After 16 years of wandering through the desert of homelessness, Berkeley’s only conservative Jewish congregation, Netivot Shalom, finally took shelter in their half-acre of promised land Friday on University Avenue. 

The 300-family congregation marched through central Berkeley, Torahs in hand, to celebrate their first Sabbath in the $6 million synagogue they built right next to the Montessori school at 1316 University Ave. 

For Claudia Valas, who in 1989 attended the congregation’s first meetings in members’ kitchens, the scene Friday was overwhelming.  

“This is just a dream. I always thought this day would come,” she said, as members blew ceremonial ram horns and sang songs after arriving at their new synagogue after a procession from their temporary quarters in Berkeley’s Jewish Community Center on Walnut Street.  

Netivot Shalom is not the only local congregation getting used to a new home. For local Jews, 2005, or 5765 in the Hebrew calendar, might well be remembered as the year of the big move. By August, Berkeley’s four largest congregations will have either moved to bigger homes or enlarged their current ones.  

Besides Netivot Shalom leaving its rented space at the Jewish Community Center, Kehilla Community Synagogue earlier this year moved to a former church in Piedmont from the space it rented at Northbrae’s Community Church, Congregation Beth El is moving to a bigger home still under construction on Oxford Street, and Congregation Beth Israel has nearly completed reconstructing and enlarging their home on Bancroft Way. 

“If you look at national trends, this is impressive growth in congregation life and religious life,” said Joel Bashevkin, executive director of the Berkeley-Richmond Jewish Community Center. He added that several congregations in Oakland were also looking for new homes or to expand their current space. 

Bashevkin suggested that the growth of local congregations was being fed by more members from outer suburbs coming to services and the effort by many congregations to welcome interfaith couples. According to some estimates, he added, Berkeley’s population is between 20 and 25 percent Jewish, with about one in four Jews belonging to a synagogue. 

For members of Netivot Shalom, a permanent home brings the opportunity to expand the congregation’s activities and attract new members. While at the JCC, the congregation couldn’t hold traditional Friday night services because of a lack of space and had to pay extra to rent out rooms for special events. 

“It’s particularly important when you have young kids to give them a sense of a communal home,” said congregation member Lisa Fink. “This is where they’re going to grow together.” 

To build their new synagogue, 95 percent of congregation members donated time and money to the effort. Ed Gold said he cashed out of stocks to make a loan to the congregation. Art Braufman said the congregation saved over a quarter-million dollars by having members donate architectural and engineering expertise to the project. 

David Finn, a congregation member and architect, designed the building to maximize natural light and separate the sanctuary from the hustle and bustle of University Avenue. In an agreement with their new next-door neighbors, Berkeley Montessori School, the synagogue will use the school’s courtyard and play area, while the school will have access to the synagogue’s assembly room. 

“This is a very efficient use of space,” Finn said. 

Finn, for a brief time, had his hand in another Berkeley synagogue project. He was hired by Congregation Beth Israel, Berkeley’s orthodox congregation, to design a replica of the wooden synagogue of Przedborz, Poland that the Nazis burned down in 1942. However, the congregation, whose former home was seismically unsafe, couldn’t raise enough money for the project and settled for a building that looks much like their former home.  

In February, the 400 member Kehilla Community Synagogue moved from Berkeley into its permanent home in Piedmont. Several members of Kehilla, the country’s largest Renewal congregation, a left-leaning branch of Judaism, refinanced their homes to loan the congregation money to buy a former church at 1300 Grand Ave., said Sandy Bredt, Kehilla’s managing director.  

“It was amazing. We raised $425,000 in loans and $500,000 in donations 90 days after our feasibility study showed we weren’t ready to buy a building,” she said. 

Bredt said the congregation has already begun reaping the rewards. It has used its space to host music benefits and bolster it syouth programs. 

In August, Berkeley’s largest congregation, the nearly 600-family Congregation Beth El, will move into its new home at 1301 Oxford St. Having long ago outgrown its current home at Arch and Vine streets, Beth El’s estimated $8 million, 33,000-square-foot new synagogue will give the congregation more spaces for its Hebrew school and youth programs, said Harry Pollack, a congregation member. The congregation’s soon-to-be former home has been purchased by the Dominican Friars as classroom space, he added. 

Pollack said the different congregations had “traded notes” on their building efforts and took pride in their successes. 

“The fact that we’re all investing the time and money into new homes shows the optimism and hope that there will continue to be a vital Jewish community.D

In order to get enough money to build what has been billed as the greenest project in Berkeley, the city may have to ask federal officials to designate part of the downtown as a brownfield—a term that typically applies to contaminated industrial sites. 

The designation could mean $2 million in extra federal funding to help build the David Brower Center, a combination of affordable housing, retail and office space for environmental groups on Oxford Street. The project, estimated at $50 million, is facing $4 million in increased cost estimates with still a year to go before construction is scheduled to begin.  

Although there is no sign of contamination at the site, the development’s partners, the David Brower Center and affordable housing developer Resources For Community Development, are asking the city to apply for the federal grant for contaminated sites on the basis that the Oxford Street parking lot has potential for contamination and is in a low-income area. 

The City Council must approve the application, which has a June 17 deadline. 

Slated to rise above the Oxford Parking Lot at Oxford Street between Kittredge Street and Allston Way, the Brower Center, which has already received $2.5 million in city housing funds, has been heralded by city leaders as a future jewel of the city’s ailing downtown.  

However, a group representing downtown merchants has withheld its support for the project over fears that it would further diminish downtown’s reduced parking capacity. 

On Thursday Berkeley’s Housing Advisory Commission, over the staunch objections of several members, voted 5-3-1 to recommend that the City Council apply for the grant.  

“This is not a brownfield,” said Commission Chair Anne Wagley, who wanted to reserve applications for Berkeley projects proposed for actual contaminated sites. (Wagley is an employee of the Daily Planet.) 

But the Federal Department of Housing And Urban Development, which manages the grants, thinks otherwise, city officials said. 

Under HUD’s definition a project may qualify if it is complicated simply by the “potential presence of contamination.” Roger Asterino, a city housing official, said local HUD officers supervising the grant program were familiar with the site and recommended that the city apply for the grant. 

The HUD grants, unlike similar grants offered by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, are also designed to spur economic growth in low-income neighborhoods. Because downtown Berkeley, home to hundreds of UC students, qualifies as a low-income area and the Brower project is estimated to create 140 jobs, city officials have been led to believe they have a good chance to win the grant. 

Just last year, HUD issued a $2 million brownfield grant to the Ed Roberts Campus, slated to rise on the northeast parking lot of the Ashby BART Station, which also had little evidence of past contamination. 

If Berkeley applies for and receives the grant, it likely won’t be able receive another brownfield grant for the foreseeable future. Because each grant is coupled with a $5 million HUD loan that the city must guarantee, Berkeley only has means to take on two brownfield grants at a time, city officials said. 

Housing Commissioner Vicky Liu argued that the Brower center was too important a project not to seek the extra funding. 

“This is an opportunity we should take advantage of,” she said. 

Brower Center Project Manager John Clawson said the latest estimates for building one level of underground parking rose from about $4.8 to $6 million. Rising costs of steel and concrete, he added, had increased the total cost by about $4 million. Clawson said the developers could provide $2 million more, but needed the grant to help build the underground parking and some of the retail space. 

The project financing is one of the most complex ever attempted in Berkeley, said Housing Director Steve Barton, adding that all of the funding sources have not yet come together. 

Meanwhile downtown merchants are pushing for the city to find a way to build a second level of underground parking at the site. The merchants are angry that the underground lot will only have 105 spaces while the current lot has space for 130 vehicles. 

“We’re concerned about the vitality of that project as well as its domino effect on the downtown if the parking issue isn’t addressed,” said Deborah Bahdia, executive director of the Downtown Berkeley Association. 

Bahdia said the downtown has lost 400 parking spaces over the past five years to new developments. She said the organization had considered assessing itself a fee to pay the estimated $6 million for a second level of parking, but learned that it would be illegal because the lot will be private property, owned by the developers. 

Under a deal between the city and the developers, the city is to sell the property, valued at $4.2 million for $1. In return, the development is to lease the underground parking lot to the city, which would receive parking lot revenues, currently estimated at $300,000. Should the brownfield grant not come through, Clawson said the city would have to accept less revenue from the parking to pay for the cost overrun on the lot.

In a setback for medical marijuana users, on Monday the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against a seriously ill Oakland woman seeking to grow and use marijuana without fear of federal raids. 

The 6-3 ruling held that federal authorities may prosecute people who have a doctor’s permission to grow and consume marijuana. The court found that state laws legalizing medical marijuana, such as California’s, do not offer protection to users from the federal ban on the drug.  

The ruling does not overturn California’s Compassionate Use Act of 1996, which legalized medical marijuana in the state. It does, however, uphold the conflict between state and federal law that leaves Californians under the threat of arrest under federal law when they grow or use marijuana as a medicine.  

“I’m a little bit stunned with the decision,” said Angel Raich, 39, of Oakland, who along with Diane Monson of Oroville took the case to the high court. “People aren’t going to stop using their medicine just because the Supreme Court ruled against them.” 

In 2002, DEA agents seized and destroyed Monson’s six marijuana plants. 

Raich, who suffers from an inoperable brain tumor, has chronic pain and a wasting syndrome that requires her to eat up to 3,000 calories a day. She grows her own marijuana, which she said relieves her pain and enables her to eat. 

While the ruling only directly applies to the small number of residents who grow and consume their own medical marijuana, it could have ramifications for medical marijuana dispensaries, where most licensed patients in the state receive their marijuana. The dispensaries, which are not specifically mentioned in the state law, have historically been subject to raids from the federal Drug Enforcement Agency. 

Don Duncan, who runs one of Berkeley’s three licensed dispensaries, said the DEA had ceased raiding collectives in the past year while the Raich case was being litigated in the courts. He feared the agency might now feel emboldened by the ruling. 

“I hope the federal government doesn’t misinterpret this ruling as a cue for stepped-up enforcement,” he said. 

In a prepared statement the Bush administration’s drug czar John Walters said, “Today’s decision marks the end of medical marijuana as a political issue....We have a responsibility as a civilized society to ensure that the medicine Americans receive from their doctors is effective, safe and free from the pro-drug politics that are being promoted in America under the guise of medicine.” 

State Attorney General Bill Lockyer criticized the ruling, saying that, “Taking medicine on the recommendation of a doctor for a legitimate illness should not be a crime.” 

Writing for the court majority, Justice John Paul Stevens held that Congress’s power to regulate commerce between states included the authority to ban marijuana that was grown and consumed within one state. Joining Stevens in the majority were justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Kennedy, Scalia and Souter. 

The decision overturns a 2003 ruling of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that had been appealed by the Bush administration.  

Raich’s attorneys said they would return to the Ninth Circuit to argue that the federal government’s ban on growing medical marijuana violated Raich’s constitutional rights under the constitution’s due process clause. 

Raich said she would also lobby Congress to support a bill scheduled for a floor vote next week that would bar the U.S. Justice Department from conducting raids in states that have medical marijuana laws on the books. The bill has previously failed to come close to garnering the 218 votes needed for passage. 

California’s medical marijuana law allows residents to grow and use marijuana with a doctor’s permission. Since California’s law passed in 1996, voters in Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and Vermont have passed similar legislation protecting medical marijuana users and growers from prosecution from state and local authorities. 

In dissent, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor held that states should retain authority over “core police powers.” 

“Relying on Congress’s abstract assertions, the court has endorsed making it a federal crime to grow small amounts of marijuana in one’s own home for one’s own medicinal use,” she wrote. “This overreaching stifles an express choice by some states concerned for the lives and liberties of their people to regulate medical marijuana differently.” 

Justice William Rehnquist joined O’Connor in her dissent. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote his own dissenting opinion. 

Recently, pharmaceutical companies have offered alternatives to medical cannabis. Raich said the most widely used drug Marinol, a synthetic form of THC, made her ill. A more promising drug, Sativex, which is a liquid form of marijuana, has been approved in Canada, but not yet in the United States. 

The Berkeley Unified School District notified families last week that it has reached a settlement in the Smith v. BUSD Board of Education case, a 2004 class action suit filed on behalf of three minority Berkeley students—two African-Americans and one Latino—who claimed that their education at Berkeley High was disrupted by improper expulsions. 

The settlement, first reached in March, was ratified in federal district court last month. The district must notify all school families in preparation for a hearing to approve the agreement in July. 

While denying that the three students were improperly kept out of school, the Berkeley Unified School District agreed to a settlement in which the students—and any other African-American or Latino students who could prove that they were unlawfully excluded from the regular school program—will be reinstated to the general school population, have their student records corrected, and be given district-sponsored makeup instruction to make up for any comprehensive instruction they might have missed. 

In addition, the district must establish a plan to “reduce disproportionally the number of African-American and Latino students recommended for expulsion, formally expelled, and reassigned to alternative school programs.” 

The settlement does not require the district to make any financial compensation to the affected students. 

One of the students, Yarman Smith, claimed in the complaint that he was removed from Berkeley High School for two months between January and March of 2004 without a legally required hearing. Juan Muñoz claimed that he was excluded from the high school from the fall of 2002 through the summer of 2004 without a hearing, and Summer McNeil said she was excluded between November 2003 and the summer of 2004. 

The plaintiffs were represented by the Pillsbury Winthrop law firm of Palo Alto on a pro bono basis, as well as the nonprofit Legal Services for Children of San Francisco and the Youth and Education Law Clinic of Stanford Law School. 

The complaint alleged that each of the students was “excluded indefinitely from the district’s comprehensive educational programs and was either provided no educational services or provided substandard educational services through a county community school, continuation school or independent study.” 

While Smith was initially offered no makeup for his two lost months, the district offered to enroll Muñoz at the Rock LaFleche county non-comprehensive community school. McNeil was offered a relocation to Berkeley Alternative High School and was enrolled in an independent study program called “Home Hospital Instruction,” even though she says in her claim that she was neither ill nor incapacitated. 

Although the settlement only affects African-American and Latino students, the settlement required the district to send out notices to households with all students currently enrolled in the Berkeley public schools. 

At the time the agreement was reached, Lagertha Smith, Yarman Smith’s mother, released a statement saying, “I am very pleased with the settlement because it not only affects my son, but it will prevent other students from being mistreated in the future. Being involved in this lawsuit has given my son more self-esteem, since he was empowered to stand up for his rights.” 

Bill Koski, of the Youth and Education Law Clinic, added that “to Superintendent Michelle Lawrence’s credit, the Berkeley School District recognizes that students are entitled to due process. The agreement … shows that the district is committed to ensuring that students will no longer be wrongfully excluded from Berkeley schools.” 

The district last week sent out notices to families explaining the settlement of the expulsion discrimination case, informing Berkeley parents of their rights if they think any of their children were kept out of school based on race. 

BUSD Public Information Officer Mark Coplan said he has no idea how many students might actually be affected by the settlement. He said that the district has already received six or seven queries from parents. 

“A couple of them wanted to know ,‘Did my child do something?’” he said. “And the rest wanted to know if their child’s situation might fit into the settlement.” 

In addition to the mailed notices, the settlement requires the district to request that the Alameda County Probation Department, the Alameda County Department of Social Services, the Alameda County Juvenile Court, the Alameda County Family Court, the Berkeley Organization of Churches and Berkeley Youth Alternatives post the agreement at their headquarters or on their websites. 

A hearing will be held on July 27 at 1 p.m. in federal district court in Oakland to consider final approval of the settlement. 

Tensions are heating up over impending changes at both East Bay Alta Bates hospitals. 

In addition to the fact that the contract for registered nurses is about to expire, recent moves of services between hospitals have alarmed some staff members. 

The latest moves will transfer elderly psychiatric patients from Oakland to the chain’s Herrick Hospital in Berkeley and will move patients from the Oakland hospital’s cancer care unit up three floors into an orthopedic ward. 

Last September, all maternity functions were transferred from the Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Oakland to the Alta Bates facility on Ashby Avenue in Berkeley. 

The California Nurses Association (CNA), which represents Registered Nurses (who have more training than licensed vocational nurses), held a press conference outside the Oakland hospital Monday noon to protest the shifts. 

One of those speaking on behalf of his fellow nurses was Berkeley City Councilmember Max Anderson. 

While Alta Bates spokesperson Carolyn E. Kemp said the moves will have no impact on patient care and will involve no restructures, CNA members and officials said Monday the effects will be profound. 

CNA Communications Officer Charles Idelson said, “It is our understanding that Herrick doesn’t have the capacity to care for its existing patients, much less those from Summit.” 

Kemp said moving the Oakland hospital’s 17-bed Geropsychiatry Unit to the Herrick Campus, a 105-bed psychiatric unit in Berkeley, would provide enhanced opportunities for patients. 

“The program at Herrick is one of the largest and oldest in Northern California,” she said. “The move will make the program more comprehensive and give it greater breadth.” 

Oncology nurse Jan Rodolfo, who has worked five years in the Oakland hospital’s oncology ward, said the changes will be profound. 

Kemp said the average number of patients currently assigned to the oncology unit averages about 10 per day, while Rodolfo said the census is kept artificially low by assigning cancer patients to other units. 

While the current second-floor unit is dedicated to cancer patients and staffed by five oncology nurses per shift, the move to the fifth floor will place patients in vacant beds in a unit dedicated to orthopedic care. Only two oncology units will be assigned per shift, Rodolfo said. 

While the initial announcement from Summit said the change in the oncology unit would be permanent, Rodolfo said officials are hinting that the move may be temporary. 

“The problem with that,” she said, “is that most of the oncology nurses who will be forced to move to other units may have left for other hospitals by then. 

“Summit doesn’t seem to recognize that it takes time to train nurses to a particular hospital’s program, and they also don’t seem to realize how much time is spent in patient and family education.” 

Rodolfo added that non-oncology nurses are sometimes reluctant to administer the high levels of pain medication needed by many cancer patients. 

Kemp said part of CNA’s motivation was because of the impending June 30 end of their current contract with the hospital’s nurses. 

“You always hear a lot of charges when it comes time for contract negotiation,” she said. 

Non-RN hospital staff have been bogged down in negotiations with the hospital chain since their contract expired over a year ago. 

“We already gave them their wage increase and benefits,” Kemp said. 

One of the key sticking points in negotiations between Summit and parent Sutter Health Care has been the Service Employees International Union’s insistence on a comprehensive agreement that would include most or all of the chain’s Northern California hospitals. 



Two weeks after the Berkeley Unified School District reached tentative contract agreements with three of its five unions, the BUSD Board of Directors on Wednesday will get back to the business of finding the money to pay for those pacts. 

The board will consider two sets of proposed budget cuts at its regular meeting on Wednesday, 7:30 p.m., in Old City Hall at 2134 Martin Luther King Jr. Way. 

In one proposal, Deputy Superintendent Glenston Thompson and Transportation Director Bernadette Cormier are recommending $150,000 in transportation cuts, which include the three bus driver positions already eliminated by the board at its April 20 meeting. 

One recommendation involves a reduction in the number of stops made by district school buses by increasing the maximum distance students will be required to walk to a school bus stop from a third of a mile to half a mile. 

A second recommendation would stagger bell times between Thousand Oaks and Jefferson, Cragmont and Arts Magnet, and Oxford and Washington elementaries “to allow [the district] to minimize the number of buses … run in areas such as the hills where [the district is] duplicating the territory covered by more than one bus and picking up a low number of riders.” 

Thompson and Cormier are also recommending the elimination of a vacant mechanic’s position. 

Thompson has also released a list of $422,000 in cuts to the district’s general fund in the next two years, some of which involve shifting general fund costs to Measure BB. 

Board members expect to hear some good financial news at Wednesday’s meeting with a release of the district’s Third Interim Report that bumps the district’s financial status up from “qualified” to “positive.” Under a “positive” status, the district certifies that it has balanced its budget both for the remainder of this year and for the following two years. 

In other action at Wednesday’s meeting, the board will decide on whether to accept changing the name of Jefferson Elementary School to Sequoia Elementary School. Parents, guardians, school staff, and students voted last week to recommend the change after complaints were raised about Thomas Jefferson’s ownership of slaves.d

An aide to Mayor Tom Bates promised Thursday to help neighbors of BUSD’s West Campus who have fought plans to move some district services and added parking lots to the University Avenue site. 

Calvin Fong, Bates’s assistant for transportation, housing, and development issues, surprised many at last week’s meeting by announcing that the mayor will work with BUSD to find another site for the Building and Grounds Department and its vehicles and equipment. 

The Berkeley Unified School District’s master plan for West Campus, proposed by Superintendent Michelle Lawrence, includes moving administration offices and service functions, including the district’s Building and Grounds Department, kitchen, and a small warehouse to the West Campus property from the seismically unsafe Old City Hall and buildings on Oregon and Russell streets. 

Throughout five BUSD community planning sessions at the West Campus site, neighbors have voiced consistent opposition to the Grounds Department, kitchen and warehouse at the site. 

Fong said Bates would also work on moving the kitchen and warehouse to another location as well. Fong later acknowledged that it was possible that efforts might not lead to moving the uses from West Campus, but said the mayor was committed to doing his best to bring that about. 

School Board member Terry Doran said he didn’t disagree with Fong’s concerns, but supported the district’s master plan for the site. 

“I am concerned about meeting the needs of the district, but I’m not wedded to any particular way of doing it,” he said. 

He said he didn’t have any objection to moving the contested functions to another site, “but we haven’t been able to find another solution, and that’s been frustrating.” 

“I feel we’ve made some progress,” Kristin Leimkuhler, a neighborhood activist who has helped organize opposition to the plan, said after the meeting. 

But even with Fong’s announcement, neighbors said they were still concerned with traffic and parking issues. 

Planning Commissioner David Stoloff, another project neighbor, said the district and its chief consultant, David C. Early, had included far more parking spaces than the city would normally allow. 

Stoloff chided the district for including “a shocking amount of parking” (170 spaces, nearly one per employee) on a site with excellent access to public transportation. 

“This is inconsistent with green planning,” Stoloff said. “The school district is so out of sync. It seems to me you can do with much less parking.” 

Early, whose firm has led the public sessions and produced the master plan, agreed when a neighbor accused the district of fast-tracking the project. 

“It’s happening at a quick pace because Superintendent Michelle Lawrence wants to get her employees out of unsafe buildings,” he said. 

“I agree that an acre and a quarter of surface parking is a misuse of the site,” said Stephen Wollmer of PlanBerkeley.org, a citizen group that monitors development along the University Avenue corridor. 

“The only other projects where you see one-to-one parking are condominiums,” Wollmer said. “One-to-four is more usual.” 

Several neighbors objected to the concentration of parking on the southern portion of the site, from Addison Street toward Allston Way between Browning and Curtis streets. What is now largely an open field with a small amount of parking would become two parking lots separated by a daylighted Strawberry Creek.  

Neighbors said they weren’t happy with the additional traffic cars would bring, nor with the speed at which the increased traffic would flow down Curtis. 

“People don’t drive 25,” said neighbor Stacey de Carion, “it’s more like 45. Why not improve our quality of life and give us something more than a parking lot?” 

One solution, she said, would be to move the building and grounds facility offsite, using the additional ground space for other parking, freeing up the rear parcel. 

For Carlotta Campbell, a Curtis Street resident, Thursday’s meeting was her first. She said neighbors of the site had not been given adequate notice about the community meetings. 

Besides the increased traffic and potential pollution it might bring, Campbell said she would regret “the loss of one of the few green, grassy areas” in West Berkeley. 

Fong said Friday that he agreed with neighbors. “Frankly, the BUSD’s design with parking in the back alongside both banks of the daylighted creek is pretty egregious.” 

Fong said an alternative plan submitted by the West Campus Neighborhood-Merchant Association (WestNEMA) was preferable to the district plan. 

Richard Graham, a critic of the district’s master plan, said that Early’s firm has done its job, and now the process moves to the school board. 

“We have to get ready for the school board, which is where any changes are going to be made,” Graham said. “We are very glad that the mayor is looking for an alternative site, and we want the community to be included in the process.” 

One of the key questions remaining is what agency will govern development at the site, the City of Berkeley or the State Architect, which has oversight of all instructional buildings. 

City and district attorneys are presently trying to hammer out a solution, said Early. 

The district has between $9 million and $11 million in bond money for site repairs and construction, said Early, but no final cost estimate had yet been established for the project.  

The plan now heads to the Board of Education, which is scheduled to take up the project at its June 29 meeting.

The Zoning Adjustments Board on Thursday will consider the addition of a fourth story to the recently landmarked Frederick H. Dakin Warehouse at 2750 Adeline St. 

The structure, built in the wake of the 1906 earthquake, features the fireproof Dakin White Hollow Building Block, a creation of the structure’s builder and namesake. 

The building, designed by George T. Plowman and noted Berkeley architect Walter H. Ratcliff, was designated a city landmark on Aug. 9, 2004. 

The proposal before ZAB calls for an addition to a fourth floor, the elimination of one live/work unit and the addition of two dwelling units. 

Also on the ZAB agenda are a proposed addition of 855 square feet to the Aquatic Park Metro Lofts Project, the installation of two fast-food restaurants in vacant commercial space in a building as 2618-2620 Telegraph Ave., and a proposal to raise and expand a residence at 2343 Stuart St. 

A preview presentation of the David Brower Center at 2200 Fulton Street has been rescheduled for June 23, said Principal Planner Greg Powell. 

There’s no Planning Commission meeting this week. 

French and Dutch voters’ rejection of the European constitution wasn’t a fluke, as some European statesmen would have us believe, but it isn’t the death of the European Union either, as some doomsday prophets on both sides of the Atlantic predict. It is, however, the most serious crisis the union has faced since its inception in 1995.  

European citizens have rejected other EU treaties. When the Treaty of Nice, the charter that regulates the EU, was first put up for approval in 2001 by the Irish government, the Irish people voted it down. Before it subsequently passed it had to be amended by an ad hoc declaration stating Ireland’s military neutrality. In 1993, even the Maastrich Treaty, which was approved by a narrow margin in France and established the euro and the EU as we know them, was rejected in Denmark.  

However, the voters of France and Holland, by the sheer power of their numbers—62 percent and 55 percent “against” in the Netherlands and France, respectively—have spoken much louder today.  

Their rejection of the charter marks a serious defeat for the EU’s organizing principle that a strong axis of nations—either a Anglo-Franco-German alliance, or a Franco-German or a Spanish-Franco-German alliance—should lie at the core of the union.  

It is also a defeat for the Europe of globalization, in which economics—marketing and the rules of monetary exchanges—prevail over the need for a common welfare policy and respect for national specificities. The vote is a rebuke as well of the European Commission in Brussels, which has been criticized by European citizens as bureaucratic, dictatorial and distant.  

Without a coordination of national economies and labor policies, the euro has become a lightning rod. “Since the introduction of the euro, popular discontent has run high across Europe,” says Maurizio Ottavi, a Roman accountant. “Prices doubled, the quality of life worsened and to make up for the loss of revenues and deficits, governments are hitting on the welfare system.”  

The European Union model can’t provide a balance between economic liberalism and a social safety net, writes Bernardo Valli in Italy’s la Repubblica. “The rules dictated by the Union are perceived as long on liberalism and short on equality—in sum, it’s too Anglo-Saxon.”  

France’s and Holland’s “No” seems to agree with Valli. In France, 81 percent of blue collar workers voted “non,” while 62 percent of white-collar workers said “oui.” Thirty-five percent wanted to renegotiate the EU’s rules, 46 percent deplored unemployment. Only a majority of voters over 60 years old approved of the constitution.  

“The country is frustrated with the elites who are unable or unwilling to put a stop to globalization, to guarantee jobs and to block off-shoring,” writes Gianpiero Martinotti, a political analyst in France. “These people are worried about the end of an era in which the state had a protective role.”  

Not everybody lost during the vote, however. The result was good news for Umberto Bossi of Italy’s Lega Nord, Jean-Marie Le Pen of France’s Front National and Joerg Haider of Austria’s Freiheitlichen Partei. They have all been unapologetic denouncers of the continent’s “cultural hybridization” over the last decade.  

Italy’ Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Spanish former President Maria Aznar and German right-winger Edmund Stoiber also won because the vote has confirmed that Europe must recognize the particularity of each nation or be destined for defeat.  

Anti-globalization and anti-capitalist formations also gained from the No vote, among them the European Left, Rifondazione Comunista, part of the French Partie Socialiste, the French Partie Communiste and the Dutch Socialistische Partij.  

So long as the Berlin Wall was in place and the Soviet threat was a reality, countries like France and Germany, which have been constantly at war with each other over the centuries, were compelled to entertain good relationships while under the U.S. nuclear and conventional military umbrella.  

The picture changed radically with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Germany again took the tired and disastrous route of trying to assert its dominance over the rest of Europe. Marco D’Eramo of the daily Il Manifesto writes that in pursuing old expansionistic dreams—in particular toward the regions of Pomerania and Sudeti—Germany initiated a policy of selective recognition of local nationalities in the former Yugoslavia and pushed for a hurried inclusion of former Soviet republics in the EU. The result, says D’Eramo, were the Balkan wars and the return of ethnic cleansing in Europe.  

France and Holland are now ground zero for the future of an EU that has teetered far too long between two opposing visions. On one side is an Anglo-American Europe, centered on economic liberalism, the abolition of all borders and reaching deep into the former Soviet empire and nearly to the shores of the Euphrates River. On the other side is a Europe loyal to social-democratic ideals and anchored on traditional Judeo-Christian values. This Europe has stricter borders and stronger nation states that aspire to play a role on the global economic stage without giving up its cradle-to-grave welfare system for its citizens.  

The two conceptions came to a crashing confrontation in France and Holland, and it is now up to the European parliament, made up of representatives elected directly by the European people, to pick up the pieces and put together a more viable vision of continental integration.  

Paolo Pontoniere is a correspondent for Focus, Italy’s leading monthly.

A photograph caption for the June 3 article about Adagia restaurant mistakenly described a meal among workers from Cal Performances as a good-bye meal for Matt Patrone. Another co-worker was leaving the company; Patrone said he intends to stay with Cal Performances for a long time to come. 

