In the wake of a 215-190 vote in the U.S. House of Representatives this week defeating a bill by Rep. Barbara Lee to rename the main Berkeley Post Office after former Berkeley Councilmember Maudelle Shirek, a spokesperson for Lee said that she has not given up on the idea. 

“She is looking into ways that this can be done,” said Nathan Britton, Lee’s spokesperson, from his Washington, D.C. office. “Congressmember Lee still would like to see the Berkeley Post Office named after Maudelle Shirek.” 

According to a recent article in The Hill, a newspaper “for and about the U.S. Congress,” most office-renaming bills are among the most routine in Congress, with “about one in eight public laws” devoted to the subject. The article added that “the practical effect of [such] legislation is less than might appear,” with only a plaque posted in the facility’s lobby, and the address listing for the post office remaining the same. 

The Shirek bill seemed headed for passage this fall after Lee won the support of Tom Davis (R-Virginia), chairperson of the Government Reform Committee, where the bill had been stalled since it was introduced two years ago. But after conservative Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa raised objections, the bill lost on a roll call vote. 

King, one of the more conservative members of Congress, told reporters that he objected to Shirek because of her support for Mumia Abu-Jamal, a man convicted of killing a Philadelphia policeman, and because of her involvement with the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library in Oakland. He said that the Niebyl-Proctor connection gave her “an affiliation with the Communist Party,” and said that Shirek’s activities “sets her apart from ... the most consistent of American values.” 

In a prepared statement, Congresswoman Barbara Lee said that “Maudelle Shirek is a woman whose leadership, service and commitment to our community are a testament to what is great about our nation, and she deserves to be honored. That a Republican from Iowa could launch a campaign to deny naming a local post office after this 94-year-old civil rights leader ... is just shameful. Mr. King’s campaign of innuendo and unsubstantiated ‘concern’ is better suited to the era of Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover than today’s House of Representatives.” 

Other Berkeley leaders agreed. 

Berkeley Councilmember Linda Maio called Congressman King’s actions “very insulting and out of step with America.”  

“If anyone exemplifies the term ‘woman warrior’ it is Maudelle,” Maio said. “She showed up all the time for important causes, with both her money and her time. She is an amazing woman. Denying her this honor flies in the face of the best American values, because Maudelle Shirek typifies those values. No matter who needed it, she was there to help.” 

Maio said that while the Berkeley City Council has no authority over the naming of the post office, “we do have authority over other things, and we should have a discussion about a permanent way to honor her,” possibly by naming some other public building in the city for Shirek. 

“Normally we don’t do that until someone passes away,” Maio said, “but this seems to be an appropriate time.” 

Max Anderson, who succeeded Shirek representing District 3 on the City Council, said his response echoed Lee’s. 

“It’s appalling that someone sitting in Iowa could be leading a floor fight against the honoring of a Berkeley individual who has been a longtime fighter for civil rights, peace, and social justice,” he said. “It appears that the old Cold War mentality is still prevalent among a lot of Republicans.” 

Anderson said he has been setting up a committee and holding a series of meetings to plan local honors for Shirek, including naming buildings after her and setting up a scholarship in her name. The councilmember said that plans are being developed for a fund-raising event on Dec. 10, Human Rights Day, to raise money for a Maudelle Shirek Scholarship Fund. 

On Oct. 19, the South Berkeley Community Church will honor Shirek, a founding member, as part of its Capital Restoration Campaign program, celebrating the Fairview Street church’s legacy as the city’s first inter-racial church. The program will start at 7:30 p.m. 

Mayor Tom Bates was out of town and unavailable for comment. 

At the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library, formerly in Berkeley and now located in Oakland, a spokesperson said that workers at the library were sharing laughs about their newfound national notoriety, saying that “it’s incredible that Congress would revert back to the old McCarthy days.” 

Edith Laub, librarian and secretary treasurer of Niebyl-Proctor, said that Shirek’s involvement in the library was minimal. 

“When the library was started, we thought it would be helpful to sign up prominent individuals as sponsors,” she said. “Maudelle Shirek was approached, along with a large number of other persons who were known by the director at that time. She said it sounded like a fine idea, and she signed the form that was sent out to her. Sponsors were only asked to lend their names, and nothing else was required of them. That is the extent of her connection to the library.” 

Among the other sponsors listed on the library’s website are Berkeley attorney and author Ann Fagan Ginger, founder and executive director of the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute, author and historian Howard Zinn, educator and radical activist Angela Davis, historian Herbert Aptheker, and longtime Southern civil rights worker Anne Braden. 

Meanwhile, Jackie DeBose of Berkeley, who is now executive director of the New Light senior lunch program which Shirek founded and still attends, took issue with a report in Thursday’s San Francisco Chronicle that Shirek was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. 

Calling that an “urban myth,” DeBose said “I don’t know where they got that information from. Nobody that I know of who knows Maudelle well thinks she has any symptoms of Alzheimer’s. I see Maudelle every day, and speak with her in depth. I took her to lunch today and we talked about the post office situation on the way there, and the possible U.S. Supreme Court nominations on the way back. There was nothing wrong with her memory. This is just an example of the fact that you can’t believe everything you read in the daily newspapers.” 

DeBose said that while Shirek has “health issues related to her age,” there is nothing to suggest Alzheimer’s. “I think this is just symptomatic of the belief that when we get old, something must be wrong,” she said. 

As for the post office snub, DeBose called that “business as usual” for the national Republican government. 

“I don’t know why people are so shocked and upset,” she said. “This is standard procedure for the Republicans. They are being consistent.” =

While the world-wide proletariat struggle may have seen better days, there is a museum in Oakland making sure socialism’s bygone era will never be forgotten. 

Stepping inside the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library at 6501 Telegraph Ave. is like entering an alternate universe. Gone are any notions of the red menace, axis of evil, or heroic entrepreneurs blazing a trail to prosperity. 

At Niebyl-Proctor, Brezhnev is presented as a matinee idol, North Korea has the makings of a utopian society and heroes carry union cards and always fight for the working man. 

“We’re preserving the history of people who led valiant struggles and have just been erased,” said the library’s Executive Director Bob Patenaude. “We keep their memory alive.” 

Niebyl-Proctor’s holdings include about 15,000 books, more than 20,000 pamphlets and dozens of cardboard boxes filled with oral histories of progressive activists from the early 20th century.  

The bulk of the collection was donated by the estate of Karl Niebyl, a Marxist economics professor who escaped from Nazi Germany and came to the Bay Area late in life to teach at San Jose State. 

After his death in 1985, Niebyl’s friends stored his 253 cartons of books and pamphlets in the basement of a San Jose bookstore while they searched for a showplace, said Edith Laub, an early museum volunteer and now, along with Patenaude, one of its two paid staffers. 

With donations from supporters and technical assistance from UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, the collection moved into Berkeley’s Finnish Hall in 1987. Shortly thereafter, the library inherited the papers of Roscoe Proctor, a Berkeley labor organizer, and the Niebyl-Proctor library was born.  

Space and money constraints keep the library from updating its collection, but when it comes to materials on progressive and Marxist causes up to the 1980s, Niebyl-Proctor is loaded. 

Inside the library’s 58 file drawers full of pamphlets, one can find the 1933 Manifesto of the Young Communist League of the United States, urging America’s youth to “Fight for a Soviet U.S.A.”, or a 1948 report on North Korea, heralding the “People’s Revolution” there and forecasting a peaceful reunification after the inevitable financial ruin for the American-dominated south. 

Pamphlets were a common tool of communist governments and their allies abroad to promote Marxist views across the globe, Patenaude said. 

“Sure this is pure communist propaganda, but it was to counter U.S. propaganda, which is just as misleading and sometimes even more vile,” he said. 

The library is also home to an extensive archive. Inside the drawers are original Black Panther street posters decrying the “kidnapping” of its leader Bobby Seale by “FBI Pigs With Drawn Guns.” Also available are first-hand accounts of a 1947 riot in Peekskill, New York, when the left-wing African American entertainer Paul Robeson tried to give an outdoor concert, and the original speech recited in 1945 by Russian diplomat Nikolai Novikov before a packed house at Madison Square Garden honoring those who had fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. 

“What people don’t often realize is that these were huge mass movements,” Patenaude said. “They might seem a little hokey now, but these ideas drive the world for decades.” 

The library is constantly receiving book donations and updating its collection. Besides the collected works of Marx and Engels, Niebyl-Proctor contains sections unfathomable in most libraries, like psychology in the former Soviet Union. 

Laub said the library gets the occasional visit from UC Berkeley researchers, but most of the patrons are locals who just want to browse. On a recent Tuesday, the only visitor from noon until 2 p.m. was Chris Kavanagh, a middle school teacher and Berkeley Rent Board Commissioner. 

“As a Green Party activist, I’m fascinated by the mass movements on the left and what led to their demise,” said Kavanagh, as he was reading a copy of Socialism and the Great War. 

The only drawback, Kavanagh said, is that the library doesn’t allow patrons to check out materials. 

“It isn’t easy for a Marxist library to survive in a capitalist county,” said Patenaude, who made his living as a purchasing manager for several local businesses before taking over the library. In 2002, the library received $61,204 in contributions, but spent over $74,320, according to state records. 

“Fundraising is always front and center,” he said. “We lose a lot of time we could spend on political work just trying to keep the place afloat.” 

The library’s biggest asset is its two-story building on Telegraph Avenue, a gift from an anonymous supporter.  

To increase its cash flow and raise its profile, the library has recently begun renting space to local left-leaning political groups like the Alameda County Green Party, the Communist Party USA and the Peace and Freedom Party. 

Although Marxism might not be the potent political force it once was, its adherents across the country are organizing to save relics of past glories in hopes that a new golden era might not be far away. There is a Marxist reading room in New York City, Patenaude said, and Marxist libraries were being planned in Sacramento and Chicago. 

“I’m cautiously optimistic,” said Patenaude. He argues that U.S. policies aren’t sustainable and if the political tide turns, Niebyl-Proctor will be around to let people know about library’s its roots. 

“We’re maintaining the history of our class,” he said. “The working class and their fight against the bad guys.” 

The Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday or by appointment. 6501 Telegraph Ave. 

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While not conceding that Christopher Hollis fired the bullet that killed his friend and former Berkeley High School classmate Meleia Willis-Starbuck, his attorney John Burris said the 21-year-old Berkeley native had confirmed earlier press accounts of the shooting. 

“He was responding to a call for help,” Burris said after Hollis’ arraignment was postponed Tuesday until Oct. 5. “He didn’t mean to kill anyone.” 

Hollis, who is being held without bail at Santa Rita Prison, is to be charged with murder in the Willis-Starbuck shooting. He is also to be charged with assault with a deadly weapon for firing a bullet that grazed the hand of Cal football player Gary Doxy who was at the murder scene. 

At a Wednesday press conference, Cal Football Coach Jeff Tedford acknowledged that two football players—Doxy, a redshirt freshman safety and David Gray, a junior wide receiver— were at the murder scene. Tedford said the bullet left Doxy with little more than “a scratch on the wrist.” 

Gray, 21, was arrested outside a North Beach nightclub last December for carrying a concealed weapon and tampering with the identification marks of a firearm. No charges were filed against him. 

“A few of our student athletes were there and witnessed it,” Tedford told reporters Wednesday. “They have been very cooperative all along with the situation. None of our players have been implicated in any wrongdoing. I want to reiterate that it is very sad and tragic and we are doing everything we can to be cooperative through the investigation.” 

Berkeley Police spokesperson Officer Joe Okies said university officials have cooperated with detectives investigating the murder. 

Burris said his defense might examine the culpability of the football players in the shooting. “That was the genesis of this whole thing,” Burris said. 

Police say Willis-Starbuck called Hollis on his cell phone to come to her defense July 17 after she and several friends got in an argument with a group of men in front of Willis-Starbuck’s apartment on College Avenue between Haste Street and Dwight Way. Her friends had said the men called them “bitches” after they refused to go to a party with them. 

Responding to Willis-Starbuck’s call, Hollis jumped out of a car at the corner of College and Dwight and fired into the crowd, striking Willis-Starbuck, according to police. 

Christopher Wilson, the man police say drove Hollis from the scene, has been released on $500,000 bail and is scheduled to enter a plea on a murder charge Oct. 4. 

Hollis fled town after the shooting. Last week Fresno police stopped Hollis and a 33-year-old woman after the woman ran a stop sign. The two gave false names and were released, but when Hollis’ fingerprints were scanned and officers found he was wanted for murder, they tracked him down to a bedroom closet where he was hiding. 

Burris, who had spoken to Hollis by phone two months ago, said his client was ready to face charges. 

“He’s absolutely relieved not to be leading a life of secrecy and hiding,” he said. 

Burris, an Oakland civil rights attorney, who has represented Rodney King, said he would defend Hollis for free. 

“Community people who knew him and thought highly of him thought that I should assist him,” he said. “He’s funny, intelligent and dependable—maybe a little too dependable.” 

Despite a signed agreement barring schools and day care centers on a toxics-laden South Richmond site, minority students of the Making Waves academic preparation program meet regularly on the site. 

Just how much danger the site poses to children remains a question. 

The highly acclaimed educational program provides support and academic preparation for 500 students selected from 20 elementary schools in Richmond and seven in San Francisco. 

The site, which housed a century of chemical manufacturing activities that loaded the soil with hundreds of contaminants, is currently owned by Cherokee-Simeon Ventures LLC. Plans to build a 1,330-unit housing complex on the site are currently on hold. 

Making Waves students meet in an office building on the site that once housed offices of Zeneca (now Astra-Zeneca), the last of the corporate entities to manufacture chemicals on the property. 

In a Feb. 11 letter to the Richmond City Council, Ronald C. Nahas, a member of the program’s board of directors, said about 200 students study onsite between 3:30 and 6 p.m. on weekdays and from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturdays. 

“The students are brought to the building via private transportation, escorted into the building by their paid tutors and confined to the building while they are on the site,” he wrote. 

Nahas said Thursday that the program wouldn’t allow students in the building unless they felt conditions were safe. “The most important thing to us is that there should be no risk to the children,” he said. 

Barbara Cook, who is overseeing the site for the state Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC), said preliminary test results show that the children aren’t being exposed to significant risks, although more will be known next week after the analysis of results of recent state tests. 

Others, including many of the activists who played a major role in forcing the handover of the site to Cook’s agency, say they’re not so sure the site is safe. 

Dr. Robert Raabe, an emeritus UC Berkeley plant pathology professor and host of the university’s popular sick plant clinic, said he believes trees near the site show indications of damage from toxic exposures. 

Cook said that Raabe, Cherokee-Simeon landscapers and DTSC staff surveyed the area near Making Waves and found that most of the damage was caused by improper watering and fire blight, an organism carried by honey bees from blossom to blossom. 

She said that, at Raabe’s suggestions, tests are being conducted on samples from one tree near the building housing Making Waves. 

Cook also said that soil gas tests conducted by Making Waves in their building didn’t live up to DTSC standards, which had prompted the agency’s own tests of soils beneath the structure.  

“We understand they will have a new location for their program after the end of the academic year,” said Cook. If the tests conclude there is no public health risk in the short term, they will be allowed to stay through the end of the school year. 

“In reality, we didn’t have any other place to meet,” said Nahas. “We were pushed out of the schools and the community center buildings, and Cherokee Simeon has been very supportive of us, even though it’s caused some bad publicity for them,” he said. 

Sponsored largely by businesses, the Making Waves program has reported remarkable success in preparing minority students for the rigors of academia. 

While only 58 percent of California’s African American and Latino students graduate from high school, Making Waves claims a 98 percent graduation rate. More impressive, 92 percent of program students go on to college. 

According to Richmond City Councilmember Gayle McLaughlin, a leading critic of past cleanup activities at Campus Bay, city staff directed program officials to locate at the building. 

“It is my understanding that the city told them that was the place to go,” she said. 

The program is housed in a building on S. 49th Street which is located in Parcel C of the Cherokee Simeon property and backs up on a toxic waste hot spot previously identified by the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board. 

Buried on the property immediately behind the building housing Making Waves is what one local activist called “a 350,000-cubic-yard, 30-acre, eight-foot-tall table top mountain” of buried wastes, largely acidic iron pyrite cinders but also housing a noxious brew of other, more dangerous compounds, many known to be lethal and or carcinogenic. 

Nahas said that the program has a new location for the program, which will be constructed in an industrial “shell” building at 860 Harbor Way South and should be ready for occupancy by the time the next school year starts. 

Joan Lichterman, statewide health issues representative for the union that represents many workers at the main UC Berkeley campus and at the Richmond Field Station adjacent to the Campus Bay site on the north, said that while Making Waves offers a very good program, she questions the wisdom of locating it adjacent to a toxics-laden waste dump. 

Lichterman, a UC Berkeley employee, represents the interests of members of the University Professional & Technical Employees-CWA union. 

Calls to Cherokee Simeon’s site manager were not returned by deadline.

Ignoring the wishes of several city commissions, the City Council gave itself the task Tuesday of forming an advisory committee to oversee the development of new downtown zoning laws.  

By a 6-3 vote (Anderson, Spring, Worthington, no) the council approved a plan by Mayor Tom Bates to establish a 21-member body to advise city staff on the new Downtown Area Plan. Each of the nine councilmembers will make two appointments and the Planning Commission will appoint three of its members to the committee.  

Appointments to the advisory group must be made by Oct. 31 and meetings are scheduled to begin in November.  

At Tuesday’s meeting, it was announced that planner Matt Taecker, a member of Berkeley Design Advocates and of the school board’s Facilities Committee, will lead the city’s effort in forming the plan.  

The new Downtown Area Plan, to be designed in partnership with UC Berkeley, has caused a political firestorm this year. While supporters maintain that new land-use rules are needed to integrate UC’s planned expansion in the downtown, opponents counter that the plan cedes city zoning authority to the university and potentially freezes out citizens while UC and city staff planners come to an agreement.  

Control over the advisory committee is seen as a tool for shaping the final plan. Councilmembers who have been most critical of the new agreement urged the council to hold off voting until receiving recommendations from the Planning Commission, several members of which have also been critical of the endeavor.  

The Planning Commission, which must approve a final plan, made clear two weeks ago that it wanted to lead the advisory body and make appointments. It had not taken a formal vote before the council vote. 

The Landmarks Preservation Commission and the Transportation Commission also have requested a role in developing the plan. 

Bates’ proposal requires the advisory group to hold joint workshops with commissions, make quarterly progress reports to the Planning Commission and accept comments from commissions on their areas of expertise.  

“The commission is going to be eminently involved. They won’t be starting from ground zero,” Bates said introducing his proposal, which he represented as a compromise.  

Councilmember Dona Spring fired back that the mayor’s plan would further erode public confidence in the planning process.  

“By short-circuiting the Planning Commission, we start off again on the wrong wheel,” she said.  

Spring is one of three councilmembers who voted against settling a lawsuit the city had filed over the university’s plan for future development. The settlement mandated that the two sides begin a joint plan for the downtown.  

The plan will cover land from Hearst Avenue to Dwight Way and from Oxford Street to Martin Luther King Jr. Way.  

Councilmember Gordon Wozniak said that the current Downtown Plan, passed in 1990, was antiquated and that the council shouldn’t waste time waiting for a formal recommendation from the Planning Commission on the advisory committee.  

“Sending it back to the Planning Commission only delays it,” he said. “The buck stops here.”  

Setting the board at 21 members was also presented as a compromise by Bates. Planning Director Dan Marks had asked for the board to have between 15 and 20 members, while several planning commissioners wanted more members to represent various interest groups and increase public participation.  

Addressing the council, former Planning Commissioner Zelda Bronstein questioned whether staff wanted a smaller committee so that it could be more easily controlled.  

Tuesday’s debate opened up old wounds over the lawsuit. Councilmember Kriss Worthington pressed City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque to acknowledge that UC Berkeley, as a state agency, will not be bound to follow the plan, and that the city won’t be able to release the plan without university approval.  

Albuquerque replied that the provisions are “not unique” when two public agencies are cooperating on a new plan.  

Striking a conciliatory tone, Acting Assistant UC Vice Chancellor Emily Marthinsen said the university had no intention of vetoing the downtown plan. “Our hope is that we can forward our mutual interests by working together,” she said.  

Other items 

At the urging of Councilmember Worthington, the council voted unanimously not to charge a veterans’ group for access to Berkeley’s Veterans’ Memorial Building. The city is working on agreements with non-profits using the building to pay a portion of the building’s operating expenses.  

Oakland residents Sasha and Merideth Shamszad won approval to add a fourth floor to 2750 Adeline St., a Berkeley landmark. The redesigned building will have one or two living spaces and four spaces for artists. Natasha Shawver, a former tenant, had appealed the permit issued by the Zoning Adjustments Board because the plans included eliminating illegal live/work spaces in the building.  

Councilmembers Worthington and Wozniak agreed to send the Elmwood Shopping District quota system to the Planning Commission for review. Wozniak, who represents half of the two-block shopping district, is recommending scaling back quotas on most types of businesses in the district. Worthington, who represents the other half of the district, supports the quota system.  

Worthington held over an item about the city removing newspaper racks until he receives more information from city officials. ›

An article in the Sept. 27 issue mistakenly reported that Abdulalaziz Saleh, Behjat Yahyavi and Johnny Shokouh were owners of Dwight Way Liquor. According to Shokouh, he and Yahjavi own the property at 2440 Sacramento St. and Saleh owns the store.

The Draft Ron Dellums For Oakland Mayor Campaign played its last act this week, with members hoping that next week there will soon be a political campaign to work on. 

On Wednesday morning at a rally in front of the Ron Dellums Federal Office Building in downtown Oakland, a coalition of Dellums supporters held up a box of petitions with what they said were more than 8,000 signatures of Oakland citizens urging the former Oakland-Berkeley congressman to run for Oakland mayor in next year’s race. 

Dellums has given a self-imposed deadline of Oct. 1 to announce whether he will run. Leaders of the petition campaign said that the petitions would be sent by overnight mail to reach Dellums in Washington D.C. on Friday in advance of that decision. 

Included in the coalition were representatives of local Latino, Asian and Pacific Islander, African-American, faith-based, white progressive, and labor communities. 

At one point, rally members sporting white “Ron Dellums For Oakland Mayor”  

T-shirts took up the chant of “Run, Ron, Run!” 

Jerry Brown will leave office in 2007 under term limits after serving two terms as Oakland mayor, with elections scheduled next spring to succeed him. A runoff will be held in November 2006 if no candidate receives a majority in the spring election. Several candidates have already announced plans to run, including Oakland City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente, Oakland City Councilmember Nancy Nadel, Alameda County Treasurer Don White, and Oakland School Board members Dan Siegel and Greg Hodge. 

Service Employees International Union Local 790 Political Organizer Andre Spearman called the petition campaign a success. SEIU volunteers helped gather many of the signatures over the past weeks. 

“It was spontaneous combustion,” he said, “the highest form of democracy.” 

Oakland educator Kitty Kelly Epstein, credited with helping start the Draft Dellums Campaign, said following the rally that organizers had done all they could do to convince Dellums to run, and “it’s in his hands, now.” 

Epstein had earlier told cheering rally participants that “we don’t need to settle for low-life politics in Oakland.” 

Directing her remarks to Dellums, who was not present at the rally, she said, “We’ve gathered the signatures of thousands of people who are saying ‘we don’t know if you want to be mayor, but we sure would like it if you were.’ ” 

In an open letter to Dellums released at the federal building rally, local Latino leaders said that by even raising the possibility of running, Dellums had done a public service. 

“Already, at kitchen tables from the flatlands to the Fruitvale, from West Oakland to the Coliseum Corridor and even in the hills, neighbors, friends, co-workers and families are coming together and rediscovering the courage to believe and to demand an Oakland where all can live, work, study and prosper together,” the letter read. 

Asian and Pacific Islander American leaders also released letters of praise for Dellums. 

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Berkeley planning commissioners looked at three thorny issues Wednesday night and decided they didn’t have enough information to make a decision. 

They did, however, give unanimous approval to a map that authorizes developers of a planned four-story residential building at 2025 Channing Way to market their 30 residential units as condominiums. 

But things bogged down when it came time for hearings on three other issues: home occupation permits for teaching, zoning ordinance amendments governing elimination of so-called accessory dwelling units and other amendments governing the definition of “yards” and where and how cars may be parked in yards. 

The home teaching issue was dropped in the commission’s lap by the City Council, which directed it to consider making it easier for teachers and tutors to ply their craft at home. 

While all the commissioners agreed that piano teachers and others shouldn’t have to pay the $1,1441.70 fee usually charged for home occupations in residential districts, they were reluctant to eliminate all restrictions on home teaching activities. 

“Home occupations have always been a bone of contention,” said commissioner Gene Poschman, who said he was hesitant to approve a process that would grant permits without notifying neighbors “because the impact could be quite heavy.” 

While the proposal before the commission would limit students to a maximum of four at a time, the measure didn’t make any restrictions on the hours teachers could bring in students—which prompted concerns about what might happen in neighborhoods where street parking is scarce. 

Commission Chair Harry Pollack said that home teaching would continue without lower fees, but a lot more teachers would probably seek permits if the permit costs were lower. 

The commission took a similar stand on a proposed ordinance to regulate conversions of accessory dwelling units back to their original uses as garages, basements and storage buildings. 

The issue of parking in rear and side yards proved even thornier. 

Poschman described it as a law that affects people in the flatlands because people who live in the hills often have plenty of on-street parking and don’t need to park in the rear and side yards. 

Sara Shumer said she was particularly concerned about the impacts that paved rear yards have on runoff and recommended that when parking is allowed there, the surfaces should be water-permeable to avoid an excess of runoff in the city’s already taxed storm drainage system. 

Several commissioners worried that backyard parking would adversely impact neighbors. 

In the end, the commission tabled the issue until the Nov. 30 meeting.

To view Justin DeFreitas’ latest editorial cartoon, please visit  

www.jfdefreitas.com To search for previous cartoons by date of publication, click on the Daily Planet Archive.

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GROVE LIQUOR 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I live in that neighborhood. With a tip of the hat to Mr. Banger, the landlord of the building, and in the spirit of an “open source” business plan, I suggest a combined cafe and grocery store. 

The neighborhood is mostly served by Berkeley Bowl which, though excellent, is often very crowded. Neighborhood residents would likely flock to a densely packed small grocery store within comparable walking/biking distance, even if that meant paying a slight premium for staples. It would likely do well to offer a selection of good prepared foods. Yes, a small coffee-bar and a table or two outside would probably be profit-makers. Beer, wine and smokes would be easy money-makers short of a full-blown hard-liquor store. Skillfully negotiated, I’d bet dollars to donuts that Berkeley Bowl would give such a store a good wholesale deal on some of the inventory and introductions to other wholesalers for much of the rest. The BB kitchens might be a great source for some of the prepared foods. 

The economic pattern of Northside’s “Produce Center,” “Juice Bar Collective,” “Saul’s,” “The French Cafe,” “Peet’s” et al. show how these kinds of services, densely packed, add up to successful businesses. 

If I had the seed capital I’d be writing up my small business loan ASAP, but I don’t. So I hope the Daily Planet will at least help me share the idea. 

Tom Lord 

• 

MAUDELLE SHIREK 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

How dare they? How dare the federal government put the kibosh on naming Berkeley’s Main Post Office after Maudelle Shirek? Ms. Shirek has spent the majority of her 94 years as a community activist, on the side of the poor and disenfranchised. Their reason for denying the request is that she lacks the proper values. Leading the whispering campaign to deny the request is Steve King, (R) Iowa, who informs us that Joe McCarthy was an American hero. So maybe we should name the Post Office after him. Right! So, let’s get on with it, Berkeley. Since when have you listened to “no,” especially from the feds. Etch Maudelle Shirek’s name on the post office, writ large, and let the chips fall where they may. If the feds don’t like it, they can come out here to the one part of the country they most fear and erase it. That should be big fun. 

