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Actor Danny Glover stood in front of the Greek Theater on the UC Berkeley campus yesterday to announce that he will boycott the school’s May 9 commencement ceremonies, where he was scheduled to be a featured speaker, to protest UC's refusal to pay a living wage to its service workers. Photograph by Mike O'Malley
Actor Danny Glover stood in front of the Greek Theater on the UC Berkeley campus yesterday to announce that he will boycott the school’s May 9 commencement ceremonies, where he was scheduled to be a featured speaker, to protest UC's refusal to pay a living wage to its service workers. Photograph by Mike O'Malley
 

News

Committee Votes to Keep Mayor’s Public Commons Initiative on Agenda

By Judith Scherr
Tuesday May 01, 2007

Despite community pleas to talk with members of the homeless community first, the Berkeley City Council’s Agenda Committee Monday afternoon refused to take the mayor’s Public Commons for Everyone proposal off the May 8 council agenda.  

Mayor Tom Bates’ proposal calls for services for people with inappropriate street behavior and, at the same time, advocates new laws to address behaviors such as prolonged sitting on the street, urinating and defecating in public and smoking within 25 feet of a commercial building. 

After listening to members of the public who underscored that social service providers and both the Homeless and Community Welfare commissions want the measure delayed, the committee—the mayor and Councilmembers Linda Maio and Gordon Wozniak—voted to keep the item on the agenda. 

However, the mayor said he wanted to assure the public that at the council meeting, no new law would be proposed, with the exception of expanding the no-smoking ordinance from 20 to 25 feet in front of a commercial building.  

“It’s not like this is moving quickly,” the mayor said, emphasizing that the initiative is on the agenda mostly for discussion. 

After the meeting, however, Dan McMullan of Disabled People Outside, told the Daily Planet he feared that even something as popular as a no-smoking ordinance could be misused. Storeowners who come outside to smoke won’t get cited, but homeless people will, McMullan said. 

Attorney Osha Neumann, who often represents homeless and impoverished people, said after the meeting that he was somewhat encouraged by the mayor’s statements. “I think they’re backing off the fast track,” he said. “They see the community opposition.”  

Mental Health Commission Chair Michael Diehl added that those supportive of homeless persons and the rights of people with mental health issues would nonetheless be out in force at the May 8 meeting. “We will definitely be there to speak to the issue,” he said. 

Speaking to the committee on behalf of the Berkeley Community Coalition, which mostly represents service providers, boona cheema, executive director of Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency, called on the mayor and city manager to meet directly with homeless people to have “open and honest dialogue as to the total purpose of the Public Commons for Everyone initiative and with their input find ways to influence street behavior without creating new laws.” 

“The May 8 report is on how we will proceed,” Bates told the community members. “It’s a way to invite discussion.” The staff report being prepared for the council meeting was not available at press time. 

Bates said implementation would depend on whether there are funds available at budget time for the initiative. Initial funding is to include a part-time employee to write the plan. “We’re not going to do something we don’t have the resources for,” he said. “You don’t have to worry too much.” 

Last week, the Berkeley Community Coalition met to discuss the mayor’s proposal. 

“The religious community says ‘love thy neighbor as thyself.’ I feel this is the antithesis,” said Sally Hindman, a member of the coalition and director of Young Aspirations, Young Artists (YAYA). 

The mayor has said in previous meetings that this initiative is important to force “service-resistant” people into getting services. But Hindman, who describes herself as a “strong supporter of Mayor Tom Bates said, “It’s not right to talk about service-resistant people when there are not enough services.”  

What needs to happen is that the community should support adequate services for those in need, including building adequate housing, she said. “We have great community organizations.” 

Also interviewd Friday, cheema said it is not fair to blame homeless people for the inappropriate behavior seen around town. “What about the UC students that come out of Pyramid [Brewery and Alehouse]?” she asked rhetorically. 

She said the mayor’s message—along with similar attempts in the past to criminalize street behavior—“is giving our city a horrible name.”  

Cheema underscored that there are already enough laws on the books to address problematic street behavior. “If someone is screaming and shouting, people can call the police or the mental health team,” she said. “Let’s enforce existing laws.” 

Councilmember Kriss Worthington, also in attendance at the BCC meeting, said the city needs to provide positive alternatives for those in need of services.  

“People need places to live off the streets,” he told the Daily Planet Friday. Another important service would be a “medical detox” facility in Berkeley, where people could get in-patient medical care to help them get off drugs and alcohol, he said. 


BP Project Impractical, Dangerous, Critics Charge

By Richard Brenneman
Tuesday May 01, 2007

Questions of scientific feasibility and environmental responsibility dominated a Thursday night teach-in called by critics of UC Berkeley’s $500 million biofuels pact with a British oil company. 

BP p.l.c. and the university are currently hammering out the details of a contract that will create the Energy Biosciences Institution, which the school and the former British Petroleum plan to market as “the world’s premier energy research institute.” 

But UC Berkeley Professor of Geoengineering Tadeusz Patzek and Professor of Ecosystem Sciences and Energy and Resources John Harte raised questions about the science and claims made for the project—the largest corporate funding package in American university history. 

And James Thorlby, Catholic priest and activist who works with the Pastoral Land Commission in Brazil, said that land barons in that nation are seizing state-owned land, evicting small farmers with troops and hire gangs to transform vast tracts into sugar cane fields for ethanol production. 

Patzek charges that the output from biofuels simply can’t match the energy inputs needed to grow the plants and transform the harvested crops in fuels like ethanol, while each American continues to consume enough calories of energy every year to grow “a big, fat sperm whale.” 

Patzek, one of the nation’s leading critics of the rush to biofuels, said conservation, including alternative forms of transit, is one solution, while production of the nation’s total energy needs from biofuels would require the sacrifice of all the nation’s crops and two-thirds of the annual growth of its forests. 

“All of the biological systems are quite inefficient compared to solar cells and wind,” said Patzek. 

Harte said that reliance on a crop like switchgrass as a source of biofuels would require enough land to produce significant climate changes in the United States. 

While biomass effectively captures about 1 percent of solar energy per acre for conversion into fuel, Harte said solar cells—photovoltaics—are now so efficient that only 1/20th of the land area would be needed, and Patzek said technology is now even more efficient. 

Harte called for tax incentives for the solar and wind energy industries. “The encouragement of clean energy through incentives is the best way to do it,” he said. 

“We have a judiciary here in the pocket of the elite of this country,” said Thorlby in a telephone interview recorded for Thursday night’s program. “I call it the scum of the country.” 

“Millions and millions of hectares” have been usurped, he said, to make way for an unsustainable agriculture enforced by armed gangs. “You could call it Neanderthal, but I have more respect for our ancestors,” he said. 

Environmentally devastating, the sugar cane super-plantations “put an end to the culture of the society,” he said. 

Thorlby received the Brazilian government’s Human Rights Award for Elimination of Slave Labor in 2003. 

Alice Friedemann, a science journalist who specializes in energy issues, said her special concern was with destruction of soil and water caused by mass planting of corn, currently the dominant source of ethanol in the United States. 

The writer said she was troubled “by the lack of any kind of input by social scientists” in the BP proposal. “Their voice needs to be heard.” 

Friedemann also cited three decades of lobbying by agricultural industry leader Archer Daniels Midland—a firm that holds patents on many crops—calling for development of ethanol-based based fuels. “Ethanol will bankrupt our soils,” she said. 

Richard Register, a Berkeley advocate for green city design, argued for an end to urban design based on the automobile. 

“As long as we keep building the same things, as long as we keep driving the same things, we’re not going to solve this problem,” he said. 

Thursday’s forum was the first of two scheduled teach-ins sponsored by Register’s Ecocity Builders, the Green Century Institute and StopBP-Berkeley.org, the student activists who have been organizing protests challenging the pact between their university and the British oil firm. 

Another teach-in will be held at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. 

That forum will feature three speakers intimately familiar with UC Berkeley’s last controversial corporate research package, the Novartis agreement, a five-year pact between a Swiss-based multinational and the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management (ESPM) at the university’s College of Natural Resources. 

Speakers include: Jennifer Washburn, who examined the Novartis pact in her 2005 book University, Inc.: The Corruption of Higher Education; ESPM Associate Professor Ignacio Chapela, a leading critic of the deal; Berkeley geography Professor Jean Lave, who helped develop a proposal for an external review of the project conducted by Michigan State University; and anthropology professor Cori Hayden, who will address impacts on government, patent regimes and ethics. 

Also slated to appear is Hillary Lehr, a student and slam poet.


Zoning Board Backs Closing of B-Town Store

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Tuesday May 01, 2007

The B-Town Dollar Store at 2973 Sacramento St. could be closed if the Berkeley City Council decides to act on a recommendation passed by the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) Thursday. 

ZAB members voted unanimously Thursday to recommend that B-Town should be closed as a public nuisance immediately. This was the first proceeding that was conducted under the new revocation and nuisance abatement procedures that the City Council adopted in March, which mandated that “ZAB is no longer required to determine whether to initiate proceedings, but need only hold a single public hearing and make a recommendation to the City Council.” 

The property, which a ZAB staff report stated has been “associated with continuing illegal drug activity,” is owned by the Chul J. Kim family and is managed by the son, Joo H. Kim, a San Francisco police officer. 

No one from the owner’s side was present at the ZAB hearing. B-Town is leased to Nayef Ayesh, who operates the discount storewith his wife and sons. 

Gregory Daniel, head of the City of Berkeley Code Enforcement Division, told board members that the Berkeley Police Department (BPD) had originally pursued the nuisance designation in 2004 with the incorrect belief that a discretionary permit was required and had not been obtained for the retail use. However, since the Planning Department has concluded that this is not the case, he asked ZAB to recommend that the City Council order abatement by termination of use.  

Daniel, along with five other officers from the BPD, testified about drug activity in and around B-Town from 2003 to February 21 of this year. The officers alleged that drug dealers were hanging out in front of the building and using it as a place to carry out drug transactions.  

They added that after a series of discussions with the owners in 2004, the problem momentarily stopped, but that it began again in 2005 and has been going on ever since. 

“We have had 55 contacts with drug dealers at B-Town,” said Daniel. “Eleven were convicted felons, 16 were involved in drug dealing and one was a known rapist. Ayesh’s own son Sammy was involved in drug dealing and was arrested twice.” 

Ayesh and his wife Fatima told the board that they did their best to keep troublemakers away from the store. 

“Sammy, he speaks to everyone,” said Fatima. “But I tell them to get away from the store. I try to keep the store as clean as possible.” 

Ayesh told board members that his son Sammy had been moved to a different business last month because of the current problems. 

Sergeant Spencer Fomby, a former beat officer and a drug task force officer in the neighborhood, said that drug dealers used B-Town as a “safe haven.” 

“They stash their drugs in there,” he said. “We have received numerous complaints from Sacramento Street merchants and neighbors about drug-related activities, drinking, loitering and dice games. There are 15 to 20 drug dealers hanging out there at the same time. There are problems in the other stores on that street but not as much as B-Town. Most of the problems are generated there. It has become a nexus.” 

Detective Chu of the BPD said that a narcotics search in the past had revealed residue of cocaine in the back room of B-Town. 

Officer Pierantoni of the BPD said that the neighborhood watch groups in the area had refused to come and testify because they feared intimidation from the drug dealers. 

“It is most shocking that none of the merchants or the neighbors from the neighborhood are here to testify because they are scared of oppression,” said ZAB board member Bob Allen. “It’s not a bunch of wallflowers out there but a group of hard-working individuals. When they say they are afraid, they are really afraid.” 

Allen added that the neighborhood had a right to know what business would go in next after B-Town’s use permit was terminated. 

Board member Terry Doran said that although he wanted to be sympathetic to the businesses that came into the neighborhood, B-Town was definitely a nuisance case. 

“Why are there no records of phone calls to the police for help from the store?” asked ZAB chair Chris Tiedemann. “This kind of illegal pervasive behavior should not be allowed to take place.” 

New ZAB appointee Suzanne Wilson said that the store’s failure to install video equipment inside the store to show what’s going on was very discouraging. 

“The operators are saying that they don’t know anything about the drug activity, and yet there’s been no attempt to show the police that this kind of behavior is not taking place,” she said. 

“The most striking thing to me is that the owners are saying there is nothing new they can do about the situation,” said ZAB vice-chair Rick Judd. “But what they have done so far is not enough.” 

Board member Jesse Arreguin called B-Town a plague on the neighborhood and said he was concerned that the same problems might migrate to the other businesses once it was shut down. 

“If it migrates, we migrate with them,” said Daniel. 

 

Other items 

• The board approved a request for modification of a use permit by MG Pacific, Inc., to change the use of an approved restaurant addition from a waiting area to a reception/cocktail lounge at Chester’s Bayview Cafe at 1508 Walnut St. 

• The board approved a request for a use permit by Robert Gaustad of San Rafael to add wine and beer service and live entertainment to Bobby G’s at 2072 University Ave.  

• The board approved a request for a use permit by Affordable Housing Associates to modify the plan approved by an earlier permit to remove four projecting bays on the south elevation, to vary open space dimensions and to replace the paving of the plaza along Ashby Avenue with asphalt at 1001 Ashby Ave.  


Woodfin Hotel Workers Fired; Supporters Cry Foul

By Judith Scherr
Tuesday May 01, 2007

The Woodfin Suites Hotel fired 12 workers Friday, according to an East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy press statement. EBASE has helped Woodfin workers in their attempts to get Emeryville’s living wage ordinance for hotel workers enforced. 

“The firings appear to be in retaliation for blowing the whistle on the hotel’s violation of the city’s living wage law, Measure C,” the statement said. “Woodfin defied an Emeryville ordinance to keep the workers on the job until May 7, so that the city can complete an investigation of the workers’ complaints of retaliation and for back wages.” 

The hotel did not return calls for comment, but in the past told the Planet it was put in the position of being forced to keep immigrant workers in their jobs, despite the workers having Social Security numbers that the Social Security Administration says do not match their names. (EBASE organizers say the Social Security number question became an issue only after workers tried to get Measure C enforced.) 

Woodfin workers and supporters will be at tonight’s (Tuesday) Emeryville City Council meeting to urge the city to deny the hotel an operating permit until it reinstates the fired workers and pays them $200,000 in back wages, owed to them due to Measure C requirements to pay overtime wages when workers clean more than a specified amount of floor space.  

The meeting is at 7:15 p.m. at 1330 Park Ave., Emeryville. 

 


Bay Area Rallies for Immigrant Rights

By Judith Scherr
Tuesday May 01, 2007

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sweeps in the Bay Area and across the nation have separated working parents from their children, forced families to flee in haste to countries of origin many scarcely know and caused millions of others to live in fear of harassment and deportation. 

On May 1, immigrants, their supporters, union activists, students and others will join hundreds of marches, rallies and speak-outs across the United States supporting immigrant rights. 

 

Berkeley 

In Berkeley, the UC Berkeley student government will lead marchers to Oakland where they will join the Oakland rally at the Federal Building in downtown Oakland. 

“It’s significant that the ASUC [Associated Students of the University of California] will lead the march,” said Dimitri Garcia, the ASUC student senator who authored the resolution calling for the student government to support the march. “It adds much more weight to the urgency of fighting the [ICE] raids,” Garcia said.  

The ASUC resolution in support of the march condemned the raids ICE dubbed as “Operation Return to Sender,” in which they targeted “immigrant neighborhoods and workplaces, in particular those of Latina/o populations, referring to over 600,000 immigrants as ‘fugitives.’ ” 

At the university, May Day is to start with picket lines forming at 7:30 a.m. at Bancroft Way and Telegraph Avenue to call for the participation of UC students and employees.  

At 10 a.m., one group of marchers, led by ASUC student officials, will begin a march from Sproul Plaza down Telegraph Avenue, ending up at the Oakland Federal Building, where they will join the Oakland march coming down International Boulevard.  

Others will rally on campus between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. And one contingent will march to the downtown Berkeley BART at noon to travel to San Francisco Civic Center to join the rally there. 

Another organizer of the Berkeley event, graduate student Snehal Shingavi, noted the importance of May Day, traditionally focusing on worker rights and evolving into a day focusing on immigrant rights issues.  

“Immigrant rights is very much a worker issue, honoring the legacy of May Day and the contributions immigrants make to the economy,” Shingavi told the Daily Planet. 


Book Commemorates 33 Years of Political Art

By Judith Scherr
Tuesday May 01, 2007

A collection of posters Inkworks Press has produced over its life as a worker-owned collective brings together art, calls to political action and 33 years of history. 

Today (Tuesday) Inkworks will celebrate the release of Visions of Peace and Justice ($30, self-published), a 400-page large-format book that has been a decade in the making. The free event will include music and food and begins at 7 p.m. at La Pena, 3105 Shattuck Ave.  

The posters include early calls for international solidarity with Palestinians of the late 1970s, the struggle against South African apartheid of the 1980s and local issues such as the fight to save the International Hotel and the Livermore Lab blockade. The collection includes present-day anti-war posters.  

“When people have a radical/progressive political movement, they need to be sure the message is on the street,” Tim Simons, a member of the collective who does marketing and helped design the book, told the Daily Planet. 

The collection of posters “creates a record,” putting political actions and movements over the years into perspective, Simons said. “It immortalizes struggles.” 

 

 


Fewer Berkeley Businesses Selling Alcohol to Minors

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Tuesday May 01, 2007

The California State Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) announced Friday that alcohol violation rates have dropped in Berkeley. 

Present at the press conference were the Berkeley Police Department, the UC Berkeley Police Department, UC Berkeley Associate Chancellor John Cummins, the UC Berkeley Party Safe program and Students for a Safer Southside. 

“What started out in 2003 as increased enforcement and education efforts is helping to reduce alcohol-related incidents in Berkeley and on the UC Berkeley campus,” said John Carr, an ABC spokesperson. 

“We heard from communities that the quality of life has improved. There are fewer loud parties and fewer alcohol sales to minors. When we provided this Grant Assistance Program (GAP)—$40,000 to the UCBPD and $85,000 to the BPD—this was exactly the kind of results we were looking for. The new resources from the grants have led to more ID checks as well as shoulder-tap decoy operations.” 

“Shoulder tap” involves a minor under the direct supervision of a peace officer who stands outside a liquor or convenience store and asks patrons to buy them alcohol. Once an adult agrees to purchase it for them, they are arrested and cited for their action. 

“Students have criticized the GAP in the past,” said Nima Golzy, a junior at Cal who was representing Students for a Safer Southside. “They claim that the student population is being targeted. But people who vocalize against these grants are the ones who want to hold parties where alcohol is served to minors. They don’t want any regulations.” 

Since the dispersal of grant money in 2003, 2,283 arrests were made through the combined efforts during alcohol-related enforcements. 

“When police started running compliance check operations in 2003, over 50 percent of the businesses that were visited sold alcohol to minors,” said Steve Hardy, the newly appointed director of ABC. “Today that figure is approximately 20 percent. We have warned, fined, suspended and revoked alcoholic beverage licenses of businesses that sold alcohol to minors. Alcohol is a problem. It’s a drug. We want to work hard to slow it down.” 

Lt. Doug C. Wing of the UC Berkeley police said that education and outreach were equally important. 

“Our efforts have certainly made students more aware of the problem,” he said. “There are fewer fights in the South Campus area. But the allure of coming to Telegraph Avenue is still there and that is a district we pay a lot of attention to.” 

Ralph Adams, a member of the Berkeley Alcohol Policy Advocacy Coalition, said that it was pertinent that a program of “outreach-education-monitoring-enforcement” be conducted by the city. 

“Besides alcohol, there are other issues such as violence and loitering with the intention of drug dealing and prostitution that need to be addressed in the neighborhoods,” he said. 

John Cummins, associate chancellor at UC Berkeley, told the Planet that enforcing alcohol policies was a huge challenge for the university. 

“For many students, this is the first time away from home,” he said. “The drinking pattern is established in the first three months of the freshman year. This is the time when they need to be educated about drinking responsibly. Also, the frats need to manage their parties carefully and we need to patrol Southside as frequently as possible.” 

 


City Officials Ponder Measures To Address Freeway Collapse

Tuesday May 01, 2007

The City of Berkeley announced Monday that as the bridge approaches become heavily congested as a result of the MacArthur Maze collapse, traffic in and around Berkeley is expected to be impacted, even though none of the detours suggested by Caltrans and local officials routes traffic directly through Berkeley. 

On Monday morning, representatives from Berkeley’s Office of Emergency Services, the City Manager’s office, and the Finance, Fire, Police, Public Works, and Traffic departments met to discuss traffic mitigation and identify other potential problems and opportunities. 

Ciry officials said it may take several weeks to understand the real effects of the disaster. 

In the meantime: 

• Police and traffic officials identified the most likely spot of trouble as Ashby/Highway 13 to Tunnel Road. There are tow-away areas on Ashby from 4-6 p.m., and police will be increasing their enforcement at those times.  

• In coordination with Caltrans and Oakland, traffic may be directed away from Ashby and toward the Telegraph and 55th Street onramp to Highway 24 eastbound or the onramp for Highway 580 eastbound at 51st and Martin Luther King Junior. 

• City staff will monitor several likely trouble spots around town, including Ashby and San Pablo, but no changes will be made until there is a clearer picture of what the regular traffic load is likely to be. 

• The city, like other employers in the Berkeley area, will encourage employees who currently drive to work to begin taking public transit. The city already offers public transit incentives, and employees will be encouraged to take advantage of those programs. 

All residents, visitors and employees of local schools and businesses are encouraged to take public transit as much as possible. 

Traffic and commute information is available by calling 511 or going online 

to 511.org.  

 

Photograph: San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums examine the collapsed freeway section Sunday.


School District Committee Searches for African-American Teachers

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Tuesday May 01, 2007

The Berkeley School Board received information on the Black College tour that took place in February to recruit more teachers of color at historically black colleges in Washington D.C. and Atlanta, Ga. 

This was the first time BUSD sent out a group to search for African-American teachers for the Berkeley public schools, said BUSD spokesperson Mark Coplan. 

Joette Al Hakim-Hall, a sixth-grade teacher at Longfellow Middle School, told the board that she had visited Howard University in Washington D.C. and Morgan State University in Baltimore with Longfellow principal Rebecca Cheung. 

“We found out that it’s not just Berkeley who wants African American teachers. Schools all over the nation are vying for these teachers,” said Al Hakim-Hall. “It made us think that what is so special about Berkeley that would make these young graduates leave the East Coast and move to the Bay Area.” 

Robert McKnight, who teaches at Berkeley High, said that his trip to Spelman College and Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta, with King Middle School Vice Principal Jimette Anderson had been positive. 

“It gives me a boost to see so many young students of color going to school and getting good grades,” said Anderson and offered herself for future discussions on the issue. 

Board members agreed that planning was required to offer new recruits a comfortable start in their careers in Berkeley. 

“The Bay Area is a very expensive place to live,” said board member Nancy Riddle. “We have to ensure that these young people have proper housing and a support system ready before we bring them in.” 

 

MLK track 

The board approved an advertisement to solicit bids for resurfacing the track at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School over the summer. Gelfand Architects were hired on January 17 to design the project. The design is scheduled to be completed on May 4. 

The track, which is also largely used by the community, will remain closed from June 15 to the end of August. 


Downtown Committee Ponders Green Plan; Landmarks Commission Weighs BHS Gym

By Richard Brenneman
Tuesday May 01, 2007

DAPAC members will finally tackle the central element of their proposed new plan Wednesday night when they consider the role of sustainabilty in the future of Downtown Berkeley. 

And a decision on landmarking the old Berkeley High School Gymnasium—home of the East bay’s main warm water therapy pool—could come as early as Thursday evening, when the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) is scheduled to hold a hearing on a building already slated for demolition by the city’s school board. 

DAPAC—the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee—is charged with handing the Planning Commission a draft of the new plan by November, and members have decided that their primary emphasis will be on creating a green city center. 

The meeting begins with a presentation by environmentalist and “smart growth” advocate John Holtzclaw on land use and greenhouse gases, followed by a discussion of the draft sustainabilty element prepared by downtown planner Matt Taecker, UC Berkeley planners Judy Chess and Jennifer McDougall and Berkeley environmentalist Juliet Lamont. 

The meeting begins at 7 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. at Martin Luther King Jr. Way. 

Proponents of the application to landmark the old gym say the building is a distinguished creation worthy of preservation, while the school board said the site is needed for new classrooms and athletic facilities. 

Representatives of the disabled community have also called for preservation. 

The school board voted Jan. 17 for demolition, but a group of preservationists calling itself Friends Protecting Berkeley’s Resources filed suit Feb. 23 charging that the district didn’t follow the California Environmental Quality Act before casting its votes. 

The building at Milvia and Kittredge was the creation of architects William C. Hays and Walter H. Ratcliff Jr., and features additional details by engineer Thomas F. Chace who conducted a rare—for its time—seismic retrofit in 1936. 

Also on the LPC agenda are proposals to remove shingle siding on a Structure of Merit cottage at 2411 Fifth St. and add additional dwelling units at the rear of the property. 

Commissioners will also review plans by UC Berkeley officials to renovate six residential buildings at the Clark Kerr Campus to keep the buildings habitable and increase accessibility. 

Also on the agenda are plans to add a by-right addition to the home at 1340 Arch St., declared a landmark in November after the commission acted in response to the plans; and plans to refurbish the Sigma Phi fraternity house at 2307 Piedmont Ave. 

The meeting begins at 7:30 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center. 


Proposal Could Affect Boston’s Asians

By Adam Smith, New American Media
Tuesday May 01, 2007

A proposal to allow green card holders in Boston the ability to vote in municipal elections could have far-reaching effects for nearly half of the city’s 45,000 Asian Americans, say local experts and office holders. 

“It would be huge,” said Paul Watanabe of the Institute for Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. 

Just under half of all Asian Americans in Boston are non-citizens, according to a 2004 report—“Enabling the Asian American Electorate”—that Watanabe co-authored. If non-citizen permanent residents were allowed to vote, Watanabe estimated that it could potentially increase the Asian American electorate in Boston by more than 20,000.  

“I think it would be the most significant expansion of the franchise in the city of Boston since the passage of women’s suffrage. Its impact would be substantial,” he said. Watanabe said he’s been advocating for such a proposal for the past decade. Similar measures have been approved by other local governments including Amherst, Cambridge, and Newton, but all are pending state approval. 

Boston City Councilor Sam Yoon, who was born in Korea, said he feels it would be fair to those who pay city taxes and use city services to be able to vote in municipal elections. 

“This would be a good thing for city government because such a large part of the people that we serve in Boston are legal immigrants,” said Yoon, who co-sponsored Boston City Councilor Felix Arroyo’s home rule petition allowing green card holders the ability to vote. “Since representation is the essence of democracy, I think city government would actually do its job better if their voices were represented.” 

In 2004, more than one in four Boston residents were born outside the U.S., according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Amy Mah Sangiolo, an alderman in Newton, said she believes that if the measure passes, Asian Americans would have a greater voice in issues affecting them locally in Chinatown, such as land use and development. 

“It’s great,” she said of the proposal, which she said would be following the lead of Newton. 

Some, however, strongly reject the idea of allowing permanent residents the ability to vote in any elections. 

“We are opposed to any measure that allows people who are not citizens of the United State to participate in our democracy. That is a right and privilege of citizenship,” said Ira Mehlman, a spokesperson for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., that promotes restricting immigration and stopping illegal immigration. 

“It dilutes the value of citizenship. If people who have not made a full-fledged commitment to this country are entitled to the same voice in this democracy, then what really is the value of being a citizen?” said Mehlman. 

But Councilor Arroyo, who co-sponsored the measure, argues that his proposal would encourage immigrants to become citizens because it would give them only a limited ability to vote. He also said that immigrants who pay taxes would acquire representation.  

“We’re talking about a big population that pays the taxes but does not vote. When we look at it from that perspective, it’s the right thing to do,” he said. In addition, he said, immigrants would have to sign statements that they would pursue citizenship if they are allowed to vote in the city elections. 

“But we are not a nation of taxpayers,” said Mehlman. “It is a nation of citizen people who have made a higher level of commitment.” He said that having immigrants sign statements that they would apply for citizenship would be meaningless because they would not likely be binding. 

“If you come here legally and have a green card, it isn’t all that onerous to become a citizen of the United States. There’s a five-year waiting period in which you are required to show that you are somebody of high character, stay out of trouble and do all the things you are supposed to do, and at the end of the five years, you can apply to become a citizen. Then you are free to participate not only in local elections but in any election you want to vote in.” 

He added: “They understood that when they came here that there were certain conditions. Coming to the United States as a legal immigrant— it’s a conditional bargain.” It’s still unclear how the measure will go over in the Boston City Council. Even if approved by the council, the bill would require final approval by the state’s Legislature. 

Yoon called the proposal “a major uphill battle. 

“It would only come into effect if the entire state Legislature agreed with our proposal. So this is the beginning of a long-term effort,” he said. After Arroyo co-filed the measure to allow permanent U.S. residents the ability to vote in city elections, Salvatore LaMattina, another city councilor, proposed that the city should determine whether it is working hard enough to promote citizenship. 

LaMattina opposes Arroyo’s plan and said that “we need to promote citizenship; if you want to empower new immigrants that come to this country, you empower them by letting them become citizens.” Still, Arroyo said last week that he has five of the needed seven councilors in support of the proposal. Councilors Charles Yancey, Chuck Turner, and Michael Ross have so far publicly endorsed the proposal, in addition to Yoon and Arroyo. 

Mayor Thomas M. Menino has not yet decided, said his spokesperson. At-large councilor Michael Flaherty said: “I’m keeping an open mind,” and that he wants to learn more about the matter before taking a position. Arroyo hopes to hold a hearing on the proposal by June. 

 

—M. Thang contributed to this story. 

 

Adam Smith is English editor of the Boston-based Sampan, New England’s only Chinese-English newspaper, published since 1972 by the Asian American Civic Association of Boston.


Mexican Journalist Risks Life to Expose Child Sex Rings

By R.M. Arrieta, New American Media
Tuesday May 01, 2007

The pristine, sandy beaches of Cancun draw more than just visitors looking for a little fun and sun. Those with a penchant for little girls as young as four have found their way to this region. 

Mexican journalist Lydia Cacho is exposing the players in these Cancun-based sex rings, and risking her life for it. 

Her empathy for human rights began at a young age when she played with the children in the slums of Mexico while her late mother, Paulette Ribeiro Monteiro, an early Mexican feminist, gave contraceptive information to their mothers. Cacho discovered that “there are things you can do to help your fellow men and women.” 

Her awareness led her to a life of activism and journalism. She started a high-security shelter for abused women in Cancun where children opened up to her about the dark underworld of child porn rings and prostitution. 

As a result, she says, “I’ve been taken to jail for telling other people’s stories. No one imagines that Cancun has this dark side.” 

The underage sex rings she has exposed include Mexico’s rich and powerful. Mexico is a country that doesn’t take kindly to exposure of corruption and greed. 

Currently the country is in the crosshairs of a violent drug war and some 17 journalists have been killed in the past five years for attempting to expose the corruption. Cacho, herself, is a target. 

Cacho, considered one of Mexico’s most prominent and imperiled journalists, was recently in San Francisco and Los Angeles on a nationwide speaking tour after being awarded Amnesty International’s 2007 Ginetta Sagan Award. 

In her groundbreaking book on child prostitution, “Los demonios del Edén” (The Demons of Eden: The Power that Protects Child Pornography), published in spring of 2005, she documented the ties between child porn rings, Mexican politicians and prominent businessmen. 

She identifies Jean Succar Kuri, a multimillionaire hotel owner, as the head of a group who sexually abused young girls in Cancun. 

“Succar Kuri would get these poor girls from the area and have sex with them, then send photos by email to his wife in Los Angeles, who would then forward them to Las Vegas,” stated Cacho. 

Lebanese-born Succar Kuri has been under arrest in Mexico since July of 2006, after his extradition from the United States. He faces charges of arranging child porn parties in Cancún, money laundering and organized crime. 

Cacho, who published all the names of the politicians and policemen who were involved in protecting Succar Kuri, told El Tecolote, “I did this quite conscious that I could be killed for this, but there was no other way.” She has been under police protection since receiving death threats last year. 

“By the time I started writing the book, we knew there were 200 kids in this ring, most of them poor, without any protection from the Mexican state, because if you are poor, there is no way you can get attention from justice or the police.” 

On December 16, 2005, Cacho was arrested and denied access to her lawyer and medicine. She spent the night in prison and was then released on $9,900 bail. 

“I was arrested with four cars and many armed policemen. They took me from Cancun to Puebla some 20 hours away,” she said. Police jammed guns against her face, threatened and taunted her with death and rape threats. 

She was charged with defamation, a criminal offense in Mexico, for writing that one of Mexico’s powerful businessmen, textile magnate Kamel Nacif, used his power to protect suspected child molestor Succar Kuri. 

Cacho remembers being marched to the edge of the ocean thinking she was going to be killed. At the last minute, recounts Cacho, the cell phone of one of her captors rang. The attitude of her guards then changed and they began treating her very well. 

Fortunately, after hearing of her arrest, Cacho’s supporters quickly mobilized and reached out to human rights organizations around the world. 

“That’s when Amnesty International got involved. For any one of you who wrote one of these urgent action letters, thank you very much, it saved my life. I’m living proof of what Amnesty International can do when you sit in your house and write a letter or when you email it.” 

But she still was considered guilty and spent the year going to jail every week. “I got my freedom back in January 2007. I could demonstrate I did not commit libel.” 

Cacho filed a counter-suit for violation of her human rights. She became the first woman in Mexico to file a federal suit against a governor, district attorney, and judge for corruption and attempted rape in prison. 

“I am the first Mexican woman in Mexican history to take a case to the Supreme Court. The Court is not interested in citizens. They are interested in politics. So they only listen to politicians. I am trying to take the governor of Puebla to trial. He was involved in getting me in jail and allowing them to plan my rape and beating. I don’t know if I’m going to win that, but I’m taking it one day at a time.” 

She has some powerful enemies. “All the experts I interviewed believe it is an international mafia also involving Las Vegas.” Cacho’s life is repeatedly threatened and she has to travel with armed guards. Despite these dangers, she continues to champion the advancement of human rights for all children and women through her writing and advocacy work. “I don’t want revenge,” said Cacho, “I want accountability and transparency.” 

As for the children… “most of the kids are going through psychological therapy, and we don’t know if they will ever really regain their lives. But some are real survivors, they are changing their lives and are taking their souls and reconstructing them every day.” 

 

For more information go to www.lydiacacho.net. 

 


Police Blotter

By Rio Bauce
Tuesday May 01, 2007

Assault 

On Wednesday, April 25, at 3:30 p.m., a Berkeley man was walking along Shattuck at Cedar Street, when another man punched him. The suspect was carrying a skateboard. No emergency services were needed for the victim. 

 

Scooter thieves 

A Berkeley High School sophomore was walking to sports practice at San Pablo Park after school on Wednesday when four to five teenagers assaulted him and took his Razor Micro scooter. No emergency services were needed. 

 

Meth abuse 

At 6:34 p.m. Wednesday, a homeowner phoned the police to report that somebody was shooting up in the basement of their 2500 block of Hillegass apartment complex. Berkeley Police Department Officer O’Donnell arrived at the scene and found somebody there. Emergency services were dispatched for a possible methamphetamine overdose and the trespasser was transported to a local hospital. 

 

Assault with gasoline 

At Ohlone park late Wednesday night, a Berkeley resident called in to report that a 67-year-old man had thrown gasoline on his face. The two had an argument but the contents of that argument remain unknown. 

 

Laptop steal 

Just before the clock struck midnight on Wednesday, an Oakland man called in to report that somebody had broken into his car. It was reported that the incident happened between 7 and 10 p.m. that night. Somebody took a laptop from the car. There are no suspects. 

