recent concoction as suggested by the commentary writer. This compromise is called the CESP/Sierra Club Plan. 

On the other hand, Magna wants to develop the Albany shoreline, planning about a million square feet of commercial development, plus keeping the racetrack, plus building a massive casino under Prop. 68, or under a tribe-for-hire Indian casino.  

CESP, the Sierra Club, Golden Gate Audubon and CAS adamantly oppose this development. 

Third, it is true that we in the environmental movement “fought valiantly in the 1970s to protect the waterfront from development.” But that is not the end of the effort. We have steadfastly continued to protect park and open space on the shoreline.  

Our waterfront protection initiatives in Emeryville, Berkeley and Albany, were created and passed in the 1980s and 1990s, all by overwhelming majorities of the voters.  

We are fighting to protect the Albany waterfront today. We are campaigning against the Racetrack Casino Initiative, Prop. 68. We are opposing the Indian casino proposal at Point Molate in Richmond, and the one being discussed now in Albany. We are fighting to protect the Breuner Marsh and the Stege Marsh (Zeneca site) areas in Richmond.  

About the allegation that the Berkeley Meadow is being destroyed, the truth is just the opposite. The Berkeley Meadow is being restored; the habitat is being enhanced.  

The current activity at the meadow is a comprehensive restoration of coastal scrub and seasonal wetlands with the goal of protecting and enhancing habitat.  

The plan has been vetted with the environmental experts not only at State Parks and the Regional Park District, but with the experts at Audubon, the Sierra Club and other environmental groups.  

The state is investing over a million dollars to complete this restoration that will provide a wonderful habitat for our fellow creatures and a learning experience for the humans who visit the area. Yes, there is some temporary work there, but it has been coordinated with nesting seasons and the result will be highly beneficial to the critters.  

Join us in working to create an open shoreline for our children and their great-grandchildren. Come on out to help on Coastal Cleanup Day, Saturday, Sept. 18 from 8 a.m. to noon, at the shore nearest you. See you there. 

Robert Cheasty, president.,Citizens for East Shore Parks 

Jonna Papaefthimiou, conservation manager, Sierra Club  

Arthur Feinstein, conservation director, Golden Gate Audubon  

Sylvia McLaughlin, co-founder, CESP; co-founder, Save the Bay 

Tom Bates, mayor of Berkeley 

Bill Dann, co-chair, Citizens for the Albany Shoreline  

Over the last four years the Berkeley School Board and Berkeley Unified School District have made cuts and adjustments to the district’s budget amounting to about $12 million. These cuts were made necessary by a variety of factors, including past mismanagement, declining enrollment, double-digit increases in healthcare, retirement benefits, and workers comp, and, most significantly, reduced state funding of our public schools. Every part of our school community has made sacrifices in order to get our financial house in order, and as a result the Alameda County Office of Education has just recently given BUSD a positive budget certification after a successful three-year recovery plan. 

Public education is under attack by many forces; inadequate state and federal funding, layers of compliance requirements and mandates, most unfunded, and an escalating neglect for the educational, emotional, and health needs of too many of our children. Children come into our kindergartens with wide disparities in academic and social preparedness, and more and more frequently with nutritional and health issues as well. There are real economic and support gaps which contribute to an academic achievement gap. There are less and less district, city, county, state, and federal funds available to address these disparities because of other national and state priorities (remember, about 75 percent of local school district funding comes from Sacramento). 

We have the opportunity here in Berkeley to do again what we have so consistently and selflessly done many times before: to pick up the challenge presented by these circumstances to support our local schools and our own children. This, after all, is their future, which is our future as well. Measure B, on the ballot in the Nov. 2 general election, would add these services and programs to our Berkeley public schools: 68 percent of the measure’s funds to reduce class size and expand course offerings (about $5.5 million, or at current salaries/benefits, 72 additional teachers) 16 percent of the measure’s funds for full staffing of district libraries (about $1.2 million) seven percent of the measure’s funds to fully restore music in elementary and middle schools (about $550,000) seven percent of the measure’s funds to program evaluation and professional development (about $550,000) two percent of the measure’s funds to parent outreach and translation services (about $150,000). An independent citizen oversight committee is charged by the measure with accountability and reporting duties. Most Berkeley residents will pay between $150 and $200 per year in special assessed taxes to pay for Measure B.  

None of these programs and services are frivolous or unnecessary. All the funds go directly to classroom needs or services to improve instruction and information. I am proud to live in Berkeley, and even prouder to represent Berkeley as a school boardmember, because of our consistent support for essential community needs. Certainly, there is no more important need than the functioning of our public schools, and the uninterrupted services and programs they provide to all our youth. Please join me and many, many others in supporting, working for, and voting for Measure B.  

John Selawsky is president of the Berkeley School Board. ›

Recently some letters were sent to the editors of the Daily Planet regarding the construction work that is currently underway at the Berkeley Meadow. We would like to respond to those letters and provide some information about this restoration project. 

The East Bay Regional Park District and the State Department of Parks and Recreation have jointly developed and are implementing Phase I of a three-phase habitat restoration and public access project on the 72-acre Berkeley Meadow. This project was described and evaluated in an environmental document that was circulated for public review and comment in early 2004. It is also consistent with the conceptual pro-ject described in the Eastshore State Park General Plan, which was approved in December of 2002 after considerable public review and comment. The City of Berkeley reviewed and commented on both of these documents and their comments were incorporated into the current plan. 

The Phase I plan calls for enhancement of existing wetlands and creation of new wetlands within a 17-acre area. This will be done by removing non-native vegetation and recontouring the site with clean imported topsoil. Clusters of native willows and coyote brush will be retained and supplemented with a diverse palette of native shrubs, grasses and herbs. Nesting locations for the Northern harrier will be protected with fencing and nesting locations for the western burrowing owl will be provided. 

Trails will be provided through and around the meadow. The interior trails will be eight-foot wide gravel trails for pedestrians. Paved perimeter trails already exist; however, the trail along the Virginia Street alignment on the north side of the meadow will be regraded, paved and landscaped to allow for better public access in this area. Perimeter and interior fencing will be provided to protect wildlife from disturbance. Consistent with the approved plans, no dogs will be allowed on the meadow’s interior trails. Off-leash dog access is permitted at Cesar Chavez Park and at Point Isabel Regional Shoreline. 

Phase I improvements will cost about $3.3 million and will be constructed over the next seven months. The meadow will be closed until these improvements are complete in March of 2005. 

Eastshore State Park extends 8.5 miles along the East Bay shoreline from the Bay Bridge to Richmond. It includes 2,262 acres of uplands and tidelands along the waterfronts of Oakland, Emeryville, Berkeley, Albany and Richmond. The state owns the majority of Eastshore State Park and partners with EBRPD to manage the site. The San Francisco Bay Trail will link the entire park when the project is completed.  

The park includes tidal marshes, sub tidal areas and mudflats that extend bayward from the shoreline, including the Emeryville Crescent, Albany Mudflat and Hoffman Marsh. Most of the existing upland area is the result of fill placed in the Bay west of the historic shoreline. The park reflects the influences of both natural systems and human intervention. State Parks and EBRPD plan to enhance and restore a number of ecosystems and habitat types throughout the park. The Berkeley Meadow project is the first of many anticipated improvements in this park that will take place as funding is provided.  

Brad Olson is manager of the East Bay Regional Parks District’s environmental program. 

›

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As one who attended what Ms. O’Malley calls the Alligator Ball (Editorial, Daily Planet, Sept. 17-20), I had a wonderful time. At the Laurie Capitelli fundraiser I spoke with a number of elected officials whose record of public service I respect, many District 5 residents, and an assortment of really interesting folks representing a broad spectrum of Berkeley political opinions. It was a far more diverse group than any I’ve seen in one Berkeley room for a long time. There were even preservationists like myself who seemed to be having a nice time talking with architects, developers, and realtors. Rather than “catching fleas from lying down with dogs” as Ms. O’Malley would have it, I prefer to see Laurie Capitelli’s City Council candidacy as offering hope for reconciliation, and the opportunity to work together to achieve common goals. Oh, by the way, the food was excellent—it had a definite Italian bias. 

Robert Kehlmann 

• 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

Your editorial comparing a Berkeley City Council race to a children’s story was entertaining, but like most works in that literary genre, it was a piece of fiction.  

Laurie Capitelli, a candidate for the District 5 Council seat, has lived and worked in our neighborhood for more than 25 years, and has been actively involved in issues and organizations that promote the best of Berkeley. He was instrumental in founding Ecohouse—Berkeley’s model demonstration project in ecological living. He is a 15-year board member of the Berkeley Public Education Foundation, overseeing more than $8 million in funding for our schools. And he was a co-founder of the Elmwood Theater Foundation, which raised more than $400,000 to save the College Avenue landmark from a developer’s wrecking ball and restore the theater to operation after a devastating fire. 

This is hardly the resume of the developer alligator your piece of fiction suggests. In fact, the Sierra Club—not a real estate industry favorite—has endorsed Laurie Capitelli as the best choice for North Berkeley’s council representative. 

Laurie Capitelli is a consensus builder, who looks for solutions that work for the entire community, not just for developers or their proponents. That’s why he’s earned the support from every part of Berkeley, including: Mayor Tom Bates, and Councilmember Mim Hawley; local environmental leaders and Save the Bay founder Sylvia McLaughlin, and former EBMUD Director Mary Selkirk; Bicycle Coalition’s Hank Resnik and Peralta Community Garden founder Karl Linn; former Citizens Budget Review Commissioner Jay Miyazaki, and community activist boona cheema; as well as hundreds of District 5 neighbors who have put Laurie’s campaign signs in their yards. 

For the real facts, and not fiction about Laurie Capitelli’s qualifications for office, his many years of dedicated service to the community, and his broad support within District 5, please check his website and campaign literature.  

David J. Snippen and Elyce Judith 

• 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Maybe the Planet’s editors are right, and my list of endorsers conjures visions of the Alligators’ Ball and hungry maneaters feeding at the public trough. But if you’d actually covered my fundraiser, instead of just criticized me by association based on some of the people who back me, you’d have seen me leave with the girl I came with, that long-time foe of big developers, the Sierra Club, who endorsed me last week. And you could have tripped the light fantastic with Save the Bay’s Sylvia McLaughlin and Elyce Joyce from the Urban Creeks Council too. There’s lots of dancing at a ball; you have to keep your eye open to make sure you spot who’s wearing the glass slippers. 

Laurie Capitelli ›

“Heidi, will you marry me?” 

“No, Mr. Donohue!” 

“‘Once upon a time...’” 

On a set lit like a cross between Piranesi and Edward Gorey, these lines become a refrain, plaintive and funny at first—like one facet of the fairy tales Mary Zimmerman has chosen to elaborate in The Secret in the Wings, now at Berkeley Rep—then more and more transparent as the tag to introduce the stories, a vignette, one tale interrupting the other . . .  

The hook’s as simple as the tag it sets up: Heidi, whose frivolous (even silly—in fact, they seem like actors) parents are going out for the evening (a real dark and stormy—), is apprehensive about being left in the care of the next-door neighbor. “The ogre? He has a tail!” He also has a tale, or a few, and after the preliminary spurning, opens a huge tome, intones the proper formula—and the enchantment is to begin. 

Zimmerman—whose Journey to the West and The Da Vinci Notebooks were past hits at the Rep—this time has chosen (and chosen well) a handful or so of the old Grimms’ Fairy Tales-type of stories that parents, especially since Dr. Spock, have been reluctant to tell to children. Zimmerman leaves them in their phenomenal strangeness; like the old Border Ballads, like medieval allegories, they are not only filled with dismemberings but are disjointed compared to modern narratives, wayward—you can never tell where they’re going. These are told and acted out by a cast accomplished at the job, bringing their own special talents (often highlighted for a moment) to the mix, switching parts and changing costume at the drop of a bodkin.  

But there are problems in tone and in development. Maybe adapting an accumulation of tales instead of an integral work (as with Journey or The Notebooks) makes the show more wayward than the tales themselves, which after all have a completely mysterious and disarming integrity of their own. That’s mostly preserved—but at the cost of the hooks and tags wearing thin: a chorus of schoolgirl rhymes, actors’ exercises at “doing” animals, bad jokes to represent bad jokes . . . a whole slew of “stagings” to set these tales make what comes on as a tour-de-force unravel into a pastiche, a workshop piece. 

The tales themselves are fascinating, but untouched—finally elaborated only by the staging as it switches attack, and a hint of psychology (for which folk and fairy tales, myths and dreams have long been fair game). The waywardness of the tales—the ways in which they change direction and narrative shape, just as their characters change form—provides an amplitude of their own signature, intuitive meaning that isn't met by the play’s coquettishness. 

Since Plato, the classic attitude for this kind of material has been twofold: ironic (which preserves the story in suspense) and anachronistic (retellings which employ the old-time story to comment on the present). This was canonized in the Renaissance and by Romanticism. Popular forms do a fair job of it for every generation, from the Fractured Fairy Tales TV cartoons of the ‘60s to Sondheim’s Into the Woods. 

But there’s little resembling irony in Zimmerman’s syncopated repetitions that are a little too on-the-beat: They begin to grate. It’s not à la Gertrude Stein, whose operas at least evolve the inner meaning of the stories. Here, it’s too much that passé gesture of an anachronism, “putting on a show.” 

And that show can be impressive: Costumes, sets and properties are lavish and inventive, the actors play with considerable energy (though finally it is only Christopher Donohue, playing his namesake, the-ogre-next-door, who captures a tone both ironic and anachronistic—and very droll) and the tales are, again, fascinating, if a little stripped of fabulousness. 

There’s even an element of fun in all this insouciance, but it’s just not the excitement that comes from the tales themselves. At the end—and hinted at during the course of the show—there’s a play between generations, the fears and monstrous dreams of one projecting into the fun and stories of the next—or next again. Interesting, but undeveloped, as so much of The Secret is—a gesture towards theater that doesn’t quite make vaudeville or burlesque. Maybe its undisclosed secret is that it's really cabaret. 

Thirty-six years ago the first occurence of what is today called the Annual Berkeley Old Time Music Convention filled downtown Berkeley’s Provo Park (Civic Center Park) with drunken judges, mad fiddlers, demented banjo artistes and old time music lovers. It was called the 35th Annual Stringband Contest. 

Eric Thompson was the responsible party.  

“I went to the city and got the permit,” Thompson recalled. “When I got to the part where the city wanted to know who was sponsoring this event I had to tell them, ‘No one. It’s just happening’”.  

The next year, 1969, they called it the 22nd Annual Old Time Fiddler’s Convention. The final event (proclaimed the 17th Annual) overwhelmed Berkeley’s downtown park in 1970 and Folkway Records issued “Berkeley Farms,” a recording memorializing the first three years. When the city’s Chamber of Commerce decided to encourage the event, the organizers called it off and, like Rip Van Winkle, disappeared for 33 years.  

Last year, local musical legend Marc Silber was asked to officiate the reborn Stringband Contest.  

“It was the first time they’d held the festival in about a hundred years,” Silber explained. “I was a judge and it was just great. There’s nothing like this on the West Coast. There are folks coming all the way from Seattle and San Diego to compete in this, just for a bunch of vegetables.” 

The winners get Berkeley Farmers’ Market vegetables. 

Last year about 16 bands played in the competition, including two youth bands, Silber said. 

“This year we’ve got a kids only competition where they’ll all just get a prize.” In an aside Silber admits, “They couldn’t compete because they’d just win anyway.”  

Suzy Thompson, an event organizer and musician, said that despite the term “old music,” the convention celebrates music that is still fresh and alive. 

“It’s possible to get a superior attitude about what defines old time music,” she said. “The music itself can seem very simple. To the casual observer it can seem that it doesn’t have much to it, but when you listen deeply…when you do deep listening…there’s more to it than what appears on the surface.”  

Her husband Eric agreed. “I recall someone saying they were trying to turn leather britches into Permapress, with all fiddlers playing exactly the same songs with the same variations. We’re not encouraging that. We like to have it as loose as possible. That’s why we bribed the judges with liquor that first year.”  

This year’s event will include Mexican-style old timers the Peña-Govea Stringband, an unnamed all banjo stringband, last year’s winners the Squirrelly Stringband, specially assembled challengers the Squirrel Hunters, the politically appropriately named Buck-Fush, and too many more to elucidate.  

Silber said he doesn’t plan to perform anytime during the weekend festival. “It’s just for white people. But I’ll be teaching my regularly scheduled free guitar classes at Live Oak Park on Sunday morning. Folks have got to get a chance to get the banjo sounds out of their heads,” he said shaking his head ruefully.  

This year, Berkeley’s festival of early American music will spring forth from four different venues.  

Friday evening, Sept. 24, the Freight and Salvage Coffeehouse, itself now 35 years old, will feature an old time concert” with Jody Stecher and Kate Brislin, the Earl White Band, and the Thompson String Ticklers (yep, featuring Eric and Suzy Thompson and various other local old time music aficionados).  

The following day, Saturday, Sept. 25, the downtown Berkeley Farmer’s Market (City Center Park) will present a stringband contest,” at 11 a.m. sharp. Twenty bands are currently scheduled but more are expected. That evening, Ashkenaz Music and Dance Community Center will host a square dance with renowned caller Bill Martin of Portland, Ore. and musical accompaniment provided by Foghorn (also of Portland), Gravel Court (from North Carolina) and last year’s stringband contest winners, the Squirrelly Stringband from San Francisco. Evie Ladin’s clogging workshop begins at 6:30 p.m., the square dance begins at 8 p.m. and there’ll be halftime entertainment by the Barnburners dance troupe.  

On Sunday there will be at least two Evie Ladin dance workshops at various private residences in Berkeley. See the Old Time website for details. The classes start at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. At 3 p.m. Jupiter Brewhouse in downtown Berkeley will offer an afternoon of dance floor space, beer and live, cabaret-style, old time music. Expect a full crowd and lots of impromptu performances by a crowd of musicians.  

How can we miss old time music, if it won’t go away?  

For a complete convention schedule, go to www.berkeleyoldtimemusic.org.  

›

FRIDAY, SEPT. 24 

CHILDREN 

“Maisy” at 10:30 a.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-3635. 

THEATER 

Aurora Theatre Company, “The Persians” at the Aurora Theatre and runs through Oct. 10. Tickets are $28-$45. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

Berkeley Rep, “The Secret in the Wings” at the Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St. until Oct. 17. Tickets are $10-$55. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

California Shakespeare Theater, “All’s Well That Ends Well” Tues.-Fri. at 7:30 p.m., Sat at 8 p.m., Sun. at 4 p.m. at the Bruns Memorial Amphitheater, through Oct. 10. Tickets are $13-$32. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org 

Impact Theatre, “Fluffy Bunnies in a Field of Daisies” a sexually-honest comedy, at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean Theater, 1834 Euclid, and runs Thurs.-Sat. through Oct. 2. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468. www.impacttheatre.com 

“Landscape” by Harold Pinter, Fri.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m., through Sept. 26, at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Tickets are $10 available at the door. 883-9872. www.nakedmasks.org 

Shotgun Players “Dog Act” Thurs. - Sun. at 8 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. through Oct. 10. Free admission, pass the hat donation. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

TheatreFirst “Joe Egg” at 8 p.m. at Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Blvd. Through Oct. 17. Tickets are $22. 436-5085. 

Unscripted Theater Company, “The Short and the Long of It,” an improv theater experience, Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Temescal Arts Center, 511 48th St. at Telegraph, through Oct. 2. Tickets are $7-$10. 415-869-5384. www.un-scripted.com 

FILM 

Maurice Pialat: “Under Satan’s Sun” at 7:30 p.m., “A nos amours” at 9:30 p.m. at Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

John Nichols reads from the first biography of the Vice President, “Dick: The Man who is President” at 12:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Brian Doherty introduces “This is Burning Man” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Old-Time Music Festival with Kate Breslin and Jody Stecher, Thompson String Ticklers and the Earl White Band at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. 548-1761. www.freight- 

andsalvage.org 

Wendy DeWitt and Stars of Glory perform boogie-woogie and gospel at 5 p.m. at Baltic Square, behind 121 Park Place, Pt. Richmond. Free concert presented by Point Richmond Music. 236-1401. www.pointrichmond.com/music 

“Archeology of Memory, Villa Grimaldi and the Autobiography of an Ex-Chess Player,” a multimedia presentation by Quique Cruz at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Alma Melodiosa and Universal Language at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10 in advance, $13 at the door. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Audrye Sessions, The New Trust, A Burning Water at 9:30 at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $7. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

20 Minute Loop, Moore Brothers, Mike Visser at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Clairdee & Ken French Trio Supper Club event at 8 p.m. at Downtown. Cost is $45. 649-3810. 

