UC Berkeley Campus Police have cited two of the tree-sitters protesting plans to cut down a grove of Oaks for the new Memorial Stadium, including former mayoral candidate Zachary Running Wolf, and served court orders barring them from campus. 

Running Wolf said he was detained outside Barrows Hall where he was meeting with Native American faculty and served with an order barring him from campus for seven days. 

Other officers cornered Asa Dodsworth that same morning, serving him with a similar citation and order, and a third protester was cited Thursday morning. He had not been a tree-sitter but had worked the crew of volunteers supporting the tree-in. 

Kingman Lim, who granted from Cal earlier this year with a bachelor’s degree in environmental science, was the second tree-sitter cited, picked off Thursday after he left his perch concealed in a large bag. He was barred from campus for two weeks. 

“The campus cops were all over it, and they served him with an order to stay off campus for two weeks,” said Doug Buckwald, ground support coordinator for the arboreal protesters. “He wasn’t primarily a tree-sitter, and he helped us with ropes and climbing.” 

The tree-sitters and their supporters are protesting the proposed destruction of most of the trees to make way for a four-story high tech gym planned for the site along the stadium’s western wall. 

Running Wolf had left his perch briefly for a meeting with Ethnic Studies faculty when officers, assisted by a police dog, cornered him, cited him for trespassing and “ordered me to stay away from campus for seven days,” he said. 

To ensure that he—or a replacement—doesn’t return to his perch high in a California redwood, campus police have maintained a constant presence around the tree since Wednesday morning. 

“They’re so pleased with themselves. They captured a tree,” Buckwald said. Police brought a ladder to the tree late Thursday afternoon to begin removing Running Wolf’s sleeping platform and equipment. 

But the university’s victory is only partial, because other activists are in residence in nearby coastal live oaks, and supporters in ever varying numbers have kept constant watch from the ground. 

Meanwhile, supporters of the Great Berkeley Tree-in are asking the community to come to the stadium grove from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. for a festival honoring the tree-sitters. 

“There’ll be singing and dancing and poetry and good food and good people,” said Buckwald. “We want the whole community to come.” 

Ongoing public support has kept the tree-sitters and ground crew well fed, and participants have adopted a new name for themselves in keeping with a long Berkeley tradition—Free Speech in the Trees. 

“We like free speech so much we do it everywhere, including on the ground and 50 feet up in the trees,” said Buckwald. 

More cops 

Campus police maintained a beefed-up presence that increased as the day progressed Wednesday. Protesters grew worried as the day wore on and up to 13 officers were in evidence along with a van, and rumors spread of an impending sweep to clear protesters from the grove. 

Meanwhile, members of Copwatch were joined by activist videographer LA Wood as their cameras captured the images and voices of the officers watching them. 

Brendan Keenan said he was taping for Copwatch starting at 4 a.m. when the first officer came, followed by the arrival of another officer four hours later. 

During a break in the police presence, Running Wolf descended and was cornered and a detective and two more uniformed officers soon arrived, and thereafter police maintained a constant presence at the base of Running Wolf’s tree. 

The former mayoral candidate returned in late afternoon, carefully staying on the Gayley Road pavement. Keenan said one of the activists and a campus police sergeant got in a verbal sparring match. 

Andy Kramer, a student who has been helping to coordinate the protest, said he advised Running Wolf to run after two officers drove by and asked him to wait while they parked so they could “check some of the spellings” in their report. 

Figuring an arrest might be imminent, the activist left. 

Copwatch had been maintaining a presence for several days in response to what organizers called a campaign of police harassment. 

Officers made frequent nocturnal sweeps in which they awakened the tree-sitters as often as once an hour, a practice that ground support organizer Doug Buckwald called dangerous because it made the protesters groggy and disoriented. 

After leaving the scene earlier in the day, Running Wolf returned in the evening, this time walking into the grove where he talked with fellow protesters. 

“The police saw him but they didn’t do anything,” said Buckwald. 

If apprehended in violation of the order, the activist could be charged with a misdemeanor, rather than the simple infraction for which he was already cited. University officials are anxious to start excavation at the site, driven by the self-imposed need to have that part of the work done by the time football season starts in the next summer. 

Briefing protest 

UC Berkeley Capital Projects staff met with would-be project contractors Tuesday morning in their off-campus office at 1936 University Ave. prior to the submission of bids to build the glade-clearing Student Athlete High Performance Center, only to be greeted by a bullhorn call from protesters outside, “Hello up there. Welcome to Berkeley.” 

LA Wood said he attended the session, where developers greeted news that the site was filled with protesters “with only a nervous laugh or two.” 

It was during that protest that officers detained, cited and served Dodsworth, said Running Wolf. “They had four cars come, even though it was off-campus,” he said. 

Would-be bidders have until 2 p.m. today (Friday) to submit their pre-qualification statements spelling out their suitability to take on the massive project. 

A Native American and environmental activist, Running Wolf launched the protest by taking up residence in a California Redwood just west of Memorial Stadium in the pre-dawn hours of Big Game Saturday, Dec. 9. 

He was soon joined by UC Berkeley student Aaron Diek and environmentalist Jess Walsh, and In the days that followed, others have joined in, either taking perches of their own to spelling the sitters during their occasional descents to earth. 

The university intends to destroy 38 of the oaks—a protected species inside Berkeley’s city limits—along with a Giant Sequoia and a mixed collection of other trees to make way for a 132,500-square-foot, four-story high-tech gym and office structure to be built at the site of the grove at the base of the stadium’s western wall. 

Regents approved the project five days before Running Wolf ascended to his perch, simultaneously accepting a controversial environmental impact report (EIR) that greenlights a massive wave of construction at and near the stadium.  

The protesters are a mixed collection of neighborhood residents, environmental activists, civil libertarians and concerned students. Two UC Berkeley professors—Ignacio Chapela and Claudia Carr—joined them at the peak of tensions during the afternoon. 

Also on hand was Michael Kelly, an officer of the Panoramic Hill Association neighborhood organization which has already filed the first suit challenging the EIR. The city will be filing its own suit, an action already approved by the City Council, said City Manager Phil Kamlarz. 

A number of citizens urged the Berkeley City Council Tuesday not to approve the second reading of the Landmarks Preservation Ordinance, which will make landmarking older structures and sites more difficult. 

The law was approved 6-to-2, with Councilmember Kriss Worthington and Betty Olds voting in opposition and Councilmember Dona Spring absent for that vote. 

In other business, the council voted to continue the Solano Avenue Business Improvement District (BID) and approved the city attorney’s interpretation of the city-university lawsuit settlement.  

Several citizens addressed the council on the landmarks law issue. Peace and Justice Commissioner Elliot Cohen reminded the council that any decision the landmarks commission makes can be appealed to the City Council: “You’ll always have the last say,” he said. 

Councilmember Kriss Worthington read from a letter written by attorney Stuart Flashman, which, Worthington said, pointed out that, in approving an ordinance that was revised by the city attorney several times over the weekend of Dec. 2-3, the first reading of the measure was “adopted in violation of the City Council’s own rules.”  

The council rule Flashman referred to says: “Matters listed on the printed agenda but for which support materials are not received by the City Council on the fourth day prior to said meeting as part of the agenda Packet, shall not be discussed or acted upon.” (The council can vote by 2/3 to waive this rule, but did not hold the vote on the first reading of the ordinance.) 

Without success, Worthington called on the council to delete “surprise” language in the last revision that would likely prevent a referendum on part of the law—an easier way to get support for a referendum—rather than on the entire ordinance. 

Solano BID 

The controversy around the Solano Avenue BID renewal is a “messy, complex situation,” Economic Development Director Michael Caplan told the Berkeley City Council Tuesday. 

Over the last several weeks, 83 Solano Avenue business owners signed formal protests calling for an end to the assessment district. However, the council voted 8-0, with Councilmember Laurie Capitelli recusing himself, to continue the BID with a 20 percent reduction in assessment fees for each business in the district, a promise from the city manager to review BID expenditures over the three years of its existence, and an agreement that the board of directors would write a new work plan. 

The businesses protesting the BID pay collectively an assessment totaling 41.73 percent of the district’s $34,000 total assessment. 

“That’s a fairly substantial percentage of opponents,” Caplan told the council. 

But it was not enough to shut down the BID. Had there been protests by business owners collectively paying more than 50 percent of the total assessment, the BID, which is governed by state law, would have been automatically disbanded. 

But Caplan said he met with leaders of the protest and came to the compromise agreement. 

Many protesters object to the BID being run by the Solano Avenue Association, which is made up of Albany business owners who join voluntarily. The BID is obligatory for those whose business is located within the district. It is run by a board of directors selected by councilmembers.  

The BID executive director, who recently quit, had been paid $60,000 annually, with half the salary funded by the BID and half by the Solano Avenue Association. 

After the question of possible conflict of interest was raised by some of the protesting business owners, and on the advice of the city attorney, Capitelli recused himself from the vote. He is a partner in Red Oak Realty, which has an office on Solano Avenue. One of Red Oak’s realtors is a member of the BID board.  

Jan Snidow, president of the BID and former president of the Solano Avenue Association, asked the council to renew the BID at its current assessment level—$65 to $500—and listed the accomplishments of the organization, including distribution of Solano Avenue merchant directories, street beautification and production of events such as the Chocolate and Chalk Art Festival and the Solano Stroll.  

A number of Solano Ave. merchants have expressed dislike for the Stroll, but Snidow argued, when addressing the council, that if you take the BID and the Stroll away “you take Mickey Mouse away from Disneyland.” 

Protesting merchant Susan Boat, owner of Scissors and Comb, called for cutting ties with the Solano Avenue Association. “Thirty thousand dollars of our $34,000 went to the salary of the executive director,” she said, adding, moreover, “I don’t want to pay for the Stroll.” 

Councilmembers Kriss Worthington and Gordon Wozniak, whose appointments to the BID board are vacant, called on protesting merchants to apply so that they can bring their ideas to the organization. 

City-university agreement  

The city attorney squared off at Tuesday’s council meeting with some citizens and councilmembers, when she supported a resolution she had written intended to counter those who have said the city has lost its sovereignty by signing the May 2005 agreement that settled a city lawsuit against the university’s Long Range Development Plan. 

“…it has been suggested that the settlement agreement improperly delegates the city’s home rule authority to the university,” Manuela Albuquerque wrote. 

The council majority agreed with the city attorney, voting 6-3, with councilmembers Dona Spring, Betty Olds and Kriss Worthington voting in opposition. 

But several plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the city disagreed.  

“There is no release of the EIR (Environmental Impact Report) without concurrence of both parties,” Anne Wagley (Daily Planet calendar editor), one of the plaintiffs, told the council, referring to the contention that no projects can be built downtown without the signature of the city and the university on the environmental document. 

“It must be acceptable to UC Berkeley,” Wagley said. “There’s no ambiguity, no confusion.” 

But Councilmember Gordon Wozniak countered: “If for some reason, we don’t like [the downtown plan] we can pull out.” 

The council did not discuss two agenda items: 

• Councilmember Dona Spring held over until January her resolution to have the city end its membership in organizations that endorse local electoral measures and candidates 

• Councilmembers Laurie Capitelli and Betty Olds’ resolution on term limits for commissioners was put off, due to the length of the council meeting, which ended just before 1 a.m. Wednesday. 

Even before the second and final City Council vote Tuesday establishing a more developer-friendly Berkeley landmark law, opponents were preparing their counterattack. 

Though voters rejected an alternative, neighborhood preservation-based alternative in November, in the hours before Tuesday night’s council meeting backers of the failed Measure J filed a petition to challenge the council’s ordinance through a voter referendum. 

Laurie Bright, one of the sponsors of both the initiative and the new referendum, said the referendum was moving forward despite the failure of the initiative last month. 

“We’re not holding a referendum on Measure J; we’re referending the mayor’s ordinance,” Bright said. 

The ordinance passed by the council was sponsored by the mayor and Councilmember Laurie Capitelli. 

“Well God bless ‘em,” said Capitelli when told the petition had been filed. “I would hope people would stop and think before signing.” 

“It’s kind of like that movie Groundhog Day, where the same things happen over and over again,” said Cisco De Vries, chief of staff for Mayor Tom Bates, who has left to spend the holiday break in India. 

Bright said copies of the referendum petition “were delivered to the eight or nine captains” Wednesday; they, in turn, distributed them to signature collectors. 

Announcement of the referendum campaign was posted on the www.lpo2006.org website, which was created for the Measure J campaign. The same text was sent to Measure J supporters who had signed up for campaign emails. 

City Clerk Pamyla Means’s acceptance of the petition triggered a 30-day period during which referendum supporters must gather the 4,100 signatures needed to force a special election. 

Article XIV, Section 93 of the City Charter mandates blocking enactment of a new ordinance if opponents gather signatures equal to 10 percent of voters in the last general election with a mayoral race. 

The block would remain in force until after the referendum is presented to voters in the next general or special election, when a majority vote determines the outcome. 

“The next general election is in 2008, although the council at one time talked about a special election to bring some new taxes to the voters,” Bright said. 

Deadline for gathering the signatures is Jan. 12. 

The strongest opposition to Measure J came the affluent Berkeley hills, while the strongest support came from UC Berkeley students and neighborhoods in South and West Berkeley. 

“We’ll have a good idea of how we’re doing by the end of next week,” he said. The initial drive will target on UC Berkeley students, many of whom are due to leave the city for the holiday break after finals conclude today (Friday). 

While Measure J basically tweaked the city’s existing Landmarks Preservation Ordinance to comply with provisions of state law, filing the referendum’s signature quota would keep the current law in effect until the election. 

DeVries said Mayor Bates wouldn’t call for a special election on the referendum, “if only because the cost would be $200,000 to $300,000.” 

A long shot might be a special election if the council needs a vote on proposals to save the warm water pool or voter authorization of Community Choice Aggregation (CCA), a power sharing plan for local governments. 

The former would be needed only if the Berkeley Unified School District moves forward with plans to demolish the old Berkeley High School building housing the pool, and a special election on CCA wouldn’t been needed unless other governments insisted, he said. 

Absent a special election, the matter couldn’t go to the ballot before the 2008 primary election, and in any case, the city would be forced to bear that part of the costs of the election related to the referendum, he said. 

Capitelli said deciding on an appropriate response if referendum backers get the needed signatures would be up the council. 

“I haven’t really given it that much thought,” he said. 

The other choice, Bright said, would be for the council to rescind their ordinance and let the old law stand. 

Developers wanted changes in the existing law in part because they content that their projects are often blocked when opponents file petitions to landmark the buildings they plan to demolish or alter. 

The landmark legislation created by Bates and Laurie Capitelli and adopted by the council adds a new provision that forces the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) to rule on the potential landmark-worthiness of properties at an owner’s request, with a two-year exemption from any landmarking efforts from any quarter if the commission fails to initiate on their own. 

Once granted, developers can then file for project permits knowing no landmarking efforts could block their projects. 

Since the new law allows this “safe harbor” provision to be used by property owners before their permit applications for new developments are filed, critics like Bright and co-sponsor Roger Marquis contend that neighbors could be stuck with unwanted projects they didn’t know were coming when it’s too late to landmark the buildings already on the site. 

The city may have dodged one bullet by going along with developer Patrick Kennedy’s notion of how much time to devote to culture at the Gaia Building—Kennedy threatened to sue the city over the question—but by doing so, the city may be running head-on into a lawsuit Kennedy tenant Anna de Leon has promised to file. 

At issue is the 1998 city decision to allow Kennedy to construct the Gaia Building at 2120 Allston Way two stories higher than normally permitted in exchange for a promise to use the first two floors for cultural offerings. 

At issue before the council on Tuesday was what constitutes “culture,” how much time Kennedy must provide cultural events at Gaia and who should decide these questions. The council voted 5-3 to approve a planning staff resolution, a six-page document distributed to the councilmembers at the beginning of the 7 p.m. meeting, that details how much time Kennedy is obligated to hold cultural events on the first two floors and what constitutes culture. 

Councilmembers Dona Spring, Kriss Worthington and Max Anderson voted against the resolution and Councilmember Linda Maio recused herself from the vote saying her husband, who now rents space from Kennedy, is negotiating to buy a storefront in a building the developer owns on University Avenue. 

A more complete discussion of the issue was to have taken place at the council’s closed session meeting on Monday. The public is not privy to what was discussed behind closed doors. 

“You’re being asked to modify a use permit for the developer,” de Leon told the council on Tuesday. “Only ZAB (the Zoning Adjustments Board) shall have the power to grant or deny use permits. The only power granted to council is the appeal process.”  

Dean Metzger, former zoning board commissioner, also argued that the correct venue to address changes to a use permit is the zoning board. “They can have a real public hearing,” he said. 

Councilmember Laurie Capitelli, however, argued that the council does have the right to make the decisions around the cultural requirements. “It would end up here” if appealed, he said. 

The resolution approved by council said it accepted the following “operator’s proposals”: 

• Ground floor theater space will be reserved for cultural use 51 percent of the weekend dates over one year plus rehearsal and setup time (80 days per year). 

• The theater space will be required to devote 30 percent of its time to performances, not including time for rehearsal and setup (109 days per year). 

• People who reserve the venue for cultural use can reserve 18 months in advance, but those reserving for non-cultural uses can reserve only 12 months in advance to give cultural groups priority. 

Jos Sances, member of the Civic Arts Commission, spoke to the council, contending that Kennedy’s original proposal to the commission was that the Gaia bookstore, which was to be the tenant in the building before it went bankrupt, would be hosting cultural events every night and that the expectation was 100 percent cultural use. 

Sances further argued against non-cultural use, which the council resolution allows. “Caterers and churches are not good uses,” he said. 

Further, Civic Arts Commission Chair Suzy Thompson wrote the council Dec. 4: “We find no record of the process by which 100 percent cultural use was changed to 30 percent cultural use, nor was the Art Commission ever consulted about this change …. If this is going to be the result of the zoning variance for cultural use—that developers receive big concessions form the city for uses that cannot be enforced—we must reconsider our positions on this issue.” 

“If the council does this, it will be the demise of the cultural bonus,” de Leon told the council. 

But developer Kennedy argued before the council that cultural uses in his building were subsidized by the profits from the receptions and dinners. And he lauded the use of his space by non-profit organizations that serve the homeless and people with HIV/AIDS. The Democratic Party also took advantage of the space, he said: “It was used for GOTV [get out the vote].”  

“Because of the influence of developers, we’ve changed our ruling,” Councilmember Max Anderson told the council. “ZAB never intended anything but 100 percent cultural use.” 

Reached Wednesday by phone, de Leon argued that by working with the developer on the resolution, city staff was doing his bidding. 

“I will be bringing suit,” she said, noting that when she was active as an attorney she sued municipalities 32 times, including Berkeley.  

With the Hallmark Card takeover of UNICEF cards, Berkeley’s United Nations Association Center that has carried the popular cards for almost half a century, is shutting its doors tomorrow (Saturday)—hopefully a temporary closure to change the center’s focus, says UNA volunteer Mary Lee Trampleasure. 

The center, tucked behind the University Avenue Andronico’s at 1403B Addison St., will be celebrating its 42 years in Berkeley Saturday with live Latin jazz, food and a sale of remaining UNICEF and fair-trade items from noon to 5 p.m. 

The ever-popular UNICEF cards and calendars never brought the center much money—the organization was able to keep about 10 percent of what it earned—but distributing them was critical in bringing people in the door, Trampleasure said. The store has also sold fair-trade gift items, flags and United Nations books. 

Hallmark Cards took over the creation and manufacture of UNICEF cards at the beginning of the year. Since June, the cards are distributed only to the 2,000 Hallmark Gold Crown stores and to Ikea and Pier 1.  

“UNICEF cards and gift items were without warning terminated in January 2006 by the U.S. Fund for UNICEF,” wrote Herb Behrstock, United Nations Association Eastbay Chapter president in the organization’s October-November newsletter. The U.S. Fund for UNICEF is UNICEF’s funding arm. UNICEF is a world-wide child advocacy organization, under the auspices of the United Nations. 

Following Saturday’s store closure, the association board of directors will regroup to determine how to keep its storefront operating part time; they are looking for an individual to volunteer as the center manager.  

The reformatted center would continue distributing United Nations and UNICEF literature, such as a study on the state of the world’s children, Trampleasure said. 

“We’re the community voice for the United Nations,” Trampleasure added, underscoring that now is a time, more than ever, that people need education about the United Nations. For example, many people do not know that the United States does not support U.N. treaties, such as the Kyoto treaty against global warming and the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. 

Trampleasure said she supports the organization despite the widely-reported abuses by U.N. soldiers in Africa, Haiti and elsewhere. U.N. soldiers “are human beings—they need better controls,” she said. 

The local U.N. Association card, gift and information shop opened in 1964 at the old Shattuck Avenue Co-Op (now Andronico’s at Cedar Street and Shattuck Avenue) and moved three times before settling into its present headquarters in 2000. 

Wendy Miller, director of product marketing for the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, said working with Hallmark is a “nice marriage. We couldn’t do it on our own.”  

Miller said she understands that the small U.N. Association outlets can’t come up with the approximately $30,000 it takes to buy the merchandise up front, which they formerly got on consignment. “It’s a different business model. There’s more risk involved,” she said. “The goal is to triple sales in five years.” 

The U.S. Fund gets 7 to 15 percent of the sales price of each item, she said, noting, however, that Pier I and Ikea turn over all profits to the Fund.  

The production of UNICEF cards is one more addition to the giant Hallmark Card business, which, in 2005 had net revenues of $4.2 billion and had more than half the U.S. market-share of the greeting-card industry. Hallmark’s subsidiaries include Binney & Smith (Crayolas and Silly Putty), the Kansas City Crown Center Redevelopment Corporation (an 85-acre commercial and residential complex), Crown Media Holdings (TV channels and film distribution), Dayspring Cards (“the leading creator of Christian personal expression products,” according to the Hallmark web site) and a half-dozen other corporations. 

The Eastbay UN Association is at www.unausaeastbay.org. The store can be reached at 849-1752. 

Photograph by Judith Scherr 

Mary Lee Trampleasure (right) and Sharon Braun staff the United Naitons Association Center store during its final days.

In what can only be considered good news for opponents of the proposed massive Oak to Ninth development in Oakland, a Superior Court judge has tentatively ruled that a lawsuit filed by the Oak to Ninth Referendum Committee can go forward, at least for now. 

Shortly after Oakland City Council approved the 64-acre development on the estuary just south of Jack London Square, members of the newly-formed referendum committee-which includes such groups as the League of Women Voters, the Sierra Club, the Coalition Of Advocates For Lake Merritt (CALM), and the Oakland Heritage Alliance-collected more than 25,000 signatures on petitions calling for a voter referendum on the project. 

When City Attorney John Russo invalidated the signatures because the wrong version of the ordinance authorizing the development agreement had been included with the petitions, the referendum committee sued, saying that they included the version that was given to them by city officials. 

With the lawsuit still in its preliminary stages, the city attorney’s office filed a demurrer, “a request made to a court, asking it to dismiss a lawsuit on the grounds that no legal claim is asserted,” according to the Nolo online legal dictionary. 

Superior Court Judge Winifred Smith tentatively denied that request last week, writing that “since the court is called upon in this case to decide whether the alleged technical deficiency in the referendum petition was significant enough to mislead or confuse electors who were asked to sign the petition, the disposition of the matter by demurrer is inappropriate.” 

Smith ruled that she has not yet received enough information to determine which side might be likely to win at trial, noting that “the case is merely at the pleading stage. The Court is not yet in a position to determine whether Petitioner will be able to prove its argument.” 

A hearing on the judge’s tentative ruling was held in court in Oakland on Wednesday, with a final decision expected within days. Two other separate lawsuits against the Oak to Ninth project are also working their way through the preliminary stages. 

The newly constituted board of directors of the Peralta Community College District acted swiftly to tighten up spending procedures at the four-college district, sending back to district administrators $17 million of a $5 million Measure A bond project authorization request after complaining about details missing from the request papers. 

The funding setback capped a day of bad news for the district. Shortly after reports were published in a Daily Planet article last Tuesday of discrepancies in a Measure A bond project list posted to the district’s website, the list was pulled from the website without explanation. 

Later that day, members of the Laney College Faculty Senate learned that district administrators have cut a promised $213 million in Measure A Laney projects down to $140 million. And far more ominously, the East Bay Express reported in its online blog that a federal grand jury is investigating a land development deal that was proposed two years ago between the Peralta district and a local developer. 

At Tuesday night’s trustee meeting in the Laney College Auditorium, trustees elected Area One trustee Bill Withrow (Alameda-West Oakland-Chinatown-Downtown Oakland) as president and Area Six trustee Cy Gulassa (North Oakland-Montclair-Berkeley Hills) as vice president, turning the officers positions over to the class of trustees that was first elected by voters only two years ago. In addition, newly-elected trustee Abel Guillen was sworn in to take the Area Seven (West Oakland-East Lake) seat formerly held by Alona Clifton, whom Guillen defeated in last November’s elections. 

Guillen was the swing vote in a 4-3 decision on Gulassa’s motion to send the major portion of a $21 million Measure A request back to the administration and colleges for further work (Withrow, Gulassa, Guillen, and Nicky González Yuen voting yes, Bill Riley, Linda Handy, and Marcie Hodge voting no). 

The request, backed up with 73 pages of supporting documents from the district and the four colleges listing specific items requested, would have set aside the $21 million in Measure A money for instructional equipment, furniture, computers and ADA-compliant equipment and library materials so that staff could begin the procurement process of those materials. $8.2 million of that money was requested by Laney, $5.3 million by Merritt College, $4.4 million by the College of Alameda, $1.6 million by Berkeley City College, and $1.3 million for district-wide needs. 

Saying that there were “significant problems with the presentation” in the request, Gulassa immediately moved to set aside $5 million of the request for approval, but to send the remaining $17 million back to the district and colleges for revamping. 

Gulassa complained that the requests for the four colleges were presented in different format with different wording, making it difficult for trustees to judge the requests uniformly, adding that “some of the requests are presented in a format that makes it difficult to understand what is being requested.” 

Yuen added that he was supporting the motion to send the request back because it did not include promised backup materials justifying the expenditure requests. 

That set off a storm of heated debate, with trustee Hodge saying that “I hope that the direction of this board isn't moving into micro-management” and Handy charging that rejecting the request because the forms were not uniform “is like handing in your masters thesis and having it rejected because it's signed on the left side rather than the right side. The presidents of the colleges went through these items and approved them. We should respect that.” 

A visibly angry Handy left the auditorium for several minutes while the debate was going on, and both Handy and Hodge left the meeting before it was adjourned. 

At one point, Gulassa said that he was “not challenging the needs presented in this request. I know these items are needed. I'm objecting to the format as it has been presented. It's unprofessional. It's presented in a helter-skelter fashion.” 

That got a sharp retort from Peralta Chancellor Elihu Harris, who called the “unprofessional” allegation a “charged word.” Harris noted that the request was not for an allocation of the funds for the items, but only a request that the money be set aside for that purpose. 

But when Withrow asked if that meant all of the money requests would eventually come back to the board for final review, Director of General Services Sadiq Ikharo at first said yes, but then clarified his remarks by adding that “but some items have established long-term contracts already, and for those items, it will not come back to the board.” Ikharo did not clarify how much of the $21 million request came under that category. 

It was also not certain from the debate how long the actual purchase of the requested items would be held up, assuming the requests come back to the board and are eventually all approved. 

The debate also included impassioned pleas from college representatives for passage of the full $12 million authorization. Laney President Frank Chong said that while he understood the need for the board to have more backup detail, he urged approval. “There is a pent-up demand for these materials at the colleges,” Chong said. “There's some fatigue among the faculty and staff over getting this through--it's been a six month process.” 

And Laney College Faculty Senate President Shirley Coaston said that Laney faculty members “have cynicism about how this money is going to be spent. The faculty helped to pass Measure A. We need to get up-to-date equipment. That's why we passed this bond.” 

Coaston added that if the board did not approve the expenditures, faculty would have to go back to students and explain why they would have to wait longer to get the equipment. 

The disapproval of the full $21 million request was the second Measure A blow Coaston received that day. Earlier, at a noon meeting with General Services Director Ikharo to clear up discrepancies in the full Measure A expenditure going to Laney, members of the Laney College Faculty Senate learned that the college was, indeed, going to get a cut of some $73 million from the $213 million Measure A money promised to Laney by district officials when the bond measure was approved by district trustees last February. 

The total amount of the Measure A bond, passed overwhelmingly by area voters last June, is $390 million. 

Evelyn Lord, Laney's representative on the District Academic Senate, said by telephone following the Tuesday noon meeting that “I don't think we're satisfied at Laney about those figures. A lot of the faculty members are upset, particularly because of the poor condition of our campus.” 

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Will Harper of the East Bay Express reported on its 92510 blog that a federal grand jury investigating corruption in Oakland politics “is investigating [Oakland] developer Alan Dones and his dealings with the four-college Peralta Community College District.” 

Dones won approval from the outgoing Peralta Board of Trustees in late 2004 for the exclusive rights to put together a development deal that involved portions of the Peralta administrative properties and adjacent Laney College sites. 

The proposal generated an enormous controversy in the district, causing Chancellor Harris to delay negotiating a contract to allow Dones to move forward with writing his proposal, and eventually Dones backed out of the deal himself. 

This week, the Express reported that last October, the federal grand jury issued a subpoena to Peralta district officials that demanded records of work performed for Peralta by Dones or his associates going back to 1998, with specific attention to the proposed 2004 development deal. 

Included with the subpoena was a request for such records on Virtual Murrell. Murrell, a former aide to former Oakland City Councilmember Leo Bazille and the brother of Peralta trustee Bill Riley. Murrell received a one year sentence in 1995 after pleading guilty to taking a $750 bribe from a developer while Murrell was working for Bazille. 

It was not clear from the subpoena whether Murrell actually has any involvement with Peralta. 

The Express reported that Dones has denied any wrongdoing in the abortive contract talks, and that Peralta spokesperson Jeff Heyman would only say that Peralta is cooperating in the investigation, and that “no district employees are targets” of the investigation. That left open the unconfirmed possibility that district trustees could be.

Holiday shopping unfinished? Unwilling to make one more trip to a multitude of malls or to … Emeryville? 

Let me suggest where to shop locally this season and also feel good about it. Come down to Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. 

Maybe you’re terrified of Telegraph? Worried you’ll find only empty storefronts, aggressive panhandling, no parking, tumbleweeds in the streets? 

Settle down. You probably read too much campaign literature during the last election. Toss those screeds in the trash, and visit the real Telegraph where you’ll find the picture implied wasn’t, and isn’t, true. 

Endless vacant storefronts? I’ve counted. There are 63 commercial storefronts on Telegraph from Dwight to Bancroft, and only four appear both empty and unrented. Panhandlers are few and actually pretty polite, and regular pedestrian traffic is heavy, although with students now leaving town after finals it should tail off in the next few days. 

All the more room for you and me to do our holiday shopping. The special character of Telegraph at this time of year goes far back.  

“In the Christmas season, I almost always think of ‘The Avenue’ wet with fresh rains, pungent with the odor of freshly unpacked merchandise in gift and book stores, exciting with Christmas sounds and decor, and somewhat relieved for an excuse to affect an attitude completely ignoring the collegiate.”  

“It was on this street and its byways, during my last days before leaving for home for Christmas, that I would walk from one end of the business section to the other, shopping for tokens and trinkets.”  

That’s a Cal alumnus writing about Telegraph during the 1940s in the December, 1954, California Monthly magazine.  

And the sentiment is true today, almost word for word, down to the rain, which drenched, but did not extinguish, the Telegraph Holiday Street Fair last weekend.  

The Fair continues the next two weekends—Dec. 16 and 17, 23 and 24—from 11 a.m.-6 p.m.  

North of Dwight the main street is closed to traffic and filled with booths, and several of the regular storefront businesses are also putting on a show, with sales and specials. Street parking can be tight, it’s true. If you drive, head along Channing to Telegraph. Just east of that intersection you can park in the University’s Anna Head lot, for a fee. Just west you’ll find the City’s Sather Gate Garage, and the new underground parking owned by First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley. Once on foot you’ll find craft booths with many regular Telegraph sidewalk vendors plus dozens who come in seasonally for the show.  

