A group of former students of Lincoln Elementary School in southwest Berkeley returned last week to find a school that was significantly larger, better-landscaped, and more ethnically diverse than the one they left some 60 years ago. Oh, and yes, of course, the name has been changed, to Malcolm X Arts and Academics Magnet Elementary. 

The gathering was part of last weekend’s 50th reunion activities of the Berkeley High School Class of 1954. Reunion participants were encouraged to fan out across the city on Friday morning to visit their old elementary schools. 

At Malcolm X, the participants—all of whom were African-American—toured the school, poured over old class photos in the library, shared stories, and sat in on class sessions to answer student questions about “the old days.” They are part of a forgotten portion of Berkeley—middle class blacks who grew up in what they like to call “challenging economic circumstances” in the city just prior to World War II, and whose ranks were later overshadowed by the huge influx of Southern blacks who came up from Louisiana and Texas and Arkansas in the early ‘40s to work in the wartime shipping industries. 

Participants recalled a black East Bay community of the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s whose recreation events stretched from the tennis courts and baseball fields of San Pablo Playground in Berkeley—where barnstorming Negro League semipro teams used to draw large crowds for weekend games—to dances at the Paramount and Fox and T&D theaters in Oakland entertained by big-name performers like Nat King Cole. 

“My students were totally fascinated by them,” said second grade teacher Susan Alexander, reflecting on the class visit by the alumni. “They were most interested in one of the stories about how students used to be popped with a leather strap. When I asked my students what they would think if I did something like that to them, they looked at me like I was out of my mind.” 

Corporal punishment was outlawed in California in 1987, long before the second graders were born. 

Mort Hilliard, a former Lincoln student of the ‘40s, was amused by one question in particular: “Did you have cellphones back then?” 

“When I went to Lincoln, we had one telephone in our house,” he said. “When you picked it up, you had to ask the operator to get the number for you.” 

Jai Waggoner, Curriculum Coordinator at Malcolm X, was also fascinated by the reunion participants, particularly their memories. “I was amazed that they could look at photos and remember the names of all of those classmates,” she said. “Sometimes it’s hard for us teachers to remember the names of all of the students in the classes we’re teaching.” 

One participant spent about 15 minutes jotting down the name of some 25 student crossing guards for the school history records to be kept in the library. The photos had been taken nearly 60 years ago. 

The student photo reminiscing prompted some good-natured “ribbing” and “boot-jacking,” included one gentle dig by Malcolm X principal Cheryl Chinn. Seeing a young photo of Homer Martin, who attended Lincoln in the late ‘40s, she asked, “What happened, Homer? You looked so good, then.” Martin smiled and shot back, “You’re trying to say that I look cute now, but I just looked cuter then.” The reunion crowd roared with laughter. 

Martin said that the Lincoln Elementary environment was “dramatically different” when he attended, particularly the racial makeup. “The school was 90 percent black in those days,” he said, even though the surrounding neighborhood was not all black. “I learned later that we were subject to red-lining. But, of course, I didn’t know that while I was a child.” 

Martin, who acted as contact man for the Malcolm X participants, chose not to limit the gathering to Berkeley class of ‘54 participants, and so the Malcolm X gathering included students who attended over roughly a 10 year period spanning the ‘40s. It also included 76 year old Newman Rebell, a Berkeley resident who graduated from the school in 1938. 

Rebell said that though he passes by Malcolm X “quite a bit” last Friday was the first time he had returned to the school since he graduated. He remembered the old Lincoln as a one-building school “with a lot of asphalt, all around.” When someone joked about it being a “one-room schoolhouse,” someone else said, “No, that’s a little bit further back than our time. You’re confusing us with Louisiana.” 

Most of reunion participants said that this was not the first time they’d gotten back together; in fact, they said that a group of longtime African-American Berkeley residents in their 60s regularly meet for breakfast, once a month, as a social event. They explained that the gatherings grew out of “penny-ante” poker games run by four or five old friends and enlarged, some two years ago, into the informal monthly events. 

“It’s primarily guys who grew up in Berkeley,” one of them said. “At this point, we even have some women show up.”?

If the big one hits, Frank Morris fears that he, and more than 2,000 Berkeley residents like him, might not be allowed to build anew. 

They live within 30 feet of one of the city’s estimated 75,000 linear feet of open and culverted creeks. If a house falls victim to an earthquake, fire or any other natural disaster, owners can’t rebuild without permission from the city.  

There is no known case of the city standing in the way of a homeowner desperate to rebuild, but that isn’t enough to comfort Morris, who lives in the Indian Rock neighborhood by the Marin Watershed. 

“I don’t trust the city very much for anything,” he said. 

When the City Council convenes for a special meeting at Longfellow Middle School Tuesday it will seek to reassure homeowners like Morris, whose concerns are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to tackling the city’s dreaded creek question. 

Already, Berkeley is facing roughly $30 million of immediate repair to creek culverts, not one dime of which is accounted for in the city’s budget, according to a July report from the city manager. 

The problem stems all the way back to the beginning of the 20th century when Berkeley built nearly 34,000 linear feet of creek culverts, pushing the open watercourses underground and in some cases redirecting them to enable development. Many of the estimated 2,000 homeowners within 30 feet of culverted creeks weren’t aware of the culverts until earlier this year when the city released a map of its creek system. 

The concrete culverts were only built to last between 60 and 80 years, and now that they are reaching the end of their useful lives, the city is facing an unfunded liability of mammoth proportions. Just last week the City Council had to make a $250,000 emergency allocation to fix a broken culvert at Allston and Harold ways. 

“It’s a huge giant timebomb,” said Councilmember Dona Spring.  

Take for example Strawberry Creek, one of the city’s ten watersheds. The city manager’s report said that the creek, which leaves UC property at Oxford Street and flows into the Bay, has six damaged culverts, including the one at Allston and Harold, that will cost roughly $11 million to fix. 

Complicating the issue is that some of the culverts run underneath private property, and although the city’s 1989 Creek Ordinance is silent on the matter, city policy places the responsibility for fixing them on homeowners. Some property owners built culverts in the early part of the 1900s, but since permits for culvert construction weren’t required until 1928, little definitive information exists as to their origins. 

Already the city is facing lawsuits from a slew of neighbors on North Valley Street, who claim that the city or neighbors who live upstream should bear the costs of fixing a damaged culvert that has placed several houses in jeopardy of collapse (see insert). 

Since some culverted creeks also serve as conduits for transporting city storm water to the Bay, even some councilmembers question the legality of the city’s stance of leaving the problem to property owners. 

“To say it’s totally the private property owner’s problem, seems a little simplistic to me,” said Councilmember Gordon Wozniak. 

When the council meets Tuesday, it will try to decide exactly what to do with its 15-year-old creeks ordinance. The law, designed to restrict further culverting of open creeks, prohibits new roofed-construction and expansion within a 30 feet of the creek line or culvert that runs along the natural creek path. 

When Berkeley passed the law in 1989 just after the Loma Prieta earthquake damaged culverts in San Francisco, the city was hailed as an innovator in preserving watersheds. But since then other cities, including Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara, have passed more restrictive laws that local creek advocates want Berkeley to copy. 

Juliet Lamont, an environmental consultant and member of Friends of Five Creeks, wants the 30-foot setback also to apply to some non-roofed structures such as parking lots, as well as monetary incentives for homeowners to help them fix culverts and a plan to prevent stormwater pollution, often caused by illegal sewer hookups and illegal dumping of waste down storm drains on city streets. 

Parts of the city’s storm water system are about as old as its culverts, and for Strawberry Creek alone the city will need to spend roughly $10 million in storm water system repairs, according to the city manager’s report. 

To tackle all of the issues collectively, creek advocates and their allies on the City Council are calling for the council Tuesday to form an independent task force to review the 1989 ordinance. 

But councilmembers who are more leery of enacting restrictive new measures favor sending the issue to the Planning Commission. 

“I don’t see why a taskforce is necessary,” said Councilmember Betty Olds. “It’s primarily a land use issue, that’s what the Planning Commission does.” 

Tom Kelly, a city health commissioner and creeks advocate, argued that the Planning Commission had other items on its plate and would take too long getting acquainted with the issues.  

“The best expertise rests with the large group of creek supporters,” he said. 

Either way, the first question in a review the creek ordinance will be how to pay for the process. City Manager Phil Kamlarz, who isn’t recommending either option, said revising the ordinance would take several years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in staff time. 

Although the biggest creek issues well might be debated for years, the council Tuesday could guarantee the rights of residents like Morris to be able to rebuild their homes after an earthquake or a fire.  

On the agenda are two proposals: The first would let residents rebuild the footprint of their home within the 30-foot setback under any circumstances and the second would require them to move the house to a portion of the property beyond the setback unless doing so proved “unfeasible.” 

Creek advocates prefer the stricter of the two proposals and want the issue to first go to the taskforce. But Councilmember Betty Olds said she would push for a resolution Tuesday. “This is the biggest issue for a lot of people,” she said. “They’re terrified what will happen if their house were to burn down.” 

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On a quiet cul-de-sac in central Berkeley, the neighbors will chat about nearly anything except the tangle of lawsuits they have filed against each other and the city. 

“I’m busting to talk, but it’s in litigation,” said Brian Huse of 2163 North Valley Street who is being sued by eight neighbors and is countersuing all of them as well as the city and Strawberry Creek Lodge, a senior living facility. 

At issue is who is responsible for paying an estimated $1.3 million to repair the dilapidated culvert. When it was built, sometime in the early 20th century, it sent Strawberry Creek racing below their houses and now threatens to drag at least two of their homes and the Strawberry Creek Lodge down into the creek. 

Last year Anthony Cody and Kristin Prentice of 2152 North Valley decided to take the matter to Superior Court. They filed suit charging that the collapse of a section of the cement culvert had resulted in damage to the foundation of their home. Since they didn’t live over the culvert, and they didn’t know where culpability rested, they sued the city and the neighbors who lived upstream from them above the damaged culvert. 

The suit spawned a series of countersuits that have been consolidated before Superior Court Judge Bonnie Sabraw.  

Although they have entangled one another in lawsuits, Jay Pederson, the attorney for Marie Andrushuk of 2151 North Valley, said the neighbors were essentially charging that the damaged culvert is the city’s responsibility. The city attorney’s office disagrees. 

With much of Berkeley’s 34,000 linear feet of concrete culverts coming to the end of their natural lives, the question of who is responsible for paying to repair culverts running underneath private property will either claim millions from the city’s coffers or from homeowners’ wallets. 

The dispute arose in 2001 when creek advocates working near the culvert at North Valley Street peeled back ivy and vines to find that a 15-foot slab of concrete had broken off from the culvert. 

An ensuing engineering study by Oakland-based Applied Materials & Engineering found that “severe deterioration” had occurred on the west end of the culvert and in one section the culvert’s strength was measured at 241 PSI (pounds per square inch), when the standard strength was 3,500 PSI. The engineer also found that the culvert had sustained multiple cracks and lacked any steel reinforcement to protect it from further cracking 

The collapse of the culvert has changed the flow of water, which during heavy rains ricochets off the displaced concrete and slams into the creek bed and the sides of the creek banks. Since the culvert has started to cave, the creek bed and banks have eroded threatening the stability of the lodge and homes of both Cody and Andershuk. 

The neighbors are contending that the culvert is part of the city’s storm water drainage system that funnels rain water from city streets into the Bay, Pederson said. If the culvert is part of the city’s flood control system, it is the city’s responsibility to fix, their complaints allege. 

The city replied that Strawberry Creek is not part of its storm drain system. Instead, Deputy City Attorney Matthew Orebic held that the city has a “formal storm drain system of pipes that run parallel to the creek.” 

Orebic also contended that the city had no record showing that the damaged section of the culvert, believed to be built between 1915 and 1928, was constructed by the city. 

He wrote in the city’s Complex Case Management Conference Statement that it was likely that a private developer extended a different culvert to increase the amount of land available for development. 

While the issue of liability remains tangled in litigation, the city and neighbors are working on an emergency repair job to prevent further erosion this rainy season. 

The project, estimated to cost in the tens of thousands of dollars, would place rock filled wire baskets against the creek banks and break up the large slabs of fallen concrete culverts to slow the rush of the water, said Ed Ballman, a civil engineer at Balance Hydrologics, one of two Berkeley-based companies asked to bid on the project. 

Ballman said the work would have to be completed by Oct. 15, the state-mandated date to cease all work in streams before the onset of the rainy season. 

With no final settlement in sight, Richard Register, the head of Ecocity Builders, a chief advocate of unearthing creeks, has floated a compromise.  

He suggested establishing a land trust in which developers would pour money into a trust to buy out the homeowners in return for height waivers for new projects in downtown Berkeley or other acceptable locations. When homeowner wanted to sell, he said, the trust would buy their land and unearth the creek. 

“So far a lot of people have been fearful of it, but we think it’s a good idea,” he said. 

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For the 20 years Maudelle Shirek has sat on the City Council she could always count on the support of Berkeley’s foremost progressive political organization. 

Until now. 

Berkeley Citizens Action, which has endorsed Shirek in all of her council races, at times unanimously, voted overwhelmingly Sunday to back her rival in District 3, Max Anderson. 