 

Convertible slash 

On Thursday evening, a victim reported that somebody had slashed the top of his convertible parked on the 2600 block of Piedmont Avenue. The police suspect that the burglar was scared off, since nothing was missing from the car. No suspects have been identified in connection with this case. 


Children’s Community Center Celebrates 80th Anniversary

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday April 27, 2007

Freedom is what pre-schoolers at Berkeley’s oldest nursery will inherit on their first day of class—freedom to learn and grow through play, by getting their hands wet and their feet muddy and by letting their imaginations soar.  

When preschoolers—both past and present—and their parents and teachers come together Saturday to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Children’s Community Center (CCC), memories will be exchanged and stories told about this unique facility tucked away in one of the greenest corners of North Berkeley. 

“Berkeley had no pre-school before the CCC was founded in 1927,” said Andrea Lampros, who has sent her three children there. Lampros’ husband John Fike is also a proud alumnus of CCC. “Original records indicate that it’s not only the oldest preschool in the city, but also the oldest co-operative preschool west of the Mississippi.” 

The first thing that hits you about CCC is the space. Massive airy classrooms open onto an undulating and lush green playground. 

What makes CCC even more special is the fact that it is directed and managed by parents, in cooperation with a professional teaching staff. 

“There is no hired administration,” Lampros said, as she volunteered at the school Wednesday. “The co-op owns the land. Teachers do the curriculum and parents do everything from cleaning the grounds to creating a budget. We have volunteers who are on the board of directors, but they are made up of parents and teachers as well.” 

Twenty-seven mothers—mostly wives of UC Berkeley professors—garnered financial support from the university’s Institute of Child Welfare and founded CCC 80 years ago. They brought in the institute’s premier early childhood educator Katharine Whiteside Taylor, who was named the school’s founding director. 

“Katherine believed that parents and children learn together through shared life in both home and school. We still believe in that today.” said Lampros. “The mothers wanted their children to have the freedom to play in a natural environment. They felt the need to be involved in their children’s education and to create a community of mothers.” 

If it’s the “dressing up” or the morning cooking project that makes CCC parent Shirley Brewin send her daughter Alden to the frontyard program in the morning, it’s the painting and the music lessons that attract others. 

Allyssa Lamb, who teaches the Front Yard younger kids and is an alumna herself, spoke of bonds she made in 1971 at the center that still exist today. 

“I remember my mother and my grandmother volunteering and making connections with other families. My mother still remembers all the names,” she said, taking part in an obstacle course with 3-year-old Delia Falliers. The program helps kids transition from one stage to the other by letting them eat pretend meals before joining the older group in the Back Yard. 

“Back then it was more moms participating,” she said. “It was all about women. We have quite a few dads now, which is great.” 

Lamb, who studied Early Childhood Education at Contra Costa College, said her best training came from watching the children. 

“I want them to have a voice, to put words to feelings,” she said. “This is where kids form their base before they go into formal education. Simple stuff such as what happens to water when you pour it or to you when you jump into a mud hole is basic to adults but not to 3- and 4-year-olds. At CCC we stress communication and conflict-resolution and value diversity and creativity.” 

As 3-year-old Devin—Lampros’s son—worked on a race track, his friends Lilah and Solomon splashed about in the water table. 

“Your bridge is going all hokey pokey,” Brian Fitch, a backyard teacher, told Devin. Fitch, a San Francisco resident, who fell in love with CCC 17 years ago. 

“It’s such a magical age,” he said. “They are vocal but still innocent in so many ways. It’s difficult not to be drawn into their world or to satisfy their curiosity. In this age of technological invasion, kids still remain pretty much the same. Toys and TV shows have changed, but the thing that hasn’t changed is a child’s need to play.” 

Water, Fitch said, was an essential play component for kids at CCC. “It’s an incredible curriculum, a teaching tool all by itself,” he said. “A child who is not aware of the physical world is moody and sleepy.” 

Lilah and Devin are perfect opposites of that child. As they struggled to create a Lego tower taller than Brian, their effort was a fine example of what CCC stands for—competence, self-confidence and co-operation. 

 

CCC 80th Anniversary Gala  

Includes silent auction, food, libations and music. 5:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Saturday at Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. $15 in advance, $20 at the door.  

 

CCC party and reunion 

June 10 at 114O Walnut St., Berkeley. 528-6975. www.cccpreschool.org.


Berkeley Lab Seeks Funds For 2nd Biofuel Project

By Richard Brenneman
Friday April 27, 2007

While Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) officials were pitching their role in the half-billion-dollar grant from British oil giant BP, they were also bidding for a second, similar but federally funded program. 

Aiding in the effort has been a coalition of regional business and economic groups, city officials from Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond and Emeryville and Economic Development Alliance for Business (EDAB)—a powerful but little-known agency that unites the interests of council chambers and corporate boardrooms. 

The Berkeley Daily Planet learned of the bids under the second program, which have not yet been made public, from documents received from the City of Berkeley in response to a California Public Records Act request.  

Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson confirmed the information in the documents, as did some employees of the Department of Energy and the city of Berkeley who were not willing to go on the record at this time. 

The $125 million Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) would be one of three national centers created by the DOE, each funded for up to $25 million a year over the course of five years. 

The local application is a joint proposal from Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia national labs, Carson said. LBNL has been playing the lead role. 

Announcement of the final selection could happen as early as June, according to the U.S. Department of Energy official who would speak only on background. 

While no site was listed in the grant application, documents provided under the California Public Records Act request show that strong interest has focused on the Marchant Building at 6701 San Pablo Ave. 

Both the massive “UC/BP” project and the federal program target the same goal—keeping cars on the road in a petroleum-starved world by turning plants into “biofuels.” 

“We see the biocenter as a focus for research and development of alternate resources for energy needs that are going to be increasing,” Carson said. He said the need is especially great given diminishing global oil reserves and the anticipated growth of the U.S. population by 100 million over the next 12 years.  

The principal focus of the project would be creation of ethanol from cellulose, said the DOE representative who would speak only on background.  

Key players who figure in both pitches are a pair of scholars-cum-entrepreneurs who have managed to carve out careers in both the academic and business worlds. 

Both Jay Keasling, listed as project director on the JBEI grant application, and Chris Somerville, a principal investigator, also have leading roles in the BP-backed Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI). 

Somerville is the LBNL scholar proposed to serve as director of the EBI, which is slated to receive most of a $500 billion grant fund by BP p.l.c.., the company formerly known as British Petroleum.  

Officials from the four cities, working with officials from Contra Costa and Alameda Counties, EDAB, the Bay Area Economic Forum, the Bay Area Council and LBNL, have been actively lobbying for the JEBI proposal, working with property owners and brokers, according to the documents obtained from the city of Berkeley. 

The effort is spearheaded by the Economic Development Alliance for Business (EDAB), a private alliance of corporate and government leaders who work to make life easier for businesses to locate and operate in the East Bay. 

EDAB Technology and Trade Director Robert Sakai has been coordinating the effort to enlist local governments in the cause of luring the JEBI—in part because of the promise of corporate startups generated by the researchers and their projects. 

While the proposal submitted to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) was written without mentioning a particular site, the written documentation and emails focus on the Marchant Building, also known as the Smith-Marchant Building and sometimes referred to as the “Marchand” building in the documents. 

The building and surrounding lot fall within the boundaries of three cities, Berkeley, Oakland and Emeryville, and the mayors of all three cities co-signed a letter to Under Secretary of Energy Ray Orbach in support of the LBNL grant application. 

Now owned by UC Berkeley, the property would be sold to the consortium of three national laboratories headed by LBNL which have teamed up for the project. The university would lease back part of the structure for continuing research. 

The federal funding specifically precludes using any of the money for buying or building a structure to house the research, said the federal official. 

 

Evolution of the project 

While the DOE announced plans to fund the centers last August, the earliest mention of the project in the documents provided under provisions of the CPRA is in a Nov. 3 email from Robert Sakai to Michael Caplan and Patrick O’Keeffe, the city economic development directors of Berkeley and Emeryvillle. 

“Our local consortium of research institutions is now competing for a $125 M institute, refocused on biofuels and renamed the Joint Bio-Energy Institute (JBEI—pronounced J-Bay). The JBEI committee has decided to propose to site the facility in either Berkeley or Emeryville,” Sakai wrote.  

In the same email he also revealed a second point: “British Petroleum is planning to establish a $500 M, 10-year Bioenergy program at a major research institution ... After a site visit a few days ago they said one strike against Berkeley is the high cost of living.” 

Sakai said he was working on mortgage assistance packages to help make the region more attractive, and urged the two cities to offer homeowner incentives to the oil company researchers. 

On Nov. 13, Caplan notified Calvin Fong, an aide to Mayor Tom Bates, that Doug Herst, owner of the old Peerless lighting factory site in West Berkeley, had expressed interest through developer’s representative Darrell de Tienne in luring the project to his site. 

Four days later, Sakai wrote to Caplan, O’Keeffe and Eileen DeGuzman, who works on housing issues for Alameda County, reporting that the JBEI application was a joint effort by the three national labs under the guidance of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). 

Sakai stressed the importance of offering incentives to the DOE to match those offered by other regions also competing for the lab. “The labs feel we have an edge in infrastructure and personnel, but obviously, the better the return on investment they can demonstrate, the better we can compete,” he wrote. 

Caplan responded 19 minutes later, telling Sakai he had discussed the proposal “with the Mayor, the City Manager and a representative of several large property owners in West Berkeley” (de Tienne), and noting that one owner, presumably Herst, had a site near the freeway and the Fourth Street shopping district. “The Mayor, the CM and I all agree that the bio-energy focus would be a terrific fit for this project ... and could catalyze much secondary and tertiary economic development in the vicinity.”  

One voice of dissent came a half hour later in an email from Dave Fogarty, the second member of the city’s economic development team: “I think it would be more advantageous to convince the University to host the tax-exempt facility on its existing property, maybe on Oxford, and have the incubator space in West Berkeley. I hate to see more commercial property go off the tax rolls.” 

Caplan met with Don Yost and John Norheim, two prominent West Berkeley commercial property brokers, on Dec. 7, and the next day Sakai emailed officials Caplan, O’Keeffe and Richmond Economic Development Director Steve Duran, reporting that a Richmond site would also be considered. 

A Dec. 8 memorandum, recounting a discussion with Doug Lockhart of LBNL’s planning staff, laid out some of the facility’s requirements, including 18,000 square feet of office and conference space, two 13,000-square-foot spaces for dry and wet labs and 8,000 square feet for research support. The project would employ an operational staff of 15 to 20 and house $15 million in technology. 

The ideal site according to Lockhart would be on property now owned by Bayer in West Berkeley, adjacent to the space now rented by the lab’s Life Sciences and Physical Biosciences program in the Wareham Development-owned office building at 717 Potter St. 

The lab also expressed interest in the Peerless Lighting site. 

The lab’s second choice would be in Emeryville, but the proposed site—also owned by Wareham—was perceive to be too costly to adapt. 

Another possible site viewed with less enthusiasm was at Marina Village in Alameda, but Lockhart reportedly said the site was small, too far from Potter Street, and would cost about $300 per square foot to bring up to lab standards.. 

Two sites in Richmond were also under consideration, but one—the Campus Bay site adjacent to the university’s Richmond Field Station—was ruled out because traces of toxins evaporation from industrial waste buried at the site would “undoubtedly get into the building itself, which is unacceptable.” 

Another Bayer-owned site in Richmond, the site of the recently closed Bayer Berlex facility, was also being considered. 

At least two meetings followed with officials from the cities, the lab and brokers and developers. 

The second meeting on Jan. 4 focused on the Marchant Building, which would require a joint powers agreement involving the three cities. 

Finally, on Jan. 3, the application was sent off to Under Secretary Orbach, accompanied by the joint letter from the three mayors. 

As work on the application progressed, a partnership of two Michigan developers—Redico of Southfield and Signature Associates of East Lansing—signed a contract to buy the building from the university, according to a Feb. 20 letter from Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates to LBNL Director Chu. 

The last document provided was a March 22 email from UC Berkeley Community Relations Director Irene Hegarty to Bates and Caplan outlining the agenda for a March 26 “Chancellor’s Dinner with East Bay Mayors.”  

In addition to mayors Bates, Ron Dellums, Nora Davis of Emeryville and Gayle McLaughlin of Richmond, the event featured Keasling and, Hegarty and UCB Associate Chancellor John Cummins, Birgeneau’s chief of staff. 

The purpose of the meeting: to share plans for the EBI “and other related research at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the potential contribution to regional economic development as well as to local energy policy and practices.”  

The aggressive nature of the research goals of both projects has been emphasized by LBNL Director Steven Chu, who compared the BP biofuel program to the Manhattan Project during a campus forum held by project supporters in late March.The Manhattan Project was a massive secret federal program directed by UC Berkeley physicist Robert Oppenheimer which led to the creation of the atomic bomb. 

Both seem to advance a deeper political agenda for the Bush Administration: using biofuels as political and economic weapons against disfavored regimes, both the oil-rich lands of the troubled Mideast and the nation of Venezuela, where Hugo Chavez, the charismatic populist president, has emerged as a leading critic of the American president.  

 

Next week, the Planet will run a second installment of this story, focusing on the Bush administration’s agenda on biofuels.


UC Student Senate Urges Caution on BP Contract

By Richard Brenneman
Friday April 27, 2007

Members of the Associated Students of UC Berkeley’s Senate voted Wednesday night to urge administrators to hold off on signing a $500 million contract with BP (British Petroleum) until their concerns have been addressed. 

The grant would create and fund the Energy Biosciences Institute, to be staffed by scientists from the university, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana in a push to create transportation fuels from plants. 

Students asked campus administrators not to sign unless the agreement received “a thorough and ongoing external review by experts who have considerable professional and academic expertise in the fields of ethics, intellectual property rights, public-private conflicts of interest, and the social and environmental impacts of the proposed research.”  

The students also asked that the results of the review be published before any contract was signed with the British oil company. 

Their vote contrasts sharply with the two-to-one majority of faculty members attending the April 19 Academic Senate meeting who resisted a similar call for oversight. 

That vote specially barred any mention of the recommendations of the review of the university’s last controversial academic/corporate contract, the 1998 Novartis Agreement. 

Microbiologist Randy Schekman, sponsor of the winning Academic Senate resolutions, provided for an oversight group comprised of four of the senate’s committee chairs. 

That committee would serve in an advisory capacity, reporting to Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, the project’s most outspoken backer and a harsh critic of any effort to rein in corporate funding of university research. 

Their charge is also much less specific than that called for by the students. 

The student senate resolution was adopted without opposition, said Jamie Tzeng, a member of the student group StopBP-Berkeley.org, who attended the meeting. 

A similar resolution had already been passed by the students in the university’s Graduate Assembly April 7, which also sought to have graduate students included on the panel. 

Meanwhile, critics of the BP proposal continue with their program of teach-ins and other activities. One teach-in was held Thursday night and another is planned for next Wednesday (May 2) at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. 

That meeting will feature presentations by science journalist Jennifer Washburn, three UC Berkeley faculty—Professors Ignacio Chapela, Carl Hayden and Jean Lave—and, by phone from Brazil, James Thorlby of the Pastoral Land Commission and Hillary Lehr, a student and slam poet.


Tussle Erupts Over Library Trustee Board Appointment

By Judith Scherr
Friday April 27, 2007

The tradition of reappointing library trustees for their second and final four-year terms without considering new applicants is being challenged by a trustee. 

At the Library Board of Trustees’ April 18 meeting, Trustee Ying Lee, a former councilmember and retired congressional aide, argued against the “flawed and misleading” practice, saying the reappointment of a trustee should be seen as analogous to an elected official running for a new term in office. 

“At the end of a term, an incumbent runs and has many advantages—but runs,” Lee said, arguing against automatic reappointment, in which new applicants are not considered.  

(Not present at the April 18 meeting, the Daily Planet reviewed the library’s recording of the meeting.) 

Unlike other Berkeley boards and commissions, the five-member library board is created by the City Charter. The council representative is appointed by the City Council and sitting trustees recommend new or returning board members—there is a two-term limit—who are confirmed by the council. 

At issue immediately is the reappointment of Library Board of Trustees Chair Susan Kupfer, whose four-year term ends on May 13.  

Despite a call for applicants to be present at the April 18 meeting, the board voted 3-1 to recommend Kupfer’s reappointment. Lee voted in opposition and Kupfer recused herself. The City Council has the final word. 

Kupfer did not return a call for comment. 

In an interview Tuesday, Trustee/Councilmember Darryl Moore, who serves as the board’s City Council appointee, argued that incumbents should be given a second term unless they have performed poorly. 

“She’s worked hard as director—she deserves another term,” Moore told the Daily Planet.  

Trustee Terry Powell agreed. Speaking at the April 18 meeting, she said, “Our past practice should be respected” and adhered to until a new process is developed. 

In the past, the City Council has traditionally approved the board’s choices without discussion. After several controversial years in the library in which the board decided to implement a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag system to check out books—unpopular with some members of the staff and the public—and during which a conflict erupted between staff and the former director, ending with the director’s resignation under pressure, the City Council and library board agreed that a new system for choosing trustees should be considered.  

An “Ad Hoc Committee for ‘sunshining’ the Selection of Library Trustees” formed “to establish a more open and transparent process for selecting Library Board members,” according to the March 13 council resolution that established the body. 

The committee met for the first time April 17. It is tasked with writing procedures for a more inclusive and open selection process. Trustee members are Kupfer and Lee; councilmembers are Betty Olds and Kriss Worthington.  

At the trustees’ April 18 meeting, Lee called on fellow trustees to extend Kupfer’s term by allowing the ad hoc committee to do its job and create an orderly process for the incumbent to reapply for the office and for new applicants to apply as well. No other trustee spoke in favor of this proposal. 

Adding to the confusion around the reappointment of Kupfer was a May 13 press release authored by Alan Bern, community relations librarian, calling for applicants who wish to fill the “vacancy.” 

Bern declined to tell the Daily Planet who directed him to publish the release. Library Director Donna Corbeil was out of town and unavailable for comment. 

The release advises the community of a number of things, including the April 17 ad hoc committee meeting and the possibility that Kupfer would be asked to serve a second term at the April 18 board meeting. At almost the end of the press release, one reads: “The City of Berkeley is currently soliciting applications to fill this upcoming vacancy on the Board of Library Trustees … The deadline for submitting completed applications by e-mail to [the city clerk] is 2 p.m. on April 18, 2007.” 

The last paragraph of the release advises applicants that they must be at the trustees’ meeting to be considered for the seat. 

Applicant Helen Wheeler, who holds a master’s degree in library sciences and has served as a professional in the field, put in her bid for the seat in March through the city clerk’s office. She told the Daily Planet Tuesday that an email from the library directing her to be at the Wednesday meeting was sent on Sunday, April 15. At that point she said she concluded, because of the short notice, that the application process was not serious and she withdrew her name. 

Applicant Pat Cody, co-founder of Cody’s books, was present at the April 18 meeting. She was not called on by the board. 

“The press release was a farce,” Gene Bernardi, a member of SuperBOLD, Berkelyans Organizing for Library Defense, told the trustees at the meeting, asking how the general public would have known there was a “vacancy.” 

The question of Kupfer’s reappointment has not yet been scheduled for the City Council. The appointment process will be discussed in committee May 1, 6:30 p.m., South Berkeley Library, 1901 Russell St. 


OUSD Local Control Bill Passes Committee

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Friday April 27, 2007

Assemblymember Sandré Swanson’s AB 45 Oakland school local control bill overcame its first legislative hurdle this week, passing the Assembly Education Committee on a 7-2 party line vote (Democrats voting aye, Republicans voting no), but in a vastly modified form that drastically changes the terms under which local control would be restored. 

“I am extremely pleased with today’s outcome.” Swanson said in a prepared statement following the vote. “AB 45 provides a structured and orderly process for the return of all administrative and fiscal operations to the Oakland Unified School Board. It is necessary for a pragmatic and sustainable transfer of governance and to ensure that parents can hold their elected School Board accountable for the educational decisions of their children.” 

With state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell announcing his opposition to the bill, several Oakland residents, activists, and officials traveled to Sacramento for Wednesday’s public hearing to voice their support. If they were critical of the changes to Swanson’s bill, none of them voiced it publicly to the committee on Wednesday. 

Oakland’s public schools have been under state control since 2003. Fulfilling a promise made during last year’s election campaign, Swanson introduced his Oakland school local control bill as his first piece of legislation, on the day he was sworn into office. 

On Wednesday, Assemblymember Loni Hancock (D-Berkeley), an Assembly Education Committee and one of several AB 45 co-authors, called the bill “fair and thoughtful,” and said it “sets out a framework for an orderly return to local control.” 

Under Swanson’s original legislation, power would have been immediately transferred from the state superintendent’s office to the Oakland Unified School District Board of Education in four of the five areas of concern being monitored by the state-authorized Fiscal Crisis Assistance Management Team (FCMAT). Those operational areas would have been community relations and governance, facilities management, personnel management, and pupil achievement. The state superintendent’s office would have continued to retain control over the fifth area of operation-fiscal management-under Swanson’s original bill, although some local school activists and officials, including Oakland Education Association President Betty Olsen-Jones during her testimony at Wednesday’s hearing, have said they wanted Swanson’s original bill amended to include return of local fiscal control as well. 

The day before the hearing, however, Swanson introduced an amended version of his bill that took out the immediate return provision, substituting a provision that would return local control in each operational area only upon FCMAT’s recommendation. Under the current law governing the OUSD takeover, the state superintendent has the final say over return to local control, and can ignore FCMAT’s recommendation. In fact, FCMAT has recommended since September of 2005 that local control be restored to the Oakland School Board in the area of community relations and governance, but Superintendent Jack O’Connell has so far failed to do so. Swanson’s amended bill would make that return mandatory, rather than at the State Superintendent’s discretion, following the FCMAT recommendation. 

FCMAT has come under severe criticism at several Oakland school board and community meetings for its oversight activities, and activists who have worked for return to local control questioned Swanson on Wednesday both before and after the hearing about the necessity of keeping the local control decision in FCMAT’s hands. 

Swanson said he would use his oversight authority in the state Legislature to ensure that FCMAT gives a “fair evaluation” to Oakland Unified, and said the amendments adding FCMAT recommendations for restoration of local control were necessary in order to ensure passage and enactment of the bill. 

“I don’t just want to get a bill passed, I want to get it signed by the governor into law,” Swanson said. He said that because AB 45 would set a precedent on how local control is restored to California school districts taken over by the state, staff members of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, especially, were concerned about having some independent authority decide when that local control would take place. 

Swanson told bill supporters that the state legislature was “a tough place,” and said he “wanted to craft a bill that could not be refuted by a simple statement.” 

That was in reference to a statement read into the record at Wednesday’s hearing by California Education Department staffmember Andrea Ball announcing O’Connell’s opposition to the bill. 

While the statement said that ‘the state superintendent would like nothing more than to return the operation of the Oakland school district to local control,” O’Connell said that “although the Oakland USD has made progress in fiscal responsibility and academic achievement, more work needs to be done,” and that he opposed AB 45, in part, because it “would make fundamental change to the role of FCMAT in making recommendations and reports on district progress” and “would set up a new bureaucratic process that would blur lines of responsibility.” 

O’Connell’s statement added that “the state superintendent will not return authority to the board until the district is on sound footing to recovery and the state can be assured that the district can sustain its gains and not be at risk of its authority being returned to state control.” [See excerpts from O’Connell’s full statement in a sidebar to this article.”] 

Following the hearing, Swanson was critical of O’Connell’s actions over the bill. 

“I met with the Superintendent as I was preparing this bill, and asked for his input,” Swanson said. “I even offered to have his office write a bill themselves that gave guidelines and timetables for a return to local control. I got back not one suggestion. Until now, they have remained neutral on the bill. This is the first time they have said that they were in opposition.” 

OUSD Board President David Kakishiba said that “if you take over something that you do not intend to hold permanently, you’ve got to nurture and support a plan for succession of the new leadership. If the State Superintendent had done that, this bill would not have been necessary. We never heard clear expectations and areas of our responsibility and time frames for return to local control from the superintendent’s office.” 

Acknowledging that Swanson “had to make changes” in order to ensure passage, Oakland City Councilmember Jean Quan, who was serving on the Oakland School Board at the time of the takeover, called Swanson’s bill a “smart bill” and told local control supporters “we all have to tell Don Perata that we have to get it through the Senate, as well. We need to send him letters of love and support.” 

That elicited groans from the Oakland activist crowd, many of whom have criticized Perata for the original OUSD takeover. But Quan said that “we need to let him know how we stand on this. He’s a smart politician.” 

AB 45 would also provide money for yearly FCMAT evaluations of the Oakland school district until the full restoration of local control. Under the original takeover legislation, money has run out for FCMAT evaluations, making it currently impossible for the district to officially demonstrate progress. 

In addition, Swanson’s bill would restore pay to school board members as each area of local governance is restored. The original 2003 OUSD takeover legislation stripped school board members of their pay. 

 


Cuts Proposed for Some Agencies Serving Needy

By Judith Scherr
Friday April 27, 2007

Start the day with a good breakfast. “That’s what our moms always told us,” said Bert Johnson Wednesday morning over hot cereal, a cup of java, a couple of slices of day-old bread and the company of friends.  

Johnson, who sleeps on the streets around town, has been getting a free no-frills breakfast for about a year at the Dorothy Day House breakfast program at Trinity United Methodist Church at Dana Street and Bancroft Way. 

The six-day-a-week offering that serves 100-to-150 meals each day is facing a proposed cut of $8,000, about one-fourth of the $31,800 the program got last year from the city’s general fund.  

“I don’t know if people doing the budget have seen the program,” Johnson said. “They stretch every penny.” 

 

Providers weigh in 

At Tuesday evening’s meeting, the City Council heard from more than 60 service providers and recipients and reviewed about 175 programs for which several commissions and city staff have proposed spending almost $9.4 million in federal and city funds, down from slightly more than $9.5 million from last year. The city’s entire budget is around $350 million. 

The council is slated to vote on the approximately $5.3 million federal funding portion at its May 8 meeting and will address the approximately $4.2 million from the city’s general fund in June. 

The city funds about one-third of the Trinity breakfast program; grants and donations fund the other two-thirds. The $8,000 cut means 8,000 fewer meals will be served, program director Jill Messing told the Daily Planet, pointing out that the program is more than simply about food. 

“We treat the homeless with a high level of respect,” Messing said. “The clients trust us a lot.” 

Program cuts are a result of a 3 percent cut in federal funds, most of which comes from Community Service Block Grants. City staff has identified some funding that is slated to make up for 1 percent of the lost funds, leaving the city with a 2 percent overall cut in community agency allocations for the 2008 fiscal year. 

Funding levels were recommended by the Housing Advisory Commission, the Homeless Commission, the Community Welfare Commission, the Parks and Recreation Commission and city staff. 

Commissioners and staff said they believe that in some cases the agencies facing cuts could make up the difference with grant funds or donations. 

 

Some get more 

Many programs won’t feel the pinch at all and some will see enhanced funding, such as Options for Recovery Services and the Emergency Services for Disabled Transportation Program.  

While most of the agencies under consideration provide services to people in need, some are categorized as providing economic development. The city manager recommended, for example, that the Berkeley Convention and Visitors Bureau, which received $241,667 from the general fund in fiscal year 2007, get $277,333 next year.  

Another city-funded program will see a cut, however. The Community Energy Services Corporation, a nonprofit whose board of directors is the city Energy Commission, is facing a decreased CDBG grant, going from about $338,000 in fiscal year 2007 to $320,000 next year. CEAC provides services such as home rehabilitation and seismic retrofit services for low-income Berkeley residents and services for businesses to help them become more energy efficient. 

Notwithstanding the cut, CEAC is slated to receive the largest among Berkeley’s CDBG grants. 

 

Providers: cuts will hurt 

Many of the providers and service recipients who filled the council chambers and stairwell outside it Tuesday evening face funding cuts. Through the Looking Glass is a program that supports the parenting of people with disabilities. The proposed cut from fiscal year 2007 to 2008 is from $31,500 to $28,300. “We’re the only group in the county doing parenting with disabled people,” Judi Rogers, pregnancy and birthing specialist at the agency, told the council. 

Building Opportunities for Self Sufficiency is facing cuts to several of its programs that serve homeless individuals and families, including a cut at the multi-service center from $193,800 in 2007 to next year’s proposed $165,000. 

Winston Burton, a BOSS staff person, told the council that the center is doing its job by serving the most difficult to serve population. “Of 119 new intakes, 33 percent are chronically homeless,” he said, noting that over the last year BOSS put 66 people into permanent housing. 

Cuts from $92,100 to $80,000 at Lifelong Medical Center’s acupuncture detox clinic means 2,000 fewer visits, a spokesperson told the council. Among a number of other agencies to lose some funding are New Bridge Foundation, Rebuilding Together (formerly Habitat for Humanity) and the Japanese-American Services of the East Bay senior program. 

While the presentation to the council by category of need—disabled, senior, health, etc.—was organized and orderly, the process leading up to the recommendations drew criticisms from various quarters. 

Marie Bowman, chair of the Housing Advisory Committee, said staff had been inappropriately lobbied by low-income housing developers and that the commission’s request to ask council to look for additional funds for Lifelong Medical’s housing needs was ignored in a staff report. 

Councilmember Gordon Wozniak said the process was driven by the agencies rather than by a more thorough knowledge of the various needs in Berkeley. 

 

Lights out for seniors 

Seniors from New Light Senior Center came out in force to lobby the council to save their three-day-a-week organic meals program. City staff has recommended defunding the program and moving it from the South Berkeley YMCA on California Street to the South Berkeley Senior Center, but the program’s last day is today (Friday). 

According to Councilmember Max Anderson, the program has no insurance, despite the city’s having given it $18,000 for that purpose, and staff has no workers’ compensation. Moreover, Anderson said, the YMCA, which owns the building, wants the space to expand its youth program. 

Former Executive Director Jackie DeBose, however, said in a phone interview Thursday that liability and auto insurance are paid up and that the funds from the city were spent on back rent and staff salaries. DeBose said budgetary problems at New Light stemmed from the 30 percent funding cuts the city made to the program in recent years. 

New Light seniors at the council meeting told the Daily Planet that they don’t mind moving the program to another venue, but want to keep the community they’ve formed and their unique organic meals program intact. Former Councilmember Maudelle Shirek was instrumental in creating the program and continues to eat there three times a week, they said. 

“These cuts are painful,” said Councilmember Dona Spring toward the end of the council meeting. “These programs do so much with so little.” 

 

Photograph by Judith Scherr. 

Bert Johnson starts his day with the Dorothy Day House breakast program, one of the many city funded programs facing possible cuts.


Effort to Save Iceland Rink Reports Some Progress

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday April 27, 2007

SaveBerkeleyIceland.org—the community based organization that came forward in January to preserve the 67 year-old historic ice-rink at 2727 Milvia St.—has so far raised $90,000 from six weeks of fundraising. 

Berkeley Iceland, which was recently landmarked, closed its doors on March 31 due to dismal profits over the last few years. It has been on sale for over a year with a price tag of $6.45 million. 

“We are still fundraising and proceeding with our plan to purchase the building and reopen the rink,” said Elizabeth Grassetti, president, University Figure Skating Club and a SaveBerkeleyIceland.org volunteer. 

“Our aim is to turn Berkeley Iceland into a community center. Make it a destination attraction to draw visitors to South Berkeley,” she said. “We want to create activities that families, skaters and other athletes can enjoy. ” 

University Figure Skating Club is an adult recreational ice-dancing club which used Berkeley Iceland before it closed down. Grassetti and her group now use the Oakland Iceland, which she said was more expensive. 

Donations are being accepted through the organization’s website. Information about preservation efforts is also being published in publications such as the Cal Alumni Newsletter. 

“A lot of former UC Berkeley students have used the rink to skate or play broomball on and have fond memories of the place,” said Grassetti. “The newsletter is a logical place to reach them.” Fundraising was also carried out in front of the rink before it closed. 

Tom Killilea, president of Bay Area Blades, told the Planet that the majority of donations had come from individuals rather than groups. 

“We are getting a lot of help from former rink users, a lot of whom want to remain anonymous,” he said. “We have had close to 1000 individual donations and the highest among them was for $5000. Kids are donating their allowance money and emptying out their savings accounts. One of our benefactors sent us money from Idaho because that’s the only thing her grand-daughter wanted for her birthday.” 

Killilea added that there had been a significant increase in figure skating at the Berkeley Iceland last year. 

“Iceland was in the news a lot in 2006. That at least helped people know that it existed,” he said. 

Killelea and other volunteers met with the owners of Berkeley Iceland Tuesday for the first time. “We know there are multiple bidders,” Killilea said, “but we are optimistic. A lot depends on the decision of owners.” 

SaveBerkeleyIceland.org has also met with Mayor Tom Bates in the past to discuss funding options. 

“We are not asking for a grant but for a loan,” said Grassetti. “Mayor Bates told us that a loan might be available. However, we have to do more work and give our plans better shape.” 

In an e-mail to the Planet, chief-of-staff to the mayor Cisco DeVries said that Bates had held a number of conversations with people interested in preserving Iceland. 

“It is the mayor’s position that our priority should be to try and preserve the rink,” he said. “The mayor believes it would be quite difficult for the City to purchase the rink outright, but that it may be possible for the City to be a partner with other organizations in that effort.”  

DeVries added that the “city has no specific funds identified to put towards Iceland at this time.”  


Council Says No to Chicks in Cages and Yes to Draft Resisters

By Judith Scherr
Friday April 27, 2007

Opposition to chicks in cages, support for draft resistors and getting rid of plastic shopping bags were among the items approved by the Berkeley City Council Tuesday. 

Although the council voted unanimously on March 20 to discuss the process on April 24 for writing a “sunshine” ordinance to make government more transparent and accessible, the issue failed to appear on the agenda. 

In his remarks to the City Council, City Manager Phil Kamlarz took responsibility. “It was a screw up,” he said, promising to bring the question to council May 8.  

In the city attorney’s draft ordinance discussed in March, citizen complaints on violations of a sunshine ordinance would go to the city manager, something a number of citizens, including Mark Schlosberg of the American Civil Liberties Union, objected to at the time. 

 

Cage-free chicks  

The city drew praise from the United States Humane Society on Wednesday for its unanimous passage Tuesday of a resolution, authored by Councilmember Dona Spring, condemning the confinement of egg-laying hens in tiny cages. The society called the practice “one of the most notorious factory farming practices: the intensive confinement of egg-laying hens in tiny wire battery cages.” 

Lindsay Vurek did more than speak against the confinement during the council’s public comment period Tuesday. He brought along a tiny cage and five stuffed chicks to show the circumstances in which some chickens spend their short lives. 

“Sometimes a dead chicken is in the cage,” Vurek told the council. 

Councilmember Betty Olds called for a resolution with teeth. 

“This is such an important item,” she said. “We would like to do more.” Olds and Spring said they would bring back stronger legislation in the future. 

 

Getting rid of plastic 

Also passing unanimously was a referral to the Zero Waste Commission and the Community Environment Advisory Commission to look at adopting an ordinance similar to the one passed in San Francisco that would ban large grocery stores and chain drug stores from using non-compostable plastic shopping bags. 

Speaking during the public comment period, Jan Lundberg said the goal was to replace the plastic, not to use less harmful kinds of plastics.  

 

Resisting War 

The council voted 8-0-1 to support a resolution from the Peace and Justice Commission declaring May 15 of every year Conscientious Objector and War Resister’s Day. Councilmember Gordon Wozniak abstained. 