In a June 3 article about the vote to change the name of Jefferson Elementary, Thomas Jefferson was erroneously referred to as the second president of the United States. He was the third.

Due to a copyediting error, the following letter ran incorrectly in the June 3-6 Daily Planet.  

• 

BAD DEAL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The mayor’s secret deal with the university—facilitated with the questionable assistance of the city attorney and affirmed by a majority of the City Council—is a disgrace. 

These people in their infinite (or is it somehow self-serving?) wisdom have in essence given the city away to the university. What did they get for their trouble? A few hundred thousand to help the University make a plan for Berkeley’s downtown, two square blocks of which are already going for a university “hotel” and associated complex. And a few hundred thousand more for some sewers and traffic lights.  

We can thank Councilmembers Betty Olds, Dona Spring, and Kriss Worthington for refusing to go along. At least three on the council could see this deal, wreaked upon us by the mayor out of public view, for the disaster it is. 

Sharon Entwistle 

TRAFFIC CIRCLES 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

Carol Denney’s “Will the Circles Be Unbroken?” (June 3) was deliciously on target: The “traffic circles” sprouting like weeds around Berkeley are incomprehensible, unsafe, and largely unwanted by the residents now being afflicted by them. Still, we can make the best of a bad situation. 

We can remove them.  

And donate all that fresh topsoil and cedar chips to community gardens, where the chips would probably make great mulch. 

Marcia Lau 

• 

TRAFFIC ANARCHY 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

With all the talk about traffic in Berkeley—Marin Avenue, the circles, the buses and all—it is time to add another concept to the mix and really get people going. How will our city streets function if we remove all traffic signage, road striping and stoplights? Is Berkeley ready for the complete removal of the reminders of the rules everyone should know anyway? 

A recent article in the Toronto Star described these “Naked Streets.” The idea, gaining popularity in Europe and pretty much the rule in less developed countries, is to reduce the sense of ownership vehicle drivers carry and equalize users of roads by forcing more eye contact and negotiation. Experiments in a handful of European cities with signage removal are ongoing, but the preliminary results are very encouraging. Dutch, German and Danish planners are having good results with the test, even in crowded inner-city intersections. Some districts in London will soon begin trying out the idea. 

On naked streets, drivers slow down a bit, check the intersections on approach and make eye contact with other drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists, instead of blindly driving wherever the signs say they can. Removal of signs and striping encourages drivers to focus not on lights and signage but on what’s happening around them, and to adjust their driving style accordingly. 

In the U.S., we go for extreme regulation rather than common sense and sharing. Americans will shudder with thoughts of anarchy on the roadway when they hear of naked streets, but when all signage, striping and lights are removed the rules of the road still apply. Naked streets might reverse our authoritarian impulses just a little. Oh, maybe we’ll keep the street signs. 

Hank Chapot 

• 

GOD ON THEIR SIDE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It is annoying that Christian conservatives are blasting people for not having God in their lives. They describe them as being “Godless.” These same Christian conservatives who claim to have God on their side are using it to commit abusive acts. For example, they use God to justify the destruction of clean water and clean air. They are getting help from both President Bush and a conservative Congress. 

Clean water is important for the human body. It nourishes and cleans it. Clean air is also very important. If it is the thinking of Christian conservatives to do away with both clean water and clean air, then they are showing the hypocrisy of having God on their side while being fake about morality. 

Bill Trice, Jr. 

Oakland 

• 

EQUALITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Medicaid pays for Viagra?!?! 

Is this true? Does Medicaid also pay for medication and/or equipment to ensure female orgasm as well? Since (to my knowledge) 99.98 percent of all erections end in orgasm, I want to know that the playing field is even. 

Since we are paying for senior sex (some well beyond what nature seems to have intended) I would like to ensure that my money is applied equally. 

H.L.Blash 

Pleasanton 

• 

SIDESHOWS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Since Oakland’s current policies have failed to curtail “sideshows,” J. Douglas Allen-Taylor apparently believes there is no point in trying to outlaw such activities (“You Knew it Was Coming—Another Sideshow Crackdown,” June 3-6). Mr. Allen-Taylor also thinks that if citizens of Oakland who are deeply offended by sideshows would make an effort to get to know the perpetrators, we “might begin to talk with them like people, and then we might begin to find that there might be a solution to the sideshow conflict besides throwing as many of them in jail as we can, and running the rest out of town.” 

It is no secret that sideshows always occur in lower income African-American neighborhoods. If Oakland’s mayor and City Council were to ignore this problem they would be guilty of liberal racism. This is because if sideshows occurred in any of Oakland’s affluent white neighborhoods, the residents of those neighborhoods would never tolerate it, and the Oakland police would immediately shut down such activities. Furthermore, the residents of the white neighborhoods would be no more interested in getting to know the perpetrators of sideshows than they would want to get to know graffiti taggers, toxic waste polluters, or heroin dealers.  

The residents of Rockridge and other bastions of white privilege in Oakland are famous for storming city hall when their aesthetic sensibilities are offended (like whenever Starbucks tries to open a new store on College Avenue). They ought to become even more agitated when a real threat to public health and safety like sideshows rears its ugly head in less privileged neighborhoods.  

Eric Tremont 

• 

JERRY BROWN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Time after time I have committed to writing a letter praising the work of J. Douglas Allen-Taylor only to fail to do so. But his column on Jerry Brown’s latest sideshow crackdown was so brilliant and perceptive that praise for Allen-Taylor can no longer be deferred. 

Allen-Taylor often seems to be the only Bay Area journalist who sees Jerry Brown for what he is: a fraud, phony, elitist, and hypocrite who has betrayed his public commitment to work hard on behalf of Oakland’s low-income African American and Latino population. 

From his bizarre appointments to the school board, his contempt for opponents of his military academy, his focus on his run for attorney general almost from the time he won a second term, and his presiding over an outrageous state takeover of a progressive Oakland school board, Brown has put his own selfish interests first. Without Allen-Taylor, many Berkeleyans who would otherwise only know Brown from his KPFA radio show and governorship would not have been exposed to the truth about his deplorable record as mayor. 

Although Brown once railed against the prison industrial complex, the attorney general wannabe did radio ads to defeat the modified version of Three Strikes that was on last November’s ballot. This type of hypocrisy has been ignored in the San Francisco Chronicle’s coverage of Brown, but readers of Allen-Taylor know better. 

Thanks to Allen-Taylor, the Daily Planet not only provides the most insightful coverage of Berkeley, but of Oakland as well. 

Randy Shaw 

• 

A SECOND OPINION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

J. Douglas Allen-Taylor’s June 3 front-page article states that Jefferson was the second president. It is my opinion that he was the third. I also believe that Washington was the first and John Adams the second. I hope my views do not offend any segment of your diverse readership. 

Edward Saslow 

• 

CHINA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

So Rumsfeld accuses China of unsettling Asia with military spending and expansion. What hyprocrisy. What about the Bush administration unsettling the entire world with its out of control military spending and expansion? I really think most people in this country and certainly throughout the world are disgusted with the hypocrisy, arrogance, and outright lying of the Bush administration. There are still a lot of unanswered questions concerning 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, voter fraud in the last two presidential elections, the torturing of prisoners—and those are just the major unanswered questions. How much longer can this all continue before something is done about it? If Congress or our judicial system does do its job of really addressing these issues then eventually we the people will have to do it our selves. This is not wishful thinking, as this has happened many times before in recent history, such as in Latin American and the former Soviet Union. It also happened here in 1776. 

Thomas Husted 

• 

FAY STENDER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Regarding Joseph Daniel Johnston’s May 24 letter, advancing his own peculiar political agenda over a Good Samaritan’s body, with no sensitivity to the memory of Fay Stender, nor to the feelings of her family and friends: How can it be a “cop-out” to describe her attempted assassination as an irrational act, when Mr. Johnston’s entire argument is based on being irrational? I know the details of what happened, but in my letter I chose instead to talk about Fay’s good life. 

Anyway, I do not necessarily regard Commentary, nor Mr. Johnston, as being absolute judges of the truth. (Nor my ethics.) E.g., it was the Black Guerrilla Prison Gang, an extreme offshoot of the Black Panthers. There were three invaders, not one. Fay was not “hiding from reprisal in Hong Kong”: considerate as always, thinking of others in that ghastly condition, she went there to save family and friends the additional trauma of her suicide. Besides, what reprisal? What more could they do to her, they’d already destroyed her. Mr. Johnston’s logic escapes me. 

I’m a survivor myself: Both my families suffered violent death, the first in the London blitz, on Sept. 24, 1940, the second by murder, Santa Barbara, May 31, 1980 (another Good Samaritan). I’ve developed a green thumb in healing other survivors. I have a sensitivity towards their feelings which Mr. Johnston, with his grudging, mean-spirited, backhanded praise for Fay, does not appear to possess. 

I don’t find his political arguments too convincing, either. “It was the night the dream died.” Overly dramatic and far-fetched, maybe? And what cockeyed, revisionist dream? There’s nothing so venal as a radical leftist turned radical rightist. 

Fay did good. She was a Good Samaritan. This cruel and violent world needs idealists. Honor them Joseph. Fuck the politics. 

Brian Gluss 

• 

SPEAKING OF LIES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

What a righteous letter from Joseph Daniel Johnston about Fay Stender and her death: “Since that night, the Left has been based on a lie, and continues to be to this day.” “Since that night”?? Maybe Fay Stender’s death was a wake-up call to some Berkeley liberals (who are always the last to know). But a lot of us had woken up a long time before that. And speaking of “lies,” wasn’t Fay Stender the one who helped ghost -write George Jackson’s prison diaries, and perpetuated the “lie” that this vicious criminal thug George Jackson was some kind of “revolutionary prisoner” and “victim of racial oppressions”? And aren’t Fay Stender’s “lies” still being disseminated to this day to hundreds of thousands of gullible readers? And wasn’t Fay Stender the one who got up and court and told countless similar “lies” about countless other black criminals who Stender chose to portray as “heroic martyrs”? And isn’t it a fact that Fay Stender couldn’t have cared less about the consequences of her action—that most of the criminal thugs that she got released from prison thanks to HER “lies,” almost immediately continued to commit similar criminal acts against other innocent victims? And that Fay Stender couldn’t have cared less about that.....until it happened to HER? Maybe some of Fay Stender’s supporters should be a little less strident about other people’s “lies.”  

Peter Labriola 

• 

MALARIA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

A little-known fact: Every day, malaria produces a human death toll equal to that of the tragic events of 9/11. Yesterday, over 3,000 people died of malaria in developing countries, the vast majority of them children. Over 3,000 more will die today, as their families agonize over the loss of a son, daughter, mother or father. What’s amazing is that it costs so little to prevent and treat malaria. Public health experts estimate that with funding of less than $3 per rich country citizen, the known solutions to the problem of malaria could be scaled up and malaria deaths would be cut in half. Yet right now our elected officials are committing less than one dollar a year per American citizen towards fighting malaria. This drastically tiny contribution of 0.002 percent of GDP ranks the U.S. last among the 22 rich countries of the OECD. Please contact your member of Congress and Senators Feinstein and Boxer, urging them to help America lead the world in making malaria history at this year’s G8 Summit on July 6. 

Mike Batell  

UC Berkeley student 

Athens, GA 

• 

THE BULB 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The Daily Planet’s May 31 front-page story about the Albany Waterfront Park—known to aficionados as The Bulb—being absorbed into the Eastshore State Park was a nice lead in to the story on the next page about the Magna Corporations greedy designs for the area right next door to the new state park.  

And of course development friendly Albany City Councilmembers and Berkeley’s corporate friend, the mayor, couldn’t be more relieved at the prospect that civil libertarians, artists and dog lovers will be thrown off their unregulated urban wilderness. The hotels, upscale mall and conference facilities will arrive at about the same time as the interpretive center is being constructed in the park. So that people who are busy consuming can be taught how excessive consumption created the mounds of landfill they are now sitting on, eating their Styrofoam packed fast food.  

  The words conformity and compliance slip off the tongue of State Parks honcho Brian Hickey when talking of art and dogs—but one look at the variety of activities provided in state parks would suggest that other California communities are more accomodated.  

  Activities like the hunting of waterfowl, spear fishing, off-highway vehicles, powerboats and high speed Internet piped directly to your tent are now standard fare in California’s state parks. A motorized trail is being planned from Oregon to Mexico through public lands...one way to avoid the freeway traffic on Memorial Day getaways.  

Did I really use the phrase “environmentalist wackos”? Oops. Mind you, I’m not the only one beginning to wonder whether this once honorable movement has seriously lost it’s philosophical way.  

Your reporter, Richard Brenneman, caught me at a bad time. Three hours after my glorious husky mix died, I was probably not as cautious as I might have been. But I’m proud to say that Riff Raff’s last—offleash—walk had been that morning at The Bulb. As she trotted past the roses, fennel and wild irises, as she sniffed the sewage wafting in from the flats, as she ran elegantly through the bushes and watched the redwing blackbirds crisscross the trail ahead of her, she looked at me  

with pure joy.  

Jill Posener  

• 

THE WASTELAND 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In the early 1950s, when middle class families could afford a television, there was serious debate regarding harm or benefit, especially to children. Would television enhance education or drug the young? Someone—I don’t remember who—told this joke: The bible forbids television. In the Gospel according to St. Matthew (17:9) Jesus admonished his disciples, “Tell [th]e vision to no one” 

Jokes aside, Newton Minow, the FCC chairman appointed by JFK, derided television as “a vast wasteland,” and during the next four decades it grew immeasurably more vast and infinitely more wasted.  

New networks, then PBS, then cable, then satellite expanded the menu to include documentaries, public service, 24-hour news, celebrity talk shows, special subject channels (MTV, cooking, weather, comedy, gardening, home remodeling, and the like), uncivil verbal combat, contrived reality and if you can come up with something not yet seen you can probably find a sponsor before bedtime. 

With us, unlike with our cousins in England, television is not government-supported (except for PBS, a tiny speck in the vastness). And unlike with our traditional protagonists (Russia, Cuba, et al.) our television is not government controlled but it might as well be.  

With us, free speech is guaranteed by the Constitution, but it remains free today only in furtherance of the nobility and selflessness of our global dominance. 

Let one example of television’s current subservience stand for its entire array of failings...laziness (Dan Rather and CBS), deceits (Jessica Lynch, Pat Tillman), implants (Jeff Gannon), fake news (Armstrong Ward) and so on. Not only does television not keep us informed it fosters confusion by not distinguishing between fantasy and fact. Let this instance of electronic spreading of political garbage stand for television’s general failure: 

In the Middle East where nearly everybody hates our guts Laura Bush’s polished goodwill tour was marred by protests and television cameras captured the shouting, sign-bearing street crowds. CBS, certainly not alone in this, concluded its report saying “The U.S. may still have some image building to do.” In other words, the U.S. need is for better public relations! Karen Hughes, Bush’s PR person, is on board but not yet at the wheel. 

Fortunately for us however, television’s trivializing spins do little to hide or diminish the tragic truth ˆ invasion justified by lies, occupation posing as liberation, tens of thousands killed, the majority by insurgents with only the armament or explosives they can carry but many by the most well-equipped military force the world has ever seen.  

The pungent odor emanating from your television is from news stories carrying an implicit, underlying purpose. Any sad truth in the story is covered by the slime brewing in a vast wasteland.  

Marvin Chachere 

San Pablo 

WE ARE ALL THE NEXT ‘DEEP THROAT’ 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Tom Lord’s commentary in support of the Iraq war was amoral and repulsive, but one could not do a better job in defending the indefensible.  

It is nonsense to think Bush & Co. initiated this war because “Weapons of Mass Destruction” threatened us. This was the justification given, by Bush and the media. We now know the “intelligence “was being “fixed around the facts,” as the Downing Street memo makes very clear.  

Mr. Lord concedes that Bush lied, but thinks it was necessary. Bush lied to the thousands of Iraq vets who now wait for treatment at his nearest under-funded V.A. hospital. I think they deserved the truth, and I think we all did. It is imperative in a democracy, which we aspire to be, to come to decisions regarding going to war based on honest debate. Instead, Bush and his apologists seem to be saying, “We have to destroy Democracy in order to save it” (or rather to control oil supplies).  

What of the current excuse—that the U.S. invaded to “liberate” Iraq? We need to look at the record of the Bush gang to expose that for what it is. We see that they have nothing but contempt for the people of the Middle East. Daniel Pipes, a Bush advisor, was a strong proponent of the arming of Saddam, back when Saddam was killing Iranians and Kurds by the thousands. We can also see the contempt in the detention of tens of thousands of ordinary Iraqis, many of whom never involved in any violent attacks, yet suffer systematic abuse at the hands of the U.S. military. All approved by guidelines prepared at the highest level of the Bush administration.  

What should those who care for peace and justice do?  

First, we must do all we can to expose Bush and his lies. At tomjoad.org, one can find copies of these documents, like the Downing Street memo, that provide all the evidence we need to prove that crimes have been committed.  

We can do our part to make sure that Bush will be brought to justice if we help spread the word to our neighbors, families, co-workers. We are all the “next Deep Throat.”  

Second, no local politician will escape accountability. That means Nancy Pelosi, who refuses to support any resolution regarding the withdrawal of U.S. troops, should never be allowed the luxury of an appearance without calling her to account for her endless devotion to Bush policy in Iraq, and her support for lobbies for militarism, such as AIPAC.  

Third, we can do all we can to counter military recruiters. There is nothing honorable in serving in a war of aggression. Indeed, it is those military men and women, who refused illegal orders, who we must honor. We must teach our youth to do likewise. We will best serve our nation and planet by ending the senseless, immoral, illegal U.S. occupation of Iraq.  

Jim Harris 

• 

THE ‘LEFT’ MADE ME DO IT 

Finally a new defense to robbery charges: The bank wouldn’t give me the money so I was justified in taking it. What a wonderful idea! We can probably use it in murder cases as well (the victim refused to die, so I was forced to kill her/him).  

That is the lesson we learn from Tom Lord’s amusing article on how the invasion of Iraq was right: The government was forced to lie to the country because the nasty “Left” refused to accept the real reason for the war—geopolitics and because the Iraqis had scientists and their regime was so terribly unfriendly, don’t you know. (I kid you not).  

Why, we wonder, haven’t we then invaded much of the rest of the world, including France—they have scientists (even more than Iraq), and they are certainly not too friendly these days. And, of course, Iran, Syria and the all-around favorite, North Korea? Maybe we shouldn’t ask that question because this administration may believe it has the moral, legal and political right to do so, and to hell with the rest of the world. 

For the record, I wouldn’t know a latte if I tripped over him or her. (Plain old retired workingperson’s decaf for me.) 

At least Christopher Hitchens justified his support for the invasion of Iraq on what he saw as the truth—support for the clearly oppressed Kurds whom he had come to like and admire. No lies for him, despite being flat-assed wrong about the probable results of an invasion as we can now see. 

Mal Burnstein 

Back in New York last week, I thought I wouldn’t have a problem finding literary inspiration. I went to the Catskills to look for excitement, adventure, and column topics. No surprise though, there wasn’t any there there—not even a piece of borderline artwork to recognize the condition. 

The village of Fleischmann’s was greener than in March when I last visited, but the weather was still iffy and the food had not improved so I headed down south in search of sun, something less Kosher, and a story. At my parents’ house on the Jersey shore it continued to rain. I took a swim, but the water was freezing. I returned to New York to visit with my friend Amy, but where I can usually count on hearing half a dozen amusing anecdotes, I found a shabby-chic, overpriced West Village flat, and a pile of dirty laundry. I called on friends in Westchester County and they invited me to join them for an evening in Yonkers at a pro-wrestling match sponsored by the New York State Wrestling Federation. I thought this might be my ticket to a Pulitzer Prize-winning article, or at least a 675-word, semi-interesting essay. 

Among the competitors (Vegas Nick, Sadam Insane, Fan Man, and Simply Luscious), one would think I could find a journalistic hook, but everything about this Greek-like tragedy made me nauseous and so I returned to Amy’s apartment on Carmine Street to help finish her laundry. Taking a break, we sat on the nearby steps of Our Lady of Pompeii Church. The people who passed by were in better shape and seemed higher on the evolutionary scale than anyone in Yonkers. I decided to stay in Manhattan.  

Amy, a public defender, was working night court at the Bronx Defenders. At 4 p.m. we walked to Union Square to catch an uptown train. As we crossed 14th Street I saw a woman I knew. The corner was crowded so I reached out and grabbed her, a faux pas in New York City, and a way to get myself into a lot of trouble. A reporter for In Touch Weekly, she was striding westward in Prada at a rapid pace. Her boyfriend was following on his skateboard, and when he saw me reach for her, he put himself between us. She quickly diffused the situation.  

“I’m on assignment,” she said, “so I can’t talk right now.”  

“I’m on assignment too,” I semi-lied.  

“Who are you following?” she asked  

“Following?”  

“Yes,” she said, “Who are you trying to scoop?”  

I hesitated. “I don’t quite…”  

“I’m looking for Brad and Angelina,” she interrupted. “They’re around here somewhere, and if I find them, I have to call the In Touch photo guys ASAP. Have you seen them?”  

“Brad and Angelina or the photo guys?” I asked.  

“Come on,” she said. “Don’t waste my time. I’m getting paid to spot them separately or together… it doesn’t really matter, though together would be awesome and together with her kid would be even more awesome.”  

“Haven’t seen them,” I confessed.  

“Gotta go,” she said hastily. “Great running into you, but journalism calls.”  

“I understand,” I said, though I’m not quite sure if I did. 

“Let me give you my number,” I shouted after her. “If you run into Ethan Hawke on the way to catching the uber-couple, will you call me?”  

“You got it,” she said. 

As she and her boyfriend disappeared into the crowd, I turned to Amy for advice. “Do you think I have a story now?” I asked.  

“No,” she said. “But listen, I’ve got to get going. I’ve been assigned an attempted murder case. A mother stabbed a daughter, or a daughter stabbed a mother, I can’t remember which. Either way, Angelina and Brad aren’t of any interest to me.” 

She paused and looked at me with an intensity that was disconcerting. 

“Think about it for just a minute,” she said. “Maybe there’s a story in that.”Ó

Party Potshots 

A Saturday night gathering of about 200 youths at the James Coney Recreation Center in the 1700 block of Eighth Street ended in a brawl about 11:30, punctuated by gunshots. 

The pistol rounds were fired off just after police arrived. Officers spotted the juvenile pistol-packer and set off in pursuit, said Berkeley Police spokesperson Officer Joe Okies. 

Surrounded by police, the young pistolero dropped his piece and submitted his wrists to steely encirclement. 

Strong-Arm Duo I 

A pair of teenagers slugged a 22-year-old man near the corner of Hearst and Shattuck avenues shortly before 6 p.m. Sunday, grabbed their victim’s wallet and ran off. 

No arrests have been made. 

Strong-Arm Duo II 

A second pair of juvenile strong-arm artists relieve d two 21-year-old men of their wallets between 7:30 and 8:30 p.m. Sunday. 

The first crime took place just after 7:30 p.m. near the corner of Dwight Way and Ellsworth Street, and the second heist occurred around 8:15 p.m. near the corner of Haste and Athe rton streets. 

Officers nabbed both youths soon after the second robbery. 

Triple Assault 

Three suspects were arrested on charges of assault with a deadly weapon in a kick and bottle beating of a Berkeley woman just before 8 p.m. Sunday. 

Police were sum moned to the corner of California Street and Hearst Avenue just in time to prevent more serious injury to the victim. 

Cab Driver Robber 

Three suspects robbed a taxi driver of his wallet and fare money at 9 p.m. Sunday near the intersection of Marina Bou levard and University Avenue. No arrests have been made, said Officer Okies.µ

Arsonist Targets Student 

Apartments on Telegraph 

A prompt response by Berkeley firefighters Sunday prevented a small arson blaze in a Telegraph Avenue apartment building from becoming something deadly. 

“It was a small fire, but a fire of great concern,” said Deputy Fire Chief David P. Orth. 

The building, four stories along Telegraph and three along Dwight Way, is home mainly to students. 

Police and firefighters arrived at the Glenn Building at 2550 Telegraph Ave. just after 5 p.m. Sunday, and the blaz e was out minutes later. 

“There was no one injured, and there was minimal damage,” Orth said. 

The Deputy Fire Chief said details of the event were being withheld to assist investigators in their search for the individuals responsible.Ã

Berkeley once was a place where ideals were pursued, where movements to make the world greener and more just were rooted, where openness and free speech were championed.  

Today it seems as though the city has been turned upside down. Benign smiles and cordiality at City Council meetings mask secret meetings that bring forth new alliances and sell out the people. Did I miss the meeting when the council decreed that Perception is Reality? To think we are now using Bush’s play book!  

While the mayor is an enthusiastic advocate for the environment, proclaiming the greenness of Berkeley far and wide, back home he is working to build more parking garages we don’t need, signing secret agreements with UC to further burden the city with the university’s development designs on the downtown, and using the federal Brown Fields money (intended for cleaning up toxic sites) to finance the underground parking at the Brower Center. In the secret agreement, he not only settled for a smaller fee for municipal services than UC offered, but he gave them a voice in and veto power over downtown planning.  

In the meantime the excuses that come from City Hall are an offense to our sensibilities. We have had five years of deceit pouring out of Washington. We surely have enough experience by now to know when a majority of our City Council is misleading us. For those of you troubled by this evaluation, what would you have done if Shirley Dean had made secret deals with the university?  

We all know the heart of our city is in trouble. But the downtown diaspora brought on by mindless development will not likely be fixed by bringing in the university and doing more studies and drawing up yet another plan, which will most likely blame it on the young and less fortunate. It will recommend a more stringent Measure O for panhandlers, locking the gates on those rowdy high school students at lunch time, and of course more parking.  

As a resident of downtown Berkeley I get the picture every day (reflected in the empty store windows) and have reluctantly concluded that there must be an evil god of parking garages that has blinded people to reality. Except to visit the library and to have lunch, there is little reason for anyone to come downtown in the daytime. After 47 years at their Shattuck location, Phoenix Optical moved to North Oakland yesterday. On June 30, after 99 years, Tupper & Reed will be a thing of the past. The small, owner-operated shops that made downtown Berkeley an interesting place have hit the road. Can you remember when downtown meant Edys’ hot fudge sundaes, the Blue and Gold Market, Pooh’s Corner, Huston’s shoes, the Kitchen, Hinks Department Store, Mrs.Bentley’s—she almost always said, “you don’t think you're going to fit into that, do you?”  

For the last 15 years I have watched developers come in and change the face of my street. Now it is an oasis of expensive apartments with revolving tenants and endless blocks of empty storefronts with rents that drove the shops out and keep them away. Buildings boldly carry names that are affronts to their history—the no-Gaia, Gaia Building; the Fine Arts Theater-less, Fine Arts Building, which sports a marquee advertising nothing...is that the whimper T.S. Eliot wrote of?  

But the prize for irony came only last week with the announcement that the new owners of the Seagate Building (the building for which the mayor’s people and the Berkeley Rep and Seagate carved out a secret deal to give the Rep all the mitigated space) have renamed it... the “Arpeggio,” while within the building, there will be not one square foot for music.  

And that’s how ”perception is reality” comes to be proclaimed from the towering rooftops of our city.  

Berkeley once was a place where ideals were pursued, where openness and free speech were championed. After a prolonged illness, that dream died, just the other day.  

The Emperor gave over His domain to the university for a song.  

But not before He etched our new motto onto the rubber stamps who make up a majority of the City Council and the commission members they appoint to carry out His orders.  

Anger gives way to a deep sadness. For the first time in my life, I feel as though there is a possibility that our nation and our city are beyond repair.  

Bonnie Hughes is a long-time Berkeley resident. 

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Reading the May 31 article and seeing the photo of driftwood/junk structures which might be removed if the Albany Bulb becomes part of the Eastshore State Park, I was taken back years and years to—does anyone remember?—the Mudflat Sculpture in the tidela nds beyond the Eastshore Freeway before it was expanded and “improved.” 

At high tide much of it was underwater. But if you happened to be driving to San Francisco at low tide, you could see Don Quixote on his rearing horse, a prop plane ready to take off from what looked like a buoy, a huge hand rising from the swampy tidelands clutching at the setting sun—and dozens of other creations that appeared and disappeared, made from driftwood and trash and whatever people could manage to cart out there in defiance of “No Trespassing” signs. 

At first it was just a goofy protuberance here and there (maybe Osha Neumann was involved in this too, I don’t remember, and after a while everyone claimed to have started it). Then whole art classes were wading out in the stinking sand (you know that smell when the tide goes out!), building and assembling things. I used to look forward to driving to The City, and, yes, we would slow down a bit to take in the latest whimsical creations in this ever changing display, which c heered us up in the most dire days when the Vietnam War dragged on and on and during the political lows that followed. 

My friend of bygone days, Bill Jackson—sometime teacher, poet, electrician, photographer—took it upon himself to photograph the ever-shifting display of art. (I’m sure he wasn’t the only one, but he was the one I knew.) I still have one of his photos somewhere—of the huge drowning, clutching hand rising from the tidelands, photographed through a red filter at sunset. One day, sitting in the Med, when it was still the caffeine-crossroads of all kinds of Berkeley folks, he told me that he had sold huge enlargements of his photos to the City of Emeryville, to be hung on the walls of their little City Hall. “What they paid me is no more than what it’ll cost me to have such enlargements made, but, oh, hell . . .” He was very pleased at even this recognition. “You ought to go see them!” 

I meant to, but . . . . 

Then Bill’s health declined rapidly, we lost contact, and I’m sure he is long dece ased. The new freeway was built, mudflat sculpture torn out, access impossible. Funky old Emeryville became a slick, shiny mall. Everything changes. Okay. 