The 41-17 vote for Anderson, the chair of Berkeley’s Rent Stabilization Board, cemented the challenger’s credentials as the standard-bearer of Berkeley’s left and finalized a painful separation between Shirek and some of her core supporters. 

Don Jelinek, a former councilmember, who introduced Anderson to the convention, said giving his speech endorsing Anderson was “the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life. 

“The idea of saying those words in front of Maudelle was painful beyond imagination,” he said. 

Telephone calls to Shirek Monday went unanswered. 

Anderson said he was “extremely grateful” for the BCA endorsement. “I think they see me as someone who represents and embodies their interests.” 

The vote by 59 dues-paying BCA members came after the BCA Steering Committee voted 4-1 to recommend endorsing Shirek.  

The 93-year-old Shirek has been one of the most revered figures among Berkeley progressives for her decades of work fighting for civil rights and against housing discrimination in the city. 

But in recent years she has frequently voted with more moderate councilmembers, and last month when a procedural slip-up cost Shirek her place on the ballot, progressives bolted en masse for Anderson. 

With Shirek running as a write-in candidate after she failed to collect enough valid signatures to qualify for the ballot, she has seen Anderson win the endorsement of progressive organizations like the Sierra Club and the East Bay Gay Lesbian Transgender Club which Shirek had received in prior races. 

Jae Scharlin, a BCA trustee who collected the signatures for Shirek that the city clerk disqualified because fewer than 20 of the names were from District 3, said she was no longer working on the Shirek campaign and questioned Shirek’s decision to mount a write-in campaign. 

“We need unity in the district,” she said, fearing that Shirek’s campaign could tip the election in favor of Laura Menard, a more moderate community activist. 

Had Shirek qualified for the ballot, Jelinek said BCA members probably wouldn’t have seen her as a spoiler and might have voted differently. 

“If she had qualified I think we would have had a dual endorsement,” he said. 

While Shirek was getting squeezed out of Berkeley progressive establishment, she was trying, with some success, to make inroads with Berkeley moderates. For the first time Thursday, Shirek sought the endorsement of the Berkeley Democratic Club, the moderate’s flagship organization. 

Shirek failed to win the endorsement but drew enough votes to keep Menard from winning it and left with the pledged support of councilmembers Gordon Wozniak, Betty Olds and Miriam Hawley, widely considered the three most conservative members of the council. 

Olds, who had already endorsed Menard, said Monday she would now endorse both candidates for District 3. 

While the BDC failed to endorse any candidate in District 3, they did endorse Olds for city council in District 6 and ZAB Commissioner Laurie Capitelli in District 5. They made no endorsement in District 2, where Peralta Community College District Trustee Darryl Moore is a big favorite. For school board, the club endorsed incumbent Joaquin Rivera and for the ballot measures only the schools tax managed to win 60 percent of the vote. 

Besides endorsing Anderson, the BCA endorsed Moore in District 2, Karen Hemphill and John Selawsky for School Board and Nicky Gonzalez Yuen for the Peralta Board of Trustees. In District 5 neither Capitelli, whom the steering committee recommended, nor Green Party member Jesse Townley could manage the 60 percent of the BCA vote required to earn an endorsement. State Senator Don Perata also failed to get the BCA endorsement. 

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Three seats on the Peralta Community College District Board of Trustees in the Daily Planet’s coverage area will be filled by newcomers. 

In Area 2 (East Oakland) currently represented by Lynn Baranco, Area 4 (Albany, Emeryville, and the western portions of Berkeley) currently represented by Darryl Moore, and Area 6 (North Oakland the eastern portions of Berkeley) currently represented by Susan Duncan, the incumbents are not running for re-election. 

Peralta operates four colleges—Laney, Merritt, College of Alameda, and Vista—with a combined student population of 27,000, 70 percent of whom are minorities. 

The district operates on a $90 million budget which Chancellor Elihu Harris, former assemblymember and Oakland mayor, says is “underfunded” by between $8 million and $10 million. Prior to Harris’ selection as chancellor earlier this year, this district was often described by local media as “troubled.” The district is currently embarking on a $67 million project to build a first-time, 165,000-square-foot campus for Vista College in Berkeley. 

Area 2 

The Area 2 Trustee race pits two public school employees against each other: Hayward Unified School District teacher Marcie Hodge against Castlemont High School counselor Johnny Lorigo. Area 2 takes in the extreme southern tip of Oakland, roughly from Seminary Avenue to the San Leandro border. Incumbent Lynn Baranco, the outgoing Peralta Trustee president, is not running for re-election. Both candidates are graduates of Peralta colleges. 

In her candidate’s statement filed with the Alameda County Registrar of Voters, Hodge said that one of her goals as trustee is to “demand better fiscal accountability. Every dollar should be used to improve classroom instruction and for student financial aid so that college is an affordable option for everyone.” Hodge also said that she would “work to expand the number of course offerings to ensure students graduate on time” and “expand vocational training programs so students gain the skills they need to get good jobs.” 

Hodge owns MLH Psychotherapy Group and is the sister of Oakland School Board member Jason Hodge, who has endorsed her candidacy. 

Hodge lists Oakland Councilmembers Larry Reid and Henry Chang and Peralta Trustees Lynn Baranco [the outgoing incumbent], Darryl Moore, and Susan Duncan as her endorsers, as well as East Oakland political powerhouse pastors J. Alfred Smith Sr. of Allen Temple Baptist Church and Bob Jackson of Acts Full Gospel Church.  

Lorigo has worked in both the Oakland Unified School District and the Peralta Community College District and served for 10 years on the Laney College Educational Opportunities Service advisory board. In one of his campaign leaflets, he says that he wants to “bring fiscal solvency back to the district through a shared decision-making process,” but stresses that he wants to do so “without sacrificing quality education to students [or] the livelihood of our committed faculty and staffs.” 

“The students are my top priority,” Lorigo adds. “I’m real concerned about the playing field being more level. We need to go above and beyond what the state is giving us to subsidize books and tuition and child care. If you just settle for what the state gives you, you’re always going to have a bare minimum.”  

Among his endorsers, Lorigo lists State Senator Don Perata, Oakland City Attorney John Russo, Peralta Trustees Linda Handy, Darryl Moore, Bill Riley, and Amey Stone, former Black Panthers David Hilliard and Bobby Seale, as well as the Alameda County Democratic Party, the John George and MGO Democratic clubs, and several local unions. 

Area 4 

In Area 4, incumbent Darryl Moore is giving up his seat to run for Berkeley City Council District 2 seat. Running to replace him are DeAnza Community College political science instructor Nicholas González Yuen, Berkeley attorney Kamau Edwards, and Lincoln University Associate Professor James Peterson. Area 4 includes the entire cities of Albany and Emeryville, as well as the western portion (generally) of the City of Berkeley. 

“One issue [in this campaign], obviously, is timely completion of Vista,” says Edwards, referring to the Peralta College in Berkeley. “Vista is a college that hasn’t always gotten its fair share of the funds. The number one issue for me is to make sure Vista gets completed on time—January 2006—and trying to make sure Vista gets its fair share of the funding. The second issue is an offshoot of Vista and an offshoot of the Peralta Colleges as a whole: funding—that is, trying to find enough funds for the Peralta colleges to become premier institutions as we move forward.” 

He also says that as one of his goals as trustee, he wants to create “custom-tailored classes” for the local business community. 

Edwards has taught courses at New College and has served on the state Select Committee on Community Colleges. He lists some of his endorsers as Peralta trustees Lynn Baranco, Amey Stone, Alona Clifton, Darryl Moore, and William Riley, as well as Albany school board member Peggy Thompson. 

Peterson is the chief financial aid officer at Lincoln University, as well as the designated school official for the Homeland Security program “In which we monitor and review all foreign students coming into the school.” He was an assistant to former Congressmember Ron Dellums, and ran unsuccessfully for Berkeley City Council District 3 in 2000. 

Among his goals, Peterson says he “would work to restore the lost California state funding. [I] shall encourage the governing board and staff to seek funding replacement through direct federal and private sector foundation sources.” Peterson also says he will “work to maintain equality among the diverse college campuses,” and says that he will “support successful on-time and within budget completion of Vista College.” 

Peterson is a former member of the Berkeley Zoning Adjustment Board. He includes former Berkeley Mayor Shirley Dean and California Assembly Speaker Pro Tempore Leland Yee among his endorsers. 

Yuen, who worked in 2001 as a congressional fellow to the late United States Senator Paul Wellstone, lists three major issues that need to be addressed by Peralta’s board: access, equity, and excellence. 

“By access, I mean that we need to work to ensure the ongoing availability of community college resources to students of modest means. [By equity], we have to make sure that there is a level playing field for people in our society. At Peralta, this means working to insure high success rates for students from groups not traditionally well served by society’s social and educational institutions. Excellence to me means making sure that the quality of education we provide to Peralta students is as good as or better than they can get at any other educational institution in California.” 

Yuen lists Congressmember Barbara Lee, local legislators Don Perata, Loni Hancock, and Wilma Chan, Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates, Berkeley Councilmembers Kriss Worthington, Margaret Breland, Linda Maio, Dona Spring, and Miriam Hawley, Peralta Trustees Darryl Moore [the outgoing incumbent] and Linda Handy, the Alameda County Central Labor Council, both the Green and Democratic parties of Alameda County, the Peralta Federation of Teachers, and the Wellstone, John George, and MGO Democratic clubs among his endorsements. 

Area 6 

With incumbent Susan Duncan retiring after 20 years as trustee, the Area 6 race pits psychologist and former Alameda County Director of Mental Health Outpatient Services Melanie Sweeney-Griffith against community college educator and Rockridge News editor Cyril (Cy) Gulassa. Area 6 includes the eastern portion (generally) of Berkeley, as well as a portion of flatlands North Oakland running up into the Montclair area of the Oakland hills. 

Gulassa has worked for 30 years as an English professor at DeAnza Community College, and was the president of the faculty collective bargaining unit for 15 years. He says that during his time on the bargaining unit, he “pioneered a concept called shared governance; it’s an opportunity for faculty, staff, and the community as well as all managers and make major decisions regarding allocations. That prevents the kind of collective bargaining games that normally prevail, where they hide the money and you ask for more than you know you want, they pretend to have less than they can give you, and then you go through this ugly game of fighting it out.” 

Gulassa says that Peralta’s colleges “need a trustee with classroom and governance experience, not political ambition. Bickering among trustees must be replaced by strategic planning, accountability, financial oversight, and open decision making that includes staff, students, and community.” He also lists ensuring that Vista College receives adequate funding is one of his highest priorities. 

Among other endorsements, Gulassa is backed by State Senator Don Perata, Oakland City Councilmembers Igancio De La Fuente, Jean Quan, and Nancy Nadel, Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates, Berkeley City Councilmembers Miriam Hawley, Linda Maio, and Betty Olds, Peralta trustees Linda Handy and Amey Stone, as well as by the Peralta Federation of Teachers, the Board of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges, the Alameda County Central labor Council, and SEIU Local 790. 

Sweeney-Griffith, a former Merritt College instructor and aide to then-state assemblymember Barbara Lee, says that “as a psychologist, I know the learning process does not begin and end in the classroom. Top-notch facilities, solid funding, appropriate curriculum, legislative action, and strong oversight fuel it.” She says she will bring “15 years of experience in these areas, including leadership skills, policy development, and multimillion-dollar budget management. I will work to ensure that my leadership is student centered, visionary, and inclusive of all partners of Peralta—community, students, faculty, and employees.” 

She says that one of her goals is “to be an innovative visionary for Peralta’s growth through creative land use and fostering collaborations with other educational institutions and the community.” 

Among her endorsements, Sweeney-Griffith lists Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson, County Board of Education members Gay Cobb and Dennis Chaconas, Peralta Trustees Lynn Baranco, Alona Clifton, Susan Duncan [Area 6’s outgoing incumbent], and William Riley, Berkeley City Councilmembers Margaret Breland, Maudelle Shirek, Donna Spring, Kriss, Worthington, and Gordon Wozniak, the Alameda County Democratic Party, the National Women’s Political Caucus, and the Black Women Organized For Political Action.ô

An unexpected increase in Berkeley High School student attendance has caused the addition of 10 new classes at the school, the creation of the equivalent of two new full-time teaching positions, and the reshuffling of some student schedules. 

BHS officials say that school enrollment is currently “fluctuating around 2,900 students.” 

In an e-mail sent to BHS parents and supporters last week, Vice Principal Mark Wolfe said that while the school “recognize[d] that these schedule changes may create a temporary disruption, they will balance classes more equitably and reduce overall class size.” 

Students received the new schedules on Monday after school counselors and volunteers worked over the weekend to draw them up. School counselors said that the schedule reorganization went well with the students “since it relieved some of the complaints we were getting about overcrowded classes.” 

Although complete data was not available at press time, counselors Stephen Chang and Susan Werd said that the combination of new staff and schedule changes will result in smaller class sizes for at least some students. 

Chang said that the class reshuffling came “later in the school year than we’d like, but there’s no question that we needed it.” 

Both Chang and Werd attributed a good portion of the unexpected increase to what Chang called “a huge extra bump in incoming freshmen.” 

