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Photograph by Riya Bhattacharjee:
          Hundreds of protesters marched from UC Berkeley toward downtown as part of the May Day action protesting proposed immigration reform.
Photograph by Riya Bhattacharjee: Hundreds of protesters marched from UC Berkeley toward downtown as part of the May Day action protesting proposed immigration reform.
 

News

A Day of Immigrant Action

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Tuesday May 02, 2006

The conch shells resounding and the flags raised in unison on the Sproul Hall steps at noon Monday signaled a day of action for a new civil rights movement. 

Students, workers, and children from UC Berkeley and elsewhere joined the May 1 national boycott to support immigrant rights. 

As they chanted, “We didn’t cross the borders, the borders crossed us,” they were joined by hundred of thousands of protesters across the nation who all demanded justice from racial discrimination, exploitation, and unfair i mmigration policies. 

Members of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights from Oakland, who called upon members of Congress and the administration to “stop masquerading immigration ‘reform’ proposals such as HR 4437 and the compromise bills p resented in the Senate as immigration reform,” came to the rally. 

After the rally on campus, hundreds of participants marched through the streets of downtown Berkeley. 

Erica Sanchez, a UC student and child of immigrants, chanted, “Se ve, se sient e, el pueblo esta presente,” translated as, “You see it, you feel it, the people are here.” 

“Our economy is built on slave labor. We have to stop the abuse of immigrant workers,” she said.  

Hilda Suarez, who had not gone to work at the Gilman Grill that day came with her nephew, Roger Magdaleno, whose T-shirt read: “If I am illegal, so is the terminator.” 

“I was able to miss work and come here today because my owners supported us. They have closed down the grill for a day. I think it is time for us to stand up. This is history in the making and we will not be defeated,” Suarez said. 

Civil rights activist Munigya, who spoke on behalf of the African People’s Revolution Party, assured those present that the “conscious progressive Revolutionary African Na tion stands with the immigration rights movement.” 

“This country was formed out of the illegality of people coming across borders that did not belong to them,” Munigya said. “The African people are the second illegal immigrants to come to the United Stat es by virtue of being stolen property. The sons of daughters of Colombus were not afraid, and nor shall we be.” 

UC student Annabele Paez spoke on behalf of the Coalition of Undocumented Students. 

“Justice has been denied to thousands of undocumented students who want to pursue their college education even after they were brought into this country by their parents at an early age with or without their consent,” she said. “The reality is that upon graduation these students face the fact that they cannot receive federal or state financial aid, they cannot work legally or obtain a drivers license.” 

Almost 40 percent of all undocumented students live in California, according to event organizers. Paez stressed the importance of supporting the Dream Act whic h paves the way for legal status and eventual citizenship for immigrant youth. Under the Dream Act, immigrant students who are long-term residents of this country can graduate from high school, pursue their education and on completion of two years in coll ege or the military become eligible to apply for legal residency. 

Ronald T. Takaki, a professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley, told those present that the struggle of the one million undocumented Asian immigrants was a struggle for all. “And in the sa me way, your struggle is also our struggle,” he said. 

Takaki added that the immigration reforms needs to go to the source of the problem. “Most importantly NAFTA needs to be reformed,” he said. “Under NAFTA 1.5 million Mexican farmers were driven into ba nkruptcy.” 

Mayoral candidate Zachary Runningwolf was also present at the rally to show his support. 

“The demonstrators who are here today are not immigrants, they are indigenous people,” he told The Planet.  

Prof. Carlos Munoz, Jr. from UC Berkeley’s D epartment of Ethnic Studies, had flown in for the rally after speaking on immigration rights in New York that morning. 

“It was incredible,” he said. “There were more than 500,000 demonstrators on Broadway supporting the end of war and immigrant rights. I t feels great to be part of something this big.” 

Berkeley Police Officer Ed Galvan said the police reported no problem’s during the May Day march, which started from the UC Berkeley campus, proceeded west on Bancroft Way, then turned north on Shattuck Av enue before heading west again on University Avenue. 

“They walked along University to Sixth Street, where we had set up a line,” Galvan said. “They sat down for ten to fifteen minutes and heard from a couple of speakers before they dispersed.” 

Galvan sa id about half the marchers went on to the BART station, where they boarded trains for San Francisco. 

The California Highway Patrol kept traffic from entering the city from Interstate 80 at the University interchange, and cars headed toward the freeway al ong University were diverted north at Sixth Street to Gilman. 

Irene Leja, who had boycotted her cleaning jobs that day, brought her daughter Briana to the Sproul Plaza rally and march.  

“We don’t have any papers,” Leja said. “But we are not doing any harm either. We pay taxes, then why shouldn’t we get benefits? Don’t our children deserve a good life too.”””


Public Mixed Over Trader Joe’s Project

By Richard Brenneman
Tuesday May 02, 2006

A parade of speakers marched to the podium at Thursday’s Zoning Adjustments Board, 22 praising a proposed development, and a dozen speaking in opposition. 

The board took testimony during a session in which they were to advise developers about the height and mass of the planned five-story project at the northwest corner of the University Avenue/Martin Luther King Jr. Way intersection. 

But rather that the building itself, many of the speakers reserved most of their adulation for the proposed ground floor tenant. 

“A Trader Joe’s in a handsome building on University Avenue would greatly enhance our community,” said Calvin Ng, a Bonita Avenue resident. 

“I totally support having a Trader Joe’s nearby,” said West Berkeley resident Verna Lim. “My roommate is sick of shopping at liquor stores.” 

The German-owned supermarket chain, known for its cult-like following, currently has stores in Emeryville and El Cerrito where many of the speakers said they currently shop. 

“We should start calling this the Trader Joe’s building,” ZAB member Bob Allen declared later in the meeting. 

Trader Joe’s has signed a lease for ground floor space in the 1885 University Ave. project, contingent on an opening date by 2009, said developer Chris Hudson, who was accompanied by his partner, Evan McDonald. 

The pair is best known in Berkeley for the projects they built for developer Patrick Kennedy, including the Gaia Building, a structure much on ZAB’s agenda of late. 

The pair have split from Kennedy, and as part of the separation apparently retained the 1885 University Ave. project, which had been initially proposed under the umbrella of Kennedy’s Panoramic Interests. 

Hudson opened the discussion with the declaration that the project had many supporters in the city, and launched into a presentation that focused initially on infill development—building on vacant or “underutilized” sites in urban communities—and the need for more such development in Berkeley. 

Contending that the project, which had been redesigned with fewer (156 versus 186) and larger units than a version submitted earlier, Hudson said they addressed concerns of residents along Berkeley Way by removing four units along edge of the property on that street. 

Opponents focused on both the building itself, which would still tower over their homes, and on the traffic impacts that would come from the Trader Joe’s parking lot, which features a single entrance and exit, accessible only from their residential street. 

Attorney Rena Rickles, whose usual clients are developers, spoke for Steve Wollmer and Residents for a Liveable Berkeley Way. 

“This is not about Trader Joe’s,” Rickles said. “It’s about the design that goes around Trader Joe’s.” 

Noting that none of the pro-project speakers lived on Berkeley Way, Rickles said, “If you designed a building to have the worst impacts on the people living nearby, you couldn’t have done a better job.” 

And design issues also prompted many of the questions raised by ZAB members. 

Architect Bob Allen, considered one of the board members most favorably disposed to new projects, raised some of the harshest questions about “fatal flaws in this building that we need to address,” adding, “I don’t think there’s anything in state law 

that says we have to approve inhumane or substandard units.” 

Allen said “about 18 percent of the apartments look out at a blank wall 10 feet away” directly into the facing windows of other apartments across a 16-foot 

courtyard. “That’s closer than I am to the two applicants.” 

“This is absolutely unacceptable housing,” he said. 

“Living conditions are terribly important,” said Jesse Anthony, who often votes with Allen and is himself head of the South Berkeley Neighborhood Development Council, a non-profit group planning an even larger development at the Ashby BART station. 

Commenting on the current design, Anthony said, “They are tearing those buildings down back east, thank God. People know better now.” 

“A lot of those units are going to be pretty miserable units,” agreed member Dave Blake.  

Sara Shumer, the board’s newest member, shared their concern about the views, noting that more units could be in the same fix should hoped-for development occur on the western edge of the block along University. 

Several members, including Chair Chris Tiedemann, said they favored shifting the mass of the building away from the residential street and more onto 

University. “The more you can shift away from Berkeley Way the better,” she said. 

Rick Judd, a board member who is also a land use attorney, said he wouldn’t mind seeing seven stories on University Avenue. But he did resent that the developers kept telling the board that if they didn’t like the new plans, they could always go back and build the 183-unit project previously proposed, one Allen had said reminded him of a prison. 

“I feel this is set up to back me into a corner by holding the 183-unit project over my head like a club,” Judd said, adding later, “I need to know what levels of discretion we really have.” 

Member Raudell Wilson seemed the most favorably disposed to the project, saying, “We all look forward to going to design review. They are bringing us affordable housing, and we get retail downtown.” 

Still, Wilson said, he’d like to see the height along Berkeley Way reduced. 

Blake said four floors was the most he’d accept along Berkeley Way. 

Member Dean Metzger also called for a height reduction along Berkeley Way, and said he’d be willing to consider six stories along University. 

Hudson said adding stories above five floors raised problems, because more expensive building techniques were required. 

Allen said he didn’t like Trader Joe’s there either. “I would love a Trader Joe’s downtown, but this is the wrong location.” 

He raised another question, based on Hudson McDonald’s most famous Berkeley collaboration. 

“What if Trader Joe’s pulls a Gaia on us?,” Allen said, referring to the controversial building where the proposed major tenant—the Gaia Bookstore—never occupied the ground floor and mezzanine “cultural” space. 

“We’re still talking about the Gaia Building when Gaia is long gone,” said Blake. The store went out of business before the building was finished. 

Just where ZAB stands remains an issue. While Principal Planner and ZAB Secretary Debra Sanderson said the developers are entitled to the 183-unit project if the board fails to agree on their new plan, Allen said he wasn’t so sure. 

 

Gaia report  

The Gaia Building, which has been the subject of much discussion at ZAB meetings, was also on Tuesday’s agenda in the form of a report from Sanderson on last Tuesday City Council meeting. 

Just what the council did or did not do remains a question, as does ZAB’s own role in overseeing the use of the building’s first two floors, the so-called cultural space that enabled Patrick Kennedy and Hudson McDonald to build a project with two more floors of apartments than city zoning would otherwise allow. 

“The council adopted a motion that the Carol Barrett letter was valid,” Sanderson said, referring to a letter written by Anna de Leon and countersigned by Barrett, the city’s then-Planning Director, on June 6, 2003. 

That letter included a section spelling out the proposed uses of the cultural space, declaring: “In the performance (theater) area, we will program performance use on 30 percent of the days of each month on average. In the remainder of the ground floor and mezzanine, we will program arts related activities fifteen days per month on average.” 

Blake said he was mystified by the council’s action. “The problem wasn’t the Barrett letter,” he said. “The problem was (Deputy Planning Director) Wendy Cosin’s interpretation.” 

“And the council said that was acceptable,” Sanderson said. 

Under Cosin’s interpretation, the performance space can apparently be used for for-profit catering and other events for 70 percent of the time. 

Another remaining question is whether or not the board still had a say in issuing a modified use permit for alterations that had taken place or were called for in the space. 

“I am not clear about that,” said Sanderson. 

 

Retroactive OK 

Rejecting the request of neighbors and Landmarks Preservation Commissioner Carrie Olson, ZAB members vote to given their retroactive sanction to the demolition of the Victorian cottage at 2194 Sixth St. 

Attorney John Gutierrez represented owner Gary Feiner, whose plans to convert two adjacent Victorians into duplexes stirred neighbors to create the Ocean View Sisterna Historic District, which the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) had designated in 2004. 

“I come with a heavy heart,” said Olson, presenting the LPC’s request that the board withhold action until the landmarks commission could consider the issue at their upcoming meeting this Thursday. 

“This is a new and unknown territory for us, a demolition,” she said, noting that demolitions were carried on the books as a misdemeanor criminal offense. 

But Rempel and Gutierrez said the demolition was inadvertent, the action of an overzealous contractor who had acted to protect the safety of his work from the perils of an old roof. 

Neighbor Jano Bogg also begged the board to delay acting, but members seemed to accept the developer’s explanations and concurred with Jesse Anthony, who said, “I’m not interested in punishment at this point.” 

Members admonished Rempel to make sure that all of the stripped architectural detail was replaced in kind, and to repair windows which had been installed contrary to the approved plans. 

The demolition was approved by a unanimous vote. 

 

Other action  

The board approved installation of a new carbon absorption system at Pacific Steel Casting at 1333 Second St., mandated as part of the settlement agreement designed to resolve the complaints of neighbors over bad odors emitted by the plant. 

The board also approved a second story addition to a home at 1309 Carleton St. over the objections of two neighbors..


Seeking a New Look For Downtown BART

By Suzanne La Barre
Tuesday May 02, 2006

Plans to redesign the downtown BART station drew a range of reactions at an open house presentation over the weekend. 

Consultants from Community Design and Architecture presented four sketches of design options for a reconfigured downtown transit area Saturday, under the stewardship of the city of Berkeley, AC Transit and BART. 

The schemes, paid for with a $75,000 grant from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and $15,000 of city money, were outlined on poster board in the meeting room of the Berkeley Public Library. Public comment was invited. 

The primary goal of the study was to float ideas for improving downtown’s transportation accessibility while maintaining commercial and cultural development. 

“It’s clear people aren’t happy with what’s there today and want that redesigned,” said Phil Erickson, of Community Design and Architecture. 

Options range from implementing a few major changes to reconfiguring the streetscape to allot for a centralized “historical” transit hub. They are as follows: 

• Option 1 would maintain the existing street layout. The most significant change would be to design enhancements to the BART rotunda at Shattuck Avenue and Center Street, as well as the possible addition of free-standing kiosks. 

• Option 2 would remove the Shattuck couplet—the division of Shattuck into one-way lanes flanking a commercial island north of Center—and reconfigure traffic to travel along two lanes in each direction. An open space on the east side of Shattuck at Center would also be included. The rotunda would be revamped. 

• Option 3 would remove the rotunda and place the main BART entrance on the east side of Shattuck at Center. Traffic along the Shattuck couplet would be redirected along four lanes on Shattuck west and two lanes on Shattuck east.  

• Option 4, referred to as the historical model, would create a centralized transit plaza for BART and buses in the heart of downtown. The BART rotunda would be eliminated, as would through traffic on Center at Shattuck. The traffic configuration on Shattuck would remain as is.  

All four plans include designated bus lanes for Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), the accelerated AC Transit line that earned a fair amount of criticism Saturday in the form of brightly colored post-it notes affixed to the designs: “Say no to BRT,” “There should be no bus-only lanes and no cooperation with AC Transit’s BRT scheme,” and “Really, really dumb. Don’t they notice that the monster buses are always empty?” 

East Bay BRT would run from San Leandro through Oakland to Berkeley, ending north of Center in downtown Berkeley. The project is still in an early phase, as an environmental impact report initially due out last fall has yet to be released. Tentative plans are now scheduled for summer. 

Nonetheless, some residents are ramping up their battle against a transit line they fear will be underutilized and harmful to city traffic flow.  

Principal Transportation Planner for the City of Berkeley Matt Nichols emphasized that design options must take BRT into account, regardless of whether it’s implemented. Besides, he said, the redesign aims to improve downtown transportation more generally.  

“It makes transit work better whether there’s Bus Rapid Transit or not,” he said.  

Public opinion on the four options varied from general concerns about public restrooms, preservation of trees and bicycle thoroughfares to design-specific comments, like the effects of closing Center to through traffic and how pedestrians would fare if Shattuck west became two-way. 

Cost estimates for the project are yet undetermined, though consultants say the more drastic options (three and four) would be pricey. Those options also seemed to garner greater public support than the other two. 

Transportation Commissioner Rob Wrenn advocated for a fifth option: running BRT north on Shattuck up to University Avenue, and south on Oxford Street, and closing that side of Shattuck to car traffic. That would make the street more pedestrian-friendly and remove the daunting task of fitting two designated bus lanes onto an already crowded artery, he said. The idea was floated by AC Transit, but was not included as a preliminary design option.  

The next step is to organize public comments then to whittle down the options, Erickson said.


Local Impact of Preschool Initiative Is Unclear

By Suzanne La Barre
Tuesday May 02, 2006

An initiative to grant preschool to all California 4-year-olds is on the ballot this June, but how it would operate locally, if approved, remains unclear. 

Proposition 82, the Preschool for All initiative spearheaded by actor and director Rob Reiner, would provide $2.4 billion a year for universal preschool, extending early childhood education to about 70 to 80 percent of California’s children over the next decade. About 35 percent of the state’s children do not attend any preschool.  

The measure would levy a 1.7 percent tax on individuals earning more than $400,000 and couples who make more than $800,000. Parents would have the option to select where they want their child to attend, whether a public, private or not-for-profit institution. Non-public programs could opt into the program but would not be required to do so. 

Teachers would be required to hold college degrees, and programs would be held to statewide academic standards to prepare students for elementary school. Administration and management would fall to county school districts. 

The proposition earned the backing of the Berkeley City Council last Tuesday, with Councilmember Laurie Capitelli abstaining.  

Berkeley is home to early childhood programs of all stripes, from development centers through the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) to private Montessori schools, foreign language programs and nonprofits.  

Currently, low-income students have access to fully or partially subsidized public preschool. Statewide, about 52 percent of low-income 4-year-olds attend preschool. BUSD offers early education to about 340 students. 

At the other end of the spectrum are the private and nonprofit programs, which parents generally finance out-of-pocket. An institution like The Model School on Prince Street can range anywhere from $667 to $946 a month, depending on hours of care received. 

Prop. 82 supporters say the initiative would benefit low- and middle-income families, who may not qualify for Head Start and other state-sponsored programs but can’t afford to send their children to pricey private schools. 

“The poor have access to the subsidized programs and the well-to-do can pay tuition,” said Rebecca Wheat, former principal of early childhood development for BUSD. “But many people in the middle and the lower middle can’t pay the $1,000 a month tuition and they do not qualify for state programs.” 

Wheat, who now teaches childhood development at San Francisco State and has penned multiple books on education, supports the proposition. 

“When we get this money, hopefully it will make a big difference in a lot of lives,” she said. 

She has reservations, though. Among them: Will standardizing curriculum tarnish program variety and lead to the type of testcentric, cookie-cutter education that features prominently in California’s K-12 schools? 

Alameda County Office of Education Superintendent Sheila Jordan says “no.” The office, which would manage Berkeley’s participating Preschool for All sites, would ensure program diversity, she said. 

“We’re not going to do a one-size fits all,” Jordan said. “There will be some standardized programs, but we want to be able to create space for the various cultures to develop programs that are culturally consonant.” 

She could not offer specifics beyond that, however.  

Another variable is the distribution of funding. A report released by the Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) institute suggests that by charging county education offices with program administration, Proposition 82 would favor public school districts over private and nonprofit institutions.  

Some non-public institutions reached by the Daily Planet say they won’t opt into the program anyway. Many have waiting lists and fare well without state money. Anthony Wang, owner of Berkeley Chinese School and Wonderland Preschool, is unclear as to how the ballot measure would affect those schools. 

“The area we’re serving, there’s not too many people who are low-income,” he said. “I’m not sure if we’d be affected by it.” 

But Daisy Mante, director of The Model School, feels certain the initiative would exact a toll on the state’s preschool centers.  

Her school offers childcare up to 40 hours a week, 240 days a year. The Preschool for All Initiative would fund the equivalent of one half-day, 180 days a year, which won’t meet the needs of some families, she said. 

She further questions the requirement for teachers to earn bachelor’s degrees. Teachers at The Model School, who earn between $12 and $14 an hour, are not required to hold degrees. 

“The ones who have them are not always the best teachers, and are certainly not the most loving and caring with students,” she said. Mante founded The Model School, a Montessori-based program, in 1987. 

Research does not indicate a link between a bachelor degree-level education and early childhood education, the PACE report said. 

Mante said she would not apply to receive state money through Preschool for All, but can envision a scenario where parents pressure centers to incorporate the program. 

The Berkeley-Richmond Jewish Community Center is among the schools that would not take part in the program, said assistant teacher Maia Fajerman, but she supports the measure nonetheless. 

She said, “Any money that supports early education is good.””


Student Achievement at Small Schools Is Mixed

By Suzanne La Barre
Tuesday May 02, 2006

Academic performance at Berkeley High School’s first two small schools is a mixed bag, new data show. 

Communication Arts and Sciences (CAS) and Community Partnerships Academy (CPA), both of which are small schools within the larger Berkeley High School, show higher attendance rates among ninth-graders and strong parental involvement, but trends outlining academic achievement in the 2004-2005 school year are less clear-cut. 

Inconclusive results are fairly typical with new small schools, said Victor Cary, program director for the Bay Area Coalition of Equitable Schools (BAYCES), the nonprofit that helped launch small schools in the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) with $1.7 million in startup funds. 

“You can’t expect to see wholesale changes so soon,” he said. 

CAS, BUSD’s first small school, opened in 2003. The institution educates about 300 students and focuses on media literacy and communication skills. CPA, which has about 250 students, formed the following year with an emphasis on community leadership development. Both were programs at Berkeley High School before earning small school status. 

Limited as the data is, findings from the 2004-2005 school year are as follows: 

On average, students at CPA, of whom more than 60 percent are African-American, earned lower GPAs than students at either CAS or the comprehensive high school. CPA also exhibited higher rates of students who are failing (receiving at least one D or F). 

However, African-American and Latino students at both small schools were outperforming their peers at the larger school. The average GPA for African-American students was 2.34 at CPA and 2.37 at CAS, compared with 2.05 at Berkeley High School. 

Scores on standardized tests displayed a range of achievement. A smaller percentage of CPA students were labeled “advanced” or “proficient”—the highest categories of achievements—following administration of the California Standards Test. At both small schools, the same percentage of ninth-grade African-American students performed at advanced or proficient levels (8 percent), compared with 19 percent at the larger school.  

Analysts prefer to look at ninth-grade statistics because 2004-2005 was the first time BUSD used an equity-seeking lottery system to people the small schools. Additionally, ninth-graders are the best indicators of the program’s effectiveness, having never attended another high school, said Berkeley High School Vice Principal Matt Huxley, who presented the data to the Berkeley Board of Education April 19. 

CPA students on a whole exhibited a lower passing rate on the high school exit exam, but when broken down by ethnicity, African-American students at both small schools outperformed their peers at the larger high school by about 30 percentage points. 

A 1996 study conducted by Kathleen Cotton for the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory found that achievement in small schools, especially for poor and minority students, is equal or greater than in larger schools. Some of the data for Berkeley schools appear to support that conclusion. 

Huxley, who also serves as the CAS administrator, urges general caution when examining Berkeley’s data, because as a cross-sectional study (as opposed to a longitudinal study), it paints an incomplete portrait of school progress. In four years, analysts should have a better idea of the efficacy of Berkeley’s small schools on academics and closing the achievement gap, Huxley said.  

One consistent finding from the data report was that both small schools have higher rates of attendance. Huxley chalks it up to the intimate environment intrinsic to smaller schools.  

“Teachers know their students better and parents are more involved, so you just notice when people aren’t there,” he said.  

An additional finding, based on a survey distributed to parents, was that small school parents feel connected to their child’s education. More than 90 percent of CPA parents agreed the school makes a concerted effort to communicate to them what students need to earn a high school diploma and get into college. About four-fifths who responded said they perceive opportunities to get involved at the school; and all said they receive information about parent council and leadership meetings.  

CAS parents also felt strong ties to the school, compared with Berkeley High School, where only 29 percent of those responding said the school effectively gets parents involved in leadership student activities and academics. 

The latter two findings—high attendance and parent involvement—lay a firm groundwork for improved student performance, Huxley said. 

“It’s very promising,” he said. “But it takes time to create these strong, small schools. We have to be patient.” 

Two small schools, the Arts and Humanities Academy, and the School of Social Justice and Ecology, opened this year, and a fifth school, emphasizing technology or engineering, is in the works, Huxley said. 

 


County Gets Late Start On Measure A Oversight

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Tuesday May 02, 2006

Two years after voters gave Alameda County the authority to impose a half-cent sales tax to augment medical and health care spending, the county is just beginning the process of monitoring how a major percentage of Measure A money has been spent. 

Six months into the monitoring process, the kinks are still being worked out. 

“We’re way past the deadline for our review,” Measure A Oversight Committee Chair Dr. Larry Platt said following a committee meeting in San Leandro last weekend. “This should have been done two years ago.” 

With the Oversight Committee just beginning review of the 2004-05 expenditures, Platt said “we hope to finish our reviews by August so that we can get a report out to the supervisors.” 

He said that committee review of 2005-06 Measure A expenditures for the fiscal year ending in July would begin immediately afterwards. 

Measure A won the support of 71.1 percent of Alameda County voters in March of 2004. Seventy-five percent of the sales tax money was earmarked for the beleaguered Alameda County Medical Center, the county’s public hospital and clinic system that has fallen on rough financial times in recent years. 

The remaining 25 percent was to be parceled out by County Supervisors to community-based health care providers and hospitals providing services to low-income citizens. 

Since then, Measure A sales tax revenues have been running above budgeted expectations, according to reports from the Chief Financial Officer of the Alameda County Medical Center.  

With collections starting in September of 2004, the county received $95.8 million in Measure A monies in fiscal year 2004-05, with $71.6 million going to the medical center and $24 million going to the remaining health care agencies. 

As of the first eight months of fiscal year 2005-06, the county received another $74.2 million in Measure A funds, with $55.6 million going to the medical center and $18.7 million to the health care agencies.  

According to Alameda County Health Services Agency Director David Kears, who is supervising the health care agency portion of Measure A funding, organizations began receiving funds at the beginning of the 2004-05 fiscal year. 

Among the agencies receiving that money were the Alameda Health Consortium on behalf of eight health care clinics throughout the county and the Bay Area Consortium for Quality Health Care. In December of 2004, the Berkeley Unified School District received $450,000 in Measure A funding for three nurses to be placed in Berkeley public schools. 

According to Susan Schroeder, chair of the health committee of the Alameda County Council of the League of Women Voters, “The wording in Measure A said that the county would appoint an oversight committee. When a year and a half had passed [in October of last year] and that committee had not been appointed, Nancy Bickel [chair of the LWV Alameda County Council] wrote to Alameda County Supervisor President Keith Carson expressing our concerns about the lack of an oversight committee.” 

Schroeder said that the creation of the oversight committee came “fairly soon after that.” 

A Piedmont LWV online newsletter says that Health Care Services Agency Director Kears wrote Bickel in late October, explaining the delays in appointing the committee and saying that the nomination process for the oversight committee would begin Nov. 1, 2005.  

Supervisors eventually appointed an eighteen-member oversight committee, five representing each supervisorial district, two apiece representing the League of Women Voters, the Service Employees International Union, and the City Managers Association, and one member apiece representing the Alameda County Taxpayers’ Association, the Alameda County Mental Health Advisory Board, the East Bay Hospital Council staff, the Alameda Contra Costa Medical Association, the City of Berkeley, and the Alameda Health Consortium. 

Some committee members believe that the oversight committee should provide funding recommendations to supervisors as well as review expenditures by agencies under the measure. But Health Services Agency Director Kears said in a telephone interview that both the language of Measure A and the ordinance which followed its passage restrict the committee to oversight only. 

“The committee’s function is to determine if the agencies have spent the money consistent with the broad guidelines set forth in Measure A, as well as actually spent it on the items that were in their proposal,” Kears said. “Their purpose is to make sure the money is well-audited and that organizations don’t keep the money and spend it for something else.” 

Kears added that because “the committee’s role did not start until after the first year of funding,” the oversight process was being carried out on a timely basis. He blamed any delays on setting up the committee on the organizations who nominated representatives. 

“Some of them took three to four months to give us the names after we made the initial contact,” Kears said. 

Once the committee began meeting last December, confusion immediately surfaced over the issue of how committee members would handle potential conflicts of interest, considering that some members represented organizations that had already received Measure A funding. 

After listening to a presentation at an early committee meeting from Jason Lauren of the Alameda County Counsel’s office outlining how members would have to recuse themselves when issues concerning their own organization’s funding came up, Alameda Health Consortium Executive Director Ralph Silber resigned from the oversight committee, saying that the conflict was too difficult to avoid. 

But when Lauren gave a second conflict of interest presentation at this weekend’s oversight meeting, Silber, who was there to present his organization’s funding report, pointedly said that Lauren’s current interpretation of the potential conflict was different from his earlier one. 

“I resigned based upon what you told us before,” Silber said, adding that he would not have resigned based upon Lauren’s new interpretation. 

Lauren suggested that Silber contact supervisors to see if his resignation could be rescinded.  

Schroeder of the League of Women Voters said that her organization had discussed the issue of conflict of interest among oversight committee members, but had not taken a position on the issue. “As a general policy, the league believes that all members of such committees should simply represent the public at large, and not specific organizations,” she said. 

Kears said in an telephone interview that some of the committee confusion is taking place “because this is the first year of operation. I am assuming that as the process gets more routine, it will get easier.” 

The next meeting of the oversight committee is scheduled for May 26. In addition to presentations from agencies receiving portions of the 25 percent funding, the committee will hear a presentation on how the Alameda County Medical Center is spending its 75 percent portion of the Measure A funding. 

Following the meeting, however, members were unclear as to how much oversight their committee would have over the ACMC portion of the funding..


Peralta Steps Back from Extending Hand to Compton

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Tuesday May 02, 2006

Recent developments surrounding Compton Community College makes it less likely—but not impossible—that the Peralta Community College District may step in to help bail out the troubled Southern California district. 

Last March, a cautious Peralta Board of Trustees gave Chancellor Elihu Harris limited authority to explore the administrative takeover of the one-college Compton district after Compton lost its accreditation from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC). 

Compton is appealing that revocation. If the district loses, it would no longer be able to operate the college under its own authority and would have to close the college doors if another district did not take over the administrative duties. 

If it occurred, the Peralta administrative takeover would be financed by the State Community College Chancellor’s office, and not by Peralta. 

At last week’s Peralta trustee meeting, however, Harris told trustees that Peralta would not participate in an Request For Proposals (RFP) process recently initiated by State Community College Chancellor Mark Drummond. 

“It looks like some of the Southern California colleges may enter the RFP process,” Harris said following the meeting. “Because of the logistics of administering a college so far away, it would obviously make more sense for a local college to take over responsibility. But we’re still monitoring the situation, and we will see what happens after the RFP process goes through.” 

Harris said that if other districts do not submit a proposal and Compton loses its appeal, Peralta could still be asked to step in. 

Cheryl Fong, a spokesperson for the strategic assistance team appointed by State Chancellor Drummond following the loss of Compton’s accreditation, said that Drummond had initially put out feelers to several districts contiguous to Compton to “provide some level of assistance” to the Compton district. 

“All of them said they were interested,” Fong said, “but none of them made a commitment. It’s a big responsibility, and all of the districts wanted to wait to see what happened with the appeal process.” 

An initial late April hearing date for the Compton appeal has been put off, and Fong said that the Chancellor’s office has not been notified of a new hearing date. 

She said that Drummond issued the formal request for proposals in response to legislation introduced by Assemblymember Mervyn Dymally (D-Los Angeles). 

She also said that “Peralta’s welcome gesture of goodwill just in saying they would explore assisting Compton may encourage other community college districts to take a closer look at the situation.””


New, Hip Identity Proposed for Berkeley Alternative High

By Suzanne La Barre
Tuesday May 02, 2006

The Berkeley Alternative High School is in for a new model—and a hip new name.  

Berkeley Technology Academy, or B-Tech as it would be called, is the latest proposal for the alternative school, which would rise again as a continuation school focused on technology, entrepreneurial skills and math. The Berkeley Board of Education will consider the program redesign tomorrow. 

The school would host about 150 students whose needs were not met or who would not be successful at Berkeley High School. Students would embark upon one of three routes for graduation: a UC and California State University preparatory program, vocational coursework or independent study. 

B-Tech would work in partnership with Vista/Berkeley City College and other local organizations including the Black Ministerial Alliance, which addresses issues of violence, education and spirituality. 

The model would require additional staff, including a new work experience coordinator, who would earn $83,000, and a second school safety officer, who would make $56,000. The school psychologist would also be employed for more hours. 

B-Tech is the upshot of a class action lawsuit settled last year after plantiffs accused the school district of discrimination by expelling students without a state-mandated hearing. The settlement included a consent decree, which is driving the current plan to institute a continuation school, district spokesperson Mark Coplan said.  

The Berkeley Board of Education meets Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., at 2134 Martin Luther King Jr. Way. For more information, call 644-6206..


Berkeley Schools, Businesses Affected by May 1 Boycott

By Judith Scherr
Tuesday May 02, 2006

A few weeks ago, most felt invisible.  

Today the immigrants—especially those from Latin America—have thrust themselves into the national spotlight. 

On May Day, they stayed home from work and school, marched and rallied and proclaimed that no person should be considered illegal and that immigrants are a vital component of the U.S. economy. 

In Berkeley the “day without immigrants” made an impact at the Berkeley Alternative School, where 28 out of 120 students were in class. School Principal Victor Diaz said he would have joined the protest but came to school because four of the 10 teachers opted to stay away. 

The remaining teachers at the school on Monday planned to talk about the meaning of the day with those present, Diaz said. 

Many parents kept Berkeley High School students out of school, but some students went to school and marched out. One group of about 50 students, led by the nonprofit group Youth Together marched along Martin Luther King Way to the Ashby BART station, where they stood in line while their adult supporters spent a half-hour trying to negotiate free BART passage to the San Francisco rally.  

Denied that and chanting “Rise up, people rise up,” the orderly group opened the gate, walked through and down to the platform, as a dozen BART and Berkeley police looked on without stopping them. 

“I’m here to represent my people,” said Tony, a student wrapped in a Mexican flag who declined to give his last name. Tony spoke to the Daily Planet as he waited in line in the BART Station with the other students. 

“I’ve got to represent what we’re doing here, standing up for our people,” he said. “We’re not here to cause problems. We’re here to work.” 

Ninth-grader Minna Toloni was also waiting to get on BART. 

“I’m here to support immigrant rights,” she said. “It’s racist to try to claim you’re free and kick out some people.” 

While the group of Berkeley High students waited to see if negotiations would work, a group of several dozen Willard Middle School students on a field trip to the San Francisco rally—with BART tickets—went through the turnstile as the high school students cheered. 

Over at Thousand Oaks school, 16 members of the staff and 150 students were not at school. A Berkeley teacher for 18 years, Liz Fuentes teaches fifth grade at Thousand Oaks. In a phone interview Sunday night, Fuentes said she planned to stay away from work and march in San Francisco “to express my horror at the possible passage of [HR] 4437.”  

The House Bill, which passed in December, would criminalize undocumented people and those who help them. It would also cause a wall to be build on the border between Mexico and the United States. 

The bill, which has not been enacted because the Senate has not signed on to it, has helped spark the anger that has fueled recent marches and demonstrations. 

“Attention must be paid to this moment,” Fuentes said. 

“How can they try to treat us like criminals?” asked a friend of Fuentes, who requested that her name not be used. 

In a phone interview Sunday evening, she said her high school-age daughter would be going to the San Francisco march with her. And she wouldn’t be going to her job cleaning houses and her husband wouldn’t be going to his job as a carpenter. 

“It’s time people opened their eyes; we don’t have to be scared of nobody,” she said. “We come here and pay taxes. It’s time for us to speak up. We have to fight.” 

While those who stayed out of work and school Monday were overwhelmingly Latino, other immigrants and supporters joined their ranks. One Frenchman, who asked not to be named for this story, works in a high-tech job in Emeryville and marched in San Francisco rather than go to work. 

The Berkeley resident criticized HR 4437, especially because it criminalizes those who help undocumented people. 