A few months ago, I happened to be near the shiny new glass Emeryville City Hall. The little old bu ilding was still there, locked up. I went into the new building and asked if we could get into the old City Hall and look at the Bill Jackson Mudflat Sculpture photos. Blank looks. I asked a few people. They didn’t know what I was talking about. I explained, again and again, to different people. Finally, an older woman said, “Oh, yes, I remember those. They were taken down and put into a warehouse.” No, she didn’t know where. No, I couldn’t go to the warehouse to see them; no one had the time to find the warehouse, let me in, and search for them. 

I hope that the people trying to save the art at Albany Bulb, can also start a campaign to hang those old Mudflat Sculpture photos somewhere. The thought of them jammed into that warehouse, lost, forgotten, is sad. 

Dorothy Bryant is a Berkeley author.  

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On May 26, the Zoning Adjustments Board ruled that an application to construct a three-story mixed-use building with two apartments over ground-floor commercial space at 3045 Shattuck Ave. (aka the “Flying Cottage”) could be approved by city planning staff on a zoning certificate. This type of staff-level approval requires no public hearing and cannot be appealed by neighbors to ZAB or City Council, as would be the case if ZAB had ruled that one or more use permits were required. 

The proposed remodeling puts the two required off-street parking spaces for the flats in the rear yard, adjacent to the next-door residence. Consequently, ZAB’s decision effectively means that no use permit or public hearing is required to convert required yards to parking lots. 

ZAB’s decision was directly counter to Berkeley’s Zoning Ordinance. Per section 23F.04.010, a required yard must be “unoccupied and unobstructed ... by the presence of a parking space.” For 3045 Shattuck, a 15-foot rear yard is required under section 23E.52.070.D.2. More generally, all properties in commercial districts must, under section 23E.04.050.C, be separated from adjacent residential properties by a 10-foot rear yard and/or five-foot side yards; most residential properties in the city are required to have 15-foot rear yards and five-foot side yards. Parking is generally prohibited in front yards, but allowed in the non-required portion of side and rear yards. 

This by no means constitutes a flat prohibition against parking in yards. By the terms of the Zoning Ordinance, most of these restrictions can be eased or eliminated provided that, after a public hearing, ZAB grants the owner a use permit. Some of the restrictions may be relaxed by planning staff subject to an administrative use permit, which can be appealed to ZAB if any neighbor wants a public hearing on the matter. In either case, ZAB’s decision may be appealed to the City Council. 

Thus the Zoning Ordinance provides a reasonable balance between developers and neighbors. If you want to park right up against your side fence, or at the back of your rear yard, you can apply for a use permit. If your neighbors object, ZAB will weigh the benefit to you and the detriment to your immediate neighbors and the neighborhood in general, and seek a reasonable compromise. If the developer or neighbors think the decision is unreasonable, they can appeal to the City Council; if they don’t like the City Council’s decision, they vote for somebody else in the next election. 

ZAB’s decision eliminates this balance. If your neighbors want to turn their back or side yards into parking lots they are free to do so, and you have nothing to say about it. In plain English, it’s a right to pave. 

Since ZAB’s decision was contrary to the clear and unambiguous text of the law, the most direct remedy as regards both 3045 Shattuck and the general zoning issues would be to file a petition for writ with the Alameda Superior Court. We’d stand a fairly good chance of winning such a suit: as ZAB member and land-use lawyer Richard Judd put it, he wouldn’t want to have to explain that decision to a judge. Unfortunately, it’s just too expensive. Any lawyers want to volunteer? Drop me a note at robert@lauriston.com. (Even without a writ we still have a shot at reining in the project through the design review process.) 

More generally, as regards the right to pave, the solution is cheap and simple: call your City Council representatives. Tell them to impose a moratorium on parking in required yards under zoning certificates until such time as the Zoning Ordinance can be modified as necessary to require public hearings on putting parking spaces in required yards. 

Robert Lauriston is the official representative of neighbors opposed to the 3045 Shattuck project. 

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The mood was somber when FBI officials recently dug up the body of Emmett Till in suburban Chicago. The mood should have been downright grim. If ever there was a racial lynching case that screamed for federal action it was the Till case. And there are more. 

While on a visit to Mississippi in 1955, the 14-year-old Till was kidnapped from his home at gunpoint, savagely beaten, shot and dumped in a river.  

The instant that story broke nationally, black leaders demanded that the Justice Department and the FBI take action. This was the right demand to make, given the absolute refusal of white Southern sheriffs to arrest whites suspected of racial murders. In the rare cases they were arrested, all-white juries refused to convict them.  

The Till case was no exception. In a farce of a trial, the two white men who killed Till were quickly acquitted. Till’s murder continued to send political shock waves across the nation, and black leaders, labor organizations and numerous public officials implored the Justice Department to get involved. Even then, there was strong suspicion that others were either directly involved in the murder, or had knowledge of the killing. 

Yet Justice Department officials refused to do anything. They claimed that state officials were solely responsible for prosecuting racially motivated crimes, and if those officials refused to do so, or conducted a deliberately incompetent prosecution, there was little they could do. This, however, was blatant legal evasion.  

Federal statutes gave the Justice Department the power to prosecute individuals on civil rights charges when state prosecutors either failed to bring charges, or conducted a weak, ineffectual prosecution that resulted in acquittals. Federal law also gave the Justice Department the power to prosecute public officials and law enforcement officers who committed or conspired with others to commit acts of racial violence. Congress enacted the latter statutes immediately after the Civil War, and they were aimed at specifically punishing racial attacks against blacks. In many of the racial killings, local sheriffs and police officers directly participated in the attacks or aided and abetted the killers.  

Till was abducted at gunpoint. That made it a kidnapping case. This automatically gave federal authorities jurisdiction over the case. They could have easily brought civil rights charges against the two principal defendants and any others who were suspected of complicity in his murder.  

Till, therefore, was not solely a victim of a racist white jury. He was also the victim of a racially indifferent federal government. In the pre-civil rights era, presidents and their attorneys general typically ignored or sparingly used federal statutes to prosecute criminal civil rights abuses. This had less to do with the personalities or potential racial bigotry of the men in the White House and the Justice Department than with political expediency. They were determined not to offend the politically powerful South.  

A half-century later, federal officials were still reluctant to get involved. It took a resolution by Illinois congressman Bobby Rush and demands by civil rights leaders to get the Justice Department to agree to probe the Till murder to see if any new charges could be brought.  

Federal officials should not stop with the Till case. There are still more racial murders that scream for redress. Mack Charles Parker, Herbert Lee and Jimmy Lee Jackson, to name three of the more blatant cases, were victims of racially motivated violence. No state or federal charges were ever brought against their murderers. Some of their suspected killers may still be alive.  

Also, according to FBI reports, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a paramilitary terror squad in Mississippi, committed several murders between 1960 and 1965. In nearly all cases, FBI agents quickly learned the identities of the suspected killers through Klan informants or the men’s own boasts of the killings. Yet there was only a token effort made to bring them to justice.  

In a final irony that tells much about the changing times, one of the FBI officials who helped supervise Till’s exhumation was black, and born in the South the same year that Till was killed. At the gravesite, he noted that the justice system turns slowly, but it still turns. State and federal prosecutors can prove him right by bringing Till’s killers to justice.  

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a political analyst and the author of The Crisis in Black and Black (Middle Passage Press). 

Two years after La Peña was founded in the same place where it is today in South Berkeley, I arrived to the East Coast as an exile. Not escaping but expelled from Pinochet’s Chile, one of the bloodiest military dictatorship in the continent. I was a youn g rebel, a bit of poet and musician who loved the political process that in 1970 opened minds giving us a deep sense of latinoamericanismo.  

At that time, a number of kids, like me, were looking at the world through different prisms. The revolution of th e flowers, the peace movement, the dusty bearded ones who changed history with Cuba, the beat poets in San Francisco, the tupamaros in Uruguay, the Black Panthers in Oakland and Che Guevara in … everywhere, were like a ripped fruit ready to be eaten.  

In Chile, we had our own revolution, a revolution that took us from the street corner, from the neighborhood gangs, to the meetings, the books, the martial arts, and the political work. Salvador Allende brought with him not only his “Chilean Way to Socialism” program but also a wave of new things, new music, new films, new books, great coffee, and new hopes for a better and more just society.  

I met him once. The sun was setting over the Pacific Ocean when several hundred of people gathered in the central plaza to see and hear Allende and his friend Pablo Neruda. I was there. The year was probably 1969, and the city was Antofagasta, a city in the northern desert of the Chilean coast. At the end of the rally Allende walked toward the group of youngsters I w as with, he briefly look at me and touched my shoulder while saying something like “I which I could stay longer but I’m a bit tired, compañerito!” and he disappeared into the crowd. I remember his black thick eyeglasses, his candid smile, his brown poncho but I also remember that little tickle in my stomach, that jolt one gets when experience something really out of the ordinary. 

His revolution lasted for one thousand days. Everything came to an end in 1973 when Pinochet and his military junta, heavily e ncouraged by the lethal duo Nixon/Kissinger, took over the country, closed the judiciary branches and the legislatives houses, prohibited the unions, killed and incarcerated thousand of people among them students workers, teachers, artists—Victor Jara was one of them. Rather than giving Pinochet the pleasure of killing him, Allende, in one of the most heroic epics of the last century, took his own life. 

The Prussian Chilean army turned against its own people and a dark cover, like a thick wool Andean poncho, covered Chile as Hell came down along with the planes bombing the government palace of La Moneda. All at the expense of the oblivious U.S. tax payers. 

In 1976 I was captured by Pinochet’s secret police and sent to jail for about a year. I was lucky. I only spent one week disappeared. One year later I was expelled out of the country and arrived in Boston—a mea culpa, or Carter’s Human Rights policies or international pressure, or something, made the U.S. government hand over 400 visas for Chilean pol itical prisoners. “Solo para salir del pais,” my passport read (“only good to exit the country.”) 

Juan Diaz was a Chilean exile who was living in Berkeley and doing volunteer work at La Peña at that time. Somehow he knew—the Chilean exile diaspora was still small and news ran fast—I was a musician, a panpipes and charango player, that little 10-string instrument—very popular these days at Fisherman’s Wharf and pretty much associated, like many other traditional instruments, with the Allende revolution.  

Once Juan, the cultural activist, called me to New York, where I was living, and invited me to come to La Peña. “Hay mucho trabajo cultural en solidaridad con Chile aqui,” he told me among other enticing things. In fact one aspect of La Peña’s cultural a nd solidarity work was to create a Latin American music ensemble. I was lucky again; a charango player was very much needed. 

Going to California and returning to the Pacific Ocean of my youth was a very persuasive idea. However, what got me drunk was the idea of finally knowing La Peña. This welcoming place run by angry-gringos in a crazy city called Berkeley. 

I took my worn-out charango, a plane and arrived in Oakland in 1979. One year later Juan, the fighter, went back to Chile “illegally” to join the resistance movement and was gunned down by Pinochet Gestapo forces. I felt that same jolt in my stomach of 13 years ago, only this time it was a mix of rage and grief. 

The music, the colorful mural, the paintings, the poetry, the politics, and the wine (not Chilean wine because we had the—Nothing for/Nothing from Pinochet—boycott those years). I felt at home immediately at La Peña. There, I worked as a volunteer in the restaurant, organized different events, taught music, and sung in the chorus, but my most important position was as a member of Grupo Raiz, a sextet of Latin American music.  

For the next five years we devoted the group and our songs to the plight of the Chilean people, denounced the atrocities of the dictatorship, and help several human rights NGOs inside Chile. With the support of La Peña we toured nationally and abroad. We become part of an international cultural exchange and participated in Nueva Cancion, new song, round tables and festivals. We had the chance to met great musicians, songwriters, and weighty creative minds. 

La Peña was not only supporting all these work but also was a place where many of us in the area got together to meet people of many other cultures, to talk about political issues, to fall in love, and to eat sup erb food. During the eighties and because of the many wars down south, we also had the chance to meet, welcome, and help many exiles and refugees from Central America. 

Today La Peña is still carring on these same ideals, the same aroma of solidarity, edu cation, justice, art, and culture, and of course, good food. The Nexgen, the Hecho en Califas festival and conference, the Mujeres and Cuentos series and many other art and cultural initiatives are endeavors to continue with the just ideas and commitments of this group of students and young activists who started all 30 years ago. Hail to them! 

Fernando A. Torres, a musician and poet, is publicity coordinator for La Peña.›r

On Saturday La Peña Cultural Center will celebrate its 30th anniversary with a free street festival at the corner of Prince Street and Shattuck Avenue. 

The center, founded in June of 1975, was the creation of a group of Bay Area activists who had come together to protest the overthrow of President Salvador Allende in Chile two years earlier. La Peña (which means “gathering place” in Spanish) was modeled after the peñas of Latin America where people would traditionally come together over music, food and politics. 

For the past three decades Berkeley’s La Peña, at 3105 Shattuck Ave., has created a community, establishing itself as one of the East Bay’s most visible clubs for world music, art and progressive political activism. The club showcases both local and international musicians, writers and artists. 

Saturday’s festival, from noon to 6 p.m., will feature live music, dancing, arts and community booths, food and kids activities.  

Scheduled performers include Pachasiku, Rafael Manriquez, La Peña Afro Cuban Youth Ensemble, La Peña Bomba Class, Jesus Diaz & QBA, La Familia, Youth Movement Records and DJ Jose Ruiz. A separate kids’ stage will run until 2 p.m. with Gary Lapow, Bonnie Lockhardt, Asheba and others.  

The center sponsors activities and performances with mostly a Latin American emphasis, but does not limit its vision or ears to only that part of the world. 

Fernando Torres, La Peña’s publicity coordinator, says, “The art has always been part of an educational vision of bringing people together to understand issues such as racism, imperialism, and the great disparities between the rich and the poor, and the need to do something about it.” 

Take a look at the extraordinary mural which covers half of La Peña’s building (close to the intersection where the festival will be held Saturday) and you’ll see social activists honored there who had little or nothing to do with Latin America: Paul Robeson, for example. But they shared the same values. Over the years, La Peña has been linked to many of the activist groups with different causes, including the Black Panthers and the United Farm Workers. But the center has maintained its focus on art. 

More recently La Peña has focused on working with young people, creating a number of groups with different interests in the arts. The Afro-Cuban Youth Ensemble, for example, will be part of the entertainment offered at the street festival. 

The La Peña 30th Anniversary Street Festival will be held from noon to 6 p.m. Saturday, June 11, at the intersection of Shattuck Avenue and Prince Street. Admission is free.

“Perhaps we exploit the past for what the present lacks.” ... 

“Are you saying intimacy clouds knowledge?” ... “The young are always unforgiving. That’s part of your charm.” 

Such provocative, even leading one-liners and repartees are spoken during Honour, at the Berkeley Rep’s Thrust Stage. At moments throughout the play, the dialogue seems to be a series of asides, a commentary by the characters on the theme rather than a vehicle (or revelation) of dramatic action. 

A triangle is played out between three writers: Gus, a successful journalist (John Doman); Claudia (Christa Scott-Reed), a younger journalist writing a profile on Gus; and Gus’s wife, Honor (Kathleen Chalfant), a poet whose career went on hold years earlier to support Gus’s and raise their now college-age daughter, Sophie (Emily Donahoe). 

Claudia openly admires Gus, but is critical of Honor. “These days we have an awareness of what we give up,” Claudia says to her. “You mean a resentment?” counters Honor. The two trade shots verbally and patronize each other across a generational gulf of mutual incomprehension and suspicion. 

It’s just that separation that provides the attraction between older man and younger woman. Each has what the other feels is missing from life. He has success, the fruit of ambition and professional experience; she has an insatiable drive, and the thirst for recognition, self-fulfillment. 

Honor is caught in the middle. Her agony is intensified into alienation as she’s admonished, scolded, even bullied in different ways by the others over what they take to be her self-denying weakness and complacency. When Sophie declares Honor’s troubles began with her marriage to Gus, Honor admonishes her in turn to try to come to terms with him: “He can stop being my husband, or her lover, but he can never stop being your father. So don’t become me.” 

Joanna Murray-Smith, the playwright said she wanted to write “a very familiar, not to say clichéd, story” but “in a way that breathed life.” Clearly, the nuances are the crucial element: “I wanted [the audience to understand] the motivations of all the characters ... to feel how confusing life is ... I find the insufficiencies of ideology endlessly interesting territory.” 

Admirable ambition, suited to high drama in the spirit of Euripides, Ibsen, Strindberg and Honour, at moments, especially early on, seems to deliver. This is the territory, in our time, of Pinter and the best of David Mamet. 

But Honour droops under the weight of its own ambition, just as Claudia comes to when she tells Honor, “I longed for parents like you ... I wish I could write like you!” 

Having created an enviable, talented poet, the script goes from biting one-liners to speeches, finally to sticky impressions of Pinteresque repetitive diction and it gets stickier. Poet-envy is contagious, along with the fear of being “obvious,” and finally the play becomes a wish-fulfillment charm for audience as well as characters—and, presumably, the playwright—to ward off the dread of such “a very familiar, not to say clichéd, story” happening. 

As the plot often resembles the adulterous triangle between Faye Dunaway, William Holden and Beatrice Straight in Network, it’s an easy stretch to imagine our heroine in the title role intoning “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”  

The plot turns over too abruptly for any motivations to be explored. The characters find themselves doing what they comment on. The dialogue, which has wit until breaking down into monologue and skeletal fragment, becomes supertitles, a translation or explanation of the action rather than its coefficient. 

The cast, imported from New York, with Berkeley Rep Artistic Director Tony Taccone presiding, puts on a very professional, verbally bright show in front of a Scandinavian Modern set that converts from office to home, backed by a wall of frosted glass subtly alive with tonal lighting effects that bring to mind a poem by David Gitin: “the door/slopes of light/your body/a delay/in glass”—perfect, substantial metaphor—whether in glass and light, or in words—for the evanescent, ineffable emotions around mortality and longing that slip Honour’s grasp. 

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This year’s Midsummer Mozart Festival kicks off a month ahead of schedule with a sneak preview Mozart at a garden party this coming Sunday from 3:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. at 1140 Arlington Blvd. in El Cerrito.  

The repertoire will include selections from Mozart’s operas arranged for two instruments; Quartet in D major for flute, violin, viola and cello; and Duo in G major for violin and viola. All of the performers are regulars with the festival orchestra and will include Robin Hansen, violin, Victor Romasevich, viola and Maria Tamburrino, flute. 

One of the inviting aspects of the festival, which formally opens July 14, is that instead of the often cold, remote environment of concert halls, these performances take place in more intimate venues like churches, wineries and pocket theaters. The music is presented in a manner closer to the way it was first heard in Mozart’s time. 

The music at Sunday’s garden party will allow listeners to get closer still. Maestro George Cleve has chosen pieces that shine a light on some of the larger compositions to be played later in the season. Limited to 100 guests, there is a $50 admission fee for this benefit event which includes complimentary food and wine, and an autographed festival concert CD.  

The Quartet, for instance, dates from the 15-month tour Mozart and his mother began in late 1777. He wrote the Quartet for a wealthy Dutch flautist he met in Mannheim where he had fallen in love with his future wife’s older sister, Aloysia Weber. This tour ended badly in every way: the Dutchman ended up underpaying him, Aloysia dumped him, his amazing and insurmountable lack of business sense first surfaced, and when they got to Paris, where he continued to be a mark for everyone who met him, his mother died.  

In spite of this he produced the charming, multi-faceted No. 31 in D major, both featured in the festival’s first program. 

The Duo was written in Salzburg in the summer of 1783. This was Mozart’s first return to his hometown since leaving the Archbishop’s service. It was also the first time that Constanze, his wife of one year, would meet his father who had disapproved of the marriage. The second program of the festival, which will open July 21, will feature the Great Mass in C minor. He had made a vow to write a mass when Constanze was ill. While in Salzburg, she performed the difficult soprano part of this transcendent mass in its final, unfinished form. 

First Program 

The formal Midsummer Mozart Festival events include a variety of favorites and surprises. Since Program One begins on July 14, Les Petits Riens and the Paris Symphony were obvious choices to commemorate Bastille Day. At the July 14 and 15 shows only there will be the debut of dances commissioned by the festival for the overture and some of the dances from Les Petits Rien, choreographed and danced by Maria Basile. Those attending July 16 and 17 shows will hear the music, but sans terpsichore. 

From 1769 through 1779, Mozart often composed the Finalmusik, music played outdoors celebrating the festivities that signaled the end of Salzburg’s academic year in early August. One of these compositions, composed when Mozart was 16, the celebratory Divertimento No. 2 in D major for flute, oboe, bassoon, four horns and strings, K.131, will be included in the first program of the festival.  

The cherry on top for this program is the Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola in E flat major, K. 364, featuring violinist Robin Hansen and violist Victor Romasevich. An early Mozart masterpiece from his 23rd year, the back and forth movement and weaving interplay between the “male” violin and the “female” viola. It is one of the most ravishing achievements of any music ever composed anywhere in the world. 

Second Program 

The festival’s second program focuses on Mozart’s compositions from 1781 through 1786. Mozart’s first of eight full-scale operas was Idomeneo, Rè di Creta, K.366, composed for Elector Karl Theodor of Bavaria. For this program, Cleve will perform only the strange overture with its ominous, disappearing ending, so unlike the usual buildup before an opera begins. The aforementioned Great Mass in C minor will feature Christina Major and Deborah Berioli, sopranos; Joseph Muir, tenor; Joseph Wright, baritone; and The Cantabile Chorale. Mozart wrote only a few pieces of sacred music after leaving Salzburg, but every one is a masterpiece with this coming in just a bit behind his Requiem.  

World-renowned pianist Seymour Lipkin will perform the Piano Concerto No. 15 in B flat major, K.450, said to be the most technically challenging of all of Mozart’s piano concertos. Lipkin will also be at the keyboard to accompany Christina Major singing “Ch'io mi scordi di te?”, Scena and Rondo for Soprano, Piano Obligato and Orchestra, K.505. Mozart composed this heartbreaking, demanding concert aria for his English friend Nancy Storace’s Viennese farewell concert with himself at the keyboard. This program, in particular, should be a powerhouse event with four remarkable works from such varied genres being performed. 

Program One of the 31st annual Midsummer Mozart Festival will be presented July 14 at 7:30 p.m. at the Garden Theatre, Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga; Friday, July 15, at 8 p.m. at the Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco; Saturday, July 16, at 6:30 p.m. at Gundlach Bundschu Winery, Sonoma; and Sunday, July 17, at 7 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, Berkeley. 

Program Two will be presented Thursday, July 21, at 7:30 p.m. at Mission Santa Clara, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara; Friday, July 22, at 8 p.m. at the Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco; Saturday, July 23, at 6:30 p.m. at Gundlach Bundschu Winery, Sonoma; and Sunday, July 24, at 7 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, Berkeley.  

Each concert is preceded by a half hour talk. For tickets and information, call (415) 627-9145 or go to www.midsummermozart.org. For tickets and information about Sunday’s Mozart in the Garden benefit in El Cerrito call (415) 627-9141. 

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TUESDAY, JUNE 7 

FILM 

Berkeley High School Film Festival at 7 p.m. at the Little Theater, Allston Way between Milvia and MLK. Tickets are $8 adults, $5 students.  

Alternative Vision: “Lo-Fi Landscapes: Pictures form the New World” with filmmakers Bill Brown, Thomas Comerford, and Melinda Stone at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Jean Schiffman, author of “The Working Actor’s Toolkit” in discussion with actor Lorri Holt at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Central Library, Community Room, 2090 Kittredge. 981-6100. 

“Oakland’s Chinatown” with William Wong at 7 p.m. at El Cerrito Library, 6510 Stockton Ave. 526-7512.  

James Howard Kunstler describes “The Long Emergency: Surviving Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Marcus O’Realius & The Transplantdentalists at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $16.50- $17.50. 548-1761.  

Duncan James, jazz guitar, at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Singers’ Showcase at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ.  

Ledisi with the Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra in a tribute to Sarah Vaughn at 8 and 10 p.m. through Thurs. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $6-$10. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Matthew Sperry Memorial Festival with Johannes Bergmark at 8 p.m. at 21 Grand, 416 25th St. Oakland. Tickets are $6-$50.  

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 8 

FILM 

Seventies Underground: “The Remake” with filmmaker RIck Schmidt at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Elijah Wald reads from “The Mayor of MacDougal Street,” a memoir by folk musician Dave Van Ronk, which Wald completed after Van Ronk’s death, at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698.  

Aaron Glantz describes “How America Lost Iraq” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

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

Café Poetry with Kira Allen at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña. Donation $2. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

“Music for the Spirit” harpsichord concert at noon at First Presbyterian Church of Oakland, 2619 Broadway. 444-3555.  

Ned Boynton Trio at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Sonic Camouflage at 8 p.m. at Cafe Van Kleef, 1621 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. 763-7711. www.cafevankleef.com  

Calvin Keys Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ.  

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

Paul Geremia at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761.  

THURSDAY, JUNE 9 

EXHIBTIONS 

June Garden Show with works by Carol Bevilaqua, Marlie De Swart, Kim Webster, Bella Bigsby and Vicki Breazeale. Reception at 6 p.m. at ACCI Gallery, 1652 Shattuck Ave. Exhibit runs to July 1. 843-2527. www.accigallery.com 

“Familiar Faces, Distant Lands” Oil Paintings by Susan Hall, Mary Jonlic and Nika. Reception at 6 p.m. at Addison Street Windows, 2018 Addison St. Exhibit runs to June 30. 981-7546. 

Alvarado Artists Group Show with works by Marilyn MacGregor, Barbara Werner, Joan Lakin Mikkelsen, Carla Dole and MJ Orcutt at the Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. Reception at 6 p.m. 848-1228.  

THEATER 

“A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream” performed by the Oxford School Fifth Grade, set in “ancient Berkeley in the time of great Hip-Hop” at 9:15 a.m. at Live Oak Park.  

Traveling Jewish Theater, “Cherry Docs” at 8 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Theater. Tickets are $23-$34. www.atjt.com 

FILM 

Anime: “Howl’s Moving Castle” at 6 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Sally Woodbridge will discuss and show photographs from “San Francisco Architecture: An Illustrated Guide to the Outstanding Buildings, Public Artworks, and Parks in the Bay Area of California,” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698.  

“One Teacher in Ten” contributions of LGBT educators at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Liz Plummer, soprano, at 12:15 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge at Shattuck. 981-6235.  

Devil Makes Three at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $16.50-$17.50. 548-1761.  

Mitch Marcus Quintet at 9 p.m. at Cafe Van Kleef, 1621 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Cost is $5. 763-7711.  

Palindrome with Bryan Girard at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ.  

Hot Club Sandwich, Klezmania!, Barbary Coast Guitar Duo at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082.  

Anton Schwartz and Bill Bell at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

FRIDAY, JUNE 10 

THEATER 

Antares Ensemble “Hellenic Image” choruses and monologues from Greek tragedies at 8 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club. Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. through June 26. Tickets are $10-$35. 525-3254.  

Berkeley Rep, “Honour” opens at the Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St. and runs through July 3. Tickets are $20-$39. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

California Shakespeare Theater, “Othello” at 8 p.m. at Bruns Amphitheater, 100 Gateway Blvd., between Berkeley and Orinda, through July 3. Tickets are $10-$55. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org 

“Cantiflas!” a bilingual play written and performed by Herbert Siguenza Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $16-$18. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Contra Costa Civic Theater “Private Lives” Noel Coward’s comedy. Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. through June 12., at 951 Pomona Ave., El Cerrito. Tickets are $10. 524-9132. www.ccct.org 

Shotgun Players, “Arabian Night” Thurs.-Sun. at 8 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. until July 10. Tickets are $10-$30. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

Subterranean Shakespeare “The Taming of the Shrew,” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center in Live Oak Park, through June 24. For reservations call 276-3871. 

Un-Scripted Theater Company “The Short and the Long of It” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., through June 25 at Temescal Arts Center, 511 48th St., Oakland. Tickets are $7-$10. 415-869-5384. www.un-scripted.com 

FILM 

American Outlaws: “Wild in the Streets” with Village Voice critic J. Hoberman at 7 p.m. at Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Ambassador Joe Wilson describes “The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies That Put The White House on Trial and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Camille Peri and Kate Moses describe motherhood in “Because I Said So” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

By the Light of the Moon open mic for women at 7:30 p.m. at Changemakers, 6536 Telegraph Ave. 655-2405. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley High Jazz Ensemble with the Lab Band and the Lab Band Combo at 7 p.m. at the Florence Schwimley Little Theater, at Berkeley High.  

Point Richmond Music with Mojo Hand and Anna Maria Flechero in a free outdoor concert at 5:30 p.m. at Baltic Square, behind 117 Park Place, in Point Richmond. 223-3882. 

The Christy Dana Quintet at 8 p.m. at The Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. at Ashby. Tickets are $12-$15. 524-1124. 

“Singin’ & Swingin’” with Music in the Community Youth and Black Repertory Group at 8 p.m. at Black Rep Theater, 3201 Adeline St. Tickets are $5-$10. 652-2120. 

Hideo Date, Stephanie Bruce and Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Corinne West at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

37th Anniversary Revue hosted by Phil Marsh, with Mayne Smith, Eric & Suzy Thompson, Suzanne Fox & Eric Park at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Vince Wallace Quintet at 9 p.m. at Cafe Van Kleef, 1621 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Cost is $5. 763-7711. www.cafevankleef.com  

Pocket, 7th Direction at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

The Lips at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

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

Bob Marley Student Ensemble at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Diego’s Umbrella, funk, jazz at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $25. 548-1159. www.shattuckdownlow.com 

Eleven Eyes at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Century of War, Black Market Bombs at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

Yellowjackets at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $15-$22. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SATURDAY, JUNE 11 

EXHIBITIONS 

The Eureka Fellowship Awards Exhibition opens at the Berkeley Art Museum and runs through August 14. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

Alvarado Artists Group Show with works by Marilyn MacGregor, Barbara Werner, Joan Lakin Mikkelsen, Carla Dole and MJ Orcutt at the Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. Reception for the artists at 1 p.m. 848-1228.  