Here are just a few of the things I saw. 

The fair opens, appropriately enough for Berkeley, at Dwight with a booth selling sparkling stained glass peace symbols beneath colorful streetlight banners featuring doves on the wing.  

On up the Avenue were vendors with unique handmade t-shirts, many of art quality, or with local themes. Holiday ornaments, garden art, and hangings. Bamboo bowls. “Aroma crystals,” colorfully knit gloves and slippers, and gorgeous patterned silk scarves. Jewelry makers of all descriptions, some of them also offering unset stones and crystals. Old vinyl records bent into bowls or transformed into journal covers. Colorful glazed tiles. Handcrafted wooden cutting boards, and whimsical stuffed animals. All sorts of ceramics. And soybean candles with a multitude of scents, including chocolate. Soybean candles! Did you even know those existed?  

One craftsman was selling sinuous metal sculptures entwining glass or crystal balls. Each orb seem to endlessly descend along the metal spiral as it revolved in the breeze. “That is so crazy!” said a shopper standing next to me. “I could seriously just watch this for days.”  

If you want to eat while strolling, the fair includes booths selling freshly popped kettle corn, organic Tibetan fare, and Southeast Asian tidbits. Beyond the seasonal vendors and outdoor shopping, Telegraph is still the go-to place in the East Bay for music, with the enormous and varied Rasputin’s Records and Amoeba emporiums.  

And books? The closing of the original Cody’s this past summer did leave a hole, but there are still more bookstores concentrated along or near the Avenue—eight, by my count—than anywhere else I can think of in the Bay Area.  

The redoubtable Moe’s, Shakespeare and Co., and Cartesian Books all cluster near the Dwight/Telegraph intersection. Revolution Books and the Friends of the Library Bookstore (with a free book cart in front!) are be found in the Sather Gate Mall, and University Press Books, Ned’s Books, and the Student Store bookstore are up along Bancroft. The latter is no mere textbook warehouse. It hosts an extensive general book department with local interest and faculty author sections. 

Telegraph also has several interesting gift, art, and specialty shops. The Reprint Mint offers thousands of posters, framed and unframed. The Framer’s Workshop helps you do it yourself. Some more recent stores—including Land of Bliss, Kathmandu, and the newly relocated What The Traveler Saw (which occupies much of the old Cody’s building) make Telegraph a nexus for handicrafts from all over the world and South Asia in particular.  

The Berkeley Hat Company is well worth stopping in for that special chapeau, and kids might enjoy the several “vintage” and specialty clothing stores along the Avenue. If you finish up or take a break from shopping at brunch, lunch, or dinner time, Telegraph is also one of Berkeley’s best areas to eat. 

Pick your style. Standing room only grilled sausages at Top Dog, or perhaps white-table-cloth upscale Adagia in the renovated Westminster House two blocks up Bancroft at College Avenue. Burger or salad, Thai, Korean, savory crepes, sandwiches, “smart food,” greasy spoon, organic, pizza, fresh baked goods (two bakeries and one donut shop), sushi boats, the fastest take out, and the most leisurely sitdown … it’s all here.  

In the long Telegraph block south of Dwight down to Parker you can find a trio of Asian-themed restaurants where I’ve had good meals, including Unicorn (fusion), Norikonono (traditional Japanese setting and dining), and Saigon City (Vietnamese). 

Or you can take a nostalgic culinary tour of college hangouts dating a half-century back. Perhaps Larry Blake’s for the ’50s, Fondue Fred’s from the ’60s, Kips for the ’70s, Henry’s Pub from the ’80s, and Raleigh’s and Intermezzo for the ’90s.  

Coffeeistas need not fear caffeine withdrawal along Telegraph, which boasts numerous cafes including Berkeley’s oldest (Mediterraneum) and newest (the Telegraph Peet’s) just a burnt bean’s throw from each other near Dwight.  

And if you’re willing to wait until dusk these days Telegraph offers an additional treat. Five blocks of street trees are festooned with thousands of yellow and blue lights, and cheery, lighted, holiday decorations twinkle from the lampposts.  

After wandering through the street fair for an hour or two last weekend we bought a book of poems ($5) from Julia Vinograd, Berkeley’s venerable “Bubble Lady,” bundled up several small purchases, detoured around a Santa in shades, and sat down in Ann’s Soup Kitchen for a bite to eat.  

I was reading Vinograd’s “Punk Girl in the Coffeehouse” when I glanced up over the top of the book and saw, dining a few tables down, a young lady who, except for a slight variation in hair color (red instead of pink), was a living image of the literary subject. Life easily imitates art along Telegraph. Come on down, take it in, and shop around.

Threatened, robbed 

A 68-year-old Berkeley woman surrendered her wallet and cash to a short, fat and angry young man who confronted her as she walked along the 1600 block of Kains Ave. just before 6 p.m. on Dec. 4. 

The suspect, a man in his mid-30s who stands about 5’4” and weighs about 200 pounds, fled the scene in a white sedan. 

Wrong place, time 

Responding to repeated calls from concerned business folk worried about drivers using bogus handicapped placards to park in scarce spaces near the corner along Oxford Street and Addison Way, five Berkeley traffic officers were checking cars just before 8 a.m. on the Dec. 6 when they heard cries of “Help me! Help me!” 

Officers spotted a man wrestling a backpack off the back of a young Berkeley man. His prize in hand, the bandit leapt into a van that sped from the scene, and officers set off the hue and cry. 

The bandit, and Oakland resident, made it as far as Delaware Street before he was pulled over and given a pair of steel bracelets before a trip to the city lockup where he was booked on suspicion of robbery. 

Wrong again 

It was one minute after midnight when an undercover officer working near the corner of Ward and Sacramento streets spotted a 16-year-old and a 15-year-old trying to steal a 13-year-old’s belongings. 

The undercover officer notified his support team, who swooped up the two young bandits and escorted them to juvenile hall. 

Fake pistol? 

Given the choice of believing if the young bandit in the black hoodie really had the pistol in his pocket he claimed to possess, a 53-year-old Oakland woman decided not to force the issue and handed over her purse. 

The robber then ran with his loot to a nearby gray sedan and headed south. Officer Galvan said the incident happened just before 8 p.m. on the 7th as the woman was walking along Howe Street near the corner of Telegraph Avenue. 

Rat pack 

A gang of three or four teenagers menaced a 33-year-old Berkeley man as he was walking along the 1500 block of Shattuck Avenue at 2 a.m. last Friday, then strong-armed away his laptop and forced him to surrender his cell phone and wallet. 

The crew escaped in a beige, 1970s Detroit-made sedan. 

Upside the head 

Three 20-something bandits, including one in a gray hoodie and another wearing a similar model in red, walked up to a 23-year-old Berkeley man as he was strolling along Grant Street near the corner of University Avenue when one of the trio hit him in the head, shortly before 2 a.m. Friday 

Dazed, their victim was in no shape to resist as the robbers relieved him of his cell phone and cash, then departed in an American-made sedan. 

Domestic stabbing 

A 31-year-old Berkeley man refused the aid of paramedics after a woman friend stabbed him in the upper chest during a spat that happened shortly before 5 p.m. Saturday in the 1300 block of 66th Street. 

The suspect, an Oakland woman, remains at large, said Officer Galvan. 

Strong-armed 

Even though witnesses gave chase, a fleet-footed felon fled successfully after strong-arming a 26-year-old Oakland woman’s purse after he grabbed her from behind as she was walking along Shattuck Avenue near the Woolsey Street intersection shortly after 6:40 Sunday evening. 

Creepy crawler 

A Berkeley woman was stunned to find herself facing a man in black sliding into her home through an open window, armed with a shiny silver revolver just before 1:30 a.m. Monday. 

“He was wearing black clothes, including a turtleneck and a knit cap,” said Officer Galvan. 

After threatening the woman, the man scooped up cash and a digital camera before fleeing. Because a resident was home at the time of the incident, police are classifying the crime as a home invasion—an offense that carries a more severe penalty than a typical robbery. 

Skateboard attack 

A 27-year-old homeless man was rushed to a local hospital after he was bashed in the head with a skateboard outside the Center for Independent Living just before 6 a.m. Tuesday.  

The suspect, who remains at large, was described as a man with shaggy blond hair and blue eyes who is between 22 and 25 years old. 

Gang of three  

Police are looking for three juveniles who tried to steal another youth’s iPod near the corner of Milvia and Carleton streets just before 6 p.m. Tuesday. The young fellow managed to hang on to his Apple music-maker—a device that has become a common target of Berkeley heisters.

UC Berkeley Campus police detained tree-sitting former mayoral candidate Zachary Running Wolf Wednesday morning, then served him with an order barring him from campus for seven days. 

He had left the tree briefly for a meeting with Native American studies faculty when officers served him with the order. “They ordered me to stay away from campus for seven days,” he said. 

Meanwhile officers stepped up pressure at the threatened grove throughout the day, with as many as 13 police officers mustering near the grove by late afternoon.

You should always say something good about the dead. He’s dead. Good. —Moms Mabley 

Former Chilean political prisoners, torture victims, exiles and refugees—all victims of General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, gathered Sunday night at Berkeley’s La Peña Cultural Center. 

Among TV cameras and lively songs the mood was celebratory. Some said the day should be a day to remember the thousands of missing prisoners, many whose whereabouts now may never be known, as it is one of the many secrets the dictator took to his grave. 

More than just a celebration, for some of the victims of his brutal reign, Pinochet’s departure also marks a new stage of relief. For me, for many years the dictator’s face has been a symbol of death and fear. 

To see him in the newspaper or on TV was always hard. He held power by crushing and eliminating any dissent through assassination. Many of us will carry the scars for the rest of our lives. 

By eliminating the trade union organizations, his “Chicago Boys” economic politics were imposed on the Chilean people by the force of the guns. 

When I was reading the newspapers and listening to the news Monday morning, I was amazed to learn about the credit given to him by mainstream media for “improving” the economy, a “miracle” unique in Latin America. But, as writer Greg Palast recently wrote, this is just another “fairy tale.” The claim that General Pinochet begat an economic powerhouse was “one of those utterances whose truth rested entirely on its repetition.” 

Under the Allende government (1970-73) unemployment was 4.3 percent. 

In 1983, after 10 years of dictatorship and in the midst of the free-market modernization, the unemployment rate was 22 percent. 

Under the military dictatorship wages declined by 40 percent. 

By 1970, Chile had 20 percent of its population living in poverty. By 1990, the number had doubled to 40 percent. 

In fact, life was far better under Allende. There was a highly just pension system, education and health care was free and there were national programs building houses for the poor and middle class. 

Pinochet jailed or killed hundred of union leaders, eradicated the minimum wage and eliminated taxes on wealth and business profits. He privatized the pension system, schools and hundreds of state-owned industries and banks. Some of the monies from these transactions are now known to be part of Pinochetbooty found in different banks abroad. 

Because the Prussian, proud, disciplined military man was not just a butcher-- he also ended up to be one of the biggest Chilean crooks who stole millions of dollars from the Chilean state.

Critics of UC Berkeley’s massive Southeast Campus Integrated Projects (SCIP) filed the first of two expected legal challenges Monday. 

The action by the Panoramic Hills Association (PHA) will be followed by a similar challenge from the City of Berkeley, said City Manager Phil Kamlarz. 

Michael Kelly, a PHA officer, said the papers filed in Alameda County Superior Court challenge the Environmental Impact Report (EIR) approved by UC Regents last week and also allege that their action violates a state law that governs building on and adjacent to active earthquake faults. 

UC Berkeley Media Relations Executive Director Marie Felde said the UC’s General Counsel hadn’t been served yet, so she couldn’t comment on the contents. 

“But if it addresses the EIR issue, as we’ve said from the beginning, we believed we have thoroughly reviewed the issues and that the EIR meets all the requirements,” she said. 

While the city’s lawsuit hasn’t been filed yet, a spokesperson for the office of City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque said a notice will be posted on the website of City Manager Phil Kamlarz when the papers are filed. 

Meanwhile, protesters continue to hold a tree-in perched in the branches of the grove threatened by the first of the projects slated to be built under the controversial EIR—and vow to continue the protest until the trees are saved, said Doug Buckwald, a Berkeley resident coordinating ground support for the tree-sitters. 

Now in its second week, the Memorial Stadium tree-in endured a weekend of cold wind and hard rain, though the hourly intrusive nocturnal name-taking visits of campus cops had tapered off. 

Measures labeled as harassment by Buckwald tapered off after attorney Stephan Volker fired off a letter to UC President Robert Dynes, UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau and UCB Police Chief Victoria L. Harrison. 

Meanwhile, city officials have released letters from federal and state geologists challenging the adequacy of an earthquake fault study UC Regents used in making their decision to build a massive gym along the stadium’s western wall. 

Two protesters are now perched in a pair of Coastal Live Oaks and recent mayoral candidate Zachary Running Wolf occupies the branches of a California Redwood. 

The tree-sitters oppose the project in part because it means the loss of the last remaining stand of the threatened oaks outside the Berkeley hills. 

Across California, the native oaks have been dying off from a water mold caused ailment that produces Sudden Oak Death Syndrome. Among the arguments raised by protesters is the need to protect the genetic diversity of a threatened species. 

Some protesters also challenge the wisdom of spending hundreds of millions of dollars building massive projects above or near the Bay Area’s most-likely-to-rupture-soon earthquake fault. 

Kelly said the PHA doesn’t oppose building an athletic training center, but they do contend that the present site should be rejected. 

One reason cited in their litigation is the Alquist Priolo Act, the California statute that governs building on or adjacent to faults. 

University officials contend that the training center is exempt from the act because it wouldn’t sit on a fault, unlike the adjoining Memorial Stadium which was built directly astride the Hayward Fault. 

That’s where the two letters sent by the federal and state geologists raise key questions. 

The letters, sent by federal and state experts on Northern California seismic dangers, both charge that more tests are needed to determine whether both ends of the crescent-shaped Student Athlete High Performance Center would be on top of the active fault. 

The structure, estimated to cost between $75 million and $125 million, would provide the latest in high tech training for all student athletes at the university. 

The United State Geological Survey letter was signed by geologists David Schwartz, chief of the San Francisco Bay Area Earthquake Hazards Project, and Tom Brocher, coordinator of North California Earthquake Hazard Investigations. 

William A. Bryant, the geologist who manages the California Geological Survey’s program regarding building in fault zones, signed the state letter. 

Both charge that the study regents relied on for approving the crucial environmental impact report authorizing the Southeast Campus Integrated Projects was flawed because it failed to conduct adequate tests in two critical areas at either end of the building site. 

That study, prepared by Geomatrix Inc., a consulting firm the university has often used, cleared the site as not being on the fault—a crucial determination because the law bars new construction directly over faults.  

Specifically, the government geologists said more study was needed to determine whether an active fault lies beneath the 138,000-square-foot site of the propose Student Athlete High Performance Center, the high tech gym regents approved for construction adjacent to the stadium. 

The federal geologists pointed to anomalies in the Geomatrix findings about the presence and angle of a serpentine layer below the site, which they said could indicate the presence of a fault. 

The only way to know for sure, they concluded, was to conduct further drilling tests to collect core samples, and the state geologist concurred. 

Monday morning found a campus police officer, Sgt. David Eubanks, videotaping protesters at the tree-in while a Copwatch volunteer videotaped him—just the latest twist in the university’s confrontation with demonstrators. 

But Buckwald said police behavior had improved considerably since Volker sent his letter to university and campus police executives. 

In a sworn affidavit attached to Volker’s letter, Buckwald said campus police had been rousting the tree-sitters throughout the nights and repeatedly making sweeps of the grove to check identification documents and compare the information with that contained in voluminous files they refused to show to protesters who asked to examine them. 

Volker’s letter cited several legal precedents supporting the tree-in, including one case that addressed a nearly identical arboreal protest which was upheld as a legitimate form of constitutionally protected free speech. 

In his affidavit, Buckwald said officers came by as frequently as once an hour when tree-sitters were sleeping, flashing lights and yelling until the sitters responded. 

“These harassments pose a direct threat to the safety of our tree-sitters,” Buckwald declared. “Sleep deprivation could cause our tree sitters to accidentally stumble, tie a knot incorrectly, or fail to clip a carbiner properly to the rope for the harness. Any of these mistakes could cause a fatal fall.” 

Buckwald said that police conduct had changed markedly Monday. “They have been remarkably nice and considerate, it’s a big change,” he said. 

Community support continues to pour in, he said, and a Celebration to Save the Oaks is planned for 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, featuring live music, poetry, dance and food. 

Meanwhile, the Rainforest Action Network offered sitters and volunteers a crash course in nonviolent civil disobedience, and Copwatch volunteers have been on hand to tape police conduct. 

“We have a great crew,” he said, and volunteers continue to bring food, bottled water and other supplies, including climbing and camping equipment needed by Running Wolf in his redwood and oak sitters Aaron Diek and Jess Walsh. 

“They’re doing remarkably well,” said Buckwald, “and they’re going to stay there until the trees are saved.” 

UC Berkeley spokesperson Felde said campus Police Chief Victoria Harrison hadn’t seen Volker’s letter as of late Monday afternoon, and said “police will continue to check on the welfare of the protesters and their supporters. The fact is that campus rules do not you allow to camp out on campus property, and we will continue to make sure that no one does.” 

But the concern of police remains “the welfare of the people there,” she said.

Presiding Superior Court Judge George C. Hernandez, Jr. paints a rosy picture of the planned move of Berkeley’s traffic court to the Wiley W. Manuel Courthouse on Washington Street in downtown Oakland. 

It will be an opportunity for the two traffic judges, one now located in Oakland and the other in Berkeley, to share their workload more equitably:  

“They can back each other up,” Hernandez told the Daily Planet on Friday. Moreover, consolidation of services in Oakland will provide more interpreters, a self-help center and even childcare.  

Hernandez said the move will take place Dec. 26, but court workers say they have been told to be ready for a Dec. 22 move.  

“Our last day here is Dec. 21. Everything is moving to Oakland on the 22nd,” said Francisco Martinez, a legal processing assistant at the Berkeley Courthouse. “They’re advancing the date,” he told the Daily Planet on Monday, adding that supervisors “are not willing to answer questions” about the move. 

Mayor Tom Bates, who also had been told that the move was Dec. 26, isn’t buying Hernandez’s pretty picture. Bates learned about the move two days after the story first appeared in the Nov. 28 edition of the Daily Planet. 

“It’s inconvenient for people—especially low-income people—to take time off to go to Oakland to appear in court,” Bates said. 

And what’s even more serious, “It will take police out of service in Berkeley—there will be less police attention to real problems in the community,” Bates said. 

“It will cost the community a lot,” said Berkeley police spokesperson Ed Galvan. The cost will be in overtime, but more important, he said, the cost to the community is in the officers being out of town. There can be six to 10 officers waiting for their cases to come up in traffic court, but if there’s an emergency, the officers can easily leave the Berkeley court and respond, Galvin said.  

The mayor said he is also angry that no public officials were consulted—neither himself, nor the mayor of Albany nor Supervisor Keith Carson who serves Northern Alameda County. “That kind of arrogance infuriates me,” Bates said, vowing to go to the state legislature, if necessary, to find a remedy. 

But Hernandez said there would have been too many jurisdictions to meet with. Not only are Berkeley, Albany, Emeryville and Oakland impacted, but other agencies such as the Highway Patrol and BART police would be involved.  

“The court is not being cavalier about this,” he said. 

What is more surprising, Bates continued, is that the city is in the middle of negotiating a lease with the county—the Berkeley courthouse building, between Old City Hall and the police department, belongs to the county, while the city owns the land beneath it. 

Hernandez underscored that only the traffic court would be moving. Small claims and unlawful detainer courts will stay in Berkeley and other civil courts could move into the Berkeley building. 

The judge further argued that the Berkeley courts actually serve more out-of-towners: of the 29,000 tickets issued in Berkeley, 19,000 are given to persons who live outside the city, he said. Moreover, he added, “It’s only 5.3 miles from Berkeley to the Wiley Manuel Courthouse.”  

Bates is meeting today (Tuesday) with Hernandez, Carson and Albany Mayor Allan Maris to try to stop the move. 

Six months after local voters overwhelmingly approved $390 million in facilities bond money for the Peralta Community College District under Measure A, there is confusion within the district about how the money will be allocated to each college. 

Faculty members of Laney College, the district’s largest college, have expressed concern about how much Laney’s share of the bond money will be, and the president of the Laney College Faculty Senate has asked the head of Peralta’s Department of General Services to meet with her organization this week for clarification. 

General Services Director Sadiq Ikharo is also scheduled to make a presentation of the Measure A bond projects to the Peralta Board of Trustees at the trustees’ regular meeting tonight (Tuesday), which will be held at 7 p.m. at the Peralta Administrative headquarters at 333 E. 8th St. in Oakland. 

In addition, Peralta may already be out of compliance with a requirement for formation of a Citizen Oversight Committee to monitor the spending of the Measure A bond money. The Measure A ballot language called for the establishment of the oversight committee “within 60 days of the date when the results of the election appear in the minutes of the Board.”  

The results of the Measure A election were reported to the Peralta Board of Directors in late June. Although the district authorized the formation of the oversight committee within the 60-day time period, only five of seven committee members have been appointed.  

Implementation of Measure A became an issue in last month’s Peralta Trustee Area 7 race, with challenger Abel Guillen charging at one debate that Peralta “doesn’t have a plan for the spending of that bond money, just a laundry list of projects” and that the citizen oversight committee “doesn’t have the power it should have. It doesn’t set priorities.” Guillen beat incumbent trustee Alona Clifton in that race. 

The confusion over the bond project list began last Feb. 28, the night trustees approved putting the bond measure on the June ballot. A Measure A bond project list handout produced by district administration officials and included in the board packet and passed out to the public that night indicated that Laney would receive $213.2 million, or 46.3 percent, of the $460.4 million committed to Measure A facilities projects. 

The list handout indicated that the $70.4 million above the $390 million requested from the Measure A bonds would come from the state chancellor’s office and from other funds. 

Last September, three months after the passage of Measure A, the Peralta Department of General Services posted an updated version of that list, with total Measure A project expenditures now listed at $528.4 million. Of that amount, Laney was slated to receive $234.9 million, or 44.5 percent of the total bond project expenditure. 

But Peralta District Academic representative Evelyn Lord, the past president of the Laney College Academic Senate, says that district officials been giving Laney representatives conflicting figures on how much Measure A money the college may be getting, some of it almost half of what appears on the general services website. 

Saying that “I think [General Services Director] Sadiq [Ikharo] has been the source of the numbers,” Lord said that “I first heard that we were going to be getting only $120 million of the bond money. That’s when faculty members first started getting concerned.” 

Lord said that the Laney share was later put at $140 million, “and the last I heard was that it will now be somewhere over $200 million. I have no idea why the number has fluctuated so much.” Lord said that current Laney Faculty Senate President Shirley Coaston requested the meeting with Ikharo “in order to get clarification on the numbers.” 

Laney College President Frank Chong says he believes that discrepancies will be worked out. 

“We feel that Laney has been shortchanged in the past concerning facilities maintenance and construction, and we now want to ensure that we get our fair share,” Chong said by telephone last week. “I’ve had a conversation with Sadiq about this, and he says that Laney will be getting 40 to 43 percent of the Measure A money.” 

Chong said that Laney is due that large a percentage of the bond measure money because “it is in line with our percentage of FTE’s (full-time equivalent students) in the district,” as well as the fact that Laney is the district’s oldest existing campus, with buildings that are more in need of repair or reconstruction than the other colleges. 

Part of the problem with the discrepancy in the Measure A figures, Chong said, may come from the fact that the district is identifying money from other sources that will be going to Laney College projects originally listed as Measure A projects, keeping those Laney projects in the pipeline while lowering the actual Measure A dollar amount that will go to Laney. 

If that is so, part of the confusion has been generated by the considerable state of disorder concerning the genesis and status of the bond project list that is posted on the district website, as well as disarray within the list itself. 

The Daily Planet earlier reported that at least two members of the Peralta Board of Trustees have directly opposite memories of whether the board approved the budgeted bond list at the February meeting in which the bond measure was authorized. Trustee Cy Gulassa says that the budgeted list was part of the board packet, and he believes that was the list that was authorized by the board. Trustee Nicky González Yuen, who criticized the district for setting up a “slush fund” for bond projects on the night the bond measure was approved by trustees, says that the board only approved a generalized, non-budgeted list that night and not the budgeted list that now appears on the district’s website. The generalized, non-budgeted list is what appeared on the ballot last June as the list of Measure A projects. 

A Daily Planet review of the minutes and videotape of the Feb. 28 meeting could not determine which of the two lists was considered by trustees, leading to the possibility that trustees had different ideas that night of what they were approving. 

In addition, the itemized Measure A bond measure list that now appears on the district’s website has serious discrepancies and lapses in its explanation of how its final figure was developed. 

There is a $68 million difference between the $460.4 million total of projects in the February list and the $528.4 million total in the list that is currently posted on the district’s website. 

While that additional money is not explained on the current list, it appears to come from the fact that the list now includes money for projects that was originally slated to be paid from Peralta’s last bond measure, Measure E. In the February list, for example, the cost projected for modernization and facility renovation of the College of Alameda’s D Building is $13,041,852. 

The cost of that same project in the currently posted list is projected at $16,331,852, with no explanation on the list as to why the cost increased. A notation on the February list indicates that the Alameda D Building modernization is “currently scheduled as a Measure E project with a budget of $3,290,000.” 

That $3.2 million figure is the exact amount that has been added to the project on the current list, with the current list providing no information on Measure E money, and giving the impression that all of the money will be taken from Measure A. 

That omission is repeated several times in the posted list. 

A second, more serious problem is that the $528.4 million total in the posted Measure A bond project list may have come from adding up project amounts that were listed more than once. 

Among its immediate, campus-wide needs for Laney College on the posted list, which was not broken out into individual projects in February, Peralta has one item of “Chemistry and Biology Laboratory plumbing and benches” at a cost of $1.5 million. Directly following that, however, is a second item of “Labs upgrades; plumbing, benches (6 labs)” also with the same $1.5 million price tag. 

The posted project list also has one item for “IT Room Air Condition Replacements” at a cost of $87,000, with a second item below it for “Main Computer Room—Air Conditioning Replacement” at a cost of $80,000. 

And one half-million dollar project at Berkeley City College is identified simply as “Unknown—unknown.” 

Meanwhile, five of the seven member citizen oversight committee have been chosen. The bond measure language indicated that each of the members must represent one of the following interests: business, students, an organization involved in support of the community college district, a taxpayers association, a senior citizens organization, and two members of the community at-large. 

The business representative on the committee, Jose Dueñas, is the President and CEO of the Oakland-based Bay Area World Trade Center, where Peralta Chancellor Elihu Harris serves as chair of the board. 

The student representative is Scott Folosade of Laney. The representative of a community college support group is Peralta Foundation member and EBMUD Board President Bill Patterson. 

The representative of the taxpayers association is certified public accountant Hyacinth Ahuruonye, owner of the HCA financial services company of San Francisco, who once served as a campaign treasurer for former Oakland City Councilmember Moses Mayne. It is not certain what taxpayer association Ahuruonye represents, and the Peralta language concerning that taxpayer representative has seen some alteration. The bylaws for the oversight committee passed last summer by Peralta trustees says that the taxpayer representative must be a “member active in a bona-fide taxpayers association,” although what that means is not defined. In its resolution appointing Ahuruonye to the oversight committee last month, Peralta officials said that he will serve “as a citizen from a taxpayers association that supports a college or the district.” Ahuruonye did not return a telephone call asking for clarification of his taxpayer association status. 

Also chosen as one of the two at-large members of the oversight committee is League of Women Voters of Berkeley, Albany, and Emeryville community college chair Helene LeCar, who campaigned for the bond measure in the June election, writing a favorable article in the League’s newsletter. The second at-large position has not yet been filled, nor has the one for a representative of a senior citizens organization. 

Late last month, in a brief telephone interview, the Peralta executive director for marketing, public relations and communications said only that the oversight committee “has not yet met” and is “still being formed.” 

The long-running battle over the proposal once dubbed the Kragen project—for one of the site’s current tenants—and now the Trader Joe’s building—for a prospective future tenant—heads for a crucial decision Thursday. 

The proposed five-story residential-over-commercial project at 1885 University Ave. is only one of several controversial projects on an agenda so heavy packed that the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) is starting its meeting at 6 p.m., an hour early. 

Kragen/TJ’s 

If ZAB approves, a controversial project will soon be rising at the northwest corner of a key intersection—University Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Way. Nearby residential neighbors have battled the scale and mass of the project, while “urban infill” advocates and Trader Joe’s advocates have trumpeted its virtues. 

The project before the board calls for demolition of the current concrete block building on a site once eulogized by Allen Ginsberg and commemorated in a noted painting—and construction of a five-story, 148-apartment building with ground floor retail and two levels of parking, one for the store and the other for tenants. 

Developers Chris Hudson and Evan McDonald bolstered support for their project when they snagged Trader Joe’s as their commercial anchor. 

Stephen Wollmer, a project neighbor and an activist in PlanBerkeley.org, sent three separate letters to ZAB challenging the project and raising the possibility of a lawsuit should ZAB approve the project as submitted. 

Early designs were rejected by ZAB and the Design Review Committee, but subsequent revisions won the committee’s approval. Neighbors have protested the mass of the project, shadowing effects and traffic impacts. 

The latest version includes a plan to block Berkeley Way immediately west of the building to reduce an expected increase of traffic on the residential street behind the project. 

Among the other projects up for action at the ZAB meeting are: 

• An appeal by neighbors of the Iceland skating rink of ZAB’s approval of a temporary cooling system outside the 2727 Milvia St. facility; 

• A decision on approval of a five-story, 24-unit condo over commercial project at 2701 Shattuck Ave.; 

• Berkeley Unified School District’s plan to build a bus depot, classrooms and offices at 1325 Sixth St.; 

• Developer John Gordon’s plans to turn his buildings at 2629-2935 Ashby Ave. into a multi-tenant collection of shops, possibly including a fitness center; 

• Freight & Salvage Coffee House’s plans to renovate the buildings at 2020-2026 Addison St. into a new home for the cherished Berkeley institution; 

• A request by Aquatic Park Enterprises to demolish a vacant warehouse at 651 Addison St.; 

• Plans to build a two-story, three-unit residential building at 2813 Martin Luther King Jr. Way; 

• A request by the Ethiopia Restaurant at 2955 Telegraph Ave. to increase their hours of liquor service now set at 8 a.m. to midnight until 2 a.m; and 

• A request by Epicurious Garden at 1513 Shattuck Ave. to add beer to their current wine-only license and to legalize outdoor service at their Gourmet Ghetto eatery. 

The meeting will be held in City Council chambers at Old City Hall, 2134 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, 6 p.m. 

Museum preview 

Members of the Downtown Area Plan Committee (DAPAC) will meet Dec. 19 with Toyo Ito, the avant garde Japanese architect who will design the new downtown Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) UC Berkeley plans to build on Center Street in downtown Berkeley. 

The meeting, which will be open to the public, will be held at the museum and archive’s current home at 2625 Durant Ave. from 10 a.m. until noon. 

Among the other speakers will be BAM/PFA Director Kevin Consey and Kerry O’Banion, principal planner for the university’s Capital Projects program.

After the battles of almost half a year, candidates winning the local mayoral and council races will be sworn in at tonight’s (Tuesday) City Council meeting. 

Following are final statistics certified by the county registrar of voters. 

There are 69,780 people registered to vote in Berkeley of whom 46,166, or 66.16 percent, cast ballots. 

In the mayor’s race, Tom Bates won the reelection with 25,680 votes, 62.72 percent of the total; Zelda Bronstein got 12,680 votes, or 30.92 percent; Zachary Running Wolf picked up 1,880, or 4.60 percent; and Christian Pecaut got 517 votes, or 1.26 percent. There were 185 votes for write-in candidates for mayor. 