Freshman counselor Werd said that more than 120 freshmen have registered at Berkeley High since the beginning of the new school year earlier this month, an increase which she called “significantly more than last year.” 

Although she did not have figures on freshman enrollment coming in after the beginning of the last school year, she said that she typically holds two orientations for such students, while this year she has already held four.ß

When heavy construction equipment moved in to the meadow on Aug. 18, a lot of Berkeley residents were angered at the sudden closure of the 72-acre site between the I-80 frontage road and the Berkeley Marina. 

Environmentalists and park officials acknowledged that they could’ve done a better job alerting the public to what was to come, but insist that the final result will be something worth cherishing. 

Arthur Feinstein, director of conservation and education for the Golden Gate Audubon Society, called the project “a wonderful opportunity for the restoration of coastal scrub habitat.” 

Addressing critics, Feinstein asked, “Do we sacrifice that wonderful opportunity to create an educational experience for our children to see what coastal habitat once was? Here’s a chance where we’re actually trying to improve the world,” he said. 

Critics aren’t so sure, arguing that the land should’ve been left untouched as a natural habitat that evolved in harmony with the ecology of today, not an ecology of an imaginary past on land that didn’t exist until trucks started dumping in trash and other landfill into the waters of San Francisco Bay. 

“I’m pretty mad,” said Curt Manning, a West Berkeley activist who has harshly criticized the project. “They’re killing all the animals. It’s a piss-poor way of starting the development of the Eastshore State Park.” 

“Creation wasn’t good enough for all these people. They think they can improve on it,” said Maris Arnold, another critic. “The native plant people have no credibility in my mind. Besides, so many of us here are transplants.” 

Under the Eastshore Park General Plan adopted two years ago, the meadow—a 72-acre bloc of landfill between the I-80 frontage road and the Berkeley Marina—will be transformed into a re-creation of the seasonal wetland and upland ecology typical of the Bay Area before Europeans first appeared on the scene. 

Directors of the East Bay Regional Parks District gave formal approval to the meadow restoration last April 6 during a meeting in which directors also voted to accept $365,335 from Cherokee Simeon Ventures. 

Cherokee Simeon is a partnership between a Marin County developer and Cherokee Investment Partners, a Colorado firm which specializes in cleaning up and developing “brownfield”—contaminated—property. 

While the partnership is developing Campus Bay, a controversial Richmond waterfront housing development on a toxic waste site, their involvement in the meadow stems from their Metroport project in Oakland. 

Because the developer is filling in a 2.4-acre Oakland wetland site, state law requires them to fund an effort to reclaim another wetland site. 

The work now underway at the meadow is the first of three planned phases, and involves 16.5 acres of the site. Cherokee Simeon funds go toward creating 3.25 acres of new seasonal wetlands and enhancement of 2.5 acres of the existing site. The other 10.75 acres will be coastal prairie recreated with native plants and existing native scrub brush. 

The partnership will design, construct and monitor the improvements for up to five years. 

Les Rowntree, a long-term Berkeley resident and Professor of Environmental Studies at San Jose State, said the Meadows project will likely need more monitoring than that. 

“We still don't know how long it takes to create a sustainable wetland, since we’ve only been restoring wetlands in San Francisco Bay since 1970,” he said. “Five years does not seem long enough—that’s a mere snapshot in what should be an ongoing process. They monitor it for five years, and think it's successful, but it might not be.” 

Rowntree also questioned the environmental value of the project, saying, “They’re just looking for a convenient place to do a trade-off on the no-net-loss agenda of the Bay Control and Development Commission.” 

When fully complete, the project will be permanently fenced, and four entrances will lead to two roughly perpendicular paths that bisect the meadow. Dogs won’t be allowed inside the paths to prevent disturbances to the wildlife. 

“What is out there did not exist in 1985,” said Norman La Force, legal chair of the San Francisco chapter of the Sierra Club. “In October of that year Santa Fe bulldozed the entire meadow clean. They scraped it. In the intervening years, all this has come back.” 

The railroad, once the major shoreline landowner, had dropped out of the picture in the intervening years and the meadow was acquired by the Eastshore State Park, which now owns 2,262 acres along the waterfronts of Oakland, Emeryville, Berkeley, Albany and Richmond. 

Under the plan adopted by park directors, over half of the site will remain as upland habitat for the protection of harriers and kites, two species of raptors who nest in the meadow. 

Once the land is scraped and replaced with clean soil, site developers will reintroduce native species and exclude “a lot of exotic plant species that are not necessarily healthy for wildlife,” La Force said. 

The Sierra Club activist acknowledges that the park district made one tactical error leading up to the restoration project by not posting explanatory signs before work commenced. That error has been belatedly rectified, and signs and an explanatory information sheet are now posted on the temporary fencing surrounding the site. 

One of the main challenges will be keeping out exotic plant species, the varieties imported intentionally or inadvertently by European colonizers.  

“It’s going to take a lot of effort,” Feinstein said. “But in Berkeley we expect plenty of volunteers to help us, so when the time comes, come on down and weed.” 

Manning scoffed at the notion. “The possibility of going around and getting rid of the foxtails and all the invasive species is like trying to wipe out the opposition in Iraq. Clean all that ground and the first thing to come in will be weeds.” 

“Basically, there’s going to be a lot of grubbing and removing of exotic vegetation,” said Larry Tong, Interagency Planning Manager for the East Bay Regional Park District. 

“The existing willows and other species are being protected by snow fences, and we’ll be finished with the initial 17-acre phase within two months,” Tong said. 

Construction is being scheduled around the nesting seasons of the harriers and kites, Tong said. 

Tong said that the park district, working with the California Parks Department and the California Coastal Conservancy, conducted a two-year series of public hearings, with 24 meetings and thousands of participants before the final plan was adopted two years ago. 

Berkeley City Councilmember Betty Olds, a project proponent, said Tong had explored all the issues with various environmental groups, who had signed off on the project.

Controversy over the high density Campus Bay waterfront residential development on a toxic waste site in Richmond continues to mount as eager-to-build developers are pitted against anxious residents. 

The next round in the controversy begins at 9 this morning (Tuesday, Sept. 28) when the Regional Water Quality Control Board and developer Cherokee-Simeon Ventures present a briefing on the proposed restoration of Stege Marsh along the shoreline. 

The meeting will be held on the Campus Bay site in the two-story building with greenhouses near the Bayview exit off I-580. 

Employees who work near the site have expressed concerns that digging up the marsh and pouring the excavated soil on top of already capped toxic wastes on the site would pose a threat to their health. 

Berkeley attorney Peter Weiner, a partner in the San Francisco office of powerhouse firm Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker, has been representing concerned residents on a pro bono basis. 

“He really should get a citizen of the year for all the work he’s done for us,” said Sherry Padgett, who works near the site and has been one of the key opposition leaders. 

Weiner fired off an e-mail last week to Curtis T. Scott, chief of the Regional Water Quality Control Board’s Groundwater Protection & Waste Containment Division, challenging both the meeting and the water board’s handling of the project. 

“We are deeply and grievously concerned that you are preparing a workplan approval letter without further consultation with the community, given all the concerns that have been raised,” Weiner wrote. 

The attorney also challenged the basis of the meeting, noting that it had “not been noticed to the public at large,” nor was it being held in a neutral location or at a time when working residents could attend. 

While the state Department of Toxic Substances Control had raised serious questions about the site’s fitness for a high-density residential complex, the water board has taken the role of lead agency in the project—a matter that concerns Padgett and other critics of the project. 

—

Richmond City Council members are scheduled to decide the fate of the Point Molate Casino proposal when they meet Tuesday night, Sept. 28, in their chambers at the Marina City Hall, 1401 Marina Way South. 

Councilmembers already signaled their intention to sign the agreement with Upstream Molate LLC, the creation of Berkeley developer James D. Levine, during a unanimous Aug. 31 vote. 

Final action was blocked by a civil injunction filed by ChevronTexaco, owners of the massive refinery just over the hill from the site of the major casino resort, shopping center and hotel complex planned by Upstream and Harrah’s Entertainment, the world’s largest casino company. 

That injunction was overturned last week by a Contra Costa County Superior Court judge, paving the way for a final decision by the council. 

Upstream’s exclusive right to negotiate ended at midnight Monday, leaving the council free, in theory, to sign a deal with another entity. 

In an e-mail sent to his constituents Monday afternoon, Richmond City Councilmember Tom Butt said he expects ChevronTexaco officials to make a more substantial offer for the property than a $34 million offering made on Aug. 13. 

Calls to Dean O’Hair, the oil firm’s Richmond spokesperson, weren’t returned.  

—

Members of the University of California community gathered at midday last week at the spreading lawn below California Hall to remember and mourn the loss of friends and colleagues during the past year. 

The Sept. 21 event was the third annual Campus Memo rial Service, a campus tradition initiated during the tenure of retiring Chancellor Robert Berdahl, who introduced the occasion with quiet grace and dignity.  

Noting it was his last day and last public event in office Berdahl, a consistent advocate of r einforcing a sense of campus community, said “I can think of no more fitting manner to close my tenure as chancellor.” 

The audience, spilled back into the trees, formed a contemplative nucleus at the center of the University, as hundreds of students stre amed past on adjacent pathways, headed to and from class.  

“I believe we become a stronger community by remembering how much these colleagues and friends have meant to us and to the life of this University,” Berdahl said. “Each one was loved by someone here who mourns their passing.” 

A speaker’s podium, flanked by blue and gold wreaths, stood in front of the campus flagpole, while an adjacent pedestal bore the names of nearly 80 faculty and staff—including retirees—and students of the Berkeley campus known to have died in the past year.  

Next to the pedestal, a cone of incense, placed in memory of Robert Black from Native American Studies, sent a faint wisp of smoke into the bright mid-day sun. 

The memorial roll included several faculty members wi th international fame: Berkeley’s first chancellor, Clark Kerr, once the most influential figure in American higher education; Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, as well as fellow poet Thom Gunn; engineer T.Y. Lin.  

A late addition to the list was legen dary Cal water polo coach Pete Cutino, who died just days before the memorial.  

“To mark the passing of these giants does not diminish the service of the others,” Berdahl said, taking special note of deceased staff members.  

The list included staff me mbers who had faithfully worked at Cal in non-teaching jobs as police officers, librarians, office assistants, administrators, “the fellow who ran Cal’s lost and found,” Berdahl said.  

Berdahl shared a message from Professor Daniel McFadden who said “his Nobel Prize would not have happened” without the work and support of Grace Katagiri, a member of the Economics staff since the early 1970s.  

Earlier this year, when she knew she was dying, Katagiri wrote to her work colleagues. “It has been a privilege and a pleasure to have been associated with the Economics Department…I ask that everyone do their best to keep things going as if nothing is wrong.” 

“So many of you have done just that,” Berdahl said to the audience of family members and faculty, staff, students, alumni. “This is what a community is.” 

After a moment of silence, three readers came to the podium in succession to recite names. Professor Robert Knapp read those of faculty and other academic personnel, while Margo Wesley, Director of the S taff Ombuds Office, recited the list of non-academic employees.  

Misha Leybovich, President of the Associated Students, read the briefest of the three lists, the names of students who had died. 

“Though I’m very grateful that my participation in this is relatively short, I wish I didn’t have to say anything at all,” Leybovich quietly added.  

Professor of English and former United States Poet Laureate Robert Hass talked about his friend, Nobelist Czeslaw Milosz, who died in August, and recited a Milosz poem, “And the Books.”  

“I had visions of him in the 1960s freshly arrived in Berkeley after his exile” from Poland, Haas said, picturing Milosz walking down the steps of Doe Library after each foray into the literature collections. 

Three Berkeley chan cellors attended the service: Berdahl; his successor Robert Birgeneau; and their 1980s predecessor, Ira Michael Heyman, who is also the former secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. He, like Birgeneau, sat quietly in the audience.  

One of the names o n the list of the deceased was Therese Thau Heyman, the former chancellor’s wife, who had her own distinguished career as a curator at the Oakland Museum of California. 

The names of faculty from Chancellor Berdahl’s home department, history, were notably present on the list, including William Bouwsma, Gunther Barth, and Thomas Smith, in addition to Reginald Zelnik who died in an on-campus accident earlier this year. 

At the end of the ceremony P.J. MacAlpine, a 2003 Cal alumnus, sang a soaring “Come Sund ay” by Duke Ellington. Musician Jeff Campbell closed the ceremony as it had begun, with a solo performance on the bagpipes.  

As the strains of “Amazing Grace” rang out, a small covey of white pigeons was released, rose into the bright blue sky, and ra pidly circled several times over the crowd before disappearing into the distance. 

For a complete list of those memorialized this year and in recent years, visit death-response.chance.berkeley.edu 

Lorie Harnden, whose daughter is a first grader at Fairmount Elementary School, is just one of several anxious El Cerrito parents awaiting the arrival of a service signed into law Friday by Gov. Schwarzenegger that allows the Department of Justice to post information about registered sex offenders on line. 

Harnden and other Fairmount parents are well aware of the law because two weeks ago they learned that a school neighbor, Paul Alfred Jagoda, 57, was arrested in a Sacramento hotel by the Department of Justice on charges of attempted child molestation. 