In other actions, the council unanimously approved: 

• Funding greenhouse gas reduction through the city at $100,000; 

• Crisis intervention training for police officers; 

• Support for State Senate bills advocating universal health care; 

• Accepting a $120,000 grant from Alameda County Waste Management Authority to start a residential food-scrap composting program. 

 

 

 


Peralta Trustees Delay Safety Report, Look at Finances

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Friday April 27, 2007

The recent Virginia Tech University mass shooting tragedy has led to widespread discussion and debate across the nation about school safety. 

At this week’s Peralta Community College District Board of Trustees meeting it led to a postponement of discussion. 

The board had been scheduled to hear a presentation on disaster preparedness by district Risk Manager Joanne Baldinelli, but a notation in the board’s agenda said that “in view of the recent events at Virginia Tech and an ongoing evaluation of Peralta’s campus security measures, the report will be expanded and presented at the May 8, 2007 Board meeting.” 

At the same meeting, board members heard a report on the outside audit of the district’s finances for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2006, which auditor Heidi White, representing the Vavinek, Trine, Day & Co. called “very tough” and Peralta CFO Tom Smith said was the “hardest audit I’ve been involved with in my career.” 

Both White and Smith credited the difficulties to its occurrence during the transfer over to the district’s PeopleSoft computerized management system. 

“PeopleSoft conversion is difficult under the best of circumstances,” White said, “and you probably didn’t have the best of circumstances.” White said that at some points reconciliation of the books had to be done manually. 

The audit found no irregularities, saying that the district’s financial statements “represent fairly, in all material respects, the financial position of the Peralta Community College District,” which White called an “unqualified opinion.” 

Board President Bill Withrow said that the unqualified opinion issuance by the outside auditors “is not just esthetics. It could have great, favorable impact on our quest to get additional money for the district.” 


Berkeley School Board Looks at ‘Curvy Derby’ Plan

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday April 27, 2007

The Berkeley Board of Education approved $20,000 Wednesday to hire WLC Consultants to officially study the Curvy Derby Plan and further develop it. 

Berkeley High School (BHS) baseball players turned up with community members to voice their support for the plan, which would keep Derby Street open, but bend it to accommodate a regulation-size high school baseball field. The plan, although much discussed for the past year, was presented to the board for the first time at the meeting. 

In the past other plans reviewed by the board to develop the Berkeley Unified School District’s (BUSD) East Campus Field included a design that would require the closing of Derby Street to fit the baseball field as well as a plan that would leave the street untouched for a smaller park without a baseball field. The school board had indicated that the “closed” Derby plan was the preferred option. 

Since it is not within the authority of the board to close the street, it requested that the city share in the expense of the environmental study of the plan. The City Council agreed, provided the district held additional community meetings so that neighbors could voice their opinions about the issue. 

The Curvy Derby plan united some members of the two opposing factions of the community, those who wanted Derby open and whose who wanted it closed. 

Curvy Derby, designed by Berkeley residents Susi Marzuola and Peter Waller, proposes to extend the field north into Carleton Street allowing Derby Street to remain open. It takes out a few trees and some playing space from the King Childcare Development Center (King CDC) across the street from Iceland and curves Derby Street through that space. 

“It’s been over 10 years and very little has progressed,” said school board president Joaquin Rivera. “I hope this will give it the push it needs to make things happen.” 

Board vice-president John Selawsky said it was pertinent to set up a site committee for the field as early as possible. 

“I have received some concerns from neighbors about whether the gates and fences to the field will remain locked to the community. Will Berkeley residents have access to it?” he asked. 

“It’s a field that is getting ready for athletic use,” said Superintendent Michele Lawrence. “At the moment, if someone else wants to use it, they take out a facility use permit. But it’s obvious that if neighbors have a field in front of their house they’ll want to use it. I think it is a complicated issue and we have to handle it in a sensitive way.” 


Commission Looks at Closed-Door Police Complaint Process

By Judith Scherr
Friday April 27, 2007

A sparsely attended public hearing to consider how to conduct closed-door complaint hearings was held Wednesday evening by the Police Review Commission. 

Following the California Supreme Court case Copley Press v. San Diego, Berkeley suspended its public police complaint boards of inquiry during which, traditionally, the complainant and the subject police officer answer questions from a three-person panel to determine whether or not the board will sustain a complaint. 

The Supreme Court decision and a recent decision in favor of the Berkeley Police Association, in BPA v. City of Berkeley, determined that complaint procedures may not be conducted in public because that violates the police officers’ right to privacy in personnel matters. 

Under discussion at the Wednesday public hearing were regulations drafted by the city attorney for eventual closed-door hearings on complaints.  

The commission took no action, but voted to have the city attorney take comments into consideration and come back to the commission with a new draft.  

Commissioners were frustrated by the fact that they have held no boards of inquiry since August. There are 51 complaints pending. “If we keep waiting, we have no way to proceed. We have to adopt something to keep the process toddling along,” said Commissioner Sherry Smith. 

At the heart of the new regulations is a requirement that the complainant, the subject officer, staff and the hearing board sign statements saying they will keep the “substance of the proceedings before the board or evidence submitted to it [confidential and will not] reveal the identity of the officer(s) or any witnesses.” 

Commissioner Michael Sherman commented on the section that read “Commission members shall not make any public comment on any complaints.” Sherman said, “This seems to be very restrictive.” 

“You can’t comment on an individual complaint,” responded City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque. “All records must be confidential—not just the name [of the subject officer],” Albuquerque said. 

Commissioner Jack Radisch commented that the rule doesn’t make sense. He pointed to a fictional example where the complainant would have already gone to the press and named the officer.  

“The complaint has been published in the press, then the complainant goes to the PRC and makes a formal complaint,” Radisch said. “A hearing is conducted. A reporter approaches me [after the closed hearing] and I cannot say what has happened,” he said. 

The city attorney affirmed that was correct, to which Commissioner Michael Sherman replied, “If I had any doubts that we should appeal this all the way, my doubts have been removed.” However, the complainant can describe publicly the incident as he sees it “that is not derived from the hearing,” Albuquerque said. 

The commission also addressed additional regulations governing the closed hearing process drafted by PRC Officer Victoria Urbi, who staffs the commission. The PRC officer “will act as the hearing officer and rule on objections and may make objections,” Urbi wrote. 

PRC members were unanimous in saying that they did not want staff serving in that capacity. “Staff should not be part of the deliberating process,” said Commissioner Bill White. Urbi said she would remove that language. 

In other matters, Urbi lobbied the commissioners to go to the councilmembers and ask for additional PRC staff to investigate complaints. “We’re behind in some very big projects,” she said. 

The commission will look at the revised regulations May 9, 7 p.m., at the South Berkeley Sr. Center, 2939 Ellis St. The PRC subcommittee looking at issues related to the police officer who stole drug evidence will meet May 3, 5:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center, Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Hearst Avenue, to question Police Chief Doug Hambleton. 


City College Event Examines ‘Crisis of The Commons’

Friday April 27, 2007

The “Crisis of the California Commons” is the subject of a conference being held this weekend at Berkeley City College. 

The theme statement says that “the bountiful commons Californians once enjoyed as a gift of nature and fruit of public efforts” is threatened today: “Our resources are degraded, our services privatized, and our public spaces increasingly pre-empted.” 

The opening reception is Friday at 7 p.m., with panel discussions Saturday and Sunday ending at noon on Sunday. 

Among the speakers are U.C. Berkeley faculty members Grey Brechin, Iain Boal, Ignacio Chapela and Dick Walker, and Berkeley authors John Curl and Ruth Rosen. 

On Saturday at 8 p.m. Country Joe McDonald will present “The Musical Commons: A Tribute to Woody Guthrie” at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way in Berkeley.  

(This conference has no relationship to Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates’ “Public Commons for Everyone” initiative, his proposed attempt to regulate street behavior.)


Police Blotter

By Rio Bauce
Friday April 27, 2007

Gun robbery  

In the early hours of the morning on Tuesday, a Berkeley resident called the police to report that he had been robbed at gun point at the intersection of Garber Street and College Avenue. The gunman stole a credit card, laptop computer, cellphone and keys.  

 

Car thief 

On Tuesday, a woman called in at 7:31 a.m. to report that her 1997 Honda Acura had been stolen from her house on the 1600 block of La Vereda Road. The victim reported that it had been taken sometime between 6:30 p.m. the previous night and 7:30 a.m. that morning. There are no suspects in the case.  

 

Forgetful car prowler 

On Tuesday, at around 7:42 a.m. on the 1600 block of Walnut Street, a female victim phoned the police to say that somebody had broken into her car during the night. The suspect left a bag behind in the car. The victim is unsure of what was taken. The suspect hasn’t been identified.  

Auto smash 

At 8:14 a.m. on Tuesday, a woman visiting from Nevada called the Berkeley Police Department to report that her car window was smashed. The burglar took her laptop computer and case during the night.  

 

Car tire vandal 

On Tuesday at 8:33 a.m., a woman called the authorities to report that somebody had unscrewed all four of her tires, letting all the air out. The tires were not cut or slashed. No suspect has been identified.  

 

Vandalism via brick 

A female victim called in at 7:08 a.m. Tuesday from the 2700 block of Garber Street to report that somebody had thrown a brick through a window. She said she was at home during the incident, heard the window break, looked outside, but didn’t see anyone. No one was injured.  

 

Burglary at Best Western 

An auto burglar took a male victim’s laptop computer via lock pry. The victim was visiting from Placerville and staying at the Best Western University Inn on the 900 block of University Avenue. He called in this report at 7:17 a.m. on Tuesday morning. There are no suspects yet in this case.  

 

 

 


Opinion

Editorials

Editorial: Celebrating the Commons on May Day

By Becky O'Malley
Tuesday May 01, 2007

Today is May Day, the first of May, the occasion in many cultures for festivities of one kind or another. The ancient Celts took their herds from winter quarters to summer pastures at this time of year, with appropriate excitement. Socialists of all stripes, especially in Europe, have traditionally celebrated May Day as a labor holiday, though it has sometimes been used as an excuse for ugly displays of weapons. The excitement which culminated in the Haymarket riots in America started around this time of year. Young folks, especially in Europe, danced around May poles, with fertility probably lurking in the background motivation in some fashion. Girls have often been crowned Queen of the May, and Catholics around the world sometimes crowned statues of Mary as well. In England and the United States, children and lovers delivered flowers to doorsteps anonymously in May baskets. Mexicans, Mexican-Americans and their friends celebrate the ejection of French invaders from Mexico this week, culminating on Cinco de Mayo, and May 1 has become a day for demonstrations on behalf of all immigrants. 

Are all of these celebrations connected? Probably. Today is about halfway between the Vernal Equinox and Midsummer’s Day(the summer solstice) so it can be considered the first day of summer. Birds everywhere are singing up a storm. It’s a day when you can be pretty sure summer is really on its way, though we saw snow in the Midwest more than once in the second week of May. In beautiful Northern California we can expect our May Hot Spell any time now: the week or so of sunny mornings and torrid afternoons which gives us false hope that summer in San Francisco won’t be cold and foggy.  

All of this makes May Day a good day to stop and consider the deep interconnectedness of practically everything. As a May Day preview, last weekend I had the good fortune to find out about a conference appropriate to this topic. Sponsored primarily by the California Studies Association, with the title of “CRISIS of the California Commons,” it mostly took a Chicken Little perspective: things have been good until now, but danger lurks ahead.  

From the program: “The bountiful commons Californians once enjoyed are a gift of nature and the fruit of social decision and collective effort. Today they are under sustained assault—our natural resources degraded, our public services privatized and our public spaces increasingly pre-empted.” Such a dim view is not wrong, but some presentations also devoted a fair amount of time to a positive historical perspective, what previous generations accomplished to promote the common good and how they did it.  

The central theme was that much of the world has always been shared by humans for the benefit of everyone, but it will take a lot of vigilance to make sure this continues. A few highlights from the three sessions I was able to attend: Dick Walker, a UC geographer, talked about themes from his most recent book, “The Country in the City,” an account of how people (mostly women) in the Bay Area preserved a remarkable amount of green space for common use. Gray Brechin discussed his Living New Deal project. He and associates are working on documenting the physical legacy of the Roosevelt administrations on behalf of the public, in California and elsewhere. Iain Boal, an Irish social historian of science and technics, took a particular delight in deconstructing what was a hot topic in the seventies, Garrett Hardin’s theory of the tragedy of the commons: an over-extended metaphor based on the belief that grazing land maintained in common is eventually exhausted by individual herdsman seeking to maximize consumption for their own flocks. Boal said that “commons” is the opposite of “commodity”, and he derided the currently trendy notion that privatization and pricing of shared resources is the best way to preserve them. Ignacio Chapela explored the continuing attempt to sell public universities to industrial interests, as exemplified by UC’s impending contract with British Petroleum. Ruth Rosen spoke about what she calls “the care crisis”—even though women have been well into the workforce for four decades, society has yet to make adequate provision for replacing what they did for family care, for doing what used to be called “women’s work.”  

Most of these sessions were standing room only, in small hot rooms in the airless and windowless basement of the new Berkeley City College. (The building comes nowhere near the elegant WPA standard for public amenities—the central “atrium” struck me as a cross between the Hyatt Regency and Alcatraz’s catwalks.) There were many provocative ideas exchanged which deserve wider circulation, so we’ve asked some of the speakers to contribute them to the knowledge commons by writing short commentaries for the Planet on the topics they raised. We’ll be running their piece in these pages as an ongoing symposium for the next few weeks, and we’re looking forward to getting our readers’ reactions. Ruth Rosen’s piece on the family is in today’s paper. 

Speaking of genuine family values, another highlight of the conference was Saturday night’s performance at Anna’s Jazz Island by Country Joe McDonald, in what was billed as “A Tribute to Woody Guthrie.” It was certainly that, but it was more, especially for a Berkeley audience. Joe is the son of two beloved Berkeley figures, Bud and Florence McDonald. He described them as an Oklahoma cowboy married to a New York Jewish intellectual, and noted that Woody and his wife fit the same description. He wondered out loud how his parents ever managed to stay together (Woody and his wife didn’t), and got his biggest laugh of the evening with the line that “it must have been the chicken”—both of his parental cultures eat a lot of chicken. He confessed that his upbringing by parents active in the Communist Party left him with a residual distrust of both communism and capitalism, but his voice, often unaccompanied, was still strong and true on the leftish songs he must have heard at home. The audience was on their feet cheering as he finished, and they cheered even louder when he sang the “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” as an encore (“next stop is—IRAN’”) complete with Fish cheer. He’ll be doing this show again soon in San Francisco and Santa Cruz, in case you missed it here. Go if you can—it will cheer you up. 


Editorial: We’ll Have to Make Our Own Sunshine

By Becky O’Malley
Friday April 27, 2007

We’d like to thank our good friends at the Bay Guardian (where several of us here cut our journalistic teeth) for their persistent advocacy for sunshine in government. In case their lively publication isn’t on your usual reading list (it should be) here’s what they have to say about what’s going on in Berkeley: 

 

At long last the city of Berkeley is talking seriously about adopting a sunshine ordinance. That’s the good news, and it’s overdue: Councilmember Kriss Worthington asked City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque to start working on this six years ago.  

The bad news is that Albuquerque has drafted a law that’s full of holes.  

The biggest problem with the proposed ordinance is its lack of effective enforcement. Although the law sets (some) standards for open records and open meetings, any complaints about secrecy would go to the city manager. That won’t work: if we’ve learned one thing in covering politics for more than 40 years, it’s that city officials can’t police themselves on sunshine issues. What happens if the city manager is the biggest offender? What happens if the city manager doesn’t want to take on the mayor or the council members? What if the city manager winds up protecting city employees (who may be violating the ordinance with impunity)?  

The ordinance needs a few other things - for example, mandatory time for public comment at City Council meetings ought to be written into the law instead of being left as a council rule that can change any time. There ought to be clear language stating that all requests for information are to be treated as public records requests, even if they aren’t in writing and didn’t come through the City Manager’s Office.  

But if this ordinance is going to make any difference, it needs real enforcement—and that means having an outside, independent panel or commission that can handle complaints. In San Francisco, the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force does that job - and the city still lacks decent enforcement. If Berkeley wants to adopt a real landmark ordinance, it should follow what Connecticut has done and create an open records commission with the authority to order city departments, agencies, and officials to release documents and open up meetings.  

Worthington is a strong supporter of an independent enforcement body and has been struggling to get Mayor Tom Bates and Albuquerque to go along.  

At this point, Worthington and the sunshine advocates would be better off letting Terry Franke of Californians Aware and Mark Schlosberg of the American Civil Liberties Union—both of whom have offered their time and expertise—simply write another draft. It should include a new sunshine commission, with teeth. Worthington says that might require a charter amendment and thus a vote of the people, and he’s prepared to push the entire package onto the ballot if necessary.  

That threat alone ought to get Bates and Albuquerque in line—and if it doesn’t, the voters of Berkeley should have the final say. 

 

We couldn’t agree more. It has indeed been six years since then Daily Planet Editor Judith Scherr, former Chronicle editor and Society of Professional Journalism (SPJ) activist Peter Sussman and Councilmember Kriss Worthington started the ball rolling, and it’s gone exactly nowhere. Things have actually gotten worse. Former City Clerk Sherry Kelly was a great believer in sunshine, and on her own put many technological reforms in place in her office which have greatly helped citizens find out what government is up to. On her way out the door she worked on a draft of a model sunshine ordinance with citizen advice, but her draft has disappeared. It was replaced, after a lot of hemming and hawing, by the dreadful Albuquerque draft which the Guardian skewers so well.  

And while our city government has been fiddling around, Rome is burning. When we in Berkeley started thinking about a sunshine ordinance, San Francisco and Oakland were well on the way with theirs, as was Contra Costa County and even San Jose. Six years ago the Contra Costa Times was a big proponent of open government, as was the San Jose Mercury News, then owned by Knight-Ridder. The Mercury even drafted its own model sunshine ordinance for San Jose. But since then almost all the papers in the Bay Area, in a doughnut-shaped mass ringing San Francisco and Berkeley, have been swallowed up by Dean Singleton’s Media News, a right-wing corporation which seems to have little interest in open government. 

So there aren’t many of us left to complain. And in the meantime governments, Berkeley’s included, continue doing their best to conduct business with no scrutiny from the voting and taxpaying public. A few recent instances here: 

• The secret settlement of the city’s lawsuit against UC on terms which turn out to be very bad for Berkeley. Some citizens are challenging it in court after the fact, but if we’d had a sunshine ordinance they might have had a chance to complain before the damage was done. 

• The scheme for creating a massive development on the parking lot of the Ashby BART station, with a grant proposal already written before citizens knew anything about it. Planet reporter Richard Brenneman documented most of the action with the aid of citizen sources, so it’s been slowed down a bit.  

• The mayor’s attempt to transfer a couple of hundred thousand dollars in city funds to the amorphous Sustainable Berkeley conglomeration, with the assignment of writing its own plan for implementing Measure G and then selling it to the citizens. Little details like the process for choosing the director and how much he was to be paid were being kept quiet. Thanks to the eagle eye of Planet reporter Judith Scherr, that deal seems to be off, so the work will now go on in the public eye, where it belongs. 

But all of these are part of a worrisome trend on the part of the current local administration to turn public functions over to non-governmental organizations which can operate behind the scenes with no chance for input from the taxpayers who are expected to supply the funding. In these three cases, much of the truth eventually came to light, if too late, but there’s probably much more going on that the public will never find out about.  

So we agree with the Guardian that it’s time for the press and the citizens to draft their own sunshine ordinance for Berkeley, one with not only teeth but backbone this time. The City of Berkeley has had its chance, and it’s dropped the ball.  

Tuesday’s City Council meeting was particularly embarrassing. The city manager announced apologetically that his staff hasn’t even been able to come up with a plan for working on fixing the unsatisfactory draft—the first step in a process that was supposed to have started last October. It’s been postponed again, until May 8, but enough is enough. 

We Berkeleyans should just get to work on our own ordinance. The Mercury News’ model ordinance can still be found on the Internet—that would be one way to get started. There are several organizations that would be a big help: Californians Aware, the California First Amendment Coalition, the First Amendment Project, the American Civil Liberties Union, the SPJ …it’s a substantial list. When we have a good ordinance ready, we can offer the do-nothing council one last chance to adopt it, but if they can’t get moving we should just put it on the ballot, as citizens did in San Franscisco. Getting the voters to pass it shouldn’t be hard. 


Public Comment

Letters to the Editor

Tuesday May 01, 2007

CREATING GREEN JOBS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Our elected officials are telling us that we need to be creating “green” jobs for East Bay workers. So why is AC Transit getting away with buying buses from Belgium when we could be making them in Hayward? Enabling our own citizens to be paid for building our city and regional public transportation systems is about as “green” as it gets. Why take that money out of our local economy in order to pay people in Belgium to build our buses that then have to be shipped all the way back here, wasting more energy? Let’s stop talking about green jobs and start creating them by putting people to work building the better public transportation infrastructure and transit oriented development that we need here in the East Bay. We should also be putting hundreds of people to work building California’s new high speed rail system in Oakland. Let’s do it! 

Kirstin Miller 

Oakland 

 

• 

GAMING THE COFFEE BAR 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I’d like to respond to Ms. Hammer, author of the First Person piece, “Compassion and Outrage at the Coffee Bar.” 

Do you go into Berkeley Bowl and ask for 50 percent off your grocery bill? I hope not. Previous Peet’s employees were nice enough to give you this discount off your tea. But the day you behaved as if you were entitled to an extra free tea bag, you lost their compassion. 

I’m sorry, maybe I should be more sympathetic. From now on, in solidarity, I will go into Peet’s and ask for three tea bags. In fact, I encourage all of you—all the readers of the Daily Planet—to go to Peet’s and demand three tea bags for the price of two! Because only an unsympathetic, “wild” young man in “recovery” would turn us down. And if we are misfortunate enough to run into such a person, we know that we will be rewarded with a “loaded” Peet’s card. But I’m sure we would all leave nice tips, anyway, to show our gratitude. 

Anne Torrence 

 

• 

GIVE REID A BREAK 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

We need look no further than Bechtel Corporation for confirmation of Harry Reid’s statement that “this war [in Iraq] is lost.” Last November Bechtel announced it was leaving Iraq after losing 52 workers in three years. When the war profiteers begin to flee, you know the ship is sinking fast. 

David Eifler 

 

• 

TOWN HALL MEETING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

A national town hall meeting is scheduled at UC Davis, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Tuesday, May 1, on the federal REAL ID Act. 

By selecting the a time conflicting with the nation-wide May Day 2007 National Day of Immigrant Rights, the DMV and the Department of Homeland Security could not have picked a time better suited to minimize the input of “a wide range public and private constituencies from California and other states on issues and perspectives as they relate to the proposed REAL ID regulations.” This is scheduled to be the nation’s only open meeting on REAL ID. 

I hope California has the guts to refuse to cooperate with the so-called REAL ID Act. Reading Vikram Seth’s Two Lives, the perspective granted by his account of the rise of racism and the erosion of civil liberties in Nazi Germany gives me cause to worry about where we are headed. 

Carolyn Scarr 

 

• 

NONVIOLENT PALESTINIANS? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Of all the Palestinian apologists regularly published by the Daily Planet, Joanna Graham is by far the crudest. According to her latest missive, Palestinians are dedicated to “creative nonviolent resistance,” while the Israelis are consciously attempting to push them into violence. In her words, Israel is “trying for a suicide bombing.” So the Palestinians are like Martin Luther King and Gandhi rolled into one? Please! Palestinians from all major factions have sent more than a 1,000 suicide bombers towards Israel. Of these, only somewhat more than 100 have actually made it through to their targets, causing over 1,000 civilian deaths. Only the security fence and Israel’s vigilance has prevented much worse. But the Palestinians keep trying, with the latest “successful” suicide bombing occurring just last month. Rockets rain down on Israel from Gaza almost daily. Graham can argue that she supports terrorism, but she cannot possibly argue with a straight face that Palestinians are nonviolent. 

John Gertz 

 

• 

START WITH THE  

MERCURY NEWS MODEL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

First of all kudos for your reporter Richard Brenneman for holding the bull by the horns and Becky O’Malley for timely and forceful initiative through her editorial note, “We ‘ll Have to Make Our Own Sunshine” (April 27).  

Taking a lead from the Bay Guardian’s editorial, after sifting through the doings and misdoings of the city manager and mayor of Berkeley, you have rightly concluded to have sunshine of your own by starting with the San Jose Mercury News model and developing an updated version corresponding to the aspirations of the citizens and vocal media to be put to the council as a last chance to adopt it, and if they can’t get it moving, just put it on the ballot as citizens did in San Francisco. 

Incidentally I’m a visitor here and picked your copy while visiting a friend. 

M. Saleem Chaudhry 

San Jose 

 

• 

UNSAFE PLACES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am very sad to know that our schools, colleges and public areas are unsafe places because early screening is not done by health departments or families are hiding certain facts from educational administrators. My suggestion is to have open discussion and then make some change in the school curriculum. We need to encourage people to sense the common good. Each day in Berkeley and Oakland I see graffiti painted in colors which won’t erase easily. We have a right to be helpful and respectful to others but we have no right to hurt or kill others. Is there a way of teaching social studies which awakens fellow-feeling among us? 

Romila Khanna 

Albany 

 

• 

WARM WATER POOL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thank you for running the opinion piece by Terry Doran in your April 27 edition. I concur with everything he had to say. The Berkeley Unified School District’s charter is to provide excellent education for the youth of Berkeley; in order to continue to do that, the district needs to be free to pursue its carefully thought out long-range plans, including plans for the orderly replacement of buildings which have reached the end of their useful lives. It’s not appropriate to force the BUSD to allocate funds to amenities that primarily benefit non-students—the pool is obviously badly needed, but the funding for it needs to be found elsewhere than in the BUSD budget. I can offer some anecdotal confirmation of Terry’s remarks about the condition of the gym and the pool. I taught at BHS in the 1970s (as did Terry) and I can vividly recall what a sorry state it was in then. It was beaten up and it stank—you could smell sweat that must have been there since the 1930s. I still live nearby and pass it frequently, and there’s nothing happening on the outside to suggest that any sort of improvements have been made since those days. I found Terry’s assertion that the present warm water pool cannot remain serviceable for very much longer to be completely believable. 

Finally, as has been pointed out in these columns before, it’s short-sighted and wrong to try to use a landmark preservation process to control permitting or development. In the case of the old gym, the BUSD doesn’t need to be permanently saddled with this old crumbling eyesore, and the warm water pool users can be accommodated—and as Terry pointed out, in the long term accommodated much better—by phasing in a new therapeutic facility in a new location while proceeding with plans for replacement of the gym on the high school campus. 

David Coolidge 

 

• 

SENATOR LIEBERMAN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

What would we do without Joe Lieberman? 

The senator himself answered this question in an essay titled “One Choice in Iraq” (The Washington Post, April 26, page A29). 

Without Senator Joe we would not understand “…the nature of the enemy we are fighting …” (paragraph 3). Without him we would not know that we were engaged in a “battle of Baghdad,”å much less that the battle is actually “against al Qaeda” and, still more surprisingly, that al Qaeda’s army is at “war against us” (paragraph 10). 

This most dedicated public servant makes his most important contribution with unique, clear-headed insights. To senator Joe we owe our protection from “specious” arguments (paragraph 13), our intimate knowledge of al Qaeda’s motives (paragraphs 14 and 18) and we can thank him for warning us that responding to al Qaeda’s barbarism by running away leads ultimately to “abandoning…our own future” (penultimate paragraph). 

Sen. Lieberman, twice defeated but still in the ring, has proven himself at least as capable as the person who now holds the office he, Joe, tried so hard to win. 

Marvin Chachere  

San Pablo 


Commentary: What Are the Prospects for Peace in the Middle East?

By Matthew Taylor
Tuesday May 01, 2007

With President Jimmy Carter coming to town Wednesday to speak to UC Berkeley students about his book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, it’s an appropriate time for us to reflect on the current prospects for justice and peace in the Middle East. 

As Carter accurately states in his book, a system of enforced apartheid reigns in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel in the 1967 war. It is systemic Israeli policy and practice to demolish Palestinian homes, uproot millions of olive trees, build roads that only Israeli colonizers are allowed to access, implant Israeli colonies on Palestinian soil in violation of international law, use an illegal wall to steal Palestinian land, and enforce two entirely different sets of legal standards for Israeli colonizers and the indigenous Palestinian population. Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians is both apartheid and ethnic cleansing, and is the further enactment of a long-standing desire for territorial expansion that has permeated Zionist politics since before the 1948 war. 

At this past weekend’s Jewish Voice for Peace conference in Oakland, several speakers demonstrated that the situation is getting worse all the time. According to Nobel Peace Prize nominee Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (www.icahd.org), Israel has managed to confine Palestinians who live inside the illegally-occupied West Bank to 72 disconnected ghettoes within only 42 percent of the West Bank area, leaving the rest to Israel’s illegal colonization as well as military installations and hundreds of movement barriers—a “matrix of control.” When Israel’s current colonies and land grabs are taken into account, the future contours of the so-called Palestinian “state” does not look like the map of a country, but a piece of Swiss cheese. 

Readers of Carter’s book are largely aware of the above challenges. However, what Carter’s book never reveals is that Apartheid can be said to prevail even inside the pre-1967 borders of Israel. Professor George Bisharat of the Hastings College of Law reports that over 100,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel live inside villages that are officially ‘unrecognized,’ appear on no maps, and are denied basic services such as electricity and garbage collection (www.assoc40.org). Israel has demolished the homes of tens of thousands of Bedouin Arabs in order to create Jewish-exclusive housing. Israel insists that its Palestinian citizens relate to Israel as a “Jewish state”—in other words, an ethnocracy that privileges one ethnic group over another in both blatant and subtle ways. 

And then, there’s the elephant in the room: the refugees. Millions of would-be citizens of the state of Israel—the Palestinians who were forcefully exiled in 1948, as well as their children—are denied the ability to return to their homes in peace, despite international guarantees and repeated U.N. resolutions affirming their right to do so. (Meanwhile, as an upper-class American Jew in Berkeley I have the unrestricted right not only to move to Israel, but to purchase a home that once belonged to a refugee.) Apartheid, at its core, is about “apartness” or “separation,” as well as the domination of one group by another. What could be a more extreme act of separation and oppression than forceful expulsion coupled with the denial of a people’s right to return to their homes? 

The formula for a resolution to this disaster can take many different directions. Some advocate for Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories to be reconstituted as a ‘single state’ between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River with equal rights for all its citizens. However, this is a non-starter for most Israelis who insist on a Jewish-majority state. Other proposals include a EU-style regional confederation. 

The international community is in near unanimous agreement that the only proposal with a modicum of justice and equity that is practically possible is a ‘two state solution’ (official U.S. policy), where Israel withdraws to the pre-1967 borders (possibly with agreed upon, equitable, minor border adjustments) and a viable, demilitarized, sovereign Palestinian state is created in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip—the territories occupied in the 1967 war. In fact, last month the entire Arab world re-affirmed its commitment to establish normal relations with Israel in exchange for a full withdrawal to the 1967 borders and a just, ‘mutually agreed’ resolution to the Palestinian refugee crisis. Israel rejected the Arab Peace Plan without consideration in 2002, and has shown few signs of taking it more seriously now. It is a tragedy of unspeakable dimensions that the Israeli political elite has for decades preferred colonization to peace. What future are we all doomed to when greed and ambition outweigh coexistence? 

According to Halper, the intensity of Israel’s colonization of the occupied territories has de facto eliminated even the possibility of a “viable Palestinian state”—one with territorial contiguity and control over its water, economy, resources, and borders. If so, then Israel’s colonization project may backfire and create a chorus of voices demanding a ‘single state’ solution in the face of ever-worsening Apartheid. 

Perhaps Halper is right, perhaps not. Either way, if the international community does not want to let go of the two-state plan, it must act quickly and decisively to explain to Israel in no uncertain terms that its colonization of the West Bank must be fully reversed. It is at least theoretically and logistically possible—France withdrew far more than 500,000 colonizers from Algeria. 

So long as U.S. taxpayer dollars fund Israel’s continued colonization and occupation of the West Bank, the United States will continue to exacerbate the conflict rather than resolve it. How can we help? Perhaps it’s time for U.S. taxpayers to demand that the United States cease financial aid to Israel that pays for its occupation and colonization and instead channel funds into activities that would create a viable two-state solution. The United States could fund the resettlement of Israeli settlers back into the pre-1967 borders, and pay to rebuild Palestinian homes demolished by Israel (both in the West Bank and within Israel proper). 

As for Carter, his book may well play a significant role in shifting the U.S. discourse and international consciousness. However, Professor Bisharat’s comments show an important place where Carter’s book is silent. Someday, equal rights for all the peoples of the holy land must prevail, no matter whether they reside in a state known as Israel or Palestine. 

 

Matthew Taylor is a fifth-year peace and conflict studies major at UC Berkeley, co-editor of PeacePower magazine (www.calpeacepower.org), and Jewish. 


Commentary: U.S. Uses Walls to Divide and Conquer in Iraq

By Kenneth Thiesen
Tuesday May 01, 2007

As we all know, the Bush administration is asking for more time from the American people to “win” in Iraq. First there was the “surge” of at least 30,000 more troops as the solution to defeating insurgents in Iraq. Now along with the surge, the U.S. military has come up with another tactic that will help “win” the war. “Building security walls” is the latest strategy. But what is the United States really constructing in Iraq? 

Last week U.S. military officials announced the building of a “security” wall to allegedly separate the Sunni Iraqis in Adhamiya (an area of Baghdad) from the Shiites who are east of the area. In the statement by the military, the Adhamiya wall was “one of the centerpieces of a new strategy.” But almost immediately controversy erupted around the erection of the wall. Protests against the barrier began and leaflets were distributed that said the wall would “turn the city into a big prison.” 

On Sunday, April 22, Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki announced he was ordering a halt to construction. In Maliki’s statement he said that the wall reminded people of “other walls,” no doubt a reference to Israel’s infamous apartheid wall in the West Bank. It may have also reminded people of earthern walls erected as a strategy used by Mussolini to defeat the Arab insurgency in Libya in the first half of the 20th century. After the Italians invaded the country, Mussolini’s fascist army built walls throughout Libya to restrict movement. He also erected massive concentration camps throughout the country for the Libyan people. Of course other notorious walls were those erected by the Nazis around Jewish ghettoes and the infamous Berlin Wall. 

As the Iraqi government made its announcement, U.S. military spokesman Major General William Caldwell, quickly issued a statement that the United States does not have a new strategy of creating “gated communities.” He claimed that it is a tactic being used in only a few neighborhoods. Gated communities? How quaint? One can almost imagine a small gated community in a quiet peaceful neighborhood in the East Bay. But make no mistake, walls are part of the U.S. war of aggression in Iraq.  

This was not the first wall erected in order to restrict the movements of Iraqis. In fact, the U.S. military has repeatedly utilized such walls as a military tactic. Remember Haditha where U.S. forces massacred two dozen civilians in 2005? Beginning in December 2006 and continuing in January 2007, U.S. Marines dug a ditch and erected a 12-foot wall, topped by concertina wire and armed sentries, around the town in al-Anbar province. Dirt berms or walls stretching 20 kilometers are outside the city limits. There is only one road in and one road out of town. All travelers must past military checkpoints where they are searched. Anyone who wishes to leave town must get written permission from the Marines. A census was conducted and all residents of the town are now known to the military in order to keep track of their movements. 

All vehicle traffic in Haditha is banned. But believe or not, in a press release the military tried to put a positive spin on this by saying “more people are walking around in the streets” than ever before. As if they have any choice? I am surprised that they did not also claim it was an effort to fight global warming or to encourage exercise. 