“New Work” paintings by Yasuko Kaya, Chung Ae Kim, Mitsuyo Moore. Reception at 7 p.m. at 4th Street Studio, 1717D 4th St. 527-0600. www.fourthstreetstudio.com 

THEATER 

Living Arts Playback Theater Ensemble improvisational theater at 8 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave. Free but reservations suggested. 595-5500, ext. 25. 

“Cantiflas!” a bilingual play written and performed by Herbert Siguenza at 8 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $16-$18. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Traveling Jewish Theater, “Cherry Docs” at 8 p.m. and Sun. at 2 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Theater. Tickets are $23-$34. www.atjt.com 

FILM 

American Outlaws: “Joe” at 7 p.m. and “Myra Breckenridge” at 9:20 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Joann Eckstut explains “The Color Palette Primer: A Guide to Choosing Ideal Color Combinations for Your Home” at 3 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

La Peña Day with live music and activities, from noon to 6 p.m. at the intersection of Prince and Shattuck. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Betty Shaw, Ellen Hoffman, India Cooke Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Hal Stein Quartet at 9 p.m. at Cafe Van Kleef, 1621 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Cost is $5. 763-7711 www.cafevankleef.com 

Wayward Monks at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10. www.epicarts.org 

David Gans, Mario DeSio, and Jeff Pehrson at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Full at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

House Jacks at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Misturada Latin Jazz Group at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $3. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

SFJazz All-Star High School Ensemble at 8 p.m. at the Jazz- 

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

Dave Bernstein Quartet at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Shades of Green at 7 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7. 558-0881. 

“The Saucy Summer Sessions” at 10 p.m. at Club Oasis, 135 12th St., Oakland. Cost is $10. 763-0404.  

Louise Taft Memorial Dance Concert with Farma, The Natives, Fun with Finnoula at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Groovie Ghoulies, The Mormans, at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, JUNE 12 

CHILDREN 

Polish Folk Culture through Song and Dance with Lowiczanie Polish Folk Dance and Music at 2 p.m. at Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, Bancroft at College. 643-7648. 

“Peaceful Families, Peaceful World” a concert with singer/songwriter Betsy Rose at 4 p.m. in the Large Assembly of First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Suggested donation is $5 per person or $10 per family. 

EXHIBITIONS 

The Eureka Fellowship Awards Exhibition Artists’ Talks at 3 p.m.at the Berkeley Art Museum and runs through August 14. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Flash with Martha Rhodes, Robert Thomas, and Daniel Tobin at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Pacific Mozart Ensemble, “A Capella Jazz & Pop” at 5 p.m. at The Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Tickets are $15-$20. 415-705-0848. www.pacificmozart.org 

Mozart in the Garden with George Cleve and Festival artists at 3:30 p.m. in a private home in the East Bay Hills. Tickets are $50. 415-627-9141. 

“Café Buenos Aires” Tango music with Creative Voices at 4 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave. Live Oak Park. Tickets are $15-$18. 415-861-3680. www.creativevoices.org 

Crying High Brazilian Jazz and Choro Band at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

DJ & Brook at 3 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Americana Unplugged: Matt Kinman and the Oldtime Seranaders at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 655-5715. 

Art of the Trio: Dick Conte Trio at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazz- 

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

“Stand Up & Get Down” Music and Comedy Night Fundraiser for East Bay Community Mediation at 7 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Alison Brown at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Mastema, 5 Days Dirty, Second Shot at 5 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

MONDAY, JUNE 13 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Tim Farrington reads from his new novel “Lizzie’s War” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Enrique Cruz describes his “Autobiography of an Ex-Chess Player,” in Spanish, at at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

www.codysbooks.com  

Poetry Express with Jan Steckel at 7 p.m., at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 644-3977. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Geraldine Walther, violin, at 7:30 p.m. in a private home in Berkeley. Benefit for The Crowden School. Tickets are $100, or $180 for two. 559-6910. 

Trovatore, traditional Italian songs, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Frankye Kelly, CD release party at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $6-$10. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com

When we import all those magnificent oaks—gracious eastern red oaks, ziggy little pin oaks, stately English oaks—to line our streets and grace our gardens and public places, we’re joining an old tradition. It’s a globalization that dates back to some of the earliest human explorations: we’ve moved taro, breadfruit, and later pineapples throughout Polynesia; coffee between Africa and Asia and South America. 

Chilipepper was moved to Eurasia from the Americas and adopted with such enthusiasm that its dozens of varieties are considered an intrinsic part of cuisines from Italian and Spanish to Hungarian, from Ethiopian and Mozambican to South Indian and Thai, Szechuanese and Filipino. Corn traveled with migrants and traders from Central America to North and South America, and moved to the Eastern Hemisphere where it found employment in every field from European livestock fodder to Southeast Asian dessert topping. (For all I know, it’s a floor wax somewhere.) 

Ornamentals came along too. Tracking their course along human migration routes would be a nice addition to Spencer Wells’ (human) Genographic project. The legend about feral mustard in California is that the Spanish padres scattered them to make a golden, parable-evoking path among the mission outposts, as well as for seasoning. 

In recent history, the Victorians were outstanding examples of beauty-bespelled, novelty-seeking plant hunters. When one of them invented the Wardian case, tender tropicals could be sent for propagation to greenhouses and gardens all over, and so we have araucarias and semitropical palms marking Victorian architecture all around us. 

But oaks are much easier to transport: acorns keep well, and they have enough nutrition to give a seedling tree a good start. They also have nutrition for us—which might account for the fringes of some American oaks’ home ranges—and for other animals. And that latter seems to account for still more aspects of their distribution. 

Glenn Keator, in his book The Life of an Oak: An Intimate Portrait, mentions an interesting fact: 

The distribution of jay species and their diversification coincide closely with the distribution and diversification of oaks. The two areas of the world most noted for their great variety of oaks, Southeast Asia and the highlands of Mexico, are also areas of great jay diversity. 

Oaks are so generous with their acorns that humans that eat them might not have not to plant them often, but I’d bet we extended the ranges of some favored species, like the white oaks, that require less processing to make them palatable. In our area, the first people had familial property rights over the crops of certain trees, and the walk from seafood on the bay shore up to the hills to gather and process acorns was a seasonal village ritual. They built granaries to keep the acorns from sprouting, rotting, or being carried off by furred and feathered neighbors. 

Those neighbors had other ways to store acorns. Acorn woodpeckers famously use “mast trees”—they riddle a tree (or sometimes a pole or building, to people’s alarm) with neat round holes; in each hole they store an acorn, and as the acorns dry and shrink, the birds shuffle them around to other, smaller holes, the very image of flying file clerks. Acorn woodpeckers here live in colonies and the whole gang defends the mast tree. 

Others—notably squirrels and jays—have to resort to earthier methods. They bury, or cache, acorns in the ground, and dig them up later to eat. Jays and their kin (Clark’s nutcrackers, other corvids) exhibit amazing feats of memory, remembering where they’ve stashed hundreds of acorns every year. But no one’s perfect—and anyone can have leftovers. 

Joseph Grinnell, in a 1936 Condor piece quoted in Oaks of California, notes the uphill advance of oak forests, watches jays cache acorns uphill of the trees they came from, and proposes that they, like other birds, squirrels, and woodrats, are agents of dispersal. He concludes that: 

[I]n the long-time interests of the tree species, involving locomotion of the whole forest, there is value received upon this huge rate of production. It is not extravagance, but good investment, for the oaks to provide subsistence for a continuing population of animal species. 

In the case of humans, oaks provide compelling beauty as well as utility—and we oblige them by spreading their populations to our abodes whole continents away.

TUESDAY, JUNE 7 

“Introduction to California Birdlife” a conversation with field biologist Jules Evens and nature photographer Ian Tait, at 5:30 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. 215-7672, 524-9992. 

Apartment Building Management For Women A class on Tues. and Thurs. evenings at 6 p.m., Sat. 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Building Education Center Cost is $250 or sliding scale. To register call 525-7610.  

Trekking in California with guidebook author Paul Richins at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. Free. 527-4140. 

“Police Practices” A panel discussion with Doris Brown, former Richmond Police Commissioner, James Chanin, civil rights attorney, Sgt. Alan Normandy, South SF Police Dept. and Mark Schlosberg, ACLU Police Practices Dept. at 7 p.m. at the Richmond Main Library Community Room, 325 Civic Center Drive. Sponsored by the ACLU. 558-0377. 

Quit Smoking Class meets Tues. evening from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at South Berkeley Senior Center for six evenings. Sponsored by the City of Berkeley. To register call 981-5330. 

Choke Saving Skills Day Learn these important skills at 11 a.m. at Habitot, 2065 Kittredge St. Cost is $5-$6. 647-1111. www.habitot.org 

Mid-Day Meander Meet at 2:30 p.m. at the Alvarado/ 

Wildcat Staging Area off Park Ave. for a history walk to the Belgum Estate. 525-2233. 

Tilden Mini-Rangers Join us for an active afternoon of nature study, conservation, and ramb ling through woods and waters. Dress to get dirty; bring a healthy snack to share. Girls and boys ages 8-12, unaccompanied by their parents. From 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area. Cost is $6-$8. Reservations required. 636-1684. 

Young Leadership Div ision Jewish Federation meets at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Hillel. RSVP to 839-2900 ext. 216.  

Brainstormer Weekly Pub Quiz every Tuesday from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. at Pyramid Alehouse Brewery, 901 Gilman St. 528-9880. 

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

Sing-A-Long every Tues. from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic. All ages welcome. 524-9122. 

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

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 8 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around Preservation Park to see Victorian architecture. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of Preservation Park at 13th St. and MLK, Jr. Way. Tour lasts 90 minutes. For reservations call 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

GPS Na vigation with Steve Wood, REI guide, at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. If you own a GPS unit, please bring it. 527-4140. 

“Lolita: Slave to Entertainment” a documentary on our relationship with wildlife at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Donation $5. www.HumanistHall.net 

East Bay Gebealogical Society meets at 10 a.m. in the Library Conference Room, Family History Center, 4766 Lincoln Ave., Oakland. Mary Jo Wainwright will speak on the history of the Peralta family. 653-6692. 

“Senior Injury Prevention Project: Falls” at 10:30 a.m. at Summit Campus, Merritt Pavilion, 350 Hawthorne Ave., Oakland. Free for Health Access members, $5 for others. For reservations call 869-6737. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wednesday at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Action St. 841-2174.  

Home Buyer Assistance Information Session at 6 p.m. at 1504 Franklin St., Oakland. Sponsored by the Home Buyer Assistance Center. Reservations required. 832-6925, ext. 100. www.hbac.org 

Poetry Writing Workshop with Alison Seevak at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720. 

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

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 

Stitch ‘n Bitch Bring your knitting, crocheting an d other handcrafts from 6 to 9 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198. 

THURSDAY, JUNE 9 

Berkeley School Volunteers Training workshop for volunteers interested in helping the public schools during the summer, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. at 1835 Allsto n Way. 644-8833. 

Hidden Lodges of Berkeley A lecture on Bernard Maybeck’s Great Hall, at 7:30 p.m. at the Faculty Club, UC Campus. Cost is $10. For information contact Berkeley Architectural Heritage at 841-2241. www.berkeleyheritage.com 

“In Rachel’s Name” with the parents of Rachel Corrie at 7 p.m. at the First Congregational Church in Oakland, 2501 Harrison St. Donation $10, no one turned away. 415-255-7296, ext. 261. 

Grizzly Peak Flyfishers meets at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Community Center, 59 Arlingt on Ave. Jeff Miller will speak on the efforts to restore steelhead to Alameda Creek. 547-8629. 

Caldecott Tunnel Fourth Boor Expansion Project Meeting at 6 p.m. at the Bentley School, 1 Hiller Drive, Oakland. 286-6445. www.dot.ca.gov/dist4/caldecott 

“Juice Fasting and Rejuvenation” with Ed Bauman, Director of Bauman College at 5:30 p.m. at Pharmaca Pharmacy, 1744 Solano Ave. 527-8929. 

East Bay Mac User Group with Linden Siahaan, Software Design Engineer, Microsoft Corp who will present the Virtual PC at 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at Expression Center for New Media, 6601 Shellmound St. www.expression.edu 

Beginning and Intermediate Computer Workshop for all ages, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Long Haul, 3124 Shattuck Ave. Free, but registration required. call after 6 p.m. 540-0751. 

“Truth or Consequences: How Filure to Disclose Ad Relationships Threatens to Burts the Search Bubble” a free conference from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Claremont, 41 Tunnel Rd. www.consumerwebwatch.org 

FRIDAY, JUNE 10 

City Commons Club Noon Lunch eon with Cornelia Niekus Moore on “Obituaries as Social, Religious and Political Commentary in Early Modern Germany” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $13, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925 or 665-9020.  

Acts Full Gospel Women’s Conference with Dr. Doris Limbrick at 7 p.m. at 1034 66th Ave., Oakland. Speakers on Sat. from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Cost is $45 for adults, $20 for youth. to register call 567-1300. 

“Three Beats for Nothing” a smal l group meeting weekly at 10 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center to sing for fun and practice, mostly 16th century harmony. No charge. 655-8863, 843-7610. dann@netwiz.net 

Berkeley Chess Club meets Fridays at 8 p.m. at the East Bay Chess Club, 1940 Vi rginia St. Players at all levels are welcome. 845-1041. 

Women in Black Vigil at noon at UC Berkeley, Bancroft at Telegraph. 548-6310. 

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 

SATURDAY, JUNE 11 

La Peña Day with live music and activities, from noon to 6 p.m. at the intersection of Prince and Shattuck. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Live Oak Park Fair from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. with arts and cr afts, jazz, children’s entertainment and food. 898-3282. www.liveoakparkfair.com 

“Beat Back the Arnold Attack!” SEIU Local 790 Membership Convention from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with community activities at 1 p.m., at Berkeley Community Theater, 1930 Allston Wa y. http://graypantherssf.igc.org/050611back.pdf  

“Dragonflies of California” a slide show with Kathy and Dave Briggs from 9:30 a.m. to noon at the Visitor Center, Tilden Park. Optional excursion in the afternoon. Cost is $30-$35. Bring your lunch. 841-873 2. www.nativeplants.org 

Mini-Farmers in Tilden A farm exploration program, from 10 to 11 a.m. for ages 4-6 years, accompanied by an adult. We will explore the Little Farm, care for animals, do crafts and farm chores. Wear boots and dress to get dirty! Fee is $3-$5. Registration required. 525-2233. 

Kids Garden Club For children 7-12 years old to explore the world of gardening. We plant, harvest, build, make crafts, cook and get dirty! From 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $5-$7, registration required. 525-2233. 

All Trails, All Day A whirlwind tour of Alan Kaplan’s favorite Trails. Meet at 10 a.m. at the Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park, and bring lunch, liquids, hat and sunscreen. 525-2233. 

Basic Organic Vegetable Gardening with special emphasis on the East Bay backyard and climate, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $10-$15. 548-2220, ext. 233. 

Passport to the Summer Garden UC Botanical Garden’s Party from 3 to 6 p.m. Tickets are $35-$45. Reservations required. 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu 

Origami from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. Free and open to all ages. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

Tryouts for Piedmont Choirs from 9 a.m. to noon in Alameda or Piedmont. Call for appointment 547-4441. 

Child Car Seat Check with the Berkeley Police Dept. from 10 a.m. to noon at the UC Garage on Addison at Oxford. 647-1111. www.habitot.org 

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

Introductory Birding Walk in Kensington with Robbie Fisher from 8 to 11 a.m. Cost is $25, includes breakfast. For meeting place and to register, ca ll 525-6155. 

“Headaches and Heartaches” with Ed Bauman, Director of Bauman College at 10 a.m. at Elephant Pharmacy, 1607 Shattuck Ave. 549-9200. 

“The Rising Power of Europe and the European Constitutional Vote” with Conor Dixon at 10 a.m. at the Niebyl-Procter Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Sponsored by the Democratic Socialists of America. 415-789-8497. 

“Starting and Managing Your Small Business” a workshop from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, Community Room, 2090 Kittredge St. Sponsored by the Small Business Network. Free but registration required. 981-6148. 

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, JUNE 12 

Live Oak Park Fair from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. with arts and crafts, jazz, children’s entertainment and food. 898-3282. www.liveoakparkfair.com 

At Summer’s Cusp An exploration of pollination in the Regional Parks Botanic Garden at Tilden Park from 10 a.m. to noon. 525-2233. 

Joys of Walking Hear what great writers have to say about sauntering and learn the origin of the word. Meet at 2 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Hands-on Bike Maintenance Learn how to perform basic repairs on your bike from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $85-$100. 527-4140. 

Theater Class for Families with improvisational games and movement activities from 1 to 3 p.m. at the Nevo Education Center, 2071 Addison St. Free, but bring a book to donate to Joh n Muir Elementary. Sponsored by Target and Berkeley Rep. 647-2972. 

Acting Out Garden Party from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Magnes Museum, in conjunction with the Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore exhibition. RSVP to magnes40@magnes.org 

Free Garden Tours at Regional P arks Botanic Garden in Tilden Park Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk around the lake every Sun. Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. lmno4p.org 

Tibetan Buddhism with Mary Gomes and “Compassionate Activism” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

Erev Shavuot Lecture with David Biale on the Jewish concept of political dissent, at 4 p.m. at 951 Cragmont Ave. Sponsored by Beyt Tikkun. Cost is $20 for non-members. For reservations call 528-6250. 

Tikkun Leyl Shavuot, all night study, at 7 p.m. at BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. 848-0237.  

MONDAY, JUNE 13 

City of Berkeley Walking Group walks Mon.-Thurs. from 5 to 5:30 p.m. Meet at 830 University Ave. All new participants receive a free pedometer. 981-5131. 

The Berkeley High School Site Council meets at 4:30 p.m. in the school library. On the agenda are the advanced placement (AP) program, attendance, and safety and discipline. For more information, go to bhs.berkeleypta.org/ssc 

Tea and Hike 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 

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 Av e. Join at any time. Cost is $2.50 with refreshments. 524-9122. 

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

TUESDAY, JUN E 14 

Early Morning Bird Walk Meet at 7 a.m. at the Bear Creek Rd. entrance of Briones to look for Redwinged Blackbirds, White-crowned Sparrows and Western Bluebirds (It is Flag Day!) 525-2233. 

Berkeley School Volunteers Training workshop for volunteers in terested in helping the public schools during the summer, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. 644-8833. 

Beyond Oil II with Joanna Macy and Richard Heinberg at 7 p.m. at the First Congregational Church, 2501 Harrison St., Oakland. Sponsored by the Eas t Bay Post Carbon Solutions Group. 496-6080. 

Peace Corps Information Night with volunteers and staff at 6:30 p.m. at Rockridge Public Library, 5366 College Ave., Oakland. RSVP to John Ruiz at 415-977-8798. jruiz@peacecorps.gov 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. In case of questionable weather, call around 8 a.m. 215-7672, 524-9992. 

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

Buddhist Meditation Class at 7 p.m. at The Dzalandhara Buddhist Center. Cost is $7-$10. For d irections and details please call 559-8183. 

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

Sing-Along every Tues. from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic. All ages welcome. 524-9122. 

ONGOING 

Summer Camps for Children offered by the City of Berkeley, including swimming, sports and twilight basketball, from June 20 to August 12, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. For details call 981-5150, 981-5153. 

Barrington Collection Free Skool holds summer classes in the East Bay. Classes include “Buying Your First Home,” “Beer Brewing,” ”Grant Writing,” “Yoga” and classes for children. http://barringtoncollect ive.org/FreeSkool 

CITY MEETINGS 

Commission on Disability meets Wed., June 8, at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Don Brown, 981-6346. TDD: 981-6345. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/disability 

Homeless Commission meets Wed., June 8, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Jane Micallef, 981-5426. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/homeless 

Library Board of Trustees meets Wed. June 8, at 7 p.m. at the South Berkeley Senior Center, Jackie Y. Griffin, 981-6195. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/co mmissions/library  

Planning Commission meets Wed., June 8, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Janet Homrighausen, 981-7484. www.ci.berkeley. ca.us/commissions/planning 

Police Review Commission meets Wed., June 8 at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-4950. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/policereview 

Waterfront Commission meets Wed., June 8, at 7 p.m., at 201 University Ave. Cliff Marchetti, 981-6740. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/commissions/waterfront 

Community Health Commission meets Thurs., June 9, at 6:45 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Kristin Tehrani, 981-5356. www.ci.ber 

keley.ca.us/commissions/health 

West Berkeley Project Area Commission meets Thurs., June 9, at 7 p.m., at the West Berkeley Senior Center. Iris Starr, 981-752 0. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/westberkeley  

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thurs., June 9, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. Mark Rhoades, 981-7410. www.ci.ber 

keley.ca.us/commissions/zoning h

Stalled plans in Richmond are giving Berkeley the edge in the effort to land the East Bay’s first new ferry stop in years. 

With funding secure for one East Bay ferry stop and partial funding for a second, the San Francisco Bay Water Transit Authority (WTA) is inching toward site selections. 

While putting one ferry stop in Berkeley or Albany has long been the plan, new doubts have surfaced about opening a second terminal in Richmond—where city officials are devoting their attentions to another, and potentially more profitable, use at the site. 

“We’re going to build a terminal somewhere in the East Bay,” said WTA Chief Executive Officer Steven Castleberry. “It could be in Berkeley, Albany or Richmond.” 

While Richmond had been an early and ardent advocate of a terminal in Marina Bay, City Councilmember Tom Butt said enthusiasm has waned in light of a proposal by Toyota for the property. 

The Japanese car maker wants to use much of the site as a vehicle storage lot as its expands its current import operations at the port. 

“Right now, Toyota and the ferry seem to be on a collision course,” Butt said. “Up until the Toyota thing, everyone on the council was a huge cheerleader for the ferry. When the Toyota thing came along, everyone else lost interest in the ferry except for me and [Councilmember] Gayle McLaughlin.” 

Castleberry said his staff will present a report on developments in Richmond at the next WTA board meeting on June 23.  

Berkeley developer James D. Levine has said that he intends to bring ferry service to his proposed casino and resort complex on Richmond’s Point Molate should the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs approve the site as a reservation for the Guidiville Rancheria of Pomos. 

“We’ve talked to a consultant for Levine and took a cursory look at the site, but we think Marina Bay would better serve the needs of commuters while Point Molate would provide good access to the casino,” Castleberry said. “If the city wants us to move to another site, it’s got to be close to houses and have adequate parking.” 

Marina Bay also makes sense as a transit-oriented development hub, said the WTA executive. Transit hubs are eligible for federal funding programs, making them attractive to developers. 

Berkeley sites 

While Richmond’s interest is momentarily diverted, Berkeley is pressing forward with its own push for a ferry terminal. 

Castleberry said the city’s Waterfront Commission has scheduled a ferry site discussion for its June 8 joint meeting with the Transportation Commission. 

Waterfront Commission Chair Paul Kamen has recommended three options for a new terminal, all at the Berkeley Marina. The sites include incorporating the ferry into the existing fishing pier; a location west of Seawall Drive between the fishing pier and H’s Lordship’s restaurant; and adjacent to the east side of H’s Lordship’s parking lot. 

While fond of ferries himself, Kamen said he is skeptical of the WTA’s emphasis on it as a means to reduce traffic congestion. 

“The best reason for ferries is that people like them,” he said. “They improve the quality of life.” 

Kamen also questions the WTA’s push for the $6 million ferries with the heavy, fuel hungry engines that will travel at 25 knots per hour. The Berkeley commissioner favors 18-knot boats which can still travel from the Berkeley terminal to the San Francisco ferry pier in 20 minutes. 

Ridership estimates 

Both Kamen and the WTA agree that a new Berkeley/Albany ferry stop would produce about 500 to 700 daily trips over the next few years. 

History shows that ridership has remained low since the construction of the Bay Bridge eliminated the need for water transit, Kamen said. He pointed to what happened when ferry service was reintroduced to Berkeley after the Loma Prieta earthquake closed the Bay Bridge. Daily ridership from Berkeley, Vallejo, Alameda and Oakland combined was at more than 20,000 while the bridge was closed, but dropped sharply after the bridge was fixed. Berkeley service was soon discontinued. 

Alternative sites 

“If the [Berkeley] City Council endorses a proposal, we will start the environmental review process,” Castleberry said. “I haven’t talked to the mayor’s staff, but I’m assuming the chosen site will be on the waterfront” at the foot of University Avenue. 

Two other proposed local locations have triggered strong opposition: The foot of Gilman Street in Berkeley and the end of Buchanan Street in Albany between Golden Gate Fields and the Albany Bulb. 

The Bulb itself is about to join the Eastshore State Park, and environmentalists, who battled for the inclusion, have announced their intent to oppose ferry service there or south of the race track on Gilman Street. 

While the WTA has the legal power to pick a site unilaterally and take it through eminent domain, Castleberry said, “We are working as partners with the communities, and we have no interest in forcing anything on them.” 

Through a polling firm, the WTA in April surveyed 600 registered voters proportionately distributed throughout Berkeley and Albany. The results revealed strong support for ferry service in both communities. 

According to the poll, which offered multiple options for a new ferry terminal, citizens in both cities gave an 82 percent approval to the University Avenue terminal, with 72 percent support for Gilman Street and 61 percent for Buchanan Street. 

Political findings 

The poll also found that Albany residents were significantly happier than Berkeleyans with the way their cities seem to be headed. While half of Berkeley residents said they were pleased with the city’s direction, 69 percent of Albany voters thought their community was doing just fine. 

Those same figures were reflected in citizen attitudes towards their respective city councils. While 71 percent in Albany gave their council a hearty thumbs up, the number dropped to 53 percent for Berkeleyans. 

Pollsters also asked for citizens’ ratings of BART, the Sierra Club and AC Transit, three entities that will have a role in the location of ferry terminals. BART came out on top (91 percent favorable in Berkeley and 88 percent in Albany), followed by the Sierra Club (75 percent and 74 percent respectively) and then AC Transit (71 percent and 72 percent). 

›

The Alameda County Medical Center (ACMC) Board of Trustees voted last week to replace 45 staff doctors at John George Psychiatric Pavilion in San Leandro with contracted psychiatrists and physicians, but a motion for a preliminary court injunction filed by the employees’ union could scuttle the deal. 

The John George facility provides psychiatric inpatient and outpatient services, psychiatric emergency services, and substance abuse treatment for Alameda County residents. 

The board voted 8-2-1 to tentatively approve a 25-month $9.5 million contract with Pleasanton-based Becton Healthcare Resources for John George after ACMC CEO Claude Watts told trustees that the move would save the medical center $1.8 million over two years. 

The decision affects 40 staff psychiatrist and five staff physician positions who currently manage inpatient care at John George. A spokesperson for ACMC said in a telephone interview that doctor employees at hospitals are now the exception rather than the rule, and that most hospitals contract out for services by doctors who are employed by physician associations. 

Whether the contracted services will equal a reduction in staff is unclear. 

In an accompanying letter to the board, Watts said that Becton currently provides oversight management for some John George services, and that an agreement with the company for all of John George care would “provide consistency in care and a single point of reference of patient care issues.” 

But Trustee Dr. Floyd Huen of Oakland disputed the savings figure, saying that the “full cost of the proposed contract needs to be more fully investigated.” He said he feared a loss of inpatient coverage if the service contract is ratified. 

“Even if it turns out that the Becton contract is cheaper, we don’t just want a cheaper contract,” Huen said. “We want one that works.” 

Watts told Huen, “If you look at the individual line items on the Becton proposal, it looks as if their proposal would result in higher costs,” but said that the savings would come from Becton’s ability to consolidate services between the different portions of John George care. 

Huen, the husband of Oakland City Councilmember Jean Quan, voted against the proposed contract along with Board President Dr. Theodore Rose of Oakland. Former Pleasanton Mayor Tom Pico, a new member of the board, abstained. 

In a letter to the trustees, one of the John George psychiatrists, Dr. Judy Bertelsen, had said that the Becton proposal could not be trusted. 

“Previous experience with Becton has involved contracting to provide services at a specified rate and then presenting ACMC with an emergency demand for large amounts of additional funds or threatening to pull out within 30 days,” she said. 

The contract had been scheduled to begin on June 1 and run through June 30, 2007, but immediate implementation was blocked by court proceedings even before last week’s trustee vote was taken. On a motion filed by the Union of American Physicians and Dentists (UAPD) for a temporary restraining order against ACMC, Superior Court Judge James Richman ruled that the proposed contract could not be ratified until a June 7 hearing in Superior Court in Oakland. 

UAPD attorneys are arguing that contracting out the John George inpatient services violates UAPD’s labor agreement with the County Medical Center. UAPD and ACMC are presently in the meet and confer process over the proposed Becton. 

A UAPD representative told board members that it was “improper for the board to make a decision on the contract before the union and the center decide whether a contract should be let out.” 

In its decision, ACMC trustees went against the wishes of a string of professional speakers talking against the contract, as well as a petition opposing the contract signed by 35 ACMC psychiatrists. 

In their petition, the psychiatrists said they were “deeply troubled” by what they called the “rapid decision to contract out our services.” 

One of the psychiatrists who signed the petition, Suzanne Bruch, suggested to trustees that if they wanted to save money at John George “you could allow us to bid on the contract as a physician-run group. That would eliminate the middle man, and we could pass on the savings to the hospital.”.

Berkeley’s outgoing health officer has charged that her bosses have mismanaged a bloated department and are jeopardizing services by using public health funds to pay for unnecessary bureaucracy. 

“We know the level of administrative support we need and it’s less than what we are paying for,” said Dr. Poki Namkung. After 10 years as Berkeley’s health officer, Namkung departs today (Friday) to take a similar post in Santa Cruz County.  

She contends that the budget proposed for Berkeley’s Health and Human Services Department overestimated funding from the state and federal governments to justify raiding the city’s public health reserve fund to pay for staff costs this year.  

When she presented city brass with a less rosy budget forecast, Namkung said she received a memo from City Manager Phil Kamlarz ordering her not to further disclose her concerns to the City Council. 

Berkeley’s public health program provides health services, such as medical care and disease prevention programs to city residents.  