Madeline Smith Moore 

A Berkeley-lover from Oakland 

• 

FATHERS AND SONS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I couldn’t disagree more with J. Douglas Allen-Taylor’s recent column where he maintained that Ignacio De La Fuente’s son’s recent arrest for rape was irrelevant to the Oakland mayoral issue. Ignacio De La Fuente Jr. kidnapped a teenaged girl right off the street, raped her and beat her for several hours, and then dumped her back on the sidewalk. And you’re saying this isn’t a reflection on Ignacio De La Fuente Sr.? Most Americans would sharply disagree with you. Why do you think every politician in America uses every photo-op possible to show off their clean-cut, smiling brood to the voters? Precisely because it does matter. If this guy De La Fuente can’t even run his own household, why should he be entrusted to run Oakland? If this specimen is the best that Oakland has to offer, if this is the kind of man that you want to represent Oakland, then all I can say is: God help Oakland.  

Ace Backwords 

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REDEVELOPMENT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thanks to the Daily Planet for its ongoing coverage by intrepid reporter Richard Brenneman on the City of Oakland’s efforts to extend redevelopment into all of the North Oakland flats.  

His most recent article (Sept. 16) covered the decision by Councilmember Brunner to withdraw the proposal. But her message to constituents which trumpeted supposed benefits of redevelopment, along with the tenacity with which the proposal was promoted by city staff, should not encourage any of us who worry about the numerous downsides of redevelopment—including eminent domain and robbing the city’s general fund—to let down our guard.  

While Brenneman was kind enough to mention Alfred Crofts and myself as ringleaders of the effort to thwart the extension, in reality several of us who met at the pivotal meeting on May 9 are involved. We formed a new group, Neighborhood Preservation, and plan to remain active. After all, many of those who came forward at this and other meetings on the subject wanted improvements we all can support, and ways should be found without redevelopment to accomplish them.  

But this happy (for now) outcome might not have happened without the Daily Planet—where would we be without it! Brenneman even covered our Sunday public forum with Orange County Supervisor Chris Norby, preservationist/author Jane Powell, and Montclair/Greater Oakland Democratic Club President Pamela Drake. (Our event was missed by the Oakland Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle, ostensibly our local “paper of record,” which had an entire bureau of nine at the Burning Man Festival.)  

Anyone interested in attending an upcoming local event on issues around redevelopment and eminent domain is encouraged to attend the “Conference on Redevelopment Abuse,” 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 22 at the Park Plaza Hotel, 150 Hegenberger Road, Oakland. Reservations: Muncipal Officials for Redevelopment Reform, (714) 871-9756. $65. (Need-based reduced rates available.)  

Robert Brokl  

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BUSD MEETING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The August BUSD board meeting was exciting to watch as this summer’s maintenance and building programs were showcased. Mostly paid for out of bond money, they ranged from routine upkeep to large scale construction. Each project seemed beneficial for our students. 

At Malcolm X, the area outside the fence was re-configured to ward off a recurrence of winter storms that flooded many classrooms. At Washington, the standing water pond behind the play structure was drained and the overall yard upgraded with more seating and trees. Le Conte’s drop off and pick up area began to be improved and the butterfly yard started to be repositioned. 

The largest area of construction was at the middle schools. Willard began a full rehabilitation of its main academic and administrative buildings. M.L. King is constructing a dining commons along with a new science building. Berkeley High School is having its “C” building repainted, lead paint removed, and the Donahue and South Campus gyms renovated. Meanwhile, the old East Campus buildings have been leveled. Additionally, there are plans for redeveloping West Campus and move central administrative offices. The garden/play area at Franklin Adult is also being completed. 

While some sites will be ready in a few weeks, most will not be finished for some time. Remembering similar past BUSD projects, I wondered how many would actually be finished with current bond monies available. Often projects have remained incomplete until new bond measures were passed. 

And then the first issue on the agenda was the report back on the fiscal feasibility of the closed site option for the Derby Street playing fields. (This report was issued by BUSD’s own Lew Jones and is “must” reading for people involved in the issue, to check for exact numbers). The review team reported that $900,000 remains set aside for improvements at this location. However, the closed site option, totaling hard and soft costs, would be around 6 million dollars. The Board asked for a reconciliation of these numbers, and a further study of “bare bone” cost comparison between the open and closed site options. However, it’s obvious that there will remain a gap in the millions between the money available and what’s needed for the closed site plan. 

And so, the question is, how will this shortfall be funded? By raiding some of the wonderful improvement projects begun this summer? And if any extra BUSD money is available, it seems that there are other projects already in line, e.g. the completion of the South Berkeley High School plan. BUSD has already admitted not having enough money to finish this project And what about the warm water pool on the high school campus? Since BUSD’s financial situation is widely viewed as still very shaky, this doesn’t seem the time to begin raiding other programs, not completing ones already started, and not fulfilling agreements.  

Waldo Esteva 

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THE WORST KIND 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Zelda Bronstein’s Sept. 27 column demonstrates the worst kind of thinking from supposed do-gooders. Berkeley’s retail quota system is clearly outdated, and I’m thrilled the city isn’t bothering to enforce it. Ms Bronstein writes, “To be truly neighborhood-serving, a commercial district needs variety.” If folks like Ms. Bronstein had her way, we’d have commercial strips lined with stores that nobody patronized. Which would lead to a rapid decline of those neighborhoods. 

Variety is failing in our neighborhoods, and you know what? That’s OK. I don’t know about Zelda, but my world view extends beyond the half-mile radius outside my home. If Berkeley excels in food service, great! However much she oh-so-wishes we’d shop at our neighborhood hardware store, well, I’m sorry, Home Depot is not that far away, and I can get great deals online at Amazon. And clearly, I’m not the only Berkeleyan of this mindset. 

Also, why pick on food service? Restaurants and cafes strengthen community through the contact that happens there. People from the neighborhood linger and talk. Retail stores encourage isolated shopping and brief interchanges. I’ll take a packed coffeehouse over an empty ACE Hardware any day. 

Peter Merholz 

South Berkeley 

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BERKELEY HONDA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

This war of sorts between Berkeley Honda and the union has dwindled over the months. There are still a few picketers outside every day standing at attention in the morning waiting for customers to drive in, and sitting in lawn chairs in the afternoon overseeing the giant rat displayed on Shattuck Avenue. During brief discussions with a few of them the general consensus is that “We’ll stay out here as long as the union pays us.” The union is so afraid that somebody might want to patronize our dealership that they are paying people to stand outside. I do not think this dispute should be fought out in a cold war-esque sort of way in the local newspapers. I suggest to the general public to find out for themselves if Berkeley Honda is a quality place to do business. This will give people a first-hand opportunity to listen to both sides of the argument and make the decision if Berkeley Honda is a good place to do business. Next time the Honda owners in the local area need an oil change, light bulb replaced or anything on their Honda please stop by and see for themselves that Berkeley Honda is a good company with skilled quality employees that lives up to, or exceeds, the legacy of the former owner.  

Barry Strock 

Service Advisor 

Berkeley Honda 

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AAA APPROVAL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Berkeley Honda customers should be aware that the service department there is not AAA-approved, despite the AAA-approval logo that appears on their letterhead and the AAA sign that hangs over the service entry. The shop’s name does not appear in the current “Directory of Approved Auto Repair Facilities” that Triple A issues. 

When AAA gives their imprimatur to a shop, they are guaranteeing the work that is done there. That is why this designation is so valued by customers. But to receive their endorsement, a shop must be in business under it’s current ownership for at least one year. Berkeley Honda’s owners purchased the dealership on June 1 of this year. 

Rather than continuing to generate the false assumption among its customers that AAA is backing their work, Berkeley Honda should immediately remove its sign and the letterhead logo. In the meantime, AAA is referring this matter to their legal department. 

Judy Shelton 

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PARSING THREATS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In a Sept. 23 letter to the editor, John Stillman writes that Carol Denny’s letter to UCB Chancellor Birgeneau (also published in the Daily Planet) makes “not one but two threats against the man. ‘It’s a good way to avoid riots’ is just another way of threatening to create a riot if Denney and her other whining friends don’t get their ways.”  

Actually, Denny’s letter about People’s Park was a quite friendly one, if ironic in places. Let’s look at the context from which Stillman has lifted the quote he takes from her:  

“We try to show a little respect for other people and trees and stuff, and check in before we do anything dramatic like cutting down a tree. It’s not that hard to write a letter or post a poster or have a meeting or something, and it’s a good way to avoid riots.... Come on up and help build a bench with the salvaged wood from the tree, for instance. I think that would be a really nice gesture, or at least don’t arrest the rest of us when we go ahead without you. But don’t be afraid to join us, we’re kind of a nice bunch.”  

These words (and the rest of Denny’s letter) do not contain any kind of personal threat to the chancellor.  

That said, People’s Park is certainly not the utopian community that some of its supporters have made it out to be. But the reasons for its failings are deep ones, not touched on by Stillman’s remarks.  

Raymond Barglow  

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SOUTHSIDE VIEW 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I would like to offer a long-standing southside resident’s view of the recently removed clothes box from People’s Park. 

That box has long been a nuisance. True it’s unsightly just being in the park, as it quickly ends up all over the sidewalk. But anyone who spends any time watching the ways of the park and adjoining neighborhood quickly observes that once delivered to the box, the donations quickly end up in various piles on sidewalks, in front of doorways, in parking lots, and so on. There seems to be a relatively small group of the chronics who wait for delivery, then immediately try to sell it to the local recycled clothing stores. In fact you often find the aforementioned piles of donations abandoned in close proximity to these stores. 

Then there is the issue of those who don’t necessarily try to sell the donations, but just use them temporarily to wear or sleep in for a night or two, then simply abandon at will. Anyone who lives/works in this are can see the resultant blight seven days a week. Believe me, it’s not a pretty sight. 

What this means is that most homeless are not really benefiting from clothes donations; just a few shrewd street people. However local residents and businesses are left to clean up or put up with donations-to-discards; and this is every day! 

Clearly this operation is a failure if you ask local residents and businesses. 

Dean Hunsaker 

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POLARIZATION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Carol Denney’s article is a good example of why there is so much conflict on the issue of People’s Park. While I may not agree with the university’s actions, I can understand their frustration at dealing with longtime advocates for the park such as Denney who refuse to see the park as anything but a wonderful paradise free of problems. 

Denney paints a picture that makes it seem like the free clothing exchange box is a peaceful wonderful way to clothe the homeless. Her refusal to even mention the problems associated with the box explains why no compromise can be made. Unless Denney and others are going to be honest about the situation with the box, no solution other than the university removing the box will occur. 

Denney doesn’t mention that the clothes donated to the box have become valuable currency to people who turn around and sell the clothes to Buffalo Exchange and other used clothing places near the park. The people getting first dibs at the clothes are not the old ladies who need Aunt Mabel’s sweaters, but aggressive people who see the box as a way to get easy cash. Denney doesn’t mention the violence and physical fighting that has happened as people argue over who gets the more valuable items left in the box. Denney does not mention how the worthless clothes are discarded around the park, making a mess. Denney doesn’t mention the fact that people “simply moved to help others” are accosted as they approach the box and have had bags ripped from their hands by overly aggressive people who want to get at the valuable clothes that are easy to sell before anyone else can get to them. 

While the box is a well-intentioned project, the reality is that it has become a source of violence and danger for many. 

Selective truth is not going to create a solution. Denney calls for discussion, but that discussion must include an honest assessment of a kind project gone bad and her refusal to do so and her playing the university as the big bad guy only continues the polarization of this issue. 

Sherman Boyson 

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ERA OF COOPERATION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Mayor Tom Bates is crowing about the “era of cooperation” between the city and the university while the university throws clean clothes in the dumpster. I either want to see some cooperation protecting the tradition of free clothing exchange or I want something besides self-serving rhetoric from Bates.  

The people I personally know who suddenly found their residential neighborhoods governed by an ever-changing and ever-expanding secret “downtown” plan in which they were allowed no voice are livid about it.  

When Shirley Dean was mayor and the university geared up to attack the free food exchange in People’s Park, she made it clear to the university and the community that the city, at least, had better uses for city police and fire resources.  

I hope we can expect at least as much from Mayor Bates and acting Mayor Kriss Worthington, so we don’t waste time and money throwing people in jail for trying to give away a warm sweater.  

The city could easily establish its right to maintain clothing exchange receptacles in several locations on the median strip around the park, making it clear to the university that the clothing exchange tradition will continue as usual, at least on the park’s periphery. Without some leadership from the city, a whole lot of taxpayer money is about to be pointlessly wasted.  

Carol Denney 

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ANOTHER WAR 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

While people think the Iraq war will be and should be ending soon, I warn you that the U.S. is preparing for another war. It was in the news a week ago that the U.S. is deploying the entire 101st Airborne Division (20,000 soldiers) together with their war hardware to Iraq. The U.S. has started sending this division a week ago. This division is supposed to be in Tikrit, Iraq for a year. 

There is no reason to send this division that specializes in air raids and rapid deployment of troops by helicopters to Iraq at this point. According to the news, this division will train the Iraqi police. This is a lie. The 101st Airborne Division is over-qualified to train soldiers and police. Besides, they do not need all their helicopters to do the training. The only purpose is to invade either Iran or Syria. The timing will be just right for the November 2006 election. 

Be prepared for another war and blood shed. 

Mina Davenport 

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TREES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Today the sound of chain saws greeted me as I left my house to go to work. A neighbor on the next block was having two large, old palm trees cut down. The loss of large trees is always of great concern to me but in this case I was even more upset because barn owls have established a nest and raised young in those palms. The owls had one brood in the spring and had a second group of young very recently. I asked my neighbor if he knew about the owls in the trees and asked him why he was cutting down the trees. “Liability” was his response. Old palm fronds were falling on the sidewalk and his next door neighbor had expressed a concern that the palms were swaying in the wind and might fall on her house in a storm this winter. Apparently ignorant of the fact that old fronds can be trimmed and palms do sway in the wind without falling as these had for decades, my neighbor decided to cut the trees down. When I expressed concern about the owls and, at least waiting until the young had left the nest, he responded that the workers “are here now” and, you know, “liability.” So when I came home today the skyline was empty where two old palms had stood sentinel for several decades and the young owls had gone—but where? A little note of nature’s grace in the city is now gone from my neighborhood. And why? Because of “liability.” 

I am grieving the loss of those trees and the future generations of barn owls who will not be part of my neighborhood. People, have some respect for the great trees that grace our city! And please be aware that when you trim or cut down trees there may be young birds in those trees. Arborists can be consulted to solve tree issues and those solutions are often short of cutting the trees down. It took many years for those palms to become the neighborhood landmarks they became and only one day to obliterate them from the landscape. And why? Because of “liability.” What a country! 

Christopher Kroll 

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SCHOOLS AND THE CITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Many letter-writers lump the local school district and the city together. This is serious misconception. The two have no common components. In fact they learn more about what each other are doing via the local papers than by any formal means of collaboration. This is how I explain to myself the cognizance rift between the two. Neither benefits by the learning curve of the other. 

I am surprised by how faintly aware are local citizens and officials of the great local building project of the past 12 years, the refurbishment and replacement of all of Berkeley’s K-12 public schools. The school rebuilding, a $300 million project nearing its completion, scarcely finds its like anywhere in the U.S. It began not with the school district bureaucracy but with citizen activists who raised the alarm after the earthquake, organized, computed the price tag and how it had to be paid, and persuaded the School Board to act. 

The early projects had some problems. But this has been a long, high-stakes learning curve. Near the end the school district was a smooth-running machine for processing public input and cranking out splendid buildings which have largely delighted constituents. (The machine has gathered a little rust recently.) Among the lessons were successful and unsuccessful models for applying public input. Another discovery was the reservoir of local citizens’ practical vision. In retrospect it was obvious that such would reside in a place like Berkeley, but there was never before such a vast occasion for turning citizen vision into concrete and sheetrock. 

I feel we should have a shot at deploying some of that local “genius” in behalf of our downtown, our “commons.” 

We know where to turn to obtain planning services. World-class professional designers are among us. But the vision which informs design must not be something we “buy”—or seek from our benign local university. We can and should author it ourselves. On the DBA design subcommittee we have thought a lot about this. Here is an idea for how it might be done, mentioned earlier in the week by in the Daily Planet: http://busduse.org/VisioningDowntownProposal.html. It is not yet approved by any organization but being shaped by citizen “brainstorming.” 

Bruce Wicinas 

DBA Design Subcommittee 

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KATRINA AND FEMA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

James K. Sayre’s commentary on Bush and FEMA contained an appropriate amount of righteous political anger at the misplanned and mis-executed federal responses to Hurricane Katrina—appropriate if focused on the bunglers at the top. But the situation on the ground was and is much more complex than he described, and not everything failed because of a simple-minded right-wing plot. As a Red Cross volunteer who’s personally dealt with hundreds of heart-wrenching requests for help to our national hotline from those affected by the storm, I recommend taking a broader perspective. 

It’s essential to consider separately the three phases of post-disaster work: search and rescue, emergency assistance, and long-term recovery. Search and rescue is a job for highly trained professionals, not spontaneous volunteers, and FEMA was entirely right to initially exclude the Red Cross and other entities from New Orleans and other flooded zones. That’s the agreed practice, not the result of incompetence or worse. This necessary first-phase delay of help explains exactly why every emergency preparedness agency always teaches people that they will be on their own for up to a week following a major disaster. No amount of preparation will ever eliminate that grim reality. 

In the current emergency-assistance phase, the Red Cross, Salvation Army, and a multitude of other public and private agencies including FEMA have been acting exceptionally well from the ground up to first provide life essentials—water, food, shelter and clothing—and then to start work on longer-term issues of housing and local infrastructure. In the zones most damaged by the hurricane—which are generally even worse to the north and east of New Orleans than that mediagenic city is—it’s only now in the fourth week that the first multi-agency service centers have begun to appear. In many of those places, such as the Gulfport-Biloxi coast, even the emergency shelters and Red Cross disaster operations centers were destroyed—there was literally nothing left standing to use for public help.  

And that chaotic circumstance, caused by physical destruction beyond all contingency planning, cannot smugly be laid at the feet of “the illegitimate Bush regime.” 

It’s only in the third phase of longer-term recovery still to come that we will truly test FEMA and the federal response. Political media tours to the French Quarter will no doubt be frequent, while Hattiesburg and Mobile will continue suffering in the shadows. My own fear is that the politicians, bureaucrats and disastercrats will focus all our attention on the future Disneyfication of New Orleans while they leave the countryside to rot. Effective disaster response will require just a bit more than building a few new telegenic theme parks to create the illusion of full recovery when the tourists return. 

As I’ve been learning on the phone one-to-one, whole communities that never make the network news have shared utter destruction. Hundreds of thousands of evacuees now face the disorienting prospect not only of starting life over in a new place, but also of doing so in other more individualistic and more shallow-rooted communities. The rest of the country may be used to anonymous urban communities but those “roots” folks certainly are not. There’s no chapter in the FEMA handbook on how to deal with cultural displacement on a national scale, and no reason to expect them to deal with a problem that’s now local to all of us. 

So while we certainly need to give Bush and FEMA an F for the first Katrina grading period, they still rate only an Incomplete for the full course. Meanwhile, let’s remember how great a job every local disaster worker and committed volunteer has been doing day after day, in all 50 states, and let us strive with them for a grade of A on the recovery tests we face together right here in California. We will all need to do our best to support the evacuees among us—more than 1200 families in the Bay Area alone—through the even more difficult times ahead. 

Alan Tobey 

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HURRICANE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

While flooded Gulf-state residents begin to reclaim their homes and communities, it looks like the inundation of federal money is going very, very well for Bush’s supporters and handlers. Look who’s receiving $100 million dollar no-bid contracts: the Shaw Group, KBR-Halliburton, Flour Corp., Bechtel, and the Shaw Group (a double-dip for them!). These corporations are clients of Joe Allbaugh, lobbyist. Remember Joe? Bush’s campaign manager in 2000, then Bush’s appointee to head FEMA before passing the patronage to his buddy, Michael “Brownie” Brown. He got money shunted to these corporations before the ink was dry on Congress’ approval of relief funds. 

Something stinks, and it isn’t just the fetid flood water in New Orleans. The administration that rivals Warren G. Harding’s for incompetence has surpassed them in corruption. And where is the press? People were outraged when they learned about Teapot Dome. Taxpayers should take note of Bush’s words when he hands such financial largess to the oligarchy, “it’s your money.” 

Bruce Joffe 

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CAUTION NOTICES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I write this letter in response to the Sept. 12 letter of A.R. Tarlow of San Pablo regarding his/her unfortunate slip and fall at Wildcat Canyon while hiking. Just today while I was carving a piece of wood with a utility knife I noticed a faint lettering on the handle, “Warning: sharp blade.” Furthermore, as we all well know, at the cafe there are signs reading, “Caution: hot coffee” and elsewhere signs reading, “Caution: slippery slope, steep drop”, etc. Now, to further augment these idiot guides to the the outside world, A.R. Tarlow suggests that the Park Service squander their time and public money to put up signs reading, “Caution: slippery acorns”! I ask this of A.R. Tarlow: What other signs should be put up? “Caution: It can be a bit chilly at night, bring a sweater,” or “Caution: uneven ground on this nature trail, watch your step so as not to fall,” or better yet, we should put up signs that warn people not to trip over signs! I would not even be surprised if A.R. Tarlow tried to file a suit against our wonderful Parks Department, which would be just another example of someone trying to find someone else or some organization to blame for their own shortcomings of motor coordination. 

In closing I suggest three things: First, A.R. Tarlow should just stay home where it is relatively safe and leave that beautiful “stately tree” free of insult from yuppie, bourgeois placards. Second, A.R. Tarlow should take the time to learn a thing or two about the “stately tree” and know that this acorn tree does indeed drop “ball-bearings” at a certain time of the year and, lastly, on his/her way to that tree A.R. Tarlow should read and re-read the sign outside his/her door reading, “Caution: the outside world.” 

Helder Parreira 

Following Norway’s Sept. 12 elections that saw a green-red coalition turn out a pro-business, anti-immigrant center-right government, the German daily, Die Tageszeitung, mused that “perhaps people in Germany could learn something from this.” It appears they did, and what they learned is likely to be repeated in Italy and France next spring. 

While the U.S. press is spinning the German elections as “inconclusive; no clear winner,” as the New York Times put it, the figures show a solid victory for the Left, and a defeat for neo-liberalism. While the Right took 45 percent of the vote and 286 seats, the Left won 51.1 percent and 327 seats in the 613 seat Bundestag. In short, there was a “clear winner,” the Times not withstanding. 

Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union/ Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) party won just 35.2 percent, losing 23 seats. The only silver lining for the Right was that Merkel’s coalition partner, the neo-liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), won 9.8 percent of the vote and 61 seats. However, most observers think the FDP’s success is fleeting, the result of rank and file CDU/CSU members jumping parties. 

The Social Democratic Party (SDP) took 34.3 percent of the vote, marginally better than it was supposed to get, but losing 29 seats. The Greens dropped half a percentage point to 8.1 percent and lost four seats.  

The real winner was the Left Party, a coalition of the eastern-based Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the former Communist Party, and the western-based Election Alternative for Labor and Social Justice (WASG). The latter is an alliance of left Social Democrats, trade unionists, young people, and environmentalists turned off by the Green Party leadership’s turn to the right.  

The Left Party won 8.7 percent of the vote and 54 seats, vaulting it past the Greens to become Germany’s third largest party. It also took 25 percent of the vote in the east, and close to 5 percent in the west. In four western states it reached 5 percent, the point that makes it possible to serve in the Bundestag. If it does well in upcoming state parliamentary elections, it will fundamentally alter the political balance of power in Germany. 

As it did in the 2002 German elections, Iraq loomed large. While Merkel said she would not send troops, the CDU/CSU strongly supported the invasion, and voters were clearly nervous about where that might lead if she assumed power. For instance, the Bush Administration has been pushing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to assume combat operations in Afghanistan, a move the German Left strongly opposed. The CDU/CSU was evasive about the proposal. 

Indeed, Merkel ran a largely stealth campaign, that was deliberately vague about everything from taxes to foreign policy. The Economist opined that Merkel was not revealing her program because “she must be elected before she can do anything, and being too candid would diminish her chances.” It would appear German voters figured this out. 

Merkel started out with a 21-point lead that partly reflected widespread disenchantment with the SDP/Green coalition’s Agenda 2010, which favored business while cutting jobless benefits and social services. However, the Left Party’s platform of raising minimum wages, restoring benefit cuts, and questioning the presence of U.S. bases in Germany drove the campaign to the left. It was clearly what the voters wanted, and they responded by tanking the right, spanking the SDP and the Greens, and rewarding the new Left Party. 

What the government will eventually look like is by no means clear at press time. The voters appear to want a red-red-green alliance. But for the time being, Prime Minster Gerhard Schroder of the SDP and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer of the Greens are ruling that out. The most talked about formations are the so-called “Grand Alliance” between the SDP and the CDU/CSU, or an odd-fellow alliance of Greens and the Right. 

Whatever the final outcome, the ripples started in Norway are spreading south.  

France’s right-wing Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy latched on to Merkel’s brand of neo-liberalism as the salvation of France and the European Union. Her defeat will certainly put a crimp in his drive for the French presidency, giving the inside track to the more moderate candidacy of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. But, more importantly, the outcome of the German elections may further bolster the French Left that was recently energized by its successful “no” campaign to torpedo the European Union constitution. 

Lastly, there is Italy. Next spring’s Italian elections will most likely see a united Left coalition, L’Unione, drive the right-wing, pro-American coalition of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi from power. L’Unione candidates took 12 out of 14 regional elections last spring, and the parties that comprise it have been at the core of street demonstrations and social actions around everything from globalization, to ending poverty and homelessness, to opposing the Iraq War. 

The most recent poll shows L’Unione at 49.7 percent and the right at 45.2 percent. 

L’Unione is a merger of the Partido della Rifondazione Comunista, Left Democrats, the left-center Margherita Party, and a host of smaller regional and social action parties. The Berlusconi government is presently trying to ram through a series of electoral changes in an effort to dilute the power of the smaller regional parties, but the maneuver is so patently undemocratic that it has even caused tensions within his right-wing coalition. 

Nor does the Italian Left see itself as just a national movement. Fausto Bertinotti, Rifondazione’s current general secretary and a moving force behind L’Unione, is giving up his post to work on organizing a party of the European Left. 

Oh, and shortly after the elections, Norwegian Labor party leader Jens Stoltenberg announced that Norway will withdraw its small contingent of troops from Iraq.  

Ya’ gotta’ love that old Europe. 

New Europe, on the other hand, still has a way to go. 

Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, Poland’s former prime minister and Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) candidate, withdrew from the Oct. 9 race for president because of corruption charges. His withdrawal leaves the Polish Left in disarray, and will probably mean that Donald Trusk of the neo-liberal Civic Platform (PO) will win the presidency (although his party took a hit in last Sunday’s election). 

Trusk has been heavily supported by foreign investors and Polish business for promising to reduce regulations and for his plan to impose a 15 percent flat tax. Trusk has been close to Angela Merkel and advocates rapid privatization of state assets.  

The SLD won the 2001 parliamentary elections, but corruption scandals brought it down. 

Trusk is popular, in part because he has publicly challenged neighboring Belarus about its treatment of its Polish minority. Nationalism—always a winner in Poland—may sweep him into office. Whether the majority of Poles want a heavy dose of neo-liberalism is another matter. PO was favored to win the Parliamentary elections this past Sunday, but came in second to the center right Law and Justice Party that opposed the tax and a number of other neo-liberal schemes.  