“It reminds me of World War II,” he said. “If you helped a Jew, you’d be a criminal. It’s pretty serious.” 

Meanwhile, at Mi Tierra Foods on San Pablo Avenue, a sign on the door Monday announced that the store would be closed May 1 for “Immigrant Solidarity.”  

In a quick phone survey Sunday evening of five Mexican Restaurants, all planned to close for the day: Juan’s Place, La Familia, Picante, Mario’s and La Fiesta. Godoalsido Mejia who manages Juan’s Place said the 34-year-old West Berkeley restaurant got calls—he did not say from whom—pressuring them to close, which is what made them decide to shut down. Besides, “the employees were going to take off and if you have no help, you have no service,” he said. 

Monday morning, down at Café Trieste at Dwight Way and San Pablo, Luis Flores was fixing lattes as usual. He said he had the option to take off, but others were taking the day off, so he decided to work. “I’m wearing a white shirt to protest,” he said. 

At Café Roma, on Monterey Avenue and Hopkins Street, two people were working, while another had taken off for the day. Caffé Strada at College Avenue and Bancroft Way, however, was closed for the day, as were Venus and La Note restaurants on Shattuck Avenue. And on Fourth and Delaware streets two lone day laborers stood waiting for work, while there are generally many more. 

Berkeley resident Bonito Tovar was at the Ashby Avenue BART station, waiting for colleagues to go to the San Francisco march. Tovar works in construction at the Richmond-based Rutherford & Singlested, which closed for the day. He beamed as he watched the High School students walk though the swinging door, down the escalator and onto the BART train. “They are the future,” he said. 

 

Judith Scherr: Mi Tierra Foods on San Pablo Avenue shut down for the day May 1..


Barbara Lee Speaks Out Against Immigration Bill

By Judith Scherr
Tuesday May 02, 2006

Calling for “real, comprehensive immigration reform,” Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) blasted legislation now stalled in the House of Representatives that would criminalize undocumented immigrants and those who help them. 

Flanked by community leaders of various ethnicities and religions, Lee spoke to the press before going outside to address the thousands of people at a rally that packed the Federal Building courtyard. 

“I don’t support a wall and I don’t think the Minutemen should be driving this debate,” Lee said.  

The fact that H.R. 4437 is stalled in Congress—the House and Senate are far from agreeing on immigration reform—“is a testament to the power of the people,” Lee said, adding that what is needed is a “path to citizenship.”  

The congresswoman roundly condemned the notion that undocumented persons are terrorists and also criticized the notion of guest workers, a program where workers are brought to the United States for a certain period of time and then returned to their home country. Unions condemn this program because they say workers would have few rights under it. 

“I hope [the guest worker program] never sees the light of day,” Lee said. 

Some of the people standing with Lee at the press conference will be part of a committee she is assembling to address the issue of immigration. A few addressed reporters. 

“We in the Jewish community have the experience of tightly-sealed borders,” Rabbi David Cooper of the Kehilla Community Congregation said. “The Torah tells us we were once resident aliens in the land.” 

Addressing the part of H.R.4437 that would criminalize those who help the undocumented, Rev. Kelvin Sauls of Downs Memorial United Methodist Church said the bill puts people in the position of choosing whether to be good citizens or Good Samaritans. Fr. Tony Valdivia, of St. Louis Bertrand Catholic Church, pointed to the road ahead: “Today we march, but we have homework to do—tomorrow we vote.” 

After speaking to the press, Lee joined the rally outside the Federal Building. Marchers, estimated at 50,000 by organizer Yvette Felarca, had walked down International Boulevard to downtown.  

The crowd that heard Lee speak was dotted with American and Mexican flags and signs that read: “Paz, Justicia, Libertad;” “Give all working immigrants amnesty;” “U.S.A. made by immigrants.”  

The ebullient protesters quieted to hear Lee, who was one of a number of speakers. “We are a nation of immigrants,” she said, noting that across the country there were millions of people marching. “I’m proud to march with you,” she said. 

Lee added that all immigrants must be honored: African, Caribbean, Middle Eastern, Asian and Latin American and she thanked the crowd for protesting, for “speaking out, for forcing America to live out its creed of liberty and justice for all.””


Asian Media Report Conflicts Over Economic Boycott

By Carolyn Goossen, New American Media
Tuesday May 02, 2006

The national economic boycott for immigrant rights on May 1 elicited mixed feelings among Asian communities, according to a survey of Asian media. 

Leading up to the boycott, the Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese press had been filled with stories designed to educate Asian employers about the legal rights of Latino workers who may strike on May 1, surveying businesses about whether they will join the boycott, and reporting on Asian American activists urging community members to participate in the May 1 work strike. 

But in some cases the articles have failed to make an impact. 

Some Korean small business owners in San Francisco seemed unaware of the planned boycott. They said the issue concerns mainly Latinos. Employers at a Korean restaurant in San Francisco said they would not allow their employees the time off to join in the boycott. 

“Even when they took time off for their citizenship exam, it affected my business,” one employer complained. 

But the boycott was widely embraced by Korean civic groups in Los Angeles, reports the Korea Times. Members of the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance, National Korean American Service and Education Consortium and the Council of Korean Churches in Southern California urged members not to go to work that day. 

According to Dong Min Cho, director of the L.A. Korean Community Center, “a large majority of garment factory workers in Koreatown are Latino.” He says between 70 and 80 percent of these workers were not expected to work on the day of the boycott. Several Korean groups plan to donate 15,000 bottles of water to protesters on the day of boycott. 

Chinese media have also been reporting extensively on the immigrant marches that have swept through the country since late March. The Chinese-language World Journal, based in Millbrae, published an article on April 19 that dealt with how to treat Latino employees who do not show up for work on May 1, suggesting that employers treat the boycott as they would Election Day, when employees have the right to leave work to vote. 

On April 28 the newspaper also reported on Congresswoman Barbara Lee’s (D-Oakland) attempt to dispel rumors that the Department of Homeland Security is conducting mass roundups of undocumented workers. Lee suggests that it may be individuals with anti-immigrant sentiment who are pretending to be Department of Homeland Security officials, with the intention of scaring illegal immigrants into not participating on May 1, reports the paper. 

While the views of Asian American civil rights groups are often found in the Chinese press, the voices of immigrants themselves have not been as prominent. 

The World Journal and Sing Tao Daily in San Francisco both reported on numerous press conferences sponsored by Asian American civil rights organizations supporting the May 1 boycott, many of which were led by second-generation Chinese Americans. For example, a headline in the April 26 Sing Tao Daily in San Francisco read, “Immigrant Organizations Call on People to Boycott Work, Stores and School on May 1.” The article noted, however, that no Chinese spokespeople parti-cipated in the press conference in front of City Hall. 

Joseph Leung, editor-in-chief of the Sing Tao Daily in San Francisco believes that Chinese immigrant participation in the demonstrations will continue to be low because of geography. “Most of the Asian undocumented immigrants are on the East Coast, not in the Bay Area, so (people here) may be seeing this as a Latino issue, not so related to our community.” 

Cat Chao, Chinese-language radio talk show host for “Rush Hour,” on KAZN-AM 1300 in Los Angeles notes that the initial admiration her Chinese listeners had for the immigrant protests wavered when the focus turned to an economic boycott. “When the Latinos started the protests, the Chinese community really admired what they did. [Now] they want to do an economic boycott, so Chinese listeners believe they sort of hijacked the national conversation about immigration reform.” 

In an editorial commentary in the Vietnamese Nguoi Viet in Orange County, Ky-Phong Tran writes, “Thirty years ago, Vietnamese people came to this country without documents either, looking for the very same things as those out there in the streets: a chance at a stable job, education for their children and opportunity.” 

He continues, “In their struggle, I see my struggle and I cannot turn my back on it.” 

However, Hao Nhien Vu, editor of Nguoi Viet, said that the Vietnamese community was largely unaware of the boycott. “As far as I know, there are not a lot of people who even know about this. There were employers who were surprised when we asked them what they would do if their employees didn’t come in. I don’t see that feeling of connectedness. They see it as between the white guys and the Mexicans. I guess they will feel differently after May 1, when they see many people not showing up at work, they will see that it is their issue too.” 

When asked if he would join the boycott, Vu responded that he didn’t see Nguoi Viet as part of the boycott. 

“The idea is to show people the effect of ignoring the economic benefits that immigrants are bringing to the country,” he said. “But my job is different. I work for a company of immigrants, so it’s pointless for us to walk out to show ourselves what we are worth.” 

 

U


Police Blotter

By Richard Brenneman
Tuesday May 02, 2006

Two heisters 

Two men in their late teens found threats of violence were enough to convince a Berkeley man to surrender his wallet and backpack after they confronted him near the intersection of Le Conte and Euclid avenues at 1:15 a.m. last Monday. 

The suspects are described as two skinny fellows between the ages of 17 and 20, one standing about 5'5" and the other between 5'8" and 6', said Berkeley Police spokesperson Officer Ed Galvan. Both were wearing black sweatshirts. 

 

Serious weaponry 

A 24-year-old Oakland man burst into Whole Foods Market about 1 a.m. Wednesday to report that he had just been robbed by a robber who struck him over the head with what he described as “a large submachine-gun-type rifle” in the store’s parking lot near the corner of Telegraph Avenue and Webster Street. 

The bandit made off with his cell phone and wallet.  

 

Another duo 

Another pair of bandits, one of them packing a long-barreled pistol, confronted an 18-year-old UC Berkeley student near the corner of Parker and Etna streets just before 11 p.m. Wednesday and demanded her purse, cell phone and wallet. 

The report was transferred to Berkeley Police from the California Highway Patrol, which currently receives all 911 cell phone calls made in the area. 

Many residents may not be aware that they can reach Berkeley emergency dispatchers directly from their cell phones by calling 981-5911, the way to insure the promptest response. 

Another citizen called in later with report that the young woman’s purse had been found, minus the cash it had contained. 

 

2


Police Chief Details How Cop Stole Drugs

By Judith Scherr
Friday April 28, 2006

While Berkeley Police Chief Doug Hambleton called Sgt. Cary Kent’s drug evidence theft “a profound violation of public trust,” in an oral report he gave to the Police Review Commission Wednesday, the chief’s accounting left some commissioners and audience members still searching for answers. 

Hambleton’s summary, presented to six commissioners and some 20 audience members—mostly Berkeley Copwatch supporters—began with an explanation of why it took several months for officers to recognize Kent’s problem.  

In the fall, colleagues noticed the 18-year veteran, “someone all trusted,” appeared in poor health. “What police observed was consistent with a medical condition,” Hambleton said. 

At the end of November the department scheduled a medical exam for Kent, who came late to the appointment, rescheduled, finally saw the doctor, but refused blood tests at the time because, Hambleton explained, “he said he was too weak to fast,” a prerequisite for the tests. 

Scheduled to transfer out of the narcotics division, Kent said he wanted to move ahead with the drug destruction process—preparing to destroy drug evidence no longer needed to convict suspects—something that “had not been done for several years,” Hambleton said. 

“Because of some of the behavior exhibited, I decided I needed to do a full audit [of the drug evidence room],” Hambleton said. He had three officers check the evidence, an audit he admitted had never been done before.  

Generally an evidence room audit consists of looking at files to make sure all envelopes are accounted for. “I believe we have never examined every envelope to that degree of scrutiny,” Hambleton said. 

The officers found about 25 envelopes opened and resealed, with evidence missing, sometimes replaced by other substances. 

Copwatch and others have raised the question of whether other officers—four others had access to the evidence room—tampered with evidence in addition to Kent. Andrea Prichett of Copwatch has filed a formal complaint with the PRC asking for an investigation of the other officers.  

“Their access to evidence was fairly limited,” Hambleton said in his report. “They’d go in and out only if [Kent] wasn’t available.” 

Once the officers uncovered the tampering with the initial 25 envelopes, Hambleton said he placed Kent on administrative leave, which some days later, at Kent’s request, was changed to medical leave. 

Hambleton secured the evidence and discussed the situation with District Attorney Tom Orloff and most the other local police chiefs, as there happened to be a police chief’s conference the following Monday, Jan. 9. 

“There was every police chief in Alameda County. I discussed (the case) with everybody in the room,” he said. 

Based on their advice, Hambleton set up a joint BPD-Alameda County District Attorney investigation. 

It took “weeks,” Hambleton said, to examine the narcotics envelopes and determine that 181 among them had been tampered with. Many envelopes were examined by the crime lab, which determined that Kent’s fingerprints were inside the envelopes where they would have appeared only if he had tampered with them. 

Among the 181 envelopes, some involved evidence for cases that had been closed, some had been prepared for sale by undercover narcotics agents, and three involved pending cases. In two of these cases, the individuals pleaded guilty to unrelated charges and in one case getting ready to go to trial, the district attorney dropped all charges, Hambleton said. 

Meanwhile other evidence against Kent was growing. 

“We knew from his cell phone records that he was in touch with an informant,” Hambleton said. “That informant said Sgt. Kent had been meeting him and purchasing methadone pills.” 

Also, a person was arrested who told officers he had been “meeting with Sgt. Kent and Kent had been purchasing heroin from him,” the chief said. 

At this point, Kent “was well aware of his legal jeopardy,” Hambleton said. He declined to come in for a criminal interview. 

“His attorney told us fairly early on that he was unavailable because he was receiving medical treatment,” which a doctor’s letter confirmed. “It did not say the nature of the treatment—we can all speculate,” Hambleton said. 

Subsequently, Hambleton asked Kent to come to an administrative interview. An officer can refuse a criminal interview, but is obligated to respond to an administrative interview. Rather than be interviewed, Kent resigned and retired. 

“I can’t stop someone from quitting and retiring,” Hambleton said. “At that point I had no more jurisdiction over him.” 

On April 14, Kent turned himself in, was booked at Santa Rita jail, released on his own recognizance and pleaded guilty to charges of grand theft, possession of heroin and possession of methamphetamine.  

Commissioners and the public questioned the chief after his report. Commissioner William White wanted to know, given the stressful nature of a police officer’s job, how the department proactively addresses stress. 

Hambleton said that during the annual physical, exam alcoholism sometimes shows up. He also monitors complaints against officers—both sustained and not. These officers might be referred to the confidential counseling sessions offered to all city employees, peer counseling or counseling through the city’s mobile counseling team. 

“I plan to strengthen the peer counseling program,” Hambleton said. 

Commissioner Michael Sherman wanted to know if the police had to face drug testing and the chief answered that, like the rest of the city employees, they did not.  

Prichett suggested to the chief that, since Kent was not drug tested, then the department would not know if he was a drug user—he could be a dealer, she said.  

And she asked if the drug evidence had been destroyed to which Hambleton responded that it is in tact.  

To date, Kent has never been interviewed regarding his actions. Jack Radish, a former Alameda County prosecutor, said there is still an opportunity for the district attorney to interview Kent. 

Kent’s plea bargain gave him five years probation, no prison time, but he will be before a judge May 12 to receive a possible one-year jail sentence. 

“Certainly a judge would consider [willingness to be interviewed] as part of a mitigated term,” he said. 

 


Bitter Honda Strike Ends With Contract Agreement

By Suzanne La Barre
Friday April 28, 2006

Service workers at Berkeley Honda overwhelmingly ap-proved a contract late Monday, ending a bitter 10-month strike—and the reign of an inflatable rat over Shattuck Avenue.  

Employees of Machinists Lodge 1546 and Teamsters Local 78 voted 14-1 in favor of a five-year deal that concludes the work action initiated last June when incoming Berkeley Honda owners declined to rehire several veteran employees and refused to renew union contracts.  

Under the watchful eye of the union’s symbol, a towering blowup rat, community members joined the picket line at 2600 Shattuck Ave. urging potential customers to take their business elsewhere. 

No longer. 

The settlement, tentatively reached late last week, extends phased employment to the roughly 20 workers who lost their jobs, calls for an annual 3 percent raise and requires owners to contribute to a new pension plan. 

The unions’ Automotive Industries Pension Plan was at the crux of the labor dispute. Management said it exacted an insurmountable financial burden on dealership owners, and left former Berkeley Honda owner Jim Doten on the hook for more than half a million dollars. In its place, dealership negotiators proposed a 401K plan, an option the unions summarily rejected. 

“A lot of our folks took wage increases and put it in their pensions, so to suddenly have that taken away, to them it’s like grabbing into their pockets and taking money out,” said Don Crosatto, area director of Machinists Lodge 1546. 

As a compromise, the owners agreed to pay into a new pension, the Machinists National Pension Plan. The contribution rate is about the same, but employees may be required to work four or five years longer before they can retire, Crosatto said. 

The unions made an additional concession by agreeing to phased reemployment. Those not hired back in June will be reinstated at a rate of about two workers every four weeks, as work demands dictate, Crosatto said. 

Mayor Tom Bates facilitated negotiations between the two sides though he did not take a formal seat at the bargaining table. The dealership rejected his offers to mediate, because he joined with the City Council last year in calling on citizens to support a boycott. 

The clash over contracts commenced when Danville businessmen assumed ownership of Berkeley Honda from Doten, and required employees to reapply for their positions. When only about half the service workers were rehired, union members walked off the job. 

Employees accused management of trying to bust the unions, a claim reinforced eight months later, some said, when an assistant manager filed a petition for a union decertification election. The petition was signed by at least 30 percent of the dealership’s employees. 

The unions’ outstanding unfair labor practice allegations thwarted progress of the petition (which is now moot due to the settlement). But the message was clear: Union support at Berkeley Honda was far from unanimous. 

Outside the tinted windows of the dealership, a different atmosphere existed.  

Legions of community members joined forces with the unions on the strike line, from labor activists and politicians to outraged Honda owners like Judy Shelton, who not only took her business elsewhere, but took to brandishing picket signs, too. More than 40 organizations supported the picket line, a representative from the Alameda Labor Council said. 

Their efforts exacted a toll. Berkeley Honda General Manager Steve Haworth estimates the boycott diminished service business by 60 percent.  

“The consumers voted with their pocketbooks and dramatically reduced the sales,” said City Councilmember Kriss Worthington, who would not give specific sales tax figures, because state law forbids it. “You could certainly tell there were a lot less customers.” 

Now, union representatives, Berkeley Honda management and the mayor are calling on the public to resume patronage of the dealership. 

“We’ve done a great job of chasing [business] away,” Crosatto said. “Now let’s chase it back in.” 

Though both sides and city representatives were all smiles at a press conference Tuesday, an undercurrent of hostility remains. Sales Representative Allen Bonet complained that the unions had mismanaged their pension fund and were now mismanaging the settlement. Assistant Manager Barry Strock, who filed the decertification petition, rued the relentless heckling he endured during the strike, and said he still doesn’t see the point in having unions. 

Crosatto hopes once workers are back on the job, animosity will wane. 

“People will be so busy, they won’t have time for personal reminiscing,” he said.  

As for the rat: Crosatto said it is now available for weddings, bar mitzvahs and children’s parties.  

 


International Food Festival Lands in West Berkeley

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday April 28, 2006

Ever heard of a little something called “Mulligatawny”? In case you haven’t, it’s a a spicy Anglo Indian soup made with red lentils, vegetables and chicken. Nothing foreign about red lentils, vegetables or chicken, is there? And yet, most of us would think of it as something exotic and even have a hard time relating it with food. 

On Sunday, the West Berkeley Neighborhood Development Corporation along with the city will host the inaugural Berkeley International Food Festival to celebrate diversity in the city. 

As Michael Caplan, assistant to the city manager and festival liaison, said, “The idea behind the food fest was to highlight the uniqueness of West Berkeley. It’s the mecca for world cuisine and we want people to know that.” 

Coplan said the idea for the event originated almost three years ago when West Berkeley was being cleaned up.  

“We realized that it was the gateway to the City of Berkeley, given that the I-80 is so close. So we thought why not give the place the importance it deserved?” he said. “No other place has such high a concentration of Indian, Fijian, Filipino, Spanish, Mexican, Middle Eastern, Turkish, Lebanese, Jamaican, and so many more ethnicities in one place.” 

Coplan also told The Planet that the city plans to address the lighting and parking problems on San Pablo Avenue in the near future through the San Pablo improvement plan which involved AC Transit working with the city to install more lights in the bus stops. 

“The food festival will be a good way to raise awareness about the place,” he said. 

“The neighborhood has a tremendous, tremendous amount of talent,” said Pam Weatherford, who was hired by the neighborhood group to organize and publicize the day. “It’s like a treasure-trove.” 

Stores such as Milan, Bombay Spice, Halal Market, Spanish Table, Mi Tierra foods, Country Cheese and Middle East Market who sell specialty foods will be present at the festival along with restaurants such as Templebar Tiki Bar and Restaurant, Bosphorous, Siam Cuisine, Casa Latina and Rountrees. 

Rosalyn Loong, co-owner of Templebar, which survived the San Francisco fire in 1906 and moved to Berkeley in 1992, will be serving Hawaiian barbeque on Sunday.  

“We are thrilled to be a part of the festival. It’s the first of its kind in Berkeley and we hope it’s a grand success,” she said. 

Maulin Chokshi, owner of Bombay Jewelry Company and President of Universty Avenue Merchants Association describes the festival as an excellent way for merchants to interact with the community. 

“We are definitely involved and would help in every way to make it a success,” he said. 

On Sunday, a promenade area running two blocks in each direction from the intersection of University and San Pablo Avenues will host restaurant specials, cooking demonstrations, and exciting samplings from noon to 5 p.m.  

The Cal Cooking Club will be present at the Spanish Table to give cooking demonstrations. 

“We will be showing how to cook Paella, a traditional Spanish rice dish made with seafood and meat. It will be accompanied by some guitar music,” said Adam Reich, Cal Cooking Club Vice President. 

There will also be music and dance.  

Khalil Shaheed’s Mo’Rocking Project will offer a mix of jazz and traditional Morrocan music while the David Thom Band will be performing its own brand of hard-driving California Bluegrass.  

The Templebar’s Royal Hawaiian Ukele Band will also be stopping by and West Berkeley’s very own Irene Sazer will be present with the School of String Improvisation to synthesize jazz, classical, and pop music. 

Freight and Salvage will be hosting Los Cenzontles, the internationally renowned performing and recording group from the Mexican Art Center in San Pablo while Sekar Jaya, the Bay Area Balinese arts ensemble, famed as the best gamelan orchestra and dancers outside of Indonesia, will also perform that afternoon. 

A fashion show showcasing the latest in international wear will be carried out to classical tabla and sitar music performed by South Asian group Dhamaal. 

Speaking to the Planet, Bruce Williams, Vice Chair of WBNDC said that one of the main reasons for the fesival was that the city needed to galvanize the area in some way.  

“It’s an economic development plan disguised as a festival,” he said. “But we also want people to come and discover for themselves the uniqueness of the different regions. Again, you would be surprised to find how food from different countries can have similar uses.” 

“This is a wonderful opportunity to showcase different talents and communities. I wouldn’t miss it for anything,” said Councilmember Darryl Moore. “We hope we will be able to make it into an annual event.” 

 

Photograph by Stephan Babuljak 

“Uncle Kem” Kanikapila Loong, left, and Dean “Dino” Morrow, demonstrate some ukulele playing at Loong’s restaurant Temple Bar Wednesday in preparation for the International Food Festival this weekend in Berkeley. 

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North Shattuck Plaza Planned for Gourmet Ghetto

By Suzanne La Barre
Friday April 28, 2006

A tree-lined plaza. Grassy area for feasting on a slice of Cheese Board pizza. Small kiosks housing newsstands, cafes and flower shops. 

These are a few of the possibilities in the works for a reconfigured streetscape at the northern tip of the gourmet ghetto, a stretch currently dominated by a complicated conflux of roadways. 

The project is still in its infancy, but some general ideas include broadening the eastern sidewalk along Shattuck Avenue from Vine Street to Rose Street and building a pedestrian plaza, closing a stretch of Shattuck Avenue where the Ecology Center holds a weekly farmers’ market, redirecting traffic onto Shattuck Place and redistributing parking. Trees, grass, benches, exhibit space and other pedestrian-friendly amenities at the plaza would feature prominently, project organizers say. 

If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. The same scheme won approval from the City Council in 2001, but proponents never found a funding mechanism and the project was subsequently tabled. Now, more than five years later, community members are brainstorming with some top city officials to develop North Shattuck Plaza on their own. 

At the helm of the mobilization team is Planning Commissioner David Stoloff, chair of North Shattuck Plaza, Inc., a nonprofit organization formed in February to develop and manage the project.  

The nonprofit’s board of directors includes Councilmember Laurie Capitelli of District 5, who is also a partner at Red Oak Realty, retired Councilmember Mim Hawley (also of District 5), former Board of Education Director Lloyd Lee, the executive director of the North Shattuck business association and others. 

Stoloff’s overarching motivation is to develop an awkward streetscape into usable, pedestrian-friendly public space. 

“I would love to have such a plaza to grace the community where I spend a lot of time,” he said. 

The surrounding area is made up of retail shops, restaurants, cafes and side streets with single-family homes, rooming houses and apartments. Stoloff, a Bates appointee to the Planning Commission, owns property in the adjacent neighborhood. 

North Shattuck Plaza Inc. will finance the plaza in collaboration with the business association, which tucked away $250,000 for the project. In 2000, reconfiguring the area was estimated at half a million dollars, Stoloff said, though he guesses costs have gone up. Project planners are looking into securing grants and private donations, hoping, as Stoloff says that “the project will sell itself.” The city of Berkeley is also providing staff time, per a unanimous decision by the Berkeley City Council in September.  

Berkeley-based landscape architecture firm Meyer and Silberberg is in the process of drafting a detailed plan and cost estimate of the project under the direction of a design committee comprised of residents, business owners and board members.  

A preliminary scheme should be available in June, Stoloff said. Depending on how much the plan deviates from what council originally approved—a negative declaration on an initial environmental study--project developers may need to conduct more studies and go through additional approval steps. 

The project’s four main goals are to provide community space, a place for the farmers’ market to expand, maintain the same number of parking spaces and uphold the flow of traffic, said Heather Hensley, executive director of the North Shattuck Association, the district’s business group. 

The latter has been cause for concern among some residents and business owners who fear the new configuration will exacerbate congestion.  

When the plaza idea was first floated, the fire department reportedly squawked over losing a thoroughfare to the hills and access to Shattuck Commons, the triangular commercial island where Shattuck Avenue splits off. But on Wednesday, Deputy Fire Chief David Orth said an alternative route would not cause an “appreciable delay.” Plaza planners have also proposed incorporating an emergency road into the project. 

Fred Shokouh, who owns Bel Forno at the fore of Shattuck Commons, worries that the closure will impact business. Patrons may have more difficultly parking and accessing the café, which has one entrance on Shattuck, he said.  

“A business like ours, people come because it is convenient to park,” he said. 

It could also cause backups at Long’s across the street at Rose and Shattuck, he said. A traffic study conducted along with the initial study in 2000 found that traffic on Shattuck Avenue between Rose and Shattuck Place is mild enough to “allow consideration of reducing or eliminating service to through-travel, without undue impacts on surrounding streets and intersections.” The study did not include a quantitative analysis. 

Peter Levitt, co-owner of Saul’s, which is located on Shattuck north of Vine, supports the project because in the long term, it would boost business, he said.  

“Generally, when you create an urban landscape that is people-friendly, the merchant community overall would benefit,” he said. 

Others are waiting until concrete details are released before coming down on one side or another. 

Todd Paradis of Safeway, which stands adjacent to the proposed reconfiguration, can’t form an opinion just yet, since he doesn’t know how the grocery store will be affected, he said.  

“They have a lot more work to do on showing us the configuration of the street,” he said. “[Until] they get down to the nitty gritty, I don’t think we’re anywhere.” 

 


Council Jumps into the Gaia Building Culture War

By Judith Scherr
Friday April 28, 2006

When Patrick Kennedy got permits to develop the Gaia Building on Allston Way, he was allowed to build two stories more than the downtown height limit allowed, in exchange for the promise of using the ground floor and mezzanine for cultural purposes. 

Since the building opened, however, the fire department, tenant Anna de Leon, city planners and councilmembers have clashed with Kennedy on a number of fronts, especially questioning the extent to which Kennedy has kept faith with his agreement to provide cultural opportunities. 

The council may have averted a lawsuit threatened by Kennedy, by passing a resolution Tuesday which Kennedy says appears to conform to his view on the question. 

The proposed resolution, first discussed behind closed doors because of the threatened lawsuit, was read to the council by Councilmember Linda Maio minutes before the council’s scheduled 11:15 p.m. adjournment. Neither councilmembers nor the public were provided with written copies of her motion.  

The resolution: 

• Affirms a ruling by a former planning director that 30 percent of the scheduled time for the first floor and mezzanine must be devoted to actual performance. 

• Requires that in addition to the 30 percent time devoted to actual performance, an unspecified amount of time should be allotted to preparation and rehearsal time. 

• Asks city staff to propose specific parameters for cultural and non-cultural use, on which the council will then make a determination.  

With Councilmember Max Anderson absent, the council voted its approval 

of the first three parts of the resolution 6-1-1, with Councilmember Dona Spring abstaining and Councilmember Kriss Worthington voting in opposition. Another part, however, provoked a heated dissent from Councilmember Dona Spring. 

This was the statement that the cultural bonus also allows non-cultural incidental uses though prioritizing the scheduling of cultural uses. 

The council approved this provision separately with Spring and Worthington voting in opposition. Spring contended that the ruling by former Planning Director Carol Barrett did not approve or even mention non-cultural uses for the space covered by the cultural use bonus. 

In a phone interview Thursday, Kennedy said he had not seen the final draft of the council resolution, but from what he understood initially, it appears consistent with an agreement between himself and the former planning director. 

In a phone interview Wednesday, Councilmember Kriss Worthington told the Daily Planet he opposed the council resolution for several reasons. One is that the staff report explaining the item on the council agenda was not available in advance of the meeting and neither was a draft resolution. 

“They should have told the public what action they were thinking of taking,” Worthington said. 

Worthington also questioned whether the council, in ruling on the question of cultural use, was pre-empting the Zoning Adjustment Board, which usually rules first on use permit controversies, subject to appeal to the City Council. The topic was before ZAB at its last meeting because of complaints filed by Gaia ground floor tenant Anna de Leon, proprietor of Anna’s Jazz Island, and ZAB was expected to rule on the question at its next scheduled meeting on Thursday. 

 


Contentious Lawn Parking Law Revision Delayed

By Judith Scherr
Friday April 28, 2006

As Berkeley curbs get increasingly jammed hood-to-trunk with stationary vehicles, easing rules about parking cars on private property becomes a viable solution, the city’s planning staff says.  

But throwing down a cement slab in a back or side yard to house an automobile or two could mean blowing exhaust fumes into a next-door baby’s bedroom window or providing a neighbor with a view of a car rather than trees or grass. The increased asphalt also reduces the amount of land where rainwater can drain through the earth rather than running off the solid surface into an already overburdened storm water system, planning commissioners argue. 

These were some of the thorny questions the City Council faced Tuesday, when looking at competing proposals for a new ordinance regulating where people can park cars in private yards. Rather than vote on the question, the body put off the decision until the council’s next meeting, May 16. 

Planning Department staff is recommending that people be allowed to create parking spaces in the side and back yards, simply by obtaining a “zoning certificate,” a permit issued administratively. This means that neighbors will not be notified of a person’s intent to create parking in a nearby yard and have no right to contest it.  

The Planning Commission is recommending something different—that an administrative use permit be required when creating parking spaces anywhere on private property. This type of permit obliges the city to alert neighbors of the project and gives them a way to file an objection and stop or alter the project. 

Councilmember Dona Spring was particularly outraged at the staff proposal. 

“How do you get out and enjoy your backyard?” she asked in an interview Tuesday morning. “It’s against what our neighborhoods are all about.” 

Spring also pointed to the problem of creating more impervious surfaces. “We’re already flooding,” she said.  

Representing the Planning Commission majority, Commissioner Gene Poschman weighed in at the meeting against the staff proposal, which, if adopted, means, “We’ll see a vast amount of paving,” he said. 

Councilmember Linda Maio agreed. Speaking of her north-central Berkeley neighborhood, she said, “People are squeezing cars in wherever they can. It’s not a good thing to take away places where people can have gardens.”  

Mark Rhoades, land-use planning manager, argued that the situation won’t change significantly if the staff recommendation is approved. 

“Driveways go through the side yards now; driveways lead to garages in the rear yard,” he said. 

Councilmember Laurie Capitelli agreed with Rhoades. Both staff and Planning Commission proposals continue to allow building garages in back and side yards, he said, arguing that it is not fair that the person who needs to obtain a permit to create an uncovered parking space can build a garage without such a permit. 

In a phone interview Wednesday, Capitelli noted, however, that he is sympathetic to the need to avoid creating new solid surfaces. 

“We should insist that any work be done using crushed granite or other pervious landscaping materials,” he said. And, he added, people should be required to provide “proper screening” for the parked vehicles. 

Councilmember Kriss Worthington said he does not accept either of the proposals, but would rather keep things as they are now, with a variance required for back and side yard parking. A variance is very hard to obtain, more difficult than the administrative use permit the Planning Commission has envisaged, he said. 

To get a variance one would have to prove an absolute need for the parking space to get it through the Zoning Adjustments Board, Worthington said..


Oakland Teachers’ Contract Meets Mixed Reception

By Suzanne La Barre
Friday April 28, 2006

Reviews of a tentative contract agreement for Oakland’s teachers are decidedly mixed. 

Negotiators for the Oakland Education Association (OEA), representing 3,200 teachers, nurses, librarians and others, settled a tentative three-year deal on the eve of a scheduled walkout April 20, hoping to end a two-year battle for fair contracts. But that prospect is on shaky ground as details of the agreement emerge—though official contract language is not yet public--and teachers must decide whether to accept the compromises.  

“Everyone agrees there are parts of this that are really not good,” said OEA bargaining team chair David de Leeuw. “But the question is, are the good things good enough?” 

The tentative agreement offers an overall salary hike, raises the wage for substitute teachers, increases the ratio of students to counselors, and ends fully funded health care. The contract also spells out policy on teacher transfers and preparation periods. It is retroactive to July 1, 2005. 

Terms reached on substitute pay and salary are a straightforward union gain, de Leeuw said. Salaried employees would earn a 6.25 percent raise over three years, of which 4 percent restores a previous cut. For substitutes, wages would increase from $111 to $118 a day, a rate that would increase with more days worked.  

Health care was a major bone of contention during negotiations, as the state administrator-run Oakland Unified School District insisted teachers share the cost of medical expenses, while the union endeavored to maintain full coverage. 

The tentative settlement offers free health care the first year, then calls on union members to contribute a half a percent of their salaries toward medical premiums, a model consistent with findings of a neutral fact-finding report. The union used the report as a basis for its demands at the bargaining table. 

On the last day of the contract, the funding apparatus would change, requiring teachers to pay 4 percent of the total cost of health care but no more than $700 a year. 

This is a higher contribution rate, “but it’s not a huge amount of money,” said de Leeuw. “It won’t do in our members.” 

Edna Brewer Middle School teacher Mark Airgood said it sets a dangerous precedent. Once the district enacts a new contribution formula, it will be difficult to reverse.  

“If we set that precedent, it’s very hard to get these things back,” he said. “It’s an automatic escalator.” Airgood is voting no on the tentative agreement. 

Compromise over elementary school prep periods is a questionable, de Leeuw said. Teachers would continue to have staffed preparation time, but financial support would come from school sites and a parcel tax, not the general fund. 

The logic, he said, is to push schools to spend their funds effectively. But some union members fear that schools wouldn’t bother with teacher prep time if they’re forced to use their own money. 

Increasing the student-counselor ratio from 500-to-1 to 700-to-1 uses a similar rationale, de Leeuw said. Schools would be encouraged to use parcel taxes and site funds to reduce that ratio. 

Castlemont High School math teacher Jack Gerson said his biggest fear is proposed policy on teacher transfers. According to the settlement, when the district shuts down a school or teachers are involuntarily transferred, they are given five choices from a list of priorities. If turned down for a position, they can go through an appeals process. 