Incumbent Linda Maio won the race for District 1, with 3,746 votes, or 76.22 percent of the total, while Merrilie Mitchell got 1,126 votes, or 22.91 percent. There are 8,580 people registered to vote in District 1 of whom 71.96 cast ballots. People voted for 43 write-in candidates. 

Incumbent Dona Spring won the race for District 4 with 3,127 votes, or 71.20 percent; Raudel Wilson got 1,228 or 27.96 percent of the vote. There are 8,492 registered voters in District 4, of whom 61.42 percent went to the polls. 

Kriss Worthington, District 7 incumbent, got 2,119 votes, or 52.86 percent of the total, and George Beier got 1,870, or 46.65 percent. There are 8,608 voters registered in District 7, of whom 54.17 percent cast ballots.  

In District 8, Gordon Wozniak got 2,730 votes, or 63.09 percent of the total, and Jason Overman got 1,581, or 36.54 percent. There are 9,463 voters registered, of whom 55.84 percent voted. 

Yes on Measure G, an advisory measure to reduce greenhouse gases in Berkeley got 33,293 votes, or 82.30 percent. 

Yes on Measure H, calling on the House of Representatives to initiate proceedings for the impeachment of President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard B. Cheney won with 28,096 votes, or 69.52 percent. 

Measure I, which would have quintupled the number of allowable conversions of rental units, was defeated with 28,396 votes, or 73.87 percent of the vote. 

Measure J, which would have facilitated landmark designation, lost with 21,869, or 56.76 percent, voting to oppose the measure.  

For school director there were three winning candidates: Nancy Riddle got 22,856 voters, or 29.70 percent; Karen Hemphill got 21,777, or 28.309 percent; and Shirley Issel got 18,827 voters, or 24.46 percent. Defeated were David Baggins who got 8,444 votes, or 10.97 percent, and Norma Harrison who got 4,836 votes, or 6.28 percent. 

Four years ago, more people were registered to vote in Berkeley: 70,184, of whom 40,142, or 57 percent, voted, compared to 69,780 people registered to vote in 2006, of whom 46,166, or 66.16 percent, voted. In 2004, 78,638 Berkeleyans were registered to vote and 54.25 percent turned out to vote; in 2000, there were 72,299 people registered and 75.6 percent voted. 

In Alameda County, Phil Angelides won the governor’s race with 56.39 percent of the vote, Arnold Schwarzenegger came in second with 36.49 percent and Green Party candidate Peter Miguel Camejo came in third with 4.49 percent. The Libertarian, Peace and Freedom and American Independent candidates got less than 1 percent.  

In Berkeley, slightly more than half the voters went to the poles and slightly fewer voted absentee: 23,299 people voted at the poles and 22,867 voted absentee. 

Councilmember Dona Spring doesn’t think taxpayers should foot the bills for membership in organizations that take part in local electoral politics. A resolution on tonight’s (Tuesday) agenda targets by name both the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce and the Chamber’s Political Action Committee.  

“It’s important that public money not go to fund organizations that are political, electoral organizations,” Spring said in a phone interview Monday. Taxpayer money should not fund groups that “try to influence who has power in your own town,” she added. 

The council will also be looking at the intent of the city-university settlement agreement, the Solano Avenue Business Improvement District, cultural uses at the Gaia Building and more. The regular meeting begins at 7 p.m. at Old City Hall, 2134 Martin Luther King Way. 

City memberships questioned 

City Manager Phil Kamlarz said Monday his office is looking at the city’s organizational affiliations in addition to the Berkeley Chamber, such as the League of Women Voters and the California and National League of Cities, to determine whether they would fall under Spring’s resolution.  

For the November election, the local Chamber of Commerce endorsed incumbents Mayor Tom Bates and Councilmember Gordon Wozniak and unsuccessful challengers Raudel Wilson, who ran against Spring, and George Beier, who ran against District 7 Councilmember Kriss Worthington. The Chamber also endorsed against Measure J.  

The Chamber Political Action Committee spent about $100,000 to influence the local election: it supported the defeat of Measure J, supported Mayor Tom Bates and shored up unsuccessful attempts to unseat Spring and Worthington. Spring pointed out that while the PAC is nominally separate from the Chamber, to which the city belongs, the PAC uses the same address, the same office equipment and shares the Chamber’s mailing list for fundraising activities. 

Spring noted that the city would certainly not join organizations such as the Berkeley Democratic Club or Berkeley Citizens Action, both of which work for candidates and measures the groups endorse. 

Because the League of Women Voters sometimes does take positions on local ballot measures, membership in the organization might not be appropriate, Spring said. Berkeley, on the other hand, can influence the League of Cities with its vote. And the League of Cities does not support local candidates or issues, she said. 

On Nov. 14 the Richmond City Council voted to drop its membership in the Richmond Chamber of Commerce “to avoid potential civil or criminal penalties for using public resources to pay for memberships in organizations that participate in local political activities,” according to Richmond City Councilmember Tom Butt. 

Settling the settlement agreement 

A resolution introduced by City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque counters an interpretation of the UC Settlement Agreement—the July 2005 agreement between the city and UC Berkeley in which the city withdrew its lawsuit against the university’s Long Range Development Plan—that postulates that the city has given away its decision-making power downtown by signing on to the agreement. 

“…it has been suggested that the settlement agreement improperly delegates the city’s home rule authority to the university and grants the university a ‘veto’ over the city’s planning process with respect to the downtown,” Albuquerque writes. 

A lawsuit filed by four Berkeley residents—Carl Friberg, Jim Sharp, Dean Metzger and Anne Wagley (Daily Planet calendar editor)—contends that the city has lost control over downtown development.  

“The settlement says that the downtown area plan must be approved by both the regents and the city,” said Stephan Volker, attorney for the plaintiffs. “And the EIR (Environmental Impact Report) must be approved by both the city and the regents.” 

That means that the city will not be able to move ahead with downtown plans until the Regents approve the plans, Volker said.  

Solano Ave. BID 

By last week’s council meeting, 80 business people who pay collectively $14,305 to the Solano Avenue Business Improvement District had protested the existence of the three-year-old district. To automatically disband the district, the protesters’ assessments must reach more than 50 percent of the total $35,000 assessment.  

The council will continue a public hearing on the BID tonight. Business people in the district can submit their letters of protest or protest orally up until the closure of tonight’s public hearing. 

In other council business, the council will be asked:  

• to loan an additional $2.5 million for the Oxford Plaza project, 

• to decide what the appropriate cultural uses are for the Gaia Building on Allston Way.  

Developer Patrick Kennedy was allowed to build the project two stories higher than it could have been otherwise in exchange for a promise of cultural opportunities,  

but the council has yet to determine what the uses are and how much time they  

must be provided at the site. In closed  

session on Monday, the council was to discuss a lawsuit threatened by Kennedy. 

• to approve the second reading of the Landmarks Preservation Ordinance 

• to approve a resolution by Councilmember Laurie Capitelli asking the city manager to report on the city’s efforts to communicate its position on UC Berkeley’s planned development at and around Memorial Stadium. 

• to approve the appropriation of $100,000 per month for six months for the fire department to provide full staffing at all the firehouses at all times. 

• to hear an appeal of a zoning board decision to allow a duplex at 2224 Roosevelt Ave. to be converted to a single-family home and a new one-bedroom unit to be constructed on the property. 

• To approve a hike in parking fees at the new “pay-and-display” meters to $1 per hour effective March 5.  

Section 8 Rents May Rise  

The Berkeley Housing Authority will meet at 6:20 p.m. Tuesday, before the 7 p.m. City Council meeting. 

Among the questions the BHA will discuss is a possible rent hike for the city’s Section 8 renters—low income people whose rent is federally subsidized. They may have to pay out of pocket beginning in March if they wish to keep their units in Berkeley, according to a report written by Tia Ingram, Berkeley Housing Authority manager.  

Generally, section 8 renters pay no more than 30 percent of their income for rent and landlords get market rates for the units they rent to people in the program. But the Department of Housing and Urban Development, in establishing what they call “fair market rents” for the area, does not take Berkeley’s high rents into consideration.  

If the government allocation is not adjusted, about 750 tenants will be affected, with people living in studios paying an increase of up to $35, tenants in one-bedroom units paying $45 more, tenants in two-bedroom units paying an additional $97 and tenants in three-bedroom units paying $187 more. Many Section 8 renters are disabled or elderly and live on fixed incomes. 

The Housing Authority is working with HUD to get Berkeley’s higher rents recognized and subsidized, but to date that hasn’t happened. 

Violent crime incidents rose nearly 15 percent in the first nine months of the year, but some of the increase stemmed from paintball attacks during the spring and summer months that were recorded as aggravated assaults. 

The figures are reported in the quarterly crime report prepared by Berkeley Police Chief Douglas Hambleton for the City Council. 

Murders doubled—from two to four—but the 2006 figure was the same as 2004, while rapes increased from 15 to 17, compared to 14 in 2004. 

While aggravated assaults increased from 128 last year to 156—with 111 reported in 2004—most of the incidents accounting for this year’s rise were paintball attacks on pedestrians and motorists in which no injuries were recorded beyond bruises and welts. 

“These crimes are classified as aggravated assaults because there is a potential of more serious injury,” reported Chief Hambleton. 

The other violent crime that accounted for a large part of the increase was robbery, and here numbers rose from 256 last year to 283 this year, and 270 in 2004. 

While crimes of violence were on the rise—460 this year, compared to 401 in ‘05 and 399 in ‘04—property crimes were continuing to fall. 

While Berkeley currently records one of the highest rates of property crime in the Bay Area, this year’s total of 5,712 was down 6.7 percent from last year’s 6,125 and 15.8 percent from the 6,788 recorded in the first three quarters of 2004. 

Burglaries fell for the first three quarters of the year, dropping from 1,032 in 2004 to 945 in 2005 and 834 this year, with similar declines reported for theft (4,719 to 3,979 over the three years), auto theft (1,005 to 873) and arson (32 to 26). 

On Wednesday, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Inyo County Supervisor Susan Cash symbolically ended the most celebrated and notorious water war in American history. Ninety-three years after Los Angeles diverted the full flow of the Owens River into the city's aqueduct, Villaraigosa and Cash lifted a gate to reverse that complete diversion. Once again, water flows in the river channel. That act marked the consummation of the 1991 agreement between Los Angeles and Inyo County to govern the waters of the Owens Valley together.  

Today's officials celebrate the future of Inyo and Los Angeles. The veterans, on the other hand, bear witness to the decades of work required to get there. For Inyo County and its environmental allies, that meant pressing claims for honest assessment of environmental harm and securing respect from Los Angeles. For the people of Los Angeles, that meant political leadership at the highest levels recognizing Inyo County as the legitimate agent for the Owens Valley’s economy and environment, and hearing the county’s request (formulated in 1985) that environmental damage be offset by rewatering the river. For the people of Inyo County, that meant daring to put aside a near-century of distrust and taking on the risk of collaboration for the Owens River’s sake.  

In compliance with the agreement, water will once again flow freely in its riverbed for 62 miles to storage ponds near the dry Owens Lake. From there most of the water will be pumped into the Los Angeles-bound aqueduct; a small amount will moisten the dry bed of Owens Lake to help cure dust pollution. Along the river, natural habitat will be re-established and a productive fishery will contribute to the tourist economy.  

Let’s hope that the long, battle-earned lessons of Inyo and Los Angeles guide other such disagreements today. Sadly, most of the other major 20th century water projects in California continue to be governed as if the Owens Valley war and peace never happened. There is one happy exception: the Central Valley Project on the San Joaquin River, where environmentalists and project sponsors have negotiated, and are now awaiting congressional approval of, the rewatering of that once-mighty river.  

But on the Colorado River, four major water districts claiming the waters of Imperial County and the state itself refuse to recognize that county’s right to negotiate along with them in reallocating California’s share of that river. This refusal disrespects that county’s role as the legitimate representative of the Imperial Valley’s economic and environmental values.  

In the State Water Project, California itself has essentially abdicated its authority in favor of the proprietary districts that contract for state water. In challenging the deal among the Department of Water Resources and the major contractors to surrender project assets to parochial control, Plumas County (the project’s county of origin) and environmentalists secured a judicial mandate that responsible environmental assessment precede any decision. The state’s and contractors’ response: Years of still-ongoing delay, coupled with a self-righteous assertion that most of the project is immune to environmental assessment.  

That’s precisely the response that Los Angeles unsuccessfully invoked against Inyo decades ago.  

Most recently, in the proceedings to re- license one of the cornerstones of the State Water Project—the Oroville Dam—the Department of Water Resources and project contractors belittle the dam’s host county, Butte, which is attempting to secure fair compensation for the project’s impacts on the rural economy. This too is an ongoing negotiation.  

We who worked to reach the settlement over the Owens River urge California’s 21st-century water administrators not to repeat the 20th-century errors that took us so long to unknot. Inyo v. Los Angeles originated in the premise that for decades the city had been the winner, the county the loser, and that now the roles would be reversed. That dispute’s conclusion recognized that collaboration makes both Inyo and Los Angeles winners: The Owens Valley’s environment will be restored, and the city has found ways to serve a vastly expanded population on less water than used 30 years ago.  

To water managers who insist that local government and values deserve little place in water governance, and to rural communities hardened by years of distrust, let’s invoke a hopeful battle cry: Remember the Owens Valley.  

Antonio Rossmann, who teaches water law at the University of California, Berkeley, served as Inyo County’s special counsel from 1976 to 1997 in the groundwater war against Los Angeles.  

This article originally appeared in the Sacramento Bee. 

It’s the time of year when the lower-middle-brow fashionistas who inhabit the pages of the magazines I sneak peeks at in supermarket checkout lines say we should be wearing Winter White. That’s as it may be, but it certainly is the season for Winter Whine. Winter Whine is the sound you hear emanating from everyone who is dissatisfied with their relationship to winter holidays, or with other people’s mode of marking the winter solstice. 

Some of them are annoyed with people who celebrate a different holiday from their own, or, even worse, celebrate theirs in the wrong way. “Let’s put Christ back into Christmas” is one refrain. This means, often: who are all these tacky people who seem to be gathering around our Christmas tree and making up new songs on non-religious topics? Or the Jewish version, “When my children were small they got one tiny gift for each day of Hanukkah, and now my grandchildren insist on expensive video games.”  

The public schools get their share of Winter Whine: “Schools should ignore holidays altogether.” Or, “Schools should celebrate all holidays, everyone’s from all over the world.” In my lifetime the pendulum has swung between these two at least five times. Kids of course prefer the latter version, where they get both latkes and candy canes at school. 

Compared to the rest of the United States and much of Europe, Californians who indulge in Winter Whining look pretty wimpy. In Michigan when the trees are bare and the sidewalks are coated with ice and you can’t take the kids out without spending an hour dressing and undressing, there’s something to complain about. But in California December is the beginning of Spring. The hills are green, and all sort of lovely flowers are starting up in the garden: early narcissus, pansies, poinsettias, Christmas cactus. We’ve got a lot of salvias in our yard which grew from cuttings in gallon cans purchased at the Strybing Arboretum sales in years past. Only recently did we notice that they come from the Chiapas cloud forest section of the arboretum, so that they’re supposed to bloom in winter—their main show is just taking off. (We also didn’t notice that the mother plant of the Salvia Wagneriana was eight feet high and 10 feet across, which is why ours now threatens to uproot the sidewalk, but that’s another story.) 

Some Winter Whiners object to giving gifts—not all gifts, mind you, just commercial gifts, whatever that means to them. Excess consumption—consumerism—they say, between pursed lips. Well, they always have the option of rescuing attractive objects from the shelves of Goodwill or Urban Ore and gussying them up with wrapping made from color comics to make re-use fun. Or, if they have a lot of time on their hands, they can make old things into new things to give away.  

Every Sunday paper at this time of year is sure to have an article about SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder. This is thought by some authorities to be caused by the dark and short days, so the recommended remedy is spending some time every day under a big, bright light. Is it possible that a well-lit Christmas tree or menorah has the same effect on those who suffer from SAD?  

Up in Seattle, Rabbi A asked the airport people to add an electric menorah to the array of Christmas trees on display, and their response was to take all the trees down, prompting Rabbi B to send an op-ed all over the country saying that his good friend Rabbi A risked making Jews look mean-spirited, and that opposing Christian symbols would contribute to further secularization of American society, which would be bad for all religions. We haven’t yet heard from the pagans—no, sorry, the Pagans—who might justifiably claim that the Christians stole the trees from them in the first place, not to mention the mistletoe and holly. Last I heard, the trees were back, though I’m not sure why. 

But what’s wrong with secularization, anyhow? And is it really new in the United States? There’s a credible body of scholarship that suggests that America’s founding fathers intentionally designed this country to be secular and wanted it kept that way. Allusions to the deity didn’t start sneaking into the civic culture until about the middle of the nineteenth century. They peaked in the middle of the twentieth before starting the current decline. Many would say that this secular trend is the result of disappointment with those disciples of the major religions who manage to consistently ignore the clear messages in their various traditions that they’re supposed to love others and take care of the poor.  

Here’s a radical suggestion for a cure to Winter Whining. We could all celebrate the season, whatever season we celebrate, by trying to live up to the noble aspirations of our ancestors to do good, even if we no longer practice the religions that prescribed them. My spiritual adviser Jon Carroll has preached the Untied Way for years: Go to an ATM, take out enough twenties that it hurts a bit, and hand them out to the first people who ask you for money. If that’s too radical for you, how about at least speaking kindly to beggars while putting serious money into the Salvation Army kettle? Many paths to enlightenment… 

You work this job too long, you find that you’re often tempted to repeat yourself. In a recent letter, a Berkeley librarian voiced a complaint on behalf of herself and presumably others: “Many readers are tired of the constant divisiveness fomented by the Daily Planet. The paper should present some news on issues and culture that build community rather than encourage bickering and false differences.” She suggested, as an alternative, another nice story on the library’s new website like the ones that had already appeared in the Daily Cal and the East Bay Daily News.  

Presumably the “divisiveness” this librarian complains about refers to our recent reports and reader commentaries about the governance of the Berkeley Public Library. Inevitably, I was reminded of an editorial that appeared in September 2003, responding to complaints by the Berkeley Unified School District about our reports of problems at Berkeley High. At the risk of boring long-time readers, I’ll just quote, once again, a sermon by the Rev. Frank Logue, a rector in a small town in Georgia. He chided his congregation for wanting only cheery sermons using this analogy:  

“Small town local newspapers are known to be like sundials, they only work in the sunny hours and so are filled with good news. But, even our local Tribune and Georgian too often have to report bad news.”  

Luckily for Berkeley readers, they have the corporate version of the small town press, the papers owned by Media News, including the EBDN, to work the sunny side of the street. But if you want all the news, the real news, sometimes you have to see into the shade as well. Another quote which appeared both in Rev. Logue’s sermon and in the previous editorial was from the Wicked Witch of the West, Evillene, the most entertaining character in The Wiz, the updated version of The Wizard of Oz. Her signature refrain, which could be that of many Berkeley folk, is: “Don’t nobody bring me no bad news!”  

There’s a certain kind of Berkeley reader who wants all local stories to end with everyone holding hands in a circle and singing “Kumbaya.” Many of us have roots in an older form of leftist ideology that believed that good people with good intentions would eventually triumph in the end, despite the bad news coming out of, for example, eastern Europe. And from what used to be called the right, we have the unbelievable example of most of the national press swallowing Bush propaganda over most of the last four years, even though the majority of Berkeleyans and some others challenged the official version of what was happening in Iraq from day one. Such publications reported “the good news” for far too long. 

Then there’s the matter of how stories, any kind of stories, get into newspapers at all. Press releases are the traditional transmission method for stories like the one about the library’s new website. All public institutions seem to have added public information officers who see their jobs as getting the good news into print and keeping the bad news out. We get hundreds of press releases every week, many of them about warm fuzzy topics like the library’s new service.  

We have four reporters who are attempting to keep up with everything our readers might want to know about from Richmond south through Oakland, and they have to decide carefully about how to spend their time. We’re happy to see such feel-good stories surface in the Daily Cal or the EBDN, but when they’ve already appeared elsewhere we’re less inclined to think we need to use them.  

Besides competing demands on our reporters’ time, our available space is limited by the number of ads our salespeople can sell. Prudent management suggests that about half of our square inches should be ads, though we sometimes run more “white space” material than this formula would permit, when you include the acres we devote to letters and commentary. But we’re reluctant to add still more unsubsidized pages just so that everyone’s press release can get into print. 

When I was running political campaigns in my youth, I learned that if I really want to get an important story out, I’d give it exclusively first to a good reporter at a serious paper, instead of sending out a press release or holding a press conference. Lesser media would then copy, and they’d get the story straight because they’d copied it from a pro. Public information officers should consider using this technique. Later on, as a reporter myself, I learned that if I did a strong story, it would soon be in many other publications and on the television news, with no credit to me, of course.  

Nevertheless, it is the holiday season, which was invented in almost all cultures as a way of cheering humans up in the dark days of winter. The holidays inevitably produce the kind of stories which can be expected to build community and make us feel good about ourselves, and we’ll have more space to run them in the Planet since the public sector is headed for its generous winter break. Less Scrooge, more Tiny Tim, that should be our motto at this time of year—not so much “Bah! Humbug,” more “God Bless Us Every One!” We’ll try to keep that in mind. 

PEOPLE’S PARK 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Last Monday I attended the meeting of the People’s Park Community Advisory Board. During the public comment period people spoke about many issues around the question of removing the berms at the edges of the park—visibility, neighbor’s fears, drug dealing, the need for seclusion, and so on. No one mentioned the basic question: Whose park is it? Does it belong to the people who create and use it? Or to the University of Corporatia? 

It turns out that the university has backed down on removing the berms. But there is more mischief afoot. The advisory board and the university plan to hire a landscape design company. This company is to uproot 40 years of creativity and sweat by the local community and replace it with an outsider’s concept. This is completely inappropriate. People’s Park is more than berms, or grass, or even trees. It is also a monument to a community’s ability to create something beautiful, if only we can get out from under the bosses’ thumbs for a bit. That is what this new plan might destroy. 

At the meeting someone suggested that park supporters should pick their battles. I would add that we need to be clear about what we are fighting for. We are fighting for a park that belongs to the people. 

Helen Finkelstein 

• 

WHERE WAS THE PLANET? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Derby Street, one of the two or three most controversial land use projects in Berkeley in recent memory, went from community pariah to community feel-good project last Thursday night, but where was our local newspaper? After 12 years of discord, hundreds of letters to the editor, the field users, neighborhood and Farmers’ Market put down their war axes and reached a consensus on what is known as the Curvy Derby plan. Yes, there are still details to be worked out, and while it was clear that a majority of people attending the meeting supported this new plan, there are still a handful of people objecting. But without question the meeting on Thursday was an historic event if only because it was the first time since BUSD resurrected their plans for an athletic field at Derby that field users, neighbors and the Farmers’ Market were actually allowed to meet and discuss options for a baseball field at the site—and they reached consensus. Why this wasn’t newsworthy for the Planet is beyond me. 

Doug Fielding 

Chairperson, Association of  

Sports Field Users 

• 

BERKELEY, 1928 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

With regards to the proposed Memorial Stadium development, your readers may find this 1928 aerial image of interest. It clearly shows the existing and (then) freshly planted trees. My favorite detail is the lovely curve of north Piedmont Avenue. Bypassed in the 1940s perhaps for parking, it was replaced in the early 1950s by the courts at the Piedmont/Gayley intersection. http://sunsite.berkeley.edu:8085/AerialPhotos/airphotoucb28/. 

John Vinopal 

• 

TREE PROTEST 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The Panoramic Hill Association does not represent the feelings of quite a few residents on Panoramic in regards to the lawsuit it has filed against the university. After reading Richard Brenneman’s article I wondered if Doug Buckwald used to write for Saturday Night Live. “These harassments pose a direct threat to the safety of our tree sitters. Sleep deprivation could cause our tree sitters to accidentally stumble, tie a knot incorrectly or fail to clip a carbiner properly to the rope for the harness. Any of these mistakes could cause a fatal fall.” Well, considering they’re trespassing, that’s the chance they have to take. If you’re worried about losing oak trees, south of Leona Quarry there are about 400 that a developer wants to take out. So Doug, get your priorities straight.  

Matthew Shoemaker 

• 

TIGHTWAD HILL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Opponents to the plans for Memorial Stadium include the over 1,000 football fans from Tightwad Hill. They signed a petition against the UC design to add rows of stadium seats and sky boxes which could block the free view that the fans enjoy from above the stadium’s east side. Their mobilization complements the fighters on the west of the stadium who seek to save the old oak trees—earmarked for replacement by a fitness center.  

Asa Dodsworth of oaks group sees saving the trees as “one of a multitude of related problems.” He speaks of a potential coalition of tree-sitters on the stadium west, hill sitters on the east, homeowners with gripes against UC on the south, and to the north, the students and alumni trying to stop the conversion of Bowles student resident hall into a hotel for corporate visitors.  

For Planet readers who hate football: Tolerance is asked for the motley Tightwad Hill crowd, described by their spokesperson, Cal grad (PhD) Dan Sicular, as fans who either will not pay to see Cal football, or cannot afford to. Their hill “is a public resource” he says. And climbing it is “what goes around here for an age-old tradition.” The sitters have trudged up the steep slope since stadium opening in 1924. In the ’60s and ’70s, when our team was awful, the aroma of ganja was strong, as those on the hill did more viewing of the panorama of the Golden Gate than the action below.  

This year Sicular mobilized to publicize the hill. He and friends sold t-shirts, strung banners, circulated the petition, and Sicular wrote letters to the Regents. He welcomes our support. 

Ted Vincent 

• 

THE GREAT MOLLOCH 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It looks like the great molloch, UC Berkeley, is finally and long-overly-dueelly being challenged by a couple of sweet tree-sitters and, just recently, some home owners above the stadium, to desist from felling oak trees around the stadium. Years and years ago I dated a girl in Sherman Hall, a UC student coop, and I would walk back, after taking her home, through that wonderful grove of beautiful oaks. I hope fervently that this fight to preserve the oaks will become a cause as powerful as our own People’s Park.  

Robert Blau 

• 

‘THE ORGANIZER’ 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I see that Pacific Film Archive is finishing off a series of Italian films this Saturday with the 1963 The Organizer, starring Marcello Mastroianni, one of the three or four films that, at the end of his life he told an interviewer, he felt proud of having been in. It told of the terrible conditions in a textile mill and the aborted attempt to unionize and change them. I’ve seen the film maybe a dozen times. The first time was in 1963 at the SURF Theatre in San Francisco, the only place to see foreign films at the time. I remember going to visit my parents and saying, “This is not the usual Anna Magnani stomping grapes in the sun. This is northern industrial Italy. It’s like what you told me about your childhood in that factory town. You have to see it.” 

My parents replied, “If it’s about our childhood, we don’t care to see it.” 

Fast forward to 1985. Both of my parents have recently died, and Bob and I are going to Italy for the first time. We connect with my cousins in that factory town (my mother had kept up writing to them, then I had taken over) outside of Turin, called Balangero, which was no longer a factory town but a bedroom community for folks who commuted to Turin to work at Fiat. One day, I am walking with a cousin, stumbling through a conversation in my halting Italian, when she points to a crumbled heap of bricks, and tells me, “that was the factory where everyone worked. Funny thing, back when I was in high school, I came home, and there was a film company out here, trucks, equipment, movie stars....” 

Yes, it turned out that the interior factory scenes for The Organizer were filmed in that factory, which was no longer operating at the time, but still had the old machines intact. Various people in the village were employed as extras, so, yes, I had seen some distant relatives in the film. The video was just available, so I bought it and brought it home to my cousin’s house. My plan: We would watch it together, and they could point out neighbors, friends, and relatives who appear briefly. We set up the video. 

After about 20 minutes, my cousins began chatting, walking in and out of the room, generally inattentive, even avoiding looking at the screen or at me. I sat there feeling I had made some kind of mistake, but didn’t know what it was. Finally, one cousin took me aside and said, in slow, careful Italian to make sure I understood. “Look, we know you Americans admire all those post-war neo-realismo films, all that ‘Open City’ stuff. But we don’t like being depicted as a backward, ‘colorful,’ third-world, war-torn country. Those days don’t interest us. We don’t want to be reminded.” 

His response was like that of my parents. I was proud of the struggle of my family. But for my cousins, their parents’ hungry 12-hour days in the textile mill (that drove my family to emigrate to America and more struggles), were a reality that went on and on, along with two world wars (leaving memorials “ai caduti” all over the village.) It was all still too close. Maybe one day they’d feel distant, secure, like me—not yet. 

In any case, it’s a great film, and if you miss the Saturday night showing, you can rent it or borrow it from the Berkeley library. A classic. 

Dorothy Calvetti Bryant 

• 

END THE WAR 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

All the new Congress has to do in January is to repeal/cancel the original Congressional Joint Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 (Public Law 107-243)(Oct. 16, 2002). This action will end the occupation of Iraq immediately. It would pass and become the land of the land with a simple majority vote in both the House and the Senate. After this repeal vote passes, Bush will have to immediately withdraw all the troops from Iraq or else be will be acting illegally and unconstitutionally. If he goes down the route of defiance, he would be immediately subject to being impeached, tried, convicted and removed from office. Of course, Cheney should be impeached, tried, convicted and removed from office first. Can you say President Pelosi? 

This repeal of the original Congressional Joint Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 will not be able to be construed as “not supporting the troops,” because it will merely be terminating the troops’ current assignment. 

James K. Sayre 

Oakland 

• 

SNOOP DOGG 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

We are students at Berkeley High School. The rap icon Snoop Dogg has been in the business longer than we’ve been alive, his music is respected and appreciated. 

Because of this Snoop Dogg is a role model to youth all across the nation (meaning they are influence by his actions). Snoop Dogg’s music is legendary and popular but his lyrics send out the wrong message to the youth. He promotes marijuana use and gang affiliation. Smoking weed has many health risks, and many serious ones like cancer and damages to the reproductive and immune systems. Marijuana is more damaging to the bodies of youth than adults because everything in our bodies are still developing. 

Recently, we came across TMZ.com and found ads for Snoops Dogg’s own line of blunt wrappers called “The Blue Carpet Treatment.” We are shock by this, not only is he promoting marijuana use but it also adds to his personal message about perks of smoking. What is Snoop Dogg gaining from promoting these blunt wrappers except enslaving a new generation of addicts? There is no respect being gained from this. Respect of an artist comes from talent and music, not from promoting unhealthy behaviors. 

We all know many people who have gotten caught up in drugs or smoking and that have died because of it. We have dedicated ourselves to preventing the further use of tobacco and other drugs, and educating people about the harmful side effects. We respect Snoops Dogg’s talent in music but it would be more effective if he didn’t add to society’s destruction of youth. 

Shantel Mitchell 

Derwyn Johnson 

Nayiri Donikian 

Antonio Beroldo  

• 

STORMY WEATHER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Ever so often the situation in Iraq hits the news cycle like a storm stirring up political bickering, drowning reason and lifting ordinary people like me from bewilderment through incredulity, to disgust, hopelessness and despair. Who could have predicted that the unprovoked invasion of a fifth-rate dictatorship would spread so much dissent, hatred and bloodletting? 

Scan the storm’s path: remove Saddam, implant freedom, foster democracy, suppress insurgency, stabilize Baghdad, and…exit strategy? Only the first was accomplished, the others form a succession of twisted mistakes and failed turns toward a very dark horizon. 

If you place the most recent news event energizing the storm, the Iraq Study Group (ISG) Report, alongside its earlier cousin, the 9/11 Commission Report, and strip away their sugar-coated bipartisan, pseudo independence so that you are able to view them with naked common sense, you’re bound to be profoundly flabbergasted. 

Our top leaders seem immune to empathy. Has politics and celebrity rendered them bloodless? Not one of them considers how he/she might react if 140,000 uniformed and heavily armed foreigners, ignorant of our language and culture, patrolled the Washington D.C. streets, supervised and sanctioned Congress and guided Supreme Court proceedings.  

Members of the ISG directed their efforts toward indefinable success and unrecognizable victory. It is unlikely that they, who cannot resist another bite and the juicy news apple, will move a president who perversely prefers saving face over saving lives.  