Mike Glendinning, solo jazz guitarist, at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Brothers Past at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$8. 548-1159. www.shattuckdownlow.com 

Alphabet Soup at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Malady, Eskapo, Our Turn, The Observers at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

SATURDAY, SEPT. 25 

CHILDREN  

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

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

Pots from Parady’s Pope Valley Kiln, featuring work by Robert Brady, Scott Parady, Trent Burkett, Craig Petey and Tim Rowan. Reception at 5 p.m. at Trax Gallery, 1812 5th St. 540-8729. 

Shona Sculpture from Zimbabwe from noon to 6 p.m. at Kofa International Art, 1661 20th St., Suite 2, Oakland. 451-5632. www.shaonkofa.com 

THEATER 

“The Deliverance of Souls” at 7 p.m. in the All Souls Sanctuary, 2220 Cedar St. at Spruce. Donation $5 and up.  

FILM 

Maurice Pialat: “Le Garçu” at 7 p.m. and “Loulou” at 9 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Robert Strom on “Miss Peggy Lee: A Career Chronicle” at 2:30 p.m. the Berkeley Public Library 357-6292. 

Rhythm & Muse featuring John Rowe and Rita Bregman. Open mic sign-up 6:30 p.m., reading/performance 7 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center. 527-9753. 

Jonathan Stroud reads from the second volume in the Bartimaeus trilogy, “The Golem’s Eye,” especially for young readers, at 1 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Orhan Pamuk talks about a poet in a small Turkish village in “Snow” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

www.codysbooks.com  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Magnificat, early music ensemble, presents Iacomo Carissimi’s “Vanity of Vanities” at 8 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. For information see www.magnificatbaroque.org 

Shen Wei Dance Arts at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $26-$48. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

George Mann and Julius Margolin with Faith Petric sing songs for labor and justice at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship, 1606 Bonita. 841-4824. 

Stringband Contest at the Berkeley Farmer’s Market in Civic Center Park, Center St. and Milvia, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., including a Youth Division for the under-18 players. 848-5018. 

Berkeley Old Time Music Festival with Foghorn Stringband, Rich Hartness, and The Squirrely Stringband at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Evie Ladin will give a clogging workshop at 6:30 p.m. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

“Real Gothic Death Metal: Secular Songs of the 14th Century” at 7:30 p.m. at the Dzogchen Community West, 2748, Adeline Street, Suite D. Cost is $5-$10. www.sospiro.org 

Cactus Fire at 2 p.m. at Down Home Music, 10341 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. 525-2129. 

Brook Schoenfield & Friends at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Mal Sharpe’s Big Money in Jazz at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Junius Courtney Band, nineteen piece swing jazz ensemble, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $15.50-$16.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

pickPocket ensemble performs European folk at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $3. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Anthony Blea y Su Charanga at 9:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

KGB, Dexter Danger at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $7. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Coto Pincheira and Friends at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$18. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com  

Sonic Calligraphy, jazz with Chinese folksongs, at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $8-$15 sliding scale. www.thejazz- 

house.com 

American Starlet, Wandering Sons at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Bill Stewart Saxophone Quartet at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

The Warriors, Allegiance, With or Without You at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, SEPT. 26 

CHILDREN 

Yoruba Children’s Theater Workshop, led by storyteller and artist Obafemi Origunwa at 1 p.m. at Phoebe Hearst Museum, Bancroft Way at College. 643-7648. http://hearstmuseum.berkeley.edu 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

7th International Juried Enamel Exhibition collector’s tour with Judy Stone at 2 p.m. at the ACCI Gallery, 1652 Shattuck Ave. 843-2527. www.accigallery.com 

Suzanne Lacke: Paintings Reception for the artist at noon at the Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. at Ashby. Exhibition runs through Oct. 12. 848-1228. 

FILM 

UPA Cartoons: “The McBoing Boing Revolution” at 5:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Free screening. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Flash with Brian Blanchfield, Srikanth Reddy and Carol Snow at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Rose Levy Beranbaum describes her new cookbook “The Bread Bible” at 4 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library Opening Celebration with lectures from 9 a.m. to noon, a concert of Italian music at 2:15 p.m. and dedication ceremony and reception at 3:15 p.m. UC Campus. 642-4864. http://music.berkeley.edu 

Salzburg Chamber Soloists perfrom Mozart, Mendelssohn and Dvorak, at 3 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $48. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Shen Wei Dance Arts at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $26-$48. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Chamber Music Sundaes The Navarro Trio, Jeremy Constant, violin, Jill Rachuy Brindel, cello, Marilyn Thompson, piano at 3:15 p.m. at St John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Tickets are $7-$19. 415-584-5946. 

Chamber Music: In the Company of Three Violin, organ and piano, at 7 p.m at First Presbyterian Church of Alameda, 2001 Santa Clara, Alameda. Tickets are $5-$10. 522-1477. www.alamedachurch.com  

Old Time Cabaret and jam session at 3 p.m. at Jupiter. Part of the Berkeley Old-Time Music Festival. 655-5715. 

East Bay Music Together Benefit Concert from 2 to 4:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $7-$35. Benefits East Bay Community Recovery. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Joe Locke/Dave Pike Group, vibraphonists, at 4:30 at the  

Jazzschool. Cost is $20. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Shakuhachi Recital by Philip Gelb’s students at 3 p.m. at The Jazz House. Donation $8-$15. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Richard Shindell, contemporary song crafter, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

MONDAY, SEPT. 27 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“Abstractions in Landscapes” with John Toki and artists with disabilities opens at the National Institute of Art and Disabilities, 551 23rd St., Richmond. 620-0290. www.niadart.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Robert Alter discusses “The Five Books of Moses” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Poetry Express Theme night for haiku and other short poems from 7 to 9:30 p.m., in a Gator Aid Benefit for hurricane victims, at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. berkeleypoetryexpress@yahoo.com 

T. Thorn Coyle presents her new book “Evolutionary Witchcraft” at 7 p.m. at Change Makers, 6536 Telegraph Ave. 655-2405. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Flamenco Open Stage with Carolina Lugo at 7:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Richard Shindell, contemporary song crafter, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $8-$12. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

TUESDAY, SEPT. 28 

FILM 

Loose Ends: “The Seventies” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Neal Stephenson introduces the third book in The Baroque Cycle, “The System of the World” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Micheline Aharonian Marcom introduces us to her historical novels of the Turkish genocide against Armenians in “Three Apples Fell from Heaven” and “The Daydreaming Boy” at 7:30 p.m. at Easy Going Bookstore, 1385 Shattuck Ave. 843-3533. 

The Whole Note Poetry Series, with Charles Curtis Blackwell and Tim McKee at 7 p.m. at The Beanery, 2925 College Ave., near Ashby. 549-9093. 

Poets Gone Wild open mic night, at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Creole Belles with Andrew Carrier at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson with Diana Castillo at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Greg Lamboy debuts his new album in benefit concert, at 3 p.m., 5951 College Ave. at College Ave. Presbyterian Church, next to Dreyers. Admission free, donation of any amount will benefit the Friday Night Community Meal.  

Dave LeFebre Horn Duo 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 

Mark Murphy at 8 and 10 p.m. Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Wed. Cost is $10-$18. 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. 

WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 29 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

California College of the Arts 2004 All-College Honors and Scholarship Awards Exhibition Reception at 6 p.m. 658-1224.  

THEATER 

“Wives” a gathering of the queens of Henry VIII at 7:30 p.m. at the Hllside Club, 2286 Cedar St., at Arch. Tickets are $15. 525-5625. 

FILM 

“Hidden Internment” and “Caught in Between: What to Call Home in Times of War” at 8 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $5-$25. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Performance Anxiety: “Paul McCarthy” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Vermeer in Bosnia” A talk by American art historian and writer Lawrence Wechsler, director of the New York University Institute for the Humanities, at 7 p.m. at Wheeler Auditorium, UC Campus. Tickets are $10. 642-9988. 

Terry Gross, from National Public Radio, visits to sign copies of “All I Did Was Ask” at 12:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Gilles Kepel describes “The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West” at 7:30 p.m. at at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Carla Woody introduces “Standing Stark” at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

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

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Wednesday Noon Concert, with University Symphony Orchestra at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. 642-4864. http://music.berkeley.edu 

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

Red Archibald and the Internationals at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Dance lesson with Nick and Shanna at 8 p.m. Cost is $6. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Salsa Caliente at 8 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Saul Kaye Trio at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Lunasa, Irish quintet, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Whiskey Brothers play old-time and bluegrass at 9 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Acoustic Wednesday at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com†

At the top of Hopkins just before the North branch of Berkeley’s public library is a point where several streets (Sonoma, Fresno, Josephine) meet. 

After 9/11, a vigil was held at that point, with candles placed directly on the roughly triangular section of tarmac. Quite a crowd gathered. 

Thanks to the efforts of various groups, this area has now received formal structure, consisting of a gently sloping terra cotta-colored ramp flanked by drought-tolerant succulents grouped in species, with one serene area of raked golden sand, on which lie five majestic boulders. 

Years ago when I was apprenticed to a gardener, this kind of simple, beautiful design was rarely if ever seen. Perennials were all the rage. Every garden looked the same, with a few reliables (lavender, yarrow, eriogonum, salvia), clean coarse mulch, and an automatic sprinkler system: instant landscaping. 

Although it was undoubtedly a tidy look, after a while it seemed predictable, even boring. While it is true that shrubby plants as well as trees can and do help to delineate space, alone they do not contribute the restfulness, fun and even excitement of artfully placed bricks and mortar, wood and stone. Nature’s mountains, screes and streams are examples of the best kind of backdrop for flora of all kinds—including perennials. 

My own house came with dismal garden architecture. The front fence looked like a cemetery’s. Built for eternity, it was removed with difficulty. In its place is now a wall with an armature of cardboard, roofing paper and chicken wire, covered with several layers of stucco mix. This wall is strong and stable, and echoes the look of the house. It is easy to make the lightweight armature indoors, in short sections. They are easily carried out and installed piece by piece. Fall, after the dry season and the tyranny of irrigation are over and winter vegetables planted, is a good time for projects like this. The wall can then be stuccoed one section at a time between rain showers. Stucco can be tinted with dry pigments, painted, and even engraved. I expect this wall to last forever, too. Passersby tend to sit on it, which is a good sign. 

Walls, water, meadows, and above all space, not only enhance the natural scene, they give the eyes a break. Perennial lavender, for instance, is so much more charmingly set off when it is allowed to grow huge and splendid and alone in a large clay or stone urn, than when it is a spindly shrub crammed into a hodgepodge of incompatible species. A row of same variety lavenders is equally effective below a brick wall, as is a row of scarlet poppies against a wooden one. Too much variety simply fatigues the eye. 

Garden architecture need not only be a divider, or a focal point. It might be a hidden surprise. In my own garden, this is a teahouse, something I had wanted for a long time. It is very simply made of found materials, just large enough for one camp bed. One piece of discarded lumber had so much hardware attached, that if I’d sold just the screws, they would have paid for the cement that secures the four corner verticals. I might even have made a profit. It is amazing what people throw away. 

The teahouse is at the end of a meandering path. I was secretly delighted when a recent visitor failed to notice it. At this time of year a clump of scarlet canna lilies, glowing without distraction against greenery, seem to make a natural lantern at the head of the path, indicating the way for the initiated. 

Similarly, the triangular architectural planting at Hopkins points the way towards the library. On Oct. 11 this space will be dedicated, with appropriate rituals. Take a look, and give your eyes restful delight. 

FRIDAY, SEPT. 24 

Good Night Little Farm Help tuck in the animals for the night, groom a goat, kiss a rabbit, or sing to a chicken. Wear boots if you have them. From 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

Native Plant Sale and Open House at the Watershed Nursery from 3 to 7 p.m. and Sat. from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at 155 Tamalpais Rd. 548-4714. www.TheWatershedNursery.com  

Free Compost for Berkeley Residents from 8:45 a.m. to 2:45 p.m. Berkeley Marina Maintenance Yard, 201 University Ave., next to Adventure Playground. 644-6566.  

Young Black Women’s Health Conference with drama and peer education to encourage young women to make healthier choices. Through Sun. at the Richmond Auditorium, 403 Civic Center Plaza, Richmond. 684-386. conference@muhsana.org 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Donald R. Olander, PhD on “Scientific Frauds and Hoaxes.” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $12.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925. 

“In Our Own Voice: The Making of A Korean Community” with a film and panel disussion at 7 p.m. at the Oakland Museum, Oak and 10th Sts.  

Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival at 1:15 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5190.  

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. 655-6169. www.bpf.org 

Overeaters Anonymous at 1:30 p.m. at the Northbrae Church at Solano and The Alameda. 525-5231. 

Humanistic Yom Kippur/Kol Nidre with Kol Hadash, the Bay Area’s only Jewish Humanistic Congregation, at 7:30 p.m, at Veterans Memorial Hall, 1325 Portland Avenue, Albany. For tickets call 428-1492.  

Celebrate High Holy Days with the Aquarian Minyan at St. John’s Church, 2727 College Ave. 869-3510. www.aquarianminyan.org 

SATURDAY, SEPT. 25 

Mini Farmers A farm explortion program for children accompanied by an adult. Wear boots and prepare to get dirty. At 9 a.m. at Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. Cost is $3-$5, registration required. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

Fall Pond Plunge Discover who lurks in the deep. With dip-nets and magnifiers we’ll search for backswimmers, dragonflies and more. For ages 4 and up, from 2 to 3:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

Strawberry Creek Work Party from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Strawberry Creek Lodge, 1320 Addison St., between Bonar and Acton. Wear sturdy footwear and bring work gloves. Please RSVP to jandtkelly@igc.org so that we have enough refreshments. 

Restoration Work Day at San Pablo Creek at the El Sobrante Library. Join us as we extend the native plant garden toward the creek, from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Refreshments, tools, and gloves provided. 231-9566. 

Permaculture: Sustainable Gardening How to create a landscape that will have the diversity and stability of a natural ecosystem, at 10 a.m. at Magic Gardens Nursery, 729 Heinz Ave. 644-2351. www.magicgardens.com 

Alternative Materials: Cob and Strawbale Two natural building methods are currently undergoing renewed popularity. From 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Building Education Center, 812 Page St. Cost is $75. 525-7610.  

Bay Friendly Gardening: The Basics A free workshop with gardening guide from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Alameda County Water District, 43885 Grimmer Blvd., Fremont. 444-7645. www.stopwaste.org 

Wildcat Canyon Hike with the Gay and Lesbian Sierrans A moderately rigorous hike of about 7 miles. Wear hiking boots, bring layered clothing, lunch, water and sunscreen. Carpool meets at 9:45 a.m. at Rockridge BART at the base of outside escalator. 594-0744. 

Free Emergency Preparedness Class on Disaster Mental Health from 9 a.m. to noon at 2100 Martin Luther King Jr. Way. To sign up call 981-5605. www. 

ci.berkeley.ca.us/fire/oes.html 

Berkeley Historical Sociey Walking Tour Ghost Campus The UC That Once Was led by Bruce Goodell, from 10 a.m. to noon. Cost is $8-$10. For information call 848-0181. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/histsoc/  

Walking Tour of Jack London Waterfront Meet at 10 a.m. at the corner of Broadway and Embarcadero. For reservations call 238-3234. www.oaklandnet. 

com/walkingtours 

Herb Walk in Strawberry Canyon Learn to identify and use edible and medicinal plants that grow wild in the Bay Area. Meet at noon at the Strawberry Canyon Fire Trail head, below the UC Botanical Gardens on Centennial Drive. Cost is $6-$12. Offered by Pacific School of Herbal Medicine. 845-4028. www.pshm.org  

Neighborhood Coffee at 9 a.m. at Cafe Roma, College and Ashby. Sponsored by Berkeley Alliance of Neighborhood Associations. www.berkeleycna.com 

Artisan Marketplace featuring jewelry, oils, bath salts and potions, astrology readings, and food from 1 to 5 p.m. at Belladonna, 2436 Sacramento St. 883-0600. www.belladonna.ws 

Berkeley Youth Orchestra Auditions from 8 a.m. to noon. To schedule an audition or to find out more about the orchestra see www.byoweb.org 

Dance Allegro Ballroom Childrens Classes for ages 5-12 and 13 and up. Cost is $5 per class at 5855 Christie Avenue, Emeryville. 655-2888. www.allegroballroom.com  

First Annual Lebowski Drive-In celebrating all things Lebowski with blacktop bowling, trivia, costume contests and Mr. Pin. Screening at 8 p.m. at Lot 69, 1515 Harrison St. Cost is $5. www.oaklandish.org 

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. 

Humanistic Family Brown Bag Shabbat and High Holidays with Rabbinic Candidate Eva Goldfinger at 11 a.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. Bring your lunch. Activities for all ages. 428-1492. 

SUNDAY, SEPT. 26 

Run for Peace A 10k run and 5k run/walk with the United Nations Association East Bay Chapter, at 9 a.m. at Cesar Chavez Park, Berkeley Marina. 849-1752. unaeastbay@sbcglobal.net 

Berkeley Citizen Action Endorsement Meeting at 2 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Annual dues $35, $15 low-income.  

Tear Down the Wall in the New Year Jews for a Free Palestine invites Jews and our allies to a community gathering and dialogue to re-commit ourselves to the movement for a just peace in Israel/Palestine at 4:30 p.m. at La Peña. 534-9768.  

Berkeley Old-Time Music Convention Workshops from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on various topics. For information call 415-431-0147. 

Jewel Lake Easy Walk Explore the history of the old reservoir now called Jewel Lake at 2 p.m. in Tilden Park. For ages 8 and up. 525-2233. 

Fall Plant Sale at UC Botanical Garden from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Members’ sale at 9 a.m. Memberships available at the door. 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu 

Berkeley City Club free tour from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. at 2315 Durant Ave. Donations welcome. 848-7800. 

Berkeley Community Orchard Festival, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., Derby St. between Sacramento and Acton. A fundraiser for the orchard-to-be with food, free fruit and fun for children. 843-2808. 

“Bush Ousting” Nudity-inspired rituals of Bush ousting at noon at People’s Park. debbiemoore@xplicitplayers.com 

“Afghanistan: A Fragile Peace” A documentary by Berkeley residents Olga Shalygin and Cliff Orloff airs on KQED, Channel 9 at 2 p.m.  

“The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream” A film exploring the American way of life at 3 p.m. at the Parkway Theater, 1834 Park Blvd., Oakland. 415-740-8833. dave@postcarbon.org 

“Independent Unions, Democracy and the AFL-CIO” Forum sponsored by the Bay Area Labor Action Coalition at noon at at the Fellowship of Humanity Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. 415-867-0628. www.laboractioncoalition.org 

“Which Road Forward For the Black Community?” A discussion forum sponsored by the Bay Area Black Radical Congress from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Fellowship of Humanity Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. cheryl@urbanhabitat.org 

“Religion and Spirituality in the Life and Work of Vincent Van Gogh” with Marlene Aron at 9:30 a.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. Part of the Personal Theology Seminars. 525-0302.  

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

MONDAY, SEPT. 27 

Candidates for the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board will speak and answer questions at 7 p.m. in the City Council Chambers in Old City Hall, 2134 Martin Luther King, Jr. Way. Sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Berkeley, Albany and Emeryville. 843-8824. http://lwvbae.org 

Lesbians and Cancer Video Night “Cancer in Two Voices” at 6:30 p.m. at Women’s Cancer Resource Center, 5741 Telegraph Ave. Space is limited, please RSVP to 420-7900, ext. 111. 

World Affairs/Politics Discussion Group for people 60 years and over meets Mondays at 10:15 a.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. Join at any time. 524-9122. 

Copwatch Class Learn about the history of police, community policing, racial profiling, government surveillance of anti-war protestors and pre-emptive arrests, and what your rights under the Patriot Act. From 6 to 7:30 p.m. at 2022 Blake St., near Shattuck. Free and open to the public. 548-0425. 

“Harnessing the Power of Storytelling” with Craig Harrison, at 7:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. Cost is $10-$12. to register call 848-0237, ext. 110. 