Gerson complains that the arrangement gives the district too much power; bargaining team member Bill Balderston agrees.  

“It was not the language we wanted,” he said, but he doubts members will reject the settlement based on that fact alone. 

The last tentative agreement included a similar clause and was rejected by 84 percent of voting OEA members. 

The union’s 15-member executive board was scheduled to take a position on the settlement Tuesday, but after nearly five hours of debate, directors had gone over only about half the contract, de Leeuw said. A second meeting was scheduled for Thursday after press time. Once a recommendation is drafted, OEA members will obtain the full details of the tentative agreement.  

Generally, when the board declines to recommend a tentative agreement, members also reject it, de Leeuw said. 

Balderston, who is on the board, is confident fellow directors and the broader membership will vote “yes.” 

“I’m going to vote to recommend this,” he said. “But it’s qualified support. I’m not going to sugarcoat it. At this point in time, it gives us breathing room.” 

Oakland Technical High School P.E. teacher Josh Fuchs said he’s ready to put a stop to the chaos that’s plagued the district since he arrived three years ago, but he won’t make a decision on the contract until he sees it. 

“My basic feeling is, we’re here for the students and we have to get this settled,” he said. “But I understand teachers want to look out for their livelihood.””


Opt Out Bill Passes Committee

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Friday April 28, 2006

Despite the absence of public speakers in opposition at a hearing held this week in the state Assembly Education Committee, a high school military recruitment notification bill co-sponsored by Bay Area Assemblymembers Loni Hancock and Sally Lieber only won the support of committee Democrats, leaving much work to be done if the bill is to become state law. 

The Hancock-Lieber bill would require that school districts within the state place an “opt out” military recruitment notification on the high school emergency information forms filled out each year by parents. 

Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, military recruiters are allowed access to high school student contact information unless the student or their parents choose to “opt out,” notifying the school that they do not wish to be contacted by the military.  

Hancock represents Berkeley in the assembly, while Lieber represents San Jose. Both are Democrats. 

At this week’s Assembly Education Committee meeting, Lieber told legislators that when Pajaro Valley Unified School District administrators voluntarily placed the opt out provision on emergency contact forms, parents or students choosing to opt out went from 16 percent of the school population to 63 percent. Pajaro Valley USD is in Watsonville. 

But that argument was not enough to sway committee Republicans. The measure passed 7-3, with all committee Republicans voting against it without comment, and the committee’s eighth Democrat, Tom Umberg of Anaheim, not voting. 

Because Democrats only hold 60 percent of the Assembly seats, at least some Republican support would be needed to prevent a possible veto by Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger if the bill were to pass the Assembly on a party partisan vote. 

The next hurdle for the Hancock-Lieber opt out bill comes in the Assembly Veterans Affairs Committee. A hearing date in that committee has not yet been scheduled. The bill has already received opposition from one veterans’ organization, the Veterans of Foreign Wars of California. 

 

 


David Beauvais: Defender of the First Amendment

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday April 28, 2006

David Beauvais loves the First Amendment.  

And the more controversial the lawsuit surrounding it happens to be, the better he says his chances are of winning it. 

When two sidewalk chalk artists were arrested for vandalism in the early 1990s after chalking political messages on a sidewalk in Berkeley and Oakland, Beauvais came to their rescue.  

He went on to defend both the cases on grounds of First Amendment rights and they were subsequently settled for a total of $40,000. 

Beauvais has also represented dozens of protesters arrested at demonstrations. Of those charged, only one was convicted for simple assault while two went to jury trials in Berkeley and won acquittals. The other cases were all dismissed. 

Born in New Jersey in 1952, Beauvais graduated from the American University in Washington D.C. with a B.A. in political science in 1973 and went on to study law at the University of the Pacific’s McGeorge School of Law. 

He began his practice in 1978 in Sacramento and later worked in Fresno, Irvine, Berkeley, and Oakland. 

“I remember being fascinated by law. I took up anything that walked in through the door back then,” he said. 

Beauvais also served as judge pro tem of the juvenile court in Fresno in the mid ’80s. 

Today, Beauvais dabbles in both civil rights as well as juvenile dependency cases dealing with violations in the Child Protection Services (CPS). 

On March 31, a federal jury in Sacramento returned a verdict of $2.6 million against the City of Stockton for violating the constitutional rights of Crystal Keller (aged 4 years in 2002, the year of the case) and her father Dennis Keller of Fair Oaks, California, when they took the child into police custody without a warrant. 

Beauvais served as case counsel in the case which involved the Stockton police receiving a complaint in July 2002 about how Crystal was being abused in her mother’s home where she was spending alternate weeks as part of a joint custody agreement granted after her parents separation.  

Officer Ernie Alverson of the Stockton Police responded to the complaint by putting Crystal under her father’s care and forwarding his report to Sgt. Ken Praegitzer who assigned the case to Detective Kathryn Henderson. 

Two days later and just 72 hours short of her fifth birthday, Crystal was removed from her father’s care and placed under protective custody by Henderson with approval from Praegitzer.  

Detective Henderson’s explanation for taking Crystal was that “the father was in violation of the custody order by keeping Crystal when the mother was supposed to have her.” 

Beauvais argued that “Henderson was not enforcing the custody order by taking Crystal from both parents.” 

Instead, he suggested, “Henderson could have gotten an emergency protective order to give the father full custody while the allegations against the mother were investigated.” 

The jury ruled that since Crystal had been in no danger of physical abuse in her father’s care, a warrant should have been used to remove her. The jury further ruled against the City of Stockton for “failing to have a policy in place that protects children from lawless seizures.”  

According to Beauvais, cases like this are not unusual.  

“The City of Stockton does not tell its officers what it can do. But it’s not just Stockton. Children everywhere are often removed from their parents without a warrant when one should be obtained. I found out about this problem when I represented a Berkeley family in 2000. We settled with Alameda County for $4000,000. Later, I discovered that these illegal removals are pandemic and not just limited to Alameda County.” 

Alameda County was forced to change its policy in 2000 after this particular case and currently a child has to be in immediate danger of bodily injury or death from his surroundings to be removed from his parent’s care without a warrant.  

Beauvais stated that systemic corruption in the child welfare system was a common occurrence. 

“Social workers have impossible case loads and are often poorly trained. Parents are often tricked or intimidated into agreeing to a watered-down version of the petition filed against them,” he said. “Courts too often rubber-stamp CPS recommendations and hearings are confidentially held. There is no public access and no media scrutiny. Once in the system, parents are well on their way to losing their parental rights. The system cracks down disproportionately on poor people without resources to hire attorneys and experts to counter CPS. Study after study has shown that poor people are no worse as parents than those in other socioeconomic groups.” 

Beauvais also said that county agencies received payment for each child they removed from the parents as well as bonuses from the federal government for each child they managed to have adopted. 

“Perverse federal funding incentives reward counties for removing children unnecessarily from their homes. Social workers often turn out to be creative writers of reports,” he pointed out. 

Beauvais spoke of a recent incident where the father had told the social worker that he had smoked a joint with the mother on their first date. Although there was not her evidence of drug use, the social worker wrote in her report several paragraphs later that "both parents have a history of using drugs." 

Beauvais is currently involved in the “Heil Krohn” case where he represents a homeless activist in Santa Cruz who was arrested at a Santa Cruz city council meeting for making “a silent, fleeting Nazi salute toward the mayor (Christopher Krohn) after the mayor interrupted a speaker and cut off public comment.” 

Although the mayor did not notice the gesture another council member did. “At that point my client was told to leave the meeting or be arrested. He refused to leave and was arrested,” Beauvais said. 

Although a federal judge in San Francisco dismissed Beauvais’s client’s federal civil rights action case for “false arrest and violation of his first amendment rights,” it was later reinstated by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The case is currently awaiting trial. 

When he’s not fighting civil rights cases, Beauvais enjoys traveling to third world countries—especially Central and South America. He recently returned from Peru and Bolivia and said he can’t wait to get back to discover more about his latest interest—ancient rituals and practices of shamanism in the Peruvian Amazon. 

 

Photograph by Hans Barnum 

David Beauvais (left) with law student intern Steve De Caprio (right) and office fashion trendsetter, Parker (center).


Commission Grills UC Officials On Campus Disaster Plans

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday April 28, 2006

Officials from UC Berkeley’s Office of Emergency Preparedness met with the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission and the public Wednesday to present the emergency aspects of the university’s Memorial Stadium project and take part in a question and answer session related to it. 

Tom Klatts, UC Berkeley manager of emergency preparedness, presented the overall UC campus emergency plan to address the concerns by the commission about the impact of the stadium with respect to disaster resistance.  

Klatts was joined by university planner Jennifer Lawrence and Richard Raymond, a representative of URS Corporation, the company that received the contract to rebuild the stadium. 

Gilbert K. Dong, Berkeley’s assistant fire chief/fire marshall told the Planet that the commission was responsible for making recommendations about the stadium’s emergency preparedness to the City Council. 

Doug Buckwald, who lives on Dwight Way, expressed concern about the increase in development on the Hayward Fault.  

“The fault goes right through the center of the stadium,” he said. “The rebuilding of a very dangerous structure in a very dangerous place only puts people at risk. Put the stadium where it belongs, in a seismically safe place.” 

He added that engineers have agreed that no amount of retrofitting would make the stadium structurally safe and in the event of an earthquake it would just split apart. 

Klatt said that talks were on going with UC geologists to look at construction possibilities that would make the ruptures less serious.  

Carol Shimmerling, a member of the public, said that when the university had wanted the deaf school to move out of the Clark Kerr campus, they had cited the existence of a fault underneath which was in actuality non-existent. So why were they saying that it was all right to build there once again when there was absolutely no reason to do so?, she asked. 

The plan for the Student Athletic High Performance Center was also discussed. According to Klatt, the roof of the center would be constructed in such a way that fire trucks would be able to access it in the case of a fire emergency.  

Jesse Townley, vice chair, questioned the school officials about their plans. 

In reply to whether the UC Campus emergency plan covered an earthquake on the Hayward, other Bay Area faults, or combination of faults, Klatt replied that the same plan applied to all although the challenges would vary in each case. 

With respect to addressing hill fire issues, Klatt said that UC’s Office of Emergency Preparedness would be able to set up an instant command center and offer treatment to those affected depending on the magnitude of the fire. Klatt also mentioned that since UC Berkeley did not have their own fire department, help would be requested from the Berkeley Fire Department. 

When asked about the impact of a potential radioactive/chemical release from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Klatt said it would depend on wind conditions and other related factors and also the direction of release of the toxic materials.  

He also added that although none of the labs had refinery or industrial quantities of any toxic material, even small fires in the UC labs in the past had been “horribly disruptive.” 

Klatt was also asked how the current UC emergency plan interacted with the planned four-part Southeast Campus Integrated Project during a major disaster.  

He replied that the university was currently looking at improvements in the current stadium plan and working on a project with graduate students in the planning department about how campus population oscillates during weekday and weekend classes. 

“The reason behind this survey is to develop a plan to evacuate students in sequenced degrees in the event of a major disaster. Disabled students will also have to be taken into consideration,” he said.  

When asked whether construction activities would interfere with emergency response in the aftermath of a major earthquake or fire, Klatt said that they would try to make provision for emergency response.  

Klatt also added that there was a contingency plan, in the event of an earthquake or a fire, to use construction equipment to “shore up collapsed buildings” and rescue those trapped.  

It was also mentioned that UC Police Department and the City of Berkeley would need to hire additional staff to control the traffic depending on traffic flow in key intersections.  

The UC Berkeley team also said that university police anticipated opening the Lower Jordan Trail for access by emergency personnel and residents in case of an emergency. However no vehicles would be allowed on the trail and the traffic would be pedestrian.  

With respect to adding a second access to Panoramic Hill, different ideas were discussed to create a foot-trail down Stonewall. 

When Sharon Hudson, a resident of Willard neighborhood, asked Klatt if there were enough shelters for students in the event of a large scale earthquake, he said that the number was not enough.  

In case an earthquake occurs in another area, the stadium could not be converted into a shelter because it did not meet the Red Cross’s needs, Klatt said. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


May Day Action Calls for Immigration Strike

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday April 28, 2006

This May 1 could become the day without immigrants if calls to boycott schools and work by national and local immigrant organizations are heeded all over the United States. 

“The Great American Boycott 2006, A Day Without An Immigrant” calls for a nationwide general immigration strike on May 1 to protest the current anti-immigration bill.  

San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley will be the Bay Area locales for a co-ordinated action that includes 100 cities across the nation, said Siu Hin Lee, spokesperson for the National Immigrant Solidarity Network. 

The Mexican “Nothing Gringo” campaign scheduled for May 1 has drawn criticism from U.S. lobbyists—as well as the American Chamber of Commerce in Mexico—who feel that U.S. Corporations lobbying the U.S. Congress for immigration reform are being wrongly targeted in this campaign. 

“No Work! No School! No Buying! No Selling!” screams an El Gran Paro poster distributed by Mayday in the Bay, an informal group of organizers and activists that got together in the San Francisco Bay area to support the call for a General Strike on May 1. The Los Angeles-based March 25th Coalition against HR4437 called the strike to help defend immigrant rights. 

The group plans to hold rallies around “local symbols of economic trade,” such as stock exchanges and anti-immigrant corporations. The organizers are asking participants to wear white and bring pots, pans, spoons, and noisemakers to the May 1 actions. 

From the government, they are demanding “full, unconditional and immediate ‘amnesty’ for all immigrants,” “de-militarization of the U.S. Mexico border,” and “the repeal of NAFTA and all neoliberal trade agreements which create economic conditions leading to the displacement of people,” among other things. 

Closer to home, the Berkeley May 1 Mobilization Committee, an ad hoc coalition of ten student groups, campus workers, and community members, have planned a student and worker walkout and rally on Sproul Plaza at noon Monday.  

“There’s a lot of excitement on campus right now,” said Michael Smith, a spokesperson for the group. “People are beginning to understand what a big movement this is becoming. It’s going to be huge. Berkeley has always had a history of activism and this will definitely help to revive that.” 

Smith added that similar rallies and walk-outs have also been planned at San Francisco State University, City College of San Francisco, UC Santa Cruz and other schools across the U.S. 

“There have always been immigrants in America, but immigrant workers have never been given the dignity they deserve,” he said. “They have always been exploited and it’s time to fight for their liberation, their rights. The fact that they are slowly finding their voice is taking people by surprise.” 

Berkeley’s Inkworks Press on Seventh Street will also be hosting their annual May Day event on Monday. Now in its sixth year of May Day celebrations, Inkworks will be getting together with the Network of Bay Area Workers Co-operative to celebrate May 1. The party, with a barbecue, dancing and music, starts at noon and will go into the evening, and is located at 2827 Seventh St. 

“We celebrate labor in its most liberated sense,” said Innosanto Nagara, who formerly worked for Inkworks and is now with Design Action Collective, a spin-off of Inkworks. “We want to give May 1, the International Worker’s Day, the importance it deserves.” 

Independent businesses around the area, such as Arizmendi Bakery Co-op, Tinker’s Workshop, and Pedal Express will also be celebrating the day. 

In San Francisco, the SF Workers Co-operative will observe May Day, as will Rainbow Grocery and the Lusty Lady. 

International Boulevard in Oakland will be the venue of a mass march organized by high school BAMN (Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary). Student organizers will be taking a stand against “racist, second-class treatment of Latinas/os, immigrants, and all minorities,” according to organizers. 

“History is only made in key moments, and this is a key moment for people to come together and demand equality. This is the start of a new civil rights movement and we will not be intimated,” Yvette Felarca, one of the organizers, told the Planet..


County Medical Center Settles Nurses’ Contract

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Friday April 28, 2006

Finalizing a settlement reached after a year of contract negotiations with its 2,000 registered nurses, the Alameda County Medical Center turned this week to shore up its remaining nagging budget problems. 

Members of Service Employees International Union 616 voted 4-1 last week to ratify a three-year contract with the medical center, and center trustees unanimously approved the agreement at this week’s trustee meeting. The contract provides a 4 percent across-the-board wage increase beginning the end of March this year, with additional 4.5 percent increases the following two years. 

ACMC CEO Wright Lassiter said that with the Local 616 approval “we have all of our outstanding labor issues resolved. It was a very long negotiation, but I think it ended well.” 

The negotiations began under Lassiter’s management predecessor at ACMC, Tennessee-based management consultants Cambio Health Solutions. Cambio was hired by the medical center in early 2004 to analyze ACMC’s finances. The company’s involvement with ACMC ended when Lassiter was hired last September. 

The rest of the fiscal news for ACMC was not so good. Lassiter and ACMC Chief Financial Officer Geoff Dottery told trustees this week that the medical center continues to run in excess of a million dollars a month behind what was projected in the budget produced by Cambio before it left the center, and is still projecting an $11 million figure over budget for the entire fiscal year. 

Dottery said that one primary cause of last month’s budget deficit was $221,000 in larger retirement costs than was anticipated. Lassiter and trustee board finance chair Stanley M. Schiffman said that in the past, ACMC accepted the projected retirement figures given them by county officials but that has now changed. 

“This is the first time that our staff is being actively involved in developing retirement amount information in conjunction with the county,” Schiffman said. 

Lassiter also told trustees that the recently completed Margin Audit Process, in which more than 80 staff members and consultants “looked at every line item in the budget for cost savings and improvements” over a 4-month period, has resulted in recommendations of $23 million a year in savings. Trustees have scheduled a public hearing on the Margin Audit Process report for May 9. 

“With the margin audit process suggestions implemented, I hope we will be able to move forward with a balanced budget,” Lassiter said. 

Meanwhile, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors moved this week to fill one of the two vacancies on the 11-member ACMC board of trustees, approving the appointment of former Berkeley City Police Chief and Compton City Manager Ron Nelson on Tuesday morning on the nomination of Supervisor Scott Haggerty. 

Nelson sat in on Tuesday’s board meeting but was unable to participate because he had not yet been sworn in. Health management professional Gwen Sykes was removed from the ACMC board last month in a disputed vote by county supervisors, and former Pleasanton Mayor Tom Pico resigned for health reasons earlier this month. A spokesperson for the Board of Supervisors said Nelson replaced Pico..


City College Completion Scheduled for Mid-July

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Friday April 28, 2006

Construction of the new Berkeley City College in downtown Berkeley is 85 percent complete with a tentative opening date scheduled for mid-July, Peralta Community College District trustees learned this week at their regular meeting.  

At the same meeting, trustees approved an additional $100,000 in overtime costs, as well as another $196,000 in change orders, to SJ Amoroso Construction Company in order to finish the construction project this summer. 

Trustees changed the college name from Vista to Berkeley City College earlier this year. 

Peralta Trustee Nicky Gonzalez Yuen, a frequent critic of Vista construction project change orders in the past, told fellow trustees that while he could “complain here and there about some of the items on the [change order] list, the alternative to completing the building in July isn’t good. We would have to continue paying $150,000 a month in rent” to stay at the college’s present facilities on Milvia “as well as face losing enrollment because we couldn’t accommodate the new students that the new building will allow us to add.” 

Yuen praised Peralta General Services Director Sadiq Ikharo, saying that “I’m fairly satisfied he did an outstanding job in bargaining” over some of the proposed change orders, “in some cases, saving us more than $100,000.”  

Saying that the district is continuing to try to save costs on the $65 million construction project, Chancellor Elihu Harris mentioned the signature open book that graces the front of the new building, joking that “we want everybody to understand that this doesn’t represent an open checkbook, it’s a college textbook.” 

The mid-July projected completion date is more than six months later than the originally-projected December 2005 completion date. And then, while Berkeley City College staff can begin occupying the facilities in July, construction crew members are expected to remain in the building doing cleanup work until late August. 

Both construction and district officials blamed the setback on a 7-month delay in installation of permanent power to the facility, as well as recent rains. 

Amoroso Construction representative Mike Childs told trustees that “the biggest concern right now is completing the atrium,” a towering structure that will dominate the center of the college. 

Childs said that the atrium will be the last portion of the construction completed, adding that “we’re confident that we’ll have the scaffolding down and be ready for business in August.” 

Berkeley City College President Judy Walters said that even uncompleted, the atrium is “awe-inspiring when you stand in the middle of it on the ground floor and look up. Some of our faculty members are calling it a cathedral to education.” 

 

 


Police Blotter

By Richard Brenneman
Friday April 28, 2006

Bloody arrest 

A fracas that broke out during an arrest by undercover Berkeley police officers resulted in bloody but minor injuries to a 33-year-old Oakland man suspected of dealing drugs in South Berkeley. 

Though some witnesses told Berkeley Copwatch that the officers attacked the man after they stopped him using unmarked vehicles, Berkeley Police spokesperson Officer Steve Burcham said force was used only after he resisted arrest. 

The arrest, which took place on Adeline Street between Fairview and Harmon Streets, just after 2 p.m., was made in conjunction with the execution of a search warrant at the suspect’s Oakland residence, where officers recovered two ounces of crack cocaine and two shotguns, Officer Burcham said. 

Strongarmed wallet 

Two bandits, described by the victims as men in their 20s, robbed a 63-year-old Berkeley man at midnight Friday as he was walking along the 400 block of Colusa Street. 

The strongarm artists wrestled the man’s mallet away from him, then departed. 

 

Broken nose 

A 26-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of assault with serious bodily injury after an April 13 fracas in the 2500 block of Haste Street. The victim, a Berkeley man, sustained a broken nose and other injuries in the 4:30 p.m. attack. 

 

Armed robbery 

A pair of bandits, one packing a pistol, robbed a 22-year-old Berkeley woman of her purse and its contents after they confronted her at 12:30 p.m. last Thursday as she walked along the 1800 block of Solano Avenue, said Officer Burcham. 

No one has been arrested in connection with the incident..


Opinion

Editorials

Editorial: Singing About America in Many Tongues

By Becky O’Malley
Tuesday May 02, 2006

A couple of weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, I attended a concert which was a benefit for African-American college students. It was organized by Hope Briggs, then just another struggling soprano, though she’s now a featured artist with the San Francisco Opera and other major companies. She had put together a bouquet of young classical singers who contributed their performances, many but not all of them African-Americans like herself.  

The concert, which had been scheduled for months, took place in a school auditorium somewhere on the Peninsula. It was during the period when people were still afraid to leave home, still reluctant to cross bridges, so the audience was modest in size, mostly, like me, friends and relatives of the singers. The music, a varied program featuring opera arias, was a blessed relief from the tensions of the day.  

After each singer had taken her turn, Hope brought them all to the stage for a final bow. Then, as they stood in a row in front of the curtain, she led them all, and the audience, in singing one more selection: “America the Beautiful.” I don’t think of myself as a sentimental person, or as being particularly patriotic, but seeing those beautiful young people up there, hearing their lovely voices singing about the beauty of our homeland and its people at a time when we felt that all we loved was in danger, moved me to shed more than a few tears.  

I remembered that evening this last weekend when with much fanfare a Spanish translation of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the official U.S. national anthem, was launched on Spanish language radio. It got the predictable shocked reaction from the expected people, including an emphatic George W. Bush. Blasphemy! Real Americans speak English!  

What it reminded me is what a really inappropriate song “The Star-Spangled Banner” is for a nation like ours, in any language. In the first place, it’s virtually unsingable for most of us, with those screechy high notes. And it’s martial, a relic of a long-ago and little remembered war, before this country became as big and as varied as it is now, when the flag was spangled with many fewer stars. The music was probably written by a British composer, and the poetry is weak.  

“America the Beautiful” would be a much better choice for a multilingual national song. The first verse, with its spacious skies and purple mountains, uplifts everybody and offends nobody. (The quality of the poetry does fall off in later stanzas, but we don’t have to use those.) And while we’re translating, there are a number of other wonderful songs which we could use to express love of home and fellow citizens.  

The best words, hands down, can be found in “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” once called “The Negro National Anthem.” They were written by a good writer, James Weldon Johnson, and are both thoughtful and inspiring: 

 

Lift every voice and sing, till earth and  

Heaven ring, 

Ring with the harmonies of liberty… 

 

African-Americans might not be willing to share their anthem with the whole country, but since some African-Americans of Caribbean origin speak Spanish as their first language, there should be no objection to translation. The music is stirring, excellent for group singing. 

Or perhaps it would be better to start with a song in Spanish, and translate it for others to sing in English. One beloved expression of love of country is “De Colores,” learned by most California school children, which starts with a verse praising the colors of the countryside in spring, the birds and the rainbow. It’s been taken as a metaphor for diversity, and many have added subsequent verses, some in praise of the people of different colors who are found on the earth. Since it’s a folk song, pride of authorship hasn’t gotten in the way of adaptation to multicultural patriotic sentiments, or of English versions, of which there are several.  

Woody Guthrie’s populist “This Land is Your Land,” in a folk vein, is also learned by most school children, and is sung even by many who would disagree with its radical author’s politics if they knew about them. People make up verses for it all the time. Translating it into Spanish wouldn’t cause any flap. It’s surprising that no one has done it yet, or maybe they have.  

And why limit ourselves to Spanish and English? Only English-speaking U.S. citizens are proud of speaking just one language. If those guys are touchy about the SSB, let’s just leave it off the program. Many Americans speak many languages, and other patriotic songs could be translated back and forth to accommodate all singers.  

What about adding a French anthem, for example? “La Marseillaise” offers stirring music and inspiring words. (Perhaps too inspiring: politically savvy French friends tell me those parts about “impure blood running in the furrows” have lost favor in some circles in France.)  

But weren’t we mad at the French about something? Remember “freedom fries”? What was that all about? 

Oh yes. We were mad at the French for warning us it might be a mistake to go into Iraq. For hinting or even saying outright that there were no weapons of mass destruction. Maybe it’s time for our national leaders, George W. in particular, to learn just one little French phrase, even if he doesn’t like the SSB in Spanish. For his next meeting with French leaders, perhaps he could practice “Excusez-moi, j’ai fait une erreur.” 


Sewers, Impeachment, Alcohol Policy on Council Agenda

By Judith Scherr
Friday April 28, 2006

After a serenade by Berkeley’s Kairos Youth Choir and enlightenment by clever Public Service Announcements written by students in Berkeley High’s Communication Arts and Sciences program to inspire recycling, the City Council was ready to dig into the more meaty issues of the evening—aging sewers, creating an alcohol policy and impeaching the president. 

But not before Councilmember Betty Olds, who last week got the Barn Owl named as the city’s official bird, announced the Honda strike settlement, saying: “One week after the Barn Owl was chosen as the official bird, the Honda wrath has disappeared.” 

The creek’s task force got a reprieve—its final plan aimed at preserving Berkeley’s waterways was to go to the council in May, but it won’t be ready. So the council will look at a draft ordinance in July, then vote on the ordinance in the fall. 

 

Curbing alcohol nuisances 

During the public comment period, Lori Lott of the Berkeley Alcohol Policy Advocacy Coalition told the council that the present complaint-driven system of regulating alcohol-vending outlets is not working and Jeana Radasevich from Students For A Safer Southside spoke of “easy access (of alcohol) for minors.” 

The council agreed and voted unanimously to ask the City Council to take the packet of suggested legislation the group provided in order to craft an ordinance 

regulating the sale of alcohol. 

 

Impeaching Bush and Cheney 

With a unanimous council vote, Berkeley became the fourth city in California, after San Francisco, Santa Cruz and Arcata to call for the impeachment of President George Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney. The council also approved a measure asking the Peace and Justice Commission to consider an advisory measure that would place impeachment on the November ballot. 

 

Sewer woes 

There was no action on the city’s aging storm water system, simply a presentation of the vast need by Acting Public Works Director Claudette Ford. One solution is funding new sewers, which Councilmember Linda Maio said she’d like to see on the November ballot. Mayor Tom Bates, however, said he thought that the large school bond measure on the ballot was enough to ask of Berkeley voters. 

City Manager Phil Kamlarz talked about a bill in the state legislature that would amend the state constitution—ACA 13—and would allow cities to fund the storm drain system through fees, rather than having to float a bond measure. 

Also, the council put off a discussion of AC transit cuts in Lines 40 and 43 until its May 16 meeting..


Public Comment

Letters to the Editor

Tuesday May 02, 2006

FCMAT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Ernest Avellar is entitled to his paranoia, but your readers are entitled to a correction about the history of the school budget crises. The Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) is not a “semi-secret organization,” as he writes. It’s a rather dull committee of school finance experts that publishes its findings and interim reports on its website, www.fcmat.org. Sheila Jordan, County Superintendent of Schools, did not run the Oakland school district into bankruptcy; the Oakland superintendent did. What Jordan did is to blow the whistle on the rampant mismanagement and climate of corruption that prevailed in the district at the time. Instead of blaming Jordan for calling in the State, Avellar should give thanks. The size of Oakland’s deficit would have cratered the County. Only the State had resources big enough to cover it.  

Martin Nicolaus  

 

• 

FORUM ON YOUTH VIOLENCE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I applaud the efforts of Mayor Tom Bates and School Board President Terry Doran to organize the forum on Youth Violence and Out of Control Parties on April 22 at Longfellow School. The forum gave an opportunity for parents, students, community members, and city and school staff to discuss issues confronting teens today and the resources needed to help. I encourage the mayor, city staff, and the administrators of Berkeley Unified School District to continue such forums so we may understand what our youth need and how we may be of greater service to them. It will take the concerted work of all agencies to begin to find solutions to the problems of violence, drugs, alcohol, and education. Thank you to the organizers and participants for a positive and productive response to recent, tragic events. 

Mary Jacobs 

 

• 

CORRECTION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In my April 18 commentary in the Daily Planet, I alluded to detailed and “arcane” language in the Creeks Task Force proposal. I remembered hearing, in the many task force meetings I attended, some rather arcane discussion, but I must admit that in rereading the final text of the proposal, it may at some points be overly detailed, but it is clear and concise, and nowhere arcane. I must also say that I think the work of the task force was thorough and conscientious and the proposal generally reasonable. 

Jerry Landis 

 

• 

TWO THINGS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I hope that there isn’t too severe a penalty for including two unrelated subjects in one letter. I promise to keep it short, like myself. 

1: Generals: “ Rumsfeld is arrogant and incompetent.” Bush: “My kind of guy!” 

2. I couldn’t help noticing in the Daily Planet the different pictures of police treatment of folks and their property in Peoples’ Park and the ones illegally lounging on the median strip in the Gourmet Ghetto. 

Ruth Bird  

• 

DOWNTOWN BUSINESS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Want more downtown business? No mystery to most consumers: Easier parking and fewer homeless people. The problem is not the lack of opportunity for brick-and-mortar retail stores. Consider the success of Fourth Street in Berkeley, or Bay Street in Emeryville, which bloomed while downtown deteriorated. 

Robert Gable 

 

• 

PUBLIC LIBRARY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I’ve been involved with Friends of the Berkeley Public Library for some years and want to remind Daily Planet readers about this fine organization, one of those little-known Berkeley organizations that quietly goes about doing essential community work.  

The Friends sponsor many of the library’s most popular programs—the Summer Reading Program, Adult Literacy, Earphone English, and the Jazz Festival. We also contribute to the acquisition of special collections and support staff development, including scholarships in library education.  

The Friends raise funds for the Library through sales at their two used bookstores—a small shop downtown in the Central Library, and a larger store in the Sather Gate Mall between Durant and Channing. Phenomenally, the Friends make upwards of $100,000 each year by selling donated books, records, videos, and cassettes. Volunteers from the Friends serve as the sales force, sorters, pricers, and shelvers of the thousands of books that Berkeleyans generously donate.  

Currently, we’re seekers… seekers of new members ($25 a year), seekers of donated books (call 841-5604 for information), seekers of book buyers, and seekers of bookstore volunteers. In fact, if you’ve ever wanted to run a little bookshop, make lots of money for the community, enjoy the company of like-minded bibliophiles, or browse through thousands of books, this is the place for you. (There’s the added benefit of experiencing first-hand, as a merchant, the indescribable Telegraph Avenue scene!) 

For those of you who love the Library and want to work directly for its betterment, please consider joining our good company. Contact the Sather Gate Bookstore at 841-5604 (Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.).  

Jim Novosel  

 

• 

ISRAEL/PALESTINE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I would like to suggest that the Palestinians and those who support a free Palestine rethink their approach to opposing Israel. Suicide bombings are counterproductive. They fail to increase support for the Palestinian’s cause and simply lead to more rounds of killing, of Israelis and of Palestinians. As a meaningful alternative I would suggest that the Palestinians embrace a Gandhi Activist Nonviolent Confrontational approach, organizing groups of children and women to sit in front of bulldozers, tanks and army trucks, etc., and see that such protest action appears on TV and Internet sets throughout the world. 

If this strategy is embraced, it would not only end the terrorist killing of Israeli civilians but would most likely, I think and pray, energize international opposition to Israel’s occupation of land that falls on the Palestinian side of the pre-1967 borders. Here in the United States, millions might be motivated to march in opposition to the continued occupation of the Palestinian homeland, much as we marched to oppose racism here at home. Nonviolent confrontational action has historically gathered support for those who sincerely employ this strategy. It is time, past time, to try something new, to embrace a meaningful alternative to terrorism on both sides, Israeli and Palestinian. 

The bottom line should be to find a way to save the lives of children and women on both sides. Simply telling the Palestinians to accept Israel and the borders being imposed by Israel just won’t cut the cake any more than telling the Israelis to forgo their occupation while their women and children are being killed by terrorists. 

Oh yes, I do appreciate that one person’s terrorist may well be another person’s freedom fighter. But this in no way changes the immediate need, namely to end the killing of civilians on both sides, Palestinians and Israelis. 

What do you think? 

Irving Gershenberg 

• 

‘SMALL TRAGEDY’ 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In his April 28 review of playwright Craig Lucas’ Small Tragedy, now playing at the Aurora Theatre, Ken Bullock writes, “he (Lucas) tries for the big post-9/11 rabbit punch masquerading as moral commentator.” 

In the final scenes, the drama is focused on the conflict of Jen (Carrie Paff) as she tries to decide what to do with her newborn infant. Fifty-five years ago this past weekend (April 30, to be exact) Lucas was abandoned in a car by his birth mother. Viewed as roman a clef, Small Tragedy is neither melodramatic nor moralistic but becomes memoir.  

Joe Kempkes  

Oakland 

 

• 

PUBLIC LIBRARY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In regard to the recent no-confidence vote at the Berkeley Public Library, where it has been suggested that we are witness to some sort of union coup attempt or private feud, one way to figure out just what hidden struggles are going on behind the public stories is to look at the probable personal gains or losses to those involved. When I do, I see that the unionized employees seem to have the most to lose in any public discreditization of the library managers and director. Managers in virtually any organization are older and so closer to retirement, and by their ambitious natures are more willing to leave an employer. They have a personal stake in keeping the library going in the short run until they retire or sufficiently impress possible future employers, even if that sacrifices the distant future of those who remain. 

The unionized employees are personally rewarded through a seniority system of salary increases, retirement benefits, and protection from layoffs the longer they stay with the library. The library can only afford to keep them to the extent that Berkeley citizens continue to vote the library money. And surely the two-thirds of the unionized employees who signed the petition must know that such a public action weakens the short-term political position of the library. So I conclude that for the employees to have so risked their futures, they must believe that the director and her managers are indeed destroying the library’s future. 

Sylvia Maderos-Vasquez 

 

• 

LAWN PARKING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The “lawn parking” issue represents two of the things wrong with Berkeley. First, in a moment in which everyone agrees that we need to cut down on gasoline use—for political, environmental, and safety reasons—Berkeley is seriously considering pouring more concrete so that the ever-more affluent student body can park its SUVs and Mercedes on the sidewalk (this is not hyperbole, check out Dana Street). Second, the staff who came up with this idea is not accountable to any transparent procedure of accountability. When I asked a City Official about who was held accountable for the recent motorcycle parking idiocy, he smiled tolerantly. Would this count for promotion? He smiled tolerantly. He added that the city manager is not reviewed by the city council even though it is part of their mandate to do so. 