The legislation that created the law, AB 488, was introduced by Rep. Nicole Parra, D-Hanford, and endorsed by the California Attorney General. It will update and expand services provided under a provision called Megan’s Law, which has made sex offenders’ information public since 1996. The law is named after 7-year-old Megan Kanka, a New Jersey girl who was raped and killed by a neighbor with a sex offense record that was unknown to Megan’s parents. 

Until now the information could only be accessed through a Megan’s Law database maintained at law enforcement agencies that serve populations of over 200,000. The new law will make the database of sex offenders available over the Internet. 

Not only should sex offender’s information be listed online, said Harnden, they should also “have to wear a hat that says ‘I’m a sex offender.’” 

According to the attorney general’s website, the new online system will have detailed physical descriptions along with a home address and picture if available, for the most serious offenders, including sexual predators and those classified as “high risk,” and “serious.” The service must be running on or before July 1, 2005. 

A serious sex crime offender is defined by the attorney general as someone convicted of committing a lewd act upon a child under 14 or some one who committed a sex crime that includes elements of force or fear. Examples of serious crimes include rape, child molestation, sodomy with a minor or by force, oral copulation with a child or dependent adult, and abduction of a child for purposes of prostitution. 

High risk sex offenders are defined as “serious sex offenders who have been convicted of at least one violent sex offense and a combination of other offenses.” 

In El Cerrito there are 13 serious but no high risk offenders whose information will be available. Their crimes range from rape, to lewd or lascivious acts with a child under 14, to continual abuse of a child, according to information the Daily Planet found on the Megan’s law database at the Alameda county sheriff’s department. 

“I never though about looking [sex offenders] up [on a Megan’s law database] because to get up and go to a police station, I don’t have that time,” said Lashelle Jones, who has one daughter at Fairmount. “But if it was on the Internet I could do it at work.” 

Angelique Shaw, 15, whose two younger sisters go to Fairmount, is a student at El Cerrito High. She said she is going to use the service and encourage her friends to do the same because they are constantly approached by older men. 

“High school girls are gullible, they want to meet older guys because they think it will make them cooler. If you run into a desperate girl and she needs a boyfriend, she’ll talk to anyone,” she said. 

According to information released by the attorney general, over 85,000 of the state’s 101,589 registered sex offenders are classified as high risk or serious. The remaining 16,307 registrants, classified as “other,” will still have their information published on the website but their zip code will be released instead of their home address. 

El Cerrito Detective William K. Zink said he doesn’t see the need for El Cerrito’s sex crime offenders to have their information listed on the Internet. He said that accessing the Megan’s Law database at the sheriff’s office was enough public disclosure. 

Zink, who is in charge of registering the sex crimes offenders every year by state law said he hasn’t had a problem keeping track of them. Four of the city’s 13 serious offenders are in violation because they failed to re-register, but he said that’s because they fled the country and have not come back. 

“I don’t think publishing their address is going to accomplish much, other than to create some hysteria,” said Zink. 

The decision by the governor brings California into line with more than 30 other states that already post varying amounts of information about their sex offenders on-line. Like the laws in those states, AB 488 has been opposed by groups who say posting information on the Internet is a violation of the offender’s due process and privacy rights. 

Francisco Lobaco, the director of the legislative office of the ACLU in Sacramento, said the law violates due process rights because the state should have to establish that the defendant will continue to be a risk before they posts the defendant’s information. 

“There is no wash out clause in the legislation,” he said, for those who committed one crime years ago and are “otherwise leading a law abiding life.” 

For parents like Jones, however, intrusion on someone’s privacy is not her main concern. 

“If [a molester] has done their time, you want to give them a second chance,” she said. “But what if they go and re-offend, that’s not like robbing a store. You can’t return a child’s childhood 

n

ELECTION 2004 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thank you, Daily Planet, for your Sept. 21 editorial (“Whine After the Election, Not Now”), and also for J. Douglas Allen-Taylor’s Aug. 20 piece (“Let Kerry Be Vague Until the Election is Over”). This is the stuff progressives need to hear, and readers who missed either one should look them up on your website. We might easily hand this race to Bush by talking ourselves into impotent despair, and the opposition will cheer us on as we do it. 

I’ll join in gleefully and chew John Kerry to ribbons as soon as he’s president-elect, but until Nov. 3, please, let’s focus on the job at hand. If you can’t bring yourself to take part in the campaign, there’s voter registration and poll-watching (electionprotection.org). At least do nothing now that hinders the effort to get rid of that man.  

If I may wander from the deadly serious to the seriously ridiculous, does anyone but me remember the neon sign by the Bay Bridge approach where, throughout my childhood, a can poured red paint over the globe thousands of times, illustrating the slogan “Cover the Earth?” The proposed Brower monument is similarly absurd, but probably not as appealing to children as that sign was. Unless kids are allowed to climb on it, but even then it would be ludicrously at odds with the environmentalist ideal: “Take only pictures; leave only footprints.”  

Instead, if we’re making a better wildlife habitat of the Berkeley Meadow, couldn’t that be dedicated to Dave Brower? 

Daryl Ann Sieck 

• 

NOTICES OF DECISION 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

Decisions of the Zoning Adjustments Board can be appealed only for 14 days after the Planning Department has posted the relevant notice of decision (NOD) on a particular project’s application for a use permit.  

So it’s troubling that, at a time when the department no longer mails out notices to interested parties, it’s also stopped posting NODs on its website. The website has a menu that includes “Notices of Decision,” but when you click on those words, no such notices can be found.  

Or so it seemed to me for a month or two this summer. Wondering if I’d missed something, I called the Planning Department on Sept. 23 and asked if the NODs were being posted on the website after all. Turns out, they’re not. The reason given was that the website is being reconfigured. “You could call the office,” said the staff person.  

Yes, I could call the office—and actually, that day I already had called about a particular project. But why should I or any other citizen have to call—and, in all likelihood, call and call and call—when notices of decision could simply be posted on the website? All we’re talking about is a list of projects by address and the date of the NOD posting. That should be feasible even while the website is being revised.  

And while you’re at it, City of Berkeley zoning staff, could you please restore the names of project applicants—another important item (though not nearly as important as the notice of decision) that’s also disappeared from the Planning Department website?  

Zelda Bronstein  

• 

AESTHETIC MISFORTUNES 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

I recently revisited my childhood haunts in northern Minnesota, home of Paul Bunyan and his companion Babe the Blue Ox, a duo commemorated by numerous colossal statues. On my way home I followed a substantial portion of the Lewis and Clark trail, marked by the conventional 19th-century image: “explorer pointing with outstretched arm.” Imagine my surprise when I returned to Berkeley to be greeted by a marriage of the two in the form of the proposed David Brower sculpture: a colossal Brower with outstretched arm (exploreresque or from The Mummy? Hard to say), confidently (or is it precariously?) astride a huge blue globe. 

When I was 5 or 10 I gazed awestruck at the colossal incarnations of Mr. Bunyan, but my taste has matured since then. As for things carved out of stone, they range from tacky to sublime, so I withhold judgment on the big quartzite ball. More dubious is attaching bronze to rocks, but I’m willing to give that a chance. But the sleepwalking figure? Surely you jest. If the drawings are accurate, it is a clumsy aesthetic afterthought, laughably trite as both literalism and symbolism. I ask you, does Berkeley really need this “Bunyan on a Beach Ball”? 

Like so many of the recent aesthetic misfortunes that are coming to define the public space and public face of Berkeley, is this going to be yet another insider/autocratic decision made against the public will? If so, then—as usual—hundreds of hours of citizen labor will probably be spent trying to stop another ill-conceived stupidity. Or, if people are too tired to fight City Hall, Berkeley can, again, “act in haste, repent at leisure.” 

Sharon Hudson 

• 

BUSD PROJECTS 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

I am responding to the letter from Dean Olson (Daily Planet, Sept. 24-27) regarding the school construction that has taken place in the BUSD within the last decade. The incredible bond measures that Berkeley voters approved followed the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake that devastated many of our schools. When the work began, my son entered kindergarten at John Muir Elementary School, so I can answer to the quality of work that took place there. Thank goodness that we did not have to level John Muir, because it is one of the Berkeley Unified School District’s oldest—and, we felt, one of our most beautiful—schools. It was probably the wood structure that saved it from complete earthquake destruction like Cragmont and Thousand Oaks. The district put $1,945,590 into retrofitting to save this historical landmark and modernized the facilities, meanwhile adding much needed new classrooms. With work still ongoing, the total price tag will be $2,360,590. The John Muir community will tell you that it was worth it. 

Work started at LeConte Elementary a few years later, coinciding with my son beginning the fourth grade there. The work in progress or completed today at LeConte totals $3,818,108, with $693,000 in future projects scheduled. The cost of all of the work on Emerson has a total price tag of $2,955,848. The new buildings unveiled at Berkeley High School last year was $35,000,000 and if you had been at the open house in April, you would have seen the value. With the opening of the new Berkeley Adult School this year, the BUSD can proudly say that every one of Berkeley’s public schools are safer then ever before, and that Berkeley is the first city in California able to boast that our schools are 100 percent retrofitted. The BUSD will be opening up a new website in October, and one of the added pieces is a complete facility page for each school that outlines every stage of their construction: 

www.berkeleypublicschools.org. The current site (same address) already has good information about our schools, including photos of the Willard Middle School beautification project. 

Mark A. Coplan 

Public Information Officer, BUSD 

• 

A GLARING OMISSION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The principal of Willard wrote a nice, polite letter to the editor (“Principal’s Perspective on Willard Garden,” Daily Planet, Sept. 21-23). But she made one glaring omission. She did not invite the community to work with the school in partnership to repair the damage, and to complete the work. Once again, the school and school district’s attitude is that they and they alone get to make the decisions. It’s the theme of the school district these days. It reflects the way government, including the federal government operates. 

In the Measure B, which they are busy touting, they have removed all citizen input into decision making. They eliminated all elected school committees and the district Planning and Oversight Committee. The school district, and the school district alone, will make the decisions on how the increased taxes (if the Measure B passes), will be spent. 

I heartily voted for BSEP, twice, because of the citizen input and oversight. The school district has shown itself incapable of proper fiscal management. The school district has gone into bankruptcy, and fiscal deficit over and over. BSEP works because of its wonderful, democratically elected committees to provide input and oversight. Measure B has none of this. 

For this reason I urge you to vote NO on measure B. 

Jennifer Havens  

President, Seniors for Fair Taxation 

• 

STREET SHRINES 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

Mr. Allen-Taylor seems to think that it is OK for what amounts to unsightly trash to be left in front of someone’s residence that just happened to be the location of the latest tragic homicide (“Police Chief Oversteps Bounds in Banning Shrines,” Daily Planet, Sept. 24-27). I must disagree. These shrines of candles, balloons and yes liquor, drug paraphernalia and the like are unsightly and should not be tolerated for more than a couple of days if at all. Do you actually live in urban Oakland? If you were paying attention instead of driving through really fast in your Subaru, you’d notice the crazy behavior under the auspices of mourning such as impromptu sideshows, public drunkenness and conspiracy to commit more violence in retribution takes place at most of these shrines. Please spare me the condescending sociology lesson on mourning traditions in black culture. We are not talking about the African village or plantation, but a large cosmopolitan area with thousands of people per square mile. 

You are more than welcome to allow your front lawn host the many monuments to urban crime. As for me, I have instructed my loved ones that should the unthinkable ever happen to me (especially while visiting family on 93rd Avenue) to not allow a shrine in front of someone’s home. Remember me at the cemetery or local park or seashore and clean up after yourselves. 

Anthony Moore 

Oakland 

“I didn’t think that guy was queer, but now that I give it some thought, I guess I did think he acted a little funny, and yeah, it makes sense that he’s a homo.” 

I was on a week-long visit to New Jersey, sitting in my parents’ living room, watching the evening news. New Jersey Gov. McGreevey had just announced that he was gay, and that he was stepping down from office. Viewing the news with my parents is always rife with potential landmines. I know I should keep my mouth shut during broadcasts but I can’t help myself. 

“Daddy,” I said. “Don’t talk like that.” 

“What’s the matter?” asked Dad, sitting next to me on the couch. “You didn’t know he was a homo?”  

“I never thought about it,” I answered. “I’m too busy worrying about the politics of my adopted home state. You never know what Arnold is going to do next.” 

“Well,” said my father, “at least you’ve got a red-blooded American for a governor.” 

“Daddy!” I shouted. “Arnold Schwarzenegger is from Austria. Why do you think he talks so funny?” 

“You know what I mean,” said my father. “He holds up family values. He believes in America. He’s a flag waving, right-thinking Republican. Personally, I like the guy. Not as much as Reagan, of course. But at least he isn’t a homo.” 

Just then my mother came into the room. “Oh no,” she said, wringing her hands and plopping down on the couch beside me. “More about McGreevey on the news? I can’t stand it. Think of his poor wife and children.” 

“You know, Susan,” said my father, ignoring my mother and staring straight ahead at the screen, “It doesn’t really bother me that the guy is a homo. But what does bother me is that he’s a cheat. He gave that Israeli guy a job and the slob never went to work. Just collected a paycheck and wrote poetry. What a crock, and a crook.” 

“Yes, Daddy,” I said. “He shouldn’t have done that and for that reason, and that reason alone, he should resign. But not because he’s gay.” 

