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A campus police officer warns Miguel Altieri, center, to step back after the professor and BP agreement critic challenged the need to detain one of the two UC Berkeley students handcuffed after they dumped molasses in front of California Hall. A second student, Ali Tonack, was booked into Berkeley city jail. Photo by Richard Brenneman.
A campus police officer warns Miguel Altieri, center, to step back after the professor and BP agreement critic challenged the need to detain one of the two UC Berkeley students handcuffed after they dumped molasses in front of California Hall. A second student, Ali Tonack, was booked into Berkeley city jail. Photo by Richard Brenneman.
 

News

Week of Arrests, Protests Challenges UC/BP Accord

By Richard Brenneman
Friday March 02, 2007

The firestorm of controversy over the $500 million pact tying UC Berkeley to one of the world biggest and most criticized oil giants intensified this week, with a teach-in, a demonstration, a pointed exchange between students and a key administrator and at least one arrest. 

The central issue is the role BP—the company formerly known as British Petroleum—will play on the campus of one of the nation’s premier public research universities. At the heart of the deal is a plan to genetically engineer grass and microbes to produce ethanol. 

According to a UC Berkeley historian Monday night, BP’s half-billion-dollar deal is nothing less than massive greenwashing by a corrupt corporation—supported by a governor eager “to keep his eight Hummers running on alcohol.” 

Iain Boal, professor of social and environmental history in the geography department, joined three other professors, an award-winning science writer and a coalition of students for the first teach-in targeting the controversial plan revealed in a press conference last month. 

The BP project has garnered an impressive collection of political endorsements, ranging from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates to Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama—whose own state of Illinois is another beneficiary of the project. 

But opposition is growing as well, with the student activists staging two major events this week—Monday night’s teach-in and a protest Thursday afternoon outside California Hall, the seat of campus administration and the offices of Chancellor Robert Birgeneau. 

Students also spoke up during a closed meeting Wednesday noon with Paul Ludden, dean of the College of Natural Resources, according to two participants. 

Then, at 1 p.m. Thursday, demonstrators gathered outside California Hall to stage a bit of guerilla theater, and two of them, clad in white lab coats emblazoned with the BP logo, each dumped a yard weed sprayer tank of dark liquid outside the main entrance. 

Campus police, present in numbers and armed with video cameras as well as more traditional hardware, took the pair into custody, and hauled at least one, Ali Tonack, off to the Berkeley city lockup. 

A series of speakers, including professors Miguel Altieri, Ignacio Chapela and Gray Brechin, joined students in denouncing the agreement. As a final gesture to demonstrate the harmlessness of the liquid, Chapela pushed through police, dipped his finger in the substance, tasted it and pronounced it be molasses. 

“It’s organic, too,” called out one of the students. 

Among those who spoke was Hillary Lehr, an undergraduate in the Conservation and Resource Studies program at the College of Natural Resources (CNR). 

The day before, she had confronted Dean Paul Ludden moments after he began his presentation to a group of students and faculty, asking the 50 or so present for a show of hands [check] on whether they had serious questions about the agreement. 

“An overwhelming majority did,” said the witness, a critic of the project. “It was wonderful. Most were worried, and they asked questions.” 

When Ludden told faculty members they’d have ample opportunity to become involved, “he was immediately challenged by” ecosystem science Professor Andrew Paul Gutierrez, who said the agreement threatened academic freedom. 

Ludden responded that “any researcher can do anything he wants” at the university. 

When students protested the commercialization of research, Professor David Winickoff, a faculty member who helped Ludden draft the proposal, said they should ask legislators to revise the Bayh-Dole Act, federal legislation which gives universities the right to patent research and work with corporations to profit from its exploitation. 

“I don’t think it went the way they expected,” said the witness. 

“Their answers were very inadequate,” said Maren Poitras, one of the organizers of Monday night’s teach-in. “It became very clear that they weren’t going to change the process.” 

“I asked the dean if he took the Novartis guidelines into account. He said no, the university had not adopted them.” 

Those guidelines were drafted by researchers at Michigan State University, who were contracted to examine the university’s controversial agreement with Novartis, a Swiss agro-pharmaceutical corporation which entered into an agreement with the CNR to fund $25 million in research. 

That deal sparked a national controversy over the increasing role played by corporations in modern universities, and drew the attention of science writer Jennifer Washburn. An article on Novartis she wrote for The Atlantic magazine was expanded into her book, University, Inc., She was one of the speakers at Monday’s teach-in. 

“It’s really critical that you get hold of the agreement,” she told the students who gathered into the auditorium at Morgan Hall. “I called the university to try to obtain a copy and I was denied access to anything.” 

Kamal Kapadia, a CNR graduate student, did get a copy, reported in some detail at the teach-in. The San Francisco Chronicle got a look at one and published excerpts Tuesday. 

Much of the research will be aimed at creating genetically modified organisms (GMOs), a highly controversial research agenda critics fear will create significant unintended consequences, especially in lesser developed countries where they fear already threatened rain forest will be destroyed to clear ground for planting crops to fuel American cars. 

At Monday’s teach-in, Boal said oil companies are increasingly setting research agendas for universities around the world, with the $100 million 2003 ExxonMobil accord with Stanford serving as an increasingly typical example. 

The 10-year BP agreement with Berkeley he described as part of a “massive greenwashing campaign” funded by a minuscule fraction of the fraction of corporate profits, which amounted to more than $22 billion in 2006. 

The same firm has shown a ruthless hand in dealing with critics, he said, hiring a former Central Intelligence Agency to break into the home of one critic and tap his phone, while another was targeted with a fabricated file offering specious evidence of an adulterous affair that never happened. 

“How could a major oil company behave differently?” he asked, because of the fiduciary responsibility of directors to generate the highest possible profits for investors. 

Under the corporate regime, he said, “science has become capitalism’s way of knowing the world.” 

Washburn told students that lack of public disclosure of corporate/academic agreements has become all too common at a time when corporate funds are a steadily growing part of university research budgets. 

Even though federal coffers remain the largest source of university research dollars, the corporate moneys that accounted for about 7 percent of university research funds in 2000 influenced between 20 and 25 percent of research projects because of matching fund and cost-sharing agreements. 

“I am not opposed to corporate/academic relationships,” Washburn said. “They have been an integral part of the advance of science and knowledge ... The problem is the way the relationships are organized and structured,” jeopardizing the university’s core missions of education an independence. 

Miguel Altieri, a professor of agroecology at CNR and an advocate of sustainable agriculture, said the corporatization of research has virtually ended research on non-chemical means of pest control, once a strong emphasis on the Berkeley campus. “The discipline has disappeared,” he said. 

By focusing research in fields where corporations can hope to harvest patents, other field of science vanish, along with expertise. 

Already, patented GMO crops occupy between 80 million and 100 million hectares (one hectare is 2.47 acres), most farmed in vast tracts beyond the scale of traditional farming techniques because farmers who own less than 500 acres simply can’t afford the essential machinery. 

Reliance on so-called biofuels doesn’t make sense, Altieri charged, and will increase energy consumption in fuel production and raise carbon dioxide emissions.  

He criticized BP in particular for working with paramilitary groups in Colombia who have kidnapped and murdered critics of the oil company. 

“Will we feel satisfied when filling our cars with a mixture containing six percent of biofuels coming from the Amazon, where peasants and indigenous people were violently displaced, leaving thousands without food security?” he asked. 

Altieri described what he call “the green fuel mafia,” a consortium of oil, biotech and agricultural businesses allied with car manufacturers and environmental organizations, including the World Wildlife Federation, Conservation International and the Nature Conservancy. 

Civil and environmental engineering Professor Tad W. Patzek is one of the university’s most outspoken critics of biofuels, and worked for Shell Oil before joining the Berkeley faculty. 

“What troubles me is this alignment of public research with corporation goals,” he said, resulting in “a public institution now completely aligned with corporate interests.” 

Patzek’s research has yielded evidence which he says proves that biofuels like ethanol are not viable because, when all costs are added up, including the loss of natural resources diverted to production, only red ink results. 

The notion that research on ethanol will solve an energy crisis that stems in large part from over-consumption is dangerous, “and our complicity in this delusion is dangerous and runs against my feelings about the ethics of scientists at a public institution,” he said. 

While research has shown the productivity of techniques that don’t require GMOs, pesticides and major applications of fertilizer and irrigation water, that’s not the work that draws grants. 

“I personally know the chief scientist at BP and I know how things work there,” Patzek said, adding that he was “quite opposed” to the agreement “because they don’t know what they want,” while the corporation itself “wants an increases in the value of their stock by using a public institution” to make it possible. 

“We are a public institution in dire straits in many, many ways. We are here, hat in hand, begging for any donations from any source.” 

“The university has been penetrated and transformed from the inside,” said CNR Professor Ignacio Chapela, who was denied tenure and released by the university following his outspoken criticism of the Novartis agreement. 

Chapela told teach-in participants that the university had seen the loss of a once-strong tradition of faculty governance in Berkeley in the face of secret corporate agreements approved by trustees acting for the public. “We are losing the trust of the people,” he said, and the people are losing their trust in science. 


Correction: No BP/UC discussion on Monday

Friday March 02, 2007

The proposed agreement between a British oil company and UC Berkeley won't be discussed Monday during a presentation at the Berkeley Repertory Theater, as had been reported in Friday's paper. 

That account was based on incorrect information received by the newspaper. 

Monday's program is “The Big Bang, COBE, and the Relic Radiation Traces of 

Creation”, presented by Nobel Laureate George Smoot. It begins at 5:30 p.m. at Berkeley Rep’s Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St.


Filmmakers Say Wareham Rent Hikes May Destroy Community

By Judith Scherr
Friday March 02, 2007

More than four dozen writers, independent filmmakers, radio producers and technicians who tenant the seven-story tower at 10th and Parker streets are facing hefty rent hikes that could squeeze them out of Berkeley, said screenwriter Karen Folger Jacobs, an 18-year tenant at the Saul Zaentz Media Center, the only renter among several contacted by the Daily Planet willing to allow her name to be used for this story. 

Wareham Development of San Rafael, self-described as Berkeley’s largest commercial property investor and developer, recently paid more than $20 million for the 2.64 acre property. On Jan. 24, the day after the deal went through, Wareham immediately informed tenants there would be two or three-year leases that would include rent increases for most.  

Wareham has insisted on meeting individually with tenants and has asked for increases up to 100 percent, Jacobs said. 

“The situation is very tense here. We’re quite vulnerable,” one tenant, an independent film maker, told the Planet when reached by phone on Thursday, explaining why he could not allow his name to be used for this story. 

Tim Gallen, spokesperson for Wareham, said Wednesday that he knew nothing about rent increases in the building. He said he would try to get the information, but did not get back to the Daily Planet before deadline on Thursday. 

Wareham owns at least three other properties in Southwest Berkeley and others nearby in Emeryville.  

For most tenants in the building, their work is a labor of love that sometimes brings honors, such Sundance Film Festival prizes or nominations for Academy Awards, but brings in minimal cash. 

“It’s unlike anywhere in the country; it’s a center of social issue documentary,” said an anonymous tenant, noting there is a special collaboration among the tenants.  

When a film editor is needed, a fellow tenant can often find the person, perhaps between films, in need of picking up an extra job. Or when someone needs a critical eye on a rough cut of a film, she will invite a neighbor over for an opinion, said another tenant. 

Jacobs said during the time the Wareham purchase was going through, she had talked to Mayor Tom Bates at a social gathering about possible rent increases. “He had told me there would be no rent increases. He said if there are, we should come to him,” Jacobs said. 

On Wednesday a group of tenants met with Councilmember Linda Maio and Mayoral Aide Calvin Fong. Fong did not return calls before deadline. 

Maio told the Daily Planet on Thursday that in the long term, she thought tenants should organize themselves as a nonprofit and buy a building, perhaps with the city’s help.  

But tenants say it’s not clear that they can last in the building long enough to save their community. 

About two years ago, perhaps in preparation for the property sale, tenants got large rent increases from the previous landlord. “I’m now paying 75 percent more rent than I did in April 2005,” one tenant told the Planet. 

“After receiving a new lease proposal with a large rent increase, one 25-year veteran of the building wrote back to Wareham questioning his ability to sign a lease with such a large increase, but expressing his desire to stay. In response he received a 30-day eviction notice,” said a written statement sent to the Planet by one of the tenants. 

Some complained that the new owners were in the midst of construction projects for which the tenants got little or no notice. Wareham spokesperson Gallen said the construction is positive. The building “needs a lot of work,” he said, noting that the owners want to make the building “the soul of a new entertainment/technology district” that would stretch to Emeryville’s Pixar Animation Studios and include enterprises such as those which use and those who produce, for example, digital-sound engineering.  

Wareham also owns:  

• a 38,000 square-foot property at 800 and 830 Heinz St. that once served as the headquarters for Durkee Famous Foods; the development includes live-work units and a childcare facility.  

• an office building at 2910 Seventh St. whose tenants are Xoma, Ltd and Bayer Healthcare. 

• a property at 2929 Seventh Street that houses Dynavax Technologies, a Wells Fargo Bank and the Wooden Duck, a furniture builder/restorer. 

Wareham gave $10,000 to the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce Political Action Committee, contributing to the successful effort to defeat Measure J, an initiative that would have made it more difficult to demolish or remodel landmarked buildings.  

Arguing for city help to keep rents affordable in the building, one tenant pointed to the mayor’s State of the City address in which he praised the local arts scene and named a number of prize-winning films created by tenants of the 10th Street Building. Among them are Academy Award nominations: Berkeley in the 60s, Complaints of a Dutiful Daughters, Promises; and Sundance Grand Jury Prize winners: Freedom on My Mind, Daughter from Danang and Long Nights Journey into Day. 


After Dissent, Panel Adopts UC/City Downtown Plan

By Richard Brenneman
Friday March 02, 2007

With little dissent, the joint town/gown subcommittee charged with finding ways the city can capitalize on UC Berkeley’s massive downtown expansion adopted guidelines Tuesday that members hope will become part of the new downtown plan. 

Only Planning Commissioner Helen Burke dissented on more than one of the 21 items in the 11-page document drafted by Chair Dorothy Walker, a retired UCB Assistant Vice Chancellor for Property Development. 

The Subcommittee on City Interest in University Properties will present the fourth and final draft of its report to the Downtown area Plan Advisory Committee (DAPAC) when it meets Wednesday at 7 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave.  

Burke’s dissent began immediately after the sole public speaker, environmentalist Sylvia McLaughlin, who urged the group to call for preservation of the crescent, the expanse of lawn at the western entrance to the campus along Oxford Street between University Avenue and Center Street. 

McLaughlin, 90, recently made the New York Times for joining City Councilmember Betty Olds and former Mayor Shirley Dean on a platform in the oak grove west of the Memorial Stadium, where tree-sitters are protesting university plans to fell the trees to make way for a new gym. 

“A pedestrian bridge across Oxford would also enhance the city/university connection,” McLaughlin told the subcommittee. 

Lone dissenter 

Criticism of the membership of the subcommittee surfaced during last week’s DAPAC meeting. 

Chair Will Travis had appointed the group, rejecting requests by two of the emerging DAPAC majority which has challenged him in other votes—Jesse Arreguin and Patti Dacey. Most of those he did appoint have sided with him on losing votes. 

Burke’s dissents began immediately after McLaughlin finished, starting with an objection to the way Walker drafted the report—which Burke said she considered a violation of Berkeley’s emphasis on open process. 

At issue was whether Walker should have followed the same procedures laid out for city commissions, where all communications must be filtered through the city staff to avoid any joint electronic consultations by a majority of the body. 

Burke said she objected because deliberations should be conducted in full public view during open meetings. 

“In my opinion the process by which the final draft report was arrived at is flawed,” she said. “In Berkeley especially it is important to have a transparent process—and particularly when it relates to sensitive issues like land use, density and UC property in the downtown.” 

Burke said Planning and Development Director had told her the policy didn’t apply to subcommittees, and Walker said Marks had told her the same thing. 

While fellow subcommittee member and U.C. Lecturer Linda Schacht called Burke’s criticisms unfair and “a tempest in a teapot,” members agreed to go through the document and vote separately on each of the points, rather than on the document as a whole as originally suggested or in sections, a compromise Walker offered. 

Member and Planning Commissioner James Samuels said the report should serve as the element on the university some DAPAC members have called to be included in the new plan, but Travis and Walker said the findings should simply be folded into the overall plan, and not featured separately.  

 

Final report 

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the document approved Tuesday is the call to locate much of the city’s new housing growth in the downtown, a plan that calls for building new high rises in the city center. 

The panel did not approve the call for new housing “for at least 3,000 new residents” and substituted the words “a sufficient number of” for the specific figure. The goal is “to create a critical mass of people to support small grocery stores and neighborhood support services.” 

City planning staff had offered a model that would have added 3,000 new residential units in 14 16-story “point towers” located throughout the downtown. That many units would have housed at least 6,000 residents. 

The plan also includes a recommendation for city zoning and possible bonuses to encourage new offices that would house so-called incubator businesses in structures that would also house new retailers on the ground floor. 

Among the other points approved Tuesday, the document says that: 

• Downtown isn’t going to attract a major department store; 

• Shattuck Avenue can’t serve as the retail hub of the city center, and east/west streets should play the key role in generating retail sales; 

• The city should work to attract so-called junior retailers, specialty retailers smaller than department stores such as merchandisers of electronic goods, appliances and men’s clothiers or stores like Pottery Barn to the buildings the university will build at the site of the old Department of health Services building and other key retail locations; 

• The downtown should play on its two major strengths, the arts district and the university, and encourage the university to bring more museums downtown in addition to the already planned Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive; 

• The city should urge the university to bring the Haas School of Business’s Executive Education program downtown instead of its planned relocation to Bowles Hall;  

• Owners of downtown movie theaters should be encouraged to upgrade their facilities; 

• Bringing more university people downtown would help retailers and encourage new businesses, so the university should plan to add housing of all types in the central city; 

• New buildings at the site of University Hall and on the adjoining university-owned property to the west should be designed as gateways between city and university; 

• The university’s “surge” building, designed to house employees dislocated during seismic retrofit of buildings on campus, should be constructed at the site of the old Purcell Paint building on the block bounded by Oxford and Walnut streets, Berkeley Way and University Avenue; 

• The eastern terminus of University Avenue should be narrowed and re-landscaped to form both a terminus and a gateway to the university. 

• Small-scale buildings around the intersection of Shattuck and University avenues should be redeveloped with greater height and density, and the city should build a new parking structure at its Berkeley Way parking lot to accommodate the new business and office developments; 

• The city should develop new locations to house new programs to meet the needs of the homeless, both “to restore the image of Berkeley as a caring city” and to aid retail business owners, who say the sight of homeless folk on the street discourages potential patrons; 

• The Tang Center site at the southeast corner of Fulton Street and Bancroft Way, now listed as the proposed site of the “surge” building, should be used for faculty housing and offices, with another potential use being a multicultural center for students from the campus, Berkeley High School and other young adults.


Riders Knock New Van Hool Buses at MTC Meeting

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Friday March 02, 2007

A small but spirited group of AC Transit bus riders brought their case against the contract for new Van Hool buses to the Metropolitan Transit Commission this week, and got what they called a “surprisingly” more attentive and favorable hearing than they expected. 

Led by San Francisco Supervisor Tom Ammiano, several commissioners sharply questioned AC Transit’s decision to continue a contract to purchase 50 buses from the Belgian-based Van Hool company in the wake of testimony from several riders against the Van Hool buses AC Transit currently owns and operates. 

Ammiano said he found the testimony of Van Hool opponents “compelling,” and asked AC Transit Deputy General Manager Al Gleich, “but you are saying something contrary. How do you reconcile those two positions? Are you saying that these people are lying? Have you accompanied these people on their attempts to navigate the buses? With all due respect, you just blew off everything that they said. I’m not comfortable with this. It’s a he-said, she-said situation, and it would be incumbent on this commission to find out what’s going on.” 

And former San Mateo Mayor Sue Lempert, representing the cities of San Mateo County on the commission, said that “while on the one hand, I don’t think the commission should get involved in telling a transit agency what equipment to purchase, when you get this many people coming to you with complaints, you just shouldn’t go back and say business as usual.” Calling the protesters “pretty savvy,” Lempert said that “after all, what we’re trying to do is to convince people to ride public transit.” 

And Alameda County Supervisor Scott Haggerty, recently elected as MTC vice chair, asked to see statistics on the new buses from AC Transit. “I’ve never been a fan of buying buses in Belgium when we have Gillig down the street,” Haggerty said, referring to the Hayward-based bus manufacturers. “I’m in favor of ‘Buy America.’” 

“I’m sort of in a state of shock,” Van Hool opponent Joyce Roy later said by telephone. “This is the first time we’ve been listened to and responded to. I think this is a good start.” 

The Metropolitan Transit Commission, made up of representatives of elected government bodies in the greater Bay Area, has no direct authority over AC Transit purchases. However, MTC is the funneling agency for federal and state transit funding in the Bay Area. In addition, MTC provides approval for the complicated government funding swapping scheme that allows AC Transit to free up enough money to purchase the buses. 

Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates was recently elected to the MTC to represent Alameda County’s cities. 

Early last month, the AC Transit Board of Directors voted to move forward with a contract with Van Hool for 50 new 40-foot buses, with an option for the transit district to purchase 1,500 more. The new 40 footers are modified versions of the Van Hool buses currently operated by the district, based on engineering changes recommended by the district, including a reduction from three doors to two, and structural changes which staff members said would provide for a “smoother ride” and a “significant improvement” over the current Van Hool 40 footers. The new buses are currently being built in the prototype stage. 

AC Transit currently operates 100 40-foot Van Hools, along with 63 60-footers and 12 30-footers manufactured by the same company. 

Many of the same community dissenters—mostly elderly and disabled riders—who spoke against the Van Hool contract at the AC Transit meeting in early February brought those same concerns to the MTC meeting on Wednesday morning at MTC headquarters near the Lake Merritt BART station. 

The most dramatic testimony at public comment was provided by AC Transit rider Lisa Bloomer of Alameda, who came to the speakers podium using a white walking cane and telling commissioners that she is “visually impaired” and going blind. Bloomer said that she has measured the height of the first step of the Van Hool buses, and said it is 11 inches.  

“That high,” she said, struggling to raise her foot a foot off the floor to demonstrate what that meant. “I’ve fallen more than a dozen times trying to get on these buses. I call them death traps.” 

Bloomer also said that she’d seen “numerous people propelled ten feet and hitting their heads inside these buses” while the Van Hool buses were in motion. “I ask you to freeze AC Transit funds,” she said. “People are getting injured daily.” 

Interrupted repeatedly by hoots and comments from the Van Hool protesters, AC Transit Deputy Executive Director Gleich disputed those claims, saying that the number of “falls and injuries on the Van Hool buses is not higher than on the older buses. It’s probably lower.” He called the Van Hools “substantially safer. We have listened.”  

When Gleich said that two earlier rider surveys of Van Hools showed a 75 percent popularity rating and added that “I’m sure if you’d do it again today you’d get the same result,” one of the protesters shouted out “do it!” 

Gleich also said he took exception to the assertion that the Van Hools were not safe for the disabled, in particular. 

“I am disabled,” he said. “I have been active in the disabled community. The new Van Hools have better accessibility for wheelchairs than other buses.” 

Gleich, who is ambulatory, has a visible disability in one leg. He agreed with Bates’ suggestion that one of the new buses be brought to the MTC so that commissioners could inspect it, and also agreed to a request from commissioners that the MTC be provided with information on the number of seniors and disabled in the earlier AC Transit survey of the Van Hools. 

Bates said following the meeting that he was unfamiliar with the Van Hool buses, and needed to inspect them before giving his opinion on the issue. 

 


Alleged Problem Cops Leave BPD

By Judith Scherr
Friday March 02, 2007

Two problem cops, apparently friends, have left the Berkeley Police Department. 

Officers Steven Fleming and Sean Derry, both 30 years old, were put on paid administrative leave in August, before leaving the department, having allegedly committed very different offenses, according to Chief Doug Hambleton, interviewed by the Planet on Tuesday.  

Records detailing the Berkeley police investigation show at least five cases in which investigators suspected that Fleming might have stolen money or other property belonging to people he either arrested or booked into the Berkeley jail. However Assistant Alameda County District Attorney Marty Brown told the Planet he declined to prosecute the case because the evidence wasn’t strong enough to get a conviction. 

Derry was arrested Aug. 12 by San Francisco police, accused of discharging his service revolver while drunk in his San Francisco home. His case is expected to come to court in San Francisco in the near future. Harry Stern, Derry’s attorney, did not return Planet calls for comment. 

Hambleton, who called on the California Department of Justice to assist in the investigation, put Fleming on paid administrative leave in August.  

“We interviewed as many people that he had arrested as we could over the past six months. Several people had credible stories,” Hambleton said. Investigators went back only six months because Fleming had been off duty for a period before that time, Hambleton said without elaborating. 

A three-inch police report details the investigation. Fleming arrested one of his alleged victims Feb. 2 on an outstanding warrant. In an August interview with the arrestee, the police report says the individual was booked into jail after signing a property receipt form, without reading the form. He told investigators that after being taken to Santa Rita Jail, he looked at the receipt and saw it did not reflect the sum he had when arrested. 

“He said he did not tell anyone, because he simply wanted to let it go,” the investigator’s report said. The arrestee was leaving town “and did not want to be bothered by the incident.” 

Another incident involved a person Fleming arrested for vandalism on March 23, who told investigators he had a $100 gift card when arrested; the card was not recorded on the property receipt. Another person Fleming arrested on a DUI claimed his belongings lacked a silver earring when his property was returned to him on his release.  

Another arrestee said Fleming had him stand with his back to him as he was searched. Fleming removed the man’s wallet from his back pocket. The arrestee said there had been $170 in his wallet, but when asked, Fleming said he did not see any money in it. “[The arrestee] said Fleming opened the wallet in front of him and the money was gone,” the police report said. 

According to the police report, the alleged victim said something to Fleming about the missing money, noting: “Fleming sarcastically said something to the effect, ‘You want to file charges against me, file charges.” The arrestee signed the property form under protest, the booking officer told investigators.  

Another officer present during the booking process told investigators that the arrestee told Fleming “I’m not saying you stole it, but I had more money than this.” Fleming then became agitated, saying, “This is motherfucking bull shit” then began to pace in the booking area, according to the second officer, who told investigators she thought Fleming should leave “because she did not want any type of incident to occur.” The officer told investigators that when Fleming left, “He hit a window in anger.” 

Fleming joined the Berkeley force March 9, 2003, after leaving the Richmond Police Department during an initial probation period, according to Hambleton. Fleming’s last day with Berkeley Police was Jan. 31. He earned $94,333 per year and about $47,000 in benefits. 

Fleming refused to speak to investigators, according to the police report. 

Fleming’s stepmother, Capt. Stephanie Fleming, retired in January. Hambleton, who praised Capt. Fleming for her work in the department, said the retirement had been planned for more than a year and was unrelated to accusations against the younger Fleming. 

Sean Derry joined the force as a trainee in January 2003 and became an officer June 27, 2004. His resignation was effective Wednesday. His annual salary was $88,510 plus about 50 percent in benefits. 

Interviewed as part of the investigation into the Fleming case, Derry said he had no knowledge of malfeasance on Fleming’s part or of money problems Fleming might have had. He told investigators that he and Fleming would get together socially for drinks and to smoke cigars. Their families would get together, Derry told investigators. 

“The most important thing about my job is maintaining the integrity of the department,” Hambleton told the Planet. The chief was unable to detail the reasons for the officers’ exits from the department, as they are privileged personnel matters. 

Last year Cary Kent, formerly a BPD sergeant, resigned from force after pleading guilty to felony charges of stealing drugs from the evidence room of which he was in charge. Kent tampered with as many as 286 evidence envelopes in cases dating back to 1998, court records say. He retired from the force rather than submit to an investigation and was sentenced in May to one year of home detention. 


Berkeley City Council Spends $3.3 Million Windfall

By Judith Scherr
Friday March 02, 2007

Among the decisions the Berkeley City Council made Tuesday night was to spend a $3.3 million windfall from unexpected revenues from investments and parking fines. 

The council also voted to uphold a carry-out business on Euclid Avenue, hold a workshop on a loophole in the inclusionary housing ordinance, support the Shattuck Cinema workers and extend permit parking. 

It was past 11 p.m. when the council voted 7-1, with Councilmember Betty Olds having left the meeting and Councilmember Kriss Worthington voting in opposition, to distribute the funds to a variety of projects: $200,000 to continuing Telegraph Avenue improvements, including extra policing and mental health services; $500,000 for economic development activities; $200,000 for upgrades in computer technology for public safety; $100,000 to Sustainable Berkeley to produce a plan for reducing greenhouse gases locally; $1 million to the fire department to end rolling fire station closures and $1.3 million for infrastructure needs. 

Much of the discussion turned around a proposal by Worthington, which went down to defeat, to hold the infrastructure money aside for housing, traffic and crime, specifically to address the increasing number of robberies.  

But Councilmember Darryl Moore was firm: “We have infrastrucure needs in West Berkeley,” he said. “We want the $1.3 million for infrastructure.” 

The council had called for details on economic development expenditures, among which will be: 

• $75,000 for a half-time project coordinator, 

• $53,000 for a half-time data analyst to map the city’s commercial properties, including vacancies 

• $20,000 for a consultant to help set up Business Improvement Districts in south and west Berkeley, 

• $20,000 to support film office activities for the city’s Convention and Visitor’s Bureau 

• $50,000 for south Berkeley’s façade grants,  

• $85,000 for short-term work for a senior planner to, according to Economic Development Director Michael Kaplan, “dig into the questions of West Berkeley zoning,” 

• $60,000 for a shop-local marketing effort. 

While detailed questions were asked about most of the expenditures, councilmembers refrained from queries about the $100,000 to be given to Sustainable Berkeley, a grouping of individuals, non-profits and UC Berkeley. Funds supposed to be used to write a plan to reduce local greenhouse gas emissions will not be allocated until a contract is approved by the council, according to Mayor Tom Bates. 

 

Public police information  

A Contra Costa Times effort to review public information efforts of a number of police departments gave Berkeley a failing grade of F-, along with a number of other cities’ police departments, and so Councilmember Dona Spring called on the Berkeley department for improvements, particularly in keeping neighborhoods current about crime waves and in accessibility to police reports. 

Police Chief Doug Hambleton responded saying that the department has retrained its personnel and would be more responsive. 

 

Euclid appeal 

While some neighbors were upset with the idea of yet another “carry out” food service outlet, the council upheld the zoning board decision to allow Jamal Fares, owner of the Euclid Avenue Hummingbird Café, to open a second establishment across the street. 

The vote to uphold the decision of the zoning board and not hold a new public hearing was 6-3, with Councilmembers Max Anderson and Kriss Worthington voting in opposition and Spring abstaining. 

 

The council also voted: 

• To hold a workshop on the loophole in the inclusionary housing ordinance for smaller projects that include a mix of live-work and regular apartment units. 

• To support workers at the Shattuck Cinema, who are working for Landmark Theatres without a contract. 

• To extend residential parking permits to Parker Street between Milvia Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Way, to Emerson Street between Shattuck Avenue and Wheeler Street and to Prince Street between Wheeler and Deakin streets. 

 

 

 

 

 


Independent Body to Govern Housing Authority

By Judith Scherr
Friday March 02, 2007

City councilmembers voted themselves out of the job of running the Berkeley Housing Authority on Tuesday when they approved a new governance structure expected to be in place by July. 

The Housing Authority board is currently constituted of the City Council members plus two BHA renters, but the agency has been in “troubled” status since the fall of October 2005. A new, independent body would have more time to direct the agency that oversees Berkeley’s low-income housing, councilmembers said. 

The new board of seven members, to include two tenants, will all be appointed by the mayor with council approval and will function independently of the council. (While commissions are generally appointed in equal numbers by the mayor and councilmembers, state law says the mayor will appoint the new entity, said Housing Director Steve Barton.) 

Councilmember Dona Spring had hoped for some continued oversight by the council and asked for regular reports on housing inspections and recertification of housing voucher holders. “The buck stops with us,” she said. 

But it doesn’t, said City Manager Phil Kamlarz, explaining that the body will have ultimate decision-making powers. Reports, however, will be public and available to the council, he said. 

“The buck doesn’t stop here, but it comes from here,” quipped Councilmember Laurie Capitelli, referring to a statement by the city manager’s in which he said that the city will need to kick in $600,000 to $1 million to keep the BHA afloat. 

Bates said he will appoint Councilmember Darryl Moore as liaison with the council. Those interested in serving on the authority can contact the mayor at 981-7100. 

 


State Administrator Agrees to Close East Oakland High

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Friday March 02, 2007

Despite protests and pleas from students, teachers, and parents who marched eight miles from the East Oakland Community High School in the Oakland hills to the Oakland Unified School District Administrative headquarters Wednesday afternoon, OUSD State Administrator Kimberly Statham ruled Wednesday night that she was following her staff’s recommendation to close the school.  

With the Oakland Unified School District under state control, Statham has the sole authority to decide whether or not the school will be closed. 

The school closing will take place at the end of the school year in June. Because of OUSD’s open enrollment policy, students currently enrolled will have the opportunity to enroll next year in any high school in the district that has the room to accommodate them. With many of the district’s high-choice high schools already at capacity, however, students currently at East Oakland Community will be “defaulted,” according to district representatives, to the high school in whose attendance zone they live.  

East Oakland Community is a district-operated small school housed in the school building on Fontaine Drive above 82nd Avenue formerly occupied by Kings Estates Junior High School. It is within a short walking distance of Castlemont High School on MacArthur Boulevard. 

On Wednesday afternoon, more than 150 marchers left the school to walk through East Oakland to present their concerns to Statham at Wednesday night’s administrator/trustee meeting. Marchers held signs reading “Give Us Time To Shine In Oakland,” “East Oakland Schools Deserve District Support, Too,” and “Keep EOC Open.” 

Included in the marchers was OUSD trustee Noel Gallo, carrying an American flag in one hand, who told marchers at a pre-march rally on the school grounds that “I am here because I believe in you. All of our schools should join you to demand better education for our district. You have the right to be here. You have the right to have quality schools. That right is guaranteed in the Constitution.” 

One of the organizers of the march, Abundant Life Ministries minister Rev. Zenzile Scott, the parent of a 10th grader at East Oakland Community, said that “this is a school worth saving. I really love this school. My child has only been here six weeks, but already, she is thriving at this school. I’ve never seen her be a part of something like this in the schools before. Something special is happening within these walls.” 

A leaflet passed out during the march by march organizers said that “we want more time and support to build on our strengths, to address our weaknesses, and to become a great school.” 

In its recommendation to Statham at last week’s administrator/trustee meeting, OUSD staff members cited several reasons for recommending East Oakland Community’s closure, including what staff called the “largest drop in [California Standards Test] scores in the district” in the past school year and what staff called a “very low” California High School Exit Exam passing rate in both math and English. In addition, staff said that students at East Oakland Community “are not offered the appropriate coursework to graduate and attend a four year university and that “student transcripts are inaccurate and student schedules do not reflect district course sequence.” Staff also said that enrollment at the school is down, and that ‘long-term enrollment projections show a continued decline within the Castlemont attendance area.” 

OUSD Public Information Officer Alex Katz said by telephone that the district feels “it is always a very serious decision to close schools” and that “where it was possible, the district has intervened in other situations to begin to bring schools up to state standards.”  

Commenting on student and teacher presentations at Wednesday night’s meeting to keep East Oakland Community open, Katz said that “it is impressive to see kids enthusiastic about their school, and it is really powerful to see teachers so committed to their school, as well. But at the same time, the district has a responsibility to make sure that kids graduate.” 

Katz said that two-thirds of the junior class at East Oakland Community “are not going to graduate” because they will not be able to obtain the full credits required by the State of California. “The district is not blaming the teachers for that,” Katz said. “There’s no lack of effort or ability on the part of the teachers that caused this.” 

But Katz said that while “there are a lot of positive things going on in the program” at East Oakland Community, “you have to have academic standards that are real and that the students and the parents can count on, and the students have to have the opportunity to get the credits that they need to graduate.” 

Katz said that in giving her reasons for the closure, Statham told school supporters on Wednesday night that “the district shares the responsibility for not making the school work and for not living up to the proper standards for the last few years.” 

East Oakland Community was one of four schools Statham ordered closed at Wednesday night’s administrator/trustee meeting. The other school closures are Kizmet Middle, Merritt Middle, and Sherman Elementary. Housed at Merritt Community College, Merritt Middle is being closed, according to the staff report, because Merritt College “has decided to end the Memorandum of Understanding with OUSD to use the facilities space for other purposes.” 

At a press conference held shortly before the administrator/trustee meeting, the Oakland Education Association announced its opposition to the closures. In a prepared statement, OEA President Betty Olson-Jones said that “these closures and the threat of more to come speeds a continuing downward spiral of instability in the district. If the district succeeds in closing these schools, it will have a devastating impact on our students.” 

Olson-Jones questioned why Sherman Elementary was being closed when “it is only now being wired for internet access, after years of requests by staff had been ignored. Why now? We have to wonder: Does this mean the school is being upgraded so that it can be contracted out as a charter school?” 

In its Feb. 28 recommendation, OUSD staff said that Sherman was being recommended for closure because of “significant decline” in California Standards Test scores in the last two school years, that “current reform efforts are insufficient to provide the accelerated academic achievement for students,” that there has been “significant enrollment decline” at the school over the past five years, and that “long-term enrollment projections indicate a continued decline over the next five years.” 

 


Berkeley School District Sued Over Warm Water Pool EIR

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday March 02, 2007

The Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) was sued by Friends Protecting Berkeley's Resources (FPBR) Friday for an inadequate environmental impact report (EIR) on the demolition of the gymnasium and warm water pool within its Berkeley High School South of Bancroft Master Plan. 

“The lawsuit is a CEQA challenge in the public interest to enforce environmental laws protecting the historic 1922 Berkeley High School gymnasium and warm water pool,” said Susan Brandt-Hawley, of Brandt-Hawley Law Group—the environmental and preservation law firm representing FPBR—in a telephone interview with the Planet from Washington D.C. 

BUSD superintendent Michel Lawrence told the Planet on Wednesday that the school district had not taken a look at the lawsuit yet. 

“The only thing we have been notified about is that a lawsuit has been filed. We don’t know why it has been filed or what their intentions are. We cannot speculate about anything at the moment,” she said. 

Brandt-Hawley described The Friends as a newly formed group of concerned citizens who came together earlier this year to protect Berkeley’s resources. 

According to the lawsuit, “the District was urged to further consider feasible alternatives to demolition that could be developed to meet all or most of the District's objectives” but “the EIR did not justify its findings.” 

The Berkeley school board voted unanimously on January 17, 2007, to accept the Berkeley High School EIR on the Berkeley High School South of Bancroft Master Plan and to approve the Master Plan for the project. 

The approval signals the beginning of the process of selecting a committee to hire an architect for the proposed construction of the South of Bancroft project.  

The Master Plan involves the southern part of the campus at 1980 Allston Way and the adjacent school-district-owned parking lot on Milvia Street. 

Marie Bowman, a member of FPBR, described the gymnasium and the warm water pool as a “jewel in the crown of Berkeley.” 