Colonel W. Blake Crowe, the U.S. commander for western al-Anbar province does actually refer to these areas as “gated communities” contrary to the statement of General Caldwell. In a press release, he claimed, “We are establishing a gated community, where good people can come in to the city, and bad people can’t.” For the 80,000 residents of the Haditha district, I am sure they are under no illusion of residing in a gated community. The words “concentration camp” more accurately describe the situation. In addition to Haditha, other areas including Haglaniyah, Barwanah, Rutbah, and Anah have been “bermed” in the province. 

Lt. Colonel Jim Donnellan, the battalion commander in charge of the Haditha area, admits that it resembles a police state. He says, “That’s what it is, that’s what it needs to be.” The U.S. military refers to all this as part of a “clear, hold and build” operation called “al Majid.”  

But the al Majid operation in al-Anbar, like the Adhamiya wall, is only a means to control the Iraqi people and the country. After Nazi Germany was defeated, many Germans claimed they did not know that Hitler was exterminating people by the millions in the concentration camps. Hitler claimed he was acting in the interest of the German people as he committed war crimes and other crimes against humanity.  

So too, the Bush regime claims to act in our name. In Iraq tens of thousands have died as a direct result of the U.S. invasion. If left unchecked the Bush regime will turn the entire country of Iraq into one giant concentration camp. We cannot claim not to know. The question is what will you do about it?  

 

Oakland resident Kenneth J. Theisen is an organizer with World Can’t Wait! Drive Out the Bush Regime. For more information see worldcantwait.org.


Commentary: Cell Phone Towers Pose Health Risks for Dense Areas

By Joanne Kowalski
Tuesday May 01, 2007

Like others, I, too, was concerned about the health effects of cell phone towers and went to the Internet to do some research. From it, I learned that while the FDA maintains that the link between RF energy emitted by cell phone antennas and health problems like cancer is “inconclusive” or “has not been demonstrated,” they also say “there is no proof that they are absolutely safe.” Even on industry friendly sites, the “prevailing wisdom among researchers” in the field is that it is “too early to draw any strong conclusions.” The research has not been expansive enough, there have been too few properly controlled studies, exposure times have been too short (sometimes as little as one hour) and the technology is too new to really know about possible long term effects. There does, however, seem to be a definite effect at the cellular level (e.g. DNA changes) which may well pose a risk to developing organisms (e.g. children). 

I also discovered there is at least one agreed upon danger from RF antennas. Exposure to high levels of RF radiation can heat the body (like “microwave ovens cook food”) and cause “thermal effects” like eye damage (e.g. cataracts), skin burns and heat strokes. Because of this there are “safety guidelines” that prevent public access to “areas within 9 meters/25 feet” of the radiating surface as well as guidelines for workers who have to go within that area (e.g. roofers). The greatest danger occurs where multiple base stations are mounted on the same building, where towers are placed lower than nearby buildings and where structures require access by workers for maintenance and repairs. 

There are also guidelines to safeguard against “improperly designed” or “inadequately secured” mobile phone base station sites. The latter, I would think, would be particularly important in areas with high winds or active earthquake faults. There was little information on how these guidelines are monitored or enforced.  

My research has led me to conclude that, in this case at least, discretion would be a better part of valor. Given the potential health and safety risks, why put base stations near schools (e.g. 2721 Shattuck), on top of buildings where people live (e.g. 1040 University) or in densely populated areas (e.g. Downtown) when other locations are possible? We should also make sure safety standards are strictly enforced and show particular caution when mounting multiple base stations on the same building and/or placing towers on roofs lower than those nearby.  

From my reading, I also learned that the total number of towers could be substantially reduced if wireless companies shared antennas rather than each having their own. If we could municipalize shared towers, place them on public property (e.g. courthouses and city hall) and charge cell phone companies a users’ fee, we could not only ensure their safety but also raise municpal funds. 

On the other hand, I saw that a property owner can get $2,000 a month to host just one of these contraptions. If they truly are as benign as some folks claim, I suggest they be totally deregulated in order to create a kind of cottage industry that would give us little people a chance at a slice of the pie. I figure I could get two, maybe three on my roof. I’d even promise to dress them up like trees so property values won’t decline.  

 

 

Joanne Kowalski is a Berkeley resident.


Commentary: A Healthy Perspective on Downtown Development

By Sweena Aulakh
Tuesday May 01, 2007

Largely absent from the on-going debate surrounding high density development in downtown Berkeley is a discussion on its health effects. As estimated by the Association of Bay Area Governments there will be an expected 4,200 additional residents in Berkeley by 2015. In determining possible solutions to the increased housing demand, Berkeley's Planning Department and the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee (DAPAC) must take into account the growing body of evidence which supports dense development as a means to improve health and well-being. 

The overweight and obesity epidemic continues to skyrocket in California; so do the number of people with chronic conditions associated with overweight and obesity such as heart disease, type II diabetes, certain cancers (e.g. breast, colon), osteoarthritis, and respiratory conditions. An estimated 200,000 annual deaths in the United States can be attributed to physical inactivity. What health professionals are coming to realize is that merely advising people to go to the gym and get the Surgeon General's recommended 30-60 minutes of physical activity per day is just not working. Instead, we now know that we need to change our built environment so that activity becomes a natural part of our daily lives. It truly is simple. More time in a car means a higher probability of obesity; more walking or biking means a lower probability of obesity; and, thus, higher density with more walkable and bikable destinations means a lower probability of obesity. 

Imagine a downtown Berkeley vibrant with activity. Residents are walking to the farmer's market, dashing to the next BART train, cycling to work, or strolling as they window shop. The noticeable difference in this future Berkeley and the one of today is the absence of vehicular traffic. Sound, high density planning can attract businesses and employers without an increase in traffic. By creating housing in proximity to attractive destinations, high density planning creates walkable communities and invites residents to leave their cars behind. In fact, we know from recent surveys done by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission that people who live within half a mile of transit use transit extensively and are more likely to walk and bike than residents living greater than half a mile from transit. 

A walkable community is one where residents can live, work, learn, and play. Such a community allows residents to easily access goods and services within a safe walk, thereby increasing physical activity and reducing their dependence on cars. This type of development and planning will significantly benefit our aging population. Recent studies have found that when elders in high density neighborhoods are able to walk to clusters of destinations such as the post office or grocery store, overweight and social isolation are reduced. High density development in downtown Berkeley will provide such an opportunity for the rapid aging of Berkeley's population. According to the California Commission on Aging, the state's population age 65 or older is expected to double in 25 years and triple in 50 years. By 2050, the median forecast projects nearly 11 million seniors in the state. When planning for the increased number of residents, it would be wise for DAPAC to consider the demographics of our community in the coming years. 

Lastly, no discussion on planning and health can overlook the impact of these decisions on our city's young people. Transportation pollutants are one of the largest contributors to poor air quality. Children are more vulnerable to the impacts of air pollution, with asthma being the most prevalent chronic disease among children in California (American Lung Association). In fact, asthma rates among children under age four more than doubled in the last twenty years and is the number one cause of school absenteeism among school-aged children. Smog and soot have been identified as key factors that trigger asthma attacks with fewer vehicular emissions playing an obvious role. Effective downtown planning can benefit children by reducing air pollution but also offering families pedestrian-friendly destinations that will increase the entire family's access to opportunities for physical activity. 

It is thrilling to see the city faced with an incredible opportunity to benefit the health of its current and future residents. Health professionals cannot do it alone. The city will most certainly be writing a prescription for health by creating a walkable and livable downtown. Let us begin to include health into the downtown planning process. It is time we consider the long-term impacts of our decisions on our city's most vulnerable populations in designing a community where health and well-being are cherished. 

 

Sweena Aulakh is a nursing student at UC San Francisco. 


Commentary: Jewish Peace Activists Must Build Bridges

By Raymond Barglow
Tuesday May 01, 2007

Over the weekend of April 28-29, several hundred activists gathered in Oakland at a national conference sponsored by the Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). Entitled “Pursuing Justice for Israel/Palestine: Changing Minds, Challenging U.S. Policy,” the conference gave expression to a movement building in the United States that is more critical of Israeli policies than is the conservative “Israel right or wrong” lobby. 

JVP has been growing rapidly over the past year, and this conference exemplified the enthusiasm and commitment of its members. Prominent political analysts and activists gave presentations at the conference, including Phyllis Bennis, Sandy Tolan, Jeff Halper, and Mitchell Plitnick. Sandy Tolan is the author of one of the most compelling recent books on the Israel-Palestine conflict “The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East.” 

The conference balanced plenaries and workshops, giving everyone the opportunity to discuss a challenging but essential project: how to create “a broad-based coalition for a just U.S. Middle East policy,” as one of the workshop descriptions put it. The workshops also covered related topics, including the predicaments of Palestinians living in Israel or the occupied territories, feminist resistance to the occupation, and alternative Middle East peace strategies. 

The perennial “One state or two?” question, regarding the form of a future settlement of the Israel/Palestine conflict, preoccupied many conference speakers and attendees. American activists critical of Israel are notoriously at loggerheads on this matter, most of them supporting a two-state solution: Israelis and Palestinians shall each have a country they can call their own, in keeping with the Israeli peace movement Gush Shalom’s slogan, “Two peoples, two states.” Most Palestinians also support a two-state solution. Jewish Voice for Peace, however, takes a neutral position on the shape of a future settlement, formulating its position as “Israelis and Palestinians. Two peoples, one future.” 

JVP thereby distinguishes itself from another progressive Jewish activist group, the Tikkun Community, led by the Bay Area’s own Rabbi Michael Lerner. JVP and Tikkun have an on-again off-again affair, with differences recently surfacing over the demonstrations protesting Israeli policy that will take place in Washington D.C. in June 2007. JVP supports these demonstrations, Tikkun does not. Lerner says that Tikkun Community cannot join with sponsors of the DC action because of “the willingness of all these organizations to keep alive as an option the notion that the solution to Israel/Palestine peace lies in the dissolution of a Jewish state, using the language of ‘one state solution’ as the way to signal to many who never thought the Jewish people ever deserved a state at all.” 

It is important that people who find Israeli policies toward Palestinians cruel, immoral, and even self-destructive work together. But here in the Bay Area as elsewhere, including in Israel itself, deep divisions split this progressive movement. Hopefully we can bridge these differences and join together to advance the reconciliation and healing that are so desperately needed. 

 

Raymond Barglow is a Berkeley resident.


Letters to the Editor

Friday April 27, 2007

CELL ANTENNA EQUITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Sometimes I like to imagine living in a fair and equitable city. I think about a just and rational solution to the cell phone antenna dilemma. I make a leap of faith and believe that this community actually supports equity and, in order to enjoy the convenience of cell phones, is willing to share the risk of living near antennas with their emissions of potentially dangerous RF radiation.  

This is what I imagine: a city-owned municipal cell phone company which installs, roughly equal distance apart, low wattage single antennas placed on tall poles in vacant lots created for this purpose throughout Berkeley. I imagine an educational campaign that teaches young and old alike the pros and cons of using cell phones, and publicizes all the latest research. I imagine a government that supports individual choice by keeping our land lines repaired and inexpensive and that puts back corner telephone booths, painted in bright colors with flower boxes containing ivy, sweet peas, and geraniums. I imagine more and more people relegating their cell phone usage to emergencies-real emergencies-and that slowly, neighborhood by neighborhood, the city is able to dismantle many of these antennas. I imagine people being fair and supporting affirmative action on this issue and shutting antennas down first in those neighborhoods that have suffered from this pollution the longest. Finally, I imagine antenna-free neighborhoods. Maybe, just maybe, we could decrease rates of cancer and autism. A healthy environment for all is worth a little inconvenience. 

I am not an electrical engineer. My fantasy may not be the best way to establish a safe wireless system. What do you think is the right way? On May 8 at 7 p.m. at Old City Hall our City Council will have a chance to practice the progressive values they claim to stand for. Join us at 2134 MLK Jr. Way to see how our elected representatives vote. For further information, e-mail BNAFU at JLLIB2@aol.com  

Laurie Baumgarten  

Berkeley Neighborhood  

Antenna-Free Union  

 

• 

WAL-MART 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Congratulations to the Berkeley Daily Planet for your California Appeals Court victory which will allow the public to see 15,000 pages of documents pertaining to the employment lawsuit that Wal-Mart faces. These documents will help shed more light on Wal-Mart’s “labor guidelines and staffing formula, pay and incentive guidelines....” 

In that April 13 article I was struck by the comment of your executive editor, Becky O’Malley: “It’s the job of the press to make every effort to find out what corporations like Wal-Mart are doing, and to tell citizens about it.” Absolutely! 

Our citizen’s group, Iowa City Stop Wal-Mart, recently concluded a successful 17-month fight to prevent Wal-Mart from building a SuperCenter on 23 acres that our city council had agreed to sell them. I was so upset by the coverage of our local newspapers that I called the Columbia Journalism Review and proposed a freelance article on the plethora of inaccuracies, omissions, and misleading comments that emanated from our newspapers. I was turned down by one of CJR’s editors, because, as she said, “This kind of poor coverage is all too typical of newspapers these days.”  

So, again, kudos to the Berkeley Daily Planet. 

Gary Sanders 

Chair, Iowa City Stop Wal-Mart 

 

• 

A MODEST PROPOSAL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Reading Tuesday’s editorial, I believe I can solve a number of downtown Berkeley’s ills with a very few steps. 

First, the Arpeggio nee Seagate building is a ludicrous waste at nine stories. It is half a block from BART and next to the two tallest buildings in Berkeley. It should be at least 16 stories. 

Likewise, similar spots for downtown living should include the ever vacant Eddie Bauer/Gateway building/flophouse and the Constitution Square. Both of these buildings cry for the wreckers ball. The footprint of the Bauer (new project name: “Bower”) should be suitable for a mid-size grocery. What, you don’t like trees? 

Furthermore, downtown Berkeley needs another cocktail lounge (perhaps in the courtyard of the Arpeggio) as Jupiter is far too crowded on weekends. Finally, as a concrete measure for the mayor’s “Public Commons” the city should take a cue from Singapore and mandate caning for public expectoration. 

With a stroll down a loogie-free sidewalk to a drink and a deluxe apartment in the sky, I believe Berkeley will be a far finer place.  

John Vinopal 

 

• 

RODEOS AND CHARREADAS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Proponents of animal welfare and fair play will be pleased to know that Assembly Bill 1614 passed the Assembly Arts and Entertainment Committee last week by a vote of 6-0. The bill will next be heard on May 2 before the Assembly Appropriations Committee, chaired by Assemblyman Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), then the Assembly floor. This humane legislation was introduced by Assemblywoman Audra Strickland (R-Moorpark), and co-authored by Assemblymen Lloyd Levine (D-Van Nuys) and Joe Coto (D San Jose). Mr. Coto is also chair of the 26-member Latino Caucus. Heartfelt thanks to all for this bipartisan effort. 

California boasts the best rodeo animal welfare law in the country (Penal Code 596.7). Sadly, by definition, it does not cover “charreadas,” the Mexican-style rodeos common throughout the state. AB 1614 would correct this inequity. It’s a matter of fairness. Current law requires either an on-site or on-call veterinarian to care for injured animals; restricts the use of the electric prod; provides for a conveyance to move injured animals; and requires that the attending veterinarian submit an injury report to the State Veterinary Medical Board within 48 hours of the rodeo’s conclusion. Seems reasonable, no? 

Support letters are needed. All legislators may be written c/o The State Capitol, Sacramento, CA 95814. 

Eric Mills, coordinator, 

Action for Animals (bill sponsor) 

Oakland 

 

• 

GRAFFITI 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Graffiti is out of control in Berkeley. There are many reasons for this. One reason is that Berkeley juries are reluctant to convict graffiti taggers, even when they are caught red-handed. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people in Berkeley who think of graffiti tagging as a victimless crime, which it isn’t. Berkeley homeowners, businesses, and the city spend millions of dollars every year on graffiti removal.  

Fortunately, there are some things you can do about graffiti: 

1. Remove or paint over graffiti immediately. By immediately, I mean the same day it appears. Graffiti attracts more graffiti. Taggers have a competitive ethic. If one tagger puts his mark on your building, a rival will want to put his mark there as well. Graffiti taggers like to see their work and show it off to others. If it’s not there when they return, they will move on to other properties, places where the owners don’t remove graffiti. 

2. Keep paint on hand that matches the exterior surfaces of your building that are most accessible to graffiti taggers. Water-based paints are the easiest to work with and easiest to clean up afterwards. Keep a can of Kilz or similar sealer on hand, in case a graffiti tagger uses paint or ink that bleeds through your cover-up paint. 

3. If graffiti is sprayed on enameled metal or other impermeable surface, like glazed tile, furniture finisher and Scotch pads will usually remove paint and ink. Don’t breathe the stuff and wear rubber gloves. 

4. Graffiti is usually impossible to remove from brick and stonework, short of sandblasting. You may be able to remove some of the graffiti with a wire brush, but you probably won’t get it all off. If you have exposed brick, stone, or masonry walls; consider coating them with clear anti-graffiti coating, available at most paint stores. If you want to see what anti-graffiti coating looks like before deciding whether to use it or not, go to the Ashby BART station. Most of the concrete retaining walls in the parking lot are covered with anti-graffiti coating. 

Mark Tarses 

 

• 

BEING GREEN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I liked the headline of Becky O’Malley’s latest editorial “It’s Too Easy Acting Green...” Players on the local, state and federal scene have bent over backwards to appear “green.” Scientists, politicians and citizens are lining up to jump on the bandwagon of curing global warming by rearranging chairs on the Titanic. How many are willing to make changes in their own diets?  

The destruction of our planet that we are now experiencing has more to do with our modern diet than anything else. The Worldwatch Institute reported, back in July of 1991, that overgrazing, deforestation, water pollution and methane emissions from livestock production were the main cause of global warming. Their calls for decreased meat and poultry production went unheeded.  

In addition, it takes a huge amount of the world’s energy to transport and store foods that are not grown locally. People around the world starve to death because their country’s land is used to grow beef, bananas, coffee, sugar and more for Americans. It could be used to grow food for the people who live in those lands. 

The single most important thing you can do to avert global warming and restore the natural order is to change your diet from a meat-centered one, to a plant based, local one. It may not grab headlines, but it will certainly be more effective than rearranging those chairs once again. 

Michael Bauce 

 

• 

WAR IN IRAQ 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The House and Senate have exercised their legal prerogative to affect U.S. policy by placing timetable restrictions on continued funding of the Iraq war. President Bush has mischaracterized this action as “micromanaging.” Indeed, it would be micromanaging if Congress told the generals “how” to fight the war, but it is Congress’ duty to tell the generals “whether” we should fight this misconceived, dishonestly promoted, incompetently managed failure. 

Bush threatens to veto the Iraq funding bill because of Congress’ restrictions. If he does veto, funding for current operations will begin to run out. If Congress refuses to pass another, unrestricted funding bill, how bad is that? Our military will have to use its remaining funding to secure a safe withdrawal from Iraq. 

Of course, Bush will blame the Democrats for “loosing” Iraq, and the Democrats will take credit for extracting us from a quagmire. Meanwhile, there will be no more killing on account of American occupation. Looks like a win-win situation to me. 

Bruce Joffe 

Piedmont 

 

• 

LETTING UP ON BUSH 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, when are you going to let up on President Bush?” my friends ask, some in exasperation, others in amusement. Well, dear friends, I’ll let up on George Bush when there are no more growing lists of American military killed in Iraq, no flag-draped coffins arriving at airports, no soldiers, only recently recovered from serious injuries, being sent back for another 12 months of duty. 

I’ll let up on Bush when innocent Iraqi citizens are no longer blown to bits in market places, when there are no haunting images of small children in hospital beds, their heads or limbs swathed in bandages. 

I’ll let up on Bush when our country is no longer viewed across the world with scorn and indignation because of this president’s 

“cowboy diplomacy.” 

I’ll let up on Bush when he no longer stubbornly defends an inept, untruthful District Attorney Alberto Gonzales, in the face of opposition by Republicans and Democrats alike, thus diminishing that office. 

I’ll let up on Bush when he no longer staunchly advocates the rights of citizens to bear arms, while tearfully extending condolences to the families of victims of mass shootings—all the while invoking the name of God. 

I’ll let up on Mr. B. when he can express a simple thought coherently and intelligibly. (I’m not hopeful on this.)  

And I shall joyfully let up on George Bush when legislators and fed up citizens have the guts to demand the impeachment of a president who’s thrown this nation and much of the world into chaos since declaring HIS war! 

Dorothy Snodgrass 

 

• 

CELL ANTENNA EQUITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

On May 15, the Alameda City Council will hear whether the Planning Board overstepped their authority in appointing an ad-hoc committee to plan a forum to discuss the charter amendment known as Measure A. 

Some background for your readers: In 1973, when Alameda had developers pushing to develop high density housing and many Victorians were being torn down, residents gathered the required signatures to place a simple proposition on the ballot. Measure A reads, “their shall be no multiple units built in Alameda.”  

The measure passed overwhelmingly. It was later expanded on to say that duplexes were allowed and that lots needed to be 2,000 square feet. As a result, a planned development of 10,000 homes was reduced to 3,000. This simple act saved Alameda from being overdeveloped. In 2002 there was a forum held to discuss Measure A which was very well attended. The response was that we needed to keep this measure in place to protect us from developers and politicians that can’t be trusted. 

In 2007, we once again have a developer friendly City Council and a Planning Board who both want high density housing. The biggest problem, of course, is that Alameda is an Island. All the bridges and our one tube are already at capacity. This seems to not make much of an impression on our city leaders. Traffic is a huge problem, with little thought or plans to solve those problems. It is apparent the big money is in town—Lennar and Catellus are two of the largest developers in the country, so us little guys have quite a task before us, just as they did in 1973. I do believe that when the facts are known, the residents of Alameda will rise and take control of our community. 

Unfortunately, we also have local print newspapers that are merchant dependent, and political yes men, so it will be difficult to get the word out. The local high density advocates seem to have all the time in the world to lobby the Planning Board and have the money to hold a forum themselves, but prefer that the taxpayers pay for the forum that they want. They cannot get the required signatures to place the issue on the ballot, so lobbying the Planning Board and City Council to place a measure on the ballot to usurp Measure A is a short cut they have been trying to put together for years. 

While I am no fan of Mayor Beverly Johnson, there might be a glimmer of hope considering she ran on a “Protect Measure A” platform in her recent re-election campaign. All who are interested to learn more can go to www.KeepMeasureA.org. 

Pat Bail 

 

• 

WAR OF WORDS ABOUT WAR 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Words are the sole product of politicians, journalists, scholars and comedians. This might lead you to think such folks schooled in meaning and skilled in assessing the value of words, would be very careful in their use. In the case of politicians (and most journalist) you’d be wrong because politicians use words either as shields to protect their authority or as weapons to defeat their opponents.  

This is aptly illustrated in the current war of words between the White House and Democratic congressional leaders. The squabble is centered on when to withdraw the “dogs of war” in Iraq.  

It is heartbreaking to read and watch humans by the hundreds getting killed and maimed daily, tragic that some killing is done by our own troops and obscene that many are killed by suicidal young people longing for paradise. “Cry havoc.” but it is not war.  

In Iraq our soldiers dressed in sophisticated gear and backed up by helicopter gun ships, fighter planes, artillery, tanks and surveillance drones fight an enemy in civilian clothes who possess no military training, operate under no established chain of command, fly no flag and are equipped with only the weapons they can carry and only the explosives they can improvise. Call it whatever you like but it is certainly not war.  

What you name a situation has a huge impact on how you deal with it. A military occupation is not a war. So long as the branches of our government see it as war they will continue to quarrel…and the killing will go on. 

We, the people who matter because we pay in lives and treasure, see it for what it is, an unprovoked, bloody and unnecessary catastrophe. And we want out. Now! 

Marvin Chachere 

San Pablo 

 

• 

ISRAEL AND PALESTINE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

To any American who happens to have even noticed, Israel’s killing last weekend of nine Palestinians and this week’s resumption of rocket fire by Hamas most likely looks like the usual they’re-always-at-it eternal-warfare-in-Israel-Palestine model . 

But it isn’t. The Palestinians have been making a heroic attempt for a long time now to refrain from violence and to use other methods to pursue justice, including legal redress, international support, and creative nonviolent resistance. None of this has been of much avail, but they have persisted. 

The Israelis meanwhile, have been badly needing Palestinian violence in order to justify their refusal to negotiate. Last weekend’s murders were a deliberate, and apparently successful, attempt to provoke it. 

There are so many things to feel terrible about right now. My worst of the week, I guess, is Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s announcement that if rain doesn’t fall soon, the government will be forced to cut off irrigation water to the farmers in the Murray-Darling river basin, who produce 40% of Australia’s food, in order to have drinking water for people in the cities. 

Given that Australia may soon become Earth’s first continent (large island, whatever) to become completely uninhabitable, that the government of Israel is cynical enough to solicit violence against its own citizens seems like an issue beneath notice by comparison. 

But, believe me, they are trying for a suicide bombing. And it is to such a country that we have pledged our most undying devotion. Should the bomb go off—and I pray it doesn’t—remember that you read it here. Before it happened. 

Joanna Graham 

 

• 

OBAMA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

On April 23, presidential candidate Sen. Obama delivered a major foreign policy speech. Those that hope Obama will be an agent of positive change should not be deluded by his proposals.  

He outlined a foreign policy to make U.S. domination of the world more effective for U.S. imperialist interests. He proposed to “build a 21st century military” by expanding it by 92,000 troops. He wants to “garner the clear support and participation of others” when the U.S. uses force “to protect...our vital interests.” In other words, he wants to involve other nations in the crimes of the U.S. when it launches war so that the U.S. is more likely to succeed. But “multi-lateral imperialism” is no better than Bush’s “unilateral imperialism.” 

For Obama, the problem with the Iraq war is not that the war’s aims are fundamentally unjust or it has led to unimaginable suffering for Iraqis. In his book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream in describing the “dire” consequences of the war, he mentions only the toll on U.S. troops and never mentions the 650,000 Iraqis killed and 3 million refugees forced to flee the ongoing carnage. For Obama the war is a mistake because it threatens to turn into a strategic debacle that threatens to weaken U.S. power and dominance. He believes that U.S. strategy must now shift and American forces should be redeployed to better protect U.S. interests. 

Obama’s proposal to expand the military is reprehensible. Already under the Bush regime the U.S. spends more money on its military than the entire rest of the world combined. The U.S. military is in 130 countries with 700 bases. U.S. armed force is utilized to enforce U.S. global domination. The Bush administration has already attacked Afghanistan and Iraq and is planning to attack Iran as you read this. We do not need to make U.S. aggression more effective, we need to end it. The vital interests of U.S. imperialism are not in the interests of humanity.  

In order to halt the horrors of the Bush regime we need to drive it from power, but we can not replace it with another “more effective style of imperialism” like that proposed by Obama. The world can not afford to wait until Bush leaves office in 2009. To learn how to rid the world of the Bush regime, see worldcantwait.org. 

Kenneth J. Theisen 

Oakland 

 


Commentary: The Peace Symbol’s Golden Year is Here

By Arnie Passman
Friday April 27, 2007

Two thirds into the winter of 1957-58, Gerald Holtom was feeling 66.6 percent-ish as he agonized over the design. That February 21, as the artist was to explain the genesis of his idea in greater, more personal depth later to Peace News editor Hugh Brock, he was “in despair. Deep despair. I drew myself the representation of an individual in despair with arms outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad. I formalized the drawing with a line and put a circle around it.”  

The two lines down were the British semaphore signal for N(nuclear) and the one line up for D (disarmament). And so did professional designer and artist Holtom, a graduate of the Royal College of Arts and World War II conscientious objector, bring the peace symbol to the world.  

A week later, he showed his preliminary sketches to a small group of people in the Peace News office in North London and to the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War, one of several smaller organizations that came together to set up the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). 

The now universal symbol reached the masses for that spring’s Easter weekend first ever anti-nuclear march from London to Aldermaston where nuclear weapons were and still are manufactured. Five hundred cardboard lollipops were made—half black and white, half white on green. 

This was an improv on the church’s original liturgical colors change over Easter—winter to spring, death to life, white and green Easter Sunday and Monday. 

Said Jackie Cabasso, director of the Western States Legal Foundation: “The first badges, made of fired pottery, were distributed with a note explaining that in the event of nuclear war, they would be among the few human artifacts to survive the nuclear inferno. From the CND website.” 

On the march was the American pacifist Bayard Rustin, a confidant of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who brought the symbol back for the growing civil rights and U.S. anti-nuclear movements. Rustin was a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR)—created by two men in 1914 to try to prevent war in Europe. The group had encouraged conscientious objectors in World War II; after that war, the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors (CCCO) was founded. 

Sometime during 1958, pacifist Albert Bigelow and crew attempted to sail their Golden Rule into the Enowetok nuclear test site, during which time the U.S. government declared the journey illegal. At one point in their widely publicized on-again, off-again efforts, they flew the peace symbol flag. 

Into the early ’60s, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), Committee for Non-Violent Action (CNVA) and Women’s Strike for Peace (a highly effective thrust that foreshadowed the feminist lysistratagems at the decade’s end) gave the symbol prominence in anti-nuclear actions. During that time, the peace symbol could be worn with one prong up for unilateral disarmament, two up for bilateral.  

In 1960, a University of Chicago freshman Philip Altbach went to England as a delegate of the Student Peace Union. Said Altbach, now a professor at Boston College: 

 

I was in the UK to speak for the national Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and was impressed by their symbol—the peace symbol. . . I put a few of the buttons and little flags in my pocket and brought them back to SPU headquarters in Chicago. I managed to convince—there was some reluctance—the SPU officers to let us print up 20,000 buttons as a first try. 

We distributed them to our chapters, sold them at meetings, and ‘the rest is history.’ My guess is that SPU probably printed at least 100,000 little pins.  

 

The Committee for Nonviolent Action in Chicago and probably FOR used the symbol before SPU, but SPU, which was the largest progressive student organization in the United States at the time, brought the symbol to wide attention.  

By 1965, the anti-nuclear movement was slip-sliding away as the anti Vietnam War breakthrough, via the communist and pacifist left, ascended to critical mass into the last years of the ’60s. With its student beginnings, the peace symbol spread far and wide from ’66 on. 

As the peace symbol was deliberately never copyrighted, this meant it was displayed on everything from earrings to record jackets, roach clips to the Peace Dress — a 1968 San Francisco mini-dress covered with the symbol below a dipping bosom line. (It paralleled an anti-war cry, “Girls Say Yes To Boys Who Say No!”)  

A paradigm shift in values, endemic to the ’60s, took place. Older activists decried the peace symbol’s commercialization, as in perhaps thong panties with the symbol in crystals across the butt.  

The huge numbers of baby boomers, however, with their TV, LSD and maturing rock ‘n’ roll culture, were thoroughly behind its popularization.  

Still, through Vietnam’s war end, the anti-nuclear and Central America demos of the ’80s, and current ongoing Iraq war protests since 1990, the peace symbol has been on hand. Highly visible protests against its display have also taken place, including great multi-body peace symbols on beaches, lawns. . . with the creation four years ago with the beginning of the Iraq War of International Peace Symbol Day, March 17.  

Last holiday season, a couple in Paragosa Springs, Colorado put up a wreath of the peace symbol on their home. They were asked to take it down by their homeowners’ association. When they refused, they were fined $25 a day by the board’s chairman. The entire board then resigned in support of the couple. 

Within a week, the controversy was the second most popular story on CNN but soon after, the fine was rescinded. A newspaper poll showed 95.7 percent of people supported the peace sign. Similar battles have taken place in Odessa, Texas and Missoula, Montana—claiming it was anti-Christian and a “sign of the devil.” 

Before Vietnam, conscientious objectors needed a rock-solid religious belief and backup to stay out of the military. Mainly these were simple living members of the Mennonite, Amish and Quaker communities. Such experiences were to begin to support many more draft resisters—with the help of the War Resisters League (WRL) and the CCCO.  

In his very good ’60s novel, Hearts in Atlantis, Stephen King describes the arrival and upheaval of the peace symbol at a Maine college campus, circa 1966, at a meeting of students and deans called by a right-wing proctor. He said:  

 

Stokely Jones wears a coat with a very particular symbol on the back. . .This symbol. It was invented by the Communist Party shortly after the end of the Second World War. It means ‘victory through infiltration’ and is commonly called the Broken Cross by subversives. . . I hardly think it takes a rocket scientist to—  

“David, that is such bullshit!” Nate said, standing up. Dearie looked stunned. I suppose the last person he expected trouble from was Nate Hoppenstan. 

“That symbol is based on British semaphore and stands for nuclear disarmament. It was invented by a British philosopher. I think he might even be a knight (Sir Bertrand Russell). To say the Russians made it up! Goodness sake! Is that what they teach you in ROTC? Bullshit like that?” 

 

The peace symbol had been quickly denigrated as a Communist or devil symbol, even, it was claimed, back into the early Christian era as a flipping of the cross. As war resistance increased, it was called “the chicken tracks of the American coward.” Ironically, the like Mercedes-Benz hood ornament, first used in 1937, for arguably the best made car in the world, is emblematic of a technology that evolved through the Nazi war machine. 

Currently, the symbol is being further flipped—from outer space. Uber UFOers Michael Horn and the Meier Contacts are spreading the word that the symbol is a deep subconscious death (and resurrection?) zap sent by space aliens. Others maintain the unilateral symbol resembles a missile, a raised sword “the hanged man;” no, a contained missile true believers argue, even the tree of life itself (which it can stand for both ways).  

In its Golden Jubilee year (right behind last 9/11’s 100th anniversary of Gandhi creating the pledge of satyagraha—soul force), the peace symbol has weathered numerous wars — and the best marketing opportunities money can buy. Facing today’s horrors of Asian wars, increased nuclear disfunction, global warming, racial injustice, the irreversible military-industrial complex?. . ., it still calls from great city protests and hamlets to all Earth’s colors and creeds for nonviolent resistance (peace marches between the 7 or 8 Gandhi statues—from Boston to San Francisco?) and civil disobedience (sit-ins at the largest defense contracting congressional districts?).  

And all from the mind of one person that deep ’50s, dead winter day in grimy ol’ London Town—and the pioneering march through the English countryside to mad western science’s Aldermaston.  

 

Arnie Passman is a Berkeley writer. He is the author of The Deejays (Macmillan, 1971), two plays about black radio history and has appeared in The Realist, Rolling Stone, Anarchy, L.A. Free Press, The-Edge.  


Commentary: Time to Re-Name the University

By Dale Becknell
Friday April 27, 2007

In the spirit of cities rolling out the welcome mat for private stadiums, a la Pac Bell Park and McAfee Coliseum, sometimes at the expense of funding such secondary needs as schools, let’s have a contest for renaming the UC Berkeley. British Petroleum has made a strong bid for renaming the school the University of British Petroleum. But that’s a little over the top—maybe we should just put department names up for sale, and at least keep the UCB acronym for the present.  