And whoever wins, the Poles will probably withdraw their 1,500 troops from Iraq.  

Conn Hallinan is a journalist and an analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus.

“Congress shall make no law … abridging … the right of the people peaceably to assemble…” 

Recognize that? It’s drawn from the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, part of that body of 10 amendments that we refer to as the Bill of Rights. The various state legislatures would not have ratified the original Constitution without the addition of those amendments, and today we consider the rights spelled out in them to be what defines our status as American citizens. Freedom of assembly is right there at the top, one of the first rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. 

How difficult, then, do you think it would be to take that right away from American citizens with hardly anyone—public, politician, or press—uttering a word of protest? 

Not very difficult at all, my friends, depending upon the community, and the setup. And if you think I’m talking about our Arab-Muslim neighbors today, you’re mistaken. 

Two weeks ago, in this column, I described the following event that occurred recently on International Boulevard in Oakland between 87th and 88th avenues near the headquarters of the East Bay Dragons Motorcycle Club: “And on the Sunday before Labor Day, Oakland police shut down the Dragons’ annual 88th Avenue block party at 5 p.m., and then conducted a sweep in which they ordered the crowds of people off of International Boulevard in the vicinity of the Dragons’ clubhouse.” Later in the piece, I added that “Oakland police shut things down early, long before dark, while neighborhood people were still hanging out, enjoying themselves, with no signs of problem.” 

Reading those lines for the first time-or reading them for the first time now-what were your thoughts? 

Let me add some context, for those who are not familiar with the area of International Boulevard between 87th and 88th avenues, which sits at the extreme eastern flatlands edge of the city. This is a mixed working class African-American and Mexican-American neighborhood. The East Bay Dragons is a black motorcycle club, and the crowds in question on that Sunday were virtually all black. The area is sometimes described by police and the press as being one of the centers of sideshow activity in Oakland, although that’s not exactly true if you’re talking about International Boulevard. Relatively few sideshows ever took place on International—the epicenter was up on Bancroft Avenue or Foothill Boulevard, several blocks away. Still, because of the natural tendency to generalize about a community you’ve never visited, a “need to disperse the sideshows” is probably what goes through most people’s minds when they think of Oakland police disbursing crowds in this neighborhood. 

As a matter of fact, “preventing sideshows” has become the underlying excuse for a lot of questionable police activity in the far reaches of the East Oakland flatlands. 

In August 2001, at the height of the street sideshows, then-Oakland Police Information Officer George Philips gave a revealing statement to the Oakland Tribune on how police were breaking up the events. Oakland police “don’t give them the opportunity to do anything,” Mr. Philips said. “Anytime an officer sees a group starting to gather, he radios up, gives their location, and everybody responds to chase them away.” In response, in an “Oakland Unwrapped” column, the predecessor to “UnderCurrents,” I wrote: “What immediately jumps out is who is the ‘them’ Mr. Phillips is talking about, and what is exactly is it that the Oakland Police Department are not giving ‘them’ and opportunity to ‘do’?” 

In 2001, you may or may not remember, the Oakland police had no official definition of a “sideshow.” But even after that official definition surfaced this year, in Mayor Jerry Brown’s “arrest the sideshow spectators” law, the question is still relevant. 

How, after all, do Oakland police determine that a “gathering” is likely to end up in a “sideshow?” And how much of this so-called “sideshow crackdown” has any relation to sideshows at all, directly or indirectly? 

Last month, in an East Bay Express article entitled “Sideshows RIP?”, investigative reporter Robert Gammon detailed how Oakland police have been recently going after sideshows: “[I]n late April [of this year], the OPD boosted the patrol of East Oakland streets on Friday and Saturday nights by adding 22 more officers and three sergeants. … These 43 cops are also joined by sixteen California Highway Patrol officers, who cruise the major East Oakland thoroughfares on weekend nights. The anti-sideshow forces focus on traffic violations, reasoning that sideshows are far less likely to materialize if East Oakland motorists are constantly seeing cars being pulled over by police. According to Downing, the officers have issued five thousand traffic citations on weekend nights alone since January, resulting in seven hundred arrests. They’ve also towed 1,700 vehicles in that time.” 

Read that paragraph again, carefully, in case you missed the point. Unless Mr. Gammon got it wrong—and he has a reputation as an excellent reporter—he is saying that Oakland police are cracking down on sideshows by flooding the streets of East Oakland with OPD and Highway Patrol officers, giving out huge numbers of tickets and towing the cars of drivers who even the officers themselves do not claim have anything to do with the sideshows. 

If the Oakland police felt the need to establish a massive presence in East Oakland to deter sideshows, why didn’t they do something more useful, say, like targeting the longtime open-air drug dealing going on in many East Oakland communities? 

Instead, on weekend nights driving along International Boulevard from High Street to 105th, it is not unusual to see multiple police vehicle stops—as many as three in a twenty-block area—many times with tow trucks lined up to make the trip over to A&B’s nearby impound lot. If driving the streets of your neighborhood without massive police surveillance can be considered an American right, then that right doesn’t exist on weekend nights in the far end of East Oakland. 

How many of these 5,000 traffic citations and 1,700 vehicle tows and 700 arrests described by Mr. Gammon are justified? How serious were the offenses involved, even when any offenses actually occurred? I have no way of knowing, but that isn’t the point, is it? Massive numbers of tickets are not being given in East Oakland because there are more violations there than anyone else. Massive numbers of tickets are being given in East Oakland because police are applying a scrutiny there that no other Oakland community receives. That’s a textbook description of discrimination. 

It gets by in East Oakland because, after all, it’s East Oakland, and that is said with a wink and a nod, and everybody is supposed to understand. It’s East Oakland, after all, where the poor blacks and the poor Mexicans live, where the liquor stores are, where the drug dealing and the prostitutes and the shootings go on. Oh, yes, and the sideshows. 

How difficult is it to take away fundamental Constitutional rights of assembly or travel from American citizens with hardly anyone-public, politician, or press-uttering a peep of protest? 

Not very difficult at all, my friends. It’s already happening. Right in front of our eyes. Without anyone even bothering to try to cover it up. 

Something to think about, while we criticize how all of those poor black people in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward got treated so bad during Katrina. 

Disaster standby 

With one Berkeley firefighter already in Texas to help in the aftermath of Hurricane Rita, other Berkeley firefighters were awaiting the call Thursday night to head for Southern California. 

Flames from an uncontrolled blaze had seared more than 20,000 acres in northwestern Los Angeles County by early Thursday evening, when Deputy Fire Chief David P. Orth said that Alameda County had already dispatched two firefighting teams to battle the blaze. 

The two teams are trained to battle wild-land fires and the Berkeley engine then on call is part of a so-called Type 1 team, which specializes in battling structural fires. 

Gas leak 

A truck backed over a gas meter next to UC Berkeley’s Foothill dorms at 2600 Hearst Ave. Monday afternoon, shutting off gas service to about 1,500 customers and forcing an evacuation of the construction site, said Orth. 

Adding to the complexities caused by the rupture of the high-pressure line was the fact that emergency workers couldn’t shut down the main line in the street—the first line of recourse in most line breaks, said Orth. 

The reason? Shutting off the line would have cut off gas to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, an event with potentially huge consequences, Orth said. 

“So they dug holes until they found the lateral line” leading to the dorms “and pinched it off,” said the deputy chief. 

Berkeley firefighters arrived at the scene shortly after they were called out at 1:03 p.m. and remained on site until 4:43 p.m. 

Orth said gas service was restored to the area at about 6 p.m.

There are countless examples of media word-storms but the deluge from Hurricane Katrina in sound and print copiously illustrated is over the top, the coverage pushing aside a newly named chief justice of the Supreme Court and also the violence in Iraq. Every conceivable point of view floods the perspective leftward and rightward far beyond previous limits. Katrina and her aftermath aroused sympathy and outrage, finger pointing and frustration; it created a swirl of passions that changed an ordinary word-storm into a rampaging tornado. Everyone with access to viewer/reader no matter how poorly or well qualified, close or distant, illiterate or eloquent contributed; the word-twister touched down, cleared existing terrain and revealed along with its real debris a bounty of dumb observations and idiotic pronouncements.  

Even if I had resources to gather all of them I wouldn’t have the stomach for it. What follows is a motley collection, not an outline but a collage or, symbolically, a sample of spicy-hot gumbo.  

By way of introduction consider Jonathan Alter’s excellent survey in the Sept. 19 issue of Newsweek. This long and valuable piece is spoiled in its finale by two incredibly dumb paragraphs.  

The third from the end starts with a question: “What kind of president does George W. Bush want to be?” The rest of the paragraph reveals the question to be neither rhetorical nor facetious nor sarcastic; it is real. But how can it be? After almost five years in office everyone can see the kind of president we’ve got and while Katrina may cause him to want to be different he has shown little inclination to actually try.  

Mr. Alter’s penultimate paragraph quotes Margaret Schuber, principal of a New Orleans middle school currently an evacuee in Atlanta: “I didn’t realize there were so many people suffering socio-economically.” This is pure undiluted bullshit.  

My roots are in New Orleans: I went to high school there, I taught school there, my oldest brother retired there after 35 years in New Orleans schools, my youngest brother was assistant postmaster, and much more. Mama and Daddy died there. New Orleans is as much a way of life as it is a city. What sets it apart is its centuries of nurturing two parallel and symbiotic worlds, one white and one black, the former symbolized on Mardi Gras Day by the Rex parade and the other by the simultaneous parading of King Zulu. 

A casual conventioneer or a Mardi Gras tourist would have to be brain dead not to notice ubiquitous dire poverty. A resident cannot but rub shoulders with a subculture of suffering, endemic, severe and firm; a school principal cannot but rub more than her shoulders.  

Rather than quote Shuber to underscore Katrina’s surprise unveiling of people in raw, un-civil circumstances, Mr. Alter ought to have used it to illustrate how these same people survived like human cockroaches—below the surface, irrepressible and menacing, how their middle school principals voice counterfeit words. Shuber’s academic jargon hardly depicts the reality: New Orleans‚ schools are situated in jungle enclaves where parents have been under-educated for generations. They’re penniless. They live hand to mouth. Destitution is real and far more painful than mere socio-economic suffering.  

Poorly educated principals and lazy editors have lapses and may with effort be redeemed. Opinionated dunces may not.  

Take Brian Pitts of CBS, for example. Asked what was different about Katrina compared to other natural disasters he had covered, Mr. Pitts replied that victims in other parts of the world—Indonesia and Sri Lanka were named—handled their suffering with more equanimity because, he surmised, they had less and expected less than the poor citizens of New Orleans. Thus, Mr. Pitts might just as well have concluded: The poorer you are the less you expect and so when disaster strikes the less you will suffer.  

Another opinionated dunce occupying a lower rung on the celebrity ladder is syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell. He had a week to ponder the situation before declaring himself capable of understanding how people “who chose to stay” in New Orleans might regret their decision, but he found their reaction in angry assaults, rapes, shootings and lootings not only unfathomable, intolerable but downright un-American.  

Opinionated dunces like these two are usually unaware of their benighted condition.  

Before continuing I must take a brief detour. Statements from the head of the Department of Homeland Security and from presidents Clinton and Bush introduced guilt as an energizing element in the storm giving the coverage a surreal tint.  

In his televised appearance two days after landfall, Mr. Chertoff, secretary of DHS, appealed to the public to send money and his plea has since been echoed in puppet-like appearances of the presidential odd couple, 41 and 42. Government, therefore, not only needs our tax dollars to pay for FEMA but it also solicits our tax-deductible contributions to non-government relief agencies. Blessed are we who see the degradation of poor blacks and do penance by emptying our pockets.  

I can think of no better retort, irreverent though it be, than the one appearing in “Boondocks,” the comic strip by Aaron McGruder: “Who’s Katrina? And why is everybody sending this broad money?” 

Finally, brace yourself for three blistering word-showers emanating from the Big House.  

Three days after Katrina hit the president looked down from the window of Air Force One, a flying Big House, and deemed conditions on the ground to be “twice as devastating” as they appeared from up there [his word, my italics]. He might have said “10” or “20” or “one hundred” and indeed higher guesses came days later when he actually walked about and hugged people “down there.” Twice! 

The secretary of state who less than two centuries ago would have been dubbed a “house niggra,” interrupted her shopping, stepped before the cameras and supported “massa” by identifying herself with the “field niggras” milling around the Superdome with whom she shared skin color and nothing more. 

The twice-anointed First Mom, recruited to stanch the leak in her son’s sealed bubble, left her own Big House to publicly extol the generosity of her fellow Texans. Then, with dignified aplomb put her aristocratic foot into shit by observing that “so many of the [field niggras] were underprivileged, you know, anyway” that the accommodations provided “worked very well for them.”  

My formulation and inserts may be offensive but the substance is true. 

Be reassured. Katrina disrupted but did not destroy New Orleans’ lifestyle. By and by les bons temps will roll again.  

Meanwhile, run for shelter! 

Marvin Chachere is a San Pablo resident. 

The anti-war movement continues to put up great resistance to the reactionary cannon balls constantly being lobbed into our lives. However, a larger, more visionary action plan has been lacking. As a result of no apparent handle to organize around a comprehensive, inspiring political agenda, the anti-war movement has steadily spiraled into a strategic dead end.  

MoveOn, from its bright beginnings, has turned into an adjunct of the Democratic Leadership Council, leading the way over the cliff in supporting John Kerry. MoveOn hasn’t yet rallied its members behind Rep. Lynn Woolsey’s resolution to bring the troops home now, and is unlikely to.  

ANSWER and United for Peace and Justice can only come up with mass rallies every six months or so, and even those have no massive and consistent civil disobedience component. Old time Marxists still call for a Labor Party as if Diebold hadn’t invalidated honest national elections and there was a labor movement supporting such a party. 

This strategic morass is based on the faithful adherence to over-emphasizing the horrors of U.S. foreign policy over domestic social and environmental justice issues. There has been a glaring lack of loudly linking chronic, hideously unmet domestic needs to the cost of the war. 

The world-wide and national revulsion to the Bush League’s display of criminal negligence, perverse morality, and classist racism in the wake of Hurricane Katrina ought to serve as a wakeup call. That call says it’s time to shift the focus in a major way to domestic concerns. It’s more than time to focus on the actions that have to be taken to undo the Bush policies that are literally destroying America.  

The accent has to be on eliminating racism, poverty, homelessness here in the U.S., health care for all Americans, massively pumping up educational funding, creating viable, sustainable mass transportation systems, rebuilding infrastructure etc. etc. Reaching these goals through the back door of focusing on U.S. foreign policy doesn’t seem to engender changes, and hasn’t for a long, long time.  

In this light, I direct readers to Rescue America: Nine Key Steps, coming from Van Jones at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights (bnb-list@ellabakercenter.org). If you agree with what you read, please sign the pledge to become part of 250,000 Americans demanding a dedicated rebuilding of our country (Colorofchange.org).  

Maris Arnold is a Berkeley resident.  

^

Karen and Tom Klaber started what is now known as The East Bay Monthly in their home 35 years ago. 

After three-and-a-half years they moved to an office at Seventh and Parker streets and then moved to their current office in Emeryville. Tom wrote all the copy and Karen was the salesperson, bookkeeper and business manager. 

It began as The Telegraph Monthly, filled with shopping advertisements for Telegraph Avenue merchants. They soon got bored with the all-advertisement format and added articles. 

For years, Fred Cody, founder of Cody’s Books, wrote a column called “The Book Bag,” which included exposés of milk, meat and sugar diets.  

As the publication’s range expanded, they changed the name to The Berkeley Monthly. Tom Klaber left the magazine in 1981, and the Klabers are now divorced, though still friends. 

Karen, a painter by training, said she wanted the cover always to feature art work. She still chooses the covers.  

“We wanted to give the public something intelligent,” Klaber said. “We’ve always wanted to have a balance of commerce and culture.” 

Another mission of the magazine was to celebrate local businesses.  

“In every issue we had an ad: support your local merchants,” she said. “There was nobody else that made merchants look good.”  

Although the circulation is still strong at 81,000, the magazine has felt the pinch of the shrinking economy and increased competition.  

“In a tough economy, which we’ve experienced since the dot-com bomb, the magazine has gotten skinnier,” Klaber said. “I’ve had to roll up my sleeves and get involved in selling advertising.” 

Klaber said she hopes to expand the magazine. She is looking for an investor or partner to increase the scope of the publication. 

To celebrate their milestone, the magazine is throwing a 35th anniversary party for friends, advertisers, writers, and editors.  

“We have advertisers who’ve been with us 30-plus years—in every single issue,” Klaber said.

Forget moveable feasts. How about a moveable gallery? 

That is what is on offer Saturday when performance artist Amber Hasselbring will conduct guests on her unique day-long ART on BART program. 

For the cost of a $5.80 BART ticket and lunch, Hasselbring will escort participants on a day-long excursion that will begin at 10:26 a.m. at BART’s Civic Center Station in San Francisco. 

The itinerary includes a ride of the entire BART system, with a stop for lunch at the Rockridge Station, and ending back at the Civic Center at 6:06 p.m. 

Participants will be given a book that will include information about the individual artists and their performances, maps of the Bay Area and information about regional ecology. 

Hasselbring often incorporates travel in her work. One of her projects, “Water Triangle,” is a 1,400-mile journey from San Francisco to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, the Owens Valley and back to San Francisco, examining manmade projects to bring water to the desert. Another featured a cross-country road trip. 

“I Stand” was the opposite, a sunrise to sunset vigil last Nov. 6 where she and all who chose to participate maintained a standing vigil at the corner of 5th and Market streets in San Francisco. 

Saturday’s excursion—billed as “An Integrative Bay Area Tour”—will feature a variety of artists and their works, including: 

• Lori Gordon, who will perform “Kiss it Goodbye,” a participatory work about healing and letting go. For more information see www.lorigordon.com/kig.htm. 

• Nicole Krauch, Jenny Selgrath, Levana Saxon and Emily Simon will perform a dance score that evolves from the actions of BART riders. 

• Bill Owens will read from his novel Delco Years, which recounts the events of a survivalist community in Livermore after a virus wipes out most of the human race. 

• Rick Prelinger will present “Wire Landscapes: Making the Invisible Intelligible,” a piece which incorporates radio frequencies. 

• Ted Purves and Susan Cockrell, founders of the Temescal Amity Works, will offer fresh apples from the backyards of their neighbors in Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood. 

• Christopher Woodward and Jessamyn Lovell will offer a work featuring journals and photographs of Lovell taken by participants. 

Seats are limited, so anyone wishing to participate should e-mail Hasselbring at ahasslebring@mindspring.com. 

FRIDAY, SEPT. 30 

THEATER 

Aurora Theatre “The Price” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m., through Oct. 9, at 2081 Addison St. Tickets are $38. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

California Shakespeare Theater, “The Tempest” at 8 p.m. at Bruns Amphitheater, 100 Gateway Blvd., between Berkeley and Orinda, through Oct. 23. Tickets are $10-$55. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org 

Impact Theater “Nicky Goes Goth” at 8 p.m., Thurs.-Sat. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid, through Oct. 1. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468. www.impacttheatre.com 

Lunatique Fantastique “Executive Order 9066” Thurs. -Sat. at 7 p.m. at 2120 Allston Way. Tickets are $15-$22. 415-826-5750. www.themarsh.org 

Shotgun Players, “Owners” at 8 p.m., Thurs.-Sun. through Oct. 16 at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. Reservations suggested. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

Wilde Irish Productions “Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me” Thurs. -Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 3 p.m., at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave., through Oct. 2. Tickets are $18-$22. 644-9940. www.wildeirish.org 

FILM 

Films from Along the Silk Road ”The Adopted Son” at 7:30 p.m. and “The First Teacher” at 9:10 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Neil Gaiman introduces “Anansi Boys” at 7 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Sponsored by Cody’s Books. Advance reservations requested. One ticket is available with each purchase of the book. 845-7852. 

“A Composer’s Colloquium” with John Adams about his opera “Dr. Atomic” at 3 p.m. in the Elkus Room, 125 Morrison Hall, UC Campus. 

Dutch Voices: Jos de Putter and Peter Delpeut Salon with Peter Delpeut at 1:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Oakland Opera “La Belle et la Bete,” Thurs.-Sun. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. through Oct. 2 at the Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway at 2nd. Tickets are $18-$32. 763-1146.  

Mark Morris Dance Group at at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $30-$58. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

I Gatti Freschi with guest flutist Marty Stoddard perform Schubert and J.S. Bach, at 8 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. Cost is $12-$15. 848-1228. www.giorgigallery.com 

Ives String Quartet, with Anna Carol Dudly, soprano, at 8 p.m. at Mills College Concert Hall, 5000 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland. 430-2296. 

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

school.com 

El Hombre y el Flamenco at 9 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $20. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Mal Sharpe Sextet & Anna de Leon at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Stompy Jones/Lindy Hop at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. East Coast swing dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $11-$13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

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

David Frazier’s Cuban Jazz Ensemble at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

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

Penelope Houston, Mike Therieau, Sean Smith at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Crow, World Burns to Death, Artimus Pyle 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. 

Santero at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $7. 548-1159.  

The Push, funk, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Earl Klugh, contemporary jazz guitarist, at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is 20-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SATURDAY, OCT. 1 

CHILDREN  

Los Amiguitos de La Peña with Colibri at 10:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $4 for adults, $3 for children. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Romanian Lace Costume and Sentimental Embroideries” Exhibition runs to Feb. 4 at Lacis Museum of Lace and Textiles, 2982 Adeline St. 843-7178. lacismuseum.org 

“Jewish Traditions” Works by Harry Lieberman opens at the Ames Gallery, 2661 Cedar St. 845-4949. www.amesgallery.com 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Dress: Clothing as Art” Artist’s talk with Anna Maltz at 2 p.m. at Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Ave., Richmond. 620-6772. www.therichmondartcenter.org 

Walter Mosley introduces his new Easy Rawlins novel, “Cinnamon Kiss” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Bay Area Poets Coalition open reading and contest from 3 to 5 p.m. at Strawberry Creek Lodge, 1320 Addison St. To enter contest call 527-9905. 

Synergy Women’s Open Mic at 3 p.m. at Lakeview Branch Oakland Public Library, 550 El Embarcadero at the column end of Lake Merritt. 632-7548. 

Synergy Women’s Open Mic at 3 p.m. at Lakeview Library at 550 El Embarcadero, Oakland.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Singing Through the Storm A hurricane-relief benefit for New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic, at 7:30 p.m. at the Mother’s Cookies Lofts, 1148 E. 18th St., Oakland. 594-4000 ext. 687.  

The Living Room, live music from emerging artists, at 8 p.m. at 3230 Adeline St. Donation. 601-5774. 

Rhonda Benin & Soulful Strut at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $7. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Sekouba “Bambino” Diabate at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $20. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Mosáico with José Roberto y sus Amigos at 8:30 p.m.at La Peña. Cost is $13-$15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Braziu, Brazilian music, at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $10-$12. 548-1159. www.shattuckdownlow.com 

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

Austin Lounge Lizards at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Myra Melford Quartet at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-18. 845-5373.  

Gini Wilson’s “Chamberjazz” at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Stanley, funk to jazz, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Steve Smulian at 8 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7. 558-0881. 

Victoria WIlliams, Carolyn Mark, Bermuda Triangle Service at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $12. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Jason Webley, Sour Mash Jug Hug Band, Dead Hensons at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $7. 525-9926. 

Earl Klugh at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $10-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SUNDAY, OCT. 2 

FILM 

African Diaspora Film Society: Bay Area Independent Filmmakers Mini-Festival at 2 p.m. at Parkway Theater, 1834 Park Blvd., Oakland. Cost is $5. www.picturepubpizza.com/special-events/diaspora 

THEATER 

PlayGround, two original short plays at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Rep., 2025 Addison St. RSVP to kickoff@playground-sf.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Single Moms: Invisible Lives” Artist’s talk with photographer Katherine Bettis at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, Central Community Room, 2090 Kittredge. 981-6100. www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org 

Bill Martin discusses “Marxism and the Call of the Future: Conversations on Ethics, History and Politics” at 6 p.m. at Revolution Books, 2425 Channing Way. 848-1196. 

Poetry Flash with Anne Valley-Fox and Joan Logghe at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Arts Festival: Barely Human Dance Theatre “From Here We Watch The World Go By” at 5 p.m. at the Downtown Berkeley BART Plaza. 883-0302. 

Four Flavors of Jazz from 3 to 7 p.m. at the Woodminister Amphitheatre in Oakland. Featured artists are Khalil Shaheed, Belinda Blair Quartet and Duo Gadjo & Joyce Grant. 238-3092. 

Sarah Manning, jazz saxophonist at 2 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Cost is $10-$15. 701-1787. 

Mike Vax Jazz Orchestra at 2 p.m. at Julia Morgan Theater, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $10-$18. 655-4593. www.bigbandjazz.net 

Americana Unplugged: The Dark Hollow Band at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Via Rio! at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way Cost is $7. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Carlos Zialcita and Myrna del Rio, jazz, blues at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Michael O’Neill Quintet, featuring Kenny Washington, at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$18. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

“The We That Sets You Free” a benefit for women in prison with Sistas in the Pit, Invincible, Tru Bloo, Tree Vasquez and others at 6:30 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $10-$25, sliding scale, no one turned away. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Catie Curtis, contemporary folk originals, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Anti-World, Love Songs, Lost Days of Jesus at 5 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $7. 525-9926. 

MONDAY, OCT. 3 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Bijoux” An exhibition in conjunction with the Northern California Bead Society, at NIAD Art Center, 551 23rd St., Richmond, through Nov. 18. 620-0290. www.niadart.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Andrew Beahrs reads from his debut novel about life in the early American colonies, “Strange Saint” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

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

Last Word Poetry Series with Christine DeSimone and Jesse Redpond at 7 p.m. at Pegasus Books, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Boubacar Traoré, from Mali, at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$16. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

TUESDAY, OCT. 4 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Modern Visions from Mongolia” opens at the Worth Ryder Gallery, 116 Kroeber Hall, UC Campus.  

FILM 

Derek Jarman’s Home Movies: “Imagining October” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Salman Rushdie reads from his new novel “Shalimar the Clown” at 6:15 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Tickets are $40, $50 per couple and includes a copy of the book. Sponsored by Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Poetry Diversified with Jan Steckel and Hew Wolff a 7:30 p.m. at World Ground Café, 3726 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland. 482-2933. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Prezident Brown backed by the Solid Foundation Band, reggae, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

The Tannahill Weavers, traditional Scottish music, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50- $20.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Singer’s Open Mic with Ellen Hoffman at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Eric Shifrin, solo jazz piano and vocals, at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

John Santos & Machete Ensemble at 8 and 10 p.m. Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$16. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

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

WEDNESDAY, OCT. 5 

FILM 

Doctor Atomic Goes Nuclear “The Beginning or the End” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Tom Panas introduces the “Images of America” book on El Cerrito at 7:30 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 16. 

Book Signing with Mary Lee Bendolph of the Gees Bend Quilters at 5 p.m. at Paulson Press Gallery, 1318 Tenth St. 559-2088. www.paulsonpress.com  

Louise Erdrich reads from her new novel “The Painted Drum” at 6:15 p.m. at The Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave., Tickets are $40, $50 per couple and includes a copy of the book. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

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. www.starryploughpub.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Wednesday Noon Concert with Anna Carol Dudley, voice, at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Free. 642-4864. http://music.berkeley.edu 

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

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

La Peña Latin Jazz Ensemble at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Saddle Cats at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Western Swing dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Pepe Y Su Orchestra at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Lessons at 8 p.m. Cost is $5. 548-1159.  