Marvin Chachere  

San Pablo 

• 

IMPEACHMENT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Car bombs killed 63 innocent civilians and wounded 106 more in central Baghdad Tuesday morning. 

A study produced by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and published online by the Lancet (one of the world’s leading medical journals), claims that the number of deaths in Iraq is more than 10 times greater than previously estimated. It is said the death toll in Iraq following the U.S.-led invasion has topped 655,000—one in 40 of the entire population. This is an old finding with a new report putting the number of civilians killed at closer to 800,000. 

Are the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in George W’s misbegotten war grounds for impeachment? How many deaths will it take? 

Ron Lowe 

Grass Valley 

The Berkeley city attorney has stated that false claims have been made against the city in the lawsuit over the settlement agreement with the University of California (Friberg v. Bates, case no. 05230715).  

As one of the plaintiffs in this case, I take such allegations seriously, and appreciate the opportunity to respond. 

Let me begin with putting this in context: 

On May 17, 2005 the Berkeley City Council was presented with the proposed settlement agreement with the University of California. This was in closed session, council members were not allowed to make copies of the agreement, and were not allowed to discuss the agreement with their constituents prior to voting on it at the next City Council meeting. No councilmember, other than Mayor Tom Bates, had been party to the negotiations of this settlement agreement. 

We, the public, later learned that there was a confidentiality agreement between Mayor Bates UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, further precluding the council’s and the public’s participation in determining the content of the settlement agreement. 

On May 24, 2005, again in closed session, City Council voted to approve the settlement agreement, with Councilmembers Worthington, Spring and Olds voting no. 

The following morning, the Regents of the University of California approved the settlement agreement and the document was released to the public. 

It came as a great surprise to those of us who had been watching and commenting on the university’s development plans to realize that the majority of the settlement agreement was devoted to explaining the process of creating a new Downtown Area Plan for the City of Berkeley. 

The idea of a new Downtown Area Plan had not been raised by the University in their Long Range Development Plans, and not by the public in commenting on those plans. It had not been raised by the public at City Council meetings prior to the settlement agreement, and not by any council member nor at any council meeting that I know of. And it had not been raised at the Planning Commission, the city’s body charged with developing new area plans for the City of Berkeley. 

This was a new concept never before raised in public. And now it was the law, the settlement agreement having been filed with the Superior Court, Alameda County. 

And, as of December 2006, we still do not know where the idea of a new Downtown Plan came from, despite numerous Public Records Act requests and discovery relating to the lawsuit. 

Most disturbing to us, and the reason for our lawsuit, is the powers given to the university in the settlement agreement to craft and approve a new plan for the city’s downtown. 

The university may be the most important power in the city, but they do not have the legal power to plan or approve development in the City of Berkeley, any more than any other entity, the Downtown Business Association, the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association, the bicycle riders, the neighborhood groups or the arts venues. All deserve a seat at the table in drafting a new area plan, but none has more power than any other, and none has power over city council. 

The specific powers granted to the University of California in the settlement agreement are as follows. I will quote directly from the agreement, which is exactly what you and the Regents approved: 

“UC Berkeley will participate in a joint City of Berkeley/UC Berkeley planning process for the Downtown Area of Berkeley.” (Section II, p. 5) 

This new Downtown Area is larger than the area covered by the current Downtown Plan. This came as quite a shock to the residents of the newly incorporated areas, as there had never been any discussion about including them in the downtown. 

“Staffing for the preparation of the Downtown Area Plan shall include at least one … city planner and one ….UC Berkeley planner…” (II.A.1) 

“All public meetings regarding the Downtown Area Plan … must be jointly planned and sponsored by the City of Berkeley and UC Berkeley. All DAP and EIR meetings before all city commissions and the City Council will be coordinated with UC Berkeley.” (II.B.5) 

“…because the DAP is a Joint Plan, there shall be no release of draft or final DAP or EIR without concurrence of both parties.” (II.B.6) 

“Any mitigation measures included in the EIR must be acceptable to UC Berkeley …” (II.B.6) 

“UC Berkeley reserves the right to determine if the DAP or EIR meets the Regents’ needs. The basis for making such a determination would be that the DAP or EIR does not accommodate UC Berkeley development in a manner satisfactory to the Regents.” (II.B.7) 

Unfortunately the settlement agreement does not include the equivalent statement the UC shall not build projects that do not accommodate the needs of Berkeley in a manner satisfactory to the City of Berkeley. 

The quotations above are the exact words City Council approved. These are the exact words the Regents approved, and these are the exact words filed with the Superior Court of Alameda County. There is no ambiguity, and no confusion over the intent of the settlement agreement. 

This is the plain language and it is quite extraordinary in its delegation of powers to the university, and even more extraordinary that Berkeley City Council approved this. (With the honorable exceptions of Councilmembers Worthington, Spring and Olds).  

So you can see why residents of the City of Berkeley, who value public participation and community involvement in determining the future of our city, should be so horrified by the terms of the settlement agreement. 

We did not elect the Regents, they may not even live in Berkeley, and their plans are not subject to our laws, so why are they given the power to approve what may happen in our downtown? 

Someone had to sue the city for improperly giving away our planning powers. But it is not an easy decision to sue one’s own city, and the people we have elected to represent us. It is even more daunting to include in the suit the very powerful UC Regents. 

But what was approved in the settlement agreement is illegal, wrong, violates our own planning processes, and is detrimental to the valued democratic tradition of public participation we have in our city. 

This is the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. 

Anne Wagley is a Berkeley resident and works for the Berkeley Daily Planet. Further information on the lawsuit can be found at www.berkeleyblue.org. 

In 1969, I was among the many that originally built the park. I’m afraid (or delighted) that we didn’t have either a committee nor, unfortunately, the university’s permission. What we did have was... people. People directly affecting the park. Voting with their presence and participation. 

I spent many, many years away from Berkeley, only returning for some visits, until about a year and a half ago. During that time, I spent a great deal of time in the park. Days, evenings, even quite late at night. I’d make a point of walking through the park to and from Telegraph Avenue and where I was living a couple of blocks up the hill. Sometimes I’d just go out for a stroll, like on pleasant full moon nights, and sit for a spell in the park enjoying the space and touch of nature, perhaps sipping an espresso coffee or snack from the nearby cafes. So I’m having some trouble understanding quite what all the concern is supposedly about “safety.” 

No one ever bothered me. Well, unless some panhandling or offering of stuff for sale has to be considered as bothering. In fact, in all that time, the only people I’ve seen bothering one another has been between people that apparently know one another otherwise. But that’s usually the case, isn’t it? And that wasn’t too often, either. What is not the case, in my experience, is that the park is at all “unsafe.” 

Are we sure that some folks aren’t mistaking “no unsavory people” for “safety”? Because, yes, it’s not uncommon at all to see or be in proximity to any number of different kinds of people, in all manner of conditions. Many of these people could easily be regarded as unsavory, by most standards. Except theirs, of course. 

And some of these people, again in my experience, have been some of the friendliest—even generous—people I’ve ever run across anywhere. For instance, scruffy homeless people that offer to share or give food to complete strangers. Reckon the value of that as a percentage of their net worth and compare with the committee members’ comparable contributions in the park. 

Now, granted, there obviously are things that also go on there that I understand folks find objectionable. That clearly includes drug exchange, even use. And homeless folks camping out, not always too artfully. But that much doesn’t seem “unsafe” other than to those doing that. This also is maybe more accurately among the unsavory category. 

I might have some trouble imagining just who these fearful, safety-concerned persons are, since I’d have trouble matching them up with any of the many people I’ve seen actually in the park. But then, anyone who goes there and spends time there at all probably can see for themselves that it’s no more “unsafe” than most anywhere, and I happen to have found it to be demonstrably safer than many other places around the area. 

Maybe these people are suffering the dangers of their own thinking, imagination and judgmental stereotyping of other people not like themselves? Even people that would welcome them amiably, or simply leave them be—that is, if they ever might someday just go spend any time there. Voting with their own presence and participation there also could be a most direct, manifest commitment to supporting safety. While they are there. Among the people. At the park. That’s what it was all about, and still is, if that’s what they care about. 

Christopher Kohler is an Oakland resident.

I have been quite busy ever since three tree-sitters climbed into the trees at Memorial Oak Grove in the pre-dawn hours Saturday before the Big Game between Cal and Stanford. Our group, Save the Oaks at the Stadium, did not know of this plan in advance, but we support the tree-sitters fully in their endeavors and we will do everything we can to make sure that they are safe and have everything they need. It takes real courage to take such an action, and I believe that each one of our tree-sitters is a true hero. 

Even though there were many things to do at the grove, I took time off on the evening of Dec. 6 to attend the meeting of the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee, made up of city and university representatives. I have regularly attended meetings of this group because it is very important to me to offer public input into these decision-making processes. For this particular meeting, I had been invited by a member to offer specific information about my experience regarding UC Berkeley’s construction projects in the Southside, a topic with which I am quite familiar. 

I stood up and spoke during the public comment period, with the understanding that I would be able to respond to questions from committee. After all, I had seen public comment time extended in the past to allow for such questions. Instead, I was cut off abruptly after my three minutes were up. I had gotten through my general overview of UC’s construction impacts, but had not offered any specifics yet. None at all. 

I was very disappointed. I explained to the committee that I had come to speak even though I had been working so hard that I had gotten only four hours of sleep in the last three days, and that I had also taken time to prepare material for the meeting. I requested the courtesy of at least being allowed to read a very short paragraph from a planning textbook used at UC Berkeley. I had timed the passage before the meeting, and knew that it would take close to one minute to read. I was not asking for much. (For your information, the paragraph may be found in The Practice of Local Government Planning, 3rd Edition, ” 2000, published by the International City/County Management Association. It’s on page 425 in the section entitled “Traditional citizen participation: The trouble with public hearings.”) Would the chair be kind enough to allow me to read it? 

I was not allowed to read the brief passage. My request was flatly denied. And the reason given was rather ironic: if I read my one-minute passage, I would “inconvenience the 22 members of the committee who would get home later” because of it. Well, OK—I certainly don’t want to inconvenience people.  

The official explanation for the refusal, of course, was that my remarks were not listed on the agenda for the meeting. Not being on the agenda is an excuse for many civic sins in this town, and that is an issue for another day. But, getting back to the meeting: I was disappointed, sure—but beyond that I did not appreciate being treated so rudely. For pity sakes, I did not have to be there. I was there to offer my experience to a group that I thought would appreciate it. It appears that they have no interest at all in the facts about UC’s construction policies and practices. Lord help you if you are a business owner or resident in the downtown. 

Things are a bit different up at the oak grove. Please come and pay us a visit, chat with our brave tree-sitters, and sit for a while under the splendid canopy of these irreplaceable trees. You’re welcome any time—even if you’re not on the agenda. 

Doug Buckwald is a Berkeley activist. 

It is good to hear that the Hotel and Conference Center (HCC) will adopt LEED’s principles to the optimum in its design. As I understand the LEED principles, the project is supposed to show “Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.” The HCC is located in the heart of downtown Berkeley where it is in Berkeley’s most transit-intensive area. The Downtown Berkeley BART station, which has the second-highest station ridership use of East Bay stations, is just across the street. The BART station is utilized by more than 11,000 patrons per day and 10 AC Transit bus routes stop right at this area. Also there is a planned Bus Rapid Transit system similar to Boston’s Silver Line that will terminate in this locale. This BRT is projected to handle well over 60,000 riders a day over its route and could be extended down University to the Amtrak Station in the future. 

This location is not like the Gerry-designed Disney Center in Los Angeles, where they built seven floors of underground parking, which makes it very car-oriented. Because it is so car oriented It does not add to the area’s ambiance in promoting local activities . 

More and more studies conclude we need to recognize the effect of greenhouse gases (GHG) on climate change. The studies conclude that there’s a great need for their reduction. Autos are the major generators of GHG and if we do not reduce emissions it is projected that it would have dire effects on life. Therefore, we need to plan developments that will reduce of the use of the car. However, the design of HCC is complicit in encouraging auto use by utilizing considerable prime first floor space for cars. 

The proposed HCC design of the first floor, excluding the area of the bank, devotes about one third of the total floor area just for the auto to ingress, turn around and egress. This access will be the only street cut or driveway in most of the blocks along Shattuck, our main downtown street. 

To design such extensive access for the auto in the most intense transit oriented area of Berkeley is truly not adhering to LEED principles. The HCC should be functioning for decades, so it should be planned accordingly. Devoting so much space to the auto is not addressing this problem of increased auto emission of pollutants and GHG. If this valuable floor space is considered essential for the auto, its use should entail a charge where its use would not be subsidized but would provide a return similar to other spaces utilized. For parking, the rate for such a high valued property should be at least $20 per day or $1-2 per half hour. And even for the use of the turnaround drop off, there should be a charge, otherwise it would constitute a poor use of such a prime location. 

For numerous similar sites around the world having access to hotels and centers the drop-off is simply off the street and not within the building wherever there is good transit. Local examples are San Francisco’s Opera House, museums, theaters and Oakland’s Paramount, which do not provide such a valuable permanent space just for the auto. Also along the hotel frontage on Shattuck where the street cut is planned, there are presently several local bus route terminals or stops, including buses from the University, which would be a conflict that would need to be resolved. 

For a facility in a location with such excellent transit access, there should not be the need for providing such an extensive access plan for the auto. A plan in lieu, which I have advocated for years as an elected transit board member to AC Transit and BART serving 32 years, is to have the various planned activities absorb the cost of transit. Most large activities are over the weekend or evenings and by adding a nominal fee to all the tickets, it would subsidize the use of transit for the percentage of people who would use transit. A ticket holder would only have to show their event ticket and board free. Parking will be available at most of the local outlying BART stations, so they can take BART free as well. 

For the hotel, many of the people will be coming from out of town using the airlines where they can use BART that has good access at the airport as well as to HCC. 

For the condos, the living unit purchase should be separate from parking, which should be a separate cost. The number of parking spaces should be limited to around one half space per unit and there should be three to four spaces for car-sharing vehicles. Car-sharing membership should be included in perpetuity in the purchase of the Condos 

And if auto access and parking is mandated, the location of access should be a joint use with the museum, HCC and condos with the access along Addison. This location will not conflict with present bus transfers and boarding stops that are along Shattuck as well as the concentration of pedestrians. 

Oakland Museum has parking some distance from the museum itself. A little walking has not been a problem to the attendees to the Museum and this should be the same for HCC or condos. Overall, since HCC will hopefully function over several generations, we need to plan and design with consideration for improving our quality of life, conservation of energy and improving our environment, placing greater emphasis on of transit use for all types of trips rather than accommodating for the auto.  

Roy Nakadegawa is a professional engineer based in Berkeley who served for many years on the boards of transit  

agencies. 

EDITOR’S NOTE: This commentary originally appeared in the Daily Planet’s web edition on Oct. 17.  

Since the war on drugs began some $47 billion a year is reserved from federal, state, and local treasuries to combat the so-called menace that encompasses the trafficking, sales, and use of drugs directly affecting the citizens of the United States of America. This obviously reflects the government’s view on the subject of drug abuse and related activities as very grave indeed. It is apparently serious enough to lawmakers who deem it necessary to spend that insane amount of tax money, and commit entire agencies of human resources annually in an attempt to try and bring the problem to a halt. The trouble is that through all the searches and seizures, television campaign ads, and mandatory minimum sentencing there is no end in sight and it seems to have fueled a kind of evolution in the world of mind altering substances. 

Has the use and proliferation of drugs actually come anywhere near to being reduced one may ask? It seems that there is still a rampant desire to obtain these illicits among the public with no short supply of those who are more than willing to supply these people who have become victims of psychological addiction, possibly brought on by the need to self-medicate in a society that breeds depression and despair among many socioeconomic levels. Perhaps the resources that are available due to the taxes paid by many of these citizens should be applied to mental health outreach programs or even simply making information available on the root causes of unhappiness and depression in various degrees of life that we all go through. Instead it appears that a majority of people are left to the wolves and are sometimes “forced” to obtain what they perceive as medication from much easier sources than “appropriate” channels that are not accessible to the common public. 

So then there we are back to the arrest and incarceration of many users who have never been involved with any sort of violent crime, which one would think only fuels the fire of hopelessness and despondency that caused them to medicate in the first place due to the harsh conditions in the jails and prisons of the nation supposedly devoted to the “rehabilitation” of these lawbreakers. 

A recent article in USA Today offers the point of view that most television ads over the years have actually convinced the youth population that “taking drugs is normal” through information gathered from the Government Accountability Office. The GAO is sanctioned by Congress and their job is to research whether or not programs initiated by the legislature are accomplishing the goals that they were designed to do, or perhaps convalescing into colossal failures. One instance of failed policy seems to be the stubbornly coordinated “War on Drugs” that although has the best of intentions has missed the mark entirely. 

This most recent report covers the $1.4 billion spent on attempts to curb the rise in use of MDMA more popularly known as “ecstasy”. The GAO spent an additional $43 million on the investigation on the validity of the ads just to find that they were not useful tools in dissuading young people from taking these pills. 

The office of current drug czar, John Walters, has disputed these findings based on the fact that the ads were used almost two and a half years ago (which strangely seems to be the time it takes to gather information on the results). They also countered through a survey conducted by the University of Michigan in 2005, that there has been a 5 percent decline in 10th graders who reported having used illicit drugs in the last year compared to statistics from 1998. Wow, seven long years of work involved in dissuading high schoolers to say no to drugs have really paid off, haven’t they? 

I think that drugs are certainly responsible for a portion of society’s ills and we cannot let their black market run amok, unchecked by law enforcement officers on the beat, but how much evidence must we see in order to come to the conclusion that there needs to be a shift in strategy here? I don’t know what positive effects might have occurred as a result of the seizures of large amounts of various drugs over the years. I would imagine however that this pressure has caused steep increases in the value of said product and the higher stakes involved have brought forth more violent means of control of this lucrative market. It also goes to reason that there would be less armed robberies and burglaries to pay for the high prices placed on the backs of those already addicted to the menace of crack cocaine and heroin through the free black market. 

Perhaps the $600 per second that the federal government spends on its failing and unwavering strategy could be used more effectively when those in power no longer fear to admit that past reasonings on the issue were not perfect and should not be continued on the basis of ego issues that they most be the most proper simply because they were instigated by those who are in charge. 

Travis C. Ash is a Richmond resident. 

As news coverage focuses on the upcoming round of six-party talks this Monday aimed at resolving the standoff with North Korea, I am reminded of an historical event that occurred more than 100 years ago. 

At that time Korea was one country but struggled to reconcile internal and external pressures for modernization with powerful forces determined to maintain the traditional Confucian system. Pro-reform groups like the Independence Club looked to Japan as a model for the successful modernization of an East Asian country, while despising China as a symbol of a tradition bound state, wholly in opposition to modern values. 

Traditionalists fought to resist modernization, which amounted to Westernization and the collapse of a system in place for half a millennium. 

In the midst of this struggle a rebellion broke out among disgruntled military men resentful of the favor shown by the Korean royal house to a new and elite group of Japanese trained soldiers. The ensuing turmoil engulfed the entire peninsula, forcing an already shaken Korean monarchy to call for aid from China, its traditional ally in times of crisis. 

What resulted was a confrontation between Japanese and Chinese forces on Korean soil, as each sought to defend their own national interests in a Korea barely in its infancy of national independence. 

War between the two East Asian powers would not erupt for another 10 years. Japan would emerge triumphant over a China in turmoil to become, along with Western powers, an imperialist nation. Prior to this, hostilities were abated by the signing of what came to be called the Tientsin Treaty, or more aptly the Li-Inoure treatry, named for the two men leading negotiations over Korea’s future status. Li Hong Zhang was the leading proponent of China’s self-strengthening movement. 

Inoure was Tokyo’s jingoistic ambassador general in Seoul. Significantly, neither name is Korean. In negotiating Korea’s position, both China and Japan had completely ignored the interests of Korea’s rulers. 

Today press coverage of North Korea is unanimous in its ignorance of this isolated nation. Adjectives like “mysterious,” “reclusive,” and “Stalinist” are used to disguise what ultimately amounts to a resounding question mark when it comes to understanding the position of North Korea and its leaders. Yet modern Korean history can shed important light on the reasons behind the North’s go-it-alone, juche mentality. 

Some 100 years ago China, Korea’s one-time suzerain and political ally, in its own struggle with encroaching Western powers and an increasingly militarist Japan, sought to annex the peninsula. Tokyo had interests in Korea to fuel its growing military-industrial complex and to prove to Western powers that it too could play the game at colonizer. More recently Russia made attempts at controlling Korea, halted only by the arrival of American military forces in Seoul after the Japanese surrender of WW II. What resulted was the 38th parallel, better known as Korea’s DMZ, drawn in Washington D.C. by the American secretary of Defense Dean Rusk, in 30 minutes. 

As the next round of six-part talks is set to take place Monday, leaders of Japan, China, the United States and Russia again prepare to discuss the fate of the peninsula, while South Korea remains relegated almost to the position of an insignificant bystander. Perhaps it’s the fate of a small nation surrounded by larger powers to have its future decided by outside intervention, yet it is striking that modern Korean history remains scarred by the aggressions of external powers acting to defend their own national interests, without regard to the independent and sovereign status of the Korean peninsula. 

The fissures wrought by outside interference on the Korean peninsula go beyond the DMZ. South Korean politics are divided not only over how to deal with North Korea, but also in its relations with the United States, Japan and the larger world. Conservatives favor a tougher stance against the North and friendlier policies towards America, while liberals support reconciliation with Pyongyang and a gradual distancing from America. 

The Japanese colonial legacy in Korea remains a sensitive and divisive issue as scholars and politicians argue over the nature of Japan’s role in Korea’s modernization and the role of Korean “collaborators.” 

In this globalized, nuclear age Japan, the United States and indeed the entire world have a stake in the outcome of the six-party talks, and yet it seems ironic that the very same powers involved in the initial division of the peninsula in 1950 should again be discussing the future of the Korean peninsula. 

Is it any wonder why North Korea proves the paranoid and unpredictable sixth member? As in the past, major powers are paying little heed to the concerns of the Korean people who are inheritors of this historical memory, and the prospects of a future unified Korean nation.  

Peter Schurmann, a UC Berkeley student in Asian Studies, has visited Korea several times.

Mexico’s new president Felipe Calderón took office on Dec. 1. In a televised inauguration, congressmen could be seen fighting for control of the podium where Calderón was to be sworn in—some attempting to block him, others to ensure that he was able to take his oath of office. Calderón and outgoing president Vicente Fox, both members of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), entered through the back door and hastily carried out the oath of office amidst shouting that made it impossible to hear what they were saying. 

Calderón has promised repeatedly that he will fight poverty in Mexico. He announced a cut in the salaries of government officials, including his own. But he failed to mention that his budget cuts include cuts to programs and services that benefit needy sectors of the population. 

A look at some of the personalities who make up the key posts of his administration shows that Calderón’s new cabinet has clear connections to Washington and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). 

Agustín Carstens, Secretary of Treasury, was educated in the United States and held an important position at the IMF. Luis Téllez, Secretary of Communications and Transportation, has a graduate degree from the United States and worked in the administration of former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988 to 1994). He is indirectly linked to the Mexican broadcasting company Televisa and is a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Javier Lozano Alarcón, Secretary of Labor, is also a member of the PRI. 

Calderón is following the programs implemented during the administration of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. But he doesn’t have the money to carry out the public work projects that Salinas was able to finance through the sale of government-owned corporations. 

Among his first actions in office, Calderón has ordered the public education budget be cut by the equivalent of 1.2 percent (approximately $3.281 to $3.236 billion U.S. dollars)—despite increases in the cost of living, the number of students and the need for school renovation throughout the country. 

Raúl Alejandro Padilla Orozco, PAN Congressman and president of the Mexican House of Representatives Budget Committee, supported the budget cuts to the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), which is considered to be among the 100 most important universities of the world. This has generated an outcry of protest throughout Mexico. 

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said that a reduction in the education budget represents a threat to the social development of Mexico, where poverty has maintained at the same level for two decades. As more social programs are slated to be cut, critics say it’s unclear how Calderón will fulfill his promise to reduce poverty in the country. 

Two cabinet posts may offer a clue as to what to expect from Mexico’s domestic politics and administration of justice. Calderón’s appointment to Secretary of the Interior, Francisco Ramírez Acuña, has been accused of torture and the repression of protests in his term as governor of the Mexican state of Jalisco. Followers of the PRI have called him “arrogant” and uninterested in negotiating. 

Another controversial choice was Eduardo Medina Mora as Secretary of Public Safety. He is a member of El Yunque, an ultraconservative group similar to the U.S. Christian right, who has strong ties to banking interests. Critics worry that the application of justice could be influenced by politics—another lost opportunity, they say, in advancing democracy in Mexico. 

This may explain the new administration’s close involvement in the social conflict in Oaxaca, where leaders of the opposition were arrested while the disputed Oaxacan Governor Ulises Ruíz Ortíz remained in power. Oaxaca has been the center of a wave of protests in the past six months that have resulted in at least a dozen deaths, hundreds of injuries, the loss of millions and a profound social crisis. 

The brawls at Calderón’s swearing-in ceremony demonstrated the deep political divisions that exist in Mexico. Though many Mexicans didn’t take Calderón’s “express” inauguration seriously, critics say these divisions could become explosive if the new administration continues in the direction of Calderón’s first steps in office. 

FOMENTING PLANET 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Why didn’t the Daily Planet report on Berkeley Public Library’s new “Berkeley History Online” service? The Daily Cal had a front page story with photos on Thursday, 12/7. The East Bay Daily News also reported on this wonderful website that offers historical images of Berkeley. (Go to www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org for the link.) 

Many readers are tired of the constant divisiveness fomented by the Daily Planet. The paper should present some news on issues and culture that build community rather than encourage bickering and false differences. 

Jane Scantlebury 

• 

A SENSE OF PLACE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

While I think the suggestion for a modern traffic signal system at the MLK/University intersection is a good one (Jerry Landis, Letters, Dec. 5), it will do little to reduce the bottleneck that will occur particularly during rush hour as shoppers idle in the street waiting to get into the lot in order to pick something up on the way home. It also fails to provide additional parking for nearby stores which will be stressed by the development. 

And it does it little to encourage foot traffic. As a car-less shopper, I know that lugging groceries home by foot or on public transit is an onerous task most shoppers are loath to try. 

Therefore, I would like to offer the following additional suggestions (to be paid for by the developer and/or store, of course): 

1) Require TJ’s or any store that locates in the commercial space to provide free, same-day delivery service to all Berkeley shoppers. 

2) Require the developer to provide for ample street level parking for bikes, particularly bikes with trailers. 

3) Turn University from MLK to Oxford into a two-lane street with angle parking along the curbs on either side. This would not only increase parking for nearby businesses, it would slow traffic into downtown (as recommended by the experts) and could provide downtown with a sense of place. 

Joanne Kowalski 

• 

GIANT RAT  

RIDES AGAIN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I noticed that the Berkeley Daily Planet ran several articles about Berkeley Honda’s labor dispute, and thought you might be interested in the sad story of our maid friends at the Woodfin Suites Hotel in Emeryville. The Berkeley Honda activists are partnering with us to protest what’s been happening at the Woodfin Suites Hotel in Emeryville. 

Our family has lived at the Woodfin for two and a half years because a condominium we bought developed mold. The developer hasn’t fixed it for more than two and a half years. About 20 other families have been displaced by the mold in our building and live at the hotel; we affectionately call ourselves “the moldies.” 

Over the time that we’ve lived at the hotel, we have made friends with the workers here. I voted for a local Emeryville law, Measure C, that gave the hotel maids a living wage. One morning I woke up to a noisy demonstration by the hotel workers because the Woodfin management not only did not pay the maids their living wage as mandated by Measure C, but also threatened them with firings in retaliation for asking about their rights under Measure C. 

My young daughter and I ran out to join the demonstration, and have since joined up with East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (EBASE) to fight the firings. The maids, who are largely single moms, are being threatened again with firing, just in time for the holiday season. The “Scrooge” aspect of this situation is appalling ... it’s very sad for the maids’ children to have no Christmas. 

We are having another demonstration in front of the Woodfin on Monday, Dec. 18 from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. and we would be overjoyed to others from the community there. Many familiar Berkeley Honda activists, including the Giant Rat, will be present. 

Juanita Carroll Young 

• 

U.S. FOREIGN POLICY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Whoo boy! I am so passed by the Iraq Study and “our representatives” responses. Here is what I need to get of my chest. The problem is not just Iraq, it is American Foreign Policy and I mean all of it. Unless we consider U.S. foreign policy historically, in its entirety, we will not understand 9/11, Iraq, Vietnam, North Korea, Venezuela, the U.S. Congress approving torture, the loss of habeas corpus, and indefinite detention. In short, why do terrorists want to hurt us and why we have we lost our democracy? Answer: Foreign policy. 

When you hear the members of the Iraq Study Group saying things like “How we got here is no longer important. What is important is how we get out of here,” think of The Wizard of Oz when Toto has pulled back the curtain and hear “ignore the obvious, just pay attention to what we are saying.” 

An arc can be infinitely divided and each piece considered individually; so too can history. It can be said that our foreign policy has rendered successes and failures, but these are just pieces of the great arc. The trajectory of the arc of our history is obvious when viewed as a whole. As long as the foreign policy of this nation is to advantage the “homeland” at the expense of the world’s people, using any means necessary, we will eventually destroy both the world and our democracy. Iraq and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 are just the latest examples of our ultimate destiny unless we change our foreign policy. 

Harry Wiener 

• 

XXXXXXXXXX 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

This week I read Mr. Taylor’s opinion piece/article on the Jerry Brown regime. Mr. Taylor is right-on about a lot of stuff. I disagree though when he tries to blame Brown and the Oakland police for the spread of sideshows. Last time I checked, spinning donuts comes under reckless driving and is likely not an approved youth activity in cities outside of Oakland. The writer insinuated that sideshows spread because police moved the activity from Eastmont Mall. Perhaps Mr. Taylor can host a sideshow on his block. 

I hate to sound like a grumpy right-winger hills dweller, but the reason sideshows spread is because of the lawless thugs who partake in them. That old phrase “personal responsibility” applies in this case. Note to Oakland parents: Do you know where your kid is? In many cases, the answer from parent(s) is : who gives a rat’s butt? My 10K a year in property taxes is most likely being eaten up in police overtime trying to stop these activities and other lawlessness all around Oakland. 

Jerry and Oakland cops can take blame for lots of problems but they are not the ones glorifying sideshows and they certainly did not spread them. 

Michael J. Spencer 

• 

HOPE FOR PEOPLE’S PARK 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I would like to congratulate the community for coming out in support of People’s Park. The University of California has stepped back from the foolish plan to bulldoze the edges of the park. Thank you everyone. The standing-room-only crowd at the advisory board meeting on Dec. 4 showed an active citizenry concerned about this special park.  

And yes, there are a variety of ideas about what is best. I believe the spirit of People’s Park is best served by promoting dialogue and finding the common ground for improving our park. I am looking for others to help organize bringing together different people in the spirit of real listening and sharing with the goal to come to common understandings and ideas. There are also at this time many positive suggestions for events at the park that could help build community. Are there any takers out there who may be interested in organizing a jazz concert? Tea party? Book swap? Movie series? Art show? Yoga? 

And lastly, I would like to invite anyone who has ideas or concerns with the community garden on the west end of the park to come join the gardeners for a tour and idea sharing for improvements. If we can change our park through collective will and effort and the joyful work of volunteers, it will strengthen not only the history and uniqueness of People’s Park, but our community as well. We want your participation. Please join us in the garden on Sunday Jan. 21 from noon-4 p.m. (Jan. 28 if it is raining). 

Terri Compost 

• 

SURPRISE, SURPRISE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The UC Regents’ Committee on Grounds and Buildings green-lights UC Berkeley’s latest mega-building manifesto (beginning with god-coach Tedford’s contentious Student Athlete Tree Removal Center).  

Berkeley’s mayor and council threaten legal retaliation (see Richard Brenneman’s “UC Regents Approve Controversial Projects” piece in the Dec. 8 Daily Planet). 