“It’s not just a cultural and historical resource but also a community resource. There’s no doubt about it. It’s confusing why the school district would want to tear down such an asset,” she said. 

Berkeley voters approved a ballot measure in 2000 for $3,250,000 to reconstruct, renovate, repair and improve the warm water pool facilities, including the restrooms and locker space.  

“In spite of approving funds for improving this beautiful building, nothing has been done about it yet,” Bowman told the Planet. 

The School District proposes in its Master Plan to demolish the old gymnasium that houses the warm water pool at the very end of the project, which they say will give them time to work on a plan with the city to save the pool. 

“It’s not clear what the BUSD is proposing to do with the city, or if anything will be done at all. What guarantee is there after what happened with the ballot measure in 2000 that they will save the pool?” Bowman said. 

The warm pool is used by hundreds of seniors, disabled adults and children, as well as by athletes recovering from sports injuries and rehabilitation patients who use the pool for physical therapy. 

Designed by renowned Bay Area architects William C. Hays and Walter H. Ratcliff Jr., the warm water pool and the gymnasium are both eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. 

Both are representative of early seismic engineering work and are rare examples of an early 20th century high school gymnasium. 

The Landmarks Preservation Commission will receive an application to landmark the Berkeley High School gymnasium and warm water pool on April 5. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Local Booksellers Cheer Barnes & Noble’s Demise

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday March 02, 2007

The Barnes & Noble bookstore located in downtown Berkeley will close May 31, a piece of news that has left local independent booksellers ecstatic. 

“I am overjoyed, to say the least,” said Tim Rogers, store manager for Pegasus Books located right across the street from the Barnes & Noble. 

“This is great news for us,” he said. “Although we were not in direct competition with BN, it was interesting working so close to a big chain. I am sure this will improve business for us.” 

Store employees declined to comment Thursday on the reason for closure. Barnes & Noble customer relations could not be reached before press time. 

“Berkeley’s a tough market to break into when it comes to selling books. We have some tough competition here in the form of local bookstores,” said Michael Caplan, the city's economic development manager. “The Barnes & Noble on Shattuck was a smaller store for the chain compared to its other locations. It just wasn’t doing the preferred volume. I guess that’s one of the reasons for it closing down.” 

Rogers said that the model that helped local book stores such as Pegasus survive was to deal in used as well as new books. 

“Sometimes you just need to do things differently,” he said. “Berkeley is a great book town and we think Pegasus has what it needs to cater to booklovers here. New book stores sometimes have it harder than used bookstores.” 

Pegasus was started 30 years ago in the Bay Area, and it has two other locations, on Solano Avenue in Berkeley and on College Avenue in Oakland. It is currently owned by Amy Thomas, a Berkeley resident. 

“What we have is a mixture of old and new,” she said. “We sell books, we buy books, we trade books. Our staff is friendly and knowledgeble and we indulge in all kinds of fun stuff such as free poetry broadsides, author readings and even the occasional Harry Potter midnight party.” 

Thomas said she is not sad to see Barnes & Noble leave Berkeley. 

“They ran the place like a business,” she said. “For us it’s more of a community thing. People who work at Pegasus and buy from Pegasus live in Berkeley. As a result the money is going back into Berkeley. But this is not the case for chains such as Barnes & Noble.” 

Pegasus reported an increase in revenue during Christmas, which store employees said was likely the result of Cody’s on Telegraph closing down in July. 

“It’s not as if I have anything against chain stores, but if a customer asks me about a book we don’t have in the store, I’ld rather direct them to Moe’s or local stores rather than Barnes & Noble,” Thomas said. 

“My first thought was happiness,” said Doris Moskowitz of Moe’s Books. “When the Barnes & Noble first moved into Berkeley, the smaller book stores were afraid it would mean less business for them. Big powerful bookstores don’t belong in a city like Berkeley. Now that they are moving out, it’s a big relief.” 

Moskowitz inherited the bookstore from her father Moe Moskowitz who started the new and used book store in 1959. 

“Their sales were pretty good, but there were some things in there which just didn’t make any sense to me,” she said. “For instance, that fountain in the middle of the bookstore. Why do you need that? Moe’s is like a theatre to the mind. It’s clean, bright and lovely, an absolute pleasure to be in.” 

Councilmember Dona Spring, who represents the district Barnes & Noble is located in, said that the closure, while possibly a boon for local book sellers, leaves Berkeley with still fewer bookstores. 

“I don’t think it is good news,” she said. “A lot of people enjoyed going there and browsing through the large collections. It had good parking and was safe. The Internet is leaving us with less and less book stores now, which is really sad.” 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Planners Look at Telegraph, LBNL Plans

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday March 02, 2007

The Berkeley Planning Commission voted unanimously Wednesday to increase the hours of operation to 2 a.m. Friday and Saturday and midnight Sunday through Thursday for businesses on Telegraph Avenue that do not involve alcohol sales. These hours may be exceeded with a city administrative use permit. 

The commission voted to extend the “by right” hours of operation for businesses on Telegraph that involve alcohol sales or service to midnight from 10 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. A permit is required to extend beyond 10 p.m. Sunday to Thursday and midnight Friday and Saturday. 

These items—along with several other parts of a Telegraph Economic Development Assistance Package—passed after four public hearings over a six-month period.  

The nine-point Telegraph Avenue package was put together by the city in 2006 to revive the ailing commercial strip. UC Berkeley students and members of the student advocacy group ACCESS lobbied for longer business hours on Telegraph. 

“The time has come to pass this item onto City Council, which has been waiting for you for nearly a year to send them a proposal,” said ACCESS founder Igor Tregub. “Please, for students, for residents, for Berkeley, do it today.” 

Members of the Willard and LeConte Neighborhood Associations requested a 30- to 60-day continuance to discuss concerns about the Telegraph Zoning amendments, especially with respect to the changes to the quota system. 

“We would like to support the neighborhood associations but we have had this issue on the agenda for a while. I am sure someone was watching the agenda,” said commissioner Harry Pollack. 

“Out of deference to all the neighborhoods, If you can’t do everything to help Telegraph tonight, at least do something,” said District 4 councilmember Kriss Worthington, who represents Telegraph. “The businesses in that area need your help.” 

The board agreed to give the neighborhood associations a 30-day time period to discuss the hearing on allowing the quotas for restaurants, beauty and novelty shops to be exceeded with a use permit where a variance was previously required. 

 

LBNL LRDP 

The Alliance to Preserve the Strawberry Creek Watershed opposed the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Long Range Development Plan (LRDP) and draft environmental impact report (EIR) at the meeting during public comment. 

The Alliance took issue with the following details of the lab’s plans: 

• 17 acres in total of new impervious surfaces that have the potential to increase flooding in the Berkeley flatlands along Strawberry Creek. 

• Earthquake Faults: The EIR fails to present a detailed map showing all the active and inactive faults within the LBNL boundary 

• Landslides: The EIR’s slope stability map is deficient in that it does not show all the landslide areas within the LBNL boundary and vicinity. Landslides have blocked Centennial Drive for lengthy periods thereby blocking ingress and egress to, for instance, the lab’s Hazardous Waste Handling Facility, by the Berkeley Fire Department’s Hazardous Materials Team at the Berkeley Way Fire Station, in case of fire and/or earthquake 

• Soil contamination: The EIR does not show that new buildings are proposed in areas contaminated with radioactive and hazardous materials. 

The public hearing for the lab LRDP and draft EIR has been set for March 14.


Flash: Bad Cops Out

By Judith Scherr
Tuesday February 27, 2007

Two problem cops have left the Berkeley Police Department, Chief Doug Hambleton told the Daily Planet Tuesday. 

Officer Steven Fleming and Officer Sean Derry, who had both been on administrative leave since August, are no longer with the department, Hambleton said. 

Fleming was charged by Berkeley police of at least four counts of stealing money or other property belonging to people he either arrested or booked into the Berkeley jail. The Alameda County District Attorney declined to charge Fleming, who refused to cooperate with the internal investigation. 

Fleming “no longer works for the Berkeley Police Department,” said Hambleton, who called in the Department of Justice to assist with the investigation. Fleming was put on paid administrative leave in August.  

“We interviewed as many people that he had arrested as we could over the past six months. Several people had credible stories,” Hambleton said. 

Fleming left the Richmond Police Department while on an initial probation period to come to Berkeley.  

Sean Derry was charged by San Francisco police with shooting his service revolver while intoxicated at his home in San Francisco. His case is yet to come to court, Hambleton said. His resignation is effective today (Wednesday). 

“The most important thing about my job is maintaining the integrity of the department,” Hambleton said. Last year former Sgt. Cary Kent resigned from the police force after pleading guilty to charges of stealing drugs from the evidence room of which he was in charge. 


BHS Basketball Coach Retires

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Tuesday February 27, 2007

As the Donahue Gym at Berkeley High School exploded in thunderous applause during the host school’s 63-14 win over El Cerrito High on Feb. 16, it was not the game that was the center of everyone’s attention, but the man who helped win it. 

Coach Gene “Nak” Nakamura, who had coached the Berkeley High girls’ basketball team for the last 25 years, retired that day, following his school’s last basketball game of the season. 

As students, parents, teachers and administrators gathered around Coach Nak to hug him and bid him farewell, he shot a parting word of advice to his team. 

“Move your feet,” he said. “Come on Yellow Jackets, you know you can do it.”  

Watching Nakamura in action with his team is like watching a tiger keep guard over his cubs. Fierce yet gentle, he stays with his students throughout the game and offers them advice from the sidelines. 

An alumni of the Berkeley High School Class of ‘62, Nakamura has dedicated 37 years of his life as a teacher and an administrator in the Berkeley Unified School District. 

Under him, the BHS girls’ basketball team went on to become Division I State Champions twice and Division I Northern California Champions seven times, with the most recent win in 2006. 

Coach Nak, as he is called, was named the 1997 NCS Honor Coach and 2006 BUSD educator of the year. He has a record of a total of 550 career wins. 

“A phenomenal human being and an exceptional coach,” was how School Board Director John Selawsky described Nakamura at the basketball game. 

Selawsky, an avid basketball fan himself, said that he had known Nakamura ever since he had started working with the school district. 

“He’s been a vice principal at Willard and an administrator at Longfellow,” he said. “He’s great with the kids and great with the administrators and a great asset to the girls’ basketball team. He’s just one of my favorite people.” 

Christine Glencher, athletic director at Berkeley High, said that Nakamura would be sorely missed. 

“When you think of girls’ basketball at BHS, you think of Coach Nak. Every tournament he goes to, people listen to him. Even high-level college and university coaches respect Nak. He is incredibly charismatic.” 

Coach to some, mentor to others, hundreds of BHS alumni were present at the gym that day to shake hands with Nak. 

“They are not going to be able to replace him,” said Chris Lim, superintendent of the San Leandro school district and a former colleague of Nakamura in Berkeley. 

“I had only one disagreement with him when I was principal at Willard. He wanted to do Saturday school,” she said smiling. 

As the girls’ team cheered Nak and offered him roses on the basketball court, current and former students shared memories with each other. 

“Nak is great. He teaches us everything. How to jump up, dunk the ball, you know all the moves. I am going to miss him a lot,” said Taylor Wallace, a ninth grader who was waiting to get her picture taken with her coach. 

Loren Nakamura, Nak’s daughter, described her dad as both a great father and a great coach. 

“He’s harder as a coach though, more critical,” she said grinning. 

Born in Colorado, where his father taught Japanese at the University of Colorado during WWII, Nakamura moved to Berkeley for high school and received his teacher’s credentials from California State Hayward. 

Basketball, Nak said, was something he picked up when he was teaching his daughters how to play church ball for the Asian Church League.  

“I was teaching 8th grade at Willard in 1981 when BHS girls’ coach Stelton Mitchell asked me to become the junior varsity girls’ basketball coach. The very next year the boys’ head coach retired and Stelton took over his position, leaving me as the girls’ head coach,” he said. 

Nak admits that girls are easier to coach than boys.  

“They are more willing to listen, and they have no ego,” he said. “But it’s a tough sport and you need to have the ability to play hard all through the game. In the process of playing above the rim, the fundamentals are sometimes forgotten.” 

Team manger Rebecca Amissah—who couldn’t try out for the team because of a leg injury—said that Nakamura always involved her in the game. 

“He treats me as one of the players and lets me go everywhere,” she said. “Coach Nak is more than a coach. He helps us with schoolwork and even talks to our teachers if need be. I hope he comes back to coach us soon.” 

Nakamura however decided that Friday’s game would be the last one of his career. 

“Basketball is my life but it is not my whole life,” he said. “If I ever come back to coaching, it will be to coach my grandkids.” 

 

 


Students Protest Controversial BP-Cal Accord

By Richard Brenneman
Tuesday February 27, 2007

Two protests—one Monday and another this Thursday—are adding new fuel to the growing controversy over the proposed $500 million pact between a British oil company, UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois. 

While hailed by politicians ranging from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates, the proposal has drawn the fire of students and faculty on the Berkeley campus. 

The students have created their own website—www.stopbp-berkeley.org—and enlisted the support of a growing number of faculty members, said Maren Poitras, an organizer who is an undergraduate at the College of Natural Resources (CNR). 

“We come from a lot of different backgrounds and for different reasons,” she said. “We are opposed to the growing influence of corporate research at a public university.” 

In addition to a teach-in held Monday evening at Morgan Hall, the students have scheduled a second demonstration at 1 p.m. Thursday outside California Hall, the seat of university administration and Chancellor Robert Birgeneau. 

“We have a petition campaign online, and we are planning on taking our concerns to the chancellor,” Poitras said. 

“In the short term we are asking him not to sign the agreement, and in the long term we are looking for the development of a procedure for corporate funding of research projects that will assure more involvement by students, faculty and community organizations,” she said. 

Several of the critics of the proposed agreement with BP—the oil giant formerly known as British Petroleum—are faculty members at the College of Natural Resources who played leading roles in criticizing another corporate/academic research accord, the $25 million deal signed with Swiss agro-pharmaceutical firm Novartis, now known as Syngenta. 

Among the critics of that pact who support the students are CNR professors Ignacio Chapela and Miguel Altieri, both critics of the Novartis agreement. 

More questions are coming from off-campus environmental groups. 

Helen Burke, a Sierra Club activist and a member of Berkeley’s planning commission, was one of a group of environmentalists and downtown business representatives who met with the students Monday. 

“This really has national implications because research will be done [at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL)],” she said. “A lot of people are saying they don’t want the university to sign, but that’s clearly the intent.” 

Burke said Monday afternoon that she planned to meet with Sierra Club members Monday night to discuss the notion of holding a public forum where all sides of the issue could be presented and discussed. 

“It sounds like a good idea on the surface, but the more I look into it, the more questions there are,” she said. 

Chapela, the CNR associate professor who had to take the university to court to keep his job after he challenged the Novartis accord, said he was glad to see the growing involvement of students in challenging the proposed BP agreement. 

“I think it’s great to see such incredible response,” he said. “As soon as students started hearing about it, they were outraged and shocked. As a result, my feelings have changed from despondency a few weeks ago to a sense that we can really do something about this.” 

The program proposed—dubbed the Helios Project at LBNL—will concentrate on creating ethanol from the cellulose of a strain of super-grass to be developed in the program by using microbes harvested from termite guts. Genetic engineering will be used to tweak both organisms for maximum efficiency. 

Chapela, Altieri and other critics of genetically modified organisms point out that GMOs have escaped into the environment, including engineered grasses. 

In response to criticism using colorful terms like “frankenfoods,” GMOs have been rebranded by corporations and academia. They’re now dubbed “synthetic biology,” a term Chapela mocks. 

The students also point to BP’s controversial environmental and human rights records. Earlier this month, the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit activist group, declared that the BP refinery in Texas City, Tex., is the nation’s “largest emitter of carcinogens.” 


Tables Seized At Oak Grove; Running Wolf Jailed

By Richard Brenneman
Tuesday February 27, 2007

Zachary Running Wolf, the activist who launched the tree-sit at UC Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium, spent the weekend in jail, charged with threatening campus police. 

But other campus police actions against protesters fighting to protect a grove of trees strike an even deeper resonance with historic events in Berkeley’s past—the seizure of information tables.  

Held in lieu of $40,000 bail, Running Wolf had company in Berkeley’s city jail—a second protester, Leah Bass, who had been arrested earlier in the day for violating an order to stay off campus. 

A scheduled arraignment Monday afternoon was postponed until 9 a.m. today (Tuesday) in Alameda County Superior Court in Oakland. 

Police have been serving tree-sitters with stay-away orders and arresting violators who return before the orders expire. Running Wolf has been arrested twice, the first time Feb. 16 for failing to appear at a court hearing following his arrest for allegedly vandalizing stop signs, and again Friday evening for allegedly threatening officers during the previous bust. 

In addition to the arrests, campus officers made two sweeps of the grove last week, planted in honor of UC Berkeley’s World War I war dead, one late Thursday morning followed by a second 20 hours later. 

Among the items seized two tables which contained information about the protests, seized as part of what campus police Sgt. David Roby said was a move to seize “everything on the ground.” 

“They have repeatedly taken our information tables,” said Doug Buckwald, who has been coordinating support for the tree-sitters. 

“We went down and demanded our information back in January,” said Ayr, another member of the support team. “We haven’t done it this time because we’re concentrating on helping” Running Wolf. 

Ayr said he believed that the activist had been targeted because of his outspoken comments to the media. 

Seizing information tables evoked strong resonance among members of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) because it was a campus move to evict information tables that ignited the spark that led to the movement’s creation, said Jackie Goldberg, a retired member of the California Assembly and an FSM activist. 

“That really started it all,” she said. “It’s interesting that they haven’t quite figured it out yet. The random terror of the administration, as we called it then, only created more people interested in supporting the demonstrators. You would think the university had learned that the more you do stuff to these people, the more people will support them.” 

A Sept. 14, 1964, letter from Dean of Students Katherine A. Towle banning information tables from the sidewalk on Bancroft Way at the corner of Telegraph Avenue sparked simmering tensions on campus and ignited what was to become the FSM. 

“The growing use and misuse of the area has made it imperative that the University enforce throughout the campus the policy long ago set down by The Regents,” Towle wrote. 

Michael Rossman, a movement veteran who coordinated the FSM’s 40th anniversary commemoration, scoffed at the notion that the university might have learned anything from the events of four decades past. 

“The idea that the university has learned anything in humanistic terms is an illusion suited to the first half of the previous century,” he said. 

While the university sent a vice chancellor to the funeral of movement activist Mario Savio and sponsored anniversary celebrations, Rossman said, “the administration has to this day never admitted that it was wrong” in ordering removal of the tables and in the actions that followed. 

Rossman said he sees moves against the grove protesters and the university’s attack on the Free Speech Movements as two points of a triangle, with the third being the university’s expansion into downtown Berkeley. 

“They pay no attention to the town as a livable and humane community,” he said. “It’s a shame and a pity that we have a municipal government that lies down and rolls over for the university just as it does for developers.” 

 

Barbour promise  

The increased pressure followed a week after an email from campus Athletic Director Sandy Barbour announced to supporters that donors have pledged nearly $100 million to build a gym at the site of the grove. 

Referring to the four lawsuits that have been filed challenging university building plans at and near the stadium, Barbour wrote, “We cannot let the plaintiffs’ actions or the preliminary injunction slow down our momentum for this first phase of Memorial Stadium renovation.” 

Vice Chancellor Ed Denton, who is directing the campus building program, told University of California Regents in December that the stadium building plans were critical because of the memories evoked in alumni. 

Unstated but implicit in the statement was the university’s reliance on donations for all new construction except for seismic renovations of existing buildings. 

The university plans to kill most of the trees along the stadium’s western wall to make room for the 142,000-square-foot, four-story gym. 

Alameda County Superior Court Judge Barbara J. Miller has halted plans for construction that had been slated to begin last month after legal challenges were raised to the massive Southeast Campus Integrated Projects (SCIP) Environmental Impact Report (EIR) and allegations were raised that the project breached state laws governing construction in earthquake hazard zones. The stadium itself is split by the Hayward Fault. 

The threat of earthquakes along the fault federal geologists say is the most likely source of the Bay Area’s next catastrophic quake was triggered anew Friday afternoon when a magnitude 3.4 quake rattled the campus at 3:46 p.m. A second, smaller quake—a magnitude 2.6 temblor—followed Saturday morning at 9:34. 

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the quakes originated in the same spot as a series of recent quakes to rock the East Bay, the Hayward Fault less than 2 miles to the southeast of Memorial Stadium.


Telegraph Has Improved, But Could Be Better, Report Says

By Judith Scherr
Tuesday February 27, 2007

Making Telegraph Avenue work for business owners and those who own the buildings the merchants rent, as well as for shoppers, students, street vendors, residents and folks who hang out in the area is a jigsaw puzzle whose odd-size pieces the City Council and the city’s various departments are constantly trying to make fit. 

At issue on tonight’s (Tuesday) council agenda is an evaluation of how effective spending $220,000 has been over six months—funding the city allocated in response to the closing of Cody’s Telegraph Avenue—before granting tonight’s $200,000 request for police, mental health, cleaning and beautification of the area. 

Councilmember Laurie Cap-itelli, who had asked for the evaluation, told the Planet he is concerned that, even with a $30,000 expenditure on a mental health team that funds two workers 3-9 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, there hasn’t been adequate reduction in problematic street behavior on Telegraph.  

Written by the city manager’s office, the evaluation says police referred 60 individuals to the mobile mental health team, but “two thirds refused referrals despite persistent efforts by mental health outreach staff.” 

Capitelli says he doesn’t know what the answer is and is anxious to hear from those providing the services at the Tuesday council meeting. “Those people need help; it goes beyond shelter or a bed.” 

In an interview Monday, Mental Health Commission Chair Michael Diehl cited the need for long-term solutions. People are picked up and placed on a mental health hold for a few days. 

“We have to do something after they come out of John George [Psychiatric Pavilion],” he said, citing possible cuts in effective city mental health programs, such as housing programs coupled with intensive services, due to pending state cuts in mental health funds, known popularly as AB 2034. 

Capitelli said he is particularly concerned about the drug dealing on Telegraph. The report indicates that police made more than 45 drug possession and drug sales arrests. (The report does not distinguish between sales and possession of drugs and does not say how many among those arrested were eventually convicted.) 

The report indicates that merchants and bike officers report a decrease in drug sales and “a slight moderation” in problematic street behavior. It also points out, however, that some individuals exhibiting problematic behavior are now spending time downtown, rather than on Telegraph. 

Capitelli said he’d like to see the Berkeley Guides program revived. The Guides, which lost funding in 2005, were teams of young people whose goal was to de-escalate conflict in the downtown area and report problems to police as well as serving as “ambassadors” to visitors. 

Telegraph-area Councilmember Kriss Worthington said in an interview on Monday that the funding for police and social services should be part of the city’s regular budget, rather than something the council must approve every six months.  

And “there are still no dedicated officers on Telegraph,” he said. Worthington is an advocate of Community Involved Policing, where officers work regular beats and get to know the community they are patrolling. 

Worthington pointed out that the $100,000 spent for police is at the overtime rate. Also, he said, police tend to work in teams on Telegraph. If they worked separately—even a block or two apart from one another—they would be less likely to intimidate a person having a mental health crisis on the Avenue, he said, noting, “It’s much harder to have a conversation with two officers than with one.”  

Addressing problematic street behavior is also discussed in a separate report to the council by the city’s Mental Health Commission, which recommends that police officers get additional training in crisis intervention.  

Commissioner Diehl said some officers are very good at such interventions. One day he watched a person in a mental health crisis waving a stick around. “An officer showed up and talked to him calmly.” 

This was an officer who already knew the individual in question. “They had a connection,” Diehl said. “The officer did a wonderful job.”  

On the other hand, Diehl said he’s heard of instances when an individual is in crisis and an officer calls for backup; suddenly there are a half-dozen police cars. In a situation like this, the individual in crisis will not want to talk to the police. 

“And the situation can lead to negative consequences.” Neighbors see the police and begin to fear the individual, who could lose his housing, Diehl said. 


Council Considers Sustainable Berkeley, Fire Department Funding

By Judith Scherr
Tuesday February 27, 2007

While most of the city’s budget questions are being referred to the months-long budget process that will end in June or July, the City Council will vote tonight (Tuesday) on disbursing a $3.3 million windfall. 

The serial council meetings begin at 5 p.m., with a workshop on proposed rules to curb underage drinking and rowdy parties. At 6 p.m., the council—plus two Housing Authority tenants—will meet as the Berkeley Housing Authority to talk about new rate structures for Section 8 voucher-holders and a new governance structure. 

The regular council meeting—with its 1,220-page agenda—will begin at 7 p.m. and address mobile fire protection, raising planner Vivian Kahn’s pay to $100 per hour, appealing a carry-out food outlet on Euclid Avenue, labor issues at the Shattuck Cinema, and joining the Center for Constitutional Rights’ lawsuit in Germany against former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others.  

Mid-year allocations 

Flush with $3.3 million in higher-than-anticipated revenue, mostly from investments and parking fines, City Manager Phil Kamlarz has recommended the following expenditures: 

• $1 million to fully fund fire department operations through December 2008, ending the rolling fire station closures; 

• $200,000 for Telegraph Avenue improvements (see accompanying story). 

• $500,000 for economic development efforts. 

• $200,000 for public safety computer upgrades. 

• $100,000 for a Sustainable Berkeley grant for greenhouse gas reduction. 

• $1.3 million for deferred maintenance. 

While the city manager’s report indicates generally how the funds will be spent, the $100,000 grant proposed for Sustainable Berkeley to write a plan to reduce greenhouse gasses locally provides the councilmembers with no information about the organization. It is actually a collection of various participants: an environmental organization (the Ecology Center), UC Berkeley, a private dentist, a healthcare non-profit, a former city employee and the Community Energy Services Corporation (CESC), Sustainable Berkeley’s fiscal sponsor, which is a non-profit set up by the city and funded by the city and PG&E. 

“I think I need to know how the money will be spent,” said Councilmember Laurie Capitelli, who said he planned to ask questions about the expenditure at tonight’s (Tuesday) meeting. “The last thing we need is a really impressive report that sits on the shelf.” 

In an attempt to gather more information about Sustainable Berkeley—which received $133,000 from the city in the fall, but has apparently presented no report to the city on how those funds were spent—the Planet submitted a Freedom of Information request last week to the city manager for details about an organization that councilmembers and the public know little about.  

Among the documents the Planet requested were: the group’s agendas and minutes, contracts and work agreements with vendors and employees, documents that established the group; names of members of all committees and subcommittees, documents that relate to the group’s work, names of steering committee members, and documents showing how they were chosen. 

The city has yet to respond, with one city staffer telling a Planet reporter that the time to get the information will be longer than it would have otherwise been because it was submitted as an FOI request, which needs to go to the city manager and the city attorney before documents are released. 

Sustainable Berkeley has been put together by Mayor Tom Bates. His chief of staff, Cisco De Vries is working half-time for Sustainable Berkeley.  

 

BPD gets F- in public information 

The Contra Costa Times recently gave Berkeley’s police department an F- grade for not making public information available and councilmember Dona Spring is asking the department to change. 

The Times report says: “The personnel that our auditor contacted on the day of the audit were not helpful at all. They seemed very confused and ultimately refused to accept any part of the auditor's request. The department then denied that any auditor had visited.” 

Spring is asking the city manager to report to the council in 60 days “with a plan to provide the public access to Berkeley’s Police Department information, including police reports, as required by state law.”  

 

Euclid neighborhood wants hearing on fast food outlet 

More than 300 persons signed petitions saying they oppose adding “another take out food facility on Euclid Avenue…” Nonetheless, in November, the zoning board approved the new business. Neighbors are asking the City Council to set a public hearing on the issue and reverse the zoning board. 

 

Other matters 

• Supporting the workers at the Shattuck Cinema, working without a contract with Landmarks Theaters; 

• Supporting a boycott of Hornblower Cruises, including its Alcatraz Cruises subsidiary, to support the efforts of former Blue and Gold Fleet workers, displaced when Hornblower took over contract services for Alcatraz.  

• Supporting the Center for Constitutional Rights’ lawsuit in Germany against former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others for alleged human rights violations. While the Peace and Justice Commission is supporting this effort, the city manager and city attorney are opposing it,because, they say, they lack experience in filing lawsuits in countries outside the United States. Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, responded in a Jan. 3 letter to the city, saying: “There is absolutely no liability of any kind for signing on as a co-complainant.”  

 

BHA discusses new rents, new governance 

The Berkeley Housing Authority will consider approval of a new payment structure affecting about 200 of the 1,700 households benefiting from federally subsidized Section 8 vouchers. While the new rent structure officially begins March 1, the BHA will absorb the added costs and make the change May 1.  

The Housing and Urban Development Department (HUD) limits the amount of money the BHA can pay for Section 8 apartments. In the past, it has been limited to an area standard of 110 percent of what is called fair market rents.  

On Jan. 25, the Housing Department received permission from HUD to pay up to 120 percent of the Fair Market Rents for two-, three- and four-bedroom apartments, so most Section 8 renters will not have to pay anything beyond the current 30 percent of their income. 

That leaves about 200 households with studio and one-bedroom apartments who face up to $45 in out-of-pocket expenses. Some of these people who rent studio apartments will be given one-bedroom vouchers; that is, they will stay in the studios they already rent, but will be given subsidies as if they lived in one-bedroom apartments, said housing director Steve Barton. 

While the BHA is permitted to spend more money to absorb the higher rents for the two- three- and four-bedroom units, it does not receive increased funding from HUD. This could mean, eventually, that the city will have to decrease the number of subsidized units, as people come off of Section 8. 

BHA will also consider a new governance structure, in which the mayor would appoint seven members to the board, which would retain the two tenant members, and the council would approve the appointments. (City commissions are generally appointed by the mayor and individual City Council members according to the provisions of the 1975 Fair Representation Ordinance initiative.) HUD considers BHA a “troubled” agency, in part, because the City Council, sitting as BHA, does not have the time to properly oversee the agency.  

 


Zoning Board Studies Panoramic Hill Development Proposal

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Tuesday February 27, 2007

A group of neighbors vociferously opposed the construction of a proposed new two-story single-family dwelling at 161 Panoramic Way during the Zoning Adjustments Board meeting Thursday. 

Applicant Bruce Kelly has applied for a use permit to construct the proposed building (The Kelly House) with 1,460 square feet of floor area, two parking spaces, at an average height of 24 feet, on a 3,295 square foot vacant lot. 

At the meeting he described the Kelly house as a small, sustainable and affordable design—“the kind of development that Berkeley should encourage.” 

Neighbors fear that the construction is a threat to their health and safety because of the area’s poor access, potential fire hazard, and location on an earthquake fault. 

The proposed project is located on one of the few remaining vacant lots in the Berkeley Panoramic Hill neighborhood—a residential area with a mixture of single-family and nonconforming multifamily development—southeast of the UC Berkeley campus which is characterized by steep slopes and substandard infrastructure.  

The neighborhood is bounded to the north and west by lands owned by UC Berkeley, to the south by the East Bay Regional Park District’s Claremont Canyon Preserve, and to the east by the Berkeley-Oakland Border. 

Jerry Watchell, president of the Panoramic Hill Association, opposed the Kelly project on behalf of the association. 

“It is located where the infrastructure is deteriorating and the road itself is collapsing. The area of the site is the worst of the worst possible on Panoramic Hill,” he said 

Panoramic Way—a narrow, winding street that begins at Canyon Road and ends at the top of Panoramic Hill in Oakland—provides the only access to the neighborhood and to the homes in the adjacent residential area in the city of Oakland. 

Access to the two parking spaces at the Kelly house will be from the upper portion of Panoramic Way via a driveway structure built in the right-of-way subject to city approval of a encroachment permit. Primary access to the living quarters will be via an uncovered at-grade stairway extending from the front (northern) property line along the eastern side of the building. 

The Fire Department is requiring that there also be a fire access stairway from lower Panoramic Way, on the southern side of the property. 

Staff has suggested that granting the applicant an encroachment permit to use the public right-of-way would be useful to the many residents who drive up and down the section of the street at the north end of the property. 

A resident of 260 Panoramic Way strenuously opposed the development and said that it would impede regular access and emergency access to properties on the hill.  

“Any delay can be fatal,” said Richard Wright of 350 Panoramic Way. “We are mainly concerned about the emergency preparedness and disaster issues.” 

In a letter to the ZAB, Ann Reid Slaby, a resident of 345 Panoramic Way, reminded board members about the 1991 fire. 

“The several hundred feet of Panoramic Way from the intersection with Dwight to 208 Panoramic is Berkeley’s Charring Cross Road. As you may recall, a number of individuals attempted to escape the fire of 1991 through a narrow road named Charring Cross Road in Oakland. My understanding is that one car stalled and all occupants of following cars burned to death,” her letter said. “Can’t we learn from the mistake of allowing such a narrow road? With all the warnings and education in the world, if there is a fire, some residents will try to escape in their cars.” 

Kelly told ZAB members that he proposed to widen the road in front of his house from 15 to 20 feet at his own expense. 

“This widened road falls in the public right-of-way and is essential to traffic safety on Panoramic Way. That is the giant step we can take to make things better. We are doing what we can to make the area safer for the neighborhood,” he said. 

“I don’t think anybody will disagree that the house adds to the dangerous conditions already existing in the area,” said ZAB commissioner Bob Allen. “However it will also do two things to make the area a safe haven. First, it will widen the street by seven or 8.6 feet which will improve the safety conditions. Secondly, the addition of the emergency stairs will also be a positive feature. I applaud the applicant on coming up with such a responsible design.” 

The ZAB has received letters calling for a moratorium on building on the hill, a decision ZAB members said could only be made by the City Council.  

Kelly further said that the coast live oak trees on his property would be preserved, thinned, and the “fire ladder”—a tree that can carry fire from the forest floor into the crowns of the larger trees that would otherwise survive a ground fire—eliminated by an arborist.  

Commissioner Dave Blake said that he would like to see an arborist’s report before commenting. 

The board ruled to continue the matter until March 8 in order to obtain an arborist’s report. 

 

Other matters 

ZAB approved a request for a use permit modification by the City of Berkeley Mental Health and Human Services to change the hours of operation of the Health and Human Services mobile crisis team at 2433 Channing Way from 11 a.m. to 10 a.m. and until 11 p.m. daily. 

The commission approved a request by Michael Nilmeyer of Nilmeyer/Nilmeyer Associates for a use permit to construct a 7,245 square foot concrete block warehouse building with associated office space at 1230 Fifth St. 

It approved a request by Christopher Witherspoon to convert a daycare center back to a single-family residence on a 6,105 square foot lot at 1226 Rose St. that already contains a single-family residence. 

The board approved a request by Ken Renworth and Catherine Crowley for a use permit to construct a new three-story single family home with 2,880 square feet of floor area and a detached hot tub at 43 Senior Ave. 

 

 

 

 


Review Board Backs Chase Law Changes

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Tuesday February 27, 2007

In the wake of several citizen complaints about crashes resulting from high-speed Oakland police chases, the Oakland Citizens’ Police Review Board has recommended changes to the city’s police vehicle pursuit policy and has set up a multi-agency task force to make further refinements. 

The police chase policy task force, made up of representatives of the CPRB, the Community Policing Advisory Board, PUEBLO, and two families who lost children in Oakland police vehicle chases, holds its first meeting this Thursday, 6:15 p.m., in Hearing Room One at City Hall in Oakland.  

CPRB Executive Director Joyce Hicks said that her agency “thought it necessary to conduct a review of Oakland police chase policy” following the receipt of citizen complaints “so that we can move towards the adoption of more restrictive pursuit policies that will prevent unnecessary injury and loss of life to innocent citizens, while still maintaining the department’s ability to apprehend suspects. We believe that the department needs to strike a better balance between those objectives.” 

Rashidah Grinage of PUEBLO said that her organization hopes that as a result of the current effort, “we will develop a pursuit policy that gives less discretion to the officers.” 

Currently, Grinage says, when officers either cannot or don’t want to get their supervisors’ permission to initiate a chase, “they simply pursue a suspect’s car but don’t call it a chase in order to get around the policy. It means any policy on the books is irrelevant.” 

As well as making the issue of a police chase a “semantic exercise,” Grinage says this practice leads to a more dangerous situation, because an official chase requires the use of a siren and flashing lights, while officers merely “pursuing” a suspect use neither warning. 

“That makes the situation worse,” Grinage said. “That’s where it’s gotten all screwed up, and has led to situations where innocent drivers have been hit by cars because they had no advance warning that a high-speed chase was taking place. The city should have strict guidelines as to when they have to activate their flashing lights and sirens based upon the speed of the chase and the distance from the suspect being pursued.” 

In its five preliminary recommendations released earlier this month, the CPRB says that the Oakland police department should restrict its auto pursuits only to suspects fleeing from violent felonies, and the OPD should provide more pursuit training for its officers, require more accountability for officers to adhere to its chase policy, should look at policies in other police jurisdictions, and should review the adequacy of its reporting on police pursuits. 

Unlike the cities of Berkeley and San Francisco, which allow for high-speed vehicle pursuits involving violent felonies only, current Oakland police chase policy allows officers to pursue without supervisory approval suspects who have committed any felony or a firearms-related misdemeanor. Oakland officers may also initiate vehicle chases of suspects who have committed infractions or non-firearms-related misdemeanors, but only with supervisory approval.  

The task force’s final recommendations will be presented directly to the Oakland Police Department, which will be solely responsible for their adoption, modification, or rejection.  

According to OPD records, Oakland police were involved in 125 police vehicle pursuits in 2004, with 51 percent of them resulting in collisions and 38 percent resulting in injuries to officers, suspects, or innocent citizens. The CPRB report on Oakland police vehicle chases provided no statistics as to the nature of the original offense for which the police vehicle pursuits were initiated. 

The push for a modified Oakland police vehicle chase policy is not related to a recent allegation by a neighborhood witness that a high-speed Oakland police chase preceded the auto accident death of an innocent bystander at the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Way and West MacArthur Boulevard earlier this month. Oakland police maintain that no high-speed chase was involved in that accident, which killed a 41-year-old Stockton woman. 

Instead, the decision to recommend pursuit policy changes came after the CPRB received five complaints between 2003 and the present. Two of those complaints are still pending, one of them from the June 17, 2006 auto accident death of Jessica Castaneda-Rodriguez and Salvador Nieves Jr., the other involving a March 29, 2006 injury accident to Lisa Sidorsky. Castaneda-Rodriguez, Nieves, Jr., and Sidorsky were all driving or riding in cars which were not being pursued by police, but were struck by vehicles which Oakland police were pursuing.  

In the Castaneda-Rodriguez/Nieves incident, outlined in a Berkeley Daily Planet UnderCurrents column on June 2, 2006, the two young Oakland residents were killed in a car that was struck on the corner of MacArthur Boulevard and 90th Avenue by a van driven by 33-year-old Oakland resident Amiri Bolten. Bolten was being chased by Oakland police for a suspected minor municipal code violation and, later, for the suspected smell of marijuana coming from his van. 

According to the CPRB report, “at the time the pursuit (of Bolten) began, officers were attempting to stop the suspect for a traffic infraction—loud music in excess of 50 feet. As the officers approached, they smelled marijuana emanating from the vehicle. However, the police did not have any facts showing that a more serious crime had been committed at the time the pursuit started.” 