“What about family values?” asked my mother. “What about Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy?” 

“What do Clinton and Kennedy have to do with this?” I asked, but I knew what was coming. 

“Well, for one thing, they’re both Democrats,” said Dad. 

My mother looked at me. “You know that horrible Teddy Kennedy walks around in his underwear in Florida and takes young girls home from bars. And Bill Clinton, he’s the man who taught the youth of America about… about...” 

“About what?” I asked. 

“You know what…” said Mom by way of explanation. 

“No, what?” I asked. I knew exactly what she was getting at but I wanted her to say it out loud, just for once. 

“You know full well what your mother is referring to,” said Dad. 

“What?” I asked again.  

“You know,” said mom. 

“Sex,” said Dad. 

“Oral sex,” said Mom.  

“In the White House,” said Dad.  

“How disgusting,” said Mom. 

“With that woman,” added Dad. 

“And god knows who else,” said Mom. 

“I guess how you view what happened has to do with how you feel about oral sex,” I said to no one in particular. 

Both of my parents looked at me in alarm. It was getting uncomfortably warm sitting on the couch between them. 

“Susan,” said my father. 

“What?” I asked. 

“I want you to sit very still,” he said. 

“Yes?” 

“Sit very still and don’t say another word,” he said. 

“Don’t say another word?” I asked. 

“Yes,” said my father. “Don’t say another word for the rest of your visit.”›

The U.S. governmental system sets forth rights of all peoples under U.S. jurisdiction (described in previous columns in 11 sections), and duties of the U.S. Administration (starting in this column.) 

These duties are described in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights and Amendments, and are also part of the common law and the law of nations. The Administration uses the common law and law of nations in its reports on violations of law by other nations (see section 15 below). The U.S. has a commitment to enforce this law within the U.S. and in all of the actions of the U.S. government. 

The Government’s Duty To Count the Votes Accurately & Report to the People Honestly 

The most obvious duty of the federal government is to see that the votes in federal elections are counted honestly. This count permits the Electoral College to decide who won the power to run the administrative branch of the federal government, and the U.S. military.  

12. Congress and the People Challenge Administration Words and Actions 

The sharp questions about the Florida and other election results led to anger at the Administration in many communities, particularly African American and low income. The Congressional Black Caucus took the unprecedented step of asking the United Nations to send observers to monitor the 2004 election. (The U.N. only has the power to grant such requests when a national government makes the request.) 

Immediately after the allegations of lying about the election returns, the Administration made statements about weapons of mass destruction requiring U.S. invasion of Iraq. The U.S. Constitution article II is full of duties of the President to report to Congress and to the people. The U.N. Charter sets forth similar duties by the heads of state. 

Report 12.2 

Wilson Stated Administration Used Information Known To Be False: Joseph Wilson (Joseph C. Wilson, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” New York Times, July 6, 2003.) 

Report 12.3 

Investigation of Administration Leak of CIA Agent’s Identity: Valerie Plame (Terence Hunt, “Bush Consults Lawyer in CIA Leak Case,” Guardian, June 3, 2004.) 

Report 12.4 

9/11 Widow Files RICO Lawsuit Against Bush: Ellen Mariani (Ellen Mariani, “911 Victim Ellen Mariani Open Letter To The POTUS,” Scoop New Zealand News, Nov. 27, 2003.) 

Report 12.6 

Waxman Report Exposes Administration’s Misleading Statements: Henry Waxman (Committee On Government Reform —Minority Staff Special Investigations Division, “Iraq on the Record: The Bush Administration’s Public Statements on Iraq,” a.k.a “Waxman Report,” U.S. House of Representatives, March 16, 2004.) 

Report 12.7 

U.S. Office of Strategic Influence Proposed to Issue Lies (“The Office of Strategic Influence is Gone, But Are Its Programs Still In Place?” Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Nov. 2002.) 

The Government’s Duty To Obey the Constitution and Law of Nations 

The U.S. Constitution, Article I, Sec. 8, cl. 10, specifically gives Congress, not the President, the power “to define and punish ... Offenses against the Law of Nations,” thus recognizing that the U.S. is bound by this law. 22 former U.S. Ambassadors, four retired Generals, Admirals, and Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a statement against Bush's re-election on June 16, 2004, because his first term was such a “complete and terrible disaster.” 

13. Not To Send Military For Regime Change In Afghanistan Or Haiti 

As a member of the U.N., the U.S. is committed not to use “threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state,...” and to “settle ... international disputes by peaceful means,...” (U.N. Charter Arts. 2.4 and 2.3) 

Report 13.1 

U.S. May Have Directly Killed 3,400 Afghans, Indirectly Killed 20,000 (Jonathan Steele, “Forgotten Victims,” Guardian UK, May 20, 2002.) 

Report 13.2 

U.S. Bombing Killed Children in Afghanistan (“U.S. Bombing Kills Afghan Children,” BBCNews.com, December 7, 2003.) 

Report 13.3 

Bush Charged with Orchestrating Removal of President Aristide in Haiti (“Aristide: U.S. Forced me to Leave,” BBC News, March 2, 2004.) 

14. Not To Send Troops for Invasion of Iraq 

The U.S. Constitution does not mention going to “war against poverty” or “war against drugs” or “war against terrorism.” Bush did not ask Congress for a declaration of war against Iraq with clearly stated goals and a plan to return power to the Iraqi people after the U.S. invasion. 

Report 14.1 

U.S. Troops Open Fire, Kill Baghdad Protesters 

(Fred Abrahams, “As U.S. Kills Two Iraqi Demonstrators In Baghdad, Human Rights Watch Demands Full Investigation Of U.S. Killings In Falluja,” Democracy Now!, June 18, 2003.) 

Report 14.2  

After Iraq Invasion, U.S. Troops Killed Thousands of Civilians (Human Rights Watch, “Off Target: The Conduct of the War and Civilian Casualties in Iraq,” Dec. 2003.)  

Report 14.3 

Over 12,000 U.S. Casualties from Iraq Invasion (Mike Lee, “Casualty Ward: U.S. Medical Center Handles Thousands of Trauma Cases From Iraq War,” ABC News, Aug. 8, 2004.) 

Report 14.4 

U.S. Appointed Ex-CIA Operative Head of Iraq After He Allegedly Murdered Six: Iyad Allawi (Paul McGeough, “Allawi Shot Prisoners in Cold Blood: Witnesses,” Sydney Morning Herald, July 17, 2004.) 

15. Not To Support Abusive Regimes or Violations of World Court Opinions 

The U.S. Department of State is required to make a report to Congress and the people every year on the human rights record of every nation so that federal funds cannot be allocated to abusive governments without an express waiver request from the President agreed to by Congress (Human Rights and Security Assistance Act). Administration requests for military, and civilian, aid to Israel and Egypt totally ignore the human rights report by DOS. 

Report 15.1 

U.S. Government Provides Aid to Abusive Regimes in Violation of Federal Law (“Country Reports on Human Rights Practices—Sudan,” U.S. Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, Feb. 25, 2004.)  

Report 15.2 

U.S. Supports Israel’s Rejection of the World Court Opinion (Aluf Benn, “ICJ: West Bank Fence Is Illegal, Israel Must Tear It Down,” Haaretz, July 9, 2004.) 

Report 15.3 

U.S. Intervention in Colombia Poisons People and the Environment (Kristine Herwig, “The Environment, Plan Colombia, and U.S. Aid,” Macalester Environmental Review, Sept. 25, 2002.) 

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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Those of us who watched the GOP convention, or have recently had conversations with Republicans, have been struck by their emotional fervor, their passion for George Bush and their hatred for liberals. Who are these true believers? 

Pollster Stanley Gree nberg tells us that Republicans are 46 percent of all voters—matched by an equal percentage of Democrats. The GOP core is made up of two fervent constituencies: conservative Christians and economic conservatives. 

Roughly 26 percent of Republican voters a re white Evangelical Christians; that is, fundamentalist, Pentecostal, “born-again”, or Charismatic Christians. Concerned primarily about morality, these religious conservatives believe that America is deteriorating because Christian values are under atta ck and the secular media is fostering immoral, “alternative” lifestyles. They are the heart of the “guns, God, and gays” social conservative movement. 

George Bush plays to this audience by emphasizing his born-again religiosity, as indicated by his recen t acceptance speech: “Because a caring society will value its weakest members, we must make a place for the unborn child. Because religious charities provide a safety net of mercy and compassion, our government must never discriminate against them. Becaus e the union of a man and woman deserves an honored place in our society, I support the protection of marriage against activist judges.” 

Economic conservatives are another 17 percent of the GOP. They have a different set of concerns from religious conserv atives, primarily taxes and privilege. Bush’s acceptance speech had language specifically designed for them, “America must be the best place in the world to do business. To create jobs my plan will encourage investment and expansion by restraining federal spending, reducing regulation and making the tax relief permanent.” 

Added together, religious and economic conservatives constitute approximately one-quarter of the electorate. These Republicans have reached a strategic accommodation; they focus on what they have in common, rather than their differences. Both groups despise liberals. Religious conservatives blame liberals for the perceived decay in American values, for preventing America from being a Christian nation. Economic conservatives blame liberal s for taxes and “big” government. They decry a liberal “tax and spend” philosophy that has them paying exorbitant taxes; they see the solution as “tax relief” because, in Bush’s words, “the people know best how to spend their money.”  

While on an individ ual level most economic conservatives are libertarians, as a group they support the socially conservative agenda espoused by their sanctimonious brethren; for example, they are willing to support limitations on choice so long as evangelicals defend tax cu ts. Christian conservatives reciprocate by blindly supporting the economic conservative agenda even when it is in their economic interest to oppose it. The two groups have an ethically challenged, but politically effective relationship. 

Pollster Greenberg characterizes the remaining fifty-plus percent of Republicans as residents of the South and rural America, as well as blue-collar white men. What all these conservatives share is a grim perspective that sees the world as a jungle, one where evil forces constantly threaten the citizens of the United States; only by maintaining “fortress America” can our safety be ensured. Republicans argue that in these terrifying times the usual rules go by the board; what the nation needs is a strong leader who will do whatever it takes to defend us. They buy what UC Professor George Lakoff describes as the “strict father” model of leadership: The US needs a macho President; one who is resolute and willing to do anything to protect America. 

The Bush campaign relentles sly plays to this theme. They package George W. as a regular guy, who was called by God to become a tough, resolute leader. In his acceptance speech, the President played to this imagery: “This election will also determine how America responds to the continuing danger of terrorism—and you know where I stand…I wake up every morning thinking about how to better protect our country. I will never relent in defending America, whatever it takes.” He returned to his characterization of Kerry as a “flip-flopper” and noted: “In the last four years, you and I have come to know each other. Even when we don’t agree, at least you know what I believe and where I stand.” The core of Bush’s campaign is that he is resolute and Kerry is not; it is based on the argument tha t America cannot win the war on terrorism without a strong leader. 

The outcome of the election depends upon whether the general public will believe that Kerry is a strong leader who will make America safer. So far, the “swing” voters—those who register i ndependent as well as malleable Republicans and Democrats—have bought another stereotype; they see Bush as the strong leader who is winning the war on terror. That reality has finally lit a fire under Kerry the fighter. Stay tuned. 

Berkeley resident Bob Burnett is working on a book about the Christian right. 

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Editors, Daily Planet:  

A renaissance of interest in condominium development (”Developers, City Push Conversion to Condos,” Daily Planet, Sept. 21-23) should raise a few red flags amongst Berkeley’s affordable housing advocates. Frankly, condominiums are not the panacea for either Berkeley’s shortage of affordable housing, nor for Berkeley’s current (or is it permanent?) fiscal crisis. Condominium development does provide developers with quick profits far in excess of those obtainable through rental housing. Condominiums do nothing to increase the availability of affordable rental housing in our community. At the suggested sale price range for “affordable” units, virtually none of Berkeley’s low-income families could afford to buy into the so-called American dream, notwithstanding the formulae of “affordability” described—which clearly does not deal realistically with the low-income sector. Many of the claimed benefits of condominium development need seriously deeper investigation as the feel-good sloganeering in support of condos may be nothing more than air. One in particular—that condo ownership is good because “people who invest in their homes have a long-term interest in the community” is a cliché which strongly suggests that those who don’t “own” don’t have a long-term interest in Berkeley. This is simply poppycock. Many thousands of long-term Berkeley residents who have a serious commitment to this community have been renters for many years—and this due to the existence of Berkeley’s rent stabilization ordinance. Rent stabilization has provided a source of stabilization for our community. A long-term commitment to the community comes from many different sources, not simply from ownership of land. Current condominium ownership and residency should also be surveyed—nothing in the article provides the percentage of current condos which are actually owner-occupied, and particularly the percentage of owner-occupancy in those condos constructed since 1981. Other issues related to the claimed tax-benefits to the city should also be evaluated. But more significantly, condominium development must be reviewed in the context of a housing master plan, including the housing element requirements under state law.  

r f

Editors, Daily Planet:  

For some time now we have been sadly disappointed in Berkeley School Board incumbents John Selawsky and Joaquin Rivera. They have lacked leadership on issues of urgent concern to the Latino and African American Communities as well as to a vast number of mainstream students who are disengaged from their education, particularly at Berkeley High.  