The Cottars, youthful Celtic roots, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50- $18.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Calvin Keys Trio Invitational Jam at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Scott Amendola Band at 8 and 10 p.m. Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$14. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, OCT. 6 

EXHIBITIONS 

The Baum Award for Emerging Photographers exhibition opens at the Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. Dialogue with the artists, Lisa Kereszi, Jeanne Finely and Terri Cohn at 6:15 p.m. 642-0808.  

“Bijoux” An exhibition in conjunction with the Northern California Bead Society,. Reception at 6 p.m. at NIAD Art Center, 551 23rd St., Richmond, Exhibition runs to Nov. 18. 620-0290. www.niadart.org 

“Taisho Chic: Japanese Modernity, Nostalgia and Deco” guided tour at 12:15 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Museum, 2625 Durant Ave. 642-0808. 

California Landscapes pastel paintings by Amy Gitelman at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave., through Oct. 31. 524-3043. 

FILM 

MadCat Woman’s International Film Festival: Animated Documentaries at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Egyptian Expeditions to the Sinai Peninisula” The AIA La Follette Lecture by Dr. Thomas Hikade, Univ. of British Columbia, at 7:30 p.m. at 370 Dwinelle Hall, UC Campus. 415-338-1537. 

Nomad Spoken Word Night at 7 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Ana Maria Spagna reads from “Now Go Home: Wilderness, Belonging and the Crosscut Saw” at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

Nuala O’Faolain on her biography “The Story of Chicago May” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Ron Powers reads from his biography “Mark Twain: A Life” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com  

Word Beat Reading Series with Dale Jensen and Judy Wells at 7 p.m. at Mediterraneum Caffe, 2475 Telegraph Ave. 526-5985. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Cecelia Bartoli with the Zurich Orchestra at 7 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $50-$250. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Global Fusion: Emam & Friends at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Tessa Loehwing & Adam Blankman at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

David Jacobs-Strain, blues, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Nine Pound Show, Powder Wheel at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

Dave Bernstein and John Wiitala, guitar and bass, at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

The Dead Kenny G’s, Brian Haas, Skerik, Mike Dillon at 8 and 10 p.m. through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$14. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com›

FRIDAY, SEPT. 30 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Ted Miles, Curator, San Francisco Maritime Museum, on “Historic Ships.” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $13.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925 or 665-9020.  

Community Blood Drive from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin Ave., Albany. To make an appointment call 1-800-448-3543. www.BeADonor.com 

“The Future of Food” A film about our corporate-controlled food system opens at the Landmark Shattuck Cinema, 2230 Shattuck Ave. For show times see www.landmarktheatres.com 

Kitka Vechirka Ukranian-style party to raise funds for Kitka’s “The Rusalka Cycle” and Musicares Hurricane Relief Fund at 8 p.m. at The Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Donation $50. RSVP to 444-0323. 

Movement: Chi Gung to improve energy and health, at 1 p.m. at Elephant Pharmacy, 1607 Shattuck Ave. at Cedar. 549-9200. 

Three Beats for Nothing sings early music for fun and practice at 10 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 655-8863. 

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. 

Women in Black Vigil, from noon to 1 p.m. at UC Berkeley, Bancroft at Telegraph. wibberkeley@yahoo.com 548-6310, 845-1143. 

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

SATURDAY, OCT. 1 

Sick Plant Clinic UC plant pathologist Dr. Robert Raabe, UC entomologist Dr. Nick Mills, and their team of experts will diagnose what ails your plants from 9 a.m. to noon at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Dr. 643-2755.  

Hawk Migration with Hans and Pam Peeters on their new book, “Raptors of California” at 10:30 a.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. Field trip with authors before the talk, meet at Claremont Ave. and Grizzly Peak at 9 a.m. to watch some raptors in action. 

Autumn Arachnids We will see slides first then explore the area to look for orb weavers, jumping spiders, wolf spiders and more from 2 to 3:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Berkeley Historical Society Walking Tour of the Berkeley View Terrace Neighborhood, led by Phila Rogers, from 10 a.m. to noon. Cost is $8-$10. For information call 848-0181. www.cityofberkeley.info/histsoc 

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

Plants with Fall Blooms with garden designer Hank Jenkins at 10 a.m. at Magic Gardens, 729 Heinz Ave. 644-2351. 

Field of Dreams A family day at the Oakland Museum of California in conjunction with the exhibition “Baseball As America” with pitching and fielding demonstrations, fast-pitch radar machines, memorabilia appraisals and historic film clips. From noon to 4 p.m. at 1000 Oak St. Free with museum admission. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

Inspiring School Gardens A tour of successful school gardens in Berkeley and Oakland, sponsored by the Watershed Project. Meet at 9 a.m. at Hillcrest Elementary, 30 Marguerite Dr., Oakland. Cost is $25. For information call 665-3689. www.thewatershedproject.org 

National Solar Homes Tour in Oakland and Berkeley from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tours are self-guided. Cost is $15 for two adults. Register online at www.norcalsolar.org 

Native Plant Sale of shrubs, perennials, succulants, grasses and bulbs, plus books and horticultural information. From 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sat., 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Sun., at Merritt College, 12500 Campus Drive, Oakland. 925-376-4095. www.ebcnps.org 

Swim a Mile for Women with Cancer to benefit the Women’s Cancer Resource Center. Sat. and Sun. from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Trefethan Aquatic Center, Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Boulevard, Oakland. 601-4040 ext. 180. www.wcrc.org/swim/index.htm 

Benefit Yoga Workshop for the Women’s Cancer Resource Center, in memory of Katie Allen from 2 to 5 p.m. at the Yoga Room, 2640 College Ave. Taught by Bonnie Maeda and Gay White. Donation $20-$40. 848-0993. 

Progressive Democrats of the East Bay meets at 1 p.m. at the Temescal Library, 5205 Telegraph, Oakland. The agenda includes a discussion of the organizing for the get-out-the-vote campaign, in coalition with Alliance for a Better California, labor groups, and other progressives. 526-4632. www.pdeastbay.org 

Rally to Fight Government Repression with Lynne Stewart and others at 2 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library Meeting Room, 2090 Kittredge St. 839-0852. 

East Bay Atheists Annual Picnic at noon at the Big Leaf Picnic Area, Tilden Park. Please bring a salad or dessert. Donation $5. 222-7580. 

Caldecott Tunnel 4th Bore Project will be the topic at Oakland Councilmember Jane Brunner’s Community Advisory Meeting at 10 a.m. at Peralta Elementary School, 460 63rd St. 238-7013. 

Sankofa Health Fair on Afrocentric roots of heath and healing, Sat. and Sun. from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 4550 San Pablo Avenue, Suite E, Second Floor, Emeryville. 839-6127. 

“Know Your Rights” A free training on what your rights are when dealing with the police from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Copwatch, 2022 Blake St. 548-0425. 

Blessing of the Bunnies for St. Francis of Assisi Feast Day at 3 p.m. at 303 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Please bring bunnies in carriers. 525-6155. 

Spirit Walking Aqua Chi (TM) A gentle water exercise class at 10 a.m. at the Berkeley High Warm Pool. Cost is $3.50 per session. 526-0312. 

Protest Rally at Berkeley Honda at 1 p.m. at Shattuck and Parker.  

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

SUNDAY, OCT. 2 

Berkeley Animal Care Run Walk and Bike Fundraiser at 9 a.m. at Berkeley Aquatic Park, west of 2nd St. Cost is $25 for adults, $5 for children ages 2-12. Registration begins at 9 a.m. Music at noon. For information call 877-472-9243. 

Morning Bird Walk to welcome back the Northern Flicker, Kinglets and others, at 9:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Spice Of Life Festival in North Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto with demonstrations, tastings and live music from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Shattuck Ave. from Virginia to Rose Sts. www.northshattuck.org 

Halloween Animals Learn the facts and myths about snakes and spiders from 2 to 4:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 525-2233. 

Retirement Party for Alan Kaplan, for 33 years a naturalist with East Bay Regional Parks District, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Indian Camp picnic area near the entrance to the Tilden Nature Area parking lot. 444-0355. 

Bay Area Woman In Black Report Back from Gaza from 2 to 4 p.m. at Oakland Main Library, West Auditorium, 125 14th St., Oakland. www.BayArea 

WomenInBlack.org 

African Diaspora Film Society presents “Bay Area Independent Filmmakers Mini-Festival” at 2 p.m. at Parkway Theater, 1834 Park Blvd., Oakland. Cost is $5. www.picturepubpizza.com/special-events/diaspora 

Johan Galtung, Norwegian Peace and Conflict Mediator will speak at 5 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, 1924 Cedar St. 526-2900. 

“Marxism and the Call of the Future” Bill Martin discusses the book he coauthored with Bob Avakian, at 6 p.m. at Revolution Books, 2425 Channing Way at Telegraph.  

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks 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 

MONDAY, OCT. 3 

National Organization for Women Oakland/East Bay Chapter meets at 6 p.m. in the boardroom of the Oakland YWCA, 1515 Webster St. The speaker will be from Narika, an organization which addresses the unmet needs of abused South Asian women. 287-8948. 

“Senior Cohousing: A Community Approach to Independent Living” with Berkeley architect Charles Durrett, at 7:30 p.m. at The Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. 315-0431. 

Citizens Soldiers at War: The National Guard in Iraq screening of a new documentary at 7 p.m. at Room 105, North Gate Hall, Grad. School of Journalism, UC Campus. 

“An Emerging Church” An evening with Tony Jones and friends at 7:30 p.m. in the Tuscan Common Room, Church Divinity School of the Pacific, 2451 Ridge Rd. To register call 204-0720. www.cdsp.edu 

Critical Viewing An ongoing group to examine the art/craft(iness) of short films and television productions and its effects on our daily lives, at 1 p.m. at the BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. Free. 848-0237. georgeporter@earthlink.net 

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. 

Kol Hadash Humanistic Rosh Hashanah Celebration at 7:30 p.m. at Albany Community Centre, 1249 Marin Ave. Please bring non-perishable food for the needy. To RSVP email Lmgutner@aol.com 

TUESDAY, OCT. 4 

Family Story Time at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Branch Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Free, all ages welcome. 524-3043. 

Healthy Eating Habits Seminar at 6:30 p.m. in Oakland. Free, registration required. 465-2524. 

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. 524-9992. 

WEDNESDAY, OCT. 5 

Cindy Sheehan speaks at 7 p.m. at the Grand Lake Theater, 3200 Grand Ave., Oakland. Donation of $20 benefits Global Exchange, CodePink, and Gold Star Families for Peace. 415-255-7296, ext. 253. 

Walking Tour of Oakland City Center Meet at 10 a.m. in front Oakland City Hall at Frank Ogawa Plaza. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. 

Albany Waterfront Development meeting at 1 p.m. at Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic. Matt Middlebrook from Caruso Affiliated will speak, discussion follows. All welcome. 524-9122. 

Sustainable Farming on the Gill Tract, 1050 San Pablo Ave., Albany, at 3:30 p.m. www.agroeco.org 

American Red Cross Blood Services Volunteer Orientation at 10 a.m. at 6230 Claremont Ave., Oakland. Volunteers are needed to support the more than 40 blood drives held each month all over the East Bay.  Advance sign-up needed. 594-5165. 

Living Mercury Free How mercury affects your health and what you can do about it at 7 p.m. at the Teleosis Institute, 1512B Fifth St. Free, but please RSVP to 558-7285. 

Book Signing with Mary Lee Bendolph of the Gees Bend Quilters at 5 p.m. at Paulson Press Gallery, 1318 Tenth St. 559-2088. www.paulsonpress.com  

Friends of the Oakland Library Book Sale from 10:30 to 5:30 p.m. at 721 Washington St., through Oct. 8. 444-0473. 

Lab Live Hip Hop Ensemble Workshop for musicians, emcees, spoken word artists and singers at 4:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Free. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation 30th Anniversary Celebration from 5:30 to 9 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St. 287-5353, ext. 344. 

Legacy And Practice Of Democratic Psychiatry at 4 p.m. at the Men’s Faculty Club, UC Campus. Conference continues on Thurs. from 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. For conference agenda and information see http://trieste-in-california.berkeley.edu/ 

Acupuncture and Integrative Medicine College Open House at 6 p.m. at 2550 Shattuck Ave. Tours of classrooms and clinics and information for prospective students. To RSVP call 666-8248, ext. 106.  

Berkeley Communicators Toastmasters welcomes curious guests and new members at 7:15 a.m. at Au Coquelet Cafe, 2000 University Ave. at Milvia. 435-5863.  

Entrepreneurs Networking at 8 a.m. at A’Cuppa Tea, 3202 College Ave. at Alcatraz. Cost is $5. For more information contact JB, 562-9431.  

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

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. 548-9840. 

Prose Writer’s Workshop An ongoing group made up of friendly writers who are serious about our craft. All levels welcome. At 7 p.m. at BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. 848-0237. georgeporter@earthlink.net 

“A History of God” by Karen Armstrong discussion group at 6:30 p.m. at Bookmark Bookstore, 721 Washington St., Oakland. 

Sing your Way Home A free sing-a-long at 4:30 p.m. every Wed. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720. 

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. 

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

vigil4peace/vigil 

THURSDAY, OCT. 6 

Oakland Bird Club with Hans and Pam Peeters, authors and illustrators of “Raptors of California” at 7:30 p.m. at the Oakland Public Library, Rockridge Branch, Upstairs Meeting Room, 5366 College Ave. 444-0355.  

Songs and Stories for Working with Children in the Garden with songwriter, storyteller Nancy Schimmel at 7 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. 548-2220, ext. 233. 

Hands-on Bike Maintenance Learn how to prevent and repair flats on your bike at 10 a.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. Bring your bike and tools. 527-4140. 

Café Philo, French discussion group, at 7 p.m. at The Alliance Française, 2004 Woolsey St. Cost is $5. 548-7481.  

“Beyond Chutzpah” On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and Abuse of History with Norman Finkelstein at 7:30 p.m. at St. Jopseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. 548-0542. 

Design/Build Workshop from 6 to 8 p.m. at Pella Showroom, 1717 B Fourth St. Cost is $20 in advance, $25 at the door. To register call 559-1333. www.mcbuild.com 

World Affairs/Politics Group for people 60 years and older meets at 3:30 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. Cost is $2.50, includes refreshments. 524-9122. 

East Bay Mac User Group Mark Altenberg of Apple presents Quicktime Streaming Server from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at Expression College for Digital Arts, 6601 Shellmound St., Emeryville. Free. ebmug.org 

World of Plants Tours Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 p.m. at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Cost is $5. 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu 

ONGOING 

Find a Loving Animal Companion at the Berkeley-East Bay Humane Society Adoption Center (open from 11 a.m. - 7 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday). 2700 Ninth St. 845-7735. www.berkeleyhumane.org  

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

CITY MEETINGS 

Creeks Task Force meets Mon. Oct. 3, at 7 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Erin Dando, 981-7410. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/planning/landuse/Creeks/default.html 

Community Environmental Advisory Commission meets Tues. Oct. 4, at 7 p.m., at 2118 Milvia St. Nabil Al-Hadithy, 981-7461. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/environmentaladvisory 

Fire Safety Commission meets Wed., Oct. 5, at 7:30 p.m. at 997 Cedar St. David Orth, 981-5502. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/firesafety 

Commission on the Status of Women meets Wed., Oct. 5, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Tasha Tervelon, 981-5190. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/commissions/women 

Housing Advisory Commission meets Thurs., Oct. 6, at 7:30 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. Oscar Sung, 981-5400. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/commissions/housing 

Public Works Commission meets Thurs., Oct. 6, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Jeff Egeberg, 981-6406. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/publicworks 

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thurs., Oct. 6, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. Mark Rhoades, 981-7410. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/zoning  

As part of a city effort to crack down on liquor store violations, Dwight Way Liquor may soon sell its last bottle of booze. 

To the cheers of dozens of neighbors Thursday, the Zoning Adjustment declared Dwight Way Liquor “a nuisance” and ordered it shut down. The store has been cited for violating city zoning and state liquor laws 45 times over the past 18 months. 

Dwight Way Liquor, at 2440 Sacramento St., remained open Monday, while owners, Abdulalaziz Saleh, Behjat Yahyavi and Johnny Shokouh prepared to appeal the ZAB ruling to the City Council.  

Deputy City Attorney Zach Cowen had recommended that the board reduce the store’s hours, but give it another chance to clean up its act. Since Berkeley has never closed a liquor store at the first ZAB nuisance hearing, Cowen warned that it could complicate the city’s efforts to win a court appeal filed by the store’s owners. 

“It seemed the zoning board was acting hastily without listening to their city attorney,” said the owners’ attorney, David Bryden. “Maybe the City Council will take a slower approach.”  

If the council dismisses the appeal Dwight Way Liquor would be the first Berkeley liquor store shut down since Brothers Liquor in 2001. 

Also Thursday, the ZAB declared Berkeley Market at 2369 Telegraph Ave. “a nuisance” and put the store on probation, which could lead to its termination if clerks continue to sell alcohol to minors. 

The two cases signal that Berkeley is taking a more aggressive tact against problem liquor stores, said Community Service Liaison Taj Johns. 

Johns said the increased enforcement has followed education of city staff by the State Alcohol Beverage Control (ABC) on the city’s power to regulate liquor stores. ABC has authority over liquor licenses, but Berkeley can regulate liquor stores through its zoning laws. 

“We now feel we have the power to abate nuisance liquor stores,” Johns said. “We never felt that way before.” 

Key to the city’s enforcement of liquor stores is a $50,000-a-year ABC grant that funds training sessions for liquor store operators and decoy operations to enforce regulations. 

A police sweep in March 2004 found six of 15 targeted liquor stores sold alcohol to minors, according to ABC District Administrator Andrew Gomez. The usual violation rate on decoy operations is about 10 percent, he said. 

Since then, Berkeley police have filed 12 cases against Dwight Way Liquor for selling liquor after 11 p.m., which is prohibited in their use permit. Police also cited the store in one instance for selling to minors. 

On Sept. 2, the day after ABC slapped the store with a 15-day alcohol suspension, a Dwight Way Liquor clerk sold alcohol to an undercover police officer. ABC has scheduled a hearing on the store’s liquor license for Oct. 27. 

For the zoning board to shut down a liquor store it must first declare the store a nuisance, then find it in violation of city zoning laws. Many neighbors testified before the board that the store had subjected them to constant late night noise, harassment from store patrons, litter and crime. 

“It’s unbearable,” said Richard King who lives across from the store. “I’m woken up all the time by two or three cars blasting their stereos hanging out outside the store.” 

Dwight Way Liquor has so far eluded strong ABC sanctions by transferring its liquor license three times among its owners. Gomez, the ABC administrator, said that tactic is sometimes successful at giving troubled stores a clean slate. “We do an investigation into the applicant, but we don’t know if the applicant is the former licensee’s brother or sister,” he said. 

In the case of Berkeley Market on Telegraph Avenue, ABC put a hold on a proposed license transfer from the owner Iqbal Mumtaz to a corporation of which Mumtaz serves as the CEO. 

The attempted transfer came after ABC gave the store with a 15-day suspension and $2,228 fine for selling alcohol to minors and after its closing time. 

Gregory Daniels, Berkeley’s head of code enforcement, said at Thursday’s meeting that he considered Berkeley Market to be a predatory business because all of its violations involved the sale of alcohol to minors. 

But the ZAB went easier on Berkeley Market, which faced complaints from just three neighbors and received support from members of UC Berkeley’s student government. 

Speaking in his own defense, Mumtaz said he was buying an ID scanner and would now ID all of his customers. “I might have made mistakes, but I’ve learned from my mistakes,” he said. 

The ZAB required Mumtaz to reimburse the city for the costs of its enforcement actions and report back in six months on any new violations for selling alcohol to minors. 

Advocates for stricter alcohol policies are not satisfied with the city’s stepped up enforcement. They are drafting an ordinance that would establish a permanent monitoring system based on fees assessed to liquor store owners, said Laura Menard of the Berkeley Alcohol Policy Advocacy Coalition. 

Meanwhile, Councilmember Max Anderson said he has met with Berkeley’s Yemeni Grocers’ Association and won agreement for stores to stop selling single shot malts and packaging alcohol in brown paper bags. 

Omar Ahmed, owner of Lee’s Market, at 2700 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, and a member of the Yemeni Grocers’ Association, criticized the recent police stings as “harassment.”  

“They’re putting every store, even the good ones, in the same category,” he said. “They should recognize the good stores to give them some encouragement.” 

With former Congressmember Ron Dellums setting a self-imposed deadline of Oct. 1 to announce whether or not he will run for mayor of Oakland in next year’s elections, organizers of a “Draft Dellums” campaign have announced that they will conclude their petition drive at a Wednesday morning press conference at the Ron Dellums Federal Building in Oakland. 

According to petition campaign worker Kitty Kelly Epstein, an Oakland teacher and education activist, Dellums has not been invited to the press conference.  

“We want to show the congressmember and the public the groundswell of support for his candidacy, including petitions and letters from leaders of various constituencies and organizations throughout the city,” she said. “We want the congressmember to take all this information in, and then give him the space to make his decision by October 1st.” 

According to Oakland Black Caucus chair Geoffrey Pete, another petition drive organizer, “there’s been no coordination of the petition campaign” with Dellums. 

“He didn’t ask for it,” he said. “I haven’t talked with him directly since the campaign began, and there’s been no association with him.” 

Pete said that he expects the number of petition signatures “will be in the thousands.” 

Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown must leave office next year at the end of his second term, and several candidates have already announced that they are running to succeed him, including Oakland City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente, Oakland City Councilmember Nancy Nadel, Alameda County Treasurer Donald White, and Oakland School Board members Dan Siegel and Greg Hodge. 

But earlier this summer, saying that he was dissatisfied with the choices, Pete stood up at a meeting of the Oakland Citizens Committee for Urban Renewal (OCCUR) and started the crowd in a chant of “Run, Ron, Run.” Shortly afterwards, Pete and several other friends and associates began the petition campaign, calling for Oakland residents to sign up to ask Dellums to run for mayor. 

Over the summer, members of such organizations as the Oakland Black Caucus and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 790 have been volunteering as individuals to get signatures at public events throughout Oakland, including this month’s Art & Soul Festival. 

At times, the petition campaign has appeared more like an election campaign, with “Draft Ron Dellums” posters showing up on telephone posts and inside storefront windows. At Councilmember Desley Brooks’ Unity In The Community free concerts at Arroyo Viejo Park this summer, SEIU members set up a petition-signing booth, complete with campaign banner. 

Epstein said that she spoke with Dellums last week in Washington about the petition campaign, “and he’s really moved by it. He said it was putting a lot of pressure on him and his decision.” Epstein said she got no indication from Dellums as to what his decision might be. 

“I hope he does, of course,” she added, “but whether he runs or not, this movement has already had a positive effect upon the future of Oakland politics. We’ve had Latinos and Black Caucus members and union organizers getting together in a more of a dialogue than I’ve seen in quite a while. Whatever happens, things aren’t going to be the same.” 

Dellums, who once served on the Berkeley City Council, resigned as the 9th District U.S. Congressmember from California in 1998 after 28 years in Congress. He continued to live in Washington D.C. after his retirement, and in recent years has worked both as a corporate Congressional lobbyist and on issues relating to the AIDS epidemic in Africa. 

Geoffrey Pete is the cousin of the author of this article.

The suspected shooter in the July 17 killing of Meleia Willis-Starbuck was captured in a Fresno apartment Friday as he hid in a bedroom closet. 

Lt. Randy Dobbins of the Fresno Police Department said the Friday arrest came 12 hours after Hollis, the boyfriend of the slain Berkeley High School graduate, was first detained following a traffic stop the night before. 

He is scheduled for arraignment this afternoon (Tuesday) at the Wiley Manuel Courthouse at 616 Washington St., Oakland, said Berkeley Police spokesperson Officer Joe Okies. 

Hollis, 21, was the second suspect arrested in connection with the shooting. Christopher Wilson, 20, who police say drove Hollis to the scene of the shooting, surrendered to police shortly after the incident and is scheduled to enter a plea before Alameda County Superior Court Judge Winfred Scott on Oct. 3. 

Hollis was first taken into custody by the Fresno Police at 11 p.m. Thursday after traffic officers stopped a car for running a stop sign at the corner of Winery and Lane streets in Fresno. Neither the driver nor her passenger was carrying identification, Dobbins said. 

The woman behind the wheel, Easter Curry, provided a name and driver’s license number that belonged to her sister, and the passenger identified himself as Brandon Davis, giving a birth date of July 27, 1982. 

“Because they provided false information and they seemed really nervous, they were arrested and brought to police headquarters for processing,” said Dobbins. 

Because the department’s computer system was backlogged at the time and there was no indication they were wanted locally, the pair was returned to Curry’s apartment and released, Dobbins said. 

The computer returned “hits” on both suspects, identifying them and turning up the homicide warrant on Hollis and the fact that Curry was currently on felony probation from nearby Madera County, Dobbins said. 

Officers returned to Curry’s apartment at 11:30 a.m. Friday after receiving an anonymous phone tip that Hollis had returned. 

As they were driving up to the building, officers spotted Hollis walking across the street. As they gave chase, Hollis fled into the Winery apartment complex, a maze of buildings that covers a square mile. 

“They lost him, and then went back to the girlfriend’s apartment, where Curry was arrested after erasing Hollis’s name from her cell phone,” Dobbins said. 

Investigators discovered that she had recently made a call from the telephone in the apartment, and a quick check matched the number to an address in the apartment complex. 

Officers went to the apartment, where they were granted permission to search by the tenants—who were then evacuated. Moments later, officers found Hollis. “He was cowering down in the back of a bedroom closet and was taken into custody without incident,” said Dobbins. 

Okies said Berkeley Police officers arrived the next day to return him the city. 

Curry was booked into Fresno County jail on suspicion of harboring a fugitive and for violating her probation, Dobbins said. 

Fatal shooting 

Willis-Starbuck, 19, graduated from Berkeley High School in 2003, and was about to enter her junior year at Dartmouth College when she was shot and killed outside her apartment near the corner of Dwight Way and College Avenue following an encounter with five young men, witnesses said. 

She had stopped by her apartment with a group of friends when five men approached and an argument ensured. According to Berkeley Police spokesperson Okies, one of the witnesses said that Willis-Starbuck called Hollis to come to the scene and “bring the heat.” 

Shortly afterward, at about 1:45 a.m., while her friends were climbing into a car, someone fired a pistol from nearly a block away, fatally injuring her. The gunman then fled in a car eastbound on Dwight Way. 

Fire Department paramedics arrived on the scene within five minutes of the 911 call. 

Willis-Starbuck had been attending Dartmouth on a full scholarship, and her death shocked both the Berkeley community, where she was well-known for her volunteer efforts, and her teachers and fellow students at Dartmouth, where she had been elected president of the Black Student Union in her sophomore year. 

She had returned to Berkeley to work as a summer intern at the Women’s Daytime Drop-In Center, which provides services to homeless women. 

Willis-Starbuck’s mother, Kimberly, worked for many years in the Berkeley City Manager’s office, and the family had moved to Georgia last year.

The owner of the two-story plywood shell with a house atop that South Berkeley neighbors call “The Flying Cottage” has won a major battle in her fight to resume construction on the building. 

Over neighborhood objections, Berkeley’s Zoning Adjustment Board voted 8-0-1 to issue a Design Review Permit for developer Christina Sun to build two stories of housing over a ground floor shop at 3045 Shattuck Ave.  

The ZAB is requiring Sun provide the city with a landscape bond so that if she fails to maintain the property, the city can take over the upkeep. After neighbors stopped the project two years ago by charging that Sun intended to build an illegal boarding house, the decision essentially gives Sun the go-ahead to complete the building. 

Robert Lauriston, who lives near the property, said neighbors might appeal the permit to the City Council. 

The ZAB vote came after Sun agreed to shrink parts of the building to appease neighbors. 