HHS Director Fred Madrano, the target of much of Namkung’s and the commission’s criticisms, said the department’s proposed budget was based on sound accounting and that proposals to streamline it would not save money.  

In her final months on the job, Namkung hasn’t just critiqued her department, she has sought to dismantle it. 

With Namkung’s assistance, Berkeley’s Community Health Commission in April unanimously recommended splitting the department into two autonomous programs: a Mental Health Department and a Public Health Department. 

The health commission’s proposal is based on findings that since 1999, while HHS’s scope of responsibilities has decreased, the department has not done enough to cut down on administrative staff. 

HHS now oversees public health, mental health, environmental health and senior programs. Before 1999, it was also responsible for programs serving the homeless, city youth and the unemployed. 

With fewer responsibilities, Namkung said that Madrano no longer needs four staffers working directly under him. “Look at any other department director in the city. They don’t have that kind of support,” she said, adding that the state health officer, with a staff of 2,000, manages with only one administrative secretary. 

The restructuring proposal would save Berkeley’s general fund an estimated $900,000, in part by reducing the need for administrative staff including the department’s director and deputy director, according to Tom Kelly, the commission chair. 

The City Council is scheduled to review the plan later this month, but it likely won’t come with a recommendation from city leaders. 

“I don’t think it’s realistic,” said City Manager Phil Kamlarz. “In my experience when you make things smaller, it costs more money.” 

Kamlarz said he was hesitant to reorganize HHS because the department, which receives nearly two-thirds of its funding from outside grants, requires extra accounting support. 

“I don’t think [the commission] appreciates the administrative burden it takes to do the accounting,” he said, adding that he thought centralizing the administration under Madrano had helped the department function better. 

Another skeptic is Mental Health Manager Harvey Turek. He said he thought the department’s structure was sound and commission report was “vague” about the expected cost savings. 

According to the commission report, since 1999, HHS administrative costs have risen 66 percent from $801,165 to $1.328 million while the scope of responsibilities decreased because of the transfer or elimination of over $11 million for programs and services.  

“This begs the question of whether or not we need the same degree of administrative support,” Kelly said.  

Madrano countered that since 1999, the department had reduced its overall administrative staff from 19 full-time positions to 15.8 next year and that administrative staff has held steady at about 7 percent of the total department workforce. 

Namkung and the commission have challenged Madrano’s figures, arguing that administrative staff has in fact increased over the past six years. According to department budget reports, HHS has cut its administrative staff from 16.5 positions in 1999 to 15.8 positions this year. 

Namkung and the health commission raised their objections after HHS revealed its proposed fiscal year 2006 budget. Required to reduce spending by 10 percent and minimize staff cuts, the department shifted $304,248 in employee costs from the city’s general fund to a city reserve for pubic health programs. 

The reserve, funded by state money, is currently $3.3 million in the black. Madrano projected that with the cost shifts the fund would remain healthy enough over the next five years to support programs should their costs rise or funding decline. 

Namkung countered that with state money less certain, federal funds dwindling and employee costs on the rise, the department would eat up the reserve within three years, placing programs at risk. 

As the city manger tried to mediate between dueling departmental budgets, according to Namkung, he also tried to keep Namkung’s analysis from going public. She said that in a letter dated May 3, Kamlarz reminded her that under Berkeley’s form of government she was not to have written or oral communication with the mayor or council. 

“To be told that I can not speak about these issues to policy makers who have control over the funds, I think is unethical and wrong,” said Namkung, who had previously copied councilmembers on a letter to Kamlarz about the budget. 

Kamlarz said Thursday that city policy was for employees to take their concerns to him first, rather than going public. 

Berkeley has a track record of misappropriating public health money. In 2000, the city had to backfill the public health reserve fund $2.4 million after the state determined that since 1993 Berkeley had illegally used the money to pay for other city expenses. 

The commission’s proposal would not end the practice of shifting employee costs to program grants. The plan would eliminate several administrative positions and then shift the rest to the newly created Public Health and Mental Health departments. Administrative staff under the new departments could be paid from grants, rather than the city’s general fund. 

According to the report, Public Health, the largest division in HHS, would require 3.5 full-time employees to carry out its administrative tasks. 

Kelly, fearing that city leaders would be hostile to such a major upheaval, hoped that the city would allow an independent analyst to review the commission proposal. 

“I think the city is obligated to at least take a look at this and see if there is a way to save money without cutting services,” he said. 

With students leading the way, 57 percent of the Jefferson Elementary School community voted Tuesday night to change the name of the school to Sequoia Elementary. 

The recommendation now goes to the Berkeley Unified School District Board, which makes the final decision on school names. 

If the name change is approved, school officials expect a minimal expense for implementation. 

The school was originally named for Thomas Jefferson, the second president of the United States and the principal author of the Declaration of Independence. But some teachers and parents began pressing for a name change last year over concerns about another Jefferson legacy: the fact that he kept slaves on his Virginia plantation. 

The final vote was 239 to 177 for the name change. Students supported the change 161 to 111, while staff supported the new name 11 to 5. The vote was considerably closer among parents and guardians, 67 to 61 in favor of Sequoia. 

Jefferson Principal Betty Delaney, who remained neutral in the vote, said that she was pleased with the way the school’s children handled the months of sometimes heated debate and controversy preceding the vote. 

“I think they took it very seriously,” Delaney said. “It was an educational experience.” 

Delaney said that she expects some of that educational process to continue in the next school year. 

“We’re not going to have an ongoing dialogue on Jefferson as Jefferson,” she said. “But we have certain building blocks of our educational process here. Being safe, being responsible. One of those building blocks is being courageous. One of our learning processes with the students that will continue out of the debate over the Jefferson name change will be what do you do when you have a difficult decision to make. How do you take a stand? How do you make courageous decisions?” 

Delaney also said that she expects the educational process will continue with the adults associated with Jefferson school. She pointed to what most participants called a “positive” meeting last month when parents/guardians and staff members met at Jefferson to debate the name change. 

“The vote has just taken place, so we haven’t had the chance to decide the form, but there definitely will be a follow-up that takes place in the fall,” she said. “That sort of community dialogue should continue. It doesn’t just stop with one vote.” 

A few tossed chairs and a sidewalk showdown are the latest signs that Berkeley’s peace-loving, left-wing radio station, KPFA, is in the throes of another civil war. 

The latest casualty of the station’s battles may soon be General Manager Roy Campanella II. 

On May 5, Campanella, who has made enemies with several staff members during his short tenure, got into a screaming match with Weyland Southon, the co-host of KPFA’s “Hard Knock Radio” show. 

According to Southon, Campanella, in an expletive-laced harangue, ordered him outside to settle their differences. “I felt like he was going to swing on me,” he said.  

The two didn’t come to blows, but Southon said he didn’t return to work for over a week out of fear for his safety. 

Campanella, under pressure from the KPFA board that had considered placing him on administrative leave, took three days off last week to reflect on the confrontation. 

Campanella said Pacifica, KPFA’s parent network, wouldn’t let him comment for this story. The incident remains under investigation. 

On the day of the fracas, Campanella sent out an e-mail to KPFA staff reminding them that “Pacifica has a policy of zero tolerance for violence in the workplace.”  

The reason for the e-mail was that two days earlier a station engineer hurled four metal chairs during a meeting of the KPFA Program Council. The employee, who has not been disciplined, was furious that the council was set to give a new show to Bill Mandel, a former host who lost his previous show a decade ago.  

For many, Mandel represents the predominantly white old guard at KPFA that younger broadcasters say is keeping them from getting shows, said board member Joe Wanzala. 

“At KPFA, programing is the third rail,” he said. 

In the battle for limited air time, a war has broken out between listener activists who want to change programming they see as either too moderate or stale, and the KPFA staff who feel under siege from their attacks.  

“There is no recognition among the listeners about what is working at the station,” said Susan Stone, the station’s former director of arts and humanity programming. She added that the station’s “culture of complaints” had left staff feeling besieged and the quality of programming lacking. 

“We’re missing the opportunity to develop quality radio because there is so much acrimony over what is owed to whom,” she said.  

Six years ago KPFA had what many consider its finest hour. Faced with a move by Pacifica to moderate the station’s left-wing shows, listeners and staff took to the streets and later the courtroom to win back control of the station, and the four-station Pacifica network. 

Activist listeners who fought the war to democratize Pacifica expected to get a stronger say over programming. But instead they say the staff has succeeded in stonewalling efforts to reform the station.  

“Ther seems to be some [staff] at KPFA that are very suspicious of democracy,” said Stan Woods, a member of People’s Radio, a Pacifica faction that represents listener activists on KPFA’s Local Station Board. The group is opposed by KPFA Forward, which includes staff members and their supporters.  

The staff’s clout, Woods said, was illustrated by the attempt to change the time of Pacifica’s flagship show “Democracy Now.” Despite the support of the program council on which Wood serves and former General Manager Gus Newport, staff resistance has kept the show from moving, Woods said. 

Although staff said there was no connection between the Campanella incident and the programming battle, some People’s Radio members say the two are related. 

“There hadn’t been managerial oversight for quite some time, so the staff could do what they wanted,” said board member and listener activist Chandra Hauptman. “Now that a manager is trying to set up a structure and protocol, the staff is resisting.” 

According to Wanzala, staff opposition forced out Newport after less than a year, and Campanella might meet the same fate. 

“There’s a big push among the staff to get rid of Roy,” he said. 

Although several listener activists gave Campanella lackluster reviews, Wanzala said they fear ousting him would concentrate further power in the staff. 

“If Roy is forced out, it will make it more difficult for listeners to have input on the station,” he said.  

The strife at KPFA so far hasn’t seemed to have cost the station the support of its listeners. The station raised over $1 million during its recent spring pledge drive. 

But Sherry Gimbelman, of KPFA Forward warned that ultimately listeners would not stick around if the station’s behind-the-scenes drama proved more compelling than its shows. 

“Eventually if KPFA doesn’t deliver dynamic programing people will go elsewhere,” she said. “They’re not interested in the 100 years war.”

Hamaseh Kianfar, the former mental health worker at Alameda County Juvenile Hall, pled not guilty Wednesday to charges that she helped a teenage girl flee after slashing a 75-year-old woman in the throat outside the Berkeley Rose Garden in March. 

Kianfar is free on $15,000 bail. 

Kianfar, 30, a resident of San Rafael, is charged with one count of accessory to attempted murder. Police say she drove the attacker away from the scene after the slashing and then lied about her involvement in the incident. 

The attacker, a 16-year-old girl, has been charged with attempted murder and is undergoing court-ordered psychiatric evaluations. She is being held at Juvenile Hall. Authorities believe Kianfar and the attacker met at Juvenile Hall when the attacker was held there for an earlier transgression. 

Kianfar resigned her part-time job at Juvenile Hall in April after charges were filed against her. 

The Berkeley school district released its master plan for its West Campus site along University Avenue Thursday without major alterations, angering several neighbors who had demanded several revisions to the plan’s draft. 

The West Campus Neighbor-Merchant Alliance (West NEMA), a group formed in response to the Berkeley Unified School District’s planning effort, had demanded keeping more open space on the site and finding ways to reduce traffic and parking on residential streets. The neighbors also asked the district to move some services, such as the kitchen and the building and grounds facility to another site. 

City Councilmember Darryl Moore said he was “very disappointed that there is very little change.” He said he agreed with the alternative plan developed by West NEMA. 

“There was resounding neighborhood support for the West NEMA plan and its call to move the district kitchen and building and grounds facility to [the planned district bus yard on] Gilman Street, and for no parking south of Addison Street,” Moore said. 

Prepared by David C. Early in his role as head of Design, Community & Environment—the same firm that prepared UC Berkeley’s Long-Range Development Plan—the district plan retains features that neighbors denounced during a series of earlier meetings with Early and district officials. The master plan is now posted on the district’s website. 

Of the 12 buildings now standing on the West Campus site, Early’s plan calls for the elimination of five: the cafeteria, library, girls’ gym, a classroom building and two portable structures while calling for construction of one new building to house the district kitchen, building and grounds department and a district warehouse. 

The plan calls for a three-story addition to the south of the existing auditorium along University Avenue, plus a small child care/development structure on Browning Street and a future private mixed-use development to the south of the auditorium along University. 

Both the WestNEMA and district plans spell an end to the ball fields and tot lot at the corner of University Avenue and Curtis Street, earmarked as the site of private development in both plans, with the addition of the kitchen/ building and grounds/warehouse building in the BUSD plan. 

The district plan was scheduled to be formally unveiled to neighbors at a Thursday night meeting, after the Daily Planet’s deadline for today’s paper. Neighbors indicated that reaction would be harsh. 

“They did it again, just like we said they would,” said neighbor Sam Bridgham, who helped organize area opposition to the plan. “Pretty much the last thing anyone wanted on the site was the building and grounds facility. That was the key piece. And if they hadn’t included it, there would’ve been room for parking by the existing buildings.” 

“The neighbors are really gearing up for the June 29 (BUSD) meeting on the plan, where they’ll make a more extensive presentation,” said Kristen Leimkuhler. 

The neighbors’ alternative, available on their website (www.westnema.org), calls for maintaining open space on the large portion of the site, south of the existing boys’ gym between Curtis and Browning streets, except for a small preschool facility. 

In the Early plan, most of the existing green space is filled with a pair of parking lots and a daylighted stretch of Strawberry Creek. Opening the creek would be dependent on available funding. 

Neighbors are also angry that the plan includes access to parking lots along both Addison and Curtis after they stressed that they didn’t want more traffic in a residential neighborhood. 

Early and the school board said that the West Campus would incorporate all district offices and functions now occupying Old City Hall and annex, the so-called Oregon/Russell Street Site, and uses currently in effect at the West Campus site. 

The two main buildings at Oregon/Russell began as the gymnasium and auditorium on the site of the former Edison Junior High School and have been substantially altered, although portions of a 1915 design by noted Berkeley architect W.H. Ratcliff Jr. remain. 

Both Old City Hall and the Oregon/Russell site have been rated as seismically unsafe. While the district owns the Oregon/Russell site, the Old City Hall and annex are leased from the city. 

First leased in 1980, the district has announced plans to abandon the Old City Hall buildings when the current lease expires in 2009. 

Early’s potential conflict of interest as both advocate for the district and as head of Livable Berkeley was raised by site neighbors Rachel Boyce and Leimkuhler. A Daily Planet reporter followed with questions about Early’s provision of DCE office space for a Livable Berkeley committee meeting held, in part, to address the West Campus project. 

Early promised to recuse himself from any of the advocacy group’s meetings that dealt with the project and not allow any other meetings at his office. 

The district plan and its supplements plus detailed accounts of the public meetings and related documents and images are available on a page of the BUSD website, www.busd.us/westcampus 

For Bridgham, the West Campus struggle was the last straw, and now he said his family are planning to move to Durango, Colo. 

“We’re looking for a place where people aren’t at war with their city government and the school district,” he said. “If there was any single reason for the move, it’s because our elected officials don’t act like the public servants they’re supposed to be. Despite their rhetoric, there’s nothing progressive about them.” Ã

Troubled by the city’s bloody history of black-on-black youth violence, the Richmond Improvement Association is sponsoring an all-day conference Saturday aimed at ending city murders within three years. Rev. Andre Shumake Sr., who heads the organization modeled after Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Montgomery Improvement Association, said the community-wide gathering is focused on solutions to the city’s notoriously high murder rate. 

Last year, Richmond, a city with about 100,000 residents, recorded 35 homicides, the vast majority black-on-black crimes, he said. “That’s one every 10 days.” 

Participants include 35 community groups, featuring clergy, top-ranking police officials, neighborhood associations and others. Members of the public are welcome to attend. 

“At the end, we will launch a three-year initiative to reach a goal of a zero homicide rate,” said the cleric. 

The program, held at Lovonya Middle School, 3400 Macdonald Ave., opens with registration at 8 a.m., followed by a morning program starting at 9. 

“Our morning sessions will focus on crime and violence, cultural awareness and spiritual response, and in the afternoon will focus on political action, economic development and education and youth,” Shumake said. 

The noon interlude will feature both music and an address by African-American best-selling author Dr. Jawanza Kunjufu, who has written several books devoted to the plight of young black males. 

The program will conclude at 5 p.m. with a review of the day’s events. 

The need for community action is clear, said Shumake. 

“I got a call from the son-in-law of a man who was murdered in Parchester Village who was killed as he was dropping off a friend. He was glad someone was finally doing something,” said the minister. 

One of the inspirations for Saturday’s session was August’s murder of De La Salle High School football star Terrance Kelly, who was gunned down two days before he was to leave for the University of Oregon on a full-ride scholarship. 

That killing resulted in the formation of a “Blessed are the Peacemakers” campaign, created by Shumake, Richmond NAACP branch President Rev. Charles Newsome and Minister David Muhammad of the Richmond Nation of Islam Mosque. 

That campaign led to Saturday’s meeting. 

Shumake stressed that black-on-black shootings, often highly territorial in nature, threaten the whole community. 

“Many residents have a false sense of security because they think these things can’t happen in their neighborhoods,” he said, “but whenever one of these young men sees someone he doesn’t like, he may shoot without any regard for those around him.” 

The program is focused on finding jobs since many young men have said they would give up their guns if they had a decent job, Shumake said. 

The lack of jobs is the main reason many Richmond clergy members have endorsed the plans for casinos in North Richmond and at Point Molate, where Native Americans and developers have promised an abundance of jobs for local residents.

When it comes to the environment, Berkeley has won the bronze medal. 

On Thursday, Berkeley was named the third most sustainable city in the country by SustainLane, a national organization dedicated to sustainable development and living. 

San Francisco and Portland finished ahead of Berkeley. Seattle finished fourth. 

Berkeley was praised for its work in transportation, planning and energy policy. 

SustainLane reported that Berkeley had more workers who either walk or bicycle to work than any city in their survey. The organization also praised Berkeley’s system of bicycle boulevards and its high number of green businesses.  

Mayor Tom Bates said he was honored by the distinction and that Berkeley would “continue to roll out the green carpet” to lure environmentally friendly companies. 

The award follows a non-partisan, peer-reviewed analysis of U.S. cities across 12 categories including transportation and land use. 

DEAD SEA, Jordan—In a region where hardly anyone can agree with anyone about anything, the governments of Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority recently signed an agreement to save the magnificent and strangely silent desert sea where Jesus once walked.  

Just a few feet from where the Jordanian-hosted World Economic Forum met on May 20-22, an environmental disaster is unfolding. The Dead Sea, a place of immense historic and spiritual significance to much of the world, is dying. In living memory, the great salt lake has shrunk by a third. And each year, its shoreline recedes by another yard.  

The Dead Sea is actually the deepest part of the Jordan Valley. Renowned since ancient times as a fertile oasis, the valley became a vital crossroads for three of the world’s great religions—Judaism, Islam and Christianity.  

Yet, partly because today’s incessant appetite for oil has made the Middle East a cauldron of chaos, developers left the Dead Sea alone and mostly untouched, leaving it almost unchanged since biblical times.  

In 1994, though, the peace agreement signed by Jordan and Israel ended this isolation. Soon, dozens of resorts sprouted on the Israeli shore. The Dead Sea’s unique water and its famous black mineral-packed mud now draw hundreds of thousands of affluent tourists annually. Some visitors are so-called medical tourists, who seek unique treatments for arthritis or dermatological diseases. Many others arrive simply to experience the strange, oxygen-rich air, where an extraordinary spirituality seems to float among ancient desert cliffs.  

The Jordanians have been relative newcomers to tourism, but are now in fast-forward mode. Today, their side of the Dead Sea boasts four lavish international resort hotels. Tourism now accounts for 11 percent of Jordan’s GDP, and a record 1.8 million tourists, many from the United States and Israel, are expected this year—a whopping 40 percent increase over 2004.  

Despite the boom, however, Jordanian officials say they are determined to protect the region’s fragile environment. “The Dead Sea is the world’s largest natural spa,” says Akel Biltaji, King Abdullah’s tourism advisor. “But it does not belong just to Jordan, or just to Israel. It belongs to the whole world.”  

“For us,” Biltaji says, “tourism is an important tool for peace. But at the same time we realize that this is a fragile part of the world, and so Jordan wants a niche market—not mass tourism.”  

The decade-long peace dividend that’s led to such economic benefits, however, is now jeopardizing the Dead Sea. Its sole source of water, aside from sparse rainfall, is the Jordan River. But the Israeli and Jordanian governments have long diverted 90 percent of the river’s water for agricultural and industrial use. Dead Sea water levels have dropped by 80 feet. King Abdullah has now declared that saving the desert sea a national priority.  

The plan calls for construction of a 130-mile channel linking the Red Sea with the Dead Sea, an audacious scheme that would bring millions of gallons of water into the Dead Sea and ensure its survival.  

Aside from rescuing the Dead Sea by taking advantage of the 1,200-foot difference in altitude between the two seas, the channel would also provide energy for hydroelectric plants that in turn would power desalination plants— providing fresh water for millions. Jordan and Israel are two of the world’s most water-poor countries, and neither nation has any oil with which to buy water. But when the “Peace Channel” is built (on the Jordanian side of its border with Israel) both countries will share the 870 million cubic meters of fresh water gained annually from the desalination facilities.  

Assistance from the World Bank would help finance the $3 billion project, as well as EU and U.S. loans.  

The plan is not without opponents. Some environmentalists suggest that building such a lengthy waterway across the desert might harm rare Jordanian wildlife, such as ibex, leopards and hyrax. It could also risk pristine coral reefs in Jordan’s shimmering Gulf of Aqaba.  

Manqeth Mehyar, Jordanian country director for Friends of the Earth, expresses cautious support for the plan. “I myself look at the Red Sea as the only hope for the Dead Sea,” she says. “But we really need to study the project properly. [But] if the impacts are tolerable, we can work around them. My worry about the Dead Sea is that we will sit and do nothing. At the rate we are going we are losing a very beautiful and important place.”  

Steven Knipp is the Washington, D.C., correspondent for the South China Morning Post. He was recently in Jordan for the World Economic Forum.  

l

Berkeley High has produced a number of outstanding individuals over the years and Joel Kaji is no exception. After graduating from BHS in 1981 Joel attended Haverford College in Pennsylvania, graduating in 1985 with a degree in political science. 

Joel then attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he received his MA and Ph.D. also in political science. 

While at Michigan, Joel met his future wife Marjorie and they have been married for 13 years. In 1993 Joel and Marjorie moved from Michigan to Long Island, N.Y.,where Joel taught political science and statistics at State University of New York, Stony Brook until 1997. 

In 1998, Sports Illustrated hired Joel as a market research manager in the New York City office. There he took part in the development of editorial, marketing programs and advertising sales. 

Currently Joel is director of market research for Time magazine in New York. Joel, his wife and 5-year-old son Jeffrey live in Manhattan.  

Joel was active on the debate team at Berkeley High School. Though he didn’t play any organized sports he was then and still is a huge sports buff. This writer and Joel used to play softball and basketball together at Le Conte Elementary School in Berkeley. 

“Berkeley High was a launching pad for me,” Joel said. “Berkeley High was also the place where I excelled academically and socially. I will always view Berkeley High as a place where I came into my own.”p

Click here to view the latest work by Justin DeFreitas

SAVING OZZIE’S 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In July of 1971 I moved into the Elmwood with my 11-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter. Within 24 hours of our move the three of us were sitting on stools at Ozzie’s Fountain relishing our sodas, PB&Js and friendly inclusive banter with other customers and Ozzie alike. I was almost immediately made to feel, along with my children, not strangers, but welcomed new residents. In the intervening 34 years many stores and people have come and gone, but the nucleus of community and neighborhood that the fountain provides has not wavered. 

Ozzie’s is a happy destination whether you have errands to do or not. If you are there often enough you will over time hear creative, cranky, funny, brilliant, bombastic, boring, sobering, political (remember the business rent control petition?) gossip and inspiring talk: You know I could go on—and on! And the kids, oh the happy kids getting endless treats and some coming back as adults five, 10, 20 years later, overjoyed to find the place still going and sharing it with their kids. You can see dogs with great hats, go caroling, help deliver neighboring merchants’ lunch orders, share sadness over the passing of a regular and joy at new babies. No cell phones allowed and great funky artifacts to admire as you chat and chew, or you can read without being disturbed. 

What in heaven’s name is going on that we would let this treasure slip away? There are very few places left for any of us that make us feel that we are an important part of a community. Ozzie’s, through the good and creative care of Michael Hogan, carries on the 82-year tradition of friendship, inclusion, community and neighborhood (and good food!). 

Whatever it takes—go in, talk to Michael, talk to Vickie, talk to each other and find the way that we can all still be together on those red stools! 

Nancy Jaicks Alexander 

Fountain employee, 1976-80 

• 

UC HOTEL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Robert Clear’s May 31 commentary piece, “The Costs of Vehicle Use,” was very helpful in describing the challenges and tradeoffs involved with urban infill growth. But it contained one inaccuracy—the prospective downtown hotel will not be another instance of UC taking property off the tax rolls. In this case the university is only acting as “facilitator” of a project which will be constructed and owned by a private developer on private land (now owned by Bank of America). At last year’s meetings of the citizens’ task force, established to propose parameters for the project, proponents and city officials estimated the hotel would generate roughly a million dollars in property, hotel and sales tax revenues for the city. 

As for Mr. Clear’s other concerns—building height and lot coverage—we’ll still have to wait and see. An actual proposed plan is due to be revealed within the next couple of months, but on the evidence so far, this project is a rare exemplar of how the city and university can work well together on a mutually advantageous development. 

Alan Tobey 

• 

BAD DEAL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The Daily Planet’s front-page story about the Albany Waterfront Park—known to aficionados as The Bulb—being absorbed into the Eastshore State Park was a nice lead in to the story on the next page about the Magna Corporations greedy designs for the area right next door to the new state park.  

The mayor’s secret deal with the university—facilitated with the questionable assistance of the city attorney and affirmed by a majority of the City Council—is a disgrace. 

These people in their infinite (or is it somehow self-serving?) wisdom have in essence given the city away to the university. What did they get for their trouble? A few hundred thousand dollars to help the university make a plan for Berkeley’s downtown, two square blocks of which are already going for a university “hotel” and associated complex. And a few hundred thousand more for some sewers and traffic lights.  

We can thank Councilmembers Betty Olds, Dona Spring, and Kriss Worthington for refusing to go along. At least three on the council could see this deal, wreaked upon us by the mayor out of public view, for the disaster it is. 

Sharon Entwistle 

• 

CALLING DEEP THROAT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

What America needs today is a Deep Throat II so we can get rid of George W. Bush. 

Molly Fullerton 

Age 13 

• 

THE COMING OF WAR 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice: “This war came to us, not the other way around.” That’s not the way it was. Showing up the lies a Downing Street memo points out that intelligence and facts were fixed and spun to warrant military action in Iraq. The president and America are now reaping the results of this deceit, with U.S. soldiers and Iraqis paying the ultimate price. 

As early as March 2002 British Prime Minister Tony Blair had been told that war with Iraq might be illegal but Bush and Blair were resolved to go to war. 

More than 1650 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis have lost their lives based on a falsehood perpetrated at the highest levels of government. Bush has the blood on his hands for those who have died in Iraq and more and more Americans become disaffected daily, having been lied to by the Bush administration. 

Won’t someone please out Bush the way Deep Throat did Nixon! 

Ron Lowe 

Nevada City 

• 

WHITHER MARTY? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I have for many years had taped to my filing cabinet a piece from the Berkeley Express, dated Feb. 7, 1986, on Marty Schiffenbauer’s (presumably) abortive run for Berkeley City Council. The piece has always epitomized for me the politics of Berkeley in the ‘80s. Asked for his qualifications to represent Berkeleyans, he replied, “I don’t smoke, I jog four times a week, I recycle, floss every night, live in a rent-controlled apartment, listen to KPFA, shop at the Co-op, drink Peet’s coffee, and have never eaten downstairs at Chez Panisse. I sign every petition put in front of me, hang out at the Med, sleep on a cotton futon, have a Ph.D., never shave, almost never watch TV, and my best friends are therapists or lawyers.” 

Sadly, on reflection this morning early in the 21st century, I realized that rent control and the Co-op have gone the way of the Department of Genetics, and the Med is no longer in the forefront of the revolution. My dinner downstairs at Chez Panisse was delightful. My wife’s back can’t take a futon, and we got cable. 

Under my wife’s influence, I jog (at the club), floss (usually), and recycle (same). I do still listen to KPFA via the Internet and NPR, and mail-order Peet’s First Flush Darjeeling (coffee’s not on the Atkins). 

Marty, if you’re still there, how’s it with you? 

Steve Carr 

• 

VAN HOOL BUSES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Someone on one of the Van Hool buses was saying that in Belgium buses are free, so passengers can get on at any one of the doors, not just the front door. It makes sense—the front aisle is very narrow, at the space between the steps to the driver’s seat and the front right seat. It doesn’t look designed for a general entrance. Perhaps someone knows more about this. 

H. Granger 

• 

ARMING SPACE 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

The U.S. Air Force has at last popped the question that George Bush II enabled and implicitly invited in his first major deed as president: abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Defense Treaty, signed and honored by the nuclear powers for nearly 40 years. The Air Force has asked for official U.S. ratification of development of both offensive and defensive missiles in space. 

Since the Air Force itself, after 20 years and 100 billion dollars has demonstrated the clumsy inefficacy of defense systems, the ratification is, most importantly, a signal to proceed with the easier technology of attack. Characterization of the weapons as “precision-guided” sounds spurious, when both precision-guided missiles from the ground and precision bombing have had wide margins of error in much shorter trajectories. 

There is, of course, a solution. It was deployed effectively during the Cold War. The solution is Mutual Assured Destruction. A decision to commit this unfortunate country to development of the Death Star is wasteful and dangerous. Committing the entire world to the inevitable Arms Race is obscene. 