In the Sidorsky incident, Sidorsky was injured when her car was hit by a van pursued by police while she was waiting at the intersection of Harold Street and Coolidge Avenue on her way to get on the on-ramp to the 580 freeway.  

According to the CPRB report, Sidorsky “did not see any vehicle approaching, nor did she see the police or hear any sirens approaching. … After the van struck her car, it continued onward to shear a light pole. She observed that the van had struck yet another vehicle, crushing the other car. The van itself had overturned, trapping people inside. Several people in the other car also sustained injuries. Unbeknownst to Ms. Sidorsky.” 

The CPRB report continued: “The van was being pursued by Oakland police officers. At the time the pursuit began, officers believed that the suspect was driving a stolen van, which is a felony offense, but not a violent felony. There was no additional factual information for officers to reasonably believe that a violent felony had been committed.” 

The most famous recent allegation concerning a high-speed police chase involved the 2002 death of 22-year-old Oakland High graduate U’Kendra Johnson, who was killed when the car in which she was riding was struck on Seminary Avenue by an auto driven by Oakland resident Eric Crawford. Police said that Crawford was fleeing from nearby Foothill Boulevard after officers observed him participating in “sideshow” activities. 

While witnesses said that a high-speed police chase immediately preceded the accident, Oakland police denied that police were chasing Crawford when Crawford’s car hit Johnson’s. Johnson’s mother initially filed a wrongful death action against the Oakland Police Department and the officers who arrested Crawford, but later dropped the suit. In the months following Johnson’s death, State Senator Don Perata introduced and got passed anti-sideshow legislation which he named the “U’Kendra Johnson Law.” 


Priano Family Continues Fight for Chase Limits

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Tuesday February 27, 2007

One of the most active campaigns in both California and the nation to put stricter limits on high-speed police pursuits is being conducted by the mother of Kristie Priano, the 15-year-old Chico girl who was killed when the Priano family van was struck by a 15-year-old girl who was being chased by police for taking her mother’s car without permission. 

On the website www.kristieslaw.org Candy Priano, Kristie’s mother, it explains that “one minute, Kristie Priano was a 15-year-old honor student laughing with her brother in the back of the family minivan on the way to her high school basketball game. The next, she was one of hundreds who die each year across the nation in high-speed police pursuits. More than a third are innocent victims. A teen fleeing from the police plowed into the Prianos' minivan, killing Kristie. Prior to the chase, officers knew the identity of the teen who took her mother’s RAV4 without permission. Officers violated their own pursuit policy by chasing her through a poorly lit residential neighborhood. This chase wasn't necessary to keep others safe. In fact, the fleeing teen went home with her mother while innocent Kristie died in the hospital.” 

The Priano website has gone far beyond the story of Kristie Priano’s death. The opening page provides a rolling list that names recent innocent police chase accident victims, including police themselves as well people who were not suspects of any crime and were not being pursued by the police, but who were struck by cars driven by pursuing police or the suspects they were pursuing. Included is the statistic that there have been 2,114 “blameless victims” of pursuit killed in the United States from 1982 to 2005, as well as the notation that “the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration also received reports that 87 officers have been killed during this time period. These figures, while high, are under-reported for a number of reasons, most obviously because reporting is not mandatory.” 

The centerpiece of Candy Priano’s efforts to modify police chase policy is Kristie’s Law, introduced by State Senator Sam Aanestad (R-Grass Valley) in 2004 and 2005 which would, among other things, require stricter guidelines for police pursuits in residential neighborhoods throughout California and mandate that an independent agency investigate all accidents resulting from police chases. The proposed law would also loosen the restrictions on the compensation of victims of police chases. 

Rashidah Grinage of Oakland’s PUEBLO says that once changes are made in Oakland’s police chase policy, “the next thing we need to work on is the reactivation of Kristie’s law,” which was last defeated in the state Legislature in 2005. “Right now, cities in California have immunity from lawsuits initiated by innocent victims of police chase crashes so long as the city has a police chase policy on the books. That’s outrageous, and it leaves innocent victims with no civil remedy. That has to be changed. We need to work on Senator [Don] Perata and Assemblymember [Sandré] Swanson to get their support for a reintroduction of Kristie’s Law.” 


Seleznow to Retire As Parks Dept. Chief

By Judith Scherr
Tuesday February 27, 2007

City Manager Phil Kamlarz announced Monday the retirement of Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Director Marc Seleznow, who has been in the position for four years. 

“We will miss Mr. Seleznow and will continue building on his efforts to improve and enhance our parks, urban forest, marina and recreation programs and facilities,” Kamlarz said in a prepared statement. 

William Rogers, who has been in the Health and Human Services Department since 1999, will step in as acting director, Kamlarz said.  

Seleznow’s resignation is effective May 11.


UC Berkeley’s Lease of SF Extension Subject of March 8 Hearing

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Tuesday February 27, 2007

The public hearing for UC Berkeley’s controversial plans to convert its historic six-acre Laguna Street Extension campus in San Francisco into a private rental-housing development is set for March 8. 

The San Francisco Planning Department will announce the time of the session next week. 

With the date of the hearing set—the only public process planned regarding the re-zoning of the campus—neighborhood groups and community activists are getting ready to voice their opposition to the proposed project. 

At a public screening of the documentary Uncommon Knowledge: Closing the Books at UC Berkeley Extension—a film which focuses on the Laguna Street property development—at the San Francisco Public Library on Saturday, director Eliza Hemenway put forward her concerns during a public forum. 

“We want to preserve the architectural significance of the place, especially the murals and the New Deal art inside it,” she said. “My main question is, Why is San Francisco even considering re-zoning it? What does the city have to gain from the redevelopment?” 

Hemenway added that the lack of media coverage on the important issue of rezoning the property on 55 Laguna St. was alarming.  

“We want UC to honor its mission as a land grant university and retain public use on it. The public hearing is the time to make that known,” she said. 

First used as a city orphanage from 1854 until the San Francisco State Normal School was established in the 1920s to accommodate public school teachers, the campus has also served as the original home of San Francisco State University (SFSU). SFSU will be screening the documentary on May 10 to raise awareness about preservation efforts for the campus. 

Citing prohibitive maintenance costs to bring the campus up to current seismic and disability codes, the UC Regents closed the UC Extension building in 2004 and it has been sitting empty since then. 

Warren Dewar, an attorney and board member of the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association (HVNA), told the audience on Saturday that the portion of 55 Laguna St. where Waller Street formerly existed did not belong to the UC Regents. 

“After examining the real estate records on the property, my conclusion is that the city still owns the land where Waller Street crossed the property in the past. The city closed Waller Street in 1921 and according to the city charter, when the city closes a street, the title to the land remains with the city,” he said. “I have examined the records of deeds in the San Francisco registrar’s office, and no subsequent deed was executed by the city for Waller Street. If this be the case, then the Regents have no power to build on that 44-foot lot that runs right through the middle of the property.” 

Dewar told the Planet that he had sent this information to the UC Regents, SF Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi and A.F. Evans—the Bay Area developers to which UC Berkeley has leased the property for 75 years for the proposed development—in August but had not heard back from any of them. 

“Their silence is deafening,” he said. 

HVNA has passed a resolution stating their opposition to the proposed development. “The Regents have no business to convert it into private property,” Dewar said. “If they can’t use it for public use, they should transfer it to another government agency who can.” 

Urban planner and co-chair of San Francisco-based Friends of 1800 Mark Paez told the Planet that the developer was using the affordable rental units in the plan as a ruse to gain favor for the proposed project. 

“They are not being very truthful. In reality, only a middle-income person will be able to afford a unit there,” he said. “The current plan calls for two of the buildings to be demolished. No public process was held when the university decided to put the property out on a bid for private development.” 

Friends of 1800 has nominated the UC Berkeley Extension Laguna Street Campus to the National Register of Historic Places and is currently collecting donations to landmark it locally. 

Although the project has met with sufficient opposition, Ruthy T. Bennett, vice president of S.F. Evans Development, wrote to the Planet in November that more than 400 letters were sent in its support to the board of supervisors. 

Bennett could not be reached for comment by press time Monday. Charles Chase, executive director of the San Francisco Architectural Heritage , said Monday that his organization found the scale and mass of the new construction to be appropriate to that of the neighborhood.


Association of Bay Area Governments Helps Fund Pentagon Program

By Richard Brenneman
Tuesday February 27, 2007

Why did a state-mandated alliance of Bay Area governments lend $12 million to a secretive military think tank to expand its facilities in San Diego? 

Berkeley City Councilmember Dona Spring said she’d like to know the answer. 

“It’s an outrage,” she said. “It’s out of sync with the political sentiment of the Bay Area and it’s very questionable.” 

On Sept. 15, 2005, the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) arranged for an $11,945,000 tax-exempt bond issue for the Institute of Defense Analyses (IDA) for ”expansion and renovation of existing facilities” in La Jolla. 

ABAG is a coalition of city and county governments formed under state law to address regional issues. The organization is presently preparing a housing needs assessment that will require Berkeley to make room for several thousand new housing units in the next three decades. 

Kathleen Cha, ABAG’s senior communications representative, said that her organization arranged for the IDA funding through its Finance Authority for Nonprofit Corporations. 

“We provided conduit funding for a non-profit group which is a government contractor to acquire and rehabilitate a building,” she said. “We’re a financing authority and we offer a full range of services.” 

ABAG has arranged for more than $3.2 billion in tax-exempt financing by linking governments and non-profits. Much of the financing goes outside the Bay Area, Cha said. 

ABAG connects the non-profits with lenders, in the case of the IDA arranging for a AAA-rated bond issue. 

The IDA is a Pentagon-funded think tank whose head at the time ABAG arranged the funds was subsequently forced to resign after a private watchdog group revealed he had advocated for a controversial jet fighter program in which he held direct financial interests. 

The IDA is a federally created non-profit based in Virginia. 

According to its own website, the organization is a think tank which traces its roots to 1947, when Secretary of Defense and Cold War architect James Forrestal created the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group. 

In 1958, the group tasked the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with creating a non-profit think tank to work with university scientists on critical national security problems. 

IDA is now entirely federally funded and conducts research for the Pentagon, much of it classified. 

In July 2006, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a non-profit private watchdog group, released a report called “Preying on the Taxpayer: The F-22A Raptor.” 

That study revealed that IDA President and retired Admiral Dennis C. Blair owned stock in two companies with financial interests in the jet fighter project during the time when IDA had urged the Pentagon to fund it in an analysis which the Defense Department paid for. 

As a result of the ensuing bad publicity, Blair resigned first from the board of EDO corporation, which manufactures missile-launching gear for the fighter, and then from IDA itself. 

POGO’s findings were confirmed in December in a report by the Pentagon’s Office of the Inspector General, which concluded that he had violated conflict of interest rules by his involvement in reports on companies in which he had financial interests. 

In September, 2006, one year after ABAG loaned the $12 million, Blair resigned from IDA. Replacing him was retired Gen. Larry D. Welch, a former Air Force Chief of Staff. 

According to a Dec. 20 report by R. Jeffrey Smith of the Washington Post, Blair donated his EDO stock to a fund for injured veterans and surrendered his stock options. 

One of the IDA’s specialties is communications security, and the organization helped the Pentagon implement battlefield command and control systems used in the occupation of Iraq, according to the Spring, 2006, issue of IDA Research Notes.  

The non-profit also analyzed communications systems used in the invasion itself. 

“ABAG is supposed to be working for cooperation and regionalism among Bay Area governments and not arranging for financing to be wasted on some military boondoggle,” Spring said, “especially when there are so many pressing needs here for housing, for health care and for emergency services. 

“It would be more understandable if something like this happened in someplace like Texas or Utah, but not the Bay Area,” she said. “But I guess everybody’s cashing in.” 

The ABAG Finance Authority for Nonprofit Corporations, or FAN, is governed by a five-member committee. None of the current members is from Alameda County or its cities. 

The decision to approve the IDA loan was approved by a unanimous vote during the committee’s Aug. 19 meeting, with Jim Kennedy, Contra Costa County community development director, moving for adoption, with a second from Novato City Councilmember Carole Dillon-Knutson. 

The oither three votes came from Santa Clara County investment analyst Paul Knofler, Sonoma County Treasurer Tom Ford and Marin County Clerk Michael Smith. 

Two representatives of IDA attended.


University Projects, Iceland Top Land Use Agendas

By Richard Brenneman
Tuesday February 27, 2007

How can the city and UC Berkeley cooperate in planning uses in the university’s major downtown expansion plans that will benefit both town and gown? 

The subcommittee charged with figuring out possible answers is scheduled to wrap up its work tonight (Tuesday) before reporting back to the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee (DAPAC). 

The 7 p.m. session in the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave., is one of three meetings of Berkeley land use commission slated this week. 

Last Wednesday night, David Stoloff assumed the chair of the Planning Commission after ousting Helen Burke two weeks ago. The light agenda features two action items. a public hearing on Telegraph Avenue business hours and uses and a discussion of regional housing needs goals for the city soon to be imposed by the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG). 

That meeting begins at 7 p.m., also at the North Berkeley Senior Center, though in the downstairs dining room rather than upstairs, where DAPAC meets. 

 

Landmarks Commission 

Thursday’s meeting is downstairs also, though it begins a half-hour later, and features the fullest agenda. 

The Landmarks Preservation Commission will hold hearings on petitions to landmark Berkeley’s Iceland, a de facto landmark facing imminent closure, and to approve alterations to the Southern Pacific railroad station at 700 University Ave. and the former Dakin Warehouse at 2750 Adeline St. 

Commissioners will also set public hearings on applications to landmark the old Berkeley High School Gymnasium at 1920 Allston Way, the structure which houses the city’s Warm Water Pool and which is slated for demolition by the Berkeley Unified School District. 

Among the other items on the LPC agenda will be a discussion of the draft Environmental Impact Report for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Long Range Development Plan which covers the years through 2025. 

The LPC, along with the Planning, Transportation and Community Health commissions, will hold a joint March 14 public hearing on the lab’s plans to add 980,000 square feet of new construction, between 375 and 500 new parking spaces and 1,000 new employees. 

The lab will also house some of the research connected with the new $500 million agreement negotiated by the university, BP (the former British Petroleum) and the University of Illinois to create genetically modified grass and termite-derived microbes to produce ethanol.


BUSD Addresses Homeless Youth Programs in Schools

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Tuesday February 27, 2007

The Berkeley school board voted last week to approve a resolution to honor Berkeley High Vice Principal denise brown and declared Feb. 15 as denise brown day. Brown died Feb. 2 following complications from knee surgery. 

 

Other matters 

The board also voted at its Feb. 21 meeting to approve a resolution proclaiming the first week of March 2007 as Week of the School Administrator.  

The board approved the memoranda of understanding between the Berkeley Unified School District and organizations supporting the district’s McKinney Vento Homeless Children and Youth Program. 

BUSD received a grant award notification from the California Department of Education regarding the Homeless Children and Youth program in August and it accepted in September. 

The district was funded for the three-year grant period in the amount of $90,000 for the first year while funding for the following two years was to be determined. The grant expires on June 30. 

The McKinney-Vento legislation requires that the BUSD help homeless students and parents get access to public education. 

BUSD’s McKinney-Vento program has partnered with local homeless organizations such as the Berkeley Food and Housing Project, Women’s Daytime Drop-In Center, and Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency to help students with registering, Medicaid, bus passes, backpacks and book supplies.  

In order to comply with a part of the legislation that specifies identifying and serving unaccompanied youth, BUSD will be partnering with Berkeley-based Youth Emergency Assistance Hostel (YEAH). 

$2,000 in funds from the grant will be allocated to YEAH to provide services to forty unaccompanied youth every evening. This includes information and referral services, emergency food and shelter, therapy, harm reduction groups and case management. A youth outreach worker will be responsible for relocating and identifying unaccompanied eighteen-year-olds and younger. 

Board member John Selawsky inquired about the sustainability of the program. 

“Is this going to end after three years?,” he asked. 

“We do not know the answer at this point,” said BUSD Superintendent Michel Lawrence. Selawsky said that it was important to track grants that were in a danger of running out and lobby to keep them going on.  

The board also approved the budget modifications to the grant award for Integrating Schools and Mental Health Systems. 

BUSD was awarded $368,007 in grant money for Integrating Schools and Mental Health Systems (GISMHS) in January 2006 from the U.S. Department of Education, for a period of 18 months. 

The grant names BUSD as its fiscal agent and the Berkeley Alliance as the lead agency. A budget change was suggested to compensate the Alliance who will be taking over certain activities from the Office of Integrated Resources to relieve time and staffing constraints within the office. 

In the past BUSD received $155,407 and the Berkeley Alliance received $212,600 in total allocated grant money. The budget change would lead to BUSD transferring $19,000 from its allocated grant funds to the Alliance, bringing the total grant money for the Alliance to $231,600. 

The board received the preliminary 2007/08 student enrollment projections from Assistant Superintendent Neil Smith on Wednesday. 

Based on data from past years as well as a set of variables, BUSD’s enrollment for the next school year is expected to be 8,929 students. This figure represents a decline in enrollment of 158 students when compared to the October 2006 California Basic Educational Data Set. 

 

 

 

 

 


News Anaysis: Campaign Fights for Japanese American WWII Vets

By Caroline Aoyagi-Stom, New America Media
Tuesday February 27, 2007

Before you lick your next postage stamp onto the electricity bill or a postcard from the latest family vacation, take a look at the variety of commemorative stamp choices you will have this year. 

There’s the Marvel Super Heroes stamps, the Disney-inspired ones, and a special “With Loves and Kisses” stamp just in time for Valentine’s Day. For history buffs there’s the Settlement of Jamestown stamp, and Ella Fitzgerald is featured in the ongoing Black Heritage series stamp collection. 

But missing again this year is a stamp honoring the heroic Japanese American World War II veterans—the 442nd Regiment, the 100th Battalion, and the Military Intelligence Service (MIS). 

For the past five years a group of individuals—many of them wives of JA WWII vets—have been working on a grassroots campaign to urge the United States Postal Service (USPS) and their Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee (CSAC) to issue a commemorative stamp in honor of these veterans. But so far only rejection letters have followed. 

“Why is our request being rejected when they are recognizing comic book characters and pop icons?” said 38-year-old Sansei Wayne Osako, the group’s California campaign organizer. 

For Osako, a former schoolteacher, the campaign holds special significance: five uncles in his extended family served in the 442nd and the MIS. 

“It’s something that’s close to my heart,” he said. “The history of the JA World War II vets is a key event for Asian Pacific American history. That’s why we’re really pushing for this.” 

Chiz Ohira, 79, wife of 442nd veteran Ted Ohira, believes the USPS needs to recognize this group of special men who volunteered out of internment camps even while their family members remained imprisoned. 

“This is a unique group of men,” she said. “I don’t think there will be anything like that again.” 

 

A coalition effort 

A petition letter to get a stamp for the JA World War II veterans now has close to 2,000 signatures. And some politicians have also thrown their support behind the effort, including Sen. Daniel Inouye. Still, the group’s efforts have not swayed the stamp committee. 

Last fall Osako learned that two other veterans’ groups were also proposing stamps with little success: the Tuskegee Airmen and the Navajo Code Talkers of World War II. Soon the idea for a coalition effort began to take shape and now all three groups are collaborating to have the USPS issue a series of commemorative stamps to honor these veterans. 

“As for combining our efforts, I think it is an excellent idea,” said Sylvia Laughter of the Navajo Code Talker Memorial Foundation. “If indeed it is true that the U.S. postal stamp committee rejected these proposals previously, it makes sense that our combined efforts will gain greater support overall.” 

Laughter, a former Arizona state legislator, also introduced a successful Arizona state Senate resolution to garner support for the national stamp campaign. Now the groups hope to introduce similar resolutions in California, New Mexico and Utah. 

Nisei Aiko King, 79, has been involved with the JA World War II vets stamp efforts since its beginning and was at first hesitant about a coalition effort. But now she hopes the combined effort will finally show some results. 

“Sometimes I think, why can’t we have our own [stamp]? But if that’s the way we’re going to get on, then we’ve got to do it,” said King. 

“I just think it is so important ... before all the vets are gone.” 

 

The Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee 

The JA WWII vets stamp proposal is just one of tens of thousands of requests the USPS receives each year. The requests are sent to the Postal Service’s CSAC—a group consisting of 15 appointed individuals from diverse backgrounds—who meet four times a year. 

The CSAC can either reject the proposal or keep it “under consideration.” Each year the committee recommends about 25 commemorative stamp selections to the Postmaster General that are “both interesting and educational.” 

“The decision is a process,” said Roy Betts, spokesperson for USPS, who noted that a Tuskegee Airmen stamp has been put “under consideration” but there are no current plans to issue a stamp. Stamps for the Navajo Code Talkers and the JA WWII vets are not currently being considered. 

“This united front is their choice but I cannot comment on the ineffectiveness or the effectiveness of it,” said Betts. “I encourage them to continue to take part in the process.” 

 

Honoring our veterans 

The USPS has a record of honoring its veterans with commemorative stamps. Latino veterans were honored with a stamp in 1984, and there was also a “Buffalo Soldiers” stamp honoring African Americans. In the 1990s a 50th anniversary World War II veteran stamp was issued although the stamp featured all Caucasian faces except for one African American man. 

So why isn’t there a stamp for the JA World War II vets, the Tuskegee Airmen and the Navajo Code Talkers? 

There’s no question the three veterans groups have made their mark on military history. The 442nd and 100th Battalions are the most highly decorated unit for its size and length of service in U.S. military history. The Tuskegee Airmen were the first African American military airmen in history and flew over 200 combat missions without any casualties. And the Navajo Code Talkers used the Najavo language to produce the “unbreakable” code of the Pacific Theater. 

Those working on the grassroots stamp campaign believe a series of commemorative stamps for these heroic vets “would be a just way to continue to honor diversity in American military history.” 

“They deserve it, for what they did and why they did it,” said Mildred Ikemoto, 77, wife of 442nd veteran Henry Ikemoto. “These veterans need to have the visibility so our young people ... will know they should be proud of them.” 

 

A long-awaited honor 

Fusako Takahashi, 79, widow of a MIS veteran, had never felt the true impact of the JA WWII veterans’ story until she read a speech by Eric Saul, a noted historian and scholar. 

“I never realized what they went through,” she said. “I feel pretty strongly about it.” 

Now she is one of the many veterans’ wives and widows who are collectively pushing for a commemorative stamp for the JA World War vets. 

“I think this is really significant. But we can’t do this with just a few people. We need a popular effort,” said Osako, who urged people to sign their petition to support the stamp campaign. 

“We have to get the story out,” said Ohira, “before all of our vets are gone.” 


Opinion

Editorials

Editorial: It Looks Like They Plan to Bomb Iran

By Becky O’Malley
Friday March 02, 2007

Sometimes it’s hard to keep your eyes on the big picture. Sy Hersh was on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air radio program, which ran twice on Tuesday, and both times I managed to listen only to the first half. He was pumping his latest New Yorker piece, which explains one more time and in even greater detail how mad dogs at the top of the current national administration, notably Dick Cheney and Elliott Abrams, really are planning to bomb Iran. Since he’s predicted this at least twice before, he knows that some are going to regard him as more Chicken Little than Paul Revere, but he convinced me. 

The normally glib Terry Gross kept rephrasing Hersh’s central hypothesis in a hesitant tone, as if she just couldn’t believe that’s what he was really saying. Briefly, it seems to be that the above-mentioned mad dogs have decided that, despite the facts that Saddam Hussein was a Sunni Moslem and the United States has installed Shiites in the current Iraq leadership, they’re now worried about the emergence of a “Shiite crescent” led from Iran, so they’re shifting their weight to back the Sunni faction, and they plan to bomb Iran to solidify their stance, using Iran’s continued nuclear research as a pretext.  

The main actors in this melodrama are guys who first worked together in the Iran-Contra caper, when Abrams and friends financed covert action against Nicaragua, which Congress had declined to fund, by arms dealing in the Middle East. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi national-security adviser, is playing the same kind of role these days as he played in Iran-Contra. A pretty picture indeed. 

After getting the gist of the analysis on the radio, I tried to check it out in the Internet edition of the New Yorker, since my print magazine hadn’t come yet, but I found myself simply unable to read through to the end. When my copy finally arrived in the mailbox, I tried again, but deep denial ruled the day, and I wasn’t able to finish it. 

Like many consumers of the news, I’m just overwhelmed by the enormity of the manipulations going on at the national level, at the same time Democrats are fooling themselves into thinking that they control the country just because they control the Congress and have a shot at the presidency. There’s a sense in which things are looking up at the national level, but it might be too little too late, as long as people like Cheney and Abrams are still in positions of power. Hersh says that they believe that the insanely broad resolution which kicked off the war in Iraq authorized them to do as they please in the Mid-East, so that Congress is now out of it. Their experience in Iran-Contra taught them that there are many ways of raising money to do what you want, and of course just for starters the Saudis have a bunch of money. And the planes and bombs are already there. 

Can we do anything about this insane plan from here? The Planet’s faithful corps of signers of form letters is going heavily for impeachment, some of Bush, others of Cheney. Impeachment of either one would certainly slow them down, but are there enough votes to impeach? It’s doubtful that the House would vote for impeachment, and even more doubtful that the Senate would convict even if one of them were put to trial.  

Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s reluctance to put her few congressional eggs in the impeachment basket is understandable. There’s more than enough that needs doing in the reality-based world, so it’s hard to insist that all of the country’s real needs should be sacrificed in an attempt to impeach Cheney that might very well fail. Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters and Lynne Woolsey have put forward a gutsy proposal, House Resolution 508, which would set a six-month deadline for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq, but it has no chance of passing and would have no effect on the bomb-Iran boys anyhow.  

More and more, we have the sense that events at all levels are simply spiraling out of rational control. It’s not that there have never been irrational elements in the national government before, of course, the self-same Iran-Contra, which the nation finally turned around, being the prime example. But the damage to Nicaragua which was done by that particular nutty episode persists until the present day, and where nuclear technology is involved, as in the case of Iran, even worse damage could be done to the whole world.  

Hersh identifies the three major national players in what the magazine titles “The Redirection” of American Mid-East policy as the Bush administration, the Saudis and Israel. At least two of the three have access to nuclear weapons, which is one of the more frightening aspects of this policy shift. The murkier parts of his piece, which I finally forced myself to read in preparation for writing this, have to do with the political goals of these three players. Influencing the course of events in Lebanon, including getting rid of Hezbollah, is certainly one, and defanging Syria seems to be another. How these goals are aided by pumping up the kinds of Sunni factions which produced Al Qaeda is hard to understand, though Hersh makes a valiant attempt to trace the logic used by proponents.  

At the end of his piece, almost certainly having been instructed by his editors to lighten up a little in the conclusion, he mentions a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing starting Monday which might include some effort to find out what’s going on. But he quotes Senator Ron Wyden, a member of the committee, as saying that “The Bush administration has frequently failed to meet its legal obligation to keep the Intelligence Committee fully and currently informed. Time and again, the answer has been ‘Trust us.’ ” Wyden said, “It is hard for me to trust the administration.”  

That goes for most Americans these days. So what are we going to do about it? It’s a question that we must face up to, even though there doesn’t seem to be a clear answer in the offing any time soon. 


Editorial: How About Some Density in the ‘Burbs?

By Becky O’Malley
Tuesday February 27, 2007

It happened that last weekend we had two excursions which took us out of the Berkeley Bubble and into the genuine suburbs, in fact into the old established bridge-and-tunnel suburbs, over a bridge to the Peninsula and through the tunnel to Lamorinda. On Saturday night in Palo Alto we were lucky enough to see two fine singers with local connections, Berkeley-born Alaine Rodin and current resident Kathleen Moss, in the West Bay Opera’s stunning production of Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades, which demonstrated conclusively that culture is alive and well outside the urban bay area. The Lafayette trip on Sunday was for a sadder purpose, a memorial for a friend who had died suddenly.  

On both trips we were struck, as we always are when we leave the city, by how much space, just plain space, there is in the suburbs, particularly in the ones which saw their major development between the ’50s and the ’70s. On a rainy Saturday night we drove (no possible alternative transit, needless to say) from 101 to Palo Alto, across wide boulevards with spacious median strips as big as some “parks” in flatlands Berkeley, to a smallish theater surrounded by a parking lot so close to the stage door we didn’t even get wet running in from the car. We couldn’t help but contrast it to Berkeley’s equivalent Julia Morgan Theater, walking distance from our house and on the 51 bus line, but where it’s almost impossible to park if those options don’t work for you. Even in the dark we could see that adjacent civic amenities—museums, schools and so forth—were in one-story buildings and surrounded by parking and parklands.  

On Sunday the 10-minute drive from Highway 24 through “downtown” Lafayette to our destination, a lovely rustic lodge in a verdant canyon setting, was also on wide boulevards, in this case leading to curving rural roads. Twice on our journey we had to brake for flocks of wild turkeys crossing in front of us. Twenty minutes from our Berkeley home, we were in the country.  

A quick peek at the invaluable Berkeley Parents Network website reveals many transplants from Berkeley rhapsodizing about Lafayette living. Numerous University of California faculty members and administrators enjoy living in the Lafayette-Moraga-Orinda area. They all drive past our house every weekday morning, and on weekends it’s even worse as they head for Elmwood shops. There’s a BART station in Lafayette, but not everyone seems to use it.  

“Downtown” Lafayette is a succession of strip malls gussied up in standard northern California pseudo-Hispanic stucco facades. Each one, and often each store, has its own right-by-the-front-door parking lot. Those who post to the Parents site make much of the fact that Lafayetters drive vans instead of the bigger and more expensive SUVs you might find in Danville, and judging by the parking lots we observed that’s true. Perhaps they also take the bus and BART, but no busses were in evidence on Sunday afternoon. You can’t get very far in Lamorinda without a car, it seems. 

What’s all this got to do with Berkeley? We’re here because we really enjoy the urban experience, right? We have BART stations (three, unless you want to come home from your event after midnight or go anywhere except the center of the city) and bus stops (many, though not necessarily all, served by frequent or comfortable busses). We even have the occasional wild turkey, if you live in the right neighborhood.  

But Berkeley now seems to be the target of a campaign to make it uninhabitable. The Planning Department is dominated by true believers who think that every flatlands back yard deserves a condo of its own, and who are bending the zoning laws to accomplish this. Such efforts won’t be needed much longer, of course, since Planning Commission purges have recently paved the way to change those same laws permanently. Zealots from ABAG to the oxymoronic Livable Berkeley seem to think that covering every square inch of the scant remaining open space in Berkeley, green or paved, with new construction will make more people want to live here and fewer people want to move to new subdivisions in former cornfields.  

Well, those who believe that urban legend should spend some time reading the Lafayette entries on the Parents’ website. They all seem to come from transplants from Oakland and Berkeley, people who finally got fed up with the stresses of living too close to too many folks. ABAG is dominated by representatives from the second-ring suburbs who are anxious to off-load the growth pressure on first-ring cities like Berkeley which long since achieved urban density. The result of putting condos in every backyard in Berkeley will be making everyone who can possibly afford it move to Lafayette or the equivalent, unless they just move all the way to Tracy. Some web-site-posters said that their new suburban homes were less expensive than their old ones in the first ring cities, and they boast of 25-minute BART commutes to San Francisco.  

They’ve even got culture out there. We passed a theater marquee touting a production of a rarely-seen Noel Coward play, and Berkeley’s favorite Philharmonia Baroque programs a Lamorinda night in addition to their two nights here. And there are acres and acres of soccer fields in evidence.  

We are going to be very sorry in five years when the vast number of shoddy Berkeley apartment buildings which were supposed to warehouse the Bay Area’s excess population have turned into poorly-maintained and often vacant rental condos, when the students who eagerly rented sparkling new units have established their families in Hercules or Fairfield. Wouldn’t it make more sense to get started now on modest density increments in all the sixties suburban towns like Lafayette? That Blockbuster Video we saw near the BART station and the central Lafayette freeway entrance could support four stories of apartments above the store and still have some parking for those who needed it. The Starbucks on the main drag would have more patrons if there were apartments above it, and AC transit could send them some buses. Of course, we have our one-story Blockbuster and our single-floor Starbucks here too, but we also have residents crowded much closer together in our neighborhoods, and they’re the ones that don’t need even more density. 

 

 

 

 


Public Comment

Letters to the Editor

Friday March 02, 2007

WAGES IN EL CERRITO 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As a former Teamster, and a believer in “Justice for All,” I was saddened to see the El Cerrito Council ditch their previous Prevailing Wage policy and buy into a developer’s cynical ultimatum “Affordable Housing or Prevailing Wages.” 

On Feb. 5, the council approved the Olson Company’s plan to build apartments at the old Mayfair site on San Pablo Avenue. The developers said they would not adhere to El Cerrito’s previously stated policy of paying prevailing wages on city sponsored projects. They claimed that paying union wages would raise costs by 30 percent, and make building “affordable” apartments unaffordable. 

The council accepted this argument though refuted by speakers for the Unions, and did not challenge them. They did not consider other methods of raising the alleged shortfall, like from Redevelopment’s incremental taxes. They agreed, in effect, to a “Sophie’s choice: affordable apartments or prevailing wages.” Nor did they ask the developers to return some of their profit for a affordable housing fund. 

I think this is wrong, it comes close to union busting, and violates the city’s earlier prevailing wage policy, which many other cities still follow. Why should El Cerrito, which prides itself on being liberal, cave in to spurious arguments by developers? Is this what El Cerrito voters want their Council to do? 

It’s hypocritical for senior city staff and council to cut workers salaries by 30 percent yet keep their own. To practice “Justice for All,” senior staff, attorneys, consultants and the council should have a similar reduction in their pay and benefits, in favor of affordable housing, for any work on such projects. 

Rosemary Loubal 

El Cerrito 

 

• 

EDUCATION NOT INCARERATION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I call upon the Bay Area community to take urgent action to stop the closure of East Oakland Community High School (EOC). It is a tragedy that our un-elected state administrator is trying to shut down this innovative community school as part of a nationwide trend to shut down and privatize public schools. It is through a mass movement that we can stop this type of policy and return Oakland schools to local, democratic control. 

EOC is important to us because Education Not Incarceration (ENI) is working with the National Education Association’s 3.2 million members to stop students from being pushed out of school and into prison. EOC represents our four point program to stop pushouts in real world terms.  

1. EOC emphasizes support of positive behavior, rather than punitive actions such as expulsion and suspension.  

2. EOC provides a strong, culturally aware staff, and curriculum that empowers youth by relating learning to their lives.  

3. EOC supports the growth of the whole child by involving the entire community in the education of each student.  

4. EOC prepares students for higher education or living wage jobs by carefully connecting students to opportunities based on their individual passions. 

EOC is not only about preparing students to pass a test, it is about teaching students to be positive, caring, successful members of our community. 

Please become a decision-maker and contact School Board members, Mayor Ron Dellums and the state-appointed administrator. 

Nuri Ronaghy 

 

• 

UC-BP DEAL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The UC/BP agreement should be of concern to all Berkeley residents. 

The University of California Berkeley’s $500 million dollar deal with BP (formerly British Petroleum) is generating much needed concern on the campus. This concern has centered on the secrecy of the agreement, the content of the research, and the implications for academic freedom, all serious concerns. The genetically modified organism (GMO) research will impact our agricultural and ecological future, mostly in developing countries, in unknown ways. 

But the deal should also be of concern to all Berkeley residents. It should concern us not only because of the questionable research using genetically modified organisms taking place in our city, but also because of the cost to the city. 

The city of Berkeley already subsidizes the university $11-$13 million per year for sewer services, fire and police protection, street maintenance, street lighting and all the other municipal services we as residents pay for through our taxes. 

The university does not pay property taxes. The university does not pay the fees and assessments on its buildings. We, the residents of Berkeley pay for the university’s municipal services, and we do this because they are a tax-exempt educational organization. 

But why should we subsidize BP’s research labs? The are a major for-profit energy company doing research under the umbrella and perhaps protection of our state university’s premier campus. This umbrella does not disguise either the controversial work they will be doing, or the fact that this work is for their own profit. 

Berkeley residents and Berkeley elected officials must make it clear to the university that we will not subsidize this for-profit activity, especially controversial for-profit activity, in our town. 

Anne Wagley 

 

• 

CANVASSER LOVE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Berkeley has a long tradition of community organizing and activism, and to this day the tradition continues. For example, the university’s plan to build a new athletic center on a fault line, at the cost of a grove of oak trees, has sparked much debate. Tree sitters are using their right to protest until the situation is resolved. Yet, on another side of community organizing we have your neighborhood canvasser. These often young and idealistic people knock on your door to raise the visibility of issues, whether they be environmental or political, they knock on your door to increase the level of grassroots contributors and ultimately they knock on your door to get you to take concrete actions like writing or calling representatives, attending rallies, or pressuring industry to have people’s interest in mind over profit. Going door to door has long been a strategy to achieve positive social change and yet again we are faced with a global record of environmental degradation that demands attention and therefore has many canvassers working on the issue. The time is now to answer the call of canvassers who come to your door by not only writing a check, but by changing your lifestyle and spreading the need to quickly change our over reliance and consumption of fossil fuels. When a canvasser comes to your door, take a few minutes and listen to what they have to say. The experience and issues they work on are worth your time. 

Joshua Sbicca 

Canvass Director 

Environmental Action 

 

• 

STILL A FREE SPEECH ZONE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

This year the Ecology Center’s Berkeley Farmers’ Markets will celebrate our 20th anniversary! We have a long and exciting history representing a generation of excellent eating, community building, food justice, and free speech! The current attempt to derail the David Brower Center will undoubtedly be written into this history, as a noteworthy debate and a moment where our dedication to free speech continued to outweigh our organizational support for the creation of this environmentally and socially responsible development. 

Despite the many complaints we have received about allowing the petitioners a space in the market, we feel it is important that diverse viewpoints be allowed to express themselves in civil and appropriate ways. While we find the arguments related to the petition campaign highly questionable and misleading, and we believe that there have already been ample opportunities for dissent, we continue to offer space to voices different from our own. This is representative of the many other wonderful things our markets offer in addition to amazing food from amazing farmers—diversity, education, community engagement, and tolerance. 

For those of you who are annoyed by whole thing, don’t want to be bothered while you shop, or feel these issues have been adequately addressed in publicly noticed meetings over the last three years, we express our deepest apologies, and hope you will continue to support the many dedicated and outstanding farmers at our markets anyway. As a consolation, you can look forward to an exciting season of amazing and edible celebratory events in honor of our 20 years at the heart of your local foodshed!! 

Food for thought. 

Martin Bourque 

Executive Director 

Ecology Center 

 

• 

BUSH AND CHENEY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Has there ever been a period in this nation’s history, when both the president and vice-president were so heartily disliked, and with equal intensity? This sad fact was very evident yesterday at a Kensington luncheon attended mostly by UC faculty wives and Cal alumni, hardly your firebrand Birkenstock radicals. During the course of the luncheon, someone at my table voiced the opinion that Bush should be impeached. This brought indignant response from two or three women, “Oh, God, no! Then we’d have Cheney!” That led to a discussion of Cheney’s near assassination the day before in Afghanistan. One woman commented wryly, “Too bad they missed!” But aware of the total impropriety of this observation, she hastily added, “I shouldn’t have said that, should I? All this country needs is another assassination.” We all agreed with that, of course. But the fact remains that the sentiments expressed by these women echo the frustration of millions of concerned Americans, dismayed by the escalating death rate and horrendous injuries of U.S. soldiers and innocent Iraqi civilians, yet powerless to stop the carnage. Will those two obstinate, arrogant leaders in the White House ever get the message that we’re fed up and sick to death of this hellish war? 