TUESDAY, SEPT. 28 

Berkeley’s Creek Ordinance, a public hearing at a special Berkeley City Council meeting, at 6 p.m. at Longfellow School Auditorium. 981-6900. 

School Board Candidate Night hosted by the Berkeley Special Education Parents Network at 7 p.m. at Ala Costa Center, 1300 Rose St. (at Cedar/Rose Park), Meet and ask important questions of school board candidates: Karen Hemphill, Merrilie Mitchell, Joaquin Rivera, Kalima Rose, and John Selawsky. 525-9262. 

“Humanity 2.0: Will your Grandchildren be Genetically Modified?” A conversation about the social and political implications of the new human biotechnologies with Bill McKibben and Marcy Darnovsky, moderated by Prof. Michael Pollan, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the North Gate Library, Graduate School of Journalism, Hearst at Euclid. 625-0819. www.genetics-and-society.org 

Furthering the Movement The War on Iraq, Political Prisoners, & Equal Rights, presented by James Cosner at 7 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St. Oakland. Donation $5-$10, no one turned away. 419-1405. 

The Golden Game: California Baseball History Month A reception and panel discussion at 6 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. 549-3564, ext. 316. 

Berkeley PC Users Group Problem solving and beginners meeting to answer, in simple English, users questions about Windows computers. At 7 p.m. at 1145 Walnut St., near corner of Eunice St. 527-2177. 

“Any Woman Can Be An Endurance Athlete” Training tips for fitness, recreation or competition at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

El Cerrrito Library Book Club meets to discuss “The Human Stain” by Philip Roth at 7 p.m. at the El Cerrito Library, 6510 Stockton Ave. 526-7512. www.ccclib.org 

Bridges Summer Field Research Symposium to learn about the work of graduate students in Latin America, at 2 p.m. at the CLAS Conference Room, 2334 Bowditch St. Also on Wed. 642-2088. www.clas.berkeley.edu 

Family Story Time at the Kensington Branch Library, Tues. evenings at 7 p.m. at 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

“Stem Cells, Religion and Presidential Politics” with Raymond Barglow at 7:30 p.m. at the BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. Free. 848-0237, ext. 110. 

“Simchat Torah: A Meeting Point between Cyclical and Linear” at 7:30 p.m. at the BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. Cost is $5. To register call 848-0237, ext. 110. 

WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 29 

Berkeley Candidates and Ballot Measures Forum hosted by the Council of Neighborhood Associations from 7 to 9 p.m. at the City of Berkeley Corporation Yard, Green Room, 1326 Allston Way. Refreshments will be served. On-site parking is available. Candidate interviews will be at 7 p.m. and ballot measures at 8 p.m.  

Candidates for the Berkeley School Board will speak and answer questions in the City Council Chambers in Old City Hall, 2134 Martin Luther King, Jr. Way. Starts promptly at 7 p.m. Sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Berkeley, Albany and Emeryville. 843-8824. http://lwvbae.org 

Peace Corps Informational Meeting Come learn more about “The Toughest Job You'll Ever Love!” at 6 p.m. at the Berkeley Library Claremont Branch, 2940 Benvenue Ave. 415-977-8798. jruiz@peacecorps.gov  

“Food for Thought” and “Field of Genes” films at 7 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Admission is free. Part of the GMOs and Food series sponsored by GMO Free Alameda County. 527-9898. www.gmofreeac.org 

“The Pollsters Handicap the Horse Race” a panel discussion at 3 p.m. at 109 Moses Hall, Campus. Sponsored by the Institute of Governmental Studies. http://politics.berkeley.edu 

“Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society” with economist and political historian Dr. Robert Higgs at 6:30 p.m. at The Independent Institute Conference Center, 100 Swan Way, Oakland. Cost is $10-$15. 632-1366. www.independent.org 

Knitting Hour at 6 p.m. at the West Branch of the Berkeley Public Library, 1125 University Ave. All levels and ages welcome. Get inspired and meet other knitters. Limited supplies available. Beginners, please bring size 8 needles and one skein of yarn. 981-6270. 

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

Over 90 Birthday Celebration with entertainment and refreshments at 1:15 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5190. 

Solid Waste Management Public Workshop on the Site Master Plan for 2nd and Gilman Sts. at 7 p.m. at the Solid Waste Management Assembly Room, 1201 Second St. Sponsored by the City of Berkeley Solid Waste Management Commission. 981-6357. 

Bayswater Book Club meets to discuss “The Early Church” by Henry Chadwick and “The Early Church” by Glenn Hinson at 6:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble Coffee Shop, El Cerrito Plaza. 433-2911. 

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 

Prose Writers’ Workshop An ongoing group focused on issues of craft. Novices welcome. Community sponsored, no fee. Meets Wed. at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. 524-3034. georgeporter@earthlink.net 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil with a Sing for Peace at 6:30 p.m. at the Berkeley BART Station. www.geocities.com/ 

vigil4peace/vigil 

THURSDAY, SEPT. 30 

Strawberry Creek Cleanup Day from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Sather Gate on UC Campus. Come help remove trash from Strawberry Creek and help preserve this great resource and San Francisco Bay. All materials will be provided. Sponsored by the UC Berkeley Office of Environment, Health & Safety. 642-6568. stevemar@berkeley.edu 

Human Rights Video Project will show “Behind the Labels: Garment Workers in U.S. Saipan” at 6:30 p.m. at Richmond Public Library Community Room, 325 Civic Center Plaza, near 26th and MacDonald, Richmond. 620-6561. 

“Asian American and African American Religious Leaders Speak Out For Civil Marriage and Civil Rights” at 7 pm at Badè Museum, Pacific School of Religion, 1798 Scenic Ave. 849-8260, 849-8235. 

League of Women Voters General Meeting at 5:30 p.m. at Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. The panel topic “Getting Young People to Know How Cool it is to Vote.” Supper costs $15. Panel begins at 7 p.m. 843-8824. http://lwvbae.org 

West Berkeley Redevelopment Area Open House at 7 p.m. at the West Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7520.  

Brower Youth Awards at 6 p.m. at the Florence Schwimley Theater, 1920 Allston Way. 415-788-3666. 

“Watershed: Writers, Nature and Community” A symposium at 7:30 p.m. at UC Extension, 2222 Harold Way. For more information see www.unex.berkeley.edu/cat/038224 

“The Weather Underground” Video screening and discussion at 7 p.m. at Grand Lake Neighborhood Center, 530 Lake Park Ave., Oakland. Suggested donation $1.  

CITY MEETINGS 

Parks and Recreation Commission meets Mon., Sept. 27, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Deborah Chernin, 981-6715. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/parksandrecreation 

Solid Waste Management Commission Mon., Sept. 27, at 7 p.m., at 1201 Second St. Becky Dowdakin, 981-6357. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/solidwaste?

Recording retailer and developer Kenneth Sarachan filed plans Thursday to build an apartment and retail complex at the long-vacant Berkeley Inn site at the corner of Telegraph Avenue and Haste Street. 

Sarachan, owner of Rasputin Music and Blondie’s Pizza, needed to file by Sept. 22 or face paying off $500,000 in city liens levied on the site after Berkeley Inn owners refused to demolish the structure following a pair of fires that left it a gutted wreck, forcing the city to tear it down. 

The plans filed last week call for a two-story structure at the Telegraph Avenue end of the structure, rising to five stories at the east end. Designs call for three ground-floor retail spaces and a second-floor restaurant with a roof garden plus 20 one-bedroom apartments. 

Sarachan did not return calls seeking comment on the issue. 

The site has a long and troubled history, recounted in a city document prepared in September 1998: 

For decades the land was the site of the Inn, a single room occupancy hotel which catered to low-income residents. The property was severely damaged in a pair of fires, one in 1986 which gutted 77 units, and another in 1990 which gutted the building. 

The city demolished the remains in November 1990 and after repeated attempts to collect from the owner, filed liens against the property which were sustained in a series of lawsuits brought by the owner, Sutter Land and Development Co., Inc. 

From 1992 through 1994, the city tried to negotiate a purchase of the site in conjunction with the nonprofit Resources for Community Development (RCD) which called for 39 units to be built, 32 of them reserved for low-income tenants, with ground floor retail space for Amoeba Music. 

The proposal died with the election of Mayor Shirley Dean, who objected to the high per unit cost and use of $3 million in public funds, half from the city’s Housing Trust Fund. 

When RCD’s option expired, Sarachan bought the site for $800,000 and assumed the liens.  

After a series of attempts to develop the property with the aide of city housing funds and a significant number of low-income units, Sarachan wrote the City Council in 1997 that the economics would not work out. 

At the urging of the Telegraph Area Association to develop the property with the possible inclusion of the site of the landmarked John Woolley House, an 1891 Victorian cottage at 2509 Haste St., then City Manager Weldon Rucker ordered staff to work on plans for a mixed use development. 

One year later, the staff suggested waiving the liens to spur development, though it took near five years before a final agreement was adopted in February 2003—the one that set the Sept. 22 deadline for submission of plans. 

The new plans call for a typical Berkeley mixed-use housing and retail development, with the city-mandated inclusion of 20 percent of the apartments reserved for low-income tenants.  

While the plans filed Thursday don’t include the Woolley House property, Berkeley Community Development Project Coordinator Dave Fogarty said “the project becomes much more feasible if Sarachan is allowed to develop on the site.” 

Fogarty said Sarachan doesn’t want the university-owned site until the Victorian house is moved. 

Developer Ruegg & Ellsworth has proposed moving the Woolley House along with the Blood House, another landmark which sites on a nearby site at 2526 Durant Ave. 

Ruegg and Ellsworth wants to develop a five-story, 44-unit apartment complex at the Blood House site, but can’t do anything until they can find a new home for the landmarked structure. 

Realtor John Gordon has been looking into moving the landmarks onto property he owns at the southwest corner of Regent Street and Dwight Way, but says “I’m running my fingernails down my head trying to figure out how.” 

Gordon said he still has no agreement with the University of California, which owns the Woolley House and its lot. “We’re only in preliminary discussions,” he said.›

In a city that lives and breathes politics, Saturday was enough to leave even Berkeley’s biggest political junkies a little short of breath. 

Five political campaigns kicked-off around town and the Daily Planet ran the gauntlet. 

First up, at 9:30 a.m., was the United Democratic Campaign—a novel concept in Berkeley where rival Democrats duke it out every other November, as well as all year long. 

True to form, attendees disagreed over when Berkeley last had a United Democratic Campaign (UDC) headquarters. UDC Chair Andy Katz said this was the first one in Berkeley since 1992. But Councilmember Kriss Worthington said he definitely remembered one in 1996 and Rent Board Commissioner Paul Hogarth said he was at the opening in 1998. 

The UDC, headquartered th is year at 2026 Shattuck Ave., is sponsored by the Alameda County Democratic Party, which sets up field offices to promote candidates and ballot measures it endorses. 

In the four City Council races this year, the county Democrats have given their blessin gs to left-leaning Max Anderson and Darryl Moore and more conservative candidates Laurie Capitelli and Betty Olds.  

Capitelli and Olds, however, likely would have struggled to find supporters among the staunchly progressive crowd of about of about 60 peo ple gathered Saturday. 

“I don’t know what to tell you about Betty Olds,” said Rent Board candidate Jason Overman, who seemed more comfortable defending rent control then explaining his presence at an event that endorsed two council candidates critical of the current pro-tenant Rent Board.  

None of the four City Council candidates endorsed showed for the kick-off. 

Morning speakers included County Supervisor Keith Carson, Councilmember Kriss Worthington, Sierra Club member Norman La Force, School Board c andidate Karen Hemphill and Peralta Community College District candidate Nicky Gonzalez Yuen. 

The field office will double as the home of the Yes on J, K and L campaigns—three tax measures facing fierce oppositions from organized neighborhood association s. 

The unenviable task of passing the measures falls to Vicky Liu, a 21-year-old recent UC Berkeley graduate, who works part time for Mayor Tom Bates. 

Liu, officially the campaign coordinator, said Berkeley residents should soon expect front door visits from benefactors of the city’s multitude of nonprofits, which will be the first groups cut if voters reject the $5.1 million in new taxes. 

“It’s not guilt,” she said. “People love this city for the services it provides.” 

Liu wasn’t the only fresh face at the kick-off. Many in attendance, including the headquarters director Paul Spitz, were on Berkeley’s political sidelines before joining the Howard Dean campaign last year. 

“When Dean said ‘support the Democrats,’ we decided we need to support the Demo crats,” said Bobbie Steinhart, representing the MMOB, Mainstream Moms Oppose Bush, a group mailing Democratic literature and voter registration cards to single mothers in swing states. 

Just after 11 a.m. the action shifted to UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza for Measure H, an initiative to publicly fund Berkeley elections. Sam Ferguson, a recent UC Berkeley graduate and president of the Berkeley Fair Election Coalition, had a few words for opponents who argue campaign finance reform is ultimately just another tax. 

“To the penny pinchers against it, I say it is a minimal price to pay to ensure the integrity of city elections,” Ferguson said. 

Sadly for him and the roughly 40 supporters assembled at Sproul, UC turned out to be the biggest penny pincher of the d ay. Without the power source Ferguson said UC officials had promised speeches by Councilmember Worthington and Mayor Bates were barely audible.  

When Worthington wasn’t condemning the influence of private developer money on city council votes, he was gri ping about his breakfast options at the event, which consisted of less-than-fresh bagels. 

“Don’t politicians understand you’re supposed to feed people?” he said. 

With high hopes for a decent lunch, it was off to San Pablo Park at 12:30 for a barbecue to kick-off the campaign of Darryl Moore, a Peralta trustee and the heavy favorite for the City Council seat from southwest Berkeley’s District 2. 

Adding to Moore’s sense of inevitable victory, outgoing District 2 Councilmember Margaret Breland endorsed him before a crowd of about 90 people that included Mayor Bates, Assemblywoman Loni Hancock, School Board President John Selawsky, Tim Perry, Breland’s controversial choice for the Planning Commission, as well as councilmembers Linda Maio, Dona Spring and Worthington 

Moore said once elected he would interview all of Breland’s commission appointments, but wouldn’t guarantee any would keep their post. 

In a passionate speech, Moore called for the construction of a youth center in District 2, and couldn’t resist utilizing his politically catchy surname.  

“We need more safe streets and neighborhoods, more opportunity for our youth and seniors, more business to serve our communities and create jobs, more diversity, more affordable housing,” he shouted. 

When the excitement of the moment subsided, Moore acknowledged he might need more rhetorical devices. 

“We really wore that into the ground,” he said. 

From San Pablo Park, it was time to cross the Oakland border for Congresswoman Barbara Lee’s campaign kick-o ff at Snow Park. Among those representing Berkeley in an otherwise Oakland-dominated crowd of about 50 people were Bates, Hancock, Maio, Worthington, and their colleague on the City Council, Maudelle Shirek. 

The 93-year-old councilmember remained mum on her decision to run as a write-in candidate in District 3. Mel Martynn, a longtime aide to Councilmember Breland, confirmed that he would be working on the Shirek campaign, but refuted a published report that he would take over as campaign manager for Mi chael Berkowitz, a longtime Shirek aide. Berkowitz’ failure to collect the requisite number of constituent signatures cost Shirek her spot on the ballot. 

“He’s the natural fit for campaign manager,” Martynn said. “Who knows the political landscape of District 3 better than Mike Berkowitz?” 

Rep. Lee said after her speech she hadn’t encouraged Shirek to run, but would back her now that she was a candidate. 

“She’s got a history of service and a vision for the community,” Lee said. 

In an apparent slip-up, Lee’s Campaign Chair Lee Halterman outed long-time Lee aide Sandre Swanson as a candidate for State Assembly in 2006 when Assemblymember Wilma Chan is termed out. 

“It is my intent to run,” Swanson told the Planet after Halterman announced his candidacy. “I haven’t said anything publicly because I’m concentrating on this year’s election period.” 

The race to replace Chan is expected to draw a crowded field that will include Oakland City Attorney John Russo, whose staff said Monday he would also seek Cha n’s seat. 

For Berkeley school board candidate Karen Hemphill, who won Rep. Lee’s endorsement, Lee’s event was her third campaign kick-off of the day. 

“It’s incredibly exhausting, but you’ve got to do it,” Hemphill said. “How will people know what you st and for if you’re not out and about?” 

Accompanying Hemphill was her 14-year-old campaign aide, William Dolphin, who by 4 p.m. had become well acquainted with the city’s political elite. 

“I see a lot of the same faces here,” he said. 

The Berkeley High f reshman is an aspiring politician, with a strong bloodline. His father, also William Dolphin, works on media campaigns for pro-marijuana group Americans for Safe Access. Dolphin said he didn’t know if there would be a campaign kick-off for the ballot measure that would relax Berkeley’s marijuana laws for licensed patients and distributors. 

“Those guys don’t normally have their get-togethers in outdoor parks,” he said. 

With the sun starting to fall, it was time to zip over to the Jazz School in downtown Berkeley where School Board President John Selawsky and about a dozen campaign kick-off survivors finished the day in subdued fashion. 

Selawsky, who considered passing on a re-election bid earlier in the summer, said he was now committed to serving a second term.  

He received support Saturday from Moore, councilmembers Maio and Spring and two colleagues on the school board, Nancy Riddle and Shirley Issel.  

Issel, a licensed therapist, said Selawsky won her over during her stint as board president when he was the only school boardmember who heeded her call to start meetings on time. 

“This is a man who likes his mother and respects women,” she said, praising the fact that he responded to her request for more punctual meetings. 

County Superintendent She ila Jordan, who several weeks ago attended the campaign kickoff for two Selawsky rivals, Hemphill and Kalima Rose, said she too would back Selawsky. 

For Berkeley residents who prefer more unorthodox campaign kick-offs, the best may be yet to come. Next u p, on Oct. 15, will be a kick-off for Measure Q, an initiative to decriminalize prostitution in Berkeley 

“We’re going to blow it out for the measure,” said Sex Workers Outreach Project Director Robyn Few at Moore’s barbecue. “It’s going to be a lot of fu n.”U 

Berkeley’s Civic Arts Commissioners are being lobbied to make the Berkeley Marina home to “Spaceship Earth,” a 350,000-pound sculpture commemorating the late environmentalist David Brower. 

While San Francisco Arts Commissioners rejected the massive stone and bronze creation last year on the grounds that the work was aesthetically dubious and failed to honor either Brower or environmentalism, Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates has been actively pushing to install the work in his city. 

“The mayor’s very interested in seeing this installed,” said David Snippen, chair of the Berkeley Arts Commission. But he also acknowledged that the piece has its detractors. 

“There are strong opinions from both perspectives,” he said. “What I do not want to happen is a level of frustration develop to a point where an installation is mandated without public review.” 

Brower served as executive director of the Sierra Club until 1969, when he was fired. He promptly founded Friends of the Earth and the League of Conservation Voters that same year. 

Then, in 1982, he founded the Earth Island Institute. 

He was born in Berkeley on July 1, 1912, and died in his home here 88 years later, on Nov. 5, 2000, six months after he resigned in protest from the Sierra Club’s board of directors. 

The mass of the sculpture, designed by Finno-American sculptor Eino, is a 12-foot sphere composed of blue quartzite quarried in Brazil. The earth’s continents and islands are formed from 1,426 pieces of cast bronze, crowned by a life-size bronze representation of Brower. 

“The rock is beautiful,” said Mayor Bates. “It’s a gem,” saying that he’d be “very proud to have it here in the city of David Brower.” 

Bates added, “I don’t think people realize that David Brower personally approved this sculpture, and he personally approved of it being at the Marina. It’s a treasure.” 

The work was commissioned by Power Bar founders Brian and Jennifer Maxwell. They had intended the piece to be placed in San Francisco. Brian Maxwell died earlier this year in San Anselmo. 

The mayor, who had been a friend of both Brower and the Maxwells, chided critics who hadn’t even seen the sculpture, which remains in an unassembled state in a warehouse in the San Francisco Presidio. 

“We’re still trying to find out more about the sculpture,” Snippen said. “We’re still learning about this, and we’re still real, real short on the details. We had a meeting last week the attorney for the Maxwells. He told us one of Brower’s feet is standing on Berkeley.” 

A year-and-a-half earlier, similar pressure from the San Francisco County Board of Supervisors confronted the Visual Arts Committee of the San Francisco Arts Commission, which wound up rejecting Eino’s 175-ton creation, standing 15 feet tall including the figure of Brower atop the globe. 