Ariel Parkinson 

• 

HOUSING AUTHORITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am very interested in learning more about Helen Rippier Wheeler’s comments in a May 27 letter concerning the Berkeley Housing Authority. I am curious about what it is she’s asking for and what her goals are in regarding the “duality structure of the BHA” (Section 8 and public housing). Which tenant member position is vacant? What is not being done that should or could be being done? 

As a senior reliant on Section 8, I am constantly monitoring the shifting sands of HUD across the country, and want to do all I can to help us save housing in Berkeley for those of us who will be suddenly homeless if HUD pulls one of its neocon tricks here. 

Frances Hailman 

• 

LET DOWN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It is sad to think that Berkeley Housing Authority thinks a person does not qualify for a one-bedroom apartment just because it is for just one person. Whoever thought of this idea is surely not thinking of the people and public at all. 

I am a 53-year-old single woman who has raised four children, mostly alone. I have down-sized from a four-bedroom townhouse to finally a one-bedroom just for me, I thought. Last year I lived in a two-bedroom apartment in Richmond, Ca. I was in Berkeley shopping at the Ace Hardware store on University Avenue. I looked up and noticed a “for rent” sign at this new apartment building I had never seen before. I decided to call the number because I needed to downsize to a one-bedroom apartment. I called the number and I found out the real estate company accepted Section 8 vouchers. I filled out the paperwork and it took me awhile, but I got together the $1,500 move-in fee. I hooked up with Berkeley Housing Authority, filled out the long trail of applications, and a representative went to the new apartment on Haste Street to inspect it before I moved in. I moved in on Sept. 4 of 2004. On Jan. 11, 2005 I received a notice from the manager of the Berkeley Housing saying I did not qualify for a one-bedroom apartment, I only qualified for a studio apartment. This was four months into my new apartment. I’ve unpacked and thrown boxes away and I’m just settling in, and I get this notice in the mail. I’ve felt very uneasy and unsettled since then. I know when my one-year lease is up in August, I will have to move. Since when can one person with a Section 8 voucher rent a one-bedroom apartment? I have a complete bedroom set, where am I supposed to put it? I’m missing something here! I’m a very decent person who has a low income and who also has a Section 8 voucher for a one-bedroom. I feel Berkeley has failed me and others just like me just because we don’t have as much money as the next person. I always looked forward to retiring in Berkeley in a one-bedroom apartment. But now I feel so let down by the City of Berkeley. There’s all kinds of programs a drug addict or a disabled person can have access to, but working in special education (for 21 years) and I have a one-bedroom apartment to rent. How unfair can it get?  

Feeling really let down by the City of Berkeley. 

Le Ester Pritchett 

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Stick Beating 

Berkeley police arrested a 60-year-old man last Thursday morning on a charge of assault with a deadly weapon after a fight in north Aquatic Park that escalated beyond mere fisticuffs. 

Moving up from fists to a stick elevated the charge from battery to the more serious felony, but the injuries to the 46-year-old victim weren’t bad enough to involve paramedics and an ambulance, said Berkeley police spokesperson Officer Joe Okies. 

Curried no Favor 

A belligerent bandit stormed into the Naan ‘N Curry restaurant at 2366 Telegraph Ave. shortly before 2 p.m. last Thursday and forced a woman behind the counter to hand over the contents of the till. 

Police have identified a potential suspect in the crime. 

Armed Backpack Heist 

A man dropped by the Berkeley Police Station last Friday afternoon to report that a gunman had robbed him of his backpack and wallet as he was walking along Center Street the night before in the vicinity of the new Vista College building. 

Rat Pack Robbery 

A gang of four teenagers cornered a pedestrian in the 1300 block of Rose Street early Friday evening and forced him to hand over his wallet before fleeing the scene. 

Women Stick-up Woman 

Two women in their 20s pulled a pistol on another woman in the 2300 block of Durant Avenue just after noon Saturday, forcing her to hand over her purse. 

The duo was last seen speeding away down Bancroft in a light-colored four-door compact, possibly a Honda, said Officer Okies. 

Edgy Settlement 

An argument between two fellows was quickly resolved when one pulled a knife on the unarmed other in the 1800 block of Berkeley Way at 3 p.m. Saturday. 

Officers summoned to the scene were quickly able to arrest a 29-year-old suspect on suspicion of brandishing a deadly weapon. 

Firearm Resolution 

An argument among a group of young fellows in the 3100 block of California Street just before 7 a.m. Sunday was growing steadily more heated until one of the disputants pulled a piece and flashed it at his confreres before boogying away on his bike. 

Sports Car Bandits 

Two men in a red sports car confronted a man in the 2900 block of Allston Way just before 8:30 p.m. and forced their 49-year-old victim to fork over his camera and wallet. 

Angry Bandit 

A 57-year-old woman was walking along the 2100 block of Walnut Street talking on her cell phone early Monday afternoon when man tried to wrestle her phone away, threatening life and limb in the process. 

The woman held on to the cell, calling police who arrived in time to confront the 35-year-old suspect, who managed to add an additional charge of resisting arrest to his robbery count before officers got the cuffs on him, said Officer Okies. 

Knife vs. Card Table 

When a stabbing victim arrived at Alta Bates Hospital early Monday evening, emergency room personnel called Berkeley police. 

What emerged was the story of yet another argument between acquaintances that took a nasty turn. During the spat, one fellow stabbed the other, who promptly responded by picking up a card table and clocking his assailant. 

Police are still sorting out the threads, and no arrest(s) has/have yet been made. 

Suspect Said Oops? 

A Berkeley police officer recognized a 27-year-old man walking along the 2300 block of Telegraph Avenue and stopped to ask if he’d recovered a bag he’d lost in a previous incident. 

As the two were talking, the hapless fellow was decidedly unpleased and a massive and quite illegal eight-inch, four-bladed throwing star dropped out of his jacket, earning him an immediate arrest. 

His situation became still worse when a search of his car turned up an illegal switchblade and a quick frisk turned up both an illegal syringe and a small quantity of marijuana. 

The fate of the bag remains unclear. 

Sexual Battery, Botched Robbery 

Police arrested a 24-year-old man Tuesday afternoon on charges of battery, sexual battery, attempted grand theft and probation violation after a boggled effort to boost the belongings of a couple who were walking along the 2400 block of Dwight Way. 

Woman-on-Woman Heist 

A 69-year-old woman waiting for a bus near the corner of Shattuck Avenue and Vine Street was confronted by a knife-wielding woman in her 30s who forced her to surrender her valuables. 

Fists for Food 

A young man stormed into the 76 Station at 849 University Ave. Tuesday afternoon, punched out the clerk and escaped with a free meal.m

Malcolm Gladwell. Ever heard of him? He’s been written up in several national publications, all applauding this bright young New Yorker staff writer and his unique analysis of why and how we think. His two books, The Tipping Point and Blink—which explore the value of first impressions—have become bestsellers. 

But, Gladwell’s literary accomplishments are not what I’m focusing on here. A San Francisco Chronicle article on Gladwell (published Jan. 30) revealed that his mother is black and therefore responsible for the curliness of his hair. When he grows it long, it turns into an Afro. While sporting this Afro, Gladwell was pulled over by cops more frequently than he ever was without the wild, nappy hair. Gladwell decided to cut his locks and it is implied in the article that he did so in order to avoid being harassed for driving while black. 

Which brings me to the subject of Ward Connerly and what I suspect is one of the primary, though unspoken reasons for his advocacy of mixed race classifications: his children and his desire to insulate them from racist behavior such as that experienced by Malcolm Gladwell and countless others who cannot or choose not to disguise the African part of their ancestry by the mere trimming of their telltale hair (a la the action movie star, Vin Diesel, for example, whose head would sprout quite a kinky ‘do if it were allowed to grow any hair at all). 

Now, I don’t know Ward Connerly or his children, however, given that he has light brown skin and wavy hair and that his babies’ mama—pardon me, I mean his wife—is white, I would guess that these young adults look more white than black. Perhaps being subject to the first (negative, erroneous) impressions of racist cops is not an issue for them because there is no trace of Africa in either their hair or skin. Whatever their appearance, I doubt that Ward Connerly’s offspring identify themselves as black or African American not only because that is not all they are but because of the negatives they associate with being black. 

Many years ago I attended a multi-ethnic support group in Berkeley called I-Pride, the “I” stood for “international.” This particular meeting consisted primarily of white women who had given birth to brown babies and did not want their children to be identified as black. During a break I wandered over to the host’s young son who was standing next to his class photo. I asked him to point out his friends in the photo. He named only the white and fair skinned children. Each time I pointed to a brown skinned or more African looking child and asked if this was also one of his friends, he assured me that no, not one of them was. Now, I could be reading into this but I sensed a bit of South Africa in that room, a feeling that the coloreds, while not on equal footing with the whites were at least superior to the blacks. 

And that’s the part that Ward Connerly leaves out of his discussion. He’s from Louisiana so I know he knows better. The black/white/Creole divisions in that state are rooted in slavery, wherein the darker skinned, more African blacks were forced to work the brutal fields while the lighter skinned, straighter haired Creole and mixed race slaves—mixed due to the widespread raping of black women—usually worked in the “big house” and were treated in a slightly more humane fashion when it came to food, clothing and the chance of being educated. For generations, lighter skinned blacks throughout the United States have been given preference over those with dark skin, particularly in the areas of education and employment and have been considered to be more attractive. Many of these race-based attitudes and practices persist to this day, both within and outside of the black community. 

My children have two multi-ethnic parents; a Creole father and me. Even though I have Native American, French, English and Irish ancestry along with the African, I think of myself primarily as a black woman. In the ‘70s I was proud to identify as black, not only as an act of defiance against the dominant culture but to embrace the beauty and true history of African roots we had been taught to disdain. 

My 15-year-old daughter, on the other hand, is equally proud of her Native American, European and Spanish ancestry. Liana considers herself to be “mixed.” She insists that the differences among her friends have to do with personalities, not race. “That’s old stuff,” she says. “That’s your generation, not mine.” Ward Connerly would be proud. And I am hopeful. But I am not naïve and neither is she. When probed, Liana acknowledges that racism does exist—in films, on television and in the classroom—the places where her world is focused right now. For example, she says that some of her teachers tend to only call upon white students and that some white kids receive better grades when they don’t deserve it. And she wishes there were more color-blind casting in films and on TV; casting people of color not only when race is an issue. When asked what she thought should be done about racism, Liana’s reply was that there should be a mass campaign to educate people about racism and its effects. 

Back to Gladwell and his first impressions. What do we base them on when assessing other human beings? Personal experience. Media influence. Peer pressure. Familial and cultural traditions. Instinct. How nice it would be if they weren’t based upon pigment and hair texture as well. ›

Well, you absolutely knew this one was coming, didn’t you, friends? 

“Following up on promises to crack down on ‘sideshows,’” we learn in last week’s Oakland Tribune, “Mayor Jerry Brown introduced an ordinance Thursday that would make attending the reckless driving exhibitions a criminal offense. … The Oakland City Council will consider the ordinance at its next meeting, June 7. Although such a measure typically would first be considered by the council’s Public Safety Committee, it will go directly to the full council because several large sideshows are expected in the coming weeks, officials said.” 

This raises some interesting questions. 

The first one is, hasn’t the mayor and the City of Oakland been “cracking down” on sideshows for some time now? Shouldn’t we discuss the results of the previous “crack downs” before embarking on a new one? (For example, we keep hearing that the sideshows are becoming more violent and dangerous. It would be instructive to find out what effect the “crack downs” have had on that, wouldn’t it?) 

The second question is, since sideshows are spontaneous events with no organization and no leaders and nobody putting out leaflets or notices on the radio, how is it that “officials” can predict that several large ones are expected in coming weeks? Presumably, it is because sideshows are primarily warm-weather events, and warm weather is now upon us, so it seems like a prudent prediction. But it leads to a third question, which is, since everybody knows it starts warming up around mid-May—it’s been happening this way every year about this same time for quite a while, now—why did Mr. Brown wait until the end of spring before introducing a new “emergency” law aimed at curbing warm weather activity? 

One answer might be to avoid a full hearing before the Public Safety Committee. 

At first glance, you might wonder why the mayor would even think avoiding the Public Safety Committee necessary. Oakland City Councilmember Larry Reid, the chairperson of the Public Safety Committee, is a vocal and ardent—one might even say fanatical—opponent of Oakland’s sideshows, and so presumably, any new “crack down” on the events would find a welcome forum there. (The other members are Council President Ignacio De La Fuente and Councilmembers Nancy Nadel and Jean Quan.) 

The answer might be in the differences between the forums provided by the committee and the full council. 

Because of the large numbers of participants and the wide range of subjects to be considered, most city councils limit the time that anyone can testify at its regular meetings on any given subject. At Oakland City Council, speakers are generally given two minutes to speak by rule, and that amount of time can be lowered to one minute on subjects that draw a large number of speakers (Interesting, isn’t it? The more interest there is in a subject, the less time an individual is given to talk about it). Anyway, in two minutes you can hardly give your name and your organizational affiliation—much less provide an intelligent argument. If the councilmembers appear to have already made up their minds, which is too often the case, then frustrated opponents end up complaining rather than explaining, often sounding merely shrill or angry or, worse yet, just dumb. 

When the committee system was put in place, from Congress down to city councils, it was always envisioned that this is where the real give and take of participatory government would take place. With fewer subjects to discuss, City Council committees, if they so choose, can allow extended public testimony in order to gather more information before they vote on their recommendation to the full council. 

In the recent past, that hasn’t happened on the Oakland sideshow issue. The Public Safety Committee of the Oakland City Council has discussed the sideshows only three times in the past year—odd, one would think, considering that we keep hearing that this is a serious public safety issue in Oakland, costing us millions of dollars in police overtime and other expenses. In any event, in none of those cases did the committee actively solicit public testimony from citizens on solutions to the sideshow conflict. You could come and talk if you wanted, of course, but that wasn’t what the agenda items were for. The purpose of two of the sideshow agenda items was to receive semiannual enforcement reports from the police department. The third was to approve a contract with the California Highway Patrol for increased sideshow-related traffic patrols. Since neither of these actions appeared (on the surface) to be especially controversial, the press didn’t report them in advance, and the general public wasn’t moved to attend and participate. 

That would presumably be much different if the mayor’s proposed “arrest the spectators” sideshow ordinance went through the normal committee procedure, since it involves the highly controversial new step of arresting spectators. 

What would I expect would happen at such a Public Safety Committee hearing? 

Possibly the same thing that happened four years ago, in the beginning of the summer of 2001, when Councilmember Reid convened a town hall meeting at Eastmont Mall to discuss the sideshow problem. 

Sideshow participants weren’t specifically invited to that June 2001 town hall meeting, but it was a public meeting, so they showed up anyhow, and talked, and participated, and gave their point of view. Most of the older East Oakland neighbors had come out to express their opposition to the sideshows, and I’m sure most of them left just as adamantly opposed, but midway through that meeting, an interesting thing happened. The sideshow participants turned out to be people. With faces. And names. And families. And homes where they lived, many of them in the same neighborhoods as the older East Oakland neighbors. The sideshow participants stopped being simply grinning, gyrating, shadowy figures on that sideshow video footage that Channel 2 keeps showing over and over and over again. The sideshow participants started being our own children. 

I think this may be one reason why Mr. Brown waited until the last minute to try to bumrush this new “arrest the spectators” sideshow law through City Council without the normal chance for public discussion and debate. Oakland’s law-and-order sideshow policy has continued for so long, not because it has worked—if it has worked, why would we need a new “crack down,” after all?—but because Mr. Brown and other Oakland city officials have successfully dehumanized the sideshow participants themselves, keeping them in the shadows, keeping them out of the public debate. They are the unknown. The dark figures of the night who invade our dreams and invoke our fears. The enemy from whom we must be saved. And Mr. Brown casting himself, as always, as the savior. 

Keeping these participants as a nameless, anonymous threat is the key to a continued law and order “crack down” because if we begin seeing them as people, we might begin to talk with them like people, and then we might begin to find that there might be a solution to the sideshow conflict besides throwing as many of them in jail as we can, and running the rest out of town. 

And so another reason for this last-minute rush to push through Mr. Brown’s “arrest the spectators” law is that if we got a chance to take a serious look at it, we might not think it’s such a great idea. What helps Mr. Brown in his run for California Attorney General is not necessarily what is best for Oakland. 

But that’s got to be the subject of another column. 

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The agreement we recently approved with UC Berkeley does much more than simply end a lawsuit. It welcomes a new era of cooperation between our city and the campus. 

Thanks to good-faith resolve on everyone’s part, the pact we signed both defends our city’s right to control development inside our borders and allows the university to advance its academic mission. The key: closer partnership and better cooperation. 

Although it was tense at times, the agreement takes a giant step forward towards a lasting and equal partnership between one of the world’s great universities and one of its most livable and progressive cities. 

Several years ago, the mayor and City Council set out to establish a new partnership between the city, our community, and the campus—a partnership built on mutual respect and substantive collaboration.  

We were deeply disheartened in January when the campus unveiled a Long-Range Development Plan (LRDP) that rebuffed our efforts to be a true partner. For months, we had worked hard to get the chancellor and UC Regents to modify the 15-year plan. Having exhausted all other options, we felt the only way to demonstrate our seriousness and to ensure a fair outcome for Berkeley residents was to take the step of filing a lawsuit to halt the LRD P. 

Specifically, we raised concerns in three areas: 

• Insufficient Voice in Planning. The campus’ plan gave the university unilateral control to build whatever it wanted, wherever it wanted, with virtually no opportunity for community input. 

• Too Much Parking. The 15-year plan relied too much on building new parking spaces that would add to our traffic congestion, and too little on workable alternatives to single-passenger automobiles. 

• Too Little Compensation. We said the city should be fairly comp ensated for services it provides to the campus.  

The agreement we reached last week—the best agreement ever between any public university campus and its host community in the state—is vastly improved in all the areas we identified: 

• On planning, the agreement calls for the city and university to work together to develop a Downtown Area Plan that will guide all new development projects. This plan—which will be developed and implemented by our commissions and approved by the City Council—guarantees that the city will maintain its control over the zoning process, ensures public input, and requires a new environmental impact report. (UC has already agreed to limit development in the Southside per a similar plan developed by the community, the city and the university.) The university also agreed to prioritize new development on properties that are already off of the tax rolls, which will significantly limit expansion into the city.  

• On parking and traffic, we reduced the number of new parking spaces allowed through 2015 without additional review to 1,270 from 2,300—a 45 percent reduction from the university’s original proposal.  

• On finances, the university has agreed to more than double its annual direct compensation to the city from $500,000 to $1.2 million plus a 3 percent annual cost of living adjustment. Beyond this annual payment, the university will work to develop a “use tax” program we expect will direct an additional $200,000-$500,000 in new revenue to the city each year. In total, the city w ill likely receive well in excess of $20 million over the life of this agreement. 

Beyond these core issues, the agreement spells out a number of new joint efforts. These include working together to increase local purchasing by the campus, efforts to hire Berkeley residents for university jobs, and create new incentives for businesses resulting from UC research to locate in the City of Berkeley. 

Is the deal perfect? No. Is it a much better outcome for our city than we were likely to achieve in the courts? The answer clearly is yes. Let’s consider the principal issues that have been raised. 

Some ask why the city didn’t hold out for more money. We do not dispute that the agreement falls short of full compensation for services the city provides to the camp us. But even if the city had prevailed in court, no court could have compelled the university to pay a penny to the city for basic services. In fact, the $500,000 we currently receive as part of the 1990 agreement would have been lost. 

The state Constitu tion explicitly exempts UC campuses from nearly all local laws and taxation. Until the Constitution is changed—for which the City Council continues to advocate—even the courts are hamstrung. In the meantime, the only way to win more resources for our community is through direct negotiation with the campus and by working together to find new ways to generate revenue for the city, like the use tax recovery program we’ve agreed to work on together. 

Some say the public should have had a chance to review the deal before it was adopted. We agree. Early in the process, the city entered into a confidentiality agreement with the campus to prevent the university from using items discussed in negotiations against us in a subsequent trial. This is a common and prude nt means to protect the public interest in high-stakes negotiations. Once a tentative settlement was reached, the City Council unanimously asked the campus to suspend the confidentiality agreement to allow public review. Regrettably, the university said it would not do so until after UC Regents voted on the proposed settlement and that the Regents could not vote until the City Council approved the agreement.  

Ultimately, the choice was to take the best agreement between any city and UC campus or to roll the dice on a multi-year series of angry court battles in an effort to impose “solutions” to our concerns. Given these constraints, we believe it was far better for the city and the university to find creative new ways to work together as partners rather than dig in our heels as adversaries. 

Tom Bates is the mayor of Berkeley. Linda Maio, Laurie Capitelli, and Max Anderson are members of the Berkeley City Council. 

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As members of BudgetWatch we carefully monitor the development and adoption process of each budget cycle. We appreciate the work that city staff and the City Council must undertake to balance each budget. That being said, we want to say that we were st unned by the council’s action on April 19 to eliminate the Citizens Budget Review Commission. We strongly protest this action on the following grounds: 

• It was probably illegal due to lack of adequate notice on the agenda.  

• It eliminated on-going co mment by an official citizens body regarding the city’s most pressing and important issue.  

• It is discourteous to every citizen who gives service to the community as a member of a board or commission.  

• It is discouraging to members of the public who want to believe that a citizen can have some impact on what is contained in the budget. 

The City Council’s action was probably illegal due to lack of adequate notice on the agenda. The report, City Commissions—Reducing Staff Support and Frequency of Meetings as a Cost Reduction Measure, placed on the City Council agenda by City Manager Kamlarz, placed four recommendations before the council. While two of those recommendations referred to consolidating two commissions, neither of which was the Citizens Budget Review Commission (CBRC), no recommendation referred to elimination of any board or commission. The only mention of the CBRC is in Attachment 1 in which it appears as one in a list of 45 boards/commissions for which “Current Frequency of Monthly Meetings” and “Proposed Frequency of Monthly Meetings” are shown in detail for each.  

An e-mail dated April 18 from Sandy Englund on behalf of Phil Kamlarz to various staff members requested that staff members “view the staff report (mentioned above) an d proposed recommendations that may or may not affect your commission.” The e-mail transmitted the exact four recommendations as contained in the manager’s April 19 report.  

In neither of these documents is there any mention of the elimination of any b oard or commission, or even of consolidation of the CBRC with any other commission. The Brown Act requires sufficient notice to the public of a possible action by the City Council. No such notice was given to members of the public or to members of the C BRC that it was to be eliminated. We, therefore, believe that your sudden action to eliminate the CBRC violated both the intent and spirit of open government as required under the Brown Act. 

The City Council’s action eliminated on-going comment by an of ficial citizens body regarding the city’s most pressing and important issue. BudgetWatch believes that the most important problem before the city at this time is the budget. The council in eliminating the CBRC seems to be saying that they do not want com ment from a citizen commission about this most important issue, even while they keep in place dozens of citizen boards and commissions on every other subject. Doesn’t the budget as a whole deserve the same careful scrutiny from an official citizen body a s the other subjects for which they maintain boards and commissions? Doesn’t the very importance of the subject require a citizen’s commission regarding this subject? 

The thrust of comments made during the discussion about eliminating the CBRC was that members of CBRC simply could not have the depth of knowledge about the budget that comes from the long hours that councilmembers have been putting into the subject. If they truly believe this (and we hope that they don’t), are the public hearings on the budget simply window dressing? Why does the council spend time and money holding community meetings on the budget even when ordinary citizens don’t attend? Less than a dozen citizens have attended the Town Hall Meetings held in West and South Berkeley. Is this a process just for show? Since there is no assurance that any citizen who addresses the council by mail or in public comment has substantial and accurate information on the budget, does that mean the council feels they don’t have to listen? 

The opportunity to address the council is fairly limited—three minutes during public comment periods, and the public hearing held on the budget is late in the process when many decisions have already been made. The best opportunities for citizens to have input into the budget early on in the process when it matters the most is through the meetings of the CBRC meetings. These meetings are more open and “comment friendly” than council meetings. The CBRC has taken these comments and officially forwarded the m to the council carrying with them the highest hopes of citizens that the council will listen to them. The City Council has closed this important avenue. 

The council action was discourteous to every citizen who gives service to the community as a membe r of a board or commission. BudgetWatch well understands the important of and agrees with looking at each and every aspect of city operations for possible savings. We also highly value the need to obtain continuous citizen input through our board and co mmission system regarding a variety of subjects. Berkeley has been fortunate in having many citizens willing to give their time and professional expertise to work on community issues as members of boards and commissions. The way to bring these two conc epts together is to work carefully and deliberately, establishing priorities, formulating clear policies and expressing rationales for proposed actions to retain, consolidate, reduce or eliminate various aspects of the official citizen participation syste m. No member of any board or commission wants to be taken lightly or have their hard work dismissed out of hand, for most the greatest reward for their participation is to know that their work is taken seriously and has an impact on city policies and pr ograms. Abrupt elimination of any board or commission is not only discourteous to the members of the board or commission that was being eliminated, it leads all members of boards and commissions to wonder who is next so why should they pour their work into something so tenuous. 

The council action is discouraging to members of the public who want to believe that a citizen can have some impact on what is contained in the budget. There is no denying that the adoption of the budget is a difficult process. It is also a clouded process in which information seems to be fully provided only when the right question is asked. Yet, we citizens keep on trying to deal with this difficult and complex subject because we understand the importance of the budget on our daily lives. We don’t want drastic service cuts but the tax/fee burden has become too great and a large number of us are hurting because of employer cutbacks, rising health care costs, retirement shortfalls, and increased fees for everything from college to transportation. Many on the City Council seem to attribute the defeat at the polls of your ballot measures to some external factors such as the number of measures on the ballot or the campaigns around those measures. Few counclmembers seem to have fi gured out that the message from the voters had to do with two factors: 1) the lack of balance between services and what ordinary people can reasonably afford; and 2) the feeling of powerlessness in dealing with their government. There is a growing fee ling that decisions have been made before council meetings begin. Yet, we all keep trying to get the message to the council but increasingly feel that the council does not hear. Whether it is a paternalistic “don’t- bother-us-we-know-better” or an autho ritarian “don’t-bother-us-we-don’t-need-you” approach, it stops the building of community understanding and consensus that is essential, particularly in crafting a budget in these difficult times. 

BudgetWatch: Barbara Allen, Kent Brown, Shirley Dean, La ura Menard, Dean Metzger, Bob Migdal, Terrylynne Turner, Trudy Washburn. 

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I think we were right to attack the former Iraqi regime because: 

• That Iraqi regime had a terribly unfriendly, oppressive, opaque, and scientifically skilled government with plenty of money. 

• Modern technology gives any such government global reach f or terror of the most horrific variety. 

• Unlike some regimes satisfying the first two, this regime was both located in a strategically significant region and was vulnerable—they were a soft spot to begin to attack a larger problem. (One should note that there is an available distinction between a “war for oil profits” (which doesn’t seem to be going on) and a “war over the globally significant control over energy resources” (which, in small part, does seem to be the case). 

Game over. The risks of not r esponding to those conditions exceed the risks of responding, big-time. More than a decade was spent trying lesser responses than the current offensive and, at the policy level, our nation’s patience was exhausted and trumped by simple prudence. 

As far a s I can tell—yes, the current administration played quite fast and loose with the truth in an effort to build political support for the war. Whose fault is that? I blame the Left who gave the administration no other option because of the Left’s predictable, consistent, and mindless (yet ruthless and tactically nasty) resistance to anything and everything that the Right might have put on the table. In our collective interest, the Right had to lie to the Left in order to save the asses of both the Left and Right. 

To borrow a sentiment from Christopher Hitchens: “The Left” should be embracing and applauding this war since it is an efficient, responsible, and proactive answer to the oppression which the Left so relentlessly (and virtuously) criticizes. (Wasn’t it the Left who used to chant “up against the wall, M.F.”?) The Right’s calls for civility and their indignance at the Left’s response is entirely understandable in this light. Meanwhile, the Left’s tiring rehearsals of weak criticisms of the Right’s t actical deceptions along the way do little but give unexpected credence to rightist comments about “latte liberals.” Far, far, too much of the criticism from the Left seems to come from a sheltered, passive, and ultimately selfish perspective—not “progres sive” at all when seen that way. 

Here are some suggestions for members of the Left who are unable to reconcile themselves to their recent political disadvantages: start volunteering. Volunteer for military service. Volunteer for “blue star” support services. Volunteer on homeland security issues. Volunteer on domestic economic issues. If the Left is to restore itself, politically, such grass-roots efforts are the surest foundation on which to build public support and I can not imagine a single non-petty reason why these would be bad ideas. Moreover, volunteerism will help to ground the Left back among “the people” about whom the Left generally claims to have such an important perspective. 

Take your lumps, latte liberals, and move on. Wake up and get wit h program. Get on the march and embrace those values the Left and right have in common. 

Tom Lord is a Berkeley resident. 

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Suddenly they’re everywhere. After weeks of heavy equipment churning up the asphalt and concrete pours between thunderstorms, my neighborhood is surrounded by “traffic-calming” round traffic barriers studded with curious signs. The symbol on the signs, w hich has a resemblance to elemental symbols from native cultures, is apparently an effort, occasionally successful, to keep drivers going in a uniform direction. 

The first truck I watched trying to navigate the circle couldn’t figure out whether he was s upposed to stop at some point, and nearly got rear-ended by the car behind him. Cars routinely stopped the first few days of the traffic circle’s birth, and skirted their remaining way around the concrete barrier in an almost majestic sweep through the ad jacent crosswalks before they got the trick down. Now they rip down the street like slalom skiers on an Olympic course. 

If you’re an adventurous driver, of which we have several in my neighborhood, you can sail a good foot over two striped street humps a nd leave rubber patches in concentric circles around the “traffic-calming” barrier, which will direct you straight into the bike lanes on Delaware Street that used to provide a small measure of safety, or the illusion of safety, when bicycling through tow n. 

I’m a bike commuter, and not the brave kind that rides without a helmet on the main roads and takes left turns from the traffic lane no matter who’s honking. I’m the kind that walks their bike through busy intersections, hunts down the empty side road s, and never uses the main traffic arteries. The bike lanes near my home were my bread and butter. Now they’re full of “calm” traffic, which curls around the concrete tubs of cedar chips like standing waves over a river rock. 