Dorothy Snodgrass 

Berkeley 

 

• 

LISTEN TO THE PEOPLE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As a Cal alumnus, I am disturbed by the arrest of Zachary Running Wolf and the manner in which campus officials are refusing to listen to the concerns of the community and of the First People, not only on the specific issue at hand, the preservation of the Memorial Oak Grove, but on many other issues. I do not know Mr. Running Wolf well, having met him only once. I do know him by reputation as a dedicated and respected activist for the local community and for Native American issues. 

As an anthropologist, I have spent many years working the members of the Gabrielino/Tongva and Juaneno/ Acjachemen people of Southern California in their efforts to save the sacred creation center of Puvungna on the Cal State Long Beach campus. During this time, I have come to have great respect for Native American activists such as Mr. Running Wolf who are attempting to preserve their heritage while educating the rest of us about the importance of that heritage. After many years, campus officials at Cal State Long Beach have finally come to recognize the wisdom of listening to the voices of the community and of the First People of California. Steps are now being taken to properly honor the Puvungna site. 

In the interest of justice and for sake of the university itself, I hope the UC administration will drop whatever charges it may have against Mr. Running Wolf. The concerns he is raising are widely felt, and he should be honored, not condemned, for his commitment. 

Campus officials need to listen to the people. 

Eugene E. Ruyle 

Emeritus Professor of Anthropology 

California State University, Long Beach 

Cal class of ‘63 

 

• 

FOOD MILES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am an eighth grade student at the Athenian Middle School in Danville. In our science class, my group and I conducted a research report on a type of pollution that we feel is overlooked far too often. This pollution is called “food miles.” 

Food miles is a serious issue. Food miles is the distance that food travels from food to plate, from the farm to the consumer. The idea is that there is a lot of unnecessary transportation that occurs. The actual pollution is from the planes, trains and automobiles used in the shipping process. Basically, to make ketchup for example, a tomato can be picked in a field, put on a truck, driven to a packaging center, then driven to a distribution center, where it is distributed to stores, and then the consumer drives all the way to the store and back home. Often times, foods are imported from far away by plane, especially fruit, because it is so perishable. Planes give off ungodly amounts of carbon-dioxide. The basic kiwi found at Safeway is imported from New Zealand, and the tomato from Mexico. This is silly, as here, near the Central Valley, we have some of the best agriculture available. Also, foods are often bought out of season, which isn’t necessary. 

It’s not just foods that are contributing, but other products as well. Bottled water is horribly inefficient, as the bottling is done before shipment, and water can be imported from very far away. Sparkling water is even worse. The top sellers, Perrier & Pellegrino are from France and Italy, whereas Calistoga is from here in California. Beer is similar; Heineken for example is imported all the way from Amsterdam. 

In terms of prevention, there are many things the consumer can do. First off, the consumer needs to be aware. They need to look at where foods are bought from and buy more local foods. Secondly, then need to try to shop at local farmers’ markets as much as possible. If not markets, then some stores feature more local foods, such as Whole Foods, which buys their produce form Happy Boy Farms in California. The consumer needs to know what foods are in season and stick to those groups as much as possible. They can drink their tap water, to reduce bottled water consumption, or if it’s bad, they can get a filter for around 30 dollars from any local supermarket. Once again awareness is the key. Food miles is a serious issue and needs to be treated accordingly. 

David Young 

Danville  

 

• 

VOTE WITH OUR DOLLARS? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Outside Zellerbach auditorium, where critical journalist Michael Pollan has just debated the C.E.O. of Whole Foods, audience members are suspicious that this fight was rigged, its champions giggling away their time in “I’m for choice” banality. And why wouldn’t they? Both speakers, and a jubilant majority of the audience, agree in a fundamental way that it’s high time to vote with your dollars—a lot of them. 

The problem is that voting with your dollars, like voting in general, isn’t doing anything other than shuffling allegiances between our masters whenever it’s in their interest to cast the illusion of choice. What of using our human faculty to create something new and better, which will correspond perfectly with our beliefs and give back to us more than the energies we happily put in? 

Alas, most of us are cursed to chase these scraps of green paper which stuff the ballot box of our discontent late after a long night of work. 

But this is the worst problem of all: some of us don’t have as many dollars to vote with. Some of us, maybe farmers of certifiable mangoes in the desert that violent greed is so quickly pacifying fertile Earth into, must desperately trade our sweat, mangoes, farm, everything, in need of the bleached, subsidized and “humanitarian” flour which by ruthless exportation conquered our ancestor’s agriculture, or desperate to enroll children in a school, to do better than this. 

The people with votes to spare are the rich few, and we already know that in their hands, nothing of substance will change. How easy it is for us to find contentment in the decision to buy only products rated highly by this very rich man and his very rich company. What “intelligence and discipline” we display. Come on, my people! This is the same old emperor. As a wise old Panther once told a room, “They’ll paint the White House black if they can keep making a buck.” As ever before, kings today are busiest extracting wealth and hoping to leave us helpless to do anything but follow their decrees. 

I’ll pose a real alternative, which Tuesday’s debate was lacking: Vote with your own creativity and energy. 

Maybe spend a few hours a month helping make real food real cheap at one of the co-op farmstands in Berkeley, plant some collard greens at your community garden, write your deep thoughts on the signs for United Fruit Co. garbage at your grocery store—and refuse anything short of complete freedom, complete justice, and complete equality! 

Adam Wight 

 

• 

PASSING TRESSES,  

CROSSING RAILS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

After reading the confusion caused by a simple typo (“tresspass instead of trespass”), I provide this entry for the Beware-of-Spelling-and Double-Meaning File:  

Once on a London Tube platform I read a sensible warning sign: DO NOT CROSS THE RAILS, followed by a wag’s reasoning: IT TAKES US HOURS TO UNTANGLE THEM. 

Thanks again for being serious but never stodgy, 

Patrick Fenix  

 

• 

IMMIGRATION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Where is the compassion and unity as new hard-core and mean-spirited immigration proposals take shape in Texas. Is blaming and demonizing hard working immigrants the most pressing problem the state is facing or are we seeing a distraction from failed policies? 

Republicans and anti-immigration forces are attacking the most vulnerable members of society denying American born children of immigrants benefits and services. Leave it to the GOP to come up with immigrant-bashing legislation to stoke the fires of its conservative constituency. Why does this still feel like racism and discrimination? 

Ron Lowe 

Grass Valley 

 


Commentary: Zero Waste: Easier Said Than Done

By Arthur R. Boone
Friday March 02, 2007

I thank the Daily Planet for providing such extensive coverage of the zero waste transfer station plan now seeking public attention. As the rhetoric about zero waste reaches forward to the “put up or shut up” phase, a few concerns rise to the surface.  

1. Nobody’s ever done this before on a big scale. There are probably 10,000 to 15,000 people in the United States who have taken a zero waste pledge. In manner similar to a chastity or abstinence pledge, the zero waste pledge involves a commitment not to use any garbage services but to reuse, recycle or compost all products and materials that come into your hands. I took the pledge in 1986; it took a while to develop the infrastructure in my house and yard and to find the markets for the materials that would allow me to fulfill this pledge, but now about 99 percent of what I dispose of goes to reuse, recycling or composting; the other materials have no markets, no matter how hard I look.  

But this model of behavior has never been rolled out on a large scale. The president of DuPont said 10 years ago, “Zero emissions, zero waste, zero accidents: makes sense to me.” As a goal on paper, or a CEO talking point, it’s great, but DuPont still has plenty of garbage. The current poster child for zero waste in California is a Japanese firm that makes machines to produce airline baggage labels, but they burn 13 percent of their materials outflow in an incinerator, not what anyone in Berkeley wants to do. So, we’re gonna invent the wheel here.  

2. Lots of materials have no scrap markets. Recycling has made progress so far because the technologies to recycle paper, metals and glass have been around for centuries; what we’ve learned in the last 20 years has been how to recycle plastics (not a complete success story yet but a matter many Berkeleyans refuse to (or begrudgingly) acknowledge) and some wood products. But then think about particle board; seven billion square feet made in the last reported year and nobody wants it for reprocessing. Or mylar: Hershey’s switched their candy bar wrapper from a foil-backed paper liner and glossy paper wrapper to a single layer enclosed mylar package; nobody anywhere will recycle this stuff (or foil-backed paper, for that matter). Packagers and product manufacturers in the United States are totally free to design and market products and packaging that have no further use; the extended producer responsibility laws currently much touted are moving very slowly on products and packaging and the packaging professionals are fighting them every step of the way (with a few exceptions).  

Building a zero waste transfer station isn’t going to change this state-of-affairs very much. Someday we will look at a non-recyclable material like an incurable disease; there will be an NIH-type braintrust that will spend public (or private) money figuring out how to give this product or that material a new, end-of-life, destination; “recyclable or ban” the zealots cry. But it hasn’t happened yet, and Berkeley’s success with a ZWTS will only underscore the lack of materials planning and control elsewhere in our culture.  

3. A lot of stuff gets thrown away because people don’t know what to do with it; the markets may exist but the sorter is uninformed. Recently at a meeting of recycling coordinators from San Francisco hotels, I said, “It’s easier to put something into storage than to take it out.” All those present nodded knowingly. Yesterday I was at the Oakland Museum’s White Elephant Sale warm-up show; I walked in by the 30 yard debris box from the garbage company in which a volunteer was happily dumping old audio tapes and 33 LP records; she didn’t think they would sell. Putting a zero waste slogan on a building isn’t going to create or find a path to market for the products and materials that enter there. And will everyone who works there know what they’re doing? Not in my experience.  

4. Our society disinvests in the end-of-life. You can do a funeral and burial for less cost than one day in ICU. When my friend’s 94 year old father had a heart attack, the doctor shrugged his shoulders and asked, without words, “He’s an old man; what do you expect?”  

There’s a lot of those feelings of rejection and low expectation about used materials and products in our culture; “Let it go; we’ve got more; why do you want to fool with that old stuff.” It’s easy to get a fetish about old this or old that but a lot of people go broke every year trying to get others interested in what they think is important but the world thinks is trash.  

This is particularly a problem among so-called solid waste professionals. The upper echelon of this occupation believes that people don’t care about their discards and won’t pay for their proper management. “Garbage is,” my friend says, “a simple answer to the Industrial Revolution.” The cost of something we buy in a store is 97 percent putting it together and getting it to the store; the materials in the things we buy are worth mere pennies on the dollar. When all you have to make a venture worthwhile is the material, you’re between a rock and a hard place; the annals of our recycling industry are full of folks who’ve gone broke thinking used this or used that ought to be valuable.  

5. A lot of stuff gets thrown away because it’s dirty. I worked two and a half years at the transfer station in San Francisco. Presumably leaving Gap to work for Levi’s, Sally Smith puts all her Gap clothes in a bag and they go to the dump. “Why doesn’t she give them to Goodwill or Salvation Army?”, you ask. I don’t know, she just doesn’t. I can pull them out and send them to St. Vincent dePaul’s; that’ll work. 

But what if they’re dirty? Off to the dump. Yesterday I pulled a nice sweatshirt out of a garbage can on Durant Street; it had had bleach dripped on the blue material and was unsalable in America (our poor people are proud, or they can get it at Target). It might end up in Afghanistan, warming some refugee, but it’ll never sell in the states. “Oh, it could be re-dyed,” say the liberals. 

So, I wish the City of Berkeley lots of luck. I would trust Dan Knapp more than ESA to come up with a workable plan, but it will take a lot of “what if” questions along the way to test any models that will get built. Turning personal behavior into public policy is a lot easier than implementing that policy amidst the myriad of stuff we easily trash today. My wife’s cousin’s husband was an engineer on the design of the North Slope oil drilling platforms in the 1970s. “It’s a bitch,” he said, “you do all the drawings and reviews and simulated stress tests but you don’t really know if it’ll work until you float it up there and see what the wind and the ice will do.” Hopefully, anybody’s plan will have lots of cautious questions asked and answered. Berkeley might well be the first out of the gate, and that’s always a dangerous position. Remember the new Denver Airport’s innovative baggage handling system, or Betamax, etc.  

 

Arthur R. Boone is an Oakland resident, a recycling professional since 1983 and the environmental representative on the Alameda County Recycling Board.  


Commentary: By Definition, Downtowns are Populous

By Erin Bradner
Friday March 02, 2007

I typically find the critical coverage of Berkeley development and city planning issues reported by the Daily Planet polemical yet comforting since this type of in-depth coverage of planning issues reassures me that our community is taking a critical and balanced look at growth in our unique city.  

However, in reading the Feb. 23 cover story, “High-Rise Tower Plan Proposed for Downtown,” I was surprised by the pithy and dogmatic negative reaction to the high-density option for the downtown plan reported in your interviews with the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee. One committee member is quoted as saying “density for density’s sake sucks.” Another is reported to be capable of both “never” supporting the high-density alternative while simultaneously being “prepared to support a range of options.”  

I’m concerned about the Advisory Committee’s ability to objectively shape the vision of our downtown. The Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee and the City Council need to have the foresight to envision a populous, livable, and lively downtown that is as vibrant and inspiring as the world class university that put this city on the map. I take pride in the environmental prescience of our city leaders—they speak for me when they decry suburban sprawl and promote environmental protection, energy conservation, alternatives to the automobile and affordable housing.  

Paradoxically, as the Daily Planet reporting reveals, many of those same leaders are philosophically opposed to higher-density construction in our downtown. I find this hypocritical at best and irresponsible at worst, since concentrating our population is how we get the economies of scale we need from our infrastructure. Concentrating housing and business in a vital downtown is a planning strategy from antiquity; by concentrating housing, jobs and services in downtown we can accommodate the inevitable growth of our population and still allow for low density and no-density open spaces elsewhere. Density helps us address the social and environmental concerns that face the entire Bay Area, if not the world. To appropriate a turn of phrase from the advisory committee member, preservation for preservation sake sucks—while charming in concept, low-density downtown corridors are the feeble signature of dying business districts throughout Middle America. The crude visual simulations pictured in your article and shown by the planning staff look monolithic and jarring if you take them literally. They don’t concern me because I’m confident that those featureless blocks are as malleable as clay in the able hands of our city’s fine architects, planners, artists, advisory committees, councilmembers and everyday citizens who take the initiative to make their opinion heard.  

It’s easy to take political pot shots at the visual simulations shown by the city planners. Rather than choosing to see them as an easy target, I see those simulations simply as a conceptual placeholder; though featureless as a nascent concept they temporarily reify a vision for our downtown where the people who work and play in downtown also make a home there.  

Downtown Berkeley should be a place where responsible historic preservation is balanced against the benefits that new buildings and a critical mass of residents can bring to the downtown. A silent majority of Berkeley residents, those who do not make careers out of engaging in city politics, are truly progressive. We want a vibrant downtown brewing with exciting new businesses and residents. We want a mature downtown community that simultaneously serves the needs of the vital, somewhat seasonal, university population plus providing a home for a year-round downtown community of families, single urban professionals and the elderly who can walk, bike or take transit to work and other destinations throughout the city and region.  

A populous and diverse downtown would invigorate and expand the arts and other existing cultural institutions from the Farmer’s Market to the theatre. Residents who want a vibrant, livable city that they and future generations can be proud of would be wise to communicate to the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee and the City Council that they support higher density development in the place where it makes the most sense—downtown! 

 

Erin Bradner is a Berkeley resident.


Commentary: Fix Van Hool Busses and Improve Service, Too

By Steve Geller
Friday March 02, 2007

The AC Transit General Manager says the Van Hools are the best bus we’ve ever had. But some riders are calling these nice new buses “Van Hell.” 

What’s the problem? 

AC Transit has been trying hard to make bus riding more attractive, so more people will ride transit—especially to and from work—instead of driving alone in a car. Because Europeans ride buses far more than we do, AC Transit decided to get “European style” buses. They couldn’t get the right kind from any U.S. bus manufacturer, not even from Gillig in nearby Hayward. So AC Transit bought Van Hool buses in Europe. 

Van Hool of Belgium has a fine reputation world-wide; they have been making buses since 1947, and they have sold city buses all over Europe, Asia and Africa. Van Hool tour buses can be seen at Fisherman’s Wharf. In local politics, however, it really looks bad that AC Transit bought buses from Belgium, while cutting service in Berkeley. Riders resent the money spent on management and staff trips to Belgium instead of improving our bus service. It turns out finally that the interior layout of our Van Hools was not designed by a specialist at Van Hool but by somebody on the AC Transit staff. Van Hool could have given AC Transit plenty of excellent ideas for seat layouts, drawing on their world-wide experience. I’m sure there are seniors in Europe, Asia and Africa who have just as much trouble climbing into those high seats as our seniors do here. 

AC Transit also required three doors on the new buses. US bus designs generally have only the front and rear doors, so the extra door became a custom item, which drove up the cost and effectively prevented any U.S. manufacturer from making a successful bid.  

Originally, the purpose of the three doors was to speed up boarding. AC Transit was going to implement POP fare collection, where people obtain proof-of-payment (POP) before they ride the buses instead of fumbling for their fare as they board. This system vastly speeds up boarding because people can enter and exit through all the doors; the buses can make faster trips. POP is used on Muni streetcars, on Caltrain, on buses in Oregon, Canada, Europe and Brazil. But according to AC Transit management, POP is too expensive for the East Bay, because of the salaries of the fare inspectors needed to keep East Bay riders honest. Well OK, but if POP wasn’t an option, why were the three doors required? This looks very bad. 

Personally, I started off rather liking the Van Hools. They do cut a fine figure as they go by, and their clean diesel is quiet. I’m a big guy, so I find it relatively easy to negotiate the high seats. But as I’ve aged, I’ve gotten a little unsteady on my feet, so I find it frightening when I have to stand, and there’s no place to grab hold while the bus swerves and lurches about Berkeley. This kind of thing can make a bus ride a “Van Hell” for a senior. The grab-bar problem is worst in the front of the bus, next to the first set of facing seats. I hope AC Transit will install some traditional hanging straps in that part of the bus, if they can’t put in more grab-bars.  

Speaking of tradition, I think we should go back to pull-cords for signaling when we want to get off, instead of those push-buttons. On a 40-foot Van Hool, if you’re sitting in the right front seat next to the window, and there’s someone seated next to you in the aisle seat, there is no way to reach the push-button, which is across the aisle, without flopping over your neighbor. Pull-cords and strap-hangers were invented over 100 years ago, and are still a good idea. 

The Van Hools should have more bench seating—the traditional seats facing the aisle from the wall of the bus, not just those folding jump-seats. A good use for the hump over the wheel is a platform to store packages, as on the NABIs and the new 30-foot Van Hools. Berkeley needs to catch up with other cities and deploy Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). The plan is for the BRT vehicle to be the same 60-foot articulated Van Hool bus now in regular service on the 40L route (where the BRT will run). I want to see more people traveling about Berkeley on buses, not continually clogging the streets with cars and spewing greenhouse gases.  

It would be great to have the big Van Hool operating as a BRT, delivering people to their jobs along Telegraph, Bancroft and Shattuck. We need more transit action, less controversy. Employers should strongly support the Commuter Check program. Employees should stop taking parking spaces away from shoppers and visitors. People working in Berkeley should be using the bus, not feeding parking meters. The Van Hools could be fixed so that riders are happy. Then we could concentrate on making sure our buses provide fast and frequent service. We need to implement BRT, POP and bus-only lanes. We need to stop being so negative. 

 

Steve Geller is a Berkeley resident.


Commentary: Democracy in North Shattuck Planning

By Helene Vilett
Friday March 02, 2007

Your recent article on the North Shattuck Plaza Forum left out many supportive statements made at the workshop, and seemed to emphasize the negative ones, many based on misrepresentations that need correction. 

Some said that the proponents of the plaza are “outsiders” and “our distrust of outsiders rises from when the Temple Beth El was built.” Outsiders can hardly apply to an institution and to citizens who have been in the neighborhood for decades. Moreover, 17 of the 20 active members of our group either live or work in the north Berkeley neighborhood. I personally have lived and shopped here since 1960. This is where my husband and I manually built our home and raised our children. 

The North Shattuck Plaza (NSP) group was referred to as a “private self-selected group.” This term would apply to just about any group that is formed to influence public policy or improve the infrastructure, including LOCCNA, Friends of the Fountain and Friends of the Rose Garden. 

“The process is not democratic. . . .” Democracies rely on the dedication of individuals organizing to contribute to their community, from the local to the national level. Our group was formed at the request of the North Shattuck Association (NSA), an organization of merchants from Rose to Delaware, to help implement one of the recommendations of the “North Shattuck Urban Design and Circulation Report” approved by the City Council in 2001. Further, in the fall of 2005 the City Council passed a motion to support our efforts. 

“How can a group of people …decide what to do with a strip of land that belongs to the city.” We are not deciding anything. After 18 months of work by volunteers and urban designers (whose fees are paid by the NSA), we are proposing an idea for public review and input. Only the City Council can approve a specific plan. Such a plan would require neighborhood consensus. 

Opponents “wanted to know whether the plaza was a precursor to high-rises.” Based on the clarifications stated above, the answer is no.  

The merchants who have organized in opposition are working contrary to the goals of their own business association (NSA). To say that “Seventy-five percent of the merchants have signed a petition opposing the development” is misleading. It may have been signed by 75 percent of owners, or their staff, adjacent to the study area, but that is not 75 percent of the NSA. It is understandable that some merchants would be concerned about the issues as they are described. However, I would hope that with dialogue and good will, we could resolve potential problems for the benefit of our shopping district. 

This area of Shattuck has an inefficient layout of roadways and parking spaces that can be reconfigured to gain a pedestrian plaza, with the goal of maintaining the same number of parking spaces. Most successful shopping areas do not have parking right in front but have satellite parking lots. An inviting gathering place with pedestrian amenities will actually bring more neighbors and shoppers to the area and will help the businesses thrive. 

 

Helene Vilett is a member of the North Shattuck Plaza group.


Letters to the Editor

Tuesday February 27, 2007

A FEW ERRORS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I would like to point out a several factual errors in Judith Scherr’s article regarding Measure G and Sustainable Berkeley. First, the contract with Sustainable Berkeley to help run the greenhouse gas effort is for one year, not two. Second, the Measure G planning meeting Mayor Bates held two weeks ago was, in fact, “put out publicly.” More than 2,000 people were e-mailed inviting them and anyone else they knew to participate in the Measure G process. Notice of the meeting was also published in a major local newspaper. The only item I did not have time to do was post it on the mayor’s website. Third, the Measure G planning process will be open and follow the public meeting and notice rules for this type of process as detailed in the San Francisco sunshine ordinance and the draft Berkeley Sunshine Ordinance. Fourth, while I was honored to recommend Timothy Burroughs for the job of organizing the greenhouse gas reduction effort, he was actually selected by Sustainable Berkeley after an interview process with their executive board. 

Cisco DeVries  

Chief of Staff  

Office of Mayor Tom Bates  

 

• 

CLARIFICATIONS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

While I appreciate the effort the Daily Planet has put into discussing the Sustainable Berkeley contract with the city (“Sustainable Berkeley Contract Questioned,” Feb. 20) my comments on the subject and my name were misrepresented in the article. My quotes were paraphrased to say that commissions shouldn’t “take on the task of reducing greenhouse gases.” I never said or implied that CEAC or other commissions shouldn’t take on climate change. I was asked if I saw a difference between CEAC and Sustainable Berkeley in coming up with a climate change plan. There is of course a difference. CEAC is a city commission filled with dedicated volunteers and has a very specific role as an advisory group to the council. An independent group can receive money, hire people, and publish their own findings. I further said that it was in the best interest of Berkeley citizens to have CEAC involvement and comments on a climate change plan. 

Jason Kibbey 

Chair, Community Environmental  

Advisory Commission 

 

• 

THANKS TO SUPPORTERS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I would like to thank all my supporters in the mayoral election. According to the Daily Planet (Nov. 10), I received 1,341 votes, or about 5 percent. The final count was 1,880 according to Berkeley’s official results available from their website.  

I received a great deal of support from potential voters who have been driven out of the election process. One friend of mine told me that she would have voted for me, if she voted. Untrustworthy counting methods and the lack of viable candidates who reflect the people’s interests make some Berkeley residents refuse to participate in the voting process at all. So I would like to thank those individuals who would have voted for me; they did in spirit. 

Though my campaign was people-powered and unfunded for the most part, one supporter did manage to donate financially after hearing about my campaign on the Internet. His name is George W. Rogers. 

Thank you also to Thunder who died mysteriously shortly before the election. He volunteered to be my campaign manager. I often say that he voted for me with his life since his death was not investigated by the Police Department. 

Zachary Running Wolf 

 

• 

PAPER BALLOTS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

There is absolutely no public interest in using computer to speed counting of votes. The ramifications of elections are enormous. The integrity of the vote is the foundation of our democracy. 

Computerized voting systems exist only to speed voting results to news media and candidates. The public needs accuracy, fairness and accountability in elections; not speed. 

Haste makes waste of elections. 

Stop corrupt, unreliable voting machines from undermining public trust. Amend HR811 to require paper ballots. 

RJ Godin 

 

• 

CHENEY’S REMARKS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Vice President Cheney is 180 degrees wrong when he besmirches Speaker Pelosi’s effort to end the war as “validating the al Qaeda strategy.” Al Qaeda’s strategy is to continue the war as long as possible. Their recruitment is up and higher than ever. Their opportunity for on-the-ground training against the best the United States has to offer is priceless. Every day that we occupy Iraq validates the insurgents’ claim that they are defending their homeland, and Islam itself.  

Come to think of it, every day that we try to hold Iraq fosters and fans the Cheney fear of terrorism. Every day our soldiers and civilian Iraqis get blown up validates Cheney’s idea that we need to continue down this disastrous path. Every day our country spends millions of dollars in Iraq, Cheney’s company, Halliburton, gets richer.  

Ignorance, arrogance, incompetence, and corruption, these are our enemies, manifest by Cheney’s misjudgments.  

Bruce Joffe 

Piedmont 

 

• 

SILENCED BECAUSE OF DISSENT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Regarding the “City workers appeal anti-gay fliers removal” article in the Feb. 16 Oakland Tribune:  

As a plaintiff in the case no one knows better than I do what my intentions were for posting the flyer to form the Good News employee association. I wasn’t implying that homosexuals lacked ethics or integrity. From a Biblical perspective all humans are created in the image and likeness of a loving creator—starting from that premise, homosexuals have dignity and worth. My focus is ideas: Marriage (one man, one woman), natural family and sexuality from a Christian world view. These Ideas are worth preserving. 

What’s disheartening is the psychological and emotional tactics used by some of the militant homosexuals to desensitize and bully the public into accepting the homosexual lifestyle as normal and natural. Why is it necessary to use elementary, middle and high schools as pulpits to teach our kids that homosexuality is an immutable characteristic when science has not discovered a gay gene? Promoting this idea in public schools amongst the most impressionable age group of society could mean only one thing. Recruitment is necessary to increase the homosexual population. 

Something is gravely wrong when all opposition on an issue is silenced politically, judicially and socially. 

What homosexuals want is complete social acceptance by any means necessary. 

Regina Rederford 

President, Emmanuel’s Coalition 

 

• 

NCLB REVISITED 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The 110th Congress is poised to revise, remodel and renew the No Child Left Behind act and all indications are that it will be guided by the findings of a star-studded commission on NCLB made public a couple of weeks ago. The 75 recommendations in this 225-page report could have been deduced, in general, from a careful analysis of the resumes of the commissioners catalyzed by the fact that not a single student was among them. 

There were 15 members assembled by the Aspen Institute. Ten hold degrees at the doctorate level. Four are women. One is a union organizer. No more than five have actually taught in public secondary schools and only one is currently so engaged. One of the co-chairmen is a White House Cabinet Secretary and the other is a state governor. There are two CEO’s (Intel and State Farm), and four college level professors. Most have held positions in government. Two are directors of private companies engaged in education. The group is blessedly bipartisan. 

Given that these commissioners are a fair sampling of the system’s brain trust, shouldn’t they bear some collective responsibility for its shortcomings? And, if so, how seriously should we treat their recommendations? Why ask the people who broke the system how to fix it? Or analogously: If you want to fix a broken car why ask the driver how to do it? 

Just as the recommendations of the report were predictable based on the experiences (and lack thereof) of its commissioners so, I think, we can predict the outcome of pending Congressional action. Full of sound and fury…. as usual. Very likely a good thing, too, for the nation’s students and teachers. 

Marvin Chachere 

San Pablo 

 

• 

CAMPAIGN OF DECEPTION 

AGAINST BROWER CENTER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Regarding the petition against the David Brower Center and Oxford Plaza, it is disheartening to witness the deception being pulled by the referendum’s authors. Yesterday, another signer relayed being told that David Brower was opposed to the project using his name. As someone who knew David Brower well and personally worked with him at the inception of the Brower Center project, I know this to be patently false. The referendum authors’ claim that the office space will be rented to the UC is a similar falsehood. I know this because I am a staff member at Earth Island Institute, one of the many non-profit conservation groups lining up to be renters at the Brower Center. The petition drafters also continue to spew the falsehood that the property was sold for $1, while failing to reveal that the project is paying millions of dollars to replace the surface parking with an underground lot to be owned and operated by the city with all revenues going to the city. 

I have heard from a number of fellow residents who regret signing once they understood the false premises being used to justify the petition, and some have decided to remove their names. I think readers should know that they may have their names removed from the referendum petition. 

In order to do so, your request must be made in writing to the Berkeley city clerk, and received at least one day prior to the date the petition is filed. As the deadline to file the petition is March 1 at 5 p.m., your letter must be received by the city clerk no later than Feb. 28. 

In order to remove your name, request that the clerk withdraw your name from the referendum petition against “Ordinance 6,965 Oxford Plaza and David Brower Center project amendments to the disposition and development agreement.” You can mail your request to City Clerk, 2180 Milvia Street, Berkeley, CA 94704; fax to 981-6901, or e-mail the scanned image of the letter as an attachment: clerk@ci.berkeley.ca.us Your letter must include your signature, date, printed name and residential address where you are registered to vote. 

The City of Berkeley deserves better than the campaign of deception against the David Brower Center. The David Brower Center and Oxford Plaza will create a lively downtown, a meeting place and educational resource for those committed to social and environmental change, a model green building that will serve as an example for the region and other cities, and badly needed housing, all near public transportation. After so much work by so many people in our community, it is finally time to break ground and create the center. 

David Phillips 

Executive Director, Earth Island Institute 

Board Member, David Brower Center 

 

• 

OUSD LAND SALE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am writing regarding Oakland School Board Member Dan Siegel’s assertion that the proposal to sell OUSD surplus property failed, in part, because of my leaving office, implying my support or acquiescence of the proposal. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

In fact, when the proposal was made I wrote and spoke to California Superintendent of Education Jack O’Connell to share my problems with the educational and economic viability of the plan. I made it clear that unless the process was transparent and made sense for students, parent, teachers and the community, I would oppose it. Without community buy in and lack of detailed financials, it is not surprising that it did not go forward. 

Wilma Chan 

Assemblywoman, 16th District (ret.) 

 

• 

BCA SUPPORTS OXFORD PLAZA, BROWER CENTER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am writing to report that BCA at its Feb. 25 membership meeting, unanimously voted to support the Oxford Plaza affordable housing project and the Brower Center. Specifically, BCA came out in opposition to the petition campaign now underway to delay the project, which may in effect kill it. 

BCA members reported that others had said that they had signed the petition because they were mis-informed by petition gathers. Participants learned that there is a procedure to get one’s name removed from the petition and that they should call BCA at 549-0816 for more information. 

Linda Olivenbaum 

Co-chair, BCA 

 

• 

PROPOSITION 83 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I have a good friend soon to be paroled from state prison and he will be subject to the provisions of Jessica’s Law. I don’t believe that they should be applied to him because he was already in prison when the law passed on Nov. 7, 2006. If it is enforced and he is subjected to the residency restrictions and the GPS monitoring it is a violation of the ex post facto clause of the United States Constitution. 

I believe that protecting our children is extremely important, I have children of my own, but I also believe that protecting out Constitution is important because without the framework it provides our society as we know it will collapse. Prop 83 was passed out of fear, without the majority of the electorate really reading and understanding it. It needs to be thrown out and other legislation, written clearly and concisely needs to be brought before the voters. 

Thank you for your consideration 

Sandy Port 

Sunnyvale, CA 

 

• 

WILLAR PARK 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Prior to my letter being printed in the weekend edition of the Daily Planet (Feb. 16-19), I received a phone call from our City Manager Mr. Phil Kamlarz, informing me that Berkeley is in the process of working on the Willard Park homeless encampment. I also was able to speak with an understanding representative from Berkeley’s Department of Parks and Recreation, who let me know of a new policy to remove all unattended carts/wheelchairs that are used to store personal possessions if the public calls to report it. 

Our city’s homeless service providers are quite familiar with the Willard campers and let me know that that they have attempted to work with them by offering shelter and that their offers are refused. What it boils down to is this: If the city really wants to be proactive in preventing the homeless from camping in Willard Park, then their actions will reflect this. 

Being born and raised in Berkeley, and attending public schools (where I now teach) has allowed me to both observe and take part in the senseless bureaucracy that entrenches every policy surrounding our wonderful city that is truly Berzerkeley. 

When I was a kid in the ’70s and ’80s, (yes, I am old-school Berkeley) Willard was a really fantastic park with a thriving after-school program (which is ironically where the homeless have made their encampment). There were family events and the Pickle Family Circus was a summer staple. We created a beautiful bench on Derby, and the bathrooms had gorgeous murals of fish painted on them. I was an active participant in those projects, and feel a connection to the park in a way that Cal students in the neighborhood never will. 

I want my daughter to feel safe playing in our neighborhood park. She sees the people who live in Willard panhandling daily in front of the 7-Eleven on College for their 40-oz. and recognizes them as the people who have chosen to live in the city’s park. Nobody can force any person to accept help if it is not wanted. If our homeless services have reached out and had their offers of shelter refused then it is time for the city to step up and take action. This is actually something that they can do if they want. It simply needs to become a public priority and then the police will be instructed to enforce the city codes. 

Sabrina Kabella 

 

• 

HABEAS CORPUS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Habeas Corpus. A term we’ve been familiar with since eight grade civics class. In essence, it (1) prevents the government from holding any citizen without informing him/her why they are being held, and (2) the person being held must be brought before the court to determine if they are being held unlawfully. As Americans, we have taken these constitutional protections for granted. After all, isn’t it true that “everyone has their day in court”? Not anymore.  

That’s right. We are no longer protected from unlawful detention.  

Thanks to the Bush administration and with the former Republican Congress’s support, over the past few years our rights have step-by-step been weakened. And ultimately, the right of habeas corpus was finally stripped from us last fall, just prior to the elections. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 not only affirms the government’s right to indefinitely detain people who are identified as having “supported enemy hostilities” but actually prohibits the courts to hear cases of habeas corpus. The person being held has no way to defend against the determination that they are supporting the enemy. 

Currently, at least three American citizens have been held for several years each—without being charged, without being allowed legal representation, and without having their “day in court.” Who knows how many more have been “disappeared,” just like in third world countries. 

You may want to believe that such things can’t happen to you. Keep in mind that by sending this letter or an e-mail or making a phone call, I myself could be determined to be “supporting” the enemy. And by receiving my e-mail or phone call, so can you.  

Read that again. So can you. By receiving an e-mail or phone call. By participating in a peace march. By writing a letter to the editor. By writing to your senator. By being overheard complaining about the government to your neighbor. 

This is how it starts. And if you are taken away in the dead of night, who would you tell your side to?  

We can’t let this happen.  

Please write your own letters protesting this usurpation of our rights. Write to your elected officials at all levels. Write to every newspaper, TV, radio, and cable station you can find. And encourage your circle of friends to do the same. Take some time away from your favorite guilty pleasure reality show, and use your energy to stop the machine from rolling over our rights. After all, they can’t detain us all. 

Can they? 

Sharon Graham 

 

• 

IRAN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The United Nations says Iran’s nuclear effort is in high gear and reports that Tehran may be capable of a nuclear warhead in a year. Big deal! How is Iran going to deliver its one nuclear warhead and even if the country’s religious aristocracy is crazy enough to do so it would mean sure nuclear suicide for the country. 

President Ahmadinejad and the world knows that if Iran did the unthinkable with its one nuclear weapon (if and when) there wouldn’t be a house or tree left standing in Iran and there goes Mahmoud’s religious crusade, boom.  

Ron Lowe 

Grass Valley 


Commentary: Notes on Derby Street Field And School Board Committees

By Mark A. Coplan
Tuesday February 27, 2007

We use many forms of communication to reach the parents, students and staff of the Berkeley schools, but when it comes to communicating with the larger Berkeley community, the one vehicle that reaches so many households and gets people’s attention, is the commentary and letters section of our local newspaper. Honestly, how many of you turned to this section immediately after scanning the front page? I have a couple of important updates for the community that I want to share with you here, because it is information that I think is important to everyone.  

As many of you have read here in the Daily Planet, the BUSD held two community meetings to receive public comment about the Closed Derby Street Plan, in December and January. The last action by the board was to direct staff to pursue the Closed Derby Option, and they directed staff to conduct these meetings for community input. The overwhelming comment voiced in the meetings was in support of a neighbor's Curvy Derby Plan, recommending it as an alternative to the Closed Derby Plan that would still allow for a larger field.  

The next step in the process is to deliver the information gathered in those meetings to the Board of Education for review. The report will come before the board in March, when the calendar will allow sufficient time to make it a conference item as opposed to an Informational Item. A conference item allows the board greater options once they receive the report, while an information item only allows them to receive the report for information. Staff listened to the community and believes that this is what they were asking for.  

Meanwhile, the BUSD Surplus Committee has completed their report to the board on the Hillside School site, and at least six of the members have agreed to continue with the committee as we begin looking at other surplus property questions. The board is looking for an additional five community members who are interested in the work of the Surplus Committee and are willing to serve. The committee is what is referred to as a “7-11” committee as it is required to have a minimum of seven, but not more than 11 members. Board members are also looking to fill vacancies in the Facilities Safety and the Maintenance Oversight Committee (FSMOC) and the School Construction Oversight Committee (SCOC). Information on all of these and applications are available on the BUSD website, www.berkeley.k12.ca.us or by calling 644-6320.  

At the school board meeting on Feb. 7, Superintendent Michele Lawrence expressed thanks to the mayor’s office, the City of Berkeley Health Department and the Albany School District who were quick to respond when we needed counselors for students and staff at four of our schools following the death of Berkeley High School vice principal denise brown (she used lower case). These are two critical partnerships that really came through when we needed them. 

 

Mark A. Coplan is the public information officer for the Berkeley Unified School District.