A scathing one-page staff report by the San Francisco commission’s staff declared that “the monument is extremely grand and flamboyant. 

“The nature of the memorial is also in conflict with the message of the commemorated individual. David Brower was about the environment. The proposed memorial is large, heavy, and would create a significant environmental footprint with the footing that it would require. The committee considered the work to lack environmental sensitivity. 

“The aesthetic relationship of the figure to the globe is clumsy and poorly integrated. The depiction of the earth is the only reference to the environment and again does not suggest sensitivity to environmental issues.” 

The San Francisco Visual Arts Committee met to vote on the work on April 16, 2003. 

After staff member Debra Lehane told the panel that staffers considered the sculpture “ostentatious and aesthetically awkward,” arts commissioner Dugald Stermer, who had been a friend of Brower, declared that “the piece does not do honor to the environment nor to David Brower.” 

With one panel member abstaining, all of the remaining commissioners voted unanimously to reject the work. 

In Berkeley, Snippen and the Arts Commission are working with staff and members of the Waterfront Commission, some of who are expected to attend the first Berkeley Arts Commission’s Public Art Committee meeting from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. today (Tuesday) in the first floor conference room of the city Permit Center Building, 2120 Milvia St. 

The discussion will continue Wednesday night when the full Civic Arts Commission meets at 6:30 at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. 

Though nowhere mentioned in the hype surrounding the statue, the term “Spaceship Earth” was coined by R. Buckminster Fuller, architect, designer, prolific writer and a countercultural icon of the 1960s. 

Fuller coined “Spaceship Earth” to remind his readers that all humans are aboard a finite sphere, hurtling through the frigid vacuum of space with a finite amount of resources in a biosphere that needed to be cherished and nurtured. 

The term quickly spread, and became a favorite of Brower’s, often used in his speeches and writings. 

Snippen said he also wants the commission and waterfront commissioners to look at a proposal he is floating to look at sculpture already in the Marina and possible sites for additional works with the idea of creating a sculpture walk. 

“It’s a wonderful environment for appreciating sculpture, and there are some fine works there already,” Snippen said. 

?

Thanks to changes in state law and a revised city ordinance, condos are making a comeback in Berkeley. 

“That’s definitely the way it seems to me,” said City Planner Debbie Sanderson. “Since the city ordinance was changed earlier this year, there’ve been a lot more applications.” 

Mayor Tom Bates, for one, is delighted. “Condos are a very important opportunity to provide more home ownership. Owners who build up equity in their property contribute to community stability,” he said. 

“I think it’s very important for the downtown area and for the community as a whole to provide more options for ownership. I think in terms of the quality of the community, because people who invest in their homes have a long-term interest in the community,” Bates said. 

Before this year, the last condominium projects built in Berkeley were two Patrick Kennedy projects from the 1990s, one at Shattuck and Hearst avenues and the other at University Avenue and Grant Street, said Tim Stroshane, senior planner for the city Housing Department. 

“There were no more significant projects until this year,” he said. “Now there are several proposals for new projects and a couple of other projects that already have use permits are being reconsidered as condos,” Stroshane said. 

One major impetus for condomania is a recent change in state law. 

“A lot of the problems arose from the tort claims environment condo builders have faced since the early ‘90s,” Stroshane said. Construction defect lawsuits had made developers gun-shy, as had the six- and seven-figure insurance fees needed to protect them from crushing judgments. 

State legislators eased the crisis by setting a 10-year statute of limitations on construction defects, and Berkeley added another key step by raising the amounts developers could charge for the 20 percent of units which must be set aside as inclusionary units for lower income tenants in all new condo and apartment projects. 

Sale prices of the inclusionary units are calculated according to the Oakland Metropolitan Area Median Income—AMI—which Stroshane said was running about $82,200 earlier this year. 

Under the earlier city policy, owners had to sell the first inclusionary condo at a maximum of three times 90 percent of AMI, or $221,940, and the remainder at three times 81 percent, or $188,746. 

“Developers in Berkeley were not doing new condo projects because under those formulas they couldn’t even recover their costs, much less make a profit,” Stroshane said. 

Berkeley revised its inclusionary pricing standards earlier this year, with the new formulae coming into effect on Feb. 26 that bracket inclusionary sales prices to levels between three times 80 percent ($246,600) and three times 120 percent ($295,920). 

“If the average construction cost is more than three times 120 percent of AMI, the developer can charge no more than that, but in the likely event costs are lower than three times 80 percent, the developer can still sell at three times 80 percent,” Stroshane said. 

The new regulations were enacted for a two-year period, and city staff will evaluate their impact before the ordinance expires to determine their impact on the city and make recommendations on modifications or continuance before the law sunsets. 

Stroshane said the developers of two previously approved apartment complexes are considering changing them to condos—an Avi Nevo project at Shattuck Avenue and Delaware Street and a Sam Sorokin development at 3075 Telegraph Ave. 

Another project that seems headed for condo status is the nine-story Seagate Building proposed for Center Street. Developers proposing another large project at 700 University Ave. have also indicated they may follow the same path. 

Another project, a three-to-five-story 69-unit complex at 1122 University Ave., has been planned as a condo complex from its inception. By allocating a fifth of the units to low- and lower-income tenants developer Alex Varum was able to add an additional 14 units to the 55 that would have been allowed without them. 

The developer of a nearly completed apartment at 2616 Telegraph has filed a plan revision for condos, but a spokesperson for K&S Properties in Emeryville said the units will be rented as apartments, and the condo filing was intended to make the property more attractive in the event of resale. 

Although Bates said the idea hadn’t occurred to him, condos are increasingly attractive to tax-starved city governments, thanks to the effects of property tax-limiting Proposition 13, which sets a ceiling on annual property tax increases that is far below the inflationary pace of the California real estate market. 

Assessment increases on all real estate are capped at two percent a year until the property is sold, when it is reassessed at the new sales price, with assessment increases thereafter kept to two percent until the next sale. 

Commercial property typically has a much lower turnover than residential property, so an apartment that remains in the hands of one owner over a period of years pays ever-smaller amounts of taxes in comparison to the building’s real value. 

But apartments in the same building sold for condos are turning over much more rapidly, kicking in ever-larger amounts to city and county coffers. 

While condos are priced considerably below detached single-family homes—with average sales prices of $355,000 versus $600,000 in Berkeley earlier this year—costs are still heading upward, Stroshane said. 

“(Developer) Chris Hudson told me recently that a chief reason for the soaring material costs is the intense development going on in China. Their demand is driving up prices worldwide,” said the planner.o

Three months after Oakland passed a law that effectively sent four pot clubs packing, Berkeley is making sure it doesn’t roll out the red carpet for them. 

Councilmembers Linda Maio and Margaret Breland are proposing that Berkeley establish a quota allowing no more than three medical marijuana dispensaries within city limits—the number currently operating aboveboard—and ensure they are located away from schools and from one another.  

If the City Council, as expected, passes the proposal at Tuesday’s meeting, city staff would draft the ordinance for council approval early next year. 

Dale Gieringer, California Coordinator of The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, charged that adoption of a quota system would be “anti-competitive and against the interest of patients and consumers.” 

The push for a quota, Maio said, stems from an Oakland ordinance passed last June, which established a strict four-club limit in that city. At the time Oakland had eight clubs concentrated in a section of downtown bounded by Telegraph Avenue and 17th Street, nicknamed “Oaksterdam.” 

Now the Oakland clubs that didn’t win a license are either operating underground or looking for new homes, Maio said, adding that she doesn’t want Berkeley to be the next East Bay city facing an uncontrolled proliferation of medical marijuana dispensaries. 

“If we limit the number of clubs, the police can better monitor them and we can keep them from concentrating in one area,” she said.  

Maio stressed that Berkeley’s three recognized clubs on Shattuck, San Pablo and Telegraph avenues have not drawn neighborhood complaints, but two years ago the city forced a fourth club from University Avenue after it had been the target of repeated armed robberies. 

Clubs in Berkeley sprouted up after California voters passed the Compassionate Use Act of 1996 that legalized medical marijuana. 

After a history of reasonably cordial relations, Berkeley’s pot clubs have clashed with the city this year. In January the Planning Department revoked a use permit that would have paved the way for the Cannabis Buyer’s Cooperative (CBCB) to move from Shattuck Avenue to Sacramento Street, where some neighbors feared it would attract more crime. More recently, the council rejected a proposal to boost the number of plants that medically-licensed cannabis users could grow. 

In response, medical cannabis advocates have initiated a ballot measure that would grant pot clubs by-right use permits to set up shop on commercial corridors and leave pot clubs regulations to a panel of club members. 

“I’d hate to think that Councilmembers Breland and Maio are retaliating against us,” said Don Duncan, director of the Berkeley Patients Group. 

With most councilmembers expressing support for a quota on clubs, the question is expected to be how many should be allowed. Though the police department recognizes the existence of only three clubs, Gieringer and Councilmember Kriss Worthington say there is a fourth smaller cooperative on the north end of Shattuck that could be forced out of business if the council imposed a three-club quota. 

“We need a reasonable quota that doesn’t tell police, ‘we’re allowing three clubs, let’s get rid of one,’” Worthington said. 

Maio said she had seen no evidence of a fourth club and if one existed, she would want to see “compelling” evidence that the city needed more than three clubs.  

Duncan estimated Berkeley has about 500 patients licensed to use medical marijuana. Berkeley Health Director Fred Madrano said the city doesn’t track the number of medical marijuana patients, but that “with three sites we’re covering Berkeley’s needs adequately.” 

In addition to settling on a quota, the council would still have to hash out most of the details of an ordinance. If more clubs move to Berkeley before a quota went into effect, for instance, the city would have to determine the criteria for deciding which clubs would get the city licenses. Also, the city would have to settle on how far the clubs must reside from schools and whether the city would tax the clubs. 

The Oakland ordinance established a licensing fee of between $5,000 and $20,000 for clubs, but Maio said she hadn’t thought of doing the same in Berkeley. 

Duncan said he wouldn’t oppose a fee, but was concerned that when city staff crafts an ordinance they will seek to add more regulations. 

Since Oakland passed its pot club law, Gieringer said, the clubs that didn’t receive a license have been in limbo, hoping that the city will raise the quota when it reconsiders the measure in January.  

But Larry Carroll, of Oakland’s City Administrator’s Office, said even by cutting down to four clubs the city still had capacity to serve patients in Oakland and throughout the East Bay. 

The Oakland law came about after a youth group that has since moved from “Oaksterdam” complained about smelling marijuana from a neighboring club.  

Oakland might be the first city to limit the proliferation of pot clubs, but Gieringer said no matter what Berkeley does, it won’t be the last. 

With the passage last year of SB420, which legalized patient cooperative cultivation clubs, he has received daily calls from patients eager to set up cooperatives in more conservative Central Valley cities that so far have not reacted kindly. 

“Any time a central valley town is approached about a cannabis club the City Council has an emergency meeting and they either ban it or allow only one club with unreasonable restrictions,” he said. “It’s happened in Oak Grove, Citrus Heights and Stockton.” 

›

For those who can’t wait until November to see democracy in action, Tuesday’s City Council meeting will include a first-of-its-kind vote. 

Two months after the council canceled a planned election amid concern that ballots contained outdated and insufficient information, the residents of 105 homes near the Kensington border will vote on whether to tax themselves $2.3 million to tear down utility poles and bury the wires underground. The vote tally will be announced at the meeting. 

The stakes aren’t just high for residents in the Thousand Oaks Heights Undergrounding District who would pay a household average of about $21,000 to underground utilities. With little public money available to pay for burying utilities underground, the City Council was hoping that the district would be the first of many to underground utilities for the city. 

“I’d like to see it go through,” said Councilmember Miriam Hawley, who represents the district. 

Undergrounding utilities is seen as a safety measure that limits the risk of fires and long-term service outages in the case of an earthquake.  

But residents are torn on the issue, with supporters arguing that the view enhancements and safety measures would improve home values and the quality of life in the district, and opponents insisting the district would place a financial burden on some residents so wealthier households could get a bay view free from obstructive utility wires. 

More than 70 percent of district residents have already shelled out a combined $183,945 for an initial study of the project, but enthusiasm waned when the cost estimates skyrocketed up to $3 million and the council, at the urging of undergrounding supporters, lowered the threshold of the votes needed for passage from 70 percent to 60 percent. Each household gets one vote. 

After a majority of residents on both sides of the debate urged the council at a July public hearing to restore the 70 percent threshold as an act of good faith, the council opted to require a two-thirds majority for passage of the district. State law allows it to set the approval threshold as low as 50 percent. 

Also updated projections have cut the estimated price down to $2.3 million. Households that have better views and are more centrally located in the district would pay a greater share of the cost. 

Earlier this month, the city mailed brochures to neighbors explaining financing schemes for homeowners who couldn’t pay for the undergrounding. 

“I wasn’t amused,” said Rosemary Green, who has lived in her house since 1970. “The degree of insensitivity these people have for neighbors who have all of their equity in their homes is unbelievable.” 

Carol Bledsoe maintained that the safety benefits of burying utilities outweighed the costs, but after serving on the undergrounding committee since its inception, she has no idea how the vote will go. 

“It should be very interesting,” she said. 

In what the California Public Interest Research Group (CALPIRG) calls a “mixed message,” Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last week split the baby on two bills designed to lower the cost of college textbooks, signing one that sets up a framework for possible book price reductions but vetoing a second bill that would have urged colleges to set up textbook rental services. 

CALPIRG sponsored both bills. 

In a press statement released last May when the two bills passed the Assembly, CALPIRG said that AB 2477 (the book price reduction bill sponsored by Assemblymember Carol Liu, D-La Canada Flintridge) and AB 2678 (the textbook rental bill sponsored by Assemblymember Paul Koretz, D-West Hollywood) “work together to lower the price of textbooks so that college students can spend less time working to pay for expensive textbooks and more time studying.” Neither bill would have made lower textbook costs mandatory. 

Both bills passed both houses of the Legislature easily, with local Assemblymembers Loni Hancock and Wilma Chan and Senator Don Perata voting for both bills.  

Assemblymember Koretz’ office said that textbook rental services would have “provided books to students for a fraction of the cost of purchasing” such textbooks. 

It is a matter of contention whether California universities and colleges already have the authority to set up textbook rental services. While Schwarzenegger says that “nothing in current statute prohibits a California university or college from establishing and maintaining” such a service, CALPIRG Legislative Director Steve Blackledge says that “some of them felt like they didn’t have the authority for the funding mechanism. ... [Koretz’ bill] made it quite clear that they had the authority to do it, and laid out some of the parameters where they could go about doing it.” 

In his AB 2678 veto message last week, Schwarzenegger said that while he “support(s) the author’s intention to lower textbook costs to college students, and am generally supportive of textbook rental programs as one means to make the overall cost of college attendance more affordable...I am opposed to provisions in the bill that would allow additional fees to be assessed to all students, even those not using the program, in order to keep a textbook rental service financially self sustaining.” 

Koretz disputed that contention, saying that “among the 20 colleges and universities in the U.S. with textbook rental programs, none require students to pay fees if they decide not to rent their books,” adding that his bill “left the decision of how fees would be levied” to the colleges themselves, “where it belongs.” 

But while Blackledge at first said that California colleges would model a textbook rental after what he called the “successful programs” in the country which have not charged mandatory textbook rental fees for all students, he conceded that there was nothing in the Koretz bill to ensure that California colleges would not charge such mandatory fees for all students. 

With the signing of the Liu bill, professors in California state universities, community colleges, and the University of California system will now be encouraged to “give consideration to the least costly practices in assigning textbooks” and to “disclose to students how new editions of textbooks are different from previous editions and the cost to students for textbooks selected.” The bill also discourages such textbook company practices as “bundling” textbooks with workbooks and CD-ROMS that the students do not necessarily use for their classes. 

Blackledge called the Liu bill “step one of what will eventually be a two-step process. It simply puts in place a series of best practices for the college textbook industry to follow, and to make it quite clear that the legislators and the State of California are concerned about [high textbook prices]. If [those suggestions] don’t happen, I think that a lot of legislators will be upset and will be looking to push something stronger in a year or two.”

Incoming UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau is expected to meet privately this week with members of the college’s Hate and Bias Task Force to discuss last week’s suspected hate crime against seven female Muslim students. 

The students reported that last Thursday night three white males in a car threw water bottles at them and shouted racial epithets at the Vista Parking Lot of the Lawrence Hall of Science, according to a UC Police statement. 

The Daily Cal newspaper reported that one of the men covered his head with a cloth, apparently mimicking traditional Muslim women dress, and another, unaccountably, shouted “East Oakland nigger!” at them. 

UC Police have issued a press release which labels the incident a possible hate crime and are currently investigating. 

Outgoing Chancellor Robert Berdahl issued an open letter to the UC Berkeley campus community last week, condemning what he called “this terrible incident.” 

The Hate and Bias Task Force emerged from a student-initiated committee formed in the spring of 2003 in response to a number of hate and bias incidents on the UC campus, particularly harassment of Muslim and Arab students following the 9/11 terrorist attacks and threats made to Chicano and Latino undergraduates. At the student committee’s request, it was formally installed as a university task force by Berdahl last fall. 

When the City Council revisits the dreaded creeks issue next week, Councilmember Betty Olds will finally be allowed to participate. 

Several months after banishing Olds—who has a creek running underneath her property—to the sidelines for a conflict of interest, City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque reinstated her, saying a state board essentially reversed its opinion on the matter. 

The written opinion by the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission could have ramifications for other councilmembers and commissioners. 

Albuquerque said she was now reviewing her decision to exclude Councilmember Linda Maio from discussions about new zoning for University Avenue. Maio lives adjacent to the thoroughfare. 

Olds would likely have remained excluded from the creeks debate had Planning Commissioner Tim Perry not asked Albuquerque last month if he should excuse himself from a commission debate on changes to the Landmarks Ordinance that would affect a property he owns. 

As she did for Olds, Albuquerque called up the FPPC hotline, only this time the telephone consultant advised her that Perry had no conflict of interest, even though his case was practically identical to Olds’. 

“I knew they had to be wrong on one of these,” Albuquerque said.  

She requested that a commission lawyer deliver a written opinion on the cases, and the opinion handed down found that both Olds and Perry were eligible to participate. 

Olds said it hadn’t occurred to her that the city didn’t have a written opinion when she was barred from the creeks debate. “I guess they should have asked for it in writing. It would have been a lot quicker than this.” 

From now on, Albuquerque said, the city would no longer accept the opinion of the FPPC’s telephone consultants. 

The council is scheduled to conduct a hearing on the creeks ordinance next Tuesday. The current ordinance forbids new construction within 30 feet of a creek and is mum on whether the homeowner or the city is responsible for fixing long-buried underground culverts.  

Councilmembers will soon get a reminder of the costs of maintaining the city’s underground creeks. This Tuesday, they will be asked to approve $250,000 in emergency funding to repair a broken Strawberry Creek culvert at Allston Way and Harold Way in the city center. The total repair project to be completed next year will cost an estimated $550,000 and come from the general fund and clean storm water fund. 

According to a city report, if the culvert is not repaired before the upcoming rainy season nearby properties could begin to sink.  

All of the 184 Reports of human rights violations since 9/11 involve violations of rights and liberties under the U.S. Constitution Bill of Rights and Fourteenth Amendment; U.N Charter Article 55 and 56, and articles in the three human rights reporting treaties the U.S. ratified in 1992 and 1994: International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), Convention on Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), and Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT). 

3. Right Peaceably To Assemble and Petition the Government 

After 9/11 Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, et al., urged using the new Patriot Act to find and stop all “anti-government” comments everywhere. The FBI and Secret Service got busy teaching local police “new” methods of “crowd control”—wooden dowels, sting balls, concussion grenades, tear gas and huge “nets” to enclose groups of people for quick arrests. Also “Free Speech Zones” to prevent any real First Amendment “petition[ing] the government for a redress of grievances.” 

Millions of men and women all across the U.S. disagreed about going to war and other Bush actions—U.S. citizens, veterans, long-time resident aliens, students, union members.  

Some found dramatic forms of individual protest. Most joined massive peaceful demonstrations, recently at the Republican National Convention, where police arrested 1,800, detained them in unhealthy conditions, and only released them 24 hours after a court order. 