Is this déjà vu all over again, or what? 

Welcome to this town’s newest spectator sport. Any citizen can play. No binoculars or skybox required. All you have to do is anticipate what will remain after municipal resolve melts down.  

For example, back in early 2005, who would have predicted a clandestine capitulation that forged, among other things, a downtown area plan advisory committee (DAPAC) from the university’s ambitious long-range development plan (LRDP)? 

Forget holiday gift-giving lists. Here’s the start of my own post-meltdown scenario list:  

The city withdraws its threatened litigation against UC in return for: 

• Three stoplights on the congested Gayley-Piedmont corridor. 

• Fresh UC Nobel laureate banners along Telegraph and University Avenues. 

• Lawyers’ fees for the city’s hired legal beagle, Harriet Ann Steiner of the Sacramento law firm McDonough, Holland & Allen. 

• All-expenses-paid tickets for the mayor and three councilmembers (Brown Act limitations apply) for the eight-day “Walk Croatia with Sandy Barbour” excursion with Cal’s athletic director during the final week of June 2007. 

• Two part-time aides to assist Planning Director Dan Marks and staff plan city-university mixed-use, transit-friendly development around the North Berkeley and Ashby BART stations.  

• A new hook-and-ladder truck for the Berkeley Fire Department. 

• Preferred-seating Big Game tickets for the mayor and three councilmembers (Brown Act limitations apply) in 2008. 

• A Goldman School of Public Policy chair for the retired mayor, beginning January 2009. 

Feel free to supply your own scenarios. Be creative. Be imaginative. But, above all, be realistic.  

You don’t want to suggest anything that would undermine or reverse that “giant step forward toward a lasting and equal partnership,” crafted in late May 2005, “between one of the world’s great universities and one of its most livable and progressive cities.” 

Go Gown! Go Town! Go Spectators! 

Jim Sharp  

• 

GIBSON FILMS BUSH? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Far from being a super-religious person, I think Mel Gibson just loves violence in all its guises. Even if his movies are historically accurate, his preoccupation with blood and gore is gratuitous. I say this because his Passion of the Christ has always bothered me. If it was meant to bring the heathen to Christ he should have concentrated on the resurrection aspect of the story. It was the so-called resurrection that supposedly gave people hope for salvation not the crucifixion. Many, many people die from execution, not many rise again to go to heaven to be with god. His latest movie is just more of the same minute inspection of torture and death. Mel would fit in well with the current administration where torture is standard practice and seemingly just begging for a Mel film treatment. Mel Gibson and his movies should be shunned by decent people. 

Constance Wiggins 

"Kudos for Kennedy" 

Developer Patrick Kennedy always seems to get a bad rap for things like shabby construction and ambiguous agreements allowing additional floors based on proposed “cultural” spaces. 

However, now seems a good time to thank him for the transformation of the former Bekins Building into UC Storage. This four story cube now has a completely new paint job plus a three dimensional “mural” of metal seaweed, fish, turtles and even giant birds adorning the Shattuck and Ward sides plus the roof. Most dramatic of all is the projected “high tide” somewhere between the second and third floor (a “global warming warning”?) 

While the outside is indeed strikingly beautiful (except for the billboards atop the north side) there is the matter of all the electronic equipment inside, ready to power up microwave antennas focused on three sides into our LeConte district. 

Volunteers have checked for cellphone “dead spots” throughout our area and have found none. Therefore, why should these new antennas be located here instead of in the hills where they would reach a larger area while filling known dead spots? (Recently the reporting of a fire in the hills was delayed because no cellphone service was available and a home was destroyed.) 

Thus we praise Mr. Kennedy for his excellent exterior while questioning the need for the highly profitable microwave antennas focused on our residential neighborhood. 

Karl Reeh 

President,  

LeConte Neighborhood Assn. 

Condomania—the current answer to developers’ prayers for short-term gain—is sweeping the commercial corridors of MLK Jr. Way, Shattuck, Telegraph, and Broadway in North Oakland. Variances and conditional use permits are being handed out like candy by the Planning Dept. to allow condo developers to exceed height limits, eliminate or reduce setbacks from neighboring properties and residences, and provide the barest minimum of off-street parking and required open space. Inadequate noticing of projects under consideration means most neighbors are in the dark until too late to do anything. 

No smaller apartment buildings or neighborhood-serving retail in existing buildings are safe from deep-pocket developers, who count on decking out the smallest parcels with the maximum number of units. UNLESS WE DO SOMETHING, YOU WON’T RECOGNIZE YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD! 

Many individual projects—some known, some unknown—are already in the pipeline. The developers and their allies are cloaking themselves in the rhetoric of Smart Growth, Density, and In-Fill. Opponents of these out-of-scale projects are now not just vilified as “anti-development Nimbys” but as promoting Global Warming! 

Development proponents—many of whom also pay lip-service to “affordability”—ignore the tenants being forced out of rent-controlled units to make way for the upscale market-rate condos. We already have woefully inadequate infrastructure—overwhelmed police and fire, failing schools, potholes and broken sidewalks—and can’t even cope with existing conditions. 

There is no legal linkage and no guarantee that building generic condo high-rises in North Oakland preserves farmland and open space elsewhere. Nor is the city making the developers put their money where their rhetoric is. The city has not demanded mitigation of money for parks, schools, and police and very little for street and traffic improvements for our neighborhoods. 

What can you do? 

The Planning Director serves at the whim of the Mayor, and planning staff may have to rationalize these projects in order to keep their jobs. Staff are not likely to oppose politicians who receive contributions from developers, who justify their projects saying they contribute fees, taxes, and jobs. But our ELECTED officials are as responsible as WE want to make them. District 1 Councilmember Jane Brunner should be aware of our concerns. She can’t pass the buck, blame Planning, or just throw up her hands. This is HER problem, too. 

•Demand a more representative Planning Commission that’s not just a developer Rubber Stamp! Appeals to the City Council of Planning Commission “decisions” are time-consuming and expensive. Mayor Brown makes ALL of the Planning Commission (and Landmarks Preservation Advisory Board) appointments. He just recently backed down from a parting-shot pick of a Republican social conservative to the Planning Commission. His pro-variance/pro-development predisposition SHOULD have prevented him from even being considered—luckily he was also pro-gun, anti-choice, and for heterosexual-only marriage! 

Major and controversial projects should go directly to the Planning Commission and bypass the Zoning Administrator. Projects first approved at the Zoning Administrator level can ONLY be appealed to the Planning Commission. Their decision is final, leaving litigation the only other step possible. 

Two side-by-side Shattuck Avenue projects exemplify the trend to development-on-steroids. 6535 Shattuck, three stories with six residential and two retail units, is already under construction after two years in the pipeline.  

More recently, planning staff readily granted a conditional use permit for a 4-story, 12-15 unit residential/ground floor retail project directly south at 6525 Shattuck, impacting the plans of the developer of the smaller project for solar energy. The Approval (oops, Planning) Commis-sion denied the appeal of the 6535 developer when he challenged his new neighbor’s proposed height, although they did lower portions of 6525 by all of two feet and limited the number of units to twelve. 

Brown’s most recent appointee, a Clear Channel executive, helpfully suggested the miffed lower-rise developer put his solar on the looming neighbor! Instead, the 6535 developer has signaled he’ll cancel the solar instead. What’s Green about that, you City Council self-styled Progressives and your Smart Growth allies? 

Another fallout of this steriod injection is the possible loss of a unique local business and de facto public park—the Dry Garden at 6556 Shattuck. The operator is in negotiations with the owner and hoping to buy the property, but with the condos-up-the-kazoo stampede, the price of the land nearly doubled after the approval of the twelve-unit condo complex. 

•Demand variances and conditional use permits be thoughtfully granted, not routinely to powerful developers so every new building exceeds the height limits, eliminates setbacks, and crowds neighbors. Ordinary people, of course, shouldn’t count on the same ease getting variances or conditional use permits for themselves. 

•Demand developers making killer profits underwrite the additional costs of police, fire, schools and other services their pro-jects require. 

•Demand a master plan—as Jane Brunner once upon a time proposed—from Lawton Associates—single-handedly morphing Temescal into Lawtonville—before more of their projects are approved. On Dec. 5 the City Council took up the appeal by outraged Temescal community members who collected over 1,000 signatures opposing Lawton Associates’ plans for 4700 Telegraph. They intend to demolish the three existing 1903 buildings with 11 affordable/rent-controlled units of housing for a five story, 51-unit market rate condo project, garnering five variances along the way. 

•Demand consideration be given to the impacts these out-of-scale projects have on the R-40 residences on the “side streets.” Property values may rise on the transit corridors with these over-sized projects, but ours will fall as we lose on-street parking spaces, views, and sunlight. 

•Demand TRUE in-fill housing—vacant lots, truly blighted buildings, NOT removal of functional, useable buildings. 

•Demand adequate noticing, including PROMINENT, eye-catching posted no-tices and project descriptions in front of development sites. If Berkeley can do it, so can Oakland. 

•SAVE what’s left of historic, interesting buildings on our shopping streets! 

BASTA! ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! 

An ad hoc, growing coalition of concerned neighborhood groups, including Neighborhood Preservation (655-3841) and North Oakland Coalition for Sustainable Community (654-2329) 

Regarding the proposed Trader Joe’s mega-project at 1885 University Avenue: 

In your last issue, Gerta Farber asked if I had considered in my previous comments the “exodus of Berkeley traffic on their way to Trader Joe’s in Emeryville or El Cerrito?” Yes, Ms. Farber, after four long years of involvement in this process, I have. I must ask you, have you carefully considered exactly what it is you are willing to give up for a developer who is shamelessly parading a non-union, German-owned grocery store chain as a means to a solely for-profit end?  

The developers’ campaign of “shock & awe,” centered on dazzling the powers that be and distracting the carbohydrate-deprived among you to the reality of this behemoth by dangling Trader Joe’s in front of you, does not fool the rest of us. Some of us see Hudson-McDonald’s ploy for exactly what it is: crude manipulation of the worst sort, designed to circumvent and explode the existing zoning laws and turn Berkeley into a densely populated, homogenized, chain-store loving mini-Manhattan. Some of us are not so blinded by the prospect of Trader Joe’s (and inflated potential revenue claims) that we are willing to allow developers any and all latitudes to get it. The point, Ms. Farber, is clearly explained by Steve Wollmer in his commentary contained in the same issue. Should Hudson-McDonald be allowed to run rough-shod over local and state laws because they have cleverly thrown a popular supermarket into the mix? As Mr. Wollmer points out, there are far more appropriate places in Berkeley for a Trader Joe’s. The site at 1885 University is not the only open space left in Berkeley, yet. Nor is it a downtown location. Andronicos on University and Berkeley Bowl are far closer to BART stations than this location, and yet, mysteriously, there are not a lot of people hauling their groceries via BART or bus all the way home. Why would this location be any different? And further, exactly what is Trader Joe’s providing that is so valuable that we are willing to sacrifice our neighborhoods and our local businesses to it? In the end, it’s all about the money.  

There are ways to lure a Trader Joe’s to Berkeley without destroying our residential neighborhoods, and without rewarding developers for doing so. Hudson-McDonald has practically given this valuable retail space away for free to a tenant who can clearly afford to pay for it. As I have said before, the residential neighborhoods have no intention of bearing the full burden of both Hudson-McDonald’s and Trader Joe’s greed. I refer you also, Ms. Farber, to the commentary by Fred Dodsworth. Be careful what you wish for and define as “success” for Berkeley. The exodus of cars to Trader Joe’s in Albany and El Cerrito you speak of will be nothing compared to the exodus of people fleeing a Berkeley they no longer recognize, care about, or care to live in. 

Regan Richardson lives in Berkeley. 

Here’s the Santa Claus plan: divide Iraq into two parts, called “naughty” and “nice.” Carve out the “nice” piece from some relatively unpopulated part of Iraq, and draw on the revenue from Iraqi oil to pay for construction of a pleasant, comfortable infrastructure—farms, homes, apartments, schools, business parks, stores and restaurants. Bring in people from Turkey to run the initial temporary administration for Nice Iraq. The Turks live in the region and already know how to run a secular state full of nominal Muslims. Invite immigration into Nice Iraq from Naughty Iraq, starting with a small group of essential workers and professional people. 

Provide initial free housing, health care and schools. Seed some business operations. It should be made clear to arriving residents of Nice Iraq that there will be no violence and no state religion. Anyone fomenting violence or preaching sectarian intolerance will be promptly deported to Naughty Iraq. 

Residents of Nice Iraq will be free to practice all varieties of Islam, including Sunni, Shia and Kurdish versions. 

As Nice Iraq becomes stable and prosperous, its residents will set their own policy for permanent residence by non-Islamic minorities. Once Nice Iraq is operational, it will begin to annex pieces of Naughty Iraq. Residents of Nice Iraq will vote on which areas to annex, and the residents of any area proposed for annexation must approve the action. There will be no mass population transfers—any annexed area will join Nice Iraq with all its residents in place. If some Shia can’t abide living with Sunnis, they are free to migrate elsewhere—to Naughty Iraq, Iran or wherever. 

A similar policy applies to any other intolerant people. Businesses operating in Nice Iraq will establish “foreign” business operations in Naughty Iraq, like Taiwan now operates businesses in mainland China. Such business activity will be at the risk of the companies involved, because Naughty Iraq will still be free to carry on with suicide bombers, roadside explosives and sectarian genocide. Visitors of all kinds will be free to enter Nice Iraq, unless they are found to have engaged in violence or have preached religious intolerance. 

Naughty Iraq will continue to be occupied, either by the US-led coalition or by a UN force. Nice Iraq will have no foreign troops, except for whatever temporary troops the Turks want to bring in, under Turkish command. 

Once Turkey has trained enough locals for police and border control, and a sufficiently long violence-free time period has passed in Nice Iraq, the locals will take over their own security. Residents of Nice Iraq will operate their own government, with initial help from the Turks, who will receive financial compensation for their efforts, from Iraqi oil revenues, via UN administration. Some neutral entity will need to keep control of the oil, so that the revenues can reliably be used for funding the infrastructure of New Iraq. 

Santa suggests one of the oil-rich Gulf States for this job. Saudi Arabia is not a suitable candidate, because so many Saudis practice an intolerant variety of Islam. 

Perhaps Dubai World Ports would take the job? 

Naughty Iraq will eventually disappear, being annexed piecemeal by Nice Iraq or perhaps absorbed by other countries in the region, such as Syria, Iran, Turkey or Saudi Arabia. Life in Nice Iraq might turn out be so good that some regions not originally part of Iraq might wish to be annexed, such as a Kurdish region in Turkey or Syria. Nice Iraq will eventually get a new name—not “Iraq,” which carries so much bad baggage. 

Santa recommends something with old historical roots, like Mesopotamia, Uruk or Babylonia. 

Steve Geller is Berkeley resident.

As an American who watched Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s violent overthrow of Salvador Allende’s government in Chile, I’m reminded of my own government’s role in the coup as I read reports of Pinochet’s death. 

In Santiago on Sept. 11, 1973, I watched as Chilean air force jets flew overhead. Moments later I heard explosions and saw fireballs of smoke fill the sky as the presidential palace went up in flames. Allende, the democratically elected socialist leader, died in the palace. 

From the moment of Allende’s election in September 1970, the Nixon administration mounted a covert campaign against him. Henry Kissinger, then Nixon’s National Security adviser, declared: “I don’t see why we need to stand idly by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” Weeks later the pro-constitutionalist head of the army, Gen. Rene Schneider, was assassinated in a failed attempt to stop the inauguration of Allende. 

For the next three years, CIA-backed terrorist groups bombed and destroyed state railroads, power plants and key highway arteries to create chaos and stop the country from functioning. The goal was to “make the economy scream,” as Nixon ordered. U.S. copper companies, along with communications corporations such as IT&T, also participated in the efforts to destabilize the country. 

In the midst of this struggle for control of Chile, Allende insisted, almost stubbornly, on maintaining the country’s democratic institutions. He enjoyed immense popular support from below, even in the waning days of his government when the economy was in shambles and virtually everyone believed a confrontation was imminent. I’ll never forget the last major demonstration on Sept. 4, 1973, when the Alameda, the major avenue of downtown Santiago, was packed with tens of thousands of marchers, all intent on passing by the presidential palace where Allende stood on a balcony waving to the crowd. This was no government-orchestrated demonstration in which people were trucked in from the barrios and countryside. These people came out of a deep sense of commitment, a belief that this was their government and that they would defend it to the end. 

In the aftermath of the coup, 3,000 people perished, including two American friends of mine, Charles Horman and Frank Terrugi. The United States, knowing of these atrocities, rushed to support the military regime, reopening the spigot of economic aid that had been closed under Allende. When the relatives of Horman and Terrugi made determined inquires about their disappearances and deaths, the U.S. embassy and the State Department stonewalled along with the new military junta. Four weeks after the coup, I fled across the Andes, returning to the United States to do what I could to denounce the crimes of Pinochet and my government. 

I returned to Chile for the 1988 plebiscite that finally forced Pinochet out of office after 17 long and brutal years. But for eight more years his dark hand hung over Chile as he continued in his role as the commander in chief of the army. Finally, as a result of years of hard work by the international human rights movement, Pinochet was detained in London in October 1998 for crimes against humanity. Five hundred days later he was sent back to Chile, allegedly for health reasons. There the Chilean courts lead by Judge Juan Guzman squared off with the general’s right-wing supporters and the military, stripping him of his immunity from prosecution as “Senator-for-Life,” a position he bestowed on himself when he retired from the army. 

As the proceedings against Pinochet advanced, new reports of U.S. complicity in the coup and the repression began to surface, particularly about the role of Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. The Chilean courts tried to compel Kissinger to testify, but they received no cooperation from the U.S. Justice Department. French courts also issued orders for the interrogation of Kissinger, making him realize that he, like Pinochet, did not enjoy international impunity from prosecution. Small wonder that Kissinger wrote an article in Foreign Affairs magazine, decrying the use of the principle of “universal jurisdiction” by courts to bring human rights violators to justice. 

In Chile, President Michele Bachelet, whose father died in prison under Pinochet, has refused to grant the ex-dictator a state funeral. Only military bands will play at his interment. Eduardo Contreras, a Chilean human rights lawyer, declared, “Pinochet should be buried as a common criminal,” adding, “The dictator died on Dec. 10, the International Day of Human Rights. It is as if humanity chose this special moment to weigh in with its final judgment, declaring ‘enough’ for the dictator.” 

The burial of Pinochet comes at a moment when the current Bush administration is being scrutinized for its atrocities and crimes against humanity that are even more appalling than those of the former Chilean dictator. It is another irony of history that Pinochet died on Donald Rumsfeld’s last full day as secretary of defense. Like Pinochet and Kissinger, Rumsfeld may very well spend the rest of his life trying to escape the grasp of domestic and international courts. Eleven Iraqi prisoners held in Abu Ghraib and a Saudi detained in Guantanamo are filing criminal charges in German courts against Rumsfeld and other U.S. civilian and military officials, including Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez. And on last Friday as Rumsfeld was making a farewell speech to his cohorts at the Pentagon, attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union argued in a Washington, D.C., federal court that Rumsfeld and three senior military officials should be held responsible for the torture of Iraqi and Afghani detainees. 

The Pinochet affair has shaped a whole new generation of human rights activists and lawyers. They are determined to end the impunity of public officials, including that of the civilian and military leaders in the United States, who engage in state terrorism and human rights abuses while violating international treaties like the Geneva Conventions.  

Roger Burbach is author of The Pinochet Affair: State Terrorism and Global Justice (Zed Books, 2004).

Next Tuesday morning, UC’s Berkeley Art Museum will host a public discussion of goals for its planned new downtown site. Attending will be Toyo Ito, the Tokyo architect whom the museum has engaged to design its new building. With this internationally renowned designer on board, and a downtown location on the map, BAM and its visitors face exciting possibilities. 

But surprisingly, the firmest foundation for this new museum sits neglected in plain view: the UC Printing Plant building that currently occupies part of the project site, at the corner of Oxford and Virginia streets. By preserving and adapting this existing structure, UC could provide the community with a truly ideal museum. 

The Printing Plant building has unique and irreplaceable historic value. In 1945, it printed the original United Nations Charter. For a community with Berkeley’s values, there is no structure more deserving of preservation. Its demolition would be a tragic loss. 

But just as importantly, the Printing Plant has inherent potential to be a really great museum space. It could be the next Tate Modern Art Gallery—the London sensation whose architects later won their profession’s highest honor, the Pritzker Prize. 

The Tate is a converted electric power station. It was originally constructed in 1947, eight years after UC’s Printing Plant. The buildings are in similar styles, with facades that feature embossed columns. 

When our city declared the UC Printing Plant a historic landmark in 2004, it cited its role in printing the UN Charter. But the landmarking also recognized the building’s front office block as a superior example of 1930s architecture. Local buildings in this “New Deal Moderne” style are few, and diminishing. 

The building’s working area, at the rear, was almost designed for conversion to museum galleries. It gets gentle natural lighting from north-facing “sawtooth” skylights, and from south-facing glass blocks. This kind of diffuse natural lighting blesses several museums that were successfully converted from industrial uses. 

My favorite is the one where I really learned to love museum-going: the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s (MOCA) Geffen Contemporary gallery. This is a red-brick building that star architect Frank Gehry adapted from earlier uses as a warehouse and hardware store. 

When I first walked into MOCA on a university assignment, it shattered my stereotypes of museums. I’d thought museums were still, stuffy, reverential places. But the “Temporary Contemporary” (as it was then known) was daylit, wide-open, and welcoming. It had the vibrancy of lofts where art actually gets made. 

“Hey,” I thought. “This place is too much fun.” I ran back every time a new show opened there. 

And a rather large city agreed with my assessment. L.A. residents loved this “temporary” museum so much that it has become permanent—even after MOCA completed a long-awaited signature building by another star architect. 

The UC Printing Plant has the potential to become just this kind of lively, inviting museum space. But it occupies only part of the site that UC has reserved for this museum. The lot just to its north, now home to a parking garage, could host a new and very different building. 

Ito is an innovative architect whose designs deliberately challenge ideas of structural permanence and outside/inside separation. With the interplay of venerable and new structures on this block, his first major American commission could give Berkeley something really striking.  

And given the Printing Press’ unique heritage—as a sort of “Ark of the Covenant” for the United Nations Charter—we might gain a truly profound monument to postwar ideals of peace and international cooperation. 

UC is a big institution with a complex mission. Part of that mission is operating the world’s two leading design laboratories for weapons of mass destruction (at Livermore and Los Alamos). 

You’d think UC leaders would take at least equal pride in the university’s small role in establishing the United Nations—an organization designed to ensure that nuclear weapons were never used again. You’d think they’d want to preserve the humble temple at the corner of Oxford and Center Streets. 

Like the United Nations itself, the Printing Plant isn’t perfect. It needed work even before UC recently shuttered it—leaving it subject to vandalism and decay. The graffiti now marring the UN plaque near the doorway is an awful shame. 

But like the United Nations, this building is irreplaceable. It’s done a lot of good over the years. And it has great promise for fulfilling a new, ever more demanding mission. 

Michael Katz is a Berkeley civic watchdog.

In a scene in the Civil War movie Gettysburg, a Confederate spy named Harrison is sent out on a night mission to scout out the position and strength of the Union army encamped in the Pennsylvania valley. The spy, identified in the movie as a former Mississippi stage actor, takes the assignment, but tells the general “but I must confess, sir, the thing that bothers me about this job [spying] is the absence of an audience. When you do it right, no one knows you’re doing it. Nobody watches your work. It’s very hard on an actor.” 

Politicians are often actors, and if you think I’m only talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger or Ronald Reagan, you’ve already missed the point of this particular sermon. Some politicians—I won’t speculate on the number—are deeply sincere in their convictions, and try to carry them out to the best of their ability within a deeply flawed system. But to other politicians-again, who knows how many—it’s all a game, an act, an end within itself, they go about their days publicly posturing and promising while privately dealing, maintaining themselves in power by any means they can get a way with, with little or no intent to actually solve the problems we have sent them up there to address. 

Jerry Brown—formerly secretary of state and governor, lately mayor of the City of Oakland, currently on his way to the post of attorney general of the State of California—is one of the most adept of these politician-actors, charming his way through a succession of public offices on a minimum of accomplishments, a maximum of show, virtually untouched by the disasters left in his wake. 

That Mr. Brown has gotten away with it so long—and continues to get away with it to this moment—will be one of the more fascinating stories of this era to political historians of another time. But how Mr. Brown has gotten away with it is one of the most underreported political stories of the present time. To keep the act up, Mr. Brown must keep us blinded by the stagelights and draw attention away from what is happening backstage. But like actor-spy in the movie, sometimes he chafes that his best work is being obscured and, with a sly wink and smile, open up the curtains just a little to give us a small peek at the real performance inside. 

Asked by a New York Times reporter late last month if the newly empowered national Democratic Party will be able to shape events in Iraq, Mr. Brown unexpectedly replied with what could be described as his definition of his life-long profession as politician. “It’s possible that President Bush will learn from [the Democratic victory] and collaborate with the Congress,” the paper reported Mr. Brown as saying. “In fact, that is the essence of an effective politician—to shift ground when the ground he’s on is collapsing under him.” 

Although we certainly want our politicians to be able to listen to their constituents and admit error and change position when and if they discover that their position is in error, we hear none of that here, and how much of a stretch is it to turn the verb “shift” into “shiftiness?” 

In May of 2003—as reported two years ago in this column—Mr. Brown was more forthcoming in describing the politician’s role-his politician’s role—when he spoke to a gathering of the Los Angeles Bar Association. 

“There’s a law we passed while I was running for reelection [for California governor],” Mr. Brown told the L.A. lawyers, “that said every high school will establish strict graduation standards, and no student can graduate without meeting them. So I took out an ad. The ad said we solved the problem of standards and slack performance in schools, because now we have graduation standards ... Well that was 1978 and of course, Deukmejian had an education program, Wilson had something, Gray Davis has these exit exams and now even George Bush has a ‘no-child-left-behind’ with the same kind of idea: standards examination. The point I want to make is that if you’ve got a problem, you can milk that thing a long time.” 

Cynical enough? Unbelievably, there was more. 

“When my father was running for district attorney of San Francisco in 1943,” Mr. Brown went on to the assembled attorneys, “he had a slogan [that] said: ‘Crack Down On Crime. Pick Brown This Time.’ I tell you I’ve been using that slogan. I find it still works. Everybody keeps making similar claims: ‘...if you elect me you’re going to crack down on crime’... Between reducing crime and improving education, you can keep that going a long time.” 

The entire speech was once reprinted on Mr. Brown’s website at www.jerrybrown.org. While it has since disappeared, the late Oakland activist Jeanette Sherwin posted the transcript to her Oakland News website, where it still exists at www.oaklandnews.com/archives/000044.html. 

Given this information, then, no one should have been surprised to read the report by San Francisco Chronicle political columnists Matier & Ross this week that begins with the sentence “Stunning as it may sound, Oakland’s Police Department—which handles some of the toughest crimes in the Bay Area—doesn’t have anyone who can read or match fingerprints.” OPD’s three-person fingerprint processing department, the columnists report, has been shut down for the past seven months “for lack of money and staff.” According to Matier and Ross, Mary Gibbons, the OPD crime lab chief, says that “she was forced to close the unit when the last of her fingerprint experts, hired with grant money and therefore temporary, left for the security of permanent jobs elsewhere.” Money to reopen the unit with two new technicians was not put into the budget until this year, after the unit had been closed. Meanwhile, fingerprints from Oakland homicide and rape investigations are sent to outside agencies, but fingerprints from other crimes are seriously backlogged or, in some instances, not even being taken at crime scenes by Oakland police because they know they will never get processed. 

Fingerprints used to be one of the staples of crime scene investigations. In recent years, the use of DNA has gotten more attention. But DNA is not always left by criminals at a crime scene and, even if it is, that has not made fingerprints any less valuable, because having DNA and fingerprint evidence together makes it both easier to identify a suspect and to thereafter convict that suspect in court. 

How many crimes have been left unsolved, or perpetrators unconvicted, is impossible to determine. But logic tells us it must be some. And because of that, some perpetrators who should have been taken out of circulation were free to stay on the streets of Oakland and commit more crimes. 

But what is most shocking—and even disgusting—about this situation is that Oakland citizens were not told about the problem with the financing of the OPD fingerprint lab when those citizens were in a position to do something about it. 

During the fall of 2004, Oakland city officials campaigned extensively for the violence-prevention funding Measure Y, which raised city taxes in part to increase police services. While there was much discussion about the shortage of police officers in Oakland at that time, at no time during that period was the public made aware that there might be a problem in the fingerprint processing department because it was funded by grant money and, therefore, permanent money for the department should be included in the measure. Had the Oakland public known the problem, it is almost certain that we would have approved language in Measure Y that set aside some of the money for the fingerprint department. Instead, fingerprint processing is not listed as one of the approved purposes in the Measure Y expenditure language, which, according to its language and the city attorney’s analysis, is specifically limited to police department hiring “63 new sworn police officers, including at least one officer for each existing community policing beat, for combating truancy, for a crime reduction team, for domestic violence and child abuse intervention, and for community policing training and equipment.” 

Was Jerry Brown responsible for this lapse? Absolutely. 

While the Oakland Police Department is run by the chief of police, the mayor has ultimate authority, with the responsibility of seeing that the major budgetary needs of the department are met by the city. In addition, in preparing for his run of Attorney General, Mr. Brown made law and order his specific province and one of his top priorities. For someone serious about solving Oakland’s crime problems, keeping the fingerprint unit online should have been high on the list of things to get done. 

But that presupposes that when you promise that you are going to crack down on crime, it is more than just a campaign slogan that can be milked out over time. 

Mercy, as my old editor, Jim French, used to say. 

Between 1900 and 1910, Berkeley’s population more than tripled, from 13,214 to 40,434 inhabitants. Much of the growth was stimulated by the flight of thousands of San Franciscans to the East Bay following the 1906 earthquake and fire. 

The disaster heralded an unprecedented building boom on this side of the bay. 

On Sept.19, 1906, the Berkeley Daily Gazette reported that 135 building permits had been issued since the beginning of that month. 

That day alone, 32 permits were issued to one man: “C.M. MacGregor of 519 Thirty-Second Street, Oakland, who is to commence the immediate construction of twelve $1,500 cottages on Peralta Avenue, North of Hopkins between the Santa Fe railroad and the Peralta Park Hotel and twenty $1900 cottages on Pine Street, near Webster. The fees for these permits alone amounted to $116.” 

Charles Manning MacGregor (1871–1954), a.k.a. “One-Nail MacGregor,” was born in Nova Scotia. While still in his teens, he joined his sister in Boston, where he learned carpentry. A brother living in California persuaded Charles that there were opportunities in construction here, and in 1889 he moved to Oakland. 

Having begun as a carpenter for hire, the thrifty MacGregor soon accumulated sufficient savings to become a builder and real-estate entrepreneur. His first house of record, a 6-room cottage constructed at a cost of $1,160, went up in 1896. 

Between 1898 and 1906, MacGregor’s name frequently appeared on building permits for houses designed by well-known architects such as A.W. Smith, Leo N. Nichols, Maxwell G. Bugbee, William Knowles, Coxhead & Coxhead, Albert Farr, and Bakewell & Brown. 

Many of his early houses were built in San Francisco, Alameda, and the nascent Piedmont, where he lived from 1909 until his death, and where he continued to build in the 1910s and ‘20s. 

By 1904, MacGregor had begun to design his own buildings, which he would do exclusively from 1906 onwards until his projects grew too vast. 

One of the largest projects built by MacGregor in the post-earthquake period is the Madison Park Apartments (1908) at 9th and Oak Streets in central Oakland. This handsome five-story, 98-unit Edwardian-style building is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. 

Apartment buildings notwithstanding, the builder was best known for his cottages. He often bought lots that were odd-sized or smaller than average and therefore less in demand by his competitors. Rather than employ an architect or use ready-made plans from pattern books, MacGregor hired a draftsman with architectural training. 

Having assumed the presidency of an Oakland lumber company, he was perfectly positioned to offer home buyers a one-stop shop at competitive prices. 