About two years ago, Latinos Unidos brought together a broad coalition of diverse parents and community leaders who share a deep frustration with the district. “United In Action” was formed and out of that partnership came an articulation of common priorities that unified us in the need to change the makeup of the School Board.  

On Nov. 2, we have an opportunity to elect two new school board members with experience and skills that directly match these priorities, Kalima Rose and Karen Hemphill. 

What are the priorities?:  

A strong and mobilizing vision of innovative and effective education. 

Full collaboration with all segments of the community. 

Excellence, equity & achievement for all students. 

Teachers, staff & School Board Directors that reflect the diversity of 

students.  

Financial expertise that will generate new resources. 

A board that clearly leads rather than follows the Superintendent. 

A board that brings a sense of urgency to all of the above. 

Unfortunately, it has come to our attention that many progressive and mainstream democratic leaders are endorsing, somewhat out of habit and prematurely, Selawsky and Rivera. They are endorsing them prior to a full consideration of the merits of the new candidates, an assessment of the incumbents’ real track record, and their responsiveness to the Latino & African American community. Some are endorsing Karen Hemphill, who is African American, and Joaquin Rivera under the noble and legitimate belief that the board needs Black and Brown representation.  

Many people in the community assume that Joaquin Rivera would be the choice of Latinos because of his Latin surname. As you can see by the signers of this letter, Rivera does not have the support of the Latino leaders who are directly involved with the community. We appreciate the community’s commitment to diversity on the board, however we urge you to look beyond the name and examine past performance, and the current state of the schools. Rivera has served for eight years. It has been over 40 years since anyone has even run for the school board for a third term, let alone served on the board for a third term. It is time to move on.  

Both Joaquin Rivera and John Selawsky, have let us down on many fronts—their lack of outreach and collaboration being one of them. Nor have they prioritized with any urgency the innovative and effective solutions that are needed to reshape the schools for the success of all students in Berkeley. 

Latinos Unidos is clear that this is not a personal issue. Selawsky and Rivera are both hard working and good people. We appreciate their dedication to the district, as we appreciate all those who make the sacrifice to serve, particularly during difficult times. This is not an easy decision for many of us who have and will continue to work with them on other endeavors. But it is time to move on and elect board members who will have a close connection with the full spectrum of diversity that makes up the BUSD. John and Joaquin have had their chance, and we will honor their service in ways that do not include re-election.  

Half of what they have done is good. However, we do not want 50 percent effective Board Directors in whom we have lost all confidence. We want 100 percent effective board members who are fully collaborative with all segments of the community, and who can move Berkeley to the forefront of much neglected educational change. Such effectiveness includes giving the Superintendent the enlightened direction from the community and School Board that she needs, a role that has been largely abdicated by the incumbents.  

Let us remind ourselves that this is Berkeley, and that we should always march to a higher standard. The fate of our children is at stake. Our patience is worn and our resolve is hardened, and it is time to move forward with fresh approaches and new leadership. We are convinced that Karen Hemphill and Kalima Rose are the best choice this time around. And we highly endorse their campaign and urge the community of Berkeley parents and voters to vote for them on Nov. 2. Please see their web sites for more detailed information as well as a list of upcoming school board candidate forums where you can meet them.  

Fr. George Crespin Santiago Casal 

Beatriz Leyva Cutler Fr. Rigoberto  

Caloca-Rivas 

Lupe Gallegos-Diaz Liz Fuentes 

Federico Chavez Angela Gallegos Castillo  

Carlos Muñoz  

Latinos Unidos is a forum largely for Latino professionals who represent various constituencies in Berkeley. Though it has concerns with health, housing and labor, the primary focus has been on education. Latinos Unidos includes representatives from Mentoring for Academic Success/Multicultural Institute; Berkeley Organizing for Congregational Action; Chicano/Latinos for Academic Success; St. Joseph the Worker Church; Vista Community College; Multicultural Academic Student Development—UC Berkeley; Bay Area Hispanic Institute for Advancement/Centro Vida; the Cesar Chavez Memorial Solar Calendar and Education Project, and an assort of individuals (teachers, city and school district workers, judicial, labor, etc.) ?

LIMA, Peru—“Vamos! Do you have that heart rate at 80 percent?” 

I’m pedaling like mad in a spinning class at Planet Fitness in the lower middle-class neighborhood of San Miguel—one of the myriad nodes of globalization mushrooming throughout the Andean nation of Peru. The internationally certified Peruvian instructor is playing salsa, but her commands of first, second, and third positions would be understood by any spinner anywhere on the globe.  

Just a few years ago, globalization came to middle and upper class Peruvians in the form of Blockbusters and Burger Kings set up in well-off neighborhoods like Miraflores and Monterrico. Gringo-style, shrine-like shopping malls such as Jockey Plaza rose alongside Lima’s prestigious horse-race track.  

But spinning classes like the one in San Miguel, as part of fully equipped fitness centers, have sprouted in lower middle-class barrios as well as in low-income shantytowns called pueblos jovenes (young towns), where wages are commonly just $2 a day. Global chains such as Gold’s Gym opened up equal sweat opportunities to thousands of Peruvians for whom, until very recently, fully equipped gyms were as inaccessible as country club memberships.  

One of these gleaming gyms sits astride the new and aptly named Mega Plaza shopping center in Comas, a low-income sector in northern Lima. As I stand at the plaza’s entrance I find it hard to believe that this used to be a car-grease, mud-caked and garbage-strewn side of the road off the Pan-American highway cutting through a highly densely populated metropolis of Peru’s working poor.  

Today the Mega Plaza is flanked by Toddus, a “hyper market,” and Max, a discount department store. The food and fashion displays at both stores are picture-perfect images of bounty and beauty. In combination with the cacophony of price-scanner beeps at the checkout counters, memories of quaint and dirty Third World open-air markets fade.  

Nestled between Toddus and Max are more than 100 boutique stores with the latest genuine or knockoff shoes, jeans and other apparel. Shoppers can catch Spider Man 2 at the cineplex and chow down at the English-named “Food Court,” complete with KFC and Dunkin Donuts. There’s even what had been until recently an oxymoron—fast-food Peruvian—at Peruanissimo.  

In this globalized, homogenized village, Dad can watch the kids at a 10,000-square-foot mini amusement center while Mom gets a plastic surgery quote at one of three storefronts enticing customers to “Finally make that change that will change your life.”  

So how do the poor afford the Mega Plaza experience? For one, the informal economy, so well documented by Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, has created a new entrepreneurial class among the low-income “chichas,” Andean Indians who have migrated to the city.  

Their businesses have generated high revenue, which they have invested back in these densely populated communities that had been ignored by mainstream capitalists. They have established private schools and clinics where people used to suffer decrepit state schools and hospitals. The other big service business is gyms. Also for the chichas, the deep-seated Andean value of ayllu, or community, means they pool their resources to buy in bulk.  

But credit-card seduction also contributes. An economic culture that used to be hand-to-mouth, with all transactions paid in cash, is quickly becoming an indebted society. Multinationals have discovered Latin America’s emerging market: 250 million low-income consumers, who, due to their sheer numbers (50 to 60 percent of the region’s population), have an annual purchasing power of $120 billion.  

Poor Peruvians are deluged by an unprecedented wave of tens of thousands of credit card offers with which to fuel the purchasing of middle class dreams. The advertised interest rate is 2 to 5 percent, but because it’s compounded monthly, the actual annual rate is a stunning 27 to 80 percent.  

Now, as poor Peruvians dress in the latest fashions, use sophisticated deodorants and perfumes and watch the latest flicks, they too are getting sucked into compound debt like American consumers.  

Yet, in the midst of this restless globalization, the ancient Peruvian Catholic soul still peeks through the Nike swoosh.  

In Arequipa, high up in the Andes, where the consumerist dynamic too is manifest through shopping malls and easy credit, there still beats a deeply felt fervor for the Virgen del Carmen and the Twelve-Year-Old-Boy.  

Outside the Cathedral, anxious parishioners purchase “milagros” (miracles)—two-inch high aluminum molds representing health for body parts such as hearts and lungs, or desires, such as for happy homes and relationships—to be pinned as petitions on the flowing manta (shawl) of the Virgen saint. When the manta is ceremoniously pulled off the Virgen and brought down to the supplicants, it is held up horizontally at the four corners. A dozen people at a time scurry underneath for a special blessing.  

Under the manta the murmur of prayers begins, “...forgive us our debts....”

“An apocalypse can be a funny thing.” 

It seems appropriate that, after long peregrinations of their own, the Shotgun Players are opening their first season at their new home, Ashby Stage (1901 Ashby Ave., across from Ashby BART), with Dog Act, Liz Duffy Adams’ play about wandering vaudevillean survivors of an apocalypse who’re just trying to make it to China for a gig.  

Dog Act, inspired by “a vision of a small group of people toiling across...bleak wintry marshes...carrying...something” (glimpsed from an Amtrak train, New York City to Boston, 1998), features a strange band of travelers on “a quest to survive in a world turned inside-out.” All the characters (played by Shotgun members Beth Donohue and Dave Meyer, joined by Richard Bolster, Eric Burns, C. Dianne Manning and Rami Margron) play musical instruments that Stewart Port has fashioned from found objects.  

It’s an after-the-end-of-the-world, neovaudevillian tale of performer Rozetta Stone (Beth Donohue) and her companion, Dog (voluntarily demoted in species from young man—Richard Bolster), on the road to their next gig—if they can ever make it to China, and find it when they get there.  

On an appropriately bare stage, Rozetta’s cart (which unfolds into a stage, and is coveted by Vera Similitude—Dianne Manning) provides the focus, though it’s really the ensemble’s acting and the strange, rhythmic quality of the spoken text that carry the show...and singing: Rozetta and Dog sing to each other to communicate, and the cast sings new lyrics to old tunes, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” being one (with the forlorn cart as backdrop). 

Phrases like “an owl” become “nowl”—and the changed times are expressed in other ways: tribal loyaties, codes of the performers and profane scavengers, with constant testing of other survivors to measure their authenticity. The play’s deliberately slow in establishing character’s identities and relationships, and ends with a rehearsal of the show Rozetta hopes to take to China (from a ruined North America? it’s never really clear), a kind of Creation Myth, new and old—though not exactly a Miracle Play...  

Originally premiered at the 2002 Bay Area Playwrights’ Festival, Dog Act’s directed by Kent Nicholson, director of new works for TheatreWorks on the Peninsula—a prolific director, who directed Adams’ Wet at NYC’s Summer Play Festival (and filled in admirably for a sick cast member the night this reporter was in the house). 

It’s all part of Shotgun’s program to support and produce new plays and experimental work in the Bay Area. That commitment is made clear by what’s been going on at the Ashby Stage even before Shotgun’s homecoming on Wednesday: Their Theatre Lab was producing Susannah Martin’s work-in-progress, The Faith Project, midweek while Oakland-based Iranian company Darvag staged The Death of Yazdgerd weekends, with personnel familiar to Shotgun audiences wearing various hats in the show. 

This community spirit will continue, at a time when most urgently needed in the current California scene of slippery funding with theater space bartered out like trophy homes. The Eastenders, for instance, whose series A Century of Political Theater just finished at San Francisco’s Eureka Theater, will return to the East Bay this spring with original plays, one by founding Artistic Director Charles Polly, to be staged at the Ashby. 

The Shotgun Players have made many a gig themselves at a variety of venues since their founding in 1992, when Artistic Director Patrick Dooley and about a dozen others put on David Mamet’s Edmund in the basement of LaVal’s Northside pizzeria. They’ve covered plays from Sophocles and Euripides, through Shakespeare and Marlowe, to Chekhov, Brecht and Genet—as well as experimental pieces and originals, like last year’s hit, The Death of Meyerhold—on stages indoors and out, the old UC cinema to the Julia Morgan Theater, John Hinkel Park to San Francisco’s McLaren Park Amphitheatre. 

The Shotgun Players have always been ambitious; settling down isn’t likely to decrease their vigor. This is one gig on their own stage these heretofore-wandering players have not only made, but one they may be playing (with many different texts) for quite awhile. 

Writer, activist, and Oakland resident Evelyn C. White settles into a comfortable leather chair at a Piedmont Avenue café and talks about her ten year project, researching and penning the biography of author Alice Walker (Alice Walker: A Life; W.W. Norton; September 2004; 496 pages; $29.95). 

“I arrived in San Francisco about the same time the movie The Color Purple was released by Warner Brothers. It was January 1986 and the protests against the film were just winding up,” she said. “The Hollywood chapter of the NAACP was critical of the portrayal of blacks in the film. Alice Walker was the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and yet the movie version of her groundbreaking work was giving her the ‘biggest headache of her life.’” 

Despite the fact that Walker had requested that people of color work on the film, and even with the presence of many black actors (Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover, and Oprah), and even Quincy Jones’s musical accompaniment, the movie still met with opposition. 

“Blacks were protesting against a work of art by a woman who had grown up the daughter of sharecroppers in the Jim Crow South, broken color lines, and marched for civil rights,” White said. “The first picket line Alice Walker ever crossed was the one for her movie. Sometimes you just can’t win.” 