Lawyers defended against the arrests. ACLU and others sued for an injunction against Free Speech Zones  

Report 3.5  

FBI Arrested Peaceful Palestinian Protester for Deportation  

(“Outcome of Amer Jubran’s final trial,” Amer Jubran Defense Comm., Nov. 24, 2003.) 

Report 3.6 

Miami Police Used Federal Money Against Peaceful Union Demonstration: AFL-CIO, et al. 

(“USWA Calls for Congressional Investigation into Police-State Assaults in Miami,” United Steelworkers, Nov. 24, 2003.) 

Report 3.8 

Military Punished Soldier for Wife’s Antiwar Protests: Jari Sheese 

(R. Gibson, “Vets for Peace on Veteran’s Day,” Free Speech Radio News, Nov. 11, 2003.)  

Report 3.9  

More Arrests at 2004 Republican National Convention than at any Party Convention in U.S. History 

(Sam Husseini, “Bush Accepts Nomination on Final Night of Convention Marked by Historic Protests and Dissent,” Democracy Now!, Sept. 3, 2004, National Lawyers Guild, New York City Office.) 

4. Right To Equal Protection Regardless of Race or National Origin 

After 9/11, discrimination on the basis of race and national origin increased markedly across the U.S. against “Arabs,” “Middle Easterners.” Attacks on “Latinos” and “Blacks” were under-reported. 

Basic U.S. law forbids the denial of “equal protection” (U.S. Constitution Fourteenth (and by court decision, Fifth Amendment). It requires the U.S. “to promote...human rights...for all without distinctions...” U.N. Charter Articles 55 and 56, and CERD.  

There were 751 active hate groups at the end of 2003, up from 471 in 1997, And U.S. Operation TARMAC caused the arrest of 700 “Latinos” but no terrorists. 

The U.S. Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice and the U.S. Civil Rights Commission took no effective measures to stop these practices.  

Report 4.1 

Racial Profiling of California Congressman and Others: Darrel Issa, et al. 

(Nicole Davis, “The Slippery Slope of Racial Profiling,” Color-lines, Dec. 2001.) 

Report 4.3 

Operation Tarmac Arrested 700 Latinos, No Terrorists: Southern CA and TX. 

(“Operation Tarmac: Overkill?” The Austin Chronicle, March 14, 2003.) 

Report 4.8 

Transportation Security Agency Screens Out 25, 000 Non-Citizens: Erlinda Valencia, et al. 

(David Bacon, “Screened Out,” The Nation, May 12, 2003.) 

Report 4.9 

Thousands of Workers File Discrimination Complaints with EEOC: Karim El-Raheb, et al. 

(Race/Color Discrimination Statistics,” Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Jan. 6, 2004.) 

Report 4.10 

U.S. Government Racism Plagues the Border: Ophelia Rivas, et al. 

(“U.S. Border Patrol Mexico-Arizona Border Fencing Project: Facts about the Fence,” Latin American Working Group, 2003.) 

Report 4.11 

U.S. Practices Deny Equal Protection to African Americans 

(Sherrel Wheeler Stewart, “Blacks Deaths in Iraq War Exceeds Rate in Vietnam,” BlackAmericaWeb.com, March 17, 2004.) 

5. Right To Equal Protection for Women 

Since 9/11, women and girls in the U.S. or under U.S. jurisdiction have had a harder life. They continue to earn less than men, and the gap increased since 2000, although they pay the same prices. Every mother and grandmother knows she can’t afford to pay another woman to take care of her offspring with what she has to pay a plumber.  

There is no record of action by the Women’s Bureau or the Civil Rights Division on these issues since 9/11. 

The Fourteenth Amendment forbids the denial of equal protection based on race; the Nineteenth Amendment granted women the vote. UN Charter Articles 55 and 56 specifically forbid sex discrimination. So does the (ratified) ICCPR. Pres. Carter signed, but the Senate never ratified, the Convention on Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. Bush has said nothing about this. 

Report 5.1 

Women Earning 76.6 percent of What Men Earn 

(“Welfare: NOW Calls for Real Reform,” National Org. for Women, Sept. 30, 2003.) 

Report 5.2 

U.S. Media Discriminating Against Women:  

(J. Pozner, “Missing Since 9-11: Women’s Voices,” Common Dreams, Dec. 13, 2001.) 

Report 5.4 

U.S. Troops Mistreating Women in Iraq 

(ICRC director of operations, Pierre Krähenbühl, “Iraq: ICRC explains position over detention report and treatment of prisoners,” May 8, 2004, International Committee of the Red Cross/Red Crescent.) 

6. Right To Free Exercise of Religion 

The First Amendment is clear: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”  

UN Charter Article 55, and many articles in ICCPR and CERD repeat this right and spell out all types of forbidden discrimination.  

After 9/11, Bush said the attackers were from Saudi Arabia. Many Americans did not know the difference between “Arabs,” “Muslims,” “Moslems,” “Shiite” and “Sunni Muslims.” So many attacked “the wrong people.” 

In 2001, the Justice Department rounded up and imprisoned over 1,000 people without charges, access to lawyers, or notifying their families. In March 2003, Ashcroft authorized FBI agents and state and local police to make routine immigration arrests for the first time, with no training in this law. This illegally transformed immigration law into criminal law, but without jury trials, etc. 

Ashcroft also began entering immigration data into the National Criminal Information Center (NCIC) database, formerly used only for criminal cases, and in March 2003 stopped requiring that such information be accurate and current. These acts violated the right to privacy (First and Ninth Amendments and ICCPR.) 

Report 6.1 

DOD Detains U.S. Army Muslim Chaplain: James Yee 

(Mike Barger, “All Charges Dropped, but Army Gags Yee,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Apr. 15, 2004.) 

Report 6.2 

FBI Arrests U.S. Citizen, President of American Muslim Foundation: Abdurahman Alamoudi 

(James Vincini, “FBI Arrests Man Linked to American Muslim Groups,” Reuters, Sept. 29, 2003.)  

Report 6.4 

U.S. Muslims Feeling a “Chilling Effect” 

(Executive Summary: The Status of Muslim Civil Rights in the U.S. 2004,” Council on American-Islamic Relations, Aug. 8, 2004.) 

To be continued… 

Berkeley resident Ann Fagan Ginger is a lawyer, teacher, activist and the author of 24 books. She won a civil liberties case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1959. She is the founder and executive director of the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute, a Berkeley-based center for human rights and peace law. 

Contents excerpted from Challenging U.S. Human Rights Violations Since 9/11, edited by Ann Fagan Ginger (© 2004 Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute; Prometheus Books 2005). Readers can go to http://mcli.org for a complete listing of reports and sources, with web links. 

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At 73 years old, after 44 years of running his own business, and recent triple bypass surgery, my father went out in search of a job. Retirement was not his thing. 

He could not bear to spend another afternoon playing bridge with my mother and her blue-haired old friends. He tried yoga, martial arts and tap dancing. He took an introduction to computers class and he spent some time with his grandchildren. But what he really wanted to do was work. 

My mother encouraged him to find a job. He was driving her nuts, hanging around the house baking cookies. And there were just so many times she could beat him in Scrabble and expect him to recover. 

“But what kind of job can you get?” she asked as he prepared for his search. 

“Edna,” he answered. “Don’t be ridiculous. There are plenty of jobs out there for a talented guy like me.” 

He left the house with buoyant optimism. 

First he headed to the nearby Atlantic City casinos. He thought he could be an asset to their security system or valet parking crew. But when he asked for a job application he was met with an incredulous stare. 

“For whom do you want this application, sir?” a young man or woman would ask from behind a glass window. “For me,” he answered. “Who else?” 

They’d sigh and give him an employment form, accept it when he turned it in and mumble something about don’t call us, we’ll call you. My father went on to the next casino, and the next. Then he returned home and waited for the phone to ring. It didn’t. 

“Where are you going?” asked my mother one afternoon after she trounced him in another game of Scrabble. 

“I’ve got to get a job,” answered my dad. “I can’t spell worth a damn and if I bake another chocolate chip cookie I’ll barf.” 

He left in a huff. Tires screeched as he pulled out of the driveway in his Lincoln Continental Town Car. 

He was gone all day. When he returned, late that night, he was exhausted. He had visited every golf course between Atlantic City and Cape May. He had decided he wanted to drive big lawn mowers and cut grass. 

For three days he waited by the telephone. On the fourth day, a personnel director called from a nearby golf course. “We'll hire you, Mr. Parker,” he said. “Weekends only. Be here at 5 a.m. on Saturday morning. The pay is $6.50 per hour.” 

My dad hesitated for just a moment. “Okay boss,” he said. “I’ll be there.” 

When he arrived early the next morning at the club he was taught how to punch a time clock. He was given a plastic bucket full of dirt. His new supervisor, who was fifty years his junior, said, “Go out on the course, Parker, and fill every damn hole you can find with dirt. Don’t come back until you're sure there is not one divot left on the course.” 

“But what about driving a tractor?” asked my dad. “You saw on the application, didn’t you, that I have experience with lawn mowers?” 

The youngster stared at my dad. “Do you want this job or not Parker?” he asked. 

“Give me the bucket,” said my Dad. “You won't be sorry.” 

And that’s what my dad now does for a living. He fills empty holes with the horse manure he carries around in a plastic bucket in the early morning hours when the rest of the world is asleep. Oddly enough, he loves every minute of it. 

But he spends his time on the fairways, greens and in the roughs hoping that someday he will be promoted to lawn mowers. Once a week he calls me on the telephone and assures me that it is only a matter of time before the super recognizes his talents, gives him the keys and sets him loose. He’s good at filling those damn holes and they know it. 

CREEKS ORDINANCE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

On Sept. 28 the City Council will consider revisions to the Creek Ordinance, that would prevent homeowners whose house is destroyed by fire, earthquake or other disaster, and is near a creek channel, whether open or not, from rebuilding what was lost without going through lengthy and costly hoops. 

Because so much is undefined in the proposed ordinance, we face a Pandora’s Box of regulations needed to implement it. Among the unknowns created are to allow rebuilding only if there is not a: 

• “Significant adverse impact on the creek.” How can a homeowner demonstrate that rebuilding the house has no “significant adverse impact” on the creek, when that term is not defined? This gets us into Kafka-land, with the homeowner taking on the burden of trying to prove an unknown. 

• “Feasible alternative.” Are there cost limits to what is feasible for the homeowner to spend on paying engineers, architects, etc. to explore alternatives? Are there limits to requiring an alternative that would cost more than just rebuilding what was lost? Why is it the homeowner who is made responsible for developing alternatives, when it is the city that wants them? 

It is certainly appropriate to conform to current building codes for safety and health. However, it is not appropriate to make homeowners trying to rebuild after a tragic loss of their house to go through undefined, costly and onerous hoops. Rather, the goal of the city should be to facilitate rebuilding and a return to normalcy after a disaster. 

Those proposed requirements attempt to turn the clock back to a time when Berkeley was undeveloped. That concept is unrealistic and inappropriate in a built-out community, and those requirements should be dropped altogether. 

Cy Silver 

• 

SEAGATE PROJECT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I attended the Zoning Adjustments Board Hearing on Sept. 9 wherein Seagate Properties scored a corrupt victory for their proposed project (2041 Center St.) and I am still stunned.  

The ZAB heard well-reasoned opposition from the public and, as evidenced by their original vote, realized that this monster project, possibly over a creek, needs an environmental impact report (EIR). Then City Planner Debbie Sanderson began a dogged campaign to convince them that they were wrong. 

Amazingly, she succeeded; the ZAB voted again, this time to allow the project to proceed without an EIR. 

If one of our eloquent speakers (who were giving up their free time to attend this meeting because they actually care about Berkeley) had had equal time to rebut Ms. Sanderson, the ZAB may well have seen the foolishness of her recommendation. 

My understanding of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is that it affords the public a chance to study and comment on a project which may affect their environment. That hearing took place, I believe, for the public to be heard. Instead, a biased staffmember commandeered it on behalf of the developer. 

Berkeley residents are being fleeced by exorbitant taxes which finance more staff per capita than any other city in the Bay Area, if not the country. Sadly, we are paying the salaries of staff who are working against us. 

Gale Garcia 

• 

BLANK FAMILY RESPONSE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am writing in response to Steve Pinto’s recent letter to the editor, which states “Go Away Blank Family.” 

While Mr. Pinto has a First Amendment right to express his opinions, he does not have the right to call the Blank family heirs “greedy” and communicate this falsehood to your entire readership. 

I am the daughter of Jerome Blank and an heir to the Blank Family Trust. I have never thrust myself or my name into the public spotlight and wish to be respected quietly by my friends, neighbors, colleagues and relatives. Mr. Pinto does not know me, and I definitely am not greedy. Mr. Pinto has maliciously and willfully defamed my name and thus has committed libel. By printing his disparaging comments, your newspaper has become a party to his action.  

Mr. Pinto has made a malicious statement about me, my mother and sister, which exposes us to public hatred, contempt, ridicule, and may cause the public to see and treat us, the living members of the Blank family, with less respect. It was hard enough to lose my father, but to have to put up with Mr. Pinto’s needlessly malicious comments is difficult, as well. (Anger management classes may solve his problem.) 

In his editorial, Mr. Pinto wished to state his opposition to telecommunication antennas being installed atop my late father’s office building. However, he strayed from his point by blaming my father for his support of the building of the Safeway Store on Solano Avenue in l964. (A little late, don’t ya think?) He insinuated that my father was a liar because he “promised” no negative effects, such as traffic and excess garbage, on the environment by the then new store. My father may have been a brilliant man, but he was not prescient. Who could have foreseen the massive population growth in Albany 40 years later? In the ‘60s, Albany was losing residents to the suburbs, and most families possessed only one car. Dad was not a liar. He was the most honest businessman most people have ever known, which is why he won the affectionate sobriquet “Mr. Albany.” Pinto’s argument against the antennas could have been very strong had it not been laced with hatred. 

Shame on you, Mr. Pinto! Shame on you, Daily Planet! 

Marcia Blank Kelly 

Topeka, Kansas 

• 

MEASURES OF J, K, L 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am writing in support of the Berkeley tax measures J, K and L. It is important for the taxpayers of our community to remember that we as individuals received both federal and state (vehicle license fees) tax cuts last year. These cuts were paid for in part by reductions in funding to our city, cutting important services.  

As I understand it, a middle class Berkeley citizen will pay out significantly less money as a result of J, K and L than received from the Bush and Schwarzenegger cuts. I want to support the important services our city provides to everyone who lives here and I ask my fellow citizens to do the same. 

Adlai S. Leiby 

• 

SUTTER HEALTH 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

A recent article in your publication questions Sutter Health’s charity care program and alleges that Sutter overcharges uninsured patients. I had a very different experience and I think it’s important that your readers hear another story—my story.  

I was recently treated at a Sutter emergency room and admitted into the hospital. My wife and I have a small savings, own our home and make a very modest income—one that qualifies us to benefit from charity care. The financial office caseworker explained the program and suggested options that allowed me to be considered for Sutter’s charity care program. Even though I had some savings, the Sutter representative suggested that I keep it instead of using it to pay my hospital bill because, “I’d need the money to get back on my feet.” 

You can’t imagine how badly I needed that break and how thankful I am. The public keeps hearing the accusations, but I felt it important that your readers understand all the good that comes from charity care. Without it, I don’t know where I’d be today. 

Bill Farnsworth 

Sacramento 

• 

U.S. HEGEMONY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

According to the recent news, Bush is leading Kerry in polls by 10-11 points. Most probably Mr. Bush will be re-elected. His re-election shows that people in the U.S. endorse his policies, his war, etc. One should note that Hitler was fully supported by the nation of Germany. So long as the Americans want to drive their SUVs and to wastefully use half of the resources on the planet, then they should approve someone like Mr. Bush to go around the world and exploit other nations. I believe that people in the U.S. have to look at themselves first rather pointing finger at Mr. Bush and his regime. Perhaps it is better that Mr. Bush gets re-elected, because he will help the U.S. empire fall sooner than later. Once the U.S. empire has fallen, the rest of the world will be free of its hegemony. 

Yash Indrajit 

• 

MEASURE H 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Becky O’Malley’s recent editorial (“Down at the Alligator’s Ball,” Daily Planet, Sept. 17-20) gives an unseemly example of a City Council candidate and current Zoning Adjustment Board commissioner accepting campaign contributions from people who have an interest in ZAB and council decisions. Berkeley’s current system of campaign fundraising means this “fishy” situation is too often the norm. 

Fortunately, there is a better way. Berkeley Measure H would make candidates responsive to Berkeley voters, not beholden to their donors. That is why Congresswoman Barbara Lee, the Sierra Club, the National Women’s Political Caucus, Common Cause, and dozens of others have endorsed Measure H. Vote yes on Measure H on Nov. 2—because democracy matters. 

Dan Newman 

• 

YES ON H 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

One would expect mudslinging and dirty politics to dominate the presidential election. I had always thought, however, that misleading statements and assertions without basis in reality had no place in our municipal public debate. Then I read Keith Winnard’s response (Letters, Daily Planet, Sept. 17-20). 

Winnard apparently has not done too much of his homework. He attempts to scare Berkeley residents by claiming that with Measure H “City funds may have to be spent to support the campaign of an anti-Semitic, racist homophobe!” I guess he does not know that the qualification requirements to receive public funding are high enough to ensure only serious candidates with deep community support can run for office. To receive public funds, a council candidate must collect 100 separate $5 contributions in district from registered voters. Mayoral candidates must collect 500 $5 contributions from registered voters in the city. Would anyone in Berkeley consider giving a $5 qualifying contribution to a self-proclaimed racist, anti-Semitic homophobe, let alone 100 people? I certainly wouldn’t, and I imagine Winnard wouldn’t either… 

Winnard apparently doesn’t know that at present incumbents generally outspend challengers two or three to one. I don’t understand Winnard’s logic that by making challengers financially competitive, incumbents somehow gain an advantage. Certainly all evidence in Maine and Arizona points to the contrary. 

Where fair and clean elections systems have been working extremely well for years, not once has a frivolous or vanity candidate qualified for public funds. All that the systems have done is increased participation in the political process (voter turnout has increased), made elections more competitive (incumbents are frequently challenged, what a noble thought!) and restored trust in government (elected officials are responsive to voters, not donors). 

Sam Ferguson 

Co-Chair, Berkeley Fair Elections Coalition, Yes on H 

• 

LARGE BUILDINGS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

How do you feel about the many very large buildings that have been built or approved in recent years? 

Do you think it’s time to stop for a while until we see how we like these buildings and what their effects are? 

Michael Fullerton 

• 

COMMUNITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Being a real part of a community goes beyond the fact of living in a community. It goes beyond a casual “hello” and “how are you?” to your neighbor. No, being a part of a community is much more involved than this. In order to be a part of a community, one must first possess a sense of community. 

What is a community? Well, the dictionary defines community as ‘a body of people living in the same place under the same laws.’ According to this definition a city is a community. A state is a community. And a country is a community. This is plain and simple. Now, let’s focus on ‘a body of people living in the same place...’ and break it down a bit. 

Every ‘body’ is composed of individual parts. The ‘body’ called automobile is composed of wheels, tires, bumpers, an engine etc. A ‘body’ of people, like an automobile, can also be broken down into individual members that collectively make up the whole...Each person, like a car part, is different. Therefore each community is different. Each is a collection of different people. A collection of different ages and backgrounds. Each community has certain needs and concerns...but at the same time a community again is composed of smaller factions that connect with the whole picture. 

A community can have a collection of communities within itself. A church is a community in itself, while being a part of the braoder community it is located in. The same is true for a school. And each of these individual communities have an effect on the whole community. All of this is plain and simple. Now let’s break it down to the lowest denomination, the individual. 

An individual is like a pebble or a grain of sand. An individual has his or her own identity or personality. And like a pebble tossed in a still pool of water, an individual can cause a ripple effect that branches out endlessly. The key here, unlike a pebble, is being conscious of your individual effect on the whole picture. If each one pulls one and each one teaches one, the influence becomes quite powerful. 

But if an individual does not have a sense or an understanding of the whole community picture then the pulling and teaching is not unified. The community becomes a collection of pieces that don’t fit together to makeup the whole puzzle. 

This is our challenge. This is our goal: coming to grips with our individuality and how our individuality contributes to the broader picture. A grain of sand is merely a part of the whole beach. And understanding this is the beginning of having a real sense of community. 