Commentary: Capturing the True Spirit of Berkeley for Tomorrow

By Dan Sawislak
Tuesday February 27, 2007

The Oxford Plaza / David Brower Center is a wonderful example of environmentally sound planning and responsible development that captures the best of Berkeley’s heritage and future. Together, the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum-standard environmental conference center and office building plus 97 units of much-needed affordable housing comprise this visionary project that honors Berkeley’s own David Brower, a pioneer in the Green movement.  

Like most Bay Area cities, Berkeley has seen teachers, artists, janitors, store clerks, maintenance workers and many other middle- and low-income people unable to live in the city where they work. Berkeley needs affordable housing, and Oxford Plaza will help meet that need. 

Resources for Community Development (RCD) has been building affordable housing for those with the fewest options for over 22 years. This has been and continues to be our mission as a Berkeley-based non-profit organization. When ground breaks in April for the Oxford Plaza / David Brower Center, RCD will be building 97 homes in downtown Berkeley that a wide range of low- and very-low-income families and individuals will be able to afford.  

Here’s what “affordable” means at Oxford Plaza: Approximately one-third of the units are reserved for households earning less than 30% of Area Median Income (AMI). That’s just $22,620, for a family of three. One-third is for households earning less than half of AMI ($37,700 for a three-person household); the remaining third is for those earning less than 60% of AMI ($45,240). Ten units will be specifically set aside for special needs households. But these numbers represent more than statistics; they represent 97 families and individuals who will work, live and thrive in Berkeley. 

There are only about 1,600 below-market-rate housing units in all of Berkeley excluding student housing. RCD has created more housing for low-income Berkeley residents than any other developer—427 units, including our 28 newest apartments at Margaret Breland Homes for low-income seniors. When Oxford Plaza is complete, RCD will serve 524 low-income and very-low-income households throughout the City of Berkeley and will have developed more than one-fifth of all below-market-rate housing in our city.  

Throughout the East Bay, RCD has built 1,313 units of affordable housing in Alameda, Contra Costa and Solano counties. About 45% of our units serve residents with special needs, including the frail elderly, people with physical and developmental disabilities, and people living with HIV/AIDS. They are award-winning, beautiful, well-managed properties that have positively affected their residents and improved the neighborhoods where they have been built. We have a solid, distinguished track record of completing excellent projects that are sound and sustainable investments for the cities that we have worked with, 

Some articles have portrayed the Oxford Plaza / David Brower Center as a costly project for Berkeley. But the housing component is actually cost-efficient for local government, with the City of Berkeley contributing just 16% of the total development cost. This percentage is lower than what most cities typically pay for affordable housing. The Oxford Plaza / David Brower Center will provide a nationally-recognized environmental center, well-built homes, offices and retail space within easy walking distance of BART, bus lines, major employers and shopping. It is a well-designed, innovative and cutting-edge mixed-use urban project that will set Berkeley apart as a leader in responsible, sustainable building and will further Berkeley’s downtown renaissance. 

 

Dan Sawislak is executive director of Resources for Community Development. 

 


Commentary: Environmental Study Needed for Brower Site

By Gale Garcia
Tuesday February 27, 2007

The referendum against giving away the Oxford Parking lot for the “Brower Center” has certainly gotten some attention. A venomous disinformation campaign is being waged against the people involved in the referendum (well, mainly against me). 

Recent commentaries against referendum supporters are riddled with misrepresentations and lies. The “Brower Center”/Oxford Plaza project has not, as claimed, “undergone extensive public review.” Rather it underwent extensive collaboration among the project proponents, our corrupt Planning and Development Department, and the various commissions appointed by City Council to rubberstamp every big box that developers propose. 

It is true that an initial study was done for this project, but that is only the beginning of the state mandated review process—hence the term “Initial.” This preliminary step allows just 20 days for public comment. The next step should be the full review involved in an environmental impact report (EIR). A huge project partly over the original Strawberry Creek bed certainly deserves such scrutiny. 

For the “Brower Center,” as well as most of the other humongous projects proposed in Berkeley over the last five years, the environmental review process has been terminated after the initial study. Thereafter, the public’s chance to comment on a project’s environmental impacts is essentially over.  

I read with interest the geotechnical study of the site, prepared for Oxford Street Development, LLC, which was mentioned in several of the disinformation pieces. It raises more questions than it answers. The four exploratory borings to obtain information about subsurface conditions were backfilled immediately and, according to the study, “may not have been left open for a sufficient period of time to establish equilibrium ground water conditions.” What was the hurry? 

I wonder about the choice of locations for these borings. It appears from the 1890 and 1894 Sanborn maps that Strawberry Creek was only a few feet away from the northwestern corner of this project (that’s the real creek which was on Allston Way, not the “water-feature” planned for Center Street). Yet the closest exploratory boring to this corner was some 60 feet away from Allston Way. Wouldn’t one want to investigate the subsurface conditions closest to the creek bed?  

Had there been an EIR, citizens could have commissioned a more thorough geotechnical study by an expert not employed by the project applicant. 

What about the “extensive outreach” with nearby businesses? One merchant described a meeting about the project arranged by the Downtown Business Association. Merchants were not allowed to speak because they had failed to turn in speaker cards on some mysterious prior occasion. They were told they could speak at the end of the meeting, if any time was left. They were ultimately allotted 90 seconds total—three people got 30 seconds each to air their views.  

This merchant added that no one from the city or from the developers of the project had ever attempted to discuss it with him, and had he known how badly Berkeley treats small businesses, he would never have located his shop here. 

In May 2006, at a point when the City Council should have reopened the review process due to changes in the project, the Board of the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA) wrote to the council, “The project, as currently planned and designed, would most assuredly have numerous environmental impacts upon its surrounding area, but has lacked, to date, the benefit of serious environmental review….”  

People have been voicing their opinions and explaining the need for an EIR for this project, and have been simply and totally ignored. 

Citizens hold two powerful tools, the power of the initiative to legislate, and the power of the referendum to suspend legislation. In this case the citizens of Berkeley are using our right to gather signatures for a referendum to suspend a legislative act by our City Council that many people believe to be illegal and detrimental to the town. 

Folks, they have given away the Oxford Street parking lot—the one with all the trees near the California Theater. There are only two days left to sign petitions to suspend this action so we can vote about it. It’s our land, and we don’t have to give it away. 

 

Gale Garcia is a native Berkeleyan who grew up on Berkeley Way. 

 


Commentary: AC Transit’s Obsession With Van Hool Busses

By Joyce Roy
Tuesday February 27, 2007

The Special AC Transit board meeting J. Douglas Allen-Taylor reported on (Feb. 9) was practically a secret meeting. Luckily, two reporters came. The other one, Erik Nelson, from ANG Newspapers, has a blog: www.ibabuzz.com/transportation. He says on his blog, “Van Hool, where have you been all my life (or short career as a blogger)? This hitherto ignored issue has become the biggest thing to hit the blog since its inception!” You can make it even bigger by logging on. 

AC Transit gets very little public scrutiny. Can you imagine the outcry if BART, or Caltrain or Muni tried to put in seating that requires a rock-climbing certificate?  

In fact, AC Transit has finally acknowledged the barrier these buses present for attracting seniors and the disabled as riders. So what is their solution? To purchase buses which don’t have such barriers? No, it is to go to senior homes, etc., and train people “how to step up the one foot riser, turn and place their fanny on the seat.” (Does this means hiring a lot of mobility trainers?) 

When staff was asked wouldn’t it be easier to purchase buses that don’t require training riders? The reply: “The board voted four years ago that they would only buy Van Hool buses.” These buses only went into service in June 2003, so this once and forever decision was made even before the buses had real battleground experience. 

Management has tried to get support for the buses through various fabrications. They claim to have a survey that shows 80 percent of the riders like the buses. (A small detail: The survey was done in November 2002 and the buses began service in June 2003!) A survey on the No. 51 line was intended to show that wheelchair loading was faster on the Van Hool than the low-floor NABI, the buses made in Alabama liked by riders and drivers. (A small detail: There are no low-floor NABIs on No. 51 line, only high-floor NABIs!)  

Another fabrication is the “Bus of the Year” 2003, 2004, etc., decal on all the Van Hool buses. Europe does give out “Bus of the Year” awards in odd numbered years. Only the 40-foot, three-door bus received such an award and only for performance, not seating arrangement. I’ve even seen a “Bus of the Year 2004” on a 601 articulated bus, easily the Worst Bus in the World. The irony is that changes have been made in the new 40-foot buses, like two doors and greater wheel span because of poor performance. 

One board member reported she heard some young riders say they liked the buses and suggested “maybe we can attract younger riders.” (And let the elderly use paratransit?) 

This same board member asked if some changes could be made. The new 40-foot bus, as well as the new 30-foot ones in service, has more floor level seats but the same bottleneck at the entry because bench seating was not located there.  

Although a proto-type is scheduled for delivery in December, nothing except minor changes can be made because, according to Kenneth Scheidig, General Counsel, it would “make Van Hool unhappy.” (If riders are unhappy that’s OK because, AC Transit is a bus-purchasing agency not a rider-servicing agency.) 

Furthermore, General Counsel informed the board they had already given approval for purchase of the 50 Van Hools last April and the bus’ frames are already under construction. This was news to the board. 

So it seems not only are riders, drivers and mechanics out of the loop, so is the board. In fact, the board is not even privy to the contracts; they only have summaries to rely on and do not know the actual costs. Despite this and the fact that the three new members didn’t even seem to have ridden the buses, the vote was unanimous. 

So how are they being paid for? Transit agencies have three pots-of-money, one limited to operational expenditures, one limited to capital costs and one that is flexible. Because funding for operational costs are harder to acquire, most agencies use the flexible funds for operations. The biggest source for capital costs are federal funds but they can only be used for domestically produced vehicles. So AC Transit has had to ask MTC to help with, as one board member described it, “creative fund swaps.” 

So are they dipping into funds that could be used for operations? Could this explain why as AC Transit receives more funding, it cuts back on service and increases fares? Could this and the fact that riders hate these buses, explain why, while ridership in other transit agencies is increasing, AC Transit’s local ridership is down. Even ridership on the much-touted 72R, the precursor of the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) service, is down. 

The goal of the BRT is to attract new riders. Wouldn’t a bus people like help? And because of the time it takes people to get seated it will be BST, Bus Slow Transit. 

Remember the ads for the parcel tax in 2004, which pleaded that funds were needed for the elderly and disabled? They were seen getting into a Van Hool bus but it didn’t show them struggling to get into a seat. In fact, that parcel tax gave AC Transit funds that added a shell to their shell game that enables them to continue to buy buses that insult the elderly and disabled. 

And when the FTA, Federal Transit Agency, doesn’t fund a bus, they have no control over its quality or ADA compliance, as riders who complained to the FTA discovered.  

An MTC commissioner asked why they are importing buses. In the response from Rick Fernandez, General Manager, he claimed “the local manufacturer decided not to submit a bid.” How could they, the GM stacked the cards against domestic suppliers by requiring buses with three doors, which were not manufactured in the USA. The GM now realizes the three doors were not necessary and are, in fact, a problem. But the new buses still were not put out to bid. On some routes there are low-floor buses made in America that get good reviews from riders and drivers and don’t incur the cost of transatlantic shipping. So the commissioner’s question remains unanswered. 

Isn’t there a legal obligation for a public agency to put such purchases out to bid? One must always be suspicious of sole source purchases but one must particularly be suspicious of an obsession to continue purchasing a product that has proved to be such a failure. 

Who benefits from this Van Hool deal? It certainly isn’t the riders or drivers. As one driver put it, “when an agency keeps on buying buses the riders and drivers hate, there is definitely something going on.” 

 

Joyce Roy can be contacted at joyceroy@earthlink.net.


Commentary: Proposal Extends Economic Benefit, Safety And Convenience of Telegraph Avenue

By Igor Tregub
Tuesday February 27, 2007

Telegraph just ain’t what it used to be. Once a beacon of a tolerance, hope, and historic significance that drew tourists from all over the world to the little city we all call home, it has more recently been victimized by a perception of decline, blight, and depravity—sometimes not fully deserved, but adverse to its image nonetheless. Almost a dozen reports, millions of dollars in studies, and hundreds of hours of discussion have been invested into addressing the causes at the heart of this avenue’s tarnished image, and yet few proposals have actually seen the light of day. 

Not all is lost, however. This Wednesday at 7 p.m., the Planning Commission will mull over a sensible proposal that has a real potential to reverse the economic travails of the area on and around Telegraph, while enhancing its safety and convenience. The proposal aims to extend the hours of several types of Telegraph Corridor businesses “by right” to 12 a.m. on weekdays and 2 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday.  

Planning Commissioners have already spoken out several times about the inextricable interrelation between longer business hours and the redress of sundry challenges that plague Telegraph today. At last year’s Oct. 11 meeting, the commission decided, in a 6-3 vote, to send such a recommendation to the City Council. And a year prior, the Southside Plan Subcommittee of this body recommended that by-right hours of operation be extended to 12 a.m. and that the commission further explore the ability of businesses to remain open until 2 a.m. on weekends. 

The resolution that will sit at the desk of the commission this Wednesday is the most viable version of this proposal yet, forged through an extensive compromise process between the City Planning Department, the Berkeley Police Department, and Berkeley residents who have had multiple opportunities to make public comment on this item. One example of the intricate negotiations with which this resolution is suffused is language that limits businesses which serve alcohol to by-right operating hours of 10 p.m. on weekdays and 12 a.m. on weekends, with a categorical mandate to close at 1 a.m., even with a permit. Intended to greatly minimize whatever increase of demands there may be on the Berkeley Police Department, this measure also succeeds in allaying concerns for the potential of public nuisances. 

In fact, very few businesses that currently operate with alcohol permits on the Telegraph Corridor will be privy to the extension of hours. The four largest alcohol distributors in the area—Blake’s, Raleigh’s, Kip’s, and Henry’s—all have permits that allow them to remain open until 12 a.m. on weekdays and 1 a.m. on weekends already. By a large margin, the primary benefactors of the proposal will be the type of quick-serve stores that cater to students at late hours as they walk from the library in the wee hours of the morning hoping for a quick bite and perhaps some coffee to aid their lucubration. 

The benefits of extended hours, of course, are not just parlayed among the students who make up over half of the Telegraph area population; they stand to benefit the entire Berkeley community. More lights in windows and more eyes on the street will greatly enhance the safety on and around Telegraph Avenue, particularly around People’s Park. Those who reside near the Telegraph-Dwight intersection have already borne witness to a marked reduction of undesirable behavior while Peet’s is open. Common sense dictates that the ability of such a store to keep its lights on beyond 10 p.m. will go an even longer way to furthering the security of these denizens. 

Lastly, we return to the economic viability equation. Lest we forget, the declining revenue available to both Telegraph businesses and, by extension, the City of Berkeley has been an indisputable fact for nearly two decades. We know the firm correlation of this recession to a combination of slackening sales, loss of clientele, and the city’s notoriously draconian zoning guidelines. We are also sadly aware of the symptoms; they greet us each time we pass a block with several vacant storefronts or recall the hole that is left in our soul by the passing of Cody’s. The proposal in question will benefit those same small businesses that most desperately need our help at this juncture. 

The proposal to extend business hours is at once the most beneficial, achievable, and prudent of the cadre of recommendations which the City Council asked the Planning Commission to create. Whether one eyes the suggestion from the standpoint of economics, safety, or convenience, its benefits are as multifaceted as they are intertwined. Please contact the Planning Commission or attend Wednesday’s 7 p.m. meeting at the North Berkeley Senior Center to request a speedy passage of this solution. 

 

Igor Tregub is a UC Berkeley student and member of the student advocacy group ACCESS.


Commentary: 10 Reasons Why Congress Should Back a Reparations Commission

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, New America Media
Tuesday February 27, 2007

A reparations bill currently floating around Congress and being debated in the House Judiciary Committee may, for the first time since it was hatched two decades ago, actually have a chance at passing. The idea to establish a reparations commission is the brainchild of Michigan Democrat John Conyers. It has been kicked around Congress since 1989, but supporters are optimistic that it will pass since Democrats now have control of the House. Several cities, including Chicago and New York, have passed resolutions in support of the bill. Los Angeles City Council vote on a resolution Tuesday. 

On the surface, the bill is straightforward, and even innocuous. It calls for establishing a commission to study reparations proposals for African-Americans, not for doling out money. But as the past hyper-charged and contentious history of this debate has amply shown, when it comes to talking about reparations it’s anything but simple and straightforward. Yet there are ten reasons why Congress should back the commission. 

1. The U.S. government, not long dead Southern planters, bears the blame for slavery. It encoded it in the Constitution in article one. This designated a black slave as three-fifths of a person for tax and political representation purposes. It protected and nourished it in article four by mandating that all escaped slaves found anywhere in the nation be returned to their masters. In the Dred Scott decision in 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed that slaves remained slaves no matter where they were taken in the United States. 

2. Major institutions profited from slavery. Several states and cities now require insurance companies to disclose whether they wrote policies insuring slaves. This is recognition that insurance companies made profits insuring slaves as property. The insurance industry was not the only culprit. Banks, shipping companies, and investment houses also made enormous profits from financing slave purchases, investments in southern land and products, and the transport and sale of slaves. 

3. The legacy of slavery endures. In its 2006 State of Black America, the National Urban League found that blacks are far more likely to live in underserved segregated neighborhoods, be refused business and housing loans, be denied promotions in corporations, suffer greater health care disparities, and attend cash-starved, failing public schools than whites. 

4. Former Federal Reserve Board member Andrew Brimmer estimates that discrimination costs blacks $10 billion yearly through the black-white wage gap, denial of capital access, inadequate public services, and reduced Social Security and other government benefits. This has been called the “black tax.” 

5. Since the 1960s the U.S. government has shelled out billions to pay for resettlement, job training, education, and health programs for refugees fleeing Communist repression. Congress enthusiastically backed these payments as the morally and legally right thing to do. 

6. The reparations issue will not fuel more hatred of blacks. Most Americans admit that slavery was a monstrous system that wreaked severe pain and suffering on the country. Also, there was no national outcry when the U.S. government made special indemnity payments, provided land and social service benefits to Japanese-Americans interned during World War II, Native-Americans for the theft of lands and mineral rights, and Philippine veterans who fought with the American army during World War II. 

7. No legislation has been proposed that mandates taxpayers pay billions to blacks. The reparations commission bill is primarily a bill to study slavery effects. The estimated cost is less than $10 million. 

8.There is a precedent for paying blacks for past legal and moral wrongs. In 1997 President Clinton apologized and the U.S. government paid $10 million to the black survivors and family members victimized by the syphilis experiment conducted in the 1930’s by the U.S. Public Health Service. In 1994, the Florida legislature agreed to make payments to the survivors and relatives of those who lost their lives and property when a white mob destroyed the all-black town of Rosewood in 1923. Public officials and law enforcement officers tacitly condoned the killings and property damage. The Oklahoma state legislature has agreed that reparations payments are the morally right thing to do to compensate the survivors and their descendants for the destruction of black neighborhoods in Tulsa by white mobs in 1921. 

9. Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan and other mega-rich blacks will not receive a penny in reparations. Any tax money to redress black suffering should go into a fund to bolster funding for AIDS/HIV education and prevention, under-financed inner-city public schools, to expand job skills and training, drug and alcohol counseling and rehabilitation, computer access and literacy training programs, and to improve public services for the estimated one in four blacks still trapped in poverty. 

10. A reparations commission may well conclude that reparations payments would do more harm than good. That slavery compensation would be too costly, too complex, too time consuming, and too dated. And that it would create too much public rancor. Yet, a reparations commission that examines the brutal consequence of slavery and its continued tormenting impact on race relations in America is a good thing. We can all learn something from that. 

 

Hutchinson is a political analyst and social issues commentator, and the author of The Emerging Black GOP Majority (Middle Passage Press, September 2006). 


Columns

Column: Dispatches From the Edge: The Strategy of Destruction

By Conn Hallinan
Friday March 02, 2007

“The Supreme Lord said: I am death, the mighty destroyer of the world, out to destroy.” 

—Shiva 

Bhagavad-Gita  

Chapter 11, Verse 32 

 

According to the great Hindu text, Shiva, in the guise of Vishnu, delivered that speech to Prince Arjuna before a great battle almost eight millennia ago. Physicist Robert Oppenheimer paraphrased it in 1945 to describe the creation of the atomic bomb. Its current reincarnation might be what an Israeli commander told Meron Rapport of the newspaper Ha’aretz about last summer’s war with Lebanon: “What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs.” 

The commander was decrying the way Israel, the United States and Great Britain wage war these days, which has increasingly become an exercise in mass destruction. 

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) fired some four million cluster munitions at southern Lebanon during the recent 34-day war, at least one million of which are still waiting in ambush for unwary farmers and children. According to UN Relief Coordinator David Shearer, “nearly all of these munitions were fired in the last three or four days of the war.” 

According to the United Nations, the IDF destroyed airports, harbors, water and sewage plants, electrical generators, 80 bridges, 94 roads, over 900 businesses, and 30,000 homes. Retreating Israeli soldiers, reports the New York Times, systematically destroyed village infrastructures and deliberately polluted water tanks and wells. Some 1,183 Lebanese were killed, 4,054 wounded, and one quarter of Lebanon’s population—900,000 in all—were turned into refugees. Lebanon is hardly unique. 

Since 1991, according to Handicap International, the United States and Britain have dropped over 13 million cluster munitions on Iraq and strewn the countryside with more than 500 tons of toxic depleted uranium ammunition. A John Hopkins University study found that anywhere from 426,369 to 793,663 Iraqis have been killed since the March 2003 invasion. The war has also driven 1.8 million Iraqis out of their country and created 1.6 million internal refugees. 

Since last January, almost 4,000 people have died in Afghanistan, over 1,000 of them civilians. The United States has dropped more than three times the number of bombs in that country over the past six months than it did in its first three-year campaign against the Taliban. B-1 bombers are routinely unloading 19,000 pounds of explosives during bombing runs, while AC-130 Spectre gunships spitting 155 mm howitzer shells and tens of thousands of 40 mm cannon shells, prowl the skies. In September, an AC-130 killed 31 shepherds.  

Three of the most powerful armies in the world attacked countries that militarily are only marginally in the same century as Israel, the United States and Britain. Yet in spite of overwhelming firepower, Israel was fought to a standstill in Lebanon, the Americans in Iraq are in increasingly desperate straits, and British forces in Afghanistan, according its former chief of staff, Field Marshall Peter Inge, face the possibility of outright defeat. 

How is this possible?  

There was a time when a thin red line of British regulars ruled the Indian subcontinent, when a few brigades of U.S. Marines could keep Central American safe for the United Fruit Company, and when the IDF smashed far larger armies in a week of fighting.  

But the thin red line faced mostly tribal warriors, and the Marines were up against unarmed peasants. The Arab armies were big, but poorly led and technologically inferior.  

All empires—whether they are based on colonies or economic domination—are built on uneven development. There was a time when industrial capitalism was all-powerful, and when the people it conquered often did not even think of themselves as “nations.” 

When the people in those conquered countries did think of themselves as a nation, the road to empire could be a rocky affair. Tiny Ireland tied down more British regulars in the 19th century than did India.  

Eventually the development of nationalism made it impossible for the colonial powers to retain direct sovereignty over Asia, Africa and the Middle East, though many of those former colonies are still economic and political vassals. The thin red line withdrew because it suddenly faced hundreds of millions of people who were united in wanting it out, and push came to shove, would fight to make it so. 

The great powers retreated, but they always believed that their superior military power gave them a final vote in matters concerning their interests. For many, that illusion of superiority held even when reality demonstrated the opposite. Hence, Vietnam was lost not because the United States could not hope to defeat an entire nation, but because — as Vice-President Dick Cheney currently argues — because the U.S. political and military leadership lacked resolve. 

Unfortunately, the hallucination that war is still a relevant strategy is not confined to the neo-conservatives and a few right-wing Republicans. Many Democrats share it as well, even if they happen to disagree with the current White House about the tactics for employing military power. 

The Democrats have voted overwhelmingly to support the almost $600 billion yearly military budget, including the unneeded $65 billion F-22 program, and $256.6 billion F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a plane no one seems to want. Ike Skelton (D-Mo), the new chair of the House Armed Services Committee—a recipient of numerous campaign donations by leading arms manufacturers Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon—has lobbied for years to expand the military.  

Lockheed Martin makes both the F-22 and the F-35. 

Senator Jack Reed (D-RI), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, recently endorsed President George W. Bush’s proposal to enlarge the military. “I have been calling for such an expansion for several years,” he told the press. 

In a recent editorial, the New York Times called such an expansion essential for the kind of “extended clashes” the United States will face in the future from “ground-based insurgents.” But “extended clashes” are exactly the kinds of wars that make military superiority irrelevant. The Bush administration’s “surge” of troops into Iraq will make not an iota of difference, any more than the Vietnam escalations did a generation ago.  

The cost of all this, however, is extraordinary. The Department of Defense will spend $2.3 trillion over the next five years—actually more if you count nuclear weapons, veterans’ benefits, and the cost of the wars themselves. The price tag for Iraq alone is $450 billion and climbing. 

What all this massive (and expensive) firepower does do, however, is inflict damage of almost Biblical proportions. The Israelis bombed Lebanon back to the stone age, and Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians are still being blown up by three-decade old cluster weapons. Iraq may find it harder to recover from its “liberation” than it did from the Mongol invasions. 

We cannot “win,” but like the Romans of old, we can sow the earth with salt. What we reap will not be acquiescence or compliance, however. 

Commenting on the recent Lebanon War, Augustus Richard Norton, a former army officer who served in Southern Lebanon and currently teaches at Boston University, pointed out that previous Israeli invasions and occupations “created the conditions for the recent war. Hezbollah had 20 years to hone their skills and hatred against Israel. That hatred was created by Israel; it wasn’t there in the beginning.” 

Substitute the United States, Britain, and Russia for Israel; and shift the locale to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Chechnya, and that is where the strategy of destruction takes you in the end. 

 

 


Column: Undercurrents: Oakland School District Land Sale Plans and Local Control

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Friday March 02, 2007

Given the almost universal community and political opposition inside Oakland to the proposed deal between State Superintendent Jack O’Connell and a group of east coast developers for the sale of the Lake Merritt-area Oakland school properties, it shouldn’t be surprising that there was almost universal relief expressed in Oakland with the announcement last week that the deal had been killed. 

But “almost universal” is not universal, and so we had the editor of the East Bay Express, in grumbling dissent, posting to the Express’ blog the following on February 23 under the headline “Oakland Schools Must Like Servitude And Debt”: 

“Despite years of impotent rhetoric from area educational leaders about the importance of resuming local control of the Oakland schools, the district and the state have shelved what appeared to be the only viable option for making that happen. As Jill Tucker notes in today’s Chronicle, the district and the state have killed a proposed downtown property sale that could have helped pay off the bulk of the district’s $100 million debt. Elimination of this debt is a likely precondition to the state returning control of the public schools to Oakland’s elected school board. A multitude of critics had opposed the property deal for reasons ranging from opposition to development to support of a competing plan to general obstreperousness. But school board member Kerry Hamill got it exactly right when she called the deal’s death a ‘terrible, wasted opportunity.’ For the complete story of how the deal could have bailed out the schools, check out Robert Gammon’s 2006 feature “The Plot To Oust Randy Ward.”  

While one is tempted to treat this as the old-time Arabs used to do (“the dogs bark, but the caravan moves on”), the Express is a powerful corporate voice whose opinions will be read—and believed—far from the Oakland borders. And so, we offer our own opinion on the subject. 

While Mr. Buel is free to reach his own conclusions in any way he sees fit, the facts he alleges in his blog posting don’t fit the facts on the ground, like they say in the military. 

When Mr. Buel says that “elimination of [OUSD’s] debt [to the State of California] is a likely precondition to the state returning control of the public schools to Oakland’s elected school board,” he is flat wrong. Repayment of the state loan as a condition of return to local control is not included in SB39, the state law that authorized the state takeover (all of the conditions of return to local control are set out in Section 5(e) of SB39, which is available on the web, if any of you care to check on this). SB39 only requires that the district come up with and carry out a budget and a plan which calls for the eventual repayment of that loan. 

And, in fact, other California school districts in recent years have been returned to local control after state takeover, while still owing—and paying back—the state loan that triggered the takeover. The West Contra Costa Unified School District was taken over by a state administrator in 1991 because of a state fiscal bailout, but was returned to what we call local control (where a state trustee has veto power over budgetary items, but the local board of trustees sets policy and hires a superintendent to run the school) a year later, with payments on the original debt still due to the state through 2018. 

But this does not mean that repayment of the state loan by Oakland Unified would not be a good thing. The annual debt service on that loan, something like $4 million, is an enormous burden on Oakland Unified’s back, taking money away from needed programs, buildings, equipment, and staff and teacher pay. 

But could the proposed TerraMark/ UrbanAmerica purchase of the OUSD Administration Building and lands and five adjoining schools have “helped pay off the bulk of the district’s $100 million debt,” as Mr. Buel asserts? It’s not likely. 

That’s because the TerraMark/ UrbanAmerica proposed land purchase was one of those “government brie” deals (poor people get government cheese, developers get the bigger stuff) that has given Oakland the name of “Moneytown” in developer circles around the country. And so the $65 million price tag for the 8.25 prime property acres which got thrown around in the local media so much was not actually the guaranteed price that the developers were offering; instead, their proposal always indicated this was the price they would pay if conditions were met by the City of Oakland that allowed the developers to make maximum money off of their development. One of those conditions was selling the developers a portion of 2nd Avenue so they could put one of their high-rise condominiums on it; a second was that the Oakland Planning Commissioner and the Oakland City Council agree to allow the developers the maximum number of floors and individual housing units they were seeking. 

Given the opposition of Mayor Ron Dellums and all eight members of the Oakland City Council to the proposed deal, it is not likely that the developers would have gotten everything that they were asking from the city. That would have dropped the price OUSD was paid in the contract, providing less money to pay back the loan. How much less it would have been, no-one knows. 

The second variable that made the TerraMark/UrbanAmerica such a bad deal was the unknown relocation costs—and district disruption—that it would have mandated. The two day care centers and the one elementary school, La Escuelita, on the 8.25 acre site serve residents in the Chinatown/East Lake area, so they would have had to be relocated somewhere in that area. But OUSD staff have never publicly identified any land parcels in the area large enough to relocate those facilities, and school board members—who had gone on previous school site searches—doubted that any such sites existed. In addition, the two high schools on the site also needed to be located in that immediate area, MetWest because it offers classes at nearby Laney College as part of its curriculum, Dewey because it draws on students from all across the city, and needs to be near a transportation hub. 

In fact, it was opposition from parents and students of these schools—and their supporters—that provided the most vigorous community dissent against the proposed land sale, and probably what sank it. When Mr. Buel says that opposition to the land deal came from people with “reasons ranging from opposition to development to support of a competing plan to general obstreperousness” (and, no, I don’t know what general obstreperousness is off the top of my head and, no, I’m not going to look it up for you), he leaves out one of the most important factors in that opposition. 

Meanwhile, the one person cited in Mr. Buel’s commentary in support of the proposed OUSD land deal—Trustee Kerry Hamill—was not all that enthusiastic about the terms of the TerraMark/UrbanAmerica deal herself while it was still on the table, and recommended that the state superintendent and state administrator continue to negotiate for better terms. What Ms. Hamill was most concerned about—during the three public hearings on the proposed land deal—was that the district not hold onto valuable “administrative” property when it had so many unmet educational needs. And other OUSD trustees wondered why there was so much attention by the state superintendent to the Lake Merritt properties when there were other surplus administrative properties owned by the district that could be sold—with much less controversy—to help pay down the debt. 

Finally, Mr. Buel’s proposition that the land-sale-would-have-substantially-paid-down-the-state-debt-and-the-repayment-of-the-debt-would-have-led-to-return-to-local-control is wrong because, while land and money may have been the ultimately reason for the original state takeover, the situation has since passed far beyond that. Stripped of the ability of Oakland residents to stop it, the Oakland Unified School has become a vast educational experimental ground, where people come from all over the country to try out their various ideas on Oakland children. 

It is one of the key testing grounds for President George Bush’s No Child Left Behind, to see how much public education can be corporatized and privatized and profitized. Under the fog that fell down on Oakland with the loss of local oversight, these folks have established a firm foothold in the school district, and will not now easily give it up. They have powerful friends in high places. 

If Oakland is to regain control of the education of Oakland children, that is where the next battle will have to be fought. 


East Bay Then and Now: Maybeck’s First House Was a Design Laboratory

By Daniella Thompson
Friday March 02, 2007

In March 1933, the Long Beach Earthquake destroyed 70 schools, and another 120 suffered major structural damage. The Great Depression was at its height, leaving 25 percent of the nation’s work force unemployed. Things couldn’t have looked grimmer, but one creative mind was busily churning out solutions. 

In December of that year, the Berkeley City Council received for consideration a novel idea submitted by Bernard Maybeck. The architect advocated that waste material from Berkeley’s condemned school buildings be diverted to constructing small homes on city-owned property, with unemployed heads of families providing the construction manpower. 

“Out of the two negatives of waste material and waste time of men might be evolved a positive condition,” wrote Maybeck. “Little houses, little gardens, play spaces for little children—the result a glorified auto camp. Should 1929 roll around again, these same settlements could be metamorphosed into auto camps, of which Berkeley has none.” 

Seeds for planting gardens could be donated by the Hillside Club, of which Maybeck was a member. Other organizations might be prevailed upon to supply furnishings. Many of the unemployed and people working under the Civil Works Administration program would be able to live comfortably if the problem of rent was removed, wrote Maybeck. If he were in Berkeley (the architect was in Elsah, IL, designing the Principia College campus), he would be glad to draft plans for the model settlement—a place that would boast show houses and not be “shackville.” 

It’s doubtful that the Berkeley city council considered the proposal seriously. Maybeck didn’t have a reputation for practicality, while the city was intent on developing taxable property. 

As for the architect, he was simply following the singular path he had begun to hew upon arriving in Berkeley forty years earlier. 

The son of a German-born furniture maker and architectural woodcarver, young Maybeck (1962–1957) apprenticed in the same trade before going to Paris at the age of 19 to study furniture design. Within a year he was admitted to the École de Beaux Arts, where he spent four years studying architecture. Along with the traditional training in the classic orders, Bernard benefited from the study of gothic structure and a mathematical theory of modern structure, both of which would play a decisive role in his future designs. 

Returning to New York in 1886, Maybeck went to work for his Beaux-Arts schoolmate Thomas Hastings at the latter’s firm, Carrère and Hastings. Here he participated in building two Florida hotels and a church for Standard Oil tycoon Henry Flagler. 

In 1889 Maybeck attempted to establish an independent practice in Kansas City. The work was scarce, but the sojourn was fruitful: the architect met Annie White, whom he would marry the following year, and the young architect Willis Jefferson Polk. Polk soon moved to California and lured Maybeck out as well. 

While waiting for an opening in the San Francisco office of the fashionable young architect A. Page Brown, Maybeck had a temporary job at the established firm of Wright and Sanders, architects of the Mark Hopkins mansion on Nob Hill. Next he became principal designer at the Charles M. Plum Company, interior designers and custom furniture makers. 

While designing lavish interiors for Nob Hill mansions, Maybeck lived with Annie in a cottage in the Piedmont hills. Here he had “an experience that profoundly affected his whole artistic outlook,” wrote Charles Keeler in his memoirs. “[N]ext door to him the Reverend Joseph Worcester had a little summer retreat. Looking into Mr. Worcester’s windows, he saw the interior of the cottage was all of unpainted redwood boards. It was a revelation.” 

In 1891, A. Page Brown’s work volume increased, and Maybeck joined his staff. A year later, the Maybecks purchased a double lot in northwest Berkeley, on the corner of West and Gilman. The streets were renamed several times since then. West became Sherman, then Grove, and is now known as Martin Luther King, Jr. Way. The old Gilman is now Berryman Street. 

The area was isolated; for over ten years, the Maybeck property was the only inhabited one on its block. It came with a small, one-story cottage that Maybeck soon began to transform. Lacking the means to hire a contractor, the architect initially did much of the work himself. Over several years, the house doubled its footprint and gained a second story, a low-pitched saddle roof with wide overhangs, a projecting sleeping porch, and a great variety of windows. Two styles of wood shingles adorned the exterior. 

Keeler, who had first met Maybeck in 1891, described the house as it was in 1895: 

I sought out Mr. Maybeck at his home in northwest Berkeley and told him I had come to accept his offer to design our house. I really had no idea what I was getting into when I put myself in his hands. I found his own home was not yet complete and that he was working on it at odd times, with the assistance of Julia Morgan’s brothers. His house was something like a Swiss chalet. The timbers showed on the inside and the walls were of knotted yellow pine planks. There was no finish to the interior, for the carpenter work finished it. There was a sheet iron, hand-built stove, open in front and with brass andirons. Most of the furniture was designed and made by Mr. Maybeck himself. It was a distinctly hand-made home. 

In 1894, Maybeck was appointed instructor in drawing at the Civil Engineering College of the University of California. A school of architecture did not yet exist, so Maybeck offered interested engineering students an independent course in architectural design, given in his house. The students included an impressive array of future luminaries: Wiley Corbett (architect of New York’s Rockefeller Center); Edward H. Bennett (co-author of the Chicago city plan with Daniel H. Burnahm); Julia Morgan; Lewis Hobart (architect of San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral and Bohemian Club); John Bakewell and Arthur Brown, Jr. (who would collaborate on the city halls of San Francisco and Berkeley); G. Albert Lansburgh (designer of many theatres, including the Warfield and Golden Gate in San Francisco, the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles and, with Arthur Brown, San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House); and Loring P. Rixford (architect of the Sacramento City Library). Bakewell described the course as combining design theory and a period of practical application, during which the students worked on the additions to the house. 

Maybeck would apply the principles tried out in this domestic laboratory to his early private commissions. Keeler was his first client, and the architect not only designed his home but provided lessons in architectural philosophy: 

A wooden house should bring out all the character and virtue of wood—straight lines, wooden joinery, exposed rafters, and the wooden surface visible and left in its natural state. A house should fit into the landscape as if it were a part of it, it should also be an expression of the life and spirit which is to be lived within it. […] whatever was of structural importance should be emphasized as a feature of ornament. […] He was interested in the simple life which is naturally expressive and consequently beautiful. He believed in handmade things and that all ornament should be designed to fit the place and the need. He did not mind how crude it was, provided it was sincere and expressed something personal. 

The Keeler house, built in 1895 on the corner of Highland Place and Ridge Road, was soon joined by three additional seminal Maybecks: Laura G. Hall house (1896), Williston W. Davis house (1897), and William P. Rieger house (1899). They transformed the Northside and served as models for the “Simple Home” gospel promulgated by the Hillside Club. 

The Maybecks continued to live in the Grove St. house until 1907. A block to the south, at 1423 Grove Street, lived Bernard’s first cousin John E. Maybeck. In the family tradition, John was a woodcarver. His grandson, William Maybeck, relates that Bernard, dissatisfied with the quality of workmanship in San Francisco, persuaded his cousin to come out from New York. John started out as a mantel dealer but eventually became a teacher at the Wilmerding School of Industrial Arts in San Francisco, a position he held for many years. 