Walker, a Berkeley resident, has gone on to write a number of critically acclaimed books, champion black women writers (most notably Zora Neale Hurston), and has become one of the world’s leading spokespersons against genital mutilation. White has also written several critically acclaimed books (Chain Chain Change: For Black Women in Abusive Relationships and The Black Woman’s Health Book) and is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Women’s Studies Department at Mills College. 

Formerly a staff reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, White attended journalism school at Columbia University, the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and taught expository writing at Harvard. She is a crusader for women’s rights, particularly as it relates to women of color.  

Brought up in a working class family in Gary, Indiana, White attended all black elementary schools and was involved with Upward Bound. 

“Every summer I was sent to college preparatory programs at places like Phillips Exeter, Yale and Purdue,” she said. “I chose to go to a Catholic high school because it was small, but the nuns tried to put me in the secretarial track. I had to take typing and I became very fast at it. It’s because of the racism of the nuns that I developed a skill that I’ve been able to put to good use ever since.” 

White graduated with honors and in 1972 she entered Wellesley College with the goal of becoming a prison warden. 

“All the groovy people were going to prison: Martin Luther King, Angela Davis. I thought that’s where I should be too,” she said. “But by the time I took child psychology my sophomore year I knew I didn’t want to be a warden.” 

What did she want to major in? “Theater,” she said.  

After graduating from Wellesley in 1976, she headed to Denmark where she worked for a theatrical company. When she returned to the United States she enrolled in the Theater Studies Department at the University of Washington. But while in Seattle she began freelancing as a writer.  

“When I realized someone was going to pay me to write, I applied to Columbia’s School of Journalism, and after a stint with the Wall Street Journal, I took a reporting job with the San Francisco Chronicle,” she said. “I fell in love with the Bay Area, the weather, the diversity, the vibrations in the Castro, and with the lemon, orange and avocado trees. I’ve been here ever since.” 

In a writing career that has spanned over twenty years, what is she most proud of besides the Walker biography? 

“It’s a series of articles I did for the Chronicle: homophobia in the black church, teen pregnancy, and an investigative piece on black farmers in the Central Valley,” White said. “I’m very concerned about environmental issues pertaining to black people and the land. It’s painful for me to go to the Oakland Farmers’ Market and not see one black farmer. African Americans are descendants of an agricultural society dating back to the plains and valleys of Africa. We’ve lost that heritage and we need to reclaim it.” 

What’s next for White in terms of writing? “I’m going to open myself to the cosmic forces,” she says. “I’m inclined to sit on chairs just like this for awhile and rest. And then I’m going to take piano lessons.” 

Sponsored by the Berkeley Arts Festival and the Friends of the Library, Evelyn White will read from Alice Walker: A Life, and will be interviewed by KPFA’s Andrea Lewis, at the Berkeley Public Library (2090 Kittredge Street) on Friday, October 1 at 8 p.m. For more information call 510-981-6100 or connect to www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org.a

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, donations 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, ensembles from Berkeley Jazzschool 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 Hillside 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 

THURSDAY, SEPT. 30 

FILM 

Maurice Pialat: “Van Gough” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“The Fourth World and Folk Art” lecture by Nelson Graburn, professor of social cultural anthropology, UC Berkeley at noon at the Phoebe Hearst Museum, Bancroft at College. Admission $4. 643-7648. http://hearstmuseum.berkeley.edu 

Rex Weyler describes “Greenpeace” at 1 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Toinette Lippe describes “Caught in the Act: Reflections on Being, Knowing and Doing” at 7:30 p.m. at at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Word Beat Reading Series at 7 p.m. with featured readers Gypsy the Acid Drama Queen and Debra Grace Khattab, followed by an open mic, at Mediterraneum Caffe, 2475 Telegraph Ave., near Dwight Way. For information call 526-5985.  

PB Kerr introduces “Children of the Lamp,” especially for young readers, at 1:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. Reservations required, email events@codysbooks.com 

Bay Area Writing Project featuring teachers from Berkeley and Oakland who are also writers at 7:30 p.m. Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

Camille Cusumano, editor, introduces “France, A Love Story: Women Write About the French Experience” at 7:30 p.m. at Easy Going Travel Shop and Bookstore, 1385 Shattuck Ave at Rose, 843-3533. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

National Ballet of Canada at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $36-$68 available from 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Tap Roots and New Growth: Cultivating World Music with the Slackers, The Phenomenauts and Teenage Harlots at 7:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $5-$15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Austin Willacy, contemporary folk, Bread and Roses Community Night, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $15.50-$16.50. 548-1761. www.freight 

andsalvage.org 

The Uptones, Berkeley’s 8-piece ska band, at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Jazz Mine, string swing jazz quartet, at 6:30 p.m. at King Tsin Chinese Restaurant, 1699 Solano Ave. www.jazzmine.net 

The Weary Boys, J. Byrd Hosch Trio at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082.  

www.starryploughpub.com 

Gini Wilson, solo piano, at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Witches Brew at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

FRIDAY, OCT. 1 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

Berkeley Arts Festival Opening and celebration of National Arts Day at 5 p.m. at Berkeley Arts Festival Gallery, 2324 Shattuck Ave. Exhibition includes woodcuts by Berkeley High Students and teachers. www.berkeleyartsfestival.com 

“Search and Restore” with works by Clayton Bain, Carolyn Gareis, Vannie Keightley, Naomi Policoff and Dorothy Porter. Gallery hours are Mon.-Fri., 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sat. 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. 1652 Shattuck Ave. www.accigallery.com 

THEATER 

Aurora Theatre Company, “The Persians” 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 

National Theater of Greece, “Lysistrata” in Greek with English supertitles at 8 p.m. at the Clavin Simmons Theater, Oakland. Tickets are $35-$65. 866-468-3399. 

Oakland Opera Theater “Akhnaten” an opera by Philip Glass, Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. Sun. at 2 p.m. through Oct. 3 at Oakland Metro Theater, 201 Broadway, at 2nd St. Tickets are $18-$32, available on line at www.oaklandopera.org  

Shakespeare in the Yard, “Notes From William, III” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 4 p.m. at Sister Thea Memorial Theater, 920 Peralta St. West Oakland, through Oct. 17. Tickets are $5-$20. 208-5651. 

Shotgun Players “Dog Act” Thurs. - Sun. at 8 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. through Oct. 10. Free admission with pass the hat donation after the show. 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 

Woman’s Will, “Lord of the Flies” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 3 p.m., at Eighth Street Studios, 2525 Eighth St., through Oct. 24. Every performance followed by a discussion on democracy, violence cessation, and preservation of just societies. Free, donations encouraged. 420-0813. www.womanswill.org 

FILM 

The Films of Roy Anderson: “Songs from the Second Floor” at 7 p.m. and Commercials and Shorts at 9 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Evelyn C. White reads from the biography, “Alice Walker: A Life” at 8 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library’s Community Room, 2090 Kittredge at Shattuck. Sponsored by the Berkeley Arts Festival and the Friends of the Library. 981-6100. www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org 

7th International Juried Enamel Exhibition Slides and lecture with Katy Bergman Cassell at 7 p.m. at ACCI Gallery, 1652 Shattuck Ave. Gallery hours are Mon.-Fri. 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sat. 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. 843-2527. www.accigallery.com 

Aron Ralston describes his decision to amputate part of his right arm to save his life in “Between a Rock and a Hard Place’ at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books, 1730 Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com 

Francisco Goldman describes his new novel “The Divine Husband” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

National Ballet of Canada at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $36-$68 available from 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

“Mediavoid” by Shahrzad Dance Academy at 8 p.m. at the Crowden School, 1475 Rose St. Tickets are $12-$15. 215-2166. www.sdadance.org 

Marcel Dronkers, soprano, at 8 p.m. at Arlington Community Church, 52 Arlington Ave., Ken- 

sington. Tickets are $12-$15.  

Oakstock Concert with Country Joe McDonald and Shana Morrison at 7 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. in conjunction with the exhibit “California and the Vietnam Era” www.museum.ca.org 

Jon Langford Ship and Pilot at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $12. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Moodswing Orchestra at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Swing dance lesson with Nick and Shanna at 8 p.m. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Last Band Standing at 8 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $10. 849-2568. 

Dick Hindman Trio at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$18. 845-5373. www.jazz- 

school.com 

Jared Karol, singer-songwriter, at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

The Toasters, New Blood Revival, Monkey at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $10. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Hakim, music of the Middle East and Arab diaspora at 7 p.m. at the Scottish Rite Temple, 1547 Lakeside Drive, Oakland. Tickets are $65-$100. 415-218-1801. www.sheekimage.com 

Reilly & Maloney, contemporary folk duo, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Jackie Ryan Quartet at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Karrin Allyson at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $15-$18. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Natural Vibes, reggae, at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $10. 548-1159. www.shattuckdownlow.com 

Jason Webley, Dear Nora, Readyville, The Flying Marrows at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

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

SATURDAY, OCT. 2 

CHILDREN  

“Wild About Books” with Larry Kluger on cowboy roping and storytelling at 10:30 a.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6223. 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

Richmond Art Center Members’ Showcase Reception from 3 to 6 p.m. at 2540 Barrett Ave., Richmond. Slide lecture and artist talk with Tamara Scronce at 1:30 p.m. 620-6772. www.therichmondartcenter.org 

Emeryville Art Exhibition featuring works of 100 artists and craftspeople in Emeryville. Exhibition open daily from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at 5603 Bay St. 652-6122. www.EmeryArts.org 

THEATER 

Ruben C. Gonzales “The Mes- 

siah Complex: Rebelations of a Mad Mexican” at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $7-$10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org  

FILM 

The Films of Roy Anderson: “A Swedish Love Story” at 6:30 p.m. and “Giliap” at 8:50 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival with Robert Haas, Lawrence Ferlingheti, Pattiann Rogers, George Keithley, Lucille Lang Day, Marc Bamuthi Joseph and more from noon to 5 p.m. at Civic Center Park. 526-9105. www.poetryflash.org  

Sarah Stewart and David Small introduce their new picture book for young readers “The Friend” at 10:30 a.m. at Cody’s Books, 1730 Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

National Ballet of Canada at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $36-$68 available from 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

“Mediavoid” by Shahrzad Dance Academy at 8 p.m. at the Crowden School, 1475 Rose St. Tickets are $12-$15. 215-2166. www.sdadance.org 

The Whole Noyse, “From Shawm to Cornett” at 8 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Tickets are $10-$25. 528-1725. www.sfems.org 

Four Seasons Concerts with Tai Murray, violin at 7:30 p.m. at Calvin Simmons Theater. Tickets are $25-$35. 601-7919. www.fourseasonsconcerts.com 

New Millennium Strings performs Sibelius, Janacek, JS Bach, and Giuliani at 8 p.m. at Grace Lutheran Church, 15 Santa Fe Ave., El Cerrito. Suggested donation $10-$15. 528-4633. www.newmillenniumstrings.org 

Trinity Chamber Concert “Two Faces of Orpheus” with Franklin Lei, Renaissance lute and classical guitar, at 8 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana St. Tickets are $8-$12. 549-3864. www.TrinityChamberConcerts.com 

Dan Zemelman, solo jazz piano, at 8 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. at Ashby. 604-1473. 

Eve of Acapella: A Night of Female Voice, featuring Ya Elah at 8 p.m. at Studio Rasa, 933 Parker St., between 8th and 9th. Cost is $10-$20 sliding scale. 843-2787. www.studiorasa.org 

Groundation, reggae classic and band originals at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Resistoleros, Eddie Haskells, Proud Flesh at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com  

Old Blind Dogs at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Marcos Silva and Intersection at 8 p.m. at the Jazz- 

school. Cost is $12-$18. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

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

Braziu, Nobody from Ipanema at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $10-$12. 548-1159. www.shattuckdownlow.com 

Tom Jonesing, The Sun Kings at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $15. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Danny Heines & Joey Blake at the 1923 Teahouse at 8 p.m. Suggested donation of $5-$10, no one turned away for lack of funds. 644-2204. www.epicarts.org 

Macy Blackman Quartet at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Babyland, Pitch Black, Midnight Laser Beam at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $6. 525-9926.?

A couple of Fridays ago, a letter from Michael Farrell appeared in the Planet regarding my recent rant about bad pruning. I thank Mr. Farrell for his kind remarks, and I’m taking another column here to endorse his accurate and perceptive pointers about choosing and siting trees in city yards. 

To summarize: a fast-growing species chosen for quick effect will probably outgrow its space; some species are more flammable than others and should be avoided; trees get big and live long, and their owners need to calculate the space they’ll need in a few decades.  

(For the record, none of the problems Mr. Farrell cited apply to the unfortunate plum I was ranting about, more’s the pity.)  

Choosing the right tree for your yard is the best way to stop problems before they start. The tree’s ultimate size is a big consideration, and to know that you have to know its species. I know of two potential problems coming into season now. 

Every winter, you can buy cunning, inexpensive live Christmas trees, pre-decorated and planted in little pots covered with red foil. Sometimes you can keep them alive through the season, too, and plant them out. They typically have bluish-green short needles, and that’s the catch; they don’t look like their parents when they’re young. When they grow up, they exchange those for long dark-green needles, and they do grow up. They’re Italian stone pines. They get huge. (They also grow pignoli, which is nice if you get them before the squirrels do.) They turn into enormous mushroom-shaped dense-headed evergreen trees, with correspondingly serious roots.  