Paul Rabinow 

 

• 

RESPONSE TO GERTZ 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Recently John Gertz wrote “perhaps Berkeley’s Peace and Justice Commission and City Council should call the Palestinians to task for [electing Hamas].” (Daily Planet, April 7.) Now he claims he said no such thing. Perhaps he shares Bush’s touching faith that no one can remember anything, for he goes on to assert in his most recent op-ed that he never packed the Peace and Justice Commission nor threatened Linda Maio.  

Let’s review the record. Last summer, when the Peace and Justice controversy surfaced, a Daily Planet reporter asked Gertz about his alleged involvement. “Corrie was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Gertz said. “What I have observed is that a lot of people were sick of the commission being run by the lunatic left and some brave people came forward to put a stop to it.” Gertz added, “The real political objective is that Maio is going down and so is Worthington. They refused to rescind their vote on Corrie. That’s it for them. They’re toast.” (Daily Planet, July, 22, 2005.)  

The reporter mentioned that Gertz had not specified how he would ensure Maio’s (or Worthington’s) defeat, so Gertz obligingly wrote to the Daily Planet to lay out his strategy (July 29, 2005). “I predict,” he wrote, “that [Maio’s] anti-Israel record will bring a lot of cash and a lot of volunteers to the cause of her more moderate opponent. Can’t she imagine the literature that will surely be mailed to Berkeley voters showing her picture right next to that now famous picture of Corrie’s contorted face burning the American flag? Does she think that only Berkeley’s Jewish community will care about this?”  

I’ve never suggested Gertz would do anything illegal. But how many of us would run for mayor if we knew in advance we’d have to use most of our funds countering a barrage of hit pieces on a fringe issue most voters know little about? Gertz’s current assertion that he’d “help make [Maio’s and Worthington’s] misguided foreign policy a central issue of the campaign,” is a veiled reminder of his previous naked threat. Yes, Mr. Gertz, unfortunately, “that’s democracy.” But for those of us fed up with the power wealthy special interest groups have over our political choices, it’s also “nefarious.”  

Joanna Graham  

 

• 

OREGON STREET 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Dan McMullan’s hyperventilating about racism notwithstanding (Letters, April 28), most of the folks—white, African American, and other—that I know here on Oregon Street are pretty much opposed to people of any color buying and selling drugs here, and leaving their used condoms and hypodermic needles for our kids to find. We’ve called in many drug deals where the buyers were white frat boys, and also had to chase off the white teenage prostitute who was hanging out here. And for years, the Moores’ drug operation at 1610 Oregon included two quite Caucasian dealers, Charles and David Szakas. My wife overheard Charles boasting about how he’d just gotten out of jail after doing time for armed robbery with a knife, and David was ultimately arrested for possession of drugs inside 1610. He was also observed up the street at the tot lot trying to recruit neighborhood kids to serve as lookouts. My neighbors and I worked closely with the police to get them out of the neighborhood. It’s been my perception that the drug trade around here is pretty colorblind—as is the opposition to it. 

Oh, and as for McMullan’s observation that “a court ruling from Commissioner Rantzman is akin to a lawful order from Adolf Hitler,” he will be interested to learn that Rantzman’s unequivocal ruling against Lenora Moore was echoed by Judge Wynne Carville when the case came to him on appeal, so there’s another Hitlerian judge here in Berkeley! What are the odds?  

Paul Rauber 

 

• 

NASTY NAMES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Dan McMullan obviously has the rights accorded him under the Constitution to express, in a free press, what he chooses—that’s the beauty of a democracy. 

He can weigh in on the neighborhood conflict around Lenore Moore, can call his fellow residents cold, distant, scary, racists and bigots. He can evoke Adolf Hitler. No problem, Dan. 

But when you’ve used all the nastiest names to describe ordinary people—flawed people who are just trying their best, just as their neighbors are—what will you use to alert us to real threats to our democracy? 

Jill Posener 

 

• 

INCIDENT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

At about 3:45 p.m. Sunday, April 30, disabled activist Danny McMullen had pulled his motorized wheelchair with a trailer attached into the driveway of People’s Park when he was informed by two police officers that vehicles or carts were not allowed in People’s Park. As Mr. McMullen was using the trailer cart to transport his two sons to the free meal being served by the Catholic Worker, Mr. McMullen refused to move his wheel chair. He was ordered to procure his ID, and when he refused to do this, Officer Uranus, Badge No. 84, put his hand on Mr. Mc Mullen, at which Mr. McMullen ordered the officer to remove his hand, and when the officer did not, Mr. McMullen got up and expectorated upon aforementioned officer, at which he was forced to the ground and handcuffed after a protracted struggle and the arrival of another eight or 10 cops of various stripes. 

Arthur Fonseca 

 

• 

CLARIFIATION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

There has been some confusion regarding my support for the Downtown Berkeley BART Plaza and Transit Area Design Plan. At this time, I have not endorsed a preferred alternative. Option 4, the “historical transit” alternative, provides a strong pedestrian orientation with sweeping east-west vistas at Center Street while successfully integrating BART with planned dedicated bus lanes. Option 3 also merits serious consideration, as it creates high-quality public open space and significantly improves pedestrian safety at University Avenue and access to BART. The feasibility of modifying Option 3 to accommodate an extended dedicated bus lane should be explored. Option 4 provides additional public open space when combined with Center Street closure east of Shattuck. I am not as impressed by Options 1 and 2. Option 1 is too timid and similar to existing conditions. Option 2 is even more convoluted and confusing than the street layout today. I encourage community members to get involved in the public planning process to help shape the future of Downtown Berkeley. If you ever walk, bicycle, ride the bus, or drive through Downtown Berkeley, we want to know what you think.  

Sarah Syed 

Transportation Commission, Chair 

Downtown Berkeley BART Plaza Community Advisory Committee, Member  

 

• 

UC POLICIES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I wonder if other Daily Planet readers caught the ugly irony in the April 25 San Francisco Chronicle between the headline story re UC’s top employees gorging themselves at the public trough and the Nevius column in the Bay Area section on Cal’s crackdown on the free box in People’s Park. There is a connection. 

It’s clear that to UC execs, higher education means two things. One, attaining higher salaries and perks by any means necessary, e.g. enrolling in a compensation plan one doesn’t qualify for (Berkeley Chancellor Birgeneau) and two, upping the cost of a free public education. 

The free box, a small visible gesture of sharing our excess, is still too strong a threat to the system that serves UC administrators so well. Therefore, they have physically destroyed the free box. UC administrators have pledged allegiance to the unfree box for everyone but themselves. 

I hope concerned readers e/write the Berkeley City Council urging them to approve of a free box on city property adjacent to People’s Park as a citizen right unto itself, and as a rebuke to the sweet deals UC execs are gobbling up at taxpayer expense. 

Maris Arnold 

 

• 

IMMIGRATION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In the middle of the 19th century, Arizona, California, Texas, New Mexico, Utah, and parts of Colorado were part of the nation of Mexico. Who then are the true immigrants? “Manifest Destiny,” the shameful rationalization for the butchering of Mexicans and Native Americans led to the present day false hubbub about restricting access to our country from especially Mexicans who have a historical right to be here. 

Robert Blau 

 

• 

OIL PROFITS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The oil companies are ripping us off, big time. Each quarter, their profits are record profits; meaning that each quarter, their profits are more than ever before. They blame high gas prices on the price of crude oil, but their obscenely high profits show this to be a lie. It is simple greed. 

We need energy independence. That means more investment in solar, wind, and other renewable sources of energy. I don’t trust the oil companies to make those investments, and neither should you. 

We need a retroactive Obscene Profits Tax on the oil companies to redirect funds toward energy independence. 

It is time for Congress to show some political courage. 

Bruce Joffe 

Piedmont 

 


Commentary: ZAB Holds Trader Joe’s Pep Rally

By Regan Richardson
Tuesday May 02, 2006

After attending the April 28 Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) meeting and witnessing the sickening and suspiciously euphoric response to the behemoth project proposed at 1950 MLK Way, and after reading the post-meeting “Livable Berkeley” (they may soon want to consider a name-change) blog page, I am compelled to respond. In theory this was supposed to be a substantive ZAB meeting to discuss the mass and height of this project. Thanks to the developer, Hudson McDonald, it actually just turned out to be a pep rally for supporters of Trader Joe’s, alternative transit and even denser housing, staged on public time in a public venue. 

I am a resident of the 1800 block of Berkeley Way, the street most directly affected by this twisted attempt at “smart growth” (or is it “intelligent design”?). I am sick and tired of being told, by neighbors who are less directly affected and developers alike, that we should “get with the program” and embrace “reasonable compromise.” I am one of the original members of a neighborhood group that proactively pursued a dialogue with Panoramic Interests, now under the guise of Hudson McDonald, in October of 2002. Our realistic goal was achieving a neighborhood-appropriate project, thus escaping the viciously cyclical process in which we are now engaged. To all the Livable Berkeley newbies, I say welcome to our world! 

The neighbors of Berkeley Way have never been, nor are we even now opposed, to a project that respects our neighborhood. We have also never maintained that the current strip mall is superior to a mixed-use building. In 2002 Scott Harrison, then a homeowner on Berkeley Way, suggested that we initiate a “constructive” dialogue, our hope being that by voicing neighborhood concerns directly to the developers before the approval process even began, we could rewrite the standard operating procedure for development in Berkeley, and the developer would have a distinct guideline to design a building in keeping with the existing neighborhood.  

We have more than held up our end of the bargain, as evidenced by the Herculean efforts of people like Steve Wollmer and Kristin Leimkuhler, to participate constructively in this process. But it is pretty clear, after four years of ever-increasing redesigns, that Hudson McDonald does not feel any obligation to honor any of our reasonable requests, rather they are choosing to roll the dice and roll ZAB and City Council. At the neighborhood meeting we had with them in July 2005, they suggested that it was time for us to get out of their way and let them get on with it, “it” being the rape of our neighborhood in the name of their profit. Each time Hudson McDonald promises an “improved” project that serves the “common good,” they come back and slap us in the face with a taller, larger, and audaciously detrimental building, their perpetual promise being that they will impose something even worse upon us if we don’t roll over and comply. In my experience, most people don’t respond well to threats to their homes and neighborhood—I know I don’t. 

Had they ever made a genuine attempt to make their building neighborhood-friendly and to respond to our clear, consistent, and reasonable concerns four years ago, we would be happy to cooperate. But by continually pushing their agenda without genuinely responding to our concerns, by displaying blatant disregard for our requests, they have willingly made us into an obstacle when we were trying to be an ally. So now, it’s personal. And they are frustrated?! We find it ironic and not a little galling that they choose to characterize us as a “dedicated group of opponents,” considering that they are responsible for that! 

There is something inherently wrong with a process that puts developers’ profits ahead of protecting the neighborhoods they invade. We have spent countless hours poring over code and debating the particulars of setbacks, density, parking, and detriment, and it is easy to lose sight of the bigger issue here: developers’ refusal to design buildings that fit alongside the small-scale residential neighborhoods they overwhelm, their argument being that they can’t make a profit otherwise. They stretch the existing laws to the breaking point, and we are asked to bear the full burden of their greed. Even the modest concessions imposed on developers based on community and ZAB recommendations are dwarfed by the sacrifices we are expected to make.  

To all you card-carrying Livable Berkeley-ites (again, a name-change will soon be required), Hudson McDonald flunkies and disingenuously recruited Trader Joe’s junkies out there (and from Thursday’s ZAB meeting turnout there seem to be an unhealthy number of you, your checks are in the mail), who clearly buy the company line, that classic American credo that bigger is better, and greed is good, I say the following: Be careful what you wish for. You will certainly get it. Please do not condescend to lecture us on what constitutes acceptable density and congestion in our neighborhood. Berkeley Way is already severely plagued by the failed traffic pattern on MLK and University, with frequent speeding cars attempting to save a few seconds. We will be the ones forced to shoulder the entire burden of this project for your “greater good.” Please do not ask us to buy into your Utopian parking, bicycle, and pedestrian fantasy. You may lead a person to public transit, but you can’t make him ride. 

Berkeley is, and always has been, a “street-car” (now BART) suburb, which is one of its many charms. In 2001 I moved 3,000 miles from Manhattan, where I lived for 13 long years, to Berkeley, specifically to live in a friendly, small-scale residential neighborhood where the sun does not disappear behind a 60-foot wall at 2 p.m. Yet some among us apparently aspire to turn Berkeley, starting with University Avenue and the streets immediately north and south, into a mini-Manhattan by allowing developers like Hudson McDonald to build without restraint. You may foolishly think this is an exaggeration, but having lived for over a decade in an intense urban environment, I respectfully beg to differ. As even you “progress” acolytes must have heard at the Thursday meeting, a substantial number of the apartments in this well-conceived building face dark, narrow, windy corridors and light-wells. I have been there, done that. Congratulations. Manhattan here we come!  

The assertion that mere architectural details will make this five-story building compatible with the existing neighborhood is patently absurd. No matter how the architect dresses it up, this massive 58,800-square-foot Goliath perched atop a 15-foot concrete podium will never a tasteful craftsman cottage make. To those of you who seem so desperately to crave density and excitement, I say move to San Francisco or New York. I have lived in Manhattan, and Berkeley is plenty exciting enough for me. Please don’t insist that we all share your need for “progress.”  

In April 2001 the Berkeley City Council unanimously declared Berkeley Way a “fragile neighborhood” that couldn’t even support the addition of a one-unit apartment and a projected six to seven extra cars at 1825 Berkeley Way. We are curious to know why, four years later, the addition of a possible 156-plus units and, realistically, an additional 100-plus residents’ cars, not to mention the projected 1,300 extra neighborhood car trips per day, is not considered a huge threat to our community. It is not our duty to make Hudson MacDonald’s assault on our neighborhood easier at the expense of our families, our safety, and our right to a livable residential environment and a livable streetscape. We cannot afford million-dollar homes in the hills. This is the only home we may ever rent or own, and this is where we intend to make our stand. While you may be drooling over the prospect of a Trader Joe’s, small streets like Berkeley Way will have to live with this massive project’s ramifications 24 hours a day. 

We do not insist on stasis, as members of Livable Berkeley mistakenly maintain. In case they hadn’t noticed, we are still constructively engaged in this dialogue. They would do well not to take the word of a developer clearly driven solely by economic interests. But this ill-conceived project is not an isolated proposal and will become yet another shameful landmark on the slow slide of Berkeley into a dense, family-hostile, DINK (Double Income No Kids) city. It dwarfs all surrounding commercial and residential buildings along its stretch of University Avenue with the exception of its evil sister—the Golden Bear, squatting malevolently a block up the Avenue.  

Hudson McDonald’s current and previous designs ignore many of the stated objectives of the University Avenue Strategic Plan and this behemoth’s approval effectively guarantees the unchecked construction of oversized developments in small-scale residential neighborhoods throughout Berkeley. This is a watershed issue for the entire city of Berkeley, not a one-block anomaly.  

This is a call to arms to the residents of Berkeley. It is time to stop this true-believer optimism that masquerades under the moniker of “smart growth.” You choose to spend all your time foisting more density in the urban core rather than fighting development in the surrounding suburban counties that are sprouting sub-divisions like a cow pasture sprouts mushrooms after the rain. As obstacles to this bright idea to Manhattan-ize Berkeley, we are clearly in the way of your “progress” to a “brighter day,” when everyone will ride bicycles to the friendly (unless you want to form a union) Trader Joe’s. 

If you care at all about where you live and breathe, it is time to wake up and smell the exhaust fumes, and to hear the warning sirens. They are not just going off in your head, they are going off at the proposed retail parking entrance for Trader Joe’s, “logically” located on a fully residential street called Berkeley Way. If you do not stand up and speak, this type of megabuilding is coming much sooner than you think to a small residential neighborhood near you, maybe yours.  

I urge you to attend the next ZAB meeting on May 11, which will address detriments to the surrounding neighborhood. If you think there won’t be any because you are not right next to this building, think again. Stop this madness, for the future of all the small-scale neighborhoods that are the core of what makes Berkeley Berkeley. The future is now. 

 

Regan Richardson is a Berkeley Way resident..


Commentary: Latini Omnes Sunt

By Thomas Gangale
Tuesday May 02, 2006

Last summer, when California Democratic Party chair Art Torres quipped from the podium, “I’ve been a Latino for most of my life,” he received the laughter his remark was intended to garner. But afterward, I got to thinking—he’s on to something here. Who are the Latinos? 

The concept of Latin America was born of 19th century French imperialism. When Napoleon III decided to extend his empire, his government invented the term Amerique Latine as a propaganda tool. Sure, we’ve invaded your country and have installed Maximilian as our puppet, but it’s OK because we are all Latins. So, it’s quite an historical irony that Mexican-Americans refer to themselves as Latinos, and at the same time celebrate the overthrow of Maximilian on el Cinco de Mayo! 

In any case, today the term Latin America commonly refers to the Americas south of the Rio Grande, including Portuguese-speaking Brazil, and French-speaking Haiti and Guiana. Louisiana and Quebec are generally not included, because they have never been independent countries and are geographically separated from other Romance-language regions of the western hemisphere, but linguistically, there is no reason not to include them. So, all dem Cajuns are Latinos, too, ah yeah! And the Quebecois, eh? 

Who else are Latinos? Well, let’s consider who spoke Latin before anyone else did: the Italians. Sure, no Italian state ever established a colony in the New World, but an Italian did “discover” America to begin with, and the Americas are named after another Italian. Certainly millions of Italians emigrated to the Americas, particularly to the United States and Argentina. I am an Italian-American, and I have many Argentine cousins. There is also a strong Spanish-Italian historical connection; because a Spanish royal family ruled southern Italy for several hundred years, I have Italian cousins named Lopez. And unlike Dan Quayle, I can even speak a little Latin. Italus sum, ergo Latinus sum. 

Can one take the question of who is a Latino too far? I don’t think so. Rather, I believe the mistake is in defining “Latino” too narrowly. The Romans—history’s most successful Latin tribe—were an exclusive society for several centuries, but they achieved their greatest height by embracing many societies. From Britannia to Mauritania to Arabia to Armenia, people proudly called themselves Romans, and many of them spoke Latin, so in a sense, they were Latinos. 

Art Torres is fortunate to have been a Latino for most of his life. I have developed my latinitas much later in life. I celebrate el Cinco de Mayo, or Quintus Maius, and I do so not only because it is a celebration of latinitas, but because—more importantly—it is a celebration of libertas. 

 

San Rafael resident Thomas Gangale is the executive director at OPS-Alaska, a think tank based in Petaluma and an international relations scholar at San Francisco State University.


Letters to the Editor

Friday April 28, 2006

OREGON STREET 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I have lived on Russell Street around the corner and down the block from Lenore Moore for over seven years. My wife and I were shocked when we heard what the neighbors were doing.  

I often would hitch my little trailer to my wheelchair and take a ride to the Berkeley Bowl. When we would get to California Street we would take a left and go the rest of the way up Oregon Street. It felt safer going this way right past Ms. Moore’s home where we would often get a smile and a hello from her or one of the kids. They especially liked our cart and always had something nice to say. The newer people on the block seemed cold and distant.  

I sat in Jon Rantzman’s courtroom. I heard an elderly woman explain how she loved her grandchildren and how they helped her take care of her ailing husband. I heard the white people wail about how they were afraid of the black people and how they were bringing down the property values.  

I have never been more ashamed of my race. There was Shirley Dean and the ever-politically maneuvering Zelda Bronstein; what did they do when Shirley Dean was in office? Absolutely nothing. I have to admit that when I see Shirley and Zelda show up I jam my wallet deeper in my pocket and put my backpack in front of me. But, if I had heard just one thing from those 30 white people and one black on the other side of the courtroom, I would have held my tongue. But it never came. Not one of those good neighbors ever said “Lenore, if your husband should fall out of bed in the night, just give us a call.” No, not one.  

Max Anderson is right to be alarmed. These neighborhood associations are scary. They smack of the “No Blacks Allowed” neighborhood groups of the 1920s (read Arc Of Justice by Kevin Boyle). I can’t remember the name of the legal hacks that helped put this lawsuit together, but does no one find it just a little suspicious that everyone they have gone after was in some way involved in helping the poor and homeless? I hear the boast by these people that the courts are on their side but anyone one who knows the scene here in Berkeley knows that a court ruling from Commissioner Rantzman is akin to a lawful order from Adolf Hitler.  

When I moved over here on Acton Street the first thing I heard from my “good” neighbors was how I should watch out for the black people down the street. They are loud, have a lot of visitors and may be up to something. I have a brother and I love him very much. He’s in prison for drugs but gets out soon. He is always welcome in my home. My home... Shirley, Zelda, Paul Rauber, Paul Lecky, and all the rest of you racist class bigots when you see me ride by, try a smile and a wave. You’re bringing this neighborhood down. 

Dan McMullan 

Disabled People Outside Project 

 

• 

BERKELEY HIGH BASEBALL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Hooray for Neil Cook! He’s come up with a brilliant solution to the Berkeley High School baseball team’s misuse and abuse of the baseball field at San Pablo Park—replace that open field with an enclosed stadium! If this happens, he will no longer have to worry about foul balls, foul language and foul behavior at his local park because these foul events will all happen out of sight. And since San Pablo Park is the largest park in Berkeley, there will be plenty of room left over for the neighborhood kids to play in the grassy areas, tennis courts and playgrounds not covered by the stadium. 

And thank goodness that we in the beleaguered neighborhood between MLK and Shattuck won’t have to deal with all this foulness, either. After all, unlike Neil Cook, we have no park at all in our neighborhood. To get to any green space, our kids have to cross one of those major motorways—MLK or Shattuck—and walk for blocks to Willard Park or to Oregon Street park. Plus, as Cook mentions, our park-free neighborhood is already used as an RV park. We deal on a daily basis with trash and foul behavior from some RV residents who use our sidewalks as a dumping ground for their discarded stuff and worse. 

The neighborhood between MLK and Shattuck hosts Berkeley Honda, the UC maintenance facility, a public health clinic, the Alternative High School, and Iceland. Our neighborhood’s only pleasant public amenity is the Farmers’ Market. Thank goodness for Cook’s stadium proposal. Not only will this stadium spare residents of both our neighborhoods the foul balls and foul behavior reported by Cook. It will also save the only pleasant public activity that we have here between MLK and Shattuck—a once-a-week Farmers’ Market. Thank you very much, Mr. Cook. 

Betsy Thagard 

Carleton Street 

• 

FAST-TALKING LIAR 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

President Bush pretended for three years to be looking for the White House leaker, when all along it was him. America is saddled with a fast talking liar in the Oval Office. 

Ron Lowe 

Grass Valley 

 

• 

FREE BOX 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

On Tues., April 25, at 2:45 p.m., in front of the Free Speech stage in People’s Park, Berkeley Police Officer Uranus, badge No. 84, impounded a bicycle cart whose intended use was to distribute free clothing (it was empty at the time of the arrest.) University of California Police Officer Murray, badge No. 76, was assisting. Community activists were informed that the bicycle cart could be repossessed at the UC police station in Sproul Hall. When activists presented their request to Lieutenant Dillard, badge No. L8, they were informed, after much beating around the bush, that they needed a court order in order to procure the release of the alleged free box. 

Arthur Fonseca 

 

• 

CARUSO’S PROPAGANDA  

CAMPAIGN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As an Albany resident, I have received more than one letter from Caruso Affiliated asking what kind of development I’d like to see on the Albany waterfront. These letters imply that Caruso is here to help me realize my vision for the Albany shoreline, and they promise open space, breathtaking views, and coastal restoration. In more honest times, such letters were called propaganda. 

Caruso’s primary responsibility is not to me. Nor is it to any other resident of Albany. It is to Magna Corp., a $13 billion Canadian corporation that owns Golden Gate Fields and has hired Caruso to produce a development along the Albany waterfront that will mean big profits for Magna.  

So what kind of development would be most profitable? A public park? Open space? Environmental restoration? An expanded beach front? Recreational opportunities for all? Not exactly. 

A mega-mall and casino on Albany’s shoreline are sure to mean big profits for Magna, so this is what we can expect if we give Caruso a green light. And while Caruso’s current proposal for a mall does not include plans for a casino, this is not because Magna has your best interests in mind. Instead, this is because California voters recently rejected Prop 68 that would have allowed for a casino at Golden Gate Fields. Prop 68 was backed strongly by none other than Magna, to the tune of $2 million. But Magna will not be deterred. They continue to push for legislation that would allow racetrack casinos, and would like nothing more than to build one right here in Albany. 

In short, Caruso must answer to Magna, whose primary aim is to guarantee a return on their investment. And the profits will only roll in when visitors to the waterfront are spending money, be it on blackjack, a Café Latte, or a new pair of shoes. One thing is certain: If Caruso and Magna have their way, there will be no place at their “lifestyle center” for those of us who want to leave the credit card at home and simply enjoy the natural beauty of our waterfront. 

Michael Marchant 

Albany 

• 

ALL IS SACRED 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

On April 20, the second-to-the-last day of the American Indian Movement’s Sacred Run from San Francisco to Washington D.C., I actually walked 13 miles! And, as you can imagine, walking through this great country is the absolute best way to get to know America first-hand. 

We learned about the hurricane devastation that still haunts New Orleans. We learned how to survive tornadoes in Tennessee. We learned about the grim cruelty of feed lots in Texas. And we also learned about the milk of human kindness that flows through America’s small towns. We learned that all across America, churches, city halls, National Guard armories and Indian casinos were willing to put us up for a night because many wonderful Americans across this broad country also believe in the Sacred Run’s motto that “All life is sacred.” 

And, as we trudged doggedly past the various Civil War battlefields between Fredricksburg and Arlington, Virginia, we also learned something else. Apparently some people are still having trouble learning one of life’s more obvious lessions—that war doesn’t work. Some 150 years after 17,000 soldiers were callously sent to their deaths by their idiot commanders at Fredricksburg, some people still think that war is a good idea. 

In the short space of time that it took us to walk past the U.S. Marine base at Quantico, Virginia—15 minutes max—we saw two military funeral corteges leaving the main gate on their way to the cemetery. One funeral every 15 minutes? Does this funeral production line go on all day? Every day? Or did we just come at a bad time. 

If Americans truly believe that all life is sacred—not just fetuses and the brain-dead—we need to make certain that not one more of our finest young men are being forced to die at the whim of the silver-tonged avaricious old liars in the White House. 

Jane Stillwater  

 

• 

WAR STANCE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Bob Burnett’s “First look at the 2006 senate races” (April 21-24) has an odd nonsequitur: “To have the BB ‘solidly anti-war’ rating you have to say something like, ‘I was always against the war and now I support John Murtha’s position.’” 

The problem with this is that Murtha’s position isn’t “solidly anti-war.” Murtha wants U.S. troops on the ground in Iraq replaced by an “over the horizon” rapid deployment force which would attack from bases in other Middle Eastern countries. This isn’t “anti-war,” it’s continuation of war with a different strategy. 

This illustrates a basic political problem. To be a “progressive Democrat,” it seems to be necessary to pretend that things are what they aren’t. 

Marsha Feinland 

Peace and Freedom Party candidate for U.S. Senate 

 

• 

ALBANY BULB 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Please choose your description of the Albany Bulb is more carefully and accurately. It is not a landfill, it is a toxic waste dump created during and after World War II and contains huge amounts of contaminates including petroleum. A trip out to the end will verify this by sniffing the many vent pipes in the area. When it was first opened to the public in the early 1980s, the stench was very, very strong and the adjacent shrubs discolored. All this is in Sierra Club home turf! 

Ronald Branch 

 

EDITOR’S NOTE: “Lady of the Landfill” was the name of the sculpture pictured on the front page of the April 25 edition. 

 

• 

BERKELEY PUBLIC LIBRARY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In response to Ruth Gordon’s April 25 letter regarding Judith Scherr’s article about recent events at the Berkeley Public Library, how Ms. Gordon could have gotten the history of the Berkeley Public Library mess so wrong is baffling. The Daily Planet’s reporting over the past couple of years must have been open to some upside-down interpretation that was not apparent to anyone else. 

When Ms. Gordon characterizes 77 signers of the no-confidence petition as “a small band of discontents,” does she mean small as compared to, say, the Normandy Invasion? Seventy-seven signatures represent a lot of people, more than two-thirds of the total library staff, including managers, who could not sign it, and to say that any of the signers was “afraid to speak out fearful of [Local] 535 threats should they disagree” is preposterous. The union has no powers of retaliation—that has been the library administration’s response to disagreement. 

In answer to Ms. Gordon’s question, “Has [Local] 535 filed grievances with the city,” the answer is a resounding yes, they have. The director has consistently chosen to “discipline” anyone who dares to disagree with her library policies. She has wrenched people from their home libraries, changed their duties, and found other ways to retaliate against staff members who questioned her totalitarian approach to administration. 

The “small band of unhappy leaders‚ [who] love the library so much that they are happily willing to kill it” Gordon talks about in her letter can only refer to the director and her handful of supporters, whose intention it is to reduce the library to a monolithic, computerized, depersonalized building, with drastically reduced hours and personnel, and as few books and services as possible. 

I have lived in Berkeley for more than 40 years and have followed the evolution of the library since Griffin’s appointment with anger and dismay. As a taxpayer I was outraged when she ramrodded through the RFID system at an outlay of hundreds of thousands of dollars, with costs escalating to more than a million dollars and no end in sight, money that could have been spent on improving the library instead of degrading it. 

Historically, the Berkeley Public Library has been a place where the community gathered to enjoy the interactions of a population as diverse as anywhere in the nation. Alterations Griffin has made to the structure and function of our library amount to distortions and corruptions of that ideal. 

Recent articles indicate that the Board of Library Trustees and the City Council are planning to terminate Griffin’s tenure with the library. If this is true, the sooner it is accomplished, the better for our library. As things now stand, it will take years to reverse the damage she has done. 

Shirley Stuart 

 

• 

PUBLIC SAFETY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The mayor’s forum on teen violence fell short in many ways. Let’s hope the follow-up meeting gives parents a significant role in planning the event and allows for enough time to hear their concerns. In the 15 minutes parents spoke we heard details of violent incidents involving their kids and the conditions in our city and schools parents want to change. 

Do we have gang activity in Berkeley? Just look around, have you ever seen so much tagging? Check out Milvia Street, right across from Berkeley High School. Is there a need for anti-gang curriculum in middle and high school, and gang suppression strategies for West Berkeley parks? 

Do we have a consistent problem with rat-pack assaults? Just a sampling of parents’ stories reveal we do. Of equal concern is the high rate of underreporting to both the schools and police. Are rat-pack assaults the result of peer pressure and bullying or an initiation into criminal activity? What should the response be, considering the nature of theses incidents in which the victim is significantly outnumbered and the resulting injury is usually to the face and head? Why did we not discuss this at the mayor’s forum? 

Is there a connection between the politicians’ “spin” and the unwillingness of school officials to properly inform and notice parents/students so we can better prepare ourselves? Do we enable the normalization of youth violence by pretending it is not as bad as it is? 

I found it painful listening to the mothers from West Berkeley speak to the prevalence of gang activity, and hear the same answers from both city and school officials: volunteer. We pay some of the highest taxes, and we have questions. What needs to change so the extensive array of services and programs reach their intended clients and goals? How can volunteers affect services when there is a need for program evaluation and innovation? When will public officials show leadership in addressing these tough issues? 

As a long time parent volunteer on youth safety issues, I offer these questions in the same spirit as when I developed the Incident Reporting Guide for Berkeley High School. We are asking for a partnership based on mutual respect between the parents and the city/schools agencies to improve the conditions and circumstances for all Berkeley kids. 

Laura Menard 

Former chair of BHS Safety Committee 

?


Commentary: ‘Push Polls’ Not Part of Downtown Association’s Agenda

By Mark McLeod
Friday April 28, 2006

I appreciate the Daily Planet’s interest in the fact that several merchant associations, including the Downtown Berkeley Association (DBA), have been discussing the commissioning of a professionally created and administered survey of Berkeley residents to determine their public policy interests and preferences. 

The DBA’s primary motivation for conducting such a resident survey is to determine what public policies our associations can support which will increase the willingness and desire of this city’s residents to do business in our neighborhood commercial centers. 

The charge given the DBA by its members is to protect and nourish the downtown as a place to conduct business. We believe that such a survey could help us understand how to do this by giving us insight into how the residents of Berkeley want to address issues such as: 

• Ability of the xity to retain and attract business, capture a greater portion of Berkeley’s discretionary dollars, and generate sales tax revenue,  

• The future of retail development. 

• Development of multi-modal transportation, including parking, Bus Rapid Transit, and the BART Plaza redesign. 

• Population density along transit corridors. 

• The hospitality industry, including hotels and conference center. 

• Cooperative developmental planning between the city and UC Berkeley. 

• The maintenance of clean and safe streets. 

• The exit of some high revenue generating businesses, such as auto dealerships, from the city.  

The DBA is preparing to hire a professional survey research firm to conduct the survey. Over recent weeks, several of us brainstormed topics and hypothetical questions. We will rely on the professional survey firm to take our list of topic ideas and transform them into a coherent and informative survey. 

We have absolutely no interest in a “push poll.” It would be a completely self-defeating and financially wasteful exercise. At its best, a sophisticated survey is a tool that educates those who commission it. In contrast, a “push poll” is simply a piece of propaganda which accomplishes nothing for anyone who sincerely wants to learn more about their community.  

 

Mark McLeod is the board president of the Downtown Berkeley Association. 


Why I’m the Only Viable Candidate for Mayor

By Zachary Running Wolf
Friday April 28, 2006

I am a Native American leader, not a sold-out career politician. Berkeley citizens need me as mayor at this very important time in world history. A career politician sells his or her souls to the highest bidder, climbs the political ladder by making “compromises” with fellow politicians, and leaves behind and ignores the best interests of their constituencies. A perfect example of a career politician and his dirty dealing is Mayor Bates and his closed-door sweetheart deal to sell out downtown Berkeley to his alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley. In contrast, a Native American leader looks to the future and out for the well being of the community (or tribe), which comes first before personal security and economic gain. This means looking out for the well-being of the children for seven generations. 

The residents of Berkeley need this kind of leadership. Buying and selling our future cannot be handed over to yet another career politician. The city and it’s residents (including the student population) need someone who will put their needs ahead of the big players (UCB, developers, etc.) in Berkeley politics. This is especially true now that Mayor Bates has given the downtown away to UCB for a song. I believe the only way to get the downtown back from the clutches of UCB is to hunger-strike them back to the negotiation table in front of all the parties concerned. Berkeley residents at the negotiation table would give strength and power to the mayor (the city), strength and power Tom Bates sold behind closed doors. Hunger-striking is not an outlandish idea: this same technique has been used many times in the past and against this same university in victorious fashion. For example, in 1999 I was involved in the victorious Ethnic Studies strike. As mayor I will hunger-strike UCB back to the negotiation table. I believe this is the only viable route rather than trying to go into court facing their vast economic wealth and capable legal team. I’m not ruling out the courtroom method, but the downtown problem has to be dealt with immediately with all our efforts. I also support a strong sunshine ordinance.  

The University of California at Berkeley is involved with genetically altered foods and is growing these crops within the city limits. This is careless and disrespectful to the surrounding communities and their gardens, which are vulnerable to pollination from these untested crops. I plan to spearhead a ban on genetically altered foods focused on these dangerous crops. The ban on genetically altered foods would mirror the Berkeley Nuclear-Free ban, which has been done by other counties in Northern California. Berkeley has the opportunity to be the first mid-sized city to induce a ban on GMO (genetically modified organisms). As they say, “if it can’t pass in Berkeley it can’t work anywhere”: we can prove that Berkeley is indeed a world leader! 