Bernard and Annie sold their Grove St. house to German professor Ludwig J. Demeter and his wife Rowena and moved to rented digs at 1615 Arch Street while their new home was being built on the corner of La Loma Ave. and Buena Vista Way. 

But this wasn’t the end of the Grove St. house’s connection with architecture. By the late 1950s and early ’60s, it had assumed legendary status among U.C. architecture students. According to architect Richard Ehrenberger its student residents included future folksinger Kate Wolf and her eventual husband, architect Saul Wolf; Howard Ray Lawrence, future professor of architecture at Penn State; and future architect/photographer Jeremiah O. Bragstad. 

The house was designated a City of Berkeley Landmark on February 1, 2007. 

 

Daniella Thompson publishes berkeleyheritage.com for the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA). 

 

 

Photograph by Daniella Thompson 

Maybeck’s first Berkeley house, 1300 Martin Luther King, Jr. Way, was designated a City of Berkeley Landmark on Feb.1 of this year. 

 


About the House: Confessions of a House Inspector

By Matt Cantor
Friday March 02, 2007

I have a terrible confession to make. I feel really bad about it, but it’s probably not going to change any time soon. I don’t care if your roof leaks. O.K., I know that I’m supposed to make a big deal about this sort of thing but I’m not going to. There, I said it and I feel a whole lot better. 

Well, maybe that’s not entirely true. I do care if your roof leaks, but not that much. And I would argue that you shouldn’t either. Now, if you have OCD you might need to fix it right away to prevent suicide and I would say, “Bully for you, get on with it then” and hand you the phone, to call to the roofer, myself. 

However, for most of us, it’s just not all that important because roof leaks don’t kill people. I’m very interested in everything about the house but I’m much more interested in things that kill people or hurt them seriously or cause a massive loss of value.  

This is what might be called worst-case scenario inspecting and is what I try to do everyday.  

It is very easy to lose perspective when looking at a large list of issues and, to the credit of many of my clients; they will intuit and communicate this when we’re looking at their house, skyscraper or aircraft hangar. Most will, at some point, say “Please tell the things that you think matter the most” or “Can you tell me the five things that you’d do first after I’ve moved in.” 

This is a darned good start and prescient, to be sure, but it’s not enough. These questions should also include, “What’s going to kill me?” and perhaps “What’s going to end up costing me a bucket of money?” and whether I’m asked or not, this robot comes preprogrammed to do this. 

Maybe it’s because I’m a worrier but it doesn’t make any sense to me to look at a range of issues and to fail to list them by hazard-level. 

So let’s take a look at a few things that I would place near the top (and near the bottom) of my worst-case scenario inspecting list and I would virtually always begin with those things related to fire. 

In my world, there’s not much worse than death by fire and there’s so much we can do to prevent it. Not that we can prevent all fires but we can certainly do a lot about preventing deaths caused by fires. So, my favorite inspection item is the smoke detector; low cost, high benefit. That’s another criterion that must be made a part of this thinking: What’s the cost and what’s the benefit?  

Smoke detectors are very rich when it comes to this set of criteria; they have very low cost, high benefit and address needs in a very bad-case scenario. They don’t prevent fires but they do help prevent deaths caused by them. 

CO (carbon monoxide) testers are similar. While fire is much worse and far more common than CO, CO still remains a killer that can be addressed with a $25 device and a $2 battery. By the way, let’s not forget batteries. Installing fresh batteries for smoke and CO detectors has an extremely high yield in our index of safety versus cost. It’s amazing how many smoke detectors I see that lack only a $2 battery to save one or many lives. 

Let’s jump to the other end of the scale and look at our leaking roof (actually, your leaking roof, mine’s fine). If the roof leaks, it is almost impossible for this to cause a death (although my mind, like yours, rushes to all the wild Rube Goldberg linkages that could cause a death). 

In fact, there are, for the most part, only very small amounts of damage done to most houses by roof leaks. This is primarily due to the fact that roof leaks rarely hide (although they certainly can in some cases) and usually become extremely noticeable, if not unsightly, before they’ve done any significant amount of real structural damage. For the most part, roof leaks damage ceiling finishes and, if allowed to advance (if you drink heavily) can do some damage to other components such as wiring and framing. I always like to remind people that wood is not easily damaged by water; they build boats out of it!  

Sheetrock and plaster are quickly damaged and possibly destroyed by roof leaks and this is sort of sad (and sort of not really very much) but it shouldn’t be anyone’s worst-case scenario. 

Flipping back to worst cases again, fire escape is very high on my list. This can include removal of window bars, looking at the needs of the disabled (e.g. can they get downstairs), training of children and installation of rope or chain ladders. Window size and type is also a pretty large issue here. 

If a window doesn’t open enough to climb out (or for a firewoman to climb in!) it’s a big problem. Window locks that require a key are a huge hazard and have a big cost/benefit and worst-case index. The same applies to “double cylinder” door locks that require a key to escape. 

I won’t miss the chance to throw in my person dead-horse (the thing I like to beat), the earthquake. While you may never experience a very large earthquake, the worst-case scenario is very, very high. There can be death (most likely by fire) and there will almost certainly be a great deal of property damage and loss if you experience a very large earthquake. 

If you live where this has a low likelihood, substitute your own disaster (are you reading this Mr. Brown?) and adjust your funding and action accordingly. For my friends in the Bay Area, earthquake concerns should take precedence over roof leaks. I would sooner see my client spend seven grand on seismic retrofitting for an earthquake that they may never experience than one grand fixing a leak that’s occurring today! 

Now, I’m not actually suggesting that you let the roof leak but you get my point. It’s fine and good and terrific to spend money on the things that make you crazy or present themselves to you, dirty paws and all, but it’s vital that we focus a portion of our energy on the things that might do great harm to us, and those we love, even if the event seems way off in the distance.  

And of course, remember to eat out more often, smile a lot and get more hugs. 

 

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


Column: The Public Eye: The Privatization of Berkeley Government

By Zelda Bronstein
Tuesday February 27, 2007

It was just over a year ago that neighbors of Ashby BART rose up in protest against plans to put a 300-unit “transit village” on the station’s west parking lot. At stake in the ensuing, nearly yearlong struggle was something more basic than land use, namely citizens’ right to have a meaningful say in the public decisions that affect their lives.  

If the Ashby BART debacle were an isolated incident, it would be disturbing enough. What’s truly alarming is that that scheme now looks part of a movement to privatize Berkeley government. Two other projects coming out of City Hall, North Shattuck Plaza and Sustainable Berkeley, have recently generated controversy about lack of public notice and accountability.  

With North Shattuck Plaza, the council has again authorized a private entity to develop public property. The rationale for this delegation of authority was the same as the one used to justify the Ashby BART arrangement: the city doesn’t have the resources to do this work itself, so we’re turning it over to the private sector. 

As with the transit village, the city did not issue a request for proposals but simply contracted with a familiar party—in this case, very familiar: North Shattuck Plaza Inc.’s board includes both a sitting and a former councilmember (respectively, Laurie Capitelli and Mim Hawley) as well as the current chair of the planning commission (David Stoloff). Once again, the neighbors, including many merchants, were left out of the loop, with the same, predictable result: an explosion of resentment at the developers’ failure to consult the community.  

Thank in part to its name, which incorporates the most politically disarming adjective of the day, Sustainable Berkeley (SB) has provoked less criticism, even though it has the potential to affect the city’s future, including its future land use, far more radically than a pedestrian plaza or even a transit village. In July 2006 the council gave the newly formed organization $133,700 on consent (no discussion). The city manager’s report described SB as “a multi-stakeholder partnership between the City, business, civic and education institutions … to leverage resources and improve coordination among Berkeley’s sustainability efforts, and to implement the Sustainable Business Action Plan.” As far as I can tell, the council’s action was ignored by the press and the public.  

Not so Mayor Bates’ current request to give Sustainable Berkeley another $100,000 to help the city prepare a greenhouse emissions reductions plan. That request appears on the council’s Feb. 27 consent agenda. 

In last weekend’s Planet, reporter Judith Scherr delved into the propriety of SB’s administration and funding. Scherr cited the list of questions sent to the council on Feb. 18 by community member Sharon Hudson. Was the contract open to competitive bidding? If not, why not? If so, why was Sustainable Berkeley chosen? What is SB’s track record of successfully completed projects? (To all appearances, none.) What is its relationship to UC? (Two of its eight board members are from Cal, both in development positions.)  

Unbeknownst to Hudson, on Feb. 15 I had sent my own questions to the mayor’s chief of staff, Cisco DeVries. DeVries began working half time with Sustainable Berkeley on greenhouse gas reduction as of Feb. 1, a month before the council was scheduled to act on the $100,000 allocation that would pay his salary and, presumably, then some. (Unlike the July 2006 funding request, the mayor’s appeal doesn’t come with a budget.) I’d heard through the grapevine that Sustainable Berkeley had held a meeting on Feb. 8, but I’d been unable to find any notice on either SB’s website or the city’s community calendar. Was the meeting noticed? I asked, and if so, where? DeVries replied that notice had been sent out to various email lists compiled by the mayor’s office, and that he’d also told a few reporters about the meeting. 

After four years in City Hall, DeVries ought to know that mentioning a meeting to reporters and alerting the people on his boss’s email lists hardly constitutes adequate public notice. When I suggested that future Sustainable Berkeley’s proceedings should be noticed like commission meetings, he emailed back: 

“Part of the reason to have Sustainable Berkeley on contract is to avoid the problem of it coming down to me having the time to post things on the web. The San Francisco sunshine ordinance has a provision for these types of meetings. (We also imported the provision into Berkeley’s draft ordinance.) It has pretty clear rules about posting and public participation. They have worked well in the past and the folks at Sustainable Berkeley were planning to follow them.” 

I guess a brazen admission—was SB really set up so as to accommodate his personal schedule?—is better than no admission at all, though I’m not sure DeVries realized that he’d admitted anything, much less anything brazen. As authorization for Sustainable Berkeley, he and Tom Bates point to Measure G. Approved by 81 percent of Berkeley voters last November, Measure G authorized the mayor to “work with the community” to adopt plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Berkeley by 80 percent.  

But Measure G said nothing about creating a costly bureaucratic fiefdom that operates outside the city’s regular procedures and laws or about hiring a consultant, Timothy Burroughs, who, Scherr reported, has already been engaged via a sole-source contract and whose salary remains a secret. Berkeley has an active Office of Energy and Sustainable Development, as well as at least six relevant commissions—Energy, Environment, Solid Waste, Transportation, Public Works, Planning—that could and should collaborate in overseeing the preparation of a bold emissions reduction plan.  

Berkeley also has a Fair Representation Act, which says that each councilmember has an appointee to each commission. By contrast, Sustainable Berkeley is a creature of the Mayor’s Office, filled exclusively with Bates appointees. If the mayor really wants to work with the community—the whole community—then he should do so through the commissions and the Office of Energy and Sustainable Development. And instead of citing another city’s sunshine law or a draft of a Berkeley sunshine ordinance that’s been seen by nobody except the insiders of Sustainable Berkeley, he and his associates should abide by the Brown Act, which governs commission and council proceedings. If DeVries doesn’t have time to post meeting notices on the web, then he doesn’t have time to do his new job right. 

The truth is that Sustainable Berkeley is only the latest, the biggest and potentially the most egregious of Tom Bates’ mayoral task forces, all of which violate the spirit and likely the letter of the Fair Representation Act. Which raises the question: Why hasn’t city attorney Manuela Albuquerque advised the mayor and the council that these bodies are improper, if not illegal? Even more troubling, why has the council repeatedly rubber-stamped the mayor’s self-aggrandizing initiatives and other disenfranchising projects such as the Ashby BART transit village and the North Shattuck Plaza?  

On Feb. 27 the council has an opportunity to start reversing the movement toward a privatized City Hall, and at the same time to take a stand for open public process, fiscal responsibility and environmental stewardship. Councilmembers, ask Mayor Bates to come back with a proposal that implements Measure G in a democratic manner and that includes a reasonably detailed budget. If you approve his $100,000 gift to Sustainable Berkeley in its present form, you will have moved us a lot closer to a Berkeley that doesn’t deserve to be sustained. 

 


Column: Get a La-Z-Boy and Write a How To Manual

By Susan Parker
Tuesday February 27, 2007

People keep giving me advice. It is useful and appreciated. (Well, maybe I exaggerate just a little, but I’m in a charitable mood.)  

“Write another book,” suggests Dad.  

“You didn’t like the last one,” I say. 

“That’s not true,” he shouts. “It was all right.” 

“Write about politics,” advises Mom. “On how Bill and Hilary ruined this country.” 

“No,” says Aunt Jeanie. “I think Susan should write about Grandpop. He was a semi-professional boxer and baseball player. He collected frogs and turtles, and sent us to college. He was really quite amazing.” 

“I didn’t know he was a boxer,” I say. “I only remember him sitting in a La-Z-Boy, yelling at Grandma.” 

“Yes,” says Aunt Jeanie, “he was good at that, too. But he was also an excellent tennis player.” 

“Finish your novel,” says Corey. “You know, the one you started five years ago. What was it about?” 

“I can’t remember,” I lie. It was about me, disguised as an attractive blonde, successful at everything she does. 

“Write about caregiving,” says Sonja. “I know you already wrote a book about it, but I mean a real book.” 

I stare at her. 

“You know what I mean. A resource book, one that gives solid information.” 

I understand. She’s envisioning a manual filled with useful facts, not a memoir chronicling the good and bad times on Dover Street: the morning we dropped Ralph on the floor and couldn’t get him back into bed; the day Andrea and I figured out how to fix the broken pipe in the upstairs bathroom; the Thanksgiving when Jerry brought home two free turkeys, one frozen and one pre-cooked; the rainy days I drove Willy to his part-time job at the barbecue joint; the time Whiskers ran down to Mrs. Scott’s house and spent the night covered in homemade quilts, snuggled against her warm body; the day Harka saw an ATM machine for the first time; the quiet April afternoon when Leroy died in our back bedroom.  

I think about those times and grow sad. Then I remember when Hans let a “friend” into our house and she stole my credit cards, cell phone, driver’s license, and passport. 

I suddenly feel the way I did then, lost, without an identity. All the people who have populated my life and given it purpose for the past 12 years are gone and scattered: Jerry and Willie out on the streets; Andrea at her mother’s house; Hans living here and there; Harka married and happy in Los Gatos; Ralph, Mrs. Scott, Leroy, (and Whiskers), hopefully raising hell together somewhere nicer than here. 

“Write about me,” says my housemate Jernee, when she finally gets up at the crack of noon. “Write about how I met you and my Dad when I was seven, and how now I’m almost 17, and we’re still friends, kinda.” 

She opens the refrigerator door and stares at the contents inside. “How come we don’t have any food around here anymore? You don’t ever feed me and I think your public should know.” 

“Not true,” I say. “Five dollars a day, everyday for lunch, plus late night runs to McDonalds and Jack In the Box. And look at the shelves, they’re filled with your favorite things: Frosted Flakes, Lucky Charms, microwave popcorn.” 

“I’m talking real food,” she says. “Remember Mrs. Scott’s fried chicken and bread pudding? Remember Andrea’s collard greens, and how Harka blew up the microwave? And my Dad’s specialty, Eggs A La Jerry: bacon, fried potatoes, and eggs-over-easy.” 

“Yes,” I say. “I remember.” 

She sighs and closes the fridge door. “Those were the days. I kinda miss ‘em.” 

“Me too,” I say.  

“Well,” she says, as she opens a cabinet and scrutinizes its meager contents. “I’m still here. You can at least be thankful for that.” 

“I am,” I say. I want to hug her, but I know she won’t like it, so I don’t. 


Wild Neighbors: Chemical Weapons: Skin of Newt and Liver of Snakes

By Joe Eaton
Tuesday February 27, 2007

A few columns back I touched on the chemical arms race between newts and garter snakes: the newts loaded with a fugu-like toxin to which the snakes have evolved resistance. Well, there are complexities to that story that I wasn’t aware of, some of which are described in a 2004 Journal of Chemical Ecology article entitled “A Resistant Predator and its Toxic Prey: Persistence of Newt Toxin Leads to Poisonous (Not Venomous) Snakes.” The lead author, Becky Williams, is a UC Berkeley graduate student; she collaborated with Edmund Brodie, Jr. of Utah State University and Edmund Brodie III, now at the University of Virginia. 

For one thing, it isn’t just any old newt or any old garter snake. The only species known to be resistant to the newt toxin (tetrodotoxin, TTX for short) is the common garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis), in respect to the rough-skinned newt (Taricha granulosa). And there seems to be a great deal of variation in patterns of toxicity and resistance. Some rough-skinned newt populations pack higher doses of TTX than others.  

It’s unclear whether this reflects the newts’ diet or has a genetic basis; other toxic amphibians, the arrow-poison frogs, have been shown to acquire their toxin from the insects they eat. Research appears to have ruled out symbiotic bacteria as a TTX source. In any case, garter snake populations that prey on supertoxic newts have evolved higher levels of resistance. 

Oregon’s Benton Couny in the Willamette Valley, where Williams and the Brodies got their specimens, is one of those coevolutionary hot spots. I’m not sure what the picture is in the Bay Area, which has its own populations of common garter snakes (of which the beautiful San Francisco garter snake is a subspecies) and rough-skinned newts, as well as other garter snake and newt species. 

The hypothesis Williams and her co-authors were interested in had to do with whether the Willamette snakes made any use of the newt toxin themselves. There was a precedent: a Japanese snake species that feeds on toads, stores the toad toxin in glands on the back of its neck, and displays the glands when threatened by a predatory bird. Was something similar happening with the garter snakes? 

After feeding newts to snakes, then sacrificing the snakes and assaying their organs, the biologists concluded that TTX stayed in the garter snakes’ livers for at least seven weeks. Three weeks after a newt meal, the average dose in a snake’s liver was 42 micrograms. 

Consuming more newts would crank up the toxicity. Even the one-newt toxin load would be enough to kill typical avian predators of garter snakes, like crows (which are particularly fond of snake livers), northern harriers, red-tailed hawks, and American bitterns. Predatory mammals seem less susceptible. 

But here’s a paradox: a defense that does in the attacker has no evolutionary advantage for the prey species. Death short-circuits the learning experience. Toxic defenses only make sense if a predator’s reaction is sublethal: it feels terrible and avoids such prey in the future. Williams and the Brodies say TTX acts quickly enough to cause an emetic response—so a crow might well survive a bite of toxic snake liver, sadder but wiser. 

They also speculate that the garter snakes’ coloration may aid that process. Most populations of the species are boldly patterned in red and black; like the monarch butterfly’s orange and black, this could function as a warning to predators with color vision, notably birds. The snakes of Benton County, which would have atypically high TTX levels, also have brighter red coloration. (The newts’ vivid orange underbellies serve to warn their own predators, and are mimicked by nontoxic salamanders like the ensatina). 

And the snakes appear to accentuate the visual signals with defensive displays that highlight their red lateral markings. The foul-smelling musk they emit when threatened may contain chemical cues to their unpalatability. 

As a sidebar, it seems that resistance to newt toxin involves tradeoffs: resistant snakes can’t crawl as fast as nonresistant ones. Why this should be is unclear—maybe one of those genetic linkage deals. But it would give resistant snakes more of a window of vulnerability to predation.  

It’s a complicated world out there, and the ancient dance of predator and prey has infinite variations. The Brodies are still working on the newt-snake interaction, but Becky Williams has moved on to other toxic creatures and is now studying the notoriously venomous Australian blue-ringed octopus. Let’s wish her luck.  

 

Joe Eaton’s column runs every other Tuesday, alternating with Ron Sullivan’s “Green Neighbors,” a column on East Bay trees. 

 

 

 


Arts & Events

Arts Calendar

Friday March 02, 2007

FRIDAY, MARCH 2 

THEATER 

Aurora Theatre Company “The Birthday Party” Wed. - Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m. at 2081 Addison St., through March 11. Tickets are $38. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

Berkeley Rep “The Pillowman” at 8 p.m. at the Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St., through March 11. Tickets are $33-$61. 647-2949. 

Berkeley Rep “To the Lighthouse” at the Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St. and runs through March 25. Tickets are $45-$61. 647-2917. 

Black Repertory Group “Phyllis” Fri. and Sat. at 3201 Adeline St. Call for time and ticket information. 652-2120.  

Central Works Theater Ensemble “Lola Montez” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. through March 25. Tickets are $9-$25. 558-1381. www.centralworks.org 

Contra Costa Civic Theater “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at 951 Pomona Ave., at Moeser, El Cerrito., through March 3. Tickets are $15-$24. 524-9132.  

Impact Theatre “Cartoon” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid, through March 10. Tickets are $10-$15.  

The Marsh “Shopping for God” Thurs.-Sat. at 7 p.m. at 2120 Allston Way, through March 3. Tickets are $15-$22. 1-800-838-5750. www.themarsh.org 

TheatreFirst “Nathan the Wise” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 3 p.m. at Old Oakland Theater, 481 Ninth St. at Broadway, Oakland, through March 4. Tickets are $21-$25. 436-5085. www.theatrefirst.com 

UC Dept. of Theater “Dolly West’s Kitchen” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Campus. Tickets are $10-$14. 642-9925. http://theater.berkeley.edu 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Growing Hunger: The Struggle of Small Farmers in the 21st Centruy” Photographs on display at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. through April 18. 981-6241. 

“Genetic Memories of Graffiti” performance art at 7 p.m. at Lobot Gallery, 1800 Campbell St., Oakland. www.weekendwakeup.com 

All Colors Oakland Celebration with recent art by Raymond Saunders. Opening reception at 5:30 p.m. at Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th St., Oakland. 465-8928. 

Overhung 3 Over 500 works of art in a garage-sized gallery. Opening reception at 7 p.m. at Boontling Gallery, 4224 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. 295-8881. www.boontlinggallery.com 

“The Stories We Tell Ourselves” works by Robert Tomlinson and Anna Vaughan. Reception at 6 p.m. at Mercury 20 Gallery, 25 Grand Ave. at Broadway.  

Deric Caner “Message to Carrier” poster drawings and Zenith Foundation “Devil’s Triangle Reprise” Reception for the artists at 7 p.m. at 21 Grand, 416 25th St. at Broadway. 444-7263. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Robert Lassalle-Klein discusses “Love That Produces Hope: The Life and Thought of Slain Salavadoran Jesuit, Ignacio Ellacuria” at 7 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker School, Marian Hall, 2nd Flr., 2125 Jefferson St. Not wheelchair accessible. 499-7080. 

Creative Aging: Bay Area Women Artists Aged 85-105 With Amy Gorman, author of “Aging Artfully” and Greg Young’s DVD, “Still Kicking” at 4 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant. 527-4977. 

Marisa Handler reads from “Loyal to the Sky: Notes from an Activist” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus, through March 4. Tickets are $32-$56. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Dance IS Festival at 8 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $10-$15. 925-798-1300. 

Groove Fest with Frank Martin and Friends at 7 p.m. at the Albany High School Little Theater. Tickets are $5-$10. Benefits Albany Music Fund. 558-2500.  

Organists Ed Teixiera and Ann Callaway perform Lizst’s Via Crucis at 11:15 a.m. at Saint David of Wales Catholic Church, 5641 Esmond Ave. at Sonoma, Richmond. 237-1531. 

University Symphony Orchestra at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $8-$12. 642-9988. 

The Edmund Welles Bass Clarinet Quartet at 8 p.m. at 1510 Eighth Street Performance Space, Oakland. Cost is $5-$15 sliding scale. events@thejazzhouse.com 

William Beatty, piano, Richard Saunders, bass, Alan Hall, drums at 8 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. Tickets are $12. 848-1228.  

Tony Bellaver “Interventions” Performance art from 1 to 4 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. Donations accepted. 644-6893. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

Country Joe McDonald Tribute to Woody Guthrie at 7:30 p.m. at Cafe de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck Ave. 287-8700. 

Manicato & Umoverde at 9 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $8-$10. 849-2568.  

Gadget, No Strangers, Jokes for Feelings, Sentinel at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $10. 848-0886.  

Mo’Fone at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$15. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Muziki Roberson Quintet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Prince Diabate & His Band in a benefit for Darfur at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12-$15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Sherry Austin at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

The Edlos at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Cyndi Harvell and Mike Eckstein at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Sean Smith and Pormpter of Conscience, GoGo Fightmaster at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082  

Verbal Abuse, A.D.T, Eskapo 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. 

The P-PL at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

Facing New York, Panda, Tempo no Tempo at 8:30 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Cost is $10. 763-1146. www.oaklandmetro.org 

Kurt Elling at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$20. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SATURDAY, MARCH 3 

CHILDREN  

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

Maggie the Clown celebrates National Reading Month Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 and 2:30 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave., Oakland. 452-2259. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Art of Living Black” Self-guided art tour from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond. Directories available from the Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Ave., Richmond. 620-6772. www.richmondartcenter.org 

8 in 07 A group show of East Bay artists opens at the Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave., to April 1. Gallery hours are Wed.-Sun. 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. 848-1228. 

California College of the Arts 100th Anniversary Art Show opens at 3 p.m. at Montclair Gallery, 1986 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. Exhibition runs to April 30. 339-4286. 

Jessamyn Lovell talks about her work “Catastrophe, Crisis and Other Family Traditions” at 4 p.m. at the Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Ave., Richmond. 620-6772. www.richmondartcenter.org 

FILM 

Women of Color Film Festival “Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena“ with fimmaker Lourdes Portillo at 7 p.m. and “The Devil Never Sleeps” at 9 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Andy Couturier on “Writing Open the Mind: Tapping the Subconscious to Free the Writing and the Writer” at 5:30 at at Black Oak Books. 486-0698.  

Bay Area Poets Coalition Open Reading at 3 p.m. at Strawberry Creek Lodge, 1320 Addison St. Park on the street. 527-9905. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at 2 and 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus, through March 4. Tickets are $32-$56. 642-9988.  

Dance IS Festival at 8 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $10-$15. 925-798-1300. 

Groove Fest with Tom Lilienthal, Tim Hyland and Friends at 7 p.m. at the Albany High School Little Theater. Tickets are $5-$10. Benefits Albany Music Fund. 558-2500.  

Nexus: Volti a capella at 8 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. Tickets are $8-$20. 415-771-3352. www.voltisf.org 

The Streicher Trio “Music and Dance in 18th Century Spain” at 8 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Tickets are $10-$25. 528-1725. 

American Bach Soloists Elizabeth Blumenstock, violin, and Mary Wilson, soprano, at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $16-$42. 415-621-7900.  

Sacred & Profane “Springtime in Paris” at 8 p.m. at All Souls Episcopal Church, 2220 Cedar St. Tickets are $15-$18. 524-3611. 

University Symphony Orchestra at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $8-$12. 642-9988. 

Poulenc Trio, with Vladimir Lande, oboist, at 7:30 p.m. at Regents Theater, Holy Names University, 3500 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. Tickets are $35-$40. 601-7919.  

Country Joe McDonald Tribute to Woody Guthrie at 7:30 p.m. at Cafe de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck Ave. 287-8700. 

John Fizer at noon at Cafe Zeste, 1250 Addison St. at Bonar, in the Strawberry Creek Park complex. 704-9378. 

Oakland Assault at 8 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Cost is $10. 763-1146.  

Altipampa, traditional sounds from the Andes at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12-$14. 849-2568.  

Eric Swinderman Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ.  

Bulgarika at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Balkan dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $15. 525-5054.  

Sotaque Baino, Brazilian music, at 8 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Jon Roniger and Theo Harman at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe. 595-5344.  

Gemini Soul with Ajamu Akinyele at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Carolyn Mark, Amy Honey, Bermuda Tirangle Service at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. 

Rustler’s Moon with Kathy Kallick & Bill Evans at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Gaucho, gypsy jazz, at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $5. 843-2473.  

Nicole McRory at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

Pete Madsen, folk, at 8 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7. 558-0881. 

Flip the Switch, A Class Act, Chris Murray at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, MARCH 4 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Art of Living Black” Self-guided art tour from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond. Directories available from the Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Ave., Richmond. 620-6772. www.richmondartcenter.org 

“Earth in Flowers” Chinese paintings by Y. C. Chiang and Hui Liu, and hand-blown glass by Michael Sosin. Reception at 3 p.m. at the Community Art Gallery, Alta Bates Summit Medical Center, 2450 Ashby Ave. 204-1667.  

“A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s” Guided tour at 2 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Conversations on Art with Ira Nowinski at 1 p.m. at the Judah L. Magnes Museum, 2911 Russell St. 549-6950.  

Serena Bartlett introduces “Grassroutes Travel Guide to Oakland” at 2 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. 

Chad Lejeune talks about “The Worry Trap: How to Free Yourself from Worry and Anxiety Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy” at 6 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698.  

Abby Seixas on “The Deep River Within: Finding Balance and Meaning in a 24/7 World” at 7 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at 3 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32-$56. 642-9988.  

Chamber Music Sundaes with San Francisco Symphony musicians and friends at 3 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Tickets at the door are $18-$20. 415-753-2792. 

Rudolf Buchbinder, piano at 3 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $42. 642-9988. 

1920’s Jazz Piano Concert with Seth Montfort, at 5:30 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. Cost is $15. 415-362-6080. 

Betty Fu, vocals, Ben Stolorow, piano at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center 1275 Walnut St. Csot is $10. 644-6893.  

California Bach Society “Consolation and Comfort” at 4 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. Tickets are $10-$25. 415-262-0272.  

Golden Key Piano School Recital at 2 p.m. in Berkeley. Call for location 665-5466. 

Liliana Herrera & Rafael Herrera, satirical socio-political songs, at 7 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $7-$15 sliding scale. 849-2568. 

David Lindley at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $22.50-$23.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

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

Country Joe McDonald Tribute to Woody Guthrie at 7:30 p.m. at Cafe de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck Ave. 287-8700 

Sambajah, Brazilian, at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

My Last Day on Earth, Almost Dead, River Runs Black and others at 6:30 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Cost is $10. 763-1146.  

MONDAY, MARCH 5 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Studio Man Ray” Photo- 

graphs by Ira Nowinski opens at the Judah L. Magnes Museum, 2911 Russell St. and runs through August 5. 549-6950. 

“A Visual Journal” Oils and works on paper by Lisa Bruce opens at Bucci’s, 6121 Hollis St., Emeryville, and runs to March 30. www.lisabruce.com 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Actors Reading Writers: “Unusual Circumstances,” works by Lorrie Moore, Wallace Stegner, and Jessamyn West at 7:30 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Free. 932-0214. 

Readings from Golden Handcuffs Magazine with contributors David Bromige, Laynie Browne, Richard Denner, Michael McClure, David Meltzer and Michael Rothenberg at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Cara Black reads from “Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis“ at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Dinaw Mengestu talks about “The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Nalo Hopkinson introduces her new novel, ”The New Moon’s Arms” at 7 p.m. at Revolution Books, 2425 Channing Way. 848-1196. 

Poetry Express with MK Chavez at 7 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. berkeleypoetryexpress@yahoo.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

David Lindley at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $22.50-$23.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Ramon & Jessica and Michael Musika at 6 p.m. at Mama Buzz Cafe, 2318 Telegraph, at 23rd, Oakland. 

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

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

TUESDAY, MARCH 6 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Dream Landscapes” works by Billana Stremska opens with a reception at 6 p.m. at at the Claremont Hotel Club Gallery, 41 Tunnel Rd. RSVP to Katy Yong at 549-8512.  

FILM 

Alternative Visions: “Nicky Hamlyn: Film Art Phenomena” with Nicky Hamlyn in person, at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

Arab Film Festival Documentaries by Lebanese Women including “Here and Perhaps Elsewhere” at 7 p.m. at the California Theater, 2113 Kittredge St. Tickets are $6-$8. 415-564-1100. www.aff.org 

“Little Miss Potentiality Returns” a film by Thalia Drori, at 9:15 at the Parkway Speakeasy Theater, Oakland. thaliadrori.com 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Michael Eric Dyson discusses “Debating Race” at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Donation $10. 848-3696.  

“A Short Trip to Italy” multi-media presentation by Countess Alessandra Ranghiasci on her family’s 150 room ancestral palace in Gubbio, Italy's best preserved medieval village, at 6 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Cost is $15. 848-7800.  

Daniel Mason reads from his new novel “A Far Country” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Art IS Education Performances and Art Show by students of the Emery Unified School District at 4 p.m. on the steps of Emeryville City Hall, 1333 Park Ave.  

Sauce Piquante at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun/Zydeco dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

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

Jenny Ferris and Laura Klein, jazz, at 7:30 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Sean Jones at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $6-$12. 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, MARCH 7 

FILM 

Film 50: “The Conversation” with a lecture by Marilyn Fabe, at 3 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

Independent Lens “Black Gold” an expose of the coffee-industry at 6 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. Oakland. Free. 238-2200. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Chalmers Johnson discusses his new book “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic” with Gray Brechin at 7:30 p.m. at King Middle School, 1781 Rose St. Tickets are $12-$15 at Cody’s. 559-9500. 

Joe Conason discusses why “It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

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 

Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32-$56. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

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

Terrie Odabi Quartet with guest Steve Turre, at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $15. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Wadi Gad and Junior P, reggae, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Orquestra Universal at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Salsa lessons at 8 p.m. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

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

Joshua Eden at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

SF Jazz High School All Stars at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, MARCH 8 

EXHIBITIONS 

“A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s” Guided tour at 12:15 and 5:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808 

FILM 

Arab Film Festival Documentaries by Lebanese Women including “Lebanon/War” at 7 p.m. at the California Theater, 2113 Kittredge St. Tickets are $6-$8. 415-564-1100. www.aff.org 

Women of Color Film Festival “Gathering Strands” with filmmakers in person at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Speaking Fierce” in honor of International Women’s Day, with Eli PaintedCrow and Anuradha Bhagwati, veterans, Kaylah Marin, Aimee Susara and others at 6:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2501 Harison St., Oakland. Tickets are $5-$15 sliding scale. 444-2700. 

“Documenting Oakland” with Erica Mailman, author of “Oakland’s Neighborhoods,” Jeff Norman, author of “Temescal Legacies” and Vietnemense poets from the Vietnamese Artist Collective at 6 p.m. at Oakland Public Library, 125 14th St. 238-3271. 

Nora Gallagher introduces her first work of fiction, “Changing Light,” a love story set in the summer of 1945 in the shadow of Los Alamos and the making of the first atomic bomb at 7:30 p.m. in the Tucson Common Room, Church Divinity School of the Pacific, 2451 Ridge Rd. 204-0710. 

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

T Cooper, Michelle Tea and Katia Noyes tell stories at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Stephen Davenport reads from “Saving Miss Oliver’s: A Novel of Leadership, Loyalty and Change” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Opera presents a free noontime concert at the Central Berkeley Public Library, 5th Floor, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6100. 

Jewish Music Festival “Musical Fortunes” with Dan Cantrell, Kitka, Michael Alpert at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $20-$25. 800-838-3006. www.jewishmusicfestival.org 

JGB featuring Melvin Seals with Rainmaker at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $17-$20. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32-$56. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Muireann NicAmhlaoibh at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Jim Grantham Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Edo Castro and Jeff Schmidt at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

And a Few to Break, The Attachments, Timothy Rabbit at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

Headnodic & Raashan Ahmad at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low. Cost is $5. 548-1159.  

Stanley Clarke at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $24-$28. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

 


Arts and Entertainment Around the East Bay

Friday March 02, 2007

PFA HOSTS ANTONIONI RETROSPECTIVE 

 

Pacific Film Archive is presenting a retrospective of the work of modernist director Michelangelo Antonioni. Antonioni had his roots in the neo-realist school of Italian filmmaking but soon moved beyond it into the langorous, minimalist films that would make his reputation, a body of work that often depicts the world and the human soul as vast, empty landscapes. The series begins Friday and runs through April 22. $4-$8. 2575 Bancroft Way. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu. 

 

SELF-GUIDED TOURS OF ‘ART OF LIVING BLACK’ 

 

A self-guided tour of “The Art of Living Black,” featuring the work of local black artists, will take place this Saturday and Sunday (March 3-4). The show includes the work of more than 90 emerging and established artists in a group exhibition through March 16 at the Richmond Art Center. Additional work is featured by the 2006 Jan Hart-Schuyers Artistic Achievement Award recipients: Aaron Carter, Patricia Patterson and Roosevelt Washington. 2540 Barrett Ave., Richmond. Noon-5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. 620-6772. 

 

THEATREFIRST’S ‘NATHAN THE WISE’ 

 

TheatreFIRST brings G.E. Lessing’s masterpiece Nathan the Wise to the stage at the Old Oakland Theater through March 4. This small, game troupe with high production standards and an ambitious, socially aware repertoire based on an internationalist perspective has come close to outdoing themselves with this outstanding show. 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays. $21-$25. 481 Ninth St., Oakland. 436-5085. www.theatrefirst.org.


Le Bateau Ivre Celebrates 35 Years

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Friday March 02, 2007

Le Bateau Ivre—“The Drunken Boat”—that unique coffee house, restaurant and bar will celebrate its 35th anniversary Monday with a special musical program in the recently inaugurated (and very eclectic) Monday night art performance series: Dazzling Divas, operatic arias and duets by Verdi, Puccini, Mozart, Bizet, Charpentier and others, sung by Bay Area favorites Pamela Marie Connelly, Tara Generalovich, Kathleen Moss, Eliza O’Malley and MaryAnne Stanislaw, accompanied by Jonathan Alford, piano. Admission is free. 

The divas are familiar faces from the stages of Berkeley Opera, Oakland Opera Theater, SF Lyric Opera, The Lamplighters, Pocket Opera, Opera San Jose and the American Musical Theater of San Jose, as well as bigger houses like the SF and LA Operas and New York City Opera. 

Jonathan Alford’s credits include performances at Zellerbach, with the Oakland Ballet and both onstage and in the recording studio with many top names in jazz and Latin music. 

Since its inception this New Year’s Day, the new Monday night series has featured performances ranging from Klezmer and Bluegrass to Sicilian and French cafe music. 

Thomas Cooper and Arlene Giordano opened their establishment on March 5, 1972, after Cooper had walked in an open side door one day the previous fall out of curiosity, saying to himself, “it would be a nice coffee house.” 

Cooper, from an old East Kentucky family, had come to the Bay Area after seven years in Europe, on his way to Japan, but stayed on in Berkeley. “I’d always fantasized about opening a coffee house,” he said, “but it was never a very solid thought. I’d listen to Vivaldi mandolin music and daydream about it.” 

The daydream became a reality as they began to restore the neglected building. “A couple of brothers owned it, who had got into drugs,” Cooper recalled. “It was almost torn down. One guy we had come in to take a look said it was like the Viet Cong had hit it.”  

Originally a home built by a Frenchman in 1898, the building sported architectural features like a porch supported by four semi-nude female caryatids—until the 1906 Quake. It was renovated twice more before the Second World War. The fireside room in the back, where performances are held, was built of brick in 1940. “It was used as a small theater in the ‘40s,” said Cooper. “When we were restoring it, we sealed in the curtain. Strangely, that’s just where musical groups today want to stand.” Cooper and Giordano bought the building in 1976. 