Jonathan Wafer 

• 

NUMBER CRUNCHING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

After reading Matthew Artz’s story about the pension costs for our City Employees, I felt like shouting “Rape, pillage, plunder!” How did the unions concoct this sweetheart deal and who among our City Council was asleep at the switch when this Trojan horse slipped by? Referring to Mr. Artz’s story, an officer who retired at age 50 after 25 years on the force would receive 75 percent of his or her highest salary annually for LIFE.  

Now let’s crunch the numbers for a minute. I turned 70 this year and the U. S. government gave me my revised life expectancy which was 97! Do I realistically expect Medicare and Social Security to keep kicking in that long? My pension plan was a paltry IRA which I contributed 15 percent of my salary. Now factor in those excessive, obscenely generous, city pension plans which our city employees are not required to pay a single, solitary cent! And that also applies to their medical care. Wouldn’t the grocery clerks, our teachers, our struggling self-employed workers love such subsidies? 

Eventually these unfunded pension liabilities will break the financial backs of us property owners in Berkeley. I commend the journalists at the Daily Planet for showing us the writing on the wall. It’s wake-up time to go back to the drawing board. Intergenerational fairness is also at stake. 

Reverend Dennis Kuby,  

Unitarian Universalist 

• 

A CRITIQUE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Your discussion of comments this newspaper from readers at the Berkeley Daily Planet was very good—except that it was filled with reasons not to read your newspaper. The original Planet folded because it could not cope in a city that did not need a daily newspaper. Berkeley does need a newspaper; the Berkeley Voice is an awful paper filled with cronyism, cheeky writing when seriousness is all that is needed, and career local journalists who devalue the newspaper by remaining in attendance year in and out. This sounds familiar, no? 

It’s funny that while the Planet is sitting in a town that trains so many wonderful journalists that we don’t see more exciting features and photowork in your pages. Perhaps a partnership with UCB’s journalism school is in order. Realistically though, the serious problem this newspaper faces is how it will stop itself from becoming a part of city politics instead of being simply an observer of it. More to the point there is a constant sense that writers are returning to the same subjects and people to interview, as though the only resource available to writers is a phone and a contact book. Journalists should be extroverts...not happy to bide their time in a newsroom waiting for the news to come to them. 

John Parman 

BBC Asian Network 

Birmingham, England and Berkeley  

• 

HOMELESS PROBLEM 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am not sure where or how to vent, but the homeless situation here is just out of control. I anticipate that my opinion is not popular given that this local population is socially aware and supportive, but can anyone advise what this City’s tact is when it comes to the homeless here? Maybe someone can tell me how to better handle the situation as a local resident. I have lived in two other major, east coast U.S. cities before and have never had to deal with this problem on an ongoing basis. 

Over the last few months, I have been aggressively approached when taking money out at the ATM (downtown and in North Berkeley), had homeless people put their faces two feet from my 2-year-old child in his stroller, experienced people practically taking food from my plate while sitting at outdoor cafes and been told by one young homeless person that I was a “MFer” since I did not give him money. In fact, a week after that interaction, that same person threw a stone at me when I was walking my child on the street. It seems like I can literally count the number of times each trip out of the house in which I have to deal with such situations. 

Other locals tell me this is “just the local flavor and diversity of Berkeley”. I would like to agree, but having to almost defend yourself is not adding to any type of flavor, but inhibiting the true potential to enjoy this great City. 

Doug Pestrak 

• 

DARK DAYS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thank you very much to Ann Fagan Ginger and the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute, as well as the Daily Planet, for publishing the articles on our rights as human beings as defined by our U.S. Constitution and various international doctrines. 

In another era pre-9/11, the idea of being reminded that we have a right not to be killed and a right not to be tortured would appear to be absurd. But such are the surrealist Ashcrafty times and the neoCONNED circumstances of our country that one finds comfort in the stating of what is definitely no longer taken for granted. 

Personally I am very pessimistic about the future of out constitutional government. However, I fervently hope that Meiklejohn’s Institute’s work of monitoring and cataloging the terrible human rights abuses of this administration and Ann Ginger’s faith in codified law of the higher principles of humankind will help all of us to weather these dark days. 

Peter Teichner 

‡

Threatens Gun, Receives Cash 

A man wearing a multicolored sweater and claiming to have a gun walked into the Bank of American branch at 1536 Shattuck Ave. at 5 p.m. Thursday and demanded cash. 

When tellers complied with his demand, he fled on foot southbound along Shattuck, said Berkeley Police spokesperson Officer Joe Okies. 

Vandal Scratches N-word On Door 

A Berkeley resident who lives near the intersection of University and Shattuck avenues called police shortly before 5 p.m. Friday after discovering that someone had scratched the N-word into his front door. Police are classifying the incident as a hate crime, said Officer Okies. 

Verbal Fray Takes Nasty Turn 

A vocal spat between two Berkeley residents turned mean Friday evening when one of the pair pulled out a pistol and threatened his co-disputant. Police are still seeking the suspect.  

Loud Frat Party Draws Warning 

For the second time since the start of the school year, angry neighbors called police early Saturday morning to report an overly boisterous party at the Kappa Sigma fraternity house at 2400 Waring St., said Officer Okies. 

After police arrived at the party at 4:07 a.m., officers issued a second response citation—which means that the house must post a prominent notice warning that any further calls to the house will result in escalating fines. 

Andronico’s Wells Fargo Hit Again 

In yet another robbery at the Wells Fargo branch in the Andronico’s Market at University Avenue and Acton Street, a 40-something man clad in a multicolored sweater walked up to a teller at high noon Saturday and presented a note demanding cash. 

Greenbacks in hand, the robber was last seen fleeing through the market’s parking lot, said Officer Okies. 

Assault With Deadly Vase 

Police arrested a 36-year-old South Berkeley woman on charges of assault with a deadly weapon at 3:30 Saturday afternoon after she threw a vase at a fellow citizen. 

Teenage Girls Stage Carjack 

Two girls in their late teens yanked a hapless motorist out of his car shortly before 9 p.m. Saturday and drove off with his wheels. If police find them, the duo face being charged with carjacking. 

Duo Snatches Purse  

Two men approached a woman walking near the corner of Alcatraz and College avenues just after 10 p.m. Saturday, then grabbed her purse and fled on foot.i

On Sunday at the How Berkeley Can You Be Parade, I engaged in a spirited conversation with Robyn Few, who had a table set up at Civic Center Park. Robyn Few, in case you haven’t heard, is the former sex worker who spearheaded the campaign to get Measure Q on the November ballot. Measure Q, if passed, will make the arrest and prosecution of prostitutes the lowest priority for Berkeley law enforcement—a possible first step, according to measure proponents, to legalizing a profession that no one expects to go away in any case. The measure is garnering widespread attention as yet another wacky, “only-in-Berkeley” concoction, so talking to Robyn while costumed, dreadlocked, half-naked people meandered by seemed fully appropriate. 

I have to admit I approached her table with attitude, although she wore a warm smile and a “Fuck Bush” bumper sticker on her behind. Holding my daughter by the hand, I launched right in asking Robyn where she lived. I ascertained that while she resides not far from a notorious stretch of San Pablo Avenue where prostitutes sometimes solicit in the middle of the day, it is clearly not like the southwest Berkeley Potter Creek neighborhood where my children and I reside. I told her about my 7-year-old seeing discarded condoms on the way to her school bus stop. I told her about the limousine driver who left his engine running mere feet from my bedroom window while he was getting a blow job in the back seat, until I shined a flashlight and he stumbled from the car yanking up his pants. Robyn was a charming, attentive listener, and even allowed as how she’s picked up used condoms herself from the streets of southwest Berkeley. She said Measure Q is designed to open up a dialogue about finding solutions to a problem that is likely here to stay. But when I raised concerns about prostitutes flocking here in droves if Measure Q passes, she poo-poo’d it as unrealistic, saying that there’s a misconception about its impact.  

I said if I were a prostitute and Measure Q passes, then I’d like to be a prostitute in Berkeley. She said that was silly; that prostitutes like everyone else have rent to pay, bills to pay, and they’re not going to just up and leave to come here if they’re already doing OK somewhere else. Measure Q, she explained was really about making things safer for the woman who police rarely arrest anyway. She suggested the way to deal with discarded condoms and their accompanying paraphernalia (empty liquor bottles, needles, etc.) was to push the city to have street cleaning in southwest Berkeley. 

I didn’t tell her it was hard for me to imagine the City of Berkeley picking out used condoms from the bougainvillea bush that grows next to my house, or from the alleyway between my home and my next-door-neighbors. Or reminding her how hard it is to get a good night’s sleep when horny johns are circling the block waiting for their favorite girl. I know she didn’t create the problem. 

I felt like a yuppie—though I’m not—when I broached the issue of possible plummeting property values if the Measure Q passes. Robyn’s demeanor finally changed from patient to haughty, and she accused me of caring more about the value of my home than about women’s rights.  

I became defensive, too, and I said I’d move out of Berkeley if Measure Q passed.  

Then, feeling I was wading into unknown territory, I stated that women always have a choice whether to prostitute themselves or not—though in reality I know that for some women it must seem the only way out of poverty, while others are likely coerced into it by pimps. Still, it’s hard for me to summon up a sort of blanket sympathy for women I don’t know and likely never will.  

I told Robyn I take care of foster kids, who have few if any choices how to live their lives. I didn’t tell her that the young girl—my adopted daughter—who by now was pulling on my hand to get her pizza, had been a foster child abandoned by a mother who had quite possibly been a prostitute at some point in her own life. 

But I want to say this now: I don’t know what will happen if Measure Q passes. I want to believe Robyn, that this is a step in the right direction. I do hope that any woman who doesn’t want to be a prostitute will always be free to make that choice. 

Beyond that, if I never see a discarded condom on the sidewalks of my neighborhood again, I’ll rejoice that even people with questionable morals have an iota of consciousness about our environment.  

Yeah, right. 

Annie Kassof its a freelance writer in Berkeley. 

When it was reported that George Bush had emerged from the vicious Republican convention with an 11-point lead over John Kerry, many Berkeley political activists seemed ready to concede defeat. “Kerry has blown it,” they moaned, “I’ve started to plan my relocation to Patagonia.” 

Subsequent polls first lowered the president’s bounce to single digits and then declared the race a dead heat. Nonetheless, local Democrats continue to be depressed; they feel that the Kerry campaign has lost its momentum—somewhere during the past six weeks the media focus shifted from Bush’s dreadful record to Kerry’s alleged character defects. 

Take heart Democrats, help is on the way! The race is so close that it is unlikely that Bush will be able to weasel out of the debates. When George W. ran for his second term as governor of Texas, he had such a big lead in the polls that he initially refused to debate his Democratic opponent, Gary Mauro; at the last moment he agreed to one debate on terms extremely unfavorable to Mauro. Many observers felt that if Bush moved into a substantial lead, he would pull the same trick with Kerry. Now it appears that there will be at least two debates, with the first on Sept. 30. 

Many political observers expect Kerry to do well, as his debating skills are legendary. (Of course, many of us remember that Al Gore was predicted to wallop Bush in the 2000 debates, but the challenger more than held his own.) Kerry has to win the debates, move ahead in the polls, and shift media focus back to the Bush record on the issues of war, economy, and character. 

Many Democrats initially supported Howard Dean rather than John Kerry, because Dean expressed our outrage over the war in Iraq. Now, Kerry must become the vehicle for this outrage. He must find the strength within himself to speak about the war in unmistakable terms, say that the invasion was a mistake that has hampered our struggle against Al Qaeda. He must make the case that a Kerry presidency will strengthen America. 

If you listened to the Republican convention, you came away with the impression that all Americans have prospered during the Bush era. To respond to this fantasy, Kerry should return to the populist “two Americas” rhetoric used by his running mate, John Edwards, and tell the truth about the Bush economic record: loss of 2.7 million decent jobs, millions without healthcare, gaping holes in the social safety net, and wanton destruction of the environment. Kerry needs to make the case that his presidency will restore the middle class and create opportunity for all Americans. 

Finally, if Kerry is to win on Nov. 2, he must challenge the president’s character; shatter the myth of Bush as America’s noble leader. The challenger can attack Bush on the grounds that he was AWOL during the latter part of his National Guard Service and asleep at the wheel before 9/11; and Kerry can remind voters that George was elected on the basis of his promise to restore dignity and responsibility to the White House. The president’s re-election campaign serves as a vivid example of how he has defaulted on this promise. During his Sept. 2 acceptance speech, one lie followed another. As one example, Bush claimed “America and the world are safer” because of his leadership, boasting that “more than three quarters of Al Qaeda’s key members and associates have been detained or killed.” As was the case with his other whoppers, this was a total fabrication. A year after 9/11, the Bush administration published a scorecard, which showed that 12 of the 32 top members of Al Qaeda had been killed or captured; two years later, only four more have been apprehended, and Al Qaeda has replaced all 16 of its departed leaders. America is not safer because of the Bush administration; most experts believe that because the war in Iraq has aided their recruiting efforts, Al Qaeda is stronger now than it was before 9/11. 

To win in November, Kerry must expose these lies and shift the media focus back to where it belongs—on the failures of the Bush administration. Rather than strengthen America, Bush has weakened our country within and without. Rather than restore character and responsibility to the White House, Bush has overseen an administration characterized by partisanship, secrecy, intimidation, and lies. In the next 45 days Kerry should have ample opportunity to make the case that he is the candidate that will fulfill the broken promises of the Bush administration—strengthen America by bringing us together. 

Take heart Democrats! It’s premature to throw in the towel, pack your bags and prepare for a hasty exit. There is still time for Kerry to regain the momentum and win the election. 

Berkeley resident Bob Burnett is working on a book about the Christian right. 

The Willard garden has been a source of visual delight for both students and community members for many years. Beyond this, it is an important part of our educational program. There is a large and plentiful vegetable garden as well as the ornamental garden that fronts the school. Our garden coordinator, Matt Tsang, has been on the Willard staff for eight years. 

There have been a number of questions directed to the community through the Daily Planet about the site renovation project at Willard Middle School that need to be addressed. There are also a number of misunderstandings that need to be corrected. First, let’s just summarize the work being done this year. 

The Willard Middle School Grounds Improvement Project is a plan that has been long in the making, with school and community input, and the Telegraph Avenue gardens are only a part of the overall project. Since February 2004, there have been eight meetings to discuss the project and to develop the plans, plus a meeting with the entire Willard faculty. The project is expected to be completed in early November. 

The focus of this effort has been on providing a student gathering space in the central courtyard of the school, starting to unify the campus, and in various improvements to the exterior of the school. Next year, additional work will be done continuing those improvements inside the school The highlights of the project under construction now are: 

• The campus quad will include an amphitheater for 250 students, a lawn for informal play, and trees to define the quad and provide a gathering place and a 

center to the campus. 

• Entrances and gates are being improved. Due to traffic congestion on Stuart Street, the Telegraph Avenue entrance is being improved. The sidewalk is being 

widened, and the chain link fence through the garden along Telegraph is being replaced with an improved fence. 

• Drainage improvements are being made to the playing field. 

• The access road from Derby Street to the basketball courts is being paved. 

• Refinement of the garden area to unify the design, ensure student accessibility, and provide additional irrigation. 

• Removal of some of the fence enclosures to open the campus up. 

• A variety of other smaller enhancements to the site. 

The path through the garden has been the subject of some discussion. Over the summer when the architect took the plans to be approved by the state, the state architect noted that both students and community members use the space—thus any path needs to be accessible. Though this change happened over the summer, we should have done a better job informing the community as to why this change was being made, and discussing implementation options. Finally, photos taken in different seasons (and years!) will show a vastly different garden even if no work was done. 

Site meetings were held to discuss all aspects of this project, starting in January. The plan was presented to the School Board in March. The site meetings were attended by Willard staff, including myself, district staff, the landscape architect, and various parents and staff. According to notes from the landscape architect, Yolanda Huang, a former Willard parent, was at the first two meetings and several others. During the summer break, as the construction progressed, Huang has had regular contact with staff, sharing her good ideas and concerns. She has personally supervised some of the removal of plantings, and helped the site host a day for volunteers to help pull out plants before the tractor’s scheduled appearance. These plants have been saved for replanting. 

The various gardens at Willard have long been part of the school experience for students. We recognize their importance to our educational program here at Willard. We appreciate the community’s effort to help us maintain the gardens, enhancing both the appearance of the community and our children’s education. 

We ask for the community’s patience as the site goes through this construction phase. We remind everyone that even the beautiful new buildings at Berkeley High, as well as the new look at King Middle School, had to evolve through a construction phase to become the beautiful additions to the neighborhoods that they are today. 

g

Earlier this month the Cal Band announced a competition for the lyrics to a new fight song, the first for the band since 1978. The winning lyrics will accompany the new tune “California Triumph” written by UC Berkeley graduate student Hirokazu Hiraiwa. 

The song was played, without lyrics, for the first time Sept. 11. The deadline for entries was Sept. 16. The band plans to be ready to play the final version of the song, with the winning words, by January. 

Carol Denney sent the Daily Planet the following suggestions for the new fight song. Too late, unfortunately, for them to win the competition.  

Football Sonnet 

Why should we vex ourselves  

with games of skill 

When simple logic verities unveil 

It is not those who win who gain goodwill 

Black seas of deep resentment winners sail 

To trade the axe seems but pathetic sport 

More tragic for the backdrop budget squeeze 

Which strikes students in pocketbook and heart 

And brings the best departments to their knees 

Alas! Brave footballs sail and bounce about 

In sympathetic havoc—wanting out! 

Smoke ‘Em Out!  

Smoke ‘em out! Smoke ‘em out! 

Roll ‘em up and toke ‘em out! 

Pass around another joint 

Till the team says what’s the point 

Who cares what the score is 

Sing another chorus 

So what was the chorus? 

I don’t know! Here we go!...(repeat) 

Nuke ‘Em 

don’t just duke ‘em out 

nuke ‘em out! nuke ‘em out! 

victory will come when we drop the bomb! 

nuclear weapons stop them in seconds 

who needs brawn when we’ve got the bomb! 

we may suck at football 

but we’ll be at the roll call 

after the ultimate nuclear touchdown 

all the little suckers 

will envy us in bunkers 

after our ultimate nuclear touchdown 

Hurrah for Los Alamos! Hurrah for Livermore! 

we can press the button and shut you down forevermore! 

don’t be stupid 

nuke it! nuke it! 

nuclear waste, yeah 

we can make ‘em puke it! 

Upstage at the Aurora Theatre is a massive, offset portal of dark wood, monumental as though made of stone, through which the audience can see a sky with clouds that brighten as night seems to fall over the empire in Ellen McLaughlin’s version of Aeschylus’ tragedy, The Persians. 

Noted by the adapter as the earliest “full-length play in the Western canon,” The Persians is also “the only surviving Greek play that treats a contemporary theme”—that of the Greek victory over the Persian imperial army and navy at Salamis (481 B. C.). A decade before, Aeschylus had fought the Persians as a foot soldier at Marathon, where his brother died in combat.  

McLaughlin’s version was commissioned by Tony Randall’s National Actors’ Theater in March 2003 as a response to the invasion of Iraq—though Randall had wanted to stage the tragedy 12 years before. But McLaughlin specifically warns against “artificial parallels.” 

Four men in simple modern costumes that indicate their roles—the program lists them as State (Christopher Herold), Chairman (Owen Murphy), General (Paul Santiago), and Justice (Lawrence Thoo)—enter and array themselves as chorus: a chorus speaking to one another, sometimes in unison, of the great dust cloud they watch as the army moves west, of other signs of departure: “Here a curtain is pulled back and a face appears in the window [a mother’s face] . . . once again he is not there . . . she can’t stop looking for him . . . she has come to know him in his absence much better . . . so many people, but none of them him.” 

The cloud vanishes—“there is only silence. And so we wait.” 

Telling of the mass of soldiery “out of every corner of the empire,” they recount the diversity and exoticism of imperial force (accompanied by a string bass solo). And their syncopated belief: “What can’t such an army do? Nothing; nothing.” 

Queen Atossa (Lura Dolas) appears, widow of Darius, who led the Persians to Marathon—and mother of Xerxes, who leads them again towards Greece. “I don't know why I’m here. Perhaps you can tell me. But I had to get away—the mirrors were staring at each other so when I passed between them . . . too many of us, of me . . . through the palace alone, echoing and reflecting myself. There is not enough of me for so much grandeur.” 