Being a traditional Native American leader requires that I take care of our mother (Earth). With that in mind I maintain that we need to get Berkeley’s diesel fleet back to 100 percent (B100) bio-diesel with the possibility of eventually going to straight vegetable oil (SVO). This would extend my work in the field of bio-diesel as I spearheaded the movement to get AC Transit to begin a bio-diesel pilot program. Along with an emphasis on green energy, my platform includes designating part of downtown Berkeley and/or Telegraph Avenue as a pedestrian bicycle and service vehicle-only zone.  

As a 43-year-old resident of Berkeley who attended Berkeley schools and graduated from Berkeley High in 1981, I have seen clearly the areas of society who need the most help. As mayor I pledge to donate the entire mayor’s salary evenly to the three most unrecognized groups in our community: to our elders with their wisdom and experience who help us throughout our lives by steering us away from danger; to our children who are our future generations and must be cultivated and trusted with their own decisions; to our homeless or less fortunate who do not take more than they need but must be given the resources to help them get where they want to go. Society has failed these groups economically and spiritually. How will I survive without getting paid? The truth is that I have already been surviving without getting paid (economically) for the past 11 years. In the Native American way our chiefs are looked after (paid if you will) by the Creator Great Spirit. It is considered the highest honor to represent your people. I have never been more proud to say I am a Native American leader and I consider the citizens of Berkeley to be my people. Helping my people is enough payment for me.  

Education will be emphasized in my administration: supporting our teachers (heroes) by ensuring that they have enough resources to provide a world-class education for our future generations. The current hurdles will be addressed head on, such as the “No Child Left Behind” act which I call “Every Child Left Behind” or “What Children?” My experience in this field includes helping start the American Indian Public Charter School. I also helped save Ethnic Studies at UCB where I was a guest lecturer (in Native American studies). I have also spoken at many schools in the East Bay. Strengthening Ethnic Studies in the schools of Berkeley is a priority. This is not just for our youth of color and women, but for our dominant culture to learn about the important contributions from these groups to our country. Strengthening ethnic studies will help reduce the student dropout rate in communities of color. 

This brings us to my views on future development in the City of Berkeley. First, I’m strongly against the West Ashby BART (transit village) development brought forward by our current Mayor Bates and other city Councilmembers without the proper notice or input by the neighborhood affected. This project has a number of problems including the mis-measurement of the lot at six acres instead of the actual four. The proposed transit village would be a 300-unit condo project, which would be at least five stories in monstrous height. It would also push out the Berkeley Flea Market, which provides a much-needed cultural and meeting place in south Berkeley. We cannot just build structures in every available space in this city; I’m for playing fields and parks for our children. I also see the need for communities to have space available for community gardens. Being a carpenter by trade I will support architecture that would rival the historical treasures this city is known for instead of this current trend of penitentiary building. Residents of areas affected by redevelopment need to be given enough notice and input to have their voices heard, a right that has been lost in Berkeley.  

Finally, educational resources such as our libraries are under assault. I reject the use of RFID in the Berkeley public libraries, as this is a bad idea for numerous reasons. We do not need a big brother system, especially in one of the most progressive cities in the world.  

My experience in city politics goes back 11 years: dealing with schools, land acquisition (Oak Knoll Naval Hospital—3.75 acres), sitting on the board of directors of the Inter-Tribal Friendship House and helping bring them out of $385,000 of debt, and defending Native American rights on a national level. My experience in the city of Berkeley includes spearheading the name change of Columbus Elementary School to Rosa Parks, serving on the Peace and Justice Commission, helping save Ethnic Studies at UCB, and finally spearheading AC Transit to start a bio-diesel pilot program.  

In closing, the City of Berkeley needs a strong leader who will make the right decisions that will benefit the community first and not just another career politician looking out for their own self interest. It is time for the first indigenous mayor of Berkeley: Ah-ho Zachary RunningWolf! 

 

Zachary RunningWolf is a graduate of Berkeley High School and a candidate for mayor of Berkeley. 

 

 

 


Commentary:How to Create a Lively ‘Green’ Oasis in Downtown

By Kirstin Miller
Friday April 28, 2006

Increasingly, people living in cities are calling for the creation of natural, beautiful, functional, and healthy public spaces accessible to all citizens, regardless of age, ability or income. Cities are also taking greater steps to heal the natural environment within their borders. Revitalizing and restoring nature in the city not only helps the environment, but also connects people with place. 

Berkeley is currently discussing ideas for improving its downtown. Citizens for a Strawberry Creek Plaza is advocating for a “green” downtown centerpiece, featuring what we are calling “Strawberry Creek Plaza,” by closing Center Street between Shattuck and Oxford to motor vehicle traffic and by daylighting a portion of now-culverted Strawberry Creek on that block. A welcoming urban oasis would be created in the heart of downtown, attracting visitors for shopping, recreation, education and enjoyment of a well-designed, pedestrian-oriented open space. 

The recent development of the Arts District is an exciting step towards increased vitality in downtown. But Berkeley still lacks a feeling of a central gathering place. A Strawberry Creek Plaza could provide that missing piece. As one model of a successful strategy that celebrates nature in the city, San Luis Obispo’s Mission Plaza and San Luis Creek restoration has unequivocally contributed to bringing the downtown commercial vacancy rate from 60 percent to current full occupancy. Other cities successfully showcasing urban waterways include: Ashland, Oregon; Santa Rosa, Calif.; Denver, Col.; San Antonio, Tex., and Providence, Rhode Island. 

Citizen interest in downtown creek daylighting has been strong for many years. It was initially inspired by the city’s (and the nation’s) first urban creek daylighting project, launched at Strawberry Creek Park in 1982. In 1999, the City of Berkeley commissioned a “Strawberry Creek Downtown” data collection study that, after public review, concluded that daylighting on Center Street would be preferred over other alternatives studied. 

Then, in late 2003, the university announced plans to develop a hotel, conference center, and museum complex on Center Street, where their printing plant and the Bank of America and its parking lot are now located. This is the same block that the 1999 Strawberry Creek Downtown study indicated was the best location for creek daylighting to occur. 

In the first phase of development, the hotel and conference center portion of the plan will be constructed with private financing. The museum complex will follow in a second phase, supported by campus fundraising efforts. The project will supply the university’s need for conference and meeting space. It also will create new quarters for the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. (The art museum is now housed in a seismically problematic building on Bancroft Way.) Additionally, the project will provide a new and more publicly accessible facility for the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology collection, now tucked into cramped campus quarters in Kroeber Hall. 

The project site is not only the core of the downtown; it is also a transit hub served by the Downtown Berkeley BART station and several AC transit lines. Approximately 10,000 pedestrians traverse Center Street each day, walking from BART to campus. 

It’s a location that has great importance to the citizens of Berkeley and the greater Bay Area as a destination for the Arts and entertainment, as well as education and commerce. To provide community input and recommendations to the new proposals, in December 2003 the City Council approved a recommendation from Mayor Tom Bates that directed the City of Berkeley Planning Commission to form a task force to “examine the potential hotel and conference center in downtown Berkeley and to report back to the council no later than May, 2004, with preliminary recommendations.” 

Included on the task force were members of AC Transit, Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association, Berkeley Chamber of Commerce, Berkeley Convention and Visitors Bureau, Bicycle Friendly Berkeley Coalition, city commissions on Civic Arts, Design Review, Planning, Public Works, and Transportation, Downtown Berkeley Association, East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, Ecocity Builders, Livable Berkeley, Sierra Club, Urban Creeks Council, local architects, and landscape architects. 

Task force meetings featured lively discussions with active participation by interested members of the public. The recommendations leaned heavily towards “green” building and design, closing Center Street to traffic, and the creation of a pedestrian environment with a daylighted Strawberry Creek included, if deemed feasible. 

After the Hotel Task Force made its report, a conflict arose over the university’s Long Range Development Plan (LRDP). A lawsuit was filed by the city in protest to the LRDP, and in the end, a settlement was reached, where, among several other agreements, the city and university made a decision to hammer out a new Downtown Area Plan that would help manage the needs of both UC and the city. 

The new downtown planning process is now in motion, and Citizens for a Strawberry Creek Plaza is hoping that a central focus on the core downtown area as a “green” centerpiece and anchor for the larger downtown area will emerge.  

In addition to the Strawberry Creek Plaza, a “green” downtown would have many or all of the following features: 

1. Demonstration of a healthy urban “ecological footprint.” 

2. Ecological design—design with nature. 

3. Re-establishment of an important urban waterway. 

4. Some natural urban habitat to bolster local biodiversity. 

5. Demonstration of the correlation between the creation of a great public place and increased economic vitality. 

6. Live rooftops and terracing. 

7. Increased transportation alternatives. 

8. Increased housing near jobs/reduction of auto dependence. 

9. Teaching about sustainability by example. 

10. Energy conservation, solar orientation of buildings. 

11. Additional “green building” methods and materials used. 

Such a “green” downtown, we believe, would bring a wealth of aesthetic, social, economic, and environmental benefits to Berkeley. It would also establish Berkeley as a leader in conservation and restoration of a healthy relationship between the natural and the urban. 

Restaurant patrons would be able to enjoy the creek as they lunch outside or stop for coffee and conversation. Cafes with outdoor seating could be added on the sunny north side of Center Street to supplement the restaurants that already exist on the south side. Pedestrian amenities such as benches, trees and plantings, and public art would be included. Space could possibly also be set aside for small-scale outdoor concerts. 

Students could easily walk to and from the university. Sightseers, school groups and visitors will appreciate a scenic environment near the two new museums on the north side of the plaza. Conference attendees would arrive via BART, making their way towards the hotel while admiring their new surroundings, briefly stopping at a kiosk with information about Berkeley’s downtown and nearby Arts District. 

Bus Rapid Transit buses traveling in their own dedicated lanes would arrive and depart frequently near the plaza, adding to the flow of visitors, residents, and commuters in the heart of downtown. Added housing at locations close to BART and to the new BRT bus routes would provide opportunities for more people to live close to their jobs in downtown and on the UC campus while all the Bay Area is just a transit ride away. The new housing would include affordable apartments and be designed to minimize energy consumption. 

Within this green urban oasis, human voices and sounds of running water and singing birds would come alive without the usual competition from cars and traffic. It would be a beautiful downtown center celebrating Berkeley’s natural and architectural past while demonstrating a commitment to a sustainable future. We hope you will join us in advocating for this promising green vision for downtown. Together, we can make it happen! 

For more information about Citizens for a Strawberry Creek Plaza, or to request a presentation, please visit www.strawberrycreekplaza.org. 

 

Kirstin Miller is program manager for Citizens for a Strawberry Creek Plaza and is on the Steering Committee. Other Steering Committee members are Syliva McLaughlin, Robert Hass, Richard Register, Rob Wrenn, Elyce Judith, Juliet Lamont, Gus Yates and David Koehn. 

 

 

 

 


Commentary: 1610 Oregon Street: It’s Everyone’s Concern

By Shirley Dean
Friday April 28, 2006

It is hard to believe that Councilmember Max Anderson actually said that the action taken by 14 neighbors in Small Claims court regarding 1610 Oregon St. involved a “revenge motive.” But, there it was in the April 18 Daily Planet, in a news story about the appeal brought by 1610’s owner against the judgment the neighbors had won in January in Small Claims Court which awarded $5,000 to each of the neighbors. The news story reported that the owner’s appeal had been dismissed by Superior Court Judge Wynne Carvill.  

Judge Carvill wrote in his statement of opinion that the owner “has been on notice for well over a decade of the problems surrounding 1610. She had, and continues to have, a duty to abate that nuisance.” There have been multiple police actions near, on and in the property. The police even testified in court that they visited the owner prior to their actions to warn her to clean up the problems or they would have to take action. As mayor, I tried to deal with the problem when the city brought an action coordinated across several city departments to clean up the property in 2000.  

The City Council at that time directed staff to provide the owner and her husband with services to assist her in any way possible. We were able to get the property repaired and cleaned-up for awhile, but it didn’t last. I attended and testified in the Small Claims Court hearing in January, and I attended both days that the appeal was heard in Superior Court during this month. 

Let’s make no mistake. The problems experienced at 1610 Oregon and flowing out from that property touch each and every one of us in Berkeley no matter where we live. Unfortunately, there are other 1610s in our community and that number will increase the more we close our front doors and delude ourselves into believing that what we are reading about is just a problem for an unfamiliar South Berkeley neighborhood in Council District 3. Recognizing that this is a city problem is the first step in finding real solutions. If members of the City Council can’t understand that, the community should make sure they get the message and get it soon.  

The situation on Oregon Street represents the failure of our city to provide the protections that are rightfully and normally expected by residents any where and any place. When a city fails to provide those protections, it is undeniable that that neighborhood and its residents feel as if, and are in fact, being treated as if they were disposable. In this case, the record screams with accounts of murders, shootings, two small claims processes in which the court ordered judgments totaling somewhere around $200,000 to the neighbors, two appeals of those small claims judgments which were upheld in favor of the neighbors by Superior Court judges, police actions, drug dealing and possession arrests. There is absolutely no doubt that 1610 is a problem. In the most recent court appeal, the owner of the property herself legally admitted that her property did indeed constitute a nuisance!  

I agree with those who maintain that those in need of services from the city should have them. The owner of 1610 has been offered services for many years, stacks of files have been created, to no avail. After years of problems, neighbors have been driven to seek the only other course that is open to them, Small Claims Court. All they want are the things that every resident wants no matter where they live—to be able to walk down the block, to sit on their front porches, to allow their children to walk to school or have their friends over, to stand in their front yards and chat with their neighbors on the sidewalk, to have yards free of condoms and syringes. 

Instead of help from the city what they got was death threats after they filed their Small Claims action and criticism playing the race card all the way up to the City Council. Neighborhoods need action not talk that ‘we’re working on it,’ press conferences, press releases or promises. The essential task before the city is as clear as it can be: 1) declare 1610 Oregon a public nuisance; 2) take all necessary action to abate the nuisance, including instituting and collecting fines for continued violations; and 3) enact a process that will ensure that no other residents will have to face the fear, terror and disruption that the people around the 1600 block of Oregon have had to live with for years.  

The essential task for the community of Berkeley residents no matter where you live is to support the neighbors of 1610 and to press the City Council to take action. The best way to do this is simply to write the council at 2180 Milvia, Berkeley 94704 or send an e-mail at clerk@ci.berkeley.ca.us. It’s a simple action, but an effective one if enough of us do it! 

 

Shirley Dean is the former mayor of Berkeley. 


Columns

Column: New From the Home Page Of the Fallen Warriors

By Susan Parker
Tuesday May 02, 2006

Two weeks ago I wrote a column about receiving a solicitation in the mail to join the United States Navy. In the letter the Navy promised me training on the world’s most advanced equipment, a debt-free education, full benefits, outstanding medical coverage, a competitive edge in the civilian job market, and no “money hassles.” 

Their words were enticing, and the small color photographs embedded in the letter provocative: a guy in a uniform saluting at me, and a couple of big battleships plowing confidently through a calm blue ocean. 

Although I knew the Navy had made a mistake soliciting me, a 54-year-old woman with no interest in going to sea in a large boat, I did think quite a bit about the contents of their missive. Why did they assume I was someone with a “vision of college and success that is different than most people’s”? 

How did they figure out I was a curious person “looking for something more”? 

I thought about contacting someone who could give me insight into the Navy way of thinking, but I know only one individual currently in the military. 

My cousin Sally is a lawyer in the U.S. Air Force, counsel to a United States general stationed in Turkey. She would be difficult to get in touch with, and her career has been somewhat unconventional. Before attending law school and signing up for military duty, she was an undercover cop specializing in prostitution and drug trafficking. 

I thought about the people I knew who were retired military personnel: my father who was in the army for two years 62 years ago, my Aunt Dottie and Aunt Peggy who served during World War II, a cousin who was a helicopter gunner in Vietnam and another cousin who, at 43, is already retired and presently working for a civilian contractor in Afghanistan. 

Not one of them had been in the Navy. Then I remembered a cousin-once-removed who had recently jumped ship in San Diego and was rumored to be a fashion model in Milan. 

Obviously, I was not going to get in touch with him. 

That left only one person for me to talk with: my neighbor, James, who served in the Navy for seven years during the 1960s. I caught up with him while he was taking a break from mowing his perfect lawn. I showed him the letter I had received from the Navy. He scanned it. 

“What a bunch of bullshit,” he said. 

“How’s that?” I asked. 

“It’s a bunch of shit,” he repeated. 

“You were in the Navy, right?” 

“Yep.” 

“In Vietnam?” 

“Yep.” 

“On a ship along the coast?” 

“Hell no. They made us put on big boots, dropped us off on a beach and sent us marching.” 

James raised his shirt and the white T-shirt underneath it to reveal a large scar across his belly. 

“That’s what I brought back from Vietnam,” he said. “Stepped on a land mine, flew 15 feet up in the air and thought I was dead. But I don’t want to talk about it.” 

We were silent for a moment. I was thinking about James flipping through 15 feet of jungle. James may have been thinking about his grass. 

“Any thoughts on what a young kid receiving a letter like this should do?” 

“Nothin’,” said James. “I didn’t know nothin’ ‘bout Vietnam when I joined the Navy. Didn’t know where it was, why I was sent there, or what we were fightin’ for. Same thing is goin’ on in Iraq right now. Nobody knows what the fight is about or why they’re there. I’d stay out of it if I was you.” 

Then James went back to mowing his lawn and I returned to my house and Googled “Navy dead in Iraq.” Up came the following webpage: www.defendamerica.mil in which a list of “Fallen Warriors” emerged. I counted the names: 45 Navy personnel dead in and around Iraq between March 2003 and April 2, 2006; the oldest age 46, the youngest, only 20.›


The Not-So-Sweet Life of the Lemon Tree

By Ron Sullivan Special to the Planet
Tuesday May 02, 2006

Lemon tree very pretty  

And the lemon flower is sweet, 

But the fruit of the poor lemon 

Is impossible to eat. 

 

It’s a slander of course, but I do remember Trini Lopez singing the song on the radio way back when. I remember hearing covers from Peter Paul and Mary and one of my schoolmates, too— catchy tune. At least it wasn’t “Banana Boat,” a song with a recurring “Deo” (or “Day-o”) upon which a pretentious or inebriated singer could get stuck for long minutes.  

Lemon trees like our climate just fine, which is fortunate because we like lemons just fine too, as a rule. Yes, there are a few on the streets, and there are more in yards and gardens. Aside from their nice fruit, they look handsome and atmospheric in Mediterranean-style settings, with adobe, stucco, or tiled surfaces. They’ll do fine in a big pot, too, and tolerate frequent pruning for size control. And their blooms do smell lovely, a great asset in a courtyard or small garden.  

One group of them that I know personally, because they live outside a veterinary clinic we frequent, get pruned rather cruelly into a forced tight shape and are barely recognizable as lemon trees. As a result of this and other hard bits of their lives, like their situation on a busy street and jammed into sidewalk wells, they seem prone to the diseases and disorders that can plague citrus trees here: infestations by scale insects, aphids and other bugs, black mold and mildew, and the ravages of snails. Snails will eat new leaves and even fruit and bark from lemons, enough to kill the trees sometimes.  

I have heard of citrus hedges, and seen a few, but they need good air circulation and attention—looking for bugs and mold and hosing down in summer to get rid of them—to thrive. 

Another problem those poor sidewalk trees have to cope with is the clay and sidewalk combo. They need good drainage, as do all citrus.  

We once moved into a flat in the Potter Creek drainage with an orange tree out back. I was ignorant enough about trees back then not to recognize that it was declining; it died within a few years and I felt guilty. We hung it with birdfeeders and windchimes, and one day decided to saw off a branch that had become snagged in a live and spreading eugenia next to it. It was rather a shock, like waking up to find yourself in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, when Joe sawed off the dead branch and braced to catch it, and instead the branch stayed suspended in the eugenia and the dead orange fell over.  

What we found at its base was a hole full of stinking water and a rotted-through stump. Mystery solved and no more guilt.  

One impediment to pruning, snagging snails, and even picking lemons is that the trees often sport big green thorns. In my experience, they don’t “heal” well from big pruning cuts, either, so if you have one it’s a good idea to set its shape early in its life and then control size by making smaller cuts frequently. Don’t shear it, though, unless you want an impenetrable thorny mass of blackened, puckered leaves in a year or two or you’re ready to give it the attention a hedge needs. 

If you’re planting a lemon for fruit, note the prices of Meyer lemons in the market and that that hybrid/cultivar is a prolific bearer here. It’s also cold-tolerant as lemons go, probably owing to its orange or mandarin parentage. (There are conflicting stories about which it is, and most writers on the subject just admit they don’t know.)  

You might want to put it where it’s protected from human poaching, too. A friend of mine swaps her Meyer lemons around to friends and other gardeners, and donates some to an elders’ food pantry. This year she can’t give her lemon tree as much attention as usual, and lately she’s found that someone’s been ripping off lemons, and in rather a careless fashion that damages the tree too. Human behavior can taste a lot more bitter than lemons.  

 

Photograph by: Ron Sullivan 

This beleaguered street tree manages to bear flowers and fruit: one lonely little lemon.


Column: Dispatches From the Edge: Rummy Shelled, Silvio Falls, Iran Strikes

By Conn Hallinan
Friday April 28, 2006

There are any number of reasons why half a dozen retired generals have turned on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, but a major one was a disastrous week in the spring of 2002 when several battalions of the 101 Airborne Division attacked insurgents in the Shahikot Valley of Afghanistan.  

Called “Operation Anaconda,” it was a test for Rumsfeld’s New Model Army, a lightly armed, high tech, slice and dice military that relies on spy planes and satellites to map the terrain and identify the enemy. On March 2, about 2,000 airborne troops were airlifted into the valley, where satellites indicated there were some 200 Taliban holed up in villages. 

The troops were sent in without artillery, because under Rumsfeld’s “transformation army” that job was left to “precision bombing” by the Air Force. But there weren’t 200 Taliban, there were at least 1,000. And they weren’t in the villages, but in the mountains overlooking the valley. Unlike the airborne, the Afghans had plenty of artillery, which they proceeded to rain down on the 101st. It also turned out that the satellites didn’t do a very good job of preparing the troops for the terrain, which was far rougher and nastier than they expected. And when the “precision air strikes” came in, the enemy had either moved or gone to ground, a tactic they learned during their long war with the Soviets. 

In short, the whole operation was bungled from start to finish, largely because Rummy’s “transformation” military has more to do with winning elections here at home than fighting battles abroad. Anaconda might have been short on personnel and common sense basics like artillery, but it was hardly war on the cheap.  

Every time the United States tried to root out the Afghans with a AGM-84H air to ground missile, Boeing rang up $475,000. For every GBU-24 Paveway laser-guided bomb (lots of those used), Raytheon banked $55,600. Alliant Techsystems, with its GBU-87 cluster bombs at $14,000 a bang, also did well. The battle was a little rough on the 101st and the Afghans, but it was clover for Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and the arms corporations that supplied the aircraft, the satellites, and the communication equipment (which didn’t work very well). 

Grateful for the silver that “transformation’ has rained down on them, the companies respond by pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into elections, 65 percent of which goes to Republicans. Between lobbying and direct contributions, it’s pure “shock and awe” come election time. 

The Army and the Marines don’t think much of the “transformation” military because both rely more on manpower than on high tech firepower (for the Navy and the Air Force, Rummy’s military is pure gravy). The Army is falling apart and hemorrhaging officers at an unprecedented rate. More than one-third of its West Point graduates are refusing to re-enlist, as are reserve officers trained at university programs, another reason the generals have gone after Rumsfeld.  

As investigative journalist Greg Palast points out in The Guardian, however, their fire is off target. Rumsfeld might be an arrogant thug (Nixon called him a “mean little bastard”), but he doesn’t make decisions like restructuring the military or invading Iraq. Those decisions are made by the president and the vice president 

“Even the generals’ complaint—that Rumsfeld didn’t give them enough troops—was ultimately a decision by the cowboy from Crawford,” writes Palast. He also dismisses the “not enough boots on the ground” argument: “The problem was not that we lacked troops—the problem was that we lacked the moral authority to occupy this nation. A million troops would not be enough—the insurgents would just have had more targets.” 

Note: Palast will be in Berkeley June 7 as part of his Armed Madhouse Tour. For a full accounting of Operation Anaconda, see Not A Good Day To Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda, by Sean Naylor.  

 

Most mainstream commentators predict the newly elected center-left government of Romano Prodi is not long for the world. Out of almost 40 million ballots cast, the difference between Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing coalition and the center-left was just over 24,000 votes in the lower house. Election rules will give Prodi 55 percent of the Chamber of Deputies, but in the Senate the center-left has only a two-vote margin. 

But the laid-back, avuncular Prodi is no pussycat. He has now whipped Berlusconi in two national elections, and the math in the senate is better for him than it looks at first glance. The independent seat and the seven senators for life seats tend to lean left, so that Prodi can probably depend on a four or five vote margin. 

Prodi will have to respond to a growing movement in Europe against the so-called “Anglo-Saxon” model of privatizing services and cutting back social support systems. French politicians recently discovered exactly how powerful the sentiment against the dictatorship of the markets can be. 

Italy’s most powerful trade union, the CGI, is demanding a repeal of the Biagi Law, which is similar to the labor law Jacques Chirac’s government was forced to abandon. The new prime minister will also need to respond to the left section of his coalition, which picked up 36 more seats than they held in 2001. 

One immediate problem that will need attention is Italy’s north-south employment gap. Southern Italy has four to five times the national jobless rate of 7.7 percent, and unemployment reaches 40 percent in some areas of the south. 

But Prodi’s natural inclination is toward an economy with a strong social welfare component. During the election he pointed to the U.S. as an example of what he did not want to happen in Italy. “You saw the terrible pictures of New Orleans,” he said, “This was the result of dismantling of social structures…this was the fruit of many years of the breakdown of the social state.” 

He is also strongly opposed to the Iraq war, a stance that has won him no friends in Washington or London. On the other hand, Washington and London have few European friends these days outside of Denmark, Poland, and about one-third of Germany. 

 

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmandinejad ran on a platform of raising living standards for the average Iranian; after almost eight months in office, according to the Iranian Central Bank, more than 50 percent of the population is below the official poverty line. 

Anger over high prices and stubborn unemployment has sparked strikes in the northern city of Rasht. Textile workers, dam workers, and pharmaceutical workers have also walked out, along with coal miners in the province of Gilan. The miners say they have not been paid in 13 months. 

The authorities in Tehran have detained hundreds of striking bus drivers, and strike leader Mansur Hayat-Gheibi is presently on a hunger strike to protest the arrests. 

Angry pensioners, along with a radical youth group, the National Bolsheviks, protested the end of subsidized heating in central Moscow rally. Most pensioners live on fixed incomes and cannot keep up with rising costs.  

A retired army colonel told Agence France Presse that, “We are following the French example,” of taking to the streets to protest the cutbacks. 

Similar demonstrations were held in Zheleznodoroshny near Moscow, the Siberian cities of Krasnoyarsk and Tomsk, and Yushno-Sakhalisk on Sakhalin Island north of Japan. 

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Column: Undercurrents: Public Comment Lies at the Heart of Democracy

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Friday April 28, 2006

Mr. Ignacio De La Fuente, we learn in last week’s Oakland Tribune, is “frustrated” with the present debate format in the Oakland mayoral race which “rarely, if ever,” the Tribune explains, “allows candidates time to rebut their opponents’ remarks.” 

Under the general debate rules that have been taking place across Oakland this mayoral election season, the candidates are asked a series of questions to which each of them must give an answer within a one- or two-minute time period. Even if follow-ups were allowed, which they often aren’t, there would be no time for them. 

Under this debate format “there’s no way to challenge [my opponents] and ask them how they are going to pay for their proposals, like health care, and whether they plan on raising taxes,” the Tribune quotes Mr. De La Fuente as saying, a little plaintively. 

I feel his pain. In one or two minutes, it’s hard to get out much more than “I will” or “I won’t” or “I’ll think about it,” much less state a complicated policy position on a difficult and controversial subject. But as my old Senegullah friends back in the Carolina Lowcountry would probably tell him, “same thing make you laugh, make you cry.” 

As president of the Oakland City Council in the era of Mayor Jerry Brown, after all, it has been Mr. De La Fuente’s job to decide how much time citizens are allowed to state their positions to councilmembers during City Council meetings. On slow nights, with a light agenda, and few people in the council chambers, you can get as much as three minutes to speak your mind. But on days when there is an issue of intense public interest—watch what happens when the Oak To Ninth development comes up, for example—Mr. De La Fuente reduces citizen participation to a minute apiece. The result is that the more important or controversial a topic is, the less an individual citizen is allowed to speak to the council about it at council meetings. Further, under the present Oakland City Council format, while councilmembers are free to comment on things said at the podium by the citizens, the citizens ourselves have no ability to question the councilmembers in return. You might stand at the podium and ask a city councilmember, for example, “how they are going to pay for their proposals, like health care, and whether they plan on raising taxes.” Good luck on getting an answer. 

In fairness, some Oakland city councilmembers do hold regular neighborhood meetings at convenient hours to speak with constituents, hear their concerns, and answer questions. I’ve been to such meetings held by councilmembers Nancy Nadel and Jane Brunner, myself. But others don’t or, if they do, they aren’t well publicized. If At-Large Councilmember Henry Chang or District 7 Councilmember Larry Reid hold regular constituent meetings, for example, I’ve yet to hear of them, and I’m eligible to vote for both of these positions. And so that often leaves the council meetings themselves as the only time for citizens to be able to get up in public and influence our elected officials on matters of city law and public policy. 

If allowing the public to weigh in on issues is the heart of democracy, then the old Board of Trustees of the Oakland Unified School District—during the time when that was an Oakland institution and not a ward of the state—was the most democratic institution in the area. I cannot remember if trustees imposed a time limit on speakers but if they did, it was not rigidly enforced, and on any given OUSD meeting night, a steady stream of parents, teachers, and students used to troop to the podium to voice their opinion on agenda items. On busy agenda nights, this often pushed important decisions late into the night, sometimes after midnight. 

That was not a perfect solution, but democracy is not perfect, and the closer you get to actually involving the people in the decision-making process, the more ragged and messy it gets around the edges. That’s one of the prices you pay. 

One of the best indications Oaklanders should have had that we were moving away from democracy and towards tyranny following the takeover of the Oakland schools by the state was State Administrator Randolph Ward’s actions limiting public input. At one point, during the early debates over school closures, Mr. Ward limited access to the council hearing room chambers to parents and teachers of the affected schools, leaving the rest of the public out and without a voice on the subject, enforcing the rule with a hallway full of Oakland police.  

The really chilling part is that even under the despotism of Randolph Ward, the Oakland public has a larger voice than we do the higher we get up the legislative chain. If you watch congressional or state legislative hearings on the evening news, you get the impression that generally the interested parties are given an extensive period to testify, with a follow-up of questioning by senators, congressmembers, state legislators, and their staff. But that’s not how it generally operates. 

When the Senate Education Committee held a “hearing” in Sacramento in 2003 on state Sen. Don Perata’s $100 million OUSD line-of-credit bill—the legislation that led directly to the state takeover—the Oakland school superintendent, the president of the school board, and one or two other representatives were given a brief period to speak and answer questions, and that was it. When the senators actually began asking questions of the Oakland representatives, the senators were pointedly cut off by the committee chairperson because there “wasn’t enough time for that.” The crowd of Oakland citizens who made the trek to the state capitol were not able to testify before the committee at all, but were only allowed to parade past the microphone in rapid fashion, robot-like, giving their name and a simple “for” or “against” the state bailout, without time to give a reason why. 

Sadly—frighteningly—Oakland was not singled out for special punishment in this process. That’s the way it usually works in Sacramento, with little or no pretense that the public’s voice is being listened to. 

Local experience shows us that when legislative bodies get on top of a difficult problem early, allow the public the chance to weigh in, and actually listen, the results are almost always better. Last year, the Alameda City Council held at least one marathon session on the controversial downtown Alameda Theater and parking lot complex. Critics of the complex—some of whom were architects and businesspersons who had managed movie theaters themselves—presented detailed alternative plans that they said would better fit in with downtown Alameda’s ambiance and architecture. In the end, while the council narrowly voted to move forward with the original complex plan, they made modifications that even many of the critics praised. “I still don’t like the plans and I’m still opposed to the project,” several of the critics said, “but it’s definitely an improvement over what they started with.”  

That seems to be the case with the Alameda County Board of Supervisors over the current issue of use of the Diebold electronic voting machines for county elections. Earlier this year, faced with opposition to the touchscreen voting machines by knowledgeable local voting activists, the supervisors held a special, evening hearing devoted to that issue, then met in regular session the next day to hear further testimony, and make a decision. While the supervisors voted narrowly to move forward with the possible use of electronic voting machines in the November election, they indicated that they had been swayed by many of the voting activists’ arguments in opposition, asked for and welcomed their participation in the process, and promised to work closely with them to work out a solution. We will wait, patiently, to see if that is actually what happens. 

Perhaps there are similar examples from the Oakland City Council. If so, I’m sure someone will let me know. 

Meanwhile, back to Mr. De La Fuente’s original complaint. No, you cannot properly run a democracy in severely-limited time segments, whether it’s in choosing a mayor or deciding on local legislation. While we are in the midst of deciding whether or not to give Mr. De La Fuente or any of his opponents larger powers, we would welcome the council president’s suggestions about how that problem can be solved within the organization he already presides over. 

n


She’s Got Your Goat at Caribbean Cove

By B.J. Calurus Special to the Planet
Friday April 28, 2006

You don’t forget your first curried goat. It was years ago, and I was on the Orange Blossom Trail, Orlando’s answer to San Pablo Avenue, looking for a cheap and non-franchised lunch. I wound up at a hole-in-the-wall run by Trinidadians that served goat and roti, a flatbread with South Asian roots. Really good goat. I’ve been looking for its equal ever since. 

Happily, I believe I’ve found it at the Caribbean Cove, a small Jamaican eatery upstairs in the Village, at Telegraph and Blake. It’s run by Judith O’Loughlin, who comes from the small island of Nevis (also the birthplace of Alexander Hamilton). O’Loughlin’s curried goat is rich and tender, hot but not painfully so. She uses an imported Jamaican curry powder, less incendiary than South Asian blends.  

The Cove has a short menu, but it touches most of the bases of Jamaican cuisine—a palimpsest of cultural influences. The curries (chicken is also available) came in with South Asian contract laborers in the 19th century. Another entrée, “es-cove-ich” fish, either dates back to the earlier Spanish occupation of Jamaica or was borrowed from neighboring Spanish Caribbean islands. Escovitch evolved from the Spanish (originally Catalan) escabeche—a quick-pickling technique. O’Loughlin’s version involves a snapper filet, fried and served with onions and bell peppers in a vinaigrette. 

She also does jerk chicken, the one Jamaican dish Americans are familiar with, and it’s a nice rendition—juicy breast meat redolent with the classic allspice-thyme-hot chili mixture. The traditional chili would be Scotch Bonnet, the Jamaican form of the deadly Habanero (up to 300,000 Scoville Heat Units). Like the curried goat, O’Loughlin’s jerk chicken doesn’t blast you out of your chair, but it does leave your lips tingling. 

“Jerk” may derive from the Peruvian-Spanish charqui, also the origin of “jerky.” An alternate etymology explains it in terms of the meat being jerked about and poked with a stick as it cooks. Traditional jerking requires a fire of pimento wood, from the tree that bears the allspice berries (Pimenta dioica). 

I’ve seen the method ascribed to the Arawak Indians, who got there first; to the Maroons, who escaped from plantation slavery and holed up in the rugged Cockpit Country; to European pirates. Whatever its origin, it’s good stuff. (I was surprised not to find jerk chicken, or jerk anything, in Caroline Sullivan’s 1893 Classic Jamaican Cooking; the jerk tradition must have existed under the culinary radar of the cookbook compilers). 

But jerk chicken is not considered the Jamaican national dish. That honor goes to O’Loughlin’s most unusual offering, ackee and salt fish, available only on Saturday nights. Salt cod—Sullivan called it “the despised salt fish”—has been popular in the Caribbean since colonial times. I read somewhere that its entrenchment in island cuisine has to do with the danger of eating your fish fresh. 