The name came when Cooper told a French friend that he, once a merchant seaman out of the Mediterranean, was thinking of calling the new coffee house The Boat. “‘Why not add ‘Drunken’ to it? ‘Bateau Ivre’,” she said. Both forms of the name stuck, the Coopers using the English version of Rimbaud’s poem title increasingly since 1995. “It’s easier for people. I’ve heard it called The Ivory Boat ... or The Drunken Goat!” 

“We continue to work on it,” Cooper said. “Arlene’s constantly searched out furniture and decor since the beginning. Everything in the building’s been redone, but we try to maintain it as it was, maintain the beauty of the building. We’re its custodians. And it’s essentially the same place it was when we opened. It’s not dated, but has taken on a certain patina after 35 years. It fits our taste. We fixed it up, but tried to keep it simple, down to earth. A simple-hearted yet refined ambiance.” 

 

DAZZLING DIVAS 

Le Bateau Ivre’s 35th Anniversary 

Monday, March 5 

open 6-10 p.m., performance 7-9 p.m. 

2928 Telegraph Ave., 849-1100


The Theater: Jackson’s ‘American $uicide at SF’s Thick House

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Friday March 02, 2007

Mark Jackson’s new play, American $uicide, now playing at the Thick House on San Francisco’s Potrero Hill, locks horns with the old saw that it’s lonely at the top. Instead, the message seems to be that when you’re scaling the heights, everybody else is yelling, “Jump!” 

Long before Warhol came up with the notion of any and everybody’s 15 minutes of fame, playwright Nicolai Erdman penned The Suicide, a satiric look at the individual in Soviet society of the 1920s, after years of famine, civil war, blockades by the Western powers, epidemics and the wayward New Economic Policy, which tried to introduce a limited form of capitalism into the avowedly Marxist-Leninist state. His play didn’t make it to the stage for over 50 years. Condemned and banned, The Suicide disappeared from sight, and Erdman never wrote another play. 

Jackson, who both adapted and directed American $uicide, has garnered a reputation in Berkeley and around the bay for the two plays he wrote and staged for the Shotgun Players, The Death of Meyerhold (a kind of biopic onstage of Erdman’s contemporary, the great Russian man of the theater) and The Forest Wars (which just concluded an extended run at the Ashby Stage), and his guest direction of Oscar Wilde’s Salome for Aurora last year, as well as the productions of his own Art Street Theatre from 1999 to 2004. With American $uicide, he takes what’s become something considered as a kind of deferred classic of a great and difficult era of theater and society, adapting it to the post-dotcom, media-saturated America of three quarters of a century later. 

Sam Small (Jud Williford) is an unemployed house husband, frustrated with his asocial nonrole in the world. But while his wife, Mary (Beth Wilmurt) slaves as a waitress, Sam has time to act out his frustrations with vague threats of suicide—and time to dream of really acting, that is, becoming an actor. That’s the way to make a bundle, he reasons, and it’s got to be easy. 

His career takes off faster than he thinks, due to the loopy cast of characters that surround his bland figure and his wife’s demure normality. Getting a book on acting from the neighborhood Avon Lady, who lives down the street in her car (Delia MacDougall as “Gigi Bolt, of Theater Communications Group”), Sam stumbles into being cast in an independent film meant as the comeback vehicle for both its frightwigged director (Michael Patrick Gaffney) and overripe starlet (Jody Flader)—all because he’s threatened suicide, so is seen as desperate, a natural. His web-hustling, across-the-hall neighbor Albert (Marty Pistone) parlays the casting into a stalking horse for something really grandiose, when he appoints himself Sam’s agent, converts the porn site he’s been flooding with videos of himself and new bartender girlfriend (Denise Balthrop Cassidy) to an auction house to sponsor Sam’s suicide by the highest bidder. 

“Mysterious men” (all played by Liam Vincent) appear, both a wannabe terrorist and an undercover G-man, trying to convince Sam to banner their ideology as his last words, while Gigi implores him to “die for the American Theater!” And so midnight draws near, everybody wildly dancing and drinking, waiting for the broadcast of Sam’s last words and the opening of the envelope containing the name of the winner—who (or what) he’ll die for. 

The script provides the opportunity for many quick, funny bits with the cast of loons that surround Everyman Sam, a few as quick slapstick demonstrations of something like Meyerhold’s Biomechanical exercises (as when Albert scuffles with Sam, trying to keep him from killing himself too early in the game—which Sam had no intention of), others as tableaux of the characters in Raquel Barreto’s costumes (Albert as a louche cop, or his girlfriend as a sad, pink-eared Playboy bunny).  

Russian and Soviet drama had (and has) a number of sophisticated techniques--and, more importantly, styles--to realize the stylized performance of ultra-caricatures ... Biomechanics, Eccentrism, Defamiliarized and “alienated” succeeding styles ... all drawn originally from models of popular entertainment, like Commedia Dell’Arte, of which Meyerhold must be counted as one of the modern rediscoverers. These take discipline, and can push past the limits of representation, creating a new kind of satire. “The Grotesque is the triumph of Form over Content,” Meyerhold held forth. Sometimes a joke is more than a joke; it can bend the space around it. 

American $uicide allows a crew of good actors to ham it up, in the best sense, overacting a panoply of cartoonish characters to the point of a balloon about to burst. But, amusing as they are, the portrayals and routines are overblown sitcom material—Albert and girlfriend a contemporary and loopier Fred-and-Ethel neighbor couple. Erdman’s original hit a nerve, was banned ... Jackson’s adaptation sports a populist message, just what’s expected, a facile swipe at the usual straw men, reading more like Meet John Doe, Frank Capra’s silver screen vehicle for Cooper and Stanwyck, adapted as a farce. 

Stylized pictures of American society that touch a nerve prove unpalatable to the same success machine that devours ringers like Sam and Mary, include those by Poe (a hero for many Russian artists) or the Melville of The Confidence Man. Stroheim made Greed out of Frank Norris’ McTeague, book about a dentist obsessed with gold, boldly caricatured. And Sherwood Anderson peopled Winesburg, Ohio with his Grotesques. There are other examples in films by Orson Welles and Samuel Fuller. American $uicide’s sketches are diverting, but don’t find their way in the tradition of stylized satire, Russian or American. 

 

AMERICAN $UICIDE 

Thick House, 1695 18th St., San Francisco. 

$25-30. (415) 437-6775. www.zspace.org.


Moving Pictures: Killing Spree’s Aftermath Takes its Toll in ‘Zodiac’

By Justin DeFreitas
Friday March 02, 2007

Few crime stories have captured the public imagination like the Zodiac murders that terrorized the Bay Area in the late ’60s and early ’70s. The case has become part of local folklore, transforming the mysterious killer who targeted couples in remote lovers’ lanes and threatened to bomb school buses into the de facto bogeyman for a generation of Bay Area children who came of age in the following decade. 

Zodiac, David Fincher’s new film based on the best-selling books by former San Francisco Chronicle editorial cartoonist Robert Graysmith, is the first of the story’s many cinematic adaptations to stay true to the facts. Previous films took liberties with the tale, embellishing, altering and simplifying the details for dramatic effect. Thus far only Fincher has had the clarity of mind to focus on the real drama of the story, which is not the depravity of the murders or the killer’s twisted mind, but the investigation itself and the toll it took on the men involved.  

In adapting Graysmith’s work, Fincher and screenwriter James Vanderbilt have focused on the strengths that constitute the enduring value of the books: that they have served as much-needed compendiums of the facts and theories which had hitherto been far flung among competing agencies in the various jurisdictions where the killer struck. 

The film starts with Zodiac’s second attack, after which he sent his first letter and cipher to the press, establishing for the first time in the public consciousness the disquieting reality that a serial killer was at work in the Bay Area. And, with the exceptions of three more scenes depicting later attacks, the film primarily consists of conversations between reporters, editors, detectives and suspects. As such, Zodiac slips into something of a pattern, one familiar from television’s ubiquitous talking head- and dateline-laden forensic dramas. Though the film is well crafted, it still lapses at times into the familiar cliches of the police procedural genre: tense discussions between a skeptical detective and an excited journalist, the latter eager to condense his insights into the “just two minutes” the former has allotted for the meeting; the late-night talks in restaurants featuring notes scrawled on napkins, with utensils positioned as makeshift maps to illustrate pet theories; and why is it that the men in these dramas are so often ravenous, taking huge bites of artery-clogging foods and chewing with their mouths open? Aren’t there any less hackneyed shorthand methods for portraying the driven, the dedicated and the self-destructive? 

The actors are forced to bring their characters alive within the limited confines of the procedural genre, and only Mark Ruffalo succeeds fully. Robert Downey Jr. is charismatic and by most accounts effective in channeling the wit and energy of Chronicle reporter Paul Avery, yet he has little time to do so and limited material with which to do it, resulting in a performance that comes across as too cynical, too sarcastic, too one-dimensionally clown-like to ring true. Jake Gyllenhaal too is limited by the material, yet in his case ample screen time actually works against the performance, giving us scene after scene of him nervously jumping about like an agitated schoolboy. We are not convinced we’re witnessing a case of obsession but are instead acutely aware that we are watching an actor employ the standard theatrical devices for conveying that obsession. Again, the details of the performance may be authentic, but sometimes absolute veracity just doesn’t translate well on screen. 

But Ruffalo, as San Francisco Police Inspector Dave Toschi, really hits the mark. Toschi benefited and suffered at the hands of Hollywood; Bullitt (1968) made him something of a legend, with Steve McQueen taking many details, including his unique holster, from Toschi, while Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry (1971) maddened Toschi as the hero’s vigilante-like approach to the “Scorpio” killer only helped to increase public frustration with Toschi and the real-life manhunt that consumed the Bay Area. Here Toschi was tracking a killer who was obsessed and inspired by movies and only now have the movies finally given Toschi his due in the form of Ruffalo’s sympathetic portrayal. Ruffalo’s Toschi is brave, bright, articulate and passionate, but at the same time flawed, tormented and ultimately all too human.  

The most significant flaw of the film is its focus on Graysmith, a character who, though integral to the tale, is hardly the most compelling figure in the story. Really the main character should have been Toschi, with a late digression toward Graysmith once the official investigation had wound down, but later returning again to Toschi to show the effect Graysmith’s discoveries had on the retired inspector as new facts, theories and circumstantial evidence pointed time and again to Arthur Leigh Allen, Toschi’s favorite suspect all along. If the premise of the film, according to its publicity, is that that the men who waged the investigation and were in the end undone by it should be tallied among the killer’s victims, why is the dramatic thrust skewed toward the only character who managed to significantly benefit from the case in the form of best-selling books and Hollywood movie deals?  

For the most part, Fincher’s direction is strong enough to overcome these obstacles, managing to create a film that is stylish without being showy. He stages the murder scenes simply and for the most part accurately, and keeps the investigation scenes moving despite the static nature of the format. One shot adds a chilling but subtle flourish to the murder of San Francisco Yellow Cab driver Paul Stine: The scene opens with an overhead shot of the cab as it winds its way through the streets of the city, the camera shifting with each turn as though locked in place with the car, suggesting care with which the killer choreographed and mapped the encounter, leading Stine on a slow death march from the theater district to the Presidio Heights neighborhood where he would be shot. 

Zodiac may be the definitive celluloid incarnation of the case, one that is unlikely to be bettered, but still it encounters the same dilemma that stymied the creators of last year’s low-budget version, The Zodiac: There’s just no way to effectively conclude the film, for there is no definite conclusion to the real-life story. Once again, Fincher turns to the Graysmith character with a scene in which Gyllenhaal finally gets to look the killer in the eye. But whatever emotional impact the scene might have achieved is undermined by the fact that we, the audience, have already looked into these eyes in an earlier scene. Again, a better conclusion might have been wrung from the fates of Toschi or Avery.  

Instead the anti-climactic encounter is followed simply by the standard coda in which we read what later became of each of the characters. It is a strong film, at times even a powerful film, and its strength lies in its adherence to facts. However, veracity doesn’t necessarily make for great art. Reality is rarely obliging in that way.  

 

ZODIAC 

Directed by David Fincher. Written by James Vanderbilt. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Edwards. Rated R.  

160 minutes. Playing at the California Theater. 

 

Photograph: Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr. as San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith and reporter Paul Avery in David Fincher’s Zodiac.


East Bay Then and Now: Maybeck’s First House Was a Design Laboratory

By Daniella Thompson
Friday March 02, 2007

In March 1933, the Long Beach Earthquake destroyed 70 schools, and another 120 suffered major structural damage. The Great Depression was at its height, leaving 25 percent of the nation’s work force unemployed. Things couldn’t have looked grimmer, but one creative mind was busily churning out solutions. 

In December of that year, the Berkeley City Council received for consideration a novel idea submitted by Bernard Maybeck. The architect advocated that waste material from Berkeley’s condemned school buildings be diverted to constructing small homes on city-owned property, with unemployed heads of families providing the construction manpower. 

“Out of the two negatives of waste material and waste time of men might be evolved a positive condition,” wrote Maybeck. “Little houses, little gardens, play spaces for little children—the result a glorified auto camp. Should 1929 roll around again, these same settlements could be metamorphosed into auto camps, of which Berkeley has none.” 

Seeds for planting gardens could be donated by the Hillside Club, of which Maybeck was a member. Other organizations might be prevailed upon to supply furnishings. Many of the unemployed and people working under the Civil Works Administration program would be able to live comfortably if the problem of rent was removed, wrote Maybeck. If he were in Berkeley (the architect was in Elsah, IL, designing the Principia College campus), he would be glad to draft plans for the model settlement—a place that would boast show houses and not be “shackville.” 

It’s doubtful that the Berkeley city council considered the proposal seriously. Maybeck didn’t have a reputation for practicality, while the city was intent on developing taxable property. 

As for the architect, he was simply following the singular path he had begun to hew upon arriving in Berkeley forty years earlier. 

The son of a German-born furniture maker and architectural woodcarver, young Maybeck (1962–1957) apprenticed in the same trade before going to Paris at the age of 19 to study furniture design. Within a year he was admitted to the École de Beaux Arts, where he spent four years studying architecture. Along with the traditional training in the classic orders, Bernard benefited from the study of gothic structure and a mathematical theory of modern structure, both of which would play a decisive role in his future designs. 

Returning to New York in 1886, Maybeck went to work for his Beaux-Arts schoolmate Thomas Hastings at the latter’s firm, Carrère and Hastings. Here he participated in building two Florida hotels and a church for Standard Oil tycoon Henry Flagler. 

In 1889 Maybeck attempted to establish an independent practice in Kansas City. The work was scarce, but the sojourn was fruitful: the architect met Annie White, whom he would marry the following year, and the young architect Willis Jefferson Polk. Polk soon moved to California and lured Maybeck out as well. 

While waiting for an opening in the San Francisco office of the fashionable young architect A. Page Brown, Maybeck had a temporary job at the established firm of Wright and Sanders, architects of the Mark Hopkins mansion on Nob Hill. Next he became principal designer at the Charles M. Plum Company, interior designers and custom furniture makers. 

While designing lavish interiors for Nob Hill mansions, Maybeck lived with Annie in a cottage in the Piedmont hills. Here he had “an experience that profoundly affected his whole artistic outlook,” wrote Charles Keeler in his memoirs. “[N]ext door to him the Reverend Joseph Worcester had a little summer retreat. Looking into Mr. Worcester’s windows, he saw the interior of the cottage was all of unpainted redwood boards. It was a revelation.” 

In 1891, A. Page Brown’s work volume increased, and Maybeck joined his staff. A year later, the Maybecks purchased a double lot in northwest Berkeley, on the corner of West and Gilman. The streets were renamed several times since then. West became Sherman, then Grove, and is now known as Martin Luther King, Jr. Way. The old Gilman is now Berryman Street. 

The area was isolated; for over ten years, the Maybeck property was the only inhabited one on its block. It came with a small, one-story cottage that Maybeck soon began to transform. Lacking the means to hire a contractor, the architect initially did much of the work himself. Over several years, the house doubled its footprint and gained a second story, a low-pitched saddle roof with wide overhangs, a projecting sleeping porch, and a great variety of windows. Two styles of wood shingles adorned the exterior. 

Keeler, who had first met Maybeck in 1891, described the house as it was in 1895: 

I sought out Mr. Maybeck at his home in northwest Berkeley and told him I had come to accept his offer to design our house. I really had no idea what I was getting into when I put myself in his hands. I found his own home was not yet complete and that he was working on it at odd times, with the assistance of Julia Morgan’s brothers. His house was something like a Swiss chalet. The timbers showed on the inside and the walls were of knotted yellow pine planks. There was no finish to the interior, for the carpenter work finished it. There was a sheet iron, hand-built stove, open in front and with brass andirons. Most of the furniture was designed and made by Mr. Maybeck himself. It was a distinctly hand-made home. 

In 1894, Maybeck was appointed instructor in drawing at the Civil Engineering College of the University of California. A school of architecture did not yet exist, so Maybeck offered interested engineering students an independent course in architectural design, given in his house. The students included an impressive array of future luminaries: Wiley Corbett (architect of New York’s Rockefeller Center); Edward H. Bennett (co-author of the Chicago city plan with Daniel H. Burnahm); Julia Morgan; Lewis Hobart (architect of San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral and Bohemian Club); John Bakewell and Arthur Brown, Jr. (who would collaborate on the city halls of San Francisco and Berkeley); G. Albert Lansburgh (designer of many theatres, including the Warfield and Golden Gate in San Francisco, the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles and, with Arthur Brown, San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House); and Loring P. Rixford (architect of the Sacramento City Library). Bakewell described the course as combining design theory and a period of practical application, during which the students worked on the additions to the house. 

Maybeck would apply the principles tried out in this domestic laboratory to his early private commissions. Keeler was his first client, and the architect not only designed his home but provided lessons in architectural philosophy: 

A wooden house should bring out all the character and virtue of wood—straight lines, wooden joinery, exposed rafters, and the wooden surface visible and left in its natural state. A house should fit into the landscape as if it were a part of it, it should also be an expression of the life and spirit which is to be lived within it. […] whatever was of structural importance should be emphasized as a feature of ornament. […] He was interested in the simple life which is naturally expressive and consequently beautiful. He believed in handmade things and that all ornament should be designed to fit the place and the need. He did not mind how crude it was, provided it was sincere and expressed something personal. 

The Keeler house, built in 1895 on the corner of Highland Place and Ridge Road, was soon joined by three additional seminal Maybecks: Laura G. Hall house (1896), Williston W. Davis house (1897), and William P. Rieger house (1899). They transformed the Northside and served as models for the “Simple Home” gospel promulgated by the Hillside Club. 

The Maybecks continued to live in the Grove St. house until 1907. A block to the south, at 1423 Grove Street, lived Bernard’s first cousin John E. Maybeck. In the family tradition, John was a woodcarver. His grandson, William Maybeck, relates that Bernard, dissatisfied with the quality of workmanship in San Francisco, persuaded his cousin to come out from New York. John started out as a mantel dealer but eventually became a teacher at the Wilmerding School of Industrial Arts in San Francisco, a position he held for many years. 

Bernard and Annie sold their Grove St. house to German professor Ludwig J. Demeter and his wife Rowena and moved to rented digs at 1615 Arch Street while their new home was being built on the corner of La Loma Ave. and Buena Vista Way. 

But this wasn’t the end of the Grove St. house’s connection with architecture. By the late 1950s and early ’60s, it had assumed legendary status among U.C. architecture students. According to architect Richard Ehrenberger its student residents included future folksinger Kate Wolf and her eventual husband, architect Saul Wolf; Howard Ray Lawrence, future professor of architecture at Penn State; and future architect/photographer Jeremiah O. Bragstad. 

The house was designated a City of Berkeley Landmark on February 1, 2007. 

 

Daniella Thompson publishes berkeleyheritage.com for the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA). 

 

 

Photograph by Daniella Thompson 

Maybeck’s first Berkeley house, 1300 Martin Luther King, Jr. Way, was designated a City of Berkeley Landmark on Feb.1 of this year. 

 


About the House: Confessions of a House Inspector

By Matt Cantor
Friday March 02, 2007

I have a terrible confession to make. I feel really bad about it, but it’s probably not going to change any time soon. I don’t care if your roof leaks. O.K., I know that I’m supposed to make a big deal about this sort of thing but I’m not going to. There, I said it and I feel a whole lot better. 

Well, maybe that’s not entirely true. I do care if your roof leaks, but not that much. And I would argue that you shouldn’t either. Now, if you have OCD you might need to fix it right away to prevent suicide and I would say, “Bully for you, get on with it then” and hand you the phone, to call to the roofer, myself. 

However, for most of us, it’s just not all that important because roof leaks don’t kill people. I’m very interested in everything about the house but I’m much more interested in things that kill people or hurt them seriously or cause a massive loss of value.  

This is what might be called worst-case scenario inspecting and is what I try to do everyday.  

It is very easy to lose perspective when looking at a large list of issues and, to the credit of many of my clients; they will intuit and communicate this when we’re looking at their house, skyscraper or aircraft hangar. Most will, at some point, say “Please tell the things that you think matter the most” or “Can you tell me the five things that you’d do first after I’ve moved in.” 

This is a darned good start and prescient, to be sure, but it’s not enough. These questions should also include, “What’s going to kill me?” and perhaps “What’s going to end up costing me a bucket of money?” and whether I’m asked or not, this robot comes preprogrammed to do this. 

Maybe it’s because I’m a worrier but it doesn’t make any sense to me to look at a range of issues and to fail to list them by hazard-level. 

So let’s take a look at a few things that I would place near the top (and near the bottom) of my worst-case scenario inspecting list and I would virtually always begin with those things related to fire. 

In my world, there’s not much worse than death by fire and there’s so much we can do to prevent it. Not that we can prevent all fires but we can certainly do a lot about preventing deaths caused by fires. So, my favorite inspection item is the smoke detector; low cost, high benefit. That’s another criterion that must be made a part of this thinking: What’s the cost and what’s the benefit?  

Smoke detectors are very rich when it comes to this set of criteria; they have very low cost, high benefit and address needs in a very bad-case scenario. They don’t prevent fires but they do help prevent deaths caused by them. 

CO (carbon monoxide) testers are similar. While fire is much worse and far more common than CO, CO still remains a killer that can be addressed with a $25 device and a $2 battery. By the way, let’s not forget batteries. Installing fresh batteries for smoke and CO detectors has an extremely high yield in our index of safety versus cost. It’s amazing how many smoke detectors I see that lack only a $2 battery to save one or many lives. 

Let’s jump to the other end of the scale and look at our leaking roof (actually, your leaking roof, mine’s fine). If the roof leaks, it is almost impossible for this to cause a death (although my mind, like yours, rushes to all the wild Rube Goldberg linkages that could cause a death). 

In fact, there are, for the most part, only very small amounts of damage done to most houses by roof leaks. This is primarily due to the fact that roof leaks rarely hide (although they certainly can in some cases) and usually become extremely noticeable, if not unsightly, before they’ve done any significant amount of real structural damage. For the most part, roof leaks damage ceiling finishes and, if allowed to advance (if you drink heavily) can do some damage to other components such as wiring and framing. I always like to remind people that wood is not easily damaged by water; they build boats out of it!  

Sheetrock and plaster are quickly damaged and possibly destroyed by roof leaks and this is sort of sad (and sort of not really very much) but it shouldn’t be anyone’s worst-case scenario. 

Flipping back to worst cases again, fire escape is very high on my list. This can include removal of window bars, looking at the needs of the disabled (e.g. can they get downstairs), training of children and installation of rope or chain ladders. Window size and type is also a pretty large issue here. 

If a window doesn’t open enough to climb out (or for a firewoman to climb in!) it’s a big problem. Window locks that require a key are a huge hazard and have a big cost/benefit and worst-case index. The same applies to “double cylinder” door locks that require a key to escape. 

I won’t miss the chance to throw in my person dead-horse (the thing I like to beat), the earthquake. While you may never experience a very large earthquake, the worst-case scenario is very, very high. There can be death (most likely by fire) and there will almost certainly be a great deal of property damage and loss if you experience a very large earthquake. 

If you live where this has a low likelihood, substitute your own disaster (are you reading this Mr. Brown?) and adjust your funding and action accordingly. For my friends in the Bay Area, earthquake concerns should take precedence over roof leaks. I would sooner see my client spend seven grand on seismic retrofitting for an earthquake that they may never experience than one grand fixing a leak that’s occurring today! 

Now, I’m not actually suggesting that you let the roof leak but you get my point. It’s fine and good and terrific to spend money on the things that make you crazy or present themselves to you, dirty paws and all, but it’s vital that we focus a portion of our energy on the things that might do great harm to us, and those we love, even if the event seems way off in the distance.  

And of course, remember to eat out more often, smile a lot and get more hugs. 

 

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


Berkeley This Week

Friday March 02, 2007

FRIDAY, MARCH 2 

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 Leonard Syme on “Preventing Disease and Promoting Health.” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $14, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For reservations call 526-2925.  

“The Life and Thought of Slain Salavadoran Jesuit, Ignacio Ellacuria” with Robert Lassalle-Klein at 7 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker School, Marian Hall, 2nd Flr., 2125 Jefferson St. Not wheelchair accessible. 499-7080. 

“Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform” with author Stephan Haggard at 4 p.m. in the IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton St., 6th Floor. 642-2809. 

“Power Trip” a film about electricity in the Republic of Georgia at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., midtown Oakland. Donation $5. www.HumanistHall.net 

Circle Dancing, simple folk dancing with instruction at 7:30 p.m. at Finnish Brotherhood Hall, 1970 Chestnut St at University. Donation of $5 requested. 528-4253. www.circledancing.com 

SATURDAY, MARCH 3 

Turtle Time Meet the turtles of Tilden Park and learn the difference between native and non-native, male and female, at 11 a.m. at the Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Kids Garden Club for ages 6-9 to explore the world of gardening, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 636-1684. 

Sick Plant Clinic Dr. Robert Raabe, plant pathologist, and Dr. Nick Mills, entomologist, will diagnose plant illnesses and recommend remedies. Bring a piece of the plant in a securely sealed container. A zipperlock bag is ideal. From 9 a.m. to noon at Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Dr. 643-2755. 

Bay Area Seed Interchange Library Annual Seed Swap potluck hoedown to share music, food, and home grown garden seeds. From 5 to 8 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $10, free if you bring seeds and a dish to share. 548-2220 ext. 233. 

The Architecture of Oakland’s Downtown Walking Tour Meet at 10 am at the below-street-level fountain just outside the 12th St. BART station. Walk ends at the 19th Street BART. This is a moderately paced, level walk. Wear comfortable shoes, dress in layers, and bring water and snack. 848 9358. www.berkeleypaths.org  

Kayak and Walking Tour of Brooks Island with Save the Bay. From 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Cost is $85-$95. To register call 452-9261, ext. 109. 

Gardening Basics: What is Really Important with Aerin Moore at 10 a.m. at Magic Gardens Nursey, 729 Heinz Ave., off 7th St. 644-2351. 

“Christian Responses to the World Water Crisis” a workshop with Marian Ronan, professor at the GTU from 1 to 5 p.m. at American Baptist Seminary of the West, 2606 Dwight Way. Sponsored by Corporate Accountability International. 644-4956. 

“Immigration: The Impact Beyond Mexico” with Arnoldo Garcia, National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, Larisa Cafilla, Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition, Nunu Kidane, Africa Priority Network at others at 11 a.m. at the Prescott Joseph Center, 920 Peralta St., Oakland. Sponsored by the John George Democratic Club.  

Making Sense of the Medicare Enrollment Period a free workshop at 2 p.m. at the Oakland Public Library, 125-14th St. Presented by Jess Strange of Health Insurance Advocacy Program. 238-3138. 

“The Legacy of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade” A luncheon with the men and women who volunteered to defend the Spanish Republic against fascism in 1936 at 2 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 27th and Harrison Sts., Oakland. Tickets are $35. 582-7699.  

Fundraiser Crab Dinner for Golden Gate Boys Choir at 6:30 p.m. at St. Peter’s Church, 6013 Lawton, Oakland. Tickets are $35. For reservations call 887-4311. 

“Finding the Creative and Spiritual in Everyday Life” a conference from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the Bade Museum, Pacific School of Religion, 1798 Scenic Ave. 527-2935. www.ahimsaberkeley.org 

Dr. Seuss’ Birthday Party at 11 a.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. All ages welcome. Free but reservations required. 524-3043. 

Oakland Museum of California White Elephant Sale from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sun. from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 333 Lancaster St. at Glascock, Oakland. free shuttle bus from the Fruitvale BART. 238-2200. 

Hopalong Animal Rescue Come meet your furry new best friend from noon to 3 p.m. at 2940 College Ave. 267-1915, ext. 500. www.hopalong.org  

Produce Stand at Spiral Gardens Food Security Project from 1 to 6 p.m. at the corner of Sacramento and Oregon St. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

Petite Pooches Playgroup for small dogs from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., one block north of Solano on Ensenada at Talbot. 524-2459. 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755.  

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, MARCH 4 

Shoreline Discovery Walk along San Pablo Bay with Bethany Facendini, naturalist, from 9:30 to 11 a.m. Call for meeting place. 525-2233. 

“Open Garden” Join the Little Farm gardener for composting, planting, watering and reaping the rewards of our work, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. Cancelled only by heavy rain. 525-2233.  

“Climate Change” the first of a series of Sunday talks on Climate Change by Karen Street at 1 p.m. at Berkeley Friends Meeting, 2151 Vine. 653-2803. 

Salon in the Grove Discussion of the tree-sitting protest at 2 p.m. at the Memorial Oak Grove, east side of UC campus just off of Gayley Rd. 548-3609. 

International Women’s Day “Criminal of Poverty” presented by memoir author “Tiny” aka Lisa Gray-Garci from 10 am. to noon at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, 1924 Cedar St. 841-4824. 

Berkeley Playreading Group meets at 2 p.m. at 1471 Addison St. at the rear of 1473 Addison. 655-7962.  

Free Sailboat Rides from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Cal Sailing Club, Berkeley Marina. Wear warm, waterproof clothing and bring a change of clothes in case you get wet. www.cal-sailing.org 

Cyber Salon with Scott Rosenberg, founder of Salon.com on his new book “Dreaming in Code” at 5 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Donation $10. 

Holistic Pet Evaluation with animal crisis consultant from 1 to 3 p.m. at Rabbit Ears, 303 Arlington Ave., Kensington. To schedule an appointment call 525-6155. 

“The Spiritual Journey of a Lifelong UU” with Sue Amgidson at 9:30 p.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302, ext. 306. 

Tibetan Buddhism with Sandy Olney on “Walking on the Roof of the World” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812.  

MONDAY, MARCH 5  

“Tule Elk: Biggest Wild Animals in the East Bay” A slide show with Mike Moran on one of California’s largest land mammals, at 7:30 p.m. at Montclair Presbyterian Church, 5701 Thornhill Rd., Oakland. Cost is $5, children free. 655-6658.www.close-to-home.org 

“The Big Bang, COBE, and the Relic Radiation Traces of Creation” with George Smoot, 2006 Noble Prize winner at 5:30 p.m. at Berkeley Rep’s Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St. Free. 486-5183. 

“Black Jews, Jews, and other Heroes” A talk with Howard Lenhoff at 6:30 p.m. at JCCEB, 1414 Walnut St. 848-0237. 

Red Cross Blood Drive from noon to 6 p.m. at East Pauley Ballroom, MLK Student Union, UC Campus. To schedule an appointment go to www.BeADonor.com (code UCB) 

Free Diabetes Screening from 9 to 11 a.m. at the West Berkeley Senior Center.Do not eat or drink anything for 8 hours beforehand. 981-5332. 

TUESDAY, MARCH 6 

Tuesdays for the Birds Tranquil bird walks in local parklands, led by Bethany Facendini, from 7 to 9:30 a.m. Today we will visit the Carquinez Strait Regional Shoreline. Call for meeting place and if you need to borrow binoculars. 525-2233. 

Tilden Tots Join a nature adventure program for 3 and 4 year olds, each accompanied by an adult (grandparents welcome)! We’ll learn about the water cycle, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8. Registration required. 636-1684. 

Documentaries by Lebanese Women including “Here and Perhaps Elsewhere” at 7 p.m. at the California Theater, 2113 Kittredge St. Tickets are $6-$8. 415-564-1100. www.aff.org 

Civil Rights Tales with Stagebridge Theater at 1:15 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5190. 

“Universal Health Care: What are the next steps?” with Richard Quint, MD, MPH, at noon at the Albany Library, at Marin and Masonic Aves, Albany. Brown Bag Luncheon Series of the League of Women Voters. Bring your lunch, hot drinks provided. 843-8824. 

“A Short Trip to Italy” multi-media presentation by Countess Alessandra Ranghiasci on her family's 150 room ancestral palace in Gubbio, Italy's best preserved medieval village, at 6 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Cost is $15. 848-7800.  

Berkeley School Volunteers Training workshop for volunteers interested in helping the public schools, from 2 to 3 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. 644-8833. 

Free Legal Assistance the first Tues. of the month at 6 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. Advance registration required. 526-3720, ext. 5. 

Discussion Salon on Schools and Gangs at 7 p.m. at JCC, 1414 Walnut.  

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704. www.ecologycenter.org 

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

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 7 

Walking Tour of UC Berkeley Campus with retired East Bay Regional Park District Naturalist Alan Kaplan. Meet at 10 a.m. at the campus entrance gate at Euclid and Hearst for this moderately paced, 2-hour walk. Dress in layers and wear comfortable shoes. 526-7609. www.berkeleypaths.org  

Tilden Tots Join a nature adventure program for 3 and 4 year olds, each accompanied by an adult (grandparents welcome)! We’ll learn about the water cycle, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8. Registration required. 636-1684. 

Teach-In and Vigil Against American Torture every Wed. at noon at Boalt Hall, Bancroft Way at College Ave.  

“Torture, Human Rights and Terrorism” a panel discussion in conjunction with the exhbition of paintings of Abu Graib by Frenando Botero, at 4 p.m. at Booth Auditorium, Boalt Hall, UC Campus. 

Walk, Talk, Buck the Fence What’s at stake in the Ecology of Berkeley’s Strawberry Canyon A walk at 5 p.m. every Wed. with guests to discuss what is at stake in the next proposed steps for the filling of the Canyon by the UC-LBL Rad-Labs, and now British Petroleum. http://canyonwalks.blogspot.com  

“Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic” Chalmers Johnson in conversation with Gray Brechin at 7:30 p.m. at King Middle School auditorium, 1781 Rose St.Tickets are $12-$15. 848-6767, ext. 609. 

“Black Gold” a documentary expose of the coffee-industry at 6 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. Oakland. Free. 238-2200. 

New to DVD: “L’Enfant” at 7 p.m. at JCCEB, 1414 Walnut St. Discussion follows. 848-0237. 

Beyond the Ivory Tower: Alternative Careers for Asia Specialists, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton St., 6th Flr. RSVP required. 642-2809.  

Red Cross Blood Services Volunteer Oreintation from 10 a.m. to noon at 6230 Claremont Ave. Registration required. 594-5165. 

Accessible Telephones, for those with vision, hearing, speaking and memory loss, on display from 12:45 to 1:45 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5190. 

Lomi Lomi Hawaiian form of bodywork, at 7 p.m. at Elephant Pharmacy, 1607 Shattuck Ave. 549-9200. 

WriterCoach Connection seeks volunteers to help students improve their writing and thinking skills. Commit to 1-2 hours per week during the school day and work one-on-one with students in their English classes. Training from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. 524-2319. www.writercoachconnection.org 

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

Stitch ‘n Bitch at 6:30 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

THURSDAY, MARCH 8 

“Unseen and Unheard: Finding Bats in the Night Sky” with Dr. Joe Szewczak, from Humboldt State Univ., at the East Bay Scence Cafe, at Spud's Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. 558-0881. 

The Natural History of the Klamath-Siskiyou Bioregion at 7 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. 548-2220, ext. 233. 

Activism in the Americas for International Women’s Day at at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Sliding scale donation $5-$20. 849-2568.  

Documentaries by Lebanese Women including “Lebanon/War” at 7 p.m. at the California Theater, 2113 Kittredge St. Tickets are $6-$8. 415-564-1100. www.aff.org 

Movies and Speakers on the Anti-G8 Movement at 6:30 p.m. at the Long Haul, 3124 Shattuck Ave. 540-0751. 

Free Diabetes Screening from 8 a.m. to noon at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Do not eat or drink anything for 8 hours beforehand. 981-5332. 

“The Care Crisis: The Problem That Has No Name” with Prof. Ruth Rosen at noon at Berkeley City College Auditorium, 2050 Center St. 981-2884. 

Family Story Time for children ages 3-7 at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, North Branch, 1170 The Alameda, at Hopkins. 981-6107. 

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 

Tax Help at the Berkeley Public Library Sat. from 11:30 to 4:30 p.m. at the South Branch. Call for appointment. 981-6260. Also every Tues. and Thurs. at the West Branch from 12:15 to 3:15 p.m. Call for appointment. 981-6270. 

Berkeley Winter Campaign for Cats We are providing free trapping assistance and spay/neuter to feral and homeless cats in Berkeley, Albany, Emeryville and Piedmont, through March 2007. The cats will be spayed/neutered, vaccinated, treated for fleas and returned safely back to their neighborhoods. To report a neighborhood in need or to volunteer, please call 908-0709. 

CITY MEETINGS 

Council Agenda Committee meets Mon., March 5, at 2:30 p.m., at 2180 Milvia St. 981-6900. 

Peace and Justice Commission meets Mon., March 5, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5510.


Arts Calendar

Tuesday February 27, 2007

TUESDAY, FEB. 27 

CHILDREN 

Introduction to Musical Instruments with musical storyteller Deborah Bonet at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. For age 3 and up. 524-3043. 

THEATER 

“Civil Rights Tales” A Black History Month celebration with Stagebridge at 1:15 p.m. at North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst St. 981-5190. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“New Work” Paintings and intaglio prints by Carol Dalton and Seiko Tachibana opens at the Cecile Moochnek Gallery, 1809-D Fourth St. and runs though March 31. 549-1018. 

FILM 

Alternative Visions “Pine Flat” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Leonard Susskind, Stanford physicist, talks about “The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

ProArts Juried Annual Artists’ talk at 1 p.m. at 550 Second St., Oakland. 763-9425. www.proartsgallery.org 

Christopher Phillips introduces “Socrates in Love: Philosophy for a Passionate Heart” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Motordude Zydeco at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun/ 

Zydeco dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

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

The David Munnelly Band at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Randy Craig Trio at 7:30 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Myra Melford & Be Bread at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$14. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

WEDNESDAY, FEB. 28 

THEATER 

Berkeley Rep “To the Lighthouse” opens at the Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St. and runs through March 25. Tickets are $45-$61. 647-2917. 

FILM 

History of Cinema “Sunset Blvd.” at 3 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy” A conversation with Grania Davis at the JCC of the East Bay, 1414 Walnut St. Cost is $10-$20. Sponsored by Aquarian Minyan. 465-3935. 

Yael Hedaya, Israeli journalist, reads from her novel “Accidents” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

China Miéville introduces “Un Lun Dun” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Ann Hood reads from her new novel “The Knitting Circle” at 3 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

Bayswater Book Club meets to discuss “I’m OK, You’re OK” by Thomas Harris at 6:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble, El Cerrito. 433-2911. 