But in deference to the university PR department (funded by little ol’ you and me and the students) working feverishly to get the half-billion-dollar BP contract, perhaps something like “University for Corporate Bidding” would entice more special interests to fund academic freedom, as defined by shill man Randy Scheckman. He’s the guy who, in the upstanding tradition of Joseph McCarthy, would misconstrue something a colleague critical of the oil company deal said, and have him fired. Having proclaimed this (according to the Daily Planet’s 4-20-07 article) at the Academic Senate meeting rubber stamping the contract with BP, whatever it says, Scheckman reportedly got a round of applause from those faculty heroically defending academic freedom (for those toeing the line anyhow, or “bottom line” from the boardrooms, as it were). It seems Mr. Scheckman took offense at Professor Ignacio Chapela referring to the oil company research deal as prostitution. As a scientist disciplined in reporting data accurately, Scheckman found it more convenient to interpret Mr. Chapela’s comment as calling the chancellor a prostitute. I know its been a while since all you rational professors took the SAT, so I looked it up...“prostitution” means “base or unworthy use, as of talent or ability.” Let’s brush up on our analogies here, too: a person is to selling her/his body as a university is to selling its...? You’re right. Not applicable—a “working” person makes no pretense as to what she/he is doing.  

Another candidate for renaming would be “University of Corrupt Boneheads.” Reportedly it takes about as much energy to convert plants to liquid fuel as it yields, slightly less or even more depending on how comprehensive you choose to be in your analysis. I don’t have a PhD, but I was awake during arithmetic class. If we burn one energy unit of oil to make one energy unit of ethanol, we get one minus one, or zero energy gain. Then we can take our unit of ethanol and burn it to make another unit of ethanol, which we’ll need to burn to produce another unit, ad infinitum. Is there a quicker way to burn more energy to heat the atmosphere than this? Of course it will require a gargantuan expenditure of capital to get there, but who needs more windmills or solar tech? Then there is the matter of converting food crops to ethanol crops, which will necessitate getting any remaining rain forests out of the way and using any unfarmed waterways for new corporate monocultures of artificially mutated plants. More petrochemical fertilizers will be needed to replenish newly depleted soils, and new roads and fleets of trucks to transport it all. Presumably what microbiologist Scheckman and his new bosses think will make all of this work will be to create genetically engineered bugs that release enzymes that will break down plants far more aggressively than any that nature saw fit to evolve. Thank you, God and independent researchers, but you’ve done your part, and you’re fired! BP and associates will take it from here. 

 

Dale Becknell is a Berkeley resident. 


Commentary: A Warm Water Pool Needs Land and Money

by Terry Doran
Friday April 27, 2007

A warm water pool in Berkeley is a truly desirable and important amenity to Berkeley residents, and a boon to the greater East Bay. The article in the Daily Planet on Tuesday, April 10, “Voices of the Berkeley Warm Pool,” is a remarkable tribute and reminder about the benefits of a warm water therapeutic pool for everyone in our community. However, the reality is that the existing pool is very old, deteriorating at a rapid clip, and may soon be unusable. And then where will we all be? 

So, what is the answer to our need for a usable, self-sustaining warm water therapeutic pool? It is, in fact, in leadership that exists with past and present School Board members and the community that developed the School District’s South of Bancroft master plan adopted by the School District last year. 

This Plan specifically calls for a dedicated location for a “new” warm water pool at Berkeley High School on the east side of Milvia Street (formerly the tennis courts), across the street from the old gym. The Plan pointedly states that the “old” pool would not be torn down for many years while badly needed new football stands are built first. Our community, during this time, could then seek funds for a new pool on School District land and facilitate a smooth transition from the “old” to the “new” pool without interrupting the availability of warm water hydrotherapy. 

I respectfully contend that those most concerned about this issue are presently being led astray, being used for partisan purposes unrelated to the pool, and are following a course of action that guarantees failure.  

The goal of some misguided souls to designate the old gym and warm water pool as a Berkeley historical landmark and preserve them at their present location would significantly delay the School District from following its adopted plans for Berkeley High School and thereby increase costs tremendously. The old gymnasium and warm water pool have outlived their usefulness for a modern High School and badly needed additional classrooms and updated athletic facilities are slated to be built on part of the land now occupied by the old gym and pools. The School District plan recognizes the significance of the Old Gym and is committed to preserve historical pictures and documents of the buildings by a qualified professional in consultation with the Landmarks Preservation Commission.  

First of all, why should anyone expect a School District that is strapped for money to spend its precious funds to rehabilitate an antiquated, regional facility, used mainly by adults in Berkeley and the greater East Bay? It just will not happen if the Berkeley School District is forced to change its master plan for improving the south campus of Berkeley High School. They will do nothing to keep the “old” pool going. The pool will die where it stands because the funds are not there and remain empty and unused in very short order with everyone loosing.  

The stakes are high and unless everyone unites around a viable course of action and works together we will never have a warm water pool in Berkeley because we will loose the present Berkeley Unified School District help.  

Just consider one consequence of following a path of trying to renovate the existing pool, which may cost more than building a new pool. Where will people swim and enjoy the therapeutic benefits of the warm water during the years of work renovating the old pool?  

We must all push to support the School District’s South of Bancroft master plan, in its entirety. We must lobby the district to fast track the surplusing of the Milvia Street parking lots, a first step in this process, so a regional pool can be built on this School District property.  

We must then advocate a joint planning process between the School District and the city to develop a plan for joint use and management of this property. These joint use agreements between the School District and the City already exist with the other public pools in Berkeley.  

And then we must raise funds like crazy, perhaps even going again to the voters of Berkeley and the wider East Bay for construction bonds. It is this approach I believe, that has a chance of success. Any other spells disaster. 

The pool and the sorely needed additional classroom space will not be built if the district is prevented from moving forward. Why would the district donate millions of dollars worth of land for a regional facility, land that could be used for other educational purposes, if it cannot proceed with the rest of the building plans 20 years in the making? And why would the School District work with warm water pool advocates to renovate a pool perceived by everyone in the School District to be a grand waste of money on a pool right in the middle of a newly designed school facility.  

Again, this is not an either/or situation. There is a win, win solution. But in order to get there we have to immediately start working towards the solutions I have outlined above. As a disabled person, a disability rights activist, a personal friend of the late Fred Lupke who worked tirelessly for a “new” warm water pool, as a former school board member, and a consistent friend of the warm water pool, I say we can’t throw this opportunity away by being diverted by advocates of keeping the old gym and pool.  

It is a suicidal mission that will be a painful lesson we will never forget or overcome, and the pool will be lost, maybe forever.  

 

Terry Doran is a former School Board member and current member of the Zoning Adjustments Board.


Commentary: AIPAC’s Legion of Supporters

By John Gertz
Friday April 27, 2007

Becky O’Malley begins her latest foray into the Middle East with noble sentiments. She endorses Pelosi’s and Lantos’ recent peace mission to Syria, and condemns the Bush administration for obstructing it. Then, as usual, our local editor severely strays. She starts by calling Israeli Prime Minister “clueless” for denying that Pelosi was bringing a peace message from him to Syrian President Assad, when everyone knows that Olmert is quite anxious to make peace with Syria, has said so often, and yes, of course Pelosi was bearing a message of peace to the Syrians from Olmert. No one has ever seriously called Olmert “clueless.” What a clueless insult. O’Malley, herself, concedes that, in order to send a peace message to Syria through Pelosi, Olmert had to disregard an explicit order from Bush not to do so. Olmert was in a tough position, since defying a bully like Bush cannot be a good thing for little Israel. Then O’Malley incoherently tries to tie AIPAC into this, as though somehow AIPAC is standing in the way of peace with Syria, citing Soros’ recent criticism of that organization. O’Malley quotes Soros as saying that he is “not sufficiently engaged in Jewish affairs,” and yet O’Malley nevertheless touts Soros as “a strong supporter of Israel.” Soros is right and O’Malley wrong. Soros has never been identified with Jewish causes or with Israel. He does not have much of a history of either support or detraction. His main focus of activity has been Eastern Europe. As for AIPAC, it did not in this case, and never would lift a finger to obstruct an Israeli peace initiative, but, more typically, in a case like this its role would be to help smooth over any bad feelings created between Olmert and Bush on his matter. O’Malley offers not a shred of evidence that AIPAC played or plays any obstructive role in the peace process, or in any way works against the interests of either the United States or Israel. Because AIPAC serves America’s interests as well as Israel’s, it is so highly regarded by politicians across the political spectrum, from Tom Bates to Tom Delay, and almost every politician in between, including Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Lee and Tom Lantos.  

Let me readily concede to O’Malley that AIPAC is an influential lobby. So are lots of other lobbies, some of whom I may agree with (Sierra Club, Americans for the American Way, MADD, etc.), and some with whom I may not (e.g., NRA). From where does AIPAC’s influence derive? Since, by law, AIPAC can neither raise money for candidates nor endorse them, it must be something else. First, polls consistently show that Americans support Israel over its Arab neighbors by very wide margins. It is never hard to be an effective lobby when you represent a majority viewpoint. Second, AIPAC is a vital resource of information. Let me offer an example. I once published an op-ed in the SF Chronicle. Two hours before going to press on the piece, the editor called me saying that he was going to challenge the veracity of one sentence in my piece. If I could not bring forth supporting sources before press time, the sentence would be struck (sadly, this kind of fact checking would never happen at the DP, at least when it comes to the Middle East). I told him that the factoid in question came from AIPAC. His response startled me: “If you got it from AIPAC, then it must be correct.” This is just one reason why AIPAC is so popular in Washington. Every member of the House and Senate knows that when they need information about the Middle East, they can get it fast, accurate, and unvarnished from AIPAC. Third (let’s get it out there), AIPAC members are largely Jewish, and Jews are, on average, more educated and politically involved than the overall population. This applies to Jews who are hypercritical of Israel as well. However, since nationwide (though not in Berkeley) such Jews are as rare as hens’ teeth, these hypercritical Jews have little effect nationally. I once met the head of AIPAC’s political division and asked him how much influence our locally vocal critics of Israel such as A Jewish Voice for Peace and the Tikkun Community had in Washington. His surprising response was that he had never heard of either group, and stressed that since he had been on the job for 20 years, that if these groups had even the slightest influence in Congress he would know of them. 

So, Ms. O’Malley let’s admit it, Jews have influence. What do you propose? Since influence largely derives from education, perhaps we can go back to the system, popular in the first half of the last century, of placing quotas on the number of Jews who could be accepted to the best colleges. It may be that Jews are more civically involved per capita. For example, there are currently eleven Jewish senators (i.e., 11 percent of senate seats), when only about 2% Americans are Jews. Perhaps we should then ban Jews from elective office. Perhaps we should dust off those good ol’ Nuremberg Laws. Maybe the DP should bring back that “Iranian living in India” pundit for his deep wisdom on the matter. 

 

John Gertz is a Berkeley resident and owner of the Zorro trademark.


Columns

The Care Crisis

By Ruth Rosen, Special to the Planet
Tuesday May 01, 2007

A baby is born. A child develops a high fever. A spouse breaks a leg. A parent suffers a stroke. These are the events that throw a working woman’s delicate balance between work and family into chaos.  

Although we read endless stories and reports about the problems faced by working women, we possess inadequate language for what most people view as a private rather than a political problem. “That’s life,” we tell each other, instead of trying to forge common solutions to these dilemmas.  

That’s exactly what housewives used to say when they felt unhappy and unfulfilled in the 1950s: “That’s life.” Although magazines often referred to housewives’ unexplained depressions, it took Betty Friedan’s 1963 bestseller to turn “the problem that has no name” into a household phrase, “the feminine mystique”—the belief that a woman should find identity and fulfillment exclusively through her family and home.  

The great accomplishment of the modern women’s movement was to name such private experiences—domestic violence, sexual harassment, economic discrimination, date rape—and turn them into public problems that could be debated, changed by new laws and policies or altered by social customs. That is how the personal became political.  

Although we have shelves full of books that address work/family problems, we still have not named the burdens that affect most of America’s working families.  

Call it the care crisis.  

For four decades, American women have entered the paid workforce—on men’s terms, not their own—yet we have done precious little as a society to restructure the workplace or family life. The consequence of this “stalled revolution,” a term coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild, is a profound “care deficit.” A broken healthcare system, which has left 47 million Americans without health coverage, means this care crisis is often a matter of life and death. Today the care crisis has replaced the feminine mystique as women’s “problem that has no name.” It is the elephant in the room—at home, at work and in national politics—gigantic but ignored.  

Three decades after Congress passed comprehensive childcare legislation in 1971—Nixon vetoed it—childcare has simply dropped off the national agenda. And in the intervening years, the political atmosphere has only grown more hostile to the idea of using federal funds to subsidize the lives of working families.  

The result? People suffer their private crises alone, without realizing that the care crisis is a problem of national significance. Many young women agonize about how to combine work and family but view the question of how to raise children as a personal dilemma, to which they need to find an individual solution. Most cannot imagine turning it into a political debate. More than a few young women have told me that the lack of affordable childcare has made them reconsider plans to become parents. Annie Tummino, a young feminist active in New York, put it this way: “I feel terrified of the patchwork situation women are forced to rely upon. Many young women are deciding not to have children or waiting until they are well established in their careers.”  

Now that the Democrats are running both houses of Congress, we finally have an opportunity to expose the right’s cynical appropriation of “family values” by creating real solutions to the care crisis and making them central to the Democratic agenda. The obstacles, of course, are formidable, given that government and businesses—as well as many men—have found it profitable and convenient for women to shoulder the burden of housework and caregiving.  

It is as though Americans are trapped in a time warp, still convinced that women should and will care for children, the elderly, homes and communities. But of course they can’t, now that most women have entered the workforce. In 1950 less than a fifth of mothers with children under age 6 worked in the labor force. By 2000 two-thirds of these mothers worked in the paid labor market.  

Men in dual-income couples have increased their participation in household chores and childcare. But women still manage and organize much of family life, returning home after work to a “second shift” of housework and childcare—often compounded by a “third shift,” caring for aging parents.  

Conservatives typically blame the care crisis on the women’s movement for creating the impossible ideal of “having it all.” But it was women’s magazines and popular writers, not feminists, who created the myth of the Superwoman. Feminists of the 1960s and ‘70s knew they couldn’t do it alone. In fact, they insisted that men share the housework and child-rearing and that government and business subsidize childcare.  

A few decades later, America’s working women feel burdened and exhausted, desperate for sleep and leisure, but they have made few collective protests for government-funded childcare or family-friendly workplace policies. As American corporations compete for profits through layoffs and outsourcing, most workers hesitate to make waves for fear of losing their jobs.  

Single mothers naturally suffer the most from the care crisis. But even families with two working parents face what Hochschild has called a “time bind.” Americans’ yearly work hours increased by more than three weeks between 1989 and 1996, leaving no time for a balanced life. Parents become overwhelmed and cranky, gulping antacids and sleeping pills, while children feel neglected and volunteerism in community life declines.  

Meanwhile, the right wins the rhetorical battle by stressing “values” and “faith.” In the name of the family they campaign to ban gay marriage and save unborn children. Yet they refuse to embrace public policies that could actually help working families regain stability and balance.  

For the very wealthy, the care crisis is not so dire. They solve their care deficit by hiring full-time nannies or home-care attendants, often from developing countries, to care for their children or parents. The irony is that even as these immigrant women make it easier for well-off Americans to ease their own care burdens, their long hours of paid caregiving often force them to leave their own children with relatives in other countries. They also suffer from extremely low wages, job insecurity and employer exploitation.  

Middle- and working-class families, with fewer resources, try to patch together care for their children and aging parents with relatives and baby sitters. The very poor sometimes gain access to federal or state programs for childcare or eldercare; but women who work in the low-wage service sector, without adequate sick leave, generally lose their jobs when children or parents require urgent attention. As of 2005, 21 million women lived below the poverty line—many of them mothers working in these vulnerable situations.  

The care crisis starkly exposes how much of the feminist agenda of gender equality remains woefully unfinished. True, some businesses have taken steps to ease the care burden. Every year, Working Mother publishes a list of the 100 most “family friendly” companies. In 2000 the magazine reported that companies that had made “significant improvements in ‘quality of life’ benefits such as telecommuting, onsite childcare, career training, and flextime” were “saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in recruitment in the long run.”  

Some universities, law firms and hospitals have also made career adjustments for working mothers, but women’s career demands still tend to collide with their most intensive child-rearing years. Many women end up feeling they have failed rather than struggled against a setup designed for a male worker with few family responsibilities.  

The fact is, market fundamentalism—the irrational belief that markets solve all problems—has succeeded in dismantling federal regulations and services but has failed to answer the question, Who will care for America’s children and elderly?  

As a result, this country’s family policies lag far behind those of the rest of the world. A just released study by researchers at Harvard and McGill found that of 173 countries studied, 168 guarantee paid maternal leave—with the United States joining Lesotho and Swaziland among the laggards. At least 145 countries mandate paid sick days for short- or long-term illnesses—but not the United States. One hundred thirty-four countries legislate a maximum length for the workweek; not us.  

The media constantly reinforce the conventional wisdom that the care crisis is an individual problem. Books, magazines and newspapers offer American women an endless stream of advice about how to maintain their “balancing act,” how to be better organized and more efficient or how to meditate, exercise and pamper themselves to relieve their mounting stress. Missing is the very pragmatic proposal that American society needs new policies that will restructure the workplace and reorganize family life.  

Another slew of stories insist that there simply is no problem: Women have gained equality and passed into a postfeminist era. Such claims are hardly new. Ever since 1970 the mainstream media have been pronouncing the death of feminism and reporting that working women have returned home to care for their children. Now such stories describe, based on scraps of anecdotal data, how elite (predominantly white) women are “choosing” to “opt out,” ditching their career opportunities in favor of home and children or to care for aging parents. In 2000 Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute in New York, wearily responded to reporters, “I still meet people all the time who believe that the trend has turned, that more women are staying home with their kids, that there are going to be fewer dual-income families. But it’s just not true.”  

Such contentious stories conveniently mask the reality that most women have to work, regardless of their preference. They also obscure the fact that an absence of quality, affordable childcare and flexible working hours, among other family-friendly policies, greatly contributes to women’s so-called “choice” to stay at home.  

In the past few years, a series of sensational stories have pitted stay-at-home mothers against “working women” in what the media coyly call the “mommy wars.” When the New York Times ran a story on the controversy, one woman wrote the editor, “The word ‘choice’ has been used ... as a euphemism for unpaid labor, with no job security, no health or vacation benefits and no retirement plans. No wonder men are not clamoring for this ‘choice.’ Many jobs in the workplace also involve drudgery, but do not leave one financially dependent on another person.”  

Most institutions, in fact, have not implemented policies that support family life. As a result, many women do feel compelled to choose between work and family. In Scandinavian countries, where laws provide for generous parental leave and subsidized childcare, women participate in the labor force at far greater rates than here—evidence that “opting out” is, more often than not, the result of a poverty of acceptable options. 

American women who do leave their jobs find that they cannot easily re-enter the labor force. The European Union has established that parents who take a leave from work have a right to return to an equivalent job. Not so in the United States. According to a 2005 study by the Wharton Center for Leadership and Change and the Forte Foundation, those who held advanced degrees in law, medicine or education often faced a frosty reception and found themselves shut out of their careers. In her 2005 book Bait and Switch, Barbara Ehrenreich describes how difficult it was for her to find employment as a midlevel manager, despite waving an excellent resume at potential employers. “The prohibition on [resume] gaps is pretty great,” she says. “You have to be getting an education or making money for somebody all along, every minute.”  

Some legislation passed by Congress has exacerbated the care crisis rather than ameliorated it. Consider the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, which eliminated guaranteed welfare, replaced it with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) and set a five-year lifetime limit on benefits. Administered by the states, TANF aimed to reduce the number of mothers on welfare rolls, not to reduce poverty.  

TANF was supposed to provide self-sufficiency for poor women. But most states forced recipients into unskilled, low-wage jobs, where they joined the working poor. By 2002 one in ten former welfare recipients in seven Midwestern states had become homeless, even though they were now employed.  

TANF also disqualified higher education as a work-related activity, which robbed many poor women of an opportunity for upward mobility. Even as the media celebrate highly educated career women who leave their jobs to become stay-at-home moms, TANF requires single mothers to leave their children somewhere, anywhere, so they can fulfill their workfare requirement and receive benefits. TANF issues vouchers that force women to leave their children with dubious childcare providers or baby sitters they have good reasons not to trust.  

Some readers may recall the 1970 Women’s Strike for Equality, when up to 50,000 women exuberantly marched down New York’s Fifth Avenue to issue three core demands for improving their lives: the right to an abortion, equal pay for equal work and universal childcare. The event received so much media attention that it turned the women’s movement into a household word.  

A generation later, women activists know how far we are from achieving those goals. Abortion is under serious legal attack, and one-third of American women no longer have access to a provider in the county in which they live. Women still make only 77 percent of what men do for the same job; and after they have a child, they suffer from an additional “mother’s wage gap,” which shows up in fewer promotions, smaller pensions and lower Social Security benefits. Universal childcare isn’t even on the agenda of the Democrats.  

Goals proposed in 1970, however unrealized, are no longer sufficient for the new century. Even during these bleak Bush years, many writers, activists and organizations have begun planning for a different future. If women really mattered, they ask, how would we change public policy and society? As one writer puts it, “What would the brave new world look like if women could press reboot and rewrite all the rules?”  

Though no widely accepted manifesto exists, many advocacy organizations—such as the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, the Children’s Defense Fund, the National Partnership for Women and Families, Take Care Net and MomsRising—have argued that universal healthcare, paid parental leave, high-quality subsidized on-the-job and community childcare, a living wage, job training and education, flexible work hours and greater opportunities for part-time work, investment in affordable housing and mass transit, and the reinstatement of a progressive tax structure would go a long way toward supporting working mothers and their families. 

Democrats don’t need to reinvent the wheel; these groups have already provided the basis for a new progressive domestic agenda. And if Democrats embrace large portions of this program, they might attract enough women to widen the gender gap in voting, which shrank from 14 percent in 1996 to only 7 percent in 2004.  

This is an expensive agenda, but the money is there if we end tax cuts for the wealthy and reduce expenditures for unnecessary wars, space-based weapons and the hundreds of American bases that circle the globe. If we also reinstate a progressive tax structure, this wealthy nation would have enough resources to care for all its citizens. It’s a question of political will.  

Confronting the care crisis and reinvigorating the struggle for gender equality should be central to the broad progressive effort to restore belief in the “common good.” Although Americans famously root for the underdog, they have shown far less compassion for the poor, the vulnerable and the homeless in recent years. Social conservatives, moreover, have persuaded many Americans that they—and not liberals—are the ones who embody morality, that an activist government is the problem rather than the solution and that good people don’t ask for help.  

The problem is that many Democrats, along with prominent liberal men in the media, don’t view women’s lives as part of the common good. Consciously or unconsciously, they have dismissed women as an “interest group” and treated women’s struggle for equality as “identity politics” rather than part of a common national project. Last April Michael Tomasky, then editor of The American Prospect, penned an essay on the “common good” that is typical of such manifestoes. It never once addressed any aspect of the care crisis. Such writers don’t seem to grasp that a campaign to end the care crisis could mobilize massive support for this idea of the common good, because it affects almost all working families.  

Now that Democrats are emerging from the wilderness, there are scattered indications they are willing to use their power to address the mounting care crisis. The Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues, one of the largest caucuses, has access to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has supported previous efforts to address the care crisis. The Senate has just created a new Caucus on Children, Work and Family, a sign, says Valerie Young, a lobbyist with the National Association of Mothers’ Centers, that “this is no longer a personal problem--it’s a national problem.” Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd says he will introduce legislation that would provide paid leave for workers who need to care for sick family members, newborns or newly adopted children. Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas has just introduced the Small Business Child Care Act, which would help employers provide childcare for their workers. Members in both houses of Congress are reopening the discussion of universal healthcare reform.  

The truth is, we’re living with the legacy of an unfinished gender revolution. Real equality for women, who increasingly work outside the home, requires that liberals place the care crisis at the core of their agenda and take back “family values” from the right. So far, no presidential candidate has made the care crisis a significant part of his or her political agenda. So it’s up to us, the millions of Americans who experience the care crisis every day, to take every opportunity—through electoral campaigns and grassroots activism—to turn “the problem that has no name” into a household word.  

 

Ruth Rosen is professor emerita of history at UC Davis and visiting professor of history at UC Berkeley. 


The Public Eye: Virginia Tech Killings Have Us Down on the Killin’ Floor

By Bob Burnett
Tuesday May 01, 2007

In one his most famous songs, bluesman Howlin’ Wolf sang “I should’a quit you, long time ago... / And I wouldn’t’ve been here, / Down on the killin’ floor.” 

The mass killings at Virginia Tech demonstrated that all Americans are “down on the killin’ floor.” 

It’s easy to dismiss the killings of 33 members of the Virginia Tech community as an aberration, the work of a terribly deranged individual. And it’s equally easy to focus on a few specific actions that might make things better: tougher gun control laws and better psychological support for troubled individuals, among others. It’s much harder to look at the deep sickness that grips America, our collective addiction to violence, and call for radical systemic change. But that’s what’s needed: recognition that we are a country of addicts; three hundred million lost souls desperately searching for our daily fix of blood and gore; a nation where the majority of citizens remain in denial that if we don’t change our reckless behavior then we’ll end up on the killin’ floor. 

In the United States there are 81 gun-related deaths each day. Columnist Mark Shields reports: “[Since 1980] Of the 26 developed nations in the world, 83 percent of all the people who died by firearms die[d] in this country.” We are the largest manufacturer and exporter of weapons in the world. The United States has the largest number of guns in private hands of any country. 

The ingredient that makes this lethal is not gun-ownership, per se, it is our addiction to violence, which is everywhere in our culture: TV, films, rap songs, video games, Internet sites, popular novels, even children’s toys. 

Given the American penchant for violence, it’s not surprising that the Virginia Tech killings dominated the media for a few days; or that they were driven off the front pages by fresh killings at the NASA Center in Houston. What is surprising is that Americans show so little understanding of the root cause of this problem. In the aftermath of tragedy, we restrict our focus to cosmetic fixes—new restrictions limiting the ability of the mentally ill to purchase automatic weapons—rather than address the systemic problem that produced the massacre. 

Why don’t we do something about violence? The simple answer is that we’ve become a nation of self-absorbed individuals: narcissists who focus primarily on ourselves and, perhaps, the members of our immediate families and, therefore, have little interest in what happens in our communities, much yet the nation. I write this advisedly, acknowledging that there are millions of compassionate people in America—such as those who run shelters for the homeless—who care deeply about their fellow citizens, who believe that they are responsible for the well-being of their brothers and sisters. Nonetheless, twenty-seven years of conservative ascendancy in American politics has exacted a terrible toil on the American psyche. One consequence has been the elevation of the personal good over the common good: “What’s in it for me?” “What have you done for me lately?” “Why should I pay taxes for services that benefit other people?” “The best government is no government;” “The market will provide.”  

Conservatives have ferociously assaulted the concepts of government, community service, and civil society. They’ve promoted the notion that individual Americans are on their own: the idea that individuals rise or fall of their own accord and government has no responsibility to care for them. Conservatives have created a system that deliberately penalizes the “losers.” 

That’s not to say that the Virginia Tech shooter, Cho Seung-Hui, wasn’t responsible for his actions; of course he was. But, as his social background unfolds, it’s clear that Cho had issues and because of these— extreme introversion and speech problems, among others—he was belittled and bullied by his peers. Unfortunately, Cho fit the same pattern as the Columbine killers, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. They were all unpopular kids—young people regarded as “losers”—filled with rage, who had all-too-easy access to weapons. Kids who perceived that they were part of an uncaring community and the way to fix this was to get even, big time. 

There is no easy fix for the problem that produced the deaths of 32 innocent Virginia Tech students and faculty. It won’t be solved by placing further restrictions on the sale of automatic weapons—although that seems like a good idea. It won’t be remedied by further restricting the activities of American with mental illnesses. It will take changes that are systemic and, therefore, more difficult. 

The United States, as a community, has to face the reality that we are a nation of violence junkies. We must go through our own arduous 12-step program: begin with the admission that we are powerless over violence and our lives have become unmanageable. In the process, we have to resurrect the notion of the common good and become a caring community, again. That’s a long, hard road, but it’s the only way we can get off the killin’ floor. 

 

Bob Burnett is a Berkeley writer. He can be reached at bobburnett@comcast.net. 


Column: Falling Down the Rabbit Hole Again

By Susan Parker
Tuesday May 01, 2007

Last Friday, April 27, I spent the day at Children’s Fairyland with one thousand other hot and tired attendees. It was a record-breaking crowd for Fairyland. The lines for the Magic Web Ferris Wheel and Flecto Carousel were long, as was the wait for a seat outside Johnny Appleseed’s Café. Almost everyone in the park was 5 years old or younger. It would have been a very good day to stay away from Fairyland, but I was subbing for a teacher who had, obviously, already thought of that.  

There were lots of adults yelling and many children crying. There were screams and threats and more than a few instances of inappropriate behavior. There were no tables available at Teddy Bear Picnic Area during lunchtime. All the shady spots along the edge of the grassy fence line were occupied. The Jolly Trolly had to make emergency stops to wait for strollers and toddlers to cross safely over the tracks. There were several broken rides, but yellow caution tape didn’t prevent some bold whippersnappers from climbing over barricades, looking for fun.  

Although I was with a group of nineteen five year olds, I was assigned the important task of monitoring one particular student, a little boy who needed special supervision. I pursued him as he ran from Willie the Whale to Crooked Man’s House to Peter Rabbit Village. Too impatient to linger long in any one spot, we spent time chasing bubbles at Bubble Elf, and pining for pink cotton candy and a blue plastic Fairyland key for sale at the Fairyland Gift Shop.  

We slid down the Dragon Slide a half dozen times. We took several trips up and over Clock Tower. We stood in line for the Wonder-Go-Round but finally gave up. We stood in line for Jolly Trolly but left after a twenty-minute wait. We arrived at the carousel just when everyone else must have been eating lunch or waiting in line for the bathroom. We rode a brown horse once, a black horse twice and ended with a rousing giddy-up session on a white stallion. We checked out Miss Muffet and the Tarzan swing. We looked at ourselves in the Goosey Gander mirror. We had really big heads and short, tiny legs. We laughed at Ms. Parker, who was beet red from too much sun and exercise, and then we took off for Noah’s Ark and Old West Junction.  

We climbed up the cement rocks near Hey Diddle Diddle, hit our head on an overhanging slab, and cried for a few minutes. We hung on the bow of the Pirate Ship, swung dangerously close to the water below, impolitely pushed several small people out of our way, and raced down the curvy path, past Pinocchio’s Castle and the Owl and the Pussycat. While rushing by the Three Little Pigs and over Yankee Doodle Bridge, I remembered that April 27th was the thirteenth anniversary of Ralph’s bicycling accident on Claremont Avenue. I looked at my watch just as I slithered down Alice’s Rabbit Hole. It was 1 p.m., about the time I learned Ralph was in an ambulance, speeding toward Highland Hospital’s Trauma Unit. But I couldn’t dwell on it for long as my charge was far ahead of me, tearing through the tunnels, pausing for only a second at the Mad Hatter before popping up into the Maze of Cards. We wandered around aimlessly, and finally emerged onto the sidewalk. My little friend smiled like the Cheshire Cat and shouted, “Let’s do it again, Ms. Parker!” I wanted to pause at the Chapel of Peace, but there was no time. I plunged down the Rabbit Hole again. Unlike 13 years ago, I knew for certain I would come up safely on the other side. 


Wild Neighbors: Where’s Poppa? The Case of the Fatherless Lizards

By Joe Eaton
Tuesday May 01, 2007

If you visit Mount Diablo this time of year and walk the Fire Interpretive Trail that circles the summit (highly recommended for wildflowers, including the locally rare bitterroot), you’re almost sure to meet one or more of the resident California whiptail lizards. Sometimes they dash across the path from one shelter to another, demonstrating why they’re also called racerunners. But I’ve had some escort me along their personal stretch of trail, keeping a wary eye on me all the while. 

California whiptails are fairly normal lizards, if there is such a thing, although as hot-pursuit predators they tend to operate at a higher temperature than the neighboring skinks, alligator lizards, and fence lizards. Normal would describe their reproduction: male meets female, a brusque courtship ensues, eggs get fertilized, the usual. 

But they have close relatives in the southwestern United States and northern Mexico—about 15 species altogether—that have evolved a much different approach. Male doesn’t meet female. There are, in fact, no males. These are all-female parthenogenetic species (from the Greek parthenos, “virgin,” as in Athene Parthenos, hence the Parthenon). It’s thought they originated as hybrids between two separate two-sexed species, a mode of speciation that’s rare in animals, although not uncommon among plants. This gives them an extra complement of chromosomes, with sets from both parent species. 

These unisexual lizards do pair off and go through the typical whiptail courtship routine. Like Ursula K. LeGuin’s Gethenians, an individual may assume both “male” and “female” roles over her lifetime. Without fertilization, whiptail eggs develop into clones, genetically identical to their sisters and their mothers and, barring the odd mutation, their founding grandmothers. 

This is not how vertebrates typically arrange things, of course. There are no parthenogenetic frogs, salamanders, birds, or mammals. But some fish and a number of reptiles do occur in female-only species.  

The lizards have gone into it in a big way, with, in addition to the whiptails, some 15 species of unisexual geckoes, night lizards, and representatives of other families. And there’s one parthenogenetic snake: the flowerpot blindsnake, which has traveled all over the world in potting soil. 

What’s the advantage of this reproductive mode? Well, if evolution is about maximizing the genes you pass on to the next generation, you can’t get any more maximal than a litter of clones. Parthenogens are great at colonizing disturbed places and remote islands; some of the geckoes that rode Polynesian voyaging canoes all over the South Pacific were all-female species. All it takes to found a new population is one gravid female. If every new addition is a fertile female, you can imagine the shape of the population growth curves. 

But, you might counter, if this is such a great deal, why are males (of any species) still around? It has been suggested that there are disadvantages to being a clone. Clones, by definition, have no genetic variety. In most species, males and females endow their offspring with a recombined mixture of their own genes, a brand new shuffle every time. Genetic variety is what makes some individuals more resistant than others to parasites and pathogens. If everyone in the population is a carbon copy, a novel disease might wipe out the lot of them. 

Beyond that, variation is the powerhouse of evolution. Genetic recombination gives natural selection something to select among—gene mixtures that may enable the organism to be better at obtaining food, eluding predators, surviving sudden catastrophes or more gradual environmental changes. Without variation, evolution stops. Some biologists have speculated that unisexual species may have fairly short life spans, in terms of geologic time. As good as they may be at exploiting new environments, all those parthenogenetic lizards may be just a flash in the pan. 

I wouldn’t want to predict the long-term fate of the whiptails. Note, however, the recent discovery that one group of parthenogenetic animals, the crotoniid soil mites, have gone back to a two-sex reproductive strategy. That’s comparable to a snake re-evolving legs, or a flightless bird re-evolving wings. “Nothing as complex as sex has ever been known to re-evolve,” says mite scholar Roy Norton of the State University of New York, Syracuse. You just never know.  

 

Photograph by Ron Sullivan 

A California whiptail lizard on his or her doorstep.  


Column: Dispatches From the Edge: Shiites vs. Sunni: The Pandora Strategy

By Conn Hallinan
Friday April 27, 2007

In 1609 a terrible thing happened. Not terrible in the manner that great wars are terrible, but in the way that opening Pandora’s Box was terrible: King James I of England discovered that dividing people on the basis of religion worked like a charm, thus sentencing the Irish to almost four centuries of blood and pain. 

If the Bush administration is successful in its current efforts to divide Islam by pitting Shiites against Sunnis it will revitalize the old colonial tactic of divide and conquer, and maintain the domination of the Middle East by authoritarian elites allied with the U.S. and the international energy industry.  

Its vehicle, according to the New York Times, is an “American backed alliance” of several Sunni-dominated regimes, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt, “along with a Fatah-led Palestine and Israel.” 

The anti-Shiite front, according to the Saudi-owned news site, Elaph, will also include Turkey and Pakistan.  