West Indian reef fish like snappers, groupers, and triggerfish may be a source of ciguatera, a type of food poisoning resulting from toxins in microscopic dinoflagellates. Salt fish, which some of us find tasty in its own right, would have been a lot safer. 

As for the ackee, there’s a long story: it’s the fruit of a tree whose botanical name is Blighia sapida, after Captain Bligh of HMS Bounty infamy—“a foul-mouthed bully,” according to Patrick O’Brian. Bligh introduced the plant from its native West Africa to Jamaica, where it was adopted with much more enthusiasm than his breadfruit. The tree is in the family Sapindaceae, related to lychee, longan, and rambutan. 

Ackee fruit has a red rind, white flesh, and shiny black seeds, and everything except the flesh is poisonous—the literary critic Edmund Wilson apparently suffered a bout of ackee poisoning in Jamaica in the 1960s. The fruit, which O’Loughlin’s menu describes as avocado-like in texture, is also called “vegetable brains.” 

So put the fish and ackee together with onions and tomatoes, and you get something that I liked a lot more than Wilson did (“highly esteemed by the natives but less by other people,” he groused). The texture of the ackee is reminiscent of scrambled eggs; it pretty much absorbs the flavor of the fish. I suspect this dish alone draws a lot of homesick Jamaicans to the Caribbean Cove. 

Plate meals come with a green salad. The lunch’s, early in the season, was iceberg lettuce with pale tomatoes, nothing special, but the dinner salad a couple of weeks later was much improved, though still simple: romaine and tasty cherry tomatoes, a spark of grated carrot. Both had dousings of a tasty vinaigrette.  

There are other entrees we haven’t sampled yet, like stewed oxtail and a couple of vegetarian options. All are in the $6 to $8 range on the lunch menu, higher at dinner. They come in generous portions with sides of rice and peas (our “peas” were actually kidney beans, cooked with the rice in coconut milk) and fried plantains. 

The rice absorbs the sauces very nicely. We also didn’t get to the classic Jamaican patties, available as an appetizer stuffed with beef, chicken, or vegetables, or the salt fish fritters. 

O’Loughlin also offers a splendid housemade ginger beer and handcrafted sorrel, the hibiscus-based drink that’s called jamaica in Spanish-speaking territories. Red Stripe beer—“Hooray Beer!” says the ad card on your table—also goes well with the spicy stuff. You can try the Jamaican grapefruit soda called Ting, or the two-item wine list: house red, house white. 

The Caribbean Cove has a cheerful yellow-with-blue-trim interior, with island beachscapes on the wall. There’s free wi-fi and a UC student discount. Business was slow at lunchtime on a rainy Friday, but when we came back on Saturday night for the ackee and salt fish, there was more activity—a lot of takeout orders—and a reggae D.J. was setting up; I suspect the Cove gets livelier as the evening goes on.  

 

Photograph by Stephan Babuljak 

Kelly Hyde serves up a meal for Gina Johnson at the Caribbean Cove on Wednesday. 

ª


About the House: Neatness Saves Time, Even on a Job Site

By Matt Cantor
Friday April 28, 2006

I have slovenly tendencies. I know this about myself. I’m not proud of it, but let’s face facts: I like neatness, but it is, on most days, beyond my grasp. I also like to complain about those around me who do not keep things neat. Of course I never complain about my wife or kids and their messes, and if you think you’ve ever heard me shouting from next door, it must have been someone else or perhaps it was the game on TV. 

So when I say that neatness counts, you will take it as a “do as I say, not as I do” moment. If we can agree on the terms then I can probably offer a healthy dose of advice on the subject without going straight to hell. 

Neatness in construction is actually something I care a lot about and there are several reasons for my concern. Let’s start with speed. I have a friend who I’ve known for many years. His name is David and he worked with me on my house almost 20 years ago when we remodeled our place. 

David never seemed to be moving very fast. He would do things very methodically and carefully. He never came to a complete stop, although sometimes it appeared so. He would just move steadily through the entire day and at the end of that day there would be this enormous amount of work that he had done. 

Mostly, it just looked like a series of slow motion movements but the thing is that he never wasted any excessive movement and he was never tripping over himself. He also kept his work area very neat and well organized. 

He would stop and sweep up his area periodically so that he could see what he was doing. He would stack things not being used, off to one side. He would take a moment to close the tool box before he began to run the saw so that it wouldn’t become filled with sawdust and thus avoided another cleanup job that would later become necessary. That was Dave’s method. 

Steve used to work for me and he would often appear to be moving too fast for the eye to see, like some sort of magic act. But Steve was far less efficient than Dave. 

I recall an afternoon when Steve spent no less than a half hour looking for his hammer. I don’t think he found his hammer during the period but eventually took someone else’s and only found his later. He had a different style. 

When people take the time to set up their work area, to lay out the tools and to continually clean and re-organize, the work moves smoothly and comfortably. I have often said to myself in the course of a job that all I’m really doing is cleaning up and at the end of it, there’s a shelving unit or a set of kitchen cabinets. 

The installation is just a series of cleaning operations with a very small number of construction operations in between. In other words, if the focus remains on organization and continual cleaning of the area, the installation of a lamp housing or the building of a formwork becomes very much simplified and incidentally, much quicker. 

Looking for things takes a lot of time. So does physically negotiating a space that has become an obstacle course. Sawdust is slippery and piles of objects can make moving back and forth through the workspace a burdensome task for the already overloaded brain. 

We brilliant humans tend to think that we can do forty-seven things at once. While this may be true, none of us are able to do so at the efficiency level that we can when we attempt a much smaller number. 

Aside from speed, there is the issue of safety. I know for certain that if anyone ever did a quantitative scientific study of this phenomenon, that they would find that the worker in the messy jobsite incurs 73 percent more cuts and scrapes than his or her counterpart in the nice neat site. 

I’ve seen it and I’ve been there. It is much easier to trip over cords, piles of sawdust and sawn off blocks than it is to trip when walking across a freshly swept floor. It is also very hard to see where you are or what’s missing when there are 178 things in front of you. I find it much easier to note a problem with the work in a clean space than in a disorganized one where there’s so much visual “noise” that I can’t pick out the things that I need to be looking at. 

Also, when you stop and sweep the floor, you find the hammer (“Hey Steve, we found your hammer!”). You find the drill bit you dropped. You find a screw on the nice wooden floor before you grind it in. You can also find the nails, the wood and the other things that you need. There’s also something about breathing and slowing down and re-framing the project that occurs when you’re cleaning up. 

Lastly, if you’re working for Mrs. Jones, she might like it. I know for a fact that Mrs. Jones loves it when you clean up after yourself. She might not mind the coiled up cords, the table-saw or the compressor if the floor is nicely swept and the wood had been stacked in the corner. Also, Mrs. Jones is a little blind in her left eye and she might not trip and tear a ligament in her one good knee if the floor is nicely cleared when she drops by with brownies and decaf in the middle of the afternoon (She is so nice).  

Another tip I’d like to offer involves protecting surfaces (and then I’ll give it a rest). Before starting a job, my friend Tim the tiler starts by covering everything in the greater Bay Area with heavy paper. Painter’s tape is used to tape things together so that when it’s time to remove the paper, it won’t pull the paint off. 

This is the blue paper masking tape so often seen left on the windows of recent paint jobs. Tim neatly cuts this stuff around corners and toilets and then can proceed to make a mess and when the job is done, he just tears the tape away, rolls the stuff up and stuffs it in the garbage. Voila, it’s a thing of beauty. 

Many builders contain their work areas with plastic sheeting and can even put zippers into these barriers in the middle of rooms to contain dust. It take a few minutes and adds on some dollars but when this is done your DVD player isn’t filled with sheetrock dust. 

Neatness seems like it takes time and, well, yes it does, but it also saves time, prevents accidents and shows consideration for those with whom we work. So next time you’re working on the job for yourself or for Mrs. Jones, try to be 4 percent neater and see how if feels. 

 

 

Got a question about home repairs and inspections? Send them to Matt Cantor, in care of East Bay Real Estate, at realestate@berkeleydailyplanet.com..


Garden Variety: Recycling For Garden Decor at Omega Too

By Ron Sullivan
Friday April 28, 2006

So I dropped by Omega Too on San Pablo Avenue to see what Jana had for gardens. The answer was: Not quite so much as she used to, but what’s there is nifty. Of course; her sensibility is one I’ve always liked.  

I met Jana Olsen years ago, when I took her garden-construction class at Merritt. She’s a good teacher, relaxed but focused—an apt combination when you’re learning to enjoy the mighty power of the Sawzall without losing any body parts or mutilating any classmates. I liked that. I wonder how many of the problems I have right now could be solved by buying a Sawzall.  

Probably not enough to justify the purchase. Just wait till I get into politics. Might’ve been handy to have one outside the City Council meeting the other night when I was being gut-thwacked by a bunch of eager young jocks whose handlers had for some reason thought it a good idea for everybody to bring his big clunky gym duffel to the crowded lobby. 

Somebody almost went home with a bag of used dinner for a souvenir. Manners, kids, manners! Some of us old coots are not only grouchy; we’re unpredictably leaky when prodded. And we vote.  

Might tools aside, I doubtless got much of my own garden sensibility from Jana, because her approach appeals to me. I remember seeing a photo of a garden she’s collaborated on, with a retaining wall that was a sort of geological cartoon, including one layer of winebottles no doubt from the early Vinaceous Age. 

She’s smart and funny and shows it in her own garden, which I got a long look at before the Park Day School Tour a couple of years ago. That work actually has a recognizable and relevant narrative structure, without being all pedantic. Great fun.  

So what you can buy from her for your own garden is, on one hand, mostly salvage or faux-salvage items. The little space behind the store had a couple of fountains and birdbaths whose aesthetics run to the Gothic and older—one’s labeled “Green Man Ruin” and features faces of that archetype. 

There’s a ceramic tortoise I covet myself, and assorted things to hang on walls and/or get plumbed for fountains, and several wreaths and crossed festooned with painted terra-cotta flowers that made me think of old Italian cemeteries back East.  

Actual salvage items I saw included a length of distressed, painted iron fencing or gate material, maybe head-tall, and a pair of the wrought-iron brackets that supported those old-fashioned school desks—the seats attached to the table part behind, so if you wiggled enough you could screw up your annoying neighbor’s handwriting. Yes, I am an old coot.  

Garden and porch lights, door or gate hardware, doormats, doorknockers including a trowel and a woodpecker, and stained glass and craft tiles for use in sheltered places are mostly inside the store. 

It’s an interesting succession, from old house-parts to things made to mimic old house-parts to handmade items that carry the same art traditions forward, always more interestingly than mass-produced imitations. Makes you think that apprenticeship has more than private effects.  

 

Omega Too 

2204 San Pablo Ave., Berkeley 

843-3636 

Monday-Saturday 10 a.m–6 p.m. 

Sunday noon–5 p.m.  

http://www.omegatoo.com/ 

 

 

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in East Bay Home & Real Estate. Her column on East Bay trees appears every other Tuesday in the Berkeley Daily Planet.


Arts & Events

Arts Calendar

Tuesday May 02, 2006

TUESDAY, MAY 2 

CHILDREN 

“The Riddle of Ridley Acres” by First Stage Children’s Theater at 7:30 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $5 at the door. www.juliamorgan.org 

Japanese Carp Day Celebration from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Habitot, 2065 Kittredge St. Children can make carp kites and listen to Japanese stories. Free. 647-1111.  

EXHIBITIONS 

“Drawings and Prints” by Georgianna Greenwood at North Berkeley Gallery, 1744 Shattuck Ave. 595-8137. 

FILM 

“Fugitive Prayers” at 7 p.m., “The Bridge” at 9:20 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Rose Castillo Guibault reads from her memoir, “Farmworker’s Daughter: Growing Up Mexican in America” at 6 :30 p.m. at the César Chávez Branch of the Oakland Public Library, 3301 East 12th St. 535-5620. 

Freight and Salvage Open Mic at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $4.50-$5.50. 548-1761.  

Karen Finley reads from her new comic novel “George & Martha” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Brass Menagerie at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Balkan dance lesson at 7:30 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Ellen Hoffman and Singers’ Open Mic at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ.  

Barbara Linn at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

WEDNESDAY, MAY 3 

EXHIBITIONS 

“The Flaming Sword of Truth” UCB Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition opens at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. 

FILM 

“The Sun” at 7 p.m., “The Betrayal” at 9:15 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Kamran Nazeer discusses “Send in the Idiots: Stories from the Other Side of Autism” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com  

Molly O’Neill describes “Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Baseball” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

George Ryder and The Joy of Music “The Show to Remember” at 1:15 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst. 981-5190. 

Music for the Spirit with Ron McKean, Marcel Dupre and Virgil Fox on the organ at 12:15 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church of Oakland, 2619 Broadway. 444-3555. 

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

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

Wild Catahoulas at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054.  

Ben Adams Trio at 8:30 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $5. 451-8100. 

3 Strikes at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $8-$10. 848-0886.  

Universal at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

THURSDAY, MAY 4 

CHILDREN 

“East of the Sun, West of the Moon” by the Montessori Family School in collaboration with Vector Theater at 7:30 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Theater, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $7-$12 at the door. www.juliamorgan.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

Keeyla Meadows Paintings opens at Bucci’s 6121 Hollis, Emeryville. 

FILM 

First Impressions: “By Rail and Trail: New Orleans to the Golden Gate over the Southern Pacific Sunset Route” at 5:30 p.m. “Bashing” at 7 p.m. and “Iraq in Fragments” at 8:45 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES.  

“Walter Ratcliff, Architect” an illustrated talk by Woodruff Minor, author of “Ratcliff Architecture” at 7:30 at Claiborne Hill Chapel, 2509 Hillegass Ave. Cost is $10. Tour of Ratcliff residences in Claremont Park on May 7 from 1 to 5 p.m. Sponsored by Berkeley Architectural Heritage Assoc. www.berkeleyheritage.com 

“The Bancroft Library at 100” a lecture by Mark Griffith at 5:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Ave. 642-0808.  

Rafaella Del Bourgo, poet, at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720. 

Sandy Tolan in conversation with Cynthia Gorney on Tolan’s book, “The Lemon Tree” on Israeli-Palestinian relations, at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Diana Abu-Jaber introduces her memoir “The Language of Baklava” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

Word Beat Reading Series with Mark Schwartz and M. K. Chavez at 7 p.m. at Mediterraneum Caffe, 2475 Telegraph Ave. 526-5985. 

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

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Seriously Soprano with Amyrose McCue Gill, Kate Offer at 8 p.m. at Regents Hall, Holy Name University, 3500 Mountain Blvd. Oakland. Free, donations accepted. 

Ancient Future, guitar and sitar, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. 

Play’s Monk at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ.  

The 500’s, The Concumbines, The Solvents at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

Showtime @ 11 Hip Hop at 10 p.m. at the Ivy Room, 585 San Pablo Ave. at Solano. 524-9220.  

San Pablo Project at 9 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $6. 451-8100.  

FRIDAY, MAY 5 

CHILDREN 

“East of the Sun, West of the Moon” by the Montessori Family School in collaboration with Vector Theater at 7:30 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $7-$12 at the door.  

Celebrate Cinco de Mayo with Ballet Folklorico Mexicano de Carlos Moreno at 3:30 p.m. at Habitot, 2065 Kittredge St. Free. 647-1111. 

THEATER 

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley “The Devil’s Disciple” by G.B. Shaw, Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave. Tickets are $12. 649-5999. www.aeofberkeley.org 

Aurora Theatre “Small Tragedy” Wed.-Sat at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m. at 2081 Addison St., through May 14. Tickets are $38. 843-4822.  

Berkeley Rep “The Glass Menagerie” at 8 p.m. at the Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St. Tickets are $59. Runs through June 18. 647-2949.  

Contra Costa Civic Theater “Animal Crackers” at 8 p.m. Fri and Sat., and Sun. at 2 p.m. at Contra Costa Civic Theater, 951 Pomona Ave., El Cerrito, through May 20. Tickets are $12-$20. 524-9132.  

Impact Theater “Money & Run Episode 4: Go Straight, No Chaser,” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave. Cost is $10-$15. 464-4468. 

Masquers Playhouse “Relative Values” by Noel Coward. Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond, through May 6. Tickets are $15. 232-4031. www.masquers.org 

Subterranean Shakespeare “Richard III” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St., through May. 20. Tickets are $12-$17. 276-3871. 

EXHIBITIONS 

New Work by Ben Belknap and Crystal Morey, figurative ceramic sculptors. Opening reception at 7 p.m. at Boontling Gallery 4224 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. www.boontlinggallery.com  

“Elsewhere: Places for the Spirit” Oil paintings by Trish Booth opens with a reception at 5 p.m. at Esteban Sabar Gallery, 480 23rd St., Oakland. 444-7411. www.estebansabar.com 

“Real and Imaginary” paintings by Bethany Ayres opens with a reception at 5 p.m. at Esteban Sabar Gallery, 480 23rd St., Oakland. 444-7411.  

“Cats and Fish” Group art show opens at 7 p.m. at WoW Art Gallery, 3721 Grand Ave. 419-0343. 

FILM 

Queer to Eternity Film Festival at 7 p.m. and May 6 at 2 p.m. at Pacific School of Religion, 1798 Scenic Ave. 849-8206. www.clgs.org 

A Tribute to Jean-Claude Carrière: “Diary of a Chambermaid” at 7 p.m. “The Milky Way” at 9 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Andrew Ross discusses “Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade” at 12:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

“Hip Hop’s Impact on the American Family” with Adisa Banjoko, Tamara Palmer, T-Kash, Eric Arnold and others at 7:30 p.m. at at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

“From Ike to Mao and Beyond: My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist” read by community members at 4:30 p.m. at Revolution Books, 2426 Channing Way, under the Sather Gate Garage. 848-1196. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $30-$52. 642-9988.  

University Symphony Orchestra “Prokofiev Piano Concerto” at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $3-$10. 642-4864.  

Miriam Abramowitsch, mezzo-soprano, George Barth, piano, at 8 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. Cost is $12. 848-1228.  

Lavay Smith at 8:30 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $15. 451-8100.  

Domeshot, Sleep in Fame, Maxwell Adams, Almost Dead at 8:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $8-$10. 848-0886.  

Cinco de Mayo Pachucada Celebration at 8:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $8-$15. 849-2568.  

Pamela Rose and her Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $7. 841-JAZZ.  

Swingthing at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Swing dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $11-$13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

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

Norton Buffalo & Friends at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761.  

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

Abel Mouton, Eric Marshall and Genna Giacobassi, singer-songwriters, at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Boatclub, Go Going Gone Girls, Bunny Numpkins at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082.  

Crom, Total Shutdown, Doomsday 1999 at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

Albino, heavy Afro-beat, at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low. Cost is $8. 548-1159.  

Suzanna Choffel at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 644-2204.  

SATURDAY, MAY 6 

EXHIBITIONS 

Piecemakers Quilting Guild Legacies of Love Quilting Show with 250 quilts on display, Sat. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sun. 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Hayward Centennial Hall, 22292 Foothill Blvd., Hayward. Tickets are $6-$8 at the door. www.piecemakersguild.org 

I Madé Moja, works by the Balinese artist opens with a reception at 4 p.m. at Désa Arts, 4810 Telegraph Ave. 595-1669. 

“Behind the Magic: 50 Years of Disneyland” Exhibition opens at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts., 238-2200. 

FILM 

A Tribute to Jean-Claude Carrière: “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” at 6:30 p.m. “The Phantom of Liberty” at 8:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Has Digital Photography Killed Ansel Adams?” a lecture on the future of black and white photography by Andrea McLaughlin at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6100. 

“Drawn Together by Line” Gallery talk with the artists Nora Pauwels, Ann Stoeher and Livia Stein, at 2 p.m. at Kala Art Institute, 1060 Heinz Ave. 549-2977. 

Ken Croswell, astronomer, introduces photographs of every planet orbiting the sun in “Ten Worlds” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Telegraph. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com  

Bay Area Poets Coalition holds an open reading from 3 to 5 p.m., at Strawberry Creek Lodge, 1320 Addison St. Park on the street, not in Lodge parking lot. Free. 527-9905. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $30-$52. 642-9988.  

Mozart for Mutts and Meows, members of the Midsummer Mozart Festival perform in a benefit for the Berkeley-East Bay Humane Society at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Tickets are $75. 845-7735, ext. 19. www.berkeleyhumane.org 

Berkeley Community Chorus and Orchestra presents the Beethoven Mass in C Major, Faure Pavane for Chorus and other musical highlights at 8 p.m. at Saint Joseph The Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. Free admission, donations always welcome. www.bcco.org  

sfSoundGroup performs music of Cage, Webern, Kagel, Grisey, Ingalls and Bithell at 8 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana St. bet. Durant and Bancroft. Tickets are $12-$18. 549-3864.  

Healing Muses “The Flame of Love, The Legend of Tristan and Iseult“ at 8 p.m. at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, 1501 Washington St., Albany. Tickets are $15-$18. Resevations recommended. Not wheelchair accessible. 524-5661.  

University Symphony Orchestra “Prokofiev Piano Concerto” at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $3-$10. 642-4864. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Persephene’s Bees, Boyjazz, Outline Kit at 8 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $8. 451-8100.  

Steve Seskin and Allen Shamblin at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Rockin’ Jalapeño Pachuco Party at 9:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $8-$12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org  

Fourtet Jazz Group at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $3. 843-2473.  

The Youngs, Brian Kenney Fresno, Salane and Friends at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Hanif & the Jazz Voyagers at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. Cost is $7. 841-JAZZ. 

The Snake Trio at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$15. 845-5373.  

Berkeley Old TIme Music Convention Family dance at 7 p.m. followed by concert with Thompson’s String Ticklers and the Squirrelly Stringband at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12 adutls, $6 ages 12-18, under 12 free. 525-5054.  

Aratic An Opiate for Angels at 8:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $8-$10. 848-0886.  

Denise Perrier Trio at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Inspect Her Gadget Element 94, Red Horizon, Normal Like You, all ages show at 7 p.m. at the Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway at 2nd St., Oakland. Cost is $10.  

Kurt Huget and Kirk Keeler, singer-songwriters, at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Sotaque Baiano at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low. Cost is $10-$12. 548-1159. 

Teenage Harlets, Ashtray, Insurgence, Static Revolution at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $7. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, MAY 7 

CHILDREN  

“Flower Tower” children’s music by The Sippy Cups at 12:30 and 3 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $10.50-$12.50. 925-798-1300. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“The Art of Political Posters and Photographs” Reception at 6 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Donation $5. 849-2568.  

FILM 

For the Love of It: Sixth Annual Festival of Amateur Filmmaking at 3 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

The State of the People Address, anti-war poetry and open mic, at 6:30 p.m. at La Peña. Free. 849-2568.  

Phyllis Mattson introduces “War Orphan in San Francisco: Letters Link a Family Scattered by WWII” at 2 p.m. at BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. 848-0237. 

“Shocking Stories” Living history performances of the 1906 earthquake and fire at 2 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. 

Ester Hernandez discusses her art of the Chicano Movement at 3:30 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. 

Devyani Saltzman reads from “Shooting Water: A Memoir of Second Chances, Family, and Filmmaking” at 4 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

Poetry Flash with Murray Silverstein and Sharon Olson at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Telegraph. Donation $2. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Community Chorus and Orchestra at 4:30 p.m. at Saint Joseph The Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. Free admission, donations always welcome.  

James Tinsley, trumpet, Miles Graber, piano at 4 p.m. All proceeds will go to support the Children’s Center for AIDS Orphans, Ilinge, South Africa. For directions, call 848-1755.  

The Jerusalem Quartet at 3 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $42. 642-9988.  

Joe Gilman Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ.  

Montclair Women’s Big Band at 4:30 and 6:30 p.m. at the Jazz 

school. Cost is $20. 845-5373.  

Twang Cafe with JimBo Trout and the Fishpeople at 7:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 644-2204.  

Tragedy, Born/Dead, Witch Hunt, Deathtoll at 5 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $7. 525-9926. 


Arts: Benny Golson Headlines At Yoshi’s This Weekend

By Ira Steingroot Special to the Planet
Tuesday May 02, 2006

If you saw Steven Spielberg’s somewhat unfocused 2004 film Terminal starring Tom Hanks, you may remember that Hanks’ character travels to America, where he proceeds to get stuck at JFK Airport, in order to fulfill a promise he had made to his late father. 

It seems the aged parent had collected the John Hancocks of all but one of the 58 jazz musician subjects of Art Kane’s famous 1958 Esquire photo “A Day in Harlem” and he made his son Viktor promise to complete his project. (The photo was the subject of Jean Bach’s moving 1994 jazz documentary A Great Day in Harlem.) Luckily for Viktor, the omitted musician was tenor saxophonist Benny Golson, one of the half dozen jazz legends from that photo shoot who are still alive. 

Luckily for us, Benny Golson, who turned 77 on Jan. 26, is still very much alive and, along with his combo from the Spielberg film, he plays at Yoshi’s later this week. 

Golson was part of the Northern industrial urban generation of jazz musicians who spawned hard bop. He grew up in Philadelphia and while still in high school was playing with friends like John Coltrane, Jimmy and Percy Heath, Red Garland and Philly Joe Jones. Later, while with Lionel Hampton, he worked alongside Clifford Brown. Within a few years, these players were to build on the innovations of bebop to create hard bop in the bands of Art Blakey, Miles Davis and Max Roach. 

Golson is one of the greatest hard bop tenor saxophonists, second only to Sonny Rollins. He is also a master composer and arranger having penned more than 300 compositions. His most famous pieces, all jazz standards, are “Stablemates,” “Along Came Betty,” “Five Spot After Dark,” “Blues March,” “Whisper Not, Fair Weather,” “Killer Joe,” and “I Remember Clifford,” his hauntingly lyrical elegy for his friend, trumpet great Clifford Brown, killed in a car crash in 1956. 

From 1959 until 1962 he co-led a famous all-star group of his own, the Jazztet featuring Art Farmer and Curtis Fuller. 

From 1963-1974 he worked in the studios and composed music for television shows you probably saw and can still see in syndication like Mission: Impossible, Ironsides, Mannix, It Takes a Thief, Room 222, M*A*S*H, and Six Million Dollar Man. Although he returned to playing live jazz in the ‘70s and even re-formed the Jazztet in 1982, he still found time to do the music for Guy Debord’s 1978 documentary In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni and wrote the theme for Cosby in 1996. 

Golson’s place in the history of modern jazz is analogous to that of swing era alto saxophonist Benny Carter. Both Carter and Golson were masters on their horns: virtuosic, inspired improvisers, innovators, but with composers’ minds. This gave their work greater formal coherence than that of many of their compatriots. It also led them into the studios and the world of film and television writing. Both were too great to be hurt by their forays into the commercial world. In fact, even in the commercial milieu, they performed at a higher level than most of their contemporaries. Yet both knew that they had to continue to play authentic jazz. 

Benny Golson is here to tell us that he is still doing exactly that.  

 

The Benny Golson Quartet featuring Mike LeDonne (piano), Buster Williams (bass), and Carl Allen (drums), performs at 8 and 10 p.n. Thursday through Sunday and at 2 and 8 p.m. Sunday at Yoshi’s, 510 Embarcadero West, Oakland. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com.a


Arts: A Tale of Genocide Unfolds in TheatreFIRST’s ‘World Music’

By Ken Bullock Special to the Planet
Tuesday May 02, 2006

“Welcome to Europe!” As a British father and son reunite in Brussels and stumble through French to order food in a cafe, a young African waitress surprises both by speaking to them in English. 

“Of course! This is Europe.” The father, Geoff Fallon (Clive Chafer) chides his 20-ish son Tim (Alex Klein) for speaking of EuroDisney and of visiting Buchenwald rather than engaging with his father’s work and obsession, postcolonial Africa. “At the very least, I’ve kept faith!” 

This seemingly typical intergenerational misunderstanding is quickly intercut onstage with scenes of a different European welcome that Geoff Fallon is giving to his old friend and recent refugee Jean Kiyabe (L. Peter Callender), who has come to address the Euro Government: “The International Community. I cannot say I understand this phrase ... We call you birds. You fly in with your plans. You have such plans for us—and in our time of need and struggle, you are gone again ... Forgive me. I am here in sadness not in anger.” 

TheatreFIRST’s production of Steve Water’s World Music (now playing at the Old Oakland Theatre on Ninth Street near Broadway) starts off like this, with intercut scenes and dialogue that bounce off the maze of committee rooms and around a center of international bureaucracy, with all the professions of friendship, the backroom jockeying for position and half-whispered trading of rumors and hunches that underpin the business of diplomacy. In this case it is the very undiplomatic declaration and censuring of genocide and all the arguments over terminology and cultural context to describe actions almost unimaginable.  

In succeeding scenes, World Music settles down to the counterpoint of following Fallon’s driven existence, ceaselessly working on behalf of his old friends from Africa, against flashbacks of the arrival of his younger self (also played by Alex Klein) in Kiyabe’s village in “Irundi” to teach English, and how his beliefs are formed “on the ground.” 

These are beliefs that are shown in their later professional expression and personal unravelling, as the contradictions and misunderstandings surrounding mass hysteria and killing find a touchstone in this lonely individual, so far from the events for which he declares a sense of personal responsibility. 

“It’s hard to get an audience to come to a play about genocide,” said Clive Chafer, who’s also artistic director and co-founder of TheatreFIRST. 

World Music proves to be a play about genocide that takes pains not to brutalize its audience’s perceptions with scenes of barbarity—or even the celebrated messenger’s grisly account of them. 

Steve Waters tries to capture the aftershocks and backwash of events, to provide a tour around the perimeter of things too big, too horrible to grasp, by conveying a sense of their effects on both victim and perpetrator—and on those who stand by, wrestling with indifference, concern and feelings of helplessness as they’re called on to intervene, yet urged to act with discretion—or not to act at all. 

By following the story of one man progressively wrapped up more and more in this deadly business throughout his adult life, the play skirts melodrama and avoids sentimentalism by staying focussed on the situations and relationships that crystalize around the figure of Geoff. 

A drunken Kiyabe, rebuffed by Geoff’s colleague Paulette James (Leontyne Mbele-Mbong), who’s refused the “compliment” of being an African woman with “I don’t go further back than St. Kitts,” ominously asks her to protect him “when the time comes.” Florence (Shakira Patrice De Abreu), the waitress/philology student tells her would-be protector Geoff what her bad dreams are really about. Kiyabe snapping a picture of young Geoff and Odette (Ashleyrose Gilham), the young village woman who seems to be Kiyabe’s ward or captive. Geoff sarcastically says of his chief in their “lofty castle” of international government, Alan Carswell (Garth Petal), cutting a meeting short to see a Lithuanian delegation, “He’s sure keen on those Baltic States!” 

These are all moments that expand into the world outside that Geoff “advocates” by sacrificing his own emotional life, becoming another refugee himself, an internal exile in a half-world peopled with representatives of the silent, arguing over words, and the guilty survivors, whose own stories betray them. 

Dylan Russell has shown great care in directing a tight cast with a real commitment to perform a play that exposes the perils of that glib word, one used more for “committing” military aid or troops than for the unreserved giving of self, keeping their characters’ stories open to the dire contradictions they pose, and to the questions begged, rather than screamed out. 

 

 

WORLD MUSIC 

Presented by TheatreFIRST at 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturdayby and 3 p.m. Sunday through May 21. Old Oakland Theatre, 461 Ninth St. (at Broadway), Oakland. 436-5085 www.theatrefirst.com.›


The Not-So-Sweet Life of the Lemon Tree

By Ron Sullivan Special to the Planet
Tuesday May 02, 2006

Lemon tree very pretty  

And the lemon flower is sweet, 

But the fruit of the poor lemon 

Is impossible to eat. 

 

It’s a slander of course, but I do remember Trini Lopez singing the song on the radio way back when. I remember hearing covers from Peter Paul and Mary and one of my schoolmates, too— catchy tune. At least it wasn’t “Banana Boat,” a song with a recurring “Deo” (or “Day-o”) upon which a pretentious or inebriated singer could get stuck for long minutes.  

Lemon trees like our climate just fine, which is fortunate because we like lemons just fine too, as a rule. Yes, there are a few on the streets, and there are more in yards and gardens. Aside from their nice fruit, they look handsome and atmospheric in Mediterranean-style settings, with adobe, stucco, or tiled surfaces. They’ll do fine in a big pot, too, and tolerate frequent pruning for size control. And their blooms do smell lovely, a great asset in a courtyard or small garden.  

One group of them that I know personally, because they live outside a veterinary clinic we frequent, get pruned rather cruelly into a forced tight shape and are barely recognizable as lemon trees. As a result of this and other hard bits of their lives, like their situation on a busy street and jammed into sidewalk wells, they seem prone to the diseases and disorders that can plague citrus trees here: infestations by scale insects, aphids and other bugs, black mold and mildew, and the ravages of snails. Snails will eat new leaves and even fruit and bark from lemons, enough to kill the trees sometimes.  

I have heard of citrus hedges, and seen a few, but they need good air circulation and attention—looking for bugs and mold and hosing down in summer to get rid of them—to thrive. 

Another problem those poor sidewalk trees have to cope with is the clay and sidewalk combo. They need good drainage, as do all citrus.  

We once moved into a flat in the Potter Creek drainage with an orange tree out back. I was ignorant enough about trees back then not to recognize that it was declining; it died within a few years and I felt guilty. We hung it with birdfeeders and windchimes, and one day decided to saw off a branch that had become snagged in a live and spreading eugenia next to it. It was rather a shock, like waking up to find yourself in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, when Joe sawed off the dead branch and braced to catch it, and instead the branch stayed suspended in the eugenia and the dead orange fell over.  

What we found at its base was a hole full of stinking water and a rotted-through stump. Mystery solved and no more guilt.  

One impediment to pruning, snagging snails, and even picking lemons is that the trees often sport big green thorns. In my experience, they don’t “heal” well from big pruning cuts, either, so if you have one it’s a good idea to set its shape early in its life and then control size by making smaller cuts frequently. Don’t shear it, though, unless you want an impenetrable thorny mass of blackened, puckered leaves in a year or two or you’re ready to give it the attention a hedge needs. 

If you’re planting a lemon for fruit, note the prices of Meyer lemons in the market and that that hybrid/cultivar is a prolific bearer here. It’s also cold-tolerant as lemons go, probably owing to its orange or mandarin parentage. (There are conflicting stories about which it is, and most writers on the subject just admit they don’t know.)  

You might want to put it where it’s protected from human poaching, too. A friend of mine swaps her Meyer lemons around to friends and other gardeners, and donates some to an elders’ food pantry. This year she can’t give her lemon tree as much attention as usual, and lately she’s found that someone’s been ripping off lemons, and in rather a careless fashion that damages the tree too. Human behavior can taste a lot more bitter than lemons.  

 

Photograph by: Ron Sullivan 

This beleaguered street tree manages to bear flowers and fruit: one lonely little lemon.


Berkeley This Week

Tuesday May 02, 2006

TUESDAY, MAY 2 

Sunshine Ordinance Community Meeting Come help to propose a strong sunshine ordinance to make Berkeley’s decision-making processes more accessible to residents at 7 p.m. at 2180 Milvia St., 6th Floor. 981-7170. 

“Loose Change 911” Documentary on the myth of 9/11 followed by a discussion with the filmmakers Dylan Avery and Korey Rowe at 7 p.m. at the Grand Lake Theater, 3200 Grand Ave., Oakland. Donation of $10, benefits Guns-n-Butter. 704-0268.  

Climate Change class meets Tues. from 1 to 3 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Topics include science, projected impacts, individual behavior, and policy. 981-5190. 

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. 

Discussion Salon on “What Do You Do For Fun?” at 7 p.m. at the BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. at Rose. Please bring snacks to share, no peanuts please. 