“I think we’ve almost produced a swan,” said Anders Brandt, the project’s architect. 

But neighbors said the improvements still left them with a towering eyesore that left little green space on the corner of Shattuck and Prince Street. 

“There’s just way too much concrete,” said Doug James. “The whole rear yard will be paved.” 

Jennifer Elrod feared that the nine-bedroom building would mean more cars parked on crowded side streets. 

The new design, conceived during meetings between Brandt and a ZAB subcommittee, lowers the roof and removes living space on the third floor.  

The building, which looms above neighboring structures, is now proposed as two separate apartments. Although Shattuck Avenue nearby is lined with two-story buildings, Berkeley zoning law gives developers the right to build up to three stories on the site because it’s zoned commercial even though adjacent streets are residential. 

Before approving the design, ZAB chair Andy Katz said the board would have voted differently if it had the authority to lower the height. 

“We did the best we could within the design review process,” he said. “This is unfortunately the best we could do.”

For the second time in less than a week, UC Berkeley officers have ripped apart the latest incarnation of a long-standing clothing donation box at People’s Park. 

On Monday, UC Berkeley officers demolished two wooden crates that homeless advocates had placed the day before besides the park’s basketball court. A week earlier at the same site police ripped out the foundation for a new box that was to be made of clay, sand and straw. 

The “free box” is one of People’s Park’s traditions, and the fight to restore it has reignited the battle between UC Berkeley and homeless advocates over the park. 

“The university is stepping beyond its domain,” said Shan Masuda of Friends of People’s Park. “They’ve pulled out something that had been here for 10 to 15 years. We’re saying you can’t do that without consulting us.” 

City Councilmember Kriss Worthington also objected to not being consulted by the university. He said the university has shut the city out of decisions about the park since it halted meeting of the People’s Park Advisory Board last November. 

“I’m concerned about the secret and imperial nature of the university administration,” he said. “It’s my district, you’d think they would call me.” 

People’s Park has gone without a free box since February when the last box, like its predecessor, was torched by arsonists. 

Irene Hegarty, UC Berkeley’s director of community relations, said the university had warned homeless advocates that it would not permit them to rebuild the box at the park, which is university property. 

Hegarty said the free box has been a costly nuisance to the university, whose employees are often left carting off “crates of trash,” from the park, including clothes and household appliances.  

She said park users often throw free box items throughout the park and then fight over them. “There seems to be a problem with selling clothes at used clothing stores and using the money for alcohol,” she said. 

On Sept. 18, about 35 homeless advocates staked eight-foot pillars into the ground as the first step in installing a six-by-ten-foot free box made from natural materials. Masuda said the new box was inspired by the state’s recent removal of homeless people’s belongings from the Albany Bulb. 

The project was scheduled for completion last Sunday, but when UC police tore down the foundation last Wednesday, Friends of People Park called off the building project and instead brought in the two four-foot-by-four-foot wooden crates that police dismembered Monday. 

“The free box is a necessity,” said Daniel Torrez, a local homeless man. “When there’s no free box, things get a lot dirtier and darker than they need to be,” he said. 

Masuda saw the university’s hard line on the free box as a signal that it planned to remove homeless services from the park, but Hegarty said UC Berkeley had no grand designs for remaking the space. 

“We don’t think the free box is an efficient way to get clothes to people who need it,” she said.1

A compromise to keep Berkeley Iceland open hit a snag last week when the skating rink reported that a temporary outdoor refrigeration system the city ordered it to install would be too noisy for neighbors. 

“If we brought it in the way it sounds now, neighbors across the street would not be happy,” said Iceland General Manager Jay Wescott. 

City officials declined comment on whether Berkeley might close the rink if the temporary cooling system proved too noisy.  

In July, Berkeley demanded Iceland install a portable ice cooling system or shut its doors while the rink upgraded its permanent system.  

The Fire Department said that Iceland’s 65-year-old cooling system lacks safety features and contains too much ammonia—over 4,200 pounds—for the city to handle in the case of a major release.  

Last week Berkeley extended Iceland’s deadline to install the new cooling system two weeks to Oct. 7. Iceland has kept the system at a warehouse while engineers work to reduce noise. 

Wescott wouldn’t disclose the system’s decibel level, but said it was significantly louder than city codes permit.  

“I just know that right now it’s loud and we’re looking for ways to see if we can mitigate the noise level,” he said. 

Engineers are considering replacing the cooling fans to reduce noise, said Berkeley Toxics Manager Nabil Al-Hadithy, who has worked closely with Iceland on complying with city codes. 

“Dampening sound is more of an art than a science,” he said. “There are tools to kill noise, but there is no guarantee that the tools will work.” 

Under an agreement with the city, singed last month, Iceland has until April to complete upgrades to its permanent cooling system. The upgrades include reducing the rink’s ammonia capacity to about 750 pounds.f

With conversion to the new PeopleSoft management software causing problems in an overworked Peralta Community College payroll office, Peralta trustees have called for an update on the PeopleSoft conversion at tonight’s (Tuesday) trustee meeting. 

Meanwhile, district and union officials were divided over whether the PeopleSoft software was working properly, or if this was the prelude to massive problems. The report by Peralta Chief Information Officer Andy DiGirolamo came at the request of Peralta Trustees Nicky Gonzalez Nguyen and Cy Gulassa. 

The payroll system has already suffered its first “glitch,” although district officials are blaming that on human error rather than a software problem. 

In its end-of-August payroll, some Peralta workers were paid twice and some were not paid at all. In addition, a district union official said that some portion of the payroll deduction component did not work, with money deducted from some workers’ salaries but not transferred to the accounts needed to be paid. 

“The inadequacies of the PeopleSoft software are enormous,” said Peralta Federation of Teachers President Michael Mills. “If you wrote them on a scroll and dropped it down, it would roll out across the floor. The district’s expectations have not been met.” 

But Peralta Director of Communications Jeff Heyman contradicted that assertion, stating that the recent payroll problems were “human error rather than system error,” adding that “the good news is that the PeopleSoft system works.” 

And speaking to trustee members at the last trustee meeting, Peralta Chief Information Officer Andy DiGirolamo said that the conversion problems “are to be expected. This is a very complex conversion, highly complicated. We’re learning this new software at breakneck speed. These problems are teething pains.” 

But Peralta Trustee Linda Handy, who chairs the board’s Information Technology committee, said she believes the problems are going to get worse. “I have been raising these issues about problems in the district’s IT department for a year and a half, but nobody wanted to hear about it until they didn’t get paid,” Handy said. “Then everybody wants to know what’s going on. They’re going to find out that it’s deeper than this.”  

Handy has been a persistent board critic of Peralta’s IT department. Last June, at her request, trustees approved a $30,000 independent study and assessment of the community college district’s information technology operations by Hewlett-Packard. The conclusions of that study were supposed to go directly to the board to help the board determine whether the IT department was following “best policies and practices.” 

Both DiGirolamo and Peralta Chancellor Elihu Harris opposed the study, saying that the timing interfered with the PeopleSoft conversion. 

But Handy said this week that HP officials had declined to enter into the contract after they learned that trustees had included a provision that HP would not be able to later bid on any items that were touched on by the study. She said the study is presently on hold. 

Peralta is currently in the midst of a district-wide conversion to an information management system purchased from PeopleSoft. Last December, after the Peralta contract was signed and while the district was in the middle of that conversion, PeopleSoft was purchased by Oracle corporation, with the Peralta contract rolling over to Oracle with the purchase. The finance, human resources, and payroll portions of that conversion were scheduled for implementation this summer, with the entire software scheduled for full implementation by October 2006. 

Communications Director Heyman said that the payroll problem occurred when a worker in the district’s payroll department failed to manually transfer seven separate payroll files into the system. 

“The humorous part—although I guess it wasn’t so humorous,” Heyman said, “was that the employee category left out was management.” 

Instead of transferring the management employee file, Heyman said the payroll employee transferred two sets of classified employee files, one for August and one for the July payroll that had previously been paid. The result was that while management employees got no payment for the August period, classified employees were paid twice. Heyman said the problem only affected employees with direct deposit, not employees who were issued checks. “The problems we are having is what you would expect out of such a huge changeover,” he said. “Overall, it’s going smooth.” 

But Peralta Federation of Teachers’ Mills, who does not represent the payroll workers, said that the changeover is putting a tremendous strain on the district’s payroll department. “Normally I’d be the first person raising complaints about payroll,” Mills said, “but the process of catching up to the new system has been arduous and lengthy, not to mention the extra training they’ve had to go through in addition to completing their regular daily tasks. They’re being asked to perform herculean tasks. The number of people in payroll was adequate to do the work under the old system software, but it doesn’t appear to be enough to carry out the functions under this conversion.” 

Peralta CIO DiGirolamo agreed with that assessment in his presentation to trustees earlier this month, stating that “we have limited staff for implementation. Some staff positions haven’t been filled.” 

The initial question about the PeopleSoft conversion at the last trustee meeting came not over the payroll problems, but over questions raised by trustee Handy about a $90,000 change order request for a PeopleSoft version upgrade. 

DiGirolamo told her that the $90,000 cost was not for the upgrade itself, which he said was provided free of charge to the district under the PeopleSoft contract, but was for the cost of consulting services from PeopleSoft to implement the upgrade. DiGirolamo also said that the $90,000 change order was not an added cost. He said that the upgrade costs had always been anticipated, and had actually been deducted from the original contract amount in an agreement between the district and PeopleSoft and was listed as a credit in the budget. DiGirolamo said that the request for the change order was merely adding the money back in again.

A gala dinner at HS Lordship’s Restaurant Sunday evening raised an estimated $83,000 for victims of Hurricane Katrina both in Berkeley and across the country. 

About 250 people paid $100 a plate for the four-hour event, co-hosted by Mayor Tom Bates and UC Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, and largely organized by local Persian-American organizations. 

“Berkeley’s generosity was tremendous in aiding the victims of the earthquake in Bam (Iran),” said Niloo Nouri of The Persian Center. “As citizens of this country we felt compelled to give back to our fellow Americans.” 

HS Lordship’s donated the ballroom space, and Alborz, a local Persian restaurant, donated food. An auction raised an additional $11,000 and Relief International matched $19,000 in donations. 

Top executives from the city, school district and university were all in attendance, but the stars of the evening were two families that are living with family in Berkeley after their homes in New Orleans were destroyed. 

“It was the families and the love that made New Orleans what it was. To be in another family-like city is very encouraging,” said Kanika Stewart, who came to Berkeley with her 6-year-old daughter Kyla to live in an aunt’s house. 

Stewart said city officials have given her clothes and helped her look for work. Along with two other evacuee families, Stewart will be moving to an apartment building at Seventh Street and Allston Way owned by Affordable Housing Associates. 

AHA’s Executive Director Susan Friedland said volunteers from Rebuilding Together and Prospect Sierra School worked to fix up the building for the evacuees. 

Families and staff at Rosa Parks Elementary School have raised about $3,000 for the family of Lamont Snaer, the Rosa Parks’ after-school coordinator. 

Snaer, a New Orleans native, has been hosting his father and three cousins who lost their homes in the earthquake. Snear’s cousin, Charles Baptiste, told those assembled Sunday, “Thank you for everything you are doing for us. We appreciate it.” 

So far, equipped with a local fund set up by the Rotary Club and Mechanics Bank, Berkeley has given aid to nine families, consisting of 31 people, that have arrived in the city following the hurricane.›

The Peralta Community College District Board of Trustees meets Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the district administrative headquarters, 333 E. 8th St., Oakland. Items on the agenda include: 

• Public hearing and proposed adoption of the 2005-06 Final Budget. The detailed budget document includes $224 million in total revenues and maintains a state-mandated 5 percent General Fund reserve. 

• Update by Peralta’s Chief Information Officer Andy DiGirolamo on the implementation of the district’s PeopleSoft management software. Peralta is currently in the midst of a district-wide conversion to an information management system purchased from PeopleSoft. The finance, human resources, and payroll portions of that conversion were scheduled for implementation this summer, with the entire software scheduled for full implementation by October 2006.Ã

After a brief respite from his work of recovering the bodies of victims of Hurricane Katrina in Biloxi, Miss., Berkeley Fire Department Lt. Darren Bobrosky is at it again. 

This time, he’s in Dallas, Texas, preparing for similar efforts in towns ravaged by Hurricane Rita. 

This time, Bobrosky is the only Berkeley emergency worker called by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), said Deputy Fire Chief David P. Orth. 

For the Katrina rescue efforts, FEMA sent three city firefighters and two health care workers to the scene. 

Bobrosky was called up on Thursday, just 11 days after his return home from his stint in Mississippi. 

“He was supposedly on the third tier for call-up,” Orth said, “but they called him anyway.” 

Bobrosky is part of a 27-member search and rescue task force that includes members from the Alameda County, Oakland, Fremont, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, Santa Rosa and other Bay Area fire departments. 

Of 28 such teams nationally, eight are based in California. 

“They will probably do search work in small communities with heavy damage,” said Orth. “We don’t expect him back for another week or two.” 

When not engaged in national disaster rescue work, Bobrosky heads the department’s rescue dog program.

The spirit of Katrina—accompanied by anger that government foresight and dollars could have blunted much of the hurricane’s damage—blew into San Francisco Saturday, stirring passions at the anti-war march and rally. 

“From Iraq to New Orleans/Fund people’s needs not the war machine,” read one of two banners that kicked off the march as it started down Dolores Street. The crowd of an estimated 20,000 people that followed that banner and a second one calling for an end to U.S. occupation of Iraq, Palestine and Haiti, eventually poured into Jefferson Square Park, where people browsed activist literature and paraphenalia, visited with old friends and listened to speeches. 

“It’s really important to construct the infrastructure rather than killing—it makes a lot of sense,” said Kate Giles of Santa Cruz, as she made her way along the march route. Giles carried a homemade sign, proclaiming: “Levees not Bombs.” 

The Gray Panthers of San Francisco targeted government militarization manifest both in Iraq and New Orleans. “Our troops are in Iraq and people (in New Orleans) feel like they’re being occupied,” said Patricia Jackson of San Francisco. “They’ve brought that war home to our streets.”  

Tim Paulson, executive director of the San Francisco Labor Council, marched with U.S. Labor Against the war. “All the money that is being wasted in Iraq, killing and endangering our people, should be used for infrastructure, for jobs, for fixing the residents’ problems in New Orleans, for taking care of hospitals and education,” he said. “The priorities are absolutely and completely skewed with this administration.”  

Calling for “College Not Combat/Relief Not War,” the nationwide College Anti-War Network brought a large contingent to the march. The network links inadequate education funding to the high cost of war and also calls for removing military recruiters from centers of learning. “Military recruiters have no place in high schools or colleges. They can’t look to poor or low-income students to be their cannon fodder for this war," said Justine Prado of San Francisco’s Academy of Art University.  

Longtime peace activists Terry and Lenore Doran of Berkeley marched to protest the war and condemn the cost of war that take funds from schools. “We spend our tax money in incorrect places,” said Terry Doran, a retired Berkeley High School teacher and vice president of the Berkeley school board.  

The Massachusetts-based National Priorities Project estimates that the war has cost $196 billion. At that price, 3,410,424 teachers could have been hired for one year or 26,068,054 children could have attended Head Start for a year, NPP says.  

Nancy Townsend of El Cerrito had a personal reason to march. Her son, whom she preferred not to name, has been in Iraq for three weeks. 

“I don’t think the war is justified. I don’t think we should be in Iraq,” she said. “My son signed up right out of high school. We weren’t at war with Iraq then. He wanted to do something good for the country. And as a young man, he wants to do something that’s ‘manly.’”  

Townsend went to Crawford, Texas to support Cindy Sheehan, the outspoken anti-war mother of 24-year-old Casey, killed in combat. In Crawford, she met a number of mothers whose sons had died in Iraq. She said they inspired her to speak out. 

“When you’re talking to someone whose son is in Iraq or who has died in Iraq, it really brings it quite in your face about what is happening over there and makes you ask, ‘Is it worth it?’ My personal opinion is it’s not,” she said. 

In addition to death and the cost of war, the conflict has imposed new limits on the ability to seek information from the federal government, according to Rick Knee, acting chair of the journalism division of the Bay Area National Writers’ Union. 

“One of the more worrying aspects is not just of the war, but of the entire way the Bush government is conducting things is secrecy,” Knee said. “After 9/11, John Ashcroft sent around a memo urging agencies to resist Freedom of Information requests as much and as long as they could and the justice department would back them. To my way of thinking, secret government is one of the biggest dangers to this country or any country.”  

George Bush and Dick Cheney, called liars, profiteers and more, were the obvious targets of the anti-war protesters. But the local politico who drew the ire of many, most notably San Francisco’s Code Pink, was Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, the Democratic House leader. Code Pink’s Janet Rosen condemned Pelosi. 

“She’s not representing her direct constituents,” Rosen said, pointing to San Francisco’s November 2004 Proposition N, which called for immediate withdrawal from Iraq and passed by about 63 percent of the vote.  

She further argued that Pelosi “has a record of saying the war was a mistake—‘we were lied to about why we went into the war’—but on that very same day she goes into the House of Representatives and votes funding for the war, she votes in favor of measures for U.S. bases [in Iraq] and a number of other things which keeps us engaged there. When people like Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) step up with legislation, with proposals, Nancy Pelosi’s response is, as the House leader of the Democrats, she can’t take a stand on them.”  

On the international front, Adrianne Aron of Berkeley said that in addition to marching for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, she came to the march to call for troops to leave Afghanistan and for the U.N. to leave Haiti. “U.N. troops have occupied and massacred the people of Haiti—and it’s gotten very little attention,” she said. 

Faisal Kahn of Berkeley was among those carrying black-shrouded caskets “to represent the death and all the ideals that have been sacrificed,” he said, adding that his casket “also represents the war on Palestine that goes on every day and the innocents that die every day in Palestine.” 

Dan Kliman of San Francisco Voice for Israel, some of whose members support the war in Iraq while others oppose it, stood with Israeli flags to protest the stand some organizations within the Act Now to Stop War and End Racism Coalition have taken to support the right of return for Palestinians to their homeland. A.N.S.W.E.R. organized the coalition that came together to put on the march and rally. 

“We are standing up for Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state,” Kliman said. “What (the right of return) refers to is a right unique to Palestinians that does not apply to any other ethnic group involved in any other conflict, when the great grandchildren and great-great grandchildren are supposed to be given the right to flood into Israel to demographically overwhelm the Jewish state.”  

As always in San Francisco, spirited music and good humor were not lacking. Placards such as “Mend your fuelish ways,” “Dyslexic Democrats Untie!” and “I never thought I’d miss Nixon” drew laughs, as did the group Insane Reagan, which brought likenesses of Bush, Chaney and Condoleezza Rice to dance to the tune of “going on a summer holiday.” 

NEXT YEAR IN NEW ORLEANS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I just got this email from my friend Alice. She said, “Some really good Christian wrote to our local paper and said that Katrina’s wrath was God’s way of punishing New Orleans because they celebrate Mardi Gras.” That’s like saying that Hurricane Rita is hitting the innocent people of Texas in retribution for all the embezzling and corruption caused by Texas-based Halliburton and the Bush bureaucracy. 

Well. There’s only one way to deal with that kind of ignorance and intolerance—aside from tossing the Bush bureaucracy out of our White House and hopefully avoiding God’s wrath on that one. 

Let’s Save Mardi Gras!  

Jane Stillwater 

• 

NATIONAL GUARD 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I speak for many when I tell you how deeply disappointed we are that the Berkeley Daily Planet did not cover to any meaningful extent the adoption of the Resolution to Bring Home Our Guard from Iraq Immediately by the Berkeley City Council on Sept. 13. 

We would expect a full report when our City Council takes action on something so vital and important to the ending of this war in Iraq, and so extremely timely and necessary to the protection and well-being of Californians, as bringing home our Guard. 

It has been made too painfully clear after Hurricane Katrina the price our citizens‚ pay when our Guard and our equipment is not around to do the job they signed up to do—assist citizens in times of emergencies. 

The warning from FEMA in the beginning of 2001 should be what we heed these days: not the fear tactics of our president who needs our Guard and Reservists to supply 45 percent of his fighting forces in Iraq. This warning alone should  

make all of us in California insist that our Guard be returned immediately. 

And the movement that is swelling in California to return the Guard, with Berkeley City Council once again in the vanguard, should be front-page news in our local paper. 

Suzanne Jo 

• 

PLANET COVERAGE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I have a suggestion for Suzanne Jo and others who express disappointment in the Berkeley Daily Planet for not covering particular issues, items on a local council meeting, etc. 

Write it yourself. Clearly, the person who wishes coverage has an interest and should be knowledgeable and even possibly passionate about it. Take the initiative and write something up. I’m certain if the Planet has the space, they’ll publish it. 

I find it amusing that it’s common for the Planet’s public to complain about “expected” coverage for several reasons. It’s a free publication, meaning that it’s completely supported by advertising. Plus the Planet has an unusual policy of taking the 1st amendment seriously—I’ve seen articles/letters printed critical of local businesses—(potential) advertisers. See if you can consistently see that in other local publications—especially considering that there are hardly any others which aren’t part of a larger conglomerate. 

When I compare the Planet to other local papers, it’s clear to me that the Planet is in a league of their own when it comes to editorial integrity. 

I doubt many of the complainers have much of an idea of how much effort, commitment, and tenacity it takes to crank out a quality publication twice a week. 

We’re very lucky to have such an outstanding local free newspaper in our community and I don’t take them for granted for one moment. 

Richard Fabry 

Point Richmond 

• 

TEEN LIBRARIANS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Is the teen readers program of the North, South, West and Claremont Branches dead? Sadly, yes they are—and we can thank the director the Berkeley Public Library for this fiasco she has perpetrated, at the behest of her own bloated ego. So where do these teenagers go now? To wal-mart and shop? To MacDonalds and socialize? To home and watch television? Probably. Thanks Berkeley Public Library director—you’re doing a fine job representing the ‘pulse of Berkeley’s most valuable asset, the kids’ by throwing their teen-librarians and program out on the street. What is next? Seeing as the Teen-librarian program has come to a grounding halt, will you then recommend to the Library Board of Directors that the Teen-librarians be laid off—seeing as they are not productive enough as compared to their prior Sept. 1 non-voluntary transfers? We’re watching you, and what you try to do. I for one want to see the Teen-librarians back where they were doing what they do best: Serve and enrich our lives in a way, you Ms. Berkeley Public Library Director have no comprehension, or confidence by many Berkeley citizens, to execute. 

Mark Bayless 

• 

BRAVO PROSTERMAN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

There is one word to describe the opinion piece by Scott Prosterman in the Berkeley Daily Planet, Sept. 23-26 issue: Bravo! 

It is the height of arrogance for writers like Mr. Gertz to assume for themselves the right to describe a “Jewish” position on political issues in the Middle East. It is as if he said that it was anti-Semitic for a Jew to vote Republican—misguided, perhaps, but certainly not anti-Semitic. 

Many of us—I don’t have a clue how many—American Jews support the right of Israel to exist, oppose all terrorist activities directed against civilians—whether Palestinian bombing of night clubs in Tel Aviv or Israeli bombing of civilian targets on the West Bank—and oppose the settlements in Palestinian territory—which are in any realistic juridical analysis wholly illegal—as self defeating by perpetuating the violence that threatens the security of Israel. All of these are legitimate, arguable positions. We don’t call those who disagree with us anything but, in our opinion, wrong. 

But the Gertz’s of the world do not accord us an equal respect and Mr. Prosterman has nailed it 100 percent. Thanks. 

Mal Burnstein 

• 

REVALATIONS OF DUNCES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

There are countless examples of media word-storms but the deluge from hurricane Katrina in sound and print copiously illustrated has set a new benchmark.  

Most writers are misinformed opinionated dunces when it comes to New Orleans; what they don’t know would fill a library.  

I went to high school there, I taught school there, my oldest brother retired there after thirty-five years in New Orleans’ schools, my youngest brother was Assistant Postmaster, and much more. Mama and Daddy died there. What makes New Orleans unique is centuries of nurturing two parallel and symbiotic worlds, one white and one black, the former symbolized by the Rex parade on Mardi Gras Day and the other by the same day parade of king Zulu, different cultures equally colored. 

New Orleans is as much a way of life as it is a city. Katrina disrupted that life but did not destroy it. By and by les bons temps will roll again. 

Marvin Chachere  

San Pablo 

• 

POLICE REVIEW 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

On Tuesday, Sept. 27, at 6 p.m. at the West Berkeley Senior Center, the Berkeley Police Review Commission will be hearing my complaint against Officer Allen of the Berkeley Police Department. 

In February of this year I was evicted from my home of 22 years at University Avenue Cooperative Homes, in Berkeley, on the basis of dozens of calls made by UACH management accusing me of crimes ranging from dealing weapons and drugs, assault, and child molestation. I was never charged with any of these crimes. 

In January I returned home to find I had been robbed, and called Police. Although Officer Allen testified to PRC staff that Mr. Charles West, manager of UACH, admitted going into my apartment, and even showed Officer Allen the stolen items, nothing was done. Nothing was even reported. 

These events led directly to my eviction. I am 60 years old, suffering from testicular cancer, in poverty, and homeless. 

University Avenue Cooperative Homes is, purportedly, a 47-unit, limited-equity housing co-operative, but after I paid a monthly carrying charge on a mortgage for over two decades and tried to find out my legal and financial status at UACH, and the legal and financial status of UACH itself, the harrassment began. 

I have learned from Alameda County documents that UACH receives $60,000 a month in Federal Section 8 subsidies, yet residents include employees of the developer, of the shadowy Partnership that apparently owns it, and of various local and state agencies. Also hidden by the confidential silence surrounding UACH is its several rich commercial rentals. 

The land under UACH, and also under some of the commercial rentals was, it was said, sold to the City of Berkeley by the late and much-lamented Consumers Co-operative of Berkeley, and leased back to the developers, who were associated with CCB’s planning and Development Committee for $1 a year. 

But Alameda County records tell the real story. CCB sold the land to the developers, who sold it to themselves under a different name, who sold it to themselves again under a second different name and then sold it to themselves a third time under a third different name! 

Then the developers sold the land to the City of Berkeley, which immediately granted it back to the developers, who sold it to the City a second time the very next day. 

It was shortly after UACH opened that CCB was sold. The reason given was that CCB had expanded into areas that were not ready to support co-operatives. No one looked into the history of the sale of CCB-owned land in North and West Berkeley. 

The attitude of the City of Berkeley, its co-operation with who-ever it is that owns and controls UACH, can be traced back to the motion made by the Newport-led City council who—in its Berkeley Redevelopment Agency hats—lent the developers of UACH $644,000, and also moved that: “For the purpose of the application to CHFA, the City is the developer.” 

California Housing Finance Agency is the State agency that funnels Federal Section 8 funds to the various municipalities.  

While the poor remain homeless, the City in its partnership with “Non-Profit” corporations continues to house their chosen people, continues to hide the pockets that fill with monies that should house the poor, continues to hide the face of those who profit from hidden commercial rentals, and continues to aid the criminal activities of profiteers who punish people who try to learn the truth. 

There have been many members of the Berkeley Police who have responded, I believe, appropriately, in the situation. I want to thank them, especially those who visited me when they were not called. There are police who act with integrity and courage. 

Richard Berkeley 

• 

JUSTICE ROBERTS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Senate committee backs Roberts for chief justice; Senator Feinstein D-CA refuses to back Roberts in vote, Sen.Leahy D-Vt goes the other way. You would think that Democrats who backed Bush on his war would have learned their lesson.  

What is Roberts hiding? People with nothing to hide, conservative or liberal, will usually tell you what they believe. Deceivers on the other hand hide their true motives with lies, deception and silence. John Roberts has hidden behind a veneer of legal ethics and privilege and a litany of excuses as he skirted important issues that divide America today.  