Along the way, he acquired the moniker “One-Nail MacGregor,” either for his thriftiness or for never sparing an extra nail. He certainly brought both qualities to bear on his projects, which were affordable and built to last. 

All 32 cottages for which he obtained building permits on September 19, 1906, still stand. The twenty that line Pine Avenue between Ashby Ave. and Webster St. make up a charming, village-like enclave that is unique in Berkeley. 

Mixing Craftsman and Colonial Revival elements, the Pine Ave. cottages are modest yet playful, with enough stylistic variations to make each one stand apart. Unifying the ensemble and the entire block are a common scale and repeated design elements such as half-timbered gables, square porch posts, and multi-paned clerestory windows. 

Remarkably, these cottages, now 100-years old, have undergone few alterations over the past century, and MacGregor’s vision for the street is virtually intact. The 12 cottages on Peralta Ave. between Hopkins and Gilman Streets did not fare as well. All but one or two have been visibly altered, and not always successfully. What brought about this dramatic difference between the two groups? 

Unlike their Pine Ave. brethren, which occupy an entire block, the Peralta Ave. cottages share the block with other, non-MacGregor houses. Whereas Pine Ave. is a narrow, intimate street, Peralta Ave. is wide and impersonal. The sense of place and the ensemble feel that are so resonant on Pine Ave. have never developed here. 

Although the Peralta Ave. cottages were built for more modest pocketbooks ($1,500 vs. $1,900 on Pine Ave.), they are attractive and well-made, featuring many of the same design elements seen on Pine Ave. Yet as realtors often remind us, location, location, location is key. Magic on Pine Ave., ho-hum on Peralta. One is a village, the other, a suburb. This fundamental difference in ambiance is what fostered respect for precedent on Pine Avenue and lack of it on Peralta. 

Of course, these 1906 cottages were only an episode in MacGregor’s career, which continued in full force for several decades. With Harry Webb, he was responsible for developing significant parts of Ashby Station. By the age of 36, he had built 600 homes. 

MacGregor is best known for having built over 1,500 homes in Albany, where he began to develop tracts in the late 1920s. The Depression did not slow him down, since his working and selling methods were particularly suited to the circumstances. He eliminated the need for subcontractors by directly employing carpenters, lathmen, plasterers, painters, and finish craftsmen. He pioneered the practice of building several houses concurrently, thus keeping his crews continuously employed. He also evolved the “rent to own” policy, helping young families to acquire a home gradually. 

In 1936, his vast projects in Albany prompted MacGregor to move his office from Oakland to Solano Avenue. For many years, Albany celebrated MacGregor Day. His houses stand as proof that thrift and quality need not be mutually exclusive. 

The writer is indebted to Gail Lombardi and Dale Smith for their research. 

Photograph by Daniella Thompson. This MacGregor cottage at 2960 Pine Ave. exudes a palpable country atmosphere.

I met a nice couple the other day. Sadly, they were clearly in some distress over the fortunes of their remodeling process. They’d engaged a GC (builder-speak for general contractor) last year to do a rather sweeping and costly rehab on a mid-sized house in the hills of Oakland and things hadn’t gone quite as well as they’d hoped. 

It seems that the fellow was something less than the consummate businessman. In fact, I’d say that the fellow (after much questioning and examination in situ) was really (drum-roll please) a “carpenter.” “Oh my gawd” wails the woman with the baby. “For shame,” proclaims the preacher. “What are you talking about?” says everyone else. 

A carpenter is not a GC, but what is? A GC is an organizer of work, a writer of contracts and a supervisor. The GC is the person who makes sure that the client gets what they paid for as opposed to the person who provides the labor, although a GC can provide both services. 

When is it reasonable for a GC to provide both services? When the job is quite small and he or she is not running several other jobs at the same time. Nonetheless, the primary function and the most vital service isn’t the swinging of the hammer but the communication, conception and organization needed to make the job happen. 

This fellow our nice couple had working for them was cheaper than the rest (one of my first questions). This was the attraction and as you’ve hear me say a hundred times, it’s often, but not always a precursor to woes and lamentations. He was probably cheap for at least two reasons. First, he probably didn’t know how much things really needed to cost to cover all his expenses. Most people don’t and builders often take some years (moi included) to begin to figure out what all this stuff really costs. Construction costs are a lot more than lumber and labor. They include profit, taxes, office and shopping time, servicing of vehicles, continuing education, paying the accountant and phone bill. There are, most assuredly, a huge number of costs in the practice of general contracting as there are in the running of nearly all business, except that contracting is more complex in this regard than most. A GC is running a tiny corporation with shipping, inventory, highly skilled labor, PR, advertising and emergency room medicine. It’s amazing that there are so many successful small contractors who don’t end up in court and not at all surprising that so many do end up in trouble with their clients. 

The second reason that this fellow was cheap was that he didn’t value his time highly enough and didn’t know how to make sure he’d make money on the job. Every good GC values their time and make sure they make enough money to make each foray worth the trip. Believe me when I say that you don’t want to hire someone who doesn’t know their value and isn’t going to make money on the job. That path is paved with discontent. 

The GC in this case was a pretty good carpenter but he was a poor manager of time and of his labor force. He didn’t show up every day and, more importantly, didn’t have a reasonable facsimile of himself showing up every day to make sure that apparent progress on the job was to the satisfaction of the clients. 

It would also appear that he did not maintain a good set of accounts on the job because in the legal trouble which is now boiling-over, he is preparing to present tens of thousands of dollars of additional cost which he had never billed for. Now, this may be a ruse but I strongly suspect from previous experience that, at least some of, this is correct. 

Small timers and those who should rightly stick to carpentry and, perhaps some plumbing and wiring, often find themselves out of their depths when they begin functioning as general contractors (in this case, read accountant). A businessman with little experience in hammers and saws is probably more qualified in many ways to function as a GC than someone who has all the back issues of Fine Home Building. 

I’ll amend the previous lie with one major proviso and that is my strongly held believe that GCs should be very good at telling the clients what they should and should not be doing to their homes. One of the best things that a GC can tell a homeowner is that the “improvement” that they’re attempting to parley for is plainly a bad idea. 

A talented GC, like a talented architect (they’re more alike than you may think) can look at a clipping from Sunset magazine and tell the client how to make it look and feel like that that but a GC who lets the client decide where the joist should run is a fool (this appellation, sadly also goes to the client who so directs the action). 

Our young couple clearly had someone (possesed of great talents and high hopes) doing more than they were really capable of doing with impunity and reliability. As a result, they’re pissed off and disappointed. Also, I suspect, the contractor is feeling similarly abused since he probably worked his hiney off to keep them happy and may genuinely feel that this house contained some of this best work. He may not yet understand that his failings were not so much in his workmanship but in his business savy. Now, I’ll confess, there were a couple of stupid things he did in the actual construction but that can happen to even the best and I have a feeling that the architect played a small role him or her/self.  

Naturally, it’s these physical items that the clients are beating the war drums about and soon the fur will be flying (I hope the arbitration judge doesn’t wear a toupee). Nonetheless, I contend that had the Carpenter been a good GC and had money set aside to fix things that went wrong (and had maintained a good working relationship with the client through speedy work and clear paperwork), they would be splitting the costs of a major screwup and would be sharing a glass of holiday cheer right about now. 

As it is, the fellow is probably unable to make his mortgage and might even be suffering the maladies of a strained marriage (I’m not joking). 

By the way, I’d like to suggest that the additional cost of a more able GC might well be less than what these sweet folk will end up laying out by the time the lawyer’s bill and the court judgment all come due (not to mention the formidable cost of suffering and delays). 

That’s another thing to keep in mind: The court won’t necessarily take their side, even if I and their attorney think they’ve been fleeced and abused. Court, even arbitration is a crapshoot. 

At the risk of repeating myself, I’ll close with the following suggestions: 

Get several bids before hiring your general contractor. Start by calling their references and visiting some of their previous jobsites. Make sure you’ve heard from some satisfied clients and be sure that they’re not old friends or relatives. A good recommendation might include “she was a bit rigid on how she worked and a more money than we wanted to spend but everyone who comes to the house just oooo’s and aaaah’s at the work. We know we made the right choice.” 

You see, the results of good choices are not necessarily sugary-sweet, easy or cheap but that doesn’t mean that they’re not good choices. 

Got a question about home repairs and inspections? Send them to Matt Cantor at mgcantor@pacbell.net.

Oh my, this is a touchy time of year, all those cultural sensitivities waiting to be stepped on. Wishing someone “happy holidays” would seem universal enough, but I read a newswire piece the other day in which a guy was quoted as bragging that he’d bullied some hapless WalMart clerk into wiping that phrase off a window because, “It’s supposed to be ‘Merry Christmas!’” Honestly, sometimes it makes me miss good old Saturnalia.  

But worse traps await the holiday gift-giver. 

You’d think I’d’ve known better, but I stepped in the droppings bigtime some years back when I gave my mother-in-law a plant for her room. The bright places by the window were already filled, and I thought she needed something green in a spot that didn’t get much light.  

I thought I had the perfect idea, inspired by my own beloved Grammy Adams who’d always had a couple of big snake plants in the downstairs parlor. 

I’d developed a fondness for Sanseveria species after seeing them as curbside plantings in Honolulu, and I knew they were tough, not choosy about light, and easy to care for. 

What I didn’t know, or had forgotten, was that in some regions they’re called “mother-in-law’s tongue” and that’s a diss on mothers-in-law, as the plant is indeed tongue-shaped if the tongue is long and sharp. (Plus, it’s green. Ew.) 

Why of course my mother-in-law was from one such region, and she’d never heard of another name for the plant. Oops.  

I have to credit her patience, nevertheless. The plant survived her, and it’s on the hereditary sideboard in our dining room now – next to my snake Shep. I put a shorter Sanseveria species in the cage with him and he hasn’t squashed it flat yet; in fact, it’s given me two offsets to plant elsewhere. 

That’s one tough plant. I’d suggest it as a holiday gift to anyone but your mother-in-law. Just persuade them not to over-water.  

Lots of those granny plants are tough, which is probably why they’re granny plants. It’s a good idea to give a plant that’s not likely to die and leave the new owner feeling all incompetent and depressed.  

Grammy Adams had a few other plants in that little coal-patch row house, including one upstairs that my dad referred to, singing the British music-hall ditty, as “the biggest asssssssss-phidistra in the world.” 

I’m pretty sure it wasn’t an asphidistra, though, from the story of Poppop Adams’ obligingly unraveling it from the picture rail, on which it clambered all the way around the room, and toting it downstairs to show off to visitors. I think it was a “Devil’s ivy” (Epipremnum) or a pothos (Scindapsus) of some sort, or maybe a heart-leaf philodendron.  

The last two are pretty sturdy and finesse the “Devil’s” superstitions. Asphidistra—“cast-iron plant”—is, as implied, another indomitable houseplant: upright but taller than Sanseveria, dark green. Asphidistra, Sanseveria, and Scindapsus all have lively-looking variegated versions.  

Go on, give one. It’s still less presumptuous than giving a kitten.  

With conservatives still reeling from their losses in the mid-term election, and President Bush’s approval ratings heading for record lows, for the first time in six years liberals have something to cheer about. Rather than gloat about Bush’s ineptness, or the failure of the GOP-controlled 109th Congress, liberals should focus on their opportunity to sink the conservative ideology that has dominated American politics for twenty-five years. 

There are ten pillars of conservative political wisdom that liberals should attack: 

1. Government is bad: Conservatives believe the federal government is unnecessary, except for the military. They maintain that entitlements for the disadvantaged—the poor, elderly, and disabled—are counter-productive, as they foster dependency. Most Americans believe in the necessity for the federal government and these entitlements. It’s the role of liberals to provide a new justification for government, in general. 

2. Competence is overrated: Because conservatives don’t believe in government, they feel the only salient qualification for political office—such as President and Vice President—is ideological purity. As a result, the Bush White House has proved to be the most conservative and least competent administration in modern political history. Liberals must insist that elected officials have a record of accomplishment; they should believe in working for the common good and know what they are doing. 

3. Cutting taxes fixes everything: Beginning in 2001, the conservative Bush administration reduced taxes, claiming this would reduce the size of the federal government and a “rising tide would lift all boats.” Instead, this ill-considered “panacea” created a record Federal debt and lifted only the yachts of the rich. Liberals need to roll back these tax cuts and take a stand for fiscal sanity. 

4. The market will provide: Conservatives believe that, in the absence of federal programs, the market will solve national problems. America’s healthcare crisis demonstrates that this is naïve: the market doesn’t care about problems that affect the average American. And the market doesn’t respond to disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina. Liberals should argue that only government can solve certain national problems and resurrect the notion that government provides a “the safety net.” 

5. Our best foreign policy is a strong military: Even though the United States has by far the largest Defense budget in the world, conservatives continue to lobby for billions of dollars for wasteful Pentagon projects. They argue that big is better, that America’s best defense is a strong military. They ignore the fact that our armed forces didn’t protect us on 9/11 and haven’t won the war in either Afghanistan or Iraq. Conservatives also argue that the military is our best instrument of foreign policy. It’s time for liberals to demand a complete review of our defense strategy and foreign policy. 

6. The U.S. is at war: Since 9/11, conservatives have argued we’re engaged in a “war on terror.” But we’re not. Terrorism isn’t a military campaign waged by countries that don’t like us; it’s a social disease that requires America to use a variety of means to combat extremists. Liberals need to stop calling this a war and begin lobbying for a balanced campaign that includes diplomacy and use of police and intelligence resources. 

7. Don’t ask questions: President Bush has consistently argued that it’s not necessary to understand why terrorists want to attack us, all that’s required is knowing they “hate our freedom.” However, most experts on terrorism argue that terrorists have readily understandable motives, and we can head off future attacks by understanding what these motives are, for example, they want us to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord. 

8. Trust the commander-in-chief: Since 9/11, Bush and his conservative supporters have argued that the President, as commander-in-chief, has special responsibilities that obviate the necessity for the balance-of-powers logic in the Constitution: because the US is at “war” the President is above the law. Liberals need to attack this notion and roll back legislation that restricts our civil rights. 

9. America can go it alone: A cornerstone of conservative foreign policy is the belief that our allies are stupid and, therefore, don’t care if we act like bullies most of the time. The Bush Administration philosophy assumes that since the United States has a bloated military, it doesn’t matter whether or not we use diplomacy or participate in international organizations. Conservatives believe that because America is big and powerful, we can do whatever we want in the world: go it alone. Liberals need to point out that the strategy hasn’t proven successful, that it hasn’t built the alliances required to solve problems such as terrorism, AIDS, and global warming. 

10. Winning is everything: Finally, the operating philosophy of conservatives has been that it doesn’t matter how you accomplish your objectives, just that you win: the ends justify the means. This has been the modus operandi of a conservative Bush Administration that lied to the American people. Liberals need to stand up for telling the truth, argue that Americans are governed by a morality that values the common good, and places the public interest above personal ambition. 

In short, liberals need to provide a resounding defense of democracy. 

For the first time in 12-plus years I’m allowing myself to think back to what life was like before Ralph’s accident. My musings began the day after he died when I started the process of planning Ralph’s memorial service. It has continued intermittently, everyday since.  

At first it was hard to look at old, pre-accident photographs of Ralph, when he was strong and fit, and could stand on two legs and swing a hammer with one hand while changing a light bulb with the other. I found shoeboxes full of snapshots of Ralph pursuing his favorite activities: biking, skiing, cooking, and brewing beer. I slid them into frames, tacked them onto bulletin boards, and prepared for the arrival of family and friends.  

During the service many people told stories about Ralph. Cal talked about working with him at the lab and a visit to England and Germany together during a business trip. Another co-worker recalled daily lunch-break bike rides with Ralph, over Patterson Pass and back, 35 miles without stopping—just a piece of cake.  

Colleen remembered meeting Ralph and his twin brother, Richard, in the Wine Country and being confused by who was who. Chris Giorni recollected running into Ralph at the local Safeway and Ralph chastising him for buying cheap beer.  

Sue Grieve told the sad story of borrowing Ralph’s windbreaker for our annual bike ride up Mt. Diablo. “Ralph’s coat got caught in the spokes of my rear wheel,” she said. “It ripped a hole in his expensive Patagonia jacket. When I told Ralph what had happened, he had only two words for me. ‘Replace it’ he’d said, and I did.” 

Kris Anderson recalled Ralph’s request to borrow her sewing machine. “I’m making a vest for myself out of an Oriental rug,” Ralph had told her. When Kris asked him if he knew how to sew, he’d answered, “No, but I’ll figure it out.” 

Our friend Aimee, who lived with Ralph and me years ago, was next to tell a story. “I wanted to make banana bread,” she said. “But Ralph informed me that I couldn’t make it unless I added nuts. I told him I didn’t like nuts. ‘So?’ Ralph had said.” 

“I volunteered to make two loaves, one with walnuts and one without. Ralph said no. He explained that if I made only one loaf with nuts, he’d be stuck with half a bag of walnuts and then the next time he wanted to make banana nut bread he wouldn’t have enough nuts for two loaves. Instead of baking,” Aimee said, “I went into my bedroom and had a good cry.” 

Lenore Waters spoke next. Unlike many of the others, she talked about knowing Ralph when he used a wheelchair. “I met Ralph at a party in Point Reyes,” she said. “My daughters and I were staying in a small cabin above Tomales Bay. It was a struggle to get Ralph and his big electric chair into the house, but eventually, with lots of pushing and shoving, and the help of several strong men, we were able to do so.” 

Lenore paused, and unfolded a piece of paper. “There was a player piano in the cabin,” she said. “We gathered around it and sang. Suzy wrote a story about that magical day. Here’s what she wrote.” 

I leaned in further in order to hear Lenore read.  

“Ralph harmonized with the group. He sang louder and louder and louder. I could hardly believe he was my husband, so strong was his voice, so clear his words, so joyous his tune. He belted out Rosemary Clooney, Fats Waller and anything by Rodgers and Hammerstein with an ease and spontaneity I did not know he possessed. When Arturo put in the roll from the musical Fame, Ralph let out a ritornello that stopped everyone cold. “FAME!’’ he shouted. “I’M GONNA LIVE FOREVER—I’M GONNA LEARN HOW TO FLY!’” 

There was a long silence after Lenore read. Some of us looked down at our feet, but many of us, including myself, looked up at the sky. It wasn’t scary anymore to think back and remember Ralph. It felt good.  

A tree student learns a set of categories: the 50-mph tree, the 30-mph tree, the stop-and-think tree. The distinctions here concern how fast-moving and far away you can be and still be able to identify a tree—how distinctive it is from a distance.  

A subset of 50-mph trees is the drive-by orchard. Citrus orchards are pretty obvious from miles away, if they’re in bloom and you’re downwind. Pear orchards are easy when they’re out of leaf, because their youngest twigs are so determinedly vertical.  

Walnut orchards aren’t hard if you can see the trunks. Even without their distinctive compound leaves, they’re marked by the funny-looking trunks, dark at the bottom and pale starting from a foot or three off the ground. The height of the change varies, but it’s usually uniform within each orchard, which gives it the odd effect of an orderly regiment of trees in knickers, or cavalry boots. 

What’s going on here is a marriage of convenience. The walnuts we find in the market most of the time are English (or Persian) walnuts, from trees of the species Juglans regia, with their familiar pale and relatively easy-to-open shells. That tree prospers here, but for one thing: it doesn’t like poorly drained clay soils.  

But we have our own native walnut, the California black walnut, Juglans californica. I myself like black walnuts better than English walnuts; blacks have a haunting perfume, a heady port-wine note in their flavor that I treasure. The problem with black walnuts as a commercial nut is that they’re really hard to crack. There are jokes about strewing them on the driveway and backing your car over them a few times.  

The native walnut, no surprise, likes the native soils just fine. So walnut ranchers (Don’t you love living here, where we have dairy ranches and walnut ranches and, up the hill, a Fish Ranch?) graft English walnut scions onto black walnut trunks, and everybody grows up to be a happy tree in kneesocks.  

The walnuts that Walnut Creek is named for were the native California species. Europeans found them growing around the sites of indigenous villages. Donald Culross Peattie cites “the oldest records” in limiting the oldest stands to “the valley of Walnut Creek, in Contra Costa County, the banks of the Sacramento River, particularly at Walnut Grove, and Wooden Valley east of Napa.”  

There’s a magnificent senior black walnut living next to a well-kept big Victorian in Rockridge. Walnut trees turn up in random backyards where squirrels have planted them; we have a ten-foot whip in the skinny space along our driveway, where the squirrels also bequeathed us a few native live oaks. The problem with a gift walnut is that they don’t play well with others, at least some others.  

Black walnut roots exude juglone, which inhibits growth in some plants—tomatoes (which you wouldn’t grow in a tree’s shade anyway) and their kin; azaleas and rhodedendrons; mountain laurel (and presumably its California cousin, Kalmiopsis); blackberries and blueberries.  

But hot or long composting breaks down the juglone compound into its nontoxic components, and there are so many plants that don’t mind juglone that it’s barely a limitation. Japanese maples supposedly get along just fine with black walnuts, and so do plants as diverse as daffodils, hibiscus, honeysuckle, and heuchera.  

There are lots of wild or feral black walnuts along the roads and streamways up in the Delta and north, and over the hills in Contra Costa. The only time you see bare spaces under them is when they’re along a cleared road, or when they’re rootstock that has overgrown the English walnut top—I see that often at the edge of an old orchard. Otherwise, natives and invaders elbow black walnuts like any other tree. 

Sometimes black walnuts are the roadside row of a working orchard. I’ve heard that tourists and passers-by can be obnoxious about helping themselves to orchard fruit; maybe the black walnuts are bait. (Professional nut rustlers typically strike after the nuts are picked and ready to ship.) You can tell them from the English walnuts by their bark—dark and furrowed all the way up the trunk—and their narrower and pointer leaflets.  

I’d thought that these and the black walnuts I see in the wild were insurance against the species’ extinction, but maybe not. Apparently most of the black walnuts we have are hybrids between our Californians—the two varieties, J. C. californica and J. C. hindsii used to be considered separate species—and Eastern black walnuts, brought here for more rootstock. The wild genepool is a resource against diseases like the butternut blight that’s whacking the southeastern Juglans cinerea. Hybrids are fine, if we keep them leashed.  

If you want to see orchard walnuts used as street trees, go to Vacaville, where there are memorials of the groves that were built over, not far from the Adobe exit from I-80. 

Photograph by Ron Sullivan  

Foreground, black walnut: dark bark, narrow leaflets. Behind, English walnuts grafted onto black walnut stock.  

FRIDAY, DEC. 15 

THEATER 

Altarena Playhouse “ The Man Who Saved Christmas” at holiday family musical Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at 1409 High St., Alameda, through Dec. 17. Tickets are $15-$18. 523-1553. www.altarena.org 

Berkeley Rep “All Wear Bowlers” at the Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St. through Dec. 23. Tickets are $45-$61. 647-2949. 

Masquers Playhouse “Company” by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2:30 p.m. at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond, through Dec. 16. Tickets are $18. 232-4031. www.masquers.org  

Naked Masks “Far Away” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. Sun. at 7 p.m. at Berkeley City Club. Tickets are $10-$20. Runs through Dec. 17. 883-9872. www.nakedmasks.org 

Shotgun Players “The Forest War” Thurs.-Sun. at 8 p.m. at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., through Jan 14. Sliding scale $15-$30. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Wondrous Possibilities” Abstract art by Sibylle Szaggers. Reception at 5 p.m. at Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th St., Oakland. 465-8928. 

FILM 

Janus Films “Kill!” at 7 p.m. and “Sword of Doom” at 9:15 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

“El Cerco” screening and conversation with filmmaker and Argentine torture survivor, Patricia Isasa at 6:30 p.m. at The Uptown, 356 26th St., between Telegraph and Broadway. Donations accepted. 654-5355. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Before Columbus Foundation American Book Awards Celebration at 6:30 p.m. at the Afircan Museum and Library, 659 14th St., Oakland. Free. 228-6775. 

Gregory M. Franzwa with show slides and discuss the “Lincoln Highway in California” at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, Community Room 2090 Kittredge St. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Ballet Theater, “The Nutcracker” at 7 p.m., Sat. at 2 and 7 p.m. and Sun. at 2 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $16-$21. 843-4689. 

California Revels “Christmas Revels” Celebrating the stories, songs, dance, and drama of 19th century Quebec, at 7:30 p.m. at Scottish Rite Theater, 1547 Lakeside Drive near Lake Merritt, Oakland. Tickets are $15-$42. 452-3800. www.calrevels.org 

The Women’s Antique Vocal Ensemble, the Schola Cantorum of St. Albert Priory, and the instrumental ensemble Alta Sonora will perform 14th to 20th-century Christmas music from France, Italy, Spain and Germany at 8 p.m. at Lake Merritt United Methodist Church, 1330 Lakeshore Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $5-$15. www.wavewomen.org 

Rebecca Boblak, Ben Stolorow and Javier Trujillo perform Gershiwn and DeFalla at 8 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. 848-1228. giorgigallery.com 

Remembering the Ancestors, Modern and Afro-Caribbean dance, at 8 p.m. at at Live Oak Theatre, 1301 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5, children free. 841-5580.  

Somos at 9 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$12. 849-2568.  

John Santos Quartet “Clasicos Criollos” at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

JukeJoint Sextet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $15. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Swingthing, holiday gala, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Swing dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $11-$13. 525-5054.  

Al Stewart at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $25.50-$26.50. 548-1761.  

Bill Crossman Group at 8 p.m. at 1510 8th St., Oakland. Donation $5-$15. sfjazzmusic@yahoo.com 

John Thayer and Christina Kowalchuk at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Built for the Sea, The New Centuries, Pants Pants Pants at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Born/Dead, Young Offenders, Surrender 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. 

Bucho, soul and hip hop, at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $7. 548-1159.  

Sol Spectrum at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Rimshot at 9 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $7-$10. 451-8100. www.uptownnightclub.com 

Charlie Hunter Trio at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $16-$28. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SATURDAY, DEC. 16 

CHILDREN  

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

La Familia Peña-Govea plays Mexican children’s music at 11 a.m. at Studio Grow, 1235 10th St. Cost is $6. 526-9888. 

Elmwood Theater Matinee Benefit for local schools showing “Madagascar” at 10 a.m. and noon, and noon on Sun. Cost is $2. Sponsored by Elmwood merchants. 843-3794. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Bringing the Condors Home” A look at the Ventana Wildlife Society’s 20-year effor to restore California condors to the wild opens at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. and runs through April 15. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

“Gesture and Gestalt” Paintings of Albert Hwang and glass and metal sculpture of Victoria Skirpa opens at 6 p.m. at Float Art Gallery, 1091 Calcott Place, Unit #116., Oakland. 535-1702. 

Ceramics by Lizette Sanchez and Robert Bartlett-Edney Functional and decorative raku pottery and sculpture on display from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. at 728 Liberty St., El Cerrito. 847-7380. 

FILM 

Jacques Rivette “Up/Down/ 

Fragile” at 5 p.m. and Janus Films “The Organizer” at 8:15 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Ballet Theater, “The Nutcracker” at 2 and 7 p.m. and Sun. at 2 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $16-$21. 843-4689. 

Carol Alban “Miracles at the Chimes” solo flute music at 3 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. Free. 228-3218. 

Pacific Boychoir “Harmonies of the Season” at 7 p.m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 114 Montecito Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $20. 652-4722. www.pacificboychoir.org 

Voces Musicales “A Renaissance Christmas” Spanish and English music of the season at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church, Dana and Durant. Tickets are $10-$25. 528-1725. 

California Revels “Christmas Revels” Celebrating the stories, songs, dance, and drama of 19th century Quebec, Sat. and Sun. at 1 and 5 p.m. at Scottish Rite Theater, 1547 Lakeside Drive near Lake Merritt, Oakland. Tickets are $15-$42. 452-3800. www.calrevels.org 

Black Nativity Holiday Pagent at 2:30 p.m. at Allen Temple Baptist Church Family Life Center, 8501 International Blvd, at 85th and A, Oakland. Tickets are $7-$20. 544-8924. 

“Remembering the Ancestors, An Eclectic Mix of Modern and Afro-Caribbean Dance,” directed by Cherie Hill, 8 p.m. at Live Oak Theatre, 1301 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5, children are free. 841-5580. 

Melodikibolism, new works by graduates of Mills College at 8 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana St. Tickets are $8-$12. 549-3864. 

Robin Gregory & Her Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Naivdad Flamenca at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $18-$20. 849-2568. www.lapena.org  

Musical Night in Africa with Kotoja, West African Highlife Band, Afro-Groove Connexion at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

“A Night in Persia” Persian dance celebration at 6 pm. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, One Lawson Rd., Kensington. Tickets are $20-$35. 925-462-6691. 

James Riddle and Heather Frederick at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Henry Clement & the Gumbo Band at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761.  

Fred Randolph Quintet at 8:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$15. 845-5373.  

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

Hammerlock, Cheap Skate, White Barrons at 8:30 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $8. 451-8100. 

Dale Miller & Powell St. John at 8 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7-$10. 558-0881. 

Big B and His Snake Oil Saviors, Crooked Roads, Lariats of Fire at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082.  

CV1, classic Jamaican dub grooves, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Fuga, La Plebe, Manicato, Son Del Centro at 7 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway, Oakland. Cost is $10. 763-1146. www.oaklandmetro.org 

Babyland, Jewdriver, Yidcore at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, DEC. 17 

FILM 

Janus Films “Yojimbo” at 4 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Dahr Jamail, Peter Phillips & Larry Everest will discuss the new book “Impeach the President: The Case Against Bush and Cheney” at 7:30 p.m. at Revolution Books, 2425 Channing Way at Telegraph Ave. 848-1196. 

Island Literary Series with Floyd Salas reading from “Love Bites: Poetry in Celebration of Dogs and Cats” at 3 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $2. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Ballet Theater, “The Nutcracker” at 2 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $16-$21. 843-4689. 

Berkeley Community Chorus and Orchestra presents Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, Copland’s “American Songs” and others at 4:30 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. Free, donations welcome. www.bcco.org 

Pacific Boychoir “Family Holiday Celebration” at 2 p.m. at St. Augustine’s Catholic Church, 400 Alcatraz, Oakland. Tickets are $10, children under 10 free. 652-4722. www.pacificboychoir.org 

Kitka “Wintersongs” music from Eastern European traditions at 7 p.m. at the First Unitarian Church, 685 14th St., Oakland. Tickets are $20-$25. 444-0323. www.kitka.org 

Cantabile Chorale “‘Tis the Season” at 7:30 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Tickets are $6-$25. 650-424-1310. www.cantabile.org 

Holiday Gospel Concert at 5 p.m. at the Linen Life Park Ave., Emeryville. 776-8222. 

Black Nativity Holiday Pagent Gala at 3:30 p.m., followed by performance, at Allen Temple Baptist Church Family Life Center, 8501 International Blvd, at 85th and A, Oakland. Tickets are $7-$20. Gala tickets are $35. 544-8924. 

Beth Custer Ensemble at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Bowman/Beuthe/Wiitala Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $9. 841-JAZZ.  

John Santos and The Machete Ensemble at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $6. 849-2568.  

The Everyone Orchestra, psychedelic improv, at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Filly Fads Harp Trio at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Radio Suicide, Heart Shed, Blue Mire at 6 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway, Oakland. Cost is $8-$10. 763-1146.  

MONDAY, DEC. 18 

CHILDREN 

Fratello Marionettes “Peter and the Wolf” at 7 p.m.. at Oakland Public Library, Main Library Children’s Room, 125 14th St. 238-3615. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

PlayGround Six emerging playwrights debut new works at 8 p.m. at Berkeley Repertory Theater, 2025 Addison St. Tickets are $18. 415-704-3177.  

Poetry Express with Afrometropolitan at 7 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. berkeleypoetryexpress@yahoo.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

West Coast Songwriters Showcase at 7:30 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $5. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

E.W. Wainwright and friends in a tribute to John Coltrane, Annual Youth Arts Benefit at 8 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. 238-9200.  