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

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

WEDNESDAY, MAY 3 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around the restored 1870s business district. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of G.B. Ratto’s at 827 Washington St. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. 

“The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War’s Buried History” with Mark Danner in conversation with Pratap Chatterjee at 7:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. Tickets are $10-$12 available at local independent bookstores. Benefits Global Exchange. 967-4495. 

“Is the Bush Administration Guilty of Torture and War Crimes?” Panel with Brig. General Janis Karpinski, former UK ambassador Craig Murray, and Larry Everest at 7 p.m. at 2050 Valley Life Sciences Building, UC Campus. Admission $5-$10 sliding scale, no one turned away for lack of funds. 355- 6915.  

“Vote Rigging 101” A documentary film at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Donations of $5 accepted. 

Lonely Planet Travel Series with Emily Wolman and Heather Dickson on Women Solo Travels at 6 p.m. at Oakland Public Library, 124 14th St. 238-3136. 

Classes in English and Citizenship offered by the Oakland Adult Education program Mon.-Fri. from 6 to 9 p.m. Free. Register at Lincoln Elementary School, 225 11th St., room 205. 879-8131. 

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. 

Red Cross Blood Services Volunteer Orientation from 10 a.m. to noon in Oakland. We need your help to support the more than 40 blood drives held each month all over the East Bay.For more information, phone Anne at 594-5165.  

Red Cross Blood Drive from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. East Pauley Ballroom, MLK Student Union, 3rd floor, UC Campus. To make an appointment call 1-800-GIVE-LIFE. www.BeADonor.com  

Swami Khecaranatha Kundalini Yoga Talk at 7 p.m. at Sacred Space Yoga Sanctuary, 816 Bancroft at 6th. Free. 486-8700.  

Weight Management Learn the best way to eat to maintain a healthy weight at 7:30 p.m. at Elephant Pharmacy, 1607 Shattuck Ave. 549-9200. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

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. 562-9431.  

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

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

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

com/vigil4peace/vigil 

THURSDAY, MAY 4 

Chabot Space & Science Center Open House for Educators from 3 to 7 p.m. Learn about education programs, lesson plans, activities and community resources from other organizations. Free but pre-registration required www.chabotspace.org 

“Dog’s and Children: Can’t We All Just Get Along?” A lecture on on how to raise a well-behaved pet, at 7:30 p.m. at Borders Books in Emeryville. 644-0729. www.openpaw.org 

Red Cross Blood Drive from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. East Pauley Ballroom, MLK Student Union, 3rd floor, UC Campus. To make an appointment call 1-800-GIVE-LIFE. www.BeADonor.com  

“Be the Stars You Are” Personal stories from scholarship recipients at 7:30 p.m. at Arlington Community Church, 52 Arlington Ave. Cost is $5-$10. www.peointernational.org 

Bone Yoga Learn how yoga can increase bone density at 7:30 p.m. at Elephant Pharmacy, 1607 Shattuck Ave. 549-9200. 

Spring Cleaning for your Body A 21 day guided detoxification and allergy elimination diet, free introductory lecture at 6:15 p.m. at Acupuncture and Integrative Medicine College, 2550 Shattuck Ave. Registration required. 415-513-7270.  

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, MAY 5 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Carl Poppe. Livermore Lab on “Energy” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $13.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. 526-2925.  

“A Pictorial History of Palestine from the late Ottoman Period to 1948” with Mona and David Halaby, who will show photos and tell their family stories at 7 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker School, 2125 Jefferson St. Free, not wheelchair accessible. 708-3347. 

“Just Garments” An evening of speakers, music, art, and film to pressure the City of Berkeley to purchase only sweat shop free goods and a benefit for Just Garments at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship Unitarian Universalists Hall, 1924 Cedar St. and Bonita Ave. Tickets are $10-$25 sliding scale; no one turned away for lack of funds. 415-575-5541. www.globalexchange.org/sweatfreebayarea 

“Tibetan Religion and State in the 17th and 18th Centuries: Tibetan, Chinese, and Mongolian Perspectives” A conference from Fri. - Sun. sponsored by the Center for Buddhist Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Chinese Studies, and Townsend Center for the Humanities http://ieas.berkeley.edu/ 

Berkeley School Volunteers Training workshop for volunteers interested in helping the public schools, from 2 to 3:30 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. 644-8833. 

Emery Ed Fund Benefit at Pixar with a pre-release screening of “Cars” at 6 p.m. at Pixar Animation Studios. Tickets are $250. 601-4997. www.emeryed.org 

Red Cross Blood Drive from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the 5th floor Tilden Room, MLK Student Union, UC Campus. To make an appointment call 1-800-GIVE-LIFE. www.BeADonor.com  

Berkeley Chess School classes for students in grades 1-8 from 5:30 to 7 p.m. A drop-in, rated scholastic tournament follows from 7 to 8 p.m. at 1581 LeRoy Ave., Room 17. 843-0150. 

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. 

SATURDAY, MAY 6 

Get Ready for Diasaster Day Volunteers needed to help get disaster information out of all Berkeley neighborhoods. Meet at 10 a.m. at Francis Albrier Community Center, 2800 Park St. between Ward and Russell. Please RSVP to 981-5584, clopes@ci.berkeley.ca.us   

Fun on the Farm An introduction to Tilden Park’s Little Farm for all ages, at 11 a.m.. Be prepared to get a little firty while you help out with chores and animal grooming. 525-2233. 

Kid’s Garden Club for ages 7-12 to explore the world of gardening, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 636-1684. 

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.  

Walking Tour of the Garden of Old Roses with horticulturist and rose expert, Peter Klement, to learn about the history of old roses, including the influences of Chinese, Persian and European cultures on the roses we grow today at 11:30 a.m. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Cost is $8-$12. Registration required. 643-2755. 

“Designing a Small Garden Using Hardscape” Isabel Robertson will discuss materials you can use for walls, paths and patios at 10 a.m. at Magic Gardens Landscape Nursery, 729 Heinz Ave. 644-2351. 

Berkeley History Center Walking Tour: “Past and Promise Along the Santa Fe Right of Way” led by Susan Schwartz, from 10 a.m. to noon. Cost is $8-$10. 848-0181. www.cityofberkeley.info/histsoc 

Walking Tour of Oakland Chinatown Meet at 10 a.m. at the courtyard fountain in the Pacific Renaissance Plaza at 388 Ninth St. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

“Heal a Woman, Heal a Child, Heal a Nation” Benefit for domestic violence centers from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at 5272 Foothill Blvd., Oakland. Donation $10 and up. 533-5306. 

Astronomy Day at Lawrence Hall of Science. Make your own sunprint and see a Planetarium show, from 11:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at LHS, Centennial Drive. Cost is $7.50-$9.50. 642-5132. 

Progressive Democrats of the East Bay features Jerry McNerney, an alternative energy specialist, who is challenging Richard Pombo in the 11th CD. Please bring cell phones for phone banking. From 12:30 to 3 p.m. at at Temescal Library, 5205 Telegraph, Oakland. 636-4149. www.pdeastbay.org 

“The Power of Nightmares” a new documentary by BBC journalist on the “War on Terroism” Parts I and II from 3 to 5 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27st., Oakland. Cost is $10. Benefits Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club. Part III will be shown on May 13th at 3 p.m. 

Piecemakers Quilting Guild Legacies of Love Quilting Show with 250 quilts on display, Sat. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sun. 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Hayward Centennial Hall, 22292 Foothill Blvd., Hayward. Tickets are $6-$8 at the door. www.piecemakersguild.org 

“Behind the Magic: 50 Years of Disneyland” Exhibition opens at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts., and runs through August 20. 238-2200. 

Basic Chinese Herbology at 2:30 p.m. at Elephant Pharmacy, 1607 Shattuck Ave. 549-9200. 

Pre-School Storytime for 3-5 year olds at 11 a.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave., through June 22. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

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

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, MAY 7 

Berkeley Architectural Heritage Spring House Tour of “The Residential Work of Walter Ratcliff, Jr. in Claremont Park” from 1 to 5 p.m. Tickets are $25-$35. www.berkeleyheritage.com 

Nature Photography Hike with nature photographers Bethany Facendini and Frank Balthis from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. in Tilden Park. All levels of ability are welcome. For ages 15 and up. Fee is $40-$44, registration required. 636-1684. 

Welcome Home the Butterflies Help weed and plant the Butterfly Garden in Tilden Park from 1 to 3 p.m. Dress to get dirty and bring garden gloves if you have them. 525-2233. 

A Child’s Container Garden: Family Workshop for 2 to 3:30 p.m. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Cost is $14-$18, $7 for additional adult or child. Registration required, space is limited. 643-2755. 

“The 1906 Earthquake and Fire and the Multicultural Experience” Living history performances at 2 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. 

“In the Company of Wild Butterflies” a film followed by art and microscope activities from 1 to 3 p.m. at Lawrence Hall of Science, Centennial Drive. Cost is $7.50-$9.50. 642-5132. 

Cinco de Mayo Fiesta with Mexican food, games and activities, from noon to 3 p.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. Proceeds benefit disaster relief and other church programs. 525-0302. www.uucb.org 

Amnesty International Rummage Sale at 10 a.m. at Berkeley Fellowship, 1834 Cedar St., with books, toys, clothes, and more.  

Discussion on Development and Liveable Cities in the East Bay at 6 p.m. at the Long Haul, 3124 Shattuck Ave. 540-0751. 

Flower Essences for Animals Holistic healing therapy from 2 to 4 p.m. at Rabbitears, 303 Arlington Ave., behind Ace Hardware. Donation $15. 525-6155.  

Chinese Medicine and Lung Disease at 11:30 a.m. at Elephant Pharmacy, 1607 Shattuck Ave. 549-9200. 

Young People’s Symphony Orchestra Auditions from 2 to 6 p.m. Rehearsals are every Mon. eve. in Berkeley. For audition time please call 849-9776. www.ypsomusic.net 

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

Tibetan Buddhism with Elizabeth Cook on “Tibetan Meditation” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

MONDAY, MAY 8 

South Berkeley Senior Center Cultural Arts and Crafts Fair from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 2939 Ellis St. 981-5175. 

“American Triumphalism in an Age of Terror” with author Theodore Rosak at 12:30 p.m. in The Edith Stone Room of the Albany Lbrary, 1247 Marin Ave.  

“Perspectives on Berkeley: Past and Present” Chuck Wollenberg’s Berkeley history class at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. Meets Mon. evenings through May 22. Free. 981-6150. 

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

Kids and the Law A presentation by lawyers for junior and senior high school students and their parents and guardians from 6 to 8 p.m. at the El Sobrante Library, 4191 Appian Way, El Sobrante. 374-3991.  

Red Cross Blood Drive from 12:30 to 6:30 p.m. in the Wells Fargo Room, Haas School of Business, UC Campus. To make an appointment call 1-800-GIVE-LIFE. www.BeADonor.com  

“Soul Mind Body Medicine” a talk by Master Zhi Gang Sha at 7:30 p.m. at Yoga Kula, 1700 Shattuck Ave., 2nd Flr. 486-0264. 

World Affairs/Politics Discussion Group for people 60+ years old meets at 10:15 a.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. Cost is $2.50. 524-9122. 

Introduction to Meditation with Diane Eshin Rizzetto at 6:45 p.m. at the Bay Zen Center, 315 Alcatraz. Donation $10. Pre-registration required. 596-3087. 

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

ONGOING 

Poll Workers Needed in Alameda County for June 6 Primary Election. Poll workers must be eligible to register to vote in California, have basic clerical skills. Training classes begin in May. 272-6971. 

Berkeley Youth Alternatives Youth Sports Classes NFL Flag Football for boys and girls ages 9 to 12 begins May 9, 4:30 to 6 p.m. Cost is $10-$15 for 5 weeks, and Pee Wee Basketball for boys and girls ages 6 to 8 begins May 13, 10 a.m. to noon. Cost is $25-$35 for 6 weeks. For more information contact BYA Sports & Fitness Department 845-9066. sports@byaonline.org 

CITY MEETINGS 

Commission on the Status of Women meets Wed., May 3, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Tasha Tervelon, 981-5190. www.ci.berkel 

ey.ca.us/commissions/women 

School Board meets Wed. May 3, at 7:30 p.m., in the City Council Chambers. Queen Graham 644-6147 or Mark Coplan 644-6320. 

Public Works Commission meets Thurs., May 4, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Jeff Egeberg, 981-6406. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/publicworks 

Housing Advisory Commission meets Thurs., May 4, at 7:30 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. Oscar Sung, 981-5400. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/housing 

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

berkeley.ca.us/commissions/landmarks 


Arts Calendar

Friday April 28, 2006

FRIDAY, APRIL 28 

THEATER 

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley “The Devil’s Disciple” by G.B. Shaw, Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave. at Berryman, through May 6. Tickets are $12. 649-5999. www.aeofberkeley.org 

Aurora Theatre “Small Tragedy” Wed.-Sat at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m. at 2081 Addison St., through May 14. Tickets are $38. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

BareStage “The Fantasticks” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. April 23 and 30 at 2 p.m., through April 30, at the basement of Cesar Chavez Student Center, UC Campus. Tickets are $8-$12. 642-3880. barestage.berkeley.edu 

Berkeley Rep “The Glass Menagerie” at 8 p.m. at the Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St. Tickets are $59. Runs through May 31. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

Contra Costa Civic Theater “Animal Crackers” at 8 p.m. Fri and Sat., and Sun. at 2 p.m. at Contra Costa Civic Theater, 951 Pomona Ave., El Cerrito, through May 20. Tickets are $12-$20. 524-9132. www.ccct.org 

Impact Theater “Money & Run Episode 4: Go Straight, No Chaser,” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave. Cost is $10-$15. Runs through May 27. 464-4468. www.impacttheater.com 

Masquers Playhouse “Relative Values” by Noel Coward. Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond, through May 6. Tickets are $15. 232-4031. www.masquers.org 

Subterranean Shakespeare “Richard III” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. at Rose in Live Oak Park, through May. 20. Tickets are $12-$17. 276-3871. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Unfinished Story” Art exhibit on the interplay between traditional and modern Vietnamese culture by Chau Huynh. Reception at 6 p.m. at Worth Ryder Art Gallery, 116 Kroeber Hall, UC Campus. 961-1682. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Strictly Speaking: Michael Feldman’s Whad’Ya Know? at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $22-$42. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Michael Pollan describes “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Opera “Chrysalis” by Clark Suprynowicz and John O’Keefe at 8 p.m. at Julia Morgan Theater, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $15-$40. 925-798-1300. www.berkeleyopera.org 

Berkeley Dance Project 2006 Works by Margaret Jenkins, Reggie Wilson and Ellis Wood Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Campus. Tickets are $8-$14. 642-9925. 

Paufve Dance “The Big Squeeze” at 8 p.m. at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center, 2704 Alcatraz at College. Tickets are $10-$15. Reservations required. 428-9713. www.paufvedance.org 

Tito y Su Son, traditional Cuban dance music at 9 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12. 849-2568.  

Full on Fly Head, Quadraped, The Ghost Next Door at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $8-$10. 848-0886.  

E.W. Wainright’s African Roots of Jazz at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $7. 841-JAZZ.  

Vismaya Lhi, soprano, Cara Bradbury, piano, at 8 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. Cost is $12. 848-1228.  

Zazen with guitarist Joaquin Lievano and bassist Andy West, at 7:30 p.m. at Wheeler Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $5-$15. www.zazentour.com  

Sambadá, Brazilian, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $11-$13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Listen, meditative sound recordings at 8 p.m. at Studio Rasa, 933 Parker St. Cost is $10-$18. 843-2787. www.studiorasa.org 

Ron Thompson, blues, at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Kathy Larisch & Carol McComb at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Bob Dalpe Quartet at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Kenny Dinkin and Lemon Juju at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Rube Waddell, Acoustic Virgin, Vermillion Lies at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Monster Squad, Action, Peligro Social 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. 

Tanya Pluth “Saving Graces” at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $3-$10. 644-2204.  

Brazuca Brown at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Rachelle Ferrell at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $15-$30. 238-9200.  

SATURDAY, APRIL 29 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Celebrating North Richmond History” with art and culture exhibits, speakers, music and community resources, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Shields-Reid Community Center, 1416 Kelsey St., Richmond. Sponsored by Contra Costa Health Services. 925-313-6862. 

Paintings by Keeyla Meadows Reception at 4:30 p.m. at Bucci’s, 6121 Hollis, Emeryville. 

“Four Faces of the Figure” Works by Carol Aust, Seth Wachtel, Laura Van Duren and Biliana Stremska at Addison St. Windows through June 19. 981-7546. 

“Images of Colorful California” Photographs, opening reception at 5 p.m. at the YWCA, 2600 Bancroft Way 232-5131. http://colorfulcalifornia.com 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

6th Berkeley Poetry Festival from noon to 6 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst St. Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented to poet Maggi H. Meyer. Free. 981-5190. 

“Chinese American Voices: From the Gold Rush to the Present” A panel discussion with Judy Yung, Him Mark Lai, Ling-chi Wang and others at 2 p.m. at Heller Lounge, MLK Student Union, UC Campus. Sponsored by Eastwind Books of Berkeley. 548-2350.  

Sebastian Junger looks at race and justice in “A Death in Belmont” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

Celebration of the Life & Work of Octavia Butler at 3 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Dance Project 2006 Works by Margaret Jenkins, Reggie Wilson and Ellis Wood at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Campus. Tickets are $8-$14. 642-9925. 

Paufve Dance “The Big Squeeze” at 8 p.m. at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center, 2704 Alcatraz at College. Tickets are $10-$15. Reservations required. 428-9713.  

“Migrating Woman with Bird” dance performance by Patricia Bulitt at 3 p.m. at Lakeview Public Library, 550 El Embarcadero, Oakland. 238-7344. 

Zakir Hussain, tabla, presents Masters of Percussion at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $24-$46. 642-9988. twww.calperfs.berkeley.edu  

World Dance Salon performances by KaUaTuahine Polynesian Dance Company, Chhandam School of Kathak North Indian Classical Dance and Bharata Natyam of South India at 8 p.m. at the Mahea Uchiyama Center for International Dance, 729 Heinz Ave. Free. 845-2605. 

The 15th Annual Opera Scenes at 8 p.m. at Valley Center of the Performing Arts, Holy Names University, 3500 Mountain Blvd. Oakland. Tickets are $5-$15. 436-1330. 

¡La Gran Noche de la Nueva Canción! Grupo Raiz’s 2006 reunion concert, a benefit for the La Peña Community Chorus at 8 p.m. at La Peña. Tickets are $22-$24. 849-2568.  

Slammin’ at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ.  

Kotoja at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. African dance lesson at 9 p.m. Cost is $11-$13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Cutty Ranks at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $15-$20. 548-1159.  

Ira Marlowe and Megan McLaughlin at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

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

The Room, The Hills, Breakpoint at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $8-$10. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Mark Levine Trio at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$15. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Rhonda Benin & Soulful Strut at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

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

Cast of Thousands, The Plus Ones, Mike Park at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. All ages show. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Fourtet with Chase Michaels at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Go It Alone, Paint It Black, The Loved Ones 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. 

Rachelle Ferrell at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $15-$30. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SUNDAY, APRIL 30 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Full Circle: Mandala” Paintings by Margaret Lindsey and Susan St. Thomas and pine needle and clay vessels by Melissa Woodburn. Reception at 4 p.m. at the Community Art Gallery, Alta Bates Summit Medical Center, 2450 Ashby Ave. Exhibit runs through May 12. 204-1667. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal” Reception and book-signing with author Anthony Arnove at 2 p.m. at Middle East Children’s Alliance, 901 Parker St. 548-0542 . 

“Jewish Women’s Voices in Prose and Poetry” with Chana Bloch and Elizabeth Rosner at 10:30 a.m. at the BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. Cost is $5, reservations required. 848-0237. 

Poetry Flash with Luis Garcia, David Gitin, and Belle Randall at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Opera “Chrysalis” by Clark Suprynowicz and John O’Keefe at 2 p.m. at Julia Morgan Theater, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $15-$40. 925-798-1300. www.berkeleyopera.org 

Berkeley Community Chorus and Orchestra presents the Beethoven Mass in C Major, Faure Pavane for Chorus and other musical highlights at 4:30 p.m. at Saint Joseph The Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. Free admission, donations always welcome. www.bcco.org  

Octangle Wind Quintet presents a benefit concert for Healing Muses, with music by Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart and Jacob at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. 644-6893.  

American Recorder Orchestra of the West “Musical Traditions of Eastern Europe” at 3 p.m. at All Souls Episcopal Church, 2220 Cedar St. richgeis@jps.net 

The Pacific Collegium presents works for double-choir by J. S. Bach and Antonio Vivaldi at 3 p.m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 114 Montecito Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $8-$12.  

“Festival of Spirituals” with Kalil Wilson, tenor and Jeannine Anderson, soprano at 3:30 p.m. at Beth Eden Baptist Church, 1183 Tenth St., at Adeline, Oakland. Tickets are $8-$10. 414-0599. 

College of Alameda Jazz Band performs a free jazz concert from 2 to 6 p.m at the Oakland Conservatory of Music, 1616 Franklin St., Oakland. Families welcome. 748-2213. 748-2312. 

Holy Names University Chorus and Chamber Singers at 4 p.m. in McLean Chapel, 500 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. Cost is $5-$15. 

Berkeley Dance Project 2006 Works by Margaret Jenkins, Reggie Wilson and Ellis Wood at 2 p.m. at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Campus. Tickets are $8-$14. 642-9925. 

Afro-Cuban Folkoric Dance Benefit for the Diaz Dance Foundation at 6 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Paufve Dance “The Big Squeeze” at 8 p.m. at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center, 2704 Alcatraz at College. Tickets are $10-$15. Reservations required. 428-9713.  

Ballet Folklorica “Quetzalli” de Veracruz at 3 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $22-$40. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Charlie King and Karen Brandow at 3 p.m. at Redwood Gardens, 2951 Derby St. Donation $10-$20. 

Save Our Steinway Benefit Concert, to restore the 1909 Steinway at Berkeley Fellowship at 2:30 p.m. at 1924 Cedar at Bonita. Donation $5. 841-4824. 

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

Brazilian Soul at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ.  

Maria Marquez Quartet at 4:30 at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$15. 845-5373.  

Flamenco Open Stage with Yaelisa & Her Students at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Adrian West at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Saros, Ocean, Embers, The Makai at 5 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

Rachelle Ferrell at 2 and 8 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $15-$30. 238-9200.  

MONDAY, MAY 1 

FILM 

Queer to Eternity Film Festival May 1-3 and 5 at 7 p.m. and May 6 at 2 p.m. at Pacific School of Religion, 1798 Scenic Ave. 849-8206. www.clgs.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Connection” Works by artists from NIAD, Bonita House’s Creative Living Center, and Berkeley Mental Health opens at The National Institute of Art and Disabilities (NIAD), 551 23rd St., and runs through June 9. www.niadart.org 

“Dreamsites” Color photographs by Len Blau at the French Hotel Cafe, 1538 Shattuck Ave. 548-9930. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Eric Schlosser discusses the fast-food industry in “Chew on This” at 7 p.m. at King Middle School Auditorium, 1781 Rose St. Benefit for The School Lunch Initiative. 845-7852.  

Actors Reading Writers “Straight from the Artist’s Mouth” excerpts from the biographies of Marc Chagall, Marie Dressler, Isadora Duncan and Groucho Marx at 7:30 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. between Telegraph and Ellsworth.  

Tony Hendra introduces his new novel “The Messiah of Morris Avenue” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

Keith Abbott and George Mattingly read at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Aurora Theatre “Monkey Sun” a reading of the play by Dominic Orlando at 7:30 p.m. at 2081 Addison St. Free. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

The Last Word Poetry Series with Horehound Stillpoint and M.K. Chavez at 7 p.m. at Pegasus Bookstore, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

Poetry Express with Alice Templeton at 7 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. berkeleypoetryexpress@yahoo.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

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

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

TUESDAY, MAY 2 

CHILDREN 

“The Riddle of Ridley Acres” by First Stage Children’s Theater at 7:30 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $5 at the door. www.juliamorgan.org 

Japanese Carp Day Celebration from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Habitot Children’s Museum, 2065 Kittredge St. Children can make carp kites and listen to Japanese stories. Free. 647-1111. www.habitot.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Drawings and Prints” by Georgianna Greenwood at North Berkeley Frame and Gallery, 1744 Shattuck Ave. 595-8137. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Rose Castillo Guibault reads from her memoir, “Farmworker’s Daughter: Growing Up Mexican in America” at 6 :30 p.m. at the César Chávez Branch of the Oakland Public Library, 3301 East 12th St. 535-5620. 

Freight and Salvage Open Mic at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $4.50-$5.50. 548-1761.  

Karen Finley reads from her new comic novel “George & Martha” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Brass Menagerie at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Balkan dance lesson at 7:30 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Ellen Hoffman and Singers’ Open Mic at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ.  

Barbara Linn at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

WEDNESDAY, MAY 3 

EXHIBITIONS 

“The Flaming Sword of Truth” UCB Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition opens at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Kamran Nazeer discusses, “Send in the Idiots: Stories from the Other Side of Autism” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com  

Molly O’Neill describes “Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Baseball” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

George Ryder and The Joy of Music “The Show to Remember” at 1:15 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst. 981-5190. 

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

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

Wild Catahoulas at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054.  

Ben Adams Trio at 8:30 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $5. 451-8100. www.uptownnightclub.com 

3 Strikes at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $8-$10. 848-0886.  

Universal at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Salsa lessons at 8 p.m. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.


Aurora Theatre Presents a ‘Small Tragedy’

By Ken Bullock Special to the Planet
Friday April 28, 2006

“I still couldn’t say whose tragedy this was ... is ... or if it even is a tragedy ... does it belong to the people suffering, or those watching them suffer?” 

So Jen (Carrie Paff) muses in a single shaft of light in the darkness of the Aurora Theatre, prefacing—or looking back on?—the theatrical events of auditioning for, rehearsing and performing Oedipus Rex in Cambridge, Mass., and the extratheatrical dialogues and dramas that swirl around the production, in Craig Lucas’ Small Tragedy. 

The cast of characters assembled as the cast of characters for Oedipus get into it almost immediately and every which way with each other, engaging with their own subtexts as much as their classic text. 

Nate’s (Mark Anderson Phillips) the kind of director who answers a question with a question, though he seems to eschew the psychological, lashing out at young, slangy Fanny (Rebecca Schweitzer), playing a Theban Elder chorine, when she says she had a similar problem with AA as she does with Sophocles, not believing in god or a higher power. 

Many of the questions Nate parries with yet another come from his acerbic wife Paola (Amy Resnick), Fanny’s fellow Elder. The couple’s marital woes add to the jerky progress of rehearsal, as do fay Christmas’ (Greg Ayers) jagged, dyslexic line readings as androgynous prophet Teiresias (rehearsing with a blindfold on “just to see what it’s like”) and a drama queen messenger of doom. 

Jen, Fanny’s uneasy roommate, is returning to the stage after putting her now-ex-husband through medical school, has scored the role of Jocasta, and is reduced to tears by Nate, not only directing, but playing Creon, her brother. 

In the title role is the mysterious Bosnian, Hakiya (Matteo Troncone), attractive and/or repulsive to the rest of the cast, deadpan (either brooding or baiting, it’s unclear which) offstage, when asked about his past in the troubles back home, and hotter than a pistol onstage as the proud tragic hero.  

Kent Nicholson directs his excellent ensemble well, as they use every inch of the stage and the hall’s entrances, rehearsing or socializing at the bar, with simultaneous and overlapping dialogue that’s been compared to a Welles or an Altman film soundtrack, but at times is even denser and loopier. 

It’s Lucas’ wit that gives the audience the opportunity to pick out little ambiguities and ironies across the board, which spans chit-chat, trash talk, unsolicited advice, put-downs, line readings, monologues, and stories. Lucas seems to be parodying Greek stichomythia, the dialogue of classical Tragedy that revealed the truth through the irony of interstices, by putting American smalltalk into a dramatic mixmaster. 

The play is finally—and impressively—staged in snippets for us; the lines and fragments of scenes now only slightly oblique commentary on the ambiguous (or just sloppy) relationships we’ve seen develop in rehearsal. 

“What would it take for your own story to change, to be tragic?” a driven Nate has asked his actors and a good deal starts to change, or at least come apart with an at first exhuberant cast party playing a party game, Yes or No. 

Just as there was a brief prologue, there’s a rather lengthy epilogue, set in a NYC apartment. Just as the switch to onstage action from rehearsal was finely contrasted by both stage direction and the lights (Christopher Studley) and costumery (Cassandra Carpenter), so the move to real life for thespians in the Big Apple is adroitly represented by a change in costumes and a filling out of the previously stark set of rehearsal hall, bar and stage with all the comforts of urbanness (Melpomene Katakalos’ set). 

But there’s a misstep here that very deliberately throws all the rest of the play not so much into question, as into triviality. 

Gone are the witty parodies of small talk, the lower-case ironies and ambiguities emerging from chatter. After constantly turning tables, shoes dropping with regular and comic effect as though from a footloose centipede, the playwright solemnly turns a final coffeetable on the audience, lets the biggest workboot of all fall, and reveals to us what it all means, kinda. 

“Many hands committed the murder ... I will bring light to this darkness,” says Creon/Nate the Director, but it’s really the playwright, trading many little ironies for the big, non-tragic, academic brand, which insinuates the audience’s morose approval. 

“This shame—it is my own!” says Oedipus at the awful moment of self-knowledge. But in globally castigating the false naivete of the masses of individual Americans, Lucas takes the nontragic fall into melodrama, becoming a haplessly conflicted faux-naif himself.  

Euripides burlesqued deus-ex-machina endings to reach a metatragic irony of audience complicity, as more modern artists turn parodies of spectacle back on themselves to realize a kind of epiphany that goes beyond the pathetic, overturning sentimentalism. It’s really too bad; if he’d just said, in effect, “here’s what a half-baked rehearsal process, where everybody’s trying to read their own thoughts into each other’s life, looks like,” Lucas would’ve had one of the best social comedies onstage in years. 

Instead, he tries for the big post-9/11 rabbit-punch of a statement and becomes another writer of soap masquerading as moral commentator. 

The transactional analyst-style director of this Oedipus-within-a-play had the best advice for his creator’s prophetic pose when he tells his clueless Theban seer, “You are by far the cutest Teiresias in theater history. I’d concentrate on that.” 

 

 

Small Tragedy 

Shows at 8 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday and at 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday through May 14. $28-$45. Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison St. For more information, call 843-4822 or see www.auroratheatre.org. 

 

Photograph by David Allen 

Director Nate (Mark Anderson Phillips) gives Chris (Greg Ayers) advice as Jen (Carrie Paff), Fanny (Rebecca Schweitzer) and Paola (Amy Resnick) look on.›


Moving Pictures: The Not-So-Discreet Charms of the Bourgeoisie

By Justin DeFreitas
Friday April 28, 2006

The name Luis Buñuel is familiar to even those with only a passing interest in movies, largely due to the success of his satiric films of the 1960s and ’70s. But when the great director made his seamless transition from experimental Surrealist filmmaking to commercial narrative work, he did so with the help of a slightly lesser-known talent: screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere. 

Carriere was instrumental in helping Buñuel to shape his cynical satires, working closely with the director in the writing of screenplays both original and adapted. The result was a lasting partnership, one that generated six films and even extended to the writing of Buñuel’s autobiography, My Last Sigh, published just before his death in 1983. 

The San Francisco International Film Festival presented Carriere with its Kanbar Award for screenwriting this year for a distinguished career in which he worked with some of the world’s greatest directors, including Buñuel, Jean-Luc Godard and Louis Malle.  

Pacific Film Archive will show Be lle du jour (1967), a Carriere-Buñuel collaboration, as part of a series of movies from the International Film Festival at 5 p.m. Sunday, April 30, with Carriere making an in-person appearance. PFA will then follow up with four more Carriere-Buñuel collab orations on May 5 and 6, beginning with Diary of a Chambermaid (1964). Other films in the series include The Milky Way (1968), Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), and Phantom of Liberty (1974). 

Diary of a Chambermaid was the first film in which Car riere and Buñuel worked together, adapting the novel by Octave Mirbeau. The story had been brought to the screen once before, by Jean Renoir in 1946, but Buñuel refused to see it for fear that it might color his perceptions of his own work. Carriere and B uñuel took certain liberties with the novel, shifting the time period to the 1930s and altering several plot points. 

The result would serve as a sort of template for future Carriere-Buñuel collaborations: The film examines and satirizes the dark underbel ly of bourgeoisie society and features a wide-ranging assortment of fetishes, vices, hypocrisies and subterfuge. As with their later fims, Buñuel and Carriere do not judge these characters. They are presented from a certain distance; we watch them, we gain a certain understanding of them, but we are not made to either identify with them or be repulsed by them. Buñuel and Carriere merely present them as they are and allow the audience to come to their own conclusions.  

Jeanne Moreau plays the role of the chambermaid as an inscrutable blank slate. The other characters, as well as the audience, are left to project onto her their own interpretations of her motives and emotions. When she first comes to work at the Monteil estate, she is somewhat defiant towar d these decadent aristocrats, flouting her mistress’ rules and looking upon the family with condescension. Yet gradually her behavior starts to change, and it is difficult to understand why. When she eagerly goes to bed with a suspected child-murderer, we wonder whether her lust for him is genuine or just a device by which she hopes to frame him. Or perhaps it is both; perhaps she is seeking justice while conveniently satisfying her own particular fetish. 

Only at the end does it become clear that somehow, for reasons unexplained, the chambermaid has decided to become one of them; that, whether due to opportunism or some darker motivation, she has managed to ensconce herself in a throne-like bed in her own castle-like mansion, safely and blithely indiffer ent to the rising forces of fascism in which her new husband plays a significant role. In the end she is as bored, stagnant and self-indulgent as the family she once mocked.  

The Carriere-Buñuel themes take a darker and more personal tone with Belle du j our, starring Catherine Deneuve as the frigid wife of a young surgeon. They are happy together, but they keep separate beds even a year after their marriage. Gradually we learn that the young bride, Severine, is anything but frigid and in fact has an acti ve fantasy life. It’s just that conventional lovemaking within a marriage is not sufficient to arouse her libido.  

And this is where the familiar themes come in.  

Belle du jour is about fetishes, appearances, fantasy and restraint. Severine is overwhelmed by fantasies of being taken by force, of being humiliated, abused and denigrated in strange rituals. Flashbacks suggest that these desires stem from incidents in her childhood, but the fetishes themselves are wisely never explained, for nothing robs a fetish of its allure than an attempt to explain it. 

Severine’s fetishes, which are often subtly infused into the fantasy sequences, seem to bring her to a frenzy like a Pavlovian dog: the ringing of bells, the mewing of cats. In her dreams she is objectified and treated cruelly to a soundtrack of primal sounds. 

Her desires lead her to take a job as a prostitute, arriving at the whorehouse each day dressed in black, as though in mourning for the life she is leaving behind, and returning home each day by 5 to her unsuspecting husband.  

One scene involves a man entering the whorehouse with a little black box. We do not see what is in it, but it is enough to cause one prostitute to refuse to do his bidding. Severine accepts, however, enticed by whatever fe tish he carries in the box. And his excited ringing of a tiny bell only seals the deal, coaxing an excited smile from her. 

Deneuve is often discussed as simply a great beauty, but she is far more than that. Her acting in Belle du jour is subtle and effec tive. She is able to consistently demonstrate the duality of Severine’s existence: the trepidation, shame and fear combined with passion and desire, as well as the bliss of masochistic fantasies fulfilled.  