Roberts is telling America that secrecy and deception are the way of democracy and judicial prudence. President Bush and religious right-wingers have been misleading Americans since Day 1 of their incorporation. Are we to believe George W. and the faithful have all of a sudden had an epiphiany and a change of heart? Unlikely!  

Ron Lowe  

Nevada City 

• 

AUGUST BUSD MEETING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The August BUSD board meeting was exciting to watch as this summer’s maintenance and building programs were 

showcased. Mostly paid for out of bond money, they ranged from routine upkeep to large scale construction. Each project seemed beneficial for our students. 

At Malcolm X, the area outside the fence was re-configured to ward off a recurrence of winter storms that flooded many classrooms. At Washington, the standing water pond behind the play structure was drained and the overall yard upgraded with more seating and trees. Le Conte’s drop off and pick up area began to be improved and the butterfly yard started to be repositioned. 

The largest area of construction was at the Middle Schools. Willard began a full rehabilitation of its main academic and administrative buildings. M.L. King is constructing a dining commons along with a new science building. 

Berkeley HIgh School is having its “C” building repainted, lead paint removed, and the Donahue and South Campus gyms renovated. Meanwhile, the old East Campus buildings have been leveled. Additionally, there are plans for redeveloping West Campus and move central administrative offices. The garden/play area at Frankln Adult is also being completed. 

While some sites will be ready in a few weeks, most will not be finished for some time. Remembering similar past BUSD projects, I wondered how many would actually be finished with current bond monies available. Often projects have remained incomplete until new bond measures were passed. 

And then the first issue on the agenda was the report back on the fiscal feasibility of the closed site option for the Derby Street playing fields. (This report was issued by BUSD’s own Lew Jones and is “must” reading for people involved in the issue, to check for exact numbers). The review team reported that $900,000 remains set aside for improvements at this location. However, the closed site option, totaling hard and soft costs, would be around 6 million dollars. The Board asked for a reconciliation of these numbers, and a further study of “bare bone” cost comparison between the open and closed site options. However, it’s obvious that there will remain a gap in the millions between the money available and what’s needed for the closed site plan. 

And so, the question is, how will this shortfall be funded? By raiding some of the wonderful improvement projects begun this summer? And if any extra BUSD money is available, it seems that there are other projects already in line, e.g. the completion of the South Berkeley High School plan. BUSD has already admitted not having enough money to finish this 

project And what about the warm water pool on the High School Campus? Since BUSD’s financial situation is widely viewed as still very shaky, this doesn’t seem the time to begin raiding other programs, not completing ones already started, and not fullfilling agreements.  

Waldo Esteva 

• 

NEW PARK NEEDS YOU 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

There are few things in life as fine as a neighborhood park and garden, and you are invited to help us build one this coming Saturday, Oct. 1, from 10-2 at Curtis and Virginia streets, the northeast corner of the new Berkeley Adult School.  

A wonderful, special time is promised. 

Bring shovels, metal rakes, and any strong family members as we prepare the site for planting later this fall and, as the community further refines its thinking, for a play area, community and school meeting space and possibly individual planting plots. this will be one of the very few new open spaces in Berkeley in recent years.  

“Sweat equity” is always important, but if you are unable to make it but would like to help, there is information about tax deductible donations to the Schoolhouse Creek Commons—the official name—at the bottom.  

Refreshments will be served and will be better than the usual rubberized donuts and warm o.j.  

This site, roughly a quarter acre, has long been used by neighborhood kids and families, with various degrees of official approval. Its exact status was never clear. Just how open to the public would this school district property be, how would it be used? 

That was answered as the district and school board finalized its plans for the site, with them paying for removal of asphalt, grading, installation of some turf and pathways. The rest -- the work and the not at all insignificant costs—is completely up to the neighborhood.  

Saturday’s work is crucial. 

The large majority of plants will be California native trees, shrubs, perennials and bulbs. Native gardeners are wary of working the soil much, if at all, before planting. But much of the soil here is compacted, lacking air and drainage. After a brief discussion, residents decided that the soil would be worked by double digging, the manual, time-honored way, instead of rototilling.  

Everyone, including children, is invited, if only to perch on some of the park’s interesting boulders and watch. 

For more information, email Jamie Day at dayork@infinex.com or call 559-8368, during the day, if possible. 

Tax deductible donations can be sent to Schoolhouse Creek Commons, c/o Brad Smith, 1205 Francisco St. Berkeley 94702. The Commons works in cooperation with Berkeley Partners for Parks, which allows for donations under 501(c)(3) of the tax code. 

Donations will go for plants, tools, a sign/community bulletin board, perhaps a few initial play area needs, benches and other equipment. 

Jamie Day 

•

One of the many nice things about Berkeley is our town’s neighborhood shopping districts. Their linear form is a legacy of the city’s early twentieth century development as a streetcar suburb. Their distinctiveness is a holdover of another sort: unlike much American retail, this city still abounds in unique mercantile enterprise, a lot of it locally owned and operated.  

As the daughter of independent small entrepreneurs—for 36 years, my parents ran a music store in South San Francisco—I appreciate Berkeley’s homegrown shops and the effort it takes to keep them running. As a resident of Thousand Oaks, I’m glad to have a shopping street (Solano Avenue) within walking distance of my house.  

Of course, commerce can impair as well as enhance a neighborhood. For that reason, the Berkeley Zoning Ordinance includes laws governing both specific neighborhood commercial districts and neighborhood commerce in general. With a few exceptions (Downtown and South Berkeley), these laws make it clear that their primary purpose is to encourage and maintain business that serves the neighborhood. That stipulation may sound innocuous; in fact, it’s generated some nasty disputes.  

Here’s why. To be truly neighborhood-serving, a commercial district needs variety. Aiming to maintain a diverse retail mix, five of the seven district-specific commercial ordinances—those governing Solano, the Elmwood, Telegraph, Central (Downtown) and North Shattuck—limit the number of certain kinds of businesses that are permitted in their area. Absent regulation, some uses—most notably, food services (as they’re known in plannerese), but in some districts, both purveyors of clothing and of personal care (beauty supplies, manicures)—will crowd out other sorts of retail.  

To observe food service run amok, check out the scene around Hearst and Euclid. Here, where there are no quotas, 22 of 33 businesses are restaurants or other food establishments. In effect, the area has become an off-campus cafeteria for the university.  

But food services have also multiplied to excess in commercial districts that have quotas—for example, Solano and the Elmwood.  

The quotas haven’t worked for a simple reason: selective enforcement. In his Sept. 13 memo to the City Council, “Revision of the Elmwood Business District Quotas” (Item 18 on this week’s council agenda), Councilmember Wozniak states: “there is a feeling among [Elmwood] merchants that the quotas have not been consistently enforced.”  

It’s more than a feeling; it’s a conviction rooted in documented fact. Last December, the council held a public hearing on Jeremy’s controversial, quota-busting application to expand its 2161 College Ave. shop into the adjacent storefront at 2163 College. At that time, city staff admitted that in issuing Jeremy’s its original use permit for 2161 College, they had already violated the Elmwood’s quota on clothing stores. Nevertheless, staff recommended approval of the expansion.  

Official negligence also contributed to the food fight over the new La Farine on Solano last winter. Everyone was thrilled to have another classy bakery in the neighborhood. The problem was that the Zoning Adjustments Board had granted La Farine a use permit for table service, which is to say, a use permit for a restaurant, not just a bakery. Solano in Berkeley already had 20 sit-down food services, which is to say eight over the legally permissible number, and that’s not counting the three operating without restaurant permits. Concerned neighbors pointed out that use permits are granted to addresses, not specific businesses. When La Farine departs, any other food service, including the greasiest of greasy spoons, can legally take its place.  

The council cavalierly dismissed both an Elmwood merchant’s appeal of Jeremy’s expansion and three Thousand Oaks residents’ appeal of La Farine’s restaurant use permit. In the case of Jeremy’s, councilmembers said the fault lay with the law! With La Farine, the council dismissed the appeal “on consent,” meaning that it accepted planning staff’s specious defense of the ZAB’s action with no discussion.  

A different sort of dereliction was exhibited by the planning commission in April 2004. At the behest of the Northside Merchant Association, the city council had unanimously asked the commission (for the third time in a row) to establish restaurant and food service quota systems similar to the ones on Solano, College and Telegraph Avenues. Instead, the commission voted 5-3-1 to endorse staff’s recommendation “that the Planning Commission advise the Council not to direct further action” on the matter (for the record, I cast one of the no votes). And indeed, no further action has been “directed.”  

To let food service creep go unabated or, worse, to abet it, is to surrender to the crudest market forces. Most retailers are tenants. Landlords like to rent to eateries because they yield much higher rents than other sorts of retail. I asked Berkeley commercial real estate broker John Gordon how food services can afford to pay more. “Food services have higher sales per square foot,” he explained. That’s partly because there’s a more constant demand for their product. “How often,” Gordon asked, “do you buy a pair of shoes, compared to how often you eat out?” Not very often, especially these days. “A generation ago,” writes Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation, “three-quarters of the money used to buy food in the United States was spent to prepare meals at home. Today about half of the money used to buy food is spent at restaurants...”  

Berkeley Office of Economic Development staffer Dave Fogarty agrees. An “increasing proportion of upper and middle-income household expenditures,” he says, “are going to eating, and less to traditional retail.” He adds that the demand for interesting food experiences is being met in part by an influx of immigrants with culinary skills, entrepreneurial backgrounds and ambitions, and long-hour/low-wage prospectuses. Meanwhile, “classic retail has been hurt by the displacement of demand to malls and discounters.” Throw in the Internet (no sales tax) and chain stores. “What’s left is restaurants and hair salons.”  

Fogarty was exaggerating. But clearly, the challenges facing “traditional” merchants are formidable. In the past few years, several revered Berkeley booksellers—Gaia, Easy Going and Shambhala—have closed their doors. Last week, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that neither of the two Cody’s Books in town is turning a profit.  

If we—meaning the city government, the merchants and the consuming public—had done everything possible to ensure that diverse, independent local retail had a future in Berkeley, then the outlook would be grim. The good news, so to speak, is that so far we’ve done very little. Here, then, are some suggestions for action:  

For the city, the obvious first step is to start enforcing the zoning laws—consistently. In this regard, the council’s decisions about the Elmwood quotas will be a bellwether; Councilmember Wozniak is actually proposing to increase the number of food services allowed in the district. Bad idea.  

Next step: implement, i.e. fund, the “Shop Local and Shop Berkeley Campaign” that the consultants Brion & Associates developed for the city in Winter 2002. Commissioned at the urging of Councilmember Maio, that proposal outlines strategies for promoting Berkeley’s varied retail districts, citing similar, successful efforts in Boulder, Austin and downtown Los Angeles.  

At the same time, the council should rescind its spring 2005 directive to staff to prepare plans for commercializing Gilman and Ashby west of San Pablo—areas now mainly zoned for mixed-use/light industry. Initiated by Mayor Bates without prior consultation with either West Berkeley businesses or merchants elsewhere in the city, much less a market study, this project will deal a body blow to our industry, artists and artisans, while draining patronage from the existing neighborhood commercial districts.  

As for the merchants: Amy Thomas, who owns and operates Pegasus and Pendragon Bookstores, is planning to start a Berkeley version of the new San Francisco Locally Owned Merchants Association. “The idea,” she says, “is to get people to recognize that there are very good reasons to shop local: more money stays in the community, and we have businesspeople who respond to local needs.” Very good idea.  

Finally, there’s the rest of us, Berkeley residents and consumers. We need to balance our wish to save time and money with our desire to live in a place whose commerce isn’t dominated by giant corporations and their distant managers (and bank accounts), a place that’s a lot like the one we still inhabit but won’t be for long unless we make it our business to shop there. Shop local, shop Berkeley.a

Last weekend I took care of my 3 1/2-year-old nephew, Bryce. It was party, party, party for 49 hours straight. We went to three parks and several places of business. We threw a small tantrum in Ross Dress for Less, and we forgot (several times) how to share while playing with Clyiesha, Maynard, and Lil’ Bobby. But all in all we had a pretty good time.  

While in my care Bryce ate three bowls of sugar-coated cereal, (Apple Jacks and Trix), six glasses of apple juice, one glass of whole milk, two bananas, some green and red grapes, 22 jellybeans, three mini Tootsie Rolls, one mini Tootsie Roll Pop, one Coffee Nip, one bite of a peanut butter and jelly (strawberry) sandwich, one small nibble on a grilled cheese (sharp cheddar on white bread) sandwich (cut diagonally for esthetic purposes), unknown quantities of micro-waved popcorn, two slices of watermelon, half a bottle of orange juice, a serving of Fenton’s homemade lemon ice cream, a small bag of Cheetos courtesy of our housemate, Willie, and one slice of Cheeseboard sundried tomato, black olive, and goat cheese gourmet pizza.  

Bryce crashed a birthday party taking place up the street. He jumped and somersaulted for awhile inside a large plastic cage-like structure that boasted a blow-up Dora doll attached to the entryway. The birthday girl gave him two gummy candies individually wrapped and shaped to look like a mouth with teeth and a hamburger with pickles, and an extraordinarily generous piece of yellow birthday cake covered in white icing. We came home and looked for snails in the garden. We neglected to take a nap, but we did enjoy a bubble bath accompanied by two floating rubber duckies. 

At 2 a.m. Sunday morning Bryce woke up screaming. I thought he was having a bad dream, but as the crying, kicking, and clawing continued I wondered if he might be having a seizure, or if his head hurt, or if he needed to have his stomach pumped. He did not open his eyes and he didn’t shed any tears, but no amount of comforting could ease his pain. I called his parents. 

They said he often had this kind of nightmare after an extremely busy day. Try to wake him up they said, but his eyes remained closed and I couldn’t stop him from howling.  

Fearing we would wake the next door neighbors and the people across the street, I coaxed Bryce into my car, strapped him into his car seat, and took him for a cruise around the hood.  

It was scary driving up and down familiar streets at 2:30 in the morning without a driver’s license. I learned which bars stay open past the mandated 2 a.m. closing time, and which fellow citizens keep their television sets on despite the hour. I saw three enormous raccoons brazenly hanging out in the middle of Dover Street, and a man with a shopping cart collecting bottles and cans.  

My nephew finally fell asleep. I drove home and carried him upstairs. He woke up and asked for a banana. I peeled it for him and he ate it, then he fell asleep on the couch in my bedroom. I covered him with a blanket, lay down on the floor next to the sofa and tried to sleep. In the morning, Bryce rolled off the couch and snuggled next to me. He whispered into my ear “pee, poop, pee, poop,” over and over, and giggled hysterically when I finally opened my eyes. I suppose these are the dirtiest words he knows, and he wanted to get my attention. I responded with the scholarly phrase “dirty underwear” and I thought he might die laughing.  

As I stated in the beginning, it was one big party at our house last weekend. You should have been there.›

The agreement signed by the City and the University earlier this year provides a historic opportunity to work together on a range of community issues—from summer literacy programs to economic and urban development plans. 

One of the most important pieces of this agreement is the creation of a new Downtown Area Plan to guide new development in the heart of our City. There has been considerable discussion, and some anxiety, about how all this will work. Let me offer answers to some of the questions that have been raised. 

First, I want to dispel the most troubling misinformation I’ve heard over the past few months – that the City gave the University veto power over City planning decisions regarding the downtown. This is absolutely false. In fact, the settlement agreement requires the University to work with the City on new development rather than simply act unilaterally to build whatever it wants on the land that it owns. 

The Downtown Area Plan is the most effective way for the citizens of Berkeley to have a voice in UC development. The 2020 UC Long Range Development Plan (LRDP) calls for 1.1 million square feet of new buildings off campus, but provides almost no detail as to where the development might take place or the purpose for the new buildings. Unfortunately, under the State Constitution, the University can build most anything it wants on the land it owns without following the city zoning laws, as any private developer must. Prior to the Downtown Area Plan, our only recourse to a university project that we did not like was to sue UC under the California Environmental Quality Act in an effort to force some changes. This lack of community control over university growth was the single most important reason we filed a lawsuit to stop implementation of their LRDP. We fought hard for the University to step back from its unilateral position and work with the City and the community on its plans. After much back and forth, they agreed to participate in the creation of a detailed new plan that will provide us information about their plans and give the City and the community an opportunity to shape those new plans from the outset.  

While we will work closely with the university, this is a City plan. The City will lead the process. The City will create its own community task force to help draft a new plan. The City’s Planning Commission will review, edit, and take action on the new plan. And the City Council will ultimately decide whether to adopt it.  

The University cannot veto any decision by these bodies. I am confident that we can work collaboratively and cooperatively with the campus throughout this effort. If the campus ultimately decides they do not like the plan, their only recourse will be to pull out of the process. If that should occur, the City would retain the authority to move forward with its downtown plan would leave us no worse off than we are now. The University retains its Constitutional right to build without our permission and we retain our right to sue the university when we do not like a proposed project. The only specific projects we agreed not to sue over are two on-campus buildings, the new Asian Library and the planned joint business and law school academic building. 

Second, people have asked why the boundaries of the Downtown Area Plan are somewhat larger than the downtown core and include portions of residential neighborhoods that border the downtown. This was done in to allow the City to consider ways to better protect those neighborhoods nearest the downtown from encroachment. The Downtown Plan boundary stretched north to Hearst in order to incorporate the old State Health Building, which will likely be taken over and redeveloped by the university in the near future. 

Third, some community members have wondered what is wrong with the City’s existing downtown plan. The current downtown will be used as a starting point for the new plan. However, it was developed over 15 years ago and is, in many cases, out of date. In 1990, when it was adopted, the downtown had seen little new development and the arts district was just getting started. Now, the downtown is teeming with new restaurants, arts venues, and shops. Hundreds of new housing units—both rentals and condos—have been built. New hotels and transit options are being planned. It would be time to take a fresh look even if the University were not looking to build downtown. 

Fourth, the downtown planning process provides an opportunity for the City to conduct an updated and complete historic survey of all buildings within the downtown area. An update of our old survey is long overdue and is needed to help the City, preservationists, and property owners have a better sense of our historic inventory. It will allow us to better protect our historic resources.  

Lastly, the City must work with the University to protect the interests of our community. The University of California’s constitutional protections make it immune from nearly all taxes and fees and give it authority to build outside of local control. I continue to strongly believe that this authority is out-of-date and has been misused in established and built-out communities like Berkeley. But only an amendment to the State Constitution can change that.  

This is a great time for downtown Berkeley. After years of hard work, Berkeley’s downtown is thriving. The Downtown Area Plan gives us all a great opportunity to get involved in shaping our downtown’s development for the next decade or more.  

In front of us are years of public discussion, public meetings, and public hearings. We will start by creating a community-led task force that will work over 18 months or so with the public, city staff, and the university on considering ideas and drafting a new plan for the downtown. I look forward to getting to work. 

Tom Bates is the mayor of Berkeley.›

On Tuesday night, Sept. 27, the Berkeley City Council will take up the planning process for a new Downtown Area Plan. The concept of a new Downtown Area Plan has generated quite a few letters and commentaries on the pages of the Berkeley Daily Planet, and also one lawsuit by Berkeley residents, (including the authors) against city officials and the Regents. We thought you might like a few facts about the Downtown Area Plan as envisioned by the City of Berkeley/UC regents Settlement Agreement: 

1) The City already has a downtown plan, created by residents, community and neighborhood groups, commission members, representatives from ASUC, UC, Berkeley High, AC Transit, business associations, and others, in the late 1980s and approved by City Council in 1990. This plan was reaffirmed in the city’s General Plan of 2001. 

2) The Planning Commission is the body charged with developing land use plans for the city of Berkeley. (Berkeley Municipal Code 3.28.100). However, the Planning Commission is not scheduled to take action on the new proposed Downtown Area Plan until Wed., Sept. 28, the day after City Council meets. 

3) The idea for a new Downtown Area Plan appears, for the first time, in the Settlement Agreement between the city and the UC Regents, approved in closed session on May 24, 2005, without any prior public knowledge. 

4) The concept of a Downtown Area Plan was not mentioned in UC’s Long Range Development Plan, the accompanying Environmental Impact Report, or in the City’s response to these documents. 

5) There was no public input on the need for, or parameters of, a new Downtown Area Plan. The proposal for a new plan was never discussed with the Planning Commission, or indeed with City Council prior to the Settlement Agreement. 

6) The area included in the new Downtown Area Plan is significantly larger than the existing plan, and includes over 150 residential parcels. No residents of these parcels were informed, or had any input in the determination of the new plan boundaries. 

7) As described in the Settlement Agreement, the Downtown Area Plan will be developed by a joint “City of Berkeley/UC Berkeley planning process” (Sec. II) and will “establish development envelopes and design guidelines … not just for UC Berkeley development sites.” (Sec. II A. 1.). 

8) However, even after the Plan is developed “[t]he Regents will reserve their autonomy from local land use regulation.” (Sec. II. B. 1.) This means they help develop the rules which they then do not have to follow. 

9) Staffing for the preparation of the Downtown Area Plan is to include one full-time city planner and one full-time UC planner. If they don’t come up with a plan within 48 months, then UC’s payments to the city (for sewer and fire services) will be reduced by $15,000 per month or $180,000 per year out of the $800,000 annual payment. (Sec. II. B. 3. (a)). 

10) Any meeting before any city commission regarding the Downtown Area Plan must be coordinated with UC Berkeley (Sec. II. B. 5.). 

11) The plan, in draft or final form, cannot be released “without concurrence of both parties.” (Sec. II. B. 6.). 

12) “Any mitigation measures … must be acceptable to UC Berkeley and applicable to all projects in the Downtown Area, regardless of ownership or sponsorship.” (Sec. II. B. 6). 

13) “UC Berkeley reserves the right to determine if the D[owntown] A[rea] P[lan] or E[nvironmental] I[mpact] R[eport] meets the Regents’ needs.” (Sec. II. B. 7.) 

If you don’t like what you have just read, let the City Council know. For information on the lawsuit contact blue@igc.org 

Jim Sharp and Anne Wagley are members of BLUE, Berkeleyans for a Livable University Environment. Anne Wagley is an employee of the Berkeley Daily Planet.

All across the nation people are collecting clothes for the needy. But in Berkeley they're throwing clean, freshly laundered clothing in dumpsters, locking the dumpsters, and threatening potential donors with misdemeanor tickets. 

And you’re paying them to do it. 

The University of California, which is flirting with paying its $200,000 - $300,000 executives even larger salaries from private donors while asking you for donations, is paying its park staff to destroy clean, useable clothing rather than allo wing it to be distributed to the poor. 

Because, they say, they have no place to put it. 

They have a point. People's Park’s freebox was recently damaged and removed. But in September the University of California ripped out both the footings for the old freebox and destroyed the initial efforts of a group trying to replace it with a new freebox, making it safe to assume they don't really want a place to put it. 

People’s Park, like many other parts of Berkeley, has always had a tradition of free clothing exchange which takes the form of boxes, cardboard and otherwise, large and small, in which one might find a sweater, a book, or the discarded kitchen utensils donated by someone trading up. You take what interests you, and you toss in whatever doesn’t. Th e scarf or the shoes you no longer wear find a new home, and you don’t have to worry about hauling things down to the dump or figuring out when the receiving hours are for a local non-profit. 

My neighborhood has several of these boxes, in which one might find a couple of books, a pair of pants, the sweater Aunt Mabel, who likes very bright colors, decided to give you for Christmas. As the autumn chills deepens, an extra layer is not only handy, it can make the difference between life and death for someon e in need. 

Write to the city and the university. The alleged era of cooperation between the two ought to at least enable us to discuss alternatives to the wholesale destruction of clean, usable clothing. We look foolish in no small degree scrambling to c lothe those shivering in Louisiana and Texas while letting people shiver here at home. 

The city and the university could agree to store the clothing in the park’s office, where it is dry. They could gather it up and donate it to a local charity. They cou ld simply allow the community to create a dry place for it. They could stop trying to ticket people simply moved to help others. Times may not be hard for executives at the University of California, but for some, even some here at home, these are very hard times, indeed. 

Carol Denney has been an advocate for People’s Park for many years.

Pigeon Drop 

Two women approached a Berkeley woman outside the Berkeley Bowl Wednesday and told her they’d found some cash, thus launching one of the oldest cons in the business—known as the Pigeon Drop. 

The con is complex in explanation but simple in execution, with the team of cons—who pretend not to know each other—inducing an elderly mark to put up temporary collateral to help the cons give some recently received cash to charity. 

The play involves the exchange “cash” wrapped either in handkerchiefs or sealed envelopes, and the mark winds up with a bundle which supposedly contains her own boodle but invariably turns out to be not valuable lucre but stacks of worthless paper. 

The duo escaped with their mark’s cash, and remain at large, said Officer Okies.  

Hot prowl 

A Berkeley man who lives near the corner of Ward and Fulton streets woke up Thursday morning to discover that he had been victimized by a hot prowl burglar—cop speak for one who burglarizes homes while the resident are sleeping. 

In this case, the felon had snuck through an open window and absconded with the sleeping victim’s wallet and laptop computer, said Berkeley Police spokesperson Officer Joe Okies. 

Bingone 

Berkeley police are looking for the volunteer for a local non-profit organization who made off with the group’s winnings from Gilman Street Bingo about 8 p.m. Thursday. 

Officer Okies said the volunteer walked out with what he would only describe as a “sizable amount” of cash collected in bingo games. Police are still seeking the suspect, who is wanted on suspicion of embezzlement. 

Masked bandit 

A man wearing a mask and dressed in dark clothing approached workers at Office Depot at 1025 Gilman Street early Friday morning and demanded cash. His demand satisfied, the fellow fled on foot. 

Glass slasher 

Emergency room personnel at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Berkeley called police after a man arrived with a slashed arm. 

Officer Okies said the 43-year-old fellow had been slashed with a piece of broken glass by a man he knew. No arrest has been made in the case. 

Arrest bonus 

Police serving an arrest warrant on a man in the 1900 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Way discovered an extra bonus—property stolen in an out-of-state crime, 

In addition to the charge on which he was already wanted, the arrestee now faces an additional count of possession of stolen property. 

Brave citizen 

Police rushed to the 2500 block of College Avenue at 4:15 Friday after a caller reported that a citizen was holding on to a suspected burglar. 

Officers arrived to find that the fellow had not only captured the criminal, but had relieved him of a pistol as well. 

The 23-year-old suspect was also found to be in possession stolen property and burglary tools as well as methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia. He was booked on suspicion of probation violation and for possession of a firearm while in possession of illegal drugs.?

Arsonist strikes again 

The latest in a series of arson-caused fires at King Middle School destroyed an $80,000 construction tractor on Sept. 18, said Deputy Fire Chief David P. Orth. 

In addition to the fire that destroyed the massive piece of John Deere equipment, a second fire did limited damage to the dining commons building currently under construction. 

Orth said the fires were reported at 5:21 p.m. and were extinguished soon afterward. 

The middle school site at 1721 Rose St. has also been the site of a series of arson fires set in portable toilets and another fire that ignited construction debris. 

The latest fire is by far the most costly. 

“Berkeley police and the school district are working on the incidents,” Orth said. “Security has been increased and cameras have been installed to prevent future incidents.” 

Eucalyptus fire 

A Thursday evening fire burned eucalyptus trees and brush along the railroad tracks at the south end of Aquatic Park. 

Two engines quickly controlled the blaze, which was limited to a small area, said Orth. No structures were endangered. 

The fire could have been started by a train, or by one of the homeless people who camp in the area around Bay Street, he said. 

Roof fire 

A fire on the roof of a building at 1533 Prince St. caused $10,000 in structural damage and $5,000 in losses to contents of the dwelling Saturday. 