The folks across the street had a couple of these right up against their house. Some child had planted them as babies, maybe fifteen years before; placed them lovingly near the shelter of the front wall and tucked them in to grow. And grow they did. They were picking the house up off its foundation with their roots and trunks, and handsome though they were, they had to be cut down.  

The Ecology Center has years of history in dealing with distraught live-tree owners who want to donate trees after the holidays. The problem is that these folks were doing something a lot like trying to hand out free Rottweiler puppies. They’re cute when they’re small and endearing as adults, but they just plain don’t fit everywhere. So have a plan before you buy a live Yule tree, get a redwood and keep it in a pot outdoors for a few years, or bonsai your Monterey pine.  

When you choose a landscape tree, first know what species will fit in your yard and your microclimate. Consider a native species, because they’re adapted to the place and because they pay their biological dues. There are nice exotics, and I’ve planted some myself, but a native will sustain more native critters, and having those in the yard is a privilege. 

Research your species, considering heat (including reflected heat from paving or walls), water, microclimate items like wind and salt spray, and soil type. In Berkeley, it’s usually good old clay. Consider height, especially if there are overhead wires anywhere near the planting site. PG&E has guidelines about that: www.safetree.net 

Choose a tree with thicker trunk over a taller one, even if it costs a bit more. Don’t waste money on a big tree; in a few years, a one-gallon tree will catch up to its five-gallon neighbor. Look for healthy color, taking the season into consideration. A yellowing conifer is dead already. Nodes—the areas that buds and twigs emerge from—should be relatively close together. 

Some pruning for shape is fine, but there should be no stubs or ugly bark scars. A tree should be fairly symmetrical, and all its twigs should be plump, resilient, and unwrinkled. Its leaves should feel cool. There should be no gap between the soil and the sides of its container. A bare-root tree should be in a damp ball of shavings or moss, and show no withered buds or twigs. 

The best idea is to find a healthy individual of the species you want, in the wild or in someone’s garden, and find something that looks like it. 

?

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, 1500 Derby St. 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. 

“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. 

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. 

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 

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

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. 

“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 

KQED Public Radio’s “Forum with Michael Krasny” Live broadcast from the Pauley Ballroom East in the MLK Student Union, UC Campus. Program topics are: 9 a.m. Proposed changes to UC’s undergraduate eligibility standards, 10 a.m. Student activism 40 years after the Free Speech Movement. Free and open to the public. 415-553-2119. www.kqed.org/radio. 

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  

“Hidden Internment: The Art Shibayama Story” and “Caught in Between: What to Call Home in Times of War” Two films on U.S. government policies toward immigrant communities at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave. Suggested donation $5-$25. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

“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 

“The Archbishop Romero Case: Legal Accountability in U.S. Courts” with Russell Cohen, of Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe LLP, and Matt Eisenbrandt, of the Center for Justice & Accountability, two of the attorneys who brought the case against Romero’s killers, at 4 p.m., Room 3, Le Conte Hall, UC Campus. 642-2088. www.clas.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 

East Bay For Kerry Debate Party at the Parkway Speakeasy Theater, 1834 Park Blvd., Oakland. Doors open at 5:15 pm. This event is first-come, first-served and is limited to 200 attendees, so be sure to arrive early to grab a spot and order food. Hosted by East Bay for Kerry-Edwards. 415-305-1345. 

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.  

FRIDAY, OCT. 1 

First Fridays Film Series “Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear and the Selling of America” at 7:30 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. Free. 482-1062. 

Berkeley-Palma Soriano Sister City Association report-back from recent trip to Cuba at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Donation $8-$15. 981-6817. 

“The Election Year 2004” with Prof. Constance Cole at 1:30 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. 

Meditation, Peace Vigil and Dialogue, gather at noon on the grass close to the West Entrance to UC Berkeley, on Oxford St. near University Ave. Sponsored by the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. 655-6169. www.bpf.org 

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

SATURDAY, OCT. 2 

Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival with Robert Haas, Lawrence Ferlingheti, Pattiann Rogers, George Keithley and many more from noon to 5 p.m. at Civic Center Park. 526-9105. www.poetryflash.org 

Mini Farmers A farm exploration program for children accompanied by an adult. Wear boots and prepare to get dirty. From 2:30 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. Cost is $3-$5, registration required. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

Leaf Art Print Collect dried leaves on a tree study walk, then make a card or decorate a t-shirt of your own. For ages six and up at 10 a.m. at Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. Registration required. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

Berkeley Path Wanderers Claremont Elmwood Walk Meet at 10 a.m. at the corner of Ashby and Elmwood Aves, just east of College Ave. 654-5448. 

Berkeley Historical Society Walking Tour “Transformation on the Waterfront” led by Susan Schwartz. At 10 a.m. Cost is $8-$10. 848-0181. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/histsoc/ 

Berkeley Solar Home Tour Self-guided tours from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. starting at the Shorebird Nature Center, Berkeley Marina. Tickets are $15 per group. For more information call 377-5849. www.norcalsolar.org/tour/berkeley/ 

Voter Education and Political Forum from 10 a.m. to noon at St. Paul AME Church, 2024 Ashby Ave. 848-2050. 

Swim a Mile for Women with Cancer from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Mills College Trefethan Aquatic Center. Also on Sun. Proceeds benefit the Women’s Cancer Resource Center. To register call 601-4040, ext. 180. www.wcrc.org 

Walk Against Domestic Violence at Lake Merritt, Oakland, to support A Safe Place, Oakland’s only shelter for battered women and children. For pledge forms and information call 986-8600. www.asafeplacedvs.org 

Walk for Farm Animals at 11 a.m. at Splash Pad Park, across the street from the Grand Lake Theater, Oakland. For pledge forms and information see www.walkforanimals.org 

A Conversation with Daniel Ellsberg at 2 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. In conjunction with the exhibition “What’s Going On? California and the Vietnam Era” 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

“A Village Gathering” A day of information, resources and support for African-Americans with disabilities from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Claremont Middle School, 5750 College Ave. Oakland. 547-7322, ext. 15. 

The Silence Of Our Friends a workshop presented by the UNtraining, a program for untraining white liberal racism. From 1 to 5 p.m. at Berkeley High School Library, 1980 Allston Way. Sliding scale $10-50, no one turned away for lack of funds. Everyone welcome. Wheelchair Accessible. 235-3957. www.untraining.org  

Great Dog Lick Off A fundraising event for the Berkeley-East Bay Humane Society at noon at Alan’s Petzeria. Cost is $5. 

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

Free Emergency Preparedness Class on Fire Supression from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at 997 Cedar St. To sign up call 981-5605. www. 

ci.berkeley.ca.us/fire/oes.html 

Pee Wee Basketball for Girls ages 6-8 begins at 10 a.m. at 1255 Allston Way. Cost is $25 for residents and runs for 6 weeks. Sponsored by Berkeley Youth Alternatives. 845-9066. 

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

SUNDAY, OCT. 3 

One Long Hike From 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. beginning at Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. Bring water, sunscreen and lunch as we take a look at the natural and cultural history of Wildcat Canyon. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

Plant It and They Will Come Learn the simple steps to attract wildlife to your backyard, from 1 to 3 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

Neighborhood Disaster Training for Panoramic Hill from 9 a.m. to noon. Sponsored by the City of Berkeley. For information and to register call 981-5506. 

“Moral Responsibility, the Mind-Body Problem” with Gunther Stent, Prof. of Molecular and Cell Biology, UCB, at 9:30 a.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302.  

Mid-Autum Children’s Festival Celebrating the Vietnamese Moon Festival from 4 to 8 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. In conjunction with the exhibition “What’s Going On? California and the Vietnam Era” 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

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

Tibetan Buddhism with Stephanie Hoffman on “Tibetan Text Preservation: Preserving an Endangered Tradition” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

MONDAY, OCT. 4 

“Does America Need a New President?” with William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard and Mark Danner, professor at the UCB Graduate School of Journalism at 7:30 p.m. at Zellerbach Auditorium, UC Campus. Tickets are $10 available from 642-9988. http://journalism.berkeley.edu 

Tea at Four Taste some of the finest teas from the Pacific Rim and South Asia and learn their natural and cultural history, followed by a short nature walk. At 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. Cost is $5-$7, registration required. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

Berkeley Measure Q: Pros and Cons at the The Oakland/East Bay Chapter of the National Organization for Women meeting at 6 p.m. at Chanel Hall of the Lutheran Church of the Cross, 1744 University Ave. at McGee. 287-8948. 

“Separation of Church and State: Where Are We Today?” A panel discussion sponsored by Americans United Against Church and State, the ACLU, Secular Humanists of the East Bay and Kol Hadash at 7:30 p.m. at BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. 848-0237. 

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. 

“Ulysses” Discussion Book Group at 7 p.m. at the Long Haul, 3124 Shattuck Ave. We will meet every Monday night and hopefully finish by Bloomsday 2005. 

Academic Center of Excellence at St. Paul AME Church, 2024 Ashby Ave. on Mon. and Wed. from 3 to 6 p.m. A free resource for students in grades K-12 in partnership with UC Berkeley. 848-2050. Also in ongoing 

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. 

CITY MEETINGS 

City Council meets Tues., Sept. 28, at 7 p.m at Longfellow School Auditorium, 1500 Derby St., for a Public Hearing on the Creek Ordinance. Sherry M. Kelly, city clerk, 981-6900. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Council Agenda Committee meets Mon., Oct. 4, at 2:30 p.m., at 2180 Milvia St., Sherry M. Kelly, city clerk, 981-6900. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil/agenda-committee 

Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board meets Mon. Oct. 4, at 7 p.m. in City Council Chambers, Pam Wyche 644-6128 ext. 113. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/rent 

Landmarks Preservation Commission meets Mon., Oct. 4, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Gisele Sorensen, 981-7419. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/landmarks 

Peace and Justice Commission meets Mon., Oct. 4, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Manuel Hector, 981-5510. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/peaceandjustice 

Youth Commission meets Mon., Oct. 4, at 6:30 p.m., at 1730 Oregon St. Philip Harper-Cotton, 981-6670. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/commissions/youth?

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. 

?

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 

?

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?

We’re going to start the Planet’s discussion of ballot choices for the November election with the easiest one to understand. Proposition 66 is a balanced, moderate reform of California’s badly drafted “Three Strikes and You’re In Jail for Life” law.  

There has been a fair amount of publicity for those outrageous cases where people have ended up with life imprisonment for petty second and third crimes like stealing pizza. The organization FACTS, Families to Amend California’s Three Strikes, has a long list of case histories on its website of miscarriages of justice which the current law has caused. California’s three strikes law, hastily passed in the wake of the Polly Klaas kidnapping, was intended to keep dangerous, violent offenders off the street. Polly’s grandfather, Joe Klaas, has agreed to be the official spokesperson for Yes on 66 because he recognizes that change is needed to fulfill the original purpose of the law correctly.  

A Field Poll released on Aug. 13 showed that the “Fix Three Strikes” initiative on the November ballot led by a 69 percent to 19 percent margin at that point. But the powerful prison guards union won’t let a profitable cash cow like the current three strikes law get away so easily. Between now and the election they and their supporters will be spending a lot of money campaigning to continue the wasteful practice of filling up prisons with people who don’t need to be there. Close to 65 percent of those serving second and third strike sentences were convicted of nonviolent, petty offenses such as simple drug possession or shoplifting. It costs on the order of three-quarters of a million dollars to keep each three strikes prisoner inside, so passing Proposition 66 can be expected to save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, much of the money diverted from the pockets of the guards’ union. 

Many voters have trouble making it through the long list of state ballot measures while they’re standing up in the polling booth, worried about keeping people behind them in line waiting. Nevertheless, you do want to make sure you cast your vote on the really important questions like Proposition 66. The best way to make sure that you have time to do the job well is to use a paper ballot and vote absentee, now relatively easy to do. This strategy is also reassuring for the many voters who distrust the new electronic voting machines.  

We will be discussing the rest of the state propositions and making our recommendations for Must Votes like Proposition 66 between now and Tuesday, Oct. 26, which is the cut-off date for the Alameda County Registrar of Voters to receive absentee ballot applications, which must be in writing. We want to do everything we can to help you make sure that your vote counts.  

Supporters of various proposals and candidates are already contributing to our opinion pages. Candidates for Berkeley City Council have been invited to submit long statements, 600-800 words, by this Friday, Oct. 1, which we will print in rotation through Oct. 22. Readers may also send in short questions for candidates, and starting on Friday we’ll print as many of them as space allows, to which candidates may submit short replies. Our “Berkeley This Week” calendar will continue to list the remaining candidates’ nights.  

We haven’t decided yet whether the Planet will endorse any local measures or candidates, but if we do so it will be by Oct. 26. That’s also a prudent cut-off date for mailing absentee ballots to be sure that they arrive by election day a week later, Nov. 2. Of course, if you don’t mail your absentee ballot in time, you can always take it to your polling place yourself on election day. You’ll still be able to fill it out in peace and quiet at home. And if you’re confused by anything in the election process or on the ballot, let us know, and we’ll try to get the information you need in time for it to help with your decision. 

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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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