The target is not simply Iran, but the so-called “Shiia Crescent,” a term first coined by King Abdullah of Jordan. The “Crescent” includes Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Alawai-dominated regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The Alawites are of Shiia origin. Suddenly rhetoric like the “eastern tide,” and the “Persian menace” have begun appearing in official newspapers in the region, despite the fact that the average Arab does not view Iran as a threat. 

A recent Zogby International poll of Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) found that close to 80 percent of those polled considered the United States and Israel the biggest threats to their security, while only 6 percent listed Iran. Further, fewer than 25 percent believe Iran should be pressured to halt its nuclear program, while 61 percent think Iran has the right to a nuclear program, even if it results in nuclear weapons.  

In fact, Iran’s opposition to the United States and support for the Palestinians is widely popular in the region. 

Writing in Al-Ahram Weekly, Omayma Abdel-Latif, project coordinator for the Carnegie Middle East Center, says, “The consensus in both Sunni and Shiia circles appears to be that attempts to emphasize Sunni-Shiia rivalries are intended to deflect attention from both the U.S. occupation of Iraq and continued Israeli aggression. That the United States is working to fuel such tensions is almost an article of faith for Muslims on both sides. In its attempt to create an anti-Iran alliance, they say, the U.S. is resorting to a strategy which aims to raise the specter of sectarianism across the Muslim world.”  

Abel-Latif is not alone in her analysis. “One might be forgiven for surmising that the current thrust of U.S. policy in the Middle East and through the Muslim world is to exacerbate and instrumentalize Sunni-Shiite divisions,” says Middle East expert and author Fred Reed. 

While much of the “Shiia threat” talk seems aimed at Iran, Hezbollah and Syria—the Shiite-dominated government in Iraq is generally excluded because it is allied with the current occupation forces led by the U.S. and Britain—the real target may be a good deal bigger. 

“Could it be that the U.S. endgame is to weaken Islam from within,” asks Lebanese writer Jihad Azine in An-Nahar, “and divert attention from targeting U.S. interests to targeting the Shiia?”  

One major concern for the U.S. is oil. While oil production in the United States, Mexico, and the North Sea is declining, U.S. consumption is predicted to increase by one-third over the next 20 years. By 2020, two-thirds of all U.S. oil will be imported, and since 65 percent of the world’s remaining oil reserves are in the Middle East, one doesn’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to conclude a strategy of divide and conquer is aimed at keeping strategic control of those resources.  

Keeping up tensions in the Middle East is also enormously lucrative for U.S. arms companies. Since 2006, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Oman have spent—or will over the next year— $138 billion on arms purchases. 

The division between Sunnis and Shiia dates from shortly after the Prophet Mohammad died in 632. But as London School of Economics Middle East expert Fred Halliday points out, the distinctions “are small, far less than those between Catholics and Protestants in Christianity,” and conflict between the two “is essentially a recent development, a product of the Middle East political crisis in recent decades.” 

Halliday argues that the wars in Kashmir and Afghanistan encouraged the division because militant Sunni groups were the heart of the resistance. The real divisions may be small, but religious conflict has always been a surrogate for something else. In Ireland it divided native Irish from Protestant settlers and kept the two at one another’s throats. In Egypt, the British manipulated Copts against Muslims; in Cyprus, Christian Greeks against Muslim Turks.  

In its campaign to divide and conquer, according to journalist Seymour Hersh, the Bush administration has ended up bolstering “Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.” 

Martin Indyk, a former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, says, “The Middle East is heading into a serious Sunni-Shiite cold war. The White House is not just doubling the bet in Iraq; it’s doubling the bet across the region. This could get very complicated.” 

“Blowback” has already happened. As Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations told the New York Times, “Who cannot remember that to contain the so-called ‘Shiite Crescent’ after the 1979 revolution, the extremism of the fundamentalist Salafi movement was nourished by the West—only to transform into al Qaeda and the Taliban? Why should the same policy in the same region procure any different results now?” 

While the Shiia are represented as a single entity, in fact there are enormous differences among Shiia communities. They are a majority in Iran, but Persians are ethnically different than Arabs. The Shiia constitute the bulk of the Muslim population in Lebanon, but Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has been sharply critical of Iraq’s Shiia government for working hand in glove with the U.S. occupation. 

In any case, Shiia make up only 12 to 15 percent of the Muslim world and, outside Iran and Iraq, constitute a majority only in Yemen. Traditionally they “are under represented,” according to Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Socially and economically, Shiia communities are more marginalized, less educated, and poorer.” 

The fact that Shiia communities—particularly in Lebanon and Iraq, but also in Saudi Arabia—are suddenly on the radar screen has less to with any kind of Iran-driven conspiracy than with growing resistance to the sect’s traditionally second-class status in the Middle East. The “divisions” are political and economic, not sectarian, says Abdel-Latif. 

According to Halliday, Shiites and Sunnis have intermarried and shared holy sites for centuries. “Actual and direct conflict between Sunni and Shiia (as distinct from suspicion and communal difference) has until recently been remarkable by its absence.” 

But as the Irish found out to their woe, small differences, if linked to a wider policy, can turn esoteric matters of theology into a life and death matter. “These fires, once lit, can destroy forms of co-existence that have existed for centuries,” points out Halliday. 

And no one can be certain where those fires will spread and who they will burn. 


Column: Undercurrents: The Dellums Disappearance Debate

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Friday April 27, 2007

Generals, so the theory goes, tend to fight the last war, and so my good friends in the local media—many of whom seemed to have missed the fact that the administration of Mayor Jerry Brown was one of the most secretive in our lifetime—have taken out, yard dog fashion, after his successor, Ron Dellums, on the same charge. 

Some of this is legitimate citizen concern. 

Grand Lake area political and business activist Pamela Drake—a former City Council aide and City Council candidate—writes this week in her column in the Grand Lake Guardian that Mr. Dellums needs to get out more. “[Mayor Dellums] told us he wasn’t Superman and some of us were OK with that. We were looking for a partnership—not a savior (admittedly, many will always look for a savior or a fixer to take care of things). So why now does it seem that our former congressman, our new mayor, our fighter for justice seems to have gone into a phone booth rather than out on the street, a sit-down with reporters, or a walk through the farmers’ markets? … Oaklanders need some reassurance. … We’re willing to open our doors as we’ve already opened our hearts but we’re also checking collars for lipstick smudges and looking for cryptic notes in pockets. We need a little face time, Mr. Mayor. We need a fireside chat here and there.” 

Fair enough to ask to see more of the mayor we elected. 

Not quite so fair, however, are two recent entries about Mr. Dellums by two different reporters in the East Bay Express. 

In an April 19 East Bay Express 92510 blog entry entitled “Poverty Pimp Alert” (“poverty pimp” being the name some use to accuse activist leaders of playing up the issue of poverty—usually race-based poverty—in order to line their own pockets), Chris Thompson takes out after the Dellums task forces. 

“So what brilliant ideas have the members of Oakland mayor Ron Dellums’ ultra-secret task forces come up with lately?” Mr. Thompson asks. “You know, the task forces that hid from the public while they debated the most important issues of the city? The task forces whose reports Dellums has been too busy reading to, you know, govern the city? What inspired policy has come out of this grand, clandestine project? Pep rallies.” 

Did the task forces “hide” from the public, as Mr. Thompson asserts? We’ll get to that in a moment. 

Meanwhile, this week in the Express print edition, Robert Gammon writes in his “Full Disclosure” column about what he calls Mr. Dellums’ “secret task forces”: “The mayor, who ran on a platform of transparency and open government, commissioned 41 citizen task forces that have been meeting for months behind closed doors to create his mayoral agenda. The groups, now in their second round of sessions, have been so secretive that the mayor has not even released their names publicly, let alone members’ names and affiliations. … One of the mayor’s top-secret task forces—whose meetings Dellums prohibits the press from attending—is named ‘Transparency in government, public ethics, making city procedures and policies understandable in plain language.’” 

Mr. Gammon, along with a number of other local reporters, has been trying to get the names and affiliations of the task force members for weeks. He reports in his column that “a City Hall source e-mailed Full Disclosure a list of the task-force names and their primary topics. … In a later phone conversation, Dellums’ spokeswoman Karen Stevenson asked Full Disclosure to keep the task-force names secret until mid-May, when the mayor plans to publish their initial results. Now Full Disclosure is not paid to keep secrets. You can find the names posted on our news blog.” 

It’s hard to say how Mr. Dellums’ citizen task forces got the name “secret.” It may have come from San Francisco Chronicle East Bay columnist Chip Johnson, who used to have insider access to Oakland City Hall during the Jerry Brown years, but lost his Oakland privileges under Mr. Dellums (a Pulp Fiction reference) for various reasons. Mr. Johnson tried to get information on the task forces from Mr. Dellums’ staff members last summer and, when he couldn’t, labeled the task forces “hush-hush.” “The people serving on those committees since Dellums’ election have not been announced,” Mr. Johnson wrote in a September 2006 column. “And while some of their meetings have been held on the third floor of Oakland City Hall, very little information has been released to the public—or to the media.” 

But how secret were the Dellums task forces? 

The Dellums Campaign began putting out word about the task forces—and invitations for people to join them—shortly after Mr. Dellums was elected in June of 2006. I can’t even remember how I learned about them, but it was common knowledge among Oakland political and activist circles in the summer of last year. From what I understand, more than 800 citizens signed up for 41 task forces, many of them people who had campaigned against Mr. Dellums in the mayoral election, and had goals and interests markedly different from his. Apparently, the task forces were open to anyone who came and signed up. Under those circumstances, how difficult would it have been for local reporters to get information on the task force membership or deliberations in a town, like Oakland, that dearly loves to gossip? Not very. So why didn’t they? 

One of the reasons may be that while there are many media outlets in the East Bay, all of them have been cutting their reporting staffs, or hiring younger and more inexperienced reporters, in corporate cost-saving measures. In addition, some of the area’s better reporters—the Tribune’s Alex Katz, for example—have been lured away to public relations duties, or in the case of Robert Gammon—who used to be with the Tribune before he came to the Express—have become spread so thin in trying to cover so many areas of concern that their work has suffered. So what should have been an easy job—getting information about the task forces from the task force members themselves—is now being made out to be difficult. 

I don’t know why the Dellums administration did not early-on release the names and affiliations of all of the task force members. It would have made things simpler, and the issue would long ago have vanished (how many people, after all, are going to read every name on the 41-task force roster that Mr. Gammon posted to the East Bay Express blog?) My guess is that the names were not earlier released by Mr. Dellums because there is some creative tension going on between the old campaign staffers who have now become city staffers—Dellums loyalists who worked on a volunteer basis during the period last year when the task forces were put together—and the administrative staff who came on after the January inauguration and may have different ideas about how the task forces—and the Dellums administration as a whole—should operate. In addition—or, maybe, as a result of that—the task forces are morphing from independent citizen bodies making recommendations to the mayor to semi-official bodies that help carry out the mayor’s agenda in various policy-interest areas, and there still seems to be some confusion about how that should, and will, operate. But I’m just speculating here, and the Dellums folks will have to answer for themselves. 

But at least the task force debate has some substance behind it. 

In a follow-up posting to his April 19 “Poverty Pimp Alert” blog, this one entitled “Poverty Pimp Alert II,” Mr. Thompson appears to drop over the critical edge. Reacting to a statement in a recent California Majority Report posting that “Dellums has allowed the community to ask a lot of him, but if anyone can harness support for large, institutional changes in Oakland, Ron is probably the man,” Mr. Thompson writes, “Apparently, Ron Dellums can sleep on the job for more than three months, create task forces to conduct secret meetings but do nothing more than draft toothless position papers, and generally piss away his time in office, and his ‘We Shall Overcome’ shtick still plays with people who should know better.” 

Is Mayor Dellums sleeping on the job and pissing away his time in office? We’ll wait for Mr. Thompson to provide more than just his opinion. 


Garden Variety: Use Your Garden Water Wisely and For Pleasure

By Ron Sullivan
Friday April 27, 2007

After driving past for months and months, I noticed an opportune parking space and misbehaved badly enough to get it, and so I finally got inside the Sahara Import shop on Ashby just east of Shattuck.  

I was greeted by a friendly young woman and the offer of Moroccan tea, which proved to be a little glass of mint tea just sweet enough to heighten the flavor. Lovely. Among the handsome jewelry pieces and lamps and even a small selection of clothing, I found a few garden or courtyard fountains. 

Made with that fantastically complicated, geometric-patterned tile that characterizes several kinds of Arabic architecture, these came in both wall-hung lavabo and ground-level central-basin styles, in blue-and-white and multicolor schemes. 

I’ve always thought the effect of these was refreshing and oddly restful, for something with so visually complicated a surface. The blue-and-white arrangement in particular dramatizes the effect of clear moving water in a hot dry place, declaring the place an oasis.  

Water, of course, actually does cool the immediate area around it. So do trees and other plants—measurably!—as they use energy in respiration and photosynthesis, and exhale water vapor along with oxygen.  

There’s generally a conflict in a California pleasure garden between water conservation—always a good thing, whether it’s an official drought year or not—and having a pleasant place to hang out on a hot day. We do get a few of those even on the west side of the hills, and it really is cheaper in terms of natural resources as well as money to have a green retreat than to air-condition a whole house.  

The classic strategy for allotting water to a garden seems to have been inspired by an aesthetic tactic that’s also happily useful for our nonhuman neighbors. This method concentrates the most manicured and/or exotic plants, the most clearly human spaces, in one area—usually close to the house—and lets the rest of the garden shift toward a looser, more natural look.  

The water equivalent gets the most use out of water by concentrating water-loving plants in one place—again, often nearest the house and the existing plumbing—and moving toward more drought-tolerant stuff farther out.  

It’s a bit counterintuitive, but a pond or pool or fountain—a “water feature” in trade jargon—is another way to get the most bang for your bucket. In fact, I’ve heard it said that a reasonably maintained swimming pool uses less water than an equivalent area of lawn, depending on where it’s sited.  

That’s defensible if you understand the radiator principle and evapotranspiration. Water vapor gets thrown off every blade of grass, which adds up to an area many times the evaporative surface of a pool.  

Most water plants are sun-lovers. If you want a water feature in the shade, it works well to have a decorative tiled pool or fountain like the ones you’ll see in Sahara Import and surround it with shade-loving plants in pots or in the ground.  

 

 

Sahara Import 

2110 Ashby Ave. 

295-4527 

Open daily 10 a.m.-6 p.m. 

http://saharaimport.com 

 

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in the Daily Planet’s East Bay Home & Real Estate section. Her column on East Bay trees appears every other Tuesday in the Daily Planet.


About the House: The Question of Capping to Keep Pests Away

By Matt Cantor
Friday April 27, 2007

I guess I have to remember to stay off of my horse else be in danger of falling off and damaging my backside. The industry (if you can call it that) that I’m employed in is fairly new and often mistaken for other adjacent trades (e.g. a friend referred to me as an appraiser the other day) including, not surprisingly, the structural pest control industry (often referred to as termite inspectors).  

Now, don’t get me wrong, I like and respect many folks I know in this business. Some do extraordinarily fine work and provide a vital service, but sadly, this does not cover all comers. There are, in my never-humble opinion a couple of major problems in this industry and, while I’ll try to swerve away form a global analysis of this agglomeration of issues, I will pick one and do a little bit of damage. 

Pest officers, like cardiologist live in their own world with their own set of imperatives. The thing that they do for a living seems, from inside that box to be the center of the universe and the rules, activities and theories that apply to their livelihood appear, from their perspective to be the most important things that exist. While some cardiologist might occasionally admit that the oncologist has something of value to say, they will still think it essential for every patient they meet to have a stress test and an EKG. It’s just a feature of being human to have your eyes stuck on your own head and no one else’s.  

For pest control people, the pest report looks like the most important way to look at the house and the repairs recommended in their reports don’t say “fix the rotten wood but be sure to get to the wiring first because a fire is more dangerous than fungal rot,” right? They just say, fix the rot, treat the ground, replace the porch and so on. Part of the problem is also that, if you only meet a cardiologist, you only hear that perspective and if you only see a pest control report, you don’t get a chance to compare those issues to the many other significant ones that might be presented to you by other persons; including home inspectors (he said, polishing his nails on his vest).  

Again, I will find much to agree with on many a pest report but there’s one thing that seems to get included as a recommendation in many of these reports and has for many decades and that is a call for the “capping” of a foundation. 

Capping is analogous to the capping of a tooth. It’s a covering and enlargement that generally extends upward from the original footing and usually has only a very small amount of concrete extending down over the inside edge and rarely much if any on the outside edge. Now why is this done? A cap is done for the simple reason that moisture and insects can more easily get at the bottom wooden elements of the building when the foundation holds these portions up a very short distance off the ground. When this is the case, it doesn’t take much of an accrual of earth along the inside or outside of the footing to allow wood boring inspects to get at the foundation or for wet earth to allow funguses to propagate along the bottom wooden members leading to rot (and there’s nothing dry about it).  

If we can hold the bottom wooden pieces aloft some 6 inches or so from the ground, they tend to fare far better than when these same “mudsills” and other sticks of wood, sit on or near the ground. 

A lot of what we’re talking about relates to termites but they’re not the whole picture when we’re talking about “grade faults,” which is another term for the condition in which wood and earth are getting too intimate. When they’re actually touching each other, we call it earth-to-wood contact, which is, as they say, a bad thing. 

So when pest inspectors see this condition, they often call for a capping of the foundation as a fix for this excess of intimacy (for shame!). The problem is that they are also engaging in the modification of a major structural component of the house without any real consideration for the structural implications. If, the caps were fairly inexpensive and if they were typically built with earthquakes in mind it might not be such a big deal but neither of these things are true. I’ve looked at something in excess of a thousand pest reports (maybe two) in my career and would say that the bids for capping of foundations that I’ve seen are usually somewhere in the range of two-thirds to three-fourths the cost of foundation replacement for the portions of the foundation that were “called.” So this begs an analysis of the difference between a capped foundation and new one (again, we may only be talking about one side or the whole thing). 

Older foundation that get called for capping are generally quite small in overall dimension and have relatively small bearing areas. In other words, the bottom isn’t that broad and they tend to settle more easily as a result. These older foundations often lack metal reinforcement and good quality concrete. Many older footings are imbalanced, bearing too much to the inside and, as a result, tend to tip slowly to the outside (this is called rotation). So when one is capping, one is left with all of these features with only limited improvement. 

Many older caps were installed with little or no interconnection between the old foundation and the cap and rely upon a “cold joint” or friction to hold them together. Today, workmanship is better but the connection is still inferior to the basic demand that foundations be poured integrally so that they will not separate over time. 

I’m darned curious to see what will happened to these caps when an earthquake hits. It may be that the early ones that lack good connection will snap and drop walls with unhappy results. 

New foundations have better balance (usually being an upside-down T shape), well integrated bolting and very hard concrete throughout. So if you can get all of these things for an extra few thousand over an already costly cap, it seems to me a no-brainer. 

I don’t want to blow by that bolting thing too rapidly because, in our earthquake anticipation, it’s a real issue. Caps are often poorly bolted and almost never to the standard required for conventional foundations. Mudsills, those bottom sticks of wood that rest on the foundation often get stuck in the mud, as it were when they get installed in caps. That is to say that they often don’t sit on the concrete but get embedded in the concrete making bracing and some kinds of bolting more difficult. 

A new foundation (or footing section) is required to have at least a moderate number of bolts installed on each section of mudsill so this becomes one more reason to choose a new foundation (or section) over a cap. 

Now, in fairness, some installers will use what is called a “saddle” when beefing up an old foundation. This is cap with one side (or both) that has been dug out and integrated into the cap. This can result in much better bearing and overall strength and I’m certainly much happier when I see one of these (which is rare), but again, I always want to come back to the question of whether a new foundation, with all there is to recommend it, would have cost much more and the answer is usually no. 

`I was asked to comment on such a case the other day and said that I felt that the client would be better off getting a new foundation installed by a cheaper contractor than to take a cap from a better one. While I never really favor working with a lesser individual, the city oversight and the basic requirements on foundations are so stringent that I rarely see a new foundation that’s been done substantially wrong. We can grouse and moan about the code (and city inspectors) all day but this is one proof of their value. You don’t have to worry too much that a foundation will be done wrong, once the drawings and permits are on the table. 

That said, I’d recommend spending a little more and working with the better contractor. It’s an old saw that higher cost is soon forgotten but bad workmanship lives on day after day and I believe it. 

So, do get a pest inspection from time to time and if your pest guy or gal says that you have a “marginal” or “faulty” grade condition and need to cap, ask very nice if they might be willing to give you a comparable bid for new VS the cap. You won’t just be doing well, you’ll be doing good and here’s why. Every person that does this, pushes the marketplace a bit more in the right direction and eventually, we won’t have to sit around and complain about all those lousy contractors. 

 

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


Quake Tip of the Week

By Larry Guillot
Friday April 27, 2007

Can You Stem the Water Tide? 

 

A faithful Quake Tip reader recently had an emergency at home which leads to this recommendation: check and see if your washer hot and cold manual shut-offs are working, as well as the hot water shut-off that should be on top of your water heater.  

If you have a broken water connection after the next serious quake, if you don’t have what’s called a “gate valve” near the house, you might thank yourself if you had on hand a plumber’s tool for shutting off your water at the meter, usually close to the curb or sidewalk. I’ve seen them in large hardware stores and places like Home Depot. They make it much easier than trying to shut off the water with an adjustable wrench.  

 

 

Larry Guillot is owner of QuakePrepare, an earthquake consulting, securing, and kit supply service. Call him at 558-3299, or visit www.quakeprepare.com.


Arts & Events

Arts Calendar

Tuesday May 01, 2007

TUESDAY, MAY 1 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Water and Light” Giclee photographs by Maris Arnold at Au Coquelet, 2000 University Ave. 843-3236.  

“Inspiring Blooms” works in colored pencil by Bei Brown on display at the Tilden Environmental Education Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Visions of Peace and Justice: Over 30 Years of Political Posters” Book release party for Inkworks Press at 7 p.m. at La Peña, 3105 Shattuck Ave. 849-2568. 

Dale Pendell reads from “Inspired Madness” at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Daniel Farber discusses “Retained by the People: the Silent Ninth Amendment and the Constitutional Rights Americans Don’t Know They Have” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Brass Menagerie and Gamelan X at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Balkan dance lesson at 7:30 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

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

Dale Ann Bradley at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Avishai Cohen at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$16. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Barbara Linn and John Schott at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

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

WEDNESDAY, MAY 2 

EXHIBITIONS 

Photo Montages by Fletcher Oakes opens at the It Club Gallery, 10070 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito and runs through May 30. www.touchablestories.org 

“Fleeting Moments in Nature and Life” Bronze sculptures by Elizabeth Dante, plein air landscapes by Barbara Ward, watercolors by John Kenyon and paintings by Paul Graf at the Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave., through June 3. 848-1228. 

FILM 

“Goodbye, Dragon Inn” with a lecture by Marilyn Fabe at 3 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Constructions” Artists’ talk with Jenny Honnert, Marya Krogstad and Thomas Morphis at 6:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

Richard Walker describes the greenswards of the Bay Area in “The Country in the City” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

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

Myra Melford UC Jazz Group at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $7. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Leftist Lounge Dance Benefit for grassroots organizations at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Zydeco Flames at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun zydeco dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

In Harmony’s Way, a capella, at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 644-2204.  

Orquestra Liberacion at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Salsa lessons at 8:30 p.m. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Abigail Washburn & the Sparrow Quartet at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $29.50-$30.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Mikie Lee and Amber at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Avishai Cohen at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$16. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

The Pine Needles, mountain jazz, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

THURSDAY, MAY 3 

EXHIBITIONS 

“My Ruling Planet” Sculptures, paintings and drawings by Rocky Rische-Baird, and “Traidor!” paintings by four Filipino artists. Opening reception at 6 p.m. at Esteban Sabar Gallery, 480 23rd St., Oakland. 444-7411. 

FILM 

“Last Summer Won’t Happen” with fimmaker Peter Gessner in person at 5:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Free screening. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Lunch Poems Annual student poetry reading at 12:10 p.m. in the Morrison Library, in the Doe Library, UC Campus. http://lunchpoems.berkeley.edu 

“Berkeley Rocks” An illustrated lecture on one of Berkeley’s unique neighborhoods by Jonathan Chester at 8 p.m. in the Chapel, Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Cost is $10. Presented by Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association. BAHA’s House and Garden Tour of this Thousand Oaks neighborhood will take place on May 6. For information on the lecture and tour please call 841-2242. www.berkeleyheritage.com 

Michael Parenti on “Political Perception and Deception: How to Think about Empire,” at 7 p.m. at the First Congregational Church of Oakland, 2501 Harrison St. Cost is $15. Benefit for Middle East Children’s Alliance. 548-0542.  

Dan Bellm, poet at 7 p.m. followed by open mic, at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave., Albany. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

Patricia Vidgerman reads from “The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

“Not for Mother’s Only: Contemporary Poems on Child-Getting and Child-Rearing” with contibuting poets Laynie Browne, Maxine Chernoff, Norma Cole, Brenda Hillman and Elizabeth Treadwell at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

Judith Stone investigates apartheid in South Africa in “When She Was White: The True Story of a Family Divided by Race” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

The Dead Guise and Avalon Rising at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13-$15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Mariachi Los Camperos de Nati Cano at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $20-$32. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

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

Peter Anastos & Iternity at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $9. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Megan Slankard Band, Cyndi Harvell Trio, Adrienne Shamszad at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

Nell Robinson & Red Level, bluegrass and country, at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 644-2204.  

Quetzal at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Joe Cardillo at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Jazz Mafia Unit at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Sylvia Herold & Euphonia at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

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

FRIDAY, MAY 4 

THEATER 

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley “Lysistrata” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave. at Berryman, through May 12. Tickets are $12. 525-1620. www.aeofberkeley.org  

Aurora Theatre “Private Jokes, Public Places” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m. at 2081 Addison St., through May 13. Tickets are $38. 843-4822. 

Berkeley High Theater “Hair” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m., also May 11 and 12 at 8 p.m., at Florence Schwimley Little Theater, Berkeley High Campus. Tickets are $7-$15.  

Berkeley Rep “Blue Door” at 8 p.m. at 2025 Addison St., through May 20. Tickets are $45-$61. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

Contra Costa Civic Theater “A Streetcar Named Desire” at 8 p.m. Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Contra Costa Civic Theatre, 951 Pomona Ave., El Cerrito. Runs through May 12. Tickets are $8-$11. 524-9132. www.ccct.org  

Impact Theatre “Measure for Measure” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave., through May 26.Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468. 

Just Theater, “I Have Loved Strangers” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave., to May 26. Tickets are $12-$25. 421-1458. www.justtheater.org 

King Middle School “The Odyssey” at 7:30 p.m. at King Middle School Auditorium. Suggested dontation $1-$5. 644-6280. 

Masquers Playhouse “She Loves Me” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2:30 p.m. at Masquers Playhouse, 105 Park Place, Point Richmond, through May 12.Tickets are $18. 232-4031. www.masquers.org  

Subterranean Shakespeare “Macbeth” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St., near Rose in Live Oak Park, to May 26. Tickets are $12-$17. 276-3871.  

EXHIBITIONS 

“Two Worlds” Photographs by Victoria Staller and sculpture by Laura Van Duren opens at Mercury 20 Gallery, 25 Grand Ave. at Broadway. www.mercurytwenty.com 

“Touchable Stories: Richmond” A multi-media, oral history event created by the people of Richmond. Fri. at 8 p.m., Sat. at 2 and 6 p.m. through May 13, at 1303 Canal Blvd., Richmond (the former Kaiser Shipyard Cafeteria). Cost is $6-$12. For reservations call 619-3675. www.touchablestories.org 

“People Are Everywhere” group show of artists from Brazil to Canada. Opening reception at 7 p.m. at Boontling Gallery, 4225 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Gallery hours are Sat. and Sun. noon to 5 p.m.. Show runs to May 27. 295-8881. 

FILM 

“Lives for Sale” A documentary on immigration and human trafficking at 7 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker School, Marian Hall, 2nd Flr., 2125 Jefferson St. Not wheelchair accessible. 482-1062.  

“Hysteria” by Antero Alli at 8 p.m. at Grace North Church, 2138 Cedar St. Cost is $6. 464-4640. www.verticalpool.com 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Alex Cavalli performs “Paul Face to Face” a dramatic presentation of Paul’s epistles as written in the King James Version of the Bible, at 7:30 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. 339-6316.  

Nina Lindsay and Helen Wickes, poetry reading for Sixteen Rivers Press at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley City College Auditorium, 2050 Center St. 415-273-1303. wwwsixteenrivers.org 

Stephanie Nolan describes “28 Stories of AIDS in Africa” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Dan Plonsey’s Daniel Popsicle “Music of El Cerrito: the Color Music” at 8 p.m. at the Fidelity Bank building, 2323 Shattuck Ave. Tickets are $10-$20. Sponsored by the Berkeley Arts Festival. www.berkeleyartsfestival.com 

Berkeley City College Talent Show with music, dance, spoken word and poetry by students, faculty and staff, at 7:20 p.m. at the Berkeley City College Auditorium, 2050 Center St. 981-2965. 

Juan Escovedo and Tortilla Soup at noon at Oakland City Center Stage, 12th and Broadway.  

University Symphony Orchestra at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $4-$12.. 642-4864. http://music.berkeley.edu 

“A Night of New World Flamenco Jazz” with Tomas Michaud and the Gypsy Groove Ensemble at 7:30 p.m. at Home of Truth, 1300 Grand St., Alameda. Benefit for the Alameda Education Foundation. Tickets are $8-$15. www.WorldMelodies.com 

Rolando Morales Quintet at 5 p.m at the Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St. 238-2200. 

Juanita Ulloa and Mariachi Picante’s Mujeres Music Festival at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $18-$20. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Sheldon Brown Group at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$15. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Yolanda Alicia & Her Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Aza and Moh Alileche at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $11-$13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Fairport Convention at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $24.50-$25.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

The Ravines and Christina Kowalchuk at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Beep!, Smith Dobson Quartet, Kasey Knudson Group at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

La Plebe, Peligro Social, 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 Wayward Sway at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Jennifer Johns at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$7. 548-1159.  

Becky White and the Secret Mission, mystic folk, at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 644-2204.  

Times 4 at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Mister Loveless, The Catholic Comb, The Fedralists at 9 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Cost is $10. 763-1146. www.oaklandmetro.org 

Hal Stein Quartet at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

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

SATURDAY, MAY 5 

CHILDREN  

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

EXHIBITIONS 

“Fleeting Moments in Nature and Life” Bronze sculptures by Elizabeth Dante, plein air landscapes by Barbara Ward, watercolors by John Kenyon and paintings by Paul Graf. Reception for the artists at 5 p.m. at the Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. Exhibition runs through June 3. 848-1228. 

“Ceramics: Form and Function” by Phyllis Pacin, Cheryl Wolff and Ann Testa. Opening reception at 3 p.m. at Montclair Gallery, 1986 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. Exhibition runs to June 18. 339-4286. 

“Divine Feminine” Contemporary Tantric Art from the collection of Robert Beer, reception at 6 p.m. at Berkeley Shambala Center, 2177 Bancroft.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Myriam Gurba reads from her debut fiction collection “Dahlia Season: Stories & a Novella” at 6 p.m. at Pegass Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

“Measure of Time” Conversation with artists Alan Rath and Meredith Tromble at 1 p.m. in the Berekeley Art Museum Galleries, 2626 Bancroft Way. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808. 

Bay Area Poets Coalition holds an open reading from 3 to 5 p.m., at Strawberry Creek Lodge, 1320 Addison St. Park on the street, not in Lodge parking lot. 527-9905.  

Chuck Palahniuk introduces his new novel “Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey” at 7:30 in the Pauley Ballroom, UC Campus. Tickets are $8 available from Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Art for Autism Poetry Reading and Art Auction with readings by Loretta Clodfelter, Gabrielle Myers, Dennis Smera and others at 5 p.m. at Gallery for Urban Art, 1746 13th St., West Oakland. Cost is $10. 910-1833. www.thegalleryofurbanart.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Community Chorus and Orchestra features Gabriel Faure’s Requiem at 8 p.m. at Saint Joseph The Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. Free, donations appreciated. www.bcco.org 

Berkeley Opera “Romeo and Juliet” at 8 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2460 College Ave. Tickets are $10-$40. 925-798-1300. www.berkeleyopera.org 

University Symphony Orchestra at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $4-$12.. 642-4864. http://music.berkeley.edu 

AVE, Artists‚ Vocal Ensemble Life and Death: A Requiem for the Victims of Darfur at 7:30 p.m. at St. Mark’s Church, Bancroft at Ellsworth. Tickets are $10-$25. www.ave-music.org 

“A Night of New World Flamenco Jazz” with Tomas Michaud and the Gypsy Groove Ensemble at 7:30 p.m. at Home of Truth, 1300 Grand St., Alameda. Benefit for the Alameda Education Foundation. Tickets are $8-$15. www.WorldMelodies.com 

“Sacred Monsters” with dance icons Sylvie Guillem and Akram Khan at 8 p.m. at at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32-$86. 642-9988.  

The Arab Culture Initiative, hip hop for social change, at 9 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Nerio De Gracia Mambo Jazztet A tribute to Carlos Federico, at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

 

 

 

 

 

Steve Lucky and the Rhumba Bums with Carmen Getit at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Swing dance lesson at 8 p.m. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

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

Wildsang and James Riddle at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Space Heater at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Henry Clement & the Gumbo Band at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Adam Shulman Quartet at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10-$12. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Marc Lemaire & Friends at 8 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7. 558-0881. 

Minus Vince, Uptones, GDB at 9 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Cost is $10. 763-1146. www.oaklandmetro.org 

Mark Growden, Freddi, Acoustic Virgin at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. All ages show. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Jason Webley, Rev Payton’s Big Damn Band, Vermillion Lies at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, MAY 6 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Through Windows” Photography by Michael Wong Reception at 2 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

“Inspiring Blooms” works in colored pencil by Bei Brown. Reception for the artist at 2 p.m. at the Tilden Environmental Education Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

FILM 

“Works from the Eisner Prize Competition” with Sophie Cooper, Wenhua Shi and other artists in person at noon at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Joseph Fisher will talk about the recently discovered childrens’ art from the federally funded childcare centers in Richmond during WWII at 3 p.m. at Moe’s Books. 849-2087.  

Alex Cavalli performs “The Gospel According to John” a dramatic rendition of biblical voices direct from the King James Version of the Bible at 2:30 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. 339-6316.  

“The Human Drama of Everyday Lives: Telling Stories with Photos” with Oakland based photojournalist, Lexine Alpert at 2 p.m. in the Community Meeting Room on the third floor of the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge. 981-6241. 

“The Sermon on the Print” with printmaker David Kelso, founder of California Intaglio Editions at 3:30 p.m at the Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. 

Adelina Anthony, Dino Foxx and Lorenzo Herrera y Lozano poetry at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $8-$10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

“Divine Feminine” Contemporary Tantric Art Lecture with Siddhartha V. Shah at 1 p.m. at Berkeley Shambala Center, 2177 Bancroft.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Community Chorus and Orchestra features Gabriel Faure’s Requiem at 4:30 p.m. at Saint Joseph The Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. Free, donations appreciated. www.bcco.org 

Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary in a family concert and sing-along at 2 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley. Tickets are $15-$20 from 559-9500. www.tash.org 

“Sacred Monsters” with dance icons Sylvie Guillem and Akram Khan at 7 p.m. at at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32-$86. 642-9988. 

U.C. Santa Barbara Dance Company at 7 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $10-$15. 925-798-1300. 