TUESDAY, DEC. 19 

CHILDREN 

Fratello Marionettes “Peter and the Wolf” at 1 p.m.. at Oakland Public Library, Lakeview Branch, 550 El Embarcadero. 238-7344. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Bayo Seco with the Creole Belles and Andrew Carrier at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun/zydeco dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $59 525-5054. 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.  

The Christmas Jug Band at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Mike Stern at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sat. Cost is $22-$26. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Jazzschool Tuesdays at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

WEDNESDAY, DEC. 20 

CHILDREN 

Circus Finelli’s Holiday Extravaganza at 1 and 3 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $8-$15. 925-798-1300. 

THEATER 

Aurora Theatre Company “A Little Cole in Your Stocking” at 8 p.m., Wed.-Sat., at 2081 Addison St., through Dec. 30. Tickets are $25. 843-4822. 

Circus Fellini’s Holiday Extravaganza at 1 and 3 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $8-$15. 925-798-1300. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Joel Ben Izzy reads at 6:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698.  

Berkeley Poetry Slam at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5-$7. 841-2082  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Music for Advent with Ron McKean, organist, at noon 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 $7. 841-JAZZ.  

La Verdad at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Salsa lessons at 8 p.m. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Kurt Ribak Trio, Mingus-inspired jazz and groove at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

THURSDAY, DEC. 21 

CHILDREN 

Circus Finelli’s Holiday Extravaganza at 1 and 3 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $8-$15. 925-798-1300. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Winter Solstice Concert with over 35 solo artists perfoming at 6 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland dress warmly and bring a flashlight. 228-3207. 

Ras Kidus, Undah P, Hurricane, McGuyva at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Benefit for Urban Community Action Network. Cost is $10-$20. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Freight Holiday Revue and Fundraiser with Laurie Lewis, Tom Rozum, Cascada de Foores, and others at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $16.50-$17.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

John Gordon Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Sueco, Naomi and the Courteous Rudeboys at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082.  

Mike Stern at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sat. Cost is $22-$26. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Loop Station, Knees and Elbows, Ragwater Review at 9 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $6. 451-8100. 

MUSIC FROM THREE GREAT COMPOSERS 

The Berkeley Community Chorus and Orchestra will present Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, Aaron Copland’s American Songs and the world premiere of Julian White’s She Walks in Beauty, as well as excerpts from The Children’s Hour and Five Parables, at 4:30 p.m. Sunday at St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. Admission is free, but donations are welcome. www.bcco.org. 

CERRITO CLASSICS  

William Powell and Myrna Loy, as Nick and Nora Charles, set out to solve a murder mystery in the 1934 screwball comedy classic The Thin Man, the first in a series of successful Thin Man films based on a novel by Dashiell Hammet. 6 p.m. Saturday and 5 p.m. Sunday at the Cerrito Theater. 10070 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. 814-2400. www.picturepubpizza.com.  

‘THE NUTCRACKER’ AT JULIA MORGAN CENTER 

The Berkeley Ballet Theater will perform The Nutcracker at 7 p.m. Friday, at 2 and 7 p.m. Saturday, and at 2 p.m. Sunday. Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. $16-$21. 843-4689. 

‘THE ORGANIZER’ 

A screening of Mario Monicelli’s The Organizer (1963) will close out Pacific Film Archive’s six-week retrospective of films from the Janus collection at 8:15 p.m. Saturday. The film examines the beginnings of the trade union movement in Italy at the end of the 19th century, with Marcello Mastroianni playing a Genoa schoolteacher who finds his way to Turin to lead textile workers in a strike. $4-$8. 2575 Bancroft Way. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.

At the outset of The Forest War, Mark Jackson’s new play (which he also directs), produced by the Shotgun Players at the Ashby Stage, a doddering old Grand Lord Karug (Drew Anderson) and his retinue slide out onto the stage, facing the audience, in an impression of Kabuki. 

The ancient lord announces he is relinquishing his office, something like the opening scene of King Lear (or the echo in Kurosawa’s Ran)—but not to his own son Kain (Kevin Clarke), the impetuous warrior. Instead, he hands over the reins (actually, the blade, sheathed) of command to another lord, Kulan (Cassidy Brown), a farmer and idealist, an aristocrat close to the people (shades of Thomas Jefferson!), a leader for a time of peace after a decade of war. 

Lord Kulan appoints his dignified wife, Lady Ema (Fontana Butterfield), as a minister to the common good, ombudsman for the voiceless. Lord Kain and General Mau Tant (Reid Davis)—a good team of villains out of an old potboiler—disgusted at the talk of peace and the ascendancy of a woman, start plotting mischief. 

Meanwhile, The People (as represented by a a cloth merchant, her son the painter, a child of the village, a drunken swordsmith and an herbalist called to the capital by Lord Kulan to be court physician, played by Carla Pantoja, Ryan Tasker, Lukas Ferreira, Richard Reinholdt and Anna Ishida), are glad the long war is over and that trusted Kulan is in command—but the gladness is expressed with the reserve of folk wisdom. The common lot is portrayed by a reflection of the Chinese Operatic look (not its style) familiar from American productions of Brecht. 

But the moral Lord Kulan has feet of clay. General Mau Tant spots him in a tryst with the old Grand Lord’s youngest concubine (Tonya Glanz) in the same meadow the painter has rendered over and over with his brush, and scandal grips the court. Later, Kulan and Ema’s daughter Ange (Caroline Hewitt) will also entertain a secret love in the meadow, and Lord Kain will further pursue his “National Security State” scheme with more trickery designed to reignite the Forest War of the title. The mood throughout darkens to one of foreboding of catastrophe, a sense of helplessness and betrayal on all sides. 

The Forest War fits in neatly in look—and outlook—with Shotgun’s last two plays, Ragnarok and Love is a Dream House in Lorin, Shotgun’s first two commissions. All are like fables or folktales that reflect contemporary events, done in a storybook style, The Forest War is a kind of Kabuki woodblock print done in Anime. In fact, there are Anime cartoon drawings in the lobby and in the program. 

Melpomene Katakalos’ set gives the sense of the bare boards of the Kabuki stage (across which skitter kurogos Erin Mei-Ling Stuart and Thu Tran, the “invisible” veiled stage assistants) with big shoji screens at back, and Valera Coble’s costumes are exotic with a dash of post-punk in some of Rhonda Kerr’s make-up, like Lord Kain’s hair. The players are well-cast, if a little restrained by the imitation of stylization, but with good presence and turns by Richard Reinholdt, Ryan Tasker, Thu Tran (as Mot) and Tonya Glanz in particular. Two talented musicians, Chris Broderick on winds and Daniel Bruno on drums (both on percussion) accompany the action—and indeed lend much in dynamics to it—taking their sound from various forms associated with Kabuki, Taiko and Gagaku. 

The overall effect, in different aspect from the last two plays, but very much in line with what seems to be a developing house style for Shotgun, is of a pageant, less stylized theater than storybook illustrations of it, promising a kind of contemporary fabulousness that goes back to the 18th-century sources of much of Brecht and modern epic theater: talking about the present situation by referring to what’s far away in time or space, like what Montesquieu did stylistically with The Persian Letters to signify the dislocations of French society of his day by describing imaginary goings-on in the exotic East. 

The play itself, though, is a curious blend, a fable without satire or irony (unless of the Alanis Morissette variety), a faux folktale without much relation to even urban myth, an impression of Asian theater without much stylization beyond a look-at-the-pictures illustrational sense. There are a few attempts at stylization with varying success: the execution of the too-honest courtesan is played simply and well, with a sense of humans being shifted around like dolls (though usually Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls); a recurring riff of dead characters shuffling backwards offstage holding white parasols (to a land where the sun don’t shine?) becomes increasingly awkward in its made-up schematism. Combined with the sometimes-fortune cookie diction of the dialogue, the neat storybook look begins to take on the qualities of the label on a Top Ramen package, “Oriental Flavor.” 

Mark Jackson, who seems to be fascinated by ingenuous characters who get into trouble by searching for something forbidden (to paraphrase Mort Sahl on Robert Redford, he wants to explore the dark side of Frank Capra—a shared trait with Steven Spielberg?), continues his pursuit of the stylized in theater, but something’s missing, or at least misplaced. I remember a teacher of Noh, after a stage adaptation of Greek tragedy featuring what was touted as Asian stylization, remarking that without the rigorous technique and dramaturgy of the old theaters, all a contemporary director could do would be to try to imitate the air of intensity that was attractive in the original. 

But the poetry—and therefore the true moral—gets lost in the process of a culinary reduction. The cover of the program gives the quote: “What is justice that it does not count love among its laws?” But what is the heart of the matter to be explored, and what really is the matter, is in what Grand Lord Karug says as a cautionary prescription at the outset of the play: “If we now have peace, it’s because we’ve forgotten why for so long we didn’t have peace.” 

THE FOREST WAR 

Presented by the Shotgun Players at 8 p.m. Thursday-Sunday through Jan. 14. $15-$30. Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org.  

Caroline Hewitt, Ryan Tasker and Erin Stuart in The Forest War. Photograph by Jessica Palopoli

Between 1900 and 1910, Berkeley’s population more than tripled, from 13,214 to 40,434 inhabitants. Much of the growth was stimulated by the flight of thousands of San Franciscans to the East Bay following the 1906 earthquake and fire. 

The disaster heralded an unprecedented building boom on this side of the bay. 

On Sept.19, 1906, the Berkeley Daily Gazette reported that 135 building permits had been issued since the beginning of that month. 

That day alone, 32 permits were issued to one man: “C.M. MacGregor of 519 Thirty-Second Street, Oakland, who is to commence the immediate construction of twelve $1,500 cottages on Peralta Avenue, North of Hopkins between the Santa Fe railroad and the Peralta Park Hotel and twenty $1900 cottages on Pine Street, near Webster. The fees for these permits alone amounted to $116.” 

Charles Manning MacGregor (1871–1954), a.k.a. “One-Nail MacGregor,” was born in Nova Scotia. While still in his teens, he joined his sister in Boston, where he learned carpentry. A brother living in California persuaded Charles that there were opportunities in construction here, and in 1889 he moved to Oakland. 

Having begun as a carpenter for hire, the thrifty MacGregor soon accumulated sufficient savings to become a builder and real-estate entrepreneur. His first house of record, a 6-room cottage constructed at a cost of $1,160, went up in 1896. 

Between 1898 and 1906, MacGregor’s name frequently appeared on building permits for houses designed by well-known architects such as A.W. Smith, Leo N. Nichols, Maxwell G. Bugbee, William Knowles, Coxhead & Coxhead, Albert Farr, and Bakewell & Brown. 

Many of his early houses were built in San Francisco, Alameda, and the nascent Piedmont, where he lived from 1909 until his death, and where he continued to build in the 1910s and ‘20s. 

By 1904, MacGregor had begun to design his own buildings, which he would do exclusively from 1906 onwards until his projects grew too vast. 

One of the largest projects built by MacGregor in the post-earthquake period is the Madison Park Apartments (1908) at 9th and Oak Streets in central Oakland. This handsome five-story, 98-unit Edwardian-style building is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. 

Apartment buildings notwithstanding, the builder was best known for his cottages. He often bought lots that were odd-sized or smaller than average and therefore less in demand by his competitors. Rather than employ an architect or use ready-made plans from pattern books, MacGregor hired a draftsman with architectural training. 

Having assumed the presidency of an Oakland lumber company, he was perfectly positioned to offer home buyers a one-stop shop at competitive prices. 

Along the way, he acquired the moniker “One-Nail MacGregor,” either for his thriftiness or for never sparing an extra nail. He certainly brought both qualities to bear on his projects, which were affordable and built to last. 

All 32 cottages for which he obtained building permits on September 19, 1906, still stand. The twenty that line Pine Avenue between Ashby Ave. and Webster St. make up a charming, village-like enclave that is unique in Berkeley. 

Mixing Craftsman and Colonial Revival elements, the Pine Ave. cottages are modest yet playful, with enough stylistic variations to make each one stand apart. Unifying the ensemble and the entire block are a common scale and repeated design elements such as half-timbered gables, square porch posts, and multi-paned clerestory windows. 

Remarkably, these cottages, now 100-years old, have undergone few alterations over the past century, and MacGregor’s vision for the street is virtually intact. The 12 cottages on Peralta Ave. between Hopkins and Gilman Streets did not fare as well. All but one or two have been visibly altered, and not always successfully. What brought about this dramatic difference between the two groups? 

Unlike their Pine Ave. brethren, which occupy an entire block, the Peralta Ave. cottages share the block with other, non-MacGregor houses. Whereas Pine Ave. is a narrow, intimate street, Peralta Ave. is wide and impersonal. The sense of place and the ensemble feel that are so resonant on Pine Ave. have never developed here. 

Although the Peralta Ave. cottages were built for more modest pocketbooks ($1,500 vs. $1,900 on Pine Ave.), they are attractive and well-made, featuring many of the same design elements seen on Pine Ave. Yet as realtors often remind us, location, location, location is key. Magic on Pine Ave., ho-hum on Peralta. One is a village, the other, a suburb. This fundamental difference in ambiance is what fostered respect for precedent on Pine Avenue and lack of it on Peralta. 

Of course, these 1906 cottages were only an episode in MacGregor’s career, which continued in full force for several decades. With Harry Webb, he was responsible for developing significant parts of Ashby Station. By the age of 36, he had built 600 homes. 

MacGregor is best known for having built over 1,500 homes in Albany, where he began to develop tracts in the late 1920s. The Depression did not slow him down, since his working and selling methods were particularly suited to the circumstances. He eliminated the need for subcontractors by directly employing carpenters, lathmen, plasterers, painters, and finish craftsmen. He pioneered the practice of building several houses concurrently, thus keeping his crews continuously employed. He also evolved the “rent to own” policy, helping young families to acquire a home gradually. 

In 1936, his vast projects in Albany prompted MacGregor to move his office from Oakland to Solano Avenue. For many years, Albany celebrated MacGregor Day. His houses stand as proof that thrift and quality need not be mutually exclusive. 

The writer is indebted to Gail Lombardi and Dale Smith for their research. 

Photograph by Daniella Thompson. This MacGregor cottage at 2960 Pine Ave. exudes a palpable country atmosphere.

I met a nice couple the other day. Sadly, they were clearly in some distress over the fortunes of their remodeling process. They’d engaged a GC (builder-speak for general contractor) last year to do a rather sweeping and costly rehab on a mid-sized house in the hills of Oakland and things hadn’t gone quite as well as they’d hoped. 

It seems that the fellow was something less than the consummate businessman. In fact, I’d say that the fellow (after much questioning and examination in situ) was really (drum-roll please) a “carpenter.” “Oh my gawd” wails the woman with the baby. “For shame,” proclaims the preacher. “What are you talking about?” says everyone else. 

A carpenter is not a GC, but what is? A GC is an organizer of work, a writer of contracts and a supervisor. The GC is the person who makes sure that the client gets what they paid for as opposed to the person who provides the labor, although a GC can provide both services. 

When is it reasonable for a GC to provide both services? When the job is quite small and he or she is not running several other jobs at the same time. Nonetheless, the primary function and the most vital service isn’t the swinging of the hammer but the communication, conception and organization needed to make the job happen. 

This fellow our nice couple had working for them was cheaper than the rest (one of my first questions). This was the attraction and as you’ve hear me say a hundred times, it’s often, but not always a precursor to woes and lamentations. He was probably cheap for at least two reasons. First, he probably didn’t know how much things really needed to cost to cover all his expenses. Most people don’t and builders often take some years (moi included) to begin to figure out what all this stuff really costs. Construction costs are a lot more than lumber and labor. They include profit, taxes, office and shopping time, servicing of vehicles, continuing education, paying the accountant and phone bill. There are, most assuredly, a huge number of costs in the practice of general contracting as there are in the running of nearly all business, except that contracting is more complex in this regard than most. A GC is running a tiny corporation with shipping, inventory, highly skilled labor, PR, advertising and emergency room medicine. It’s amazing that there are so many successful small contractors who don’t end up in court and not at all surprising that so many do end up in trouble with their clients. 

The second reason that this fellow was cheap was that he didn’t value his time highly enough and didn’t know how to make sure he’d make money on the job. Every good GC values their time and make sure they make enough money to make each foray worth the trip. Believe me when I say that you don’t want to hire someone who doesn’t know their value and isn’t going to make money on the job. That path is paved with discontent. 

The GC in this case was a pretty good carpenter but he was a poor manager of time and of his labor force. He didn’t show up every day and, more importantly, didn’t have a reasonable facsimile of himself showing up every day to make sure that apparent progress on the job was to the satisfaction of the clients. 

It would also appear that he did not maintain a good set of accounts on the job because in the legal trouble which is now boiling-over, he is preparing to present tens of thousands of dollars of additional cost which he had never billed for. Now, this may be a ruse but I strongly suspect from previous experience that, at least some of, this is correct. 

Small timers and those who should rightly stick to carpentry and, perhaps some plumbing and wiring, often find themselves out of their depths when they begin functioning as general contractors (in this case, read accountant). A businessman with little experience in hammers and saws is probably more qualified in many ways to function as a GC than someone who has all the back issues of Fine Home Building. 

I’ll amend the previous lie with one major proviso and that is my strongly held believe that GCs should be very good at telling the clients what they should and should not be doing to their homes. One of the best things that a GC can tell a homeowner is that the “improvement” that they’re attempting to parley for is plainly a bad idea. 

A talented GC, like a talented architect (they’re more alike than you may think) can look at a clipping from Sunset magazine and tell the client how to make it look and feel like that that but a GC who lets the client decide where the joist should run is a fool (this appellation, sadly also goes to the client who so directs the action). 

Our young couple clearly had someone (possesed of great talents and high hopes) doing more than they were really capable of doing with impunity and reliability. As a result, they’re pissed off and disappointed. Also, I suspect, the contractor is feeling similarly abused since he probably worked his hiney off to keep them happy and may genuinely feel that this house contained some of this best work. He may not yet understand that his failings were not so much in his workmanship but in his business savy. Now, I’ll confess, there were a couple of stupid things he did in the actual construction but that can happen to even the best and I have a feeling that the architect played a small role him or her/self.  

Naturally, it’s these physical items that the clients are beating the war drums about and soon the fur will be flying (I hope the arbitration judge doesn’t wear a toupee). Nonetheless, I contend that had the Carpenter been a good GC and had money set aside to fix things that went wrong (and had maintained a good working relationship with the client through speedy work and clear paperwork), they would be splitting the costs of a major screwup and would be sharing a glass of holiday cheer right about now. 

As it is, the fellow is probably unable to make his mortgage and might even be suffering the maladies of a strained marriage (I’m not joking). 

By the way, I’d like to suggest that the additional cost of a more able GC might well be less than what these sweet folk will end up laying out by the time the lawyer’s bill and the court judgment all come due (not to mention the formidable cost of suffering and delays). 

That’s another thing to keep in mind: The court won’t necessarily take their side, even if I and their attorney think they’ve been fleeced and abused. Court, even arbitration is a crapshoot. 

At the risk of repeating myself, I’ll close with the following suggestions: 

Get several bids before hiring your general contractor. Start by calling their references and visiting some of their previous jobsites. Make sure you’ve heard from some satisfied clients and be sure that they’re not old friends or relatives. A good recommendation might include “she was a bit rigid on how she worked and a more money than we wanted to spend but everyone who comes to the house just oooo’s and aaaah’s at the work. We know we made the right choice.” 

You see, the results of good choices are not necessarily sugary-sweet, easy or cheap but that doesn’t mean that they’re not good choices. 

Got a question about home repairs and inspections? Send them to Matt Cantor at mgcantor@pacbell.net.

Oh my, this is a touchy time of year, all those cultural sensitivities waiting to be stepped on. Wishing someone “happy holidays” would seem universal enough, but I read a newswire piece the other day in which a guy was quoted as bragging that he’d bullied some hapless WalMart clerk into wiping that phrase off a window because, “It’s supposed to be ‘Merry Christmas!’” Honestly, sometimes it makes me miss good old Saturnalia.  

But worse traps await the holiday gift-giver. 

You’d think I’d’ve known better, but I stepped in the droppings bigtime some years back when I gave my mother-in-law a plant for her room. The bright places by the window were already filled, and I thought she needed something green in a spot that didn’t get much light.  

I thought I had the perfect idea, inspired by my own beloved Grammy Adams who’d always had a couple of big snake plants in the downstairs parlor. 

I’d developed a fondness for Sanseveria species after seeing them as curbside plantings in Honolulu, and I knew they were tough, not choosy about light, and easy to care for. 

What I didn’t know, or had forgotten, was that in some regions they’re called “mother-in-law’s tongue” and that’s a diss on mothers-in-law, as the plant is indeed tongue-shaped if the tongue is long and sharp. (Plus, it’s green. Ew.) 

Why of course my mother-in-law was from one such region, and she’d never heard of another name for the plant. Oops.  

I have to credit her patience, nevertheless. The plant survived her, and it’s on the hereditary sideboard in our dining room now – next to my snake Shep. I put a shorter Sanseveria species in the cage with him and he hasn’t squashed it flat yet; in fact, it’s given me two offsets to plant elsewhere. 

That’s one tough plant. I’d suggest it as a holiday gift to anyone but your mother-in-law. Just persuade them not to over-water.  

Lots of those granny plants are tough, which is probably why they’re granny plants. It’s a good idea to give a plant that’s not likely to die and leave the new owner feeling all incompetent and depressed.  

Grammy Adams had a few other plants in that little coal-patch row house, including one upstairs that my dad referred to, singing the British music-hall ditty, as “the biggest asssssssss-phidistra in the world.” 

I’m pretty sure it wasn’t an asphidistra, though, from the story of Poppop Adams’ obligingly unraveling it from the picture rail, on which it clambered all the way around the room, and toting it downstairs to show off to visitors. I think it was a “Devil’s ivy” (Epipremnum) or a pothos (Scindapsus) of some sort, or maybe a heart-leaf philodendron.  

The last two are pretty sturdy and finesse the “Devil’s” superstitions. Asphidistra—“cast-iron plant”—is, as implied, another indomitable houseplant: upright but taller than Sanseveria, dark green. Asphidistra, Sanseveria, and Scindapsus all have lively-looking variegated versions.  

Go on, give one. It’s still less presumptuous than giving a kitten.  

FRIDAY, DEC. 15 

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Berkeley Aquatic Park, ongoing on Fridays until impeachment is realized. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Rita Maran, Peace and Conflict Studies, UCB on “United Nations in a Hostile World.” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $14, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925.  

Conversation with Patricia Isasa, filmmaker and Argentine torture survivor, and screening of “El Cerco” at 6:30 p.m. at The Uptown, 356 26th St., between Telegraph and Broadway. Donations accepted. 654-5355. 

Before Columbus Foundation American Book Awards Celebration at 6:30 p.m. at the African Museum and Library, 659 14th St., Oakland. Free. 228-6775. 

“Lincoln Highway in California” a slide show and discussion with author Gregory M. Franzwa, at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Central Library, 3rd floor Community Meeting Room, 2090 Kittredge St.  

Movies that Matter “Field of Dreams” at 6:30 p.m. at Neumayer Residence, 565 Bellevue Ave. at Perkins, Oakland. 451-3009. 

Kol Hadash Humanistic Judaism Pot Luck Chanukah Party at 6 p.m. at the Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin Ave. For potluck assignment and other info call 428-1492. 

SATURDAY, DEC. 16 

Celebration to Save the Oaks, with music, poetry amd refreshments from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the threatened oak grove in front of Memorial Stadium. 841-3493. 

“Bringing the Condors Home” An exhibit of the Ventana Wildlife Society’s 20-year effort to restore California condors to the wild, opens at the Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St., at 10th St., Oakland. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

Berkeley Farmers’ Market Holiday Crafts Fair from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Center St. at Martin Luther King Jr. Way with local craftspepole, live music and prepared food. Benefits the Ecology Center. 548-3333.  

Telegraph Avenue Holiday Fair with more than 200 vendors, music and food, Sat. and Sun. from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. 

The Crucible Holiday Celebration with fire dancers, stilt walkers and art, Sat. and Sun. from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 1260 Seventh St. 444-0919.  

Muir Family Christmas Tours of the Muir House in Martinez decorated for the holidays on Sat. and Sun. Cost is $3. For details call 925-228-8860. 

Lake Temescal Water Quality Monitoring We will be performing our monthly water chemistry test at the inlet of Lake Temescal. Meet at 10:30 a.m. at the Broadway Terrace entrance. 415-561-7762. www.ebparks.org/resources/pdf/trails/temescal_map.pdf  

Restore Arroyo Viejo Creek Have fun while helping to improve our local watershed. Sponsored by the City of Oakland Arroyo Viejo Watershed Awareness Program and the Oakland Zoo. From 10 a.m. to noon at Arroyo Viejo Recreation Center, 7701 Krause Ave., Oakland. 665-3508.  

Progressive Democrats Celebration of the work we have done this past year at 4:30 p.m. at Albatross Pub, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 636-4149. 

“Behind the Mask” A documentary about people who take direct action to save animals at 6 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Cost is $10. Benefits Animal Rescue, Media & Education and East Bay Animal Advocates.  

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

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.  

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755.  

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, DEC. 17 

Christmas Bird Count Join Bay Area birders for the annual Audubon Society bird count in Alameda, Albany Berkeley and Oakland. For details on how to connect with a group call 704-9353, 910-1905. www.audubon.org 

Christmas Caroling in Point Richmond Join us for chili at 5 p.m. at First United Methodist Church, 201 Martina St., corner of Richmond Ave., Point Richmond, and then stroll with us through the town. 236-0527.  

Community Labyrinth Peace Walk at 3 p.m. at Willard Middle School on Telegraph Ave. between Derby & Stuart. Everyone welcome. Wheelchair accessible. Rain cancels. 526-7377. 

“Impeach the President” Dahr Jamail, Peter Phillips & Larry Everest will discuss the case against Bush and Cheney at 7:30 p.m. at Revolution Books, 2425 Channing Way at Telegraph Ave. 848-1196. 

“The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: It’s the Economy” with Israeli economist Arie Arnon at 3:30 p.m. at the JCC of the East Bay. Doantion $5. sf-bayarea@ 

btvshalom.org  

Code Pink’s Glad Voter Tea Party to celebrate recent election victories from 3 to 7 p.m. at Redwood Gardens Community Room, 2951 Derby St. 524-2776. 

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

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

“The Divine Feminine in the World’s Religions: Christianity” with Anna Matt of the GTU at 9:30 a.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, One Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302, ext. 306. 

Tibetan Buddhism with Bob Russo on “Holistic Work” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812.  

MONDAY, DEC. 18 

“Acupuncture for Parkinson’s Disease” with Jacqueline Sohn at 10 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. 981-5190. 

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

TUESDAY, DEC. 19 

Visioning for Downtown Berkeley Art Museum at 10 a.m. a the Berkeley Art Museum and Film Archive, Gund Theater, 2625 Durant Ave. 981-7487. 

Discussion Salon on The Next ? Years at 7 p.m. at JCC, 1414 Walnut.  

Red Cross Blood Services Volunteer Orientation at 6 p.m. at 6230 Claremont Ave., Oakland. Registration required. 594-5165. 

Free Diabetes Screening from 8:30 a.m. to 11 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. Do not eat for 8 hours before-hand. 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. 

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

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, DEC. 20 

New to DVD “Joyeux Noel” at 7 p.m. at the JCCEB, 1414 Walnut St. 848-0237. 

Music in the Community Fundraiser from 6 to 10 p.m. at Kimball’s Carnival, 522 Second St., Oakland. Tickets are $5-$15. 444-6979. 

Gingerbread House Party from 9:30 a.m. at 1 p.m. at Habitot Children’s Museum, 2065 Kittredge St. Please bring a bag of candy. 647-1111. 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Wear comfortable shoes and a warm hat. Heavy rain cancels. 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 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at 6:30 at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. www.geocities.com/vigil4peace/vigil 

THURSDAY, DEC. 21 

Candlelight Vigil to Save the Oaks and to Celebrate the Winter Solstice at 5 p.m. at the Memorial Stadium Oak Grove, 841-3493. www.saveoaks.com 

Winter Solstice Gathering at 4:15 at the Interim Solar Calendar, Cesar Chavez Park, Berkeley Marina. Led by Alan Gould, dress warmly. www.solarcalendar.org 

Easy Does It Disability Assistance Board meeting at 6:30 p.m. at 1636 University Ave. Open to the public. 845-5513. 

Bayswater Book Club meets to discuss “Make Money in Short Sale Foreclosures” at 1:30 p.m. at Barney’s on Solano. 433-2911. 

Avatar Metaphysical Toastmasters Club at 6:45 p.m. at Spud’s Pizza, 3290 Adeline. namaste@avatar.freetoasthost.info 

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. 

ONGOING 

Help with Medicare Part D Enrollment Seniors who need to enroll in the prescription drug plan, or change their plan can get help and advice at Berkeley Senior Centers. Appointments required. Call 1-800-434-0222. www.lashicap.org 

Holiday Food Drive Sponsor a Food Drive to help the Food Bank reach its goal of collecting food for families in need during the holiday season. 635-3663, ext. 318. www.accfb.org  

UN Association’s UNICEF & Fair Trade Gift Center Closing Sale, Tues.-Sat. noon to 5 p.m. to Dec. 16, 1403 Addison St. 849-1752. 

Magnes Museum Docent Training Open to all interested in Jewish art and history. Classes begin Jan. 18th. cultural.arts@sbcglobal.net 

CITY MEETINGS 

Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board meets Mon. Dec. 18 at 7 p.m. in City Council Chambers, Pam Wyche, 644-6128 ext. 113. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/rent 

Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee meets Dec. 19 at 10 a.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, Gund Theater, 2625 Durant Ave., for a visioning session on the new downtown art museum. 981-7487. 

Fair Campaign Practices Commission meets Thurs., Dec. 21, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Prasanna Rasaih, 981-6950.

TUESDAY, DEC. 12 

CHILDREN 

Opera Piccola “The Guest” at 7 p.m. at Oakland Public Library, Rockridge Branch, 5366 College Ave. 597-5017. 

EXHIBITIONS 

The Photography of Matt Heron “Voting Rights: The Southern Struggle, 1964-1965” on display in the Catalog Lobby, Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St., through Jan. 6. 981-6100. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Susan Snyder introduces “Past Tents: The Way We Camped” at 7 p.m. at Phoebe A. Hearst Museum, 102 Kroeber Hall, UC Campus. 643-7649. 

George Leonard reads from “The Silent Pulse: A Search for the Perfect Rhythm that Exists in Each of Us” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Swamp Coolers at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun/zydeco dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 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. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

The Roches, with a Holiday Twist, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $21.50-$22.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Charlie Hunter Trio at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $16-$28. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

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

WEDNESDAY, DEC. 13 

THEATER 

Azeem’s “Rude Boy” Wed.-Thurs. at 8 p.m. at The Marsh, 2120 Allston Way, through Dec. 14. Tickets are $15-$22. 415-826-5750. www.themarsh.org 

FILM 

Janus Films “Throne of Blood” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

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

Daniel Lev and Bobby Kinkead, storytelling at 7 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Robert Marshall reads at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

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

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Music for Advent with Ron McKean, organist, at noon at First Presbyterian Church of Oakland, 2619 Broadway. 444-3555. 

Terrence Brewer Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Zaatar at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Karabali at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Salsa lessons at 8 p.m. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Brown Bums, delta blues and soul at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

31 Knots at 8:30 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $5. 451-8100. www.uptownnightclub.com 

Greenbridge, Celtic trio, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

THURSDAY, DEC. 14 

FILM 

Jacques Rivette “Va savoir” at 7 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Robert Fisk on Iraq and Lebanon at 7 p.m. at the First Presbyterian Church, 2619 Broadway, at 27th, Oakland Tickets are $20, no one turned away. Benefit for children in Gaza, via the Middle East Children’s Alliance. 548-0542. www.mecaforpeace.org 

Eric Kos and Dennis Evanosky talk about “East Bay Then and Now” with historic photographs of Oakland at 7:30 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Avenue. Donation $8-$10. 763-9218. www.oaklandheritage.org  

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

Robert Hanson introduces “The Rough Guide to Climate Change” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Symphony performs Shostakovich “Leningrad” and works by Arvo Part at at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $10-$56. 841-2800. www.berkeleysymphony.org 

Patrick Ball, “Christmas Rose” music from England, Ireland and Wales, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Steve Gannon’s Monday Blues at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $7. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Tommy Carns, Sean McArdle, Sweetbriar at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

Razero the Band, Unequaled Clarity and Five Characters in Search of an Exit at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $5-$7. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Charlie Hunter Trio at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $16-$28. 238-9200.  