When firefighters answered the 5:41 p.m. call, they arrived to find tenants fighting the blaze with fire extinguishers and a bucket brigade. 

Deputy Chief Orth said the fire was apparently caused by shingle work during the construction of a rooftop catwalk leading from an upstairs bedroom to a fire escape ladder. 

Too flaming Berkeley 

One display at Sunday’s How Berkeley Can You Be Parade proved a little too hot for the taste of Berkeley police, who called in the BFD for a second opinion. 

Orth said the ride in question was a renovated fire truck sponsored by the Crucible, a workshop for artists who work with flame in Oakland. 

“It had been rigged to shoot a 15- to 20-foot flame” from the truck top mount more traditionally used to blast water, and a second arrangement set off small blasts from the exhaust. 

“The police notified us, and we ordered them to stop because they didn’t have a permit and it was dangerous,” said Orth. 

The truck’s operators complied, and the truck paraded on, though with considerably less sturm und drang than before.

A casual chat between a customer and the proprietor of a butcher shop about spousal murder ... an aggressive real estate investor torn between evicting a pregnant woman and her passive husband, (former neighbors), or reinstituting her old affair with the husband instead ... a suicide-prone go-fercum-hit-man in an amorous clinch with the monstrous realty lady while her butcher husband watches a strip-show in a seamy club. 

These predicaments could only be from a hallucinated, over-the-top soap opera, or C aryl Churchill’s “first-mounted” full-length play, Owners, now at the Ashby Stage, produced by Shotgun Players and directed by Patrick Dooley, their founder and artistic director. 

First produced in the United Kingdom in ‘72, following hard on abysmal tim es economically and a rough winter of eviction wars, Owners forecasts, in a way, the beginning of gentrification: buying-up and conversion of tenements, with high profits for fly-by-night absentee owners and nowhere to go for tenants during a period of fo undering industry and high unemployment. 

The monstrous realty woman in question (Marion, played with piss and vinegar by Shotgun stalwart Trish Mullholland) seems like an intern Margaret Thatcher. The web this cast of human arachnids weaves is less intri cate than tangled, each pulling insistently at her or his own particular thread, often wrapped round another who will serve as prey. 

The laughs are just as outrageous as the situations, though they may not always please the fans of the vaguer, Pythonesqu e brands of Brit comedy. The sense of agit-prop political theater is never that much further from the text of this very early work of Churchill’s than it is from, say, the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s outdoor shows. 

“Most plays can be looked at from a pol itical perspective and have said something, even if it isn’t what you set out to say ... Sometimes it’s going to be about images, more like a dream to people, and sometimes it’s going to be more like reading an article. And there’s room for all that,” acc ording to the playwright. 

And her technique seems to consist of bombarding the articles read with the images dreamt, and—as in a reactor—seeing what comes loose. There is a relation to the pre-Python kind of gonzo humor of The Goons (Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe), whose cockeyed radio brouhahas set the tone for post-war Brit comedy. But Churchill, with eyes on whatever political or social prize, is tamer. 

Maybe the best slightly askew original elements in Churchill’s script date back to “that savage old English humour” T. S. Eliot saw in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays like Marlowe’s Jew of Malta or Tourneur’s Revenger’s Tragedy, having its final echo in the grotesques of the socially conscious Dickens. Owners seems at times like an up side-down White Devil or Duchess of Malfi, with an eccentric and overly self-conscious (not to say sensitive) cast of prima donnas meting out a form of unintended justice on each other as they mutually betray their allies or lovers of a scene ago and broo d on it in image-laden soliloquies. 

The Shotgun production doesn’t much get to that stratum of theatricality, but does catch these unlikely soap opera divas caroming off each other like bumper cars. It’s a little rough at first keeping up, but the cast—e specially Zehra Berkman, Howard Dillon, John Mercer and Mulholland as the two crossed couples—warm to their mad roles and proceed to tear up the stage. They appear ready to chew the tacky wallpaper on the tenement set Jean-Francois Revon puts on a lazy su san turntable with the realty office and the strip club, all coordinated with Christine Crook’s costumes. 

There are theatrical moments under the laughs: “I feel so funny; I think I must be guilty,” muses venomous Marion. Or Alec, asked by Worsley the mur derous suicide-manqu’s, (Ryan O’Donnell) if he’s attempted it: “No; I don’t need to.”  

And it all ends very quickly, not only because of the snowballing catastrophes climaxing or the soap opera tempo of production. It’s just that “one thing led to so many others. It wasn’t what was on my mind.” 

Shotgun Players present Owners at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave, through Oct. 9. Performances are Thurs.-Sun. 8 p.m. For more information call 841-6500 or see www.shotgunplayers.org.

A documentary that takes aim at the business of genetically modified food will debut Friday at Shattuck Cinemas. 

In making The Future of Food, Filmmaker Deborah Koons Garcia traveled in Canada, Mexico and the United States, lending a critical eye to wha t she sees as a corporate drive to control the world’s food supply. 

“I thought people should find out what was happening so we don’t lose control over the food we eat,” said Koons, a Mill Valley resident, and the widow of Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia. 

The film is one of the first feature length documentaries to critique how the increasing use of genetically modified seeds might affect independent farmers and human health. 

Featured prominently in the film is UC Berkeley professor Ignacio Chapela. In 2001, Chapela published in the journal Nature findings that genetically modified corn had unintentionally contaminated native corn in Oaxaca, Mexico. 

Chapela, who traveled to Mexico with Koons Garcia, will be on hand at Friday’s premier screening to field audience questions. 

Koons Garcia said the film took three years and several hundred thousand dollars to make. The funding came exclusively from Jerry Garcia’s estate. 

“It felt like it was the most responsible thing I could do with the money,” said Koons, who has directed several feature and documentary films and was the creative consultant for the Jerry Garcia retrospective, Grateful Dawg. 

Koons Garcia said she hoped her new film, which has already debuted in New York, Los Angeles and Oaxaca, Mex ico, would encourage viewers to support local organic farmers and help spur an effort to label genetically modified food in grocery stores. A labeling bill sponsored by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) and Sen. Barbara Boxer has so far failed to garner support in either legislative chamber, she said. 

After several years of research, Koons Garcia said she was most surprised by the lack of health tests performed on the genetically modified foods. 

“There are elements that have never been in food before and aren’t being tested,” she said. 

Koons Garcia makes no bones that the documentary takes a strong anti-genetic engineering stance. Her biggest target is agri-business giant Monsanto, which she says is buying up the world’s seed supply. 

Monsanto refused interv iew requests for the film, but agri-business firms have bought four copies of the documentary, she said.  

“They still haven’t acknowledged me, but I know they know about it,” she said.  

The Future of Food is scheduled to run for one week at Shattuck Cin emas, 2230 Shattuck Ave., beginning Friday. Showtimes Friday will be 7:10 p.m. and 9:20 p.m. A question-and-answer session with Koons Garcia and Chapela will follow the early show. For show times on other days, see www.landmarkthreatres.com or call 644-2992.

In his 80s, George Stewart was a tall, slender gentleman with white hair and white moustache carefully trimmed, in a businessman’s style. I thought his observant blue eyes were his most interesting feature. He wore his years elegantly and spoke carefully, with a great concern for accuracy. In his speech, as in his writing, he was clearly not a man given to verbal extravagance.  

A year after his death, Wallace Stegner wrote of George Stewart as “a much more important writer than the general public knew.” The editor of an anthology of California literature described him as a “revered professor of English.” He was both, but his fiction and non-fiction writing carried his words far beyond the classroom. One of his novels actually changed how we talk about t he weather. 

Berkeley 

Born in Pennsylvania, Stewart (1895-1980) attended Princeton in the era of Edmund Wilson, John Peale Bishop and F. Scott Fitzgerald (he didn’t speak well of Fitzgerald’s college novel, This Side of Paradise). He served in the Army A mbulance Corps during World War I and, after his discharge in 1919, he came to Berkeley for graduate studies. Looking back in 1970, he gave us his first impression of the campus: 

“On what was, if I remember correctly, a fine August morning I came upon the campus by one of the west entrances, looking for the place to register—a tallish young man, wearing glasses, on the slim side. I had recently been seriously ill and I doubt if I gave much impression of energy and durability ... I found the registration desk ... near the present bridge across the creek, not far from the northeast corner of the present Life Sciences Building ... my credentials from Princeton had not arrived, and I had brought my diploma along ... The girl looked at it, and found it all in Latin, of which she did not read a word. But she could see the orange-and-black ribbon. She said, ‘That’s a pretty one!’ And so I was admitted, without the aid of a computer.”  

He studied with Chauncey Wells, who “did much to inspire and shape my style of writing,” and with the historian Herbert Bolton. “Out of [Bolton’s] course,” he wrote, “has sprung about half of all that I have ever written.” His M.A. thesis was “Robert Louis Stevenson in California.” Stevenson spent a lot of time around Monterey in 1880, and it occurred to Stewart to go there, looking for people who had known him 40 years earlier. Of course he didn’t find anyone, as he told me, but he did meet an elderly woman who might have seen Stevenson for a few moments. Little as it yielded, S tewart enjoyed the experience and it whetted his appetite for “the pleasures and possible rewards of field work, as opposed to library work.” Going to the scene and meeting people who knew the place became a basic part of his method as a writer.  

Stewart left Berkeley long enough to get a Ph.D. at Columbia, teach at Michigan for a year, and marry Theodosia, his beloved wife. They returned to Berkeley in 1925, and he began a teaching career which lasted into the 1960s.  

His career as an author began with The Techniques of English Verse (1930). His second book was Bret Harte, Argonaut and Exile (1931) a biography; his third, English Composition (1936), a useful text on writing; and his fourth, Ordeal by Hunger (1936), a history of the Donner Party. Each w as well-received. 

“But it was the universal ambition in my generation, at least,” he told me, “to write novels.” He achieved this for himself in 1938 when he published East of the Giants, a historical romance set in early California. For his second novel, Doctor’s Oral (1939), he chose an academic setting, presenting a lightly disguised picture of his own Ph.D. exam as something akin to an auto-da-fe.  

Storm 

Then, in 1941, at the age of 46, he published Storm, the strikingly original novel that made him famous. The storm is the protagonist, and the story is its biography, telling of its birth in the mountains of Asia, its growth as it travels across the Pacific, its power as it inundates the Bay Area with wind and rain, and the beginnings of its death as it travels into the Midwest. The storm is named Maria by an anonymous junior meteorologist, who follows its progress from beginning to end, but who never speaks its name to any of his colleagues. In the aftermath of Storm’s success, real weather forecasters all across the country began naming storms for the public. Every time you hear a reference to “Tropical Storm Alice” or “Tropical Storm Fred,” you hear life imitating the art of George Stewart. 

Storm pits the power of the storm against life, human and animal, and the shape of the land itself. The fortunes and misfortunes of individual truck drivers, electrical linemen, wild pigs and birds caught in Maria’s path demonstrate its all encompassing force and power. The storm is opposed by people as soci al beings, doing their best, performing their duties as well as they can. 

Following the practice begun with his quixotic quest for signs of Stevenson in Monterey, Stewart prepared for Storm by doing research and getting to know the people and places he proposed to write about. He made a study of meteorology, and then (he wrote later) “When a bad storm broke, I took to the road—up to the Pass, out with the Highway Patrol, through the flooded Sacramento Valley. I talked with the men and saw what they were doing, and I was sometimes cold and wet and hungry along with them. Not the least among my later pleasures was to get comments and letters from men who...knew the book to be genuine.” Storm is a singular act of imagination disciplined by research, humane observation, and participation. Everything in the story could have happened as described. He used no tricks or special effects.  

Brilliantly clear and accurate as it is, Storm was an unlikely best-seller. Perhaps its popularity stemmed from being the rig ht story at the right time: storms traditionally symbolize turbulence in human affairs. He has told us he wrote some of Storm’s bleaker passages in 1940 “during those grim and terrible months of Dunkirk and the fall of France.” I think this novel, which shows people working together against vast adversity, struck a note readers responded to spontaneously in those last troubled months before Pearl Harbor. 

And then...  

In Fire (1948), Stewart dealt once more with a natural catastrophe—a California forest fire—and the ordinary people caught up in it. Earth Abides (1949), which takes place largely in Berkeley, gave us his version of how our society might come to an end. To his surprise, the novel developed a cult following. He told me young people came to see him for years after its publication, eager to sit with him and discuss the concerns it caused them.  

In his final novels, Sheep Rock (1951), and The Years of the City (1955), he explored the unchanging permanence of nature, and the rise and fall of a civilizations. “I wrote seven novels in fifteen years,” he said to me, “and after that, I just didn’t have the drive to write another.” Subsequently, he concentrated on non-fiction, notably Not So Rich as You Think (1967) and American Place Names (1970). 

I asked him whether he had ever considered leaving the university to devote himself to writing on a full-time basis. His answer was, “No. I do not consider myself to be a good money writer.” He added that he was glad he had not done so because he valued the freedom the University gave him to write as he pleased and because he also really enjoyed teaching. 

His Qualities as a Writer 

Stewart possessed an exceptional ability to choose subjects and themes that caught the attention of large numbers of people and touched them deeply. In retrospect, his choices often seem obvious. Storms and fires, for example, are common enough. Weather is one of the staples of ordinary conversation, and in any vicinity where there has been a fire, people talk of it for weeks and months afterwards. It takes penetration of a peculiarly lofty kind to find riches in such apparently threadbare topics. His ability to focus on the commonplace and to find something new in it may be his most remarkable quality. Beginning with simple materials and commonly accepted assumptions, he creates effects which are powerful and strikingly original. 

He was not a technical innovator. His influence on writers has been exemplary and indirect. In an amiable celebration of his work, Wallace Stegner spoke for a lot of authors: “Of George Stewart’s twenty-eight books, I find I have seventeen on my shelves. Some of them I have read only once. Eight of them I have just reread to remind myself of George’s historical and fictional methods. Three or four of them I read all the time, and refer to, and quote, and steal from, and couldn’t get along without.” 

For his eightieth birthday, the Bancroft Library honored George Stewart with a comprehensive exhibition of his writings. Visiting it, I found myself da zzled both by the abundant quantity of his work and by the number of languages into which it had been translated. The display made it clear that his audience was world-wide, transcending cultural differences, class lines, and ideological barriers. Even now, people in all walks of life continue to discover his books, read them, and keep them in memory as vital parts of their experience. 

George Stewart changed my life. 

It was 1958 and I was a precocious 8th-grader at Lincoln Junior High in Fort Collins, Colo., when a great teacher lent me a book she said she was certain I would like. 

Pat Scheffer taught social studies while she was hel ping her husband earn a graduate degree at Colorado A&M (now Colorado State University). She was the epitome of the Good Teacher, gifted at reading and playing to the approaches that could inspire a passion for learning. Quickly determining that I was a 1 2-year-old best motivated by a challenge, she immediately provided them—earning my instant and enduring gratitude. 

So the day came when she handed me a paperback. “Here, read this. It offers a lot to think about, and I think you’ll like it.” 

It was a re print of George Stewart’s 1949 book, Earth Abides, an account of the collapse of modern civilization in the wake of a plague that claims the lives of all but a widely scattered handful of humans. 

The basic concept was all too familiar in the late Eisenho wer years, when horrifying images of nuclear annihilation were regular offerings on the nightly news, the front pages, movie screens and both the fiction and non-fiction racks at local libraries and booksellers. 

Younger readers won’t be able to fully gra sp the undercurrents of fear that played through the mind of children who had grown up with the graphic images of nuclear test fireballs and sky-rupturing mushroom clouds broadcast on small black-and-white TV screens and printed in the daily press. 

The U nited States and the Soviet Union seemed destined to meet in a war of nuclear Armageddon, and the instant annihilation of the vast majority of Homo Sapiens was considered a daily reality. 

Unlike the fire-and-radiation blasted landscape of thermonuclear w ar, Stewart’s holocaust was aimed solely at people, leaving all the physical structures of mid-20th Century life in place. Electricity and the water kept flowing for months, kept in operation by mechanical governors in those pre-computerized days. 

The pr otagonist is a socially isolated graduate student named Isherwood Williams, known in his post-apocalyptic life only by his nickname, Ish. 

Ish survives the apocalypse because he is bitten by a rattlesnake while exploring in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada and forced to seek shelter in an abandoned cabin, laying in the grips of feverish delirium while the rest of the human race succumbs to a far grimmer fate. 

He returns to a abandoned world, and days pass before he finally encounters another survivor, and then, very slowly, another. 

Ish evolves through the book, shaped by his character and circumstances to become the head of a prototypical tribe of whose progeny gradually transform his stories, sayings and acts into an oral mythology as literacy vanishes and the writings of the ages are reduced to dust and fire fuel. 

As I devoured Stewart’s book, I immediately grasped the implications of the tale he spun. 

Stewart’s cataclysmic context is ecological, describing the collapse of industrial civilization in tandem with the rapid cycling of organismic explosions and natural forces that followed when humans lost their place atop the pyramid of life. 

Confronted by a vivid account of the consequences of social collapse, Earth Abides left me with an enduring se nse of the fragility of everyday life in a universe where the unexpected is the rule. 

I had seen another world, and it struck me to the quick. My world was never the same after that, and I was driven to ask questions I’m still asking today. I will be for ever grateful to Stewart, who led a young future journalist to search for a deeper understanding of the world around him. 

My Berkeley connection 

Though I didn’t quite realize it then—mainly because I was 12 and the city’s name was never invoked—the story was set in Berkeley. 

I only later learned the hidden meaning of the protagonist’s tribal name years later when I read Ishi in Two Worlds, Theodora Kroeber’s account of the last survivor of a Northern California Native American tribe known as the Yahis, a group that had once numbered about 15,000. 

Brought from isolation in the wilds into contact with a population that exposed him to new organisms, Ishi died of tuberculosis three years layer. He ended his days in the museum of UC Berkeley’s anthropology department where the author’s future spouse, Alfred Kroeber, would become one of the school’s better-known academic luminaries. 

Like Ishi, Ish ended Earth Abides book as the last representative of his people—those who had known the pre-tribal era that h ad been the Industrial Age. 

One future irony for me was his depiction of the demise by fire, termites, weather and time of the structures I would later encounter as a reporter covering land use and landmarks for the Berkeley Daily Planet. 

I was prompted to revisit Earth Abides after seeing it mentioned by Mike Davis, California’s most provocative journalist/writer, in his 2003 book Dead Cities: A Natural History. I recently managed to locate a 1983 paperback reprint at Shakespeare Books on Telegraph Avenue and a fresh reading reaffirmed of the vital power of the images conveyed by Stewart’s prose.t

OK, it’s autumn. The warblers are migrating through town—Joe saw two yellow warblers and a Wilson’s, another yellow and an orange-crowned, two more yellows and a Townsend’s; we’ve seen Townsend’s and hermit warblers with gangs of Wilson’s warblers and the usual chickadees and bushtits in Tilden Park. The fog has a colder, Arctic-flavored edge to it in the evenings. The trees are starting to fall into step, the mulberries tossing leaves to the ground with an audible whack.  

And there are persimmons on the persimmon trees. 

There are persimmon trees dotted all around here, all of them, as far as I know, privately owned. They’re Diospyros kaki, a species from Asia, known as “Japanese persimmon.” There are astringent and non-astringent varieties.  

The astringent kind is a bit more familiar in most places; you find them in the market, labeled as ‘Hachiya’ variety. They’re pointy at the bottom end, and you have to let them get so soft they won’t hold their own weight before you eat them; you cut them in half and spoon the translucent flesh out like pudding. (Or you use it to make real pudding, sweet, dark and spicy. Or bread. Or cookies.) At that point it’s been transfigured to incredible sweetness. Traditionally you were supposed to wait for the first frost, but even here, they do ripen—if they’re allowed to. 

I’ve seen a squirrel hopping across the street with a ripe-looking persimmon in its teeth, looking absurdly top-heavy but squirrelishly smug. Those annoying rodents also have the habit of taking one bite out of each fruit they find and leaving the rest to fester. Pfui. Well, sometimes birds will, too. Most of the persimmon trees I see are small enough to use bird netting on. 

The non-astringent persimmons—the ones you see in the produce store are mostly the ‘Fuyu’ variety—are flattened little globes and you can eat them while they’re still hard and crunchy, just so they’re orange. It’s counterintuitive, but they are actually a bit harder to store than the ‘Hachiya’ types, because they often get mushy if you put them in the fridge. You can sieve out ripe ‘Hachiya’ pulp and freeze it and it’ll be fine for months. 

I used to like working on persimmon trees when I was an arborist. It’s hard to explain, but some trees just feel pleasant under the pruning shears, and are open in structure and not jabby and rude, and generally show you what they want besides. When you develop some tree sense, it quickly becomes clear what will keep the tree healthy and give it the form it wants to grow into, in the space it’s allowed. They like the climate here, but they don’t go crazy and get huge either.  

Aside from the fruit, one reason people plant persimmons here is their fall color. Not every tree will get gorgeous without cold weather, but persimmons’ big oval leaves can turn outrageous shades of bold gold, deep orange, and scarlet, sometimes all on one leaf. This, all on a small tree with an open structure that you can look through with minimal pruning—it makes for a nice inhabitant in a small yard.  

We have a tansu in the dining room, found at a bargain price maybe 15 years ago. It caught my eye from across the warehouse because, while perfectly natural and unaltered, it was gaudy and extravagant; the veneer on the front looked like tiger hide. The seller said it’s persimmon wood, with cypress insides and Japanese maple trim. The veneer must be peeled off the log like an apple peel; persimmons are pretty skinny even when they’re mature—at least on this side of the Pacific.  

Persimmons do have a native North American representative, Diospyros virginians. That’s the one the folk songs refer to: “Possum on a ‘simmon tree/ Raccoon on the ground;/ Raccoon tell the ‘possum/ Won’t you shake them ‘simmons down?” They grow in the eastern United States as far north as southern Pennsylvania and Illinois, at least, and bear much smaller fruit, compared to cherry tomatoes or walnuts. I’m still trying to chase one down, myself, as the little fruits are supposed to be much more intensely flavored than the big ones. Clues appreciated! 

Ron Sullivan’s last column (Sept. 20 issue) was not printed in its entirety. The whole piece is posted on www.faultline.org /place/toad/archive/002590.html and on the Berkeley Daily Planet web site.›

TUESDAY, SEPT. 27 

FILM 

Madcat Presents: “The Time We Killed” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Tell on on Tuesdays Storytelling with Marjorie Mann, Maiyah Hirano, Jessica Ferris and Sandra Niman at 7:30 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. Cost is $8-$12 sliding scale. www.juiamorgan.org 

Ken Goffman looks at “Counterculture Through the Ages” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com  

The Whole Note Poetry Series with Dr. Jeff and Dr. X at 7 p.m. at The Beanery, 2925 College Ave., near Ashby. 549-9093. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Coro d’Amici, a capella, at 8 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Tickets are $20. 525-5211. www.berkeleychamberperform.org 

Wild Catahoulas at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054.  

Ellen Hoffmaan with Singers’ Open Mic at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ.  

Bohola, Irish-American folk trio, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvag e. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Four Corners of the Round Table, with Adam Caroll, Beaver Nelson, Jud Neson and Steve Poltz at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082.  

Randy Craig Trio at 7:30 p.m. at Caffe Tr ieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Luciana Souza & Romero Lubambo at 8 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$16. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Jazzschool Tuesdays at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Eric Swinderman, solo guitar, at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 28 

FILM 

Tropical Punch: The Video Works of Tony Labat at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

Cine Documental: “Intermissions” on the 2002 Brazilian presidential elections, at 7 p.m. at the CLAS Conference Room, 2334 Bowditch St.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Jim Lynch introduces his novel “The Highest Tide” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

William Sloane Coffin introduces “Letters to a Young D oubter” at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Donation of $10 suggested. Sponsored by Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

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

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Wednesday Noon Concert, with Garrett McLean, violin, Gabriel Trop, cello, and Inning Chen, piano at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Free. 642-4864. http://music.berkeley.edu 

Music fo r t he Spirit with guest organist, John Walko at noon at First Presbyterian Church of Oakland, 2619 Broadway. 444-3555. www.firstchurchoakland.org 

Calvin Keys Trio Invitational Jam at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazz Isla nd.com 

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

Balkan Folk Dance at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Lessons at 7 p.m. Cost is $7. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Universal, salsa, at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Dance lessons at 8 p.m. Cos t is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Loosewig Quartet at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

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

Mel Martin All Star Band with vocalist Jamie Davis at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $7-$14. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, SEPT. 29 

EXHIBITIONS 

Closing Ritual for “Wholly Grace” Works by Susan Duhan Felix at noon at the Bade Museum, 1798 Scenic Ave. 841-1781. 

Nordic 5 Arts, paint ings, basketry, and sculpture. Reception at 5 p.m. at the Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Clarement Ave.  

FILM 

Dutch Voices: Jos de Putter and Peter Delpeut “Felice... 

Felice...” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTUR ES 

“L.P. Latimer: California Watercolor Painter” with Alfred C. Harrison, Jr. at 8 p.m. at The Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Donation $8-$12. Part of the Arts and Crafts Lecture Series. 843-8982. 

“Why I Commissioned ‘Dr. Atomic’” with Pamela Rosen berg, Ge neral Director, SF Opera at 8 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library Central Reading Room, 2090 Kittredge. 981-6100. www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org 

“On Nuclear Time” A discussion of the marker to be placed over a New Mexico nuclear waste dump to warn future g enerations, with Julia Bryan-Wilson of the Rhode Island School of Design at 5 p.m. in Room 160, Kroeber Hall, UC Campus. 

Nomad Spoken Word Night at 6 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Paul Anderson introduces “Hunger’s Brides: A Novel of t he Baroque” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Jacquelynne Baas describes “Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to Today” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com  

Word Beat Reading Series wi th Joan Gatten and Eliza Sheffler at 7 p.m. at Mediterraneum Caffe, 2475 Telegraph Ave., near Dwight Way. 526-5985. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Albany Music in the Park with The Shots, Irish, bluegrass, Cajun music at 6:30 p.m. at Albany’s Memorial Park. 524-9283. ww w.albanyca.org 

Oakland Opera “La Belle et la Bete,” Thurs.-Sun. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. through Oct. 2 at the Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway at 2nd. Tickets are $18-$32. 763-1146.  

Mark Morris Dance Group at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Camp us. Tickets a re $30-$58. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

The Dave Bromberg Quartet at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $29.50-$30.50. 548-1761. 

LiveAndUnplugged Open Mic, acoustic music by local artists, at 7 p.m. at Unitarian Universalists, 19 24 Cedar St. a t Bonita. 703-9350.  

Terry Rodriguez Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ.  

Phillip Rodriguez, guitar, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

Michael Fracasso, Ana Egge at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

Isaac Peña at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $6-$8. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Carlos Oliveira Duo at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Earl Klugh, contemporary jazz guitarist, a t 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is 20-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Selector: Smartbeat Sound- 

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

FRIDAY, SEPT. 30 

THEATER 

Aurora Theatre “The Price” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 a nd 7 p.m., through Oct. 9, at 2081 Addison St. Tickets are $38. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

California Shakespeare Theater, “The Tempest” at 8 p.m. at Bruns Amphitheater, 100 Gateway Blvd., between Berkeley and Orinda, through Oct. 23. Tickets are $10-$55. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org 

Impact Theater “Nicky Goes Goth” at 8 p.m., Thurs.-Sat. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid, through Oct. 1. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468. www.impacttheatre.com 

Lunatique Fantastique “Executive Order 9066” Thurs. -Sat. at 7 p.m. at 2 120 Allston Way. Tickets are $15-$22. 415-826-5750. www.themarsh.org 

Shotgun Players, “Owners” at 8 p.m., Thurs.-Sun. through Oct. 16 at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. Reservations suggested. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

Wilde Irish Productions “Som eone Who’ll Watch Over Me” Thurs. -Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 3 p.m., at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave., through Oct. 2. Tickets are $18-$22. 644-9940. www.wildeirish.org 

FILM 

Films from Along the Silk Road ”The Adopted Son” at 7:30 p.m. and “The First Teacher” at 9:10 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Neil Gaiman introduces “Anansi Boys” at 7 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Spons ored by Cody’s Bo oks. Advance reservations requested. One ticket is available with each purchase of the book. 845-7852. 