Twang Cafe features Rancho Deluxe & High Diving Horses at 7:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $10, all ages welcome. www.twangcafe.com 

Jupiter String Quartet at 6 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. Vintage poster sale at 4 p.m. Tickets are $25-$30. 644-6893.  

Don Neeley’s Royal Society Five, music from the teens, twenties and thirties from 3 to 6 p.m. at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, 37417 Niles Blvd., Fremont. Cost is $20, benefits the museum. 494-1411. www.nilesfilmmuseum.org 

Irina Rivkin, Moira Smiley with VOCO & Ashley Maher at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Ana Carbetti & Recita da Samba at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $9. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Americana Unplugged: Jeanie & Chuck’s Country Roundup at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

David K. Mathews B-3 Organ Quartet at 4:30 at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

The Look, The Symptoms, Tea and Tricky Fish at 7 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Benefit for La Familia Music Education. Cost is $10, $8 for 18 and under. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Philips Marine Duo at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Elk, Horn of Daggoth, Sands at 9 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Cost is $10. 763-1146. www.oaklandmetro.org 

MONDAY, MAY 7 

EXHIBITIONS 

Photo Montages by Fletcher Oakes Reception with the artist at 7 p.m. at the It Club Gallery, 10070 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. Exhibition runs through May 30. www.touchablestories.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Aurora Theatre Staged Readings “Learn to be Latina” by Enrique E. Urueta at 7:30 p.m. at 2081 Addison St. For tickets call 843-4822. 

Will Shortz on his favorite puzzles and how crosswords are created at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $20-$32. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Chiura Obata and the Art of Internment with Kimi Kodani Hill, author, at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6150. 

Michael J. Sandel, Harvard Professor of Government will discuss his new book, “The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering” at 4:30 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant. 625-0819. www.genetics-and-society.org 

Actors Reading Writers “From Story to Screen,” works by O. Henry and Annie Proulx at 7:30 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. 932-0214. 

Freight and Salvage Open Mic at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $4.50-$5.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Gloria Frym and Joseph Lease, poets, at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Poetry Express with Avotcja at 7 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. berkeleypoetryexpress@yahoo.com 

 

 

 

 


Arts and Entertainment Around the East Bay

Tuesday May 01, 2007

ETHNOPOETICIST READS AT MOE’S 

 

Dale Pendell, a poet, software engineer, and long-time student of ethnobotany, will read from Inspired Madness at 7:30 p.m. today (Tuesday) at Moe’s Books. Best known for his books of epic entheogenic poetry, Pendell was the founding editor of KUKSU: Journal of Backcountry Writing. He has led workshops on ethnobotany and ethnopoetics for the Naropa Institute and the Botanical Preservation Corps. 2476 Telegraph Ave.  

 

COLLAGE ARTISTS 

DISCUSS THEIR WORK 

 

The Berkeley Art Center is hosting an artists’ talk from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Wednesday for its new exhibition, “Constructions,” featuring the art of Jenny Honnert Abell, Marya Krogstad and Thomas Morphis, all of whom work—in different and challenging ways—in collage, assemblage and found object media. All three of the exhibiting artists will take part in the discussion. 1275 Walnut St. For details, see www.berkeleyartcenter.org. 

 

BEANBENDERS REUNITE FOR ARTS FESTIVAL GIG 

 

The Berkeley Arts Festival’s May 4 concert of Dan Plonsey’s “Daniel Popsicle” will be a reunion of some of the Beanbenders musicians, including John Schott, Tom Yoder, Lynn Murdock and Randy McKean. The show begins at 8 p.m. at the Fidelity Bank Building, 2323 Shattuck Ave. $10-$20. For details, 665-9496 or www.berkeleyartsfestival.com.


Savall’s Skill Lends Immediacy to Performance

By Ira Steingroot, Special to the Planet
Tuesday May 01, 2007

Before going to hear the work of a particular classical composer, which, for me, usually means Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Mahler, or Satie, I try to listen to recordings of the pieces on the program before hand. Listening ahead not only makes the melodies performed familiar, it also gives the live concert a nostalgic resonance, and suggests a context for the music, both the original moment of its creation in time by the composer, and its creative intervening afterlife.  

This eventually leads to the current moment of performance and my experience as audience.  

On the other hand, I have probably attended 100 times as many live jazz performances as classical and I have never felt the need to study up for a jazz musician. Certainly my familiarity with the context of jazz—its more contemporary nature, its use of popular standards—is part of the reason for that. More important though, jazz has an immediacy that, in a lot of classical music, has become secondary to historical authenticity of performance and accuracy of reproduction of notes. Not only is jazz improvised, making listening ahead irrelevant, but the players understand that improvisation confers upon them the further freedom of playing in the moment, playing from the way they feel while performing.  

Although I am sure that all musicians aim for that existential quality in one way or another, the only living classical player to impress me with that sense of immediacy is the Spanish viola de gambist, Jordi Savall, who returns to Berkeley for two concerts of early music this weekend. No matter how unprepared I am, Savall is always prepared—not just to unlock the doors to what should be an esoteric musical experience, but to blow the doors off their very hinges.  

His Friday evening concert will feature the compositions of Marin Marais (1656-1728) and Antoine Forqueray (1671-1745), dubbed the angel and the devil by Savall, the greatest viola de gambists of their time. The viola de gamba, if you do not know, is the instrument that preceded the cello. In fact, Savall’s viola, a 1697 instrument made in London by Barak Norman, had been converted into a cello. Savall had it restored as a seven-string viola de gamba with traditional moveable gut frets. If you know Gainsborough’s various portraits of Karl Friederich Abel, you may have noticed that the 18th century transitional composer/performer is sometimes painted with his viola de gamba and at other times with the newer cello. Also on the Friday evening program are pieces by François Couperin (1668-1733), Sainte Colombe le fils and Robert Visée.  

The Saturday concert will feature works by the Spanish composers Diego Ortiz, Gaspar Sanz and Antonio Martin y Coll, a harpsichord sonata by the Neapolitan composer Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757), who spent most of his professional life in Spain, and improvisations on the Canario, a dance form from the Canary Islands. Also on the bill will be works by Bach, the revelatory Captain Tobias Hume (c. 1569-1645), Marin Marais, and Sainte-Colombe pere and fils. If you have seen the haunting film, Tous les Matins du Monde, based on the lives of Sainte-Colombe and Marais, with music performed and conducted by Savall, you will already be familiar with some of these vital early music composers.  

But, as I have indicated, it does not matter whether you already know any of this pre-classical music. Savall’s passion, virtuosity and freedom in performing these works makes everything he plays absolutely contemporary.  

 


BHS Revives ‘Hair’ for 40th Anniversary

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Tuesday May 01, 2007

Students at Berkeley High will “Let the Sunshine In” by performing a 40th anniversary celebration—and critical examination—of the musical Hair, this weekend and next on campus at the Florence Schwimley Theater. 

Director Maya Gurantz, founder of the East Bay theater troupe Ten Red Hen, which just finished their run of Clown Bible at the Willard School Metalshop Theater, called the production “a full collaboration with the students; they own the piece. They’ve been so creative.”  

“I was interested in a way for the cast to look at the legacy of hippies at Berkeley High and in their lives,” Gurantz said. “Hair itself wasn’t written by hippies, but by a couple of out-of-work New York actors. There’s a famous letter by Hal Prince to them saying there’s nothing experimental at all about the play. The music is ‘50s music, not ‘60s. It’s not genuine to the period, yet its legacy is that people are moved by it. It’s still provocative. It’s full of contradictions and we use it as a way to look at the contradictions of the legacy of the ‘60s.” 

The cast did their own research on the background, interviewing parents, teachers and others about the times the musical claims to exemplify 

“It was an opportunity to ask their parents and themselves what it was all about,” said Gurantz. “There’s something self-selective about doing this here, now ... so many of the parents came to the Bay Area from elsewhere looking for something. That already changes the tenor of who their kids are. One parent’s a wonderful photographer and has put together a display of pictures of parents then [in the ‘60s] until now, which will go up in the lobby with an exhibit of our research notes.” 

The play opens with a stage jammed “with so much stuff that it’s like a storage space. The cast enters as themselves, present-day Berkeley High students. There’s hardly any room for them! But they excavate and clear away all the clutter.”  

One number, “Going Down,” about getting expelled from school, which traditionally features actors as administrators with Hitler mustaches, proves a wry moment.  

“It makes no sense to Berkeley High kids,” said Gurantz. “And the real, present-day administrators watch the scene and say, ‘We’re so proud of our students challenging authority!’” 

Pianist and composer Dave Molloy, a colleague of Gurantz from Ten Red Hen, supervised the music, and according to Gurantz, the tone is definitely post-’60s: “An uptight girl comes out and sings ‘Aquarius,’ as if it’s the Pledge of Allegiance, and all the others react, ‘O God, not that song again!’ ”  

“There have been multiple productions every year for the past 40 years of Hair,” Gurantz said. “It’s usually presented as a nostalgia fest, nostalgia for something that maybe never was. An expression of yearning—I think the title song’s a sad song. Nostalgia for the ‘60s is often expressed as some idea of authenticity before everything became a commodity. But Hair was a commodity before it opened. It’s bizarre to do Hair in Berkeley, more than anywhere else. The strangest thing. But it’s the thing to do.” 

 

HAIR 

8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m., Sunday through May 12. $7-$15. Florence Schwimley Theater, Berkeley High School campus.


TheatreFIRST Struggles to Survive in Oakland Arts District

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Tuesday May 01, 2007

TheatreFIRST, Oakland’s only resident theater company, will perform the West Coast premiere of John Arden’s 1959 antiwar masterpiece, Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance, opening this Friday at 8 p.m., and running through May 27 at the Old Oakland Theatre, 481 Ninth St., just north of Broadway. 

Meanwhile, TheatreFIRST has also been waging a war of its own, one of survival, with what is perhaps its most challenging season artistically being matched by the greatest financial and logistical challenges in its 13-year history. 

Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance is “a very colorful, theatrical play,” according to Clive Chafer, director and founder of the company. “It’s about four soldiers on a recruiting mission during a war fought far from their home country, but it’s a recruiting mission with a different purpose: to shock the people of a town that’s in the grip of a miners’ strike into understanding the true nature of war.” 

There will be music and dancing, and the entire cast of 13 appears onstage during one scene in the storefront theater, “not the quiet psychological drama you’d expect in an intimate theater space! The actors directly address the audience, invite them to take sides, become passionately involved. It’s sometimes very funny, always appalling, and it slowly sucks you in—a fully engaged and engaging experience.” 

Chafer continued: “What I love about the play is its language—gritty, loamy, earthy, but never crude. British critic Michael Billingsley called it ‘language that seems hewn out of granite.’ I love to hear it spoken. And it’s the opposite of an academic discussion or a didactic tract. No single voice, not even the pacificists’, prove unflawed. Arden was a fan of Brecht, suspicious of plays with a mouthpiece. His characters are strongly written. It’s a parable, but one of complexity.” 

TheatreFIRST, which recently finished an acclaimed production of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, historically the first play of intercultural and religious tolerance, with its tale of the web of relationships between Christians, Muslims and Jews, is a company that chooses unusual plays with a social dimension, staging them with proficiency and élan. But a combination of events has challenged their resourcefulness—not artistically, but in terms of finance and their tenure in the declared Arts District in downtown Oakland, from 3rd to 21st streets along the Broadway corridor. 

“We want to stay, to be a part of the neighborhood,” said Chafer. “It’s close to BART, well-lit, with a parking lot and six restaurants of a full range in price and cuisine. We committed seven years ago to being a full-time Oakland company. And we’ve been lucky so far and gratified by the support of both individuals and the city.” 

But an obstacle has arisen, “more a bureaucratic problem than anything else. The City of Oakland won’t be able to fund us for the next year—one program ends, and we don’t qualify for the next for a year. It’s been our biggest source of funding for quite a while. And we’re told they want us to stay, to fund us again. This comes at a time when we’re playing in the only unleased space in Old Oakland. Our landlords have been kind enough to let us occupy a storefront for less than the commercial rate, but the increased retail development in the area has made it hard. We need an influx of funds and a lease before we can announce a full season, with more shows than before. We need increased support, from the NEA down to local business.” 

But Chafer’s upbeat, noting progress: “Nathan the Wise was our best-attended play in 11 years, since we did Anything To Declare, a French farce at the Julia Morgan Center—and that had 400 seats, compared with the 75 we have in Old Oakland. We sold out more than half the performances! And people have stepped forward to help. It’s entirely individuals who have contributed to our next season, starting next fall. We know we’re on the right track, doing what people want to see.”  

 

 

SERGEANT MUSGRAVE’S DANCE 

Presented by TheatreFIRST at 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and at 3 p.m. Sundays through May 27. $18-$25. Old Oakland Theatre, 481 Ninth St., just north of Broadway.436-5085 or www.theatrefirst.com.


Wild Neighbors: Where’s Poppa? The Case of the Fatherless Lizards

By Joe Eaton
Tuesday May 01, 2007

If you visit Mount Diablo this time of year and walk the Fire Interpretive Trail that circles the summit (highly recommended for wildflowers, including the locally rare bitterroot), you’re almost sure to meet one or more of the resident California whiptail lizards. Sometimes they dash across the path from one shelter to another, demonstrating why they’re also called racerunners. But I’ve had some escort me along their personal stretch of trail, keeping a wary eye on me all the while. 

California whiptails are fairly normal lizards, if there is such a thing, although as hot-pursuit predators they tend to operate at a higher temperature than the neighboring skinks, alligator lizards, and fence lizards. Normal would describe their reproduction: male meets female, a brusque courtship ensues, eggs get fertilized, the usual. 

But they have close relatives in the southwestern United States and northern Mexico—about 15 species altogether—that have evolved a much different approach. Male doesn’t meet female. There are, in fact, no males. These are all-female parthenogenetic species (from the Greek parthenos, “virgin,” as in Athene Parthenos, hence the Parthenon). It’s thought they originated as hybrids between two separate two-sexed species, a mode of speciation that’s rare in animals, although not uncommon among plants. This gives them an extra complement of chromosomes, with sets from both parent species. 

These unisexual lizards do pair off and go through the typical whiptail courtship routine. Like Ursula K. LeGuin’s Gethenians, an individual may assume both “male” and “female” roles over her lifetime. Without fertilization, whiptail eggs develop into clones, genetically identical to their sisters and their mothers and, barring the odd mutation, their founding grandmothers. 

This is not how vertebrates typically arrange things, of course. There are no parthenogenetic frogs, salamanders, birds, or mammals. But some fish and a number of reptiles do occur in female-only species.  

The lizards have gone into it in a big way, with, in addition to the whiptails, some 15 species of unisexual geckoes, night lizards, and representatives of other families. And there’s one parthenogenetic snake: the flowerpot blindsnake, which has traveled all over the world in potting soil. 

What’s the advantage of this reproductive mode? Well, if evolution is about maximizing the genes you pass on to the next generation, you can’t get any more maximal than a litter of clones. Parthenogens are great at colonizing disturbed places and remote islands; some of the geckoes that rode Polynesian voyaging canoes all over the South Pacific were all-female species. All it takes to found a new population is one gravid female. If every new addition is a fertile female, you can imagine the shape of the population growth curves. 

But, you might counter, if this is such a great deal, why are males (of any species) still around? It has been suggested that there are disadvantages to being a clone. Clones, by definition, have no genetic variety. In most species, males and females endow their offspring with a recombined mixture of their own genes, a brand new shuffle every time. Genetic variety is what makes some individuals more resistant than others to parasites and pathogens. If everyone in the population is a carbon copy, a novel disease might wipe out the lot of them. 

Beyond that, variation is the powerhouse of evolution. Genetic recombination gives natural selection something to select among—gene mixtures that may enable the organism to be better at obtaining food, eluding predators, surviving sudden catastrophes or more gradual environmental changes. Without variation, evolution stops. Some biologists have speculated that unisexual species may have fairly short life spans, in terms of geologic time. As good as they may be at exploiting new environments, all those parthenogenetic lizards may be just a flash in the pan. 

I wouldn’t want to predict the long-term fate of the whiptails. Note, however, the recent discovery that one group of parthenogenetic animals, the crotoniid soil mites, have gone back to a two-sex reproductive strategy. That’s comparable to a snake re-evolving legs, or a flightless bird re-evolving wings. “Nothing as complex as sex has ever been known to re-evolve,” says mite scholar Roy Norton of the State University of New York, Syracuse. You just never know.  

 

Photograph by Ron Sullivan 

A California whiptail lizard on his or her doorstep.  


Berkeley This Week

Tuesday May 01, 2007

TUESDAY, MAY 1 

“Energy Policy in California: 2006 Study Results and Aftermath” a League of Women Voters Brown Bag Lunch at noon at the Albany Library, Marin and Masonic Aves. 843-8824. 

“Why Save the Oaks?” a public forum on The Oaks & The Gym with Ignacio Chapela, Gray Brechin and others at 7 p.m. at 105 North Gate, UC Campus. www.saveoaks.com 

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. 

Family Storytime at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

Discussion Salon on “Is Society Sick” at 7 p.m. at JCC, 1414 Walnut. 848-2995. 

Teen Babysitting Class An introduction to child development and practical babysitting hints from 4 to 5:30 p.m. at Bananas, 5232 Claremont Ave. To register call 658-7353.  

“Bodhisattva” A lecture by Rev. Carol Himaka at 7 p.m. at the Jodo Shinshu Center, 2140 Durant Ave. at Fulton St. Registration fee is $10 for three lectures. 809-1460. 

Red Cross Blood Drive from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at UCB Fiji Fraternity, 2395 Piedmont Ave. To schedule an appointment call 415-531-8554. 

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, MAY 2 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around the restored 1870s business district. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of G.B. Ratto’s at 827 Washington St. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. 

The UCB-BP Deal: Implications for the Public University with Jennifer Washburn, author of “University, Inc.,” Jean Lave, Ignacio Chapela and others at 7 p.m. at The Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. 

“Our History is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution” A panel discussion at 5 p.m. at the Heller Lounge, MLK Student Union, UC Campus. 

9th Annual Community Job Fair featuring representatives from more than 40 Bay Area employers from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the College of Alameda Central Quad, 555 Ralph Appezzato Memorial Parkway, Alameda. 748-2208. 

Red Cross Blood Services Volunteer Orientation from 10 a.m. to noon at 6230 Claremont Ave., Oakland. Registration required. 594-5165. 

New to DVD: “The Queen” at 7 p.m. at JCCEB, 1414 Walnut St. Discussion follows. 848-0237. 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome. 548-9840. 

Stitch ‘n Bitch at 6:30 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

THURSDAY, MAY 3 

“Berkeley Rocks” An illustrated lecture on one of Berkeley’s unique neighborhoods by Jonathan Chester at 8 p.m. in the Chapel, Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Cost is $10. Presented by Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association. BAHA’s House and Garden Tour of this Thousand Oaks neighborhood will take place on May 6. For information on the lecture and tour please call 841-2242.www.berkeleyheritage.com 

Michael Parenti speaks on “Political Perception & Deception: How to Think About Empire” at 7 p.m. at the First Congregational Church of Oakland, 501 Harrison St. Benefits Middle East Children’s Alliance. Tickets are $15. 1-800-838-3006. 

Alzheimer’s Services of the East Bay Art Auction and reception to benefit ASEB's Adult Day Health Care Program, at 6:30 p.m. at Piedmont Community Hall, 711 Highland Ave., Piedmont. 644-8292. 

“Sex Workers‚ Rights Approaches to Human Trafficking: Addressing the Need for Public Policy Reform and Challenging Misinformation” a forum from 5 to 8 p.m. at the Center for Labor Research and Education, 2521 Channing Way. 

Living with Ones and Twos Practical advice for new parents with Meg Zweiback, nurse practitioner at 7 p.m. at Bananas, 5232 Claremont Ave. To register call 658-7353.  

Baby and Toddler Storytime at 10:30 a.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

Poetry Workshop with Donna Davis, ongoing on Thurs. from 9 a.m. to noon at the JCCEB, 1414 Walnut St. Donation $10 per semester. 848-0237. 

Avatar Metaphysical Toastmasters Club meets at 6:45 p.m. at Spud's Pizza, 3290 Adeline. namaste@avatar.freetoasthost.info  

FRIDAY, MAY 4 

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 Philippe Eberhard on “Quantum Physics and Common Sense” 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.  

Law Literacy Outreach Program for youth aged 13-17 and their parents with workshops on legal responsibility Fri. and Sat. from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at East Bay Law School, 554 Grand Ave. 835-7999. www.eastbaylawschool.org 

“Lives for Sale” A documentary on immigration and human trafficking at 7 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker School, Marian Hall, 2nd Flr., 2125 Jefferson St. Not wheelchair accessible. 482-1062.  

Five Star Night Benefit for Alameda County Meals on Wheels at 6:30 p.m. at Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Ascension, 4700 Lincoln Ave., OAkland. Tickets are $300, sponsorships available. 577-3581. 

Red Cross Blood Drive from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Oakland Children’s Hospital, Outpatient Center Basement, 747 52nd St., Oakland. To schedule an appointment call 1-800-GIVE-LIFE. 

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 

Planning Meetings for a Dedication to denise brown will be on going every Fri. at 2 p.m. at LeConte, Room 104. Photos, videos and dvd's are welcome to be included in the event. For more information, contact Rita Pettit, PRitaAnn@aol.com, 559-4602. 

SATURDAY, MAY 5 

Bring Back the Natives Tour of “Gardening for Bees and Butterflries” throughout the East Bay. Cost is $30. 236-9558. www.BringingBackTheNatives.net 

Biking with Youth A free workshop for parents and children over 9 years old, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Carter Middle School Basketball courts, 4521 Webster St., Oakland. Bring your bike, helmet and be ready for a relaxed 4-mile ride. RSVP to 740-3150, ext. 332. 

Rollin’ by the Bay Bring your rollerskates/blades, skateboards, wheelchairs or scooters (no bikes) on a 3.5 mile cruise of the Eastshore State Park from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. For information call 525-2233. 

Walking Tour of Oakland Chinatown Meet at 10 a.m. at the courtyard fountain in the Pacific Renaissance Plaza at 388 Ninth St. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

Mt. Wanda Wildflower Walk Join a Park Ranger for a walk in the hills where John Muir took his daughters. Terrain is steep, wear walking shoes and bring water. Rain cancels. Meet at 9 a.m. at the Cal-Trans Park and Ride lot at the corner of Alhambra Ave. and Franklin Canyon Rd., Martinez. 925-228-8860. 

The Crucible Open House for youth interested in learning how to weld, forge steel, melt glass, make jewelry, cast molten metal, and more from 1 to 3 p.m. at 1260 7th St., Oakland. Call to reserve a place at the orientation 444-0919. www.thecrucible.org 

Cinco de Mayo Fiesta from noon to 3 p.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, One Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302. 

Design Your Own Russian Nesting Dolls at 2 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

Annual Junktique Sale with furniture, computers, kitchen and household goods, books, linens, toys and more from 8:30 a.m. t0 3 p.m. at First United Methodist Church, 201 Martina St., corner of W. Richmond Ave., Point Richmond. To arrange donations call 964-9901.  

Dramatically Speaking Toastmasters Club meets to discuss ”Elderhostel: Adventures in Lifelong Learning” at 9 a.m. at 1950 Franklin St., Room 2F. RSVP required, ID needed to get into building. 581-8675. 

Cottage in the Woods Preschool Yard Sale from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 3917 Lyman Rd., Oakland.  

Lead-Safe Painting & Remodeling Free class to learn about lead safe renovations for your older home, from 10 a.m. to noon at the West Oakland Branch Library, 1801 Adeline S., Oakland. Presented by Alameda County Lead Poisoning Prevention Program. 567-8280. www.ACLPPP.org  

Petite Pooches Playgroup for small dogs from 10:30 11:30 a.m., one block north of Solano on Ensenada at Talbot. 524-2459. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

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

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

SUNDAY, MAY 6 

“Among the Rocks” Berkeley Architectural Heritage’s 32nd Annual Spring Tour and Reception of homes and gardens in the Thousand Oaks neighborhood, from 1 to 5 p.m. Cost is $25-$35. 841-2242. www.berkeleyheritage.com 

STAND: Standing Together for Accountable Neighborhood Development Garden Fundraiser with live music by Robert Temple, light buffet and information on how to stop the high-density condo developments that threaten North Oakland’s identity and diversity, at 4 p.m. in the historic Temescal District, 449 49th St., at Clarke, Oakland. Cost is $25, $40 for couples, children free. 655-3841. 

Bringing Back the Natives, free self-guided garden tour of sixty gardens throughout Alameda and Contra Costa counties from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. For details see www.BringingBackTheNatives.net  

To Bee or Not to Bee Learn about bees through a puppet show, and get to taste some honey at 11 a.m. at the Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Community Cleanup and Weedout at King Middle School from 9 a.m. at noon Sponsored by the Kiwanis Club of Berkeley. Please wear gloves and long pants, and bring clippers and other gardening tools. 527-8652. 

“Climate Change: Our Own Carbon Emissions” the second in a series of Sunday talks on Climate Change by Karen Street at 1 p.m. at Berkeley Friends Meeting, 2151 Vine. 653-2803. 

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 

Prader-Willi Syndrome Walkathon at 10:30 a.m. Cesar Chavez Park, Berkeley Marina. Registration fee is $20 for individual walkers or $50 for families or teams. Contact Prader-Willi California Foundation at 800-400-9994. www.pwcf.org 

Holistic Pet Evaluation from 1 to 4 p.m. at RabbitEars, 303 Arlington Ave., Kensington, behind Ace Hardware. Free, appointments required. 525-6155. 

Parenting Teens Workshop on developing character in teens at 2:30 p.m. at Westminster House, 2700 Bancroft, enter on Bowditch. www.hyde.edu 

Community Singalong with the Cockettes pianist Scrumbly Koldewyn and Leslie Bonett to sing Broadway tunes and golden oldies from 3 to 6 p.m. at Lake Merritt Hotel, 1800 Madison, Oakland, near 19th St. BART. Cost is $5-$15. 534-2750. 

Broncho Billy’s Tea Dance, music from the teens, twenties and thirties from 3 to 6 p.m. at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, 37417 Niles Blvd., Fremont. Cost is $20. 494-1411. www.nilesfilmmuseum.org 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Tilden Park Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m. Call to confirm. 841-8732.  

Meeting in Satsang and Dharma Inquiry with John Sherman, a teacher in the lineage of Ramana Maharshi at 3 p.m. in the Fireside Room, 1940 Virginia St. 495-7511. www.eastbayopencircle.org  

Tibetan Buddhism with Robin Caton on “Healing through Meditation” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812.  

MONDAY, MAY 7 

Read Aloud Theater A free Berkeley Adult School class at 9 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst. 981-5190.  

“Human Rights in Chile: Then and Now” with Judge Juan Guzmán at 7 p.m. at the Women’s Faculty Club Lounge, UC Campus. Sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies. http://clas.berkeley.edu 

Red Cross Blood Drive from noon to 6 p.m. at Tilden Room, MLK Student Union, UC Campus. To schedule an appointment call 1-800-GIVE-LIFE. 

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

ONGOING 

Food Drive for Alameda County Food Bank Drop off canned goods, peanut butter, ceareal, powdered milk, beans, rice and pasta at Citibank, 200 Shattuck Ave. from May 1 to 15. Financial donations always welcome. 635-3663, ext. 318. 

CITY MEETINGS 

Library Board of Trustees Appointment Process will be discussed Tues., May 1, at 6:30 p.m. at the South Berkeley Library, 1901 Russell St. 

Commission on the Status of Women meets Wed., May 2, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5190.  

Downtown Area Plan Advisory Commission meets Wed., May 2, at 7 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7487. 

Housing Advisory Commission meets Thurs., May 3, at 7:30 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. Oscar Sung, 981-5400.  

Landmarks Preservation Commission meets Thurs., May 3, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7419.  

Public Works Commission meets Thurs., May 3, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-6406.  

Peace and Justice Commission meets Mon., May 7, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Manuel Hector, 981-5510.  


Arts Calendar

Friday April 27, 2007

FRIDAY, APRIL 27 

THEATER 

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley “Lysistrata” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave. at Berryman, through May 12. Tickets are $12. 525-1620. www.aeofberkeley.org  

Aurora Theatre “Private Jokes, Public Places” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m. at 2081 Addison St., through May 13. Tickets are $38. 843-4822. 

Barestage “Cabaret” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at 72 Cesar Chavez Center, UC Campus. Tickets are $8-$12. 642-3880. 

Berkeley Rep “Blue Door” at 8 p.m. at 2025 Addison St., through May 20. Tickets are $45-$61. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

Contra Costa Civic Theater “A Streetcar Named Desire” Tennesse Williams’ Pulitzer Prize winning play opens at 8 p.m. Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Contra Costa Civic Theatre, 951 Pomona Ave., El Cerrito. Runs through May 12. Tickets are $8-$11. 524-9132. www.ccct.org  

Impact Theatre “Measure for Measure” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave., through May 26.Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468. 

Masquers Playhouse “She Loves Me” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2:30 p.m. at Masquers Playhouse, 105 Park Place, Point Richmond, through May 12.Tickets are $18. 232-4031. www.masquers.org  

Shotgun Players “Blood Wedding” Thurs.-Sun. at 8 p.m. at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., through April 29. Tickets are $17-$25. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

Subterranean Shakespeare “Macbeth” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St., near Rose in Live Oak Park, to May 26. Tickets are $12-$17. 276-3871.  

EXHIBITIONS 

Acrylics on Canvas by David Giulietti Opening reception at 7 p.m. at Artbeat Salon and Gallery, 1887 Solano Ave. 527-3100. www.arbeatsalon.com 

“Touchable Stories: Richmond” A multi-media, oral history event created by the people of Richmond. Fri. at 8 p.m., Sat. at 2 and 6 p.m. through May 13, at 1303 Canal Blvd., Richmond (the former Kaiser Shipyard Cafeteria). Cost is $6-$12. For reservations call 619-3675. www.touchablestories.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Jonathan Chester presents a slideshow and lecture on “Berkeley Rocks” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. Some of the homes and gardens will be featured on Berkeley Architectural Heritage’s Spring House Tour on May 6. 704-8222. 

“Music and Message” with Sweet Honey in the Rock on the role of music in the Civil Rights Movement and social activism today at 2 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Free.  

Strictly Speaking with David Sederis at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $22-$42. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

“Returning to the Shore” Tribute to James Chaill, connoisseur of Chinese painting at 5:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. all-day symposioum on Sat. 642-0808.  

Jazz Poetry Festival with Adam David Miller, Gael Lacock, Avotcja, Modupue and others at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Tickets are $20. 848-3227. www.hillsideclub.org 

“The Music of Primes” with mathematician Marcus du Sautoy at 5:15 p.m. at the Valley Life Sciences Bldg., Room 2050, UC Campus. Sponsored by the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. 642-0448. 

Marta Acosta reads from “Midnight Brunch” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Dance Project 2007 “The Reception” choreography and tele-immersion technology at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Campus. Tickets are $10-$14. 642-9925. 

De la Canción Protesta al la Canción Propuesta with Holly Near, Linda Tillery, Lichi Fuentes and others at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Kimberly Jackson & “Urban Legends” at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $15. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Ed Neumaster Quartet at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Sambada, Sage, Afro, Brazillian, funk, at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Nearly Beloved, folk, country afrobilly, at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

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

Evelie Posch and Steve Taylor-Ramirez at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Pat Nevins & Ragged Glory, City Fritter at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Monster Squad, Ceremony 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. 

3rd Date at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Native Elements at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $10-$12. 548-1159.  

Beatropolis at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Marian McPartland at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $20-$24. 238-9200.  

SATURDAY, APRIL 28 

CHILDREN  

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

Stage Door Conservatory “The Hobbit” Sat. and Sun. at 5 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $10-$20 at the door. www.juliamorgan.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Tied Up On A Rainy Day” Paintings by Bill Jefferson, sculpture by Larry Baumiller. Opening reception at 7 p.m. at The Gallery Of Urban Art, 1746 13th St., Oakland. 910-1833. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Outdoor Poetry Reading at Berkeley Arts Magnet’s Allen Ginsberg Poetry Garden from 2 to 4 p.m. at 1624 Milvia St.  

National Poetry Month Celebration with readings by Denise Newman, Barbara Tomash, Brian Strang, Patrick Duggan, Chad Sweeney, David Holler, Ilya Kaminsky, Bruce Boston, and Martin Woodside at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

Jeremy Scahill describes “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army” at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Oakland, 2501 Harrison St, Oakland. Tickets $10 in advance, $15 at door, available at independent bookstores, or at 415-255-7296, ext. 253.  

“A Gathering of Greatness" Allegorical photographs of famous people in the Pere-Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, by Dorothy Levitt Mayers. Lecture at 2 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. 228-3207. 

Ann Fagan Ginger, Candace Falk, Helene Goodwin, Kathy Johnson, PhoeBe ANNE (sorgen) discuss “Where is Feminism Now?” at 7 p.m. at Black Oak Books 486-0698.  

Rhythm & Muse Open Mic with Tracy Koretsky at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. 644-6893.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Opera Free Concert at 2 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 3rd flr Community Room, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6100. www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org 

Harp Music with Chris Caswell Celtic, Latin and Middle Eastern music on hand-made harps at 4 p.m. at Magic Gardens Nursery, 729 Heinz Ave., off Seventh St. 644-2351. 

Flauti Diversi “Bella Rosas” a program of renaissance and contemporary works for recorder trio at 8 p.m. at St Alban’s Episcopal Church, 1501 Washington Ave., Albany. Tickets are $15-$18, reservations recommended. 527-9840. 

Berkeley Dance Project 2007 “The Reception” choreography and tele-immersion technology at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Campus. Tickets are $10-$14. 642-9925. 

Kensington Symphony performs Smetana’s “Ma Vlast” at 8 p.m. at Northminster Presbyterian Church, 545 Ashbury Ave., El Cerrito. Suggested donation $12-$15, children free. 524-9912. 

Ronnie Gilbert, Sandy Tolan, Charlie Varon, Jeff Halper, and more, at 7 p.m. at the Fontaine Auditorium, Samuel Merritt Health Education Center, 400 Hawthorne Ave., Oakland, in a benefit for Jewish Voice for Peace. Tickets $15-$25 sliding scale. 465-1777. 

Quinteto Latino Compositions by Latin American masters at 8 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana St. Tickets are $8-$12. 549-3864. 

Classical African Music and Dance at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $4-$12. 642-9988. 

National Jazz Appreciation Month BMI & The Roster Super Company at 7 p.m. at Oakland Public Conservatory of Music, 1616 Franklin St., Oakland. 836-4649.  

Steve Mann and Friends at noon at Cafe Zeste, 1250 Addison St. at Bonar, in the Strawberry Creek Park complex. 704-9378. 

Jesus Diaz & su QBA, Cuban timba dance music, at 9:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Music on the Commons at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Kotoja at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. African dance leson with Comfort Mensah at 9 p.m. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

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

Chris Zanardi Quartet at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Steve Forbert at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Juliet Green and Moodswing at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

David Feffrey’s Jazz Fourtet at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $5. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Nicole McRory at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

The Pine Needles, skiffle band, at 8 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7. 558-0881. 

Captain Mike and the Sea Kings, Amy Lou’s Blues at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Born/Dead, Signal Lost at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $7. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, APRIL 29 

CHILDREN 

Stage Door Conservatory “The Hobbit” at 5 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $10-$20 at the door. www.juliamorgan.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

Works by Carla Van Slyke, Rita Sklar, Charlotte Britton and Jack Anderson Reception for the artists at 2 p.m. at Solano Grill, 1133 Solano Ave., Albany. 525-8686. 