This wouldn’t bother me as m uch if I didn’t distinctly remember attending a neighborhood meeting where these traffic circles, obviously the favorite toys of the town traffic engineers, were hooted and laughed at by people who knew what they wanted was a stop sign and said so. We wer e an unfashionable group, to be sure. We didn’t care about the latest planning fashion. We didn’t want what we have now, an endless river of unstoppable cars skirting the backlogged traffic at San Pablo and University Avenue on its way to the freeway. 

We showed up, we spoke up, our city council representative managed to give us the impression that she listened to us, and then she let the traffic engineers build their favorite toys anyway. We’re showered now with the rhetoric that the cedar chip-filled obstacle course our neighborhood used to be will have enhanced property values. Maybe so. And if not, we certainly can host a rocking demolition derby. 

Carol Denney is a local activist and the author of the Pepper Spray Times. 



Last fall the Berkeley City Council created a Creeks Task Force (CTF) to review and make recommendations to the Planning Commission and City Council about the Creeks Ordinance and overall City policy regarding creeks and culverts. The CTF is a broad-based, 15-member body, representing several diverse points of view. 

To prepare these work products, the Task Force faced a steep learning curve. They began meeting last Feb. 7 and met every week through April 4. The CTF is composed of one member each from councilmembers, one each from Planning, Parks and Recreation, Public Works, and Community Environmental Advisory commissions, and one representative each from the creeks community and a creek property owners group, Neighbors on Urban Creeks. Mayor Tom Bates appointed myself as chair. Planning Department staff support the work of the task force. 

The basic challenge of the Work Plan is to strike a balance between creek protection, creek property owners’ rights and new scientific information about creeks. Specifically seven key issues are to be addressed: 

• Definition of a Creek. The current definition of a creek is very broad, including depressions or swales and culverted creeks that run in the location of the original watercourse. The task force will look at what definitions other jurisdictions have used and what experts suggest to see what definition is appropriate for Berkeley. 

• Setbacks. The current ordinance includes a 30’ setback requirement for new development from the centerline of a creek. This was an arbitrary number in the original ordinance which seemed to make sense at the time. The task force will look at how this setback has worked in Berkeley and at what other jurisdictions use to determine what seems right for Berkeley. 

• Regulated structures. Currently the Creeks Ordinance regulates roofed structures within 30 feet of a creek centerline. That means that a homeowner is prohibited from building most additions, garages or covered porches within 30 feet of the creek centerline. The CTF will consider whether to expand regulated structures to include parking lots, kids’ play areas, and open decks and porches. 

• Daylighting. The city’s General Plan encourages daylighting where safely feasible as well as restoration of natural watercourses in a former culvert location. The ordinance is not clear on priorities for potential projects, criteria for determining feasibility or how such projects could be implemented. The CTF will look at these factors. 

• Maintenance and Repair. Culverts have been around a long time in Berkeley, and many are failing. Although the CTF is specifically prohibited from addressing the question of financial responsibility for failing culverts due to on-going litigation on this subject, the CTF will look at ways to evaluate the condition of culverts as well as possible sources of funding. 

• Mapping and Ordinance Administration and Enforcement. The CTF will review the current creeks map for accuracy and determine whether improvements can or should be made. The CTF will also address the administration and enforcement of the ordinance. 

• Overall Watershed Policy. Creeks and culverts are part of an overall watershed management policy in Berkeley. The CTF will consider the role of creeks and culverts in this broader context, including non-point source pollution. 

In April the Work Plan, budget and timeline were unanimously adopted by the CTF and the Planning Commission. On May 10 the Berkeley City Council approved the Work Plan and timeline by an 8-0 vote with one abstention. The 0.5 FTE request was tentatively approved by the City Council, and the $100,000 request for consultant funding was referred to the budget review process. 

The CTF meets the first and third Monday at North Berkeley Senior Center from 7-9:30 p.m. Meetings are open to the public, and public participation is welcome. All agendas, meeting minutes, the creeks map, the Work Plan, timeline and budget may be found on the CTF’s website: www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/planning/landuse/creeks/default.html. Secretary Erin Dando can be contacted at 981-7429. 

Helen Burke is chair of the Creeks Task Force.  

Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin survived a razor-thin vote of confidence on May 17 when the House of Commons voted 152-152, putting his minority government in peril. It survived by a single vote when the Parliament speaker gave the minority government its one-vote victory. 

A few months earlier, Canadian citizens opposed to a secret National Missile Defense (NMD) agreement between Martin and President George Bush, forced Martin to reverse the agreement contributing to the crisis in his government. 

After the Berkeley City Council passed a resolution in 2002, “Endorsing the Space Preservation Act and Companion Space Preservation Treaty to Permanently Ban the Weaponization of Space,” the resolution swept through cities in Canada and helped gather thousands of signatures opposing Canada joining NMD. When citizens appeared in the Canadian Parliament with piles of paper covered with thousands of signatures, Martin was forced to reverse his secret agreement with Bush and the Canadian government rejected NMD.  

For several years I had wanted to thank the mayor of Bowen Island, the first municipality in the world to adopt the Berkeley resolution. In the summer of 2002, with the help of Vancouver lawyer Alfred Webre Jr., we created the space preservation resolution, which was introduced by Berkeley City Councilmember Dona Spring, and passed by the Berkeley City Council on Sept. 10, 2002. 

The resolution was in part a response to the bill and the “definitions” of weapons intended for space as described in HR 2977, the “Space Preservation Act of 2001,” introduced by Congressman Dennis Kucinich, which included the following: 

• Inflicting death or injury on, or damaging or destroying, a person (or the biological life, bodily health, mental health, or physical and economic well-being of a person). 

• Directing a source of energy (including molecular or atomic energy, subatomic particle beams, electromagnetic radiation, plasma, or extremely low frequency (ELF) or ultra low frequency (ULF) energy radiation) against that object [individual or targeted populations]. 

• Through the use of land-based, sea-based, or space-based systems using radiation, electromagnetic, psychotronic, sonic, laser, or other energies directed at individual persons or targeted populations for the purpose of information war, mood management, or mind control of such persons or populations.  

I suggested at the time that it seemed impossible that these weapons were even possible, but Kucinich, a member of the Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee, assured me that these weapons exist and “those people who control them are deadly serious and intend to use them if we don’t stop the weaponization of space.” 

In early April I was traveling to Vancouver to meet with Lisa Barrett, mayor of Bowen Island. Martin’s Liberal Party government was embroiled in a corruption scandal. The opposition insisted he no longer had enough support to govern, which threatened a government crisis. I was unaware of the impact the Berkeley resolution had on the Canadian decision to reject NMD, and how it tied into the minority government crisis. But a few days later during my visit to Bowen Island, I discovered just what role the Berkeley resolution had played in Canadian Foreign Policy.  

On April 10, Webre Jr., his wife Geri, and I traveled from Vancouver to meet Barrett. Bowen Island is a town much like Berkeley, with an interesting mixture of writers, artists, musicians, lots of bicycles, and a progressive flavor to the political landscape. We met in an art gallery where a local artist was having an exhibit, and together we nibbled on the artist’s homemade gingerbread cookies while mingling with citizens and artists. I even talked physics with another city councilmember.  

Barrett was very pleased to hear that Berkeley had adopted the Kyoto Protocol. She pointed out that even though the Canadian government had already signed on, it was still necessary that locally, towns like Bowan Island, must also make efforts to meet the standards. She said it was important for cities like Berkeley to act when the United States government refuses to sign the Kyoto protocol. 

It was energizing to realize that citizens of Canada and the United States can work together. We can learn from each other by implementing and sharing our ideas on issues such as energy choices, divesting pension funds from weapons manufacturers, stopping the U.S. Navy from shooting depleted uranium weaponry in United States and Canadian coastal waters, and sharing information about the spider web relationships between United States and Canadian corporations. 

Barrett told us that the U.S. Navy is shooting depleted uranium weapons into the waters around Nanaimo, poisoning their fisheries just as they did around Seattle and in California. Lockheed Martin Marietta has bought a controlling interest in the ferry systems of British Columbia, privatizing an essential public transportation system—and raising the cost of the services.  

The next day, Afred and I were interviewed on CO-OP radio CFRO 102.7 FM in Vancouver with Gail Davidson, co-founder of Lawyers Against War. We discussed the extent of Canadian government pension fund investments in United States weapons manufacturers and the Carlyle Group. Gail explained the extent of pension fund investments in United States corporations and weapons manufacturers by the British Columbia pension fund, called the British Columbia Investment Management Corp. (BCIMC), and Vancouver City pension funds. 

As of March 2004, investments were estimated to be $4.6 billion in 251 companies that provide goods and services to the US Department of Defense or are otherwise involved in military production. Missiles (17 kinds), bombs (16 types), and bullets (300-500 million per year by SNC-Lavalin alone) are produced for the U.S. armed forces by Canadian corporations.  

Vancouver antiwar activists wrote in an April 26 letter to New Democratic Party leader Carole James, “What this means is that every nurse, physiotherapist, floor cleaner, and pharmacist in every hospital in the B.C. health care system, every kindergarten teacher, college instructor and university professor, every city worker, garbage collector, computer programmer, firefighter, ferry worker, B.C. transit driver, ICBC employee, B.C. Hydro worker—in fact, virtually every municipal and provincial public sector employee—is involuntarily supporting the U.S. invasion and occupation, because of decisions taken behind closed doors by the BCIMC.” 

U.S. war crimes and the use of illegal weapons such as depleted uranium was also a top concern. Gail described how she had filed a lawsuit against Bush in a Vancouver court. This action discouraged and impacted his visit to Canada, and he did not visit the Canadian Parliament nor make any public appearances except in a small town in eastern Canada—for a photo op with the media. She was a party to a second lawsuit filed in Germany charging Rumsfeld with war crimes, preventing Rumsfeld from visiting Europe in February 2005 with Bush and Rice. 

This trip to Canada made me realize that the need for citizen oversight and participation in local government is greater than ever before. Many things that we see happening locally such as election fraud are actually broader trends, the result of global corporatization and militarization. 

The vast looting of pension funds began about eight years ago and will continue until we stop it. Enron was just the beginning and CalPERS, the California state government workers pension fund, is in the crosshairs now for privatization and looting. The extent of pension fund investment in the U.S. military industrial complex is shocking. We are actually unknowingly supporting and benefiting from wars we oppose. 

Divesting from weapons of death takes the profit out of war. Subtle implementation of police state policies—such as RFID tags in the Berkeley library—must be stopped. There are many things that can be done locally and through “cross fertilization” of ideas across borders. We are the only ones who can make this happen. And it can start with something as simple as a Berkeley resolution, Canadian paper ballots, and a determined citizen lawyer. 

Leuren Moret is a member of Berkeley’s Community Environmental Advisory Commission.›

On the day before the conclave to choose a new pope began, future pontiff Joseph Ratzinger led a liturgy that reassured the church’s believers that the Holy See was not giving up on them and was prepared to fight for the salvation of their souls. He surely meant to allude to the fight against moral relativism, but he also had his sights set on evangelicalism. 

Indeed, during the first mass held by Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI, he strongly implied that the Catholic church is the rightful House of Christ, and said that his first commitment was toward “the full and visible unity of Christ’s followers.” 

Today, to regain ground in the first world and continue to expand in the Third World, the Roman Catholic Church, more than fighting secularism, must counteract the expansion of evangelical groups. It is a silent clash that could be compared to the protracted, mostly slow-burning feud between capitalism and communism during the Cold War.  

According to some researchers, evangelical Christianity is expanding three times faster than the world population and is the only existing religious group showing a significant growth through conversion. By contrast, the Roman Catholic Church is expanding at a slower pace than the population, which will mean an overall decrease in the number of Catholics worldwide. 

In addition, the dissolution of the Berlin Wall not only reinvigorated the Orthodox church, but also saw huge numbers of believers from the former Socialist bloc—where the church had been persecuted—move into evangelical groups.  

There are currently more evangelicals in Asia than in North America. Singapore’s churches are among the most active in the world, sending one missionary abroad per every 1,000 members. Seven of the world’s 10 largest evangelical churches can be found in Seoul alone, a city in which 110 years ago there was none.  

In Latin America, a mostly Catholic region for the past 500 years, the number of evangelicals has grown from under 250,000 in 1900 to over 60 million in 2000. Critics of the Vatican say the vacuum left by Pope John Paul II’s disavowal of the “basic Christian communities” movement has been filled by the evangelicals. 

In 1960, the number of evangelicals living in the developing countries were one-half of those in the West; in the year 2000 they were four times more and in 2010 they will be seven times as numerous. 

In America, where even Protestant groups have lost 5.4 million members over the last decade, evangelicals have enjoyed a growth rate of 40 percent. They have become the largest religious force in the United States, with 26 percent of all believers—and they wield undeniable political clout. 

“The current pope is a renovator. But there cannot be renovation without tradition,” says Father Joseph Fessio, founder of Ignatius Press and Chancellor of Ave Maria University in Florida. “I don’t have any doubt that he’ll realize the full spirit of Vatican II, of unifying all of Christ’s believers under the benevolent care of the Holy See. 

“He has already laid the doctrinal ground for the renaissance of the church—he did it when he was at the helm of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. Under Benedict XVI the world will know that the Roman Catholic Church has Christ’s message at its core and follows his teachings closely,” adds Fr. Fessio. 

The battle for the soul of believers in developed countries, particularly the United States, is also critical—most of the funds used by alternative evangelical churches to send missionaries and proselytize in the poorer countries come from there. 

The appointment of San Francisco Archbishop William Levada to the previous position held by Pope Benedict XVI himself can be better appreciated in this light.  

Levada’s appointment sends the message that the church entrusts its doctrines to a prelate who had led a diocese in America’s most secular humanist and morally relativistic city. Levada has dealt firsthand with the legacies of free love, feminism, the gay movement and the evangelical juggernaut. 

“Benedict XVI has chosen Levada specifically because he knows how to face these challenges,” says Father Labib Kobti, pastor at St. Thomas More in San Francisco and U.S. Representative for the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem.  

“When Levada expressed his surprise at his appointment, the Pope responded that he was in fact the right man for the task because he came from a world where evangelical groups were a challenge, where the message of Christ was being distorted, and that he had provided a compassionate but firm rebuttal to the many assaults that the church of San Francisco had faced during his years as head of the diocese.” 

Under Levada’s almost decade-long tenure, San Francisco’s Catholic church regained a religious presence that had been faltering under the more politically adaptable administration of Archbishop John Quinn. 

Father Kobti, however, dismisses suggestions that the Vatican is more than alarmed at the growing influence of evangelicalism. “In the past the church has been given for dead more than once,” he says. “Take for example the rise of the Baptists and of the Lutherans.” 

PNS contributor Paolo Pontoniere is a correspondent for Focus, Italy’s leading monthly.  

›

From tango to reggae, Big Bones’ blues to Celtic rock. With the sound of Steel Drums, electronics, Indian flute, hip hop and musical saw the second annual Berkeley World Music Weekend will make a joyous noise on and around Telegraph Avenue during this weekend, all for free (except a Saturday night show at Larry Blake’s for $8), with a little bit more than something for everybody—from everywhere. 

With 27 performances featuring more than 70 musicians at over a dozen venues (including People’s Park), World Music Weekend goes into its second year with a great deal of ambition and local talent. 

“The Taarka Quartet is the only non-Bay Area group we’ve booked,” says event organizer Gianna Ranuzzi, who described the band’s music as Gypsy hypno-jazz. “They’re playing both days for free and have been great to work with. The musicians advise us on the shows, tell me what worked for them and what didn’t last year, turn me on to the best people to bring in, then throw their own parties by bringing in friends and special guests to jam at their performances.” 

Ranuzzi said one of the best aspects of the music weekend is that people can enjoy the avenue and see how beautiful People’s Park can be. 

The shows begin at noon Saturday with Zulu Spear’s Khumbala Dance Company. A double concert with Reggae City Band and Groove.Org will play in People’s Park from 3-5 p.m. Other performances in and around cafes and businesses include La Peña favorite Rafael Manriquez, as well as saw player Morgan Cowin and others at Julie’s Healthy Cafe. Salaat will play Arabic and Turkish Sufi music in a dual show with Spirit of Ireland, featuring Melanie O’Reilly at Raleigh’s. Glenn Morgan will play at Cody’s on his hammer dulcimer. 

Other shows around the avenue include The Shots (an Irish/Bluegrass/Cajun band), Peter MacDonough and Quiet Dignity (paying Brazilian-Afro-Cuban music), Alan Smithline (on acoustic Steel Guitar), Bokei Steel Drums, and Islands Of Fire Drum Ensemble. 

Also on Saturday, Laurie Chastain on fiddle and Ed Sherry on guitar, mandolin, and bouzouki will play at Baguette at 5 p.m. with a reading of Julia Vinograd’s poem, “Limbo Town,” about Berkeley. 

Sunday’s music begins at noon, with harmonica ace Big Bones on the plaza in front of Cody’s, while Cortez Harmon will play Latin jazz trumpet with his ensemble at the Durant Food Court. Annette Bauer will play the North Indian sarod at The Musical Offering at 1 p.m., while Fredi Bloom sings traditional Jewish Song at C’Est Cafe. Blues and Americana This Old Band plays on the street, and Sandeep Bhatt sings devotional and Bollywood with Robin Sukhadia. Others include Jeff Whittier on Indian flute, and The Toids (New Balkan).  

Sunday also will bring Venezuelan rhythms with flute Snake Trio at the Beau Sky Hotel at 2 p.m. and DJ Cheb i Sabbah, who plays an African, Arabic, Indian mix, with a dancer at 4 p.m. at Amoeba. The festival closes with Tango No. 9 at The Village at 6 p.m. 

“Many of these musicians are trained in a classical tradition, carrying it further through improvisation,” Ranuzzi said. “They’re rooted in that, but are also entertainers and this is an intimate event where the performers are available; you can talk to them.” 

For more details, see www.telegraphberkeley.org of for day-of-event information, go to the event table outside Cody’s Books, 2454 Telegraph Ave. 

So, naturally, what you’re asking is why on earth is the Subterranean Theatre Company producing Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew—arguably the best-known, supposedly funny, and longest-running assault on women’s human rights on the English-speaking s tage—and they’re committing this outrage firmly in the middle of Berkeley?  

The short answer is that in no way is this your father’s Shrew. Truth to tell, it’s almost certainly unlike any version that’s ever been staged before, even though theater people have been struggling with the play ever since Shakespeare died. (According to the renowned Shakespearean scholar David Bevington, English audiences didn’t get to see a version close to Shakespeare’s original until 1844).  

But the real answer lies with t he multi-award winning Canadian director Tom Bentley, who came to Berkeley planning to devote himself exclusively to his own writing. He was suffering from a bad case of theater burnout, but Bentley’s a guy with really strong views, one of which is his de ep concern about what he sees as the increasing political strength of the religious right.  

When Bentley realized that Shrew provided an almost perfect setup from which to attack what he calls “these righteous men who have gone back to the Bible to bolst er their manhood” he set to work. He’s quite up-front about what he’s done with the play.  

He says quite explicitly in the program notes, “This production is inspired by The Promise Keepers and other similar men’s groups that promise easy answers for men seeking to define a superior place in the family.”  

It should not be surprising that Bentley has edited the play to present a cleaner plot movement through the story he has in mind. It’s still a fairly long presentation—there’s always more than enough p lay in an Elizabethan drama for a modern audience to work with. But what is there makes sense. 

One of the production’s great strengths is the ensemble of men formed from the collection of various “friends,” and other roles. The men make a tremendous impa ct from the moment they open the door and come down the aisle, two by two, holding small books to their eyes, blocking off the world. The men are dressed completely in black: shirts, socks, everything. The only touch of color distinguishing one man from another is in his satin tie, and they’re identical except for muted colors, slightly different with each man.  

And then there’s the most daring act of the production: A fairly small structure sits at the center of what would be a stage if the Art Gallery co-opted for this production had such a luxury. It serves as a theatrical “flat” where actors can go “off stage.” 

There’s a large white cross painted on it.  

So the short version of this review is to say that it’s a powerful and very effective productio n, but the truth of the matter is that it’s also pretty scary. Watching someone lose her strength, her will, her very “self,” is terrifying; there’s nothing funny about it at all. Mary Mackey has a full grasp of both parts of her role as Katherine, and her deterioration from the powerful—albeit unpleasant—woman at the opening of the play to the pathetic dependent at the end, desperately agreeing to any irrational statement thrown at her, is entirely too convincing to forget. 

Scott Nordquist is Petruchio, a man who knows what he wants. He’s the one who unblushingly declaims the famous lines “I come to wive it wealthily in Padua/ If wealthily, then happily in Padua.” His role requires a wide range of behaviors, from “Good Buddy” with his friends, to explos ive, frightening rages specifically designed to break Katherine’s will.  

It’s successful. And in this version of a very old play, it’s no longer funny at all. It is, however, fine acting. 

Subterranean Theatre Company presents The Taming of the Shrew, Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, Live Oak Park, through June 24. For reservations, call 276-3871.

FRIDAY, JUNE 3 

THEATER 

Berkeley Repertory Theater “The People’s Temple” at the Roda Theater and runs through June 5. Tickets are $20-$55. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

Berkeley Rep, “Honour” opens at the Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St. and runs through July 3. Tickets are $20-$39. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

Contra Costa Civic Theater “Private Lives” Noel Coward’s comedy. Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. through June 12, at 951 Pomona Ave., El Cerrito. Tickets are $10. 524-9132. www.ccct.org 

Shotgun Players, “Arabian Night” Thurs.-Su. at 8 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. until July 10. Tickets are $10-$30. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

Subterranean Shakespeare “The Taming of the Shrew,” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center in Live Oak Park, through June 24. For reservations call 276-3871. 

Un-Scripted Theater Company “The Short and the Long of It” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., through June 25 at Temescal Arts Center, 511 48th St., Oakland. Tickets are $7-$10. 415-869-5384. www.un-scripted.com 

EXHIBITIONS 

Gallery Talk with Sculptor Bruce Beasley discussing his 45-Year Retrospective at 7 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. Cost is $4-$8. 238-2200.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Myrlie Evers-Williams presents “The Autobiography of Medgar Evers: A Hero’s Life and Legacy Revealed Through His Writings, Letters and Speeches” at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Sponsored by Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley High Dance Projects Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Florence Schwimley Little Theater, Berkeley High. 

Berkeley Edge Fest 70th Birthday Celebration for Terry Riley at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $26-$32. 642-9988.  

Pacific Collegium “Couperin le Grand: Grand Motets” at 8 p.m. at St. Paul’s Church, 114 Montecito Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $12-$20. www.pacificcollegium.org 

Galax Quartet, consort music for strings and voice by John Dowland and Roy Wheldon at 8 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Cost is $10-$15. 601-1370.  

Hide Date at 8 p.m. and Ed Reed and his Trio at 9 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ.  

Cowpokes for Peace at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10.  

Lalo Izquierdo and Rompe y Raja, Afro-Peruvian music and dance at 8:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Vince Wallace Quintet at 9 p.m. at Cafe Van Kleef, 1621 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Cost is $5. 763-7711.  

Tom Paxton at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $24.50-$25.50. 548-1761.  

Houston Jones at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Jeff Kazor and the Swerve Beats at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082.  

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

Todd Boston at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

The Push at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Eileen Hazel and Helen Chaya at 8 p.m. at Changemakers, 6536 Telegraph Ave. Cost is $5-$10.  

A.D.D., Riot Au Go Go, False Alliance at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

Paquito D’Rivera and members of the Turtle Island String Quartet at 8 and 10 p.m. through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $15-$24. 238-9200.  

SATURDAY, JUNE 4 

THEATER 

Bembero Mudengu: Telling My Story Zimbabwean dance, music, ceremony and storytelling with Julia Tsitsi Chigamba at 7 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. Tickets are $12-$18. 925-798-1300. 

California Shakespeare Theater, “Othello” at 8 p.m. at Bruns Amphitheater, 100 Gateway Blvd., between Berkeley and Orinda, through July 3. Tickets are $10-$55. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“New Work” paintings by Yasuko Kaya, Chung Ae Kim, Mitsuyo Moore opens at 4th Street Studio, 1717D 4th St. and runs to June 17. 527-0600.  

East Bay Open Studios Sat. and Sun. and June 11-12. Maps available at www.proartsgallery.org 

FILM 

International Disability Film Festival Sat. and Sun. from 1 to 5 p.m. Reception Sun. at 6 p.m. at La Peña. 849-2568.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Mike Marriner, Brian McAllister, and Nathan Gebhard describe their cross-country road-trip and interviews with notable leaders in “Finding the Open Road: A Guide to Self-Construction Rather Than Mass Production” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

“Blind at the Museum” sign-language gallery talk at 1:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, 2625 Durant Ave. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

“Terry Riley and the Last Half Century of American Music” A discussion with Paul Dresher, Joan Jeanrenaud and others at 4 p.m. at 125 Morrison Hall, UC Campus. Part of The Berkeley Edge Fest. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Punnany Poets at 7:30 and 9 p.m. at Black Repertory Theater, Adeline St. 652-2120. www.blackrepertorygroup.com 

Bay Area Poets Coalition open reading from 3 to 5 p.m., on the front lawn at 1527 Virginia St. 527-9905. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Edge Fest “The Music of John Zorn” at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $26-$32. 642-9988.  

Pacific Mozart Ensemble, “A Capella Jazz & Pop” at 7:30 p.m. at The Crowden Music Center, 1475 Rose St. Tickets are $15-$20. 415-705-0848. www.pacificmozart.org 

Kensington Symphony, “Tribute to French Music” at 8 p.m. at Northminster Presbyterian Church, 545 Ashbury Ave., El Cerrito. Donation $8-$10. 524-4335. 

Trinity Chamber Concerts: Bellavente Wind Quintet at 8 p.m. at 2320 Dana St. Tickets are $8-$12. 549-3864.  

“Tribute to the Divas” with Faye Carol singing Billie Holiday, at 8 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6100. 

World Music Weekend on Telegraph Ave., between Bancroft and Parker, from noon to 8 p.m. 

Jason Martineau, Rhonda Benin & Soulful Strut at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ.  

Bokei, The Taarka Quartet and Islands of Fire Drum Ensemble from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. at the Caribbean Cove, 2556 Telegraph Ave. 981-8476. 

Norton Buffalo at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Lua, a quartet of voices, at 6:30 p.m. at Cafe Valpariso, 3105 Shattuck Ave. 841-3800. 

Mitch Marcus Quartet at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Tracorum at 9 p.m. at Cafe Van Kleef, 1621 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Cost is $5. 763-7711.  

Los Mapaches at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $4-$8. 849-2568.  

The Unravellers, The Kissers at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082.  

Braziu with Sotaque Baiano at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $15. 548-1159.  

Matthew Sperry Memorial Festival with Triaxium West Large Ensemble at 8 p.m. at 21 Grand, 416 25th St. Oakland. Tickets are $6-$50.  

Samantha Raven and Friends at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Hali Hammer & Randi Berge, folk rock, at 7 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7. 558-0881. 

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

Larry Stefl Jazz Trio at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $3. 843-2473.  

Kenny Brooks Trio at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$18. 845-5373.  

Candice & Company at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Little Brown House, Hong Kong Sit, Dink at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $7. Benefit for Stand Up for Kids. 525-9926. 

Famous Last Words, acoustic americana, at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10. www.epicarts.org 

SUNDAY, JUNE 5 

EXHIBITIONS 

“From Isolation to Connection” works by artists with psychiatric disabilities at the Berkeley Art Center. Curator’s walk-through at 2 p.m. 644-6893. 

“Sustainable Energy” photographs by Martijn Mollet at 2 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Berkeley Edge Fest Discussion with the composers at 6 p.m. at 125 Morrison Hall, UC Campus. 642-9988.  

Poetry Flash with Gerald Fleming and Maria M. Benet at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Edge Fest The Music of John Zorn at 3 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $26-$32. 642-9988.  

Berkeley Edge Fest The Music of Jorge Liderman, Fernando Benadon and others at 7:30 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $26-$32. 642-9988.  

World Music Weekend on Telegraph Ave., between Bancroft and Parker, from noon to 8 p.m. 

Prometheus Symphony Orchestra at 3 p.m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 114 Montecito Ave., Oakland.  

Frankye Kelly sings Ella Fitzgerald at 8 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, Central Reading Room, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6100. 

Cantabile Choral Guild “Winds of Time” at 7:30 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Chiurch, 2727 College Ave. Tickets are $6-$25. 650-424-1410. www.cantabile.org 

Community Women’s Orchestra performs music by women at 4 p.m. at Zion Lutheran Church, 5201 Park Blvd. Piedmont. Donation $5-$10, children free. 6899-0202. 

Fourtet with Brendan Millstein at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ.  

Carlos Oliveira and Ricardo Peixoto, Brazilian jazz guitar, at 4:30 at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$18. 845-5373.  

The Twang Cafe, Americana, at 7:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10.  

Austin Lounge Lizards at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Americana Unplugged: Loaded Ponies at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Matthew Sperry Memorial Festival at 8 p.m. at 21 Grand, 416 25th St. Oakland. Tickets are $6-$50. www.21grand.org 

MONDAY, JUNE 6 

CHILDREN 

Family Music Night World music with Amber Hines from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at Bananas, 5232 Claremont Ave., Oakland. To register call 658-7353. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Punim: Our Spoken Treasures” An exhibit of photographs at the BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St., through June 7. 848-0237. www.brjcc.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Actors Reading Writers “American Folktales” at 7:30 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Bring a book for the book exchange. 

The Last Word poetry reading with Louis Cuneo and Diana Quartermaine at 7 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

Meredith Maran and friends introduce “50 Ways to Support Lesbian and Gay Equality: The Complete Guide to Supporting Family, Friends, Neighbors or Yourself” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

Poetry Express with Avotcja at 7 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. berkeleypoetryexpress@yahoo.com  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Matthew Sperry Memorial Festival with Phase Chancellor, John Bischoff at 8 p.m. at 21 Grand, 416 25th St. Oakland. Tickets are $6-$50. www.21grand.org 

Molehill Orchestra at 9:30 p.m. at Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. 