“A Composer’s Colloquium” with John Adams about his opera “Dr. Atomic” at 3 p.m. in the Elkus Room, 125 Morrison Hall, UC Campus. 

Dutc h Voices: Jos de P utter and Peter Delpeut Salon with Peter Delpeut at 1:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Oakland Opera “La Belle et la Bete,” Thurs.-Sun. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. through Oct. 2 at t he Oakland Metro, 2 01 Broadway at 2nd. Tickets are $18-$32. 763-1146.  

Mark Morris Dance Group at at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $30-$58. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

I Gatti Freschi with guest flutist Marty Stoddard perform Schubert and J.S. B ach, at 8 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. Cost is $12-$15. 848-1228. www.giorgigallery.com 

Ives String Quartet, with Anna Carol Dudly, soprano, at 8 p.m. at Mills College Concert Hall, 5000 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland. 430-22 96. 

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

school.com 

El Hombre y el Flamenco at 9 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $20. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Mal Sharpe Sextet & Anna de Leon at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Stompy Jones/Lindy Hop at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. East Coast swing dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $11-$13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

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

David Frazier’s Cuban Jazz Ensemble at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

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

Penelope Houston, Mike Therieau, Sean Smith at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plou gh. Cost is $7. 841-2 082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Crow, World Burns to Death, Artimus Pyle 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. 

Santero at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $7. 548-1159.  

The Push, funk, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Earl Klugh, contemporary jazz guitarist, at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is 20-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SATURDAY, OCT. 1 

CHILDREN  

Los Amiguitos de La Peña with Colibri at 10:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $4 for adults, $3 for children. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Romanian Lace Costume and Sentimental Embroideries” Exhibition runs to Feb. 4 at Lacis Museum to Lace and Textiles, 2982 Adeline St. 843-7178. lacismuseum.org 

“Jewish Traditions” Works by Harry Lieberman opens at the Ames Gallery, 2661 Cedar St. 845-4949. www.amesgallery.com 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Dress: Clothing as Art” Artist’s talk with Anna Maltz at 2 p.m. at Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Ave., Richmond. 620-6772. www.therichmondartcenter.org 

Walter Mosley introduces his new Easy Rawlins novel, “Cinnamon Kiss” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Bay Area Poets Coalition open reading and contest from 3 to 5 p.m. at Strawberry Creek Lodge, 1320 Addison St. To enter contest call 527-9905. 

Synergy Women’s Open Mic at 3 p.m. at Lakeview Branch Oakland Public Library, 550 El Embarcadero at the column end of Lake Merritt. 632-7548. 

Synergy Women’s Open Mic at 3 p.m. at Lakeview Library at 550 El Embarcadero, Oakland.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Singing Through the Storm A hurricane-relief benefit for New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic, at 7:30 p.m. at the Mother’s Cookies Lofts, 1148 E. 18th St., Oakland. 594-4000 ext. 687.  

The L iving Room, live music from emerging artists, at 8 p.m. at 3230 Adeline St. Donation. 601-5774. 

Rhonda Benin & Soulful Strut at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $7. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Sekouba “B ambino” Diabate at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $20. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Mosáico with José Roberto y sus Amigos at 8:30 p.m.at La Peña. Cost is $13-$15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Braziu, Brazilian music, at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shat tuck Ave. Cost is $10-$12. 548-1159. www.shattuckdownlow.com 

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

Austin Lounge Lizards at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Myra Melford Quartet at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-18. 845-5373. www.jazz 

school.com 

Gini Wilson’s “Chamberjazz” at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Steve Smulian at 8 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7. 558-08 81. 

Victoria WIlliams, Carolyn Mark, Bermuda Triangle Service at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $12. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Jason Webley, Sour Mash Jug Hug Band, Dead Hensons at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alc ohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $7. 525-9926. 

Earl Klugh at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $10-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SUNDAY, OCT. 2 

FILM 

African Diaspora Film Society: Bay Area Independent Filmmaker s Mini-Festival at 2 p.m. at Parkway Theater, 1834 Park Blvd., Oakland. Cost is $5. www.picturepubpizza.com/special-events/diaspora 

THEATER 

PlayGround, two original short plays at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Rep., 2025 Addison St. RSVP to kickoff@playground-sf.or g 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Single Moms: Invisible Lives” Artist’s talk with photographer Katherine Bettis at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, Central Community Room, 2090 Kittredge. 981-6100. www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org 

Bill Martin discusses “Maarxism a nd the Call fo the Futu re: Conversations on Ethics, History and Politics” at 6 p.m. at Revolution Books, 2425 Channing Way. 848-1196. 

Poetry Flash with Anne Valley-Fox and Joan Logghe at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.co m 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkel ey Arts Festival: Barely Human Dance Theatre “From Here We Watch The World Go By” at 5 p.m. at the Downtown Berkeley BART Plaza. 883-0302. 

Four Flavors of Jazz from 3 to 7 p.m. at the Woodminister Amphitheatre in Oakland. Featured artists are Khalil Shahe ed, Belinda Blair Quartet and Duo Gadjo & Joyce Grant. 238-3092. 

Sarah Manning, jazz saxophonist at 2 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Cost is $10-$15. 701-1787. 

Mike Vax Jazz Orchestra at 2 p.m. at Julia Morgan Theate r, 2640 College Ave. Ticke ts are $10-$18. 655-4593. www.bigbandjazz.net 

Via Rio! at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way Cost is $7. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Carlos Zialcita and Myrna del Rio, jazz, blues at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkena z.com 

Michael O’Neill Quintet, featuring Kenny Washington, at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$18. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

“The We That Sets You Free” a benefit for women in prison with Sistas in the Pit, Invincib le, Tru Bloo, Tree Vasquez a nd others at 6:30 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $10-$25, sliding scale, no one turned away. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Catie Curtis, contemporary folk originals, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Anti-W orld, Love Songs, Lost Days of Jesus at 5 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $7. 525-9926. 

MONDAY, OCT. 3 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Bijoux” An exhibition in conjunction with th e Northern California Bead Society, at NIAD Art Center, 551 23rd St., Richmond, through Nov. 18. 620-0290. www.niadart.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Andrew Beahrs reads from his debut novel about life in the early American colonies, “Strange Saint” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

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

Last Word Poetry Series with Christine DeSimone and Jesse Redpond at 7 p.m. at Pegasus Books, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Boubacar Traoré, from Mali, at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$16. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

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TUESDAY, SEPT. 27 

Return of the Over-the-Hills Gang Hikers 55 years and older who are interested in nature study, history, fitness, and fun are invited to join us on a series of monthly excursions exploring our Regional Parks. Meets at 10 a.m. to discover the Miller/Knox Shoreline. For information and to register call 525-2233.  

Tilden Explorers An after-school nature adventure program from 3:15 to 4:45 p.m. for 5-7 year olds, who may be accompanied by an adult. No younger siblings please. We will learn about birds and bird migration. Cost is $6-$8. Registration required. 636-1684. 

The Berkeley High School Site Council meets at 4:30 p.m. in the school library. bhs.berkeleypta.org/ssc 

“Issues in Dying: Learning from Terry Schaivo” An evening with Anne Wall, Ryan Lesh and Kathleen Kelly at 7:30 p.m. in the Tuscan Common Room, Church Divinity School of the Pacific, 2451 Ridge Rd. To register call 204-0720. www.cdsp.edu 

Mountain Biking Basics for Women at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

“Why We Need Black Power” with Omali Yeshitela, chair of the African People’s Socialist Party, at 6 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Donations accepted. 625-1106. 

Workshop on the Individual Education Program for parents of children with special needs at St. Paul’s AME Church, 2024 Ashby Ave. Free, but registration required. To register call the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund, 644-2555. 

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. 

Berkeley PC Users Group Problem solving and beginners meeting to answer, in simple English, users questions about Windows computers. At 7 p.m. at 1145 Walnut St. corner of Eunice. All welcome, no charge. 527-2 177.  

Family Story Time at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Branch Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Free, all ages welcome. 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. 

Be rkeley 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 

“Estate Plannin g” at 4 p.m. at Center for Older Adult Services, 828 San Pablo Ave. To register call 558-7800. 

St. John’s Prime Timers Annual Picnic at 10:30 a.m. at Lake Temescal. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members ove r 50. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 28 

Green Business Tour of the Teleosis Institute to learn about ecologically sustainable medicine at 7 p.m. at 1521B 5th St. 558-7285. www.teleosis.org 

Berkeley Gray Panthers celebrates the 100th Birthday of Maggie Kuhn at 1:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 548-9696. 

WriterCoach Connection Training Sessions Wed. Sept. 28 and Oct. 5 at 6:30 p.m. Help students improve their writing and critical thinking skills; become a mentor to students at Berkeley High, Willar d, King or Longfellow Middle Schools. Commit to 1-2 hours per week during the school day. To register call 524-2319. www.writercoachconnection.org  

An Evening for Educators at the Magnes at 6:30 p.m. Reservations required. 549-6950 ext. 333.  

Writers of t he Storm: “Fake News and Public Decency in the Age of Terror” a writers panel moderated by Clinton Fein of the First Amendment Project, at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. Cost is $10-$15. 848-0237. 

Bayswater Book Cl ub meets to discuss “The Long Emergency” by James Kuntsler at 6:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble, El Cerrito Plaza. 433-2911. 

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

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 

Prose Writer’s Workshop An ongoing group made up of friendly writers who are serious about our craft. All levels welcome. At 7 p.m. at BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. 848-0237. georgeporter@earthlink.net 

Sing your Way Home A free sing-a-long at 4:30 p.m. every Wed. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720. 

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. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station. Sing for Peace at 6:30 p.m. Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www. 

geocities.com/vigil4peace/vigil 

THURSDAY, SEPT. 29 

“Impacts of the Proposed Rezoning of Ashby and Gilman” Comm unity Workshop on the potential displacement of industries, artisans, and artists; and impacts on traffic, jobs; neighborhood character and quality of life, at 7 p.m. at the West Berkeley Senior Center, 1900 Sixth St. 841-7283, ext. 304. 

WAGES: Women’s Action to Gain Economic Security celebrates ten years of work with women’s cooperatives, at 5:30 p.m. at Lake Merritt United Methodist Church, 1255 First Ave., Oakland. Donations welcome. RSVP to 532-5465. 

Funkytown Trunk Show by East Bay fashion designers at 6 p.m. at 510 17th St., Oakland. Salvation Army trucks will be on site to accept clothing for Katrina victims. Tickets are $10. 879-3724. www.at17th.com 

Protest Rally at Berkeley Honda, Shattuck and Parker every Thursday 4:30 to 6 p.m.  

World Affairs/P olitics Group for people 60 years and older at 3:30 p.m. at Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. Cost is $2.50. 524-9122. 

Science of Breath Seminar, for stress management, at 7:30 p.m. in the Home Room, International House, 2299 Piedmont Ave. For inform ation call 894-2920. www.artofliving.org 

Communication for Caregivers An ongoing free Berkeley Adult School class meets Thurs. at 1 p.m. at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5170. 

“Using Medications Safely” at 7 p.m. at Center for Older Adult Services, 828 San Pablo Ave. To register call 558-7800. 

World of Plants Tours Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 p.m. at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Cost is $5. 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu 

FRIDAY, SEPT. 30 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Ted Miles, Curator, San Francisco Maritime Museum, on “Historic Ships.” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $13.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925 or 665-9020.  

Community Blood Drive from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin Ave., Albany. To make an appointment call 1-800-448-3543. www.BeADonor.com 

“The Future of Food” A film about our corporate-controlled food system opens at the Landmark Shattuck Cinem a, 2230 Shattuck Ave. For show times see www.landmarktheatres.com 

Kitka Vechirka Ukranian-style party to raise funds for Kitka’s “The Rusalka Cycle” and Musicares Hurricane Relief Fund at 8 p.m. at The Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Donation $50. RSVP to 4 44-0323. 

Movement: Chi Gung to improve energy and health, at 1 p.m. at Elephant Pharmacy, 1607 Shattuck Ave. at Cedar. 549-9200. 

Three Beats for Nothing sings early music for fun and practice at 10 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 655-8863. 

Berke ley 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. 

Women in Black Vigil, from noon to 1 p.m. at UC Berkeley, Bancroft at Telegraph. wibberkeley@yahoo.com 548-6310, 845-1143. 

M editation, Peace Vigil and Dialogue, gather at noon on the grass close to the West Entrance to UC Berkeley, on Oxford St. near University Ave. People of all traditions are welcome to join us. Sponsored by the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. 655-6169. www.bpf.org 

SATURDAY, OCT. 1 

Sick Plant Clinic UC plant pathologist Dr. Robert Raabe, UC entomologist Dr. Nick Mills, and their team of experts will diagnose what ails your plants from 9 a.m. to noon at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Dr. 643-2755.  

Hawk Migration with Hans and Pam Peeters on their new book, “Raptors of California” at 10:30 a.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. Field trip with authors before the talk, meet at Claremont Ave. and Grizzly Peak at 9 a.m. to watch some raptors in action. 

Autumn Arachnids We will see slides first then explore the area to look for orb weavers, jumping spiders, wolf spiders and more from 2 to 3:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Berkeley Historical Society Walking Tour of the Berk eley View Terrace Neighborhood, led by Phila Rogers, from 10 a.m. to noon. Cost is $8-$10. For information call 848-0181. www.cityofberkeley.info/histsoc 

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

Field of Dreams A family day at the Oakland Museum of California in conjunction with the exhibition “Baseball As America” with pitching and fielding demonstr ations, fast-pitch radar machines, memorabilia appraisals and historic film clips. From noon to 4 p.m. at 1000 Oak St. Free with museum admission. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

Inspiring School Gardens A tour of successful school gardens in Berkeley and Oakl and, sponsored by the Watershed Project. Meet at 9 a.m. at Hillcrest Elementary, 30 Marguerite Dr., Oakland. COst is $25. For information call 665-3689. www.thewatershedproject.org 

National Solar Homes Tour in Oakland and Berkeley from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tours are self-guided. Cost is $15 for two adults. Register online at www.norcalsolar.org 

Native Plant Sale of shrubs, perennials, succulants, grasses and bulbs, plus books and horticultural information. From 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sat., 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Sun., at Merritt College, 12500 Campus Drive, Oakland. 925-376-4095. www.ebcnps.org 

Plants with Fall Blooms with garden designer Hank Jenkins at 10 a.m. at Magic Gardens, 729 Heinz Ave. 644-2351. 

Swim a Mile for Women with Cancer to benefit the Women’s Cancer Resource Center. Sat. and Sun. from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Trefethan Aquatic Center, Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Boulevard, Oakland. 601-4040 ext. 180. www.wcrc.org/swim/index.htm 

Benefit Yoga Workshop for the Woman’s Cancer Resource Center, in memory of Katie Allen from 2 to 5 p.m. at the Yoga Room, 2640 College Ave. Taught by Bonnie Maeda and Gay White. Donation $20-$40. 848-0993. 

Progressive Democrats of the East Bay meets at 1 p.m. at the Temescal Library, 5205 Telegraph, Oakland. The agenda includes a discussion of the organizing for the get-out-the-vote campaign, in coalition with Alliance for a Better California, labor groups, and other progressives. 526-4632. www.pdeastbay.org 

Rally to Fight Government Repression with Lynne Stewart and others at 2 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library Meeting Room, 2090 Kittredge St. 839-0852. 

Caldecott Tunnel 4th Bore Project will be the topic at Oakland Councilmember Jane Brunner’s Community Advisory Meeting at 10 a.m. at Peralta Elementary School, 460 63rd St. 2 38-7013. 

Sankofa Health Fair on Afrocentric roots of heath and healing, Sat. and Sun. from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 4550 San Pablo Avenue, Suite E, Second Floor, Emeryville. 839-6127. 

“Know Your Rights” A free training on what your rights are when dealing wi th the police from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Copwatch, 2022 Blake St. 548-0425. 

Protest Rally at Berkeley Honda at 1 p.m. at Shattuck and Parker.  

Blessing of the Bunnies for St. Francis of Assisi Feast Day at 3 p.m. at 303 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Please bring bunnies in carriers. 525-6155. 

Spirit Walking Aqua Chi (TM) A gentle water exercise class at 10 a.m. at the Berkeley High Warm Pool. Cost is $3.50 per session. 526-0312. 

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

SUNDAY, OCT. 2 

Morning Bird Walk to welcome back the Northern Flicker, Kinglets and others, at 9:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Spice Of Life Festival in Nort h Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto with demonstrations, tastings and live music from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Shattuck Ave. from Virginia to Rose Sts. www.northshattuck.org 

Halloween Animals Learn the facts and myths about snakes and spiders from 2 to 4:30 p.m. at T ilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 525-2233. 

Retirement Party for Alan Kaplan, for 33 years a naturalist with East Bay Regional Parks District, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Indian Camp picnic area near the entrance to t he Tilden Nature Area parking lot. 444-0355. 

African Diaspora Film Society presents “Bay Area Independent Filmmakers Mini-Festival” at 2 p.m. at Parkway Theater, 1834 Park Blvd., Oakland. Cost is $5. www.picturepubpizza.com/special-events/diaspora 

Johan Galtung, Norwegian Peace and Conflict Mediator will speak at 4 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, 1924 Cedar St. 526-2900. 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks 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 

ONGOING 

Find a Loving Animal Companion at the Berkeley-East Bay Hum ane Society Adoption Center (open from 11 a.m. - 7 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday). 2700 Ninth St. 845-7735. www.berkeleyhumane.org  

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

MONDAY, OCT. 3 

National Organization for Women Oakland/East Bay Chapter meets at 6 p.m. in the boardroom of the Oakland YWCA, 1515 Webster St. The speaker will be from Narika an organization which addresses the unmet needs of abused South Asian women. 287-8948. 

“Senior Cohousing: A Community Approach to Independent Living” with Berkeley architect Charles Durrett, at 7:30 p.m. at The Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. 315-0431. 

“An Emerging Church” An evening with Tony Jones and friends at 7:30 p.m. in the Tuscan Common Room, Church Divinity School of the Pacific, 2451 Ridge Rd. To register call 204-0720. www.cdsp.edu 

Critical Viewing An ongoing group to examine the art/craft(iness) of short films and television product ions and its effects on our daily lives, at 1 p.m. at the BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. Free. 848-0237. georgeporter@earthlink.net 

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

Kol Hadash Humanistic Rosh Hashanah Celebration at 7:30 p.m. at Albany Community Centre, 1249 Marin Ave. Please bring non-perishable food for the needy. To RSVP email Lmgutner@aol.com 

CITY MEETINGS 

City Council meets Tues., Sept. 27 at 7 p.m in City Council Chambers. 981-6900. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Citizens Budget Review Commission meets Wed., Sept. 28, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7041.  

Civic Arts Commission meets Wed., Sept. 28, at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Mary Ann Merker, 981-7533. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/civicarts 

Disaster Council meets Wed., Sept. 28 at 7 p.m., at the Emergency Operations Center, 997 Cedar St. William Greulich, 981-5 502. www.ci.berkeley.ca. us/commissions/disaster 

Energy Commission meets Wed., Sept. 28, at 6:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Neal De Snoo, 981-5434. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/energy 

Planning Commission meets Wed., Sept. 28, 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. Sept. 28, at 7:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-4950. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/p olicereview9

Congressman Steve King is the yokel who has organized the successful Republican effort to prevent the Berkeley Post Office from being named after Berkeley’s revered Maudelle Shirek. We won’t waste much space here delineating exactly how annoyed the people of Berkeley are at his presumption, because they’ll certainly make their opinions known in our letter columns. Instead, let’s take a good look at who King is, and what we might do from here to make sure the people in his district are suitably embarrassed by him. First, he’s been quoted speaking admiringly of old Joe McCarthy (dean of the Congressional witchhunters in the ‘50s, for those young readers who were shortchanged in their U.S. history class.) His website does a candid job of describing his other politics: 

“He worked in the State Senate to successfully eliminate the inheritance tax, enforce workplace drug testing, enforce parenting rights, including parental notification of abortion, pass tax cuts for working Iowans, and pass the law that made English the official language in Iowa.” A veritable laundry list of ignorant and misconceived Republican crusades, and he’s been on board for all of them!  

And there’s more. He’s evidently an economic ignoramus as well. He’s described on a Republican party site as “an outspoken proponent of the FairTax, a national sales tax that would replace the federal income tax. ‘I was an advocate for replacing the income tax with a consumption tax long before I ever ran for public office,’ King said.” Tax cuts for working Iowans, indeed. King doesn’t seem to know or care that sales taxes take the most from the least well off, since even poor working people have to spend money to buy the necessities of life.  

But does this mean that he opposes unnecessary federal spending, as a genuine conservative might? Well, let’s look again at his website: 

“He has long been dedicated to adding value to the corn stalk and bean stubble. The Fifth District … is one of the most productive areas in the nation for renewable fuels. King’s very first bill in Congress was an expansion of a tax credit to small ethanol and biodiesel producers.”  

Ethanol is created by the over-production of corn on those federally subsidized Fifth District farms. No one seems to have told King, or perhaps he doesn’t care, that the use of ethanol as a gas additive is “one of the most misguided public policy decisions to be made in recent history,” according to UC Berkeley professor of civil and environmental engineering Tad Patzek. Professor Patzek, in common with colleagues at Cornell and elsewhere, proved that there is a net energy loss from every gallon of ethanol produced from corn. He says that the whole process of producing ethanol from corn takes more fossil fuel than the energy that comes from the biofuel. So King’s tax credit program for his Iowa constituents is, to coin a phrase, just another pork barrel, a transfer of wealth from national taxpayers to the homefolks.  

It’s tempting to call for a popcorn boycott as a way of letting people in Iowa know that we Californians don’t like them to dis our local heroine. But all Iowans are not bad guys. King’s district includes Sioux City, birthplace of Dear Abby and Ann Landers, twin sisters who were reliable voices for sensible politics in their long careers as newspaper advice columnists. State 29, a funny anonymous Iowa blog, dubbed Steve King “Iowa’s Dumbest Congressman.” Statewide, Iowa often goes for Democrats.  

But what’s with all those other people out there in western Iowa? King carried his district last time by a two-thirds vote. Evidently a lot of people there think that it’s all right to insult a 94-year-old woman who has devoted a major part of her life to a meal program for senior citizens, just because back in the day she might have had some Communist friends. They don’t seem to care that their own congressman (that’s what he calls himself) looks dumber than dirt to a lot of us. And they have the right to elect anyone they want.  

But just on the off chance that some people out there do care what their district looks like in more enlightened places, our reliable corps of dynamite opinion writers should write to the two Iowa papers which have endorsed King in the past, the Des Moines Register and the Sioux City Journal, and let them know that we northern Californians don’t appreciate being insulted by western Iowans. (Keep in mind, though, that all papers are not as generous as the Daily Planet with column inches for letters.) 

—Becky O’Malley

A few weeks ago we received an email from a member of the Downtown Berkeley Association’s design committee asking if the Planet’s opinion pages would be available for a forum on the future of downtown Berkeley. The idea, not yet adopted A few weeks ago we received an email from a member of the Downtown Berkeley Association’s design committee asking if the Planet’s opinion pages would be available for a forum on the future of downtown Berkeley. The idea, not yet adopted by the DBA or fully fleshed out, was that there would be a two-part process. First, the public would be asked to submit ideas in writing for publication: a kind of “civic visioning exercise” to tap the creativity of Berkeley citizens to think about what Berkeley Downtown might be. That would be followed by a well-conceived scientific phone poll to gauge citizens’ preference for what should be happening downtown.  

Our quick reply was an easy “yes!” That’s why we’re here—to provide a way for good ideas to be brought forward and debated in public. The group’s preliminary proposal can be viewed on the internet at http://busduse.org/VisioningDowntownProposal.html. It hasn’t yet been launched, but it’s promising. 

In the same spirit, we’re happy to provide space for the opinion from the Mayor’s Office which appears today. We firmly believe that sunshine in the planning process is the best way to avoid mistakes. In the days to come we expect that citizens with all kinds of opinions on how to plan for improving downtown Berkeley will come forward to comment on the Mayor’s ideas, and that’s great too. We’ve already received comments on the University-City aspects of the planning process, and we expect more. 

And of course we reserve our own right to make our own comments on the process as it develops. In fact, as it happens, when we got the mayor’s comments on Friday we were preparing comments on the proposal for public participation in planning for Downtown, authored by Dan Marks, head of the city of Berkeley’s planning department, which the City Manager included in the Council’s packet for this week’s meeting. Comparing the mayoral statement and the staff proposal, we note a certain amount of overlap, indicating perhaps a certain amount of pre-proposal collaboration, which is fine. But we urge the city council, who should be the ones with the real power to decide what’s going to be the policy here, to pause for reflection before rubber-stamping any process which bypasses the Planning Commission, the body which under the city charter has been set up specifically to do this job.  

One comment on the mayor’s opinion: we haven’t heard what he characterizes as “troubling misinformation”—that the city gave the university explicit veto power over city planning decisions regarding downtown. That’s a straw man, easily knocked down, as it should be.  

What we have heard is that the University has the right to dock the city, at the rate of $15,000 a month, if the joint plan isn’t finished on schedule. The money would come out of the very meager compensation the university has agreed to provide in lieu of taxes for sewer use, fire protection and other necessities of life for campus employees and residents. At the rate of $15,000 a month, the tiny hoard would soon be gone. Since the total is so small anyway, perhaps the penalty clause isn’t a major issue, but it’s profoundly irritating.  

What’s more serious in the agreement is that the university can indeed veto lots of aspects of the process, for example in Section II.B.6 of the agreement: “Joint review of DAP and EIR: because the DAP is a Joint Plan, there shall be no release of draft or final DAP or EIR without concurrence by both parties.” If that’s not a veto, what is it? 

Here’s the worst problem with the agreement: it says nothing about public participation in the planning process, which has always been one of Berkeley’s core values. It’s clearly an attempt to bypass our long tradition of citizen-led planning. Yet Mayor Bates’s opinion says that the Downtown Area Plan is the most effective way for the citizens of Berkeley to have a voice in downtown development. If that’s the case, why is the Planning Commission, the body which is entrusted by the city charter with planning responsibility, not leading the effort? In Sacramento, where the Mayor has perhaps spent too many years, decisions are often made in advance behind closed doors, but here in Berkeley we’ve become accustomed to open planning. But the Marks proposal, in bureaucratic double-speak, says that “staff specifically does not recommend” that the planning commission take the lead—in other words, he’s against it. 

The key to the staff attitude regarding citizen-led planning can be found in the Marks proposal’s frequent use of the word “manageable” in discussing various approaches to citizen participation. We counted four instances with no effort, and there are probably more. Yes, yes, we get it, city staff wants a process that they can manage! 

Well, “managed public participation” will be no more successful than “managed care” has been, and for many of the same reasons. The city of Berkeley’s planning department submitted an appalling first draft of the city’s general plan, which required four hard years of citizen effort to straighten out. We expect the City Council to speak up for all of us at this juncture, to make sure that if we’re stuck with a UC-led downtown plan, at least citizens’ voices will be heard loud and clear from day one of the planning process, even if Berkeleyans aren’t always “manageable.” Democracy is a messy process, hard to manage indeed, but a lot more likely to work in the end than top-down planning a la Robert Moses.