The film’s conclusion is ambiguous and probably has a number of valid interpretations. At first glance the final 20 minutes seem like a 1930s American film under the Production Code, with a wild woman bringing ruin to herself and to those she loves because of her lurid behavior. But another interpreta tion takes the film in quite another direction. Severine has her fetish: to be defiled, abused and humiliated. Hussan, a friend of Severine’s husband, has his fetish: to defile his friend’s seemingly virtuous young bride. The gangster Severine becomes ent angled with has his fetish: to live the life and die the death of an outlaw, disrupting the social order and going out in a hail of gunfire. And the husband can be said to have a fetish as well: a virtuous wife by day, a sexual animal by night.  

The endi ng, with Hussan revealing Severine’s secret to her paralyzed and unresponsive husband, provides a bit of satisfaction for everyone, for Hussan gets the chance to expose Severine’s tawdry dark side, thereby defiling her in the eyes of her husband; the gang ster gets his tragic, romantic death in the streets; and Severine ends up sitting quietly under the mysterious gaze of her husband, exposed and vulnerable, just as in her fantasies—a “slut,” a “whore,” waiting for the “firm hand” to administer her punishm ent. And the husband now has his virtuous and apologetic wife, but an all-new and improved version, for this one just might share his bed.  

A final dream sequence concludes the film, with the husband forgiving his wife for her actions. Is this a vision o f the future, or is it a new kind of fantasy for Severine, one in which her husband finally grants her the forgiveness and understanding her guilty conscience craves? Or perhaps it’s simply a new twist on the old fantasies, with Buñuel and Carriere taking one last swipe at the bourgeoisie as they infuse the dream once again with the ringing of bells and the meowing of cats—everything a good society girl needs to keep her happy. 

 

 

The Films of Jean-Claude Carriere and Luis Buñuel 

 

Belle du jour (1967) 

5 p.m. Sunday, April 30 

 

Diary of a Chambermaid (1964) 

7 p.m. Friday, May 5 

 

The Milky Way (1968) 

9 p.m. Friday, May 5 

 

Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) 

6:30 p.m. Saturday, May 6 

 

Phantom of Liberty (1974) 

8:30 p.m. Saturday, May 6 

 

Pacific Film Archi ve 

2626 Bancroft Way 

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu9 

 

 

Photograph: Directors Luis Buñuel directs the coachman on the proper technique for ravishing Catherine Deneuve in Belle du jour.›


The International Reach of the Arts and Crafts Movement

By Marta Yamamoto Special to the Planet
Friday April 28, 2006

The Arts and Crafts Movement is no secret in Bay Area architecture and furnishings. The Berkeley hills are dotted with homes designed by Bernard Maybeck, Julia Morgan and others while the California bungalow dots neighborhoods from north to south. 

Imagine dwelling within one of these simple yet aesthetically beautiful homes: upswept gable peak with window flanked by ventilation louvers, pergola-style entry porch of massive timbers set in river rock, all redwood interiors, beamed ceiling hung with hammered copper light fixtures, tile-faced fireplace, Stickley chairs, Weller Coppertone vase, wallpaper friezes and tailored canvas Roman shades. Sound appealing? Much more is on hand across the bay. 

At the de Young Museum is “International Arts and Crafts: William Morris to Frank Lloyd Wright,” organized by England’s Victoria and Albert Museum, where the movement began. 

If you think you already know a lot, think again. The unique feature of the 300 multi-media pieces in this exhibit is their international scope. While admiring the exquisitely preserved museum-quality works I came to understand the diffusion of this movement, from England to America, continental Europe and as distant as Japan. Far beyond architecture and design, the social implications of Arts and Crafts remain strong today. Revolutionary changes were made to both aesthetics and lifestyle with new mind-sets toward ornamentation, simplicity and craftsmanship. 

The mere collection of a vast array of artifacts is a Herculean task. Arranging such artifacts into pleasing combinations requires another set of skills. Teaching the viewer to observe artifacts within their historical context sets the icing on a fantastic cake. International Arts and Crafts overachieves in all respects. 

I left with a true sense of the artisans involved and the philosophies behind their work. Not only architects and designers lead this movement. Craftsmen working in textiles, books, stained glass, ceramics, metalwork, jewelry, photography, furniture and fine arts all contributed to the total picture. 

In 1887, reaction against Victorian mass-production and overt ornamentation resulted in England’s first Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, whose goal was to raise the status of decorative arts. George Watson’s gracefully curved iron and copper candlesticks and William Benson’s simple, yet striking, pansy-shaped copper and brass fire screen exemplify this goal. 

Furniture with clean lines, subtly enhanced with marquetry in contrasting hues, allows the quality of the woods to speak for themselves. Simplicity carried over to textiles as well. Charles Voysey’s bedcover in block print silk with intertwined orange and blue tulip-like blooms the perfect compliment to a chestnut dresser adorned with hooks. 

William Morris designed to protest “soulless goods” amid the decline of craftsmen and society; John Ruskin provided the words. Their ideas reached the populace through design firms and print. The proof sheet from a 1920s edition of Don Quixote displays distinctive lettering and illustration. 

Many believed that the proper place for Arts and Crafts was in the country, where man was closest to nature. This nostalgia for local traditions is evident in Stanhope Forbes almost photographic painting, “A Fish on a Cornish Coast,” and George Sumner’s “Four Seasons,” panels that clearly display reverence for a changing landscape. These ideals made their way into English gardens where harmony and a looser design by color revolutionized horticultural schemes. 

The movement and exhibit next move to Europe where the need for national identity within an industrialized society was just as strong. In Germany, artisans from the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony created furniture using exotic wood inlays like the handsome cabinet by Joseph Olbrich. In Vienna, Joseph Hoffman used classic fluted silver fitted with ebony and braid to create a Tea and Coffee Service fit for a Queen. Historic Viking traditions are evident in Scandinavian Arts and Crafts work, in both a drinking vessel and an armchair designed by Lars Kinsaruik in painted wood. 

In America, the Movement turned to the native landscape, climate and a romanticized Native American heritage for inspiration. I saw vases painted with the image of a Navaho chief and designs taken from Indian basketry. 

Unique to this exhibit are four domestic settings, each illustrating the importance of the home. One room, appearing to have been pulled from a California bungalow, features the work of Gustav Stickley, who labeled the living room the heart of a home, the perfect sanctuary for the workingman. My long contemplation lovingly took in the sturdy hexagonal table fronting a fireplace fitted with simple wood mantle and green tiles. I could easily picture the family at the end of the day, lit from above by ceiling lanterns of copper with hammered glass. A handsome, uncluttered room in greens and browns reflecting nature’s colors. 

Instant name recognition came with the Prairie School of Frank Lloyd Wright, who viewed both the inside and outside of a home as a complete work of art. He opened interior spaces, eliminated excess ornamentation and brought in nature with wood and rocks. The exhibit’s dining room attests to Wright’s beliefs. Simple, yet imposing dining table and high backed chairs require a great space. Motifs from native plants appear in his Tree of Life window and carpet. 

Bernard Maybeck and the Greene brothers provide name recognition to those familiar with Berkeley architecture. I admired rough-hewn redwood gates, appearing Gothic, from Maybeck’s masterwork, the First Church of Christ Scientist. Designers and craftsmen, Charles and Henry Greene created specific furniture, room by room. Exotic koa wood, along with mahogany, ebony and oak blend into a handsome Library Table while rich amber glass panels used in four-meter wide Entry Doors subtly shift patterns of light. 

My biggest surprise came in the final exhibit rooms displaying the movement’s influence in Japan. Here too, Westernization and industrialization alarmed artisans concerned with retaining Japanese national identity. Again, craftsmen returned to traditions and the simple beauty of folk crafts as their muses. A utilitarian woven Back Protector worn by a farmer carrying heavy loads is anything but. Intricate straw work in patterns of black and white elevate this to the category of art. The powerful stoneware bowls of Bernard Leach, who studied in Japan, and Hamada Shoji, resonate with power and traditional line designs. Leach’s Tree of Life bowl represents his ties to the nature themes of Wright’s Prairie School.  

Reaching the end of this masterful exhibit, I was ready to give it a second round. I’ve always loved this style and felt affirmed to realize that the philosophy mirrored my own. Belief in a simpler way of life, allowing the beauty of natural materials to shine, nature’s inclusion in everyday life, the value of tradition and fine craftsmanship—all ideals close to my own. In truth, I’m just an Arts and Crafts groupie. Spend time in this exhibit and you may be one too.  

 

De Young Museum 

Arts and Crafts exhibit runs through June 18. Adults $15; seniors, $12; youths 13-17 years old, $11. Audio and docent tours available. Open 9:30 a.m.–5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday.  

Golden Gate Park, 50 Higawara Tea Garden Drive. (415) 863-3330. www.deyoungmuseum.org. 

 

Photograph by Christine Smith 

A re-creation of rooms from the Mikuniso, a Pavilion built for a Tokyo exhibition in 1928.


She’s Got Your Goat at Caribbean Cove

By B.J. Calurus Special to the Planet
Friday April 28, 2006

You don’t forget your first curried goat. It was years ago, and I was on the Orange Blossom Trail, Orlando’s answer to San Pablo Avenue, looking for a cheap and non-franchised lunch. I wound up at a hole-in-the-wall run by Trinidadians that served goat and roti, a flatbread with South Asian roots. Really good goat. I’ve been looking for its equal ever since. 

Happily, I believe I’ve found it at the Caribbean Cove, a small Jamaican eatery upstairs in the Village, at Telegraph and Blake. It’s run by Judith O’Loughlin, who comes from the small island of Nevis (also the birthplace of Alexander Hamilton). O’Loughlin’s curried goat is rich and tender, hot but not painfully so. She uses an imported Jamaican curry powder, less incendiary than South Asian blends.  

The Cove has a short menu, but it touches most of the bases of Jamaican cuisine—a palimpsest of cultural influences. The curries (chicken is also available) came in with South Asian contract laborers in the 19th century. Another entrée, “es-cove-ich” fish, either dates back to the earlier Spanish occupation of Jamaica or was borrowed from neighboring Spanish Caribbean islands. Escovitch evolved from the Spanish (originally Catalan) escabeche—a quick-pickling technique. O’Loughlin’s version involves a snapper filet, fried and served with onions and bell peppers in a vinaigrette. 

She also does jerk chicken, the one Jamaican dish Americans are familiar with, and it’s a nice rendition—juicy breast meat redolent with the classic allspice-thyme-hot chili mixture. The traditional chili would be Scotch Bonnet, the Jamaican form of the deadly Habanero (up to 300,000 Scoville Heat Units). Like the curried goat, O’Loughlin’s jerk chicken doesn’t blast you out of your chair, but it does leave your lips tingling. 

“Jerk” may derive from the Peruvian-Spanish charqui, also the origin of “jerky.” An alternate etymology explains it in terms of the meat being jerked about and poked with a stick as it cooks. Traditional jerking requires a fire of pimento wood, from the tree that bears the allspice berries (Pimenta dioica). 

I’ve seen the method ascribed to the Arawak Indians, who got there first; to the Maroons, who escaped from plantation slavery and holed up in the rugged Cockpit Country; to European pirates. Whatever its origin, it’s good stuff. (I was surprised not to find jerk chicken, or jerk anything, in Caroline Sullivan’s 1893 Classic Jamaican Cooking; the jerk tradition must have existed under the culinary radar of the cookbook compilers). 

But jerk chicken is not considered the Jamaican national dish. That honor goes to O’Loughlin’s most unusual offering, ackee and salt fish, available only on Saturday nights. Salt cod—Sullivan called it “the despised salt fish”—has been popular in the Caribbean since colonial times. I read somewhere that its entrenchment in island cuisine has to do with the danger of eating your fish fresh. 

West Indian reef fish like snappers, groupers, and triggerfish may be a source of ciguatera, a type of food poisoning resulting from toxins in microscopic dinoflagellates. Salt fish, which some of us find tasty in its own right, would have been a lot safer. 

As for the ackee, there’s a long story: it’s the fruit of a tree whose botanical name is Blighia sapida, after Captain Bligh of HMS Bounty infamy—“a foul-mouthed bully,” according to Patrick O’Brian. Bligh introduced the plant from its native West Africa to Jamaica, where it was adopted with much more enthusiasm than his breadfruit. The tree is in the family Sapindaceae, related to lychee, longan, and rambutan. 

Ackee fruit has a red rind, white flesh, and shiny black seeds, and everything except the flesh is poisonous—the literary critic Edmund Wilson apparently suffered a bout of ackee poisoning in Jamaica in the 1960s. The fruit, which O’Loughlin’s menu describes as avocado-like in texture, is also called “vegetable brains.” 

So put the fish and ackee together with onions and tomatoes, and you get something that I liked a lot more than Wilson did (“highly esteemed by the natives but less by other people,” he groused). The texture of the ackee is reminiscent of scrambled eggs; it pretty much absorbs the flavor of the fish. I suspect this dish alone draws a lot of homesick Jamaicans to the Caribbean Cove. 

Plate meals come with a green salad. The lunch’s, early in the season, was iceberg lettuce with pale tomatoes, nothing special, but the dinner salad a couple of weeks later was much improved, though still simple: romaine and tasty cherry tomatoes, a spark of grated carrot. Both had dousings of a tasty vinaigrette.  

There are other entrees we haven’t sampled yet, like stewed oxtail and a couple of vegetarian options. All are in the $6 to $8 range on the lunch menu, higher at dinner. They come in generous portions with sides of rice and peas (our “peas” were actually kidney beans, cooked with the rice in coconut milk) and fried plantains. 

The rice absorbs the sauces very nicely. We also didn’t get to the classic Jamaican patties, available as an appetizer stuffed with beef, chicken, or vegetables, or the salt fish fritters. 

O’Loughlin also offers a splendid housemade ginger beer and handcrafted sorrel, the hibiscus-based drink that’s called jamaica in Spanish-speaking territories. Red Stripe beer—“Hooray Beer!” says the ad card on your table—also goes well with the spicy stuff. You can try the Jamaican grapefruit soda called Ting, or the two-item wine list: house red, house white. 

The Caribbean Cove has a cheerful yellow-with-blue-trim interior, with island beachscapes on the wall. There’s free wi-fi and a UC student discount. Business was slow at lunchtime on a rainy Friday, but when we came back on Saturday night for the ackee and salt fish, there was more activity—a lot of takeout orders—and a reggae D.J. was setting up; I suspect the Cove gets livelier as the evening goes on.  

 

Photograph by Stephan Babuljak 

Kelly Hyde serves up a meal for Gina Johnson at the Caribbean Cove on Wednesday. 

ª


About the House: Neatness Saves Time, Even on a Job Site

By Matt Cantor
Friday April 28, 2006

I have slovenly tendencies. I know this about myself. I’m not proud of it, but let’s face facts: I like neatness, but it is, on most days, beyond my grasp. I also like to complain about those around me who do not keep things neat. Of course I never complain about my wife or kids and their messes, and if you think you’ve ever heard me shouting from next door, it must have been someone else or perhaps it was the game on TV. 

So when I say that neatness counts, you will take it as a “do as I say, not as I do” moment. If we can agree on the terms then I can probably offer a healthy dose of advice on the subject without going straight to hell. 

Neatness in construction is actually something I care a lot about and there are several reasons for my concern. Let’s start with speed. I have a friend who I’ve known for many years. His name is David and he worked with me on my house almost 20 years ago when we remodeled our place. 

David never seemed to be moving very fast. He would do things very methodically and carefully. He never came to a complete stop, although sometimes it appeared so. He would just move steadily through the entire day and at the end of that day there would be this enormous amount of work that he had done. 

Mostly, it just looked like a series of slow motion movements but the thing is that he never wasted any excessive movement and he was never tripping over himself. He also kept his work area very neat and well organized. 

He would stop and sweep up his area periodically so that he could see what he was doing. He would stack things not being used, off to one side. He would take a moment to close the tool box before he began to run the saw so that it wouldn’t become filled with sawdust and thus avoided another cleanup job that would later become necessary. That was Dave’s method. 

Steve used to work for me and he would often appear to be moving too fast for the eye to see, like some sort of magic act. But Steve was far less efficient than Dave. 

I recall an afternoon when Steve spent no less than a half hour looking for his hammer. I don’t think he found his hammer during the period but eventually took someone else’s and only found his later. He had a different style. 

When people take the time to set up their work area, to lay out the tools and to continually clean and re-organize, the work moves smoothly and comfortably. I have often said to myself in the course of a job that all I’m really doing is cleaning up and at the end of it, there’s a shelving unit or a set of kitchen cabinets. 

The installation is just a series of cleaning operations with a very small number of construction operations in between. In other words, if the focus remains on organization and continual cleaning of the area, the installation of a lamp housing or the building of a formwork becomes very much simplified and incidentally, much quicker. 

Looking for things takes a lot of time. So does physically negotiating a space that has become an obstacle course. Sawdust is slippery and piles of objects can make moving back and forth through the workspace a burdensome task for the already overloaded brain. 

We brilliant humans tend to think that we can do forty-seven things at once. While this may be true, none of us are able to do so at the efficiency level that we can when we attempt a much smaller number. 

Aside from speed, there is the issue of safety. I know for certain that if anyone ever did a quantitative scientific study of this phenomenon, that they would find that the worker in the messy jobsite incurs 73 percent more cuts and scrapes than his or her counterpart in the nice neat site. 

I’ve seen it and I’ve been there. It is much easier to trip over cords, piles of sawdust and sawn off blocks than it is to trip when walking across a freshly swept floor. It is also very hard to see where you are or what’s missing when there are 178 things in front of you. I find it much easier to note a problem with the work in a clean space than in a disorganized one where there’s so much visual “noise” that I can’t pick out the things that I need to be looking at. 

Also, when you stop and sweep the floor, you find the hammer (“Hey Steve, we found your hammer!”). You find the drill bit you dropped. You find a screw on the nice wooden floor before you grind it in. You can also find the nails, the wood and the other things that you need. There’s also something about breathing and slowing down and re-framing the project that occurs when you’re cleaning up. 

Lastly, if you’re working for Mrs. Jones, she might like it. I know for a fact that Mrs. Jones loves it when you clean up after yourself. She might not mind the coiled up cords, the table-saw or the compressor if the floor is nicely swept and the wood had been stacked in the corner. Also, Mrs. Jones is a little blind in her left eye and she might not trip and tear a ligament in her one good knee if the floor is nicely cleared when she drops by with brownies and decaf in the middle of the afternoon (She is so nice).  

Another tip I’d like to offer involves protecting surfaces (and then I’ll give it a rest). Before starting a job, my friend Tim the tiler starts by covering everything in the greater Bay Area with heavy paper. Painter’s tape is used to tape things together so that when it’s time to remove the paper, it won’t pull the paint off. 

This is the blue paper masking tape so often seen left on the windows of recent paint jobs. Tim neatly cuts this stuff around corners and toilets and then can proceed to make a mess and when the job is done, he just tears the tape away, rolls the stuff up and stuffs it in the garbage. Voila, it’s a thing of beauty. 

Many builders contain their work areas with plastic sheeting and can even put zippers into these barriers in the middle of rooms to contain dust. It take a few minutes and adds on some dollars but when this is done your DVD player isn’t filled with sheetrock dust. 

Neatness seems like it takes time and, well, yes it does, but it also saves time, prevents accidents and shows consideration for those with whom we work. So next time you’re working on the job for yourself or for Mrs. Jones, try to be 4 percent neater and see how if feels. 

 

 

Got a question about home repairs and inspections? Send them to Matt Cantor, in care of East Bay Real Estate, at realestate@berkeleydailyplanet.com..


Garden Variety: Recycling For Garden Decor at Omega Too

By Ron Sullivan
Friday April 28, 2006

So I dropped by Omega Too on San Pablo Avenue to see what Jana had for gardens. The answer was: Not quite so much as she used to, but what’s there is nifty. Of course; her sensibility is one I’ve always liked.  

I met Jana Olsen years ago, when I took her garden-construction class at Merritt. She’s a good teacher, relaxed but focused—an apt combination when you’re learning to enjoy the mighty power of the Sawzall without losing any body parts or mutilating any classmates. I liked that. I wonder how many of the problems I have right now could be solved by buying a Sawzall.  

Probably not enough to justify the purchase. Just wait till I get into politics. Might’ve been handy to have one outside the City Council meeting the other night when I was being gut-thwacked by a bunch of eager young jocks whose handlers had for some reason thought it a good idea for everybody to bring his big clunky gym duffel to the crowded lobby. 

Somebody almost went home with a bag of used dinner for a souvenir. Manners, kids, manners! Some of us old coots are not only grouchy; we’re unpredictably leaky when prodded. And we vote.  

Might tools aside, I doubtless got much of my own garden sensibility from Jana, because her approach appeals to me. I remember seeing a photo of a garden she’s collaborated on, with a retaining wall that was a sort of geological cartoon, including one layer of winebottles no doubt from the early Vinaceous Age. 

She’s smart and funny and shows it in her own garden, which I got a long look at before the Park Day School Tour a couple of years ago. That work actually has a recognizable and relevant narrative structure, without being all pedantic. Great fun.  

So what you can buy from her for your own garden is, on one hand, mostly salvage or faux-salvage items. The little space behind the store had a couple of fountains and birdbaths whose aesthetics run to the Gothic and older—one’s labeled “Green Man Ruin” and features faces of that archetype. 

There’s a ceramic tortoise I covet myself, and assorted things to hang on walls and/or get plumbed for fountains, and several wreaths and crossed festooned with painted terra-cotta flowers that made me think of old Italian cemeteries back East.  

Actual salvage items I saw included a length of distressed, painted iron fencing or gate material, maybe head-tall, and a pair of the wrought-iron brackets that supported those old-fashioned school desks—the seats attached to the table part behind, so if you wiggled enough you could screw up your annoying neighbor’s handwriting. Yes, I am an old coot.  

Garden and porch lights, door or gate hardware, doormats, doorknockers including a trowel and a woodpecker, and stained glass and craft tiles for use in sheltered places are mostly inside the store. 

It’s an interesting succession, from old house-parts to things made to mimic old house-parts to handmade items that carry the same art traditions forward, always more interestingly than mass-produced imitations. Makes you think that apprenticeship has more than private effects.  

 

Omega Too 

2204 San Pablo Ave., Berkeley 

843-3636 

Monday-Saturday 10 a.m–6 p.m. 

Sunday noon–5 p.m.  

http://www.omegatoo.com/ 

 

 

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in East Bay Home & Real Estate. Her column on East Bay trees appears every other Tuesday in the Berkeley Daily Planet.


Berkeley This Week

Friday April 28, 2006

FRIDAY, APRIL 28 

Reduced City Services Today Call ahead to ensure programs or services you desire will be available. 981-CITY. www.cityofberkeley.info 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with David Bain, space scientist on “Mars” 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.  

How Did You Become an Activist? with Paul Larudee, co-founder International Solidarity Movement and Barbara Bechnel, journalist, at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Unitarian Universalist Hall, 1924 Cedar at Bonita. Donation $10. 528-5403. 

Historical & Current Times Book Group meets on Thursdays from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1249 Marin Ave. 548-4517. 

Early Childhood Safety: Earthquake Safety at 3 p.m. at Habitot, 2065 Kittredge St. Cost is $5-$6. 647-1111. 

Berkeley Chess School classes for students in grades 1-8 from 5:30 to 7 p.m. A drop-in, rated scholastic tournament follows from 7 to 8 p.m. at 1581 LeRoy Ave., Room 17. 843-0150. 

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. 

SATURDAY, APRIL 29 

Open the Farm Join us to greet the animals in the morning, help feed them, collect eggs and do a few chores. Dress to get dirty. From 9 to 10:30 a.m. at the Little Farm in Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

3rd Annual Green Home EXPO from noon to 5 p.m. at Civic Center Park, next to Farmer’s Market. Trade in your old incandescent light bulbs, learn about energy savings and lead safe painting. Panel discussion on Energy Independence at 1 p.m. www.GrennhomeEXPO.org 

Free Universal Waste Drop-Off from noon to 5 p.m. at Civic Center Park for batteries, computers and other electronic equipment. Also Safe Medicine Disposal Event: Safely dispose of your old expired or unused medicines, including over-the-counter medicines. www.GreenHomeEXPO.org  

El Cerrito Earth Day Join the city in planting trees along San Pablo Ave. from 9 a.m. to 11:30 p.m., follwed by a barbeque for volunteers at noon. Call for specific locations. 215-4353. www.el-cerrito.org 

United Nations Association Open House from 2 to 5 p.m. 1403 Addison St., in Andronico’s University Ave. parking lot. 

“Celebrating North Richmond History” with art and culture exhibits, speakers, music and community resources, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Shields-Reid Community Center, 1416 Kelsey St., Richmond. Sponsored by Contra Costa Health Services. 925-313-6862. 

Mt. Wanda Wildflower Walk in the hills where John Muir took his daughters. Meet at 9 a.m. in the Park and Ride lot at the corner of Alhambra Ave. and Franklin Canyon Rd., Martinez. Wear walking shoes and bring water. 925-228-8860. 

Redesign of the Downtown Berkeley BART Station and Transit Zone The public is invited to an open house to view four different design options from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, third floor community room, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-7065. 

Berkeley Poetry Festival with featured poets and open mic. Jack Hirschman, Poet Laureate of San Francisco, will read his latest haikus. From noon to 6 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. 549-3345. 

Crowden Community Music Day with concerts, instrument petting zoo, instrument workshop and more, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 1475 Rose St. 559-2941. 

Sports Medicine for Young Athletes with Michelle Cappello, Director of the Sport Medicine Center for Young Athletes at Children’s Hospital, Oakland at 6 p.m. Coaches, parents, players, trainers, and interested others all welcome. Refreshments will be served. For ticket and event location information call 528-9026.  

Benefit Gala for the Oakland Museum of California with dinner and entertainment. TIckets are $300-$600. 239-2919. 

International Family Fair and Raffle with games and activities for children and an incredible variety of live entertainment from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at New School of Berkeley, Bonita Street at Cedar. 548-9165. 

UC Botanical Garden Annual Plant Sale with cacti and succulents, ferns, new perrennials, and rare trees and shrubs from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at 200 Centennail Drive. 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu 

Annual Junktique Sale from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. in a benefit for the First United Methodist Church, 201 Martina, corner W. Richmond Ave., Pt. Richmond 236-0527. www.pointrichmond.com/methodist 

“The Five Secrets to Permanent Weight Loss” with Dr. Jay Sordean, at 12:30 p.m. at South Berkeley Curves, 2855 Telegraph Ave. Sponsored by the Doctors Speakers Bureau. RSVP to 849-1176. 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

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

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, APRIL 30 

Berkeley International Food Festival from noon until 5 p.m. at the intersection of University and San Pablo Aves. The Festival will showcase restaurants and markets, and will feature related cultural activities. www.berkeleyinternationalfoodfestival.com 

Berkeley Citizen Action Economic Development Forum from 4 to 6 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. 549-0816. 

Children’s Book Day from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Children’s Library, 4th floor, Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. Musician, clown and refreshements. 981-6107.  

Wonderous Wildflowers An easy stroll through the Tilden Nature Are to see what is blooming. Meet at 2 p.m. at the Tilden Nature Center. 525-2233. 

“Get Inspired to Green Your Garden” Bay-Friendly Garden Tour from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. A free and self-guided tour throughout Alameda County. Registration required to receive the guide book and garden directions. www.BayFriendly.org 

Secret Gardens of the East Bay A tour with marketplace and opportunity to visit with professional garden designers from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Cost is $45. Benefits Park Day School. 653-0317, ext. 103. www.SecretGardenTour.org 

SF South Bay Restoration Project Tours of the salt pond project from 2 to 4 p.m. Please meet at Menlo Park’s Bayfront Park, at the corner of Marsh Road and Bayshore Expressway. From 101, exit Marsh Road, and head west into Bayfront Park. Tour will repeat on May 6 and May 21. Reservations required. 792-0222, ext. 43. 

“Darwin’s Nightmare” A documentary on the importation of the Nile Perch to Lake Victoria, which decimated the native fish population and impoverished local villagers, at 2 p.m. at the Parkway Theater, 1834 Park Blvd., Oakland. Proceeds benefit Priority Africa Network. 527-3917. 

“Making Connections: Israeli-Palestinian Peace and U.S. Middle East Policy: Where do we go from here?” Discussion presented by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, East Bay Branch, at 1 p.m. at Redwood Gardens, 2951 Derby St. 665-5459. 

Using Art to Teach Science Biological Illustration as a Way of Seeing. A workshop with biological illustrator Vicki Jennings, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. Cost is $50-$60. 238-3818. 

Save Our Steinway Benefit Concert, to restore the 1909 Steinway at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian-Universalists at 2:30 p.m. at 1924 Cedar at Bonita. Donation $5. 841-4824. 

“Come Spot, Come” A recall workshop for your dog from 3 to 4 p.m. at Grace North Church, 2128 Cedar St. Cost is $35. To register call 849-9323.  

Tour of the Flora Lamson Hewlett Library, rare books and a comprehensive theological collection, at 4 p.m. at 2400 Ridge Rd. Reservations required 649-2420. 

Hands-On Bicycle Clinic on bicycle safety inspections from 10 to 11 a.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. Free. 527-4140. 

“Fledglings and Fly In” Bird walk accompanied by a dance performance by Patricia Bulitt at 4 p.m. on the patio behind the Lakeview Public Library, 550 El Embarcadero, Oakland. 238-7344. 

“Houses and Housings: Portability in Jewish Faith and Culture” Panel discussion at 2 p.m. at the Judah Magnes Museum, 2911 Russell St. Cost is $10-$12. 549-6950. 

“Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal” Reception and book signing with author Anthony Arnove at 2 p.m. at Middle East Children’s Alliance, 901 Parker St. 548-0542. 

Tibetan Buddhism with Rosalyn White on “Is Tibet Forgotten?” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812.  

MONDAY, MAY 1 

Immigrant Rights Rally at noon on Upper Sproul Plaza, UC Campus. Join us to demand Human Rights and dignity for immigrants. Speakers to include immigrants and workers at UC Berkeley. 452-7790. 

National Organization for Women Oakland/East Bay Chapter, with Stephanie Simpson, Resource Developer for the International Rescue Committee at 6 p.m. at the Oakland YWCA, 1515 Webster St.  

“Perspectives on Berkeley: Past and Present” Chuck Wollenberg’s Berkeley history class at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. Meets Mon. evenings through May 22. Free. 981-6150. 

May Day Event at AK Press Warehouse, celebrating the workers’ holiday with speakers, musical guests, food, and general merriment. At 6:30 p.m. at 674-A 23rd St., Oakland. Suggested donation $5. All proceeds benefit the Kate Sharpley Library. 

May Day Open House at Revolution Books at 6 p.m. at 2425 Channing Way, under Sather Gate Garage. 848-1196. 

World Affairs/Politics Discussion Group for people 60+ years old meets at 10:15 a.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. Cost is $2.50. 524-9122. 

“How to Expand Your Mind- Body Connection with Yoga, Pilates and Tai Chi” at 5:30 pm. in the Rose Room at Mercy Retirement Center, 3431 Foothill Blvd., Oakland. Cost is $30 or $120 for the entire series. 534-8547, ext. 666. 

Beginning Bridge Lessons at 11:10 a.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. Cost is $1. 524-9122. 

“The Castoffs” Kensington Library’s Knitting Club meets at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave.  

McGee Avenue Toastmasters meets at 7:30 p.m. at McGee Ave Baptist Church, 1640 Stuart St. 501-7005. 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St.548-0425. 

TUESDAY, MAY 2 

“Loose Change 911” Documentary on the myth of 9/11 followed by a discussion with the filmmakers Dylan Avery and Korey Rowe at 7 p.m. at the Grand Lake Theater, 3200 Grand Ave., Oakland. Donation of $10, benefits Guns-n-Butter. 704-0268.  

Climate Change class meets Tues. from 1 to 3 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Topics include science, projected impacts, individual behavior, and policy. 981-5190. 

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. 

Discussion Salon on “What Do You Do For Fun?” at 7 p.m. at the BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. at Rose. Please bring snacks to share, no peanuts please. 

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

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

WEDNESDAY, MAY 3 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around the restored 1870s business district. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of G.B. Ratto’s at 827 Washington St. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. 

“The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War’s Buried History” with Mark Danner in conversation with Pratap Chatterjee at 7:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. Tickets are $10-$12 available at local independent bookstores. Benefits Global Exchange. 967-4495. 

“Is the Bush Administration Guilty of Torture and War Crimes?” Panel with Brig. General Janis Karpinski, former UK ambassador Craig Murray, and Larry Everest at 7 p.m. at 2050 Valley Life Sciences Building, UC Campus. Admission $5-$10 sliding scale, no one turned away for lack of funds. 355- 6915.  

“Vote Rigging 101” A documentary film at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Donations of $5 accepted. 

Lonely Planet Travel Series with Emily Wolman and Heather Dickson on Women Solo Travels at 6 p.m. at Oakland Public Library, 124 14th St. 238-3136. 

Classes in English and Citizenship offered by the Oakland Adult Education program Mon.-Fri. from 6 to 9 p.m. Free. Register at Lincoln Elementary School, 225 11th St., room 205. 879-8131. 

Red Cross Blood Services Volunteer Orientation from 10 a.m. to noon in Oakland. We need your help to support the more than 40 blood drives held each month all over the East Bay.For more information, phone Anne at 594-5165.  

Red Cross Blood Drive from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. East Pauley Ballroom, MLK Student Union, 3rd floor, UC Campus. To make an appointment call 1-800-GIVE-LIFE. www.BeADonor.com  

Weight Management Learn the best way to eat to maintain a healthy weight at 7:30 p.m. at Elephant Pharmacy, 1607 Shattuck Ave. 549-9200. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

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. 562-9431.  

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

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

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

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

com/vigil4peace/vigil 

THURSDAY, MAY 4 

Chabot Space & Science Center Open House for Educators from 3 to 7 p.m. Learn about education programs, lesson plans, activities and community resources from other organizations. Free but pre-registration required www.chabotspace.org 

“Dog’s and Children: Can’t We All Just Get Along?” A lecture on on how to raise a well-behaved pet, at 7:30 p.m. at Borders Books in Emeryville. 644-0729. www.openpaw.org 

Red Cross Blood Drive from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. East Pauley Ballroom, MLK Student Union, 3rd floor, UC Campus. To make an appointment call 1-800-GIVE-LIFE. www.BeADonor.com  

“Be the Stars You Are” Personal stories from scholarship recipients at 7:30 p.m. at Arlington Community Church, 52 Arlington Ave. Cost is $5-$10. www.peointernational.org 

Bone Yoga Learn how yoga can increase bone density at 7:30 p.m. at Elephant Pharmacy, 1607 Shattuck Ave. 549-9200. 

Spring Cleaning for your Body A 21 day guided detoxification and allergy elimination diet, free introductory lecture at 6:15 p.m. at Acupuncture and Integrative Medicine College, 2550 Shattuck Ave. Registration required. 415-513-7270.  

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 

Poll Workers Needed in Alameda County for June 6 Primary Election. Poll workers must be eligible to register to vote in California, have basic clerical skills. Training classes begin in May. 272-6971. 

Berkeley Youth Alternatives Youth Sports Classes NFL Flag Football for boys and girls ages 9 to 12 begins May 9, 4:30 to 6 p.m. Cost is $10-$15 for 5 weeks, and Pee Wee Basketball for boys and girls ages 6 to 8 begins May 13, 10 a.m. to noon. Cost is $25-$35 for 6 weeks. For more information contact BYA Sports & Fitness Department 845-9066. sports@byaonline.org 

CITY MEETINGS 

Peace and Justice Commission meets Mon., May 1, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Manuel Hector, 981-5510. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/peaceandjustice 

Commission on the Status of Women meets Wed., May 3, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Tasha Tervelon, 981-5190. www.ci.berkel 

ey.ca.us/commissions/women 

Public Works Commission meets Thurs., May 4, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Jeff Egeberg, 981-6406. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/publicworks 

Housing Advisory Commission meets Thurs., May 4, at 7:30 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. Oscar Sung, 981-5400. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/housing 

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

berkeley.ca.us/commissions/landmarks 

 

 

 

 

 

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