Eldar, jazz pianist, at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$14. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

TUESDAY, JUNE 7 

FILM 

Berkeley High School Film Festival at 7 p.m. at the Little Theater, Allston Way between Milvia and MLK. Tickets are $8 adults, $5 students.  

Alternative Vision: “Lo-Fi Landscapes: Pictures form the New World” with filmmakers Bill Brown, Thomas Comerford, and Melinda Stone at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Jean Schiffman, author of “The Working Actor’s Toolkit” in discussion with actor Lorri Holt at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Central Library, Community Room, 2090 Kittredge. 981-6100. 

“Oakland’s Chinatown” with William Wong at 7 p.m. at El Cerrito Library, 6510 Stockton Ave. 526-7512.  

James Howard Kunstler describes “The Long Emergency: Surviving Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Marcus O’Realius & The Transplantdentalists at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $16.50- $17.50. 548-1761.  

Duncan James, jazz guitar, at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Singers’ Showcase at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ.  

Ledisi with the Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra in a tribute to Sarah Vaughn at 8 and 10 p.m. through Thurs. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $6-$10. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Matthew Sperry Memorial Festival with Johannes Bergmark at 8 p.m. at 21 Grand, 416 25th St. Oakland. Tickets are $6-$50.  

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 8 

FILM 

Seventies Underground: “The Remake” with filmmaker RIck Schmidt at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Elijah Wald reads from “The Mayor of MacDougal Street,” a memoir by folk musician Dave Van Ronk, which Wald completed after Van Ronk’s death, at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698.  

Aaron Glantz describes “How America Lost Iraq” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

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

Café Poetry with Kira Allen at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña. Donation $2. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

“Music for the Spirit” harpsichord concert at noon at First Presbyterian Church of Oakland, 2619 Broadway. 444-3555.  

Ned Boynton Trio at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Sonic Camouflage at 8 p.m. at Cafe Van Kleef, 1621 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. 763-7711. www.cafevankleef.com  

Calvin Keys Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ.  

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

Paul Geremia at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761.  

THURSDAY, JUNE 9 

EXHIBTIONS 

June Garden Show with works by Carol Bevilaqua, Marlie De Swart, Kim Webster, Bella Bigsby and Vicki Breazeale. Reception at 6 p.m. at ACCI Gallery, 1652 Shattuck Ave. Exhibit runs to July 1. 843-2527. www.accigallery.com 

“Familiar Faces, Distant Lands” Oil Paintings by Susan Hall, Mary Jonlic and Nika. Reception at 6 p.m. at Addison Street Windows, 2018 Addison St. Exhibit runs to June 30. 981-7546. 

Alvarado Artists Group Show with works by Marilyn MacGregor, Barbara Werner, Joan Lakin Mikkelsen, Carla Dole and MJ Orcutt at the Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. Reception at 6 p.m. 848-1228.  

THEATER 

Traveling Jewish Theater, “Cherry Docs” at 8 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Theater. Tickets are $23-$34. www.atjt.com 

FILM 

Anime: “Howl’s Moving Castle” at 6 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Sally Woodbridge will discuss and show photographs from “San Francisco Architecture: An Illustrated Guide to the Outstanding Buildings, Public Artworks, and Parks in the Bay Area of California,” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698.  

“One Teacher in Ten” contributions of LGBT educators at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Liz Plummer, soprano, at 12:15 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge at Shattuck. 981-6235.  

Devil Makes Three at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $16.50-$17.50. 548-1761.  

Mitch Marcus Quintet at 9 p.m. at Cafe Van Kleef, 1621 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Cost is $5. 763-7711.  

Palindrome with Bryan Girard at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ.  

Hot Club Sandwich, Klezmania!, Barbary Coast Guitar Duo at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082.  

Anton Schwartz and Bill Bell at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.

Adagia, the new restaurant at the corner of Bancroft Way and College Avenue, looks like the dining hall of an East Coast prep school. Luckily, the food doesn’t follow suit. The restaurant, opened in February after months of planning, permitting, and delays, is located in Westminster House, a 1926 Tudor-style building designed by Berkeley Architect Walter Ratcliff, with an enormous fireplace in the dining room, wood panelled walls, and stained-glass windows. 

The restaurant has swept the old space with a breath of decidedly modern air. Chef Brian Beach, formerly of Aqua, brings a steady hand to a menu that shows both French and Italian influence. A plate of prosciutto and manchego cheese with a scattering of toasted almonds and dates is one of the tasty, straightforward appetizers. Asparagus risotto and duck confit are among the stable of entrees. 

“We’ve been waiting for a place like Adagia to open on the southside,” said Susan Dennehy, a Jurisprudence and Social Policy Ph.D. student. “It’s nice to have a place to go where the food is good and you can get away from all the undergraduates. I think it’s filling a void near campus.” 

Dennehy, who praised the lamb pasta dish, represents the market that owner Daryl Ross is targeting with Adagia, his latest restaurant in the area. Ross also owns Caffe Strada across College Avenue from the restaurant. He also runs Café Muse in the UC Berkeley Art Museum, Café Zeb in Boalt Hall, and the Free Speech Café on campus. 

“Everyone who opens a food place around here thinks students because that’s where the numbers are. They think “Let’s do a Fat Slice,’” said Ross. “But for faculty and staff looking for a place to eat there’s really only the Faculty Club on campus, which has sub-par food.” 

At lunch, Adagia offers a bubbly tartine of ham and Gruyere on Acme levain bread, green garlic and potato soup, and Caesar salad. At night, the menu features cod with artichokes, lamb shank over polenta and spaghetti with tomato, basil and garlic bread. Adagia also serves weekday breakfasts and weekend brunch with dishes like poached eggs with toast, Greek-style yogurt topped with poached fruit and well-executed espresso drinks. 

Ross said his target audience at lunch, when items on the menu are less than $12, is faculty and staff from the university with a few students mixed in. At night when prices run higher, Ross said he hopes to lure residents from the Berkeley hills and people coming to attend Cal Performances programs. 

“Our space seemed conducive to the nicer menu,” said Ross. “Here we have this elegant space and that’s really where the idea came from.” 

The dining room décor is simple so the natural beauty of the room is undisturbed. During the day, light pours in through the diamond shaped windowpanes and bounces off the hardwood floors and high ceiling. At night, a gas fire and cream-shaded wall sconces illuminate the room, which feels like a cozy cave. A few purple orchids punctuate the space and a long, handsome table, made from recycled wood by The Wooden Duck in Berkeley, sits at its center. 

The building is owned by a Presbyterian Ministry, which uses the rest of the facility to house more than 100 students and host conferences and events. During the 1960s, Westminster House was a gathering place for student organizers of the free speech movement. 

The idea for Adagia began about five years ago when Ross approached Westminster’s executive director and campus pastor, Randy Bare. The two discovered they share an interest in philosophy, and in the writings of Erasmus of Rotterdam. Ross convinced Bare that opening a restaurant would be the perfect way of welcoming the public to Westminster House and settled on Adagia, a Latin word meaning slow, as a name for the restaurant. The name seemed perfect because it recalls Erasmus’ famous book of Latin and Greek adages, as well as the Slow Food Movement, to which Ross ascribes. 

Chef Beach gets much of the produce through organic distributor GreenLeaf. “All of our lettuces come in whole head,” said Beach. “All of the herbs are organic. We don’t put fish like swordfish and Chilean sea bass on the menu.” 

Adagia’s hard-won liquor license allows them to sell beer and wine but no hard alcohol. Former Chez Panisse pastry chef Charlene Reis consulted on the dessert menu: a caramel apple tart served with zabaglione and an almond cake with strawberry rhubarb compote both are delightful. 

A lovely garden with benches graces the corner outside the restaurant’s door. 

“It’s just such a beautiful place to sit,” said grad student Dennehy. “And that’s worth paying a dollar or two more for your food.” 

Adagia Restaurant 

2700 Bancroft Way 

647-2300 

In Oxford as in Berkeley, housing has become a major political issue. Decisions on how many new homes are needed in Britain start with the central government, with quotas being set by regional planning groups similar to the Association of Bay Area Govern ments. The South East England Regional Assembly is putting together a 20-year plan in consultation with the Oxfordshire County Council, but the County Council’s plan is now facing opposition from Oxford City Council’s Administration.  

An interesting diff erence from Berkeley is that the Administration (corresponding to Berkeley’s managerial staff) is quite up front about having its own agenda. When I visited the planning department at Oxford’s city headquarters, I picked up a glossy magazine, complete wit h advertisements, in which the Administration argued on behalf of its ideas about where new housing should be located in Oxfordshire. In brief, they think it should be in the city of Oxford where possible. But Oxford is already dense, with 61 homes per hectare as compared with the national target range of 30 to 50 homes per hectare.  

The young planner I interviewed said that he wasn’t sure how much more “town cramming” people were going to be willing to tolerate. Oxfordshire County Council’s alternative is to build more housing on the edges of the three or four towns of 20,000-30,000 population on the outer edge of the county, outside Oxford’s long-established greenbelt. Oxford City’s planners think that would just encourage more commuting.  

A feature o f the City Administration’s plan which is controversial is their proposal to take a section of the greenbelt, amounting to half of one percent of the total, to build what they call as a “well-designed sustainable community” of five thousand homes. As they describe it, it sounds very much like the “new towns” which have been a gleam in the eyes of British planners since early in the 20th century. Their history is one of mixed success and failure.  

Why is there a housing shortage, I asked? My informant tol d me that the overall population of Britain isn’t increasing by any dramatic amount, even with some immigration, but household size is changing. People are living in smaller groups: single-parent families, young wage-earners on their own instead of in fam ily homes, old people. We see the same thing in Berkeley. Where students used to be happy enough to live in dorms with bath down the hall, they now want their own units shared by no more than four people, with kitchens and multiple bathrooms.  

Britain has also abandoned its attempt to prevent the population from migrating en masse to its South East region. For a long time there were government incentives to encourage people to move to the depopulated north, but no more. The pressure on the coastal U.S., especially California, is the same kind of problem, and won’t be solved by insisting that people move back to Oklahoma. 

What about student pressure on Oxford’s housing? Here there are 27,000 students in a city of 134,000. In Berkeley we have closer to 35,000 in a city of 109,000; the University of California is coy with exact numbers. Most of Oxford’s students are housed by their university. How did the city of Oxford accomplish that, I asked? It’s simple. The university doesn’t have “development rights,” i.e. it must follow the city’s zoning regulation or apply for a variance, even on land owned by the university or its colleges. When the city wants the university to build more housing, it simply designates the appropriate area as housing only, and the university is forced to build housing or nothing.  

I did a quick check of other Berkeley hot buttons. Height limit? 18.5 metres, or about 60 feet, set so that Oxford’s famous spires will not be hidden. One consequence is a boring roof line, since everyon e builds to the limit. Pedestrian streets? “Oxford has been too successful with those,” said my informant. Privatized diesel busses are everywhere, and they’re blamed for bad air quality. There’s an electric signboard in the city administration building r ating the day’s carbon monoxide level.  

Local retail? It’s big chains on the High Street these days, including Starbuck’s and Borders. But things are bustling—no rows of empty storefronts as in Berkeley. This is a consequence of the national government’s sea-change on mall development in the mid-’90s—where malls were once encouraged, now they’re effectively banned as a way of supporting town centres. The policy started under the Tories, but Labour has kept it up.  

This doesn’t mean that the charming local stores have lost out completely. Those which have survived are so good that they don’t need to depend on government protection for their success. 

Blackwell’s Bookstore is heaven on earth, though it’s a national and international powerhouse as well as Oxford’s local institution. It offers comfortable armchairs, an excellent café and well-read clerks who are featured as personalities in Blackwell’s ads—and all the books in the world, with plenty of time and encouragement to sit down and read them for as long as you want. I saw a young mother reading stories to her child in the café for at least an hour, with no one complaining. In Oxford, they’ve got Borders beat by a mile. Some Berkeley booksellers might take a leaf or two from Blackwell’s book. 

—i

Today’s lesson in comparative local government in university cities (a putative excuse for our trip to Oxford) started with a two-hour walking tour of Oxford’s university, including seven or eight of its colleges and some principal university buildings. We were lucky to have as our guide the retired university marshal (head of its police and security services), previously superintendent with the fabled Oxfordshire police force of Inspector Morse fame. Besides giving us a capsule history lesson at every s top, he entertained us with anecdotal asides about how public relations image diverges from reality, here as in Berkeley.  

For example, pedestrianized streets: He led our tour group skittering across one of them in the rain, dodging trucks, busses and al so plenty of speeding luxury cars. “Not supposed to be here!” he muttered. Why, we asked, were private cars allowed to use this street, even though the signs clearly said they couldn’t? “Enforcement,” he said, “I’m not running things anymore—I didn’t allo w it.”  

The tour ended in front of Oxford Town Hall, which presented further research opportunities. Soaking wet and probably suspect-looking, we asked the woman at the reception desk if we could talk to someone about how government works in Oxford. “You need to talk to the information office,” she said. This seems to be the new world standard—anyone who’s anybody anywhere has a hired buffer between them and the questioning public. She sent me to a telephone booth to call the PR person, whose message machine, of course, said that she was “away from her desk.”  

Maybe I’ll call back tomorrow, but in the meantime I grabbed a handful of printed material that told me more about what’s going on here.  

First, a little flyer photocopied onto cheap green paper informed me of the existence of the Oxford Civic Society. It started in 1969 “as a protest group to stop the wholesale destruction of the City by those determined to strangle us with roads and destroy our heritage...the Society believes that it is only by concerted action that our City can be defended from poor planning, pollution, and the mass invasion of cars.” Noble goals, suitable for most cities these days, even for Berkeley—and a look at their web page, www.oxfordcivicsoc.org.uk, has many particulars about how much they’ve accomplished and how they’ve done it. 

Next, some pamphlets from the Oxford City Council: The one entitled I Want to Make a Complaint, your guide to the Council’s complaints procedure, said earnestly that “our aim is to provide a quality service to you, our customer.” A full page flow chart detailing many ways citizens might register complaints gave the impression that they really mean what they say. Another one, aimed at dealing with citizen fears about cell phone towers, showed that some things are the same everywhere. Not the same: Oxford Shopmobility, a service which provides free wheelchair or motorized cart use for anyone with a temporary or permanent mobility difficulty while they’ve shopping in Oxford. That’s something Ber keley could use. 

But the best information, of course, was only available after we got back to our friends’ flat, on the Internet, increasingly the major means of communication for those who can afford it. I learned that Oxford is a city of 134,000 reside nts, and I found out that I was wrong about details of how the Oxford City Council works. 

There are 48 (!) Councillors, representing 24 Wards (2 Councillors for each Ward), with half elected every two years. Councillors are said to be “democratically acc ountable to residents of their Ward....the overriding duty of Councillors is to the whole community, but they have a special duty to their constituents, including those who did not vote for them.” The full council decides on policies and budgets, and elec ts an executive board which makes day to day decisions. There are also six area committees with additional citizen members and a variety of special purpose committees which have powers and budgets of their own. 

Oxford is like Berkeley in one way: There’s no interest here in right-wing politics. After the 2004 elections, Labour holds 20 seats on the Oxford City Council, Liberal Democrats have 18, greens seven, and something called the Independent Working Class Association captured three seats. No Conserva tives need apply, evidently.  

Government funding has been much more centralized in Britain than in the United States in the past, with less of the budget raised and spent locally, but California cities have almost lost control of their own budgets in the past few years. Our tour guide told us he still pays about $5,000 a year in local “rates,” besides what I assume was a hefty income tax when he was a wage-earner.  

Does a much bigger pool of active citizen participants in government make for a more demo cratic city, or is Oxford, like Berkeley, increasingly controlled by the managerial class despite apparent citizen power? That’s not easy to figure out in a short visit like this. The only local paper I’ve seen so far is a community weekly, much bigger than the Daily Planet, with many more ads from local merchants, but not much local hard news. Berkeley being Berkeley, there are probably Planet readers who know more about local government in Britain than I do—maybe they’ll write with their analysis. 

FRIDAY, JUNE 3 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Tom Goldstein on “What Journalism Does Right and What it Does Wrong.” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $13, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. 526-2925. 

“The Iraq War: Domestic Costs” with William Rivers Pitt at 7 p.m. at Fellowship Hall, Cedar and Bonita. Cost is $5-$15, no one turned away. 524-4244. 

“Speaking Out Against the War Machine” a discussion with Donna Foley of Pax Christi, and Cathy Orozco of CCCO at 7:30 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. 482-1062. 

“An Evening with Iyanla Vanzant” at 6:30 p.m. at Black Repertory Theater., Adeline St. 652-2120. www.blackrepertorygroup.com 

Womansong Circle Potluck snacks at 6:45 p.m., music at 7 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing. Suggested donation $8. 525-7082. 

Water Safety Day Learn how to keep your child safe in the water, at 11 a.m. at Habitot, 2065 Kittredge St. Cost is $5-$6. 647-1111. www.habitot.org 

Yoga with Baby Learn stretches and techniques that you can do with your baby. Mats provided. At 6 p.m. at Bananas, 5232 Claremont Ave., Oakland. Registration required. 658-7353. 

Kirtan, improvisational devotional chanting at 7:30 p.m. at 850 Talbot, at Solano, Albany. Donation $10. 526-9642. 

Berkeley Chess Club meets Fridays at 8 p.m. at the East Bay Chess Club, 1940 Virginia St. Players at all levels are welcome. 845-1041. 

SATURDAY, JUNE 4 

Family Fun Day at the Berkeley Farmers’ Market from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. in Civic Center Parrk, with performances, hands-on activities and informational booths. 548-3333. www.ecologycenter.org 

Spring Faire at Washington Elementary School, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at 2300 Martin Luther King Jr. Way. Activities for kids, health and education booths, food, raffle and performances. Free. 486-1742. 

Longfellow Middle School Fair from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. with a flea market, music, dance, games, food. 883-5258. 

Sacramento Street Community Cleanup, from Oregon St. to Alcatraz. Meet at 9 a.m. at the El Nopal Restaurant parking lot, 3136 Sacramento, to help sweep, weed, pick-up litter and remove graffiti. Bring gloves if you have them. Sponsored by the City of Berkeley Neighborhood Services, 981-7000. 

Bateman and Willard Neighborhood Planning Meeting with City Council member Kriss Worthington to prepare for a City meeting to discuss traffic calming, traffic circles, and proposed Ashby & Hillegass traffic light. At 2 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, Benvenue at Ashby. 981-7170. 

National Trails Day Service Project Join REI for a day of trail maintenance in Tilden Park, from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. For ages 14 and up. Registration required. 527-4140, ext. 259.  

“Eating Wild Foods” Learn about the edible native plants and common weeds and how to gather and prepare them. From 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $10-$15, no one turned away. 548-2220, ext. 233. 

Bird’s Eye View Hike to the top of Wildcat Peak from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Bring your lunch and something to drink. For meeting place call 525-2233. 

Build a Pond for Wildlife Learn about the design and features, including native pond plants and maintenance, from 9:30 a.m. to noon at the Visitor Center, Tilden Park. Optional tour to Big Nest Wildlife Pond in Sebastopol from 2 to 3:30 p.m. Cost is $30-$35. Bring your lunch. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

Sick Plant Clinic from 9 a.m. to noon at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Dr. 643-2755. 

Nature Survival For Kids from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. For ages 8-12. Learn what to eat, how to make shelter and first aid techniques. Registration required. 525-2233. 

East Bay Atheists meets at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St., third Floor meeting room. Burt Bogardus will speak about the separation of religion and government, with particular attention to faith-based initiatives. 222-7580. 

Berkeley Historical Society Walking Tour of the “Square Block” in West Berkeley at 11 a.m. Cost is $8-$10. Call for meeting place. 848-0181. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/histsoc/ 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around the restored 1870s business district. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of G.B. Ratto’s at 827 Washington St. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. 

“Anti-War Activities in the Bay Area” A forum on the laws, anti-recruitment efforts and Conscientious Objectors from 1 to 3 p.m. at Temescal Library, 5205 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. 601-6456, 525-6105. 

California Writers Club hosts fifth-graders reading their prize-winning work at 10 a.m. at Barnes & Noble, Jack London Square. 482-0265. www.berkeleywritersclub.org 

North Berkeley Block Party from 4 to 8 p.m. on Delaware, between Shattuck and Milvia. Potluck/bbq with music. Benefit for Vitamin Angels. Donation $5. 

Record Show with hard to find LPs, 45s soul, jazz, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 2318 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Cost is $2. 452-2452. 

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, JUNE 5 

A Taste of Albany: A Small Town Walkabout from 1 to 7 p.m. on Solano and San Pablo Aves. Tastings at 18 restaurants, music and arts and crafts show. Tickets are $20 in advance from participating restaurants. www.albanychamber.org 

Compost Critters An afternoon of exploration for ages five and up. Learn what animals do the dirty work of turning leftovers into rich soil, from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Afternoon in the Garden with Anne Lamott with a reading, silent auction and refreshments, fom 1 to 4 p.m. at 485 Ellita Ave. on Lake Merritt, Oakland. Tickets are $50. Benefit for Jesuit Volunteers. 415-522-1599. www.jesuitvolunteers.org 

Good Night Little Farm Help with the afternoon feeding, learn about our rare breeds and help tuck the animals in for the night, at 3:30 p.m. at Tilden Little Farm, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Hands-On Bicycle Clinic from 10 to 11:30 a.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. Free. 527-4140. 

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk around the lake every Sun. Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. lmno4p.org 

“Being Gay, Jewish and in an Interfaith Relationship” A discussion with Rabbi Allen Bennett at 11:30 a.m. at Temple Sinai, 2808 Summit St., Oakland. 547-2250. 

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

MONDAY, JUNE 6 

City of Berkeley Walking Group walks Mon.-Thurs. from 5 to 5:30 p.m. Meet at 830 University Ave. All new participants receive a free pedometer. 981-5131. 

Tea and Hike 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.  

Charles Ostman, cofounder of Fourth Venture, a company formed to convert former Soviet military technologies into applications for water treatment and alternative energy at 7 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Non-member donation $5. 527-0450.  

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. Cost is $2.50 with refreshments. 524-9122. 

Claremont Elmwood Neighborhood Membership Meeting with discussion on the Elmwood shopping district, at 7 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. 

Free Women of Spain Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women with Martha Ackelsberg at 7 p.m. at AK Press Warehouse, 674A 23rd St., Oakland. 208-1700. www.akpress.org 

Sufi Teachings and Zikr at 7 p.m. at the MTO Center, 2855 Telegraph Ave., Suite 101. 704-1888. 

Trivia Cafe at 7 p.m. at Ristorante Raphael, 2132 Center St. Cost is $10. 644-9500. 

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

TUESDAY, JUNE 7 

“Introduction to California Birdlife” a conversation with field biologist Jules Evens and nature photographer Ian Tait, at 5:30 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. In case of questionable weather, call around 8 a.m. 215-7672, 524-9992. 

Trekking in California with guidebook author Paul Richins at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. Free. 527-4140. 

“Police Practices” A panel discussion with Doris Brown, former Richmond Police Commissioner, James Chanin, civil rights attorney, Sgt. Alan Normandy, South SF Police Dept. and Mark Schlosberg, ACLU Police Practices Dept. at 7 p.m. at the Richmond Main Library Community Room, 325 Civic Center Drive. Sponsored by the ACLU. 558-0377. 

Quit Smoking Class meets Tues. evening from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at South Berkeley Senior Center for six evenings. Sponsored by the City of Berkeley. To register call 981-5330. 

Choke Saving Skills Day Learn these important skills at 11 a.m. at Habitot, 2065 Kittredge St. Cost is $5-$6. 647-1111. www.habitot.org 

Mid-Day Meander Meet at 2:30 p.m. at the Alvarado/ 

Wildcat Staging Area off Park Ave. for a history walk to the Belgum Estate. 525-2233. 

Tilden Mini-Rangers Join us for an active afternoon of nature study, conservation, and rambling through woods and waters. Dress to get dirty; bring a healthy snack to share. Girls and boys ages 8-12, unaccompanied by their parents. From 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area. Cost is $6-$8. Reservations required. 636-1684. 

Apartment Building Management For Women A class on Tues. and Thurs. evenings at 6 p.m., Sat. 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Building Education Center Cost is $250 or sliding scale. To register call 525-7610.  

Young Leadership Division Jewish Federation meets at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Hillel. RSVP to 839-2900 ext. 216.  

Family Storytime at 7 p.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

Brainstormer Weekly Pub Quiz every Tuesday from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. at Pyramid Alehouse Brewery, 901 Gilman St. 528-9880. 

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

Sing-A-Long every Tues. from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic. All ages welcome. 524-9122. 

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

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 8 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around Preservation Park to see Victorian architecture. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of Preservation Park at 13th St. and MLK, Jr. Way. Tour lasts 90 minutes. For reservations call 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

GPS Navigation with Steve Wood, REI guide, at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. If you own a GPS unit, please bring it. 527-4140. 

“Lolita: Slave to Entertainment” a documentary on our relationship with wildlife at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Donation $5. www.HumanistHall.net 

East Bay Gebealogical Society meets at 10 a.m. in the Library Conference Room, Family History Center, 4766 Lincoln Ave., Oakland. Mary Jo Wainwright will speak on the history of the Peralta family. 653-6692. 

“Senior Injury Prevention Project: Falls” at 10:30 a.m. at Summit Campus, Merritt Pavilion, 350 Hawthorne Ave., Oakland. Free for Health Access members, $5 for others. For reservations call 869-6737. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wednesday at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Action St. 841-2174.  

Home Buyer Assistance Information Session at 6 p.m. at 1504 Franklin St., Oakland. Sponsored by the Home Buyer Assistance Center. Reservations required. 832-6925, ext. 100. www.hbac.org 

Poetry Writing Workshop with Alison Seevak at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720. 

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

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 

Stitch ‘n Bitch Bring your knitting, crocheting and other handcrafts from 6 to 9 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198. 

THURSDAY, JUNE 9 

Berkeley School Volunteers Training workshop for volunteers interested in helping the public schools during the summer, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. 644-8833. 

Hidden Lodges of Berkeley A lecture on Bernard Maybeck’s Great Hall, at 7:30 p.m. at the Faculty Club, UC Campus. Cost is $10. For information contact Berkeley Architectural Heritage at 841-2241. www.berkeleyheritage.com 

“In Rachel’s Name” with the parents of Rachel Corrie at 7 p.m. at the First Congregational Church in Oakland, 2501 Harrison St. Donation $10, no one turned away. 415-255-7296, ext. 261. 

Grizzly Peak Flyfishers meets at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Community Center, 59 Arlington Ave. Jeff Miller will speak on the efforts to restore steelhead to Alameda Creek. 547-8629. 

Caldecott Tunnel Fourth Boor Expansion Project Meeting at 6 p.m. at the Bentley School, 1 Hiller Drive, Oakland. 286-6445. www.dot.ca.gov/dist4/caldecott 

“Juice Fasting and Rejuvenation” with Ed Bauman, Director of Bauman College at 5:30 p.m. at Pharmaca Integrative Pharmacy, 1744 Solano Ave. 527-8929. 

East Bay Mac User Group with Linden Siahaan, Software Design Engineer, Microsoft Corp who will present the Virtual PC at 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at Expression Center for New Media, 6601 Shellmound St. www.expression.edu 

Beginning and Intermediate Computer Workshop for all ages, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Long Haul, 3124 Shattuck Ave. Free, but registration required. call after 6 p.m. 540-0751. 

ONGOING 

Summer Camps for Children offered by the City of Berkeley, including swimming, sports and twilight basketball, from June 20 to August 12, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. For details call 981-5150, 981-5153. 

Barrington Collection Free Skool holds summer classes in the East Bay. Classes include “Buying Your First Home,” “Beer Brewing,” ”Grant Writing,” “Yoga” and classes for children. http://barringtoncollective.org/FreeSkool 

CITY MEETINGS 

Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board meets Mon. June 6, at 7 p.m. in City Council Chambers, Pam Wyche, 644-6128 ext. 113. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/rent 

Creeks Task Force meets Mon. June 6, at 7 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Erin Dando, 981-7410. www.ci.ber 

keley.ca.us/planning/landuse/Creeks/default.html 

Council Agenda Committee meets Mon., June 6, at 2:30 p.m., at 2180 Milvia St. 981-6900. 

www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

citycouncil/agenda-committee 

Landmarks Preservation Commission meets Mon., June 6, 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., June 6, 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., June 6, at 6:30 p.m., at 1730 Oregon St. Philip Harper-Cotton, 981-6670. www.ci.ber 

keley.ca.us/commissions/youth 

Commission on Disability meets Wed., June 8, at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Don Brown, 981-6346. TDD: 981-6345. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/disability 

Homeless Commission meets Wed., June 8, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Jane Micallef, 981-5426. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/homeless 

Library Board of Trustees meets Wed. June 8, at 7 p.m. at the South Berkeley Senior Center, Jackie Y. Griffin, 981-6195. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/library  

Planning Commission meets Wed., June 8, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Janet Homrighausen, 981-7484. www.ci.berkeley. ca.us/commissions/planning 

Police Review Commission meets Wed., June 8 at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-4950. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/policereview 

Waterfront Commission meets Wed., June 8, at 7 p.m., at 201 University Ave. Cliff Marchetti, 981-6740. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/commissions/waterfront 

Community Health Commission meets Thurs., June 9, at 6:45 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Kristin Tehrani, 981-5356. www.ci.ber 

keley.ca.us/commissions/health 

West Berkeley Project Area Commission meets Thurs., June 9, at 7 p.m., at the West Berkeley Senior Center. Iris Starr, 981-7520. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/westberkeley  

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thurs., June 9, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. Mark Rhoades, 981-7410. www.ci.ber 

keley.ca.us/commissions/zoning ?