“Celebrate the Earth” a show by members of the California Watercolor Association and hand-blown glass by Michael Sosin, on display at the Community Art Gallery, Alta Bates Summit Medical Center, 2450 Ashby Ave. through June 8. 204-1667.  

“Jazz on High” Art Show and Jazz Vespers featuring the Art of Andres Guerrero and jazz by Dave Rocha & Quartet at 4 p.m. at High Street Presbyterian Church, 1945 High St, Oakland. www.highstreetpresbyterian.com 

“In Earth’s Shoe” drawings and prints by YaChin You and “The Prom Queen Series” paintings by Brooke Hatch. Artists’ reception at 7 p.m. at 1811 Carleton St. # A. 847-6272. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Amy Wachspress reads from “The Call to Shakabaz” at 6 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Jacqueline Bautista reads from her stories about modern Spain, “Fiestas” at 4 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Community Chorus and Orchestra features Gabriel Faure’s Requiem at 4:30 p.m. at Saint Joseph The Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. Free, donations appreciated. www.bcco.org 

Berkeley Dance Project 2007 “The Reception” choreography and tele-immersion technology at 7 p.m. at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Campus. Tickets are $10-$14. 642-9925. 

California Bach Society “A Madrigal History Tour” at 4 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. Tickets are $10-$25. 415-262-0272. www.calbach.org 

William Beatty, pianist, Marvin Sanders, flute at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. Cost is $10. 644-6893.  

Theater in Song Frederica von Stade, mezzo-soprano with music by Jake Heggie and Ricky Ian Gordon at 3 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $62. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Ravi Shankar, sitar, at 7 p.m. at at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $36-$68. 642-9988.  

“Songs of Lesser Known Writers” Dave Shank, piano, at 5 p.m. at First United Methodist Church, 201 Martina St., corner of W. Richmond Ave., Point Richmond. Suggested donation $10. 236-0527. 

Healing Muses and Octangle, wind octet, at 4 p.m. at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, 1501 Washington St., Albany. Tickets are $15-$20. 524-5661. www.healingmuses.org 

Novello Quartet “Spanish Masters” at 4 p.m. at Ridgeway Yoga Studio, 250 Ridgeway St., Oakland. Donations at the door. www.novelloquartet.org 

“Journey to the Heart of Israel/Palestine” with Linda Allen at 7:30 pm La Peña, 3105 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $10. 849-2568. 

Ian Tyson at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $24.50-$25.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Brazilian Soul at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $9. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Gift Horse at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Balkan Folkdance at 1:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $7. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Battle of the Bands at 6 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Cost is $10. 763-1146. www.oaklandmetro.org 

Shotwell, Sonskull, Coming Up Roses, Shorebird at 5 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

MONDAY, APRIL 30 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Aurora Theatre Staged Readings “Happyslap” by Laura Jacqmin at 7:30 p.m. at 2081 Addison St. For tickets call 843-4822. 

“Art of the Book” with Malcolm Margolin, Publisher, Heyday Books and Amy Thomas, owner of Pegasus and Pendragon Books at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6150. 

Steven Bach Describes “Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl” Hitler’s filmmaker, at 7 p.m. at Cody’d Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Masha Hamilton reads from “Camel Bookmobile” at 7 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Poetry Express with open theme night on “secrets” with special guest Blair at 7 p.m., at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 644-3977. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

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

Berkeley High School Jazz Bands at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $15. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

TUESDAY, MAY 1 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Water and Light” Giclee photographs by Maris Arnold at Au Coquelet, 2000 University Ave. 843-3236.  

“Inspiring Blooms” works in colored pencil by Bei Brown on display at the Tilden Environmental Education Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Visions of Peace and Justice: Over 30 Years of Political Posters” Book release party for Inkworks Press at 7 p.m. at La Peña, 3105 Shattuck Ave. 849-2568. 

Dale Pendell reads from “Inspired Madness” at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Daniel Farber discusses “Retained by the People: the Silent Ninth Amendments and the Constitutional Rights Americans Don’t Know They Have” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Brass Menagerie and Gamelan X at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Balkan dance lesson at 7:30 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

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

Dale Ann Bradley at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Avishai Cohen at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$16. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

WEDNESDAY, MAY 2 

EXHIBITIONS 

Photo Montages by Fletcher Oakes opens at the It Club Gallery, 10070 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito and runs through May 30. www.touchablestories.org 

“Fleeting Moments in Nature and Life” Bronze sculptures by Elizabeth Dante, plein air landscapes by Barbara Ward, watercolors by John Kenyon and paintings by Paul Graf at the Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave., through June 3. 848-1228. 

 

 

 

 

FILM 

“Goodbye, Dragon Inn” with a lecture by Marilyn Fabe at 3 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Constructions” Artists’ talk with Jenny Honnert, Marya Krogstad and Thomas Morphis at 6:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

Richard Walker describes the greenswards of the Bay Area in “The Country in the City” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

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

Myra Melford UC Jazz Group at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $7. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Leftist Lounge Dance Benefit for grassroots organizations at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Zydeco Flames at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun zydeco dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

In Harmony’s Way, a capella, at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 644-2204.  

Orquestra Liberacion at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Salsa lessons at 8:30 p.m. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Abigail Washburn & the Sparrow Quartet at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $29.50-$30.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Mikie Lee and Amber at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Avishai Cohen at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$16. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, MAY 3 

EXHIBITIONS 

“My Ruling Planet” Sculptures, paintings and drawings by Rocky Rische-Baird, and “Traidor!” paintings by four Filipino artists. Opening reception at 6 p.m. at Esteban Sabar Gallery, 480 23rd St., Oakland. 444-7411. 

FILM 

“Last Summer Won’t Happen” with fimmaker Peter Gessner in person at 5:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Free screening. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Lunch Poems Annual student poetry reading at 12:10 p.m. in the Morrison Library, in the Doe Library, UC Campus. http://lunchpoems.berkeley.edu 

“Berkeley Rocks” An illustrated lecture on one of Berkeley’s unique neighborhoods by Jonathan Chester at 8 p.m. in the Chapel, Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Cost is $10. Presented by Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association. BAHA’s house and Garden Tour of this Thousand Oaks neighborhood will take place on May 6. For information on the lecture and tour please call 841-2242. www.berkeleyheritage.com 

Michael Parenti on “Political Perception and Deception: How to Think about Empire,” at 7 p.m. at the First Congregational Church of Oakland, 2501 Harrison St. Cost is $15. Benefit for Middle East Children’s Alliance. 548-0542.  

Dan Bellm, poet at 7 p.m. followed by open mic, at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave., Albany. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

“Not for Mother’s Only: Contemporary Poems on Child-Getting and Child-Rearing” with contibuting poets Laynie Browne, Maxine Chernoff, Norma Cole, Brenda Hillman and Elizabeth Treadwell at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

Patricia Vidgerman reads from “The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

Judith Stone investigates apartheid in South Africa in “When She Was White: The True Story of a Family Divided by Race” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

The Dead Guise and Avalon Rising at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13-$15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Mariachi Los Camperos de Nati Cano at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $20-$32. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

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

Peter Anastos & Iternity at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $9. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Megan Slankard Band, Cyndi Harvell Trio, Adrienne Shamszad at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

Nell Robinson & Red Level, bluegrass and country, at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 644-2204.  

Quetzal at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Joe Cardillo at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

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

 

 

 


Arts and Entertainment Around the East Bay

Friday April 27, 2007

POETRY READING TO HONOR GINSBERG 

 

An outdoor poetry reading in honor of Allen Ginsberg and National Poetry Month will be held from 2-4 p.m. Saturday at the Berkeley home where he wrote portions of his landmark “Howl!” The home, at 1624 Milvia St., is now the site of a poetry garden dedicated to Ginsberg. The event will feature poet/writer/teacher G Reyes.  

 

KEVIN BROWNLOW AT PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 

 

Silent film historian, archivist and documentarian Kevin Brownlow will make the last of his three San Francisco International Film Festival appearances at 5:30 p.m. Sunday at Pacific Film Archive, when he will present an introduction to silent film. The program will feature clips and short films from different genres, nations and eras within silent film, along with discussion of each and accompaniment by pianist Judith Rosenberg. $10-12. 2575 Bancroft Way. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu. www.sfiff.org. 

Brownlow, the author of the silent era oral history The Parade’s Gone By and producer of many documentaries, including Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow, will also appear at 2 p.m. Saturday at the Castro Theater in San Francisco, where the festival will present him with the Mel Novikoff award, followed by a screening of Brownlow’s recent preservation of Douglas Fairbanks’ The Iron Mask; and at 9:15 p.m. Saturday at the Kabuki Theater, where he will present his new documentary about the life and career of legendary director Cecil B. DeMille.  

 

LIBRARY HOSTS FREE OPERA PERFORMANCE 

 

The Berkeley Opera will hold a free concert at 2 p.m. Saturday in the third-floor Community Room of the Berkeley Public Library. 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6100. www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org.


Moving Pictures: A Portrait of the Artist as a Bad Father

By Justin DeFreitas
Friday April 27, 2007

Architect Glen Small, feeling unappreciated, with no books or significant critical studies of his work in print, drafted his will and testament with a special request: He bequeathed to his middle daughter Lucia the task of writing his biography. His hope was that she would document his achievements and thus firmly establish his professional reputation once and for all. He wasn’t sick; he was just bitter, and wanted the story to be finally told. 

The assignment was strange for other reasons as well. Glen Small was closer to his oldest daughter, and his youngest daughter was a writer. So why had he chosen Lucia? 

Despite having no answer to the question, she took him up on the offer with the hope that the project might bring the two of them closer together. But she had two caveats: that she make a film rather than a book, and that it cover the man as well as the work. With some hesitation, her father agreed. 

The result, My Father the Genius, is amateurish, but in the best sense of the word: It’s a very personal film, with the feel of a home movie. With the exception of a few animations, there is little flourish or flare. Instead it presents a simple, eye-level portrait of a man and how his obsession with his work has affected his personal relationships.  

Glen Small was, by most accounts, a visionary architect in his younger years. He was a founder and faculty member of the Southern California Institute of Architecture and one of the principal proponents of ecologically sound design. His fantastically futuristic Biometric Biosphere combined eco-architecture with science fiction to create an arresting vision of the city of the future, a structure that would touch the ground in only a few places but could house 100,000 people.  

His more modest designs—the ones that actually got built—include houses, museums and commercial buildings that usually feature dramatic sweeping lines. “Sensuality,” as Small puts it, is his intent.  

But despite his talents, Small was brash, arrogant, rude, and at times downright stupid. He alienated his colleagues, jeopardized his career, undermined his own financial stability, and all but abandoned his wife and daughters. And, as we see in the film, he has apparently learned little from his mistakes. 

Small is presented as an aptly named man, one so self-centered and tunnel-visioned that he repeatedly fails as father, as friend, as husband and as lover. His world view allows for little that does not center on himself and confirm his self-image. Granted, when a camera is in your face you’re inclined to behave as though you’re the center of attention, but we get the feeling that Small believes there should always be a camera in his face, that he is just that interesting and important. And the irony is that this is precisely what makes him compelling, if not personable, as a subject. 

It is surprising and a bit disappointing that Lucia Small was unable to get better access to some of the buildings her father designed, and that there is little discussion of the merits of each structure, other than from Glen Small’s own perspective, which we at times suspect is an inflated view. But if you go into this film with only architecture in mind, or with the hope of finding an in-depth portrait of an artist, you’re bound to be disappointed, for My Father the Genius is only superficially concerned with these matters. Ultimately the film is not about whether Small is great or what he is like as a man; it is really Lucia’s story, the story of a daughter given a strange assignment, her willingness to take on that assignment, and the effects that assignment has on her relationships with her sisters and with her father.  

 

MY FATHER THE GENIUS (2005) 

Written, directed and produced by Lucia Small. Featuring Glen Small. 84 minutes. $29.95. www.myfatherthegenius.com. 

 

Photograph: Architect Glen Small, posing here with an early design for a solar-powered mobile home community, is the subject of his daughter’s documentary My Father the Genius.


‘Savage War of Peace’ Author Alistair Horne at The Hillside Club

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Friday April 27, 2007

Noted historian and author Alistair Horne, whose book A Savage War of Peace (1977), on the French war against Algerian rebels (1954-62), has been reprinted by the New York Review with a new preface that draws parallels with the War in Iraq, will lecture and be interviewed Monday, 8 p.m., at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., in a coproduction with Moe’s Books. 

Interest in a new printing of Horne’s book, with its familiar issues of torture and “asymmetrical” tactics, arose when American officers in Iraq began passing around copies and discussing its parallels, rather than those of the War in Vietnam, to Iraq, a situation officially conceived in completely different terms. 

Used copies of the book began selling on Amazon.com for as much as $150—an underground bestseller. The new paperback edition is $19.95, and will be available at the event for signing. 

The event was organized by Lewis Klausner, who coordinated the reading series at Black Oak Books for several years. 

“Lewis came by the store, after the announcement that Black Oak was for sale,” said Owen Hill of Moe’s, who organizes the reading series there. “Things were in a state of flux, and Lewis said he was interested in producing offsite events. Then he called, asking if we wanted to coproduce an Alistair Horne appearance! We jumped at the opportunity. We’d never done offsite events, but had been talking about it, and were grateful for Lewis’ expertise. He wants to make it something a little bit like a Berkeley version of City Arts & Lectures, and plans to interview Horne onstage after the lecture.” 

Horne, the author of a number of books on modern French history, draws several parallels between the Algerian War and the one in Iraq: the tactic of insurgents avoiding the occupying military and attacking police and civilian targets instead, in order to demoralize supporters of the occupation; premature declarations of the conflict being “virtually over,” “porous borders” that allowed rebels sanctuary, supplies and reinforcements from contiguous countries (Morocco and Tunisia in Algeria’s case); and, comparing American attempts to build an Iraqi army and police force to fight insurgency, the fact that more Algerians fought for the French than there were rebels—and yet France still lost after eight years’ struggle. 

Horne also emphasizes that “simultaneous internal ‘civil war’” often flares up alongside “a revolutionary struggle against an external enemy”—and that “torture should never, never, never be resorted to by any Western society,” quoting a French officer that when torture was taken up by the military, beyond the scope of civilian police use of it, “the honor of the nation” was involved. 

In a Washington Post book review of the new edition of Horne’s book, Thomas E. Ricks wrote, “As I wrote about the U. S. Army’s big ‘cordon and sweep’ operations that detained tens of thousands of civilian Iraqi males in the Sunni Triangle in the fall of 2003, I remembered Horne: ‘This is the way a administration caught with its pants down reacts under such circumstances ... First comes the mass indiscriminate round-up of suspects, most of them innocent but converted into ardent militants by the fact of their imprisonment.” 

“When we announced the event on the Moe’s website, we got a flurry of emails from customers,” Owen Hill noted, “who had read Horne’s book on the French Commune of 1871, and were intrigued with what he had to say about Iraq. It’ll be fascinating to see how he compares the different historical situations, speaking in person.” 

Admission is $5, though no one will be turned away for lack of funds. For more information, see www.hillsideclub.org, www.moesbooks.com or call 848-3227. 

 

 

 

 

 


Garden Variety: Use Your Garden Water Wisely and For Pleasure

By Ron Sullivan
Friday April 27, 2007

After driving past for months and months, I noticed an opportune parking space and misbehaved badly enough to get it, and so I finally got inside the Sahara Import shop on Ashby just east of Shattuck.  

I was greeted by a friendly young woman and the offer of Moroccan tea, which proved to be a little glass of mint tea just sweet enough to heighten the flavor. Lovely. Among the handsome jewelry pieces and lamps and even a small selection of clothing, I found a few garden or courtyard fountains. 

Made with that fantastically complicated, geometric-patterned tile that characterizes several kinds of Arabic architecture, these came in both wall-hung lavabo and ground-level central-basin styles, in blue-and-white and multicolor schemes. 

I’ve always thought the effect of these was refreshing and oddly restful, for something with so visually complicated a surface. The blue-and-white arrangement in particular dramatizes the effect of clear moving water in a hot dry place, declaring the place an oasis.  

Water, of course, actually does cool the immediate area around it. So do trees and other plants—measurably!—as they use energy in respiration and photosynthesis, and exhale water vapor along with oxygen.  

There’s generally a conflict in a California pleasure garden between water conservation—always a good thing, whether it’s an official drought year or not—and having a pleasant place to hang out on a hot day. We do get a few of those even on the west side of the hills, and it really is cheaper in terms of natural resources as well as money to have a green retreat than to air-condition a whole house.  

The classic strategy for allotting water to a garden seems to have been inspired by an aesthetic tactic that’s also happily useful for our nonhuman neighbors. This method concentrates the most manicured and/or exotic plants, the most clearly human spaces, in one area—usually close to the house—and lets the rest of the garden shift toward a looser, more natural look.  

The water equivalent gets the most use out of water by concentrating water-loving plants in one place—again, often nearest the house and the existing plumbing—and moving toward more drought-tolerant stuff farther out.  

It’s a bit counterintuitive, but a pond or pool or fountain—a “water feature” in trade jargon—is another way to get the most bang for your bucket. In fact, I’ve heard it said that a reasonably maintained swimming pool uses less water than an equivalent area of lawn, depending on where it’s sited.  

That’s defensible if you understand the radiator principle and evapotranspiration. Water vapor gets thrown off every blade of grass, which adds up to an area many times the evaporative surface of a pool.  

Most water plants are sun-lovers. If you want a water feature in the shade, it works well to have a decorative tiled pool or fountain like the ones you’ll see in Sahara Import and surround it with shade-loving plants in pots or in the ground.  

 

 

Sahara Import 

2110 Ashby Ave. 

295-4527 

Open daily 10 a.m.-6 p.m. 

http://saharaimport.com 

 

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in the Daily Planet’s East Bay Home & Real Estate section. Her column on East Bay trees appears every other Tuesday in the Daily Planet.


About the House: The Question of Capping to Keep Pests Away

By Matt Cantor
Friday April 27, 2007

I guess I have to remember to stay off of my horse else be in danger of falling off and damaging my backside. The industry (if you can call it that) that I’m employed in is fairly new and often mistaken for other adjacent trades (e.g. a friend referred to me as an appraiser the other day) including, not surprisingly, the structural pest control industry (often referred to as termite inspectors).  

Now, don’t get me wrong, I like and respect many folks I know in this business. Some do extraordinarily fine work and provide a vital service, but sadly, this does not cover all comers. There are, in my never-humble opinion a couple of major problems in this industry and, while I’ll try to swerve away form a global analysis of this agglomeration of issues, I will pick one and do a little bit of damage. 

Pest officers, like cardiologist live in their own world with their own set of imperatives. The thing that they do for a living seems, from inside that box to be the center of the universe and the rules, activities and theories that apply to their livelihood appear, from their perspective to be the most important things that exist. While some cardiologist might occasionally admit that the oncologist has something of value to say, they will still think it essential for every patient they meet to have a stress test and an EKG. It’s just a feature of being human to have your eyes stuck on your own head and no one else’s.  

For pest control people, the pest report looks like the most important way to look at the house and the repairs recommended in their reports don’t say “fix the rotten wood but be sure to get to the wiring first because a fire is more dangerous than fungal rot,” right? They just say, fix the rot, treat the ground, replace the porch and so on. Part of the problem is also that, if you only meet a cardiologist, you only hear that perspective and if you only see a pest control report, you don’t get a chance to compare those issues to the many other significant ones that might be presented to you by other persons; including home inspectors (he said, polishing his nails on his vest).  

Again, I will find much to agree with on many a pest report but there’s one thing that seems to get included as a recommendation in many of these reports and has for many decades and that is a call for the “capping” of a foundation. 

Capping is analogous to the capping of a tooth. It’s a covering and enlargement that generally extends upward from the original footing and usually has only a very small amount of concrete extending down over the inside edge and rarely much if any on the outside edge. Now why is this done? A cap is done for the simple reason that moisture and insects can more easily get at the bottom wooden elements of the building when the foundation holds these portions up a very short distance off the ground. When this is the case, it doesn’t take much of an accrual of earth along the inside or outside of the footing to allow wood boring inspects to get at the foundation or for wet earth to allow funguses to propagate along the bottom wooden members leading to rot (and there’s nothing dry about it).  

If we can hold the bottom wooden pieces aloft some 6 inches or so from the ground, they tend to fare far better than when these same “mudsills” and other sticks of wood, sit on or near the ground. 

A lot of what we’re talking about relates to termites but they’re not the whole picture when we’re talking about “grade faults,” which is another term for the condition in which wood and earth are getting too intimate. When they’re actually touching each other, we call it earth-to-wood contact, which is, as they say, a bad thing. 

So when pest inspectors see this condition, they often call for a capping of the foundation as a fix for this excess of intimacy (for shame!). The problem is that they are also engaging in the modification of a major structural component of the house without any real consideration for the structural implications. If, the caps were fairly inexpensive and if they were typically built with earthquakes in mind it might not be such a big deal but neither of these things are true. I’ve looked at something in excess of a thousand pest reports (maybe two) in my career and would say that the bids for capping of foundations that I’ve seen are usually somewhere in the range of two-thirds to three-fourths the cost of foundation replacement for the portions of the foundation that were “called.” So this begs an analysis of the difference between a capped foundation and new one (again, we may only be talking about one side or the whole thing). 

Older foundation that get called for capping are generally quite small in overall dimension and have relatively small bearing areas. In other words, the bottom isn’t that broad and they tend to settle more easily as a result. These older foundations often lack metal reinforcement and good quality concrete. Many older footings are imbalanced, bearing too much to the inside and, as a result, tend to tip slowly to the outside (this is called rotation). So when one is capping, one is left with all of these features with only limited improvement. 

Many older caps were installed with little or no interconnection between the old foundation and the cap and rely upon a “cold joint” or friction to hold them together. Today, workmanship is better but the connection is still inferior to the basic demand that foundations be poured integrally so that they will not separate over time. 

I’m darned curious to see what will happened to these caps when an earthquake hits. It may be that the early ones that lack good connection will snap and drop walls with unhappy results. 

New foundations have better balance (usually being an upside-down T shape), well integrated bolting and very hard concrete throughout. So if you can get all of these things for an extra few thousand over an already costly cap, it seems to me a no-brainer. 

I don’t want to blow by that bolting thing too rapidly because, in our earthquake anticipation, it’s a real issue. Caps are often poorly bolted and almost never to the standard required for conventional foundations. Mudsills, those bottom sticks of wood that rest on the foundation often get stuck in the mud, as it were when they get installed in caps. That is to say that they often don’t sit on the concrete but get embedded in the concrete making bracing and some kinds of bolting more difficult. 

A new foundation (or footing section) is required to have at least a moderate number of bolts installed on each section of mudsill so this becomes one more reason to choose a new foundation (or section) over a cap. 

Now, in fairness, some installers will use what is called a “saddle” when beefing up an old foundation. This is cap with one side (or both) that has been dug out and integrated into the cap. This can result in much better bearing and overall strength and I’m certainly much happier when I see one of these (which is rare), but again, I always want to come back to the question of whether a new foundation, with all there is to recommend it, would have cost much more and the answer is usually no. 

`I was asked to comment on such a case the other day and said that I felt that the client would be better off getting a new foundation installed by a cheaper contractor than to take a cap from a better one. While I never really favor working with a lesser individual, the city oversight and the basic requirements on foundations are so stringent that I rarely see a new foundation that’s been done substantially wrong. We can grouse and moan about the code (and city inspectors) all day but this is one proof of their value. You don’t have to worry too much that a foundation will be done wrong, once the drawings and permits are on the table. 

That said, I’d recommend spending a little more and working with the better contractor. It’s an old saw that higher cost is soon forgotten but bad workmanship lives on day after day and I believe it. 

So, do get a pest inspection from time to time and if your pest guy or gal says that you have a “marginal” or “faulty” grade condition and need to cap, ask very nice if they might be willing to give you a comparable bid for new VS the cap. You won’t just be doing well, you’ll be doing good and here’s why. Every person that does this, pushes the marketplace a bit more in the right direction and eventually, we won’t have to sit around and complain about all those lousy contractors. 

 

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


Quake Tip of the Week

By Larry Guillot
Friday April 27, 2007

Can You Stem the Water Tide? 

 

A faithful Quake Tip reader recently had an emergency at home which leads to this recommendation: check and see if your washer hot and cold manual shut-offs are working, as well as the hot water shut-off that should be on top of your water heater.  

If you have a broken water connection after the next serious quake, if you don’t have what’s called a “gate valve” near the house, you might thank yourself if you had on hand a plumber’s tool for shutting off your water at the meter, usually close to the curb or sidewalk. I’ve seen them in large hardware stores and places like Home Depot. They make it much easier than trying to shut off the water with an adjustable wrench.  

 

 

Larry Guillot is owner of QuakePrepare, an earthquake consulting, securing, and kit supply service. Call him at 558-3299, or visit www.quakeprepare.com.


Berkeley This Week

Friday April 27, 2007

FRIDAY, APRIL 27 

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Berkeley Aquatic Park. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with David Ratner on “How Stock Markets Work” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $14, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. 526-2925.  

Film Festival for Diversity “Making Whiteness Visible” at 6:30 p.m. in the Longfellow Middle School Auditorium, 1500 Derby at Sacramento. Free, including dinner and child care. Presented by the Berkeley PTA Council. 644-6320. 

“Residues of the Cold War: Cross Straits and Korean Peninsula” A symposium from 1 to 5:30 p.m. in the Great Hall, Bancroft Hotel, 2680 Bancroft Way. Sponsored by the Institute of East Asian Studies. 642-2809. 

Circle Dancing simple folk dancing with instruction. Potluck at 7 p.m., dancing at 8 p.m. at Hillside Community Church, 1422 Navellier St., El Cerrito. Donation of $5 requested. 528-4253. www.circledancing.com 

Planning meetings for Dedication to denise brown will be on going every Friday at 2 p.m. at LeConte School, Room 104. Photos, videos and dvd's are welcome to be included in the event. For more information, contact Rita Pettit, PRitaAnn@aol.com, 559-4602. 

Family Pot Luck Shabbat at 6 p.m. at the Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin Ave. Please bring dinner food appropriate for children and non-perisahble ffod for the needy. Sponsored by Kol Hadash. info@kolhadash.org 

SATURDAY, APRIL 28 

“Pursuing Justice in Israel/Palestine” The Jewish Voice for Peace National Conference begins at 7 p.m., followed by a day of speakers on Sun., at Samuel Merritt Health Education Center, 400 Hawthorne Ave., near 34th, Oakland. Cost is $25-$200. Advance registration recommended. 465-1777. www.JewishVoiceforPeace.org 

Open the Farm Meet and greet the animals at the Little Farm as you help the farmers with the morning chores. Meet at 9 a.m. at the Little Farm, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Bring Back the Natives Tour of School Gardens throughout the East Bay. Cost is $30. 236-9558. www.BringingBackTheNatives.net 

LeConte Elementary School Multi-cultural Spring Festival “Tastes of the World” from noon to 4 p.m. at 2241 Russell St. www.leconteonline.org 

Berkeley History Center Walking Tour “South West Berkeley Cultural Landscape” led by William Coburn at 10 a.m. Cost is $8-$10. For information on meeting place and to register call 848-0181. 

Mt. Wanda Wildflower Walk Join a Park Ranger for a walk in the hills where John Muir took his daughters. Terrain is steep, wear walking shoes and bring water. Rain cancels. Meet at 9 a.m. at the Cal-Trans Park and Ride lot at the corner of Alhambra Ave. and Franklin Canyon Rd., Martinez. 925-228-8860. 

City of El Cerrito Earth Day with volunteer work parties, food, music, an art show, composting demonstrations, an alternative fuel vehicle display, fun activities for children. Barbeque lunch at noon at the El Cerrito Community Center. For more information on the work parties, please contact earthday@ci.el-cerrito.ca.us or call Garth Schultz at 215-4351.  

“Where is Feminism Now?” Panel Discussion on the newly published Feminists Who Changed America by Barbara Love and Nancy Cott at 7 p.m. at Black Oak Books, 1491 Shattuck Ave. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com  

“Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army” with author Jeremy Scahill at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Oakland, 2501 Harrison St, Oakland. Tickets $10 in advance, $15 at door, available at independent bookstores, or at 415-255-7296, ext. 253. www.globalexchange.org/events/blackwater 

Volunteers Needed for “Get Ready Berkeley” to distribute information on Pandemic Flu preparations at 10 a.m. at Frances Albrier Community Center, San Pablo Park. 981-5342. 

“Universal Healthcare-How Do We Get There?” A forum with Ron Adler, MD., Susan Bergman, Ann Munoz, MHA, at 10 a.m. at North Berkeley Senior Center, Martin Luther King and Hearst.  

E-Waste Recycling for computers and monitors, cell phones, televisions, printers from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Whole Foods Market, 3000 Telegraph Ave. 649-1333. 

Know Your Rights Training with Berkeley CopWatch Learn your rights when interating with police from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Grassroots House, 2022 Blake St. 548-0425. 

Cal Carnival for Children from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Lower Sproul Plaza with games, prizes and food. CalCarnival@gmail.com 

Berkeley Public Library Teen Services Demonstration of Live Homework Help at 2 p.m. at the Electronic Classroom on the 3rd Floor of the Central Library, at 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6133. 

International Family Fair with games and activities for children, entertainment and food, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the New School od Berkeley, Bonita St. at Cedar. 548-9165. 

WriterCoach Connection Yard Sale and Fundraiser at 2447 Derby St. from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. 

The SAT or ACT? Which Test is Right for You? A free test assessment for high school students from 9 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. at Princeton Review, 2176 Shattuck Ave. For information call 845-7900, ext. 111. 

Bolshevik Café “Putting the social in socialism, the comedy in communism and the peace in a piece of pizza” at 7 p.m. at Finn Hall, 1819 10th St. Cost is $5-$15. 415-863-6637. 

Film Screening of “Street Survivors” a Claire Burch film at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Unitarian Fellowship, 1924 Cedar St. 547-7602. 

Luna Kids Dance Open House from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, Studio C, 2640 College Ave. kids@lunakidsdance.org 

Petite Pooches Playgroup for small dogs from 10:30 11:30 a.m., one block north of Solano on Ensenada at Talbot. 524-2459. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction Wed. and Sat. at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732.  

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755.  

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

SUNDAY, APRIL 29 

2nd Annual Children’s Day/Book Day Celebration with music, a magician and origami, from 2 to 4 p.m. in the Children's Library, 4th floor, Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6107. www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org 

Albany Spring Art and Music Festival with rhythm and blues, Taiko drumming, West African dance and more, children’s activities, food and community booths, from noon to 6 p.m. at Memorial Park, Washington at Carmel, Albany. www.albanyca.org 

“The Status of Education in Berkeley” with BUSD Directors Karen Hemphill and John Selawsky at 4 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst St. 

“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.  

El Cerrito Historical Society Spring Meeting will show a video of Sundar Shadi in his home and walking around his garden as he talks about his annual exhibits and his flowers at 1 p.m. at the El Cerrito Senior Center, behind the El Cerrito Library, 6510 Stockton Ave. 526-7507. 

CA Revels Mayday Zoo Event with a Maypole, the Deer Creek Morris Men and other activities at 1 p.m. at the Oakland Zoo. 632-9525.  

OakTown Blues & Bar-B-Que, St. Paul’s Episcopal School’s annual auction, will be held from 2 to 6:30 p.m. at Dunsmuir Historic Estate, 2960 Peralta Oaks Court, Oakland. Call for more information and tickets 285-9614. 

“War & Peace: Israel and the New Regional Paradigm” with Israeli security analyst Eran Lerman at 7 p.m. at Congregation Beth El, 1301 Oxford St. Cost is $10. 525-3582. 

Berkeley Playreading Group reads Lillian Hellman’s “The Little Foxes” at 2 p.m. at 1471 Addison St., cross st. is Sacramento, in rear of the 1473 building. Donation $5. 655-7962.  

Tibetan Buddhism with Ken McKeon on “Inside Inquiry” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

MONDAY, APRIL 30  

Red Cross Blood Drive from noon to 6 p.m. at the East Pauley Ballroom, MLK Student Union, Bancroft & Telegraph. To schedule an appointment call 1-800-GIVE-LIFE  

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

TUESDAY, MAY 1 

“Energy Policy in California: 2006 Study Results and Aftermath” a League of Women Voters Brown bag Lunch at noon at the Albany Library, Marin and Masonic Aves. 843-8824. 

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. 

Family Storytime at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

Discussion Salon on “Is Society Sick” at 7 p.m. at JCC, 1414 Walnut. 848-2995. 

Teen Babysitting Class An introduction to child development and practical babysitting hints from 4 to 5:30 p.m. at Bananas, 5232 Claremont Ave. To register call 658-7353.  

“Bodhisattva” A lecture by Rev. Carol Himaka at 7 p.m. at the Jodo Shinshu Center, 2140 Durant Ave. at Fulton St. Registration fee is $10 for three lectures. 809-1460. 

Red Cross Blood Drive from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at UCB Fiji Fraternity, 2395 Piedmont Ave. To schedule an appointment call 415-531-8554. 

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, MAY 2 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around the restored 1870s business district. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of G.B. Ratto’s at 827 Washington St. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. 

The UCB-BP Deal: Implications for the Public University with Jennifer Washburn, author of “University, Inc.”, Jean Lave, Ignacio Chapela and others at 7 p.m. at The Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. 

“Our History is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the uban Revolution” A panel discussion at 5 p.m. at the Heller Lounge, MLK Student Union, UC Campus. 

9th Annual Community Job Fair featuring representatives from more than 40 Bay Area employers from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the College of Alameda Central Quad, 555 Ralph Appezzato Memorial Parkway, Alameda. 748-2208. 

Red Cross Blood Services Volunteer Orientation from 10 a.m. to noon at 6230 Claremont Ave., Oakland. Registration required. 594-5165. 

New to DVD: “The Queen” at 7 p.m. at JCCEB, 1414 Walnut St. Discussion follows. 848-0237. 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome. 548-9840. 

Stitch ‘n Bitch at 6:30 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

THURSDAY, MAY 3 

“Berkeley Rocks” An illustrated lecture on one of Berkeley’s unique neighborhoods by Jonathan Chester at 8 p.m. in the Chapel, Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Cost is $10. Presented by Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association. BAHA’s house and Garden Tour of this Thousand Oaks neighborhood will take place on May 6. For information on the lecture and tour please call 841-2242.www.berkeleyheritage.com 

Michael Parenti speaks on “Political Perception & Deception: How to Think About Empire” at 7 p.m. at the First Congregational Church of Oakland, 501 Harrison St. Benefits Middle East Children’s Alliance. Tickets are $15. 1-800-838-3006. 

Alzheimer’s Services of the East Bay Art Auction and reception to benefit ASEB's Adult Day Health Care Program, at 6:30 p.m. at Piedmont Community Hall, 711 Highland Ave., Piedmont. 644-8292. 

Living with Ones and Twos Practical advice for new parents with Meg Zweiback, nurse practitioner at 7 p.m. at Bananas, 5232 Claremont Ave. To register call 658-7353.  

Baby and Toddler Storytime at 10:30 a.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

Poetry Workshop with Donna Davis, ongoing on Thurs. from 9 a.m. to noon at the JCCEB, 1414 Walnut St. Donation $10 per semester. 848-0237. 

Avatar Metaphysical Toastmasters Club meets at 6:45 p.m. at Spud's Pizza, 3290 Adeline. namaste@avatar.freetoasthost.info  

ONGOING 

Food Drive for Alameda County Food Bank Drop off canned goods, peanut butter, ceareal, powdered milk, beans, rice and pasta at Citibank, 200 Shattuck Ave. from May 1 to 15. Financial donations always welcome. 635-3663, ext. 318.