The Time Flys, The Pets, The Makes Nice at 9 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $5. 451-8100.  

FRIDAY, DEC. 15 

THEATER 

Altarena Playhouse “ The Man Who Saved Christmas” at holiday family musical Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at 1409 High St., Alameda, through Dec. 17. Tickets are $15-$18. 523-1553. www.altarena.org 

Berkeley Rep “All Wear Bowlers” at the Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St. through Dec. 23. Tickets are $45-$61. 647-2949. 

Masquers Playhouse “Company” by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2:30 p.m. at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond, through Dec. 16. Tickets are $18. 232-4031. www.masquers.org  

Naked Masks “Far Away” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. Sun. at 7 p.m. at Berkeley City Club. Tickets are $10-$20. Runs through Dec. 17. 883-9872. www.nakedmasks.org 

Shotgun Players “The Forest War” Thurs.-Sun. at 8 p.m. at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., through Jan 14. Sliding scale $15-$30. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Wondrous Possibilities” Abstract art by Sibylle Szaggers. Reception at 5 p.m. at Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th St., Oakland. 465-8928. 

FILM 

Janus Films “Kill!” at 7 p.m. and “Sword of Doom” at 9:15 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

“El Cerco” screening and conversation with filmmaker and Argentine torture survivor, Patricia Isasa at 6:30 p.m. at The Uptown, 356 26th St., between Telegraph and Broadway. Donations accepted. 654-5355. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Before Columbus Foundation American Book Awards Celebration at 6:30 p.m. at the Afircan Museum and Library, 659 14th St., Oakland. Free. 228-6775. 

Gregory M. Franzwa with show slides and discuss the “Lincoln Highway in California” at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, Community Room 2090 Kittredge St. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Ballet Theater, “The Nutcracker” at 7 p.m., Sat. at 2 and 7 p.m. and Sun. at 2 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $16-$21. 843-4689. 

California Revels “Christmas Revels” Celebrating the stories, songs, dance, and drama of 19th century Quebec, at 7:30 p.m. at Scottish Rite Theater, 1547 Lakeside Drive near Lake Merritt, Oakland. Tickets are $15-$42. 452-3800. www.calrevels.org 

The Women’s Antique Vocal Ensemble, the Schola Cantorum of St. Albert Priory, and the instrumental ensemble Alta Sonora will perform 14th to 20th-century Christmas music from France, Italy, Spain and Germany at 8 p.m. at Lake Merritt United Methodist Church, 1330 Lakeshore Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $15-$5. www.wavewomen.org 

Rebecca Boblak, Ben Stolorow and Javier Trujillo perform Gershiwn and DeFalla at 8 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. 848-1228. giorgigallery.com 

Remembering the Ancestors, Modern and Afro-Caribbean dance, at 8 p.m. at at Live Oak Theatre, 1301 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5, children free. 841-5580.  

Somos at 9 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

John Santos Quartet “Clasicos Criollos” at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

JukeJoint Sextet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $15. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Swingthing, holiday gala, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Swing dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $11-$13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Al Stewart at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $25.50-$26.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Bill Crossman Group at 8 p.m. at 1510 8th St., Oakland. Donation $5-$15. sfjazzmusic@yahoo.com 

John Thayer and Christina Kowalchuk at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Built for the Sea, The New Centuries, Pants Pants Pants at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Born/Dead, Young Offenders, Surrender 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. 

Bucho, soul and hip hop, at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $7. 548-1159.  

Sol Spectrum at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Rimshot at 9 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $7-$10. 451-8100. www.uptownnightclub.com 

Charlie Hunter Trio at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $16-$28. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SATURDAY, DEC. 16 

CHILDREN  

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

La Familia Peña-Govea plays Mexican children’s music at 11 a.m. at Studio Grow, 1235 10th St. Cost is $6. 526-9888. 

Elmwood Theater Matinee Benefit for local schools showing “Madagascar” at 10 a.m. and noon, and noon on Sun. Cost is $2. Sponsored by Elmwood merchants. 843-3794. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Bringing the Condors Home” A look at the Ventana Wildlife Society’s 20-year effor to restore California condors to the wild opens at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. and runs through April 15. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

“Gesture and Gestalt” Paintings of Albert Hwang and glass and metal sculpture of Victoria Skirpa opens at 6 p.m. at Float Art Gallery, 1091 Calcott Place, Unit #116., Oakland. 535-1702. 

Ceramics by Lizette Sanchez and Robert Bartlett-Edney Functional and decorative raku pottery and sculpture on display from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. at 728 Liberty St., El Cerrito. 847-7380. 

FILM 

Jacques Rivette “Up/Down/ 

Fragile” at 5 p.m. and Janus Films “The Organizer” at 8:15 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Ballet Theater, “The Nutcracker” at 2 and 7 p.m. and Sun. at 2 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $16-$21. 843-4689. 

Carol Alban “Miracles at the Chimes” solo flute music at 3 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. Free. 228-3218. 

Pacific Boychoir “Harmonies of the Season” at 7 p.m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 114 Montecito Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $20. 652-4722. www.pacificboychoir.org 

Voces Musicales “A Renaissance Christmas” Spanish and English music of the season at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church, Dana and Durant. Tickets are $10-$25. 528-1725. 

California Revels “Christmas Revels” Celebrating the stories, songs, dance, and drama of 19th century Quebec, Sat. and Sun. at 1 and 5 p.m. at Scottish Rite Theater, 1547 Lakeside Drive near Lake Merritt, Oakland. Tickets are $15-$42. 452-3800. www.calrevels.org 

Black Nativity Holiday Pagent at 2:30 p.m. at Allen Temple Baptist Church Family Life Center, 8501 International Blvd, at 85th and A, Oakland. Tickets are $7-$20. 544-8924. 

“Remembering the Ancestors, An Eclectic Mix of Modern and Afro-Caribbean Dance,” directed by Cherie Hill, 8 p.m. at Live Oak Theatre, 1301 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5, children are free. 841-5580. 

Melodikibolism, new works by graduates of Mills College at 8 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana St. Tickets are $8-$12. 549-3864. 

Robin Gregory & Her Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Naivdad Flamenca at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $18-$20. 849-2568. www.lapena.org  

Musical Night in Africa with Kotoja, West African Highlife Band, Afro-Groove Connexion at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

“A Night in Persia” Persian dance celebration at 6 pm. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, One Lawson Rd., Kensington. Tickets are $20-$35. 925-462-6691. 

James Riddle and Heather Frederick at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Henry Clement & the Gumbo Band at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Fred Randolph Quintet at 8:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$15. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

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

Hammerlock, Cheap Skate, White Barrons at 8:30 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $8. 451-8100. www.uptownnightclub.com 

Dale Miller & Powell St. John at 8 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7-$10. 558-0881. 

Big B and His Snake Oil Saviors, Crooked Roads, Lariats of Fire at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

CV1, classic Jamaican dub grooves, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Fuga, La Plebe, Manicato, Son Del Centro at 7 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway, Oakland. Cost is $10. 763-1146. www.oaklandmetro.org 

Babyland, Jewdriver, Yidcore at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, DEC. 17 

FILM 

Janus Films “Yojimbo” at 4 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Dahr Jamail, Peter Phillips & Larry Everest will discuss the new book “Impeach the President: The Case Against Bush and Cheney” at 7:30 p.m. at Revolution Books, 2425 Channing Way at Telegraph Ave. 848-1196. 

Island Literary Series with Floyd Salas reading from “Love Bites: Poetry in Celebration of Dogs and Cats” at 3 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $2. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Ballet Theater, “The Nutcracker” at 2 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $16-$21. 843-4689. 

Berkeley Community Chorus and Orchestra presents Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, Copland’s “American Songs” and others at 4:30 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. Free, donations welcome. www.bcco.org 

Pacific Boychoir “Family Holiday Celebration” at 2 p.m. at St. Augustine’s Catholic Church, 400 Alcatraz, Oakland. Tickets are $10, children under 10 free. 652-4722. www.pacificboychoir.org 

Kitka “Wintersongs” music from Eastern European traditions at 7 p.m. at the First Unitarian Church, 685 14th St., Oakland. Tickets are $20-$25. 444-0323. www.kitka.org 

Cantabile Chorale “‘Tis the Season” at 7:30 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Tickets are $6-$25. 650-424-1310. www.cantabile.org 

Holiday Gospel Concert at 5 p.m. at the Linen Life Park Ave., Emeryville. 776-8222. 

Black Nativity Holiday Pagent Gala at 3:30 p.m., followed by performance, at Allen Temple Baptist Church Family Life Center, 8501 International Blvd, at 85th and A, Oakland. Tickets are $7-$20. Gala tickets are $35. 544-8924. 

Beth Custer Ensemble at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Bowman/Beuthe/Wiitala Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $9. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

John Santos and The Machete Ensemble at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $6. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

The Everyone Orchestra, psychedelic improv, at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Filly Fads Harp Trio at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Radio Suicide, Heart Shed, Blue Mire at 6 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway, Oakland. Cost is $8-$10. 763-1146. www.oaklandmetro.org 

MONDAY, DEC. 18 

CHILDREN 

Fratello Marionettes “Peter and the Wolf” at 7 p.m.. at Oakland Public Library, Main Library Children’s Room, 125 14th St. 238-3615. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

PlayGround Six emerging playwrights debut new works at 8 p.m. at Berkeley Repertory Theater, 2025 Addison St. Tickets are $18. 415-704-3177. www.PlayGround-sf.org 

Poetry Express with Afrometropolitan at 7 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. berkeleypoetryexpress@yahoo.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

West Coast Songwriters Showcase at 7:30 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $5. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

E.W. Wainwright and friends in a tribute to John Coltrane, Annuel Youth Arts Benefit at 8 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com  

RISE OF ITALY’S TRADE UNION MOVEMENT 

A screening of Mario Monicelli’s The Organizer (1963) will close out Pacific Film Archive’s six-week retrospective of films from the Janus collection at 8:15 p.m. Saturday. The film, nominated for an Academy Award for best screenplay, examines the beginnings of the trade union movement in Italy at the end of the 19th century, with Marcello Mastroianni playing a Genoa schoolteacher who finds his way to Turin to lead textile workers in a strike. $4-$8. 2575 Bancroft Way. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu. 

EAST BAY THEN AND NOW 

Eric Kos and Dennis Evanosky talk about how the book East Bay Then and Now was written and photographed on Thursday at 7:30 p.m. at the Chapel of the Chimes. 

They will focus on historic photos of Oakland and the surrounding area including Fabiola Hospital, Harrison Street Produce Market and the bustling pier at the foot of Broadway. They will discuss their new San Francisco in Photographs, and Oakland’s surprising role in their latest project, California and the Civil War. 4499 Piedmont Ave. Donation: $8 members, $10 nonmembers. 763-9218, 

www.oaklandheritage.org.  

JAZZSCHOOL  

TUESDAYS 

A continuing weekly showcase of up-and -coming young jazz ensembles plays each Tuesday at Jupiter, 2181 Shattuck Ave, 8 p.m. 848-8277. 

Today (Tuesday) marks the return of Berkeley’s Charlie Hunter, one of the most innovative and entertaining performers in jazz, to Yoshi’s for six shows. For many years a regular on the Bay Area club scene, the guitarist, currently based in New York, will bring his trio back to the East Bay for his annual winter pilgrimage. 

Like Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock before him, Hunter never stands still long enough to be easily labeled, generating a diverse catalogue of music. 

He graduated from Berkeley High School, having played in the school’s renowned jazz band that has nurtured the talents of several other jazz greats, including saxophonists Joshua Redman and Peter Apfelbaum, and later worked as a guitar teacher for Subway Guitars on Cedar Street in Berkeley.  

After spending some time performing as a street musician in Europe, Hunter formed an acclaimed trio in 1992 with another local talent, tenor saxophonist Dave Ellis, and drummer Jay Lane, an original member of Primus. 

Hunter also records with the popular funk-infused band Garage A Trois, and while he was living in the Bay Area he was known for his performances with a guitar-based band TJ Kirk, a guitar band whose name is derived from the name of jazz multi-instrumentalist Rashaan Roland Kirk and from the first initials of Thelonious Monk and James Brown. 

Hunter plays an eight-string guitar rather than six, enabling him to play his own bass lines while soloing. This unusual style creates a sound that has been compared to a Hammond B Organ. And his repertoire is vast; throughout his career he has brought his vision to a wide array of genres, including a cover version of Nirvana’s “Come As You Are” and a startling remake of Bob Marley’s album Natty Dread.  

Performing popular pieces and standards has long been a practice in jazz, but Hunter doesn’t merely adapt each piece to a jazz signature, but rather imbibes each work with the spirit of the original, in the process creating a new take on old material that can stand on its own. 

Hunter manages to perform Nirvana’s simple grunge rock hit with the sophistication and swing of jazz without losing its intensity, and pays homage to one of the most revered of reggae albums without ever using a reggae beat. 

Hunter’s collaboraters also constitute a diverse group. He has performed as a duo with avant-garde percussionist Leon Parker, recorded with reggae guitar greats Ernest Ranglin and Chinna Smith and opened for the likes of J.J. Cale and U2. And in a 2001 appearance at Yoshi’s, Hunter brought a special surprise guest, a little-known singer named Norah Jones, who was on the brink of stardom with the release of her debut album Come Away With Me. 

But despite his skills as a guitarist, it is as a composer, arranger and bandleader that Hunter excels. Whether it’s the mellow sounds of “No Woman No Cry” that opens with a quote from “Tennesee Waltz” before melting into Marley’s famous melody or whether it’s “Two for Bleu” with its conga percussion underneath Hunter’s guitar and Apfelbaum’s Parisian nightclub-sounding sax, Hunter’s music is always eclectic and imaginative. 

Hunter has been bringing his sound to Yoshi’s every December since 2000. Yoshi’s Artistic Director Peter Williams explains, “He likes it because he gets to visit with friends and family for the holidays, and we like it because he is a great artist and it is a big time of year for us.” 

Hunter will be performing this month with his new trio, consisting of piano player Erik Deutsch and drummer Simon Lott. Williams admits that he hasn’t heard Hunter’s new lineup, and in the six years that they have been booking him, Hunter has never brought a trio centered around keyboards rather than saxophone. 

“But that is the great thing about Charlie,” says Williams. “He is always looking at doing new things, and it’s always great.” 

The Charlie Hunter Trio 

performs Tuesday through Sunday at Yoshis. $10-$18. 510 Embarcadero West, Oakland. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com.  

Among the Nutcrackers and Christmas Carols, another holiday show has sprouted up, Ron Lytle’s original musical comedy, The Man Who Saved Christmas, going into its last week at Altarena Playhouse on High Street in Alameda. 

The Man Who Saved Christmas has an intriguing hook. It’s the story of “Toy Baron” A. C. Gilbert, maker of Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs (and, maybe later, the chemistry sets we thought would blow up the house), and his crusade against a nationwide ban on holiday toy sales during the First World War. 

It’s theme enough to animate a cast of 16—and of all ages—through a brisk 2 1/2 hours of song and dance, romance and general light-hearted good spirits. 

As it’s really centered around a love story, The Man Who Saved Christmas is a little bit more like The Music Man in its nostalgia than the various toy and candy fantasies the holidays usher in.  

Boston Gazette reporter Johnny Eli (a boyish David Irving) shows up at the New Haven toy factory, amid a swirling mass of happy, aproned toy makers singing and dancing out their last-minute holiday rush, as he hopes to interview notoriously press-shy A. C. Gilbert for a story. Gilbert (sanguine Scott Phillips) charges in like a Teddy Roosevelt of toys, and taking Johnny for a consultant, gives him a wind-up toy ferris wheel to fix—which he does, with a stickpin extorted from unxious factory manager Mr. Dixon (smarmy Gregory Lynch).  

Though thrown out on his ear by Gilbert (to the delight of Gilbert’s personal secretary Alice, whom Johnny’s been sweet-talking, played with pert humor by Rebecca Pingree) once the real purpose of his visit becomes plain, Johnny soon finds himself back in the factory at the magnate’s invitation, as Gilbert’s sure he’s spotted another toyman in the rough, and a partner in his crusade. They celebrate their joining forces with zest in “You and Me,” and all at once young Mr. Eli—who had confessed to Alice he wasn’t much of a reporter, or anything—finds himself writing his story, conferring with Gilbert for real (he advises that children be consulted on their preference in toys), courting the once-standoffish Alice—and the target of Dixon’s venomous enmity.  

Meanwhile, at the Gilbert home, their young niece Ellen (Jennifer Beall, a deadpan imp in a doughboy’s hat) is waiting for a reply to her letters from her father, who’s in the army Over There—and, unbeknownst to Ellen, missing in action, though she’s dreamed he’ll be home for Christmas. 

Ron Lytle’s score is quite serviceable, and his lyrics often clever. Lytle also stage- directs, keeping the show brisk and energetic. Armando Fox leads a quintet aloft (Josh Cohen, Randy Hood, Mike Wilson and Mike Wirgler) that cooks and sometimes swings along, giving the action its impetus. Though there’s the whole spectrum of musical comedy-type numbers (including a great comic buck-and-wing of self-righteous resentment by that Iago-at-the-water-cooler Dixon on exiting the factory), the most tuneful is a lullabye sung to a sleepless Ellen by her Aunt Mary (a warm, poised Jenifer Tice), “See You in the A.M.”—though the best set-up and delivery of a number is with “Daddy Has to Leave You,” Ellen upstairs remembering what her father (Lyle Nort) said (in song) to her when he shipped out for the war—joined by a chorus of other doughboys parting from their little girls. 

In Washington, Gilbert and Johnny win over the weary wartime council of Cabinet members, who play with the toys like kids—while back at home in New Haven, the kids themselves (Zoey Brandt and Maggie and Julia Franks as Ellen’s pals—as well as the newsboys yelling “Extra! Extra!” periodically, out in the audience), bored at the complications brought on by Dixon’s duplicity, straighten out the adults, first with a production number (“What’s Wrong with the Grownups?”), then with mischievous action, masterminded by Alice. 

It’s a good showcase for the Altarena’s cranked-up community theater, from musicians to set design (Frederick Chacon’s set of enormous wrapped presents that unfold into the Gilberts’ parlor), from principals to Ensemble (Lorie Franks, Amanda Gelender, Sadie Shaw, Matt Beall, Kevin Hammond, Paul J. White—as the names indicate, a few families are involved). There are particularly bright moments, and more pedestrian connectives, stock and standard fare for musicals when the moments just happen, rather than develop. Besides a few howlers—phrases that fit in more with the aftermath of the Second World War rather than the First (particularly sticky amid Kathleen Edmunds’ striving for a period feel in costumes), there are missed opportunities to cash in on the bounteous background color and flavor the theme suggests: Gilbert’s educational toys, more period Americana in story and song—not to mention the Christmas spirit itself. 

But the show springs from an opportune partnership with time to develop: Altarena plans to reprise Lytle’s first hit for them, Oh My Godmother, next year. The first edition featured Armando Fox’s musical direction, with Scott Phillips in the title role, Jenifer Tice as the Evil Stepmother, and other present cast members also embedded. His musical of Rumpelstilskin will debut with the East Bay Children’s Theatre in February.  

The Man Who Saved Christmas 

Alterena Playhouse 

1409 High St., Alameda 

Through Sunday 

Fri.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 2 p.m. 

Tickets $15-18 

523-1553, www.alterena.org

A tree student learns a set of categories: the 50-mph tree, the 30-mph tree, the stop-and-think tree. The distinctions here concern how fast-moving and far away you can be and still be able to identify a tree—how distinctive it is from a distance.  

A subset of 50-mph trees is the drive-by orchard. Citrus orchards are pretty obvious from miles away, if they’re in bloom and you’re downwind. Pear orchards are easy when they’re out of leaf, because their youngest twigs are so determinedly vertical.  

Walnut orchards aren’t hard if you can see the trunks. Even without their distinctive compound leaves, they’re marked by the funny-looking trunks, dark at the bottom and pale starting from a foot or three off the ground. The height of the change varies, but it’s usually uniform within each orchard, which gives it the odd effect of an orderly regiment of trees in knickers, or cavalry boots. 

What’s going on here is a marriage of convenience. The walnuts we find in the market most of the time are English (or Persian) walnuts, from trees of the species Juglans regia, with their familiar pale and relatively easy-to-open shells. That tree prospers here, but for one thing: it doesn’t like poorly drained clay soils.  

But we have our own native walnut, the California black walnut, Juglans californica. I myself like black walnuts better than English walnuts; blacks have a haunting perfume, a heady port-wine note in their flavor that I treasure. The problem with black walnuts as a commercial nut is that they’re really hard to crack. There are jokes about strewing them on the driveway and backing your car over them a few times.  

The native walnut, no surprise, likes the native soils just fine. So walnut ranchers (Don’t you love living here, where we have dairy ranches and walnut ranches and, up the hill, a Fish Ranch?) graft English walnut scions onto black walnut trunks, and everybody grows up to be a happy tree in kneesocks.  

The walnuts that Walnut Creek is named for were the native California species. Europeans found them growing around the sites of indigenous villages. Donald Culross Peattie cites “the oldest records” in limiting the oldest stands to “the valley of Walnut Creek, in Contra Costa County, the banks of the Sacramento River, particularly at Walnut Grove, and Wooden Valley east of Napa.”  

There’s a magnificent senior black walnut living next to a well-kept big Victorian in Rockridge. Walnut trees turn up in random backyards where squirrels have planted them; we have a ten-foot whip in the skinny space along our driveway, where the squirrels also bequeathed us a few native live oaks. The problem with a gift walnut is that they don’t play well with others, at least some others.  

Black walnut roots exude juglone, which inhibits growth in some plants—tomatoes (which you wouldn’t grow in a tree’s shade anyway) and their kin; azaleas and rhodedendrons; mountain laurel (and presumably its California cousin, Kalmiopsis); blackberries and blueberries.  

But hot or long composting breaks down the juglone compound into its nontoxic components, and there are so many plants that don’t mind juglone that it’s barely a limitation. Japanese maples supposedly get along just fine with black walnuts, and so do plants as diverse as daffodils, hibiscus, honeysuckle, and heuchera.  

There are lots of wild or feral black walnuts along the roads and streamways up in the Delta and north, and over the hills in Contra Costa. The only time you see bare spaces under them is when they’re along a cleared road, or when they’re rootstock that has overgrown the English walnut top—I see that often at the edge of an old orchard. Otherwise, natives and invaders elbow black walnuts like any other tree. 

Sometimes black walnuts are the roadside row of a working orchard. I’ve heard that tourists and passers-by can be obnoxious about helping themselves to orchard fruit; maybe the black walnuts are bait. (Professional nut rustlers typically strike after the nuts are picked and ready to ship.) You can tell them from the English walnuts by their bark—dark and furrowed all the way up the trunk—and their narrower and pointer leaflets.  

I’d thought that these and the black walnuts I see in the wild were insurance against the species’ extinction, but maybe not. Apparently most of the black walnuts we have are hybrids between our Californians—the two varieties, J. C. californica and J. C. hindsii used to be considered separate species—and Eastern black walnuts, brought here for more rootstock. The wild genepool is a resource against diseases like the butternut blight that’s whacking the southeastern Juglans cinerea. Hybrids are fine, if we keep them leashed.  

If you want to see orchard walnuts used as street trees, go to Vacaville, where there are memorials of the groves that were built over, not far from the Adobe exit from I-80. 

Photograph by Ron Sullivan  

Foreground, black walnut: dark bark, narrow leaflets. Behind, English walnuts grafted onto black walnut stock.  

TUESDAY, DEC. 12 

Anti-Torture Teach-in and Vigil with Trevor Paglen member of the UC Berkeley Geography Department, investigator and author of “Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights” at 12:30 p.m. at Boalt Hall, School of Law, UC Campus. 649-0663. 

“Adventures from the Mojave to the Antarctic” with Lucy Jane Bledsoe at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Berkeley High School Governance Council meets at 8:30 p.m. in the Berkeley Community Theater Lobby. The agenda will cover the Advisory Plan. 644-4803. 

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

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, DEC. 13  

Golden Gate Audubon Society Volunteer Orientation Learn about the ways you can help protect local birds and their habitats at 7 p.m. at 2530 San Pablo Ave, Suite G. RSVP to 843-7295.  

“New Treatments for Irregular Heartbeat” with Dr. Steven Kang, cardiologist at 9:30 a.m. at Alta Bates Summit, Merrit Pavillion, Cafeteria Annex B & C, 350 Hawthorne Ave., Oakland. Registration required. 869-6737. 

Poetry Writing Workshop led by Christina Hutchins at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

New to DVD “The Devil Wears Prada” at 7 p.m. at the JCCEB, 1414 Walnut St. 848-0237. 

“Natural Treatments for Low Back Pain” with Dr. Jay Sordean, LAc, OMD, at 1:15 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5190. 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets 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. 848-1704.  

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, DEC. 14 

“Robert Fisk on Iraq and Lebanon: Pointing the Finger of Guilt” at 7 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church, 2619 Broadway at 27th, Oakland. Donations $20, $50 for reception. 548-0542. 

“Natural Treatments for Low Back Pain” with Dr. Jay Sordean, LAc, OMD, at 1 p.m. at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5174. 

Pt. Richmond Shores Design Charrette for the housing project planned at the Terminal One site, at 6 p.m. in Richmond City Council Chambers, 1401 Marina Way South St., tichmond. 307-8140. 

FRIDAY, DEC. 15 

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Berkeley Aquatic Park, ongoing on Fridays until impeachment is realized. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Rita Maran, Peace and Conflict Studies, UCB on “United Nations in a Hostile World.” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $14, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925.  

Conversation with Patricia Isasa, filmmaker and Argentine torture survivor, and screening of “El Cerco” at 6:30 p.m. at The Uptown, 356 26th St., between Telegraph and Broadway. Donations accepted. 654-5355. 

Before Columbus Foundation American Book Awards Celebration at 6:30 p.m. at the African Museum and Library, 659 14th St., Oakland. Free. 228-6775. 

“Lincoln Highway in California” a slide show and discussion with author Gregory M. Franzwa, at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Central Library, 3rd floor Community Meeting Room, 2090 Kittredge St.  

Movies that Matter “Field of Dreams” at 6:30 p.m. at Neumayer Residence, 565 Bellevue Ave. at Perkins, Oakland. 451-3009. 

Kol Hadash Humanistic Judaism Pot Luck Chanukah Party at 6 p.m. at the Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin Ave. For potluck assignment and other info call 428-1492. 

SATURDAY, DEC. 16 

Celebration to Save the Oaks, with music, poetry and refreshments from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the threatened oak grove in front of Memorial Stadium. 841-3493. 

“Bringing the Condors Home” An exhibit of the Ventana Wildlife Society’s 20-year effort to restore California condors to the wild, opens at the Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St., at 10th St., Oakland. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

Berkeley Farmers’ Market Holiday Crafts Fair from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Center St. at Martin Luther King Jr. Way with local craftspepole, live music and prepared food. Benefits the Ecology Center. 548-3333.  

Telegraph Avenue Holiday Fair with more than 200 vendors, music and food, Sat. and Sun. from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. 

The Crucible Holiday Celebration with fire dancers, stilt walkers and art, Sat. and Sun. from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 1260 Seventh St. 444-0919.  

Muir Family Christmas Tours of the Muir House in Martinez decorated for the holidays on Sat. and Sun. Cost is $3. For details call 925-228-8860. 

Lake Temescal Water Quality Monitoring We will be performing our monthly water chemistry test at the inlet of Lake Temescal. Meet at 10:30 a.m. at the Broadway Terrace entrance. 415-561-7762. www.ebparks.org/resources/pdf/trails/temescal_map.pdf  

Restore Arroyo Viejo Creek Have fun while helping to improve our local watershed. Sponsored by the City of Oakland Arroyo Viejo Watershed Awareness Program and the Oakland Zoo. From 10 a.m. to noon at Arroyo Viejo Recreation Center, 7701 Krause Ave., Oakland. 665-3508.  

Progressive Democrats Celebration of the work we have done this past year at 4:30 p.m. at Albatross Pub, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 636-4149. 

“Behind the Mask” A documentary about people who take direct action to save animals at 6 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Cost is $10. Benefits Animal Rescue, Media & Education and East Bay Animal Advocates.  

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

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.  

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755.  

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, DEC. 17 

Christmas Caroling in Point Richmond Join us for chili at 5 p.m. at First United Methodist Church, 201 Martina St., corner of Richmond Ave., Point Richmond, and then stroll with us through the town. 236-0527.  

Community Labyrinth Peace Walk at 3 p.m. at Willard Middle School on Telegraph Ave. between Derby & Stuart. Everyone welcome. Wheelchair accessible. Rain cancels. 526-7377. 

“Impeach the President” Dahr Jamail, Peter Phillips & Larry Everest will discuss the case against Bush and Cheney at 7:30 p.m. at Revolution Books, 2425 Channing Way at Telegraph Ave. 848-1196. 

“The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: It’s the Economy” with Israeli economist Arie Arnon at 3:30 p.m. at the JCC of the East Bay. Doantion $5. sf-bayarea@ 

btvshalom.org  

Code Pink’s Glad Voter Tea Party to celebrate recent election victories from 3 to 7 p.m. at Redwood Gardens Community Room, 2951 Derby St. 524-2776. 

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

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

“The Divine Feminine in the World’s Religions: Christianity” with Anna Matt of the GTU at 9:30 a.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, One Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302, ext. 306. 

Tibetan Buddhism with Bob Russo on “Holistic Work” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812.  

MONDAY, DEC. 18 

“Acupuncture for Parkinson’s Disease” with Jacqueline Sohn at 10 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. 981-5190. 

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 

Help with Medicare Part D Enrollment Seniors who need to enroll in the prescription drug plan, or change their plan can get help and advice at Berkeley Senior Centers. Appointments required. Call 1-800-434-0222. www.lashicap.org 

Holiday Food Drive Sponsor a Food Drive at your business, school, place of worship or community center. Help the Food Bank reach its goal of collecting food for families in need during the holiday season. 635-3663, ext. 318. www.accfb.org  

UN Association’s UNICEF & Fair Trade Gift Center Closing Sale, Tues.-Sat. noon to 5 p.m. to Dec. 16, 1403 Addison St. 849-1752. 

Magnes Museum Docent Training Open to all interested in Jewish art and history. Classes begin Jan. 18th. For information contact cultural.arts@sbcglobal.net 

CITY MEETINGS 

Youth Commission meets Mon., Dec. 11, at 6:30 p.m., at City Council Chambers, Old City Hall. 981-6670.  

City Council meets Tues., Dec. 12, at 7 p.m in City Council Chambers. 981-6900. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Commission on Disability meets Wed., Dec. 13, at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Don Brown, 981-6346. TDD: 981-6345.  

Homeless Commission meets Wed., Dec. 13, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Jane Micallef, 981-5426.  

Planning Commission meets Wed., Dec. 13, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7484. 

Police Review Commission meets Wed., Dec. 13, at the South Berkeley Senior Center, 981-4950.  

Waterfront Commission meets Wed., Dec. 13, at 7 p.m., at 201 University Ave. 981-6740.  

School Board meets Wed. Dec. 13 at 7:30 p.m., in the City Council Chambers. Mark Coplan 644-6320. 

Community Health Commission meets Thurs., Dec. 14, at 6:45 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5356. 

Mental Health Commission meets Wed., Dec. 14, at 6:30 p.m. at 2640 MLK Jr. Way, at Derby. 981-5213.  

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thurs., Dec. 14, Special Meeting at 6 p.m., regular meeting at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. Mark Rhoades, 981-7410.  

Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board meets Mon. Dec. 18 at 7 p.m. in City Council Chambers, Pam Wyche, 644-6128 ext. 113. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/rent