Freight and Salvage Open Mic at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $4.50-$5.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

“Writing Teachers Write” monthly student/teacher readings at 5 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus, through March 4. Tickets are $32-$56. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Music for the Spirit Music celebrating African-American composers at 12:15 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church of Oakland, 2619 Broadway. 444-3555. 

UC Jazz Ensembles at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $6. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Tamsen Donner Band at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. West Coast Swing dance lesson at 7:30 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Orquestra Candela at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low. Salsa dance lessons at 8 p.m. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Charley Baker at 9 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $5. 451-8100. www.uptownnightclub.com 

Beckett’s Family Reunion with Nicole and the Sisters in Soul at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Willie Jones III Trio at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$16. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, MARCH 1 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Through Women’s Eyes” featuring works by Frances Catlett opens at the Prescott Joseph Center for Community Enhancement, 920 Peralta St., Oakland, and runs through May 3. 835-8683. www.prescottjoseph.org 

“Gossamer Worlds & Quilted Quandries” Mixed media works by Patricia Gillespie, Bethany Ayres and Hillary Kantmann on display at Esteban Sabar Gallery, 480 23rd St. at Telegraph to April 2. 444-7411. 

“A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s” Guided tour at 12:15 and 5:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. 

FILM 

“Las Madres: The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo” with filmmakers Susana Muñoz and Lourdes Portillo at 5:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Free screening. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Lunch Poems with Myung Mi Kim at 12:10 p.m. in the Morrison Library, in the Doe Library, UC Campus. http://lunchpoems.berkeley.edu 

Elmaz Abinadar and Suheir Hammad, Arab-American spoken word, at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Anne Barrows reads from her new poetry at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

Stuart Skorman on “Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur: Why I Can’t Stop Starting Over” at 5:30 and 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Len Lyons talks about “The Ethiopian Jews of Israel: Personal Stories of Life in the Promised Land” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

The Uptones, ska, at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Mary Youngblood & the Sisters of the Earth at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Bob Kenmotsu Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Elise Lebec, solo piano, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

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

Tourettes with Regrets at 8:30 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Cost is $8. 763-1146. www.oaklandmetro.org 

Kurt Elling at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$20. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Headnodic & Raashan Ahmad at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low. Cost is $5. 548-1159.  

FRIDAY, MARCH 2 

THEATER 

Aurora Theatre Company “The Birthday Party” Wed. - Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m. at 2081 Addison St., through March 11. Tickets are $38. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

Berkeley Rep “The Pillowman” at 8 p.m. at the Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St., through March 11. Tickets are $33-$61. 647-2949. 

Berkeley Rep “To the Lighthouse” at the Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St. and runs through March 25. Tickets are $45-$61. 647-2917. 

Black Repertory Group “Phyllis” Fri. and Sat. at 3201 Adeline St. Call for time and ticket information. 652-2120.  

Central Works Theater Ensemble “Lola Montez” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. through March 25. Tickets are $9-$25. 558-1381. www.centralworks.org 

Contra Costa Civic Theater “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at 951 Pomona Ave., at Moeser, El Cerrito., through March 3. Tickets are $15-$24. 524-9132.  

Impact Theatre “Cartoon” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid, through March 10. Tickets are $10-$15.  

The Marsh “Shopping for God” Thurs.-Sat. at 7 p.m. at 2120 Allston Way, through March 3. Tickets are $15-$22. 1-800-838-5750. www.themarsh.org 

TheatreFirst “Nathan the Wise” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 3 p.m. at Old Oakland Theater, 481 Ninth St. at Broadway, Oakland, through March 4. Tickets are $21-$25. 436-5085. www.theatrefirst.com 

UC Dept. of Theater “Dolly West’s Kitchen” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Campus. Tickets are $10-$14. 642-9925. http://theater.berkeley.edu 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Genetic Memories of Graffiti” performance art at 7 p.m. at Lobot Gallery, 1800 Campbell St., Oakland. www.weekendwakeup.com 

All Colors Oakland Celebration with recent art by Raymond Saunders. Opening reception at 5:30 p.m. at Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th St., Oakland. 465-8928. 

Overhung 3 Over 500 works of art in a garage-sized gallery. Opening reception at 7 p.m. at Boontling Gallery, 4224 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. 295-8881. www.boontlinggallery.com 

“The Stories We Tell Ourselves” works by Robert Tomlinson and Anna Vaughan. Reception at 6 p.m. at Mercury 20 Gallery, 25 Grand Ave. at Broadway.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Robert Lassalle-Klein discusses “Love That Produces Hope: The Life and Thought of Slain Salavadoran Jesuit, Ignacio Ellacuria” at 7 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker School, Marian Hall, 2nd Flr., 2125 Jefferson St. Not wheelchair accessible. 499-7080. 

Creative Aging: Bay Area Women Artists Aged 85-105 With Amy Gorman, author of “Aging Artfully” and Greg Young’s DVD, “Still Kicking” at 4 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant. 527-4977. 

Marisa Handler reads from “Loyal to the Sky: Notes from an Activist” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus, through March 4. Tickets are $32-$56. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Dance IS Festival at 8 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $10-$15. 925-798-1300. 

Organists Ed Teixiera and Ann Callaway perform Lizst’s Via Crucis at 11:15 a.m. at Saint David of Wales Catholic Church, 5641 Esmond Ave. at Sonoma, Richmond. 237-1531. 

University Symphony Orchestra at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $8-$12. 642-9988. 

The Edmund Welles Bass Clarinet Quartet at 8 p.m. at 1510 Eighth Street Performance Space, Oakland. Cost is $5-$15 sliding scale. events@thejazzhouse.com 

William Beatty, piano, Richard Saunders, bass, Alan Hall, drums at 8 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. Tickets are $12. 848-1228.  

Tony Bellaver “Interventions” Performance art from 1 to 4 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. Donations accepted. 644-6893. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

Country Joe McDonald Tribute to Woody Guthrie at 7:30 p.m. at Cafe de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck Ave. 287-8700. 

Manicato & Umoverde at 9 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $8-$10. 849-2568.  

Gadget, No Strangers, Jokes for Feelings, Sentinel at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $10. 848-0886.  

Mo’Fone at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$15. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Muziki Roberson Quintet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Prince Diabate & His Band in a benefit for Darfur at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12-$15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Sherry Austin at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

The Edlos at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Cyndi Harvell and Mike Eckstein at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Verbal Abuse, A.D.T, Eskapo 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. 

The P-PL at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

Facing New York, Panda, Tempo no Tempo at 8:30 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Cost is $10. 763-1146. www.oaklandmetro.org 

Kurt Elling at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$20. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SATURDAY, MARCH 3 

CHILDREN  

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

Maggie the Clown celebrates National Reading Month Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 and 2:30 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave., Oakland. 452-2259. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Art of Living Black” Self-guided art tour from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond. Directories available from the Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Ave., Richmond. 620-6772. www.richmondartcenter.org 

8 in 07 A group show of East Bay artists opens at the Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave., to April 1. Gallery hours are Wed.-Sun. 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. 848-1228. 

California College of the Arts 100th Anniversary Art Show opens at 3 p.m. at Montclair Gallery, 1986 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. Exhibition runs to April 30. 339-4286. 

Jessamyn Lovell talks about her work “Catastrophe, Crisis and Other Family Traditions” at 4 p.m. at the Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Ave., Richmond. 620-6772. www.richmondartcenter.org 

FILM 

Women of Color Film Festival “Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena“ with fimmaker Lourdes Portillo at 7 p.m. and “The Devil Never Sleeps” at 9 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Andy Couturier on “Writing Open the Mind: Tapping the Subconscious to Free the Writing and the Writer” at 5:30 at at Black Oak Books. 486-0698.  

Bay Area Poets Coalition Open Reading at 3 p.m. at Strawberry Creek Lodge, 1320 Addison St. Park on the street. 527-9905. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at 2 and 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus, through March 4. Tickets are $32-$56. 642-9988.  

Dance IS Festival at 8 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $10-$15. 925-798-1300. 

Nexus: Volti a capella at 8 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. Tickets are $8-$20. 415-771-3352. www.voltisf.org 

The Streicher Trio “Music and Dance in 18th Century Spain” at 8 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Tickets are $10-$25. 528-1725. 

American Bach Soloists Elizabeth Blumenstock, violin, and Mary Wilson, soprano, at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $16-$42. 415-621-7900.  

Sacred & Profane “Springtime in Paris” at 8 p.m. at All Souls Episcopal Church, 2220 Cedar St. Tickets are $15-$18. 524-3611. 

University Symphony Orchestra at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $8-$12. 642-9988. 

Poulenc Trio, with Vladimir Lande, oboist, at 7:30 p.m. at Regents Theater, Holy Names University, 3500 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. Tickets are $35-$40. 601-7919.  

Country Joe McDonald Tribute to Woody Guthrie at 7:30 p.m. at Cafe de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck Ave. 287-8700. 

Oakland Assault at 8 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Cost is $10. 763-1146.  

Altipampa, traditional sounds from the Andes at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12-$14. 849-2568.  

Eric Swinderman Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ.  

Bulgarika at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Balkan dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $15. 525-5054.  

Sotaque Baino, Brazilian music, at 8 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Jon Roniger and Theo Harman at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe. 595-5344.  

Gemini Soul with Ajamu Akinyele at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Rustler’s Moon with Kathy Kallick & Bill Evans at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Gaucho, gypsy jazz, at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $5. 843-2473.  

Nicole McRory at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

Pete Madsen, folk, at 8 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7. 558-0881. 

Flip the Switch, A Class Act, Chris Murray at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

 

 

 

 

 

SUNDAY, MARCH 4 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Art of Living Black” Self-guided art tour from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond. Directories available from the Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Ave., Richmond. 620-6772. www.richmondartcenter.org 

“Earth in Flowers” Chinese paintings by Y. C. Chiang and Hui Liu, and hand-blown glass by Michael Sosin. Reception at 3 p.m. at the Community Art Gallery, Alta Bates Summit Medical Center, 2450 Ashby Ave. 204-1667.  

“A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s” Guided tour at 2 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Conversations on Art with Ira Nowinski at 1 p.m. at the Judah L. Magnes Museum, 2911 Russell St. 549-6950.  

Serena Bartlett introduces “Grassroutes Travel Guide to Oakland” at 2 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Chad Lejeune talks about “The Worry Trap: How to Free Yourself from Worry and Anxiety Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy” at 6 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Abby Seixas on “The Deep River Within: Finding Balance and Meaning in a 24/7 World” at 7 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at 3 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32-$56. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Chamber Music Sundaes with San Francisco Symphony musicians and friends at 3 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Tickets at the door are $18-$20. 415-753-2792. 

Rudolf Buchbinder, piano at 3 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $42. 642-9988. 

Betty Fu, vocals, Ben Stolorow, piano at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center 1275 Walnut St. Csot is $10. 644-6893. berkeleyartcenter.org 

California Bach Society “Consolation and Comfort” at 4 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. Tickets are $10-$25. 415-262-0272.  

Golden Key Piano School Recital at 2 p.m. in Berkeley. Call for location 665-5466. 

Liliana Herrera & Rafael Herrera, satirical socio-political songs, at 7 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $7-$15 sliding scale. 849-2568. 

David Lindley at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $22.50-$23.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

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

Country Joe McDonald Tribute to Woody Guthrie at 7:30 p.m. at Cafe de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck Ave. 287-8700 

Sambajah, Brazilian, at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

My Last Day on Earth, Almost Dead, River Runs Black and others at 6:30 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Cost is $10. 763-1146. www.oaklandmetro.org 

MONDAY, MARCH 5 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Studio Man Ray” Photographs by Ira Nowinski opens at the Judah L. Magnes Museum, 2911 Russell St. and runs through August 5. 549-6950. 

“A Visual Journal” Oils and works on paper by Lisa Bruce opens at Bucci’s, 6121 Hollis St., Emeryville, and runs to March 30. www.lisabruce.com 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Actors Reading Writers: “Unusual Circumstances,” works by Lorrie Moore, Wallace Stegner, and Jessamyn West at 7:30 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Free. 932-0214. 

Readings from Golden Handcuffs Magazine with contributors David Bromige, Laynie Browne, Richard Denner, Michael McClure, David Meltzer and Michael Rothenberg at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Cara Black reads from “Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis“ at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Dinaw Mengestu talks about “The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Nalo Hopkinson introduces her new novel, ”The New Moon’s Arms” at 7 p.m. at Revolution Books, 2425 Channing Way. 848-1196. 

Poetry Express with MK Chavez at 7 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. berkeleypoetryexpress@yahoo.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

David Lindley at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $22.50-$23.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Ramon & Jessica and Michael Musika at 6 p.m. at Mama Buzz Cafe, 2318 Telegraph, at 23rd, Oakland. 

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

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


Arts and Entertainment Around the East Bay

Tuesday February 27, 2007

MYUNG MI KIM AT UC’S DOE LIBRARY 

 

Myung Mi Kim will read from her work at the Morrison Library (inside Doe Library) at noon Thursday as part of UC Berkeley’s Lunch Poems series. Born in Seoul, Korea, Kim goes to the root of language, connecting speech and culture in a rich web of immaculate phrases. She strips words to the bone, using fragments and white space to enhance her themes of dislocation and first language loss. She is the author of four books of poetry, including Under Flag, winner of the 1991 Multicultural Publishers Book Award, and Commons (2002). http://lunchpoems.berkeley.edu. 

 

ARAB-AMERICAN POETRY AND MUSIC 

 

Elmaz Abinader and Suheir Hammad will present an evening of Arab-American spoken word, with music by Tony Khalife and Kamal Ghammache-Mansour, at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña. Mills College professor Abinader is an Arab American author, playwright and poet and was the recipient of the 2002 Goldies Award for Literature. Her poetry collection In the Country of My Dreams... won the 2000 Josephine Miles/ Pen Oakland Award. $12. 3105 Shattuck Ave. 849-2568, www.lapena.org or www.elmazabinader.com. 

 

‘THE ART OF LIVING BLACK’ 

 

A self-guided art tour of The Art of Living Black, featuring the work of local black artists, takes place this Saturday and Sunday (March 3-4). The show includes the work of over 90 emerging and established artists in a group exhibition (through March 16) at the Richmond Art Center. Additional work is featured by the 2006 Jan Hart-Schuyers Artistic Achievement Award recipients: Aaron Carter, Patricia Patterson and Roosevelt Washington. 2540 Barrett Ave., Richmond. Open noon-5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. 620-6772.


The Theater: Central Works Stages ‘Lola Montez’

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Tuesday February 27, 2007

It’s tough being king ... Ludwig of Bavaria is a proactive, very public monarch. Nothing, whether extensive engineering projects such as roads and canals, or grandiose museums and other monuments to the arts, is too good for his people, and the exchequer be damned. He’ll find a way to make Munich the envy of even Paris and Vienna. 

The private king (if that’s not an oxymoron) is a different man from the capricious, headstrong visionary ever in the limelight. Ludwig is a sensitive, searching soul, a would-be poet of Romantic verses. His decades-long marriage to his queen, celebrated in a gala repetition of wedding vows just before Oktoberfest each year, has become a loveless one. Is this just another sublimation, a sacrifice he should accept for the good of his kingdom, as his minister suggests? Or is there another free spirit, a kindred soul with whom he could soar, eagle-like, into the light? 

His unspoken plea seems to be answered by the advent of an itinerant Spanish dancer, the title character of Gary Grave’s Lola Montez, Central Works’ newest production. Is this the Platonic (or maybe not-so-Platonic) soulmate for whom Ludwig has been yearning, prefigured in his verses—or an impulsive femme fatale and wastrel, a self-made mythic figure cutting a swath across Europe in a scenario which could lead to fiscal ruin, at least—or to a revolutionary Gotterdammerung? 

In a series of scenes laid out in the Julia Morgan-designed salon in the City Club where Central Works plays, mostly dialogues between the king and his minister or his queen, or between queen and minister, or tete-a-tetes with Lola Montez (especially once they’ve become Lolita and Luis to each other), the play delineates Ludwig’s progress from fascination to rapture to besottedness. His own soliloquies (and sometimes a kind of self-narration) highlight his steps along a road that lead him further and further away from the regal life he’s known, a road that never seems to end, even with disenchantment. 

Louis Parnell plays Ludwig with great charm, sometimes courtly, sometimes boyish. But he also shows the paternalism so deep in the king’s soul that he’s oblivious to the possible political effects of his conduct—otherwise, his Romanticism would make him seem almost bourgeois. The focus is on him throughout the play, and Parnell carries it with grace, even when his character’s shoulders begin to sag under the weight of events. 

Central Works co-founder Jan Zvaifler makes of Lola an intriguing woman, perhaps in both senses of the word, though it’s left open how much of the rout the faux-Espanola leaves in her wake is considered or just impulsively willful. She’s seen as Ludwig sees her, a hounded free spirit of femininity seeking shelter, an understanding companion of culture and insight, a tempestuous fighter, holding off a mob at her door with a pistol—or as a forbidding idol, offering her foot to her devoted worshipper.  

Otherwise, Lola’s character is ambiguously drawn by inference, the minister’s reports on her activities, or the rumors of her activities. Gary Graves calls his play a romance, and there is an intensity to the scenes between Lola and Ludwig, especially with the excellent lighting which seems to silhouette or halo them, devised by Graves, who also directed. But the burden of the tale is expressed in the character sketch of the king, who goes from building monuments to his ambitions for his people, to an intoxicated idealist lover raising shrines to the object of his affections, finally to a spent Romantic, sculpting the air with his disillusioned words. 

This is the subtler approach and allows us, for instance, to see Lola miming the Tarantella that made her famous through the eyes of the gently smiling king, already hypnotized, soon to be in over over his head. 

It’s difficult to communicate the effect such women as Lola Montez had in their time, the female equivalent of Lord Byron plus his corsair. Maybe a bit more of the showy element of surprise could be shown early on, as later, when Lola appears, triumphantly feminine and loving, in a dragoon’s uniform she’s put on to sneak into an insurrection-plagued Munich, connecting with her kingly admirer. 

Like that later idol, Lillie Langtry, an habitue of the Bay Area, Lola was borne up on the winds of the 1848 revolutions, eventually to be deposited, at least for a while, in Grass Valley, where she was mentor to little Lotta Crabtree, whose fountain still stands, a cast-iron anachronism, on Market Street in San Francisco. 

Sean Williford, as the gimlet-eyed minister who serves the crown with increasing distaste, and Ludwig’s common sense Queen, who presides with the dignity of the matter of fact, perfectly bookend the pair of lovers with their skepticism becoming alarm.  

From performances to costumery, to the conception of this chamber play that attempts to skirt melodrama and the maudlin in depicting both a historical and an intimately emotional situation, Central Works shows once again their high standards as a resident company committed to the collaborative mounting of new works. 

 

LOLA MONTEZ 

Presented by Central Works at 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and at 5 p.m. Sunday through March 25 at the City Club Theatre at 

Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. 

www.centralworks.org. 558-1381.


Books: Author Commentary: Elephant, Reel Founder Tells How He Did It

By Stuart Skorman, Special to the Planet
Tuesday February 27, 2007

Berkeley has long been famous for starting revolutions—especially revolutions that come from the political left. The purpose of this editorial is to make the heretical proposal that Berkeley launch a revolution from the right—a revolution drawn from the heart of the free-enterprise system.  

I have to admit that I am a poster child of the capitalist system. I come from a family of business owners, and I have spent a lifetime making (and losing) millions of dollars as a start-up entrepreneur. The truth is I may not be good at anything else beyond starting innovative new businesses.  

But whatever your background, it’s hard to deny that socialism will never take root in the U.S.. This means that our only hope for making the world better for everyone is to revolutionize the capitalist system.  

The kind of businesses I really like to start are socially-conscious businesses, businesses that have a double bottom line. By that I mean a business that measures its success by both making a profit and also by helping the community to become a better place. Elephant is the best example of a double line business that I’ve ever started. 

At Elephant, for instance, we provided free wellness classes and also free advice from a variety of health practitioners. This extensive program both helped Berkeley become a healthier place and it also helped Elephant by attracting thousands of new customers.  

Socially responsible capitalism is not a new venture for me. I’ve been doing it for 30 years. With every business that I’ve started throughout my decades of entrepreneurship, my goals were not only to make money (for an enterprise that is not profitable does not survive) but also to revolutionize industries and enrich people’s lives. And it is the opportunity to enrich people’s lives that has given me the most satisfaction. 

At Reel.com, the first Web-based video rental service, I had the good fortune to become an Internet pioneer (and also very wealthy). With Elephant Pharmacy, I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help make Berkeley a healthier place—and to spark drugstores throughout the country to follow suit and become healthier places by emphasizing customer education, natural products, and community outreach. (That Elephant Pharmacy also had a positive impact on other business in our North Shattuck neighborhood was also very important to me.)  

But my biggest motivation and inspiration was customer education. I envisioned a revolutionary store that would not only have a unique product mix from around the world but also be the first big-box retail concept focused on education.  

As most of you know, the dream became a reality. Not just the dream of creating a revolutionary pharmacy, but the leading the world to better things … from Berkeley, California. The first eight customers who waited in line for Elephant on our grand opening day were all Walgreen’s managers — and they were just the beginning of a daily pilgrimage of pharmacy executives visiting Elephant from all over the world. We called them “the suits,” and they stuck out in Berkeley like Deadheads at an NRA convention. The nation’s largest drug store chain, CVS Pharmacy, kept very close tabs on us from their headquarters in far-away Rhode Island. How do we know? Because when we visited Chris Bodine, a very senior CVS executive, he not only knew that we had moved our flower department the previous week, he also knew every detail about the flower’s new location (and was willing to debate us on every detail of the move in the first place!). After our flower debate finally ended, Chris smiled and congratulated us for creating such an incredible new business model and said that CVS could never have done what we did.  

I am writing this guest editorial to encourage the Berkeley community to embrace, welcome, and nurture new businesses that have a double bottom line. I call this new type of capitalism “gentle capitalism.” My dream is for Berkeley to become known throughout the country as a center for gentle capitalism and for incubating new socially-conscious businesses. Berkeley has a national reputation—we capitalists might call it a brand—for leading revolutions. (When Elephant opened wellness boutiques in the Saks Group department stores, our tagline was: “A radically healthy idea from Berkeley, California,” and the people in the Midwest loved that tagline).  

Berkeley has many other assets to attract vibrant, socially conscious startups besides its powerful brand and legacy. We have excellent political leadership with Tom Bates and his dedicated team. The Haas Business School can provide great leadership in many ways and gives us an academic infrastructure that is second to none. Other assets that can attract start-ups are relatively cheap office rents, our great school system, and our biggest asset of all—our strong diverse community of spirited, multi-talented people.  

Berkeley, let’s put out the welcome mat for new innovative double-line businesses that will do a lot more than just help Berkeley’s tax base. These colorful, dynamic, young businesses will add to the vitality and creativity of our community in many ways. Just as we’ve done in the past in the areas of free speech, civil rights, and peace movements, we can set an example for the rest of the country. It’s time for another revolution. 

Since I am much more qualified to start new businesses than I am at managing a more mature business, I have moved on from my leadership role at Elephant. I would like to thank many hundreds of Elephant employees and customers for their incredible support. Now that my job at Elephant has ended, I’m already working on my next start-up—a revolutionary new online movie recommendation engine.  

 

 

Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur 

By Stuart Skorman 

Jossey-Bass Publishers 

 

 


Wild Neighbors: Chemical Weapons: Skin of Newt and Liver of Snakes

By Joe Eaton
Tuesday February 27, 2007

A few columns back I touched on the chemical arms race between newts and garter snakes: the newts loaded with a fugu-like toxin to which the snakes have evolved resistance. Well, there are complexities to that story that I wasn’t aware of, some of which are described in a 2004 Journal of Chemical Ecology article entitled “A Resistant Predator and its Toxic Prey: Persistence of Newt Toxin Leads to Poisonous (Not Venomous) Snakes.” The lead author, Becky Williams, is a UC Berkeley graduate student; she collaborated with Edmund Brodie, Jr. of Utah State University and Edmund Brodie III, now at the University of Virginia. 

For one thing, it isn’t just any old newt or any old garter snake. The only species known to be resistant to the newt toxin (tetrodotoxin, TTX for short) is the common garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis), in respect to the rough-skinned newt (Taricha granulosa). And there seems to be a great deal of variation in patterns of toxicity and resistance. Some rough-skinned newt populations pack higher doses of TTX than others.  

It’s unclear whether this reflects the newts’ diet or has a genetic basis; other toxic amphibians, the arrow-poison frogs, have been shown to acquire their toxin from the insects they eat. Research appears to have ruled out symbiotic bacteria as a TTX source. In any case, garter snake populations that prey on supertoxic newts have evolved higher levels of resistance. 

Oregon’s Benton Couny in the Willamette Valley, where Williams and the Brodies got their specimens, is one of those coevolutionary hot spots. I’m not sure what the picture is in the Bay Area, which has its own populations of common garter snakes (of which the beautiful San Francisco garter snake is a subspecies) and rough-skinned newts, as well as other garter snake and newt species. 

The hypothesis Williams and her co-authors were interested in had to do with whether the Willamette snakes made any use of the newt toxin themselves. There was a precedent: a Japanese snake species that feeds on toads, stores the toad toxin in glands on the back of its neck, and displays the glands when threatened by a predatory bird. Was something similar happening with the garter snakes? 

After feeding newts to snakes, then sacrificing the snakes and assaying their organs, the biologists concluded that TTX stayed in the garter snakes’ livers for at least seven weeks. Three weeks after a newt meal, the average dose in a snake’s liver was 42 micrograms. 

Consuming more newts would crank up the toxicity. Even the one-newt toxin load would be enough to kill typical avian predators of garter snakes, like crows (which are particularly fond of snake livers), northern harriers, red-tailed hawks, and American bitterns. Predatory mammals seem less susceptible. 

But here’s a paradox: a defense that does in the attacker has no evolutionary advantage for the prey species. Death short-circuits the learning experience. Toxic defenses only make sense if a predator’s reaction is sublethal: it feels terrible and avoids such prey in the future. Williams and the Brodies say TTX acts quickly enough to cause an emetic response—so a crow might well survive a bite of toxic snake liver, sadder but wiser. 

They also speculate that the garter snakes’ coloration may aid that process. Most populations of the species are boldly patterned in red and black; like the monarch butterfly’s orange and black, this could function as a warning to predators with color vision, notably birds. The snakes of Benton County, which would have atypically high TTX levels, also have brighter red coloration. (The newts’ vivid orange underbellies serve to warn their own predators, and are mimicked by nontoxic salamanders like the ensatina). 

And the snakes appear to accentuate the visual signals with defensive displays that highlight their red lateral markings. The foul-smelling musk they emit when threatened may contain chemical cues to their unpalatability. 

As a sidebar, it seems that resistance to newt toxin involves tradeoffs: resistant snakes can’t crawl as fast as nonresistant ones. Why this should be is unclear—maybe one of those genetic linkage deals. But it would give resistant snakes more of a window of vulnerability to predation.  

It’s a complicated world out there, and the ancient dance of predator and prey has infinite variations. The Brodies are still working on the newt-snake interaction, but Becky Williams has moved on to other toxic creatures and is now studying the notoriously venomous Australian blue-ringed octopus. Let’s wish her luck.  

 

Joe Eaton’s column runs every other Tuesday, alternating with Ron Sullivan’s “Green Neighbors,” a column on East Bay trees. 

 

 

 


Berkeley This Week

Tuesday February 27, 2007

TUESDAY, FEB. 27 

“Civil Rights Tales” A Black History Month celebration with Stagebridge at 1:15 p.m. at North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst St. 981-5190. 

Watershed Council Presentation on Pacific Lumber and an update on the thereat to the Memorial Stadium Oak Grove at 7 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. 548-3113. www.HeadwatersPreserve.org 

“Quakes, Quacks, and Conquistadors” A slide presentation of the Bay Area’s natural and cultrual history at 10 a.m. at Shorebird Park Nature Center, 160 University Ave, at the Marina. 636-1684. 

Community Celebration for Black History Month at 6:30 p.m. at James Kenney Recreation Center, 1720 Eighth St. 981-5158. 

Holocaust Remembrance Day Planning Meeting at noon at 2180 Milvia St., 5th Floor Redbud Room. Come help plan for Berkeley’s 5th Annual Holocaust Remembrance Day. 981-7170. 

“Project Censored” with Peter Phillips on how and why the mainstream corporate media make decisions about which stories to cover, at 7:30 p.m. at the mmeting af the El Cerrito Democratic Club, Northminster Presbyterian Church, 545 Asbury Ave., El Cerrito. 835-2727. 

Alaska’s Wilderness Rivers A slide show with Oliver Steinfels on rafting the Tatshenshini and Alsek rivers at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Free Eating Disorders Screening from 10:00 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center, Herrick Campus, CC Conference Room (Level A), 2001 Dwight Way. 204-4580. 

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. 

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. 848-1704.  

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. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, FEB. 28 

Teach-In and Vigil Against American Torture every Wed. at noon at Boalt Hall, Bancroft Way at College Ave.  

Disaster Preparedness for Seniors: Lessons from Katrina at 1:30 p.m. at North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst. 548-9696. 

“What’s at Stake in the Ecology of Berkeley’s Strawberry Canyon” A walk at 5 p.m. with Joe McBride, UC Forestry Professor on the significance of the Oak Grove in Strawberry Canyon. http://canyonwalks. 

blogspot.com 

“Grassroots, Nonviolent Resistance in Palestine” with Feryal Abu Haikal and Mohammed Khatib at 7 p.m. at 145 Dwinelle Hall, UC Campus. Sponsored by Students for Justice in Palestine.  

“Immigration Reform: Problems and Prospects for the Community” a panel discussion from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Richmond Public Library’s Madeline F. Whittlesey Community Room, 325 Civic Center Plaza in central Richmond. 620-6561. 

Progressive Democrats of the East Bay meets at 7 p.m. at Spud’s Pizza, 3290 Adeline, to discuss against the war, electoral reform, and other issues in California and local politics. 636-4149. www.pdeastbay.org 

“Sustainability Education for Inspired Lives and Healthy Communities” with Trathen Heckman at 1 p.m. at Wurster Hall, 315A, UC Campus. Part of the Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning Colloquium. http://laep.ced.berkeley.edu/events/colloquium 

Live Free Box Clothing Swap from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. at the Long Haul, 3124 Shattuck Ave. 540-0751. 

Exploring Jewish Responses to Big Questions at 6:45 at JGate near El Cerrito Plaza and BART station. Suggested donation of $5. Call for reservation and address. 559-8140. 

Berkeley School Volunteers Training workshop for volunteers interested in helping the public schools, from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. 644-8833. 

El Grupito, a group for practicing and maintaining Spanish skills, meets at 7:30 p.m. at Diesel Books, 5433 College Ave., Oakland. 653-9965. 

WriterCoach Connection seeks volunteers to help students improve their writing and thinking skills. Training from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. 524-2319.  

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Heavy rain cancels. 548-9840. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil e at 6:30 p.m. at the Berkeley BART Station followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www. 

geocities.com/vigil4peace/vigil 

THURSDAY, MARCH 1 

“Feminism Transcends Borders” A panel discussion for Women’s History Month with Paola Bacchetta, Purnima Madhivanan and Beatríz Pesquera at 6 p.m. at the Free Speech Movement Cafe, UC Campus. 643-6445.  

Alameda County Transportation Authority Public Meeting on the Local Business Enterprise Program at 6:30 p.m. at Oakland Mariott City Center, 1001 Broadway. 267-6111. 

What to Eat with Marion Nestle at 5 p.m. at Elephant Pharmacy, 1607 Shattuck Ave. 549-9200. 

Teen Book Club meets to discuss wordy books at 4:30 p.m. at the Claremont Branch Library, 2940 Benvenue at Ashby. Bring a book to share. 981-6107. 

Red Cross Blood Drive from noon to 6 p.m. at Unit 4 Dorms, UC Campus. To schedule an appointment go to www.BeADonor.com (code UCB) 

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.  

Avatar Metaphysical Toastmasters Club meets at 6:45 p.m. at Spud’s Pizza, 3290 Adeline. 

FRIDAY, MARCH 2 

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 Leonard Syme on “Preventing Disease and Promoting Health.” 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.  

“The Life and Thought of Slain Salavadoran Jesuit, Ignacio Ellacuria” with Robert Lassalle-Klein at 7 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker School, Marian Hall, 2nd Flr., 2125 Jefferson St. Not wheelchair accessible. 499-7080. 

“Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform” with author Stephan Haggard at 4 p.m. in the IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton St., 6th Floor. 642-2809. 

“Power Trip” a film about electricity in the Republic of Georgia at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., midtown Oakland. Donation $5. www.HumanistHall.net 

Circle Dancing, simple folk dancing with instruction at 7:30 p.m. at Finnish Brotherhood Hall, 1970 Chestnut St at University. Donation of $5 requested. 528-4253. www.circledancing.com 

SATURDAY, MARCH 3 

Turtle Time Meet the turtles of Tilden Park and learn the difference between native and non-native, male and female, at 11 a.m. at the Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Kids Garden Club for ages 6-9 to explore the world of gardening, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 636-1684. 

Sick Plant Clinic Dr. Robert Raabe, plant pathologist, and Dr. Nick Mills, entomologist, will diagnose plant illnesses and recommend remedies. Bring a piece of the plant in a securely sealed container. A zipperlock bag is ideal. From 9 a.m. to noon at Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Dr. 643-2755. 

Bay Area Seed Interchange Library Annual Seed Swap potluck hoedown to share music, food, and home grown garden seeds. From 5 to 8 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $10, free if you bring seeds and a dish to share. 548-2220 ext. 233. 

The Architecture of Oakland’s Downtown Walking Tour Meet at 10 am at the below-street-level fountain just outside the 12th St. BART station. Walk ends at the 19th Street BART. This is a moderately paced, level walk. Wear comfortable shoes, dress in layers, and bring water and snack. 848 9358. www.berkeleypaths.org  

Kayak and Walking Tour of Brooks Island with Save the Bay. From 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Cost is $85-$95. To register call 452-9261, ext. 109. 

Gardening Basics: What is Really Important with Aerin Moore at 10 a.m. at Magic Gardens Nursey, 729 Heinz Ave., off 7th St. 644-2351. 

“Christian Responses to the World Water Crisis” a workshop with Marian Ronan, professor at the GTU from 1 to 5 p.m. at American Baptist Seminary of the West, 2606 Dwight Way. Sponsored by Corporate Accountability International. 644-4956. 

“Immigration: The Impact Beyond Mexico” with Arnoldo Garcia, National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, Larisa Cafilla, Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition, Nunu Kidane, Africa Priority Network at others at 11 a.m. at the Prescott Joseph Center, 920 Peralta St., Oakland. Sponsored by the John George Democratic Club.  

Making Sense of the Medicare Enrollment Period a free workshop at 2 p.m. at the Oakland Public Library, 125-14th St. Presented by Jess Strange of Health Insurance Advocacy Program. 238-3138. 

“The Legacy of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade” A luncheon with the men and women who volunteered to defend the Spanish Republic against fascism in 1936 at 2 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 27th and Harrison Sts., Oakland. Tickets are $35. 582-7699.  

Fundraiser Crab Dinner for Golden Gate Boys Choir at 6:30 p.m. at St. Peter’s Church, 6013 Lawton, Oakland. Tickets are $35. For reservations call 887-4311. 

“Finding the Creative and Spiritual in Everyday Life” a conference from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the Bade Museum, Pacific School of Religion, 1798 Scenic Ave. 527-2935. www.ahimsaberkeley.org 

Dr. Seuss’ Birthday Party at 11 a.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. All ages welcome. Free but reservations required. 524-3043. 

Oakland Museum of California White Elephant Sale from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sun. from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 333 Lancaster St. at Glascock, Oakland. free shuttle bus from the Fruitvale BART. 238-2200. 

Hopalong Animal Rescue Come meet your furry new best friend from noon to 3 p.m. at 2940 College Ave. 267-1915, ext. 500. www.hopalong.org  

Produce Stand at Spiral Gardens Food Security Project from 1 to 6 p.m. at the corner of Sacramento and Oregon St. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

Petite Pooches Playgroup for small dogs from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., one block north of Solano on Ensenada at Talbot. 524-2459. 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

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

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

SUNDAY, MARCH 4 

Shoreline Discovery Walk along San Pablo Bay with Bethany Facendini, naturalist, from 9:30 to 11 a.m. Call for meeting place. 525-2233. 

“Open Garden” Join the Little Farm gardener for composting, planting, watering and reaping the rewards of our work, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. Cancelled only by heavy rain. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

“Climate Change” the first of a series of Sunday talks on Climate Change by Karen Street at 1 p.m. at Berkeley Friends Meeting, 2151 Vine. 653-2803. 

Salon in the Grove Discussion of the tree-sitting protest at 2 p.m. at the Memorial Oak Grove, east side of UC campus just off of Gayley Rd. 548-3609. 

Berkeley Playreading Group meets at 2 p.m. at 1471 Addison St. at the rear of 1473 Addison. 655-7962.  

Free Sailboat Rides from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Cal Sailing Club, Berkeley Marina. Wear warm, waterproof clothing and bring a change of clothes in case you get wet. www.cal-sailing.org 

Cyber Salon with Scott Rosenberg, founder of Salon.com on his new book “Dreaming in Code” at 5 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Donation $10. 

Holistic Pet Evaluation with animal crisis consultant from 1 to 3 p.m. at Rabbit Ears, 303 Arlington Ave., Kensington. To schedule an appointment call 525-6155. 

“The Spiritual Journey of a Lifelong UU” with Sue Amgidson at 9:30 p.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302, ext. 306. 

Tibetan Buddhism with Sandy Olney on “Walking on the Roof of the World” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812.  

MONDAY, MARCH 5  

“Tule Elk: Biggest Wild Animals in the East Bay” A slide show with Mike Moran on one of California’s largest land mammals, at 7:30 p.m. at Montclair Presbyterian Church, 5701 Thornhill Rd., Oakland. Cost is $5, children free. 655-6658.www.close-to-home.org 

Red Cross Blood Drive from noon to 6 p.m. at East Pauley Ballroom, MLK Student Union, UC Campus. To schedule an appointment go to www.BeADonor.com (code UCB) 

Free Diabetes Screening from 9 to 11 a.m. at the West Berkeley Senior Center.Do not eat or drink anything for 8 hours beforehand. 981-5332. 

CITY MEETINGS 

City Council meets Tues., Feb. 27, at 7 p.m in City Council Chambers. 981-6900. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Energy Commission meets Wed., Feb. 28, at 6:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5434.  

Planning Commission meets Wed., Feb. 28, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7484.  

Police Review Commission meets Wed., Feb. 28, at 7:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-4950.  

Housing Advisory Commission meets Thurs., March 1, at 7:30 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5400.  

Landmarks Preservation Commission meets Thurs., March 1, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Gisele Sorensen, 981-7419.  

Public Works Commission meets Thurs., March 1, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. J981-6406.


Correction

Tuesday February 27, 2007

• The Feb. 9 story “Peralta Trustee Questions Financial Priorities of District, Debate Grows over Bond Funds” misquoted Peralta Trustee Abel Guillen following last week’s trustee meeting. Guillen said his vote against the audio visual contract for the renovation of the Peralta Administration Building boardroom was “on principle,” not “symbolic,” as was reported.