She recounts dreams: Xerxes bucked from his chariot by a horse; a falcon tearing an eagle to pieces (accompanied by the elongated sound of strings). “Where is this Athens? . . . A vast distance . . . where the sun dies.” 

(McLaughlin’s lines are eloquent, bringing over something of the genuine irony of tragedy into English—that unspoken pause of meaning, far from the “artificial parallels” that pass for irony in today’s media.)  

A Herald appears, torn, bloody: “I am the last, the only survivor”—who has come halfway across the world to tell of disaster. “I hear it still . . . the cries of the men as they fell into the unforgiving darkness . . . and no-one to save them; men I couldn’t save, men I never knew; I'll never know.” And of the agony of the long retreat and those who survived: “Only a handful of us came through all of that, and we cannot look at each other.” Michael Wiles, slowly staggering about the stage, delivering this difficult, long, gut-wrenching speech, acquits it well. 

The chorus decries Xerxes, who the Herald said has survived, comparing him derogatorily with Darius. There’s something of the “chorus of humbugs” from Dallam Simpson’s version of Aeschylus’ The Agamemnon in the slippery way this chorus turns on their master, changing fluidly with the mood. A tympani accompanies their list of his sacrileges—the famous flogging of the waters of the Hellespont when a bridge of boats was broken. 

The Queen re-enters twice more: Her entrances in progressive mourning mark the dramatic shifts of mood. And Lura Dolas carries herself well; one of the old definitions of tragedy is the downfall of the mighty, and she shows us both terms of that. 

She performs two ironic welcomings—to her dead husband, Darius (Charles Shaw Robinson), in the first, one of the most affecting ghost scenes in our dramatic literature—and to her very young, defeated, castigated and self-deprecating son Xerxes (Craig W. Marker), who seeks expiation, kisses the Persian soil and asks, “Lead me home.” To the ascending sounds of strings and gongs, at first seemingly contradictory to the somber mood (Chris Houston’s incidental scoring is fine), the last lines are spare; the chorus doesn’t have the last word.  

Directed by Barbara Oliver, founder and—until recently—artistic director of Aurora, this is a sensitive production. But it’s still overshadowed to some degree by the difficulty of any presentation of tragedy today in English: the lack of a parallel—not in content, but in the liturgical power of the original—makes even eloquent translations seem like echoes of—or gestures towards—the rhetoric of the original alone. Sometimes this is represented by a Shakespearean or Scriptural idiom, or an unctuous mix of sanctimony. That’s far from the case here. But maybe the only substitute is through the bolder verse adaptations by poets—Ezra Pound’s Sophocles (which has indications for music that have a parallel with Aurora's use of it) and H. D.’s Euripides come to mind, or Witter Bynner’s Iphigenia for Isadora Duncan. 

A classics scholar friend told me The Persians was an anomaly for Aeschylus in that its Greek is much simpler than the ornate idiom in his other extant plays. I mentioned this to another spectator who had just read the original and praised McLaughlin’s adaptation for fidelity. 

“That’s in part due to its topical nature, events only a decade or so old everybody knew firsthand. Can you imagine an American playwright putting on a play about World War II seen through the eyes of the Nazis?” Then we both smiled wryly and said in unison, like the chorus, “Only Mel Brooks.” 

?

TUESDAY, SEPT. 21 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

Suzanne Lacke: Paintings opens at the Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. at Ashby, and runs through Oct. 12. 848-1228. 

FILM 

Loose Ends: “The Sixties” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Authors and Advocates” with Dave Eggers and Ayelet Waldman at 7:30 p.m. at College Preparatory School, Buttner Auditorium, 6100 Broadway, Oakland. Cost is $5-$10. 658-5202. www.collegerep.org/livetalk 

Joseph Coulson, El Cerrito resident and author of “Vanishing Moon,” reads at 7 p.m. at El Cerrito Library, 6510 Stockton Ave. 526-7512. 

Clive Barker returns with “Abarat II: Days of Magic, Nights of War” especially for young readers, at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Michael Schapiro describes “A Sense of Place: Great Writers Talk About Their Craft, Lives and Inspiration” at 7:30 p.m. at Easy Going Bookstore, 1385 Shattuck Ave. 843-3533. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Chamber Performances presents Strata Trio with Nathan Williams, clarinet, James Stern, violin/viola, and Audrey Andrist, piano at 8 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Tickets are $20. 525-5211. www.berkeleychamber.perform.org 

Henry Kaiser’s Grooves of Mystery, psychedelic blues rock dance party, at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

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

Baka Beyond, Africa-Celtic crossover, at 8 and 10 p.m. Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Wed. Cost is $12-$20. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

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

Rob Ewing and Lisa Mazzacappa at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 22 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“¡Cuba Viva!” Thea Bellos’ large format photography at Berkeley Public Library Central Catalog Lobby, 2090 Kittredge at Shattuck. Exhibit runs through Nov. 24. 981-6100. 

FILM 

Performance Anxiety: “Martha Rosler” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Café Poetry hosted by Paradise at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña. Donation $2. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Cintra Wilson describes “Colors Insulting to Nature” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Jeffrey Lewis discusses his novel about two Yale grads of 1966 in “Meritocracy” at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

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

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Wednesday Noon Concert, Ting Chin, cello and Siu-Ting Mak, piano, at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. 642-4864. http://music.berkeley.edu 

Autumn Equinox Concert at 7 p.m. at The Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave. Oakland. Free. 

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

Balkan Folk Dancing at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Dance lesson at 7:30 p.m. Cost is $6. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Tito Garcia Big Band at 8 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Dan Pratt Quartet at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Carol Elizabeth Jones and Laurel Bliss with Tom Rozum, traditional country and bluegrass, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $15.50-$16.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Acoustic Wednesday with Mikie Lee Prasad at 10 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

THURSDAY, SEPT. 23 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“In Defense of Liberty” A spontaneous artist-installed exhibition from 6 to 8 p.m. at Pro Arts, 550 Second St., Oakland. www.proartsgallery.org 

FILM 

Maurice Pialat: “Police” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

“Orphans of Delerium” by Antero Alli at 9 p.m. at 21 Grand, 449-B 23rd St. Oakland. Cost is $7-$12. 444-7263. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Shen Wei on Shen Wei” The modern dance artist talks about his inspirations at 4:30 p.m., Geballe Room, Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Campus. Admission is free. 642-0212. 

Heidenreich and Hofmann in Postwar New York Curator’s talk at 12:15 p.m. and panel discussion at 3 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

Lynette Chiang will discuss her book “The Handsomest Man in Cuba: A Bicycle Escapade” at 7 p.m. at El Cerrito Library, 6510 Stockton Ave., El Cerrito. 526-7512.  

Susanna Clarke introduces “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Word Beat Reading Series at 7 p.m. with featured readers Buford Buntin and H.D. Moe, at Mediterraneum Caffe, 2475 Telegraph Ave. 526-5985.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Battlefield Band, forward with Scotland’s past, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Jazz Mine,string swing jazz quartet, at 6:30 p.m. at King Tsin Chinese Restaurant, 1699 Solano Ave. www.jazzmine.net 

The Model Americans at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082.  

www.starryploughpub.com 

Gini Wilson, solo piano, at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Christian McBride Band at 8 and 10 p.m. through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$20. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

FRIDAY, SEPT. 24 

CHILDREN 

“Maisy” at 10:30 a.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-3635. 

THEATER 

Aurora Theatre Company, “The Persians” at the Aurora Theatre and runs through Oct. 10. Tickets are $28-$45. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

Berkeley Rep, “The Secret in the Wings” at the Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St. until Oct. 17. Tickets are $10-$55. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

California Shakespeare Theater, “All’s Well That Ends Well” Tues.-Fri. at 7:30 p.m., Sat at 8 p.m., Sun. at 4 p.m. at the Bruns Memorial Amphitheater, through Oct. 10. Tickets are $13-$32. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org 

Impact Theatre, “Fluffy Bunnies in a Field of Daisies” a sexually-honest comedy, at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean Theater, 1834 Euclid, and runs Thurs.-Sat. through Oct. 2. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468. www.impacttheatre.com 

“Landscape” by Harold Pinter, Fri.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m., through Sept. 26, at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Tickets are $10 available at the door. 883-9872. www.nakedmasks.org 

Shotgun Players “Dog Act” Thurs. - Sun. at 8 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. through Oct. 10. Free admission, pass the hat donation. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

Unscripted Theater Company, “The Short and the Long of It,” an improv theater experience, Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Temescal Arts Center, 511 48th St. at Telegraph, through Oct. 2. Tickets are $7-$10. 415-869-5384. www.un-scripted.com 

FILM 

Maurice Pialat: “Under Satan’s Sun” at 7:30 p.m., “A nos amours” at 9:30 p.m. at Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

John Nichols reads from the first biography of the Vice President, “Dick: The Man who is President” at 12:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Brian Doherty introduces “This is Burning Man” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Old-Time Music Festival, with Kate Breslin and Jody Stecher, Thompson String Tickler and the Earl White Band at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Wendy DeWitt and Stars of Glory perform boogie-woogie and gospel at 5 p.m. at Baltic Square, behind 121 Park Place, Pt. Richmond. Free concert presented by Point Richmond Music. 236-1401. www.pointrichmond.com/music 

“Archeology of Memory, Villa Grimaldi and the Autobiography of an Ex-Chess Player,” a multimedia presentation by Quique Cruz at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Alma Melodiosa and Universal Language at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10 in advance, $13 at the door. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Audrye Sessions, The New Trust, A Burning Water at 9:30 at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $7. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

20 Minute Loop, Moore Brothers, Mike Visser at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Clairdee & Ken French Trio Supper Club event at 8 p.m. at Downtown. Cost is $45. 649-3810. 

Mike Glendinning, solo jazz guitarist, at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Pete Escovedo Latin Jazz Orchestra at 8 p.m. at the  

Jazzschool. Cost is $22. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Brothers Past at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$8. 548-1159. www.shattuckdownlow.com 

Alphabet Soup at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Malady, Eskapo, Our Turn, The Observers at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

SATURDAY, SEPT. 25 

CHILDREN  

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

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

Pots from Parady’s Pope Valley Kiln, featuring work by Robert Brady, Scott Parady, Trent Burkett, Craig Petey and Tim Rowan. Reception at 5 p.m. at Trax Gallery, 1812 5th St. 540-8729. 

Shona Sculpture from Zimbabwe from noon to 6 p.m. at Kofa International Art, 1661 20th St., Suite 2, Oakland. 451-5632. www.shaonkofa.com 

THEATER 

“The Deliverance of Souls” at 7 p.m. in the All Souls Sanctuary, 2220 Cedar St. at Spruce. Donation$5 and up.  

FILM 

Maurice Pialat: “Le Garçu” at 7 p.m. and “Loulou” at 9 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Robert Strom on “Miss Peggy Lee: A Career Chronicle” at 2:30 p.m. the Berkeley Public Library 357-6292. 

Rhythm & Muse featuring John Rowe and Rita Bregman. Open mic sign-up 6:30 p.m., reading/performance 7 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center. 527-9753. 

Jonathan Stroud reads from the second volume in the Bartimaeus trilogy, “The Golem’s Eye,” especially for young readers, at 1 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Orhan Pamuk talks about a poet in a small Turkish village in “Snow” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

www.codysbooks.com  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Magnificat, early music ensemble, presents Iacomo Carissimi’s “Vanity of Vanities” at 8 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. For information see www.magnificatbaroque.org 

Shen Wei Dance Arts at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $26-$48. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

George Mann and Julius Margolin with Faith Petric sing songs for labor and justice at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship, 1606 Bonita. 841-4824. 

Stringband Contest at the Berkeley Farmer’s Market in Civic Center Park, Center St. and Milvia, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., including a Youth Division for the under-18 players. 848-5018. 

Berkeley Old Time Music Festival with Foghorn Stringband, Rich Hartness, and The Squirrely Stringband at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Evie Ladin will give a clogging workshop at 6:30 p.m. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

“Real Gothic Death Metal: Secular Songs of the 14th Century” at 7:30 p.m. at the Dzogchen Community West, 2748, Adeline Street, Suite D. Cost is $5-$10. www.sospiro.org 

Cactus Fire at 2 p.m. at Down Home Music, 10341 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. 525-2129. 

Brook Schoenfield & Friends at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Mal Sharpe’s Big Money in Jazz at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Junius Courtney Band, nineteen piece swing jazz ensemble, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $15.50-$16.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

pickPocket ensemble performs European folk at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $3. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Anthony Blea y Su Charanga at 9:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

KGB, Dexter Danger at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $7. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Coto Pincheira and Friends at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$18. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com  

Sonic Calligraphy, jazz with Chinese folksongs, at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $8-$15 sliding scale. www.thejazz- 

house.com 

American Starlet, Wandering Sons at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Bill Stewart Saxophone Quartet at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

The Warriors, Allegiance, With or Without You at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, SEPT. 26 

CHILDREN 

Yoruba Children’s Theater Workshop, led by storyteller and artist Obafemi Origunwa at 1 p.m. at Phoebe Hearst Museum, Bancroft Way at College. 643-7648. http://hearstmuseum.berkeley.edu 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

7th International Juried Enamel Exhibition collector’s tour with Judy Stone at 2 p.m. at the ACCI Gallery, 1652 Shattuck Ave. 843-2527. www.accigallery.com 

Suzanne Lacke: Paintings Reception for the artist at noon at the Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. at Ashby. Exhibition runs through Oct. 12. 848-1228. 

FILM 

UPA Cartoons: “The McBoing Boing Revolution” at 5:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Free screening. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Flash with Brian Blanchfield, Srikanth Reddy and Carol Snow at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Rose Levy Beranbaum describes her new cookbook “The Bread Bible” at 4 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library Opening Celebration with lectures from 9 a.m. to noon, a concert of Italian music at 2:15 p.m. and dedication ceremony and reception at 3:15 p.m. UC Campus. 642-4864. http://music.berkeley.edu 

Salzburg Chamber Soloists perfrom Mozart, Mendelssohn and Dvorak, at 3 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $48. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Shen Wei Dance Arts at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $26-$48. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Chamber Music Sundaes The Navarro Trio, Jeremy Constant, violin, Jill Rachuy Brindel, cello, Marilyn Thompson, piano at 3:15 p.m. at St John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Tickets are $7-$19. 415-584-5946. 

Chamber Music: In the Company of Three Violin, organ and piano, at 7 p.m at First Presbyterian Church of Alameda, 2001 Santa Clara, Alameda. Tickets are $5-$10. 522-1477. www.alamedachurch.com  

Old Time Cabaret and jam session at 3 p.m. at Jupiter. Part of the Berkeley Old-Time Music Festival. 655-5715. 

East Bay Music Together Benefit Concert from 2 to 4:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $7-$35. Benefits East Bay Community Recovery. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Joe Locke/Dave Pike Group, vibraphonists, at 4:30 at the  

Jazzschool. Cost is $20. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Shakuhachi Recital by Philip Gelb’s students at 3 p.m. at The Jazz House. Donation $8-$15. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Richard Shindell, contemporary song crafter, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org›

I had a breakthrough of sorts this summer: I learned to identify skippers. A couple of skippers, at least. Thank God for good field guides, in this case Jeffrey Glassberg’s Butterflies Through Binoculars and Jim Brock and Kenn Kauffman’s Butterflies of North America. There’s a real satisfaction in being able to assign names to things, even things as obscure as the umber skippers in my back yard. 

Skippers are those small, mostly brown, hyperactive butterflies you may have noticed dashing around your flower bed and passed off as some kind of day-flying moth. They differ from typical butterflies in the shape of their antennae, which have a kink in the clubbed tip, and they tend to have thicker bodies and shorter wings.  

In some skippers, males have specialized scales on their forewings that produce pheromones to attract females. There are a lot of skippers—3,600 worldwide, about a third of all North American butterfly species—and, apart from a few flashy tropical types in Florida and south Texas, they all look pretty much alike. But with patience, it’s possible to sort them out. 

Lepidopterists believe skippers branched off from the main stem of butterfly evolution in the Cretaceous period, when the dinosaurs were still going strong. The caterpillars of early skippers probably ate plants in the legume family: lupine, locust, lotus, wisteria. Early on, though, one group, the grass skippers, developed a preference for monocotyledonous plants, mainly grasses and sedges. As the global climate cooled and grasslands displaced the old broadleaf evergreen forests of the northern continents, grass skippers spread and diversified along with the bigger grazers like horses and bison. 

Skipper caterpillars are modest-looking creatures, without the horns and bristles of some butterfly and moth larvae. After hatching, they roll up a leaf into a tube and stitch it in place with silk. This becomes home base, from which the caterpillar ventures out to feed. As it grows, it constructs successively larger tube nests; in the last one, it transforms into the pupa from which the adult butterfly will emerge. 

The caterpillars have one trait that’s really remarkable, and that inspired a recent article in the journal Ecology Letters entitled “Good housekeeping: Why do shelter-dwelling caterpillars fling their frass?” Frass is the collective term for the fecal pellets of larval insects. Years ago on a summer trip through New England, camping under an oak tree that was being defoliated by gypsy moths, I woke up to the patter of frass on the tent roof, like a gentle rain of Grape-Nuts. 

Skipper caterpillars, as first described by an entomologist named F. W. Frohawk in 1892, eject their frass from their leaf-tube nests with impressive velocity and range. There’s a structure on their rear end which was originally interpreted as a kind of catapult, but which has been shown to be a mechanical latch in an ejection system driven by a localized increase in blood pressure. 

Martha Weiss, the Georgetown University biologist who wrote the “Good housekeeping” article, studied the silver-spotted skipper, a handsome species that ranges from coast to coast. She found that skipper larvae can propel frass up to 39 times the length of their bodies. The older and larger the caterpillar, the greater the distance. With an average score of 19 body-lengths, 39 would be Olympic quality. Compare that with your world-class human shot-putters. 

And why do they do this? Weiss came up with 3 hypotheses: sanitation, crowding, and protection from enemies. If the caterpillars let frass accumulate, they might be vulnerable to fungal diseases. Or the buildup might force them to change shelters more often, wasting vital energy. Or they might be eliminating a cue that would lead predators and parasites to their nests.  

In an elegant set of experiments, Weiss shoveled frass back into the nests of some caterpillars while allowing control larvae to practice their usual housecleaning. She found that fungi grew on the frasspiles, but that this did not appear to harm the caterpillars, which reached maturity in similar numbers to the controls. And caterpillars repeatedly crowded out of house and home also did about as well as 

those that were left alone. 

But the predator trials had a dramatically different result. Weiss found that predatory wasps picked off skipper caterpillars in frass-filled nests more often than in untreated nests. They seemed to hunt by scent, ignoring nests with faux frass in the form of small black glass beads. You do have to respect the olfactory powers of wasps; some species can detect spiders in their subterranean burrows by smell. The Defense Department has funded research into the ability of parasitic wasps to sniff out nerve gas toxins or chemical signals from unexploded bombs and mines. 

The one question Weiss was unable to answer was, Why so far and so fast? The skipper larva’s system does seem a tad overengineered. 

She speculates that the speed and distance of the fling may be just a byproduct of larval physiology. 

Nonetheless, it does seem clear that frass-flinging is an advantageous behavior that must have been subject to natural selection—which, after all, can work on anything an organism does, any physical trait or behavior that varies among individuals. It’s an interesting point to contemplate in an election year when the frass is flying fast and furious. 

TUESDAY, SEPT. 21 

Afternoon Bird Walk from 4 to 5:30 p.m. at the Martin Luther King Jr. Shoreline. Turn into the park off Swan Way, follow the drive to the end and meet at the parking lot by the observation deck. 525-2233. 

Residential Green Building and Remodeling Learn about healthier building materials, how to lower your utility bills, reduce home maintenance and minimize remodeling construction waste. From 7 to 10 p.m. at the Building Education Center, 812 Page St. Cost is $35. 525-7610.  

Friends of Strawberry Creek meets from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. in the Central Berkeley Public Library Meeting Room in downtown Berkeley. We will be preparing comments for the Creek Ordinance Public Hearing. 524-4005. jennifermaryphd@hotmail.com, caroleschem@hotmail.com 

“Environmental Dominion and the Ecology of Genesis” with Greg Zuschlag at 7:30 p.m. in the GTU Dinner Board Room, 2400 Ridge Rd. 649-2560. www.gtu.edu/studentgroups/trees 

“Climbing Mt. Shasta” Lisa and Michael Krueger will show slides at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Wellstone Democratic Club with John Judis, on “Will the Emerging Democratic Majority Defeat Bush in November?” at 7 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St. www.DemocraticRenewal.us 

“National Security in the Age of Terror” A talk by Gary Hart, fromer U.S. Senator and co-chair of the U.S. Commission in National Security for the 21st Century at 4 p.m. at International House, 2299 Piedmont Ave. Sponsored by the Goldman School of Public Policy. 642-4670. 

Family Story Time at the Kensington Branch Library, Tues. evenings at 7 p.m. at 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

The New SAT with Tara Anderson of Kaplan Test Prep at 7 p.m. at Barnes and Noble, 2352 Shattuck Ave. 644-0861. 

“Are We Eating Too Much?” Is Caloric Restriction for You? with Toni Piechota, City of Berkeley Nutritionist, at 2 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center.  

“Eligibility and Services of State Department of Vocational Rehabilitation” a talk by Sonia Peterson, MA, Rehab Counselor, at noon at the Herrick Campus, Alta Bates, 2001 Dwight Way. 644-3273. 

“Weight Loss Surgery: Is It for You?” A seminar at 6 p.m. at the Alta Bates Summit Medical Center, 400 Hawthorne Ave., Oakland. Free, but registration requested. 869-8972. 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 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. Laurie Shay will speak about living with her guide dog and other issues for the blind at 11 a.m. 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, SEPT. 22 

Berkeley Path Wanderers Annual Meeting at 7 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Chuck Wollenberg will speak on the history of Berkeley. www.berkeleypaths.org 

“Demystifying the November Ballot” with Councilmembers Linda Maio and Kriss Worthington, at 1:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Sponsored by Berkeley Gray Panthers. 548-9696. 

“Sowing for Need or Sowing for Greed” a film at 7 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Admission is free. 527-9898. www.gmofreeac.org 

Fall Equinox Gathering at the Interim Solar Calendar, Cesar Chavez Park in the Berkeley Marina. Begins promptly at 6:15 p.m. chavezmemorial@earthlink.net 

“The Issues: Terrorism and National Security” a panel discussion at 3 p.m. at 109 Moses Hall, UC Campus. Sponsored by the Institute of Governmental Studies. http://politics.berkeley.edu 

“The Unfolding National Tax Disaster” with David Cay Johnston and Chuck Collins at 7:30 p.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302.  

“Is Taiwan Chinese? The Politics of National Identity” Panel discussion at 4:30 p.m. at the IEAS conference room, 2223 Fulton St. http://ieas.berkeley.edu 

“Privatized Unemployment Insurance in Chile” with Kirsten Sehnbruch at 1 p.m. in the CLAS Conference Room, 2334 Bowditch St. 642-2088. 

“A Breath Inside a God” music and poetry workshop with Kim Rosen and Jami Sieber at 7 p.m. at 1517 Fifth St. Cost is $15-$20 sliding scale. To register email delphirose@earthlink.net 

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. 548-9840. 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around the restored 1870s business district. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of G.B. Ratto’s at 827 Washington St. For reservations call 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

Argosy University Open House Information on programs in psychology, education or business, from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at 999-A Canal Blvd. in Point Richmond. Event is free. 215-0277. www.argosyu.edu 

Prose Writers’ Workshop at 7 p.m. at the BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. 524-3034.  

The Berkeley Tango Studio Beginners Series with Argentine tango master Paulo Araujo at 7:30 p.m. Series lasts three weeks. Cost is $35. to register call 655-3585. smling@msn.com 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil with Sing for Peace 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 

“Roots of Jewish Humor: How It All Began in One Day in 1667” with humorist Mel Gordon, at 11:30 p.m. at the BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. Cost is $5. 848-0237. 

“Sukkot: A Meeting Point between Cyclical and Linear” with Avital Plan, at 7 p.m. at the BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. Cost is $5. 848-0237.  

Durga and the Dashain Harvest Festival of Kathmandu at 7 p.m. at Belladonna, 2436 Sacramento St. Cost is $10. 883-0600. www.belladonna.ws 

Want to Quit Smoking? Free smoking cessation program offered at the Over 60 Clinic, 3260 Sacramento St. at 1 p.m. To register call 428-4550. 

“Low Vision Magnifiers and General Eye Health,” with Patricia Hom at 1 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Free. 981-5109.  

THURSDAY, SEPT. 23 

The Mexican Grey Wolf Slideshow and discussion on North America’s most imperiled mammal with Michael J. Robinson of the non-profit organization Center for Biological Diversity at 7 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. 548-2220, ext. 233. www.ecologycenter.org 

Berkeley Fire Station Open House from 1 to 4 p.m. at Station 3, 2710 Russell St. Tour the station, see a safety presentation, and historical display and enjoy hot dogs and cake. Families and children especially welcome. 981-5506. 

Oakland CarFree Day A transportation and smart growth fair from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. in Frank Ogawa Plaza in downtown Oakland. 849-4412. www.carfreecity.us/Oakland.html  

International Institute of the East Bay Open House from 4 to 7 p.m. at 449 15th St., Suite 201, Oakland. Join us to learn about our work serving immigrants and refugees. 451-2846. www.iieb.org 

UC Botanical Garden Docent Training classes begin and run through Feb. 18, Thurs. from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at 200 Centennial Drive. Fee is $150. Registration required. 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu 

FRIDAY, SEPT. 24 

Good Night Little Farm Help tuck in the animals for the night, groom a goat, kiss a rabbit, or sing to a chicken. Wear boots if you have them. From 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

Native Plant Sale and Open House at the Watershed Nursery from 3 to 7 p.m. and Sat. from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at 155 Tamalpais Rd. 548-4714. www.TheWatershedNursery.com  

Free Compost for Berkeley Residents from 8:45 a.m. to 2:45 p.m. Berkeley Marina Maintenance Yard, 201 University Ave., next to Adventure Playground. 644-6566.  

Young Black Women’s Health Conference with drama and peer education to encourage young women to make healthier choices. Through Sun. at the Richmond Auditorium, 403 Civic Center Plaza, Richmond. 684-386. conference@muhsana.org 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Donald R. Olander, PhD on “Scientific Frauds and Hoaxes.” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $12.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925. 

“In Our Own Voice: The Making of A Korean Community” with a film and panel disussion at 7 p.m. at the Oakland Museum, Oak and 10th Sts.  

Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival at 1:15 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5190.  

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. 655-6169. www.bpf.org 

Overeaters Anonymous at 1:30 p.m. at the Northbrae Church at Solano and The Alameda. 525-5231. 

Humanistic Yom Kippur/Kol Nidre with Kol Hadash, the Bay Area’s only Jewish Humanistic Congregation, at 7:30 p.m, at Veterans Memorial Hall, 1325 Portland Avenue, Albany. For tickets call 428-1492.  

Celebrate High Holy Days with the Aquarian Minyan at St. John’s Church, 2727 College Ave. 869-3510. www.aquarianminyan.org 

SATURDAY, SEPT. 25 

Mini Farmers A farm explortion program for children accompanied by an adult. Wear boots and prepare to get dirty. At 9 a.m. at Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. Cost is $3-$5, registration required. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

Fall Pond Plunge Discover who lurks in the deep. With dip-nets and magnifiers we’ll search for backsimmers, dragon- 

flies and more. For ages 4 and up, from 2 to 3:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

Strawberry Creek Work Party from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Strawberry Creek Lodge, 1320 Addison St., between Bonar and Acton. Wear sturdy footwear and bring work gloves. Please RSVP to jandtkelly@igc.org so that we have enough refreshments. 

Restoration Work Day at San Pablo Creek at the El Sobrante Library. Join us as we extend the native plant garden toward the creek, from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Refreshments, tools, and gloves provided. 231-9566. 

Permaculture: Sustainable Gardening How to create a landscape that will have the diversity and stability of a natural ecosystem, at 10 a.m. at Magic Gardens Nursery, 729 Heinz Ave. 644-2351. www.magicgardens.com 

Alternative Materials: Cob and Strawbale Two natural building methods are currently undergoing renewed popularity. From 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Building Education Center, 812 Page St. Cost is $75. 525-7610.  

Bay Friendly Gardening: The Basics A free workshop with gardening guide from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Alameda County Water District, 43885 Grimmer Blvd., Fremont. 444-7645. www.stopwaste.org 

Wildcat Canyon Hike with the Gay and Lesbian Sierrans A moderately rigorous hike of about 7 miles. Wear hiking boots, bring layered clothing, lunch, water and sunscreen. Carpool meets at 9:45 a.m. at Rockridge BART at the base of outside escalator. 594-0744. 

Free Emergency Preparedness Class on Disaster Mental Health from 9 a.m. to noon at 2100 Martin Luther King Jr. Way. To sign up call 981-5605. www. 

ci.berkeley.ca.us/fire/oes.html 

Berkeley Historical Sociey Walking Tour Ghost Campus The UC That Once Was led by Bruce Goodell, from 10 a.m. to noon. Cost is $8-$10. For information call 848-0181. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/histsoc/  

Walking Tour of Jack London Waterfront Meet at 10 a.m. at the corner of Broadway and Embarcadero. Tour lasts 90 minutes. For reservations call 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

Herb Walk in Strawberry Canyon Learn to identify and use edible and medicinal plants that grow wild in the Bay Area. Meet at noon at the Strawberry Canyon Fire Trail head, below the UC Botanical Gardens on Centennial Drive. Cost is $6-$12. Offered by Pacific School of Herbal Medicine. 845-4028. www.pshm.org  

Neighborhood Coffee at 9 a.m. at Cafe Roma, College and Ashby. Sponsored by Berkeley Alliance of Neighborhood Associations. www.berkeleycna.com 

Artisan Marketplace featuring jewelry, oils, bath salts and potions, astrology readings, and food from 1 to 5 p.m. at Belladonna, 2436 Sacramento St. 883-0600. www.belladonna.ws 

Berkeley Youth Orchestra Auditions from 8 a.m. to noon. To schedule an audition or to find out more about the orchestra see www.byoweb.org 

Dance Allegro Ballroom Childrens Classes for ages 5-12 and 13 and up. Cost is $5 per class at 5855 Christie Avenue, Emeryville. 655-2888. www.allegroballroom.com  

First Annual Lebowski Drive-In celebrating all things Lebowski with blacktop bowling, trivia, costume contests and Mr. Pin. Screening at 8 p.m. at Lot 69, 1515 Harrison St. Cost is $5. www.oaklandish.org 

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. 

Humanistic Family Brown Bag Shabbat and High Holidays with Rabbinic Candidate Eva Goldfinger at 11 a.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. Bring your lunch. Activities for all ages. 428-1492. 

SUNDAY, SEPT. 26 

Run for Peace A 10k run and 5k run/walk with the United Nations Association East Bay Chapter, at 9 a.m. at Cesar Chavez Park, Berkeley Marina. 849-1752. unaeastbay@sbcglobal.net 

Berkeley Citizen Action Endorsement Meeting at 2 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Annual dues $35, $15 low-income.  

Berkeley Old-Time Music Convention Workshops from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on various topics. For information call 415-431-0147. 

Jewel Lake Easy Walk Explore the history of the old reservoir now called Jewel Lake at 2 p.m. in Tilden Park. For ages 8 and up. 525-2233. 

Fall Plant Sale at UC Botanical Garden from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Members’ sale at 9 a.m. Memberships available at the door. 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu 

Berkeley Community Orchard Festival, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., Derby St. between Sacramento and Acton. A fundraiser for the orchard-to-be with food, free fruit and fun for children. 843-2808. 

“Afghanistan: A Fragile Peace” A documentary by Berkeley residents Olga Shalygin and Cliff Orloff airs on KQED, Channel 9 at 2 p.m.  

“The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream” A film exploring the American way of life at 3 p.m. at the Parkway Theater, 1834 Park Blvd., Oakland. 415-740-8833. dave@postcarbon.org 

“Independent Unions, Democracy and the AFL-CIO” Forum sponsored by the Bay Area Labor Action Coalition at noon at at the Fellowship of Humanity Hall, 390 27th St., between Telegraph and Broadway, Oakland. 415-867-0628. www.laboractioncoalition.org 

“Which Road Forward For the Black Community?” A discussion forum sponsored by the Bay Area Black Radical Congress from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Fellowship of Humanity Hall, 390 27th St., between Telegraph and Broadway, Oakland. cheryl@urbanhabitat.org 

Berkeley City Club free tour from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. at 2315 Durant Ave. Donations welcome. 848-7800. 

“Bush Ousting” Nudity-inspired rituals of Bush ousting at noon at People’s Park. debbiemoore@xplicitplayers.com 

“Religion and Spirituality in the Life and Work of Vincent Van Gough” with Marlene Aron at 9:30 a.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. Part of the Personal Theology Seminars. 525-0302.  

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

CITY MEETINGS 

City Council meets Tues., Sept. 21, at 7 p.m in City Council Chambers, Sherry M. Kelly, city clerk, 981-6900. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Citizens Budget Review Commission meets Wed., Sept. 22, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7041. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/budget 

Civic Arts Commission meets Wed., Sept. 22, at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Mary Ann Merker, 981-7533. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/civicarts 

Disaster Council meets Wed., Sept. 22, at 7 p.m., at the Emergency Operations Center, 997 Cedar St. Carol Lopes, 981-5514. www.ci.berkeley.ca. us/commissions/disaster 

Energy Commission meets Wed., Sept. 22, at 6:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Neal De Snoo, 981-5434. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/energy 

Mental Health Commission meets Wed., Sept. 22, at 6:30 p.m. at 2640 MLK Jr. Way, at Derby. Harvey Turek, 981-5213. www.ci.erkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/mentalhealth 

Planning Commission meets Wed., Sept. 22, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Ruth Grimes, 981-7481. www.ci.berkeley. ca.us/commissions/planning 

Police Review Commission meets Wed. Sept. 22, at 7:30 p.m. at the South Berkeley Senior Center, Barbara Attard, 981-4950. 

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thurs., Sept. 23, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. Mark Rhoades, 981-7410. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/zoning  

Amid all the discussion of which casino should go where, who has which tribe backing their proposal, which proposal is best wired in Sacramento or Washington, and attendant topics, the central issue in the situation has been largely overlooked. Is gambling the right way to finance government, or to compensate Native Americans for past injustices? Legislators have been tip-toeing around that question, proposing partial solutions which might just end up favoring one player over another. Diane Feinstein, for example, has proposed revoking the special legislation sponsored by the usually estimable Rep. George Miller on behalf of the crowd running Casino San Pablo, which positioned them to cut a recent exclusive deal with Governor Schwartzenegger. Feinstein’s solution seems at first glance like a good one, but it won’t be if it simply clears the way for the politically connected Upstream project at Point Molate, which has undesirable environmental consequences and poses a major liability risk for the adjacent Chevron plant.  

Assemblymember Loni Hancock has made some forthright statements about the patent foolishness of trying to finance the state of California with gambling money. It seems at first glance to give the taxpayers a free ride—gambling money only comes out of the pockets of gamblers, who can afford it, right? Wrong. Most habitual gamblers are working stiffs who are spending money they (and their families) can ill afford to lose. When they go into debt or even bankruptcy, it’s the government who has to pick up the pieces in most cases. Hancock took a step in the right direction in August when she proposed a constitutional amendment requiring more public discussion before casinos are sited, especially in urban areas. She’s recently been quoted as saying that she doesn’t know of any families who have gambled their way to economic security, and she’s got that one right too. More lawmakers should be on record opposing the idea of funding government with ill-gotten gambling proceeds. 

Instead, we see the embarrassing spectacle of jurisdictions falling all over each other to collect the supposed gambling largesse. The City of Richmond is plagued with unemployment and crime, but it’s sad to see that many of its citizens appear to believe that casinos will bring good jobs and less crime. The dismal history of Atlantic City should tell them a different story. And Atlantic City enjoyed a monopoly for a long time. If San Francisco Bay is ringed with casinos, gambling interests will be taking a lot more money out of the state’s economy than they’ll be putting into it.  

It would be refreshing to see even more, yes, moral judgments from our political leaders on this issue. Gambling is an anti-social addictive activity, and it doesn’t belong in every shopping mall in California. Is there someone besides Hancock, in Sacramento or Washington, who’s prepared to say on the record that it’s no more desirable for Native Americans to have to support themselves by deals with sleazy gambling conglomerates than it would be for them to be given a monopoly on, say, selling crack cocaine on reservations? One would hope so, but don’t hold your breath. 

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As our family party was getting underway this weekend, Peter laid down the law: “Okay, no more dumping on Kerry, from now until the election.” For a group like ours, that’s hard, really hard. On almost any political topic, everyone has an opinion or five, even the toddlers. There’s no question of Bush, of course, but as charter members of the chattering classes we all have our own ideas about how to get rid of him. As the election approaches, it’s too easy for the chattering classes to turn into the nattering classes, preparing to say “he should have taken my advice” if Kerry doesn’t win. Yesterday’s New York Times and this week’s Nation were full of scoldings for Kerry and his advisors from all kinds of commentators who think they know how to run political campaigns, despite having spent the better part of their lives as scribblers. They’ve done their scribbling in the best venues, granted, and they’ve managed to make a living giving unsolicited advice, but in the last analysis how do they know what they’re talking about?  

Leon Panetta, who has had some real experience in the trenches with both Republicans and Democrats, came as close as anyone to making sense with his op-ed in the New York Times yesterday: “Pick a Message, Any Message.” That’s a simple, obvious idea, but there’s no indication that Kerry is trying to do anything else. The problem is that the media, even the members of the media who claim to understand what a disaster George W. Bush has been, can’t resist picking everything Kerry does to pieces, so that his message gets lost in the reporting of it.  

He’s making campaign speeches, okay? And these speeches, when you hear them, sound a lot like lots of other speeches, and no voter can be sure from listening to the speeches what Kerry will do if elected. But the point, and it’s not a complicated one, is that we can be absolutely sure what Bush will do as president, because he’s already done it. It seems so unsophisticated, so boring, to say that the reason to vote for Kerry is because he’s not George Bush, but that’s the truth. (And we’re going to leave out, for the purpose of this discussion, the California angle of being able to vote for Leonard Peltier or someone because California is sewed up for Kerry. Such votes are sacramental for the voter, but statistically they have not much to do with politics.) 

There seem to be two main modes of reporting on elections these days: drama critic and sports page. It’s either “how good is his performance” or “who’s ahead in the race?” What the chattering classes who have access to the media can do, if they really want to get rid of Bush, is simply to talk straight about the situation the country is in, rather than critiquing Kerry’s performance on the stump as if it were a recently opened off-Broadway play, or trying to second-guess the electorate by calibrating the polls as if they were batting averages.  

A lot of voters seem to look at elections as if they were sports events, and to view casting their votes as a way of trying to bet on the winner. My mathematician friend tells me that the best report on how such voters are thinking comes from some professors in Iowa who have set up a kind of futures market to predict how well Bush and Kerry are doing. As of Monday, he says that they’re rating Bush as being ahead by the equivalent of one percentage point in the polls, which doesn’t seem like much, but is enough to win if the election were today. But margins like that change, and they could change several times between now and the election. Neither the drama critics nor the sportswriters can really tell anyone anything about how Kerry is doing with odds like these, and they should stop trying. It’s the commentators and the voters who need to stay on message, not the candidate.  

Panetta opined that “Mr. Bush is most vulnerable on two issues—Iraq and the economy. Mr. Kerry needs to confront the president on both, with specific proposals that make clear the stark choices facing voters.” But the voters don’t need Kerry to tell them that Bush has made a colossal mess of Iraq. If they don’t know that by now, they could have heard it last week from Republican Senators Lugar and McCain, among others. And they don’t need Kerry to tell them whether the economy is hitting them in the pocketbook—if it were not doing that, he wouldn’t be able to convince them that it was.  

The Planet is getting many fine letters about the campaign from all over the country. We usually don’t print all of them, because we save our available space for local writers, and because we think they’re preaching to the choir in the Bay Area. But people around here should be sending such letters to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Miami Herald and the Toledo Blade and all the other papers around the country in swing states. We should be writing and calling our friends and family in those states, and we should be raising money for organizations who are contacting voters in those states on our behalf.  

This is not a complicated or subtle election. We need to stop sitting around in cafes whining about why Kerry isn’t making the case for us. After Kerry is elected there will be plenty of time for whining. And if Bush wins again, whining will not be enough. 

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